How can you take some sales best practices from other industries (like retail, tech sales, real estate and others) to level up your team and grow you business? Here are some best practices we pulled from top performing home services companies, tech sales leaders and some widely read authors on the subject.
Live Role Play - If your team is struggling to go through their sales discussions even inside the relative safety of your team, how can you expect them to execute to complete strangers. Moreover, it’s not doing your customers a service to ask your team to ‘practice on them’. Setup live role play sessions regularly to practice objection handling, initial conversation tactics and proposal/pricing discussions. They should really never say anything for the first time to a customer. A couple quick notes on this.
Make sure you give real example for them to work from - you can play the buyer
Bring in a buyer if you can once in a while to make it even more ‘real’ - you must know someone who wants free lunch and can stop by to play the homeowner.
Give positive and constructive feedback on each session.
If they struggle with a portion. STOP and start over with more instruction and have them do it again. Practicing the RIGHT way is the answer. Not letting people struggle through the wrong process.
Practice Practice Practice - You should be practicing with your team 2-3 times per week. Adult learning theory has pretty much shown by now that if you don’t revisit something multiple times over a 2-3 week period, you’re lucky if the audience can retain 10% of what you’re presenting. Everyone knows that practice makes perfect. Budget for this time. Put it into your weekly operating cadence with your teams. Mix up the sessions so they aren’t always the same format. Best practice is about a 45min - 1hr session which is long enough to get people talking but not so long as to drive them to boredom or see too many outside distractions. Here are a couple of quick notes:
Mix up the times on these meetings a bit but keep them on set days. We recommend you avoid Friday's b/c that is when most people take off for a long weekend.
Have your examples ready - whether they are call recordings, role play customer profiles, visuals - Don't make people sit there any wait for you to get things together.
Try to make it fun. How does your team think about these sessions. If they are dreading them, you aren't likely getting a ton out of them.
Record Your Customer Interactions - There are tons of call recording tools out there today. If you are doing all or some of your sales by phone or remotely, can you record these interactions. If so, use these to learn about how the team is running their process. Find both good and bad examples and use them in your training. Make time to listen to these calls and hear from the customers about their questions and concerns.
High Trust, Low Ego ‘TEAM’ - T.E.A.M can be an acronym for Together, Everyone, Achieves, More. When you create a team where people genuinely WANT to get better and everyone is working to improve, magic can happen. Tactically, you can promote a low ego, coaching first culture by leading by example. As the leader, participate in the training, show them what good looks like and be willing to fall on your face in front of the team. They will see that it’s ok to struggle to get better.
This subject also speaks to who you hire in the first place. If you want to build a trusting team of people who genuinely want to learn and get better, you must make sure that you look for those qualities in the hiring process. Ask them about things they learned from their last jobs, books they've recently read and skills they want to develop. People LOVE to talk about themselves so if they have real examples, they'll probably give them to you very easily.
“You don’t build a business. You build people and then people build a business” -Zig Ziglar
4 Books and resources for you to dive deep into sales strategies
They Ask, You Listen by Marcus Sheridan - Here is a link to listen to Marcus on the Boardroom Buzz Podcast where he discusses how he used this strategy to create a successful home service business.
The Transparency Sale by Todd Caponi - How you can lead with transparency in all customer engagements. Consider how your sellers are being transparent with your customers to build trust.
The Challenger Sale - How you can educate your buyers about what you do differently.
Influence - This is a very DEEP dive into buyer psychology for any industry, with a focus on consumers.
As you look to build your home service business, consider how you can continue to grow your people by investing in their continuing improvement.