May 20, 2025 • 28 mins
Tired of waiting for leads to come to you? A door-to-door marketing team can be the game-changer that fuels rapid business growth. Learn how home service business owners can recruit, train, and compensate a high-performing team that brings in 100+ leads a month—without relying on expensive ads. Master the scripts, timing, and strategies that make this approach so effective. Join host Adam Sylvester with Mike Gore-Hickman of Painter Growth.
New to Jobber? Masters of Home Service listeners can claim an exclusive discount for Jobber at https://bit.ly/4d0KAEh
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
We had a client a couple of weeks agoand he went out for his very first time
ever going to door-to-door, huge mentalchallenge, really not comfortable,
a lot of anxiety.
He went out and he met a home builderand a realtor and got two estimates
booked. Wow, in like two hours.
Welcome to Jobber Masters of HomeService, a podcast for home service pros,
(00:20):
buy Home Service Pros.
Today we're in Las Vegas and we'retalking about building out a door-to-door
marketing team to generate moreleads. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
Today's guest is Mike Gore Hickman.
He's the CEO and founder of paintergrowth.com. Mike, welcome to the studio.
What's up Adam? Thanks for having me, man.
Yeah.
Good to be here.
Yeah, I'm super excitedabout this. So first of all,
(00:41):
let's tell our listeners who you are,what you do, all that kind of stuff.
For sure. So like yousaid, Michael Hickman,
founder of painter growth.com andhost of the Painter Growth Podcast.
So if you're a painterlooking to grow your business,
then just type in Painter Growth Podcastwherever you listen to this and listen
to it after you're done. We felt hundredsand hundreds of painting contractors,
so basically like the one-stop shop,
if you're looking to get startedor scale up to 5 million,
(01:04):
we got something for you.
Awesome. Cool. Well, let's get into it.
So today we're talkingabout door door sales,
which for a lot of people iskind of scary. It a scary topic,
but does it work? Does door, door-to-doorsales still work from your opinion?
What do you think?
I mean, yes, definitely, and I wouldn'teven say it's my opinion, right?
It's from hundreds andhundreds of contractors doing door-to-door sales all over
(01:28):
the country and just seeing thereturn on investment being so much
greater than you could get fromsay, Facebook ads or Google Ads.
If you do it right andpeople have a gut wrenching
reaction,
a lot of people have a gut wrenchingreaction to the idea of going door to door
because uncomfortable. It's notlike a comfortable thing to do.
(01:49):
So it's half mental and half tacticaland you have to be able to get over the
mental hurdle of it and only then you canstart approaching the tactical side of
it.
Yeah, it's such an active thing, right?
It's so much easier to sit in on yourcouch at night and post Facebook groups
and change your website. All those arevery passive ways to generate leads,
but door to door is about the mostactive go out, you leave your cave,
(02:12):
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.
It's just scary and it's alot of work at the start.
But what I wanted to talk about todaywas not how to go door to door yourself.
I don't think the average contractor wantsto go door to door every single night
for the rest of their time in business.
It's about building a system that cangenerate you leads without you actually
(02:36):
having to continue to do it. And it's alot easier. It's easier said than done,
but it's a lot easier than you mightthink it is to get it to that point.
There's going to be some uncomfort,
you're going to have to go to yourcomfort zone, but you can get there.
You can get to a point where your doorto door team is bringing you 30, 50,
a hundred leads per month, basicallywhat you need to hit your sales goals.
So let's talk about the nuts andbolts here. So when you say your team,
(03:00):
are these people you hirejust do door to door sales?
Are they your painters when it'sraining? Who are these people?
Yeah, there's a bunch ofdifferent ways to go about it.
Now I'll start with something that wecall warm calling or job site marketing.
And this is the easiest one to kind ofget started at because you're going into
a warm neighborhood where you're alreadyworking on projects and the concept
(03:20):
around it is basically youhave a neighborhood that you're already doing work
in, you put a lawn sign up, hopefullymaybe you add on some other marketing,
like you throw some flyers up theday before and then either yourself,
you and your partner oryou and your painters,
you just go and knock theneighborhood real quick. Hey,
we're doing some work in your area. Areyou thinking about having any work done,
(03:41):
painting done,
whatever your service of choiceis and doing the first couple of
doors, you'll get a rush.It's kind of uncomfortable,
but you'll realize reallyquickly that it's not that scary.
People are typically prettynice and if they're not nice,
then you're probably in the wrongarea and the right neighborhood is a
whole discussion in and of itself.
(04:03):
Let's go there. So how do youchoose a neighborhood? I mean,
you said the ones you'realready working in.
So I've heard this idea over yearsand so one variation I've heard is
before you start the job that morningyou go knock on Miss Nancy's door next
door and say, Hey, we're going to bemaking some noise. If it's too loud,
come get me. Where can I park mycar? And you're hoping that they say,
well paint my house too, right? Sosimilar idea where you just go around,
(04:25):
knock on the door,
the five doors around the house you'reworking on before you start the job.
Is that what you're saying?
Five or 50?
Okay.
Yeah, so the way that you justdescribed it, where can I park my car?
Hope we're not going to making anynoise. 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 abouthaving any painting?
(04:46):
Do you need any gutters cleaned orwhatever 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 betweenfour o'clock and seven o'clock window in
the evening when most people are homeand it's the end of the day and you can
just go, just see if anyoneelse is thinking about painting.
And that's a reallyimportant note because it,
(05:06):
it's a lot easier on your mental stateto 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 behome to actually talk to people because
the whole point is to generateleads, not to knock and run away.
For sure. Yeah, you want to generate leadsand you'll make a lot of connections.
We had a client a couple of weeks agoand he went out for his very first time
(05:29):
ever going to door-to-door, huge mentalchallenge, really not comfortable,
a lot of anxiety.
He went out and he met a home builderand a realtor and got two estimates
booked in two hours, and it's like, wow,
this could actually turninto a lot of business.
Now imagine if you did that evenonce a week, an entire year,
it would potentially changethe outcome of your business.
(05:49):
Okay, that's a good segue. So thepurpose of the door knocking is what?
To generate a lead or close a deal.
So definitely generate lead orpreferably book an estimate. Okay,
explain that.
The difference between a lead and anestimate is obviously an estimate is
scheduled. You have a date inthe future to go to their home.
If you just have a lead now you haveto convert that lead into an estimate.
(06:11):
It's a lot easier to get alead than to get an estimate,
and the economics of it are actuallyvery favorable when it comes to paying
for someone to go out and get you leads.
I'm just going to gopainting for an example.
If your average job size is$5,000 and you want to keep
your cost of marketingbelow 10%, which is $500,
(06:31):
that means you can pay $500 per a job.
If you close one out ofthree estimates, now you can.
What is that $166 per estimatethat you can pay? So on average,
a marketer once they're trained up,can get about one estimate per hour.
So that means every houryou can pay them up to $166.
So how bad you could pay them $40 anhour base and a hundred dollars an
(06:53):
estimate.
And as long as they get that one estimateper 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 hourbase and $50 an estimate.
But even then they could make70 bucks an hour, $120 an hour,
and all of a sudden you don'thave to just hire a student,
you can hire a professional, you can hiresomeone who sells cars during the day,
(07:17):
a professional salesperson,
they're going to make 70 bucks an houras long as they get one estimate per hour
and they're going to representyour company way better.
Is that your suggestion isto hire completely people completely outside of the
painting world basically?
Yes. Yeah,
I recommend hiring forpersonality and specifically first
(07:38):
impression, right? Because whattheir job is is first impression,
they're going to go out and do 201stimpressions. That's a great point.
So the skill doesn't really matter.
Teaching a few things about whateveryour 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 twoimportant skills that they need to have or
(07:58):
traits, one would be that firstimpression, are they happy? Are they,
you just feel good when youtalk to them? And then two,
are they motivated for money?They need to be hungry for money.
They can make a lot of money, butthey do need to be at some level.
You can manage them, you can deploythem, you can tell them where to go,
when to go,
but if they're not self-driven andthey're not motivated and they go out and
(08:21):
they get skunked one night,they'll quit. They'll quit.
They might not show up the next day.
I met my first door to door sales guy.
He was working for pest control and weall know pest control is on the rise.
And this guy,
he was paying for medical schoolby door knocking all summer long.
He was making that much money. I waslike, man, let me see your flyer thing.
He had his whole laminated sheet, whichis another thing I want to get to.
(08:44):
What do you equip these people with? Whatkind of marketing, collateral, flyers,
business cards, what kind of stuff dothey have in their quiver of arrows,
so to speak?
For sure. A really important metric.You don't really necessarily track it,
but you can kind of get a goodsense if it's good or bad.
Is your door open rate? How many peopleare actually answering the door for you?
So part of that is time of day,so you want to go in the evening,
(09:04):
but part of that is are you approachable?
Are.
You someone that someone wantsto open the door for, right?
You need to be friendly, youneed to have bright colors.
You need to be logoed up. Ideallyyou have a bright colored polo,
bright colored hat with matchinglogos, a clipboard and a lanyard.
You can get a clipboard and alanyard at staples for like.
A lanyard. Now what's that.
(09:25):
For a lanyard with just a littlepicture in your name on it.
Okay. Name tag. Name tag.
Yeah, you just go to themore official you look,
even if you're a chuck and a truck,
you're a one man show andyou're going out by yourself,
go buy a lanyard at maps.
It is going to make you look so muchmore professional and people are going to
be way less scared to open thedoor for you. So you knock,
take three or five big steps back.
If they have that little step onthe front of their door, whatever,
(09:47):
like the three steps leavingup the door, go to the bottom.
You don't want to be a threat.
It's intimidating to be rightby the door when you open it.
You don't want to be there. You want totake a few steps back. Just be friendly,
be happy,
have a big smile on your face and havethe intention to be helpful because
people like people who are helpful.So don't go try to selling something,
(10:07):
just see if you can help them.
Yeah. Now I have a question aboutpay. So you talked about hourly pay.
Explain that a bit more because Ithink a lot of people assume it's just
straight commission.So tell us about that.
Yeah, you definitely cando straight commission.
The problem with straight commission isthat if someone goes out for one, two,
or three shifts and gets skunked,
(10:27):
they get nothing and you're goingto lose that marketer, right?
Finding a really good marketer and puttingthe time and energy into recruiting
them, interviewing them, hiringthem, the paperwork, training them,
all of that is so labor intensive.So retention is a very important.
Metric.
So I would prefer to have a healthy basewhere you're paying them actually 20
(10:48):
bucks an hour just as a base and thena reasonable amount per estimate.
And I like paying per estimate insteadof a percentage of the job booked.
Because.
That becomes, you can't track itthemselves. It's out of their hands,
it's out of their control.
Pay for the metric that you wantand what is within their control.
And if you can help them win,help them achieve their goals,
(11:09):
know how much money they want to makeand help them make that much money,
they're going to love you. They'regoing to stick around for a long time.
Okay, so I know a lot of our listenershave a lot of questions. Don't worry.
I'm going to ask 'em all if peopledon't worry. But before I get to that,
so I like what you saidearlier about tracking,
how many door knocks do you make andthen how many people did you talk to
keep going? What are thoseKPIs that you really track?
(11:32):
So I know in sales it'sall about the numbers.
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 yourquestion for a second because a lot of
people, when you pay anhourly rate like that,
you're concerned about wage theft. Whydoesn't, someone's just going to go out,
(11:54):
they're going to say they workedfive hours. Oh, I didn't get yet.
Sit around.
Yeah, they're sitting in theircar just didn't even go out.
So there's a lot of door-to-door toolsout there like apps and stuff that you
can use.
But what I found is free and the bestapp that you can use is just Strava,
S-T-R-A-V-A, Strava. It's afitness tracking app and it's free.
They're going to ask you to payfor it, but you don't have to.
(12:14):
It's just a free app and you haveyour marketer just record their route
while they're out and about and it'lltake their map and their start time and
their end time and their total time,
and they just send you a screenshotof their route when they're done.
And that's how you can pay them. Youcan see every single neighborhood,
every single door that they went to,
and then they can't steal money fromyou because you know that they went,
(12:36):
if they don't send you thescreenshot, they don't get paid.
Interesting. Now,
what do you do about leads thataren't good quality control?
What if you just get a bunchof bad leads from these people?
Does.
That happen?
Of course it happens.
So that's where number oneneighborhood is really important.
So you asked earlier about neighborhood,
the easiest way is justlook at lawns and cars.
(12:57):
Is.
The lawn in good shape and do theyhave a decent car in the driveway?
And even if the housesare small lawns and cars,
that's a very high indicatorof a good neighborhood.
If you want to go a little bit moregranular, a little bit more scientific,
you can use as a tool on the USPSwebsite. And if you're in Canada,
a tool on the Canada Post websitewhere you can go into each zip code,
each street, each neighborhood and seewhat the average income levels are.
(13:20):
So what I would do is startwith the online tools,
see where the good income levels are,
and then you can use GoogleMap to actually drop a pin onto those streets to see
the car in the lawn room. And then youcan deploy marketers in those areas.
And what I would like to see you dois be the big fish in a small pond,
meaning if you're in Chicago, don'ttry to do all of Metro Chicago,
(13:42):
but pick a little neighborhood that fitsall of your criteria and hit that spot
like five or six times in a year.
You're.
Going to create that brand recognitionand become that big player in a small
pond that everybody knows andstarts referring back and forth.
So your target homes are gettingdoor knocked every two to three?
Yeah. Yeah. I'd say around,yeah, two to three months.
Okay.
(14:03):
And you would say that'senough that frequency is appropriate where people don't
feel like you were just hereyesterday? That doesn't happen much.
Not really. In our experience,
it's long enough apart where you'regoing to get that natural cycle.
Not everyone is ready forevery service all the time.
There's a natural cycle to things,
so you might not catchsomeone when they're at their specific pain point or need
(14:27):
point, but in three monthsthey might be in six months,
they might be in 12 months, they mightbe, but even if you don't show up,
maybe it's every six months, they'regoing to hopefully start remembering you.
Maybe in between door knockingroutes, you throw a flyer,
you have some really targetedFacebook ads to that area.
We call this stacking ourmarketing on top of each other.
So it's not just thedoor knock in isolation,
but they see your lawn signs becauseyou're targeting this one area,
(14:50):
so you're doing work in this. Theysee your vehicle all the time.
They see your flyers that you're dropping,
your lawn signs and they seeyou doing work in the area,
so they're going to thinkthat you're everywhere,
even though you're just in that one area.
Do you give the homeowner, let's saythey act interested, but not right now.
They don't want to book an assessmentyet, but call me back next week,
(15:10):
that kind of people, doyou give them a brochure?
Do you give them something or doyou just say, okay, I'll call.
What do you do in that situation?
The goal, you shouldalways try to get the lead.
Okay.
Yeah, always try to get thatcontact information yourself,
and you could have a flyer or somethingthat you can give them that's nice to
kind of reciprocate and actuallygive them something useful.
But you try to get that leadand if you have a CRM job,
(15:33):
you can set reminders for yourself tocall back those leads at different times
and send them different types of emailcampaigns, nurture those leads over time,
again, hitting them. Now youhit them in the physical world,
now you're hitting themin the digital world.
Something that I've really enjoyedover the last several years of learning
marketing and especially website design,
is instead of asking the personto marry you the first visit,
(15:54):
offer them a free PDF,
the five things you need to knowbefore you paint your house,
that kind of stuff. Andso I'm just curious,
have you ever integrated anything likethat into this sales cycle before where
they're not quite ready to booka quote, but hey, we have a free,
anything like that?
Yeah, so I would call thisa long-term nurture sequence
Where it would be almostlike a monthly newsletter,
(16:15):
but it's not like a newsletterin the traditional sense,
but we'd call it a newsletter, but everymonth they would get a value email,
exactly like you said,
five things to ask your contractorbefore you book with them.
If you're in painting,
like the top three trendy colorsthat all builders are using now. Oh,
that's a good one. I like that.
Things like that that people would wantto click on and these days you can even
(16:37):
ask chat GBT to come up with thatcontent and write it for you.
Just go in and make itnot IE afterwards. And
with the use of chat GBT,
you can make all of that copywriting somuch easier and the average homeowner
would never never know.
Right. Mike, this is really great.
I'm going to pause for a minute totalk about jobber. So here's the thing.
You're going to go knock on allthese doors and get all these leads,
(16:58):
and then what do you do with them? Youneed to have jobber because jobber,
once they're in the system,
they won't fall through the cracks andthen jobber will automatically follow up
with them. They will stay in touch.
You'll nurture your clients to the finishline, and that's why you need jobber.
So if you are not usingjobber, you need to today,
go to jobber.com/podcast deal, get anexclusive discount and try out jobber.
(17:19):
You will not regret it. How does someoneget 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 knockon the doors between four and seven.
Anything else in terms of getting started?
If people are interested in figuring outhow I actually put together a special
package just for today, if yougo to painter growth.com/jobber,
(17:41):
I put together a door-to-door mini coursewith training videos and templates and
all that stuff. Sopainter growth.com/jobber,
you can get that first step is I wouldsay it's going to start a few steps back,
and that's really start with theend in mind. What is your goal?
What's your goal for youryear based on revenue?
What's your average job size?
And then how many jobs does thatmean you need to get from there?
(18:04):
What's your close rate? So thatmeans how many estimates do you need?
And then you can break that downinto a weekly estimates goal.
That's where we want to start.
How many estimates do we really needevery month in order to hit our goal?
I have some math.
If you need to do a hundred thousanddollars in a month at a $5,000 average job
size, you need 20 jobsat a 33% close rate.
That's 60 estimates and dividedby four weeks in a month.
(18:25):
That's about 15 estimates per week.
If.
You want to do 15 estimates per week,if you're going to door-to-door,
that's about 15 hoursof marketing per week.
So two marketers go ineight hours each that,
and if they're good enough and they'regetting you one estimate per hour,
that will be enough to help you booka hundred thousand dollars per year at
those numbers, a hundred thousanddollars per month at those numbers.
(18:46):
That's great.
Do you ever send out twopeople at a time for a
competition sort of dynamic or lovethat? Did you go through my course.
Yet? Yeah, so that'sactually a great tactic.
I actually prefer to, I know it's notlike pc, but have a boy and a girl go,
or two girls, girls typically get ahigher door open rate. I don't know.
(19:09):
It is what it's just do.Yeah, it is what it is.
You can have them and it'salso safer going in pairs,
especially if you don't know thearea. So it's a little bit safer.
You can have them go upopposite sides of the street.
You can get neighborhoods done alot faster and you can totally have
competitions like that.
What we would even do is have once amonth or once every six weeks or so,
we would have a full door to doormarketing event where we would get
(19:32):
all of our painters, whoever wasinto coming and all of our marketers,
and we would go and we wouldcompletely blast an area.
We'd go for about an hourand a half, two hours,
and then we'd meet at a pool hall afterand whoever had the most leads would an
A prize. We'd pay everyone. We'd buybeers and play pool and stuff like that,
and we'd make a whole night out of itand we put people against each other and
it got pretty competitive.People run door to door,
(19:53):
and it's pretty cool to get that typeof competition on something that's just
going to help your business.
Another question I have is how doyou make sure, I mean accountability.
How do you lead your team to makesure that these things, because pool,
the parties and the beers, allthat's super fun and great,
but that doesn't happen overnight.
You have a culture whereit's appreciated and valued.
(20:15):
People want to knock on doorsand generate leads and it's fun.
How do you get to that point?
Yeah, that's a goodquestion. So basically,
how do you get to the pointwhere you have a success culture,
like a performance culturein your marketing team?
Yeah, it's a leadership question really.
How do you at the top createthis environment where people hit their numbers and
(20:35):
all that?
Yeah, I mean, just like anything else,
when you're startingsomething for the first time,
you're not going to be very good atit, right? And you're going to go,
everyone here listening.
If you've never hired a marketerbefore and you're to go that route,
you're going to hire someone. They'renot 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 mightshow up to three shifts,
and you're going to learn a little bit,
and hopefully we can help youskip a little bit of that.
(20:58):
First thing you need todo is try it yourself,
and this is the scariest part. Thisis where most people get hung up,
but you need to go yourself at leastfor a few hours, maybe two shifts,
get some results, figure out how to do it,
figure out what your script is going tobe and see that you can actually get the
results. See that youas the business owner,
can get at least one estimate perhour. Once you are able to do that,
(21:19):
now we can go hire someone and we cantrain them. You need to go out with them,
make sure that you cansee them be successful,
because that's a huge mistake thatpeople have is that they just like, oh,
I'm going to hire you to gomarketing. I've never done it before,
but there's this neighborhood. Go haveater. No training. No accountability,
and never having done it themselves.
So go do it yourself andthen go out with them,
(21:41):
train them until they're successful,until they're able to hit their metrics.
When it comes to creatingthat performance culture,
it always needs to tie back to theirgoals. They don't care about your goals,
they care about their goals.So it's like, Hey, Lucy, cool.
What are you saving up for?Alright, you want to buy a new car?
How much money do you need tosave for that? Okay, $20,000.
How much do you want to make a month?You want to make $4,000 a month? Okay,
(22:04):
here's how you can make $4,000 permonth. If you go out Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday from here to here, youget this many leads a week,
you're going to be making $4,000 a month.
Do you think we can getyou there together? Cool.
And then constantly remindingthem why they're working so hard,
why they're doing this. It's not for you.
They don't care abouthow many sales you make.
They care about what's in it for them.
(22:25):
Salespeople care about money.
They.
Care. That's okay. Yeah.
But that's, remember of the start, I said,
they need to be really happy and havea great first impression. Very hungry,
and they need to be very hungry.
Yeah.
So important.
What about as you're monitoringthese people's results and
making sure, and you're startingto see patterns they don't like,
how do you pinpoint those and how doyou say your conversion rate just isn't
(22:45):
high enough or you knocked on so manydoors, but no one answered really?
How do you troubleshootproblems as they come up?
I mean, the biggest thing isdiagnosing 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 theother one is not having doors opened.
If.
You're not having doors opened, youneed to check your neighborhood.
(23:07):
Is it a neighborhood that you'vedone work for in the past?
That's probably the best way to pickyour first neighborhood is just look at
your city. Where have you done a lot ofjobs? Where were your best customers?
Where did they live? Goknock around those areas.
There's a lot more good people inthere that you could do work for.
Are you going at the right time? Testdifferent times. Try the evening,
try Saturday morning, try Sundayafternoon. Just test different times,
(23:28):
see when the higher openrate is in your neighborhood.
And then if they'regoing out, they do one,
two or three shifts in a row withoutgetting an estimate or without missing
their goal KPIs, you need to go out withthem. There's no other way to do it,
but you need to actually just go outwith them and see what they're doing,
problem solve it with them.
I've actually had some people justhave the marketer have their phone on
(23:49):
speakerphone and just put it on theirclipboard so you can coach them from long
distance. So you don'tnecessarily have to be there,
but you do need to do some coaching.
You need to make sure that theyare saying the right thing.
They're problem solving,they're overcoming objections,
they're collecting the lead even beforethat, that you actually do it first.
Were you able to be successful?
Yeah, that's huge. So a lotof people will say, but boss,
(24:09):
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 notsaying exactly what I told you to say,
and as soon as you go in therewith them or listen to recordings,
you'll very quickly, most of the time,
know exactly what they're doingwrong within like seconds.
Yeah. Are they taking a big step back?Are they knocking loud enough? They.
Bang on the door when they knock?
(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 youtold them or asked them to wear?
There's just a lot of things that couldgo wrong, but if you're there in person,
you see it, it's going to bea lot easier to problem solve.
Okay, Mike, last thingI really want to know,
and I think our listeners wantto know too. What's the script?
What's the first three seconds? Give usthe script. The first knock on the door,
(24:53):
they open it, and then what do you say?
So one way that I like to kindof start it out is ask them, Hey,
my name's Mike. I'm with BlueprintPainting. Have you heard of us? Just.
Quick question.
Oh, no, we haven't. Okay, cool. Well,
we're just painting a homein your neighborhood right now and just wondering if
you were thinking about havingany painting done this year.
(25:15):
That's it.
That's it. They say no. Some peoplewill 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 getit. You might get a few people,
but it's going to bea numbers game, right?
As long as you hit the otherthings that we mentioned earlier,
and then you also hit enough homes,
those are the two things thatare really going to matter.
(25:35):
Just that first impression.
And then the numbers. My dad isone of the best salespeople I know,
and he's always said,
you're just pulling up rocks and seeingthere's a big juicy worm under it.
If there's not, you put the rockback down. If there is, you're good.
And that's what you're doing.
You're hoping that you catch people inthat 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.
(25:56):
You're not trying to arm wrestlepeople to paint their house.
You're just hoping that you're justwanting to be there for them when they're
ready.
If you believe, and this ispart of the mentality of it,
if you believe that you'rethe best show in town,
you're going to give 'em the best results,
not only the best and servicepaint job or whatever,
but also the best customerexperience and at the best price.
(26:17):
If you believe that you're the best,
then selling your services shouldn'tfeel slimy. It shouldn't feel dirty.
It should feel good.
It should feel like your missionis to go spread the good word,
and that's what you're doing,
is you're helping peopleovercome crappy contractors.
Because when someone wants to hire acontractor, they pick up the phone,
they look on Google,
and they leave a bunch of voicemailsand hope someone calls 'em back.
(26:39):
You're helping them skip that wholeprocess and just giving them a seamless
sales experience.
Mike, it's been great. I reallyappreciate all your insights here.
I'm going to try to break it downfor three actionable takeaways here.
Number one is hire for Hunger.
Make sure that your marketers havegreat first impressions and they conduct
themselves well and that they'rehungry. Salespeople have to be hungry.
(26:59):
Number two is use theStrava app to track them.
Make sure that they're going the rightplaces and they're not stealing from you,
stealing time, and use theStrava app to your advantage.
And number three is make sure that yourteam is presenting themselves well,
whether that means that they're takingthose steps away from the front door so
they're not intimidating or they aredressing properly with the lanyard,
the name tag and the brightcolors and the hat and the shirt.
(27:20):
Make sure that they are presentingthemselves. Clipboard, professionally,
clipboard, and the clipboard.Yes. Anything else, Mike.
Clipboard or iPad?
Oh.
Yeah, iPad can work really good too.I mean, I've broken all this down.
If you're actuallyserious about doing this,
I have a whole free video seriesthat I put together just for this,
so painter growth.com/jobber, and youcan go get the videos, the downloads,
(27:40):
the scripts, all of that absolutely free.
I just really want to give you a goodgift for listening to this and paying
attention to what I have tosay. So thank you for that.
Or the Painter Growth Podcast.A lot of good tips there too.
Well, Mike, thanks for being here.
I think the impact you're having onyour community is really significant,
and your painters are reallybetter for it, so keep it up.
Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.
And thank you for listening.
I hope that you heard on the day willhelp you build out your marketing team
(28:03):
door to door sales. I'myour host, Adam Sylvester.
You can findme@adamsylvester.com. Remember,
your team and your clients deserveyour very best, so go give it to 'em.
We had a client a couple of weeks agoand he went out for his very first time
ever going to door-to-door, huge mentalchallenge, really not comfortable,
a lot of anxiety.
He went out and he met a home builderand a realtor and got two estimates
booked. Wow, in like two hours.
Welcome to Jobber Masters of HomeService, a podcast for home service pros,
(00:20):
buy Home Service Pros.
Today we're in Las Vegas and we'retalking about building out a door-to-door
marketing team to generate moreleads. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
Today's guest is Mike Gore Hickman.
He's the CEO and founder of paintergrowth.com. Mike, welcome to the studio.
What's up Adam? Thanks for having me, man.
Yeah.
Good to be here.
Yeah, I'm super excitedabout this. So first of all,
(00:41):
let's tell our listeners who you are,what you do, all that kind of stuff.
For sure. So like yousaid, Michael Hickman,
founder of painter growth.com andhost of the Painter Growth Podcast.
So if you're a painterlooking to grow your business,
then just type in Painter Growth Podcastwherever you listen to this and listen
to it after you're done. We felt hundredsand hundreds of painting contractors,
so basically like the one-stop shop,
if you're looking to get startedor scale up to 5 million,
(01:04):
we got something for you.
Awesome. Cool. Well, let's get into it.
So today we're talkingabout door door sales,
which for a lot of people iskind of scary. It a scary topic,
but does it work? Does door, door-to-doorsales still work from your opinion?
What do you think?
I mean, yes, definitely, and I wouldn'teven say it's my opinion, right?
It's from hundreds andhundreds of contractors doing door-to-door sales all over
(01:28):
the country and just seeing thereturn on investment being so much
greater than you could get fromsay, Facebook ads or Google Ads.
If you do it right andpeople have a gut wrenching
reaction,
a lot of people have a gut wrenchingreaction to the idea of going door to door
because uncomfortable. It's notlike a comfortable thing to do.
(01:49):
So it's half mental and half tacticaland you have to be able to get over the
mental hurdle of it and only then you canstart approaching the tactical side of
it.
Yeah, it's such an active thing, right?
It's so much easier to sit in on yourcouch at night and post Facebook groups
and change your website. All those arevery passive ways to generate leads,
but door to door is about the mostactive go out, you leave your cave,
(02:12):
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.
It's just scary and it's alot of work at the start.
But what I wanted to talk about todaywas not how to go door to door yourself.
I don't think the average contractor wantsto go door to door every single night
for the rest of their time in business.
It's about building a system that cangenerate you leads without you actually
(02:36):
having to continue to do it. And it's alot easier. It's easier said than done,
but it's a lot easier than you mightthink it is to get it to that point.
There's going to be some uncomfort,
you're going to have to go to yourcomfort zone, but you can get there.
You can get to a point where your doorto door team is bringing you 30, 50,
a hundred leads per month, basicallywhat you need to hit your sales goals.
So let's talk about the nuts andbolts here. So when you say your team,
(03:00):
are these people you hirejust do door to door sales?
Are they your painters when it'sraining? Who are these people?
Yeah, there's a bunch ofdifferent ways to go about it.
Now I'll start with something that wecall warm calling or job site marketing.
And this is the easiest one to kind ofget started at because you're going into
a warm neighborhood where you're alreadyworking on projects and the concept
(03:20):
around it is basically youhave a neighborhood that you're already doing work
in, you put a lawn sign up, hopefullymaybe you add on some other marketing,
like you throw some flyers up theday before and then either yourself,
you and your partner oryou and your painters,
you just go and knock theneighborhood real quick. Hey,
we're doing some work in your area. Areyou thinking about having any work done,
(03:41):
painting done,
whatever your service of choiceis and doing the first couple of
doors, you'll get a rush.It's kind of uncomfortable,
but you'll realize reallyquickly that it's not that scary.
People are typically prettynice and if they're not nice,
then you're probably in the wrongarea and the right neighborhood is a
whole discussion in and of itself.
(04:03):
Let's go there. So how do youchoose a neighborhood? I mean,
you said the ones you'realready working in.
So I've heard this idea over yearsand so one variation I've heard is
before you start the job that morningyou go knock on Miss Nancy's door next
door and say, Hey, we're going to bemaking some noise. If it's too loud,
come get me. Where can I park mycar? And you're hoping that they say,
well paint my house too, right? Sosimilar idea where you just go around,
(04:25):
knock on the door,
the five doors around the house you'reworking on before you start the job.
Is that what you're saying?
Five or 50?
Okay.
Yeah, so the way that you justdescribed it, where can I park my car?
Hope we're not going to making anynoise. 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 abouthaving any painting?
(04:46):
Do you need any gutters cleaned orwhatever 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 betweenfour o'clock and seven o'clock window in
the evening when most people are homeand it's the end of the day and you can
just go, just see if anyoneelse is thinking about painting.
And that's a reallyimportant note because it,
(05:06):
it's a lot easier on your mental stateto 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 behome to actually talk to people because
the whole point is to generateleads, not to knock and run away.
For sure. Yeah, you want to generate leadsand you'll make a lot of connections.
We had a client a couple of weeks agoand he went out for his very first time
(05:29):
ever going to door-to-door, huge mentalchallenge, really not comfortable,
a lot of anxiety.
He went out and he met a home builderand a realtor and got two estimates
booked in two hours, and it's like, wow,
this could actually turninto a lot of business.
Now imagine if you did that evenonce a week, an entire year,
it would potentially changethe outcome of your business.
(05:49):
Okay, that's a good segue. So thepurpose of the door knocking is what?
To generate a lead or close a deal.
So definitely generate lead orpreferably book an estimate. Okay,
explain that.
The difference between a lead and anestimate is obviously an estimate is
scheduled. You have a date inthe future to go to their home.
If you just have a lead now you haveto convert that lead into an estimate.
(06:11):
It's a lot easier to get alead than to get an estimate,
and the economics of it are actuallyvery favorable when it comes to paying
for someone to go out and get you leads.
I'm just going to gopainting for an example.
If your average job size is$5,000 and you want to keep
your cost of marketingbelow 10%, which is $500,
(06:31):
that means you can pay $500 per a job.
If you close one out ofthree estimates, now you can.
What is that $166 per estimatethat you can pay? So on average,
a marketer once they're trained up,can get about one estimate per hour.
So that means every houryou can pay them up to $166.
So how bad you could pay them $40 anhour base and a hundred dollars an
(06:53):
estimate.
And as long as they get that one estimateper 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 hourbase and $50 an estimate.
But even then they could make70 bucks an hour, $120 an hour,
and all of a sudden you don'thave to just hire a student,
you can hire a professional, you can hiresomeone who sells cars during the day,
(07:17):
a professional salesperson,
they're going to make 70 bucks an houras long as they get one estimate per hour
and they're going to representyour company way better.
Is that your suggestion isto hire completely people completely outside of the
painting world basically?
Yes. Yeah,
I recommend hiring forpersonality and specifically first
(07:38):
impression, right? Because whattheir job is is first impression,
they're going to go out and do 201stimpressions. That's a great point.
So the skill doesn't really matter.
Teaching a few things about whateveryour 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 twoimportant skills that they need to have or
(07:58):
traits, one would be that firstimpression, are they happy? Are they,
you just feel good when youtalk to them? And then two,
are they motivated for money?They need to be hungry for money.
They can make a lot of money, butthey do need to be at some level.
You can manage them, you can deploythem, you can tell them where to go,
when to go,
but if they're not self-driven andthey're not motivated and they go out and
(08:21):
they get skunked one night,they'll quit. They'll quit.
They might not show up the next day.
I met my first door to door sales guy.
He was working for pest control and weall know pest control is on the rise.
And this guy,
he was paying for medical schoolby door knocking all summer long.
He was making that much money. I waslike, man, let me see your flyer thing.
He had his whole laminated sheet, whichis another thing I want to get to.
(08:44):
What do you equip these people with? Whatkind of marketing, collateral, flyers,
business cards, what kind of stuff dothey have in their quiver of arrows,
so to speak?
For sure. A really important metric.You don't really necessarily track it,
but you can kind of get a goodsense if it's good or bad.
Is your door open rate? How many peopleare actually answering the door for you?
So part of that is time of day,so you want to go in the evening,
(09:04):
but part of that is are you approachable?
Are.
You someone that someone wantsto open the door for, right?
You need to be friendly, youneed to have bright colors.
You need to be logoed up. Ideallyyou have a bright colored polo,
bright colored hat with matchinglogos, a clipboard and a lanyard.
You can get a clipboard and alanyard at staples for like.
A lanyard. Now what's that.
(09:25):
For a lanyard with just a littlepicture in your name on it.
Okay. Name tag. Name tag.
Yeah, you just go to themore official you look,
even if you're a chuck and a truck,
you're a one man show andyou're going out by yourself,
go buy a lanyard at maps.
It is going to make you look so muchmore professional and people are going to
be way less scared to open thedoor for you. So you knock,
take three or five big steps back.
If they have that little step onthe front of their door, whatever,
(09:47):
like the three steps leavingup the door, go to the bottom.
You don't want to be a threat.
It's intimidating to be rightby the door when you open it.
You don't want to be there. You want totake a few steps back. Just be friendly,
be happy,
have a big smile on your face and havethe intention to be helpful because
people like people who are helpful.So don't go try to selling something,
(10:07):
just see if you can help them.
Yeah. Now I have a question aboutpay. So you talked about hourly pay.
Explain that a bit more because Ithink a lot of people assume it's just
straight commission.So tell us about that.
Yeah, you definitely cando straight commission.
The problem with straight commission isthat if someone goes out for one, two,
or three shifts and gets skunked,
(10:27):
they get nothing and you're goingto lose that marketer, right?
Finding a really good marketer and puttingthe time and energy into recruiting
them, interviewing them, hiringthem, the paperwork, training them,
all of that is so labor intensive.So retention is a very important.
Metric.
So I would prefer to have a healthy basewhere you're paying them actually 20
(10:48):
bucks an hour just as a base and thena reasonable amount per estimate.
And I like paying per estimate insteadof a percentage of the job booked.
Because.
That becomes, you can't track itthemselves. It's out of their hands,
it's out of their control.
Pay for the metric that you wantand what is within their control.
And if you can help them win,help them achieve their goals,
(11:09):
know how much money they want to makeand help them make that much money,
they're going to love you. They'regoing to stick around for a long time.
Okay, so I know a lot of our listenershave a lot of questions. Don't worry.
I'm going to ask 'em all if peopledon't worry. But before I get to that,
so I like what you saidearlier about tracking,
how many door knocks do you make andthen how many people did you talk to
keep going? What are thoseKPIs that you really track?
(11:32):
So I know in sales it'sall about the numbers.
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 yourquestion for a second because a lot of
people, when you pay anhourly rate like that,
you're concerned about wage theft. Whydoesn't, someone's just going to go out,
(11:54):
they're going to say they workedfive hours. Oh, I didn't get yet.
Sit around.
Yeah, they're sitting in theircar just didn't even go out.
So there's a lot of door-to-door toolsout there like apps and stuff that you
can use.
But what I found is free and the bestapp that you can use is just Strava,
S-T-R-A-V-A, Strava. It's afitness tracking app and it's free.
They're going to ask you to payfor it, but you don't have to.
(12:14):
It's just a free app and you haveyour marketer just record their route
while they're out and about and it'lltake their map and their start time and
their end time and their total time,
and they just send you a screenshotof their route when they're done.
And that's how you can pay them. Youcan see every single neighborhood,
every single door that they went to,
and then they can't steal money fromyou because you know that they went,
(12:36):
if they don't send you thescreenshot, they don't get paid.
Interesting. Now,
what do you do about leads thataren't good quality control?
What if you just get a bunchof bad leads from these people?
Does.
That happen?
Of course it happens.
So that's where number oneneighborhood is really important.
So you asked earlier about neighborhood,
the easiest way is justlook at lawns and cars.
(12:57):
Is.
The lawn in good shape and do theyhave a decent car in the driveway?
And even if the housesare small lawns and cars,
that's a very high indicatorof a good neighborhood.
If you want to go a little bit moregranular, a little bit more scientific,
you can use as a tool on the USPSwebsite. And if you're in Canada,
a tool on the Canada Post websitewhere you can go into each zip code,
each street, each neighborhood and seewhat the average income levels are.
(13:20):
So what I would do is startwith the online tools,
see where the good income levels are,
and then you can use GoogleMap to actually drop a pin onto those streets to see
the car in the lawn room. And then youcan deploy marketers in those areas.
And what I would like to see you dois be the big fish in a small pond,
meaning if you're in Chicago, don'ttry to do all of Metro Chicago,
(13:42):
but pick a little neighborhood that fitsall of your criteria and hit that spot
like five or six times in a year.
You're.
Going to create that brand recognitionand become that big player in a small
pond that everybody knows andstarts referring back and forth.
So your target homes are gettingdoor knocked every two to three?
Yeah. Yeah. I'd say around,yeah, two to three months.
Okay.
(14:03):
And you would say that'senough that frequency is appropriate where people don't
feel like you were just hereyesterday? That doesn't happen much.
Not really. In our experience,
it's long enough apart where you'regoing to get that natural cycle.
Not everyone is ready forevery service all the time.
There's a natural cycle to things,
so you might not catchsomeone when they're at their specific pain point or need
(14:27):
point, but in three monthsthey might be in six months,
they might be in 12 months, they mightbe, but even if you don't show up,
maybe it's every six months, they'regoing to hopefully start remembering you.
Maybe in between door knockingroutes, you throw a flyer,
you have some really targetedFacebook ads to that area.
We call this stacking ourmarketing on top of each other.
So it's not just thedoor knock in isolation,
but they see your lawn signs becauseyou're targeting this one area,
(14:50):
so you're doing work in this. Theysee your vehicle all the time.
They see your flyers that you're dropping,
your lawn signs and they seeyou doing work in the area,
so they're going to thinkthat you're everywhere,
even though you're just in that one area.
Do you give the homeowner, let's saythey act interested, but not right now.
They don't want to book an assessmentyet, but call me back next week,
(15:10):
that kind of people, doyou give them a brochure?
Do you give them something or doyou just say, okay, I'll call.
What do you do in that situation?
The goal, you shouldalways try to get the lead.
Okay.
Yeah, always try to get thatcontact information yourself,
and you could have a flyer or somethingthat you can give them that's nice to
kind of reciprocate and actuallygive them something useful.
But you try to get that leadand if you have a CRM job,
(15:33):
you can set reminders for yourself tocall back those leads at different times
and send them different types of emailcampaigns, nurture those leads over time,
again, hitting them. Now youhit them in the physical world,
now you're hitting themin the digital world.
Something that I've really enjoyedover the last several years of learning
marketing and especially website design,
is instead of asking the personto marry you the first visit,
(15:54):
offer them a free PDF,
the five things you need to knowbefore you paint your house,
that kind of stuff. Andso I'm just curious,
have you ever integrated anything likethat into this sales cycle before where
they're not quite ready to booka quote, but hey, we have a free,
anything like that?
Yeah, so I would call thisa long-term nurture sequence
Where it would be almostlike a monthly newsletter,
(16:15):
but it's not like a newsletterin the traditional sense,
but we'd call it a newsletter, but everymonth they would get a value email,
exactly like you said,
five things to ask your contractorbefore you book with them.
If you're in painting,
like the top three trendy colorsthat all builders are using now. Oh,
that's a good one. I like that.
Things like that that people would wantto click on and these days you can even
(16:37):
ask chat GBT to come up with thatcontent and write it for you.
Just go in and make itnot IE afterwards. And
with the use of chat GBT,
you can make all of that copywriting somuch easier and the average homeowner
would never never know.
Right. Mike, this is really great.
I'm going to pause for a minute totalk about jobber. So here's the thing.
You're going to go knock on allthese doors and get all these leads,
(16:58):
and then what do you do with them? Youneed to have jobber because jobber,
once they're in the system,
they won't fall through the cracks andthen jobber will automatically follow up
with them. They will stay in touch.
You'll nurture your clients to the finishline, and that's why you need jobber.
So if you are not usingjobber, you need to today,
go to jobber.com/podcast deal, get anexclusive discount and try out jobber.
(17:19):
You will not regret it. How does someoneget 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 knockon the doors between four and seven.
Anything else in terms of getting started?
If people are interested in figuring outhow I actually put together a special
package just for today, if yougo to painter growth.com/jobber,
(17:41):
I put together a door-to-door mini coursewith training videos and templates and
all that stuff. Sopainter growth.com/jobber,
you can get that first step is I wouldsay it's going to start a few steps back,
and that's really start with theend in mind. What is your goal?
What's your goal for youryear based on revenue?
What's your average job size?
And then how many jobs does thatmean you need to get from there?
(18:04):
What's your close rate? So thatmeans how many estimates do you need?
And then you can break that downinto a weekly estimates goal.
That's where we want to start.
How many estimates do we really needevery month in order to hit our goal?
I have some math.
If you need to do a hundred thousanddollars in a month at a $5,000 average job
size, you need 20 jobsat a 33% close rate.
That's 60 estimates and dividedby four weeks in a month.
(18:25):
That's about 15 estimates per week.
If.
You want to do 15 estimates per week,if you're going to door-to-door,
that's about 15 hoursof marketing per week.
So two marketers go ineight hours each that,
and if they're good enough and they'regetting you one estimate per hour,
that will be enough to help you booka hundred thousand dollars per year at
those numbers, a hundred thousanddollars per month at those numbers.
(18:46):
That's great.
Do you ever send out twopeople at a time for a
competition sort of dynamic or lovethat? Did you go through my course.
Yet? Yeah, so that'sactually a great tactic.
I actually prefer to, I know it's notlike pc, but have a boy and a girl go,
or two girls, girls typically get ahigher door open rate. I don't know.
(19:09):
It is what it's just do.Yeah, it is what it is.
You can have them and it'salso safer going in pairs,
especially if you don't know thearea. So it's a little bit safer.
You can have them go upopposite sides of the street.
You can get neighborhoods done alot faster and you can totally have
competitions like that.
What we would even do is have once amonth or once every six weeks or so,
we would have a full door to doormarketing event where we would get
(19:32):
all of our painters, whoever wasinto coming and all of our marketers,
and we would go and we wouldcompletely blast an area.
We'd go for about an hourand a half, two hours,
and then we'd meet at a pool hall afterand whoever had the most leads would an
A prize. We'd pay everyone. We'd buybeers and play pool and stuff like that,
and we'd make a whole night out of itand we put people against each other and
it got pretty competitive.People run door to door,
(19:53):
and it's pretty cool to get that typeof competition on something that's just
going to help your business.
Another question I have is how doyou make sure, I mean accountability.
How do you lead your team to makesure that these things, because pool,
the parties and the beers, allthat's super fun and great,
but that doesn't happen overnight.
You have a culture whereit's appreciated and valued.
(20:15):
People want to knock on doorsand generate leads and it's fun.
How do you get to that point?
Yeah, that's a goodquestion. So basically,
how do you get to the pointwhere you have a success culture,
like a performance culturein your marketing team?
Yeah, it's a leadership question really.
How do you at the top createthis environment where people hit their numbers and
(20:35):
all that?
Yeah, I mean, just like anything else,
when you're startingsomething for the first time,
you're not going to be very good atit, right? And you're going to go,
everyone here listening.
If you've never hired a marketerbefore and you're to go that route,
you're going to hire someone. They'renot 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 mightshow up to three shifts,
and you're going to learn a little bit,
and hopefully we can help youskip a little bit of that.
(20:58):
First thing you need todo is try it yourself,
and this is the scariest part. Thisis where most people get hung up,
but you need to go yourself at leastfor a few hours, maybe two shifts,
get some results, figure out how to do it,
figure out what your script is going tobe and see that you can actually get the
results. See that youas the business owner,
can get at least one estimate perhour. Once you are able to do that,
(21:19):
now we can go hire someone and we cantrain them. You need to go out with them,
make sure that you cansee them be successful,
because that's a huge mistake thatpeople have is that they just like, oh,
I'm going to hire you to gomarketing. I've never done it before,
but there's this neighborhood. Go haveater. No training. No accountability,
and never having done it themselves.
So go do it yourself andthen go out with them,
(21:41):
train them until they're successful,until they're able to hit their metrics.
When it comes to creatingthat performance culture,
it always needs to tie back to theirgoals. They don't care about your goals,
they care about their goals.So it's like, Hey, Lucy, cool.
What are you saving up for?Alright, you want to buy a new car?
How much money do you need tosave for that? Okay, $20,000.
How much do you want to make a month?You want to make $4,000 a month? Okay,
(22:04):
here's how you can make $4,000 permonth. If you go out Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday from here to here, youget this many leads a week,
you're going to be making $4,000 a month.
Do you think we can getyou there together? Cool.
And then constantly remindingthem why they're working so hard,
why they're doing this. It's not for you.
They don't care abouthow many sales you make.
They care about what's in it for them.
(22:25):
Salespeople care about money.
They.
Care. That's okay. Yeah.
But that's, remember of the start, I said,
they need to be really happy and havea great first impression. Very hungry,
and they need to be very hungry.
Yeah.
So important.
What about as you're monitoringthese people's results and
making sure, and you're startingto see patterns they don't like,
how do you pinpoint those and how doyou say your conversion rate just isn't
(22:45):
high enough or you knocked on so manydoors, but no one answered really?
How do you troubleshootproblems as they come up?
I mean, the biggest thing isdiagnosing 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 theother one is not having doors opened.
If.
You're not having doors opened, youneed to check your neighborhood.
(23:07):
Is it a neighborhood that you'vedone work for in the past?
That's probably the best way to pickyour first neighborhood is just look at
your city. Where have you done a lot ofjobs? Where were your best customers?
Where did they live? Goknock around those areas.
There's a lot more good people inthere that you could do work for.
Are you going at the right time? Testdifferent times. Try the evening,
try Saturday morning, try Sundayafternoon. Just test different times,
(23:28):
see when the higher openrate is in your neighborhood.
And then if they'regoing out, they do one,
two or three shifts in a row withoutgetting an estimate or without missing
their goal KPIs, you need to go out withthem. There's no other way to do it,
but you need to actually just go outwith them and see what they're doing,
problem solve it with them.
I've actually had some people justhave the marketer have their phone on
(23:49):
speakerphone and just put it on theirclipboard so you can coach them from long
distance. So you don'tnecessarily have to be there,
but you do need to do some coaching.
You need to make sure that theyare saying the right thing.
They're problem solving,they're overcoming objections,
they're collecting the lead even beforethat, that you actually do it first.
Were you able to be successful?
Yeah, that's huge. So a lotof people will say, but boss,
(24:09):
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 notsaying exactly what I told you to say,
and as soon as you go in therewith them or listen to recordings,
you'll very quickly, most of the time,
know exactly what they're doingwrong within like seconds.
Yeah. Are they taking a big step back?Are they knocking loud enough? They.
Bang on the door when they knock?
(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 youtold them or asked them to wear?
There's just a lot of things that couldgo wrong, but if you're there in person,
you see it, it's going to bea lot easier to problem solve.
Okay, Mike, last thingI really want to know,
and I think our listeners wantto know too. What's the script?
What's the first three seconds? Give usthe script. The first knock on the door,
(24:53):
they open it, and then what do you say?
So one way that I like to kindof start it out is ask them, Hey,
my name's Mike. I'm with BlueprintPainting. Have you heard of us? Just.
Quick question.
Oh, no, we haven't. Okay, cool. Well,
we're just painting a homein your neighborhood right now and just wondering if
you were thinking about havingany painting done this year.
(25:15):
That's it.
That's it. They say no. Some peoplewill 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 getit. You might get a few people,
but it's going to bea numbers game, right?
As long as you hit the otherthings that we mentioned earlier,
and then you also hit enough homes,
those are the two things thatare really going to matter.
(25:35):
Just that first impression.
And then the numbers. My dad isone of the best salespeople I know,
and he's always said,
you're just pulling up rocks and seeingthere's a big juicy worm under it.
If there's not, you put the rockback down. If there is, you're good.
And that's what you're doing.
You're hoping that you catch people inthat 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.
(25:56):
You're not trying to arm wrestlepeople to paint their house.
You're just hoping that you're justwanting to be there for them when they're
ready.
If you believe, and this ispart of the mentality of it,
if you believe that you'rethe best show in town,
you're going to give 'em the best results,
not only the best and servicepaint job or whatever,
but also the best customerexperience and at the best price.
(26:17):
If you believe that you're the best,
then selling your services shouldn'tfeel slimy. It shouldn't feel dirty.
It should feel good.
It should feel like your missionis to go spread the good word,
and that's what you're doing,
is you're helping peopleovercome crappy contractors.
Because when someone wants to hire acontractor, they pick up the phone,
they look on Google,
and they leave a bunch of voicemailsand hope someone calls 'em back.
(26:39):
You're helping them skip that wholeprocess and just giving them a seamless
sales experience.
Mike, it's been great. I reallyappreciate all your insights here.
I'm going to try to break it downfor three actionable takeaways here.
Number one is hire for Hunger.
Make sure that your marketers havegreat first impressions and they conduct
themselves well and that they'rehungry. Salespeople have to be hungry.
(26:59):
Number two is use theStrava app to track them.
Make sure that they're going the rightplaces and they're not stealing from you,
stealing time, and use theStrava app to your advantage.
And number three is make sure that yourteam is presenting themselves well,
whether that means that they're takingthose steps away from the front door so
they're not intimidating or they aredressing properly with the lanyard,
the name tag and the brightcolors and the hat and the shirt.
(27:20):
Make sure that they are presentingthemselves. Clipboard, professionally,
clipboard, and the clipboard.Yes. Anything else, Mike.
Clipboard or iPad?
Oh.
Yeah, iPad can work really good too.I mean, I've broken all this down.
If you're actuallyserious about doing this,
I have a whole free video seriesthat I put together just for this,
so painter growth.com/jobber, and youcan go get the videos, the downloads,
(27:40):
the scripts, all of that absolutely free.
I just really want to give you a goodgift for listening to this and paying
attention to what I have tosay. So thank you for that.
Or the Painter Growth Podcast.A lot of good tips there too.
Well, Mike, thanks for being here.
I think the impact you're having onyour community is really significant,
and your painters are reallybetter for it, so keep it up.
Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.
And thank you for listening.
I hope that you heard on the day willhelp you build out your marketing team
(28:03):
door to door sales. I'myour host, Adam Sylvester.
You can findme@adamsylvester.com. Remember,
your team and your clients deserveyour very best, so go give it to 'em.
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