Ep 314 - 3 Secrets to Turning Your Inspections to Sales

0:04 Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to yet another episode of Electricpreneur's Secrets, the Electrician's Podcast. I am your host, Clay Neumeier. With me, as always, my esteemed co-host, joseph the robot, the wizard of options, lou Canney, here's with us. Hey, listen, guys, we are just a couple of master electricians with business addictions here and ready to serve, serve, who Serve you, if you're in the service electrical game, serving homeowners at your peak level, and we're here to help you simplify your pricing, master your sales and absolutely deliver premium level electrical home service.

0:45 Joe, how are you doing today, brother? Man, I am feeling really, really great. I've been so dialing into the inspection process and digging into it. I've been in absolute flow state all week. It's been wonderful. Awesome man, I'm super pumped for this. As you know, I am in Mexico. Currently we are not going live with this one, but it is a new weekly episode and I'm so, so happy to be here with you and diving into this, because I know you've been, as you said, excited about this inspection process and, following last week's action post where we gave away our club membership outline, which helps entrepreneurs not only simplify this club membership thing We've talked about that a couple of times get away from the passive income, get away from all these crazy ideas about different tiers and levels and just serve at the highest level.

1:30 Our club membership helps them do that, but it definitely includes an annual inspection. Can we just touch on why that's important to have in there in the first place? So the annual electrical safety inspection does a couple of things for us. One, it establishes that we have a good gauge of their home's electrical system so that as we work with them long-term we can say well, we're already intimately familiar with your home. So, naturally, who would you call for other services? The person who already knows your home backwards and forwards and has gone into it and understands it. Or you're going to call someone else who's going to spot, fix something. So there's one angle for that. The second is is that it's a number one way you can defeat slow season.

2:11 Whenever your slow season is, you simply pre-schedule these inspections for those times. The main benefit behind that is the best person to sell your services to is the one who's already seen the value in purchase before. They already purchased a membership at some point. So you have the benefit of now doing an inspection and having another offer. The last thing why we do the inspection is another way of cutting losses. There are some situations where you can actually use your membership to supplement a low ticket offer where you may not have otherwise seen value. But you recognize that this is a good client to take a gamble on and you offer them that membership and now, by being able to come in and do the inspection, you can find things or address things that you otherwise would have had the opportunity to do so.

2:59 So, realistically, it's an incredibly powerful tool, providing you know how to leverage it and how to use it. Absolutely, man. All great reasons One of my favorites for this club membership, if I can just add in there. You know, when you identify that top buyer, that person who's truly your VIP, they want the platinum. And then afterwards the old way of doing it was just waving goodbye after the installation and like hoping hey, maybe we'll make a desperate call back to John later and see if he needs anything else. He just kind of gives me chicken skin. You know, there's a very big difference between calling someone and saying, hey, I just wanted to check in on you versus hey, I'm just calling to confirm your appointment.

3:39 We already have you on the calendar. Is that still going to work for you or would you like to reschedule for another time? It's like I already had a purpose of calling you that the thing you've already paid for, like I want to give you what you've paid for. Is it wrong of me to keep following up to make sure that what you've paid for I'm giving you? And so you've already gotten in place. Yeah, man, you nailed it there. And even like referencing our own team, and one of the rules we have in-house is ABV. We love these little acronyms that just stick in your head, right? Abv just means always bring value. So in every engagement, we have an angle to bring value to that engagement that maintains our brand equity, the equity in that relationship, and these club memberships help with that.

4:20 Without further ado, though, bro, let's jump right into this. Memberships help with that. Without further ado, though, bro, let's jump right into this. Top three things to help you guys be successful with these inspections, whether it's from that club membership or someone just calling for an in-depth inspection for, maybe, a realtor or something where you've got that kind of worked out. I know you've got a few things to help some electricpreneurs today with this man. Your head's been right in it. So please start us off man, what do you think is like the top thing someone's got to know and be able to take some action on here? Well, the first thing that I'd want them to know is that one. You don't have to figure this out yourself. We literally have an absolute step-by-step follow the bouncing ball process for inspection calls, and everything that I'm going to teach you right now is leveraging that process for maximum benefit.

5:08 So, assuming you have the process, this is what you can do and how it's going to serve you. The first thing you need to know is how you can gauge the client's understanding of the state of their electrical systems, like if you know that they know something's unsafe. That's a very different type of call than hey, they're keeping the cards close to the chest and they think everything's fine. So the thing that we do is, in multiple parts in our process, we're asking questions like oh so great, it's. Just, is it safe to assume that the home is perfect, wonderful, so it's perfect? That would mean that you wouldn't have any, and you start listing things like that you could expect, such as hey, there's no unusual smells that are coming from things.

5:51 Or like there are no lights that are flickering any point, there's nothing that's hot that I touch. Like this home is perfect. And then you're already on the right side of the line, because it's either great, wonderful, I'm so happy to hear that or oh, okay, so if I could resolve that, what would happen then? So, being able to gauge and say do you know if something's not right? If they know something's not right, then it becomes a targeted approach of how can we solve that concern. That's number one. Can I just ask what do you see happen if you don't have a good gauge of what they understand about what's right or wrong? Okay. So every electrician right now could probably close their eyes and think of a time when a client lied to them and saying I think everything's great, it was working fine before you got here, or we've never had issues.

6:41 It's like you know the excuses we're running into, right, yeah. Or we've never had issues. It's like you know the excuses we're running into, right, yeah. So when we take the customer's words at face value, it often can lead us in a situation to where we feel like we're pushing something on someone, right? So, let's say, sake of argument, they call me for an inspection, but they recognize that their laundry room light occasionally flickers. Okay, well, would it then justify you getting on the ladder and taking down the fixture and looking at it and, through those extra efforts, like, okay, I'm going to put extra focus on it to look for that problem, direct, recreate it, so that I can solve that emotional concern? If I never knew that your thing was flickering, me digging that hard into it from the customer's perspective might seem less of a service and more of me just trying to find something to sell you.

7:30 So if I know that, you know we can be on the same page and the same team working on the same side of the line versus me just trying to come up with things to throw across on the list. That sounds really important. Oh yeah, oh yeah, for sure. And I hear a bit of like Dr House in there, right, Kind of like okay, I get that there's kind of three sides to every story. There's my side, their side, and then kind of what's in the middle here, what's the understanding between us? that down. So the second thing, then, is the understanding. We need to understand what they're trying to prevent by doing this inspection.

8:11 So we employ something known as the law of motion and we use that in multiple times where we're asking clients while they're moving to get more truthful answers. And one of the things that we ask is so what made you even decide to do this inspection in the first place? Or if it was from a first-class membership, so what made you even decide to do this inspection in the first place? Or if it was from a first class membership, so what made you decide to invest in the service anyway? We want to ask it as casually as possible because I want to hear well, this happened or we don't want this. And these are key words, because if I understand what you're trying to solve and game, all of my solutions can rally behind that, Such as I mean. There's some extreme circumstances, such as like well, my last house, I had a house fire in.

8:55 Now, that's a very extreme and drastic situation, but assuming you heard that, would you now have the gauge or the understanding to be like okay, so we don't want this to ever experience that again. So would it be wrong of me to go the extra mile just to ensure that there's nothing else, Like all your detectors are in place and all the anti-sparks are in place and we have all our safety systems and there's redundancies, Like, would it be wrong, at the very least to invest in that and see if they have everything they need? At least now I know what they're trying to solve right, absolutely. That actually reminds me of Chris Voss the book Never Split the Difference. He talks about a black swan and having that critical piece of information that really changes all negotiations and all proceedings forward and that is something like exactly true to to form there with the black spawn, like knowing that they've felt those pains in the past, is a critical piece of information that you would not want to miss in the rest of this endeavor you're right.

9:59 And the last thing, then, is understanding. This is actually this is gonna be the most important one. So I'm going to highlight this and everyone who's listening really focus on this one. All right, understanding that this call is likely going to be a two call close, but that you still need to present on the first one. And let me explain why that's so important. So, clay, let's say that I come to your home and I'm doing an inspection, right? You don't expect any things wrong In your mind. Everything is good in this home. This is just a general inspection I'm doing right. And then, when I come upstairs from the panel and you say so, how's it looking? And I don't tell you the answer, but I said that I need to meet with you and your spouse. Isn't that like a little questionable?

10:40 Like what are you feeling in that moment? Yeah, a little scared, to be honest, like what's going on. What are you holding? Why are you holding the cards? Exactly Because the thing is. The natural question that customer is going to ask is well, can you tell me what's going on? Is it serious, is it unsafe? And that forces you into a presentation before you have all your cards in hand. So just by not offering it and trying to pull for a two call close, you often end up in situations where the client's pushing you to make a presentation and that pushed presentation often doesn't come out as successfully. So that's the first thing. The second is they weren't expecting something to be wrong. So, as a result, you're presenting things that you found by doing a deep dive.

11:24 Okay, maybe they thought they had a flickering light. They weren't expecting to find an extension cord buried in the wall that's feeding it from the last homeowner that was here, and now the $150 call became 15,000. I don't know, something could be drastic, we don't know. But they're not mentally prepared for that and you can't force that decision either. So we're going to introduce it to the person that's there and then keep in mind that we're training for the email it over, because they're likely going to be in overwhelm or confusion, so they're going to want you to email it. They're going to want to show this to someone. They're going to want to bring someone else involved. We see that coming and, as a result, we specifically trained for those responses and we know how to position it into a two call close, and that's what's going to be so much more effective.

12:14 I see the ball coming before it's even pitched and I'm already ready for it so that it can come out very cool and casual, but also very pointed and focused but also very pointed and focused. I feel like that's what a friend would do, joe, you wouldn't rush that. You wouldn't rush that it just comes back. I mean, you remind me so much of just the two-call-close mentality. To begin with, right, the reason so many aren't doing it in the first place is because they're just guarding their time. But if you really think from that homeowner's perspective, I mean they're worth it, they're worth more than that and I, all I want to do is what what others are not doing, to show my clients, to show those relationships the respect they deserve.

12:59 And what you just said makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, and I've seen inspections go the wrong way before and often it's because the technician is trying to respect their time. And I'm not judging you If you're in the van and you're like well, I've got seven inspection calls a day. How do I do that? The issue might be you have too many calls. We should be treating each call like they're a priority. And that also means that, if I know that if I dropped big, important, unexpected information that costs a significant amount of money, very few people A have the assets to just drop and go, but two have the mental bandwidth to just drop and go. Sometimes you need to let it sit and marinate, but being able to protect your time by saying I'm going to schedule a time to come back so that, instead of this being a wasted hour, this is an invested hour into this client, I'm investing my time into them and they'll return that investment with a successful purchase huge perspective change there.

13:58 Man, I can appreciate that. I can appreciate that for sure. I know there's a lot we could have uncovered on this subject. We discussed, kind of okay, what are we going to boil this down to for today's episode? There's a ton of rules I mean not just on the people's side, but even the technical side to really make the most of an inspection. Do you really feel, though, can you just help us with this, help us get some clarity? Do you really feel there's a ton of opportunities in these inspections? A hundred thousand billion percent. I cannot underline, bowl, italicize. This is a huge endeavor because it showcases a couple of things to your customer. We can even look at it like emotional versus technical, technical.

14:41 Think about the last home you ruined that was perfect, not just like bad, which was the last one that was perfect. The odds are not a lot of them, like, even for those of us who live in brand new homes, like I literally just the other day had to do a major infrastructural change because the builder did the job the wrong way. So, like, when you go into this, you're assuming that you're going to find something, and would your customer be mad for you to tell them about something that you could dress while it's still small? And to speak to that like, okay, yeah, a newer home builder did it the wrong way, still passed inspection right, still got their occupancy permit to move a family in, still had a home inspector go through.

15:28 It's seen multiple professionals and yet these things go missed, exactly guaranteed. That's happening in almost every homeowner's home. There's's something being missed because there's a lot of pieces to this puzzle. So the thing is is that from a technical perspective, every one of us can say there's things to find, but from an emotional perspective, why are we looking in the first place? We're not looking to come up with big tickets, but we will produce big tickets by focusing on emotionally solving problems. If I can make your life better, if I can make you happier, if I can make you enjoy your home more, if I can get you more use out of it, if I can enhance the time you spend with your family through this service that I provide, I've made your life better, both electrically, technically and in quality of life.

16:23 So, solve the emotional concerns, learn your client, and what you'll find is they'll keep coming back because you've done something that no one else has done. You've listened. You've actually listened and through that listening, you were able to create real on-code results, and that's why inspections are so important. They just keep giving and giving and giving. I love what you just said Produce real on-code results, but through solving the emotional needs of your customer and communicating those on-code results in a way that's meaningful and powerful to them. Any electrician can study the code book and then go into a house and find a bunch of off-code items to offer.

17:09 The real magic is in how you offer those things, how you communicate those things and how you make sure it even pertains to the needs, desires or problems of that client. 100%. You got it All right, man. We nailed down a few things here, but, joe, either way I want to stay true to form and a couple of action item. What would you say would be the all-star and the basic on this one, okay. The all-star is the last thing that I mentioned, which is that you understand it has to be a two-call close, right? The reason why I say that's the all-star is because some people won't make that presentation to start with. They'll say, well, it's going to be a two-call close, so I should just hold my cards until I can do it.

17:49 Not the right idea. I've tried it that way. Trust me, I love two-call closes. I try to make everything a two-call close, but maintenance calls and inspection calls particularly need to be solved right then and there. So the all-star is resisting that knee-jerk reaction to try to pull on the call and instead try to go for on the first one, even though you know there's a secondary result. So, that's all started off the top. The basic, then, is knowing what to look for and being willing to be open-minded for it. The reason why I say that is because you can go into a home, let's say typical 1950s home.

18:31 You walk into the bathroom and you say okay, I see they've got one point, I see they got one vanity. That should be fine. This is to code, right. That's basic. But what is it lacking then? Well, it probably doesn't have an exhaust system. Okay, it probably doesn't have a backlight for the USB charger, or it doesn't have a nightlight built into it, or there's definitely no heated floors, or there's definitely no light over the toilet, or there may not be a light in the shower. So, looking at it from a technical perspective and saying, can I take what I know now and figure out how I can? apply it. So, even if it's not a code concern, it's an enjoyment factor Boom, wow, man Dropping like it's hot.

19:13 Joe, thank you so much for that man. This has been an incredible, incredible episode. You guys are going to want to listen to this again. You're going to want to take advantage of these few, the top few things to really help you be successful on these inspection calls. This stuff is important, guys. Get the inspections, which means get the club members Do the inspections, and do them in a format that is productive, not just for you and your sales, but for your customers. Take care of people, bring that value. This has been another effort, guys, to help you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. Thank you, joe. See you guys on the next one. And we'd see you then.