Articles Tagged with ''sales''

Direct mail can be the most lucrative marketing tool you’ll ever use — if you use it correctly. Yet most plumbers waste wads of money on ineffective mailings because they don’t know how to do it right. Direct mail offers the advantage of laser-like targeting, where you can pick your list exactly.

The first cautionary bit of advice I received from my dad was that I learn how to “avoid stepping over dollars to pick up dimes.” I was just a kid getting started in the family business. This seemed confusing to me so I asked him, “What does that mean?”

Whoa — is the end of this year really around the corner? Maybe, maybe not. As Winston Churchill once said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” I’m sure that explained everything very well.

I’d hear, “This is going to hurt you worse than it hurts me,” just before getting my rearward region spanked into next week. Whenever I used to hear this phrase — which was shockingly regular — I used to think, “Then why do it?” I mean, can’t we spare some pain for both of us by overlooking that little melted-crayon-in-the-Easy-Bake Oven-incident?

As contractors, we love spending money on any new tools we can get our hands on for the trades we do, but not so much when it comes to stepping up and investing in other powerful business technology tools.

 How well you close is perhaps the ultimate judge of your sales success. But how you open has a lot to do with whether you get to close at all!