If you’ve ever studied sales or watched a YouTube video on sales or anything then you know that one of one the main things that everyone brings up is that you want to talk to the decision-makers. This is super common in Remodeling and home construction.
Often with remodeling, we’ll get an inquiry and it will be a wife who wants her kitchen remodeled and she’ll be the one spearheading this. She’ll be asking the questions and she is the one that we meet with but she’s probably not the only decision maker. Her husband is another decision maker and in many cases the primary decision maker but he’s not the one that you’re actually talking to. In sales, this is why it’s one of the common questions that you’ll get on every checklist. You simply need to ask, “Who are the decision-makers?”
The reason you want to know is because you’re gonna require their buy-in in order to make the sale. If you don’t have the buy-in of all the decision-makers or the most important decision maker, then there’s just no way that this deal is going to progress down the line. Let’s talk about buy-in for a second. What exactly am I talking about? Today, I was talking with a couple of people and the third decision-maker, who is the primary decision-maker, was not there. I knew what the priorities were for these two guys but I didn’t know the exact priorities of the main decision maker and so this is one of the questions I asked. Eventually, I’m going to have to speak with this person because I need to know for sure what their priorities are.
Now, how does this relate to selling a remodel? It’s very simple and it’s very powerful. If you’re not doing this already, you should absolutely be doing this. When you are meeting with a couple, if it’s a husband and wife decision-makers, you want to meet with both of them. You should try to meet with both of them. When you walk through their kitchen, you want to spend a lot of time pulling out of them their priorities, and things they care about in their new kitchen. Maybe the wife wants a really nice gas range and a farm sink but the husband really cares more about the refrigerator. You need to find out all these things and figure out what the most important things are for each person.
Once you do that, then everything that you propose moving forward, probably giving an estimate or a verbal proposal or both, or whatever plan that you propose moving forward, needs to address directly the priorities of each person. If you can come up with a plan that includes the really nice range, the farm sink, and the exact fridge that they want, and you should be talking about things that matter the most to them.
On the flip side, if you create an estimate or a proposal and it is a full kitchen remodel but you don’t address specifically those wants and needs of those people, then the deal isn’t likely to move forward. Figure out who the decision-makers are. Make sure they’re both there when you’re meeting with them. Get to the bottom of their real priorities, the most important things to them, and then frame everything moving forward based on those priorities. If you do that, you’ll make more sales.
