How a Remodeling Company Can Find Value in Price Shoppers

You’re upset. You’ve built a reputation as a remodeling company that anticipates, responds to, and follows up on the needs of your customers. Your remodeling contractors are always efficient, polite, and never leave a mess in the homes they work on. Your business has been built on referrals—you are proud of the caliber of company you have created. However, whenever you’re in your customer service department, all you seem to hear are calls from people asking how much your services cost. When they hear you cost more than your competitor, they hang up.

You are frustrated that these price shopping calls are taking up your customer service representatives’ (CSRs) time and not resulting in any sales. Is your remodeling service cheaper than your competitors’? No, but that’s not what makes your company the one to choose. Maybe you are the only Certified Master Deck Builder in your service area. Maybe you have 50 years of experience. Maybe all of your servicemen are employed in-house. However, these conversations don’t seem to indicate that customers care about that. You feel discouraged as these price shoppers waste your CSRs’ time and don’t convert into paying customers.

We’re here to tell you that you don’t need to be discouraged. Price shoppers don’t have to be frustrating or invaluable to your remodeling business. If your CSRs have the skills to handle them in right way, you can turn these leads into valuable information, or even (often) customers. Keep reading to learn how your remodeling company can find value in price shoppers.

Take These Steps and Get the Full Potential from Your Leads

Converting price shoppers is more possible than you think. Below are steps that will help you close more sales, as well as tips on how you can still get value from price shoppers when you can’t make a sale.

How to Use Price Shoppers to Improve

Don’t waste time or resources trying to avoid price shoppers

You’ll never be able to avoid them fully, nor should you want to. As someone who needs home services yourself, you probably shop around for the best deal possible before shelling out your hard-earned cash. It’s natural to want to get the most value for your money, and consumers will never stop looking for it. Trying to avoid that fact will only waste time. Instead, you should use that time and energy to improve your business—which will help you prove that, in fact, your remodeling company does provide the best value.

Know your worth

The lowest bid doesn’t always win the contract, and dropping your price to meet what you perceive as demand from price shoppers can actually sometimes lead to the perception that your service isn’t worth what you were charging. That’s not a signal you want to send to anyone. Keep in mind that most people are willing to spend more money for higher quality services—isn’t that true for you?

Listen to your customers

You know that business is all about supply and demand, so take the time on these calls to identify what your customers want and need from their remodeling company, and you’ll be better prepared to give it to them.

Remember that people value their time. Once they like and trust a company, they’re much less likely to go looking for other options. When you invest your efforts in meeting and exceeding the demands of your customers, you’ll often enjoy dividends in the form of loyalty. It pays to truly embrace and listen to price shoppers and understand what they’re after—price is only one component of value.

Tips to Close Sales

Make sure your CSRs know all of your services and your entire service area

We have been monitoring and analyzing inbound leads for years, and you would be amazed at how often we hear a sale not being made simply because a CSR simply wasn’t accurate, helpful, or prepared with all the information a customer—even a price shopper—needs. You need to ensure that every single CSR knows the basic information about your company.

Answer the phone like you’re excited to hear from your customer

A customer can hear your CSR’s smile through the phone, and a positive tone and first impression can signal that your remodeling company is competent, pleasant, and easy to work with. A hurried or annoyed tone can give the impression that your contactors will be too busy or inconvenienced to do a job well.

Consider a Customer Service Training Program

Do your CSRs understand why knowing how to properly handle price shoppers is so important? If you understand, but your call handling team doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. You need a way to communicate to your team how price shoppers and other inbound leads can most effectively be handled.

Try Smart Selling: A customer service training program that has helped many home service companies increase sales and get more value from their existing lead pool.

As a marketing company that specializes in working with the home services industry, we have listened to and analyzed more than 1.5 million phone calls between CSRS and customers looking for services like remodeling, and have discovered:

• The most common CSR errors that lead to missed opportunities and the loss of booked appointments
• Effective approaches for closing sales over the phone on the first call
• A proven method for tracking and recovering lost leads

We have learned that, whether they realize it or not, your CSRs are most likely the first—and potentially last—impressions a customer will have of your remodeling company, making them arguably your most important representatives. They are the deciding factor in how much value you get from each lead. Ensuring that they are fully trained, prepared, and confident enough to handle price shoppers (and any other common type of inbound lead) is critical if you want to make as many sales as possible.

When you implement our customer service representative training program, our seasoned coaches will work one on one with your call handling team to apply Smart Selling concepts in practice call scenarios that are created and selected based on your industry and team’s needs. Through ongoing coaching and training, your CSRs will have the confidence to handle difficult phone calls, provide peerless customer service experiences, and convert more leads into sales.

See how Smart Selling helped one home service company double their booking rate through bi-weekly one-on-one training and development sessions with our Smart Selling coaches—download our free case study!

Convert Common Inbound Leads with our Smart Selling Program

If you are the owner of a remodeling company who wants to maximize the value of your existing lead pool, you need Smart Selling. This program will give you the best ROI on your marketing dollars possible by transforming your customer service department.

Contact us today to start our CSR training program and get the most value from your leads!