Ask the Experts | Creating Urgency for Homeowners to Buy

Question: What’s the best way to create a sense of urgency when calling our past customers to sell tune-up specials?

Weldon Long; New York Times Best Selling Author:

The first thing that jumped out at me when I read the question is, maybe take one step back and look at whether or not we’re selling maintenance agreements for those tune-ups if they’re previous customers. If it’s a new system or previous customer, maybe the first question is, “what are we doing to sell maintenance agreements?’ Then, let’s assume we have a system that we sold our previous customer that is not a maintenance customer, we call these people back and offer a tune up.

It’s just a common-sense approach. We’re talking about the maintaining of the equipment. We use the same technique when we’re selling attic insulation. Let’s say the customer had the system installed 10 years ago. We tell the homeowners that we know the system wasn’t cheap, it costed thousands of dollars. We just want to make sure when you invest that type of money, we’re going to make sure that we get every day of life out of the system that we can. So, with attic insulation, the better it is, the less work it has to do and the longer it will last.

On the tune-up situation, obviously we use the metaphor of changing the oil in your car. If you do the basic maintenance in the car, it’s going to last a lot longer and get better gas mileage. Your heating and air conditioning system is very much the same in that we have to maintain it so we continue to get the efficiency out of it, continue to get the performance out of it, and continue to get the life that they’re designed to deliver in terms of the number of years.

We can accomplish this by routine regular maintenance, making sure that everything is adjusted and operating properly, it’s clean and maintained, very much like you would change the oil in your car. That would be a very simple answer. When there’s no urgency, a lot of times we can go to the cost. You can always create urgency when you talk about people wasting money. People get very motivated when it comes to their money. Just remind your customers that the ongoing maintenance and the tune-up is going to increase the life of the system, the efficiency, and the performance.

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