Lead Strategies for an Industry That’s Tough From the Bottom Up
It’s not rare for construction companies to struggle with setting sales appointments and achieving ambitious growth goals. Whether those challenges are related to cash flow issues when capital is tied up in fixed assets such as equipment, tools, and vehicles or difficulty forecasting for future sales and resourcing, many growth constraints are deeply rooted in the industry itself.
All it takes is hiring the wrong subcontractor who underperforms on one project to set back your growth back for the quarter. While the construction industry is inherently rife with hazards and risks at the job level, there are also a number of dangers at the strategic level. Such a multifaceted industry presents a unique set of problems and solutions for construction companies to navigate and implement.
With so many potential pitfalls surrounding owners and construction managers, it can be challenging to figure out what strategies your company needs to source leads and drive growth, but growth is ultimately guided by sales.
Where Most Construction Companies Start (and Frequently Fail)
Larger construction companies sometimes acquire smaller companies to drum up more business. However, buying out another company’s assets means absorbing that company’s liabilities, and acquisition often isn’t a realistic prospect for smaller companies looking to gain market share. Overgrowth can also be counterproductive to your growth goals when you don’t have the right resources or infrastructure in place to navigate the acquisition, even if you have the capital to absorb another company.
Some construction companies may also try adjusting their business model from seasonal to year-round in an effort to drive more business and avoid losing knowledgeable tradesmen and employees during layoff periods. This can be somewhat effective for seasonal services like roofing companies that pivot to offer gutter cleaning and snow removal during the off-season. However, this model has varying degrees of efficacy and depends largely on your company’s ability to adapt to other needs in your region. Ultimately, this approach only works for companies that actually have an off-season.
The above strategies, while helpful for some, are generally not the most effective ways to grow your construction company. There is a much better, tried, and true and universal solution for construction companies to achieve needed growth.
Growth Strategies That Consistently Work for Construction Companies
When the above options don’t pan out, construction companies often employ other initiatives like increasing their online presence, investing in advertising and utilizing social media channels to try and find new business, but it can be difficult to know where to start when jumping into the uncharted territory of the digital space for the first time. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.
Aligning and refining your construction marketing and sales tactics is not just the best strategy for growth but is also ultimately critical for growth-focused construction company’s given the boom-and-bust nature of the construction industry.
As business needs evolve and construction companies are forced to adapt, even methods that were previously regarded as tried and true take a back seat to sales strategies like lead generation and B2B appointment setting. You can handle it in-house or turn to companies specializing in comprehensive marketing services that merge advanced growth strategies lead generation, B2B appointment setting, prospecting, and in-depth data cleansing. For smaller companies ready to quickly gain market share, outsourcing these strategies is the generally the most reliable way to ensure growth for your construction business.
By unifying marketing strategies, your construction company can spend less time on outreach and sourcing new work while still achieving your growth goals with the benefits of targeted strategies like:
1. Data Cleansing Is Critical for the Construction Industry
What is data cleansing and why is it at the top of the list? Data cleansing in the context of a construction company’s growth is the process of identifying, correcting or removing any outdated, inaccurate records in your prospect database. Data cleansing is essential because you can’t hit what you can’t see, and cleansing provides critical insights enabling you to guide your company’s growth, including:
Lead Qualification
If your prospecting tools and databases only provide surface-level information, you’re going to struggle with growth. Contact information like names, addresses, e-mails, and phone numbers really only provide a fraction of the information required to target new business opportunities.
Lead qualification and database cleansing ensure that you’re able to accurately assess prospects and have all the information to confirm a deal is feasible before you invest time and resources in pursuing someone who isn’t ready to build anything. Incorrect, outdated data must be identified in order to disqualify prospective leads that aren’t a good fit and move onto viable leads with the confidence to close a deal.
Timelines
Outlining timelines for your construction leads allows you to be more focused on your sales efforts. Timing is everything in sales and knowing exactly when to target a lead improves close rates and subsequently helps refine your sales tactics. By understanding where leads are at in the sales cycle, you can consistently target sales efforts in the right place at the right time.
Positioning
Making a pitch at the right moment won’t help you if you aren’t speaking to the right person. Cleansing data helps you keep up with changes that impact sales. Key decision-makers can change suddenly when someone is fired, promoted, or leaves. When you get in touch with the wrong person at the right time, that’s a flag you need to cleanse your dataset in order to keep up with changes as they occur. When you get the timing and positioning right, your team can be confident they’re continually in a position to close more deals.
Deeper Data
As touched on above, a name and a phone number can only get you so far. Using a focused growth service focuses your efforts in a way to generate more leads and close deals. Having accurate data is important but only if it is relevant, and a targeted approach helps you uncover sales patterns that you’ve probably been missing.
2. Lead Generation
Aside from increasing the number and quality of prospective leads with a data cleansing process, you should also consider building a department dedicated to targeting those leads. In other words, the team responsible for identifying leads shouldn’t be the same team pursuing them. Cold calls and emails are a time-consuming trade, and it makes far more sense to delegate these strategies to a specialized team, who thoroughly knows the in and outs of the process. On top of the skillset and know-how, having separate teams, one that specializes in lead generation and one that specializes in closing demands a lot of time and energy.
3. B2B Appointment Setting
Another critical strategy that’s worth leveraging is B2B appointment setting. Hiring sales development specialists is extremely costly and expensive. Outsourcing a service like B2B appointment setting allows your sales team to focus on warmer leads and spend less time hearing the word no. A sales and marketing partner gives you access to a full team of specialists and their entire kit of tools for far less than it would cost to onboard a single full-time sales development professional.
Investing in a process rather than a person is one of the simplest ways to boost your sales, grow your sales team, and ultimately grow your company in a sustainable manner.
4. Website Development and SEO
Think of your website as the salesman that never sleeps. A strong web presence has become one of the most critical tools for organizations in any industry, and construction is no exception. At the same time, your site won’t drive new business if prospective customers can’t find it.
Building and optimizing your website so it’s easily found on search engines is one of the most significant opportunities for construction companies looking to grow. Ensuring that you’re first in line when someone searches for construction services solidifies your sales strategy by establishing credibility in the industry and lining up your sales team with warm leads. If you’re already investing in data-cleansing, B2B appointment setting, and prospecting, you never want to sell yourself short by letting competitors show up first when prospects are looking for you.
While they overlap with sales, SEO and web development are two highly specialized fields that require an entirely different set of skills. Outsourcing the optimization and development of your website is a cost-effective method to ensure your company gets the attention it deserves.
Construction Has Always Been About the Same Thing
At its heart, construction is about finding the right team of people to accomplish the job at hand. Whether the job is constructing a new building, replacing leaking pipes, or planning tenant improvement, it’s your responsibility to ensure your company enlists the right people at the right time so the job gets finished on time and on budget.
It’s the job of a specialized marketing and sales partner like Abstrakt Marketing Group to ensure your business gets the right leads at the right time to grow your business. We specialize in aligning all of the above business growth strategies for construction companies, so you can achieve your growth goals without sacrificing project success.
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