The construction industry can be a tough business to crack from cash flow problems. Struggling to find skilled labor and not making enough money for your efforts leaves many business owners feeling frustrated and burnt out. But when you get the business strategy right, it's an industry that can be highly satisfying and financially rewarding. I'm here to give you the resources to be able to create a construction business that gives you more time, more freedom, and more money. This is to develop your Construction Business podcast. And I'm your host, Greg Wilkes. Can I just ask a quick favor? If you are getting some value out of our podcast, I'd really appreciate it If you could just quickly go online, make sure you subscribe and leave us a review on the platform that you're listening on that really helps our rankings and just helps other construction business owners find out about the show so they can improve their businesses too. So let me just say thanks in advance. So today on the podcast, we are discussing your client's journey with you or your prospective client's journey with you as a company. So what do we mean by that? The journey of a client? Well, just think about if you just draw a line, imagine you've got a bit of paper at the moment. Just draw a line and you've got a start of that line and you've got the end of that line. And we could call this line your customer's journey, the journey they go on with you. So right at the start of the line, this is where people first find out about you. And the end of the line we could say is when the client finally finishes with you. So all the focus for a lot of construction companies either goes right at the front of that line, this is the attractive website, uh, your Google Ads campaign, your Facebook ads, your social media, whatever. It's, it's gonna be a lot of the focus for most companies is right, how do we maximize the customer's journey right at the beginning? How can we really impress a customer? It's all about that attract side at the beginning of that line on that journey. And then at the same time, the other effort that seems to all go into that line is when you're actually delivering the product, uh, project for a client. So that's the end of the line, isn't it? The end of their journey where they're you, you are, you are delivering the product that you've sold. So you've got one end of the line, a load of effort going in at the beginning, and a ton of effort going in at the end when you're trying to get the project delivered for the client. But what you might notice is you've got a huge gap in the middle where nothing is really going on. There's a bit that just gets completely ignored on a client's journey. And it this bit is absolutely crucial. If you wanna improve your conversion quality and your lead flow, and this is the bit that I call nurture. We need to nurture those leads because we've got people coming in cold when they start the beginning of the journey. When they sign up, they're hot, which is what we want, but there's a bit in the middle, which is how do we, we warm them up. How do we get them from cold to hot? And the only way we do that is by lead nurture. And that's a crucial part of our customer's journeys. That's what we're gonna discuss today. How do we nurture leads and improve that conversion rate? Now, if we are not nurturing leads at the moment, there's gonna be a lot of frustration in your business around that. And some of the, the things you are gonna struggle with if you're not nurturing leads is that maybe one you are, you are constantly having to go out there and find new leads to bring into the business. Maybe you're spending more than you need to on your advertising. Or sometimes if you are not nurturing at all, have you ever had it where you go completely cold into an estimate. So maybe you visit someone and uh, it's really frosty the relationship when the client first meets you because they don't know you at all. You've not done any work to nurture them. Another frustration is you could be spending hours and hours pricing up lots of work. You're sending in lots of estimates and you never hear from that client again. That's a sign that nurture hasn't taken place. And overall you're just gonna have quite a low conversion and a low win rate. So we wanna stop that, don't we? Well, clearly what we want in business is the opposite to that. We, we wanna be able to stay in the forefront of our client's minds at all times. We, we wanna slowly build that relationship with the client, don't we? And ideally, that wants to be on autopilot for us, and we want more and more of them coming back to us cuz they're interested in going for our quotes. So that means we can negotiate and, and close more sales, which of course means a higher conversion rate. And if you can do that, it's a ideal situation because it just means you need less leads coming in overall. And it takes pressure off you, it takes pressure off your marketing and your ad spend if you are converting a, a much higher rate. So I'm sure that would mean a lot to your business if, if you could do that, if your nurture process was in place in the right way, it would enable you to have a much higher conversion rate. So a lot of mistakes that many construction companies make is that they just don't have any nurture process in place at all or even any follow up process. So they send a quote and that's it. You know, the, the, the client never hears from the builder again. Uh, and sometimes the attitude is, well, if the customer wants me, they'll call me back. If they don't want me, well, we're not the right fit, so I won't bother. And even if, you know, you should be following up as a, as a company, even if you know that's the right thing to do, sometimes you've just got no time to do it at all. You're so busy that that gets pushed aside. So sometimes the nurture process just isn't there at all for many companies. So maybe some of those mistakes resonate with you in, in your business, but why do we need to nurture leads? What is the importance of nurturing leads to, to help them get over the line? Well, just to illustrate it, um, imagine you've got a single guy who decides he wants to find himself a, a partner. So, uh, he wants to get married finally. So this guy walks into the pub and he spots a beautiful girl sitting at the bar, and he walks over to this beautiful girl straight away. First time he's ever seen her, gets down on one knee and he proposes, well, what's gonna happen? Well, even if he looks like Brad Pitt, she's probably gonna tell him to get lost, isn't he<laugh>? It's it's just too much too soon. You know, no one does that. No relationship has been established yet. So he is moved him for the commitment way too fast. So his mates put him aside and say to him, listen, let's call him Jeff. Listen Jeff, um, you're doing it all wrong, mate. This is completely wrong. You're going for the commitment way too fast. And they show him what to do. So he listens. Jeff listens, and he goes back into the pub. And this time he sees a beautiful gal at the bar. He walks over, he makes eye contact, he smiles. 15 minutes later, he shuffles his chair over and he, he starts a conversation. He offers to buy her a drink. Maybe at the end of the night they exchange numbers. He arranges her first date. It goes well. He rings her a few times in the week, they go on a few more dates, and a few months later, he's taken her on a trip to Paris. He's taken her up the Eiffel Tower, gets down on one knee and proposes. Now what's the likelihood of her saying yes now even if he doesn't look like Brad pit, well, it's more likely she's gonna say yes now than previously. And why is that? Because he's taken the time to nurture her over time, step by step. He's slowly improved that relationship until he was ready to ask for that commitment and she was ready to commit at that stage because that relationship had been established. Now, it's no different for us when we're trying to land a client. People need to feel like they've got that relationship with us. I mean, just think about it. Some clients they might be committing to a six month, 12 month project reverse. It could be a few hundred thousand pounds, could be their life savings, couldn't it for, for many. And so many construction companies out there expect they can go and win a client like that with no more than just a, a simple estimate going over. There's no relationship established. So the key to winning these projects, especially if they're bigger projects, is we need to nurture, we want to warm those cold leads up slowly so it feels like they know us, that they trust us, and eventually they want to commit with us. So, um, there's a, there's a really good authority in the space called, uh, Jay Abraham, you may have heard of him. He did a lot of, uh, marketing and business growth for companies like Microsoft, FedEx, taco Bell. One of the things he always said was that we needed, uh, in order to get a a client to come to trust us, you needed seven interactions with that client. And they need to be repetitive and consistent. So you might think, wow, well, seven, seven interactions is, is quite a lot, but it's not really, if you break it down that you, we, we can achieve seven interactions. And, and as we go through this podcast, we'll, we'll talk about how we can get those interactions. So it's, it's interesting because one interaction, you might think, well, yeah, the first interaction is the client phones me and, uh, they book in a, an appointment. So that's interaction number one. You might then say, oh, second interaction is I go and visit the client. And then third interaction is I send the quote. And for many, they're the only interactions that a client is getting three interactions and it's not enough. You know, as Jay perhaps says, it takes at least seven before you can start to move in for, uh, a commitment and a client is trusting you. So how do we track these interactions? How do we track how many interactions we are doing with someone? Because that's the, isn't it, we we're really busy. You might have multiple quotes going out there, um, and you might be too busy to get seven interactions in. So is there a way of making that a little bit easier? Well, there really is, and if you haven't heard me talk about it before, one thing you really need to do in order to nurture your clients and be able to track the process is you need a CRM system, a customer relationship management system, crm. And these CRM systems, they, they help organizations build customer relationships. They help streamline the process so that customers can increase sales, improve their customer service, and increase profitability. So the bit we are focusing on today's podcast is the sales section. How do we increase the sales? So at the moment, just think about your process and, and what you are using. How are you tracking your potential clients, these customer relationships? Are you using a C R M or maybe, you know, someone's called you for a quote, you've been round and you've measured up and you found out the name of the dog and the kids, and you know, what do you do with all that information? Maybe you're just throwing it in a, in a black diary or, uh, in spreadsheets. But, you know, how are you setting reminders that that quote needs to be sent? Or how are you, you reminding yourself to remember to follow this client up? How do you remember what their dog's name is? It's really important that we need to take note of that and we need to put that in a system so we can remember all that stuff from a client. Because if a customer decides they're not gonna proceed for a few months, how are you gonna remember that? You're just not, are you? Whereas if you've got it in a CRM system, it tracks the whole thing for you. And this is the, the benefit of using a crm, because the CRM will help you remember every interaction that you have with a potential client. You can store documents in a crm, you can store drawings, it'll store their details, their name, their phone number, notes, every conversation, even every email can be synced to go into a CRM system. So you, you can track every email you've ever sent to them. So that's a, that's a CRMs very basic level. So if you haven't got a CRM in place, you need to get one. Now there's, there's tons on the market. Um, one of my favorites, active campaign, uh, I use that a lot. Um, there's Zoho, uh, Salesforce loads of different ones, and they're cheap. You know, they're only, I think they start like$30 a month or something like that. So it's, it's, it's, it's not a lot of money. Um, so I think make sure that, you know, as a, as a basic principle, if you're gonna do anything and you take anything away from this particular episode, get yourself a CRM system. It's absolutely vital for tracking those customer relationships, which is all part of nurture. But that's only a basic thing that a CRM system can do. That's, that's just the basic tools is, is tracking the, uh, client details and, and the contact details. What we wanna do with our CR M is a little bit more than that because as we said, what we're trying to do is nurture our clients. And as we said earlier, what Jay Abraham said is, we want to get to those seven interactions, and the CRM can help you get to those seven interactions. And one way it does this is by giving us the option to use automated email campaigns. So have you ever tried that in your business? An automated email campaign? Now I can tell you that, uh, a lot of us think up, you know, what's, what's the point of that? But I can tell you that email is still highly, highly effective. People read their emails, we straighten their inbox. I know you probably get a lot of spam in there, but emails are highly effective, especially if someone is already slightly warm to you, you've already been round and you've quoted or they've made some contact with you, then they're really gonna read your emails. So email comp campaigns really do work. So what sort of email campaigns could be put in place? And just to clarify, it's the CR M system that is gonna enable you to put this email campaign in place. You don't have to get other software. Most CRM systems will have an auto email feature that you can set up for your clients. So just for, for the next few minutes, I'm just gonna structure out potentially what an email campaign could look like in order to warm up a client. So, so one of the first ones you might want to use is what we call a know, like, and trust email campaign. So that's where you're getting a exactly what it says,<laugh>. You're getting a client to come to know you as a business. They come to like what you've got to offer, and then they're gonna come to trust you eventually. Now, this is great if we've ever used, uh, a lead magnet, maybe you've got someone to come onto your website and download a, a lead magnet. It might be, um, top 10 ideas for kitchen installations or wherever it, wherever it's gonna be. Your, your, uh, top uh, 10 tips to for keeping your boil up, up and running this winter. Uh, so you might have a lead magnet that you've already got on your website and someone might download that lead magnet. Now, once you've, they've downloaded that lead magnet, you've got some information, you've normally got the client's name and you, you've got their email address or you, you, you should have done if you lead Magnus, sell properly. So once you've gather that information, they should then drop into your CRM system automatically. But now what are you gonna do with that information? Now you wanna move that client along in the funnel, don't you, at the moment, all they've done, if they've just downloaded your lead magnet, but now you want'em to make contact with you. So this is where a no like and trust campaign can come in and it can just be a series of emails, maybe just four emails that go out. And each of those four emails are just gonna tell the client a little bit about your company. Thanks for downloading our lead magnet. That was our top 10 tips on how to keep your boiler running this winter. Um, let's just tell you a little bit about our business. We've been established for blah, blah, blah years. Uh, you know, and you'll give it'em a bit of information about your business. That's the, the no side of it. Maybe you send'em a second email. It's a little bit of the, the like side. They, you tell'em a little bit about you and why you sell the business and your values as a business owner. Um, and then you might do the trust side of the campaign. It might be showing them some testimonials that you've got of, uh, people that have used you to do boilers and how pleased they've been. It might be a case study, something like that. So this is all part of a no like, and trust campaign. It's just a simple maybe four to six email campaign that goes out over a few weeks, just gets a client to stay in the front of their minds. And we we're trying to do is move that client on to take action. So that's your no like and trust campaign. That's part of nurture. So now let's imagine the client has reached out, they've seen your campaigns. It's all on auto, uh, pilot by the way, you, you're not actually manually doing this. You, you, once you've set them up, you just, uh, push the button and it'll happen automatically. The second thing w will happen then is the client contacts you and says, yeah. Um, that's great Greg. I'm really interested. Thanks for sending me all that information on boilers. I'd love to have a quote because, uh, my boiler maybe doesn't need a service. It actually needs replacing cuz uh, it's getting a bit old for this winter. So that's great. So you book in the appointment and you're gonna go and see them next week to look at their boiler. You could then put another campaign in place. You could push the button on your CRM and say, yep, I've got a quote to go and look at. How about doing a, an email campaign to warm them up for the quote. So it could just be some helpful information that goes out. Uh, Mrs. Jones, we're really pleased that we're coming out to see your boiler next week. Um, here's a few tips on what we're gonna do on the day, something like that or another email could go out. Uh, we're really, uh, Mrs. Jones, we're really pleased we're coming out. Just to let you know, here's the, uh, sales engineer that's gonna be visiting you, his name Bob, and here's a picture of him and he's been in the industry for 20 years. You can give him a little bit of information about Bob. So can you do that? Can you start educating your customers to as to what to expect for the quote? Because a lot of customers don't know what's gonna happen. Are you gonna measure up? Are you gonna take pictures? Do you need access to the whole house? So this is the sort of thing that you might wanna warm them up with. And what this does, the more information you give to your client, the more transparent they are, the more they start to build trust in you, the more interactions you are getting with this client. So they come to know you as a business and you start to look really professional. So that could be a second, uh, email campaign. Now what about once you've sent the quote over? Well, this is where so many companies fall down. There's, as I said, there's no follow up process for, for many construction companies, which is a absolute sin. Uh, you've gotta follow up in some way, but sometimes people say, well, I haven't got time to to follow up all these leads. Well, again, this is where your auto email campaigns can do the heavy lifting for you. So once a quote's sent, you can push a button on your CRM to say, yep, quote has been sent to Mrs. Jones. Now you can go into the post quote campaign. So what could go into that? Well, maybe you could just send an email saying, we hope you've received your quote. Okay? Uh, if there's anything you wanna explained or you feel there's anything missing on this quote, please reach out on this number and we'll get that clarified for you. That could be a simple post quote email that goes out. Then you can send a, there could potentially be another email that goes out. Just again, some testimonials of people that have pushed the button with you and, and work with you and how pleased they were. You could be sending out an offer potentially, if they don't get back to you for a, for a, a while, for a week or two, you might think, right, I need to put an offer in now and say, look, if you sign up by the end of this week is 50 pounds off or a hundred pounds off, wherever, wherever you are gonna do as part of your, your offer, this could all go on autopilot with your CRM system and it's all part of that nurture process. So there's lots more that can be done with email campaigns, which is really sort of scratching the surface of it here. But can you really see the benefit of why you might need to do this? What you're doing is you can see clearly it's really easy to get those seven interactions in. If you've<laugh>, if you email just one or two of those email campaigns, you've easily hit seven interactions. So that's the first thing we're getting to the customer to, to come to trust you by those interactions. But what we're doing is we're just staying in the forefront of client's minds. And it's really important to do that. We're staying in the forefront. So when they are ready to make a decision, we are the ones that are in their inbox. We drop into their inbox and it just prompts them to take action. They may have got a couple of quotes, but if we are the ones that are sending them information all the time and being really helpful and it's all on autopilot, then uh, we are more likely to get that business. So that's what we wanna do with our clients. That's part of the, the nurture campaign. You can settle that up. It's really easy to do. You can get, you know, if you're not sure how to do it, there's a specialists out there there that can set email campaigns up for you. Uh, we are work working closely with a company at the moment called, uh, construct Virtual, that do all of this. Um, and they know the sort of campaigns that need to go out in the mastermind clients that I'm working with. We've got all this set up already. You know, most of our clients are doing this because they know it works. So it really, it really is a powerful process. So give it a go. Um, make sure that when you do start nurturing people, you are using your reports in crm. You've got, uh, most good CRMs will have reporting features. So you can check your open rates, uh, what you know, what emails are working, what are not, make sure you're checking all that stuff so you can tweak it, you can analyze it and uh, yeah, just make sure you're testing it properly. So I hope that helps. I hope that helps you see the value of nurturing. If you do carry out nurturing and you do do this, it will increase your conversion rate without any shadow of a doubt. So try that. Maybe a subject for another time is actually how do you get all these emails into your system? That's, um, maybe how do you generate these lead magnets? We won't talk about that on this podcast, but that's something you need to think about too. But for now, let's nurture all those leads and let's move them on in that journey. Let's warm them up so they become hot buying customers. If you'd like to work with me to fast track your construction business growth, then reach out on www dot develop coaching.