How to Increase Plumbing Sales & Win New Business
June 16, 2022 | Read: 9 minutes
What’s your motivation to increase sales for your plumbing business? Is it:
- The prospect of earning more money?
- To delight more customers?
- To be better than your competition?
Whatever your motivation, you need a plan to make it happen…
It’s time to develop a sales strategy.
Whether your aim is to get more customers, or to work with bigger customers, join us as we explore how to increase plumbing sales so you can win new business:
How to Increase Plumbing Sales in Five Ways:
1. Train Staff and Set Goals
It’s easy to think of a sale only in terms of money. But a sale can mean so much more than that. It’s an opportunity to build customer relationships, promote your services, and satisfy customers with fantastic work.
The good news is that your staff are already doing those things.
However, to make them more effective salespeople, they’ll need some guidance. To find success, your entire team must be aligned with your sales strategy.
That’s where training (and a plan) comes in.
Sure, you want to drive more sales […] 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 go out and actually sell more, everyone needs to be aware of the goals and 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 you can set those goals.
How to Set Effective Sales Goals:
First, you need to ask yourself a question: What do you want to achieve?
- More sales?
- To have a frictionless sales process?
- To maximise profit per job?
- All of the above?
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. Are you talking more customers or jobs with greater value? One strategy will require you to market your business and spread the word. The other might mean adapting the types of services you can provide and finding new ways to generate income.
However, a lot of plumbing & heating businesses aren’t necessarily struggling with getting customers. Most are busy enough and it’s actually managing all the job requests that’s holding them back: they lack the resources and/or means to do cope.
In this scenario, using software can bridge the gap and rather than drive more job requests, they’ll use software tools, like intelligent scheduling, to maximise sales opportunities.
If you’re after more lucrative opportunities, you must create relevant offers that appeal to the wants, needs, and costs of your customers.
The keyword here is relevant.
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.
2. Track Every Sales Opportunity
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. Provide Customer with 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. Create Beautiful Sales 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 sales 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 help you build beautiful proposals?
5. Reward Customer Loyalty & Earn Repeat Business
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, 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
Show Customers Gratitude
A “Thank you” email for leaving the review is nice (and encouraged), but rewarding a customer can be even more impactful.
It could that you give them a loyalty discount, enter them into a prize draw, or for customers who’ve been around for a long while, post them a gift! Such gestures can make them feel valued and it’s satisfying to connect with customers on a more human level.
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.
How to Increase Plumbing Sales with Commusoft!
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 Trades Businesses to take control of their entire Sales process:
