5 Strategies to Increase Winter Sales for Home Service Businesses

Welcome back to the show. My name is Phil Risher and today we're going to actually be taking a subscriber question and that is how do I create revenue or stay busy during the winter months? And so I came up with a list of five things that I'm going to discuss today. These are things that I would implement when I was the director of Business development at a home service business and also things that we recommend to our clients to do actual strategies that you can implement in your business as well. All right, so the first one is to reactivate your lost estimates. What this looks like is over the last year you've had estimates that came through your door and let's say you close 50% of them. Well, the other 50% you lost or abandoned or you never heard anything back from. These are estimates now that you should be following up on hard and you should be offering them some type of a discount because it's better to have work to be done during January, February, March than to have nothing to be able to do. What this looks like is go back to all the ones that you got no's from and say, hey, were you able to get this work done? Are you still lingering? Are you on the fence? Was it a pricing issue? What was the price that you're looking to pay? And then figure out a solution for them. The other thing is people that you just never heard back from that maybe it was three, six months ago that now it's like, hey, we're going into, everyone's going to be hunkered in at home and you might want to get this service done. So let's reactivate this loss estimate and get you on the schedule over January, February, March. Really, really good way to take the estimates that you already have in your pipeline that fizzled out and then use them as leverage as basically they've already said that they want this service or they want this to get done. Now you have something to contact them on. The second thing I would say is annual services creating a revenue opportunity for your business in January, February, March, which is if you offer some type of a monthly subscription service, whether that's a service contract or lawn care maintenance or fill in the brink for whatever annual service contract. I would recommend charging an annual fee every January where if they sign up for an annual program, they get some type of a discount or something, a benefit. And that could sound like if you pay in full on in January, you get a 10% discount. This would then give you the cash flow for January, February, March. That would help Sustain some of these things. Now understand, if you sell service contracts throughout the year on a six month or annual or three month base quarterly basis, which is fine. It's just one way that I've seen for some companies to get a nice cash flow advantage right in the beginning of the year to get them into spring. Number three would be to do a newsletter swap with your B2B partners. So this is, I would say more people do this more in the blogger space or in E commerce where you get like quote unquote backlinks and that kind of stuff. I'm not talking about the backlinking thing. What I'm talking about is you're an H Vac contractor and you work with an electrical contractor and you both have customer database. Well, you swap newsletters. So inside of your H Vac newsletter you put a blurb about an electrical contractor that you work with and vice versa the other way, basically unlocking the opportunity to contact all of their customers or get in contact with them, or make all of their customers known about this service as well. It's a really nice way. You know, you have to have a good relationship with someone obviously to be able to open up your customer database to these people. But basically you're an H Vac contractor. You say, hey, send me a blurb about your service or your promo going on in the winter months, or even just a quick synopsis of what you do. And then, and I'll put that as a quick blurb in my newsletter and vice versa, and then you send it out to your customers. It's a nice way to be able to leverage other people's databases and also cross sell different services for your referral partners. Number four would be to sell service at a discount throughout the year. So that way you can do it in January, February, March. This takes a little bit of planning. So if you're listening to this in December, it might not be something that you can implement, but you can do that going forward. And this is something that we definitely do and we work with arborist companies that do this as well. So basically when you talk with someone in the summer and you're super busy, you know, you're packed, three weeks, three months out of service, you say, hey, is this something that you want to get, that's pressing, that you need to get done now, or is this something that you're just looking to get done in the next 12 months? And if they say the next 12 months? Well, what you say is if you want, we can actually push this out to our Slower season and we'll give you a discount and because you're pushing it out a little bit. So for arborist, for example, it's pretty, you know, it's right now I might not be able to see all the tree stuff because there's leaves on the tree. When leaves fall off, it's going to be better for us to come in. And that's our slow season. So we'll be able to do this. Basically, it's allowing the customer to dictate the timeframe, but then incentivizing them to fill your schedule on this time when you know you're not going to have work that's coming in. So you are purposely setting yourself up to have work on the schedule. You January, February, March, throughout the year, basically you're planning ahead, which that's what everyone should be doing. And then the last one, this one is a home run for most home service businesses and that is to send out an email newsletter to all of your customers. In the subject line, put something about their common issue. So let's say you're an H VAC contractor. You sell ductless units. Ductless would help fix cold rooms in your house in the winter. So in the subject line, you'd say, fix cold house. Fix cold rooms in your house this winter. And everyone that clicks on that would probably interested in fixing cold rooms in their house. And now you have a whole list of people that you can create estimates for and contact them. So the way this might look is, hey, we're calling people. We did a diagnosis on your house and we're out there this year and we're calling people that we've seen in the neighborhood have had cold rooms in their house. So you're not saying, hey, I saw your email, but you're saying, hey, hey, we're calling people that in this neighborhood we have cold rooms in their house. And what we did is we actually created an estimate for all the homes in this neighborhood and we can send it over to you to help you fix the cold rooms in your house. Would you like me to send that over to you? Do you have any questions about how this would help? And basically, it's turning your customer database into leads. Now, it takes a little bit of salesmanship and confidence and execution on this, but if you can get this part dialed in, you basically have inside sales reps closing for you and cultivating your database over and over again to do the work. So those would be the really the big ones that I would recommend. I'll give you one other bonus one, which is all the people that did service for you last January, call them this January and say, hey, it's time to get your service done again. Everyone that used you to January to go call all those people and say, hey, we haven't seen you in two years. It's time to get this done again. And it gives you the opportunity. Because clearly in January is when they get X, Y and Z done. So this January should not be any different for them to be able to do that service. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. Maybe you have a question or two, drop it below and I'll see you in the next video.