Business Tips 05
page 5 of 5
- Get a 50% deposit at the job start. If it's huge job, take 25%. Again, make sure you have all your contract forms in order.
- Technology: have it. Use our website to promote yourself. You have a gallery to use there and an intro video. You like our site, so will your customers. We made the site for you and them. You ought to have a computer to e-mail pictures and a good digital camera with a decent flash to take pictures. Have a good printer to print pictures for your great portfolio. It's important that your work, or our gallery pictures, look great on a laptop computer if you are showing clients a compelling slide show.
- Make sure your contacts understand how your referral fee works. On a $20,000 job, this can be $4,000 cash in their pockets. It's real money. Surprisingly, most people will never react to this offer, so use it as a last resort.
- Drop names. It's a nice marketing tool when beating the pavement. People will be less likely to close the door on you. Research your targets well. Try not to come in blind when selling someone on your services and product. Find out what projects they're doing. If you know something about them, use it in your opening line. Stroke their egos. Use charm and jokes. It's not unlike getting a date; except you are profiting financially from the relationship. Well, most relationships.
- This goes without saying, but be confident. Come into a project site knowing that you are the best wall finisher ever and that you will make the walls look amazing. Your customers desperately need you, but they don't know it yet.
- Again, be persistent. It takes at least 6-7 contacts with someone to make them comfortable with you. Make an excuse for each time you see them, or call them. Say you have new samples, or you want to send them a CD with all your/our sample pictures, or you were in the neighborhood, whatever fits your personality; just keep trying until they think of you as The Plaster Wall Finisher to go to.
- And lastly - IF YOU DON'T PUT A SMILE ON EVERYONE'S FACE WHO'S INVOLVED WITH THE PROJECT, THEN IT'S NOT WORTH DOING. THIS SHOULD BE YOUR ULTIMATE MOTIVATION, AND IT WILL SHOW.
