What levers do you need to pull to grow?
In an effort to grow your business, you need to know the levers that you can pull that will actually grow it. It’s easy to say “just increase your revenue” but how? Revenue, profit and all that jazz are lagging indicators that only show what you’ve done after you’ve done it.
You need to be able to figure out the formula for how that revenue number is going to go up. To do that you’ll need to break down the variables that make up your revenue. For us it was:
# of qualified leads
Technician Availability
Conversion rate
Follow Up conversion rate
Retention / Repeat
If we wanted to increase our revenue we had to play with the above variables - all being equally important. The easiest ones to change are the conversion rates while the qualified leads and technician availability are the hardest and most expensive.
You could even break this down into individual services you provide, their profitability, the % of jobs you do there and the conversion rates. You can use this information to send to your marketing team to focus on advertising those.
Now the question is how do you improve these metrics? It’s one thing to know what to do but another to do it successfully. You’re better off focusing on the highest leverage activities first and then moving down the list starting off with:
Conversion rate, retention, technician availability and then you focus on the qualified leads. Obviously, there is a balance if you’re getting little to no leads or no technicians available then you have to worry about that first but in general the above is true.
To improve your conversion rate you need to look at your call center:
- Are they picking up the phone quickly if at all
- Are they really showing the value of going through you versus anyone else?
- Are they taking control of the conversation?
- Are they following a well thought out script or steps?
- Are they handling objections well?
- Do they sound like they care?
Once we get the above taken care of, then it’s working on the technicians closing skills:
- Do you have a sales process for the technicians?
- Is that process simple enough to match their capabilities?
- Are you technicians clean / give the impression they can be trusted?
- Are you customers able to pay the increased fees?
- Are you charging appropriately (hint the answer is almost you’re not charging enough)
Once you’ve gone over the above now you have to look retention - are you doing everything you can to get your customers to come back? This starts off with providing a great service and doing what you’re paid to do but that is the bare minimum. You can’t just rely on that and expect them to come back - you’re going to need to do more.
- Do you have a maintenance program or a reason for them to come back?
- Did you tentatively book their future job?
- Were they blown away by the service? Did you go above and beyond what your competition did?
You’re going to have to focus heavily on the experience of the customer from the moment you arrive on time to very end when they pay their bill (ideally the technician doesn’t take payment). Unless your industry is not saturated or competitive - it’s really important to give the customer a different experience than the rest. This will also make a huge difference to the number of leads you get coming in.
Once you’ve got the foundation set you can focus on increasing the number of the leads and technician hours. Those are much more complex topics that we talk about in other posts.
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