Secrets to Getting More Weekly Pool Service Customers

Phonedial Hed

Pool service companies know new customers are vital to their success. Whether you want to increase your weekly service customers or just grow your opportunity for repair jobs, new customers must be cultivated. And that requires two basic steps:

1. Generate more high-quality leads

2. Convert more leads to customers

Here are a few secrets to help pool service companies grow their customer base.

Reach the right prospects

However you currently advertise, you are likely targeting three weekly service categories:

1. Qualified Existing Pool Owners Not On Weekly Service – This group includes existing pool owners who have sufficient home worthiness and discretionary income to afford a pool service.

2. Existing Pool Owners on Weekly Service – These people are existing pool owners already using weekly service who may be interested in switching to a new service company.

3. New Pool Owners – This group includes new pool owners or prospective new pool owners who have sufficient home worthiness and discretionary income and may be interested in weekly pool service.

These are the people you are trying to reach via whatever marketing channels you choose: online advertising, website, blogs, broadcast media like radio, outdoor signage, print media such as local newspapers, word-of-mouth or direct mail. It’s a numbers game, so make sure you understand how many of these prospects are reached by your chosen marketing method.

Generate qualified phone calls

Here’s a simple but little-known fact: When people make bigger decisions, like who to hire for weekly pool service, pool repair or replacement liners, the vast majority pick up the phone. But in today’s digital world, some companies are obsessed with getting clicks and web form submissions.

Most experienced pool service companies will tell you they prefer a call over a click any day — you simply can’t sell weekly pool service without speaking to the prospect on the phone to set an appointment. Make sure your marketing approach is designed to generate and measure qualified phone calls.

Here are the facts from a BIA/Kelsey survey:

  • 86 percent of businesses say calls are the best leads they receive.
  • Calls are 12 times more likely to become customers than web leads.
  • Only 2 percent of web leads convert to customers.
  • Web leads are passive. They are a “sit back and wait until the consumer is doing comparative shopping” approach. And by the time the customer finds you, you're just one of many options competing for his or her business.


How to judge your marketing campaigns

Say the goal for your marketing campaign is to grow your pool service business by generating a certain number of highly qualified phone call leads. How do you know what is working well and what needs to change unless you are tracking the resulting phone calls?

But tracking phone calls is not enough; you still need to turn calls into customers. Converting phone leads is critical, and that is all about phone sales skills. Missing phone calls or handling them improperly leads to lost opportunities — you’re essentially throwing away your most profitable leads. Pool service companies should measure their marketing programs by the number of high quality phone calls directed to their business, and they should judge their phone skills by their close ratio.


Call Tracking

So how does call tracking work? Your company is given a unique phone number that is seamlessly ported to your preferred company number. From there, a provider like Xmente can identify and track phone call leads that are generated by your campaign. This approach can be used with all advertising methods from pay-per-click to direct mail. For every campaign, call tracking shows you things like how many phone calls came in, date and caller phone number.


Conversation Analysis

While call tracking is good, there's one problem: it stops gathering data when the phone rings. That's problematic because there's a lot of useful stuff that happens after the phone rings...like pretty much everything of importance. That's why conversational analysis goes hand-in-hand with call tracking. With this service, which Xmente provides, all tracked calls are recorded so they are available for listening at a later date. In addition, the calls are analyzed to identify three key factors about the call:

1. Prospect Interaction. Did the caller speak to a live agent or leave a voice message? Did the agent display a high level of phone etiquette, enthusiasm and professionalism?

2. Contact Information. Did the agent obtain the caller name, phone number, physical address and email address?

3. Sales Process. Did the agent use skills and techniques to set an appointment, follow up call or convert a sale? Were there any customer objections? Was there a missed opportunity? How can you improve?


Rethinking your marketing approach.

It is easy to get stuck doing the same things in the same way year after year. If you think that might be you, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

  • Are you reaching the most qualified prospects?
  • Are you delivering the most effective message?
  • Are you saying it with enough frequency?
  • Do you generate and track phone calls and measure results?

New and affordable tools like prospect targeting, call tracking and conversation analysis can help service companies evaluate and improve their marketing programs in a way that will increase their odds of getting more weekly pool service business.


Learn more

For more information, request Xmente’s free white paper, “How to Get More Weekly Pool Service Customers by Increasing Phone Call Leads and Improving Conversion,” or request a free Growth Opportunity Assessment for your weekly service, repair or liner replacement business. Requests should be made to my partner, Steve Carlyle, at [email protected] or (828) 389-9601.


Larry Bloom is a co-founder of Xmente Direct, former CEO of BioLab, Inc. and a past chairman of APSP. Contact him here.


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