Boost Your Contracting Business: Stand Out with Free Follow-Ups

In a competitive contracting space offering free follow ups (touch ups, inspections, adjustments) may set you apart in the space enough to win jobs and even to leverage your current customer base in the future for additional work or referrals.

You have done your diligence and know you have presented your client with a competitive proposal based on your cost based estimating style. Adjusting your profit margin slightly might make your price more alluring to a client, which is a possibility in a tight project market. 

What else can make you stand out from the competition as a service contractor?

Offering free follow up services, the first thought on this might be that it will drag down your business because it is time spent on something already completed… 

But are there any benefits?

The free follow up offer lets your prospective customer know that you believe in what you do and are willing to back it up. In an environment where the margins are shrinking and the calendar is becoming more and more difficult to fill, this can be a key differentiator for your company and push you in front of your competitors.

Customer acquisition costs continue to remain high so why not leverage your current customer base. Email follow ups are great but phone calls and face to face interactions are the key to building the client relationship. 

Offering a free follow up will allow you to get some face time with the customer to allow for some additional work to be upsold. Some examples of Free follow-ups is an annual touch up or inspection offering. These offerings can be well defined to prevent abusers from taking advantage of your generosity, for example, free touch ups could be limited to 1 per year and require that the customer supplies the paint from leftovers or new purchase, a great example from a wildly successful company is Walls By Design’s touch up policy. 

The point is that it’s an opportunity to spend high quality, low pressure time with your past client that can easily lead to more business with that customer or possibly a referral to another NEW client.

Here are 3 key reward opportunities of offering free follow ups

• Sets you apart from the competition to allow you to sell the original job, perhaps without reducing your profit margin
• Gets you in front of the client in the near future to look for other projects with them
• Gets you in front of the client to ask for referrals

The free follow up is a perfect way to make the client connections, sell some additional work to them and even get referrals.

At a recent contractor conference I attended there were a number of businesses offering free follow ups. The general consensus from those businesses was that less than 10% of the original clients took them up on the follow up offer. 50% of the touch up visits led to additional work either with that client or a new one. Based on that data this is going to be an offer that sets you apart but does not consume too much time or money. 

In Estimate Rocket it is simple to establish a follow up rhythm that includes emails, phone calls and text messages. It is also simple to track the clients who have taken you up on the free follow up offer.

The free follow ups set you apart from the competition and allow you to re-establish the client connection to win repeat business and get referrals for future jobs.