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 and 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 cells reps fell.
Speaker: I teach you how to avoid the mistakes I made and bringing the top solar dogs of the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, following 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: What's up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Taylor Armstrong back with another episode, How Are Ya?
Speaker: I hope you had a dominant week, closed tons of deals, and I hope you're happy with the election if you're listening to this.
Speaker: It's the week after the election.
Speaker: Congrats, President Biden.
Speaker: And if you've been following all the posts on Facebook and everything, there's a lot of division.
Speaker: But I think what our country needs is just accept the results and
Speaker: And be happy with the outcome and don't act like it's the end of the world.
Speaker: Some people I see, they're acting like the president's going to control their lives, like he is literally going to destroy their life.
Speaker: Or the opposite, some people are acting like the president is going to save them from all their struggles and all their problems are going to go away.
Speaker: But I think at the end of the day,
Speaker: If you were struggling before this election, you're going to struggle after.
Speaker: If you're dominating before, you're going to dominate after.
Speaker: People need to stop putting so much emphasis on the politics, on how they control their lives.
Speaker: Anyways, I digress.
Speaker: We're going to jump into an episode today.
Speaker: But before that, I want to apologize.
Speaker: Super embarrassing, but the link I have been talking about at the end of the episodes in the outros, it is the webclass.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: I actually found out it was a broken link and messed up the technology part.
Speaker: So super embarrassing, but should be fixed now.
Speaker: So go log on to that.
Speaker: You'll hear it again at the end.
Speaker: It should be webclass.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: There's a forum on there.
Speaker: You can enter in your email.
Speaker: And we are going to be launching a super exciting, super exclusive
Speaker: three step course that's going to teach you the three secrets I followed to hit the Golden Door Award in Solr, which is over 100 installs.
Speaker: So if you have less than 100 installs last year or haven't hit that mark, I want to give you the personal invitation to go and put in your email and then you're going to be the first notified to get that free training.
Speaker: So go jump on that.
Speaker: I apologize again.
Speaker: And to get to the content today, here's what we're going to talk about.
Speaker: How to know which part of your clothes needs improvement?
Speaker: It's something I get asked all the time by my reps, especially newer reps.
Speaker: Taylor, how do I know which part of the clothes I need to improve?
Speaker: How can I improve it?
Speaker: So what I want to answer first, preface that question, is I want you to go and look back on your cells or look back on your previous weeks.
Speaker: And look at your numbers, which hopefully you're all keeping track of your numbers.
Speaker: And look at how many appointments you actually went to that week.
Speaker: Did you go to more than two or three appointments?
Speaker: If you didn't go to more than two or three appointments, then there's your first problem.
Speaker: The issue is not the close.
Speaker: You're not giving yourself enough opportunities to close.
Speaker: And this is what I see over and over and over again, is newer reps, even experienced reps, they're saying, Taylor,
Speaker: not just me, but to any manager, right?
Speaker: They're saying, how come I'm not closing?
Speaker: What's going on?
Speaker: How do I improve my close?
Speaker: And then I'm like, well, how many appointments were you even in?
Speaker: And a lot of times with newer reps, they're only in one or two appointments a week.
Speaker: So I'm going, dude, or dudette, if you're a girl, if you're not in four or five appointments a week, then you're making it tough to give yourself a chance at success.
Speaker: Okay, because to all the top closers, I mean,
Speaker: Even if your closing ratio is 50% or higher, you got to be going to two or three a week to close one, right?
Speaker: That's the first issue.
Speaker: So for the managers that are listening or for any reps that are struggling, how many appointments did you actually sit in?
Speaker: Because if you're not seeing enough appointments, then you're not even going to be able to figure out how to improve the close.
Speaker: You're not giving yourself enough opportunities.
Speaker: So remember that mistake.
Speaker: Before you ask that question, ask yourself the question, how many appointments did I sit in?
Speaker: How come I'm not getting enough appointments?
Speaker: What's going on?
Speaker: So that's a lead gen issue.
Speaker: Okay, but after you figure that part out, let's say you are sitting in four or five appointments a week.
Speaker: You're doing that consistently, but you're not closing them.
Speaker: Then you can ask the question, what part of the close do I need to improve?
Speaker: Now you have the right to ask that question.
Speaker: But first, figure out your lead gen issues.
Speaker: But to answer the second question now that that's been prefaced, I think we need to go back to discussion on tracking, measuring, and adjusting.
Speaker: I've told this story, I think it was probably in a podcast maybe six months ago.
Speaker: But something that I learned when I first started in the industry is that I needed to be recording myself on the doors.
Speaker: I needed to be recording my closes.
Speaker: So what I did is I started just hitting the record button on every single close I went to.
Speaker: I was getting in.
Speaker: Yeah, I figured out the lead gen.
Speaker: I knew I needed to improve the clothes now.
Speaker: So I started recording my appointments.
Speaker: But what happened was, and you can go back and listen to the full story, but just to kind of paraphrase for those that already heard it, is I went into this home.
Speaker: I started recording the deal.
Speaker: It was this Hawaiian guy.
Speaker: Things were going good.
Speaker: He was the only homeowner.
Speaker: And then about 20, 25 minutes into the appointment, he actually saw me take out my phone.
Speaker: I think he asked me a question.
Speaker: I need to look at my phone for something.
Speaker: He saw me take it out.
Speaker: The screen lit up.
Speaker: And he saw the recorder to bar going at the top of my phone.
Speaker: And he called me out on it instantly.
Speaker: He said, are you recording this?
Speaker: And it was in an angry tone, though.
Speaker: It wasn't like, you know, questioning.
Speaker: He's like actually could tell he was mad about it.
Speaker: And I was caught like a deer in the headlights.
Speaker: I had no idea what to say.
Speaker: And I'm just kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's going.
Speaker: I might have said I forgot to turn it off or something like that.
Speaker: But I just kind of made like a quick excuse.
Speaker: Tried to kind of blow it over.
Speaker: He was mad about it.
Speaker: He's, what are you doing recording?
Speaker: You don't have my permission.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, sorry.
Speaker: And in my head, going back in hindsight, I should have just said, oh, I'm using it for training purposes.
Speaker: No big deal.
Speaker: But I was just caught, didn't know what to say.
Speaker: And I just apologized.
Speaker: I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, man.
Speaker: Yeah, I can delete it.
Speaker: And at that point, it wrecked the deal.
Speaker: He did not trust me at all.
Speaker: In fact, I think he only gave me like five more minutes after that.
Speaker: And I could tell he was just like super annoyed, super upset that I was recording him, which depending on the state you're in, in California, it's illegal to record someone without their permission, I found out.
Speaker: But other states, like Nevada at least, at the time of this I know you actually can record people.
Speaker: But anyways, maybe figure out the laws of your state before you do something like that.
Speaker: So funny story, but the principle stays the same though.
Speaker: You should be recording yourself in your appointments.
Speaker: You should be figuring out ways to improve.
Speaker: And you're not going to improve if you're not recording yourself.
Speaker: So how do you know which part of the close to improve?
Speaker: Start recording your deals.
Speaker: and then start drilling, start rehearsing, start practicing.
Speaker: If anyone's read The Closer's Survival Guide by Grant Cardone, this is one of the main points of the book is that you need to be drilling, practicing, rehearsing.
Speaker: And it's one of the biggest, I think, pitfalls of any sales industry, sales career.
Speaker: People are not practicing.
Speaker: They're not treating it like a profession.
Speaker: You look at anyone else in any other professional gig that they're doing, they're practicing.
Speaker: Anyone that's a pro athlete, they're practicing.
Speaker: Anyone that's a pro musician, they're practicing.
Speaker: And I think that's why people don't improve, especially people that aren't naturals.
Speaker: I know myself, it took me a long time to have success in this game, success in the industry.
Speaker: And the only way someone like me did it is just by practicing over and over and over.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Most of you probably heard that there's a book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker: He talks about you need to have 10,000 hours before you truly master something.
Speaker: So think about that.
Speaker: If you're not where you're at, if you truly put in 10,000 hours studying, practicing, rehearsing, drilling, okay, and you can have success before that.
Speaker: I probably haven't put in 10,000 hours.
Speaker: But the more you can put in that effort, the more you're going to put yourself ahead of the learning curve.
Speaker: So that's the biggest, I think, tip with that question is figure out, record, and that's how you're going to figure out where mistakes are being made.
Speaker: Then once you can isolate that, then you can start to drill, practice, rehearse.
Speaker: As you record, I mean, go, if you're new to the industry, have a manager listen to it, a sales manager.
Speaker: If you're trying to do this out on your own, which I don't recommend,
Speaker: But hit me up.
Speaker: Join in some of our coaching programs.
Speaker: So what we're all about is helping people develop the systems and figure out what needs improvement.
Speaker: But if you don't record it, if you don't know what's wrong, there's no way you can make improvements.
Speaker: After you have some type of recording, after you can isolate what is going wrong, then just think about it.
Speaker: Are you having trouble closing?
Speaker: Have you gone to four or five deals?
Speaker: What type of objections are you getting?
Speaker: Do the people need to think about it?
Speaker: That means you're not building up urgency.
Speaker: If they need to think about it, they don't see the need to go solar right now.
Speaker: So what can you do now to implement building more urgency in your clothes?
Speaker: Forgetting a high cancellation ratio.
Speaker: Why is it?
Speaker: Survey your customers, figure out after.
Speaker: My biggest pet peeve is when I can't figure out why people canceled or why they didn't go solar.
Speaker: Drives me nuts.
Speaker: And because that's how you're going to improve.
Speaker: If you figure out why people didn't do it, then you can hopefully overcome that objection for the future.
Speaker: So if they canceled, figure out why.
Speaker: Was it because they found something in the contract they didn't like?
Speaker: Was it because they found a better quote and you didn't prepare them for that and you didn't see if they were going to shop around?
Speaker: You need to figure out what's going wrong and then you need to figure out how you can improve it, how you can isolate those objections.
Speaker: Okay, so that's just a quick tip.
Speaker: Figure out what's going wrong, which is why you need to record it.
Speaker: Get with your team, whoever you're working with.
Speaker: Join our coaching programs and we can help you, Joe, practice and rehearse these steps.
Speaker: But if you're with a team, start doing it.
Speaker: You know, lots of people we've had on the podcast.
Speaker: We had Frankie Lane a while back.
Speaker: He talked about how their company does.
Speaker: It was, I think, every quarter they do a whole day just devoting to pure role playing.
Speaker: Can't remember what they call it.
Speaker: They get like an Airbnb.
Speaker: They rent out a house.
Speaker: They have their whole team.
Speaker: And then they bring in, I think he said, an actual homeowner or someone who
Speaker: to be, you know, a homeowner and they go through just rep after rep.
Speaker: They're just drilling the whole day.
Speaker: So start with that.
Speaker: If you're a manager, if you're a company owner, what can you do to help your team start drilling, practicing, rehearsing?
Speaker: You should be having correlations, but how much of those correlations are devoted to actual rehearsing and practicing?
Speaker: You can do the door approach practices, but you need to devote time for people that are closing deals.
Speaker: Start devoting time to go through role plays and truly practice these because that's how you're going to master.
Speaker: Remember, practice doesn't make perfect, but whatever you practice becomes perfect.
Speaker: Sorry, I butchered that.
Speaker: But if you're practicing bad habits, you're going to master them.
Speaker: So you need to make sure you're practicing good habits because that's what you truly want to master.
Speaker: So that's the tip with it, guys.
Speaker: Let me know what you think.
Speaker: Let me know what other ways you're implementing to figure out what part of the close needs improvements.
Speaker: And then go out there, implement that this week, use it to dominate, and we'll see you on the next one.
Speaker: Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode.
Speaker: I know when I got into the industry, I had almost no resources like this.
Speaker: So I hope this show is helping you get the success you deserve.
Speaker: If you found value from anything in this episode today, think about someone who can benefit so you and I can help people fulfill their potential.
Speaker: Zig Ziglar said, if you help enough people get what they want, you will get what you want.
Speaker: So I promise by sharing this, it will help you grow and improve.
Speaker: The value bombs on today's show will take you one step closer to success, but it's always to the degree that you apply and execute the principles.
Speaker: I've spent the last few years interviewing the top solar experts and helping other reps and businesses discover their potential.
Speaker: If you want more help achieving your goals, then I put together an exclusive video training on three hacks that help me close multiple deals a week while knocking less than 10 hours.
Speaker: And who doesn't want that?
Speaker: So go check it out at webclass.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Once again, that's webclass.solarpreneurs.com to get exclusive access to the training and take your skills to the next level.
