5 Strategies for Driving Sales to Your Plumbing Business
June 16, 2022 - Sales - 10 minutes
What’s your motivation for driving sales to your plumbing business? Is it:
- To delight more customers?
- The prospect of earning more money?
- A desire to be better than your competition?
Whatever your motivation for driving sales is, you need a plan…
No matter whether you’re in a plumbing & heating business, working in gas or with renewables, it’s important to think about developing your sales strategy.
So, whether you’re aiming to get more customers, or driving sales with the intent to work with bigger customers (and earn more from each individual job), join us as we explore five ways to help you drive sales to your plumbing business:
- Set goals so your staff are actively driving sales
- Track every sales opportunity with software
- Achieve sales excellence with customer self-service tools
- Send your customers beautiful, eye-catching proposals
- Inspire customer loyalty to drive sales into the future
1. Set goals so staff are actively driving sales
It’s easy to think of a sale only in terms of money. And sure, every business needs money. But a sale can mean so much more than that. It’s an opportunity to build customer relationships, promote your services, and do the job you know and love.
However, when it comes to driving sales, your entire team must be aligned with your sales strategy.
Sure, you want to drive more sales, increase revenue and strive for greater success, but without a solid plan detailing how to achieve a tangible set of goals, it’s unlikely your team will make your number.
Pipedrive
Remember: “Sell more” is an instruction, not a strategy.
To actually go out and actually sell more, everyone needs to be aware of the goals and sales KPIs that help motivate them. With more awareness of these targets, team members can actively see how they help to achieve success.
Let’s explore how to set goals that will help you out:
Here’s what to think about when making sales goals:
What do you want to achieve? Do you want:
- More sales?
- To have a frictionless sales process?
- To maximise profit per job?
When everyone is aligned with these goals, you’ll develop ideas to help everyone achieve them. As you build out a plan for your plumbing company, team members be confident that their actions are leading to the company’s success.
For instance, let’s say you want more sales. This will mean getting more customers. To get more customers, you need to market your business and spread the word. This will increase awareness of your brand and attract new leads.
However, a lot of plumbing & heating businesses aren’t necessarily struggling with getting customers. Most are too busy and so can’t manage all the job requests. They lack the means to do so.
In this case, rather than driving more job requests, they’ll want to maximise sales opportunities.
That can mean seeking out more lucrative opportunities, or perhaps finding a tool (like a Sales CRM) that helps them to better manage their sales pipeline.
If you’re after more lucrative opportunities, you must create relevant offers that appeal to your ideal customer’s wants, needs, and costs.
The keyword here is relevant.
With a better idea of who your ideal customer is (your buyer persona), you can appeal to their needs with more bespoke proposals. The more you understand your customer’s needs, the more you can tailor jobs, increase deal value, and consult with customers to find great solutions that work for everyone.
With this knowledge:
Customer service reps can help identify key moments in the customer lifecycle to offer an upsell, or point out behaviors […] that suggest they’re ready to invest more resources in a solution better-suited to their needs.
Hubspot
Don’t underestimate the power of context, either. For instance, your team could follow a “good, better, best” sales model. That’s where customers can select from a range of options, at increasing price points and choose the service they want.
Solutions like this keep the customer focused on you. After all, if you offer a variety of solutions at different price points, why would they need to consult your competition?
Every feature like this plays a part in having an effective sales strategy. And achieving these new goals will also be easier if you’re setting and tracking KPIs for your team.
2. Track every sales opportunity with software
Managing sales can be complex without the right procedures in place.
As we said, plumbing businesses like yours are likely already kept very busy. That means it’s not necessarily more jobs you need but the ability to track and organise the opportunities you already have.
Don’t aimlessly send quote after quote. Track the sales process from start to finish and stand out from the competition with proposals that drive your revenue
Commusoft
If you’re not organised, it’s easy for opportunities to slip through the cracks.
Slow response times can mean customers will go to a competitor. Or it means that deals in the pipeline go stagnant. This can lead to frustrating experiences for staff and customers alike.
So, even if you do successfully drive more sales, if you’re not able to properly track opportunities then all that effort will go to waste.
Using software can change your fortunes by helping you better track new opportunities with a clear sales pipeline.
Digital tools will make tracking, converting, and completing every part of a job more straightforward for your team. From booking, organising diaries, getting paid, and much more.
This is especially true thanks to communication tools, like automated service reminders and updates. These will enable your team to more easily follow up on calls, emails, and generally keep customers in the loop.
With software, you’ll save your team from spending more time than is necessary on admin and keep customers engaged, attentive, and convert more sales.
3. Achieve sales excellence with customer self-service tools
When it comes to making a purchase, the easier the process, the more likely someone is to buy something.
With that in mind, aim to create a sales experience that doesn’t leave your customer waiting!
Self-service tools can immediately solve that problem as they help customers find their own solutions, but they still keep your team in the loop.
Using tools that are powered by your job management system, you can satisfy the most important desire that a customer will have: convenience.
A booking portal can solve a lot of problems, helping customers make inquiries and arrange jobs with ease.
For your team, such a tool can help lift admin burdens and ensure customers can make an inquiry that’s promptly dealt with.
When responses are timely, it helps win customers over and they’ll be impressed by your customer service.
Of course, when it comes to sending a job proposal itself, it helps to make them appear as attractive and clear as possible. This brings us to point 4:
4. Driving sales with beautiful proposals
If you were to Google “plumber in my area” it’s likely many options will pop up.
So in order to get a customer’s attention, you’ll need to stand out from the crowd.
The thing is, your competition isn’t going to make that easy for you. They’ll also be doing everything they can to draw customers to their plumbing business instead of yours.
To help, reviews, images, and customer ratings will go a long way to winning customers over, but you need to do all you can to keep it, as well.
That’s where creating a beautiful, informative proposal can make a massive difference.
People often make snap judgements based on visual cues and impressions and a well-designed sales proposal needs to succeed in being memorable.
By building proposals that draw the eye and give customers all the information they need, you’ll reinforce why your brand is great. They’ll see more reasons to choose your plumbing service, and you’ll ultimately drive more work to your business.
Did you know: Commusoft’s Sales CRM can be used to build beautiful proposals?
5. Inspire customer loyalty to drive sales into the future
Driving sales to your plumbing business is easier if you also focus on customer retention.
It’s so much easier (and cheaper) to win business from happy customers you’ve worked with before than it is to invest in attracting new customers. In fact, can be:
“About five times as much [to attract new customers than] it is to retain existing customers”!
Word Stream
While you’ll want both new and returning customers using your services, if you can inspire loyalty, you’ll find driving sales to be much easier. This is what will help your business thrive long into the future.
We’ve touched on a few ways you can make customers happy, including creating a frictionless booking process and sending proposals as quickly as possible. However, there’s more that can help you to drive sales:
Self-service tools can add to the already streamlined processes you’ve created, giving customers the confidence to create new opportunities that you can easily follow up on.
Automated replies will save your administration team time and give customers timely responses that make them feel valued. That sense of value, not to mention the opportunity to provide feedback with after-sale care (all powered by a customer portal), can also aid in driving future sales.
Showing off what your business is capable of can help in the effort to attract new customers. Not only that but collaborating with happy customers to collect great pictures and feedback will also add genuine value for new prospects to see.
Going that extra mile for your customers is always going to create the memory that helps them form the bond you need between yourself and valuable customers.
That’s how you increase customer loyalty.
Socital
Rewarding customers can also lead to boosting loyalty.
A “Thank you” email for leaving the review is nice, but rewarding a customer goes the extra mile.
It could that you give them a loyalty discount, enter them into a prize draw, or post a gift; such gestures can make it feel worth their while to stick with you.
The same can be done if they recommend your services, or if they’ve used your services multiple times.
Reward customers for choosing you and you’ll be rewarded in turn, too.
Driving sales the Commusoft way:
To learn more about driving sales to your plumbing business, explore our free downloadable guide Stop Quoting, Start Selling. It’s your gateway to build on the success of your sales, so you can consult with customers and bring them more value through your services.
Want to level up your sales game even more? Commusoft Sales CRM helps Sales Managers take control of their whole sales process and increase sales revenue.
