Why You? Marketing Tips to Lock Down Jobs

Why should any customer want to hire your firm to do any work on their house, their office, their company, their building. . .their anything?

“We’ve got the best prices!”

“Our people are skilled and reliable.”

“We only use the best materials.”

“We’re always on time and budget.”

Fantastic. But those are just different ways of saying, “our company is great our people and products are terrific.”

Here’s our tough-love response: Besides you, who cares?

Or maybe you honestly believe you’re the best roofing and siding company in the area.

Customers can’t actually know that until after the job is done.

The art of marketing yourself is the ability to get people to believe that before they hire you.

How many roofing and siding companies are there in your area? 10? 20? More?

Even if you only compete with the ones at your price point, you’re probably still looking at three or four serious competitors.

How many jobs do you win compared to the number you bid on? One in five? One in three?

If your answer is, “We win every job we bid on,” then you’re either underpricing yourself in your market or you’re only doing work for friends and family.

You know Mike Holmes. He and his kids have three reality shows on DIY Network, 250,000 followers on Twitter, a monthly magazine—and turns away work.

Our question to you is, “Why him?” Why not you? There are 405,000 general contractors in the U.S. and Canada.

What does Mike Holmes do that got him a cable TV reality show and more?

The answer is that he’s got a customer-centric approach to what he does.

Watch his shows. When he talks to homeowners (or in your case, business owners) he doesn’t say things like “Our people are skilled” or “We only use the best materials.”

A few years ago we watched him talk to one of his customers and he said to her, “My job is to make your dreams come true.”

Who would you hire: A company that said it had the best prices or a company that promised to make your dreams come true?

If you listen to any of the hosts on HGTV, Discovery, TLC or DIY, they don’t talk about their business, their company or their practice (yes, even physicians have reality shows).

They talk about their customers’ desires and needs.

So here’s our assignment for you: Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns.

Label the first column “Features” and the second column “Benefits.”

Then start listing all the features of your business, such as “7 Day a Week service,” “Insured employees,” “Guaranteed for. . .”—you get the idea.

Put all those “our company is great” statements on the left.

Now go back to the top and identify what the benefit is to your customers for each one of those features.

And don’t just take your own word for it.

Ask people you trust who know your business if they’d do the same exercise for your company. Your spouse. Your foremen. A satisfied customer. As many different points of view as you can get.

When you’ve pulled all those lists together, tear off the “features” half and throw it away.

Then start talking to customers and prospects using the language you wrote for “Benefits.”

Watch the difference in how they engage with you. You’ll win their hearts. You’ll win their minds.

And we practically guarantee you’ll win their business, as well.