Unlocking Sales Success in the Home Service Industry with Joe Crisara
In the virtual Lemonade Stand, Crystal is joined by the legendary "Uncle Joe" Crisara from Service MVP! They discuss effective sales strategies, the art of persuasion, giving more than taking, and the importance of a coordinated effort between sales and marketing.
0:00 - The Power of Value in Sales
10:18 - Strategies for Sales Success
20:40 - Building Leadership for Sales Growth
If you'd like to learn more about Joe and Service MVP, you can visit their website and check out one of their free classes - or, you can take advantage of a great new offer! You can get Joe's newest book, What Should We Do?, for free - send an email to joe@servicemvp.com with the subject of "Free Book" to claim your copy. All you have to do is pay shipping and handling - get ready to unlock the secrets of the system!
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We’ll see you next time, Lemon Heads!
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Speaker 1: 0:00
What's up, lemonheads? Welcome to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. I am Crystal and today we are talking with a true legend in the home service industry. Uncle Joe that's what I'm going to call him, but Joe Crisara, founder of Service MVP, is in the lemonade stand today talking with us about how he has transformed some companies through sales. We're going to dig all down into it. Let's sip some lemonade. Well, lemonheads, listen up. Uncle Joe, we're so glad to have you today.
Speaker 2: 0:43
Well, thank you for inviting me here, crystal. I appreciate it. Definitely. I'm a big fan of the show and I'm an avid listener, so I'm kind of like a fanboy of this program. So thanks for inviting me, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: 0:54
Well, absolutely, you know sales is so integral when it comes to the success of marketing that sometimes I really like I'm like I need to dive into this a little bit more. And so I know that you have books on. You know the art of persuasion and selling and closing, and I know tons of contractors, all different sizes, have really like enlisted you to help them, you know, just guide their companies and selling services, but really creating that higher perceived value, but really creating that higher perceived value. And so I just thought a little bit like you could just start off with a little bit of telling us about, kind of, who you are where you came from.
Speaker 2: 1:35
Why should we listen to you, uncle Joe? Well, I'm not sure if you should listen to me, but you're welcome to if you'd like to. But anyway, I've been in the service business since 1977. So that's going on 48 years now. So 48 years working in the service business, and so I've been around for a while. But I also have done every single job in the service business, including customer service dispatch. I've been a service technician for many, many, many years. Salespeople, I've been an installer. I've been pretty much everything, even marketing and ran my own business for 15 years.
Speaker 2: 2:13
And you know and so I think I look at it is that in the 48 years I've been doing this, I got 24 years that I know. I did things completely wrong. When I first got started I had no training. I went to the school of hard knocks and it really knocked me around pretty good. And then I did. And once I learned, I start getting realizing that there's other information out there. You know, I mean I would have. I mean, if I would have just listening to your episodes all the time, I would have killed for just even like one or two episodes. It would have been great to help me you guys provide. You guys are so great because you put so much effort every week.
Speaker 2: 2:48
I know this is not easy to run this podcast and you guys do so much to help some other people and definitely you're in the same business I am, which is helping people with information to succeed. Because, listen, even though I struggled for 24 years and I got it right for 24 years I could try to help people avoid the 24 years of struggle, and that's really what my higher purpose is is to really make sure people are aware of the tools that are available to help them and, truthfully, I don't even want to even charge for it at first. I want people to help them first and then, if they want to use my services and use an inventory of my efforts, that's something that they can invest in later. But I always try to say, just like even you guys at LemonSeed, what I've noticed about you guys is you've always provided value just in the process.
Speaker 2: 3:35
You bring people and bring them into your company to show them what you do. There's value there because you're giving them information about how the marketing should be doing, how that part should be. I do the same thing with the sales part of it which I give information on how the sales should be done, with the science behind it and the persuasion and science of pricing and all that kind of stuff, and so, at heart, I'm trying to give people the information. Now, of course, they want me to hold you by the hand and make you do it with you. That is going to be an investment, but I will be happy to give it to you and you can walk on that path on your own if you want to. I really believe in that's the best way to gain trust from people Does that make sense, Crystal, oh, no, 100%.
Speaker 1: 4:13
You know I spend a lot, you're right. You know I've always felt like you need to give more than you take, Because we've all been there, Like I mean, I sit on calls with contractors every day, walking through their marketing and trying to understand what, where, if we are missing. Where are we missing? Are we missing operationally, or is the advertising tactic that we're launching? And people tell me all the time that I would kill to have just some advice, Like who can I just call for advice on some things? And so Right, Well, I'm the guy who can.
Speaker 2: 4:42
I always have a saying I say in seven minutes or less I'll give you an answer. If I don't have an answer in seven minutes or less, I'll give you a hundred hour bill, because I've gone through every single emergency you can possibly have in this kind of a business, and I am. I've lived to tell about it. So I challenge anybody to now. The seven minutes starts once you get a hold of me, though, right?
Speaker 2: 5:03
So the seven minutes doesn't mean I got to track me down in seven minutes, but once you get a hold of me and we get on the phone, I'd say tell me the problem, I'll give you the unique solution in about seven minutes Because, truthfully, it's like once you failed as much as I have and once you've succeeded as much as I have. The path is pretty clear both ways and sometimes it takes courage to walk down that path. But every client that I know that uses lemon seed marketing has always said that They've always said that just walking through the process of what they do taught me about marketing and how it works. So I think that journey some of it is valuable just in engaging with smart people like you guys, and I'm honored to be here. I'm happy that I'm flying above my altitude right now. It'll rub off on me a little bit, you know.
Speaker 1: 5:50
Oh my goodness. Well, we try. I'm kind of like you. Like you know, I would give away the whole company a lot of times. Like my passion is, I want people to truly understand their marketing, and I'm sure you're similar Like I want you want them to understand the sales process, because there is power in knowledge and you don't have to be an expert at every single marketing tactic to understand how overall, how you should set your expectations and how you should know if you're being successful or not. And so you know. I'm just excited that you're here for us to dig a little deeper into this. Now, one thing about Service MVP is that you're a truly independent, right. You're not really tied to a manufacturer, and how does that really impact the value that you bring to your members? It's a membership program, right?
Speaker 2: 6:35
It is Well, it's self-guided membership, it's coach-guided membership, it's live in-person events that we hold every single month. We graduate roughly 300 to 400 technicians, office staff and leaders in the service industry. Every single month they graduate and get a new level of achievement. We have a program that just continues the education after we do the initial onboarding, after we do the initial onboarding, and it gives people new information to help build leaders, to build the office staff and to build the field staff into a unified team that operates with world-class service. We call it pure motive service, which is a process we believe is the same thing.
Speaker 2: 7:18
I'm a product of the product, just like LemonSeed, lemonseed and Service MVP. We've already been aligned for years. You just didn't know it, which is that in our heart. We're trying to. I'll give you one you can use if you want to. Crystal, I always say after we get to working together, I want you to always feel like you owe me more than I owe you. Does that make sense? I want to make sure that the client feels like man. I think I should have paid more for this service. I thought it was expensive when I started. Once I got them, I realized I should have actually paid more. These guys could have charged me way more than I still would have paid it. You know, ethical people like you and I'm in that category do, I feel, which is the pure mode of service field try to make sure that the client always sees more value than they paid for. That's really what I want for people Make sense.
Speaker 2: 8:15
I want that for contractors too. If you're a plumber or an HVAC guy or electrician or garage door guy, I want you, I want your client to feel that way about your service too. That's what we're trying to do.
Speaker 1: 8:24
Yeah, and you know, you know the. We want the homeowner to feel like they're getting above, you know, well, above par service. You know, live and see. Like again, I struggle with this, Like sometimes I work with vendors and I'm like this is not a very ethical business practice, and that's a struggle for me because I feel, like you know, integrity is what happens in the dark, and so sometimes I'm like man, and we've made mistakes before that we caught that we could have, you know, just kind of swept under the rug, and I'm always like, no, we're going to call the client, tell them this is what happened.
Speaker 1: 8:54
And I think far, far, far more good comes from that type of mentality than any sort of you know, negative feedback that you might receive. You know, and so tell me you know, negative feedback that you might receive. You know, and so tell me, you know, tell me a little bit about some success stories that you have. Like you know, I know about some of our rebrand clients, like we've helped them launch a full new brand. They really owned it and they went to town and you love to see that. But I want to hear, I know you've worked with like a wide range of businesses from like small startups to fortune 1000 companies and just just I don't know if you had a few stories where your training really made a huge impact and like maybe even you know how easily bought in was the owner of that company to invest in that training. How did that whole story go together?
Speaker 2: 9:42
I think whatever you do when we do our service or anybody the plumber, lemon seed, anybody the things you're saying to people have to have sort of a ring of truth to it in a way. Does that make sense? And so once people feel like, yeah, I can see this working, you're kind of giving them a vision of how this is going to work, whether you're an air conditioning guy and you're giving people a vision of a cool, dehumidified home that has clean air, or me a vision of letting me onboard train graduate your employees to create high-level service for your clients. So they get five-star, I get service MVP. Go check our five star reviews. It's like we have 262 of them and we only have one guy who didn't have the right company.
Speaker 2: 10:25
He was reviewing the wrong company and he's like, oh dude, you got to get that off. He's like I can't get a holy guy but nonetheless. But you know we pride ourself on that. You know anybody could give a review and Nobody gives a bad one, so that's good for us. But to get that it does take a process to do it. But you know we have a lot of success stories.
Speaker 2: 10:45
You know, going back to probably one of my most famous clients is a guy named Rick Picard who I first met him. He was about a $2 million salesperson. A company in the East Coast hired me. They were kind of a poster child on PM Magazine. They hired me to come in and help their team and Rick heard the ring of truth. He told me he's the one who came up with the words Pure Motive Service. He goes what you're teaching is Pure Motive Service. This is what you should call it. So he came up with that title himself.
Speaker 2: 11:11
Rick went from two million the first year After he learned how to. He was already making friends with people. And I think a lot of people do that initially Like how do you make a friend with people? But then, when you got that friendship, how do you turn that friendship into a personalized, customized solution, so people feel it's customized just for them, not something that's taken off the rack in a way. Does that make sense, sir? And then, after you make these premium, mid-range economy personalized solutions, you also bring it to a conclusion and get the job.
Speaker 2: 11:40
That's where we have the famous words what should we do? Which is the way we say well, here's the prices, here's the way to get the job done. What should we do? And people are like, well, I got to think about it. Yeah, go ahead, chris, we'll take all the time you want. I'll stay right here. What should we do? It's a lot of money, it's an investment, but it's an investment in your family. So what should we do, you know? So, basically, these are the things we teach. They're really simple.
Speaker 2: 12:03
I call small bigs, crystal, but I say Rick went from 2 million, then he went to 4.3 the next year, on his own, just one guy. Then he went from 4.3 to 6 million the next year after that and then fast forward. This was back in 2007. So by 2010, he was doing 6 million Year. To date, he has done $12 million a year. One person, that's over $250,000 a week in revenue the guy creates and he's got a whole team of guys now working with him, but he himself does 12 million a year. That's 1 million a month for one salesperson working with the service team. He does get the service team leads and stuff like that, but he does $12 million a year and at a 65% gross profit at Rodenheiser Services in what do you call it? Boston, outside of Boston? New York, boston, massachusetts? What did I say New York? Oh geez, I'm going to get in front of the flagpole for that Boston Massachusetts State?
Speaker 1: 12:58
did I say New York?
Speaker 2: 12:58
Oh geez, I'm going to get in front of the flagpole for that, boston, massachusetts. Get my states ready, hey Joe, where are you located, anyway? And then the cool part about that part, though Rick loves it so much. He taught all the other salespeople on his team, and there's nobody on that team that sells, there's like five other salespeople. No other salesperson does less than 5 million as well. So not only did he himself do it, he's got the pure motive to teach it to other people, and that's what I'm most proud of.
Speaker 2: 13:22
Crystal is the reverberation or the ripple effect that, even if I don't teach everybody individually that the material is so powerful that there are people who teach it. I mean I probably put at least 20, 30 consultants in the business using my material to teach, to do consulting, and I'm proud of that. I'm not. That's like some people would be like you know, joe, aren't you afraid these people are taking your material? I'm like dude. That's what the material is here for is to teach other people. If somebody can be successful using the material, god bless.
Speaker 2: 13:51
I've reached my mission, which is to make a positive impact on other people. That's what I'm here for and it is financially rewarding. If you're the source of all that information, obviously it becomes very financially rewarding as well too. So we're doing well from that standpoint as well too. So it just goes to show you that when you have pure motives in your heart, financial rewards just kind of follow.
Speaker 2: 14:11
And there's countless of stories that people, if you go on Google reviews, you'll see everybody telling you exactly how much they made on these calls. I mean just probably we have over 33,000 people that we know that took our training courses and stuff like that in the past. We have zero people with bad reviews or complaints at all and every thousands and thousands of people it'd be too many to count. But like Tina and Rocky Lozano just recently from Air One here in Colton, california, came to a call-by-call management class we teach. They literally 10x'd their revenue results at a 70% gross profit this summer by putting in place that call-by-call management. We teach, which is another element. So we don't just teach service and sales training, we also teach sales management as well as the office staff to make sure the whole company integrates together as one unified service force, peer-motiv force.
Speaker 2: 15:06
It makes sense there, as we tried to do no-transcript when you're doing call by call management it's not what do you call it? Micromanaging? A lot of people forget the wrong thing, like I don't want to watch all my guys, I don't got time for that, and that's true, you don't. But here's what you can do. There's key moments in a call there's only take a few minutes that somebody would say, like we did this back in without technology, believe it or not, back when the iPhone first came out and you could take a picture and send the picture. It was back in like 2007 or whatever, somewhere in the mid 2000s, right, and before that I was doing it just based on a verbal talking to people. But what we would do is we'd say, hey, when you finish the diagnosis, send me the diagnosis so I can look at it and then go ahead and write the solutions that match up with the diagnosis so I can look at that before you present to the client, right? So imagine, even lemon seed marketing. Somebody calls you and they want to get marketing done. And if you hire a salesperson, okay, crystal's probably the best salesperson here because you have so much heart in your heart and people can feel the warmth and all that stuff from you. But when you get a salesperson and people working for you, now it's different, right? They're speaking on your behalf and they got to have the same. You know it's hard to give up the sales part of it, because you know they're speaking for you and that's it. They represent you, so you got to say so. Wouldn't it be nice to know whatever they're doing and saying is representing you the right way? And you're actually seeing that each customer is getting the same quality or better quality presentation than you yourself would give, and the salesperson becomes better than you are at that. That's really what we're all looking to have, is our employees become better than we are right? But what they experienced at call-by-call management was number one. Let's make sure we diagnose everything about all the problems in the system, not just what the technician thinks is wrong. Let's have an expert look at everything and remind the technician hey, you got to look at this, this and this too. Don't forget that. Okay, now go ahead and write it down. So you're making sure it's being documented. Okay, now write down the solutions in ServiceTitan or one of those programs here it is. Write that down. Let me see what you got. Let's go ahead and practice it once. Okay, go ahead and present it now. So by doing that, that's what 10X the sales Like.
Speaker 2: 17:58
Let's make sure the diagnosis is correct and you can read it and understand it. Let's make sure the solutions that are premium, mid-range, economy choices are customized and personalized for people. We can understand those. Let's make sure the warranty and service is done right, and then let's make sure the pricing is right. And then you're like okay, go ahead and present it to the client. Why don't you go ahead and just run it by me first? It's like one time first and then, okay, you're ready to go, let's go and do it with the client now. At that point the success rate just climbs because each technician or person in the field salesperson or service person they've already had a dry run. It's like going up the home plate when you swing a baseball bat. Wouldn't you want to take at least a few swings, even if there's no?
Speaker 1: 18:36
ball.
Speaker 2: 18:38
Before the pitch comes. You want to warm up, right. You don't want to just go to the plate and hold the bat up there and swing the bat. You've got to kind of warm it up a little bit. It's the same with the pitcher. A pitcher doesn't just pitch from go out on the mound and pitch. He warms up before the inning starts. And I think that's the same thing that what call-by-call does is it helps people get warmed up and it brings a quality control, like a pitching coach, if you will, for service. That allows people to kind of fix the problem before we have that problem with the customer. So instead of waiting until the problem occurs, you're kind of fixing it before the problem happens. Does that make sense there, crystal? I think really every company, including ServiceMV. We're instilling call-by-call in our team right now. This month, by November, our team will have a call-by-call manager doing it that way in our sales department. So we're a product of the product.
Speaker 1: 19:27
What? Yeah, and I love call-by-call and I'm kind of like you. You know when we are, when we're putting aggressive offers out there. It is so important and I know I keep reiterating this, but it is a. Ben Stark taught me this and one of the things he taught me was like the three-legged stool method, like everything has to be working together or that stool is going to wobble, Two of those things drastically being that operations and marketing are working in tandem with one another and so a lot of times that really will shake things up if your operations gets thrown off or if you're marketing.
Speaker 1: 20:01
So you know, operations can only excel when they have leads to go on and marketing can only excel when they have people that are operationally efficient and getting those things done and making those inferences to be able to get those average tickets up. And I just love people being intentional about their sales processes and how you even follow up. So how do you present, how do you follow up? Where's your confidence and things like that. So last little bit that I wanted to get from you really quick so for service, people that are listening and maybe they're struggling like man, I just can't seem to grow this thing like I feel like I do a good job. I'm following all these things. What would be? One little piece of advice would you give them? Um, about, maybe, like just how they approach sales in their business?
Speaker 2: 20:47
uh, for companies that are having a kind of a barrier to growth as a company you're talking about. Yes, yes, I would say for companies that are kind of a barrier to growth. Is the company you're talking about?
Speaker 1: 20:53
Yes, yes.
Speaker 2: 20:54
I would say for companies that are kind of stuck at a certain place, most likely it's because you have not done anything to develop more leaders in your company. So the company will always hit the wall and be stalled. When we have our leadership is packed up to the gills, like when Crystal can't do anymore, that's it. There's no more growing at this company. We're to our capacity because you're doing all the thinking and all the doing here and as soon as that gets capacity, there's no help. So here's the tip you can't break through any walls by yourself. It has to be as a team. So the first thing you do here's what I would say people. If you as a team, so the first thing you do here's what I would say people. If you're a two-man company, you got an owner and a service tech you got.
Speaker 2: 21:35
The first barrier is how do I get out of the truck and get back, get in the office and run a company right? So you say how do I do that? Well, number one, you got to make not only teach this guy to do what you would do and train him and graduate him and doing what you would do, but you also have to monitor him and do it that way. Now he's used to getting monitored so he knows what that looks like. Now we hire a second employee, because the first employee went through this experience. He would now be capable of teaching the second employee, which allows me to get into the office and do my work in the office right. And the same thing happens as the company grows bigger.
Speaker 2: 22:07
If I have five people with one leader, that's my first performance group. Now, out of the five people there's probably one of those that could be another leader. So I make another performance group, make two groups, and then you can now do more marketing, get more of these. I got two groups of five people with two leaders managing those groups. So the one see one sales manager, service manager is going to get filled up when he gets about seven people. That's all about he can do.
Speaker 2: 22:34
When he gets to like 20 people, he's just like sitting in a chair looking at the window, going I can't do anything. It's like he gets. Not only does the team get stunted, but the manager kind of gives up and throws in the towel because he's like how am I supposed to talk to 25 people? I can't even deliver my dry cleaning to 25 places, or whatever you know. So talk to 25 people. I can't even deliver my dry cleaning to 25 places or whatever you know. So how am I supposed to do that? So the bottom line is, I think management is something you've got to scale and I don't really think management.
Speaker 2: 23:00
I think management is dead. It's really coaching is what you've got to scale. I think management is a bygone thing. I think active coaching. That's why I think call-by-call coaching is to change the result before the end of the call. A good coach doesn't wait until the job's over. After we lose the game and did the team, they go at halftime and they change the team so we can now win the game by the end of the game. Make sense. So I think that's the thing we've got to do here.
Speaker 2: 23:26
To scale growth you have to have active management. And if the owner is the only guy who's managing, that's a problem. And management, and if the owner is the only guy who's managing, that's a problem. And if you've got four people on your team, pick the one that's best to be your leader and train that person to lead. There's leadership training available to do that. There's training to do the system, sales and stuff like that. But if you can't scale the management. So the more leaders you create, the more teams you can create and the more the company just organically grows. That's why some of these guys like I had Crystal, I had seven, we had a thing called True Grit our yearly event.
Speaker 2: 24:02
we have we had seven people who were under 40 years old who started up startup companies, who went from zero to $40 million in less than five years and they all were doing a net profit of minimum of 25% net profit. And that's what we were proud of is the fact that people can take this system and scale it by creating performance groups or performance pods that help people grow this thing bigger, because when you have you're just not training leadership is what the problem is when you hit that barrier. If you can solve it by taking the next person who should be in line to be a leader and creating a new leader, then next thing you know you can create more followers for that leader.
Speaker 1: 24:45
That's exactly true. I see a lot of people, a lot of home service contractors, that they're just they don't have any support, leadership support, and they're just out there, you know, doing everything they can Like. I see really good people a lot of times just really struggling to be good owners, and so, you know, I really just encourage you guys to consider all that Joe is saying here. So, joe, if our listeners wanted to learn more about you or Service MVP, what's the best way for them to connect?
Speaker 2: 25:11
Well, they can go to servicemvpcom and if you want to take a free course, you could do that over there. If you want to. We have our new book called what Should we Do, which is a new book. We have Somebody sent me a postcard with a new book on it, so I figured I'd use this for our visual. If you want the book for free, you just got to pay shipping and handling. It's $8.95 for shipping and handling. Just email me at joe at servicemvpcom and just in the subject line put free book and I'll send you back the link where you can order the book for free. It's 430 pages of the whole system and you can use it to upload those pages into something like Rilla or use it for your own process and it's like a training manual, right. So everybody can take that. And the book only costs like even if you bought it full retail, it's only $25. So it's my gift to the industry to try, and Audible is only $19. So get the Audible book that's amazing, yeah.
Speaker 2: 26:06
So bottom line is you got a whole system under your belt. You don't got to spend even more than that. The book has brought us so many blessings, crystal, because people are getting the help they need and they're thanking me by purchasing more from.
Speaker 2: 26:23
Service MVP. So that's really. It's really a great, a great way to market, I feel, which is create value first and then have people purchase after they get value. That's what we try to do there. So, yeah, just Joe at ServiceMVP, free book, or just go to ServiceMVPcom and take a course if you would like to, or just email me if you want help at Joe at ServiceMVPcom.
Speaker 1: 26:41
Well, that is fantastic. Well, Joe, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate this fun little conversation that we've had here about the importance of sales being ethical guys, being just kind of holding your leadership accountable, All of the things that Joe mentioned there. That really, again, it takes both of our departments working together right the sales side and the marketing side working together. But thank you for listening to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. If you enjoyed this episode, consider writing us a review, giving us a follow, and make sure you go check out all of our social media platforms. We are so excited to be back and rocking and rolling. Thank you for sipping lemonade with me and Joe this afternoon. We'll see you next time.
