What if you could go from struggling to book jobs week-to-week to being booked out 8–10 weeks in advance with just three simple changes to your sales process?
When you have good leads, a hardworking team, and a strong service—but jobs still aren’t closing—it can be frustrating to know what needs to change.
In this episode, you’ll hear how one struggling trade business transformed its sales process and became booked out in less than six weeks without making massive changes to the business.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How increasing your speed to lead, speed to qualify, and speed to site can help you capture customer interest before it disappears.
- How shortening your sales cycle can keep customers engaged and reduce the chances of competitors, distractions, or indecision getting in the way.
- Why presenting your quotes face-to-face can dramatically improve engagement and give you more opportunities to answer questions, create value, and move the customer toward a decision.
Press play to discover the three simple sales process changes that helped turn a struggling trade business into one booked out 8–10 weeks in advance in less than six weeks.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
In this episode, we’re going to share how one of our trade customers became booked out in less than six weeks.
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:
There’s not a lot in life I love more than a really successful client story. Today, we’re going to go through one of a struggling business, young guy, great team, great ideas, great work ethic, but someone who just couldn’t quite bring the pieces together to get his business humming.
In this story, we’re going to talk through how he went from having a business that was struggling to book jobs week to week through to being booked out in less than six weeks. And the best news about all of this is he did it with only some very small changes to his business that made a really large impact. So to set the scene here, this customer was late last year, had a business that had all the hallmarks to being able to succeed, was working really hard, just wasn’t quite able to get the work closed, had a big enough pipeline, had good leads coming in, but they were quoting deals and they just simply weren’t moving anywhere.
Or when the jobs did go ahead, they were fickle and they were falling through. So we worked together just before Christmas last year, did three things, made three nice short sharp changes for that business to implement. And by the end of January, so that includes a break for the Christmas period, but by the end of January, they were booking themselves out about eight to 10 weeks in advance.
Pretty good result from struggling to have deals done and struggling week to week in terms of how they were going to fill their business and keep their team busy to having an eight to 10 week roadmap, which is generally what I recommend for trade businesses. We try to sit anywhere between eight and 12 weeks booked out in advance. It’s the balance between having good, clear forward work pipelines for your business and not having a wait time being too long for customers.
But we had that done in a very short period of time. Okay, so what you want to know is what they did. Well, the first thing that this customer did, and you’ve heard me talk about this across the podcast, is they got really clear when and how they were going to get back to their customers.
So when a lead came in, they weren’t just quick to call it, but they were quick to qualify it so they knew exactly what type of customer they wanted to get out to. They were quick to understand if the customer was ready to go or just looking, and they were quick to then get out and meet the customer. And the piece where I see a lot of trade businesses miss out on is that they won’t get all of these right.
They’ll get one or two right, but without getting all three right, then you very quickly can have a deal go from more to one that’s very tepid and really unlikely to move forward. So those three things, and by the way, this is only part one. We’ve got two to go.
But those three things were speed to contact, speed to qualify, and speed to get out to site. So what this business did was make sure all of that happened in a 48 hour or two business day period. So they contacted their leads as soon as they came through or at the very least same day.
They qualified their leads according to exactly who they wanted to be speaking to, i.e. the customers who were most likely to say yes and move forward. And then number three is they got out to site within two days. All right.
So that was number one. Number two is they shortened their sales cycle. And what I mean by this is they were able to quote quickly.
This business had a two-stage quote process when we started. We merged that into one. Right.
So their first stage was all around design. They were very much in the home improvement kind of broader renovation space. Right.
So they had design first and then they moved into pricing second. So they brought this together, which is not possible for all businesses because a lot of businesses, right, particularly trade businesses are out quoting on the spot. Whether we’re out there doing fences, building pools, fixing roofs, electrical work, plumbing work, right, blinds, curtains, whatever it is, we’re often quoting in one step.
Right. But the key piece here that they did on top of bringing two quote meetings into one was that they shortened that sales cycle. And for most businesses out there where you can quote fast and that is either on the spot, straight away after the job or same day, that’s where we’re then able to keep the excitement, right, or the engagement going with our customers to get deals done.
So what a really effective shortened sales cycle looks like is one that very quickly not only gets to site but ascertains what the customer wants, talks through how you can bring that to life with them and then follows that through with the formal paperwork. In my experience, in most sales under $10,000, we’re able to get deals done in 24 hours if we have the right process. Now that doesn’t mean deals above $10,000 don’t happen.
I’ve personally signed deals worth tens of thousands of dollars on the spot. But what it does mean is that for those under $10,000, if we’re moving with speed, getting clear on what our customer wants and shortening that sales cycle, we’re increasing our chances that nothing else gets in the way. Competitors, other things in life, inertia, i.e. not doing anything, customers changing their mind.
So by keeping that sales cycle nice and short and sharp, we reduce that risk. So number one was all about speed. Three things, speed to lead, speed to qualify, speed to get out to site.
And the second piece was all about shortening the sales cycle once we get to site. So finding ways that we can quote our customers really quickly by knowing what they want, how we’re going to do it and then formalizing that work. Okay and then the last piece is that this customer made sure they got in front of their customer with their quote.
There was no email quotes. Look, if you’re a trade business, in fact if you’re any business and you’re emailing quotes, just throw that process in the bin. It is by far the least effective way to get deals done.
However, it can be used when you’re pairing it with a phone call, pairing it with a video call, pairing it with a face-to-face visit. But if emailing quotes is your go-to, then I’d really encourage you to look long and hard if that’s doing what it needs to do for you. But certainly the gold standard here for this business was that they got in front of their customers.
Now they had an average deal of about $40,000. They got in front of their customers and they worked through the whole quotation with them and then what was missing, what else needed to change and what they wanted to do next. So three things here this customer did that were super impactful to get them from a business struggling to book deals or book projects for the next week through to being booked out and all of that in under six weeks.
So to recap on those six things. Number one, speed. Speed to lead, speed to qualify, speed to get out to site.
Number two, shortening the sales cycle. So the time from getting out to site to getting their quote in front of their customer was shortened by knowing exactly what they wanted, how they were going to do it and then getting the formal paperwork out. And then number three is when they’re presenting quotes they got in front of them.
Not possible for everyone but certainly it’s a long way ahead of emailing. So that’s a nice short and sharp episode on a real life example around how one of our customers managed to grow their business quickly and the message I’d love you to take from today and we’re very grateful that you’re listening as always but as you’re going about your day I want you to take from that is what is one of those things that you can do for your business that could move the dog quickly because they’re all easy to do. All three of those are in the power of almost every business leader but the challenge here is how are you going to do it and how can you make it happen because if you don’t what will happen is you’ll just keep spending hours and hours wasting time on quotes.
You’ll get stressed and it generally means you don’t have enough money in the bank account and that generally means not enough money in the bank account to show for it. So spoiler alert, it’s our job to try and fix that. We’ve got some amazing programs launching in the coming months.
They’re not out yet but all of them are going to be running off a wait list and we want to make sure that everyone listening to the podcast at least gets notified about these. So to do that all you need to do is click on a link in the show notes. It’ll take you 30 seconds.
We’ll let you know when they’re launching so you can be one of the first to hear about it. By the way, some of them won’t cost any money. So before you leave this podcast, just jump onto that link, do it now.
It takes 30 seconds and you’ll get alerted when they come out. That’s it for now. Keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.