How to Consistently Convert Prospects for Your Moving Company

The moving world is competitive, and that means potential customers should be treated like gold. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen, so instead of converting prospects to customers, they slip through the cracks and ultimately land with the competition.

How can your moving company close prospects more consistently and avoid losing out on customers? Thankfully, lots of studies have been conducted on this matter, so the path to prosperity is clear for those willing to take it!

Before you start closing more customers, you actually need to get potential customers interested in your business. You can use a variety of strategies including social media marketing, digital mark eting, and guerilla marketing campaigns. You could even hand out flyers or go door-to-door.

If you have a great product and are willing to put in some work, customers will be interested! The hard part will be keeping up with demand once the word is out about your fantastic service. When prospects start coming your way, follow these steps to consistently convert prospects into customers.

Contact Prospects as Quickly as Possible

According to a study conducted by MIT, a salesperson is 100 times less likely to close a deal if the first contact is made 30 minutes or more after the prospect was first contacted the company. And that drops to 3000 times less likely if that first call is made 5 hours.

That number seems surprising when you read it, but when you actually think about it, it makes total sense. If you reach out for more information about a product or service and don’t hear anything for 30 minutes, you will probably start seeking out other options too.

A few more stats to think about:

When a salesperson responds to incoming prospects in one minute or less, they are 391% more likely to close the deal
78% of customers buy from the company that responds first to incoming prospects.
If you wait 5 minutes to reach out to a prospect, you are 80% less likely to close the customer
Only 7% of companies respond to prospects inquiries within 5 minutes

That last point is particularly helpful to business owners. If you make the effort to reduce the time it takes you to contact prospects, you have a distinct advantage over 93% of your competition. That’s huge!

For some moving companies, it may be worthwhile to assign a dedicated member of the sales team to reach out to customers immediately. Or if you have a limited staff, you could use a marketing automation tool such as Hubspot or Marketo. For example, you can build an automated e mail that will send immediately to a prospect as soon as they contact your company.

While personalization is great, ultimately, speed is still the primary tool in your arsenal to convert prospects more consistently.

Don’t Underestimate the Follow-Up

One more fun fact: a study done by Marketing Donut found that 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the meeting, yet 44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up. There is no denying that sales is a hard profession and rejection is a natural part of sales, but far too often a salesperson will give up on a prospect much too early.

Follow-ups can be very tedious, but again, automation can help. There are a huge number of tools out there that can help you create an email flow to drastically cut down the time and effort required to reach out to prospects on a daily basis.

Know When to Give Up

While relentlessly following up is an admirable trait in any great salesperson, you don’t want to become a spammer. There is a fine line between persistence and annoyance and if you don’t want to alienate customers, it’s an important one.

There are plenty of signs a prospect may not be right for your company, but the bottom line is that you have to use your discretion. For example, if it’s clear that your prospect doesn’t have the right budget for your company, or they haven’t opened your last four emails, it’s time to call it quits.

If you do decide to give up on a prospect, don’t just go dark. Be the bigger person and send them a very nice break-up email.

Get Referrals

Since the beginning of time (probably), word of mouth marketing has been the most impactful way to earn a prospect's business. If someone you already know and trust vouches for a company or product, you will inherently trust that service much more readily.

You want to gather as many referrals as you possibly can for your business. If you need help, you could use software (like this one) to assist in collecting referrals. Technology can allow your company to build out and implement advanced referral programs, which will ultimately boost your conversions and revenue. Referrals are also a great way to build loyal advocates for your brand. One person refers another, and then they refer two friends, and one day you’ll end up with a flourishing web of happy customers raving about your services.

If you follow these steps, you’ll definitely see more prospects convert to customers of your company. Running a small business is difficult, so don’t make it harder on yourself by allowing interested prospects to slip through the cracks and fall into the lap of your competition.