Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fell.
Speaker: I teach you how to avoid the mistakes I made and bring in the top solar dogs of the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro, and closing more deals.
Speaker: What is a Solarpreneur you might ask?
Speaker: A Solarpreneur is a new breed of Solar Pro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery and you are about to become one.
Speaker: What's up, Solarpreneurs?
Speaker: Taylor Armstrong here with another episode helping you conquer the solar industry one deal at a time.
Speaker: And as always, we're here to help you make it easier to close your deals, easier to get referrals and easier to have success in this great industry.
Speaker: So I am back from Mexico.
Speaker: If you heard the past was a week and a half ago, I was down chillin in Puerto Vallarta.
Speaker: I'm back, had the first week back to selling last week.
Speaker: And I will say something that has always been an issue for me is just getting back into that flow of things when I'm gone.
Speaker: I know everyone struggles with it.
Speaker: When I first started in pest control, I remember I took a week, I think it was a little over a week off to go on a cruise with my family.
Speaker: And for those that have done summer sales, you know that if you take a week off in the middle of the summer when you're only out there for 10 weeks or so, I guess more than that, but you know, three and a half, four months, taking a week off can just kill your sales.
Speaker: So it's no different in solar.
Speaker: I mean, I'm doing this year round, but you got to get strategic with how you're taking things off and use those things as motivation to push even harder.
Speaker: What I did that helped me a lot is I used this trip I knew I had planned.
Speaker: I tried to push as hard as possible.
Speaker: And luckily it helped motivate me.
Speaker: It helped me push harder than I would have.
Speaker: So I didn't let it affect my cells before.
Speaker: But coming back, I'll be honest, it was sort of an issue.
Speaker: Last week I struggled.
Speaker: I didn't get in as many appointments as I wanted to.
Speaker: Only gotten, I think, three or so.
Speaker: Makes it tough to close if you're not getting in the amount of appointments that you need to.
Speaker: So have a plan.
Speaker: If you are taking time off, have a plan for before and then after the trip.
Speaker: What are you going to do?
Speaker: How are you going to find that extra motivation to push hard when you get back?
Speaker: It's a lesson I was reminded of.
Speaker: And now this week I'm ready to grind hard again.
Speaker: So what I wanted to go through this week that I know is going to help you solarpreneurs out there, have a little story.
Speaker: I was out on the weekend.
Speaker: I was at an appointment with one of our newer reps.
Speaker: And some of these newer guys, they turn this game of sales into sort of like a begging thing.
Speaker: How hard can you beg to get the customer to do your bidding?
Speaker: And we were with an older...
Speaker: older guy in his home.
Speaker: He'd been in there forever.
Speaker: He actually lived with his mom.
Speaker: His mom was like in his 90s.
Speaker: He was in his like 60s.
Speaker: And what happened is they weren't really interested in
Speaker: in letting us inside the house.
Speaker: We had to kind of boil our way inside the home to get and do the presentation.
Speaker: And once we got in the home, he's like, man, I never let people inside the house.
Speaker: And then the mom pipes in and says, hey, we're not signing up for anything.
Speaker: We don't want to do any home improvements.
Speaker: So at that point, I knew it was going to be an uphill battle because she was technically the owner of the home, even though she was super old, wasn't really making many decisions for the home at that point.
Speaker: But the mistake we made, and I sort of let the newer rep, you know, take more control, which I probably should have jumped in more.
Speaker: But he starts, he starts basically kind of begging for it.
Speaker: Oh, well, you're definitely going to want to do it after we show you.
Speaker: You guys will love this.
Speaker: And then what it ended up doing by the end, I mean, that stuff works to a degree, but by the end, the more you like beg for the cell, the more you show that you're kind of desperate, it ends up backfiring on you.
Speaker: I've seen this time and time again.
Speaker: People beg, oh, please do this.
Speaker: If you're not doing it for me, do it for my dog, do it for my cat, do it for my wife, do it for my kids.
Speaker: It's some of Grant Cardone's closes.
Speaker: If you read his books, he has some closes like that.
Speaker: And those can sometimes be effective, but what you'll find in sales, people are turned off when you start begging like that.
Speaker: People want to do pretty much the opposite of what you're begging them.
Speaker: They can see the desperation.
Speaker: If you're out there with desperation, people are going to snip that out immediately.
Speaker: It's going to turn them off to the sale.
Speaker: So I was listening to a podcast after that, another great podcast listened to.
Speaker: I should probably do an episode on all of that.
Speaker: the top podcast for sales guys let me know if you'd like to hear that but there's one really good one it's the school of greatness by Lewis Howes it's a big big podcast he gets top guys from all different industries I guess entertainment pretty much anyone that's influenced a lot of people he gets them to come on and share you know just their stories their successes
Speaker: So good podcast.
Speaker: And this last week he had on a guy named Ryan Serhant, which a lot of you have maybe heard of him.
Speaker: He does the billion million dollar listing in New York.
Speaker: One of the top real estate agents in the world has sold billions and billions in, you know, in revenue for real estate.
Speaker: And he was talking about just the new book he launched and just little tips, tricks, secrets that have helped him.
Speaker: One thing he said that is just going along with all this, he brought up the movie Ghost of Girlfriends Past.
Speaker: It's a 2009 Matthew McConaughey movie.
Speaker: And I actually watched this, I think, six months ago or something.
Speaker: It's kind of a chick flick.
Speaker: My wife sort of made me watch it.
Speaker: But he brought this movie up, and it reminded me of something.
Speaker: In the movie, Matthew McConaughey, the guy he plays, he's basically picking up all these chicks, and his dead uncle appears to him.
Speaker: And the line he tells Matthew McConaughey, it's not his name, but whatever his name is in the movie,
Speaker: He's like, hey, the power in the relationship lies with whoever cares less.
Speaker: And that's like his big secret for picking up chicks.
Speaker: And at the end, you know, moral of the story, he sees that it's not just about getting all the chicks and that doesn't really cause the happiness.
Speaker: But Ryan Serhant in this podcast interview, he brings that up and he said, sells is no different.
Speaker: The person that cares less has the power in the transaction.
Speaker: And that just reminded me of that.
Speaker: I'm like, yeah, that's so true.
Speaker: Because so many examples I've had where I have kind of turned into that beggar on the doors, beggar in the presentation.
Speaker: And homeowners just hate that.
Speaker: They lose their interest every time.
Speaker: Hey, another great book that goes along with that is Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff.
Speaker: He's basically all about using these takeaways, just flipping the script on the homeowners and really making your product the prize, making it seem like, hey, this is exclusive.
Speaker: Tell me why you guys should qualify for this.
Speaker: Tell me why we should even consider you guys.
Speaker: So you're not necessarily saying those things, but I've realized that the more you can have that attitude in your presentations, in your door approaches, the more you can have it be something exclusive that the homeowner they should be begging you to get.
Speaker: If you can come across with that attitude,
Speaker: you're going to see so much more success.
Speaker: Every single time, the more takeaways I can do, the more ammo I can load up to have the homeowner, you know, make it believe or make them believe that it's exclusive, that we're not helping everything.
Speaker: They want it more.
Speaker: And same thing, I mean, you can see it anywhere in your relationships when you're in high school, the more exclusive you made yourself.
Speaker: The girl's always one of the guys that were hard to get, right?
Speaker: Guys always one of the girls that were hard to get.
Speaker: Same thing in everyone.
Speaker: It's just our human psychology.
Speaker: It's the way we're built.
Speaker: People want what they can't have.
Speaker: So just a good reminder for me, start to notice that.
Speaker: Are you coming across a beggar in your presentations?
Speaker: Are you coming across as that person that has to, you know, get on your knees and kiss their feet for them to do things?
Speaker: Or are you loading up the proof that this is something exclusive, that people are dying to get in on this, that you have limited availability?
Speaker: You don't need to lie to them, but bring up examples.
Speaker: Here in California, we have our net metering that we have with utility companies.
Speaker: They do change the fees that are included in with that.
Speaker: Okay, so something we do is we say, Mr. Jones,
Speaker: They are changing how the net metering works out here.
Speaker: So good news, all the homes were getting approved.
Speaker: They're letting us grandfather it in at what the current net metering plan is.
Speaker: So that way any changes, any increases in the rates, you guys are still on the old program.
Speaker: Okay, that's something.
Speaker: Tax credits.
Speaker: How can you build the urgency?
Speaker: The tax credit, Mr. Homeowner, it's at 26% right now.
Speaker: Luckily it got extended because of COVID, but it is going down.
Speaker: These things are disappearing.
Speaker: There's a ton of other things you can use to build urgency, to build that exclusivity.
Speaker: I mean, you look at other states, of course, we're talking the US here, so all our Australian listeners, Canadian, sorry, it's a little bit different.
Speaker: But there's always things you can do to build that exclusivity.
Speaker: If you look at like Hawaii, for example,
Speaker: Their whole net metering program changed drastically down there.
Speaker: So there's much more need for batteries.
Speaker: It's more expensive because of it.
Speaker: Same thing in Utah, where I'm from.
Speaker: I think it was last year they changed their net metering to where the utility company is only buying back something like half their energy.
Speaker: They'd have to pull up the exact changes to it.
Speaker: But they had a big change to where it's affecting people.
Speaker: They need to put up quite a bit more solar to have more protection.
Speaker: production than they were having before to cover what the usage they need is.
Speaker: So all these things you can bring those up as examples say Mr. Homeowner I'm from something I use hey I'm from Utah what happened there is they changed the structure so now people are having to pay way more for their solar because they need to put up more panels to get the production they need.
Speaker: And also they need to buy batteries.
Speaker: Batteries are expensive, 10 grand.
Speaker: They need to put these in just to be able to produce for them because all the net metering change there.
Speaker: So it's something that is, they're trying to have it happen in California too.
Speaker: These people are losing money.
Speaker: So the reason why all their neighbors are trying to get in on it is because we're grandfathering all these things in.
Speaker: They're protected by the old plants.
Speaker: That way they don't have to spend more to get their solar.
Speaker: So think of things like that.
Speaker: Go today, write out three things you can use to build urgency, exclusivity.
Speaker: Write those out and then build stories around them.
Speaker: The more you can give real life examples, the more you can say it coming from a neighbor's perspective, not just yours.
Speaker: It's gonna make it way more believable, even better if you have a video.
Speaker: This is something I've started to implement now.
Speaker: Have testimonial videos of customers, preferably on their same street, is the best case scenario.
Speaker: If you can pull up that you're having a conversation with them, they recognize them, it's going to be so powerful, blow their socks off.
Speaker: So look for ways you can build that urgency, exclusivity.
Speaker: It's going to help you.
Speaker: It's going to be a game changer and teach your new reps to do it.
Speaker: We're not beggars out there.
Speaker: We're professionals and we should be treated with respect.
Speaker: So make the homeowners respect you.
Speaker: You got to earn that though.
Speaker: And that's how you do it.
Speaker: So that's my thoughts.
Speaker: Okay, hope it helps you share it with your team.
Speaker: Let me know what you thought of this.
Speaker: And let me know if you guys have other questions or needs that you want me to get someone on or talk about and keep crushing it.
Speaker: Let's start second quarter with our best quarter ever.
Speaker: All right, we'll talk to you in the next one.
Speaker: Hey SolarPrinters, quick question.
Speaker: What if you could surround yourself with the industry's top performing sales pros, marketers, and CEOs and learn from their experience and wisdom in less than 20 minutes a day?
Speaker: For the last three years, I've been placed in the fortunate position to interview dozens of elite solar professionals
Speaker: and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level.
Speaker: That's why I want to make a truly special announcement about the new solar learning community exclusively for solar professionals to learn, compete, and win with the top performers in the industry.
Speaker: And it's called Sol Society.
Speaker: This learning community was designed from the ground up to level the playing field and give Solar Pros access to proven mentors who want to give back to this community and help you or your team to be held accountable by the industry's brightest minds for, are you ready for it?
Speaker: Less than $3.45 a day.
Speaker: Currently Sol Society is closed to the public and membership is by invitation only, but solopreneurs can go to solciety.co to learn more and have the option to join a waitlist when a membership becomes available in your area.
Speaker: Again, this is exclusively for Solopreneur listeners, so be sure to go to www.solciety.co to join the waitlist and learn more now.
Speaker: Thanks again for listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you again in the next episode.
