Ep 161 - Sales Is an Endurance Race! Objections Are Exhausting

Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to Electricpreneurs Secrets the electricians. You know what I'm making an adjustment here, joe. Can I call a timeout the Premium Electricians podcast? Why did I not think of that before You're on episode 161. We just renamed it Live. That's how you know. There's no fancy shit. A couple of master electricians with business addictions back to help you again, master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium-level electrical service. So if you're looking to bring your A-game, welcome back to the right place. Joseph, how the hell are you man?

I'm feeling actually really, really good today. It is now fall weather. Your boy can see through his eyes I'm living, breathing good air. I'm a happy man.

Me too. I found my stress ball yesterday.

All right, well, there you go, that was huge.

That was huge, and you'll never guess where.

I found it. That sounds like a loaded question, but all right. Where did you find it?

It was actually stuck in my chair, like where the seat meets the cushion, and I'm not sitting in a lazy boy recliner here, I mean an office chair. I was actually really surprised. I went back to itch the back and pulled out a stress ball. It was amazing.

Divine intervention right there. It was like you're stressed Clay here. Take this.

All right, and already getting some good mornings here in the Facebook Electropreneur Secrets Group. If you're not there engaging with us, live. Why the hell not Just kidding? I'm in the van right now. If you're at the gym or in the office, wherever you are hopefully not presenting to a customer with us in one ear, but either way, we're here to serve and continue this value and price objection week and obliterating it. We're trying to obliterate it. This is rare and unique. We did not set up a single episode where it's just like here's the one liner Get out of it, You're good forever. Instead, we're spending the whole week obliterating it. Even if, in your business, you and your staff and your clients all understood your value and price objections were no longer a problem for you. A stumbling point what would happen then, Joe?

I mean, if you're not worried about price objections, that takes a ton of mental and emotional load off of your shoulders. Because one of the biggest problems with objections is that you've gotten the customer to bond with you, you've already learned about them, you've already connected. You should design your solutions, You're ready to go, you put in a ton of energy. Then later, after all the commitments, they're like oh wait, this is more than I thought it was. Can you just email it over? Now you have to dig back in to try to find a way to salvage it. It can be so emotionally overbearing. But if you could just solve it right, then and there would you be stressed why would you?

Proper preparation prevents piss. Poor performance. Proper preparation prevents piss. Poor performance. Proper preparation prevents piss. Poor performance. If you were prepared in this endurance race, which is something I got to speak to, we've got to speak to today Sales is an endurance race. Guess what I'm living proof. Objecting yesterday was exhausting. I became exhausted and Joe beat me. You guys got to hear that live. Was it a perfect role play? Absolutely not. I made it up on the spot, but we got through it and I was exhausted after. That was the point. You said this so wonderfully Sales is an endurance race. What the fuck are you talking about, Joe?

Realistically, you have to imagine not two physical bodies but two emotional entities where you have one person being you and the other being the client. You're both expending emotional energy, not physical energy. If you think about it, the thought of having to ask questions and give rebuttals and provide proofs that takes an emotional load. It takes a mental load to carry it. What we're trying to do is train those emotional and mental reserves so that you can outlast the objections of someone else. If you're imagine, no different than if you were in a fight. If you were fresh and the other person's tired, what are you more likely able to do? You'd be able to overcome the situation. Really, it is an emotional endurance race. We're teaching you how to overcome it this week.

I love how you say that and use the fight metaphor as well. In our training. In the program you actually speak to how important it is to throw the first punch. Correct. What do you mean by that? Utilizing this metaphor now for objection handling?

Sure, by throwing the first punch. It means this If your client has an objection to something like I don't like this, really you're now on defense. You have to then defend the thing that you're trying to say. This is why I'm offering it. But if you had placed certain commitments in the beginning of the call, where the customer had already, on their own volition, said things contrary to what they're saying now, you don't have to come up with a word. You're literally almost judoing the energy, which, technically, is just redirection of energy. I am going to take your exact words, I'm going to reposition them, I'm going to hand them back to you and I'm going to say what has changed between then and now. Now that's all the energy I've had to use. Now you have to give the energy again. So as long as this exchange constantly happens, you're the one getting burnt out, and not me, and we stay on top of the situation. So that's what I mean when we say strike first. It means plant the seed that you're going to be able to come back to. That way, you're not on defense.

I like that. How, bruce Lee of you.

Well, style of no styles right.

Style of no styles. This is the style of a style, the salesbot style, giving it away man Speaking of giving it away, we're giving away a value piece and no one's even gotten it yet. We've been just exhausting these last couple of days talking about it. Haven't even sent it out. So if you've already put your hand up for this on the Facebook page, guys, thank you for your patience. It's still coming. In fact, there's another post today to get more hands up. If you guys don't have this, you don't know about this yet. You ought to know that we're giving away our objection handling level one training from our program, as well as some added nuggets from this week to help you with these three big problems that become foundations to this endurance race your value, offer and belief. Their value and understanding of and belief in your value that's, they as in your staff, and then the articulation of that value. And if you had all three of those and you trained it, what would be in your way then?

That's the thing. If you're training it and you're being about it, that means you're going to be consistent, and if nothing else, consistency is always better than an explosive growth. I would rather be a singles hitter than someone who swings three or four times and then it's a home run.

Yeah, you know what. I want to draw on a bit of a story here, because it's early still in this particular client's journey, but still honorable. Mention. First, full time month 63, I believe $63,000 for one of our guys. Like was part time. We went to our one-to-one meeting just a couple of weeks ago and I said, oh, is this your biggest month? And he was like dude, that's my first full time month. Yeah, it's my biggest month, massive, and I shared this in social for you guys to see. One of the wins in particular, though, was actually a solution after a price objection. It was an objection handle, but the result was sitting at the table and the clients in tears about how they were just had to proceed, like they had to break through and have this trust and realization that someone's actually trying to serve them at the highest level, and when they did, it hit them so hard that they're in tears. Joe, have you ever had this happen to you? Have you put people into tears?

So there was one specific situation that I remember happening where and I'm not sure if I've talked about this before where I was going to work with a client and I remember she wanted some lighting done in one of these rooms in her home and as the conversation led on and we started bonding, I couldn't understand why she wanted the light in this particular room, because it looked like it hadn't been touched in years and she had mentioned that her son, her former son had passed away. Her late son had passed away from an overdose and she likes to keep the light on his room so she feels like he's still there. And when I told her that I would do everything I could to honor her son's legacy and that you know he really was lucky to have a mom like her, because to keep the memory alive to such an extent is really beautiful and heart touching and when I explained that to her, she just stopped and just pretty much wrapped her arms around me and gave me the biggest hug and just sobbed into my shoulder and just said thank you over and over again. And it's one of those moments that I'll never forget because it shows how powerful the process is when you learn to bond and connect. It stops being salesperson to client and you really can break it down to be person to person again. Genuine human connection at the highest level.

Gosh man, I love that, and I know that you had a second shirt in the van so that any of the tears and mascara on your shoulder were able to be resolved for the rest of the day.

You know, to be completely honest, I don't remember if it actually was a situation where I had to change, but you're right, it was practically biblical at that point where I would always have that uniform with me no matter what. Ever since I got caught in the rain and I got burns all over my body from it, I would never, ever go to a call about another van or without another uniform in the van.

You got to have that second van just in case.

Yeah, just in case you know what it is, I got a Sprinter van and then I've got like a little Prius in the back of the Sprinter van so that when I want to drive out it just rolls out.

Yeah, yeah, backup van man, just in case, just in case. Okay, so do you have any tools to help us in this endurance race? To you know, if someone's experiencing this and they're still uncomfortable, say they've got the foundations, the team buy-in, everything's there and they're still, you know, in practice of articulation of these objection handles and kind of redirecting and getting their value across. I imagine people are still uncomfortable in learning this. So what are some techniques you could take to kind of improve that situation for them and help them survive this endurance race?

So let's see what we have on the top of mind. I mean realistically, the first thing that comes to mind is learning how to take proper pauses. Now, what I mean by proper pauses is that we have to understand how the brain works. Now, if someone were to give you an objection, very rarely are you able to instantaneously have a response. I know I don't. Very few people do. There's usually a one to three second buffer time. That happens between question to response. The problem is is that so many of us try to have that response quickly and we feel that not having it shows inadequacy or incapability. That feeling then leads us to then saying, oh, I know what's wrong, I need to prove that I'm capable of this. So we start to flounder. I found and actually have a specific technique that works to buy you those three seconds back. It's one of the reasons why, if you guys notice, I'll always have like if you actually want some demonstration videos, I'll always have a glass of water with me every single time, like there will not be a presentation that I will knowingly get into without a glass of water next to me, ideally, and we can get into this with the customer giving you that glass of water. The reason why is imagine you were to hand me an objection, right? What I would do is I would keep my hand on the glass and if someone were to answer or give me an objection that I felt was beyond something that maybe frazzled me or caught me off guard. You can take one second to lift, two second to drink, put down one second. You bought yourself four seconds. That means you've already had three seconds to mentally reboot, plus one to pivot. I know it may seem like a little bit of an advanced thing as far as how much thought we put into it, yeah, but the simplest way to describe it is if you have water nearby, you can use that to effectively pause as well as to increase the heightened attention that your client is giving you.

I love that Really good tactic. Did you ever try—I'm always the asshole joker Jackass here Did you ever try with a straw and slurp it right to the bottom while maintaining eye contact until it bubbled like a little kid?

I can't say that I did. I mean, that'd be the equivalent of asking if I had a crazy straw and I blew bubbles in my milk. I mean like no, but no, I can't quite say I did that.

All right, A little bit, A little bit. And then there's this concept of redirecting questions I think you mentioned earlier in the week too. Can you tell us a bit more about that tactic and how that fits into this situation?

Okay. So though I remember in the beginning of the conversation we talked about not being on defense and instead having the situations in the beginning that we can pull back from and then use those back at the customer like a redirection. We're doing the exact same thing in almost any question that they give us. It's a defensive posture that we have where, once again talking about the emotional load, your client and you are carrying the same load, and when that client gives you a question, you have to be in defense. But if you can analyze the question and figure out what are they actually saying, you could then ask them to clarify idea or meaning. Usually, that causes them to go off guard and, if nothing else, it forces them to have to re-explain it. Two things happen there, and I'd be happy to give examples of the specific situation. Sure, so the first thing that would end up happening is by you putting it back into their court. You've now redirected that energy back to them, so they're still lifting while you're resting. Then, from there, what will end up happening is the client will then have to do one of two things they either have to re-explain what they're trying to do in usually a deeper context, which takes more emotional and mental load but gives you better clarity of the situation. So if the client is using emotional load and you're not, and you're getting better clarity when they finally finish talking, you're in a better position to formulate a response that's more on point, because you have the real reason they're asking. Can I give an example of what this might look like?

I would love that. Let's do it Okay.

So one really great place that this comes up is when the client you get to the front door and or somewhere in the beginning of the call and the client says hey, joe, just so you know, we're going to be getting three estimates on this. Now that sounds like an objection, right, like it's something that we don't want to hear and it's directly opposed to what we're trying to do. But we don't know why they've asked it. They don't know why they've said it. They just made a statement and it's simply floating out there like this storm cloud that we don't have a grasp on. If we let it sit there, it's going to come back and bite us. So instead, what we can ask is you know, clay, I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know that and thank you for the transparency, but if you don't mind me asking, what were you hoping to accomplish by telling me that? I mean, we've just gotten here. We really haven't got a chance to connect what we're really hoping to communicate.

You want me to jump in and role play?

I mean you can, but really the point of the statement was that if we're shifting back over now, the client has to say well, what am I really trying to say here? I've had this question come up and it usually causes a pause where the client's like well, I don't want you to sell me anything, yeah. Or I don't want to buy it, yeah. Yeah, it's like I don't want you to sell me something, yeah.

I don't even know how to answer that without a well, I guess.

You're right. Now, the thing is is now this client is being exposed to their own emotional concern, where they're like well, why did I even bring that up? I don't know. I just kind of said it. I don't want you selling me something I don't need. Okay, well, have I given you the impression at any point since we've talked, that I would be selling you something you don't need? I?

mean, I've just got here.

What have I given you the impression of that that would be the case. Can we just call a timeout here and go back to the beginning? I mean, I don't want to be on the wrong foot before we even get started. Have I done something to offend you? No, no, no, you're fine, you're great, I just didn't want you, okay. So if I could give you an offer that was fair, that gave you what you're looking for without breaking the budget, what would happen?

Okay, which ultimately I mean that's I mean, this is more of an opportunity call, obviously into those listing who haven't seen the whole process yet that we have on the inside track. For opportunity called that. Was there one of the commitments, mm-hmm, so it just led back to one of the commitments we're looking for anyway. In fact sounded like they kind of set you up for it.

Mm-hmm, and that's the best part about it. So these situations come up and we have to just be identifying why it's happening. If we don't know the why, we can't solve the what. That's the biggest concern of the endurance race. If you can find the real emotional reason, you don't have to keep pulling the way it layers. You'll be like I know really why they're doing it, so I'll know why I can solve it, thus using once again less energy.

Hmm, yeah, I love that if I could sum this up with the, the fighting metaphor. If that's all right, I'll wait till you're done drinking, because sorry be humor. Punch your client before they punch you. Oh my god, make sure to hold a glass of water between punches so that you can drink while you're punching them and ask redirecting questions between punches. Is that the takeaway here?

I mean in that particular light. I'm not quite sure how to handle that particular one because I haven't gotten that objection before, but yes, in theory the goal is is that we're trying to connect with our client in multiple levels and, as long as we can outlast the endurance that they have, we can always end up by 10 the presentations there, that we have the most energy and that all the major things that had bite, like all their objections that really could come up, like my spouse isn't here, I've got someone else that I'm working with your prices too much. We've already had all the plants in advance for that, so instead of having to do it, it's simply just having an extra tool in your arsenal.

Yeah, I love that, man, I do, and I can't even tell you how aligned we are. Once again, undeniable. Spark right here between a couple of sparkies, because in my head earlier I was thinking do I have time to throw a curveball at Joe and bring an opportunity called price objection in? And you did it to yourself, so Hats off to you. Thank you again. We're running out of time, joe. We got to drop a couple of action items and get the HE double hockey sticks out of here. Not a problem, you taking a boat today, this is your arena, you can have them both.

It's okay, happy to feel bad, please. Oh, all right, Thank you, Clay. I'm glad you're in some In that case. So let's start with the bare minimum action. The bare minimum action is I could teach you the skills Theoretically, but you need to understand why they're happening in the first place. Right, the bare, bare, most basic action you can take, it's simply having a list of what objections are currently stumping you. The reason being is it's almost like, once again, if you are in a fight or you're working out, you need to know what techniques you have available. The thought is okay, am I strikes correct? Am I hips incorrect placement? Am I shoulders out of alignment? All these things are important to know. So you can't fix something unless you know what it is that's wrong. So my first suggestion is get a list of all the objections that are throwing you. Now the all star action goes a little bit beyond that. Assuming you now have that list, what I want you to do is create almost a forked line with two to three prongs off of it and list three reasons why you would suspect they would give you that answer. Once you have that suspicion, you then can formulate a question that aligns with that suspicion, such as hey, you know what, Joe? You were the greatest electrician I've met. I loved your presentation. You know, it's just we're 99% going to go with you. But I need to talk to my wife about this. If they were really 99.9% going to go with us, would it really be something that they would talk to their spouse with right now and they couldn't do something about it? The objection would then be no, I'm suspecting that they're actually stalling and pushing me away, but we've built enough of a relationship that they feel awkward doing so and they want to put someone else in between like a straw hat. Okay, great. So now you at least have the plan of attack. So step one get your list of all the objections that are stumping you. Step two get a forked prong with two or three points off of it. That'll say why you think they're giving you that objection. Once you have that, then you can formulate the questions that can bring that up.

Incredible, incredible. And of course, you can get a lot of that advice from the action piece that we're giving out for free. So you've got it hard copy, able to learn from. Teach your team. Would you expect any less? You just keep showing up 161 episodes helping electricians, master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. Joe, thank you again for another great episode and sharing your dear sales bot expertise with all of the electricpreneurs out there. Guys, if you're not taking action on this, my question is why not? I don't want to deal with these exhausting objections anymore, and I'm sure you don't either, so why not make them a walk in the park? Why not let us help you with that? I can't wait to do it again tomorrow to conclude our week. Thanks, and we'll see you again tomorrow. Take care.