233. How to Triple Your Revenue with a 5-step Sales Process

0:00Brian grew up in Detroit in a family of plumbers. And like a lot of people in the trades, he believed that if you worked hard enough and mastered your craft, the money would follow. But early on, he noticed something frustrating. The highest paid guys weren't always the best technicians. They were the ones who knew how to talk to customers. At 24, he went to a sales bootcamp that changed his career, taking him from plumber to general manager at a major home service company, and eventually into running sales training bootcamps for blue collar workers across the country. Today, he teaches plumbers, HVAC techs, and contractors how to close more jobs without feeling pushy.

0:37I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to Helpful Podcast, where we give you actionable strategies that you can take to start or grow your own business. I am so excited to welcome Brian to the show today to talk about all things sales. It's going to be a great conversation. So, Brian, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I'm glad to be here, man. Yeah, well, glad to have you here. And let's baseline for the audience. They're hearing about Brian for the first time. What exactly do you do now? My day job, if you will, or my main thing is I'm the general manager and partner in Benjamin Franklin Plumbing of Scottsdale.

1:12So I run that business with an amazing leadership team and a phenomenal group of technicians and support staff. And then I'm the host of the Waste No Day podcast, which is a show that just hit five years old that was started primarily to bring a kind of sales and communication awareness to the skilled trades and home services. And then through that, we run some sales training boot camps once a quarter around the country. And then we have an online training platform as well, which is basically that in short form videos in a community of 350 owners, managers, technicians, CSRs, dispatchers, equity partners and whatnot, actually all over the world.

1:56There's like six, eight countries in there now. That's just running kind of like a Facebook group, but private 24-7 of people all over the world hyping each other up and overcoming objections and posting live roleplay videos of themselves. And this conversation is going to be a lot about sales. So I'm very excited for that. Give us your revenue just so like the audience knows, you know, you're not no Joe Schmo that doesn't know sales. You do know sales. So give us like an estimated revenue, what you guys did in like 2025 or what you'll do in 2026. Yeah, I'll say I joined the team at the end of 2023.

2:30They were tracking 1.9 million. We ended up doing 2.4. And then in 24, we did 4.8. And then 25, we did 6.2. And we have, I believe we have added a total of four employees in that time. Yeah. Yeah. So, but what one thing we did was we tripled the average ticket. So we went from$506 to closing out 2025 at just under 1600 for running just a little bit more calls, but we're getting triple the revenue out of those calls. So the major thing we've done so far is it seems like a juxtaposition, but it's not. We've tripled the amount of revenue we get out of a call while taking our Google score from the one we had when I got there at like low fours to we got a new shop in Scottsdale two years ago.

3:24And we have, we're just about to hit a thousand reviews at 4.9 average. So we've actually cranked up our customer satisfaction and customer service while tripling the amount of money we're collecting per job to show that you can do both. And you will do both because as your service toward the people that you serve goes up, you're going to easily get more money for the transaction. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about going from a$500 ticket to now a$1 ,600 ticket. That is now a little over triple that. What changed? How do you go from serving a$500 clientele to a$1 ,600 ticket? How does that change your sales process?

4:01That's what I'm really curious about because that's what I'm also building for my own company. We raise prices like 1.6x to 2x essentially from last year or this year. So how did that change like how you guys approach clients and like talk with prospects? Sure. Yeah. So we're part of a phenomenal network and this team was already part of that network, which is the Authority Brands Group, which owns the Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, One Hour Heating, Cooling, Mr. Sparky and 16 other brands. So they have frameworks of how to, you know, how you could buy into the home services and with no previous knowledge and start building on something.

4:36I think the one thing that this team was lacking was a very real structure of how to walk into a call and go from never meeting you before to leaving with$15 ,000 and a whole bunch of new equipment installed and that person being a raving fan. Because we need all of that, right? From first step to last step. And then we need referrals and all the other thing to keep our marketing costs down. So probably shorten that answer up a little bit, a process, like a five step is mine, the GoPro selling process where everything is not scripted for a technician because you're not going to deliver it the same way as me.

5:15And then you have mechanics. We're talking about technical, mechanical people who were not all charismatic by nature. That part actually takes quite a bit of training. But if we can just give them a pretty easy to follow five step process of how to go from beginning to end, that works. And that's the challenge with a lot of sales training in our industry is it is built in a lab by really smart people with pens and paper who have never actually run service calls before. Well, this one's different. Let's talk about the five-step process. And of course, like if someone's hearing this for the first time, you know, they're getting started with their company.

5:51They want to sell, you know, high ticket,$1 ,600, whatever it is. Five-step process. Highlight it at like a very high level of like what goes into like a successful sales process. Nothing I do is original to me, I'll say, because I've spent a little over 20 years studying. It started as Tom Hopkins and Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar, and it's evolved into the newer people like Grant and Andy Elliott and Jeremy Miner and Dr. Robert Cialdini and Chris Voss. And I try to take what I can from each one of them and then mold it into what I could use in my plumbing truck where I ran calls for so many years.

6:24So the beginning would be what like Sandler training would call the upfront contractor. Tom Hopkins would call the intentionality statement, right? This part scripted. So when you get up to the door, exactly what you say in the beginning, this is actually a script. There's a little fill in the blank dependent on the person, but most of it's scripted. And then from there, you go to how I'm getting to go take a look at everything, right? If you're in the home services, you know, we have like pest control companies and windows and doors and roofing. You don't want to just walk over to the spot where they have an issue, right?

7:01You want to assess the entire system as a whole. No matter what part of the home services you're in, you need to see the entire system. So if you're a roofer and there's a roof leak over in the living room, you don't want to just look at that. You need to get up top and inspect the entire roof. And it's no different in plumbing and electrical. So we figure out how to get to that point. And then you build your assessment. And then you need to get to the point where you're going to present all of the options. And you have got to present options. Because as some, I don't remember who, but someone said one option is an ultimatum.

7:34So you want a yes or no, right? So I want a higher percentage chance that it's a yes. So it's a minimum three options. So we present options. And then the really tough part comes next where the R in GoPros request ownership, ask for the sale, right? The National Association of Sales Professionals, they released like a survey with Richard Fenton, who's the co-author of Go for No, which is one of my favorite sales books of all time. It's like an hour and a half read where they said that 85 % of sales presentations in the United States, this was just done in 2025 and without a prospect client ever being asked to buy.

8:13And that one, you know, that's a, that's a gut punch because they're talking about insurance sales and like car sale and high level real estate agents, right? Trained salespeople. That's not your HVAC technician. So if it's only 15 % in pros, imagine what it is in one of my plumbers. Are you ready to launch, grow, and scale a business? Inside the Upflip Academy, you'll get a complete roadmap to shortcut your success with 25-plus step-by-step programs taught by active business owners, not gurus, who share their step-by-step blueprints, plus ongoing live workshops, skills training, a business idea database, and community to share resources and celebrate your wins.

8:58Click the link in the description below to join the Elphab Academy today and start surrounding yourself with the people and tools that can change everything for your business. I wanna ask, what does that look like though? Like to actually ask someone for buys, it's simply saying like sign the contract here because I was listening to a book. I don't know what book it was because I only listened to like half of it, but it was an audio book where like it was, it basically said the same thing. The number one thing you have to do in a sales call is like ask for signature. But like, how do you do that?

9:24like the right way. There are a lot of great ways to do that. We actually did a waste no day episode called exactly how to ask for the sale. And I've had most of the sales trainers we've talked about and authors on the show now, and I get most of their cell phone numbers. So I texted all these guys, Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins, Chris Voss, all these dudes, how exactly do you ask for the sale? And then we went through eight different sales trainers, exact language on it. And then we ended with mine, which was only built for the home services. So the exact way we do it is to say, we push the three options for, we give a little explanation on each one.

10:00And I would say, Ryan, hypothetically speaking, if you had to choose one of these today, which one do you think you'd lean towards? And that's just going to funnel down to one of the three, right? And now I get to eliminate two because without any resistance, because I didn't ask you to buy it, I just asked you to nail down one and you would say, I'd probably lean toward the middle one. And then I say, that's a great option. More and more of the people we serve are going with an option just like this one, which is a Robert Cialdini thing, right? From influence. So I say that and then I explain exactly what delivery would look like.

10:36You know, I have most of that stuff in my truck. What I don't have, I'll get an apprentice to drop off while I get started. Man, I'll have your system back up and running and be out of your hair before you guys sit down to dinner. Does that sound good? And I just raise the eyebrows, crack a smile and nod. And I won't stop nodding for 45 minutes. I'll just sit there nodding with the smile cracked. And when I started that, actually asking for the sale, because a mentor of mine who kicked my butt every month, I said, bro, Mike, his name's Mike Bissell. I said, you destroy me every month. What would you do if you were me?

11:08How would you catch you? And he said, and he gave me a lot of compliments. He says, Brian, you're a great guy. People like being around you. You got a million dollar smile. I don't have any of these things, but I will always beat you because I ask everyone to buy and you don't ask anyone. Mike's never done a ride along with me. Like, so I said, I said, I ask everyone on one to buy. What do you mean? And he said, all right, sell me a whole house filtration system. So I turned my notepad around. I did pretend water test and presented the options. I slide the options forward. I sit back like I do at the kitchen table.

11:43I nod and he goes, that was awesome. That's like way better than I even thought it would be. Are you going to ask me to buy it? And I was like, oh, I never asked a question and I never did. And the majority of our technicians in the home services and salespeople in general get to a point where we've done a phenomenal presentation and we've really built some belief in our product, but we don't understand that one, the client needs leadership here. We as buyers in that moment need leadership, right? And we don't necessarily understand what delivery looks like. So we get confused. We sit there, you know, my wife looks at me and I look at her and we look back, we look at the rep, the reps just sitting there with like deer in the headlights and we go, yeah, why don't you leave your card on the table?

12:31We'll stick it to the fridge. We'll give you a call back in a couple of weeks. And yeah, you'll never give him a call back. That's, that's the No, dude, we got four kids and a dog and two cats and three businesses. Like, please. Well, no, we got a lot going on. Yeah, I want to ask. So asking for the sale is a big part for it. So you present all the options and you say, hypothetically, like, what would you do here? And it's like, this is what delivery looks like. That's a great option. Yeah, compliment as the authority on the system, which is me or you and you're that compliment of that's a great option feels good to me as the client.

13:05And then you say, as Dr. Cialdini said on our show, he said, don't say most of because that sounds like I might be joining a dying trend. Say more and more of the people we serve because now I'm part of a growing trend and we don't want to be on the back end of a trend. Dude, that's really good advice. Yeah, he's a killer. Do you ask specifically for signature though? Or like, I know you're giving the recommendation, you're flashing the smile, but like actually asking for, maybe I just totally missed that. But like, do you specifically say, will you sign like right now? So if you're sitting there, you got the tablet or the paper, I'd probably still be presenting on paper, frankly, if I was still in a truck, but whatever you do.

13:45And I say, does that sound good? Now, you know, when I ask that question, if you say, yes, it sounds good, we're agreeing to the order, right? And as soon as you say, yeah, you look at your wife, she looks back at you. This is what always happened at the kitchen table. She puts her arm through yours and then I just know it's a done deal, right? And I go, yeah, yeah, that does sound good. And I go, awesome. If you'll just give me your endorsement right there on that line, we'll go ahead and get started. Endorsements good. Yeah, I'm a Tom Hopkins student. One of the crowning achievements of my life was when he came on our show So because the first, you said it in the beginning, the first sales thing I ever attended was a Tom Hopkins bootcamp here in Scottsdale, which is why we call the Waste No Day Bootcamp, the Waste No Day Bootcamp.

14:29I tell people all the time, if Tom was still doing his, I wouldn't have one. I'd just be telling people it is, right? So yeah, so he had his list of, he called it the dirty words in sales. We call them the cortisol producing words in sales and sign signature is a known cortisol producing word in a sales or negotiation set. So we don't say sign. We don't say contract. We say paperwork. We don't say any of these words that make you think attorney. That's very, very like actual stuff there. I want to ask about like more communication stuff because you've talked about changing closing jump rates from like 45 % to like 90%.

15:10like that can like triple your income like overnight. What are some other like key negotiation things or like what did you exactly like change? Is it that five-step process or I wanna hammer home like communication because you sound like a communication expert here. There are a lot of tiny nuance things that go into the communication piece like these words that have no business being in the presentation or certainly at the close. But there are also some higher level psychological things like technicians being so just crippled by shyness where these are very mechanically minded, usually, you know, young men who have, and it's way worse now than it's ever.

15:49I came up in the 90s, right? I mean, I didn't have Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. So I had none of this, right? I just had school and maybe a Nintendo 64 or whatever. No, but I was out in the world meeting people and having conversations. And now they're not really doing that. And then we're giving them a bucket of tools and dropping them off on a front porch and saying, go be a communicator. And this is where we're having such a struggle in the industry, moving to a communication or sales focus is these guys are walking into the home and they they're struggling to even introduce themselves. And it's a real thing.

16:26I had it, too, even though I didn't grow up in the same culture. Like I remember going to my first call in Las Vegas where I had a little sales training and I I'm looking. I grew up in a one bedroom, second floor apartment in Southwest Detroit with a single mom. And I walk up to this house and the door looks like it's like 200 feet tall and probably weighs two tons of wood. And I remember thinking the door to this house costs more than the apartment I grew up in. Like no question about it. It's a mansion. And then I knock. I can't even hear the knock because it's so heavy. And the guy opens the door and he's like a rich guy, you know, is very wealthy and established and I just fall apart.

17:04I can't even have a conversation with him because I just feel like I didn't know it at the time, but like imposter syndrome. Oh, for sure. In the teeth. And I felt like he's better than me. He's smarter than me. I have no business trying to like sell him anything. And I wasn't prepared for this. Right. So these kind of things like we have the core personality profiles is part of bluecollarcloser.com, the training where it's I studied DISC for 10 years, DISC personality profiles, right? And Myers-Briggs and I don't know, five or six other ones. And I found the one that makes the most sense to what we do in the home services is DISC.

17:43It's the easiest to recognize quickly, the easiest to know which one I am, and then how to communicate with each of the four from my profile, right? Challenge was I would train technicians on it and I'd ask them three months after training, I go, Ryan, which profile how were you on disk? And they would go, what's the S stand for again? They couldn't keep it, right? So I restructured them to CORE, C-O-R-E. And it's the CEO, the optimist, the reassurer, and the engineer. And these are the four basic profiles of client that you'll see. They're also the basic profiles of who you are as a salesperson.

18:20And then we have a AI generated person for each one. So the chief's name is Nate Noper, and he's just a dead serious looking, guy. You know, the optimist is Sonny McSmiles and he has a Hawaiian shirt on and the reassurer is Kathy Comfort. She's a kindergarten teacher. And then the engineer is Calvin Calculus, just your typical nerdy engineer type, right? And then you take 120 question assessment inside the group and it emails you back what you are and then exactly how to communicate with each one in their own language from your profile. So this is part of what you, you know, long story, but part of what you asked of how we've managed to turn the ticket average.

19:04Well, it's a huge world communication, right? And then getting 20 year olds that I'm getting ahold of and we'll teach them plumbing, but also how to be a communicator. It's like breaking them back down to zero communication skills at all, which isn't that far of a jump really. And then building them up into this high level communicator, but we'll send them to a grocery store to have conversations about water treatment with people shopping. Like a real homework assignment might be to get yourself a call set by someone at a gas station today. Wow. I don't want them to go sell water treatment necessarily, right?

19:40I'm not worried about a conversion. I'm worried about Ryan having to go have this weird conversation with a total stranger and nothing more than I hope you get rejected it as hard as possible and realize that you did not die. You ate a hard rejection sandwich and came out the other side just fine. It sounds like it's like a lot of like rejection therapy is like kind of what I'm hearing, just like getting used to like saying no or having people say no, no, no to you. And that's just like, it's part of sales. Like you're going to get told no more times than yes, basically all the time. So yeah, I feel like it's like building that muscle of like hearing no and like being okay with no and like knowing like having it punched in the face they just like told me no i feel like that is a big step for salespeople i interviewed a mormon just last week oh gosh he tells me he's lds and i'm like sweet like inside i'm like yes because these guys have to do these two-year mission trips where they're knocking on strangers door to present their their spiritual philosophy and people are slamming the door in their face right there to F off, boom, slam the door.

20:47And I know that those guys have the thickest skin on the planet and the rejection therapy course, as you call it, is going to be very fast compared to most of us. I want to talk about specific levers you pulled. We've talked about a lot before the show about like influence, the book, the psychology of persuasion. We've talked about like never split the difference with Chris Voss before the show as well. Is there a favorite like psychology lever you pull when you are selling to people? I would love to hear that. I don't know if there's a favorite, although scarcity and newer ones we're interjecting more and more right now would be persuasion, which I have a great story about using.

21:23Pre-suasion is just persuasion, but beforehand. And Dr. Robert Cialdini, who wrote Influence, which is top three best books on sales and communication ever written, he wrote a second book called Pre-suasion, which is the law of reciprocity in a nutshell, right? And that's probably my favorite one. So we have this little blue plastic dog bone that says Benjamin Franklin Plumbing and has our phone number on it. And it has a key chain loop, the little hook one, and it deposits little blue dog poop bags. So all it is, is just a little container of baggies. And we tell clients, if you run out, let me know, we'll swing back by and give you another pack.

22:01But the way we hand it out is, so I was going to meet Dr. Robert Cialdini, who's is, or maybe was, I think he's retired now, but the head of psychology at Arizona State University and author. And I was going to meet him for breakfast before he came on our show down in Tempe, Arizona. And I brought one of these with me. And so I did it to him the exact way that we do it to our clients, right? So we meet, I stick my hand out, introduce myself. He introduces himself. I said, Dr. Cialdini. And he's just like, call me Bob. I'm like, I can't, but I'll try. I'll try. All right. I've been reading this book for two decades.

22:36So I'm like, okay, Bob, do you have a dog? And he says, no, no, we don't have a dog. I said, do you know anyone who has a dog? And he said, yes, my granddaughter has a dog. I said, awesome. Do we like our granddaughter? And he says, a hundred percent love my granddaughter. And I said, I got a gift for her. And I said, you might not know it if you don't walk the dog, but here's something she runs into pretty often. You grab the dog, you throw the leash on, You head out the door, right? You get down the street. You're in front of three neighbors that you like. And all of a sudden, the dog squats down on someone's grass and starts to do his or her business.

23:13And you go, crap. Pardon the pun. I didn't bring any bags, right? So now you're looking at the, you're like, I'm going to come back for that. I'll be right back, right? And you're like scurrying out, humiliated because you forgot the baggies. Well, no more because you'll just clip this onto the leash. And anytime she puts the leash on the collar, she has her bags. And this was crazy because we're standing in the middle of a restaurant. We hadn't even sat down yet. And he starts like Dr. Chaldini starts choking up a little bit. And I was like, are you OK? And he said, yeah, you know, I just pictured her being like humiliated like that.

23:46And it crushed me. And he said, and now I feel bad for saying that we don't have a dog because that dog is a member of our family. And he said, most people that I meet for the first time who are fans of the book give me a gift in terms of persuasion. This was the best one I've seen yet. And then I asked him at the end of breakfast, if we get a pick together and he says, yeah, sure. And then he says, let's hold the dog. So yeah, so I got a pick with Bob and this little Benjamin Franklin plumbing dog bone right in the middle of the pick, which is pretty fun. But that's what we do on the front porch as we meet a client is that exact thing.

24:24Do you have a dog? And if they say no, do we know anyone as a dog. Yes, my brother. Do you like your brother? And hopefully they say yes, right? Well, here's the gift and here's why. And I don't know that our conversion rate changed as a result, but I know that if you have Eddie from Benjamin Franklin Plumbing over on Monday, and then six months later, you have Tim from one of our competitors over, your experience with us in the beginning was 10 times more memorable. The lesson there is the law of reciprocity. I imagine that's what we're going for with that one. Yeah, you did for me. Now I feel compelled to do for you.

25:01And in most cases that do for you is going to be, I'm looking at three options at the end instead of saying no, maybe I'll just pick the lowest one. Yeah, I think that's like one of the most powerful things that someone could easily deploy early on in their sales process, just some like law of reciprocity type of work. So lots of people there. Yeah. And we talked about this before the show is I'm, I have relationships with a lot of these people that I, as a high school dropout recovered drug addict, former gangbanger from Detroit with no dad, I'd have no reason to have all the relationships I have, right.