I want you to follow along with me because I handle the marketing in my company. I’m passionate about it. I have a digital marketing company, but in my home remodeling companies, I have eight divisions. It’s a multi-million dollar company. It’s an eight-figure valuation and it’s an amazing company.
I still do selling for a very finite amount of our customer base and I talked how 15 years ago I made a $2k sale. Fifteen years later, it was a $200k in sales from that house, and now it’s over $300k. And we could do bigger sales, but we don’t want to fight with 20% of the difficult clientele, so we focus on the 80% we’ve defined our market as. What are the projects that we can do really well? Get in, get out, make a ton of money. And then the remaining 20% of clients who would be difficult, we let our competition fight over. We don’t even fight over the crazy jobs, so we’ll take that. We have a dollar figure that we like and we like to be in and out of a project in less than 90 days.
So in 90 days, we can only make so much money. That kind of gives you the parameter of our company, but I was really thinking about the marketing. I’m a fanatic about marketing and I want you follow this with me because I’m kind of breathing this podcast out…
Our tag line is: “The leader in home repairs and projects”
It sounds great, doesn’t it?
It kind of tells you what we do. Our name kind of tells you what we do as well, but I have been so proud of that tagline for 21 years. The more I thought about that is, if my employees were asked what do we do, they would probably give thirty different answers.
Well, we do home remodeling and we do home improvements, etc. And that’s okay, but the problem is, I probably have 100 competitors that say the same thing. So the phrase, “The leader and home repairs and projects”, even though it’s a great tagline, it just says: We’re better than everybody else. Okay, so that’s open to interpretation but I’d say we are based on size, revenue, BBB rating and awards we’ve recieved, but not every customer knows that when they get correspondence from us.
I was thinking about it the other day, and I said, What do we really do for our clients that nobody else does, and why is it the customer is 20 years later spend the crazy amount of money they’re willing to spend with us? Per person, nobody’s making more money in Virginia on a home contractor than my company.
And I thought about it, what we actually do for clients, and this is what I’m now putting in every proposal we do.
Listen to this: We actually provide a stress-free home improvement experience. That isn’t sexy, but I tell you what, it says a whole heck of a lot more than “the leader and home repairs and projects”. “The leader in whom repairs and projects” makes us look good. It’s bold. It’s a good tag line, but that in a proposal is not going to make anybody buy.
Maybe looks good on a website under our logo, but I was thinking about it. Why us? Why do you want to hire us? Is it because we’re the leader in home repairs on projects, or is it because we can provide a stress-free home improvement experience that most people have never experienced?
I believe it’s the stress-free home improvement experience. I believe that’s why people hire us. I believe they know we’re talented, but they probably have had a lot of people tell them that they’re talented. I believe they hire our company because we provide a stress-free home improvement experience.
To provide that, we have to do a lot of things really good, and we’ll layer this into of our marketing. This will be built into testimonials and TV commercials and all the things we do, but we’ve have about eight different touch points. I started going through what our company has done exceptionally well and why we can make this audacious statement and why it’s going to be our new sales line. It’s going to be the one-liner that I’m going to tell my entire staff to respond with when people ask what we do.
“We strive to provide a stress-free home improvement experience.”
But in short, “we provide a stress-free home improvement experience”.
Well, how do we do that? What’s the execution on that? Well, the execution is at length, and it really makes us have to do a lot of great things.
In our marketing, we’ll have different clients share a variety of these things because you can’t hit them all, but for example, our pricing cannot go up, so we’ll do a TV commercial where customers will say, “You know, they quoted me this price and it stayed the same”.
Pricing remains at what was in the contract?
Number two is scheduling. We tell you this is when we’re starting. We do the best we can to communicate with you in the case of weather and things like that, but we do everything we can to guard the schedule. We don’t tell you September and don’t come back until January. That’s important to people.
Number three is our staff is knowledgeable. You don’t speak with an automated system or a virtual assistant who has no idea what your company actually does and they can’t answer a question. Well, that doesn’t get people peace of mind. Our staff are very knowledgeable. The talent we hire is exceptional. We only hire people with 10 years experience.
We provide a great warranty, we have a great reputation, and we carry the highest licensing that you can possibly have in our profession. We have a massive portfolio on our site of all the work we’ve done.
You gotta put your thinking cap on. I don’t know what will work for your company, but I just have been thinking about how many sales you may be losing, and I’m thinking about sales that we have lost because we bragged about us when what we should have done is found the pain point of our customers…
How many times have you heard me say this? Find the one promise that if you could make and deliver on your target customer would chase you down for your business.
Well, I don’t think our customers will chase this down for our business because we’re the leader and home repairs and projects, but I do think customers would chase us down for our business if we could provide a stress-free home improvement experience, defined by being consistent with what we quoted, scheduling, knowledgeable people, on-site supervisor coordination for the whole job so you don’t have to get involved, and talented people.
We have a clear warranty that we honor and we have a reputation that you can trust. We have the highest level of licensing and we have a portfolio that’s second to none. I believe those eight things allow us to say we can provide a stress-free home improvement experience to justify the millions of dollars that we receive.
This is an epiphany I’ve had over the last 48 hours.
If I did not own a company and I was not an active business owner, I would not do the podcast as I would be no longer qualified. I wouldn’t write books anymore, either! Things change and by being an active business owner in companies, I get to experience this.
So the other day, it just hit me. No, we gotta change this. So I changed our verbiage and I talked to all my partners. We strive to provide a stress-free home improvement experience. That’s it because that’s what customers want.
The low-end people could care less about that. They’re paying Billy Bob from out of the woods, and they know their stress comes with that, and they’ve already equated it with saving money.
Our clients are not thinking about the money end of it. They want turnkey, stress free, knowledgeable and talented staff, and project coordination.
Find out what your customers want. You need to find a one-liner that resonates with your customer, not with what makes you look good. Rethink your marketing. Create a one-liner that resonates with your customer.
