In this episode we learn a valuable lesson in what not to do when dealing with a combative prospect. Then we move into the real focus of the appointment

Welcome to Close it now, an H Vac sales training podcast with Sam Wakefield.

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Now let's get started with your host of the Close it now podcast.

This is Sam Wakefield.

Hello.

Welcome back to the Close It Now H Vac residential sales podcast.

Your source for all things things with heating and air sales.

My name is Sam Wakefield, I am your host and yeah, this is a really cool topic we've got today.

It is when to say when.

Go back and listen to my the episode on how to build instant rapport because that will be the like basically first half of this.

But there's a an entire story behind what's good, what I'm going to teach you today and it's when to when to not continue down that path of sales.

Are there people in your career that you've come across that you just raised the white flag and said you know what, this person doesn't want to buy, this person is maybe combative, this person is angry, this is not the right time to try to sell them anything and we should just move on and not waste life on this person.

Have you ever had that situation?

Raise your hand if you, you've had that experience in somebody's house.

So yes, that's what we're going to cover today because there's a story to back this up.

So let me tell you this.

My wife calls me earlier and she is livid, she's angry.

She's telling me about this door to door salesman.

So first of all, the first question.

Do you or do you know of people who do door to door air conditioning sales?

Is that something that happens in your market?

Shoot me a message and let me know about that because that's very interesting if that is actually happening.

So door to door air conditioning sales, I'd love to talk to you if that's going on in your area.

But more importantly there are, that is so, so I mean to use a silly term, last century door to door sales people that they don't want to give up their time to anyone knock a cold, total cold stranger knocking on their door.

But companies still do it.

People still, you know, pursue that way and they're so forceful, it's ridiculous.

But back to the story.

This guy knocks on the door earlier.

My wife is at home with the kids.

It's middle of the afternoon.

She has three kids, under 8 years old and doesn't want to answer the door.

So she doesn't doesn't answer the door.

The guy knocks three different times and then moves on down the street.

Comes back several hours later.

It's about 7:20 at night.

We've got some young kids.

So she's trying to.

She's working on getting into the bed process, getting them to, you know, the whole routine.

If you raise your hand, if you've got some little.

Got little kids, you know that there's a whole bedtime routine that you have to go through.

So she's in the middle of the process and this guy comes back to the door.

He knocks, she doesn't answer.

He knocks, she doesn't answer.

He rings the doorbell, she doesn't answer.

He rings the doorbell again.

This is the second visit to the house.

So she answers the door angry.

He.

She answers the door.

He's like, hi.

Did you know you have bugs in your trees?

She's like, I don't care.

He's like, but what about the bugs?

She's like, I don't care what you're selling.

He says, would you even know why I'm here?

She's like, I do not care why you're here.

I'm busy.

And so through this conversation five times, she tells him, I'm busy.

I don't care what you're selling.

I don't want any.

Go away.

And he just keeps talking.

But in talking to her about this, she realized as soon as she answered the door angry, what this guy did.

He matched her energy and became combative and said, but you've got to care about the bugs in your trees.

Turns.

She was like, what bugs?

What bugs?

Are you selling me some?

He's asking her, do you know why I'm here?

She says, is it for the alarm system?

And she's like, no.

She doesn't even know what bugs he's talking about.

So the point is in this lesson, because we talked about building rapport and, and we talked about how to use matching to build rapport because people buy from people they know like and trust, and they like people like themselves.

So when you match energy and you match tone of voice and tonality and you match body language, people are much more receptive to open up, to have A conversation with you.

Well, this is an example of the wrong way to use matching.

And the other point of this is, within 60 to 90 seconds, you need to come educate yourself and use your skills and use your perception skills to know if this person's energy, if you're matching them, if it's appropriate or if it's inappropriate, if their energy is fixed, if it's in a fixed position at that moment and can be changed, or if it's stuck there.

Because in this example, in this situation, my wife's anger and her energy level was in a fixed position.

It was not going to be changed.

And by matching her, it only made it worse.

It was not going to change the fact that her energy was in such a place that this guy better get off the porch or she's fixing to punch him in the face.

And for whatever reason, he didn't get the picture because he's still talking about the bugs in the trees and selling his stuff.

And it didn't at one moment stop to pay attention to what she was saying or what her energy was or any of that.

So he instantly became almost just like telling her about.

He still goes through a spill, and she's telling me she closed the door, says, go away, get off my porch.

Best wishes, closes the door, and she can still hear him going through his spill about the bugs in the trees and how is this exterminator?

And blah, blah, blah.

And in the middle of the process, he tells her, well, who do you use for your exterminator?

So she tells him, he says, oh, well, ask your neighbor across and over, they just switch from them to us when we know for a fact that company has never been in our neighborhood other than coming to our house.

So he was lying on top of it, which was obviously just the nail in the coffin for him.

But she's closing the door on him, and he's still just, you know, sputtering his sales pitch to the door.

Is this example of great salesmanship?

Absolutely not.

But the lesson here is learn to recognize very early on what a person's energy is and learn and figure out if it's fixed or if it can be changeable.

Is it something that you can start to ask questions and open them up?

Or in her case, she's like, I'm trying to get kids in bed.

I don't have the time.

Go away at that point, if you're like me, I would have asked, oh, I'm sorry, ma' am, when would be a better time to come back?

And that's it just go away.

There are plenty more people to talk to.

Of course, I wouldn't be doing door to door either.

So that is a whole different world in itself.

But please send me a message.

If somebody is doing door to door in your area or if you do door to door and you've found it effective, let me know.

But yeah, so this is, that's the story.

It's like, geez, don't match somebody's.

If it's in a place that you don't want to be, you can start there and bring.

Sometimes if people are angry about something, maybe they're angry about the service bill.

So this is a great segue into my sales experience.

Just a little while ago, going to this house and the guy is telling me it's a turnover for my technician who was there the night before, who replaced the capacitor, added a hard start kit capacitor and of course it was an after hour service call.

So he tells me, he's like, man, I was really sticker shock at the repair price and I don't know why it was so high, but we just wanted to get the cooling going.

I felt like I was over a barrel.

And I asked him, I said, did it feel like this?

Did it?

And you can name what he's feeling.

He didn't actually say that.

I said, so it felt like you were over a barrel and you had to, but you didn't have an opportunity to really question the price because you knew he could get you cooling right?

Then he's like, yeah, that's exactly how I felt.

So clearly we need to work on our systems to communicate better.

At the same time, I was able to ask him those questions and diffuse the situation and communicate with him enough to be like, okay, well let's break this apart and explain why the price is what it was.

He's like, oh, well, after you break it down, I completely understand the price and I have no problem with it.

It's just in the moment, it didn't feel like it.

So we've got some work to do.

But moving forward after we accomplished that, then I was able, by asking the questions and explaining, able to bring his matched his energy, but brought it down to where I wanted it.

Until I led his energy and the excitement about the new equipment to where I wanted that to be when we ended the call.

So that was a really, really great sales presentation here earlier.

But that was an interesting lesson is to ask the right questions and lead the energy.

They can start angry if you lead it in the right direction, but be able to recognize or very, very quickly if they're not going to be able to be changed, if they're in a fixed position and their energy level can't be changed, then don't waste your time.

Don't give the time.

Say, listen, this is not clearly not a good time for you.

You're very angry about this.

I feel that you're angry.

It feels like you're upset about this situation.

And if they don't explain themselves and come down at that point, when you've labeled their energy and you labeled what they have going on and just called it out, if they don't change, if they don't start to explain themselves, move on.

Do not waste your time.

Say, list.

And you're clearly upset about this.

Maybe we could reschedule to a time when it might be better for you.

So that's a good.

The other lesson out of this experience is don't try to sell something to someone who's not interested in buying it.

Think of if you've ever seen the Wolf of Wall street, you've got Jordan Belfort.

And he's telling the guy, here, sell me this pin.

Well, I actually listened to his book recently, and he tells the full story.

So the version in the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio is not exactly as it happened in the book.

It's very interesting because he's got a new recruit that he's got in his office, and he's really working with him on, you know, when and how and why to sell.

So he hands him this pin and says, here, sell me this pin.

Well, the guy, the kid goes into all of the details about, well, let's look, check out this pin.

It'll write upside down, it'll write underwater.

It'll do all these things.

And it's 500, only $500.

And he hands it back to him.

He looks at it.

He's like, it's just a cheap Bic.

What are you talking about?

You know, it's a silly little pin, and it doesn't understand.

You know, the recruit doesn't understand what's going on.

So one of his top salesmen walks in, he hands it to him and says, here, sell me this pen.

And instantly his demeanor changes, his tonality changes.

He looks at him and says, okay, Mr.

Belfort, how long have you been in the market for a pen?

And he says, I'm not in the market for a pen.

So he throws it back at him and says, well, then keep your pen.

He says, I only sell things to People who are in the market for them.

Not like this rookie who tried to sell anything to anybody, which is such a powerful lesson because in what we do, thankfully for most of the time, people are calling us.

By calling us, that means they are in the market for what we're selling.

They have a problem and they called us to solve their problem.

Now when we get there, we all have experienced and if you haven't yet, you're going to experience.

You get there.

And when you open up your full offering and ask the questions, you'll find out what people are in the market for.

Do I go through my entire presentation every time?

Yeah, probably 90% of the time.

But I will clearly very quickly figure out if someone is in the market for a top of the line communicating system or by questions, you'll find out if they're selling the house in six months and they don't want to invest, or if they have other things going on in their life.

They would like to have a better system and more comfort in the house or they've got indoor air quality problems, but they're really working on balancing the budget so that you can figure out really quickly a good way to find a good fit for that client, but do not try.

And so what happens so many times though is say the company is running a contest on, okay, the first person to sell 10 of the very highest end fully functional variable Speed Systems gets $1,000 or whatever the contest is in the company.

Well, I've been guilty of this myself and raise your hand if you've ever been guilty of this is I've had some of my team who will and I've followed up after with the clients and with the homeowners.

They'll say, man, all he ever offered was the highest end system and I'm moving in a year.

I didn't even want it.

But that's all he talked about.

So I went with another company where if he said, but I liked y' all's company, I would have gone with you.

But I knew if I even thought I had another option.

So clearly they didn't offer what the customer wanted to buy.

They didn't investigate enough to figure out that they were not in the market for the most expensive highest end system because what they were doing, they were walking into a house with their own benefit in mind, not the customer's benefit in mind.

So when your focus changes, your focus has to shift to their benefit.

In fact, this is going to be a fantastic next podcast which we're really going to dive into.

This a little bit, but that's it.

So you don't sell something to some.

If someone's not in the market for that thing, figure out through your investigation process, through your questionnaire, what do they want to buy?

Because we all know people write checks for what they want, not for what they need.

Wow.

Okay.

I've gone on about that.

That's my passion.

I hope you feel my passion because I am working.

I definitely wanting calling together a tribe of H Vac sales professionals who serve on a deeper level.

Your intent is to help the customer and by helping enough people get what they want, you can have anything you want.

Classic Zig Ziglar quote.

If you don't know who Zig Ziglar, then research him.

He was a personal growth titan.

Go read See youe at the Top by Zig Ziglar.

That's our book of the episode See youe at the Top Zig Ziglar.

Go read that.

It's on audio.

You can read it either way.

I love audio because that's your drive time University.

Go read that book.

That's the recommendation of the episode See you at the Top by Zig Ziglar.

So I would love to connect with you again.

My name is Sam Wakefield.

Thank you for listening to this.

You can reach me@samsamwakefield.com and go to closeitnow.net that is the website that's the landing place for this.

That'll get you connected to our Facebook group.

We're building an online community of sales professionals who will want to crush it in your environment, crush it in your area and your market.

Want to double, triple, quadruple 10x your sales, double your ticket price, work less and earn more.

Who doesn't want that?

Raise your hand if you want to have that bottom line go up and up and up.

So thank you for listening.

I will talk to you again soon.

Thanks for listening to Close it now with Sam Wakefield.

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