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Do These Things To Boost Your Team Production
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The SOLARPRENEUR podcast is here to help you close more deals in the solar industry, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully, have a much better time and situation.
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Transcript
Taylor's Journey and Sales Expertise
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level.
00:00:08
Speaker
My name is Taylor Armstrong.
00:00:10
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.
00:00:19
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.
00:00:31
Speaker
What is a solopreneur, you might ask?
00:00:33
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.
Team Building and Productivity Insights
00:00:41
Speaker
Hey, what's going on, solopreneurs?
00:00:42
Speaker
Today, we're going to be talking about how you can build your squad, how you can help your team achieve better results, produce at a higher level, and I'm going to share some things that I've personally been working on that have been helping my team tremendously.
00:00:57
Speaker
So if you are interested in growing your team, this episode is for you, which hopefully everyone should be interested in growing a team because I think that's one of the best ways to grow in sales and in the solar industry.
Recording Challenges and Family Visit
00:01:12
Speaker
And so welcome to the podcast.
00:01:13
Speaker
My name is Taylor Armstrong.
00:01:14
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.
00:01:21
Speaker
I'm recording this actually from Utah here for a little family getaway.
00:01:26
Speaker
My sister actually just got back from a 18 month church mission.
00:01:30
Speaker
So we're coming out, visit her, spend a little bit of time with the family as we get closer to the end of summer.
00:01:38
Speaker
And want to apologize if my voice sounds a little hoarse or if I sound like I'm a little out of it.
00:01:44
Speaker
We drove pretty much all night and got in at like three in the morning.
00:01:52
Speaker
So half the night and then was up at like 7 a.m.
00:01:55
Speaker
So 630 to 7.
00:01:59
Speaker
So, a little bit out of it.
00:02:02
Speaker
I'm trying to recover here.
00:02:03
Speaker
And I know my one negative review on the podcast so far is that I sounded monotone, or one of the few negatives we've had.
00:02:10
Speaker
So, if that person is listening, then I apologize in advance for sounding a little out of it.
00:02:17
Speaker
But we're still coming at you.
00:02:19
Speaker
and still want to bring some high quality content.
00:02:22
Speaker
And again, especially if you are looking to build a team, this episode is for
Upcoming Episode Preview: Will Brindley
00:02:27
Speaker
you.
00:02:27
Speaker
And specifically also next episode, we're going to be having on one of my friends, Will Brindley, who actually is managing a very successful, very large team here in San Diego at our company and has just grown it like crazy.
00:02:44
Speaker
has been able to push his team to get results and has hit the metrics to be a manager and just grow into it very quickly.
00:02:54
Speaker
So he's going to be coming on next episode, sharing how he grew his team and how he makes, you know, over a million a year in solar.
00:03:03
Speaker
Okay, but let's talk about some things that I personally have been
Career Path and Team Rebuilding
00:03:06
Speaker
doing.
00:03:06
Speaker
So for those that don't know my story as well, or maybe need a refresher, about two years ago, I was with two, three years ago, coming out of COVID, joined a dealer, pretty successful dealer, working with guys like Ricardo Richie, a lot of other successful dudes that just made over a million in solar, absolute beasts, was able to learn from them.
00:03:32
Speaker
But unfortunately, we had some issues as most people have that have been in solar for any length of time.
00:03:38
Speaker
Had some installer issues.
00:03:40
Speaker
We started, we stopped getting paid out.
00:03:43
Speaker
We had delays and long story short, we didn't get paid out a ton of money.
00:03:49
Speaker
And all of us just kind of disbanded, went our separate ways.
00:03:51
Speaker
And so since then, about two and a half years ago, I went to another dealer, had some issues with them, some similar, and just wasn't really building up the team to what it was.
00:04:06
Speaker
Essentially started over when I joined Legacy here at my latest company.
00:04:11
Speaker
I've been with for about a year now.
00:04:14
Speaker
And so pretty much started from scratch about a year ago.
00:04:17
Speaker
Didn't really have brought on a few people that came over just over after all the transition, but had to essentially start from the ground up.
00:04:25
Speaker
And so right now we are sitting at about 14 people on my direct squad.
00:04:32
Speaker
We're building a ton of momentum right now and shout out anyone that's on my squad listening to this.
00:04:36
Speaker
Love you guys.
00:04:38
Speaker
And specifically,
00:04:39
Speaker
My co-squad leader, we got Javier.
00:04:42
Speaker
He's been helping me a ton and would definitely recommend building up a team, building up a squad together.
00:04:48
Speaker
And so I want to share just a few things that we've implemented.
Managing Teams with Smaller Squads
00:04:52
Speaker
If you are with a larger company, currently our team here in San Diego, our whole office, we're at over 150 reps.
00:05:00
Speaker
So obviously a massive team.
00:05:03
Speaker
So just to preface it, depending on how many reps you have, you should divide into squads.
00:05:08
Speaker
If you've read the book Extreme Ownership, one of the best books on leadership, Jocko, he talks about how one of the keys to leadership is you can't really lead more than 10 people at the same time.
00:05:22
Speaker
And so that's where squads come in, which is what we do.
00:05:25
Speaker
Obviously 150 people, that is way too many people to manage and way too many people to hold accountable.
00:05:30
Speaker
So we divide into squads.
00:05:33
Speaker
And so what I'm going to talk about is how you should be leading your squad or maybe your smaller office, get your reps to produce more and trying to grow.
00:05:43
Speaker
These are some systems I believe you should put into place.
00:05:47
Speaker
And I think it's helped our team a ton.
00:05:50
Speaker
And so here's what we've done.
00:05:51
Speaker
First of all, number one, we do a weekly squad call.
00:05:55
Speaker
Hey, this is outside of meetings.
00:05:57
Speaker
We have meetings with our whole office.
00:05:59
Speaker
We have our correlations, right?
00:06:01
Speaker
We do them twice a week right now.
00:06:03
Speaker
But on top of that, we are doing a weekly squad call because again, we know we're not going to get a ton of accountability for going to correlation with
00:06:12
Speaker
typically like around 100 people.
00:06:14
Speaker
It's not like you can go through everyone's numbers, just impossible.
00:06:18
Speaker
You're not going to go through and get weekly numbers.
00:06:21
Speaker
You're not going to really talk to people on a personal basis if you have that many people in a correlation.
00:06:26
Speaker
So what works for us is we have been doing a weekly team call.
00:06:30
Speaker
So we jump on Google Meet is what we use.
00:06:34
Speaker
And this is where we can get a little more personal and hold people a little more accountable.
00:06:40
Speaker
And so I'm going to go through the structure of these little team calls we have weekly.
00:06:46
Speaker
And this is something you could use also if you're just running a smaller office too.
00:06:50
Speaker
But if not, I would recommend people that have larger offices divide up into squads and run something similar to this or figure out a way where you can increase the accountability for, you know, little pods, little squads of 10 people.
00:07:03
Speaker
So
00:07:03
Speaker
So some of you already know that I run my own door to door sales team here in San Diego.
Introducing SolarScout App
00:07:08
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.
00:07:14
Speaker
But if I want to increase my deal flow, I need to do something different to get an advantage.
00:07:19
Speaker
Then we discovered an app called Solar Scout, but it's not a door knocking app.
00:07:23
Speaker
It's a data platform that shows us who is likely to go solar in our market.
00:07:28
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.
00:07:37
Speaker
It's been working for a lot of teams across the country, and now I'm on board too.
00:07:42
Speaker
I'm going to be one of the first to use SolarScout in San Diego, so I decided to partner up.
00:07:46
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.
00:07:51
Speaker
And they did.
00:07:52
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.
00:08:02
Speaker
That's solarscout.app forward slash Taylor.
00:08:05
Speaker
Okay, back to the show.
Structure of Squad Meetings
00:08:07
Speaker
Okay, so what we do is we go over, we try to keep them around 30 minutes.
00:08:14
Speaker
Okay, but we it's pretty straightforward.
00:08:17
Speaker
We go over a weekly value, we have our company values.
00:08:21
Speaker
So what just an example that's of our most recent squad call, the value we went over was building the foundation.
00:08:28
Speaker
So we talked about that and we gave, we try to give like an example, people we see that are living the values that we want in our company, in our squads, in our teams.
00:08:41
Speaker
And then we go over updates and reminders, just, you know, like agenda stuff, events coming up, activities coming up.
00:08:48
Speaker
And then our team, we're all about standards, right?
00:08:52
Speaker
And so what we do, we have a spreadsheet and our team, we know that the standard we want our guys to hit and we're holding ourselves accountable to is a thousand doors knock or four deals, daily checking at 2 p.m., daily checkout after 8 p.m., attending all the meetings, lead chat engagement, maintaining high level of accountability and being coachable.
00:09:15
Speaker
So those are our standards that we review and just kind of beat into our team's heads because we want them to live in the standards.
00:09:22
Speaker
Hey, so we review that.
00:09:24
Speaker
We go over some announcements, something really important for us that's helping massively as well as we have all of our new reps that join.
00:09:32
Speaker
We have something called eight and eight, and it's where they need to get ideally eight deals in their first eight weeks.
00:09:38
Speaker
If you look at any team, if you look at retention in solar, most people are going to fall out because they're not getting deals quick enough.
00:09:46
Speaker
They're not getting paid quick enough.
00:09:48
Speaker
And so they lose motivation.
00:09:49
Speaker
They fall out.
00:09:50
Speaker
So what we did is, and this wasn't my idea, but this is on a company level, but it's helped us out a lot is we just keep track of that.
00:09:57
Speaker
It's like, okay, okay.
00:09:58
Speaker
In the first eight weeks, where are we at?
00:10:00
Speaker
How can we get guys moving on that train quicker to actually get the eight deals in eight weeks?
00:10:05
Speaker
And it's just as they get deals, they're given like swag, backpacks, hats, stuff like that.
00:10:11
Speaker
But the main goal is to get to eight deals.
00:10:14
Speaker
And anyone that hits the eight deals in eight weeks, they're going to get to go on the company cruise that happens once a year.
00:10:20
Speaker
So it gives our guys a lot of motivation to come out running and try to get those eight deals in eight weeks.
00:10:26
Speaker
Hey, and then from there, basically the only two other things we go through is just accountability.
00:10:33
Speaker
So we have a spreadsheet of everyone's numbers, the doors they hit on the week, the appointments they booked, the sits, the closes, which definitely should be tracking those if you're not.
00:10:44
Speaker
Very, very important that you track those KPIs.
00:10:47
Speaker
Keep a spreadsheet of your team.
00:10:49
Speaker
have someone that's designated to go and update those numbers, whether it's yourself or I'd recommend outsourcing possibly like a virtual assistant, possibly a setter manager.
00:11:00
Speaker
So if someone that goes in and gets these numbers, updates them, and then you just go through the numbers, right?
00:11:05
Speaker
And it's holding people accountable.
00:11:07
Speaker
So our standards are, again, if people aren't hitting 250 doors in a week and they're not getting a deal, then we put them, we highlight them in red.
00:11:17
Speaker
And we give them like, you know, we don't shame them.
00:11:20
Speaker
We're not going to like punish them necessarily, but we're going to give them just they're going to see their name in red.
00:11:25
Speaker
And the idea is that they can want to make sure that they never show up on this spreadsheet in the red again.
00:11:31
Speaker
Right.
00:11:31
Speaker
And it's effort based.
00:11:33
Speaker
Right.
00:11:33
Speaker
But we anyone that gets at least a deal there in the clear situation.
00:11:37
Speaker
Hey, but our standards are 250 doors and at least a deal a week.
00:11:41
Speaker
If not, they are highlighted on this spreadsheet.
00:11:45
Speaker
And then we just have a goal board for the month.
00:11:47
Speaker
So we put everyone's name, list where they're at on the month.
00:11:52
Speaker
And we do bug goals.
00:11:53
Speaker
How many deals are they committing to for the month?
00:11:55
Speaker
And then our quarter, our install goal for the quarter.
00:11:59
Speaker
And then that's basically it.
00:12:00
Speaker
We sometimes do a little leadership thought or a small training after that, which you can delegate to other people on your team.
00:12:08
Speaker
But these calls, they are, it's been a game changer for us.
00:12:12
Speaker
And so especially if you are with a larger company, maybe you're trying to build up a squad, maybe you're trying to get into management.
Leadership Lessons and Goal Setting
00:12:20
Speaker
The biggest mistake I think I made is I we were growing our team, but I was not doing calls like this.
00:12:26
Speaker
Wasn't tracking our numbers that much would kind of look at them from time to time.
00:12:31
Speaker
But it wasn't like a weekly thing where I was analyzing how many numbers.
00:12:35
Speaker
And so I just thought, you know, our company, they have metrics to get into leadership you got to be doing.
00:12:42
Speaker
It's 40 installs in a quarter between you and your squad.
00:12:46
Speaker
And so when I first joined Legacy, my current company, I'm like, okay, we'll hit that easy.
00:12:52
Speaker
Just whatever.
00:12:53
Speaker
It's going to happen naturally.
00:12:54
Speaker
And then we came to the end of the quarter and we were pretty far off from what I thought in my head, the numbers I thought we hit.
00:13:03
Speaker
So I realized these things, you have to be intentional about it.
00:13:06
Speaker
Hey, you have to hold your team accountable.
00:13:08
Speaker
You have to get them bought into a goal, right?
00:13:10
Speaker
You have to incentivize them.
00:13:12
Speaker
And so these are all things we're doing.
00:13:14
Speaker
We have our whole office group me, but then we also have a separate squad text thread where we're checking in.
00:13:21
Speaker
We're holding people accountable on that as well.
00:13:23
Speaker
Okay.
00:13:24
Speaker
But yeah, just a few small things that have been helping us a lot.
00:13:27
Speaker
So whether you are looking to get into leadership, whether you're trying to lead other people, maybe you only have two, three people right now.
00:13:34
Speaker
Well, hey, consider doing just a quick call and just getting the accountability and getting your two, three guys more bought in.
00:13:43
Speaker
Promise it's going to help you.
00:13:45
Speaker
Our team, they have been producing at a much, much higher level since we have implemented these things.
Engagement Through Technology
00:13:51
Speaker
We're hitting between 13, 14 reps.
00:13:53
Speaker
We have been hitting about 30 deals a month and it's only up from here.
00:13:59
Speaker
So those are the main things.
00:14:01
Speaker
Just doing a weekly squad call, having a just text thread with your squad and
00:14:08
Speaker
In addition to your main team group me, if you have a bigger team and just making sure guys are engaging, right?
00:14:15
Speaker
We're always posting check-in photos.
00:14:17
Speaker
A lot of days we're posting what are, what, what the KPIs we hit on the day.
00:14:22
Speaker
We post screenshots of our little, it's the Tally app where you can keep track of.
00:14:28
Speaker
your conversations and your appointments and closes.
00:14:32
Speaker
So I recommend doing that.
00:14:34
Speaker
I hope this helps anyone that is aspiring to get into leadership or is trying to become a better leader.
00:14:40
Speaker
Try these things out.
00:14:41
Speaker
I know it's going to help you so much.
00:14:44
Speaker
And next episode.
00:14:45
Speaker
make sure you tune in because we've got will brindley that he actually shared a lot of these systems with me and so he has a lot more that he's going to talk about um as far as leadership goes as far as producing on a much higher personal level um this guy uh we do these big check friday um you know little friday shout outs we post commission checks
00:15:07
Speaker
This guy will, he is consistently, you know, 20, 30 thousand dollar checks almost every week that he's pulling in.
00:15:14
Speaker
So if you want to learn how to do that, tune in to next episode.
00:15:17
Speaker
It's going to be unbelievable.
00:15:18
Speaker
And I hope you crush it this week.
00:15:21
Speaker
I hope you get a lot of deals.
00:15:22
Speaker
I hope you grow your company in whatever role you are in.
00:15:26
Speaker
We'll see you on the next episode.
Solciety: A Learning Community for Solar Professionals
00:15:29
Speaker
Hey, Solarpreneurs, quick question.
00:15:30
Speaker
What if you could surround yourself with the industry's top performing sales pros, marketers, and CEOs and learn from their experience and wisdom in less than 20 minutes a day?
00:15:40
Speaker
For the last three years, I've been placed in the fortunate position to interview dozens of elite level solar professionals and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level.
00:15:52
Speaker
That's why I want to make a truly special announcement about the new learning community exclusively for solar professionals
00:15:59
Speaker
to learn, compete, and win with top performers in the industry.
00:16:03
Speaker
And it's called Solciety.
00:16:05
Speaker
This learning community was designed from the ground up to level the playing field and give Solar Pros access to proven mentors who want to give back to this community and help you or your team to be held accountable by the industry's brightest minds for, are you ready for it, less than $3.45 a day.
00:16:24
Speaker
Currently, Soul Society is open, launched, and ready to be enrolled.
00:16:30
Speaker
So go to soulcidity.co to learn more and join the learning experience now.
00:16:38
Speaker
This is exclusively for solopreneur listeners, so be sure to go to soulcidity.co and join.
00:16:45
Speaker
We'll see you on the inside.