Imagine you get in an elevator on a high floor of a building dressed in khakis and your logo shirt. There’s one other person in the elevator. He turns to you and asks, “Why should I use your company at my home?”

You’ve got that 90-second elevator ride to give him at least three great reasons he should give you a try. Go!

A good starting place is to look at your positive Google reviews. What are customers saying about your service? Some examples might be: showed up on time; thoroughly examined my system and provided great recommendations; was neat, clean and courteous, etc.

Those reviews might get people to pick up the phone, and that is great. However, once you are at their house, they still need a reason to feel confident in choosing you to do the work. 

These 10 reasons not only can be used to get people to call, they also can help homeowners feel more confident in buying from you. In an elevator, it’s three reasons, but in all your marketing and sales efforts you can have 10 “unfair” advantages to offer them.

Here are the 10 most frequent reasons that my family’s contracting business used and what I taught many of my clients to also use when prospective customers ask, “Why should we use or buy from you?”

1. We have detailed, one-of-a kind operations and trade manuals, so it doesn’t matter which technician we send; they all do it to the same high standard. 

2. We look the whole job over, make good recommendations and quote complete prices so you can choose what you want us to do before we begin any work. We also take our time and explain those options clearly.

3. We’re not coming to your home to learn our business. We’ve been trained and certified in our own training center.

4. We do ongoing drug testing of our technicians to make sure you can rest easy.

5. We do criminal background checks so you can have peace of mind about the technician coming to your home.

6. We send trucks that are like rolling warehouses, stocked with more than $20,000 in parts, so there’s a good chance we’ll have what we need nights, weekends or holidays.

7. We answer our phones live 24/7/365, and there are technicians on-call nights, weekends and holidays. 

8. We’re so sure about the quality of work, we offer an industry-leading warranty of one year on all repairs we do (parts and labor).

9. We arrive looking neat and clean. We leave your home as clean, if not cleaner, as when we arrived by wearing shoe covers and putting down floor mats. 

10. We’re licensed, bonded and insured for any work we do so you are protected.

Be honest. How many of these 10 reasons can you confidently claim right now? 

If zero, drug testing, background checks and insurance (5, 6, and 10) are the first three things I’d strongly recommend you get into place. 

After that, it would be getting operating manuals and a training program into place, which will give you 1 and 3.

If you focus first on doing those five, you will be well on your way to creating an unfair advantage over your competitors, who are still running their company by the seat of their pants with techs doing things their own way, creating callbacks and worse.

Feel free to adopt the other five as your own or mix and match based on the unique selling proposition of your specific company. Another approach is to study your ideal customers and dial in the reasons they love you.

Trust, Value and Price 

Why is this approach so effective? Because customers buy for two reasons: trust and value. When value is greater than price, the sale is made.

That’s why you should be ready to enthusiastically share at least three of the 10 great reasons why a prospective customer should do business with your company.

Memorize all your reasons, but don’t recite all of them every time to every customer. In fact, you only ever need to talk about three at any one time. Which ones you choose will depend on where the customer is in their buying journey and what you want them to do next. 

The other great thing about these 10 reasons is you can use them as part of your marketing messaging. You want people to know all this information because of how few other contracting companies are holding themselves to such high standards. 

Obviously, if you give any of these reasons, they have to be true, so get to work! I’m hoping you are already licensed, bonded and insured. 

The next step would be drug testing and criminal background checks, which might take some time to implement. 

And, if you need operating and trade manuals, I have them all and they are 90 percent done for you. Go to 7powercontractor.com/soms and let me know what you think.