Tip #3 – Do Not Save Important Information for the Closing.
I work with many small businesses in many different industries. I have found a disturbing trend among them. They do not list the price of their service on their website or promotional materials. They want the customer to call and THEN they will go into the pricing issue. I think their is a belief that if there is mystery, the customer will call to find out the rest of the story and then the business owner will have the opportunity to close the sale.
Guess what! Your customer does NOT want to call you. They are looking at your website and/or brochure to find out everything they possibly can BEFORE they call you. Why? Because they can. In this day and age consumers can and will spend time on the Internet finding everything they want to know about a product or service and make a decision on their own. They avoid the hard, in your face, sales call. They call you to buy. Yes, that is right, their mind is made up by external information such as your website so they call when they are ready to buy.
Many businesses, especially service/consulting businesses revolt at this issue. “I can’t list prices because it DEPENDS on the job”. Skeptical consumers wonder what exactly it depends on. How new your car is or how big your house is? This is surely not how most small businesses price their service or product, but not being upfront about the price of your service or product does leave a certain amount of distrust for the consumer.
The solution: Close the sale on your website and other promotional materials. Tell the consumer exactly what they are looking for. If you can’t list the exact price of your service, list your hourly rate and “sample” jobs and times, rates and cost of materials that are associated with them. Another idea is to list different packages and the prices for those packages. It is OK to put disclaimers along with your prices to explain that certain situations or additional problems will require longer hours or more materials and prices may raise do to these issues. Tritz Plumbing, Inc and Well Grounded Electric have very simple and effective examples of how to list your pricing on your website.
Comments