If you own a service-based business it can often be a race to the bottom to provide the most cost effective pricing and win over clients from your competition.
Many owners can be tempting by simply competing on price and “offering better service.”
I would argue that the exact opposite is true – let me prove it to you.
Here are the 5 ways you can absolutely dominate your market whether you are a lawn care business, pool care, A/C or heating company, laundry mat, contractor, or auto shop (just to name a few).
- Generating Leads
- Pricing
- Showing up
- Systems
- Follow up
Generating leads. Without leads, you don’t have any customers. If you are a business owner that looked at that and said “advertising doesn’t work, I have tried everything,” you are in serious trouble.
That is simply not true. There is always a profitable way to acquire customers. You may be asking yourself the wrong questions here:
Wrong: “Well where can I go to advertise and generate a profit. I have tried ads everywhere”
Correct: “To what price can I increase my service, so that I CAN afford to advertise on all these sites?”
The minute you can afford you generate leads, your business will become a money printing machine if you have the right people and systems in place.
Pricing. As stated above – you NEED to have your pricing on point. It isn’t a race to the bottom! You will fail trying to do that model.
You need to be the premium in the market. Your service, skills, and your image needs to back up your pricing. A magical thing happens when you are a premium service.
It goes like this: You can afford ads – and much more of them than competitors. That means more leads. More leads means more customers. More customers means more money. More money means more leads….
It’s a license to print.
Showing up. Currently I own and operate a commercial and residential firewood business. Do you know what the main thing people say to us is when we pick up the phone?
“Thank you for picking up the phone.” OR
“I called a ton of people and you were the only one who picked up.”
That is only because we constantly show up when our competitors don’t. It’s so simple and boring, yet for some reason it’s hard for people to do. We make thousands of dollars a month from our competitors that don’t pick up.
Honor your business hours, pick up your phones, don’t over promise and always try to over deliver. Customers will notice your company showing up. Referrals will follow. Stay the course.
Systems. Systems are the glue that holds everything together in your business.
Some of the systems you will want in place:
- 1-888 number that you can get voicemails logged and even transcribed through.
- CRM like Monday.com or Hubspot to track your customer interactions from your web forms and phone calls.
- Logistics app such as route4me that can get you the most efficient routes for yourself and your drivers.
- Payment gateway for mobile and static payments
- Email sequencing and email generator for generating sales and compiling customer emails. I like convertkit.com and Hubspot for this.
Follow up. Follow ups can happen in many ways and in take many different forms throughout your business.
- Follow up in phone calls – Always try to pick up your calls immediately. If you miss a call, call them back ASAP. Often your customers are going on a call blitz to shop the competition.
- Follow up in emails – Set up an auto responder that acknowledges their initial reach out, then get back to them ASAP.
- Follow up in lead forms. Have these set to notify you via website or mobile. Stay on top of them and also set up a template(s) in order to quickly answer questions efficiently. Craft/tailor them to each person if possible.
- Follow up with reviews – Use email sequences, phone calls, texts, or physical mail to follow up with clients/customers to get their valuable reviews. Reviews help you rank, convert, and ultimately make you more money.
Using these methods, we were able to take our 4 month old service business to $60,000 a month in sales with 64 – 5 star reviews on google. Not bad. This will certainly help your business if you apply these learnings.
scalecustomers.com 