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 solarpreneur you might ask?
Speaker: A solarpreneur is a new breed of solar pro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery and you are about to become one.
Speaker: What's up solarpreneurs?
Speaker: Taylor Armstrong here.
Speaker: As usual we're here to help you generate more leads and referrals, close more deals, and have a much better experience in the solar industry.
Speaker: Hope you're doing awesome.
Speaker: Hope you are having a great week.
Speaker: We are kicking off the weekend with some fire here today.
Speaker: And this podcast is going to be a little bit interesting.
Speaker: If you have been following me on social media, you've seen a little bit about what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker: But that is had a crazy customer experience.
Speaker: First time this has happened to me, but I literally got down on my knees.
Speaker: Okay, actually, I don't think we knelt, but we prayed for five or 10 minutes straight with a customer for her to get an answer on if she should go solar or not.
Speaker: So you're going to hear about that.
Speaker: And I did end up closing that deal.
Speaker: So you're going to hear about it, what I did, been getting a lot of questions around it.
Speaker: So excited to share some nuggets from that.
Speaker: But before we jump into the podcast, I wanted to give a very special thank you.
Speaker: to my friend thorn green he left us a very nice review on the podcast he says essential and grateful five stars this is an onboarding dream a very appreciative of the podcast it's part of my daily routine every morning at the gym one two episodes using and applying the lessons and advice learned here is truly game-changing god bless hope to be on here one day with some major success stories
Speaker: and at Florida at FL Solar Realtor for American Energy and Construction.
Speaker: So Thorne, you are the man.
Speaker: Appreciate it.
Speaker: Go follow him at FL Solar Realtor and hope you crush it out there.
Speaker: So happy to give anyone a shout out if you want to go leave us a review just like Thorne did.
Speaker: I hope we get him lots of business.
Speaker: Go follow this guy.
Speaker: He's awesome.
Speaker: And so that being said, let's jump into the podcast.
Speaker: So we've been getting some questions around this.
Speaker: And I posted this, if you follow on Instagram or Facebook, you've been seeing me post about this specific customer.
Speaker: But we, long story short, what happened with this one is I had gone in to close her about two weeks ago.
Speaker: Didn't end up closing her.
Speaker: It was, she owned the home, but they're, I think, 65, 70-ish.
Speaker: And she needed to talk to her son.
Speaker: Her son has dealt a lot with, like, I don't know, home projects and things like that.
Speaker: So she says, Taylor, I'm not doing anything until I talk with him.
Speaker: We got the son on the phone and he ended up just preventing the deal from closing.
Speaker: He's like, hey, I don't want my mom to sign anything.
Speaker: We're going to have to think long and hard about this.
Speaker: And, you know, sometimes not a ton you can do in those situations.
Speaker: Obviously, you can't really apply pressure and get her to sign because then I'm going to have the son knocking at my door and not happy.
Speaker: So I had to wait in this specific situation, but here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker: And so a couple lessons from this.
Speaker: So I'm going to tell what happened with the deal.
Speaker: I'm going to share some specific lessons that you can go out there and apply.
Speaker: And you're going to hear what I did.
Speaker: So what happened was this.
Speaker: We went about a week.
Speaker: She told me she's going to follow up with me over three, four days.
Speaker: Didn't hear from her, of course.
Speaker: And I end up, to be honest, forgetting about her as well.
Speaker: I'm going, I'm knocking in this neighborhood.
Speaker: And thanks to RepCard, a lot of you guys had heard me talk about RepCard.
Speaker: I'm going through my previous customers, the digital cards I've sent out.
Speaker: If you're new to the show, RepCard is the digital business cards.
Speaker: You can send out cards to your customers and do automatic follow-ups.
Speaker: So highly recommend them.
Speaker: But I'm going through this customer list and I see this lady again on there.
Speaker: I'm like, oh, you know what?
Speaker: She said she was going to talk to her son.
Speaker: Hadn't heard from her.
Speaker: Let's shoot her a text.
Speaker: I send her a text.
Speaker: Rep card reminded me.
Speaker: So appreciate it, Evan.
Speaker: And I get a response from her.
Speaker: She says, you know what, Taylor?
Speaker: Thought about it.
Speaker: And after reviewing everything you sent me, $41,000 is just too much to spend.
Speaker: That's just a crazy amount.
Speaker: Can't afford this.
Speaker: Something along those lines.
Speaker: And instantly in my head, I'm like, okay, well, she does not understand this clearly because she's not spending $41,000.
Speaker: Yeah, that's the total price tag on it, but it's cutting her bill by 40% and she's paying nothing out of pocket.
Speaker: But obviously she is not thinking about it that way.
Speaker: She's just looking at the price tag and thinking, wow, this is expensive.
Speaker: Not going to work for me.
Speaker: And texts like that, what I like to do is just show up to the door and try to overcome this, especially with, you know, older people that maybe aren't the best with texting.
Speaker: Sometimes you're just going to be running around in circles trying to overcome things like that.
Speaker: So what do I do?
Speaker: Luckily I'm in the neighborhood still, so I show up not a ton of time out of my day even if I can't get her attention or can't generate the interest again.
Speaker: If I show up and I said, hey Vanessa, you know what?
Speaker: I saw your text and just wanted to go over it one more time because yeah, this is a lot of people get confused by the numbers.
Speaker: So luckily she's super nice, lets me in, talk to an older lady, right?
Speaker: And we get to talking and I just start doing some simple math with her.
Speaker: So Vanessa Knight, and I know 41,000, it is a lot of money, but do you remember the numbers we kind of went over last time and the breakdown of it?
Speaker: And she's like, yeah, yeah, I remember.
Speaker: And we pull up the T-shirt.
Speaker: This is how I like to close.
Speaker: Got it from Taylor McCarthy and Knox Stars.
Speaker: And I just show her the comparison.
Speaker: She was paying $200.
Speaker: With solar, it's going to drop her bill to like $130.
Speaker: And some of you are hearing these numbers and probably being like, wow, I wish people saved that much in my market.
Speaker: So the answer to that is come out and sell in San Diego if you want to see those savings.
Speaker: Just stay out of my area.
Speaker: Just kidding.
Speaker: But regardless of the savings, still there's a lot of value to be built.
Speaker: But that's kind of what I came out to in her situation.
Speaker: She was saving $70 on her bill.
Speaker: It's keeping her amount set.
Speaker: So I just kind of briefly went over those numbers again with her.
Speaker: But then what really helped her see this is I pulled out a calculator in front of her and said, Vanessa, check this out.
Speaker: And for some reason, this just clicked.
Speaker: So there's a little nugget right there is sometimes you can say things over and over and over, but you got to say it in different ways.
Speaker: You got to involve different explanations, involve different senses.
Speaker: You got to just think of every way possible to explain it.
Speaker: Because sometimes you can say the same thing 10 times, but the 11th time you say it, you explain it a different way and something just clicks in their head.
Speaker: So this is exactly what happened with this lady is I pulled out a calculator and I said, look, so if you're paying 200 right now, times that by 12, what is that?
Speaker: 2,400.
Speaker: You times that by 25 years, you're going to be paying, and it was like, I don't know, 60 or 70 grand.
Speaker: And so that's without inflation, right?
Speaker: That's if the rates never went up.
Speaker: That's if they stay exactly the same.
Speaker: You never use more energy.
Speaker: That's what you'd pay, right?
Speaker: And so now compared to the $41,000, does that seem terrible to spend $41,000 compared to this?
Speaker: And at that point, I just see the gears turning in her head.
Speaker: Something clicks for her.
Speaker: And finally, she understands.
Speaker: She's like, oh, you know what?
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: And that's if the rates never changed.
Speaker: I'm like, yeah, that's a three.
Speaker: It's never changed.
Speaker: So most likely it's going to be at least 20,000 on top of that if you compared it over the long haul.
Speaker: So that was when I finally grabbed her attention.
Speaker: That's when she finally opened up and was like, okay, you know what?
Speaker: I got to explore this again.
Speaker: And here's where we get into the juicy details.
Speaker: So after that, I see that she's interested again.
Speaker: You know, we review everything.
Speaker: She says she wants to do it.
Speaker: She's interested.
Speaker: Now it comes time to close her again.
Speaker: And I find out that really she has not like thought this over really.
Speaker: She hasn't really talked to her son.
Speaker: So that's another lesson learned is when people say they're going to talk about it, when people say they're going to talk to sons, when people say they're going to pray about it or review, in my experience, 90% of the time, no one's going to do that.
Speaker: You're going to step out the door.
Speaker: They're never going to think about it.
Speaker: And the only time they're going to take action doing anything is if you get back in the house, get them to see things for themselves.
Speaker: In most cases, right?
Speaker: Some people, there are times they do that.
Speaker: But first, she didn't do any of this because we start going into closing and I get the same excuses as last time.
Speaker: oh, you know what, Taylor, I need to talk to my son again about this.
Speaker: I need to pray about this.
Speaker: I'm just going to have to think long and hard.
Speaker: And I'm saying, Vanessa, we had the same conversation last week and you had a whole week to think about this and do all those things.
Speaker: She's like, yeah, well, you know, stuff comes up and it's just been busy.
Speaker: Starts throwing out the smoke screens, just throwing out the excuses and
Speaker: And that's where I need to start calling her out.
Speaker: That's where I need to start closing her and digging deep, deep into these, you know, objections he's pulling out.
Speaker: And so the first one she started bringing up was pray about it.
Speaker: And that's where some of you guys saw me posting on Instagram, on social media is I had to use the pray about it clothes.
Speaker: And if any of you have read Closer Survival Guide, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker: It's like Grant Cardone's book.
Speaker: I reference it a lot.
Speaker: Highly recommended.
Speaker: Some things apply to solar better than others.
Speaker: But I will say this is the first time I actually used the pray about it close.
Speaker: And so it's taken straight from the book.
Speaker: Here's the close.
Speaker: And you guys can go look this up later.
Speaker: But it goes like this.
Speaker: It's on page 180 of the book.
Speaker: He says, and sir, I appreciate that.
Speaker: I pray about every decision I make myself.
Speaker: How are you most comfortable praying?
Speaker: Let's pray together.
Speaker: I trust God won't mislead either of us.
Speaker: I'm willing to accept God's will for the both of us.
Speaker: So that's his clothes.
Speaker: And that's what I pulled out.
Speaker: You got to have multiple arrows in your quiver.
Speaker: So I pulled out this arrow.
Speaker: I said, Vanessa, well, you know what?
Speaker: I'm a religious man myself and told my little story of how I did on my two-year church mission in Columbia and
Speaker: I'm a, you know, feel like I'm a religious guy myself.
Speaker: She liked that.
Speaker: We built a little rapport, built a little connection on that.
Speaker: And I said, you know what?
Speaker: Why don't we offer a prayer?
Speaker: I'm happy to like offer a prayer and then we can find out God's will on this.
Speaker: Obviously, I think he'd be happy with you saving the money, helping the environment, putting yourself in a better situation.
Speaker: But yeah, obviously, if God doesn't want you to do this, then he should give you a sign, right?
Speaker: And she said, Taylor, you know what?
Speaker: Yeah, we can pray.
Speaker: Why don't you offer us the prayer?
Speaker: She wanted me to pray.
Speaker: And so I say my prayer.
Speaker: We're asking God.
Speaker: And then after we get done praying, she says, I want to pray too.
Speaker: So she prays.
Speaker: We go on for like, like I said, five, 10 minutes.
Speaker: Then we get done praying.
Speaker: I said, all right, Vanessa, how do you feel?
Speaker: Do you feel like God's, you know, happy with your decision to go solar?
Speaker: And she's still kind of iffy, so it wasn't like an instant yes, let's do it.
Speaker: But she said, well, yeah, I mean, it feels okay.
Speaker: I don't know if I feel one way or the other.
Speaker: And then I say, well, Vanessa, what I taught as a missionary is,
Speaker: And what I believe is that God is going to give you an answer.
Speaker: But first you have to take action.
Speaker: Sometimes it's not going to be a yes or no, but you have to move forward with your gut feeling.
Speaker: And then if it's not the right decision, God's going to let you know.
Speaker: But you have to act first.
Speaker: And so that's what we're going to do with the solar is as long as you don't feel terrible about it, we would just get the application and get the ball rolling.
Speaker: But like we've been over, if you've for some reason felt it's a terrible idea, then by all means, we would stop the process too.
Speaker: So give her an out, you know, some people, you got to let them know that worst case scenario, they got their days from the state, California.
Speaker: They got their three day right of rescission.
Speaker: She's a senior citizen.
Speaker: So she has her five day right of rescission, which, you know, you don't want, you don't want to invite people to cancel, but some cases you have to pull that out of your, out of your hat in order to get people to, to take action.
Speaker: And so that's when she's like, okay, well, all right, sounds good, but I still want to like check with my son on this.
Speaker: And I say, okay, well, let's get him on the phone.
Speaker: And that's another secret with this.
Speaker: If you ever have other parties, third parties involved, people that they want to talk to, make every effort possible to get those people in front of you or to get them on the phone or talk to them yourselves.
Speaker: Because let's be blunt.
Speaker: We are the ones that know how to explain solar.
Speaker: We are the ones that know how to sell this product, that know how to build value.
Speaker: And so if you're just leaving it to them to explain and talk to people later, it's not going to go well most of the time.
Speaker: And so we get the son on the phone.
Speaker: I walk him through everything, say, look, Vanessa, she's not paying anything out of pocket.
Speaker: It's keeping her bill set.
Speaker: She's going to be able to use more power than what she's using right now.
Speaker: And we answer all his concerns.
Speaker: He has questions about the roof.
Speaker: He has typical solar objections that you could think of.
Speaker: We lock it down.
Speaker: And then he tells his mom, all right, well, up to you.
Speaker: But, I mean, it sounds good from what he's saying.
Speaker: So, yeah, if you want to do it, then that's fine.
Speaker: finally after all that after praying about it after getting the sun on the line that's when I could finally see some of these barriers start to go down the castle moat finally went down and she was finally open to it but before I even did that another couple things that did help in this process for those that's
Speaker: want even more arrows in their quiver.
Speaker: Two things in specific.
Speaker: The first one I did, I brought up the fact that we're in a competition.
Speaker: And whether you're in a competition or not, this is a big secret right here.
Speaker: You should always be in a competition for your customers.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And they don't have to know maybe it's a competition with yourself, but I bring this up.
Speaker: I say, Vanessa, you know what?
Speaker: I know you're hesitant.
Speaker: But here's who you'd be helping.
Speaker: You'd be helping me.
Speaker: You'd be helping my family.
Speaker: Pull up a picture of my kids again.
Speaker: Get some emotion involved.
Speaker: But not only that, we're in a competition against our North team.
Speaker: We're down by two right now.
Speaker: And you would be our team player.
Speaker: You would be our LeBron James, so to speak.
Speaker: She's a basketball fan.
Speaker: So bring up her favorite player, right?
Speaker: Or, you know, someone she'd know.
Speaker: And you would be our team player.
Speaker: You would help us win this.
Speaker: So what do you think about that on being the team player?
Speaker: You help us win the competition.
Speaker: It's for, I think it's for a pair of shoes or something.
Speaker: I'll give you the shoes if we win it.
Speaker: I don't care about that.
Speaker: But I just want to beat those guys up north.
Speaker: Can you help me?
Speaker: And this was one thing.
Speaker: Every time you, you know, pull a new arrow out of the quiver, if you do this correctly, you can see people's guards start going down less and less.
Speaker: But it's like layers, right?
Speaker: I had to peel back layers of the onion until I got to that core and finally broke it down.
Speaker: So that was one thing.
Speaker: And then the second thing that helped is just trying to add in, you know, more urgency.
Speaker: Got to build that urgency.
Speaker: And so for her, she wanted a panel upgrade.
Speaker: And I explained that this is usually expensive, that we add some time to the project.
Speaker: But she and, you know, we saw that she wasn't willing to submit the forms, submit the documents today.
Speaker: And so this was another thing I threw at her.
Speaker: I said, Vanessa, look, I know you want this panel upgrade.
Speaker: And so let me check, but I think they will allow me to do this.
Speaker: What our company is doing is they're trying to group all these site surveys together at the same time.
Speaker: And so if we can get yours scheduled at the same time as the neighbors, then what we'll do, we'll go ahead and throw that in.
Speaker: But we would just need to get the forms in today so we can get that scheduled.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so this was another thing added another reason she should get it in today.
Speaker: And another thing that she was getting out of it versus waiting.
Speaker: So those were two more arrows I pulled on my quiver and threw at her in order to get this deal.
Speaker: so all that being said that's kind of what happened with this whole showdown between me vanessa and i ended up getting the deal she ended up signing signing and you can go see the video it's probably well i'll have to post on social media again so i think i had a story of it so it probably disappeared by now
Speaker: But by the end, got referrals out of her.
Speaker: She said, Taylor, I don't know why I was so nervous.
Speaker: Now that we signed all this, I'm like happy I did this.
Speaker: I don't know what I was so nervous about.
Speaker: Because this lady was literally shaking in her boots, feeling like she was just putting everything on the line to go solar.
Speaker: It was such a big commitment.
Speaker: But that's how it is with people.
Speaker: You show them the social proof.
Speaker: You show them that other people are doing it.
Speaker: You give them more and more reasons that they should act now, should do it now.
Speaker: And you pull different closes out.
Speaker: And that's how you're going to get deals.
Speaker: So that's the story behind the pray about it close.
Speaker: You can go read that in Grant Cardone's Closer Survival Guide.
Speaker: So hope you took a few little takeaways from that.
Speaker: Hopefully there's some things you can apply in your next deal or in your next close.
Speaker: So I would ask, send this to someone that maybe could use some religion in their life.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: First of all, go learn how to pray.
Speaker: If you don't know how to pray, I'll teach you.
Speaker: So send me a message.
Speaker: Because you're not going to be able to pray with a customer if you don't know how to pray.
Speaker: So learn how to do that first.
Speaker: And then use this in a deal next time it comes up.
Speaker: Let me know what you think of it.
Speaker: And I will say I've been in this six years, right?
Speaker: And this is the first time I've used the pray about it clothes.
Speaker: So this isn't something that's going to happen probably that often.
Speaker: But hey, never know when you'll need these things.
Speaker: So hopefully it helps.
Speaker: So that's the episode for today.
Speaker: And make sure you tune in to next episode.
Speaker: This is going to be probably one of the craziest episodes we've done next time.
Speaker: And that is because we have a certain solar VP on.
Speaker: She's very well known in the industry.
Speaker: So you're going to recognize her when she's on the podcast.
Speaker: But she has probably the funniest story I've ever heard in solar and the craziest, one of the craziest stories I've ever heard in solar.
Speaker: So make sure you tune into this episode.
Speaker: It has to do with a certain boob job she got.
Speaker: after one of the first deals she ever sold in solar so does that sound intriguing i hope so make sure you tune in the next one it's gonna be insane and hope you enjoyed the episode keep crushing it
Speaker: What's up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Hope you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker: Before you run out and start selling more solar yourself, wanted to let you know about an exciting new cheat sheet we created specifically for you in mind.
Speaker: One of the top questions I get asked on Instagram, on Facebook, by our listeners is, Taylor, where should I start?
Speaker: What episodes should I listen to in the podcast?
Speaker: 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 at top10.solarpreneurs.com again that's top 10 the number 10.solarpreneurs.com don't forget the s on solarpreneurs
Speaker: We will have that in the show notes.
Speaker: Go download it right now.
Speaker: And especially if you have not listened to them, go listen to them and you can re-listen to them.
Speaker: That's going to show you how.
Speaker: So go download it and we'll see you on the other side.
