Slowly read that headline again. Can you feel the grease in my slicked-back hair and sleaziness oozing out my pores? That’s the feeling customers get when plumbers start the “sales process.”

But high-pressure sales tactics don’t work. The only way to sell jobs is by being thorough and brutally honest with homeowners. There is no magic, just hard work.

Be wary of sales coaches

I never understood the sales coaches of the world. You’re browsing through your feed and up pops these cheesy guys promoting themselves and their sales systems.

Detach for a minute. Most of the guys have become millionaires selling their ideas about how to become millionaires. You might rebut and say, “Well, they’re good at selling themselves, right?” The answer is sort of. They are not great salesmen of tangible products. They’re very good at eye-catching phrases, eye-catching images, and using combinations of tactics to close the online sale. If you are starting an e-commerce platform online you would be smart to listen to some of these guys. If you are talking to a customer at their dinner table about a $20,000 excavation, it’s not the time to put on a funny hat and make it rain money around their kitchen to catch their attention.

You must be careful with the “sales process” stuff. Are there great sales coaches out there who can help you talk to customers about big-money tickets? Absolutely, and you can use them to leverage your average tickets. Comb over the content, add the strategies and tactics to your skill set, and get better with the intricacies of talking to customers. The thing to keep in mind is to use the information you gather to help you get comfortable talking to customers about money; not use it to pin customers into a corner and manipulate them into buying something they don’t need. Make sure you separate the work that needs to be done and the unnecessary work that gets contractors in trouble.

Be brutally honest

It sounds a bit old fashioned, but being honest with people works every time.

You open a drain, run the sewer camera, and find a rotten cast iron pipe that runs the entire length of the house under slab. Difficult job, difficult terrain, big-money job. Most guys think “There’s no way I’m telling the customer about this. They will have a meltdown.” Or “I’ll tell them about it and tell them if it happens again give us a call”. But neither one of those gives the customer a permanent solution. You are a professional, and you need to give them a quote to fix the old piping. Whether that means a liner or an excavation.

Run into a water heater with a leaking T&P valve? Do a thorough job and check the water pressure of the building. Do they need the pressure regulated? Do they have a properly sized and working expansion tank? How old is the water heater? Has it been expanding, contracting and cracking under these extreme pressures? Don’t avoid discussing your concerns with the homeowner. You’re a doctor doing a checkup on their system. Discuss the concerns and be brutally honest.

The conversation might go like this: “Ma’am I’d like to discuss your problems down there. The water pressure in your house is excessively high. The water heater itself is acting as an expansion tank which over time easily cracks the lining of the tank. The T&P valve is leaking, and your unit is over 10 years old. I can either install an expansion tank and pray that it gets you by for an unknown amount of time, or we can start fresh and put in a new system.”

That’s it. There are no high-pressure sales tactics or lies. Just be honest and give the customer options. The customer may then ask what you would do in your own house. The key again is to be honest. What would you do in your own house?

Don’t wear blinders

The other way to sell more is to not go in with blinders on.

The key is to be honest and not tramp around the whole house looking for problems. On the other hand, don’t ignore obvious repairs that need to be made. Let’s say you have a customer who wants a new kitchen faucet, and you notice the water shutoff valves don’t shut off all the way, the sink drain is very slow, and the chrome trap looks like you can poke your finger right through it. The conversation would be, “Ma’am I just wanted to point out a few things I noticed under your sink. The old chrome trap looks like it’s going to go soon, the emergency shutoff valves don’t shut off all the way and your drain is slow. Do you want me to give you a price to knock all this out now or do you want me to just replace the faucet and leave it as is?”

Don’t be the guy who ignores these issues and gets a callback or an angry customer calling you out because you should have told them something. Do a thorough job, every time, and “sales” will simply come rolling in.

Remember that it’s not your decision to make and it’s not your money. Your job is to do a professional job, give the customer honest repair options and facts, and then execute the job after the customer makes a well-informed decision.

About the Author

Anthony Pacilla is a registered master plumber for McVehil Plumbing in Washington, Pennsylvania. He has over two decades of experience in the plumbing and HVAC trades and has a bachelor’s in business and economics from Thiel College.