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 the year and cracking the code on why sales reps fell.
Speaker: I teach you 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 going on, solopreneurs?
Speaker: My name's Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: We are here with another episode, here to teach you how to close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and have a much better time in the solar industry.
Speaker: And this episode, I am a little bit off my funk because we are recording this in the kitchen today.
Speaker: Usually I record these just straight from my little room, got my little podcasting section squared away.
Speaker: But right now we have a seven-month-old baby, and he's trying to get sleep trained, which means we moved our other kid into my little podcasting corner, and the baby's in his room by himself.
Speaker: So now I'm delegated to the kitchen doing this podcast.
Speaker: So if you hear a little echo, a little frying pan action going on, that is why, because I'm in the kitchen doing this.
Speaker: And I'm looking at food right now.
Speaker: Might get hungry.
Speaker: So if you hear me snacking, that's what's going on.
Speaker: But anyways, we're going to bring some heat today.
Speaker: I'm going to talk about things you should consider delegating and potentially hiring someone else to do in your solar business.
Speaker: So if you've been in this for a while now, you know that there are a lot of tasks we handle being in the solar industry.
Speaker: We're closing deals.
Speaker: We're following up with customers.
Speaker: We're managing CRMs.
Speaker: We're sending out customer gifts.
Speaker: We're trying to remember all the people we need to follow up with.
Speaker: Just a plethora of tasks, and there's no way we can do it all realistically.
Speaker: Which is why I think you should consider getting help.
Speaker: And I've talked about this before.
Speaker: We'll link to a few episodes where I've talked about this.
Speaker: I have a virtual assistant.
Speaker: Her name's Angelica.
Speaker: She edits all these podcasts.
Speaker: So that is one thing that I wouldn't be possible to continue doing the podcast without her help.
Speaker: So Angelica, when you listen to this, thank you so much for helping me with the podcast.
Speaker: You help me all the time with it.
Speaker: And so let's jump into this.
Speaker: Before we get into the content here, I wanted to give two big thank yous to number one, Evergreen Peace.
Speaker: He left us a great review.
Speaker: Five star last Friday.
Speaker: He said, I was hired by a solar company 30 days ago.
Speaker: My onboarding is in a couple of days now.
Speaker: The entire time that I've been waiting to be onboarded, I've been listening to about one to three episodes a day.
Speaker: And wow, I feel so excited and so thankful to enter the industry with so much knowledge and tips from professionals.
Speaker: I am beyond stoked to go 1000%.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Evergreen.
Speaker: Peace.
Speaker: You rock.
Speaker: And that review is much appreciated.
Speaker: And then we also had one from Double A Roofing.
Speaker: He says, thank you for continuing putting up content that is helpful.
Speaker: I've been listening now since Solar and have listened to about 60 episodes.
Speaker: I've been in the solar industry now for almost nine months and continue to learn new things daily about solar.
Speaker: I look forward twice a week at least to hearing new podcasts from you to see what I can learn today.
Speaker: Between your info and the info I get from Michael O'Donnell's training, I can't wait to see what the rest of the year brings.
Speaker: I also tell my team to listen to your podcast.
Speaker: Thanks again.
Speaker: Double A roofing, you're the best.
Speaker: I'm going to hire you to come put a roof if I ever need one.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Thank you for sharing the podcast.
Speaker: Thank you for spreading the love.
Speaker: That is what keeps this show going.
Speaker: So if you have not yet, if you've been a listener for a while, I would appreciate it if you could share the podcast or leave a review like these two fine, beautiful people just did.
Speaker: Consider going on to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and leaving us a review.
Speaker: So let's get into the content here.
Speaker: We're talking about things you should outsource, things you should consider having someone else do.
Speaker: And if you follow some of the greats of the solar industry, this is something that everyone is doing.
Speaker: People are outsourcing tasks.
Speaker: No one is doing everything by themselves.
Speaker: And I'm talking about company owners, but I'm also talking about top reps.
Speaker: Every top rep I've interacted with in the solar industry,
Speaker: They're outsourcing things.
Speaker: As a matter of fact, I just saw a post from one of my friends, Melissa Ramiza.
Speaker: She is in the Noxstar community with me in the Noxstar community.
Speaker: I think it's Noxstar United, the program that we're in.
Speaker: And she is one of the top reps in Noxstar.
Speaker: I think she's consistently doing 20 to 30 deals a month from what I've seen.
Speaker: She made a post just last week and I screenshotted it.
Speaker: So I don't know if she listened to this, but I love the post, Melissa.
Speaker: Keep it up.
Speaker: She says, everyone keeps asking, what's the secret?
Speaker: How do you close so many deals?
Speaker: The secret is I don't take a single day off.
Speaker: I've worked over a month straight without a full day off.
Speaker: So that's our first secret.
Speaker: And yeah, I mean, hard work.
Speaker: That is probably the first key with everything, right?
Speaker: But then after that, what was cool to see her say, she said, I delegate all tasks.
Speaker: I don't even clean my own house, nor do I do my own dishes or laundry.
Speaker: I keep the most important thing, the most important thing.
Speaker: Closing deals is the most important thing.
Speaker: Hold yourself accountable.
Speaker: It's your job to push yourself, no one else.
Speaker: Boom.
Speaker: So Melissa, she is outsourcing stuff.
Speaker: You see her say she doesn't clean her house.
Speaker: She doesn't do her dishes.
Speaker: And then I recently was at a Pi Syndicate retreat, which shout out to Pi Syndicate.
Speaker: They are my finance guys.
Speaker: They help me find investments, do my taxes, and multiply my money.
Speaker: And they also sponsor this show, so definitely hit them up if you want more help in that sector of your life.
Speaker: But anyways, I was at a little retreat we did with them, Pysynicate.
Speaker: And in this retreat was my friend Ricardo.
Speaker: He is the top dog over at the company I'm with right now, Future Home Power.
Speaker: And he's closing...
Speaker: Yeah, he's closing probably 15 to 20 deals a week right now.
Speaker: Pretty insane what he's doing.
Speaker: And we were asking the same question.
Speaker: We're like, Ricardo, what are you doing, man?
Speaker: How are you closing so many deals?
Speaker: You're setting records in the industry.
Speaker: No one's closing as many deals as you are.
Speaker: He said pretty much the same thing.
Speaker: He is not doing anything except for showing up to appointments and closing them.
Speaker: Hey, he has an assistant he's hired that he sends a text out to right when the deal closes.
Speaker: He'll do a group text with the customer and his assistant.
Speaker: Say, hey, here's your personal account manager.
Speaker: She's going to help you with everything from here on out.
Speaker: And then hopefully he doesn't have to interact too much because, I mean, truth is he doesn't have time to.
Speaker: If he's closing 15 to 20 deals a week,
Speaker: He's ripping these things through and he doesn't have time to really manage them or do much else.
Speaker: So that was his big thing.
Speaker: And just like Melissa, they've got guys that do his laundry.
Speaker: I mean, he's not doing anything really.
Speaker: And I think some of his roommates hated him because he left dishes out.
Speaker: He leaves his dishes out and stuff like that.
Speaker: But hey, if you're closing 15, 20 deals, then you do you.
Speaker: He also, as we were going, I picked him up on the way.
Speaker: He clogged his toilet on the way out.
Speaker: Hopefully he doesn't listen to this and hear that I ratted him out on that.
Speaker: But I'm like, Ricardo, what are you doing unclogging your own toilet?
Speaker: You need to focus on closing the deals.
Speaker: Don't be unclogging your own toilet.
Speaker: Hire someone to do that.
Speaker: So he didn't outsource that.
Speaker: I think pretty much everything else he outsources.
Speaker: Okay, so just a little bit of social, a little bit of proof that this is what top guys are doing.
Speaker: And I do it too.
Speaker: And I'm not closing as many deals as these two, but I mean, I close a decent amount and I have to outsource a lot of things still.
Speaker: And so let's get into what are six things that you can outsource.
Speaker: I'm going to go through just some of these things.
Speaker: And the key with this is just be creative.
Speaker: There's a lot of things that you're probably doing that maybe if you write them all down, you can go through a list of everything you do in a day, everything you do in a week.
Speaker: everything your solar career requires you to do.
Speaker: And chances are you're going to find a handful of these things that you don't have to do yourself, that someone else can do these things.
Speaker: Could you pay someone, you know, 10, 15 bucks an hour to do these things?
Speaker: So that's the first key, write down everything you're doing.
Speaker: And then go look at what are some of these things that I could offload to somebody else.
Speaker: We have episodes on how you can find your own virtual assistant.
Speaker: Like I said, mine, her name is Angelica.
Speaker: She's in the Philippines.
Speaker: She helps me with a lot of these tasks.
Speaker: So if you want more info on that, we're going to link to a separate episode where I have gotten more in depth about how to find one of these.
Speaker: how to find your own virtual assistant.
Speaker: But for today, we're going to talk about just a few specific things that you can consider delegating.
Speaker: So number one is email.
Speaker: Okay, and this is something that you probably are wasting time on.
Speaker: But email is a big thing.
Speaker: You're probably either one or two people.
Speaker: I'm the type of guy that just doesn't check email at all.
Speaker: That's 20,000 messages pile in the inbox and don't really check it.
Speaker: Or the second type, you're probably spending too much time just trying to get to inbox zero, but it's never going to happen.
Speaker: So something you should definitely delegate is just having someone...
Speaker: manage your email.
Speaker: Okay, reply to customers for you, delete unneeded emails, mark emails as junk.
Speaker: You shouldn't need to waste time on this.
Speaker: And I saw an interesting stat today.
Speaker: It said you open up the email.
Speaker: This is from a little blog here.
Speaker: It says it takes you an average of 23 minutes to refocus and get back into the zone every time you open an email.
Speaker: Crazy.
Speaker: 23 minutes for opening an email.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So how many of you are out there knocking doors, out there doing something different, managing accounts, you open an email, 23 minutes lost.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so that's a big one is offload email.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Don't touch it.
Speaker: Figure out someone else to do this for you.
Speaker: Number two is managing leads.
Speaker: This is a big one.
Speaker: So many people spend time just managing these leads, putting them in spreadsheets, submitting them into forums.
Speaker: If you're like most people, you are with an organization that probably requires you to submit deals, to submit leads.
Speaker: to submit forms for tracking purposes, to put it in a CRM, so many different things.
Speaker: And I've even been at times asked to put in, you know, a lead information in like three or four separate sheets.
Speaker: Ain't nobody got time to do all that.
Speaker: So if you can have your assistants start doing this for you,
Speaker: Let's say you close a deal.
Speaker: Let's say you get a new lead, set up an appointment as you're out there knocking doors or on the phones, whatever you're doing.
Speaker: Have someone else just put it in these forms.
Speaker: Every time I close a deal, I shoot an email to Angelica, my assistant, and she puts it in our closed deal form.
Speaker: She makes sure all the info is correct.
Speaker: She makes sure everything is matching.
Speaker: You shouldn't have to check it.
Speaker: Another one is if you're in competitions or if you have like a team chat.
Speaker: This is even something that I've seen top guys do is a lot of them.
Speaker: They're not even taking the time to put it in competitions or team chats.
Speaker: Almost everyone probably sends out a message that you close the deal and
Speaker: Okay, but depending on how specific it is, can you have someone else send this message out for you?
Speaker: Okay, because if you are taking time to send out, oh, I closed the deal and all the information right there, it's probably costing you time, particularly if you're doing it right after you close the deal.
Speaker: Because when's the best time to close another deal?
Speaker: Right after you close the first one.
Speaker: You need to take that momentum.
Speaker: You need to go get to the next door, get to the next appointment and close the next deal.
Speaker: Last thing you want to do is spend 20 minutes after you close the deal, submit everything when you could have used that time to go out and get another one.
Speaker: So that's another big one.
Speaker: At number three is for training.
Speaker: This is specifically or more importantly, if you are in management, if you're planning trainings,
Speaker: Have someone design slides for you.
Speaker: Have someone plan the meetings, update things, update spreadsheets, update team numbers.
Speaker: You do not want to be spending your entire day doing all this stuff, tracking the numbers, making sure accounts are all in your CRMs, whatever.
Speaker: So especially if you are managing a team,
Speaker: Make sure you have someone helping with this.
Speaker: And I have not created slides for my presentation for years now because I have my assistant do it.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't want to spend time creating new slides, creating training slides.
Speaker: I'm going to send her the info.
Speaker: She can create it for me.
Speaker: She does a better job than I do and saves me time.
Speaker: That's another big one.
Speaker: Number four, we got social media management.
Speaker: Hopefully everyone listening is on social media to a degree.
Speaker: You don't have to be on it a ton, but there are deals to be found on social media.
Speaker: Hopefully, you're taking pictures with your customers.
Speaker: But when you do this, you can have an assistant, create a business page if you're on Facebook.
Speaker: And th is is something I learned from my friend Danny Pesce over at Noxstar.
Speaker: He told us that we should all create a business page, whatever your name is.
Speaker: It can be Taylor Armstrong Solar.
Speaker: And then...
Speaker: Whenever someone wants to go look at reviews, direct them to that page.
Speaker: Say, hey, we're Taylor Armstrong Solar.
Speaker: Then they're looking at good reviews of you.
Speaker: Even if they find negative reviews about the company, you say, hey, the thing about this company, there are hundreds of reps or there are dozens of reps, but you're working with me and here's my specific reviews.
Speaker: Okay, so have someone manage social media.
Speaker: If you're trying to build a brand, whatever you're doing, you can have your assistants just basically respond to comments, respond to customers on there, and just make sure it is up to date.
Speaker: So there's number four.
Speaker: Number five, we got travel planning.
Speaker: This is another thing, especially if you're booking flights, if you're traveling back and forth, especially if you're in management trying to plan travels for your teams, doing blitzes, have an assistant to have someone plan this out for you.
Speaker: I try to never book my own flights anymore.
Speaker: Have someone find the deals for you.
Speaker: Have someone plan it.
Speaker: Book the hotels.
Speaker: Book the dinners.
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: You should not have to think about these things.
Speaker: That's number five.
Speaker: Travel planning.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And last but not least is account management.
Speaker: And this is a big one.
Speaker: I am at a solar.
Speaker: We're a solar dealer.
Speaker: So we're not installing the deals directly.
Speaker: And I've been with companies.
Speaker: Some are better than others.
Speaker: Hopefully you don't have to manage your accounts a ton.
Speaker: But the truth is no one's going to manage the accounts as good as you are and as good as someone that you can be helping manage them.
Speaker: So this is why I think it's so cool to have someone helping you with this that you are directly over.
Speaker: Unfortunately, I've had account managers specific to the company drop the ball on things.
Speaker: I've had customers say they don't have good communication.
Speaker: And all this time I thought the account managers were talking to them.
Speaker: They weren't.
Speaker: And so I had to go back, do it myself, make sure they were getting communicated to.
Speaker: So now I have, this is a big one that I'm trying to just improve by leaps and bounds because I don't want to spend hours and hours managing accounts.
Speaker: I want to just close the deal and make sure someone is doing it.
Speaker: So this, as we're talking about this, this is a chance for me to kind of introduce the next, the guests we have coming up on next episode.
Speaker: Her name is Lindsay Erickson.
Speaker: She's been helping me with my account management.
Speaker: If you haven't heard of Lindsay, she is a solar stud.
Speaker: She's doing some awesome things.
Speaker: She has been in solar for a while now, but her primary business is helping people with their account management.
Speaker: She runs a company called Radiant Resources.
Speaker: She's been working with me for around a month now and it's been crazy to see just how much my account management has improved.
Speaker: Because now instead of me having to check my CRMs every day, check and make sure the deal is progressing, she goes in there, she's on top of it, she's communicating with the installers, she's making sure that they're on track for the timelines, she's making sure the HOAs are handled, she's
Speaker: She's making sure that we have all the correct paperwork.
Speaker: She's making any holds that are on there.
Speaker: She's a lot of times handling the holds for me, which is awesome.
Speaker: Before, I was the only one that had to do all these things.
Speaker: Or if it's something that she can't personally do, she's notifying me.
Speaker: And then I am getting the accounts taken off of hold for whatever it is.
Speaker: Sometimes it's a finance issue.
Speaker: Sometimes we need income verification.
Speaker: You know how it is.
Speaker: A lot of different things can happen.
Speaker: So just ask yourself these things right now.
Speaker: Are you the one checking your CRM daily to make sure the account is progressing?
Speaker: Are you the one communicating with the HOA of the homeowner and getting the forms?
Speaker: I think you should be getting the signatures.
Speaker: Okay, so don't outsource that because HOA signatures are a great way to actually get new leads.
Speaker: But as far as getting the paperwork, following up with the HOA, who's doing that?
Speaker: Okay, another big one, who is sending gifts and following up to customers?
Speaker: Hopefully you're all sending out.
Speaker: I'm a big proponent of sending gifts to customers.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But you shouldn't be the one spending time to do this.
Speaker: Okay, you can of course write a little something and I have episodes about this.
Speaker: I use send out cards for all my customer gifts because you can send a handwritten card, you can add photos in there.
Speaker: So I had the picture with me and the customer.
Speaker: But I'm not the one typing it.
Speaker: I'm not the one sending it.
Speaker: I'm not taking the time to put in the address.
Speaker: I send all the info to Angelica.
Speaker: She sends out the customer gift.
Speaker: Okay, and now Lindsey has helped me just streamline this process even more because she sends out basically a whole frequently asked questions.
Speaker: She helped me design slides to send to the customer after the deal that just goes through all the information we covered.
Speaker: They get the gift.
Speaker: She communicates with the installers and she has just been improving my processes by leaps and bounds.
Speaker: So those are some things that you should consider offloading, some things you should consider outsourcing.
Speaker: Okay, next episode, Lindsay is going to be coming on.
Speaker: She's going to be talking about her exact process.
Speaker: And then she's going to be actually dropping a link where you can schedule a call with her.
Speaker: She will give you a free evaluation to see how much you're actually doing for yourself.
Speaker: She'll let you know if she can help you or not.
Speaker: And it's crazy.
Speaker: Even just doing a call with her without working with her.
Speaker: She helped me see so many areas that I could follow up with my customers better.
Speaker: that could streamline my processes with the installers.
Speaker: So I would highly suggest setting up a call with Lindsay and her team.
Speaker: Have her do just a free evaluation of where you're at and how you can possibly streamline your processes.
Speaker: Even if you don't work with her, she's going to give you so many awesome ideas.
Speaker: So tune in to next episode.
Speaker: You're going to hear from Lindsay Erickson at Radiant Resources.
Speaker: In the meantime, just write down everything you're doing, outsource some things.
Speaker: And just like top producers are doing, get someone to clean your house, get someone to, that's why we get married, right?
Speaker: We make our wives clean the house and everything.
Speaker: I'm just kidding.
Speaker: but no in all seriousness hire a cleaning lady have someone wash you know wash fold your clothes if you can we're not promote um promoting laziness we're just using this time to go out and close more deals so that's the last thing you want to do don't outsource all these things you can sit on the couch and watch tv all day outsource these things so you can go out and make some killer money closing those deals
Speaker: Hope that helps.
Speaker: Send this to someone who is spending too much time in their business and not working on their business.
Speaker: I think that's the saying.
Speaker: And go close some deals this week and we will see you on the next episode.
Speaker: What's up, solarpreneurs?
Speaker: Hope you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker: Before you run out and start selling more solar yourself, wanted to let you know about an exciting new cheat sheet we created specifically for you in mind.
Speaker: One of the top questions I get asked on Instagram, on Facebook by our listeners is, Taylor, where should I start?
Speaker: What episodes should I listen to in the podcast?
Speaker: You got too many podcasts, man, because now we have over 200 episodes.
Speaker: So what we've done, we created the top 10 most downloaded, most listened to, and I would say widely accepted, most useful podcasts that we've done here on Solrepreneur.
Speaker: We put them together all in one sheet so you can go, you can hit the ground running, especially if you're new, you do not want to not have this sheet.
Speaker: So go download it right now.
Speaker: It's going to be at top10.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Again, that's top10, the number 10,.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Don't forget the S on solarpreneurs.
Speaker: We will have that in the show notes.
Speaker: Go download it right now.
Speaker: And especially if you have not listened to them, go listen to them and you can re-listen to them.
Speaker: That's going to show you how.
Speaker: So go download it and we'll see you on the other side.
