In this episode, we unpack one of the most crucial—yet most commonly mishandled—stages of the Sales Process: quote follow-up. While many salespeople assume the job is done once the quote is sent, top-performing sales pros know the real story:

Deals are won in the first meeting.

Today, you’ll discover the three key skills your team needs to sharpen in order to significantly lift their quote follow-up success. You’ll also learn exactly when and how your team should follow up so customers feel genuinely supported—not hounded—and so your deals move forward far more consistently.

These principles tie directly into the structure, discipline, and preparation we covered in Wednesday’s episode on Tom Hopkins—highlighting, once again, that high-level sales performance isn’t about luck. It’s about planning, process, and precise execution.

Key Takeaways:

• Deals are won or lost in the first meeting—not during the follow-up.
• Great follow-up requires clarity about what’s important, who decides, and when.
•  Quotes should be presented live (face-to-face, video, or phone).
• The follow-up plan should be agreed upon before the quote meeting ends.
• When teams script these questions and follow the structure, consistency and Results improve rapidly.

Time Stamps:

0:00 Intro

0:49 Closing Deals

1:45 Understanding What’s Important To The Customer

3:24 When and How We Follow Up

4:49 Wrap-Up

5:50 Call To Action

6:45 Outro

To learn more about our Coaching Program that is seriously growing our Customers sales: https://strongersalesteams.com/program/

To book a time to Meet with Ben directly: https://strongersalesteams.com/strategy/

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, you will learn how to effectively follow up on sales quotes to close more deals.

Intro:

Welcome to Sales Process Made Easy, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, 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:

By the end of this episode, you should be really clear on the three most important things we need to know to nail our quote follow-up, as well as when and how our team should be structuring that follow-up to help them close more deals. When it comes to closing deals, I am without doubt an advocate that the most effective sales closes nail it in the first meeting. That very first time they have the meet and greet or the second stage of our sales process, skip back to episode 143 if you want to learn more about that, but they are effective at being able to understand exactly what they need to do to close their deal in their first meeting.

Now, where they focus around is three areas, and we have a framework called the three Ds that we spend, or certainly that teams spend a huge amount of time implementing and have had some really impactful changes to their teams. But in short, the three Ds really focus around deliverables, deadlines, and decision makers, and we’re not going to go through that in detail today. We’re going to focus really clearly on what we need to do to be making sure that we are effectively following up in our sales quotes.

So before we leave any first meeting, we really need to understand what’s important to our customer, who’s deciding around the decision, and when that decision is going to be made. And as we roll out our sales quotes, getting those three things right will be super impactful to how we follow up in our sales quotes. 

So that’s the first part of the most important ways to be following up on quotes, getting really clear on what’s important, who’s deciding, and when they’re deciding, so that when we do deliver that sales quote, we are able to confirm with our customer exactly those three things. What’s in our quote that we took down as being important to them, the information that’s relevant for each of the decision makers that we deal with, and what we’ve included in our quote to help them make their decision by the time that’s important to them. 

So each of our quotes will have this information in here, but when it comes down to specifically following up on sales quotes, before we finish our quotation meeting, and I am an advocate bar none of quotes being presented either face-to-face or via video, I am without doubt an anti-campaigner for quotes being sent in any other way than through face-to-face or video deliveries. Certainly they can be supplemented through emails or any other version, however for me and the sales teams I’ve worked with across the past 25 years is they simply need to be delivered face-to-face or via video. And I’ll give a pass mark to over the phone for some instances too. So before we finish that quotation presentation, we’ve confirmed with our customer that we have nailed what’s important, who’s deciding that the information’s in there for them, and when their decision’s going to be made. 

Because what happens from there is stage two, and that is the second focus of today, and when and how we follow up, is that we’re able to have that conversation with a customer that says, okay, so we have for the electrical requirements of your house, for the installation of your new air conditioner, we’ve confirmed that it needs to be white, it needs to be installed in the living room in the top right-hand corner, the compressor needs to be going straight outside on the back wall, but what’s most important on top of this is that it’s going to cool the whole room at a really effective cost, to a level that both you and your husband are going to be happy about. Right, you’re planning on making the decision by the end of next week, so hopefully you’ve put everything we need here in the quotes, right, we then go through and we confirm that we’ve ticked off the deliverables, that her and her husband are going to be making the decision, and that the plan is for that to be made by the end of next week.

 Now here’s where the fortune comes, because we’re then able to sit with our customer and say, okay, great, is there anything you think that’s missing? When would you like me to follow up? Right, and how can I follow up with both of you to make sure you’re both happy? And this, as I said, is where the fortune is, because before we finish that quote meeting, we are able to talk to our customers around when and how we’re going to be following up with them. Next week, phone call to them. Next week, phone call through to both of them. Come around to the house to meet, to close out the yes or the no. Whatever it may be, before we finish that meeting, we’re really clear on the next steps around follow-up.

So to summarise this really short and sharp episode, when it comes to following up quotes, and this absolutely is a follow-up on Wednesday’s episode from Tom Hopkins, all around discipline and sales process being talent. But the key things to wrap up from today is that deals are closed in the first meeting, and the best sales people, the best sales professionals that we’ve ever worked with know how to set up a deal to close in that first meeting. And it’s by focussing around what’s important, who decides who’s making the decision, and when that decision is going to be made.

That information is then conveyed out during the quote meeting, but before that quote presentation meeting finishes, we’re agreeing with the customer how and when we’re going to be following up via phone, via face-to-face, via video message, whatever it may be that works for them and us, when we’re going to be doing it, and the points we’re going to be touching on, which is invariably that we’ve nailed all those things that are important to them. 

So we’ve got clear on what’s important, who’s deciding, and when they’re making the decision, and then before we finish that meeting, we are confirming when and how we’re going to be following up. 

Call to action for you out of today is to make sure that you’re clear with your team the questions that they need to ask to be getting the information around what’s important, who decides, and when they’re going to decide by, as well as writing down how we’re going to ask the questions around when and how we’re going to follow up. If you nail that out of today and your team have these written down for reference whenever they need them, then that is a perfect outcome for you. Thank you for listening in. Really grateful for everyone who spends their time with us. We’ve spent 25 years in selling and love sharing the information that we have. Episodes are dropping every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, first thing. Slightly different depending on the time zone you’re in. Between now and our next episode, next week, please keep thinking about how you and your team can be 1% better each and every day because it will make all the difference. Bye for now.

Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you’ve reached a sales ceiling? Are involved in every deal or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that’s you, that’s exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams programme, to help you get month-on-month sales growth with less stress.

In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that’s just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we’ll offer you a bonus one-on-one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster, which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales.

To book in, click the link in our show notes. It’s a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.