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Sales In A Rut? Try This Challenge
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In this episode, we delve deep into the common remedy for stagnating sales: a challenge. Blitzing is one of the best ways to push yourself to perform more, and with the support of a team, will lead to a heightened accountability on the doors.
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Journey
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level. My name is Taylor Armstrong. 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.
Goals and Expert Insights
00:00:19
Speaker
I teach you 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.
00:00:31
Speaker
What is a solopreneur you might ask? 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.
00:00:43
Speaker
So some of you already know that I run my own door-to-door sales team here in San Diego. 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.
Innovative Tools and Offers
00:00:54
Speaker
But if I want to increase my deal flow, I need to do something different to get an advantage. Then we discovered an app called Solar Scout. But it's not a door knocking app. It's a data platform that shows us who is likely to go solar in our market.
00:01:08
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. It's been working for a lot of teams across the country and now I'm on board too.
00:01:22
Speaker
I'm going to be one of the first to use SolarScout in San Diego so I decided to partner up. But I told them, hey, I'm going to talk about SolarScout on my show, you need to give my listeners a great deal. And they did.
00:01:32
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. That's solarscout.app forward slash Taylor.
00:01:45
Speaker
Okay, back to the show.
Motivation Challenges and Solutions
00:01:47
Speaker
If you're running a door-to-door team, you know that sometimes as you're getting out of the winter slums, it's still dark early. It can be tough to keep your team motivated year-round. so I'm going to tell you about a challenge week we recently completed as a team that boosted our numbers.
00:02:03
Speaker
and got some great results. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Taylor Armstrong. We're here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and have a much better time in the solar industry. We are getting close to daylight savings time and about to gain an extra hour.
00:02:18
Speaker
ah so Unless you're one of those lucky states, I'm not even sure. Do other countries have daylight savings time? Not sure. Let me know in the comments. But if you're one of those lucky people that do not have daily daylight savings time, I envy you because it is always so frustrating as someone that's selling, that's out in neighborhoods to lose that extra hour of daylight. And yeah maybe it's to make our team tougher, right? Knocking in the dark. But ah I much prefer to have that extra hour from six to seven o'clock still in the daylight. Catch some extra people home.
00:02:48
Speaker
So I hope you are getting ready for that. Hope you're having lostes lots of success. And um today's podcast, I just wanted to talk about a challenge week we wrapped up with. And before I get into the details, let me share with you some of the results we had just from doing this challenge week.
00:03:07
Speaker
So we wrapped it up. We just did a seven-day challenge week. That week, we had a 65% increase in doors knocked. We had a 43% increase in appointment set for our team of over 100 people here in San Diego. And if you do the math, some pretty big numbers.
00:03:25
Speaker
And granted, we are in you know February. It's still one of our historically a little bit slower months, although we are starting to ramp up. But yeah, we had a big increase from that week compared to any other week we'd had in 2025 to this date.
00:03:41
Speaker
So if you are ah losing momentum a little bit or if your team hasn't quite reached their full potential, going to share with you what we did for this challenge week. So the way we modeled our challenge week is we really tried to make it, you think back to your high school days,
00:03:57
Speaker
anyone that played any sport in high school, you typically have a week. They usually call it hell week where you're just going extreme effort. You're practicing. It's like two a days for football. You're doing way more than you regularlyly regularly do. That's how we tried to model it for solar. We call it challenge week because most of us are Christian. We like to not think about hell.
00:04:19
Speaker
But ah whatever you want to call it, you can call it Hell Week. and Really, it's just a week blitz. And our teams were primarily year round teams. So um we're not, you know, we're not doing like the whole blitz schedule, obviously, for an entire year. So it's good to mix in whether you're doing an out of market blitz.
00:04:37
Speaker
or whether you're doing a challenge week like this, um this is something where if you, especially see if you do have mostly year-round reps and maybe not all your reps are blitzing, maybe a lot of them are just staying in market, have families um like a lot of us do out down here. I think this is a good thing to do to kind of like model that same blitz feel, but you don't have to go out of town for it and you still can get a huge increase in production.
Challenge Week Structure and Impact
00:05:02
Speaker
So especially for teams like that, I want you to take notes And especially for the managers listening, if you're not managing a team, if you're not over anybody else, then go to your leaders. Maybe you suggest that you do something like this or you run it yourself, or a little personal one.
00:05:16
Speaker
yeah But the way we did this is we just made it, um there were, I think, 10 different knocking sessions. So Monday through Saturday, we had a morning and an afternoon session.
00:05:28
Speaker
of knocking on every single day or being in appointments if you're closing deals. So the sessions went as follows. It was from 10 a.m. m to 2 p.m. Then there was an hour break. And then the second session was 3 p.m.
00:05:40
Speaker
to 7 p.m. So two four-hour sessions. And what's really funny about this is when they first introduced it, they're like, yeah, guys, we're going to have you knock like a full-time job just for a week. for one week, we're going to treat this like a full-time job. If you think about it, it's kind of funny that you know people that are knocking on doors, a lot of us in solar, we get complacent. you know We make some big commissions and we take days off.
00:06:04
Speaker
We yeah don't go hard. So you know I got respect for people that can treat this like a full-time job and can go eight hours a day knocking or being indoors. I mean, i you know I close deals and I'll be out there you know for probably six hours. But ah people that are knocking... eight hours a day.
00:06:22
Speaker
ah you got my respect. um Because if you do that year round, that is a grind. Hey, but this is how we did it. We divided it into sessions. Tuesdays and Fridays, we have correlations for our teams at 10 a.m. m So Tuesdays and Friday, we only had an afternoon session.
00:06:37
Speaker
yeah But the goal was to win every single session that week. and the way you want them is We just needed to have people hit um a minimum of 30 doors in the knocking session, yeah which super easy to do.
00:06:53
Speaker
um We made it easy so people would hit it. We wanted to get as many people winning the prize and we gamified it. And the best leaders, the best ah motivators in solar is they gamify things.
00:07:06
Speaker
If you can treat this job like a game, if you can make a game for yourself, even if you weren't doing something like this with your team, I would suggest doing something like this for yourself. you know some I listen to lot of Ed Milet, great podcast. Go listen to Ed Milet podcast if you haven't. But ah he talks about when he was in his selling days, he would gamify his sales. And at the end of his quarters, as long as he hit the metrics that he was shooting for, he would go out to like a Ritz-Carlton with his wife for three days or something.
00:07:36
Speaker
and take like a mini vacation. And he talked about even though he didn't have money at the time, he still would use that as like a surprise. And the other benefit was that it was he was getting around other hyper successful people.
00:07:49
Speaker
And even though he didn't yet have the success himself, he was getting around those people and it was pushing him to do something great. So it kind of serves as a double purpose. So the tangent is even if you aren't doing something like this for your team, how can you gamify the process for yourself?
00:08:03
Speaker
hey Maybe it's if you hit your sales metric, maybe you're buying the new MacBook, maybe you're doing a mini vacation like that. um This is what the most successful reps do. But what we did for our challenge week is we did a six flags trip. So anyone that won the rounds that worked the two rounds, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and then 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. and hit a minimum of 30 doors.
00:08:27
Speaker
We have an app that verifies that they have to go change the you know status of the door in there. Anyone that did that, they won the challenge week and they get to go on the trip to six flags.
00:08:38
Speaker
and And then we added another layer to it And shout out to my guy, Tyler Anderson. He's actually one of our regionals and most of these were his ideas. So shout out to Tyler.
00:08:48
Speaker
Not trying to steal Tyler's thunder here. The second layer that was added to it was we did an all out winner. an all out was just you had metrics metrics attack attached on top of the door count.
00:09:01
Speaker
So what we did for that is anyone that hit, it was 270 doors knocked, nine plus appointments booked with utility bill and three cells, three assisted cells. That's from a setter. They got a pair of Nike Air Maxes. So that was the other layer.
00:09:20
Speaker
So yeah, we had two incentives going and I would suggest doing something like that too. yeah You don't want to like, you want a prize that everyone can win based off their input. And then you want a prize based off the people that are going to, you know, actually produce more.
00:09:34
Speaker
um And yeah, just the morale we saw, people were pushing for this. It had a massive increase just in buy-in. And the way we started the rounds is you take a selfie picture on the door.
00:09:46
Speaker
That's your clock and photo. So we had to do that at 10 a.m. or before 10 a.m. to win that round. And then for the second round, you had to take a clock out photo. in the dark after 7 p.m.
00:09:59
Speaker
knocking our last door. And that's how you won the second round. So pretty simple metrics. And yeah, it was just an all-out hustle. um We created like slides for this and everything.
00:10:10
Speaker
ah Career breakthrough, creating the best version of ourselves, celebrate like champions. Let me know. I can send you some of the slides that were created for this. um So yeah, we saw great results.
00:10:22
Speaker
And I personally had, you know, a lot of my team we bought in we went out as a team, um we motivated each other, we held each other accountable. So again, if you are feeling like your team is in a little bit of a rut, you consider doing a challenge week for your team. You can come out to Six Flags with us.
00:10:41
Speaker
You can go, I don't know, zip lining. Just plan a team activity, get people fired up, do something to kick off daylight savings time that's coming up. That's how you're going get your team cranking and ready to go for the summer when you really want them pushing hard.
00:10:56
Speaker
Okay, so I hope that gives you a cool, unique idea. to try out with your team or try out for yourself. Give yourself some sort of incentive, motivation to push hard whenever you listen the
Preview and Resources
00:11:08
Speaker
podcast. And I wanted to preview next episode we have coming out is one of my friends, Nick Nassimeno.
00:11:15
Speaker
This guy is... Definitely one of the influencers in solar right now. He's running a team in Utah of all places. That's where I'm from. I thought solar was dead in Utah. Well, you thought wrong. Nick is leading his company, Sparta Solar, and they're just absolutely crushing it in Utah, which is not a great market for solar.
00:11:32
Speaker
ah Somehow these guys are making crazy money and just blowing up out there. And Nick, he's had you know multiple million dollar years himself, has always been a top producer in the industry. So if you want to hear how he runs his team, how he makes seven figures for himself, then make sure you tune in to the next episode. And don't forget, grab your SolarCon tickets.
00:11:55
Speaker
We got the link in the show notes and they're going up on pricing. You got about a month left before we see at SolarCon. So grab your tickets, keep crushing, try out a challenge week or a hell week with your team, and we'll see you on the next podcast.
00:12:11
Speaker
What's up, solopreneurs? Hope you enjoyed the episode. 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.
00:12:24
Speaker
One of the top questions I get asked on Instagram, on Facebook, by our listeners is, Taylor, where should I start? What episodes should I listen to in the podcast? You got too many podcasts, man, because now we have over 200 episodes.
00:12:39
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 Solarpreneur.
00:12:52
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. So go download it right now. It's going to be at top10.solarpreneurs.com. Again, that's top10, the number 10,.solarpreneurs.com. Don't forget the S on solarpreneurs. We will have that in the show notes. Go download it right now.
00:13:17
Speaker
And especially if you have not listened to them, go listen to them and you can re-listen to them. That's going show you how. So go download it and we'll see you on the other side.