EP40: Have You Audited Your Sales Process?

absolutely. Dude, I was nine years in, I thought I was a good salesman. And then I started getting some real sales training and realized that I was not a very good salesman. I mean, I'm a very trustworthy person. And so if I get in front of people, I tend to close deals. But what I also realized was that I wasn't charging enough. So it's easy to be a good salesman when you don't charge enough. When you're the cheapest guy out of three or five, and they trust you the most. that's an easy sell. Yeah. Right? Like all day long, you could do that. But once you start raising your prices and now you're the most expensive guy out of three or five, you have to be a little bit better at your sales game.

You're right. Well, yeah, a lot better for sure. Yeah. So why don't you share, Eric, why we're talking about this today and kind of what the experience we've had just literally in the past week.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, but what the series that got a lot of traction was on, you probably suck at sales if, right? And so you started asking serious parts of questions.

Yeah, I got them written down here. I can just go through them real quick and then we'll hit on each one. So we had free. If you use the word free in your marketing or in your sales, if you negotiate against yourself, if you talk too much whenever you're talking with the prospect, if you... don't have all the decision makers present whenever you're talking or when you go out to look at the job. If you ask your prospects for their budget. And then lastly, we had on here was if you talk poorly about your competition. Now, clearly, these are not all the things that you could do wrong. There's dozens and dozens of things that you could do wrong in your sales process. But these are the ones that we did, or I should say you did TikToks on, and we got quite a bit of response. Some of it was actually, we thought we were going to get a lot more hate from it, but we actually got a lot more people agreeing with you, which was kind of shocking, Eric.

Yeah. So let's start with free. This is huge in construction, right? Free estimates, free estimates. I see them on the side of trucks, on their website. Free estimates, free estimates, free estimates. Every time I see that, I want to punch myself in the face because it drives me nuts. But what's wrong with the word free? Why can't you use the word free?

Dude, if you're free, who wouldn't take advantage of that, right? If I'm going to get a remodel done and I'm looking for some contractors and I call one and he wants to charge me $500 to come out and I see another one and he gives me a free estimate, why wouldn't I want to call the free guy? I mean, it doesn't cost me anything. Right. So when you do that, you're basically training your customers that you don't value your own time.

Sure. I mean, like you said, if you have a qualifying... I mean, we do free estimates, but we do them over the phone, right? Free budgets, if you will. I mean, that's how we do that, but we don't market it as free. The thing is, is that I've always been told, and I don't remember where I saw this, but you should never do coupons because people who... use coupons are people who look for deals and they're only using you because they're getting a deal. Now, some people may argue and say, well, it's still work. If I'm charging my normal rates and I'm getting my normal price and I do a coupon, why does it matter? And we could argue that and there's some validity there and I'm not going to get into it. But overall, when you discount, you're going to get people who look for discounts. It's that simple.

Exactly. So that's why we said you probably shouldn't use free. Listen, I already know what's going to happen. There's always exceptions to everything, right? But what happens is people want to think they're the exception. Everyone believes that they're the exception to the rule. And the reality is most of you are not the exception. So don't hang your hat on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I did a free thing one time and I got 10 customers and that's great. That's not what happens across the board. So don't hang your hat on that. You're not the exception. Trust me. Eric might be the exception. That's just because of his looks, but you're not the exception. Hey, I'm getting old.

Number two, negotiate with yourself. Now this one, this one blew up big time. Right. If you negotiate with yourself. Yeah. Why don't you explain that a little bit?

Yeah, I was actually shocked at the number of people that were like, yeah, why do I feel attacked? And this is me. And how can I stop doing this? So I think this one is probably, if I had to guess, this one is probably the number one thing that most contractors do that costs them the most profit. besides not knowing what they should charge, right? But if they do know what they should charge, they negotiate against themselves. And literally every job, they're cheating themselves out of money.

You know, I think the overwhelming, I mean, there's, again, there's exceptions, but I think the most. contractors who are craftsmen. For them, an ideal job would be like, hey, we want this thing done and we don't care what it costs. Take as long as you need, do it the right way. And then the contractor is like, I can make this perfect. I can spend more time. I'm not pressured by time or money or any of this stuff. That would be the ideal situation to work in, correct? But we had one person comment. He goes, yeah, my dad does this all the time. And then... The whole time we're working on the job, he's complaining that we got to hurry up because we're not going to make any money. And that's the story of almost every contractor and every comment that's on there.

So that's why, you know, negotiate against yourself. And here's the thing too, Eric, it might be a $10,000 project. You sell for $8,900. The customer was expecting it to be $12,000.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And they're like, oh, $8,900. That's a great deal. That's cool.

And here's what happens to, especially if it's like a fixed type of job where it's like the same job every time. What are they going to tell their friends? Right? Oh, yeah. I mean, we had three other contractors come out. One was 15, one was 12. And then this guy did it for $8,900, did an awesome job. Now... He's going to tell all his buddies, you're going to get five new referrals from them. And now you got five jobs where people want you to do it for $8,900.

Yeah, absolutely. So the next one was, you know, talking too much. And I mean, there's some good information here, but basically what we do is we want to go on, either whether it's on the phone or in person, we just start puking at the mouth, right? We just start puking all over our customers. You know, I'm great. I've been doing this for so long and I'm all these awards and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like we've said before, you know, grandma's wisdom, there's two ears and one mouth for a reason. So, you know, when you talk too much, you basically are shooting yourself in the foot.

Yeah, I think you stole that from me, actually.

No, you're right. I think I brought it up one time and then you stole it from me. That's all right, though. I got a copyright on it. You'll get a letter from my lawyer. Oh, shit.

The next one was decision makers. You know, going out and looking at a job and... And they're like, oh, yeah, it sounds great. Now I just got to talk to my wife. Like, that's the worst.

Yeah. I mean, that's how many times you get caught in someone's like wishful thinking. Right? Like the wife wants a new kitchen and she says, could we, can we get a new kitchen? And the husband's like, well, get some estimates and we'll see where the price is at and then we'll talk about it. Right? And then you go out there and you meet with the wife and you spend like six hours doing an estimate and all that stuff. And then you give them a price and the husband's like, yeah, there's no way. We're not, that's, we're no, there's no way we're doing that.

I haven't seen that one. I'll have to go look for it. Need to have a take my Hope Island video and play it for him. No kidding. Next one was asking about budget. Right? If you ask your prospect what their budget is, you probably suck at sales.

I saw the one, the lady was like, can you tell us how to respectfully, you know, ask the contractor for a cheaper price or something like that?

The asking for budget.

I like the ones that are like, I get, I win 99% of my bids. I'm like, I can guarantee you you're too cheap. I can guarantee it. Yeah.

yeah. Unless you have just a... Unless you're the only one that does that thing and it's high demand. But the thing about asking for budget is that you can ask for budgets. Sure. You can legitimately ask for budgets and get a budget and sell the job. So it's not a... It is a little tricky because it's not... If you ask for a budget, then you've ruined the sale. That's not what it is. But what happens when you ask for budgets is you put people on the defensive. You make them uncomfortable. Because what happens is everyone thinks you're going to, you know, if the job's going to be $15,000 and they tell you their budget's $20,000, then you're going to say, oh, well, coincidentally, the job's going to be $20,000. And in reality, it's only $15,000. Like that's what every consumer believes whenever they give budgets. Because we've all heard the, well, we don't really know what our budget is. We're kind of hoping to get a price from you. That's a lie. I mean, that is a lie. Everyone has a number in their head. What I would do before I started giving my price first is if I said, Eric, what's your budget? And you're like, well, I don't really have a budget. You know, we're trying to figure it out. And I'd be like, well, everybody has a number. I mean, if I told you it was going to be $100,000, you know, you'd probably be say no. Like, oh yeah, yeah. No, there's no way. Yeah, we're not. We definitely wouldn't pay $100,000. And I'm like, yeah. So see, everybody's got a number. I mean, where are you guys wanting to be at? And then they would kind of begrudgingly say, well. We don't really want to be more than 15, which is probably not even true then. It's probably like 20, but they're holding back money because they don't want to give me the full amount. That's what people do. Not everybody, but that's what a lot of people do. So when you learn how to give your... This is what we say. Give your price to get their price. If I tell you that the project's going to be about $18,000 and you were willing to spend $20,000... then we can have a conversation after that, right? Because now it's not a matter of me trying to take all your money. Yeah.

Yeah, the other thing on this too, Eric, I saw comments were like, oh, I just start high and then work my way down. That's confirming what the consumer is assuming. Exactly. Don't freaking do that. Yeah. I mean, just give your price. If the price is 15, that's your price. Is it negotiable? No, not unless we change the scope. Right. Like it's not, well, it's 15, but if you pay cash, I'll do it for 14, five. I mean, I'm not getting into the cash thing, but I'm just using it as an example of negotiation. The number you give is not a starting point. As a contractor, when you're giving your number to a customer. That should not be a starting point for negotiations. Now, the number, the final number may change. Don't get me wrong, depending on the scope of work. Sure. But if I'm telling you, Eric, this job is a $20,000 job and you're like, oh man, that's way more than what I thought. Well, we could probably do it for 16. And 16 was my number to begin with. Don't do that.

Yeah. I would say if I had to guess, just based on the comments that we got, probably 80% of the contractors screw themselves. You know, and maybe 20% or maybe 5% screw the customer. And there's a 10% in there that actually know where they're supposed to be or whatever that percentage is,15%.

We've said it before, Eric. They haven't been to contractor school. They don't go to contractor school. Yeah. They're craftsmen. They know how to do their craft. They don't know how to sell. They don't know how to know the numbers and all that stuff. So, the budget one's tricky. And I want to clarify one thing so there's no misconception that when we talk about like... the number. When we give pricing over the phone, we give ballpark prices and we use high anchors. So I may say, Eric, this bathroom that you're wanting to have done, you know, it could be as much as 30,000 or as little as 20,000 because I'm giving you a ballpark. I'm not giving you a hard number, right? But what a lot of contractors are doing is they're not... pre-qualifying on the phone. They're going out and looking at the job and they're giving them a number, like an actual estimate to the customer. And they're telling the customer, this is going to be $20,000. And then they're saying, well, that's too much. Can we come down? And they're like, yeah, we could probably do it for like 16. Like they're changing their actual hard estimate number. And what I'm talking about is like giving ballparks over the phone. Those are two different things and don't get them confused.

The last one actually is talk poorly about your competition.

Well, there were lots of comments that were like, well, I don't do it unless they ask me about so-and-so and then I'll tell them they suck. Yeah, I don't

Yeah, that's so funny. I'm not going to lie to them.

Yeah, I used to, I learned the hard way because I'd go in and like say it was a shower or something, tile that was tiled poorly or incorrectly and they want to fix it. And I'd be like, man, whoever did this shower did a terrible job. And the customer would be like, well, I did it myself.

Yeah, insert foot in mouth. And so what I've realized now, not now, but what I realized learning this was that you just don't talk bad about them. Now, if they ask you a direct question, like we hired so-and-so and they came out here and they did this specific thing, is this up to code? Is what they did up to code? Right? Now, I may answer that. Well, technically, it's not to code. But it's not terrible either. You know what I'm saying? Like, I may answer a direct question like that. But I'm not going to say, no, this ain't up to code. Those guys are a bunch of hack jobs. And I don't even know why they're still in business.

Oh, that's brutal. Was he mad after that?

I've done stuff where I've taken pictures of something in our video and be like, hey, this, you know. This is not the way it should be done. If you've had situations like that, give us a call, we'll fix it or whatever. But again, I don't call out any contractors or say anything. I may have said something like, this is what the cheap contractor gets you to kind of make it more of a bold statement. But I definitely don't call out any contractors.

Well, it's insecurity. It's insecurity. They're on the job. You're trying to... puke all over about how great you are. And then they say something about another, or you're bad-mouthing the other contractor. Yeah, this contractor sucks because he didn't do this. He didn't use the right spacers. He didn't use this type of backing material, blah, blah, blah. Whenever we do it, we use all the great stuff. And we do, you know, like it's just out of insecurity and out of, and or it's out of ego, right? We talked about ego suppression before. It's either out of insecurity or out of ego. Listen, guys, if there's no reason whatsoever that you should be bad-mouthing another contractor, there's no benefit to it ever.

It does.

I'm sure there's people out there that are like negative Nancys and they love feeding off negativity and stuff. And those people may actually like the fact that you're talking bad about another contractor. And they may hire you because of that. But that's not, again, that's an exception that is not the majority.

Well, we learned that. And actually, in some sales training that we took, we learned about selling from pain. Use pain to attract them. So, I want to know, am I a sucky salesman? I already think I'm a good salesman, so I don't need to look and see if I'm good. I want to know if I'm sucking at it. Well,

Yeah, absolutely. And again, we're kind of more surprised by the... sheer number of people that were in agreeance, we thought we were going to get tons of hate comments and backlash. But wrapping up the whole auditing your sales process, these things we talked about, those are not all of the things that you could do wrong. We could probably do 20 other topics on things that contractors do wrong on their sales process. But auditing your sales process is basically taking a look at it. Look at it objectively. Look at it as if you were a consumer and you were talking to yourself. Is that how you would want to buy? One thing that we get in there on some of those videos, the comments, Eric was like, I ask them for their budget and if they won't give them to me, I move on. Screw them. I ain't got time for them. That's not a good process. You know what I mean? Because you could suck at sales, ask for the budget. They would have been the perfect consumer or customer that you've ever had, but because they didn't give you the budget, then you just said, screw you and moved on. Like that's a problem in your sales process. So when you got to look at it and audit it, you got to take a step back and look at all aspects of it.

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, we've actually gotten several emails, Instagram messages. People are like, yeah, I do this. I'm starting now. I need help. What kind of help can you give me? And the unfortunate thing is we have tons of free resources like our podcast, our free group, the TikTok videos, all these different things that we're doing. We can't help every single person individually, right? Because that's, I mean, we just can't do that. That's why even our paid coaching group is a group type setting because we can help more people that way. But we try to help as much as we can, but listen to the podcast, get on our free Facebook group. There's, you know, there's, you can ask the same question in that group that you send us privately. And if we answer it, then, you know, several hundred people can get that response. So there are thousands of people that that's what we want to do. We don't want to, we can't have individual conversations with John Smith, who's starting out his contracting business. We want to help you. We just can't give you. our personal time to every single person.

No, I mean, I do have a final thought. And that is, again, you need to look at all aspects of your sales. Have a friend or someone who's non-buy, I should say not even a friend, maybe another contractor, maybe it's us. Again, if you go to our free group and you say, this is my sales process, what do you think about it? We, Eric and I and others in the group will look at it and we'll audit it for you and tell you what we think. Like that is a way to get your sales process audited. So that's my final thought.

Yeah, I want to also say thank you for that. I mean, obviously we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for all the support that we get. Very thankful for our community, you know, our students and the Profit Club. Very grateful to be in this position to be able to give back.