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5 fast ways to generate construction sales leads

5 fast ways to generate construction sales leads

Cold calling is one thing. Cold calling during a pandemic is another. One sales rep I talked to said receptionists are taking 20 minutes to transfer calls and many of his contacts have been furloughed.  That’s tough.

So how do you generate sales leads?

Often it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes you need to take a look at your sales strategy and re-evaluate your entire approach. The right sales strategy will allow you to grow consistently and organically over the long-term.

We suggest you align your sales and marketing teams behind a great inbound strategy before going straight to generating new leads. For more information check out our article how to change the way you sell to bounce back. 

But at the end of the day – you need to generate leads. And it’s not easy.

Here are a few tips ideas to energize your sales efforts.

 

5 ways to generate new sales leads:

 

1.      Yellow Pages

 

Do you feel like your whole life is spent in front of a computer screen? You may enjoy thumbing through the pages, making notes with a pencil and highlighting numbers to call.

Another benefit is that it skips Google’s algorithm, and you can look at an unbiased list of leads in your chosen field.

Also, the smell of yellow pages will likely bring back memories of ordering pizza from a local delivery service when you were knee high to a grasshopper. You can look forward to a heavy dose of nostalgia along with a few new numbers to call.

 

2.      Referrals

 

Ask for a few moments of your previous clients time. Ask them to fill out a customer satisfaction survey or leave a review on your website. If their experience with you has been positive, ask if there is anyone in their network who they could recommend you to.

Business transactions depend on a relationship built on trust and referrals help you to establish trust quickly.

 

3.      Business Directory Websites

 

Ok, let’s move on to something you have to plug in to use. Hop on the computer and search: “business directory”. These helpful websites list businesses, especially SME’s, according to industry.You can add your business to get listed, and you can also use it to create a list of businesses to contact.

Sites like Business Directory and Approved Business are great resources.

Some construction-specific sites with similar resources are Building Talk and Specified By.

 

4.      LinkedIn Sales Navigator

 

LinkedIn is the premier social media platform for business to business connections. To take this one step further, LinkedIn offers the Sales Navigator account for £80 per month. Fairly pricey, but a good tool. It provides you with more information about your connections and better search tools.

For instance you can search for people who have recently started new management-level jobs. These new hires will likely be trying to establish themselves by making changes and improving the quality of products used in their business. Introducing yourself at this stage is a good strategy.

 

5.      Construction Project Leads

 

Construction project lead companies are searchable databases of every current construction project and associated contacts. Of these services, Barbour ABI and Glenigan are the largest. They do the hard work of tracking every project that is submitted to planners, and submitting them to their own personal database. With a subscription, you can access the database and create filters for job role, project type, and timeline and have these sent to you as reports daily or weekly.

Barbour ABI uploaded 42,000 new projects this week. That’s a lot of potential new leads. In fact, it's the largest UK-based research team in the industry and the market leader in construction intelligence. 

How do you make the most of all these projects and contacts? The key is getting specific with what projects and roles you’re targeting. You may also need to implement a plan to consistently follow up on these leads to make the most of these services.

There are services available that can help you with that, one being Project Prospecta.

Integrating with Barbour ABI, it uses AI to make soft outreach with relevant contacts and alerts you when they have shown interest in your products or services.

To find out more visit Project Prospecta or book a meeting.

 

Conclusion

 

Lead generation is a tricky business, but there are more effective ways than others. Maybe try one of the more basic methods before moving on to the more sophisticated ones. See what works for you.

 

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