What if the fastest way to close more sales isn’t a better pitch—but asking better questions in the very first meeting?
Many trade and business leaders think closing more deals happens at the end of the sales process, when the quote is sent and the follow-up begins. But the truth is, most sales are won or lost long before that moment.
Without that clarity, quotes become generic, competition increases, and close rates suffer.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- Why understanding what your customer truly wants is the most powerful closing strategy you can use.
- How asking “why” creates stronger emotional connection and trust during sales conversations.
- The simple framework that helps trade businesses increase close rates by turning first meetings into “hell yes” moments.
Press play now to learn how to ask smarter questions, create stronger customer connections, and close more deals before the quote is even delivered.
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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.
Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
In this episode, I’m going to show you how you can get a hell yes from your clients in the very first meeting by leveraging one simple strategy.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry sales and business leaders finally in 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 and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s Get Started
Ben Wright:
Today, we’re going to deep dive into one simple strategy that you can use as a trade and business leader to get more yeses from your clients, and most importantly, how that simple strategy can change the future projection of your business. Today’s topic has come off the back of being asked this morning in one of my larger group sessions around how a salesperson can close better.
How do I close more sales, Ben, was the question, and it brought a smile to my face because normally when we think about how we close more sales, immediately our mind moves to the customer’s got the quote, how do we get them to say yes? Do we put in a time-based offer, right? You got to sign by this day or the price is going to go up. Do we offer them a small discount? One of my least favourites. Do we offer them extra value? Do we call them consistently? Are we very eloquent with our words and we’re able to convince people? That’s normally where minds start to go when we talk about closing deals.
For me, what I really like is that there is a much more powerful way, certainly in my experience and that of our customers, where we can get deals closed, and in fact, the most common strategy that I work with every single one of our customers, particularly across trade businesses, and we’ve spoken about in this podcast a number of times, is how we can close a deal at the very start. So, in that first meeting, we spoke about this last week in episode 213 around how important it is for first impressions to stick, but in that first meeting, there is one strategy that over and above everything else influences close rates at the end of that sales process. So, what is that? In these short, punchy episodes, I like to get straight into it.
So, let’s do that. Having now worked with hundreds and hundreds of sales leaders and salespeople across a huge number of industries, particularly trade businesses turning over that $1 million to $10 million type of revenue lines, what has become really evident across my last 25 years is that when we can seek to understand what a customer wants, we control the outcome of a meeting in just about more than any other way I can think of or have experience with my customers. Now, we need to think that this statement, this blueprint comes across having dealt with hundreds of businesses and close to thousands of salespeople over the last 25 years, right? There’s a really big source of database here and lots and lots of mistakes that have been made along the way.
But if I now have to recommend to my customers what’s one thing they can do to increase close rates, it all comes down to understanding what the customer wants. So, what do they want, why do they want it and what’s most important? So, let’s picture ourselves as if we are a company quoting on a kitchen and bathroom renovation. I don’t mind if this is commercial or residential.
Certainly, they have different drivers but let’s zero in hard on a residential kitchen and bathroom right now, okay? If you’re not in the kitchen and bathroom industry, it doesn’t matter because the principles are very, very similar. In fact, I’m going to say they’re almost exactly the same. So, in that kitchen and bathroom renovation period, we’ve got our first meeting with our customer, we’ve made a great first impression and please go and listen to episode 213 if you haven’t but we’ve made that great first impression.
The very next thing for us that is super important is to seek to understand what they want. So, what are you looking for in this kitchen and bathroom renovation? Is it aesthetics, the colours, the feel, the flow? Is it the function, quality of water pressure and two dishwashers instead of one? A butler’s pantry if we’re getting towards the high end? Is it a gas stove? Is it an electric stove? Are you looking for a centrepiece in that kitchen and bathroom to be quite often the oven being one of those? Do we have a particular type of lighting of mood? Do we have a position that you want the kitchen moved to? Starting to really understand what the customer want is far and above the most important way to start off this seeking to understand conversation because once we get to understand that, it starts to then drive our process and our questions into what’s really relevant to the customer. And when we’re having a conversation that’s relevant with someone and please think about this in your own experiences.
When someone has a conversation with you about something that you’re interested in, does your engagement rise or fall? For me, my engagement rises when someone talks to me about something I’m interested in and particularly in engagements with suppliers, with people that I don’t have a strong relationship with yet. When they can zero in on exactly what I want, I start to build that really strong and that positive energy with that person. I don’t live in a world of woo-woo.
I’m very much black and white but I can certainly acknowledge that when people start to talk to me about what’s most relevant to me, I engage back. As we’re seeking to understand what they want, that’s fantastic and that’s a really good step. I’ll give that a grading of a B when it comes to understanding what customers want.
But if we want to move to the B plus scenario here, really starting to get close to an A. For me, a B plus is a pretty good result. We need to then find out why. Why is the oven the centrepiece? Is it because it’s something you use all the time and you want to feel really good about it? Is it because it’s something you want customers to see? Is it because it’s an oven you had when you were growing up and you want to gauge that into your life, into your new kitchen? But understanding not just what someone wants but also the why then allows you to even more effectively design that.
If that oven is one that someone wants to include because it’s similar to what they had when they were young, you know then that you can really zero in hard around that oven as a signature part of your presentation, as a signature part of your quote, as something you talk about how we can have the kitchen bench tops complementing what we’re doing in the oven, around how we can make sure that everything around that oven really complements it. It’s a step above understanding that someone just wants that style of oven because it allows you to layer deeper into those conversations. And the reality is it’s a very easy question to ask.
What are you looking for and why do you want it? So when we’re seeking to understand, first of all, the great examples, the great experiences that we’re seeing are when trade businesses in particular are asking what do you want followed by why is it important. As we move from there to get yourself from that B plus into that A grade, we start to then talk about out of all those features, what are they after, what do they want and why? What’s the number one piece out of in this instance we’ve spoken about a great oven, we’ve spoken about the colour palettes, we’ve spoken about two dishwashers. What’s the number one most important piece? And we may have spent a whole lot of time talking about the oven around how they want it and why but when we ask that question, customers’ responses are absolutely it’s the colour palette.
It’s having a really bright kitchen that makes people, myself, my family and those that visit our house feel uplifted when they walk in the door. Okay, now that may be a little bit too, right, but certainly a paired back version of that is I’d like a really bright and light kitchen that I feel good in when I’m there. Now we may have spent a lot of time getting that oven right but could easily walk past what is most important.
And so for me in designing that kitchen and renovation, that means Mr. Customer or Mrs. Customer, I’m saying, hey, the most important thing here for me is the colour palette. Yes, the oven’s really important but it’s also really, really important that we get two dishwashers in because we’ve got a big family and I’m so sick of loading and unloading the dishwasher twice a day. I’d rather it just be once a day or once every two days and we can achieve that by two dishwashers.
So then we’re making sure we make room in that. So we’ve moved into a B by asking in a grade of B what do they want, a grade of B plus by asking why and then straight into that realm of an A, an A grader, by then asking what’s most important. Now as we wrap all of that up to try and get to an A plus here in terms of your delivery around really getting a hell yes in that very first meeting, it’s all about wrapping up and confirming what we’ve asked.
Okay, so here’s what you want, here’s why you want it and here’s what’s most important. And by confirming that scope of work which again I referenced really heavily in episode 213, we are then saying to the customer, here’s what you’ve told me you want, here’s what I’m going to go and get done, here’s what I’m going to make happen for you. Now the impacts and outcomes that we see for businesses when they do that is very much around an increase in close rates because with so many businesses we work with, it’s not about getting more leads but it’s about closing more of what they have, about taking that money and time invested into an initial quote and turning it into a successful sale.
And those hell yeses that we talk about, i.e. an increase in close rate, they really come from seeking to understand what a customer wants, why they want it, what’s most important from that and then confirming the outcome. So that’s nice, short and punchy around how we can get a hell yes in our very first customer meeting. Unfortunately, the reality is lots of customers that I work with aren’t able to get enough yeses.
They quote too much, they’re short on time and they just can’t nail the outcomes. And the reality is that unless they actually do something about this, they continue on that same path over and over again and it can be really frustrating at the very least if not stressful at a level up. So to get you to that A plus grade, we provide a free quote audit that will really help pinpoint some of the reasons you’re not winning more jobs and give you that 20 to 30% bump in your sales levels.
It will also help you increase those close rates really quickly. So when you’re ready, click on the free quote audit link in the show notes if you want to get started. Of course, keep listening to this podcast because it’s in those show notes up the very top each and every episode.
That’s it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.