Help-
As you know, too much business when you can't handle it is just as detrimental to the health of the business.

I need help - or suggestions anyway. We are generating many leads from our website daily for free quotes, but we are unable to handle the load. It takes quite a bit of time to give these quotes and the customers don't like to hear $xx per Square foot, meaning they have to figure it themselves. And at this moment we are still in the process of hiring outside reps, but not fast enough to cover these request nationwide.

I see a few obvious ways to handle this but am not sure the best way to go (and may be missing the big picture here).

1) charge for estimates, not my first choice
2) offer an upgraded express paid estimate service, but then we have more obligation to deliver asap.
3) better qualify leads coming in.

I choose 3 but am not sure how to go about this without turning away the many leads we are collecting.

Any suggestions? Thank you in advance for your help!!

M

Have you actually considered providing an automated quotation system to your visitors online?  That would free up resources and time at your end and the clients would get a prompt answer to their enquiry.   Then those who wish to go ahead will contact you directly.  We've done this with  http://www.translate-to-chinese.com

Regards,

Denis Kondopoulos
Technical Project Manager
Naxtech.com

Hello -

I would like to thank you all for such great input, and it is very much appreciated.  Looking at these ideas and sitting on this for awhile, here's what I came up with:

 We created a second website  designed specifically for our commercial visitors. We send them there and they get priority service as they are our core customer.  Then we are modifying our main site to focus on stock plans with a price request feature.  Again, our main focus is volume production (repeat, repeat, repeat), currently unavailable in this industry, so this eliminates many of the requests for price quotes all over the board.  Then we will refer the custom orders to our other company that specializes the specialty products for custom orders.

How's that?

On 19:21:18 21 May 2007 WillHumphries wrote:

Seems like you have what is known as a "good problem"!

I would agree that number three is best option. I have experienced similar problems in my current company and also previous companies I have run.

The trick seems to be to decide what criteria these “requests for quotes” need to meet in order for you to have the maximum chance of a conversion into a sale.

Then look at the value of the potential sale.
Quote on the highest value leads with the maximum chance of conversion first gradually moving down the scale until you run out of resources.

Sounds simple but it is all about sticking to your criteria and being prepared to walk away from the wrong type of business (low margin, low chance of conversion) for the greater good. It gets more interesting if you keep your criteria even when you have more resources as it will force your sales team to go out and find more profitable sales opportunities.

Hope this makes some sense!

Will Humphries, Red 360 –

On 18:37:03 21 May 2007 SIPmktg wrote:

Help-
As you know, too much business when you can't handle it is just as detrimental to the health of the business.

I need help - or suggestions anyway. We are generating many leads from our website daily for free quotes, but we are unable to handle the load. It takes quite a bit of time to give these quotes and the customers don't like to hear $xx per Square foot, meaning they have to figure it themselves. And at this moment we are still in the process of hiring outside reps, but not fast enough to cover these request nationwide.

I see a few obvious ways to handle this but am not sure the best way to go (and may be missing the big picture here).

1) charge for estimates, not my first choice
2) offer an upgraded express paid estimate service, but then we have more obligation to deliver asap.
3) better qualify leads coming in.

I choose 3 but am not sure how to go about this without turning away the many leads we are collecting.

Any suggestions? Thank you in advance for your help!!

M