Seriously? you guys can get a meeting with both of the decision makers? I have a hard enough time getting one of them for a site survey! 98.9% of the time there is only one decision maker in the home and thats the wife. 85% of the time I dont even see the other spouse during installation,service anything.

I sell to the lady of the house, it works out really well :)

Selling to the "lady" of the house is important. More important is to find out who "owns" the project. Whoever owns the project is who you really want to meet with to pitch the deal. If you meet with the person who doesn't own the project and you don't connect with them AND your product and installation is superior to the other quotes the customer received you are not going to get the deal.

I always ask "who's baby is this project?" and "who else is going to use the system?". If I find out the person I meet with is not the one who "owns" the project, I gather preliminary information and always ask several questions that I know the person I am meeting with cannot answer. They will ask me to write the questions down and that is when I get both decision makers' email addresses and send the questions to both people.

Usually the chief decision maker will rear their ugly head and then I pitch to them if they don't want the other person involved going forward...

Here's what we do:

Free site survey for most customers unless site survey turns into a service call to determine what's wrong with an existing system that most likely going to need an overhaul. Service call does NOT go toward proposal.

1/2 price service call charge for an estimate that involves an unusual request. Such as getting on a steep roof to see where DirecTV dish will go, crawl thru attic to see if AV lines can be put where requested, travel to a place that is hard to get to (for example - by boat to Island we work on), etc. 1/2 price call goes toward job if they have it done. Just have to increase total on proposal to really not give them the 1/2 price call back.

Any work that needs to be done in order to give an acurate proposal is invoiced at regular rate & does NOT go toward work. For example: trace out a AV/data lines ran by "others" in order to determine proposal for work requested.

Half the time we don't meet any of the home owners at the site survey. Many times are working for very busy professional that are never home & they have a "rep" let us in. IE real estate agent, contractor, relative, nieghbor.

Most proposals are submitted via email then followed up immeadiatly with a phone call or VM to make sure they got it. We get many people that won't even get on the phone with us. They deal stricly thru email, text, or the personal assistant. We have had a few customers that we have never met until demo.

Meet both the man & lady of the house is very "outdated." So many of our customers are single, gay or have other living arrangements.

And finally, if we are way over booked. We get choosey & turn down doing an estimate from jobs with high potential for problems. Such as: customer wants a discount, customer with bad attitude, customer that is bringing some of there old equipment to be installed, customer that has been high maintenance on previous jobs.

We are also finding it increasingly difficult to meet the owners on site before we get the deal. If it's competitive bidding, even with only 2-3 companies per trade, if they were expected to meet every potential contractor on site you can imagine what an terrible investment of their time it would be.

We have really tried to spruce up our digital proposals including scopes of work and pictures/cut sheets to better convey some of our ideas that may seem expensive when just looking at a line item.

When I do have to send proposals via email, I too send pictures of equipment and sometimes a spec sheet, depending on the product. I also will refer the people to our portfolio section of our website. It's not the same as meeting and closing the deal on the spot though of course. I am looking into Salez Toolz right now to help with the process. The hardest part is being a one man shop. During a slow period it is fine, but when things get even moderately busy, the time it takes to get out on the jobs and spend the amount of time to close the deal can be difficult.