STOP "Winging It" With Your Pitch! Do This Instead

Stop winging it. This is one of the most common mistakes for both seasoned veterans and brand new salespeople. And believe me, I made the mistake and be throwing myself under the bus here. But hang with me, because in today's video, I'm going to be sharing why you need to stop winging it. And for new people, it could be the reason that you're not getting either consistent success or any success at all. And for the seasoned folks out there, this might explain why what was working for you really well may have stopped or you found yourself in a little bit of. Of a sales slump. And I'm super excited for this video. Thanks for being here with me. By the way, I have to apologize in advance if I sound nasally, it's because I'm getting over a little something. So appreciate it. Hey, welcome. Or welcome back. My name's Adam Bensman, the roof strategist. Everything I do here on this YouTube channel and on my podcast is designed to give you and your team the resources that I wish I had when I got started so I could have fast tracked my success. And so I can help you do that, so you can smash your income goal and give every customer an amazing experience. And that amazing experience starts off with the initial conversation, whether that's at the door when you're canvassing or whether it's at the kitchen table on an inbound sales appointment. Selling a retail roof. The same message applies now. I want to take a little step away from sales, and let's think for a minute. I'm going to be blunt, but hang with me. Because sometimes it takes an outside person to hold up a mirror and say, dude, look what you're doing. To look at yourself, be like, oh, man, maybe I should be following a different system, a different plan. Winging it. I've done it. I've done it more than I wish to admit. Because the truth is, salespeople like us often have a taste or a, well, heaping helping of ADD or adhd. We have the attention span of a gnat. We don't like learning. And we get into this business because we're good with people, we're good with words, we connect, and we're fast on our feet. So we get thrown into sales situations and then we wing it. And believe me, I've wong it. Is that the past tense of winging it and wonging it? So I've wong it or winged it, whichever you prefer in the past, and it doesn't go that well. I feel like I'm doing things right and Then I reflect. Which, by the way, side note, if you're not doing this, do an after action report from every sales day. I do this myself. The after action report, what you did well and what went well and what you could do different next time, then you get a plan for improvement. So looking back when I was winging it, I kept coming up with the same thing. I went through this in the wrong order, I forgot this part or the customer threw me off. Those are the three big things when I'm winging it. So now that we have this framework, we're going to set sales aside. We're going to turn our attention to the filmmaking industry or TV series industry. So you have those, like those shows, you know, the type of the shows you cannot peel your eyes off of the shows that get you on that couch binging. Hour after hour shows like Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, Walking Dead and Ozark. These series are written by scriptwriters who have studied the art of communication to reach out through that screen, grab you by the jugular and hold you at the edge of your seat, needing to know what happens next. Why? Because human behavior has been studied along with human attention, along with how emotions drive what we do. Sales is the same thing. The only thing that's different about sales is the name sales. Ultimately, sales and movie entertainment all are designed to do one thing, grab your attention and hold it irresistibly to get you to want more. Think of that. It's fundamentally powerful. So when we can look at this movie industry and learn that all of these writers are studying how we observe, how we take in information, how we hold attention and what leaves us on the edge of our seats, the same can be applied to our conversations with our customers. So if we are winging it all right, which we've done and I've done, we're trying to make it up as we go. Or we could harness the power of what we know from the movie industry, from the film industry. And combined with, of course, the obvious, what we are talking about today, sales, which has been studied for decades and decades of why we make buying decisions. And the truth is, the right sales process knocks down the right dominoes in the right order in order to get the sale. If you skip certain steps or wing it, you don't close because you're not doing it right. You're literally not giving the homeowner the option to receive the information they need to hear in the right order in order to make the right decision. So what is the key takeaway with this stop winging it and I'm going to give you the three paths that work for me, but it may not work for you. So we'll talk about that. In terms of pitching, there's three areas of sales. In pitching, I say pitching loosely, meaning canvassing, objection, handling and closing. Those are three categories. Alright, so we've got canvassing, objection, handling and closing. Within each of those, we need a framework to follow. Now, I teach formulas. Why do I teach formulas? I don't teach word for word scripts for a variety of reasons, but the truth is storm damage, there's seven mindsets to sell to in four different scenarios. Will a word for word script work for all of those? You bet. Not. Not a chance. Retail. There's four reasons people replace the roof. So if you're selling both, that's a lot of options. You have to know how to navigate that conversation. That's why we follow a formula which is a framework of what to hit. Now, door to door, I teach the SLAP formula. Slap, say hi, break the ice, let them know why you're there, ask an open ended question P present to their answer. And if you want to learn more on that, I'm going to link to this video in this card right here to learn the fundamentals of that SLAP formula. And then you should jump on the playlist. On this channel I have a playlist called Ace youe Pitch. There's a ton of videos that blend in that SLAP formula there. But first I want to explain to you how I developed this formula and then we'll talk about the other two really fast. The way I developed this formula is because I was winging it and I sat down one day and I'm literally, I started thinking, my mind said what was the common themes among all of the easiest sales that I ever made. I kept envisioning the same theme. I was going door to door. I caught the old guy out in his yard either mowing his lawn or washing the car. And I started a conversation. So this is a good starting point. And I'm like, I started a conversation. But how? That's what led me to the SLAP formula. So one day, this is back when my office was in my house. It's four in the morning, I shoot out of bed, run into my office, I grab a pen and I, I write the word slap. And I figured it out. My wife woke up, I told her how excited I was. I figured out the formula of what I proved. Work. Excuse me, worked from winging it so many times. Then once you have the formula, once I had the formula, I could then replicate it and do the same thing over and over again without sounding like a robot. So if you want to use my formula SLAP formula, you can learn it here. Of course it's included, by the way, in my all in one sales training, sales strategy and sales system, how to use it for every scenario, for when you're showing up, which is the reason you're showing up, whether you're a brand new customer, excuse me, you're brand new in the neighborhood, you signed a new customer if the job's scheduled and you're knocking the neighborhood on the day of install, when it's done, paired with the different scenarios or responses that the customer might spit at you. So you can respond. And that was how I developed it. And you can either use mine or you can develop your own. And then we have the ARO formula, which is my acknowledge, reassure, overcome when it comes to objection, handling. And again, that way there's a framework to follow. So I'm not winging it because oftentimes when we wing it, we try to answer the question too soon when we're unprepared, it just doesn't work. So you can again either use mine or use yours. And by the way, I touch on this formula a bit throughout my YouTube videos, but I provide that full training in my roofing sales success formula that all in one training that I shared with you. And there's a link in that video description below. If you have any questions, you can call the number on the screen. It's 303-222-7133. That's our office. And you can call or text by the way. Alright, then the final piece is the closing. So how do you run that sales appointment? And I want to break down again how I developed my formula here because I was winging it. And what I realized is I got really good at presenting and I got really good at building rapport. But I didn't do so well on closing. And then I started to figure that part out. So I taught my team, like here's how you go through the paperwork, whether it's retail or contingency agreement, but they weren't. And I started to piece together through being inside the home with them and then again now on this side as the roof strategist, being inside the home on sales appointments across the country, I started to identify the nine most common mistakes that I saw in the house. Because let's face it, I mean, I'm a baby faced guy. I was training guys my dad's age. So I could sit back as a little helper and watch. And when I started to identify these nine different mistakes I said okay, so those nine mistakes, if we can reverse engineer this will plug the holes so to speak. So instead of having to teach you what not to do, I'm just say do this because this avoids all those critical mistakes and allows you to go through the right process in the right order. C Connect A Assess R Report P Present A Ask R referrals K Kickstart Again the presentation is bulked out. I teach an eight part presentation but this is how I broke down those mistakes like selling too soon and not asking the right questions and telling homeowners their roof is damaged and getting invited into the house and how to go through the presentation, how to go through the contingency not transitioning properly when you are ready to ask for the order, how to ask for the order, all those things. So I put those together. So my takeaway to you. And by the way, if you want to learn my car park intro, I did a long video on that on YouTube and you can click right here that will bring you to that car park video to kind of learn that concept. And of course if you want more, that is included in my all in one sales training, sales strategy and sales system system. It's called the roofing sales success formula. And that's the program I was talking about before. So I wanted to share with you how I developed this from winging it and seeing what works. The threats of winging it are inconsistency, not being able to train what you do, or simply not being as effective as you know you could or should be because there's a proven way to do it. And again it's a big claim to say it's proven, but the fact is it is because it's how humans process information. And I can confidently say that these are proven because I have currently thousands and thousands and thousands of users on our platform using these today in addition to the 25 some thousand, excuse me, I over embellished 23 and a half thousand I believe subscribers at the moment who are following this and commenting about the slap formula working. So my message to you, stop winging it. Use these formulas right here or create your own so you have a repeatable process to fast track your success and sales so you can stop winging it. Alright, that's all for this video. And just because your and my time is about to wrap up doesn't mean ours needs to. And maybe you want to jump into this next video and hear me sounding a little less nasally. So start here. And if you haven't yet done it, I'd love to get you a free copy of my pitch Like a Pro Roofing sales training video library available 100% free right here. And I'll see you on the next one.