Winning at Sales: Untold Secrets from $2M+ Painting Sales Reps

Jon Bryant: Welcome back to another episode of PriceSellPaint. I'm Jon Bryant. This is Michael Murray. We are going to take a look today at a session that we got to do at the PCA Expo around winning at sales: Untold Secrets from the $2 Million Sales Rep Club. Very interesting presentation that we were able to do, and both of us found this information fascinating as we dug into it. We hope you get something out of this. If you're not a member of the PCA, be sure to check it out. This last year's show was huge, biggest ever, great community, awesome educational content, and something to really take yourself to the next level. Can't encourage you enough to check that out.

Michael Murray: One of the things we mentioned is that you and I actually met at a PCA Expo back in 2020. For anybody listening that has never been to a PCA Expo, highly recommend it. At this point when we're recording, we don't know where next year's is going to be, but I think maybe by the time this episode comes out, that might have been announced. I'm looking forward to it. It's definitely really educational - three or four days - and it's also a ton of fun. Some of the best parties in our industry certainly happen at PCA.

Michael Murray: All right, let's get into it. To get started, I want to take us back 70 years to May 6th. The year is 1954 when a medical student from London helped us realize that we often underestimate what we're capable of. On this day, the weather is not great - it's wet and windy at Iffley Road Track, and there's a little more than a thousand people gathered to watch what has become known as one of the most historic sporting events of all time. On this day, back in 1954, something happened two seconds faster than it had ever happened before. But our presentation and what we're going to share with you today is not about these two seconds. It's about reshaping what we believe to be possible.

Leading up to this date, for more than 50 years, men had sought to accomplish this athletic achievement. They had so many different advancements - athletes, coaches were trying for a very long time to make this happen, and it was deemed to be almost impossible. They knew that if it was ever going to happen, it would take perfect conditions, a scientific approach to the training, and it might not even be possible.

But it was, and what we now know is that it didn't take the ideal conditions. Certainly on this wet and windy day, it wasn't ideal. It also did not take this exact scientific approach. What it took was a 25-year-old English medical student named Roger Bannister. Leading up to that time, he was often criticized by those in the sport for not following the conventional wisdom of the training of the day. But it wasn't the conventional best thought of training. Really what it took was Roger Bannister believing that he could be the first person ever to run a sub four-minute mile.

We now know that on that day this historic event happened, he proved that by doing that, he was able to show what is possible for so many others to be able to do after him. That's what we want to accomplish today. We want to be able to show what people in our industry are doing that are selling two, three, even four million dollars in painting projects every single year that we can see through the PaintScout system and the data of the numbers that they're putting up. We also went and surveyed these top performers. We're going to share some interviews. You're actually going to hear from them so that you can understand exactly what is possible as a sales professional in our industry.

Jon Bryant: One of the big problems with our industry is that we exist in these siloed businesses. We have maybe we do the selling for our business, or maybe we have a couple of sales reps, but ultimately we don't know what excellence means. We're only comparing it to the small amount of data that we have, and that data often isn't even close to what is possible. Now with PaintScout and creating this community of sales reps and sales professionals in the painting business and bringing that data together, we can now see what excellence means and set that standard. That is just super amazing.

Today you're going to see some information from some really top performers where you can start to actually see how you compare and what that standard of excellence means. In addition to that, we're going to look at what good versus great means. We've got great performers and we're going to compare those to people that are also good performers. These are people that aren't selling $2 million - they're more in the $750,000 to $1.25 million range. We can start to compare what excellence means from these two categories and how to elevate yourself in sales. Not only that, but the third thing we're going to do is give you three things that you can start doing today to start getting on that $2 million annual path. As a bonus, you're going to get to meet some of these legendary sub four-minute mile painting sales reps that we didn't even really know existed. We're going to get to meet them and hear in their own words what this meant to them and why they achieve what they achieve and how they do it.

I'm going to start off with a quick story here. These two pictures are my first foray into business. When I was in junior high, I made these beautiful sticks here on the left. They were called devil sticks. I was not allowed to call them that because my parents did not want the devil in our house, so I had to call them flower sticks. But I sold these at craft fairs. What I started to realize when I went the first few times is that I wanted to know why different booths performed better. I wanted to understand why some people sold better. That became really lodged in my brain as something that I wanted to figure out because it was so interesting to see the differences between each booth.

Fast forward a couple of years and I started making duct tape wallets. As you can tell, I was definitely a cool kid - that didn't happen. This business started to make me understand more about what sales was, and I had to literally craft these on my own and sell them at craft fairs, sell them online, and try to learn how that works. It was a fascinating experiment for me. I also learned how to pay for a lot of things with my business, whereas the flower sticks was more for fun.

But everything changed when I met this guy - I didn't meet him, but I want you to meet him. This is my brother, Dave. Dave and I worked together. We've worked together for a long time, actually. It's been probably 10 years that we've worked together in our family painting business. In 2009, I had the unfortunate situation of having to part ways with my brother. This came because we had roles that weren't fitting. Dave was in operations, and I was trying to run the business, and the friction that was causing us was tremendous. It was really hard. As somebody who values my relationship with my brother far more than working together, I decided that we needed to part ways. It was a very tough day for me. We agreed on some severance and some time in order for Dave to figure out what to do next.

At the end of that time, I called Dave up and said, "Hey, how's it going? What'd you decide to do?" And he said, "I'm coming back to work." I said, "I don't think that's going to happen. I thought we had this amicable parting of ways, and now this is putting me in a tough spot." I knew as I was doing personality profiles and such that that role wasn't going to be the right fit. I thought, you know what? I'll give you one last chance. This was two o'clock, I think on a Tuesday. Our sales meeting was at three o'clock. I said, "If you would like to come back, you have an hour to decide if you want to join the sales team."

Now Dave's personality profile also does not lend itself well to the traditional salesperson. When we do a DISC assessment, and for those who know what DISC assessments are, Dave does not score high on D or I, and those are often indicators of high sales success. When I was inviting Dave back, I knew that this potentially wasn't a great fit, but it was also a low risk situation. In any case, I gave him an hour. Dave showed up at that sales meeting. Dave has since been one of the most amazing sales reps I have ever seen in the painting industry. Over the last four years, he's gone from zero to one of the top performers. That surprised me and shocked me. I'm also super proud of the guy. He's done fantastic. It's given me a chance to firsthand see and learn from somebody that is not the traditional sales rep and how they are a top performer. We're going to analyze that today.

Michael Murray: I love that Dave confused his severance with paid time off. That part of the story is awesome. I need to let Dave know that if you ever make the mistake of firing him again, he is more than welcome in Cleveland and we always have a spot here at Textbook for him. I'm excited - we're going to hear from Dave in some of the recorded videos.

I want to share a little bit about my experience with some sales reps and some of the data. For me, the more I get access to the data of top performers in our industry, whether it's in the sales realm or in revenue size or profitability, the more my mind expands to understanding that there's so many amazing possibilities in our industry. That's what we're trying to do here.

Back to when you and I first met - we met in February of 2020 in Phoenix at the PCA Expo. It's about two or three weeks before COVID came into really our lives and completely changed everything. Around that time, I went back and I looked at some of our sales performance and I knew that we weren't very good, but I didn't realize how bad we were. I had two sales reps in 2020 - Larry and Michelle. They were newer. The year before we had a sales rep named Ramon who was not a great performer at all. He barely lasted a few months. Our track record at that point was not looking good.

When I went back and looked at the numbers, Michelle and Larry sold 27% and 31% of the estimates they did in 2020. That, as we're going to see here in a little bit, is not good. At the time, I knew that I was frustrated. I felt like they could be doing better, but I didn't have anything to compare it to. Really because of our friendship and your experience, obviously with your brother and just even some of this data, I was able to realize how bad we were. Realizing that even just to be industry average, we needed to get ourselves into that low to mid 40s percentile. Of the estimates that we go on, we should be winning at least 40 to 45% just to consider ourselves average.

Luckily, for a handful of different reasons - one of them because we made the switch to PaintScout - our sales success rate, our win percentage now is as a company right around 44-45% over the last few years. There's a lot of reasons for it, but one of them was simply just understanding what does good look like. I think we've gone from okay to good, and now after really diving into this data over the last few months, I now have a really good idea of what great looks like and I'm excited to work with our sales reps to help get them to that level.

Jon Bryant: Let's break down some of these $2 million unicorns here. Here's the facts. These facts are powered by PaintScout, so this is driven from user data. We've got 32 reps that sold $2 million plus this last year - that's 2023. There's four commercial reps in that amount, 28 residential. Ten of these people were owners, 22 were professional reps. Just to also take a note here, there were 29 other sales reps that were within $200,000 of the $2 million mark. That just goes to show that once we set this standard, next year we're going to see another minimum 29 people who are in that category, and that's exciting because once you see the data, it's really simple to get there. That sticks out to me as something to strive for - just the simplicity and the consistency of this.

The top commercial sales rep was $5.7 million. That shock you?

Michael Murray: I'm going to be honest - a little bit, but not overly. I don't do a lot of commercial work in my business, but I'm certainly aware of bigger projects on the commercial side. I'm familiar with some of the bigger commercial companies in our industry, some of which are PaintScout users. I'm lucky to call a few of them friends. What was surprising though was the numbers behind this sales performer. What was the total number of sales that this person had?

Jon Bryant: I believe they won 14 jobs.

Michael Murray: Average job size a little over $400,000. That's amazing and awesome and crazy.

Jon Bryant: What would you say top residential was? If this didn't shock you, what would you say about residential?

Michael Murray: Before we had looked at the data and having done this presentation now twice, we've had the opportunity to survey the audience live when we did it at PCA and just a couple days ago in Chicago at a Sherwin Williams pro show event. The answer that I would have said, and I think the common answer, is something in the neighborhood of like two and a half, maybe a little bit more than two and a half million. I can get my mind around that as possible.

Jon Bryant: That's kind of where I'm at too. But the reality is very different. $4.56 million is your top residential. I'd say there's probably some light commercial in there too, like HOA stuff like that, but that's a lot of jobs.

Michael Murray: I mean, that's crazy. If you're running a business that size and residential focused repaint, you're crushing it. As an individual salesperson, it's pretty awesome.

Jon Bryant: Average job size. What we're talking about here is within those $2 million sales reps residentially - we took the commercial out because it just skews it too much. Average job size - what have you heard? What do you think is the industry norm?

Michael Murray: In the industry, the most common answer I see - again, Facebook groups, this comes up quite often - people in the Facebook groups, business owners trying to figure out what should a sales rep expectations be, maybe trying to figure out compensation models and things like that - commonly hear numbers around the four or $5,000, maybe a little bit more. But I think the most common answers that I hear are in that $4,000 or $5,000 average job size.

Jon Bryant: Same here. Now this number surprised me for a couple of reasons. It's quite a bit larger and it's also geographically diverse, which is important to note here because I think a lot of people, when they consider this question, think there's a lot of "my market is smaller, that market is bigger." Surprisingly, the data didn't show that, although I know there's some reality to that. This is based on reps all around the country, all around North America actually. That number is $7,432.

Michael Murray: What's interesting on this slide is this is where we're going to start to see some of the data comparison. You mentioned earlier between the reps selling over $2 million - those 32, and we took out the commercial for this number, so this is the residential repaint focused reps, I think it's the 28 - their average job size versus the reps in the $750,000 to $1.25 million annual sales, that control group. Almost 50% larger average job size. Pretty substantial. I know we're going to dive more into that for sure.

Jon Bryant: We're going to look into that later on and how to improve that number for yourself. Next question - how many estimates do you think a $2 million plus sales rep is going on per week, per year? Give me a sense. Obviously this is hard because we've gone through the data already, but what we hear and what we see out there is sometimes different than what the data tells us. Would you agree?

Michael Murray: My first thought would have been for somebody to achieve the numbers that we're talking here - two, three, four plus million in residential sales - they're working extra hard. Maybe they're willing to sacrifice that quality time with family, or maybe they're just not married yet so they've got all the time in the world. So they're doing 20 plus estimates a week or something along those lines. But as we're going to see, that's not the case, and it's actually much more attainable than the number 20 plus.

Jon Bryant: Do you want to talk about this a little bit?

Michael Murray: For sure. What we're looking at here is 12 per week. We have on the screen the top performers are averaging 12 estimates per week throughout the year, where that average control, the group that's in that roughly $1 million, is a little bit more than half - 6.7 estimates per week.

What we found and what I found that was really interesting is it's not about these wild swings of busy season being 15, 20 estimates and slow season being five, but it's more about finding consistency. The top performing sales reps have specific strategies to - yes, they're going to work a little bit harder in the summer, but they're not slow in the winter. They've got a full workload all year long and they're much more consistent. There's some people in the data that are doing more estimates maybe per week in the summer but doing significantly lower in the wintertime where they're really struggling with that consistency that these top performers showed.

Jon Bryant: The other thing I'll mention here is that when I've seen top reps work, they typically almost limit the amount of estimates they're doing and they're looking for quality. Quantity seems to be kind of - we'll talk about this later, but it's a little misleading. That said, in our data, if you did 15 estimates a week, you were almost guaranteed, is that right?

Michael Murray: For sure. That's definitely going to be one of the key things that we want to dive into. It's not these wild swings. I found that really interesting that somebody can perform at a super high level and still have plenty of time for family or other pursuits. I think that's fairly exciting. I think that's really promising for somebody that's listening. As we really start to dive into this, we're not telling you the secret solution here is you get up at four in the morning and you work till 10 o'clock at night and just hustle harder. It's definitely about working smarter and having the time to maximize all the opportunities that you're going on.

Jon Bryant: What about win percentage? What percentage of the appointments, the estimates, do you think top performers are winning?

Jon Bryant: Before we looked into the data, I really wasn't sure. I know what I saw from reps I've worked with personally. Some of them were in the 60% range, but I knew that was probably pretty high. I've also seen people not be successful below the 30% range, like the reps you were talking about that you had on your team. That's a hard number because that whole "30% will, 30% won't, we battle for that middle 40%." I would have thought top reps are in and around a little above 45% probably.

Michael Murray: As we'll see, not far off. The top performing group, that group over $2 million, just over 50% - 50.23%. Our control group was about 7 points less - 43.3% of the estimates they give do they win. I know we both agree on this - that spread at first glance seems like not that far off. But when you really dive into it and you look at the volume, the number of estimates, and you multiply that 7% over that, that's pretty staggering how much more sales is being captured by these top performing reps. There's some really specific things, skills, and habits that we learned from the surveys and the interviews that we're going to dig in here to help people raise their game in terms of win percentage.

Jon Bryant: This was a fascinating one for me - it's around emails. I've always wondered this. I see a lot of Gmails, Yahoos, and then company names. Does it matter? Well, interestingly enough, 100% of the $2 million plus sales reps had company email. Do you think why is this? Because those companies take sales more seriously? They're spending more money on it? Do you have a hunch?

Michael Murray: I do think it is a limited selection. There is a little bit of a survey bias. Everybody that we're looking at is a PaintScout user, so these companies have made investments in software and technology and professionalization that certainly is not the norm in our industry. But we did see that there are plenty of companies in the PaintScout system that are using not company email addresses - Gmail or Yahoo. So there's a cost there. I can imagine from a customer's perspective it shows a level of professionalism and commitment. I would feel more comfortable certainly hiring somebody with that company name email address.

Jon Bryant: It's interesting because I was reflecting back on contractors that I've hired in the past, and they almost always in a competitive situation - for some reason, the email does make a difference. When I'm communicating with them, if it's a Gmail or Yahoo, I don't feel the same. I really don't. Obviously maybe I'm in a unique situation, but I think there's something at play there for sure about professionalism and trust. If you don't have that company email, this might actually help you boost sales and it'd be the simplest, easiest $12 you ever spent as long as you have your domain.

Comp style. I hear the question a lot like, how do we pay sales reps to make sure that they're excited every day to sell? I want to pay them on commission because I don't want to take any risk. Do you hear all this stuff too, Michael, when you talk to people?

Michael Murray: For sure. We did a whole episode on compensating sales reps and there's a lot of different options. There's no completely right answer, but what we found is that the top performing sales reps all worked off of some sort of salary plus commission type of a model. I think that it makes sense. I feel like there's a level of comfort and security that comes with that where sales reps feel like they're taken care of, they feel like they're working for a top-notch company, but they're also incentivized to go out and get results and drive sales and have the ability to make extra money for themselves and their family. Not too surprising.

Jon Bryant: As you're listening today, we have that other podcast topic about sales rep compensation - definitely an interesting one. If you're looking to bring on a sales rep into your business or just in the constant evaluation process that we all are in doing sales and running our sales teams, something to check out just looking at the pros and cons. But this definitely came through as the most common.

Does it matter if the sales reps have painted before?

Michael Murray: We really wanted to see here, because we hear this a lot in conversations at PCA - at the bar or whatever, somebody may be looking to hire their first sales rep and it's like, where do I look? What am I looking for? Do they have to have painting experience? Obviously that might be important to understand how much, how long something takes or speak the lingo. What we found is the results weren't overly conclusive. It was about a 50/50 mix between sales reps that have experience versus those that don't. Did this surprise you at all? What were your thoughts going into it?

Jon Bryant: There's an ease of bringing on people that have had industry experience. I think what shocked me though is that doesn't always translate to top performers. A lot of the reps we talked to were not in painting sales. They came from sales of other things. This reconfirmed to me that this is a skill. You are a skilled salesperson, and you can learn the industry, but selling is really where the value comes and really how you get those exponential awesome results. When you look at the data, 10 of the reps are owners, which means that almost all of the reps came from out of industry. It's very interesting.

Michael Murray: Certainly you shared your story about your brother. He had some painting experience and some industry knowledge there. But to your point, a lot of those skills I think are perhaps overvalued - just that understanding of paint knowledge. Those are things that people are going to be able to pick up. I think there's a common mistake, not just in our industry but really in so many companies, of taking somebody who's maybe a good crew leader and has the gift of gab and we're going to make them a sales rep because that has to work. It's actually a completely different skillset to succeed in a sales role. It doesn't mean that somebody coming out of the production side can't work - obviously it has with Dave - but certainly we want to be careful that we don't overvalue that as a business owner.

Jon Bryant: I'd love to do a show in the future about identifying key skills in field members that may be able to do sales. There are some indicators from the people that we've put in place and who have had success that they could do it before they did it. I'd love to dig into that later.

Does money matter to sales reps?

Michael Murray: Not surprising here, the answer generally speaking is yes. We talked about the commission idea. On the survey, they had to rate their own answer here - how important is money to you - and the average answer was nine out of 10. Pretty important.

Jon Bryant: I think that other one out of 10 was just to try to be perceived as humble. I think it's actually 10 out of 10.

Michael Murray: They knew the correct answer. Here's another interesting one - how do these people estimate their jobs? What's their process?

Michael Murray: I got a pretty good guess on this one. Production rate estimating, and the number one software for those in our 32 was PaintScout. A little shout out for PaintScout there.

Jon Bryant: Considering the data came from PaintScout, that is weird. A little bit biased.

Michael Murray: Yes, a little bit biased. There's obviously people that are performing at high level in the industry, but PaintScout certainly lends itself towards some of the top companies and top performers in our industry, so not too surprising.

Jon Bryant: If you're a $2 million plus sales rep who's not using PaintScout and you're tuning in, you want to get involved in PaintScout so you can show the whole community what you've got. Because right now we have no idea.

Michael Murray: I love it. We should bring those people on when we interview them.

Jon Bryant: Here's a quick little slide about the actual sales volumes of these 32 reps. You can see here - we're not making this data up. This is real data that's been pulled from the PaintScout system. You can see the spread of all those $2 million plus sales reps.

Michael Murray: I appreciate the fact that nobody's name - for anybody that's listening right now, we're not sharing any names. This is not a list of people for hire. I think we might upset some of our users and our companies and certainly would have a bidding war going on. If we can't go out and hire these top performers - I think they're making pretty good money where they're working - we better figure out how can we up our game. How do I sell more or how do I help the people on my team sell more? Let's dive in. We've got three key activities that we encourage sales reps and people selling in our industry to get started on today.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. These three things came from the data that we just shared. We dug into it further as to how these reps are having the success. The first thing we identified is that, as you saw in one slide about average job size, there's a significant difference between good and great - about 50%. We want to talk about how to raise that average job size so that you can start doing that today.

The first thing we found is that this idea of lead vetting is very strong. What lead vetting is for those who don't know or aren't aware - it's just the idea that all the leads that we get might not be the right fit for our company or the right fit for what we're looking for. We heard this time and time again from different sales reps that they're trying to find projects that are the best fit for their company's values, and that the clients that they get are going to be able to be happy with the results that they provide at the end of the day.

What they start with is usually by ranking those leads in terms of value and fit. What that might look like is that when a lead comes in, we have an actual chart that says the things that we value - proximity, job size, type of job, timeline, all those types of things. We start ranking them to see if that overall is going to be a good fit for our business.

The second thing is that these people look at jobs as they've got to get the right job at the right time. Winter, you might be taking on jobs that might not be as perfect of a fit as you might take on in the summer when the demand is so much higher. The other thing that they do is they don't look at filling up their busy times too fast. They are delaying and trying to use the idea that they have a lot of supply and when there's a lot of demand, they can charge a higher price and get the jobs that they want.

It's much like if you look at a buffet - when you go through a buffet, all of the cheaper items, the breads and the salads are up at the front and they hold that meat till the end. As sales reps, what these successful people are doing is they're trying to get past all the bread and salad so they can just get that meat.

What that takes is an abundance mindset. Not every single job that you get is perfect for you. We need to be okay with saying no. As a sales rep, it's just as important to say no as it is to say yes. We want to say no to bad customers, want to say no to bad jobs. We want to start really tailoring what we're selling to what our company has to offer. That means we've got to say no. That's hard for a lot of us because we want to take what comes our way, especially coming out of that slow season into the busy season. We've been so conditioned to need everything now, but at the end of the day, we're going to get that rush of leads if you're in a climate that is seasonal, and we have to have an abundance mindset to start saying no.

Here we are, we're going to hear from our first $2 million plus sales rep. This is Connor. Connor here is in the Pacific Northwest and Connor's going to talk about how he vets leads primarily based on price and how that's a major driver for fit with their company.

Connor: The component is qualifying the project. Is this person even going to be willing to spend the money to hire people? Because why do the whole song and dance if they're never going to hire us? I heard something that said the best time to give price was the first 10 minutes of a pitch or 50 minutes in. I really take that as true if I think a client is a right fit for us or not. If they're a right fit, I'll give it to them at 50 minutes because I want to bond and rapport, find their pain, do all of those things. If I don't think they're a right fit for the price component, they're probably going to hear about the price in the first 10 minutes and then we'll work through those things. Because they'll tell you. If you come at it honestly, most of the time people are relatively honest.

Michael Murray: A few things that Connor talks about - having conversations with customers about price early on. It can be for certain types of projects that can happen before you even get on site. We can utilize tools like Google Maps to see maybe what a house might look like. I can have a phone call with the homeowner or whatever a couple days before the estimate appointment and just get some expectations. Hey, what are you guys thinking in terms of price? Have you gotten any other bids? You can start to have some conversations about, "Here's obviously a ballpark, looking at your picture on street view, you might be looking at something in the neighborhood of about $10,000 to $15,000 to paint this project. Is that in line with some of the bids you've already received or your expectations?"

If the client says, "No, we actually got a bid for $5,000 and we're actually hoping to spend less than that," that might tell us that this is not going to be a good fit. I love that Connor talked about that - just having conversations with clients about money early and often. I think it can be really wise, one, to make sure that we're talking to the right people, like that vetting idea. But also I think it's just price conditioning and it helps to avoid some of that sticker shock if we wait until the very end of this whole estimate presentation, or if you don't even just give them their price on the spot and you send them an email and there's sticker shock there. We definitely want to avoid that.

Jon Bryant: When you're looking to increase your average job size, the next thing you can do is charge more. I want to talk a little bit about this with you, Michael, because I think in our industry, we have this hesitation of charging appropriate for our time. We are constantly downplaying what we're really truly worth and what we're delivering to our customers.

What we found is that the average hourly rate of top performers - and obviously these are going to be top performing companies as well - was $98.34 an hour. That didn't surprise me, but what surprises me more is the discussion that I see around hourly rates that are half that. People have a hard time getting to that as a concept. I think there's this issue going on in our heads where we think, "Oh, if I charge more, I'm not going to get more work." Well, here we are seeing that these are top people selling jobs that are twice the price of what a lot of people think our time is worth.

Michael Murray: This is not a commodity. We would learn in our basic economics classes supply and demand - if we charge more, there's going to be less demand. But that's not what we're doing. It's a perception of value. With that being said, this is not about just overcharging people. It is about providing the value that justifies these higher price points, but also having the confidence that we're worth it from a company's perspective, but also from the sales rep's perspective.

That's one of the big takeaways - these sales reps know what they're worth as individuals, but they also know what their company's worth. They know that they are the best in class in their local markets, certainly, really just around North America. We're talking about awesome world-class companies that have limited inventory. They can't paint every house. They can't work with every client. So they're going to charge a fair price for the amazing service that they provide. I think so many in our industry lack the confidence and are maybe not providing that top value. There's certainly opportunities for raising prices and raising the perception of the customers.

Jon Bryant: Now we're going to meet Colton. I want to introduce you guys to Colton. Colton's in the Midwest, center of the country - let's call it flyover country. Definitely not like one of the more expensive coastal cities where you'd have a much higher cost of living. Definitely a top performer in a pretty average market. I think this goes back to this idea of Colton's going to talk a little bit about charging more and just how he has that discussion with customers in terms of price and sets that expectation.

Colton: People know that we are going to deliver. I can give a homeowner the name of 10 different companies that will come in cheaper than me, or less cost than me, but the guarantee isn't necessarily going to be there. They might do a good job. That company that's cheaper than us, they might do a good job, but that's the gamble that they're going to have to take for the cost difference. Whether the homeowner is willing to make that gamble is up to them.

Jon Bryant: So well said. We're going to go over here back to Connor. Connor's going to talk about how to sell on value outside of price, which is so important because I think innately a lot of us - and I know I've fallen victim to this too - we start to believe that price wins jobs and that's not true. It's just fundamentally not true. Connor's going to talk a little bit about how he deals with talking about value outside of price and with getting a higher price.

Connor: People that are actually willing to spend more money on you will listen to you and actually take that information that's quality. People that really were only price conscious won't listen to you. They'll justify in their head that this guy is just higher than this guy because they have more overhead. The client hears what they want to hear. It just depends on how much they trust you versus the person that went before you or after you. Most are willing to listen if they're going to hear something.

Michael Murray: He summarizes it really well. It's awesome to hear from somebody who's crushing it at such a high level.

Jon Bryant: Quickly, I'm just going to talk a little bit about the third point here of bigger job size. I think the obvious answer here is we've got to do bigger projects. The average residential repaint value at $7,432 for $2 million plus sales reps is just indicative that there are bigger projects out there. Going back to that idea of the abundance mindset where we don't fill our schedule full of things that prevent us from doing those, we actively seek them out.

If anything, just take that away from this conversation - if you're not watching average job size, this is a number that's representative of success in terms of volume, increasing your volume, increasing the efficiency of your time. Dig into that, see where you're at, and start looking at what jobs you might be able to do that are a little bit bigger.

Michael Murray: Top performing sales reps know they have a limited amount of time to go on appointments. If they spend all their time on estimates that are $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 projects, that is time that they're not able to do other things. They're not able to maybe go on as many appointments for those bigger $10,000 plus projects. They're not able to do maybe as many follow-ups on those bigger quotes. That's one of the things that we found - these top performing sales reps really value their time. They're intentional and focused on getting the most out of every appointment.

Let's go to point number two - doing more estimates. We looked at the data earlier, but I want to show that again. The top performing sales reps, those over that $2 million club, are doing 12 estimates a week, where our control group, those around that $1 million number, are a little bit more than half - 6.7 estimates on average per week. Significant difference here. Excited to hear from the sales reps as to how they do this.

One of the things that these top performing sales reps do is they take ownership for the number of quotes. They're not just sitting back waiting for leads to come in. You and I have been doing this a long time. I think anybody that's been in this industry for at least the last four or five years knows that things have certainly changed. We talked about it as one of the first episodes - things have slowed down in our industry in terms of demand. There's this post-COVID boom that I don't think we're ever going to see again in our lifetimes. Everybody was painting their house. We're all sitting around during COVID and realizing that the living room and the home office and everything else needs to get painted. All of the painting companies that I'm friends with, demand was just going crazy. Phones were ringing off the hook. The last year in 2023, that certainly changed. Things have gotten a lot harder.

The top performing sales reps though aren't just frustrated. They don't just throw their hands up and say, "Oh, times are tough. I guess I just can't hit my sales goals." No, they go out and we're going to hear from these guys here in a minute - they make it happen.

We mentioned it earlier and I just want to point out a couple more things that we found in the data. Sales reps that do on average more than 15 estimates a week are almost 100% guaranteed to sell more than $2 million. To some extent, this is a key stat - if you give yourself enough at-bats, you're going to be successful at a high level. Part of that is having the time to do those estimates and part of it is just having the opportunities, the leads.

We saw though that if you do 12 to 15 estimates per week, you're going to be at least really close. On average, you're going to have $1.75 million in sales. If you're in that 12 to 15 range, you're going to be really close to getting over $2 million. At that point, it's going to come back down to some of these other key numbers that we're diving into.

I want to introduce Mike. He's going to be our next sales rep here. Mike is one of the top three sales performers in the entire PaintScout network. Definitely a unicorn, a superstar here. He also works for a company up in that Pacific Northwest area. Certainly something up in the water - top performing sales reps. Let's hear from Mike as to how does he make this happen and how does he do some cold calling and drive leads when he needs to.

Mike: I make it fun. I'll make goals around it and I'll do 20 cold calls. I'm not going to stay in two hours cold calling because you're going to get burnt out. I'm going to do a 15 to 20 minute block where I've got at least 20 targets, I'm going to call them. I don't hate cold calling - I mean, nobody really likes cold calling. If you can make it a game and say, "Hey, I've got 15 or 20 targets, I want to set five appointments. From those five appointments, I'm probably going to close half of those jobs," if you try to make it a game, it helps.

Michael Murray: I love it. Nobody likes cold calling. Certainly part of these top performing sales reps though is doing the things that maybe they don't always love to do. Mike talks about here cold calling, going out and making things happen.

Jon Bryant: The thing I hear too, Michael, before we move on to the next, is there's goals being set here - we'll talk more about that - but this is not random. Mike knows what he needs to get done. He might not like it, but he still does it. That's what separates, I think, top performers from non-top performers - just doing the things that are maybe a little more uncomfortable.

Michael Murray: For sure. He knows his numbers. You could hear that just in that almost casual way he mentions, "If I make this many calls, I'm going to sell this much." He definitely knows his numbers.

Let's hear from Connor again, specifically he's going to talk about the value of past customers. This is such a huge opportunity for sales reps and really companies in our industry. I know my company, it's something that we're making a really intentional effort to do a better job with - keeping in touch with our past clients and making sure that they know that we're available if and when they have that next project ready. Let's hear from Connor as to how does he take ownership of that and why it's so important.

Connor: We basically do a lot of marketing to past customers. The closure rate of a repeat client is like 82%, the win rate. You've got to basically market to them.

Jon Bryant: That number is wild because we see that all the time - repeat or referral business is so much more valuable. I think it's because we operate in an environment where trust is so important. If you're doing interior painting in your home, you don't want to let strangers in there. You want to know you're getting some quality, especially when you're spending thousands of dollars. Inherently everybody wants to know they can trust the people.

Michael Murray: For sure. It's a really intimate experience that homeowners have with contractors, painting contractors that come into their house, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a few weeks. 82% - that's bananas.

In addition to past customers and cold calling, these top performing reps take ownership of the number of quotes that they're giving or estimates that they give every single week in the form of referrals. We often think of referrals from past customers, but what we found is that some of these top reps are really intentional about creating and cultivating a referral network.

We're going to hear now from Dave. We mentioned your brother Dave earlier. He is going to talk about a really specific system. We did a podcast episode on his system. He utilizes this analogy of a referral tree. I love this idea - it's not just about finding one referral partner, right? That could be a realtor, it could be a property manager, it could be other people in trades - it might be the local moving company or somebody at the local flooring company. People like that can refer their clients to us. But he's not just looking for one person, he's looking for many. Once he has a relationship with that one realtor in the office, he wants to utilize that relationship to earn business with their clients, but also to get connected with some of the other realtors in the office so that he can grow that referral tree. Let's start the clip with Dave talking a little bit more about that.

Dave: With companies, you can kind of figure out on the internet - just Google it - to know how big they are. I only have two branches on that company. There's at least 20 that I could have on that company. So trying to expand - you're already there, network. You know one person in an office, but they don't always talk to each other.

Michael Murray: It's that multiplication instead of addition kind of idea. The last point here on doing more estimates is goal setting. We mentioned it before when we looked at that first clip from Mike. These sales reps are really competitive. They know their numbers. They're competitive maybe with others within their company, but certainly with themselves. They want to take whatever their numbers were last week or last month or last year, and they want to do better. It's just this constant improvement mentality and being very specific around the KPIs that they're looking at. The first clip we're going to look at, we're going to go back to Colton and hear some of his thoughts on goal setting.

Colton: I track my own metrics personally - number of leads, number of estimates given, close rates. If you're getting 50 leads a month and you're closing less than what it should be, even if you're losing, track those close rates. I would say tend to set more aggressive goals versus conservative goals. I like big numbers, so that's my philosophy with that.

Michael Murray: I love it. Both so far have talked about specific goals and all self-generated leads. That taking ownership is so key here. I want to go back to Dave, one of the absolute top performers in all of the numbers, specifically in his win percentage. He's crushing it at a really high level, selling 63% of the estimates that he did in 2023. Let's hear from Dave a little bit more about that.

Dave: I set two goals - I set a monthly goal just to keep on track. I feel like to hit my goal or stretch goal, I can maybe go below my monthly goal twice a year, maybe three times, and just have other really good months. If I keep track of that - like January was below - so I'm already like, "Hey, I've got to pull my pants up and do some more." The thing I set goals on is self-generated leads, because those are things I can control.

Jon Bryant: The thing I love about all three of these reps is just how motivated they are internally. I think for me, that's a common thread amongst all top sales reps I talk to - it's them against themselves and then them against the world. That's really fascinating.

Michael Murray: I love just real quick - I love how Dave, as he's talking about these goals, it almost scares him a little. He's like, "Well, I think I'm... why not? Let's go do this." I've heard that before - if your goals don't scare you a little, they might not be big enough. It's so telling how he mentions, "Yeah, I'm going to go see what I'm capable of." It really is that four-minute mile mentality of just because somebody else hasn't done it yet doesn't mean that I can't. Let's go see what's possible. I love that.

Jon Bryant: Let's move to our third point here, which is increasing your win rate. This one is self-explanatory and really at the end of the day, it's something that I watch so closely with our sales team - how are we performing on each individual opportunity. Fortunately and unfortunately, it's a bit of a measuring stick. We need to learn from that. The first thing here we'll mention is getting the right mindset around what winning and losing looks like and how to really put yourself in the best position to win every day.

Michael Murray: I think we've heard from some of these sales reps obviously quite a bit. We're about to hear in a second some more of these interviews. I just love their approach and that confidence that they have in what they're doing. They know that they're capable of doing great things. We're going to hear from them even in terms of what do they do when they're struggling and how do they work through that. I just love the mindset that these top performers have. The big thing is they don't even realize how incredibly strong and powerful that mindset is for them.

Jon Bryant: We're going to hear from Connor here talking about that exact thing.

Connor: I'm genuine in my approach. I think when you sell like I sell, the more authentic and genuine you are, the better the trust is going to be and the better relationship you're going to have over the term, which gets us right back to the very beginning - it's all about the relationship. A sale does not equate to success. I've had clients that don't hire me for one project but call me back because they felt trust, but maybe they went with someone cheaper the first time and they got burned and they realized the value of what we do. You're establishing your brand long term, not on just a microtransaction.

Michael Murray: Love it.

Jon Bryant: Let's hear from Colton here on his mindset as well. Specifically, Colton here is talking about his mindsets around cold streaks and how he gets himself out of those.

Colton: I really try not to have any other excuses other than, "Hey, the person who put me in this position is right here, and the only person that can get me out of this cold streak is also right here." If I'm behind, I will not go home at the end of each day without completing my daily tasks. There is no excuse when you're low on a sales goal to go home with 90% of your work completed for the day. It's got to be everything. Most of the time, I create my own struggles by being lazy. When I'm behind, I double down.

Michael Murray: For anybody that's listening and not watching, Colton is pointing back at himself with his thumbs. When he says that person's right here, he's not referring to me and Jon.

Jon Bryant: Now we're going to get into just a couple of ways to actually increase that win rate. The first thing here is asking for the sale. I think that's always a challenge in the sales process - asking for that sale. It really separates our lower performers from higher performers. For some reason that seems to be really hard. Two sticking points seem to be talking about price and asking for the work. Really that's what we're talking about.

Michael Murray: For sure. Part of it is just having the software and the ability to give the quote on the spot so that we can ask for the sale. We can't ask for something like an abstract. That's one of the nice things about PaintScout - it allows us to utilize the iPad or whatever and go over the quote, handle those objections, have these conversations. I think that's so key. Connor is going to talk to us about how if he's willing to send a quote, he is going to do everything he can to win it. He's going to ask for that sale and follow up. Let's hear from him in his own words.

Connor: I don't judge people's projects and experience by the money they spend. It grows your brand to work with that one person for another. For example, I had this guy hire me for one room - it's like $600 for walls and stuff. Then he just called us out last year doing a $20,000 interior. Just because one project was small doesn't mean that's what they're worth overall.

Michael Murray: I love it. It's that long-term mindset that he's talking about here, which is so awesome.

Jon Bryant: Going back to that idea of qualifying, I think a lot of times we can qualify on job size. I think we talked about job size matters, but more so what I appreciate what Connor's saying here is that it's actually a value fit. That value fit to your business is going to be a long-term value relationship with the customer and the business. I think that's super accurate for bringing good value to everybody.

Michael Murray: Knowing who your customers are and knowing who they aren't, I think is critical for sales reps to know where to spend their time and attention.

Jon Bryant: I'll talk here for a second about this idea of getting yeses and nos. I think in our industry, we give a lot of estimates. You can ask for the sale and they might say, "Well, I'll get back to you." Then you go on to the next estimate, you go into the next thing, and maybe you forget. But when we dug into the data, what we found is that reps that got more yeses and nos had more successes.

When we're having this discussion, there's two terms that we use in the industry that people use synonymously, but they're different - that's closed and won. When we talk about won, like jobs that are win rate, that's the jobs that we actually got. But when we talk about closed, closed should be the jobs that you got a yes or a no on. Those are jobs that are closed out. You have an answer. It's now complete. It's closed. It's done.

When we examined top reps, they get answers on their jobs. For example, Dave - in Dave's situation, he did about 575 estimates last year. Of those estimates, he had only not got an answer on six of those jobs. Hence why he had such a high win rate. These things are very correlated. When we look into the data of reps that don't get answers, that don't close out those jobs, their win rate is significantly less. It leads me to believe that if you can get a yes or no and close it out, there's a lot of available work you already have in your pipeline that you just have to push over the finish line.

Michael Murray: Before you go to the next slide and start that clip from Dave, I think this is one of the biggest things for me as we went through all of this data. I've actually had a chance to start talking to some of our sales reps about it here - there's really three numbers. We think of things as how many did you win, what percentage did you win? We use like 50% before, so our mind immediately thinks that if you sold 50%, that means you didn't sell 50%.

For top performing reps like Dave, that might be the case where he's at close to 65% on the win percentage. But really there's a third category, which is just this ghosted, this open - I really never got an answer. I followed up maybe a couple of times, gave up, it is what it is. They're just going to - I'm just going to assume they're not interested. The top performing sales reps don't, first of all, get to that spot because they have really good conversations upfront. They set the expectation that it's not going to be okay for the customer to ghost them. Then they follow up with a tenacity that maybe those regular average performing reps certainly are lacking. I was really impressed by that. I'd love to hear though from Dave who's actually doing it.

Dave: I'm really good at kind of knowing where they're at in the process. I always set that next step. If I can tell they're not ready to move forward, I make sure I know when they are - like, "When are you looking to have this done by? When can I follow up with you?" I make sure I get something. I set a timeline with them on the next steps. Setting expectations is so key in sales. If you don't set expectations of what's going to happen next, the homeowner's not going to either. They're just going to do what they want to do.

I think the key thing is just being persistent but not pushy. There's a fine line there. You want to follow up, you want to stay in touch, but you don't want to be annoying. I think if you're respectful of their time and you're providing value in your follow-ups - not just "Hey, did you decide yet?" but "Hey, I was thinking about your project and I wanted to let you know..." or "I have some availability coming up" - things like that add value to the conversation rather than just "Are you ready yet?"

Jon Bryant: I'm so impressed. This has taken Dave obviously a few years to get to this point, to understand that. But it speaks to this whole concept of helping people buy. I think what he's really getting at the root of is people hate being sold to. We all don't like being pushed into something and we don't like pushy salespeople. Dave offers them the opportunity through his approach just to say yes or no - either we're good or we're not, let's move on and let's be comfortable with it. I'm a human being. I think that takes a bit of practice, but it's definitely apparent.

Michael Murray: I'd love to share some of the things here that I got out of this whole experience. For me, doing this entire exercise - we spent a lot of time analyzing these interviews, data, and surveys. A few things that I got: top reps, they're competitive and they're consistent. Specifically the number of estimates that they're doing. I saw a good amount of consistency in that. It's not these wild swings. Certainly at different times of year there's some highs and some lows, but they keep those numbers closer to each other.

They also don't just hope for success. They're very active and intentional about making sure that they're going to be successful. They don't leave that up to chance. They don't wait for the company to do everything, do all the marketing. They're getting those referrals as well as getting closure - some of the stuff that we talked about just a few minutes ago. They're getting answers. Just like we mentioned Dave here on this last clip, they're getting those yeses and nos. They're actively seeking out relationships with their ideal customers. How about you, Jon? What were some of your takeaways?

Jon Bryant: Let's look at this clip from Mike first, then I'll get into that. Mike's talking about that competitive mindset - what is his mindset around being competitive and putting up these big numbers?

Mike: I'm very competitive. I think most top sales reps are. You have to be. You're competing against other companies, you're competing against yourself from last year, last month. I want to be better than I was yesterday. That drives me every single day. When I see other people on my team doing well, it pushes me to do better. When I see industry numbers or benchmarks, I want to beat those. It's not about beating other people in a negative way - it's about pushing yourself to be the best version of yourself you can be.

Jon Bryant: Exactly what you're talking about, Michael. I think that was a theme throughout all the reps that we chatted with and interviewed. My takeaways here - I think it's fascinating. It goes back to that original idea of siloed businesses and that we are not exposed to what excellence is. In the situation of the four-minute mile, everybody kind of knew what the standard was - we're trying to beat this unbeatable standard.

I think for the first time in maybe the history of the painting industry, we finally have some people who are showing what the standard is. What's so interesting is that not a single one of the reps that we talked to knew they were a top performer. That to me is so fascinating because when they found out that they were a top performer, not only were they excited, but they also wanted to know how to move up the charts. They want to know who is above them.

It goes back to that original story about my brother Dave. Dave's profile is not one that is perfectly aligned with sales, but what Dave is, is hyper competitive. I've seen him do some crazy things on the soccer field just to prevent someone from going by him. This is ingrained in him - this competitiveness. Dave is a top performer because not only is he competitive, but he has access to data. He gets to ask, "How am I doing? How do I compare? How do I get further ahead?"

I think this exercise, the reason it's so powerful to me, is that finally we can show what being a top performer looks like, how to get there, and now how to compete. My hope is if you're watching this podcast, that you start setting standards for yourself. You start competing with yourself, but you also start to get to compete now with the top performers in the industry and try to chase them. That is fun. That is motivating. That is exciting. I think it's going to be great for you as much as it's been great for us and our team to be able to see that data and interact with it.

The ability for you to use this data, start to compete - I hope it drives you, it motivates you, and I hope it starts to set the standard for you and your company.

Michael Murray: Let's finish here with a quick quote from Roger Bannister: "Failure is as exciting to watch as success, provided the effort is absolutely genuine and complete." What we would hope is that just like Roger Bannister was the first to run the four-minute mile 70 years ago - actually, if you know the story, there were many more that ran the sub four-minute mile even within a few months in that first year after that happened, because they now knew that it was possible. It was really just about taking away that self-limiting belief as to what they were capable of.

We hope that by sharing this data and sharing some of the interviews and stories from these amazing performers - but fairly regular people - that everybody that's watching and listening is able to understand that they're capable of doing some amazing things, whether it's selling $2 million, maybe $3 million or even $4 million, maybe $5 million in sales this year. We're excited to see what's going to come from just by sharing this data and letting everybody know that sky's the limit when it comes to what we're doing.

Jon Bryant: Awesome. Now go forth, exceed your wildest sales dreams and goals. Michael, thanks so much. This has been fun. I hope to connect with everyone soon. As per usual, if you liked the podcast, feel free to give it a like, subscribe. It's encouraging for us and we'd love to have you following along. We'll connect soon. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

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