Tune in now and don't forget to sign up for www.solciety.co!

Welcome to the Solarpreneur podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level. My name is Taylor Armstrong and I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fail. I teach you to avoid the mistakes I made and bringing the top solar dogs, the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro and closing more deals. What is a Solarpreneur you might ask a Solarpreneur is a new breed of solar pro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery and you are about to become one. All right,

Speaker 2 (02:01):

Welcome back everybody. If you guys are not familiar with me, my name is James Swiderski. I was one of the, uh, original co-hosts and guests of the Solarpreneur podcast. You guys are listening to. I helped Taylor build this up a few years back. Some of you may know me from my sales training program. I used to have called the Solar Spartan system, which is now uploaded for free, or my marketing agencies, Solarpreneur. I've been in the industry for about six years now at this point, I've owned and operated my own solar company, um, marketing as well, sales training, and, uh, Ben really an integral part of every aspect of this industry. And one thing has remained consistent throughout my career within solar. And that is training solar reps. I've trained over a thousand solar reps at this point directly, not just through videos or podcasts like this.

Speaker 2 (02:56):

I've actually been in the room training, sitting with reps, working with them through their mindset issues, their tactics, going out on the doors with them, listening to their calls and coaching them with over a thousand different reps. And the purpose of this series train to win is to put out some content for you. Business owners specifically, um, this podcast has primarily catered towards reps, right? And yes, we've thrown into marketing strategies and whatnot in here, but there has not been any, any specific content for how to actually train and scale a sales team, which is what I have been doing personally for the better part of six years. I've trained and scaled teams, upwards of eight figures per year. My own sales team. I'm managing over a hundred reps at one point, and I've got a couple of tactics and strategies I want to talk about over the next coming months, um, within this podcast format here.

Speaker 2 (03:53):

So if you like this type of content, keep tuning in, you're going to see train to win on each podcast episode. And it's going to be primarily for business owners, VPs, directors, anybody who's managing and growing a sales team. Now let's dive into today's topic and my case study and story I want to talk about here. This is stuff that I have really only taught with my personal clients. I'm working with some of the largest solar companies in the country. Um, this is stuff that I have not actually legally been able to share. I know this sounds like marketing hype and whatnot, but this is stuff I have not actually been able to share because of contract rule like obligations and, uh, privacy with clients and whatnot. And I couldn't share the exact case studies and things like that. And quite frankly, it's stuff that I wanted to keep for myself when I was operating a company a few years back, but the table is, have quite literally turned and things are different now.

Speaker 2 (04:52):

And I could come out and talk about some of these strategies for you to benefit and implement within your company. So the $3.2 million weekend sounds like a crazy outlandish promise. I'm just going to confront it right away. Right. Um, but if you break down the math on this 3.2 million in solar is not that crazy. And then we're going to talk about in this case study, we actually did battery sales with this. This is with the startup company called Evelar solar that it worked with back in Utah on the first part of my career, a couple of years into my career re really where I got my feet wet in the industry, um, and was able to really learn all of the aspects of the solar business to eventually start my own company. And, um, the promo that we did specifically over a weekend, um, with our 11 reps was we were introducing a new partnership with Sonnen.

Speaker 2 (05:43):

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Sonnen-battery company. Um, we were introducing a new partnership with them, a new product launch and offer, and we put together a special promo over about two weeks that the very pinnacle point was a 72 hour period over. And I can't remember what holiday it was, but it was like Memorial day weekend or something like that. Um, so let's just dive into the meat here. What do we actually do? Okay. First of all, we warmed up our lists of homeowners who were current customers and past leads can at the time, I believe we had about 2,500 customers. So we had a lot of customers. Um, and then we had, I don't know, 10, 20,000 leads, right? So we had a lot of to work with, but these were dead leads that, um, most companies would consider dead stale.

Speaker 2 (06:37):

Right? They've been talked to a million times beat to death. Um, and nobody had called these guys in months or years. Right. Just rotting away in the CRM. Okay. So what we did is we took our list of customers, right? Couple of thousand, right? And we separated those from the other guys. And for two weeks, four to five times a week, we emailed these customers would just value content. Okay. How to save money on your electric bills, boom, walking them through an energy audit in the home, right. How to use a tax credit when you go solar, right? Whatever the content was. And I can't remember the very specifics of what it was. It was value-driven content to really just get the line of communication open. And then in the first week we introduced the offer. We said, Hey, we've got something very special coming up.

Speaker 2 (07:27):

We're going to call and announce it. Next weekend. One of our reps are going to call you, they're going to tell you about the new, special, our new partnership with Sonen. So you can, uh, go off the grid without your, uh, with electricity, blah, blah, blah, benefit on the battery. Just kind of hooking them and teasing them for that aspect of the promo. Right? So plain and simple. I think you guys get it warm up the list for two weeks prior, right? During this two weeks, you're also going to hype up your sales team. Step number two here. Right? And you're going to tell them, Hey, we've got a massive promo, massive drop sewn and batteries, whatever our, to whatever your offer is, Ken, we've got this massive thing dropping. You guys need to be prepared for this. We're going to have a specific contest for when this drops.

Speaker 2 (08:17):

Um, and you're going to involve every department, not just sales. We'll get into this in a moment, but make sure the entire company is onboard with what's going on here. Step number three is this is going to be a time sensitive promo for not just the homeowners, but it's also going to be a time sensitive promo for your reps. Okay. So what does this mean? The offer is going to be gone. It's a onetime 72 hour offer, and I believe it should be 72 hours. You could go a little longer and I've done it, but hasn't met as effective as that 72 hours. If it's one day, it's not quite long enough, give it three full days a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or a Thursday, Friday, Saturday. You want to give it that time? Okay. And what you're also going to do is you're going to put together a commission offer for your reps.

Speaker 2 (09:12):

This is what we did. So normally reps would make unbeliev as, uh, let's see, 200 kilowatt is what they were doing. This was in Utah as well. So not crazy California. Yeah. But 200 kilowatt was the commission. And, uh, for battery sales, I believe it was just a flat 1000 a piece. And what they did is they two X the battery commissions. So that was also 200 kilowatt for each battery. And then we also did, um, a 1.5 X commission multiplier on normal sales commissions, just for sales made within the 72 hour period. Right? So to review, we have a time sensitive offer and promo for the homeowner. This could be 12 months free power just for the three months. It could be anywhere from we've done 36 months free power before that could be whatever you want. New battery drop. I believe the promo we did at this point was, uh, 12 months, no payments for batteries and solar.

Speaker 2 (10:10):

So they got a battery free of payments for their first year. Um, and then it was like a $500 back or something like that. Um, whatever there's a lot of offers you could do, but put together a time-sensitive offer for the homeowner and then a commission offer to go with it. You need the commission offer because that's going to push your reps to engage with the contest. Many business owners and clients have worked with where they make a mistake. When it comes to contests, they don't get proper engagement. And this is a real easy way to fix that. Hyping the contest up. And then, um, actually having a commission multiplier, step number four. What this process we do is we had clear action items. All right. So everybody had two lists. Every single participant in the contest blitz had a list of customers. And we had a list of leads, old leads in the CRM aged leads, right?

Speaker 2 (11:04):

Um, so we split those lists up into two, divided them up, right? Top producers got a little bit higher quality warmer leads, obviously, and then everybody else got the other ones. Um, and then we made sure everybody's prepared for this. This wasn't like we're wasting time on day. One of the launch trying to figure out lists. This was prepared well in advance leads were well informed. What was coming. They had lots of value in the door, right? And it was time to take some action. And then number five here. The last thing we did is we called every lead and customer twice per day, once in the morning, once in the evening morning from nine to 12:00 PM, Ken, and then once in the evening from six to 9:00 PM. So twice per day and those two sessions for the three days back to back to back.

Speaker 2 (11:51):

So you're calling every lead right? Twice per day, three days in a row, you're going to leave a voice memo. The voice memo is going to be about the promo. Hey, this is James with X, Y, Z solar company. We've got a special promo going on where we are offering insert your offer. It's time sensitive. I need you to give me a call back before tomorrow at 12 o'clock. So you guys don't miss this, that's it right now. Some of you guys may be saying, don't leave voice memos is a waste of time. I totally disagree. I am a strong believer in voice memos and the effectiveness, and especially in a promotion type of setting, you want to be leaving voice memos with your customers. That's how you're going to get these callbacks. And then for every single one of these calls, you're going to shoot them a text.

Speaker 2 (12:44):

And it's going to be a simple text of first name, question, mark, shoot the text. And you're looking for a response, right? And you just want to get an established contact so they know who's calling. And then for every single call, you make double ring, double dials. They don't answer the first one, give it a double dial, right? If you want to go hyper, hyper aggressive, triple dial, okay. You have to hit the three days in a row though. That's the key here because a lot of them will not pick up on the first day. I'd say about a 20, 30% pickup rate on the first day, second day, that's where stuff's going to start to happen. The last day, 80% of your sales are going to happen on that last day. So what are the total numbers for when we did this, actually went back into the CRM and looked at the numbers from what we did.

Speaker 2 (13:32):

Um, there was 42 deals and they were about $75,000 a piece on an average contract. Now you might be say at 75, that's a freaking huge, this was a sewn in battery plus solar. Okay. Almost every deal that was sold on this weekend was with a battery and sown and batteries. If you're not familiar at the time, they were about 25, 30 5,000 a piece for the small ones. Some of the bigger ones were close to a hundred grand for a piece as well. So averaged out we did about 42 contracts, 75, a piece 11 reps, 3.2 mil in revenue. So guys, this is not rocket science. I'm not sharing anything that you guys probably have not taken a stab at before, or at least thought about doing this is just straight up execution and getting your team on board. The biggest problem, as I said, company owners have with doing contest blitzes promotions.

Speaker 2 (14:29):

Like this is participation and participation comes from the top. Okay? I want you to remember this participation starts with you. If you are not 100% sold on this with your partners, with your managers, with your VP, this thing's not going to work. You need to have management all of your stakeholders all in on this thing. I have never been able to get a company to adopt any sort of sales training, marketing plan, a strategy promotion, whatever it is. I've never been able to get a company in my career so far to implement something like this. If all of the stakeholders were not on board, you need to have your entire team on this. So whatever you got to do, sit down with them, hype them up, talk about it. You really have nothing to lose and doing a promotion like this. That's the other thing I want to leave you here.

Speaker 2 (15:21):

What do you have to lose here? Because you might be thinking that the incentives could be expensive, right? Oh, we can't do a two X commission or a 1.5 X commission. Right? We'll do the numbers. If your guys generated an extra 10 deals because of this contest, 15, 20, 40 deals like we did, right? What does that pay out? Do the numbers and look at how can you afford to do the contest? Because the reality is you can't afford to not be doing contests like this on a regular basis. The top companies and clients I've worked with, they do promotions all the time. Weekly contest challenges, monthly contest, quarterly yearly. They're doing them constantly because you have to keep things interesting for your reps. If you don't have interesting promotions for your reps to get them engaged, get them excited to show up in the office, go out on the doors, right?

Speaker 2 (16:16):

You're going to have a high turnover rate. If you're not throwing unique, interesting offers in front of your customers on a regular basis, calling them and upselling them additional products and services. You're just literally throwing money out in the trash, right? You are wasting opportunity wasting cash. The last takeaway I will give you here is you've got to follow up with your leads, this contest. This is the most amazing part of this contest. In my opinion, these were not new leads. These were old quote unquote dead leads. Think about it. Most reps will say, oh, that's dead opportunity. They'll never go solar. Every single rep in my office when we were doing this and every client I've implemented this with, guess what? Like all of the reps say, oh, they're not going to go solar because of this or this or this. We take that out of the equation by just mixing up the leads and passing them around the company.

Speaker 2 (17:14):

And all of a sudden you've got reps calling other reps leads and they don't know what the situation was. They don't know what the heck happened. And guess what happens? We start closing those deals. Okay? Do not let the limiting belief of your reps or the situation or interaction your reps had with leads, taint your conversion rates with your leads. Okay? Age, the leads and opportunities are still opportunities. Take advantage of them. My friends, it will pay, let us know, hit up. Taylor, head, hit them up with an email. Find me on social. Primarily I'm on LinkedIn. Hit me up and let me know what the results of this contest did for you guys. I promise you if you do this follow exactly what I just talked about. Warm up the leads for two weeks, have a unique compelling offer with your existing product or introducing a new product.

Speaker 2 (18:09):

Hype up your sales team, have a special promotion for them and then send them for them. Make it time sensitive, have clear prepared items. Have the list prepared the day before two days before, make sure everybody's ready to go and then call every lead and customer twice a day, three days in a row. Voicemails texts, double rings, guys. You're going to make some magic happen with this thing. All right. I hope you guys enjoyed the content onto the next one. I will talk to you guys real soon. It's been real. My name's James Swiderski and until next time

Speaker 1 (18:42):

See ya. Hey, Solarpreneurs quick question. What if you could surround yourself with the industry's top performing sales pros, marketers, and CEOs, and learn from their experience and wisdom in less than 20 minutes a day. For the last three years, I've been placed in the fortunate position to interview dozens of elite level solar professionals and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level. That's why I want to make a truly special announcement about the new learning community, exclusively for solar professionals to learn, compete, and win with top performers in the industry. And it's called the Solciety, this learning community with designed from the ground up to level the playing field to give solar pros access to proven members who want to give back to this community and help you or your team to be held accountable by the industry. Brightest minds four, are you ready for it? Less than $3 and 45 cents a day currently Solciety is open, launched, and ready to be enrolled. So go to Solciety.co To learn more and join the learning experience. Now this is exclusively for Solarpreneur listeners. So be sure to go to solciety.co And join. We'll see you on the inside.

The SOLARPRENEUR podcast is here to help you close more deals in the solar industry, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully, have a much better time and situation.