Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to be here. We've had a lot of interviews coming up and we got a lot more scheduled. We're going to do a little solo cast on this one because I want to talk about something that's really important to the sales process and a lot of guys get this wrong. It's the simple concept of less is more. I don't know what it is about this specific topic that contractors, they really struggle with this. But every time I have a new client come into the program and we start going through some sales training, almost every single one has to work on this. And it's just a matter of, it's just talking too much. And so we have this, I call it the grandma rule. Our grandmother, adults, parents. grandparents all used to say you got two ears and one mouth for a reason. Well, this is so true because listening is 10 times more important than talking. But for contractors, we believe that the more useless knowledge and crap that we spew out of our mouth, the smarter that people will think we are and that they'll hire us because we're so talented and so knowledgeable and all this other nonsense. The reality of it is Most people like to hear themselves talk, but also they also want to be the center of attention, right? So when you're talking to your clients, you should not be talking more than 30% of the time. Now, I say clients, I use the words clients and prospect and leads and customers. I use all those kind of interchangeably. In this situation, I'm talking about leads, right? Like not people that haven't actually purchased from you yet. When you're doing sales calls with them. but it extends past that. It extends into the conversation after the sale. And this, you know, what we're talking about here, this process of shutting your mouth, because that's what we're talking about is like basically keeping your mouth shut as long as possible. It applies to your relationships. It applies to anything that you deal with. Employees. leaders, management, kids, wife, you know, spouse, husband, whatever, it applies across the board. It's a fundamental tool than what we call as a tool. It's a tool of the trade as what we call it in the, in the profit club. But one of these tools is what we call the art of silence, where you just like stop talking, like just shut your mouth and listen. Right. And so again, talk less. And this is another principle that comes into this is what I posted in the free group article. It's tell me more. And I'll get into that here in a second. But basically, you want to give people the least amount of information needed for their brain to process what you just said. And then use the fewest amount of words required to convey with them the idea and to have a conversation. So we always say with the grandma rules, two ears, one mouth for reason, but really you should be talking no more than 30% of the time and your customer should be talking 70% of the time. And it's hard to understand this concept. It really is, but it truly is how you provide more value. My clients and myself, we have conversations where we talk 30% of the time. And they talk 70% of the time and we close the deal. And there's times where we're talking 70% of the time and the customer's talking 30% of the time and we don't close the deal. Okay. And this has been proven time after time after time with my clients and conversations because we talk about these in the profit club. We go over sales calls. They record their conversations. They'll send them to me. I'll listen to it. I'll give them feedback. We do live role plays in the group. Like we dive deep. deep, deep, deep into sales, the philosophy, the principles, all of it. It's a complete masterclass in sales. And the guys who have gone on and have embraced this completely have set record revenue sales in their business. Like the stuff works, right? I can give you case studies. I can give you testimonials. I can give you all the data that you want to prove to you that this stuff works. And here's the best part about it. It's easy. It's easier. Like it's easier to talk less than it is to talk more. Who wouldn't want to just sit there and ask like seven, eight,12 questions, do a couple of mirrors, a couple of labels. And then at the end, you sell a $30,000 job. You sell a $100,000 job or more. Like who wouldn't want that scenario? But for whatever reason, we got to puke our immense amount of knowledge all over people. And I've seen contractors literally lose the job because they talked too much. Because the lead, the prospect, was just sick and tired of hearing you talking. And so they just want to get off the phone or they just want to get out of that meeting if you're in person. So guys, you don't need to talk more. And I don't know really how to justify or prove that to you, but you just, you don't need to talk more. Right? And so when we do our training. I always say like, don't go technical because this is what we want to do. This is our comfort zone. This is where we live. This is our confidence lies in technical. If you were a, an electrician and you know, I'm a client and I call you up and say, Hey, we have, you know, we're wanting to get a backup generator installed in our house, you know, so that when we lose power, we have our, you know, our refrigerator and air conditioner or whatever it is that we want, you know, powered on. And we're wanting to get an estimate from you. And you instantly go into, well, yeah, well, we have six different types of generators. We have the 600XL and the 300X and the 150L. And, you know, this one does this many watts and this one puts out this much power and this and that. And you start spitting out technical knowledge. If we're in person, I'm just going to look at you dumbfounded and be like nodding my head and go, oh, OK, yeah, sure. OK, yeah, that makes. OK, sure. That's great. Have no idea what you're talking about. No clue. But you thinking that it's going to add value because you know all of this information does not add value. It actually removes value from the conversation because what's happening is you're now making me feel stupid because you're talking in a manner of the way you feel like I should know this information. And so if I don't know this information, I'm going to feel really dumb if I'm like, uh, uh, Brad, I don't know what you're talking about. And so you literally create a situation to where you're making your clients feel dumb. The other thing that ties into this is what I call the curse of knowledge. I didn't come up with that. It's a real thing. It's called the curse of knowledge. But that's where, because you're surrounded in that every single day, you start to lose the reality that most people have no idea what you're talking about. Right. I mean, I could go down a rabbit hole talking about firearms and guns and this and reloading and what grain of bullet you should have, how many grains of gunpowder. And I can go down this rabbit hole of firearm stuff because I'm knowledgeable in that. And most of you wouldn't have a clue what I'm talking about. Right. Like, because that, I mean, I know that, but if I'm talking about it every single day, I may talk to someone who knows how to shoot guns. Maybe they go, oh yeah, we, you know, I go to the range once a week and I'm like, oh, you're a firearms guy. So you know exactly what it's like to reload bullets and you know, what type of poundage on a recoil spring. And they're like, no, I know. I mean, I just go shoot. I don't really know anything about guns. Right. And so the curse of knowledge is like, because you're in that every single day, you just kind of naturally start to think that everyone knows the same thing you do. And this also applies to when you hire people, especially no people or not no new people. It's N E W not K N O W. When you hire new people because you've been doing it for 15 years, your memory of what it took for you to learn that stuff is vastly jaded. And so like it may have taken you three to five years to really understand everything about your trade. But in your mind, you learned it in one year. And so you're like, well, this new guy should just learn it in one year. It's like, yeah, that's not reality. If you could go back and measure, it took you like, you know, three to five years. And so all of this knowledge, this curse of knowledge really plagues us in the sales process because we feel like we got to puke this information all over the client. And so a lot of times what happens in the sales call is if we're having a conversation and I say, you know, so John, tell me, what do you want to have done in this project? And he's like, well, you know, we really want to have tile floor. We know that. And we were thinking about getting a heated tile floor. My wife really wants to get a heated tile floor, but we don't know anything about that, you know, if it's worth it or not. And then your eyes get real big and you're like, okay, you're thinking to yourself, here's my moment to shine. And you're like, what's that? I think it's Jim Carrey in one of his movies. He like takes a deep breath and then like spits out this three minute long, you know, response. And that's like, I'm picturing that. of what contractors are doing and they go into it and they go well let me tell you about tile floor heating first off and you know that just goes into this 15 minute tirade about all the pros and cons of tile floor heating and the different types and benefits and blah blah blah and all i was asking as a customer is does it really keep the floor warm or is it just kind of a You know, does it heat the house? It's like, is it going to heat the room or does it just keep the tile warm? Like that may be all I wanted to know. And you went down this tirade of, you know, dissertation of puking all over me about, you know, all the different types and, you know, how much it costs and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, dude, I didn't want to know all that information. I just want to know, like, is it worth it? If it's just going to keep the tile warm, then I don't want to do it. But if it's actually going to heat the room, then yeah, that makes sense. We might be interested. This is what I'm talking about. Like, don't give too much information. Like, give just enough. And then on the back end of that, if they want more information, they will ask you. And so the post that I made this week in my free group was about tell me more. And I learned this many years ago. I went on a mission trip with my church, and it was a construction trip where we went overseas and we built some stuff. And the very first trip that I went to was to. uh, Krasnodar, Russia. And we were working on this, um, this building that was going to be used for a Bible leadership group. And so anyways, when I got back from that trip, it was my first trip I ever went on, you know, it was life changing. It was. amazing experiences and, you know, emotional about it, trying to unpack everything. And when you get back, you're very excited about it and you want to tell everyone. And so someone who knew you went on this trip may say, Hey, Brad, you know, you see him at, maybe you saw him at church, maybe you saw him at work or whatever. You're like, Hey, Brad, how was that trip? You're like, Oh man, let me tell you all about it. This was absolutely amazing. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you got to go on this. It was life changing. And I go on this 15 minute speech and the whole time they're like, looking at their watch and looking at the ground and like, oh yeah, okay. Oh yeah. Deer in the headlights look and like, oh, you know, I'm sorry, man. I didn't mean to cut you off, but I got to go. I got to go take care of something. The reality of it is they didn't care. They didn't actually care about all the stuff about your trip. And so after I did that a couple of times, I was talking to one of the guys in the, that went on the trip with me. Cause we were having like a debrief afterwards. And they said, you know, Because this this person, I don't remember who it was, but this person had been on several trips. He's like, you know, you experienced something that was unique to you. And, you know, it was moving and emotional and life changing. But to them, it's just no it's no different than like going to the movies. Right. And so the best thing you can do when someone asks you about like, how was your trip? Is you just give them a one sentence reply of like, it was a really great trip. I really enjoyed it. Hey, just a quick time out from the show. In the next 30 seconds, I'm going to tell you exactly how you can transform your contracting business.
