Removals, courier and logistics
Everybody quotes, few book, and the difference is decided by how fast somebody replied. That is a measurable thing and hardly anybody measures it.
You move things for money: households, offices, pallets, parcels. Work is quoted, capacity is a van and a crew, and the calendar has weeks you cannot serve and weeks you cannot fill.
You send out far more quotes than you win, the win rate feels random, and nobody can tell you whether the losses are about price, timing or the fact that a competitor answered first.
What we keep finding
Four things that decide a removals year.
Response time is the whole game and nobody times it
In a market where five firms are quoting the same move, the one that replies within the hour wins a disproportionate share. Most operators could tell you their average quote value and none could tell you their median response time.
Quote volume is reported, quote conversion is not
Two hundred quotes at a nine percent win rate and eighty quotes at a thirty percent win rate are very different businesses that produce similar revenue and completely different amounts of wasted survey time.
Seasonality is dealt with by panic
Summer and month ends are immovable. Budget spread evenly across the year overpays in February and runs dry in July, and it happens again every year because nobody wrote the pattern down.
Price shoppers and buyers arrive through different doors
Somebody searching for the cheapest man with a van and somebody searching for a firm that will pack a four bedroom house are not the same customer. Run in one campaign, the cheap clicks win the budget and the profitable work goes to somebody else.
The operational side of this business is measured to the minute. The commercial side, which decides whether the vans are full, usually is not.
The change
What a quote looks like as a measured thing.
Not a new system. The same quotes, with four timestamps and an outcome attached to each.
Now
- Enquiry received
- Quote sent, eventually
- Won or lost, recorded somewhere
- Win rate discussed by feel
- Budget the same every month
After
- Enquiry received, with source, job size and move date
- Time to first response, measured in minutes
- Quote value, outcome and reason for loss
- Win rate by source, by job size and by response time
- Budget shaped to the demand curve you actually have
What we measure here
The numbers that fill vans.
- Time from enquiry to first human response, tracked and reported weekly
- Quote to booking rate by source, by job size and by lead time
- Completed jobs and their values sent back to the ad platforms
- Reason for loss captured in one click, because a free text box never gets filled in
- Demand curve mapped across the year, with budget agreed against it in advance
- Separate campaigns for price led and service led searches, with separate expectations
- Return loads and backhaul tracked where they apply, since they change the maths on a route
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
We get most of our work from comparison platforms.
Then the first useful piece of work is comparing them against your own channels on cost per completed job. Some operators find the platforms are excellent value and stop worrying. Others find they are paying a commission on work that was already searching for them by name.
Can you help us respond faster?
Yes, and it is often the highest return thing on the list. Usually it is an automated acknowledgement with a real time commitment in it, plus a simple alert so an enquiry at four on a Friday is not found on Monday. That is a day of work and it moves the win rate.
We do commercial and domestic. Should they be separate?
Almost always, yes. They have different decision makers, different lead times and different values, and blending them produces an average customer who does not exist.
Our busiest period is already fully booked.
Then the advertising should be aimed at the weeks that are not, and at the higher margin jobs during the weeks that are. Spending more to fill a full July is one of the more common ways money gets wasted in this trade.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
The same shape of business: vehicles, a phone, and advertising judged on enquiries rather than on completed jobs.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.