PacificOutdoorLivingPro.com: Effective Marketing for Contractors

Why does one contractor have work and another does not?

Why does one company succeed and another does not?

Why does one salesman always seem to sell more than another?

Could the answer be; the company that has more marketing leads than the next knows and is applying the technology of marketing better?

If this were true it would be easy, wouldn’t it? Then all one would have to do is find out what the other guy is doing and do that!

“But my company is different.” “I don’t do things that way.” “You know you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

The guy doesn’t believe the idea that knowing the technology of something makes you more successful. So he assigns all kinds of reasons, like “The other guy went to college and I didn’t,” or “He’s better looking or he has a knack that I don’t,” or “He’s just in the right place at the right time.”

All these are not the reason. I’ll repeat, all these are not the reason!

There has to be a reason for success or failure, and there is. I would ask this of my salesmen all the time and they used to give all kinds of excuses. But I no longer accept the excuses. The reason is that the one who is consistently selling the most knows the technology of selling and can apply it better than the guy who is selling less. He also knows the product that he is selling better and exudes confidence.

The reason is there is some technology or skill that the guy on the bottom is not applying that the guy on the top is applying. And these skills are LEARNABLE.

If you don’t agree with that then there is no point continuing. This is about teaching OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS. The idea that one cannot learn and apply new ideas and data is FALSE.

I really mean this - if you don’t believe you can learn new things and if you don’t believe you can duplicate what another successful person is doing, if you believe all is pre-determined and you can’t change anything, then quietly stop reading this article and go to a movie or go play golf.

THE ANSWER IS TOO SIMPLE. THE GUY AT THE TOP KNOWS AND IS APPLYING SOMETHING THAT YOU ARE NOT.

AND ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS LEARN AND THEN USE IT.

Rule 1: To learn something you must agree there IS something to learn and that you can learn it.

Why Not Copy Donald?

Find someone who is successful and do what they are doing but do it even better.

No matter what field of work you might be in there are the folks out in front leading the way. It would be wise to find out everything that you can about them, what are they doing that has made them successful

Many times it’s not a bad idea to work for one of these leaders and really get down in the trenches and observe what is going on. What do they do and why are they doing it? What systems do they have in place? What is it that makes them successful?

There are books written on just this subject, books by authors who have studied very successful people and what they did to become success.

As contractors, my company Pacific Outdoor Living has had a certain amount of success. We went from one crew doing under $100,000 a month or about 1 million dollars in sales after our first year to 20 million dollars in sales per year, 8 years later.

We recently made the decision to become a distributor of pond products and sell to other contractors, some of the same contractors who we were bidding against before. In doing so we also decided that we would help these contractors become more successful. We decided that that was part of our product as a distributor. Our job was not just getting pond equipment in the hands of our contractors but working with them to make them the best. It’s a big industry and big marketplace and there is plenty of business out there for everyone.

In doing this we found that there were many, many areas where we needed to improve ourselves. We had many job descriptions written up for our crews and crew chief and supervisors, but we found that we could do much better in many areas ourselves.

We have rewritten many of these job descriptions. I have looked and studied what we did to get in sales. How did I go about it? What method did I use? How can I explain that to others?

We are in a phase as a company where we are codifying all that we have done so that others can really get it. In doing so it is benefiting us greatly because we are refining, correcting, revising and reconstructing many of our policies and hats.

All of which we are willing to share with other contactors.

The data in this article series is on marketing and what we did and how it was successful for us. This information has been through several stages of evolution to get to where it is today. It focuses primarily on very specific things that a specialty contractor, such as a pond or paving stone contractor, can do to sell directly to the homeowner.

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Terry Morrill is CEO of Pacific Outdoor Living Pro Division (www.pacificoutdoorlivingpro.com), a distributor of Aquascape pond equipment and products, and a distributor of quality interlocking concrete paving stone products. The company is located in Sun Valley, CA. Pacific Pavingstone (www.pacificpavingstone.com), also owned by Terry Morrill, has twice been listed on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing companies in America, and this year is listed on the Inc. 5000 list. California Waterscapes (www.californiawaterscapes.com) is the largest designer and installer of commercial and residential ponds in the U.S.

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