If there’s anything I’ve learned over the years — and it’s something that’s never changed — it’s the simple fact that generating leads is critically important to sustain your roofing business. While most business owners and salespeople will quickly acknowledge this as fact, many will also stress that leads need to be “qualified” and not want to break the bank to find them.

Much earlier in my career, I remember helping roofing contractors develop a lead qualification process that tasked them with asking questions, assigning a score to the answers, and then using the sum of the scores to “qualify” the lead.

As much as I believed in the process, I was surprised that the contractors’ revenues declined because they used my highly subjective scoring system to disqualify viable sales opportunities.

Yes, my process spared them from investing their time with “unqualified” prospects, but it also drained their pipeline, leaving them with fewer prospects to sell.

Today, I’m less focused on helping contractors disqualify leads and more focused on assisting them in optimizing the leads they have to maximize their sales and profit opportunities.

Lead optimization evaluates leads based on their potential value to your business and assigns those leads to the salesperson with the highest probability of selling them. We all know all leads are not created equal, and dedicating the same effort to every lead can be a huge waste of time and resources.

ProFund helps with this by providing four powerful data points contractors can use to validate the lead, identify upsell opportunities, and determine the lead’s potential revenue opportunity based on thousands of peer transactions.

Rather than working leads based on when they entered the pipeline, salespeople can use ProFund’s data to prioritize the leads with the greatest value to the business.

When assigning leads, we should also consider that every one of your leads has a different buying style and a uniquely different  propensity to buy. Understanding and aligning your sales approach to your prospect’s buying style is an excellent way to provide a more personalized buying experience and quickly earn the trust you’ll need to win the sale.

Learning about your leads is another area where ProFund gives you a competitive edge. ProFund uses its AI-driven analysis to match your lead with seven buying personas by creating homeowner profiles using the lead's name and address.

Now, rather than trying to size up your prospect as you enter their home, you’ll know before you knock on the door if you’re meeting with a “Value Shopper” or a buyer who’s “All About Quality,” for example.

If you think about it, sales is a game of probability, and your success in sales comes from your commitment to the actions that will drastically improve your likelihood of winning the sale. Using new tools, like ProFund, to optimize your leads is a powerful strategy that will bend the probability curve in your favor and propel your business to new heights.

ProFund is a cloud-based technology platform provider of sales automation and project management services for professional contractors and homeowners. To learn more, go to ProFund.net.