Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level. My name is Taylor Armstrong. 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 fail.
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.
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. Hey, solopreneurs. Today, we're going talking about some custom gift solutions you can use to send to your customers. We've talked about it in the podcast before, but sending gifts to your customers is one of the best ways to retain them, to get more referrals, and to just feel that sweet feeling like you're doing a good deed.
Speaker: So we're going talking all about that and a whole lot more. Welcome to the podcast. My name Taylor Armstrong. We're here here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and have a much better time in the solar industry.
Speaker: And this is coming up on the season of gifting, approaching December, can't even believe it, 2026. And hopefully whenever you are listening to this, you are crushing some sales. Right now we are in the middle of our yearly competition.
Speaker: ah to kind of make a final push towards the end of the year. i think it is a great idea to schedule your competitions in November because a lot of people, they take it easy during December. So why not get the most out of your sales teams before the holidays hit? Maybe you should consider it, do some type of competition. We're doing a little team push. Anyone that gets six sales in the three weeks of December, we are doing a little snowboarding trip, going out as a team. So consider doing something like that.
Speaker: right But this podcast, we're going to be talking about some gifting solutions. And I've mentioned a few of these before in the show. So if you are a longtime listener, you're going to hear something you've probably heard or reviewed before. But the third solution I have today, this is ah something I got really excited about on a gift I sent my customer actually today at the time of this recording.
Speaker: So i stay tuned till the end because this was probably one of the coolest custom gifts I've ever sent a customer. All right. And so i'm going to go through three options that you can use to send out gifts to your customers.
Speaker: And the way I've set it up, just to give kind of a brief recap that we've talked about bits and pieces in other episodes, is I have my virtual assistants, they automate a lot of this. And so um what I do is I'll take a photo of my customer,
Speaker: I'll send it to my virtual assistants and they take care of sending the gift. They look it up in the CRM, the address. We have a note templates and so they will go off that note template. I'll send them a few sentences specific to that customer. And just like that, you got a custom gift. Takes me less than, i don't know, 30 seconds probably to send out just the photo. And a couple lines custom to that customer and then bada beam, bada boom, they send it out.
Speaker: Right. And so the first website I've used for the longest time, this is the one I've used most consistently, but it is called send out cards. So we've talked about this in the show before.
Speaker: I think they did rebrands to promptings, but send out cards. I love it. And the main reason I love it is because you can attach the photos to the cards you send. So you go attach the photo, you know, I take all the photos with my customers. And then you can plug in the hand the font so it looks like handwriting.
Speaker: And from there you go and select a gift I send out usually two brownies, there's an option for brownies two to four brownies depending on how many people are in the household. So that's my go to gift. It's usually what I send out to the customers.
Speaker: People love It's Proof somewhat and inexpensive. I think it's like you subscribe, you pay monthly fee, 30 bucks a month or something, and then it gives you discounts on sending the gifts and the cards. But I would say it comes out at, I don't know, maybe 30 bucks every time you send one of those averaging out between, you know, the monthly costs and then the gift. gets cheaper the more you send essentially.
Speaker: So send out cards, great way to do it. And especially if you're just starting with this, I would highly recommend send out cards. What did I say they're called promptings? Go check it out.
Speaker: Great way to start. If you are doing more of these at volume, this is the second option you can choose. A few different ways to do it. But one I was just checking out today, actually, it's called thanks.io.
Speaker: And what's really cool about some of these ones you can send volume is you can integrate them with your CRM. um I don't think send out cards, promptings doesn't really have any integration.
Speaker: And so that's why I have my team go in. They send out the gifts, they attach to it. So pretty straightforward doing it that way. But maybe you don't have a team, maybe you don't have a virtual assistant or anything like that that can go and do this.
Speaker: You can set up. Well, first of all, you should get a team. okay But you can set up integrations with other software called thanks.io, where for using a CRM like high level sales force, I think it connects with pretty much any major CRM out there.
Speaker: if you have a custom one might be a little trickier. But you can have it integrated to where every time you create a customer, move it to a certain stage, it can automatically send out the gifts. And that's cool.
Speaker: I do like my process. But what I'm thinking and what I'm probably going to start experimenting with is I mentioned another podcast doing you you like direct mail campaigns.
Speaker: And so what if there is a way where you can use something like this to send out these direct mail campaigns, maybe appointments you set? 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.
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 SolarScout. 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. 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. I'm going to be one of the first two 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.
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.
Speaker: Okay, back to the show. Maybe the appointments that I've ghosted. And I do think a tool like this would be extremely useful um in that use case, right? Because I do like the customization of send out cards.
Speaker: I do like the system I have, the SOP I have to send out those customer gifts. I do like personalizing. i think you can do that in some of these other websites like thinks.io. Specifically, if you're sending out like mass mail campaigns, or maybe you're targeting the people around your installs, which I talked about a few weeks ago on an episode.
Speaker: think that would be a great solution and a way to do this. Pretty inexpensive and it just at a high clip, right? So check out something like that if you are interested in and sending it to maybe ah just appointments, your book, um probably some ways to do it with customers. But I do like the first option, send out cards better for sending those custom gifts.
Speaker: Hey, but then the third option, and this is what I got pretty excited about today. Third option is this, ah maybe you have a customer where you talk about something specific. Maybe you see they have a favorite sports team.
Speaker: okay so if any of you that follow me on social media, you saw a couple days ago, I posted a story that my customer, they were huge Georgia Bulldogs fans, right? And so I'm thinking, okay, what can I diff them that would relate to this? We had a long conversation about Georgia. I'm a Utah fan, go Utes, which they're ranked number two right now in college football. And so we had a big conversation about that.
Speaker: And so I get out of this appointment and this was, um you know, we're pulling a high commission on this too. It's like a $20,000 commission. So my first thought is how can i solidify this deal?
Speaker: How can I make sure these guys, you know, don't have buyers remorse, want to continue with it. And I'm like, I got to get a gift out as soon as possible. So you saw me post on my story. I actually had ordered, think it was like a custom, trying to remember what it was now. I can't remember.
Speaker: um But I went to ChachiBT and said, what can I get for a Georgia fan? Right. And it gave me a few ideas. I ended up going and ordering one of the first ideas that it gave me trying to find it here.
Speaker: See what ChachiB told me. That's right. So it was a like a photo, the stadium, the Georgia football stadium and a little portrait photo they could hang on the wall. Pretty cool.
Speaker: So I ordered it. But then after I ordered it, the next day I woke up and it said order was canceled. So I'm like, god back to the drawing board. What can I get them? Want to get them something custom? I do a little more digging and I find these cool little college football candles off Etsy of all places. and So I'm like, all right, well, you know, I'm just going to order one of these candles. So i make the order.
Speaker: But then here's where it gets pretty cool that I thought this was something that I had to share on the podcast. Once I ordered this candle, you know, you select that you're sending as a gift. Usually there's an option to include a little note with it But the option they gave me on Etsy is it actually let me record a video on there.
Speaker: send out a video with the gift. So when once the gift ships, they're going to get a custom video of my face talking, telling them how excited I am about Georgia football, about the solar process.
Speaker: And um yeah thought I thought it was just really personalized, something that I hadn't seen before. How cool is that sending a video? I think there are actually gifts out there that you can send like a I don't know, a screen that plays a video that gets pretty expensive. This was really cool thing. Custom gift video included. The customer is going to get it in two days crossing their fingers. I mean, who's what what reason would they have to cancel after that? Right? It was a solid deal. But It's a crazy industry. You never know the reasons that people cancel their solar deals.
Speaker: So um try that. And, you know, especially if you have customers that you talk about, things that you can personalize, go to Etsy. You can find some pretty custom, pretty sweet gifts on there.
Speaker: Shout out to my friend Ashton Buswell. He's I see him sending in custom like sports memorabilia, custom little items to his custom to his clients all the time. So um took a page out of his playbook. And I took it one step further as far as the customization goes.
Speaker: All right. And so hopefully that gets you thinking, how can you serve your customers? How can you lock them in? And um how can you get more referrals? And the way is you treat them like a million bucks. So if you do this, they're going to want stick with you.
Speaker: They're not going to want to answer the door when people come to permit poach them, when people come to offer them better pricing, whatever. They're going remember that gift you sent them and they're going remember it, especially more so if it's something custom.
Speaker: All right. And so start with the send out cards. I think that's a great thing to just send mass to people, just kind of a generic gift. But if you want to take it a step further, do some mind digging. And I love recording my appointments. And when i record my appointments, i can go back and kind of refresh myself on what we talked about.
Speaker: But that's the first thing I did. Figured out something custom I could send them, you know, I'll have to report back. But I believe it's going to pay dividends. okay Sorry, I'm not coming to this with a case study, but was just too excited about it to delay, you know, the cool custom gift. All right. And so hopefully that helps. Make sure you solidify it your customers this holiday season. Hope you're crushing it. And thank you for listening to the show today. I love you. We'll see you on the next one.
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 it specifically for you in mind 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.
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 Solopreneur.
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 top10.solarpreneurs.com. Again, that's top10, the number 10,.solarpreneurs.com. Don't forget the S on solarpreneurs.
Speaker: We will have that in the show notes. Go download it right now. And especially if you have not listened to them, go listen to them and you can re-listen to them. That's going to show you how. So go download it and we'll see you on the other side.
