Ep 138 - "It's Not Just A Numbers Game"

0:00 Wow. How many of you have listened to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast? I can't tell you that reaction, how much that means to us. Welcome back to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours. I'm noticing that and I really appreciate it. I thought you did that on purpose. No, I don't. I didn't. And I am not happy with it. Hey, y'all. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Hey, if you're not already following, please do so. And ultimately share, right? The coolest currency that we have in terms of supporting this is share it with a friend, share it with somebody, a colleague, a peer, one of your downline team members.

0:43 Let them be able to take advantage of the information you're already leveraging in your favor. And finally, guys, if you hear a show that really moves you, that really moves the needle, will you please leave us a review? Those five-star reviews help Right on. And listen, if you're trying to grow your business, you might consider checking out Floodlight's Business Opportunity Audit. It's free. We provide it at no charge. It's actually what we use to assess new clients as they come in. It's a 110-point assessment for your business. And we've now decided to give access to the general public for it. So go and take our business opportunity audit at floodlightgrp.com. It's going to help you identify the biggest gaps and opportunities in your business right now.

1:25 And at the end, it'll assign you a health score to let you know exactly where your business stands right now. So go check it out, floodlightgrp.com forward slash audit and take the BOA. It's a great way to get a pulse on your business. Well, bro, we made it here. We showed up. Isn't that 80% of life, right? Going up. Showing up. One foot in front of the other. You know, there are days, I'm not going to lie about it, where showing up is the best I'm going to pull off. And today that might be the case. We're here. We are here, my friend. Yeah. And don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Where are we going today, man? Well, yeah. I want to talk about sales. We did a little ad video thingy for CNR.

2:08 Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, I think it went out in their little thing. I don't know what it's called. We sponsor some advertising we do. And Wayne messaged me. He's like, we need a video on this. Let's talk about that. And the thing that Wayne brought up, I'm like, yeah, it's real. Claim volume is down 20 to 30%. Which is wild, but it has been. Which is crazy. And again, many have not felt that at all. No, exactly. There's definitely winners. There's winners that are up 20, 30% and whatever. There's always winners and losers. But I think the industry has been feeling it. We've certainly, we have some clients that are feeling it hardcore and then others seem totally unaffected. But nonetheless, I think the clients that we have that are really winning and have grown a lot this year in spite of that or with that still being true are the ones that are selling commercial.

2:57 Yeah. Yeah. Almost across the board. Yeah. They're the ones, their growth has come from commercial. That's what's been keeping them ahead of the game. And, you know, I think a lot of restorers are kind of pulling their hair out and some aren't sure exactly how to course correct. Yeah. They're deep into their lines of credit. It's like, man, their overhead was set up for XYZ amount of monthly production. They set their goals around this target. And now because of claim volume and all the other things that are happening in the industry. I mean, we really haven't had any significant storms either, apart from the Houston floods. There really hasn't been meaningful activity yet. I think there's still a lot of speculation that we're going to have a very active storm season, but it hasn't hit yet.

3:41 And meanwhile, some restorers are bleeding. So I think sales is a good topic. I was listening to one of my favorite sales voices, not in our industry, but his name is Brian Burns, has a podcast called The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling. He wrote a book called The Maverick Selling Method. I recommend both. Super aware. Not a construction guy, not a... He came up in software, selling software as a service and other tech services and so forth. But I first read the Maverick Selling Method and I was like, gosh, this is so good. I can't even remember what context. If I first read it back when we were operating in the field early on or when it was, maybe pre-restoration even.

4:23 I think I might have read it when I was at Cintas. Okay, his thing. And I borrow a lot of it from our floodlight sales methodology. Mm-hmm. It's all rooted in pain solution selling. Yeah, of course. So I'm listening to one of his recent podcasts and he's interviewing this guy who's like a mega heavy hitter sales guy. Major heavy hitter sales guy. This guy might be making a million bucks a year as a sales guy. Wow. And they're having this really great, honest chat about sales best practices. And one of the things that comes up is just how hyper fixated a lot of companies are around CRM and activities, leading activities right now.

5:05 And in our industry, there's groups, there's masterminds, there's services, there's consulting companies that are entirely built around kind of this fractional sales manager sort of role, really driving accountability to the activities. Now, hear me out. I'm not saying activities don't matter. I'm not saying KPIs don't matter. And neither is Brian. But in this episode, he's like, basically, it's not a gosh damn numbers game. And this is part of the problem that people are encountering in sales right now, particularly in B2B sales, is that they are so oriented around what their metrics are telling them. And yet they're completely failing to connect the dots in terms of what kinds of conversations, what kind of activity should I be focused on in the field?

5:54 I'm hearing you set the stage. Okay. I was at first like... Yeah, you didn't know where I was going to go, right? Dude, what are you about to drop? And he's like, what are people doing right now? Well, people are over-indexing on number of outbound calls, number of outbound emails, emails. like automation, AI, you know, like all of these CRM platforms are coming out with AI in terms of like, you know, outbound group emails and segmenting customer email lists and all of this stuff that you can do from your laptop in a Starbucks. And he's like, that is not... how operational leaders buy. And we talk about this. I mean, we've been ringing this bell for a long time, but I...

6:36 Okay, so I'm listening to that. And he's like, it's not a gosh damn numbers game, right? It's about solving problems for your prospect. Yeah. It's about asking great questions so you understand your customer's buying process. What is their decision-making process? And then how do I slide in and facilitate that process for them? Lead the process, give them what they need, ask for what I need, and solve their problem. And taking extreme ownership over the process too. So hold for just a second because now I'm seeing where you're going. I'm actually pretty psyched about it. If I could, I'm just going to... I want to just draw some context in case people come across stuff or maybe they've been exposed to some of our theories or our focus around the numbers.

7:23 I think just to be clear, the reason we press so hard on leading activities is because until you establish those, there's nothing to help equip or problem solve with your sales person around. And what I'm hearing you say is like one of those variables is who am I talking to and what's the quality of the conversation? So again, just from some quick stage setting for those of you that have listened or gone through the commercial sales course or maybe been exposed to some of our training before... It's this idea of once we establish we're doing enough activity, so the frequency box is checked, that variable is solved. And now it's our opportunity as leaders to come in and begin working with our team member about, okay, let's start iterating on who it is that you're speaking to.

8:07 And then what kinds of conversations you're having so that you can increase the competency in their skill set and get the numbers, right? Get the outcomes that we're looking for. So anyways, I just want to throw in there. Now I know where you're going. This is solid. Yeah, you know, in the past, one of the ways we've talked about this is when you're not seeing the sales results that you want, there's really two gas pedals in this. And maybe perhaps in all sales, right? Are we having enough interaction with prospects, enough activity in the field And then what is the quality of those interactions? What's the content of those conversations, right? So are we having enough conversations with prospects and clients in the field? And then what's the quality, right?

8:48 So if I look at somebody's CRM and I look at their activity log, whatever way that you monitor somebody's activity... they can be putting all the right outbound activity in their thing, and then they're still not getting the results you want. It's like, well, then what do you do? Well, you need to evaluate, okay, what kinds of conversations are they having? Are they talking about the right stuff? What's their methodology? What kinds of questions are they asking the client, right? What kind of interactions are they having in their follow-up with prospects? How many of these prospects that they're talking to are actually qualified? Or are they just having a bunch of superficial touches and interactions with potential prospects? So there's so much going on when your salespeople are not succeeding, when you're not seeing the revenue from your sales team that you want to or need to see based on your overhead.

9:33 It's like, shit, if you've got three or four people on your team, obviously, depending on the size of your company, that's a massive sunk cost. And if the revenue is not coming in, commensurate with how much you're spending on that sales team, you have to take action. And some of you are feeling that. Like that's what's happening for a lot of restorers is a claim volumes down. So our overall revenue is down and potentially we have a sales problem. My sales team is not directly bringing in revenue either. And now we're in this crunch, right? In some cases, our costs are now exceeding our income. We have a problem, right? So- And Norm, I mean, this is kind of that perfect storm where those become really apparent because we tend to get more investigative Yeah.

10:19 When revenue is not covering a multitude of cents. Yeah. When it's going well. Yeah. Right. When we got more than enough money to cover payroll and, and, and, right. It's just, it's so easy to get lazy. Yeah. And, and of course now, I mean, here's the, here's the real perfect storm, right? Because this reduction in claims volume has been happening really throughout the year and nobody knows exactly if or when that's going to change or recover. Right. I think everything ultimately, the pendulum swings. But here's the problem. Like I was talking with Scott on our team about large loss in cat. We're going to be doing a big webinar here coming up. And Scott's like, look, one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of restorers make is they go into a cat, they go chase cat, and they aren't well capitalized.

11:02 They don't have enough cash or they don't have enough free credit to... successfully navigate a big cat loss. You can go get a million dollar job, but if you don't have a half million bucks in the bank or an open line of credit to be able to do the work, you're in trouble. You're in trouble. And so restorers are coming into the storm season, some of them, thinking potentially that the storm is going to save their year, but they're coming into it undercapitalized. Their lines of credit are already tapped. Okay, so this is a problem everybody has to solve. How do we solve it? How do we get on top of our sales problem? I think for most restorers, most sales teams, we need to take a really critical look at what is the story we're telling?

11:43 What is the conversation we're engaging with these clients? You go to Brian Burns stuff. It's like operational sales leaders are not going to switch vendors just because your sales rep is attractive, funny, or bringing them good gifts. We've bought into that lie because it has worked in the past, the whole booze and schmooze thing, but especially post-COVID, it just doesn't work anymore. And if you have an outlier on your team that that's their modus operandi, just get it into your head that it won't last forever and good luck building a team around that. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So I was never able to rely on my good looks and my humor.

12:23 I never had the juice in those categories to propel my sales. I had to get good at being curious, being authentic, asking good questions, understanding my client's business. And that's where I was ultimately able to find success. And that is the path for your team as well. That is the only way to build a team that's generating ongoing sales from these direct customer relationships. And commercial is probably, for most of the people listening to this, it probably is your way out. It probably is your way of building an engine, a direct sales engine that you have control over rather than being reliant on whatever inflow you get from programs, insurance agent relationships, national accounts from corporate, etc., etc.

13:07 Yeah, because I think when people talk about the claims volume issue, and again, if it sounds like we're kind of skirting, it's because nobody really knows in a concrete way. This is lots of conversations with lots of folks that represent different sides of the table. And there's just this collective stuff was down. I don't know how else to better categorize it. Yeah. But I would also say that the majority of that is probably in that residential space. I don't think that... I mean, not that the economic swings don't have enough profound effect on commercial businesses, but when your P&L is based on being able to use your buildings, it does change some of the decision-making that you have options for versus a residential space. So anyways.

13:48 I do think right now with money being expensive, it is... multifamily can be a tricky spot for people right now too. Yeah. You know, they're, they're punting repairs, they're punting process and they're punting damage repair or doing it quote in-house because you know, there's some multifamily owners that are like, God, money's really expensive right now. I don't want to pay for that right now and whatever. So I think there is some pullback maybe in the multifamily space, but elsewhere anyway. Yeah. Let me hit on something. Let me give what is not necessarily a silver bullet, but it's as close to one as I can offer. And I think that anybody can offer in our space, in the service space, even. I think this is true. One of the most powerful behaviors that you can engage your team in, in terms of what is the quality and content of the conversations we're having in the field.

14:39 One of the most powerful behaviors that you can teach them and hold them accountable to is asking really good pain-seeking questions. I'm going to say that again. Pain-seeking questions. Memorize that. Bring that to your next sales meeting or your next one-on-one with your salesperson. And I'm going to give you a pain-seeking question that you can orient around for the rest of the year. There's other pain-seeking questions. I may highlight a couple of them. But this is far and away the most powerful. And it's an excellent tip of the spear that you can leverage in almost any environment, including on the sidelines of a soccer game this weekend when you're watching your kid play soccer and And there's some dude next to you and you're like, hey, hey man, I don't think we've met before.

15:24 I'm Chris. What's your name? Bob. Okay. Oh, hey, so what do you do, man? Well, I'm a real estate developer. Oh, no shit. I'm in construction. Well, actually I'm in disaster restoration. How long you been doing that? This is a pain seeking question that you can literally bring up in that environment. And it doesn't make you the douchebag. It's always pitch slapping people, you know, in the bar, right? Or on the sidelines of a side. That's a Brian Bernstein, by the way. I love that. I don't think I've heard that before. That's great. I know. I like that. I wish I could take credit for that, but that's Brian Burns. Brian Burns, pitch slapping. That's great. I love it. Okay. Pitch slapping is also what people do in the LinkedIn DMs. Oh gosh, I get those daily. Is that perfect? It drives me crazy. Yeah. So you'll never be accused of pitch slapping if you ask this pain-seeking question.

16:05 So let me give you the example. I'm back to the sidelines on the soccer game, but this could be at a BOMA event. This could be at a multifamily Northwest event for all of our Northwest cats in Oregon. It could be whatever. Whatever. In any context, you can use a pain-seeking question to cut to the chase and get into a meaningful chat that potentially leads you to business. Here's an example. Brandon's my property manager prospect. And I'm chatting with him in the leasing office. First time we met, I'm like, hey, listen, I know you're probably busy. I probably caught you at a bad time. I can come back if you want me to. Oh, no, I'm cool. I actually need a break from the conference calls and shit. Okay, sweet. How long have you been doing this? Well, I've been asked for five years. Okay, great. Well, I don't need to tell you anything about what I do.

16:46 You've had your own run-ins with restoration and such. Can I ask you a question though? My multifamily clients bitch and moan constantly. And their biggest gripe with contractors is that they never know what the hell's going on. Whenever they have a job on site, they're always having to chase down their project manager to get an update that they can inevitably share with their owner client. He's probably breathing down their neck. What's happening to my units? When are they going to be open again? When can I start collecting rents again? Or just an update that they can share on their weekly conference call with home office. It drives them crazy. Have you guys ever had that issue at your property? And the inevitable answer is yes. It's yes always, right? Let me say this once more, right?

17:27 Hey, can I ask you a question? My multifamily clients, their constant gripe with contractors is that they never know what the hell is going on. They're always having to chase down their project manager, get an update on what's the status so they can share that with their owner client who justifiably wants to know what's happening with their units, right? Or to share on their weekly conference call with all their other property manager colleagues and whatever. Is that something you've dealt with? The purpose of this question is to help establish a connection with something that that prospect actually gives a shit about. Because the assumption we wrongly make in restoration and certainly other service verticals is that our prospect is thinking about our business all the time.

18:11 And I think especially for those of us who've been in the multifamily game, property management game for a while, which our industry, it's a big area for us, big customer segment, is we just think, well, God, we have some property management companies, we get three, four jobs a month. And we get in our head that multifamily is constantly having damage events. Yeah. The reality, the lived reality for most property managers and maintenance people in that industry and so forth is we are just one moving part. We are one of many contractors they work with. I mean, think about it. They have a street sweeping, like a parking lot sweeping vendor. They have hardscape landscape. They have painters. They have roofers. They have general contractors that they're working with for CapEx projects and large Electricians, HVAC, mechanical, like fire suppression systems, all of these things, right?

19:05 Sherwin-Williams floor cover. It's like they have so many vendors and service partners. And so how he asks these things is important. So first of all, let's kind of break down this question because I think it's helpful to just consider how we should be thinking about these conversations. Yeah. Number one, I'm asking the question in such a way that I'm giving them an out. Because just because the vast majority of property managers have this frustration with contractors, not all of them do. And that's another false assumption we make is that we're an awesome restorer and everybody else is shit, right? I've been guilty of that. We've been guilty of that. You get on your high horse, you think you're hot shit. And so we can develop this posture of, well, of course, of course you've had trouble with other restores.

19:48 They're just not as good as us, right? Or in some contract, all of us are guilty of this. We just get, we get enthusiastic about our own brand, whatever. But when I ask that question, hey, listen, a lot of my multifamily clients tell me their biggest frustration with contractors is X. Have you ever had that experience? Some may come back and be like, you know, honestly, we have a great batch of contractors we work with. We're pretty lucky. Okay. I've got a response to that, by the way. Well, let's come back to that. But I ask about contractors specifically instead of disaster restoration companies. Or the reason I just mentioned, which is they actually don't deal with restorers as often as you think they do.

20:29 And if I ask them specifically about their experience with restorers, they may have to literally take a pause and be like, when was the last time I had to call a restoration company? It might have been three weeks or three months ago. But if I say contractors, they probably have a contractor on their property right now. now. Okay. So what I'm trying to do with that question, and again, this is not guru shit. This is how all of the other service industries around us sell. All the successful ones. It's just that as an industry, we're new to this stuff, right? So with that question, I'm trying to build a connection to something that they've actually experienced, that they've felt, right?

21:14 So that then I have an opportunity to actually speak to what we do that potentially addresses that thing that is a felt need, right? So I'm sharing some social proof saying, hey, other property managers or other senior living groups or other cities and municipalities that I service, tell me this. Is that your experience? I'm asking them to validate that. And then if they say yes, it tees up the opportunity for me to say, hey, yeah, obviously it's a problem. I hear about it all the time. Sounds like it's an issue for you guys. Listen, we're not perfect. Now we're getting into the response. So we ask that pain-seeking question. They validate that, yeah, oh my God, it's a constant problem.

21:58 Now I have an opportunity to speak to it. I'm now moving the ball downfield. They just handed me the ball. I'm going to run towards the end zone. I'm going to try to now move toward a sale. The instinct a lot of salespeople have is to, Oh my God, this is so exciting. They have a problem. I know we can fix it. And then they're like, Hey, that's awesome. Gosh, we'd love for you to give us a shot. They go straight to, Well, give us a chance. We're better. We're better. And of course, the problem with that in our industry is that every single restorer falls down. There is no such thing as perfect execution. And so one of the things you and I've learned over the years is the first response before we go to sell is, hey, listen, we're not perfect either.

22:39 And so we start out with humility. We say, hey, we're not perfect either. But can I tell you about a system, process, or person that we've put in place to try to solve for that? So in the case of this pain-seeking question we're talking about, they never know what the hell's going on. Is that true for you? Yeah. Oh, my God. Our answer to that with our floodlight system, and I recommend this to every single restorer on the planet, if you're going to do commercial, is our 24-hour job update standard. So I start out with humility, say, hey, we're not perfect either. But can I tell you about a system that we use with all of our project managers to solve for that? It's the only way we found to keep our property managers informed. So they do know what the hell is going on. We call it our 24-hour job update. It's not sexy. It's not fancy technology.

23:20 It's just a Gmail template. And our department leaders hold our PMs accountable to send one of these 24-hour updates to every single one of our active property management jobs. Monday through Friday. It answers three questions. What happened today? What's happening next? And is there any questions or concerns that we need to deal with? Liftify.com forward slash bloodlight. You've heard Brandon and I talk a bunch of times about the importance of Google reviews. Maybe you even heard our episode with Zach Garrett, the CEO and founder. Recency, consistency, two of the most important things when it comes to maximizing the benefit from your Google reviews.

24:01 Why not use an outside partner? Liftify is targeting 20 to 25% conversion, right? So if you do a thousand jobs a year, you ought to be adding right now, 200 to 250 reviews a year, every single year. If you're not doing that, you owe it to yourself to get a free demo from liftify.com. See their system, see how it works, see how affordable it is. I promise you, you'll thank us. Liftify.com forward slash bloodlight. You know, we spend a lot of money and a lot of attention trying to get that first call. And one of the things that we do once it happens is sometimes we leave it to chance, right? Who picks up the phone? How do they respond? How do they walk that client into a relationship with us? Well, one of the benefits of partnering with a team like AnswerForce.com is we can systemize that.

24:45 We can make it more consistent. We can also have backup for when our teams need that help, right? Somebody goes on vacation. Somebody's out sick. You know, we get a storm surge. We get cat event. All sorts of things can have an impact on how we receive that client. But the most important thing is they need to know that they've chosen the right team. And so AnswerForce.com can support you, be a bolt-on partner to help you consistently produce an awesome onboarding experience with that first call with your client. So AnswerForce.com forward slash answerforce.com. blood light. Sounds great. CNR Magazine, we're friends with all the folks at CNR. Michelle and her team, they do a great job of keeping their ear to the ground and reporting all the important information from our industry.

25:28 Right? You want to stay up on all the M&A activity and what the latest best practices are for selling your company successfully. Right? She's got that. Great articles about all the four quadrants of our business. Right? CNR is constantly pushing out great material and leveraging great writers and subject matter experts in our industry. It is the water cooler of our industry. So if you're not subscribed, go to cnrmagazine.com. Follow them on LinkedIn. Follow Michelle on LinkedIn. Trust us. If you're trying to stay on top of everything happening in the industry, your best destination is cnrmagazine.com. You guys, many of you have already heard about actionable insights and the training and the technical expertise that they bring to the industry.

26:10 But how many of you are already leveraging the actionable insights profile for Xactimate? That's the game changer. It's essentially an AI tool that's walking alongside of you as you write your estimate, bringing things to your attention that should be added, that could be considered. All of them items that increase our profitability, increase the effectiveness and the consistency of that scope. And it can do anything from helping a new team member assimilate some estimating best practices. And it also helps the grizzled bets add back that few percent that we've just forgot over time. So actionable insights, get insights.org forward slash floodlight and take a look at what the actionable insights exactimate profile could be doing for you and your team.

26:58 Now, if the last contractor you were working with, you had on property, had had a system like that and they used it consistently, do you think you'd had a better experience with them? And of course, what is our prospect's answer going to be 100% of the time? Yeah. Of course. I don't think I've ever been in a scenario where somebody said... Anything remotely near no would not have been helpful. So what have we done? Okay, I just want to reiterate this. What have we done? We started out with a fresh prospect, somebody that I'm in real estate development. It could have been I'm in senior living, you know, whatever, at the sidelines on a soccer game or in a lobby of a hotel at a BOMA event or whatever. I've moved very quickly from, hey, so what do you do?

27:40 Here's what I do. How long you been doing that? Da-da-da-da-da. Hey, can I ask you a question? Yeah. A lot of my clients in your industry tell me this. To now, they've just validated they have this pain point that they routinely experience. So I've just shared with them how we solve for that in a very specific way. I'm not pointing to, hey, communication is one of our company values. Yeah, yeah. This isn't some cheerleader response. Hey, that's on our wall in our training room. Or look, it's on the back of our business card. It's also shop talk at this point. It is shop talk. That's exactly what it is. Like it's just peer-to-peer shop talk. We're not even selling anything. You asked a question that's common to people in a shared experience in the industry. They validated it. And in talking shop, you're like, yeah, we've run into that before.

28:23 Here's what we did to solve that problem internally. And you're asking for validation. Does that make sense to you? Would that have helped your current situation? This is no different than me having a conversation with a friend about a pair of shoes I bought because it fixed my running and me just talking shop. Like, hey, have you ever experienced that? Have you bought similar shoes? Did it help you? Like, it's shop talk and it's relevant shop. That's right. So I tell them how our shop works. Hey, yeah, common problem. This is the only way we found to truly solve for it. If those companies you've worked with had been using a system like that, would there ever have been a problem? No. Yeah, well, that's why we do it. Hey, you have a team. I imagine you asked them to do things that just need to be done.

29:04 And they probably don't. Yeah, look, our guys don't always, they aren't super excited about sending these emails at the end of every day, but it's just the only way we found to keep our people informed. And so we do it. And then I finally, I have an opportunity. And I've just, again, I think there's nothing wrong with saying that. There's nothing wrong with being honest. I guarantee you, if you deploy the 24-hour job update, your PMs are going to hate it at first blush. Be like, what? On top of all the other things that you ask us to do, right? I mean, listen, Brandon, I've been through this. We work with teams all across the country. It's not an easy standard to maintain. Right. But it is the only way. And if you want to differentiate yourself from other contractors and restorers in the market, that is the number one thing you could deploy in your business right now to change your business.

29:51 Guaranteed. 20 bucks if you prove me wrong. Oh, big vendor. 20 bucks. Steak dinner, bro. No. So once I make that connection, it gives me or it gives your sales rep an opportunity to do a trial close. Yeah. So in the sales books, what a trial closes, it allows me to test the waters a little bit. I can take the next step. What's the next step, right? The next step is, hey, what... Okay, so we've established that you have a problem or have had a problem. We have a system, person, or process in place to solve for that. Hey, listen, I want you to see that in real time. What would need to happen for us to help you on your next damage event? Is there anything we would need to do on our end to be ready to help you on your next thing?

30:31 And of course, what is your typical commercial prospect going to say? Well, they're either going to ask for your W-9 and your insurance certificate, right? If there may be a smaller company or whatever, or they're going to ask you to get on their vendor list. Now, most of your wife, when they ask you to get on the vendor list, most of your people are just going to be like, oh my gosh, I made the sale, right? But of course, that's not the end of things. In fact, often it means absolutely nothing. But in the context of this conversation, it means a whole lot more. So again, this comes back to managing activity versus the quality of the activity that your teams do out there. You cannot do one and not the other. It's always this balancing act of, yes, we're...

31:13 I need my people out there maximizing their time in the field and FaceTime with prospects. But I also need them having the right kinds of conversations. And this is the hardest thing to manage, by the way. It is. It is so hard. Can I lean on that a little bit? Yeah. You know, I've just, I think recently... Just again, I think we in the last episode or two, we've been kind of hinting at we're working on some pretty significant changes in the way that we deploy consulting and then the platform that we use and all the things. And so similarly, let's say to a company that's adopting a new behavior in sales operations or renewed focus on outbound commercial sales, you're learning some new skills, you're taking on new process, you're changing behavior in your organization.

31:58 And I think one of the things that I've seen happen, and with our clients too, as they try to adopt some of the floodlight commercial sales process is they're attempting to do everything at once. And I think for us personally as a business, we just went through this. We're in the throes of it right now where we've got some very significant work to do. It's all good. It's super exciting. And though, if we're not careful, we're going to get very motivated and we're going to say we can do it all and we're going to half-ass all of it. Yeah. And so one of the things that we did, and I'm thinking out loud for those of you listening to this to say, yeah, let's kind of dial in here. Let's figure out what we can do to begin changing the system or the process we're deploying for more effectiveness is, I think the reason Chris used that specific question.

32:45 is that we have an opportunity to develop a specific skill instead of trying to develop all the skills. That's right. And so there's an opportunity here for us to just say, okay, there's 10 different versions of that question. We could try to assess the 10 different pain points that every client's potentially going to have. And I think the challenge with that is you go back and you just do shotgunning. And you get half-assed participation, half-assed inspection, and half-assed result. And I think my encouragement to you out of my own experience recently is just to say, consider the one question, really drilling and practicing deploying that question and hyper-focus on it for several weeks.

33:27 As the team goes out and they literally, they have to memorize one exchange, one little piece of dialogue, have them practicing that over and over and over. And when they come back to a sales meeting and we're talking numbers, great. Get that dialed in, get it tracked, get it logged, and then start diving into the responses and the way that the question's going, where they're getting tripped up. how they specifically said it. In fact, you and I tiptoe or kind of accidentally got exposed via paid ads to a platform that may be very meaningful and helpful for teams to monitor how the team's doing it in the field and then coming back and doing some AARs and practicing, not in an effort for just accountability and discipline, but equipping, behavior modification, skill acquisition, right?

34:14 So here's an example, guys. And then I'm going to shut down again because I think you're in a good vein is... We took our plan. And many of you that listen, if you're our client, you're about to start getting these emails and this communication from your consultant. But we said, okay, how can we make movement in the next four weeks? And each week, for example, we have one thing. that we're going to coach the client on and get them prepared for to make the transition. And each week, we're going to have a focus and that's all we're doing. That's all we're focused on. That's all we're going to talk about. That's all we're going to report on. And that's all that we're going to problem solve around to make sure that ourselves get perfect execution. And more importantly, that our client is capable of following us through the transition.

34:57 And so again, I think just hearing you talk, I think the opportunity here is simplified. Go in on one thing and hang in the pocket. Just hang in the pocket. Yeah, I was talking with one of our clients, their sales manager, and they've got multiple locations, multiple salespeople, and they're just really frustrated with year-to-date performance. They got a couple high flyers. It's not doom and gloom. It's not sky is falling, but frustrated with the performance of several on the team. And yet, I think the confusing part for them was, like, I look at the activity logs, we look at Salesforce, we look at Luxor, whatever, whatever platform people are using, and they And they're dialing for dollars.

35:37 They're out doing their visits, blah, blah, blah, and still not seeing the sales. And I just said, look, let's, for the next four weeks, let's hyper fixate on this pain-seeking question. all of your one-on-ones and interactions, let's role play this to where people get uber confident. Yeah. Asking that question and then also delivering the response. Yeah. Because people might think it's too simple, but it's not. I think if all you did was orient your team around this pain-seeking question for the next four to six weeks and just hyper fixate on, let's ask this of as many prospects as we possibly can you are going to gain some fresh momentum in your sales.

36:19 Not only your prospect relationships and your sales pipeline, but actually an inbound business. Yeah. Because it motivates, what it does is it instigates the right kind of conversation with your prospects to where you get closer to a first notice of loss. Can you, I'm just thinking, I mean, this is a little bit of an isolated section of the course, right? But I think it's this other half of this conversation I think is important so that we don't leave without people hearing it. Because many people listening have never gone and bought the master course. Yeah. Okay. So we got the key question. Okay. It doesn't cover all the bases, but it covers one that is probably globally. Universal. Yeah. It's most universal. Yeah. Okay. You've done that for us, which is great, right?

36:59 Like you immediately help move this kind of soccer mom and dad conversation into something that's relevant, something they care about. But then what's the next couple follow-up moves look like? So that like, I'm just thinking if a team says, you know what? Hey, we heard this. We're going to go spend six weeks and this is all we're going to practice. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's give them the two follow-ups so that it can go all the way through. Totally a notice of loss. That's good. That's good. So first of all, let's address the elephant in the room though, because some of the restorers listening to this are like, well, we don't do 24 hour job updates. That certainly could be an elephant. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then the follow-on concern here is by salespeople who even if an owner listening to this or a GM listening to this is like, you know what?

37:41 He's right. We need to start doing that. And they start to put it in place. It's going to be months before there's real adoption and traction, like 70 plus percent accountability across that standard. It doesn't happen overnight. As a sales rep, though, it doesn't need to be 100%, right? If your team is moving in the direction and talking about it and beginning to hold people accountable to that, you are 100% ahead of most of the competitors in your market. If your team decides to adopt that 24-hour job update standard and begins moving in that direction, you can have confidence that that puts you miles ahead above most of the other contractors, let alone the stores in your market. So few are willing to even try.

38:22 Okay? Yeah. So you can be proud and you can sell that with conviction. And know that it's failing forward. It's failing forward. Absolutely. Right. So you have that conversation. You get on the vendor list. How do you continue to nurture that conversation and nurture that prospect until you get that first notice of loss? I think that's kind of what you were pointing to. It is. Yeah, yeah. And again, staying in this vein. Let's just focus one topic. Yeah. And I think that's an opportunity that a lot of restorers miss is they get out of even a great conversation like that. And then they just kind of revert back to their candy and smiles approach, poking their head in, hey, how's it going? You know, and dropping off a mug or filling the candy jars with the mini Snickers. And we miss the opportunity to stay in that pain solution vein.

39:05 So how do we follow up? Well, we follow up based on the pain we identified. Yeah. So if their primary pain, which often it will be, is we never know what the hell is going on. Like we're always having to chase down our project manager. We talked about the 24-hour job update. Well, I want to try to keep that in front of them in a authentic material way. How can I do that? Well, one of the things that you and I talk about is where possible, I think sales reps should start their day in the shop. 7.30, 8 a.m. is a great time to go in, be building relationship with your tech teams, your field teams, your project managers, department managers. You as a commercial sales rep, you should have a healthy relationship, a healthy rapport with your team.

39:46 And the only way to do that is to spend time with them. I didn't learn this until a year or two into my time in the industry. I just didn't understand the value or the need for me to be connected. But once I did, it all made sense. It helps me understand what the service delivery actually looks like. It helps me properly respect and esteem my operations partners. But it also helps me get valuable information. So one piece of information I can get is, as I'm hobnobbing and rubbing elbows with my PMs and everything on the team, I can ask them, I can say, hey, do you have any multifamily jobs you're doing right now? Hey, could you send me one of your 24-hour job updates that you sent to them? I've got a client that they've had the same issue with communication.

40:28 I want to swing by this week and try to get them an example of it. Right? So then one of my PMs sends me one of those emails. I print it out. And then when I'm in a certain area of my market, I know I've got one of my multifamily prospects that has had that same issue. I shoot them a text. I send them a LinkedIn DM. Hey, I got to swing by. I wanted to show you something real quick from our last conversation. Could you have forwarded this via email? Oh, God. Yeah, of course. But I want FaceTime. Right. Exactly. And the reason why I want FaceTime, so many restorers hyper-index on phone calls and emails because they want to sit and work remotely from their house. Okay. That is not how business is transacted in our industry. It's face-to-face. So no, I want to take and give them a hard copy that might sit on their desk for a few days.

41:12 They glance at it. They may have been working with another contractor where they never know what the hell is going on. And I've just dropped off a physical representation of what we do. Okay. So that's one follow-up. Let's call that two weeks after this great conversation I had. What else can I do? Well, as a sales rep, I want to be watching our Google reviews. Anytime I see a Google review from a commercial client, I want to print that out that references communication. I want to print that off. And I want to use that with my prospects, where I know that that's a felt need and a pain point that they've had in the past. And then that becomes my next follow-up. I'd add to that too, because sometimes commercial clients are a little slower to give us Google reviews, right? There's a lot of material reason for that.

41:53 And I know that some people are like, oh boy, I don't even know when the last time I got a Google review from our commercial client. But we do get confirmation and affirmation about behavior and process via email often from our commercial clients. So if you're thinking, again, ear to the ground, I think one of the things you're talking about here is just the synergy that we need to be developing between operations and sales. is we can ask the operational team, hey guys, we just were working on the USA, whatever enterprise location. I know we were doing a really great job communicating. I think we got some feedback from them about it. Do you have, did you get that in an email exchange that I can share with this prospect I'm chasing down? So wherever you've got some social proof, it may not just be a Google review, for example.

42:36 Here's another best practice that we teach all of our commercial sales reps. And that is when your job closes, swing by and do a QA visit. QA visit is really simple. Hey, Sally. Hey, John. Listen, looks like we just closed out your job this last week. I think you guys even paid us. Awesome. Thank you very much. Hey, quick question. How did my team and I do on this last one compared to other restorers you've worked with in the past? Yeah. Now, if we killed it and they're like, oh my God, there's no comparison. You know, like you guys are just, it's so much better. I so appreciate you guys' service level. Awesome. Hey, listen, would you mind, it would be incredibly helpful because everybody says they're awesome, right? But when I have a client that shares a testimonial, there's nothing more powerful than that.

43:19 Would you mind just shoot me a quick email and just share specifically one or two things about this last job experience that made it better than other contractors you've worked with. There you go. And now all of a sudden, I've got that in my toolkit. And that is another piece of validation that I can take to my clients and speak specifically to pain points that came up in prior conversations. Now, in addition to that, of course... There's nothing wrong with donut drops. There's nothing wrong with finding out what they really love dark chocolate. There's nothing wrong with that kind of thing. Barbecues out in front of the leasing office. Those kind of things are awesome. It's just that everybody else does that too. So how are you going to differentiate in a way that makes you feel more like the peer partner?

44:05 Yeah. Right? Versus just another sales rep. And that... comes from those kind of pain-focused follow-ups, solution-focused follow-ups. Because what we're doing is when we weave that into our follow-up every other time, what it does is, is it starts to build a really powerful connection between I've had really crappy service from contractors in this regard. And I'm pretty sure these guys are different. I'm going to get a better experience from them because of specific things they've showed me, talked to me about. I'm trying to bridge that logical connection between bad service in the past. I think I'm going to get better service the next time from this guy or gal.

44:45 That's all we're trying to do. It's that simple. And there's a lot of creative ways that you can do that. But I hyper encourage you, if you don't have that habit as a sales rep of doing that QA visit at the end of your job, that's the most important time for you to visit that client in terms of the job process is right at the end. And ask them that simple question. How'd my team do compared to other contractors you worked with in the past? Yeah. And if you get a rad response, ask them for a simple email. I love that. I think another piece just to tag onto that. And then I think we should stop because I think otherwise we'll just give more and more ideas. And I think the opportunity here is just to really stay hyper focused on one tool and just go, go own it. Yeah. If they're willing to give you an email that tells you how well you did, I think now is the time too.

45:29 Most of our commercial folks have peers in the industry. They might be at a sister property. It might be under the same management umbrella. But it could be their team member or their friend that they worked for five years at the last company they were at. And they know what kind of struggles they have because they sit around and they can moan about it together. I mean, there's so much when you identify the pain and then your team provides a concrete solution to solve the pain. Then we get to ask, hey, is there anybody else in your sphere that might have the same pain? And when we're talking about something like this as global as communication, the chances of that being the case is so damn high. Very high. That there's, again, that's how much faster. Are we going to shake the tree and get some fruit to drop if that's the cadence of behavior that you're following?

46:13 So again, I think the way you opened this is really interesting. You didn't, I mean, you said it's like it's closest thing to a silver bullet. I agree. There is no such thing. And even just hyper focusing on a single target like this, there's still some auxiliary things that you got to dial in. But man, this is doable. This is something all of us can do more of tomorrow. The reason why this is a silver bullet in closing, or the closest thing to it, is that you read the sales books, follow the sales podcasts. One of the things that's universal across everybody's methodology that knows anything about it is, I'm always trying to get to a yes. Big yeses, small yeses. The yes is the result of me getting paid. But I'm always trying to get little yeses and stack up the yeses because it gets me closer to collecting money, right?

46:58 To getting in an actual transaction where we do something and we get paid. And this is this pain seeking question that we've been talking about this whole time is has a very, very, very high likelihood of resulting in a yes answer. Right? Yeah. The faster that you can get your sales reps getting a yes from a prospect, the closer you are to an FNOL. And right now your sales rep is probably spending way too much time with candy and smiles, soccer mom, soccer dad chatter, waiting to ask the really targeted questions. And this is one of those questions that anybody with a little bit of practice can cut right to the chase.

47:39 And that's what operational leaders want. They're not. And especially post-COVID. Post-COVID is almost completely done away. COVID rather, did away with cocktail hours, lunches out, baseball tastes. Nobody has time for that anymore. Yeah. It's not... And again, broad strokes here. Broad strokes. Of course, there's exceptions. It's both and, but it's definitely not that as the primary anymore. Yeah. They just want to solve a problem and make their life easier. And this is how we cut straight to that. They don't want the small talk. Most operational leaders are like, hey, can you help me or not? Yeah. And this is a question that gets right to, can we help them?

48:19 And then a natural opportunity for us to share how we can. So... Anyways, if this stuff is valuable to you, share this with a fellow business owner, a sales colleague, whatever you think might benefit, put this into action right away. And certainly if your company is looking for a consulting partner to help you scale up or get your business ready for an exit to maximize your multiple. Good place to start is floodlightgrp.com forward slash audit and take our health and value assessment. Yes, sir. One thing that's guaranteed is you're going to learn something about your business. You're going to learn about what it's probably worth right now, as well as some really important health vitals that affect your overall enterprise value.

49:00 What it could be worth. what it could be worth. And our team's going to reach out. We're going to offer to do an integration call to really help you walk through where are the gaps in the business right now and what can you hit on right now to begin maximizing your enterprise value and building towards what you're trying to do in your business. So floodlightgrp.com forward slash audit. Till next time. We'll see ya. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart & Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps.

49:40 Thanks for listening.