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Painting leads can expand a painting business extremely fast if you can manage all your painting leads correctly. Many painting contractors spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month in leads that they under-utilize.

Don’t be one of these companies!

The following tips will allow you to squeeze every drop out of your painting leads.

1.) Call Early and Often

Call Early: It is CRUCIAL to call the lead within the first 30 minutes of receiving it. Realistically, you should call the lead the second it hits your text/email. People searching for painting services online want INSTANT gratification. This is the nature of online searching and fast-acting search engines. If you’re not contacting them to service the quote instantly, you’re losing a higher percentage of business every waning hour.

Call Often: Some painters think they are being overly-aggressive if they call the customer twice within minutes of receiving the lead. However, sometimes people are ready for quotes AND expecting the call, they just simply set their phone down or missed the first call (or they’re already on the phone). You will instantly improve your conversion of the lead by calling twice within minutes.

2.) Get a lead management tool (CRM-Customer Relationship Management)

Many painters miss out on job opportunities by not organizing and tracking their lead follow-ups. They’ll contact the lead the first day, leave a message, and never call again. DON’T DO THIS. People are busy just like YOU’RE busy with your business. Some people might call back days, weeks, even months later. If you continue to call 1 to 2 weeks after receiving the lead (without pestering the customer), you’ll notice an immediate spike in your sales.

Organizing Your Leads with a CRM: CRM’s are great tools for keeping dated notes and follow-up schedules with your leads. Say you call Joe Homeowner and he’s not quite ready to paint but wants you to call him mid next month. If you’re not organizing your follow-up schedule, you might forget to call Joe Homeowner and lose out on that business. Our company uses amocrm.com, but try out a couple different CRM’s until you find one that’s both easy to use and something you’ll use.

3.) Send an accompanying email

Many painters JUST communicate through their phone. They are missing out on a large percentage of people that communicate most effectively through email. Again, people get busy and are not always in a good environment for a phone call. Sometimes a personalized email, with samples of your work or testimonials can do half of your selling for you. You have done the customers research for them by showing you are reputable, have customer testimonials, and deliver great work. ALWAYS SEND AN EMAIL!

4.) Try Text-Messaging the customer

Another overwhelmingly under-utilized form of communication from a painting company’s stand point is TEXT MESSAGING. Having a nice personalized text message sent with an invitation to quote their painting project might get a quick response from a text-savvy customer. Yet again, you are utilizing an up-rising form of communication that will instantly help you convert your leads at a higher percentage.

If you implement these best practices into your painting company, you will INSTANTLY get more sales from your painting leads. A painting company owner once told us: “Leads are like a T-Bone steak. Am I going to get every bit of meat I can, or leave steak on the bone?” We tend to agree.

Thanks for reading!

-Painter Choice Team