Andy Irvine from Plumb It! runs a successful plumbing company in Cheltenham, UK and gets most of his business from word of mouth. However, when Bark emailed him with a customer requirement from someone just down the road he decided to give it a try and has since got 12 jobs using Bark. Kai gave him a call to see if he had any tips for other Pros on Bark.
So, how did you get started on Bark?
I randomly got an e-mail from Bark.com saying that someone in Cheltenham was looking to have a bath tub removed and replaced with a shower. To be honest as I hadn’t heard of Bark before I thought it might be dodgy but I decided to give it a go anyway and wrote a reply to them asking for some more detail about exactly what they wanted. They actually replied straight away and it turns out they lived 5 doors down from me and we’ve got friends in common! I went round and did a quotation for them and installed their new shower the following week.
That’s a great start! So did you subscribe to Bark at that point?
Haha I probably should have but no I thought I’d see what else would come in first! I got a about 5 more leads over the next month and was successful with one of them and that point I decided to subscribe to get more leads.
And what happened next?
After subscribing I started getting leads every day and I also found buyers responded more quickly. Having the Verified Pro badge next to my name seems to make buyers a lot more trusting and I guess it makes you stand out amongst the crowd. I’ve been getting about one in 3 jobs I reply to which the Bark customer service team told me is pretty good going!
Why do you think you get a good response?
I’ve always put a fair bit of time into writing proper emails and detailed quotations. I’ve found with Bark that you have to spend the time to write a good pitch – or at least ask intelligent questions so that the buyer realizes I know what I’m doing and I’m worth talking to further. I know a lot of people just type one-liners and don’t even check their spelling and grammar!
Any other tips?
What’s good about Bark is that I get out what I put in. Sometimes I’m just too busy to reply quickly if I’m on a job and in those cases either I’ll just leave it or I’ll reply that evening if the job looks good enough. I think it’s important to either give the client a good experience or not at all – so I don’t reply to everything just to see what happens, I only reply to jobs I know I can deliver on.