I T & SOF TWARE
Secure your golden leads
After the initial shock waves of lockdown, homeowners have found themselves
with an extraordinary amount of time on their hands to consider how they can
improve their virtual prisons. Installers have realised this and reached out for when
we are all allowed out again. “Those leads are gold” says Rhonda Ridge, creator of
AdminBase. “Don’t waste them!”
Congratulations! You’ve tackled the
lockdown by actively marketing your
business and taking advantage of the
extra time homeowners have to think
about their homes. You’re taking leads, you’re
even offering ballpark quotes and people want
to see you when it’s all over. And what are you
doing with those golden leads? A spreadsheet? A
proprietary sales admin system? Surely not…
Nobody knows just what life will be like when
some sort of return to normality is resumed…
in fact by the time you are reading this we may
well have some sort of indication of the timing
although as this is written, the government has
said three more weeks at least. However, what
we do know is that it will be years before we
return to what life was like before the coronavirus
outbreak. Brexit – remember Brexit? – seems so
inconsequential now.
What we do know is that every business
opportunity will become so much more valuable
than before. Every slight interest shown in
May www.ggpmag.com
your business and what it offers, will be worth
its weight in gold. Every sales lead must be
nurtured, caressed, treated with intense care and
attention…because we will need everything we
can handle to get ourselves back on our feet, as
individual businesses and collectively therefore,
as a nation. So, we must ensure those leads are
dealt with effectively.
Rhonda Ridge, the creator of the AdminBase
management system for window and door
installers, says that from the moment an enquiry
is received, a business should know how it
will be processed, if it is to be successfully
converted into a sale: “Assuming that some sort
of computerisation is used to manage a business,
so many companies continue to use basic,
unconnected programmes such as spread sheets,
databases and proprietary project management
software to hold information,” explained Rhonda.
“These often require the transfer of key data
from one programme to another at each stage: a
sales lead is taken and entered, followed up and
an order is taken. That information is often then
transferred manually or even ‘cut and pasted’ to
another programme to take the order through
the business, to surveying then on to installation
and then invoicing and so forth…and at each
stage the opportunity for losing track, errors and,
bluntly, cock ups, is exacerbated.”
Rhonda knows what she is talking about. She
first wrote what was to become AdminBase more
than ‹Œ years ago when she was working as the
financial controller of a Swindon-based home
improvement window and door installer: “My
job was to make sure that everything balanced
financially but of course, that led me into other
areas of the business as I tried to tie all the ends
together,” she said. “When I found an anomaly –
"Every sales lead must be
nurtured, caressed, treated
with intense care and
attention..."
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