A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. 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. All right. Welcome back to the Hammer and Grind podcast. This is episode number 128. Sales secret number two. Attack! Guys, you have to attack at sales. Sales is not an inbound activity. Sales is an outbound activity. It blows my mind. I go on these Facebook posts all the time and I see contractors saying, hey, has anyone noticed the phone slowed down a little bit right now? And then you get the 47 comments. Yeah, the economy's starting to tank. We're going into recession, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All fear-based scarcity mindset stuff. It's all a bunch of bull crap. Your results are directly related to your input. Your output. in terms of what you get is related to the input. So in data, in terms, in like computer terms, you have an input and an output. Whatever you put into the data spits out a second, you know, an output. Guys, if you want to 10x the amount of leads that you get, the amount of sales that you make, you have to 10x the amount of output, right? You don't just open the doors, throw a magnet on your truck, and then all of a sudden... The universe delivers and you get 20 leads a week. That is not how it happens ever. Now, if you're the secret unicorn, the special once-in-a-lifetime unicorn phenomenon, then let me know. Maybe you have something special. But for 99.9% of us, it does not happen. I started my business in 2009 right in the heart of the recession. People were leaving the business, contractors were... exiting construction at a high rate. And I thought that'd be a good idea to start a construction business. And so I went into that and having to deal with one, learning how to run a business and two, learning how to sell when there's not very many leads to even begin with. So you have to understand that the amount of leads coming in is directly proportional to the amount of output you do. Now, inevitably, almost every single time, probably 100% of the time, actually. When I say you can't rely on referrals, there's somebody that comes in and says, well, I've been in business for 35 years and all I ever did was referrals. That's great. I'm happy for you. That's great. You started back before phones existed and everything was done by word of mouth. That is not true today. Now, do you want to get to the point to where you have referrals coming in? Absolutely. Are referrals the best type of lead to get? Absolutely. But you cannot scale a business. You cannot rely 100% on referrals. If you do that, if your only source of leads is referrals, then what you're saying is I put 100% of my livelihood and my business into other people's hands because you have zero control on how to get the phone to ring. When people says, I rely on referrals, I say, great, go out and get me 10 referrals today. Make it happen. I want you to give me 10 referrals today. Well, I mean, I can't do that. Yeah, because you can't deliver leads. on demand. That is the whole purpose of marketing. That's the whole purpose of branding. The whole purpose of having a business is to make money. And the way you make money is by selling jobs. And the way you sell jobs is by having leads. And the way you get leads is by marketing. It's a circle. It's circular. It's crazy how that works. You cannot simply rely on others to carry your business. If you're a subcontractor, and you rely on general contractors to provide you with work, you're putting 100% of your business in the hands of someone else. How do you get past that? Well, if you're a subcontractor, you go out and you get more general contractors to work for. Maybe you only need four to keep you busy, but you have relationships with 20. And they may call you and everyone's calling you and you're busy. Hey, I'm six months out. Okay, they don't use you on this one. But in three months, whenever everyone else is dead, this other one needs somebody still and now you're available. Right? That's how you combat this. Oh, the phone stopped ringing. I don't get it. I opened my business and during COVID time, the phone started ringing right off the hook. Now it's starting to slow down. I don't understand. It's because you didn't put any effort into actually marketing your business. So sales, and you're saying, well, Brad, this is not a sales secret. This is a marketing secret. No, it is a sales secret. Because sales is an outbound activity. There's a whole reason why they have cold calling as sales. There's a whole reason why there's door-to-door salesmen. It's an outbound activity. When you go to the gas station, Are you starting a conversation with the guy on the other side of the pump? Hey, man, is the gas any cheaper on that side over there? Ha ha ha ha ha. No, unfortunately, it's not. Man, I wish there was some magic pill to make this thing work. By the way, I'm Brad. I own a so-and-so construction. How are you doing? How's your day going? That's a simple outbound activity. They used to say, hand out five business cards a day. I don't give out business cards anymore. But it's still the same type of activity as starting conversations with people. You have to be an extrovert in that situation, even if you are an introvert. Oh, Brad, I can never do that. I don't like talking to people. Well, then why are you in business? Because that's the number one skill you need as a business owner is communication. And if you're just absolutely terrible at it, then hire a salesman. But sales is an outbound activity. then in sports they say the best defense is a good offense. It's true. If your offense is so good and you score five touchdowns per quarter, the other team, no matter how good their defense is, if you dominate their defense with your offense, your defense could suck pretty bad as long as they can hold them to a certain extent. You just score so many points that they can't even catch up. So offense is always a good defense, no matter what it is. And so offense and sales is getting leads to come in. It's getting leads to come in. The reason why you want so many leads is because now you get to pick and choose. You get to pick and choose on who you do business with. When you need five leads a month, when you need five sales a month, and you only have five leads a month, You either have to accept the job that comes in on their terms or not get enough sales. That's the option. You either accept them what they are. They may be jobs you don't like to do. They may be for people you don't want to work for. It may be in locations you don't want to go to. But you have to because you need five sales and you only got five leads versus you need five sales and you got 25 leads. Now I get to be a little more picky and choosy. Is that a word? Picky and choosy? Now you get to pick and choose what you want, right? One of my clients, he has done very well. He raises prices, makes a crap ton of money. He works even less than he's ever worked in his life. And he has a great business. And his closing rate is 4%. It's 4% because he's so expensive that 96% of the people don't want to pay that much money. But because he has so many leads coming in, he's still booked out for six months or so, five, six months. So when you're in, that's a good position to be in. All you have to do now is put a good sales process in place to pre-qualify people. You can do things by adding more friction to the sales process. The answer is and never won't and never will be, get less leads. Because the number one thing I get, well, I don't want to get more leads because I can't call them back. I can't handle it. I don't have enough time as it is. I can't go out and look at every job. Well, then don't. Don't go out and look at every job. Put a pre-qualification process in place. It only takes you 20 minutes to qualify someone. Would you rather spend 20 minutes on the phone qualifying someone and then getting paid to go out and do the estimate? Or would you rather go and spend two hours doing a free estimate only to find out that they're not going to hire you anyways? 20 minutes or two hours? If you had 10 leads to pre-qualify and you could spend 20 minutes per lead or you spent two hours per lead, which one of those scenarios would you want to do? And why would you want it to be the 20 minutes? Because that is the only answer. That's the only answer. So whenever you learn how to pre-qualify people and you put the sales process in place, now you can handle more leads coming in. which is where you want to be. Not only that, is that when you start understanding your clients and you can start seeing who it is that you want to work for, now you can start positioning yourself in the marketplace as someone who only caters to that type of people. But you have to have more at-bats, right? The professional baseball players have like a 300 batting average. That's good. That's considered good. They get three hits out of 10,30%, basically. And if you do sales correctly in your business, you're going to have somewhere between 20% and 30% on average. Guys are in Facebook groups bragging about how they have a 90% close rate. It's like, dude, if you have a 90% close rate, you are way too cheap. Way too cheap. Well, I'm not trying to rip people off. Okay. I'm not going down that road again. Either you're in business to make money or you're not. If you don't want to make money, then go work for someone else or go work for a charity. Start a charity, start a nonprofit, and go do that. Stop running your business like a charity instead of being charitable. I had a conversation just today with a contractor. He's complaining that he doesn't make any money when he does certain types of jobs. Other types of jobs, he makes really good money. And I'm like, well, I don't want to be Captain Obvious here, but why don't you just do... the jobs that make you the most money. I don't know. I guess I never thought about it. I guess I never really tried. I never tried going after those. All the guys really like doing that type of job. And when they do, they do really well. Whenever we do this other type of job, we lose money. It takes longer. They don't know what they're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, from my perspective, it's pretty simple. You just do that one type of job and that's it. You don't do everything else because that's what leads come in. Right? So you have to position yourself in the marketplace to only cater to one type of client that you want and type of service that's going to be most beneficial. It's going to be the most profitable. When you charge more, you don't have to work as more. It's easier to get off the tools. You have more time available to work on your business. So when you charge more, it allows you to do more things. And when you charge more, you're going to lose more clients because people don't want to pay as much. And therefore, you need more leads, which is why you go on the attack. You should always be attacking. In business, you're either growing or you're dying. There is no sustaining. There's tons of books on this. This topic has been proven factual. You don't get to a certain place in your business and just stay there. And then you're like, oh, this is a sweet spot. I'll just stay here. Doesn't happen. It may last for five years. It may last 10 years. Eventually, though, it's going to break. It doesn't work. Scalability. It doesn't work. You have to always be scaling your business. And that doesn't mean like hiring more people per se, but scaling it in the sense of adding revenue. It can mean adding more people, but you're either growing or you're dying. There's no difference. You can't stay in the middle. You have to grow or die. That's it. So if you know you need to grow, then you need to be on the attack all the time. And that can include B &I groups, networking groups, cold calling, referral sources. I call it dialing for dollars. Talking to people in the public. You go to a friend's party. I'll help you guys out here. You're at a party. You don't know anybody. You walk up to someone. Hey, how you doing? My name's Brad. Hey, what's up? I'm Chris. So what do you like doing for work? Right? Something like that. What do you do for work? Oh, I'm an accountant. Oh, really? What type of accounting do you do? You just start asking them questions. You just start making it about them. You're not waiting for them to ask you. They will eventually, but you're trying to make it about them. Oh, what kind of accounting do you do? I do mostly corporate accounting. Do you work for a company or do you have your own practice? No, I work for a company. Oh, which company do you work for? I work for Shoe Carnival. Oh, okay. So you're on staff there. You handle all of their accounting. Do you do everything or just specific types of accounting? Like accounts payable? No, I do cost accounting for this and blah, blah, blah. Oh, how long you been there? How long you been an accountant? Where'd you go to college at? Did you go to college? Which one's your wife here? Who's your wife? Who's your kids? Right? It's not that hard to have a conversation with people. Eventually, they're going to want to ask what you do. Oh, I own a construction company. I own a landscaping company. By the way, you don't say I'm a landscaper. I'm an electrician. I'm a drywaller. I'm a painter. I'm a carpenter. It's I own an electrician, an electrical company. I own a landscaping company. I own... a carpentry company. I own a remodeling company because you're an owner. You're not a tradesman anymore. Stop thinking like a tradesman. Stop acting like a tradesman. Start acting like a business owner. Start having conversations like a business owner. So you're not a carpenter. You own a carpentry company. Even if you're the only person that does it. I own a carpentry business. That's just a little sidebar tip there. But being on the attack. So you need to be able to create sales and turn it on and off like a faucet. And again, you're saying, well, that's a marketing thing. It is tied to marketing, but you create your own sales by being on the offensive. So yes, you can run ads. That's a marketing output, but you can also create sales by calling old clients. That's an outbound activity. You call your clients that you did work for 11 months ago. Hey, Sally, this is Brad. Just reaching out to see how you're doing. I want to let you know that your one-year worksmanship warranty is going to be expiring next month. And we want to come out there and inspect everything. Make sure everything's up to par so that once the one year's up, we don't have any issues. Oh, that'd be great. Yeah, absolutely. Come on out. Or no, we're actually... Everything's great. Everything's great. I'm glad you called, though. Because we have another project that we want to get an estimate on. That stuff happens. That's creating a sale through an outbound activity. That person may have actually forgot your name. Newsflash, guys. Newsflash. Just because you go do work for somebody and you spend two months in their house does not mean they remember you. They literally can forget who you are. They can forget the name of your business. They can forget your name. So just because you did work, you know, you spent two months in their house and that was a year and a half ago or 11 months ago does not mean they remember you. People forget. I don't remember the names of the technicians that came out and serviced my heating and air company. I don't remember their names, right? I may not remember the person that pressure washed my driveway two years ago. Like, you just can't assume that people know these things. So you reach out to them. You have a newsletter. You have an email newsletter. You have all kinds of outbound. You send direct mail twice a year. There's all kinds of things you can do. But calling someone is an outbound sales activity. You're cold calling realtors and general contractors and other subcontractors and people in your industry who you can share work with. That's an outbound activity. So you have to be on the attack at all times. You don't go, oh, wait a minute. I got too many leads coming in. I'm not going to pursue any relationships anymore. I'm not going to interact with my networks anymore because I have too many leads. No, that's where you want to be. You want to have too many leads. Yes, you're going to be like, oh, it's overwhelming. But I promise you, if you have the choice between having too many leads, and not having enough leads, you will always pick too many leads. So why wouldn't you want to be there anyways? So put yourself in that position by always being on the attack. Anything sales, always on the attack. You call someone or someone calls you, hey, we want an estimate on a bathroom. Cool, you do the estimate. They say you're too expensive, right? Okay, we're going to get another estimate. They ghost you or whatever. They say, no, we're not going to do it right now. We're going to hire somebody else. No problem. Three months later, email goes out. Hey, Sally, it's Brad. Have you given up on your project? Three things. Have you given up on your project? Haven't heard back from you. You only mean one of three things. You found somebody else to do the job and I should stop bugging you. Two, life has gotten in the way and you're still interested. Or three, you've fallen and can't get up. In that case, let me know I'm starting to worry. You send out that email,90 to 95% response rate. No, actually, I'm glad you emailed. We have decided to wait. We've been waiting and we were going to reach out to you and have you come out and look at everything again so we can get started on this. Or yes, we hired somebody else. By the way, that's called follow-up. I would guess maybe 90% or greater. of you do not have any type of follow-up process in your sales process. And an overwhelming majority of sales comes through the follow-up. I have some of you listening to this may have been getting messaged by one of my new team members, Julio. He's reaching out to everybody that has ever contacted us or gotten any kind of information from us. He's reaching out to you guys to see if there's anything else we can do for your business. That's a follow-up process. Because we want to make sure that we're getting you the right information. Because we want you to be successful. Julio is my contractor success liaison. I brought him on board just to make sure you guys are having success in your business. And his job is to get you the resources that you may need. Whether it's a worksheet or some information or a call with me or even possibly getting coaching. It's his job to make sure you have the information so that you can be successful. That is an outbound sales process. He's 100% dedicated to reaching out, doing outbound sales, essentially. Now, he's not selling anything. He's not the one that's going to sell you anything. Even if you said, yeah, I want to sign up, he can't do that. I have to do that. But his job is to make sure you have the information, right? Because the follow-up is so important. It's so critical. It's an outbound activity. So I don't know how else to say you need to continue to do outbound activity and always be on the attack. I mean, I could say it like 15 different ways, but basically you need to always be on the attack. It's pretty straightforward. Always be on the attack with sales activities. Every week. You should be doing something in your business that's an outbound activity. Calling past clients, handing out business cards, going to lunch with an influencer, cold calling referral sources, some type of outbound sales activity to ensure that your business is going to be here 20 years from now. That's all I got on this episode, guys. Thanks for hanging out with me. do me a favor, go and leave a review for the podcast. Let me know how it's going. I'm still curious because last week you would have heard the podcast I did with Doug and his business. It was kind of a coaching podcast. And I want to still get your feedback. If you haven't listened to that podcast, by the way, go back. It's 127. It's a very good podcast and it dropped last week. Go back and listen to it. Leave me a review. Let me know if you like that type of interview because I'll do more of them. And if you want to be in the hot seat, let me know. More than happy to bring you on. You get some free coaching out of it and I'll try to help you in your business. So leave me a review. Reach out to me. Comment. Tell me how it's going. What you like, don't like. I appreciate you. And you know where to find me. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. Search for the Hammer and Grind Podcast. And remember until next time, Profit is not a dirty word.
