No Pictures, Please

What do you do when homeowners want to take a picture of your price cards?

Obviously in an ideal world we don’t want them to do that because there’s the possibility that they’ll share that with your competition (or they will shop based solely on price instead of the full package). There’s probably a decent chance that you’ve seen some of your competitors’ bids that they’ve left behind with your homeowners and of course you don’t want to be in that situation.

Sometimes Unavoidable

You can’t always avoid it. For example, sometimes people will do what’s referred to as “secret shopping,” where a competitor of yours will have a friend or relative call your company and have your tech/salesperson come out and give a bid for a new system just so they can discover your prices. And by the way, it’s not a bad practice. There’s nothing wrong with it. You’ll learn a lot if you call another company and have them come out on a weekend or on your day off. Call a couple of companies. Have them come out and give you a bid at your home or if people in the industry know you, maybe have someone like a relative or friend call.

You’ll gain insight about what your competition is doing, what they’re charging, what their process looks like, etc. It’ll give you more confidence because you’re going to realize how they present their prices (sometimes lowballing the price with hidden future charges). But it’s also interesting to know what your competition is doing inside the house. They’re going to want to find out everything they can about how you guys are running leads, how you’re pricing your systems, all those different things. And so when a homeowner asks to take a picture of your prices, it could be they’re actually a secret shopper. They’re trying to get information for one of your competitors and it might just be an innocent homeowner, but you’d still rather not do it because there’s a possibility they’ll share that with your competitor to try to get a cheaper price by haggling.

So the basic strategy is similar to when homeowners want you to drop off your bid. We don’t like to do that if we’re not coming to terms on a deal, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid. So if a homeowner asks you to take a picture of your prices, understand that there’s a quick-ish way to handle it and there’s a more educational way to handle it.

The Short and Long of It

The quick-ish way helps avoid getting into a long, complicated conversation about it. You can just respond, “Oh, I’d love to, but my boss would kill me,” and then just move on to the next step in your demo. They’re not going to take the price card from you or anything like that. Now, if you walk out of the room, they might snap a picture of it behind your back, but if you just say, “Oh, I’d love to, but my boss would kill me,” it probably won’t come up again.

There’s a small chance it will come up, however. And they may say, “Well, why not?” In this case, you can use the longer form of that answer. And I would be more inclined to give a long form because I always want to give the homeowners as much information about why I’m doing what I’m doing.

And this longer explanation may sound something like, “You know, Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner, the first thing I want to tell you is that I am happy to come out and share these price cards with you and discuss this with you as many times as you need. However, I am not in a position to allow pictures to be taken of these price cards for a couple of reasons. Number one, our company uses a proprietary system to calculate exactly what it costs to do this job, how much overhead costs, and exactly what needs to be covered so that we, you know, don’t lose money on a job.”

“Some of our competition, they kind of make prices up in their head. And so we don’t want to give them the insight to our proper pricing models that they could use to cut corners to get every sale in the neighborhood. There has been a flood of companies who get our information, lower the prices by enough to attract customers, then their installations are shoddy, their warranties invalid, and they end up going out of business quickly.”

Obviously you should use your own words in a way that’s comfortable for you and still gets the message across. We’ll cover more on this in the future. Until then, be good to each other.