Could one simple sales mistake be costing you thousands of dollars in lost jobs without you even realizing it?
Many trade business owners believe they know exactly what their customers want. After all, they’ve quoted hundreds or even thousands of similar jobs.
But making assumptions instead of asking the right questions can quietly kill deals before they ever get off the ground.
By listening to this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why assumptions are one of the biggest reasons trade businesses lose potential customers.
- The common sales process mistake that causes business owners to miss what matters most to prospects.
- A practical three-step questioning framework that helps uncover customer priorities and win more jobs.
Listen now to learn how asking the right questions at the right time can eliminate costly assumptions and help you close more deals with confidence.
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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:
Are you selling to a new prospect? Well, today we’re going to go through the biggest mistake that I see trade businesses make when they are selling to brand new customers in their businesses.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you 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’s episode is very much out of the 1% Better Every Day theme because we are going to focus on what I see as one of the largest mistakes that trade businesses make selling to new prospects, the main reasons that they’re happening, and what they can do to fix it. So buckle in, short and sharp episode today, but this is very much going to be one that will move the dial for you and your business if you can make a small adjustment to what you’re doing in your sales processes.
Assumptions make fools of all of us. It’s a quote I’ve never forgotten and it’s one that I unfortunately seem to fall into the trap of periodically across not only my life but also my sales activities. Assumptions make fools of us all, right? It’s a great quote because it certainly reminds me that asking questions whilst in the moment we can be nervous about or we can be worried that they’re going to stall deals with customers, in the long run really help us deliver better experiences not just for our business but also for our customers.
I constantly need to remind myself to be asking those questions because just last month, well, in fact, it was two months ago now, I was meeting with a GM of a business. They were absolutely in the building and construction industry. They built outdoor pools.
In fact, they did good volumes of pools. I was meeting with the GM and had a great session with the GM, really strong session. In fact, the GM was ready to move forward with their business.
It was outside of our normal academy. In this meeting, I ticked off everything I needed to do. What does the GM want? Built a great relationship with him, asked him the right questions, set up what we’re going to do from here, described what success looks like, agreed on the format of the entire program and we were away.
We left that conversation with him just needing to check with his owner of the business exactly what he wanted to do just to make sure that it lined up. Now, where I made the mistake here was that I assumed that the GM and the owner were going to be reasonably well aligned. As a GM of a business and a very capable man, that he’d be speaking to his owner regularly and would have had discussions with him about the program before we were talking with each other.
How wrong I was. I made that assumption and in the end, the deal did not proceed. It didn’t proceed because there was something that the owner wanted to do before they got into the sales training piece.
That meant that they put it on hold. Now, this may come around again down the track, but I think the main message for me out of that was I didn’t ask if the GM was aligned with the owner. I didn’t ask a simple question that said, have you guys had a chat about this already? If I had have asked that question and the GM had have said no, then I would have been far more forthright in making sure that I met with the owner of the business.
Instead, I didn’t. I made that assumption that they were aligned and the deal didn’t proceed. Now, for me, that assumption or assuming that I knew what the customer wanted cost me tens of thousands of dollars in terms of closing a deal.
Now, of course, you never lose, you learn. I really love that saying and I was very quickly from there able to straighten myself back up and the next 5 or 10 sales conversations that I had, it was all over that part of the sales process. But the reason that this mistake came about is because I assumed that I knew what the customer wanted and that’s the big mistake that I see way too many trade businesses make when they are talking to new prospects.
They quite simply rush through their process and assume that they know exactly what the key outcomes that a customer wants for their plumbing, for their electrical, for their roofing, for their concrete slab, for their garage build, for their landscaping, whatever it is, they assume that the customers are all pretty much alike and they know what they’re going to want. And the reason that I see this happening is mostly because these trade businesses are in a rush or they’re worried their customer’s in a rush. So they get to site, they’ve had a lot going on in the background, they walk in, they do the quote, they whiz through it, based on experience, here’s what I think this customer’s going to want.
They punch the quote out and silence. Not a hell of a lot comes from it. And that speed from rushing through the quotation or the early engagement process is where I most commonly see that assumption mistake made.
And it kills so many brand new deals, more than I can possibly count. And there are countless times where I have conversations with trade business leaders when it comes to closing a customer, where I ask the question, do you know what they want? Do you know what’s most important to them? And they can’t answer it. And the reason is because they’ve rushed through that process, through that sales process.
And I don’t throw any blame here, because having run a trade business myself for a long period of time, I recognize firsthand what the pressures are around growing businesses. And it certainly can wear you down, but it certainly can compromise great quality in some of the activities that you do. But as we go through this process today, there’s a really nice, easy fix that I think you can roll into your sales process, your quotation process, that isn’t going to slow you down and take you lots more time when you’re out on site.
And that process comes down to asking three times across the sales process, what is most important to that customer? So when are those times? Well, it’s when we’re qualifying the lead, number one. Phone call comes in. Great.
What’s most important to you to get this job done? Number two is when we’re on site. And when we start that quote, right, you mentioned on the phone that these three things are most important to you. Have I got that right? Is there anything that’s missing? Is there anything else we need to focus on? And then once you finish that site visit, confirming that you’ve got them right, okay, here’s what we’ve gone through today.
Here’s what I see as most important. I’m going to focus my quote around those. Now, there’s more to it in terms of the execution around how we focus on what’s important to the customer.
But what this piece does is it removes the assumptions that many of us have to make. It stops us just assuming that we know what’s important, and it makes sure we slow down to ask the customer what it is. And it’s very simple.
It’s asking three times across the sales process what’s most important to our customers. So that’s the key outcome from today’s episode. As you roll into whatever else you’re doing today, I want you to think about how you can put into your sales process to more regularly ask customers exactly what they want.
Because if you can get that right, that is going to close you more deals. Now, if you’re quoting a lot at the moment and you’re not winning enough deals, I know it can be frustrating. But the reality is if you don’t change something now, it’s probably not going to get any easier and you’re going to waste more time and it’s going to cost you more money or you’re going to have less money in the bank.
Thankfully, we’ve got a nice solution to that. We have a free quote quiz that’s in our show notes. You can jump in and do it.
It’s free. It’s quick. It’s easy.
And you can expect to move the dollar 20% to 25% if you can implement what comes out of that quote quiz. I’d recommend you jump into the show notes, have a quick look at it. It won’t take you any time and it won’t cost you any money, but you’ll get something out to you straight away.
But between now and next episode, please keep thinking about that 1% better each and every day approach. It does make all the difference. Bye for now.