Ep 257 - 1M Launch Series 2024 - If You Can Measure It You Can Manage It!

Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to yet another episode, episode 257 of Electricpreneurs Secrets, the Electricians podcast. We are the Electricpreneurs just a couple of master electricians with business addictions, here and ready to serve as we do, five days a week, helping you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. I am Clay Neumeier. This is my esteemed co-host, Joseph Lucani, and welcome to our freemium daily coach call, where the cost for admission for you. Sit back, listen to everything we have to say, take action on this stuff and share your wins back with us so we know that it's working. Joe, how are you doing today, my brother?

Man, I'm feeling great. You know, remember one of those days where you just wake up and you just feel like the sun just happened to sign on you. Yeah, it's a weird moment because as a dad that doesn't often happen. He's waking up to the sound of crying or someone woke up earlier than they needed to. But today I woke up feeling really, really, really good, which is not common. So I'm just going to say it's a great day to have a great day.

Well, I love that man. I'm feeling it too.

Are you a high?

old num. Yeah, great energy, brother. The whole week's shaping up. I love this. We're midweek and we've got a great podcast, and this one actually is all about you can measure it, you can manage it, tie them back into our sales sanity and making sure that we in this million dollar launch are able to consistently keep going towards the finish line. We've been working hard, we've laid out our entire plan, we've shared Dan's story in this one and how that's related closely to exactly what we're doing, the exact steps we're taking, and everything's really coming together. I know we could have spent a ton of time on maintenance agreements, diving much deeper on filling the voids, and there's a ton more to it, but in our discussion, I mean, there's weeks of training around that stuff, so we kind of just got to move on. This is the best we can do in this podcast series and I think we would be making a mistake if we didn't talk about some of the measurement and management principles, some KPI, how to leverage this stuff, how to make that information then turn into data sets and knowledge that we can take action on.

Would that make sense to you? I agree with that completely, because, at the same time, any marksman needs to know the need to find the target before he can fire at it. And there's a lot of times where people can often feel in paralysis, where you want to do the right things, you feel like you want to move your company forward, but you're not able to place your direction and, as a result, you end up just waddling and spinning in nowhere.

Definitely, man, definitely. So there's a few areas we could really go with this, and I think my original idea was even a bit different than what I'm thinking now, because we've got a few positions working for us and I think we have an opportunity to touch on each of them a little bit, and some of the levers we might have. So, even right at the front end, with our CSR, what are some of the ways that we can really kind of measure their performance and make sure that we're able to consistently deliver? And maybe it's even in part the burning basic action from yesterday with making sure we're having 10 potential customer conversations every day. But what are your thoughts around that? Are there some areas that we can kind of leverage and measure with that CSR position?

Yeah, so it depends on what your CSR is technically doing, because sometimes people will have their CSR be the office manager and they combine dispatch with CSR work, but if they're strictly a customer service representative, they're managing phones. Then you would manage the output and the inputs of what they're doing in their position. What I mean by that is we know there's a certain amount of calls coming in. Those calls, we know percentage of them are going to be done. They're calling because I think you have the utility company. They're asking you to fix their lamp. Like, okay, those aren't the right fits, yeah, but let's say 80% are. So all that 80%, how many calls were taken and how many calls were converted?

Love it so call booking rate. That would be the average generation.

Yeah, booking rate would be there Absolutely. Secondly is that during our process, we offer our first class pass. So then your next metric would be are you offering it to every customer? Because even though it's on the script, you'd be surprised it doesn't mean. Well, don't mention it because they are worried that it might make them seem pushy.

But it's not.

It's just a way of qualifying who wants different levels of service. Yeah, so one did you offer to everyone, and the second metric was how many people would take it. That's a smaller metric. Usually you only expect them from 515 percent to take your top options, so maybe as much as 30% take your first-class pass if you for some reason exceed 30%. That's really important information to know, because if too many people take the first-class pass, no one is first-class naming right and, as a result, you could have an influx of customers all at once that are trying to get that same treatment when you're not staffed properly to do so.

I love that you brought up the the overselling it to.

Yeah, well, it's a possibility, you know, because, if you think about it, it's something that appeals to everyone. I want my priority service, I want my after-hour service, the diagnostics wave, like all those things. Every customer would say, yeah, I'd want that. So, provided that their justification is you can get out today. Yeah, here you go. I Got to prevent too many people from taking it. Yeah, so I'm monitoring are we not selling enough of them? Are we selling too many of them?

and we adjust according yeah, love that, love that man really good stuff.

Yes, sir, awesome. Additionally, we want to talk about your outbound happy calls. So it's okay. How many existing customers have you contacted today? You would set a metric for it and say, like you know, you mentioned 10 incoming calls. Yeah, well, what if you set a percentage of how many calls you're going to make outbound Mm-hmm, if you have a thousand customers and you only did one a day, you still couldn't get to every one in a year you'd be there in three years later.

That's to be proactive on that.

Exactly so. If you said that your KPI is I'm going to make three outbound happy calls per day, you could theoretically take care of a thousand customers in one year. Mm-hmm, but provided you did that, it would be a. Did I do my outbounds B? What was the conversion ratio of accepted people who want new work? So if you make a happy call, you're not trying to sell them anything additional, but while you're talking to them, if they mentioned something that could be a value to them, you should be able to be measured and bonus by. Can you get the text foot back in the door?

100%. One of my favorites on our front end even is hey, if they're also doing some of your organic marketing for you. If that person, if your CSR does oppose or engages, causes someone to come in book an appointment with you and realizes the sale, isn't that worth a bit of a home run bonus right there?

I think, it would be because Be radically, that's just free money. Oh, you had a customer who didn't currently buy that you got your foot back into and now they're able to prove over the higher tier sale Because of that person's efforts. Why wouldn't you want to pay them?

Love it, man, love it. So really good expression, getting the wheels turning. Now let's say, just for a moment, we'll just touch on this. Let's say, call booking rate is actually a bit lower than what we're looking for. Maybe they're shooting a dismal 30% for a couple of weeks. What are some of? Just quickly, joe is some of the areas we might look to see what's going on here. How would we leverage our information and begin to make a decision on what to improve?

So the first thing is is that we would one want to monitor the call. So what we like to do is we would use an app called ring central. Granted, any kind of monitoring software you use is totally fine, but the benefit of using a recording software is you can Unobjectively look at it, either with them or without them. The reason why I say you go into recording software first is, let's say I were to come to you, clay and your rcsr, and I say, hey, I'm gonna listen to you, I'm gonna sit right next to you and I'm gonna listen to you, take your calls and I'm gonna be taking notes the entire time. You think that might affect performance, even a little bit?

Absolutely. Even if I'm a clutch player, I'm going to be showing off. To an extent there's a bias here. I'm not gonna miss anything. It's just not a real scenario. It's not going to be the consistent average.

Exactly. So if you were to say, okay, I have, I'm gonna use random numbers. Let's say you had those 10 calls a day. Okay, how many of those calls are you randomly selecting for inspection? So you the manager, or do the customer service manager or the operations manager? Some position that you have Requires you to now go and upkeep your staff, which is okay. Which calls are they succeeding with? Which calls Are they not? Is it a particular type of call? Is it a specific demand scenario? Is it a timeframe issue? What do we need to improve on? Yeah, after you've gone through and said what do we as a company to improve on, Then you can focus on the person themselves, because it I'm not one to throw rocks at a glass house because if they say, hey, the reason it's not going is because we don't have the availability, that doesn't sound like the CSR can suddenly drum up techs at a thin air.

Yeah, so some I could do better. Love it, man. We're gonna leave the CSR there because there's so much more to cover here. Oh yeah, let's now move to the person taking running that play, then the call, the sale, the sales tech in this case. In our million dollar launch, that could be you or I. Now how would we begin to evaluate our performance in that sales process, brother?

I love that you're asking this because we have a pretty. It's like I think you know the answer to this one, but realistically, it's because we have something known as a post-call fact sheet. What that means is that our process has been broken down into bullet points of the major individual levers and we're checking off after the sale or after the interaction, which of these levers did we activate, and what we'll find is that, provided they're consistently filling it out, which should be required in our KBI we then could sit down and have them turn into our service manager with yourself or me or whoever that is. That person can then see, because the system lines approach, we can see where in the call it's falling apart. Is it post-price, is it pre-price? Is that arrival? Is it when we're investigating the competition? Where does the fall apart happen? Once you recognize where the gap is, you can shore up and strengthen the defenses around it. There's a role playing exercises, there can be additional training, there can be scenario breakthroughs. Whatever it is, we need to figure out where the problem is, and without the post-call facts, it's only done off intuition, and intuition is not a good measure.

Yeah, I love that. And for this role there's really kind of two levels right, because that post-call facts is like the zoomed in the process fulfillment, this little check sheet that they can do each time. But then there's also the zoomed out. Is there a need for concern here? Calls ran, calls sold, gives us a conversion rate, right. But also, what type of call was it? That's something that many companies are not tracking In our KPI workbooks we do. Was it a demand call? Was it an opportunity call? Was it an inspection or maintenance call? That's kind of important information. Obviously, having your trip charge built in diagnostic call there's a higher percentage of conversion just based on the lever that is there in saving people time and effort and sacrifice. And all I mean by that is if you're there to fix something and you give options that fix the thing, what are the chances they're going to want to start over from zero and wait for another tech?

You'd have to be pretty significantly either higher than what they expected, but even then it's not always price. Do I trust this person? Do I believe what they're telling me? Do I have faith that this is the right fit to solve the problem? If you can check those three boxes which our process is meant to do, because we established that we're showing up as 10s, because it's been built through our CSR and tech process, then you should be the one who moves far with it 100%. But I'd rather have this person know that we're at least monitoring it, we're at least trying to find gaps for our own improvement, so that we can improve how we serve them.

Of course, whereas if we're running opportunity calls and let's say one of us does actually, maybe we split that up and I'm doing demands and you're doing opportunities the opportunity call is likely to have a lower conversion rate just based on the fact that it's a higher percentage of people collecting multiple estimates because they're not looking to get it done today.

Correct and there's no shame in someone not wanting to do it today. A lot of times, the biggest concern that contractors face is oh, they're just getting estimates. Okay, focus on why they're trying to get estimates. What are you looking to provide from someone else that you haven't already offered? Why do they feel they need to keep looking for other people? What if you could only offer them a solution and feel like you can ethically question them on it? If you can do that and you feel like you're not being pushy, then you're more likely to create the relationship required to succeed on the opportunity call.

Definitely man. So I'm going to zoom us back out and say okay, demand calls ran. Number of demand calls sold. Number of opportunity calls ran. Number of opportunity calls sold. Demand call average ticket. Average options sold. Checking which options were sold. Once you have all this information for each of the type of calls, you can see pretty quickly and a spreadsheet does a wonderful job of representing this data in a single dashboard. And that's what our KPI workbook does to show you exactly where you ought to focus. For example, high conversion, low average ticket and a bunch of basic options. Where would you focus? Maybe we ought to take another look at our six options, our spread between them, make sure that there's consistent gaps, make sure that the stuff we're offering is actually speaking to the observation section and what we're presenting, and that's kind of where that post call fax can tie in and we can hyper focus on some really strong improvements just from having that information. And that's learning. I love this redefinition, If I can just throw this in here for a minute. Hormozzi said this and it really stuck with me Learning is not the text and the information you extract, or the audio that you extract and hold in our minds. Learning is the behavioral difference, given the same situation, which implies we've got to take action right, Like, in other words, knowledge isn't power, the use of it is, so without the activity right. Last thing I wanted to touch on Joe here, if we could. I think there's still a bit of a veil around installer metrics, potentially and since we brought on an installer. how would we begin to measure some of their performance and be able to have some levers there to help them stay in tune and values and get these jobs done in reasonable time and get those payments coming in so we can keep on growing this business?

So there's really two different metrics that you would look at. One is the physical and the second is the relationship. So the physical is relatively straightforward. Did you perform above or below the specified amount of hours that we had allotted for this project? Did you do it above and below the material allotment for this project? That stuff is pretty straightforward, right, okay, you took an extra day. That's a problem. You finished in half a day. Great, all right, wonderful. Physical, I don't think we need to get into too much. The relationship, on the other hand, has a lot that goes into it. So I would say, as a very first metric, how many reviews are you consistently getting at the end of the process? The reason why I stress that is because, if you follow our process, you're supposed to be getting a review after every interaction and, additionally, if you're using the wording the right way, almost every customer is going to say, yeah, of course we're at your review, but when you have it in your hand, available for them, the odds of them not doing it right there is pretty low. So I would want to say, okay, at least 60%. You should be getting reviews on your jobs. If you're getting above 60%, that's great. Let's figure out by how much and what are you doing differently. Maybe we can change the process to incorporate it. If you're getting under 60%, the odds are you're not doing it wrong. The odds are you're just not doing it. That's the first lever. Additionally, I would say what options were upgraded while you were on site. We have an install upgrade process because our salesperson reviewed every option with your installer prior to them leaving the shop. So when they presented the install upgrade, there was a strong reason why the customer could do it. So you'd want to say what kind of reviews did you get? What kind of upgrades did you get? Additionally, they're doing the good neighbor policy. So if they're doing the good neighbor policy, how many reviews did they gather? Verse, how many doors did you knock on? So maybe you finished a half day early and you're knocking on the entire neighborhood. You hit 50 doors. Okay, well, I came from that. We don't know, but I know you did 50 doors. Maybe you only did three and one person answered. That's still huge. So all these metrics focus back on what can you do to strengthen the relationship and the presence in this area?

And that was fire.

Thank you so much I can see you're going that was fire, you know me.

There's some really good stuff in there and I think we made it obvious enough. On the installer, Of course, we always got to mind the time. Here I want to just point out how this now comes full circle back to the office and office manager and the follow up calls and that follow up care. And then if we're not getting the reviews on site, how many are we then getting back on the board from the office, from the CRM? There's so much in this full loop, just like our loop method, and everything we're trying to do again in service loop is that little bit extra for future serviceability. And doesn't that tie right back into yesterday's episode? Filling the voids, caching checks and building a team on a values base. That is so important and so critical to industries everywhere to continue being able to actually have a service experience as a homeowner, have a service experience that actually serves you in your life and your growth and relationships in your community. I mean God, this stuff's important. I agree with you. 100% Basic action. Can I take it by all means, Because I've got some alliteration here? The basic action today is the bottleneck. It's the recognition of the bottleneck. Ask yourself this in this million dollar launch, wherever you're at in your business, if you're following along, where is my bottleneck? Where is it? And it can't be intuition that shows you where the bottleneck is. You can't just close your eyes and meditate on it and go. I know where it is. It's here. What data do you have that's telling you where the bottleneck is? And you might actually see several. But notice the order we went in today. If your call booking rates at dismal 21%, does it make sense to go to the sales guy and crank some training up, or does it make sense to go back to where the call comes in or where the call is made and start training and refining that process and finding the lever you need to move the bottleneck to the next place? Find your bottleneck. That's the basic brother. Do you have an all star for us?

You know I don't top of mind, but I'm very certain that we can work through it. Because when we're talking about trying to come up with moving the bottleneck, my next thing is going into are you trained enough to teach someone else something? What I mean by that is you're the service manager, you're the operations manager, you're the person who's overseeing this. So you're listening to how the CSR was taking their calls, but how could you do it if you yourself didn't know how to do their job? It wouldn't be a fair person. You'd be holding and comparing by script notes, and that's not gonna work. So the all star action is before you feel comfortable training someone, you should at the very least understand what their job requires and what the right way is supposed to sound like. That way, you'll have a sharper ear to notice where the gaps are and you'll also be someone who's approaching as a peer rather than just the supervisor.

I love it, man. I think that ability to demonstrate that is huge in leadership, right, you can't push a string across the table and expect it to stay in a straight line, but you sure can pull one. That's gonna tie us perfectly into the next episode, which I think is due to go into some training, training schedules how we're gonna train, what we're gonna do in that, joe. But this has been another episode, a fantastic episode of Electric Purnier Secrets. I would really advise you go back again and listen to the Electricians podcast today, because this one was huge on our mission to help you guys master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level electrical service in this million dollar launch. We'll see you again tomorrow.

Look forward to seeing you guys. Be well.