Lead Automation: Supercharge Your Home Services Sales Pipeline
In the fast-paced world of home services, every lead counts. Competition is fierce and converting precious leads into loyal customers is the lifeline of any business. Unfortunately, the traditional sales funnel can be a grueling process that drains your time and resources.
Luckily, AI-powered lead automation tools are bringing much-needed change. Change that will unlock the full potential of your sales and marketing teams and increase your conversions with automated lead generation.
Many of these powerful B2B lead generation tools (with AI built-in) are game changers for these home services businesses that can’t afford to let any leads slip through the cracks. And with good reason. Lead automation tools deliver sales scenarios where leads and customers flow seamlessly through your sales funnel, are nurtured with relevant, personalized content, and are qualified before making the first contact with your sales team.
Good customer service matters–it matters a lot! According to a Zendesk report, more than half of consumers stop doing business with a company after just one bad experience.
Not only must you have the right tools to keep up with your competitors, but to truly outmaneuver your competition you need lead automation tools that use AI to maximize efficiency and productivity. Nowhere is this more important than in the home services industry.
Because, as anyone in the home service industry knows firsthand, competition is fierce, and timely communication with customers and prospects (especially those facing emergencies) is vital.
What is Lead Automation?
Let’s start with what lead automation is. Simply put, lead automation is the strategic and systematic use of tools, like those powered by AI, to streamline and automate repetitive tasks in your lead gen and sales nurturing process.
Lead automation tools can help with tasks like:
- Capturing leads
- Qualifying leads
- Nurturing leads
- Scheduling appointments
These non-negotiable steps in the lead generation process can be time-consuming. When sales and marketing teams have to qualify and score leads manually, they might be missing ‘hotter’ leads and delaying agents getting back to them.
Manual lead qualification and scoring is, in 2024, time wasted.
This timeliness is particularly important in the home services industry where time is of the essence. Lead automation systems that route priority callers to the right agent or alert someone if the need is urgent ensures that you connect with customers who are facing emergencies like a busted pipe or broken heater in the middle of February.
Let’s see how lead automation can help with each of these tasks:
1. Capturing leads
No matter what industry you’re in, capturing leads is vital to your success. From email lists and landing pages to form fills and chatbot conversations, capturing leads is a must for any business, and home services is no exception.
What makes lead management and automation tools special, however, is their ability to capture leads and connect with customers 24/7. For home services businesses, this is a major win. Not only does this round-the-clock service improve your customers’ experience, but it also prevents potential leads from slipping through the cracks.
2. Qualifying leads
Getting leads in the door is a priority for every marketing and sales team. But that’s just the beginning. These lead-driving teams need to know which of those leads are good ones–and which aren’t. Manually qualifying leads wastes a lot of time, but lead automation tools simplify the process and give time back to agents to do what they do best–sell!
3. Nurturing leads
Many industries have a longer sales cycle and leads need to be nurtured before they convert. While nurturing leads is essential, it’s a big time lift when done manually (one that often falls by the wayside, especially with smaller marketing and sales teams). Lead management tools, powered by AI, make this easy. For example, with lead automation, you can:
- Update email lists
- Send automated emails
- Use triggers to prompt next steps, like a text message promo code
- And more!
In other words, nurturing leads has never been easier–or faster!
4. Scheduling appointments
Often, customer service representatives’ time gets taken up on repetitive tasks like making callbacks to schedule appointments and vet insurance providers. Lead automation tools, like an intelligent virtual agent (IVR), take these tasks off your team’s plate. These AI-powered tools can schedule appointments, check to see if specific insurance is accepted, reset passwords, and so much more.
The Benefits of Lead Automation for Home Services
Getting in front of prospects interested in your product or service at the right time, with the right message is critical to consistently converting leads to customers. Lead automation software makes this goal achievable. With an automated lead generation process, sales and marketing teams have more time to focus on what they do best–driving and converting more of the best leads.
Let’s explore some more of the benefits of automated lead generation.
- Increased conversion rates
Who doesn’t want more conversions? Lead automation tools can help support your sales team to convert more of your best leads and empower your marketing team with first-hand insight into how campaigns are performing and how messages are being perceived by your target audience. These B2B lead generation tools that nurture potential leads through the sales funnel, lead to more conversions in the long term.
- Improved productivity and efficiency
When sales and marketing teams can work on more complex, time-sensitive tasks, their productivity and efficiency both improve dramatically. They can focus on tasks that drive more conversions.
- Better customer experience
Delivering a better customer experience is essential to stay competitive today. When you use lead management and automation tools that provide round-the-clock communication options, personalize interactions with agents, and send automated follow-ups, customers have an exceptional experience with your brand from start to long past conversion.
Building this long-term relationship is critical to success when it comes to home services.
- Increased cost savings
Saving money is a primary goal of many organizations. With the onslaught of AI-powered tools, this drive has become more attainable than ever before. Lead automation tools, like CallTrackingMetrics’s AskAI take away the need for employees to carry out many of these tasks like summarizing conversations, automating call scoring, and triggering workflows to carry out the next steps.
- Deeper customer insights
When you use lead automation tools to extract customer insights from all of your conversations like phone calls, chats, texts, and even Zoom meetings, you’ll get a deeper understanding of your customers. This helps you not only personalize messages and conversations but also helps your customer service and product development teams keep customers’ needs in mind.
Customer service agents can now have the information they need to deliver relevant, fast, and personalized service to their customers, and sales staff knows which products or services a person has been exploring before they pick up the phone. This not only shortens the sales cycle, it also supports agents in converting more prospects into customers.
Six in ten customer service agents reported that not having enough data on their customers leads to a poor customer service experience.
These benefits can be customized to meet your specific needs and business goals. The options are virtually endless with some software platforms. Read on to find out how to get started with automated lead management tools.
How to Get Started
So you’re sold on using lead automation tools for your home services business. But where do you start? With so many tools and AI-powered options, it can be overwhelming. Here are some points to consider when you are thinking about getting started with automated lead generation for your home services business.
1. Outline your business goals
The first step is to take a look at what you are looking to achieve when it comes to lead management. Does your team need a tool with virtual agent options that will allow your customers to connect with someone around the clock? Or, does your marketing team need support in lead nurturing with automated email drip campaigns? Whatever your goals are, take some time to consider your top goals.
These goals can be general or more specific. For example, do you want to increase leads, or prioritize nurturing customers?
2. Determine your ‘go-to’ tech stack needs
Marketing and sales teams all have their most trusted tech stacks. From HubSpot and Google Analytics to Salesforce and Microsoft, having integrations with your favorite software platforms is integral to a successful lead automation strategy.
Take a look at the ones you use most – is it ImproveIt360 or PestPac? Or does your team prefer ServiceTitan or FieldRoutes? You’ll want to be sure that whichever software platforms your teams use will integrate seamlessly with the lead automation platform you choose.
3. Choose your tools
Keeping in mind both your goals and the must-haves in your tech stack, you’ll want to choose tools that can meet your current goals and objectives. It’s also important to consider what type of lead management tools your home services business will need next. Do you plan to grow? Pick a software platform that will grow with you and offer the ability to upgrade plans for new lead management needs you may encounter.
Some platforms offer the most basic lead automation functions and those that deliver a plethora of benefits built to scale with your company. Find the software platform and plan that meets your business needs and fits into your budget.
4. Personalize
One of the best aspects of AI is the ability to personalize messages and interactions with customers and prospects. Take the opportunity to engage with potential leads, prospects, and customers with information relevant to helping them and their specific pain points. This personalization not only goes a long way but is also essential in today’s competitive home services landscape.
CallTrackingMetrics’ ChatAI helps teams to deliver personalized, round-the-clock customer service experience that helps to transform home services businesses and grow revenue.
5. Customize workflows
Take some time to look at where you want to automate your lead management system. Where are the glitches? Where do prospects tend to drop off more? Which are your busiest days, and times during the week? With this information, you’ll know precisely where your lead management workflow needs automation and support. When you know this, you can fine-tune your lead management system to go above and beyond to meet the needs of your customers whenever they need you.
6. Track, assess, optimize
Make consistently tracking and assessing the performance of your workflows and lead automation system routine maintenance. What has changed? Which areas in need of support have surfaced? Do you need to update any workflows to improve the customer’s experience?
No matter what lead automation platform you choose, be sure to keep assessing and optimizing to provide better customer experiences, drive more of your best leads, and increase conversions and revenue.
CX experiences matter more now than ever. Hyken reports that 90% of customers said they’d switch to another company if they provided better customer service.
Ready to learn more about how lead automation tools with AI built-in can help transform your lead management system and empower your team to close more deals? Book a Personalized, No Obligation Demo and see for yourself.
