How to Make Quality Touches Without Speaking a Word

Traditionally, working in the home service industry has been a high-touch category.

To make a sale, you have to generate phone calls, qualify the customer in a phone call, visit the site for an estimate, educate them on all the possible options, calculate a price, and then explain why the pond project they seen on HGTV for $5,000 is going to cost $15,000 and contact the customer again once they’ve gotten other estimates, and interact with them throughout the entire job.

However, the rise of technology has made getting quality touches much easier, and you no longer need to make as many in-person touches as you once had to – hell many consumers might even prefer the ‘touches’ digitally.

Now, you can make a basically unlimited amount of quality touches with a little bit of work upfront. Let’s take a look at how you can make quality touches without speaking a word.

What is a Quality Touch?

In business, you can think about a touch as any interaction that you have with a lead, prospect or a customer.  A moment associated with you (or your company) that will subconsciously stick with them. Some businesses require a lot of touches to make a sale, while others are pretty hands-off.

In a high-touch business, the customer puts a lot of trust and partnership in a company (and oftentimes individuals within a company). With a model like this, a company is very person-centric, and the relationship between the salesperson and customer is very important in the sales and retention process.

In a low-touch business, a company can be successful without a lot of customer interaction. The product that the customer is purchasing can be consumed on their own and is easy to purchase. Fast food, for example, is a low-touch industry. You order at a screen, swipe your card, and take your food without ever having to have much of a conversation.

In home services are a high quality touch business. Project values are high and rely trust. It doesn’t matter if you’re an air conditioning contractor, pressure washer, or painter. One major carpet and flooring franchise trains their sales people to make 19 points of contact before expecting a sale.

So, how many prospects should you pursue?

It’s More About Quality That Quantity

When you’re running a business, it can be tempting to try to chase after as many leads and customers as you can to increase your odds of making a sale. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough time in a day to build meaningful relationships with every single person that you interact with on a daily basis.

So, the question becomes how you prioritize the leads that you make.

While the quality of your touches is certainly important, what’s even more important is understanding how many touches you can make before you start sacrificing quality.

Luckily, John Asher of ‘Close Deals Faster’ has a simple formula that you can follow to determine how many prospects you can comfortably serve without sacrificing quality.

First, you need to figure out the amount of quality touches (the amount of people you interact with who may actually do business with you) per week:

• (You spend 50 hours per week working) x (30% of your time on quality touches) / (one hour per touch) = 15 quality touches per week
• Second, you need to calculate the average sales cycle. In the home service industry, this can be quite long:
• (26 weeks in the sales cycle) x (15 quality touches) = 390 quality touches in the average sales cycleLast, think about how many quality touches you need to make in the average sales cycle. In the home services industry, you’re often selling high-end, expensive services. With these types of sales, you often need several touches. This may mean seven or more quality touches before your prospect makes a purchase:
• (390 touches) / (7 touches to close a sale) = 56 total prospects during a sales cycle

Based on this formula, which will vary depending on your sales cycle, you can only keep around 50 sales prospects in your pipeline at any given time before you start spreading yourself thin.

However, you can increase these touches without spreading yourself too thin by making your touches without even speaking a word.

Here’s how.

Making Quality Touches Without Speaking a Word

Although the amount of prospects with which you can communicate with is limited to a point, there are many ways that you can make a ton of quality touches and build trust without ever even talking with your leads.

Here are some of my favorites:

• An Effective Website:
  A home service company’s website should be the respiratory system of their marketing efforts. How you design your website says a lot about your image, and the functionality of it helps determine whether or not people trust your company. If your site is fast, designed well, and well-written, it’s already a quality touch when a prospect sees the site.
• Content Marketing:
  What’s more powerful telling your customers you’ve built dozens of fences and you put an 8” x 8” isolated footing at each post or discussing it in a blog post with a picture of a tape measure showing each dugout isolated footing?Content marketing is one of the best ways to build trust and authority in your field. Whether you use blog posts, photos, videos, or infographics, it’s a quality touch every time someone consumes your content and finds value in it. Without talking to them, you’ve shown them that you’re a reputable company with expertise in the respective trade. Notice I said “shown”. Using content to demonstrate, or visually ‘show’ something you’ve done is far more powerful than just .Now a big pickle with content marketing is the time it takes to generate value.  In other words, nobody see’s it the first day it goes it up online.  It takes time to get traction.  This is why it is important to use content in the sales process, and scale up your content with Facebook Advertising (As of writing this our course the Home Pro Success Formula For Facebook Advertising is open for enrollment).
• Build Reviews:
  When someone searches for your company, one of the first things that they’ll find is your reviews. What your reviews say tell people a lot about your company. If you don’t have any reviews, they might think that you’re new and inexperienced. If you have a lot of really good reviews, that’s one of the highest quality touches that you can get.
• Strong SEO: When you search for something in Google, you inherently trust the results more that show up at the top because Google’s algorithm has determined that they are the most useful websites. If you want to make more quality touches, getting yourself to the top of the search results for important keywords will help.
• Get In Front Of The Camera.  Put your name, and your face out there with your business.  There’s a powerful element to letting customers know that there are real people behind the business, and that they aren’t just doing business with the Wizard of OZ.  And today, with a powerful camera in your hand 75% of your life, and the internet it is easier than ever to put it out there.  I’ve found that with simple ‘talking head’ style videos, you can get 10 second video views from a targeted audience for less than a 1 penny.  You can’t even give away business cards, with no personality, to an un targeted audience, for that cheap.  So share some videos on your Facebook wall.  Put your picture and a bio at the end of your blog posts.  If you run print ads, stick a head shot in there.  It’s a huge, personal differentiator and quality touch.If you want to learn more about how to fit those ultra low cost video views with Facebook Ads, into customer buying process, I suggest taking a look at my course, the Home Pro Success Formula For Facebook Advertising.

  

If you’re a home service contractor, these are some of the most cost-effective ways to make high-quality touches with your prospects before you even talk with them

In Conclusion

For those that work in the home service industry, making several high-quality touches on a regular basis is important for making a sale. Although it isn’t necessarily possible to keep an unlimited amount of prospects in the pipeline, you can be making high-quality touches with leads without ever even talking to them if you have a smart marketing plan in place.

How do you make quality touches build long-lasting relationships with your leads?

Let me know in the comments section below!