What I've learned about qualifying customers over the phone 📞 in a small scale Landscaping business

[0:00]What's up? It's Keith. In this video I want to talk about qualifying your customers over the phone before you go give them quote or an estimate. I say an estimate would be an estimated price, a quote would be an exact figure down to the penny, as far as I'm aware. So, if you ever had a customer call you and they want a quote, you want work, you need money, so sure I'll be right there. And now, either that day or on a different day, you'll schedule and drive out across town to walk a property with a customer and you don't even get the job. Or you had that kind of subtle gut feeling the whole time that it just wasn't the job for you anyways and you did it anyway. Why would you do that, right? So qualifying a customer of the phone would be like once you do your whole speil, you pick up the phone, you get to talking to them. Steve Shiner from the contractor sales Academy has this type of, it's like a cadence in how he speaks. It's basically like I'm not coming out there and sitting in traffic unless we've talked about it over the phone and I know I'm coming there to pick up a deposit check. Now, the type of work he does is probably the it's it's a very niche type of work so maybe he can be like that, but what I'm saying is it's that feeling of knowing that your time is so valuable. That why would you drive across town on a take time out of your life and your business to go you know, be somebody's bitch and give them all this free advice and give them a quote. So, you qualify them, you start asking questions about the property. You ask them to send you pictures, you go on Google Maps, you look at the house, you really get down and you're trying to find. You're trying to find what this person's intentions are. How far are they at in the buying process? There's an amazing book called six great leads. It's a book about marketing and it goes from cold prospect to warm prospect to like that prospect and the way you communicate to those people depends on how far they are down the line of they're ready to buy right now. Like they're ready to buy yesterday, it's an emergency, right? Or they're just starting to become aware that they might need this landscaping done or this, you know, warm would be like they've been thinking about it. They've they've looked at some stuff online and and now they're kind of they're open. So, you're looking for a warm and hot prospects. Cold leads would be like pissing your time away to somebody who's like, you know, thinks they need something done and I'll get a price on it and they're not even ready. And then they're just kind of price shopping and trying to get an idea before they can even get down the line to even make a decision. Why would you be this guy down here? Let, you know, somebody else, nothing against anybody else, but let them figure it out get all the way to that point to where they're now warm to where now when you get in there, they're already to they're ready to buy. They've kind of seen what's out there. So when you ask them these qualifying questions over the phone, you say things like you know, is that sound about right to you? Are you are you comfortable with that? Does that is that in the ball park, John? You know, we're talking maybe 2500 bucks to bring the top soil and grade this, plant a few shrubs, put some mulch in. Like I don't know exactly, but you know, what we're talking about, you know, because if you've been doing something long enough, you can get in a ball park and then you could feel, whoa, 2500 bucks. I thought I was going to get all this shit done for like 400 bucks. Well, instantly, you know that whoa, that's not your customer and what have you been doing on the phone besides getting good practice and then getting the hell off the phone and getting on to something else? But we can get caught up especially when we're newer. running out it's been Dude, I've put together bits. I I've spent like four hours messing around with customers and putting together these detailed quotes and I'm all excited and then I give them the price and they're like, whoa, okay, okay. I got to check with my wife or something like and I never and I'm like, what did I do wrong? It's because you just haven't been through the process enough to get to the point where you can see that stuff with X-ray vision and now it becomes obvious. Competence and confidence go hand in hand. If you're not confident in something, it's because you're not competent in it, because you haven't done it enough and gone through the processes enough to see it from all different angles to now where you can look at it and extrapolate all the information just by looking at one piece. That's how people hit mastery is um when they can look at one piece of information and then their brain can tell them what's going on in the whole thing because it's like a Fibonacci sequence. It's a it's quantum, it's holographic, the nature of it. Is as is above so as below. Uh as is the micro so as the macro. So now you could look at one sample of something and you know what it comes from, you know what it's made of. Yeah, dog. All right, that's my my video. Now we got to hustle off to a job. Keith Calus, the landscape employee trap dog. Dude, I want to make so many amazing vlogs and videos. I got the drone with me. I would like but it's like if you you do YouTube, you know what I'm talking about. All right. Peace.