How to Influence WITHOUT Being Pushy: 7 Roofing Sales Secrets

I'm going to show you how to embrace the seven most powerful principles of influence in roofing sales and to do so without coming across as salesy, sleazy, pushy or any of that stuff. Because if you have been to roofing sales the way I probably did, and that's how many of us do, it's on accident. No one grows up being like, oh, I can't wait to be in roofing sales. We stumble upon it and we know that our livelihood depends on how we perform in the home. But if you're like me and you're a good person, you don't want to come across as being like salesy, pushy, sleazy or aggressive. And you've probably watched other videos or sales training philosophies and you've watched people do certain things that seems natural to them, but when you try to mirror that behavior, it seems completely inauthentic. Not you. And it feels weird. And you know that the homeowners are going to sniff it out. So in this video, I'm going to be breaking down Robert Cialdini's seven principles of influence and teaching how to use them in roofing sales. Now, I had an opportunity to watch Robert Cialdini speak in person. This was at Genius Network, a high level mastermind I'm part of. And during his presentation, he broke down these seven principles of influence. And I was taking aggressive notes. And even though I had read his books, in fact there's two of them that I highly recommend. First is his book Influence the Psychology of Persuasion. This is a must read for anyone in sales and marketing. And I would follow it up with Pre Suasion. And when you read Pre Suasion, which he actually wrote, six second. Well, see this book, you're going to start seeing a lot of the influence that went into my philosophy of approaching sales. And as we get into this, Robert Cialdini is known as the godfather of influence. In fact, he is the most cited individual in the entire world when it comes to studying and yes, I mean studying influence and persuasion. So I'm really excited to break this down. We're going to go through all seven here in a moment. But first, welcome, or welcome back if you're new. I'm so excited to have you here and if you've been tagging along, you might have seen that what I do here has evolved over the years. And yes, my mission has changed and in fact it's even changed in the last year. And I'm going even deeper. I'm clear on what I'm doing, and that is on a mission to create the most powerful thinkers in the roofing industry. So if that's you, you're in the right place. And let's get started. All right, I want to jump into the first topic of persuasion, and that is reciprocity. Reciprocity, in a nutshell, means if I do something nice for you, you are more likely to do something nice for me. So how do we apply this in roofing sales? Well, in roofing sales, there's a lot of different ways we can do this. I'm going to hit about three of them. Okay, let's take a look at how people handle this in the mall. Maybe you walk by, like a food court or something, they're offering free samples. That's the idea of reciprocity. I do something nice for you, I give you a kind gesture, you do something nice for me. We see this in the nonprofit world. If you've ever gotten something in the mail, like, you know those return address labels, and it's like, hey, here's a gift now you should give. Well, we can do something similar in roofing, and I'm going to give you a few ways. Number one, when you're doing your roof inspection, go above and beyond and do something nice for the homeowner. Simple things like cleaning out the gutters, if that's easy access. I'm not talking to the whole gutter cleaning. If there's one run with a bunch of leaves in it and you can just scrape them out and say, hey, I took a picture. I cleaned out those gutters for you. Or one of my favorites, whenever there was like a frisbee or a kid's ball stuck on the roof, I'd pick it up and I'd grab it and I'd bring it down and I'd let the homeowner know. These are the kind gestures that as you lead up and do something unexpected in a value, they go a long way. But it's really important that when you do this, you're authentic. You're not doing this because you want to influence them. You're doing it out of the goodness of your heart, knowing this is how people think and how they operate. All right, number two, let's get into that. And that is liking. Liking is people like people who are like them. And I know in the rapport building world, we've covered this ad nauseam. In fact, there's acronyms you might have heard. Some people teach form F O, R M. Others Ford, F O R D, Family, occupation Recreation and dreams, finding ways to connect with common ground. Absolutely. But at the end of the day, what I've found is that people like people who like them. There's the surface level bonding, right? Oh, you golf. I golf too. You fish, you hunt, you boat. That's all good and great, but if you connect on a real level and you truly love your customers, they feel it, they feel liked, you know, those people that you're around and you just love being around them because they like you. And in return, we like them back. And if you don't believe me, I want you to think back. Maybe this happened to you like it did with me. Did you ever end up in a really dysfunctional relationship with someone because they liked you first? Yeah, that'll land. And if it landed for you, by the way, drop a comment because I know it did for me. Someone liked me first, I liked her back. We ended up in a multi year relationship that wasn't the best. But you know what? That was because I was influenced. People like people who like them. All right, let's move on to number three on the list. And that is unity. Humans by nature want a sense of belonging. So when you're communicating with your homeowners, you can give specific examples of customers that you've served that are just like them. Because after all, people want to know, are you right for me? I can choose from all the roofers, but are we a right fit? So let's say, for example, I'm in the insurance restoration world and I know we have a lot of folks tuning in doing retail. And in fact, many of the people that we serve in our sra, in our community, our private community, are retail only. In fact, 85% of our companies are hybrid models. And as we all know, the trend is away from storm and into retail. But let's assume for this conversation that you're serving a homeowner through a storm damage process. Maybe you're on a fringe area and this homeowner had just some partial payment or denial. What I'll do is I'll play into Unity by describing other customers like them. So I'll say things like, hey, many of our best customers who are happiest with us and love us for serving them is because when we first met, their insurance company only covered a certain number of shingles to get replaced due to wind damage. And when we came in, they thought, hey, we only had a few repairs, maybe we'll end up with a slope of the roof and it's going to look like a patchwork quilt. And they loved that we were able to get everything fully taken care of from them. And they ended up with a full roof replacement for far cheaper than they ever imagined. Okay, so again, this is unity. It's describing other people like them. Now, if you're selling retail roofs and let's say you're working with a mid-40s couple with two kids, I'm going to start describing other customers that are just like them and say, hey, you know, some of my favorite customers and the folks that have loved us the most and written us five star reviews are in their 40s with a couple of kids. They're super busy going to all the ball games, all the practices. Their kids are active and they just want their home really well cared for. And they want to know that when the install is done, it's cleaned up. When all the neighborhood kids are playing soccer in the backyard, no one's going to get a nail on their foot. So what I'm doing is describing other people that are just like them, saying, hey, people, just like you chose us too. And that's unity. Number four on the list is consistency. And this is the principle that people want to behave in a consistent fashion, especially publicly saying and doing things in a consistent way because it represents who they are. So how do we apply this in roofing sales? It's quite simple. There are two methods to do this, and the first method is to use analogies like if it was your car, what would you do? You know, one of my examples that I've given to homeowners is on the insurance side. As an example. Hey, Mr. Homeowner, the reason that insurance companies cover roofs, it's because your roof is the single most expensive maintenance item on your home. So picture it like your car. As an example, let's say you bought a brand new Ford F150 and you were expecting it to run 200,000 miles, but some kids stole it. They're driving down the highway, they're putting it in reverse, they're going through the gears. Do you expect that transmission is going to last 200,000 miles? No. So you'd want the insurance company to do something about it, wouldn't you? You'd expect to get the full life out of your vehicle. And they say, yes. And what I'm doing is getting the homeowner to understand the concept of replacing their roof with consistency. Yes, if it was my car, I'd take action. The other thing that you can do, this is method two is to get the homeowner to describe the condition or damage in the roof. This works for both storm and retail. And in fact, at the end of this video, I'll be linking to another one for you to jump into to learn this exact technique. But just share a comment below. Let me know if you're doing this right now. Because if you sit there and tell homeowners, hey, your roof is damaged, it's all messed up, you need a new roof, it doesn't work. Instead we get the homeowners to describe the damage to us so they take ownership of it. This creates that level of consistency of, yeah, if it was my car, I'd do something about it. Yes, my roof is damaged. So when it comes time to making the decision to move forward with a full repair, excuse me, a full replacement on the roof or calling in a claim, they're acting in a consistent way. Alright, consistency. Let's move on to number five, scarcity. People want what they can't have. So if we want to embody scarcity in our sales, what we want to do is share with people what they're going to lose. People are more likely to take action based on what they'll lose rather than what they will gain. And what's interesting is Robert Cialdini breaks this down when he shares a example in the insulation world. Yeah, another home improvement service. So they did an experiment of people going door to door and they said, hey, if you get insulation, you'll save $1 a day. A dollar a day is what you'll save by getting your insulation upgrade or replace, whatever. And then they had another section of people, excuse me, another test of door to door canvassers saying, hey, if you don't replace your insulation, you're losing a dollar a day. And guess which one had better results. Loss, fear of loss. And this is scarcity. So reminding people what they will lose out on by not taking action today, that could be cost savings, a more expensive roof, it could be energy savings. If you're doing multiple product sales like insulation windows or even solar. And I know solar is its own little can of worms right now, but all of this along with, again, if you're working insurance claims, this can have everything to do with the statute of limitations when the homeowner can make a claim by that date or they lose out. It could be limited time financing offers that you're 0%, 0 down, 0 payments for 12 months offer is going to expire. It could be a promotion in the retail world or all of this is scarcity. The fear of missing out. Number six on the list and one of my favorites, authority. People naturally trust authority figures. If you are having medical problems, who do you go to, a doctor or a mechanic? You go to a doctor, the expert in the field, duh. So you, my friend, are the expert, the authority in roofing. You need to position yourself as well. Now this isn't something that you can just like say or pull out of a hat. Be like, I am the, the master architect of persuasion because I gave him this one liner. No, no, no. What it means is you need to be the authority. When you talk or communicate with your homeowners from a position of authority, meaning you know what you're doing, they will listen to you and they will look at you as the authority figure. So you can't fake it. Study up. And I'm so glad, like when it comes to new salespeople specifically, they get really concerned about being caught on their heels and not really knowing a lot about roofing. So get in there. Learn everything you need to learn. For members of RSRA, we have a roofing 101 course which I'm so grateful for building Experts Institute for putting together a beautiful training exclusively for us. We've got experts like Daeshun Bryant and John Cenac in there. And John Cenac is just peeling back the curtains and sharing incredible amounts of information, helping people get projects approved that have been a challenge. So become the authority and the expert. And when you know what you're talking about, people see it. That brings us to number seven. Social proof is credibility and authority. It's not what you say, it's what other people say about you. So for many of us, we'll say things like hey, I'm five star on Google, 4.8 star on Google, whatever the number is. But what people want to know is what are your customers saying? Not what are they ranking you. And what you can do is share actual screenshots. If you go to RSRA.org join and visit the page where I share what we're all about at rsra. You'll scroll through and see social proof screenshots. Stories of people's close rates going up. Stories of people navigating real life problems on the fly with feedback. The community stories of members who created business partnerships on multimillion dollar government projects because licensing was needed in multiple states. You'll see navigating real life problems on the fly with feedback the community stories of members who created business partnerships on multimillion dollar government projects because licensing was needed in multiple states. You'll see stories of new sales reps landing big deals standing in front of the yard sign, wearing an RSRA shirt. So this is social proof. And what you can do in the home is show homeowners the testimonials, read them the stories and keep a few of those stories in the bank. That way when you're talking to somebody, you say, ah, they're going through this. I have the perfect story and testimonial for it. And if you're not collecting these, I'm telling you, your homeowners will be the very best salespeople that you could ever hire and they're even better than you. So there you have it, the seven principles of influence. Which ones are you going to start using right now? Let me know in the comments below. And if you want to take this one step further, I want to teach you the most powerful technique, which is the one of consistency, to get homeowners taking ownership of their damage on the roof, whether it's storm or retail, so they end up proceeding now and not delaying it any further. To learn that, jump into this next video. We'll see you soon.