The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Grow Your Sales With The Five Steps of Sales Differentiation

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

Lee Salz is the founder of Sales Architects and The Revenue Accelerator, as well as the author of five bestselling books, including “Sales Differentiation” and “Hire Right, Higher Profits.” With his remarkable expertise in sales and entrepreneurship, Lee has assisted hundreds of companies in building world-class sales forces, developing effective strategies and processes for maximizing profit, and transforming their sales perspectives from people-based to process-based. In this episode, we talked about sales management, entrepreneurship, social media...

Many of your listeners, as you look at your business, imagine if one of your salespeople quit a really good one, what would happen? And the most common response is, uh-oh. But if we're process-based, that's the foundation, then we just go get that next person, bring them in, and they just execute the same plan as the prior one. And I don't mean to make it sound easy. It's certainly not. But I'll tell you what, you sleep a lot better knowing that the foundation of your revenue is based on a system, a process, if you will, than on individuals. So I like to say, love your process like your salespeople. The process is the core. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership,

to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have Lee Sahls with me. This guy is amazing. I met him several months ago. We were both speaking at an event and he absolutely murdered it. He's an expert at sales management, entrepreneurship, social media, strategic planning, sales operations, leadership, training, and new business development. He's part of sales architect, sales management strategist from 1997 to today, revenue accelerator CEO from 2011 till today, business journal featured columnist from

2014 till today, Kansas State University National Strategic Selling Institute program advisor and strategy coach from 2015 till today, sales education foundation advisory board member from 2014 till today. He's the CEO of Business Expert Webinars, sales and marketing management magazine editorial advisory board from 2012 to 2016. He's the author of five best-selling books, including Sales Differentiation, 19 Powerful Strategies to Win More Deals at the Prices You Want. A columnist with the Business Journals, serves on an editorial advisory board

in Sales Marketing Management Magazine, and is the program advisor at Kansas City University Strategic Selling Institute. Built the largest, the largest LinkedIn management group. It's called Sales Management Executives with over 315,000 executive members. And he's also been quoted and featured on Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Times, Dallas Morning News, Selling Power, Sales and Marketing Management, ABC News, MSNBC, and many more. Lee, that is probably the most impressive resume I've ever read. Oh, you're too kind. Thank you.

This is awesome, man. So obviously the whole crowd listening right now is people that generally are in the home service industry. Tell us a little bit about your journey, your books that you've written. You've done a lot of speaking engagements. Tell us how you got where you're at and a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so I had the privilege of a really cool job right out of college. So I was managing a hardcore gym, and one of the members was a banker.

And he said, hey, we just loaned a bunch of money to some muscle heads, and they need you running this chain of clubs. So right out of college, my first job, I was the executive director of a chain of health clubs in Syracuse, New York. I was there for a cool start. But as much as I love the world of health and fitness, I've competed in bodybuilding, competed in powerlifting. There's no money there. So what I really recognized that I loved was sales, marketing, sales management, and had a career of building sales organizations. And my first book came out in 2007, and that became the launching pad for me to go off and do my own thing. So I've been providing consulting, coaching, and keynote speaking since then. Awesome.

So you got this sales differentiation, 19 powerful strategies to win more deals, win more deals in the prices you want. I just talked to you before we started the podcast that my team tends to give discounts. And for some reason, we have a hard time, a lot of us in sales at confrontation. Have you ever noticed that? Yeah. And that's why, because they see it as confrontation. It's not confrontation. Now, if we use that word objection, right, and we wait for a price objection to come up, yes, you're exactly right. You have a confrontation on your hands. But if you look at it as saying, I need to sell what

I'm selling at a price that's commensurate with the value, then you say, what's my strategy to help someone see the value in both what I sell and how I sell it. Now it's not a confrontation. It's a strategy upfront to help your buyers see the value in what you offer. And the price issue only comes up when we haven't done the best job that we can at positioning value commensurate with what we're offering. I agree a hundred percent. And value is such a big thing. I love talking about that. And on LinkedIn, you talk a lot about process-based versus people-based selling. Can you talk a little bit about those approaches and the difference? Yeah. So a lot of companies, particularly the small and mid-sized ones, they build their

business around a salesperson. So you can imagine how this happens. They hire one salesperson, then they hire a second, the third, the second one failed, the fourth, the fifth, and on and on and on. And from a maturation perspective, meaning how do we scale the business, each one of those people that's been added to the team is allowed to sell in whatever way they feel like selling. And when I work with organizations like that and I look at revenue performance, it looks like an EKG report. I can tell when a new person started and when someone left. I'll tell you a little story. I had a client, very successful minor league baseball

team. And minor league baseball, affiliated baseball, affiliated with a major league team, you have no say over the product. It's strictly a sales and marketing business. So selling ticket packages and sponsorships. And they were very much a people-based organization. And again, I could look at their revenue like an EKG report. I could see when someone came in. I could see when someone left. And in that business, they have a lot of turnover. They're hiring young kids just out of school in their 20s. It's not a career that people take on. It's a job. So we know people are going to come and go. A lot of executives ask me, how do we keep these millennials? How do we keep them? Well, what if we go the other way and accept that we can't? And let's build our business based on

process, meaning we look at each sales role that we have and determine how it's supposed to work. What are all the responsibilities and develop a game plan and a corresponding playbook that says, okay, when we bring a salesperson on for this sales role, this is how you do it. And that's exactly what we did with this baseball team. I used to get calls, gosh, I'd get it on a Sunday afternoon. so-and-so just quit. And it was catastrophic to the business. And many of your listeners, as you look at your business, imagine if one of your salespeople quit, a really good one, what would happen? And the most common response is, uh-oh. But if we're process-based, that's the foundation, then we just go get that next person, bring them in, and they just execute the same plan as the prior one. And I don't mean to make it sound easy. It's certainly not. But I'll tell you what, you sleep a lot better knowing that the foundation of your revenue is based on a system, a process,

if you will, than on individuals. So I like to say, love your process like your salespeople. The process is the core. You know, I talk a lot about this on the podcast about Marcus Limon and the, what is his show? It's the, The Profit is what it's called. And he goes, people, process, and product. But I always, I think the process dictates the products you choose and the people you get. And the process, I have an eight-step sales process. And we call it the eight-step sales process

that works every single time. Because it's 100% non-failure. It will not fail if you follow it. It's impossible to fail unless the person literally is not the decision maker. And we failed on our call center if we go to that job. So if the people learn the process, and I've got people that have come out of the training and been amazing salespeople. One thing I can't train though is body language, eye contact, confidence, and tonality and how to smile. So that's the only thing I look for. I don't look for, do you have experience? Are you good at sales? I say, look, everything you did from meeting your wife to making friendships to building long lasting relationships happen because of your confidence of how much you believe in yourself. And if you believe in yourself, I want to hire you because I can tell by your eye contact that you're a winner and you're going to strive to be number one. What do you have to say? What are your comments on that? I'm curious to hear your perspective.

Yeah. And so when you talk about having a process or a system, you're right. You put that first because that dictates who you need for this sales role. I like to really stir the pot and tell people, I don't believe that there's this entity called a great salesperson. And I get funny looks and I say, I can prove it. How many of these so-called great salespeople had a fantastic track record? They were successful elsewhere and they failed in your company. So if you believe that there's this entity called a great salesperson, then you also have to subscribe to one of two of the following. Either this person arrived on your doorstep and completely forgot how to sell, or your company is the worst company to sell for in the history of business. And while that's humorous, what that really calls out is we need to look for the right salespeople who can succeed in this specific sales role.

There isn't this general, you can put somebody anywhere and they're going to succeed no matter what. Because you're not hiring those people. Those people are called entrepreneurs. Those aren't the salespeople, the sales talent available to us. Those are entrepreneurs. They're building businesses. But when we talk about salespeople that can be successful in our company, we need to take a 360-degree look at the role and identify what I call performance factors, factors that lead to success, failure, and underperformance in that role.

Based on those performance factors, that tells us how we evaluate sales talent. Because we're not looking for a great salesperson, we're looking for the ones that match what we feel this role necessitates. So we're looking for the right salesperson who could be great in this sales role in our company. And you'll notice I'm not even saying sell for our company. Companies have different sales roles. They have hunters, they have farmers, inside, outside, all different sales roles. And those factors that lead to success, failure, and underperformance in those roles are different by role, by company. I love that.

And I'm just, I'm totally on board. And I hope the people that are listening understand that if you build your company on the people, I always say, instead of if somebody gets hit by a bus, I say, if someone were to win the lottery, they probably wouldn't stick around. And what does it look like? Try to keep it a little more optimistic. But, you know, I got all these questions. So I love sales. First of all, I don't think it's a four letter optimistic. But, you know, I got all these questions. So I love sales.

First of all, I don't think it's a four-letter word. I think sales is inevitable. It's a part of life. It's everything we do, from building relationships to building success. What's the best way to open up a conversation that increases the likelihood of a successful sale? Meaning when you're prospecting? I guess. What do you mean? So you had a LinkedIn sale. Meaning when you're prospecting? I guess. So you had a LinkedIn post. I think it was something about two words, troubleshoot sales performance issues. Yes. But what's that kind of

going on? There are two words that are deeply ingrained in our communication style. We use these two words all the time and don't even consider how someone is going to hear them on the other side of the desk. And there are two words that I personally guarantee you turn buyers off. Those two words, I want. So imagine we work so hard to get a meeting, whether it was inbound, outbound, whatever it is, we finally get the meeting. And no sooner do we get to that meeting that we're going to blow it because we're going to use those two words. Because we've been told sales best practice, you set an agenda. So it sounds like this. What I want to do today is ask you some questions about your business, what you've been doing, and what your goals are.

If you think about what that message is, I'm here to sell you something. I don't really give a rip about what you want. I'm here for me, myself, and I. But if we propose an agenda, it's now a question. For this to be a good use of your time, what is it you want us to be sure to talk about? Remember the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, that scene with Spicoli? Yeah, he smoked a lot of weed. Yeah, well, but there was a scene where he was talking with his teacher and they were talking about time.

And he said, well, if you're here and I'm here, doesn't that make it our time? And that's what we want to be conveying right at that very outset of the meeting. We don't want to come across, I mean, it's so hard to get in front of buyers and then you turn them off right in that first second by saying what I want to do today. Yeah. So you've got 19 strategies on sales differentiation and I am familiar, but I think a lot of the audience might not know. Tell me a little bit about the concept about sales differentiation. Okay. Well, I'll start at the very beginning where the whole interest that I have in differentiation started. When I was a teenager, I'd just gotten my driver's license and a family friend in New Jersey had started a new business

and he was looking for a driver. And this new business, this is in the 1980s, was a delivery and pickup dry cleaning. So he didn't own any dry cleaning businesses, no stores. He was strictly selling transportation. And I was intrigued by this whole idea of seeing would people pay more because you're going to pay a premium for this, for the same exact dry cleaning. And guess what? People were very willing to do it. He kept me very busy driving for him after school. And that created intrigue. I like to describe it as I got pregnant with the idea of differentiation as a teenager, but it wasn't until my late 40s that I was prepared to come out and share it with the world. And I've worked

with companies, all sizes, all different industries, whether it be selling products, service technology, B2B, B2C, selling to the government. It doesn't matter what you're selling. At some point, there's going to be a conversation about price. As prospects are trying to justify the price you put in front of them, like we talked about, is the number you put there commensurate with the value they perceive? And salespeople really struggle with that. And that leaves them no choice to drop their price to win the deal. So the core objective of sales differentiation strategy is to help salespeople win more deals at the prices that they want. And there's two components

to sales differentiation. There's sales differentiation in what you sell and sales differentiation in how you sell. So we look at the what you sell side of the equation. This is understanding what your differentiators are, when they're relevant, to whom they're relevant, and coming up with a strategy to get someone on the other side of that desk as excited about it as you are. Because if you can't get someone

on the other side of the desk as excited about it as you are, there's only one conversation you're going to have, and it's going to be price. I'll tell you a little story. I moved to Minnesota about, gosh, a little 15 years ago. And moving from the East Coast, one of the things I discovered is they don't issue you Minnesota skin. I still have my East Coast skin. And having a

couple of dogs that go in the backyard to do their business, come the winter months, you know, from November to March, even April, I don't pick it up. I just let them go in the backyard and do their thing. And if you're thinking that's disgusting, Tommy, remember the climate where I live, right? We've got, I mean, it's only November 14th and we've already seen a temperature of four degrees wind chill minus 10. That was just the other day. So one of the smartest things that I did was I found a company that does what's called a spring cleanup. So they come out in the spring and they pick up all the dog poop. And it's always a great day when they do that because it's all gone.

My yard is pristine again. But there was always one thing about that service that I didn't care for. They pick up all the dog poop and they'd leave giant bags of it on the side of my home and it was left for me to discard. So you can imagine you put these in your garbage cans, now it starts to thaw and you can imagine what your garage smells like. So last year when I called to schedule service, for some reason they were slow in responding. And I got an email from one of their competitors who would have thought of this as a competitive business offering to provide the same service,

same price. I said, well, gee, this isn't rocket science. We'll use somebody new this year. So I contracted with them. Guy comes out, picks up all the dog poop and he's leaving. And I said, what are you doing? He says, what do you mean, what am I doing? I'm done. I said, yes, but you're taking the dog poop. And he says, yeah, that's what we do. And I said, oh my gosh, you take the poop. Tommy, it made my day, made my week knowing that I didn't have to deal with that. So that afternoon, I get a call from the owner of this business, you know, small business customer service call, saying, how'd we do? And I said, you did fine.

I said, but I got to ask you, do you compete against this other company? He says, oh, yeah, we run into them all the time. I said, do you know what your biggest differentiator is compared to them? He says, no. I said, you take the time. I said, do you know what your biggest differentiator is compared to them? He says, no. I said, you take the poop. And he goes, oh yeah, I think I knew that. I said, well, you've got to be talking about that when you're selling your service. You need to pose a question like, what are your expectations with respect to discarding of the waste after we pick it up. Because you know, industry standard, now this is an industry, industry standard isn't to do that. You know, your competition is leaving it for the homeowner. And if you remember what I said, I received an email from this company offering to provide the same service at the same price.

They didn't have to price it the same because the service wasn't the same. Therefore, because they didn't see that difference and they weren't helping their buyers to see it, they had no choice but to sell based on price. That was the only way they're going to get someone to make a change. But I would have paid more for that service. And no, I didn't tell him that because I just gave him free consulting. Let someone else pay more. But that's what we do in sales all the time. If we can't get someone on the other side of the desk as excited about our differentiators as we are, you may as well not have them. If we don't position them, if we can't position them in a meaningful way, all we're going to be talking about is price. So that's what I mean about what you sell sales differentiation.

Now we have the other side of it, which is sales differentiation in how you sell. And salespeople are so hypersensitive about differentiating the widget, the what you sell side, looking for every nook and cranny. How do I make this different? Very few think about the how you sell side of sales differentiation, looking at every interaction, every touchpoint with a buyer and challenging yourself with this question, what is it that I could do different than my competition that my buyer would find meaningful? So it's not different for the sake of different. It's got to be meaningful differentiation, looking at every touchpoint, every interaction and challenging yourself with that question. And it's prescriptive. Once you figure that out, you don't happen to fall into it. It's not accidental. You have a prescribed way that you say, this is the way I'm going to handle

the way that I prospect, the way that I handle an in-person meeting, how I follow up, how I present my solution. For example, I was in an industry where all the competitors would send out these glorious multicolored proposals for every deal. And I mean, super, super thick, 99% of it was meaningless marketing stuff. And we looked at this and we said, what is it that we could do different that our buyers would find meaningful? And what we decided was we were going to get away from this fancy stuff because it looked like everybody else's. And we were going to provide a statement of work that was absence of any marketing information. If they want to learn about us and

what we do, what we're all about, they can go on our website. It's chock full. And we even talked about that. When we were getting to the point where it was time to put a solution on paper, we positioned why we put together a statement of work where we said, what we're going to do from the conversations we've had here today is we're going to sit with our department heads and put together what we feel is the right solution for you. And we're going to put this together in a document that is not a fancy multicolored marketing document. This is going to be a three to five page statement of work that you can hold in your hands and know exactly what you're getting for the dollars you're investing. So that you could look at this and say, I know exactly what they're going to do, when they're going to do it, how they're going to do it for me, and even share it with others in the organization, completely absent of marketing fluff.

And it worked fantastically well. Buyers were so appreciative of that. Had nothing to do with differentiating what we were selling. It was strictly in the way that we were selling it. I love it. A lot of people don't like to talk about the process in which you do sales. A lot of people, especially small businesses, in the infancy stages, in the e-myth, he talks about infancy, adolescence, and mature. For some reason, when we hit that mature stage, it's all about systems and processes, and it changes the whole dynamic of the business. And I just think it's so important. I talk about this all the time.

I have a manual for everything. I have a standard operating procedures. I have a checklist. I have a system that gives me the consistent output. And it's so important to think about the system. We ask the same three questions to every customer. This is a beautiful home. How long have you lived here? The next question is, when's the last time you had your garage door looked at? The next question is, tell me exactly what's going on with the garage door. Now I know what's going on with the garage door. I'm the pro, but I'm getting them to talk and I'm building a rapport and I'm educating. You know, I want to kind of divert a little bit here because I got your book right here on my desk, Higher Right, Higher Profits. It's an amazing book.

Jeffrey Gittermer, I think I've been on his email list for the last 15 years. Amazing guy. He says it's the best book he's ever read on building a sales team. Tell me a little bit about this because a lot of people listening are trying to figure out how to build a funnel for amazing people. And I love the process, but you still need great people. Give us some tips on what we need to do to really maybe some gold nuggets on how to get these amazing people. Yeah. So Hire, Write, Hire Profits is a book that's told with a metaphor. And the metaphor is that we're not hiring salespeople. We're making an investment in revenue. So when you spend money on any of the marketing things that you spend money on, you're doing

it to get a return through revenue. Well, it's the same thing when you bring on a salesperson, right? The sole reason you bring on a salesperson is to get the output of revenue. And so if you were making an investment as you would if it's a trade show or whatever it is that you might be making an investment in to get more revenue, you in this case are the sole investor in this salesperson's business. That's the metaphor that the book is told around, this whole idea of a revenue investment. And it talks about, like we talked about a few minutes ago, this idea of before we're going to look at talent, we're going to analyze the role and identify how we get the highest rate of return on it and what would cause this investment to fail, that performance factor discussion that we had a little earlier. And then we build

an evaluation program, an investment evaluation program designed to highlight the matches or lack thereof between those performance factors and the candidates sitting in front of you. Now, the output of that process is not a great salesperson. It's someone with the potential to be great in that role in your company. So they come to the table with knowledge and skills. You need a program, commonly called sales onboarding, that is going to help this new investment that you've made yield a high rate of return fast. And this book provides you with a step-by-step recipe how to build that entire framework, that entire system. One of the common mistakes that I see when

we talk about the sales onboarding side is you'll have a bunch of people that sit in a conference room and they say, what are we going to put into that program? And you say, boy, what's wrong with that question? It seems like you're being thoughtful. Well, if you started from that perspective, you could add content or curriculum forever and still miss the mark. So my suggestion is you first identify expectations. So imagine you have a salesperson who has successfully completed your sales onboarding program. Well, there's now expectations of that individual because you've just described him as successfully completing your onboarding program. Well, what are those expectations? What is it that you would expect them to know, be able to do, and be able to use on behalf of the company? So know refers to information like

product knowledge. Do is an action like conducting a consultation, like a discovery call. And use refers to systems or tools like a CRM or an order management system that you might have. The curriculum that you put in place is a function of the expectations that you have. For each expectation on your list, there has to be a way to develop mastery in it. There's got to be a way that you're going to help them succeed in meeting that expectation for your company. And as a part of onboarding, another common misstep is it's strictly education, strictly training or curriculum. At the end of this onboarding period, there needs to be some level of assessment,

an exam, a simulation, what have you, so that this investment, if you will, demonstrates that they have what it takes to be successful in the role. They're ready to go do their thing because you now know that they meet all the expectations that you have someone in this sales role for your company. Okay. So what is the thing that you do at the end of the training to make sure? Because

I think one of the biggest mistakes that I've seen with training is letting a person out of training because you need them more than you've tested them and you're sure they're going to make a positive impact on the company. So what's the best way to kind of go through the motions with that to make sure that they're going to be successful? So you said kind of a final exam of some sort. How do you build that? Yeah. So I would create a written exam around your line of products, the competition, the process steps, and make sure that they understand how to execute all of those. And then I would create a simulation. In other words, so you take the garage doors that you sell. I'd come up with a realistic but fictitious situation and have someone on your management team play the role of the prospect and see how they do. See, in the absence of that,

I'm guessing no one buys garage doors coming to your office. You're going on site. You're going to them, correct? 99% of the time, yep. Right. So if you don't have this step, then how do you know how this person is doing in the field? If you're not going to assess them up front, how are you ever going to find out what they're doing? How are you going to coach and further develop them? like they were on site with a prospect and see how they do. And until they meet your expectations for effectiveness, they don't get to sell, at least not by themselves. I love that. I'm such a big fan and we call it role-playing and I know the guys don't love that, but we talk through things and I'm like, if you can't do it to me in a safe zone, in our trading center, how are you going to be able to talk in front of a customer? And I don't believe in role play.

You don't believe in role play? I don't. I believe in skill practice. They're the same thing, aren't they? Ah, it's packaging, my friend. I like that. Role play doesn't give it the seriousness of what this is. We're not messing around.

We're not playing around. This is skill practice. You know, it's funny. There's a lot of people that use a metaphor of contrasting salespeople to athletes. And there's one huge, huge difference when you compare those two. If you think of an athlete, they practice all day long, all week long, all year long, years and years and years, specializing in their skills because they know when they get to competition, there's no thinking, there's just doing, right? You can't hit a hundred mile an hour fastball thinking about your feet in the right places, your elbow right? Is your head straight? You can't do it. All you can do is execute. So they will work until they can't get it wrong.

So that in that moment of competition, their body does exactly what they want it to do. Salespeople, they play the game over and over and over again to the business owner's peril because it costs you money to generate leads. And they're just hoping to get better by continuing to play the game. Skill practice gives it the seriousness that this represents, which is it costs money to generate a lead, a lot of it. I have a client the other day, we were talking about it, for their inbound sales, it costs them over $300 for every lead. And the salespeople had no level of seriousness in the handling of those. They'd get an inbound lead and it would take them a few days

to respond to the individual. So skill practice is designed to give this the seriousness that it deserves. I love that word. It's going into my skill training center. This is a really good question that I have about differentiation because when I talk to companies and I've consulted hundreds of companies, I said, well, let me ask you something. Why would I choose you over ABC company? And they say, well, we're ask you something. Why would I choose you over ABC company? And they say, well, we're open nights and weekends. We do drug tests. We do background checks. We've got a wrapped truck. We've got the best warranty. And I'm like, and we've got a price

match guarantee. And I always say, well, every company I've ever talked to has that. And tell me a little bit about finding out and building something that differentiates you and moves you away from the pack. Because some people like to talk about themselves, like you talked about earlier and say, well, our guys are better trained and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think about Blue Ocean a lot when I talk about this is people don't buy a blender because it slices and dices better. They buy it because they're going to break down those nutrients more and you're going to live longer and have more energy and sleep better. So talk to me a little bit about how a company goes about

building those differentiation factors. Well, you get better answers than I do. The one that I hear most often is, well, what's different about you? Our people. We have the best people. Yeah. Right? Oh, stop. Do you really believe that your competitors are going to

prospects and say, you know, we got pretty mediocre people in our company. Everybody is saying that it's meaningless because you can't prove it. I love in the recruiting space, they say, well, we have the best people. How could you possibly have the best people? You have access to the universe of people that are out there. Every recruiter does. You can't possibly have the best candidates. Just stop. So when we talk about the side of the equation you're referring to of sales differentiation and what you sell. There's a five-step process that sales differentiation, the book walks you through that I'll share with our listeners today. So when you identify a differentiator of yours, the first step is to ask yourself this question, why should a prospect care about that? Why should they care?

You feel that you have superior customer service. The second is to ask which types of prospects are going to care about it. Not everyone's going to care about this. So, for example, if you're selling to a homeowner, maybe something's going to be more of interest to the husband or the wife or what have you. So you've got to figure out who's going to care about what. And then under what circumstances is this differentiator going to matter? So this is our third step of the process. So this is saying, what is it that you learned beforehand?

What did you observe when you were there? Maybe observing the garage door or some other aspect of the home. What did they share with you that screams to you a conversation about our approach to customer service is really going to hit the mark here? And then the fourth step is to develop what I call a positioning question. An open-ended question, which means it's a non-yes or no question, designed to help that buyer think differently about the solution they have or could have. And then once you develop that question, the last step is, now that we've opened the door, what relevant information are we going to share about this differentiator? But I want to come back to this positioning question step. One of the worst things that salespeople have been told in the last

15, 20 years is that they're selling to educated buyers. It's so not true because that expression correlates with the adoption of the internet. I ask salespeople, I've asked this in every industry, companies of all sizes, all across the country and around the world, who knows more about the world of potential solutions in your industry? You or the people you sell to? Tommy, I've never had one person say to me, oh, the people I sell to know much more about the world of potential solutions in my industry. It's never

happened. So even though they have access to information, we still know more than them. But if our approach is to lecture them, thanks for a very short conversation. Tommy, you don't like to be lectured, do you? No. Kids don't like to be lectured. It's a horrible communication medium. So we need to develop questions, open-ended questions that help them see what we see without us telling them. I do a lot of work with sales support people. So in a team selling

environment, this isn't the lead salesperson. This is a subject matter expert. And when they are brought in, they want to get on the soapbox and lecture about all these wonderful things that they know. Well, no one likes to be lectured. So the challenge I give them, take what's so vividly clear in your mind that you could lecture on it and develop a question or questions that you look at the guardrails and they're rusted out. You and I both know that at some point, rust is going to lead to a deterioration of that metal. And you're going to have a really big problem on your hands. Now, if you come to them and you lecture them on dealing with the rust and what's going to happen, no one likes to be lectured. But if we develop one of these positioning questions around the rust, say, so what have you done to reduce rust on your, are they called guide rails? Did I get that right, Tommy?

Yeah, just your rails. They're not down on your rails. Don't get away with it. Okay. So what have you done to reduce the rust on your rails? Because you know, once rust takes hold, that you're going to have some severe damage. So you're leading them down the path with a question so that they see it without you telling them. Yeah, I think that's super powerful as to the questions that lead the way. One of the things that I taught my guys last week is we sell a service agreement that we take care of your door every year

for 10 bucks a month. And I tell the guys, don't use any power tools. And I want you to spend 15 minutes showing the customer how we maintain the door. I want you to take your ratchet and I want you to turn the door. I want you to take your ratchet and I want you to turn every screw. I want you to take your level and I want the magnetic level and make sure the rails are good. I want you to clean the safety eyes. Take the case off the opener, put the lubrication, it's a low temperature grease on the gear and sprocket or definitely the

gear and the worm gear. So we go through all these things. It takes about 15 minutes and it's a slow process. We take our time, we get the customer involved. And then we say, would you like to do this every year or would you like us to take care of it and be responsible to make sure it's safe? And as we do that, very rarely does the customer go, oh, I got this. They go, you know what?

Man, that's a lot of work. And you're the expert. We're just going to have you take care of it. So I think that the presentation and the questions, and then one thing that I noticed, Lee, is that I love adjectives. I never say these are great rollers. I say these are machine-pressed, lifetime warranty, self-lubricating, quiet rollers. And doesn't that add value? Doesn't that add, like, in my opinion at least, it just sounds so much better when it sounds like pristine. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, as soon as you take away the superlatives, you do much better.

I mean, a lot of what we're doing in sales is psychology. And as soon as you use words like this is the best or this is the greatest or any of that, we turn people off because every salesperson comes in saying that. And everybody listening knows that that's true because in addition to being in sales, you also buy stuff. And if you think of the instances when you've bought and a salesperson says, oh, this is the best thing ever, they didn't endear themselves to you. You had an eye roll. You're like, oh, here we go. Now the game's starting. So what you're describing, where you're saying I'm much more descriptive of what they're

getting rather than using superlatives, I think is a great way to do it. I love it. I think the most important thing, sales and marketing, in my opinion, mask everything. And I've had times where, whether the Google algorithm changed or I've lost somebody that was really good at sales and learned the hard way

of how to identify other problems in the business. So one of the things I do, Lee, is I tend to look at other things in a business before I start talking to them about marketing. Because everybody says, well, Google and marketing, and they go into sales and marketing. But I say, look, your call booking rate is crap. Your average ticket seems to be too low.

Your conversion rate is not where it needs to be. Your online reputation is bad, and you're paying too much for lead. But then I look at all these numbers and I say, let's not focus on all this stuff. Your booking average is 42%. If I can get that to 70%, that would almost double. So don't pay more for leads. But I love sales. Why is it that some people say, I don't want to rip customers off? What is it in their minds? But why is it always the worst guys that don't understand how to sell? They always say that.

It's like a cop-out. Do you ever hear that? Yeah. That's one of the things when I talk to business owners is the excuse list never ends, right? My favorite is when the salesperson comes to that business owner and says, you know, if we could only get this in red oh my gosh you have no idea how much i can sell of this and then the business owner they put it in red of course no more sales come they said yeah but if you could also make it red but round the edges that's that's really what we need so now they

round the edges and again the sales don't come. Yes, but if you can make it red with rounded edges and just a little bit smaller, a half inch, that's the gangbusters. That's right there. And, of course, it never comes. So part of my counsel when I'm working with executives, I'm not suggesting that no feedback is meaningful. But they can't just take it as the gospel. And the owner of a business can't outsource the ownership of sales performance. They need to know how selling works for their company because that's the only barometer that they have to make sure it's working right. Let me ask you this. I got a really good sales tip two years ago and I never thought about it,

but I think this is probably one of the best things I've coached my guys on is a lot of people go good, better, best. They give three choices, but I kind of flipped it. I learned to say best, better, good. And what I do is I anchor at the best. And I know you don't like those, those words. And that's just- Yeah, yeah. I understand what you're saying. But how important is it? Because all of a sudden I anchored at this high price.

Everything else looks great. But when I start with the cheapest, I've already anchored them at a lower price. And all of a sudden they might go in the middle and everybody says, well, your goal is to get that middle one. No, my goal is to give them the best of what I would give my mom, my sister, my niece, my grandma, whatever it is. I think they should have the best.

So how important is that? No, I agree. I mean, you just said the magic words. If you believe that this is the right solution, this is what you're saying, you'd have your mom, your sister, whoever would have this. If you truly believe that, then that's the conversation you should be having. If you don't believe that the value of what you're selling is commensurate with the price that's been put on it, go sell something else. Is that clear? If you don't believe the price you're putting out there is worth what you're offering, go sell something else. This is not for you. And I've got people that luckily for my technicians, I could turn them into installers and there's not as much sales involved that they're technically very, very good, but they don't, there's something to do with confidence and just talking to people and building rapport. And certain people have it and certain people don't, but I don't necessarily think it's something you're born with. Although some people have it from the way they're nurtured. I think it's something that could be acquired if it's process-driven like you talk about. Absolutely. It can absolutely be taught.

So one of the things that I wanted to ask you here, I got a few questions when we closed it up, but there's got to be a balance of troubleshooting sales performance issues and not alienating your salespeople because it's so easy to criticize. And I'm a big caring guy. I love giving positive feedback to really exemplify that behavior. Tell me a little bit about how to create that balance of better your best and always push, but also not alienate your people.

Yeah, so one of the things when you look at managing salespeople is you have to manage the performance. You don't take your top salesperson and manage them the same way you'd have somebody who's brand new. Or you wouldn't manage either of those the same way you'd manage someone who's failing. Each one of those is different. And so recognizing when you have a new person, your overall core mission is to help that person be successful

quickly, and that's how you manage them. For your top performer, it's making sure that they know you're there when they need them. If they're doing all the things that you want them to do at the levels that you want, get out of their way. And then when they run into issues with operations or whatever that might be, whatever's getting in their way, you remove that barrier so that they can go sell the next thing. The one that is failing, I break down salespeople who are not doing what you want them to do with two very simple words. It's either insubordination or incompetence.

It's only one of those two things. Insubordination means you've asked them to do something, they know how to do it, and for whatever reason, they're not doing it. Incompetence is you've asked them to do something. They know how to do it. And for whatever reason, they're not doing it. Incompetence is you've asked them to do something. They don't know how to do it. And therefore, they're not doing it. There's no door number three.

But the resolution of those two is very different. So you have to troubleshoot and figure out, is it incompetence or is it insubordination so that you can resolve it properly? And me personally, I'd rather have incompetence because that could go, I guess, with what we would call skill practice would fix that. But insubordination is hard to cure, right? They both have challenges because if it's incompetence and you've trained them to the best of your abilities and they still can't do it, then maybe sales isn't the right place for them. Insubordination, it sounds like it's a very negative expression, obviously, but it could be they have too much on

their plate. Maybe it's a motivation issue, but the key is getting to the root cause. What's getting us to this juncture to resolve it. So you may put it in the insubordination bucket and then you meet with them and you find out they're spending 80% of their time dealing with service issues. And you don't want them involved in service issues. And there's not supposed to be service issues. I need to free this person up to go sell so that you release those handcuffs of service from them and get them back selling as opposed to dealing with issues. But again, the root cause is they know what you've asked them to do. They know how to do it, but they're not doing it. And you needed to figure out why. So I think you're the first guy I've had on the podcast to really take a deep dive into sales. And I think a lot of people, they don't understand in their mind the value they bring.

They don't understand the outcome of what they deliver. And I always say people compete on three things and three things only. Customers of mine and customers of yours and customers in general want three things. They want it done fast on their timeline. They want it done correct with the best parts and the best warranty. And number three, they want it done for cheap. And in their minds, cheap can mean a lot of things, but you can't do all three because the mechanic I know that's amazing and he's trustworthy, does an amazing job.

He's booked out four months. So you got to decide, am I going to compete and be fast? Because if I compete on those, I'm probably putting in shitty parts and I don't have a good warranty. If I'm competing on being cheap and good parts, I'm not fast. I'm so booked out. I can't work 20 hours in a day. So I think the main thing that people got to understand that are listening, if you're buried and you just so deep entrenched in so much work and you need employees, you're probably not charging enough money and you haven't created the steps to train people. So it's one thing that I think they should focus on.

So if somebody wants to get in touch with you, Lee, and they want some sales coaching, what's the best way to reach out? They go to my website, salesarchitects, A-R-C-H-I-T-E-C-T-S.com. There's a wealth of free information up there, articles, blogs, videos to help you with a lot of things that we've talked about here today. But also my contact information is there. Phone number is 763-416-4321. Pretty easy to remember.

Okay. And if you go ahead and go over all your books that you have available and how to get them. Well, the main ones that we talked about here today are higher right, higher profits. And that's for those looking to build a sales team. It's my hiring and onboarding methodology. And then those that are in sales or want to refine their sales approach,

sales differentiation is what you're going to want to read. Both of those are available on Amazon. Okay. And I always ask the same question. I got two more questions. If you were to advise a few books other than your own, we always talk about the E-Myth and home service. We talk a lot about the ultimate sales machine and a good to great built to

last. And I don't want friends and influence people and with Dale Carnegie. And what's the other one that we talk a lot about? Ooh, it's Napoleon Hill. Oh, Thank You, Grow Rich. Yeah. So what are some maybe, and it doesn't need to be about sales or business. It could be fiction. It could be about your personal life.

It could be about religion, but what are the three books that kind of moved you in the right direction and really impacted your life? Yeah. So there's one that's fairly recent that was really good by Larry Levine, Selling from the Heart. That really, really is great reading for salespeople. And it gets you away from this dirty feeling that is commonly felt around sales. So that's a really good read. And if I could use a little bit of profanity, because it's in the title, Jeffrey Gittimer's new book, Get Shit Done. Oh, yeah. I have that. Yeah, that just came out. That's a fantastic read as well.

And another one that I really enjoyed is Snap Selling by Jill Conrath. So that's recognizing that you're selling to crazy busy buyers. So how to be effective knowing that they have limited time to speak with you. I love it. You know, I think people got to be getting sick of my podcast because they have to buy so many books, but readers are leaders, man. I truly believe if you're not bettering yourself, you know, I've been using this analogy a lot. Have you ever seen the movie? It's a pretty old one called Short Circuit with the robot. Oh, sure. Yeah.

Remember, his name is Johnny Five. Johnny Five. Yep. He just goes, Johnny, who's Johnny? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good movie, but he starts reading the book and he's getting consumed with knowledge. And I just feel like I love the listeners because they're listening, obviously.

Tommy, it wasn't knowledge. It was input. Input. wasn't knowledge. It was input. Input. That's right. I didn't need input. That's a good one. So last thing I like to do, Lee, is give you kind of the stage. Maybe give the audience something to really start with today and get going and change their life. Something impactful that you think will really cause action. Okay. So, and you touched upon it a few moments ago. Every salesperson, whether you've been selling a few months or 30 years, there is value that you personally bring to bear to your prospects, to your clients. But I find that most salespeople

have never taken a step back and figured out, why should they buy from me? Because they're selling for your company, Tommy. They're not selling for the other guys. So what? I get you as part of the deal. So that's something to really think about and figure out what that personal value is. Because if you haven't identified it, you can't possibly position it in a meaningful way when you're selling. That's something you could do right now, today. Can you elaborate a little bit for me personally on this? So I've got a whole list of reasons that I think, but give me just maybe a company you're working with of an individual that you truly believe in and give me maybe four attributes of really an example of that. I think that would really help the listeners. Sure. So the first one is to become an expert in your industry,

because remember I said a little while ago, people don't know how to buy what you're selling. They need your help. So you should know what's out there, what's available to them, and help them see that you have the right solution for them. So having that knowledge and guiding them through so they make an informed buying decision and they believe that they've made an informed buying decision. Another one is to be genuine. And gosh, I wish I could teach that. I'd be a billionaire if I could teach you how to be genuine. Either you are or you're not. And when I say being genuine, whatever is most important to your prospects and clients, it's just as important to you. And coming across that you care, that you care about whatever is most important to them goes a long way. And these sound like very simple aspects, but they're so important when you're selling.

Again, the best way to think of this is when I'm buying, what's important to me, the attributes of the individual that I'm working with. We surely don't want to deal with someone who's absolutely clueless about product options. We don't want to deal with someone who's going to try to push me or manipulate. We want someone that we see as helpful, that's going to guide us, that is genuine, so that we come away feeling good about the decision that we've made. Does that help? That helps so much. And I'm going to do this with my guys. That's an actionable item that everybody should be doing is really get with their people. And it's not a bad word. Just remember that. I want to leave you guys with one thing for me. It's just don't think

sales is a bad thing. I hate it that it gets the stigma of a used car salesman. It's a great thing to embrace it and to be confident and to give people a great experience and make them raving fans. So Lee, I've got a lot out of this. I've got a million notes. I love your book. I'm going to get with the other three books that you didn't really mention. But if you look up your name, you got all the books listed there. You got so many great articles. You guys need to check out his website. Yeah. Go to salesarchitects.com. His email is lsalz at salesarchitects.com. He gave you his phone number.

Lee, thank you so much for coming on. I really, really appreciate it. I got a ton out of this. Thank you, Tommy. One other thing I'll mention, if you're intrigued and you purchase Sales Differentiation wherever you wind up doing it, go to salesdifferentiation.com. There's a free video series that's available to anyone who purchases the book. All you got to do is go to that page.

There's a place to upload your receipt, fill out the form, and you'll get a video every week for a year. Oh, my gosh. I love that. How long are the videos? Sales differentiation minutes. So it's between one and three.

Perfect. That's a great thing to play at your weekly meetings. So definitely going to do that. Lee, thanks again very much. Thank you. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown

is when people subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, while it's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also when you subscribe, what I'm going to do is let you know the next guest

coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here. I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow together. Also, I'm giving away my book for free now. All you got to do is go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. You got to cover the shipping and handling, but I'm giving the material out for free. It's 200 pages. It's a hardcover book. Homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. I appreciate each and every one of the listeners and thank you for making this Home Service Expert podcast a success.

I hope you're having a great day and thanks again.