PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. Today I’m going to do a quick solo podcast. Because this has been requested several times by a lot of home inspectors, how to upsell services. And this is an important one. Because, as I said on this podcast before, the home inspection is our base fee, where we really make money, where we make our living and build a business off of, are our ancillary services. So first of all, if you’re listening to this, and you don’t have ancillary services, which some home inspectors don’t, or you have a very limited number, now’s the time to start building it up, the market still isn’t quite as hot as we’d like it to be for us as home inspectors. So let’s take that time build up ancillary services, fill a need in the market and provide a great service. So those of us who do offer additional services, how do we upsell those? Well, let’s take some quick points. And we’ll go through the very basic process and a couple of finer tune points.

First of all, this one’s easy. And I have mentioned this before, be awesome. We should never upsell a service that we’re not overly qualified for. If we offer septic inspections, we should be the best septic inspector in the area. If we offer thermal imaging, we should just be overqualified for our job. Because the basis of sales is not sales, the best salesmen never have to sell hard, because they believe in what their product is, they know their product is awesome and that the people they’re talking to needs it. So when you have that combination, you never have to sell anything, because the confidence and the sales just comes out of you. So remember that, be awesome. Be confident in what you’re doing. And you’ll never have to sell a day in your life because it’ll just happen. So now that we’re done with that little soapbox speech about being awesome, let’s go to some finer points.

The second one is not to try to sell everything at once. Have you ever been to a restaurant and I use restaurant illustrations a lot in this podcast, but maybe I just like food too much. But I’ve been to a restaurant before where they tried to upsell everything on me. It wasn’t actually that long ago, I went and they had this great chicken sandwich at this little bistro type place that I like. And I go there and they tried to sell me on these fancy deviled eggs and a whole bunch of other foods. And here’s 15 specials. And you know what I had a maximum that I would have gone for it. The deviled egg sounded good. And so did the soup. But then he listed five other things. So then I’m like, okay, whatever just I came here for the chicken sandwich, just give me that. So he actually took my baseline of what I was willing to buy and lowered it. That means people come to us with what we call their original need, which is a home inspection, they may not even think about all the other services we offer. So when they first contact us, then is not the time to mention all of our services, to try to upsell them on all of them, which sounds counterintuitive, but it lowers the max value of that prospective sale. They came to us for home inspection, we could hypothetically sell them a sewer scope and termite inspection. But we, if we offer 18 services, now they bring it right back down, they only want the home inspection or nothing at all. So don’t try to sell everything all at once. Sales is not a book of tricks. It is a human process where you connect with people. And where you connect with people, where we connect with people is to speak to their original need, their original need was home inspections.

So that leads us to our third point, stick to staple services. What are staple services? Well, the market determines that, so in my market, we call them the big three or at least I do anyways. It’s home inspections, wood destroying insect, and radon. If you offer septic inspections, septic, everything else is considered an add-on service, so when people call us we sell them those big three. Then once we do we might be able to sneak in a about a sewer scope. Hey, how about a well test? And we do that by asking questions and leading to them, them to the conclusion that they need that, oh, do you have a well? Oh, okay. Do you already have a well inspector coming to look at the well? No. Okay, if you want, no pressure, but we offer professional well testing services. That is also what we call soft touch sales. We’re not hard selling, hard selling gets us nowhere. That’s why people make fun of the quintessential car salesman. So don’t try to sell everything at once. We’ll get to when we sell the rest of our services in a little bit. The initial call, stick to staple services. Try to find your big three, what are your big three? Is it sewer scope, home inspection and thermal imaging? Is it different combination of different services, wind mit and four point with a home inspection? Whatever it happens to be find your staple services. Once you have that person in the restaurant so to speak, then you can sell other things. That waiter would have been a lot more successful with me if he came back after the appetizer, and said, hey, those deviled eggs were really good, weren’t they? I tell you what, I wasn’t gonna tell you this before. But half off if you get this other appetizer, I love it. Oh, yeah, sure. Let’s try that. Or hey, did you hear about our dessert? Do that at the end of the meal, there’s a reason why they don’t ask for your dessert at the beginning of the meal. Wait till the end, the upsell comes sometimes later on.

So the fourth point is patience. And this is where we fail a lot, is patience, right, waiting for the right time. And you’re going to hear this woven in, we’ve already woven it in a little bit. And we’re going to weave it in a little bit afterwards. The right time matters. So for instance, we find that we’re very successful selling sewer scopes, not before the inspection, but on the inspection. So while we’re on the inspection, and people are looking at this cast iron pipe that could be Orangeburg piping, and just is there a problem in there, we say, well, you know, if you’d like, we could always do a sewer scope, that will give you a video record of what’s in there and find any of these expensive issues. That is a much better sale than trying to sell it before the inspection. So we’re selling the dessert after the meal. So remember waiting for the right time.

So let’s talk about things about timing and also how to sell it. So the next one ties in well, making it their idea, evidence based sales. That’s extremely important. And we just talked about that with a sewer scope. We did evidence based sales, trying to describe to someone in an email or phone, on a phone call or anything like that, it’s really hard to describe why a sewer scope is important, we’re just going to pick on that one additional service, really hard to describe that. And it takes a lot, a lot of words. And it takes a lot of mental imagery on the other person’s end. But now, when you’re all standing there on the home inspection, they’re already vested, they’re staring at this big cast iron pipe and an unknown world. And you have the solution for making that world now known, what’s underground in that pipe? That is a much easier sales. That’s like being on the road. And somebody’s trying to sell you a new tire before you go on the road. But now you’re sitting there, and your tire’s flat and somebody tries to sell you a tire. Yeah, you’re much more apt to buy that tire now, evidence based sales. So try to think about when your services are the most sellable. Is it when you’re on site starting a septic inspection? Oh, I see you have a well, we could do well yield test while we’re here, because we have to run the water anyways. Oh, sure. Yeah, that’s an easy upsell. We don’t have to sell everything. It’s not written in stone. When we get there that we’re going to do XYZ, we can always upsell on site. And sometimes that is the best time to upsell.

Another thing that we can do is an email before the inspection with a full list of our services. We don’t want to take my point at the beginning saying we never give them a full list of our services. But wait for the right time. My favorite time is like the day before the inspection, an email goes out. Looking forward to your inspection. Thank you very much for choosing us. Here’s a full list of our services in case you need something else. A lot of the times we get a call and say hey, you know, can you add this on or an email back, oh, yeah, you know what? I forgot. We do have a septic system. Can you guys do that while you’re here? That’s a great practice for upselling services.

This one. Point number seven, is very much my opinion. And I’m probably going to get a lot of feedback. But that’s okay. I love that. Don’t do package deals. I hate package deals. I have seen inspectors for the past over a decade, try to put package deals on their website, get the gold package, it’s home inspection, radon and septic. Get the premier package. It’s this plus this and this and this. First of all, it tends to be a little bit confusing. And second of all, it kind of bottlenecks our sales, you know, if we have a gold, silver, and platinum package, really hard to add things on a la carte, we could upgrade their package, but then we have to go over and look at it again. And maybe some things in the package don’t apply to that home or maybe they have a RADON Mitigation System already. So none of the package really fit in so they really don’t want a radon test. A la carte is probably the best sales for our industry. And I learned that a long time ago from not only my own companies but from other home inspectors. I don’t think I have one website client, maybe a couple left at most, that still do package deals because they all ended up the same way, really hard to upsell services. And then one of the worst things that happens is you upsell them on some services on site. Then they go back and they see well they could have just given me the platinum package and now they’re upset. So a la carte tends to be best. We can do base packages. So I have a base package. If you get home inspection with our companies, you automatically get a wood destroying insect inspection. We do not differentiate it, we do not take it out, we do not sell it separately, it is what it is, then everything else is an add on to that, you can try that. But either way, try not to do the package deals. Again, that’s just my opinion, based on data that I’ve seen, basically is just not great for sales, A la carte allows us to have greater end results.

So the eighth point, sell what people want, and not what you want. That’s an important one. I see a lot of home inspectors make the mistake of getting really excited about adding on a service. But then nobody wants it. Oh, I tried to sell energy audits, but nobody wanted that, oh, I tried to sell, you know, tank sweeps. Nobody wanted that. I tried to sell, they did services that sounded good in concept or something that they were interested in. But the market didn’t want it. We may want to do thermal imaging inspections. That’s a good example. I see a lot of inspectors say, well, I want to upsell full thermal scans of an entire building. All right, cool. Is there demand in your market? Could you create a demand in your market for it? Have you been trying to sell it for a year and nobody’s bought what you’re selling? Could it be maybe that we’re missing out on something else, like the market may want septic inspections? Well, I don’t want to do those? Or, you know, I don’t like to have to dig in the inspection. What about this? What about liability? We’re trying to sell what we want to sell instead of what the market wants. Businesses have made that mistake for 1000s of years, they think they want Pepsi clear soda, remember that from the 90s. And then it disappeared, instead of giving people what they really, really want. So find out first what your market wants. And then whether or not we want to do it, at least look into it as an add on service. And before we add on a service, try to get some market information. Is there a gap in the industry? Is there other people providing the service outside of a home inspection? And I mentioned septic inspections a lot because years ago when we started doing them, no other home inspectors were really doing them. And there was another industry coming in doing septic inspections. And it was like, well, why have that other industry come in when we can do it, saw the gap, saw the need, created an add on service. And we became awesome at it. Do we see the things that we want to sell really being the things that the market wants? That’s what we have to ask ourselves.

Now those are some basic sales things. My favorite out of it being the evidence based sales, basically onsite sales, they tend to be the easiest close. But if you take all this information, an email with a list of our services day before the inspection, try not to sell everything up front but find our big three, so to speak, speak to their original need, always be anchored in the home inspection as the inspection that they called about. And then build off of that instead of talking about everything else except for the home inspection.

Then on the last point here, we’re going to talk about real quick, not to forget follow up. Now a lot of times we think okay, inspection is over, they didn’t get my ancillary services, inspection done. That’s it, and move on. It’s not the case. So emails are cheap. Have a standard email if you use our app, Inspector Toolbelt, have a follow up email a day or two later after the inspection, and send them a full list of your services again. What’s happened many times to me is I’ll go and do a home inspection and they didn’t want the radon test. Now they’re calling me back. Ian, you know what, I found out, my lender requires it, can you come back and do a radon test? Thanks for the email reminder. Or you know what, the septic guy never showed. Can you guys come back and do a full septic inspection? Yeah, sure, happy to. Follow up emails and soft touch. You notice through this whole process, we never did a hard sale pitch, no hard sales. My opinion has always been soft touch sales all the way through the entire process and then a little bit afterward. If we follow these basic rules, it will help us to upsell our services.

So as always, thank you for listening into Inspector Toolbelt Talk. I’m your host, Ian. And we’ll see you next week.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.