How to Get Long Distance Moving Leads for Your Website

The lifeblood of any business is sales. In order to get sales you need to have customers. Where do the potential customers come from? They come from leads for “in home” appointments, because we know that generally tariffs prohibit any quote across state lines from not being in writing after a thorough home or business inspection.

Types of Sales Leads

There are three main types of sales leads for moving and storage companies. They are:

Call In: They call you. They are familiar with your brand name either from past business that they have done with you or from your company’s general reputation. These are the most valuable of leads because they have a high potential for closing and they are “free.”

They do have the longest time horizon from learning of your brand to actually contacting you for a moving quote, so they can’t always be relied on to meet your monthly sales goals. They are gravy when they come in, but totally unpredictable.

Inbound: They saw you online or saw one of your ads and completed a “contact us” form. This type of lead is valuable because the prospect has shown interest, but they are far from closing because they do not know your company and may be shopping other competitors, too. Yet being given the opportunity to provide a quote is a good lead and shows consideration.

This type of lead does not take as long to cultivate. In fact, it could happen in just one day, but the chance of leading to a sale is less than 50/50.

Outbound: These leads are ones that you buy either from a list aggregator like moving.com or movers123.com, or from a company that keeps track of people who may be moving in the near future. They require a fair degree of selling as the prospect may not be truly interested in your company and only learned of your company from your phone call or your sales piece in the mail. The closing ratio here is low, but it is still considered a lead, and may result in a sale. You need to pursue it.

This type of lead, while low in value, has the least amount of incubation period and may result in a quick appointment. It does require more nurturing than the other two tiers of leads, but it is still a lead, and sold properly, may result in a sale.

Long Distance Moving Sales Leads

A long-distance sales lead of any type is valuable because the resulting sale is generally $3,000 or more, and as such can substantiate a fairly expensive lead generation cost. Most moving and storage companies try to keep the sales lead generation cost under $100 for long distance sales leads, but it is often more than that depending on the market.

Of all the leads, the one that is the most valuable and easiest to get is the Inbound Lead from a Get Quote Form on your website. This lead generally closes at least 20% of the time compared to Outbound Leads closing about 12% of the time. Once your website is optimized for web leads, they will start coming in… slowly at first, but build over time. Expecting from 30–100 leads a month in the winter/spring months leading up to the busy summer moving season is very reasonable. Depending on market size and your brand recognition, it can easily be 200–300 leads per month. We quote those figures with high authority based on our provable experience.

Don’t overlook your website as being a “lead generation machine.” It doesn’t happen overnight. Of course not. But over time, given the proper experienced optimization, it will provide your business with a huge stream of moving sales leads that will make your moving and storage business profitable and dominant in your market.