In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to manage sales in your moving company.
“If you’re spending money on marketing and you’re not maximizing it through proper Sales Management, it’s really cutting into your profitability.”
“Whether it’s you, someone you need to hire, or somebody already in your company that you need to promote… Someone must wear the Sales Manager’s hat.”
“Sales Manager is a role in your moving company that someone needs to own. Because your sales and leads are just too delicate of a thing to leave up to chance. They need to be managed by a proactive position in your business.”
“Lead providers, Google, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc… All these different places where a potential customer could end up. And it’s your Sales Manager’s job to make sure your company gets those leads and get them booked to maximize your marketing spend.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to increase your revenue per move.
“The customer needs certain things when they’re moving, like packing, cleaning, mounting, storage, etc… And you could provide those things. You just need to make sure they know about that stuff and that they see it as additional value from your company.“
“During the off-season, the volume of moves naturally decreases. It just happens. For years, I was trying to overcome that to where there was no difference in the winter, but traditionally the household goods moving space is going to dip when you come out of summer.”
“What usually happens is moving company owners start to think that the only thing they can do is raise their rates. But there’s really more that you could do.”
“Things like upselling additional services and increasing the number of attempts you make to provide value for your customers can really make a big impact on how much money you are able to make with the same amount of moves.”
Watch the video to get full training.
HOT NEWS & DEALS!
Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
Latest Instagram! Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!
It’s important as we’re coming out of season, that the volume might naturally decrease. It just happens. It’s one of those things where for years, I was trying to overcome that to where there was no difference in the winter. So you might be able to supplement the work you do with some other their type of work. But traditionally the household goods moving space is going to dip when you come out of summer, usually moving season ends about September 15th. So with less moves, I remember sitting down and saying, okay, look, we are doing everything we can to book as many moves as we can. We have all the marketing, the sales process is strong. What do we need to do? Well how can we make more money per move? Right?
If we only have a limited amount of moves, whatever it is, you could still be doing 300, 400 moves a month, but it’s still a limited amount. How can you make more per move? And I think what happens is we start to think that that only is… We can only do that by raising our rates. And there’s really more that we could do. And, if we could add the value to our customers, we could look at our rates. We could increase the attempts that we’re making to upsell additional services. We can really make a big impact on how much money that we’re able to make with the same amount of moves. At the end of the day, you want to be doing that all the time. Anyways, that became a common theme for me and my company, which is how can we raise the RPM, the revenue per move, or the average move? Can we raise that? Right?
Because you know, if you’re at 800 and you go to 900, times the amount of moves you do, or maybe you’re at 1500 and you’re able to go to 1800, whatever your average move is, I’m pretty sure by the time we get through this, you’ll have some ways that you can go and increase that. All right.
So first section here, first thing we want to look at is increase value. The first thing you want to do, anytime you want to make more money, how could I provide more value? So how could you provide more value to your customers? Right? So this isn’t about just increasing rates. It’s like, what else can we do that they’re in need of, that they’d be willing to pay? And a lot of times I think people fear providing any additional services because they think maybe their customers only have a limited amount of funds or a limited amount of money.
And they want to be willing to pay for extra stuff, but they are, right? They need certain things. You could provide certain things. You just need to make sure they know about this stuff. And they see it as additional value from you and your company. So first thing is packing. I know that’s obvious. I know it seems simple and basic. However, are you making a push to sell packing on every single move? Whether it’s just the essentials, the breakables or full pack. So, that was kind of the different packages that we had. Which helps break it down for customers, because they don’t know what they need when it comes to packing. So if they need a full pack, everybody gets that everybody understands that.
But you could offer a breakables packing. Where we just come in and we handle the China we handle anything that’s delicate, anything that’s the breakables. The stuff that like, if they pack it themselves, they’re going to break. Then you can do the essentials where you’re also doing like their pictures and things like that. So to decide what’s in those packages. So definitely write down essentials, breakables, and full pack and decide for you, because it’s different for everybody what’s included in each of those packages. And so in other words, the idea is not to package each one as a price, but to make decision making process easier for the customer. So they don’t feel so overwhelmed. It’s like, hey, we could just kind of come in and do the essentials. We could do the essentials package.
We can come in and just take care of your breakables. The stuff that requires a little extra skill and professionalism to pack, or we could do the full pack. Then you’ve got boxes. Selling boxes to the customer ahead of time, where they come to your office, they pick them up, you deliver them, you send them directly to their house. I had a client tell me they started shipping… Great idea. Genius idea, actually. Shipping directly from Amazon to customers houses for boxes. Like they took the order and then shipped the boxes from Amazon. Super easy. That’s extra money that you can get. Plus having that on the job as well. This, you could also sell on the job, not only ahead of time.
Unpacking services. So we tend to think the move is done. It’s over and we move on, and maybe the customer doesn’t want unpacking up front, but you could offer unpacking services on the day of the move and to where you could either do it that day or come back and do it. But at least you want to plant the seed in their mind that you offer these unpacking services to where you’ll come in, unpack everything, place it where it needs to go, haul away all the boxes. Okay. At the end, the moving day, they’re exhausted. They’re like, no, I don’t know. We’ll let you know. But the next day, when they’re feeling beat up from that move and they don’t want to do all this unpacking, why not send one or two people out to do the unpacking and collect additional money on that move. All right. It’s again, you’re providing additional value where you can charge extra money for that value.
Mattress bags. So, you go out and you move mattresses every day. Well, what are you putting those mattresses in? Are you shrink wrapping them or are you putting them in mattress bags? That’s an easy sell. You just like start talking about the cleanliness of their mattress. All of a sudden the words, bedbugs come out of your mouth. And they’re like, yeah, what do you got? All right. What do you got that you could put on these mattresses? So again, that could be sold at the time of the reservation, but that could be sold on the day of the move as well. Okay. So sometimes they’re not thinking about it at the time of the reservation, but mattress bags are a huge, huge… Listen, it could add an extra 20 to 50 bucks a job, depending on how many bedrooms they have in the house, right?
Cleaning. Whether you want to do a full on cleaning or a light clean, and a light clean could literally mean they sweep up and vacuum. You could easily charge an extra $100 to $200 base on whether you’re doing that just at the pickup or at delivery. And then you could do a real full on clean as well that maybe you can get the crews to do, or maybe you send a cleaning crew in there after the fact to do a real thorough cleaning where. The toilets, the countertops, thorough deep cleaning, like a cleaning crew would do. But easily, easily, you can add a cleanup with the broom vacuum. Keep them in the truck. And that’s an extra a $100, a job, easy. All right.
Mounting. For years, I didn’t want to be bothered with any mounting or dismounting, but now flat screen TVs are so common. Who doesn’t have a flat screen TV? Everybody’s got a flat screen TV for the most part. So if you have one person, okay, not even have to train all your movers, you have one person that can go out there and mount for them. They make kits. The kits are super easy to do. You drill one hole, you drill another hole. You put the kit in, you run the wires, they level it. They put it up. That’s something that they’re most likely going to pay somebody else to do as well. If you have someone on the crew, especially like if you have to send somebody out, okay. You know, it might not be… You’ll still could get 200 bucks maybe even 300 bucks per mount. However, if you could do it while you’re on the job, okay. That’s just extra money per move. All right. All you need to do is train your guys on how to do it. It’s not that hard.
And then storage, all right. Always have storage paperwork on every job. You never know when you get to the house, if there’s any items that the customer’s like, you know what? This doesn’t really look good here. This doesn’t fit the way that I thought it would fit, but I don’t want to get rid of it. Right? If the movers are there and prepared with storage paperwork and inventory sheets and inventory stickers to go ahead and take that stuff back to storage. Listen, we would take a whole home of storage or we would take one piece of furniture.
I can’t tell you how many times, like a couch or random stuff, chairs, dressers. They didn’t want that or they brought it there and you know, they thought it was going to fit in the space. Sure, we’ll store it for you. Right. And they paid to keep it in storage until they figured out what they wanted to do with it, which a lot of times was keep it in storage and keep paying us. So this is increasing value. So you want to increase value because when you increase value, you have additional things that you could charge for.
Go ahead. And in the comments, this is your community here. This is your moving mastery community. What are some other ways that you can increase value? Right? If you’ve got some additional ones, put them in the comments down below, share them with your community. Let’s talk about this here, because you know what, at the end of the day, everybody here needs to be making additional money per move. So even if you’re sharing something with your direct competitor, which what I’ve found is within the moving mastery community, that word kind of goes away. You know, it’s nice to have that friendship in your community, but even if you are, this isn’t about gaining a competitive advantage over somebody, it’s like, you’ve already got the move booked. How can you make more money on that move?
So increase value is the first way, the second way increase rates. Plain and simple. Increase your rates. And I think a lot of people are scared to do this, and the people that do see… I mean, I was here with the mastermind group. I don’t know, losing it, 10 days ago or a week ago, whenever it was. And, one of them I had worked with as a private client for quite a while. And I remember in a conversation with him and his wife, I said, you need to raise your rates. And he literally got up, walked out of the Zoom call. And I was like, “Where’d you go?” She’s like, “He went to raise the rates.” He did that two more times since then, their rates are higher than they’ve ever been. And they’re still booking jobs. I don’t know the exact amount off the top of my head that that equated to, but it’s a lot of extra money from them, because I know the first time you raised it by like $10 an hour than another 10.
So first one is, increase your hourly rate. Local moves. Increase your hourly rate. Don’t be afraid to do that. Even if we’re coming out of season, what a lot of people think is that when it slows down, you have to lower your rates in order to book move. But what you need to look at before you ever, ever, ever lower your rates is, is our booking percentage going low. Right? In other words, what happens is we come out of season, you have less leads. So if you have less leads, of course you’re going to book less move moves. But if you’re still, let’s say you’re booking at 30%. A hundred jobs come in, you book 30. Well, if 200 leads came in, you book 60 And then it slows down and a hundred leads come in.
Now you’re only booking 30, you’re in a panic. You’re like, oh my God, we’re only booking 30 jobs. We need to lower the rates, but you’re still booking at the same percentage. You just have less leads. So don’t be quick to lower your rates and really raise your rates. You’ve got to try. You’ve got to get out of that comfort zone. You just treat it like a hot stove where, all right, we lower the rates. I’m going to put my hand on this and see, if it starts to get too hot, I need to take my hand off before it takes all my skin off there. Right? So the point is, don’t just raise the rates and then not pay attention to what’s going on. You’ve got to pay attention to your booking percentages to see if it makes any difference. But don’t be afraid to raise your rates.
Same thing with long distance. Your tariff rates, everything you charge for in your tariff, raise that as well. Travel trip and truck fees. So whether you charge a travel fee, whether you charge a trip fee or a truck fee, typical someone would charge one of these. For us, we charged travel time. We started the time when we got to customer’s house stopped the time when the last it was off the truck. And then in a local Metro vicinity, we charge one hour for travel to compensate the men for their drive to and from the job. That’s how it was explained to the customer. But you know, maybe you charge a trip charge or a truck charge. Well, what is that trip charge and truck charge. You know, some people are like, we charge $45 trip charge. So what’s the difference if it’s a $65 trip charge? Do you think you’re going to not book the move from a $45 trip charge to a $65 trip charge or truck fee?
Or your travel time, maybe you only charge half the time in travel instead of the full hour in travel. Like maybe instead of your full hourly rate, you charge half your hourly rate. Can you raise the rates here? So this is to get you thinking about where you… You might say Louis, we’re selling boxes, we’re selling on packing, cleaning boxes, all of that. We’re doing all that. Well, can you raise any of these rates? So you’re really looking for where you can increase your avenue per move.
Fuel. When I started, I based on just kind of picking rates and seeing what people did, I had no idea what I was doing when I started my business. And I was charging a 10% fuel surcharge. And then I’m like, you know what? I looked at the math and I’m like, I’m going to change it to 12%. I forget exactly at the time, I want to say at least I knew on a 100,000… What was it? It was a 100,000… I just don’t want to….
Yeah. So my thought process, I forget what it was. For every 100,000 that we did, that’s an extra 2000 bucks. Later I raised it from 12% to 18%, because there was no kind of pushback from when I went from 10% to 12%. I’m like, you know what, I’m going to go from 12% to 18%. No pushback. You can imagine what that did to the average move.
The revenue per move. So if you don’t charge for fuel, you could charge for fuel. Now of course, when it comes to your rates, it’s about how they come together as a complete package. It’s all about how you present all of that to the customer. So for us, it was for local, long distance was long distance, but for local here’s our hourly rate. We start the time at your door. Stop when we’re done at an hour for travel, and then there’s a standard transportation fuel surcharge as well. And that showed on their estimate when we sent it to them. And that’s how it was presented.
So you just got to look at this and say, how can we piece this together to where we can increase it? So your baseline here is whatever your average move is now, whatever your revenue per move is now is your baseline. And then you’re looking at it and saying, can we raise it by 50 bucks? Can we raise it by a hundred? Can we raise it by 150? And chances are with all of this, you can.
Packing. I did the same thing. Our 1.5 box… So we charge per box for packing. Meaning if it was an hourly rated move and let’s say we were doing it all on the same day. A lot of times a pack job was the day before. But let’s say it was all on the same day, we’d say, we’re going to send you out. You know, the crew they’re going to come, they’re going to pack everything for you. We charge for packing by the box. This way we could take our time. We could pack everything with care and you don’t feel like we’re dragging our feet, taking our time. And we build in the labor and material into the cost of the box. So for example, a 1.5 box, a book box was $9. Right? Then I was like, you know what, let’s make it $11. And across the board, everything went up like that. So whatever you charge for packing, can you increase that by a dollar, $2, three, whatever it might be, where can you increase for packing.
Storage? For years, I charge $45 a vault, okay. $45 a vault for years. And the storage price, when we were quoting, never really seemed to make a difference to the customer, for some reason. Even though they were paying that month after month, when I raised the price, it didn’t really make an impact at all. And we still booked the same amount because we offered one month free storage or when we were moving into a new facility and it was a ton of extra space. I’d offered two months free storage, but I went from $45 per vault to $65 per vault. That’s $20 per vault difference with the average customer having six volts. So what is that? $120 per customer per month extra. Per customer, per month extra.
So maybe you don’t go… Actually, I’m sorry. We did do a short term, very short. We went to 55 of vault from the 45 to the 55 for a very short period of time, and then went to 65 and stayed at 65. So make that jump, make that leap. And you could always… Don’t do it to customers that just moved in. But if people have been in your storage for quite a while, it’s common to send out a notice to say that rents are going up.
And valuation. So if already charging for additional valuation, so it’s not insurance, but basically saying, hey, we’re going to collect this much extra you know, we’re going to collect an extra $600, $700 from you and we’re going to cover the entire shipment instead of just giving you 60 cents per pound. And the only reason I don’t have valuation over here is increased value because it is an increase of value, is because I wouldn’t say rush out and start selling additional valuation if you don’t already. Because, there’s a lot that needs to go into that first.
Like you have to have really good claims tracking. You’ve got to know your numbers to the T to know, okay, if we do this, here’s what we’re paying out. You can’t just assume we’re going to charge extra for the valuation, make that extra money, and it’s all good. A lot of people do make a lot of money selling additional valuation. I never did it because I didn’t really want to be bothered with it, but I know a lot of people that are making money, but you’ve got to have your numbers dialed in. So you know exactly where your claims are coming from. How much you’re paying out. But, the only reason I would say is that there are people now that either pay out fully for everything that they damage without collecting any money for valuation or are charge for valuation and still paying out everything fully.
But you could raise your prices on what you actually charge for, for the valuation. So we’ve got increased value, increased rates. Third one is increased attempts. All right. So when do we offer this stuff? Right? We’ve got all this additional things that we could offer to increase the value. We could increase our rates, but we need to increase the attempts of selling and upselling this additional value. So where do you do that? Well, first, rate on the reservation. Rate when you book the move, you go ahead and you ask about all this stuff as well.
Ones the move is booked. Don’t flood the customer with all this. By the way, I know you’re just calling for prices, but we could charge for this. We could do this, we could do this. We could do this. We could do this and get all these extra costs. Book the move, because that’s the most important thing. You don’t want to sacrifice the move for the sake of trying to increase the revenue per move. So book the move, once the move is booked, then you can let them know about all these additional services as well.
Seven day packing checkup call. So this was something that we implemented as part of that question of the ongoing theme and the company of like, how can we increase the revenue per move? How can we increase the revenue per move? And we started doing a seven day packing checkup call. Because, we had customers. We were offering packing at the time of the reservation. But what do most customers say? No, no, we’re going to take care of that ourselves. We’re going to take care of that ourselves. Well, what happens is they get out seven days. They’re like, okay, we’re a week away. Something about a week. Once you get a week or two weeks, the numbers register. Like right now, we’re two weeks in a few days for moving moving mastery summit.
But once we get to two weeks, the number is registers different. Once we get to it registers different, I’m like, “Oh man, it’s like, this is a week away. We got to make this happen.” So when they’re seven days away from their move and you call and ask them, just calling to see how things are going, just want to see how your packing is coming along. If everything’s getting prepared. And if they’re in a place which a lot of people are where they’re like got a million things to do, they had planned on doing the packing themselves. Yeah, we’ll do the packing. But now maybe they started the packing or maybe they haven’t even gotten to the packing yet, and they’re a week out and they’re like, you know what yet, can you tell me about packing again? I know you told me about it on the reservation, but can you talk to me about that?
Do you have somebody that could come out here still between now and then and pack us? Seven day packing checkup call. Huge. If you’re not doing that now, start doing that. Okay. Number one, it’s great customer service. Because the call essentially is not a sales call. The call is, we’re just calling to see how things are going. I know we are a week away. Just we’re ready. Just wanted to see how you’re coming along, how your preparations are going. You know, how’s the packing coming along. Oh great. We’re packing everything up. Awesome. All right. Well, my dispatcher is going to call you two days before the move and we’ll confirm everything again. Then we just wanted to check on you. If they say the packing’s going fine, you’re not like trying to push packing on them and close a deal.
You’re basically there to offer additional value in that seven day period. Then you’ve got the two day confirmation call. So, hopefully you’re doing a confirmation call one or two days before the move, where for us, that was a scripted confirmation call, where we made sure that we hit on certain points. And in this confirmation call, we were asking them pretty much all of that. I wasn’t do when any mounting, I would do that today. But the packing, the boxes, mattress bags, storage are you going to need any packing at all? Right? Are you going to need to bring anything back in storage? Because if there’s just a few items that you need to be held for a little while, we could definitely do that for you. And we were confirming the move. Like not just saying we’re going to be there, but going through all the notes, making sure that the dispatcher had an opportunity to wear, even if the salesperson did a terrible job, putting notes in the system and booking and communicating with the customer.
This is when you could save that. This is when you could turn that mess of a job back into a good job. Right? And for me, there were times when we had like an assistant dispatcher make the calls, but I really like to have the dispatcher themselves make the call, the person that’s going to be in charge of coordinating and sending out the crews so that they could hear the customer’s unique moving needs to find out like what the deal is and how we could service them the best. And which crew would be the best based on what they’re saying. Definitely. And, it’s a great opportunity for upsells as well. On the move. Once you get to the move, customers aren’t packed. They’re trying to put stuff in garbage bags. They’re trying to like get things going. And it’s a great opportunity to sell packing. They don’t want you to packing. They don’t want to pay for the packing. No problem. Sell them some boxes. Because we’re not bringing the garbage bags on the truck. Stuff needs to be packed.
The mattress bags, the cleaning, the mounting, the storage, the unpacking, you could offer all of this on the move. And it’s important that when you do offer additional services, regardless of what your laws are and regulations are, make sure the customer knows upfront what the additional cost is going to be. Don’t just start packing up boxes and then hit them with a bill. Like here you go, right? Interstate moves. You have to revise the estimate for any additional charges up front, a lot of states as well. But it’s also just the right thing to do.
Emails. So now you’ve booked a move. So once you booked a move, you’re sending out emails to them, like prepare for your move. Maybe you’re sending some for the seven day packing, two day confirmation. Make sure that in those emails, hey, did you know we also offer these services well, right? If you don’t tell them, they don’t think about it. If they don’t think about it, they don’t see how that could work for them.
If you never knew of Uber, and somebody comes along, like you could go on an app on your phone and just get a car to come pick you up. In other words, if people don’t know about stuff, they don’t start thinking about how they could utilize it in their life. All right. So make sure whatever emails you’re sending out there’s also a little section that has additional services.
On hold music. So we had on hold music that was specially made. So we had it made. So it was the music. But it was talking. Thank you for calling Neighbors Moving in Storage. Please hold, we won’t be long. We want to make sure that all your needs are met. By the way, did you know that we also offer packing services as well, where we could have professionals pack all of your belongings up or maybe just a few items on the day of the move or even come out ahead of time? Don’t need packing. No problem. We sell boxes as well. We’d be happy to give them to you at a wholesale price. Do you need anything stored? We’d be happy to store stuff right now. We’re offering a promotion for one month free storage. Anything that you want them to hear? Don’t ever let a customer sit on hold and not let them hear valuable information about your company. It shouldn’t all be like sales. It should just be stuff like, yeah, offer boxes.
Make sure you ask your moving consultant about how we could get you some free boxes. And it’s also reassuring them that they’re with the right company. Hey, did you know that we won the Angie’s List Super whatever it is award, three years in a row? Our customers love us on Yelp. We got a five star rating. All of that type of stuff. It’s super easy to make on hold music. If anybody needs a recommendation, just email us at support. Have a company called The Informer. I don’t know if you could look them up. You might be able to just look them up online. The Informer on hold music, the guy’s name’s Casey. Did my on hold music. You know, for time I needed to make changes they made changes.
You say, we want a man. We want a woman. We want them to sound mature. We want them to sound young. And they send you a bunch of options of voice, of talent. And you’re like, Ooh, I like that person. Here’s the script. Have them read that. Oh, here’s all the choices for music. Here’s the music. Here’s the person I want to read the script. Here’s the script. They put it all together. They send you a file that you upload into your phone system, and that’s it. And all of your marketing material. All of your marketing material, like on your website services provided. If somebody’s reading about you, let them know all of this additional value that you could provide for them. If they don’t know it, they’re going to go somewhere else. I mean, I have a private client who, the name of his company is his company’s name movers. And he’s trying to push storage. But on his website on his postcards, it’s like storage is like a little bullet point. I said, “We either need to get storage big, across the top with pictures of your warehouse, or we need to get a DBA of your company’s name. And instead of movers, moving and storage.” If customers don’t know that you offer certain things, they don’t just know what moving companies do. A lot of people think that you’re just going to come in and move the heavy stuff.
They don’t even realize that you can do all of it. So make sure they know about it. These are the ways that you can increase revenue per move. Here’s what I could tell you. I did this, not the whole presentation here, but I went through this with a private client. I don’t know if it was a year ago, whatever it was. Eight months, 12 months. And they were doing on average, I think the average was like 220 moves average when they averaged out over the course of a year, a month. And it was $92 a move extra. So 220 times 92. It’s 20,000 a month, times 12. That’s $242,000 a year. So don’t take this lightly. And you know, if you’re like Louis, which one should I do? Whichever one you’re not doing. You might be like, wow, we could do all of that.
All right. Well, pick one, start with that. Incrementally start adding it. Maybe you start your upsell processes. Maybe you start your seven day packing checkup call. Maybe you get your on hold music made. Maybe you come in here and say, you know what, let’s actually make some adjustments to our pricing, so that we can actually make more money for each move that we’re doing. Set yourself a target.
I would say to set self a target of $50 to $100 per move. That you’re going to increase it. I mean, that was the $92 over 220 moves a month. It’s almost a quarter million dollars a year for the same moves. Yeah, you might have some material cost. Yeah, you might have to pay the guy a little extra to clean or to mount. All of this stuff is just extra money. And this is just all… I mean, this is good customer service. This is good customer service. This is good value. This is good customer service. And this is just smart marketing to make sure that everything is in there. All right. So get that extra revenue per move.
In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to create your moving company sales script.
“A well designed sales script is going to make sure that everything you need to say to that perspective customer is said, and you don’t leave anything out.”
“How many times have you arrived to a job and the customer’s like, “Nobody told me about the travel time.” Or “They didn’t tell me about this and that.” If you’re not using a sales script in your moving company, and instead you’re just trying to rattle off bullet points at somebody on the phone about your services, sometimes you forget stuff.”
“There are many things that need to be said to a customer during a sales call. And having a sales script ensures that your sales team is saying the things that you want them to say, every single time. All the things you want them to always say, and all the things you never want them to say.If you build it into the sales script, it will get said.“
“How do you know if your moving consultants are giving the customers all the important information they need and are able to answer all the customer’s questions correctly on every call? How can you effectively train and manage your sales team and ensure that they are being consistent on every call? How do you know that you are in legal compliance with local county laws, state laws, federal laws on every call? Having a sales script.“
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Who uses a sales script in here? Okay. Crucial, crucial. Now, I know there’s a lot of stigmas about sales scripts. I know there’s a lot of people that don’t like sales scripts, and it’s probably because you call the place one time or they call you one time and you could tell that that person probably didn’t graduate the third grade. And they’re trying to read a sales script to you, and it just sounds awful. And you’re like, “No, I’m not doing that at my company.” Okay? A well-designed sales script is going to lead the customer to book their move with you. It’s going to make sure that everything you need to say to that perspective customer is said, and you don’t leave anything out. How many times you get to a job and the customer’s like, “Nobody told me about the travel time. They didn’t tell me about that.”?
And you know what? Sometimes, when you’re just trying to rattle off bullet points at somebody, sometimes you forget, right? It ensures regulation compliance, okay? There’s many things that need to be said to a customer, and there’s many things that cannot be said to a customer to make sure that you are in legal compliance. Local, county laws, state laws, federal laws, you build that into your sales script so that you make sure it gets said every single time. It increases sales, period. Ensures always say and never say. There are things right now that you know you don’t want your team to ever say to a customer. You never say that. But there’s things that you want them to say every single time. Make sure you tell every customer this. Just build it in the sales script, and it will get said.
So increasing sales. There’s people in the room that I work with personally. There’s people in the room that have been to Moving Sales Academy in the past that have been in the online course that didn’t have a sales script that implemented a sales script. And so I get reports daily of people’s sales going up, not just because of the sales script, but it’s a big part of it. Okay? So these aren’t just my theories or my thoughts or some good idea I had in the shower. These are facts.
It keeps the moving consultant on track. So what you have is you have moving consultants that’ll say, “You know what? I don’t want a script. I like to flow and kind of be natural with the customer and just have that conversation,” which is important. But then they’re having that conversation and they’re like, “Okay. All right. All right. Where was I?” Right? “Where was I?” And that’s how the travel time gets left out. That’s how the things that you need them to always say don’t get said, right? So now, with the script, you’re going through the script. Customer interrupts you. They have a question. You’re free to go to the side and have a conversation away from the script with that customer. Talk to them, right? Go through whatever they discuss with you. Maybe it’s an area of concern that provides opportunity to close the deal.
Right? So if they bring you in a side conversation about their grandfather clock, you’re writing that shit down. “Grandfather clock, da, da, da, da,” because you’re going to use that to close the deal at the end. Right? But now, you go right back to the sales script. “Where’d I leave off?” Right back. Okay. And it flows. Easier to manage. If you have a team of people that they’re all saying different things to people, you can’t walk through your office. I mean, I’m not going to try to count. But let’s say, I mean, I used to have 60 something people in my office on the phones. So it’s at least this side of the whole group. If I’m walking through and everybody’s saying their own thing, I don’t know what they’re… How can I manage that? You can’t possibly manage that. Or even if you just have a few people and everyone’s off on their own different version of the script, you don’t know where they are.
Right? But when you know your script like you know the Pledge of Allegiance, you could identify exactly where they are. And you’re like, “All right, they’re about to go in for the close.” Right? And you could know, are they saying it correctly or are they not saying it correctly? And whoever’s managing the sales team, it makes their jobs so much easier. Consistent training. We’re going to talk about how to really train people. Not like, “Hey, come on in. You’re going to sit here next to Tommy for a couple days, watch what he does. You’ll be good to go. And we’ll give you a phone in two days.” Right? Real training. They know a script. They learn the script. They know what to say. It builds confidence in them.
What makes a good salesperson? When they know what to say. How do they know what to say? When you give them what to say that you know works, right? When they know what to say on the front end, you’re halfway there. When they know what to say when the customer says, “You know what? I need to think about it. I need to talk to my husband.” And they know what to say to overcome that and get them to book now, now you’re all the way there. They just need to know what to say. And if you could train them on what to say, you’re closing deals. You’re increasing your booking percentage. And it answers common questions in advance. You know what every customer’s thinking. And if you haven’t really thought about it before, think about it. Make a list, make a little side note to make a list of everything that every customer’s ever asked you. You build that into the script. You ever talk to somebody and you’re thinking something and then they say it before you even ask them the question? You’re just talking.
And most of us, when someone else is talking, we’re not really listening, tuned in to what they’re saying. We’re thinking about our question or we’re thinking about what we want to ask or we’re thinking about what we’re going to say next. Right?But when all of a sudden, that person answers your question, you’re like, “Ah.” And they do it again. And they do it again. It builds trust. And it’s like, “Ah, he gets me.” Right? “I want to do business with them.” It puts the whole… It’s like they feel like they’re in good hands at that point. And company image consistency, right? It’s just consistent across the board. Everybody’s doing the same thing.
If you want to scale, it’s necessary. It’s necessary. And I know. I know there’s people that have teams of great sales people. I know somebody, I think it was the last, in the spring. They said, “Louis, I have 12 salespeople and they’re really good. I brought them in from the outside. They’re really, really good. They’re closing deals. I’m trying to get them…” He had the online course. He said, “I’m trying to get them to follow the script, but I’m having a really hard time doing it.” I said, “Well, are they good on the phone?” He said, “Yeah, they all kind of have their own style.” I said, “Well, let ask you a question. Do you believe that if they follow this script, it will help them increase their sales?” I don’t care. Right? I hope that you guys go out and create a better script than I’ve created for your own companies.
Right? I don’t want you to reach where I was. I want you to reach beyond where I was. I mean, that’s my goal for every one of you. So I said, “Do you believe that if they actually use it, it’ll help them? They’ll make more money?” He goes, “Absolutely. 100%.” I said, “You have to show them that you believe. You have to get them to make that change.” And I know it’s hard and it may not happen overnight. But if you believe it, don’t just do it because I said, “This is the script to use.” If you don’t believe it, if you’re like, “No, this guy, Louis, he does a lot better than you do in your script.” Leave him alone. Or you take what he says, write that shit down, put it on a document, and make everybody else say the same thing. Right? I mean, that’s really what it boils down to is consistency. What is our best message? Remember the octopus, right? If you’re a one man show, it’s very easy to do everything yourself.
It becomes very scary to delegate because you’re like, “Ah, they don’t do it as good as me. They don’t do it as good as me.” I told you I had 60 something people. There was a few that definitely could outsell me, right? But the rest, I mean, I’d take them down in a competition anytime. But what am I going to do? Go, “I’m the best.”? No. Here’s what I say. I’m going to put it on a piece of paper. Now, all of you say the same thing, right? That’s really what it’s all about is if you’re going to extend yourself and you’re going to grow and you’re going to have more, what do they call it, tentacles? From an octopus, what do they call those? Arms. Let’s call them arms. If you’re going to have more arms, you need to make sure that each one of those arms is doing the same thing that you’re doing. Make sense? All right. So the greeting, right?
Very simple. Your greeting, “Hi, thank you for calling Neighbors Moving and Storage,” type of estimate and the benefit. Okay? So I don’t need to ask the question. I already know. Some of you book hourly rate. Some of you book flat rate. Some of you book by the piece. Some of you book by weight. Some of you book just flat rate. Any other ways? Cube, cubic feet. Okay? I don’t care how you book. Make that customer believe that the way you book is the only way to book. It’s the best way to book, right? They have to believe that. I’m not going to tell you which way to do it. Do it how you do it. But tell the customer, “Thank you for calling. We’re going to go ahead. We’re going to give you an hourly rate for the move. The benefit of that is you’re in complete control of the move.
When the guys get to the house, you sign them in. When they get out, you sign them out.” Right? “We’re going to charge you by the cube.” Look, whatever it is, make sure they know the benefit and make sure you sell that type of move. Because that type of estimate, because there’s people that you’re competing against that are selling something different, but they’re not selling their type of estimate. They’re not thinking about that. You want the customer going, “No. I need an hourly rate.”
When they call somebody else and the guy wants to give them a flat rate, we all think that typically a customer would want the flat rate. Not if you sell them on the benefits of the hourly rate and they believe you. Then you gather information, basic information, okay? This is when you start to do lead capture, right? Name, email address, how many bedrooms, square footage, if you know it. Simple. Don’t ask too many questions here. Then you paint the picture. So painting the picture is one of the most important parts of the script. Okay? You need to realize that when you talk to somebody, when I’m talking to you right now, you all have your own vision going on. Hopefully, it has something to do with sales scripts, right? But you’re kind of putting pieces together for yourself. You’re like, “Oh, shit. I could see where if I put this here and they start doing that. Oh, yeah. Okay.” Right?
We’re visionary beings. Right? We hear something and we envision something. So it’s not all about the words on the paper on the script, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, right? That doesn’t capture them. You’ll notice that a lot of the points that I’m trying to make, I paint the picture for them to help you understand where we’re going. So you paint the picture for the customer so that they can emotionally buy into your pitch, right? If you’re just like, “We charge by the hour. We disassemble. We reassemble. We’ll throw in some free boxes.” Right? You’re hitting bullet points. You’re not touching them here. When you touch them here, you have a different opportunity to close the deal. Okay? So let me give you an example of painting the picture.
So if you’re doing an hourly rated move, you could be like, “All right.” You’re talking to them. You’re going along. You get all the information. And you’re like, “So what we’ll do is we’ll send you out three professional movers, a truck, and all the equipment. They’ll come to your home. They’ll quilt, pad, and wrap all of your furniture, load it onto the truck, unload it at the new location. If there’s anything that you need disassembled or reassembled, they’ll do that for you as well. They’ll also set everything up and place it exactly where you’d like it in a new home.” You see where I’m going with that? I’m hitting bullet points, but I’m doing it in a conversational way where they’re thinking about their first house. They’re like, “Okay, they’ll come in, load it on the truck. Okay.
Oh, they’re going to disassemble. Okay. I was worried about that. I didn’t really realize. They’ll set everything up exactly where I want it. Oh my God. I didn’t even. Okay. Cool. Professional movers are awesome.” Right? They’re envisioning their new house with everything set up exactly where they want it. They’re envisioning these professional guys showing up at their house. This is really important. You don’t want to miss this part because… And I had a sales rep say to me one time, he’s like, “Well…” Because there’s always, they’re good at sales and they come in and they have their way of doing it. “Why would I tell them we’re going to unload the truck? It’s obvious. If we load it, we’re going to unload it.” Right? Well, when you’re talking about painting the picture, it’s an incomplete picture, right? The complete picture of a successful move is the shits unloaded at their house everywhere they want it, exactly where they want it to be.
And believe it or not, not all your customers know that you do that. We have to recognize that. You guys do this every single day, so we take it for granted. But there’s a lot of people that don’t know what a moving company provides. They’re just like, “Oh, you mean you take boxes too?” Right? They don’t know that you do the whole thing. They’re just thinking, “Oh, I need a few guys to help with the sofa and the armoire and things like that. And they’re going to drop it off in my garage and then I’m going to have to get it inside.” Never take it for granted. Always paint the picture with everything you do, and never leave anything you do out of painting the picture.
In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to systematize your moving company’s sales process.
“I discovered early on that just moving someone from one place to another doesn’t require “sales”. After all, people need to move. You’re not selling them something that they don’t need.”
“If you believe in your company’s ability to provide great value and service, and you know you can create a pleasurable experience for your customers, then it is your responsibility to “sell” that experience to your customers.”
“People want to be sold. They don’t want to be pressured. The customer just needs someone to take them by the hand and lead them to the right decision.”
“When you see things this way, it changes everything. You are still “selling” to the customer, but you are selling through service. You are selling them trust in your company.”
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In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares 4 Must-Do Marketing Strategies for Moving Companies
“Marketing is the fuel that runs your sales machine. You pour leads into the machine and (if your sales process is on point) booked jobs come out the other end (aka money).”
“In order to really make the most out of your marketing dollars, you need to make sure your lead generation process is consistent and completely dialed in.”
“How do you know if your marketing is really working the way you want it to be working? How do you know when to spend more, or pull back on your monthly marketing spend?”
“A lot of people will start to pull back on their marketing when things get busy, or worse, pull back when things slow down in order to help with overall cash flow. But this is one of the worst things you can do.”
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In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares his Top 5 Sales Tactics for moving companies.
“When we talk about sales, when we talk about creating a sales machine, the way that I was able to go from zero to making my first dollar in the moving business was just straight up [sales] tactics.”
“When you speak to somebody on the phone, you’re attempting to book a move and you ask for the business and they say, “No, I need to think about it.” You never want to get off that call without setting up a tentative reservation.”
“No matter what you do, whether it’s digital, whether it’s in a three-ring binder, have rebuttals in front of each and every one of your reps and make sure they’re using it.”
“This is about booking more jobs. Every single person watching books moves, but I want you booking more moves. The time, energy, effort, money that you put into getting the phone to ring, speaking to the customer, giving the estimate, or going out and doing an onsite… You need to raise your booking percentage. That’s where the profits are.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
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Louis: So when we talk about sales, when we talk about creating a sales machine, the way that I was able to go from zero to making my first dollar in the moving business was just straight up tactics, right? Things that you do and say on the phone to close the deal. So let’s start with the tactics. First tactic I’m going to share with you today, tentative reservations. Tentative reservations. So make sure you write this down, tentative reservation. So a tentative reservation is a way to increase your booking percentage tremendously. If anybody’s, by the way, if anybody’s doing tentative reservations now, if you’ve learned this from me in the past, write it in the comments down below. If you’re also slipping in this area and not doing this consistently, let me know too. This is a safe place. It’s confession time, right? Who’s doing it, who’s not doing it. Let me explain what it is for those of you that don’t know.
So when you speak to somebody on the phone, you’re attempting to book a move and you ask for the business and they say, “No, I need to think about it.” What you want to do is you never want to get off that call without setting up a tentative reservation. So you would say something to the customer like this, you would say, “Okay, well I’ll tell you what, why don’t I set you up on a tentative reservation? There’s no obligation. It’s just a courtesy we provide for our customers. If you need to change the time, date, cancel, it’s not a problem at all, but at least I could secure a spot for you with no obligation,” okay? They’re going to say, “Sure, why not?” Right? You’re penciling them in and by doing that, at that point, you would continue to get a little bit more information from them. “Okay, great. I just need to get the address we’d be starting at, the address we’d be finishing it,” right? You fill in the details of the move estimate and here’s what’s going to happen and you’ll see. And if you’ve experienced it let me know down below.
Here’s what’s going to happen, they’re going to give you that little bit more information and their minds are going to start saying, “You know what? I’m going to have to go through this all over again with another company. Now I’m going to have to call this company back and cancel this tentative reservation.” And they’re going to say, “You know what? I’ll tell you what, why don’t we just set it up?” You’re going to get a lot of those right there on the first call. Then if you don’t get those, they’re going to hang up, they’re going to make some other calls, speak to a few other companies, and they might hear something from somebody else that their service is just as good, their price is comparable.
And they would have normally went ahead and booked with them just because they were on the phone with them but now they remember they have this tentative reservation with you, they’re going to have to call you back to cancel that. So what will happen is they’ll say, “No, you know what?” And they’ll just call you back and say, “Let’s go ahead and firm that up,” right? Tentative reservations are powerful. Don’t get off a call without setting that up, okay? And by the way, you have replays of this. So if you’re like, what did he say? What was the terminology? What was actual script of how you said that, go back and watch the replay of this, which I’m suggesting that you do anyways. Do this with your sales team, do this with your sales manager, go back and watch this stuff.
But the tentative reservations, huge, all right? So make sure that’s the first tactic that you want to make sure you’re doing on every single job. And as far as how long you keep these on your calendar, so let’s say you book it in your CRM and you have it marked or tagged as a tentative reservation, you basically keep that on the calendar until you start to have an issue with capacity. Meaning, that day starts to book up to where you’re like, “Are we going to book more jobs for that day or are we not going to book more jobs for that day?” Otherwise, what you do is if there’s no capacity issue, you have 10 trucks and you have 6 trucks worth of jobs, anyways, you’ve got enough for 6 trucks, right? You’ll just keep it on there and then call like you’re doing a normal confirmation call, right?
But if you book 100% of these, 30% might cancel you end up with 70%. But if you didn’t do this, you’d probably only end up with 30 or 40%, all right? Powerful, powerful. That’s tactic number one. Tactic number two, rebuttals. A rebuttal is a response to why your customer is not ready or prospective customer is not ready to set up their move with you at this point, okay? They have an objection to why they’re not ready to set it up. You want to overcome that objection with a rebuttal. So for example, what are all the reasons? I want you to make a list of all the reasons a customer would not or says no, or says, “We’re not ready to set this up yet,” right? Maybe it’s your price, they need to get other quotes, they need to speak with their husband or wife. They’re not sure about their closing date.
What are all the reasons that somebody would say they’re not ready to set this up today, right now on this call or at this onsite. What are those reasons? You need to have a rebuttal for each and every single one of those for yourself and for your team, okay? These are tactics, but they’re also ways … You’ve got 10 people on the phones, this is how you get all 10 people booking more jobs, right? It’s how you start to scale your business. So, if somebody says a price, you’re a little bit higher, you want to go into that rebuttal for that. You want to be able to say to them, “Listen, when you’re comparing prices for movers, it’s really not apples to apples comparison. And what I mean by that is, if you’re out shopping for a TV, you could price that TV out at Best Buy and then go check out the same TV at Walmart and see which one’s cheaper and buy that.
But with movers, it’s a service. And in order for me to send you quality trained professionals that are going to move all of your belongings without damaging anything and making the day more stressful than it needs to be, we charge a little bit more, right? What is it that you’re actually looking for? Are you looking for the cheapest price, quality movers or both?” You’ve got to be able to have those responses. Listen, the people that are going to dominate are the people that are not taking no for an answer on that first go around. Doesn’t mean that you have to just drill them until they say yes, that’s not what you want to do, okay? But you do want to give one little pushback on that first call, engage them in the conversation. And when you’re overcoming objections, the main thing you’re doing is you’re not being pushy, you’re just making sense of your service. You’re making sense of your point.
Let it make sense to them why you charge more, let it make sense to them why you have binding or non-binding or why you charge hourly or why you do flat rate, whatever it is, let that rebuttal make the way you do things make sense to them, okay? So rebuttals, you’ve got to have strong rebuttals. So make a list. By the way, those of you in Moving Sales Academy, go to the lesson on overcoming objections, in the downloads you have a PDF of all of my rebuttals. So it’s all in there for everything that someone could possibly say why they’re not going to move, why they’re not going to set up their move immediately. You’ve got the rebuttal and the response to give them to make sure your whole sales team has it and have it at their desks, right?
Make sure they have quick access to those rebuttals, that they don’t have to go look for them, they have either a book right here, or those of you that are using smart moving you know you could just write in the estimate screen, on your script, you could just click rebuttals and it’ll say, “Price is too high,” you go price too high and boom, the rebuttal pops up there. So no matter what you do, whether it’s digital, whether it’s in a three ring binder, have it in front of each and every one of your reps and make sure they’re doing it. All right. Tactic number three, roll into the reservation, okay? Roll into the reservation. As you’re giving estimates, you want to assume the sale, right? You want to assume that, hey, this is part of the process. They’re calling, I’m giving them the information that they need, and at the end of this call, I’m going to go ahead and book the move, right?
It’s the same as if you went to the grocery store and you got a cart full of groceries, and you came up to the counter, the cashier assumes that you’re going to be purchasing that stuff, right? So you’ve got to get yourself in that mindset. And then what you want to do is roll right into the reservation. So instead of what most people do, they get to the end of their script, they get to the end of their pitch and they say, “Well, how does that sound for you?” That’s not what you want to do, all right? You want to roll right into the reservation and how you do that is you say things like, you get to the end and you say, “All right, great. You’re all set. I just need to take $100 deposit. Did you want to put that on a Visa or a MasterCard?” So you’re assuming the sale.
You gave them their estimate. You told them the price. You’re like, “Okay, you’re all set.” And now you give them two options. You always want to give two options and both options lead to them booking with you, Visa or MasterCard. Never say, “What type of card would you like to put that on?” Because now you’re making them think, right? You want make from where they are, which is not booked yet to where you want them to be, which is booked, you want to make that path as easy as possible. Would you like to put that on a Visa or a MasterCard? Another one is, “I have two times available on that day. I have a morning and an afternoon, which would you prefer?” Again, two choices, morning or afternoon, which would you prefer? Another one would be, “You’re all set. What’s the best email for me to go ahead and send you your move confirmation email to,” right?
So in other words, you’re sending the confirmation, they’re ready to go. If you don’t take deposits or you know it’s going to be a morning job because of the size of it, that’s how you roll into the reservation, all right? Very, very important. Don’t ask the customer, “How does that sound? And do you want to book the job,” right? And you might say, “Louis, I do that now we book jobs.” This is about booking more jobs. This is about booking more jobs. Every single person watching books moves, I want you booking more moves. The time, energy, effort, money that you put in to getting the phone to ring, getting on there, giving the estimate or going out and doing an onsite, you need to raise your booking percentage. That’s where the profits are, all right? Roll into the reservation. Tactic number four, authority takeover. Authority takeover.
So an authority takeover is when a person of authority, in most cases, a manager or an owner takes over a call from a moving consultant to help close that deal, right? Either takes over the call during the call, or does a call back, authority takeover call back to speak to that customer as another voice. Listen, everybody loves talking to the top dog. Everybody loves talking to the manager. Everybody loves talking to the owner, right? So as a manager, as an owner, you don’t want to spend all this time giving estimates, taking inventory doing that, unless you’re just at that level, which is totally okay, right? I mean, that’s what I did at the beginning. Every single estimate, I did them all. But as you start to scale, you don’t want to be the one taking the time to give an estimate, spend 20 minutes on the phone with the customer. Your sales team does that.
But if you have someone that’s a closer, a sales manager, owner, someone that’s just another sales rep that could call back and say, “Hi, I’m the concierge. We’re just calling to see if there’s anything we can do for you,” and then roll into that. Another voice will help seal the deal. And they know they’re talking to the power to be. So this would be great to do any time where somebody’s maybe asking for a discount and you’ll say, “You know what? If I can take $10 off, is this something you’re ready to do today? Is this something you’re ready to do today? Okay, hold on, let me go speak to my manager,” right? Now, the rep could get back on the phone and say, “You know what? We could go ahead and give you the $10 off or whatever it is,” or the manager could get on the phone and say, “Hi, is this is this Ms. Jones? Hi, John told me that, you had a great conversation and you’re moving from here to there.
What’s it going to take? Is it going to take us taking the $10 off per hour in order to earn your business because what we really want is we want to make you a repeat and referral customer. We know that you’re going to tell all your friends and family about us. So let me know. What’s it going to take?” Yeah, the $10 or maybe not, right? At that point, you might even be able to get it without giving them the discount. Authority takeovers. All right, so the last tactic I have for you today, and remember, these are all go apply these now. Now, right? Don’t wait. Don’t pick and choose. I picked five of the best that you can implement now that it’s not overload. It’s not overwhelming. Tactic number five is called the kitchen table close. The kitchen table close.
When you go out and you do an onsite estimate, you need to go for the close while you’re there. Too many people are going and giving an estimate, leaving, going back to the office, working on the estimate, sending it to the customer. Maybe that day, maybe the next day, maybe within a couple of days and you’re crushing your chances of hitting that high booking percentage. Onsite estimates, if you’re doing them are naturally a higher closing rate, right? You’re now face-to-face with the customer in their home, you’ve got to close the deal there, okay? So you go through the house, you take your inventory, right? Whether you’re doing it on your tablet with your CRM or on a sheet of paper, whatever. You go through the house, ideally you’ll have your nice presentation folder, but maybe you don’t have it yet, right?
Don’t wait to do this until you get all the nice presentation, folders until you get the CRM or whatever it might be. And you say, “Okay, I have all this information, can we go ahead and sit here at the kitchen table and just go over this together?” Right? Now that’s when you break out the estimate. And ideally, ideally, what you want to do is have a portable printer to where you’re printing out the estimate right there on the spot. I know that you can email it to them. I know that, right? You’re going to do that as well, but you want to print it out so that they have something tangible to look at right there on the spot. So you get a portable printer, you hook it up to your CRM, you print it and now you go over to the information and you take these same tactics, right? You roll right into the reservation.
You use your rebuttals. I have three more estimates, right? What’s your response to that? I need to have a response for that. I have three more people coming. All else fails, you do the tentative reservation, right? And you also now can do the authority takeover. What’s it going to take to go ahead and get this booked? You know what? Let me call my manager. Let me call my owner. Let me call whoever and find out what we could do to make that happen for you, right? If you’re doing onsite estimates, please don’t waste your gas, time, money, energy walking through somebody’s house and not go for the close while you’re there. This is a game changer, game changer. I had a client that had three, at the time I think it was three and then he went to four onsite estimators. They were all going to the house to do a walkthrough, do a survey, right?
You got to get away from that, we’re doing a survey. We’re not doing a survey, we’re going to come do an estimate and when we’re done, you booked the job. But he had three, possibly four onsite estimators going out and just doing a survey and coming back to the office, going over the estimate for hours with the sales manager, and then getting back to the customer with the price. When they switched this to the kitchen table close, dramatic difference in their closing rate. Dramatic difference.
I can’t remember the exact percentage, but I want to say it doubled, okay? I want to say doubled. So those are the five tactics. Let me go through them again just in case you didn’t write them down. Number one, tentative reservations. Number two, rebuttals. Number three, roll into the reservation. Number four, authority takeover and number five, the kitchen table close, all right? So now, this is stuff you could start immediately. It doesn’t matter what size your business is, it doesn’t matter how many people you have working for you. You’ve got to get this going immediately.
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to build trust and capture leads in your moving company.
“Building a brand is expensive and takes a lot of time. Just focus on building trust and capturing leads. With all your marketing, that’s all you need to do.”
“Explain in detail all of your services and the areas that you service. A lot of times we take for granted that the customer just knows because we’re a moving company, we do this, this, this, and this. Or that because we have this area code that we service all these areas. Make it clear in your marketing.”
“I’m not saying you have to be on social media, posting, but there’s people out there that, one Thanksgiving, maybe you had a nephew over and it’s like, “Hey, you got to be on Facebook. I’ll set you up with a page. Don’t worry about it. I’ll do it for you. I’ll set it up.” They set it up with some old picture that they found with your old address. And if someone goes there, it just looks like a ghost town, like you’re out of business.”
“Going from Neighbors Moving and Storage, it has that very down-home feel. It doesn’t sound corporate at all. If you see the trucks, it looks like the circus is coming to town. Right? So I could tell you, for local moves especially, the down-home feel wins all the time.”
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Louis Massaro: Two things to focus on, building trust and capturing leads. With all your marketing, that’s all you need to do. Okay? Building a brand is expensive and takes a lot of time. Just focus on building trust and capturing leads, building trust and capturing leads. So how do we do that?
Building trust, use real pictures of your mover staff and trucks. Even if you had to go take it on your iPhone and upload it, that’s fine. It’s better than stock photography. The stock photography worked 10 years ago when websites were new, right, and people didn’t really know how easy it was to just go find a fake image. But everybody’s onto that shit now. You’re not fooling anybody. They don’t think that that’s your, whatever it is, on the picture.
Explain in detail all of your services and the areas that you service. A lot of times we take for granted that the customer just knows because we’re a moving company, we do this, this, this, and this. Or that because we have this area code that we service all these areas. For example, if you’re in, let’s say, you service LA, Orange County and San Diego, you would want to make sure that that’s on there. Right? If you do local, long distance, storage, you want to make sure all that’s on there. When I say on there, that’s any marketing material you have, website, postcards, brochures, emails, whatever it might be.
Show off your awards and affiliations. People love logos. Any logo you could get, get it. Legitimate logos, don’t make shit up. Right? We had a company come in and they’re like, “Hey, we want to award you mover of the year,” this and that. I’m like, “Yeah?” They’re like, “Yeah, we got a logo. We’ll give you a plaque, but it’s X amount to do it.” Yeah, sign me. Right?Legitimately, that consumer business review named us mover the year. Guess what? I resign that every year and it was on every piece of marketing that we had. Real logo, real company that named us in their newspaper, mover the year. Wherever you could get logos from, get them, put them on there. People love them.
Display all of your license numbers everywhere. By the way, when it comes back to affiliations and awards, if you’ve got an A rating or an A-plus rating with the BBB, put that on there. BBB is real. Okay? Everybody thinks that, no, that’s old school. Listen, it’s not old school. If you Google the name of your company and they show up on the first page with a listing for you, it’s not old school. Right? Customer puts your name in and they have a listing, they’re going to go look at it. And even if they don’t go look at it, if you’ve got a good rating, put it on the side of your trucks, put it on your website. All right? It builds trust.
Use social proof like testimonials with real pictures and videos. I’ll show you my postcards. We had a testimonial on there, on the website, pictures, videos. Provide free valuable content, such as packing guides. You can have this that you just sent to your customers. We’ll talk about a value building sequence at some point this weekend. I had the curriculum down after the last four seminars, but now I’ve changed everything, so I don’t know when stuff’s coming, but it’s common this weekend. You give them a packing guide. That’s something they could download off your website or you send it out once you get their email. Just something super simple that provides value to them. It helps to build trust and establish you as an authority.
Have good reviews and show them off. Show them off, put them right on your website where they could see them, right? You don’t want to link over to Yelp, where you could put that this review is from Yelp. All right? We had all the reviews on there, actually created a whole other site, which I want to recommend called Neighbors Moving Reviews. And we linked to that site and I had somebody that every review that went out there, we put it on that site and actually did link to it at the time. It was some SEO strategy that really didn’t end up working anyways, so you don’t need to do that. Just put them all on your site.
Show off your years of experience in the business. You don’t have to say, listen, we’ve been in business since 1982 if you haven’t been in business since 1982. But, if the last 10 years, you worked for another moving company and now you own your own moving company, you could say, 12 years of experience. It’s a real statement. And if you’ve been in business for 10 years, 20 years, put that on everything. Right? Put that on everything.
Keep all your social platforms updated. I’m not saying you have to be on social media, posting, but there’s people out there that, one Thanksgiving, maybe you had a nephew over and it’s like, “Hey, you got to be on Facebook. I’ll set you up with a page. Don’t worry about it. I’ll do it for you. I’ll set it up.” They set it up with some old picture that they found with your old address. And if someone goes there, it just looks like a ghost town, like you’re out of business. Right? At least just get it updated. Make sure that the phone number is correct. Make sure the address is correct. All the data, all the link to the website, make sure that’s correct. Get some decent pictures on there. You don’t have to keep up with it. But again, anything that shows up on that page of Google, you want to be aware of all those listings and know that if customers are looking at it, are we putting our best foot forward to help build trust?
And then, have a consistent message in your marketing and sales. We talked about this for resolving customer complaints. I mean, you’ll start to see how all this stuff ties together. And it seems like so much stuff, but it’s like if you dial in just a few things, it all comes together. But if what’s in your marketing material is also what gets said by the salesperson, that builds trust. When your marketing material says one thing, they call in, your salesperson says something else, you lose trust, right?
Then, capture leads. Have calls to action leading the customer to call you or request a quote. So on your website, you want to have your phone number there at the top on a landing page, on a postcard, on your truck. Our trucks had the phone number and it said, call for a free, friendly estimate. On the website, it said, call now for free, friendly estimate and advice. Right? Calls to action. Just because the number’s there doesn’t mean anything. These are all just little cues that are going to help generate more calls. Remember, we got to capture leads. Having a beautiful website doesn’t mean anything. People landing on it doesn’t mean anything. Hey, we pay this much per click. I don’t care how much you pay per click. When the people landed on your site, how many of them turned into a lead?
Place your phone numbers in easy to spot areas in all your marketing, right? Don’t let them search for that. All these new modern looking websites with a phone number really small, forget that. Make the number big, not extremely big, but big enough that no one’s going to miss it, right? Big enough that if your grandma goes on there, she’s not going to miss the phone number. Right?
Have click to call set up on mobile version of your website. Okay? So either you should have a mobile version of your website, which we’ll go over, or responsive website. When they go to it, the phone number, when they see it, if they click on it, the little thing pops up. On an iPhone, at least, it says, call this number? Yes. If that feature doesn’t work, don’t think someone’s going to pull up their phone, find a pen, write down your number, go close the Google search, go to the phone number, type it in. No, they’re not. They’re just going to move on. The attention span is not there.
Easy to use quote forms to capture leads with a two-part web form. We’ll go over that. I won’t get into it now. I’ll show you an example. Offer coupons. Always offer coupons, even if you don’t want to have them in plain view on your website. It’s a closing tactic for your salesperson, instead of giving a discount, sounding like you’re wheeling. And you’re like, well, you know what? If you actually, here, let me send you a link to the website, you could actually get 10 boxes for free. Or you could actually get X amount of dollars off your move.
On my postcards, I always had, I used to do percentage off a move. I did 10% off a move for postcards. Free boxes. One month free storage. When long distance was with the 400N tariff years ago, before 2008, we had 70% off long distance moves on there, because that was how you did the tariff back then. I mean, everybody was offering 70, 75%. That’s just how it was. But then later on, we did $125 off long distance moves, 35 maybe off of local moves. I’ve found that people like the dollar amount more than the percentage. So you just figure out what you’re comfortable with, but offer coupons.
Put an explainer video on your home page. I’ll show you an example what that is. Use landing pages instead of your website for Paper Click marketing. We’ll get to that as well. Offer free downloads in exchange for email addresses. So we were talking about that packing guide. You could have that on your website. Maybe they don’t want to request a quote right away, but they’re like, you know what? I need to start thinking about packing. If you ever go to my website, you can get the ebook, but you put your email address in. You could do the same thing with moving checklists, packing guides. And now you have them in your database to email them.
Use a live chat popup. A lot of people will have live chat, but if they’re on the page for a certain amount of time and they’re scrolling, you could set it to pop up and say, is there anything we could help you with? Right? Just make sure if you have live chat, there’s somebody on the other end to have the chat. There’s nothing worse than, we’re not available right now, but we’ll get back to you. Right? If there’s no one available, just disable it during that time. If you’re going to do live chat, commit to it and set it up correctly, or just don’t put it on your website.
And use local phone numbers instead of 800 numbers. People want to do business with a local company. They don’t want to call a call center. An 800 number makes them feel like they’re calling a call center. So unless you have some kind of nationwide operation and you’ve got one website and you’re not going to list all these different phone numbers on there, have local numbers. It does not make you look bigger. Everybody wants to say, I want to look bigger for the customer. The customer doesn’t care how big you are. They care about the quality of your service.
And I can tell you, going from Neighbors Moving and Storage, it has that very down home feel. It doesn’t sound corporate at all. If you see the trucks, it looks like the circus is coming to town. Right? So I could tell you, people, for local moves especially, the down home feel wins all the time.
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to set moving season revenue targets in your moving company.
“I’m a big believer in business in having sprints. Usually, it’s a 90-day sprint. In typical circumstances where you kind of go hard on one thing and then take a little break, relax, recuperate… Figure out what the next move is. Usually, those are quarterly sprints. However, with moving season, we’re going to do a 120-day sprint to where you maximize this season”
“It’s easy to say, “Hey, I’m just going to go out, seasons here, we’re going to make a bunch of money.” But if we don’t have a clear target on where we’re headed and what we want and where we’re going, then it’s easy to just drift. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of what’s going on and not hit those numbers, right? And just because we’re hitting certain numbers and just because we’re busier than we are the rest of the year, doesn’t mean that we’re going to be profitable.”
“If your targets are constantly being hit or your goals are constantly being hit, you’re not setting them high enough. Never be afraid to not hit your target. The targets aren’t there to get hit, they’re there to keep you moving towards them. So don’t feel like you need to set this low, realistic target so that you can win the game, hitting the target is not winning the game. Getting beyond where you are now, that’s what starts to advance you towards winning the game.
“Please don’t move on with your day if you’ve got the time, just sit down and come up with these targets. You don’t have to make it complicated. You don’t have to get a spreadsheet out, just get a single sheet of paper, write them down.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis: This is really where I kind of say, all right, look, what’s going on now and how can you maximize your business and really take advantage of the current season or the current circumstances, whatever’s going on in the economy, whatever new technologies out there. And right now starting today, it’s moving season. So what we’re going to talk about is we’re going to talk about doing 120 day sprint. So you’ve got, May 15th, which is today. Okay? And then we’re going to take that through September 15th, so that’s going to be your 120 day sprint. I’m a big believer in business in having sprints. Usually it’s a 90 day sprint, right? In typical circumstances where you kind of go hard on one thing and then take a little break, relax, recuperate, right? Figure out what the next move is. Usually those are quarterly sprints. However, with moving season, we’re going to do 120 day sprint to where you maximize moving season, all right? I know you know it’s going to get busy, however, what a lot of people will do during moving season is assume that it’s going to get busy and kind of rest on their laurels a little bit. Right? So what I want to do today is I want to talk about some ways where you can maximize this season to bring in more money. And we do that by setting targets, right? It’s easy to say, “Hey, I’m just going to go out, seasons here, we’re going to make a bunch of money.” But if we don’t have a clear target on where we’re headed and what we want and where we’re going, then it’s easy to just drift. It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day what’s going on and not hit those numbers, right? And just because we’re hitting certain numbers and just because we’re busier than we are the rest of the year, doesn’t mean that we’re going to be profitable. Right? So I want to give you some targets that I want you to set and I want you to set them from today, May 15th through September 15th. And by the way, I don’t know if it’s exactly 120 days. It’s four months. So I know somebody is going to be in the Chatroll like Louis, it’s 123 days, or it’s 118 days, whatever it is, it’s a four month sprint, okay? So here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to go over five different areas of revenue targets that you need to set and then try to achieve this moving season and realize that setting a high target is a good thing, right? If your targets are constantly being hit or your goals are constantly being hit, you’re not setting them high enough. Never be afraid to not hit your target. The targets aren’t there to get hit, they’re there to keep you moving towards them. So don’t feel like you need to set this low, realistic target so that you can win the game, hitting the target is not winning the game. Getting beyond where you are now, that’s what starts to advance you towards winning the game. So let’s talk about these areas. The first area is gross revenue target. So gross revenue for your business, everything combined, right? Whatever you do, local, long distance, storage, everything combined, gross revenue for May through September 15th. So the best way to do this would be to take a look, run the dates in your CRM for May 15th through September 15th of last year and see where you’re at. See how each month breaks down so that you could kind of identify certain milestones of where you are along the way to see if you’re on track, but take a look at last year and then see where you are now. Right? Do you have more momentum? Have you increased over last year? As the first quarter of the year. So if you run those numbers on January, February and March and include April in there too, what percentage are you up over last year? Do you have more leads coming in? Do you have more salespeople? Do you have more trucks and movers and opportunity to bring in more money? And you’re going to want to set your target based on gross revenue. This is the easiest number to attain in the way of like, it’s the easiest thing to just shoot for a high number, but it’s not everything because it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day what the gross revenue is if it’s not translating into net profit. I mean, it’s not really about what your company does. You’re not winning awards for doing two million, three million, 20 million, whatever it is, you’re not winning awards for that. Your awards are the net profit that you’re able to take home at the end of the day. So gross revenue target, and they need that. That’s first, then your RPM target, your revenue per move. So this is going to help you increase this. Revenue per move, another way of saying your average move is so important right now, because most people will run into capacity issues over the next few months. Meaning, I’m talking to people already and they’re already booked out for the end of this month. And so when you start to hit capacity issues, meaning you don’t have enough trucks or movers to service all the demand, what do you got to do to raise the revenue? You got to make more money per move. So how do we make more money per move? Well, number one, raise your prices, this is the best time of the year to raise your prices. If you’ve been hesitant to do so, or even if you’ve already raised your prices, this is a great time to raise them again. A higher price, people are worried that people won’t move with them, but if you’re selling service and not price, and you’ve got the objections, most of you are in Moving Sales Academy, you’ve got the online course. You’ve got all the rebuttals and you know what to say to overcome that, you could sell at the higher price, but even if it reduces your volume, that’s okay because you can’t handle as much volume in the summer, right? If you’re finding yourself turning away business, you need to raise the prices. Another thing is, your revenue per move can consist of packing. How much packing are you selling on each individual move? Now, packing can be sold at the time of sale. Meaning when they’re booking the move, it could be sold, we do a seven day packing checkup call. Where seven days prior to the move we call the customer to see how the packing … how everything’s going, your moves coming up. It’s a week out. Just want to check in on your packing to see if you’ve been able to get everything packed, it shows here that you’re going to be doing the packing yourself. And the customer’s like, “Well, to tell you the truth, it’s a mess. I haven’t had time to do anything.” “Oh, well, we offer packing services as well.” Then you go into selling packing, a week out is perfect to do that because the people that are behind. And at that point, if they haven’t started packing a week out, they’re going to be a little stressed out about it. And if you could come in and help them alleviate that, plus raise your revenue per move, perfect. You could also do this again on the confirmation call two days before the move and all of your movers should always have packing material on the truck. You go out there and there’s paintings on the wall that need to be packed, they can sell additional packing. Mattress covers, mattress bags, shrink wrap, all this additional stuff that … even general boxes, 1.5, 3.0, whatever it is, where you go out there and there’s stuff not packed that they said they just didn’t have time to do, it’s an opportunity to sell additional packing. Now of course, always make sure that the customer knows that there is an additional charge, don’t just pack up a bunch of stuff and then hit them with a bill. They need to understand what it is they’re paying for. You also can bring in storage as well. Don’t think that storage has to be all or nothing, a lot of times the customer will just need to store one room of furniture, so always have storage paperwork with your movers on every job even if that job’s not a storage job. Be proactive in having the materials and having the stuff you need to do that. So you raise your price, you sell some packing and any other additional services that you could do, maybe you’re selling valuation. Anything additional that you could sell on those moves, maybe there’s some things you’re not charging for, but you want to start charging for. Maybe you can charge for a truck fee or a trip fee that you don’t normally do. I was talking to somebody recently and they’re like, “I’m going to add $40 trip fee to every job.” They did the math, I forget what the number was, but it was a significant amount of additional money. Now, they weren’t going to just add it, they were going to tell the customer upfront. It was like part of the estimate. It was going to be added into the estimate. Let’s see how you can raise your revenue per move. Now’s the perfect time to do that. Sometimes in the other parts of the year you’re like, “I just need moves. I just need moves, I just need moves. I have trucks to fill, I’ve guys to keep busy.” Well, now you’re like, “My trucks are full, my guys are busy.” Okay, well, if your average moves $800, can we get it to 950? Do the math, you could easily raise hundred dollars across the board average move, easily, with increased rate and selling some additional packing. So figure out what your revenue per move target could be. So for example, if you’re at 800 average, maybe your target’s going to be 850 average or 900 average or 950 average. So by the end of this sprint, where can you get your average move up to? It doesn’t mean that’s going to happen overnight, but you use the summer as an opportunity to say, hey, volume is not the issue right now. Quantity of moves is not the issue, let’s make more money for the moves we’re doing. You all know you’ve got additional costs involved. You’ve got movers want more money, everyone out there is having drivers and movers say, I want numbers that are unheard of for labor. Well, you’ve got to compensate for that somehow. You can’t keep charging the same old rates and pay a ton of money more for movers. So track that, set yourself a target because here’s what will happen with this, now is the time where you almost get like a free pass to try this out, because it’s going to be so busy as it is, but what you’ll find is you’ll build this up, let’s say from 800 to 950 or whatever. And that’s like a local move average, long distance, maybe you go from 3000 to 4,000, whatever it might be. So once you get to September 15th, once we start to come out of the heart of moving season, all these principles and all these practices and your confidence, and being able to sell at a higher price is still with you. And that’s how you’ll be able to continue through October, November, December, January, February, with those higher rates. Okay? So revenue per move target, RPM, then your cash reserve target. So it’s so important that you’ve got a cash reserve for the off season. And now’s the time where you start to fund that cash reserve. And cash reserve is essentially an account that you set up with money in it that you don’t touch from the end of moving season to spring time. You don’t even start to think about touching it until let’s say March, and you feel things start to pickup. And the only time that you use it throughout the off season is to balance out cashflow. If you’ve ever been through a tough winter and you’re juggling expenses and juggling bills, and you kind of can’t pay everything, that cash reserve account is there to help fund that. Right? And so the idea is that you fund it in the summer. So fund it now between May 15th and September 15th, fund that account, then you don’t touch it, you leave it in there unless you need it for running your business for cashflow purposes. A lot of people, what they’ll do is they’ll winter time, all of a sudden, they’ll say, “Things are tight, I need to cut off certain marketing sources,” which is like killing your business. You can’t cut off marketing when you need it the most, so you don’t want to be in a position where you have no ammunition, you can’t win the war. And sometimes you know that’s how it could feel in the winter when you’re struggling to make ends meet and things are tough and they’re tighter than usual. You can’t win that war without ammunition, and the cash reserve is ammunition. So my recommendation is you take 5% of your gross revenue and you put this in a cash reserve account. So let’s say you do 200,000 a month and you do 200,000 a month for the next four months. What’s that? 800,000, right? So 5% of 800,000 is going to be 40,000 bucks. How nice would it be to go into the winter with just an extra, and this is if you’re like a $2 million company, it all adjusts. You might say, “Louis, that’s so much.” Or “Louis, that’s not enough.” Figure out what your 5% is. But you go into that winter with 40,000, there, that’s a feeling of security. That’s a feeling of confidence. Listen, juggling expenses, I went through the recession, I don’t want to do that again. I don’t want to be in a position where it’s like, what could we pay? What could we not pay? What could we pay? What could we not pay? I’ve been there, and it’s one of the most stressful things, and it interferes with your business and your ability to lead. When you could pay all your bills, maybe you’re not raking it in, in the winter, but you could pay all your bills. And you know if you hit a rough spot, no problem, there’s a cash reserve account that your main account could pull from, you can rest assured that all your bills could be on auto pay. Everything could … You know what I mean? You don’t have to juggle and have those big cashflow meetings and things like that. Fund this account and what I want you to do is have a target for this. So I’m suggesting 5%. Maybe you’re like, hey, I’m going to do three. Hey, I’m going to do 10, whatever it might be for you, whatever that number is. So let’s say, again, let’s say this is $200,000 a month is your gross revenue. And we’re talking about four months, 800,000, 5% of that is going to be 40,000. So for this you would have a cash reserve target of 40 grand. So maybe in the first month, maybe in May, maybe right now, you’re still catching up on some expenses from off season. And you’re not able to fund the 5% this month. Okay. Well, you got some catching up to do to hit the 40,000. Don’t make the target 5% a month, make the target a set number. So if that’s 40K, that’s 40K. 40K by September 15th, right? Again, whatever that number is for you, you’ve got a target, you’ve got a cash reserve account, you’re filling it to where you get to September 15th and you’ve got, you’re like, I’m good. I got the fund. Let me tell you something, you want to talk about stress relief. You want to talk about going into the winter with a sense of security. You’ve got that money stacked up in there, you’re going to feel really good about that. Then net profit percentage target. So you might have this big gross revenue target and let’s say your gross revenue target, for example, just to put it in context here would be, I’m just going to use the same example here. Let’s just say it’s 800,000. Okay? Is your gross revenue target for the four months, meaning you’re going to do 200,000 a month. And you’ve got your revenue per move and maybe you’re going to go from 800 to 950, average. Okay? Now here you’re going to say, okay, I’m going to have 40,000 by September 15th. Well, here, we’re going to talk about net percentage. So just because you did 800,000, doesn’t mean you’re going to make any money. So anybody could go out and spend all kinds of reckless money on advertising, all kinds of reckless money on labor that they can’t afford based on their rates. Have low prices and their job costing is so off that every move they sell, they’re losing money. Anybody could do that, that’s not the name of the game. The name of the game is to get the gross revenue so that you could get the net profit. So what I want you to do is come up with a target, wherever you are now, as far as net profit target. Look at last year, okay? Look at May 15th through September 15th on your P&L and see what your net profit was for that period. Because a lot of times I’ll see companies that they’ll have like a very busy summer, but they’re letting the wheels fall off, if you will. Things are running so fast that the tightness starts to loosen up and all the profits come dripping out the bottom. So maybe in the past you are at 10% net, and you’re like, hey, I want to go to 15%. Maybe you want to go to 20%, whatever that number is, if it was me, unless you’re at like a really low percentage, unless you’re like under 10, which there’s companies out there doing millions of dollars that are doing 3% and it kills me to see it, but it happens. So set yourself a realistic percentage. I would recommend that that’s anywhere between 15 to 20%, that should be your target. And you want to make sure that in the midst of the busy season, in the midst of things being little chaotic, it can be a little extra just constant stuff going on. The more moves that happened, the more problems that could happen, the more trucks that are on the road, the more truck issues you could have. I mean, it’s just everything compounds and everything increases, so you’ve got to make sure that you keep your eye on this. You don’t want to get to the end of the season to discover that you dint make any money. So if you’re doing 20% and you’ve got 800,000, what is that? That’s $160,000. That’s the move in business. That’s what it needs to be. So when you talk about, okay, I’m going to fund a cash reserve account. Okay. Well, where’s that 40,000 going to come from. It’s going to come from there. Right? It’s going to come from there. So this net profit, in other words, this isn’t an expense. This still is part of the net profit, but when you take it out from a cashflow perspective there’s still 120 there. So net profit, then you need a reason to be doing all this. Sometimes we profit, but we forget to thrive. Or you thrive and you forget to profit. You’re living your life, you’re enjoying your life, but you’re forgetting to make money. Well, we’ve got the money part covered for the business, right? This is smart business right here doing this. But what you got to do now is you got to set a target for your fun fund. You’ve got to fund the fun fund. Say that 10 times over, fund the fun fund. So you’ve got to have a target of money that you say, you know what? By September 15th I’m going to have a fun fund set up. You can call it whatever you want. That that’s money for me to do whatever I want to do with, money for me to blow. You’ve got to reward yourself after every moving season, but the first thing that needs to happen is you’ve got to be able to get this gross revenue up. You’ve got to be able to raise your RPM, your average move. You need to be able to make sure that you’re profiting, so there is this money so that you can fund a cash reserve account, you could fund a fun fund account, and still have operating capital within the business to move into the off season. Because the idea is that you don’t want to really have to touch this if you don’t have to. So you can make this number whatever you want. I would say to make it two to 3% of the gross. Two to 3% of the gross, or you can make it on the net profit if you have this set and you know what the net profits going to be, you can make it on the net profit and set it. But let’s say you made it, let’s just call it 2.5% of gross, so 2.5% of gross. So you’re talking about 20K, you’re doing 200,000 a month. At the end of the summer, I want 20,000 bucks to blow, to do what I want to do with. And I don’t mean you blow it, like go to the club and pop bottles. If that’s what you want to do, do it. Maybe you want to get a new car, maybe you want a down payment on a house. Maybe you’re like, hey, my goal for this season is to invest in a new piece of real estate that I can collect rent on. Maybe you need to pay college funds for the kids, whatever it is, it’s money to spend. You’ve got to have a target in mind, okay? This is what’s going to keep pushing you through the summer, take a $20,000 vacation, that’s a nice trip. Set yourself up, go away for a couple of weeks, spend 20,000 bucks, stay in a nice places, do what you want to do, whatever it is for you, everybody listening, everybody watching, you all have different things that you want to do. The point is, you’ve got to have a target with money for you and your family where it’s like, why did I work so hard? Right? What is it all about? You didn’t work so hard so you can have a, hey, look at my P&L, I’ve got 160,000 net. Okay, that’s cool. Or I have got 40,000 to get me through the emergencies in the winter. Okay, great. You need some money to go enjoy yourself. Profit and thrive. And what I would do is I would figure out right now, when you’re setting these targets, what you’re going to do. You come up with that number and say, what could I do with that number? It could be anything, could be trips, could be some type of … something that brings you satisfaction in some way, shape or form. So these are the targets I’m encouraging you to, if you’re not doing it right now as we’re talking and coming up with these numbers, as soon as we get off to just number one, what’s this going to be? Number two, what’s this going to be? What’s this going to be? What’s this going to be? And what’s this going to be, all four. You might say yes, this Louis, this is a great idea. I’m going to do this every single month. And that’s cool if you already do it, but if not, I think going from May 15th to September 15th on a sprint, knowing that there’s an end in sight, because you might be hustling a little bit more, you might be working a little bit more. You might be dealing with a little more problems and stress. You want to have that end in sight, set yourself up for this sprint. Have these targets, have these goals, it will set you up to thrive in the off season and you’ll do higher numbers period than you would have done if you didn’t set these targets. And guys, that’s it. Make sure you go set these targets. Please don’t move on with your day if you’ve got the time, just sit down and come up with these. You don’t have to make it complicated. You don’t have to get a spreadsheet out, get a single sheet of paper, write them down. They’re targets, don’t feel like you’ve got to hit them, don’t feel like you’ve got to set them low. Season is what moving business is all about. You got to get out the rake, rake in the money, go out there and make it and make sure as you’re doing all this, you not only profit in your business, but you thrive in your life as well.
In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to win big in the moving business in 2020.
“With internet marketing, you’re able to tweak, you’re able to modify, you’re able to really track everything, and you could make changes quickly. You’re not stuck with something for an entire year. You want to open a new market? You don’t have to wait for the yellow pages to come out. You go open whenever you want to go open and start your marketing.”
“ I would say, over the course of 11 years, I feel like I came pretty close to perfecting a system for what I call a sales machine for the moving business.”
“There’s no doubt that there is a shortage of drivers, that there is a challenge in getting movers nowadays. However, the people that have this process down for hiring are winning and they’re winning big.”
“I’m not saying that the moving business is easy, but it can be easy to make changes… Take the steps, and believe that it’s possible.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: All right, my friend. Welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. This is Louis Massaro. I got my main man, Chris, with me today. What’s going on?
Chris DeHerrera: What’s up?
Louis Massaro: All right. In these episodes, it is all about helping you take your moving company to that next level, eliminate the stress, overcome any challenges, any obstacles that you’re having, make more money, be able to spend more time with your family, create a model business, and just let this business that you’re in be the vehicle to the life that you want to live. All right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yes.
Louis Massaro: That’s what we’re trying to do. In these episodes, what we’re doing is we’re taking questions from my social media feed. If you follow me on any platform, it’s at louismassaro.com. That’s L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. If you have any questions, anything you want us to tackle on The Moving Mastery Podcast, just DM me on Instagram. Chris randomly pulls some out. Well, I wouldn’t say randomly. He’s not picking them out of a hat. You’re hand-selecting them because, as the producer of the podcast, essentially, you’re kind of running the show. I’m just here to answer whatever the question.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. I’d like to go through the comments, the questions, the things that come into our support desk and find stuff that I think that, maybe, a lot of people may be wondering about, and stuff that I feel like you can shed some light on and bring some value to these people who are our listeners and stuff.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. What do we got?
Chris DeHerrera: Today, I’m going to throw a little bit of a curveball at you. I’d mentioned earlier that it’s a comment this time. It’s not necessarily a question, but I wanted to kind of lay this on you and see how you feel about it. I have a feeling that there may be, maybe not a lot, but some people who share this gentleman’s sentiments. Okay?
Louis Massaro: Mm-hmm.
Chris DeHerrera: I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t follow up with this. It’s just a comment that was on one of our social media outlets. I’ll read it to you and then I just want to hear how you feel about it. Okay?
Louis Massaro: All right.
Chris DeHerrera: The comment is, “I’ve been in the business for 22 years, and I can tell you everything has gone to shit.”
Louis Massaro: Oh, bad.
Chris DeHerrera: He says, “Internet marketing is a joke. Guys don’t want to work. Yelp takes down all my good reviews.”
Louis Massaro: Oh, boy.
Chris DeHerrera: “I’m not so sure it’s all as easy as you make it out to be. Get real, buddy.” That’s what he said.
Louis Massaro: Really?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. Hey, listen, there’s some truth behind it. There’s some heartfelt sentiment behind that, I feel like. I don’t want to make fun of the guy. He’s having, maybe, some hard times.
Louis Massaro: I’m not making fun of the guy. I’m in shock a little bit. I wasn’t expecting that. All right. Hold on, let me just make sure I got this right. 22 years in the business, business has gone to shit, guys don’t want to work, Yelp reviews come down. What else?
Chris DeHerrera: He says, “I’m not so sure it’s as easy as you make it out to be. Get real, buddy.”
Louis Massaro: All right. Give me a minute. This is a good one.
Chris DeHerrera: It’s a good one, right?
Louis Massaro: You know what? Here’s the deal. I think that 22 years, I would have been, I started 20 years ago. He’s probably in business since ‘98.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s 22 years, yeah.
Louis Massaro: ’98 to now, things have definitely changed. There’s no doubt about it. ’98 until now. Let’s just say 2000 until now, because that’s when I got in, about two years after he got in. Things have definitely changed. Gone to shit, no. Guys don’t want to work? It’s a challenge, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yelp reviews coming in. Yelp didn’t exist 20 years ago. Not so easy. I don’t know that I’ve ever sat here and said that this is easy at all, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: All the time, this is not a get rich quick business.
Chris DeHerrera: Definitely not.
Louis Massaro: It’s a great business that if you do it right, you can make a lot of money. Here’s the deal, because I do see this a lot with veterans, not veterans of our country, but veterans in the business, people that have been in the business for a long time, is that, there’s a couple of different groups. This guy sounds like he just hasn’t made the shift to the new way of doing things. There’s been a few dramatic shifts. Did he say something about everything on the Internet or Internet marketing or something?
Chris DeHerrera: He said, “Internet marketing is a joke.”
Louis Massaro: Let’s just kind of look at that, because in order to win today, in this day and age, in order to win in 2020, we know there’s companies crushing it purely, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Absolutely, yes, we see them every day.
Louis Massaro: Then, there’s other people that they believe it’s possible, but they still haven’t found the way to do it. Then, there’s people that have seen it just get, I shouldn’t say harder, but it just has changed the way that it’s adjusted from back then, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: I mean, when I started, I put the yellow page ad in, set back my feet up on the desk once I had a desk, once I moved out of the yard, and just phone rang and booked moves.
Chris DeHerrera: Yes, different game back then.
Louis Massaro: Different game. Then, 2007, 2008, there’s like the perfect storm.
Chris DeHerrera: The economy-
Louis Massaro: Yellow pages stops working. No, I shouldn’t say stops. For the money you’re paying, it’s not worth it anymore.
Chris DeHerrera: For a while, though, just real quick, how many different yellow page books were you in at one time? Didn’t you have a bunch of them?
Louis Massaro: Man, every city you were in. I had six offices. Every city you were in, there was the main book from the main phone company. Then, there was, I don’t want to name any of them because I don’t…
Chris DeHerrera: Who knows? Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Then, there was another phone provider and there was another yellow page provider. There was at least two to three major providers in each city. Then, they all started coming out with different, like, “We have this area book for the south side of town,” and the east side, they have an area book.
Louis Massaro: I’m like, “What, don’t they get the main book?” Yeah, but we also want to give them this little book. It was just a way to get more –
Chris DeHerrera: I remember I had a stack of them.
Louis Massaro: It was just the way to get more money out of you. You have a total spending of 250,000 a month on yellow pages at the peak. Anyways, when that stopped working… I’m telling this story because I want to illustrate how to adapt. We’re talking about this guy and I know a lot of people feel that way. Maybe, not with such a negative tone.
Chris DeHerrera: He’s passionate. He’s passionate, yeah.
Louis Massaro: They feel like, maybe, it was easier back then. It would’ve been very easy for me to argue, “Man, it’s these Internet leads and this and that, and all this stuff online. It’s whatever,” and just complain about it. But the reality was I saw that that’s where things were going and I had to make that shift and I had to make that adjustment.
Louis Massaro: Instead of fighting it like a lot of people did, I jumped in and I learned what SEO, pay per click, leads, just Internet marketing in general, all of that. How do I make part of me operating my business as I need phone calls, I need leads, I need people that are moving? How do I continue to get those? You’re talking about that timeframe there, 2007, 2008, and then even before that. Leads were coming out. There was stuff going on, but I didn’t really make that adjustment until around that time.
Louis Massaro: The reality is that a lot of people that didn’t make it through the recession, it wasn’t that the recession did it to them. It was that they didn’t make the adjustment that they needed to make in the way that they handled marketing, and continued to spend money in areas that were no longer working, and, I shouldn’t say refused, but did not adopt and learn the new ways of generating leads for their business.
Louis Massaro: Here we are 22 years later, and he says the Internet marketing is terrible. I think the Internet marketing is an amazing thing for companies out there. Your flexibility that you have now compared to then, it was great. You put a yellow page on and it was easy, meaning there was less steps involved, but you also had less control. Where now, you’re able to tweak, you’re able to modify, you’re able to really track everything, and you could make changes quickly. You’re not stuck with something for an entire year. You want to open a new market? You don’t have to wait for the yellow pages to come out. You go open whenever you want to go open and start your marketing.
Louis Massaro: For me, I had to make that shift or I wouldn’t have been able to stay in business, with the marketing. Then, it was I’m getting all these Internet leads and I was, even stuff, pay per click, whatever, anything that wasn’t a phone call. Phone calls are gold, even today. Your phone rings, don’t ever miss that.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s right.
Louis Massaro: Don’t ever miss that. We used to print them off on the printer, right? The leads used to come and walk around and hand out pieces of paper back then. That was when the leads first started. There was no CRM with the leads coming directly into them and all that. It was, “Here’s the leads. Hey, call this,” and they would write on there. They did their whole lead follow-up on the sheet of paper that we printed out.
Louis Massaro: This was now starting to get out of control. And so, I had to shift again and adapt again to the times. I’m like, “What do I need to do to make sure that these leads aren’t getting lost? What do I need to do?” Or I walk up to moving consultant’s desk and I see a stack of these leads with handwritten notes, coffee stains. It just wasn’t organized at all. That’s when I went from studying marketing and learning that to studying call centers, studying sales, how other industries basically handled this type of stuff.
Louis Massaro: I didn’t sit there and say, “This is terrible. The good old days, you used to be on the phone.” Believe me, there was part of me that was resistant to it, but I knew I had to adapt and I had to change. I’m saying this because it sounds like, for a long, long time, he’s resisted making the adjustments that need to get made.
Louis Massaro: It was like, first you got to learn Internet marketing is here to stay, period. When somebody wants a service, they go online, they look for it. You’ve got to learn how to be at the end of every path that they choose, meaning customer goes on computer. They Google, “Movers in my city,” let’s just say. Well, everything that shows up, you want to make sure that you’re on the end of every single one of those paths.
Louis Massaro: If it’s your site directly, you get the lead. If it’s a lead provider, you get the lead. Then, you need to make sure that it’s all profitable. We won’t necessarily get into that too deep right now.
Louis Massaro: That was the first piece to marketing. Then, the sales piece. How do you start? For me, the leads came out once I had five offices already. I had a good handful of, I think at first, maybe, 15 reps, approximately, in those early days. How do I make sure that the money that I’m spending on the marketing is not going to waste?
Chris DeHerrera: Well, first of all, let’s back up. For a guy in this situation, let’s just say he’s never bought leads before, he’s never been in that situation.
Louis Massaro: Well, just so you know, when I say leads I’m talking about any form of mar… It could be from your website. It could be modern-day. It could be from Yelp.
Chris DeHerrera: I see.
Louis Massaro: When I say leads, I don’t necessarily only mean moving leads or moving lead.
Chris DeHerrera: Got you. Even just going from being an old school phonebook only, maybe, they’ll put out a few little flyers or something, to getting a structured lead management process, or anything like that, how does that even happen? You had to make that transition. Was it something that you were able to do quickly, or is it like a process that takes time? How did it go?
Louis Massaro: I opened my call center. My office, they all handled their sales individually. One office was doing great and the other office wasn’t. I’m like, “I need a centralized call center.” I opened that in 2004 or ’05. I can’t remember exactly. Then, for 11 years, I built my call center to the point we had 60, 70 reps on the phone to book in nationwide. That 11 years was all perfecting that process.
Louis Massaro: Lead comes in, how and when do we call it? How many times do we call it back? What’s the approach? What forms of communication do we call them on? If this rep’s not there, what do we do with that lead? If a phone call comes in, how do we route that phone call? What are we saying to every one of the customers, based on if it’s a local or long-distance job? If they say they’re not ready to move, what do we say about that? All of it was all to just increase that booking percentage. You got X amount of leads, how do we book more of them? How do we book more of them?
Chris DeHerrera: Just incrementally one little decimal point at a time.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I would say, over the course of 11 years, I feel like I came pretty close to perfecting a system for what I call a sales machine for the moving business. That was the second big shift. You got to get the marketing, shift your way from the old ways to the new way. Then, you’ve got to build a sales machine. Anybody that’s been following me for any amount of time knows that’s the main thing that I go after, is you’ve got to build a sales machine. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how good your crews are. It doesn’t matter how great your trucks look. It doesn’t matter how many people you have in your office. If you don’t have consistent moves being put on the board and they’re high paying jobs and you’re not just discounting, you’re going to have a really hard time.
Chris DeHerrera: Sounds like kind of, maybe, that might be what this guy’s going through. He’s just not having consistency.
Louis Massaro: Well, it sounds like he hasn’t adapted to the marketing. Listen. I don’t want to out this guy.
Chris DeHerrera: No.
Louis Massaro: Because it’s hard to learn all this stuff. I remember, in the moving business, everything is great. I’ve got five offices, making money. I’m not thinking about marketing because the phone just rings from the yellow pages. Back then, it’s like if you had the balls to put the money up for the yellow page ad and you had the ability to sell… See, I had the ability to sell from day one. Those were sales tactics. I just didn’t have the sales systems down.
Louis Massaro: If you had that ability to do it, then, you were good. Now, when that stops working, it’s panic mode. What a lot of people do in panic mode is they retreat. It’s not a test to anybody’s character or hammer or anybody else, but it could be scary. To be in a business where all this time you’ve known things to work a certain way and all of a sudden they’re totally different, I remembered the feeling.
Louis Massaro: It wasn’t like at first, I’m like, “Yeah, no problem. I’m going to go learn it.” It wasn’t. It took a while. It took a lot of denial of what was happening, of what was going on, and, “Oh, that’s not going to last,” to finally saying, “If I don’t learn this, if I don’t get on top of this now, I’m going to be in a really, really bad spot.”
Louis Massaro: It’s true. I mean, if you’re not dialed in on your Internet marketing and your marketing in general, you’re going to be in a really bad position. I tell people all the time, “You, as the moving company owner, need to be the best marketer in your business. Don’t hire an agency and expect them to come in. If you need them to do specific things for you, technical, pay per click, SEO type of things, great. You don’t need some big branding agency to come in and brand your business. You just need to learn what it is about the marketing.” Same thing with the sales. Now, in 2020, we’ve got a new obstacle.
Chris DeHerrera: What’s that?
Louis Massaro: There was, “Hey, you’ve got to learn internet marketing. You’ve got to get on top of that. Then, you’ve got to create your sales machine.” Both of these still are true today. Before I get into the challenge today in 2020, you still got to have your marketing on point. You still have to have a strong sales process. Now, there’s another piece, which is your ability to hire and train movers quickly.
Chris DeHerrera: A lot of what he said there was “guys don’t want to work.”
Louis Massaro: It’s true. Guys don’t want to work. Listen, I’m not sugarcoating anything. The reality is it’s a different generation. They don’t want to go and move furniture for a living. It’s not. It’s different than it was. There’s a lot of other opportunities or, at least, perceived opportunities in this social media world that we’re in, where everybody’s like, “Hey, do this. You can make a bunch of money online.” Guys could go work for Uber, or whatever the case may be.
Louis Massaro: There’s no doubt that there is a shortage of drivers, that there is a challenge in getting movers. However, the people that have this process down for hiring are winning and they’re winning big. What I mean by that is it’s easy to sit here and say, “It’s so hard to hire movers these days. They don’t want to work. They go and work here. They want more money. It’s just so hard. It’s so hard.” It’s easy to get caught up in that mindset. It’s easy for an owner to listen to his dispatcher that’s in charge of hiring and bringing movers onboard and getting them into the rotation, telling him how hard it is. It just starts to infect everybody.
Louis Massaro: I’m not saying that there’s not truth to the fact that it’s harder to do. What I’m saying is this is the reality, so, either get good at it or get out of the business.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. You got to adapt.
Louis Massaro: You got to adapt. The people that are adapting are crushing it. I talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of people. We hear a lot from what’s going on. I’ve got a good amount of private clients that I work with directly in their business. The ones that they’ve got their marketing on point, they know their numbers in their marketing, they’re testing, they’re tracking, they’re tweaking, they’ve got their sales machine going, and now they’ve added this piece of hiring movers and not complaining about how hard it is but just doing the additional work that it takes to make it happen, they’re winning.
Chris DeHerrera: They’re winning.
Louis Massaro: They’re making a lot of money. They’re expanding, they’re opening additional locations, and they’re not worried about that. If we just take a step back and we say, “What’s this all about?” Forget about 22 years ago. Forget about today. It’s a moving business. What do people want? They want to hire a professional moving company.
Louis Massaro: As a professional moving company, what do I need to do to get that job and be in front of them and be successful? I’ve got to be able to generate leads and book moves.
Chris DeHerrera: Step one.
Louis Massaro: Your sales machine. You’ve got to be able to service those moves by hiring movers and, obviously, having trucks and dispatch and all that. You got your sales going and you’re constantly able to book moves and you’ve got your hiring process going for movers and you’ve got that. There’s details in between, but those are the two main things. Book the move, service the move; book the move, service the move.
Louis Massaro: Yes, it’s different today. Man, anybody who’s sitting and thinking about this, like, “The moving business is tough in 2020,” or, “It’s different than it was 22 years ago.” What we tend to do as humans is, when we don’t understand something, we start to reject it or we start to fear it or we realize that we need to learn more about it and we go right after it.
Louis Massaro: I think, for the people that want to just say the moving businesses is, like he says, gone to shit or it’s not so easy, guys don’t want to work, there’s all kinds of reasons that people can complain about what it is, but there’s also strategies that aren’t that hard that will solve all these problems. It’s all perception, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Right.
Louis Massaro: You get this guy, he comes into the seminar and we sit him next to someone that we know has a totally different perception and they talk for three days, it’s going to be–
Chris DeHerrera: Change everything.
Louis Massaro: It will change everything.
Chris DeHerrera: Perspective.
Louis Massaro: I’m not selling anybody a dream. This is hard work. Here’s the difference between just doing the work and then trying to go figure out a way. That’s why I’m doing this. I know it’s challenging. I’m saying like, “Hey, let me help you avoid all these rabbit holes that you could go down looking for solutions and just lay out a plan for you.” On a macro-level, this is what’s needed. You’ve got to book moves, you’ve got to service moves. It’s really that simple.
Chris DeHerrera: The name of the game.
Louis Massaro: Then, everything else in between is just details that we lay out in courses and seminars and all that.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. Now, there’s nothing wrong with somebody who has gotten to a certain level in their company and they’re cruising along and they’re comfortable and they’re happy with the way things are going. I think, maybe, a guy like this who’s been in the business for 22 years, at some point, he did have to do some work to get off the ground, I would imagine. Then, maybe, he just got to a certain level where he felt like business is good, maybe, didn’t want much more than what they were doing. Does somebody have to have that go get them attitude? Where is his bitterness coming from? That’s what I want to know.
Louis Massaro: His bitterness is coming because his business is probably going down. I’m not going to say failing, but it’s going down. I could totally understand this and I know quite a few people like this. It’s a natural tendency, too. You build a business, you get it to a certain place, then, you set up everything, so it’s just like you’ve got your little routine going. Jobs are being booked, guys were servicing the moves, everything’s fine.
Louis Massaro: He probably had a good amount of years where he thought he was done innovating. He thought he was done trying to make things better. He got to a place, I’m assuming. In my mind, I’m thinking of several people that I know that went through the same thing. They get to a place where they’re like, “I’m good. I’m comfortable. I’ve got a business that runs. It makes the money that I wanted to make. Yeah, sure, I could always make more money.” Then, all of a sudden, enemy fire starts coming in at you. It’s like, “Boom, this stops working.”
Louis Massaro: Now, there’s these lead review sites online. If you don’t have a good review, then, you’re not going to get the business. Then, when you get a good review, they take down your good review. You got to understand, from being in a nice cushy place of things are going good, it’s like enemy fire coming at you. You’re being attacked.
Chris DeHerrera: You feel threatened.
Louis Massaro: You feel threatened. Many years of being comfortable, it’s tough to, say, let me go do this all over again, because when you succeed at that first level of saying, “Hey, I just need to get my business off the ground,” and you get to that level where it’s good and it’s stabilized, and then you kind of sit back a little bit. “I don’t have to work like I used to work.” Then, something comes in and kind of challenges you to have do that again. It’s not something’s coming in and saying, “Hey, I’m challenging you to do this.” It’s saying, “Hey, your businesses failing. There’s these things out there that could be the possible culprits of what’s going on. Go figure out what’s happening.”
Chris DeHerrera: Uh-huh, and you don’t know.
Louis Massaro: You don’t know. I mean, I get it. What I did, maybe, I don’t get into detail enough about how challenging it was to make those shifts. Not I was like one day I decided I need to learn marketing and I just went and did that. I went through all the same stuff of like, “Man, I was living really, really, really good before that recession came. Then, I had to really change the way I looked at everything.”
Louis Massaro: Anybody that’s in that position that’s comfortable, right now things have been booming, I think that you’ve always got to be looking for, first of all, do you know your numbers? Do you see things dropping? You got to be able to identify what it is. I know the feeling. When you’ve got a successful business, success can totally be the enemy.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. It makes you relaxed.
Louis Massaro: It makes you relaxed. It makes you sit back. You don’t need to go, “I’m successful,” or, “I’m stressful.” It doesn’t need to be one or the other.
Chris DeHerrera: Either one, yeah.
Louis Massaro: You just have to be aware. You’ve got to be aware of what’s going on. In a long run of success for somebody doing something the same way, you have two choices. You could sit and complain and go, “This Internet stuff’s going on and the guys don’t want to work.” You got two ways to do it. You could say, “What can I do about it? How can I step up my game and use this as a challenge to become better? How can I do this?” Because you know what? If you’re struggling with it, other people are struggling with it. He probably has something to say about all the competition, too. If you’re struggling with it, other people are struggling with it. That’s the perfect time for you to step up your game and make sure that you will survive whatever comes your way.
Chris DeHerrera: If someone has been running a company for 22 years like he has and things have been just on autopilot, basically, how would somebody like that go about creating some sort of contingency plan? Maybe, they don’t want to necessarily grow at scale, but they want to be prepared if something happens.
Louis Massaro: I don’t think that people don’t want to grow and don’t want to scale. I truly believe that they just feel like it’s going to be more work for them. They look at, “I’m at this level, and at this level I’ve got this much stress, I work this many hours. If I want to go to this level, that means the amount of stress and the amount of hours are also going to go up.” That’s very common and, I think, just natural feeling that’s a misconception.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. It makes sense to think about
Louis Massaro: It makes sense to think about. I think that a lot of times people will, consciously or unconsciously, say, “I’m good here. I don’t want to go any further,” because they’ve reached a certain comfortable level; but, you’ve got to reach a level that’s beyond comfort, so that you can safeguard yourself against whatever happens. Get beyond so you could weather any storm. Get beyond where you currently are.
Louis Massaro: Listen. If somebody’s totally happy, they’re totally content, they just need to make sure that they’re watching certain KPIs, certain key performance indicators, or seeing what’s going on in their business, they’re identifying any dips right away and still maintaining it, but there’s maintaining and then there’s building. If you’re just maintaining, it becomes very hard to just do the same amount without it dipping.
Chris DeHerrera: It just naturally wants to start dipping.
Louis Massaro: It naturally wants to start dipping. If somebody’s comfortable, they’re making the money they want to make, their business is smooth, their business is running, the question I would ask them is, if you weren’t going to have more stress, you didn’t have to work more hours, you could actually have less stress and work less hours, would you want a bigger business? Would you want more money?
Louis Massaro: The business doesn’t always have to be bigger. I know very big businesses that aren’t making a lot of money. I know mid-sized businesses that are making a ton of money. Would you want to make more money? Who’s going to say “no?” It’s that people are like, “I don’t want to sell my soul to make more money.” Of course not. It’s just a different strategy and it’s just a different approach to doing it. We have to look at happiness, too. People are like, “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” but, one of the main indicators in psychology of happiness is if you’re activating your full potential. It’s directly tied to your happiness.
Chris DeHerrera: Really?
Louis Massaro: Really. If you know you could be doing more and you’re not and you feel a little uneasy, you feel like something’s missing, it’s because you’ve got more in you. It doesn’t mean you have more hours in you. It doesn’t mean you have more stress in you. It just means you could use what’s between your ears, what’s in your head, to become more resourceful, to get more creative, and to start saying like, “Is there a better way I could be doing this?” What could I be doing? Maybe, raise your level of ambition to, if you’re like, “Hey, I just want to increase by 10%,” well, how do we increase by 50%? Or, 100%?
Chris DeHerrera: Mm-hmm. You had mentioned earlier, what did you say, $500,000 mindset versus a $5 million mindset?
Louis Massaro: Well, a strategy.
Chris DeHerrera: Strategy, okay.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, it’s like if you’re in a position where you’re trying to get your business to, let’s say, $500,000 a year, you’re going to have one strategy that’s going to help you get there. It’s going to be very short term. It’s going to be very based on next month and next month, and that type of thing. If you lay out, “How do we get the five million?” Even just asking that question and thinking through the answers, you’re going to have a whole different strategy.
Louis Massaro: What a lot of people do is they go, “No, no, no. That’s too much work. That’s going to take too long.” They don’t even think about how long it’s going to take. They just think about how much work it’s going to take and how much pressure it’s going to feel on them. Short term. They’re like, “I need to get $500,000 this year.” Why couldn’t you get to five million in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years?
Louis Massaro: What I’m saying is your strategy changes. It doesn’t mean you’re going to go from zero to five million in a year, but what it means is you’ll pass through that milestone of hitting $500,000, of course; but, if your strategy is laid out to go to five million, it’s going to be–
Chris DeHerrera: You’ll keep going.
Louis Massaro: It’s a game plan to get there. Otherwise, you get stuck at where your current strategy was and just spin in circles.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. I think, probably a lot of people don’t even have a strategy. They just kind of get to a certain point and then they say, “I guess this is where I’m going to stay. This is where I’m at.”
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I get that. I totally get that, because the initial start of the business is so challenging that when you get to a place of stabilization where you’re stabilized, it’s like, “Ah.” It’s time to take a breath.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s okay.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, it’s time to take a step back. It’s time to take a breath. Once you stabilize, then you’ve got to come in and you’ve got to optimize. Take your breath. Take your break. Take your time. Reduce your hours that you work. Start to pick up those hobbies that you didn’t have before. Schedule in that time with the family. Great, but use your time now to optimize the business.
Louis Massaro: Then, once you optimize the business, now, you sit back and you look at it like an amazing piece of work that you created. You design this amazing thing that’s running. It’s optimized. Now, you really feel proud of what you’ve done.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. It’s okay to hang out there for a little while.
Louis Massaro: Then, you hang out there for a minute. Then, from there, from an optimized place, you decide, do I want to scale? The first rule of scale is, do I need to scale?
Chris DeHerrera: What does that mean?
Louis Massaro: That means, do you need to open more locations? Do you need to get a new division? Do you need to get into commercial and long distance and this and that in order to reach your personal income goals?
Chris DeHerrera: It’s not always…
Louis Massaro: It’s not always the case. I see a lot of people that will open an office too soon or open a new division too soon. I shouldn’t even say too soon in a time regard. It’s more like there’s these other fundamentals that aren’t in place first that need to be locked down in an attempt to make more money. I’ll sit with several people like this and say, “Well, how much money do you want to make?” They say that number and I’ll challenge them to compare that to what it’s going to take. Go make a list of everything that you want in your life. What’s it really going to take to live that life?
Louis Massaro: Go sit with a financial planner. Do it yourself. Whatever you need to do, but everything you want, what’s it going to cost you to do that? That means that this is what you need to make in order to live, invest, save, pay your taxes, do whatever. A lot of times, they could do that with their one office and keep things simple.
Chris DeHerrera: It can be a recipe for disaster to try to expand like that without being ready for it or having the fundamentals in place.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. What happens is a lot of people will actually jump before they even get stabilized and go right to scale without stabilizing or optimizing.
Chris DeHerrera: Dangerous.
Louis Massaro: That’s dangerous. That’s how you take the whole ship down with you.
Chris DeHerrera: Getting back to the marketing, let’s just, for the sake of argument, call him an old school person, somebody who came from those yellow pages days. What’s a way for them to kind of start learning about the new marketing SEO and pay per click and buying leads and stuff like that?
Louis Massaro: Honestly, go to louismassaro.com. Go to sales and marketing. Watch all those videos. Go back in the podcast. Listen to anything that has the word, “marketing,” in it. That’s the place to start for free. We’ve got courses. We’ve got seminars. We’ve got coaching. We’ve got all kinds of programs to help with that.
Louis Massaro: It would be crazy for me to tell somebody to go on the journey I went on when I went and I sought out the information, brought it back. Not like I went and brought some information, I’m just a messenger, and I went, “Hey, guys. I went and studied a bunch of marketing books and let me tell you what I found.” No. I went and learned everything I could. Books, coaches, mentors, consultants, courses, all of it. Still to this day, constantly. Then, came and applied it to the moving business on a high level.
Louis Massaro: For me, it might sound self-serving to go, “Go listen, go watch my videos,” but I believe that, for anybody in moving, that is the best information out there that they could get, other than, of course, seminars, coaching, courses, and all that with us. It’s so tried and true and proven and tested. That’s where I would start because a lot of books out there, the authors are writing them in… A lot of great ones, but a lot of books are they’re writing these books in a way where it’s just way over people’s heads and it’s totally unnecessary and it’s like to make the author just sound smart. I don’t know what the deal is, but it’s just a lot of fluff.
Louis Massaro: I tell people all the time, “You’re better off going to the bookstore and going to the personal development section and read that stuff, getting your mind right, getting psychology books.”
Chris DeHerrera: Rather than business.
Louis Massaro: Well, especially, if you’re in the moving business. We’ve laid it all out. I’m not saying it’s not good to learn. You could read books and you could do all that, but you ask like, “Where is the best place?” I mean, that’s the best place.
Chris DeHerrera: Speaking of personal development and stuff, how important is that in being able to evolve and grow and change with a business?
Louis Massaro: When you look at this gentleman here, it’s a guy?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: This is what would be considered in psychology a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset, which is like, this is happening and everything just stays fixed. Whereas, in a growth mindset, you’re looking for the way, you’re adapting and you’re growing as an individual.
Louis Massaro: If you look at he started two years before I started, I don’t know where he’s at, and it’s not about bigger business or anything like that, but the amount of growth that I have experienced from all of the same challenges that he went through, to me, that’s what life is all about. If you’re not using every single one of these challenges that you face in your business to grow as a business person, as an individual, you’re wasting those opportunities and you’ll stay stuck within those walls that are keeping you confined until you decide to grow, so you can either go over those walls and round those walls or bust straight through them. It’s super important.
Chris DeHerrera: Let’s talk about Yelp. He’s saying Yelp takes down all of the good reviews. I know Yelp is changing their algorithms frequently.
Louis Massaro: So we think.
Chris DeHerrera: So we think.
Louis Massaro: So we think. That’s what we say, but the truth is we really don’t know what they’re doing. They’re going to do whatever they want to do. It’s their business.
Chris DeHerrera: What’s a way to ensure that you can always have a good representation of your company on Yelp?
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to just do the best job you can and you’ve got to be proactive with asking for the reviews. It is what it is. Did you get five-star reviews? Did you get a ton of five-star reviews and they filter all of them?
Chris DeHerrera: No.
Louis Massaro: What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do with that? Probably, somebody in this guy’s category, if we were to categorize him, would totally disengage from Yelp and stop responding to reviews and stop dealing with it because they get so pissed off that all their good reviews are down that they just totally say, “I’m not dealing with Yelp. Yelp wants me to advertise. I’m not dealing with that. I’m not advertising with them.”
Chris DeHerrera: That’s not a good idea.
Louis Massaro: You have to accept the landscape that is out there. You’ve got to accept every single bit of it. I don’t care if you like it. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t care if you like Yelp. I don’t care if you don’t like Yelp. They’re here and they’re a part of this business right now in 2020. Play the game. That’s it. Do everything you can to get that five-star rating, and that’s what you have to do. I say that, but at the same time, I know the feeling of getting that five-star review and it gets filtered. I know the feeling of getting that one-star review and you can’t even figure out who it is. You’re like, “This isn’t even our customer.” I’ve looked everywhere like, “This doesn’t even make sense. This isn’t even our customer.” I know that.
Louis Massaro: I don’t know. My thought process is always, “Can I do something about it? If so, let me take action and do something about it. If not, let me just accept it and move on.”
Chris DeHerrera: Stay stuck in it.
Louis Massaro: I’m not going to tear myself apart and have a sick stomach because Yelp took my five-star review down. It stings at first. The idea is, with that type of stuff, talking about the mental game for a moving CEO, you get upset about something. Your mover doesn’t show up, one of your sales reps does something wrong, puts the wrong notes in the system, it screws up a job, Yelp takes down your five-star review. You’ll get mad. You’ll feel a burn in your stomach. To whatever level you’re used to feeling that, you’ve got to just start, little by little, closing the gap between the time that the thing happens that you’re pissed off about and the time where you shake it off and let it go.
Chris DeHerrera: There’s no benefit to just staying.
Louis Massaro: If you need to feel it for five minutes and get pissed, whatever you got to do, punch the walls, whatever it is, close the gap from the place where you’re pissed to the place where you’re all good again, because that’s where your company needs you to be on point. Not to be upset about little trivial stuff. Again, $500,000 strategy gets mad over a Yelp review? $5 million strategy says that’s part of the game, move up on. You know what I’m saying?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. Either deal with it or accept it.
Louis Massaro: That’s it.
Chris DeHerrera: It is what it is.
Louis Massaro: What can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen again? That’s it. Something happens, what can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen again?
Chris DeHerrera: You had addressed the last part of his comment, in which he said, “I’m not so sure it’s as easy as you make it out to me. Get real, buddy.” I agree with that. I don’t think you make it seem as easy as he maybe thinks you do, but, I would say, maybe, you could give just a couple of helpful tips or pointers for somebody who may be experiencing some of these same feelings that this guy’s going through.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Well, I think we kind of sprinkled a bunch of them all throughout this episode. Go back and listen to it again. I would say, to win in 2020 in the moving business, you’ve got to have your marketing on point. You’ve got to know your numbers, your marketing, ROI, report. You’ve got to have that. Smart Moving users, it’s in there. It’s built-in for you. Full disclosure. I’m a co-founder of Smart Moving.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to know those numbers so that you could test certain things, track them based on what the ROI is, and then tweak them. Your marketing, you got to get on top of that. Then, your sales process has to be more than, “Hey, we call people, we leave them a message, and we move on,” and that’s it. You’ve got to really dial that in. Go to louismassaro.com. Watch all the videos on sales. Click on the sales category. Watch all those videos just to get you started.
Louis Massaro: Then, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got your mover hiring process down. Yes, it’s hard. Double, triple, quadruple down on the effort that you make to hire movers. Instead of looking at it as just something we do once in a while when we need people and we put an ad and it used to be kind of easy, look at it as something where this needs to be a built-in process that the minute we need somebody, we play on the process, the recruitment effort goes out and we run them through it, and that’s it.
Louis Massaro: It’s got to be taken more seriously. It can’t be something where your dispatcher says, “Hey, we’re short on guys,” and you’re like, “We’ll run an ad.” You’ve got to step it up. You’ve got to step it up and you got to tackle it, because the companies that are crushing it right now, they’ve got all three of these things lined up solidly. I would say, focus on those three things.
Chris DeHerrera: Cool. All right. Good. Well, I won’t throw curveballs at you anymore from negative comments, but I thought [crosstalk 00:47:42].
Louis Massaro: No. I like that. It was good. I think it’s important, Chris, because I know there’s a lot of people that feel that way.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s what I thought.
Louis Massaro: There’s nothing wrong with them. It’s just, sometimes, you need someone else to shed light on a different way of looking at it. When you are in a position where you’re a business owner, you own the company, a lot of times, you don’t have people around you that will tell you the tough things that they need to tell you.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s true.
Louis Massaro: Because the people that are surrounding you almost every day are your employees. Sometimes, you could get some decent feedback from them and some good feedback from them, from trusted people, but, if you don’t have someone else to share that perspective and say, “Hey, why don’t you look at it like this?” Actually, let’s send him a link to this. Let’s make sure he gets this and listens to this and say, “We made this for you.”
Chris DeHerrera: Okay, yeah.
Louis Massaro: I hope that just the change in perspective gets him to look at it, because he can change all this so easily. I say that again. He can change all this so easily. I’m not saying that the business is easy, but he could make the changes. All it is is steps. Do this, do that, do this, do that. Take the steps, but believe that it’s possible.
Louis Massaro: Anybody that is feeling this way, they don’t believe that it’s possible. They’re like, “The world’s going on and the world’s going to end, tat-tat-tat-tat.” You’ve got to block all that out, ignore that, go for what’s in front of you, because the iron is hot right now and a lot of people are making a lot of money. That’s just the reality of it.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s true. Well, he was asking for you to get real. I think you just got real.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, probably more than he was expecting from his comment. Listen, guys. Let me know what you think about these episodes. If you are loving this, if you’re liking this, if you’re hating this, if you’re getting some perspective, some motivation, some tips, some strategies, let me know. Just send me a DM at Louis Massaro on Instagram. Send me a picture of you listening to this. I’d love to get the feedback. I’d love to know that we’re not just sitting here talking to each other for no reason. Leave me a review on Apple Podcasts. Let me know what you think about this specific episode.
Louis Massaro: If you don’t already have your tickets for our upcoming seminar, Moving CEO Live, make sure you go to movingseminar.com. That’s movingseminar.com. For three days, I am going to lay out detailed step-by-step strategies on how to dominate the next 10 years of the moving business. You need to be there. Go to movingseminar.com. All the details are there. Until we see you next time. Go out there every single day, profit in your business, and thrive in your life. I’ll see you later, my friends.
In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to motivate your sales team to book more moves.
“Your team’s got to be motivated. Because it’s no longer a reactive game. It’s no longer, hey, the phone rings off the hook, and we pick it up and we book moves.”
“The way that you structure your sales process in your organization has to be on point in this modern day of moving, in order for you to be ultra-profitable.”
“When you’re spending money on leads, you need to have a solid sales team and they need to be motivated to go after these leads, because it’s very proactive, what they need to do.”
“I used to make the same mistake, I believed that our employees were just as motivated and excited for the growth of our company as I was. And it’s not the case.“
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: All right, my friend, this is Louis Massaro and welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to help you take your moving company to the next level, reduce stress, increase profits, live a better quality of life. I’ve got my main man, Chris, with me today. What’s up, Chris?
Chris: What’s up? What’s up?
Louis Massaro: So, these episodes, what we’ve been doing is, we have been taking questions that come in through social media, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channel, or through support. And usually, I don’t know what the question is going to be, ahead of time, but I happen to see just now, two seconds before we went on, the question. So, I have a little bit of a head start today, but not much. But I’ll let you go ahead and ask the question because all I saw was what you put as the title for the video.
Chris: Okay, all right. Well, yeah, I’ll give you a few more details here then. So, this question came in from one of our followers, and he’s having some issues with his sales team. His first question, his first initial question was, “How do I motivate my sales team? They don’t want to follow up on leads.” So, I commented back with him, I wanted to get some more details. And he wrote back and he says, “Listen, I give them a ton of leads, they don’t seem to want to follow up with them. I have four moving consultants, no sales manager.” All right. “Last year, we did just under $2 million, but I’m trying to get to $3 million.” And he just wants to know, how can he kick his sales team into full gear, into high gear?
Louis Massaro: Okay. All right. So, for sales consultants, here’s the deal, your team’s got to be motivated, right? Because it’s no longer a reactive game. It’s no longer, hey, the phone rings off the hook, and we pick it up and we book moves. You’ve got to be able to deal with leads, whether you’re buying leads from moving lead providers or they’re just leads coming from your website. There’s outbound calls that need to be made, and you might not always get them on the phone. All right? So, the way that you structure your sales process in your organization and in your call center, whatever you want to call it, has to be on point in this modern day of moving, in order for you to be ultra-profitable.
Louis Massaro: Because, if not, I would just guess to say that his profits aren’t nearly where he wants them to be either. If he’s got four consultants, they’re doing under $2 million, he’s got nobody managing them, he’s trying to go to three, I mean, because at the end of the day, it’s like, what are the profits? We didn’t get that information. Next time, we’ll dig a little deeper. But, you didn’t get that. Did you?
Chris: No.
Louis Massaro: Okay.
Chris: No. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, the thing is, when you’re spending money on leads, and when I say leads, I’m talking about any form of advertising, any form of marketing. So, whether it’s pay-per-click, direct mail, billboards, moving lead providers, Yelp, it doesn’t matter, that’s all lead. You need to have a solid sales team and they need to be motivated to go after these leads, because it’s very proactive, what they need to do. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And, a lot of times, what I see companies do is they cast a vision for the business, “Here’s where we’re going, here’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going to go from $2 million or just under $2 million to $3 million. Guys, come on, this is what we’re going to $3 million.” Which is good. That’s part of the equation.
Chris: Yeah. Fire them up.
Louis Massaro: Fire them up, but that’s only part of it. So, the next part is, what’s in it for them? We, because I used to make the same mistake, believed that our employees are just as motivated and excited for the growth of our company as we are. And it’s not the case.
Chris: Not true. Not true.
Louis Massaro: They might show it. They might act like, “Yeah, let’s go, we’re going to $3 million.” Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But they’re not that motivated. So, you’ve got, hey, what’s in it for the company? Right?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Louis Massaro: Then you’ve got it, what’s in it for them?
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: If they book more jobs, if they follow up on those leads, what do they get out of it? And then you also have, what’s in it for the customer? As well. So, if you’re out there, we didn’t find out, that’s everything you’ve got on him, right? I’m not going to…
Chris: Yeah, I mean, he may have messaged me back before we started filming.
Louis Massaro: No problem. No problem. So, what’s in it for the company? What’s in it for me, the salesperson? What’s in it for the customer? And what I mean by that is, if the sales reps on the phone, moving consultant, whatever you want to call them, and they’re quoting that customer and trying to book that move, they need to believe in their product. Meaning, they need to believe that they’re going to send crews out, they’re going to do an amazing job for that customer. And if they believe that, it’s your job as the owner or the sales manager, to let those sales reps, those moving consultants know that, “Hey, it is your duty to make sure that we book these jobs because we need to make sure that these customers that come across our path are in good hands.
Louis Massaro: “We know some of the competition out there, we know some of the horror stories of the things that happen. We do a great job. Not only are you going to make money for you, make money for the company, but you’re also going to save these customers from any potential problems that they might have if they don’t go with us. And I know we’re not the cheapest,” but you need to be able to explain to them why it is that we’re not the cheapest. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, they need to see those three dynamics to get the ultimate, not only motivation, but inspiration.
Chris: To feel like they have more of a purpose than just selling a move. Like they’re actually helping these people, they’re making their lives better.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, even moving company owners, don’t realize that they are really helping people. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: If you go and you do a good service, you don’t realize it because you don’t get the thank you’s. It’s hard to get the good reviews. Nobody’s sending you a box of chocolate and flowers and saying, “Thanks so much for the great move.” If something goes wrong-
Chris: You’ll hear from them.
Louis Massaro: There’re scratches, you’re going to hear from them.
Chris: You’re going to hear from them.
Louis Massaro: But if it goes great, you don’t hear from them. But, when you do this so much and you see the difference and you know the stress that people go through when they move, and you’re able to perform a good move for them, you don’t realize what that can do for their stress levels. And then, from that, what that does for their family, what that does for their job, what that does for their health.
Chris: There’s lasting effects.
Louis Massaro: There’s lasting effects of it. So, just because you’re not getting the, “Thank you,” and you’re not getting the, “Hey, you’re changing people’s lives,” don’t think that you’re not changing people’s lives.
Chris: Right. That’s really cool. You don’t think about that very much, but you’re right. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t use a moving company to move, but, I mean, I would never not. Moving yourself is rough. It’s hard. And when you have a good company, like you have somebody come in and they do a good job, they’re professional about it, I mean, yeah, that alleviates a lot of stress when you’re moving.
Louis Massaro: But, you know what? If you had a couple of bad experiences, you’d probably be looking for a U-haul and some friends to do it yourself. Because you’d say, “You know what? I’ve tried that professional mover route, and that’s not good.” So, when you think about it like that, too, it’s like, “Hey, this customer has come across our path, we’ve got to make sure that they get a good move. It’s good for our business, it’s good for the industry as a whole. Because, if they go out there and they get a bad move, they get duped into one of these low prices, and they have a bad experience, well, what happens next time they want to move? And they just want to rent a truck.
Louis Massaro: I mean, that’s what hurts the industry more than anything. So, again, back to where we saw motivating his salespeople.
Chris: Right, he wants them to be fired up, not only to be excited about being on the phones or whatever, but he’s got a goal in mind. He wants to reach $3 million.
Louis Massaro: Okay. Well, each one of those individuals, we’re talking about for individuals, they all have a goal, too. And if they don’t have a goal, it’s his job to give them a goal. A lot of times, first of all, they need to be on commission. Hands down, there’s no doubt about that, they need to be on commission. But they also need goals to reach. At a minimum, they need monthly goals that they’re trying to hit, revenue numbers. I like to do revenue and not amount of jobs booked. Because, I want them focused on what I’m focused on. And what I’m focused on is like, if I’ve got an opportunity to call this little one-bedroom apartment, or I’ve got this opportunity to close this big $5,000 job. As a company, if we’re one collective mind, I want them focused on the $5,000 job.
Louis Massaro: So, I want their goals to be based off of revenue. And a lot of times, you’ll hear people say like, well, they get a commission, they should be incentivized, they should be focused. That should motivate them enough just to get the commission. But what happens with the commission is, if you’ve ever gotten like, and I know you have recently, if you’ve ever gotten more money or a raise, anybody listening, you had a certain goal in life to make a certain amount of money. Originally, when I first got in the business, I’m like… Before I got in the business, I was like, “I want to be able to make $100,000 a year.” It was like, in my mind, it was actually, I said, “$10,000 a month,” which is $120.
Louis Massaro: Once I got in the business, I was like, “Okay, I want to make $400,000 a year.” And so, now, I look at $100,000 a year and I’m like, I can’t-
Chris: You’re not motivated, you’re not pumped up about that.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. And so, the point is that, it’s the same thing when you get a pay raise. It’s like you’re all excited you got this raise. Or, as an owner, you’re making more profit, but then you get accustomed to that amount, and then you’re no longer motivated. Now it just becomes the norm. That’s your baseline.
Chris: Right. The excitement wears off.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, it wears off. So, by having goals that they could hit every single month, and then tying those goals to bonuses that you pay them, it changes it up every month. The number that they need to hit is different. The number that they get is different. They need to know what’s in it for them.
Chris: When it comes to those kind of bonuses, I mean, what did you pay your salespeople as far as bonuses go?
Louis Massaro: It would be something that was basically, I would sit them down and look at what they did the month before. I would look at where we are currently. Like, okay, we’re coming out of slow season, we’re going in the busy season, things are going to naturally pick up anyways. So, let’s say you did 60,000 last month, and I’m looking at it and I’m like, “Okay, the lead volume’s up, you’re closing your leads at this percentage, you should be able to book $72,000 this next month.”
Chris: Okay. So, you give them a goal.
Louis Massaro: What I would do is I would sit down with them, and then, later on, I taught this to my sales managers and they would do it. But, I would sit down with them and say, “Look, here’s what you did last month,” talk about it a little bit. There’s a whole process for this that we teach in Moving Sales Academy. For the one on one goal setting meeting, there’s a whole framework for it. But essentially, we sit down and go over where they are, and say like, “What do you think you could hit this month?” So, instead of me giving it to them, I’ll be like, “Chris, what do you think you could hit this month? You hit $60,000 last month, what do you think you could do?”
Louis Massaro: And depending on what you say, if I think what you say is out of reach, or I think it’s too low, I’m going to challenge you one way or the other.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: You see what I’m saying?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, if you’re like, “Hey, I think I can go to $62.” I’m going to be like, “$62? You did $60 last month. Every month, you’ve been getting better since you got here. And we’ve got season coming up. The lead, you can see the leads are coming in. There’s more leads coming in. I think you’ll do $72. And I’ll tell you what, if you hit $72, I’ll give you $350 extra this month.” And you’re like, “I don’t know.” “Okay, I’ll tell you what, how about $70, I’ll give you $200 extra.”
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: Don’t get caught up on the percentage and the amount, it’s just, it’s something that’s significant enough to make them move. You’re talking about $350, that’s a car payment. That’s a significant amount of extra money for a sales rep to make that month, that they wouldn’t normally make. And so, once you have that agreed-upon amount, and the goal is that, the key to the goal is that it needs to be attainable. Don’t dangle some carrot out in front of their face that they’re never going to get, because then it loses its effect.
Chris: Yeah, they lose their motivation.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, you go a few months and you keep setting these goals that are way too high…
Chris: They won’t care anymore.
Louis Massaro: They won’t care anymore. So, don’t be cheap. You’ve got to be able to say like, “I’m willing to spend some money, to get them to move, to get them to do the things that I need them to do.” But now, you do that every month, they get used to that, too. So, it becomes, okay, they’ve gotten accustomed to the commission, that’s just part of their pay. They’re just, they’re used to it. Because, typically, people will kind of level out at a certain amount. You’ll have somebody there, this guy, he’s a $40,000 a month type of guy. Then you’ve got somebody else, she’s $120,000 a month type of girl. You know what I’m trying to say?
Louis Massaro: They could get better and they could grow, but they’re usually like, will hit, become who they’re going to be within that first six months. If you’re coaching them and you’re working with them and you’re guiding them through the process, they’ll get to that point.
Chris: That’s helpful. I mean, they can become predictable, so, you know what you can rely on.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I mean, because, ideally, you don’t want to just hire somebody, train them and then send them off to swim or sink. You want to have what we call a Moving Sales Academy Enhancement Training. You want to have the process of taking them through and making the existing reps you have better, but there are certain key points that you focus on to make them better. But, after six months of doing that, it’s like, okay, we know where they’re at. However, if there’s somebody that, let’s say, they’re in that $60, they’re kind of like $60,000 a month type person.
Chris: Consistent.
Louis Massaro: It doesn’t mean you can’t push them to go to $70. You take four reps and you push each one of them to do an extra $10,000, that’s $40,000. That’s what? $400 and… what is that? $480,000 a year.
Chris: Half a million, almost.
Louis Massaro: Almost half a million dollars by getting those reps to book an extra $10,000. When you talk about an extra $10,000, I mean, what are we really talking about? So, let’s say you’ve got…
Chris: Maybe like an extra seven moves each or something.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I mean, let’s say if $1,000 average move to an extra 10 moves a month, a month. So, you’re talking about like an extra two and a half moves a week. So, you’re telling me that if you had them motivated, you gave them the coaching, you gave them what they needed and the incentive to hit it, they couldn’t book an extra two and a half moves a week?
Chris: Yeah, that’s attainable.
Louis Massaro: I mean, if you asked all of your sales reps. If you’re listening, just to go ask all your sales reps, “Hey, you think you could book an extra two jobs or three jobs a week? If you just focused a little bit more, if you try to…” Without even giving them tools, and without even giving them motivation, they could do it. You give them the tools, you give them the motivation, you give them the coaching, and manage the sales process, I mean, that easily could double.
Chris: Do you feel like, in this guy’s situation, that jumped from just under $2 million to $3 million in revenue? Is that something that you think could be done with those same four salespeople, and just by incentivizing and motivating that team? I mean, is that something that’s possible?
Louis Massaro: I mean, look, you might need another one or two salespeople. I don’t know how these particular salespeople are performing. I don’t know what his lead volume looks like. But, yeah, it’s totally attainable. I mean, to go up from two to $3 million, it’s just in the tightening up of the sales… I mean, you’ve seen it. I mean, all that, we get the success stories, we hear them, “I doubled. I went up from $3 million to $6 million. I went from $2 million to $4 million. It’s…
Chris: Yeah, it’s doable.
Louis Massaro: It’s doable, for sure.
Chris: Yeah, that’s good. What else would you do to motivate them? Just day-to-day, I know you had talked about having meetings every day, right? Like sales meetings?
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: What does that look like?
Louis Massaro: Well, we call it the morning huddle. And basically, you start off by, essentially, it’s just a meeting in the morning to get them going, to get them fired up, to get their head in the right place. If you’re listening, you think about your team, your sales team in the morning in the office. And without anybody guiding them, they’re at the coffee machine making their third cup of coffee. They’re a little slow to sit down, they’re putting on their headset or whatever the situation is.
Chris: Yeah, they’re hungover.
Louis Massaro: Well, yeah, whatever. Most people don’t do the work to get their mind in the right place every morning, every day. You know how important, I mean, for me, that’s my whole morning setup on getting my mind right. Most people don’t do that. You can’t expect your team to do that. You’ve got to come in and help them get their mind right on the mission for the day. And the mission for the day is to book the move of every call that you speak to, every person you speak to. So, it’s basically a little pump up session, to get them committed to what the day is going to look like. What their goal is for the day. And also acknowledge some of the successes from the day before and encourage them. Basically, fire them up, and get them on the phones.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to think about it. And I didn’t want to do this back in the day. Like, you see me, I’m on camera or on stage and doing what I do because I have a mission right now. When I had my business, I didn’t want to come give a big pep rally. I wanted to come in and go to my office and not say hi to anybody and close the door, and do my own thing. It’s what I wanted to do, but I knew what was necessary. I knew there was a whole day ahead of the team, and somebody had to set them off in the right trajectory. Somebody had to get their mind going towards booking moves.
Chris: I know you had talked about before, setting the mood in the office, not just with the morning huddle, but also, I remember you used to talk about you played music. What are some more things like that that can help fire them up?
Louis Massaro: The tone of the office is so important. For me, one of the rules of setting up your sales department is have it as far away from dispatch as possible. Right?
Chris: Uh-huh.
Louis Massaro: If you think about what goes on in dispatch, they’re dealing with the day-to-day of the business. This guy didn’t show up, somebody’s calling your truck, cut them off in traffic. This customer is calling, they’ve got an issue with some damage, whatever. The piano fell off the 10th floor, whatever it might be. Sales doesn’t need to hear that. Sales needs to be in positivity, like, “Everything’s all good. I believe in my product. I’m selling my product.” If they’re constantly hearing about all these little things that happen, it’s part of the logistical thing. I don’t care how good your company is, there are things that happen in dispatch that makes that a stressful position. Don’t put that stress on the people that you want to be out there fishing for customers. Right?
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: So, that’s number one. Next thing is, keep it upbeat. Play some music lightly. Like, we had speakers installed in the ceiling. You don’t have to get fancy with it, you can get a couple wireless speakers, and you put them in the office. And played music to where it was loud enough that they could hear it, but low enough that the customer couldn’t hear it on the phone. And it just helped with the energy in the office. And so, different days, we’d play different types of music. It could be, one day, it’d be dance music, and other days it would be old school, Motown R&B. Another day, it’d be hip hop, whatever it might be.
Chris: Mix it up.
Louis Massaro: And then, if it’s the afternoon time and everybody’s dragging, you might have to turn it up a little bit, it gets more BPMs going in there and really turn it up to get them fired up for the day. Another thing that we did was, every day, we did a two o’clock stretch. And so, at two o’clock, I played a song, and when that song went on, everybody in my office had to get up. If you were on the phone with the customer, it didn’t matter. You had to stand up from your desk, and I came out of my office too, you had to stand up. And if you didn’t want to stretch, you didn’t have to stretch, but you had to move around, move your body. Because when you sit all day, by two o’clock, you’re just like…
Chris: Oh, yeah, that afternoon lull kicks in.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So, we would do that. And then, spiffs.
Chris: Spiffs.
Louis Massaro: Spiffs. A spiff is an incentive that you just arbitrarily come up with, whatever it’s going to be. I’ll give an example. A spiff would be, “Hey, guys, whoever books 10 jobs today, you’re going to get $20 bucks. Hey, guys, if we book 100 jobs together as a team for the week, I’m going to buy everybody lunch on Friday from your favorite restaurant. While I’d walk in, take $100 bill out of my pocket, tape it on the wall, and be like, “Hey, listen up, whoever books the first five jobs, go grab that $100, that’s yours.
Chris: Nice.
Louis Massaro: So, the thing would spiffs though, is that, you can’t use them every day. That’s your secret weapon. They expect the commission. They expect the monthly goals. If they expect the spiffs, they lose their effectiveness.
Chris: I see. Okay.
Louis Massaro: So, the spiffs are like, “Okay, I see, the energy’s low, everybody’s been like they’re not seeming motivated. I need to come in and give them that shock factor, and get them motivated again.” Whether that’s like, first thing Monday morning, you just want to get the momentum going, or whether it’s like by Thursday, everybody’s just kind of dying off and you need to get them excited again. It’s got to motivate them, it can’t be expected, and you’ve got to be able to change it up. Make it fun. We used to put a wheel of fortune in the office, whoever books the next whatever, you get to go spin the wheel. And I’d have all kinds of prizes on there, whether it was 20 bucks, 100 bucks.
Louis Massaro: I had tickets to the Dolphins, season tickets, where I had club level seats. I’ll be like, you get two club-level seats to the next game. You’ve got to keep the excitement up. And it doesn’t always flow over to the other departments, but your sales is different. You’ve got to keep them fired up and you’ve got to keep them wanting to go out there and chase down these leads and get these jobs booked.
Chris: What’s an ideal schedule for a salesperson that’s going to get them to perform at their most? Because I can see how they could get burnt out.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: Do you want to only work them certain time of the day, certain hours, anything like that?
Louis Massaro: No, I mean, it all depends on where you’re located, how many offices you have. Like, for me, we had, our call center was on the East Coast, but we had offices on the West Coast and all in between. So, I had to have two shifts going on, so that we could be open from 8:00 to 8:00, or 9:00 to 9:00 at one point. So, I don’t think that necessarily matters, but it is important that they have certain criteria. You’ve got to have certain… we’re getting into managing them now, which is a little bit different than keeping them motivated. But, the idea is, with their goals, you want to make sure, with those goals, they know where they’re at.
Louis Massaro: So, whether you send out a weekly progress report email to everybody, that says, “Here’s where you’re at in relation to your goal.” Or, if somebody’s using SmartMoving, I’m co-founder in SmartMoving, if you’re using that as your CRM, then you could have that all on your dashboard right there. Or, you have a whiteboard in your office and you could show the progress of everybody where they’re at and turn it into more of a competition. There’s a lot of other things you could do with challenges and face-offs. You’ve got to keep it exciting. We had all kinds of what I call carnival games going on in the office too. We would do the wheel of fortune, we would do a little basketball hoop, I’d had a putting green in the office, and I’m like, “Look, first person to book,” whatever it might be, whatever it is, if it’s 10 jobs, “You get the putt for $100.”
Chris: Nice.
Louis Massaro: And so, they would go, and I’d say, “Listen, I’ll give you $10 bucks right now. Or, you could putt and get $100 if you make it in, or zero if you don’t make it.” But the whole office would gather around, nobody was going to take the $10. And it just created excitement for everybody. So, even if the person that was doing it, didn’t make it or the other people weren’t involved, they were still involved. There was still excitement. It’s not a boring like… job. So, that’s the natural state of what will happen with your moving consultants. What he’s expecting is the natural state of what will happen if you sit somebody down at a computer with a phone, say, “Here are some leads, call them, talk to them about their move, listen to everything they have in their house, and then guide them through the process of booking with our company. Oh, and when they say that your price is too high, then you’ve got to come back and you’ve got to say this to them.”
Louis Massaro: If you just leave them alone, and let them just do that, their natural state is going to be… I mean, they’re not going to want to do it, you’ve got to cultivate that environment.
Chris: Are there signs that can let you know ahead of time when the morale is getting low? Or, I mean, besides the numbers, obviously, but, I mean, is there something you could look at a salesperson and just see in them that they need some incentive, some motivation?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, well, obviously, you have the numbers. You’re tracking how many calls they’re making and how much talk time they have. But, you could tell just by their demeanor. And, if you don’t have… like, this guy doesn’t have a sales manager, someone has to wear the sales manager’s hat. Because, there are certain things that need to happen in order to keep them running and keep them fired up, keep them on point. But, if you’ve got to grab one person and pull them aside, “Hey, what’s going on? What’s up? I see you’re not quite into it.” And just talk to them like a person, to find out what’s going on. Give them some encouragement, and then send them back out on the field. You’ve got to give them some encouragement, talk to them, see what their issue is. And make sure that there’s nothing going on in their head, that makes them not motivated anymore.
Chris: Well, and that can be contagious. They can infect the rest of your team.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, absolutely. You can’t let it linger. You’ve got to be able to identify it. You don’t identify it one day, okay. You don’t identify it after three or four days, you let somebody go a week, fine. You let it go longer than that, it affects the people around you. And it affects them if they’re just minding their business, and they’re just like… But if they start talking negatively, they start complaining, now they’re an infection. And infection will take down your whole company, from the inside out. So, you’ve got to be able to talk to them and see what’s going on. And if you can’t reverse the infection, then they’ve got to go.
Chris: Yeah. I wonder, in this guy’s situation, his initial comment was saying, “They don’t want to follow up on leads.” Is there something that he can do just… Maybe they’re making their initial dials and stuff, but when it comes to the follow-up, maybe it’s… Could it be something in his process with it that’s keeping the salespeople down? I don’t know.
Louis Massaro: Well, what I’m thinking when you say that is probably there is no process. He’s probably barking orders and saying, “Hey, follow up with them, follow up with them, follow up with them.” But, that doesn’t work. Because I’ve been where he is. I’ve been at four consultants with no sales manager, asking them to follow up. And then I’ve been at 60, 70 consultants with four sales managers, and they’re all doing it. So, if you can’t get four people to do it, but you could get 60, 70 people to do it, what’s the difference there? The difference is, you’ve laid out something that is systematic that they just have to follow. They know what’s next. They get off the phone with one customer, they know what to do next. They know what the priority is, they know which lead they should call, they know when they should call that customer back, when they get off the phone with them.
Louis Massaro: When you have all that lined up, they’ll do it. And all you need is just somebody to just make sure that they do it. You pull up, you could see it all in your CRM. You pull up SmartMoving or whatever you use, you can see what they’re doing and you can identify it and have a talk with them right away, and coach them right away. But, typically, what I see is that people don’t have a follow-up process. So, they bark the order, and then the reps just don’t know what to do, or when to do it, or how to prioritize what’s in their lead inbox.
Chris: Yeah. One of the other aspects of this is he was saying, “I give them a ton of leads.” And with the leads, obviously, if they’re not following up, they’re burning through his leads. Right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Costing him a ton of money.
Chris: Costing him a ton of money. With those leads, do you want to… Obviously, there’s going to be some salespeople who are better than others, right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: So, do you reward the people who are doing well with good leads? Or, do you give the good leads to the guys who are struggling to make them maybe have an easier job booking the move?
Louis Massaro: Which one of those options, I’m going to ask you, which one of those options lead to the company making more money?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, obviously, you’re just going to give the good leads to the good salespeople and get them booked. Right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to starve out somebody new and not give them a shot, but, we teach at Moving Sales Academy, it’s called skill-based routing. And with phone calls and with leads, it’s about getting the lead to the person that’s got the skill to be able to handle that lead. So, whether it’s a bigger job, or whether it’s a job with packing, or whether it’s local versus long-distance, or a hot lead source versus one of the ones that doesn’t convert high, you want to be able to route those, based on that information.
Chris: Now, let’s say he decided to get a sales manager, what are the qualities of a good sales manager? And how can a sales manager step into this situation and make a difference?
Louis Massaro: Like, for me, when I first set up the call center, when I realized like, “Okay, I’ve got four offices, everybody’s booking themselves, each office, they’re handling their own calls. Some were crushing it, some were struggling. I said, “All right, I need to set up a central place to handle all of the calls.” So, I opened it up. I opened another office there, too. So, I made it the fifth office plus the call center. And went out and looked for a call center manager. I hired a recruiter, I looked for a call center manager, brought somebody in, highly qualified, they came in, and it wasn’t impactful.
Chris: Why not? Right?
Louis Massaro: He said, he was like, a great guy, by the way, but I didn’t have it set up for him properly. So, he came in, he’s like, “I need an assistant manager.” I said, “Okay.” I didn’t know anything at the time about call centers. This was me learning it. And so, I hired another assistant manager to help him. I was expecting him to develop and put all the processes in place.
Chris: You would think he would know how to do that. I mean, that’s, he’s a…
Louis Massaro: Yeah, but it’s not the case. It’s not the case. So, what I say now, what I decided to do after I let him go, was, I developed all the processes myself. I started really studying, I started learning sales psychology. I started going to call center conventions and learning all the different tools and everything like that, and put all the processes together myself, hired, took one of my moving consultants, who was awesome on the phone, made him my sales manager, and then mentored him and guided him on implementing those processes. So, now, I was like, “Here’s what needs to get done. Manager, here’s what needs to get done. Here, go make sure it gets done.”
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, the key is, and that’s what a lot of people do, they get like the Moving Sales Academy online course, for example. And what they’ll do is, they’ll give it to their sales manager and say, “Go implement this.” I mean, you know I can name a few. You know a few people out, their story. “I didn’t want to be bothered, I got it for the sales manager, he took it and ran with it and we had great results.” So, the idea is, when you bring a manager in, that manager’s role is to manage the processes. If the manager is managing processes, and managing people as an afterthought, they’re more effective and their job becomes easier. If you bring somebody in and manage these people, and they’re unruly, and they’re not doing what… It’s not even that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do, they don’t know exactly what to do. You’ve got to give them instruction.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to tell them, “Here’s what needs to get done, here’s when it needs to get done.” And then a sales manager just needs the ability to make sure all that stuff’s getting done. To show up every day, pull up the CRM, see who is following up with their leads, who’s not. Asking them about it. Blocking time on their calendar for enhancement training, to listen to calls from reps and take them through, we had the moving consultant evaluation guide, take them through that. See where they’re lacking, is it in their intro? Is it in going through the script and painting the picture? Or, is it going for the close and asking for the business? Find out where they need some help, coach them, work with them, make them better. Put them back on the phone, see the improvement.
Chris: Along the same lines as you were talking about hiring the call center manager, is it better to, I know the answer, but I wanted to just talk about this, sometimes it’s better to hire somebody without experience than it is to hire somebody who’s got 20 years of sales experience, to come in and start selling for you. Right? I mean, I don’t know, talk about that a little bit. I know the answer, but I feel like it’s never too late to… I mean, would you recommend he start over?
Louis Massaro: I would recommend, if he wants to go to $3 million, that he gets himself a sales manager. Whether it’s, he goes out and gets it, or makes one of his moving consultants the sales manager, or he becomes a sales manager. Okay?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Because part of that too, is the hiring, the training. You can’t let your sales machine break down. If you’re trying to get somewhere, your marketing is the fuel that goes into the vehicle, the vehicle is the sales machine, that’s what’s going to get you there. So, you need the fuel. But, if the sales machine breaks down, or slows down, you’re not going to get to where you need to be. So, that needs to be a focus. They need to be managed. You need to be able to hire quickly, you need to be able to fire quickly. You hire, you train, you get them in the seat, you bring them through both phases of training, then you continue to do enhancement training to make sure they’re good. You invested in this person, you took the time. Nobody likes hiring.
Louis Massaro: Nobody likes having to put an ad and bring people in or ask somebody if they know somebody and it’s someone new, are they going to work out or they’re not going to work out? So, once you do that and you’ve invested in them, let that first phase of training and the second phase be like, they’ve got the training wheels on, and then you finally take the training wheels off. But that doesn’t mean, if they’re a little kid, you don’t say, “Go ride around the neighborhood instead of big major streets and do what you want.” You still guide them and show them how to do things, and you want to do that with your sales team to build them up. But I missed, what was the original question? We went off.
Chris: Yeah, I was just thinking…
Louis Massaro: You were saying that do they need experience?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Do they need experience coming in? If they got a bunch of sales experience, is that good or not good?
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Sales experience can be good. Now, if they’ve sold for another moving company, you want to be, it doesn’t mean they’re bad, but it does not mean they’re good either. A lot of people will be like, “Oh, yeah, look, no, they did it, they have experience with the CRM, they know that, they know how to do an inventory. They must be good.” But the reality is, most people aren’t doing it the right way. And so, you might have to retrain somebody. So, for example, that sales manager that hired and didn’t work out, it wasn’t his fault. I was just expecting him to build my processes and build my business the way that I wanted it to be built. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, had I brought him in after I established, built my moving sales machine, if you will. And said, “Here’s what it is, here’s the processes, here’s what you need to do on a daily, go and run it,” he would have done a fantastic job. So, I just want to make that distinction that to where it’s not that he was experienced, he wasn’t good, it was that he came in, there was nothing for him to manage except people. And those people had no processes to follow. So, they became very hard to manage. When people have a process to follow, all you need to do is guide them back to the process. What is that person supposed to be doing right now? You know, guide them back to that. Does that make sense?
Chris: Yeah. Is that the route that you recommend for a moving company once they get to a certain size that they should, if you have multiple locations, should you have a call center?
Louis Massaro: If you have multiple locations, and they’re all owned by you, I would definitely have a call center. Because it gives you more… And when I say a call center, let’s say he has one office, and then, this guy, he’s got four consultants. He’s doing $2 million, approximately. Let’s say he opens another office. Maybe he needs to add another consultant for that. But he’s already got this, sound like he doesn’t have them yet. But, once you get the systems and the processes going, it’s easier to control at one location than it is at multiple locations. So, you don’t need to have people on the phones in another location. You might need an on-site estimator, and that’s okay, that you could book appointments for out of the main location. But what do you need there? You need trucks, you need movers, you need somebody to control and operate the movers and the trucks. But, keep your sales centralized.
Chris: Yeah. I’m thinking back to, well, I’m not thinking back, but I want you to think back to some of your biggest sales days, coming up. Do you remember any of those days where, I mean, was there excitement in the air, people jumping up and down where you were having big days?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, there were days, I mean, we definitely had like $100,000 days.
Chris: Wow. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But, you’re talking about multiple locations, you’re talking about local and long-distance. There was a time period there where we were hitting that on a pretty regular… Not every day, but it was definitely a big deal. And it was super fun to sit there, and just hit refresh on the CRM. And just watch that, and watch that number just climb, and climb, and hear the excitement and just go out and rally everybody up. But that was a result of a well-orchestrated sales process. That’s it. It’s not that I have any type of superpower or anything like that, it was, from early on, it was like, all right, things need to be done a certain way. If you’re going to grow and you’re going to scale, you can’t expect every person to figure it out. You’ve got a small shop, it’s you and a couple people and you all sit around and you dispatch and we both do sales and you handle customer service and we’re all just doing a little bit of this, and that’s where we’re at. Okay, you could get away with, I do it my way, you do it your way.
Louis Massaro: But you start wanting to build a business and grow, it’s got to be uniform. It’s got to be the same. And when the stakes are high, like for me, you’re spending a lot of money on marketing, you’re spending a lot of money to hire and train salespeople, and then pay them to be there. Plus, phones, plus managers, plus directors, plus everybody that’s in there, plus, you’re there to make a profit, the stakes are high. So, for me, it became, every little micro-adjustment meant a significant amount of money. Every little improvement we can see. So, you look at all these processes. And then, a lot of people have been to either Moving Sales Academy seminars or even at the current seminars, Moving Mastery Summit, Moving CEO Live, we teach sales too, in addition to everything else.
Louis Massaro: But, all those processes were all developed out of the realization that little micro-improvements make a big difference. We show the example sometimes of like, what a 5% booking increase can do to the bottom line. And we show the example, and it’s like, for a small moving company like a $300,000 moving company, I believe this number’s like $156,000 more for the year, if you increase your booking percentage by 5%. For a midsize company that’s doing like a million, I believe the number was like $450,000 more a year, by increasing your booking percentage by 5%.
Chris: Yeah, now you’re getting bigger.
Louis Massaro: For a large company, like I think it’s a $2 million company in the example we use, $2.5, which is a good size, local only, 5% booking increase, it’s a million dollars more a year. So, when the question comes like, “Louis, where should I put my focus?” Or, “Louis, how did you build a $20 million company? Sales. Because, it’s not what we, leads, leads, leads. Listen, take the same leads and book them at a 5% higher. If you’re booking at 12%, get it to 17%. Do the math for yourself. Run those numbers for yourself and be like, “Okay, instead of booking it wherever you book at, if we went from 25… 12 to 17 doesn’t matter.
Louis Massaro: If it’s 20 to 25, or if it’s 30 to 35, wherever you’re at, wherever your booking percentage is, run the math on what it would be if you increased it by 5%.
Chris: Big difference.
Louis Massaro: And then just look and go, “Yeah, I can see that there’re some inefficiencies here, and I can see it’s possible.” I use that small example because it’s a small example. People are like, “Well, how did you help that company double their sales? How did they go from three to $6 million?” It’s not that hard once you realize all the little loose screws in the sales. And when you tighten that up, it’s a whole different business. It’s a whole different business.
Chris: So, for this guy, we know you recommend, for him to get to $3 million, you said, he’s going to need a sales manager for sure.
Louis Massaro: Whether he hires somebody or whether he steps into that role. He’s at that point where he could do it himself or somebody, somebody has to wear that hat. If you’re a little bit smaller, you can wear the hat part-time. At his level, wanting to go to three, you can’t just wish your way to three. And don’t buy more leads just to get to three. You might need more, I don’t know. But, the key is, tightening up that sales process. So, yeah, I would say, he’s going to probably need another, at least, another rep and somebody to be the sales manager.
Chris: Yeah. And that’s talking about upping his revenue to the goals that he has. As far as his specific question about incentivizing and motivating his salespeople, what are some specific things he can do?
Louis Massaro: Specifically, I mean, basically, make sure they’re all on commission, because we don’t know that they are. Make sure that they’re all on commission. Give them a weekly check, either hourly or salary as a draw, then give them a commission on the moves that they book. Keep them incentivized, but also keep them with some weekly pay, so they’re not waiting till the end of the month. That’s number one. Number two is, set monthly goals, and tie those to bonuses every single month, individually, for each rep. They don’t have to be the same. So, like, if I’m setting your goal for $75,000 because you’re currently at $68, but Susie over here is at $42, and I’m setting her for $50, it’s not about fairness.
Louis Massaro: It’s not about like, “Oh, why does she only have to hit this goal, and I have to hit that goal?” Because, I’m pushing you to be better, and reach more from where you’re at.
Chris: It’s an individual thing.
Louis Massaro: It’s an individual thing. So, set those goals every month. And then, when you feel the energy lacking, do the spiffs. Right?
Chris: Yeah, throw those in there.
Louis Massaro: Do the spiffs. Walk-in, “Hey, whoever books five jobs today, the first person to book X amount of jobs.” So, it’s like, “Whoever books X amount of jobs today, gets this thing.” Meaning, anybody that does it, gets whatever that thing is.
Chris: Whatever it is. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: “The first person to book this many jobs gets this thing.” That sets them off to the races. You want to get somebody going quick in the morning, the first person to get there, that’s what they get.
Chris: What’s the biggest spiff you ever gave out?
Louis Massaro: Well, I’ve done a few yearly spiffs. One of the things we did was, we called… and I always tried to have a theme around it too, just to make it exciting. Something new, something they’re talking about, something to break up the stagnant energy. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: We did the Rolex 500. And the thing was, it was like, “The first person to hit $500,000 in sales,” it was going to take them a few months to do it, “the first person to hit $500,000 in sales, I’m buying you a Rolex.”
Chris: Damn, that’s awesome.
Louis Massaro: And so, yeah, that you want to talk about getting them fired up. It depends where you are. Like I was in South Florida, I had a bunch of hungry guys that that motivated them. And so, we probably gave away, I forget, at least, two or three, we did that.
Chris: That’s cool.
Louis Massaro: We did, whoever books the most this year, at least, a million dollars for the year, gets a trip to Vegas, all expenses paid, plus $5,000 in spending money.
Chris: Awesome.
Louis Massaro: Second prize gets $2,500, no trip. Third prize gets… No way, second prize I think got $5,000 also.
Chris: Okay, but no trip.
Louis Massaro: But no trip. And then third prize got $2,500, no trip. If you ever do like a winner gets this, do a second and third place. Because, what will happen is, even at that time, everybody knew who was going to win. Because one guy was just crushing it. So, if you put out this, “Hey, whoever hits, the number one person gets this.” And everybody goes, “We know it’s going to be this person.” Give them something to shoot for a little bit, “Man, well, I might be able to get second place. I might be able to get third place.” It’s not about the destination, it’s not about the amount, and it’s not about them, you want them self-driven going after something. And if they don’t feel like they can get it, they’re not going to go after it. So, that’s what I would do.
Chris: Do the rockstars that you had in the past, did you promote them? I mean, at some point, do they just keep being awesome salespeople or do you bring them up at some point?
Louis Massaro: Well, it depends. I mean, if you take somebody from sales to management, typically, they’re going to take a step back in pay.
Chris: Oh, yeah. If they’re a rockstar, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So, the people that I did, one sales manager that I mentored and brought up. I mean, he went from being a salesperson to being a sales manager, took a little step back, but then, went beyond where he could have went.
Chris: Oh, cool.
Louis Massaro: So, he’s a sales manager and moved into director of sales, who’s making over $200,000 a year. Wasn’t going to be able to do that booking moves, but, even the other four sales managers that I had had during that timeframe at the same time, because all those people require quite a bit of sales management, they had to take a step back in order to first step in that position with the hopes of growing with the company. So, if somebody is like an ultimate, ultimate, management, just because you’re great at sales, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be great at management. And just because you’re terrible at sales, it doesn’t mean you’ll be bad at management.
Louis Massaro: You might have somebody that’s really organized, and they’re really good with people, and they’ve got some management experience, but they’re just not a closer, that might be able to run your processes.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: And then if you have someone that’s just a rock star on the phone, and now you take them off the phone, and you’re having them just do a lot of administrative stuff, it could hurt your sales.
Chris: This is a good question, just being able to recognize those abilities in people like, if he’s going to go to $3 million and he’s going to hire some more salespeople, what should you look for in salespeople?
Louis Massaro: Well, first thing is, they need to sound good on the phone. So, before you even, during a phone interview, if they sound like they just crawled out of a dumpster, they’re not for you.
Chris: It’s not the guy.
Louis Massaro: Because that’s the first perception that your customers hear. So, they need to sound good. They need to be hungry, they need to want to make money. They need to be coachable. They need to be resourceful. They need to be someone, because you’re also helping these customers, the way that we teach to sell, is to provide excellent customer service, but then lead the customer to booking with our company, and enrolling into that reservation asking for the business. So, it’s not salesy, salesy, salesy, salesy, it’s not that at all. Anybody listening that knows our processes and using our products, they know, it’s not, the customer doesn’t feel like they’re being sold, the customer feels like they’re getting excellent customer service, and just, the person on the phone knows, like, “I’m now leading them to book the move with our company.”
Louis Massaro: So, those are some of the characteristics that they want to look for.
Chris: That’s cool. That’s good. I think we’re going to really help this guy out.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I think if he does that, he’ll be right on track. And, I mean, not to put a plug in there, but I would highly, highly recommend that he enrolls in our Moving Sales Academy online course, or join us at Moving CEO Live coming up.
Chris: I tell you what, if he just applied a small fraction of some of the stuff in Moving Sales Academy, that 5% increase is done deal.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: I mean, that’s very, very easy and attainable to do.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I mean, we tell people when they look into it, it’s like, “Look, you try it, you don’t see the results in 30 days, I’ll give you your money back.” No big deal. And when I say that, Chris, it’s, I’m thinking, how could I help? I’m not thinking, how could I sell him something?
Chris: Of course.
Louis Massaro: I mean, you know that, but I’m just saying, I know, it’s like, there’s only so much that we could talk about in a podcast episode. But to get to step by step processes, there’s a place where I have that.
Chris: It’s all laid out.
Louis Massaro: It’s all laid out. And it’s just crucial that people have that sales process.
Chris: But that’s what’s great about Moving Sales Academy, and in here, I am plugging away, too. But it’s the program that we offer that you just see instant results. I mean, it’s immediate, as soon as you start implementing stuff.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. It’s cool to hear the comments about it. If anybody wants to learn more, you can just go to louismassaro.com. There’s probably a link on there somewhere.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: They’ll put a link. But, yeah, I mean, that’s how you take what took me 16 years to develop, on a high level, and apply it to any size company. You’ve got, you’re booking moves yourself, what you need is there for you. You’ve already got a call center, we’ve got a lot of bigger clients as well. Everything you need is there.
Chris: It’s the same.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. And you start dialing it in and you start taking a step by step, we call it learn and implement style, just learn it and implement it, you’ll see the results. But, for the sake of the podcast, make sure you’re paying them a commission, set up those goals every month, get some exciting spiffs, and make sure someone steps up into that role of sales manager, even if it’s the owner.
Chris: It’s a perfect time right now, we’re coming out of winter, getting ready to go into moving season, you could implement a few of these things and have a really great spring.
Louis Massaro: Well, and not assume, see, this big mistake people make is they assume, “Summer is coming. I’m going to make money. It’s all good.” But, the reality is, can you waste less leads? Can you raise your price, and book more jobs, so that at the end of the summer, there’s more left, there’s more money for you, so that you’ve got that money to get you through whatever you need. So, yeah, you’ve got to go out there, you’ve got to focus on building that sales machine for sure.
Chris: Awesome. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks for helping this guy. I’m sure he’s going to be happy.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. All right, guys, well, thanks for being here. Listen, if you like this episode, do me a favor, go to iTunes, Moving Mastery Podcast, and just leave me a review. Let me know what you thought, let me know what you think. If you have any questions at all, just hit me up on Instagram, it’s Louis Massaro, or @louismassaro, @ L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. Shoot me a DM, ask me a question and we’ll try to get it here on the podcast to answer for you. And until I see you next time, till I talk to you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, and thrive in your life, my friend.
