For contractors, a successful project starts with trust. There are easy ways to build trust before and during projects. Even if these just serve as reminders for your crew, you’ll want to keep them top of mind.

1. Ask Questions

By being genuinely curious about customer needs, they’re more likely to see you as a trusted partner rather than someone constantly trying to sell them something.

Try to spend around half of your conversations listening and asking questions consistently. What’s their ideal timeline? Preferred budget? Do they have financing? Asking thoughtful questions will get you the info you need to make projects a success.

2. Keep an Open Mind

As a contractor, you’ve completed countless jobs and have plenty of expertise, but you still need to work with your customer’s ideas. Avoid being too committed to your own ideas or a single area of thinking. Being open to customer suggestions and thoughts can lead to more collaboration and trust. Plus, they’ll likely remember you the next time they need a contractor or recommend you to family and friends.

3. Make Time With Customers Count

In other words: It’s important not to be selling them something all the time. Make sure you’re taking the time to understand their needs and guide them during projects.

Aim to pull them in during major steps of each project. ABC Supply’s Solution Centers offer easy access to everything from product displays to material samples. This will again emphasize the fact that you’re there to help them, not just to make more money.

4. Find the Problems

To make sure you’re doing customers a service, it’s important to understand where their pain points are and tackle projects from there. You can’t help if you don’t know the problem, right?

Schedule time for an initial consultation meeting to discuss the general project. From there, you can set up a quick check-in before project work begins to make sure you understand exactly which challenges you’re addressing.

More than anything else, leading successful projects for your customers will be the number one way to get them to call you for more projects down the road.

5. Keep Your Promises

While it’s important to help customers in as many ways possible, you don’t want to promise work you can’t deliver, which is probably the worst thing you can do when you’re trying to build trust.

Be honest about your capabilities. If more can be done, great. Maybe you can offer certain product discounts from your supplier, or good weather can help you get ahead of the initial timeline. It never hurts to over deliver.

6. Be Transparent

In any industry, it’s important to be honest with customers around all parts of their projects. If any project challenges arise, like going over budget, it’s best to have those conversations sooner rather than later.

If you’re worried about having that conversation right away, remember it will always be much harder if customers find out you could have told them sooner.

Asking questions, identifying pain points and being transparent will all help customers see you as a trusted partner, and build trust for the long term too. Remember to visit the ABC Supply blog for more tips on guiding customers and growing your business.