Backwards Method to Get Motivated, Even When Things Suck

Motivation and hype is total garbage. This is the thing that people are teaching salespeople how to stay motivated. They put on the playlist, they'll get amped up. But all that stuff just kind of dwindles. And motivation is like a fleeting thought. Work ethic only carries you so far. What we need to tap into is a deeper sense of drive and a deeper sense of purpose. And no, this is not trying to find your why. It goes far deeper than that. What I'm going to share in this video is a completely backwards way for you to look at motivation. This new approach is how I kicked off the members only event of the Roofing and Solar Reform Alliance. I had members like Mickey say, Adam, I would have paid $50,000 to be here. It would have been worth every penny. I had people like Mark say, I have never once approached my business like this and been challenged this way. And then I had folks like Andrew who have come up to me and said, dude, that concept of what you just taught about motivation I never applied to my business. I do this every single month and has transformed how we're growing our business and changed the trajectory of the decisions we make day to day. So whether you're running a company, you're managing a company, or you're in sales, what I'm about to share with you in this video truly has the power to change your life. Now, I just want to make one thing clear. I do not have the power to change your life. That is entirely up to you. But the new perspective that I'm about to give you on motivation, it changed my life. And it's one of the reasons that I made the conscious effort to shift away from a transaction business as the roof strategist, selling, training one on one to to a relationship business, getting in the trenches and providing even more value and working alongside people in the Roofing and Solar Reform Alliance. I hope that this perspective shift is as impactful on your life as it's been on mine. The members of the Roofing and Solar Reform Alliance. So let's jump right to it, shall we? Let's rock and roll. Wait, before we do, welcome or welcome back. Adam Benzeman here. And everything that you're gonna see on this channel is designed to help you and your team smash your income goal and give every customer an amazing experience. I got goodies and invitations for you in the description. Just click it it out. But let's get into this whole topic on motivation, shall we? I want to teach you guys a little something about motivation. Goals are hype is this is a true experiment that was done. They starved a rat, okay? They put a rat in a tube after it was starving to death, and they put its tail into a trap with a spring on it that measured its pull. And what they wanted to do is say, how hard? What is the level of drive of a starving animal? In this case, a rat, to catch the cheese that was just out of reach. How hard will it pull on its tail? Starving to death, by the way, guess how hard it pulled. You're wrong. Not very. It didn't want to deal with the pain. So then they did a variation of the experiment. What'd they do? They introduced a cat behind them. Cat will kill the rat. Guess how hard that rat pulled. Really freaking hard. This is called defensive pessimism. I'm going to let you in on a little secret for those who are in this position because your wallets are fat and padded right now. They won't be in four months. I have watched sales rep go from being at the top of their game. In fact, I just had dinner with one sales rep. He had earned a half million dollars. Actually, it was 550 the previous year. The next year, less than half of what he had done. Now, don't get me wrong, 200 grand is still a boatload of money. But if you had a lifestyle at 550 and you made 200, you're out $350,000. That's also a crap load of money. And if you don't believe me on this, how about this scenario? I put a gun to your head. This is metaphor. This is a thought experiment. Thought experiment. I put a gun to your head and I say, make 10 grand. You know what? Let's go away from the gun analogy. That was too vile. Let's stick with money, okay? We're going to go there. We're going to dial it back. Here's the experiment. Ten grand, you sell five more jobs than you did last month, it's a $10,000 bonus. How many people on the team will hit it? No, they won't. I've run teams. My team was 30 people at its peak. 30 or 31. And if I had those incentives, only a few people would actually achieve it. But if I said if you don't sell five more jobs this month, you lose ten grand, who's going to do it? Most everybody. By human nature, we fear loss more than we get excited about gain. There's a word for this. It's called defensive pessimism. In fact, the community mastermind that I run called the Pitch Pro Movement. The exercise that we started off the event with was called Kill the Company. And that set the benchmark for the entire two days. Because we sat down and I talked through this whole exercise and I said, I want you to think what could kill your company? And for the sales reps, because sales reps are included at the event, what could kill your sales? And there's three things to look for. Number one, what. What can kill you? From industry threats. This is things beyond our control. Insurance companies changing the policies, retail rates going even higher, prices skyrocketing, interest rates going up. This is all beyond our control. Number two, what threats your competitors have? This is things like the unlicensed contractor who's coming in cheaper, which we'll talk about. And then number three, what threats internally am I facing? This is your own inner demon. For those who have read my book. And when you identify those. My goal is to reverse engineer a plan to protect myself. I still do it to this day. I'm motivated to grow, but I'm more motivated about what I could lose. And what I do is I strategically plug those holes and create a bulletproof plan. And that's what brings me up and propels me forward. So most of us think that if we look towards something, it'll be motivating, when actually the motivation is what's going to destroy you. And for many of us who have gotten comfortable with a certain lifestyle because you're in roofing and you went from like I did when I couldn't afford food to then the privilege of being able to go to any restaurant you could ever dream of and order anything you want and not feel it at all. That, to me is ultimate free. Maybe it's because I'm a fat kid at heart, I don't know. But when you're used to that, what ends up happening is your income goes here, you get lazy, and it slowly starts to dwindle, and then it completely drops off and then you're like, holy, I have to fill my pipeline up. And you will not sustain that because you won't get to that same level. Because once that momentum is lost, it's hard to regain. And you ride that roller coaster of I'm knocking, I'm knocking, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm fulfilling customers. Oh, crap, I'm running out. I'm knocking, I'm knocking. And our mission is to stay on the gas. So if it were me on my team, I would motivate them of the reality of what they're going to face. And that the time to let off the gas is not when things are good, because things won't be good. And I don't know about you guys, but we had our absolute worst year in business. Following our absolute best year in business. I also shared this in the book Absolute best year. My Christmas Bonus was a 1991 Corvette ZR1. The next year we had our total top line revenue. One person could have sold. It's horrible like that. So motivation is one thing and the other thing is the standards in which we hold people to. So to me, I set the bar and I get in the trenches. The standards that I hold my team to is what I hold myself to. And if I create that culture of we're out knocking doors, you're either on the boat, because everyone that's on the boat needs to be rowing in the same direction. And if they're not, they need to get off the boat. And when we set the standard, anything that we accept with our team sets a standard that it's acceptable. And I've been there, believe me. I had the same problem. Guys weren't knocking doors. I spent more on marketing, put more money in leads, created lead babies. Guys wouldn't knock doors, tell them to go knock doors. Wouldn't do it. So then what I started to do is I'd have my sales meeting out in the field on a Saturday morning at 7:30 in the morning at a Starbucks and I'd sit on my tailgate with a carafe of coffee and that way I was out, out with them. And if I didn't, you know, I wasn't always out knocking with them, but I would sit in the neighborhood working within my truck. So I'd keep an eye on everybody and if they needed something, I'd be right there. So I led from the front and I just set the bar here and I didn't accept anything that was lower. And I still do that to this day with the team. And one thing that will help, by the way, for those that aren't doing this, for the owners in the room and sales reps, you guys can do this with buddies. If the owner's not here and doesn't want to do this for any reason, is we have in our company a group chat. We use slack and we have full visibility of what everybody's doing. We have full visibility of the phone calls, recorded calls. I can run an activity report so I know exactly who on my team made how many calls. Average call duration. I can listen to all the calls I know how many emails are sent, text messages that are sent, and then I get a daily sales report. So every morning, this is how we do it at our company. We have a wig. Wildly important goal. Everybody posts their wig, myself included. No one gets a pass. The wig is the one thing that if I accomplish today, it will be successful. And some people will account for, oh, I'll get a sale. Stop doing that. Because they'll be like, oh, I didn't get a sale today. It has to be within your control. You can't control whether you make a sale or not. You can control all the sales activities, but not the sale itself. What you can control is knocking 50 doors, 60 doors, 100 doors. What you can control is following up with all the people in your pipeline that you haven't done. So it has to be something in control. So that's how we open our day. The day gets closed out where everyone posts in our sales channel. The number of sales, the value of those sales, how many demos they had, how many no shows there were, and then how many new demos they got booked on their calendar. And now that's visibility for everybody. Everyone sees everybody's close rates as well. So now instead of just like holding individuals accountable, they know that eyeballs are everywhere. And what I've done is I've built a team of A players and aspiring A players and the A players we hold to a standard. I just let someone go and I immediately told the team I let them go because they are not an A player and we're a team of A players. They're a good person. They're a really good person, actually. I liked her as a human being, but she wasn't an A player, so she had to get let go. And when you raise that bar and have that full visibility, complacency just dies. Because there's no way you just can't accept it. I know that was probably a little bit more long winded than you may have anticipated, but does that answer your question? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Visibility, visibility, visibility.