https://youtu.be/w0sjC3RYnYk
Links mentioned:
- The Valve Stem Sales Strategy – http://contractormomentum.com/infographic-the-valve-stem-sales-strategy-close-more-sales-using-story-trust-without-sales-tactics/
- Plumbing Website Teardown: Not An Award-Winning Design But Likely Profitable – http://contractormomentum.com/plumbing-website-teardown-not-an-award-winning-design-but-likely-profitable/
- How To Sell To Four Different Types of Buyers – http://contractormomentum.com/how-to-sell-home-services-to-4-different-types-of-buyers/
IN THIS VIDEO, YOU WILL LEARN:
- Why it’s crucial to understand your buyers’ challenges and identify what type of buyer you’re dealing with
- About a structured sales approach that isn’t pushy
- How to maximize your time by automating your follow-ups
- Why your website should be least of your worries
FULL TRANSCRIPTION:
In this show, I covered fives pieces of clarity that will radically change the way you market and sell your services.
I start with understanding the buyers’ challenges and then go through to covering a structured sales approach.
And then finally, how and why your website design is far less important than you think.
This one’s rich so tune in and listen carefully.
Sales and marketing or the lifeblood of any business.
You need sales and marketing.
You need projects coming in.
Once you have your sales and marketing figured out, it’s easy to grow.
You can hire more people without wondering if you’ve got the cash flow to hire them.
You don’t have to worry about what you’re doing next week or if you’re going to be pulling in any revenue, or to an extent, what your accounts receivable is because you’re pulling in new projects and generating new cash flow.
Randal Dehart, a construction accountant, you might hear of him on lots of podcasts.
He’s very well what he calls the Manufacturing Accounting and Production formula and he says, excuse me, Marketing, Accounting, and Production, he says, “Marketing is 80% of his whole success formula.
You need to have the marketing right with that.
Once you get that setup, you’ve got the right marketing going on.
You get more leads.
You can sell it a proper price to where you can actually make money and then you can focus on actually handling the cash that you have and producing but it all starts with marketing.
Now, it fits into the whole clarity + consistence = success formula that I have because there’s just a few pieces of marketing clarity that you need and once you have those, as long as you’re consistent with them, it all adds up.
It all drives to marketing growth and growing your business.
So, right now I wanted to cover five pieces of clarity.
Five realizations that will change the way you market and sell your services.
The first one is understanding the buyers’ challenge.
Too many contractors and service business salespeople just treat their customers as if they don’t have a challenge like the only reason why they are coming to you is because they just want something.
I just feel like they want it.
Well, that might be the case behind that want is a challenge or an issue.
So, if you are doing kitchen remodels, they’re your kitchen remodeler.
Why does somebody want their kitchen remodeled?
Is it because the kitchen feels out of date and it just no longer matches the style and design trend in their head and every time they look at it they cringe and think of the 90s?
Is it because they need more function, they need more space, more functionality, more space? Do they need more countertop space, cabinets, etc?
Think of that stuff. In some cases, it might be like, in my case with screen enclosures, we do these restorations or repaint or replace fasteners etc, reason why somebody wants that because they’ve got a nice and this pool cage area looks dingy and cringe-worthy.
So, they don’t go out there, they don’t use their pool area because every time they look at it, “eww”, you know.
It just doesn’t look good.
Doesn’t look appealing.
Think about the challenge and the pain point.
I suggest for each one of your services, and you should only have three to five of them if you’re small business.
We’re even medium-sized business, pretty good-sized in the realm of contracting.
My company, we’ve only got five services that we offer, and they’re all fairly concise in the same vertical.
Take each service and write down why your customers would want it.
What problems are they having, what challenges are they having, and once you have that list down, you’ll find that you’re writing and the advertising copy that you have, you know your Facebook Ads, your print ads your pay-per-click ads, once you have that list all of that writing becomes easier because you just keep going back to their pain points and talking about how they can solve it or how they can move away from it and get what they want without a certain frustration.
So, understanding their challenge is something extremely, extremely powerful to use in your marketing concepts and ad copy.
From there, understand the type of buyer you’re working with there’s four broad categories of buyers.
There’s Analytical, Amiable, Expressive, and Driver.
Which type of buyer are you working with? If you’re working with someone that’s analytical, you’re not going to want to come out saying, “Oh, yeah. This project is going to look amazing when it’s done.”
They don’t care about that.
You need to tell them what they want to hear.
I train all my salespeople, too, as soon as you pull to a home and you know greet the customer or got them on the phone, start trying to figure out which type they are — analytical, amiable, expressive, driver.
We’ll put a link to this in the notes.
There’s a blog post that I did on it and you want to figure that out and gear your whole presentation and conversation towards what they want to hear.
So, it’s not you know, it’s not what you say.
It’s what they hear that matters.
You hear that saying that’s where this applies.
You need to gear it to them.
If you’re trying to, trying to sell using an analytical style to somebody that’s expressive, they’re not going to care about it.
They’re not going to care how the warranty builds value.
They’re not going to care how long the materials last.
They just know that they want this thing to be great.
They want it to look amazing.
The analytical person, on the other hand, they’re not going to care so much about that.
So, always understand the buyer that you’re working with as you’re going to into these projects.
Of course, the bigger the project, the more thought-out it is.
The more time you have to put into this and should if you’re just selling smaller things you might not need to put in so much time.
It’s suggested but don’t put in a lot of time really, you know, hone it in and customize to that customer.
It’s all relative to the value and to the amount of sales that you need to bring in.
With that, you know, I mentioned sales presentations — you need to have a structured sales approach.
This might be you this is a lot of contractors out there.
It was me.
You just go out there.
“Hey, Miss Jane.” “Hey, Jane Doe.” “Hey, John Doe.” “You know how’s it going, guys. All right let’s take a look here and see what you’re looking to get done…Okay, well, yeah. We can do that. Your price is $5,000.”
Awkward moment of silence and then they say,”All right. Well, thanks for your time. We’ll call you here.” “Yeah. Okay, thanks. Nice meeting with you.”
Why do people do that but if you really want to sell a lot of projects and make the estimates you were going on worth your time, you need to step up your game.
You need to step it up a lot.
You need to have a structured sales approach.
You need to go out there with “closing” in mind.
Now, do mind you, I hate sales strategies.
I hate sales techniques.
I hate being the cliche salesperson.
I’ve had all the sales training on doing that.
I’ve even used it and implemented it, and I will say that it does work as much as I want to say it doesn’t.
The high-pressure sales tactics do work but that’s not for me, probably not for you. It kind of feels unethical.
Feels sleazy.
So, I put together what is called “Valve Stem Sales Strategy”.
That’s my structured sales approach.
You’re going out–having a structure and formula to your sales presentation using trust and story inside of it to build trust and then guide the customer to closing without any sales tactics.
If that sounds like something you’re interested in, check the notes below this video here.
I’ll link you to it.
We’ve got an awesome infographic going up on that and video where I explain and teach that whole process — The Valve Stem Sales Strategy.
Now, if you don’t have anything right now, that’s probably you want to go towards or if you want to get into the high-pressure sales tactics, you know you’d have to research that on your own but having a sales structure when you’re out there is crucial.
You can’t just go out there and you just can’t wing it and start talking about random stuff because you forget and leave things out.
You have no method to guide them back to closing.
You have no strategy to measure.
Once you can measure this and figure out what’s happening and when I say this or do that, these people tend to buy more then you can start to kind of hone in, improve, refine, and increase your closing rate.
Think about this. Let’s say your closing rate is 20%, one out of five projects.
Well, if you just double that to 40% which is not far-fetched, I’m not unheard of when you go from no strategy to strategy, doubling that closing rate you just doubled your revenue.
If you’re selling half a million dollars, you went to a million real quick.
You doubled your profit.
Just by, increasing your closing rate.
No advertising expenses needed for that.
No marketing.
No finesse.
Just a little bit of strategy in your on-site estimates you can increase that closing rate a lot.
It’s an often overlooked area of marketing and sales, investments I should say, or of your time or of your whole sales process that most small business don’t catch on to and that’s the sales presentation and leading to closing.
You’re not saying you had to go out there and be sleazy and do the unethical stuff.
Don’t do that.
I don’t do that.
I use the Valve Stem Sales strategy.
You look it up.
I’ll put it in the notes.
Go out there.
Put the into place.
You’re going to be two steps ahead of your game before if you had no sales strategy.
Then what happens after the sales appointment because you’re not going to close all of them.
Some people are going to, you know, just say “I need some time to think about it”.
Or in some other words.
Something to that effect that says not now or maybe never.
What do you do?
You follow up.
A lot of people go towards the phone calls or they say they’ll make phone calls but most people don’t actually do it because it’s frustrating and time-consuming.
Best thing you can do in this case, automate your follow-ups using Facebook Ads.
Create value-based Facebook ads.
I call them Authority amplifiers.
That’s what I use at this stage and funnel.
Mind you I have a whole funnel setup for multiple stages for Facebook advertising.
Show your customers these authority amplifiers which are content value-based ads.
Get them in front of them after you deliver the estimate so that way you walk away now, they go on their computer, who’s in front of them, you, your company, and you’re providing value. You’re not invasive like phone calls.
I find that you know, I get a follow-up phone call, I’m generally, “yeah, don’t even bother calling me.”
A lot of homeowners are like that, too.
A lot of customers will be like that.
So, put your ads in their Facebook feed every time they login they see you, and then they’ve also got the option to click back, go to your website, build a further connection with you.
They say it takes some sales training.
I think it says 17 or 19 points of contact to make a sale.
Well, how about this.
Rather than doing that by phone or in person, do it the quick and easy way, and cheap way, especially if you consider your time.
Serve them the Facebook ads.
It’ll only cost you five bucks a day.
With five bucks a day, you can serve a prospect pipeline of few hundred people with more ads than they can handle.
It’ll be the best five dollars a day that you can spend.
I always say that.
Best five dollars a day.
You can spend Facebook advertising going to your prospects that have already got an estimate.
And finally, your website design.
Your website design is less important than you think.
I can’t tell you how many people messaged me and they say: “Corey, just got a new website design. Check it out. What do you think?”
“Cory, should I redesign my website? It’s just not working.”
Truth is, your website design is not important.
What is important is the content and personalization that’s on it.
Does that website make a personal connection with the viewers on there that make them feel connected to your business?
Given an emotional connection and then make them want to contact you.
And on top of that, back to point number one, your buyers’ challenges: Does it relate to their pain points?
So, I just did a website teardown of a plumbing website company in Seattle.
I found this website and it looks horrible.
Any web designer out there, any multi-million dollar agency, you’d be like “Oh my god.
That thing is awful.
Get it off the web.
You need a new website right now.”
That’s what they say about this thing but when I looked at it, with my experience dealing with dealing with service businesses and service business websites, and do mind you, my company drives close to eight figures a year all through the internet in the website.
We do a lot with the website.
That’s my big forte and the sales and marketing realm, there’s the website.
That’s part of how I’ve gotten this company to be how big it is today.
From my experience, this website that looks horrible with a yellow background and unformatted text was wildly effective because they had good content and good personalization on there.
So, I’ll also link to that in the show notes.
You can go through and what that full video.
So, keep all those things in mind.
Clarity plus consistence equals success.
These are five key points of marketing clarity that will change things.
Once you get things in your head from here, your marketing and sales process should change.
Understand those buyers challenges, use the pain points, gear your marketing content towards that, understand the type of buyer you are dealing with, gear your sales presentation towards that.
If you don’t have a sales presentation, get one.
You really need one.
You can look towards the valve stem sales strategy I’ve got published that’ll help you automate your follow ups, stop making phone calls if you’re even making the phone calls you’re probably just saying you make some phone call you call about ten of them get frustrated and stop. Don’t do that.
Automate them with Facebook ads.
Stop doing the follow-ups and your website design.
Stop worrying about having the fanciest website.
Get one that’s simple functional and the content is rich and it’s personalized.
It engages them on a personal level so that the visitors of the website feel they know your company before they even call you.