According to Exterior Contractor, 30 percent of leads that remodelers think are “dead” are in fact willing customers. To help these customers find their way back to your company, it’s vital to understand the path they take through your selling system. This can be done with the help of a lead map.

A lead map keeps track of your potential clients, from the moment they make their initial inquiries through the processes of sales, production, and even giving feedback. Luckily, making a lead map is easy, and even a simple version is effective to help you visualize how well your current system responds when leads don’t.

Essentially, a lead map will illustrate where you obtain your leads. From there, it will show how you make contact with them, including the length of time it takes to reach them and the script used once contact is made. Lead maps can then be divided between “lost” leads and “set” leads.

For set leads, the lead map can show how many steps led to the sale, as well as any follow-through steps that occurred. For instance, was the job completed? Did you make a profit? Did you receive a reference? For those leads that are supposedly lost, a lead map can show whether an appointment was ever scheduled and how much follow-up took place. It can also help answer the following questions:

• Do you understand why the lead was not set?
• How much time elapsed before your team called the client back?
• How many follow-up phone calls are made and what is the protocol for this?
• Does your company have a method of staying in touch with the customer, such as via an electronic newsletter?
• How do you track older leads?

Exterior Contractor has found that 50 percent of lost opportunities tend to occur during scheduling. By mapping out the answers to these questions, a lead map will help you strengthen your marketing and outreach where you need it most. So before you spend money on more advertising, see if there’s anything your company can do to strengthen contact points, especially for those leads that seem to have lost their way. In two weeks, you should be rewarded with a bigger lead flow.

Tags: dead leads, lead map

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Lead Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.