Builders: Here’s How You Can Grow a Professional Sales Team #1 - Create Saleable Products
So you want to get more sales and more new clients into your building business but you don’t have time to do it all yourself. You look with envy at the building supply companies that employ professional sales people (who are not even builders!!) and you wonder what your renovation business might look like if you could do the same. But you don’t know how to go about it.In this article I will outline how you go about preparing your business to accommodate a professional salesperson.Professional sales people prefer to sell products rather than services. It’s easier to define and explain to prospective customers. And it means they don’t have to be building technicians, able to “create” the product from the ground up. So, here’s how you can turn your services into such products.
1 Identify your Best Service
Evaluate some of your recent jobs that have gone really well, and where you enjoyed dealing with the client. For example you may have completed several renovations of 100 year old central city villas, and really enjoyed the experience. You seem to get on well with the clients and they enjoyed working with your company and facing the challenges such work presents.
2 Package into a Product
Package the job by giving it a name and offering several options. For example in the above situation you might call your product, “Villa Revitalisation.” This product has a starting price tag of $150,000 (i.e you can’t really do up one for less), but you can easily spend $200,000 if you replace everything, or more if you really want to recapture the original atmosphere.
3 Give Each Option an Identity
Rather than giving a vague idea of what can be done for a client, offer several options. Use your previous jobs as examples. For each option create an approximate price guide, based on your experience. Your salesperson can then use these “saleable” products to sell your company’s services. In the above example the options might be
Villa Revitalisation:
Restore - Recapture the Original. Price Guide $250,000
Remodel - In with the New. Price Guide $200,000
Repair - Fix the Broken Hearted. Price Guide $150,000
Obviously there will be individualised estimating and design required, but the more you can “productise” your services the easier it will be for your services to be sold by a non-builder professional salesperson.
A sub-trade company I worked with combined several tasks to create a home beautification “product.” This was easy for prospective clients to understand and for commission salespeople to sell. This “product” has now become a major source of income for the company.
Talk Back
So how have you gone about sales in your building business?I’d love to hear of your experience of professional salespeople?Post your comments below.
Read more in the "How To Grow a Professional Sales Team" series:
- Builders: Here’s How You Can Grow a Professional Sales Team #1 – Create Saleable Products
- Builders: Here’s How You Can Grow a Professional Sales Team #2 – Make Your Production Scale-Able
- Builders: Here’s How You Can Grow a Professional Sales Team #3 – Relegate Retainers
- Builders: Here’s How You Can Grow a Professional Sales Team #4 – Expect Discomfort
- Builders: Here’s How You Can Grow a Professional Sales Team #5 – Step up to Lead
- Builders: Here’s How You Can Grow a Professional Sales Team #6 – Rewrite the Rule Book