Our dryer died the other night. I didn’t know a single appliance repair outfit, so I started digging.
I crossed every “call us to schedule” vendor off the list before I finished reading their homepages. Only the outfits with “book now” and visible pricing made the first cut. Of those, I picked whoever could be at my house inside 48 hours and booked them the same way I order from Amazon Prime or Papa John’s.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: I would have picked a less capable vendor through an easier booking engine. How many buyers are like me? How many will swear they aren’t, then behave differently at midnight while doom scrolling?
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That instinct didn’t come out of nowhere. I ran out of energy drink mix recently and needed more. “Get it by tomorrow between 10 and 11,” Amazon chirped. I winced. Why not today? I really needed it today. Never fear. For $2.99 more, I could have it in four hours. I paid, then rationalized the hundreds of dollars in wasted efficiency it would have cost me to visit the (gasp) grocery store. A trip to the market now stands in my mind as a complete failure to optimize.
Rewind a few decades. If we wanted something (cue old-timey soundtrack), we waited 4 to 6 weeks for it. We might have even called a phone number to ask if it was in stock. Some of us “sent away” for things to a far-off address in Pueblo, Colorado. Where the hell is Pueblo anyway? I’ve been to Colorado plenty of times without so much as a hint of Pueblo. Never mind that.
Why the trip down memory lane? Because most of our businesses still run consult-to-proposal like it’s 1982. Worse, we’re proud of it. We put contact forms and lame answering services on our websites and then hope prospects are champing at the bit to “call the office.”
Livewire was the first company to face my withering criticism. Do we offer live booking? Sure. Instant pricing? You bet. What could be wrong? Plenty.
Here’s our actual workflow: A prospect books with us. We budget qualify over the phone, then come out to do the consult. On site we run our budget calculator. Once we arrive at a mutually agreeable budget, we ask (sorry, we should ask) for a 4% design retainer to send the scope to engineering. Then we schedule a follow-up meeting to review the proposal, usually two weeks out, so the design team has ample buffer to scope everything. As Walt Disney was fond of saying, “people need deadlines.” I affectionately call that two-week stretch the “Lake of Fire.”
Best case, we hold the window, present the scope, and close it, because we already set budget expectations and took the job off the street with a retainer. Worst case, we quietly lose the scope to a competitor inside that interregnum because they were faster. No retainer means no perceived sunken cost to trade on.
The bigger your organization, the more likely you’re quietly living scenario two. Your guys will smile and nod when you spot-check the workflow, then cut corners in the heat of the moment. Why? Salespeople can’t stand rejection, and most of them aren’t playing to win. They’re playing not to lose.
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So, what’s a poor boy to do in the face of so much dark news? Control the controllables, manage around the rest, and turn the “Lake of Fire” into a puddle.
- Publish pricing. If you aren’t running a tool like Priceguide (full disclosure: I’m a co-founder) or the HTA Budget Calculator on your website, Google is downranking you, and customers are moving on down the street to your competitor. “But Henry, we can’t show pricing, we’re custom!” A budget range still leaves you plenty of room to tweak the final scope directly with the client. This one turns browsers into buyers.
- Charge a design retainer. Invoicing a de minimis amount to engineer the scope does a bunch of things at once. It takes the job off the street, it gives the client skin in the game before a competitor shows up, and it turns engineering time into something you get paid for instead of something you gamble.
- Shrink your turnaround time. Two weeks is a buffer you built for your design team, not a promise your client asked for. Every day inside that window is a day a faster competitor can take the job. Measure your real number, cut it in half, and see what breaks.
What are you doing to drain your “Lake of Fire” down to a puddle?
Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
