Looking for sales prospects that are perfectly suitable for your irrigation business can be a daunting and arduous process. Sale is not your typical process; there is no step-by-step guide. The movement of your irrigation lead can often be unpredictable. One moment you notice that they are very interested in your service, the next minute they are no longer responsive to your emails, then they will suddenly send you an unexpected message. It is not surprising to encounter customers that will take months to convert into paying customers.
Essential Tips for Generating Irrigation Leads
Developing a system wherein marketing and sales work hand-in-hand without any gap could be tricky. However, if you choose to tackle this side of the business appropriately, you will capture high-quality sales and increase your conversion rate.
Communication Flow
Mapping your sales process can have a dramatic effect in generating free leads. Ask yourself, what happens when a prospect reaches out to your company? Perhaps, you may send them an estimate, but what will you do after? How will you communicate with them if they fail to follow up? There should be a smooth communication flow that your sales rep can follow. Suppose you have a CR in place. In that case, you can easily filter the leads that haven’t been following up for more than a week or more. You can then create a process to reach out to them, either by phone or email. Try various strategies and see what works best for you.
Information is Power
Being in the irrigation market, it is extremely important to compile all the information you have gathered throughout the sales process. From the first time that the prospect reached out to you, you should be committed to learning more things about them. You should understand their needs, pain points, and desired solutions. You should ask them how they found you to develop a more robust marketing plan. These pieces of information are necessary to move your irrigation check leads closer to your sales funnel.
If you have been offering your potential clients an estimate, don’t just stop there. Ask them how this sounds to them. You need to know if they have any doubts or concerns about the process preventing them from taking that one final step to their buyer’s journey. Take advantage of your experience in this market. Provide them with adequate information to give them the confidence to make that tough decision.
What Are Some Metrics You Need to Track?
Having insights on some KPI (Key Performance Indicator) would help you devise a method to minimize the risks and boost your gains. Here are some metrics that you need to watch out for if you want to capture more irrigation leads.
- Deal Size- Computing the average size of the deal is relatively easy. You don’t even have to be a mathematician to do this. Start by collecting all the estimates you’ve closed in a single spreadsheet. Add the total number of dollars and divide it according to the numbers of the estimates.
- Average Days of Closing the Deal- How long will it usually take you to close the whole deal? Just like how you calculate the deal size, you should place all the deals that you’ve successfully converted into one document. For instance, if one transaction started in October 1 and the agreement was closed in October 15, then it takes you 15 days to close this deal. Do this on the remaining account, and you will get the average days for each transaction. Add all the days and divide them according to the number of deals. The number you will produce would basically be the average number of days you will need to fine-tune your sales process.
- Win Rate- The win rate will give you a better view of the efficiency of your sales representatives. Simply compute the total number of sales (either win or loss) and divide them by how many wins you’ve gained.
Knowing these numbers would be a great method for forecasting and comparing your sales reps. It will tell you whether your targeted market stays away from the particular representative.
What Are Some Passive Ways to Generate Irrigation Leads?
What we’ve mentioned mostly above are proactive methods to generate and convert leads. However, there are instances when your prospects will avoid this kind of strategy since they want the sales to happen naturally, and there’s also a chance that your sales rep is acting too forcefully or pushy in creating those sales. Therefore, we’ve listed some of the passive methods to capture your irrigation lead.
Creating Website
If your irrigation business doesn’t have a website, then you are missing a great deal of opportunity to connect with your prospects. Creating a website is relatively easy, and you don’t have to break the bank to have a major domain site. There are various solutions that you can use. Here are some of your options.
- Weebly- Perfect for anyone who doesn’t want a complicated way of developing their website. It comes with a simple drag-and-drop feature to edit the web content.
- Wix- With this option, you have more than 500 templates to choose from. It is fairly easy for anyone to create a polished website using this tool. It only takes a couple of clicks on your mouse button to add all the necessary elements.
- Squarespace- This is one of the favorites of those in the service-based industry. They have fantastic yet minimalistic template choices. All of the templates are responsive, which helps ensure that your website complies with the latest search engine algorithm.
SEO
Now that you have a website, you want to ensure that it will be discoverable by your irrigation leads. SEO helps ensure that your name will appear on top when your audience searches for the related services. SEO is not a process that should be limited to agencies and marketers. We understand how some factors of SEO can be quite complex for us to understand, but for the most part, even a kid could understand it. Pay attention to the keywords that you are using to rank your site. Be sure that you will use them in proper density. Develop high-quality content that offers a solution and not just a way to promote your service shamelessly. Here are some things to remember when using SEO to capture your Irrigation free leads.
- Research- Your SEO strategy will start with research. You will have to determine where your website currently stands in the SERP game and how well your competitors perform in critical keywords. To do this, you will have to find out the keywords your competitors are targeting. Focus more on the long-tail keywords; you will do this through different SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs.
- Targeting-Once you manage to identify all the keywords they are ranking at, start to reduce your list to the top ten keywords. Preferably, consider the keywords that will drive traffic to your website.
- Creating Content- Now that you have a list of 10 keywords to target, it is time to develop content related to this keyword. You want them to be of high quality, with a proper keyword density, it should have a high readability rate, and images with alt attributes. Based on the recent data, the average number of keywords for a blog article that ranks on the first page of Google search results is around 1,200.
Social Media Management
While some people think it will take a while to build a social media following, and sharing posts can constantly be laborious, it can be a powerful platform for collecting your irrigation leads. Make sure that you add all the necessary information about your company, so the user can easily reach out to you. Here are the best ways to manage your social media account.
Research
Like with SEO, your Social media management strategy will start with research. However, you will need to get to know your target audience this time. You need to understand who are the people bingeing on your social content. With this, it will be easier to understand their preference and post relevant and engaging content on your social media account.
Content
You can share different content on your social media page, but be sure that it will help you achieve your end goal. For instance, if you want them to sign-up for your mailing list, you can post your latest blog article and add a CTA at the portion of the blog receiving the highest engagement. You can also add videos, infographics, memes, images, etc.
Goal
You should have a clear purpose in your mind when you open your social media page. If not, you will end up mindlessly posting irrelevant and boring content, which is a perfect recipe to kill your social media page. Pick a particular goal, and start curating content that will lead you to your end goal.
Cross-Platform
It would be wise to focus on 1-3 platforms when you are just starting to increase your social media presence. However, once you’ve created multiple content, you want to share it to various platforms, Be present in all channels related to your irrigation business. However, you should be careful in doing this since things can easily get messy.
Engage
Finally, you should continue engaging with your social media followers. If you receive a mention, respond to it regardless of whether it is a positive or negative mention. You need to respond to them professionally and timely to address their concerns immediately and prevent them from causing harm to your business. Be friendly to your irrigation check leads.
Looking for prospects in the irrigation market can be quite complex. Nonetheless, having a steady supply of quality irrigation leads is necessary to keep your business competitive. Try some of our recommendations above if you have trouble finding your audience online.
