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 solopreneur, you might ask?
Speaker: A solopreneur is a new breed of solopro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery, and you are about to become one.
Speaker: Hey, what's up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Today, we're going to be talking about a topic that I don't think we've ever talked about before, and that is how to be more effective when you are calling leads, calling people.
Speaker: I know most of this is door-to-door, but hey, we all got to make calls and
Speaker: We're probably calling referrals, leads.
Speaker: So how can we be a little more effective when we're making calls?
Speaker: Okay, so we're going to be jamming on that and a whole lot more.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to the podcast.
Speaker: We are here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully have a much better time in the solar industry.
Speaker: It was actually my birthday yesterday at the time of this recording.
Speaker: So thank you to everyone that told me happy birthday.
Speaker: And the biggest present I could ask for is if you guys would go leave a review, share the podcast, spread the word.
Speaker: That's what helps us grow.
Speaker: That's what helps us make an impact over here at Solarpreneur.
Speaker: So it'd be much appreciated if you have not done those things.
Speaker: Please go out and spread the word, leave us a review.
Speaker: That's all we ask.
Speaker: That's all I ask.
Speaker: And speaking of reviews, we did have a few new ones I wanted to feature on the show.
Speaker: So I wanted to give a quick thank you.
Speaker: Our most recent review was from Bill Solar Pro.
Speaker: And Bill is a friend of mine, actually hopped on a call with him.
Speaker: We've known each other for a little bit, connected through the podcast, actually.
Speaker: And he said, like a trusted friend, five stars,
Speaker: This positive review is long overdue.
Speaker: I've been listening to Solopreneur for years now as the best use of my commute, and it has helped me immensely.
Speaker: Taylor has such a chill style and is a skilled interviewer, able to bring together talented players from the industry and able to ask the right questions from guests to bring out golden nuggets to share with all of us.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Bill, brother.
Speaker: Appreciate it.
Speaker: And keep crushing your solar in Hawaii.
Speaker: And shout out, if you need a plug for solar in Hawaii, hit Bill up or hit me up.
Speaker: I should say, and I'll connect you with him.
Speaker: And then our second review is
Speaker: Shout out to EJ Hernandez.
Speaker: This is on a negative note.
Speaker: He left us a one-star review.
Speaker: I apologize, EJ, that we're not living up to your expectations.
Speaker: But the only thing he said is monotone and much.
Speaker: So EJ, I'm sorry we failed your expectations.
Speaker: And I know I can be a little monotone sometimes.
Speaker: So I try to keep it a little animated.
Speaker: And unfortunately, I've just had a monotone voice.
Speaker: Probably my whole life.
Speaker: I do everything I can to, you know, not be super monotone.
Speaker: But hey, we're getting there.
Speaker: Probably should do some voice coaching or something.
Speaker: So EJ, hopefully that is not relating to the value of the podcast, because I believe we are sharing the best, the latest, the greatest tricks and tips for solar cells.
Speaker: So I hope you'll give us a shot.
Speaker: But I'm sorry that apparently I'm too monotone.
Speaker: But come on now, one star review.
Speaker: Can you at least give us like three stars?
Speaker: And say, hey, work on your work on not being so monotone.
Speaker: But OK, it is what it is.
Speaker: Haters going to hate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So anyways, enough about reviews.
Speaker: Let's jump into the topic of the show.
Speaker: And that is how can we be more effective when we are calling people on the phone for solar?
Speaker: And I think it's a skill that isn't talked about very often.
Speaker: I don't think I've ever really heard this brought up in any like door to door training.
Speaker: I've been in the industry eight years on mostly door to door teams.
Speaker: And I can't remember ever doing a training about how we should call people.
Speaker: Hey, but recently had a guest on who you're going to hear from on the next episode coming up.
Speaker: His name is Peter Roth.
Speaker: He works with age leads, which are just leads that's, you know, at some point they responded to an ad.
Speaker: At some point they showed interest and we have a name and a phone number for these people.
Speaker: So he's all about collecting these lists of age leads.
Speaker: and then setting up call centers calling these people.
Speaker: And so I'll admit a lot of people, myself, I have not done age leads, per se.
Speaker: And some of us, maybe we're not really planning on calling like lists of leads or anything like that.
Speaker: But I think there is still training needed on how we can be more effective when we call.
Speaker: Because we're all even if we're doing purely door to door,
Speaker: working referrals, whatever, there's going to be many times when we're making phone calls and maybe we're calling a somewhat colder referral or just a cold lead, right?
Speaker: We need to know how to be effective.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So I'm going to talk about a few things, a few ways you can be more effective when you are making these calls.
Speaker: And I'll preface it by saying I'm not an expert on this.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I am mostly door-to-door guy.
Speaker: But I have picked up a few things, especially as I've interviewed people that are experts that I think help tremendously.
Speaker: And a few tweaks myself.
Speaker: The most calling I do personally is calling referrals personally.
Speaker: Yeah, here's a few things I learned.
Speaker: Okay, I'm going to give you guys three things.
Speaker: Okay, but the story on this was I started to increase my referrals.
Speaker: Over the last few years, I've been dialing in my process more and more to get more referrals from people I sign when I knock on their doors.
Speaker: And I realized I was getting these long lists of leads and
Speaker: And then I was just not calling them.
Speaker: So they just sat there for a long time.
Speaker: But then when I was calling them, the problem was people weren't answering.
Speaker: I would get discouraged.
Speaker: And then when I do these sessions, I just realized it was taking a lot of time to actually call these people.
Speaker: It's like I had them all scattered all over the place, these notebooks, these papers of referrals.
Speaker: And so it's super disorganized.
Speaker: And then number two, it just took a long time.
Speaker: I would have to like, OK, figure out where's this phone number written down.
Speaker: OK, let me type it in.
Speaker: Oh, you know what?
Speaker: I mistyped that number.
Speaker: Retype it in.
Speaker: And then just probably like 30 seconds, maybe even up to a minute sometimes between calls because I would have to figure out where I was doing.
Speaker: And that may that may not sound like a ton, but if you add up.
Speaker: So some of you already know that I run my own door to door sales team here in San Diego.
Speaker: And as we are gearing up for the summer, I realized if we do the same thing we always did, we're going to get the same results.
Speaker: But if I want to increase my deal flow, I need to do something different to get an advantage.
Speaker: Then we discovered an app called Solar Scout.
Speaker: But it's not a door knocking app.
Speaker: It's a data platform that shows us who is likely to go solar in our market.
Speaker: It shows us who has previously applied for solar but later canceled the deal, who has moved in recently, and even how much electricity the homes are using in a given neighborhood.
Speaker: It's been working for a lot of teams across the country, and now I'm on board too.
Speaker: I'm going to be one of the first to use Solar Scout in San Diego, so I decided to partner up.
Speaker: But I told them, hey, I'm going to talk about Solar Scout on my show.
Speaker: You need to give my listeners a great deal, and they did.
Speaker: So go to solarscout.app forward slash Taylor and book a demo with them, and you'll get 10% off your first month when you sign up.
Speaker: That's solarscout.app forward slash Taylor.
Speaker: Okay, back to the show.
Speaker: however many calls you're making.
Speaker: If you're making, let's say 50 calls and you've got a minute between each of these calls, you know, including breaks, maybe that's 50 minutes of extra time you just added in there because you had to check your notes.
Speaker: You had to figure out the right phone number.
Speaker: So how can we be more effective?
Speaker: So these are some steps I made right off the bat that helped me be way more effective, speed things up.
Speaker: And so the first one is this.
Speaker: going directly off that point is have some type of dialer or CRM.
Speaker: And so if you're new to this, a dialer, that's what like you think of these call centers, you know, the Filipinos on head headsets or, you know, different countries that have the headsets.
Speaker: I know there's American call centers too, but pretty popular to start offshore call centers.
Speaker: So you think of them, they got their headsets on and they're not just hooking it up to their iPhone.
Speaker: They have a dialer software.
Speaker: So it's basically a software that just makes it automatic, has all your phone numbers and boom, boom, boom, boom.
Speaker: At the very least, it's calling them all automatically.
Speaker: There's no time between calls.
Speaker: It's just cranking them off one by one.
Speaker: Hey, and there's a few different types of dialers.
Speaker: You can Google it.
Speaker: If you Google top dialers for sales, it's going to show you all that stuff.
Speaker: So you can pick one.
Speaker: You can do it if you're calling lots of leads.
Speaker: Great way to handle it right there.
Speaker: But I would recommend that
Speaker: The very simple solution I have is you can use software called High Level.
Speaker: A lot of people are familiar with it in solar now.
Speaker: I've talked about it on the podcast, but it's just a CRM, right?
Speaker: You have all your leads plugged in there and you can use it also as a dialer.
Speaker: OK, so it has a feature where you can just have an entire list that will go through and just crank them out automatically.
Speaker: So when I discovered this, I had no idea I had been using high level for a while.
Speaker: But when I discovered it, it absolutely changed my approach to calling these referrals.
Speaker: All these lists of referrals, it made it so much easier.
Speaker: I would just upload them, go through my pipeline of or go through my little list of referrals.
Speaker: And instead of like having to double check the phone number, they're already all uploaded in the software, right?
Speaker: You can just upload spreadsheets and stuff like that in there.
Speaker: And just automatically, boom, boom, boom, I could crank out calls the speed of lightning it felt like compared to what I was doing before.
Speaker: So at the very least, if you are making calls, get some type of CRM, get some type of dialer because you just want to be more efficient.
Speaker: And so you will get burned out if you're just using your regular iPhone and making a high volume of calls.
Speaker: If you hardly ever call, if you're just, you know, calling every once in a while, referral, whatever, then you don't have to worry about this as much.
Speaker: But I would say start getting better at referrals and collecting more leads like that, more names and numbers from people.
Speaker: And hopefully you can get your refer to actually introduce you through a three way text.
Speaker: But if not, then you got to be calling them.
Speaker: Okay, so make sure you have some type of software, some type of solution for that.
Speaker: Okay, and then number two is follow some type of script.
Speaker: We all have scripts for knocking on doors for closing, at least we should.
Speaker: We should not be winging it.
Speaker: So why do so many of us wing it when it comes to calling referrals, when it comes to calling leads, when it comes to calling past appointments that ghosted us?
Speaker: We should have a separate script for all these situations, right?
Speaker: And even if you are experienced, even if you're like, oh, Taylor, I don't need a script.
Speaker: I can just call.
Speaker: People love me.
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: What about for all your new guys?
Speaker: You give a script to all your new guys when they're knocking doors.
Speaker: Why don't you have some type of script for calling people on the phone for different situations?
Speaker: And I noticed myself, I felt like I was experienced.
Speaker: I felt like I would have good conversations when I started doing these things.
Speaker: But as I would listen back to these calls, which that's another cool thing about using a software like HighLevel is it will actually record the calls.
Speaker: So you can go back, you can listen to conversation, analyze what happened.
Speaker: But I was really realizing that every call I was like saying different things.
Speaker: Sometimes I was getting confused.
Speaker: Sometimes they bring up some objections on the phone.
Speaker: I didn't know how to handle them the best way.
Speaker: So when I actually just wrote myself a script, things became much easier.
Speaker: So whether you're new, whether you're experienced, even if you're experienced, I would just write yourself a script so you can refer to it.
Speaker: You can follow it because trust me, when you're making a ton of calls, sometimes your mind can go blank too.
Speaker: A little bit different than knocking on the door.
Speaker: So it helps to just have like a script to know where you're leading the conversation.
Speaker: And just like a framework, fossil framework, if you need help with that, hit me up.
Speaker: we can help.
Speaker: We do have coaching options.
Speaker: Okay, little plug.
Speaker: Okay, but hit me up.
Speaker: This is what we help with.
Speaker: Okay, and then last but not least, number three in all this is make sure you just act like you're having a conversation with a real person.
Speaker: This was another thing I realized when I went back and listened to a lot of these recordings.
Speaker: At the door, you know, I'm seeing body language when I'm knocking a door.
Speaker: I see how the customer's acting.
Speaker: I'm mirroring them.
Speaker: If they're
Speaker: you know, grandma, happy, excited, whatever.
Speaker: I'm trying to be the same way.
Speaker: And so on the phone, this is a little bit tougher.
Speaker: You don't see their body language.
Speaker: And I guess going back to the review, I got that it's the podcast is too monotone.
Speaker: That's how I was sounding in these calls.
Speaker: So I realized that
Speaker: that I need to like stand up.
Speaker: I need to have a smile on my face.
Speaker: I need to act like I'm happy to talk to these people because it comes off on the phone how you're acting.
Speaker: If you're laying down, have you ever like laid down and tried to have a conversation?
Speaker: Your voice changes and people can tell anytime I have a conversation laying down, I always get, hey, did you just wake up?
Speaker: I guess people can hear in your voice.
Speaker: And maybe that's maybe EJ, the person that left us a one star.
Speaker: Maybe I was doing a podcast like, I don't know, sitting down or laying down.
Speaker: Sometimes I do do podcasts sitting down.
Speaker: But yeah, they probably come out more monotone.
Speaker: I know they do come out a little more monotone than if I'm standing up.
Speaker: That's why if you watch any of the videos of the podcast, usually I try to stand up because I'm getting more, I would say more oxygen.
Speaker: Just easier to be a little more animated.
Speaker: You're awake, right?
Speaker: Lots of a lot easier to fall asleep in the chair.
Speaker: Hey, so it definitely helps if you can stand up and have a smile on your face when you're making these calls.
Speaker: Hey, so that's just some simple tips you can follow.
Speaker: And again, I'm no expert in these, but these are some basic things that you all should be doing when you're making calls.
Speaker: And if you don't have anybody to call, then again, get more referrals, get more leads to call.
Speaker: And I know a lot of us were knocking doors, getting leads with other methods.
Speaker: But I would say, you know, when winter, fall starts rolling around, when the days are shorter,
Speaker: Myself, personally, I'm knocking in the dark, but I'm not knocking until 8 or 9 o'clock in the winter like I am in the summer.
Speaker: So how about those hours when you probably would be knocking in this summer?
Speaker: Why don't you use those hours to maybe make a few phone calls in the winter?
Speaker: All of us have appointments that ghosted us.
Speaker: All of us have past leads that we can follow up on, and we're hitting the phone for those hours.
Speaker: Okay, so I hope those things help today.
Speaker: Again, we have Peter Roth coming on that is a master in setting up call centers in using age leads to get more business.
Speaker: So make sure you tune into that to learn more about that topic.
Speaker: I don't think we've had any anyone on the podcast talking about those things.
Speaker: So tune into that one.
Speaker: And then just to review today, number one, it's use some type of CRM, pick a dialer.
Speaker: If you are making a high volume of calls at all, then you need some type of dialer.
Speaker: Number two, follow a script.
Speaker: And number three, don't fall asleep on the calls.
Speaker: Hey, you're talking to a person.
Speaker: So stand up, smile, whatever you got to do.
Speaker: I hope that helps you today.
Speaker: I hope you have an awesome week and close lots of deals and grow your solar business.
Speaker: We'll see you on the next episode.
Speaker: Peace.
Speaker: Hey, solopreneurs, 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 level solar professionals and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level.
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