The Customer Focus Series

What it is and what it isn’t

When I started painting, people would walk up to me on a job and say, “Hey, would you be interested in another job at my house down the block? Maybe you could give me an estimate?”

Seriously, this was my plan for getting new clients!

I would drop what I was doing, clean my hands, and walk with them to look at their project. I’d get the job, then Jack and I would stay busy for another week. We primarily relied on word of mouth for the first few years. I added a couple more employees using this method, but we didn’t grow much.

A systematic marketing plan builds real organizational muscle.

Marketing means:

• building a budget
• diversifying your campaign’s advertising sources
• tracking the results of your efforts

A throwback to analog days…

Before we were heavily computerized, I kept a clipboard beside the office phone. A clipboard! Anybody who answered the phone and took a lead from a customer had to note the information on the clipboard using hash marks. We had several categories, and they were instructed to link the hashmark to the correct category: Yellow Pages, direct mail, word of mouth, and repeat customers.

Data collection is prophetic, and therefore necessary.

I have been keeping phone call data for the last 25 years, and we use this to help predict future sales. This data is also part of a formula which uses close rates and average job size to predict how much future revenue we will bring in. Very helpful! Today, phone calls are put into a database and divided into similar categories. Again, this helps us understand what’s working and what’s not.

Build a marketing budget, diversify your advertising, and track your results—next year will thank you.

Build muscle. See you next week.