EP126: Sales Secret #1 - Become A Teacher

Welcome to Hammer and Grind. And welcome to the Hammer and Grind podcast, the podcast built for contractors to help maximize profits and get you off the tools before burnout or bankruptcy happens. I'm your host, Brad Hebner. And I'm here to help you on your journey to self-mastery. Make sure you check us out on our social media platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast and you'll be able to find me there. Consider joining my free Facebook group called the Contract Your Profit Blueprint. I created this free group to give you as much information as possible to help you in your business. I go live in there once a week, tons of content to help you in your business. If you want to accelerate the success, consider joining my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. In there is a great community of contractors all willing to share information and help each other succeed, as well as hundreds of hours of training, coaching calls, everything you need to accelerate your business. If you want to learn more about that, you can find out more information on hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. Or just send me a message and I'll be happy to share that with you. Now, let's get on to the show. Hey, welcome back to the Hammergrind Podcast. Thanks for hanging out with me. I just want to tell you how grateful I am that you listened to this podcast. I get feedback from you all. I appreciate it. It keeps me going. Today, I want to talk to you about sales secret number one. I'm going to do a little mini series of sales secrets. And I'm going to talk about sales secret number one, which is become a teacher. Yes, you heard me correctly. Become a teacher. And you might be thinking, Brad, how does becoming a teacher have anything to do with sales? Well, who do we learn from? Right? I mean, it's pretty basic. When we go to school, we learn from teachers. Right? That's who teaches us. So when we want to learn a new subject or a new topic or a new skill, what do we do? We go find somebody that can teach us how to do that. A lot of you listen to what I have to say. You listen to my podcast. You watch my TikTok videos. You follow me on Facebook and social media. And you hear the things that I say and you may go implement it or you may gain new knowledge. Why? Why are you listening to me? What's so special about what I have to say? Well, there's really nothing special about what I say. It's just I'm the one that's present every day. delivering information, which is value. That's translated as value. If what I was teaching, one, didn't work, or two, was not useful for you and your situation, you would not be listening or consuming my information. If you were trying to figure out how to build a boat because you want to build your own boat, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. Because I'm not providing you with any value on how to build a boat. It's not relevant. So when you're a contractor and your clients are looking for someone to hire for the services that you provide, then you become the teacher. You become the source of all things knowledgeable about said service or topic or whatever product, whatever you're doing. And so you need to become a teacher to your clients. Back in the day, there used to be, it was different. Like you would dangle the carrot of knowledge and then you had to pay money in order to gain the knowledge on the back end, right? It was called, it was like gatekeeping. So it was a marketing strategy that if I had, you know, if I wanted to teach you how to do real estate, then you would go buy this course, right? Or program or whatever it is. And then on the inside, you would gain all the knowledge. Well, through the years, somebody else comes and says, well, I don't want to pay for this because I pay a bunch of money and I didn't learn anything. And it was a bunch of BS. So I'm going to give the information out and help others for free. So now here we are,2023. Pretty much everything that I teach you and everything that everyone else has to say in the world is available on the internet somewhere for free. The information is already out there. The problem is putting all that information together in a central location to make it digestible and to make it in a form or a fashion that is easy to implement. That's what I've done with the Profit Club and the Contractor Profit Blueprint. I've taken all of this information and then synthesized it down into an actionable 90-day blueprint so that you can implement it in your business. I've taken the meat and the potatoes of the stuff that you really need to learn, put it into a program that's easy to digest and implement. That's the benefit of hiring someone or joining a program or a coach like what I do. That's the benefit. It's not that I know secret things, although the name of this podcast title is Secret Number One. That's just a copywriting trick to get you to want to click on it. That's literally what it is. There's really no secrets in the world today. Maybe the cabal or whatever secret society you want to talk about, UFOs or whatever, maybe those secrets still exist. But in the business world, there really is very far and few in between secrets. It's just not out there. Everything is out there for you to consume. But the secret is, in the sense, a way that you maybe never thought about it. You know what a teacher is, you know what teachers do, but you never thought about how to apply it to yourself and how it would benefit you in a sales situation. So the reason why it's beneficial is because whoever is the best teacher is who you're going to learn from. It's also who you're probably going to buy from. So if I asked you who was your favorite teacher in high school, you could probably instantly name one or two. favorite teachers. And if, you know, I'm going to bet, I would bet money that that class that you had with that teacher, you probably did pretty good in. You probably enjoyed that class and as a result, you probably got pretty good grades in it. Now, maybe you like the teacher because they let you screw off and do whatever you want. That's a little bit different situation, right? But more than likely, you did good in the class. of the teacher that you really liked. They impacted you some way in your life. Maybe they helped you outside of class. Maybe you just loved the way that they taught, their personality, whatever. But there was something about them that you loved. And so as a result, you showed up and wanted to deliver for them almost in a way of thanking them or paying them back for what they did for you. And that's exactly what your clients will do when you become the experts. When you become the teacher. See, when you teach, you become the standard by which all other contractors will be measured. When you're the person in your community who's putting out so much information that everywhere they turn, they see you, no matter what services that you offer, they will be compelled to at least talk to you first. you will get first right of refusal because they're going to call you first before they call any other contractor because you're the one who's done the educating, right? And when you educate people and you become the teacher, you also become the expert. So I'll share a story how this applies directly to my life. Recently, my wife and I have been looking at possibly buying a camper. We like to go camping several times a year. We've been doing it for a few years. We rent. We use it outdoorsy. We rent campers from people. And it's been a good experience. And so we thought, well, maybe it's time for us to get our own camper instead of renting. And there's always pros and cons to renting somebody else. You show up and they don't have plates or whatever, whatever it is. So we just like, we're going to start. We want to entertain the thought of buying a camper. So I started doing a lot of research. Start looking at floor plans. Start looking at manufacturers. Start looking at features, things to consider, weight, length, height. All this stuff you got to take into consideration. And I go on YouTube like everybody else and start searching for what's the best family camper or bunkhouse camper. What's the best kind? And I find a video. Find a video of this guy. And I start watching it and it's very educational. He's given me lots of information. And then like YouTube does, it recommends other videos. Well, there's other videos by the same person. And I watch a couple of them. And then I see some other videos by other people, couples and full-time RVers and people that have channels. And I start watching four or five, maybe six different specific people that have put out a lot of content. And what's happened for me is that now, anytime I want to learn information about a specific camper, like a new floor plan or to do like a walkthrough of a camper, there's one specific channel that I go to because he has put out so much information that's been extremely helpful and relevant that now I see him as an expert. And so now anytime I want to learn something about campers, I go find his channel and I start watching it. There's also another guy that I watch who talks about like the maintenance side of RVs and little hacks and tricks. So if I want to learn anything about like maintenance or how to repair something or fix something or different tricks, I go watch his channel because he has provided so much value around that specific topic. And so when we want to go buy a camper, now this person that I follow that I really like who does a lot of videos on campers, he works for an RV place that sells campers. He's not a salesman himself, but he does a lot of the marketing stuff. And so I really want to go buy a camper from that place that he works at because he's provided so much value. it's like three and a half, four hours north of where we're at. So it may not make the most sense, right? But still, if they were local, I would 100% go there first. And we still may end up going there, even though it's three or four or five hours away. We may still, if we buy one, we may buy it from that particular place. Purely because he is a teacher, because he's putting out relevant information. that I'm actively looking for. And I've said this before on the podcast. It's like, this is why you should be creating blogs. This is why you should be doing short form video, YouTube videos, blogs, putting out content about your services and your industry because it makes you the expert. It does. It just makes you the expert. I mean, you can't argue that. I don't care what... If you're on YouTube or you listen to podcasts, you listen to me, if you're listening to me in my podcast, then in your mind, you've deemed me as an expert. But you don't really know what my experience is. I've talked about it a little bit. But truly, you don't know. Is he full of crap? Did he actually do this? Did he own a construction company? How successful was he? You guys don't know all those details because I don't really talk about them. But you trust what I say because I'm the one putting out content on a regular basis. And it makes sense. If I was putting out gibberish, if I was telling you, go out there and lower your prices as cheap as you can, give away your stuff for free, and don't hire anybody and work by yourself. And if I was telling you a bunch of nonsense, you'd probably be like, yeah, this guy has no idea what he's talking about. No clue whatsoever. This guy's an idiot. But because I've given you some information, you've applied it in your business, had some success with that information. I give you one little tip, you apply it, it works. I give you another tip, you apply it, it works. Okay, so far we're two for two. So on and so on and so on. You trust what I'm telling you because of the information that I'm putting out there. Had I not done this podcast, had I not made any YouTube videos, Had I not made any TikTok videos and all I did was open my coaching business and then hope that people come and find me, how successful do you think I would be? Probably not very successful. Yet that's what some of you are doing with your sales and your marketing. Now you may be thinking, well, Brad, this sounds more like marketing than sales. It is because when you have really, really good marketing, sales becomes 10 times easier. See, I already want to go buy a camper from this person, regardless of what the price is. I want to buy from their place because he's educated me. Now, if I go there and their prices are like three times more expensive than somebody else, then I may have to make some considerations potentially, but I'm still going there first regardless. And if I go there and I have an experience with their salesman, that it's a complete 180 from what I had with those videos, then I'm going to take a step back. Like, wait a minute. Man, this guy here did a really great job, but the salesman is telling me a bunch of crap that's completely opposite of what he was telling me in his videos. So then you have conflict there. You've created conflict. But if your sales... And what you say and do matches all of your teachings, all of the content that you put out there. It's a congruent flow from, I've never heard of you before, heard of you. Now I know you exist. Now I consume all of your content. Now I'm much more educated and I actually know you as a person, or at least I think I know you as a person. Now I talk to you in real life. And it's the same. Everything's congruent throughout. Now I'm ready to hire you because you're the one that's provided me with all the information. So if you want to get really good at sales, not the actual technique, but if you want to have higher at-bats, if you want to be better at sales, then be better at teaching. Start teaching your clients how to do business. Teach your clients how to do business with you. Teach your clients what it's like to work for a professional contractor. See, whenever someone calls me or my clients and they say, well, we're getting multiple estimates. You're the first person we've called, Brad. We want to get multiple estimates. I'm not going to go on the defensive and be like, oh, well, I mean, we are the best. We've been doing this for 45 years and we got all these awards. No. I'm like, yeah, no problem. No problem. How many more are you going to get? Two more? Okay. How long do you think that's going to take you? A couple of weeks? No problem. Why don't we do this? I'll just circle back around with you in three weeks if I haven't heard back from you before then and we'll follow up. I don't care because the experience they just had with me, I've set the bar. I've set the standard. And we're doing things that most people aren't doing. So we're setting the standard super high. And then they go talk to the other contractor and he's like, I mean, we're pretty busy right now. Like, I'm not going to waste my time. How serious are you? I should have used my other voice.

And then they don't call back for, you know, they never give them an estimate. Right? Like, that's the comparison. amazing experience, okay experience, terrible experience. Who do you think they're going to come back to? They're going to come back to you who have not only gave them all of the information that they've been looking for, have providing tons of value through your teachings, had effective communication. I mean, it's a no-brainer, guys. It's a complete no-brainer. But if you remove all of the teaching aspect and you don't have any content, anything out there, now the first point of contact for them to you is the actual sales call. So now you have to try and provide all of the value of what you can do in that sales call. And it's a much more difficult situation to be in. It's still possible. You can still do it. But I'm telling you, it's 100 times easier. when you've already provided them with all of the value they've been looking for. You have a blog post on what the average cost of a bathroom remodel is. You have a blog post on how long it takes to do your project. You have a blog post on the top five features that you should have in your kitchen. And you have a blog post on what's the difference between natural stone and fake stone. You have all of these blog posts and or videos that you've created answering all of the questions that people already have. And so now you're the expert. They're coming to you because you're the expert. They're not coming to you because you're just another name on a list of contractors to call. Can you see the difference of positioning yourself in the marketplace? When you're the teacher, You're the expert. And this mindset of like, well, I don't want to tell people how to do stuff because then they won't call me. I don't want to tell them how to fix their leaky faucet because then they won't call me. That's like giving my work away. No, it's not. It's not. I cannot tell you how many, I mean, probably 30 times at least, at least 30 times someone called me and needed a repair. And I told them how to fix it over the phone. They were super grateful. And then later on, they called me back to fix something else or to hire, you know, to build something or whatever. Because I was helpful. I was the expert and the teacher. It blows my mind when I talk to contractors and it's like, I don't even have a website. I don't have anything. It's all about referrals, guys.

No, it's not all you need. Yes, referrals are good. Yes, I agree with you. They're good. But it's not the only way to have business. Most of the people that tell me that all you need is referrals are like one-man outfits. They may be a general contractor. They may be a carpenter. They do it themselves. They have one helper and they're only doing like 15 jobs a year. That's it. Well, if that's the case, then yeah, you don't need that many leads. But if you're trying to grow your business and you want to have high quality leads, you're going to need more than just referrals. So become a teacher in your industry. And I promise you, your sales will be 10 times easier. 10 times easier. On the back end here, I want to tell you some tips on what you can do to become a teacher. So one of the things you got to do about becoming a teacher is you got to get over the fear of like putting yourself out there. You just have to. Go look at my TikTok account. Scroll all the way up. There's hundreds of videos on there now. Scroll all the way up to like the very first videos that I did. They're nothing like they are today. Nothing. Go listen to my first podcast compared to today. they're not, there's really nothing comparable. Like it's almost night and day difference. If you go look at a lot of my content on my Facebook page where I make posts, early posts, pretty bad. Today posts, they're not great, but they're probably better. If you're always developing, you're always getting better. This idea that you're going to learn how to swim without getting wet by watching some YouTube videos is absolutely ridiculous. The way you learn how to swim is by getting in the water. The way you learn how to be a good teacher and how to put out content is to actually start doing it. One of the things I tell people in the profit club when they want to know about marketing is go live. It's the easiest thing you can do. When you show up at the job site, pull out your phone, go live. Hey, we're live here at the Johnson residence. We're live here on Main Street, redoing this bathroom. I just want to give you a quick update of what's going on. Like that's all you got to do. Is it going to suck the first time? Absolutely. Probably going to suck. I'm just telling you, get over it. Get over that fear of sucking. You know, a lot of professional like influencers and professional people that do this for a living have now have done a complete 180 where they started out, you know, with just a camera and they sucked. Then they went into full production development. paying for thousands of dollars per video. And now they've actually circled back around to just grabbing a phone and doing it because people have overproduced things and it takes away the authenticity of what the message is. And so a lot of people have gone back to actually just being completely raw. I did this in TikTok videos. I asked the audience, hey, do you guys like these polished videos with stuff or do you want me to do raw? The overwhelming majority was raw. We just want you to do raw videos. So I do those. I still do raw videos, but I also sprinkle in produced videos based on trends and based on different feedback and human behavior and so on and so on. But I'm always constantly testing to see what does best, right? And I can see that. The beauty about... Facebook and about blogs and about TikTok and everything else is that they track all of the data and you can see what works best. I get people in the Profit Club. We do a marketing call once a week. And one of the common questions is like, what's the best kind of social media post to make? And I'm like, you just test it. You put out 10 different types of social media posts. You test it, look at the results and see which one wins. And then the one that wins, you start doing that. And then maybe you can make, you can A-B split test it or you can try a variation and you put that winner up against nine new ones and you test it again. And maybe that first winner is not the winner this time. Maybe there's a new one that's a winner and you run, use that one as your control and you run nine more ads and you just keep reiterating this. Until you've refined it down to the perfect ad or the perfect content or type of content and you just run with it. That's it. That's all you got to do. You don't go on Google and it's like, what's the perfect post to put on Facebook? No, you guys, you just test it. You put it out there. You jump in the water and start swimming. And when you start swimming, you're flailing around because you don't know how to swim yet. But eventually you start figuring it out. But the biggest thing is taking action. You have to take action in order to get results. When I started running Facebook ads for coaching, because coaching is totally different than construction marketing. And I was talking to one of my coaches and he's like, how much money have you spent on ads? And I was like, oh, like a hundred bucks. He's like, dude, don't even come here and ask me for help until you spend at least a thousand dollars. You're not even doing anything. Like you have to spend the money. You have to collect the data so that you can see the trends. Some of you are going out there, you're tipping your toe in the water. Oh, it's cold. It's too cold. I can't do this. Right? Or you're dipping your toe in the water. I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm a swimmer now. I know how to swim. It's like, no, you haven't even done anything. Right? Like you have to actually go out and try stuff in order to get data back. So just start. The first step is just start. Go live. Just start. Write a blog post. You can use AI. Use ChatGPT now to write blog posts. I mean, people are just spitting out blog posts right and left now with ChatGPT. It's useful. It's kind of like cheating, but it's also useful if you do it right. It can also hurt you if you do it wrong. But regardless, just start doing it. The other thing is there's short form video and then there's blog posts. Right? And then you can do newsletters. You can send out email newsletters to your list, to your customers. Even people that didn't buy from you. If you have their list, you can send it out to them. Obviously, you got to follow specific spam laws and all that stuff. But you can send out a newsletter. I did a newsletter for a long time in my business. And every single time I put out a newsletter, I would get one or two people email me back and say, Hey, Brad, I need to get on your list. I need to get on your schedule. I got some work I need you to do. It was just sending out a newsletter of new things and new gadgets and what's going on and service spotlight. Here's a service that we offer. There's lots of ways that you can educate your clientele. And when you do that, it's going to make the sales process so easy. So tell stories, use short form video, upload it to YouTube, create channels there. You can put blog posts on your website. social media, post content and stuff on social media. It's better to master one channel than it is to halfway do stuff on multiple channels. So if you're limited on time, pick one channel, whatever channel that most of your clients are on, pick that one channel, that one medium, and do really good at that. And then if you kind of... get that under control and you got it figured out and you can create systems and processes to make it super easy, then you can add another channel. But don't go out there and start a YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and blog all at the same time and think you're going to do all of those at once. It's not going to happen. You'll get burnt out so fast it's not even funny. You can also multi-purpose or repurpose stuff. So you could do a YouTube video. A 10 to 15,20-minute YouTube video on the pros and cons of using natural stone versus man-made stone in your landscaping project. And that goes on YouTube. And then you take that video and you chop it up into like 10 or 15 short-form videos. You already recorded the content. You chop it up in a short form video and then you post those on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. And then you can take that same video and you can even transcribe it. There's software that does it automatically. You can transcribe the whole video and turn that into a blog post. Or you can just take the link from your YouTube video and then embed that on a blog post. So when they go to the blog post, there's a video they click on, which takes them to your YouTube channel. Either way, You can record one piece of content and use it in 6,7,10,15 different places. And it only took you one 10,15-minute video. That's how you start getting smart about how to use your information out there to leverage your time and energy. But the key thing, guys, become a teacher in your market. If people don't know that you're the guy or gal... then you haven't done enough of educating. You just haven't. So take that and plug it in. Take action on it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to the comments and I want you to tell me what's the thing you're going to take action on. How are you going to become a teacher? Just tell me one thing. Are you going to start a blog? Are you going to start doing videos? What are you going to do to become the teacher in your town? Let me know in the comments. Shoot me a message. You know, if you're watching a clip of this or whatever, post on that, reply to it. I don't care. Smoke messages, you know, snail mail. Just send me a message and let me know what you're going to do to take action today to become a teacher. That's all I got for today, guys. Thanks for hanging out. That's sales secret number one. Become a teacher in your space. You know where to find me? Instagram, TikTok. Facebook, search for the Hammer Grind Podcast. And remember, until next time, guys, profit is not a dirty word.