If you want to find the quickest way to a roof sale, you've got to find the customer?s hot-button!

I?m not talking about general buying motives?I?m talking about finding the 1 thing that influences the customer?s decision to buy, more than any of the other things combined?

The hot-button isn?t just a buying motive, it's THE buying motive!

So why doesn?t everyone find the hot-button and make selling easy?

Finding the hot-button is hard!

The hot-button is typically tied to emotions, experiences and expectations. This is what makes it'so powerful? and also so hard to uncover.

To uncover the customer?s hot-button, you must clearly define EVERYTHING in the customer?s answer and understand WHY those things are important. you'll also need to make sure you can identify an experience from the customer?s past that ties everything together (make sure everything checks out).

YOU: ?What is the most important factor to you when selecting a roofing contractor??

CUSTOMER: ?Quality is the most important thing, for sure.?

(This is where most salesmen start talking about how great their ?quality? is. But how do you know what the customer means by quality? You Don't! Quality means different things to different people, so your next question needs to focus on what they mean by the word ?quality.?)

YOU: ?What exactly do you mean by quality??

CUSTOMER: ?I mean I care about how the roof looks when it is finished and how clean the job-site is. I hate when things are left messy and look sloppy? no matter how functional they may be.?

(This may not be your definition of ?quality,? but it could be your customer?s! Imagine how stupid you would have looked if you would have started describing how you install a 2-piece metal drip edge instead of defining the word! Now it's time to get into ?hot-button? territory?)

YOU: ?Oh, I see what you mean. Why exactly is this the aesthetics and clean-up so important in your decision process??

(BOOM! This question has been positioned in such a way that the customer?s answer will reveal their hot-button via some sort of past experience).

BIG SECRET ? The customer will not readily reveal their hot-button. People will often try to back track or ?beat around the bush? when They arealize They are about to reveal their hot-button. If you feel like that?s happening, just keep questioning until you get the truth. You can modify your last questions from, ?Why is this important to your selection process?? to ?What has been your experience with this sort of thing in the past??

Often dozens of questions are required just to get clarification on 1 item! Hey, if it were easy everyone would do it!

1. Prepare Your Questions in Advance

Prepare, and rehearse, a list of 20-25 questions prior to meeting with your customer. Just as you practice objection handling, your customers prepare to answer sales questions. A well-crafted question can catch them off-guard and get to the heart of the matter.

2. Take Notes

Take notes during your meeting. Taking notes enables you to slow the pace and control the rhythm of the meeting, making it easier for you to define all customer answers and move toward the hot-button.

3. Follow-Up with Value

You won't always uncover a hot-button in your first meeting. Study your notes and follow-up with ideas, information and additional clarification questions based on the data collected in the past meeting.

The hot-button can be elusive and takes a lot of work to find. However, finding this critical piece of information will make your roof soar!

How do you find the customer?s hot-button? What are your ?power? questions that shift through the BS and get down to the REAL issues? Take a moment to share your thoughts so we can all improve!

Stay Dry,

-Eric

The difficulties of keeping a tile and grout floor clear are caused from the porous nature but thankfully, recent technology in restoration makes it possible to have a tile and grout floor that is structurally sound but unattractive, look like new once again and the process will also make it easier to clean and maintain than the original. This is an advanced restoration system that is not just mere cleaning but will install an extremely durable coating to both the grout joints and the surface of the tile that will seal out all food contaminants, urine, foul odors and dirty mop water.

These coatings will eliminate porosity of the tile and grout making it no longer able to absorb anything that will cause the tile to become dingy, discolored or emit foul odors. This high quality restoration process is called restorative bonding and should not, in any way, be confused with staining, painting or re-coloring, which only give you temporary improvement to the surface. These temporary fixes are not effective as a long lasting solution and cannot be compared to the results you will have with restorative bonding. These temporary solutions are nothing more than off-the-shelf products like stains, floor finishes and paints, all of which, should be avoided.

The problem with these off-the-shelf solutions is that they cover the issues up instead of solving them. In addition, they lack the durability and hardness of the restorative bonding coatings that are used only by a professional tile and grout restoration company. To begin a restorative bonding process, the tile and grout floor is given a thorough prep to remove any dirt and embedded contamination. When that is complete, the grout is first etched either with chemicals or mechanically to ensure that the coatings will bond to the grout, permanently. Next, a nonporous, permanent coating is applied to the grout and last, the entire surface is coated with a shield that is impermeable and that will provide durability from further soiling.

These coatings are clear and are composed of different polymers that are similar to urethanes and acrylics and are made for the long-term with durability that will wit'stand both cleaning and high foot traffic. You must however, have the installation done by highly-trained professionals to ensure that your tile and grout floor is also slip-resistant. There are benefits to having your tile and grout floor restored by a professional who is trained, certified and has experience in restorative bonding. Any reputable company will offer a warranty, support services and a guarantee against the longevity and integrity of the work performed.

If you follow the above guidelines, you will enjoy, for years to come, a durable tile and grout floor that has a surface that looks brand new, is easy to maintain, is slip resistant, and resist any further contamination and all for much less than what you would pay to have the entire floor replaced.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent some time watching "The Men Who Built America" on the History channel (if you haven't checked this series out, I highly recommend it). You can't help but come away with the feeling that Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Morgan built their empires (partly) by exploiting opportunities that just aren't available today.

"Don't know what you've got 'till it's gone" is not just a hair metal ballad by Cinderella. it's also how contractors everywhere are going to be feeling over the next 2-3 years as they think about the online marketing opportunities they once had that have suddenly vanished.

Opportunities Lost

Ranking #1 on Google used to be as simple as throwing a few target keywords in your "meta keyword" tag. Today, that tag is ignored by nearly all the search engines. Adding your keywords to it does one thing - it'shows your competitors which keywords you think are important.

It used to be easy for a "mom and pop" company to outrank a much larger and more well-established business. While the larger company was having meeting after meeting with their various "website stakeholders," the small company could engage a smart web design firm to completely re-build and optimize their website - leapfrogging the larger company before they even knew what was going on. Today, Google is adapting its algorithm to more heavily weight what might be viewed as more "traditional" brand strength indicators (which could make life much harder for small businesses to outrank the big guys).

You used to be able to see exactly which keywords someone used to find your website. Armed with the keywords people are using, you could fine-tune your site's content to improve your organic rankings and your website's visit-to-lead conversion rate.

Today, Google encrypts the keyword data when a visitor is logged in to any Google product (Gmail, etc.). With a growing number of "Google Products" - AdWords, Analytics, Google+, etc., guess what 's happening? You guessed it - the number of visits to your website reported in Google Analytics as keyword (not provided) is sky rocketing.

Before the average contractor knew what "PPC" stood for, you could get people searching for high-value keywords like "roofing contractor + your city" or "furnace replacement + state" to your website for pennies per click. And yet, I had people telling me that I was crazy for recommending they be "ok" with paying $.50 per click.

Today, clicks for those same keywords cost roughly 2000-5000 percent more and guess what? For smart contractors, the math still works.

What You Should Do

The Internet is still the Wild West of advertising and marketing and with uncertainty comes major opportunity, but the times are a changin'.

Here's a quick and dirty list of what you can do to maximize the opportunity sitting right in front of you:

The Internet is a gold mine for small business owners. However challenging you think things are today, let me let you in on a little secret - things are only going to get harder tomorrow. Stop procrastinating. Don't be penny wise, pound foolish. If you need an online marketing guide, hire someone you trust to help you. The time to act is NOW.

No business stands still. you're either growing and getting better every day or you're dying. Which way are you going to go in 2013?

My company had an a chance to win a job today through an interview process. We were far more prepared than any other team. I know this because we had done three exact projects just like the one we were interviewing for in the same location! Our team studied the proposed site extensively, did mass amounts of research and used our past success's as a basis.

Our presentation went well and we had all the right answers. We also solved many of the problems the design staff had without even viewing a full set of plans.

At the end of the day, we did not get the job. It turns out that telling the truth about the schedule and possibilities of the job hurt us. I learned a lot from this experience, all I can say is that I am proud of my team and a company should never lie about a projects actual realities. Good luck to the company who was awarded the job, I am sure they did their due diligence.

With that being said, today's experience reconfirmed the fact that it is not a good business practice to change your integrity on the fly. If someone is asking you to change what has made you successful over the last five decades, then you probably Don't want to do business with that person. Though the smell of money can be great, Don't forget to bring your brain with you to the meeting. Check your ego's at the door and get down to business. Don't jeopardize the strength's your company was built on for a quick buck.

Hold what is true and you will succeed, over and over again.