Managing director of InspireKbb David Barker considers the best strategies for marketing your business when demand is at an all-time high

I don’t need to tell you that the KBB market is in pretty uncharted territory right now.

The pandemic has created an unprecedented demand for home improvement, and when you add in the fact that there are loads of people sitting on cash they haven’t been able to spend on holidays, it’s fair to say this wave won’t run its course anytime soon.

Sponsored Video

Embrace Hygge with Pronteau Scandi

Many independent kitchen retailers are used to having to work super exceptionally hard for every sale – sweating blood and tears to generate leads and convert them into clients.

Leads aren’t difficult to come by recently, though, which means a different problem for KBB retailers:

What sales and marketing activity should you be doing when demand is high and time is tight?

I could write a small book answering this question, but I’ll focus on just two points for now:

1. Cherry-pick best leads

When leads are hard to come by, you’ll likely spend a lot of time on every single one, digging into your pipeline and trying to squeeze every last drop of value from every lead that comes through the door.

But when you’ve got an abundance of leads, that’s no longer viable – there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Instead, you can afford to be more selective with the leads you develop, focusing on the best opportunities – the customers you most want to work with and the jobs that make you the most money.

If you’ve got limited capacity, this is vital, otherwise you’ll end up leaving money on the table because you’re filling your diary with jobs that aren’t delivering maximum revenue.

2. Go all in

I was speaking to an astute client of ours a couple of weeks ago, and he came up with a pretty apt analogy about what’s going on for him – and plenty of other retailers – right now.

Picture one of those 2p Penny Pusher machines you get in an arcade.  He feels like that’s what he’s doing right now – putting coins in, more and more of them balancing precariously on the shelf.

His dilemma was: do I keep putting coins in?  Do I keep hunting for more leads?  Because what happens if they all come off, all at the same time?

It’s a great metaphor, and it perfectly sums up a predicament that lots of kbb retailers have right now with their marketing – that they’ll be overwhelmed with demand.

Here’s my response: Just keep putting those coins in.

You can do several things to deal with demand – from raising your prices to employing more subcontractors, delaying start dates, and turning people down.

But what you can’t do is stimulate the sort of demand we’re seeing right now.  It can’t be replicated.  You just have to make the most of it when it arrives.

And if you hold back, and you slow down on your sales and marketing activity, you risk undoing the good work you’ve done up until now … just like those wasted 2p coins back in the arcade.

After all, you don’t want to leave them for the next person, right…?