So one of my customer leads from a month back suddenly dropped me an email today and in it, she dropped me a copy of her floorplan and shared with me that she would like to work with me and then gave me the colour scheme she was interested in.
My company has been giving me a relatively steady steam of customer leads, but I will say 90% of them are pretty much a waste of time, they are either unresponsive when reached out or they have a budget that is comically low, this particular client who reached out to me today belongs to the latter.
Back when the office gave me her enquiry, the renovation requirements didn't really state much, it had the basic information attached to the email, which is the type of apartment the client had and the budget, when I saw those 2 information and how much they did not tally together, I just immediately labelled it as a waste of time and didn't bother reaching out.
Normally our leads are distributed to us by renovation portals. When a customer reaches out to a renovation portal, their enquiry will get disseminated to an average of about 5 to 6 random interior design firms that matches their requirements, which is basically "budget conscious" or "willing to pay for design", no prize for guessing which category my company falls under. Anyways, I figured if 1 out of the 5 to 6 interior design firms didn't reach out to her, she probably wouldn't even notice, so I dropped her as a potential customer lead the moment I got my hands on her requirements.
Well, she reached out today and I was honestly surprised because it has already been a month since I got her information and there was no prior contact from my end to her, so the only possibility could be that she either really wants to engage my company for her renovation services or she has spoken to all the other interior design firms and they have turned her down because of her unrealistic budget.
I think it is probably the latter, I think she had a whole month to talk to a few of them who even bothered reaching out to her and all of them came to the same conclusion, to drop her.
The budget she has set aside to renovate her apartment is just not realistic, it would be the same as me walking into an LV Store with $500 to purchase a limited edition $8000 bag. The amount I brought with me isn't low and I can probably get something from the store, but it is not the limited edition bag and it is the same with this particular customer, she has enough budget to do a small renovation, but not enough to do the renovation she wants to do.
I do not like reaching out to customers like her who have such unrealistic budgets because I feel that to them, the amount that they have decided to set aside is already considered, to themselves, "realistic", and asking them to increase their budget any higher than what they have decided to spend would be ridiculous, if they added more to their budget, they would expect better materials, higher level of service and higher level of just everything because to them, they are "paying more", so they "expect more", I can offer them a very competitive price for the works they have requested at the expense of my commission, but in their head, my reduced commission means nothing to them, they will still expect more even if I do them the favor of earning less on my end and I am simply not that generous of an individual to want to work with potential ingrates.
I really do not get clients like this. We are not going to take projects that will cause us to make a loss! Simple as that, it is not about our willingness to earn less, it is about the fact that we won't NOT ONLY be earning nothing, we will literally be losing money if we take on projects like theirs.
Anyways, since the client emailed me, I decided to email back and asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted to renovate, I also of course told her that her budget was not viable at all, that if she wanted to proceed, she should reconsider her budget and then also just slap my company's renovation package in the email so she can actually see how much a renovation of her magnitude would cost. The company's renovation package barely covers the basic stuff and it has already overshot her budget by 50%, and I think it is very safe to assume her requirements will be more than what the package covers.
Well, I hope she gets me message and don't message me back.
This is the kind of leads the company has been providing me, quantity over quality.
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