This morning, I was reading in Sales EQ, by Jeb Blount and something he said hit me square between the eyes. I remembered how I shut off the valve of prospecting and putting more sales into the pipeline at one low point during the solar business years.
I remember being in my parent’s kitchen and somewhat boasting to dad about how I had so much work that I was turning people away. That I was not taking on any more new clients or giving out proposals because I was just so “covered up”. I was hurting and little did I know but he could see the death of my business by looking at the dried up and shut off outlook of my sales funnel.
Imagine being in the bottom of a ditch, the lowest point of a valley. I was there. I thought that if I could just actually complete the installation of these two client’s projects that it would pull me out of the ditch. I had sold both clients on the idea of letting Warren Solar actually do the installation. So, I didn’t need to go and sell more clients at this point, I had months of work that needed completing. I had done a fantastic job of selling….well, as I write this, I am reminded that I took the lowest bidder position with the highest quality products too.
So, I am not going to call it fantastic selling at this point. Lets just say that they signed up for that deal. Lowest price of all my competitors with the same or better equipment than my competitors. Their chances of losing were super small and they took it because at the time of me signing them up, I was confident and knew we were going places with this new solar business.
One thing that I didn’t realize until it was too late, was that these two clients of mine were ruthless, seasoned businessmen who came across early in the process as more of mentors to me. Towards the end of the deal though, I was scared shitless. I worried about them showing up to my house. They both were talking to attorneys and I was staying up at night fearing that I was going to lose everything including my house.
I’ve been trained to focus on the bottleneck. The bottle neck at one point was the installation process. I was so in the thick of my addiction and desperate for cash to survive that I had convinced myself that the best thing to do in that moment was to focus on closing the deals out that I had sold and committed to already. You see, at this point, I remember having the Greenville residential and commercial solar job going on as well as this father and son combo client job in Aiken needing to get going and I was on the verge of a breakdown.
The “Universal Law of Need” according to Jeb Blount says:
The more you need something, the less likely it is you will get it. when all hope for survival rests on one, two, or even a handful of accounts, win probability plummets. Desperation is a disruptive emotion and a sign of low Sales EQ. When you are desperate, you no longer focus your thoughts on what is required for success. Instead, you focus on what will happen to you if you fail. The result is lowered self-esteem, lack of confidence, palpable fear, irrational behavior, and poor decision making. In this state stakeholders sense your desperation. They naturally repel salespeople who are needy, desperate and pathetic. Instead, they gravitate towards sales professionals who exude confidence. When you reek of the foul stench of desperation, people don’t guy from you.
Sales EQ, p38
What I did to try and get out of the hole was to just focus on the installations. I believe that if I would have tried the “easy does it” approach and grew slow and steady, instead of trying to grow with credit cards, lines of credits and by using all of the cash in our emergency fund that things would have been much different.
I was able to get a loan from the back based on having these contracts. They offered me 1/2 of the entire contract so that I can get the equipment. At the time, I sold the banker on the idea that “the only problems that I have are money.” Growing up, dad used to say “Son, If money is your only problem…you aint got no problem.” He would pause and say “If your ideas are good enough that you are only left with a money issue, then someone will invest in you and your ideas.” I convinced, or sold, the banker on that. I told him “If I just had the money to buy the solar panel, inverters, and wire, then I’d be set. I could install everything and get paid for it. I could return the money back in no time.” He said lets do a 6 month interest only loan. “6 months! absolutely, I can have you the money back in probably 2 months.”
I got the money for the panels and inverters for the Greenville jobs. One client, two jobs. One installation was on his house and the other was on his business. Two applications for Duke Energy. Two types of installations that I had never done before. One was on a flat TPO roof. One was on a sloped old home. I remember sitting in the client’s office and him saying…”you know, I was talking to your competitor and they really want my business too. They said that the best panels on the market are LG solar panels and that they could install them for X price.”
“I can match that.” I said. I didn’t even shop the prices. I just jumped to it and said that my overhead is lower so I must be able to do it for whatever price he says. I didn’t even look into it. He could have been feeding me a crock of shit and I took it, bite for bite. “Sure, if you sign today, I can change that to LG solar panels.” That was the downward slide behavior that helped me get to the bottom that much quicker.
LG panels were about double the price of the panels that I had quoted. Not to mention that I had to start over on the Duke application process because the panels changed, the watts changed, the inverters then had to change. This would set me back from getting to this chicken farmer in Aiken and his son’s project in the time frame that I had promised him.
When I was in the kitchen that afternoon boasting about how I was not taking any more clients, I went on to get an attaboy from dad by telling him how I had convinced a banker to back me. I told him that I had gotten a loan for 1/2 the solar contract so that I could buy the panels and equipment. He got real quiet and just cleaned up the dishes. He later told me that that freaked him out. He said that I had so much riding on one job, then the next job, then the next job that if one failed…the whole thing would crash and burn. That is exaclty what happened. When the Greenville job started to get off schedule and off course, it effected the Aiken job…when the Aiken job wasn’t happy and working out…it was over. All over.
The Universal Law of Need was in full force. I needed them to work and the clients could tell. There was no upselling. There were to be no change orders. It was over. They knew that I needed them desperately and I had the stench, rotten smell of need. I had to hire an attorney to help me get out of both deals without completing a single one of them.
