What if your quote could keep selling your service—even after you’ve left the room?
In most sales conversations, you might spend a few hours with a customer over several days. But once you send the quote, it often sits with them far longer—and gets shared with people you’ve never even met. That means your quote becomes the most powerful representation of your business when you’re not there to explain it. In this episode, we break down how to transform a basic quote into a tool that continues selling your value long after the meeting ends.
- Learn how to structure your quote so it tells a compelling story that moves customers from where they are now to the outcome they want.
- Discover a simple summary format that clearly shows clients you understand exactly what they asked for.
- Understand how explaining the “how” behind your work builds trust and helps decision-makers say yes faster.
Press play now to learn the three simple improvements that turn an ordinary quote into a powerful sales tool that closes deals—even when you’re not in the room.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you’ll learn how to build a quote that sells for you when you’re not in the room.
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:
In this episode, we’re going to focus on how you can build a quote that sells for you when you’re not in the room by looking at three key levers in particular that will be able to move the dial when you’re not present. So as we get into today, I’d like you to picture yourself that you’ve presented a quote to a customer. They say, leave it with me.
I’ll come back to you within a week, right? And you’ve got seven days before you next meet with that customer. Now, across that journey, you’ve probably had a phone call with them. You’ve probably met them on site for 20 minutes, half an hour, maybe even an hour, maybe a bit longer, depending on if you’re a commercial or a residential business.
You’ve sent them out a quote. You might have spoken to them one or two more times, but perhaps the sum of time you’ve spent with them might be three or four hours if you’re lucky, if it’s really detailed, across a four, five, six, seven-day period. Now, that quote gets left with them, and it’s going to sit with them for another seven days, which is significantly more time.
You can do the numbers, right? It’s 15 times more than you’ve spent with them if you’ve had four hours and you’re only thinking about working hours, right? It’s 42 more times than you’ve spent with them if you’re thinking about 24 hours in the day, right? But the reality is it is multiples in terms of how much more time than you’ve spent with them across the journey. So what happens from that point in time is that the customer’s left with two things. Memories, I feel like breaking out in the song.
Memories, but it’s memories, number one, and number two is your quote. And in many instances, that quote is going to be shared with people that you’ve never even met, a husband or wife, an influential person, business decision makers, boards, CEOs, GMs, CFOs. It doesn’t matter who it is, people that have never met you are going to be getting their only impression from you from that quote.
So how important would that then place the quote to be in your mind? For me, it says it’s a representation of your business that goes beyond what you or your salespeople can do. It is critical in fact in helping people make decisions. And that for me is the premise around how we should start to think about building quotes that sell for us.
Because at the end of the day, single page, boring quotes do nothing to help sell for us other than being based on the price. And whilst we may have delivered the best sales process we possibly can outside of that, if what we’re left with is a quote template that’s decided on price, then we’re in a rat race and the shifting sands of time, i.e. whoever else has quoted on that project, are going to make a lot of the decision for us. Now, yes, I’m dramatising that a little bit.
We can certainly leave strong impressions on customers that mean before we even quote, they’ve made their decision on who we are. But we’re not going to be able to do that all the time and we’re going to end up in competitive processes. So for me, what’s critical, in fact, the most critical part of this episode is not to write down some notes around how you can make your quotes better, but to shift the mindset in your own head around how important your quote is and how much a quote can work for you when you’re not in front of customers.
And at the end of the day, is the next best representation of your business after you or your salespeople. So three areas I’d really encourage you to think about around how you can make your quote sell for you when you’re not in the room. First one is making sure that that quote tells a story.
I’ve spoken about this at length over the last few weeks, but we need to make sure that your quote is telling a story that takes a customer along their journey. It doesn’t matter what they’re building. It doesn’t matter what they’re fixing.
It doesn’t matter what they’re growing. It needs to tell a story about where they are now and where they need to be. If you’re a brand that’s building garages, it needs to explain what that garage will do for that person.
Even more specifically, if you’re selling garage doors, the quote needs to explain how the person is now going to have a garage that keeps pests out, keeps snakes out, is more secure, allows them to build their gym inside their garage, stores their cars, allows them to build more usable rooms within that garage, neatens up their house, adds value to their property, whatever it is. We’ve got to think about how we can make sure that quote is telling a story. Number two is that there’s a summary in there that gets really clear on what you’re doing to meet what the customer wants.
Page one. Here’s what you’re asked for. You’re asked for some garage doors that were white, that were automatic, that had a long battery life, and sealed around the edges.
In my case, sealing around the edges would be super important. I’ve had snakes in my office, which is in my garage. It’s not ideal when you’re on client calls to have a red belly just slither up to your ankles there.
I’ve had that. For me, having a garage that seals is really important. You’re stating that in the summary.
Here’s what you wanted. Here’s what we’re doing. Nice and straightforward.
Really crisp. Really important to get your quote to be representing your business when you’re not in the room. Then the third piece is an area we haven’t spent much time on, but it’s about making sure we’re telling a story how.
How are we going to do this? We’re going to instal those garage doors in three hours on a Tuesday morning. You’re going to need to move your cars out, but it’s going to have very little impact to you. You’re going to have those doors in within four weeks.
Great. Customer starts the plan. What am I doing in those four weeks? Have I got stuff in here I need to secure? Do I need to get it out? Have I got other purchases I want to make? For me, getting the garage doors on when we put them on a couple of years ago quickly was really important because we needed the space in that garage and we had things piled up everywhere inside the house.
I didn’t want to put them out there because it wasn’t secure. If you’re telling the how, the when, the what you’re going to be doing, we’re actually stepping our customer through the journey and giving them a little bit more information to share with those who haven’t met us, those people who are involved in the decision who we don’t know. Really important that we’re going through the how.
Those three things, just to recap, number one is making sure we’re telling a story, taking people on a journey from where they are today to where they’re going to be. Number two is building out a summary and summarising really clearly what they want and what we’re going to give them. Then number three is talking through how we’re going to do it.
How are we going to bring this to life? Right now, we don’t need to necessarily have an aspirational journey for every industry that we’re in or for every customer we’re going to speak to, but we should be able to have a read on our customer from having spent time with them and know what we can roll in. Now, the good news is this is all templatable. It can all be done pretty easily.
There are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who have tread these paths before you. There’s people that you can learn from. We certainly have done it a lot of times.
We have a whole academy that focuses on this, which you can absolutely speak to us about. But more importantly is a lot of these things you can do yourself if you need to. If you’re short on time or investment periods to do it, get out and make that happen because those three things, storytelling, putting a summary in and talking to the customer about how you’re going to do it will make a difference.
They will move the dial and they will help you sell more sales. That I can guarantee, that I’ve seen happen across dozens and dozens of businesses over the last couple of years. That’s what I want you to take out of today.
How am I going to improve my quote template? We’re dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We have a big focus on 1% better each and every day. It makes a difference and I can’t wait to see you in next week’s episode.
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.