In today’s episode, we explore one of the most important—yet most frequently overlooked—skills in Sales Leadership: opening a sale the right way. That very first interaction with a customer—the meet and greet—often determines whether you win or lose the deal long before price, quoting, or follow-up even come into play.

You’ll uncover a practical, repeatable three-step approach that helps you identify what customers genuinely care about, build early emotional connection, and guide them into a natural buying conversation that significantly lifts your chances of closing the deal.

Key Takeaways:

• Customers buy emotionally, then justify rationally.
• The way you open the sale sets the tone for how you close the sale.
• The three steps to open a sale powerfully are:
  • Ask what’s important
  • Repeat it back
  • Ask what happens if you get it right (trial close)
• This process uncovers deeper needs and builds strong emotional connection.
• Teaching your team this framework will lead to better deals, stronger conversions, and more predictable Results.

Time Stamps: 

0:00 Intro

0:54 How to Open a Sale

1:25 Importance of Opening a Sale

2:24 Understanding What The Customer Wants

3:50 Repeating It Back To The Customer

4:42 Asking the Customer What Happens If You Get It Right

6:13 Wrap Up

6:46 Action Items

7:45 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 will understand how your team can effectively understand what’s important to a customer, ensure that they are clear that you know exactly what is important to them, and get an understanding around what you need to do to be closing a deal more often. 

So if we get straight into it, there’s a framework that we’ve spoken about a number of times across this podcast called The Three Ds. One we’re not going to go into detail into today, but certainly focus around a subset of that. And that’s all around how to open a sale, which is typically now meet and greet. 

So we mentioned back in episode 143, the shortcut steps to a great sales process. And really, when we look at opening a sale, that typically comes in at the second stage of a process, which is the meet and greet. 

Now, why is it important to open a sale really well? Well, as humans, we often make really snap decisions around the people around us and who we’re dealing with. And sales is no exception. If we think around the emotion that people decide emotionally and justify rationally when it comes to sales decisions or purchase decisions, decide emotionally and justify rationally, that a very large number of people fall into that category. And us as salespeople are part of that decision at an emotional level. Does the customer like us? Are they ambivalent? Are they Switzerland to who we are? Or on the fortunate side, do they just not like us? And where we come to opening up a sale being so important, it’s around creating that great first impression. And now today, we’re not going to focus on dressing well, on presenting in a professional manner, on being on time, on meeting a customer in the format that most suits them. But instead, we’re going to talk about how we open it from a verbal level, right from a real practical level. 

And that comes down to step one, which is understanding what our customer wants. That is absolutely step one of the Three D’s process, the deliverables, and getting really, really clear on what is most important to our customer in their decision-making process. Historically, we’ve done thousands and thousands of deals. And one I remember really well is a customer who had an operating flour mill and were looking to instal solar. And for them, they received flour deliveries quite regularly, but also had quite a full office that needed some quiet to be able to talk to customers.

So they had two needs that came out as really, really important. Number one was that when the flour was delivered, airborne particles were quite common around the site, which were highly flammable. So we needed to be really certain that when we were installing this solar system, and a large solar system was a multi-million dollar project, that we were not contributing to the risk of combustion across the site. And number two was when we had the workforce in the building, that we were making sure that our team being on the roof weren’t going to be disruptive over what was also quite a long number of weeks of installation. 

So for us, understanding those deliverables really early in the process was super important to being able to deliver a solution that A, ensured we weren’t using power tools when the product was delivered, when the flour was delivered. And B, we’re really minimising the use of impact drills on the roof during hours. So it allowed us to plan a workflow and communicate that to a customer that was going to work. But the important first step here was that we asked the customer questions around what’s important to them. 

The second step to giving that customer confidence very, very early, that emotionally we were the right person for them, was to repeat those back to the customer. Sounds really simple, right? But it is as simple as saying, okay, so what we’ve taken from today is that you’re looking to drastically reduce your power bills, but what’s really important is that we are not creating a flammable environment or a combustible environment and we’re allowing your team to continue to work without disruption. Because despite any amount of money you’ll save from putting this system on your roof, if your team don’t do the deals they need to do and don’t look after the customers in the way they need to, the impacts could well and truly be counted out from lost customers, right? So we were able to repeat that back and the customer was able to have some confidence that, hey, these guys are on top of what we want to do. They’ve listened to me, they understand what I want and straight away that emotional connection begins to form.

The third step when it comes to opening your sale is to then start asking the customer what happens if you get that right. And in this instance, it went along the lines of, okay, if we’re able to pull together a system that’s able to save you that money, if we can bring forward a plan that really ensures the safety of your environment and no impact to your team, where does that leave you in terms of what we want to do? Now sometimes, and I don’t want to run a fool’s errand here to say that we’re going to get an instant yes from our customer. In fact, quite often what we’ll see is that it will open up more areas of importance that we haven’t yet covered, which means we return to that pace around understanding what’s important around repeating it back to them and then confirming next steps. And that in itself is a great outcome because the more of this we do, the more we are justifying emotionally and supporting rationally for our customer that we’re the right choice. 

So often it’ll lead into more areas that’s really important, but also will lead to customers in saying, actually, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the ones we need to work with. That of course gives us the opportunity to say, all right, outside of these really tangibly important things, what else do we need to be doing? 

So we create a circular conversation that can continue until we get to a point where a customer says along the lines of fantastic, we nail that, we move ahead. Or whilst I won’t guarantee that that’s going to win you the deal, and often it’ll come back to you’ve got to get your price right, right, it’ll certainly hold you in good stead. And that’s what we want to be nailing out of how we open a sale. 

So the key things from today are really around making sure that we’re opening a sale to help our customers decide emotionally, then justify rationally. Focussing most importantly on asking what’s important to them, repeating back to them that we’re all clear, and then asking our customer what happens if we get all of these things in line with what they need. Right, in brackets, we call that trial closing. But what comes out of this is a circular conversation where we get to understand, repeat back and confirm next steps or trial close until we get to a point where we are significantly closer to winning the business than we were before that meeting.

So the action items that are really important out of today are to sit down with your team and make sure that we’re clear on the questions that we’re asking our customers to understand this, but also how they repeat it back to the customers and what we do when we’re asking for next steps. So we get those questions right, we add them to our playbook, we’ve certainly covered some other questions that we want to be standardising and writing down, right, and then move towards having our team start to improve that little bit each and every day. 

Now we’re super grateful for everyone listening to this podcast. Thank you, 25 years of experience, we really love sharing with people. We’re dropping podcasts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 

In the middle of the week, we’re looking at a leadership lesson, a business or a person who has really redefined the sales landscape. This week, we’re talking Ford Motors, so can’t wait to have you on for that. 

But between now and when we meet next, please keep thinking about how you and your team can be 1% better each and every day, because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.