How To Handle These 3 Tricky Questions When Your Customers Ask

Things are going swimmingly.

And then…

Your customer decides to ask a question.

Questions, that if you had a pound each time you heard them, you could have already hung your tools up by now?

Annoying aren’t they?

Well, let’s look at them from a different context.

Firstly, let’s reframe them from being annoying to helpful. And I’ll explain why.

They’re helpful, because they give you insight into what your customer is thinking.

The more you understand the customer, the more you have the opportunity to keep them happy.

And as you already know, a happy customer comes back to buy repeatedly.

For any plumbing business owner that has their head screwed on, they know there’s far more money in repeatedly serving a customer over and over, rather than always hunting out new ones.

Everyone’s A Sales Person

Like it or not, anyone in your company from your engineers who stand nose to nose, toes to toes with your customer.

Through to your receptionist when they answer the phone (or your telephone answering service if someone calls out of hours).

These are all salespeople and what they say matters more than you might imagine or hope.

Which means how you handle these questions, moves people nearer, or further away from the next sale.

Here are 3 tricky questions and how you can prepare for them or handle them when asked.

1) “That’s expensive isn’t it?”

The classic. Designed to make you feel bad about the prices you’re charging.

In all fairness, it’s most likely said through a mismatch of expectation. Probably with an underlying hint of jealousy.

Unfortunately, most unknowing customer’s have a tendency to think you’re marching all that money straight to the pub on Friday night.

If they only knew the half of it?

The other reason for asking this is to see if you’ll crack, feel guilty and lower the price.

Hold tight.

So this is technically a ‘sales objection’. You’ve pitched a price and they are saying it’s expensive.

The trick with handling any sales objection is to first take the sting out of it.

You’ll need to make the customer feel at ease and see if from their side. With empathy.

The temptation might be to say “no it isn’t.. I’ve got X,Y and Z to pay for”.

But don’t.

This will just create conflict and this is one of the most unhelpful environments for closing deals.

But by agreeing with them, you reduce tension.

Then you’ll need to move their thoughts away from the price and put it towards another area which they might value.

Like not wasting their time or high quality work.

You could say:

2) “That only took you 45 minutes, why am I being charged for an hour?”

So the answer to this one can be a bit more complicated.

That’s IF you have quoted the customer by the hour or for an hour’s work.

There’s not really much you can say which doesn’t imply you’re not rounding up and making a cheeky extra 15 minutes.

This needs to be fixed, long before the question is asked.

Most plumbers quote based on the hour. The whole ‘time is money’ thing.

Which is fine. It makes sense to have that.

My problem comes with communicating this with customers.

In this instance, it puts the customer in ‘time tracking’ mode.

They’ve paid for 3 hours, they want what they’ve paid for by hook or by crook.

Anything less is shortchanging.

When you go for a haircut, you don’t say I’d like 30 minutes worth of hairdressing please.

You’d be annoyed if you only got 15 minutes worth.

However, if you just buy a fixed price haircut, it’s done when it’s done.

If it’s done well AND was quicker than you thought, it’s even a positive.

I’ve written in more detail here about pricing strategies for plumbers.

3) “I thought your initial diagnosis would be free?”

This is an interesting one.

It crops up regularly until you fix it.

And you can kind of understand it.

The way most ‘services’ work from the customer’s perspective is that you figure out what needs to be done and then they agree to go ahead and pay for it to be done.

Getting this question is really a symptom that you’ve not managed the customer’s expectations well enough.

Now that’s not to say you’ve not mentioned it. Or you’ve not covered it in your terms and conditions, it just says the customer either didn’t hear it, didn’t see it or didn’t understand it.

All of which results in them being disappointed.

The best way to handle this one is to firstly be really clear on how it works.

Ask them to confirm they understand.

The secret is to explain with a good ‘reason’ why this is the case.