The foot in the door beats the cold call

Cold calling a stranger to sell them some random service is a rough way to make a living.

I was on a call with our community this week and we got deep into lead scraping. Stuff like public records, new business licenses and building permits, which is all just sitting out there if you know where to look.

A buddy on the call told a story I can't stop thinking about. Some young guy called him out of nowhere offering to help with his website. My buddy asked how he even got his name, and the kid said he found him because he'd just applied for a business license.

Honestly, that's a pretty smart way to get a conversation started!

When you call with some random offer, you're just one more person they're trying to get off the phone. But when you already know something real about them, they actually have a reason to stay on the line.

So instead of calling a roofer and saying "hey, do you need marketing?" you call and say "I've got ten houses that just pulled a permit." Same thing works for fencing, and for a whole bunch of home services that show up right after somebody pulls a permit.

Facebook groups work the same way. You can pull what people are asking about in the local and home service groups and see what keeps coming up. AI is really good at spotting that kind of pattern. Then you either solve the problem yourself or go find the person who already does.

You don't need to build some crazy system for this lol. The info is already public, so use it before you pick up the phone.

Back in the day a business that wanted customers bought a full page ad in the yellow pages. Now it's a new license, a permit, or an ad running in a local group. Those are people who are already out there looking for help.

Here's your homework:

• Pick one public signal in your market (new licenses, building permits or local group ads) and spend an hour figuring out how to pull it.
• Write one outreach line that starts with that signal instead of your service.
• List three businesses you're pretty sure would actually want that list.
• Have five of those conversations this week. No pitch deck, just what you found and a question.

I'm going to try this myself with a couple trades here this week, so I'll let you know how it goes. If you try it too, tell me what you find!

Stay in the fight, Kevin