Are your salespeople losing deals before they even start—without realizing it?
Even experienced salespeople often make one critical mistake in front of customers: focusing too much on their own product instead of truly understanding the customer’s needs. This episode reveals the three key errors that silently lower close rates—and how to fix them.
By listening, you’ll learn:
- How to qualify the right customers before the first meeting to avoid wasted effort
- How to uncover exactly what your customer values and needs during meetings
- The power of follow-up questions to dig deeper and ensure your solutions align perfectly with their goals
Press play to master the three levers that keep your sales team customer-focused, increase close rates, and prevent avoidable mistakes in every meeting.
New episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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, you will learn the biggest mistake sales people make in front of customers.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Process Made Simple, 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:
In this episode, we will focus on the three biggest mistake sales people are making in front of customers, what they can do about it, and then how you can make sure those mistakes don’t happen to you.
It’s so difficult to always be on your game when it comes to customer interactions as a salesperson. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the most experienced in the industry or you’re learning, it’s never easy to be at the top of your game 100% of the time. What that means is that regardless as to how experienced we are, the big mistakes can happen to any of us. The biggest mistake that I see from sales people in front of customers is that they worry far too much about them. What I mean by that is they worry far too much about what they can offer to customers, the features, the benefits, the outcomes of the product that they do, without really understanding what the customer wants.
The result here is not necessarily a bad relationship, but certainly lower close rates. Those lower close rates come about because the sales people haven’t been able to really understand what the customer needs, but have instead focused around them. This most typically happens in our first meeting. That’s the time when sales people tend to get this wrong. However, there’s a really nice format that we can train our sales team in to make sure that they’re not making these mistakes.
There’s three parts to this. Let’s go through each one of these now, and then we’ll wrap up what you can do to make this work for you. The first thing we can do to make sure we’re not making this big mistake in front of our customers is qualifying them. Before we go and see them, actually making sure that they’re a business that we’re going to be able to add value to. That can simply be done through your qualifying questions, and that should happen in the very early stages of your lead generation before we even get out face-to-face. That’s number one.
Number two is when we’re in front of customers, we need to make sure that we’re asking what adds value for them. We’re getting really clear around what their problem is, what their opportunity is, and what they see as a solution to fix it. Because once we understand that, it gives us the opportunity to pair our services or our products with exactly what they’re looking for.
The third piece, and this is very much a technical element here, i.e. a way that our team should be behaving, is to make sure that when we’re asking these questions, we’re following them up with a second question. What I mean here is if we’re asking the question that says, what’s the reason that we came together today? We’re then following that up with a more direct question around their answer. So if their answer is, well, I need you to help me reduce my operational expenditure. Fantastic. Can you tell me more about in particular which operational expenditure lines are causing you the biggest trouble? Or can you tell me in particular about where you’re overspending and how we can pull that back? Or if we’re in a residential landscape, what I’m looking to do is actually make my house feel like my home. Fantastic. So when we talk about taking your house to be your home, what are the type of things that are going to really land with you to make it feel like that forever home?
So they’re both slightly different examples. However, what they’re doing is they’re following a first question with a deeper second question that allows us to really understand exactly what our customer’s looking for. It’s also by asking questions, stopping us talking about ourselves. Because as soon as we start doing that, our products and features become the main star of the show rather than lining them up with exactly what our customer wants.
So the biggest mistake we’re seeing sales people make in front of customers is focusing more on themselves than what the customer wants. It’s generally happening in the very first meeting. So it’s really early when this mistake is, but it’s nice and easy to fix. And all we need to do to fix it is make sure we’re qualifying customers. So we’re actually sitting in front of the right customers in the first place. When we get there, we’re focusing on their problem or their opportunity. So we can then work out where we add value. And to get to the bottom of that problem or opportunity, we’re actually asking multiple follow-up questions. So a general question is followed by a more specific question, which may even be followed by more specific questions after that. But the narrower we can go in terms of what they want to achieve at a meeting with us, the more likely we are to be successful.
So as you leave today, the thought that I’m hoping is landing with you is thinking about those three levers and wondering where you can improve them in your team. Are we qualifying people well enough? Are we actually spending enough time understanding what they want when we’re in front of them? Or lastly, are we asking multiple questions or just taking the first answer and flowing straight into what we can offer? In most teams I work with, there’s something in there that they can improve. And if you can take that 1% better approach, that’s a perfect example here around little mini improvements or micro improvements that improve our sales team.
Thank you for joining in today. Very grateful as always. We’re dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Between now and next session, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does help grow sales. That’s it for today.
See you next time. Bye for now.
Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you’ve reached the 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%. That’s just week one.
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.