Tradies, how's your presentation
because presentation counts.
Part of my business coaching program for tradies and builders, it's called the Tradies Toolbox
Coaching program by the way is building a sales machine
and that's all about doing sales properly, using a process, being disciplined methodical, professional
about your sales and commanding better margins.
That's why you do sales properly so you can charge a bit more and that's important.
I want to shift from putting a quote in when you're asked to to explaining improving your value
and putting your quote forward in context and that's what I want to talk about today,
that context because part
of the context for your quote is how you look, how your business looks, how it is presented.
The better you look the more your customers will be inclined to pay.
Think about a burger, it looks this up.
A McDonald's big mac is $6.40, I looked it up online.
There's a burger bar near me, it's called Old maids in Brunswick Heads and a burger there is $16 or so
and I checked this one online too in Sydney.
You can pay $30 for a burger at the cup bar and grill. It's made by hand...
I’m going to ignore the thousand dollar Gold Leaf burger that came up when I
googled expensive burger because that's just silliness.
There are undoubtedly quality differences between our $6, $16, $30 burgers.
There'll be taste difference, there'll be texture difference, there'll be the
differences in where the ingredients came from, what the beef was like and all that sort of stuff.
But how they look is also very different, isn't it? And that's really
what I want to talk about because how they look is very much part of how much we're prepared to pay.
Macca’s is served in paper, it's limp and floppy served by a spotty kid in a limp and floppy
polyester uniform in a kind of a restaurant as they call them, there's a bit grim as well.
It's very much something we're all familiar with and it's worth $6 burger bar here in Brunswick.
It's quite nice, it's a bit funky, pretty girls are serving, cool people are sitting on the tables outside,
your burger comes in a cardboard tray thing looks rather nice and the whole thing's a step up.
We're not talking five-star restaurant, you’re still sitting on the pavement while cars drive by
but it's a whole step up and the burger tastes better as well.
I've been to the Cup bar and grill in Sydney.
I looked it up on the internet but if you look at their website which is quite funky and cool,
it's a step up again in terms of where you eat and in terms of what the burger looks like, in
terms of what their website looks like as well.
So three burgers, three price points.
I've eaten $6, $16, and $30 burgers in restaurants before
and been quite happy
to do the difference. I've been quite happy to know that the burgers were better when I was paying more.
They might not be three and four and five times better but I was happy to pay the extra
when I was having all her other stuff, the presentation as well.
Now where I'm heading here,
I'm sure that's true for you as well. I'm sure you've had a big mac a $16 burger and $30 burger before.
Where I'm heading here is not a comparison of the relative price and quality of the burgers,
although that is an interesting conversation perhaps it's one I'll come back to in another video.
Where I'm heading here is a discussion about presentation. I hope that was obvious.
Part of why we're prepared to pay more for the more expensive burgers is their better quality and texture,
taste, ingredients all that and part of it is how they're presented, how they look,
not just the burger
but that whole thing, the restaurant, the wrapping,
how they're advertised, what they look like when they're advertised, the context, all that context.
So there are two things going on here. The first is the presentation makes our experience of enjoying
our burger better.
It's part of the whole deal.
Sitting in a restaurant is better than sitting on a nice table by the side of the road,
is better than sitting in a McDonald's with screaming kids.
The second is that we use how the burger looks and how the presentation
and that context looks as a guide to how good our burger's going to be, don't we?
We take one look at a limp burger and one look at the lovely plump thing in the cardboard tray
and we know which one's going to taste better.
We know how much we're going to enjoy the experience of eating our burger.
So back to a trades business because there's only so much bird talk I can do without getting hungry.
A trade business coming into our house
or into our business or into our building site that looks professional, is neat, is clean, is well branded
that improves our experience of the work. We're going to be more satisfied
with what we've got we really are.
Likewise, if somebody comes in onto our building site or our house or our business looking a bit sh*t,
we're going to be less than satisfied and we're going to be probably looking for faults.
It reflects well in our business to have professional looking trades working in it for our customers.
For example, when we contact a trade business how they present on the phone or on the internet or on the email?
It makes a big difference to how we feel about the experience and how likely we are to make an enquiry
or book a job and how they look online and in-person before we engage them?
It makes a big difference too, doesn't it?
It makes a big difference to what kind of service we're going to expect and perhaps also
how much we're prepared to pay.
If they look good online, we have higher expectations of their professionalism for their work,
probably their price and as people, all customers are people remember. As people, we correlate
the effort someone or a business puts into their appearance
and their sales proposals and their website. We correlate that
with how much effort we expect them to put into the work they do.
There's a big thing going on there. If they look like they don't put effort into the presentation,
we kind of imagine they put less effort into the work.
So pay attention to this. It's quite important and put some effort into your business's presentation.
Do a review if you like.
All your customer's touchpoints
your website, your facebook page, your instagram, your ads, your google ads,
all that stuff. What happens when somebody calls, how is the phone answered
and who buy, what happens when somebody emails, what do your emails look like, what language do you use,
how do you talk to them in your emails. When somebody visits the business or the house or whatever for
a sales visit, how do you present then or your vehicle, how do your sales people dress,
what attitude do they present, with what language do they use, what accessories are they carrying,
what do sales proposals look like, what do your invoices look like, what are your payment procedures
and what are the interactions that occur around payment,
what do trades people look like when they do go to do a job and their vehicles etc.
every single touch point between a customer and your business.
Check it out and have a look at how it presents to your customer.
Think about what can you do to present better to come across and look and appear better, more organized,
cleaner, neater, better, prepared all that stuff.
It's a worthwhile investment to make, it's not a difficult or expensive investment to make.
It's part of your sales machine, of course, did you see how it loops back
to the beginning there. It's part of your sales machine and that of course is what I'm going to help you build
if I'm your business coach.
But it also goes through your whole business, doesn't it? This way how you present,
how organised you are. It's your marketing, it's your operations and it's the back office
and it's how your people behave. So it's the whole thing, okay?
If you want help from me to help you improve your presentation
or help you put all that other structure in place in your business to make it perform better,
succeed better and make more money then you need to book a 10-minute chat.
Talk it through with me. Start the process. There's a process.
You don't decide on business coaching in 10 minutes. There's a bit more to do
or put yourself on a Tools Down workshop, that's two whole days. It's $300,
you could learn that framework I was just very quickly running through
and think about whether you want to invest in business coaching from there.
And do you see I'll put my nice velvet jacket on for this?
I thought about my presentation as well. See you later.