Many salespeople for remodeling contractors lose many more construction project sales than they make by talking too much and listening too little.
Every remodeling sales person knows that there is so much information and so many details in a remodeling project that you have to talk a lot to get across to the customer all the information the customer needs to pick your company, right? No, wrong!
Other than stating your name and answering direct questions from the prospective customer, almost every sentence coming out of your mouth in the first appointment should be a question.
“How are you?” Can we sit and chat for a few minutes? Build rapport and talk about their lives while answering questions about yours. When it is time to move to the next stage- the business interview- the questions should be more to the point.
“What do you have in mind?” “Can I ask why you wish to put your new addition here?” “Would you be open to any suggestions?” The questions should not stop and you should be taking notes on every answer; but do not make it an inquisition. Be conversational but keep the questions coming.
We have a career salesman who sold a large, very profitable addition to a couple by asking these exact questions and then showing them how they could save a substantial amount of money by placing the addition over an existing one-story side wing and entry area. His commission was around $10,000 for about 8 hours of work getting it reduced to paper and a contract.
In between questions it is fine to offer an observation here and there. “The reason I am asking this is because we just finished a job recently similar to what you folks (don’t say ‘you guys’, please) have in mind. Would you like to hear a little about it?”
Use the customer’s name frequently and ask if you can call him/her by his first name. A person’s name when used with respect is the sweetest sound to that person. Always be soft and gentle in your manner even if you are not the soft and gentle type. Do not come on in an intimidating fashion. You will lose for sure.
We outlined our own very successful sales approach in a series we did in our winter newsletters. These newsletters are still available online when you take out a one-year subscription. We will be spending a lot more time in future blogs about how to sell while appearing not to sell and talking about the mistakes that sales people make.
Remember- “Nobody wants to be sold; but people love to buy.”
A remodeling contractor who strives for big-time success in this business should make customer service an absolute obsession of every person in his organization.
When a customer calls your office or even your cell phone with any kind of a service question, the person answering that phone should make it his/her number one priority to solve that customer’s problem immediately. You must do whatever it takes, contact the correct person to handle it; but do not make a note of it and deal with it later. Do it now!
In this business of residential and commercial remodeling, good to great references are the life blood of your operation. Other contractors can compete with you in many ways; but they cannot compete with or top great references. They are not that hard to get. I will give you an example from a little over a month ago in our business.
We agreed to do a good number of small to handyman tasks for an out-of-state couple who bought a new home in our area and then returned home while we did the work. We treated it like every job we do even though it was not a big dollar amount.
- We emailed them notes about the progress;
- We sent them pictures when we felt it necessary;
- We called them when we thought that they might want to reconsider something;
- We let them know about small problems that they might want to address while we were there; and,
- We found and recommended other contractors for them who were not part of our scope of work so that they could feel comfortable dealing with them.
In essence, we took complete ownership of making sure they had a great experience with us.
Part of our agreement was to have the place “deep-cleaned”. We brought in a company that we felt would do a good job. When we found that we were not completely happy with the overall cleaning we had our own people go in and bring it up to our standards at our expense.
My wife and I personally checked every part of it before agreeing that we were ready to say it was finished. A few days later the homeowners arrived ready to move in. A couple days after that they called to tell us how pleased they were with our commitment to quality and service; and…making sure every detail was done.
Last week the realtor who found them the home called to say that he had just received an email from the couple thanking him for recommending us. We work very hard to achieve that result every time on every project.
Are we obsessed? Yes, we are; and we have just added another homeowner to our list of great references. Become obsessed about your customer service and you will begin to notice higher closing ratios on sales, less discussion about price; and, ultimately, higher profits.
