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 to this episode of the Hammer and Grind podcast. Today, we're talking about how to think about sales. Now, I've done lots of podcasts on sales. I've talked about the questions that we asked. I've talked about how to pre-qualify. I've talked a lot of things about sales, but I've never actually talked about how to think about sales, how to approach sales. overall. And this has come about because I've had several conversations in the past week with people in the profit club, my clients in the profit club, as well as other contractors outside of the profit club, not clients of mine. And what I've seen online with Facebook posts and different groups and stuff and in my own experiences as well. And so I really want to kind of paint this picture of what sales really is. Because it's not what 99.9% of contractors think it is. It's not. So I'm going to unpack this here for you and really try to change the framework of which you view sales in your contracting business. Right off the bat, I want to tell you this. Sales is not convincing someone why you're so good at what you do. I've had this conversation multiple times. Let's call it an argument. I've had this argument multiple times. with contractors because we all hear the, my quality sells itself. If you do good work, people will hire you. And yes, there is truth in that. That is absolutely, can be true, but it's not the ultimate truth. It's not the only truth, right? Quality is important for sure. There's contractors out there that do terrible, crappy work and rip people off. We know that. Let's exclude those people. For the sake of this conversation, let's just exclude all of the contractors that are scam artists, that have no idea what they're doing, that rip people off, that do terrible work. Like work you wouldn't even, your 10-year-old son could do better. We're not talking about those. So I want to take those and just remove them from the conversation because we can all agree that those people don't represent the embodiment of what it means to be a contractor. So we're taking those off. Those are the outliers. We're moving them out. So now we're dealing with a core group of contractors, which is most of us, an overwhelming percentage of us that's left, believe in delivering good work, quality work. Now we can all debate on what levels of quality there is. We can debate on what that is. And quality is really a completely subjective. Now, there are some industry standards that define what quality is in certain instances and certain things. But what I think is quality and what you think is quality and what the guy down the street thinks is quality is all different. And we all have our own areas that we are more passionate about higher quality than others. I'm not passionate about having super high quality. drywall finishes on the wall. That doesn't mean that I want it to look bad. I'm just saying I'm not passionate about it. Whereas I'm more passionate about finished carpentry, joints, gaps in wood, all of your cabinets. I'm very passionate about cabinets lining up, not having lippage on cabinets and your face frames. Those are things that I'm very passionate about. A guy who finishes drywall every day for a living. he's going to be much more passionate about having very nice finished drywall and probably least passionate about cabinetry and having lippage and all that stuff. So there's going to be, if you want to call it a scale of what quality is. And we're not going to talk about that. So we're going to lump everybody into this group that everybody on a scale of 1 to 10 of quality, this made-up scale, this completely subjective scale, is going to be somewhere between 6 and an 8 on quality. So we're not dealing with poor quality work. We're dealing with acceptable work. The other thing that I want to say here is that most customers of yours, unless they work in this industry, they don't know what quality is to our level. So even if we deliver a, let's say we have a bad day and we deliver a six out of 10 quality product, they come in and they see it and in their eyes, it's an eight out of 10. Oh my gosh, Brad, this looks so amazing. We just thank you so much. It's so great. Your quality is fantastic. We knew we made the right choice. And the whole time you're thinking to yourself, man, that joint over there looks like crap. I wish I had more time because that board over there is crooked. You know, blah, blah, blah. We're just picking apart our own stuff. Meanwhile, the customer's praising us and telling us how great we are. So even in our own minds, quality is more important than what the customer is. So even if we are delivering a six quality product, we're still delivering an eight quality product in their customer's mind. So why am I prefacing how to think about sales by talking about quality? Because what we all want to hang our hat on as contractors is that we deliver quality work. And therefore, we have to prove and we have to basically show why we're so superior. and why they should hire us because we do high quality work. Now, I did a TikTok video a little while back. If you follow me on TikTok, you've probably seen it. But if you don't, I did a video. It was a Buzz Lightyear. You've probably seen Toy Story. And there's a scene in Buzz Lightyear where they go, when Buzz goes to the toy store across the street and finds out for the first time that he's not unique. There's a whole entire roll stacked floor to ceiling shelves of Buzz Lightyears. And so I did a little video of that. It was Buzz Lightyear. And it said, when I ask contractors what sets them apart from everyone else, and the typical response is, my quality work. My quality speaks for itself. And then I had one person, you know, one Buzz Lightyear basically saying, my quality speaks for itself. And then I scanned to a wide shot of this entire row of Buzz Lightyears, like a thousand of them on the shelf, and they're all saying the exact same thing. My quality speaks for itself. So you're out there saying my quality speaks for itself. And there's a thousand other contractors that are saying the exact same thing. So whether your quality speaks for itself or not may be true, but it doesn't speak for everyone else because everyone else is saying the exact same thing. So by that definition, your quality does not sell jobs. Okay. The quality may get the phone to ring. They may see a picture of a beautiful project that you did and they're like, wow, this looks really nice. This is what we want. And that may get the phone to ring, right? But that is not what's going to sell the job. Because people universally across the board assume that whoever they hire within reason, again, taking out the bad ones. If we remove the bad ones from this conversation, I'm not going to bring it up again. They're out. Don't even think about them. They assume that everyone else is going to deliver the same level of quality across the board because they assume that contractors act good at what they do. Just like when you and I go to a dentist or an eye doctor or a medical doctor or we go to a massage therapist or wherever we go to have a service done, we kind of assume that doctors across the board are going to be good at what they do. Now, we know that some are better than others. But we still assume that there's a certain level of competency based on their training and their schooling that they're going to be able to deliver the results that we're looking for. And that's the same with your clients. So your quality play does not help you at all. But what contractors want to believe is that we sell people on why we're so good. I've been in business for 35 years. I've won these awards. And I've done this too, guys. I've done the awards. Hey, we just got announced as we're the house best contractor of 2020 or whatever, right? 2019. And we put that little badge on our Facebook and we put it on our website. And it's like, look at us. We're great. Most of that crap is junk. It is. Just like when you have the cities voted best in our city, it's all bull crap. It's all popularity contests. It's how many people can you get to vote on you, right? It's not a true measurement of how good someone is. But we think that that's going to help sell our brand and sell our services. And so we hang our hat on this quality thing. And I'm telling you right now, if you live in the cities and do the trades that the members of the profit club do, they will beat you nine out of 10 times on a sale. And they will be more expensive than you because they're getting a 50% gross profit. They will beat you on the sale because they know what's important to connect with the customer. And that's what we're going to dive into on this podcast. Now, I know we've kind of spent a few minutes now just kind of setting the tone, but it's important for you to understand is that the way you need to think about sales is not about you. It literally has nothing to do with you whatsoever. It has nothing to do with your quality. It has nothing to do with how good you are, how good you think you are at sales. It's not that, well, if I get in front of them, then I can just wow them with my charm and get them to hire me. It's not about that stuff. It really is not. It's about how well you connect with the person on the other end emotionally. It's how well they understand that where you're coming from in the sense of you're connecting with them. How well do you understand them? That's what I'm trying to say, right? If someone's having something done, if they're having some work done, let's say a basement remodel, they want to have... They're doing this basement remodel because they want to have some type of results. They want to be able to use it for their kids so they can create memories. They want to have a man cave so they can have their buddies over and play poker. They want to put a studio down there so they can do a side job and make some extra money. Whatever it is, whatever their reason is, that's what's most important to them. And if you don't understand that that's what's most important to them, and you go in there to the meeting and you're trying to sell them on how you've been doing this for 35 years and you know what quality looks like and you've won all these awards, that does not speak to them about what they want. So we have to stop bragging. We have to stop trying to convince our clients, our prospects, to why they need to hire us and start actually having conversations with them and making a personal connection. If you don't think this isn't true, I mean, how many times have you ever... This has happened to me before. You're driving down the road. somebody's acting like an idiot or you think they're acting like an idiot driving. You're getting frustrated. You're like, what's this freaking idiot in front of me doing? Come on, man. Let's go. Let's go. And you're frustrated, right? And they pull into the parking lot where you're going and they get, you know, like pull in next to you. And the whole time you're like, this freaking idiot. You better not even talk, you know, look over at me. And they get out of the car and it's somebody, you know, like a friend or relative or, you know, acquaintance, whatever. Then you're like, Oh, it's Joe. Joe, what's up, man? I didn't know that was you in front of me. And instantly, our demeanor changes. Instantly, because we know them, they're no longer a douchebag. If that's ever happened to you, because it's happened to me before, not necessarily just in the car scenario, but it's happened where I've judged someone and then found out who it was and I totally changed my tone. This is the difference. I mean, this basically transfers over into your sales process because if they know you, like in a sense of, they like you and they feel like you know them and what they want, they're going to be attracted to you, which means it's going to make it more difficult for them to tell them no or tell you no. So here's another side story. We have a rental property. We bought it earlier this year for my daughter and she moved out recently. So we were putting it on the market. Now we're new to rental properties. This is our first rental property we ever purchased. So we don't, I mean, we've never gone through the process of pre-qualifying renters, doing an application, none of that stuff. We're brand new to this. And yesterday, I, or two days ago, I put a sign in the yard. Actually, it was yesterday morning. I put a sign in the yard that said, for rent. And I went next door. There's a, there's a sign shop there. I went next door and. There was a lady, I was going in there to tell them that a part of their siding on the back of their building, which butts up to our property, the siding was missing. And I was just trying to be friendly. I was like, hey, your siding is missing. You probably never noticed it because you never go back there. You might want to fix it. And the lady that was working there knew we had the house and everything. And she said, oh, is your daughter still living there? I said, no, she moved out. It's actually for rent. And one of the girls there was like, oh, wow, we're looking for a... A renter. We're looking for a house. We're actually looking for a house. I told them some specifics about it, and they were very interested. And so they came over later that day and looked at it. And then another couple saw the sign and called, and they wanted to look at it. So two different people, two different renters, potential renters. The one renter is basically trying to convince us. as to why we should rent to them. And the other one is just like, hey, okay, yeah, we're interested. Let's put in an application. And so it's a natural thing for us to try and convince people why they should hire us. In this case, this one particular rental couple is showing me pictures of their current rent house and how nice it is and how clean it is and telling us how they fix everything themselves and they don't call the landlord. I mean, they're hard selling me on why I should rent the house to them. Right. And that's what we do when we go on a sales call is we try to hard sell them on why we're the best fit. They're trying to hard sell me on why we should rent to them because they're the best fit. And this is what we do. It's a little bit reversed situation there, but it's the same. Our natural human behavior is to try to convince people. why they should like us, why they should hire us. So what you need to do is flip the script on this. This is kind of a, whether you agree with this or not, it's kind of a strategy that's used in dating. A lot of times guys who are good at wooing over women, they'll use the strategy of kind of ignoring them, but it's like... they're unavailable. Women will use this too, where it's like they're unavailable. And by being unavailable, in a sense, it makes them more attractive. Now, I'm not suggesting you be unavailable. What I'm saying is they limit the amount of exposure that they have to each other. And so when you're talking to a prospect, you're not there to try and convince them as to why they should hire you. You're there to get them to open up about all their deep, dark secrets. And then just reaffirm that you understand why they're wanting this done. And by that simple act, you will make a personal connection with that person. And it will make it more difficult for them to not hire you versus somebody as another contractor. Especially if the other contractor is cheaper, which a lot of times is the case. We all assume that they go with the cheapest price. It's not true. They don't always go with the cheapest price. Sometimes they go with the cheapest price because that contractor who is cheaper than you may actually be just as good, if not better than you, but they may not know their own value or understand that they could charge more. And so they're over delivering the value at a cheaper price simply through ignorance. And so if they're like, we really like this other contractor, we're going to go with him because he's cheaper. They may tell you it's because he's cheaper, but that may not be the case. I mean, sometimes it is the case, but it may not always be the case. Sometimes you sell jobs, and this is the case for a lot of my clients. They are the most expensive client, and they still sell the job. Why? Because they've connected with them at the very basic human level. They've connected with them, and now it's harder. It's like a bond that's harder to break. They don't want to not hire you. The conversations go something like this. after they get off the phone with you or if they meet with you and they got to make a decision. I mean, I really like this couple. I mean, I'm sorry. I really like this contractor. He just looks professional. Everything looks nice. They got good reviews. I really like everything about him. And it looks like they do good work too. But I also like this other contractor, this Brad guy, but he was more expensive. But I just really felt like... he understood what we were trying to accomplish. I know it's more expensive. I know it's $3,000 more, honey. But I just really feel like we're going to have a much better experience with this Brad guy than with the other guy. And so then they just make that decision based on how well you connected with them. So when you think about sales, it's not about you at all. It literally has nothing to do with you whatsoever. Zero zelch. I know this hurts your ego, especially for some contractors that put all of their self-worth in their ego and then the praise that they get, but it really has nothing to do with you. It's what's in it for the customer. And when you can understand this and you can tap into that, it is a form of manipulation, by the way. And if you don't understand this, everything in life, and I mean everything in life, is a form of manipulation. The only difference is whether it's good manipulation or bad manipulation. That's it. Every advertisement is a form of manipulation. Whenever you try to seduce your spouse, that's a manipulation. Everything in life is a manipulation. So you can manipulate the conversation that you have with people by understanding the deep-rooted need to feel connected with them. That's just how to think about it. There's all kinds of tactics and questions you can ask, which I've covered before. But if you don't have the right mindset behind sales, the right tactics and all that stuff, not executed, or even if it is executed correctly, it's not going to work as well. It's not going to be as effective as if you don't have a core understanding about sales in general. I used to think I was a fantastic salesman. Nine years in business. I would close 70% of the jobs that I would go look at in person because, you know, if I got in front of them, I'm a very trustworthy person and they would hire me because I'm very trustworthy. You know, nevermind the fact that I was probably the cheapest contractor or cheaper, but I was very good at what I did. High quality, great communication. Like even back then when I was newer, I was still better than a lot of contractors. And that's not, I'm not, that's not my ego. That's just facts. But I didn't know that I could be charging more. I had no idea. And so I was screwing myself to the benefit of the customer. It wasn't until I started to learn that I could charge more and I started to learn about sales, like correct selling, emotional selling, that I finally discovered that I really had no idea what I was doing and I wasn't that good at sales. It's easy to be good at sales when you're the cheapest, right? And it's easy when you're to be good at sales when you over deliver way above what you're charging because you don't know any better. Right? It's not necessarily just being the cheapest. You can be the cheapest and deliver mediocre results, but you can also be cheaper and deliver very high quality results and service and everything else that goes with that. And people will love it because they feel like they're getting a steal. Even to this day, I've hired contractors or hired people. And I say, oh, how much do you charge? Oh, we charge $30 an hour. And in my mind, I'm thinking, wow, I was willing to pay $60 an hour for you. But yeah, I'll pay you $30 an hour. Heck yeah. It's because they don't know their own value. And so that happens across the board. And so when you think about sales in terms of dealing with them and connecting with... with your clients, think about it that way. Think about it in the sense of you're trying to connect with them. You're not trying to sell them anything. Now you gotta be, this is a consultative approach. I don't sell to anybody. I've said this before. I don't sell to anyone ever. When you're talking to someone, it should feel like you're talking to a friend. It should feel like your cousin who lives a state away is like, Hey Brad, we're going to have a bathroom model done. We've never done anything like this before. Just curious, do you have any pointers for us? I mean, do you have any advice like how to hire a contractor or what things we should look for in the bathroom and what types of products or whatever to stay away from? Anything you can help us with, we'd really appreciate it. And I'm going to have a conversation like, yeah, absolutely. Make sure you do this, this, this, this, and this. When you talk to a contractor, ask them these questions, do this, blah, blah, blah. It's just a general conversation where I'm trying to be helpful for them. That's all it is. That's how I approach my sales calls. If you've ever talked to me about joining the Profit Club, it's not a high-pressure sales situation whatsoever. All I'm trying to do is find out about your business and then see if I can help you. And if I think I can help you, I'll present to you what that looks like and what the investment is. And then you have to decide if that's what you want to do. And that's it. It's not a high-pressure sales tactic. It's not secret ninja. you know, word sales scripts that you can use and say a secret word. And then all of a sudden they, you know, they drop their panties and they're ready to get in bed with you. Like, no, it's none of that stuff. It's literally none of that stuff. It's understanding that connecting with them at a human level and truly understanding what their desires are and then labeling that. Hey, Mary, it sounds like it's really important to you guys to, Make sure you have a backyard that you can enjoy and having your neighbor's backyard and all the things they got in their backyard is really an eyesore. And so I can definitely understand why you would want to put up some shrubs and stuff to help protect that or conceal their backyard from you. So I can definitely understand why this is important to you. And they're going to be like, yes, that's it. Exactly. We just want to be able to have a nice time in our backyard and not see the eyesore. And we're thinking about getting a pool back there. And we don't want the neighbors being able to just look over and see us swimming and stuff. And it's just really important for us and our family to have a nice area that we can enjoy without having everybody look at us. Yeah, I can definitely understand why that would be important to you. And that's just it. I'm connecting with them versus, yeah, Mary, I can come out there and give you an estimate on your... Landscaping? Sure. Come out there Thursday and give you a price. Get out there. Hey, Mary. I'm Brad. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I can see this. Yeah, we can put this type of shrub up and we can do this and this and this. And here's all these ideas. We can do this. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've won the award eight times. And that's why you should hire us because we're the best. No connection whatsoever. No understanding of why they want this done. You just see it as here's the scope of work. We're the best to deliver that scope of work for you. And here's what we can do. And this is what's going to cost. There's no connection building whatsoever. There's no understanding of what's really important whatsoever. And this is what separates the profit club members from everybody else. It's not even just sales, guys. I can strip how to think about sales. I can just remove the word sales. And I can replace it with how to think about human connection. How to think about communication. That's what it is. It's learning how to connect with your fellow human beings on a very emotional level. And when you do that and you tie that together, then they have no reason not to hire you unless they literally don't have enough money to pay you. That's like the only reason why they wouldn't hire you. That's how you think about sales. It's connecting on an emotional human level. And if you want to learn about how to do that so that you can close your jobs at a 50% or more rates, reach out to me and I'll be happy to share with you what that looks like. But that's literally what we do in the Profit Club. That's why my clients are super successful in their sales training and in their businesses. Because we're not even competing. I have to laugh because it's not even... It's just not even in the same universe. A lot of contractors that go through my program, they'll remember how they were when they first came in six months, eight months, a year later. It's like a totally different person. And they look back at themselves and it's like, I can't believe how much of a dummy I was. I can't believe how bad I sucked at sales. That's a legitimate conversation that we have on a regular basis. And that's the difference of understanding that you're not good at sales because you can get in front of them and they trust you. That's not sales, guys. That's a component of sales. That's not sales. You don't have to get in front of people to convert them or convince them. Stop trying to convince people why they need to hire you and start persuading them. When you persuade someone, you get them to understand why they need to hire you. Convincing them is trying to convince someone to hire you for my benefit. Persuading someone is getting them to hire you for their benefit. And that's the true difference. A lot of times contractors will try to convince you or convince their clients that why they should hire you. We teach you how to persuade them through the art of communication so that they benefit from hiring you, not you. And that's the difference. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. And I hope you got something out of it. Leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts on this. If you don't agree with anything I say, by the way, I have an open invitation to come on the podcast and have a discussion or debate. Anybody who wants to come on and talk about this or anything that I talk about, if you disagree, if you have a different opinion, more than welcome to come on so we can discuss this open mic policy for anybody who wants to challenge me or think that what I say is incorrect or wrong. Like I said, more than welcome to have you on the show. So if you or somebody you know might be interested, send them my way. I'd like to talk to you or them. And with that, you know where to find me on the social media platforms. Go to TikTok, go to Instagram, go to Facebook, search for Hammer and Grind Podcast. You'll find me there. Also check out my free Facebook group that I have. I've been dropping a ton of stuff in there recently and I'm going to continue to do that so that I can provide as much value. for my audience. But you can search for that. I did change the name. And so if you listen to the last podcast, it used to be called the Contractor Profit Group. It's now called the Contractor Profit Blueprint. And so you can search Facebook for that, or you can just go to the show notes and get that link there, which would be the easiest. But if you don't have access to the show notes, you can go to the Contractor Profit Blueprint on Facebook and you'll find us. Find us there and join that. And I hope to hear and see you guys soon. I appreciate you tuning in as always. Until next time, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
