Have you ever had a customer say, “Yes, I’m in,” only for the deal to mysteriously never get signed or started?

Getting a verbal yes feels like the hard work is over, but the deal isn’t actually won until the paperwork is signed, the deposit is paid, and the project is moving forward. 

In this episode, you’ll learn how to keep momentum after the customer says yes and avoid losing deals to delays, distractions, or uncertainty.

• Learn how getting face-to-face with the customer can turn a verbal yes into signed paperwork before anything changes their mind.
• Discover how to close smaller or remote deals immediately using phone calls, digital signatures, and payment links.
• Find out how to agree on clear timelines and next steps while keeping control of the sales process instead of handing the momentum back to the customer.

Press play to learn how to turn more verbal yeses into signed, paid, and completed jobs instead of letting promising deals slip away.

Take our Free Quote Quiz now to Kickstart Your Sales Growth

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

Read Client Results

Watch Testimonials

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: 

There are simply things that you must do when you get a yes from a customer, but the paperwork isn’t signed. And if you don’t do them, that risk of your sale walking away and never happening is seriously high.

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:

We’ve all had deals where the customer says, yes, I’m in, let’s do it. And then nothing happens. So today, we’re going to go through three steps that are really impactful when it comes to making sure that the majority of your customers who say, yes, I’m in, actually go ahead and then you don’t get the frustration of that customer not moving forward and your business not winning the deal. So what am I, 25 years in sales now, it has been a great journey, but gee, there’s been some frustrations along the way.

And for me, I think one of the most significant frustrations is when a customer says to me, yes, and a project never happens. You’ve done the hard work, you’ve qualified the lead, you’ve shown up on site, you’ve quoted, you’ve given them everything they want. They say, yes, they’re going to do it.

And then for whatever reason, the deal doesn’t go ahead. I have had it happen to me countless times. I’ve seen it happen to my teams countless times.

But thankfully, there are some tried and tested strategies, both that I’ve run personally, both that I’ve used with my teams, and that I’ve seen across the customers that I work with that have really made a difference when it comes to moving that customer from a yes through until a deal sign. But before we get into that today, there’s a saying that I’ve lived by for about a decade now. And it actually started when we had the largest of our businesses that we’d owned, the renewable business.

We had 21 salespeople out on the road. And I was finding that we were having far too many deals where a customer came in, said, yes, I’m ready to go. Or we went to site, said, yes, I’m ready to go.

And the deal didn’t go ahead. So what we implemented into that business was the same. When you’re down to the last two, you work twice as hard.

That still sits with me to this day. And the reason it does is because we’ve done all the work, we are down to the pointy end. And of course, the last two is a little bit metaphoric.

You may be at the end and the winner of that deal. Or you might simply have been whittled down from a field of three, four, five, six, seven, eight competitors down or even more down to the last two and you’re almost there. And it’s that point where I see so many salespeople take their foot off the gas, pull right back and not make sure the deal gets done.

So that mentality of when you’re down to the last two, you go twice as hard simply says that the deal isn’t done until the deal’s done, until the paperwork’s in, deposit’s paid and the project starts. So when you’re at the end, when you’re at that point where you are really confident that deal is going to get done, leave nothing to chance. That’s how the saying goes and it’s really stood me in great stead across my last decade of selling, but also everyone that I’ve worked with across that period.

So if nothing else from today, there’s a nice little saying down to the last two, work twice as hard that you can take away with you. However, there’s also some really key activities you can be doing to make sure that when a customer says yes, you get the deal done quickly. So some of these are going to be quite obvious.

We’ve got three we want to work through and a couple of asterisks, a couple of little bonuses. But what’s really important is where you think they’re obvious that you take them into a practical application for your business. So let’s start with the biggest first.

When a customer says yes for any trade business in particular that I’m working with, it’s all about getting in front of that customer to get the paperwork signed. So the absolute gold star here is when customer says, hey, I am ready to move forward with my renovation, you go, great, I’ll be there tomorrow, we’ll get the paperwork signed off and just confirm any colors or any designs or any important features of the project that we need to make sure we’re on top of before we get moving. So what you’re saying to the customer is, I’m going to be there tomorrow, there’s a reason that I need to come down other than just getting the paperwork signed, but hey, we’ll get that done at the same time.

What we’re doing then is making sure that tomorrow doesn’t get in the way of today. And what I mean by that is that the customer doesn’t get distracted, not sign the deal and then something in their life changes. Across my sales career, there have been dozens and dozens of episodes or times when a customer has said yes, they’ve delayed signing the paperwork and something has changed in their life that stopped them moving forward.

Something completely unforeseen, but still something that was given the opportunity because there was time between the yes and the paperwork being signed. So number one recommendation here and look, to be fair, it is as good as anything when it comes to guaranteeing a sale and that’s to get down to your customer face to face. Okay, so there’s times when you either can’t or won’t get in front of a customer.

And what I mean by that is they’re too far away, the deal is too small, right? We’re talking about a thousand dollar deal and it’s not worth that journey back to see the customer or the customer simply won’t see you. In those instances where I see really strong sales people and sales leaders and business leaders get deals done is that they do them then and there over the phone. So they send across the quotation to their customer and the customer completes that then and there at the time.

Even better is actually send them across the digital payment link. It’s very, very easy to do now and the customer steps through that process. I was signing up for a new telephone number for our studios earlier in the week and the telco provider, it was actually a really good experience with them.

What they did is that when I was ready to go, they said, right, I’m sending you across the contract now to sign. I’m going to stay on the line just so you can ask me any questions as you go through that. As he was doing it, Jackson was his name, I thought, perfect.

Absolutely textbook when it comes to making sure the deal gets done. It was about two or three minutes extra. I worked through the contract quickly, deal done, signed, away we go.

So it’s all about making sure if we can’t get there or won’t get there face to face, we get the deal done over the phone and what’s really important there is that we have our quotes set up to do digital signatures. Anyone in a trade business, you should now be able to do that. If you can’t, DocuSign’s a great place to start.

Otherwise, have a look at things like PandaDoc or a type of online quoting software that will actually allow you to do that. Okay, so the first two options, take the paperwork in, get it done face to face. Big ticket item, most likely to succeed.

Number two, if we can’t or won’t get face to face, we’re doing it over the phone, sending across the contract, sending across the payment link and making sure it happens. Fantastic way to get the deal done, not quite as strong as taking the paperwork in but very, very successful. Number three, you can’t get it done on the phone or you can’t get it done face to face.

What else can you do to get a yes from the customer that isn’t just verbal but it’s done in writing? For me, this is where we get into a little bit of gray but there are absolutely ways that you can make sure that customer goes from that verbal yes to the signed paperwork. So when we can’t get face to face, when we can’t do it over the phone, where I see really successful sales paperwork is that they agree on timelines. So they agree on who’s going to do what and when they’re going to do it.

So a little role play as to how this could go. Fantastic, we’re really looking forward to getting your project started. When do you think you’ll be able to get the contract back to us so we can get the ball rolling? What’s the best way that I can get the contract to you so you can sign it easily and we can get started? Is there anything getting in the way of you signing the paperwork? Otherwise, I’ll get it across to you and perhaps we can get it done tonight.

Write three examples around how we can be working through with the customer to a tight timeline to get that contract back to us. Now, where one of the asterisks has come in here is I see way too many businesses say, fantastic, thanks for the go ahead. I’m going to tentatively book you in for four weeks time pending paperwork coming back.

In my book, it doesn’t work because we’ve transferred the power to the customer to say, great, I’ve got four weeks to sort out the paperwork and get the deposit signed. On the inverse, where I see really successful businesses, salespeople and sales leaders get deals done here is to say, fantastic, we are ready to go. I just need your paperwork signed and then I can get your installation booked in and then I can get your project started.

So for me, when we get a yes from a customer at an operational level, we cannot roll the truck until we get the paperwork back because that is our key point of leverage at this time. Customer wants to move forward. Customer generally wants it done as quickly as possible.

That’s our leverage to get the paperwork back. So really important when we can’t get face-to-face, when we can’t do it over the phone, agreeing on next steps but making sure that we keep control of the sale is really, really important. So there are three ways when you get a yes from a customer that I strongly recommend you focus on to take that from an informal to a formal yes.

Right from getting the deal almost done to actually getting it done. Now, if you’re someone that’s frustrated because you’re spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes that you keep losing, well, without changing something now, you’re going to continue to get those same stressful results over and over again which means you’re going to be stuck working long hours and not have enough money in the bank to show for it. Thankfully, we’re here to help that and we have some terrific sales and marketing workshops that are kicking off in the coming months.

Now, that doesn’t mean go and click a link and go and sign up to these sales and marketing workshops but what I do recommend is that you learn more about what we do. We’ve got a link in our show notes. Click on it.

You can make some time with us and we can talk through exactly how we can help your business get that sales growth moving fast. That’s it for today. Keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.