Are you losing sales before you even get the chance to present your quote properly?

From poor first impressions to rushed quoting processes and weak follow-up systems, these small mistakes quietly destroy close rates and leave business owners frustrated after spending hours quoting work that never converts. 

If you’ve ever felt like you’re working harder than ever but not seeing enough signed jobs, this conversation will hit home.

Listeners will learn how to:

• Identify the three most common sales mistakes causing trade businesses to lose jobs
• Improve customer engagement by matching buyer excitement and building stronger trust from the first interaction
• Create a more effective quoting and follow-up process that increases close rates and revenue per deal

Press play now to discover the practical sales fixes that can help you stop wasting quotes, win more jobs, and grow your trade business faster.

Take our Free Quote Quiz now to Kickstart Your Sales Growth

To see how we’ve helped business grow their sales: 

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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, I’m going to convince you how the first seven seconds of a client meeting will win or lose your sale.

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:

Big statement, the first seven seconds of your client meeting will win or lose the sale. Now, as we get in today, the first thing I think you’re thinking is, why seven seconds, Ben? So there is heaps of literature out there around why the first seven seconds are so important when it comes to making relationships and making impressions, and these come down to many subconscious or even unconscious thoughts around your confidence, your knowledge, your trustworthiness, right, through to some closer-to-conscious elements such as how you present, how you look, how you smile, how you talk, right, and how you engage with a person generally.

For me, in particularly the trade sales market, an industry that I would say generally is regarded as blue-collar over white-collar, but generally where we have non-permanent sales people making sales, i.e. people that are arriving on site in work gear, who are busy, who are often distracted, who are multitasking, right, first impressions are as important if not more important than any other industry we work in. So when I’m working with trade businesses and they ask me, hey, Ben, how do I make sure that I get this right? Because at the end of the day, I can’t simply present in a clean white shirt every single time I go to a customer. And look, I think even more impactfully is I don’t always want to present like that because trustworthiness can certainly be lost if we are overdressed, you know, for a site visit versus dressed appropriately.

So when I talk to customers about this, I reference three things. It’s so important to look good, smell good, and sound good. Now, you can smile, you can shake your head when you hear this.

These are very much subtleties in how we present, but period, first impressions matter. First impressions, when you get to that door, those things that you can control are so important. And I remember I had a salesperson and I know he listens to the podcast in the very early days of his career.

We are talking about 15 years ago. He arrived to work dressed in a manner that I didn’t think was acceptable to present to customers. I sent him home.

He was super annoyed with me, super annoyed. And I don’t know how long he stayed annoyed with me for, but we are still friends now. And in fact, I’d say we’re good friends.

I went to his wedding. He would be invited to any major party in my life that I had and it’s 15 years later, right? Now, that could have gone either way. But one of the things I remember saying to him was that there is so much in this world you cannot control.

There is so much about your business, about your customers, even about some of the jobs that you implement that you cannot control. But what you can control should be done to a high level at every moment, right? How you do anything impacts how you do everything, how you train impacts how you race, how you talk to your family impacts how you talk to those outside of your family, how you talk to yourself impacts how you talk to others. So, to look good, smell good, and sound good is well and truly in the grasp of every trade business leader.

Right. Let’s start with the easy one, smell good. Okay.

When it comes to smell good, there’s actually this is a very low bar here in terms of getting this right. And what I’d say is that it’s actually more important that you don’t smell bad. So, if you’re a smoker, you need to be aware of it.

If you’ve perspired heavily, right, and you’ve been out on site and you’re maybe not coming in that best presentation of yourself, you need to be aware of it. Smell good is all about making sure that when we present on site to our customers, it’s in a form where we’re not going to upset someone with anything that comes from our body. Some would argue that this is a really harsh conversation to have.

And I’ve evidenced across this podcast quite a few times that, unfortunately, people do make impressions based on how you smell. So, I’m going to move on from this one pretty quickly, but certainly at a base minimum, we need to make sure that we have a natural or a neutral smell about us when we get to site. Second one is all about looking good.

Now, looking good is one that I see a lot of, you know, trade leaders need to spend a bit of time on to get right. What I will say from the outset is that presenting in work clothes is absolutely fine. I very rarely see an expectation, particularly in trade construction industry businesses, where we need to have exemplary presentation in terms of what we’re wearing.

However, arriving to site in clothes that are generally clean, paint is a great example. You don’t have paint all over you, paint all over your clothes. Wearing clothes that represent your business, having your hair brushed, if hats are what you wear, having a nice clean hat, your work boots are clean.

Yes, of course, we should be taking them off before we walk in the door, but making sure that you are presenting in a manner that represents the quality of work that your business does is absolutely critical. We can muck around about the smell good piece, right? You can take offence, you can take it for what it’s meant to be, right? A way to help everyone. But if you don’t smell at least neutral, but more importantly, look the part, you’ll be judged on how you look.

Quality of your service, right, will be judged against how you present in that first meeting. Now, of course, and I’ve said this already today is this can be seen as a bit harsh, but my job for everyone listening is to help you be the best you can be. And certainly in the trade industry, where I see leaders spending time on smelling good and looking good, presenting in a polo top, having a clean polo top in your car to throw on, right, if your clothes are dirty.

So easy. You know, brushing your hair quickly before you go in, making sure that you are ready to present in a nice manner. It doesn’t have to be first date worthy, but certainly needs to be better than, hey, I’ve just come off site and I’m going home for a shower.

So where you can spend a little bit of time on looking good and smelling good, that’s where you influence those first seven seconds. Third part of this, all right, and we’re building up here from easiest probably to hardest and that comes down from smelling good, looking good and sounding good. So when you’re meeting with a customer, you are saying hello.

How are you? How’s your day? Thank you very much for having me. May I come inside? You have a tone in your voice that is welcoming and shows you want to be there. And the number of times that I’ve worked with businesses where you can see it’s not evident and they see going to site to quote customers as either a pain, right, an annoyance or a privilege for the customer, that this comes across in how they sound.

And simply being able to reset your tone, so before you get to that door, taking 30 seconds to get clear on what you need to do in that meeting is the most successful way I’ve seen particularly busy trade businesses level out how they sound. Smelling good, easy. You just need to neutralise anything that can go the other way, right, any bad odours.

Looking good, relatively straightforward. Have some clothes in your car, have some branded uniforms and make sure that you check yourself before you go on to site. Sounding good, not quite as easy but certainly doable when you find a moment to reset before you go in to that first site visit, right, before you meet that customer.

Just taking that 30 seconds to say, great, here I am, I’m coming to meet Ben Wright at his house, at his business and the things that I want to go through are one, two and three. But just resetting yourself so that you not only smell good or smell neutral at best but you look good and also sound good has a huge impact on your first impressions, right. When it comes down to all of these, right, the best I see at this, smell good, look good, sound good but they also smile, right.

It’s that warm, welcoming engagement, hey, thanks for having me, I’m glad to be here where a smile can say a thousand words. So, when we talk about the first seven seconds of a client meeting being the moment where you win or lose the sale, it’s the mentality that says, hey, I’m doing the best I can, I’ll get to site when I can and I’ll appear as I do versus a corresponding attitude that says, you know what, I can’t control everything but those things I can control, I’m going to do well. How I do anything is how I do everything and for me today, those key areas are around smelling good, looking good, sounding good and smiling.

First impressions matter and fortunately, when you get them right, they can really have a positive impact on your close rates. So, if you’re someone that is frustrated that you’re spending hours of time quoting and you keep losing, you’re not winning deals, certainly that first impression could be impacting it and from today’s podcast, I hope you can spend some time thinking about what you can do to improve that but the reality is if you don’t change something now, you’ll continue to get these same results over and over again and they’ll be stressful and frustrating. The free quote audit we offer to podcast listeners will pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs, both at a quote and a mini sales process level and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly.

So, click on the free quote audit link in the show notes to get started. That’s it for today though. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day.

Look forward to our next podcast. Bye for now.