Someone asked me recently if I thought a salesperson for a construction-related company should help provide leads, and how many. My answer – yes, they should help provide leads, and how many depends on the company.
Let’s start by working backwards, considering the amount of money the salesperson wants to make each year. I’ll consider [...]
Continue reading: Should Salespeople Have to Generate Leads?
Nothing happens until somebody sells something . . . for a profit.
If you employ a salesperson to help you sell something, for a profit, you need to pay them for their services. I am a firm believer in paying sales people by commission, a percent of the gross sales price of the job. Paying salespeople [...]
Most contractors I talk to believe that sales in their neck of the woods is different. They believe their potential clients are more difficult to sell to than anywhere else in the country. This is seldom the case.
Many of them fall into the trap of letting the potential client qualify them. Instead, they should be [...]
A contractor friend called the other day. He just went through an IRS audit – the auditor, after going through all his records and asking a ton of questions, some of them going back four or five years, announced, “In my opinion, you owe us $22,000.”
He called and asked what he should do. He described [...]
A homeowner posted a comment recently on ServiceMagic’s forum. He said he’d been told by many people to add $3 to $5 K to a substantial job just to cover the extras that seem to come up. He was under the impression that this is normal in contracting.
It isn’t normal, or at least it shouldn’t [...]
A friend, Barb Techel, sent a note this morning informing me about this article (click here)
You need to read this and make sure your fellow contractors read it – it’s the kind of stuff (that’s being polite) your potential clients might be reading.
He quotes David Fogt, chief of enforcement for the California Contractors State [...]
Continue reading: Your Contractor Isn’t Telling a Tall Tale . . .
Phone call last week:
A friend was doing an insurance job, repairs to an exterior wall. The siding had been improperly installed, and here in the Pacific Northwest, if you don’t keep the water out you’ll see rot sooner or later.
After doing the tearout, he found a lot more structural damage than was expected. He [...]
Continue reading: Construction Insurance Repair Job That Could Have Gone Bad
One of our coaching clients called in the other day. He had made a proposal to a group and they were asking him to come back to yet another meeting and explain again what he was going to do. He said he had already explained the project to one of their representatives before, and they [...]
