Could three simple sales mistakes be costing your trade business hundreds of thousands of dollars every year?
Many experienced trade business owners assume their years of industry knowledge are enough to consistently win jobs. But even highly skilled operators can unknowingly overlook a few critical sales fundamentals that dramatically impact close rates.
The result? More time spent quoting, more money spent generating leads, and fewer jobs won than expected.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- Why getting physical products or samples into your customer’s hands creates emotional connection and increases buying confidence.
- How missing key decision-makers during the sales process can quietly derail deals you’ve worked hard to win.
- The simple process improvements that help turn more quotes into jobs without generating a single extra lead.
Listen now to learn how small improvements to your sales process can increase close rates, win more jobs, and add significant revenue to your business without spending more on marketing.
Take our Free Quote Quiz now to Kickstart Your Sales Growth
To see how we’ve helped business grow their sales:
Or email Ben if you would like to get in touch: hello@strongersalesteams.com
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 bring together 20 years of trade experience into my top three sales mistakes that cost businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you 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’s one of those episodes where I want you to be really tuned in to precisely what you do in your business because what I’m going to go through is three sales mistakes, really common sales mistakes that I see from experienced trades people and talk through not only how they’re impacting their business but what you can do about them to improve them really quickly. This episode actually came about from a customer of ours.
There was a Zoom call with or an MS Teams call that we were having about a week ago. This is an experienced trade leader, I should say, before I get into it. But in that call, we were actually working through a lot of their recent deals.
So I do with every one of my customers, particularly through the Sold Out Sales Teams Academy, we very, very regularly review their broader suite of deals. And in these deals, there are a couple of common things that were coming out as issues or more importantly, pieces of the process that this customer of mine had missed and they’re in the home improvements business, I think is the easiest way to say it. They step across quite a broad number of areas.
But what came out of that more importantly was that for an experienced trade person, they were actually doing some of the basics wrong again and again and again and that was actually costing them quite a bit of money because not only were they paying for their leads but they were also going out to site, spending time with the customer. In a home improvement sense, it’s really important that you are in front of the customer. But they were doing that and they’re doing that right.
But these common mistakes they made actually meant they were not only paying for the leads, going out to site, but also then spending time quoting and not winning enough deals. So we moved a couple of things for that customer and I’d expect over the coming weeks that they’re going to have some really significant changes in their close rates. And in fact, last week, they managed to get a deal done on the spot.
So they actually went to a site, closed a deal then and there and that has given them about a week’s worth of work. So not too bad, one sale, one week’s worth of work. So those three mistakes that I see really commonly made, I’m going to break down into three areas.
So the first of those areas is around getting some emotion into the deal. Getting some emotion into the customer, not only about what they’re going to proceed with. So the example I’m going to use today is carpet.
Now it doesn’t matter what you are in terms of a product but I want you to listen through as if you’re laying carpet and find some similarities in terms of your business because they’re always there. But I want you to imagine that you’re in front of your customer and you’re trying to draw some emotion in carpet. Yeah, not always easy to get people excited about carpet.
However, the great sales people and the teams that we see closing deals in the 40s and 50 percents, so that is almost one out of every two deals that they quote they’re closing, we see these customers work really heavily on not just emotion in the deal but emotion towards them as a supplier. Now that doesn’t mean that people fall in love with them and it’s all kumbaya and romance from there but it’s emotion to say actually this person feels like the right one to do the job. And it’s that saying that says decide emotionally, justify rationally that I really lean into here.
It’s one of my favorites because I’m certainly guilty of it. I’ve just had some panel bidding work done on my car and I picked my supplier based on the fact that they were doing work for someone I knew. So I’d already decided emotionally that they were the one I wanted to use and I just had to rationally make sure they did everything that I wanted.
So the emotion piece that I talk about here, it’s certainly able to be achieved in many ways but the number one way that I recommend and it’s the inverse of the mistake that I see many trade leaders make and that’s to get something in their customers’ hands. Far too often or far too rarely I should say do I see trade leaders actually get product in hand. I have not worked with an industry yet where they have not been able to or where we have not been able to decide on a product to get into hand.
So please don’t automatically think you’re excluded because you’re a builder. Builders can absolutely bring finishings into site into a quote when they’re there meeting with customers. But for me the most common mistake I see made is that trade leaders do not get product into hand.
So that’s the number one recommendation I have today around bumping up close rates is to make sure you get product in hand. Products in hand does a couple of things. Number one is it shows it’s real intangible.
Number two is it actually allows the customer to visualize what the finished product could look like in their hands. And number three is it opens up questions and questions create conversation and conversation will often create trust and trust wins deals. So the first mistake that I say that is genuinely costing my businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars each business each year is not getting product in hand.
And I think the key part around this mistake is it’s so easy to fix. It’s just about being organized and if you’re in an industry where you’re not sure what that sample could be book some time with me because we can certainly rather than doing a quotation review or a quote process review we can actually just talk about how you can get samples in hand. And as I said I’ve never had an industry where I couldn’t get something worked through.
So moving to the second area. The second piece moves on from a motion but it actually has quite a similar train of thought and that is around missing decision makers. So think about when you’re on site whether it be a commercial job or a residential job they do follow similar patterns here.
And that is that it’s very rare that you get everyone involved in deciding which way someone or a business wants to proceed in the meeting at that moment. Very very rare. And we can certainly work hard to get more decision makers in particularly in a commercial sense and we can certainly work hard in a residential sense to try and preempt those questions.
But the key piece that I see trade businesses in particular miss is making sure not that they know who the decision makers are but those decision makers know them. And it’s a serious mistake because once quotes then get presented or concepts then get presented to anyone else involved in the process, be they homeowners, be they businesses, those that don’t know you and all that work you’ve put in around arriving on time, around being well dressed, around asking the right questions, around walking around site, making sure you know what’s important, everything else there, that when they don’t know that you’ve done that and have had no exposure to you a lot of it gets lost in translation. And in the end we end up having decisions being influenced by people that you don’t know.
And the very simple inverse or fix to this is to simply make sure that when you can’t get decision makers in that meeting then and there you find a reason to engage with them outside. Be it a phone call to explain specs, be it dropping samples off at another time, be it a video call, be it a return visit, be it rolling in to do something of a trial installation or your first stage of preparation, whatever it may be. But by missing that opportunity to make sure every decision maker actually knows who you are, to gain one more I see each business that I work with cost themselves many tens of thousands into hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every year.
So first one, building some emotion and I particularly recommend that through sampling. Number two is making sure that decision makers know who you are. Those involved in the decision have some engagement with you so that they can build a little bit of emotion around who you are as a person in a business.
And the last piece is all about following a process. And I talk about this so often and we have so many podcasts on it. But the mistake I want to focus in on here is that by not having a process, i.e. a process to sample or a process to speak to decision makers, what happens is that these businesses are rolling up to site and relying on their memory to get things done.
Now, yes, we can talk about the fix here being a broader sales process. But if we look specifically into this carpet example, so you’ve walked in, you’ve left some carpets there for your customer to sample, fantastic, right? That’s product in hand. Wanting to get involved in with all decision makers, i.e. making sure that they know you, fantastic.
The way we can handle that is a phone call to that team, husband and wife or business if there’s more than one person, a phone call to that team when they have samples in front of them to explain what each stripe means, to explain the different thread counts, to explain the different thicknesses, to explain the cleanability or lack thereof, to explain the laying process, right? But by doing that, by having that phone call booked in, we’re then making sure that every single person involved in the process knows exactly who we are. The third piece here around process is to then have something as simple as a return time booked in to go and pick that carpet up. Because when you’re returning to pick that carpet up, you are getting to have more contact with your customer then and there, talk through what’s in the way, talk through any problems, talk through what they do or don’t like about what you’re doing.
But really, impactfully, it allows you to have more contact with that customer and for them to build that relationship with you. So when we think of process lens around mistakes costing businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars, I want you to think around a process, not just your broader from lead generation to meet and greet to quote to closing and then to the post-sale management. I also would love you to think about how can the little parts of process around sampling, around meeting with decision makers, how can you make sure that those are all process driven so that you can not only efficiently roll them out but also get some engagement back from your customers.
So they’re the three mistakes that I’m seeing and they were very particular to the customer I mentioned in the home improvement industry. However, these are the three types of mistakes that I see trade businesses make really often. Getting the product in hand, making sure decision makers know who they are and wrapping it all up with a nice sales process or even more impactfully, a specific process around these areas.
But these three mistakes, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And to give you a lens around what I’m talking about here, if you are a business that is doing $100,000 a month, so call it $1.2 million a year and you are closing at 25%, if you were to simply improve your close rate by 20% and what I mean by 20% is to go from 25% to 30%. That’s it, from 25% to 30%, very small change.
That 20% change, no more leads, just converting 30% instead of 25%, that single change is 20% more business each and every month. So your $100,000 per month goes to around $120,000 per month. Your $1.2 million per year goes to $1.44 million per year.
So it’s a $240,000 growth number to your business just from increasing your close rates from 25% to 30%. Now, I’d certainly expect more. Anyone we work with, we aim for a lot more improvement than that.
However, you can see that small changes to sales process or to close rates can really drive significant sales numbers. So that’s it for today. I’d love you to think about as you’re leaving today if one of those three things you can make a change to in your business and whichever one of those is what you’re going to do about it.
If you do that thinking and you’re still a little bit frustrated that you might be spending quite a lot of time quoting but you’re losing deals and you’re not sure that this or those areas in particular are the ones you want to focus on, I think the main message I have is that if you don’t change something now, you’re going to continue to get those same pretty stressful results over and over again which means you’re going to be working long hours and not having the money in the bank to show for it. So, I’ve got the free quoting quiz that will pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs and I’d expect you’d be able to grow your close rates by 20% to 25% from that. So, there’s a free quiz link that’s in the show notes.
Jump into that. Get started now. But between now and next podcast, please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.