Nationals Still Misleading Customers

I read a 3 day old thread on http://double-glazing-forum.com/topics.aspx?ID=434 in which a customer explains that a national company told him that the other two local companies couldn't possibly have A rated windows as only they (Anglian) and Everest are the only ones who have that rating.


After years of energy rated windows being very widely available, and at the A rated standard, it surprises me that sales reps are still spouting this sort of rubbish. I say sales reps because it may not be company policy to use false information like that during a sales demo. But if there are elements of the company saying such things, then this needs to be seen as a wake up call and to right such a laughable wrong!


If we're trying to improve the reputation of the industry, we need to start being genuine with the general public. These sorts of lies and distortions only serve to confuse potential customers, alienating them, giving them a more negative view of our profession.


And before anyone starts to think I'm being hypocritical by mentioning national companies even though their ads might pop up next to this post, well I'm not. The ads are randomly generated by Google, not placed by me. And I won't change the way I write. If there's crap practices to be aired, then I will carry on doing so.

National Companies Create False Customer Hopes

Recently we have seen campaigns by Everest and Anglian Home Improvements advertising their own scrappage schemes. From their point of view, the campaign to get the government to introduce a scrappage scheme design to benefit the double glazing industry provided the perfect advertising gimmick, and no doubt it may have swung a few customer's their way by now. But their campaigns in my opinion are mis-guided and have been a waste of energy. With the size of the companies involved with this type of campaign, I would have thought it more beneficial to have all the employees of both companies sign the government petition to introduce such a scheme nationwide. At the moment, the number of signatures on that petition stands at just over 3700. How many more could there be if there was a concerted effort by both Anglian and Everest to get as many new names on there as possible?

My second thought is that the campaign is not so believable. Because there seems to be just these two involved, when customers start to shop around for prices they will come to realise that no one else is advertising a scrappage scheme, and realise it is just another advertising gimmick, feeding off the success of the car and new boiler versions. To me this puts the validity of the campaign in doubt. It won't have the effect on customers that it wants to achieve because it's not a government scheme. This is why energies would have been better placed in putting thousands of signatures on the government petition website.

We risk the petition falling through and not being noticed because of this. While Anglian and Everest were thoughtless and only saw a 'quick buck' benefit for themselves, they have put the success of the petition at risk. Personally, I now think that we won't have such a scheme introduced because the heavy-weight influence of the national companies hasn't been put to good use, and has instead been used to feed greed, much like the bankers in fact!

So, if there are any readers who work for a national company, why haven't you instructed your employees to help the industry they work in and sign the petition for a national windows scrappage scheme?

Why Door Knocking Is Never Productive!

I found this interesting article published in the Telegraph back in March 2009. It just goes to show that door to door sales is not the way to be going about business in this day and age:

Frustrated double glazing salesman lashed out at villagers, court told.

A double glazing salesman attacked a man and made an obscene gesture at an elderly woman after his sales pitch was repeatedly rejected, a court heard.

By John Bingham

Published: 6:12PM GMT 25 Mar 2009

Leo Wardrop, 18, lost his temper after spending an afternoon being turned away by villagers in Lingwood, Norfolk, while under pressure to make commission fees worth £60-per-sale.

Great Yarmouth Magistrates' Court heard that the teenager snapped when Hazel Wilcox, a pensioner, said that she was not interested in his wares.

He repeatedly rang her doorbell and banged her gate in frustration, said Fergus Harold, prosecuting.

As the row escalated, he became caught up in a tussle with one of her neighbours, Michael Dack, 67, a retired engineer and former neighbourhood watch coordinator, after he took a photograph of him arguing with Mrs Wilcox.

Vaulting over a 3ft garden fence, he tussled with Mr Dack trying to grab the camera from his hands and blocking his doorway.

The photograph was later used to identify Wardrop, of Wymondham, Norfolk, who was fined £125 after being found guilty of assault and harassment by the magistrates.

He has also been sacked from his job at Anglia First Home Improvements based in Lenwade, Norfolk, following the incident on Feb 3.

"I feel a bit sorry for the poor lad," Mr Dack said after the hearing.

"He was at the end of his tether after everyone had turned him away and he just blew a fuse.

"It is a terrible job going around knocking on doors trying to sell things.

"I think I did him a good turn by getting him the sack so he could find another job."

The court heard that matters escalated when Wardrop made an obscene gesture at Mrs Wilcox prompting her to warn him: "If you come by again, I will clip your ear for you."

Mr Dack saw what was happening and stepped outside to take a picture.

But Wardrop accused him of breaking the law by taking the picture and jumped over the fence and began struggling with him until Mrs Wilcox's husband, Robert, stepped in forcing the salesman to retreat.

Under cross examination, he told the court: "There was pressure on me to get quotations. You get rejected a lot."

You can find the article at:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5049873/Frustrated-double-glazing-salesman-lashed-out-at-villagers-court-told.html.

Luckily I joined this industry as the door-to-door sales method had died out. A lot of our customers come through the door and into the showroom. A lot of our customers are local to us, but we also have a very good repuation and people know we have a good product. They also know that we are by far not the cheapest, but also appreciate that we sell a superior product.

A Sale Does Actually Have To End!

All over the TV and radio you see and hear of sales. From sofas and furniture, and especially double glazing, and they always end with a deadline sounding something like: "must end Sunday" or something along those lines. But for a sale to have some modicum of credibility, it must actually have to come to an end!

A prime example is the Safestyle, and especially the DFS adverts. Both of which offer 'superb' offers and great 'deals'. But people have become weary of them (especially Safestyle, I know it memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. Most people find him annoying, and who would buy windows from a guy who throws them on the floor like they are made from cardboard!). Every week there's a new offer, and every Sunday it ends, just for a new one to start again on Monday. It's lost all it's credibility because people know it's never ever going to end! And because of that, people won't rush in on a weekend making sure they get there in time before it ends. Making the whole point of a 'Sale', pointless.

If companies are going to embark on TV land with adverts advertising sales and giving some indication that these 'offers' and 'discounts' are going to end at some point, they must. It gives the business and the sale credibility and believability. If they don't, they could end up in a position like DFS, where their sale is now just a national joke and has no credence.

How Dirty Can Companies Get!?

I know I've said I'll try to keep my blog unbiased towards any company, but in this instance I have to mention the company name again, Safestyle.

I've come to know of a customer who had asked Safestyle to visit his home to quote for replacing his windows and doors. When the 'salesman' turned up, he was in a tatty T-shirt, scruffy jeans, no relevant paperwork to even begin to work on the quotation, and a terrible attitude to boot. The customer allowed him time to get into his sales pitch and talk about the product he would be buying, but that never came. All that he got was pressure to buy right there and then. After a lengthy amount of time, the customer had run out of patience and asked the salesman to leave. At first he resisted and gave the customer the usual twaddle about the kids not eating tonight, then the usual aggressive 'well you've wasted my time' speech. Eventually the rep agreed to leave but (and this is where it's gets disgusting) asked the customer to sign a form to say that the rep had actually been out to the house and had not been wasting Safestyle's time.

Two weeks later, a Safestyle van had turned with the windows and doors for the property! The form the customer had been asked to sign was actually disguised as a contract. Despite the fact that the customer had kicked the rep out two weeks earlier without any intention of buying, the fitters still initially tried to fit the windows! The customer quite rightly told them where to go and that was the end of it.

These extreme and disgusting tactics are something which nearly all national companies practice. In my opinion, the sooner they either get fined, stop operating the way they are, or go bust, the better it will be for the smaller, well established companies trying to shake off our terrible reputation.

My Three Most Hated Words

Here's a list of the three words that make me cringe the most whenever I hear or see them:

1. Discount.
Whenever customer's ask us if we have any discounts on offer, my heart sinks! After we explain that discounts only exist after a company has added money on in the first place, just to take it back off again, they see the light as it were. Most consumers out there now realise that a company isn't just going to take off money willy nilly, they know it's already added on and taken off.

2. Deals.
I HATE this word. To me it screams 'cheap and tacky'. It always reminds me of the type of customer who tends to be a bit of a DIY, hands on kind of person, looking for the cheapest of the cheap, and generally comes out the with the line : 'have you got any deals on at the moment?'
God I hate that word!

3. Sales.
A mix of the two reasons above really. I think the word 'sale' has been plugged as much as it can be plugged, I think the general attitude of consumers towards a sale is: 'oh look, the sales on again'. Customers have wised up a lot and realised that in most cases companies add a margin on, take it back off again and disguise and advertise it as a 'sale' or 'discount'.

I think you could put my frustration of these words and tactics down to the fact that, rather than use these techniques to hood-wink those who aren't as alert to these methods, as a company we just price the job in hand as keen as possible in the first place. We make this absolutely clear to our customers and I think they appreciate this. We get a lot of positive feedback from our customers commenting on the honest and straight forward approach to our pricing methods. What we also see a lot of now is customers asking for the bottom line price straight away, no flanneling or pretend discounts, which suits us to the ground!

Plastic Tactics

After all the positive press about timber windows, and how bad PVC windows are, it seems like I've been converted, I mean, look at the sheer beauty of this timber door...

English Heritage your absolutely right, PVC is a blight and a plague we need rid of!

Undercutting

Over the past couple of weeks a large percentage of our appointments have been for whole house installations. What we've also noticed is that our main competitors are majorly undercutting our quotes in order to win the order. With companies already cutting costs, lowering profit margins and reducing fitters wages, how can taking thousands of pounds off the cost of a whole house installation be a sustainable way to do business? This has been occurring regularly. What makes this tactic more confusing, is that when we question the customers to ask if the standard of product is the same as our high standard, the just say 'yes'. This could mean two things, the first is that other companies are just telling customers what they want to hear when they ask the salesmen about the product spec. Or secondly, if other companies have improved their product spec to match ours, they are selling it with hardly any or no profit at all. We know this because after taking all profit and commission out of our quotes, only then do our prices match our major competitor.

Long term, this isn't going to be a tactic that's going to be sustainable, and with the massive hike in glass prices coming next week, I may just sit back and watch the larger companies struggle with their underhand business practises.

Our Excellent Marketing Campaign

We're over half way through contacting all our previous customers advertising some of the new products, innovations and services we have on offer (putting lots of emphasis on our energy A rated windows). We've had some great feedback already and were only half way through. The key, as most have said, is to make sure you diversify and expand your products and services range to attract new business, which is what we have done, to great effect :).

Previous Customers

We're starting a process today of contacting all of our previous customers via a mail-shot, to show them the benefits of our Energy A Rated windows. A lot of companies out there are doing a lot to find new customers, which is all well and good, but the task of signing up new clients in this climate is extremely difficult. Lots of companies sit on a huge previous customer database, it is they, who are already familiar with the company they have already bought from, that provide an excellent source of quick revenue. If you have a good rapport with your customers, like we have, they are more likely to give you repeat business in the future. So give your customers an excuse to upgrade, like we are doing with our A Rated windows. We did something like this 3-4 years ago with another product and we had a great response.

Offers All Wrapped Up In T's & C's

Something came through the post today which i found quite...well if i were a customer I'd think 'whats the point'?

Everest sent a mailshot to where I live, with a flimsy small brochure and a two page cover letter. And it was at the bottom of the second page which left me a bit...well unimpressed to say the least. The letter makes a point to tell the potential customer that they are valid for 'at least' a 35% discount if they were to buy. It goes on to say that there is no hard sell, but then straight away goes on to confirm that this 35% discount applies if you buy immediately, so straight away pressure on the customer. At the bottom of the letter, plenty of fine print. Read on and i found that to qualify for this discount (which is probably added on anyway!) the customer has to place an order of over two grand, is dependent on the product you pick (which probably means the products with the highest profit margins!), have to buy immediately, which most customers don't want to do, and the discount can't be used with any other offers.

Oh and you've got to pay through their finance system, so diddling the customer with high interest payments.

So it got me thinking, for all the effort they make to say that 'hard sell' isn't used, any customer who spent just a few minutes working out how they would qualify for this discount, would realize that it is in fact, a 'hard sell', not a directly vocal hard sell, but one which would bind the customer in the home to make a buying decision, one which they probably would not have liked to make in that manner.

The company I work for has always worked on the premise that we give the customer the keenest price in the first place, no fake discounts by adding then taking away money, just the best price, in writing, definitely no hard sell, then the balls in the customer's court. Honesty being the best policy in my opinion!