ExteriorContractor.com |

A simple plan for change: Lower your costs first. Your previous customer list is your best chance to generate leads that are low cost and high quality. Approach them with your lower priced products or partials of your premier products. Offering partials with require retraining of your sales force. Partials need to make sense to the homeowner. Breaking down how the rest of the home will be taken care of over the next few years on a schedule is a good start. Remodelers must carefully plan out the best way to break apart a job. As an example siding contractors need to decide if a particular customer’s needs are best met by offering just the front of the home or offering to side the entire job and them come back to complete the soffit and facia as part of another contract.

Remodelers that offer multiple products are best positioned to make a change. Servicing each of your past customers with an additional product has been the single best way to maximize a lead. The great news: Even if you do not offer multiple products, many companies offer additional product lines in a turnkey fashion. When choosing your next product line, consider products that have lower lead costs and are not luxury goods. The economy will reward those that provide lower priced products that fit more into the need category than into the want category. These tactics have not been suggested or tested or, for that matter, succeeded without much forethought. The companies that succeed and grow their business in this recession will be poised for intense growth once the economic environment improves.