Mike (00:00):
We had a client a couple of weeks ago and he went out for his very first time ever going to door-to-door, huge mental challenge, really not comfortable, a lot of anxiety. He went out and he met a home builder and a realtor and got two estimates booked. Wow, in like two hours.

Adam (00:16):
Welcome to Jobber Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros, buy Home Service Pros. Today we’re in Las Vegas and we’re talking about building out a door-to-door marketing team to generate more leads. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. Today’s guest is Mike Gore Hickman. He’s the CEO and founder of painter growth.com. Mike, welcome to the studio.

Mike (00:37):
What’s up Adam? Thanks for having me, man.

Adam (00:38):
Yeah,

Mike (00:39):
Good to be here.

Adam (00:39):
Yeah, I’m super excited about this. So first of all, let’s tell our listeners who you are, what you do, all that kind of stuff

Mike (00:45):
For sure. So like you said, Michael Hickman, founder of painter growth.com and host of the Painter Growth Podcast. So if you’re a painter looking to grow your business, then just type in Painter Growth Podcast wherever you listen to this and listen to it after you’re done. We felt hundreds and hundreds of painting contractors, so basically like the one-stop shop, if you’re looking to get started or scale up to 5 million, we got something for you.

Adam (01:05):
Awesome. Cool. Well, let’s get into it. So today we’re talking about door door sales, which for a lot of people is kind of scary. It a scary topic, but does it work? Does door, door-to-door sales still work from your opinion? What do you think?

Mike (01:18):
I mean, yes, definitely, and I wouldn’t even say it’s my opinion, right? It’s from hundreds and hundreds of contractors doing door-to-door sales all over the country and just seeing the return on investment being so much greater than you could get from say, Facebook ads or Google Ads. If you do it right and people have a gut wrenching reaction, a lot of people have a gut wrenching reaction to the idea of going door to door because uncomfortable. It’s not like a comfortable thing to do. So it’s half mental and half tactical and you have to be able to get over the mental hurdle of it and only then you can start approaching the tactical side of it.

Adam (01:58):
Yeah, it’s such an active thing, right? It’s so much easier to sit in on your couch at night and post Facebook groups and change your website. All those are very passive ways to generate leads, but door to door is about the most active go out, you leave your cave, drag it home kind of thing you can do. And so is that just the biggest hurdle? It’s just scary and just a lot of work.

Mike (02:18):
It’s just scary and it’s a lot of work at the start. But what I wanted to talk about today was not how to go door to door yourself. I don’t think the average contractor wants to go door to door every single night for the rest of their time in business. It’s about building a system that can generate you leads without you actually having to continue to do it. And it’s a lot easier. It’s easier said than done, but it’s a lot easier than you might think it is to get it to that point. There’s going to be some uncomfort, you’re going to have to go to your comfort zone, but you can get there. You can get to a point where your door to door team is bringing you 30, 50, a hundred leads per month, basically what you need to hit your sales goals.

Adam (02:56):
So let’s talk about the nuts and bolts here. So when you say your team, are these people you hire just do door to door sales? Are they your painters when it’s raining? Who are these people?

Mike (03:06):
Yeah, there’s a bunch of different ways to go about it. Now I’ll start with something that we call warm calling or job site marketing. And this is the easiest one to kind of get started at because you’re going into a warm neighborhood where you’re already working on projects and the concept around it is basically you have a neighborhood that you’re already doing work in, you put a lawn sign up, hopefully maybe you add on some other marketing, like you throw some flyers up the day before and then either yourself, you and your partner or you and your painters, you just go and knock the neighborhood real quick. Hey, we’re doing some work in your area. Are you thinking about having any work done, painting done, whatever your service of choice is and doing the first couple of doors, you’ll get a rush. It’s kind of uncomfortable, but you’ll realize really quickly that it’s not that scary. People are typically pretty nice and if they’re not nice, then you’re probably in the wrong area and the right neighborhood is a whole discussion in and of itself.

Adam (04:03):
Let’s go there. So how do you choose a neighborhood? I mean, you said the ones you’re already working in. So I’ve heard this idea over years and so one variation I’ve heard is before you start the job that morning you go knock on Miss Nancy’s door next door and say, Hey, we’re going to be making some noise. If it’s too loud, come get me. Where can I park my car? And you’re hoping that they say, well paint my house too, right? So similar idea where you just go around, knock on the door, the five doors around the house you’re working on before you start the job. Is that what you’re saying?

Mike (04:29):
Five or 50?

Adam (04:30):
Okay.

Mike (04:31):
Yeah, so the way that you just described it, where can I park my car? Hope we’re not going to making any noise. That’s an ideal approach. If you’re in a non-solicit area, Hey, where can I park my car? Don’t want to park in your spot. Okay, sounds good. Hey, by the way, are you thinking about having any painting? Do you need any gutters cleaned or whatever you’re doing if you’re in a non-solicitation area? But most, I mean, a lot of places are final solicitation, and so I recommend kind of the between four o’clock and seven o’clock window in the evening when most people are home and it’s the end of the day and you can just go, just see if anyone else is thinking about painting.

Adam (05:04):
And that’s a really important note because it, it’s a lot easier on your mental state to knock on doors when no one’s home. You’re like, oh, they weren’t home, they weren’t home, they weren’t home. But between four and seven, you’re expecting way more people to be home to actually talk to people because the whole point is to generate leads, not to knock and run away.

Mike (05:21):
For sure. Yeah, you want to generate leads and you’ll make a lot of connections. We had a client a couple of weeks ago and he went out for his very first time ever going to door-to-door, huge mental challenge, really not comfortable, a lot of anxiety. He went out and he met a home builder and a realtor and got two estimates booked in two hours, and it’s like, wow, this could actually turn into a lot of business. Now imagine if you did that even once a week, an entire year, it would potentially change the outcome of your business.

Adam (05:49):
Okay, that’s a good segue. So the purpose of the door knocking is what? To generate a lead or close a deal.

Mike (05:56):
So definitely generate leads or preferably book an estimate. Okay, explain that. The difference between a lead and an estimate is obviously an estimate is scheduled. You have a date in the future to go to their home. If you just have a lead now you have to convert that lead into an estimate. It’s a lot easier to get a lead than to get an estimate, and the economics of it are actually very favorable when it comes to paying for someone to go out and get you leads. I’m just going to go painting for an example. If your average job size is $5,000 and you want to keep your cost of marketing below 10%, which is $500, that means you can pay $500 per job. If you close one out of three estimates, now you can. What is that $166 per estimate that you can pay?

(06:40):
So on average, a marketer once they’re trained up, can get about one estimate per hour. So that means every hour you can pay them up to $166. So how bad you could pay them $40 an hour base and a hundred dollars an estimate. And as long as they get that one estimate per hour and you close one out of three around your average job size, you’re going to be in the green. You don’t have to pay that much. You can pay 20 bucks an hour base and $50 an estimate. But even then they could make 70 bucks an hour, $120 an hour, and all of a sudden you don’t have to just hire a student, you can hire a professional, you can hire someone who sells cars during the day, a professional salesperson, they’re going to make 70 bucks an hour as long as they get one estimate per hour and they’re going to represent your company way better.

Adam (07:25):
Is that your suggestion is to hire completely people completely outside of the painting world basically?

Mike (07:32):
Yes. Yeah, I recommend hiring for personality and specifically first impression, right? Because what their job is first impression, they’re going to go out and do 201st impressions. That’s a great point. So the skill doesn’t really matter. Teaching a few things about whatever your trait is pretty simple, but you can’t teach first impression. You can’t teach, get up and go. So if I were to classify the top two important skills that they need to have or traits, one would be that first impression, are they happy? Are they, you just feel good when you talk to them? And then two, are they motivated for money? They need to be hungry for money. They can make a lot of money, but they do need to be at some level. You can manage them, you can deploy them, you can tell them where to go, when to go, but if they’re not self-driven and they’re not motivated and they go out and they get skunked one night, they’ll quit. They’ll quit. They might not show up the next day.

Adam (08:25):
I met my first door to door sales guy. He was working for pest control and we all know pest control is on the rise. And this guy, he was paying for medical school by door knocking all summer long. He was making that much money. I was like, man, let me see your flyer thing. He had his whole laminated sheet, which is another thing I want to get to. What do you equip these people with? What kind of marketing, collateral, flyers, business cards, what kind of stuff do they have in their quiver of arrows, so to speak?

Mike (08:52):
For sure. A really important metric. You don’t really necessarily track it, but you can kind of get a good sense if it’s good or bad. Is your door open rate? How many people are actually answering the door for you? So part of that is time of day, so you want to go in the evening, but part of that is are you approachable?

Mike (09:07):
Are you someone that someone wants to open the door for, right? You need to be friendly, you need to have bright colors. You need to be logoed up. Ideally you have a bright colored polo, bright colored hat with matching logos, a clipboard and a lanyard. You can get a clipboard and a lanyard at staples for like

Adam (09:23):
A lanyard. Now what’s that

Mike (09:25):
For a lanyard with just a little picture in your name on it.

Adam (09:27):
Okay. Name tag. Name tag.

Mike (09:29):
Yeah, you just go to the more official you look, even if you’re a chuck and a truck, you’re a one man show and you’re going out by yourself, go buy a lanyard at maps. It is going to make you look so much more professional and people are going to be way less scared to open the door for you. So you knock, take three or five big steps back. If they have that little step on the front of their door, whatever, like the three steps leaving up the door, go to the bottom. You don’t want to be a threat.

Adam (09:51):
It’s intimidating to be right by the door when you open it.

Mike (09:54):
You don’t want to be there. You want to take a few steps back. Just be friendly, be happy, have a big smile on your face and have the intention to be helpful because people like people who are helpful. So don’t go try to selling something, just see if you can help them.

Adam (10:08):
Yeah. Now I have a question about pay. So you talked about hourly pay. Explain that a bit more because I think a lot of people assume it’s just straight commission. So tell us about that.

Mike (10:20):
Yeah, you definitely can do straight commission. The problem with straight commission is that if someone goes out for one, two, or three shifts and gets skunked, they get nothing and you’re going to lose that marketer, right? Finding a really good marketer and putting the time and energy into recruiting them, interviewing them, hiring them, the paperwork, training them, all of that is so labor intensive. So retention is a very important metric.


Mike (10:43):
So I would prefer to have a healthy base where you’re paying them actually 20 bucks an hour just as a base and then a reasonable amount per estimate. And I like paying per estimate instead of a percentage of the job booked because that becomes, you can’t track it themselves. It’s out of their hands, it’s out of their control. Pay for the metric that you want and what is within their control. And if you can help them win, help them achieve their goals, know how much money they want to make and help them make that much money, they’re going to love you. They’re going to stick around for a long time.

Adam (11:15):
Okay, so I know a lot of our listeners have a lot of questions. Don’t worry. I’m going to ask ’em all if people don’t worry. But before I get to that, so I like what you said earlier about tracking, how many door knocks do you make and then how many people did you talk to keep going? What are those KPIs that you really track? So I know in sales it’s all about the numbers.

Mike (11:34):
Yep. The main KPI is estimates per hour. If you can get one estimate per hour, you’re going to be, that’s the goal. That’s the goal. When we pay a solid base. I’m going to kind of sidestep your question for a second because a lot of people, when you pay an hourly rate like that, you’re concerned about wage theft. Why doesn’t someone just go out, they’re going to say they worked five hours. Oh, I didn’t get yet.

Adam (11:56):
Sit around.

Mike (11:56):
Yeah, they’re sitting in their car just didn’t even go out. So there’s a lot of door-to-door tools out there like apps and stuff that you can use. But what I found is free and the best app that you can use is just Strava, S-T-R-A-V-A, Strava. It’s a fitness tracking app and it’s free. They’re going to ask you to pay for it, but you don’t have to. It’s just a free app and you have your marketer just record their route while they’re out and about and it’ll take their map and their start time and their end time and their total time, and they just send you a screenshot of their route when they’re done. And that’s how you can pay them. You can see every single neighborhood, every single door that they went to, and then they can’t steal money from you because you know that they went, if they don’t send you the screenshot, they don’t get paid.

Adam (12:38):
Interesting. Now, what do you do about leads that aren’t good quality control? What if you just get a bunch of bad leads from these people?

Mike (12:46):
Does

Adam (12:46):
That happen?

Mike (12:47):
Of course it happens. So that’s where number one neighborhood is really important. So you asked earlier about neighborhood, the easiest way is just look at lawns and cars.

(12:57):
Is the lawn in good shape and do they have a decent car in the driveway? And even if the houses are small lawns and cars, that’s a very high indicator of a good neighborhood. If you want to go a little bit more granular, a little bit more scientific, you can use as a tool on the USPS website. And if you’re in Canada, a tool on the Canada Post website where you can go into each zip code, each street, each neighborhood and see what the average income levels are. So what I would do is start with the online tools, see where the good income levels are, and then you can use Google Map to actually drop a pin onto those streets to see the car in the lawn room. And then you can deploy marketers in those areas. And what I would like to see you do is be the big fish in a small pond, meaning if you’re in Chicago, don’t try to do all of Metro Chicago, but pick a little neighborhood that fits all of your criteria and hit that spot like five or six times in a year. You’re going to create that brand recognition and become that big player in a small pond that everybody knows and starts referring back and forth.

Adam (13:54):
So your target homes are getting door knocked every two to three?

Mike (13:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I’d say around, yeah, two to three months.

Adam (14:01):
Okay. And you would say that’s enough that frequency is appropriate where people don’t feel like you were just here yesterday? That doesn’t happen much.

Mike (14:11):
Not really. In our experience, it’s long enough apart where you’re going to get that natural cycle. Not everyone is ready for every service all the time. There’s a natural cycle to things, so you might not catch someone when they’re at their specific pain point or need point, but in three months they might be in six months, they might be in 12 months, they might be, but even if you don’t show up, maybe it’s every six months, they’re going to hopefully start remembering you. Maybe in between door knocking routes, you throw a flyer, you have some really targeted Facebook ads to that area. We call this stacking our marketing on top of each other. So it’s not just the door knock in isolation, but they see your lawn signs because you’re targeting this one area, so you’re doing work in this. They see your vehicle all the time. They see your flyers that you’re dropping, your lawn signs and they see you doing work in the area, so they’re going to think that you’re everywhere, even though you’re just in that one area.

Adam (15:02):
Do you give the homeowner, let’s say they act interested, but not right now. They don’t want to book an assessment yet, but call me back next week, that kind of people, do you give them a brochure? Do you give them something or do you just say, okay, I’ll call. What do you do in that situation?

Mike (15:16):
The goal, you should always try to get the lead.

Adam (15:19):
Okay,

Mike (15:19):
Yeah, always try to get that contact information yourself, and you could have a flyer or something that you can give them that’s nice to kind of reciprocate and actually give them something useful. But you try to get that lead and if you have a CRM job, you can set reminders for yourself to call back those leads at different times and send them different types of email campaigns, nurture those leads over time, again, hitting them. Now you hit them in the physical world, now you’re hitting them in the digital world.

Adam (15:45):
Something that I’ve really enjoyed over the last several years of learning marketing and especially website design, is instead of asking the person to marry you the first visit, offer them a free PDF, the five things you need to know before you paint your house, that kind of stuff. And so I’m just curious, have you ever integrated anything like that into this sales cycle before where they’re not quite ready to book a quote, but hey, we have a free, anything like that?

Mike (16:09):
Yeah, so I would call this a long-term nurture sequence

(16:13):
Where it would be almost like a monthly newsletter, but it’s not like a newsletter in the traditional sense, but we’d call it a newsletter, but every month they would get a value email, exactly like you said, five things to ask your contractor before you book with them. If you’re in painting, like the top three trendy colors that all builders are using now. Oh, that’s a good one. I like that. Things like that that people would want to click on and these days you can even ask ChatGPT to come up with that content and write it for you. Just go in and make it not IE afterwards. And with the use of ChatGPT, you can make all of that copywriting so much easier and the average homeowner would never know.

Adam (16:50):
Right.

(16:51):
Mike, this is really great. I’m going to pause for a minute to talk about Jobber. So here’s the thing. You’re going to go knock on all these doors and get all these leads, and then what do you do with them? You need to have Jobber because Jobber, once they’re in the system, they won’t fall through the cracks and then Jobber will automatically follow up with them. They will stay in touch. You’ll nurture your clients to the finish line, and that’s why you need Jobber. So if you are not using Jobber, you need to today, go to Jobber.com/podcast deal, get an exclusive discount and try out Jobber. You will not regret it. How does someone get started doing this kind of stuff? What’s the first few steps? You said in the beginning, take some of your people out and go knock on the doors between four and seven. Anything else in terms of getting started?

Mike (17:33):
If people are interested in figuring out how I actually put together a special package just for today, if you go to painter growth.com/Jobber, I put together a door-to-door mini course with training videos and templates and all that stuff. So painter growth.com/Jobber, you can get that first step is I would say it’s going to start a few steps back, and that’s really start with the end in mind. What is your goal? What’s your goal for your year based on revenue? What’s your average job size? And then how many jobs does that mean you need to get from there? What’s your close rate? So that means how many estimates do you need? And then you can break that down into a weekly estimates goal. That’s where we want to start. How many estimates do we really need every month in order to hit our goal? I have some math. If you need to do a hundred thousand dollars in a month at a $5,000 average job size, you need 20 jobs at a 33% close rate. That’s 60 estimates and divided by four weeks in a month. That’s about 15 estimates per week.

(18:29):
If you want to do 15 estimates per week, if you’re going to door-to-door, that’s about 15 hours of marketing per week. So two marketers go in eight hours each that, and if they’re good enough and they’re getting you one estimate per hour, that will be enough to help you book a hundred thousand dollars per year at those numbers, a hundred thousand dollars per month at those numbers.

Adam (18:46):
That’s great. Do you ever send out two people at a time for a competition sort of dynamic or love that? Did you go through my course

Mike (18:56):
Yet? Yeah, so that’s actually a great tactic. I actually prefer to, I know it’s not like pc, but have a boy and a girl go, or two girls, girls typically get a higher door open rate. I don’t know. It is what it’s just do. Yeah, it is what it is. You can have them and it’s also safer going in pairs, especially if you don’t know the area. So it’s a little bit safer. You can have them go up opposite sides of the street. You can get neighborhoods done a lot faster and you can totally have competitions like that.

(19:22):
What we would even do is have once a month or once every six weeks or so, we would have a full door to door marketing event where we would get all of our painters, whoever was into coming and all of our marketers, and we would go and we would completely blast an area. We’d go for about an hour and a half, two hours, and then we’d meet at a pool hall after and whoever had the most leads would win a prize. We’d pay everyone. We’d buy beers and play pool and stuff like that, and we’d make a whole night out of it and we put people against each other and it got pretty competitive. People run door to door, and it’s pretty cool to get that type of competition on something that’s just going to help your business.

Adam (19:59):
Another question I have is how do you make sure, I mean accountability. How do you lead your team to make sure that these things, because pool, the parties and the beers, all that’s super fun and great, but that doesn’t happen overnight. You have a culture where it’s appreciated and valued. People want to knock on doors and generate leads and it’s fun. How do you get to that point?

Mike (20:20):
Yeah, that’s a good question. So basically, how do you get to the point where you have a success culture, like a performance culture in your marketing team?

Adam (20:29):
Yeah, it’s a leadership question really. How do you at the top create this environment where people hit their numbers and all that?

Mike (20:37):
Yeah, I mean, just like anything else, when you’re starting something for the first time, you’re not going to be very good at it, right? And you’re going to go, everyone here listening. If you’ve never hired a marketer before and you’re to go that route, you’re going to hire someone. They’re not going to show up the first shift, you’re going to hire the next person. They’re going to show up to one shift. The next person might show up to three shifts, and you’re going to learn a little bit, and hopefully we can help you skip a little bit of that. First thing you need to do is try it yourself, and this is the scariest part. This is where most people get hung up, but you need to go yourself at least for a few hours, maybe two shifts, get some results, figure out how to do it, figure out what your script is going to be and see that you can actually get the results.

(21:14):
See that you as the business owner, can get at least one estimate per hour. Once you are able to do that, now we can go hire someone and we can train them. You need to go out with them, make sure that you can see them be successful, because that’s a huge mistake that people have is that they just like, oh, I’m going to hire you to go marketing. I’ve never done it before, but there’s this neighborhood. Go have ater. No training. No accountability, and never having done it themselves. So go do it yourself and then go out with them, train them until they’re successful, until they’re able to hit their metrics. When it comes to creating that performance culture, it always needs to tie back to their goals. They don’t care about your goals, they care about their goals. So it’s like, Hey, Lucy, cool.

(21:55):
What are you saving up for? Alright, you want to buy a new car? How much money do you need to save for that? Okay, $20,000. How much do you want to make a month? You want to make $4,000 a month? Okay, here’s how you can make $4,000 per month. If you go out Wednesday, Thursday, Friday from here to here, you get this many leads a week, you’re going to be making $4,000 a month. Do you think we can get you there together? Cool. And then constantly reminding them why they’re working so hard, why they’re doing this. It’s not for you. They don’t care about how many sales you make. They care about what’s in it for them.

Adam (22:25):
Salespeople care about money,

Mike (22:26):
They

Adam (22:26):
Care. That’s okay. Yeah,

Mike (22:27):
But that’s, remember of the start, I said, they need to be really happy and have a great first impression. Very hungry, and they need to be very hungry.

Adam (22:32):
Yeah,

Mike (22:33):
So important.

Adam (22:34):
What about as you’re monitoring these people’s results and making sure, and you’re starting to see patterns they don’t like, how do you pinpoint those and how do you say your conversion rate just isn’t high enough or you knocked on so many doors, but no one answered really? How do you troubleshoot problems as they come up?

Mike (22:53):
I mean, the biggest thing is diagnosing the problem, right? If you can diagnose the problem, you’re going to be able to solve it. You mentioned two problems there. One is not getting leads and the other one is not having doors opened.

(23:04):
If you’re not having doors opened, you need to check your neighborhood. Is it a neighborhood that you’ve done work for in the past? That’s probably the best way to pick your first neighborhood is just look at your city. Where have you done a lot of jobs? Where were your best customers? Where did they live? Go knock around those areas. There’s a lot more good people in there that you could do work for. Are you going at the right time? Test different times. Try the evening, try Saturday morning, try Sunday afternoon. Just test different times, see when the higher open rate is in your neighborhood. And then if they’re going out, they do one, two or three shifts in a row without getting an estimate or without missing their goal KPIs, you need to go out with them. There’s no other way to do it, but you need to actually just go out with them and see what they’re doing, problem solve it with them. I’ve actually had some people just have the marketer have their phone on speakerphone and just put it on their clipboard so you can coach them from long distance. So you don’t necessarily have to be there, but you do need to do some coaching. You need to make sure that they are saying the right thing. They’re problem solving, they’re overcoming objections, they’re collecting the lead even before that, that you actually do it first. Were you able to be successful?

Adam (24:06):
Yeah, that’s huge. So a lot of people will say, but boss, that’s exactly what I said. Well, if you recorded it and we listened, that’s not what you said, right? We all know that. You can say, that’s what I said, but you’re not saying exactly what I told you to say, and as soon as you go in there with them or listen to recordings, you’ll very quickly, most of the time, know exactly what they’re doing wrong within like seconds.

Mike (24:25):
Yeah. Are they taking a big step back? Are they knocking loud enough? They

Adam (24:29):
Bang on the door when they knock?

Mike (24:30):
Yeah. My biggest pet peeve. Yeah, right? Or are they not taking that step back? Are they not dressed professionally? Are they not wearing what you told them or asked them to wear? There’s just a lot of things that could go wrong, but if you’re there in person, you see it, it’s going to be a lot easier to problem solve.

Adam (24:44):
Okay, Mike, last thing I really want to know, and I think our listeners want to know too. What’s the script? What’s the first three seconds? Give us the script. The first knock on the door, they open it, and then what do you say?

Mike (24:57):
So one way that I like to kind of start it out is ask them, Hey, my name’s Mike. I’m with Blueprint Painting. Have you heard of us? Just

Adam (25:06):
Quick question.

Mike (25:06):
Oh, no, we haven’t. Okay, cool. Well, we’re just painting a home in your neighborhood right now and just wondering if you were thinking about having any painting done this year.

Adam (25:15):
That’s it.

Mike (25:16):
That’s it. They say no. Some people will say, okay, try to get three nos, but I don’t think that’s really important. If they’re thinking about painting, great. If they’re not, just telling them again, isn’t necessarily going to get it. You might get a few people, but it’s going to be a numbers game, right? As long as you hit the other things that we mentioned earlier, and then you also hit enough homes, those are the two things that are really going to matter. Just that first impression

Adam (25:37):
And then the numbers. My dad is one of the best salespeople I know, and he’s always said, you’re just pulling up rocks and seeing there’s a big juicy worm under it. If there’s not, you put the rock back down. If there is, you’re good. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re hoping that you catch people in that mindset of yesterday they had a conversation around the kitchen table. I think we should paint the house. And then you show the next day. You’re not trying to arm wrestle people to paint their house. You’re just hoping that you’re just wanting to be there for them when they’re ready.

Mike (26:02):
If you believe, and this is part of the mentality of it, if you believe that you’re the best show in town, you’re going to give ’em the best results, not only the best and service paint job or whatever, but also the best customer experience and at the best price. If you believe that you’re the best, then selling your services shouldn’t feel slimy. It shouldn’t feel dirty. It should feel good. It should feel like your mission is to go spread the good word, and that’s what you’re doing, is you’re helping people overcome crappy contractors. Because when someone wants to hire a contractor, they pick up the phone, they look on Google, and they leave a bunch of voicemails and hope someone calls ’em back. You’re helping them skip that whole process and just giving them a seamless sales experience.

Adam (26:43):
Mike, it’s been great. I really appreciate all your insights here. I’m going to try to break it down for three actionable takeaways here. Number one is hire for Hunger. Make sure that your marketers have great first impressions and they conduct themselves well and that they’re hungry. Salespeople have to be hungry. Number two is use the Strava app to track them. Make sure that they’re going the right places and they’re not stealing from you, stealing time, and use the Strava app to your advantage. And number three is make sure that your team is presenting themselves well, whether that means that they’re taking those steps away from the front door so they’re not intimidating or they are dressing properly with the lanyard, the name tag and the bright colors and the hat and the shirt. Make sure that they are presenting themselves. Clipboard, professionally, clipboard, and the clipboard. Yes. Anything else, Mike

Mike (27:25):
Clipboard or iPad?

Adam (27:27):
Oh,

Mike (27:27):
Yeah, iPad can work really good too. I mean, I’ve broken all this down. If you’re actually serious about doing this, I have a whole free video series that I put together just for this, so painter growth.com/Jobber, and you can go get the videos, the downloads, the scripts, all of that absolutely free. I just really want to give you a good gift for listening to this and paying attention to what I have to say. So thank you for that. Or the Painter Growth Podcast. A lot of good tips there too.

Adam (27:51):
Well, Mike, thanks for being here. I think the impact you’re having on your community is really significant, and your painters are really better for it, so keep it up.

Mike (27:58):
Thanks, man. Thanks for having me,

Adam (27:59):
And thank you for listening. I hope that you heard on the day will help you build out your marketing team door to door sales. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me @adamsylvester.com. Remember, your team and your clients deserve your very best, so go give it to ’em.