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: Hey, what's up, solarpreneurs?
Speaker: Taylor Armstrong here, and today we are going to be talking about a secret gifting process that you can fully automate to send all your customers and help set you apart from every other solar rep in the whole world, if you actually implement it.
Speaker: So we're going to be jamming on that and a whole lot more.
Speaker: Welcome 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: We are free and available on iTunes, Apple, Spotify, wherever you can listen to podcasts.
Speaker: And we are coming at you every Tuesday and Friday and
Speaker: Thank you for being a loyal listener, or if this is your first time, welcome to the show, and you are about to have your mind blown with the content here.
Speaker: So make sure to tune in every Tuesday and Friday.
Speaker: And so recently, some of you may know, actually just welcomed our third kid into the world.
Speaker: So thanks in advance, all of you, congratulations and all that.
Speaker: I'm pretty stressed.
Speaker: I could barely handle two kids.
Speaker: So we have a third one was just born last week.
Speaker: And last week, it got kind of chaotic because I couldn't necessarily go out and knock and sell just because.
Speaker: My wife was supposed to have a baby any day.
Speaker: So I had to kind of like stay close by, couldn't really go to appointments.
Speaker: And as a high producer and someone that's always wants to be moving forward, it can be tough to just like chill out for a second.
Speaker: So I took advantage of this time where I was kind of just sitting around waiting for this baby to come to work on some back end stuff and to improve my systems and processes a little bit.
Speaker: And something I struggle with, I'm fascinated with learning how to be more efficient, how to set up better systems.
Speaker: But I struggle with organization.
Speaker: I am definitely ADD, very disorganized at times.
Speaker: And so I use this time to just improve my process a little bit.
Speaker: And I figured out a cool little gifting process, an improvement I made on a gifting process that I've been using off and on for a while now.
Speaker: And I think those of you, especially if you are looking for a way to stand out from other competitors,
Speaker: especially if you do like the idea of giving gifts to your customers, I think you're going to love this.
Speaker: And I already shared this with some of our coaching clients in our program.
Speaker: And if you are interested in getting more coaching on some of these things and help with the implementation part, that's what it's for.
Speaker: The podcast, we're going to share with you all the information.
Speaker: Information is free.
Speaker: But if you need help implementing, that's where I think our coaching program takes it to another level because we help you actually apply step-by-step the stuff that we discuss on the podcast.
Speaker: And it's all the hand-holding, it's all the help, and it really speeds up the process of implementing and improving on the things you hear on the podcast.
Speaker: But you can set this up yourself, and I'm going to walk you through step-by-step
Speaker: And hopefully, whether you follow my exact process or not, I'm sure there's even better ways out there.
Speaker: But hopefully you do give back to your customers.
Speaker: And I think that's a little pre-step, step zero, right?
Speaker: Is we all should be investing a portion of our commissions back into our clients, back into our customers.
Speaker: You think of most other industries, other sales industries, especially like bigger sales, bigger commissions, right?
Speaker: like we enjoy in solar, most of the time they're gifting their customers, right?
Speaker: I have a buddy who recently bought a house.
Speaker: As he bought his house, he had like a huge gift basket from his real estate agent.
Speaker: And I think it's just much more common.
Speaker: And I don't know why we don't do it more in solar because I think it's
Speaker: sets you apart, number one, but number two, it's going to help you get more referrals.
Speaker: So I love gifting my customers.
Speaker: And just on top of that, not even your customers, like you can gift people, maybe leads, prospects, right?
Speaker: Ashton Buswell, one of my friends down here, many of you know Ashton, one of the goats of solar, but he told us a story.
Speaker: He sent us this message in our group app, our little group me.
Speaker: He sent a prospect he couldn't close, and he found out they were huge Lakers fans.
Speaker: So he sent them a custom Lakers oven mitt from Amazon, even though he didn't close them.
Speaker: And then sure enough, today I look at our notifications in the group, in the group me in.
Speaker: He had a picture of him closing that deal with those same people because he set himself apart.
Speaker: He followed up.
Speaker: So that's the power of this stuff.
Speaker: I'd highly recommend...
Speaker: You just think outside the box and think of ways to incentivize, think of ways to gift your customers, follow up, creative ways like that.
Speaker: It's going to help you make more money this year.
Speaker: All right, so let's get into the step-by-step process that I...
Speaker: I won't say I came up with, but I've tweaked over the years for my customers.
Speaker: And so if you've been a longtime listener of the podcast, you may have heard that I used to use a service software called Sendout Cards, which is still a great...
Speaker: great software, great service.
Speaker: Basically what it allows you to do is you go in there, you log in, create an account, and it allows you to send cards that you can make it appear handwritten.
Speaker: You can pick like a handwritten font and lets you send gifts with those cards.
Speaker: So my process for a very long time is I would take a picture with my customer.
Speaker: I would send it to my virtual assistant along with the address.
Speaker: And I would send her the message that I wanted in that card.
Speaker: She would send it out.
Speaker: And it was great.
Speaker: Customers would get a little pack of brownies.
Speaker: They get the card.
Speaker: They get the photo on it.
Speaker: Send out cards.
Speaker: Did the job.
Speaker: People thanked me.
Speaker: Got referrals for it.
Speaker: And I stopped using it for a while.
Speaker: partly because I tried some new gifts out.
Speaker: I bought some Cutco knives, been giving those out for a while too.
Speaker: And so it just became kind of a lot.
Speaker: I had to like worry about going back, giving people a Cutco knife and just like remembering it was great.
Speaker: Sort of, even though I had a virtual assistant that's helping, it kind of became a few extra steps that I had to remember to send out the photo I took with the customer, send out exactly what gift I wanted, and send out the message.
Speaker: So it was a few extra steps.
Speaker: So here's the tweak I made to this.
Speaker: I found a service and we will link all these in the show notes.
Speaker: So don't worry if you can't remember.
Speaker: I know I wouldn't.
Speaker: The service I found is called Zen Direct.
Speaker: And what's so cool about this is it actually allows you to integrate with your CRM with wherever you're storing your customers and it'll automatically send over the information and allow you to actually automate the process.
Speaker: which is really cool because the other ones send out cards.
Speaker: You had to follow these extra steps to do it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I'll walk you through the process.
Speaker: And I haven't fully automated it.
Speaker: You'll understand why in a second.
Speaker: But you can technically fully automate it to where you just have your customer in whatever CRM you're using.
Speaker: And then you hit send.
Speaker: It'll automatically send out a gift of your choice in there.
Speaker: So here's what I'm doing currently.
Speaker: Step number one is you need to pick a CRM.
Speaker: If you're not using a CRM, that's Customer Relationship Manager, I believe is what it stands for.
Speaker: And currently I'm using one called CRMX.
Speaker: I will link to that in the show notes.
Speaker: And disclaimer, if you want to support the show, I do make a small commission if you decide to purchase or use any of these tools that I'm using with the links.
Speaker: So it'd be much appreciated if you want to click the links.
Speaker: It helps support the show.
Speaker: But I use CRMX.
Speaker: And it is my friend Brent Attaway.
Speaker: He's been on the show.
Speaker: He spoke at my referral boot camp.
Speaker: But part of this came from him too.
Speaker: He's really good at setting these up.
Speaker: And so once you have a CRM, whatever you're using, I think pretty much... There's a lot of different CRMs out there.
Speaker: High level is really the backbone of the one I use.
Speaker: Some of you've heard of go high level.
Speaker: So this CRMX is Brant Attaway's customization of go high level.
Speaker: So if you're using go high level works with whatever form you're using it.
Speaker: Hey, but there's a lot of different CRMs out there.
Speaker: There's ClickUp, there's Monday.com, there's PipeDrive I was using for a little bit.
Speaker: There's all sorts of these different CRMs.
Speaker: And it should work with basically all of them because what you do, and this is step number two, is assuming you're entering your customers in your CRM, like you all should be doing, because no point in having a CRM if you're not actually putting your customers in there.
Speaker: But once you put it in there, you use another tool called Zapier.
Speaker: We will link to that as well.
Speaker: But Zapier, what it does, it allows you to basically integrate to link these tools together, link softwares together.
Speaker: And so what's really cool is you enter your customer and you set up Zapier and you can YouTube this stuff.
Speaker: It's not super hard, but you set up a Zapier to say, hey, once I enter in my customer data,
Speaker: And once I move it to my customer pipeline, that is you've actually signed them and they're in the process to get installed.
Speaker: You say, take this data, take the name, the address, phone number, whatever, and send it to the other software, which is Zendirect.
Speaker: And then this is how you actually automate it.
Speaker: So now you put the customer, you add it in your pipeline, get sent to Zendirect.
Speaker: And then from there, you can technically automate it to where it just will like send out a gift.
Speaker: Hey, you could say, hey, every time it gets put in this customer pipeline, send out this gift.
Speaker: And so here's the reason I did not fully automate it like that.
Speaker: Um, first of all, it's, um, you know, it's not like it's, you're paying a ton for these services.
Speaker: Hey, really?
Speaker: That's, what's cool.
Speaker: It's super affordable.
Speaker: Um, it's like 10, 15 bucks to send out card brownies and sends out in like two days.
Speaker: Hey, but, um, I didn't want to like, I guess, fully automate it, um, testing it a little, a little bit.
Speaker: Um, so that's part of it.
Speaker: But the second part is, um, as I mentioned before, I like to send actual photos with my customers.
Speaker: Many of you see me on social media.
Speaker: I'm posting photos, videos with customers.
Speaker: And so to my knowledge, there's not really a way to fully automate like sending a photo over to Zendirect from your CRM.
Speaker: And so you do have to take another step.
Speaker: You have to actually go in and you have the address, you have the customer data, but you do have to actually add the photo in the card if you want that in there.
Speaker: So that's the main reason I'm not fully automating it right now is because I do like to add that little personal touch of the card of the photo in the card.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But what I've done is we just set up a standard message, which I use.
Speaker: You can just use chat GPT, say, hey, make me a cool thank you card message to send to all my solar clients.
Speaker: And this goes in there.
Speaker: I will probably sometimes customize that a little bit.
Speaker: Hey, because, you know, there's power and making it a little bit heartfelt, right?
Speaker: It's not making the same standard message.
Speaker: But now all we need to do is I still have my virtual assistant, right?
Speaker: She'll go in there and customer will already be in there.
Speaker: She'll just paste the photo.
Speaker: She'll paste the the message in there.
Speaker: Click send should take less than 30 seconds.
Speaker: And a lot less work off my plate.
Speaker: I just now include the, you can add photos in your CRM.
Speaker: Most CRMs should have this too, is to add attachments.
Speaker: So now I just add the attachment of the photo in there.
Speaker: She copies and pastes it into Zendirect, which is the card sending software service and bada beam, bada boom, that's sent.
Speaker: Automatically, you're standing out to your customers.
Speaker: You're getting more referrals and I've just found it.
Speaker: a cool little, you know, extra touch, cool little cherry on top to do over the years.
Speaker: So if you like the idea of sending gifts, but you don't want to be just adding all this extra time, try this out.
Speaker: Okay, I'm testing it.
Speaker: I'm tweaking it, but I'm really liking the power of this.
Speaker: Just started using it last week, actually.
Speaker: And another cool thing is you can just set up campaigns in here.
Speaker: So I mentioned how Ashton Buswell, he did.
Speaker: He sent a gift and a card, or I think just a gift to one of his prospects, right?
Speaker: Well, I had a prospect, someone I met with recently.
Speaker: A week and a half ago, they were going into surgery.
Speaker: Couldn't get them to pull the trigger just because they didn't want to like deal with solar before their surgery.
Speaker: They liked it.
Speaker: And so what I did, I went in there, plugged in the address, sent them out a gift.
Speaker: There's a whole bunch of gifts, gift cards you can send from this Zendirect service.
Speaker: So I sent him a card.
Speaker: Hey, hope you get well soon.
Speaker: Send him a gift to go with it.
Speaker: And he should have it in the mail now.
Speaker: Hopefully hasn't told me yet, but should be in his mailbox any day now.
Speaker: Hey, and it's like, come on, who's doing that?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If he's going to go solar somebody, it's going to be the person who sent him like a get well soon card with a gift.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is how you stand out.
Speaker: I guarantee someone knocks their door like doesn't matter.
Speaker: They're going to go with the person that's went above and beyond and was different for him and made him feel good.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They're going to go with someone who made them feel that emotion.
Speaker: So that's the power of this.
Speaker: So again, get a CRM.
Speaker: You can use a tool called Zapier to get these things to integrate together.
Speaker: And then Zen Direct.
Speaker: Click the link in the show notes.
Speaker: You're going to be able to like sign up.
Speaker: And all you do, you buy credits on this.
Speaker: You can have it by like 50 credits at a time.
Speaker: But 10, 15 bucks, you got a custom card and a pack of brownies, pack of cookies, whatever you want to send out to your customer.
Speaker: So let me know how it's working for you.
Speaker: Again, if you want help actually integrating this and you're sometimes overwhelmed by the technology, don't worry, I was too.
Speaker: And if I'm being honest, this actually took me like, I ran into some technical issues.
Speaker: I'm not the most tech savvy guy.
Speaker: So I know if I can figure it out, you can too.
Speaker: It took me probably a couple hours to get it working, but I'm like, yeah, I'm going to do something.
Speaker: I'm not out knocking doors.
Speaker: I'm waiting for a baby to come.
Speaker: And finally got it figured out.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But if you want help with this and actually applying it step by step, we do have a few spots open for our coaching group.
Speaker: Hey, you can shoot me an email, taylor at solopreneurs.com or shoot me a DM on the socials.
Speaker: I've been catching up a little bit, new baby.
Speaker: So been a little bit behind.
Speaker: So I apologize if you have not gotten a response, but hit us up.
Speaker: We can potentially get you in the group.
Speaker: And wherever you're at, I hope you go above and beyond for your customers.
Speaker: And last thing, big thank you to our sponsors who are Solar Scouts.
Speaker: They are just speaking of going above and beyond.
Speaker: These guys are changing the game when it comes to customer data, when it comes to the data you can get on your prospects.
Speaker: Talked about it in previous episodes, but just insane the amount of data as far as like expired permits.
Speaker: people that have clicked on ads for solar where you can go and literally knock their door or someone that clicked on an ad yesterday.
Speaker: Just changing the game.
Speaker: And I've already gotten a deal from it.
Speaker: I've been using it like two weeks now.
Speaker: So highly recommend checking them out.
Speaker: They are also in the show notes.
Speaker: If you want to book a demo, they can show you what they got going on over there at SolarScout.com.
Speaker: And then last but not least, thank you to everyone who has left us a review, has shared the podcast.
Speaker: We are on YouTube.
Speaker: So go subscribe to us there if you want to see videos dropping.
Speaker: We're trying to grow the YouTube channel.
Speaker: And let me know if you have suggestions for guests, for topics you want covered.
Speaker: And please go leave us a review if you've not already.
Speaker: It means a lot.
Speaker: And that's how we grow the show.
Speaker: So thanks again.
Speaker: And we'll see you guys on the next episode.
Speaker: Keep crushing.
Speaker: Peace out.
Speaker: What's up, solopreneurs?
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.
Speaker: 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.
