When it comes to selling to homeowners, salespeople are selling to new prospects or existing customers. There are valid reasons for selling to both.

New prospects offer the opportunity to serve a new home that is full of potential. This can lead to increased market share and a new referral resource.

Existing customers offer the opportunity to elevate your level of service, expand your relationships, sell more products, plus solve longstanding problems. Existing customers often cross-pollinate with other services you offer, with a higher probability of buying and spending more money. In other words, existing customers should never be taken for granted in favor of new prospects.

While new prospects may offer new revenue potential and the allure of a large purchase, there are no guarantees they will buy anything. While you invest money and time chasing prospects and not paying attention to existing customers, don’t be surprised if those current customers leave you. Why? They may feel indifferent toward your company, or another company poaches them by offering to solve problems you miss.

Plus, if you choose not to offer high-performance products and services to pesky problems that present a lower-revenue opportunity on the surface, you miss the chance to turn those small money fixes into larger income projects. Such longer-term scenarios can help your customer build their perfect home environment over time.

Sales Should Be Like Consistent At-Bats

In baseball, you cannot always swing for the fences, or you end up striking out more often and hitting fewer home runs. However, if you consistently put the bat on the ball, you will get on base more, drive in more runs, hit your fair share of home runs, and win more games.

In-home sales work much the same. The customers you serve consistently can eventually turn into a consistent string of base-hit sales, home run sales, or a referral to more base hits and home runs.

Cost Strategies

Regarding the effort to sell prospects versus customers, prospects require more marketing dollars to convert into a customer. High-performance home service contractors report the average cost to create a prospect can average $400. That cost increases to an average of $600 to convert the prospect to a buying customer.

These costs stem from expensive marketing strategies that include direct letters, radius mailers, billboards, radio, television, over-the-top streaming, digital marketing, newspaper and magazine branding, direct response ads, and more.

Existing customers, on the other hand, cost very little to resell. Most companies can flip an opportunity to sell high-performance services from an email, text, phone call, postcard, letter, tech handout, newsletter, service visit, etc., each of which costs only pennies to a few dollars.

Existing customers also offer low-cost opportunities to create new prospects and customers through yard signs, branded homes (decals, grocery bags, and other in-home branded materials), referral rewards, mailbox/door hangers, as well as trucks (rolling billboards) in neighborhoods.

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