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Many painting contractors face intense pressure to provide the lowest price quote to win jobs, but doing this can eat most or all of the profit in a painting job.  This is the third in a three-part series about how to earn business through trust instead of rock-bottom pricing.  Previous posts covered personalizing your quoting process and personalizing your walkthrough.

As mentioned in a previous post, the best time to solidify your company as an excellent one in the customer’s mind is during a post-job walkthough. Their mind is still on your work, and they can ask you to touch up trouble spots while you’re still in front of them and on-site, which makes it much more likely they’ll actually give you the chance to make the job perfect.

That doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to follow-up with them.  In addition to thanking them for the work, a great hand-signed follow-up letter accomplishes three things.

• It gives customers another chance to let you know about any touch-up work they’d like you to do. This is valuable if they didn’t notice it while you were there but it has been driving them crazy since that time.
• It re-emphasizes how important referrals and online reviews are to you. Customers might remember that in the first few days after the job, but as time passes they’re less likely to remember.  If they haven’t left an online review, this note might spur them to do that.
• It provides one more example of uncommon service for customers to mention in referrals or recommendations. And if you provide one or two referral discount cards, it will increase the likelihood of a referral even more.

If you want this letter to make an impact, it can’t look like a generic mass-mail letter from the cable company.  To make sure it gets opened, hand address and sign it, and use a stamp instead of a meter to pay for postage.  While a small reference to something specific to their job would really make you stand out, if you are time-pressed that may not be necessary to demonstrate that you care more about your customers than almost any other painting contractor out there.

The customer referral cards have another benefit.  If they’re individually numbered and signed, you can track who is referring you business.  This gives you a chance not only to thank them for the referral, but to help you figure out what types of customers make the best referral sources for you.  This is information you can use to focus your referral efforts more heavily on your best sources to earn even more customers through referral efforts.

This may seem like a lot of work.  It’s an easy choice, however, when compared to the cost of mailed postcards or online pay-per-click advertising, or the time and hassle of a door-to-door sales campaign.

It also has another benefit – unlike other marketing campaigns, it has long term benefits.  Online reviews can bring you customers for years, and happy customers may refer you for years.  If a person reads a postcard at all, they won’t remember anything on it for more than thirty seconds, and unlike websites, pay-per-click ads disappear from the web after a few people click on it and your budget is spent.

When a potential customer goes to your website and gets your phone number, they could be doing a couple of different things.  They might be calling to ask when you can come paint their house.  They also might be calling you and five other painters to find the cheapest one.  The difference between the first type of customer and the second type is often how much effort you’ve put into securing referrals and reviews.  By building and following a process of personal follow-ups you’ll set your business up for many years of success.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your painting business gain more customers and earn more money, call us at 855-385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

Many painting contractors face intense pressure to provide the lowest price quote to win jobs, but doing this can eat most or all of the profit in a painting job.  This is the second in a three-part series about how to earn business through trust instead of rock-bottom pricing.  The first post, about personalizing your quoting process, is available here.

For many businesses, each customer provides revenue month after month – for years.  Cell phone service providers are a great example.  The reason they’re willing to pay so much money to get new customers is that one customer might pay them 50 or more times before switching providers.

Unfortunately, that’s generally not the case for residential painting contractors.  Most customers have one house, and once it has been painted, they probably won’t need to hire you again for years.  For contractors, that can lead to intense focus on earning the business, doing the work, and getting paid.  Customer interaction after the job is complete takes a back seat to finding new business.

Just because a customer isn’t going to hire you again doesn’t mean they won’t be valuable to you in the future.  In fact, they are your cheapest, easiest, and most effective source of future revenue.  That’s because a referral is extremely valuable in the painting industry.

For one thing, referrals are more likely to happen in residential painting than in most industries.  Anyone who sees a customer’s house and talks to them regularly will bring up the new paint job – it’s just a polite thing to do.  The customer’s most likely response will be to thank them and tell them a bit about what led to their decision to paint the house and how the process went.

Simply put, if your company made an impression – good or bad – your customer is going to bring it up at least a half dozen times in the weeks immediately after the job.  Those conversations are reviews of your service, and most of them are being provided to family and friends who trust your customer’s opinion.  These opinions travel, too: each of the people your customer tells about your company could in turn recommend you to anyone else they talk to about home renovations in the coming weeks.

Good customer service is hard to find these days, and it only takes a few simple acts to make a shockingly good impression on a customer.  Here are some things you can do during the final walkthrough to make your customers want to recommend you to everyone who mentions their new paint job.

• Take your time. Commit all of your focus and attention to the customer and their home.  Eliminate distractions like your mobile phone.  Don’t make them feel like they are keeping you from something else.
• Ask them if they’re happy with your work, or if they have any spots that they want you to touch up. It’s better to hear about these now, while you’re still on-site, than in a follow-up call a week later.  And it’s better to deal with them a week late than to read about them online in a negative review of your company.
• If you read the recent post on increasing value during the quoting process, you’ve already asked the customer what they hoped to accomplish with their paint job. Whatever it was – increasing home value, highlighting a new bathroom renovation, or just making a room look bigger or more modern – bring that topic back up during the final walkthrough.  It reminds them of why they hired you, and lets them know that the job was about more to you than the number of hours worked and paid.
• Finally, tell them how important it is that you want them to be happy, both because you take pride in your work and because you know people may ask about their recent paint job, and those conversations are one of your best sources of new work. This is also a time to ask for an online review if they’re pleased with your service.  If they love the work you’ve done and they know these informal referrals matter to you, they’ll probably be happy to mention your company’s name in conversation, and many customers will even take the time to leave you a positive online review.

Don’t ask for payment until after you’ve confirmed they’re happy with the work and there are no touch-up requests.  Their mind will be on the paint job while you’re in front of them, but it might seem like too much of a hassle to get you back out to the house to fix a few things once you’ve left.  Instead of being thrilled with the job, they just settle for satisfied – and satisfied probably won’t get you any new customers.  Bringing customers from satisfied to thrilled doesn’t take much sometimes, but the business reward for you can be extraordinary!

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your painting business gain more customers and earn more money, call us at 855-385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

Many painting contractors face intense pressure to provide the lowest price quote to win jobs, but doing this can eat most or all of the profit in a painting job.  This is the first in a three-part series about how to earn business through trust instead of rock-bottom pricing.  Future posts will cover personalizing your post-job walkthrough and following up with customers after the job has been completed.

Most able-bodied people who hire a house painting contractor aren’t looking for the cheapest solution out there – the cheapest solution is to simply paint the house themselves.   But, even though they aren’t necessarily looking for the cheapest painting contractor, they end up choosing a contractor based on price.  That’s because money is the easiest way to make a decision when there aren’t any other major differences.

Imagine this scenario: you go into a store to buy a speaker system.  There are three of them, and as far as you can tell, they’re all similar.  One has more options, another is slightly louder, and the third takes up less floor space.  The smaller one is $100 cheaper than the other two.  What do you do?

You could debate what’s more important to you.  But if you don’t spend hours every night listening to music, and they all sound good, you’ll probably just buy the cheaper one.  If none of them particularly stand out to you, there’s no point in wasting the extra hundred dollars.

Don’t Be Average

Unfortunately, this is the experience that most people have with painting contractors.  Hiring a pro might sound like less of a hassle than painting the house themselves, but it’s still a hassle.  Will the painter show up, or will they cancel at the last minute?  Will the paint job look good after they’re done?  Will they move or cover furniture?  Will the painter be someone you trust in your house?

None of the contractors they call make that much of an impression.  One might call back slightly faster than the others.  One seems slightly more interested, while the others get off the phone as quickly as possible.  They’re nice enough when they show up to quote the work, but none of them are very personable.  To these customers, It seems like their house is just another job to every contractor they call.

The easiest way to get a customer to consider something other than price is to be the obvious choice for a hassle-free experience.  Don’t bother telling them about excellent customer service – everyone says that.  The key here is to show them instead of telling them.  Here are a few tips to make a great impression.

• When a customer calls to ask for a quote, focus on the conversation and ask them detailed questions about their house and their job.
• Ask the customer what they see as the most important part of the work they’re doing. Are they trying to increase resale value?   Do they want to make rooms look larger with a lighter color?  Is the paint job part of a bigger renovation project – and if so, what are they trying to accomplish with that project?
• When you quote the job, don’t wait for them to ask if you do things like cover furniture or what shape the house will be in – explain all of that as part of your process.

Make it clear that you want them to feel like this task is off their plate – and on yours – as soon as they hand the job to you.

If a prospect likes you personally and felt you were ‘on the ball’ in all of their conversations, they’ll consider your company even if your price is a bit higher than the other painting contractors they called.  They’ll have to consider whether it’s worth that small upcharge to work with someone who will do a good job the first time.  For many of your prospects, it’s definitely worth the money to have the feeling that the problem is taken care of once they’ve given you the job.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your painting business gain more customers and earn more money, call us at 855-385-1134 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.