Ep 2 - How Educating Customers Too Soon Is Killing Your Sales Potential

Transcript

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Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Million Dollar Electrician podcast where we help home service pros like you supercharge your business and spark up those sales.

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I'm Joseph Lucani and, together with my co-host, Clay Neumeier, we're here to share the secrets that have helped electricians sell over a million dollars from a single service van.

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Now it's time for sales, it's time for scale, it's time to become a million dollar electrician.

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Welcome back Season two, episode two of Million Dollar Electrician.

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We've got a great episode today.

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We're going to help you sell more permanent solutions instead of band-aids by letting you know this one service process mistake that's keeping you at bottom dollar sales and how to fix it.

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Joe, what the he double canadian hockey sticks are we talking about here today, brother?

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oh man.

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So this is an issue that so many people do, and they actually do it, thinking that they're trying to seem smarter or to try and educate the customer, but it actually shoots them in the foot.

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Have you ever been in a situation where you're at the panel and the customer turns behind you and says how's it looking?

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Not a fun place?

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Right, yeah, because you're stuck in one of two choices.

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You're stuck in either the I educate them now and I risk creating a presentation, or I hold off on the information and risk seeming incompetent to them.

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I've seen another variety of this as well, where people kind of spice this in here on purpose and I don't necessarily agree.

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But you know how some electricians open the panel and then they make a face or present some body language that communicates what Safety concerns right.

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Yeah, now the customer is hyper-focused on it.

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What do you think about?

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that that actually can be very helpful at tactical times, right?

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So I've actually heard it almost described as like diagnosing, like you're in a medical profession, right?

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They don't go and say, oh that, right there, yep, write that down.

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It's more likely.

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Hmm, okay, we'll take note of that and they write it down.

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That's a more professional way of handling it.

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Yes, but you do that to do a specific response from your customer.

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If your customer is standing behind you and you go, huh, all right, you can expect that they're going to want to say well, what do you see?

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So you would never want to make that reference unless you already have a response planned.

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And here's why Because this is how doing it that way could lead to the real nuclear explosion.

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All right, let's hear it.

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What will end up happening is let's go through the scenarios.

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Let's say this customer now asks what do you see?

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Well, you know it's too soon to say well, okay, that's one thing, but the most of us electricians are doing something worse, where we're going to go to the customer and we're going to say oh well, right now we're seeing it looks like there's some.

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Uh, one of these breakers has been properly seated.

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I can see right here.

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The wiring to it is loose.

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You can tell there's burn marks on it.

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Oh well, okay, that doesn't sound good.

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Yeah, no, it's not.

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What do you think it's going to cost to fix?

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Oh well, you know, we'll have to talk about that later.

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Oh well, can you give me a ballpark?

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Well, there's not really a ballpark.

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We're going to have to figure it out as we go.

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Well, don't you do these a lot.

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You see how that backs you into a corner of now having to come up with a ballpark and realizing that that ballpark may not actually fit their need, because either you're going to guess too low and, as a result, when it's time for their real price, they're going to be pissed, or you're going to guess too high or accurately, and now they're going to gauge everything you do by the hourly rate of how long they think it's going to take you to do it.

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So you thought you were spicing up the call by creating interest and desire, but by doing it wrong, you've actually created the scenario where the customer thinks you're incompetent, or they don't think you know what you're talking about, or, even worse, they think you're trying to sell them something.

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And I see this, we see this a lot with clients that come in, they come to class and they actually say, well, I had trouble coming up with options or they'll say actually no.

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I came up with six options, but I only presented one or two, and it's because of this process of elimination that's happening along the way and they're ending up at these tickets that just aren't impressive.

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And yet they're impressive salespeople that are building great rapport and doing what seems to be many things right.

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There's a specific problem here.

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The problem is that by educating the client too much at the wrong times, it's taking actually away from your value.

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And let me touch a little bit more what that means.

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Right, sometimes the electrician involves the homeowner as if they're the one who's going to be doing the work, like, hey, I know that there's a couple of ways we can get this done.

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I know you were asking this panel to be changed, but you know we should also upgrade the service because it's really undersized.

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No, no, no, I don't want to hear anything about that.

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I'm just looking to have this breaker changed.

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Okay, so now what do you do?

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You've made the suggestion that you, the electrician, justify and say this is the right thing to do, but the customer, specifically, is now telling you I do not want that, I only want this.

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Don't quote me for it.

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What do you do?

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Do you now quote the customer against their wishes and try to push them to do it?

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Do you avoid it and now miss a major safety issue that could have been prevented?

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You're in an absolute lose-lose.

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You're backed into a corner, as you said.

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And here's the thing.

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The customer's not wrong, but they also are presenting a bias, and that bias is actually something from our value equation, which is they're worried about time, delay, and they're worried about effort and sacrifice when they're making that decision, and you and your solutions later could actually be handling those things to create a valuable solution.

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But now that they've said no, disclude that.

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What are you to do?

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I'm back with you, man.

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Big question mark here what would you do, joe?

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So, believe it or not, the solution isn't to sell less, it's actually to sell more.

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And here's why you need to manage customer expectation in your presentation, not prior to your presentation.

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So imagine this the customer may say I don't want to run any new wiring, I want to keep the existing cloth.

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And we, as electricians, are like add your mind, this is 1940s, 1930 wiring.

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We're not keeping it, but we're hamstrung because we educated the customer.

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But the reason they're trying to keep it isn't because they want the old cloth wiring.

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It's because they think that in order to do it you have to open walls and they don't want to spackle and paint.

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So they decline the opportunity, not because they don't want it, but because they see all the extra labor that's going to have to be involved.

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But you could have solved this problem by when you started doing your presentation.

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You would have presented it as yes, this is a problem, but just so you're aware, we've created options where we do literally everything and you do nothing but write the check all the way down to the most bare minimum, where you're putting on a hard hat and stra it's powerful stuff, man.

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And for anyone questioning the integrity of this because I've heard that in circles too right, well, I don't want to withhold information.

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You're not.

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You're not intending to leave this situation with a customer that is not educated enough to make a sound investment in what they feel is necessary for their home, family and safety.

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That's not the intent, and if it were, I agree with you major integrity compromise there.

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That's a conflict.

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That's not the point here.

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The point is to present solutions in a way that actually serve your customer and the biases that they're prematurely holding because they don't understand the level of service that you provide.

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Yet and the proof is in the pudding you can see the difference in the number of sales, and the number of sales and the number of quality reviews that come as a result of those much greater, bigger sales, at a result of the much greater, bigger service really is a huge difference.

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And if you're making this mistake, I'm betting that you're not going to get to a million dollar banjo, but maybe we're a bit biased on this one.

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Yeah, it's possible.

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But at the same time, the reason why we'd hold those biases is because everything we teach comes from things we've actually done in the van over years of trial and testing this process that we now teach.

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I've been in those moments where I've educated the customer and, as a result, ended up with bottom ticket sales.

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And I've also done it where we presented properly structured options at the right time in front of the right people at the right place, and I'll take that option every single choice, every single time I can, because I've seen the results, absolutely.

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Do you mind walking through just a little bit of what this looks like for you?

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Then, when you're doing that professional kind of a little aha moment, just oh, okay, make a note and they ask what do you say then?

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sure.

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So let's say I'll get, I'll get into character.

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At the moment I'm opening the panel, I take it off, I open and go okay, let's take a look and see we find oh okay, well, we'll come back to that later what do you see?

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oh, what I'm doing is I'm doing a total inspection of the system and I'm notating anything that's questionable.

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It's still too early to say, because we look at the total system as a whole, but we will be making sure that we're going to circle back to this to avoid giving you too much information now and thus risking anything.

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I'm going to make sure that we don't hold any information until we know exactly what we're talking about.

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So, with that being said, I'll be covering that in a little bit.

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Sounds fair, man, and that's a wrap for today's episode of the Million Dollar Electrician.

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Podcast.

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We hope you're buzzing with new ideas that charged up to take your business to the next level.

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So don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share the show with fellow electricians.

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Together, we'll keep the current flowing.

Ep 2 - How Educating Customers Too Soon Is Killing Your Sales Potential

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