Why Pre-Qualifying Your Painting Leads Is an Expensive Rookie Mistake

Hey, it’s Brandon Lewis here with Painter’s Weekly, and I
want to talk about pre-qualifying leads and how it is so unbelievably stupid
and that those who are teaching it to you are costing you tons of income and
equity.

Let me explain in three points.

Point number one: how many times have you been absolutely, positively sure that a project would close? You had no doubt in your mind, you spent months following up with people, everything was set to happen, you had a great relationship with the client, but then they decided not to buy.

How many times have you tried to not run a lead, done a very
poor job of selling, and before you even got out of the driveway, the person
was trying to schedule and hand you your money?

Now, if we don’t know what’s going to happen in the sales
cycle, after we’ve spent hours and sometimes weeks or months with a client, how
in the world can we possibly know what’s going to happen after we’ve had a
two-minute phone conversation?

It’s idiotic.

Number two: we sell something that is remarkably expensive, and really risky in a reputation-poor industry. The average transaction size is 3,000 dollars. Sometimes we’re quoting things that are 4,000, 5,000 dollars, 10,000, 15,000 dollars, and we’re going to try to sell that over the phone like a pizza delivery boy and hope to magically close something? It’s crazy.

People do not know if our painters are background checked,
or screened, what our warranties, our guarantees are, what our reputation is,
we’ve shown them no social proof, and now we’re going to close on this big
transaction with somebody we’ve never met and maybe don’t know in a couple of
minutes on the phone…we’re going to figure all this magic stuff out? Crazy.

And here’s the big kicker, finally…number three: when you pre-qualify Mrs. Johnson to death and you run her off from your business on the phone asking a bunch of fool questions trying to divine if she’s going to buy or not, and you miss her little powder room. Well the next time she paints the outside of her house, which is 15,000 dollars, you miss it. You see, every client represents, on average, 1,000 dollars in organic spending every year for their entire lifetime as long as you have good customer reactivation and retention in place.

That means that if you lose 70, 80, 100 clients by trying to do this goofy phone selling pre-qualification stuff, that not only do you lose that sale, but you lose 100,000 dollars for the rest of your entire career.

I’m Brandon Lewis with Painters Weekly saying, please stop
trying to prequalify your clients. You know you can’t do it. Don’t be lazy. Be
professional. Let the numbers speak to you. Run the job, pay the expense,
invest the time, and I promise you, long term, and even in the short term, the
numbers will come out in your favor if you just do your best sales job every
single time.

Take care, guys.