What if the mistakes you’re making with customers could actually become your greatest opportunity for growth?
Every business makes mistakes—it’s inevitable. A quote gets missed, a delivery goes off track, or communication falls short.
Handled poorly, these moments can cost you repeat business and referrals. Handled well, they can actually strengthen trust, deepen customer loyalty, and create even more opportunities down the road.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- The three most common customer service mistakes that can quietly cost you future business
- How to respond effectively when quotes, delivery, or communication fall short
- Why fixing mistakes the right way can actually increase customer trust, loyalty, and referrals
Press play now to learn how to turn customer service mistakes into stronger relationships, more repeat business, and long-term growth.
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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, we are going to unpack the three ways making mistakes and disappointing customers actually lands you more sales.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry sales and business leaders finally in 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 and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s Get Started
Ben Wright:
Today, we’re going to unpack three of the most common errors that I see sales and businesses make when it comes to delighting customers and how you can turn these mistakes into more future business. There’s no doubt as a salesperson or a business leader that one of our nightmares is we promise something to a customer and we don’t deliver to it.
I’ve certainly been in that camp. I have most of the businesses that I work with that have been in that camp and as sales people, it’s something that unfortunately is just part of life that we need to deal with. The most common types of mistakes that I think I see businesses make is the first one is doing the wrong quote, so pricing wrong or the wrong specification and that generally is in the salesperson’s hands and certainly happens very often that we don’t quite get it right.
The next two errors often come about from a delivery point of view but sometimes have the involvement of a salesperson. The second one being an error in delivery, i.e., we just don’t nail the process of delivering the job. The third one which is related but not the same is our communication during project delivery isn’t strong.
That’s one that can often, I think, be a shared piece between sales and delivery or operations whereby we’re not quite keeping our customer updated effectively even though we’re delivering a great project. We’re not letting them know when we’re on site, when we’re going to finish, any challenges we’re having, right, all those type of vital pieces of communication that keep customers engaged along the journey. So they’re typically the three main buckets of errors that I see businesses delivering and look, for you listening, please have a think about which ones are those you’ve had experience with because it’ll really give some context to what I’m about to go through next.
Many businesses I work with, when these type of things go wrong, don’t respond in ways that generate some future business and I’ll give you an example of each of the three. So the wrong quote example, what I’ll often see from salespeople is when they get the quote wrong is one of two things. They’ll try and hold to that quote and try and encourage the customer to change their mind and go for what they’re presenting or they’ll redo their quote and one of two things will happen.
They either get it wrong again because they haven’t asked the right questions to confirm what the customer wants or they’re too slow. So by the time being they re-quote, they’ve lost the business, right. So that’s typically what I see businesses respond to from a wrong quote.
The second one around delivery error, again, one of two things that I see is businesses are too slow to fix it so the customer gets pissed off, right, that the delivery hasn’t been good enough or number two is they band-aid over it, right, or essentially avoid the problem. So that happened really regularly with businesses and they end up with a substandard delivery but they band-aid over it and they negotiate as such with the customer to get something that’s acceptable that they’re not necessarily happy with. When it comes to communication, look, what I often see businesses or how they respond when it’s poor communication is generally they actually don’t realise it’s been poor until the end of the project and the customer says, hey, I’m not happy about this and bang, future business goes out the door, right, and certainly future business for all of these three things, we’re talking about future business here and not getting future business is an absolute, you know, cardinal mistake for me in any business because there’s three ways to grow revenue.
Number one is new business, number two is getting more from your current transaction, i.e. increasing your sale price, right, or increasing what you’re delivering with that project and number three is repeat business. All three of these when you get them wrong will impact not only your future business from that customer but your ability to get referrals from them and so often I see businesses respond in a way that I wouldn’t regard as, you know, future focused when it comes to fixing these areas. However, those that do respond well, I actually see drive in many cases more future business than have they done nothing as wrong and so again, let me step into examples here when we get a quote wrong and I see a business going, you know what, I’m terribly sorry, do you mind if I check with you exactly what you’re after, I want to get this right the next time so that we are really confident we’re going to deliver it for you and then they turn that quote around as a priority.
When it comes to a delivery error, a business is prepared to stop and say yeah, we got that wrong, here’s what we’re going to do to fix it, are you happy with that and they go about and make that happen and the third one when it comes to communication is typically how I see a business realise this is a, they learn from their prior mistakes when they get feedback from customers and they fix it or B, the salesperson stays involved particularly with larger value projects, it gets easier and easier, they stay involved and they check in periodically. I generally say for a short-term project, right, for one to two-week project, they’ll check in once at the middle and once at the end. For a longer-term project, right, a month or more, they’re checking in every couple of weeks but the salesperson’s checking in and they’re finding out if the communication simply isn’t strong enough.
So, when we see businesses do that, what we often find with customers is that the business goes from an entity that they like but is still somewhat unknown to an entity that they like but also they know how they respond under pressure and I have absolutely at a personal level used businesses again and again and again after they’ve made a mistake because they’ve shown me they’re prepared to fix it. So, at the end of the day, we are all perfectly human, we all make mistakes but when you’re prepared to admit it and stand by the promises, i.e. fix it even when no one’s watching, that’s when you build really great long-term relationships. So, if you’re out there as a sales or business leader, I want you to have a think about how you respond in those instances.
So, if you deliver a quote that’s wrong, do you confirm what the customer wants and respond really quickly? When you make a delivery error, do you fix it or when communication’s poor, do you make sure you do something about it to improve it moving forward? I’d really like you to think about that as you get off this podcast and if you find some gaps, jump into one of them now and do something about it because at the end of the day, getting these things wrong, right, leads to a lot of frustration where you spend hours and hours of wasted time on sales quotes or chasing up for repeat business or referrals that just don’t happen and generally speaking, if you don’t do something about it, if you don’t change something now, you’re going to continue to get these same results over and over again and they’re going to be stressful, they’re going to piss you off, they’re going to really annoy you or whatever it is, right, but change is unlikely. Improvement is even less likely. What we do to help our podcast listeners is we have a free quote audit that pinpoints exactly why you’re not winning more jobs or in this instance, more repeat business and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly.
Just click on the free quote audit link in the show notes, that’ll get you started. It’s nice and simple but for today, that’s it. Please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day.
Look forward to the next podcast. Bye for now.