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Host Scott Lollar is a 35 year veteran of the painting industry, and founder of Consulting4Contractors. The Beyond $1,000,000 Podcast serves as a touchpoint to painting contractors who have hustled, sacrificed, and worked hard to get their business to where it is today. Now, you need the guidance, expertise, experience and team to make it into the multi-million dollar company of your dreams. You'll hear stories and interviews from "Brothers of the Brush" and "Sisters of the Sprayer" who have been where you are and are charting a new course for their company's success. Listen in and go beyond $1,000,000!
Episode 15 - Navigating the Sales Landscape: Carl Utter's Journey to Training the Best in Paint Contractor Sales
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[00:00:00]
[00:00:00] Sales Trainer's Journey and Successes
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Scott L: Hey, today I'm looking forward to my conversation with Carl Utter, founder of Contractor Growth Strategy. Carl is a sales trainer, among other things, and is the only sales trainer I know that focuses on painting contractors, like you. He has adapted my favorite sales system to the painting contractor that results in fewer tire kickers, more engagement, and higher close ratios at higher job sizes.
So I hope you're excited for this episode. I know I am.
So let's get into it.
My name is Scott Lollar a 35 year veteran of the painting industry where I've been part of growing several multimillion dollar painting companies. I have worn all the hats and have experienced everything you have experienced, are experiencing, or will experience. There is lots of chatter about getting to a million dollars, but what very few focus on is what it takes to blast through Death Valley and create the multi million dollar company of your dreams. We don't focus on fads, tricks, or shortcuts. We focus on solid foundational business principles and data [00:01:00] that deliver results. This is the consulting for contractors beyond a million dollar podcast. So welcome to the podcast, Carl. Thanks for being here.
Carl: Scott, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this for a few weeks now.
Scott L: Awesome. So start us off by telling us a little bit about your journey, how you got here, tell us about your early adult life. And, you know, I know you did some work in the sales arena there. So just give us a overview of how this all started.
Carl: Yeah, in my early days, Scott, I was, an aspiring musician and I learned it. I learned that, Scott, I did everything backwards. I went from being a thriving musician to a starving salesman.
Scott L: That's unique.
Carl: It is unique. Usually it's the other way around. You know, it's the starving musician, right? That has to go find a job. But I was actually doing pretty good. And my father, who I always looked up to, [00:02:00] suggested that, you know, it was time to get serious about a career. and he had the foresight to realize that I probably went about as far as I was going to go in music.
And I needed to make some real money. I took a job in sales and realized very quickly I was very bad at it. that having a personality was not enough to ensure success. but, you know, when I was, taking my first job, they sent me away for two weeks for sales training. And, you know, when I saw the guy up on the stage delivering the training, I said to myself, that's what I'm gonna do.
Scott L: No kidding.
Carl: Yep. Yep. I sold insurance door to door, excellent 40 and 60 insurance policies with a company called, combined life. And, I did that for a year and I was fortunate. I got turned down to, [00:03:00] a lot of great information at the time in the eighties. There was a lot of new things, you know, starting to percolate its way up.
NLP being one of them, that I immediately kind of latched on to and, you know, just love the whole training and development field. and, in the nineties I had worked my way up to a VP of sales. I had, About 16 people working for me. and in 1994, we were Inc. Magazine's second fastest growing company in the United States.
We were growing at a rate of about 5, 000 percent a year, which enabled our president, Sherry, to sell the company. so we ended up selling the company to a firm out of Chicago. I'm sorry, out of San Francisco. And, you know, it wasn't probably five months later, we had the FBI kick in the door, come in and [00:04:00] close our business down completely.
we had actually sold the company to some bad people.
Scott L: Okay.
Carl: myself out of work. And, one of the guys that I was buying sales training from said, why don't you come sell sales training? And I went. Well, you know, Hempton Hawd talked to my wife, so I started selling sales training, and I showed up on my first day at work, I'll never forget, it was July 3rd, because the next day was July 4th, and I said to Al, I said, Al, I'm here, I'm ready, when do I get to start training, and Al says, Carl, come here, let me show you something, and he takes me out into this empty classroom, I love it, And he says, you see all those chairs?
I go, yep. He goes, as soon as you fill them, you can start training. I go, Al, that sounds a lot like sales. He goes, exactly. He goes, we are a sales training organization, [00:05:00] first and trainers second. Okay, how do I get started? So he gave me a phone book and said, start calling people out of the yellow pages. And I just started cold calling people. I started with the Z's because nobody ever called anybody with a Z.
We worked our way backwards. Yeah, you know, it was kind of the idea was that, you know, everybody quits around D when you're cold calling. And I committed, I, You know, and, you know, I learned the hard way, old school, you know, just dialing for dollars, a lot, of rejection and, had to find some ways to, you know, creatively reframe what the objection meant and probably one of the best things I ever learned.
And this is great if you've got commercial guys out there who are trying to, trying to develop some new accounts and stuff, we always set a goal to have like 10 no's a day. That was our goal. You know, get your 10 no's and then stop. [00:06:00] And a funny thing happens when you're looking for no sky, you stumble in by accident to a couple of yeses.
Scott L: Is, it that something? Yeah.
Carl: Yeah. and it was like, Oh, I like, this. you know, as long as I can get a few yeses, I can deal with some no's. And it was probably, you know, it was in a field where many of us were called, but very few survived it. And, you know, I was kind of lucky that way.
Scott L: Awesome. All right. I'm taking notes here cause you're, there's a lot of good stuff here. So I want to keep going. I don't want to stop you, but I'll, interject later. So you did that and had some success or what was your next step then?
Carl: Well, I would say some success. I'm looking back now having some perspective. I was probably a lot more successful than I gave myself credit for, you know? and, so I did that for about three, four years. the guy who brought me in decided he wanted to sell it. At the [00:07:00] time I was in Albany, New York.
And, the nickname of Albany, New York is Smallbony. Small, Smallbony. We are the capital of New York. So there's a lot of institutional business here, but business, not so much. I went down to Philadelphia, got to spend a couple of years working with my mentor and, watched a pretty amazing guy operate and learned a lot.
2000, I, decided to, venture out on my own. I didn't want to share my, you know, I was doing all the work. Finding the business, closing it, training it, and giving away half the money. It just economically didn't make sense to do that. Even though, you know, I was, learning a lot. And, so I went, on my own, and, grew my own business, right up until about 2010, and then, between my parents and [00:08:00] stuff, we, my wife and I decided it was time to come back home.
You know, after 17 years in Philadelphia, we came back home and, I took, I started out working a job again and realized very quickly, Scott, I'm a terrible employee.
Scott L: Knowing you a little bit, that doesn't even shock me slightly.
Carl: And I figured it wouldn't, and I was terrible. I was terrible, you know? And, 2016, I decided, you know, it's time to, you know, it's time to reopen the business. COVID hit and, I looked around and it seemed like most of my business was coming from my old painting clients, you know, from, 2005, in fact one of my clients, I'm now like, it's the second generation I'm working with.
And guys that used to work for him have gone off and worked in other parts of the country. And now they're sending me their sales [00:09:00] people. you know, and, guys like you, who, you know, you and I, our paths crossed what probably 2004, 2005, six, somewhere in that era. And, you know, here we are on a podcast together.
Who knew?
[00:09:13] The Importance of Sales Training
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Scott L: Yeah. Who knew? Yeah. Excellent. if I was to give you the mic, which you already have, tell me, your philosophy of sales or why do people need sales training and, you know, What keeps people from thinking, used car salesman? You know, what's your philosophy? why, do people need your services?
And why do you know, why do you do this?
Carl: Why do I do this? Oh, that's what they need and why I do it. Wow, that's that's a good, that's a deep question for a Monday.
Now I know how my clients feel when I
Scott L: Yeah, there you
Carl: hot seat, Scott.
Scott L: we'll start with, why don't you just start with this? What, [00:10:00] why do you think people would benefit from a sales trainer?
Carl: So I can tell you from experience that, most people out there Don't have a real sales system, at least in our world, working with painting contractors, they don't have a sales system. They go out and they sell by the seat of their pants. And oftentimes they're coming in, they're sort of looking at work, spitting some features and benefits out.
And then hoping they get sales. And you know what it worked for a few years there when, there was more business out there than there were people to fill the work, people got fat and dumb and lazy and, and now they're just late. Now they're just dumb. they fattening more, you know, leads and leads have dried up.
So, people have to compete. And, what I've come to realize is that. [00:11:00] in the residential trades, especially, and even more so in the commercial trades, is there's nobody, out there is being trained in how to present a value proposition for the customer. In other words, the people we work with, Scott, tend to have real businesses with real cost.
So they can't compete with the guy that doesn't have, you know, chuck in a truck. You can't compete with that, but on price, you can't compete on price. So the question is, if you're not competing on price, what are you competing on? And, if that's, you know, if that's service and quality, then that's not enough to say, well, we offer service and quality, which is what.
Quality and service companies say we offer good service, good quality, right? What does that mean to the customer, right? What does that, how do we put that in terms the customer can relate to that? And that's why people, in our industry need sales training. They need to learn [00:12:00] how to communicate the value proposition.
And, ask better questions and, actually have a structured call where, you know, we're going out, we're going to sit down, we're going to talk face to face for maybe 10 minutes. Then I'm going to look at the work, then we're going to give you a price. And then I'm going to tell you why we're a good fit for you.
And, but if we don't sit down and ask those questions and find out what's really driving the customer, people buy emotionally, we all know that. The question is how do you uncover what those dominant emotions are and how do you show somebody that what we do fits exactly what you want most if we don't take the time to learn about them and what's driving them.
Scott L: Yeah, I love it. So just let me pause here. And for those listening, highlight a couple of things that Carl just said that are gold. Okay. the first thing is that, during the good years, people were just [00:13:00] selling, what he called features and benefits. And what we know is those are things that, you know, like he said, quality, right?
How, many people come into a sales call and say, just want you to know we are not quality. We are not insured. We don't use good products. I mean, those are things that are baseline and we don't even think hardly worth mentioning because everyone is, has that. selling features and benefits, worked because, as Gitimer says, you showed up, you were breathing, and if you gave them an estimate, you're going to get one in three.
And, some, companies said, Oh, you're successful, we'll keep you.
But then when it got rough, that wasn't good enough. And the second thing Carl said is most people don't have a system, that starts at point A, all the way to either a yes or a no.
And by the way, a no is okay because as he referenced earlier, just, doing his cold calls, he wanted to get to 10 no's right? Well, if anyone stops at two, they never get to the, [00:14:00] the chance to have the accidental yes. Right. So the idea of a "no" is okay. And I think sometimes we think that, we need a yes every time.
And, that's not necessarily the case so, that people don't have a sales system is awesome. So great stuff.
Carl: And the other thing, Scott, too, to build off what you said is customers don't want to be sold today. They don't want to be sold, you know, and, so what they do is they keep salespeople at arm's length. And, in order to take that wall down, you really have to take the time to build very strong rapport and strong trust.
I mean, customers inherently mistrust contractors. You
Scott L: Yeah. So you've touched on it, but just give me a little traditional, paint contractor sales, you know, the one that, we all abhor and makes us cringe. What's the, what is their current system, if there was any?
Carl: You mean, the mean, paint [00:15:00] contractors?
Scott L: The contractor, yeah.
Carl: Yeah, you mean the, can I have, can I use salty language? Are you going to edit this out later on?
Scott L: All right, can we do a PG version?
Carl: Okay, I can make that work. So, I say that they show up, they throw up, they screw up, and I have a much better euphemism screw up,
Scott L: Yes.
Carl: And they follow up. Right? you know, and, they lose, control of the sale and never really make the sale, you know, and I always say that most, good salespeople, the good ones, I'm talking about the good ones that want to get better, very rarely do they do anything wrong.
It's that they don't do enough things right,
Scott L: Yeah.
Carl: They don't know what those things are, and that's all because they don't know what they don't know.
Scott L: Yeah. [00:16:00] one of the things, what Carl's talking about here, I call that really more of an estimator. They, the salesperson has the system and asks good questions and has a system, whereas an estimator shows up and says, show me what you want painted. I will give you some kind of written or electronic estimate.
That's an estimator. That's not a salesperson. A salesperson understands what the buying criteria is, how to understand and read the customer and if they can deliver what they're looking for, deliver it at their price. That's a salesperson to me. Agreed?
Carl: Yeah, and, I'll go a step further and a real good salesperson also recognizes when the criteria of the buyer doesn't match the offer.
Scott L: Yeah. Yeah. Love it.
Carl: gets out of there, gets, you know, go, you know, you're, better off working with somebody else.
Scott L: Yeah. So earlier you mentioned NLP give us a quick [00:17:00] overview of that.
Carl: Well, you know, it's, ancient history now, but back in the 80s and 90s, it was pretty cutting edge stuff, but NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming, and it's the study of how people take in information through their five senses, and then make meaning of their experience through the use of language, right?
And then how we react to that meaning, which are the programs that are automatic, unconscious, and conscious. Programs that sort of run in the background. So NLP gives us sort of a way into understanding what somebody's experience is. And a way to use language, the structure and sequence, the way we talk about what we do, so it kind of matches the way somebody thinks about purchasing services.
So when we can, better match how your customer comes to that decision, you're going [00:18:00] to create that slight edge that's going to give you a real advantage in the marketplace.
Scott L: Yeah,
Yeah. So could you give me one example of that, you know, that we, so people can understand exactly what you're saying.
Carl: buyers that are auditory and some buyers that are kinesthetic.'
And I find most of the people know that, but they don't know what to do with it. You know what I mean? The other thing is you always want to know is all behavior is based on pain or pleasure. Is your customer moving towards a result they want, or are they moving away from a problem they don't want to repeat?
So one of the things we always have our clients do is we call it the pain gain value proposition. And let's find out a little bit about what has their experience been in the past with, professional services. You [00:19:00] know, it's been good, been bad. You know, if you've been around, if you've been around for a while, you've hired somebody on the cheap or really screwed up, you know, and probably have left you with the, taste in your mouth that, you know, you get what you pay for, which is true.
You get what you pay for. You know, when you buy cheap, you get unorganized, unprofessional, and, mismanaged, projects that eventually get done. Sometimes half assed, sometimes not, you know, clean, sometimes not neat, sometimes you gotta have them back two, three times to get it done right, but when you buy quality, you know, you're getting, an entire company dedicated to your positive experience. And that's huge.
That's huge. And that's kind of the way we try to get our clients to think about it is there's a value in that.
C4C: Well, we are about halfway through this episode of the beyond a million dollar podcast from consulting for contractors, [00:20:00] and we still have some great content left for you before we get to that, though, I wanted to let you know about some resources that are available to you via the show notes. You'll find links to our website, social media outlets, and highlights of this show.
You'll even be able to schedule a discovery call with Scott and our team to find out how consulting for contractors can help your contracting business. It's very low pressure. We'll ask you just a couple questions, see what your current situation is, and then get you started toward the contracting business of your dreams.
The best part about it, it's completely free. So just click on the link in the show notes, or you can visit our website@www.consulting the number four contractors.com and reach out to us there. Again, that website is www.consultingthenumberfourcontractors.com. Now here's the remainder of the show. [00:21:00]
[00:21:00] Painting Contractors' Selling Strategies and Techniques
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Scott L: So let's shift from the system that most people are using and let's talk about a system that would be better, or if it's fair to say your system.
Carl: Which is absolutely the best selling system on the planet for painting contractors.
Scott L: Without question.
Carl: You know, if you don't believe me, just ask me. But you know what? In all fairness, Scott, right? If you don't have conviction in what you sell, if you don't believe that what you're selling is of the highest quality, and then you shouldn't be selling it, right?
Or go fix your conviction. So I believe in what I do. And I've also seen what its done for people. You know, it's, there's very few examples of people that have applied what they've learned and failed. They're, you I can't think of any, you know, generally it, you know, if you work the system, the system works.
And it's, really going in [00:22:00] and establishing an agenda, a mutually agreed upon agenda, right? We're not strong arming customers. We are trying to ask questions and do things that are in their best interest and, help the customer understand through the strategic use of questions that what you really want most is not a cheap price, but what you really want most is a good quality job by somebody who's going to show up when they're gonna, somebody's going to deliver what they promise, and it's going to be there to answer any questions you have, clean up when they're done.
And, provide a really good warranty so that if anything does go wrong, you know that they're going to be back to fix it. Because they're not looking to get your money. They're looking to get your business. And that's a longer term, that's a longer term relationship. It's not as transactional. So. it's a, very, it's very systematic how [00:23:00] we go through that and how we uncover what's most important to the client and then take some time at the end to present very, persuasively.
And, you know, we all know that people buy emotionally and defend it with logic and reason. But nobody knows how to sell emotionally. They don't understand how to tap into those emotions and get the customer to understand that the emotional experience they're going to have is far going to exceed a cheap price.
Scott L: Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the things that you teach clients that are not normal or maybe they should be normal, but you know. I'm thinking about on the way call, I'm thinking about the pre engineered agreements. Take us through some of these things.
Carl: Walking in a setting, setting an agenda and setting an agenda that's mutually beneficial. Taking control of the sale as opposed to [00:24:00] following the customer. And also I think Scott, what I'm finding is probably the most unusual, which is a big surprise. I kind of, after about two years, I've kind of realized now that people aren't doing this is there's no formal presentation of the offer.
I'm not talking about the written estimate. I'm talking about, here's what we're going to deliver. Here's the main feature. Here's why that feature is important. And here is the, experiential and emotional benefit of that feature. And, putting that in terms of, you know, experience.
You know, it's like one of my, one of my famous sayings are, you know, Hey, you know, imagine you come home from a hard day at work and you look at your house freshly painted. As you realize you have the most beautiful home in the neighborhood, just then a neighbor walks by [00:25:00] and says, Scott, your place is looking great.
You're making the rest of us look bad here. Slow down, buddy. Your place is looking awesome. My wife's now bugging me. Who'd you have paint it, right? You know, when you can put the customer and get them to picture that's the experience they're going to have. Game over.
Scott L: Yeah, talk to us a little bit about pre engineered agreements. What does that mean? How are they used and why are they important?
Carl: so pre-engineered agreements are pre right? So, pre meaning, meaning you have to, agreement, you know, engineered is something you, you engineer, you design it. So you wanna create these agreements in advance, you know? And, one of the ways that you create that is by asking, you know, if we were to do this for you, what would we be able to expect in return?
And it's based on, [00:26:00] it's based on the notion that you are providing a service when you do an estimate, you're providing a service. What goes into that estimate is not free. It's not free, right? Doesn't, it's free to the customer, but your knowledge, your expertise, your time, your attention, all those things go into your estimate.
And as a salesperson, you have rights just like the customer has rights, and you have the rights for ask for something in return for that. And that's called consideration, right, out of basic business law. If I do this for you, in consideration of that, Would you do something for me? Right? And that something maybe, you know, Scott, if you decide to go with someone else, you know, would you do me the courtesy of having a quick five minute conversation to help me [00:27:00] understand, you know, what went into that decision so we can improve our sales and marketing.
So you want to get something in return. My stronger clients will ask for a decision. They'll say something like, you know, I'll be more than happy to provide you a free estimate. If you like what we offer you, you know, if you don't like what we're offering, I assume you're going to tell me no.
Would that be fair, Scott? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, if you like it. Would you be in a position to tell us whether or not you're going to move forward with us? I'm okay with yes. I'm okay with no. But can we avoid the typical, you know, I don't want to chase you. I don't want to be a pest. Just, if it's going to be a no, just tell me it's no.
Scott L: Yep, that is one of the concepts, one of the Several concepts that I've learned through Carl's training that is amazing. If. You have salespeople that say, um, I [00:28:00] just can't get the customer to answer my call, or I can't do this, or I can't get them to do that. It's because you failed at this step.
I think we're uncomfortable doing what Carl just explained, which is, hey, it's okay if it's a no, but, will you make a commitment to me to tell me and to answer my call? And even better is to, Make an appointment at that moment to say, could I call you next Thursday or would Friday be better so that they're conditioned that this is going to happen?
and it's also a reason why I advise people to call and not use email because, I have people that email me 5, 000 times, am I going forward? And it's very easy to blow off your email and sometimes, and by the way, I am your client. I [00:29:00] sometimes want your service, but I'm a little bit bummed at the price and I need a little love.
I need a phone call. Hey, Scott, I know it's a little more than you wish, but we are going to blow it out of the water. You're going to love it. Let's move forward. And then I go. Okay, right, I need that, but an email can't give me that, you know, hey, you're putting this effort, you're doing this follow up, you're, actually fulfilling the agreements we made, which is, which is, helps me think that probably, since you're doing these things that you promised, you're probably going to do the job like you promised.
But when you send me an email, I'm like, they've got a huge automation and I'm just going to ignore them forever.
Carl: Even worse, Scott, I see a lot of people prejudge. They think they, a lot of good mind readers out there. Oh, that person's never going to do business. They're never going to pay our
Scott L: I hate that.
Carl: Oh, it's like, how do you know? And, your [00:30:00] job is to sell the value of your offer. You know, it's like, you know, I mean. I don't know, just a lot of people out there just running around trying to take orders.
And what you just said is really important. You know, the number one, you want to get in person. And I tell people, if it's a big sale and it's February, you know, and you're in the northern hemisphere, you know, you know, anything north of, Oklahoma, you know, where we have winters and things are slower, you know, season, your business is more seasonal. Get in person. Go back. If it's a decent sized sale, get back in front of them. So the, most powerful thing you can do is get in front of somebody again. The second most powerful thing you can do is make a phone call. The least powerful thing you can do is text or email.
Scott L: Yeah. Yep. talk to me a little bit of That's fine. Love it. tell me a little bit about, this, [00:31:00] your feeling and how you teach people about money, budgets. You know, it's unpolite to talk about money, Carl. tell, me a little bit about your philosophy and, what, where does the discussion of money come up in a sales call?
Carl: Yeah, there's, two elements to money, right? There's, what you do, and then there's how you feel about talking about it. And, money is something that it's a skill. Talking about money is a skill. It's a behavior and a mindset. Meaning, meaning there's a way to do it that is eloquent and works.
There's ways that don't work, you know, you just can't come out and say, what's your budget, you know, and stop there. If that's, all you have, right, that's your money game. That's your game right there. And it ends there. You know, you know, insanity is doing the [00:32:00] same thing over expecting a different result, right?
It doesn't, that doesn't work. So, first of all, you have to be comfortable with money. It's a mindset, right? And it's an important part of any sale. The other thing too is, I've become a huge advocate of, and added it to all my training now, is price conditioning. is that you have to anchor, this is another NLP term we use, Scott, but you have to anchor people at a higher price than you're going to deliver, right?
And so by the time they hear the price, and we call that, and that's based off of Dr. Robert Cialdini's notion of contrast, right? If you can contrast your number with a higher number, it makes your number seem lower. It just works. The science is there. It's proven to work. So we use a lot of price conditioning to get people ready for the price we're going to [00:33:00] deliver to them.
And we also let people know that we're going to bust our butt to get them the best price we can listen, Scott, you know, you know, I know you said you, you know, you were hoping this would come in around 10, 000 and I'm telling you, it's going to come in between 15 and 18.
And Scott, what I'm going to do for you is I'm going to bust my butt to get this price down as low as I can. I may not get it to 10 and probably won't. You know, I've done three houses like this week, and these are all coming in between 15 and 18. But I think you would be a good client for us, and I know we'll do a good job for you.
So I'm going to work really, hard to get to as close to your price as I can. You love me now. You love me. You know, you love me. I not only am I setting a high number, but I'm also telling you I'm going to work for you on your behalf to get you what you want, right? So now I've got contrast working for me in this [00:34:00] notion of likeability, you know, I'm not going to get into neuroscience today.
But one of the Likeability is such a powerful factor when people are making buying decisions. Carl, you've talked about a few bits and pieces, but just tell me a little bit about why your system works.
Well, great question, Scott. And, you know, I'm asked that quite a bit and it's funny. It's something I have forgotten. You know, I've taken it for granted. I've been doing it for so long, but what I've kind of realized again is that we, employ an adult learning strategy and it's based on providing, we provide our training in small doses.
Right. Small. So it's smaller doses of, training spread out over a longer period of time, right? So it's incremental and then it's reinforced. So what we do [00:35:00] is we deliver, the training in eight to 10 weeks. But then we reinforce it for a year. So, it's like we teach you the words, we teach you all the words and the alphabet and the words right over 10 weeks.
And then what we do is we spend the next year helping you work those things into your sales call. So this notion of ongoing reinforcement. is I believe what really separates what I do from just about anybody else offering any kind of sales training to painting contractors.
[00:35:33] Sales Training and Business Growth
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Scott L: I agree and what I send all of my clients to Carl and I tell them that they should plan on a minimum of a year but I would prefer them to spend two years because there's parts of this that are gonna be uncomfortable, which is role playing, which is real repetition and you know, if you're not great at this, which is why you're probably need training,
you're, you need to master the system. And people ask me, [00:36:00] why can't we shorten this? Because you haven't mastered it. So when someone asks you, an, you know, question, that's an objection, you need to be able to spit this off. You need to go point a or to point B or point C, or maybe this person needs point F.
You need to, there's a lot of things that can happen in a sales call, and you need to master the system, not do the cliff notes. Right? And so that's why I tell people master the system, uh, spend a minimum of a year and we've seen an amazing results for people we sent to Carl and, and I, just recommend them. And the investment is very reasonable in my opinion. for what you get and what you will gain. You're going to get a system that is going to increase your close ratio, and it's going to increase the job size that you close. And so you're going to have both increase in job size and you're going to have an increase in close ratio, in my opinion, and I'm just third party here.
[00:37:00] I'm, I don't even, I don't even get anything from referring you to Carl. I just think he's got a great program and it, and, I just think it's, a wonderful program for for our our industry.
Carl: Thank you. And thank you for your support, Scott. It's meant, you know, a lot to me over the last couple of years. And you know, the other thing too is we're going to train you in the system, but we're also going to coach you how to implement it into your business. So we're there for you.
We're going to, we're going to hold your hand. We're going to lead you through it. And I tell people all the time, I will not work harder at this than you're going to work. You know, you're going to do the work, but I, you know, if you're willing to put in the work, I'm willing to put in the extra time to help you get to where you want to get to.
You know, there's nothing beats a raving fan out there.
Scott L: Yeah. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you wished I had asked or something that you'd like to add before we say goodbye?
Carl: You know, Scott, after we hang up, I'm going to think of about 20 things. You know that, don't you?[00:38:00]
Scott L: That'll be part two then.
Carl: Part two, there you go. You've already got the sequel set up.
Scott L: Yeah. Carl, we'll put all of your information and links in our show notes, but just so you can say it, what's the best way for people to reach out to you and connect with you if they'd like a little more information?
Carl: Yep, they can go to my website, which is ContractorGrowthStrategy. com Also, carl@ContractorGrowthStrategy.com is my email and I think you can even get on my calendar through my website if I'm not mistaken. I think there's, you can, schedule a strategy call. Another thing is we always, Scott, we always do a first call, which is non committal.
There's no commitment required. I know people think of us as sales trainers and we're just going to sell them. We, won't sell on the first call. We will do some qualifying. You make sure it's a good fit, and if it is a good fit, then we'll decide if it makes sense to continue [00:39:00] talking, and if it doesn't, that's fine.
You know, we, don't want to bring anybody kicking and screaming into this that doesn't necessarily want to come.
Scott L: Yeah.
[00:39:10] Don't Go It Alone: Get A Coach On Your Side
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Scott L: More than ever with this economy and some of the weirdness that we're experiencing more than ever I just am convinced you need a system because our clients are still growing to a company, but we're finding that the lead flow is tougher and the job size is dwindling. And so you need more ammunition than ever before. And so if you are struggling with anything along the sales journey, I would at least give Carl a call.
It doesn't cost you a thing. And if nothing else, I believe he will leave that, leave you with something valuable from that call. You know, I think Carl's a great resource. We could talk for hours, there's so much that we could talk about, but this has been a good conversation and gives you a little, [00:40:00] glimpse into what Carl could do for your business.
If you're in a sales role or if you have salespeople in your company, give Carl a call and, let him tell you a little bit more about your, about his system and, see if it's a good fit for you, Carl, I appreciate your time and as always your friendship and what you've done for my clients and for our industry.
I appreciate it.
Carl: Well, thank you, Scott, and I appreciate you having us, and Scott is such a great resource for everyone out there. I've seen what he's done for his clients. You know, I get to work on the back end and I see these guys come to the table. They're more organized, they're more structured, and they're growing because Scott's helping them put all the right things in place.
And if you're not a client of Scott's, you need to be.
Scott L: Thanks. You're very kind.
Carl: Then you can become a, then you can become a client of mine, get with Scott first.
Scott L: Either way, it's all, both are, great.
Carl: There you go.
Scott L: Thanks so much, Carl.
Carl: You're welcome, Scott. Thank you. [00:41:00]