We wanted to share with you our unique approach to sales for our projects. It may be a little different than what you’re used to, but we’ve found that our customers love it!
Education.
We can all agree that the best consumer, is an educated consumer. With that in mind, we made this entire website which has became the go to resource for screen enclosures and patio projects online. Some companies even use our website to train their employees. You can checkout our featured projects to get ideas and the Learning Center for in depth explanations on how we complete our services. You can even leave comments to discuss with the author. This gives you an understanding of our capabilities, our process, and what you need.
No Sales People.
If you’ve ever dealt with a sales person, chances are you got someone with lots of training on how to ‘sell’ you, and actually has no experience actually doing (or building) whatever they sell you. Many companies just take random applicants, send them to a high pressure sales class, arm them with a pricing multiplier and send them out to SELL! The more they can SELL, the more they make. They want you to sign on the dotted line, and then they are done with it. The end. They have no physical experience with the services they are selling other than a couple days of ‘product’ training , and therefore have no clue to the method of out come. While high pressure salesmanship by excellent sales people like this will get sales, we find that that it generally leaves customers unhappy and results in a poor outcome. Here are a few of the frequent complaints of customers that deal with salesman
- Too much pressure
- Sales person overlooked things that resulted in blatant change orders
- The sales person lied about the materials
Lets face it, nobody likes dealing with sales people, and they generally aren’t earning lots of happy (keyword) customers, so here at GCA we don’t have any. All of the people you speak to from our company regarding your estimate are project managers. They’re spent their time in the trenches of our company, handling our various projects, and fully understand the scope of how our services are completed and what they entail. Their primary task, is managing the projects from permitting on through to scheduling, and then completion — we do not even track their sales.. In between managing projects, our project managers are also responsible for doing estimates, and answering your questions. While we do not keep track of our sales by each project manager, we do ensure that all of our customer estimate requests and questions are handled attentively. This ensures that you are dealing with someone who thoroughly understands what they are estimating and how our company will be doing the work. It also means that you don’t have someone who is focused on ‘selling you’.
Online Estimates
If you’ve tried to get an estimate from one of our competitors you’ll probably find out that it might take them a couple weeks to get to you. After waiting for your date, taking some time out of your day, no one shows up, or at best they show up late. It’s time consuming and frustrating. Not to mention, if they do show up, expect some salesmanship. Now I don’t know about you but I generally do not like to have someone in my house to sell me. It can be a little uncomfortable. By doing estimates online there is no hassle to find a convenient time, wait for someone and then deal with a sales person. This low pressure sales approach puts you in the driver’s seat and insures you get pricing quickly…truly a win-win!
Our online estimates are done using imagery from a low flying plane. There are multiple companies that offer this service around the world, and we pay for it in the areas that we do business in. This allows us to measure height, depth, and width, of nearly any structure in our service area with precise accuracy. In some cases, we will check building records for more details. Other times we might need you to send us a picture of the work area.
Projects on existing structures, like a re-screen, repaint, front entryway, or cage replacement are quoted (a firm and final number online. New structures, or large projects with many variables are given an estimated price range. For example we might tell you “based on what you described and the size, this project is going to be between 15 and 20 thousand dollars” The final price is a factor of site conditions such as slope of the ground, eaveheight of the host structure, design intentions, access to the back yard, and bells & whistles (options, number of doors, types of materials). For Getting a final quote for this requires an on site consultation.
From this point, most customers are in 1 of two scenarios.
- They’re inline with the project estimate, have read our reviews, heard about our reputation for a headache free project and quality, and are ready for us to start.
- They need ideas, help conceptualizing the project, or just want a final quote.
On-Site Consultation & Quote.
If you’re ready to go ahead with your project, within our estimated range, there’s no fee for us to come out and go over everything with and finalize the scope of work. We simply take a credit card deposit for the on site consultation and that gets credited to the final price.
If you need ideas, or a final quote, that’s fine too. We charge an on site consultation fee, which we’ll be credited towards a project you go with within 30 days. We’ll send out a project manager to tell you whats possible, the best way of getting it done, what other people are doing, and everything you need to narrow down a specific scope of work that suits your intentions and needs. This includes stuff such as overall layout, roof styles, door and fan quantity/location. As a trade contractor, this all stuff that is often drafted by an architect before even coming to us to bid. We’ll even tell you the best way to coordinate other trades that we don’t offer, or anything else you need to know. Since you’re paying for an on site consultation, our knowledge is yours offered up in a way that is unbiased to our bottom line and comes out with the car lot sales tactics. We’ll then work up a quote and leave you with the decision to hire us or not.
Final Words
I hope the explanation above helps you understand how and I why we do things. Most of the people we speak to love our process, and the fact that it keeps transparency in knowledge up front and leaves behind commission driven salesman. That said some people object to it to it with questions which we will address below:
Why do I have to pay for you to come on site when your competitor will come on site for free?
Glad you asked! The answer to this is two-fold so we shall explain both points.
- Many of our competitors use sales people, who are paid strictly on how much they sell. Their goal is to get you signed, collect a commission, and then pass you on. Their sales people often lack practical knowledge or experience with these projects but are well trained in sales tactics. For these businesses, its a numbers game. The inexperienced people they send out only get compensated on ‘closings’ and the more people they send out the more they close. In our opinion, we find that sending someone out just to ‘sell’ you is bad business and doesn’t work out in the best interest of the customer or ending with happy customers. When we send someone out, it is someone who has been ingrained in our company and thoroughly understands our projects and processes. They receive no commission or have an incentive to sell you. It other words we’re going to tell you what you need to know, give you our best quote, and not play car lot games.
Its says you give free estimates, so why can’t you tell me exactly how much it will cost?
This is a good question. It mainly only applies to larger projects for a new structure as work on existing structures or replacement of an existing structure can be quoted precisely online. To answer it, it’s important to understand exactly what an estimate is. The definition of an estimate is below:
an approximate calculation or judgment of the value, number, quantity, or extent of something.
By definition, asking how much it will be ‘exactly’ is not an estimate. What this question is asking for, is a quote. If you recall, a free estimate is given to everyone: i.e. ““based on what you described and the size, this project is going to be between 15 and 20 thousand dollars”.
