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: In today's episode, you're going to hear about the mistake that cost me over 30 grand in commissions, and how you might be losing money without even realizing it.
Speaker: All that and much more in today's episode of the solopreneur.
Speaker: Let's jump into it.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: I'm here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully have a much more enjoyable time in the solar industry.
Speaker: It's a great day today.
Speaker: It's raining outside here in San Diego, California.
Speaker: Hopefully wherever you're at, don't let the rain scare you away.
Speaker: We get some of this winter weather.
Speaker: I'll admit I am a sucker for not wanting to work in the inclement weather.
Speaker: That's why I live in San Diego because, let's be honest, San Diego has pretty much the best weather in the 60 to 70 degree range basically all year round.
Speaker: So if you're sick of knocking in that brutal heat or those winter storms, then come on over.
Speaker: We got a job for you.
Speaker: But in all seriousness, sometimes it is an advantage to knock in those inclement weather conditions.
Speaker: I've got friends that are out in Colorado, friends in Arizona knocking in snow storms.
Speaker: And the advantage you have with it is people are usually going to be more sympathetic and let you inside the house.
Speaker: And I was talking with one of my friends in Colorado saying that when they're knocking in the winter, it's so cold outside that people just let them right in half the time.
Speaker: So that's your advantage.
Speaker: If it is raining or if it is hurricane weather, whatever, then people are probably going to let you inside.
Speaker: Either that or tell you you're crazy and not listen to you at all, right?
Speaker: But with that being said, let's jump into the episode.
Speaker: So before we get into that, I wanted to just remind everyone that I was on the Solar Objections live stream.
Speaker: If you didn't have a chance to go check that out, go head on over to the Solar Objection Facebook group and obviously join the Solarpreneur Facebook group.
Speaker: We actually posted a copy of it in there.
Speaker: but make sure you're part of both of those Facebook groups because we got some cool stuff going on.
Speaker: You don't want to miss out on them and you can see a replay of yours truly dropping some heat for y'all.
Speaker: Go check it out.
Speaker: Let me know what you think.
Speaker: Let me know if you liked the content we had in there and maybe we'll start doing more stuff like that.
Speaker: So that's once again, solopreneur Facebook group in the solar objection group with my friend solar Joe over there.
Speaker: So today's episode, hopefully that got you a little intrigued.
Speaker: I did lose out on about 30 grand in commissions.
Speaker: And I want to tell you guys some mistakes I made with that, how I could have probably prevented it.
Speaker: Nothing's 100% preventable.
Speaker: and just some steps that you should be taking yourself to ensure that you are getting paid what you're worth.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so I'm going to preface that with a little story.
Speaker: When I first started out in pest control, as many of you know, started out my first summer in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker: This was back in 2012.
Speaker: So I
Speaker: I'm one of the old guys here.
Speaker: Back then, it was all paper.
Speaker: We carried around our clipboards.
Speaker: I assume the pest control guys have digital stuff now, digital contracts.
Speaker: It's been a while since I've been in the pest control game.
Speaker: That's how it was back then.
Speaker: We were literally carrying around paper contracts, just stacks of them in our clipboards.
Speaker: And then we had just this chunks of chalk.
Speaker: There was no cells rabbit.
Speaker: There was no canvas.
Speaker: There was no knocking app like that.
Speaker: We were carrying around chunks of chalk.
Speaker: Every time someone rejected us or was a follow up, follow up, we'd put an X on the sidewalk.
Speaker: If it was someone that said no, not interested.
Speaker: And then we put just a straight line down the middle of the sidewalk.
Speaker: If it was someone who said to come back and then I'd put the time next to it.
Speaker: Like, oh, husband's not here.
Speaker: Come back after five.
Speaker: I put 5 p.m.
Speaker: next to it.
Speaker: So you got a lot of people looking at you like you're crazy, right?
Speaker: walking around with a piece of, you know, chalk, just drawing all over the place.
Speaker: But that's besides the point.
Speaker: Anyways, what happened back then, though, is we had one of the reps in our office.
Speaker: His name was Corey.
Speaker: He was our top rep.
Speaker: And he was getting, I don't know, like usually four to six deals a day in PEST, which is pretty decent.
Speaker: I know there's guys bowling numbers like that.
Speaker: out of the park today in pest control.
Speaker: But back then is pretty phenomenal what this guy was doing.
Speaker: And he had already, I think two kids.
Speaker: He was one of like the more mature kids on the mature guys on the team.
Speaker: He's probably like,
Speaker: you know, I don't know, 28 that age I am right now.
Speaker: So I don't want to call him an old guy because that would make me old, the old guy right now.
Speaker: But Corey, he was having a ton of success.
Speaker: He was closing a lot of deals.
Speaker: Now, remember one thing that stood out to me is he always was insanely organized with these deals.
Speaker: Every single contract he signed, he kept a copy of the paperwork and
Speaker: And he put it in these folders.
Speaker: He had stacks and stacks of these copies of the contracts.
Speaker: And once he put that copy of it in a folder, he would make a spreadsheet.
Speaker: I think it was a spreadsheet or I don't know, some sort of binder.
Speaker: And he kept record of the name of the customer, their contact info, exactly how much he sold them for.
Speaker: and exactly how much he was supposed to make on this deal.
Speaker: So one time I saw him doing this and I said, Corey, why are you keeping track of all this stuff?
Speaker: What's the deal?
Speaker: I mean, you sign up a deal and you get paid.
Speaker: Why are you keeping track of this?
Speaker: That's for the office people.
Speaker: And what he told me, he said, Taylor, you'll learn in this industry, people make mistakes.
Speaker: No matter how many deals you think you close, no matter how organized you think the office people are, mistakes are going to be made and you're not going to get paid on things if you don't keep track and if you don't keep records yourself.
Speaker: So I kind of brushed it to the side.
Speaker: I'm like, I've always gotten paid.
Speaker: You do your work and you get paid for it, whatever.
Speaker: And I only closed, you know, 100 pest accounts, whatever.
Speaker: So what do I know, right?
Speaker: But I didn't listen to them.
Speaker: And what happened?
Speaker: I didn't get paid as much as I thought I did, but I had no proof of anything.
Speaker: Hey, when they went to pay me, they said, hey, you had deals cancel.
Speaker: This and this happened.
Speaker: I had no record.
Speaker: So I'm just like, okay, well, I'll take whatever.
Speaker: And they probably were, right?
Speaker: But I learned an important lesson that's going to transition into how I lost 30 grand in commissions.
Speaker: And that is that you need to be keeping records of your accounts.
Speaker: You need to be keeping track of who you signed up.
Speaker: You need to keep track of their progress.
Speaker: You need to keep track of their still active.
Speaker: Because if you don't, you're going to get a shortcut.
Speaker: You're not going to get paid.
Speaker: Inevitably, you're not going to get paid at some point what you thought you were owed.
Speaker: You're going to have people mess up on a commission.
Speaker: Maybe you're supposed to get paid $20,000 and you won't get paid $2,000.
Speaker: Hopefully not that drastic.
Speaker: But things are going to be inaccurate at some point.
Speaker: I don't care how organized your company is.
Speaker: At this time, I was with Aptiv.
Speaker: which bigger company, but they're probably the biggest door-to-door pest control company at the time.
Speaker: So I thought there's no way they can mess things up.
Speaker: But come to find out, lots of people had things that weren't right with them.
Speaker: So if it can happen, the big companies, I don't care if you're with a big company, if you're a well-established dealer or whatever, you should be keeping track of your accounts.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so here's what happened to me.
Speaker: Here's how I lost about 30 grand in commissions.
Speaker: So I signed up two accounts.
Speaker: One was a, um, they were both around 15 kilowatt systems.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so out here in California for me, that equaled about 30 grand in commissions.
Speaker: So pretty huge systems, the wells, as we would call it.
Speaker: And one was a referral from the other.
Speaker: So there's several problems with this.
Speaker: And like I mentioned at the beginning, even if I would have done the deals perfectly,
Speaker: I don't know if, I mean, who knows if they necessarily would have gone through.
Speaker: There's a couple issues, but I'm going to talk about the things that I could have prevented.
Speaker: And if I would have been organized, then I probably would have at least one out of these two accounts installed.
Speaker: So the first one, his name was Hutch.
Speaker: Signed him up.
Speaker: Everything was good.
Speaker: He was super excited to go solar.
Speaker: He said he checked it out once before, but the company couldn't help him.
Speaker: For whatever reason, they said they didn't like his roof type.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But it was fine.
Speaker: We got him approved.
Speaker: But the issue was we had switched to a new installer.
Speaker: We're a dealer here in San Diego, Future Home Power I'm working with.
Speaker: We switched to a different installer.
Speaker: Obviously, we have multiple installers we can choose from.
Speaker: But our primary installer, we had switched to a local one that had really great reviews, great warranties, 25 years on everything across the board, including the roof, the workmanship, labor, all that stuff.
Speaker: So I'm thinking, man, that's pretty awesome.
Speaker: And they got good reputation.
Speaker: They're a local company.
Speaker: So we all start slinging deals through this.
Speaker: But the problem was all of us thought that they were going to be smooth as butter, just deals flying through, installs happening.
Speaker: What I didn't know behind the scenes is that there were a lot of issues going on that they didn't know how to handle all this new business we were giving them.
Speaker: I closed these accounts probably like the first week we started using these guys.
Speaker: And so all of a sudden they're getting dozens and dozens of deals sent to them.
Speaker: And guess what?
Speaker: They didn't know how to handle the volume.
Speaker: I didn't know this at the time.
Speaker: I just thought, okay, if I sign them up, it's just going to be about like the same as all our other installs.
Speaker: They'll go quick.
Speaker: They'll do their thing.
Speaker: They'll get installed and no problem at all.
Speaker: But what happened was pretty much the opposite.
Speaker: It didn't go quick.
Speaker: There were mistakes made.
Speaker: And come to find out about two months after I signed up Hutch, the first customer, they had gone and they didn't even have the correct site survey pictures.
Speaker: I found this out two months after they did their original site survey and after I signed all the documents.
Speaker: So Hutch was a chill guy, but the other mistake I made was
Speaker: The other, the second account that I closed that was part of this whole thing that was actually Hutch's girlfriend and he had referred her and she liked me.
Speaker: It went great.
Speaker: She was a little more skeptical.
Speaker: She was a single mom.
Speaker: So she was pretty hesitant to sign up, but applied a little bit of pressure, um, soft closed her and boom, she was good to go.
Speaker: But then what happened with her is they went and they missed, again, they missed pictures on the site survey.
Speaker: So the first mistake made is I call her back.
Speaker: She was already, you know, a little bit on the fence.
Speaker: So I called her back and I'm like, hey, so they missed some pictures.
Speaker: We're going to need to come back and go through this.
Speaker: This was probably two and a half weeks after I closed her, which at this point, anyone that closes a deal, you should, this should be a done deal.
Speaker: You shouldn't have cancels.
Speaker: Um, unless it's maybe in the first couple of days, cause everyone has the three day ready cancellation, but after that you should not be having cancels.
Speaker: So I'm thinking for both of these smooth selling, they're not going to cancel.
Speaker: It's going to be good to go, but she hears me say this and just because of the fact she was already on the fence.
Speaker: She's like, you know what, Taylor?
Speaker: Yeah, if I'm going to have to do this, I just like I told you from the beginning, I still feel like I should just take it a little slower, get some more quotes.
Speaker: So why don't we just put it on pause?
Speaker: So that's why I say it wasn't 100% because of this, but the fact that I had to call her back, I had to try to schedule a site survey again.
Speaker: She cancels, and this was kind of the first domino that falls.
Speaker: And then, of course, Hutch, the one that I closed originally that was a lot more solid, a lot more excited about it.
Speaker: We go through the similar stuff.
Speaker: And I don't know this for sure, but I assume that he probably talked to his girlfriend and, you know, maybe she was in his chirping in his ear a little bit.
Speaker: But similar thing happens only with Hutch.
Speaker: It was two months after the fact, right?
Speaker: Two months after the fact, we had to try to redo a site survey and similar thing happens.
Speaker: He says, Taylor, yeah, you know what?
Speaker: I just feel like nothing's really happened and it's been taking a long time and site survey that was already done.
Speaker: Seems like there's mistakes being made.
Speaker: So yeah, why don't we just go ahead and put this on hold?
Speaker: I want to go ahead and get some more quotes too.
Speaker: two deals lost because this stuff.
Speaker: So here's what I could have done better.
Speaker: If I would have been number one, checking in with the installer, making sure they were doing their stuff, making sure we had all the right pictures, two months wouldn't have gone by.
Speaker: Um, because two months, the site survey, that should be like the first thing that happens.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And after two months, we're back to square one.
Speaker: We have to redo a site survey.
Speaker: Ridiculous.
Speaker: Okay, and obviously a lot of this, you know, the installer had to figure out some stuff and we've helped them improve their processes.
Speaker: So I know I'm probably going to get messages from people saying, dude, why are you using this installer?
Speaker: Okay, well, they look good at the time and most installers I've dealt with know how to figure that stuff out.
Speaker: But
Speaker: People make mistakes.
Speaker: So what I should have been doing is I should have been keeping track of the progress.
Speaker: What I've since done is I've created a spreadsheet of all my accounts that I've closed.
Speaker: And I've got my assistant doing check-ins every week, just following up on the progress, getting an update on this.
Speaker: So do you think that would have happened if I would have been having her do that from the beginning, checking in on my accounts?
Speaker: Probably not.
Speaker: You don't necessarily have to have an assistant do this, but for me, it saves me time.
Speaker: It's something I've talked about before, getting a virtual assistant.
Speaker: That's my first suggestion I would make.
Speaker: No matter how organized you think your company is, maybe you don't need to do weekly check-ins on your accounts, but just create some sort of system.
Speaker: I use an app called Trello is a good one.
Speaker: Maybe you can put your accounts in there or just a good old spreadsheet.
Speaker: Google Sheets, put your accounts in there.
Speaker: Just keep track of them.
Speaker: Even if you haven't had any mistakes in the past, keep track of them because who knows?
Speaker: Maybe one day...
Speaker: You switch companies for whatever reason.
Speaker: At the very least, you want to be keeping track of all your customers.
Speaker: Because think of how many referrals you could be getting.
Speaker: Think of how much follow-up you could be doing.
Speaker: That's important data that you just want to keep track of in general.
Speaker: So that's the first tip.
Speaker: But then the second thing is, and the story that goes with this, is actually last week we had a rep in our company.
Speaker: I closed an account for him about a couple months back, got installed, things were good.
Speaker: I got paid on the account, but the rep didn't.
Speaker: The rep in our company didn't, and he was the one that said it.
Speaker: In our company, we do splits.
Speaker: He said the deal, I closed it, so we split it.
Speaker: So this deal, for whatever reason, the people in the office didn't keep track.
Speaker: I don't know what happened.
Speaker: I got paid the full amount.
Speaker: He got paid nothing.
Speaker: And this rep, he actually wasn't even keeping track.
Speaker: So it went by probably about a week and a half before I even like dug into the numbers.
Speaker: I was like, oh, well, I got paid a lot more than I thought I was supposed to on this.
Speaker: And then come to find out he didn't get anything.
Speaker: And I don't know.
Speaker: Hopefully you're the kind of rep that would, you know, report this.
Speaker: Obviously, if you're getting overpaid, you know, report it.
Speaker: You want to make sure your guys are getting paid.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So definitely don't just take the money and run with it.
Speaker: Obviously, that's a thought that probably crosses everyone's mind.
Speaker: Oh, they paid me extra.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know what happened.
Speaker: but i wanted to make sure this rep got paid so i told our office people and they had no idea that it was this rep's account so luckily we got him paid we got it figured out but imagine if i hadn't reported that he probably forgot about it altogether he wasn't getting paid on account this was like three grand that he got paid that if
Speaker: You know, I hadn't reported it.
Speaker: He might have forgotten about it.
Speaker: And yeah, who knows what happened.
Speaker: So lesson learned.
Speaker: And this has probably happened to me.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Because there's been lots of times where I haven't been organizing, keeping track of this stuff.
Speaker: But that's the lesson here is just keep track of your accounts.
Speaker: Keep track how much you're supposed to get paid.
Speaker: Because again, people will make mistakes.
Speaker: Things will happen.
Speaker: And if you're not going to keep track of it, who will?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So you need to be keeping track to the dollar, the commissions you're owed.
Speaker: Make sure you get paid what you're worth.
Speaker: That's the lesson today.
Speaker: Don't be like me.
Speaker: Don't lose the 30 grand commissions.
Speaker: Number one, make sure you're keeping track on the progress of your accounts.
Speaker: If I would have been doing this, this deal probably would have been installed.
Speaker: I mean, our install time usually takes like a month to a month and a half here in San Diego.
Speaker: So the fact that it took two months and he canceled after that because of the issues we were having, I would have got that one installed at the very least because...
Speaker: I mean, any other deal would have been like a month and a half and you're not canceling after it's installed, right?
Speaker: So keep track of your progress and then keep track of how much you need to get paid.
Speaker: If you want a spreadsheet I've been using to keep track of that stuff, hit me up and send you a copy of it.
Speaker: But don't be like me.
Speaker: Don't lose 30 grand in commissions and send this to someone that needs to be more organized.
Speaker: And we're going to be having more trainings about this on how you can implement an assistant if you need to or ways to be more organized.
Speaker: But it's costing you money, I'm telling you.
Speaker: So get organized.
Speaker: Don't forget.
Speaker: And we will see you guys on the next episode.
Speaker: Hey, solopreneurs, quick question.
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