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 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: Today we're going to be talking about trust, how you can build it, why it's important, and why you need to be thinking more about it.
Speaker: All that and much more on today's podcast of The Solarpreneur.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: We're here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and have a much better time in the solar industry.
Speaker: Hope you're doing awesome.
Speaker: And as usual, we're free and available on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you can find your podcasts.
Speaker: Appreciate you sharing the show, spreading the love.
Speaker: And if you have not gotten your tickets to SolarCon, go grab it.
Speaker: We still got an awesome deal for our solopreneurs going on.
Speaker: All you need to do is go onto the website, type in coupon code SOLARPENUR.
Speaker: I think the discount is a little bit less now.
Speaker: So don't wait any longer.
Speaker: If you would have gotten it the previous week, I think it's 40%.
Speaker: Now I believe it's at 30%.
Speaker: So not quite as good, but that's what happens.
Speaker: When you drag your feet, you pay more.
Speaker: So stop dragging your feet, go grab your ticket.
Speaker: So let's jump into the topic.
Speaker: Today, we're going to be talking about all about trust, why you should want to have more of it in your sales career, in your solar sales.
Speaker: And if you don't realize already, trust is a massive part of what we do, whether it's building a team, building an organization, obviously getting customers to sign up and go solar with you.
Speaker: Super important, many different aspects.
Speaker: Recently, I've been reading the book, The Speed of Trust.
Speaker: Speaking of trust, it is by Covey.
Speaker: I think it's the son, not Stephen R. Covey, but Stephen M. R. Covey.
Speaker: Same guy who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but his son.
Speaker: I heard about this book.
Speaker: I think it was recommended by some real estate guy, but I'm making a goal this year to read more books.
Speaker: I think you should too.
Speaker: If you're in the solar industry, if you are not growing, if you're not progressing, you're getting worse, right?
Speaker: There is no neutral.
Speaker: This is something I've learned.
Speaker: There's either getting better or getting worse.
Speaker: So something that Brian Tracy talks about is always making your car a library on wheels.
Speaker: Some of us are listening to drunk, pure garbage as we're going out to areas.
Speaker: So next time you're driving out a value or server, are you listening to this garbage?
Speaker: Are you listening to just music all the time?
Speaker: Nothing wrong with music, get you pumped up, but you should be making your car a place of learning.
Speaker: And I heard this tip from somebody.
Speaker: I need to figure out where my sources are coming from.
Speaker: Listen to a lot of podcasts.
Speaker: Some
Speaker: else's podcast, they were saying that on the way out to their areas, they always use the drive to the area as a seminar to listen to some type of podcast, listen to this podcast, of course, or listen to an audio book and just get people in the right mindset for the day.
Speaker: Then on the way back, they'll use the car, you know, they'll turn on some music, whatever.
Speaker: They'll celebrate on the way back.
Speaker: So I thought that was cool and good way to do it.
Speaker: A lot of us sometimes are driving out in car groups.
Speaker: Sometimes it's maybe not everyone likes to listen to these audio books.
Speaker: I remember my first summer doing, I think it was my second summer actually doing pest control.
Speaker: I listened to Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing the Cell, I think was the book.
Speaker: And we drove from Utah to North Carolina.
Speaker: So I listened to this thing for like 20 hours straight.
Speaker: And about 20 hours, 19 hours into it, my buddy that I was driving with, he said, Taylor, if I have to listen to Zig's voice one more time, I'm literally going to crash the car into a ditch because I cannot listen to this guy anymore.
Speaker: So maybe don't drive people insane with it.
Speaker: But, you know, take the time to listen to positive, uplifting material, because what's going on between your ears, that's going to reflect in your career.
Speaker: That's going to reflect in your sales ability.
Speaker: That's going to reflect to your teams.
Speaker: And especially if you're leading a team, do you want them to know you as someone that's always looking to be better, that's focused on his self-improvement or a guy that's just fooling around or gal that's just fooling around and listening to whatever on the way to the area?
Speaker: So that's my soapbox speech is make sure you are listening to your audiobooks, making it a point to grow and always listen to good material.
Speaker: And I just got back from the Setter Closer conference with Danny Pesce and we heard Jeff Mendez also talk about this guy reads a book every single week.
Speaker: And I'm sure you guys have heard of those successful entrepreneurs that read a book every week.
Speaker: And mind you, he is not reading it, but he's talking audiobooks.
Speaker: So just wanted to give a quick little shout out to before we jump into the media of this podcast.
Speaker: If you are looking for a good way to get through more books, number one, listen to it.
Speaker: I prefer on 1.5 speed.
Speaker: But number two, you don't have to buy all these books.
Speaker: They've got Audible where you pay like 15 bucks a month.
Speaker: But another great tool, if you're not aware, it's called Libby, where you can rent these audiobooks from the library.
Speaker: You can reserve these books, put them on hold, and it's free.
Speaker: Don't got to be paying for Audible.
Speaker: And so far, they've had pretty much every book that I've looked for on there.
Speaker: So another good resource, Libby, go download it, get your library card,
Speaker: And you don't even got to buy the book, no excuses.
Speaker: And I actually like it because it puts a deadline on how long you have the book.
Speaker: So it almost adds some urgency to have you get through these books instead of just buying it and forgetting about it, which I've done on Audible.
Speaker: So let's jump into this.
Speaker: We're talking about trust.
Speaker: And so again, trust is important with your customers, with your team, and with yourself.
Speaker: Okay, and something that Stephen M. R. Covey talks about in the book, and this really opened my mind to it, I wasn't really thinking this way, but if we have the trust, everything's going to go quicker.
Speaker: That's why the book is called The Speed of Trust.
Speaker: And a couple examples he gives just to illustrate this really worked well for me.
Speaker: You think back to 9-11, if any of you went in the airport before 9-11,
Speaker: What was it?
Speaker: You could go through, you could go to all the restaurants, the shops.
Speaker: Security took like five minutes to get through.
Speaker: No big deal.
Speaker: But then what happened?
Speaker: 9-11 happened.
Speaker: And then what happened in the airports?
Speaker: The trust went way down.
Speaker: We no longer trusted people in airports because of 9-11.
Speaker: So the time increased.
Speaker: You go into an airport now, you're not getting, I mean, you can get TSA pre-check, which I have, I would highly recommend, which makes them trust you more.
Speaker: But for an average person, you got to get to the airport an hour and a half early, usually, right?
Speaker: To get through security, make sure you don't have enough time.
Speaker: And he even tells a story in the book where if you go to a high security airport where the trust is even lower, you got to get there even earlier.
Speaker: He talks about how he went to like a different country that was on alert or whatever, and it took him five hours.
Speaker: He had to be at the airport five hours early.
Speaker: It took him hours just to go through security and all these checks.
Speaker: So that's a cool example.
Speaker: Another example is he talks about a guy that had a donut shop or like a little donut vendor outside of big skyscraper in New York.
Speaker: And this guy would sell donuts every day to people.
Speaker: But he started realizing, he's like, man, it's just me working in the shop.
Speaker: People are buying their donuts, but I see a lot of people that don't want to wait in this line to, you know, get their donut.
Speaker: I'm losing customers.
Speaker: And the reason for the line is just when working, he had to, you know, take people's money, accept the change, give them their exact amount of change.
Speaker: And this probably was also before a lot of the technology we have today.
Speaker: But he was losing customers because of this.
Speaker: So what this dude at his donuts cart did, he decided he's like, you know, I'm just going to choose to trust people.
Speaker: I'm going to put a jar out front that has all the change, a bunch of coins so they can just get their own change.
Speaker: And I'm going to have him do that.
Speaker: So he decided he was going to trust the people to not just steal from his bucket of coins out front.
Speaker: And he was going to give them their donuts and coffee.
Speaker: and say, hey, the bucket's right there, grab your own change.
Speaker: What did this do?
Speaker: It decreased the amount of time it took to serve his clients, his customers.
Speaker: People liked it more.
Speaker: The trust in him went up.
Speaker: And sure, I'm sure some people took advantage, maybe stole some coins, whatever.
Speaker: But he ended up profiting way more in his business, getting way more customers, and by far making up for any money that maybe was stolen from that just because of the fact that he decided to trust other people and do that.
Speaker: Pretty mind-blowing.
Speaker: So just some examples that illustrate trust.
Speaker: So for you, how can you get more trust in your solar business?
Speaker: How can you have your team trust you more?
Speaker: Well, there's lots of ways.
Speaker: And I think you can brainstorm some of your own ways.
Speaker: That's the main point of this, because this wasn't a solar specific book.
Speaker: Okay, but just business in general, how can you do that?
Speaker: So number one, I think you need to make sure that you trust yourself.
Speaker: Do you trust yourself?
Speaker: Are you keeping the commitments to yourself?
Speaker: Are you waking up when you say you're going to wake up?
Speaker: Are you starting a meeting when you say you're going to start a meeting?
Speaker: If you're a manager, are you showing up to your customers' homes on time?
Speaker: If you're driving out in car groups, are you meeting at the right place on time and showing up for your car buddy?
Speaker: And so that's number one is in order to have people trust you more, you got to trust yourself.
Speaker: If you don't trust yourself, how can other people trust you?
Speaker: So do what you're going to say if you have a goal for how many hours you're working today or how many people are you going to talk to on the doors.
Speaker: Don't go home until you hit that goal.
Speaker: And this is something powerful for me.
Speaker: I've been guilty of this.
Speaker: How many times have you been out there and no one else is watching?
Speaker: Like, it's late.
Speaker: No one's answering the doors.
Speaker: You know, I'm just going to cut out half an hour early today.
Speaker: I've been guilty of that.
Speaker: And if you're listening, I'm sure you have to at times.
Speaker: So trust yourself first, keep the commitments to yourself.
Speaker: It's going to make it easier for your team to trust you, your customers to trust you, if you can trust yourself first.
Speaker: Okay, and then number two and three, once you have make and keep commitments to yourself, how are you going to show your customers they can trust you?
Speaker: I had a situation today.
Speaker: I went with one of my customers.
Speaker: I popped by one of my customers.
Speaker: Her name is Vanessa.
Speaker: And she had, unfortunately, not the greatest experience with our installer.
Speaker: This is a previous installer I was using.
Speaker: Not going to shout out any names, but those that were working with me know some of the stuff that went down with this installer.
Speaker: But it took her like seven months to get installed.
Speaker: Way too long.
Speaker: And just not the greatest communication.
Speaker: But one thing that I feel I did do right on this is
Speaker: is I set expectations with her and I've been back to her house three, four times now, just checking in.
Speaker: And I would always tell her, Hey, Vanessa, look, I know it's not going as well as we hope with the installer.
Speaker: I'm frustrated too, but I'm going to do whatever I can to help you through this.
Speaker: I'm going to be there.
Speaker: And I was communicating with her the whole time.
Speaker: even though the installer wasn't getting things done on their ends the way they should have.
Speaker: I was communicating with her every week.
Speaker: I sent her a couple of gifts, just apologizing.
Speaker: This things were taking long, even though I could have just been like, Hey, it's not my fault.
Speaker: Installer dropping the ball, but I showed up.
Speaker: I sent her some gifts, communicating with her.
Speaker: I've been back two times now after she's already been installed.
Speaker: And she trusts me, even though she knows that, yeah, we had a bad experience with the installer.
Speaker: She trusts me, at least I'm going to show up.
Speaker: I'm going to be there for her.
Speaker: So for you, even if you have maybe some install issues, number one, try to solve them or switch to a different installer company that you know is going to take good care of your customers.
Speaker: But maybe you're going through a rough patch.
Speaker: Maybe you had some installer issues you didn't know would come up.
Speaker: Be there for your customers.
Speaker: Show up for them.
Speaker: Do the things that other people aren't.
Speaker: And guess what that's going to do?
Speaker: You're going to get referrals off of it.
Speaker: You're going to get good reviews.
Speaker: You're going to get video testimonials.
Speaker: All these great things are going to come from it.
Speaker: So this lady, Vanessa, she's talking to her son and her sister this week.
Speaker: grabbing some referrals.
Speaker: Don't do it with just the mindset to get referrals, but that's going to be a byproduct of you showing up for your customers and being there.
Speaker: Hey, and then number three, show your team they can trust you.
Speaker: Hey, when I was working at my first company out here in California, we had a big setter closer program.
Speaker: We're cranking a lot of deals.
Speaker: We had a big team of setters.
Speaker: And I just remember it got to a point, this is back in 2019, I think, or 2018, where
Speaker: We had one dude, one of our closers that decided he's not going to show up to some of the deals.
Speaker: He was, I don't know, consistently showing up late, things like that.
Speaker: And of course, he wasn't closing a ton.
Speaker: And I think what happened was one of the setters went to the home when he was supposed to be there.
Speaker: No one was there.
Speaker: And he said he's going to be there.
Speaker: And what happened, this trust was lost on all the closers.
Speaker: Because of this one, dude.
Speaker: Now all of a sudden this setter is like, I don't know if the set closers are going to show up.
Speaker: I don't trust them going to my leads.
Speaker: I want to get someone else to go.
Speaker: It just slowed down everything.
Speaker: It made people resistant.
Speaker: What we had to start doing was like send pictures that were showing up at people's homes.
Speaker: So the setters would trust us again.
Speaker: We lost reps because of it for sure.
Speaker: So all because of this one trust issue.
Speaker: So remember, trust is lost in buckets, but it's gained in drips, right?
Speaker: Trust is lost in buckets, but it's gained in drips.
Speaker: So how can you gain the trust of your people?
Speaker: Again, show up, do what you say you're going to do.
Speaker: If you are running the setter closer model, don't ever do your setters dirty like that.
Speaker: Show up for their accounts and make sure they have extreme trust.
Speaker: Because guess what?
Speaker: If the setters don't trust that you're going to be there, that you're going to give it your all on your deal, their confidence is going to go down.
Speaker: they're going to be way less effective on the doors.
Speaker: They're not going to have confidence in their product or their company.
Speaker: And it's going to affect things across the board.
Speaker: And it's going to slow things down because you have to do things like we had to do send pictures and, you know, promise them, convince them, spend more time on the phone.
Speaker: Yeah, after this issue happened, every single setter was calling us asking for every single detail about the deal.
Speaker: So all of a sudden, we can just text setters and say, hey, it went well, this is what happened.
Speaker: They were calling us.
Speaker: They wanted to grill us and basically make sure we for sure showed up to the appointment.
Speaker: So don't be like that.
Speaker: Make sure you show your team they can trust you.
Speaker: Okay, give them after the deals.
Speaker: If you're running set or closer, make sure you text them, give them updates.
Speaker: They shouldn't have to be the one updating you.
Speaker: Get a system together where it's not just like disorganized.
Speaker: Make sure you have a system in place where you're updating all people that are involved in the transaction, what happened, what went down in the deal, and things like that.
Speaker: That's how you're going to develop the trust of your team.
Speaker: That's how you're going to maximize your results.
Speaker: Hey, so hopefully that's helpful.
Speaker: Just some things I was thinking about.
Speaker: We all need to have more trust in our people and our company.
Speaker: We need to help our customers trust us more.
Speaker: And most importantly, we need to make the commitments we set for ourselves and we need to have trust in ourselves.
Speaker: That's going to reflect across the board and everything we do.
Speaker: So send this to someone who could use some more trust in their day, who could trust themselves more, or who could help develop more trust in the team.
Speaker: Hopefully these things helped.
Speaker: And speaking of trust, next week or next podcast, we're going to have a dude that I trust tremendously.
Speaker: One of the most trustworthy guys in solar that's built out a huge organization, largely because of these same concepts.
Speaker: Okay, so this dude's name is Marshall Tootin.
Speaker: He is a stud.
Speaker: He is one of the VPs over at Better Earth Solar.
Speaker: He drops some freaking nuggets.
Speaker: So make sure you're on for that next podcast.
Speaker: We'll see you guys at SolarCon.
Speaker: Shoot me a DM.
Speaker: Let me know if you guys have any thoughts on the podcast, the topic today, or any suggestions for future guests or topics.
Speaker: Would love to hear them.
Speaker: And with that being said, we'll see you on the next episode.
Speaker: Hey, solarpreneurs, are you sick and tired of spinning your wheels every month and not seeing your sales increase?
Speaker: Well so was I and the truth is I was never able to improve it until I figured out what was going wrong.
Speaker: So that's why I'm excited to announce for a limited time we are doing a free sales diagnostic.
Speaker: We'll break down your sales process, figure out the holes in your business and see how we can help you improve.
Speaker: So act now we have six bucks for this month so book a call now don't miss out.
Speaker: What you're going to do is send an email to taylor at solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: That's taylor at solarpreneurs with an S dot com.
Speaker: I'll send you out a calendar link and we will figure out the time that works best.
Speaker: So shoot that email and let's increase your sales.
