Lenny Gray on Door-to-Door Sales, Black Friday Offers and the Six-Step Sales Flow

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey there and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. I'm your host, Dan Leibrandt, and today I'm with Lenny Gray. If you don't already know Lenny, he's one of the top names in door to door sales. He started his consulting company, Door-to-Door Millionaire over 15 years ago, and has helped some of the largest home service companies in the US like A1 Garage. He is also a best-selling author with his books, Door-to-Door Millionaire and MORE Door-to-Door Millionaire. Additionally, he released two books in December on how to do Door to Door specifically for Pest Control. Those two books came out recently, make sure to get those two as well. Those two are just for Pest Control. So I love that not only is Lenny in the door to door space, but he's also Pest Control specific. And going off of that, he's also the owner of Rove Pest Control. Pest Control company, he started 22 years ago, which is now worth eight figures. So if you want to learn how to do door to door sales for Pest Control, Lenny is going to break down everything you need to know in this episode. So without further ado, thanks for coming on the show, Lenny.

00:53 Lenny Gray

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Dan.

00:55 Dan Leibrandt

Of course, man. So I want to jump straight into it. First off, I want to ask you, how do you think about door to door sales? And how does it compare to other lead generation mechanisms? So there's so many different ways to generate leads now. I'm mostly digital. I'm kind of an SEO guy, social media, etc. But there are so many different ways to generate leads. So there's directories, there's Facebook ads, whatever. How does door to door compare to other lead generation mechanisms? And overall, how do you think about it?

01:22 Lenny Gray

Yeah, I think of door to door as a piece of the overall marketing puzzle. It used to be back in the day, and there's still companies nowadays that maybe strictly do door to door, maybe 90% of their growth is attributed to door to door. But with my company specifically, we've moved away from that over the last decade where we don't just bank on door to door. In fact, we're to the point now where if we don't have a single rep, knocking doors will still grow. So door to door is kind of a bonus.

01:48 Lenny Gray

Part of that is strategic, which I'll talk about. The other part is just more of a financial decision. Like door to door teams are very expensive. That's one of the things I do for business owners is I teach them how to recruit and hire, compensate and train their own door to door sales reps and create their own teams. Because if you go hire that out to some company in Utah or Idaho, you're going to spend so much money. It's ridiculous nowadays where you're going to be in the hole on those new accounts for years. And so just the costs, the cap costs for those are just astronomical at this point. So to me, door to door is a nice play because it's a way to consolidate routes. It's a way to really keep a geographical space tight where you can get more, just more volume from your technical team. Technicians can do more services if they're on the same street or within the same block or zip code and there's not as much windshield time. So there's some efficiencies that door to door creates that it's really hard to find a comparable in other avenues of marketing to condense and consolidate routing.

02:51 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. Yeah. I had Adam Coffey on my podcast recently at Local Marketing Secrets. And he was talking to me about how important route density is. And ideally you have all of your customers in one select area because now your techs aren't spending so much time driving, but now they're spending all their time servicing. So they can actually spend more time working. Can you talk more about that?

03:13 Lenny Gray

Yeah. So the point of that is exactly what you said or what Adam said, is what you're doing is now, it's like there's a ticker, right? I kind of think of that every day, like as a business owner, it's like, okay, what's happening? How productive are we? How efficient are we? These seconds just continue to tick and nobody's making money. In fact, you're losing money if your technicians are just driving around. You've got fuel costs, your tires are getting worn thinner, the mileage on your vehicles, the value of your vehicles is dropping. All of those things are like a tick mark against you versus if you've got a technician that can roll in, as I mentioned, on the same street and half their day is spent in one block versus driving from different zip codes to different cities. So that's really the idea behind that is you don't have to start a pest control company door to door. Obviously, most people probably don't. We did it kind of reverse. So we were super consolidated and then as we started to add people, it was easy.

04:11 Lenny Gray

But I look at the reverse as being just as easy, if not easier, where if you've got a group of customers and they're all over the Metro, all of the city where you're in, the state that you're in, you can take a door to door team and you can plug them in and say, we need to really grow this zip code or this city. And I need to add new accounts there to make it really efficient for us to maximize our tech capacities and those types of things in this zip code. And so we get 86 accounts from our door to door team on a quarterly service. Now we bump into the next zip code and we need 37 accounts here and you can start to backfill that in and using a door to door team as an ancillary way to grow after you've already developed yourself, I think is a great way to make your business, not only just growing exponentially, just based on number of new clients that you have, but also creating more value into your company because of those route efficiencies and that density that Adam talked.

05:06 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. Awesome. And you were talking about how expensive it is. I've heard this from a lot of different pest control owners where they're talking about different lead generation mechanisms and I'm kind of just acting as an overall marketing consultant. And I'm like, yeah, you should definitely look into door to door. You know, you should listen to Lenny Gray, get his books and see all the podcasts that he's been on. But a lot of them say, you know, maybe I tried it or maybe I've heard about it from friends and it seems or it is way too expensive. So how do you combat that? How do you make it less expensive?

05:34 Lenny Gray

Yeah. So I have a webinar, a monthly webinar specifically for business owners and most of them are home service business owners that jump in. And what I do is I teach the basics kind of high level, again, how to go out and recruit a team. What are we looking for? What's the demographic? How do we spot those people? How do I identify them? How to put on a recruiting meeting that engages people, that gets them interested in the job? What does that look like? What do we talk about? Then once we get them recruited and we hire them, what does training look like?

06:02 Lenny Gray

What is the ramp up to make sure they're successful? Because to me, there's kind of these three R's that I always say that go into a good program. And number one, you've got to have retention, right? Like you've got to have these reps stick around. And the way you get retention is because they get results. And then when they get results, what actually happens is they help you in the recruiting, where now they're like-minded people, their friends and family or their network is being drawn in because you've created a great opportunity for them. So a lot of that really kind of goes back, Dan, into what kind of training program do you have? Most people can be really good at recruiting and getting the right people in. And then you're all sitting there in the office and you go, all right, well, let's go get them. Let's go knock a few doors and let's make it happen. But if you have the tools, the proven tools that have been used for decades in door-to-door pest control, the ones that work, if you have those tools, now you can train people.

07:00 Lenny Gray

Now they're going to be stickier because they're going to go out right away and get those results. And again, once they have the results, then they're going to be retained. And if they're retained, they're going to help you with recruiting. So I think it's kind of this cycle where most people are like, let me figure out recruiting first, and then we'll worry about the training and the onboarding and all that later. To me, it's have the training first. So when you get the people in, they're going to feel like we've got the best training. We're going to go out and just crush it on the doors.

07:27 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. Awesome. So you own a successful pest control company and you built it off of door-to-door. How has that process evolved for your company? I'm sure it is super refined now. You've got it totally dialed. How has that evolved from when you first started out?

07:40 Lenny Gray

Yeah. So when we started back in 2003, my business partner and I, he was more on the day-to-day operational side of pest control. We both worked for Orkin essentially. He was running a franchise in Albuquerque. I was kind of traveling around and doing a lot of training and developing training programs for Orkin pest control. Well, we had met and we kind of figured, hey, if we can just do our own thing, like you know the operations, I know the sales, that should be a win, right? We decided when we started, we said, okay, we're going to just go with the two of us. I was really good at door-to-door obviously. So I was like, we don't need to hire a team. We don't need to go in debt our first year in business. So why don't I just sell? Why don't you just spray? And so year one, that was it. I mean, it was, I was knocking six days a week. He was servicing six days a week. I will say he serviced six days a week until July. And then he told me, I need an extra day off, Lenny.

08:32 Lenny Gray

You're killing me because I've been doing 10 starts a day for three months or whatever it was. So that's really how we started. I put on about a half a million dollars worth of business that first year. And then we had, and this was back in 2003. Nowadays that converts to like, you know, 850, 875 million dollars [He meant $850,000 to $875,000]. So I put on about a million dollars worth of business if you look at it in today's conversion. But that said, what we did is we had now a company. We had revenue coming in. We could afford to go out the next year and recruit four other door-to-door reps, pay them well, and have me continue to not just sell, but to manage them. So I sold about half as much volume that second year because I was managing these four. And then what happened is year three, we said, well, now we can blow the roof off. We brought in 35 reps. We just set every record that we ever knew existed as far as how many accounts were put on in a summer.

09:23 Lenny Gray

And we did that for two other summers. And by year five, we were the largest residential pest control company in the state of Utah. And that's when ServiceMaster came knocking on our door saying, hey, we don't like being second biggest. Like what is it going to take to buy you guys out essentially is what happened. And we didn't have a website. I mean, or just the very worst website you've probably ever seen. We were just, I mean, it was literally all we did is door to door. Well, in the meantime, after selling, we had started operations in Minnesota and Oklahoma and Arkansas, Nebraska, Iowa. We were kind of all over the Midwest. And then we started to get smart and say, let's actually work on growing in other ways besides whether it was SEO, traditional marketing, billboards, radio ads, mailers, all the things that everybody does. Let's add that to our arsenal so that we're not just totally dependent on door to door. We always knew if the house was going to burn down, who was going to go out and knock doors? It was this guy, because I could go out and make it happen.

10:19 Lenny Gray

But at the end of the day, we didn't want to just rely on that. Nobody should be reliant on one person or one arrow in their quiver to take down a bear. I mean, you've got to have a lot of different weapons, a lot of different arrows. And that's really what our philosophy has been since, since first started.

10:34 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, awesome. I want to get really granular on that, that year one, I want to make sure not to skip over that, because that's where a lot of pest control owners still are today, where maybe they're at 10k a month, 20k a month, 30k a month, they're really looking to scale. Maybe, you know, they're in Facebook groups, maybe they're doing a little bit of SEO, getting some stuff from the Google Business Profile. But I feel like this could potentially be a huge unlock for them of just maybe doing door to door themselves or having their son do it or having, you know, an uncle or whoever. Like talk to me about exactly what you were doing regarding door to door in that first year.

11:07 Lenny Gray

So I was killing myself. So I'm not going to say that this is the way to do it, especially if you don't have the experience. I had five years of experience prior to just starting on our own and me going out. So I knew what my metrics were. I knew every 36 minutes, I was going to sell a new account. And so if I put in eight hours a day, or, you know, I put in about 50 hours a week, we kind of knew it was almost a math equation at that point, we knew what our numbers would be. And I had my goals in mind, we were going to do that. Most people don't have that where they work for another company in sales.

11:36 Lenny Gray

So, but that's the magic about all the content and everything I put out there for the world to see, because I'm not shy about it. Reveal it. There's no secrets with me. We put it all out there in books and webinars and newsletters and everything else that we do at D2D Millionaire. But basically, I like the idea of an owner to understand door to door. They do have to kind of get their hands dirty a little bit and do it. And just to even empathize with door to door reps that they're bringing on to realize the difficulties. They don't have to do it for two summers like I did, you know, with my own company and five summers before they had their own company. Obviously, they don't have to do that. But if they have some kind of understanding of what it takes and the grind that it is, you realize that, wow, maybe these reps are kind of worth it. It reminds me, so my, one of my brother-in-laws, when I started in Utah, he's like, hey, I want to go out and I need to make some extra money and I'd like to go out and do this. And I think he lasted two or three hours maybe.

12:30 Lenny Gray

And he came back to my sister-in-law, my wife's sister, and he said, listen, whatever kind of money Lenny is making, I will tell you he's worth every penny because I don't understand how he can go out and do what he does. So door to door is not for everybody, but I teach a system that everybody can learn. So it is replicable. It's something that anybody can do. If you're an owner right now and you're like, I would like to have some route consolidation. I would like to add on some accounts and not have to pay the bank or break the bank to pay reps to do that. Like there's a way to do it and to do it the right way. And again, it's something that's been repeated for decades now. I mean, I'm almost three decades into the industry and I've seen people that have no business running a company or selling accounts door to door and they're fine. But just being willing to do it, I think Dan, back to your original questions, just being willing to go out and do it, even just to understand what it is, I think is very helpful for every business owner.

13:24 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, great. And I feel like, kind of like what you were talking about, there's a huge mental barrier for anyone that's trying to go out and do door to door of maybe they're scared. No one wants to see me at their door and I'm trying to sell them something. Like, did you have to overcome that barrier or was it kind of natural for you? Like what was that experience like for you?

13:41 Lenny Gray

Yeah. When I first started with Orkin, I mean, I was in between college, you know, semesters, I was doing the summer sales thing. I had served a two-year church mission and all we did seven days a week was knock doors and talk religion for crying out loud with people. Right? Like you can talk about Jesus for people for so long. And then, you know, obviously people, pest control is like easy. It was like, oh, people actually be okay with that. Like, wow, pest control. That's a much easier topic today, just for most people. So I had that experience. I had never sold anything, but it was a buddy of mine from high school. One of the guys on my football team was like, dude, you need to come out and do this. And I actually put him off and said, I don't even believe that's real. Like you probably have to lie and it's just not my thing. And he says, well, if it's legit, will you do it next year with me? And sure enough, after that first summer, he called me and he said, hey, I'm running a team next year in Birmingham, Alabama. You need to come with me. This is real. I just made 25 grand.

14:32 Lenny Gray

And so that's really what, you know, I was very hesitant, very skeptical. Like most people are door to door. The thing of it is, I think from a lot of business owners who are listening right now, you're probably thinking, well, we'll just have my technicians go cloverleaf and they'll go knock a few doors and that. And yeah, they can do that certainly. But the mentality is the same. Like why aren't you or other people in your organization out there doing the same? Well, there's a truck in the neighborhood servicing the Smith's and they're right there and they can see the technician outside with his, his Webster, you know, doing the power spray or whatever he's doing. And if you can go knock on the neighbor's doors and say, yeah, we're just over at the Smith's house. I mean, you automatically become the anti door to door sales rep because you're not just randomly knocking. You actually have a purpose because you're right there and you just tell people like, Hey, since we're already at the Smith's house, we've got some openings on our schedule. I can offer a discount to get you on board with, with the same service that we're doing for them, you know, and it makes it a really easy transition. It's not like I never had, when we first started, I never had my guy do same days for me or could be there to do accounts except for on day one, day one, he did same days for me because I hadn't done anything the day before.

15:41 Lenny Gray

But after I filled up that day and the next day, like from then on, I was scheduling a day out and it worked just fine. But if I could strategically be on one side of the street and sell a bunch of accounts one day, I wouldn't just hop over across the street. I'd wait till the next day to do that. When that truck was going to be along that street. Cause it's really, it's kind of that social proof where I'm legit. Like you don't have to worry if I'm some scam artist or whatever. I've already got that. Not that that's a necessity, but it sure puts people at ease. It should put the rep at ease as well, or the business owner that's trying it out to know, yeah, we're already taking care of the Smiths anyway. So why not be here and try to help, you know, consolidate our route, get some route density going here in the, in the neighborhood and offering people some kind of a discount to do it.

16:26 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No, exactly. That ties into what we were talking about earlier, that route density, but when you can cloverleaf whenever your techs are servicing. So how do you go about that then? How do you incentivize techs to do something like cloverleafing after a service?

16:39 Lenny Gray

So here's what I think. I think that 99.9% of technicians just want to be technicians, techs want to tech. And so when you start putting that pressure on them to go out and sell, that's not what they signed up for. 99.9% of the time, once in a blue moon, you might have a technician who's ambitious, wants to make a little bit more money. But the challenge is if you go sell somebody on the doors, you're probably talking about a 15 to 20 minute conversation. How many of those conversations can you have before you're off to your next appointment? And so now you start to, if you have expectations for technicians to do cloverleafing, I don't, I just don't think it works personally. Again, for 99.9% of the people, I would say, don't have your techs do it because they're not wired that way. They're not going to like to do it. They're going to hate their job. They're going to look for ways not to do it. They'll drag their feet on services. They'll become less dependable.

17:30 Lenny Gray

Like I just don't think that's the way to go about, about that. Where we've had techs in the past where it's like, hey, can we just have you, if somebody's out in their yard, you know, next door, can you just go over and talk to them? We give a little script and they're like, we just don't want to do it. And I don't care what the incentive was. I could have said, here's $5,000. If you go talk to five people this week and sell one of them and they wouldn't do it. It was just like, that's just not our thing. So I would be hesitant to put that on, on the technical staff. I think you're talking about two different types of people, people that can go up and knock doors and are more sales oriented. And then people who are more technical, technically sound, they just want a smiling face when they person answered the door, they're happy to see them and they build a good relationship with that customer. Let's keep them in that lane more often.

18:18 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. I actually never thought about it like that, but I guess it is two kind of distinct personality types, or maybe a sales guy is more of an extrovert, you know, Hey, how are you doing? And you know, just endless conversations and just, you know, trying to figure out something where as techs, it's like, you know, they're, they're just kind of in a routine of just, I drive to the house, I service, I drive to the house, I service. It's not like, Oh, I get denied. Someone slams the door and me or the sales guys are like, yeah, bring it on. You know, so it definitely is a different kind of personality type and mentality. So cool. So then companies should just be knocking doors. Like, what exactly is the strategy of knocking doors? Not not the sales script. But how do you approach like going to neighborhoods? And what does that look like?

18:58 Lenny Gray

Yeah, a few things about that, I think that is very important to understand if you're new to the door to door game. Number one is, there's not necessarily a demographic where it works or doesn't work. Like some reps pigeonhole themselves and do, well, I'll only knock in new builds or only knocking in areas with overgrown trees or people have weird, you know, socioeconomic or demographics that they're looking for. I'm like, if you're good, you can just sell on anything. Now, sure, you can sell more in some things than other, you know, but for the most part, like I wouldn't get too caught up on area outside of it's the ghetto, like stay out of the ghetto. Cause we all know, you know, you're not going to have any long-term customers there. So you want to be cognizant of that, but you can pretty much roll into any neighborhood in the suburb and you can just knock doors and start that. I would first start if I were to start all over again and say, okay, maybe I've got a handful of customers or whatever. Maybe I've got a hundred customers. Like you said, maybe you're doing 10 K a month or something like that. And you're relatively small. What I would do is I would take all of my customers and I would go knock on the next door neighbors of every single one of my customers first.

20:02 Lenny Gray

That's the first thing I would do because inherently you are going to have a higher closing ratio, knocking the doors next door to somebody you've already currently serviced and built a relationship with. Because again, that's that social proof that people go kind of keeping up with the Jones's fear of missing out. If you have some big Black Friday discount, which we can talk about in a little bit, how important that is for door to door reps to have an exclusive discount that they can offer. It doesn't have to, it doesn't matter what the dollar amount is at the percentage off. It just has to be something exclusive that they can offer. But if you have that going in, I would target all next door neighbors. And then what you're doing from that point is if you just decide, well, I'll just keep knocking this street because I have enough people that I can point to or say that, you know, we do services for. Then at that point, what I'm doing is I have what I call my three door rule. My three door rule is if you're out knocking doors, if you knock three doors and nobody answers, then I don't care if you see somebody mowing their lawn a block away.

20:50 Lenny Gray

You walk a block and talk to that person before you just keep mindlessly knocking on empty doors because nobody makes money in door to door, knocking on doors. And it always kind of funny to me when reps like companies that track doors knocked in a day, I think are wasting everybody's time because that should never be a measure. It doesn't matter. I've never sold a door by knocking or an account by knocking on a door. You have to be in front of potential buyers. That's really where the first measurement comes in is how many prospective customers am I talking to and engaging in a given day or an hour, you know, a week or whatever you're tracking. If I'm obeying the three door rule, then I'm constantly staying in front of people, which not only gives me a higher probability of success of actually making sales, but it also makes the job a little bit more entertaining. Who wants to just go around, knock on empty doors, not talk to anybody. You're going to get inside your own head and you're going to say, what am I doing out here? This is horrible. This is miserable. Versus if you're talking to people consistently, it's actually kind of fun. It can be entertaining and time just flies by and you're like, holy cow, like where did the day go?

21:51 Lenny Gray

Like I'm just talking to people all day. It's just, it's a much better way to approach that. So next door neighbors, three door rule, those are like right away things that I'd implement if I'm out starting to do.

22:02 Dan Leibrandt

Okay. Awesome. So that's kind of like an adjacent strategy to the cloverleafing, where maybe it's not right after the service, but you know, if you can have a sales rep, go to the houses that we are already servicing or, you know, the nearby houses, then that totally makes sense. And then you can say, Hey, we do pest control for your next door neighbor. You know, Amy, right? They're like, Oh, you know, I love Amy. And then, you know, then they're much more likely to become a customer. So awesome. You were talking about, Oh,...

22:28 Lenny Gray

Sorry. I just want to make one point with that, Dan, just to make sure we're clear on this. I wouldn't ever want for myself or my sales reps to get in the habit of thinking they need a truck to be successful at door to door. They should never, they should never be thinking that. Now I know there's some big hitters that are like, I have a truck following me around and whatever. I've never really had that happen except my first day, you know, starting our company outside of that, I just went and sold where the truck was probably going to be nearby. But that wasn't always the case. It didn't really matter. So I wouldn't get too caught up on the truck actually being there doing the servicing. But the fact that you know, the customer's name next door and you can name drop like you just didn't say, Hey, you know, Amy next door, we've been taking care of them for the last year or so. The reason I'm in the area and you kind of get into your approach there. Now you validated the reason why you're talking to that person because here's the science behind it. And this is something that a lot of people don't really understand about name dropping.

23:19 Lenny Gray

We hear a lot about name dropping and the power of name dropping. My first year knocking doors, I was out with one of our team leaders or VPs or whatever that flew in and we are knocking doors and he kept saying, yeah, you know, the Johnson's down the street. And I was just kind of going along with it like, okay. And then he's like, okay, now it's your turn to knock a few doors. And I'm like, okay, so where did the Johnson's live? Just so I know I'm pointing to the right house. He says, ah, there's a Johnson's out here somewhere. You know that. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like you're lying to people. Like I was just like, it really turned me off. Like I'm not like everything that I do is integrity based. That's a big deal for me. Everything that I teach, because I know door to door has a bad rap. Some people are thinking, oh, you just got to lie, cheat and steal like such and such company or such and such reps. Like that couldn't be further from the truth. You did not need to do that to be successful in door to door. I will tell you that right away. But that said, I learned the power of name dropping is when somebody knows that you know who they know.

24:12 Lenny Gray

When, when there's that familiarity, people will treat you better. People will treat you differently. If I'm just rolling up saying the Johnson's and pointing a block away, even if there are a Johnson's, a block away, that's not going to have the same power as if I were to say, you know, I was just talking to Dan next door. The reason I'm out here, I'm going to get treated differently in a better way more often than not, because they know that I know who they know. And it just changes the whole dynamic. You see this every day, you're on an airplane, and you know, you're sitting next to a complete stranger and you start talking. Maybe they chat you up and you're like, Oh my gosh, you know him and I know him. And you have these connections and all of a sudden you're like best friends on an airplane. You never met before. And the guy sitting next to you is a serial killer, right? For all you know, you have no idea, but it's like, we know the same person. So we're kind of buddies. That's the power of what I call relevant name dropping. Don't just name drop to name drop. Make sure it's relevant.

25:04 Lenny Gray

Make sure the person knows the person your name drop.

25:07 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No. Mutuals are incredibly powerful. I'm actually thinking of one particular to this circumstance. I had Allan Draper on my podcast, Local Marketing Secrets. And I was talking about how I did a podcast with you and immediately I could see his tone and mood change. He's like, Oh, you know, Lenny, like you had Lenny on the podcast. Oh, okay. Awesome. And his whole demeanor change. It's like, it's so crazy how just establishing a mutual like that can, can change everything. So yeah, I'm a, I'm a huge advocate for his, for it as well. And you know, that's part of why I do the podcasting is so I can establish all these relationships with high level people. So it's oh, well, Dan knows Lenny and Dan knows Jonas and Jake and all these different people. Like it's incredibly powerful. So yeah, I absolutely love that. And another thing I want to make sure to cover, which you were talking about is you want to have some kind of exclusive offer. What does that look like?

25:53 Lenny Gray

So in my first book, Door-to-Door Millionaire, I write about, I think it's my first chapter. In fact, it's called Black Friday. We all know this day after Thanksgiving where retail stores all of a sudden turn a profit, right? Being in the red is bad. That's you're losing money. But all of a sudden being in the black is good. You're, you're earning money. And it always baffled me. Like my mom was a big Black Friday shopper. She'd go out and you know, wait in the parking lot of Mervyn's or whatever and try to get a Cabbage Patch doll back in the day or whatever was the hot thing. And it was just like so much fun for her. It was like this event. And it always like, I was so curious about this idea of Black Friday. Like why do people like go line up in the parking lot of a Best Buy in the freezing cold, at least where I'm from in November, right? It's freezing cold if they're, you know, because like, what, like, are these people all crazy or is there something behind this? And if there's something behind it, I always thought, why in the world do retailers wait till November to freaking do a Black Friday?

26:47 Lenny Gray

Like I would be doing Black Friday if I owned a retail store every Friday. It would always be Black Friday, right? For me, but the science behind it, and again, I did a lot of studying and I have a lot of my findings in this first book, but essentially there's three components that I found that make Black Friday create action for people. Like why would people want to wait in the parking lot of Best Buy to save a hundred dollars on a flat screen? And the three elements are for a limited amount of time, for a limited amount of resources or goods or services, whatever, that are offered at a discount. If you can incorporate those three things into your pitch, now you've brought Black Friday to the doorstep. So for instance, so if I'm talking to Dan next door from one of my customers and I do my relevant name dropping, right? And I say, listen, while we're going to be in the neighborhood the next couple of days, my service truck's going to be here. I have this many spots to fill. It doesn't matter how many spots you have to fill by the way.

27:46 Lenny Gray

We found, we've done studies and all this with our reps. I could say one to two spots. I could say eight to nine spots. It just has to be exclusive, right? There's a hundred TVs, flat screen TVs in Best Buy that you're going to get for a discount today on Black Friday. So tomorrow or the next day while my truck's here, I'm filling up five or six spots with the neighbors. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to offer them a huge discount while I'm in the neighborhood. What we found is this, as long as the discount, if the rep is excited about the discount, that's what makes the impact on that person being excited to find out what the discount is. So for example, we had reps one summer and we had one team that did big discount. It was very vague, just kind of, Hey, we're offering a big discount or a huge discount. We had another group say we're offering a hundred dollars off. Another group was $50 off the initial service. One group was saying half off. One group was saying 75% off. And we wanted to find out what drove more people to qualify by asking, well, how much is that? And what we found is it didn't matter which one of the five, it mattered what the energy of the rep was and the excitement of the rep had about what they were going to be able to offer.

28:50 Lenny Gray

Because let's be honest, most people, if you said, what's the price of a pest control service? I think most, I mean, you'd get all over the board, right? People probably just don't know. It's probably not something that keeps them awake at night. Like how much is pest control? So if that's the case, then if I'm not, if I don't have energy or excitement about my discount, whatever it is, then how can I expect that person to mirror me and have excitement about it? They're not, they couldn't care less. So whatever your exclusive discount is, whatever your Black Friday offer is, just make sure it's something that is exclusive to your door to door team. I don't care if it's a dollar difference or whatever, $50 difference, $5 difference. That doesn't really matter. What matters is if I'm a rep, I know that when I knock on a door, I can offer a customer something that nobody else in the company can offer. And if I have that confidence and belief in my Black Friday offer, I'm going to be more excited about it, which is going to get the person I'm talking to more excited about. It's going to get them to qualify and ask, well, how much is it? What do you do?

29:49 Lenny Gray

And start to ask some of those buying questions.

29:51 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. But the offer itself doesn't matter as much. I feel like that really would. Like what do you guys typically see works best? Is it $50 offer? Does it not really matter?

30:00 Lenny Gray

It doesn't matter. So I will tell you when I'm out, and I don't care if I'm doing this for a roofing company, you know, because I consult 33 different home service verticals. So I'm all over garage door company, whatever it is, if I can just go to the door and because I get them all mixed up because I'm all knocking doors all over the place with different things, I always just say we're offering a big discount right now, right? Or a huge discount, or we're doing a massive discount, just something that I'm excited about. And then I worry about the numbers, you know, later once they ask how much that is and that sort of thing. But I get more people asking me how much is it? If I'm just excited about it, if I changed the offer from massive discount to 50% off, like I'm going to get about the same exact results. That's not going to matter. Or even if I said it's $100 off, it's going to be the same results. Or if I say, you know, it's going to be a $50 off discount for the next couple of people, or we're offering a huge discount for a few people on the street, that's going to get the same results. It's going to be worse because I don't have energy and excitement.

30:56 Lenny Gray

I don't have excitement about what I'm able.

30:58 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, so there's a difference between saying the offer versus showing the offer of, hey, you know, $50 off today, or, you know, whatever, I guess your neighbor can get it or, you know, $50 off today, I can't believe we're giving this away. You know, usually it's much more expensive. But you know, if you want to buy it today, you know, we only have it this week. You know, if you want to buy it, then I think this would be an excellent choice for you and your company or you and your your own whatever. I'm not like a door to door sales guy, but I'm just trying to envision that for myself of like, you have to show it. It's not so much about what you say, like of the term, what is it that like 20% of communication is what you say, and then the other whatever, 80% or so. So you probably know that better than me. But the other part is your tonality, your body language, all of that other stuff. So all of that other stuff is much more important than what you're actually saying, right?

31:43 Lenny Gray

Yeah, the nonverbals and metaverbals, like all of those, yeah, those outweigh anything that you're actually saying, it's how you're how you're saying them. And by the way, it reminds me, one of these days, we need to get together and I need to take you on the doors with me. So you can actually see this in real life and go, Oh, wow, this is this is kind of how he does it. Because, because again, I feel like I've had people in my company over the last, you know, 20 whatever years that have no business out knocking doors and making, you know, 25 $35,000 in the summer, and they do it. And it's because they just become like mini me. It's like, let's just do it. Like Lenny teaches us to do it because it works for everybody. It doesn't matter if you're a high performer, a medium performer, low performer. If you incorporate my style and my systemized process, I call it my sales flow process, you'll be successful. No question. And my new books, you brought those up earlier, my pest control books specifically go through the sales flow process. I mean, there is no fluff in these books. There's no stories.

32:36 Lenny Gray

It is here are my scripts and here are my techniques for managing an area and managing my time and all the mental stuff that goes behind being successful on the doors. That's what the two books are about. It's just legitimate legitimately everything that I do and say, uh, all summed up in less than two hours.

32:51 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, that's awesome. No, I'd love to come on the doors with you and see how you do it in person. Cause it's different from reading the book versus actually seeing it in person. Right. Um, yeah, no, I would love that. That'd be cool to do that sometime. And, um, talking about like recent examples and like what you're doing in the door to door space, I want to dive into the Tommy Mello example. So most people in the home services space know Tommy Mello. He has A1 Garage. He's doing like $300 million a year, totally balling, you know, everyone knows about him. He's got like a huge podcast and everything else. So a lot of people look up to Tommy and what I really respect about Tommy, or at least one of the many things is that he constantly surrounds himself with super high level people that are experts in different verticals. So I've had you on my podcast. I've had Dan Antonelli on my podcast. He does the branding for A1, you know, I've had some other people that are helping out with A1. Let's see. I'm kind of blanking on it now, but several people that have helped Tommy Mello and I pull those people specifically because I know that Tommy's done his research.

33:50 Dan Leibrandt

So I also know that because Tommy's picking you, he's picking the number one guy and door to door. So can you talk to me about what was the process of helping A1 Garage? Like did Tommy reach out to you? Did you reach out to him? And what was that like of, did he even have door to door? Or did you have to implement that for him?

34:06 Lenny Gray

Yeah. So Tommy, so this was, this was four and a half years ago now. So we've, we've known each other and been working together now going on five years. And Tommy kind of called me out of the blue and reached out. We have a mutual friend. In fact, Paul Giannamore, a lot of people in the pest control space know Paul. So Paul is a mutual friend. Paul actually wrote the forward of my second book. So I've known Paul for a long time and he knew Tommy and Tommy came to him and he says, Hey, I have, I have some thoughts about doing door to door for my garage door company. Like who should I contact? And Paul's like, there's only one guy you contact and it's Lenny Gray. You give him a call and do whatever it takes to get him down to your, your shop and tell him what you're thinking. And he'll tell you straight up if it's going to work or not. And so Tommy reached out and said, Hey, I want to fly you down to Phoenix. And I just want to talk to you about my idea. And Tommy's like, you know, I love Tom. Like he's like a ball of energy. Like you can't help but get excited about life, you know, being around Tommy. And he took me to the shop and he gave me the tour and he's talking a million miles an hour.

35:00 Lenny Gray

He's just doing the Tommy thing. And I'm just like trying to take it all in. And I'm like, I, you know, he sat in his office for probably three hours after the shop tour and he was telling me all his vision and everything that he's going to do, which he's already doing. It's like, the guys are visionary beyond that. But he basically said, this is, this is kind of what I want to do with door to door. I want to do a door to door marketing program where we put a sticker up by the garage door button and those stickers will pay off over time. Because people when they have the garage door broke, what do they do? They looking at that sticker. They've been pushing that button eight times a day. They look at that sticker and they're going to call that sticker if they have any garage door issues. I said, yeah, that's genius. This is how we're going to put it together. This is a script. This is what we'll do. So for a year straight, Tommy, I was down in Phoenix. I fly from Salt Lake to Phoenix every single week for two or three nights for a year. The only weeks I didn't go down were New Year's and Christmas. That was it. And every other week I was down there putting this program together. We were recruiting all sorts of different people from skate park kids and high school kids to reps that had had a lot of experience.

35:57 Lenny Gray

And I was just trying to really figure this out. And we've got a program now that we're, we're, we're just like crushing it with Tommy. Like we've got 80 some odd reps. Like we just opened it up to like virtually almost everywhere in the company right now. We just started with like two or three offices. We were doing seven figures for them. And now it's like their private equity group is like, we just need gas on this fire. Like get as many reps as you can in all these markets. And so we're just really in growth mode with, with Tommy right now. And it's just, it's been a ton of fun. He is everything you see. I mean, there's some people think he comes across as just fake or he's just not, he's the most authentic, genuine guy. And he's just, he's a powerhouse though. Like I stay, I tell you just a quick funny story. I stayed at his house. He got a new, new place after this acquisition, you know, where half of his company went to private equity and we're at his house. This is man, you know, this mansion. I mean, we're at this house and he's got in his garage, he's got like his workout stuff and he's got this sauna.

36:54 Lenny Gray

It's like a two person sauna. And then he's got like a cold plunge and he's like, let's do some cardio. Like we wake up at like, I don't know, we go to bed. We're talking business, you know, till 11 and 12 o'clock at night. And then we got to get up at five in the morning. Cause we're going to do this workout. Cause he's got all this stuff going on. And so we're sitting there or we're walking, you know, and then he's like, all right, let's get in the, let's get in this, let's get in this two man sauna. And Tommy's big, like he's working out and he's, he's huge. And so we get in this two man sauna and it's like, you know, we're like sardines in there, but we are having that we're laughing and we're just talking about everything.

37:24 Lenny Gray

And then we go cold plunge and we challenge each other. How long can you stay? And we're doing all this. And he's just like, he's just, he's awesome. He's just a great guy. Seriously, a friend of mine, like I could text him and he'll respond within two or three minutes if I text him and he's got, I mean, you see he was on his podcast and his shows and does his stuff. I mean, his, his Rolodex is just packed with like the most successful of all successful people. I think at the night I stayed at his house, that next night, like RFK was staying at his house.

37:51 Dan Leibrandt

What?

37:52 Lenny Gray

Yeah. He's like Tommy just, yeah, he's, he's something else.

37:57 Dan Leibrandt

Well, that just goes to show. I mean, you're, you're his door to door guy. So that's like, that's what I was saying is that it really goes to show of your authority and your social proof, because I know Tommy, everyone knows that Tommy's like crushing it. One of the main things that he does is surround himself with experts. So it really speaks volumes that you're the door to door guy that he trusted. By the way, it also ties back to that mutual connection thing that we were talking about of it was through Paul Giannamore. You know, Paul, he says that you're the number one guy. So Tommy trusts Paul. So then he trusts you. I'm sorry. I like the way we continue to do those tie backs. That's awesome. And to kind of wrap up here, I might want to ask a few more questions, but I want to get clear on what is the actual script that you use when you're at the door. So I feel like a lot of people are kind of unfamiliar with this. Now we've covered that you need an offer. You have to have the right body language, the right tonality, but what does the actual script and the words look like once you're at the door?

38:52 Lenny Gray

Yeah. Let me give you kind of a very high level breakdown of how this goes. So this sales flow process, I refer, I referenced to earlier, there's six steps to it. There's six steps from the second somebody opens the door to where you're walking away with a signed agreement, right? And with an appointment scheduled with a sale made. Those six steps are as follows. You have your initial approach. That's the first 20 to 30 seconds. They open the door. What does that sound like? There's five steps to an effective initial approach. We've gone over some of them here, who you are, why you're there, what you're offering, addressing a common concern, and then having a conversational close. The goal of those first 20 to 30 seconds is literally just to start a conversation with somebody. And what you're trying to do is see if somebody qualifies that step two of my six step sales flow. You go from initial approach to qualifying somebody. Is this person worth my time? In all the sales I've ever made in pest control, I reverse engineered what the commonalities were. And I found that there were several things, five things that were common in any sale I've ever made.

39:50 Lenny Gray

One of these five things, if not multiple of these five things would happen. I'm not going to blow them all because they're in the book and, you know, and for sake of time. But it's, do they have what I'm already selling? So if they have a pest control service, they qualify for my time. They already see the value in pest control, right? So now it's just a matter of me, what am I switch over? I've got a seven step switch over process that I have to share in my book. And it works. Like if you just use this when somebody says, oh, we already used such and such company. It's like, okay, perfect. We'll start with the seven steps and we'll get them switched over, right? So if they've already had pest control service, that's a qualifier. If they're a DIYer, like they already do their own pest control, that's great. I have a six step DIY process. How do we address a DIYer to make sure that we're not trying to take their hobby away? That's what most people want to do, right? They say, oh, you're a do it yourself or let me get this off your hands. Well, this guy who does it himself, that might be his, his like best part of his life, right? Right now, where he's not just sitting in front of the TV dying.

40:42 Lenny Gray

He's like likes to get out and get his fingernails dirty and do his pest control. I don't know. So anyway, I have a six step process with, with DIYers. We also have, if they ask you, how much is it? So that's why we have this Black Friday offer. So we want to almost bait people and say, well, how much is that? Because I will tell you every sell I've ever made, I had to tell them the price at some point. So if I can get them to kind of bait them into it, or I can say, well, like I said, we're offering this huge discount and I smile and nod and I wait and they say, we're good, man. If they've done that a couple of times, they're not going to qualify. I'm out unless they, you know, um, and then the other one is going to be if I observed bugs or they admit to bugs, it's more likely than I've been observed bugs. So if I see a bunch of ant beds in the yard, I'm going to bring that up in the initial approach. I'm going to do it non-confrontationally, right? I don't want to hurt any feelings or, Hey, did you know you had a bunch of ants in the yard? I'm not going to be that, that type of person, but I'm going to do it non-confrontationally and I'm going to do it in a way that, that helps me to qualify them so I can tell them exactly what I'm going to do to help them with that issue that they might be having.

41:37 Lenny Gray

And then the fifth, uh, qualifier is going to be what I call indisputable facts. And I'll just leave those as a little bit of a secret for the book, but there's indisputable facts. There's several of them that if somebody cannot argue as to why they would need a pest control service over time, because maybe it's the age of their home, maybe it's surrounding areas around their house, maybe it's, uh, you know, maybe they have a swimming pool, maybe they have big trees, maybe it's the weather in areas you're in sometimes can, can bring up more bug activity. There's a lot of indisputable facts. So if I can use those as qualifiers as well. So once I've qualified somebody, I know they're worth my time. Then we value build. That's step three. We value build with people and we basically make what we do seem like completely customized to their situation, whether it's their house or they've got dogs or kids, or they've got certain types of bugs going on, whatever it is, we have an award-winning value build. It's got to be no more than two minutes, preferably around a minute and a half, but you have a value build that basically makes it impossible for them to turn down what you're, what you're offering.

42:36 Lenny Gray

After we value build, we close and we use a close after the close. Inherently, what's going to happen is you're going to get people that have concerns. There's, I call them the magnificent seven. There's seven main concerns you're going to hear in pest control sales. Leave me your card. We already have it. I need to talk to my wife. We don't have money, right? We go, we go through all seven of those. These are all in my books, right? It's like, I go through every little step that I do with all seven of these concerns so that you overcome concerns and you close again and you continue to do that cycle till finally somebody says, okay, yeah, we'll go ahead and sign up for tomorrow afternoon. That sounds great. Then I have a 13 step solidifying the sale process to make sure the sales that you make receive service and are going to be the lifelong customers. And so we go over these 13 points. My third year selling for Orkin, I was in Jacksonville, Florida. I sold about 700 accounts. It was 674 accounts to be exact. And by the time the backend payments came out early the next year, so six months later, I got paid for 668 of my 674 accounts.

43:34 Lenny Gray

So less than 1% cancel, which is pretty rare in door to door, let alone in just any pest control sale. And I outlined exactly what I did with every customer with these 13 steps to make sure your sales are solid. So that in a nutshell, that's my six step sales flow process from start to finish. There's sub steps within each step. But if you can learn that and anybody can learn that, then you've created a monster. You'll know who's worth your time to talk to and who's not. You'll know how to close more deals, obviously help your company grow and be rock stars.

44:05 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. That makes sense that we probably can't cover all of your 30 years of knowledge in the podcast. So yeah, talk to me a little bit about the books then of should people read all four books? What exactly are each book about? How are they different?

44:19 Lenny Gray

Let me talk to you about the books. And I want to talk to you about a bunch of other resources that I have. Because that's the thing about me is I do not, I have so much content, like so much content. I have a weekly newsletter. I have a sales tip of the week. And if you subscribe to my newsletter, you go to LennyGray.com. It's free, right? And you just get a sales tip of the week for me. And that's really the newsletter. So it's just more information I can give to elevate the door to door industry. That's what I'm all about. But the book specifically, like I said, there's an orange one and a blue one. If you go to Amazon and type in my name or Door-to-Door Millionaire, you're going to come up with a white book, a green book, an orange book, and a blue book. I try to make it simple because we're peasant. That's right. So the white book and the green book are more general door to door. Like I have, like I said, I have clients in 33 different home service verticals. They all read those too, but the pest control people, this is where my family, my pest control piece, because I've known you for 30 years, right? I wanted something specific for just the pest control industry.

45:12 Lenny Gray

So the orange one and the blue one are specifically for pest control people. I would use those anybody, even your technicians, anybody who touches the sales process in your organization, your CSRs, maybe you have a commercial team going B2B. They need to understand the concepts in this book because I outlined all those steps and sub steps in the sales flow process ad nauseam and those ones. I have an app out. People call me crazy because it's a free app and it's on the App Store, Google Play. It's called Ask Lenny. And the reason I created the Ask Lenny app is because I know as a business owner, if I have to answer the same question from different reps or the same rep every other day, I'm pulling my hair out and I'm hating my life. And so to me, I just wanted to alleviate not only from the business owner standpoint of having to answer the same questions, but also from the sales reps. Like sometimes the sales rep reaches out and they don't hear from their team lead because their team leads out training somebody else or knocking themselves.

46:07 Lenny Gray

So the idea was Ask Lenny, just ask me. There's a search function. I go over all the stuff and it's just like, this is a great way for the reps to get answers that they want immediately or that they need immediately rather than have to wait for their manager. So it's kind of serves a purpose to help reps get answers quicker, but to help business owners buy back some of their time so that they're not just answering a bunch of the same questions from their reps day in and day out.

46:30 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, that's awesome. I love how much free value you're giving and even the books, I mean, I don't know, you might pay like 10, 20, $30 for the book. It's like, that is for all of your industry expertise and experience. Like, you know, like you're paying such little amount of money for such great quantity of value. So I can't preach about you or your books enough. I think they're absolutely awesome. I really respect what you're doing in the space. And I guess just a final question here is, so you have two pest control books that you released in December, so less than six months ago. What is the difference between those two?

47:01 Lenny Gray

So one is the orange one is just my scripts. So I go through the sales flow process, not just like the high level that we just went through, but exactly what I say and how I say. And then the blue one is more the technical side, like where we talked about the three door rule or how to manage your time, how to knock and be effective in the mornings and afternoons versus in the evenings or after dark. What do you do after dark weather, you know, how to handle weather situations, what's the most effective things to do with that. So it's more the tactical pieces of what I do to be successful. It's not just about what you say, right? That's super important, but it's also how you do it. And so I wanted to kind of separate those two books into two different ways to learn. Again, here's the scripts. Here's exactly what to say, but here's how to do it to make sure that now that you're saying the right things, you're maximizing your potential all the way around.

47:49 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, awesome. So every pest control owner should definitely have those two books and we'll wrap up the podcast here. Where else can people find you, Lenny? So I know you're on LinkedIn. I think Facebook, where can people find you and learn more about you, learn more about you and connect with you.

48:01 Lenny Gray

Yeah. I think my website's a great resource. Like I said, my website has a ton of free stuff on it. The newsletter, you can sign up there. It's free. Just free, free, free. If you like free, go to LennyGray.com and you'll see, I mean, I offer free webinars. I do sales training events on a monthly basis. The webinar has been a great one for business owners because business owners come into that webinar and I do teach them the high levels of how do you recruit, how do you hire, how do you compensate and how do you train your door-to-door team to be successful? I mean, I think the heading of my website is I help home service companies build successful door-to-door programs. Like that's what it's all about. So the webinar just kind of piggybacks off that. I actually even offer a free 15 minute consult call. Anybody wants to just jump in and ask me questions for 15 minutes and talk to me about whatever and ways I can help them in that time. I do that every week as well. I carve out some time to do that. So my website, yeah, all the social media channels, I'm all over that stuff.

49:01 Lenny Gray

But my website is probably the best way to find out as much as you can about what I have out there and what you can take advantage of, whether it's free or like I said, the books are super low cost. Nobody's ever bought my books and like, that wasn't worth that $25 or whatever they're selling for now. It's like the ROI is inevitable. It's like you can go make one sale from all the nuggets that I share in the book and you're already 10 times what the book costs. So yeah.

49:24 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Okay, so cool. All those links will be in the description, the website, social media, the books and everything else. So yeah, cool. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Lenny. This is the second time interviewing you. And again, you're so generous with your time of like the consults, the newsletter, all this stuff. I am so grateful to now this is my second time interviewing you and I might interview you again in the future. So don't, don't, don't know.

49:47 Lenny Gray

There's a lot to say and I love what you're doing for the industry too. Dan, I got to give you a huge shout out. Like you're a new kid on the block and you are making some serious splashes in the wave pool right now and in a good way. And so I've got to give you props as well for doing what you're doing and the level. Anything that elevates an industry for me, whether it's the door to door industry, the pest industry, people who elevate the industry, it's like they say, you know, high tides raise all ships.

50:13 Lenny Gray

Like that's what you're doing. And I love it.

50:15 Dan Leibrandt

I really appreciate that Lenny, especially coming from you. So again, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been awesome and we'll stay in touch.