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The Story Engine Podcast: Where we teach you how to make marketing easier, more powerful and fun through storytelling. Each week we learn from top entrepreneurs, influencers and world-changers on how to share your story through content, copywriting, speaking and how to make your story your most powerful marketing tool.

Feb 5, 2019

Today on the show we have Billy Murphy. Billy has mastered the skill set of sales and thrives in the solar energy marketplace, helping people install solar energy in their houses. This is a very cutthroat and high-profit industry, and he has been able to take his skills and monetize them in a very unique way by applying digital marketing principles to what he was doing and finally, helping other salespeople master these skills too, in a membership site. He's done really well at taking a core skill set and then using it and a building a brand new business model around it and becoming an influencer himself. This is a great example of a transition from somebody doing something to becoming an authority in that area and really profiting off of it. Listening to Billy's story will really provide a lot of powerful insights and maybe give you some inspiration on how you can further monetize your expertise.

 

Key Takeaways

[2:45] How Billy started his business

[10:03] Lead funnel marketing

[11:38] The most effective way to sell today

[13:47] How to make a systemized sales process

[15:49] How Billy transitioned from sales to starting his own business

[21:10] Finding your niche and monetizing it

[24:47] Developing a membership site that is a lead funnel

 

Links and Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Solar Cheat Code

Facebook

Grant Cardone

 

Transcript

Kyle Gray:                            

Hello and welcome to the Story Engine podcast. My name is Kyle Gray and today on the show we have Billy Murphy. Billy has mastered the skill set of sales and thrives in the solar energy marketplace. This is a very cutthroat and high-profit industry, and he has been able to take his skills and monetize them. Without any further ado, let's turn it over to Billy. Billy, thanks so much for joining us on the show today.

Billy Murphy:                    

Thank you, Kyle. Appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Kyle Gray:                            

I want to get to know you a little bit better before we start learning some of your wisdom and one of my favorite questions to open up the show is, tell me about a story, or a moment in your life that really defined who you are and has led you down the path to what you're doing today.

Billy Murphy:                    

Well, specifically to the Internet Marketing Company, these marketing techniques that we now have monetized and teach other companies how to replicate for themselves. It's something that we've used for our own benefit for years. I never really knew if I was going to be able to duplicate what I was doing in somebody else's business. I figured perhaps I was some unicorn that had this magic touch to be able to generate leads online.

Billy Murphy:                    

The reason it turned into a business, as I started testing groups. There are solar sales groups that are specific to this niche where we can network, and you know, trade best practices and all that sort of thing. I used to be too cavalier with showing people what I was doing. I would show them almost everything. Just never thought that anyone would try to take advantage of me, but one day I got a call from a guy, and he was in Australia, and I'll never forget his name is Brett. I'm actually still good friends with him to this point this day, but he's like, "Hey mate, I found your funnel, and I copied it." I'm like, "Oh, I got to be more careful about that." And he says, "I got 80 leads in four days." Right.

Kyle Gray:                            

Wow.

Billy Murphy:                    

Right there, I knew that what I had, like this idea of consulting other businesses to duplicate the process of I've been doing successfully for years was going to be a hit. In any case, that's pretty much how we came to what we do today. We just closed out December as our first, we did a $112,000 in just membership sales. From a concept to a 100k a month in seven months. We're pretty happy to be where we're at now.

Kyle Gray:                            

That's incredible and well done on the Australian accent by the way. I attempt-

Billy Murphy:                    

I had to work with four different companies and pick it up because I have to sit and drink coffee and stay up late at night because they're like 15 some odd hours ahead of us or what not. I'm working 11:30 at night. Anyway yeah, and I love the Australian accent.

Kyle Gray:                            

It works well. The first startup that I worked for was run by Australians as well.

Billy Murphy:                    

No kidding.

Kyle Gray:                            

I still have a lot of the things, just the euphemisms or things they say still rub off on me. I find myself saying like, are you keen to do this, or I'm keen to do that and stuff like that all the time now as a result.

Billy Murphy:                    

Yeah, there's those and sometimes they'll call you like endearing names and that sort of thing. If it was another say Americans saying that you'd almost be condescending, but you know, they call you champ and sport, stuff like that. That's just how they talk.

Kyle Gray:                            

That's super interesting figuring out like navigating kind of remote communication, you're coming to us from your home office right now and then international communication, all these things. It's a very interesting world we live in these days where all these things are coming into play. It's fun to see how cultures cross borders like that.

Kyle Gray:                            

Take us back a little bit further. I'd love to know like why you even got into solar in the first place. Tell me about your original solar company before you started these digital marketing practices. Yeah and then I'm thrilled about the little moment of copying funnels and how that inspired this whole move venture.

Billy Murphy:                    

Right. Everyone's signs, NDAs, and all my funnels are closely guarded at this point, so no one else can tap into ... My first real job out of college was selling gym memberships at Gold's gym. I did that for about six years, and I've always been interested in doing sales type positions simply because of the money, the earning potential. Within four years of starting as a membership person, I ended up being a regional manager of seven gym locations and had over 250 employees. It was fun, but it was extremely stressful because most of these locations where 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If I had an overnight person not show up, it was me. At the same time, my wife and I had just had our first boy and it was a bit too much.

Billy Murphy:                    

There was a marketing director who worked for a local marketing company, his name was Big Jake. We call him Big Jake, he's a former middle linebacker for Boston College. Big Six foot five, shredded muscles, he could still jump 35 inches in the air. He's just a natural beast. He did all of our marketing. Big Jake and I, we became friends over the years at Gold's gym, and we always used to like spitball different business ideas we can start together, and we even bought a photo booth years ago and just tried to do a photo booth renting business.

Billy Murphy:

He and I ended up both becoming big, big names in northeast solar power. He owns one of the biggest solar power companies in New England right now from this story. He was also doing marketing for a very, very small solar company in Concord, New Hampshire, which literally it was like the Attic of a barn and there was no heat in the building, freezing cold. When I started with this company, he basically said to look for a sales manager, I was ready for a change.

Billy Murphy:                    

I had positioned myself to take more risk if something didn't work out, I was going to be okay for a little while. I'll never forget, I started on November 1st, and on November 30th, the general manager who hired me, he left the company and took all the installation crews and formed his own solar power company. The first month I was there. I saw the owner of the company, how shocked he was, completely blindsided, but that's this industry. There's so much opportunity. People do this all the time. Unfortunately, all this backstabbing. Anyway, my heart went out to this guy. It was him and his wife and they're looking at me and we don't even know each other. He basically was like, "If you stay, you'll have an opportunity to grow with the company."

Billy Murphy:                    

I made a decision, I saw an opportunity. I stayed at that business and that same 12 months, that same first year, so November turned into December, which we ended up the year and then that next year we did $7 million in solar sales the first year. Ryan and I hired every single person, trained every single person and that's ... throughout that year it was when I was galvanized into, "Okay, this is what I'm actually really good at." Gym sales, trying to convince someone to spend $20 a month was like 10 times harder than trying to convince someone to spend 30 grand, ironically. In any case, that business went on to do very well. We ended up cashing out, we ended up being purchased. At that point is when I moved down to Texas and got into another local solar installer down here and almost repeated the same history.

Billy Murphy:                    

We grew as I said, this is when I started doing the digital marketing stuff, our own sales team. We were spending 50 grand a month buying leads because HOA is a homeowners associations in Texas. You can't really go canvassing. They kick you right out. In any case, I developed this ability to copycat big companies lead funnels online. What I did was, I removed their misleading advertisement because a lot of these digital marketers, they'll say, "Clickbait type ad copy." They'll say, "The government pays for panels or veterans get free solar power or solar power comes at no cost to you." That sort of thing. Homeowners would be mismanaged going through the lead funneling process and then solar companies are trying to sell to these people that are expecting things for free.

Billy Murphy:                    

We were able to take their best practices and put realistic advertising, still sexy, still marketing, still very intriguing, but it didn't position homeowners to think that they're going to get stuff for free. Then our company in Texas really took off. We did like nine megawatts. I know that doesn't mean a whole lot to you, but it's a lot of solar power in 2008.

Kyle Gray:                            

You've been in sales for a long time, and I feel like even ... I feel like you learned a lot of really good core lessons. One of the things you just told me, which is surprising, but also I think it's pretty common is like it's hard to sell a $20 membership sometimes, but a $30,000 big product. If you know how to sell that well then it can be easier. You've been in sales for a long time, and I'm wondering if you have a couple of like, it probably comes really naturally to you, but do you have a philosophy or a couple of like concrete ideas that anybody selling anything but especially kind of high-end products, whether it's a product or a service or anything like that, that we can take away? What is the magic behind your sales success?

Billy Murphy:                    

People are smarter and more well informed today than ever before. Since 2008, there's been a fundamental change in how people trust salespeople. With the financial collapse, a lot of people lost trust in organizations, in banks, in salespeople in general. The way to sell today is to essentially hide the salesperson. If you use the same opening line on the phone, "I'm Kyle with one, two, three sales company." they're going to completely put up that barrier.

Billy Murphy:                    

You are now playing your role as a salesperson by saying those words. Therefore, the homeowner plays the role or whoever you're trying to sell to plays the role of prospect who doesn't want to be sold anything. Everybody loves to purchase and buy. We actually get a dopamine hit right when we buy something, but nobody wants to be sold anything. For instance, we don't call people. When new leads come into our system, we don't call them. Calling from an unrecognized number is the same as door to door. You're actually interrupting somebody, typically they're not going to answer and no one listens to voicemail-

Kyle Gray:                            

Plus these days, everybody's getting ... I've probably gotten two or three robot calls today and now. Yeah, I just don't-

Billy Murphy:                    

You know what's crazy too is, those robot calls, they continue, and it works, and the reason I know it works is because it continues.

Kyle Gray:                            

Yeah.

Billy Murphy:                    

If it didn't work they wouldn't continue to do it. Though in any case if you can, whatever product or service you sell, whatever industry you're in. That first impression, if you can hide the salesperson or hide the business and just be another human being, right? Just be a human being reaching out to another human being to make a connection, then that is how you're going to win that relationship and not get into that role-playing scenario.

Kyle Gray:                            

Yeah.

Billy Murphy:                    

I guess that would be a big one for me. Other than that it's really about having a systematic sales process and what I mean by that is like on a minimal level, what your sales conversation should go, what it should look like. A lot of people don't take the time to really sit down and brainstorm and write down exactly past experiences as they can run through sales conversations that went really well. What they did in those sales conversations and then conversely run through sales conversations that didn't go very well and write down what you did in those, and come up with a system; Because, when you have a system no longer do you have the pressure to perform. Whether it's the last day of the month and you're one sale away from hitting the goal.

Billy Murphy:                    

You put that pressure on yourself. If in turn, you learn a system, the pressure comes off of the sales rep and the pressure is pushed down on the system. It's no longer a matter of performing as a salesperson. It's just literally following a roadmap to a sale, right. More often than not, they're going to convert. It's more of a relieving process. For sales managers, I highly recommend systemizing the sales conversation because of too many guys out there just willy-nilly it. There's not a lot of training, It's more of a trial by fire. Get out there and make some sales and sales managers sit behind their company desks and they don't ever close anything themselves. Instead, the real way to scale a team is to give them that systematic tool that they can just duplicate and learn.

Kyle Gray:                            

Oh my gosh, I love that. That not only applies to sales but so many different things. If you really are just like you're saying, going willy-nilly, then you're always dependent on your willpower, essentially, to perform and how you're feeling and things like that. That can go in every which direction. I love the idea of just having a process takes the pressure off yourself, and it really takes the pressure off of the individual sales. If you understand yourself and your numbers, okay, well I get 3 out of 10 of these and that's good enough.

Kyle Gray:                            

Then, you know you're not showing up with this desperation of being like-

Billy Murphy:                    

Correct.

Kyle Gray:                            

If you don't do this, then I don't know and people can smell that from a mile away, especially in this day and age for all the reasons you explained. Now you've given us a little bit of a hint into what it looks like currently. You've transitioned out selling solar yourself and now you're helping other salespeople get into digital marketing. It doesn't seem like ... you mentioned you were copying people sales funnels, but it really seems like, I haven't heard much from you in terms of like studying a lot of digital marketing. How did you even become aware of this world and how did you learn those things and transition out of kind of a classic sales formula to more of these digital strategies?

Billy Murphy:                    

One word, mentorship. I began hiring mentors. That's really the biggest x-factor, I think, in people's ability to get to the next level because everybody talks about wanting to level up. "I'm leveling up 2019 is my year, I'm gonna level up!" Very few of them have a clear picture of what the next level actually is, and what it looks like, and what action steps they need to take to get there because you haven't done yet. The easiest way to get where you want to go in life is to find someone who's there and pay them for a result. It really is that simple, honestly. That is how I found some of the best lead generation digital marketers, salespeople, that I could find, and I bought into their mentorship programs. None of it was specific to what I was doing. It was more on a general level, and I don't know a whole lot about digital marketing.

The easiest way to level up is to find a mentor who’s already there and pay them for a result

Billy Murphy:                    

I know how to progress a homeowner from not knowing anything about solar power to make the decision to spend tens of thousands of dollars within a couple of hours. That translates into how the funnels are so effective because again, I go back to digital marketers, and my quote-unquote competition. They've never sold a solar system before, and why would they? All of their advertising is relying on misleading information, click bait and things that don't really exist. That's how I got into it, is I started investing in myself, and I'm telling you, most people don't invest in themselves, whether it's health, mentorship, mental health, relationship health, relationship with a kid. I go to therapy once a week for like the past year. It's the best thing I do, and sometimes we don't even really talk about anything. We just talk about business, and I consider that mentorship as well.

Billy Murphy:                    

When you start investing in yourself, it's really incredible. The exposure of your true potential becomes, right, because most of us are not striving to get our full potential. Everyone's in a routine, the routines are soul-crushing man. I mean you and I know that you haven't had a job in years. Routines are soul-crushing, and unfortunately the vast majority of people out there, they get up the same time, they go to their same coffee shop, they go to the same office, they talk with the same people, they cook the same stuff for lunch and dinner. They're in a routine and that's ... nothing wrong with that. Personally, I want to know my full potential.

Kyle Gray:                            

Yeah.

Billy Murphy:                    

I want to get as close as possible to what I'm capable of really doing. I have no regrets.

Kyle Gray:                            

One of the things I love about what you said, aside from all of that, and thank you for the vulnerability and just sharing like how valuable it is to invest in yourself and sharing your own results there. Something that I've heard kind of between the lines, that I think would help somebody who wants to invest in themselves, especially in terms of business. One of the things that you did is you understood your audience and your market really, really well, and you understood the sales process. So you were able to quickly identify instead of thinking about, "Okay, well I'm going to learn all kinds of digital marketing SEO or Facebook or Instagram and things like that." You skipped that, and you just said, "Okay, I understand that I need something to solve this specific problem, this is the best way to do it, and these are the best people that know."

Kyle Gray:                            

It made it a very simple process to invest in yourself, and you were able to just focus on where results are driving. I just think for anybody out there who's listening, one of the most important things is just understanding the problem you want to solve, the audience you want to serve, and then seeing what you can bring to the table can fill in the gaps.

Billy Murphy:                    

Yeah, I think to continue your point. I never really envisioned doing anything besides solar lead generation, because I'm a solar guy. I don't know anything about generating leads for eCommerce or retail space. I don't know that niche. I really encourage everyone out there to find your niche, whatever that is. Like if it's your hobby and you love it, turn it into a profit center for yourself. Monetize that stuff, because the world is so small with social media, you can really make yourself an authority in a niche pretty darn quickly. I mean, if you post a couple times a day, just delivering value, couple minute video clip, that's how I did it. I've 1500 likes on my page in seven months and it's just because I would do two to three-minute videos. Not every day but multiple times per week.

Billy Murphy:                    

These videos essentially are sales training and that earned people more money. I get comments all the time like, "Hey man, I tried that notebook close thing that you did and I closed the sale this morning thank you so much." That's like the free value that you deliver. Once you deliver free value, money is a natural consequence. You don't even have to think about it all that much. If you deliver value, you get money back, but niche out. Don't try to take over multiple markets, find a niche, because I'm not going to be the solar guy forever. This business is something that I'm going to scale to a point where I can remove myself and then I'm going to go start another business. Perhaps it's in another niche. You can always reinvent yourself. Don't worry about being pigeonholed as the niche guy and one industry because that's not really something that happens. That's our own scarcity coming into play.

Once you deliver free value, money is a natural consequence

Billy Murphy:                    

It's a funny notion that I have, but I'm very passionate, and I started out very passionate about solar power for the same reasons everybody else is. It saves the planet, and it saves homeowners money, and it's a good thing for the environment and all that sort of thing. But, with that said, the reason why I'm truly passionate about this industry is that it makes people rich. It doesn't matter if you were ... you couldn't afford the best college, perhaps you have a checkered history with getting in trouble and that sort of thing. Or maybe you didn't have the best upbringing in your family life.

Billy Murphy:                    

If you work hard and do the right things to solar power, you can make more than most doctors and lawyers in your first year. That's really why I'm passionate about helping salespeople, and you know what? Homeowners can be pretty annoying when you sell them. You have to hold their hand for months. This is a construction project. It's not fun. Working with salespeople is like I'm hanging out with my buddies, man. This like helping guys make money is literally the best job that I could ever imagine myself doing. That's why the pivot has been so natural.

Kyle Gray:                            

I love that. Now tell us a little bit about how you designed and developed without giving away too much of your own IP. Tell me about the membership you've created and what you've put together to create a really incredible and valuable experience for people, that's been so very successful.

Billy Murphy:                    

Yeah. I think the big difference is we don't talk about ... we were very specific in our training. We have a membership portal that new members that join and get a username and password to. This website contains our best performing funnels over the past five years, broken down into copy and paste or downloadable links. Most digital marketing programs, they cover all industries. It's like Ty Lopez, Gary V. They're not niche, right, they're general. When you buy into like a Grant Cardone training program, you have to take what they're training you to do and then interpret it into whatever industry you're in. There's that bit of a transition. For me it's like we don't talk about how to write a good ad, we show you. Here are the ads you copy and paste, here's the images you use, here's the landing page you use, right. Here's the question sequence, here's the automated emails, here's the pre-written emails that you can copy and paste.

Billy Murphy:                    

There is no figuring anything out, you don't even have to know how to use a computer. You could just follow instructions and within a couple hours, you have your own lead funnel that is basically duplicated from ones that we've already used for years. If you can follow instructions to set up an Ikea table, you can follow the solar cheat code and get your own funnel up and running without any digital marketing background.

Kyle Gray:                            

That's powerful and kind of reinvent or restates of your point of how important niching down is because you can serve them so much better, so much more efficiently, because you honed in on the exact problem, and it just makes it simple.

Billy Murphy:                    

Which makes conversions on the sales side higher, because essentially you've established yourself as an authority in that niche so people trust you.

Kyle Gray:                            

At this point, are you totally out of solar sales and only working on your own business now?

Billy Murphy:                    

Yup. That's right.

Kyle Gray:                            

Okay. You mentioned you liked to change a lot, you don't like routine, and you like to reinvent yourself. Was it a challenging transition at all to go from kind of being familiar and in one world to this, you serve a similar audience and a similar marketplace, but how your business works is very different than it used to. Is that a challenging transition?

Billy Murphy:                    

No, there was no trials and tribulations in this story so far. It's been all just trying to keep up with the growth, honestly. I think it was November where I went from self-employed, everything myself, to having a team. Technically I'm like the CEO now and through investing in mentorships and getting into better networks, I was able to acquire my first core, two salespeople, a tech guy, and a operations manager, and they're like ... I could have never found these people if I hadn't started investing in mentorship myself and getting into these networks. The transition has been surprisingly easy and hugely profitable. I'm not going to stay away from solar sales forever. I totally anticipate getting back into that.

Billy Murphy:                    

I actually believe that this little hiatus has positioned me better to get back into residential solar sales. Hopefully, we can do that here in the next six months or so. That's the idea.

Kyle Gray:                            

That's incredible. Well, Billy, there's been so many golden nuggets of information here that I think our listeners can really take away and get a lot out of. I want to thank you so much for joining us and if there are any solar sales people out there listening or if anybody wants to connect with you, how can we find you? Where can we go?

Billy Murphy:                    

Go to Bill Murphy on Facebook. I do most of my communication off of that.

Kyle Gray:                            

Awesome.

Billy Murphy:                    

It's a nice little picture of my face, my hairline.

Kyle Gray:                            

Well, all right, well, thank you so much for sharing some wisdom with us today. It's been a total pleasure and yeah, excited to see where this takes you and to see how you can keep changing the world with solar power. Thanks for joining us.

Billy Murphy:                    

Thank you, Kyle. Appreciate you, man. I'll talk to you later on. Okay.

Kyle Gray:                            

Thanks for listening to the Story Engine podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes and resources mentioned in this episode and every episode at thestoryengine.co. If you want to tell better stories and grow your business with content marketing and copywriting, be sure to download the content strategy template, at contentstrategytemplate.com. This template is a part of any business that wants to boost their traffic, leads, and sales with content marketing. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.