Yelp Help: Harness The Power of Online Reviews

Upon completing a home improvement installation, it’s standard practice to ask the homeowner for a referral. That is, an introduction to neighbors, family members or anyone else that homeowner thinks could also be interested in purchasing your product.

Fact is, these are among the best sales leads you can get.  First, because they don’t you cost anything.  And second, because attached to them is an implicit recommendation of your company direct from your newest satisfied customer.

Your Phones: The Painful Truth That Costs You Money

So, you hired somebody to answer your incoming calls, call back your Internet leads and set your homeowner appointments.  Now you can move on to selling, installing and making some money, right?

Wrong.

Arranging for someone to “cover the phones” is certainly a convenient solution. But it’s also an ineffective one. Why? Because for most home improvement companies, even smaller ones, a single individual just simply can’t provide the telephone coverage you need.

Why’s that?  When a hot homeowner prospect calls in, just consider what else your phone person might be doing:

• Answering another call

Setting Appointments: Your Company’s Internal Tug-Of-War

Want to turn more leads into appointments? More appointments into sales? You may not be able to have it both ways.

Whether you know it or not, there’s a tug of war going on in your company right now.  And the folks who set your appointments are right in the middle.

On one side is your marketing team.  That includes your homeshow reps, SFI teams, canvassers and the like.  They work feverishly to generate connections with homeowners interested in what you sell.  You pay many for each appointment they produce, and as far as these folks are concerned, every lead they generate should turn into an appointment. And they naturally want to be paid for all of them.

Online Customer Surveys For Fun & Profit

With the 2010 Census still fresh in your mind, consider how customer surveys can help you run a more profitable home improvement business.

Surveying your customers used to be a huge hassle.  Writing up your survey questions.  Finding the right addresses to which to send them.  Stuffing envelopes with stamped return envelopes.  And then hoping that you get enough surveys back to make your results statistically significant.

Fortunately, you can now take advantage of a number of simple and inexpensive online services that ease the process of surveying your customers.

Daddy, Where Does SPAM Come From?

With one click, most Internet users delete annoying SPAM e-mails they receive out of their lives forever.

Not so fast. Home improvement dealers would do well to pay attention to some of the SPAM they receive. Let me explain.

Trashy e-mails promoting kitchen gadgets, payday loans or male virility products. Most with “buy now” offers about as a subtle as a plane crash.

It’s hard to define, but everybody knows it when they see it: yes, it’s SPAM.  Allow me to define SPAM as unsolicited e-mail, generally from sources looking to sell you something.  They capture e-mail addresses from unsuspecting Internet users in countless ways, and then pummel them constantly with unwanted solicitations.