The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Leave the “Commodity Corner” to Price Your Services The Right Way

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Jaynie Smith is the bestselling author of the books Creating Competitive Advantage and Relevant Selling. An international speaker and consultant, she has spent over 35,000 hours consulting CEOs and C suite executives, and two decades working with Fortune 500 companies. She received one of the 15 Top Performer Awards for CEO coaching, and has been featured in Entrepreneur, and Industry Week, among many other publications. In this episode, we talked about competitive advantages, marketing, sales...

you do not need to be a commodity. You do not need to lower your price if you sell value. Every one of us will pay more for value when we see it and hear it. But most companies are selling that list of strengths, their givens. If you say I should choose you because you've got good quality and well-trained employees, yeah, that's a given. You better have, right? So you're not standing out from the crowd and you're not differentiating at all. So how are you going to answer the question, why should I buy from you? Because if you can't answer that with a solid competitive advantage or two or three, then you're not creating a value proposition. And what I tell folks is 99% of products and services are commodities.

It's not what you sell, it's how you sell. If you're a pest control company, there's gotta be 25 more of them in your town. But what are you gonna do to stand out from that crowd? And that's what we focus on. 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 an awesome guest. I've been a big fan of Janie's since five years ago. I was at a Clopay convention, and one of the guys that was invited to be part of it went over the two books we had to read, and they gave us the books. So I read them back then. I read them again three years ago, and I just recently read them. And my amazing team on the podcast was able to get Janie to come on the podcast. So I appreciate it, Janie. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Tommy. Thanks for inviting me. So Janie is an expert of competitive advantages, entrepreneurship, marketing, sales,

and strategic planning. She's a CEO and president from 2000 to present of Smart Advantage Incorporated. She also was the president of ICS Marketing Incorporated. And a few years ago, part of AIG, she was the vice president. Janie is an international speaker who spent over 35,000 hours consulting CEOs and C-suite executives, two decades working with Fortune 500 companies. She's the best author of books, creating competitive advantage. And then I left the other one in my backpack, relevant selling. She received one of the top performer awards, 15 top performer awards for CEO coaching. She has been featured in various publications, including Entrepreneur Industry Week, Investors Business Daily, and Business Strategies Magazine. I think your book is

remarkable. I think if the podcasters here do not listen to the book, they're making a great mistake. And what I usually do when I get started, Janie, is give you the mic and have you just tell us how you got into this business, about your books, about what you're doing today, and what you're going to carry on forward with. All right, well, happy to do that. I started out my career in New York working for Fortune 100 companies and all the way through a couple of international airlines and AIG and a couple of companies, large organizations. I moved back to Florida and I began working with mid-market companies, entrepreneur owners of mid-market, not Fortune 100, although we do work with them, but mostly mid-market.

And I was learning what mid-market did well that big corporations don't and what they don't do well. And so I get focused, very focused early on, on asking these companies, what differentiates you? Why should I buy from you and not your competition? And the answers I got, you know, were like, they were vague. They were like, we're honest. We've got good quality. We've got great expertise. I'm like, yeah, but your competition says that. Everybody says that. How do you make it different? I joke. I say, I asked everybody for about a year that I met, every business person, what's your number one

competitive advantage? And I joke, I say, you do not want to sit next to me on an airplane. Hi, where are you going? What's your competitive advantage? And I started to keep track of the answers and they were very, very vague. Good quality, good customer service, good reputation. And they weren't saying anything their competition couldn't say. So I began to devise this process of helping companies identify competitive advantages and differentiation that they already had that they didn't know they had. And so I started, I got a few guinea pigs, just some clients of my own. And I said, let me try this with you. And it was remarkable. We would uncover differentiators they didn't know

they had. They'd use them in sales. They'd close more sales. And I said, this is working. And so over the years, I started to get bigger companies, more companies, dig deeper and refine our process. And in doing that, we ended up with scores of case studies of companies who used the process, used the competitive advantages and sales and had amazing outcomes. So one day I said, I got to put this in a book because anybody can use this. This is a simple formula and any business can grow with this. So that was when I wrote the books. So I got to put this out there. As you know, Tommy, from reading them, loaded with case studies,

my company and my other consultants, we can tell you stories all day long about companies who went through the process, where they were, where they went, and what they uncovered. And in many cases, they didn't need to spend a penny more to create a competitive advantage. They just needed to do some internal homework. And we found some great stuff and we always do. Yeah, that's great. I think a lot of people tend to say you've got a whole page full of it in here and your creative competitive advantage but let's say we're open nights and weekends we uh give elderly and and seniors and military discounts we train within

we have w-2 employees we wrap our trucks we don't 1099 i think there's everybody does that stuff we don't charge extra for nights and weekends and you got a lot of this stuff outlined and unfortunately those aren't differentiators anymore there's no exact formula for it and i love that you go into it and really i mean i've got a lot of notes here from both books it's like you know one of the things that people think is it becomes a commodity can you explain how a lot of companies, especially smaller companies, and probably some of the bigger ones you work with, says, what am I supposed to do when someone offers a lower price?

And it seems like they're commoditizing the industry. And it's not that I hate those people. I hate their mindset. Yeah. So we work really hard with our clients to get them out of commodity corner. You do not need to be a commodity. You do not need to be a commodity. You do not need to lower your price if you sell value. Every one of us will pay more for value when we see it and hear it.

But most companies are selling that list of strengths. They're givens. If you say I should choose you because you've got good quality and well-trained employees, yeah, that's a given. You better have, right? So you're not standing out from the crowd and you're not differentiating at all. So how are you going to answer the question, why should I buy from you? Because if you can't answer that with a solid competitive advantage or two or three, then

you're not creating a value proposition. And what I tell folks is 99% of products and services are commodities. It's not what you sell, it's how you sell. If you're a pest control company, there's got to be 25 more of them in your town. But what are you going to do to stand out from that crowd? And that's what we focus on. Yeah. I feel like for my business and home service, and home service is a great business that people think, man, there's so many competitors here. I got to be the best price. And I got to tell you, I'm by no means, I don't want to play the price game. We're not Walmart. A lot of people, the best way I describe it, Janie, is I say, look, I enjoy going to a nice

dinner. And in fact, there's a place called Steak 44 a few miles from my house, and we got to set a reservation a week in advance. And there's no doubt I'm walking out of there with my girlfriend for $300 plus. And if I walk in there and expecting a seated, we won't, even though we consider ourselves awesome. My point is, we're waiting in line and setting an appointment to get to this restaurant. It's the most amazing service. It's the best experience ever. The meat has, it's a special grade of meat. Everything's delicious. The scenery is beautiful. The service is amazing. And anybody that would be from maybe another country would say, how in the heck could you wait in line to spend $300?

But the fact is, is I'm buying the experience. I'm buying a lot more. I'm buying the fact that it's good for me. It's cooked the way I like. The service is outstanding. And I think that people don't understand. They say, well, you could go to McDonald's and spend 15 bucks for two people and be full. And the fact is, is those people are right as well,

but that's not what I want to be. I don't want to be the McDonald's of the industry. I want to be the most expensive steakhouse, if not even a higher class meal. Yeah. So let's use your example, Tommy. You can go to a steakhouse that has the very best beef that money can buy. And you can go to one up the street that has the same really high quality. But if the service is terrible or they're... I mean, I went to a place the other night and somebody was so rude. I won't go back there. So this is my point. It's not what you sell. They both sell beef. One is a good experience for any number of reasons and the other one is not.

It's not what you sell, it's how. You got to make that buyer experience in any service business. You've got to make that customer feel important. And I think I shared this quote with you the other day. I heard it recently and I love it. If you cave in on price, you're telling your employees their jobs don't matter. I mean, I love that because it's all about the employees being 100% invested in the customer experience, but delivering it in a way that's measurable, in a way that you can tell future buyers about what you've done.

You don't just say, well, we will deliver within 24 hours. That's a promise nobody believes promises. You say for the past three years, our on-time delivery has been 97.6%. You show them that you hold people accountable, you track it, and you can do it. I explain to people, think about it this way. Past performance in business is the best indicator of future performance, unlike a mutual fund, right? You have to be able to show people you did it. If I'm buying from you and I want my garage door installed on time and you've got all these metrics about how good your technicians were, what their training is, and you say to me, our technicians don't work for us until they've installed a minimum of 500 doors elsewhere. And you start talking about the criteria. And the other people just said,

we'll show up on time and we'll get it done. But you go through a whole laundry list of metrics that you have, proving to me that you're extraordinary about this and you have been doing it that way. Yeah, well, obviously that'll sell. I think I'm just going to recite some things that I thought was really cool. Put yourself in the customer's shoes, be the customer. What good is a lower price if my order doesn't get here on time for my production run? What good is a lower price if my order doesn't get here on time for my production run? What good is a lower price if I get the wrong parts? What good is a lower price if I call 15 times to get the order?

What good is a lower price if my supplier goes out of business? What's it going to cost to find another supplier? What good is a lower price if the widget or gadget system I order doesn't work as promised? What good is a cheaper general contractor who doesn't show up to manage the subs? This is just one great example. But then I love how you talked about when you speak to CEO groups nationally, about 75% of them, you gave them a choice, one out of 10. How many of you have lots of competition, super amounts of competition? 75% said 7, 8, 9, 10. And most of them, a good portion of them

said 13 through 20. And that doesn't even exist on the criteria. So what I get in most home service industries is they go, Tommy, you have no idea. We have so much competition. I'm in ValPAC and there's five competitors. I'm on Google and there's a thousand competitors. You have no idea. Like they offer a better price and free service calls. And I'm like, so you're going to win by working seven days a week by running more calls. You're going to pay the quantity game instead of quality. You're never going to be able to hire great people because you're going to work them to death. You're not going to be able to offer any incentives for them to stay on board.

What is good about working for you going after the cheapest price? They can't answer that. And I, you know, I love having you on here because my biggest criteria, probably one of the biggest reasons to have a podcast is to say we're better than this. Just because we're home service doesn't mean we're not important. Just because we're a blue collar does not mean we need to be a commodity.

And I want to change the mindset in this industry. And this podcast is a great way to start doing it. Some of our best client work is done in those kinds of companies because that's where the rubber meets the road. So here's one, a window company we worked with up in the Northeast, a window installer, very large. And one of the things that they focused on, and people don't think to talk about, don't say we have experienced technicians. I mean, get real clear on how many hours they have,

what the criteria was to hire them. Be very specific because the value, I want it done the first time you install the window or the garage door, whatever it is your service is. So how are you going to prove to me in the sales encounter that it's going to be in and out, clean? We've got this because we have done A, B, and C. But most people, most businesses don't go to that. And consequently, they paint themselves as a commodity corner, and the only differentiator they have is price,

and they've done it to themselves. I think I told you, Tommy, when we go in and do our workshop with a company that's never done this work, we find a minimum of 50 potential differentiators. They haven't even done it. They haven't had to put another dollar into the business, but they're there. They're just low-hanging fruit. Here's the low-hanging fruit, a simple one that I like to tell people. What's your referral rate? How much of your business comes from

referral? So even the sales encounter and you say, hey, Mrs. Jones, do you know 85% of our business comes from referral? Well, that's pretty darn good. That means you're doing something right. And how about retention? 90% of our customers have been with us for repeat sales over five years. Well, that also says you're doing something right. So that's low hanging fruit. Those are

things that are, you know, we find almost everywhere. There's tons of those things. We go in, we turn over a lot of rocks, we find scores of these things for companies. So until you do that exercise, you're going to be painted into the price corner because you sound like everybody else. You know, We go look at websites and I always encourage you to do this, Tommy. Your websites are pretty good, but I always say to your listeners, whatever your service business is, look at your website and pull up two or three or four of your top competitors and see if you can see much difference in what you're claiming. And much of what they're saying are these,

what we call blah, blah, blah comments. Good quality, good people, good customer service, knowledgeable. You're the customer, we put you first. Cliche after cliche. And if your website looks like everybody else's, it's going to be price is the tiebreaker. You got to get away from that. You know, what you said is customers want on-time delivery, order accuracy, product reliability is what the market research confirmed. And I couldn't agree more. Right now we're in a weird area post-pandemic. Obviously you've seen, I just looked the other day day a four by eight sheet of wood that goes on our roof was selling january last year for around eight dollars now it's 54 oh my lord and there's a shortage as

obviously when there's shortages prices spike and we're working with a home builder right now and they're struggling i didn't realize it was that. I mean, our metal's going up and we're on our third price increase this year, price increase from our vendors. And I'm telling you what, then you got the president and the people in office saying raise minimum wage, and that just hikes labor. So we're seeing drastic increases.

I mean, literally somebody that was making 17, now they got to make 22. I mean, this is what's happening. And what we're doing as business owners is innovating and trying to not cut corners, but remove steps and automate as much as we can to be able to afford this stuff to have a competitive advantage, which actually brings me to my next question. How do you define competitive advantage? How do we define it? Yes. I'm going to give you the simple answer. The simple answer is competitive advantage is the answer to why should I do business with you? It's that thing that you do better than your competition. A lot of people get stuck on the

idea that, yeah, I sell what 25 other people sell, so I have to differ on price. And I know I've said this, if I say, I may say it 20 more times, it's not what you sell because what you sell is a commodity, it's how. So for the competitive advantage for us is, you know, a lot of people want to say, well, we're a family business. Well, that's not buying criteria. Delivering it on time, delivering it accurately, all of those things give you the position of competitive advantage. I just want to go back to something you said, Tommy. You said that in the book, you read off three or four things that are top attributes or competitive advantages. What you were reading from was a case study, but every company is different. Every industry

is different. You're reading from the research, I think, that we did for Clopay. But if you were an electrician or home service warranty or something, you would have different criteria. So also over time, we've been doing this for so many years, we've seen different trends go all the way back to 2008 when there was a recession. Well, guess what? One of the highest attributes where people wanted to buy from companies who could prove they were financially stable. If you can't prove you're

financially stable, I'm not doing this with you. That was right after the recession. But then what happens in a recession, people cut inventory. So then it was about being on time. And then it was quality because when you're rushing things, you'll lose quality. So there are trends with what shows up in the research. And I bring that up because coming out of COVID, some companies are going to have to talk to their customers to prove that they're financially stable. That may be an important buying criteria. I don't want to sign up with you to find out I've given you my money, my deposit, and boom, you've gone belly up.

So those are some things to think about to differentiate. That's how you have competitive advantages. Use your metrics to prove you can deliver. You know, I've got a sales coach that I invited into town for a week, a couple weeks ago, and he sent me a quote. He said, when a customer asks you how much are parts or labor, you say 100% of the investment is only your service. The parts and labor are free. That's a good way to say it.

I like that. Yeah, that's something interesting. There's a lot of confusion on how to get there. I know you guys do this for a living, but just a little insight for us listening. What's the easiest way for a business to figure out exactly what their customers are interested in or concerned about? I think you talk a lot about it in your book is really a double-blind study, but can we go into that a little bit? Sure. In the second book, Relevant Selling, Chapter 9, gives a few suggestions. So in my company at Smart Advantage for our clients, we always do the double blind study. But in the book, if you're smaller companies

and you don't have that kind of budget, then you can use SurveyMonkey. You can get an intern from a local college. And that chapter explains the pros and cons of doing things that way. But I always tell folks, you've got to ask your customer, and I don't care how you do it, everything from asking yourself to a double blind. We like double blind because it removes the bias. They don't know what you're asking. And you don't get to know what customer A, B, and C said. That way you get projectable, quantifiable data, totally 90%

accurate onto the marketplace. And that's really what you're after. You can make decisions on the top three or four attributes. Focus on those top three or four in your operations and make sure your salespeople say everything they can about those top three or four deliverables that you have to have. So when you do a double blind study, is the best way to give, maybe do a fill in the blank with the first hundred to tell, and then once you get them quantified down to 15, I don't know how many, but then you have them rate them? No, no. So we only test 20 attributes because the method we use is a 10 to 12 minute telephone survey. You can't keep them on longer than that. So after we've done the drill down, so let's say, Tommy, we're in your

company. We do the drill down. We get 50, 60 potential drafted differentiators. Now we distill those into attributes and then we decide on 20 that we're going to test. Probably like to do all 50, but we can't. So we figure out, and also add our experience. Certain things we won't test because we know they don't rate high and we're just not going to waste a tested attribute. So we design the survey for 20 tested attributes. And then we ask people on a one to 10 scale,

how important is this attribute in your buying decision? And then we force rank them statistically when we get all that data back. Now, I feel like some of these things not explained properly. Like apples to apples. And I always tell people apples to apples, I sell oranges. So I don't do apples to apples. We have different parts.

We differentiate ourselves completely different. The things are completely different with the company. But I feel like if I were to say the roofers are both in business for 20 years, everything, then it does go to price. If everything's the same, you got two twin brothers. They were raised the same. The companies are the same. Everything, the same benefits, the same trucks, just, you know, A company, B company.

What is the best way to deliver that message to the consumer to kind of say, Hey, listen, how are these attributes accounted for in your mind? You see what I'm saying? Does that make sense? The question? Well, again, are you saying not using double blind research? No, no, no. If I was using a double blind study, but to say, which of these are important? No, no, we don't do that. We don't ask them which are important. We say on a one to 10 scale, how important is showing up on time, sales support after the call, order accuracy, stimulus accuracy. On a one to 10 scale, they have to tell us one to 10 of each of these, which then allows us to statistically force rank them.

And then what's the minimum of a double blind study to have statistical analysis? Was it 500? How many do we call? How do you get to a 99% confidence interval? Okay, we get 90% confidence level plus or minus 10%

error rate. Okay. So that's what we're after. And typically, and again, it depends on the business, B2B versus B2C, depends on what you're doing. But we will usually start in a B2B setting with 70 customers and 70 prospects. We want to see what are the differences between people who have not bought from you or came to you and went elsewhere and your existing customers. We want to see if there's a delta between their buying criteria. We usually find there are some. And that's important in your messaging because you don't message to existing customers to keep them the same way you would with a prospect.

So we're always dividing the research that way. I just also remind you that when we do double blind, we start out by saying, you know, you're a buyer of XYZ service. We have nothing to sell. All your answers are confidential. We remind them their answers are confidential all the way through. Our goal being to remove the bias. Let them give you the honest answer to how important things are. You know, my favorite is especially in service businesses. A lot of them love to tout that family business. We're a family business.

Where do you think that falls when we tested and 20 tested attributes? I don't give a flying, you know, it's a family business. It doesn't rank high, but family owned businesses love to lead with that. And it's not a buying criteria. I'm like, look, I don't, yeah, not at all.

You know, there's certain people, I think local, am I contributing to my local community, the city I live in, the schools I live in? I think that's more important than family. I think people love a local because they've got a lot of experience in this. The 55 and up, they always want to buy. They say, is it a local company? Are we contributing to a very, very local, local, local, hyper-local community? For some reason, it seems like that matters. What's that? No, what I would say is, is that what you're hearing about that anecdotal, or do you actually

hear it an awful lot? Because when we've tested that, it doesn't come in high. You know, what I would say is there's different, what I've learned is the last two years were the first two years that millennials bought more houses than baby boomers. I don't think that the buying decision is exactly the same. In fact, I think there's certain, and you can't say this absolute, just like you said, statistical analysis, but I know that me personally, I'm at the borderline of, I'd rather talk to somebody than just book online,

but we're seeing a big, huge uptick in millennials booking online without even talking to anybody. They don't want to talk. They want to just message themselves in and book it. So I will say the buying decisions are starting to change people that with double blind research you can do the same study and have different what we call cohorts so you can do a whole a certain number of the 55 plus and you can

do the 25 to 40 and then you can say we've tested the same attributes for everybody. And the 55 plus folks value A, B, and C. And the under 40 value D, E, and F. So we have different sales pitches. And that's what's beautiful about this. You can get laser focused on the audience and the buyer, you know, if you're selling to different kinds of buyers. Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I tell my guys, if we're selling to different kinds of buyers. Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I tell my guys, if we see somebody that's perhaps over 70, 75, and you're able to tell that, or there's a lot of times people go, I'm 77 years old, you know, usually the lifetime warranty doesn't mean anything to them.

We say it's a transferable warranty. If you were to maybe want to leave your home one day, they go, I got one to two years left, you know, and we're like, well, is there anybody else? Yeah, my dad is going to have the house. So you'd want to be able to transfer the warranty. So instead of lifetime, we use the word transferable. I've got a lot of really great questions that are just not on my sheet, but you say you look at the website and once you got this real accurate evidence,

89% of our service have been started exactly on time. And that 11% was actually, out of that 11%, 7% of it was fixed within 24 hours. And the 4% was resolved within 72 hours. Where do you tote or discuss or just make those available on the website? Is there like a pop-up? Is there like, is it just the content? How do you lead a website? Where do you want those?

Let's say you got your four attributes that are just freaking, that they're just killer. They score 10 out of 10. Where do you put those on the homepage or where at? Yeah. So there's a number of places to put them. We recommend you have a dropdown that says, why us? But we also recommend you have them above the fold on the homepage so they don't get lost because you have four seconds at best when somebody goes to your website. And if you don't get the hook in with something relevant and measurable right away, they may be going on to the next boilerplate website with a competitor.

So absolutely, they have to be dominant. And to your point about keeping track, a lot of our clients, we have them put up a metric such as accuracy. If you click on the 98% accurate box, you'll go to a graph and they update it each month. Where is it this month? Where is it last month? And the salespeople use the website as a sales tool. And the salespeople, some of our clients start screaming if it hasn't been updated in time. And I want to see those numbers in our clients who have used that accountability and actual metrics on their websites have really good spike in sales because it gives the salesperson credibility. It gives them the competitive advantage right before their eyes. And they see that it's updated and it's accountability. You know, I'd probably just simply do an RSS feed

directly from our CRM, just that automatically pulls that data. I love the idea of it. So where do companies go wrong when, I'm sure that if I was to pull 10 people from the audience right now, they might get the wrong impression. Although we've mentioned a lot of things,

where do companies go wrong when they're figuring out their competitive advantages? You see it all the time, I'm sure. Well, we tell companies you're either sitting on a landmine or a goldmine of data. So you just talked about your CRM. You probably have a goldmine of data. But if you're not looking at something specific, you could be looking at a landmine. So a client of ours went through the process, this company over in the UK, and the number one attribute, because he was a distributor, manufactured to wholesale and retail, and the number one thing was order accuracy. So he said, oh, that's great. We measure order accuracy. And we looked at the number. I mean, we measure order accuracy. His COO leaned over

and said, boss, we haven't measured it in four years. So the biggest mistake is companies don't look at their metrics because they don't know if they're sitting on a time bomb. We've had a number of time bombs revealed. Another one, quality was number one. We said, measure it. We don't measure it. We said, well, measure it the next couple months and call us. It was a high ticket item, small company. They had 63 sales and 54 had issues sitting on a landmine. So the answer to your question is many companies keep KPIs, right? They're key performance indicators. They're internally focused. They're the dashboard for how I need to run my company, but they don't have what we call at Smart Advantage, CRIs, customer relevant indicators. The biggest mistake they have is too much inward facing, not enough outward facing.

Not getting that information from the customer or assuming you know what the customer wants. You guys heard it, CRIs, customer relevant indicators. So sales are the lifeblood of business. I mean, I'm obsessed with sales and marketing, but so many businesses really do. They struggle. They hate the word sales as a four-letter word. Tell us the difference between prioritizing what you sell

versus how you're selling it. So I'm basically talking about how I sell a garage versus the difference in the process in which we sell it. Because you said it's how you sell it. You mentioned earlier when I talked to you that you have a few competitive advantages in the parts and installation. I don't recall what they were, but those are... Those are the ones right here. Okay, so go ahead. Tell me what they are.

So this is a Z-be bearing. You need a special tool called a bearing buster to even install it. This is 60,000 cycles. A cycle is each time the goes up and down. The bearing place that every other manufacturer and every other company like mine gets is a 20,000 cycle. Now, what I did was I got with the manufacturer to make sure that they tested this and how they tested it and got the records from them. So I actually have true tests and significant data. And then we put a load on this and we're actually hooking up a fan with a belt to count cycle life to do it internally as well. But I could really say that if you're going to pay $40 a bearing for a 20,000 cycle, theoretically, for a 60,000 cycle, you'd be paying three times as more, so $120. But we don't charge

that. In fact, we charge less than half of what you would pay for that. But we're going to charge more than you'd pay for the smaller, lower cycle. So those are facts. These are factual. There's no arguing the facts. So you're answering the question you asked me. So that cycling is a product differentiator well worth mentioning and putting a value on. The other side of it is the how you deliver what we talked about earlier. Do your folks show up on time? What is the training of your technicians?

How can I feel completely confident that your guys... I mean, we all have people show up at our house to do things and it's like, do you know what he's doing? You want to be rest assured. You want to make sure... Here's what we like to tell every company. Think about the sales encounter as your opportunity to build confidence and reduce risk. What are you going to tell me that does not make me feel like I'm taking a crapshoot because I chose you over the other two men or women who have sold me this week? Build confidence, reduce risk. And when you build confidence and reduce risk, you minimize prices and issue. But most of us don't do that. And what you just described, build confidence and reduce risk, the cycle time, I know I'm less likely to have an issue with that. And then if you tell me that your technicians, I made one up earlier,

have to have installed 500 doors where they can even come work for you. Those kinds of things build confidence and reduce risk. You know, here I always talk about our own internal objections. And it seems like every company has a guy that says, I'm not a salesman. I'm only, and I'm having 15 companies come into town tomorrow, all $10 million plus companies. And I'm going to ask them, is there any time that you think it's not okay to offer a new door or a new hot water heater or a new whatever when you're in the garage or the plumbing or the air conditioning? Is there any time that you could mention to me that it's not okay to mention it? We had one of our employees go out and there was beautiful wood overlay doors,

really expensive wood overlay doors. And I've got a really good guy. He's really, really great at building those bonds with customers. And he goes, let me ask you something. Do you like these wood doors? And the guy goes, to be honest with you, hell no. He goes, I hate maintaining them. He goes, they're so heavy. He goes, they're always making noise. He goes, can we just get rid of these and get a metal door?

Can we get a really nice metal door that really keeps the curb uphill, but there are low maintenance? And so you might say, well, they got the best expensive doors. There's no time that I believe that we're not able. If I ask you, let's say I pull up to a neighborhood and it's a very, very low income house. And I offer that customer financing. Let's say I go to a really, really nice neighborhood, really, really expensive. And I don't offer that client financing.

My biggest problem is I'm a finance buyer, same as cash. I'm watching inflation go up. You're going to give me two years, same as cash. I'm not stupid. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in two years. So I'm a finance buyer. And I just feel like there's so many things that we do that we go, oh, these people would never use financing or this or that.

And a lot of people are seriously scared. And I say this, I say this all the time, Jeannie, all you got to do is ask. There's no secret sauce. You just got to grow enough confidence to look someone in the eye and just say, what do you think? Do you like this door? Because I've got other options. And if this were my home or my mother's home, this is what I would do. A lot of people, when I was in the garage, just as years ago, they'd say, now, Tommy, what would you do if I was your mother? And I said, this is what I would do. She wouldn't be paying as much as you're going to pay, but this is what I would tell her. So what are your thoughts on this whole concept of getting over the natural fear or aversion of selling?

Well, we always say you as management within a company, you have to provide your salespeople with the competitive advantage statements because that will allow them to feel confident. A salesperson goes in unarmed when they're going into a sales encounter with what we call blah, blah, blah sales pitch. Sound like everybody else, saying the same thing as everybody else. And so that just takes my confidence out. But if you give me four or five statements to make that I know none of my competition is making because we're the only company that can say that or does say that, then I'm going to feel pretty confident.

It just takes the whole fear thing out of the sales encounter. And I always tell managers, CEO, business owners, sales managers, you guys have these metrics. You got to put them in the hands of the salespeople. They can't do the analysis. You have them. We also say you can turn mediocre salespeople into extraordinary salespeople if you arm them with competitive advantages.

Makes the sales encounter so much easier. You know, I used to tell my guys I have a six-shooter in my pocket. And my six-shooter, that sounds bad, but the six shooter is like my bullets. Okay. One of my bullets is, and never start with a coupon, discount. So the sales trainer said, like somebody would say, listen, I'm a military vet. You got any discounts? He goes, sir or ma'am, I would never discount the service that you did for our country. As a matter of fact, we have a bonus.

We're going to give you an extra two-year warranty on labor. So never would we discount the fact that you were in the military and you fought for our country. So the bullets, and then another bullet, you always have the opportunity to call a manager. And a manager, for some people go, I want to talk to a manager. I want to talk to somebody that has the right to change. Because I don't believe my technicians have a right to change the price book and just give discounts. But there's a few things here because I feel like technology has changed the way we do things. I feel I had a guy on a podcast a few months ago

when he said, Tommy, if I knew about software what i know now and back was back in the home service space i would completely dominate he goes now i've got a software company but i agree with them i mean i've got kpis and i think i got some good cri's but i want to really work on that the fact is that there are a lot of people right now that don't have anything they're not running out of a crm they're still on paper they don't know their marketing spend. They don't have attribution correct on marketing. They really don't know much about anything. And this is where I think it's very pivotal, Janie. I think right now you're going to see the companies like mine and a lot of others that are just quadruple. We grow hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of percentages over the next two years. They're going to see

companies that are the mom and pops that decide they weren't going to go on a CRM, decide they're not going to use a very sophisticated financial software, like even QuickBooks. And last night I took a picture of my receipt, wrote down what I was doing. It entered into a thing called Expensify. And my buddy goes, what are you doing? I go, we got to track this stuff. We got to track what we talked about. And he's like, you do that? And I'm like, trust me. I used to be just like the wild, wild west, like everybody else. But what are your thoughts as far as what technology is doing now, especially post COVID? I mean, we're on a Zoom call and Zoom just, so many things are changing. It just sped everything up. Yeah. I think that we're not going to be able to keep up with the technology.

There's a wonderful book called The Future is Faster Than You Think. I think that's the name of it. It just talks about all the innovations coming at us in every industry. And it's staggering. If I have that name of the book wrong, I'll get it to you. I think it's The Future is Faster Than You Think. Anyway, when I read that book, it's like, who knew this technology was out there? And, you know, if you think back to when we first all started getting email and on the internet,

we thought, oh, this is never going to take off. And then, you know, in a blink, it's there. I think the speed of which this technology is occurring, I personally will admit I can't keep up with it. I don't know what's going on everywhere I look. But one of the other things, the technology, the automation, to the extent that businesses can automate, I see news about that on a regular basis in all kinds of industries. What does that mean to employees if we've gone to automation? You know, you check out of the store on your own now. You don't need people to check you out in

the store. And that's just an example. But in all businesses, there's going to be lots more automation. One of the other changes that's not technology, but when I was thinking about this question, I thought we live in a very mobile society. People are moving fast. They don't have staying power. The next generation only wants to stay at a job a couple of years. So companies have to be very clear on their competitive advantages for recruiting and retaining.

You've got to be able to do the same thing. How do I quantify what they get from me? How do I keep them here by showing them what they've been getting? Critical to have competitive advantages for not just the next generation, but the mobile generation. Yeah, there's so many things. Look, there was a time and I was right at the tail end of it of put a double truck on the yellow pages. That's your marketing. Now I can go through a few real quick. You got Google, Facebook.

You've got Groupon, Living Social. You've got the newspaper, TV, radio, billboards. You've got HomeAdvisor. You've got Yelp. You've got Angie's List. I mean, ValPak, MoneyMailer, Clipper, you and your home. Welcome home. I'm on at least 50.

I've got affiliate marketing. I've got Gannett. I've got, there's so many things. And a lot of them work. A lot of them have a next door. And they each kind of have their own little following. But I got to ask you is, what are your thoughts? It's just, there's so much coming at us.

There's so many places to buy. There's Amazon, there's Google, Facebook. There's so many things going on at once. It's just a different era now. I mean, if my grandpa were alive, he was born in 1910. And I mean, he died in 2001, but me and him used to watch golf, go golf and walk around, play a lot of cribbage. So I got to see it see it before you know this crazy world of social media and i feel like i'm at the age where i mean my grandma used to watch black and white tv and but she'd cook so i got to see it firsthand and i just i'm flabbergasted just thinking about it how much we've changed over the last decade it's changing faster and faster every day. Called exponential. Exponential change.

Absolutely. In every area. How, you know, Bitcoin, how we pay for things, how we buy things. I mean, healthcare, all of those things. I mean, it's going to be insane. Would you have thought five years ago that millions of people would be going to the doctor via Zoom? I mean, after Bill was telling that. you want to hear a good one selling that you want to hear a good one janie yeah you're gonna love this okay all right so lift master

is owned by chamberlain that's the opener that opens your garage well amazon teamed up with chamberlain to go so you could know on your cell phone when your garage you could open and close it know when it's opening they're also making this for other devices so you could add this to any unit there's other manufacturers getting involved amazon created an amazon key that goes along with the myq system to open up your door so now if i'm amazon prime i can come open up your garage for a one-time use there's a camera that views it that you know not worried about theft or anything like that. That's not what I'm talking about. I want to be able to drop off items that directly into your garage now. And I said, this would happen two years ago when I found out that this was coming now in Portland and Los Angeles, they're putting an Amazon freezer. So now they

could deliver frozen food directly into your freezer. So here's what's coming. I think an Amazon refrigerator and an Amazon refrigerator, a freezer refrigerator, and you're going to have a little council, like a little bit bigger than my cell phone. You're going to be able to scroll through your favorites, whatever your favorite beer, your favorite water, milk, whatever your favorite kids, food, cereal, just going to be able to scroll, hit, hit the button for the five people in your family, your dog, have the kids formula for the milk. Boom, hit the button.

It's in the fridge the next day. That's what I believe is coming. So they will have access to your garage. You have to grant access. You just hit the one button for one-time access. They'll have access into your fridge. They'll place it in there. And I believe they're even going to have some stuff with codes that actually have sensors

that when it goes to a certain level, just like the cop, it's called Kaizen, you know, the Toyota way, there's different things. I believe the Kaizen foam is one of them, but the thing is after a certain amount, they'll replace it. I believe it's going to have automation and it'll be, let's see, FIFO, first in, first out. Yeah. Yeah. So, or LIFO, I guess. But I think that there's so much innovation going on. It's really hard to watch because it's speeding up faster. You know, I'm a big fan of Bitcoin, but I found out about it way too late. I own a lot of it, but I paid way too high of prices for it. But I seem to...

Nobody listen to me for financial advice, do not go buy Bitcoin because Tommy Mello said so. But I've invested really, really heavy into it. And the buddies that I've talked to say it's going to replace the world's currency. It's bigger than gold. So what are your thoughts? I'm just curious. That's one area I will plead 100% ignorance.

I haven't got a clue. I watch the business news in the morning and I hear both sides of that argument and I haven't picked a side yet. You know what? But most people don't understand it. When you talk to people that do, there's more computing power for Bitcoin than add up all the world governments combined because the way that they mine it they're spending hundreds and hundreds of millions and billions of dollars creating computing systems to run a currency yeah it's just computing systems so i don't know if it'll go but

i i can't imagine i know india outlawed it and it went up 10 000 when they did that well then there's the facial recognition technology you just saw this week uk you're gonna have your face just to go on mar it's it's crazy and you know that gets me back to the bible there used to be well i haven't watched a movie on it but there is a movie called the mark of the beast where you start putting a serial number on everybody and you get access to it and you know i don't know i know. I don't know. It's scary stuff. It's scary. But here's what I asked somebody. And I know this is off topic, but it's interesting because people listen to this stuff and we're human beings. We go off topic. So I asked somebody, they said,

there's no way I would ever get anything in my kid's body. And I said, well, let me ask you this. What if there was a chip that told you their iron deficiency, that told you their calcium, their vitamins, exactly told them everything. And what if you knew, for example, that your kid had really, really bad asthma and it told you the exact formula you needed and the exact vitamins to keep them super healthy, what would you do then? And a lot of them have a hard time because it always comes in as a good thing, right? thing right like oh yeah but then it can be twisted and scary scary stuff it could be great for mankind it could be i don't want to think about it right now i like talking about creating competitive advantages so i got a few more questions for you you know you guys do something pretty cool over at your your business

and you really come in and I want to talk about your process and the different size businesses you work with, because obviously a mom and pop with three or four employees might be not ready for you guys yet. But also you don't need a Google or Facebook. You don't need a massive shop to go into. How does it all work and what do you guys do? So I'm going to walk you through the steps of our process very briefly. The first one is brainstorm in the workshop what competitive advantages you may have. And we can do that with any size company. We've done that from relatively small mom and pops all the way up to Fortune 100 companies. The second step is the research. Find out of all the things you came up with, which ones do the customers value the most?

And it's not as simple as I sound. We distill the list of competitive advantage statements to attributes. Once tested, then we validate the things that came in on top of the three or four things that scored the highest. We got to validate them with your metrics and then create and deliver consistent communication. I just wrote a blog. You can find it on my website, which is the big mistake, big problem, easy resolution, which is, does your website convey the same message as your marketing material? Is the same as your salespeople? Is the same as your social media messages? Are they all different or is there consistency? When we test it, they're all over the place. So the marketplace can't know

what you're about if you don't know what you're about. So getting that consistent message is the final step of our process. But again, we do everything from an onsite workshop with the small, medium-sized companies all the way up to the process, taking them completely through communication strategy and sales training. And not the typical sales training, but sales training based on how you use competitive advantages. I love it. So at what point does the company say I'm not big enough yet? I know we're not going to go over pricing or anything like that, but I'm going to put some materials that you get to me on this podcast on homeserviceexpert.com. It'll have your podcast, and then we'll have underneath there a bunch of resources to get a hold of you. What do I do? I feel like I'm a nice size company of 25 people. I got 15 sales reps

or technicians that sell. Am I big enough? Yeah. So a couple of things we recommend. We do our work either on site or by Zoom, depending on where the company is in the United States. But we do flying out to a lot of organizations still. If you're really small and you don't have a budget, you can team up with a couple of other companies and we can do what we call kind of a public workshop and handle a few companies at once. We can do some one-to-one. Brian Neff, who's been listening, my senior consultant, he does one-to-one coaching and counseling with really small companies, at least to get them started. They won't get 25, but they'll get a handful of potential differentiators they can use on their website. So we like to work with

everybody that expresses a need and we try to tailor what we do for them. So for larger companies, we have a number of processes. You can elect to have the workshop, the workshop and research, the workshop and research and validation and communication strategy. It's a menu. You can do anything. Right. Well, you know what? Once again, my buddy Joe, Uncle Joe said, menu's where it's at. The menu, the options, but the options to not be so complex that they confuse. So yours are, I'm sure, right on. So if I want to get ahold of you, Jeannie, obviously we buy your books. If you guys are crazy, don't buy her book. If you guys just want to learn creating competitive

advantage and relevant selling, those are on Amazon, right? They're on Amazon. And I like to refer to them as one airplane ride reads. They're really easy. You've read it. They're on Amazon and I like to refer to them as one airplane ride reads. They're really easy. You've read it. Very easy to go through. It's loaded with case studies. So it's just talking to you. It's not a lot of academic work. It's real conversation. And, you know, I scribble and highlight and circle and put the page numbers on the back. I could tell you that I love the fact that you came on because usually we find guests

and then I learn about them. I learned about you, read your book, and then I wanted you and you're here. You are. So this is awesome. So I talk a lot about free books. You know, I've got a lot of books that are cliche books. I've got the Bible, how to win friends and influence people. The E-Myth, Home Service Millionaire.

I was just kidding. That's my book. But what are three books that may be out of the norm that you'd recommend that just... Because there's so many that I see influenced by Robert Cialdini. I just get the same answers a lot of times. And some of them are classics and you got to read them. But are there three books that you'd recommend that really you think the listeners could get a lot out of? Obviously, Being a Competitive Advantage and Relevant Selling are... You got to get those for sure. And then you mentioned possibly the future is faster than you think or something along those lines. Yeah, that's really a good one.

And Traction. Traction is a very important book now. A lot of people are reading that one. Off the top of my head, I can't think of others because there's so many. I know. Well, I'll go for you because I got the visual sale as a good one. And then I will see No BS about Maximum Referrals and Customer Retention by Dan Kennedy. It's always good.

All Dan Kennedy's books. So last thing I do to have you kind of close this out here is I'm going to give you the floor, Janie. And what I like to do is just a lot of people listen to the podcast. Not all of them are taking action. Not all of them are doing the things that we recommend. And possibly some of them are doing too many things. But I'm going to let you kind of take the floor and maybe give some words of wisdom and what you would do to get started or just things that will impact their business today. But whatever you want to leave them with that maybe we didn't cover and i'll give you the floor for a few minutes to close this out all right so what i'd like to convey is that if you do some work this is not hard can sometimes be a little rigorous but most of what you need you have and so read the book

even if you never call me or contact Smart Advantage, if you read the book, it's loaded with case studies. I have people tell me what Tommy just told me. They highlight it, they underline it. There's things they can do for their own company. You can do that. Use it as a workbook for starters and make sure your salespeople are saying these things. So salespeople like to say, hey, I've been successful so far. I don't need to do that. Well, maybe you do. And you want to test. And what I like to say is double back, double back over the sales force, reinforce, ask them, did you use your competitive advantages to speak with the customer? What was their reaction? How did it go?

And reinforce them using it. So, you know, number one, find the competitive advantage you have. Reinforce the usage of them and double check and audit the consistency of it throughout your marketing and sales messaging. I love it. These things really work, guys. These competitive advantages in a world of competition, we need to separate ourselves. We need to be different. And it's not by staying open late and drug testing our employees because everybody does that now. So figure out what you can do. And not only this, the scary thing, Janie, and I just want to add this is you're going to find things you don't

like. And we all know that we're going to find things that we know we need to work on. It's like this. You got to ask yourself, if I know something's wrong with me, I hate going to the doctor because we don't want to hear the news. We don't want to check our bank accounts. We don't want to look at those credit card statements. We tend to just avoid those things. But man, when you learn to look at them and you can grow exponentially, we just talked about exponential growth. It's happening. Fix those things, jump in and get dirty and fix them. No, I just want to say, you know, if you look at the old masters in business, Warren Buffett and a good old Jack Welch, these guys were brilliant at growing companies

exponentially. And when you ask either one of them, what is the single most important thing you focus on? Both of them will say competitive advantage. Yet when I ask business owners, how much time do you devote to finding your own competitive advantage? Two most common answers is never or once a year when I'm looking at planning. Oh, we give it 20 minutes. If these two geniuses have grown billions of dollar empires by focusing on competitive advantage, a small business owner should not neglect this. It's foundational to growth. Yeah. And beyond that is build competitive advantages.

You know, you should have quarterly goals to say, listen, we might not have this competitive advantage, but our goal is to be 98% on time. Because coming up with your CRIs is you want to improve those CRIs, just like your KPIs. You want a higher booking rate. You want to hire a lower acquisition rate. When you start measuring what matters, you start fixing what matters. So if you look at our website, smartadvantage.com, we have three boxes there showing the results of our clients.

One of them, I forget the exact number. I want to say 89% reported increasing sales and or margins. And 90-something percent cited improved operations for the exact reason you just said. Now we're focused on something we learned mattered to them. And we have a big improvement because we focused on that operationally. So it's not just about marketing and sales. It's every bit about improving the operations so you can tout it. Well, I got to tell you, these are the podcasts that I feel like are super easy to implement

by just taking time and start working on the business. You know, Michael Gerber, he was in my office, shoot, just before COVID. And my trainers were there. I was right in between class. He goes, where are all the people? He's 83 years old. And I was like, dude, don't worry, they're here. But the deal is, is work on the business.

And this is something we need to do to work on the business. So if you guys don't buy those books, go online right now, buy the books. I believe you have them on Kindle as well. Or you didn't have the relevant selling one. The relevant selling is the red one. Yeah.

And I posted this and I saw a bunch of people buying it the other day. They bought it, the PDF version, but it's available on Amazon. Relevant selling and competitive advantage. Get your books. And Janie, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Tommy.

Thanks for having us. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, heart means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts.

You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company and we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically and people say why do you give your secrets away all the time and I'm like you know the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them so we also create a lot of accountability

within this program so check it out it's home service million or calm for slash club it's cheap it's a monthly paymentillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.