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My Toughest Deal of 2025
140 Plays3 days ago
In this episode, we go through a deal filled with confusing oversights and mix-ups that challenged how I preserved the feasibility of the deal and my rapport with the customer. This experience put to light several checks and legalities that you should check and establish before setting the install itself in motion.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Solarpreneur Podcast
00:00:03
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.
Learning from Industry Leaders
00:00:19
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.
00:00:31
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.
Reflections and Future Goals
00:00:41
Speaker
What's going on, solopreneurs? We're coming up on the end of 2025. I hope you had the best year ever in solar and we are ready to grind through another year and have the greatest years of our solar careers. So this episode, we're going to be talking about the most difficult sell I had of 2025. I'm going to tell you some good, some bad, some lessons learned from this particular sell. And hopefully you can go and apply it in your daily sales this week.
Holiday Plans and Family Visits
00:01:07
Speaker
So welcome to the ah podcast. My name is Taylor Armstrong. We're here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and have a much better time in the solar industry. I hope you're having an awesome finish to the year. This is a rare year for me because usually I'm in Utah for the holidays.
00:01:21
Speaker
ah Usually I'm just kind of, you know, doing some office work, just kind of finishing out the year, setting goals. But this year we had family coming to town ah from Utah to come visit us. And so we have some time to go out and get some final deals of the year.
00:01:37
Speaker
So happy about that and ah happy that I have time to go and crank out a couple couple more deals. We'll see what we can
Challenges in Solar Sales
00:01:44
Speaker
do. But today I'm going to tell you about one specific deal, one specific sale that has just given me more headaches than I've had in a while. And not because of the customer. The customer is actually and super sweet lady, one of the nicest...
00:01:58
Speaker
customers I've had. But the reason this deal has been such a pain is because we've had some challenges getting the permit for it and it just made it really complicated to get this deal to the finish line. so I'm going to go through just kind of the beginning of it and then we'll get into some lessons learned. Hopefully you can avoid some of the mistakes we made and hopefully you don't have a deal that's this difficult. hey But this specific account, we sold it um at the time of this recording, I think about three months ago. And we expected that it would be installed by now, right? Installed, paid, all that good stuff. But it wasn't.
00:02:33
Speaker
You know, we signed her up. um This lady, she had two properties. She had two, it was a big property and she had two mobile homes on the same property. Luckily, one one of the properties, it already got installed It's good to go. Paid out on that one.
00:02:50
Speaker
We're going. It's all good. But the second one, that's where we ran into some pretty big challenges. So we get this customer signed up. We get our other house installed.
00:03:00
Speaker
And she actually had signed with another company, but she didn't like some their process. They were giving her some delays. Could have been part of the reason why there were delays. They possibly were having the same issues we're having right now. We got her all switched over.
00:03:15
Speaker
um She she ah liked us. She fed us food, you know older, sweet Mexican lady. And we thought everything was sunshine and rainbows. We actually ah replaced, we bundled in a roof with our project. So we replaced the roof on a third property. She had three manufactured homes on one property.
00:03:34
Speaker
So we replaced the roof of of another property. We had everything I thought ready to get installed on her main house where she was living. But then I get a message from our permit coordinator say, hey, we're not able to pull permits on this. um It's showing that she's not registered.
Understanding Permit and Registration Issues
00:03:50
Speaker
We don't know why um Can you figure this out?
00:03:53
Speaker
So we go back. When I say we, I had a setter on this account, someone that set this appointment. We go back together. We try to figure this out. We start making some calls and it turns out this lady, she, i don't know how it happened, but she's been living in the home 20 plus years. And the ah manufactured home department here in California, it's called the ah HCD. think it's the housing community district, something like that, or division. Yeah. I don't know, but people that are in charge are like manufactured home permits and things like that here in California. We give them a call and they start saying, ah yeah, we don't even see her registered for the home.
00:04:31
Speaker
And I'm like, what do you mean? She'd been paying the mortgage. It's all good. We're really confused. We talked to a few different people. They're saying some are saying the the same thing. Some are saying different things. We get told basically that, okay, you need to go to her bank, get some type of paperwork that shows she's um the owner of the house, that she get the original loan documents for the house and that should do it.
00:04:56
Speaker
So we spend almost a whole day going to her bank. I go pick her up. This lady, she can't drive anymore. So I go pick her up, take her to the bank. We go through this whole thing to get the original loan documents. I thought that it could be done in one day, but then we get to the bank and they said, okay, well, you can submit the request, but they're going to get mailed to you. Tried calling the bank and they said, go to the branch and we get the paperwork right on the spot. Then we go to the branch and the branch tells us, no, we need to get mailed at the same thing they told us over the phone. It's like, are you kidding me? In this particular cell, um, she's about an hour from me.
00:05:30
Speaker
So it's not really an easy thing to just go and run errands for a lake. We're putting some work into this. So we go, we, we get, we finally a couple weeks later get the original, uh, loan documents for the house. And then I make another call in to the HCD people. They say, hey, we have these documents.
00:05:47
Speaker
Can we get this all cleared? and they say, oh, that's not going to work. um You need to actually like switch the title of the home. And I'm like, well, how did she's been living here forever. How do you do that? So they send me this whole like form that explains it. There's like 10 steps on it. All these different things you need to do And at this point, I'm just...
00:06:08
Speaker
my head's about to explode. I just don't know what to do anymore. You know, finally took to social media, actually posted this on social media. If you follow me on Instagram, Facebook, you might've seen me post about this, but just so many things going on here and getting told one thing from one person, another thing from another person.
Financial Risks in Solar Sales
00:06:25
Speaker
And it just turns into this huge, massive headache. Finally, we have a few um steps in the right direction, but ah there are a lot of things that I think could have done better on, could have been better on our ends. You know, just going to share a couple lessons. Hopefully, if you have a problem account like this, you can learn from some of the things we're going through. And this is California. I'm sure if you have manufactured home in other states, hopefully they're not this complex for you. Never encountered a situation like this in my 10 years in solar where it's like someone's been living there, but the home is registered to another person. You have to do all these things to switch. it It's like, can't we just show that she's been paying the mortgage? She's on the title. But apparently we haven't been able to get a permit because the home is registered with the HCD um to someone else.
00:07:09
Speaker
So yeah, that's the ah you know long story short case. I'm going get in in a couple of lessons learned, put some of the pieces together here. But the first lesson is this, and that's just make sure you don't count your chickens before they hatch. What I mean by this is you heard that we had already paid for the roof on um her other manufactured home on the property. That money, it's coming from somewhere and we're expecting to come from installed accounts. Well, guess what? We don't have her main house installed, which is where most of the profit was coming on this deal. And so as it is, you know we got one installed. So I guess we're kind of breaking even on the roof. But where we're profiting is actually getting her...
00:07:50
Speaker
home installed and that's where we're going to make some money on this. And so um lesson from this is make sure if you're doing like roofs or additional work on any of your projects, make sure you don't run run into any hiccups. And if it's a particularly complicated account, maybe it's a manufactured home. Maybe it's a home with a difficult HOA.
00:08:12
Speaker
Maybe it's a home where it's like condo shared roof space. If there's anything that's complex about it that you think, I've never done a deal like this. I hope everything goes well. If you're saying that in your head, and maybe you should wait to do the roof work or whatever you're going to do until you know you get the details ironed out. Because if not, and then you could be you know paying paying for roofers and then losing money on the deal. Now, should have learned my lesson because I believe I did a podcast about this a month or two ago where we actually did pay for a roofer on ah on a home that's still not installed.
00:08:44
Speaker
And we ran in some title issues with that home, I guess in a way a little bit similar. So this one, we're at least breaking even for now, right? Because we did get paid on the first property she did.
00:08:55
Speaker
And ah you know
Innovations in Solar Sales with SolarScout
00:08:57
Speaker
I did so have that thought in the back of my head, on maybe we shouldn't have the roofers do this do this other roof until we get this figured out. But at the same time, I'm like, oh well, if we do the roof, then you know she'll be she'll be dialed in. It's like once you get work going on it, they can't like cancel the project or back out. So I was kind of like, ah you know, I'm just going to have send it and then, you know, it should be fine. Hey, so maybe that's fine. Maybe you want to be a little risky like that because it's true when you have work done, the chance of them like canceling or not moving forward the project, it's next to nothing. Right.
00:09:29
Speaker
But we've all had those customers, especially where we're doing leases or PPAs, power purchase agreements like we do in California. where they get cold feet, something happens and they just the deal doesn't get installed. And it's like you know a month plus into the project. you think You got to be kidding me. So you know ah take your risks. Think how risky you want to be. If you're thinking of paying out roofers 20, 30 plus thousand to do a roof before you have details ironed out, maybe think twice about it.
00:09:57
Speaker
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. But if I want to increase my deal flow, I need to do something different to get an advantage.
00:10:13
Speaker
Then we discovered an app called Solar Scout. 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.
00:10:32
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 to use 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.
00:10:47
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.
Documenting Sales Interactions
00:11:00
Speaker
Okay, back to the show. If it's a a lesser value, lesser projects, maybe you do take that risk. Okay, but just be aware of the risks you're taking. so that's the first lesson. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Number two lesson is record and document everything. Hey, um so earlier in the story, you heard that I had made multiple calls to the HCD, ye to the housing district and talked to all these different people. One person was saying one thing, another, another thing. And I was getting told conflicting information to the point where it caused me probably...
00:11:32
Speaker
a day or more in wasted work and driving to the house thinking I need to do something that didn't actually need to be done. So I could have avoided a lot of that if I would have recorded and documented everything. Okay. And one thing that I've been using now, it's called a Plod voice recorder. If you're watching the video version of this, you can see it on the back of my phone here. but it's a cool little device. It's like an AI note recorder. And you can you know record your conversations, you can record phone calls, it'll transcribe it all. It'll use AI to give you a summarized version, give you like to do notes and everything.
00:12:07
Speaker
For most of the calls, I started doing this. But for like the first day of calls I made, i didn't record anything. I didn't document things. I just took people's word for what they're telling me. So I had two or three people tell me different things, conflicting information. i went down a rabbit hole, waste a bunch of time.
00:12:23
Speaker
You know, you got a couple options. If you get something like that, you can record your calls, can reference exactly what they're saying. Make sure you ask, hey, what's your name? do you have like an ID number just so I can reference if I need a callback?
Using AI for Sales Solutions
00:12:37
Speaker
ah Just so you can basically call out people. If you talk to someone else, you can say, hey, Maggie, ah badge number 276, she told me this. So is she there? can we can Can we get to the bottom why she told me to do something different?
00:12:50
Speaker
Hey, if I would have done that, then I probably would have saved myself headaches. Because the other thing, if you do that, and if you kind of like make it a little bit difficult for the people on the phone, they're probably going to check things before they tell you their name and badge number and stuff like that.
00:13:05
Speaker
yeah have I've been on calls where I asked them to reference, you know, their name, ID number. They say, you know what, hold on, let me check with my supervisor. And they actually go and double check what they're telling me so so they don't look bad.
00:13:17
Speaker
So consider doing something like that. If you have a complicated deal, if you're talking to people from a different department, make sure you reference it. One step better, you can record it. So it did save me a lot of time as the deal progressed because I had i everything recorded of what we needed to do. And I was able to reference specific people, names, go back in recordings and hear exactly what they're telling me So make sure you're doing that. Save yourself time. Okay, number three, speaking of ah AI, use AI to help you.
00:13:46
Speaker
Hey, I was using a lot of chat GPT. You just heard I was using the AI voice recorder. If I didn't have that, I don't know, would have added probably hours and hours more to this process. But I was having AI, you know, search for what we needed to do. And then along with AI, i wasn't trusting AI because that's the thing. ai will make mistakes too. Chat GPT, it's sometimes going to tell you wrong information. So what I was doing that I feel like works started working pretty well in the end is I would ask, hey, what's the next steps for this deal? We can't get the permits. Here's the details. Walk me through what we need to do to transfer the registration. And then I would make the call to the people in the department and basically like make sure AA was telling me the right thing. so I wanted to get the the source. I wanted to get the facts from multiple people.
00:14:33
Speaker
ah before spending time, wasting time on it And then another thing we did is just having, this was a complicated process to me. It seemed like you needed a PhD just to interpret the steps of what to do on the website to actually transfer over the registration. So I would have AI just, I would snap pictures of steps that they had sent me. i would say, hey, explain this to me as if I'm five years old.
00:14:55
Speaker
I'm not the smartest dude out there. okay But you can use AI to break things down to simplify it. and It made the process a whole lot easier. hey And then the last lesson I learned and last thing we did in this is you saw me post on social media.
00:15:08
Speaker
Just I made a little video saying the things I was stuck with. And I asked for people's input. And I got some great feedback. okay Because what happened at the end of this, you already saw this if you saw my video on social media. But basically what they said is that we needed to we needed to go track down the previous owner and have her sign registration transfer request in order to transfer it so we get the permit.
00:15:33
Speaker
And when they said that, I was like, oh my gosh, I have no idea who the previous owner is. are we going to track her down? like i was seriously considering hiring like a private investigator to figure this out.
00:15:44
Speaker
Luckily, they did give me a name.
Resolving Registration Challenges
00:15:46
Speaker
so when we called the HCD, they gave us a name of who the previous owner was. that gave us something. But then from there, I'm like, well, how do we track her down? you know The current owner, she has no idea.
00:15:58
Speaker
who they are, their number. She's like, oh yeah I haven't spoken to them since we bought the house from them. So she has no idea. And she tells me that they were older when they sold the house. I'm like, are these people even alive?
00:16:10
Speaker
so that's the video I posted. I'm like, please, someone help me. How are we going to track down these other people to get to the bottom of this, to transfer the registration? Hey, and I got some extremely helpful advice. a lot of people helped.
00:16:22
Speaker
And so what we ended up doing, there's this website called True People Search. We went and searched within minutes, found out who the previous owners were, found out their direction, sorry, their address, their phone number. And I guess it did take me a little bit longer because I had incorrect spelling. So ah yeah, make sure you have the correct spelling when you're searching for people on there. Took me like, you know, 30, 40 minutes actually, because I was looking for people that weren't it. But make sure you have the correct spelling. And then once I did, I found out where they live, their address, their phone number. So now I know exactly who I need to go to. um I mean, it says they're like, I think, 96 years old. So that's going to be the next challenge of this.
00:17:02
Speaker
You know, hopefully they will cooperate and hopefully they're coherent enough to, you know, not think this is a scam and actually help them. help the homeowner out. yeah But that's where we're at. And then I did get some helpful advice from my realtor. Shout out to my realtor. is ah he's sending me the He's helping out with his realtor database, seeing if there's anything else we can do.
00:17:25
Speaker
So this story is to be continued. Okay, this thing is not over yet. It's a marathon. So there probably will be a part two once we finally get this thing across the finish line. But we have finally made some progress.
00:17:36
Speaker
We know the steps we need to take. Still need to go track track down, drive to the address of the previous owner. Hopefully you get her to sign this thing. um I am talking with my realtor. We're seeing if there's possibly another way, an easier way. But that's the steps that we have so far. So that's the fourth step. lesson learned from this is make sure you use your network.
00:17:56
Speaker
Don't sleep on the people in your corner. If you can, you know, use like your company chats. Hopefully people all have experience in this. But in my case, I don't have anyone from my company that experienced a deal with this complex.
00:18:08
Speaker
So
Key Lessons and Gratitude
00:18:09
Speaker
I went to social media and you can use Facebook groups. You can use social media. Just post on your stories. People are eager to help out. And that's what I love about this industry. A lot of people are willing to help. So shout out to everyone that did reach out with advice and help help get me to this point. um I'm hoping I can have a part two and have some good news. This finally gets installed. And we finally made some money on these accounts because right now we're luckily if we're breaking even after we paid the roofers. But hopefully those are some things you can apply to your next accounts.
00:18:41
Speaker
Okay, that's number one. Just don't count your chickens before they hatch. Don't be paying out a bunch of people if you know you don't have all the details ironed out, so you might be losing money. Number two, record and document everything. Make sure you have, you know, notes, names, ID numbers, whatever you need to reference. Three, use AI to your advantage. Use it to simplify things.
00:19:03
Speaker
And number four, use the people in your corner. Reach out for help. People are willing to help. Okay,
Looking Forward and Top Episodes
00:19:09
Speaker
so speaking of that, reach out to me if there's anything I can do to help you as we come to the close of 2025. Happy New Year if you're listening to this after the new year. And can't wait to crush 2026 with you. Please let me know what your goals are. Let me know what gets what guests and topics you would like covered for this new year. And we will see you on the next episode and in the new year. Peace.
00:19:34
Speaker
What's up, solarpreneurs? 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.
00:19:47
Speaker
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? And You got too many podcasts, man, because now we have over 200 episodes.
00:20:02
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.
00:20:15
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 at top10.solarpreneurs.com. Again, that's top10, the number 10,.solarpreneurs.com. Don't forget the S on solarpreneurs.
00:20:37
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.