Tell Them What They Can Fix Themselves

There is a spring above your customer’s garage door that could put her in the hospital. She has driven under it twice a day for eleven years. She has never once looked at it.

Your website should introduce them.

The pitch that sounds like bad business

Most garage door companies treat every question as a service call. Door making a noise? Call us. Door reversing? Call us. Door looked at you funny? We have a truck for that.

The homeowner, who is not a fool, can smell it. So she searches, finds a video made by a man with a great deal of confidence and no visible insurance, climbs a ladder, and does the one thing she should never do.

The better approach sounds like bad business, and is not. Tell people which problems they can fix themselves. Then tell them, just as plainly, which ones they cannot.

What a homeowner can safely handle

• The door reverses before it closes. Very often the photo-eye sensors near the floor are dirty or knocked out of line. Wipe the lenses. Check that the indicator lights on both sides are steady. A good many service calls end right here.
• The door squeals and groans. Rollers and hinges want lubrication — a proper garage door lubricant, not whatever is under the kitchen sink.
• The remote quit. Batteries first. Then the lock button on the wall control, which a child has almost certainly pressed.
• Debris in the tracks. Clean them out. Do not try to straighten them.

What nobody should touch

• Torsion springs. The heavy coil on the shaft above the door stores the energy that lifts a door weighing a couple of hundred pounds or more. When one breaks, it breaks with a bang like a gunshot, and the door suddenly weighs what it actually weighs. Adjusting or replacing one takes proper winding bars and training. A screwdriver is not a winding bar. People learn this at considerable expense.
• Lift cables. They carry the same tension. A frayed cable is a phone call, not a weekend project.
• A door off its track, or hanging crooked. Leave it closed. Leave it alone. Keep the car and the children clear of it.

Why honesty closes the job

The homeowner who realigns her own photo eye because your website told her how has not cost you a job. She has spared you a truck roll for a two-minute fix, and spared herself the resentment of paying for one. She will also remember whose website was straight with her.

And the spring will go eventually. Springs are rated for a limited number of cycles, and then they quit. When it goes, she will not search. She will call the company that told her the truth about the photo eye.

It is the oldest move in selling, and it is not a trick. Give away the small thing. Earn the big one.

Build the triage into the site

1. Organize by what the homeowner hears and sees. A bang from the garage. A door that stops halfway. An opener that grinds. Each gets its own plain answer.
2. Mark every answer safe or not safe. A clear yes for the jobs a homeowner can do. A clear stop for the ones she cannot. No hedging, no weasel words.
3. Put a price range on the page. A spring, an opener, a whole door — give a range and say what moves a job to the top of it. The customer who sees a number calls. The one who sees “call for a quote” calls somebody else.
4. Show the new door before it exists. Replacement doors are the big ticket. A homeowner who can pick a style and a color and see it on her own screen is halfway to the order.

See it done

We built a complete garage door homepage to demonstrate the approach, for a company called Overhead Works. The company is fictional. The design is not. It has a door designer that redraws as you choose the style, color, and glass, with the price range moving alongside — and a triage that names the noise your door is making and tells you whether it can wait.

If your company deserves the same

A website that talks to homeowners like adults, tells the truth about the spring, and still gets the phone to ring. Here is how we build garage door websites, and our prices are on the page, not held back for the follow-up call.

Or start a conversation. We will tell you what we would change first, and why.