Are Your Roofing Customers Reasonable?

By Mike Coday •  Updated: 03/29/21 •  2 min read

Kinds of Customers

If your customer feels like a burden, you might have an opportunity, or you might have the wrong customer.

You have an opportunity if your customer is giving you a chance to stand-out from the crowd. You’re not shooting for basic “customer satisfaction” (that just means they don’t want to kill you); you’re shooting for amazement, blown-away, can’t believe it, crazy over-the-top, fans for life customer service.

If you can do this, you’ll eliminate the competition entirely. If not, you’ll have to keep fighting for every new job you get.

Sometimes, no matter what you do, you’re not going to make that customer happy.

Face it, you’ve got yourself the wrong customer.

If you’ve been in the roofing business for more than one year you know not everybody is reasonable. Your definition and their definition of what’s reasonable may be completely different.

However, when your goal is amazing customer service, you’ll have to give your customer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to who’s definition of reasonable you’re going to use.

However, when your customer crosses the line and wants to exploit you… believing you are weak… cut them off immediately and deal with them very strictly going forward. That’s the wrong customer.

All other customers, you should bend over backwards for because they’ll eventually reward you with fierce loyalty and profuse praise. Their gratitude for your patience will astound you.

This means you have to be very careful with the kind of customer YOU CHOOSE to do business with.

I sometimes tell prospects up-front I’m not sure I want to do business with them since I’m the one taking on all the risk by extending them thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in credit.

When a prospect becomes a customer and later takes advantage of your good faith, it is extremely frustrating.

As much as it is within your power to do so, give them the benefit of the doubt. You make more hay from a combination of sunshine and rain. You need both to bring in the big harvest.

Peace,
Mike

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Mike Coday

Mike started selling roofs in '95 while working as a youth pastor at a small church in North Texas. A decade later he transitioned to speaking at industry conferences and training outside sales teams. Today, he works exclusively as the premier consultant to roofing company owners who are driven for growth.