How to get clients to listen to your pitch: Art Sobczak

Tom Houghton:

You are listening to “The Building Code.” I’m Tom Houghton.

Paul Wurth:

Everyone, I’m Paul Wurth.

Tom Houghton:

It was a nice warm welcome there, Paul.

Paul Wurth:

I did a little mixed on that one.

Tom Houghton:

You did.

Paul Wurth:

Surprise my co-host.

Tom Houghton:

You did. We will roll with it though. We like our surprises here. Our guest today is Art Sobczak from Business By Phone, or you might’ve heard him on “The Art of Sales” podcast. Art, how are you doing?

Art Sobczak:

I am doing great guys. Thank you for having me.

Paul Wurth:

Hello, Art?

Tom Houghton:

Thanks for being here. Art, your background of course is heavy and sales, but let’s dive right in first off with just giving us more of a background on you and your history in sales.

Art Sobczak:

Well, my history in sales started when I was probably old enough to talk like most people. I always say everybody’s a born salesperson, some people just choose not to make it their career. But it seems like I always had sales jobs all the way up through high school and in college. Matter of fact, my first sales job was when I was 13 years old. My first sales job, I took a bus into downtown Omaha and sold tickets to the policeman’s fundraiser circus. It was actually the fraternal order of police, but that was my first paid sales job that it seems like I had all different types of sales jobs all throughout high school and college. And then my first actual corporate job was with the old AT&T way back in the day at the Bell System Sale Centre. And probably even more relevant for your audience is that I knew I was going to go into business.

Art Sobczak:

I had a high-level course at Creighton University where I graduated from. It was on small business and we had to do a business plan for our business that we would actually go into and I’m looking around going, “What can I get into?” So I’m studying different franchises. And I did one on a bathtub refinishing franchise. I got an A+ on the paper. The professor said, “You could actually take that to the bank and get financing for it.” But I thought, “Let’s go with the corporate job, get some guaranteed money before I go do my own thing.” So that’s when I decided to start my own business after about a year at AT&T. Here I am today, about 35 years later.

Paul Wurth:

And was that first new business what you see today? Sales coaching?

Art Sobczak:

Pretty much, pretty much. It was a consulting company that morphed into a training and publishing company. So when you start out at about 23 years old, you make about every mistake in the book and you star for a while, but then eventually if you stick with it you figure things out.

Paul Wurth:

Great. And that’s our connection. So when we first started this business, one of our co-founders Dan Houghton knew about you. We listened from afar. We read your emails. Helped us sort of hone our cold calling skills, which we had to do a lot of back then. Then I’ve just followed along, but you’re no longer in Omaha, which makes you smart and good in sales. So you’re based out of… you were saying Scottsdale now, right?

Art Sobczak:

I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona. Yes, but Omaha will always be home. I still actually read the Omaha paper every day online and still have my Creighton basketball tickets and still Nebraska football fan.

Paul Wurth:

That’s great. I thought bringing you on Art would be great for our clients because we talk a lot about lead management sales. And this is another element to that, right? So what do you specialize in when it comes to the sale?

Art Sobczak:

Well, for the audience, my background and my specialty is in using the phone as one of the main parts of your sales process. Primarily over the years, I’ve worked mostly with business to business sales people on proactive outbound calling. However, I’ve done over 1,500 training programs over the years. And I’ve worked with companies in a wide variety of industries, including those who are selling directly to a consumer, and those who are handling the incoming call. I know your audience being in the construction business, primarily, unless they’re doing commercial, they’re dealing with the consumer.

Art Sobczak:

Probably many of them are handling the incoming call, whether it be a lead they generated or a referral or possibly calling up a referral that is given to them. So even though my background isn’t in that primarily, I’ve done so many things that focus on those functions. That it really doesn’t matter because when it gets right down to it, guys, it’s humans talking to humans. And selling to me, my definition of sales is helping people get what they want, which is helping them buy. And everybody listening to this, that’s the business that you’re in as well.

Paul Wurth:

Right? And so we talked about this on our previous episode, I keep saying that, but there’s a qualification when it comes to construction, especially if you get a volume of leads. You can’t meet face to face with every single person, because they may not even be worth your time as it relates to budget and their style and what you want in a client, because it’s important to have the right clients for your business. So a lot of our clients and people listening are doing at least that initial phone call. So what would be some tips or sort of some structure around that original phone call to help people. That first call that either the client calls you and says, “Hey, we’d like you to come out,” or they get a lead in an email from their contact form and they’re making that first call, “Hey, we got your information.” What should that be like?

Art Sobczak:

Yeah, here’s the biggest problem I see with people who get incoming leads, is that they get a lead and then they want to talk. They want to sell what they want to sell. Well, bottom line is, I mean, common sense tells you that if somebody raised their hand and they contacted you, they did so for a reason. So why in the world wouldn’t we want to find out what that reason is as quickly as possible. I mean, I do this with my incoming calls. So somebody calls me up and say, “I want to talk about training. Tell me what you have or what are your prices?” And I’ll say, “I’ll be happy to, let’s talk about what you’re looking for.” And I’ll ask many variations of the why question. And really, if you can find out somebody’s why.

Art Sobczak:

Why they’re looking to get something built or something remodeled. I’m not talking about just because they say that they want to build a house or they want to remodel their kitchen. That’s not the reason. What’s the why behind that? Again, in my case, I’ll say, “I’ll be happy to. So tell me, why did you call me?” And there’s a lot of different variations of that. You can of course play off of what somebody says. Let say, “I’m looking at doing addition to my house here.” “That’s great. Tell me about that.” And then let them go. Get out of the way. Shut up.

Paul Wurth:

Let them finish a lot. A lot of our sales team is younger people. So one of the first things we talked to them about is, when they start a sentence and when they start talking, let them finish. Just because you have an answer halfway through doesn’t mean that they’re done talking in telling you about it. So I think that’s great.

Tom Houghton:

I like that as a step one. Just shut up.

Paul Wurth:

Are you looking right at me for that one? Thanks, Tom.

Tom Houghton:

Awesome.

Paul Wurth:

The other thing I liked about what you just said there, Art was, if you ask, why did you call me? Not only are you going to get the reason for their call, but you can help with your marketing, right? Like, “Oh, I saw your website. I liked your photos.” Or, “Oh, I talked to somebody and they said your name,” or “I saw your sign out in the yard.” Those are all keys to let you know that whatever you’re doing marketing wise is doing that, so do more. Was working, so do more.

Art Sobczak:

And the other part of that is listening, because you said they’re going to give you a lot of information. And again, everybody listening to this might not consider themselves to be salesperson. They may not have that in their title, but nevertheless everybody sells. Listening is a skill that really needs to be practiced and refined. When you ask a question, so for example, you ask that why question? I would suggest that you take it to the next level of listening and have a pen in hand and listen for the emotional trigger words. When they say something like, “We’re just really tired of the bathroom that we have right now.” “Oh, really tired. Why is that?”

Art Sobczak:

Or they say, “We saw something that one of our friends did with their family room and it looked perfect.” Perfect in what way? And if you just sit back and now you’re taking notes, they are actually writing the proposal and the presentation for you. Because they’re going to be using words that you can use back to them both verbally and on paper that they’re not going to argue. I mean, they can argue with your words, but they’re not going to argue with their own.

Paul Wurth:

Wow. That’s fantastic.

Tom Houghton:

It’s great stuff. I’m taking notes right now.

Paul Wurth:

True. I know. Well, just like every other part of the construction business is most of the time you’ve not been trained in what you’re doing. So you’re a business owner of construction because you were good at actually producing homes.

Tom Houghton:

Sure.

Paul Wurth:

And then you hire production and you don’t really think about sales. So teaching your sales team some of this stuff is great, but then taking that to the next level with that presentation. A lot of construction sales right now is tactical. “You want a home?” “What do you want in it?” And then you go find out how much it is and you present to them. Not super exciting, right?

Tom Houghton:

Right.

Paul Wurth:

So it’s pulling on those emotional triggers. That could be a great tip for our team.

Tom Houghton:

I love that. Going into this podcast, I was thinking, we’re going to talk about sales. Sales is all about talking, right? And I love that the first step is don’t talk. Just listen. I think that’s fantastic. What else do you got for us Art?

Art Sobczak:

I would say that the skills that are required to be extraordinarily successful at sales in the construction business are really no different than the skills that everybody uses every day in just normal social conversation. Too many people think that, “Oh my God, I got to be in sales. I got to sound like that slick talking salesperson. I got to deal with objections and all that.” Actually forget all that crap because that’s what people don’t want. What people want is to talk to a human who really cares about them. If you look at any sales situation where you were happy about the outcome, it was because again, you probably did the majority of the talking, the salesperson listened, and then just gave you exactly what you wanted. So again, it’s pretty simple for your business in that… again, I work a lot with higher level sales, enterprise sales and all that.

Art Sobczak:

Here we’re just talking about humans who have a need. So somebody calls you get a lead. You either follow up on the lead, or if you can answer it as quickly as possible, because let’s face it, today we live in this attention deficit instant gratification society, where if a webpage doesn’t load in two seconds, we’re out of there. I know in my case, if I’m looking for something and I already have a preferred vendor in mind. And I did this I think it was sprinkler repair. I called up three different people that I found on home advisor and had to leave messages for all three of them. One called me within 30 seconds. He was the guy that got the job. Another guy called me within two minutes and he didn’t get the job. Now you would think two minutes is pretty quick.

Art Sobczak:

And it was. I mean, have some systems in place. I’m sure there’s varying degrees of how people are generating leads. But if anybody is spending any money at all on advertising or search engine optimization or anything at all, where you’re generating lead, what you really need to do is to put a price tag on that and say, “Every one of these phone calls is costing me 50 bucks. Would I just throw 50 bucks out the window?” Probably not. So if I’ve got 50 bucks laying here that could potentially turn into tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, why wouldn’t I jump on that right away? That’s number one, the timeliness of it. Number two is again, very quickly getting to the why. Asking questions. Because that’s what’s going to separate you from the person who is just quoting on price and is going to be beaten down on price, also how they’re going to be perceived by a buyer.

Art Sobczak:

Because if somebody thinks they’re buying a commodity and the contractor is selling as a commodity, that’s what’s going to happen. But if I’m asking questions and I’m asking, “Well, what’s going to be important to you here.” “What haven’t you liked about anything that you’ve had in the past, as far as your experiences with contractors, what did you like the best?” Now how are you going to be making your decision on this? Again, what are your three most important criteria in the home that you’re going to be building? I can spend hours just coming up with questions like this. But bottom line, you mentioned qualification, guys, I’ll be asking them, “So what are you ultimately going to be basing your choice on?” And if somebody says, “Well, your price is going to be a concern.” “Aside from price, what else are you going to be looking at?” And if they say, “Well, I’m going to be looking at this as a…” “So if I can give you this, this and this, but we’re going to come in higher than somebody else, would you go with us?”

Paul Wurth:

That’s great. Tom has just been writing so many things down right now.

Tom Houghton:

I have so many follow-up questions.

Paul Wurth:

But I think what’s great, it’s not just great… Like you said, if you’re a sales person, it’s great for a business owner, a construction company to understand this and take some of these tips to their team.

Tom Houghton:

Question for you Art. When you called those sprinkler companies and left a voicemail, did their voicemail set expectations for when you were going to get a message back from them, or what are you seeing there? Do you have any tips for people when they are recording those voicemail messages for the potential clients?

Art Sobczak:

My voicemail greeting if somebody is calling me.

Tom Houghton:

Yep. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Art Sobczak:

So if I’m a contractor, what I would definitely have on there, and again, it’s going to vary on size because I’m sure you have some solopreneurs out there, then you probably have some bigger operations. I would most definitely have on there, who you are. I would have the day, today is, the date. I would even have the time on there because this is time sensitive business that you guys are in. I would let them know that we’re out on a job right now, but if you leave a message, I will get back to you by whatever time. So give very specific instructions. This is, and this. Or if you have alternative methods, you say, “You can go to my website, you can submit your inquiry there. I will get that on my mobile as well.” People want information, just don’t say, “Hey, leave a message. I’ll get back to you at my earliest convenience.” When might that be? Right? So let them know, let them know. At least now they got a little bit of satisfaction there.

Paul Wurth:

Great. So let’s reverse that. What should the talking points of a voicemail be back to the client, to a prospect?

Art Sobczak:

So this would be after I’ve received an inquiry, I’m following up on that, right? I would say, “Hey, Mike, our subject here with ABC construction. Thanks so much for contacting me. I am very interested in talking to you and finding out more about your project so I can give you the best quote possible for what you’re looking for. I will give you my phone number. I will be available,” give them the times. “Also, if you’d like to reach me by email, here’s my email. But again, please, please do give me a call back and I’d love to speak with you.”

Paul Wurth:

That’s great. So you had mentioned something about systems, and we talked about this quite a bit on this podcast, but I want to talk specifically about scripts. Even if you have one sales person or even you are the business owner doing the sales, do you think it’s beneficial to go back to a script to retrain yourself on what your talking points are? Whether it’s the first call, whether it’s the estimate meeting, whether it’s, whatever it is. Do you feel like that’s important? Scripts have a bad name. So what’s your take on that?

Art Sobczak:

Well, here’s my take on scripts. We need to follow a script like an actor follows a script, not like a telemarketer in a boiler room reading something. If you look at what a script is, it’s the proper combination of words to use in the exact situation that’s going to give us the audience response that we want. And the absolute worst time to think of what you’re going to say is when it’s coming out of your mouth.

Paul Wurth:

Lipsy-daisy, that’s my brand.

Art Sobczak:

If I have the opportunity to prepare for something in advance. I mean, why wouldn’t I? And you could tell everything I just said there was scripted because it wasn’t the first time I said it.

Paul Wurth:

Right.

Art Sobczak:

But the key is it can’t sound like a script. So again, all joking aside, here’s what a script is. It’s being prepared for what you’re going to say, when you need it with the best words possible to get the result that you want, so you sound smooth when you’re doing it. And too many times salespeople will say, “Oh, well, the script is not me. It’s not natural. It’s not conversational. It sounds canned.” And if somebody is afraid of sounding canned, what are they afraid of? They’re afraid of sounding stupid, right? But if a salesperson gets on the phone and starts winging it and starts bumbling and stumbling, what happens? Their worst fear has just come true because they weren’t prepared for what they’re going to say.

Paul Wurth:

That’s great.

Art Sobczak:

But again, the key is never sounding like you have something there in front of you. Now, with that being said, I can’t script out my entire conversation because the homeowner or the customer doesn’t have a script. So what we do want to do is be prepared for the things that we know don’t require a response, our voicemail message, our opening statement. Okay. I can know exactly what I’m going to say there. Now, after that, I want to have my questions prepared. But then after that, I want to be prepared for where am I going to go with the answers? So if I ask, “Well, what’s going to be most important to you in your remodel.” “Well, we’re looking at the lowest price.”

Art Sobczak:

So my scripted answer to that is going to be, “Aside from price, what are you going to be looking at?” And they say, “Well, mostly it’s going to be price.” “So you’re telling me that you’re going to go with the absolute lowest price regardless of what’s in the proposal or the type or quality of work?” Now see, that’s all scripted, but it doesn’t sound like it. Now, the other key to having the script is being comfortable in knowing where I’m going to go with it. So we can’t confuse script like the telemarketer with being prepared. So instead of thinking script, think of being prepared for what I’m going to say, and that also includes the practice part.

Paul Wurth:

Absolutely. So practice. But to generate that script, would we just start with, who are we as a business? What’s our brand? To make our messaging right, or do we look at our best sales guy or woman and say, what is that person doing every day? Let’s just duplicate that.

Art Sobczak:

Well, I would look at your best sales guy or woman if they’re blowing it out of the water. What I would also do is go out and look at some standard sales principles and processes and figure out what should I be doing in this particular situation? In your business there are probably some of those things out there. Just in sales, in general, what the internet has done for us, has put out there just this tremendous collection of sales knowledge and techniques. Now, with that being said, not all of it necessarily as good, just because you see it on the internet. Because I’ve made a business out of making fun of some of the stuff that’s out there on the internet because it’s just garbage. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I just wouldn’t rely on just your own internal best practices granted. I got somebody who’s blown it out of the water. Somebody is doing great. I most definitely want to see what are they doing well. But regardless of how good they are, they can get a little bit better as well.

Paul Wurth:

Right. Absolutely.

Tom Houghton:

You know what our listeners can take away is if they’re interested in doing the script idea, maybe they could reach out to a coach like yourself to get more information.

Art Sobczak:

Absolutely. Like I said I’m not going to claim that I specialize in your business but I’ve done a lot in inbound calling, outbound calling for people who are doing professional sales to consumers as opposed to the telemarketing sales to consumers. At the very least, if somebody wanted to contact me and kick some ideas around, I’ll at least be able to point them in the right direction and tell them what to avoid as well.

Paul Wurth:

Well, I think it does apply quite a bit to this industry because one of the biggest problems with this industry is differentiating yourself from the competition. Because it is in some people’s eyes, commodity… I’m really struggling with this one.

Tom Houghton:

Maybe we should have wrote out the script for this.

Paul Wurth:

Well, you know what I meant. You’re right. Everybody’s going off price and they’re looking for a way to go. Look here is why you should go with me beyond the price thing. And there’s a lot of companies that come in. If they’re newer construction businesses, don’t mind losing business on a deal. So they’re super cutting the price. So you’ve got to figure out a way to sell on something besides price.

Art Sobczak:

I would say in your business, it is probably easier for people to differentiate themselves than it is in a product commodity business. Simply because there are so many different variables involved in what you all are doing. I mean, if I want a room built, if I want a house build, if I want to remodel, “Oh my gosh.” Again, so many different variables involved there, both in the aesthetics, as well as what’s behind the scenes and then also the follow-up afterward. When somebody is well equipped as a contractor, they’re going to be able to ask those questions to find out what somebody really wants. See a problem with people who aren’t comfortable with selling is that they sometimes think that everybody just wants the lowest price. And if you think about it, that is rarely true because everybody wants the best value. And that’s not always and probably the fewest number of cases is that the lowest price?

Paul Wurth:

Sure. That’s great.

Tom Houghton:

Art, do you think maybe you could give our listeners three tips on how they could increase their meeting set rate when they’re trying to make that conversation. Obviously we covered trading phone calls back and forth. Now we’ve got them on the phone. How can we get a meeting set with them?

Art Sobczak:

So three tips would be question, question, and question.

Tom Houghton:

That’s going to be easy for me to remember.

Art Sobczak:

I always say that partially ingest, because it’s funny, a similar question that we get sometimes is, “Well, what can I do to increase my closing ratio?” And my answer that always is, “Be better at opening, because the close is running the ball in from the one inch line.” The way that we increase the ratio of scoring the touchdown is being better at getting the ball to the one inch line. The same thing is true with setting appointments, because setting an appointment is a close in a sense, because you’re closing on the right to go out there and have somebody invest their time with you. So in order to do that, what I’m going to be doing is, again, asking a lot of those questions about their why, exactly what are they looking for.

Art Sobczak:

Of course, we’re doing this by phone. We want to do that qualification that you guys mentioned, because you don’t want to waste your most valuable asset, which is time just going out there chasing shadows for somebody that is not serious, or doesn’t have the money depending on how you’re positioning your services. So I would definitely be asking questions in the area of, again the why. I would be asking questions about their intent. When do they plan on doing it? And then I want to get some feel for making sure we’re in the same ballpark as far as the scope and the quality of the work that we’re dealing with. And then I would not most definitely quote a price ever over the phone. If I determined somebody as qualified, what we want to do is we want to get in front of them, because once we’re in front of them, I mean, I’m a phone guy, but by far the most effective way to communicate is face-to-face.

Art Sobczak:

Then of course, being in the visual business like you are, and your listeners are, you’ve got samples, you’ve got the portfolios, whatever it is. It possibly is just the fact that when I’m there physically they can see you. I was working with a guy, or actually I was on a podcast called “The Home Service Expert,” and he’s in the garage door business. They’ve got an entire process where when they show up, I mean, he insists that their guys are well-dressed, that their teeth are brushed. They do not have bad breath. There’s no smoking involved, because they are forming an impression of you from that very first second. Certainly doing it over the phone but also when you show up there. When people are making a big investment, like what we’re talking about here, anywhere from again, doing a simple contracting job, all the way up to investing your couple of million dollars in building a home, there’s got to be a trust factor there.

Tom Houghton:

That was great.

Paul Wurth:

People should be taking notes.

Tom Houghton:

I was.

Paul Wurth:

You’re really good at that.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks.

Paul Wurth:

Were you a good student?

Tom Houghton:

Sure.

Paul Wurth:

Of course you were.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks.

Paul Wurth:

This has been great. Honestly, it’s been really helpful. Tom and I were talking, where does an expert at phone sales apply to the business? I think we just found that out.

Tom Houghton:

I think the answer is clear.

Paul Wurth:

Very clear. So that was really amazing.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks so much Art for joining us on the podcast and sharing your experience with us. We really enjoyed having you on and talking about sales. Of course, if you’d like to learn more about Art and his business or his podcast, please check out our show notes page at buildertrend.com/podcast. There you’ll find links to Art’s website and to his podcast on there.

Art Sobczak:

Thank you guys. It was a pleasure and I’d be happy to do it again.

Tom Houghton:

Great.

Paul Wurth:

Great. We definitely will.

Tom Houghton:

Part two.

Paul Wurth:

Part two with Art from Scottsdale. Maybe we can go there.

Tom Houghton:

Let’s just do that there. There we go. Thanks Art. Love what you heard. Don’t forget to rate and subscribe to our podcast so you can hear for more guests that will benefit your business. Also, please check out our show notes page for more information on what we discussed on this episode, you can find it at buildertrend.com/podcast. Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you next time on “The Building Code.” Appreciate you.