What makes a great solar business? How can you learn from the past and prepare for the future? So your solar businesses right? We set out to answer these questions and more. My name is Nigel Marx, and I'm the head of business development at solar analytics. Welcome to great solar business, proudly brought to you by soldiers. Hello, solar friends, and welcome back to another episode of great solar business. This week, we explore more secrets of how to build a great solar business, and in particular the topic of golden rules for effective solar sales. Now, it's probably fair to say that many of you have trade backgrounds or at a minimum don't have degrees or training in sales necessarily. So how do you build a great site, a great solar sales team? How do you arm your salespeople to compete in a brutally competitive environment? Do you need pointy shoes and slick suits to succeed at sales? I often ask myself to answer these questions. I pin down one of the most respected Australian solid sales gurus that I know. Day manager is recognized as one of Australia's leading sales performance coaches with 30 years of experience, and a mix of Yun and a unique blend of sales experience psychology and motivational theory designed to help organizations grow their sales. I have to admit, I've seen many of Dean's presentations. They're genuinely electrifying. And every single time I listened to Dean, I learned something. Dean, welcome to great all the business very kind. And I feel very, very kind shot. Totally, totally my a totally justified, Dean, I must say, you know, I didn't come from a sales background. And so there's always something for me to learn. I I enjoy selling, I love the chase of selling, but I don't have the panache that you do. So it's a it's a it's a joy to have you on here. Now listen, to get started might give us a brief history. Explain to me how you got to where you are and how your experience relates to the solar industry. What can you bring for solar companies?
Yeah, for sure. As you know, for the last almost 25 years, I've been running the world, over 25 countries with the biggest companies in the world, helping them solve the problem of how to sell more of their product, whatever that might be, and deliver amazing customer experiences. And do it in a way that keeps people engaged. And so around about five and a half, six years ago, a good friend got into solar and we started talking about how all the strategies and tips and techniques that I've developed over those years, applied solar, then ran into supply partner so Liam, average supply partners always like to yell out to him, give him a wrap because he got me started on conferences, those conferences led to a lot of one on one engagements with solar companies. And I got quite passionate about the solar industry because I really believe in what you're doing. And I get frustrated when I see the really quality delivers, as in the the installers and the retailers and the electricians who are committed to delivering excellent quality getting smashed by solid bandits who are pulling the wool over people's eyes and delivering absolute crap and destroying what should be a great industry. So that's how I got involved. And it's been, you know, literally 1000s of hours of one on ones and reviewing calls and talking about scripts over those years. And and that's how it started. And these days, I have been putting out quite a bit of training content, there'll be a lot of social coming through in the next year around. This is challenging the solar
market. It is a really challenging market, actually. And I'm gonna go straight off script here just to give you a curveball, but you know, how different is the solar industry to other industries and the challenges that we face, particularly with, you know, the sort of crap solar end of the of the market, it's extremely
different and extremely different, because the barriers to entry are much lower than most people would realize. It blows my mind how easy it is to get in amongst the sole industry, given the risks and the differences in qualities. And there's a lot of money, there's a lot of margin to be made in the industry. And there's not that many. There's not that many markets where you get that combination not that hard to get into and still a lot of money being made. And that tends to attract the bandits. Interesting. That's something I'd never really thought of before to ask that question. But that's that. It's no wonder it's hard. Yeah. Think about you think about, say software sales, right? What a margin but actually really hard to create a high demand product really hard to sell it and so it doesn't attract the bandits. But the other factor is government funding. Look, the one thing that you and I know over the last 20 years, every time government funding is thrown at something, it attracts a pack of people that really don't care that much about the customer and just want to milk the machine.
Yep. Yeah, you nailed it in one there. So listen, I know a lot of a lot of our listeners and a lot of people in the solar industry have come from a trade background, right, they'd typically sparkies or people with those types of trade backgrounds who've sort of fallen into the building, they're converting their business from, you know, perhaps just being focused on install, to actually being focused more on selling and marketing and trying to build their their little solar world. Can a trade person really get good at selling and and what's the number one key to doing that?
Yeah, for the agents? Absolutely. So it's a thing I talk a lot about globally, is the most successful sales people that I've met around the world, the ones that doing eight figure salaries as in commission plus salary is not, I mean, eight figures, not seven figures are the most boring people that are that you've ever met. A lot of people it's a lot of people think that the most successful salesperson is this really Spivey, high contact, high energy, high communication, roll $1, you know, and it's absolute crap. The bottom line is the process beats personality, every time when it comes to scaling things up. And so, you know, if you've if you've learned to trade, and if you've got a mind that analytical enough to have done that, then you can absolutely learn sales, the only thing I can't teach you in sales, is I can't teach you curiosity. And I can't teach you to care enough about other people to go that extra mile and understand them a little bit deeper. But if you've got those two things on board already, everything else can be taught. Absolutely beautiful. What
a great starting tip. So tell me, you've spent I've seen you talk to literally hundreds, probably 1000s now of, of solar people at various different events around the traps. what's the what's the most common problem you see in solar businesses in Australia.
Um, I think it's a lack of skills that cause people to go head to head with the price, you know, the soul then with the cheap price, and when you go head to head on price, the only comparison that the potential customer has is one price over the other. And what the reason that's such a big challenges is it's not easy without clearly defined strategies to differentiate one solid solution from another one, because the bank will tell tell the customer, it's a tier one panel for tier one panel, there's no difference, just trust me, I'll tell you no need to worry about installation, we'll sort that out. And we get out there, they'll tell you, they'll tell you anything they need to. And I'll leave with no remorse in relation to what they've delivered on your roof. Because they know that you're not going to figure it out for probably two to four years. Yep. Um, and so I think the biggest challenge they they face is they get sucked into this price game, and that, that sucks their energy out of them, that sucks the energy out of them, it sets the margin of their business, it takes all the fun out of what should be, you know, a fantastic business and career. And so this week, they need to develop the ability to go toe to toe but change the game so that they can create someone who's focused passionate about and educated on quality enough to say, I'm actually scared of your cheap, quiet. Like, there's just too much risk involved in that. And so that's the that's the challenge. I think most face it takes a little bit of work. But it's a lot easier than I think most people realize
process and getting that story across I that's something something I see all the time is how do you actually get his story across to people? So how can the other one that I just want to ask them there's a few questions before I want to sort of jump into you know, a little bit more about the future and preparing for the future. But very common scenario is, you know, our market has a very small number of very, very large players, and then a long tail of 1000s of small companies. Yes. And is there any way How can you compete? If you're a tiny little company competing with these, you know, leviathans who have multimillion dollar budgets, and and in particular, what sales techniques can be used to survive and to compete successfully?
Yeah, for sure. Look, you've got to know where you can be no matter what your business is. You've got to know what your competitive advantage is. And you've got to double down on strategies that link to that competitive advantage. Let me explain. When I'm talking to a tier two bank as one of my clients like let's talk about a bank of Queensland has some court Bendigo to a lesser extent, and I'm talking about say competing with other people who are my clients as well say a con bank or nav. I always say you are never going to out market commbank or na but you'll never have a big enough marketing budget. You'll never have as big a brand. You'll never be as strong as they are in that space. So don't compete in That space compete where your strengths are. Where are your strengths? Well, your relationship with your community, the fact that you know everybody's name in the marketplace, the fact that people love people who are using you love small, and often as a result of loving, small, don't love big. And so how does that translate into the solar world, but the smaller players have to double down on the difference, they have to deliver significantly better service experiences, make those experiences personal, build a relationship that goes well beyond installation, and generates advocacy have strategies for staying in touch and staying Top of Mind with with the happy customers, they've got that cause those customers be more likely to advocate double down on Google rankings that provide a real level of detail and richness in terms of, you know, the experience that the customer had. So they've got to compete, where they can compete, and they've got to let go of trying to compete anywhere else. And here's the biggie, if you try to provide amazing quality of service, and incredible product and the cheapest price, you will go broke, well, you will go broke. So you're going to double down on where your strength is. And it's not in price. And it's not in marketing, you know, massive, we're big, and we've got the best, it's all about amazing personal experiences, and educating customers to understand the value of and care about the value of quality.
Well, that that, that leads me to the next question that I wanted to ask, and it's this perennial issue of similar but slightly different, but competing against low price, right? Yes. What would be the top three things that you would advise people to do to challenge that, you know, 50 cents of what deal that splashed all over the TV? Which which drives, you know, that the majority of solar installers insane? How do you deal with that?
Yeah, for sure. Okay. So the first thing is, you've got to make an emotional purchase. What most solid professionals fail to do is understand that for most people in the markets, they want to play in the purchase of their home. And everything to do with that home is emotional and highly emotional. So you've got to connect the purchase of the solar system to the same emotions they have about their house. And help them understand that anything cheap and nasty, that they attach to that home, is something that they have attached, cheap and nasty to their identity and who they are and what their friends see. So that's the first thing that really got to focus on, there's just not enough time spent on helping the customer appreciate that this thing is going to become part of their home something that others see something that is unavoidably part of our homes, and sadly, should be emotional that I think the second thing is, is the need to be able to clearly and easily articulate and help the customer understand the differences. Now I can tell you what the six differences are between any solid installation, and I can get 123456 Wow. And if if you can't, then that's a huge part of the problem. Because if you can't easily articulate what the differences are, then you're never going to compete with someone who's better on price because the customer go the easiest price, the easiest difference to understand. And the easiest difference to understand is always going to be price. Yep, yep. And the third thing is, it's not enough to educate someone on what the differences are, you've also have to be able to educate them on why they should care, and how to quantify the extra value. You see, people have to get emotional enough to do something different to just bind on price. And then they have to be able to rationalize it. So there's really three questions that you need to go to answer to sell quality versus cheap in any market. It's one of the differences. Why should I care? And how do I justify paying more you answer those three questions as a result of your sales process. You'll create a value advocate, and ideally, create someone who's scared of cheap. That's what we want. That's what we want. We want people to be scared of cheap. I love that. And this is this is the big thing. It's how do you professionally do that without rushing the competitive because that's the workplace we want to be playing? Yeah. But you know, I can make you scared of any cheap product, if I understand why quality products better and what the differences are. But if you don't have that information, you it's always going to come back to price because it's the easiest comparison. See, I really want to make a point here. People who buy on price are not stupid. on price, you're just looking for the easiest thing to compare. And if that's the only thing they comparing, then you failed to help them understand what the other differences were. It's your failure, not this
here, or here. My This is absolute gold. But we need to take a breather for a sec. Let's take a moment and hear a message from our sponsors.
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couldn't, couldn't have this podcast and couldn't come to wear if it wasn't for the great support from the boys and girls at solidary. Thanks so much for being our sponsors. All right, Dean, we've got our breath pack, let's shift our focus. Now. Because what I really want to do is head to the future, right? I want to build some techniques and learn from you and share the stories from you about how to help solid businesses prepare for the future. So number one, what do you think? What do you predict are going to be the biggest changes that we'll see? And how will they impact on selling techniques in the next year or two? You know, the, what I've seen selling techniques evolve over my 30 years in the solar industry. And there's, you know, there's new flavors. And you know, we're all on social now. And I watched a sales video the other day was it's all about stories, you got to have stories Now, what's coming down the pipeline, right? What's the next thing that you think solar companies are going to need to learn and are going to need to get ready to adapt to
the customer and the way that human beings make decisions has not and will not change? And that's really important, that won't change. But the way that we engage them around that process is changing solid you through a great example. So would you say you know, definitely a company I admire and respect. And if you look at the way that they deliver social, the way that they communicate their message across multiple mediums, the way that they humanize the personalities inside the business, despite the fact they're a big business they come across as being very personable, what you're going to find is, is the bigger organizations are just going to get better and better and better at conveying a really powerful message across a very broad cross section of markets to a lot of people. So they're going to be very hard to ignore if you're in the market for a product. And I think what that means is when they're going to get better in that there of that, because AI is going to help them market more effectively to the right people, Google's only going to get better at putting in front of the right audience, their marketing expertise is only going to get better and better. Because every single ad every single post, they learned something new, and they get better and better. They're going to be as they grow, they're gonna be hiring specialists for each and every area of communication. And so in terms of getting people into the top of the pipe, that's where things are really changing. And I think what that means for the smaller players is that it becomes even more important that they create highly differentiating stories and make it easy for their customers to share those stories in the network. So little things like they need to take a video of themselves talking to the customer out on site about why they're installing something in a certain way and how they hid the conduit, and why they didn't take the shortcut. And what it would have looked like if they hadn't taken if they had taken the shortcut, they need to convey stories that really pronounce that difference, but also include the alive human customer for credibility. And they need to find ways to do that on the run at a low cost and share effectively into the network that might buy from them, as opposed to this mass market that that your story goes to if you try and share it socially. So it's just it's doubling down on the human experience. It's doubling down on the network of the customers you've already served. And it's doubling down on deliberately creating amazing experiences that make it very easy for people to talk to talk about you. You know, that's where they've got to go if they want to maintain margins. And and I really believe maintaining margins is super important because you have to do it if you're going to sell quality, because if you're selling quality, you're never going to sell as much volume. Yep. And so therefore, to maintain absolute quality, you have to have a much higher conversion rate and a much lower cost of acquisition in terms of leads. So they've got to be thinking about, you know, really doubling down on that human experience and amazing customer experiences that cause people to talk about you and demand use of you. Yep.
Yep. And I couldn't agree more with what you said about the fundamentals of the way consumers behave. But But odd to me this over over your, over your time and with your experience in solar. Do you think consumer expectations are going to change over the next year or two, you know, consumers getting the message or getting savea or, you know, what are they going to what I'm going to be asking for in a year or two that that cost that solar businesses need to prepare for,
you know, I wish It's really interesting, I was reflecting on this quite deeply, about four or five days ago, there was a post from Tinder around recycling of panels, and quite an emotive post around the number of panels that are needing to be recycled, the impact on the environment. And the fact that, you know, somewhere, somehow, Australian need to take responsibility for the amount of crap that was allowed to be important was going to end up in landfill. And and if that story happened to me, but then I went, you know what, I wonder, I wonder how many non solar industry human beings contemplating purchasing a product to save money on electricity bill, that that would impact enough to say, I'm going to pay for quality? Hmm. And my reflection was not many. You know, we like we like to think that people would be happy to pay significantly more for products that don't impact the environment, for products that are better for the human race for products that aren't made by people that are getting paid low wages. But the simple reality is, is that whilst we see stories about this stuff, the majority of products sold, doesn't take those boxes. And so I don't know that it will change that dramatically. And that's why I think, actually it is, you have to change the expectations yourself as a result of the way that you sell, and change those expectations to a much higher expectation of quality installation, fantastic looking aesthetics, and high quality equipment, absolute confidence in warranty, etc. The way you sell has to create those expectations. If you want to compete with cheap. Control the expectations absolutely, we need to we need to create the through the way that we sell in the way that we educate people. Because if we want to make people make smarter, solid decisions, we have to make them smarter about what quality is and what crap it's Yeah,
yeah. All right. Yep. No, I got you there. Alright, sadly, we're nearly out of time. But let me let me give you a chance to last question to wrap it all up. If you do Mannix, and God forbid you enter the solar market, because you're going to make it hard for everyone else who I love so dearly. But if you owned a solar business, and you were, you know, building yourself up to get ready for the next year or two, what's the thing you'd be most focused on?
I've been most focused on making sure that my conversion of lead to site visit was extremely high, might be looking to radically differentiate a site visit from myself to anybody else visiting the site, or making a phone call and making promises that they could do it over the phone, I would develop my personal capability and my people's capability in relation to building a strong and deep sense of rapport and credibility rapidly on a visit and educating the customer around what to look out for with cheaper providers. And I would be very, very deliberately figuring out how I could capture moments on every installation through phone cameras, that enable me to send a consistent stream of information out to the marketplace, through my website, through my social that what we're doing is different to what you're going to experience if you choose to buy cheap. Those things I care about,
you know, a recurring theme through all of this, to me is how critical communication is in all of this, right?
Yeah, the people skills are really important. And I think, once again, you can systemize and radically improve the human interaction, if you can just understand the science behind what a great human interaction is. Does that mean scripts? Does it look as literal as that? Yeah, at the beginning, yeah, the bottom line is, is it's like, Look, going to a sales situation with a script is like going into cooking a cake without a set of instructions. Mm hmm. And, yeah, there might be one in 10, that can figure it out. But nine out of 10 are gonna fail miserably, despite the fact they had all the ingredients. So it starts with scripts, but then scripts and structure should then give your people the freedom to be themselves. And know that the way they're interacting, the way they're engaging is increasing the probability of people accepting what they got to say, and decreasing the probability of people resisting
magic magic. Dain. There is something in there for every solar business to contemplate. Like I said, Every time I listen to you, you give me great food for thought on not an intrinsic sales guy. But I do enjoy it. And I love the chase and there's always something in it. Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. Absolutely tonight. Good idea for listeners. I'm sure if you google Dean Mannix, you will find him and he's out there and having a great time helping all sorts of his Oh We've run out of time. There's my time. So friends, that's a wrap. My name is Nigel Morris and on the head of business development at solar analytics, I hope you picked up some tips on how to build a great solar business and look forward to speaking to you again.
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