TOP REP Rush - What's Wrong with Most Sales Presentations

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Hey everybody, welcome back to Contractor Radio and another episode focused on you, the home service contractor to help you exceed achieve accomplish all those dreams that you have out there as being an entrepreneur in the contracting world. In today's episode we're going to be talking about sales and maybe what's wrong with most presentations or proposals and hopefully some action steps that you can take to help you refine and improve your sales. Process your sales skills out in the field and help you to achieve a little bit higher closing percentages and and probably a little bit more profit. We have an amazing guest today. He's a guru in this industry whenever it comes to sales and I cannot wait to bring him on board. But before we do so we gotta pay the bills around here and I wanna make sure that we highlight our sponsors and our first message today is going to be from signpost.

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Now if you want to get more reviews, Signpost is a great way to do that and also to interact with your client, lead them to the sales process and then when we lead them to that sales process we actually have to deliver a great experience and if we don't do that In a way that seems logical and makes sense to people. We have this opportunity to get set up for failure. So I wanted to bring in the best of the best that I know whenever it comes to presenting and demoing. And this can be either for retail. You know, you guys out there that are cash oriented jobs, maybe you do financing, maybe you're in insurance restoration. All of us need to approach this with a step by step presentation that leads people to the decision of yes, you are the logical choice for us. So without further ado, I want to bring in our master of sales here at Contractor Coach Pro and one of the most renowned gurus in the home services in home selling aspect of our business. Chuck, welcome to the board. How are you doing, man?

Man, I am doing phenomenal. Especially right after top rep. I'm ready to go.

Yeah. So you and I just spent this past Monday and Tuesday with dozens of sales reps teaching them this top rep sales process. And part of what we were doing is going through a presentation how to present and what that might look like for somebody out in the field. So today's episode is about what's wrong with most sales presentations and proposals. And so, you know, what are the, you know, maybe two or three things that you see out there that where people fail at this presentation aspect of things?

I'm gonna tell you when it comes to presentations, several things. So the first is that the sales rep has no idea how to give a presentation. That is the first and probably biggest issue that I see. And then when, also when you get into presentations, there's so many pages that should not be there. They're just fluff. Nobody cares about it. And I'm not gonna name any big manufacturers, but a lot of these big manufacturers will send the dealers these presentations and you'll have the serenity page. And you know, this, this, this whether maybe it's a sighting, this sighting is so surreal. And you're gonna. And nobody cares. It's just taking up a sheet of paper or it's a taking up a slide. So you know, it's. You always have to be educating the homeowner, whether you're educating them on the company, what the company can do, and, and then what they should be more worried about or the homeowner should be more worried about, which is what's about to go on their house.

Yeah. So. So one of those things that I see, that's like one of those biggest problems out there in this home services world or smaller companies. Sometimes we don't even have a presentation like the presentation is actually determined by the person that we go and see, and they direct everything, which puts them in charge of the whole presentation. And we're in this role of really being more information giver because they're asking us a bunch of questions instead of actually truly presenting a valuable thing that we offer. And what happens whenever we do that is it's not repeatable. One time it sounds like this, One time it sounds like that. Then we bring somebody, we hire somebody new, and that new person, we tell them, hey, I don't have anything like that. I don't have a person. So just come listen to me. Come listen to me. You'll learn it, you'll gain it through osmosis or magic or something. I don't know what it is that they're expecting them to get, but it's not repeatable. So we can't perfect it, we can't measure it, and there's just no tool for it, which I think is a big disservice to anybody that comes into our teams. Would you agree?

I will. And with that being said, I don't care if It's a flipbook, PowerPoint, you know, engage any of those. You have to do something. It can't just be, I'm going to sit in front of them and I'm going to talk them to death, or I'm going to use our trifold and hopefully sell off of it. I mean, they really have to sit. And I understand where a lot of these companies say, oh, the customer doesn't care about it. They will tell you that they don't care. But when they go through that presentation, it's really what sells the deal if they do it right.

Yeah, I think we listen to our customer too much. You hearken back to Steve Jobs, he's one of my heroes. And they did this big market survey of, like, what people wanted in a phone. And after that whole big market survey, all they wanted was like a regurgitated BlackBerry. And he's like, nope, that's not what we're giving them at all. We're gonna give them this whole different thing that they don't even know that they want yet. And I look at our presentations like that. Like, hey, they are. All they want from you, you believe is an estimate. Like, give me an estimate, tell me how much it's going to cost. And so we sit back and that's what we're focused on, getting some measurements, some pictures, and then maybe some type of proposal with a price on it. And we listen too much to what they want. And we're not able to create any kind of true value in what we do that way. Although there are some pretty cool proposal tools out there. Most guys proposals are here's everything we're going to do and how much it's going to cost. Right. Like that's about it to it.

And I'm glad you mentioned that. And so when we work with sales reps, we always say you need to understand what they want, but know what they need.

Yeah, exactly.

Know what they need.

And that want that they want usually comes from a bunch of questions that we would do in addition to our presentation. But so let's take this that now we know we need one. Right? We know that we need a presentation. What are some of the first steps that somebody could do in order to create that presentation? I mean, do they just start taking what it is they do out in the field and start putting it into a slide or a flip book or something like that?

So when I started doing presentations, we did a storyboard. Just as if you're going to do a commercial, movie, whatever. We did a storyboard. And that storyboard is going to help you when you're putting it on a whiteboard, blackboard, whatever you're going to do. What does a customer want to see? And what we found was that first of all, you can't get a customer to even listen to you until they buy into the company. So the first thing that you need to start talking about is the company and yourself Once you can get them to buy into the company and to the rep, now they're willing to let to open up enough to allow the other information to sink in. If you don't start with that, then their guard is still up until you can get them to be okay with you and the company.

So why would we want them to know about our company and know about us? What are we trying to accomplish there?

So remember that when you're looking at the company itself, and I've seen many of these presentations where it's got the old Ford truck and this was my granddaddy's old Ford truck when we had. And the customer does not. They don't even find it interesting, let alone do they care. You know, they. You have to realize that the customer just wants to know you're big enough to handle their situation. And you've been doing this long enough that you have the experience to do it right. You know, do you have good reviews? I mean, you really have to bring the who you are and the credibility.

Yeah. So things like what you may have achieved, if you've won some awards, some certifications, whatever credentials you may have. And so all. All of those things, whenever I look at them, I kind of think that they. What they're doing is they're building some trust into this company or this person that's sitting in front of me. And people buy from people that they know like, and trust. So we got to get that part out of the way first. So that's the first piece of our presentation. What comes next?

So what I. What I do like, is when you're talking about your reviews, you're talking about where you stand. You know, anybody that has seen our presentation at Top Rep, that they understand that we talk about the top 500 and that you don't have to be that big to be on it. You know, and if you just talk about it. Right. You really position yourself as, you know, a true player in the industry.

Yeah. So again, we're establishing a little bit more trust. This top 500 remodeler or home service contractor, building that up more. So we've got that established. We've got some trust in us. What's the next thing that we've got to get done? Who do we have to become?

So you have to be the expert at that point. Yeah.

And so how might we be able to do that? Some of that's been done a little bit in our own personal credibility, our credentials and who we are and what we're about. But what else would you probably include in there?

So you might jump into. These are all the sales reps, and here's me. I would click on my picture or if you're using a PowerPoint, maybe it's just your slide that, hey, we have a lot of different sales reps. But I'd like for you to understand who I am. Why should you even be listening to me? So a little bit about your credentials, but remember that they don't really care about that as much as. Are you a human being? Do you have a family? You know, they. I know that they've said that, you know, poor salesmen have skinny kids. You know, so it's. We all laugh about that, but sometimes it can be true.

Yeah. So we've gotten this trust in our business. We've gotten this trust in us. We started creating ourselves as the expert, but we're also about this, like, creating us as somebody that they know, not somebody that's a stranger. Nobody likes salespeople. And it's just. We all know that, like, we were right there with attorneys, and they don't like either one of us. And so we have to become something different. And in order to do that, we have to share a little bit about ourselves that might be more personal. For example, like where we grew up, what high school we went to, college we attended, if we're married and we have kids, hobbies that we like doing. Because what that'll do is that'll switch on this ability to create some more rapport where we go from being a salesperson to maybe at least an acquaintance and maybe even a friend or neighbor that we have a conversation that you would normally have between friends. And so I would guess if once I have the trust and that I'm starting to create a little bit of an expert aspect, the next thing that we probably would do would be maybe set some expectations. What does that look like?

So setting expectations, as far as what's going to happen here in the house, we're also, we might also be doing some price conditioning, you know, that kind of goes right along with setting those expectations. So you have to set the homeowner at ease because they're going to have this mental block until somebody's going to tell them how much this thing's going to cost. And you never want to remember that once price is given, game's over. However, there is a way of doing this without giving them what the price is going to be. The other piece of this is understand that when you get there, you know, they're going to be here at the bottom of the ladder of where what they're willing to spend, but yet your price is up here. And so we need to be, you know, let them know that, hey, the average price is maybe it's $800 a square. And in Cincinnati, that's right where it is. If you look at cost versus value, it's at $800 a square. So when we show that when it's a 30 square roof and like, hey, I'm sure that you were expecting to pay about 23,500 and their jaw hits the floor.

Yeah, we got to think about it like the buyer, right? When was the, when was the last time a buyer had one of those things done? Whether they got, you know, an epoxied concrete floor or they had a new bathroom or a new roof, but like maybe never, or if they did, it might have even been while they were at their parents house and it was like this much, right. And now it's this other number because it's been so much later. So we've got to work on setting these expectations. I think those things would be like, what are we going to do on our inspection? Like, what does that look like? What are they going to get when we get our inspection done? And whenever that inspection is done, we're going to give some other expectations, like price conditioning, like you're talking about, so that we can establish where the price really is today so that if we can hopefully come in below that number or somewhere around that number, it's not so egregious when we get late, later on in the presentation, actually give them the real price. That's good. That's great.

So you mentioned something real quick, and I'm glad that you did, because this is the contractor. And so let's just say that this is a bath. And so when you get onto the cost versus value, it tells you what a complete bath remodel is. And that complete bath remodel can be like 30 or $40,000. But most bath remodelers, such as re bath, bath fitter, you know, Bath Plan, any of the BCI dealerships, you know, they're only doing the wet area. So what we do is we look at this and we'll take a sheet of notebook paper and we're going to write down the 30 or 40,000. We say, all right, well, let's look. I mean, how much is a toilet and how much is the mirror? How much is the flooring? And when we get down to it, what we find out is that WET area is 70% of the cost of the, of the job, and it's still so much higher. You know, you're thinking maybe $10,000 is what a typical wet area is going to cost, but it looks like it's going to be $20,000. And the homeowners like, oh, my gosh, I'd have never thought that. I know that's going to be right around 30 or 40,000, but I would have never have guessed that 20,000 of this would have been my wet area. Yeah. So then at the end, when you quote $10,000 for their wet area, they're like, man, I'm so happy this isn't 20,000. And when you got there, they were thinking, I'm not going to spend more than $3,500 for this.

Yeah. And that's, that's absolutely critical to us. Being successful is saying establishing by a validation source, that's not us. You talk about cost versus value, something people can Google, go check it out, and it'll show what the average price is, which should tell you as a contractor, if you're charging less than that, you might want to question where you're at in the market, because somebody's getting it to make that the average and somebody's getting more than that. So we have established some trust, some rapport. We're an expert. We started to set some expectations in the rest of this presentation, we're kind of setting these expectations. What's the next step? Are we going to. We're going to involve them in the sale at all? Like we're going to take them around, show them anything. What are we going to do?

We are. But before we get into that, I want to share the give back. You know, that is.

Yeah, you don't want to miss that.

You know, that give back. And I have to tell you that I don't know how many jobs I have sold simply because of how a give back is done. If you do it, if you do it right now in PowerPoint and obviously a Flipbook, it's hard to do. So you'll see a lot of logos of different charities. But if you have the opportunity at some point, whether you're going to use Engage or any other type of software, maybe if you just have the video to play, but have a video of how your company, it's not just the charity, but how your company gets involved and picked a charity that you are really going to get your entire company involved with. Ours is the Dragonfly Foundation. But I mean, if you can get your entire company, even the sales guys involved in it, the emotion that they're going to give off is going to be so much more genuine than. Yeah, the owner really likes this charity. I don't know much about it, but, man, it is really cool. But they have the opportunity to show a very heartfelt video and has some. It's the only, only part of your presentation that should have any sound whatsoever. And so maybe there's some, some music just to kind of pull at the heartstrings a little bit, but let them know what the company does inside of that. That company and, you know, we call it the make me cry story, but it truly does. Whether it's going to make them cry or me cry. I've shed a few tears myself. I mean, it's, it's very, very. It does pull at the heartstrings with what we do.

I really like the way you look at that because it's one that you get behind that's in your own community. Right. Like everybody's heard of, you know, Ms. Society or St. Jude's and all of those are great things. Wounded Warrior. They're all great things. I think we should all give to them. But when you get back in your own community where it, there's a personal attachment to, has a different level of meaning to it because we as the, the contractor ourselves can get involved, you know, like Ms. Foundation. Yeah, I can go ride a bike and do that kind of thing. But can I really work with somebody that has ms? Maybe in a small circumstance. But if I can get behind something that is community oriented, I'm doing something that is, you know, it might be some food shelf thing. It might be. There's one out there that the guys did that. It's here in our actual area. One of the churches they build ramps for older people so they can get into their house once they reach that age. That's not a national organization or anything, but boy, I guarantee you it's something that you can help with and do. You're a contractor so you can step up and be a part of and it's going to tug at the heartstrings of people and not just your clients, but the people that are coming to work for you saying, you know what? I want to be a part of this. This is bigger than just being, you know, this contractor that you are. A great call out right there. That is something that we should definitely include in our present now as we're talking about this. This sounds like, man, this thing's getting long and a lot to it and all the other good stuff. It's not. You're going through each one of these things fairly quickly to establish certain things. Whether that's trust or an emotional attachment. They go pretty quickly. So now I've, I've done that. I've created trust. I'm an expert, some emotional attachment, set some expectations for what's about to happen, what they're going to get. Maybe they're going to get a report or something like that, what comes next and actually let go. Inspect.

Yeah, we're going to go up, we're going to inspect and then once we get back, we're going to, you know, show them the video, show them the pictures of what we had. And now it's time to show them the culprit of what's going on up.

There and how we gotta create some need, right?

That's right, yeah.

So and when we create that need, we're using all types of tools. We got maybe a report that we're going through with them. We got some photos that back up that report. That proof a video works really great. I'm a big believer in the video because like, for example, if you're doing roofing, when was the last time somebody was on a roof, right? They haven't been on a roof in forever and probably don't ever want to be. And. And you start showing them, you know, where the squirrel chewed through their soffit, where the rubber is failing, on their neo boots, nail pops all over, like, man, we created some need. There's some fear that something is going to happen to my most valuable project. One of the other things I try to create and you tell me if this is something that you do, but there is types of trades out there that aren't fear oriented. Like something's going to damage, right? The one that really comes to mind for me is the guys that do the concrete stuff. You know, they do decorative concrete or they do the epoxy floors and that type of thing. I can't really create a lot of fear through, you know, need. Through fear on that. There's not going to be consequence. Like, I can't park in my garage if you don't do this. I kind of have this other one that's fulfillment, right? Like there's joy, there's almost bragging rights that I got this cool thing that nobody else has. How do you go about doing that? Do you teach much of that, Chuck?

So with the garage floors or just the floor coatings? When we look at the garage floors, what you have to look at with garage floors, can you imagine if your garage floor cracked? You can't jackhammer that up. It's attached to your home. It's going to crack your foundation. So if you don't, I mean, again, you can. There's not. There's very few trades out there that you can't bring at least a little bit of concern if not fear. And so the other piece of this is, is once you get this thing, this coating down, I mean, it's. It. You can't get fuel can drop on it, oil can drop on it. It's never going to permeate the, the surface. And all you have to do is wipe it right up. I mean, it's just an amazing product itself. I can go all day about.

Yeah. Now you see why Chuck is the guru. He was able to create fear in a place like, wow, man, I really don't worry too much about my garage floor, Right? That's really good, Chuck. That's great stuff. But there's still this part of like involving them in the story of what it's going to be like after, like, after I get this thing done. There's this fulfillment feeling of, dude, you're gonna have the, like, if you go with this garage floor, you're gonna have the coolest garage floor. Are you planning to have parties here and stuff like, oh, yeah, like that person's now starting to picture what that might be like. We have to create that emotional attachment in our presentations when we go through them. But that's not necessarily that I'm going through a presentation at that point. I'm giving the results of my final findings, right? Like, I found this. There's a report. I'm still using a tool. It might not necessarily be the slide by slide presentation, but I'm using a tool, Photos, videos, things like that. So we've created need. Now they know they need. My garage floor is about to come apart on me if I don't do this thing. And then oil and crap's gonna be everywhere. So I need to get this garage floor or, hey, my roof is gonna leak. Once that's been done, what's the next thing we do?

So we need to bring them into what makes the company different. Remember that when you're trying to make a company different, it's got to be more than something that is your customer service or whatever. So what is it they can touch and feel that truly brings them into something that the customer's never seen or heard before? Especially if they're the third person in the door. Like, you know what, no one else said that to me. So that's. That's going to be important as well as the process itself. When you're talking about garage floors, you know, that is one of the main pieces that enabled, you know, someone like GarageKings to bring their pricing, you know, to.