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A RocketLevel playbook for restoration sales managers and sales reps, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 7-minute read.
Plenty of contractors never think to call a corporate risk manager, which is why it can be one of the biggest-payoff calls in commercial. A single property manager controls a building or a few. A risk manager can control the approved-vendor list for an entire portfolio, sometimes hundreds of locations. One relationship, properly earned, can bring in more work than dozens of individual building conversations.
You have to talk to them about risk, cost and paperwork. Save the drying talk for later.
A corporate risk manager is responsible for protecting an organization from loss across its whole footprint. They sit above the individual buildings and the property managers, and in many organizations they own or heavily influence which contractors are approved to do work anywhere in the portfolio.
Get approved at the risk-manager level and you stop bidding building by building, because you are on the list for all of them.
Start with how their losses get paid. On a portfolio of any size, many water losses never reach the insurance carrier at all. There is a per-occurrence deductible or a self-insured retention sitting in front of the policy, and it is frequently high enough that a sixty-thousand-dollar water loss gets paid out of the company's own money. Ask what theirs is. That one question tells you whether you are selling to somebody spending an insurer's money or their own, and it changes the entire shape of the conversation.
From there:
Severity, not frequency
They cannot stop pipes from failing. They can stop a two-day response from turning a water loss into a mold claim, and a mold claim into a bodily injury claim from a tenant or an employee. That escalation is what actually keeps them up, because it crosses out of property and into a far uglier line of coverage.
Total cost of risk
Premium, plus retained losses, plus the cost of administering all of it. That is the number they are graded on, and retained losses are the only part of it a restoration contractor can move.
Documentation that survives a deposition
Records that hold up when a tenant's attorney asks, two years later, what was done and when.
The same answer in every city