06 - Why Great Salespeople Stay Curious | Megan Beattie

SPEAKER_04 0:23

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Selling in the Dwelling, the go-to podcast for the in-home and remodeling world. I'm your host, Alan Langer, and we've got another great episode coming up because I've got another great guest coming up for you. But before we get to Megan, two quick things. The website is sellinginthedwelling.com. And on the website, you want to go to the Ask Alan segment, send me a question. If I read your question in the next podcast, you get a free selling in the dwelling t-shirt. So take care of that. And the other big news is that our title sponsor is Paradigm Vendo. Go to paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling. They are our title sponsor. Good friends. Check them out. They're the best software you can find in the in-home selling industry. So without further ado, I want to bring on Megan Beattie. Megan, I've known her for years, but virtually and in the social media world because I see her everywhere. But I think people who are listening to this podcast probably know Megan as well. She's known as the lead queen. And you can see behind her, she has Megan knows marketing, and she certainly does. Megan has been in the business for probably decades. I haven't actually asked you how long, but she really helps companies, in-home service companies, get leads, keep leads, set leads, home shows, call centers, all of that stuff. So Megan, welcome to the podcast. I'm really glad you're here. How are you today?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

I'm great. Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_04 1:46

So Megan works for uh Tony Hody and Associates, which Tony is a lead company and he's been around for years as well. Awesome guy. In the in-home world, what I'm seeing now is one of the biggest things when I talk to business owners and even sales managers, what's your biggest issue right now? They always say leads. It's been like that for probably a year, maybe more. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that is the number one thing people are coming up with saying leads are my biggest problem?

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Well, Alan, as you know, and anyone that has been in the industry for more than you know 10 years knows we had a giant boom during COVID-19, right? And we spent about four years writing the coattails of that. And so leads were easy to get, selling was easy, right? Like we started our fence company in it during COVID in 2020. And man, I was given email bids and yards, and I was selling a million dollars the first year, right? Like easily, like not what I'm used to, which is you know, in-home selling, like we do, right? Like with a real process, but it was easy. And so what happened was we all got spoiled with leads and we all got spoiled with sales being easy for about four years. The end of 2024, beginning of 2025, which all things that come up must go down, right? So we knew that was coming eventually, and it is now normalized back to where it was like 2018, 2019. And those of us that have been around a while know that, right? But those got into the business 20, 20 years sooner. We got a little spoiled. A lot of people got spoiled. And so what happened was we thought it will always be this way. Now digital is expensive as hell. It's gone through the roof in terms of cost on paid search, SEO leads. I mean, got clients happy with an $1,100 issue lead cost, which I never thought would happen, right? Oh, we're only at a thousand this month. And several years back, we would have said, Oh, we're kind of mad we're at five or six hundred. So, what's that that's done? Has it's created companies that have had to find other ways to get leads and to hedge some of those more expensive lead costs, right? And that's really what I've been doing since I got into the business very early on. Like I got into the business making leads out of nothing. So inbound leads weren't even a thing my company had when I got there. Like we had no inbound leads. That's why they brought me there. They said we we need we need leads. So get in a van and go knock on some doors.

SPEAKER_03 3:59

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

You know, so I I'm used to having no leads. And then a lot of these companies that are out there currently, they just don't know how to generate their own. They just have relied on lead aggregator or Google for so long, and now those costs are so high that if they don't have something else to balance it out, they can be in real trouble.

SPEAKER_04 4:17

Yeah, and and they're so high. And if they come in and they're spending a thousand dollars and it's really a bad lead, or it's just a lead that the rep shouldn't even be there. That's one of the things that drives an owner crazy because how do they how do they get a more qualified lead? But I I think you and I are cut from the same, whatever the term is, same, same skin. Where when I was selling, I got five or six leads a week, and the rest were me. Like I was out there getting my own, get my own referrals, get my own self change. And then you're right. Then it comes 2020 and you get all these guys like, Hey, where are the leads? What's going on here? Right. You know, this company sucks and all that stuff. So what would you do if you're if I'm starting a company tomorrow? I'm starting Alan and Megan's roofing company tomorrow, and I hire you to say, like, get me leads, what was the first thing you would do?

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Well, first thing I do is make sure foundational things are put in place. We've claimed our Google business listing. We have all the basic web stuff set up. We have a website that functions and it's high converting, because all the other lead sources that we drive into the business are ultimately going to end up on our website. So we have to make sure that's done first. But then after that, we need to start finding out some ways to make leads. Shows and events would be one of the first things that I would do. The other thing that I would do is, you know, investigate some of the lead aggregators because in the beginning we need to keep the lights on. You know, I'm running a small business. My husband and I own a residential fence company. So this is very close to the time for me because we haven't been in business that long. We have to find ways at a low cost to make leads. Unless you have, you know, unlimited private equity money, fine. But that's not most contractors' story, right? And so we have to figure out how we can bring in enough leads at a cost that we can keep the lights on, keep payroll going, and then eventually be able to grow the company. But we have to have some foundational things in place. No matter what we do, we've got to have somebody fielding the leads in the call center. We have to have someone that is the first point of contact getting to the leads right away. And even if you run shows and events and canvassing, those leads have to have a call center touch point too. So in either fashion, we need to get that going. So one person to field the leads, you know, that's what I had going here at my call center. I had one person. Now she's the office manager. Now I have a kid running my call center. Now I have a second caller. So we've grown it from that, from nothing into, you know, a couple of people. As the sales rep team grows, we need support for them in the field with no shows or one party appointments. We need to be able to give them backup appointments. We need to be able to make sure we're resulting leads so we can rehash. Like there's a lot of things that initial call center person needs to do. So I would tackle shows and events right away. I would make sure we have foundational Google things put in place, make sure we have a call center person to field those leads. Whatever you're paying them, it's it's worth its weight in gold because without them, everything else is going to cost more.

SPEAKER_04 6:54

You know, you hit the nail right on the head. I would ask business owners when I'm called for consulting, whatever, I'm like, who's the most important person in your company? And they'll answer me, or they'll answer, oh, my sales manager, or they'll whatever. No one ever says the person who picks up the phone. Like to me, that that's really the most important person. That's the first contact that starts the customer journey. And and they're like, you know, some of them are like, hey, Marge, you know, answer the phones this afternoon, or or Shirley, or Big Bob from the warehouse. We don't have anyone for two hours. Can you pick up the phone? You can't run a business like that. It doesn't work. You need someone dedicated to who knows what they're doing, who picks up that phone, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Absolutely. And I mean, if you think about it, Alan, with human beings in general, right? We're going to put anything on the back burner that we like to do the least. So if you got Bertha who's keeping the books and you tell her personality type, now we want you to be cheery and answer the phone. Um, you know, we're just not going to get everything we need out of that scenario, right? If we got Big Bob in the warehouse, you know, unloading the window truck, and oh, by the way, there's, you know, Mr. Mr. Johnson is calling and he's trying to force a price over the phone. Like, Big Bob doesn't want to answer that call. He doesn't want to answer. So, and to be fair, like we should have people in their area of strength, right? We don't really want Big Bob answering the phone anyway. Like, he might give too much information. We need somebody quick to, you know, point to the sales appointment as the solution to their problem and you know, be able to get our our sales rep in the house. The amount of warm reception the customer gives to our sales rep when they get there is directly proportionate to the person on the phone setting up the appointment and how they set it up. So it's a very important piece that we don't realize until we don't have it.

SPEAKER_04 8:31

Yeah, absolutely. And there's so many things that are asked, especially when it comes to call center. Here's one I'm going to bring up. I'd be shocked if you don't train this, but the one party appointment. That's the biggest frustration with owners and sales reps. Oh, we have too many one parties. How do you handle what is your whether it's a script or what do what how do you handle that? I I have a small way that I train. You do this a lot more than I do. How do you how do you handle the one party or the person that says, oh, I I I'll take the information, I'll tell my husband when he gets home.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Absolutely. So yeah, one of the biggest headaches in our industry is that now there's two sides to the coin. There's these companies that demand it and they tell the customer it's a requirement that we need you all at the kitchen table and we need all decision makers present, all homeowners, all spouses. What happens is I agree as well, Alan, because I mean I've sold in the home, so I agree I want both parties there. Yeah. I just don't agree that telling them that we require it is the best way to get them to comply.

SPEAKER_04 9:27

100%. I think it does the opposite effect.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

It did 100% as the opposite effect. In fact, when you as a call center person use the word decision maker, you have now just given them the words to use against you. Because now the first thing that comes out of their mouth is, well, I'm the only decision maker, which we know damn well is not true. However, you know, I can't just say, Well, Mr. Jones, you're not picking out a bathroom without your wife. Like that's not going to track on the phone. So I need to handle that in a different way, which is number one, we don't come out the gate going, we need to just say, you know, we didn't say we need 60 to 90, we need all decision making. I I agree with all the concept that we do need those things. I just believe that human beings work under what's in it for me. And if I tell the customer this is what we want, this is what we prefer, they don't care what we prefer, they care what they prefer. And so we have to really, first of all, when the husband and wife get together, the wife and wife, husband, husband, it's 2026, could be any combination of this, you know, relationship type. When they get together, they have a meeting before we get there. And, you know, when they decide they're gonna one leg us, whether it's predisposition that they're gonna do that, or they just last minute mandated to stay over at work. Do we know what we want? Oh, yeah, we know I just want, you know, white bathrooms, just they gotta be updated, just nothing fancy, just and they think that's it. With windows, it's the same thing. They just need to open roof, it's just shingles, right? They know nothing of ventilation or insulation or any underlayment, nothing, right? And so to them, it's very simple. So we need to speak to that on the phone. Hey, when it comes to replacement windows today in 2026, there are just so many options, colors, styles, not to mention the way you want them installed in glass packages. What we have found in 20 years of doing business, we know initially it sounds like a window is pretty basic, but I gotta tell you, most people don't sit around and think about these projects every day. Something people do a couple times in a lifetime. So whenever we meet with people, there's always more questions from both parties than they ever anticipate initially. So, in order to leave you the most accurate quote while we're there, nine times out of ten, we just we end up needing both parties input. I'm sure you could appreciate that. But the first thing we have to really get down to brass tacks on is number one, how did you ask for both people? Because most companies miss this off the rip. They're just like, is there any other people on the deed? And they're like, no, well, you got somebody they say do it all the time. I go, Well, what the hell do you care if they're on the deed or not? You if their spouses in the house together and they live together, they gotta be there. Well, no, if they're not on the deed, they don't. I said, You never sold in the house then.

SPEAKER_03 11:47

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

I have. And so, you know, I I said, You clearly, this is a person that's not educated on why this makes sense, right? And to be fair, Alan, what I found is we don't educate the call center on why it's not in the customer's best interest to set a one party. Right. That's really where it begins. Because absolutely our call center hears enough times, I'm the only decision maker, and guess what? They start to believe it. It's like sales reps in the home. They start to hear you guys were too expensive. And you know what they do, Alan? They start to believe that.

SPEAKER_04 12:16

Yeah. And now they have no confidence in their price.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Correct. Over and over again, they hear the customer trains them. And so our our call center gets trained too, because they don't understand the bigger picture of the fact that we go out and meet with one of them. The problem is if you do pitch it, because studies have shown that trying to get back in the house, right, and reset the appointment. I mean, there's there's it's a mixed bag, like one scenario, we're not gonna get back in. The other scenario, we can, then we have to hope they're both there this time and present to both. But if you present to one party, right, the other party is never gonna get an accurate view of the value. They're just not going to. And so what ends up happening is they come home, they hear one thing, as you know, the price, and they say, Oh, we need to get a few more prices, and they end up going with Dale out of jail or chucking a truck, and they don't take care of them. And then they call us back in, you know, five years to do it the right way. Now they pay twice plus inflation. So we didn't help the customer by doing that. And that's what our call center doesn't get educated on from the higher-ups very often. They don't let them know that even if it sounds plausible that they're the only decision, maybe that's at the price they think it's gonna cost before we get there. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 13:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

And so, you know, when we get there, it's going to change. And really, it's something that both people are going to have questions on and be a part of, no matter what way you slice it or dice it. And so it starts in the mind, and that is that we just don't give our people the right education on why it is. And we also just say, hey, we need all parties there, make sure they're both there. And then what happens is we draw this hard line and we lose a bunch of those expensive leads coming in on the front end because we've said something that just pissed the customer off. And maybe we got a bad review on the way out the door. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 13:50

It doesn't stop there anymore. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

That's no, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 13:53

You don't even go to the house when you get a bad review. So that's that's the worst case scenario.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Yeah, yeah. And then there's a couple other ways we handle it. If you know they've been abused by someone else in our industry, it's very common. We're saying, Well, is this one of those things? And you're like, Oh, you've uh what makes you say that? Yeah, tell me tell me about what you might have just said that. Yeah, tell me, tell me, tell me what makes you come to that conclusion. Wow, we had such and such, and that's like, oh, okay. So someone was poorly trained in the home and didn't understand how to present properly, is what really happened. And so now they're going to drag that baggage from that old relationship with that other window company into this one with us. And our call center needs to know how to put that to bed, or they will never get both people there.

SPEAKER_04 14:31

So that's what I'm talking about. That's why I asked you this question because there's so many layers in a call center. It's not just answering the phone, it's all of this that you just put all of these scenarios. Amazing. I'm gonna ask you now, if you're training me, this is what I used to do. Tell me what you think about this. So I did a lot, I led the RBA network when I sold for RBA for seven straight years for self-gen and and referral appointments. And when I would try to set an appointment, I never said, Are you the only decision maker? I actually used to use this phrase. I would talk about where you, hey, there's a lot of things, windows have changed, there's a lot of blah, blah, blah. Then I would say, so who else would benefit from being there and hearing all this? So I just say, Who else would benefit putting it on them rather than saying we require? And it and it was pretty successful. What do you think about that sentence?

SPEAKER_01 15:12

Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think that's bad at all. I think that most of the time you'll get it with that phraseology. We ask, is there a spouse in the house there with you? And we say that because it rhymes and it's kind of cutesy. So it's less, you know, invasive than are you married, right? If they say no, we say, is there anybody else whose opinion you value on projects around the home? And so that's our second check. You know, because truthfully, that's it. I mean, they are going to value someone else's opinion on something, then they should be there. And that all also covers like our senior citizens that might need their kids. That also is going to cover like a young person who bought the house but dad helped them with the mortgage, right? She's going to say, Yeah, I run everything by my dad. Well, then I'm going to catch it with that phrase. You know, that does give me a little bit of a, you know, leg up on the scenario of just expecting that they're going to tell me, you know, whose opinion they would value. I start with, is there a spouse? Because if there's a spouse there, we want them there. But I don't, I don't immediately say, oh, and by the way, we require that. I'm just going to say, yeah, is there a spot, you know, how long have you owned the home there? Great. Now is there a spouse in the house there with you? Great. And their name is. You know, and it and if they say something like, Well, what does that matter? I don't see how that's relevant. Well, the first thing that we do is we back that down. We respond with softness when we get a bully, like when someone is getting very defensive and we haven't really said anything yet to be defensive about. We haven't demanded they're both there or anything yet. So we start to say, Well, is there a spouse in the house? Well, what does that matter? Oh, we came out, we just didn't want to call anyone, hey you. I mean, it's how would you like us to refer to the other person there?

SPEAKER_04 16:39

Right. Well, oh.

unknown 16:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:43

I'm a jerk. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yeah. I've I barked up a tree, I didn't need to. So that will back down a lot of it. But then, you know, if we need to take it head on later, we can. But what that enables us, Alan, to do is the rest of the conversation, now that I know there's another person, I'm going to say you both, you folks, you guys. I'm going to say you and Joanne, the whole conversation. So when I get down to the end and ask for both, it's not a surprise. See, most companies try to slip it in at the end when it's too late. You've already had the whole conversation with A and B party, and then you try to bring C into it, and they're like, no, you just yanked the rug out from under me. Instead, we gotta, we gotta plant the seed. Rick Grasso taught me that, you know, many, many years ago. They got people have to hear something like 10 times to really get it. I have to be able to plant those seeds through the conversation. The other thing that helps me with, much like a sales presentation, is if I handle the objection before it comes up, you can't tell me she doesn't have an opinion when you just told me what you and Joanne hate about the windows. You just told me what you and Joanne have tried to do to solve your problem already. You just told me what you and Joanne are thinking about. When I come down to the end and ask for you and Joanne, you you can't try to tell me she doesn't have an opinion. You just told me for the last five minutes that she it just gives me several different, you know, because I've I've done this every which way. I've try I've sampled and tried every piece of verbiage out there. And you know, this is the one that gets overall least amount of resistance, best amount of results, and covers people that live together that aren't married, boyfriend and girlfriend that live together, fiance and fiance. Like it covers all those different relationship types that we have to be conscious of today.

SPEAKER_04 18:12

I love this. And then this is again, like this is why I had you on because you're bringing up such great tangible stuff to use. And you also are bringing up the nuances of the sales conversation because let's admit it, that call is a sales call. And you said something that I guarantee you, if I told sales reps, give me a list of the top 10 things you got to be cognizant of in a sales appointment, this would not come out. And it's tone. Tone is so unbelievably important in a sales conversation, and reps don't think about that. And especially on a phone call, that's all you have is your tone. You don't have your face, you don't have any body language. Do you train a but you said soft tone? What do you tell your call center people about tone?

SPEAKER_01 18:54

Well, we talk a lot about how you must come across with most of the questions we're going to ask as curious and not interrogating. And that has a lot to do with the tone, right? If our voice inflection goes up at the end, we're going to have a curious tone. You know, if they say to me something like, Yeah, my wife doesn't need to be here, I make all the decisions, I'd say, I get it. Uh what makes you say that? Very curious, right? Softer tone goes up at the end. Well, what makes you say that? And in that case, the customer reads that as curious. On the other hand, if I say, What makes you say that? They're gonna go, Well, who the hell are you to ask me that? Right. And we're gonna have a, we're gonna get into an altercation. The last thing we want on the phone is an argument. We get a lot more, you know, questions lead to confessions. And so we get a lot more accomplished when we ask questions. If we're able to ask a question and we can land the question in a curious tone and the customer hears that from our tone, it doesn't leave the customer sort of deciphering our question and trying to read more into it than maybe they should, right? And so the tone is very important in that area. It's also very important to pause for emphasis when we need to, right? If we want to get a point across on the phone, yeah, we absolutely have to. Most people on the phone talk way too fast, not loud enough in some cases, depending on you know who our person on the other end of the phone is. If I'm talking to a senior, okay, and my mom lives with me, she's 76, so I can tell you this. We have to talk slower and louder, or we're just gonna say it twice anyway. Right. What was that, honey? Right. But the seniors get frustrated quicker and they're more apt to hang up when they get frustrated than to stay on the phone with what they perceive as a fast talking salesperson. So we have to be conscious of that and make sure that you know our tone is not uh sounding demanding or overly salesy and much more curious. Because again, questions lead to confessions, they'll confess many things if we uh if we just ask the right questions. I can ask the right line of questions that lead them to the answer I want them to give anyway. I you know, I I know what that looks like.

SPEAKER_04 20:59

So I talk about this all the time. Nobody wants to meet with a salesperson, and nobody wants to have that phone, like, oh, I gotta make the phone call to set up the appointment. They're expecting a bad experience.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 21:09

Because most of the things and when they get a good experience or get experience that they're not expecting, it's like a breath of fresh air, and then it's probably easier. And you gotta show that within that first 60 seconds of the phone call that this is not gonna be the experience you're you're expecting.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Absolutely. And one of the ways we do that is we change the greeting. You know, every company that you call is gonna say, Hi, thank you for calling such and such, how can I help you? And look, there's nothing wrong with that, Alan. Like, but that's what they expect, right? Right. So there's no differentiation. So if we say, Thank you for calling privacy fence company, how can I make you smile today? They something different, right? Or you know, and I I we do play on words at different companies, you know, how can we create a raving fan today? How can we make you a raving fan today? There's all kinds of things, but I learned that from Joel Tallman back in the business many years ago, alarm co windows. He was doing the red carpet treatment when they would answer the phone that way, right? They were getting raving reviews, and so When we started doing it, I realized why because the customer immediately goes, Oh, you just did. I'd say, Oh, good, I can go home now. And we'd have a good laugh, right? Right. And then, you know, what I w was really impressive to me, Alan, is then there are times where I would run those appointments. You know, I did the last couple of years I spent at the company I was at for 11 years. The last two years I spent doing sales recruiting and sales training. And I would go to the house and people go, Oh, you guys are the ones that say the smile thing. And I'm like, how do they remember? Like all the yeah, I was like, holy shit, that did work better than I thought. Right. I thought it was something cheesy we were saying because my boss said we were gonna say it now. And really, you know, I saw that, and then I saw some of my clients, you know, more recently in the last few years, get five-star reviews online based on this introduction.

SPEAKER_04 22:46

And who couldn't just based on that one line, yeah. I would walk into a house, and first thing I'd try to do is to lower the sales resistance which was built, and I would literally say, I've I changed it, you know, a little bit over the years, but essentially it was, hey, Alan from Renewal by Anderson, just so you know, I'm not here to do a dog and pony sales show. And literally, I would say dog and pony sales show, and they would laugh.

SPEAKER_03 23:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:08

And then I would say, No, seriously, I'm not, and they would laugh again. And it just that one first two or three minutes lowered it because it wasn't what they they were expecting.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

So oh, absolutely. We had that the the sales manager who's my partner at all weather steel. He was so magical at this in the house. We went to a house one day and the notes on it read, you know, Garred says she's gonna throw you guys out after an hour. You know, like he pressured her. And my partner, Leonard, he was amazing. He goes, Watch this. We go up to the door, he knocks, and she goes, he goes, Hey, you Sandy? She says, Yeah, he goes, Hey, I'm Leonard, I'm the biggest jerk in the company, and they sent me. Don't worry, I'll only be here about four hours or so. And she went, he goes, I'm just kidding. I just heard you liked lots of pressure. And she starts going, Oh, and he goes, Look, I just need you to remember five words. Leonard, get the hell out. Can you remember those? And she's like, Sure. And he goes, if at any point you feel uncomfortable with me being here, you just tell me, Leonard, get the hell out, and I'm gone. Fair enough. She goes, Okay. We came in because Alan, it wasn't what everybody else was saying, right? And immediately pattern interruption, it worked, and we got in, and after she was telling us she had to go to a doctor's appointment. And I was new and in-home sales at the time, and I'm watching the clock. I'm like, she's about to throw us out. She's about to, and Leonard knew she was full of it, right? And he just kept about an hour and a half in. He goes, Now are you going to that are you going to that doctor's appointment, Sandy? Or were you BSing me? She goes, I was BSing. He goes, I kept going. And I just thought, you know, that was a great lesson for me early in the home to learn, right? And and to also know on the phone when they're putting up resistance about that. I I don't care how much time they want to give me, because the answer is they want to give me 20 minutes in any case, but I care how much time they have if they're not going anywhere, right? Right. And that's that's why the 60 to 90 thing. I mean, you get people all day long that'll agree to it on the phone. You get out there, they still don't give it to you. So that's not really accomplishing what we think it is. I'd rather find out, look, do you got anything else on the calendar we need to be respectful of?

unknown 24:59

Right?

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Are you got a little Sally's ballet recital? Like, what do you got going on? Now, if you want to watch Wheel of Fortune, yeah. If you want if you want to watch Wheel of Fortune, that's different. That's not a real time constraint, but I'm gonna figure out what it is, right?

SPEAKER_04 25:11

So is anybody be watching Wheel of Fortune while I'm demo demoing the Windows?

SPEAKER_01 25:18

The price is right, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:19

This is right with the TV nice and loud. So hey dwellers, quick break. Hey, did you know that the closing percentages for in-home sales has been dropping consistently over the last 10 years? It's really crazy, and there's a lot of reasons for it. But one of them is reps have so much to do in the house because there's so many different platforms that you're jumping back and forth all the time. Well, my title sponsor, Paradigm Vendo, takes care of that. In one digital platform, you can go from initial appointment right to final sale and signatures by visiting just their platform. It's amazing. You gotta check them out. It's paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling, P-A-R-A-D-I-G-M Vendo.com forward slash dwelling, because your reps need to give the homeowners a great experience in the house, and jumping around doesn't do that. Visit paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling and take care of the experience your reps are giving in the house. Well, this is great stuff. So let me let me uh transition a bit now because now you're obviously a call center expert, but you're also a home show expert. And we've actually got a question coming up in the Ask Alan segment about home shows, which I can't wait to get to because I want to hear your answers. But talk about the importance of home shows. I hear so many different, you know, some business owners like, oh, they're a waste of time. People are just going and window shopping. I don't want to spend my money. Some are like, it's the best, you know, money we spend all year. So give it give me your overall opinion of home shows for the service industry. And then what could a smaller company, what should they do? Like, should they get a big booth? Should they spend a lot of money? What would you tell me to do for as far as a home show?

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Absolutely. So all great questions. The difference between the companies that say shows and events didn't work for us and the companies that are absolutely cleaning up at shows and events, home shows and otherwise, is one very, well, two very simple words. Number one, people and number two, process. Okay. If I show up to the home show with a couple of sales guys that don't want to be there and a handful of brochures, I'm absolutely going to show up to the next qualified remodeler event and tell Megan how shows and events didn't work for us. 100% will happen. However, if you do what we demonstrated in business, which at my company we did uh over 300 shows and events a year. So we're doing five to seven a week every single week. We built an army of young people. That company this year, they'll do about 39 million. They do uh about 400 events a year now, a lot of call center, and then they do retail. So they're inside of Walmart's Myers, they are inside of Sam's Club. But they also develop small partnerships, so like Ace Hardware. Face-to-face marketing is all the same. If you follow the process, whether it's canvassing, whether it's retail, whether it's events, it's the exact same script. It's just a slightly different introduction depending on where we're catching them. But the same formula holds true. So if you go to a home show and look, if you're small, you can buy a 10 by 10 booth. You don't need a big, elaborate display, but what you do need to spend the money on is the people that you're training to do this the right way because they have to sell the appointment in the booth and they have to do it. It's just as important as a sales process in terms of we say this at this step, we say this at this step, we say this at this step. Oh, and by the way, you have a trial close here at the end, and then you extract the information. They have to follow an exact process, and they all have to do it the same every single time. That's the difference between companies that are running 200, 300, 400 leads at a show and a company that's like, oh, this show is slow, we didn't make any money. It's the the complete, it's the 100% difference. I say don't spend money on a bunch of dumb stuff and spend that money on people in process, which means get a company that has a proven track record of doing well at this and uh figure out what they're doing and do the same thing or hire an expert, right? Because, you know, hiring an expert can be expensive, but what's more expensive is paying the dumb tax and buying all these booths, right? And paying all this and not getting a return and not having any leads at the end of a show that had 30,000 people in attendance. Like it doesn't make sense. So, you know, my company's small. I only had two sales reps at the time, but we did a home and garden show this year, and we got a 10 by 20 booth, so just slightly bigger than the smallest booth you'd get, and we wrote 81 appointments in three days because we ended up doing about $260,000 off of that just in fence jobs. We're still running them, actually. We got a couple home show leads on this month, even though it's been three months since we did it. So we're still eating off of those same leads that came in. What companies do is they focus on the shit that doesn't matter. They say, I've got the biggest displays, I've got the best banners, I need to do this for branding. There's a lot of things you can do for branding, and branding should absolutely be a secondary reason that you do it, but you've got to be able to bring home the bacon today. You've got to be able to put leads on for Monday when you're working a show on Saturday, and you have to have the ability to run them. Um, and what most companies don't do is they don't go out in the aisle and engage with every single person that's walking by, and that's where they fail. They sit in the booth and they hope the customer is going to come up and say, Hey, can I be your customer? And look, at home shows, a few people will. And that's the the danger of it is they say, Oh, we got three leads and they all sold. Well, they better all sell if they came up to you and said, I want to buy from you, right? But if you want a volume of leads, if you want that to become part of your overall marketing strategy and not just a flash in the pan in March, right? We've got to develop a strategy, which means we can work strawberry festivals with a very similar technique and we can work the Christmas festival. I wrote a $75,000 window and siding sale out of a bass festival once. That guy, Alan, did not get a bass like fish bass? Bass, yeah, Mancelona Bass Festival. That guy did not get up that morning and say, Boy, I hope I find a windows and siding company at the bass festival. But he wrote a check for $75,000. So, you know, and so um that can be done at all kinds of shows and events. I mean, we have clients that have done one. I have one guy, uh, bath company in Georgia. He did one 90-minute training with us and he took off. But you know what he did? He followed our process to a T.

SPEAKER_03 31:24

Yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

Try to Frankenstein it, Alan, and say, Well, I like this part of your process, but I like to stay, I don't want to set the appointment in the booth. Well, you're not gonna have the results we promised you if you're not gonna capitalize on setting appointments in the booth, right? Right. And so, yeah, you can get names and numbers if you want, but you're just not going to see the return. The effort's the same.

SPEAKER_03 31:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

So why not get more, right? It's a hundred percent people in process. They have to be trained like a little army. We have home show boot camp the week before our and all people working the show at my company are here. I even had 10 companies fly in. I held one here at my fence company office in Great.

SPEAKER_03 31:59

I saw that.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

I had them come in, I said, send, you know, two to three people from your company, we'll train them. And uh, we had them come in and had a you know we've we could fit about 20 people in our conference room. I mean, it was a great training for all, and everybody went home and a couple of them really executed on it well, and a couple people said, Yeah, we're gonna do it part our way, part your way, and they got partial results. Like it's the same thing with sales process, you know that.

SPEAKER_04 32:20

Exactly right. And it's such a great way to invest because if they don't know what they're doing, you're just wasting your money. You're literally tossing your money in the air and letting the wind take it. And you made a great point because I think a lot of companies, when it comes to events, miss the boat on the non-traditional, the non-home show events, the strawberry festival, the bass festival, the farmers market. Yeah. You know, when I was at Renewal at Southern New England and they started this, we were like, as reps, we were like, what are they going to the fishing show for? Why are they going to the boat show? What are they doing? And then and then all of a sudden we're going to these boat show leads, and we're like, oh wow, these all these people have money because they don't work anywhere at the boat show.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Secondary incomes. Yeah, they have spendable income. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:02

So it's like, so I used to love these. Everyone would complain about, oh, it's another event lead. I used to love them because I knew I didn't have any competition. If they got the if they got the appointment at the strawberry festival, there was not another window company there.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

That's exactly it. And that's, you know, I I actually coach, I don't do a lot of work with sales teams, but I do a little on this specific situation. They're like, well, how do, you know, why are we not converting? I said, because if you run leads all year that come to you that have the urgency level built for the project, so they say windows near me, and they end up on your website, right? They have a certain level of urgency. Their urgency meter for the project is high. They know they need it. There's no doubt. The Strawberry Festival people are like, Yeah, I probably got old windows. I mean, I should do something, but there's no urgency. So the salesmanship on the measure and inspection step in the home has to go up. And they some just aren't equipped because it's like it's like a vegetarian that you put on to eat meat. Like they end up in the bathroom. Like it's a it's a bad they they don't understand, it's different, right? Their body doesn't respond the same. Right. You know, you have that. The sales team really has to be, it's the same way when you start a canvassing program. I mean, RBA said this for years. There's a reason that they did canvassing for so many years. Closing rate on everything else goes up when we run a canvassing department at our company. Why? Because once you can sell one of those, you can sell anything. But the good news is too, reps hate the shop around. You don't get that. That's the great news about the boat show lead, right? Like, yeah, when I've been in the house, I'm like, I'd rather the fight be at the door than in when I'm asking for money. I mean, I can't get in the door.

SPEAKER_04 34:30

Hey, sellers and dwellers. So the next segment of selling in the dwelling is sponsored by our friends at Destination Motivation. You know, what would a 33% increase in close rates and a 55% reduction in cancellation rates be worth to you? Well, check out Destination Motivation because that's exactly what they can do for you. You want to visit www.increaseroursales.com for more. Now let's get to the ask Allen segment. The choir that you just heard sing is now going to introduce the Ask Allen segment of the of the podcast. For folks who have been listening, they know that if you send a question, so go to sellinginthedwelling.com, click on ask Allen, send me a question, and if I read it, you get a free selling in the dwelling t-shirt. And this one, so I go through the questions every week to see if any line up with the guests. And I I swear, Megan, you probably know Jennifer from Pensacola because she asked the question here that's made for you.

SPEAKER_03 35:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 35:31

This is from Jennifer in Pensacola, Florida. She writes, When working a home show, I actually have two questions. So she's we're going to do two for the price of one. Her first question is Should you have reps themselves, sales reps themselves, work the shows at all or leave it up to the booth people? And the second question is, should you set appointments right there on the spot or just get their info and set the appointments later? I know how you're going to answer that one, but go to the first one. Should you have reps work the shows?

SPEAKER_01 35:59

Long answer, short answer, no. And look, there's a reason for this. Let me say this. There's always an exception to every rule. I have trained a couple of sales reps that have done well at shows, but it's rare. Because, and there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, the sales rep has so much information that they give out too much information in the booth. Okay. When the customer comes up and says, How much is an average blank? We now are asking the sales team to lie. And they have to say, I don't know, or they have to say it depends, which it does depend. I mean, you know that as well as I do, but the customer really presses them and they have that information. And, you know, when the homeowner finds out they're the salesperson, they know that I have that information. So we end up kind of shooting ourselves in the foot because it's not that the information they have is wrong, but they also try to sell, they unfortunately don't understand the difference between selling the appointment and selling the product. And so they start trying to sell the product in the booth, meaning they're going to tell you about all our great, you know, we're we have an integra weld and it's a foam-filled frame and it's a krypton gas and eight coats of low E. And by the way, we have a super spacer, it's not one of those metal spacers. The customer doesn't understand what any of that means if they haven't been educated. It must be demonstrated to be appreciated. And this and they'll come up and say, What brand do you carry? And they'll say, We carry this brand. And if the customer hasn't heard of it, they think it sucks.

SPEAKER_04 37:19

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

And and so they start going, Well, that's I've never heard of that. And maybe I should do some more research. You have a brochure, and the lead is dead now. We're not writing that lead. And so the problem is the sales rep just has too much information. Not to mention most of them don't want to do it.

SPEAKER_04 37:35

Yeah, that's the biggest thing.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

I mean, that's the biggest thing. And look, why should they? To be fair, we should be keeping people in our in our company in their area of strength. I want to keep them busy enough with leads that they don't have time to work the damn show. They should be running leads on a Saturday, not working the home show.

SPEAKER_03 37:50

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_01 37:51

And so ideally, that's what that's what we would want. Now, I do have a couple of sales teams that I coach on home shows because they generate their own leads year-round. They are they don't have an influx of leads coming in. Their sales team is the lead generation team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In that case, you know, they have taken my processes and a gutter company in the Carolinas, they've done really well with the process and at the show. Um, but it's been it's been few and far between. Most of the time, what it is, Alan, is we have a recruiting problem. And so we throw the salespeople in there because we don't know how to recruit the right people to work for the booth. That is the wrong strategy. We need people whose whole job is to sell the appointment so that they're going after every person that has a you know thought of doing windows in the next year, and they're trying to pull them into the market sooner. So we're not just getting the the yeses right now for home show, but we're getting a separate segment of the market that has a future plan of doing it as well. And the sales rep is not gonna do that. When they say, Well, we're gonna wait till next year. Well, here's my car, give me a call when you're ready.

SPEAKER_04 38:53

That we're gonna get the information, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:56

No, they'll never even get the customers' information half the time because the sales rep is going, Well, if they're not doing it till next year, I don't want their own waste my time. Yeah, exactly. And and what they don't know is we could put them on that lead and they'll sell it all day long. And they'd, you know, we have to kind of save them from themselves. So we need, you know, if we really want to make a big splash at the shows, we've got to hire lead generators where their whole job is to generate leads. And, you know, we can do that if you do a couple of shows a weekend every single weekend. It's enough to have a part-time person and like a manager that works full-time, and then we grow it from there. But yeah, having sales reps work the show later on, usually we regret that. And we say, hmm, you know, and and like I said, I've trained some, but it just doesn't have the results that training a bunch of young people who know nothing but lead generation, they're gonna have a much better result because it's what they focus on 100%.

SPEAKER_04 39:45

And it makes total sense. And I and I am totally in agreement with you. But let me let me play devil devil's advocate simply because it's it's been my own experience. And again, I'm gonna be in the minority of this, but when SNE used to work shows, especially the big home shows, I would actually request to work them because I actually knew how to, you know, figure it out on my own a good process, which I wasn't selling the window in the booth, I was selling the appointment, and and I was very good at it. And what SNE did was well you set the appointment, it's your it's your lead. Sure. So I'd I'd set myself up for the two weeks in a row of all these home show appointments, and what I saw was the the homeowner loved the fact that they knew me already coming to the house. But however, I did see, yeah, Alan works the shows and he's doing great. Okay, Tony, you go work the show, and Tony's sitting there on his phone the whole time, and he's like, Oh my god, this is why why do I work a home show? This is terrible. So I would absolutely follow what you say, but I think there is a there's an exception to that rep who understands it and gets it. Because for me, I loved home show season because I would go get my get those appointments and I'd be set up for a month.

SPEAKER_01 40:51

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. My husband works the home show, he's he was our top sales rep, but he and he will work the home show, but you know, he also hears me preach this 700 hours a month, and he knows he better, you know, and so he loved it, right? But I'll tell you what, he struggled at first too. And what happened was him and my call center kid, Trent, were working the home show the first day, and uh they struggled a little bit. I taught them, we we worked, drilled, and rehearsed, but neither one of them had ever worked a show. Well, my assistant Hannah, who's a call center or call center and events trainer now, she works in my consulting practice, she goes to clients, teaches them how to do this. She walks up to the booth in her plain clothes, two minutes. She writes an appointment, like just walks up to the booth on this day, was going there looking for kitchen companies because her kitchen had flooded, and she walks up, sees Dan and Trent struggling in the booth. They watch her, she executes our process to a T, boom, boom, boom, writes the appointment leaves, they go, Oh, just like that. And then both of them took, I mean, they wrote seven or eight more appointments that night on a Thursday at a home show and they killed it. But what I will tell you is most sales reps, unless they're the owner or they're taking serious leadership seriously, they don't want to do it. And so, but I do, I do agree because when Dan would say, you know, I'm I will be the one coming out, there were certain people that did really like that, or they he'd get there and they'd be like, Oh, it's you from the show.

SPEAKER_04 42:06

And they're like, Yeah, exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:07

Yeah, and so there is some of that. Now, what we do try to do though, Alan, is actually have a prepositioning email. Um, and it's not quite as strong, but um, we can send them an email with the sales rep's picture, a little bio about him, just to give that same warm, fuzzy feeling whether he set the lead or not.

SPEAKER_04 42:21

Yeah, and it's all about that, it's part of that whole buyer's journey that they're the customer journey that they're on. All right, so the second half of the question, and I think you and I agree on this, and you already mentioned it, should you set the appointment right there in the booth or call them back later? Yeah, set them in the booth all day long, set it in the booth.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

Yeah, it's it's stronger, not only because you're going to get more volume of appointments, also just because look, once they commit, right, there's a certain amount of people that once they commit to the appointment, they're gonna go through with it no matter what. And so it if we we have to sort of bank on the fact that they're hopefully gonna answer our call later if we don't set the appointment in the booth with something. And so we may never talk to those people again. This may have been our only shot. So I want to get them on the calendar with a definite set appointment, even if it cancels, it's easier to reset if this is the case, right? So yeah, we always want to do, we want to set the appointments live in the booth. Anytime I work with a company that doesn't, their goal is eventually to set leads live in the booth. So might as well just, you know, rip the band-aid off, go right for the close. Yeah. And then you could send them home with some information to read over before we come out. You send them home with an appointment reminder. You, you know, we've got a couple things we button up with. So, but we don't want to send that home with somebody. If we send it home with somebody, if you give somebody literature, it's a goodbye. So you better be done talking to them because if you give them a brochure, they're gone and you're not getting their phone number. So exactly. Wanna make sure we're using that in the right way.

SPEAKER_04 43:44

Let me tell you a quick story about something I did when I used to before I went was at SNE, I worked for Home Depot in home in home sales over there.

SPEAKER_03 43:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:51

And we used to we were required back then to work the stores. Like we had to get our appointments from the stores. So like maybe one or two appointments from the company. The rest was me walking around Home Depot aisles and asking people for appointments. So one day it was tax season. I th I came up with an urgency idea. So I took one of the big eight and a half eight eight by four foam boards, you know, the big silver foam boards that you can put on a wall. And I put it horizontally and I drew a big calendar on it. And I put like three or four fake appointments on a day. And then people would come up and I'd say, okay, I'm setting appointments for Windows. Here's the calendar. And they'd be like, oh, that Thursday's taken already? Well, let me take Friday. And I created this. I don't have a lot of space for appointments. Uh urgently.

SPEAKER_03 44:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:35

And then I started tacking all these, and all of a sudden I had 30 appointments on the board and maybe like three or four open. And I'd be like, oh, this is the only day I got open. And it was wild because I set so many appointments because of this urgency I created by putting a calendar in front of their face.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that that's that's absolutely true. You know, we we really fail when we lose when we lose control during scheduling, which is what usually people setting appointments don't understand is by telling the customer, oh, we can come out anytime. We have run appointments Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday from 10 to 10 and it's like you just told them you aren't very busy and not in you also gave them 17 time slots and said pick one. We have a hard enough time with them picking one out of two. Yeah, exactly. You know, one out of 17. Now they're like, well, let me go home check my schedule, let me talk to my wife, and you're like, Oh shit.

SPEAKER_04 45:21

Yeah, I'll call you back tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Correct. Yep. But I like how you created the urgency with that because you know, it also boils down to a few of the the psych psychological principles of influence that uh Dr. Robert Cialdini talks about, which is you know, scarcity, people want more of that, which they can have less of, right? So if they see, and people also follow the herd. So social proof is everybody else is doing it in Home Depot, they want to do it too. So it speaks to all those psychological cues that we know are the backbone of sales and marketing. So you just kind of execute it on that in your own way and it paid off.

SPEAKER_04 45:53

Yeah, it was cool. It was fun to do that. So well, we are running out of time, Megan. This has been awesome. Um, so tell people, I know you you do consulting. So if someone listening to this podcast wants to get in touch with you, where do they go?

SPEAKER_01 46:03

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, you can email me at Megan, M-E-G-A-N at TonyHoadie.com, t-o-n-y-h-o-t-y.com. I'm a partner in Tony Hody Consulting. So if you want to uh go to our website as well, fill out a request, that'll come to me directly and my team will be in touch with you within 24 hours to set up a call. Um, we do free 30-minute discovery calls where we'll just sit down and talk about your needs in the call center or special events or canvassing, whatever it might be, and uh assess if we can help. Sometimes we can, sometimes maybe you're coming to us a little early and we tell you, hey, get a couple things in order, and then we'd be happy to help. But either way, we're gonna point you in the right direction of where to go.

SPEAKER_04 46:39

And I got to tell you, folks, I mean, I've been following Megan for years now, and she knows her stuff, as you heard on this podcast, and she's really well respected in the industry. So if you need help with getting leads, she's your first phone call. So, Megan, I want to thank you for being here. This has been awesome. And I want to thank everyone there, out there in the selling in the dwelling world, for joining me on this great episode we just had with Megan Beattie. Remember, our title sponsor is Paradigm Vendo. Check them out at the link in the show notes, but they are also at paradigmvendo.com forward slash dwelling, the best software you're gonna find in the in-home service industry. And also destination motivation is also the sponsor for the Ask Allen segment. That's it for now. Megan, thank you very much for joining me. And we'll talk soon. And thank you, everyone, out there. We'll see you next time on Stelling in the Dwelling. Take care.

unknown 47:27

Stelling in the Dwelling.