Transcript
Speaker: Hey, Solarpreneurs, what's up?
Speaker: Taylor here.
Speaker: Just wanted to give you a quick intro to this episode.
Speaker: It's going to be James Swiderski on, and he is doing a little series on how we are implementing trainings.
Speaker: for companies that would like to uplevel their sales trainings.
Speaker: As many of you may know, we launched our new SolCity training app.
Speaker: We're already getting great results with it.
Speaker: So James is going to talk about a few things that we were able to implement within the app and ways we're getting great results.
Speaker: Whether you're on SolCity or not, you can go and implement these things today, but you can also go and book a demo at SolCity.co.
Speaker: So hope you enjoy the episode and we'll see you on the inside.
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 and 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: Solopreneurs, what is going on?
Speaker: My name is James Svorsky and for those of you guys who don't know me, go back a few episodes for the intro.
Speaker: I don't want to bore you guys to death.
Speaker: I just want to dive right into the content today here and I want to talk about how to hold your reps accountable.
Speaker: Now, this is going to be primarily for business owners, VPs, directors, managers on how to hold your reps accountable, get them motivated, and specifically my four-step formula on how to do this.
Speaker: Just an absolutely killer formula on how to cut through the BS, cut through excuses of, oh, I'm working 60 hours a week.
Speaker: I don't know what's not working.
Speaker: Oh, I swear I'm putting in numbers.
Speaker: I'm working really hard.
Speaker: it's gonna cut through all of that crap and just get straight transparency on the performance of each rep so you can make critical training and hiring decisions on a regular basis to scale your company.
Speaker: If you enjoy that type of content, you know exactly what to do.
Speaker: So let's go ahead and dive right into it.
Speaker: What is the formula to hold reps accountable?
Speaker: First thing I like to do is identify my activities that reps are supposed to be performing on a daily basis.
Speaker: You'd be very surprised how many companies don't have this clearly communicated within their organization.
Speaker: The best way I used to do this and currently do this with my team at Epic as well, although not solar, it's the same thing and I learned how to do this in solar.
Speaker: is I actually have flat screen monitors up in the office where we are projecting everybody's metrics.
Speaker: It is just a naked organization with metrics.
Speaker: I see every single rep as it's scrolling through, how many appointments they've set, leads, calls, call time, presentations, their close rate, everything transparent.
Speaker: The entire company can see what's going on.
Speaker: The entire company can see
Speaker: what kind of numbers we're doing as an organization.
Speaker: What's our revenue look like, right?
Speaker: What's our deal install rate?
Speaker: They see everything.
Speaker: Transparency is absolutely key here.
Speaker: Now, that's just kind of a bonus, but we want to identify the activities that reps perform.
Speaker: So it's probably going to be a nine times out of 10, door knocking, appointment setting, right?
Speaker: presentations, follow-up activities, and usually some type of referral activity.
Speaker: These are going to be customized for your business.
Speaker: Map out your entire process, what activities they should do on a regular basis.
Speaker: We're going to play out an example in a minute, so you'll get some ideas from that.
Speaker: Step number two in this formula, identify how long it actually takes to do the activity.
Speaker: Okay?
Speaker: Again, this is where it starts getting real spicy because nobody does this and knows how long it takes.
Speaker: Go ask your reps individually, how long does it take to do an appointment?
Speaker: You're going to hear 40 minutes.
Speaker: You're going to hear two hours.
Speaker: You're going to hear an hour and a half, right?
Speaker: You need to come to a conclusion what that average time is.
Speaker: All right, so you're gonna ask all of your reps, do a survey, do whatever you gotta do, get the numbers, average them out, how long it actually takes to do what they do, right?
Speaker: Sending out a proposal, adjusting a bid, right?
Speaker: How long does it take to adjust in a bid?
Speaker: 20 minutes, 30 minutes?
Speaker: How long does it take to send out a follow-up email?
Speaker: You gotta get every activity on the board mapped out, okay?
Speaker: Step number two.
Speaker: Three,
Speaker: take your results from last month for each rep.
Speaker: So you're going to actually go through this process with your reps on a one-on-one meeting, and you're going to take the results from their previous month, not like the previous week or days, because that's not enough.
Speaker: And more than a month is too much.
Speaker: One month's going to give you a real good grasp of a rep's performance.
Speaker: This is also going to cut out all of those guys who were top producers a year ago and
Speaker: they haven't sold anything in three or four months, this is going to shine the light on that.
Speaker: Here's the deal.
Speaker: If you're guys and you're hanging on and paying out payroll or whatever, some kind of base salary or something, rewarding guys and incentivizing guys who are not producing, you got to cut that out ASAP, okay?
Speaker: Only incentivize guys who produce results, period.
Speaker: Cut the base commissions.
Speaker: Cut the salaries.
Speaker: Cut all that crap.
Speaker: Fire the lot.
Speaker: Get rid of the old veterans who have been in the industry and who are just riding comfortable for 10 years.
Speaker: They are ruining your culture.
Speaker: They are bad apples in the barrel.
Speaker: Cut them out.
Speaker: Get some fresh, new, young blood.
Speaker: Boom, rock and roll, right?
Speaker: Again, I don't expect many of you guys to apply that because, again, you've got to be willing to take a few steps back to go forward over the next several years.
Speaker: There's very few companies who are willing to do that.
Speaker: I know I'm sounding aggressive with this, straightforward.
Speaker: I'm just really sick of seeing it.
Speaker: It's a super common thing in the industry, any industry for that matter.
Speaker: You have to be willing to make some temporary sacrifices if you want to grow.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: If you don't want to grow, I respect it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Don't complain about your situation if that's the case.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I'm off my soapbox now.
Speaker: So take your results from last month for each rep.
Speaker: Hey, Taylor, you closed 10 deals last month.
Speaker: You did 20 appointments.
Speaker: You did 500 doors knocked, whatever it is, right?
Speaker: Make sure they agree with their results when you're talking to them.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And then next,
Speaker: And the last part here is simply calculate how long they actually worked.
Speaker: All right?
Speaker: So let's play out an example.
Speaker: Let's say that a rep closed 10 accounts last month.
Speaker: And for math purposes, I know this is a small commission.
Speaker: Math purposes, he made $1,000 per deal.
Speaker: He made 10 grand in commissions, right?
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: 10 grand.
Speaker: What activities made up those 10 accounts?
Speaker: Well, he had to go prospect and knock doors.
Speaker: It takes him about 30 minutes of knocking doors to create an appointment.
Speaker: We know how long it takes.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: 30 minutes equal an appointment.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Let's say he has a 50% close rate.
Speaker: He's just like on the ball.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And it takes him 90 minutes driving to the appointment, having the appointment, following up with the appointment.
Speaker: It takes him 90 minutes to do a presentation.
Speaker: And he closes 50% of his presentations.
Speaker: And then let's say it takes him about half an hour to send out a proposal and a bid.
Speaker: It takes 30 minutes to do a proposal, a bid.
Speaker: That's not just the deals he closed, the follow-up deals.
Speaker: And then let's say he takes about 40 minutes per account, 20%.
Speaker: total to close a deal so 40 minutes of following up with calls emails texts that is about what it takes to close one deal all right so after you map out each activity how long it takes all that jazz right you're going to come to the conclusion of the monthly results you're going to find in this example that he spent 30 hours running appointments for the month
Speaker: He spent 10 hours setting appointments in the month, 10 hours sending proposals for the month, and 6.6 hours following up for a grand total of 56.6 hours worked for the month.
Speaker: Monthly, not weekly.
Speaker: And what you're gonna find is most of your guys who say they're working their tail off, they're working like 15, 20 hours a month when you do this math.
Speaker: I just did math for a guy who closes 10 deals a month.
Speaker: How many of your reps close 10, right?
Speaker: Super rare, right?
Speaker: You're doing pretty well if you have a lot of 10 deal reps, right?
Speaker: Most of your guys are gonna be working like 15, 20 deals, I mean 20 hours a month, right?
Speaker: And what happens is for the first time with these guys, they're going to realize that they're full of shit.
Speaker: Pardon my French, right?
Speaker: They're just full of it, right?
Speaker: They've been lying to themselves.
Speaker: And you're going to find your guys are just like, oh, crap.
Speaker: You can't argue this.
Speaker: You cannot argue this.
Speaker: And the way you make sure your reps are on page with this is you just make sure they agree with every number.
Speaker: So if they say it takes 90 minutes, do the math with them in front of them for the 90 minutes.
Speaker: If they say they take 30 minutes to close an appointment or 60 hours or whatever, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: Their close rate's 100%.
Speaker: Do the math with them on their level.
Speaker: Trust me, it doesn't matter how you do the math.
Speaker: It's always gonna highlight and expose how little they actually work.
Speaker: And you could have a frank conversation at this point.
Speaker: Now that the numbers are out in thin air, you could say, John, you wonder why you're making seven grand a month, closing two deals a month.
Speaker: You're working 15 hours a month.
Speaker: What are we gonna do about that?
Speaker: What can I help you with as your manager, your VP, your director, your CEO, whoever?
Speaker: What can I help you with to increase those numbers?
Speaker: What do you need help with?
Speaker: Do we need to hold these kind of meetings on a weekly basis?
Speaker: What do we need?
Speaker: Have those conversations and make real decisions.
Speaker: The problem is it's difficult to make hiring, recruiting, or firing decisions, or training decisions, or whatever if you don't have proper data, okay?
Speaker: I preach a lot about data the last couple episodes.
Speaker: Data's king.
Speaker: It's everything.
Speaker: Tracking is everything.
Speaker: That's the only reason I had two failed solar companies before starting my first successful one was purely because of tracking.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I had to learn the hard way.
Speaker: do not do the same mistake that I did and many others do.
Speaker: Start tracking these things.
Speaker: Use this formula with each one of your reps.
Speaker: Use this formula with yourself, with your activities, your daily pipeline, right?
Speaker: Whatever you're doing, this is the magic formula.
Speaker: So guys, that is it.
Speaker: That's how to hold your reps accountable.
Speaker: It's a no BS straightforward way.
Speaker: It's how to hold yourself accountable.
Speaker: And I hope it serves you guys well.
Speaker: If you like that type of content, keep tuning in to
Speaker: this series I'm doing.
Speaker: I'm going to be dropping to fire for company owners.
Speaker: I know I'm calling my own stuff fire, but I don't see anybody talking about it.
Speaker: So I got to call it what it is, right?
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, it's been real, guys.
Speaker: My name is James Sersky, and I'll see you in the next video.
Speaker: Hey Solar printers, 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 solar professionals
Speaker: and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level.
Speaker: That's why I want to make a truly special announcement about the new solar learning community exclusively for solar professionals to learn, compete, and win with the top performers in the industry.
Speaker: and it's called Sol Society.
Speaker: This learning community was designed from the ground up to level the playing field and give Solar Pros access to proven mentors who want to give back to this community and help you or your team to be held accountable by the industry's brightest minds for, are you ready for it, less than $3.45 a day.
Speaker: Currently Soul Society is closed to the public and membership is by invitation only.
Speaker: But solopreneurs can go to soulciety.co to learn more and have the option to join a waitlist when a membership becomes available in your area.
Speaker: Again, this is exclusively for Solopreneur listeners, so be sure to go to www.solciety.co to join the waitlist and learn more now.
Speaker: Thanks again for listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you again in the next episode.
