Builders are you wasting lots of your time quoting for projects you’re never going to win?
If your in the category of doing 10 – 20 quotes and being lucky to win only 1 or 2 of them, read on.
Quoting is obviously a very important part of a builders’ business, no doubt, BUT they do take a lot of time and effort and there is a big risk that it won’t pay off at the end which results in it becoming a task that you tend to hate rather than enjoy!
There is absolutely nothing worse than sitting at your computers for hours on end quoting up a job when in the back of your mind your thinking there is a bigger chance that your not going to win the job as opposed that you win the gig.
Whether you should be quoting on jobs for free or paying for the is a whole nother argument and one I wont debate in this particular article.
But what I want to tackle is how are you going to ensure that – for those jobs your going through to process to quote on you are putting in your precious time – you MUST be the company they choose to complete the job. Otherwise why bother at all right?
Why are they not choosing you to build their house?
So it usually goes like this, you have quoted the job and your feeling really good about this one, you think you’ve quoted it out properly, covered everything off properly, done it at very good value. You either send your quote throught to the prospect / or had a meeting with them and gone through your quote.
They thank you for your time and doing the quote and they tell you they need some time to think about it and will get back to you. Silence, they don’t make contact for weeks. You don’t hear from them at all. So you give them a call to “follow up”. They tell you they havent decided yet and they hoping your don’t follow up again, or perhaps they cut your off straight away and tell you they’ve gone for builder that was “cheaper”. It’s the easy shutdown for them to make, but they thankyou for your time.
You understand and never call them again, deep down your thinking, not again, I really thought they liked me and I was going to win this one, it would have been a great project to win.
Your problem is not price it is TRUST!!
The actual reality is, they love the fact that you put time in to quote for them, but not because they like you, its because they now have a great comparison to the company they were going to use in the first place. The company they “trust”.
How do you be “that” company they “TRUST”?
It starts with your marketing, not your quoting.
Your simply not winning your quotes, because your clients don’t trust you.
But the problem is you think its because your not the cheapest.
But when your winning on price alone and being the cheapest, it totally sucks.
You either have to resort to working out ways you can be unethical without coming across as unethical in order to charge more that your quoted price. The wrong answer!
Or you just have have to suck it up and be a sad case with your sucky low margins and tell yourself you can get it back next time around. The only thing next time around you end up in the same sad position and your doing it all over again, not ever reaching the full potential you know you should be working out.
So what is the answer?
As I mentioned earlier, you have a trust issue and you need to fix it. Immediately!
Your actually loosing your quotes way before you even write up the quotes. The quotes your loosing I’m sorry to say, you were never in the race to win in the beginning. You were simply there to make up the numbers and to compare to the company they already really were keen to use in the beginning.
Now dosent that hurt to know this? I know it does. It hurts a real lot .
To create trust to be “that” company, you need to get your marketing, branding, pitching, proof and all those things right so that you build up the trust early enough in your customers buying cycle so that when they want a quote.
By introducing a proper marketing it will set yourself up as the trusted authority of the industry, the trusted expert they ‘must’ use for their project.
By being the trusted authority it will ensure that you’ll win 90% of your quotes at profit margins well north of 15% and make selling yourself extremely easy? Instead of the other way around!
You’ll need to consider all aspects of your marketing to become the trusted authority and win those quotes at a far higher rate.
Using proof to win your current quotes!
One major element of this as mentioned above is “proof”. For a residential builder a great way to prove your ability to your customers and hence build trust is through the use of photography of all your past projects.
Now depending on where you are currently at in your business life, that may look like taking images yourself if you’re a new builder starting out.
For those small building companies looking to take it to the next level you could look at taking your images to the next level and use a professional re-touching service such as ours at We Shoot Buildings to improve your photographs on a budget for as little as $15 an image.
For builders with some experience, higher standards and marketing budget available to them, you may wish to employ a professional photographer to take full control of your portfolio building process. We get this a lot at We Shoot Buildings where a residential buidling company is fed up with loosing out on quotes for really good projects and they know they need to do something about it. They tend to order photography for the recent 5-10 projects and we can do a package deal at a cheaper rate to accommodate a multi project photograph service. Then as new building projects come up, we can do some mid-construction images for them for a very cheap rate, and build up their portfolio of before and after images of their projects going forward so they can use that along with the quoting process to help them win those new jobs, building trust in the process, by showing them their capabilities and their experience in doing a project similar to theirs.
This puts them in front of their competing quotes as it now allows them to win the quotes based on their trust to be able to complete the job at the standard their expectations desire. Confident they will end up with their dream home.
If you would like to discuss how photography could help your building company win over your current quotes. Please contact Grant on 0400 82 55 98. We can not only show you how to get the best results when photographing your projects but can help you by discussing ways you can use your images in your marketing to win your quotes.
