The Next Level Contractor Event

FIRST TIME EVER OFFERED: More than “just” a webinar, it’s a SERIES of FOUR powerful webinars (beginning October 6) from the Nation’s TOP trainers. You’ll see the GAME CHANGING METRICS to use in your company including:

• Course #1 High Performance Marketing in the New Economy: Get more leads online AND offline using blistering strategies formed in the ‘new economy’.
• Course #2 Your Next Million Dollars in Maintenance Agreements: See how hundreds of contractors are making millions with no more effort than a simple service call!
• Course #3 World’s Simplest Methods for World Class Customer Service: Leap frog “average” contractors and become “World Class” with simple strategies now.
• Course #4 Your Step-by-Step 90 Day “Next Level” Blueprint: A full course synopsis PLUS a map to take you to the NEXT LEVEL. You won’t wonder what to do next! Tools, downloads, and follow up training included!

Register ONE TIME for access to all 4 webinars. Includes all Workbooks, Downloads, Follow Up training.

NOTE: ONLY 550 lines available (Adams’ last webinar with The News had over 800 registrants)

PLEASE REGISTER TODAY. When this event closes, that’s it. Do not delay.

Shed Light On Dishonesty

I want to start by saying that I am against government interference in the contracting industry as much as anyone.  It is certainly hard enough to profitably operate an hvac, plumbing or electrical service contracting business without another partner who is guaranteed their profit before the contractor owner gets theirs.

However, one of the places where local government and some dishonest people in the trades makes a mockery of the statutes and laws, is in the area of licensing and permits.  All of the honest contractors I know voluntarily follow the requirements to be licensed or registered if the community requires it.  These same contractors comply with permits and inspection requirements as well. Even though it increases the cost of doing business and the prices the consumer pays for this service.

I Know It’s Harder To Do it The Right Way

I understand, this licensing and permit process is a great burden to the average contractor who complies with these laws in good faith. This raises the question… What can the licensed or registered service contractor do about the fringe side-jobber or dishonest contractor who works in the shadows and does not follow the process?  You know, the people who willfully skirt the local ordinances requiring permits, inspections and in some cases licensing?  The ones who seem to consistently “forget” to get a permit over and over again.

Following this process protects consumers as well as increases the quality standards of the work that the hvac, plumbing and electrical industry provides to consumers.  When asked most contractors will say there is nothing you can do about it.

Do Nothing & You’re Part Of The Problem

I would like to offer some ideas to all of the honest contractors who follow the correct licensing and permit process.  The people who have worked hard in some cases for generations to build their name and reputation on doing things BETTER than local government asks them to.  You who have scratched and clawed in a day-to-day struggle to make ends meet only to have some “hack” avoid the local laws and ordinances that you follow each and every day and then lowball a price to do the work without permit or inspection.

You Can Make a Difference If You Take Action

Remember that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I have personally seen contractors I know make a difference in towns and villages who have sleepy or just downright dishonest inspectors, by getting serious about this issue. Here are some of the techniques that I recommend honest contractors do about this problem…

- Get a lawyer to write a letter on your behalf about the specific contractor and the specific address of home.

- State the law or ordinance that is being violated by the contractor and homeowner not being in compliance with licensing or permit laws.

- In the letter state the unfair business practice this presents, the loss of jobs and the potential danger to the community from these non-inspected jobs.

- Demand the contractor be fined, penalized and even banned from doing business for not following the permit/inspection process.

- Tell them to update you with the progress as a public citizen as to what action has been taken. Provide all contact information so the can keep you in the loop.

- Let the building department know that you are sending this letter to the mayor’s office and village or city board members.

- Advise all interested and influential branches of local government that legal action will be taken against the city if nothing is done about this issue.

- Create a deadline as to when you expect to be updated about this situation

- Also send the letter to the offending contractor, (If you can find them) and let them know that they may be a party to the eventual lawsuit.

Don’t Give Up At First Resistance

Get permission from your lawyer to send this same letter to other cities and towns where you find license and permit violations. With the only change to the letter being the address of the home and the contractor or person in violation. You must keep doing this for each time you lose a job where no permit was pulled.  Obviously this will rock the apple cart but you must stand firm on principle

Create An Alliance Of Honesty

Also attend local contractor meetings such as ACCA and PHCC and let your fellow honest contractors know about this process so they can do the same thing. You will probably never take legal action, but the threat of this is too big to ignore. Especially if multiple people in the local city or village know that each other knows about the situation but does nothing to stop it.

Call The Press

Finally send a copy of this letter about this situation to the local media with a letter from you talking about how unlicensed contractors are a danger to our community. Ask them to run a story about this to create awareness. Tell them that you are available as an expert on this subject to be interviewed for the story. This is great PR for your company as well.

You CAN Do A Lot

I completely disagree with those who say we can do nothing about this. As you can see by the above, there is a lot you can do. Remember that if you want a fair playing field you sometimes have to fight for it! When it cost “Cheap Charlie” contractors money, they will take the path of least resistance and start to follow the codes and laws to keep our families safe.

I also completely disagree with those claiming this is a government is “too lazy” or that this is “government interference” in this situation. It is a matter of fairness and a service we are already paying for with our taxes. Shame on us as for not demanding that we get the enforcement of these laws that we have paid for with our hard earned taxes. Remember “we the people” ARE the government and as citizens, we are the boss of the building department and the mayor’s office. Hold them accountable and the laziness and uneven enforcement will stop.

What Is a Professional?

The difference between a REAL professional in any occupation and those who aspire to this status is not the talent level or even any of their great achievements.

The main difference in my opinion are the times when they struggle or find themselves in a slump. The true professional does not lose their enthusiasm when faced with a setback or challenge.  On days when the normal person would rather call in sick, the professional shows up and gives the same effort they would give on their best days.  What then do professionals do when they go into a slump or suffer a poor performance? They always go back to the fundamentals and remember the little things that mean a lot when the pressure is on.

Think about what you or your sales team do when you are faced with tough times when you struggle to gain even modest results.  Do you “not show up?”  Or, do you go back to the basics to “stop the bleeding” and turn your sales results around.

Here are some things that you should consider when you are stuck in a rut of poor performance:

#1 – Are you customer focused or self focused?

You should focus 90% of your energy on getting information about the buyer and reserve 10% of your energy on giving information about yourself. “Brag-books,” Presentation binders and literature can kill a sale fast.  Sales is about finding what the right answer is from your buyer and then passing the test during your presentation.  Ask yourself how well you knew these people?

Did you even know their first name? Are they married? how many kids are there? What are the names of everyone in the home? YES even the dog!  Knowing your buyers perception of important factors like the “green” movement are essential before you start to prescribe any solutions for them.

#2 – Be different than your competitor

Differentiation is one of the key foundations to any sales situation. In effect if all of you line up and essentially give the same presentation the buyer has no way to tell who is better other than price.

Use different verbiage, services, warranty and solutions than your competitor. Also, make sure that in every presentation you are telling your buyer something that no one else has told them. Never present “apples to apples” to your buyer. Include some oranges, grapes and bananas too.

#3 – Get buyers to commit before giving prices

Do you feel pressure when you are presenting your options? Selling is a series of commitments followed by an agreement at the end. There should be no pressure at the end. If you fail to get the necessary commitments up front then you will have to deal with all of them when you attempt to close.

Always ask “what if?” questions before you decide to give people solutions.  Questions like, “What if I put together some solutions for you today. what would happen then?” are great ways to predict the outcome of your interaction.  What good are your solutions if the buyer is not committed to purchasing them?

#4 – Deal with perceptions of your competitor

Although you should never talk bad about the competition, you DO need to find out the buyers perception of them. Have they used other companies before? If so, why did they switch. You must find out how others have failed or you are doomed to repeat the same mistake they have made.

Remember that success leaves clues and so does failure. It is much more fun in sales to learn from the crash and burn stories of others rather than learning from your own setbacks.

#5 – Be a system renovator not a fix it man

In today’s uncertain economic times buyers are not going cheaper as you may think. Instead, they universally want the problem to be completely over and done with after you finish. Small, cheaper solutions are temporary fixes that lead to lost customers. Include complete overhauls or renovations in your presentation and your buyer will discover the value in your services.

Don’t be afraid to take what seems like a small opportunity and create a major event out of it.  Bigger solutions equal larger purchases in one chunk.  It is simply better service to get everything done today than make your buyer wait until tomorrow.

#6 – Do you sell tomorrow’s solutions today?

Can any of us argue that your services won’t cost more five years from now? With the rising cost of transportation, labor, insurance, energy, gasoline, copper, steel and brass the price of what you are selling now is sure to rise. Your customer would appreciate if they could buy tomorrows service at today’s prices.

Always offer multi-year follow-up service, warranty and maintenance plans with your best options. Think of it as an “inflation buster” package. It’s a simple investment in their comfort and peace of mind that they will thank you for.

#7 – Show buyer’s their best & worst options

I know that top professionals present what they think is the best option for their customer. What if you suspended your judgment and got out of the way to let your buyer decide what is right for them? If you fail to offer your buyer the worst thing they could do, then they feel compelled to look elsewhere for a point of reference.

First offer your buyer the premium solutions with a system renovation, multi-year warranties and services and at then take away the quality and services in each subsequent solution until your sixth option at the bottom is a band-aid with no warranty. Stop assuming that you know how they will buy and let them choose for themselves.

#8 – Present to the right person at the right time

How many calls have you gone on where you painstakingly diagnosed the problem and created a “bonzer” solution only to find out that you were not talking to the buyer at all? Or perhaps the buyer was not ready to decide today.

Always make sure you align the time you present with the day people will decide. By all means also make sure that this is the person who can make the final decision as well. Just ask who owns the home and what they are hoping to accomplish today and the answer will reveal itself.

#9 – Let your buyer choose what’s best for them

You have no doubt heard the phrase, “Silence is golden” before. In selling nothing is more true that that simple axiom. Listen to your buyer and then diagnose the problem, finally create a presentation with all your solutions. After that just ask, “What should we do?”

Then remain silent and let your buyer make their decision. Many times the best way to handle an objection is to just let the buyer handle it themselves.

Stop trying to over-convince your buyer to purchase from you. Just stand there after your presentation and wait without talking. Your silence will be interpreted as confidence. The best thing to say is often nothing at all.

Stop Amateur Night On Your Calls

Vince Lombardi once said, “Being a champion starts with the ability to take a hard look at yourself.”  Try to remember than even the most seasoned professional baseball players always take batting practice before every one of the over 200 games they play from spring training through the world series.  Don’t you think that someone at that level know how to bat already?  How much “batting practice” are you taking or skipping before each day starts?  My advice to bust a slump is to get in the cage and practice your fundamentals every day and you will always win.

Are These Skills Really “Soft?”

One of the things that has always made me crazy is the labeling of sales and customer service as a so called “soft” skill. If sales and service are soft then why is it so hard to get your team to put them into practice?  I often wonder, “Who was the dunderhead, that coined this term?”

My best guess is that it is probably someone who has a very strong technical skill-set that has failed to develop equally strong customer skills. This person (Probably a guy) then trying to justify this weakness, downplays the importance of customers by labeling this uber-important skill as “soft” which implies that it is not very important.

Selling Skills Are Essential

The essential skills of selling your services at a profitable price while providing service that exceeds that price is very rare indeed. In fact, many careers, companies and customers have been lost due to the inability to implement them. Far from soft, they are very powerful and can indeed change the lives of employees, customers and companies.

In fact, when you think about it, your “Hard” (technical) skills will whither away fast if you fail to sell or create value in your service. After all, if you can’t convince a customer they should purchase from you, then you will not do the work. This means that all of our tech and product knowledge never gets put into action. Eventually you will lose your skills due to atrophy.

Do You Diagnose People?

What we are talking about here is the ability of your team to diagnose a customer and their family so that your technical solutions can be “on-code” with these buyers. It really amounts to our willingness to listen to our customers words and feelings in a way that helps us find the perfect solution for them. This creates a higher value for the service they provide.

Conversely those who are great at the technical part of their jobs but can’t communicate the value of the service they are about to do, will find themselves struggling to find work. Think of all the families of those employees who are suffering because of this.

The Happy Loser

These “happy losers” are stuck in a rut, going about their lame but persistent business of trying not to go broke. No doubt they will blame, the economy, the president, employees, vendors or anybody else but themselves for their failure. I call them “happy losers” because they are fine with mediocrity or failure as long as other contractors they know are failing too. Basically, they understood the work but they do not know how to provide service or know how to sell that service. That is their legacy.

Essential Skills Used By Very Few

On the other hand there are a small but growing group of service contractors who are working to master these essential skills. Their employees are working year round. They are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, while the “company-next-door” continues to struggle not knowing these “soft” skills.

In summary, one must be crazy to not see the importance of these so called “soft” skills. It is the difference between a life wasted, families broken and financial struggle OR a legacy of value, quality family togetherness and living the life you have always imagined. This is “soft?” This is easy? Let’s stop with the “soft” label and let everyone know how essential this skill is to become a true success.

Keep Your Eye On The Ball

I can tell spring is about to arrive when I listen to my favorite sports radio show and I hear the ‘Hot Stove” league heating up. The show hosts go on seemingly forever about the same players and how they fit in to this years team. This week they started to play the pre-season games in earnest as all the players try to play themselves into mid-season shape by the first week in April.

In the selling world try to think about how you can use this time of year to do the same thing. What i mean is that we have all endured a challenging economy over the recent past. Just remember that when a person who is good at selling their services goes to work that the economy is always a lot better. At least it is for those who are in great mid-season selling “shape.”

What do top sales professionals do to stay in top selling shape? The answer is probably easier to explain by telling you what they do NOT do. For one thing, they do not make any assumptions. They are always thinking of news ways to approach buyers that they have had challenges with in the past. They acknowledge selling as a competitive sport and they feel that if they are not growing that their competitor probably is. So the one thing for sure is that they do NOT stand pat and rest on their laurels.

Get Yourself In Shape To Close

Here are some of the things that the best people in sales do to round themselves into top shape before they go on their next round of calls.

Focus - Exercise your ability to focus only on the things you have control of. Worrying about the past or the future is just not a productive use of your time. Think about what you can change right now and not on the economy, your prices and other things that won’t change under your direct control.  All of the things you worry about would improve if you were just focused on your selling behaviors and how they effect the outcome of each interaction with buyers.

Practice - Think about the areas of your calls that need the most practice. Is it listening? Or how about creating interest and desire? How about the timing of your presentation? Are you always sure that you are finding solutions for the right people or is their someone else who should be involved? Of course there is always closing and handling objections. Do you have ways to eliminate objections before they happen? Are you good at responding th them after your presentation? These are things that will always need practice to get into top shape.

Are You In The Minors?

If you watch enough sports you can tell the difference between a minor league player and a seasoned professional at the highest level. It is the details and polish that shows from years of practice. So many sales people who are in the “minors” actually practice their skills for the first time in front of a customer. Why not use the rest of this month to get prepared for the regular season and eventually you might wind up in the “World Series” of selling and finally reach your goals. You and your family will be glad you did.