How do you price your management services?
- By how badly you need a new client?
- By how many extra resources you happen to have at the moment?
- By how much you would love to wrestle the client away from their current management company?
- By your mood?
- By how much you like the bid solicitor?
- Or perhaps you leave it up to your commissioned sales team to set?
None of these are particularly good ways to price your services. Our bid calculator gives you a much better option. You click four buttons and a bid price is created! How does it know? Well, it has figured it out after decades of experience! Well to be precise, I have figured it out and then I have taught it how………..via complex algorithms.
I know that sounds impossible, but here is the rest of the story. It doesn’t give a precise bid, it offers you a bidding range (which is what we suggest is all that you want to offer early in your bidding process with a potential client).
When you get that phone call inquiring about management services, there are two prevalent facts about the person on the other end of the line. 1) THEY want to ask the question 2) they want to know what you will charge. That’s right, they don’t want to answer a bunch of questions (i.e. How many pools do you have? Do you have a clubhouse?) yet they want to know what you will charge them. So those two conditions don’t work in your favor when you are setting the price for services which will be the anchor for the price they will pay you over the next twenty years, hopefully. That’s ok, ask them three questions, give them a price range, and go on to active and empathetic listening………and agree with them about how badly their current management company is treating them. Ok, I am just kidding there, but I bet you get the point.
Then when you hang up the phone (or finish reading the electronic request for bid), you shoot an email with your follow up including your fee proposal, within a minute or two. Won’t they be impressed with that. Further, the details of your bid and the bidder are all logged without any more action on your part!
Let’s summarize the advantages of our bidding strategy and system.
ADVANTAGE #1:
First, when you bid a prospective client, that is the start of a negotiation. The negotiation is to the end of winning their services with a fee that will allow you to make a reasonable profit. My years of studying negotiation have taught me that generally speaking, when you start discussing numbers in a negotiation, it is better to let them go first. Of course in this case, that is not impossible but it is improbable, for after all they called you to “get a bid”, right? So it is kind of your responsibility to go first. So by quoting a range instead of a price, you hedge that responsibility. You delay the final, firm bid until you have gotten to know them a little better and also, hopefully, gotten to know your competition a little better. I have heard this oh so many times over the years, “Jim, we like you guys, but even the low end of your range is higher than the company we like second best.” Oh really!? That is good information to have…..before you have set your bid. So my response, “well that is a good company, but they are no XYZ Management. At XYZ, we do more and we do it better, indeed we are both higher quantity and higher quality. That is worth something. But I like you too, so I am willing to go toward the low end of our range. Within our range, where are you comfortable?”
ADVANTAGE #2:
Because of the complexity of our bidding system, nobody knows the math of your pricing, not your employees, not your prospective clients, not your competition. Heck, you don’t even know it. Indeed you have set the pricing (by completing our pricing setup page), but you surely can’t state what it is……..no matter how loose your lips may get at the industry social! When someone says, “Well we charge $17 a door, with a minimum of $800, how about you?” Your response is, “Well for us it is not that simple. We use a bidding application, which employs a very complex algorithm to set our prices.” You have therefore not shared your pricing, and you also look pretty smart!
ADVANTAGE #3
To quote Steven Covey, “the speed of trust.” Trust our system and you can avoid the time it takes to calculate out a bid…..at least until you are deeper in the process. Your prospective clients will love it!
ADVANTAGE #4
Consistency of bidding. Again, it is important to bid each prospective client at a proper fee for your services regardless of all of the other conditions which may affect your bidding, if you do not maintain full objectivity. Our system is always objective. Oh, and by the way, perhaps even more important than bidding clients consistently, is bidding the same client consistently. The bid process for an association manager is generally that a couple of board members or a committee is assigned to gather bids. Each individual is asked to go out and bring in a bid or two. Guess what? Often two members from the same association may call the same management company. If the management company has more than one person taking new business inquiries, there is room for trouble. Your company could offer wildly different bids. With our calculator, anyone from that association contacting anyone from your company will get the exact same bid range!
ADVANTAGE #5
The efficiency of creating and logging a bid in your very busy world of community association management will have you jumping with joy. In our system, you create a follow up to the inquiry in only a minute or two and it is customized to the needs of the prospective client. You click a few buttons to add the customized message to the bid that the system calculates, click another button which creates the email in your own email system, you send it off and you are done. Later when they call you back, you pull up your historic log of such activity, and you know exactly what your promises were, in easy to read log format.
Now you can price your services quickly and consistently without giving up your trade secrets and follow up on ALL of the leads not just those that you get around to. And it is so easy. Press the “show me the product” button for a presentation on the product.