How do I approach 2 systems with 1 still working?

How Do I Overcome the “We Still Have One System Working” Objection?

One of the biggest mistakes customers make is confusing “still working” with “healthy.”

In today’s Question of the Day, I tackle a common objection in dual-system homes: one system is down, but the customer doesn’t want to move forward because the other system is still heating or cooling the home.

I use the analogy of an airplane flying on one engine:

•  Yes, it can still function 
•  But all the pressure now shifts to the remaining engine 
•  And nobody wants to operate that way for long 

In this episode, we cover:

•  Why one remaining system often leads to more runtime, more stress, and the next breakdown
•  How to shift the conversation from “Can we survive today?” to long-term comfort and reliability 
•  Questions you can ask to create awareness without creating fear 
•  How to reframe the decision around comfort, efficiency, future risk, and peace of mind

This episode isn’t about pressuring customers. It’s about helping them think beyond the immediate moment and understand the bigger picture.

Because sometimes the real question isn’t “Can the home still heat and cool?”
It’s: “At what cost?”

Have a Question? - Submit your questions to chrish@nexstarnetwork.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the question of the day. Today's question is from Matt in New York. And Matt asks, What are the main things you would focus on today for a sales team to be successful? Great question. Your question gets me thinking about the last couple of years and like as AI tools began to come out. I will admit, I was in a bit of a panic that processes were going to change and they were going to change at a speed that we had never seen before. And so I was in a panic because I needed to be, I needed to be cutting edge. I needed to be on the front of this thing, right? Like I coach sales teams. I can't be the one finding out after the sales teams, right? So I need to be on the cutting edge so that the teams that I coach can be on the cutting edge. And so we're we often ask this question like, hey, what's the new thing? How do I stay relevant? How do I stay cutting edge? And that is a great question to ask. You should be asking that question because you you should constantly be changing, constantly adapting. Because if you're not changing, you're dying. But the question that I don't think we ask enough is what are the habits that stand the test of time? What are the things that I would focus on today that have always been those things that are gonna make a difference in my team? And I I would start, I'll start by this. I'll ask this question. Do you know what the number one selling cookie was 50 years ago? The answer is the chocolate chip cookie. That was the number one selling cookie 50 years ago. Do you know what the number one selling cookie is today? It's the chocolate chip cookie. It's still the chocolate chip cookie. 50% of all cookies baked are chocolate chip cookies. You go to the Minnesota State Fair, the Great Minnesota Sweat Together, and they have a stand there. It's called Martha's Cookies. It's famous because you for $20, they give you a bucket, a literal bucket of chocolate chip cookies. They don't have other cookies, they have chocolate chip cookies. And this bucket, it's overflowing. They heap it up, they stack it up on top of that bucket. So it's a bucket, but it's like heaping out the top. They do this because people love chocolate chip cookies. They don't do this with other cookies. So the number one selling cookie today is still chocolate chip cookies. Now there's different versions, right? Like now we have, you know, protein chocolate chip cookies or vegan chocolate chip cookies or uh carb-free chocolate chip cookies, right? So I mean there's different, but they're still chocolate chip cookies. Now, this cookie example, tie this back to my my panics about AI. If you fast forward, now everyone has AI. Pretty much everyone. Everyone uses AI in some kind of capacity, right? And and so when everyone is special, no one is. They watch uh the movie, we have Disney Plus, of course, right? And they watch the movie The Incredibles, and there's that villain in the Incredible syndrome, and and his goal is through his technology that everybody can be super. And he even says, when everyone's super, no one is. Well, that's really what AI did, right? Like now, pretty much everybody uses AI in in some capacity, right? And so pretty much everybody's special now, and so therefore nobody is special anymore. And so that that fad is kind of past. And what I what I found was really what we have now is we have a lot of data, data that supported what we always what we always said, right? We knew if you have a poor process, it will it will equal poor closing, poor average sale. We knew that, right? Like we didn't know exactly how much, but we we knew that. Now with AI, I can really dig into that data. Like you can look at hundreds of thousands of calls and you can see trends. For example, that if you're not setting a visual agenda, it will impact your closing by about 30%. So salespeople that use a visual agenda at the beginning close 30% higher than those that don't use a visual agenda. Another example would be uh your adherence to the process. Like if you're adhering to about 40% of the process, but going off the rails on the other 60%, versus someone who adheres to the process 90% of the time, that will equal about a double, double closing, double average sale, double the performance. I know that because I can look at the AI tools and the data that it extracts and it shows me those kind of trends. But now that everybody has AI, everybody knows that. And so now my coaching calls are spent answering this question. Now, what do I do about it? So there's six things. There are six things that I coach teams on every day, every single day. There's at least one call that I'm coaching these six things on. And the companies that do these six things, they get great results. They're top of class. And it's not because they're following some newfangled tool or AI thing. It's because they do these six things, these six things that have stood the test of time. They were just important 50 years ago as they are today. And the teams that struggle, well, they don't. They don't do these six things and they get poor results because of it. And so it's pretty simple, really. As we dig into this, you're gonna see it's pretty simple. That there's nothing rocket science here, but it's just not easy to execute. It's simple, but not easy. And you know how to do these things. Like, you may not know all the logistics. I can help you with that. We know how to do it, it's just it's hard. It's hard to do it. It's like six-pack abs, right? Like, we all know how to get six pack abs. I know I have to eat right, and I know I have to work out daily, and like I I pretty much know how to get six pack abs if I want six pack abs. The problem is I spend too much time at Martha's uh cookies when I go to the Minnesota State Fair. So let's dive in. The six things, right? What are the six things the teams are doing to get a leg up on everybody else? The first one is ride-alongs. We're doing ride-alongs. When I go visit a company, first thing I do is I ride along because I know it's the quickest way to see what's working and what's not working. And when I go visit a company, let's face it, I got three, four, five days max to like figure out what the opportunities are and do something about it to pay for myself, right? Because there's a cost to have me come out. I gotta figure out how to pay for myself within that week there. Because if I don't, nobody's gonna want to have me come out. And so, quickest way I know of, ride along. You'll see exactly what's working and you'll see exactly where your opportunities are. Now, there's gonna be some individual opportunities, so focus on the individual in those in those situations. Just coach them one-on-one. But there's gonna be things you see the whole team work at and struggle with. So there's gonna be the whole team struggling with spouse objection. There's gonna be the whole team didn't do a visual agenda, right? Like those are the things that then become my trainings. So I'm riding along weekly, I have to train weekly. So every single week I'm having a training. That's the second thing. Weekly training, not a sales meeting, not a dramatic reading of the numbers, but a training. And that training is set up on one thing. One thing my team is gonna be able to leave that training and do in the field differently than they're doing now. So if they're not setting a visual agenda, that's gonna be the training. We're gonna train on how to do a visual agenda. When they leave, they'll be able to do a visual agenda. And so I have to train weekly. Now, the third thing I have to do is I have to have one-on-ones, weekly one-on-ones. My weekly one-on-one is where I'm checking in. That's where I'm holding the team accountable to the things we trained on. Because I rode along, I saw opportunities, I trained on one opportunity, and now I'm checking in. How's that thing going? Are we actually applying it into the field? There's really only two answers you're gonna get. Yes, I'm applying it in the field, or no, I'm not. And if it's no, I'm gonna dig into that. And there's really only two reasons they wouldn't be applying it. One would be I don't know it well enough. Great, we can train on that. And two would be, I think this is stupid. And that's a whole different conversation we're having then. So my one-on-one is where I'm checking in. And then that leads back to the ride-alongs. Now, the next ride-along I do next week, I should see that thing in the field. So that way I know that adoption is taking place. Because if I'm training and it's not adopting into the field, I'm just wasting my time. So these first three ride-alongs, training, one-on-ones, these are done weekly. Consistently, weekly, we're doing those three things. But just like a great infomercial, wait, there's more. There's some things we're doing daily in addition to this as well. The next thing would be debriefs. After every single call, I'm doing a debrief. That's where I'm checking in with the salesperson. How did that call go? And I'm just asking a couple simple questions here. Did it sell? Is the first question, right? If it, if it did, rah-rah, way to go, I'm your biggest cheerleader. If it didn't, let him digging into that. Okay, well, what went well? Uh, what didn't go well? Like, if we had to do it over again, what would we do different? And what do we do next? What's the next step in this? Like, when are we following up, etc.? Right? What's the reason we're gonna be following up? Those are the questions I'm asking. What went well, what didn't go well, and what's next? I'm doing that after every single call. Getting my fingerprints on every one of those. So I'm doing a debrief after every call daily. The other thing I'm doing daily, win the day. So as a leadership team, you're probably looking at your budget and where you're pacing, and you have a win the day, a revenue that you gotta hit every day. Most teams don't cascade this to their team, though. It's kind of like playing a game, and the coach is the only one that knows the score. Your players need to know the score too, because they're gonna play differently. And so if I have a revenue that I'm trying to hit for the day, I need to communicate that to my team. A super simple example would be let's say I need $30,000 today. That's my win today. And I got three salespeople. I'm gonna communicate that every single day. I'm gonna say, hey guys, we need $30,000 today. If you're doing the math, that's $10,000 for each of you. So if this is HVAC, that's one sale. Everybody's got to get one replacement. And then throughout the day, I'm following up on that communication. Hey, Joe's on the board, $15,000. He's already got us a good chunk of the way there. Who's next? Right? And I guarantee you, if you're communicating that through the day, you're gonna end up with that last guy on that last call. You're $6,000 away from winning the day. He's going to dig in harder. He wants to be the guy that carries the ball across the finish line. That's two different examples there. I use track and football. He's gonna carry the ball across the end zone. So I need to communicate the win the day because he's gonna dig in. He's gonna identify the objection, he's gonna try to move past that objection. He wants to win. So debriefs and win the day. I'm doing those every day. So that's five things. What's the sixth thing? Sixth thing is this all should funnel into goals. And so my goals should be set for a team, but also individually. And here's how I set my goals. When I set my goals, this all started with a company budget. You had a budget you have to hit. And often when I meet with a sales leader, I'll say, What's your budget? And I'll say, We got to hit this much dollars in revenue, right? And I'll say, How are we gonna get there? And they say, I don't know, we're gonna try real hard. Yeah, we don't have a plan. And so that budget needs to have a sales plan. So that sales plan is the team goal. What do we need to do as a team? But then out of that team, that's where I need those individual goals. So everybody on my team needs to know what their piece of the pie is, what's their individual goal? And mathematically, those individual goals should equal my sales plan. And my sales plan should equal my budget. So that allows me now as a sales leader to focus on the individual goals. Because this is like dominoes. I set this up like dominoes. If I focus on the individuals and they hit their goals and they're successful, now as a team, we hit our team goals, our sales plan. And if the team is hitting their goals, we're hitting our piece of the budget. I can't guarantee you're gonna make your budget, but I can guarantee it won't be your team's fault if you focus on the individual goals. And how do we focus on the individual goals? Weekly ride-alongs, weekly training, weekly one-on-one, daily debriefs, and daily win the day, all encompassed by individual goals. So, in summary, there's a lot of great things that you can pay attention to. AI to assist with process adherence, CRMs to streamline communication from sales to install. But the real difference makers, the real difference makers, they haven't changed at all. The good news is good news for you anyways, not many companies do this very well. Like cookies though, like chocolate chip cookies. This hasn't changed. Do it right, you're gonna have Martha's cookies. Miss some of the ingredients, you're gonna end up with very poor cookies. That's today's question of the day. If you're enjoying question of the day, follow, share, give a rating. Question of the day is on major streaming platforms. If you have a question, reach out to me via email. It's gonna be listed below in the show description. Let's get your question answered. And if you're a next star member, schedule a call with me. Let's get this addressed one on one and get very specific to your situation. I'm Coach Chris. See you tomorrow.