About The Tools
This is the cornerstone of the program. I am the kind of person that, even if it’s not broken, I’ve got to fix it. Over my 22 years of pool selling, I buffed and polished all of the forms and tools I used to sell pools. I tried different elements, discarding everything that did not help and improving upon the things that made a positive difference. I studied photography, particularly digital photography and researched inkjet printers and cameras for maintaining my portfolio. I tried various kinds of paper and printing methods to get the best results in terms of both sales and usability. I enlisted the aid of a programmer and, together, we have studied the internet and how people use it to make money. He has also helped me develop the best retail pricing spreadsheet for selling pools.

The result of all of this effort is the upXel Sales Tool Kit, a complete set of custom-printed materials for lead generation, information gathering, pricing, presentation and after-sale documentation. Everything, in other words, that you need to:

Get the Lead • Get the Sale • Get the Profit • Keep the Profit

There are nine distinct elements to the upXel Sales Tool Kit, they are:
1. . Web Form with Autoresponder: I customize a PDF version of the Yardscape Design Guide with your company information and logo that can be sent as a safe, email attachment. We put that document on our web server and provide you with a form to put on your web site. The form offers your site visitor the Design Guide to be sent to their email address. The form requests their name, email address, phone number and zip code and, although none of these are required fields, we find that over 85% include all information. You are sent an email with the information they submit and their email address is entered into our server to automatically receive a series of emails from you. Value... $500.00

2. Survey Tablet: We print ten 50-page tablets with your logo and company information on the cover and lightly screened onto each page on a quarter inch grid. This tablet is for recording your yard measurements and, as the first step in your sales process, makes a positive first impression with the message that you have a well-established plan for what you are about to do. It also serves as an archive of your lead information for future reference which has proven invaluable to me in the past. Value ... $250.00

This set of tools will help you find the Yard of Their Dreams, cut the time it takes to make a presentation in half and increase your close rate.

3. Sketchpad: We provide twenty of these with 50-sheets each, they are custom-printed with your information and logo on 11x17 translucent vellum. These sketchpads make it easy for you to develop your preliminary designs and ideas with the customer's help while branding those ideas with your company’s identity. Used with the Survey Tablet, they provide an organized, systematic approach to the design process that keeps your valuable lead from being lost to the vapors with some comment like, “Work up a design and call us when you have it done.” This often leads to no follow up visit at all or you having to make a wild guess as to what they really want. Value... $300.00

You will feel like a kid on Christmas morning
when you see your new sales tools!

4. Portfolio Album: Positively the finest album money can buy, loaded with gorgeous color photos of your pools and spas in 9” x 12” format with your color logo in the corner of each page. These albums are custom-made for me by the finest leather manufacturer in the US using padded, calfskin leather that is so soft the customers actually stroke it before opening it. What do you think that tells them about your idea of quality? I digitize 60 of your photos, have them printed on special, large-size, matte-finished paper and place them in the album. This eliminates the plastic cover which reflects the dining table light making it difficult for customers to view the pictures. This album is part of the system and I will show you how to keep the album up-to-date with a digital camera and inkjet printer. Depending upon travel time, you will be less than one hour from photographing a pool to having it in your album. Value... $1,000.00

The February 2003 San Diego class reported an average sales increase of 100% over the previous year.

5. Drawing Tool Kit: To assure consistency in the training, and that you have everything you need, I have included a basic set of drafting tools that you will learn to use in class. The kit includes: 18” x 24” parallel-edge drawing board/case, 0.05mm pencil, Architect and Engineer scales, 60º and 45º triangles, circle template, flexible ruler, eraser, colored pencil set, tape and texture mat. If you already have these items, this kit makes a great backup set to keep in your vehicle for when you might need them. Value... $200.00 Description in PDF format: MPB Drawing Kit

6. Drawing Form: You get 500 of these 3-part forms printed on 11” x 17 ” NCR (carbonless copy) paper, customized with your company information and logo in the title block. The 11” width fits standard wide-format desktop printers so you can use the system with computer drawing programs, if you wish. The 17” width gives you plenty of real estate to work with for those larger yards. The 1/8” grid lets you tell them, “Each square is a foot, just count the squares.” Most importantly, this format assures that any last-minute changes and specifications get recorded on everyone’s copy. This alone could save you thousands of dollars on a job by preventing communication errors. Value... $400.00

7. Disclosure Form: You get 500 of these customized, 3-part letter-size forms that I call The Mother of All Dig Slips. This form is the result of 20 years of growing frustration in dealing with the conflicts that arise when the excavation becomes difficult. Besides rock (which is rarely a subject of dispute), this form covers bad soil, long dirt hauls, even archeological sites and crime scenes. As a separate form, not on the back of your contract, you assure that they understand the terms and communicate their importance. Using this form, in my last two years of pool sales, I did not eat a dime of overtime on any dig and I rarely ever heard from customers about overtime charges. Value... $150.00

This set of tools will help you increase the size of your average sale, raise your margins and keep the profit while you build the pool.

8. Retail Presentation Spreadsheet: Using Microsoft’s Excel® program, we have created a spreadsheet for calculating and presenting the price of the project in a way that will increase your close rate, raise your average sale amount and retain your profit margin. You simply enter your wholesale prices from your subcontractors, distributors and in-house costs then set your mark up factor. The spreadsheet then creates your retail price list so your customer can see all of the details (at retail) that you considered to arrive at the price of their project. Each individual item seems reasonable, it is the cumulation of them that results in the shock. We have also provided our unique tag column that allows you to identify specific line-items related to an element of the project they may elect to eliminate. Every item tagged under the same label will be sub-totaled on the Cover Sheet. This lets you tell them how much you could reduce the cost by eliminating that item. The cost is included in the main total, which conditions them to spend more. Value... $300.00

9. Video and Book by Hal Slater - The video The Gentle Art of First Call Closing uses props, humor and live, unrehearsed demonstrations to show you how to read people and build enough emotional excitement to close the sale today! Selling Power Magazine says... " this is the first video where nonverbal and Neuro-linguistic techniques are applied in a practical way to advance the sale, not just to advance the viewers thinking. I think that the ideas are worth at least ten times the price of the video." One hour long, supported by a 21 page workbook available online in PDF format. The book Secrets of High Ticket Selling uses contemporary psychological research to teach you how to understand the behavior of your buyers to improve your unique sales process, leaving you with more control over your sales process and its outcomes. The Secrets of High Ticket Selling describes advanced negotiating skills, language patterns, and gestures that enhance a buyer's excitement. Value... 60.00

If you have been doing the math, that is over $3,000.00 in materials alone and should supply you for 500 presentations. I chose that quantity because it is the minimum run and printing fewer would not save you any money. I will admit that I pay less than that to produce your set but I would also like to point out that you cannot produce ONE package for that cost, either. I have the advantage of re-using programs and templates I have already developed and bulk pricing when I buy. I have no idea what you would have to spend but I can assure you it would be far more than the total tuition.

It is not enough to operate with good will and the customer's interests at heart, although you must certainly do this. You also need a thorough, systematic and well-documented process for gathering information, designing, pricing and presenting your proposals that will keep minor glitches from becoming major problems. That is the purpose of the sales tools and, as with any fine tool, in the hands of a trained expert they will produce tremendous results.

After seeing the materials, Lew Akins asked me to tell you this: