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 up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Today, we're going to talk about how you can make money even if your deals cancel.
Speaker: Hey, we all hate them.
Speaker: Cancels are like one of the worst things about solar.
Speaker: But recently, I had a deal that canceled, and I still was able to make
Speaker: $2,000 on it.
Speaker: So I'm going to tell you guys how I did that and help you be more profitable, even when you might be struggling with some cancels.
Speaker: Hey, so welcome back to the podcast or welcome if you're newer.
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: We are free and available on Apple, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you can find your podcasts.
Speaker: Thank you for tuning in.
Speaker: And we're coming at you every Tuesday and Friday.
Speaker: And so this is kind of a crazy story.
Speaker: It has, I guess, somewhat of a happy ending, some negatives about it, some positives, part of being in the solar coaster.
Speaker: But the way this episode came about is I had a deal.
Speaker: This was actually a mobile home out here in near San Diego where I'm at.
Speaker: And this account, it was going great.
Speaker: There's an older Mexican gentleman.
Speaker: He was one of those guys that just like goes with the flow.
Speaker: Wasn't like a super tough deal to close.
Speaker: Um, but you've probably had those accounts to where they're like lay down sales to where sometimes the littlest thing will set them off and they'll just be like, you know what?
Speaker: I don't want to go slower anymore.
Speaker: So this guy was funny.
Speaker: He was excited about it, but then he kind of lost some motivation.
Speaker: I had to go back.
Speaker: I had to re-explain the benefits, got him excited about it again.
Speaker: And then, um, we had to get the approval from his park.
Speaker: He was in a mobile community.
Speaker: And so that took, I, that took some handholding.
Speaker: I had to go to the park manager with him, um, show him the plans, get those approvals.
Speaker: And by the end of that, he, I thought he was solid.
Speaker: He was good to go.
Speaker: Um, but then three days later, right after I would hold his hand, take him, I pick him up in my car, take him to the park office.
Speaker: And, you know, we're good friends.
Speaker: And the crew shows up the day of the install and
Speaker: They climb on this guy's roof.
Speaker: And right is there, I think, from what I heard from the installers, I wasn't actually at the home when this was happening.
Speaker: But from what the installers told me, they were like unpacking panels out of their trucks to install them up there.
Speaker: And he comes out and he says, guys, I don't want to go through with this.
Speaker: Call it off.
Speaker: I get a message.
Speaker: And so I'm calling frantically.
Speaker: And I call him.
Speaker: get a hold of the homeowner.
Speaker: And he's just like, yeah, you know what?
Speaker: I don't want to go through with this.
Speaker: I'm nervous about these panels going up.
Speaker: I've had termite damage on the back of my house, worried about the roof.
Speaker: So I tell him that, hey, we already approved your roof.
Speaker: We're going to be maintaining that.
Speaker: We're on the hook for the roof as well.
Speaker: Just throw everything at him.
Speaker: But he's like, no, no.
Speaker: you know what, just no, I don't want to do this.
Speaker: So at that point, obviously, for me, it's extremely disappointing.
Speaker: You know, I'm hours away from having glass on the roof, about a week out from getting a pretty good commission on this account.
Speaker: And poof, it just, you know, implodes like that.
Speaker: So here's what I did after this and how I approached it, where I still made a little bit of money, not, um,
Speaker: what I would have made on the commission, but I still was able to come away with a few thousand.
Speaker: And this is what I think everyone should be doing.
Speaker: And that is you should be invoicing your customers.
Speaker: If they are, especially if they're pretty far along the process or heaven forbid, they're canceling at install,
Speaker: These people need to be, I think they need to be held responsible.
Speaker: So it's like how much time has gone into this project?
Speaker: Okay, people have spent time, effort, money on the project.
Speaker: So I think like, yeah, they should be liable to pay back some of that to compensate us.
Speaker: Hey, and some of you, you may be with an installer where they do have cancellation fees.
Speaker: Personally, most installers that I have worked with and that I'm currently working with, most of them don't actually have cancellation fees, especially we are doing leases and PPAs out here in California.
Speaker: Most of them don't have any fees for it.
Speaker: But even if your installer doesn't, I would still recommend you personally write your customer an invoice.
Speaker: And the reasons why for this, well, number one, it's probably going to motivate them to rethink canceling, right?
Speaker: If they're far in the process, you hit them with an invoice, then they might think twice.
Speaker: I mean, they might be like, which I have had this happen.
Speaker: here and there as well, where they see the invoice and they're like, you know what, this is more than I thought.
Speaker: You know, okay, let's just go through it, I guess.
Speaker: And it pushed some more of the fence.
Speaker: Okay, so I'm going to walk, I'm going to give you four tips on this that hopefully help, but here's the process you can follow.
Speaker: And yeah, spoiler alert, I walked away with a couple thousand
Speaker: from just following this process and invoicing my customer.
Speaker: Okay, so you can probably tell now that this account is still did not go to install.
Speaker: But the silver lining is, yeah, I did, you know, still make a little bit on it.
Speaker: Okay, so here's the steps.
Speaker: Number one, just create the invoice like we're talking about.
Speaker: So if your company does not do invoices, this is pretty easy.
Speaker: You can literally just go Google chat GPT, whatever, just make you a simple invoice.
Speaker: You can have a virtual assistant do it.
Speaker: Should take very little time.
Speaker: So no need to spend a bunch of time on this.
Speaker: And then, yeah, just put all the reasons, you know, all the work that's gone into this.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like we've paid site surveyors.
Speaker: We've paid project managers.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And you might want to, depending on the size of your company, maybe you talk to them and you guys like collaborate together where, you know, their company is getting paid back some, you're getting paid back some.
Speaker: If they don't do invoices at all, then yeah, you just send an invoice and collect it for yourself.
Speaker: But you may want to collaborate with your company because if they have put in quite a bit of work, I'm sure they would appreciate that they get some of the invoice if you can collect from the customer.
Speaker: Okay, and then what I did is you can go on a high level.
Speaker: Many of you have probably heard by now.
Speaker: It's pretty much, I think, the gold standard at this point for CRMs, customer relationship managers.
Speaker: You can do so many things on this CRM high level.
Speaker: So hit me up if you want access to that or more details.
Speaker: But you can create invoices on there.
Speaker: And then very simple, all you need to do is just create a Stripe account that is a payment processor.
Speaker: You can send out the invoice directly from HighLevel if you're using that.
Speaker: I'm sure it can integrate with other, you know, kind of template.
Speaker: I know there's Document Software, PandaDoc, DocuSign.
Speaker: I'm sure you can do similar things with those, but you can integrate it together and then you can have it so the customer can just pay from their card, from their routing or checking his account.
Speaker: with their routing and account number and then just pay directly from there.
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, I'm going to talk about SolarScout on my show.
Speaker: 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: Okay, so that's the steps.
Speaker: Just create some type of invoice, send it out.
Speaker: And then just a little background on that.
Speaker: I would say just make the amounts.
Speaker: Um, not super small, but you don't want to make it like outrageously high either.
Speaker: Um, just a little backstory on that.
Speaker: I had one, um, the previous company I was with, they would do invoices and
Speaker: And they wouldn't actually like go after the customer, which I don't really know of any sort of companies that are actually taking people to collections if they don't pay.
Speaker: But the last company I was with, they were sending out just outrageous invoices and they would never collect.
Speaker: So like I'm talking like $5,000 plus invoices and customers just would not respond.
Speaker: And, you know, they would go to court over stuff like that.
Speaker: So I would say, depends on the demographic too, but make it high enough so it stings a little bit, but don't make it like so outrageously high that the customer is going to like freak out and say, you know, we're going to court over this because ideally you want to help them understand, but just make them see that it's fair.
Speaker: And the way I did this is you tell them the outrageous amount that it is supposed to be.
Speaker: So in my example, my invoice was $2,000.
Speaker: But I told the customer as I was sending him this invoice, hey, normally these things are $4,000 to $5,000 when we get to this point.
Speaker: And also you got to take into account what point of the project where they have.
Speaker: If they were like a few days past their cancellation, that's going to be obviously a different amount than if they were about to get their panels installed.
Speaker: So take that into account.
Speaker: And then when you call the customer and try to actually collect on these invoices, you tell them, hey, I actually got them to lower it.
Speaker: It was going to be $4,000.
Speaker: It's actually only $2,000.
Speaker: So still a lot, but hey, at least they feel like you helped them out.
Speaker: And at least it hopefully doesn't break the bank for them.
Speaker: They're just like, this stings.
Speaker: And the reason for that is because you want to ideally get them to stay with the account, like I mentioned before.
Speaker: And so what I did personally for this customer, and obviously didn't work, but this has worked too, is you go and you say, hey,
Speaker: look, instead of paying this $2,000, what our company has agreed to do is you stay with the account, you save money, we still get the panels up, you get all the benefits that we talked about, and we will pay you $1,000.
Speaker: We're going to pay for your first eight months of the bill, essentially.
Speaker: We'll pay you $1,000.
Speaker: And alternatively, if we can cancel it, you pay $2,000.
Speaker: But I'm fine with either one.
Speaker: But personally,
Speaker: I think it sounds like a way better idea to just get all the benefits, save money, and you're coming out on top.
Speaker: We give you $1,000 too.
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: Okay, so I've saved a decent amount of accounts doing that.
Speaker: It didn't work this time.
Speaker: The customer still chose to pay the $2,000.
Speaker: Okay, but something like that works well.
Speaker: And then a bonus tip with this, if you can't get a response when you send your customers an invoice,
Speaker: Most of the time we're collecting routing in account numbers when we sign documents, right?
Speaker: So kind of a threatening, you know, passive threatening text you can send is, hey, Mr. Customer, we have the account info on file for you.
Speaker: Do you want us to just go ahead and build that same account we have on file?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I've had many customers who second they hear that, I get a response from them.
Speaker: And obviously we're not going to actually build account.
Speaker: We don't have authorization to build the account.
Speaker: you know, account for a cancellation that I know of, right?
Speaker: Especially on these PPAs and leases, but hey, it gets some attention.
Speaker: Yes, that's a little bonus tip for you.
Speaker: Hey, and then last two things with this.
Speaker: Yeah, I already went over offering a money, try to get them to remain active to get installed rather than cancel.
Speaker: And then worst case scenario, the last piece of this, you've tried everything.
Speaker: They're set on canceling.
Speaker: They pay you out.
Speaker: Hopefully you get paid out.
Speaker: The last piece of this is still try to get some referrals from this.
Speaker: hey, I still think you can get referrals from these customers.
Speaker: In my case, the customer still understood the benefits.
Speaker: He just was worried about his roof, I guess.
Speaker: He's an older guy.
Speaker: His bill was a little bit lower.
Speaker: So I guess he just felt like the risk didn't justify the return because he wasn't necessarily saving a ton of money.
Speaker: Um, so yeah, ended up not being able to get them, but make sure you try to mind some referrals.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So in this story, um, I told the customer, Hey, um, it's unfortunate that we had to have you pay the cancellation fee.
Speaker: I definitely didn't want you to have to pay anything much rather you just gone solar.
Speaker: And I think that's a much better decision, but Hey, it's your home.
Speaker: But hey, one last thing, we'd love to be able to reimburse part of this.
Speaker: And so I know I mentioned our referral program, but if you can get us a few referrals, we can actually reimburse this and essentially make it so you're paying nothing.
Speaker: Hey, and there's another opportunity where you could get them excited too.
Speaker: You know, refer some people.
Speaker: If they're not going to do it, hey, have them refer some people and they can come out scotch-free from this.
Speaker: Hey, so that's the last piece of advice.
Speaker: Okay, so again, it's just simple as creating the invoice, sending it out, making the amount on the invoice painful, but not like...
Speaker: So painful that they just completely ghost you.
Speaker: And then just going to the customer and offering them money saying, hey, on the flip side, why don't we give you some money?
Speaker: Stay with this rather than you paying $2,000.
Speaker: What if we gave you $1,000 or whatever that amounts you want?
Speaker: So hope that helps.
Speaker: And I hope you don't have to go through these.
Speaker: I hope you don't have to have cancels.
Speaker: But if you do, and if obviously if they are past their right of rescission, for us personally, that's they have seven business days.
Speaker: Or actually, I think it's 10.
Speaker: We're using Everbright currently.
Speaker: I believe it's 10 business days they have.
Speaker: So anything past that.
Speaker: make sure they understand that, right?
Speaker: So make sure you go through the contract with them when you're signing it, okay?
Speaker: Because you don't want it to be a surprise that there's a potential penalty that's going to make it harder to collect.
Speaker: But you should say, hey, we just asked that you don't cancel after this because we are going to be spending money on the projects.
Speaker: Make sure they understand that.
Speaker: And then if they choose to, then hey, you should still be getting something out of it and hopefully saving the account that way too.
Speaker: Okay, so I hope this helps.
Speaker: Make sure you take care of yourself.
Speaker: Guys, we work too hard to be having people just not go solar.
Speaker: Hey, we need to help these people know that, hey, this is a good decision.
Speaker: And so send this to someone that is having a lot of cancels.
Speaker: And that's another episode is how to prevent cancellations.
Speaker: Because there's obviously things you can do to hopefully never put yourself in that position.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, no matter what you do, some people are going to cancel.
Speaker: Just how it goes.
Speaker: So I hope this helps.
Speaker: Let me know.
Speaker: Shoot me a DM or send me an email.
Speaker: If you have any advice on maybe invoicing your customers or preventing cancellations, we'd love to hear feedback from you guys and what's working.
Speaker: And we'll be coming at you with more FIRE content, more FIRE guests.
Speaker: So make sure you keep tuning in and we'll see you on the next one.
Speaker: Peace.
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