[pianotech] Repeat customers

[Chuck Behm]

>Do you ever get the "oh the piano isn't played much" routine only to have
no repat business from a person?  This seems to be my trouble - Marshall<

One final thing you might try, Marshall. When you make an call to a
customer, give the impression that you're time is in demand - even if your
calendar is totally unbooked. You want to avoid what I call the "empty
parking lot syndrome." (When you drive by a restaurant at dinner time and
there are only 2 cars in the parking lot - one the manager, and one the
cook, and you're asking yourself, "Is there a reason no one is eating here?
Let's go across the street where the lot is full.").

If you want to give the customer a sense of how busy you are, say something
of this nature - "Mrs. Jones, if you would like to book a time to have your
piano tuned, I've got 3 specific open time slots that I could stop by. Once
on Wednesday, the 27th at 3:00 in the afternoon. Then again on the 5th of
the next month at 10:15 in the morning. Finally, I'll have a time in the
early evening, say around 6 pm on the 14th of that month. Would you like to
check your calendar to see if any of those times would work with your
schedule?" Have those times and dates written on a note pad so that you can
repeat them back to the customer when she has her calendar in front of her.

There's no falsehood here. It's true that those times are available. Along
with a lot of other time slots as well. However, if you tell your customer
to just pick a time, any time, because you have no other work lined up, that
you're just sitting at home swatting flies, that creates the impression that
your service is not really in demand at all - not the impression that you
want to give.

If she looks at her schedule and says none of those times you've suggested
would work, but she could have you at 2:30 in the afternoon of the 10th say
something like this - "Well, I had planned that time as shop time to get
some work done on a project piano, but if it would work for you, I'll switch
things around a bit. Let's do it then." She'll appreciate the fact that
you're willing to work with her to make things work.

Marshall, when I started in business in 1974 in Boone, Iowa, there were 4
other established, full time tuners within a 15 mile radius. I had to be
inventive to build a customer base. Now, I've got close to 900 active
customers, which with my restoration business and on-going writing projects
for the Journal, for Schaff, and for the piano repair promos I'm doing is as
much as I can handle.  Keep working at it, and someday you'll be passing
along pointers to guys starting out of how you built your business from the
ground up. Best wishes, Chuck
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