A series of blogs about creating a personal brand as a home inspector.
Introduction: Have you thought about what makes you appreciably different from other home inspectors? If that notion seems strange and foreign to you, you’re not alone. The fact is, it’s deceptively difficult to be completely objective about oneself.
In this series of blogs, we’ll look at why establishing your differentiation is important, and we’ll consider ways to build a personal brand around your special attributes.
Part 1: Discovering Your Personal Differentiation
It’s difficult to be objective about what makes you (and your home inspection services) unique in the eyes of the marketplace.
Fortunately, there’s a rather straightforward way to find out how the marketplace perceives you and your services: Ask your customers!
And when we say “customers,” we mean both real estate agents AND homebuyers. While the vast majority of your referrals come from agents, it’s still important to understand how homebuyers view you and your service, if for no other reason than the fact that homebuyers provide the bulk of online reviews. So you’ll want to gather information from both groups.
We know of four basic ways to approach soliciting information from your real estate agent customers:
1) Ask them in person. This is the most direct path, but not necessarily the one that produces the most objective results. You can do this informally — invite one of your real estate agent partners to join you for coffee or lunch, and engage them in conversation about why they work with you. Dig into what they like AND what could use some improvement.
You could do the same thing over the phone, but you won’t be able to evaluate their body language, which tells you whether they’re being sincere.
And speaking of sincerity, that’s the downside with this approach – it’s unlikely that anyone will be truthful with you about any negative aspects of your service while they’re sitting right there with you. However, since our primary purpose is to discover what you do best, it’s okay to skip the criticisms and focus on the positives in this case.
2) Ask them via email. A similar approach to asking in person, but a good deal less intimidating for your real estate people, because they don’t need to answer any questions extemporaneously.
3) Gather a focus group. Invite a small group of real estate agent referral partners to participate in a roundtable focus group. You can secure a meeting room in a municipal center, hotel, coworking facility, restaurant, or other venue in neutral territory. Over refreshments, dive into some conversation that uncovers what your agents like about you and your service, and what they wish someone would do differently regarding inspections.
4) Secure a third party to conduct research for you. It’s an undeniable part of human nature that people will tell others things about you that they would never say to your face. So find a third party who can gather information from your real estate partners and feed it back to you. If you don’t want to hire someone for this, arrange a trade deal with someone you know who would like to gain the same kinds of insights about THEIR business. They ask questions of your customers, and you ask questions of their customers — then you get together to compare notes.
Gathering information from homebuyers is less complicated than interviewing real estate agents. You already have their email addresses, so simply set up a brief survey (via surveymonkey.com or similar) and email it to your homebuyer customers as soon after the home inspection as possible. Consider sweetening the deal to increase response by offering some kind of free service or other premium – getting this information is important enough to warrant the cost of the premium. Compile the resulting data and look for trends.
Once you’ve gathered this information, take the time to write down what you’ve discovered about yourself and about your inspection business. Chances are you’ll find one or more common threads emerging around your strengths and weaknesses. The strengths form the basis of your differentiation, so find a way to focus on your strengths and continue developing them, while you simultaneously work on mitigating any common weaknesses that were revealed.
We suggest distilling your newly-discovered differentiation into a statement or two that captures the essence of what you have that nobody else does. Share it with people who are important to you. Print it out and post it somewhere where you’ll be reminded of it frequently. This statement the basis of your personal brand, a concept we’ll explore more fully in the next blog post.
Oh, and by the way…in the process of gathering this data, it’s likely you’ve also collected some testimonials! Whether they’re from real estate agents or homebuyers, make sure they’re displayed on your website, and that they also find their way into your promotional materials.
Watch for Part 2 coming soon! And meanwhile, tell us about any successes or failures you’ve had in identifying your personal differentiation.