We have been talking about a do-it-yourself of getting construction sales leads by developing your own website – but this is not traditiionally how consturction companies have got sales leads.
Instead – contractors would get sales leads by paying a lead generation service. Whether these leads resulted in any actual sales for you though varied considerably. And these services did not come for free either. You can end up paying 25cents for every dollar of value for hte potential contract. And the key word here is “potential”.
So why can these leads be such a waste of time for the average construction firm? First off the leads are often not very targetted – you may be getting speicalist leads for work you don’t do. You may be getting leads on jobs which are at the earliest feasbility stage – these aren’t jobs their are pipedreams. And remember you are paying for all of this.Leads may be sold to your competitiors too – not just you.
However there are good services out there – the tricky bit is finding them! The good leads finding services will really find you qualified leads who do want to buy and want to buy your service. You may pay more per a lead – but the leads will definintly be worth it! In some cases you won’t pay a flat-fee but a percentage of the work done. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you are comfortable with this business model.
Paying for leads is a tricky thing – in the end you are always going to be dependent on the lead generation company – and you will never grow the skills you need to actually need to develop your own leads. Learning how to develop leads yourself may be a bigger investment of time up front – but lets face it if times are slow you may have that time anyways! More importantly you will need to invest effort to get outside your own comfort zone. You may be comfortable building a home – but not a website? Trust me when I say that building a website is a lot lower amound of effort!