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 up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Today, we're going to be talking about eight different ideas you can use around the holiday season.
Speaker: We've got lots of sales coming up.
Speaker: You got Black Friday.
Speaker: We're recording this on Veterans Day.
Speaker: There's so many different ways you can utilize holiday sales, discounts, offers.
Speaker: you name it.
Speaker: So hopefully that gets your gears turning.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast.
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.
Speaker: If you have not shared the show, left us a review, sorry, please do that.
Speaker: Really helps us grow the show, grow the channel, and spread awareness.
Speaker: And that's the main thing we ask.
Speaker: We're not asking for money here.
Speaker: But please share the show.
Speaker: Okay, so let's jump into it.
Speaker: Recording this actually on Veterans Day.
Speaker: And hopefully if you're knocking, cold calling, whatever you do, hopefully you're able to get out there.
Speaker: Talk to some prospective customers because people are around.
Speaker: People are happy.
Speaker: People love their Veterans Day.
Speaker: And really just a great day to be out there.
Speaker: So it got me thinking, how can we use these different holidays to create offers?
Speaker: I've told stories before, but I came from pest control.
Speaker: And I remember in pest control, we would always have these offers around certain holidays.
Speaker: right?
Speaker: You got, you know, Memorial Day, you got 4th of July in the pest control season.
Speaker: And the trainings we always had were guys, we're starting our 4th of July sale.
Speaker: And almost all the time, it was basically the same offer, but you just created it around the holiday and people loved it.
Speaker: So I'm like, why don't we do that more often in solar?
Speaker: And I think it's a great way to get people excited, to get people to take action because it creates urgency, creates deadlines, creates scarcity.
Speaker: Think of Black Friday, right?
Speaker: You got people lining up
Speaker: You got people camping overnight.
Speaker: I don't know if that happens as much anymore, but people go crazy for these deals.
Speaker: So how can we create that same effect in solar?
Speaker: So let's talk about eight of these specifically and things you can create, offers you can use.
Speaker: And hopefully this helps you in your cells this week and throughout this holiday season, or really whenever you're listening to this, because you can use it basically at all times.
Speaker: Okay, so number one, you got smart thermostats.
Speaker: This one's a classic.
Speaker: When I got into solar back in 2016, we were all about these smart thermostats.
Speaker: You got the Ness.
Speaker: Another one we were using at the time were the Ecobee's.
Speaker: And people love them.
Speaker: Something easy to install.
Speaker: And I remember I would pull up to customers' homes and
Speaker: I would have a trunk full of these things, boxes and boxes of these smart thermostats, because what we did that's super powerful, and I think even more than giving the people the item, the major purpose was to lock them into the deal.
Speaker: And so we would close the deal, sign the documents.
Speaker: Immediately after, we'd
Speaker: put these smart thermostats in and it did add an extra 30 minutes.
Speaker: And there were many times I did not know what I was doing.
Speaker: Specifically, I remember a time where I messed up someone's HVAC unit because I blew a fuse or whatever.
Speaker: And I spent literally, I think a few hours in an attic trying to fix this thing.
Speaker: Customer was not happy.
Speaker: they canceled their solar and um yeah i just messed up their whole hvex system had to go buy fuses i think i eventually figured it out but i'm sitting in their attic i can hear them talking below me just saying what is this what is this effing solar guy doing why has he been up there so long and i'm just like dripping sweat dying of heat so anyways don't mess these things up but it is a great idea utilize smart thermostats
Speaker: These things, people love them, helps their home be a little more efficient and something easy to lock your accounts down.
Speaker: Number two, you got whole house fans.
Speaker: And keep in mind, even if your company doesn't have these, maybe you're not doing anything like this.
Speaker: It's pretty easy to go out and do your own research and
Speaker: You can Google it and you can easily add this into your deals.
Speaker: Maybe you're a newer rep.
Speaker: You've never done anything like this.
Speaker: Simply priced in your accounts, price a little bit higher and you're paying these things out of your commission.
Speaker: But if you can get extra attention, if you can get extra excitement and help the home be more efficient, a lot of times it's worth it.
Speaker: So these whole house fans, if you don't know what it is, actually have one in my house here, but it sucks the air from the outside and pushed in the inside.
Speaker: So it only works if it's cooler outside than it is inside.
Speaker: Not going to work if it's 100 degrees outside.
Speaker: You're just blowing in warm air.
Speaker: But a great idea we use in the summer.
Speaker: We would use it every night when it cooled off to 70 or below.
Speaker: it turned that baby on, you don't got to run AC and it's cooling the whole house down and barely using any power.
Speaker: So great thing to add in whole house fan.
Speaker: Number three, you got six months of free power.
Speaker: This one's a classic.
Speaker: And I love the six months of free power because it's not requiring you to drop the price.
Speaker: And it's something you can add in pretty easily, right?
Speaker: And so I love the way of any of all Michael O'Donnell, if you've read or if you've read his book, he does this a lot of times as kind of like a last resort offer.
Speaker: People don't want to sign.
Speaker: And he says, hey, instead of having our marketing team have to follow up with you, our inside sales team have to follow up with you.
Speaker: Let's take that money.
Speaker: Let's apply it towards your solar deal and we'll give you six months of free power.
Speaker: OK, and even if you already signed them, even if you already priced them,
Speaker: You don't have to play that game of dropping the price, recalculating documents, whatever.
Speaker: You can just pay it out of your commission.
Speaker: Six months of free power.
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 SolarScout.
Speaker: 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 Solar Scout in San Diego, so I decided to partner up.
Speaker: But I told them, hey, if I'm going to talk about Solar Scout 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: So this is a great one.
Speaker: And another note on this is when you're creating these offers, it's a good idea to have some sort of graphic or some sort of slick that's showing these things.
Speaker: Because remember, people believe what they see, not what they hear.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so if you can have that extra validity, extra validation of what they're getting and add like a deadline to do it even better, then it's going to be even more powerful.
Speaker: So that's number three.
Speaker: Number four, you got alarm systems.
Speaker: This is something we were doing for a little bit, too, is putting an alarm system, covering their first year of monitoring, and
Speaker: And we had like an incentive going on for a while with one of our installers where they would cover this and they would actually install it on the site survey.
Speaker: So if you can't install something, even better, have somebody go out there and install it at the site survey or soon after.
Speaker: Because again, it's locking them down.
Speaker: if they have a product delivered then they can't really cancel after that or it's going to be much more difficult to so that's one of the downsides of solar is they got to wait and i remember um i had one um installer a while back where they would actually put in we're using nphase inverters at the time and if you've sold nphase inverters they have a combiner box
Speaker: that goes next to the electric panel has some of the components in there.
Speaker: And we got this installer to actually put in the combiner box at the site survey.
Speaker: And it was a little like pre-installation.
Speaker: So we weren't doing anything else.
Speaker: But I remember I had like at least two or three customers that I saved from canceling just because of this.
Speaker: So I'm like, look, we've already done a personal installation at your home.
Speaker: We can't cancel it.
Speaker: And was able to use that to leverage my way in front of them again.
Speaker: Save the deal from canceling.
Speaker: So don't sleep on it.
Speaker: It's so powerful to have these little pre installations of these Nest thermostats of the whole house fans of the alarm systems.
Speaker: And if it's getting you extra retention, if it's helping you retain your deals and probably worth taking a hit on the account, even if you have to take a little bit out of your commission, because some commission is better than no commission.
Speaker: Okay, number five thousand dollar cash rebates.
Speaker: And this could be powerful.
Speaker: Some people, maybe you're in lower income areas and it just depends.
Speaker: Some people like the idea of getting a thousand dollars right now versus the six months of free power.
Speaker: So know your customers.
Speaker: What's their income brackets?
Speaker: Are they in, you know, high class area, lower class?
Speaker: Um, depending on the people, maybe they're not working, maybe they're retired, maybe they're living paycheck to paycheck.
Speaker: Some people would be stoked out of their minds to have a thousand dollar rebates for doing it today.
Speaker: And like I said, if you make the graphic and you, you can put a deadline on it, these things work better right now.
Speaker: We're in the middle of our, uh, it's called masters or competition, um, before Thanksgiving when we move it, we make a huge push for like three weeks.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: to close a bunch of deals.
Speaker: And we made graphics just for this competition of, hey, here's the deal.
Speaker: You're going to get six months of free power.
Speaker: It expires November 21st.
Speaker: And we can put whatever date on there, but especially on competitions, make some type of graphic.
Speaker: And you can use ChatGPT for this.
Speaker: As I was researching some ideas for the podcast, if you have the paid version of ChatGPT, I think it's called 4.0 now, 4.0, something like that.
Speaker: It's about 20 bucks a month and it can create graphics for you.
Speaker: So you can do this on the fly.
Speaker: Super easy.
Speaker: You can use other tools like Canva.
Speaker: Insanely easy to create some graphics and have these ready to show to your customers.
Speaker: Go create an album of all your graphics, photos you use in your accounts and just have that ready to show your customers, to show your prospective clients.
Speaker: OK, we got three more here.
Speaker: And the last one is a little bit unconventional, so I should have mentioned this, but stay till the end.
Speaker: But number six, you got an EV charger.
Speaker: These things are EVs are blown up.
Speaker: And depending on what area you're selling, I'm in California, but everyone here is pretty much getting an EV or they have plans to in the future.
Speaker: It's actually a majority of the homes I sit in.
Speaker: They tell me that they have plans to add an EV in the future at some point.
Speaker: So not a bad idea.
Speaker: Throw in an EV charger.
Speaker: And, um, yeah, have, have your, um, talk to your install partners.
Speaker: A lot of times they're willing to do these.
Speaker: And again, if you don't have someone that will do it pretty easy, do Google search.
Speaker: And if you have people asking about it, maybe have that deal that, uh, you're so close to getting them.
Speaker: They said they're going to get an EV charger, or they said they're going to get an EV in the next few years.
Speaker: Like, uh, we'll push them over the edge.
Speaker: Hey, Mr. Customer, you know what?
Speaker: If I can get them to add in an EV charger for helping us out today as we're facing some deadlines and trying to get you helped out at the same time as everybody else, could I tell them that we're good to at least get the applications in, get them scheduled for site survey?
Speaker: Can I tell them that?
Speaker: Yeah, cool.
Speaker: Let me make a quick call.
Speaker: Okay, do a little manager close.
Speaker: Call the manager, see if you can add it in.
Speaker: So be creative.
Speaker: Think on your feet.
Speaker: Okay, and then number seven, maybe you have someone that they like the idea of using extra power, but they don't want to pay for more panels.
Speaker: They don't want to have their monthly bill go up.
Speaker: If you can figure that out before, then consider adding an extra panel at no cost.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So maybe you're at 15 panels.
Speaker: Hey, Mr. Customer, you know what?
Speaker: If we can get this in today,
Speaker: I'll get them to go ahead and add that additional panel, give you 5% more power, whatever.
Speaker: Maybe it's not that much.
Speaker: They give you a little bit more AC to use in the summer, give you a little bit more juice to play your Xbox at night, tie it to them.
Speaker: What are the benefits for them?
Speaker: So I'll go ahead and get that added if we can get you in.
Speaker: Does that sound good?
Speaker: Sound good to you?
Speaker: You like that?
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: And then number eight, the last thing on the list here, don't sleep on this, and that is increasing your referral bonus.
Speaker: So not exactly the same thing here, but maybe you do a referral bonus of $500.
Speaker: How about during the holiday season, how about you do a Black Friday $1,000 referral bonus?
Speaker: We all know sometimes appointments can be tougher to come by.
Speaker: During the holiday season, people are busier.
Speaker: People want to put things off until after the holidays.
Speaker: So how about
Speaker: increasing that referral bonus and putting a deadline on that, creating a graphic for that and using that as you're in your appointments, get you some extra referrals.
Speaker: So those are the eight ideas to create urgency, to create offers, create discounts for the sales we got going on during the holiday season.
Speaker: Use them wisely.
Speaker: Just to recap one more time, you got smart thermostats, whole house fans, six months of free power, alarm systems, $1,000 cash rebate, EV chargers, electric extra panels rather at no additional cost, and then stacking that referral bonus a little bit higher.
Speaker: Okay, so use these this week.
Speaker: Take advantage.
Speaker: Holiday season.
Speaker: There's always holidays coming up.
Speaker: Remember, you can extend it.
Speaker: Today, we just had a Veterans Day.
Speaker: So, hey, you're running a veteran.
Speaker: You're extending your offer for this week only, right?
Speaker: So extend it if you need to.
Speaker: and build urgency.
Speaker: And that's going to help you close more deals during the holiday season and really whenever you're selling solar.
Speaker: So I hope these things helped.
Speaker: Go out and get some extra accounts this week.
Speaker: Let me know if you guys have any other ideas of offers or discounts or ways to get customers excited that you've used effectively.
Speaker: Send this to your team or whoever could use some help this week, whoever might be struggling.
Speaker: And we'll see you on the next episode.
Speaker: Peace.
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