Six Months Later

This weekend, we put the big blue chair back in the front of my house.

It is both hard and easy at the same time to believe that Hurricane Sandy hit the south shore of Long Island six months ago. So much has been has been accomplished yet so much more needs to be done.

So the chair going back in front of the house is important because for the first time in six months, there are no damaged cars, damaged washer/dryer, storage pods or other remnants of the storm blocking the space between the street and my front door.

It took until this past week to repair all of the damage to my house and relative to most of the people in my neighborhood, we really didn’t have all of that much to fix.

Still, and since this is a sales and marketing column, there were some sales lessons to be learned from the process.

But before we get to those, I want to thank my friends in the mortgage community for your offers of help and expressions of concern.

And it didn’t hurt that my knowledge of housing finance, built up from years of talking with you, didn’t hurt when it came to dealing with certain issues.

I even picked up new bits of knowledge. The New York Association of Mortgage Brokers at their delayed annual conference in November had a speaker from the Small Business Administration and I learned things about its loan process and how it fit with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now for those sales lessons. The first is respond to potential clients in both a timely manner and in the manner they wish to be contacted. We spoke with three contractors about doing the work on my house, one which we did work with before (and we liked his work) and two others being used by friends who were happy with the job being done.

The contractor we worked with before, we knew going in was not going to be the low bidder. But he is the one who got the job.

Why? Because he responded to our request in a timely manner. Plus, he sent us the written estimate by email. Contractor No. 2 never sent us a written estimate at all and Contractor No. 3 gave us an estimate at the last possible moment, and he dropped it off, rather than send it by email.

Lesson No. 2 is when your client calls with concerns about the process, take the time to respond. We had our contractor’s cell phone and we had some (well at least in our minds) important questions.

The contractor got back to us the next day and was able to address our concerns and as a result alleviated a lot of anxiety. Yes there were things we felt that could have gone better, but there were also items outside of the scope of work that he took care of. We recommended him to people after the first time we used him (to renovate a bathroom) and we are very likely to recommend him again.