Category Archives: swimming pool

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Pool Pro Spotlight – Leisure Tech

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About Leisure Tech

Leisure Tech is committed to the best value for you. For over twenty years they have built a stellar reputation for high quality service with many repeat customers and referrals.  The knowledgeable, friendly and professional staff at Leisure Tech is known for their integrity, honesty and fairness with suppliers and customers. Each year they continue to grow, currently we service New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.You can reach them at (845) 422-1300. Visit Leisure Tech on Facebook

Services

Leisure Tech’s services are tailored to specific customer’s needs. They are available for a wide range of home improvement projects. The swimming pool division can build, repair, renovate, maintain, and service your pool.



Five steps to get the most out of every lead

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Your leads are your future

Your leads are your next customers and your best referral sources.  Here is a quick five step way to get the most out of every lead.

(1) Design a Good Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is the way a lead becomes a customer.  Its called a funnel because it get narrower.  Based on our data of over 494,350 pool customers about 15% of households that request a pool quote will purchase a pool within 5 years. This means that 85 out of 100 leads will not buy a pool, no one knows which 15 will buy a pool.  You need a sales funnel that keeps as leads active and engaged in your business so that you can capture as many of those 15 sales as possible.

Your funnel should:

  • Allow as many leads as possible to fall into your sales funnel.
  • Keep your leads active and engaged with your business.
  • Tell you to know when a lead becomes a hot prospect.
  • Help you close the deal.
  • Build your word of mouth and referral business – filling up your funnel.
  • Give you the information to get better at all the above.

(2) Keep your leads active

One out of seven pool leads will turn into a project, by only about 25% ( 1 out of 30 leads) will close right away.  A good sales funnel will keep all of these leads active and engaged in your business.  This could mean up to 3 more projects from the same leads.  If you just keep your leads active in your sales funnel you can triple your lead to sales rates.

(3) Build a social community around your business

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The quote above is from a personal friend and social media expert Brian Franz. He most certainly gets it.  Smart phones, Facebook and social media has changed the business game. You must use mobile web, Facebook and “content” keep your leads active. Is this worth your investment? We think so because keeping your leads active can triple your revenue from the same leads.

(4) Use social media to keep your leads active.

Keeping your leads active means nurturing your leads. Nurturing leads is all about quality ‘touches’.  This means how are you building your brand awareness with your leads.  This use to be very expensive and difficult.  Television, radio, newspapers and direct mail use to be the only way to connect with your potential customers and build brand awareness, loyalty etc.  Today there are many inexpensive branding channels like web search, social media and email. Seeing a nice picture of your pool on Facebook, or learning something interesting about your business in a blog post is the modern day television commercial.

The key to doing this well is know what you are doing and automate to nurture all of your leads. Use social media engagement and drip marketing to keep your leads active. 

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(5) Create a consistent, evolving content strategy.

Content is another way to say ‘stuff you share’.  It can be pictures, stories videos, status updates or other stuff.  Creating a winning content strategy is figuring out what you are going to tell your leads, when are you are going to say it, and how are you going to say it.  Content strategies are effective if they are designed and implemented well.  A well developed media campaign will keep your leads active and engaged.

A winning content strategy should:

  •  Keep leads entertained and engaged to build brand awareness, trust and loyalty.
  •  Slow-cook leads into prospects by reinforcing the desire to get a pool, addressing the logical questions about getting a pool, and building familiarity and trust.
  • Create triggers so that you can identify when it is time to treat an individual lead like a prospect.
  •  Build referral channels. One of the best thing about qualified pool consumers is that they know other pool people.  Creating incentives to share content and information about your business will feed the above objectives and also continue to fill your pipeline with new leads.

Building your sales funnel for the next decade

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Building an effective sales funnel for your present & future

An effective sales funnel is the future of your business.  It is the process that transforms consumers in your market into leads, then prospects and eventually your customers. The keys to an effective sales funnel are:

(1) Get leads into the top of your funnel & don’t let them fall out.

(2) Consistently identify which leads are prospects and move them down the funnel.

(3) Efficiently convert prospects into customers.

(4) Innovate, improve and REPEAT.

Get leads into the top and don’t let them fall out.

Pretty much all customers start as leads.  A lead is a person who generally qualifies as a prospect for you now or in the future. In the pool business that is basically a homeowner with reasonable income who wants a pool.  Based on our data of over 594,000 pool customers roughly 15% of households that inquire about getting a pool will purchase a pool within 5 years.

Keep leads in your sales funnel for 5 years to maximize sales.

The numbers speak for themselves.  Basically for every 100 consumers that enter your sales funnel, 15 of them will buy pools within 5 years. If you only focus on leads that are immediate prospects, and you do a relatively good job converting leads into prospects and then into customers you will close 20% to 30%. That equals between 3 to 5 new customers – not bad!

However, if you do a good job keeping most of these 100 leads in your sales funnel for 5 years, you may capture between 50% to 60% of those customers.  That could mean an additional 7 to 10 additional projects for every 100 leads over 5 years.

Whats make such a big difference? 

Most of your competitors do not have an effective sale funnels. In other words everyone is spending almost all of their resources chasing the lowest hanging fruit, and the same low hanging fruit (meaning the same leads).

Also most pool builders do not leverage the benefits that come from building brand recognition with consumers.  A ‘lead’ today is a ‘prospect’ next year and a customer the year after that.  If you start while they are a lead and continue to nurture them through the funnel, they will never be your competitor’s low hanging fruit – they will ONLY be yours.

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Also we all know that referrals are the gravy.  An effective sales channel creates the sweetest of low hanging fruit – the referral.

Once you build an effective sales funnel, you will be the only one harvesting the middle and high fruit.  The trick is to figure out how to “set it and forget it.”  The good news is that with technology you can do it.  Is this worth your investment?

Is this worth your investment? We think so because effectively keeping leads in your funnel can increase your revenue 2 to 3 times.

Technology techniques to keep leads in your sales funnel

There is a HUGE positive difference to your bottom line if you effectively keep leads in your funnel. Almost all leads have value. The key is setting up automated systems to nurture all of your leads.  Properly nurturing your leads will:

(1) Keep them in your funnel so that you can get the most possible sales out of your leads over time.

This is most easily be accomplished with a combination of social media engagement and direct communication via automated drip marketing campaign. Social media and technical communication platforms are the only efficient way to stay in touch with your lead funnel.

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(2) Once you have your systems in place you need to create a consistent, evolving content strategy.

This is a fancy way of figuring out what you are going to tell your leads, when are you are going to say it and how are you going to say it.  Content strategies are effective if they are designed and implemented well.  Haphazardly posting pictures or emailing the same message multiple times will not have the effect of nurturing your leads like a well developed media campaign will.

Your content should have multiple objectives:

(1) Keep leads entertained and engaged so that they continue to look at your content.

(2) Slow-cook leads into prospects which means feeding their desire to get a pool, addressing the logical questions about getting a pool, building a relationship of familiarity and trust and creating triggers so that you can easily identify when it is time to treat an individual lead like a prospect.

(3) Your content should also help you build referral channels. One of the best thing about qualified pool consumers is that they know and hang out with other pool people.  Creating incentives to share content and information about your business will feed the above objectives and also continue to fill your pipeline with new leads.

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If this sounds overwhelming – well it can be, but you are a lot closer than you think. We can help. If you have questions feel free to reach out – you and our industry has a friend in technology center of San Francisco.

Swimmingly yours,

David

David Grossblatt , @dmgrossblatt

In addition to running Swimming Pool Quotes (for the last 10 years), David runs the Founder’s Dojo in the heart of San Francisco.  Founder’s Dojo is an incubator for cutting edge technology companies.