[Rick Carver]

Voodoo,,, I agree with exactly what you posted. Opportunity for any service industry company may come in many forms. Up selling or add on's are natural and most customers would admit,,,, I bet,,,, expect it. I know I do when I am getting quotes on projects here.

I think that may be why our sales did so well. I didn't use our standard 30 day warranty as a up sale,,,,,,, but we did with our " OPTIONAL" extended warranty and it worked in several positive ways,,,,
First it truly proved that honesty & professionalism with this certain quote is unquestionable. Second, when (not as often as you would expect) the warranty option was questioned it gave our sales staff a UNIQUE opportunity to explain how all warranties work in reallity and that the correct way to price and contract it in the agreement,,,,, normally in my market,,,, customers were impressed. Why? (third) because it cast the light on companies who didn't maybe understand their own cost for a warranty and/or their ability to service the warranty in the future,,,,,, of course this would become a customers concern without US ever having to say a negative word about our competition.

We also used the warranty for negotiating on many bids. Like,,,, instead of our 30 day standard we would offer a 60 day standard, or maybe instead of charging for any extended warranty (after showing the TRUE cost for this warranty) we instead offered a maint. program for XXX months where the 100% plant guarantee that we installed would be in effect as long as we had the maint contract,,,,, and we had a chance to show off our TLC service's,,,,,, this ended up getting us multi year contracts with customers who originally only wanted an installation and then took advantage of a offer from us.

There are so many variations to offer warranties that makes the customer and company equall in satisifaction.

We would never argue why we wouldn't include a no hassle industry standard one year warranty, we only asked if they wanted one,,,, and if so,,,, what it would actually cost and what they could expect from us is all. That by itself was so different in our market that it made us stand out.


Rick Carver