How to nurture trade business leads?

Do you know what I’m talking about when I say nurturing leads? Let me explain.

This is your customers buying process that goes on in their head.

They decide they want something done — a new fence, house, or kitchen, etc. Then they start looking around and researching – they’re kicking tyres at this stage (we all hate tyre kickers, don’t we?). But kicking tyres is an important and necessary part of their process.

So they start looking around at their options. They’re doing research. They might do it on the internet, or ask friends or start contacting some trade businesses and asking them some questions. 

Now, they might ask for quotes when they’re still researching because we’re stupid people and that’s all we know to ask our tradies, “Can you give me a quote?” 

Not, “I think I might like to do a kitchen, how much do they cost?”.

Then they get some quotes and they start deciding which business they’re going to choose. They’re deciding now. And then they decided, accept the quote, and they pay a deposit and the sales process is finished.

Now this process applies whether it’s a person buying a fence, bathroom or house or whether it’s a builder preparing a proposal for a customer or corporate business or somebody doing a fit-out. The same stages occur from researching to actively purchasing.

Nurturing trades business leads – it is your job!

And your job is to influence this decision.

It’s your marketing machine’s job to be in the frame when they’re kicking tyres so they consider you and your business. And it’s your marketing machine’s job to educate them during this process. 

It’s your sales machine’s job to understand what they need and what they’re comparing, to design something appropriate, quote it and win the work.

Recommended Reading: Following Up And Closing Deals – It’s Your Job Tradies!

It’s a process and often this process can take quite a long time. The bigger the project, the longer the process takes. People don’t decide to choose a builder for building a brand-new house over three weeks, it can take several months, or a year.

So nurturing means staying in touch with them throughout this process, building a relationship with them so it’s your business they choose because they’re confident you’re going to give them what they need.

If you have a website or some marketing, and it gets you an enquiry, and you call them, and you go and do a visit and then you send off a quote – you haven’t done any nurturing.

The nurturing wraps itself around that basic sales process, and it can take a few forms. The simplest and most obvious is calling people up and chatting with them while they’re in their researching phase.

If it’s a big enough project, you’ll do that naturally. You’ll keep track of them and you’ll call them from time to time.

Certainly, if I’m your business coach you’ll be calling them because I’ll be nagging you to call them and see where they’re at.

If you’re diligent, you’ll systematise it, you will plan it and you’ll use a tool such as a CRM database to manage it.

And I’ve been saying to most of my clients that investing in a CRM, that’s a Customer Relationship Management database is a bit of overkill. For most of you, your list of prospective customers and jobs is too small for it to be worth investing in a system like that. They’ll really come into their own when you’ve got more customers. 

However, there are other ways to nurture your customers, besides just calling, and you can nurture them while they’re in their buying process. You can send them emails, postcards, letters and you can automate all of this.

I encourage my clients who do large projects like builders, in particular, to invest in a lead magnet system. Your customer comes to your website, downloads a useful report and gives you their email address in return for the free thing and your system sends them more useful information that helps them decide and it helps them to get to know your business – and you can automate this.

That’s nurturing, too. It’s automated. You don’t need to be picking up the phone spending your precious time talking to somebody who is still in the tyre-kicking stage.

They’re both important and you should do them both. You should be calling people once they’re worth that investment every time and you should be setting up something automated like this so that you do some nurturing without having to spend your time.

My conversations with Matt Jones of The Site Shed and Tradie Web Guys have led me to reconsider my position. Maybe you should all be investing in this technology and in marketing automation in particular, and using it to nurture your customers. 

I’m coming around to his way of thinking. It seems cheaper and easier than it used to be which is really why I’m starting to come around. 

So we’re going to talk about this in our interview. 

You can register for the podcast here – tradiewebguys.com.au/smallfish – and you’ll get notified when we’re doing our interview. 

If you’re interested in hearing us argue about marketing automation for trades businesses, jump on the podcast and have a listen.