Ep 258 - 1M Launch Series 2024 - Staff Training for Success

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to yet another episode of Electricpreneurs Secrets. I'm your host, clay Neumeier, with me, as always, my esteemed co-host, joseph Lucchani, and we are the Electricpreneurs Just a couple of master electricians with business addictions, here and ready to serve With what With our freemium daily coach call. The cost to you is actually, like we just said, free. I just need you to sit back in the hot seat, take everything we give, just promise to take action, because there's some useful stuff coming up, including the continuation in our last couple episodes of this million dollar launch series where we've been building this B-stop and if you've been following along, then maybe you're prime to make a million in your first year or maybe it's your second year and you're going to reprim it. I'm not sure how are you doing today, Joe?

Man, I'm feeling so fired up to get into this topic, which is interesting, because I'm equally so physically tired, you know if anyone who's got kids knows what it's like. Sickness comes easy, tired comes, or sleep does not come easy. But regardless, I am just so primed and ready to tackle this today. What are you, brother? How are you feeling?

Yeah, fantastic. You know what? I'm pretty fired up from our last episode, still really talking about identifying the bottlenecks. As you know, I get a little bit horny around the data. I love that stuff. He's not the right word. Just don't drop the H word on the podcast, It'll make Joe crack up. The data gets me going, man. It really lights my fire. I love, I love what data can tell us that story. And so the next thing is you know what do we do with the data? How do we train to what the data tells us? How do we then use it as leverage? And we began to cover it a bit. But I really wanted to get into that big T word, the training word, because I feel like too many people too often just kind of rest on their laurels with this stuff and it really is something where practice makes perfect. Right, there's so many areas we're going to touch on this today, but right off the bat I mean yesterday we talked about bottlenecks, maybe being at the front with your call booking rate and that could be something you'd recognize. So in your experience, Joe, and for this million dollar launch, what's a way that we could even train on our front end to help them improve, which seems to be good timing as we're launching some CSR classes on the inside track here in the coming weeks.

So the benefit of the CSR is that we have to acknowledge that they're the front and they are the first point of contact, and a lot of times it's not what they're saying, it's how they're saying it. So the best things to do when you want to talk about training your CSRs is one do you have a recording software? Because if you have a recording software, then you can actually listen to real calls and actually review them with your CSR staff. So something that's always fun to do is say, all right, we're going to randomly select a call you had 40 calls that came in this week we're going to randomly pick one of them, or you can pick one that you feel specifically requires attention and then we're going to review what went well, what didn't get well and how we can correct it. The reason why I like this as well is because no one likes listening to dad, and what I mean by that is is, if I were to sit down, let's say I have a CSR and I want to monitor them, like I'm imagine I say, hey, clay, I'm gonna sit next to you and I'm going to watch you with a clipboard and take notes while you're answering your call. What are the odds, you're going to give me your top tier performance.

Yeah, yeah, we talked a bit about that last time, right, and it's definitely going to, definitely going to change the way that I act, for the better or for the worse, depending on my comfort level with you beside me.

Yeah. So the thing is is now that we know what we're going to be monitoring. Now let's talk about how we're going to train it. What I would recommend for maintaining your CSR is a minimum of once a week Minimum. I say minimum once a week because how you practice is how you play the game, and if they have four days just running it and one day refining it, it could create some gaps. I would rather ensure that they have the process down first and do either one at the beginning of the week so your Monday is primed and then one at the end of the week or midweek to ensure we haven't lost any steam.

I love that man. That's really good stuff, and something we were talking about earlier in the class that I think is so important to bring up here is again just really highlighting how important this is to have someone on your front end, that first point of contact. I mean, how important is it that they set you up and your tech up to show up as a 10, as you said earlier for that call and if we didn't train. Would we be really risking that?

Yeah. So the thing is is that if you're listening to this podcast, it's likely that you charge more than your competition because you're trying to provide something better than your competition is offering. But your customer doesn't necessarily know the difference yet. They just know you're an electrician and they're a living electrician and we don't want them trying to figure out the difference only when it comes down to price. So what we need to do is establish those differences from the moment they start working with us. So what that might sound like is we're going to connect with them and we are going to ensure that everything that they talk about sets that technician up to be the best impression possible. First impressions are the most important, but additionally, let's say, for some reason you didn't give a great experience over the phone that tech may show up as an eight. It's so much harder to go from an eight to a 10. Oh sorry, it's harder to go from an eight to a nine than it is for a 10 to go to a seven, right? So it's better to make sure that they're as high as they could possibly be on their scoring. That way, the tech has a stronger chance of converting this call.

Yeah, I love that way of looking at it too. And so when you talk about training at least once, maybe even twice a week with this person, what would you say is like the great timing of those trainings and even duration? Does it need to be hours of a day? Is it something you would pose on a Monday morning, fresh in the week, and a Friday afternoon? Or what would you do Help us set up for this million dollar launch to make the most of this?

Monday morning and Friday afternoon is a dangerous combination, right, but I actually do like the Monday morning training. I like to explain why. So, as a CSR, your phones start ringing the moment you're available in office. That's just what it's going to be like, no matter what you have to do. You've got that morning times on the side, and if you were punching in at Monday let's say, seven, 30 to fire up at eight you only got 30 minutes to prep yourself, not a whole lot of time for training. I personally believe that Monday should be a day of training, whether you're morning or afternoon person, specifically because how you train on Monday will set you up for the rest of the week. You're setting your flow and saying I'm going to intentionally do these things and I'm going to be improving it throughout these next few days. So what I've seen effective is either Monday morning or Monday take an extended lunch. This is particularly helpful if you have an additional person covering you. Maybe that means that while your team is training, you have to step in as the owner. I understand. Or whether you're going to hire a secondary person and they're rotating longer lunches, but I would say regardless, monday is the first and most important day, because that's the day that your week starts.

I love that man and something I want to throw into this because it's not just about the front end there's a whole team to address here that we're building and on the next step so we're going to go further into that really the multipliers of that growing the team and managing those staff journeys, as we call it. But in this I also want to have like a daily quick huddle. I want to have something where I'm like setting the sales. Just it's like an energy clearance. You know what I mean, because everyone comes into the building metaphorically, of course, if you don't actually have the office yet. But everyone comes into this with their own baggage, their own energies, their own impressions, and I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole here. But let me ask you a question that's kind of off left field a bit. Sure, go for it. Have you ever seen how, or do you understand how, a vinyl record is produced and able to make sound?

Interesting question. I don't necessarily know how it works in a practical example, though I do understand how it works in a theoretical. So I couldn't tell you how it's constructed, but I could tell you how it works based on the sound and audio transfers.

It's an analog sound, right, and the whole way around this thing, they're basically carving, using a vibration, into that record all the way around. And so then the needle after in playback is actually just feeling the vibrations from either side of that little carving to create a left and a right channel of audio. And it's absolutely mind blowing, and kids actually these days even are still mind blowing. If you turn the speakers off and just listen, you can hear the sound coming from the needle on its own. The reason I bring that up is because we're kind of the same. We're kind of like a vinyl record In our whole life. We're getting these vibrations, these energies, these impressions on us and then what we do is we kind of play them back throughout the day. And that could be recent on the last ring that was recorded, or it could be from 30 years ago, but we're constantly in between impression and playback and managing that, if you really think about that energy. So wouldn't it be right of us inversely here I'm not going with it would it be wrong? Wouldn't it be right of us to start each day with actually setting intention into the impression for the day, setting the sale, trying to cleanse everyone of the feelings they may have and just have a great day.

I like that a lot Like I really do because a lot of what it comes down to is, by you setting your intention, you're also ensuring that your team is able to move in a positive forward from the moment they start in. Because, if you think about it, monday mornings are usually from a text perspective. Monday morning is not great. I'm going outside, I'm cleaning the screws out of the yard, I'm making sure that I'm loading my van. It's cold. I had Sunday. Yesterday I had a ton of things on my plate. I'm not feeling great, but by going in, let's say having a morning stretch or like what I used to like to do is, before I start my day I would do laps around the building. I would just walk around and my partner and I would just talk and we would just like go through and say what are we setting the week's intention on? So things like that are helpful. So, yeah, if you wanted to set a time for training your team while also having a culture improvement, I never gonna get an objection on that for me.

There's another piece to this I want to tie in quick Sure, and it's something we've done at service of electrical and it's it's, it's, it's really built off this idea that we can't be forward enough with our vision, our values, our offer, everything that we've articulated about who we are and how we serve. We cannot be forward and repetitive enough about that. In our company internally, most people have this innate feeling like well, we spoke about the vision last month. We talked about our mission last year. Right, like the everyone knows I don't need to say it again, but it's truly is that record needs to replay and replay, and replay and replay, and every week we should be touching on that in some capacity, tying it to a recent story and how it served us, so that it's relatable and so that people continue in their Understanding and the development of understanding really what we're trying to accomplish here and how important that is Right. If something was truly important, wouldn't we talk about it often?

Yeah, it's like the thought of what you think of takes precedence in your life. Like, obviously you could only have there's thousands of thought that happened, but we're only conscious of some, many of them. And the thought of saying I am intentionally bringing this thought into the forefront of my day Effects every decision that follows it. So if your team is saying we're told that we are doing things for quality, reliability, customer service and a white glove experience, and they hear that every single day, wouldn't they be able to also regurgitate that to the customer?

100%, and that sounds like what's important to our value price objection, which we expect. We train around it. We expect it right. It's a massive piece, man, and I'm gonna take it a level beyond. Here's the expert level of this. Okay, as you know, we recorded Saying that passionately in our company and the reason we have a recording of it is because in conflict management, in a place where someone's uncomfortable or they can't find their edge, they're feeling lost, they just don't have it, and maybe we don't have a huddle timed, maybe we don't have a time booked in the schedule, to say the right thing. Would it be wrong of us to have something in place and in that conflict resolution, be able to say look, we want you to call a time out when you're feeling that way? Go back to the basics, watch this little video on how we treat people, what we're looking to do, our mission, our vision, and and then and then reach out to us and let us know what solutions you can think of for this problem, and we'll be happy to engage with you on that, so that it's not an emergency call right, trying to manage everything in our four quadrants to keep it out of urgent and important, because the last thing we want is someone else's emergency is falling on us unless it's truly an emergency.

Yeah, I always thought that when it came to other people's emergencies, it was your emergency becomes my emergency based on the option that you take. I'm going to present you options. If you want an emergency, here's my first class pass. I can give you first class availability.

Oh you're thinking about the client. You want me to take care of this today Was that You're thinking with the client.

Yes, yes, I was addressing with the team.

Yeah, no, go ahead yeah.

No, I was thinking, but the logic was it was supposed to connect with it, where it's like when your emergency becomes my emergency. What defines now our emergency as a team? And when I say our emergency, what I mean by that is when we're all facing the same vision. Now we're able to all be in alignment on what takes priority over something else.

I love that. That's really good. So I want to jump back into the field stuff Now. Obviously, this is our million dollar launch. We're the one selling.

Yeah.

But using the post call facts and the things we talked about last time to identify the bottlenecks, we actually get some great information there too. Can I share a little bit of my dad and nerd horniness here, please? And thank you, go for it. I didn't crack you up that time, all right.

No, no, because at least now I'm prepared for it. It was just when you came in and I know we're right out the gates I was like whoa, let's do it.

So the post call facts told us some really interesting stuff. Right, what parts of our sales flow are we not doing? Are we missing spots? Are we consistently missing the same spot? Because then it begs the question well, why? Why do we keep missing the spot? And when you ask a person that question and you ask why, a couple of times you might get to a root cause which is well, I don't actually believe in the price that we have, or I don't actually believe this serves, or you'll find in your case, many times you've worked with people role playing through it and you find it's just a tonality thing. Hey, down in the south, that would be taken as offensive. Joe, have you ever heard that?

Yeah, I mean, that comes up a lot, and the benefit of why I wanted to put my hand up for it is I love finding when someone feels this won't work, because I spent so many years trying to find every angle that it wouldn't work by so that we can create protections against it, and most times it's an internal issue that someone's having. I can't say this because they'll think this when it's like well, why are those two thoughts connected? If you're presenting something with quality, reliability and customer service and you're not pushing it on someone and it's their choice, and you're merely asking, is it truly wrong to ask to bring something unsafe to their attention? No, okay, then why would someone be upset with that, regardless of where you live in the country? Okay, so how would you like to proceed?

Yeah, great stuff, and I love that. When it's an internal issue, then that means we have an opportunity to help lift someone up right there, and that happens through training, once again, and through role play, and once they're able to execute this with an actual customer, there's just this aha moment that happens and it's almost difficult to explain, but I've had them, you've had them. Anyone who's learned anything in their life that afterwards you felt was like oh, that was simple and if I spent enough time I would have figured this out. But I'm so glad I was able to have this enhanced roadmap to it, this, this more accelerated version of it, and when we help someone, that's really what's happening. So when they experience it, it's like, oh, that's actually easy, now I can do this. I now know what it looks like, I know, I now know what it feels like, so I can do this again. I think that's so important and that's a huge piece of training.

Yeah, I was going to say I feel like a very big area. Where this has a lot of similarities is when people start understanding their pricing, where it's like I can't charge this around here, People are going to kick me out. But then you look at the numbers and you're like is there anything here that we're fudging? Is there anything here that you feel isn't justified? No, that's what we need to charge. Okay, well, if you acknowledge that the numbers are telling you that this is exactly what we need to do, and why and you've agreed with all those things why then wouldn't we do it? Yeah, it's the same with the sales process. I'm going to never cut corners on quality, reliability or customer service. I am always going to go to the panel. I am always going to present you with choices, and I'm going to do so with the intention of presenting something ethically. Yeah, Regardless of what your reasoning is beyond that, you're in the clear. No one will fault you for trying to protect them and their families 100% man, 100% Okay.

So just quick, because we're getting along in this one now with that sales team. You would probably advise as well training once twice a week, once minimally.

So with the sales team, I also want to ensure that it starts on Monday. Monday training is very important to me, regardless of the department, because you need to set the intention of the week. Like, have you ever noticed that, like, sometimes, saturday and Sunday come by? You got the Friday, where the team is already ready, checked out somewhere like 3.30, they're done, and Saturday comes with their family. Sunday, they come with their family Monday. They're cleaning the sleep out of their eyes and they don't really fire up until 11 am. Yeah, but there is two calls that could have happened at this point, which means you paid for two leads that may have something happen on them. But if you start the morning where I'm not letting you go to your first call unless you train let's start Monday at 7.30. Let's start Monday at 7. You know what? Maybe we make your Monday start at 8 and you're delayed your call. So, in other words, instead of having an 8 to 10 every Monday, maybe you having 9 to 11 as your first Monday slot. I'm okay with that too, but your first thing of the day needs to be setting your team up for success. It's not let's get them out the door so they can crash out jobs. It's let's make sure, before they leave the door, they're primed to succeed on every opportunity we give them, not just fulfill the opportunity.

Yeah, definitely, man. That's huge. Let's crank out a couple of action items to summarize this one best weekend and get some people having some wins with it. Would you like basic or all-star today? I could do either one. Whichever you prefer, All right? Well, I'm going to take the basic and I'm going to tie it into what we had yesterday.

Sounds great, I'm all yours.

Again being a freak about the data. I really want to encourage this Maybe it's even two parts is just that if we inform our decision about what we're training, we can be very effective trainers. There's kind of two schools of thought around this, and one seems to be like well, what do I train? And usually, if you have that question, it just means that we're not collecting data or reviewing the data to actually hold people accountable to our process, or worse, I mean, we don't have a process yet, but we can't start there, right, we're too far down this road. So how can we inform your decision about what to train? And that's maybe a hard question for you, but we have some tools to help with that, such as our post-call fax. Right, we have tools to help with that, such as even a KPI workbook that your CSR can use to just track, hey, what calls came in, where are they coming from and what's our call booking rate, so that you know how to identify that bottleneck and begin to train to it. That sounds fair, joe.

Yep, and I love that, because that actually sets me up perfectly, all right. So what I was going to originally talk about was how we should be using the post-call facts and things like that, but you've already touched on it, all right. So, additionally, the next level is why do they want to train? Now, everyone's motivation could be different right. That's good Like. For me it's less about the money and more about being a present father. But for someone else they may say you know what? I don't have any kids, I don't have a spouse. I need to make sure that I'm living a certain lifestyle so I can take the vacations I want.

Yeah.

Someone else may say I'm just trying to pay off debt. So the motivating factors for each person to succeed would be different. So I would say, in addition to having training, in addition to knowing what to train, focus on why are we training for each individual? So that, when they crush a sale, you can be like Clay. You are that much closer to being able to have your Mexican villa, or you know what be like. You know, joe, you are that much closer to being completely debt free. Or you're that much closer to being able to have your weekends off with your family or having a screw it. You know what. You were able to hit these numbers by Thursday night. You can take Friday off with your family every week. I love that. Now they've got a motivating factor to do these things and, as a result, they'll be dialed into the training because they're personally have some of the gain or lose from it.

Gosh man, I'm so glad that you found that inside and brought it to the front man, because that is so important. Why would they want to train? That ties us perfectly into really a little more discussion on performance pay and what we would think about that. In a million dollar launch and developing on these staff journeys, creating all stars, keeping people long term, that retention piece is going to be massive because if we're losing people all year round, it's going to be really tough to ever get the momentum we need to really launch through this million dollar mark. So thank you for that and thank you, guys, for joining us on yet another episode of Electricpreneurs Secrets, the electricians podcast, where Joe and I show up five days a week to help you master sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye for now. It'll be well. We'll see you guys next week.