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 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: Today, I'm going to share with you one thing I did that helped me save an account from canceling and might not be what you expect.
Speaker: So you're going to have to wait for a minute till we tell you what that thing is.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: As usual, we are here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and have a much better time in the solar industry.
Speaker: I apologize if my voice sounds a little hoarse.
Speaker: We actually just got back from a little team event today.
Speaker: We went to Universal Studios there in Hollywood.
Speaker: Had a great time with the team.
Speaker: Did lots of shouting, did lots of hollering.
Speaker: So voice a little bit shot right now.
Speaker: And a long day recording this after being there all day long.
Speaker: Should have probably had it done days before, but I procrastinate.
Speaker: I'm a sales guy.
Speaker: What can I say?
Speaker: Sometimes we wait till the last second.
Speaker: So here I am getting it done.
Speaker: Always want to make sure we bring you consistent content week after week.
Speaker: And if you have not left us a review or shared the podcast, please do so.
Speaker: That is the reason that I go to Universal Studios all day long and come back and record more content for y'all because I love you.
Speaker: I want you to have success and I want you to take your solar career to another level.
Speaker: So please do that if you have not.
Speaker: But yeah, I had a good time with the team.
Speaker: Would highly recommend throwing incentives like that.
Speaker: Team days.
Speaker: We've done paintballing in the past.
Speaker: I've gone rafting on rivers, theme parks, hikes.
Speaker: You can think of all different types of things to do, all different types of budgets.
Speaker: Doesn't have to be expensive.
Speaker: But I had a great time and that was an incentive we ran about a month ago.
Speaker: We celebrated all the people that pushed hard during a blitz that we did.
Speaker: We like the mummy ride was probably our favorite there.
Speaker: If in case you're wondering, in case you want to go to Universal Studios, it's a good time and go on a Monday or a weekday because it was dead there.
Speaker: It's a good time.
Speaker: Okay, so let's get into the topic.
Speaker: And that is one thing I did that recently helped me save a deal.
Speaker: And we all know there's probably never going to be just one thing 100% of the time that makes or breaks a deal.
Speaker: But in this case, it was one specific thing I did that completely flipped the deal on its head.
Speaker: I thought it was going to cancel, thought I was losing her, and did this one thing.
Speaker: And she ended up sticking with it and being excited to go solar again.
Speaker: So I'm going to tell you the story of what happens.
Speaker: And hopefully you can go and do this one thing if you're not ready.
Speaker: Okay, so this customer, she was living in a retirement community.
Speaker: And this particular community, there was hardly any solar, which is pretty rare for California, at least San Diego area where I'm at.
Speaker: Typically, any neighborhood at this point is going to have, I would say, at least 15% solar at the very least.
Speaker: But usually more like, I would say more like 30% solar in most neighborhoods around San Diego where I'm at.
Speaker: It's because it makes so much sense out here.
Speaker: So a little bit odd, very few people with solar in her specific community.
Speaker: And they were condos that probably contributed to it.
Speaker: I think the HOA made it very tough to get solar before that.
Speaker: And they didn't really have the bylaws written out, whatever you need to specify how to approve the whole process.
Speaker: And so I noticed it.
Speaker: So I decided, you know, I'm going to hit this neighborhood.
Speaker: And I told the story, I think about a month ago on the podcast.
Speaker: But first thing I did was I go and get a testimonial with the few people that had solar in the neighborhood because I knew that that was potentially going to be an objection coming up.
Speaker: Like, hey, no one has gone solar.
Speaker: I don't think it's allowed or I don't think it's possible.
Speaker: So I wanted to get ahead of that.
Speaker: So that thing did help me.
Speaker: Ended up closing this specific deal.
Speaker: And this lady, she was really excited.
Speaker: Just didn't have a ton of objections.
Speaker: And after I showed her the testimonial of the other lady, yeah, it was pretty smooth close.
Speaker: And things were going well.
Speaker: And about a week ago,
Speaker: I get the final plans back.
Speaker: And so I know, okay, we have to submit the HOA application.
Speaker: That's the next step.
Speaker: Everything's pretty much ready to go.
Speaker: Now we need the HOA approval.
Speaker: So I get the HOA application.
Speaker: This one, we have to go get her signature again.
Speaker: We have to go get the neighbor's signatures again.
Speaker: And so at first I'm calling her, calling her, and she starts to not answer.
Speaker: She hadn't been like super responsible for her, but I call her probably half a dozen times and not able to get a hold of her.
Speaker: So I'm like, okay, well, I'll just have to roll up, see what's going on.
Speaker: So finally, after that week of calling her, I roll up to her house and finally catch her at the door.
Speaker: Well, actually, I catch her sister first.
Speaker: She says to come back.
Speaker: So I go back the next day and I catch her finally.
Speaker: And I could tell right off the bat something was up.
Speaker: She didn't look happy to see me at all.
Speaker: And just I kind of had a hint of that just because she hadn't been picking up.
Speaker: The sister was kind of weird at the door, too, when I talked to her.
Speaker: So I knew, okay, something's up here.
Speaker: What's going on?
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: I talked to her and she just starts going off about how she doesn't still doesn't know if she wants to go solar.
Speaker: She heard some negative things.
Speaker: I made some mistakes and appointment that I had with her neighbor two doors down didn't go great.
Speaker: And I made the mistake of name drop dropping this customer maybe a little bit too much.
Speaker: And she connected with this customer that like was sort of like the Karen of the neighborhood and just was extremely skeptical.
Speaker: And then that rubbed off on my customer.
Speaker: Then on top of that, our installers, they had been calling her multiple times every day, telling her that her account was ready for install because I didn't let them know that we were still getting HOA approval.
Speaker: So that was a small mistake I made.
Speaker: And then she was like burnt out by all those calls, was like made it seem like our installers didn't know what they were doing because she knew we still needed to get HOA approval.
Speaker: So just some mistakes made on my end and then some miscommunication.
Speaker: In my head, I'm like, okay, why didn't you talk to me if you were concerned about the installers calling and concerned that they didn't know that you didn't have HOA approval?
Speaker: Like, why not call me?
Speaker: Why not get an update?
Speaker: Why not see what's going on?
Speaker: And so we had a conversation.
Speaker: She was complaining.
Speaker: And I kind of gave it back to her a little bit because I'm like, look,
Speaker: I had been calling you, I had been leaving messages to make sure we're on the same page, because she had more doubts and questions put in her head from her neighbor, and then just from the installers calling her.
Speaker: So it was just a whole mess.
Speaker: We were on completely different pages.
Speaker: She thought the whole thing was unprofessional, but she didn't express any of that to me.
Speaker: And I was just like, why don't you pick up?
Speaker: And so I long story short, I try to get the HOA signature from her.
Speaker: And she's like, you know what, I'm right now I didn't want to think about this.
Speaker: I don't even know if I'm ready to go solar.
Speaker: I didn't even know that I was like signing up all the way.
Speaker: And when I signed her up, I made it very clear that, hey, we're moving forward with this.
Speaker: This is the process.
Speaker: But, you know, time had gone by.
Speaker: And on top of that, she was a Mexican lady.
Speaker: I closed this deal in Spanish, which I'm fluent in Spanish, but.
Speaker: Sometimes, you know, it's not my first language.
Speaker: Sometimes I can't explain things quite as well.
Speaker: Sometimes I can't overcome objections quite as well in Espanol.
Speaker: So, yeah, it didn't go very well.
Speaker: And I thought this lady was going to cancel.
Speaker: And I'll get to what I did in a second here.
Speaker: But make sure you don't make those mistakes.
Speaker: You know, communicate with your customers.
Speaker: Probably should have dropped by this lady's house sooner when I realized she wasn't communicating, especially where she was pretty close.
Speaker: She was only a 15-minute drive from my house.
Speaker: So not a ton of excuses there.
Speaker: Hey, so we end up just basically still frustrated.
Speaker: She said she was going to talk to the people that had gone sore in her neighborhoods and she just needed to do some thinking.
Speaker: She didn't say she fully wanted to cancel out the sore, but she's like, I need to think if I want to for sure do this.
Speaker: And I need to give it a week.
Speaker: I'm not going to sign in the HOA form.
Speaker: And she sort of used that as leverage.
Speaker: She knew that we need the HOA form completes to move forward in the process of going solar.
Speaker: So she just like use that as kind of a way to like basically put the deal on holds.
Speaker: She knew that we can't go anywhere until we get that form signed off on.
Speaker: So I'm just like, oh, great.
Speaker: Like, this is going to cancel.
Speaker: I've been down this road before.
Speaker: People start getting cold feet.
Speaker: Buyer's remorse.
Speaker: She's not confident in her decision making.
Speaker: She's an older Mexican lady.
Speaker: It's probably going to cancel.
Speaker: And I was being negative about it.
Speaker: So here's what I did.
Speaker: I'm like, you know what?
Speaker: Okay, she said come back next week.
Speaker: Okay, so I'm going to do everything I can to press this account.
Speaker: Let's just see what happens.
Speaker: Okay, so immediately I tried to correct, do damage control on everything I could.
Speaker: I called the installers.
Speaker: I said, hey, don't contact this lady anymore.
Speaker: We need to get HRA approval.
Speaker: Please don't call her.
Speaker: Don't reach out to her.
Speaker: I went and talked to the other customer that's or the other appointment I had that had sort of like put negative thoughts in her head because things didn't go great.
Speaker: And I tried to like clarify things with her.
Speaker: and make sure that, yeah, there wasn't any more damage done from talking to that particular neighbor.
Speaker: And then the third thing I did, and this is what I think saved the deal, is I let like three, four days go by and I go and take this customer a little gift.
Speaker: I took her actually a Cutco.
Speaker: It was like a Cutco serving spatula thing.
Speaker: And if you know the brand Cutco, they got super nice knives.
Speaker: It's like guaranteed for life, I think.
Speaker: Really nice products.
Speaker: A lot of people have come from selling Cutco.
Speaker: Check them out.
Speaker: But I gave her this spatula.
Speaker: She wasn't there.
Speaker: So I gave it to the sister and she gave it to my customer.
Speaker: And what happened was this, six, seven days go by and actually get a text from this customer.
Speaker: And I'm like, oh, great.
Speaker: She's saying she doesn't want to go through with it.
Speaker: And she actually text me saying, hey, Taylor, I got your gift.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Please come by when you're available so we can sign that H way form.
Speaker: And I'm like, is this the same lady talking?
Speaker: Is this my customer?
Speaker: So this little gift and just trying to do damage control and what I could just completely flip the script of this customer.
Speaker: She all of a sudden was like willing to sign the H way for him.
Speaker: And I wasn't reaching out to her.
Speaker: She reached out to me.
Speaker: And it just made her want to, I guess you could say, return the favor of me giving her a gift.
Speaker: And that was it.
Speaker: That one thing, it went from this deal almost canceling to just completely flipping the script on it.
Speaker: Hey, so that's the secret.
Speaker: Give a gift.
Speaker: All your problems will be solved.
Speaker: Maybe not all of them, but just wanted to share that.
Speaker: And I think the point of that story and the moral is, well, number one, yeah, try to give gifts, but make yourself seem like a human.
Speaker: Because once I gave her that gift, all of a sudden, I think we connected more on like a personal level.
Speaker: She's like, OK, this is a friend now.
Speaker: He's going out of his way to do things for me.
Speaker: She wanted to return the favor.
Speaker: And then I think it just gets the emotions evolved a little bit.
Speaker: Because she knew solar is the right thing to do logically.
Speaker: But we got to remember that any sales process, anytime someone is buying something, sales is a transfer of emotions.
Speaker: So when you make people feel good, they have emotion.
Speaker: Emotion leads to feelings.
Speaker: Feeling leads to thoughts.
Speaker: Thoughts lead to action, I think is what they say.
Speaker: Tony Robbins says stuff like that.
Speaker: So we need to create those emotions.
Speaker: We need to make people think of us as human beings, as people.
Speaker: And it's just going to be much more likely that people stick with it, with their commitments.
Speaker: And if they're on the fence, if they're feeling iffy about something, if they're having buyer's remorse,
Speaker: Consider, yeah, make sure you give a gift.
Speaker: Just do something like that to bring people down a little bit, make them see you as a human being again.
Speaker: And people don't cancel on their friends, right?
Speaker: So if we can become their friends, much less likely to cancel.
Speaker: Hey, so yeah, and I've talked about giving gifts, I'd say many times in the podcast now.
Speaker: But it's just a reminder that if you do have people on the fence, if you have people overthinking things, even if you have maybe like many of you've heard my process as far as like, well, I'll send them a card with some brownies, a little treat or whatever.
Speaker: I'll usually send that in the mail.
Speaker: And I think I did send this to this customer, but
Speaker: It's like it's been a little bit.
Speaker: And so maybe that's what it's going to take is maybe give them another gift, maybe hand deliver it.
Speaker: And in this case, it worked for me.
Speaker: So hopefully if you're listening to this, if you have people that maybe they're on the fence, maybe you close them a little softer than you should have.
Speaker: You should not be someone on the site survey.
Speaker: You should not be cancel closing saying, hey, you can cancel whenever you want.
Speaker: Hey, we're just going to get this started.
Speaker: Do a site survey.
Speaker: avoid that as much as you can.
Speaker: Sometimes I'm guilty of a little bit, but whenever possible, try to not soft close, make sure people know, hey, this is to get it going.
Speaker: Like if we got to get it approved, but if everything gets approved, everything checks out, then we're doing this.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So make sure they know that you're getting the process started.
Speaker: Um, and that'll help too.
Speaker: But if you have people on the fence, then yeah, maybe try giving them an extra gift and hopefully you'll have a similar result where people will be like, okay, you know what?
Speaker: This guy's pretty cool.
Speaker: This girl's pretty cool.
Speaker: Let's just, yeah, I'm kind of, kind of not positive about this, but you know, they seem cool.
Speaker: I like them.
Speaker: I trust them.
Speaker: Let's move forward with it.
Speaker: Okay, so I hope that helps.
Speaker: Treat your customers like family, treat them like human beings, and they will love you for it.
Speaker: And they will hopefully be much more likely to progress to install and make you money and give you referrals.
Speaker: So remember that.
Speaker: And guys, please send me your suggestions.
Speaker: If you have guests, if you have people you know that are crushing it in solar, crushing it in business and or life,
Speaker: Would love to hear about them and potentially have them on the podcast.
Speaker: Or if you are listening to this and would like to be on the podcast, we do have applications available.
Speaker: So shoot me a email or a DM if you're interested.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: Make sure to tune in.
Speaker: We've got a ton of exciting guests coming up and some great content coming at you.
Speaker: Special thank you to our sponsor, Solar Scout right now, the best solar prospecting software available on the market.
Speaker: Check them out.
Speaker: And we'll see you guys on the next podcast.
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 Solrepreneur.
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.
Speaker: So go download it right now.
Speaker: It's going to be at top10.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Again, that's top10, the number 10,.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: 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.
