What if three small changes to your quoting process could help you close a $63,000 sale?
Many business owners think improving sales means learning complicated tactics or building complex systems. But the truth is, most deals are won or lost in the small details—especially in how you quote your work. In this episode, you’ll hear the real story of a young landscaping business owner who made a few simple adjustments to his quoting process and dramatically improved his chances of winning the deal.
- Discover how turning your quote into a compelling story can make customers excited to work with you.
- Learn a simple way to personalize quotes so clients clearly see that you understand exactly what they want.
- Find out why presenting quotes face-to-face can dramatically increase your close rate.
Hit play now to learn the three simple quoting improvements that helped close a $63,000 deal—and how you can apply them to win more sales in your own business.
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This podcast helps the entrepreneur, founder, CEO, and business owner in the trade, construction and industry segments, regain focus, build confidence, and achieve measurable results through powerful sales training, effective sales strategy, and expert sales coaching—guiding every sales leader, sales manager, and sales team in mastering the sales process, optimizing the sales pipeline, and driving business growth while fostering leadership, balance, and freedom amidst overwhelm, stress, and potential burnout, creating lasting peace of mind and smarter decision making for every California business and Australia business ready to scale up with excellence in sales management , through refined sales processes, proven trade sales techniques, and strategic sales leadership that strengthens sales process execution, accelerates sales team development, builds stronger sales teams, improves time management for sales, drives resilience and results, increases team results across the construction industry and wider industry sales sectors, and supports sustainable trading growth that continues to drive results through an effective management process in modern trade sales.
EpisBen Wright:
In this episode, you’ll discover how a trade landscaper closed a $63,000 sale in the first week after making three quoting improvements.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.
Ben Wright:
You’ll often hear me talk about the small things that we can do to impact our sales for big results over time. In fact, everything I do across all of my programmes is focused on simplicity. It’s why the podcast name has that word in there, simple, because for me, great sales progress and great results don’t need to be complex.
We don’t need to make sales seem like it’s a profession that needs a master’s or a PhD degree, but instead, it’s a function or a profession where just like anything, we can make small, regular improvements that can really move the dial in terms of our results. And the example today is one of those where we have a trade landscaper who closed a $63,000 sale by making three simple improvements to their quoting process. We’re going to go through those and from today, I’d love it if you can take something, a small piece of inspiration that will help you close more deals in your business.
Okay, so what did this landscaper do? I’ll paint the picture here. This is a very young trade landscaping business. He’s a guy that is ready to work hard.
Like most people that come into our programmes, they’re ready to work hard and really want to grow, but I think above everything else is he’s super open to listening and learning, super open to doing things differently. He’s got his own opinions, his own ways of doing things. He doesn’t necessarily take every bit of advice that we pass through, but the reason that he was able to make these changes quickly is because he was ready and willing to get some help.
And look, for me at 43, I still absolutely get help with what I’m doing and I’ve been doing this a really long time, right? Not as long as those who have got a decade on me, but I’m 25 years in sales and I still look for people to help me. So I think that’s really important, a really important note to add here as to how he’s been able to improve his business through this process. Okay, but let’s get into the three things that he did for his quoting that really helped him grow.
Okay, number one is he built a quote template that was more than just a zero invoice dump. I’ve spoken about this before across the last three or four episodes it’s come up. He stopped having his quotes be one page and in fact, he actually had two or three pages in his quote before we started, but they were very mechanical, didn’t necessarily tell a really strong story to his customers about what their gardens could look like once his team had finished, right? The aspirational journey wasn’t there, that storytelling that, hey, let’s get really excited about what we’re going to do.
So what he did was he took that quote, he listened to some advice that I gave him and expanded it into a great product that told stories and really engaged with his customers around what they could do once they’d finished working with him. So that was number one. He took his quote from a zero invoice dump or a couple of pages to one that really told a great story.
Second thing he did was he really made sure that he personalised the quote. Now, I think the important piece to say here is it’s not necessarily about the output around the words on the page here, but it’s more about making sure that when he was in front of customers, he was getting really clear on what they needed from their project. What was their signature piece, the most important part of the project? What were the nice-to-haves, things that they’d really like to have? If they were looking to put in a pool, was the signature piece that the pool needed to be a particular type of water or that it was in a position where it had sun all day or it had a really blue, blue water? A lot of pools, you’ll see they have that slight green tinge and it’s not the water, it’s the covering down the bottom.
What was the most important part of that pool or in some instances, just having a pool might be the signature piece. Then what were the nice-to-haves? The type of fencing, the type of grass, the type of landscaping around the pool because certainly you can have big variations in costing there. By understanding exactly what the customer wanted, he was able to then personalise one of the pages of the quote.
Here’s what you’re asked for, here’s what you’re getting. Here’s what you’re asked for, here’s what you’re getting. That’s the second thing that he did.
The third thing is that he got really focused around presenting his quotes face-to-face. There’s a couple of really unique things that he did around how he presented the quotes but I think the most impactful piece to say is that quotes were not just emailed through but they were sent across face-to-face. Made a really big difference to his close rates and at the end of the day, closed a great sale one week in that having a conversation with him, he wasn’t sure he would have closed that sale without those changes.
I think that’s the really important part here is that when we can take quotes from, gee, I’m not so sure if I’m going to close them to getting them done, they’re the types of small improvements that we want to be getting from improving our sales processes. Three things that this landscaper did to make that $63,000 sale, number one was build a quote template that was more than just a data dump. Second thing was to really personalise the front page and make sure that he was lining up what he was offering with what the customer actually wanted.
The third thing was all about presenting the quotes face-to-face, getting back in front of them, getting the deal done. Yes, you can say that takes more time but there’s also things you can do to save yourself time and have your net time spent on quotes to be very similar to what you were previously by adding in that face-to-face meeting. Small changes, big impact on this business and I think it very much follows that 1% better approach, try and make progress over perfection.
But for me out of today, have a think about something in there that you might be able to roll out with your business. I’d say if I had to pick one, I’d find it really hard because across the three businesses, I think all three of those could be ones that your business could look at improving or sharpening the axon. We’re dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
This was short, sharp and punchy today. That’s it for today. Look forward to seeing you next time.
Bye for now.
Are you frustrated spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes that you keep losing? Without changing something now, you’ll continue to get these same stressful results over and over again. My free quote audit will pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. Click the free quote audit link in the show notes to get started now.ode Transcript