Are you losing sales because you’re chasing perfection instead of focusing on what actually matters?
In trade and service-based businesses, it’s easy to fall into two traps—either overcomplicating everything in the pursuit of perfection or lacking enough structure to be consistent.
This episode shows you how finding the sweet spot—precision—can help you move faster, build trust, and win more work.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- The critical difference between precision and perfection—and why it impacts your sales more than you think
- How to respond to leads and get to site faster without overthinking or overcomplicating your process
- A practical way to run site inspections that balance efficiency with building strong customer relationships
Hit play now to simplify your sales approach, move faster, and start closing more deals with confidence.
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, we are going to really unpack why perfection won’t ever grow your sales, but three ways that precision will.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry 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:
So today, we’re going to be unpacking what the difference is between precision and perfection, and then we’re going to pick three areas where I’d suggest you as a business can hone in on to be more precise and grow your sales. This episode all kicked off from a quote from a recent customer of mine, and Metallics, right in Metallics here, it went something like, I learned that in your sessions, I can be more precise and it’s empowering. Quite a different quote when I first heard this from one of my customers, and I asked him to unpack it.
He’s an individual salesperson based out of Victoria, smart guy, has been in sales for a long time, but had been struggling with his numbers. However, post our sessions, his numbers really started to pick up. So it was interesting from a direct salesperson rather than a leader.
And when I asked this participant, this student in our courses what he meant by being precise, what he says was that, in the past, I tried to get everything to be perfect. I wanted everything to fit into a nice box, tied up in a bow, and I spent so much time on making things perfect. But I forgot that what was really important was to be precise without aiming for perfection.
And I said, okay, that makes sense. He also then went on to say, I was also finding that in some areas, I was too sloppy, I was too slack, I didn’t have a process. So I needed to be a little bit more precise rather than chase perfection to get deals done and win programmes and win projects.
So this was really interesting for me because it crossed between both not having enough process and how being precise could help with that, but also how chasing perfection was slowing down getting business in the door. So that one landed with me and as such, we’re doing a podcast today on that. So for me, the way here to define the difference between precision and perfection is that having a good commercial process, a good commercial outcome for our customers is often far more impactful than going to perfection.
So perfection can certainly slow down deals. But then also on the flip side, if we don’t have enough precision in our sales process, we can be left short because we’re not consistently applying our craft with customers, i.e. we’re not consistently creating value for them. But at the same time, we’re not consistently giving ourselves an approach that we’re confident in, can go out to customers with a smiley face, run on autopilot, and actually listen to what they’re saying rather than needing to fumble through how we’re going to get the information collected or the quote information.
I had this example today. I had a quote come in for window cleaning. The guy was lovely.
He asked me all the right questions. He had quite a good sales process. But his quote template, so his iPad, it needed to be so precise that he took forever to get around and quote the house.
And in the end, he ended up saying to me, look, I’ll just go around and complete the rest of it myself. Now, for me, he lost all momentum with me because when I was standing with him and he had me as a captive audience, he could talk to me about what he did, he could tell me what he was going to move through, but his software was so perfect or demanded perfection that he wasn’t actually able to get around and get the quote happening quickly. On the flip side, someone who quoted me last week for the windows actually just had the old notebook and pen.
He was able to move really quickly around the site with me. But instead of focussing on updating the tech, he was actually able to just write down the numbers, the grey lead pencil on the book, and then talk to me about what he did. So he’s actually going to get the business for the window cleaning, right? It will have all been decided by the time when this goes live.
But I think that’s a really nice example around where perfection got in the way and precision really could have actually saved the day or won the day in this instance. So if I’m sitting here now and I’m in a trade sales business, which I have been for much of my career, and I certainly work with many leaders who are in the trade industries, I’d be encouraging you to think of some areas that you can be precise on. And I want you to think of it as coming either from a way where you don’t have a process and you need to be more precise or perhaps where you’re aiming for perfection and things are taking too long.
So your speed to market is too long, i.e. we’re too slow and customers aren’t necessarily waiting for us to then make the decisions on who they’re going to use. So first thing I’d really encourage you to look at from a precision point of view is to find a way that you can get to your leads within two hours of them coming in. And more importantly, I should say, within two business hours, right? So when your lead comes in, you’re able to bang, get out to that straight away.
And the way I’d encourage you to be precise is that you have a system that collects those leads and spits them out to your phone, right, your emails or your text messages so you can get onto them straight away. But the same in reverse, that you don’t rely on perfection in having to capture every single detail from customers or do every single piece of research before you call them, but you’re able to then say, right, lead comes in, I need to call them and we have some standard questions set to ask them. So that’s the first area.
The second area is I’d really encourage you to have a look at speed to site visit. So how you’re able to get out to sites quickly without needing long lead times. This may mean that you run slightly shorter site visits.
This may mean that you have dedicated times in your calendar to be able to get to site visits. This may mean that you prioritise local quotes versus those that are a little bit further away from you. But the aim here is that you can get to more quotes more quickly because time is of the essence when we’re contacting our customers.
All right, and the last one here that I’d really encourage you to think about is your site inspection process. So making sure that you’re precise in that you are collecting the right data, but it’s not so perfect that you need to spend your time on site with your head buried in your iPad or your head buried in your quoting tool. We need to be able to collect the information that we want, but still have a really engaging conversation with our customers so that we can grow some sense of trust and really build up on that phrase around people buying from those they know, like or trust.
So that’d be the three areas I’d be focussing on precision over perfection with some honourable mentions to your quote template, right? Making sure your quote template is fast enough for you to fill out, but also provides all the detail that you need for customers, right? And the second honourable mention here would be around understanding what your customers actually want. So making sure you can get really clear on what’s going to add value to them without having to go through every single detail, right? But at least asking those main questions so you’re clear. Now, this is a really interesting episode because precision can come from both ways.
It can come from not being precise enough, right? And it can also come from being too precise. So there is a real nice sweet spot here in terms of precision over perfection or precision over having no process at all. So recommendation I’ve got from today and I hope as we’re winding up this podcast that you start to think about three areas that you can be precise on.
Speed from lead generation to contact, speed from contact to getting out to site, and then the quality of your site inspection process, right? Strong enough that you’re collecting all the information, but not too robust that you’re not spending enough time talking to the customer. Now, my experience with many sales professionals is that they spend so many hours quoting and end up with really low close rates. It’s frustrating.
Often people won’t change anything. They’ll just continue to get the same results over and over again and they can certainly be very painful if not stressful. What I’ve done for podcast listeners is I’ve set up a free quote audit that’s going to help you pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs and what you need to do to really quickly increase those close rates.
It’s free. You can book in by going to the free quote audit link in the show notes. It’s really easy.
It’s right up near the top of the show link and if it’s something that you think will interest you to help you build more momentum in your sales growth, then I’d really encourage you to go and do it. That’s it for today. Thank you very much for listening.
Look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.