Today's residential homeowner construction market has tightened and leads for contracting services are scarce. Leads are more precious than ever. Many remodeling companies were founded by carpenters and tradesman with little or no formal training in sales. You are very good at building things, you are an expert at crafting and your miter joints are perfect. You started out working for someone else only to find you were treated poorly, paid less than what you are worth with no benefits and blamed for the mistakes of the owner. You said the heck with this crap and you started your own remodeling business. After all you can do better and you won't treat your people that way.

So you start out on your own and you develop a fine remodeling business through referrals from your family, friends, relatives and professional contacts. You keep investing in your tools and equipment, you set up the office, and do some basic marketing. Now fast forward to today and the referrals have dried up, marketing doesn't work the way it used to and leads have slowed to a trickle. You run the available leads and unlike a short time ago people aren't buying what you are offering. The approaches from a year ago are falling on deaf ears and you now hear the homeowner say too much money, you have to do better, we need to think about, we are getting five more quotes, or worse, "looks good, you're the guy, we'll get back to you in a week" and they never do.

You spend hours crafting and pricing your proposal and they give you a maybe. Your investment in time preparing and mental anguish is getting you down. You are questioning yourself and start to have doubts about your decision to be a remodeling carpenter.

Now you talk to other successful remodelers, read trade magazines, go to a supplier seminar and you come to the realization that you need to do better at sales. You learn and find out that other remodelers who have taking sales training are faring better than you.

You now are faced with the question and you say to yourself I want to be a carpenter, not a salesman! What are you going to do?

Most people don't want to be seen or perceived as a salesman. Ever been to a christening and hear the relatives say to the parents of the child what do you want your child to be when he grows up? You usually hear the standard I want little Johnny to be a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or some other respectable profession. Do you ever hear I want little Johnny to be a salesman?  

Any business that provides products and services to a market has to be sold. If you are the sole employee of your company the sales role has to be performed by you. If you are challenged by the sales role because you don't want to be salesman then you have three choices.

1. Sales training and coaching

2. Hire a salesperson.

3. Go work for someone else.

Now is the perfect time to obtain sales training and coaching to improve your chances of converting precious leads into contracts so you can continue to craft an awesome miter.

What are you doing to improve your sales performance?

mark the coach