Brian Kaskavalciyan spent $5,000 mystery-shopping ten window contractors and found most were unprofessional: only one brought a product sample, only one did a thorough inspection. He shows how his company wins by diagnosing customer pain points and using a heat lamp to demonstrate energy loss, so buyers choose them over cheaper competitors.
I'll tell you a little story. In 2017, I hired some friends of mine that live in a home that was typical of a home that we would do work in, and they had not replaced their windows and doors. And I met with them and I gave them a script, and I wanted them to call 10 of my competitors, and I gave them a list of questions to ask the competitors. And I wanted to go everything from who answered the phone, How was the appointment set? Did they try to get a complete party appointment? You know, did they let the appointment be set whenever you wanted it set, or did they have a defined structure for setting the appointment? So, to when they actually showed up, did they show up on time? And what was their process, if anything? And I paid them $500 per appointment. So they did 10 of my competitors, so we paid them $5,000. It was the best $5,000 I ever spent. And then, and I, again, after each appointment, they had to complete a questionnaire that I created for them with maybe 25 or 30 questions. And the information I got was amazing. And what it told me is that for the most part, there's a lot of really unprofessional, poorly trained companies out there. And there's a few really good companies, a few really good competitors. I mean, of 10 competitors, one guy had a sample to show the customer. About 5 or 6 of them had a brochure. The rest of them had nothing. Two companies— actually, one company actually walked around and did a thorough inspection with the customer with them. And I told the people that are friends of mine, I said, when they come, just show them, we want those windows over there measured, because that's typically what the customer knows, because we have a process that they don't know. And they have been— seems natural, yeah, just go measure those windows. And the sales rep goes over and starts measuring and writing down. We don't want to do that. We want the customer with us. We want to be able to open and close the windows and doors. We want the customer to tell us, oh, I haven't been able to open this since we've been here. I want them to They tell me this is hard to lock, this can't be locked, this can't be unlocked. If you slide it up, it's gonna come down. We wanna ask them why the screen frame's bent, 'cause they can't get the screen out, or how come there's no screen in this window? We want them to tell us. We want them to ratchet up the pain. We want this to be fresh in their mind. And at that point in time, we're just like the doctor. We're diagnosing what's wrong with the patient. We're not prescribing any treatments. We're not telling them how we can solve their problem. We're not doing any of that. We're just trying to really find out. So 9 out of 10 companies never had that, never even took that opportunity to really walk the job. Most of them, you know, came in and did a little chit-chat and they had no real agenda, no questions. They didn't take control of the appointment. They kind of went wherever they went in the home. They didn't get them to the kitchen or dining room table. You know, We use a heat lamp to show the energy efficiency of our windows. Our glass is really no better than the competitor's glass, but what we want to do is we want to put a heat lamp on their glass and have them feel the heat coming through from the outside— from the inside to the outside in the winter months, and from the outside to inside in the summer months, right? Because it's emotional. I can show a gauge or a meter or something to show you how great my glass is, but when I show it to you and you feel the heat coming through, and then I put it on my window and you don't feel the heat coming through, You can't unforget that. That's an emotional experience. No one had a heat lamp. So the whole thing was we compared what our competitors were doing to what, you know, we do, and it became very eye-opening. And there's a lot of lack of professionalism. But if you're not different and better demonstrably than the competitors, guess what? The one thing customers will always fixate on is price. If they don't understand why there's a difference in price. So in the absence of discernible differences, customers will always resort to the one difference that they know and understand, which is the difference in price. And why would anybody pay more for what they see as about the same or similar to what you have to offer? So if you can't differentiate demonstrably and make an emotional connection, then, you know, you're gonna be in the price game. So very, very important. And so you might want to try that. You might be surprised at what a lot of your competitors are doing.
