Systematize Your Moving Company's Sales Process

When people ask me, louis, how did you build a $20 million a year moving company? My answer is usually sales.

Right?

That's the number one thing, is sales. And the reason I say that is because your ability to convert opportunities leads into booked moves at a high level will determine the success and profitability of your moving company. If you're joining me for the first time, my name is Louis Massaro, founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes in their business to increase profits, reduce, and live a better quality of life. And if you've been with me for the last few weeks, you know we've been releasing replays of a live series that I did called the Moving CEO Scaling Series. This week, we're on episode six, which is all about supercharging your sales. And as my team sent me over the video to review, I looked at it, and the quality is terrible. They warned me about it. They said, louis, the quality is terrible. The sound's terrible.

What should we do?

Should we skip it? You know, can you shoot another video? And I don't have the time today to shoot another video about this. But knowing the content that's in there, I'm like, you know what?

Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter how I look, doesn't matter how I sound.

It doesn't.

None of that matters. What matters is the moving company owners that are watching it. If they could extract the value, if they could extract the pieces that they could implement in their business and see the results to get the impact that they're looking for, that's what matters.

So if you could look past the quality of the video, if you could look past the.

The sound of the video and just extract the information that's in there, get your pen out, get your pad out and take some notes and go apply what I'm sharing in this video, I promise you it'll make an impact on your business and allow you to take your moving company to the next level. So without further ado, let's jump into this choppy video.

Bear with it and I'll talk to you soon, my friend.

Remember, go out there every single day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. Let's jump into this video.

Now, people say, louis, how do you go from working out of a truck rental yard to $20 million a year sales? We need to focus in on the sales process and do our part to get that customer to say yes. In moving, all we're really doing, somebody calls up or there's a Lead. You just need to provide them really good customer service, educate them about the moving process, give them an estimate, and then lead them to do business with your company. Just remember that you're selling something the person needs. And if you believe in your service, then you know what, fight to make it happen. This is how it becomes consistent, this is how it becomes predictable, and this is how it becomes scalable. So let's talk about the process, the sales process that needs to be systematized. Today. We're gonna talk about systematizing your sales process. Okay? Systematizing your sales process. And this is something for me. You know, those that have been. Those of you that have been following me for a long time. You know, one of the first courses I did, seminars, I did all that was Moving Sales Academy. And the reason for that was because when I sat down and I'm like, okay, what's the one thing that I could teach moving companies that most of them are not doing that would really help transform their business? And I really thought about it, you know, long and hard. And, you know, now I've got a lot of courses to cover everything. And it was sales, right? Because people would say, louis, how'd you go from working out of a truck rental yard to $20 million a year sales, right? I wasn't sitting around just answering the phone and giving a quote and then seeing what happens and waiting for business to fall in my lap, right? I set up a sales process and to be able to grow and to be able to scale, right? My little one man sales process that I, you know, basically wrote myself a little script. And I would ride around in my car on my Nextel, walkie talkie slash cell phone, you know, talking to my movers on the chirp chirp, talking to them there. Booking moves in between going to the truck rental yard and then driving around to apartment complexes, having my script writing it out. That little one man sales process needed to be duplicated in order for me to grow, in order for me to scale, in order for me to open locations nationwide, in order for me to be able to open a call center with over 60 sales reps on the phone. Booking moves, right? And how did we do that? How did we get everybody to be able to be in line, to be able to say the right thing, not only to keep you in compliance, but also to make sure that customer says yes to you and not to your competition? I never worry about competition, right? You don't need to worry about the competition. I don't want you worrying about the Competition either. What we need to worry about is we need to focus in on the sales process and do our part to get that customer to say yes. So important. And, you know, a lot of people like Louis, that seems very salesy. You're salesy. I'm not like that. And the reality is, moving doesn't require, quote, unquote, sales, right? People need to move. You're not trying to sell somebody something they don't need. You're trying to get them to move with you. And if you believe that, you provide a good service. And we all know that there are companies out there that don't provide a good service for whatever reason either. They don't. You don't have what it takes to really put it together and just haven't cared enough about the customer's experience, or they're just, you know, they don't care. Right. We know there's those companies out there. So if you know that you're doing a good job and you're going to take care of these people, it's your responsibility to sell that job. Right? It's your responsibility to get that booked. You know, how did I learn all this sales process? When I was in high school, I worked at a call center selling vacation packages. I went in every day and there was like. Imagine like a stack of cards like this, okay? All different colors. I don't even know where they came from. Different sizes, handwritten. People wrote their names and phone numbers. I forget what else was on the. On there. They gave me a stack and a phone and a book with a script and some rebuttals and said, call them and sell them a vacation package, like a cruise package or Disney package or whatever the case may be. And that's really where I learned the importance of a lot of the stuff that I'm going to teach you today. Because I'm like, wow, it has brought me in this high school kid with no real sales experience and all these other people, like, they don't really look like they're, you know, qualified salespeople, and we're selling vacations. But I was also selling somebody something that they don't need. And we've all received that phone call. We've all gotten that telemarketer that is on the other line. And, you know, it turns us off, right? It can turn you off to sales. It can make you look at sales and be like, I don't like being sold. I don't like salespeople. And the reality is that'll affect your business. But the reality Is people want to be sold. They don't want to be pressured, right? When I go to Best Buy to look for a new tv, I want someone that knows what they're talking about to take me by the hand and lead me to the right decision, right? That's being sold, but it's being sold through service, right? So what we're doing in moving, all we're really doing, somebody calls up or there's a lead, you just need to provide them really good customer service, educate them about the moving process, give them an estimate, depending on what type of move and how you choose to, you know that whether it's hourly or flat rate or binding or non binding or whatever it might be, and then lead them to do business with your company. That's all that sales is. And it's something that they need. How easy is that? Some of the best salespeople I ever had were customer service people. Their background was customer service. I'm like, I don't need you to be some kind of sales shark. I just need you to sound good. I need that customer to hear your smile through the phone, and I need you to follow our processes and that's it. Right? And so, you know, I just wanted to break down the stigma of sales because it's like, you know, people could look at it, it's really salesy. It's really salesy. I'm not really that salesy. But here's the reality of it. Our entire world economy is based on sales. Let me say that again. Our entire world economy is based on sales. Everything needs to be sold to somebody in order for the world to work, okay? So you just remember that you're selling something the person needs. And if you believe in your service, then you know what, fight to make it happen, right? So let's talk about the process, the sales process that needs to be systematized, okay? This is how it becomes consistent, this is how it becomes predictable, and this is how it becomes scalable. You know, I could still very easily be sitting, working out of the truck rental yard, driving around in my car, booking moves, missing calls, you know, maybe hire a person to help me here. Oh, man, those leads suck. It's the leads. It's the leads. They're the problem. I could still have been in that place, but instead I built a company, I built a business, I scaled it, and in doing so, I stepped away from selling, right? I stepped away from giving estimates, I stepped away from giving quotes, I stepped away from closing and booking moves. Not because I found people that were better than me, but because I took what I was doing, that worked, systematized it, and then taught other people how to do it. Okay? That's the key. That's the key to your freedom, that's the key to more money, and that's the key to scaling. So let's talk about what it's going to take to systematize your sales process. The first thing is, and by the way, we talked about marketing yesterday and what I said in marketing was we talked about how to systematize all of that, right? And we talked about how sometimes we want to blame the marketing and the leads that don't work, right? So I want you to keep that in mind. If you didn't see that yesterday, it's okay, you could go watch, watch it. But the concept here is, as we're looking at, as we're looking at this today, I'm giving you these points here. I want you to think about, wow, is that a gap? You know, is that a, you know, if, if I'm pouring money into a bucket, right? Pouring money into a bucket with advertising dollars, marketing dollars, and I'm pouring money in and the bucket is like my sales process, right? What do we want? We want to be able to pour that in and money just starts overflowing, right? You start making money. But if there's holes in your sales process, there's holes in the bucket, then that money you're putting in just dripping out, dripping out, dripping out. People like, why am I not profitable? Why am I not where I need to be? The quickest, like, most impactful way to improve profit is to focus in on the sales process. All right? So think about where your gaps might be, right? First thing is lead management. Lead management. We need a lead management process. A lead is any opportunity that comes into your business, somebody looking to request an estimate, which is typically what it is, right? They're either calling or they are submitting a request for a quote on your website or a third party site and they're requesting pricing, requesting your rates, information they want to quote. Well, we need to manage these leads and these opportunities. And so what does that mean? That means from the minute it comes in, first of all, we need to make sure we're capturing that data. We need to make sure that we're getting that information into a place, ideally a CRM. You know, most of you are on my smart moving software CRM, but any, you know, get something to where you're capturing that information in a consolidated place and this is going to help your marketing ROI report that we talked about yesterday too, okay? You got to be able to capture that information because if you're not getting that information, you're missing so many other points that you could be touching on later on. Number one, how do you, you know, manage the distribution of those leads to your team? Leads as in an incoming lead or an incoming phone call. How do you distribute that if you don't first capture it in a way that gets all the information that you need, including how they heard about you, so that your marketing report is accurate. Right. And so then it's like, okay, when do we call them? How many times do we call them? What method should we use to contact them? Right. This is all lead management. Like this is the first part of the entire everything, right? We've got to start where it starts. And it starts the minute somebody calls in, the minute somebody requests a quote and it gets emailed to you or ideally goes into your CRM, right, Your software. And so what is your process for this? So you need to think about three different points here. All right? Three different points. The process of capturing the lead. That means making sure that you're getting their name, their email, their phone number, where they're moving from where they're moving to the zip codes, at least the date of their move, the size of their home, at least how many rooms. And this includes phone calls too. Too many times. I will talk to companies, okay, what's the process? And they're totally missing incoming calls. They're not recording that. They're not getting that data into their system so that they could A, follow up with that person to book that move, B, get them involved later on, okay, in booking their move again a year later. Also retargeting them and doing some other advanced marketing stuff. So you've got to be able to capture the information. Anybody that's answering your phones, somebody calls in, their information has to go into your CRM. Okay? That's the first part. Second part is lead distribution. Lead distribution. You've got to establish your process for if you want to scale or if you want freedom or if you want less chaos or more money. You've got to establish your process of how do we distribute these leads when they come in, whether you're a one person operation or you've got 2300 people on the phones. Okay? You got to establish who gets which leads and when do they get them. Right. Because you've got leads. First of all, you gotta. When did the lead come in? Right? You come in on a Monday morning, there was leads that came in over the weekend. How do you distribute those leads? Which ones you distribute first out of the different leads and the different types of leads that you have, how do you prioritize those and distribute those to your team? Right, so then there's lead distribution, lead capture, lead distribution, and then there's lead follow up. Okay, so let's say you actually get a lead, you've got some, you know, you get, something comes in, somebody messages you on Yelp, or you've got a, you know, somebody goes to your website and submits a request for a quote, or maybe you're buying some leads from a third party lead provider. Whatever it is, right? You get like a lead, not a phone call. Well, you've got to establish a process of saying, here's the first time we call that person, okay? And when we call them, what else do we do? Do we also email them? Do we also text message them? Should we leave a message? Should we not leave a message? Right. When is the second time we'll reach back out to them, Then maybe the third, right? At what point do we stop reaching out to them? This is such a. You know, I see so many people wasting so much time on new leads that come in. They're buying leads like, yeah, we just pound the phone and we call them and we call them, call them. Until. Until what? Right? So you're wasting a lot of time, right? And so whatever the method is, what I've witnessed is that usually more times than not, there's not an actual method. This salesperson does it one way, this salesperson does it another way. Right? Somebody might call a lead once, never call it back again. Like, I left a message, I emailed them. If they want to call me back, they know how to reach me. Somebody else in your company might call them and call them and call them again. They might call, not leave a message, and then call right back again. Right? And so those three make up what I call three point lead management. Okay? Lead capture, lead distribution, lead follow up. In order to scale at any level, you've got to systematize this. Think about those three things the minute the lead comes in, okay? Lead capture, distributing the lead, getting it out, okay? And that also, distribution also goes for the way you route your phones for incoming calls. Right? We can't just look at phones anymore and go, okay, the phone rings and it rings to my cell phone or rings to the office. We've got to be able to set up call cues to where it distributes those calls. And if this sounds Like a lot. And it sounds overwhelming. It's only because it's new to you and it's only because you haven't done it. And it's only because I'm talking about it at a high level. But once you get it set up, it changes everything. It changes everything. It changes your ability to grow to scale, you know, to get some freedom away from those phones, right? So think about those. And then you also have lead follow up, right? When do you call the new leads? How many times do you call them? When do you stop calling them? What other methods do you use to try to contact them? How do you keep track of all of that? Remember we talked about lead capture? Get them into a CRM, okay? You need that to help you work them through the process. All right, Lead management, first thing, the next one. And I know not everyone agrees on this, but I'm going to tell you why this is so important. Sales scripts. Okay? Sales scripts. You know, I originally learned this like I told you, I was working in the call center selling vacation packages. And you know, I had a script in front of me. I had a three ring binder and script was there and a laminated sheet, you know, and some days the script would change up on me. Like this place was. It was not like a professional operation, let's just say that. And. But the script was there, right? And it gave me the confidence that I needed to know that I was saying the right thing. And at that point, that's all I really knew as a 17 year old kid working there after school. Right? And but what I realized when I started my moving company and I placed the, when I placed the script. I'm sorry, when I placed the ad in the yellow pages, what I realized is that I was kind of just a little all over the place with every customer that I spoke to and sometimes even myself when they called in, I'm like, oh, I forgot to tell them about the travel time, right? And sometimes it wasn't even that I remembered. It was like, you know, you never told us about the travel time. It wasn't at all that I was trying to leave anything out. It was just that, you know, when you're just rattling off stuff because we think we know stuff gets missed, right? So I'm like, you know what, I need to just get a script, write it down, memorize that script, work on it, tweak it, make it better. And that's what I did. You know, I literally carried around my own three ring binder, right? In my car, in my suv. And I basically, you know, would pull over and pull out the script on the little Nextel cell phone and give somebody a quote and what it does, you know. So, yes, I believe, like, if it's just you, great, figure out, like your best. Like the times where you put your best foot forward. You're like, oh, my God, that was, like I said, everything just right, great. Write it down and memorize that and do it that way every time. And, you know, essentially the script does a couple of things. Number one, it keeps you in compliance, right? Because let me back up for a second, because when we talk about scripts, you know, people that are opposed to it in their mind, they're thinking about a person that maybe called them before that sounded terrible. That was like the first day on the job reading from some script, right? And they're like, I want that in my company. And so they've like said to the scripts, it's not natural. And so the idea with the script is that you learn the script, right? Within a few days of training. You learn the script, you have it there, but you're able to read it naturally. Nobody knows you're reading from a script. They can't tell you're reading from a script. But what it does is it keeps you in compliance, right? I know we've got people, because I see some of the names going through people I know here and that are at all different levels. When you have employees that work for you, whatever they say you're liable for, right? Whatever your state regulation is, whatever you know, you're doing long distance, whatever the federal government regulation is, dot, FMCSA regulations are. You're responsible for what they say over the phone, right? So that's one. Another thing is, you know, kind of in your script, you're kind of building and anticipating. You already know, what's the customer going to be thinking? What are they going to be saying? Let me go ahead and answer those questions in advance, right? You know, there's not enough emphasis put on, we've got the customer on the feed phone, right? Think about how much time we spend and how much money we spend just to get them on the phone. Once we get them on the phone, let the words that come out of our mouth be the right words that are going to get them to say yes to your company. And don't just train somebody and say, hey, sit next to so and so for two days. Listen to what they say. Here's the bullet points, here's our rates. Go ahead, talk to my customers, burn my leads, give them the tools that they need let them know what to say. And that's all in script. You know, a script, all this does, right, is it allows you to tell the story that you want to tell. Remember, you want to serve and sell. You want to be able to give the customer the information that they called for, which is a quote, how much is my move going to cost me? What services do you provide? Right? Talk me through it. So you want to give them all of that so they feel totally satisfied, and then you just want to lead them to do business with your company. And in your script, it's written why you're the company to go with, right? You know, a big part of the scripts is painting the picture, right? A lot of people just go through bullet points. But, you know, when a customer calls, remember, a move is not a move. Like, they are judging and want to feel trust. When they speak to you, they want to know this is the company that's going to perform the move. The way that I see it, the way that I envision a smooth move, you want to paint that picture for them, right? You want to be able to say something like, you know, you know, our movers will, you know, when they come to your home, they'll send you three professional movers, the truck and all the equipment. They'll come to your home, they'll quilt, pad, and wrap all your furniture, load it onto the truck, unload it at the new location. If there's anything you may need disassembled and reassembled, they'll do that for you as well. They'll set everything up and place it exactly where you'd like it at the new home. Like, that's what I mean by painting the picture, right? You're walking them through a process to where you're talking to them on the phone. Anytime you talk to somebody on the phone, right? We've got a lot of video these days. When you're on the phone with somebody and they're talking, don't you kind of visualize what they're saying? Like, you kind of put your own, you know, movie to it. If you will paint the picture you want them to envision of the services that you actually do. Sit down and write out what works. Like, if you've got one person in your office, like, man, they just are so good on the phones. Good. Sit, listen to what they're saying, write it all down, and then make everybody else say the same thing. You know, this is such a crucial time, right? October for me, every. This is why I'm doing it now every year. October was like, okay, this is when I'm gonna sit down and kind of debrief from moving season, right? Think about what the next steps are, where I want to go, and stabilize whatever needs to be stabilized, whatever still needs to be systematized. Let's do that and then start scaling the summer. You're all in the summer. It's hard not to make money in the summer in the moving business, right? This is the time that, you know, serious moving company owners go to work in the off season and really set a plan to make it happen. That's why we're doing this right now. Next one. We've got rebuttals, okay? Rebuttals. So rebuttal is a response to an objection that a customer may have, right? Because you've got your script so your people know what to say. But now, what do they say when the customer says, I need to think about it? What do they say when the customer says, I don't know my closing date yet? What do they say when the customer says, I've got lower prices than yours? What do they say when the customer says, I saw a bad review online. Right. Those are all objections, right? They're given an objection to the reason that they're not ready to set their move up with you. We need a rebuttal, right? We need, again, written rebuttals of what to say for your sales team and for yourself. It just makes things easier when that happens, because, you know, all that means is that we just haven't done a thorough enough job yet of educating and serving that customer and getting them to see why we are the company for them to go with. Right? And so we have to realize that when a customer. You know, the biggest myth I want to bust right now is that customers only care about price. Customers only care about price. And I hope that there's a lot of people on here. Right. I hope everybody on here believes that right now and hears what I'm saying is that that's total bs, okay? And the reason is because we just set our sales pitch up in a way where we make it about price, we don't make it about service, and then we don't educate them between the difference of, yes, that person's charging $92 an hour, and we charge $122 an hour, and we don't educate them on why it doesn't necessarily mean that it's cheaper, right? And so, you know, we need to have that rebuttal for any. Any reason that Any, here's like what you need to write down any reason that any customer has ever said, I'm not ready to set this up. Write down the reason and write down what you want to have everybody saying to them, right? Like price. You know, we've got to make sure that the customers understand that otherwise we are, you know, too many companies are charging way too little and not making any money. It's sad. It's sad. And we fix that by first fixing and understanding that, okay, maybe, maybe that guy Lewis is a little bit onto something. And maybe they don't only care about price, but they do care about price. Of course, everybody cares about price. You just have to show them the value. It's the same reason people are going to pay for a Mercedes. It's the same reason somebody from driving a Mercedes will pay for a Bentley, right? It's the same reason somebody driving a Hyundai will pay a little bit more for you get what I'm saying? Right? We've got to let them see the value. So, you know, the reality is with moving companies is that we're not, you know, the customer's not comparing apples to apples. You know, so I would tell a customer, you know, listen, I understand that you got a cheaper price and there's a, there's a process for overcoming objections. There's a six step process. But you know, when it comes to price, we've got to let them know, like, you know, with moving companies, you're not really comparing apples to apples. And what I mean by that is what you're telling the customer. What I mean by that is, you know, if you're shopping for a tv, you could go price the TV out at Best Buy and then price that same TV out at Walmart, whichever one's cheaper. Sure, of course you should buy the one that's cheaper. But in order for me to send you highly trained, quality professional movers, I need to pay them a little bit more money. And because of that we charge a little bit more. Right? Just because another moving company is another moving company doesn't mean they've got the quality trained movers that we have. So the last thing I would want to see happen is for you to go with the cheaper company, end up with a lot of stress, a lot of damage, and wish that you had gone with us. Right? And you say that in your own, in your own tone, you know, you might be like, Louis, I can't say it like you say it fine. But like all you're doing, think about it like this. Think about if that customer is a friend, right? I'm talking to you guys like your friends. Like, I'm. This is. This is the way I talk to friends and family. Like, I. When I believe in something, I'm fired up about it because I want to help them get to where they want to go. And we all know somebody could have given them a price. Maybe they'll do a good job, maybe, Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll double that price on them and not do a good job, right? So you're not going to single out a company and badmouth them. But you need to make sense of your service and why it is you charge more. And by all, like, you've got to charge more. Simple as that, right? And I'm not saying keep charging and charging and charging until you, you know, it's so expensive. What I'm saying is you can't, like, do all this work and not make any money. And there's certain leverage points in the business, and this is one of them. When I mean that it's like where they say you're between a rock and a hard place, right? You're stuck. You're like, I need to pay the movers more because I need good quality guys, and I also need to compete, so I need to keep my price low. And it's just simply not true about keeping your price low. But what you have to do, what you absolutely must have in order to, is you need these two things. Scripts and rebuttals, right? I don't believe, you know, there might be great salespeople that are born great salespeople, but that's not what you're looking for. Great salespeople become great salespeople because they just know what to say and when to say it. That could all be taught. We've got to get your profitability up. And it starts with sales. Starts with sales. It starts with getting. You know, it starts with, you know, one of the things we teach is job costing. Well, let's. Instead of, let's just look at, like, the price. Like, let's see what everybody's charging, and let's charge a couple dollars an hour cheaper. Let's first establish how much we need to charge to make this a viable business model and be like, that's the number. Okay? Let's figure out how to add that number. One of the biggest mistakes, by the way. And I just want to give this warning right now, because as things may get slower in the off season, which they. I mean, they do, right? That's just the nature of the business. The quickest thing someone will do is they'll go and drop their prices. Oh, my God. Things are slowing down. Lower the rates. And again, I'm not just. If you guys know me by now, you know, I'm not mocking you, if that's what you do. I'm just trying to illustrate a point that used to be me. And so the problem is things are slowing down, typically not because your price is high and people are going, your price is too high. It's because your lead volume is going down. Right? So before you go and start chopping the price and cutting into your profits and, like, basically doing all this work for little to nothing, first look at the lead volume. Go. Oh, okay. It's slowing down because there's less leads. But out of those leads, what's our booking percentage? Are we still booking the same out of every hundred, Are we still booking, you know, X amount? Okay, so that seems to stay pretty consistent. So it's not the price that's making us slower. Okay. And it's not the price that's gonna fix it. It's that we need to ramp up the leads because they've. They've dropped off. I hope that makes. Because, you know, it's. It's a tragic thing that happened every year, and it affects everybody because, you know, you lower your price, the next guy's like, oh, they lo. And all of a sudden, everybody's lowering their price, and everybody's doing this and, you know, not making money. I want you guys to make some money. All right, so got your rebuttals right now? Now we've got. We've talked to the people. We've given them. You know, we went over to script. They didn't say yes. Okay, so now we go into the rebuttals. They still don't say yes. Okay, no problem. You're not gonna get. You're not gonna get everybody on the first call, right? And. And those of you that have my rebuttals, that have my scripts or have been to the seminars, you know, that we don't push and push and push and push, right? We do it in a way that is elegant and classy and, you know, we're making sense of our service as opposed to just, you know, pushing and pushing and pushing to where you just burn that. And they don't want to talk to you anymore, right? So now the next step. This is all stuff that needs to be systematized in your sales process, guys. Systematized, right. The next one is estimate Follow up, estimate, follow up. This is, you know, one of the biggest areas that a lot of companies are just dropping the ball and losing a ton of money. So estimate, follow is after you've given them the estimate, okay? After you've given them an estimate or a quote or, you know, you spoke to them, kind of told them what it's going to take to get set up with your company, and they still have said no, that's okay. There needs to now be a process for follow up on that. And the biggest mistake and mindset shift that we need to make is when people say, you know what? I gave them a quote. They've got everything. If they want to move with me, they'll call me. And if you're happy with where you're at and you're making enough money and you don't want any more business, great. You could have that approach, right? You could have that approach, but I can almost guarantee that's not the case. Especially if you're watching this. You would have. If you're at this, if you're at this far in a video, that's not you. You're not like, I'll take what I could get and I'm good, right? So we need to follow up on those estimates. And, you know, because just it doesn't, you know, we have to recognize something that we're not as unique and special as we think we are as movers to the customer. It's like, you're a mover, they're a mover, they're a mover, Right? We've got to accept that. And so it's about who made them feel, feel like they're going to give them the move that they want at a price that's not, not the cheapest, but that a price that is valuable for the service that they're going to get. Right? And so a lot of times they may speak to three people and feel kind of the same about all of them. Like whatever one that follows back up is doing them a favor. You're not being annoying and you're not being pushy and you're not being a pest. By following up, you're being diligent. Customer asked for a quote, you gave them a quote. They need a move. You could provide a great move. You know, they're busy, they've got stuff going on in their life. Follow up with them. Make them feel like you want their business. See, a lot of people look at it and go, you know, oh, it looks desperate. No, it looks like, hey, we want your Business, we care, like we're going to do a good job for you. So you need to establish what your follow up process is, okay, for you and your team. Otherwise it doesn't happen. If you don't have a rhythm of like, okay, we get off the phone and then here's what happens over the next few days. It'll, it'll just fall apart and be messy, right? You need a CRM to be able to follow up with this. You know, smart moving handles this perfectly. And, but then you need a method exactly when to call them back, exactly when to say it, what to say, exactly what methods to use and who should call them back. And I'm going to explain in depth why you should never ever, ever ask a customer, okay, well when should I follow up with you then? If you, if all you take away from this for the escrow process, stop doing that. Establish what your follow up process is. And at the end of the call they've already said no to you. They don't want to hear you say well when should I follow up? They're like, like leave me alone. Like stop you gracefully get off the phone because you know when you're going to follow up with them, don't ask them. If you ask them, they're going to say two weeks from now or they're going to say, you know what, I'll call you. And then if you do call them back in your follow up process, now you're going against what they said and you look like a real, you know what, right? Stop asking people when you should follow up with them. So now we've got a little bit of a process going, right? We've established our lead management, we've got that in order. Okay? Then we've got our scripts, people are saying the right stuff. People say, you know, the customers will give you an objection and you'll be able to say, well here's the reason why I think you should reconsider that or here's the reason why we could still take care of you even though you don't have a moving date right now, right? Then you know how to follow up with them after you give an estimate. This is the same for phone estimates or on site estimates, right? So now you've got a little process. So having a little bit of a process, that process needs to be managed. We want processes to run our business and then we want people to run those processes. We don't want people running our business. Want processes to run our business and then we want people to run those processes so if you have this, you know, this is like the beginning of a little sales machine right here. You get this stuff going, right? And we can't just say, hey guys, do this and expect everybody to do it. It just doesn't work that way. Right? Because we need to manage the processes. So we need to manage that sales process. So the last component is sales management for today anyways, is sales management. Now you can say, louis, I can't afford a sales manager. I'm not ready for a sales manager yet. Or does it make sense to have a sales manager? And this does not mean you need to go hire a sales manager. What this means is somebody must wear the sales manager's hat. Somebody must wear the sales managers hat. Early on in this series, I forget what episode it was probably when we're talking about process, stabilizing your process and people, we talked about assigning roles, defining and assigning roles. And what that means is it's like right now if you're, you know, look, I started, it was just me by myself, okay? I was the salesperson, I was sales manager, I was the dispatcher, I was the operations manager. I was everything, right? So essentially I had all these hats that I wore. But if nobody wore one of the hats, that area would get neglected. So if you're building a sales process, someone needs to where the sales manager's hat, okay? So that could be you, the owner, that could be a top salesperson, that could be your partner, that could be an actual sales manager that you hire, right? You know, I hired my first sales manager. As we grew, I had four sales managers, plus a director of sales, plus a director of call center operations and all to run this massive sales team. But it all started with me on the phone by myself, right? And so, you know, you want to make sure that the lead management is getting handled correctly, that people are following their scripts, that they're using their rebuttals. If they need some help closing deals, there's somebody to help them close deals, that they're doing the estimate, follow up, right? So with those things, make a list of what you, you know, when you establish these processes for yourself, how are you going to manage that on a day to day basis? Crucial. Crucial. Like don't set this up and then let it just get away from you, okay? Don't let it just get away from you. We want to make sure that it's managed. We want to make sure that it's handled, right? So you know, this is, again, people say, Louis, how did you go from the truck rental yard to 20 million a year. And it was sales. That was it. Sales. The sales process was there, right then I went and found marketing and fuel to fuel it. It's critical. And I'm saying that in a time where I know a lot of you may be coming off of a very busy summer, but we can't let that give us false sense of confidence thinking that that's just going to be the way that it is moving forward and then come and all of a sudden it gets a little slower and things drop off a cliff and we're in a total panic. I witnessed it for years with friends and people in the business and people I work with now. Well, when I started working with them, when I talk about what happened, it's like the summer. Everybody's on a high. They feel as rich as could be and then winner comes around like, oh, I need to get in a different business. I need to start doing something else, maybe deliveries, maybe. And they drive themselves insane. Where if they take some time now, if that's. You take some time now and set up your sales process. Consistency, predictability, higher rates that you could sell because you're selling service. I'm telling you, it's like you can't scale without that. You can't scale without that. And what most people do is they'll just spend more money on marketing. Like if they really are hungry and aggressive and have the, you know, what's to do it right, they'll just spend more money on marketing. Well, stop spending more money on marketing until you get your sales process in line. Stop spending more money on marketing until you know your marketing dollars. Get these things in place. I'm telling you, you could go to whatever level you want to go to. And guys, hopefully this has been helpful for you. Go out there today and every day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. See you guys tomorrow. 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 next level.

Go watch them now and I'll see you over there.