Foreclosure Cleaning Marketing Advice: How to Use a Simple Call Intake Form to Get More Jobs

If you own a foreclosure cleaning business, one of the easiest, free ways to land more jobs is to create a caller intake form (ie, call log) to use as an everyday part of your marketing efforts. We’ll explain how in a moment.

This is a very easy form you can create yourself using MS Word, or any other word processing software. Once you create it, give it to the person answering your phone and instruct them how to use it – and ensure that they do for every call.

Why Use a Caller Intake Form In Your Foreclosure Cleanup Business

This simple little form can tell you a lot about your business. For example, you can find out how many calls you are getting each day, the types of jobs prospects are calling about, how many estimates you are asked to give, which geographic location the calls are coming from, how many prospects are responding to any marketing you may be doing, which season is the busiest, etc.

By having information like this at your fingertips, you can tailor your marketing efforts to make more money. For example, if you see that the bulk of the calls you’re getting come from a certain geographic area, you can market more heavily in that area. As another example, if you see that approximately 50% of the calls you’re getting are for light repairs, you can offer special deals and discounts to bring more of those types of jobs in.

This is the kind of info (ie, market research) large companies like Home Depot and WalMart use to fatten their bottom lines. Only you don’t have a marketing department or Harvard MBAs on your staff to conduct this type of research for your foreclosure cleaning business. And luckily, you don’t need to.

A simple Caller Intake form can do the job for you. In fact, this one simple little form – that you create yourself – can help guide the growth of your business for years to come.

How to Set Up Your Caller Intake Form

The Caller Intake form you create for your foreclosure cleaning business should include, at a minimum, the following info:

–Date/Time of Call

–Caller’s Name

–Caller’s Company Name

–Caller’s Contact Info (at minimum, a phone number; if possible an email and mailing address). Note: The person answering your phone can say something to the effect of, “Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter? We offer special deals and discounts on services in it, in addition to providing valuable industry info our prospects can use.”

If the person says yes, then get their email address.

–Location of Prospective Foreclosure Cleaning Job

–Scope of Job (ie, what they want done)

–Job Deadline (When they want the job completed)

–Date/Time Prospect is Available to Meet for Estimate

–How Caller Heard About Your Foreclosure Cleaning Company

How the Foreclosure Cleanup Caller Intake Form Can Help Grow Your Business

The Call Intake form ensures that you get all the information you need to give the prospect exactly what they asked for. It will make your enterprise appear professional because you won’t have to keep calling the prospect back to ask questions.

It should take you no more than 10 or 15 minutes to pull this form together using the tips here. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy; just thorough.

Call Patterns that Will Guide Your Decision-making

As time passes, you’ll start to see a pattern in your calls, eg, are most calls coming in the early evening, mid-day, or morning? The intake form will also reveal whether most of your call activity is happening at the end of the week or the beginning of the week, mid-month or end of month, etc.

Phone Activity vs. Actual Jobs

As your foreclosure cleaning business grows, you will see which months received the most phone activity versus actual jobs. You’ll also notice that certain times of the month may see you acting as an “estimate machine. ”

However, when when you compare your call sheet to the actual foreclosure cleaning job estimates given out compared to the estimates that eventually led to jobs, you’ll may be able to discern a pattern that you can use to make better decisions moving forward.

For example, after a while you’ll be able to forecast with some degree of certainty that in this particular month, we will be geting “x” number of calls, which we know will lead to “x” number of estimates, which will then lead to “x” number of actual foreclosure cleaing jobs.

Then, you can go back to see if your foreclosure cleanup calls spiked as a result of a certain type of marketing you did (eg, postcards mailed, calls made, email campaigns sent out, etc.). Once you make this connection, then you can double up on the marketing that worked and eliminate the marketing methods that weren’t as effective.

Geography Matters

This is another thing you’ll be able to see from your caller log, ie, where most of your calls are coming from as opposed to where most of the actual foreclosure cleaning jobs you landed are located.

How’d They Hear About You?

The line near the bottom of the call intake sheet is crucial to your marketing budget — and landing more foreclosure cleaning jobs. Why? Because it will tell you which marketing methods are most effective; hence, you can do more of this type of marketing to land more jobs. .

Note: While you may not be able to ask all the questions on your call log, do your best to get an answer to this one; it is the most important.

Create Your Call Intake Form and Use It from the Day You Open Your Business Doors

If you don’t have a call log, create one using the guidelines outlined above. And, no matter who you hire as your receptionist (can be family, friends, formal or informal administrative help), call in and test them to see if they are asking the questions on the form. While some calls may not lend to a full intake, most will.

An Invaluable, Free Marketing Tool for Every Foreclosure Cleaning Business

As you can see, this one little seemingly unimportant form provides a wealth of information — right at your fingertips — that you can use to grow a very lucrative foreclosure cleanup business for years to come.

P.S.: Read how one foreclosure cleaning business owner makes up to $40,000/wk.

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Copyright © 2010 Yuwanda Black for Foreclosure Business News. Article may not be reprinted or reproduced in any manner without the express, written consent of the author.