Home Improvement Sales: Why New Reps Are Outselling Veterans
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Summary:
A strong attitude is just as important as sales knowledge when building a successful career in in-home sales.
Focus on your goals, track your numbers, and take control of the factors that can improve your results.
Leave missed sales, one-leg appointments, and other uncontrollable problems outside before entering your next home.
Protect your mindset from negativity and remain committed when sales become difficult.
Accept failure and adversity as part of the price you pay to achieve long-term in-home sales success.
In-Home Sales Success: Five Ways to Protect Your Attitude
New reps are walking in cold and outselling people with 5, 10, 15 years of experience. I'm going to tell you exactly why—and it comes down to one thing most veterans stopped doing.
Does a salesperson have a good attitude because they are selling, or are they selling because they have a good attitude? The answer is yes. 😊
If you do home improvement sales using a one-call close, it’s tough to keep your attitude positive and consistent—whether you just started in this business or have been selling for 20 years. The ability to maintain your attitude is just as important as knowing how to sell and close.
It’s easy to have a good attitude when you are selling, but when you’re not, it’s brutal. If you don’t know how to control it, it becomes a vicious cycle: not selling gives you a poor attitude, which causes you to make even fewer sales.
A lot of the time, attitude is more important than aptitude. When you have both, you become unstoppable.
One example I am sure you have seen is how new salespeople generally always sell. They don’t know nearly as much as an experienced salesperson, but they sell because their attitude is still strong. It hasn’t been beaten down by the job or by the frustration that happens when sales stall.
Everyone knows how important a good attitude is. If there were a pill you could take like a vitamin that gave you a great attitude—while keeping you sober—everyone would take one.
1. Control Your Future in In-Home Sales
The first thing is to understand that one of the most important factors determining your attitude is your vision of the future.
What is happening right now won’t necessarily hurt your attitude. Even if you are not doing well, you can remain positive when you have a plan and know how to change your results. Your vision of the future is still good.
On the other hand, you could be making lots of sales, but if you think it is all luck and don’t know how long you can sustain it, your attitude will be poor.
An important factor in your vision of the future is your feeling of control. The more you feel like you are in control, the better you feel. The less control you feel you have, the worse you feel.
The best ways I know to take control of my future are to constantly improve by learning every day and to have a definite game plan. Know your numbers, track your results, compare those results with your plan, and make the necessary adjustments.
This gives me a positive vision of the future because I am controlling it instead of merely hoping things will work out.
2. Focus on What You Can Control During an In-Home Sales Appointment
The second thing is this: stop wasting mental energy on things you can’t control.
Take responsibility for what you can control and compartmentalize the rest. The things you can’t control include one-leg appointments, sales you already missed, and changes your company makes.
Talking to other people—or thinking, which is really talking to yourself—about these things wastes time. More importantly, it affects your attitude.
When I talk to reps and they say things like, “All I’ve had are one-legs this week,” or, “I haven’t sold anything for three days,” I know they are in trouble. That kind of thinking can only hurt them.
You can’t change it. What good does it do to talk or think about it?
Good reps have the ability to compartmentalize these thoughts. Reps who are unaware of what they are doing don’t, and it hurts them.
It’s like watching professional poker players. They play the same whether they are $10,000 up or $10,000 down. More importantly, you can’t tell by looking at them whether they are winning or losing.
You need to be the same way. I shouldn’t be able to tell whether you are having a good week or a bad week. You should be consistent in how you act and talk.
One trick I used when I had thoughts I couldn’t put away was to pretend they were a dog named Trouble. I would consciously leave Trouble in the car before I went into the home. I would even crack the window a little so he had air to breathe!
That way, I didn’t bring Trouble into the house with me—even though I knew he would be waiting when I came back out.
Another thing that helped me was learning to deal with things the way they are instead of the way I wanted them to be. That mindset alone helped me go from whining to winning.
3. Commit to Your In-Home Sales Career
The third thing is this: quitters never win.
I know you have heard that your whole life, but hearing it and actually living it are two completely different things.
The reps who wash out of this business usually don’t get fired. They quit. Maybe they don’t quit out loud, but they stop pushing, stop believing, and eventually stop mentally showing up.
Sales is hard, and when the going gets tough, it becomes even harder. The way to overcome this is to commit.
Salespeople who take a job while thinking, “I’ll try this for a couple of months, and if it doesn’t work out, I can do something else,” never make it.
In fact, if you were working for me and told me that, I would tell you to stop hurting yourself and quit now. There is no way you can be successful in a job this difficult with that level of commitment.
The people who think, “I am going to do this because if Ron can do it, I can do it—and they are going to have to drag me out of here to stop me,” are the people who make it anywhere in life.
New reps are committed because adversity hasn’t jaded their belief yet. With veteran reps, adversity gradually wears away at their commitment if they don’t guard against it.
Whenever I started a new sales job, all I needed to know was that one person could do it. If someone else could do it, I knew I could do it—and I committed.
Persistence is like courage. Brave people get scared, too. They simply have the self-discipline to move forward despite the fear.
Sales was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I wasn’t prepared for adversity. Things came easily to me—school, memory, and everything else required very little effort.
Then I tried in-home sales. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t just be instantly good at something.
What kept me going was one thing: I was relentless, and I resolved never to quit until I won.
That is what kept me working through the adversity involved in home improvement sales. Once I succeeded, the biggest lesson I learned was that you really can do anything you make up your mind to do.
It was liberating when I finally made it. Make up your mind and don’t stop until you get there.
4. Protect Your In-Home Sales Mindset From Negativity
The fourth thing that helps keep your attitude strong is avoiding the things that bring it down—especially negative people.
Negative people come in many forms. They could be coworkers who aren’t doing well and feel better when they can have a pity party where everyone blames someone other than themselves.
I never understood that. If everything is so horrible, why are you working there?
I have enough problems in my own life without letting someone else drag me down. You need to protect your attitude like you protect your money because, in this business, your attitude is your money.
Don’t let people steal it from you.
Another type of negative influence can come from the people who care about you most: your family and friends.
Unless the advice comes from someone who actually makes a living doing what I do, even well-meaning advice is meaningless.
“How can you work in commission sales?”
“Is this what you’re wasting your college degree on?”
“They don’t give you a company car or a cell phone?”
I understand their concerns, but those comments aren’t helping.
Would you take advice about joining the Army from someone who had never served in the military?
The most important person you need to get on board is your significant other, if you have one. Without their support, it’s going to be brutal.
There is a big difference between coming home late without a sale and finding dinner waiting while someone tells you, “Tomorrow will be better,” versus coming home and immediately hearing, “Did you sell anything today? Why are you still doing this?”
I am not a marriage counselor, but you need to sit down together and work it out.
My explanation was simple: I can get a regular nine-to-five job, make $60,000 a year, and we will have to live on a strict budget. Or you can believe in me and my judgment, and I will make over six figures, never ask how much something costs, and take you somewhere warm twice a year.
You have to understand that your partner’s resistance often comes from fear. The two of you are a company, and it is just as much their responsibility as yours to make sure the corporation doesn’t go bankrupt.
Enough said about that.
5. Pay the Price for In-Home Sales Success
The fifth thing is to be prepared to pay the price in advance.
Before you make real money in this business, you have to accept that you are going to fail—and that you cannot succeed without failure.
Be willing to fail, handle adversity, and put in the time required to learn.
New reps often understand this intuitively. Veterans sometimes forget it. They begin expecting results without putting in the same work they did when they started. That is when the slump hits, and they blame everything but themselves.
Think about it this way: people attend college for four years, graduate owing $50,000 in student loans, and make less than you can make selling home improvements.
You receive three weeks of training, start running leads, and expect to earn high six figures instantly?
That’s not how any of this works.
Nothing worthwhile is easy. Yes, this business is hard—but it is definitely not as hard as being poor.
I always tell people, “If you find an easier way to make more money with less hassle, show me, and I’ll go there with you.”
Thirty-five years later, I’m still here.
That should tell you something.
Five Keys to In-Home Sales Success
To recap:
Control your vision of the future.
Stop burning energy on things you can’t control.
Resolve never to quit.
Avoid negativity—and it usually comes in the form of two arms and two legs.
Be prepared to pay the price in advance.
Do these five things, and nothing can stop you from getting what you want out of this business.
If you’re serious about making more sales and earning more money, check out my full training program, The Art of Selling Home Improvements, backed by a double-your-money-back guarantee.
Happy Selling!
