Ep 268 - Free Inspections Won’t Pay the Bills

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to yet another episode of Electric Purners Secrets, the Electricians podcast. I'm your host, Clay Neumeier, with me, as always, joseph Lucani, and we are the Electric Purners, a couple of master electricians with business addictions, here and ready to serve With what and who. We're serving electricians. We're helping you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. Welcome to your freemium daily coach. Call the admission for this Absolutely nothing but your attention. Sit back in the hot seat, take everything we give, just promise to take action and report your wins back to us. We can't wait to hear how this works for you, joe, we've got a big episode today on how free inspections won't pay the bills. Got into this a bit yesterday and we just felt that we needed to get deeper with it and really engage with this problem, because so many electricians, I feel, make this mistake, especially when it slows down. But, brother, how are you doing today?

First and foremost, first and foremost, man, I gotta say my feet are toasty and everything else is freezing. It is cold today in New York and I'm cranking the space heater. At all at all blasts right now.

Okay, so warm feet, cold shoulders warm feet cold shoulders, but you know what.

At the end of the day to put a positive emotional spin to it my heart is warm. I genuinely feel inspired. I love what we do. I love who we're doing it for. So I don't care if I'm standing on side and nothing. I'm going to be warm in my heart.

Absolutely. You know, I agree with that and I share that. It's a moment of grace, man. We absolutely get to do what we love, and helping electricians is that's the mission, man. That's what we're doing. Vision is to rise the tide for all of us in this premium service as a way to it. But I mean really coming down to the basics of knowing your pricing, understanding some basic human psychology to leverage in marketing and sales and, of course, leveraging this loop method just really is what service loop stands for. It's that little bit extra for future serviceability and today's topic is no exception. Can I just do a disclaimer statement quick, please, by all means. I know that we're getting very specific here and this kind of rubs people in a certain way when people reach out, sometimes afterwards and like they did on yesterday's episode, and just like, hey, are you talking about me? It's so many people are engaged in this way and what we're talking about today. So I just want to be very clear you're not alone in this. This is a huge misconception, and why I call it a misconception is what we know about marketing ourselves is actually quite wrong. Fundamentally, we all see the big advertisers, the big companies ads because they're the ones with money to throw and they're the ones with thousands upon thousands, upon thousands of eyes to see it, because they've got that money to double down. So, really, what? A lot of times, what we're seeing in marketing is an awareness campaign. It's like hey, don't forget us. Hey Coca Cola, hey Starbucks, hey McDonald's, hey Tim Hortons, and a lot of times they'll use loss leader strategies and it's not really something that we advocate, because we actually prefer a style of marketing and execution that we find is above that, and here's what I mean by that. It's above that, because what we're trying to do is speak to a specific issue, so that we're in a problem aware conversation, because we are the specialists who solve problems. I don't mean we as in coaches, I mean we as in master electricians and you as in master electricians. And as we dive into this today, I hope that you'll understand with us that the free inspection, as this loss leader thinking we're going to get a bunch of work and that that's an easy conversion is a really lost cause. Can we dive right into this, joe? Yeah, I'd be happy to.

And realistically, I want to put you in the mind of a tech and see where the gap is. All right, let's assume you've had some sort of sales training. Right, doesn't matter where you're not, you're not completely green. This is we're sending a seasoned sales tech to the home, so we're already assuming he's not a scrub. He knows what he's doing, gets to the call and all it is that's on the ticket. Is this a complimentary inspection, or they called for something and now they're trying to offer a complimentary inspection? What this tech usually has to do is they've got a list of things that they're supposed to check. I'm gonna check your smoke detectors. I'm gonna check your GFI's and take your panel and check your overhead connections can check. They have a list of things they're checking out.

Yep.

The thing is and I finally I said thing is they're presenting Things and in those things they're not tied into the who and they're not tied into the why. So you're called out for a GFI but you're quoting a panel fully arc faulted. You're quoting out all new nest smoke detectors. You're quoting out localizing everything. They're relative, it makes sense from an electrician to an electrician. I see the value, I see why you're doing it, but the customer doesn't. Yeah, and the problem is that you as a tech now need to be in a position where you're quoting things to someone Without having either they bringing it up to you or it being relative to their particular situation. So when they ask, why did you offer it, you're forced to give a very generic answer. And I've tried doing this before when I first started off, and it never felt good. Yeah, it never felt good.

You'll feel the. You'll feel compelled the pole to fill the void with words, mm-hmm, ramble on about why something's important, without ever understanding why it might be important to them.

Correct. Why it's important to us is very different than why it's important to them. Like you may have a situation where the customer says you know what are? Even even further, you recognize that the kitchen countertop needs to have two dedicated circuits and you can tell them this requires it for code and for safety standard and for it, and they won't care. But you, being able to say you know what, you can have your coffee machine run because I see that you have it tugged into another circuit. It's like, oh so it's not gonna trip when I have my. Okay, now the wine makes sense. I'm only offering this to you because I know you mentioned your coffee is a big important thing to you and I can see you've got a double burner for the espresso drip.

I want to try and back out of this for a moment. Sure, and just use a statement that we've learned and come to use very often, and you guys may have heard this before. I'm gonna ask you a hard question after okay, market the problem that you want to solve and the sale is yours to mess up. Why is that true? It's because if we're marketing a problem using the words that our target market uses to describe that problem, then we're speaking their language, about their experience of something that's bothering them mm-hmm. So when they call you because you spoke to what they're feeling, what they're engaged with in their minds about this problem when they call you, it's very clearly to solve, or at least create options to solve, this problem. Would you agree with that? I would. So if we extract the problem sorry men, just to finish this and get to that hard question If we extract that problem and we just market our discount, now people are calling us for a different reason. We're just marketing a seasonal offer, right, and when it's general, like a free, compulsive, comprehensive inspection, then the question becomes what's in it for them? Why would someone call you for a free inspection, like, even picking up the phone and calling is an effort and it takes time. So what problem are they solving? And if you're causing them to have to guess at what you might be able to solve in that inspection, then that alone is really defective marketing at its root, at its core. Does that make sense, joe?

I agree, and it's one of the reasons why, when we call for our first class inspections, we have very specific why factors for every single time that we're calling, such as, I know, that it's the coldest season of the year and, as a result, we want to prevent any issues from coming larger. So, and then we go into our whole spiel as to why we do these things. Mm-hmm. So the customer say, okay, I get it. You're calling because if you come now, you can catch problems While they're small, before they become bigger. That makes sense. It's the right time, it's the right season. You're, it's clear. But when they have to guess, I give you. If my HVAC company were to call me and say, hey, we're doing a free inspection, I wouldn't take it. And I love that company, it's just because it's like I don't need to be sold with anything right now. Nothing's broken, nothing's wrong. But if they were to call me and say, hey, we noticed that there was a higher acidity in your water concentration and we just wanted to do a follow up on it, yeah, come on by, that would make sense.

Solid, because frame and I think the reason that people don't go into this like truly they don't. And even again, marketers mess this up. We see it all the time. Marketers won't niche Like the person building your website do they just serve electricians Because they should, because that would mean there's a specialist at doing that one thing right. So even in your marketing, we see this. Marketers mess this up. But think about that. Why wouldn't we speak to a specific thing when we need work? Why wouldn't we do an email blast to our clients that's based on data, that's based on options and or even objections, and re-offering things in a way that serves them at a better level, using the whys that we already have? If we already know this stuff, then why don't we take that specific approach? And the only logical answer is because we're worried that there's just there's only a few people, Whereas me, as an electrician, I can see the value in a free home inspection. Look at all the things. The smoke detectors need to be replaced, they got circuits that aren't properly labeled right or even going to the right place. Maybe they've got multiple circuits under a single breaker, right, like this kind of stuff you find all the time we get it. It's easy for an electrician to find the value, but again there's a communication and an intention gap here and people see through it just like the mechanic that's gonna do the 100 point inspection for you. I've seen countless electricians and, heck, we even have one. We've got one built. That's a 10 point inspection with a green for good, a yellow for caution and a red for not good. Right, but that's just a crutch to help people start to see the things we should pay attention for, pay attention to as we're working through systems and understanding people's why's. It's not a tool to leverage to cause sales, and I think that's where this whole thing gets mixed up. Imagine, so just imagine, as Joe said before, two sales tax or two service tax. One's going in for a general inspection that someone inquired about and then he's going to try to create a ticket from this so that it wasn't all for free. The homeowner has no idea what that service tax is gonna present and the service tech has no idea what the needs are of that client. That is extremely difficult to close and I actually feel bad for the service tech and I feel bad for what happens after that because of any size of a team. Hey, the service tech comes away feeling like I'm not converting like I used to what's going on. Even when there's no leads, I can't Seem to hit a home run or even get a base. But then it goes back to if there's a sales manager, service manager, team, lead on those and they're going well, why aren't you, why didn't you offer this, why didn't you do this white? And it becomes this big like blame cycle when the reality is no one was problem. Where To finish that thought in the comparison is then look at the tech. Who's problem? Where the client has put their hand up and I acknowledged that. Oh no, we're looking for any be charger. Actually, we're thinking about getting an electric vehicle. You now have an opportunity as a night to show up, be informative, be the authority and be the friend and actually lay out some options that they may be interested to do with. And, speaking to the, why go ahead?

I also wanted to put up a point that I think is really help people know and that I'm very proud of my ability of creating options on the fly. But this situation even trips me out, and what I mean by that is this. People will sometimes come into class and they'll say what do I do with this? And my first question is why do they want it? And if they don't have an answer for it, it's usually okay. Well, what is it trying? What are you trying to solve that? So if we don't know the why and we don't know what the customer is trying to solve, I'm pretty much just stuck saying well, what could we generally offer in this scenario? And it all becomes very broad stroke and vague compared to know this is a specific option to solve this specific problem. It's more like well, did they have search protection? All right, throw that in. Is it labeled that throw that in the smokers. After that in localized from into and then why do we do it? Good luck coming with the because frame is almost all gonna be technical based. So remember no matter who you are, and my betters are out there. I'm 100% certain of it. There are people who struggle creating this value and my answer to it is don't chase the what, chase the why. Find out why they need it and what they're trying to solve, and you will find on code options.

Speaking of answers, man, I'm gonna start with the basic. Today we've got to wrap this up. Sure, yesterday we talked about the specialist checklist, not a self promotion. This is free. You guys would give this stuff away. If you're live with us on the on the electric nerf secrets facebook group Awesome type in specialist checklist are gonna send this over. If you're hearing this in your favorite podcast channel, reach out to us on service loop electrical dot com, anywhere you see us on facebook. If you're there to okay, and what this does is takes the guess work out of it because you might be sitting here going well, if I'm not offering inspections, and what am I offering? Where is that data? How do I know what to do? I don't know what to say. I've never done this before. It's uncomfortable Giving you the exact guide to be able to leverage this. You can use in your email marketing. You can use it in your organic marketing using our facebook cheat sheet. Either way, it's gonna help you interrupt with a problem where statement, engage in the problem that your clients are facing and thinking and hearing in their head, educate them slightly on it and then offer a solution like a specific inspection on that device need desire problem. That's the basic. I know that's big, but all you've got to do is reach out and grab that value piece. Guys, you're gonna learn a ton from this. It's marketing that even marketers mess up.

All right, do you have no, sir? Sorry, I do, I do, I do that you're taking the answer it's all good. So in the all start, give me a moment with this, because I had on tip my tongue and then we dropped it. What was it I'm blanking out here, man, I had a moment. It's on my tongue. What was it?

It's all good, we can come up with something and I can just fill space with my wonderful voice in the meantime. I think that you know we're kind of speaking to the marketing bit. Is there anything we can tie into the sales bit here today, joe?

Yeah, so if we're going to go into this oh yes, I remember what it was. Okay, sorry, sometimes my brain goes on a little bit of a journey but I'm here, I'm back in the stage. All right. So I want to give you guys an all-star level sales advice. There is a particular thought process that you can follow that's going to help you build options, and the first is be unconvinced that they want or need the thing that they're asking for. Because imagine the difference. Like Dr House, yeah, I want to search protector. Most lectures like great. Let me sit down and show you all the options. Yeah, I got this one. I got that. One opens like their coat and there's a pile of watches there. It's like no, okay, the better question is oh well, I'm surprised to hear that why do you feel like you need it? And just that question there alone is going to give you your why I want a generator. Well, I'm surprised. I figured you guys didn't lose power around here a lot. Why do you feel like you need one? I want to get a new panel. Well, why is that? It seems like this one's in great condition. Or is there a reason why you'd want to change it? Well, why not keep it the way it is? Just asking the why and posing that you are unconvinced that they want or need the thing they're asking for will encourage them to double down and give you more of a why, and once you have that why, then you can solve it and you'll have a strong because frame in every option you present.

I love that man and the line it's in my head is just that like what happens if we don't.

I mean, if we don't like what do you mean by that? If we don't ask the why?

Adding to discovering that why, when you confirm later and say what happens if we didn't do anything about this? Yeah, I mean they reinforce the problems and the why that that's been discussed, to really hit that home. Man, I didn't mean to interrupt or tag on to you, but that was a massive all-star action and the moment you said that I was like, oh Mike, drop, that is fire. We've got to go though. This one's getting long, hugely impactful podcast to in a row. I love these. Joe, this been another episode and all of you listening, of course, to help you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service Right here with us on Electropreneur Secrets. We'll see you guys again tomorrow for another one.

Looking forward to it. Take care.