Appointment Center: Leads into Appointments

In a relay race, you’re only as strong as your weakest runner.

A home improvement, home service business is a lot like a relay race. Our marketing gets us started with a well-communicated Great Brand, which they pass on to our potential customer. The homeowner, when they feel the need for our service, then passes the baton on to the next member of our team by contacting us. That lead now needs to be converted into an appointment for the race to continue, on to the salesperson. What happens to that lead next is the difference between potential growth for our company or nothing.

Nothing. Zilch. Nada. That lead, that you paid for with marketing and reputation building, can vanish into the air without benefiting you or your company. How? The phone rings at your company but nobody answers. The homeowner gets a busy signal when they call. No one follows up on the internet lead or they don’t do it fast enough. Or the lead isn’t handled right when someone does catch it. Homeowners have a zero percent chance of buying if you can’t get your salesperson in front of them.

So there’s two points here that we need to pay attention to if we’re going to makes this part of our business a strength:

1) Catching the lead and 2) Handling it right when it’s caught.

How important is getting this whole appointment thing right? Well, your business can be double or half its sized based on how well this part of your business functions. Put plainly: The growth of your entire company is at stake.

What strategies might you consider to up your lead to appointment ratio? Contractor Nation has identified six distinct roles that an Appointment Center can implement for even greater success. (We’re going to touch on these in the future, so stay tuned, but if you want to go deeper, check out our School of Entrepreneurship program.)

A good place to start, without getting into the Six Roles, is to identify where you have ‘holes in the net’ and work to eliminate them. Have you looked into where you might have holes in the net? What would be a percentage to aim for? Contractor Nation sets the standard at 95% Lead to Appointment Conversion. How does that sound?

See you soon.