The customers you already have, and forgot

A trade business with five years of work behind it holds hundreds of customers who already chose it once. Most of those people never hear from it again.

Meanwhile the same business pays for advertising to reach strangers. The strangers cost money and the old customers cost a phone call.

Your list already exists

A marketing database is unnecessary. Your jobs table holds every customer, what you did, when you did it, and what they paid.

That last column matters most. A customer who spent four thousand dollars two years ago is a different prospect from one who spent ninety.

Give the call a reason

Ringing to ask whether somebody needs anything gets a no. A specific reason tied to their own job gets a conversation.

• The thing you flagged and they deferred. You wrote it on the job at the time.
• The service interval. Whatever you installed has one, and you know the date.
• The season. Gutters before the storms, heating before winter, irrigation before summer.
• The second half of a staged job. They did the kitchen and left the laundry.

Each reason comes from a record you already keep, which is why the list is worth more than any advertising.

Write down what you deferred, on the day

The most valuable line in this whole system is the one your team writes while standing in the house. The customer says not this time, and that becomes next year's job.

Your team notes it on the job, with the price you gave. A year later you ring with a specific offer rather than a general enquiry.

Pick a month and work the list

A campaign nobody scheduled never runs. One quiet month, the fifty best customers, and a proper run through them is the whole campaign.

Your quiet month is the point. Repeat work fills the gaps that new enquiries cannot, because you control when you ask.

Some of it should book itself

Where the work genuinely repeats, stop ringing and set a schedule. Your customer agrees once, and each visit lands in your jobs four weeks ahead with its site and its lines.

Our guide to maintenance rounds covers how to price that kind of repeating visit so it pays across a whole year.

Measure it, or it stops

Count the calls you made and the jobs they produced. Repeat work usually converts several times better than a cold enquiry, and seeing that keeps the habit alive.

Hold that conversion against what you spend on advertising. Most trade businesses find the phone calls win easily, and then they make time for them.

Ask for the referral while the work is fresh

A happy customer refers you in the fortnight after the job, and almost never six months later. Most businesses ask in neither.

Your team asks at handover, when the work looks its best. A single sentence about who else might need you produces more work than most advertising.

The job records who referred whom. Thanking somebody for a referral is what produces the second one.

A referral also arrives pre sold. Those customers negotiate less and cancel less, which makes them worth more than the enquiry rate suggests.

What to change first

• The list comes from your own jobs table, sorted by what people spent
• Every deferred job goes on the record, with the price quoted at the time
• Each call carries a reason drawn from that customer's own job
• One quiet month a year covers fifty customers properly
• Genuinely repeating work belongs on a schedule instead of a phone call
• Calls against jobs won, held beside the advertising spend, settles it