Driving Around And Literally LOOKING For Homes That Need Your Services Is A Quick Way To Round Up Easy Leads

Use Your Brains Instead Of Your Checkbook To Generate Home Improvement Leads

By Rich Harshaw

A few years ago I was talking with one of my clients, the owner of a very successful metal roofing company in Indianapolis. We were working on a dizzying array of sometimes complex roofing marketing campaigns including everything from high-frequency mailers to radio, pre-positioning materials, home show displays, phone scripting, email marketing, and more.

At some point during one of our many conversations he sighed and said, “It was so much easier when I was young and new in this business. I got all the business I could handle by driving around high-end neighborhoods in my truck with a handheld microcassette recorder looking for homes with roofs that clearly needed to be replaced. I’d make a note of the specific addresses on the recorder, then go back to the office, jot them down, then send them a simple hand-addressed letter saying I had noticed their roof had some issues and would it be okay to come over and give it a formal inspection?”

When I quizzed him a little bit more about how many letters he could send in a day (ten to twenty, a few times a week), how many responses he would typically get (two or three for each ten sent), and whether or not the inspections led to quality sales (yes), I asked him the only remaining logical question:

WHY ON EARTH DID YOU STOP DOING THIS!?!?!

His response: I don’t have time to do that anymore!

There are several takeaways from this story: 1) When you’re new and broke and hungry you often find the most direct, inexpensive, and effective ways to generate customers; 2) You absolutely CAN trade time for money when it comes to marketing; 3) Just because you’ve grown bigger doesn’t mean that you have to abandon the resourceful mindset that got you launched into business in the first place.

Oh yea, and takeaway #4: The story above is the first of the four guerrilla marketing tactics I’m going to teach you in this posting!

But before I elaborate on that, let’s talk GUERRILLA for a minute. Guerrilla marketing, more than anything else, is a mindset. It’s about finding ways to generate leads and customers without spending a lot of money. It’s about using time, creativity, and resourcefulness instead of simply writing a check. But guerrilla marketing doesn’t have to be reserved exclusively for the small fries, startups, and the cash poor. It can be an important part of any contractor’s marketing program.

I’ll visit this topic of guerrilla marketing from time to time and drop a few ideas on you. I’d also be interested in hearing any guerrilla ideas that have worked for you—see my challenge below. Don’t worry if some of the ideas don’t seem like a good fit for your company or your current situation—the idea here is to give you ideas. Think of these as “thought spurs”; ideas that will generate situation-specific ideas for you and your company. With that said, here we go with four guerrilla marketing ideas:

Guerrilla Tactic #1: Literally LOOK For Prospects – Okay, let’s go back to the story I started with and flesh it out a little bit. First thing you’ll need to do is determine if you can tell from a simple visual inspection whether or not a home needs your particular services. If you sell vinyl windows and you find a neighborhood full of old-style aluminum windows, you’re in luck. If you’re a roofer and a storm has recently blown through, go look for damage. If you sell siding, you can easily pick out homes with dilapidated old siding.

On the other hand, some things are not quite as obvious—but you can still use this method. If a neighborhood was built between 1990 and 2000, the timing is probably right for kitchen remodeling. If the minimum age requirement for a retirement community is fifty-five-years old, that might be a good place to look for sunroom customers. Use your noggin—it doesn’t take a genius to figure this stuff out.

The next step, obviously, is to compile a list of specific addresses that you want to send your mailer to. If you have a smartphone (and of course, you do), you won’t need an old fashioned microcassette recorder. Make a goal to find twenty homes per session (as many sessions as you want per week), then go back to your office and jot them down.

Now for the letter. My advice: Keep it simple, honest… and just a touch unsophisticated. You don’t want to come across as a long, lost Beverly Hillbilly, but you also don’t want to appear to be super polished and hyper-professional, either. That’s because a big part of this entire tactic involves you being a sort of wet-behind-the-ears, aw-shucks, just-trying-to-help “good guy.”

The letter should go something like this (my commentary in parenthesis):

(No letterhead; typed out is fine, but put it on a plain piece of paper… or at the VERY MOST, just your logo at the top.)

Dear Friend (since you don’t actually know their name),

Please excuse this intrusion, but I was driving through your neighborhood earlier today on the way to visit a customer (i.e. I have other customers) when I saw your home and noticed that your roof has several black streaks on it (or whatever it is you noticed). Usually when (condition you just described) occurs, it means (whatever it means—something bad).

As they say, “better safe than sorry.” If you want, I can come by and take a closer look at it and tell you if it’s something you should take care of right away, or if it’s not that big of a deal.

I usually charge a small fee for an inspection like this, but since I’m working in your neighborhood and will be close by anyway, I’d be happy to stop by and take a look if you want. It should take about four to ten minutes.

Just call my cell or text me: (555) 345-2344.

Sincerely,

John Stevens

ABC Roofing

ABCroofing.com

It’s really just about that darn simple. It’s simple and straightforward; it doesn’t try to “sell” anything—it offers a service as a courtesy. It asks for a direct response in a non-threatening way… sending a text or calling a cell. It doesn’t look like “marketing.” Nor does it smell like it. It’s guerrilla marketing.

Guerrilla Tactic #2: Guerrilla Door Knocking, Part 1 – Knocking on doors is always a great guerrilla marketing tactic because it costs NOTHING to execute except your time—and especially if you’re new in business, you have plenty of time.

I have plenty of guerrilla canvassing tactics, including the Time Share Approach, the Big Bill Approach, the Utility Official Approach, the DVD Commitment Approach, the Survey Approach, and Wham-Bam Approach.

But for starters, today, we’re going to discuss the “I’m Not The Boss, He Is” Approach that I learned from my friend Dan Wolt. Like many of you, Dan started his company on a shoestring and found himself with lots of time and not very many customers. So him and his then-partner started knocking doors and came up with an ingenious approach.

Their approach had a lot more to do with the logistics than the content of the message. What they would do is put on company T-shirts and blue jeans in the morning and hit the streets at about 11 AM. They’d canvass for three or four hours knocking doors and telling homeowners that “their boss could drop by that evening for ten minutes and give them a quote on replacement windows.”

The offer was compelling because it was low risk—ten minutes to get a quote. No big deal. Then he’d go home, shower, and change into a suit and tie. Then he’d meet his partner and they’d exchange leads. Dan would then show up as “the boss” to the homes of the leads his partner had found that day, and his partner would show up in a suit as “the boss” of the homes he had found that day.

They discovered that “the boss,” who was clearly indicated by his impressive looking suit, was respected at a much higher level than the lowly door knocker who had set the appointment earlier that day. They could generally set upward of a dozen leads per day each, and found at least half of those would be home and willing to let “the boss” in to give them a quote. INSTANT BUSINESS.

You don’t even need that great of conversion ratios to make this work. If you’re just two guys who own a new business, one sale each per night could net you $2,000 to $3,000 in gross margin per sale… repeated five days a week is a company that has monthly gross profits in the $100,000 range. Not bad for a guy in a T-shirt knocking doors.

Accelerator: What if you took the “drive by” approach in the first guerrilla tactic (above) and instead of sending letters, you simply stopped and knocked on the door? Yea, this is actually pretty easy.

Guerrilla Tactic #3: Jobsite Signs & Take-One Boxes – Most of you already utilize jobsite signs to a certain extent, but I’d like to suggest a few ways to make them work better.

• Try making your jobsite sign a super bright color, like fluorescent pink, yellow, or orange. You don’t have to—I’m just saying try it.
• Put a web address on the sign that is easy to remember:

o   BestDarnRoofing.com

o   RoofingForJesus.com

o   ExpensiveButWorthItRoofing.com

o   ClearlyTheBestRoofer.com

o   OtherRoofersAreJealous.com

o   You get the idea, right?

• Try making the jobsite sign bigger than normal. Usually they’re 24” x 36” or 36” x 48”. Try getting one 50% bigger… then make it bright pink and say RoofingForJesus.com. People will notice that.
• Make a sign that’s a cardboard cutout of something—you, T-Rex, UFO, a house, whatever. Use this thing called “Google” to find this.
• Put a “take one box” next to the sign and stuff it with one-page flyers for your company that showcase your identity. Check this sample out. This will make a HUGE difference in getting people to actually respond. They only cost about $15 from real estate supply websites.

Guerrilla Tactic #4: Quirky Mailers – Okay, so you have the mailing list, now try sending them a quirky mailer instead of a simple straightforward letter. You’d be surprised at what the USPS will allow you to send mail in, including:

Yes folks, that is a coconut. You can indeed send stuff to people inside of a coconut. Forget about what goes inside the coconut—is there any chance at all the coconut would NOT get opened? Of course not—nobody can resist the coconut in the mail tactic. Or shiny mailers… or tube mailers… or medicine bottles… or whatever. It’s all USPS compliant, and they all work.

Naturally, they cost more money to send that regular envelopes… so don’t run out there and spend $10,000 on coconut mailers. But you could spend $100 on them and see what happens. And what will happen will be RESPONSE, SALES, and PROFIT.

That’s it for today—there are plenty more guerrilla ideas to talk about in the future… so keep reading these posts to find them (and other great marketing advice!). And if you have any of your own guerrilla marketing ideas, please send them to me at rharshaw@mymonline.com.

Happy marketing!

Guerrilla Marketing Challenge: Have you used Guerrilla Marketing with success before in your business? If so, email me the most effective tactics you’ve used, and if I judge it to be one of the THREE most interesting methods, I’ll send you a signed copy of my book, Monopolize Your Marketplace. By sending me an email with an idea, you are giving me permission to publish your idea in this blog, with credit to you, of course. Send any stories or ideas or comments directly to me at rharshaw@mymonline.com.

© 2014 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.