How to Start a Handyman Service - Telemarketing

This step by step guide will explain how to
Start a Handyman Service - Telemarketing

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• phone

1. 

   You have been promoting your new business every way you know how. Now you need to do some prospecting. Hire a telemarketer. Get someone to call around getting you leads & appointments. Pay by the lead or offer a percent of the finished job.

2. 

   I do prospecting for www.LowcountryOneCall.SC which is a referral service for contractors along the coastline between Myrtle Beach, SC and Savanna, Georgia. Check into signing up with some referral services to do the prospecting for you. Look for a company with no fees that only requires 10% of the profit upon completion like the company I work for.

3. 

   Have your telemarketer use a source of leads like goleads.com or salesgenie.com This way she has access to names, phone numbers, addresses. She can search for new homeowners which is the ultimate target - all homeowners - geographical locations - income - and the list goes on. These sights do charge subscription fees but you won't have to worry about any of these leads being on the National Do Not Call list.

4. 

   A free source of leads may be available online through your local library. Check into this if you don't want to pay for leads. You may hire ten telemarketers and will be lucky if one of them makes calls without monetary and hourly compensation and constant supervision, so you may not want to invest much money into telemarketing.

5. 

   Yellowpages.com and yellowbook are good free sources of commercial leads.
   Have her call local nursing homes, apartment complexes, real estate agents, & trailer parks!

6. 

   You may also consider the apartments for rent section of the local paper. Although most landlords have the apartment move in ready, there's a chance they may have additional apartments sitting vacant due to cosmetic issues and lack of time.

7. 

   If you are lucky enough to have campgrounds in your area with some semi-permanent set ups these are great targets. This type of campground is usually limited to warmer climates and inhabited by retired couples. If you get hired to work on one camper, pretty soon you will be fixing the whole park. For this market you need your fliers which I will save for part 7 in this series.

8. 

   For telemarketing I get a better reception cold calling by stating, Hi this is Claire and I was just checking in to see if you might have any jobs around the house for a local licensed and insured handyman? This catches them off guard and they don't automatically realize you're a telemarketer as soon as they answer the phone.

9. 

   Either yes, tell me more, or no and on to the next target. If yes, I'd say, "great, John with Low Country One Call can give you a free estimate on anything you need done around the house. What type of work were you considering having done?" get conversational....and so on.
   The most common answer is "No thank you we already have a handyman we've been using for umpteen years."

10. How to Start a Handyman Service - Telemarketing is Step 6 in the series. Please click the link below for the final step 7. I saved the best for last.

Tips & Warnings

• Telemarketing isn't the most productive way to start a handyman service - advertising venture but is a good supplement when your out of options or on a low budget, especially if you can find someone productive to work on commission.
• Be sure to honor the National Do Not Call List and timezone restrictions.
• Businesses have no protection against telemarketer calls.
• When they call they may request no solicitations which is fine, because you won't be calling them back. You can, however get in trouble for unsolicited faxes.

Resources

• Part 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Part 7

[jenng]

on 4/15/2009 Great article on how to start a handyman service telemarketing 5*