7 deadly sins when selling renovations

Most contractors never receive any formal training in professional selling. Instead, they learn through trial and error. Unfortunately, this is an expensive way to learn. You will pay dearly for your mistakes through lost sales. However, talking like a used car salesman is not the way to win profitable renovation projects and develop long-term relationships clients. Contractors who learn how to help a homeowner make a buying decision are going to outsell those who don’t.

This series will appear in full in the September/October issue of Canadian Contractor

Learning how to sell is about strategy. Let’s look at this step-by-step.

Sin #1:
Assuming price is the most important part of a homeowner’s buying decision.
The most common reason contractors claim when they lose a project is because they were too expensive. It’s the easiest thing for the client to say and the hardest objection for you to overcome.

If price was the only purchasing factor, luxury goods wouldn’t exist!

It’s easy for them to focus on price, but very difficult to tell you that they didn’t feel you had the skills to make their project a reality.

Research shows that buying decisions are 80% emotion and 20% logic. The emotional part of the buying decision is hard for many contractors to identify and satisfy, thus the focus on price. However, once the homeowner has made a decision based on emotion, they then justify their decision based on logic.

When you hear that you lost because someone else was cheaper, the reality is that another contractor out-sold you. Sure, there are those homeowners that buy solely based on price. If your competitive advantage is that you sell based solely on price, then you had better be the cheapest! However, most people don’t make decisions based solely on price. If they did there wouldn’t be many luxury items in the marketplace.

Be different!
When people make a buying decision based solely on price, it is due to the fact that the contractor didn’t do anything to set themselves apart from their competitors. While price is always a factor, it is rarely the only one or the most important one. For example: think about the range of bathroom faucets and the range of prices. They all deliver hot and cold water. Nevertheless, some homeowners spend a fortune on a bathroom faucet because they like it better. When a customer sees two or more contractors as essentially interchangeable, of course they will make their decision based on price.

Other selling points can be even more important than price:
*Your experience doing similar projects
*Your project management systems that help keep the project on schedule and on budget
*Your written guarantee
*Your workers’ comp and liability insurance
*Your site cleanliness, safety, references.

These critical factors should be introduced as early as possible in the sales process, and can potentially move customers away from price as the sole factor in deciding who to hire. In fact, presented early on, they can quickly eliminate some of your competitors from the running.

You will need to return to these non-price selling points when you present your final proposal, which I discuss later in the series.

Mike Draper is Vice President, coaching, at Renovantage.com

Next week…. 
Sin#2: Failing to take detailed notes of the scope of work.