Sell Better by Understanding Today's Consumer Better

You better not be doing business as usual. Industry advisor Mark Richardson says today's remodeling clients have changed significantly. Are you adjusting your sales and business approaches to meet potential clients where they are?

"You've got to break down some of these assumptions that you have, if you're going to be more successful," says Richardson.

To break down these assumptions and understand the consumers of today, Richardson offers several tips and background insight. The first one is "Don't judge a book by its cover." This means that you need to stop judging a lead by its home, its cars, its home value, and its location.

Listen to this episode, "Consumers Aren't What They Used To Be," to hear all of Richardson's insights:

Transcript:

Mark Richardson: Remodeling has become fairly complex both in terms of certainly the projects in the process, but also the consumer themselves. You know, remodeling has always kind of responded to what's happening in terms of the marketplace, but specifically to consumer sentiment.

Today I want to talk about a topic that is really important as you think kind of long term about how the consumer is adjusting and pivoting and changing you know, in the title is, the prospect ain't what they used to be, you know, all prospects are not created equal. So as you think about this topic, if you don't really understand kind of specifically who the target who's in the bullseye, so to speak of your client and your prospect, chances are you're not going to be very successful.

Now, I don't think for a second that consumers have changed, you know, 30-40 degrees, but I do think they've adjusted one or two degrees. Now, what is one or two degrees mean? If I'm flying from New York, down to Miami, one degree off means that flight would put me in Cuba, so you don't have to necessarily be off by too much to really miss the mark.

So today, what I want to do is I want to take kind of a little bit of time to reflect on history going back roughly the last 20 years or so, and kind of walk you through at least what I've seen both in the trenches as well as from a higher level that after that, I want to talk about some data data that really supports who the consumer is today in the prospects and then give you a few tips and techniques of how do you really adjust your specific game to adjust to this new consumer.

So starting a little bit with history history going back, let's say to 2004/2005. Now, those were in many ways we call sometimes the gogo times they were the phone was ringing off the hook. We had pricing that was nicely moving up, profitability was very strong. I think for the most part, both the consumer and the remodeler was quite happy with the process that was going on.

Now, if you really get back to the why was that? Well, the leading driver at that time, in addition to just general consumer confidence was home appreciation. In many of the markets in the country, we were seeing literally as much as double digit home appreciation on an annualized basis.

So imagine for example, you might have had a home in the Midwest, and it was a $500,000 home. We're literally in the course of developing that concepts design putting together the parts and pieces that that home value went from 500 to 550. Then the following year to a little over 600.

So you were seeing a level of home appreciation that was going on that quite frankly didn't really matter how much the projects costs because just purely appreciation of the homes. Homeowners would have the equity and be able to get the cost back. 

Listen to the full episode above.