A common frustration for all trades business owners is when you’re submitting a quote you can get price-pressure from your client.

It can come as direct pressure when they say, “It’s too much, I can’t afford it”.

It can come as a counteroffer, “I’ll give you the job for this much”.

And it can come by reference to competitors, “The guy down the road can do it for less, can you match the price?”

This is a common experience for most of us. It’s uncomfortable and it messes with your confidence.

“Am I really too expensive? Can someone else really do it for that much?”

A guy called Richard posted a very similar complaint on Facebook in Builders Talk Group. He booked a job in. The guy accepted his quote, called him a week before the job was due to start and said someone else can do it for £300.

And he was understandably nervous for the reasons I wrote above –  ‘Am I wrong? Is the guy lying?’

You don’t know. You’re not confident.

All the people who commented were pretty consistent and pretty much said, “Run away!” ‘He’s lying’. ‘He’s behaving unethically coming back to you at this last minute after he’s accepted the quote.’ “He’s probably a bad payer.’ ‘You’ll have a bad experience.’

And I commented something similar. And it’s the right advice.

The guy sounds like an asshole. He sounds like he’d be a problem. He’s probably lying because if someone else said he’d be £300 why didn’t he buy it from them?

All sorts of things are wrong with that situation. I don’t really want to go down that rabbithole because this video of course, is about marketing.

I will say, all your d*ckhead alarms should be going off at once.

Marketing is important

It’s not easy to refuse work. It’s only a week before the job.  Poor old Richard, he’s likely to end up with his guys with no work to do if he’s not careful. You’ve got people’s wages and it’s not good. He’s going to have a hole in his work schedule.

And this is why marketing is so important. It’s easy to refuse work. If you’ve got lots of work in the schedule and you can adjust your work schedule, it’s not a problem for you.

If you’ve got quotes closing and are confident the money is going to keep coming in, you can be strong in that position.

It’s not so easy if you don’t have that, is it?

If there’s no backlog and you need this job then you’re in a much weaker position. If you really needed it you’re not going to feel confident at all.

And the way to have loads of quotes to close and win is to do more marketing. Not to have a small team of people to be less risky, but to do more marketing.

The answer is do more marketing.

The way to get more leads or enquiries or jobs is to do more marketing.

Most tradies don’t do enough. Most people rely on one or two major relationships. Or most smaller businesses rely on a few more major relationships, one or two ads, hipages or word-of-mouth.

You do a bit of marketing, but you don’t do enough and that leaves you vulnerable to such things like feeling weak or lacking in confidence when you’re faced by somebody who’s being unreasonable.

And your marketing is a bit skinny and leaves you vulnerable. You’re not strong and you’re not confident in a negotiation.

And it’s better to be confident in the negotiation. In any negotiation you need to be prepared to walk away. If you can’t walk away, you’ve got no power.

If your negotiating position is weak, you’re more likely to give concessions or take on a job you shouldn’t with somebody who is clearly a d*ckhead.

It’s far better to do enough marketing to generate a flow of leads with your systematic and automated marketing machine rather than:

• To be talking to me about how to handle all this extra work and have to be hiring somebody else so you can grow the business.
• Feeling weak in your negotiations and not having a flow of leads and feeling anxious about where the work is gonna come from.

I’m a business coach for trades business owners who want to grow and scale so a marketing machine is a vital part of that.

And today is about marketing, and doing enough marketing and boosting your confidence, not just in a price negotiation but in a more general sense as well. A lot of business coaching is about confidence.

I’ll help you build your marketing machine. I’ll help you understand what your market is, understand what type of work is right work for you to be chasing. And I’ll help you choose which marketing building blocks to use. And then, I’ll help you get stuck into using them and implementing.