The Fastest Way To Make More Money Doing Home Improvement Sales
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Summary
Every sales call should earn commission or pay tuition. If you don’t make the sale, learn exactly what went wrong so you can improve.
Analyze every no-sale immediately. Waiting until the end of the month or year is too late to fix mistakes.
Track your numbers and objections daily. Patterns in lost sales reveal where you need to adjust your approach.
Adopt the mindset that everyone can be sold. Avoid the “nobody could have closed that” excuse and take full responsibility.
Get feedback and stay committed to growth. Continuous improvement is the fastest way to boost your sales and income.
The Fastest Way To Make More Money Doing Home Improvement Sales
After being in over 16,000 homes doing home improvement sales, there is one thing you can and should be doing every day to make money faster. In every sales call, it’s very important that you are either making commission or paying tuition. If you don’t make a sale, obviously that’s bad for you and your company, but if you learn from it and get better, then it’s worth it. If you keep learning from your mistakes and get better and better, then eventually you will be forced to make the sale 😊
Commission or Tuition: Why Every Sales Call Matters
The point is that it is very important when you don’t make a sale to analyze where you went wrong and get better from it. Most salespeople, after a no sale, just go to the next one and forget all about it. That’s wrong. The key question should be, “If I went to a home like this again, what could I do differently so I would make the sale?” You need to get the answer for this, or the no-sale was wasted.
Adopt the Mentality That Everyone Can Be Sold
For this to happen, you have to have the mentality that everyone can be sold. Never fall into the “nobody could have sold that one” trap. It justifies your failure and won’t do anything to make you better, and therefore make you more money. Plus, it puts you back in control instead of being a victim. Your attitude is always better when you feel you are in control than if you feel you are not. It’s not that the leads suck, it’s that I suck. As funny as that sounds, it empowers me and makes me feel stronger because I am in control of the situation.
Analyze Every No-Sale
When managing salespeople, I told them that after every sales call where they didn’t make a sale, that their responsibility was to figure out what they could have done differently to make the sale. Or where they made the mistake. If they knew what they did wrong and where they lost it… Good, but if they didn’t know what they could have done differently, then they were to call me and we could debrief and get the learning experience out of it.
Getting Better Is a Continuous Process
You can and should always be trying to get better. This should be an ongoing process, whether you are new or have been doing this for 20 years. Now, if you are new, getting better may just mean learning to follow the right sequence and stay in control. If you've been doing this for 20 years, then getting better may be on a whole other level. Either way, in our business, getting better means making more money.
Failure Is Just Feedback
To stop getting better is like saying you don’t want to make more money than you are. This is how we learn and become successful. You try something and what doesn’t work, you change and try something else. Failure is just feedback telling you that you did it the wrong way. When you don’t make a sale, it means you did it wrong. Then you need to figure out what you did wrong and make the necessary adjustments. Remember when Thomas Edison was asked why he kept trying to invent the light bulb after he failed 10,000 times, his response was, “I didn’t fail 10,000 times, I correctly identified 10,000 ways that don’t work.” Remember.. everyone who is first started last.
Track and Analyze Your Results Daily
Besides the individual sale, look at the big picture. One thing that will help is that you keep a logbook or some way of tracking your results. Obviously, you want to know your numbers like closing rate, sit rate, average contract price, net dollars generated per lead issued, and things like that, but I always wrote down what happened in the ones I lost.
Identify Patterns
“Wanted to get three estimates,” “thought our price was too high,” “wife killed the sale”. I wrote down what happened and where I thought I lost it. “failed to get wife involved,” “didn’t’ price condition effectively,” etc. Also, I wanted to see if there was a pattern happening. “Wow the last 5 leads I missed all said that they wanted 3 estimates what’s happening here.” That way, I could make my adjustments.
Find the Lesson in Every Objection
If you wait until the end of the month or even worse until the end of the year to analyze your results, it’s too late.. Any changes I made then would be reactive vs tracking on a daily basis, and allowing myself to become proactive. I could adjust as it was happening vs just counting the chips at the end of the game. Plus, by the end of the year, it’s too late, and I have already lost all the money by not making the changes sooner.
Awareness is Key
Lots of times, if you look at the final objection, you can easily spot where the learning experience is. “They thought it was going to be half and didn’t think it was worth it.” Means you need to work on your price conditioning. “They thought they could get the same thing for from anyone else for less money”. Means you need to work on building value and selling your company in a way that differentiates you from other companies.
“They never made snap decisions” meant I needed to work on the close and learn to bring it to the money better, or it could be that in that situation, they really just didn’t want it and were giving me the brush off. Which meant that I failed to build enough need and desire, and needed to learn to sell the product better. “They didn’t want to do anything for 2 years” meant that I didn’t bring it to the real issues, which were that they couldn’t afford it right now (affordability), or I failed to create urgency in the needs analysis to get it done now. In most cases, it would be the affordability, because if it were free, would they still want to wait two years?
The point is you need to really analyze what happened and which doors you left open so you can get better. You learn from your mistakes, and the first step is to be aware of them. Just being aware of the mistake will train your mind to be better next time. Remember, the first time it’s a mistake, but if you keep repeating them, it becomes a decision.
Get Feedback From Someone Experienced
In most cases, it helps if you have someone experienced to help you. They can spot things you didn’t. You need another perspective because the reality is that a lot of times, you don’t know what’s happening, or you would have changed it already. You have to be open-minded to what changes you can make instead of being defensive about why it really wasn’t your fault. Taking responsibility is another key to getting better and makes people more receptive to helping you. Who would you want to help more, “it’s not my fault they just wanted a free estimate” vs “tell me what I could do so this won’t happen to me again”? Plus, if you don’t take responsibility, why would you even want to change, since it “wasn’t my fault”
Commission or Tuition: Your Path to Higher Income
So remember… If you don’t learn from your mistakes, then the experience is wasted. You didn’t make commission or pay tuition. Doing this simple thing of analyzing and tracking every no sale you have will accelerate your learning curve, and your sales will skyrocket. Not to mention your income.
Now, if you like this type of post, check out the article on why “Failure is Good in Sales” or these posts on Closing.
Happy Selling!
