Is your construction company not currently closing enough deals or bringing in new projects?

A simple explanation could be that something is getting lost in your sales pipeline once leads come in. 

In this short podcast, our founder Adam Cooper provides a rundown on key differences in responsibilities of marketing and sales teams in construction companies. We also discuss the specific role of construction business development professionals. Performing daily outreach to potential clients of his own, Adam understands the best ways to follow up with leads to maximize new business and win new projects. 

What is lead generation? Whose job is it to call back that developer's office about scheduling a meeting? How quickly should we respond once a lead comes in? We answer all these questions, discuss specific roles for both marketing and sales teams, and highlight the role of business development. In addition, Adam offers quick tips you can apply to your business today to start improving your lead follow-up and closing more deals. 

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Podcast Transcript:

Adam Cooper:

I want to talk about a couple of things. So, the first is I want to talk about marketing for a construction company, and I think we need to explain the difference between marketing and sales.

So, marketing for construction companies is designed to accomplish two things. It is designed to provide you with more visibility into an existing marketplace, like if they don’t know about you. For example, a residential homebuilder is trying to find people who want to build a new custom home. They are trying to connect with people, so think business to consumer marketing, B2C. In this case, you’re trying to build visibility … Regular homeowners don’t know about you until they go looking. So, marketing in this case is about getting your name out there and building your search engine results, because they’re going to Google ‘custom homebuilder’ in whatever city or geography they’re in. For example, here, you might say ‘Custom Homebuilder Atlanta’ or ‘Custom Homebuilder Marietta’, or ‘Custom Homebuilder, Ellijay’, right? So, you’re trying to build your visibility. You’re trying to connect with people and get your name out there so when they go looking, they find you. Or, in the case of putting it on a billboard, you’re top of mind when they start thinking because they’ve seen your name again and again. Then, you’re trying to overcome anonymity. That is the first thing they are trying to do with marketing is trying to build visibility in the marketplace.

The second thing that you’re trying to do with marketing, after you’ve built visibility, is you’re trying to generate opportunities. So now, you’re already known in the marketplace, think about a commercial contractor, think about our client J.R. Electrical. They’ve been around almost 20 years. They have an established group of general contractors that they work for, but they’re trying to find more general contractors. So, it’s not about building visibility, it’s about building credibility. It’s about saying ‘Hey, you might know us as a company that does small retail or does lighting, but we actually do all these other things. We do mission critical, we do healthcare, we do these other areas, these other market sectors and services,’ to make them more appealing to the marketplace that they’re already visible in. All of the general contractors in Atlanta already know J.R. Electrical. But a lot of them think they’re too small to use them on their projects, they don’t think they specialize in that type of work that this general contractor does. So now, they’re trying to build more opportunities by going out to their existing market and trying to build not visibility, but credibility. So, I see that as the two areas of marketing.

The other thing is marketing is not sales. When you run a marketing campaign like we do, we are trying to drive leads into a business … but, just getting someone to fill out a contact form, or schedule a consult, or call their office to talk to somebody, that’s the purpose of marketing. Once that contact, that person, fills out the form, sends the email, schedules the consult … you’re no longer in marketing; you’re in sales. Contractors sometimes don’t understand that … they think that is still marketing’s job to follow up with the lead and nurture the lead. Once you’ve got the lead, it is no longer marketing. It is now sales.  

Even in our business, we market with Google Ads, and SEO [Search Engine Optimization], on our blogs, and we’re trying to get people to fill out a form, send an email, call the office, schedule a consult. Once any of those things happens, it is no longer the marketing department’s job to handle that contact, that lead. That is now sales. Our clients sometimes blur the line. They think ‘Well, they’ve filled out the contact form, so what are you going to do next as a marketing department?’ We shouldn’t be doing anything, it should really be the sales team that now takes that opportunity, that lead that came in, and they now pursue that lead. They do the outreach and the follow up, they have the sales consult, they send the follow up emails, they generate the proposals.

I think it’s really important that contractors understand that marketing is just designed to …. I always like to use fishing as my analogy. Marketing sets the line, hooks the bait, puts the bobber on it, and puts it in the water. Once a fish nibbles or bites, that is now sales. Sales is now the one that has to pick up the rod and reel and work that fish, work that lead, to reel them into the boat so they become a client … or get a good enough view of that fish to realize ‘This isn’t the fish I’m fishing for, I don’t want them’ and throw them back, cut them loose. ‘I don’t want to pursue that lead anymore. Hey, we got a lead as a custom homebuilder. Sales is now going to pursue that lead and figure out whether they want something that we do, whether they are too small for us, if they just want a small bathroom remodel and we want to do full kitchens and full homes, we don’t do bathroom remodels unless it’s part of a bigger scope. So, they have to have a process to evaluate those leads. We call that a Go, No-Go process, or an Opportunity Evaluator. We design these, kind of, calculators to objectively measure a lead’s worth, their value, whether they’re a viable opportunity or if you don’t want to pursue it. That is outside of marketing, that is a sales scope of work. That is something that sales should be doing is opportunity evaluation. We do that here. A lead comes in, a salesperson then takes that lead and figures it out. The marketer’s job is to get the lead in, to nibble on the hook or the bait, to bite and get hooked. And then it’s the salesperson’s job to evaluate that lead and figure out whether they’re worth pursuing to create a proposal, a scope of work and get them to sign up and sell that job. That’s the difference between marketing and sales, and contractors need to keep that in mind.

So, the other thing that contractors sometimes have is they sometimes have what’s called ‘Business Development.’ Business Development straddles Marketing & Sales. Business Development is typically more lead-nurture, or lead-gen. A business development rep as a general contractor is either going out to the developers and real estate managers they know or trying to find new ones and forge relationships. Business development is more of an ‘outbound’ strategy, as opposed to an ‘inbound’ strategy. Business development really relies on human-to-human contact. They often work with the marketing department because the marketing department might surface a lead, but that lead is not ready to buy anything yet. They’re a Developer that is looking for general contractors. Now you hand that over to business development, and business development goes out and builds that relationship with that developer, so they get qualified to bid on the next opportunity. The developer may not have something ready right now, but you’re talking about building that relationship.

Then once that relationship yields an opportunity, the developer says ‘Hey, I’ve got a project.’ Typically, it’s the business development rep who brings that into the office, works with the estimating team to get an estimate put together, and then delivers that back to the client. So, they’re kind of straddling. Estimators are not salespeople, and marketing are not salespeople. Business development straddles. They are in lead nurture, lead development, relationship building and then typically they are the ones to work internally with the estimating department to get the numbers and then take that back to the developer or the contractor and then finesse the deal to win the job. So, business development straddles marketing and estimating, and they are basically outbound marketers and external salespeople. That is what I wanted to talk about today, do you have any questions about that?

Jack Austin:

Okay. So that sounds like … sounds like this is pretty recent for you. Did you deal with this particular problem with any recent clients, or see this break down, kind of real-time for anyone?

Adam Cooper:

Yeah, *redacted* because … they weren’t doing a good job of lead follow up as salespeople, and then they were saying ‘this lead was unresponsive.’ Well, maybe because you waited three days after it came in to call them, and you weren’t the only people they reached out to. So typically, sales needs to be very prompt with their actions. So, as soon as a lead comes in, sales should be following up within 24 hours. Typically, I would say they need to be following up the same day if the lead came in before lunch. If the lead came in late in the day, the following morning would be good. So, within the same day, or within 12 hours of the lead coming in. So, if the lead came in at 5:00 in the evening, you should be following up within 9:00 am the next day, business hours. If a lead came in before lunch, you should be following up with them before the end of the day. Like with *redacted* … they weren’t doing a very good job of lead follow up. Or the lead called the office, that was the initial contact, and the person that they had answering the phone was awful … that’s not who you want. Or it went to an answering service, that’s awful, it should never go to an answering service. If it goes to an answering service outside of business hours, that answering service needs to be trained to collect certain information and then convey the message of ‘We will have somebody get back to you by noon of the next day’, and then make sure those messages are promptly delivered to the company so they can be prompt at responding.

The faster you are to responding to a sales lead, the more likely you are to get the job. The longer you take to respond, the more unlikely it is that you will get that job, just because buyers are impatient. When they actually call the office, they want to talk to somebody. So, the best is to have somebody who can answer the phone and can get them to the right person right away or collect enough information and then have that call returned promptly. That happens here, people call our office and Kellie answers the phone. Jeff, Greg or I are tied up, we’re out of the office, we’re at client sites, on other calls or in meetings. She’ll either interrupt us to say, ‘Can you take a call?’, or she will say ‘I’ll have somebody get back to you right away,’ and then she gives it to whoever is available or she sends an email out to all three of us. We know we have to get back to that person promptly. That’s the type of response and attitude you need to take as a contractor, the same way. You have to treat each lead like it’s a great lead and call them back right away, put them in touch with somebody on the call that can answer their questions. The longer you wait, the more likely you will not get the job. The chances diminish quicker and quicker the longer you wait.

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