Are you constantly chasing customers—only to feel like they’re just not ready to buy?
If you’re doing all the follow-ups but still struggling to close deals, the issue might not be your effort—it’s what’s missing in your relationship with the customer.
This milestone episode reveals how to shift that dynamic and make customers move toward you instead.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- The real reason you’re stuck chasing customers—and how to reverse it
- How to strengthen the “know, like, trust” factors that drive buying decisions
- A simple, powerful way to involve customers in their projects so they’re more invested in saying yes
Hit play now to stop chasing deals and start creating customers who are ready to buy from you.
New episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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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 real reason why you’re always chasing customers for sales that you never considered before and how to fix it.
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:
Before we get into today’s episode, I just want to ring the bell. This is episode 200 for Sales Growth Made Simple. Episode 200, I cannot believe we have made that, right? Four years ago or three and a half years ago when we started this project, you never could have said to me we’re going to get to 200, that we’re going to be a top two and a half percent global podcast and growing and growing rapidly at this point in its evolution.
I’m very, very grateful to be getting here and for those listening, I hope that you’re listening because we have generated you lots of value along the journey and please be rest assured we have so many great topics ahead that we’re going to keep talking about. But for the moment, for now, just a very quick point in time where we can acknowledge 200 episodes for our podcast and for everyone involved, particularly for those editing Yahweh, a shout out to you. Shout out to my wife, my family and all of my customers that have got involved in this.
Thank you. Great moment and I can’t wait for the next 200. But to get to the next 200, we need to make sure we continue to create value.
So today, we’re going to be focussing on the real reason why you’re always chasing customers for sales and we’re going to focus on three things that you’re generally not generating enough of if you’re chasing customers for sales. That’s making sure they know you, they like you and they trust you. So, they are without doubt the three levers that lead to customers making purchasing decisions.
So, let’s slow down and unpack those for a minute. We speak about customers or people making decisions to buy from someone because they know, like or trust them. So, knowing them.
Knowing them all comes down to that they feel like you are an entity that they have a relationship with, that you’re a person who they don’t just see as part of a business, bend from the business, but you’re a person that they have a little bit of depth with. You’ve had conversations with them. You’ve had emails.
You’ve had phone calls. You’ve discovered problems and you’ve unpacked them. You’ve gone through a process whereby you’ve understood what they need.
You know one of their friends or one of their colleagues. You’ve worked with them before, but knowing somebody is more than just having seen their social media account, but it’s a number of layers that you’ve been able to develop with your customer or the customer has been able to develop with you to make that decision. Now, often the no part can come very, very quickly, but I’m going to give you a lever at the end of this as to how you can build the know, like, or trust really effectively.
The second one is like. Like can come in a couple of ways. The first one is that instant attraction, if you like, that when someone comes to your front door, to the front of your business and you sit down, in that first 30 seconds, you make a judgement call that says, yeah, I could work with this person.
Yeah, I like that person. The early indicators that says, yeah, you’re my type of person. Now, that can obviously be influenced in a lot of ways, but it’s very much so by being punctual, by being well presented, by smiling, by some of your basic body language, I’m here, I’m engaged, I’m ready to talk to you, by how you smile, by the questions you ask, and by simply how you can make that person feel.
So, knowing someone, liking someone, and the third one being trusting someone. Trust is the hardest of the three in my experience to build, and that’s because normally to trust someone, you need to have a moment in time when you can build that trust. Something’s gone wrong, they’ve sent a quote through at their agreed time, they’ve answered your questions, they’ve met any of your needs that you have.
But building trust is very much about having a relationship with someone where they don’t necessarily feel like they know you or like you, but they can trust you that when you say you’re going to do something, you do it. And trust for me in my experience is most effectively building things like getting quotes out promptly, getting that on time, being accurate, being attentive, listening to customers, and answering their questions. Now, for each of these three, there’s so many different things we can be doing to be building our examples of being known, liked, or trust.
However, one thing for me that universally works really effectively to build that know, like, or trust levers, and in essence, stopping you needing to be always chasing customers for sales, is getting them involved in projects. And what I mean by that is not just meeting them on site, meeting them out at their business, meeting them out at their homes, and saying, hey, let’s get going on this. Let’s talk through your project.
What do you need? What do you like? What don’t you like? It’s more than that. It’s about getting them actively involved in the project, getting them involved in designing the project, getting them involved in choosing where things go, choosing colours, giving them options around quality levels, giving them options around prices, around speed to instal, around type of fixtures and fittings, but actively talking to them about what they do and don’t want within that project. And the best example I have of this from my time in any industries is in the renewables industry, when we had our solar business, and we used to give customers an online rooftop design version of their house.
So, they’d log into a system that we had, they’d go and type in their address, whatever it may be, they’d type in their house and bang, up would come a satellite image of their roof. And on there, they could actually design their own solar system. They could lay out panels where they wanted them on the west, on the east, north, south, whatever it may be, put them so you couldn’t see them from the street, whatever took their fancy.
And why this was really effective is that it got customers really engaged in seeing solar being brought to life. And with you there as the partner, with you there as the one that was going through that journey with them, you were someone that they could build some knowing, some liking or some trusting around. Now, of course, in our industry in solar, it was a little bit difficult to always follow customers’ designs, but what it did was it gave us somewhere to start from.
It gave us a point at which we could start talking to our customers about their design. They were engaged, they were ready to go because they were putting things on their roof. It was like having solar panels in their hand, right? But by being actively involved in that process from start through to finish, we were able to very quickly enhance those capabilities around know, like, and trust around customers saying, hey, I know you.
I’ve spent some time designing out this project with you. You’ve gone back and forward. You’ve given me some suggestions.
Love it. He’s here. He’s helping.
She’s been involved in this process and she’s had a smile on her face when we’re talking about doing the design. She sat next to me when I did it on my computer at home when she came around to visit my site or trust. I put some panels in a certain location of the roof, right? He said to me, actually, that’s not a great spot because you’re going to get shaded by the tree.
It meant I didn’t quite put as much on the roof, but I wasn’t wasting money and putting solar panels on there that weren’t going to generate any energy. So, it gives us the chance as the supplier to be really working on those three levers, really increasing the opportunity that we can be someone that they know, like, or trust through one simple lever and that’s getting them involved. So, as we roll out of today’s episode, I’d really encourage you to think about what’s something you can do with your customers to get them actively involved in the design of their project.
I have never, ever met an industry where we couldn’t do this. So, if you think you’re one of those people that can’t, then get in touch with me and I’ll give you some ideas. I promise you that.
There’s a commitment there. All right, but have a think about how could you get customers involved in designing their own project to increase the chances of you being known, liked, or trust. That’s it for today.
I’m very grateful that you not only listen, but I’m really grateful in this instance that you take a moment once this podcast finish to think about how you could get customers more actively involved in their projects. It’s very much a 1% better everyday approach. It very much works.
Small little changes that we can repeat again and again do make all the difference. But between now and Wednesday, thank you for listening in to today. Bye for now.