Estimator’s Top 10 Guide For When You Are Short of Leads Any Day – Tip #4 – Make 5 or more good cold call contacts every day.

Speaking from experience, I can tell you that for contractors, one of the hardest parts of the job, (besides everything), is keeping the pipeline full.  What do I mean by that?  Contractors know.  But for the rest of you it’s the concept of looking at a business like a pipeline (or lets say an assembly line).  You have to have a continuous flow of leads (or new clients in the door), in order to keep the production line of the business busy, which in turn keeps a flow of money coming into the company, which finances everything else.  It’s a never-ending process.

Focusing on the marketing concept, it’s really a simple matter of math.  Lets say you know that you (as a business) sell 40% of all customers that come through your doors.  You can say that your “close ratio” is 40%.  To keep it simple, if you need to sell 10 customers a day (based on your average sale amount)  and you know that you have a 40% close ratio, then you need to have 25 customers per day walk through your doors as an average to meet your minimum goal.  From there, you can do lots of things like increase your average sale and increase the number of customers, and especially, increase your close ratio.

Lets apply this to marketing and sales people.  When a company knows all this information, then a salesman can apply it to their number of customers they need to keep their personal “pipeline” full.

Here is what I mean.  We all know that despite our best efforts, there is a certain amount of customer attrition. They leave for whatever reason.  So to keep a sales person’s (or a company’s) pipeline full, you must keep a flow of new clients into the company to replace the one’s that leave, or to grow your business.

That brings me to this free tip.  If you make 5 new contacts every day, you will always keep your pipeline full.  I also want to point out that it’s not the Marketer’s or the Sales Manager’s or even the business owner’s responsibility to do that.  That’s why they call them cold calls.  They are not a warm prospect.  You are developing new prospects for yourself and for the business.  If everyone does that, the the business as a whole will keep the pipeline full, unless there are other problems to be fixed.

Remember, reputation and integrity are everything in business!

Allen Beck

Owner

AKOR Services