Painting contractors can plan ahead and use these customer-focused strategies to increase the number of job wins you get throughout the whole year.
A successful painting business focuses on exactly what the customer needs. Here are the strategies to get you started.
Successful painting business strategies
The paint can flow all year-round with customer focused strategies. Consider our tips to maximize the jobs you get.
Painting may not be as seasonal as some businesses. Still, there are times during the year when the paint dries little slower. That’s where the challenge remains for our contractor clients and why we love finding out what makes their sales process thrive during such times.
We’ve learned that to be successful, America’s top painting companies believe in what we believe in — building game changing relationships. More and more, painting contractors are mastering the art of reaching out to clients and truly engaging with them. That’s been key to their sales growth.
Keep the painting leads flowing in
Painting contractors that are growing their business make sure they do a few key things to keep the leads flowing in. Let’s consider two scenarios in the painting industry today. First, there will be painting jobs available all year round but it just depends what type of job. Due to the season, some jobs will be indoor and others will be outdoor jobs. Second, homeowners will always be viable leads.
Homeowners will start thinking about how they want their house to look long before they decide they need a painter and when they might want that new paint job completed — also dependent on the season in your area.
Generally, that’s why you’ll need to consider the seasonality of the painting business. Prepare prospective customers for the possibilities that the season holds for them and how their house could look with a new paint job.
3 tips to help you run a painting business
Once you know what kind of business a season holds in store, you’ll need to hone in on how you approach, market, and deal with customers. Put some thought into this to truly build a customer-centric painting business.
Here are three strategies that painting companies can take to build game changing relationships and win more customers throughout the year so those painting jobs keep flowing.
1. Wrangle your customer list.
Arguably the single biggest difference between businesses that make it and those that don’t is how they keep track of their customers. Juggling your contacts with your inbox and by text message may work when you have five contacts that you’re working with, but it’ll never do when you have 20, let alone 200.
Keep track of your customers
As your businesses continue to grow, you’ll want to effectively track customers long before they engage with you in an actual bid process. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is built to capture and track your interactions with clients and prospective customers.
That’s the difference between businesses that stay small and those that win. If you are keeping track of these contacts as they move through the sales process, you’ll be better at scaling your business. You’ll find more and more that wrangling your customer list with the right software will turn into jobs.
When choosing a CRM, it’s important to select one that conforms to your sales process, so you don’t waste time or resources. Go with the CRM features you need and forget the features that are complicated and will get in the way of your job.
2. Re-engage people you’ve talked to before.
Now that you’ve wrangled your customer list into something usable, let’s talk about next steps for finding customers. There’s no doubt that there are a lot of contacts that have entered your sales process at some point and ended up not hiring your company for the job.
Believe it or not, these are the people you need to start with.
With this group of people, try to answer some basic questions. Why did they not buy from you? Did they end up going with another painter? Were they happy with the outcome? The odds are that these questions are difficult to answer.
If you don’t know the answer to any of the questions above, then there’s no better way to learn than by simply asking.
Make a habit of routinely following up with customers, even if you didn’t get the sale. Maybe they didn’t move forward for their own reasons, and they’re getting ready to start the job again. Perhaps they went with someone else because of price and weren’t happy with the results. Engaging customers who were previously in the sales pipeline is a leading strategy of high-intensity marketing and sales teams in the most competitive industries in the world.
Restart the conversation. Stay persistent. Focus on creating value for your customers and you’ll be amazed how many jobs can come in after the sale was “lost.”
3. Start new conversations.
Marketing and your painting business
Sales and marketing teams look broadly at two different sources for bringing customers on board: inbound and outbound. Most painting contractors are familiar with inbound strategies. This involves getting prospective customers to either call you or email you in response to an ad.
Outbound is a strategy that is widely employed among corporate teams but is far less familiar to most contractors. Finding business through outbound methods involves actively emailing and calling cold prospects. The goal is to try to develop interest and gain their business.
Creating a successful outbound strategy is often more challenging. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering if you are a painting contractor looking to grow your customer base. Selectively targeting prospects to reach out to gives contractors the ability to bring on larger commercial projects. These are a great addition to the smaller residential jobs with which inbound marketing efforts tend to be successful.
In addition to targeting commercial accounts, painting contractors can take advantage of online services to acquire the information of property owners who are physically close to recent jobs. That way they can be engaged while there is particularly relevant proof right in front of them.
Running a painting business better
Make sure you’ve got the resources to make each job successful and that you’re in control for changes in seasonality. Keep the customer in mind. How can you better serve them?
For all companies, full control over a sales pipeline is the key to independence and growth. For successful painting businesses, a customer’s needs and wants should always be important to you. By employing consumer-centric strategies and a customer obsessed mindset you’ll run a painting businesses that will have paint flowing all year long.
Webfoot Painting grew by 35% while using PipelineDeals.
Painting & Construction Industry
Summary:
- 2-person part-time summer operation expands to thriving 100-employee business.
- Sustains year over year growth of 35% for a decade.
- Average close rate of 45% with an increase to 55-60% during winter months.
