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The #1 Principle You're Probably Forgetting (Even If You're Experienced)

The Solarpreneur
The Solarpreneur
Episode • Oct 19, 2021 • 16m

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Speaker 1 (00:03):

Welcome to the Solarpreneur podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level. 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 sales reps fail. I teach you to avoid the mistakes I made and bringing the top solar dogs, the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro and closing more deals. What is a Solarpreneur you might ask 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 2 (00:42):

What's going on Solarpreneurs Taylor Armstrong here with another episode. And as usual, we're here to make you a sell more solar, close, more deals and get more referrals and more leads. So I kind of butchered that in show, but I'm just getting back from a little hunting trip more about that later. So apologize if I'm a little out of it here, got back late last night, trying to get back into the grain of things here and excited to get back into it. Get closing some deals before we jump into the episode today. And of course, I'll tell you more about my, uh, hunting trip for my hunters out there. If you don't care about hunting, then you can skip pass maybe the first minute or two after this. But before we jump into that, I want to invite you to a special live stream I'm doing with my friend, Solar Joe.

Speaker 2 (01:36):

He was on the podcast, I think about a month ago. So he's a master of objections. He has what I would say. The number one Facebook group for solar pros, um, Solarpreneur, Facebook group. Isn't quite there yet, but, um, someday his group is called solar objections and he does some awesome live streams in there, which he graciously invited me to take part in one. So that's happening tomorrow. Um, at the time, you know, you hear this episode will be tomorrow. Um, but when I say tomorrow, I mean Wednesday, October 20th, 2021, of course. So if you listened to this episode after the fact, I apologize, you're late to the party. So listen to the episode, right? When they come out and come on, turn your notifications on and get this content. You can be fresh on the announcements, but if you want to join that, it's going to be at 4:00 PM Pacific standard time.

Speaker 2 (02:34):

And I would love to see you on there. Hit me with some questions. I'm going to try to brush up on my objections a little bit. So hopefully I don't look like a complete idiot up there. I know I'm probably not the world's greatest at overcoming objections, but I think I can drop some knowledge in there. Hopefully help some people out. So go join in. If you want to check that out and of course join the Facebook group if you haven't already. So without further ado, jump into the topic for today. Okay. And what I want to talk about is why we need to keep solar super simple and a couple different meanings with simple. When I say simple, Hey, actually my hunting trip that I just got back from kind of ties into this. And I got thinking about it. I got asked an interesting question.

Speaker 2 (03:24):

Um, couple of days back, I, I always love, you know, interacting with my Solarpreneurs, with my homeys, with, uh, all our listeners here. So definitely feel free to shoot me a message. I try to respond to all of them on a Facebook and Instagram, but I got a question, um, from my friend Carston, he asked if you were to go back and start from the beginning, which skill would you put your focus in to get back to where you are now, the fastest? What would you say are the most important skills that one can develop when just starting out to maximize or maximize their effectiveness? So I thought that was an interesting question. And I want to talk about that a little bit more on the podcast. And the short answer is I would focus on keeping things as simple as possible. Hey, in simple, in the fact that people complicate their presentations too much people combo complicate the process.

Speaker 2 (04:24):

People come complicate just solar in general, in many different aspects. So I want to talk about some ways that we, as Solarpreneurs, solar professionals, we can simplify things and just focus on the things that matter the most. And so here's how this hunting trip kind of ties into this. This is my second, uh, hunting trail. I took I'm from Utah. So I went back down to Southern Utah, met up with a buddy, went on this little hunting trip, just, you know, the general rifle hunt, um, bought my first gun actually, um, last year. So I'm not a big time hunter. This is my second time ever. And I needed to have my buddy coming with me because I don't know what I'm doing out there. So I meet up with him and my first hunting trip, I was able to get a deer probably in like, I dunno, second morning, where out there didn't spend much time.

Speaker 2 (05:20):

Um, just sort of drove around and found a deer on the side of the road, shot it and was done. But this trip was a lot different. What happened was we went out it's a Thursday morning. We went out, drive around, drive around, didn't see anything, Thursday night drive around, drive around hike, hike, drive, drive, rinse, and repeat finally saw one dough. But of course, you know, you got to shoot the buck. So we didn't even see any bucks, just one dough. All right, man, what's going on? So next day, morning, drive around, drive around nothing. Absolutely nothing afternoon of Friday, um, slash evening drive around, drive around. Finally we start seeing herds of dos. So a lot more deer we see, but no box. So at this point we're just pretty frustrated because not only have we driven around, we're going to side by side at truck.

Speaker 2 (06:21):

Um, we're driving a lot, going all over these mountain trails, but we also hiked probably seven or eight miles up to this point. And it's like, you know, up mountains and Hills and stuff like that. So it's not easy hiking. So I'm thinking, man, why is this taking so long to, you know, see a buck? Like I usually at least see something by then. And this is me. I mean, I'm impatient. I'm not a patient guy. Like I said, this my second time hunting ever. So those that are actual hunters, they're probably hearing this and thinking, this is stupid. Cause I know guys will go out and scout and you know, search for deer for months and you know, pass on box and stuff like that. But me being a beginner hunter, not really know what I'm doing. I'm getting frustrated. I'm like, man, I thought you just go out there, see tons of bucks and you can get yourself a monster, one be done with it.

Speaker 2 (07:17):

But no, that's not how it was. And then the other thing is there's lots of hunters up here. So we're seeing tons of people. You might as well call it Disneyland up there in the mountains. There's a ton of people just walking around. I felt like there's crowds of hunters. So got pretty frustrating. And then finally, Saturday morning, well, we didn't see anything again on Saturday morning, but at this point I'm about ready to just call it quits, give up, okay. This is day three. I'm like, man, okay. I'm not getting the data this year. And we decided, okay, let's go out one more time. I took my car up to the base of the mountain. We didn't camp that night just because we're getting sick of camping in the freezing cold. We went back into, uh, Cedar city where Stan, um, and find the Friday afternoon slash evening though.

Speaker 2 (08:11):

We finally see a couple of bucks and it's a little, two point, nothing big. If you follow me on Instagram, you saw me post it, but get it, shoot it from the side of the road. And I'm stoked to finally, I get my buck, taking it to the butcher, get some meat out of it. Uh, Mike, about freaking time. So how does this tie in with solar? Well, it's not that much different. Yeah. I was not patient out there. We're going to different areas. We're knocking on doors. So to speak. We're trying to get our opportunities, but we're not getting anything we're searching around. We're a trick or treating for dear, I guess you could say, but there's no sign of anything. So sometimes that's how it is in solar. How many times are we going to neighborhoods? Maybe we're used to getting a deal closed the first day.

Speaker 2 (09:05):

Maybe we were, we were used to booking lots of appointments after, you know, an hour, whatever, but sometimes that's not how it's going to be. This is how it was on my hunting trip. The first time I went out, got a deer pretty much right off the bat. This time it took driving around for tons of miles that took hiking, probably like close to 10 miles when it's all said and done, and it took a ton of work to get the same result. So that's how it is in solar. Some weeks are going to be that way some weeks it's going to take twice the amount of effort to get a deal as other weeks. So that's why you need to keep things simple. You need to keep things consistent and you need to not give up. You need to take your mind off of the results and focus in the input.

Speaker 2 (09:57):

What are you inputting to get the results? If you focus, if you take yourself out of the results and focus more on the output you're putting in the time you're putting in, that's what you can control, right? You can't necessarily control how many people are going to sign up that week, but what can you control? You can control the doors. You knock, you can control to some degree. The people you talk to, you can control the hours you put in. Okay? There's things you can do to control your attitude. So focus on those things you can control and that's how you're going to get way more consistent results. Okay? So this is part of what I told Carson. Um, when he was messaging me, what would you focus on? And that's what I would focus on. I would focus on those things. You can control and track it like a mad man, the most successful people I know in this industry, that's what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (10:49):

They're keeping everything super simplified. They're tracking their numbers and whether they close 10 deals that week or whether they close one deal, they're working basically the same day they're putting in that same output as they, as the week that they closed 10 deals, whether it's one deal or 10 deal, 10 deals. So it's easy to forget. I did this couple of weeks ago. Matter of fact, where I closed a couple of deals early in the week, and it's a trap we can all fall into pretty easily. If you don't watch yourself because I got two deals closed early in the week, I started getting lazy like, okay, well, you know what? I'm not going to go knock. Um, you know, I'm just going to follow up and I'm going to see if I can get some, uh, installs, hopping a little bit quicker, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna not start knocking until a little bit later today.

Speaker 2 (11:45):

And what could have turned into many more deals that week? I only closed the two because I, I took down my effort. I took down my production and I got lazy because I closed the two deals. And then guess what happened after that? Both those deals ended up canceling. So now instead of having the two deals close on the week, I was at zero that's kicking myself. I'm like, man, why didn't I keep my production the same? I could have had two deals that stuck two more deals that stuck, but I got lazy and didn't do it. So at that'd be a lesson to you, focus on keeping things simple, keep, keep things, um, focused on what you can control and then track it like crazy. I've talked about this before, but keep spreadsheets of, um, you know, the hours you're putting in the doors, you're knocking the appointments.

Speaker 2 (12:41):

You're sitting down with homeowners, the closing opportunities. You're getting have those key metrics, make sure you're tracking them like a madman, cause that's how you're going to make improvement. And then there's an app you should all be using. If you're on the doors or however you're tracking stuff. I just have an app that my friend Earl told me about. It's called counter. You can go download it app store and you can customize it to the things you want to track. So for me, I'm checking my close deals on the week. I'm checking my appointments kept track of my appointments booked. I'm tracking my conversations on the doors. Okay? How many qualified prospects my talking to? So I would suggest tracking those things, go download that app. And on next episode, we're going to hear from one of my friends that is having some insane results, not just right now, but the past pretty much, I would say six weeks or sorry, six months minimum.

Speaker 2 (13:37):

I've been seeing this guy close, super consistent deals. And I think he's hit 15 deals on the month for going on. I think like six, seven months now consistently. So these are things that he actually talks about in the podcast. We did his name's Christian Maroney. So you're not going to want to miss out. That's going to be next episode. And he's going to talk about a lot of these topics. We're going to dive deeper into it. And you're going to see the things he's doing to be super consistent and get results and be the top rep at his company. So tune into that episode, I hope this helped you send it to someone that wants to simplify more. And we'll talk more about how you can simplify other things, but for now just simplify the process, focus on the things you can control. And it's not that complicated.

Speaker 2 (14:24):

Sometimes we make it difficult. Oh, why, why aren't they closing deals? Go back to the beginning, focus on those things that matter. And that's how you're going to get massive results. Hope that helped. And you we'll see you on the next episode with Christian Maroney, send this to someone who needs it. And don't forget to tune into the live stream tomorrow. You can make it in the solar objections, Facebook group peace.

Speaker: (15:26):

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