One price is a coin flip
Send one number and the customer compares it to the other guy’s number. You win some and lose some, and the ones you lose you usually lose on price alone.
Send three and the comparison moves inside your estimate. Now they’re weighing a basic replacement against a better unit with a longer warranty. You’re no longer the cheap one or the expensive one. You’re the one who explained the choice.
What makes three options real
The tiers have to differ in the work, not in the invoice. A few that hold up in residential service:
- Equipment grade. Standard tank, better tank with a longer warranty, or a tankless unit.
- Scope. Replace the failed part, or replace it and fix the two things that caused it to fail.
- Protection. The job alone, the job plus an expansion tank and a pan, or the job plus a leak shutoff.
Three prices for the same work with different margins isn’t good better best. It’s a markup ladder, and customers see through it.
Build the middle one on purpose
Most customers land in the middle. That means the middle option is the one you’re really selling, so it should be the one you’d recommend to your own mother, not the one that happens to fall between the other two.
Doing it without the paperwork
The reason most shops don’t present three options is time. Pricing one job by hand is slow enough. Pricing it three ways in a driveway isn’t happening.
BidRise builds the three from your price book while you’re still at the house. Talk through the work, ask for tiered pricing, and you get good, better and best laid out with your numbers. The customer picks one on their phone and signs it, and the option they chose is recorded on the job.
Your prices come from your own plumbing price book, so the tiers are built on numbers you set, not on anything invented.
Go deeper
The longer write-up, including the mistakes that make tiered estimates look like padding, is in the guide on good, better, best plumbing bids.
