Anchoring Your Prices
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Anchoring prices is a powerful technique we can use to help dictate where our transaction will go next!
PDR Estimate Estimating Software
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Shane Jacks: Are you trying to stay on the cutting edge of paintless dent removal when it comes to your tools? If so, you need to make sure you have two things in your arsenal. One is Shane Jack’s Jackhammer Blending Hammer. Find it at blendinghammerpdr.com. If you want to learn blending, we’ve got an awesome tutorial to go along with the hammer right there on the site. You’re going to love it, you’re going to learn something, and you’re going to get better and make money. In addition to the hammer, if you are doing any glue pulling, you need to have the Black Plague Crease Tabs. It’s a six-piece crease pulling set. The two largest are absolute monsters. They are going to pull out collision damage like nothing else you’ve got available, and the smaller sizes are going to be for the normal everyday kind of door edges and minor minor collision dents in a dog leg in a bottom of a door. I’m telling you guys, it is going to change the way you do your repairs when you have the cutting edge tools, and these are two of them. Blackplaguepdr.com, blendinghammerpdr.com, check out the sites, guys. Bring yourselves into the 21st century.
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Shane Jacks: Hi, I am not Keith Cosentino but I am Shane Jacks, and this is the PDR College podcast, where I am coming at you with noises from my mouth instead of music because when Keith Cosentino isn’t here, it all falls apart. The proverbial poo hits the fan. But we’re still going to bring it here today boys, because I am Shane Jacks, and we are going to bring you the tools, the tips, the techniques, the things you need to kick that old, ugly, useless girlfriend, mediocrity, out of your life forever. Why? Because she can’t cook, and we don’t need her anymore anyway, boys. Today I want to discuss something that came across a post that I saw, and it really hit home with me, and it is an idea called anchoring. And anchoring, we see and experiencing anchoring all around us all of the time, in every store we go into, every restaurant, everywhere we go where we’re going to buy something, or even outside of that.
Billboards, advertisements, we see anchoring. And anchoring is a mental bias that our brain performs on us. And according to some, it’s even at times when we don’t want it to, okay? Again, this topic was brought up to me by a gentleman, and it really intrigued me when it came up because it is something that you may be doing and that I am doing, that Keith does, that most of us are doing whether we know it or not, actually. We are anchoring our prices in the heads of our customers, okay? At all times, we are anchoring the value that they place on our service. In 1974 these two cognitive psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, they identified what is known as anchoring heuristic. And again, what it is is our brain tells us what something is worth based on numbers or on things that are going on around us. And here are a few examples of anchoring in action. Multiple unit pricing.
They did a study on how multiple unit pricing increases supermarket sales. So when you go into a supermarket and you see, “On sale, four rolls of bathroom tissue for $2.00,” versus, “On sale, $.50 a roll,” in this experiment, it showed that multiple unit pricing, the four rolls for $2.00 versus the $.50 per roll is the same exact price. But they found that the multiple unit pricing performed 40 percent better than the single unit pricing. 40 percent. That is a huge huge huge chunk, and it’s the same product and they should perform the same because their price is the same, but your brain fixes the number four, in this case, as the anchor. Pretty interesting stuff. Another study done – this may get a little boring for you. This won’t take but a couple of minutes, I promise. Another study done was done on purchase quantity limits. So they put a bunch of cans of Campbell’s soup at the end of an aisle and they put a label above it reading, “Limit 12 per customer.”
Most people think that this limit is there to protect the store, to protect the people that are selling things, but it’s actually not that. It’s an anchoring technique used to sell more product to you. So they advertise it for the same price, $.79 per can, they put it in another area of the store also with no limit. No 12 cans per person limit. But on the limit of 12 per person aisle, the result showed that the purchase limits increased sales a ton. The people that were on the aisle where there were no limits, $.79 a can, they bought an average of 3.3 cans of soup, and the buyers with the limit of 12 purchased an average of seven cans of soup when that 12 can per person limit was put up there. So more than double the sales of this soup simply by putting a sign above it that says, “Limit 12 cans per customer.”
What your brain is doing there is anchoring the number 12 and it adjusts downward. On the aisle where it’s $.79 per can and there are no limits, your brain anchors on the $.79 per can sale, and you think, “I need 3.3 cans,” on average. And whenever they anchor, “Limit 12 per person,” your brain automatically uses the number 12 as an anchor. Pretty interesting stuff. More than double their soup can sales. And this video that I was speaking of earlier that brought this up, this link will be added to the podcast. You’ll be able to check out this link. It was a Prudential commercial, Prudential Insurance commercial, and the salesman is selling this, it looks kind of like a Dent Donk. If you guys don’t know who Dent Donk is, you are way behind the times. Look up Dent Donk videos. There are four or five on there I believe. Maybe more, but I know four or five for sure are on there.
But this pillow that is supposed to help you sleep, you’ve got this little opening for your mouth and nose so you can breathe and then the ears are covered up with these big Dent Donk looking side pieces, and he unveils this thing in front of people and the look on their face is pretty cool in itself, so you need to watch this video on this sleep anywhere pillow. So on this Prudential advertisement based on anchoring, when the salesman anchored the price, all he does is unveil it and he goes, “How much do you think this is going to sell for? $150.00?” The people automatically adjusted downward from the $150.00 and their average price, their average value placed on that pillow was $121.00. So different people, he unveils it, and he says, “How much do you think this pillow is worth? $50.00?” The people automatically adjust upwards a bit, use the number 50 as an anchor, and they ended at $54.00.
So the difference between the value just from these salesman, the gentleman unveiling this pillow, when he recommends $150.00 as the starting price point, they adjust downward a bit to $121.00. When he anchors $50.00, they adjust upwards to $54.00. That is a huge difference. $121.00 and $54.00 simply from a man saying, “How much do you think this is worth?” And giving a random number. So what our brains do here is they automatically anchor on the number that he gives. Again, this is pretty interesting stuff if you’re a nerd, like myself, but anyway, we can learn a lot from this price anchoring if we will just listen. So after this, they carried the experiment on just a little bit further. He gives more info when he unveils it and he sales it as a valuable product without really putting a price on the product.
He goes, “How much do you think this will sell for? It is hand-made in Spain of high quality fabrics, it’s hypo-allergenic, it’s machine washable,” and this automatically made their initial value of this product higher, because he’s anchoring it with valuable information as to what it’s made of and what it’s used for. So he’s anchoring, in many different ways here, the salesman that is unveiling this pillow, he’s anchoring with price and then he’s anchoring with quality. Another video, again this will be on the site, on pdrcollege.com, on our podcast, is a video called Cakes of Deception. And I had seen this video about a month or two ago, I think it was, and I found it pretty interesting also. And this was on, I believe, Brain Games is the – yeah, it was Brain Games, that’s it. I’ve got it pulled up right here.
It’s Brain Games on National Geographic channel. It’s a very interesting show and it dissects why your brain does what it does and gives you information that you can use. If you guys haven’t seen this, it is a really cool show to watch if you’re into that kind of thing and understanding why people think the way they do. Because, as salesmen, we need to know, and as marketers, we need to know what people are thinking and why they are thinking it and why they react the way they do to different situations. So in this Cakes of Deception video on Brain Games, they go to it looks like a pier, I believe, if I remember correctly. They go to this pier and they tell people that they’re opening up a cake shop and that they’re asking people to taste their two different kind of cake, and the people that are tasting the cake have no idea they’re in an experiment of course. And they have two different cakes.
And one is a $15.00 cake and one is a $55.00 cake. Now they are anchoring the price at $15.00 and $55.00 but they’re doing a little something more here with this experiment. What they’re doing is they’re anchoring your idea of value based on the price of the cake, based on your perception of what the value should be based on price. So when you walk up to a cake stand, the same people make the cake, and they say, “Hey, we’ve got a $15.00 cake and we’ve got a $55.00 cake,” and they’re giving you a free slice, which one are you going to want to taste first? Me personally, I’m going to hit the $55.00 cake first because I perceive that it’s going to be a better cake. The people tried both cakes, and it was really cool to see what happened with these cakes, and what happened to people’s perception of value of the cakes when they tasted them. So whenever the people tasted the $15.00 cakes, it was almost all exactly the same comments and reactions. Whenever you think of cake, there are a couple of things a cake can be, in my opinion.
I’m kind of a foodie of sorts. Not terribly, I’m not a critic by any means, but I do love food, and I like a lot of different varieties of food. I will eat dang near anything once, and I know what the difference is between a good oyster and a bad oyster. So I really really do love food. So there’s a few things that a cake can be to make it good, and the same thing in the opposite can make it a bad cake. The first thing people think of when they think of a bad cake versus a good cake, a bad cake is dry. A good cake is moist. Is it wet? No, but it is moist and it has a correct consistency and texture in your mouth. So when people tried this $15.00 cake, almost every single one, if I remember correctly only one guy said something about the frosting.
This was up in Jersey or something. He said, “There’s not enough frosting on the cake.” But most everyone else basically lined up, step in step, with one another, and said, “It’s too dry. It’s a little dry. Too dry.” And it was almost every single person. Then when they were given the $55.00 cake, they all said, “Oh, this is so much better. This cake is more moist.” The guy that said, “Not enough frosting,” he said on the next cake, on the $55.00 cake, he goes, “Oh, much better, much better. More frosting is a better cake.” The thing about it is they were both the same exact cake. One of them was square, one of them was round. They had the same amount of icing on them. They were cooked in the same oven at the same exact time. They were the exact same cake, which is interesting. So they let the people in. The jig was up after they told people, “Look, these are the exact same cake.” And wouldn’t you know, even after being told it’s the exact same cake, their brains were anchored to the $55.00.
No matter what facts they were given after that, their brains told them that that $55.00 cake was better. On the video you will see they have several people who said, “No, that $55.00 cake was better,” even after being told they were cooked at the same exact time in the same exact oven, everything was identical, their brains had tricked them into anchoring onto that $55.00 price point and it told them that the cake was better. Our brains are very intricate, very finely tuned, but you can manipulate the brain into thinking what you want it to think. I know you can see where we’re going here, so we’re going to get into that here in a minute. But again, both of these links to these videos will be posted. So let me ask you. Think of some things, right now, some anchors that you have been given over time in your life. It’s literally daily that we are given anchors. Every restaurant we walk into, you walk into a McDonald’s, it is bright red and yellow and there are reasons for that.
That is a brain game in itself. From what I understand, red makes you want to eat quickly and get out. McDonald’s and many many other fast food joints use red as a play, a game to play on your brain to get you in and get you out quickly. You’ve never thought of it probably, unless you’ve heard this before, but that is what that red is for. Now you may have owned a restaurant in the past or known somebody and they used red and had no idea why they were using red, and that’s fine also. But studies have shown that you get in and get out quicker when red is used. And those bright colors, they don’t really speak value into my mind. So think of some other restaurants you’ve been into. Think of some swanky places that you’ve been into. I’ve been into a few myself. Again, I do love to eat. I like food. I will take my lovely bride out once a month or more to a pretty nice restaurant.
Whenever you walk into these places, there are literally tons of things inside those restaurants and outside, but mainly inside those restaurants, that throw off the vibe of extreme value. And when I mean value – well, not value, of extremely good food, of extremely high quality product that they have inside the restaurant itself. So you go into these places, there is normally a lot of thick, rich wood on the tables and the walls. There may be some stacked rock. It’s going to be dimly lit, and this is automatically giving you, it’s going to calm you down a bit, and it’s going to give you the perception that the food in there is more valuable than, say, at McDonald’s, and yes, it normally is. McDonald’s is absolutely nasty, however I’m using it as an example for our anchoring here. So you go into these restaurants and they’re absolutely set up for this to exude value, to exude extreme quality, so you will pay more.
So restaurants. What is another thing that restaurants use to put out the perception of higher quality? One is stars. You’ve got the Michelin stars. Keith knows all about this. I know he’s going to listen to this, so I don’t want to go into his story where he paid $9,000.00 a plate for food. That’s a little high. He didn’t pay that much. But he went to a Michelin starred restaurant, and a three starred Michelin restaurant, I believe it is the highest honor you can have as a restaurant according to the Michelin stars. We have Zagat ratings also. We have Yelp reviews. These are things that are going to, in your mind – the Yelp reviews are not put out there, the restaurant itself does put out, put the Yelp out there. They do create the Yelp. However, the reviews are done organically through customers that they have had in the past. So whenever you’re looking for pizza in the city, you don’t have to be a hail chaser but usually a hail chaser is an example, and you look up pizza.
And you see one that has 472 reviews and they have an average of 4.5 stars and the one right below it has 350 reviews and an average of 3.2 stars. I don’t know about you, I will use that star to put value onto whether that pizza is worth it or not. I don’t even look at the price so much, honestly. I’m like, “Okay, that’s good pizza, apparently.” And I will read a few reviews down to see what style of pizza it is. So I like all styles of pizza but I do have a preference, so I will see what style of pizza it is and bam, I make my decision based on those Yelp reviews or the stars or whatever form of review system that they have to determine the value of that pizza. So restaurants use many things to anchor value in your mind to let you know that what you’re paying for is worth what it is worth. So they use those anchors. Another one, a big one for me that I thought of when I was preparing for this, was water. Now you can get filtered water at restaurants all across America.
But I guarantee you a ton of you, or some of you at least, maybe not a ton of you, some of you are going to buy a bottle of Perrier, or you are going to buy something different other than the filtered water in the restaurants. I typically will just not buy the filtered water, but accept filtered water before your meal. Whenever they ask me if I want water, I say, “Yes, I would like some water please.” “Do you just want ice water or do you want bottled water?” Normally this is going to be a nice restaurant. If they’re asking you which one you want, bottled or out of the tap on ice, typically these nicer restaurants are going to have a filtration system, and that water is just fine and dandy for me. It is delicious. I am not paying for the extra water because to me water serves one purpose and that is to hydrate me and I kind of like the taste anyway, so it doesn’t matter if it’s out of a bottle or it’s filtered.
It’s going to be good to me, especially over ice. So not just in restaurants, you see bottled water at convenience stores. Now here’s where I get nerdy with water. My favorite water out there is smart water, and smart water is that triple filtered osmosis drip cross infused, all this kind of stuff. It tastes really good to me. I have no ice to put it over. Smart water tastes better than any other water out there to me, and you can call me crazy but that’s what I buy most of the time when I stop and get a bottled water, is smart water. Now this stuff is a lot more expensive than other bottled waters out there, but I buy it. Some of these waters are melted from the ice crystals off of Mars. I mean, they go as far as they possibly can to give you a value or to give you a basis to form the value of that water on. So those are two things. Restaurants and water, those are two big ones that people that produce these things use to anchor your mind and to give you the value, for you to come up with the value of what their product is worth. So how can we use anchors in our business? You’re already seeing some of them in your mind. I guarantee it. You’ve already come up with several of them and if you haven’t, here we go, we’re going to give you a few really quickly here.
One anchor that we can use, and this is a biggie, is body shop pricing. Okay? Somebody comes up with a door ding and they’ve got a half dollar sized door dent in their door. You can put extreme value on that door ding by using body shop pricing. Now, if they drive up and they say, “I’ve already gotten a few quotes from some dent guys in the area,” you may have lost on this one already because, in their minds, what have they anchored their price on, their perception of the price on? They have anchored the perception of price based on other quotes from paintless dent repair techs in your area. So the body shop anchoring is completely out of the window at that time. Now maybe they have not gotten prices from another dent repair specialist in your area, but they’ve heard of paintless dent repair before and they’ve heard a number thrown out there.
I don’t care what number has been thrown out there in the past. It does not matter what number they have been told about paintless dent repair in the past. That number is what their mind is going to use for anchoring. It doesn’t matter what size their dent is. I’ve seen it 100 times. Sometimes it matters. Some people do have common sense and they say, “Yeah, I’ve seen guys that will repair these dents that are quarter sized for $80.00, but I know mine’s a little bit bigger. I know mine is the size of a saucer.” But you know what? They’re automatically formulating in their minds from that $80.00, just like with the salesman with the Dent Donk style pillow, their mind has already formulated a number and they have adjusted up a bit from that $80.00 and formed a number in their brains. Because that $80.00 has absolutely anchored in their mind what the price of dent repair is in the area.
Okay? So the body shop pricing may not work in every scenario. You’ve got to feel your customer, what Keith and I talk about a lot is asking the right questions. So let’s ask the right questions to begin with, and then we can figure out what anchoring system or what anchoring bias we want to use to push these people in our direction. Okay? So body shop pricing is one, again. “This dent, at a body shop,” if they’ve never heard of PDR or had any kind of experience with paintless dent removal or the pricing of paintless dent removal, you can automatically bring up the body shop pricing by asking the right questions. “This in a body shop would cost,” depending on your area, “This in a body shop would cost $600.00, $800.00, $1,000.00 to get repaired,” bam, you’ve got an anchor. Does that mean you should charge $700.00? I’m going to leave that up to you, but you’ve anchored that price in their head as to what a body shop would charge.
So use that anchoring technique of body shop pricing whenever you possibly can, and you can show an extreme value in your product by using, or your service, by using that body shop pricing. Another is professionalism. Sound crazy? It’s not. Using professionalism to anchor your prices is very effective, okay? So every time somebody pulls up to your shop or every time you pull up to someone’s house and you hop out of your truck or van or whatever it is that you have, and we’ll get to that anchor here in just a second. It goes along with the one we’re speaking of now, the professionalism. Whenever you get out and you walk up to these people, please, please look professional, okay? You need to have a clean appearance yourself. You need to act professional also. Again, we shared this, I shared this story a week or two ago on the podcast where I had a lady that was going to give me 60 some odd percent more for a dent than another dent tech in the area simply because I acted more professional, and she told me that.
She said, “You just acted way more professional than he did, he got on his phone while he was talking to me. He asked, “Hey, can you hold on a minute?” And he got on his phone and he talked for five minutes or whatever it was, while she was speaking to him. They were in person. He was looking at this in person, and he gave a price of $350.00 and I gave her a price of $600.00 and she came back to me because I was “more professional,” okay? Going along with that, you need to speak with authority and speak with what many will view as arrogance. It can be a controlled arrogance though. Whenever the customer is in front of you, you anchor a value on your professionalism not based just on your appearance and how you interact with a customer and the attention that you pay to the customer, but also with your authority in your business. Before that person leaves, I want to tell this to every dent guy in my area. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve told it to three or four that are in my area personally.
I’ve been like, “Dude, you tell those people that you are the best dent guy that ever lived.” You don’t say it like that, but you basically say, “Okay ma’am, I have no doubt,” and you don’t say it that way. You tell this lady, this customer, just like I told this lady, “Ma’am, I have no doubt. You bring that car in here on a Monday morning, as long as you get it to me by 10:00 a.m., you are going to have your car back at 5:00 p.m. and it is going to be absolutely flawless and you are not going to have any troubles whatsoever.”
One of the problems that this other tech in my area had with this lady, besides the talking on the phone, shoulders slouched, he kind of wish-washed back and forth. He threw out all the negatives before anything else, she told me. And the information she gave me was so freaking valuable, and it goes along with what we’re doing here and it proves what Keith and I preach, and many others out there preach, that what you put in their minds is what they’re going to think. So anyway, one of the problems the other tech, he basically went over all the negatives. He said, “Yeah, it’ll take me about a day, but you know what? It may go over depending if I have problems.” Ding ding ding, red light in her brain automatically right then. “What can the problems be?” With me, there were absolutely zero problems. None.
I told her, I said, “Yes ma’am, we’ll have your car in here, you get it here by 10:00 a.m., we’re going to pull the car into our state of the art shop,” bam, there’s an anchor right there. “We’re going to pull the car into our shop. We will have to take your door off. It is not a problem at all. Just a few bolts, disconnect a couple of wiring harnesses,” and you don’t have to put that information out there. If you’re not completely confident with the way you sell, you might not want to put all of that out there because that can automatically anchor in their head that there could be problems even if you’re acting really confident. So I’m not telling you to say you’ve got to disconnect wiring harnesses, you have to tell the customer you’re doing that. Feel the customer out. But you can anchor a value on that because of the work that you’re putting into it. “Yes ma’am. I’m going to pull your car into our state of the art facility. We’re going to pull your door off; I’m going to put it on a heavy duty stand.”
I know this all sounds really kind of stupid at times, but it anchors that value in people’s minds. “I’m going to put it on a high quality, durable stand that is designed to hold these doors, and we’re going to gently push your dent out from the back side. It will take all day.” I have a shop, so I have this liberty. Even if it’s not going to take me all day, I will tell them, if it’s going to take me 30 minutes, I will say; “Yes ma’am, this dent can take,” can, you see how quickly I said that, “This dent can take up to six to eight hours to repair, and we will have your door back on, buttoned up, we will function test every option on your car, the windows, the mirrors, everything on it, make sure the door closes, and your car will be like new at the end of the day at 5:00 p.m. when you come and pick it up.”
Bam. That’s professionalism, that’s confidence in your selling. That’s confidence in yourself. Don’t come in like this guy did. He goes, “It’ll take me a day, but you know, if I run into problems,” there’s that red light again in her head, “if I run into problems it may run over into the next day.” So you’ve created a problem for the customer. At this point, they’ve got to find a ride the next day. If it’s going to take two days, be up front about it and confident about it. “Yes ma’am. This dent is a little on the side of extreme for what we do, but I am fully confident we can do this if we take our time. We’re going to need your car for two days. We’re going to keep it inside the shop so nothing will happen to it.” So you go through all of that with a customer. He also said, this other tech in my area, he also said, “And if a clip breaks on your door panel, I’ll have to get one of those.”
There’s another problem. So she’s thinking, “Oh crap, he’s going to break some stuff.” Don’t ever tell anybody you can break some stuff. Holy crap, that is a death signal to the sale. If you’re the only guy in town and if you can show them a bag of clips that are specially made for their car and say you’re going to put those back in then do that, but don’t put in their minds that there are going to be problems. That is not professional and it is not inspiring confidence in them to leave their car in your care. So professionalism. All right, I said something about you being professional. Also your surroundings need to be professional, your work vehicle. Man, I really need to wash my truck at this point. Thank god I’ve got a shop. I do keep this shop really clean, and that is huge. Keep your work vehicle clean and/or your shop clean also.
I’ve said it 100 times and I will preach it until I do not do this profession anymore, until I don’t have this business any longer, which I hope is never. I hope I’m in it in some capacity forever. It may be a very tiny one, I hope, in the future, overlooking things. But I have said it 100 times. I have sold so many people on this shop, on PDR, and using me by having this shop and having it clean. I had two customers one year, this was at the old shop, and the lady, it was a hail damage estimate, this couple came in with, I believe it was a Yukon if I remember it correctly, had hail damage all over it. And I bring them in, I give them an estimate, and I can tell she is eyeballing the snot out of my entire shop. Now the old shop wasn’t nearly as nice. I didn’t do it up as nice as I did this one, but it was still nice and it was kept very clean, and she’s eyeballing.
She’s looking in the corners. She’s looking for cobwebs. And every couple few weeks I will take a clean broom and sweep the cobwebs, if there are any, out of the corners of the ceilings because I just, I didn’t really think about it when I started doing it, I’m just kind of a clean freak myself with interiors of houses, shops, etc. My truck, not so much. But anyway, she is eyeballing this thing to death, and she says, “Can I use your bathroom?” And I said, “Well yes ma’am, you can. If you go out this door, take a right, it’s on your right.” She comes out and she looks at her husband, she looks back at me, and she says, “We’ve gotten estimates from a couple of other people, but this is where we’re bringing our car.” I said, “Well good. That’s good news. Great to hear.” She says, “That is the cleanest public bathroom in any kind of shop or anything like this I’ve ever been in. By far the cleanest.”
And I said, “Well, I’m kind of a clean freak and I’m glad you think so.” She said, “This is where we’re bringing our car.” And what it did was it, bam, it threw that in her mind that I cared enough about my surroundings that I was going to take care of her car in the same manner. Well you know what? They scheduled right then and brought the car in, I think it was two or three weeks later. We were pretty busy at that time with hail, and they bring their car in, we take care of their hail damage. I have a customer that’s happened two, I know it was three times where the actual comment was made to me but that the shop was clean and the other two didn’t say it, one or two, I can’t remember which, the other one or two didn’t say it explicitly but they did comment how clean the shop was and they scheduled right then, brought their car in, and had their dents repaired by us. So body shop pricing, professionalism, clean shop, clean work vehicle, clean self, look professional.
Keith says all the time, “Don’t have this big scruffy beard.” I do have a little bit of scruff going on, but I keep it fairly manicured, so my wife digs it. Another thing that you can use to sell your professionalism and anchor value in people’s minds is your website. Oh man, there are so many terrible websites out there, and we harp on this constantly. There’s so many websites that were designed back in 1996 that are still going. And you know what? A lot of you guys may have those websites and you’re thinking to yourself right now, “Well it’s done me good so far.” Well that’s good. Good is good. Good is average. Good is mediocre, and good is that old ugly girlfriend. Mediocre is that old ugly girlfriend. We want to go out with a freaking bombshell, fellas. We want to take this thing to the next level. Good is not good enough. My wife tells me constantly, “You’re just moving too much. You’re doing too much.” And she’s right.
I do do too much, but I cannot sit still, whether It’s on this business or something at home, projects at home, I am moving at all times, because my brain is wired, I was raised this way, good is not good enough, period. So if your website is 1996 and it’s doing you “good,” freaking change it. Get up to speed. I had a gentleman last week come in on Friday, this shop has been just crazy busy lately. One day a few weeks ago we had eight retail customers that didn’t call, just stopped in based on the sign before lunchtime. Between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m., eight people walked in here for estimates. Well this gentleman comes in last Friday. It was a little slow here last Friday, but he pulls up last Friday, I happen to have been standing outside, and he says, “Yeah, I’ve been doing some research on this PDR. I had it done in Charleston a while back. That guy did amazing. Couldn’t even tell where it was at,” and he said, “Stuck something down in the door, this plastic thing, and then he stuck this rod.”
So he knew what he was talking about. He said, “So I started doing some research, and your website,” and this is an older guy. Fellas, this guy was probably in his 70s and this older guy goes, “You have a very nice website. It’s very clean. I really like your website.” And I’m thinking, “Holy crap. He’s more in tune with the times than most dent guys out there. He understands what a good website looks like. I’m not saying my website is great, but I like it. It’s clean. It serves a purpose. If you guys would like to visit that and check it out, dentsgonenow.com. Check out Keith’s site also. Completely different, but both are very effective, very clean, very up to date, and again, just very effective. So if your website is doing you good, that’s not good enough, guys. It’s just not good enough. Get up with the times. Your website will project value and you can charge more. Do not base your prices, fellas, based on the time that is involved. I’ve done that for years. I did that for years.
Bump all of that. That is not what it is. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about what it’s worth and the value that you’re giving and the value that you’re placing on your products and putting in the minds of your people, of your customers. Another one you can use is your training. All dent guys have training, right? Well yeah, different levels. Man, I will use this quite a bit. I will use the, if people ask me where I trained, I’ll tell them for sure, but I use it at times when it’s warranted, when it is natural in the conversation. Some people say, “Well I just don’t know how you all do this. How do you do this?” That’s boom for me. I say, “You know the BMW plant up here, in Spartanburg,” and they go, “Oh yeah.” “Well I was the first one doing it there. I had Germans flown in, the BMW plant, BMW manufacturing, flew Germans in for months to come over here to train me specifically. I was the first guy there. I trained 20 some odd people over there.” They’ve called me back in to train people, and man, you can just see in their eyes, “If BMW called him back in after he quit, to train people? This must be my guy.”
There I am. I am imposing myself on the customer and giving them an anchor, my training and my ability to train others in this field to give a value to my services. And I sell higher than most guys around here. There are some guys around here that sell pretty high. I’m rarely cheaper than anybody else out here, rarely. It does happen at times, believe it or not. I have some, “Oh, you’re cheaper than that other guys,” but a lot of times it’s stuff that the other guys can’t do and they’re just trying to get rid of it, honestly. We definitely do work around here that 99 percent of the other dent guys around here just can’t do, period. So use your training as an anchor to impose on your customers what you are worth and what your services are worth. And now here’s another one. Here’s the last one that I’m going to mention, and I’ve been using this a lot the last few weeks. I don’t know why I hesitated to use it before. It is an excellent anchor that I’ve been using here lately, and that is an app called – There are several out there. This one is kind of dear to my heart especially.
It was developed by a dent guy for us dent guys, and it is called PDR Estimate. And that is also going to be our tool review, so listen close. Tool review now and last anchoring idea now. PDR Estimate, and if you guys, pdrestimate.com I believe is the website. We will put that up as a link also. PDR Estimate is an estimating system that uses – It’s not a matrix at all, it is an algorithm. Even for the hail damage it’s an algorithm that bases it off the account. It doesn’t base it off of 75 to 100, it bases it off of 76, 77, 78. It bases it off of a single dent off of diameter, the depth. There are four different depth categories there I believe, and the quantity in it uses an algorithm to determine the price. Now the cool thing about PDR Estimate is not only that. It is extremely effective just for that reason. It’s also very professional.
You email them an estimate or you can print it out, and it is a freaking four-page estimate. We are killing trees like mad over here at Dent Pro Website. And it prints off, basically it looks a lot like a body shop estimate. You staple that together with one of your cars and you hand that to the customer and email them an estimate, you don’t have to print it out, they don’t have to choose that option, and you email that customer or you give them a printout and it looks absolutely professional. It’s not scribbled on a piece of paper or on a paper invoice estimate at the top, like I used to do. I just wrote “estimate” and give them a handwritten estimate. It just doesn’t look professional enough. That imposes that anchor of value in their mind, and that sounds crazy. Four freaking pieces of paper. That’s it. It’s four pieces of paper and/or an email, and it anchors in their mind the value of your services, and you’re imposing that on them again. Okay? But this PDR estimate is also effective, man, it is absolutely awesome. Another reason it’s effective, the prices can be really high.
I believe the base, when you put up your profile, the base setting is $100.00 an hour. There are times when I’ll go out and I’ll see a 12-inch crease, it just happened Friday again with an infinity QX, and this crease was pretty shallow. It was, I believe, 11 or 12 inches long, and I put it in there at $100.00 an hour, and this thing came up to seven something, I believe it was, and I was like, “Man.” I didn’t feel comfortable. I know Keith may get on to me, some of you guys may get on to me, but I didn’t feel like I could sell it for that, let’s just be honest. So I backed it off to $80.00 an hour, and came up with $570.00 something I believe, and I sold that job to that lady. She scheduled for next Tuesday, I believe it is, with this infinity QX56. It was a few years old. And so she’s coming in for that $570.00 some odd if I remember correctly to have that dent repaired. You can manipulate the value of this thing by changing the dollar amount per hour that you’re charging. So this PDR Estimate, man, it is the truth. I’ve been using it for a few weeks.
I’ve had it downloaded for much longer than that, but just got busy, got lazy more than anything, and didn’t use it. But now, man, it is selling, selling, selling for me. It is helping close sales at a higher rate than I was before. So guys, use PDR Estimate or comparable. I honestly don’t think there is a comparable one out there. Right now I haven’t seen it, let me be totally fair, that uses an algorithm and looks as professional as this one does and that you can change the hourly rate, that’s not just a matrix, and you can adjust it to where you want to adjust it to. Heck if you want to put $20.00 an hour, if that’s what you feel like you can sell, go for it. I don’t suggest it, but that’s your business. Do what you want. But this PDR Estimate, again, get this thing. I believe they have a free trial if I’m not mistaken also, a seven-day trial. So try this thing and if you don’t like it, well, you’re wrong about that. Again, anchoring. This idea of your brain playing tricks on you, you let it happen to you. You don’t even let it. Your brain does it automatically. This is what we need to impose on our customers is anchoring these prices.
Am I saying rip people off? No. We are worth what we are worth. We are less than a body shop. We are better than a body shop in all facets. Every single facet we are better than a body shop. Anchor that in their stinking heads. Okay? Look, you’re not going to be without your car for five days. Look, your car is not going to be painted. Look, it’s going to be absolutely perfect. Look, when you go to trade it in, they’re not going to be able to use that meter to test the paint. Your paint is going to be intact. You’re going to save money on your car at the end of the day when you go to trade it in or turn it in. All of these things are anchoring techniques that we need to be using, guys, and they are extremely effective. Again, watch these two videos, check out PDR Estimate and until next time, get better.
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Duration: 51 minutes
