These guides will help your surveying company succeed.
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Everything from starting your company, to getting more clients.
Find and win more surveying work, all year round.
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21% of asbestos surveyors say winning new work is a major challenge. So, with so much competition, how can you win more work?
In this guide, we'll provide some actionable tips for winning work. We'll start by explaining how you can leverage your existing network, and then we'll move on to some tricks for getting in front of your ideal client and gaining their trust.
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Existing relationships are the biggest source of new clients for asbestos surveyors. The old adage, "It's not what you know; it's who you know" is especially true here.
According to our State of the Asbestos Industry Survey, the biggest sources of new work for surveyors are:
What ties these together is that they're all built on personal relationships. So, winning more work might be as simple as picking up the phone and calling some industry pals.
Asking for referrals from happy clients should be part of your sales cycle. Check out this advice on how to ask for a referral. If you want to win more referrals, you should also give more referrals. Get into a referral mindset!
Offering free Awareness Training or Continuing Professional Development (commonly known as CPD training) is a great way to reach your ideal clients and gain their trust. The goal here isn't to "hard sell" to your audience; it's more of a soft sell exercise to build relationships and eventually get your foot in the door.
If you're comfortable speaking in front of an audience, this strategy is for you. Having some charm and charisma will also work in your favour. Try to deliver as much value as possible and be memorable, so you're at the top of someone's mind when they need your services in future.
The types of companies you could offer training to include RICS Surveyors, Architects, Insurance Companies, or Project Managers. Pick a niche and see if you can carve out a reputation as someone who understands the industry.
There’s a ton of new work sitting waiting for you. It’s in that dusty file in the corner of your office.
Remember those old management surveys you did over a year ago? Did you remember to contact those old clients to prompt them for a re-inspection survey? Probably not. Re-inspections are a great source of new work because don’t need to find new clients. You already have the clients; you just need to remind them that a re-inspection is due.
Nowadays, with digital record keeping and software like Flow Mobile Surveying, it's easier than ever to identify jobs due a re-inspection. Try to get into the habit of scheduling a reminder for the following year each time you finish a job.
The good thing about these types of leads is that there's zero acquisition cost!
Tenders are competitive but can offer 3-5 years of guaranteed work.
Having the predictable long-term income offered by tenders is attractive for any business. But there's a catch: writing tenders is time-consuming, and each tender can take up to a week to write. There's no guarantee you'll win, either. In fact, a 20-30% chance of winning would probably be considered "good" for many companies.
This strategy isn't relationship-based; it's about hitting the right markers on the tender. You can write tenders yourself. Or you can hire professional bid writers to increase your chances of winning.
You'll need to register on the regional tender portals to find tenders. Then, your management team will need to monitor these portals to see what's available. Alternatively, you can use tender aggregator sites like constructiontenders.co.uk to find new tender opportunities from across the web.
While speaking to building managers, you'll often learn about opportunities for other types of surveyors. Don't squander these leads; pass them on and strengthen your relationships. You'll find that they return the favour. Mutual referrals cost nothing. This makes them a great source of new clients.
For example, you can develop key partnerships with fire risk assessors or legionella inspectors if you're an asbestos surveyor. They're not in direct competition with you, but you'll often hear of opportunities for each other.
The best type of work is the regular work. Partner up with companies who are the first to know about surveying work. Become their go-to surveyor, and you'll get a constant stream of warm leads.
Consider forming key partnerships with architects, building and RICS surveyors, project managers, demolition, and insurance companies. These are all well-placed to send you work in future.
A simple but often under-utilised way to win new work is to have better quotes than your competition. Improving your quotes —even slightly— can dramatically increase your win rate, and your business will prosper.
Here are some things you can include to improve the quality of your quotes:
If you really want to set your quote apart from everyone else's, focus on personalising it for the job at hand.
Private domestic clients often search the internet to find someone to carry out an asbestos survey on a property they're aiming to buy. This is often prompted by a home-buyer survey. So, optimising your website and online presence can maximise your chances of winning these online leads.
Organic SEO can lead to hundreds of inquiries every month.
To improve your SEO, you need to get into the habit of creating content for your website. You can hire companies to perform SEO for you (normally done on a retainer agreement). Or you can do SEO yourself. SEOÂ requires some patience, writing skills, and consistency. You can track keyword positions over time using tools such as Ubersuggest, which will also prompt you with content ideas.
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Creating landing pages for your different geographical areas is a good way to get more inbound leads.
For example, rather than creating a single landing page for "asbestos surveyor in Newcastle", try creating landing pages for all of Newcastle's suburbs. Just make sure each landing page is unique, Google will penalise you for near-identical content on multiple pages.
Asbestos surveyors say LinkedIn is the best social network for winning new work (State of the Asbestos Industry Survey). We can vouch for this, too. Last year, 50% of our work came from LinkedIn —it's a powerful networking and marketing tool.
To get the most out of LinkedIn:
Online networking is the home of the “humble brag”.
Professional business networks like LinkedIn are perfect for discussing new client wins, interesting projects, team news, and company growth. Keep your writing conversational and establish your credibility in the industry. Tell stories and focus on others rather than yourself.
If you have some money in the bank, online paid ads may be a good option.
You create a campaign, choose some industry-specific keywords to target, set an upper spend limit, and then let the campaign work. Google ads are usually the best platform for paid ads. Your ads will appear in the Google search results, so there’s a high volume of potential customers. Just be careful, it's easy to lose money overpaying for ads if you don't know what you're doing.
There are lots of different ways to win work for your surveying company. Choose the techniques that play to your strengths. Make the most of your skills and network - and you'll find work all year round.
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