When to bite your tongue........

[smokin68]

Went to lowes today for some supplies, old man about 10 ft away from me asking the aisle guy about air conditioning. Needs a whole house system. Guy tells him to go to local hvac company...good advise so far. Old man asks if any other stores carry them, like Home Depot. Guy says no, only Sears might. Home Depot here is set up with Trane. Either lying to old man or mis-informed. I didn't say anything, but was biting my tongue, but figured not my place. Having mixed thoughts though......

[coolwhip]

Home Depot+Trane=

[bootlen]

Home Depot+Trane=

Roger that!

[Special-K]

I was at Home Depot awhile back and overheard a sales rep talking to a customer. Customer told him he had X square feet of living space-sales rep said "oh you need a X ton unit".

And all this time I though a load calc was important. (sarcasm alert)

[coordinatesales]

That's the kind of stuff that got us into Home Depot.

huh you say?


The local HD stores were tired of problems with their multiple contractors so the local Trane distributer asked us to take over. It's been much better since. We have process's in place that insure a load calc is done (it must be submitted with any HD sale) and all jobs are reviewed by the boss. Not every problem can be quickly solved since the lead generators in the HD stores know very little about HVAC so we tell them to give as little info as possible and let me talk to and inform the customer.

[bootlen]

I've been on many HD leads. Most were unqualified. Something around 90%. I'd go to the home and find systems sometimes less than a year old. HO was just curious if they got a good deal on the system they had put in 6 months prior.

We don't deal with HD anymore.

[Trublshter]

At our local Home Depot I've usually seen people hanging around outside that have bought a unit and were disgusted by the quote given by a recommended contractor and you see them eyeing customers to see if they're driving service trucks and approached them to see if they will do the work. I had that happen to me a couple of times. I overheard some of the conversations. Pretty good entertainment.

[otto]

I like it when I go in there and get solicited for an hvac quote. If I have the time I will mess with them for a bit.

[Trublshter]

Oh, you mean like ask them if they have well or city water so's you can size the reversing valve and electric emergency heat. LOL.

[lolson]

the big box want our buisness but i bite my toung to. but like otto i love giving a time for a quote in front of them

[coordinatesales]

I've been on many HD leads. Most were unqualified. Something around 90%. I'd go to the home and find systems sometimes less than a year old. HO was just curious if they got a good deal on the system they had put in 6 months prior.

We don't deal with HD anymore.

We've run into that a lot too. That's part of what I do is screen the leads before a consultant actually goes out. Home Depot says they have almost a 20% closing rate. I don't see how. Ours is much lower for HD although our closing rate on leads we generate ourselves is around 50-60%.

[bootlen]

When we dealt with HD, our total leads were about 10% from HD. Out of HD, about 20% were legit leads. Out of those, about 20% were qualified as buyers through HD. Do the math...less than 1/2% of our total sales was HD. Simply not worth the trouble.

From April through September, I typically present about 3-1/2 proposals a day. My rate of successful sales from proposals is around 60%. Naturally, that raw drops off in the off-season but you can see how HD leads wasted a lot of my time.

[midhvac]

I get that same feeling when I see the HO's in the filter aisle at Homo Depot.

I wanna say "NO! Not the True Blue PLEATED one!"