Are your sales conversations helping you win more work—or are they costing you deals without you even realizing it?
Many trade business owners either rely on rigid sales scripts or simply “wing it” when talking to prospects. The problem is that both approaches can lead to missed opportunities, inconsistent results, and wasted time quoting jobs that never convert.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- Why sales frameworks create more consistent results than scripts while allowing you to build genuine connections with customers.
- How simple frameworks like Deliverables, Decision Makers, and Deadlines can help you uncover critical information and avoid costly sales mistakes.
- Practical ways to improve your sales process, increase quote conversion rates, and bring more structure to every customer conversation.
Listen now to learn how a simple framework-driven sales approach can help you win more jobs, improve your close rates, and make every quote count.
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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:
I grew up being given endless sales scripts. The big change that moved the dial in selling for me came when I moved to sales frameworks that not only kept me on track but they allowed me to be myself.
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:
No doubt everyone listening particularly in the trade landscape has been in that situation where they have been given sales scripts, use this script, it will move your sales by 36%, grow your sales by $650,000 or allow you to have a lifestyle where you own the boat and the helicopter and so forth, right? Sales scripts are a huge part of the landscape around the world.
For me though today we are going to talk through around why frameworks are far more impactful than sales scripts and also how they’re going to allow you to show some of your natural flair that will get more deals done for you than sales scripts. So for those that have worked with us before, so the hundreds and hundreds of sales people, in fact we’re into the thousands now, one thing that comes back really commonly as a piece of feedback is that we make things simple by using some really basic frameworks. Frameworks are something that I came around to about 10 years ago and the difference between a sales script and a sales framework is that a sales scripts are really effective when you are learning a new skill, certainly for a very short period of time because they allow you to get your head around the broad frameworks of what you’re doing in any process.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling, whether you are, I mean coding is getting bigger and bigger, vibe coding as it’s being called, doesn’t matter whether you’re learning how to use a bookkeeping system zero or mile or even whether you’re learning how to drive, right? There are very regimented scripts and instructions that come very early with learning these types of skills. However, for me what happens is once we move past base levels of knowledge, if we’re sticking with scripts, as I said earlier, we become very robotic. But above everything else, they become impossible to remember and teams that I see running sales scripts actually have huge variances in ticking off major, major boxes of a sales process because when they miss a part of a script, they don’t just miss a few words, they miss entire sections.
And for me that’s really dangerous because if you’ve asked some great questions but then forgotten to check in with a customer if you’re right and got them wrong, then you run a really high risk of losing that deal. You run a high risk of going all the way through that coding process and getting to the end and saying, hey, I’m sorry, I got that wrong. And that’s where sales frameworks can become really impactful once you’ve gone past that base level of knowledge around a sales process.
And so for trade leaders that are listening, I want you to think about when you’re out on site if you’re running scripts, if you’re flying by the seat of your pants and relying on experience or if you have a broad framework that you approach when it comes to selling to customers. The majority of trade businesses that we work with, we’ve got at the moment the latest person in our business, they are a roofer, a roofer in our business, smart, capable but absolutely flies by the seat of his pants, has a few things that he does really well every single sales call, always asks customers how they are, always tries to build a personal connection but almost always forgets to check at the end of his sales process, at the end of his site visit if he’s ticked off exactly what the customer wants. And he also has a couple of great bits of value that he adds to his customers that he often forgets to tell them about when he’s out on site.
So if we’re talking about frameworks, frameworks for me we work off, we’ve got three or four frameworks that we roll through our sold out sales teams academy, generally we’ll work off threes or fives in those frameworks. A, because they’re really easy to remember but B, because they’re quite consistent when we’re rolling out the same numbers in each of these frameworks. And by having a framework, what it allows us to do when we are on site, let’s think we’re out at a commercial site, we’ll stick with the roofing example, right and we are quoting a re-roof.
What it allows us to do is if we know that there’s three things that we have to tick off when we’re on site, three broad categories, it allows us to grab that category and work through at a broad spectrum, at a broad level exactly what we need to tick off to be successful. So let me give you some examples around some frameworks that we use and I’ll just very quickly touch on three of these and you can have a think about where they might apply to your business. Absolutely we’re not going to go through them in detail today but the frameworks when they’re rolled out well are so effective in moving deals forward.
So first one’s 3Ds, that’s one where we’ve rolled out with hundreds and hundreds of sales people have used the 3Ds and that’s all focused around deliverables, decision makers and deadlines. So deliverables, what’s most important to the project, decision makers, who’s involved, who do I need to know and who needs to know me and timelines, when are we going to get this done. And then within each of those three frameworks there’s generally questions and approaches you can take to make sure that you’re most effectively understanding for example what the key deliverables are, what’s most important, what’s not important, what are the things that we need to consider and all the other important aspects that make up getting the deal right.
When we go into the framework that says hey we’ve got the 3Ds, we need to make sure we focus on these, it allows us to tick off each section and drill into those even with notes if we need to, a lot of trade businesses I’m working with will take their iPads to site, they’ll have under the 3Ds, deliverables, decision makers, deadlines, certain things they need to tick off and they go about it and they use the iPad to prompt them. So by having that framework it allows them to go in with a broad process but also show their personal flair. In deliverables it allows them to talk through common deliverables that other customers have asked for or things that the customer might want to consider or when in their experience where they’ve seen job go wrong with certain deliverables.
Super powerful when we have the framework but allow a level of personalization and flair to make it happen. Second framework is called the core three, that’s all around speed, value and process, how we move through deals quickly by creating value in a process that we can roll out again and again and again. Core three is a great framework from a simplicity focus, it’s the simplest of everything we have and absolutely without doubt we see customers moving their dial.
I’ve had a painter recently, painters are certainly a business that we’ve had a lot of over recent times but I’ve seen painters, one in particular, move his sales by about 25% by just focusing on two of those three sections of the core three process, right, then again that gives them a process without a script. Now this painter in this example was very freestyle, was found that he wasn’t actually sticking to the processes that he set himself, so we made the processes a lot simpler for him and he’s found that his compliance has been able to absolutely improve. And then the last one here is all around having a sales process, so five stages in this, that’s recognizing that we have prospects in the lead stage, the meet and greet stage, the quote stage, the closing stage and the post close stage, i.e. we run the deal, what happens next.
And by looking at these five stages we’re just able to build out what we do within the business across each of these and deep dive into one in particular when we’ve got gaps we find or things that we need to improve but it keeps it really compact and really clear around what stages our customers are in. So scripts versus frameworks to recap on this. Scripts very much tell you exactly what you need to do at every single point.
Great because if you get them right, they’re amazing, right, they often will cover everything you need in a sales deal but don’t really allow personality, don’t really allow flair and when you get them wrong, you can often lose whole chunks of sales processes. So for me I moved to frameworks about 10 years ago and without question it has helped me, my business and the businesses I work with close way more deals than sales scripts. So if you’re a trade leader that’s sitting out there and you are and first of all thank you, very grateful for you listening today and if you’re a trade leader that’s out there thinking, okay, I’m working off scripts, right, I think there might be a few out there or I’m running freestyle, I’m just approaching deals in whatever I feel is like most important and there’s a framework or two in there, I do a few things well but there’s plenty I can do better.
I think there’s going to be a huge number of you in that stage or in that part of your business, right, or the third one that says, hey, I’ve got some frameworks, I follow them but I want to check them and I want to make sure I’m doing the right thing. So if you’re in one of those three camps, well and particularly in the first two, you’re potentially quoting over and over again, wasting time on deals that aren’t closing, certainly not closing enough and for me the main message is that if you don’t change something now, you’re going to continue to get those really stressful results, it’s going to happen again and again and again, you’re going to work on the wrong thing, long hours and really at the end of the day not have enough money in the bank to show for it. So my free quoting quiz, that will pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs, it will use the core three framework, it will give you one thing to quickly grow your sales by 20 to 25 percent.
It’s free, you just need to click on the free quiz link in the show notes and get started now, it will take you less than one minute. That’s it for today, please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day and we’ll see you next time. Bye for now.