Hi Tradies, you know what it’s like when you don’t have work – nobody wants to have people standing around twiddling their thumbs or cleaning the shed or doing work on your place. 

It’s not what you want but it’s horribly common. 

This is what often happens: 

You win a job and you focus on doing it and it gets towards the end and you realise there’s no more. 

Or you have a nice consistent stream of work so you focus on operational issues but then the consistent stream dries up unexpectedly. 

Or you’re working on a few jobs and feeling good about winning some but then they all fall over and you’re left with a gap to fill.

It’s almost always because (if you read between the lines there) you focused on other things and not marketing (finding work) and the lack of that activity suddenly left you without enough work. 

You’re not alone; everyone has done this once or twice – as I said, it’s very common. 

Maybe more so for tradies than other business owners because your focus is so much on the work and the outcome (which is important, right). 

As a business coach for tradies and builders, part of my job is to help my clients guard against this. 

To build a Marketing Machine that keeps working all the time so you don’t end up in this sh*ty position. 

What your marketing machine should be made up of is the subject of another video and clients get a much more detailed version of that and are pushed to build and continuously improve their machine so they grow and all that lovely stuff.

This video is about the fact that marketing is a numbers game and how to play it. 

When you go quiet, two numbers are important – your marketing activity that finds opportunities and your sales funnel as your forecast – all the opportunities you could win (right now if you don’t find any more).

Your activity is what finds work and your funnel is what you’ve found and you might win.

Let’s talk about your funnel or your forecast or what I sometimes call your quote tracker. You might track this in a spreadsheet, your job management system, or on a whiteboard if you’re a bit old-school.

Let’s say there are 10 opportunities in it with a total quoted/quotable value of $1,000,000

The most you can win is 10 and the most revenue you can get is $1,000,000, isn’t it?

And the thing about winning sales is they’re binary, aren’t they? 

You win them or you don’t. So you could win all 10 and $1M but you could only win 9 or 8 or 7 or even none of them.

Even if your usual win rate is 50%, it could still be zero wins, couldn’t it?

The more opportunities in your funnel, the more you mitigate this risk and the more likely it is that you’ll get ‘enough’ jobs. So that’s an important number and your average win rate is important as well.

Now to marketing, what activity is happening to find opportunities to quote on? What activity is happening to fill that funnel up?

I touched on this in the previous video, didn’t I? I talked about Relationship Marketing, counting the calls you make each day and noticing how many it is and what happens as a result (meetings and sales).

We can apply a similar approach to all your marketing, not just your calls to potential customers or referrers.

People can only buy from your business if they are in contact with it, right? On the phone to you, emailing you, filling in a form on your website.

You can count those enquiries or leads (and they should go into your funnel and be counted there).

And you can count the activity like calls. Ads are more difficult. It’s certainly possible to count what you spend on ads (in money) and that’s a reasonable thing to do but what are those ads asking buyers to do?

How many people see them? (That’s impressions) 

How many people click? (That’s what you pay for)

How many then enquire? (Not all of them do)

I’m thinking of Google Adwords here but, if you’re paying for SEO, you could count backlinks and reviews and visits to your website (and enquiries).

If you have signage, how many people see it? 

If you drop leaflets, how many?

Do you see where I’m going with this… 

What are your numbers? Do you know? It’s worth knowing, isn’t it?

For each of your sources of leads, you spend money or time and you generate something – calls, impressions.

They generate something – with a conversion rate – answered calls as conversations and clicks, perhaps.

I’ll restrict myself to these two, they should really be your main two – everything else is support for these.

You make 100 calls, you leave 85 voicemails and speak to 15 people, have 15 conversations and arrange 8 meetings and get 5 leads (and maybe you win 3 of them).

(I made these numbers up – measure yours)

You spend $3000 on Google Ads and get 200 clicks at $15 a click, some of them enquire, let’s say 50 and you have 50 people to take through your sales process and you win a percentage of them.

(I don’t know what a good click-through rate is for your business. It varies depending on your trade).

These are mine for my Google Ads for January

• Spend $3603
• Impressions 227,99
• Clicks 599 To a landing page
• Conversions 108 (Downloads of my thing)
• Calls booked 11
• Calls attended 5
• Strategy Sessions 4
• Showed up 2
• New clients 1 (Value $20k)

So that’s my Adwords funnel, yours will be analogous.

Spend, impressions, clicks, conversions (could be calls or web enquiries), conversations, quotes, won jobs. 

This might start to sound a bit complicated but that information is easy to get once you set it up – and your agency should be able to do it for you.

You do your own for calls. You see how the numbers get smaller? If you start small, they’re only getting smaller, aren’t they?

Go and measure yours for a week or two and then ask yourself – are they enough? I bet they’re not, which means your risk of being quiet soon is higher than you probably want. 

You might be fine but you might not. 

You should do this – don’t walk blindly into a dry patch, measure your marketing and your funnel and decide whether you’re doing enough. Then decide what to do.

I’ve made a chart to help you. Comment ‘CHART’ and I’ll send it and comment ‘CALL’ and I’ll talk to you about whether my coaching can help you.