BSGA leaders at The Sign Show discuss why sign makers should sell their expertise rather than their discounts
In the podcast booth at The Sign Show, BSGA chairman Craig Brown, BSGA president David Allen of Allen Signs and director Lawrence Green of Greens the Signmakers join Jack Gocher to tackle a question members keep raising. When a customer pushes back on price, too many sign makers knock a percentage off the bill rather than talk about value, and the panel agrees that habit hurts the whole industry.
Members often use the association as a sounding board, and lately the phone has been busy. “I’ve probably had more calls over the last six to eight weeks than I remember in quite a while, from people coming up against price challenges. Rather than challenging the customer’s perception, people are going straight to taking a percentage off the bill, and I always worry that’s the race to the bottom we all talk about,” says Craig.
Selling expertise, not a commodity
Craig was taught to talk about the product and the specification first, perhaps changing the materials or making a sign slightly smaller to meet the client’s budget. He asks, “Is it me being old fashioned, or is it just that we’re going for the easiest solution?”
David believes the industry doesn’t help itself because it undervalues what it produces. “When customers talk to us about price and say they’ve seen it cheaper somewhere else, the people you’re competing against are selling it as a commodity,” he says. He points out that an architect would never set out to win a job on price, relying instead on expertise and knowledge, and sees no reason why sign makers should behave differently.
Lawrence is fortunate that most of his customers understand the value of a service that makes their lives easier, though not all of them. “We do have our fair share of customers where it is very much down to price,” he admits. Some of those were big accounts. “We were effectively saving them a member of staff with the amount of extra work we were doing, and they couldn’t see that, so we have walked away from working with them,” Lawrence explains.
Read the brief before you cut the price
Among the businesses Craig speaks to, from an owner plus one to firms approaching a seven figure turnover, most quote from a fixed set of materials they know well. “So you’re specifying a material that lasts five years, a polymeric film perhaps, where actually the life of the thing they want is only 12 months,” he says. Looking at alternatives takes effort, but it offers an easier answer than cutting the price.
The reverse happens too. On one large project, three sign makers are pricing every site individually, and when the customer quoted a lower rival figure, the project manager asked questions instead of matching it. “Are they the same? Is it double sided like ours? Is it needed? We went the clarification route and had a good outcome,” says David.
Underspecified work leaves its mark on the high street. At an NHS Trust site in Norwich, signage specified to last seven to ten years has shrunk and split after five, with the laminate the likely culprit. “Why hasn’t the owner gone back to the original provider to challenge them on a sign that is failing and looks absolutely awful? To me, that damages us all,” Craig asks.
None of this is new. “We’re talking about the same things that were going on when my dad was in business, picking a monomeric film when it should have been a polymeric,” David says. The panel’s answer to the sharp pencil is a sharper conversation about the brief, the materials and the value behind every quote.
David concludes, “We have to be multiskilled to do what we do, whether it’s handling a planning application or doing design work for people. All of those skills have a value, and as an industry we tend to chuck them in for free.”
