Contractor Tip Of The Month: If You Want the Order, Show Up on Time, Make My Job Easy, and Give Me a  Damn Price 

Damian Lang

1. Showing up late for a sales meeting: This is a sure way to make a poor first impression with a potential customer. He should have planned to arrive 15 to 30 minutes early for the meeting. Yes, we all encounter unforeseen delays. That’s why you build in extra time to arrive early. Then if you get stuck behind a slow truck or caught in a construction zone (excuses I often hear for being late), you can still be on time. Arriving late to a meeting shows the customer that the salesman’s time is more important than his time is.  
2. Making a customer re-arrange his meeting plan: He is the customer. My salesman shouldn’t have asked him to shuffle his plan for the meeting. Having the customer change his schedule displayed again that our time was more important than his. That’s a real detriment to the sale at stake.   
3. Asking a customer to do the work instead of doing it himself: He asked the customer to take a 15-minute video of each area in question and send it to him so he could analyze the situation. Really, I thought. You are asking the customer to set up a video shoot of three different locations for 15 minutes each instead of you standing there watching the situation yourself. The whole point of us meeting at the plant was so we could observe. The customer expected us to do the work instead of doing the work for us. (I was fuming at this point, but held my emotions in.)  
4. Telling the customer he would get back with him, instead of giving a price on the spot or laying out a clear plan as to what the next steps would be. The salesman left the site without giving the customer a price. He could have stayed longer to give the customer a clear plan of how we would be able to promptly address his need. Ideally, he should have closed the deal before he left the site, even if it met staying onsite for a couple of days. It is hard to get into these plants to look at work. Once he was in, he should have stayed onsite until the job was completed. Instead, he  departed without explaining the next steps in the process of us doing the work.  

• Parts or Equipment Sales: In most cases, provide a quote right on the spot, but always within one hour of the customer request.  
• Contract Specialty Work (repairs or small projects): In most cases, price the project before you leave the site, or within 24 hours.  
• Bid work: Contact or meet with the customer within 24 hours of the request. Keep in touch daily and submit a bid before the competition does. Then, get a seat at the table to discuss options for moving forward with the project.  
• Hard Bid Projects: We do hold some bids until the last minute of the due date so certain contractors won’t have time to shop our number with our competition. However, always submit the bid before the due date.