How to Manage Sales in Your Moving Company

No matter what you do, someone has to wear the sales manager's hat. Someone needs to own that role, and that might be you. That might be someone that you need to hire, that might be someone you need to promote, that might be somebody in your business that you need to assign that role to, but someone has to wear that hat. It's too delicate to just leave it up to chance. You know, it's a very proactive position. You don't want that sense of worry that comes when things slow down. You've gotta work on building your sales machine. You've gotta have that thing strong. By focusing on your sales management as the controlling piece, you'll feel more confident to do the things that you need to do. So let's talk about the role of sales manager and what that sales manager needs to do today. I want to get into how to manage the sales, because no matter what you do, no matter what you do, someone has to wear the sales manager's hat. You don't need to go get a separate sales manager. Some of you do, depending on the level that you're at in your company. But someone has to wear that hat. So sales manager is a role, right? Sales manager is a role that someone needs to own that role. And that might be you. That might be someone that you need to hire, that might be someone you need to promote, that might be somebody in your business that you need to assign that role to. But someone has to wear that hat. The reason is it's too delicate to just leave it up to chance. You know, it's. It's a very proactive position, and your sales need to be proactive. You know, back in the day, I put a big yellow page ad out and sat. Put my feet up on the desk and sat there and just answered the phone and just booked jobs. It was. It was pretty easy back in the early days, you know, but now there's more competition, right? There's more people. There's more places for people to go. When someone goes online looking for a mover, look at all the options. They've got lead providers, they've got individual movers, they've got Yelp, they've got Angie's List. They've got all these places that they could end up. And our job is to make sure that you get those leads, right? But getting the leads isn't enough, because if you're spending money on marketing and you're not maximizing that marketing, it's cutting into your profitability. You guys, I want to see everybody here at that 20% or more profitability, you know, take home for you. If you're doing a million a year, I want to see you, you having the benefit of 200,000 a year for you. If you're doing 10 million a year, I want you with 2 million and coming to you, right? That's what we need to shoot for. And it happens with incremental adjustments in each area of your business. There's five core areas of the moving business. You got lead generation, getting the marketing, booking moves, servicing moves, customer service and accounting. We've got to make sure that the sales piece is just maximizing each and every single one of those leads. Because the answer is not to just go get more marketing. Right? That's, that's. I knew and I bring it back because I want you to realize that my whole mission is to help moving company owners get past the struggle, get past the times of low profitability and the uncertainty and have that consistent, predictable money making machine, you know? I know like, you know, it took me a few years to come out with a marketing course because. But yet that was the big demand for me. If it was all about selling courses and money, I would have come out with that first. Because everybody's like, what leads, what leads, what leads everybody wants to go after. What leads do I need? I could give you all the best leads in the world. If you don't know what to do with them, you're just throwing your money away. Because I want you to optimize. I don't want you to just take the low hanging fruit. I want you to optimize. I want you to be able to, if it gets so busy, shut off marketing if it's too much and not spend that extra money. But more importantly, I want you to be able to charge the prices that you need to charge to make sure that you're profitable after you pay your movers. And if you're having trouble finding crews, you know, you're probably going to have to raise what you're paying a little bit. But that should be passed on to the customer, right? It's just, that's the cost. I mean, it's inflation, right? Things are, things are going up. If your costs go up, you shouldn't be the one just absorbing that cost and you're not punishing the customer. This is commerce. This is, this is the world we live in. This is, this is how businesses run, right? The prices of houses right now are insane. They're going through the roof. You know, you shouldn't feel bad selling your house for More money because the other person has to pay more money. If you're providing a service, you're providing a good service, you want to get paid for that. And it needs to cover all your expenses, your movers, your workers comp, your insurance, your trucks, your fuel. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of stuff, right? But it's got to cover all that. So when we talk about sales, we can't look at last year because I know there's a lot of companies, this is a dangerous time right now because there's a lot of companies that had moves just falling on their lap and like, ah, it's raining moves. And it was just like, like, like, you know, and hopefully everybody acknowledges and realizes that that's not a normal thing, that there was a gift from this whole pandemic and we're not resting on our laurels and saying that's just going to continue to happen, right? You don't want that sense of worry that comes when things slow down. You've got to work on building your sales machine. You've got to have that thing strong. That's what's going to give you the peace of mind to go on vacation and, you know, take trips and make a purchase. You know, maybe you guys might have made a ton of money last year. I know a lot of you made a lot of money last year. Then you got a little PPP money on top of that. That helped too, right? But maybe you're a little scared to spend that money. Maybe you're a little concerned, like, oh, what do I do with this? If, you know, you've got that sales machine going, if you know, you've got that consistent, predictable money making machine, you'll feel more confident to do the things that you need to do, right? Because I do believe that in the next 18 months there will be some great investment opportunities across the board. Whether it's in real estate, stocks, businesses that don't make it, that need partners or need investment. And you want to be in a position where you've got the money to make those investments or you've got the money to just go live your life and enjoy your life, right? Sales is where it's at, you know, and I know you've heard this from me before, but I wanted to get you here today and really dial in on this. Dial in on this and it will. By focusing on your sales management as the, as the controlling piece, the more areas of your business and your life that you have control over, you feel a sense of ease, right? When you feel like out of control and you're not quite sure and things are happening without your wanting them to happen or input, that's when uncertainty and chaos and anxiety come up. Right? That's where, you know, some people will outsource their sales. Right. And put it in the hands of somebody else. I truly believe that, you know, we could look at it and say, well, we're in moving and I want to provide good service for moves. But the two things you've got to make sure that you're doing and you've got a machine for moving forward are sales. And everything that goes into that, hiring, training, recruiting, sales scripts, rebuttals, everything that goes into sales, right. Follow ups, your CRM gotta have that whole sales machine dialed in. Then you've got to have your recruiting and training process for movers. You've got to be able to sell moves, and then you've got to be able to consistently have enough people to service those moves. Those are the two things that you've really just got to dial in. You got to have a machine for both of those. Systematic, predictable machine. Honestly, it breaks my heart when I get messages and people are struggling in this business or we're up and then are down. And listen, I know there's a lot to deal with. I know there's a lot of moving parts in the moving business and you've got life to deal with as well. So if you know this stuff and you haven't been doing it, don't beat yourself up over it. But just take this as the reminder that like, okay, yeah, this is time. Because either we get proactive now or we sit at some point. I don't know when it'll be, but we sit at some point and we're like wanting to pull our hair out because we don't know why we don't have the profitability that we want to have. You know, we usually get excited in this business when we see jobs getting booked. I want you to know that those jobs turn into profitability for you, for your family, for your, you know, retirement, and everything that you're hoping to accomplish in life and that you need that vehicle for financial freedom. This is that business. You guys should be out there making a lot of money right now. So let's talk about the role of sales manager and what that sales manager needs to do. Remember, you don't have to go hire a sales manager, but someone has to wear the sales manager's hat. If it's just you. I broke this down to the core. Stuff okay, that you, your sales manager, whoever's wearing that hat needs to be doing right away. First thing is every single day is a morning opportunity review. A morning opportunity review. What this means is you pull up all the leads in your system. Okay, When I say you now I'm talking. Whoever's a sales manager needs to be doing this right? You pull up all the leads in your system. Let's say your software. Most of you are in smart moving or you know, whatever software you might be using and go through all the opportunities. Like so if I'm looking at, you know, I got five different reps, I want to pull up each rep and then look at all their opportunities. I want to make sure I'm looking at, hey, are they calling? And to get ahold of the customer. Cause we got two jobs with leads, right? First we need to get them on the phone and then we need to book them, right? So to get them on the phone we use, we call them, we message, we call, we leave a voicemail, we email, we text, right? Cmet, call, message, email, text, every time. We want to be doing that twice the first day, one more time the next day. Alright. If you want to get aggressive with it, you could do three the first day, two the second day and one more time the third day. But I believe it's important to spend more time on the follow up of the people that you spoke to and not just hunting down new leads. But this is what we're looking for, right? We're going through and we're looking to make sure that the team is doing this stuff. We're also looking to see the people that they quoted. We want to look at the notes in the system, what's going on with this job. You know, in the notes, anybody that they spoke to, there should be something in the notes that says what it's going to take to book the job. What's the reason that they didn't book customer, said they need to speak to their husband, will be calling us back, isn't short of moving, closing date, is going to call back, said our price is too high but will let us know whatever it is. There needs to be something there in the notes so that there's communication with the sales manager. The sales manager is the one that's making sure it all happens right. If, you know, like I know with my company, if I could have booked every single job myself, I would have loved to just book every single job myself. But you can't scale that way, you can't grow that way. So you look at yourself almost like sales managers, like an octopus with a bunch of tentacles, right? Each sales reps a tentacle, but you got to make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to do. So then you're also pulling up the people they quoted and you're looking to see if they're doing their follow up. Right, their 5x follow up. They should be following up, you know, that day, the next day, the next day, skip a day, follow up again. There's so much money being left on the table from companies not following up after they give the quote. The stance of if they want to book with us, they'll call us back. Is robbing you of your wealth in the future. People can feel how they want to feel about it. I don't want to be pushy. Follow up is not pushy. Make sure when you follow up, you've got a reason for the follow up. Always have a reason for the follow up. And the best way to get your team on board is this. The morning opportunity review. If you're the, you could do this in a half hour every day. If you can't make time to make sure that your team is out there selling, you can't make a half hour and then your priorities are out of whack. This is important. Are they doing their follow up? Now what you do is during this time you're able to have conversations and maybe you've got teams working from home. It doesn't matter. Right now it's just as easy to have teams working from home as in the office. You know, you should have some type of messenger going on. Whether it's slack or, you know, something internal or just text messages or whatever it might be where the sales manager or whoever's wearing the hat, I just want to keep making that clear because it, you know this, don't get off of this zoom today and go, I can't do any of this until I hire a sales manager. Like, no, no, this stuff needs to start happening tomorrow, right? But start sending messages. Hey, what's going on with this job? Anything we can do to get that one closed? Did you hear back from this customer? Hey, I noticed your fall mine on your, on your, on your follow ups, right? You want me to pull back on some of the new leads that I'm giving you so you could make time for those? The sales manager is the driver of the sales, right? They're the ones pushing the sales. Again, we don't want to just sit and wait for stuff to fall on our lap. This is what makes the difference. You're not being pushy. You guys know, all of you that have my scripts that go in, it's like, it's not being pushy. You know, people don't like to be pushed, but they do like to be sold. They do like a professional to take them by the hand and lead them where they need to go. They need to move. Just remember this, they need to move. So you're not trying to sell somebody a marker that they don't need or a vacation that they don't need. You're trying to sell somebody something that they need that you provide a great service. And if you believe that your company provides that great service, then you need to make sure that everybody that's talking to your customers believes that and goes for the job and books the job. And the morning opportunity review is really all about just identifying if the sales process is being followed, right? When we talk about creating systems and processes in our business, it does us no good if no one's coming along and saying, wait, wait, you guys are off track. Think of the processes in your business, your sales process as a track, a train track. And if the train is on the track, it's running smooth, right? It's chugging along. But if it's off track, I'm out here in Arizona, like it goes into the desert, it's off track, right? Things are going to get messed up. Problems are going to happen soon enough. All you've got to do this morning opportunity review is bring them back on track, right? Do you really want to let your sales team be the ones that dictate the future of your business, the future of your legacy, the future of the wealth that you're able to create in this business. They just need a reminder. That's why there needs to be a sales manager. If they were able to do it all on their own and would follow it to a T and would consistently stay on top of their follow ups, then you wouldn't need that. But that's why managers exist. The whole reason why the word manager is there, why companies have managers in different areas, is because the employees that are under that manager don't just do exactly what they're supposed to do each and every time. The manager job is to bring them back to the processes, right? So morning opportunity review, then they need to also be quarterbacking the leads. Quarterbacking the leads. And so what this means is as a quarterback, right, in football, if you're a quarterback, you might need to call an audible, right? You go up to the line, you know, you see the defense lined up a different way. Maybe you need to call an audible, change up the play at the last minute, right? Or maybe you get the ball, there's nobody open, and you've got to do a QB sneak and run it yourself. Your job as the quarterback is to advance the ball down the field. So whether that's pass it, hand it off, run it yourself, throw it out of bounds to prevent sack, you've got a quarterback, the leads the same way. And what that means is you've got to get the leads in the hands of the right people that give the company the biggest and best opportunity to book those jobs. Right? So this is part of lead distribution. Who gets the leads? Who gets the phone calls? How do we distribute them? This is not little league. You know, everybody gets a trophy for participation, right? This is, we're here to win, and I want you guys winning. You got a new rep and you've got somebody that crushes it. You got somebody that's booking it 35% and somebody that's booking at 15%. If that 35% is off the phone, give them the call, give them the lead, right? It is what it is. So you got to make sure that they're quarterbacking. And sometimes that means the QB sneak, sometimes that means they're going to book the jobs themselves. They're assessing. They're assessing who's on the phone, what their pipeline is, what, what they have to work on, what the call flow is. And as stuff comes in, they've got to be the ones that determine who gets the call, when they get the call, who should get which lead. Oh, leads are coming in from, you know, a lead provider that books at a low percentage. And leads are coming in off our pay per click ad that we're paying a lot of money for. Who am I giving these leads to? Right. There needs to be intention behind how leads get distributed. So quarterback the leads. Remember, these are like, I'm giving you guys the top five things that, that your sales manager needs to be doing right away, okay. That are going to make the biggest impact. The next one is keeping the energy up. Keeping the energy up. And whether you're working remotely or you're working in the office, you know, it could be, listen, it could get very repetitive. Being a sales rep on the phone, being a moving consultant on the phone, calling leads, hearing a lot of no's. Right? You're going to hear a lot more no's and yeses. And so someone needs to be intentionally keeping the Energy up, right? If you're in the office, a little light music in the background, creating excitement with spiffs, right? Hey, next person that books five jobs, you get $20. If you guys book 50 jobs together as a team this week, I'm going to bring in lunch from our favorite restaurant. You know, walk into the office, everybody's like down and out on a Monday. They're dragging. They're already at the coffee machine for their second cup of coffee. It's not even 9:30. Walk in and say, hey, here's 100 bucks on the wall. Whoever books five jobs or ten jobs today, that 100 bucks is yours. Like whatever you have to do to create excitement and get the energy up, because that goes through the phone. The consumer hears that. If, if your team, whoever's talking to your customers is not excited about your service, it's gonna come across, right? So we've gotta keep the energy up. We've gotta keep them engaged. It's very proactive. Especially now with a lot of stuff coming in off the Internet. It's very proactive to. Do follow ups, to call people more than one time, to get them on the phone, to send texts, to send emails. It's very proactive. We got to keep them fired up and excited about that. And you just keep that energy going. Oh, someone else booked a job. Someone else booked a job. Let's go. Come on. Get people excited. Believe it or not, this is not me. You know, some of you are going to sit there and go, I'm not that rah rah guy. Right. I wasn't either. Right. I do this now and I get on camera now because I'm on a mission. But like when I had my company, I really wanted to show up and like walk into my office and like just shut the door and not talk to anybody. But I did what I had to do to keep the machine going and then hired somebody else and had them do it so I didn't have to do it anymore. It's important. Next one is coaching and role playing. Coaching and role playing. You can't hire people, train them initially and then let them swim or sink. Great salespeople are made. There are some out there that are born. There are. But you got to remember something. When we say sales, I want to just put it back in perspective. When we say sales in moving, it's really not sales. It's really great customer service. Educating the customer and then explaining why you're the best choice for them to move with. You know, sales has such a negative Connotation sometimes. And what you have to remember is that this is just an elevated level of order taking, an elevated level of customer service. You're not cold calling people, trying to sell them vacation packages. You know how I was doing. That's how I started in high school. They have a service and they're requesting information from you. Provide them all the details in a friendly, digestible, informative way and explain to them why you're the best choice. Right. So with that, we've got to be constantly taking our team and looking to make them great. You know, so many of my salespeople were just good customer service people. When I was doing hiring, I didn't even look at your. I didn't even look at resumes for salespeople. We had a phone number. This is what I suggest all of you do. The phone number goes to a voicemail. Hi, if you're calling about the moving consultant position, please leave your name, your number, and let us know why you think you'd be a great fit for this position. And then I would sit and I would listen. Early on I had like an extra cell phone before we had a fancy phone system. And I would sit and listen and be, oh, they don't sound good. Delete. Oh, they sound good. Save. They don't sound good. If they're going to be on your phone, it's all about how they sound. Okay. And then you provide them with the tools to be able to provide, to learn how to estimate the job. Right. To learn how to give rebuttals. The customer says, you know what, I need to think about that to help them make sense of your service and understand why it's important to book now. But that's how we make great salespeople. So we do this all through coaching and role playing. Role playing. Well, coaching is listening to their calls and identifying, you know, where they, you know, where they're not following the process. Okay. And role playing. Right. Someone needs to be the customer and they're the agent, and you go through the whole thing. This should be part of your training and this should be part of your ongoing coaching as well. Right? Okay. Today, you know what we're going to work on how you ask for the business at the end, and then I'm going to give you some pushback. And I want you to use the rebuttals that you have to help make sense of why it is we charge more. You know, there's nothing salesy about rebuttals. If you're going to charge more than other People, you've got to be able to explain why, you've got to be able to make sense of it to the customer on why you charge more. And that's it. I'd rather take a little extra time to make sense of why we charge more than charge less and go for the easy job. That's not profitable, right? You guys got too much liability going after these cheap jobs. So coaching and role playing, very important. And then hiring and training, hiring and training. The hiring and the training feels more like a hassle. But if you've got someone that's in charge of this, and hopefully by now you're looking at it. And some of you, I know what you're thinking. You're like, shit, I need a salesperson. I need a sales manager, you know, and you get somebody in there that can handle the hiring and handle the training and get people in when you need them. You don't. It's when you go a period of time shorthanded and leads are falling through the cracks. You're leaving so much money on the table. But it's not that you're just leaving free money on the table. You're leaving money that you paid to get those leads on the table. So the cost to you and the cost to your business is significant. So when we look at, okay, what's it going to cost? I just worked this up right before we got on because I wanted to have it ready so I didn't have to do the calculations for you. What's it going to cost to hire a sales manager? All right, so let's just say you want to pay somebody 50,000. Okay, could be 50, could be 75, could be 100. Depends on the level of your company, how many reps they're managing, what caliber. But let's say it's going to cost you 50,000 to get somebody in. In order to pay for that, you need another 250,000 in revenue a year. Okay, 250,000 in revenue a year at a 20% profit margin to be able to pay for that. And that's simple math. That's not even taken into the equation. The amount of leads that aren't getting wasted and burned and that are converting. Right? So the number is actually lower than that. I want to make it the extreme. Let's say you got a thousand dollar average move, that's an extra 20 jobs a month. Now, for some of you, you might do 20 jobs a month now. So that's like, that might be double your business. For some of you, you're like 20 jobs a month. That's like less than a job a day. Do you think if you had somebody in there doing these things that you could book a job a day? 5 jobs a day, 10 jobs a day extra? You definitely can. You definitely can. The sales don't just happen, right? It's got to be managed. And if it's like, hey, Louis, that sounds like a lot of work, then, you know, I'm here and I'm doing my part, and I'm telling you what it's going to take to get to the next level. If you want to get to the next level requires next level thinking, and it requires next level action. Doing what you've always done won't get you to where you want to go unless you're just on that fast track and you're already doing it and you're on your way, and you just haven't yet. You're still in lag time. Like, you put in the effort and you're just. You're on your way. You're just not there yet. But this is it, you know, we can't just wish and visualize our success into existence. And no matter what other areas of our business we want to focus on, we've got to dial in our sales. And not just the sales, but the management of the sales. Hey, my friend, before you go, you've got to hurry and watch these next few videos over here. They will absolutely help you take your moving company to the next level. Go watch them now, and I'll see you over there. Sa.