To improve yourself, personally and professionally, you have to commit to personal responsibility — even when it’s hard.

Weldon Long explains his simple strategy of CPA — “cause, permit or allow” everything that happens in life — in a clip from the Cracking the Code weekly show.

Watch the clip from this week’s episode of Cracking the Code below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show, before it goes in the members-only archive on July 2nd.

Question: What percentage of total sales should be financed if my sales team is being effective?

Drew Cameron; President, HVAC Sellutions & Energy Design Systems, Inc.:

That’s going to vary by company, and there’s a lot of factors in there – how well are they trained on financing, how many programs do you have available for your team to use, because credit cards are also a form of financing, let’s keep that in mind too.

But between a combination of credit cards and having your standard financing – your zero percent interest; your extended term, low-rate stuff; your programs for the credit-challenged; maybe even a home equity refi piece where you’re dealing with a local credit union – if you have all of those resources in place, and you had your team completely trained on the value and virtues of each of those offerings, and they understood how to promote payment options (cause I don’t like to call it financing, I like to call it “payment options”), and then have the tools in place – your price book, with the monthly payment in a larger font than the total investment – and really had your people skilled in offering that, Id’ like to see the number be at least 60%.

Now that could vary by market, because if you’re in a mass affluent community, where they don’t need to use other people’s money, then you may not find yourself up in that percentage range.

But if I look at Middle America, if you will, who have that middle income – we have some mass affluence maybe with the piece of the territory we serve and maybe some people who are income-confined – then that’s where I’m looking at that 60%+.

And some of the best companies that I see out there, that are very effective at financing, are up in that 75 to 80% financing – though again, that includes credit cards. So even the people who live in the house up on the hill, they might like to get those miles, or points, or cashback or something, so some of them like to take advantage of that.

Weldon, do you have any thoughts on that?

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this week’s calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

The results are in, and science is starting to agree: the homeowner can actually sense your negativity — or positivity!

Weldon Long, in a clip from the Cracking the Code weekly show, explains how mindset — the way you actually think — can have even more of an impact on your prospective customer than you realized.

Watch the clip from this week’s episode of Cracking the Code below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show, before it goes in the members-only archive on June 25th.

In the May 2018 Snapshot Survey, we asked contractors all about Company Vision & Culture. Here’s one survey question and its results from the summary report, which is now available in its entirety to EGIA members.

Question: Is your company vision put down on paper (ie a vision statement)?

It’s well established that having a company vision can get the entire organization on the same page, working with the same goals and values in mind. But while 82% of those surveyed said their company has a set of core values, just 71% said they have an actual company vision established and written down.

Even if you think everyone understands the company vision, there’s plenty of room for (mis)interpretation if it’s not put down in writing. And several respondents don’t merely settle for a vision statement tucked into employee paperwork – some reported displaying it on an engraved plate in the office, while others emblazoned it in the conference room and prominently displayed it in the warehouse.

Login to access the full research report on Company Vision & Culture.

For a deep dive into Company Vision & Culture training resources, recommendations and educational materials, visit the Contracting Best Practices Library at the EGIA Member Dashboard.

Question: Should we utilize paid advertising with Yelp?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

Well, the answer is yes and no, because Yelp varies greatly depending upon the marketplace. So we’ve had — like in our own marketplace in Phoenix — we’ve had great success with Yelp. And in other markets, not so much.

So, it depends on the users that are in the Yelp community, just like we talked about earlier: identifying your target audience and your target geographic zones is part of the marketing model. So in a marketplace where Yelp actually has a strong brand and a strong digital footprint, which in many cases they do, the Yelp advertising works well.

But I think if you go onto a variety of contractor networking forums, ours [ContractorConnect.org] included, you’ll find differences of opinion on that. Meaning that other people have found that the Yelp customer is not really a good customer, and is somebody that they’d just as soon not do business with.

So the answer is I think you have to do A and B testing, it’s what we talked about earlier. You have a campaign, you set up a promotion, you work with Yelp to see how it works, you track the actual results, you look at your cost per lead, you look at your cost per sale, your gross profit dollars per transaction, and you determine whether or not that’s a medium that is a quality medium for your brand and the business model you’re operating under.

I could spend a lot of time and go through each medium that’s digital in that regard. There’s just a great variety in the marketplace and — Angie’s List is a good example. It used to be a fantastic lead source for us, and it’s turned into something that we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole today. Now some people might have great success with that in other marketplaces, but in our area that product has changed quite a bit, and the market has changed. Therefore, our A/B testing says it’s not really a good place for us to spend our money, even though this question is about Yelp.

Today, we would say Yelp is a good place for us in our area, but again, it can change, so you’re constantly looking at your metrics. And I think the biggest issue with contractors is that we don’t always track success patterns of it, and we need isolate the cost per lead and the cost per transaction. Drew and Wally, I’ll pass this off to you.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this week’s calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

The difference between excelling in your work and simply keeping your head above water? Consistency. Perfect the process and run it consistently and, more often than not, you’ll succeed.

Mark Matteson talks consistency and its role in success, on the latest episode of Contractor Coffee Club.

The summer busy season can push your CSR’s to the limit — that phone may not stop ringing until fall. So how can they cope, while delivering the highest level of service possible?

Brigham Dickinson explains 3 key tips for CSR’s, in a clip from the latest episode of the Cracking the Code weekly show.

Watch the clip this week’s episode of Cracking the Code below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show, before it goes in the members-only archive on June 18.

Question: How do you measure the effectiveness of TV and radio marketing?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

Great question. TV, radio would both be considered broadcast media, and it’s very difficult to measure that. The advanced approach would be to create a unique promotion, and then you can create some sort of a tracking mechanism that attaches itself to that promotion, so that it’s unique to that particular medium.

So whether that’s radio or TV as a combination or individually, we would almost always have something that we would try to create that was specific to that. So that if we get calls from those particular media, or if someone even lands on the website, and somehow comes through a digital platform and we collect that call and record that call, we know what the question is relative to the promotions – we can track that back to the actual media choice.

This extends past radio and TV as well, by the way. So I spent 14 years with Lennox, and we sold TV to a lot of our Lennox dealers as part of our dealer-group advertising program. Lennox would throw money at that, and I think suppliers today still do something similar, a co-operative type platform. And the difficulty back in those days, where we didn’t really have the web technology that we have today to be able to tie everything in, record the calls, do all those kinds of things we do today.

But even in those days what we know for sure, was the most successful contractors always had a balanced approach to media. So they did some form of advertising that was beyond just one or two things, whether that be direct mail or newspaper. Typically they looked at all forms of media and said, “How do I create a promotion and how do I track it?”

So, in today’s world, it’s much more fragmented than it was even 10 years ago, let alone 25 or 30 years ago. So I think what you have to do is be mindful that your promotional pages, your pay per click pages, all of those things have to line up to your promotions, so that anytime you do some sort of a media platform, you create some kind of call to action that can be tracked.

And then the biggest challenge I see is that a lot of companies don’t train their internal organizations to support the idea that that’s out there. So customer service and dispatch folks, sometimes, are unaware of that. So make sure you align the training with that as well.

Wally, I’m sure you probably have some comments on that. …

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this week’s calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

One tried and true technique for unburdening debt: Sell your way out of debt — and into prosperity.

In a clip from the clip from Cracking the Code weekly show, Weldon Long explains that, when you have a business problem, you can’t beg, borrow or steal your way out of it. You have to sell your way out of it.

Watch the clip this week’s episode of Cracking the Code below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show, before it goes in the members-only archive on June 4.

Question: What continuing education do you recommend for technicians and sales reps?

Mike Treas; The HVAC Sales Coach:

Well, first of all, once a year I believe everybody, I don’t care how long they’ve been in the industry – whether you’re a service tech, a service selling tech, or a comfort advisor — you should be in a class.

The EGIA classes, or having someone like one of the EGIA faculty come to your center and teach all of your people the sales process, go through it from beginning to end, and roleplay, roleplay, roleplay, one week every year. Everyone. And I believe that goes for customer service reps as well, they’re just not part of this question. And then, that curriculum needs to be carried through on your weekly meetings. So anytime someone goes to that training, their manager needs to go to that same training, so that their manager – or coach, or internal training person – can coach them every single week on those meetings that we have in the mornings at the shop.

So the other, of course, there’s a lot of other great opportunities out there. EGIA Contractor University is a great way to get ongoing education, and I believe that all of your techs and your comfort advisors should, once a week, pull up something from the EGIA website and just start working your way through the Contractor University curriculum from beginning to end. The beautiful thing about it is that after you finish each module, you are required to pass a test before you can move on to the next one, so they have to pay attention, which is a great thing.

Then of course there are others like Weldon Long’s HVAC Sales Academy, and again back to people like myself: we all do onsite training classes. For example, I’ll be traveling to a center next week and I will work with every one of their comfort advisors, every one of their technicians, to teach them a process. And again, even if they’ve gone through it before, and many of these people have, it’s a great refresher to do it live with other people in your organization, so that you’re all on the same page. And then the manager has, of course, the curriculum to manage you every day as you go in and out of customers’ homes.

James Leichter; President, Aptora Corporation & Mr. HVAC, LLC:

I would reiterate one thing, and Mike says it all the time, and I think it’s just worth underlining: The managers need to go to these things. Oftentimes managers, especially owners, we make the mistake of thinking that we can send our people to a seminar and they’ll come back fixed, right Mike?

You send them off to be fixed, like it was dog training, and you get your dog back and he’ll go fetch the bird. It just doesn’t work like that.

Even with us, we owners, we have to be constantly reminded of our education. So owners and managers – managers at a minimum – need to go to these training sessions to learn what is being taught, so they can reinforce it when they get back. I think that’s what Mike was saying, I just wanted to underline it.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this week’s calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.