Tricks to Beating FEAR in D2D Roofing Sales: Lessons From Madi The Rescue Dog

Let's talk about fear. The crippling fear that keeps you from doing your job. The crippling fear that gets you to drive out to a neighborhood and sit in your car or truck waiting to get out to knock the door. Worst case, like the email I got today, turning around and coming home before you even get out of the door. Now listen, in order to do well in roofing sales, we need to conquer fear. We need to learn how to rewire our mind and our emotions to overcome fear for good. So in this video, I'm going to teach you the step by step strategy to rewire your mind to overcome fear so you can build confidence, sign more deals, and do a better job at what you do. Because at the end of the day, without any of that, you're not going to make sales, you're not going to earn a living, and you're not going to last in this industry. So let's jump right in and hey, if you're new here, my name is Adam the roof strategist. I help salespeople and sales teams just like you reach peak performance. Have fun doing it. Smash their income goals. In order to smash your income goals, you need to eliminate fear. In this video, I'm going to be sharing the story of my dog, Maddie. We're going to get her on camera here in a minute and you're going to see how training animals is identical practice to rewiring our own mind to reach peak performance and overcome fear. So let me tell you the story. Maddie, let's go for a walk. I'm going to grab a quick drink and some dog treats. Maddie is a rescue. Maddie, come. Luna's also a rescue. This one's Luna. This one's Maddie. Sit. Now, Maddie came to us from New Mexico. My wife and I found her on accident. She was powered up in her cage in the corner of a petsmart down and she was about 15 pounds underweight, skin and bone. She had no nails. She was horrified of being outside and walking. She would literally claw at the ground. One day we were out and I was throwing a ball for Luna. This one right here. Maddie sees my hand come up like this. She hit the ground and then she scrambled off, horrified that I was going to hit her. She had incredible amounts of fear of being outside. When the wind blew, she wouldn't take a poop. My wife sat outside with tremendous amounts of patience for three hours at times to get her just to use the bathroom. But look at her now. Confidence loving puppy who. Hey, right here, puppy. She's going after the scribblets, who we were able to turn into a confident trail dog who chases me on my bike. Now, how did we do it? We did it very simply, Maddie. We did it by reinforcing the behavior that we wanted, by helping her face and overcome her fears. And I want to give you some examples. And I'm going to tie this into what this means in door to door sales. So Maddie was afraid of noises. She was afraid of the wind. She was afraid of my hand coming up. I literally couldn't do this at all, Couldn't put my hand over my head. And what did we do? We slowly had her face her fears with patience, with diligence, pushing it enough and then rewarding her for that behavior. And through doing this, we now have a confident dog who literally has a new lease in life. Think about how this applies to you in door to door sales. And I want to tell you a story about this. First, there's an age old saying in the roofing industry among owners, and I've never fact checked this, but the saying is powerful. And the saying is this. Someone ran an ad saying, Earn $200,000 a year shoveling poop. And all these applicants apply and they show up at the interview. And the interview of the roofing company says, guess what, I have a surprise for you. You don't have to shovel poop. All you have to do is knock doors. And then no one showed back up. How funny is that? If you think about it, people will be willing to earn $200,000 a year shoveling poop. But the minute that they have to face their own discomfort by knocking doors, they will tuck their tails knowing that the earning potential and the opportunities are there. The same opportunity to simply knock doors and talk to people. But don't avoid it because they're afraid of fear. And that fear that I showed you on the board controls their lives. So think of it like this. There are two ways to engage with fear, okay? There's facing it and overcoming it with a positive reward. And then there's avoiding it. Each one of those is going to reinforce. We talked about rewiring our mind. It's going to reinforce how we feel and think. Every time I avoid fear, it tells my mind and my body, good job, Adam. You avoided that scary situation. Avoid that it's bad and it reinforces the fear. So every time that we go and drive our truck and we don't get out, or we cut door knocking short or we can't open the car door, or we get rejected and Call it quits. Every time we do that, do you know what we're doing? We're literally spoon feeding ourselves. Fear. Yep, you can be afraid, little boy. You can be afraid. It's okay. Be afraid. That doesn't help build confidence at all. What we want to do is the opposite. Where instead of spoon feeding this, yep, I'm afraid of this. I should quit instead. Hey, girl, sit good. What we want to do is positive, positive reinforcement by facing our fear. So we know, hey, to get over fear, nothing's going to make it better other than facing it. If you're afraid of heights, how do you overcome being afraid of heights? You face it. You climb a ladder, you stand on ledges, you slowly face it. Now, are you going to start by going to a 100 foot tall building and leaning off the edge? No. You might stand up on a step stool, for example, and then slowly ease into it. And you need to do the same thing with whatever you're afraid of. And to help you do that, write down, what are you afraid of? Is it rejection? Is it disrupting people in the middle of their day? Is it getting kicked off the doorstep? Is it getting screamed at? And once you get clear, you say, listen, I'm not afraid of knocking doors. Because ultimately knocking doors like this, anyone can do it. It's not the act of knocking doors, it's deeper. So when you understand what it is you're actually afraid of, you can now, with an open heart, say, listen, instead of spoon feeding myself like a little baby, that it's okay to be afraid of it. I am now going to face my fear. I am going. You see this? See this tail? This shows that she's a little nervous and you know what? But she's still confident. So you can be afraid in a moment while still facing what you're doing. This is a. No one's going to disagree with me. People say, adam, your dog's nervous. No, she's nervous. She's scared. She lived an abused life, but with love. Watch how fast I can get her. Snap out of this, Maddie. See the tail? Relax. She sits down. Oh, food's coming. So now I'm signaling to her, this is a safe environment. And when you put yourself into that situation of saying, hey, I'm going to the door and I'm afraid of rejection, and then you go get rejected. But then, guess what? Nothing changed. Did it hurt your ego? A little maybe, but you're going to get over it. And you're like, I survived. Look at that. Okay, that wasn't that bad. It didn't feel the greatest, but I'm alright. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And I'll never forget I was shaking in my boots the minute I pulled up to the neighborhood to knock doors. Good girl. For the first time. And I remember that fear. I would put a stack of all my letters I leave at the door on my passenger seat, said, I'm not going home. I'm not quitting early until those are all hung up there. And I'm only going to hang them up if I knock first and no one's home. By doing that, I started to overcome that fear. And then it became a little easier and a little easier and a little easier. I'll give you one more trick to help. When you approach door knocking the right way, and you understand that when you're showing up cold to knock now, it's not that fun. Now you're soliciting. But when you follow a strategy like the one I teach, it helps you progress from these cold dialogues where you're just like the salesperson at the door to developing warm conversations, easy conversations, right? Like you're showing up to follow up on the letter you sent in the mail or because you're working with the neighbor. So the whole idea is to get over this the fastest way, face your fear, open up the neighborhood, and then shift how you approach your door to door sales in a conversational path, which is what I teach when I provide in your complete sales strategy, which you're welcome to use or go on your own, it doesn't matter. There's links to it in the video description. But either way, you know, by identifying your fear, facing it just like Maddie faced her fear, slowly, slowly, slowly, with patience, she's become a confident little trail runner who loves to chase me on my bike and I love it. And same with this one. She was afraid of bags, by the way. This one was a rescue. She was born in a landfill. She hated bags. You know what we did? We'd feed her and then in the background we'd shake a bag and she'd look up and then we'd stop. It's all good. And then day by day, we'd get closer and closer until I was shaking a plastic bag right next to her head. And I'll tell you what, I needed to do it. Because she'd poop on a walk, you'd go out and get a bag. She'd damn near slip out of her harness because she was so afraid of back. But through controlled exposure and facing that fear. I have two confident dogs that people always tell me, hey, see? See what I mean? Maddie, you're getting a cameo. I'm writing a check for the celebrity pup over here. So I hope you learned something about overcoming fear and thinking of it like a dog. You either have a choice of spoon feeding your fear and saying, it's okay little boy, or taking a spoon out of your mouth, facing it and realizing, I'm good. Dust it off. It will get easier in time and before you know it, you're going to be a confident door to door salesperson earning a really healthy income. Now, just because this video is done doesn't mean our time together needs to be. Click up here to check out a playlist. Actually, it's going to go right here. I have a playlist on. Excuse me, Gaining confidence and overcoming fear. If you're looking for other strategies and stories to tell yourself that are really helpful and if you're new here, download a free copy of my pitch Like a Pro Roofing Sales Training Video library. Here for the Free library Here for a playlist on helping you build confidence. I'll see you on the next video.