It has been pretty exciting, the journey of of doing this and being a entrepreneur, having the opportunity to grow and do what I do and do what I love. I started the company twenty six years ago, and I always call it my forty three dollars and a dream story. Meaning that when I started my company, I only have forty three dollars to my name. And, the industry that I came from was actually network marketing, and I did that for a while. I loved it. But when I started seeing that there were some ethical issues with the company, as with anything, my heart wasn’t in it. And when your heart isn’t in something, you’re not really doing it full on like you should. And that’s exactly what happened. But one of the things that I did learn before things went sour in that industry was we learned about sales, and we learned about discipline, and we learned about consistency. And so the lessons that I did learn when things were really rocking and rolling and, you know, when I what I learned from the trainings, I actually brought to the tree service. And so I’m really excited to be able to share that with you. We’ve got an amazing team of people that have grown from just me, you know, with this dream to now forty three team members. We went from, you know, basically zero to, like Erin said, over five million dollars in sales last year. And I wanna, just insist on having people understand how important consistency is, which is why we’re actually doing this. We went from four million to five million in a year because we decided to hold ourselves accountable and be consistent with the twenty five twenty five ten rule. And we actually have made a couple of adjustments in the last year because we have grown, and I’ll talk about that towards the end of the training. Alrighty. So the twenty fivetwenty fiveten rule is basically this. If you’re growing a sales team or if you’re trying to get your sales going, there are some consistent things that really need to happen in order to make that happen. And that is calls, texts, and emails, or basically reaching out to people to acquire more customers. So that’s twenty five calls, twenty five texts, and ten estimates. Now for my industry hold on for a second. Let me get this here. I’ll share a little bit about myself. So for my industry, we go out and we do quotes. So for whatever industry you’re in, it might be a little bit different. But for us, we do twenty five calls a day, twenty five texts a day reaching out to clients, and at least ten quotes or setting up ten appointments. And that’s what we’re gonna focus in. The other thing that we’ll talk about today is authentic selling. Why being authentic is extremely important to making the process work? Why being authentic is also important to being able to communicate with your team effectively, communicate with your clients effectively, and actually come from the heart. In our company, we really focus on our core values, and that keeps us in alignment with authentic selling. So our core values are love, respect, integrity, teamwork, discipline, consistency, and gratitude. Also, if you’re a business owner watching this, just as a little side note or a little bit of a tangent, we really started restructuring our company and getting on the same page when we started reading a book and sharing a book called Traction. So if you are growing a company and you really want to stay on the same page, you want to use Jobber for your software and you want to use Traction to kind of keep things going and give yourself a framework for building your company. Number three we’ll talk about today is mindset and motivation. That’s a huge thing in our company is really focusing on our mindset and what’s our motivation behind what we’re doing. Then we’ll talk about what to track. And once again, we’re tracking our calls, we’re tracking our texts, and we’re tracking the number of quotes we’re doing. So we’re tracking that input so that we can maximize our output. Okay. So why is this important? Without a clear process, discipline, and a culture, sales become unpredictable. So for us, like any industry, especially in the home services, you have months that you’re really, really busy and you have months that you’re not so busy. And that can create an unpredictable revenue and that affects your sales, it affects the energy in the company, it affects the culture. Meaning, you know, people come to work and they don’t see work on the board and they’re just like, what are we gonna do today? Well, goal is to make that happen. As salespeople and people that are business people, our goal is to make sure our teams always have something to do. And the only way that that happens is through creating a system where our sales can become tracked, they can become predictable and it becomes a process. So for us, process is extremely, extremely important. Alrighty. So twenty five calls, what does that look like? Twenty five daily outbound calls to existing leads, estimates, past clients, and follow ups. This is a pipeline generation deal. So if you don’t have any calls, you don’t have any revenue. So a lot of times when I say calls, people think that that’s just a follow-up call or it’s just opening up Jobber and just locking in and just calling people asking if they want work done. A lot of times your calls can just be a touch point. That’s what I like to look at it, is a touch point. It’s tapping your client on the shoulder and letting them know you’re still here. So a call could be, if you’ve done a quote or in our case, we have team members that go out, salespeople that go out, they do a quote, after they do the quote, they send it to the customer, And then we have a follow-up team that follows up with calls. Well, as a salesperson, your job, our job is to make sure we are the ones that are also following up, not just waiting for back office to do it, but to create those relationships. So for example, and we’ll get into authentic selling in a minute, I know that’s the next phrase, but whenever we go meet a client and we’re there to do the estimate, we try to take notes of what’s going on around the client. Why the client called? What’s motivating them to want to get the tree work done? So for some people, they want trees trimmed away from the house. For other people, they might have a situation where there’s a dead or dying tree in their yard and they need it to be removed because they’re they’re scared. Or maybe they have some landscaping that needs to be done and they need the the tree cut down, in order to do the landscaping. So in our CRM, in Jobber, we make notes of why the client is getting the work done. Why is that important? Because when we do these twenty five calls, we want the twenty five calls to be of value. We want the twenty five calls to be about creating a relationship. I love to eat. I love horses. I love to travel. So how does that come into play with our twenty five calls? What I like to do is with my clients, I’ll get into a conversation with them. I’ll talk about their likes, their dislikes, what they’re working on, what their goals are, why they’re getting the tree cut down, why are they getting the trees trimmed? And so I’ll try to connect with them on what they like, but I also share a little bit about myself on what I like. Why? Because I wanna give them an anchor that makes me a little bit different. So when we get to doing our twenty five calls, we’ll have it in the notes. And so when we pick up the phone to make a call to a customer, it becomes more of building the relationship. So what does that look like? We make a call, we talk to the client, we find out why they haven’t, what we can do to get them on the schedule for the next day or why they haven’t gotten on the schedule. And if we have some context behind why they want the work done or we have something to lean on that we both connected with. So once again, going back to the fact that I love horses. If I have a client that loves horses, I might talk to them about that a little bit before I start talking to them about why we’re getting why we haven’t gotten them on the schedule or what we need to do to get them on the schedule. So once again, going back to twenty five calls, it’s not just twenty five calls just to make twenty five calls. It’s twenty five calls with intention. Going back now to the text, twenty five texts. Twenty five personalized value based follow ups and reactivation texts. So what do we do with the text? With our text in Jobber, what you can do is you can copy and paste a text, go to the messages and copy and paste. And you can do twenty five just random customers in your database, or you can be intentional about it and actually offer something. So for in our case, we offer a free inspection. Now we just had a lot of ice here in Atlanta. So our texts that we sent out related to the ice. The text that we sent out was related to the fact that there was a storm. And here’s the cool thing, it wasn’t just random texts. Each one of our salespeople has a different personality, kind of a different energy. So they were able to create a text that kind of spoke to their personality, but also spoke to why they were reaching out to the customer. So with five salespeople, so we have five salespeople in our company. Each one of us had a different text that we reached out to our customer on. So going throughout your day, you wanna make sure you’re using these texts as a way to connect with the client and build value and show them that you really care. You’re not just somebody else with a CRM that’s, you know, sending them a message. Number three, ten quotes. Why ten quotes? Ten is just a good solid number. If we know we’re doing ten estimates a day or ten quotes a day, or at least scheduling that, we will keep the momentum going. Our goal with this framework, the twenty five-twenty five-ten rule, the twenty five-twenty five-ten framework, the reason why we do this is so that we can avoid those dips in revenue. Sorry about that. So we can avoid those dips in revenue. If we can do this consistently, guess what? Then our revenue becomes consistent. And actually I was gonna mention this, since we’ve been implementing this for a while, we’ve actually gotten to a place where we do twenty five calls, one hundred texts, and our goal is to schedule ten estimates. But we’re gonna focus today just on the twenty five, twenty five, ten, Because some people on this training might be, you know, ten years in business and they’re just trying to find a way to kind of get some more momentum. Or you might have somebody that just started in sales on this call and they’re like, well, what do I do? This is a great framework to just get started, just to hold yourself accountable that you’re going to schedule time and do this. You’re going to schedule time and you’re going to mark it on your calendar because if it’s not on your calendar, is it important to you? And so that’s what this part is for, the twenty five, twenty five, ten framework. So authentic selling. Authentic selling is extremely important. Why is that important? Because if you’re gonna be doing twenty five calls and you’re going to be doing twenty five texts and you’re going to be scheduling these estimates, you want to make sure that the reason why you’re doing is because you are willing to that you’re wanting to serve. You want to be of value to the client. You wanna really make sure that you’re coming from a good space. And that’s why in our company, our first core value is love. Not only love for our team members, not only love for the fact that we love our job and we love the tree care industry, but love for the client. And how do we show our love? We show our love by doing quality work for these clients. Well here’s the crazy thing, we can’t do quality work for the clients if we don’t have clients. So the way we get that is by once again following this framework. So always make sure that no matter what you’re doing, that you’re building trust with your client. That you are doing whatever it takes to make sure that there’s a connection there. And when you’re making the calls and you’re, you know, trying your, you know, you’re doing your best to stay consistent with your text and you’re wanting to get sales on the board or quotes on the board. You’re not just coming from a place of, I just gotta do this. You’re coming from a place of honesty and integrity. Why? Because people don’t buy tree work. They buy confidence, safety and trust. But it’s the same thing as if you were selling cars or if you were selling landscaping or if you’re selling plumbing or heating or AC, you wanna make sure that you are building trust with your customers. So the other thing that doing twenty five calls and twenty five texts does, it shows the clients that you’re there. It shows them that you’re available and it shows them that you care. Like you’re not just a one and done person. Like you did the estimate and boom, you’re gone and you’re off to the next thing. And the way that looks in our company is we have some of our team members that get their calls done and their texts done early in the morning. And sometimes we break it up and we do early in the morning or in the afternoon. And we’ve had a few times, myself included, when we’ve done our calls and our texts in the evening, or we mix it up. But the goal is to make sure that you’re doing it, actively doing it. And how do we do that? I actually pull out a yellow pad of paper, and I actually mark off how many calls I’ve made. I don’t just leave it to chance. I don’t just go, oh, let me see, did I do twenty five calls today? Did I not? No, we actually track it. So we personally track it. Some of our team members, they’ll keep track of it in their phones. They’ll open the notes in their phones and then do the mark of how many calls they’ve done. So that’s very, very important. But to get back on track, make sure we diagnose before prescribing. So whenever we’re doing an estimate or we’re going out to do the quote, we build trust and then we find out what the client actually wants. And when we do that, going back to what I was saying earlier, you take that information and you put it in the notes. You take that information and you make sure it’s available for the next person because we do have people on our team that are in the, I always, I don’t actually like saying back office because they’re such an important part of our team, but we have three ladies that actually help us with follow-up and they take care of the customers and they do the backend. But by diagnosing and prescribing and capturing that information and putting it in it helps our team be better able to take care of our clients, okay? We don’t just quote, we assess, we educate and we guide. And we take that information, we put it in Jobber so that it’s accessible to our team. And then also clarity. Clarity creates certainty. And we’re not just talking about being clear with our clients, but we’re also talking about being clear with our team. Once again, making sure we capture that information, we put it in our CRM so that when we’re making our calls and we’re doing our texts, that we’re actually approaching the customer with concrete information that we can use to help close the sale, okay? When homeowners understand, in our industry, what we look at is when homeowners understand the risks of not taking care of the tree work or the risks of not doing something, they’re more inclined to actually want to get the work done. But the only way we do that is by communicating with them, by offering help, by coming from a place of service, And that’s why I call this authentic selling. Not just fake, I’m trying to just do whatever, say whatever I gotta say to get the sale, but actually coming from the heart. A big thing for us as a company is to do everything we’re coming from the heart. Now, before I get specifically back into the twenty five, twenty five, ten framework, I’ve already talked about the authentic selling. I wanted you guys to really understand how powerful this can be. So for us, we’re gonna go over our numbers from twenty twenty five. For twenty twenty five hold on for a second. Let me grab some something I drink real quick. Sorry about that. So from twenty twenty five, we added three thousand new clients to our database using this process. Okay? We did thirteen thousand quotes that converted into jobs last year. We did two thousand three hundred and thirty five jobs that were actually completed last year. And I’ve went over this other number before, we did five million in sales. Our goal this year is to double that. So once again, twenty five, twenty five, ten is the start, but that’s not where you have to stay. You can always scale this based on the needs of your company. But I just wanted to give you guys proof that this really does work. Because it’s one thing for me to be on here saying, oh, we do this, but it’s a whole another thing to be on here saying this and seeing it actually work in action. Okay. I think I skipped a slide. Hold on for a second. I apologize. Hold on. Okay, where are we at? Okay, mindset and motivation. So mindset and motivation, that’s truly, that’s really big in our company too. Because it’s one thing to have twenty five, twenty five, ten, but here’s the thing though. If you get to a point where you’re doing this and it’s just a robotic thing that you’re doing just because, know, Donnie says this is a good thing to do. You’re really not going to get what you want out of twenty five, twenty five, ten. You really got to have the mindset like, listen, I’m here to grow my business. I’m here to be of service. I’m here to create opportunities for my team members. I’m here to serve my community. That’s gotta be the mindset, the mindset of service. And then your motivation also has to be coming from a place of integrity. Is it just about the money or is it about the money and what the money can do to grow your company, to create opportunities for your team members, to provide great service for the people that you serve? What is your motivation for wanting to learn twenty five, twenty five, ten? What is the mindset behind being focused on doing this and doing it consistently? In our company, we actually have a sales meeting every morning. Sometimes it’s five minutes, sometimes it’s twenty minutes, sometimes it’s thirty minutes. But every morning we go over our numbers and we go over information. We even go over the reviews that we get because sometimes doing the work, it can become a little bit, I don’t wanna use the word boring, because I love Alex or Mosey, but he talks about the work can become God, how do you do it? Wanna scratch that. I’m not gonna try to quote him, but basically do the boring work. But you can’t really consider it boring work because it’s the work that helps you get the result. So shifting that mindset and knowing that the mindset helps you stay focused to get the work done and the motivation is the heart behind why you’re doing it. Okay, here we go. And I apologize guys about my computer here. But anyway, mindset and motivation. Sales performance is not a talent issue. It’s a belief and consistency issue. And when you have the right mindset and the right motivation, you can stay consistent. We train for confidence, not pressure. So once again, if you are taking your time and energy and you’re getting all the information from the client, you’re being authentic about the reason why you’re doing it, you’re being authentic in your sales technique, you’ll build the confidence and sell from that space as opposed to pressure. Nobody, including myself, wants a really high pressure sales person. And the thing is nowadays, that just doesn’t work. I came from the network marketing industry and I think I mentioned that earlier. And we sold health and nutritional products. And if we didn’t sell, we didn’t eat. And I know that’s the philosophy a lot of times in sales. But the other thing is we had to learn that we are selling these health and nutritional products to help people. And if we don’t come from that mindset, and we’re only coming from the fact that if I don’t sell these vitamins, I don’t eat, guess what? You wind up not selling as much. And the same thing is true, I found out coming into the tree care industry. There were times when we needed a truck fixed, or there were times when I needed to make payroll. There’s times when you got to pay for your insurance and you start to get into that point where you got to pressure the sale, you got to pressure the client. We don’t want to come from that. We want to come from the fact that, listen, we’re confident in what we do. And because of that confidence in what we do, and we’re confident that we can take care of the client, we don’t have to be high pressure. We celebrate effort, not just outcomes. Why are we measuring the effort and not just the outcomes? Because if we do the effort, the outcomes will happen. And energy drives execution. So if we have the right energy, we have the, we’re putting in the effort and we have the confidence, guess what? The results will follow. Okay? One of my models is dream big, work hard and never quit. And that all comes back to this twenty five, twenty five, twenty five, this twenty five, twenty five, ten rule, what to track and how do we track it. Let’s see what we got here. Okay, so once again, we mentioned the calls. This activity, the calls, they equal opportunity. Also, wanna mention, calls does not always have to be somebody in your CRM, meaning jobber. Calls can be, it can be a card that you picked up that could, somebody that could turn into a client. A call could be calling real estate agencies in our industry, calling a real estate agency and introducing yourself. But what I will say is when you make that call, still put that person into Jobber because that’s a contact that can be followed up on. Anytime I get a contact, I put it in Jobber. Even if they haven’t got a quote yet, why? Because that’s a lead that can then get on our newsletter list, or we can send them an email, and it’s also a way for me not to forget. So we wanna track our calls. How many are we actually doing? And if we’re doing a little more, that’s great. But if we’re not doing enough and we’re not tracking it, we won’t know if we don’t track it. The text. We wanna make sure not just to send the text, and this is so important, so, so, so important. Don’t just send the text, make sure you respond to it. Why do I say that? Because there’s a lot of times that we send out texts and clients will respond, especially inside a Jobber, But we didn’t realize it because we didn’t go back and check. And then the quotes, make sure we’re filling our pipeline when we’re making these calls and when we’re making these texts, that we’re doing what we need to do to create quotes. And quotes become jobs. Alrighty. All right. Scoreboard equals accountability. So we want visibility. Going back to tracking everything. Everyone sees the numbers and there’s no hiding, no guessing, no excuses. So for us, we have a sales team and this is what we actually do on a daily basis. Okay? Boy, need some glasses. Okay. So we go through our KPIs every single morning. We go we have a board in our office, and I wish I would have taken a picture of that, but we have a board in our office where we do go through how many calls each salesperson made, how many texts they made, and I actually might be able to jump back through that. Hold on for a second real quickly. Alright. I’m a show you this real quickly. I just wanna share this with you real quick. This board right here, that’s us standing at the board going over the numbers so that everybody knows where are we at, how many calls we’ve made. So this is actually something we do. So this middle picture is actually us going over numbers on a daily basis, every single morning, right after our seven thirty am huddle, we do that. Okay? So we have a morning meeting. Okay? And then we celebrate each other. So we go over the numbers and then we celebrate each other. In our case, we put a little Rocky music on or we put the Pokemon music on or some Imagine Dragons, whatever. We put some music on and then we go over the numbers and we celebrate each other. And then if there’s some areas where we’re a little bit soft, we talk about it and then we put together a game plan and go around the table and ask like, hey, what are we gonna do today to improve on that number? In fact, one of the things that’s really big for us, especially this year is to get one percent better every day. One percent better every day. Okay? And then we put in a training video. Sometimes that can be anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes long. And then we’ll practice objection overcome. A lot of times we’ll also do some role playing. And then we go out in the field and we go do estimates and we go talk to our customers. We go do our calls. We do our texts. And each salesperson schedules their own time to do this. But in the morning, we’re holding each other accountable for did we do the actual work. And then in the evening, each person is accountable for holding themselves accountable, accountable for holding themselves accountable and turning in their numbers. And then the next day we do the exact same thing over again. So that’s the twenty five-twenty five-ten rule. And a lot of times when we do things like this, I know people have questions. And one of the ones we get a lot is why track activity and sales? Well, without the activity, the sales don’t happen. And so that’s the reason that’s the main reason why, we track. Also, the activity predicts income. If we know how many calls and how many texts we’re doing and we’re not getting where we wanna be, is it a situation where maybe we need to track how are we doing the calls? We need to do some more role playing during the calls because calls, that’s an activity. You gotta know how to call the client. And so we practice that. Activity predicts income in all different areas. How many quotes are we doing? That’s a predictor. Why? Because if we’re doing the calls and we’re doing the texts, but we’re not actually out there turning in our quotes, guess what? Can’t close something that’s not there. Also, sales lag behind behavior. And for those of you that have been in sales for a very long time, you may have heard that what you’re doing right now, you’ll see within the next sixty to ninety days. It won’t show, the results will not show for the next sixty to ninety days. And that is so true. And so sometimes it’s hard when you’re sitting there, you’re making the calls, you’re doing the texts, you’re making the calls, you’re doing the texts, but your phone’s not ringing yet. You have to do it consistently because eventually the sales will come from consistency. Also going back to what I said, coaching fixes conversions, not volume. So what do I mean by that? When we can talk to our team members and try to coach our team members on what could we do better. The other day we went around the table and we asked what each team member was doing that was working. That way we can have a hands on experience in real time. What can we do to improve the process? What can we do to improve our sales? All of that. So pretty excited about that. That’s one of my favorite things to do is the role playing and the coaching so that on a day to day basis, we’re fixing those little issues. Okay? What if my teams resist structure? I’ve had people ask me this and I am blessed with an incredible team. I literally, and I don’t want to give them a shout out right now. I’ve got Diego, Megan, Abdi, just an amazing, we have Carlos. He’s actually new to our sales team now. Augusto’s new to our sales team now. We have some back office people. And I know these names may not mean anything to you guys, but these guys, we would not be here. I would not be here if it were not for that team. Our back office team of Maria, Deborah, and Quinencia, we’re a team. We do these twenty five-twenty five call, we do the twenty five-twenty five-ten rule together. We don’t do this separately. So what happens if a team member resists structure? We have a conversation about it. We I always I shouldn’t say it like this, but I always feel like sometimes our company is like the mafia. You know, sometimes it’s hard to get in, but it’s even harder to get out. Meaning that if somebody does something wrong, it’s not like, oh my god, you’re fired, but it becomes, okay, they’re resisting this. What can we do to help them? And we have a process for that too. We talk to them, we sit down, we have a one on one and then we try to put systems in place to where we found out why they’re resistant. Because most people, if they have a job in your company, they don’t wanna not do their job well, they wanna do their job well. It just might be there needs to be an opportunity to coach and learn how to do things better. So structure creates freedom. So if you explain these things to your team, a lot of times what they’re pushing up against or what they are, I guess, resisting, if you can help them understand how this structure helps them, a lot of times their shoulders will drop and they’ll go, okay, I get it, I get it. So also clarity removes stress. So if you can explain to the person why, going back to what I said before, why this is important and make it very clear to them, it removes stress. Also a scoreboard builds opportunity. So even though we count the numbers as a team, meaning how much the company sold, We also count it individually when we do our scoreboard. Why? Because we wanted them to see that, listen, if each one of us is carrying our weight, the company does well. But if we don’t carry our weight, then the company suffer. And then also culture drives consistency. So we really, really work hard to create a good culture so that we have consistency. So the reason why this is important is because it creates a predictable pipeline, you have culturable reps, which we just talked about, and then you have forecastable revenue. Create a sales machine, not just a guessing game. So do this so that you have better accountability of what is possible in your company and what you need to work on in your company. And then basically, just do it. Success comes down to discipline and consistency, not just intensity.
