Ep 174 - Please Don't Spray & Pray

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of Electric Preneur Secrets, the Electricians podcast. Joe, I had to laugh when I said hello three times, just because I've gotten away from it a little bit. It's when people come on to these calls with us I keep asking hey, do you know what I say? on every episode, and they go hello, hello hello I moved away from it, but yesterday, on the call, justin McKim was with us live in the Facebook feed. Guys, if you didn't know, we're live on Facebook with these podcasts before they ever get to the service that you're listening to right now. So if you're live with us, please say hello, hello, hello back. I'd love to have you on this fantabulous Tuesday which is, by the way, an entirely new term made up on the inside in our client group. I want to have our good friends and dear allies good term for it. Who says he's fantabulous about every day of the week? Speaking of every day of the week. Joe, we're back again to help you. Help you, electricians, master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level service. Not my smoothest intro, but it'll do. Brother, how are you doing today?

I actually got a bit of a fun story for us today, and this goes out to anyone who has ever had kids. So I'm sitting down on my desk, I'm chipping away, I'm loving what I'm doing and I've got this weird thing in my pocket. I'm like what do I? Got here Something like you know, reach in and it's a tiny little pebble. And I'm like what, why the hell do I have a tiny little pebble here? And I remember that last night my daughter handed me a rock that she just found and said here, dad, this is my favorite rock and I want you to have it because I love you. And now I've got this little rock that is just going to sit on my desk forever because of the meaning behind it.

Okay, well, a, that's lovely. What a sweetheart. Thank you for sharing that little pebble. Also, I might have to start calling you Fred Flintstone.

I mean, I could have a dabbado.

Yeah, but I forgot about that. I used to know a pickup line with the Fred Flintstone thing. That would be an unusual one.

I got it and, first of all, actually did it actually work, or was it?

No, it's one of the awful ones that the guys laugh at. But it's not. It's not good. No, I think it went something to the effect of I'm no Fred Flintstone, but I could make your bedrock.

Oh, that's bad.

right, that's bad, not tasteful, so sorry to share that with you guys. If I could ever take back a moment on the podcast, this might be it. I'm embarrassed by that joke, but now you know it. Don't share it. Please just end it. End the suffering. Oh man, we got a cool show again today, as we're going a bit deeper. Of course the title says a bit of it. Please don't spray and pray. Mandy's laughing. That gets me going. If Mandy laughs, it's good, right, we got approval.

Mandy, we got our approval.

We're good, Awesome man, I'm reminded of the spray and pray this morning, as I receive about I don't know half a dozen emails and there are people that will just message you and I smile, joe. I smile when I get these, when they reach out and they're like hey, by the way. I was just like hey, by the way, I was on your website. I think we could really improve. X, y, Z, hey, reach out to me and let's get started. You ever get that.

I do. In fact, that actually just happened today. I was going through my messages and someone messaged me saying hey, it's that time of year, it's time for us to tune up your AC. And I'm sitting there and I looked it up and the guy is nowhere near my state, even inside the side of my country. Like, did you just auto message everyone in your messenger that it's time for a $50 heating tune up?

Spray and pray, that's a killer Spray, and pray man, that's what it is. You know what One of my early mentors he used to do like the teleconferences, and when FACC similes came out they would send like a hundred thousand FACCs and play kind of a 1% game and that's sort of that spray and pray tactic, isn't it Like, let's just be bold, let's just send it out and let's just catch a few. We're just going to cast a net here.

That's the same concept that people who say like and this might hurt some of you that are listening, so forgive me, I'm just going to email it out, because you never know he could take it. You know that there are people out there that are like, yeah well, you know what, I don't have a good feeling about this, but I mean I already put the time into it. I'll send them an email. What's the worst is going to happen right, yeah, yeah, that's fair man.

In fact, if you've got so many leads and so much demand that you can just send an email email out for every quote that you do, I'm actually a bit envious, I'm jealous of that situation, because you know what, if you've got so much demand that you can email it out, convert 40% to 50% and just work on that, fill the schedule with that, that's actually a point of pride.

Maybe I might say here yeah, I mean you may not have the same control over who gets the jobs, because the kind of people who spray and pray are usually motivated by their circuit factors. Like if you say what would entice someone who does not know me to say you know what, I will give this person money and give them the job. Compared to the other people, it's usually either you've drastically oversold your services In other words, like I'm telling you things that I'm probably not going to do or may not likely be able to do but it's man, it sounds good or the prices to a point where you're like I'll make you an offer you can't refuse. Whatever those circumstances attract long-term, lifetime value customers. It should be built on trust, honor and respect. I believe that you're the best at what you do. I've seen you perform at a high level in my home. I've seen you perform at a high level in my neighbors and other people on you post reviews on. I am willing to bet on you because I believe that you're a safe bet and I want that better level of experience. That's why they're shooting in one direction and let them shoot, even with a fire hose, because we're going in the complete opposite direction of that.

Yeah, you know what I like about really the way that we go about this and bringing that premium service through is the element of control. I'm always cautious when I say that because in this world we're always overly conscious and aware of control freaks and people. You can't control everything, but I do want to be able to influence it. There's a few things I want to be able to take away from a sale or a sales position that allow me to better understand that position. I feel like if I email it over, if I'm just spraying and praying, then what I'm owed back is nothing. Crickets. I'm owed a blank space with no explanation.

Mark on red.

If you go and put the effort in and actually work on building a relationship and follow a process that actually extrapolates that information constantly aiming to qualify further and further into the process and make sure we're still the right fit also earns us the right to know if we're the right fit or not and why that stuff's important isn't it.

I agree. It's one of the reasons why I love the good neighbor policy so much, because theoretically let's just put creating two different scenarios. I want to explain the difference of what we're actually trying to communicate here. I could take a mailer and I could put it inside your mailbox with everything that I was going to say verbatim written there. Put it in close the box, walk away. The percentage is very, very low. They might not even open it, like I know. When I get junk mail, doesn't matter who it is. If I wasn't expecting it, it's right in the recycling, yeah. But if someone knocked on my door and said, hey, I didn't mean to take too much of your time, but I was really just working at clays across street you know the Red House across the block and I checked with him and he said I thought it was a good idea for me to check with the neighbors and let them know that we're his electrician and then if you need an electrician, then we're here to serve. I'm not trying to push you to do anything you don't wanna do, but here's a card. If you ever feel like you need services, I'd love to be your guy. Which one of them is gonna be more memorable?

Well, the latter, the latter, clearly I mean volume down. The spray and pray can work because you're getting more quantity, but it's also, I think it's worth saying, that just sending EDDM doesn't necessarily have that same appeal. It's not necessarily this spray and pray that we're talking about in the essence of like I'm gonna send out 100,000 and hope for 1,000 sales out of it. It can also work in the fact of like this is a drip campaign and if we see the three-dimensional aspect of it, this is me rising awareness again and targeting a specific pain point, and I just wanna be very clear that that's not necessarily something that we're saying is bad. But I have to agree with you going and running the good neighbor play and actually working on the relationship gives us a lot more information. And well, most of us honestly most electricians don't have a place to put that information. We just put it in our head and kind of create a memory around it and then that memory is lost here shortly thereafter. But if we actually take that information and put it into data sets, then all of a sudden there's so much more that we get from it the trends and the understanding of why and that?

why is so important? I couldn't agree more. It's one of the reasons why whenever we did EDDMs, it was always targeted to certain neighbors that didn't have. You know, they had power outages. Utility company said these are the blocks where people lost power most. And then, immediately after, we were getting note cards from us saying, hey, either it was door hangers or EDDMs. It wasn't in the attempt of that thing was going to get the sale, but it was hey. When I have an issue, I'm calling Patriot.

Absolutely. And that, I think, is really the defining moment. Here that sort of shines through, is recognizing that there's no single moment in marketing that causes a sale anyway. So spray and pray is actually really quite antiquated as a model of just oh, we can just blast this once and get sales, sure, you might get the 1%, but how deep are those relationships? Will that client buy more? Will they trust you to do and serve at a premium level? And that's the stuff that comes into question. And I think, to properly transition this to our topic of the week, really we're talking about hiring, but unfortunately I feel like too many premium service providers or residential service providers that actually rely on customer service more than they know are hiring like construction companies.

Yeah, and such a shame because it's like we have this impression that we need bodies on our team. But those bodies need to be. We can't just hire a apprentice anymore because we don't have the time to train them, quote, unquote. So I was like I'm going to get journeymen. Well, I can't find any journeymen. Well, there's guys who are laid off construction projects. They're journeymen. Great, bring them in. And then you wonder why they're not converting. Is because they had no background in customer service. You were allowed to throw a wrench at your fellow coworker. You're not allowed to do that in a residential home. It just doesn't quite work. So, yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks, but wouldn't it be better to make sure that you're looking for the right person, even if it takes a little longer?

Definitely and what is the right person? Do you even know right? Do you actually have a list articulated that you made, not AI? We didn't go to chat GPT and ask the world what it thinks we should have, or you've actually got your value, your requirements of whatever position you're hiring next down on a page that you can reference in an interview, that you can utilize throughout the process to qualify your most important sale, as we said yesterday. And that's where this becomes really interesting, I think, and to say the least, I mean, let me ask the question to our listeners or people that could engage with us right now when was the last time you saw a residential service electrician hiring guide? When was it? Did you have one, joe?

No, no, we had to make one and it literally, once again, was cannibalized from. Well, this works for a plumbing company. We're going to try that and modify it. This works for a landscaping company. This works for an HVAC company. That worked for a roofer. Let's cobble it together and see if we can make work for electricians 100% and we're having that same realization right now about the sales too.

Right, and that's what we've been able to bring to this industry is the recognition. Finally, people just understand like, oh yeah, we aren't plumbers, oh yeah, we aren't HVAC techs. Some of the clients we have on the inner circle literally the club memberships they have in their companies are built around the HVAC. So when the electrician comes to the door, homeowners are literally pissed off like why did you send an electrician here? That wasn't part of the agreement. Every step of the way we see a devaluation of electricians in the home service industry and tell this movement.

And then it shouldn't happen.

It should not happen.

I know it's absolutely wild.

You've been in classes teaching plumbers, hvac and electricians, right? What happens when the electrician asks the question?

I mean when the electrician asked the question and I was in a position where I was training HVAC and plumbing, it was rough because I would finally get that moment where I'd be like, yes, I can help this person. But the problem was is that I had to code it in the language that I was taught to speak and I'm like this doesn't apply to you, it's not going to. It has to be through your filter to work. And they often felt like the redheaded stepchild of the trade.

And in many cases maybe I'm wrong. Didn't plumbers and HVAC guys actually log out of those meetings when the electrician talks started happening?

A lot of times it would. They really would. Can you blame them? No, they really can't, because the thing is is that you would have these circumstances where, if an electrician comes in and we start talking about like anything that we find interesting like how can I learn more about surge protection, plumber's not going to offer a surge protection I don't blame them. I'm not shitting on that trade, I'm not. But at the same time, the things we need to offer generators, tesla systems, home automation, backup, smart controls, levitons, like all these things that we do that are specialized to us we need to have sales training that directly correlates to speaking its value. You can sell air quality all day. Like you want to talk about IEQs, no problem, I'm your guy. But if you want to go through it and figure out how that translates to, maybe, instead of doing home air quality, you're air sealing every recessed fixture and every sealing fan. Wouldn't that be more relevant?

Totally, totally, man. That's the thing. It's not slamming anyone or saying that anyone's more important than anyone else. It's just the recognition here that we're calling attention to that our process does deserve to be different, and just using what someone else used in a different trade isn't necessarily going to apply here as a solution to this. I mean you in your business residential service you did have to create your own processes you alluded to, but we're some of the key areas that you found to make sure that your candidates were qualified to work for you.

So actually this is kind of fun. So what we would do is we had certain questions and I don't want to say trick questions, but we had certain questions in there that would reveal their own personality before they even realized they were revealing it. Can I give some examples?

Yeah, give us some examples, and then, of course, our time will watch that. We've got just a few minutes here. Still some actions to go, but tomorrow I'm really looking forward into deep diving into this even further Is that some of your job.

Yeah, that's totally fair. Yeah, so I'll just touch on one example and then we'll move on with it. So, realistically, there was a fun example where people would always be worried about how do I get this guy tonight Not side job, no side jobbing, no side jobbing, no side jobbing? Well, you would ask the question do you side job? And everyone always says no. So instead we did the inverse of it and it would say things like hey, I know that there's a lot of different customers with a lot of different needs, and we might have done a job with a customer. We'd redevice their whole home. And then this customer comes to you and says listen, I just spent a ton of money on this, you guys did great work, but I'm just looking for a ceiling fan to me and still have it. It's in the box, it's already here. Can you come, because I already know you and I trust you, can you take care of this on the weekend? And the question we would ask is what do you feel would be a fair price to charge this person? And if they said anything other than well, I would refer them to the company or I wouldn't do side jobs. You knew that in their mind, in the right circumstance, they would side job.

Definitely, and you know what. That's a really important statement because in many cases we've seen this, especially in service work, where your rates have to be higher, right, because of that 50% efficiency. So we see contractors all between three and $600 an hour, I say everywhere in between. So are your guys going out there representing you with whole belief, whole, some belief, carrying your values forward to those clients in recognition that that's what it really does need to cost, or are they actually carrying a bit of guilt with them to that client who then pleads for a lower price, and they're pivoting in after hours, giving in on the side, without you knowing?

It's one of the reasons why I hated price books so much and why I never use them in my own business. Because if you've ever been in a circumstance where you open that book and you see the number and you're like there's no way this number is accurate for what I'm trying to do, let me call the boss. No, that's actually the number. This is what we're charging them. I'm going to be here for 20 minutes, all right? Hey, mr Customer, this is what I have to charge. It feels terrible. It feels terrible, but at the same time, your team needs to believe in it, and that's why our method for coming up with pricing was so effective. Because, you could see it, you had to understand the technical, but if you were a technician, that was already done. You were the one doing the work anyway, so you could leverage your technical knowledge to actually serve the client in a way that you felt was integrous 100% man, really valuable stuff.

I know we got away from our main topic here, but, guys, let me sum it up for you full circle Please do not spray and pray, even in your hiring. We need to have deeper relationships. We need to have deeper layers of qualification. You need to have a deeper connection on this greatest sale that you need to make and that is building a team full of the right people in the right seats so that they can become your apex players. We're going to go much more deeper and more tactical into a lot of the stuff that can help you with that tomorrow and even try to get a value piece out to you guys. What do we got for a couple of action items today, joe, anything come to mind.

Yes, I got a couple to come to mind. Okay, the basic is I'm going to make an expression that I hope doesn't insult anyone, but it's the thought of emails or where presentations go to die. What I mean by that is you can spray and pray, you can right, and you send a thousand messages out. You may get 1% back. You get 10%. You're amazing, you get 1% back. That's just enough enticement for you to say, oh, all that effort was worthwhile. Instead, imagine taking it to an average and saying I took this much time to follow up with this many customers. I met with them, I bonded with them, I designed options, I designed all these things. Is this the amount of effort I'm willing to go to make sure this deal is done or not? Is it not even justifying a phone call, because email is easy to send and easy to ignore, but a phone call or even a visit that holds a ton of weight and communicates a lot more of? I want to serve you and just want to make sure I give you everything you paid for. Hey, just checking in. Here's your quote that you didn't receive. Let me know when you want to move forward. Talk to you later. Bye 100%.

I'll follow that up with an all star and actually take it to just a slight tangent off of that. Actually Go for it when it comes to hiring and someone you believe in. I believe in a multi-interview process for that very reason.

Yep.

Every time I've had to go through multiple interviews, I have immediately felt that this was a more professional establishment and that they take this much more seriously than the spray and pray method of hiring, even where we're just trying to get resumes, make short and sweet interviews and just get them in to trial run them with very little connection, very little relationship and very little investment. I think it's one of the most transparent things that we all recognize as consumers, as staff at some points in our lives and as employers. It's actually really easy to see who's taking shortcuts, who's just putting just enough effort in to get that communication out there and who's actually taking time with communications to make sure that they're not just sent but they're received as per the intention of that communication. Does that make sense, joe? That does a lot.

That does a lot and I'd love to go into when we get more chances, we go into how we like to hire, the different interview processes, the locations of everything, the questions to ask. But I think that you hit it really on the head Clay. I can't top that. All right.

Well, let's dive deeper tomorrow, guys, thank you for joining us on another episode, episode 174 of Electric Perniers Secrets, the Electricians podcast, and thank you, guys for contributing on the Facebook page there to a little bit of rebranding questions. We're looking forward to launching that out for you guys too, and very excited to see you guys again tomorrow for Action Wednesday, as we help you again master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium-level electrical service. Cheers to your success.

Wishing you all the best.