Could your communication style be costing you sales before your quote even gets considered?

Winning more jobs isn’t always about lowering your price—it’s often about how you communicate.

 In this episode, you’ll discover the three communication habits that quietly push customers away and learn how making a few simple adjustments can improve trust, strengthen relationships, and increase your close rate.

By listening to this episode, you’ll learn how to:

• Slow down your sales process to create stronger customer confidence and avoid costly mistakes that lose deals.
• Build a simple, consistent sales process that delivers a great customer experience every time.
• Stay persistent with prospects without being pushy, helping you convert more opportunities that others give up on too soon.

Press play now to learn how improving your communication style can help you win more quotes, reduce wasted effort, and grow your sales without competing on price.

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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: 

Communication kills more deals than speed. In fact, your communication style is probably killing you landing more new trade deals than you would think. So today, we’re gonna go through what you can do about it now to grow your sales.

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:

I had a terrific example as we’re building our commercial studio here in Noosa Heads at the moment around working with a customer who was rushed. They were rushed in everything they did. They were rushed in their quote.

They were rushed in how they spoke to me. They were rushed in the deliverables that they sent through. And I haven’t seen yet if they’re rushed in how they deliver because they didn’t get the job.

And the reason they didn’t get the job was in my opinion, because they were rushed. They actually priced well, they had good product, and I wanted to use them. But I didn’t feel as if they cared.

I didn’t feel as if they had enough time to actually spend on us and our business to reassure me that they were gonna do a great job. Now, the reality from this instance is, and please have a think about if this is a situation where you’re in, where I think the issue was they were just too busy. They either didn’t have enough support or they were quoting so many deals but not winning enough of those that instead of quoting five deals and winning two or three, they were quoting 10 deals to win those two or three.

So they had to do twice the work to win those same amount of deals because their communication style was simply too rushed. And in reality, they could have fixed this by some very simple changes to their sales process. And look, I love taking these examples around from my own sales life, from our customers’ sales lives, or from when I’ve dealt with companies where I can find an issue and then share with everyone listening some ways you can go about fixing it.

Because certainly my belief is they won’t be the only business out there that’s rushed and simply doesn’t have enough time to move the dial with their customers. But if I can help that business and anyone else listening, then we’ve done a great job. So the number one area that I see a communication style killing businesses landing new deals is around when they rush it, right? We’re going to go through three of these today, but number one is the rush piece.

And it’s not always evident in your spoken language, but where it is always evident is in your unspoken language and often things like being late to meetings, not being dressed properly, not taking your shoes off, not asking enough questions. So whilst you may not be rushed in how you speak, you don’t take the time to qualify someone before you go to site. So you end up arriving to a deal that’s not good for you, i.e. one that’s never going to close.

Or that you don’t ask questions when you’re on site, right? That would then allow you to understand exactly what the customer wanted, but more importantly, build a great relationship with them. Or they miss things when they’re rushed. They jump around the home or the business and they don’t get all the measurements.

Or they don’t find out the right heights or the right colors, right? Or they make a mistake on these and then when they deliver it, it costs them money and rework. But being rushed is the number one impact to a communication style that I see kill trade business deals. And look, this is a nice follow-on to the other episodes for this week, both 242 and 243, when we are speaking with a little bit of a shortstop focus on communication this week.

So number one is I really encourage you to ever think about if you are rushed when you’re out on your sales quotes. And if you are, where are the areas that you’re perhaps missing? And what would happen if you didn’t miss those areas? And for example, you slowed down and instead of quoting 10 deals, you quoted eight, but you could grow your close rate by 30%, right? This is a really great philosophical conversation I have with most of our customers and it goes along the lines of, I want you to quote less. But if you quote less and close 30% more, what’s it going to do to your numbers? And in almost every instance, and we can map it out now, it grows those numbers.

So if you’re a business closing at 20% and you’re quoting 10 deals, you’re going to be closing two out of those 10. If you drop that down to eight deals, so you quote two less and your close rate goes up to 30%, right? Or even if it just grows by 30% and goes to 25%, well, then you are at two deals that you’ve closed as well. So at a minimum, if you grow your close rate from 20 to 25%, right, a 30% bump, you are actually closing the same number of deals, but you’re quoting two less.

Now, if your close rate can jump up to that 30% mark, right, then you’re winning two and a half deals and obviously those numbers extrapolate out, but for every 100 deals you’re quoting, you’d be winning 20 at 20%. Every 80 deals you’re quoting, when you’re winning 30%, you’re winning 24. So you’re winning four more deals and how many you quote per week will obviously determine how long it takes you to get there.

But the numbers stack up when you can slow down, not rush deals, but increase your close rate. So I really want you to think about that. Number two is not being consistent in their communication style.

That’s the second biggest area that I see businesses lose deals around because quite simply, they’re not consistent in some really impactful areas. Number one, they don’t get back to leads quickly enough. Number two, they don’t get out to site quickly enough.

Number three, the process when they are on site is not the same each time and it relies on what’s in their brain. Number four, when they leave site, they’re not really clear on what they need to do to win the deal. Number five, they don’t quote in the quick enough fashion or they’re haphazard, hit and miss with their quotes.

Number six, their follow-up is too slow. Number seven, they don’t follow up enough. I could go to about 30 of these.

But the reality is that inconsistency, particularly in trade salespeople and trade leaders is what I see kill so many deals. So what do you do about it? Well, it’s all just about building a basic sales process. It doesn’t have to be significant.

In fact, I’d encourage you that it’s very simple and you focus on just a few key areas. With most of our customers, we really only focus on three or four key areas of their sales process to get right. And most of our customers have nailed it within a month, if not a couple of weeks.

And most of our customers are only spending a few hours to get those changes right. So the message here is that if you’re rushed, we need you to slow down. If you’re not consistent, we need you to build a process that can be really simple and really easy for you to impact.

But if you get it right and it makes an impact to your closed deals, it can have huge improvements to your numbers. And if you go back to episode 237, you’ll hear about how one of our painting contractors went from a 15% close rate to four out of seven, right? That’s a terrific change. And they only changed a few things across their process.

So number one, being rushed, number two, they’re not consistent in how they apply their process. Now, number three, where number two is not being consistent, number three is not being persistent, right? So they are quite simply not hungry enough to win the deals. Now, they may be hungry in their internal appetite, but their behaviors don’t reflect that.

And what I mean here is that they call a lead once. If it doesn’t answer, they don’t call it again. They try to make a time to go out to site.

If it doesn’t work for a customer, they get frustrated and they don’t find another one. They get out to quote, and if the customer doesn’t move ahead straight away, they don’t engage with them in the process. And what this all comes down to is not being persistent enough in your process of engaging with customers.

Because quite simply, not every customer moves at the same speed. And I’d certainly encourage you to go back to episode 238. Gee, I’m referencing a few episodes today around the questions of buying versus browsing.

That is a terrific episode when it comes to changing just one thing in your business. That is an absolute game changer. But what I’d really encourage you to also think about is whether or not you are persistent enough to engage with your customer.

Because people move at different speeds. And when we can recognize that, we can then adjust our communication styles to deal with their customer when they’re ready. And more importantly, understand what’s getting in the way so that we can help them move forward.

So they’re the three key areas today around how communication styles I so regularly see kill deals for trade businesses. Number one, the businesses are feeling rushed. And it’s coming across in how they behave.

Number two is they’re not consistent. So they’re not always bringing their A game. And number three is they’re not persistent.

So they’re not staying with deals long enough to get them across the line. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it can be frustrating.

But I’ve just seen tens of thousands of deals lost because salespeople are not prepared to hang in there a little longer. So that’s it for today. Thank you, very grateful for your listening.

If you are someone who is spending hours wasting time on quotes, it could be that you’re not persistent, not consistent, or you’re rushed, right? It could very well be one of those three reasons. But the result is probably the same. You’re frustrated.

You know that if you don’t change something now, you’ll keep getting these results. They’re stressful, you’re working long hours, or you’re not getting enough money in the account to show for it. Well, then I’d encourage you to just jump onto our free quoting quiz.

It’ll pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs. And then it’ll also give you an idea around what you can do about it to try and give you that 20 to 25% bump in your sales. It’s a free quiz link.

It’s in the show notes. Please, it takes less than a minute. Jump in, give it a go, and I’ll review every response that comes through personally.

That’s it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day, because it will make all the difference.