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Without This 1 Thing Your Solar Business Will FAIL
67 Plays3 years ago
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose of the Podcast
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 fell.
00:00:19
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.
00:00:31
Speaker
What is a Solarpreneur you might ask?
00:00:33
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.
Building Trust in Solar Sales: Why It Matters
00:00:43
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.
00:00:50
Speaker
All that and much more on today's podcast of The Solarpreneur.
00:00:54
Speaker
My name is Taylor Armstrong.
00:00:55
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.
00:01:01
Speaker
Hope you're doing awesome.
00:01:03
Speaker
And as usual, we're free and available on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you can find your podcasts.
00:01:10
Speaker
Appreciate you sharing the show, spreading the love.
00:01:13
Speaker
And if you have not gotten your tickets to SolarCon, go grab it.
00:01:18
Speaker
We still got an awesome deal for our solopreneurs going on.
00:01:21
Speaker
All you need to do is go onto the website, type in coupon code SOLARPENUR.
00:01:26
Speaker
I think the discount is a little bit less now.
00:01:29
Speaker
So don't wait any longer.
00:01:30
Speaker
If you would have gotten it the previous week, I think it's 40%.
00:01:34
Speaker
Now I believe it's at 30%.
00:01:36
Speaker
So not quite as good, but that's what happens.
00:01:39
Speaker
When you drag your feet, you pay more.
00:01:41
Speaker
So stop dragging your feet, go grab your ticket.
00:01:44
Speaker
So let's jump into the topic.
00:01:46
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.
The Role of Trust in Efficiency and Relationships
00:01:54
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.
00:02:06
Speaker
Super important, many different aspects.
00:02:08
Speaker
Recently, I've been reading the book, The Speed of Trust.
00:02:13
Speaker
Speaking of trust, it is by Covey.
00:02:16
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I think it's the son, not Stephen R. Covey, but Stephen M. R. Covey.
00:02:22
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Same guy who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but his son.
00:02:30
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I heard about this book.
00:02:31
Speaker
I think it was recommended by some real estate guy, but I'm making a goal this year to read more books.
00:02:40
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I think you should too.
00:02:41
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If you're in the solar industry, if you are not growing, if you're not progressing, you're getting worse, right?
00:02:47
Speaker
There is no neutral.
00:02:49
Speaker
This is something I've learned.
00:02:50
Speaker
There's either getting better or getting worse.
00:02:52
Speaker
So something that Brian Tracy talks about is always making your car a library on wheels.
00:02:58
Speaker
Some of us are listening to drunk, pure garbage as we're going out to areas.
00:03:02
Speaker
So next time you're driving out a value or server, are you listening to this garbage?
00:03:07
Speaker
Are you listening to just music all the time?
00:03:09
Speaker
Nothing wrong with music, get you pumped up, but you should be making your car a place of learning.
00:03:15
Speaker
And I heard this tip from somebody.
00:03:17
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I need to figure out where my sources are coming from.
00:03:20
Speaker
Listen to a lot of podcasts.
00:03:22
Speaker
Some
00:03:22
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.
00:03:39
Speaker
Then on the way back, they'll use the car, you know, they'll turn on some music, whatever.
00:03:45
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They'll celebrate on the way back.
00:03:46
Speaker
So I thought that was cool and good way to do it.
00:03:49
Speaker
A lot of us sometimes are driving out in car groups.
00:03:52
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Sometimes it's maybe not everyone likes to listen to these audio books.
00:03:57
Speaker
I remember my first summer doing, I think it was my second summer actually doing pest control.
00:04:02
Speaker
I listened to Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing the Cell, I think was the book.
00:04:07
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And we drove from Utah to North Carolina.
00:04:10
Speaker
So I listened to this thing for like 20 hours straight.
00:04:13
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.
00:04:27
Speaker
So maybe don't drive people insane with it.
00:04:29
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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.
00:04:38
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That's going to reflect in your sales ability.
00:04:40
Speaker
That's going to reflect to your teams.
00:04:42
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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?
00:04:56
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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.
00:05:05
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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.
00:05:16
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And I'm sure you guys have heard of those successful entrepreneurs that read a book every week.
00:05:21
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And mind you, he is not reading it, but he's talking audiobooks.
00:05:26
Speaker
So just wanted to give a quick little shout out to before we jump into the media of this podcast.
00:05:32
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If you are looking for a good way to get through more books, number one, listen to it.
00:05:37
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I prefer on 1.5 speed.
00:05:38
Speaker
But number two, you don't have to buy all these books.
00:05:41
Speaker
They've got Audible where you pay like 15 bucks a month.
00:05:44
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But another great tool, if you're not aware, it's called Libby, where you can rent these audiobooks from the library.
00:05:51
Speaker
You can reserve these books, put them on hold, and it's free.
00:05:55
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Don't got to be paying for Audible.
00:05:56
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And so far, they've had pretty much every book that I've looked for on there.
00:06:00
Speaker
So another good resource, Libby, go download it, get your library card,
00:06:05
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And you don't even got to buy the book, no excuses.
00:06:07
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And I actually like it because it puts a deadline on how long you have the book.
00:06:11
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.
00:06:19
Speaker
So let's jump into this.
Trust in Business Processes: Real-World Examples
00:06:21
Speaker
We're talking about trust.
00:06:23
Speaker
And so again, trust is important with your customers, with your team, and with yourself.
00:06:30
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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.
00:06:43
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That's why the book is called The Speed of Trust.
00:06:45
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And a couple examples he gives just to illustrate this really worked well for me.
00:06:50
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You think back to 9-11, if any of you went in the airport before 9-11,
00:06:54
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What was it?
00:06:55
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You could go through, you could go to all the restaurants, the shops.
00:06:59
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Security took like five minutes to get through.
00:07:01
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No big deal.
00:07:02
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But then what happened?
00:07:03
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9-11 happened.
00:07:05
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And then what happened in the airports?
00:07:07
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The trust went way down.
00:07:09
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We no longer trusted people in airports because of 9-11.
00:07:13
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So the time increased.
00:07:14
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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.
00:07:23
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But for an average person, you got to get to the airport an hour and a half early, usually, right?
00:07:28
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To get through security, make sure you don't have enough time.
00:07:31
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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.
00:07:38
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He talks about how he went to like a different country that was on alert or whatever, and it took him five hours.
00:07:44
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He had to be at the airport five hours early.
00:07:46
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It took him hours just to go through security and all these checks.
00:07:49
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So that's a cool example.
00:07:51
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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.
00:08:00
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And this guy would sell donuts every day to people.
00:08:03
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But he started realizing, he's like, man, it's just me working in the shop.
00:08:06
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.
00:08:12
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I'm losing customers.
00:08:13
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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.
00:08:23
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And this probably was also before a lot of the technology we have today.
00:08:27
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But he was losing customers because of this.
00:08:29
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.
00:08:35
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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.
00:08:42
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And I'm going to have him do that.
00:08:43
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So he decided he was going to trust the people to not just steal from his bucket of coins out front.
00:08:48
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And he was going to give them their donuts and coffee.
00:08:51
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and say, hey, the bucket's right there, grab your own change.
00:08:54
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What did this do?
00:08:55
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It decreased the amount of time it took to serve his clients, his customers.
00:09:01
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People liked it more.
00:09:02
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The trust in him went up.
00:09:03
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And sure, I'm sure some people took advantage, maybe stole some coins, whatever.
00:09:08
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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.
00:09:20
Speaker
Pretty mind-blowing.
00:09:21
Speaker
So just some examples that illustrate trust.
00:09:23
Speaker
So for you, how can you get more trust in your solar business?
00:09:26
Speaker
How can you have your team trust you more?
00:09:29
Speaker
Well, there's lots of ways.
00:09:30
Speaker
And I think you can brainstorm some of your own ways.
00:09:32
Speaker
That's the main point of this, because this wasn't a solar specific book.
00:09:36
Speaker
Okay, but just business in general, how can you do that?
00:09:40
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So number one, I think you need to make sure that you trust yourself.
00:09:44
Speaker
Do you trust yourself?
00:09:45
Speaker
Are you keeping the commitments to yourself?
00:09:48
Speaker
Are you waking up when you say you're going to wake up?
00:09:50
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Are you starting a meeting when you say you're going to start a meeting?
00:09:53
Speaker
If you're a manager, are you showing up to your customers' homes on time?
00:09:58
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?
00:10:06
Speaker
And so that's number one is in order to have people trust you more, you got to trust yourself.
00:10:11
Speaker
If you don't trust yourself, how can other people trust you?
00:10:14
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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.
00:10:22
Speaker
Don't go home until you hit that goal.
00:10:25
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And this is something powerful for me.
00:10:27
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I've been guilty of this.
00:10:28
Speaker
How many times have you been out there and no one else is watching?
00:10:32
Speaker
Like, it's late.
00:10:33
Speaker
No one's answering the doors.
00:10:35
Speaker
You know, I'm just going to cut out half an hour early today.
00:10:38
Speaker
I've been guilty of that.
00:10:40
Speaker
And if you're listening, I'm sure you have to at times.
00:10:43
Speaker
So trust yourself first, keep the commitments to yourself.
00:10:46
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.
00:10:53
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?
00:11:02
Speaker
I had a situation today.
00:11:04
Speaker
I went with one of my customers.
00:11:06
Speaker
I popped by one of my customers.
00:11:07
Speaker
Her name is Vanessa.
00:11:09
Speaker
And she had, unfortunately, not the greatest experience with our installer.
00:11:14
Speaker
This is a previous installer I was using.
00:11:16
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.
00:11:24
Speaker
But it took her like seven months to get installed.
00:11:28
Speaker
Way too long.
00:11:29
Speaker
And just not the greatest communication.
00:11:32
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But one thing that I feel I did do right on this is
00:11:36
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is I set expectations with her and I've been back to her house three, four times now, just checking in.
00:11:43
Speaker
And I would always tell her, Hey, Vanessa, look, I know it's not going as well as we hope with the installer.
00:11:48
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I'm frustrated too, but I'm going to do whatever I can to help you through this.
00:11:53
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I'm going to be there.
00:11:54
Speaker
And I was communicating with her the whole time.
00:11:56
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even though the installer wasn't getting things done on their ends the way they should have.
00:12:03
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I was communicating with her every week.
00:12:06
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I sent her a couple of gifts, just apologizing.
00:12:08
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This things were taking long, even though I could have just been like, Hey, it's not my fault.
00:12:12
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Installer dropping the ball, but I showed up.
00:12:15
Speaker
I sent her some gifts, communicating with her.
00:12:17
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I've been back two times now after she's already been installed.
00:12:21
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And she trusts me, even though she knows that, yeah, we had a bad experience with the installer.
00:12:26
Speaker
She trusts me, at least I'm going to show up.
00:12:28
Speaker
I'm going to be there for her.
00:12:29
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.
00:12:40
Speaker
But maybe you're going through a rough patch.
00:12:41
Speaker
Maybe you had some installer issues you didn't know would come up.
00:12:44
Speaker
Be there for your customers.
00:12:46
Speaker
Show up for them.
00:12:47
Speaker
Do the things that other people aren't.
00:12:49
Speaker
And guess what that's going to do?
00:12:50
Speaker
You're going to get referrals off of it.
00:12:52
Speaker
You're going to get good reviews.
00:12:53
Speaker
You're going to get video testimonials.
00:12:55
Speaker
All these great things are going to come from it.
00:12:57
Speaker
So this lady, Vanessa, she's talking to her son and her sister this week.
00:13:03
Speaker
grabbing some referrals.
00:13:05
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
Trust Within Teams: Challenges and Solutions
00:13:11
Speaker
and being there.
00:13:11
Speaker
Hey, and then number three, show your team they can trust you.
00:13:15
Speaker
Hey, when I was working at my first company out here in California, we had a big setter closer program.
00:13:23
Speaker
We're cranking a lot of deals.
00:13:24
Speaker
We had a big team of setters.
00:13:26
Speaker
And I just remember it got to a point, this is back in 2019, I think, or 2018, where
00:13:30
Speaker
We had one dude, one of our closers that decided he's not going to show up to some of the deals.
00:13:37
Speaker
He was, I don't know, consistently showing up late, things like that.
00:13:41
Speaker
And of course, he wasn't closing a ton.
00:13:43
Speaker
And I think what happened was one of the setters went to the home when he was supposed to be there.
00:13:49
Speaker
No one was there.
00:13:50
Speaker
And he said he's going to be there.
00:13:52
Speaker
And what happened, this trust was lost on all the closers.
00:13:57
Speaker
Because of this one, dude.
00:13:58
Speaker
Now all of a sudden this setter is like, I don't know if the set closers are going to show up.
00:14:03
Speaker
I don't trust them going to my leads.
00:14:06
Speaker
I want to get someone else to go.
00:14:07
Speaker
It just slowed down everything.
00:14:09
Speaker
It made people resistant.
00:14:11
Speaker
What we had to start doing was like send pictures that were showing up at people's homes.
00:14:15
Speaker
So the setters would trust us again.
00:14:17
Speaker
We lost reps because of it for sure.
00:14:20
Speaker
So all because of this one trust issue.
00:14:22
Speaker
So remember, trust is lost in buckets, but it's gained in drips, right?
00:14:28
Speaker
Trust is lost in buckets, but it's gained in drips.
00:14:31
Speaker
So how can you gain the trust of your people?
00:14:34
Speaker
Again, show up, do what you say you're going to do.
00:14:37
Speaker
If you are running the setter closer model, don't ever do your setters dirty like that.
00:14:41
Speaker
Show up for their accounts and make sure they have extreme trust.
00:14:45
Speaker
Because guess what?
00:14:45
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.
00:14:51
Speaker
they're going to be way less effective on the doors.
00:14:54
Speaker
They're not going to have confidence in their product or their company.
00:14:56
Speaker
And it's going to affect things across the board.
00:14:58
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.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, after this issue happened, every single setter was calling us asking for every single detail about the deal.
00:15:13
Speaker
So all of a sudden, we can just text setters and say, hey, it went well, this is what happened.
00:15:17
Speaker
They were calling us.
00:15:18
Speaker
They wanted to grill us and basically make sure we for sure showed up to the appointment.
00:15:23
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So don't be like that.
00:15:24
Speaker
Make sure you show your team they can trust you.
00:15:26
Speaker
Okay, give them after the deals.
00:15:29
Speaker
If you're running set or closer, make sure you text them, give them updates.
00:15:33
Speaker
They shouldn't have to be the one updating you.
00:15:36
Speaker
Get a system together where it's not just like disorganized.
00:15:39
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.
00:15:48
Speaker
That's how you're going to develop the trust of your team.
00:15:50
Speaker
That's how you're going to maximize your results.
00:15:53
Speaker
Hey, so hopefully that's helpful.
00:15:54
Speaker
Just some things I was thinking about.
00:15:56
Speaker
We all need to have more trust in our people and our company.
00:16:00
Speaker
We need to help our customers trust us more.
00:16:03
Speaker
And most importantly, we need to make the commitments we set for ourselves and we need to have trust in ourselves.
00:16:10
Speaker
That's going to reflect across the board and everything we do.
00:16:12
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.
00:16:21
Speaker
Hopefully these things helped.
00:16:22
Speaker
And speaking of trust, next week or next podcast, we're going to have a dude that I trust tremendously.
00:16:28
Speaker
One of the most trustworthy guys in solar that's built out a huge organization, largely because of these same concepts.
00:16:36
Speaker
Okay, so this dude's name is Marshall Tootin.
00:16:38
Speaker
He is a stud.
00:16:39
Speaker
He is one of the VPs over at Better Earth Solar.
00:16:44
Speaker
He drops some freaking nuggets.
00:16:46
Speaker
So make sure you're on for that next podcast.
00:16:48
Speaker
We'll see you guys at SolarCon.
00:16:50
Speaker
Shoot me a DM.
00:16:51
Speaker
Let me know if you guys have any thoughts on the podcast, the topic today, or any suggestions for future guests or topics.
00:16:58
Speaker
Would love to hear them.
00:16:59
Speaker
And with that being said, we'll see you on the next episode.
00:17:04
Speaker
Hey, solarpreneurs, are you sick and tired of spinning your wheels every month and not seeing your sales increase?
Enhancing Sales Process: Opportunities and Offers
00:17:10
Speaker
Well so was I and the truth is I was never able to improve it until I figured out what was going wrong.
00:17:16
Speaker
So that's why I'm excited to announce for a limited time we are doing a free sales diagnostic.
00:17:22
Speaker
We'll break down your sales process, figure out the holes in your business and see how we can help you improve.
00:17:29
Speaker
So act now we have six bucks for this month so book a call now don't miss out.
00:17:35
Speaker
What you're going to do is send an email to taylor at solarpreneurs.com.
00:17:40
Speaker
That's taylor at solarpreneurs with an S dot com.
00:17:44
Speaker
I'll send you out a calendar link and we will figure out the time that works best.
00:17:48
Speaker
So shoot that email and let's increase your sales.