Large corporations collect data on their customers to customize and personalize service experiences. Then they use data mining to examine past behavior and purchases to predict future needs.
As a professional contractor, why aren’t you making use of the data available to you to grow your sales?
Sales Opportunity #1: When you visit job sites, log what else the customer needs!
Your technicians have the opportunity to visually examine what additional services a customer might need. Put checkboxes on your work orders to trigger “marketing” to contact the customer for additional services: irrigation upgrades, weed control, mosquito control, pruning, etc. Instruct your technicians to check anything that they think the customer will need in the next few months. Pay them a bonus for any services sold because of their assessment.
As an example, a technician could notice that a customer is experiencing a drainage problem while servicing the irrigation system. He marks off the “drainage problem” section on the work order. The office manager sees this and emails a premade drainage problem solver guide “just for the customer.” This direct approach gets you an additional sale with no traditional expensive advertising.
Sales Opportunity #2: Data mine your past invoices
Go back and look at what customers bought which services in the past. Is there an opportunity to go back and sell pruning to a customer that had trees installed 3 years ago? How about updating an irrigation system that’s more than 15 years old? Make use of all of the stored information you have in your system.
In a similar manner, mining your data can help you cross-sell effectively. A customer who bought irrigation two years ago might be ready to add landscape lighting, and so forth. The contractors who take this approach find the next sales happen very quickly, and without needing to find new customers.