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 fail.
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: Hey, what's going on, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Something that has been a little bit of a struggle this year for me is getting the accounts, the glass to the roof, which is the most important part, because we all know we don't get paid until we get that glass on the roof.
Speaker: So today I'm going to be discussing some things that I have recently changed, some strategies I've started implementing to help with your post-sell management to help actually get your accounts installed.
Speaker: Because you might be selling a lot, but none of that matters if you can't get the solar up on the rooftop.
Speaker: So we're going to be talking about that and a whole lot more.
Speaker: Thanks for coming on the podcast for listening today.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: We're here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully have a much better time in the solar industry and make a whole lot more money and make and save a lot of people more money.
Speaker: And if you're new to the podcast, we are releasing fresh content for you every Tuesday and Friday for the most part.
Speaker: We're
Speaker: Occasionally life gets busy, but pretty much every Tuesday, Friday, we're coming at you with content.
Speaker: So if you have not already, please share the show.
Speaker: Please send this to people who have not yet reached their potential in solar, even if they have.
Speaker: I think there's a lot of things in here.
Speaker: especially from some of the amazing guests we have coming on.
Speaker: They can open your perspective and really help you see what's possible on the show.
Speaker: And that's a big reason I've kept this going is being able to connect with just, I think, the best people in the world at Cell & Solar.
Speaker: And then, of course, hearing the feedback from great listeners like yourself.
Speaker: Yes, let's get into the show.
Speaker: Again, I've been struggling a little bit this year.
Speaker: especially early on in the year.
Speaker: I was selling a lot of accounts, but just my ratio from sign to install was much lower than I wanted it to be.
Speaker: And recently I've implemented some things that has been helping.
Speaker: And then just in talking with people that are elite, I think about getting the glass to roof and about managing their accounts, gotten some great strategies that I want to share with all of you.
Speaker: I'm going to give you five tips, maybe five or six, on things you should be doing if you're not already to help push your accounts to install and manage your accounts better, which we all know will help lead to more referrals, will lead to more customer satisfaction, and will make your job much easier.
Speaker: We'll be talking about five or six of these strategies here today.
Speaker: As always, if there are things that are helping you, would love to hear them.
Speaker: Um, don't worry if they're top secret, we don't have to talk about them on the show, but tell me, um, feel free to shoot me an email or a DM.
Speaker: I am catching up on DM.
Speaker: So I apologize if you've sent me anything that we haven't responded to.
Speaker: But shoot me a DM or an email over at taylor at solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: We'd love to hear your feedback.
Speaker: Okay, so let's get into it.
Speaker: The five or six things.
Speaker: And so the first one hopefully should be a no-brainer, but that is you need to close clean accounts.
Speaker: And what do I mean by clean accounts?
Speaker: You need to make sure you're collecting all documents when you sign the deal.
Speaker: Every market I know of, you need to get a utility bill.
Speaker: You need to sign every utility doc typically.
Speaker: You need to sign, of course, the customer agreements.
Speaker: Depending on the market, there may be more forms, more documents you need to fill out.
Speaker: And some of it you might not need right at the point of sale.
Speaker: But I would just recommend as much as you can get done in
Speaker: get it done right away.
Speaker: I recently have been in a neighborhood where I know they have an HOA.
Speaker: I've closed a lot of accounts in the specific neighborhood.
Speaker: So instead of waiting to get HOA docs and go back to the home, get signatures, right at the point of sale, I get the signature right away for the HOA document.
Speaker: So I'm like, hey, if I knock this out right away, then makes my life a lot easier on the back end.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So make sure you get everything needed, install the accounts, and it's going to make your life a lot easier.
Speaker: And I think even more important than that, though, is it's just important for the dynamic of the sell.
Speaker: We've talked about how we want to be the people needed, not the needy.
Speaker: And so if you don't collect everything at the point of sell, then all of a sudden you're changing the whole dynamic where you now have to beg the customer for things.
Speaker: You have to show up as an annoying guy.
Speaker: Oh, sorry, I need this document.
Speaker: I need this.
Speaker: Just makes your life harder.
Speaker: I've literally had people cancel over this whole dynamic change where they start getting annoyed that I'm bugging them for more and more things.
Speaker: And I also did a podcast on this where I actually stole a account from someone because they signed up with another company.
Speaker: The customer or the rep left things undone.
Speaker: Homeowner got annoyed with it and just said, you know what?
Speaker: We're not doing this.
Speaker: So make sure that doesn't happen.
Speaker: You collect everything at the point of sale.
Speaker: Going along with that, make sure you set the expectations, right?
Speaker: I would have some type of leave behind.
Speaker: For us, we have like a company brochure.
Speaker: We leave and it just shows the steps of the installation process, right?
Speaker: You got site survey, you got final design,
Speaker: You got engineering, permitting, probably forgetting a few, but all the steps that shows a timeline of it.
Speaker: And then the most important expectation I would recommend setting is just permission to operate.
Speaker: Depending on where you're at, it may take a long time to actually get permission to operate.
Speaker: for the panels to actually be turned on.
Speaker: So make sure you set that expectation because this is the number one complaint I've gotten from customers.
Speaker: They get their panels up, they think they can turn them on, and they get frustrated because they have to sit months and months and before they even reap the benefits of solar, which they weren't told, which I didn't tell them.
Speaker: So I've learned my lesson.
Speaker: I try to tell everyone I help.
Speaker: hey, it may take two to three months after getting installed to turn these things on.
Speaker: Hopefully it's not that much, but you got to set the proper expectation that it could take a long time.
Speaker: So that's step number one.
Speaker: Number two is use some type of CRM spreadsheet.
Speaker: Just keep track of all your customers, all your deals.
Speaker: Hey, I see people forget all the time because they don't have any type of organization.
Speaker: Hey, I know all of us, we forget things.
Speaker: A lot of people on sales have ADD.
Speaker: We can't remember.
Speaker: So we need some type of spreadsheet at the very minimum, little notes.
Speaker: Just save it in your notes app if you use an iPhone.
Speaker: But keep track of the names.
Speaker: Keep track of promises you made to the customer.
Speaker: I've had it happen in the past where I promised the customer, hey, I'll pay your bill for six months.
Speaker: I'll give you a thousand bucks.
Speaker: And I forgot about this.
Speaker: Then they come, they text me after the install and said, hey, where's my thousand dollars?
Speaker: And didn't even think about it, which can cause some frustration.
Speaker: So make sure you keep track of promises you made to the customer or anything you're going to be getting them.
Speaker: So it doesn't come back to surprise you later.
Speaker: Another thing that just in general, like keep track of names of everyone, maybe in the household.
Speaker: I had a customer recently where the sister was pretty involved in the decision, but she wasn't on the customer agreement.
Speaker: But I've had to go back a few times, get some docs that just came up, HOA for this particular neighborhood to go back for that.
Speaker: And I didn't know the sister's name.
Speaker: I forgot the sister's name and it was just a bad look because I had to go back and ask the sister what her name was again.
Speaker: So just little things like that.
Speaker: Keep track of anything you might want to remember about the customer, about their family in the spreadsheet.
Speaker: So some of you already know that I run my own door to door sales team here in San Diego.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: Then we discovered an app called Solar Scout, but it's not a door knocking app.
Speaker: It's a data platform that shows us who is likely to go solar in our market.
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.
Speaker: It's been working for a lot of teams across the country, and now I'm on board too.
Speaker: I'm going to be one of the first to use SolarScout in San Diego, so I decided to partner up.
Speaker: But I told them, hey, if I'm going to talk about SolarScout on my show, you need to give my listeners a great deal.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: That's solarscout.app forward slash Taylor.
Speaker: Okay, back to the show.
Speaker: Hey, because if, especially if you're signing a lot of accounts,
Speaker: Last week I signed seven, which was a great week.
Speaker: But if I didn't have any systems or processes, if I don't have a CRM in place, if you sign a lot of accounts in one week, it just it gets super overwhelming.
Speaker: So that's why you need to set up these systems now.
Speaker: and get it in place.
Speaker: And then just another point before we get to number three here is if you are a setter, maybe you're new to solar, you might not necessarily have all these things set up at once.
Speaker: But whoever is closing your accounts, send this podcast to them.
Speaker: And I would keep track, even if you are setting your own deals, it's not too early to start setting up your own systems and processes to keep track of your accounts.
Speaker: Because there's a lot of setters I hear from where they don't get updates on their accounts.
Speaker: They're confused what stage in the process their customer is.
Speaker: And yeah, they could use a CRM and a way to track their accounts as well.
Speaker: So even if you're just setting appointments, maybe you're not closing, maybe you're not doing much as far as post-sell goes, massive benefit to keep track of this stuff.
Speaker: Okay, and number three is have a dedicated account management day.
Speaker: For me, it's every Monday I use as my account management day.
Speaker: And that's not to say I'm not going to knock, I'm not going to close, but the majority of the day,
Speaker: Um, I'll probably go out a few hours for knocking or appointments later in the afternoon, but majority of the day I'm spending on, okay, what do I need to do to progress my accounts and going along with, uh, number four, might as well combine these a little bit, but that's have someone that can help you manage the accounts.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Because what I'm doing on the account management days, I'm going with my account manager, which I have a virtual assistant.
Speaker: She helps with this.
Speaker: And then recently actually got my wife to start helping with it too.
Speaker: Um, and we go through, we have a meeting usually takes about an hour.
Speaker: We go through every single account and we just figure out, okay, is this progressing?
Speaker: What's the update on it from the installer?
Speaker: Is there anything needed from us?
Speaker: Let's call the installer, figure out what they need.
Speaker: So, um, I sit in the background mostly and then my wife and my virtual assistant, they go through the accounts and then I'm just there to kind of like answer questions about them.
Speaker: But it helps.
Speaker: It's been helping it tremendously just progress the accounts faster, get them to install quicker, and then just eliminate any holds on the accounts.
Speaker: Because so many times early on this year,
Speaker: I had holds on accounts.
Speaker: I forgot about things that needed to be done.
Speaker: Then I would go back to the customer a month later and we're like, oh, yeah, we need to do this.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I was missing the bill, whatever it was.
Speaker: And it just added a ton of time.
Speaker: Or the worst case was I had some cancel.
Speaker: I actually had a guy last month or a few months back where we forgot about he needed a trust document, I believe it was.
Speaker: And I honestly just forgot about it.
Speaker: I thought it was progressing.
Speaker: Didn't really check on in on in on this particular account.
Speaker: And then by the time I realized, oh, I wasn't doing the weekly meetings at this point, by the way.
Speaker: But by the time we realized this, it was too late, took forever.
Speaker: And the customer just used that as an excuse and was like, you know what?
Speaker: I thought I would be getting installed by now.
Speaker: Let's just forget about it.
Speaker: And that's happened more times than I would like to admit.
Speaker: I have forgotten about holds.
Speaker: And I let it sit there for a while, I come back and customer kind of use it uses as an excuse to cancel.
Speaker: Okay, now maybe they were going to cancel either way.
Speaker: But I know for sure that I've lost some where they would not have canceled.
Speaker: But I dropped the ball.
Speaker: I let the account stagnate, you could say and fell through.
Speaker: So don't make some of those mistakes that I make.
Speaker: That's why we're here.
Speaker: So you can learn from my mistakes.
Speaker: Okay, so three and four, again, is having account management day.
Speaker: For me, it's Monday.
Speaker: Number four, hire someone to help you.
Speaker: And guys, this can even be someone, maybe you have a newer setter on your team, maybe not newer, but maybe you have a experience rep.
Speaker: that they're struggling a little bit with their production.
Speaker: Maybe you have someone you know that understands solar, but they're not in it anymore.
Speaker: You can go to these people, offer them, I don't know, a thousand a month, pay them a percentage of the deal, pay them, I don't know, 150 bucks a kilowatt, whatever, just to manage your pipeline and progress it and give them bonuses if they can get these accounts progressing quicker.
Speaker: If you have someone like that, that understands that, understands the process, they can be a huge help on getting these accounts to install quicker.
Speaker: And it's always worth it.
Speaker: Having another eye on these on accounts, it can never hurt, especially if they understand the process.
Speaker: I know some of our top producers on my team here in San Diego, they've done this.
Speaker: They have reps that were struggling with their production.
Speaker: And they're just they're helping them make a little bit of money on the side.
Speaker: They understand the process of solar and they can tackle a lot of these holds on accounts and they know the game of solar.
Speaker: So they know what's needed a lot better.
Speaker: So consider doing that.
Speaker: Hire someone to help you.
Speaker: And then the last point here, number number five.
Speaker: is make sure you are sending weekly updates to your customer.
Speaker: Something I've been doing for a while now, this is something that I feel like I have done a better job about, but I think this might be one of the most important things.
Speaker: Just having that weekly interaction, weekly check-in.
Speaker: You don't want to be that rep that just sells them and then they never hear from again.
Speaker: You want to be sending some type of weekly updates, even if it's the same thing.
Speaker: hey, Mary, we're still waiting on the permits.
Speaker: It's been three weeks now, should be back soon.
Speaker: You send that week after week.
Speaker: Hey, at least they know that you're checking in on the account and that you're still interacting with them.
Speaker: And if they have, I would recommend if they're married, if there's more people in on the decision-making process, I would do a group text if you can and send that weekly updates to everyone involved in the process.
Speaker: And this is something that you can outsource.
Speaker: I have my virtual assistant that does this.
Speaker: After we do our weekly meeting on the accounts, she'll take those updates, notate them in the CRM.
Speaker: that we use and then she will send out the weekly update to the customer and recently started.
Speaker: I was just sending them out through email, but I think even better send them email and text.
Speaker: You want to make sure they see it.
Speaker: People a lot of times don't check their email.
Speaker: So that's the main things that I've been implementing.
Speaker: It's helping a lot.
Speaker: Okay, so again, just to review them.
Speaker: Number one, close clean accounts, collect all documents, make sure you don't leave loose ends, get everything done the right way the first time.
Speaker: Number two, have some type of CRM spreadsheets, notes, way to keep track of all your accounts.
Speaker: Number three, have a dedicated account management day.
Speaker: where you're dedicating the majority of the day, mostly, especially if you have a lot of accounts, right?
Speaker: If you don't have a lot, then maybe it's not going to take the majority of your day, but just have at least a few hours during the week that you set aside to just manage your accounts and check in on them.
Speaker: Make sure there's nothing missing.
Speaker: Number four, hire someone to help you, especially if you are doing volume, if you are doing a lot of accounts,
Speaker: I think it's just too much and too much for you to do alone.
Speaker: You need someone.
Speaker: That's why I had my wife start helping as well as because she's checking on these things daily.
Speaker: So if you get someone that's checking on the accounts daily and then just keeps a to-do list of everything needs to be done, it's just going to help you so much.
Speaker: And it's going to help you be able to devote more of your time to actually selling and creating more opportunities than having to manage your accounts as much every day.
Speaker: And then number five is send weekly updates to the customers, even if there aren't any, make sure you're sending out updates.
Speaker: Okay, so I hope that helps.
Speaker: I know this isn't the most exciting stuff.
Speaker: I know this isn't cells that we usually talk about, but this isn't a very important, very important step of having success in solar.
Speaker: Hey, and it's something that I go through phases where
Speaker: I feel like I don't struggle with account management.
Speaker: And sometimes I drop some of these steps, which I did this year, and then I pay the price.
Speaker: So just set up the systems, right?
Speaker: The first time,
Speaker: have a process in place.
Speaker: And I guarantee you, you're going to make way more money.
Speaker: And you're going to avoid the solar coaster a little bit.
Speaker: Because if you don't have this process, if you don't have a system like this set up, you're going to have way more ups and downs because you're going to see people cancel more often, you know, less referrals, less satisfaction.
Speaker: So set it up right the first time and learn from my mistakes.
Speaker: Hey, so that's it for the podcast.
Speaker: Please let me know if you have any suggestions for guests or topics.
Speaker: And then also leave us a review if you have not yet.
Speaker: That is how we continue the show and the podcast.
Speaker: Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next one.
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