What if you could use AI to respond to leads faster, create more engaging quotes and generate more sales—without spending a fortune or completely overhauling your business?
AI can feel overwhelming, especially with new tools and possibilities appearing constantly. But you don’t need to become an AI expert to benefit from it.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How AI agents can qualify incoming leads, respond faster and even book appointments for your team.
- How using AI-generated visuals, designs and comparisons can increase customer engagement and help them see the value of choosing you.
- How AI-powered nurturing can keep customers engaged after a quote or sale, creating more opportunities for repeat business and referrals.
Press play to discover three practical ways you can start using AI today to save time, engage customers more effectively and turn more of your existing leads into sales.
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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:
AI is here and there are easy ways that trade businesses can use it to grow their sales fast.
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 have to admit I’m regularly overwhelmed by what’s available in the AI landscape now but on the same token there are some really easy things that I’m seeing businesses do that utilize AI without significant cost, time or worry that are helping grow their sales and save them time. So today we’re going to go through three of those and what you can do to very quickly make some impacts in your business that’s going to move the dial.
So let’s go straight into it today because I think AI is a topic that’s talked about all the time, we all know what it is, we all know it’s coming and most of us know we’ve got to get on board with AI processes in order to outcompete against the competition. So let’s go through these and I’m going to focus today on three stages of our deal cycle, qualifying, engaging with our customers and post site visit or the post growth process, we’ll call it the close. So when it comes to AI and we’re qualifying, the simplest thing that I’m seeing businesses implement is a basic agent that when a lead comes in qualifies the lead.
So lead comes into the business via email, even via phone or text message and some text messages go back confirming what they want and when they want to make an appointment. Really simple, there’s plenty of tools out there, jump online, type in AI qualifying agents or AI phone agents or AI sales agents and heaps will come up. There’s nothing I want to specifically recommend because I’m finding that businesses are moving so quickly in their capabilities, right, that when you recommend one within a few months time, right, when someone’s listening to this podcast down the track that that business is no longer relevant.
But what I would simply recommend is type in a Google search and you look for an AI agent, an AI sales agent, an AI qualifying agent. They’re cheap, they’re easy to set up and they take the load off your team in a way. Number one is they get back to their customers really quickly, right, and we know speed to lead is a big driver of winning deals.
But number two is they do the qualifying work so they’re saving the team time and they can even book in those appointments for you, right, so they can look at your calendar, get that appointment set and then you’re very quickly out to meet the customer. So I really like the two parts of that, obviously the speed but also saving time within the business because the reality is a lot of business leaders are simply not getting back to their leads quickly enough, right, very simple way to solve it. So that’s number one.
Number two comes down to winning the deal. One of my favorites that I heard recently was actually from George Bryan who I’ve mentioned a few times and in one of his roofing businesses across in the United States is that when they are quoting a customer, they will actually do an AI design around what the house will look like with their new roof. Fantastic.
Couldn’t think of a better way for a customer to get engaged than seeing exactly what their project is going to look like once it’s done. We actually did this in the solar business about 10 years ago where customers could design their own solar system on their roof, right, really increases engagement but I think in today’s market it’s so easy to use an AI tool, a Claude, a chat GPT, whatever you’re using to quite simply take an image of a house, an image of a business, right, an internal photograph of a wall, of a table, of a kitchen, right, of a backyard, whatever you’re going to be changing and mock up what that’s going to look like for the customer. Very simple.
We can put logos onto our product if our products are all about branding for our customers, if it’s signage, right, if we’re doing anything that is related to advertising a business, we can throw their logos onto that design. We can pull together comparison tables. I did just last night for a customer in our studio that’s wanting to look across a number of different options is I quite simply wrote those options down, copy and pasted that into AI, said pull it into a table for me and it compared the difference for them, right.
So, we can be using AI to help us win the deal by increasing the engagement that our customer has in the journey. My favourite out of all of those is using visuals to show our customers exactly what their project or service is going to look like once it’s done. It’s quick, it’s easy, a three, four, five-minute job.
Once you train a chat GPT or a Claude or something on it, you can get them done pretty quickly. And number three is all around nurturing. So, what happens post our customers doing a deal with us or post our customers even being quoted is that we can set up some smart nurturing campaigns that keep our customers engaged.
If we’re looking at how we’re winning a deal, right, we can have an AI model set up that is speaking to our customers specifically about what’s important to them, right. We can use tools like our CRM systems like HubSpot to help us use some real smarts in that. But the piece I really like is using an AI system to get some of our outbound messaging done post deals, right.
So, we set up with our agent to be contacting our customers at certain time periods, right, when times elapsed, probably my favourite, across seasons, right, is another great one. But reach out to customers with some specifics about their deal and ask them how things are going. Ask them if they’d like anything else.
Ask them if they know anyone who’d benefit from our business. Now, it certainly doesn’t replace some of the face-to-face and phone-based work we’re doing, but it supplements it. And it can really accelerate the results we get from that dedicated face-to-face time, right, to win us more deals.
Because at the end of the day, we’re in the game of trying to increase our close rates. Very rare we’re going to get to perfection where we’re closing every deal, right. But if we can take our close rates from 30 to 35 percent or if we can increase our repeat business or if we can get a referral regularly from our customers, these are all little processes and systems that over time significantly move the dial in our business.
And to be honest, it’s actually the difference between a good and a great business. It’s not getting more leads, but it’s what they’re doing with those leads to really work them through the pipeline and generate great result. Now, you’ve heard me talk about this a lot.
As you’re leaving today’s podcast, what’s your focus? What do you like from those three AI things? Something from your early customer journey, something from during the quotation or something from after the quotation and into what we do after we’ve won a deal, right. What do you like from that that you can implement in your business to help you make change, right, because making that change is really important to help you get reward for those long hours, get more money in the bank, right, reduce your stress, reduce your time commitment and that at the end of the day is what we’re trying to do with this podcast. Now, good news is we’ve got some great new programs launching in the coming months.
They’re going to be running off a wait list. Some of them are going to cost nothing. If you want to be told about them, right, and talk in more detail about some of these things that we mentioned on the podcast, please make sure you click on the link in the show notes, register and we’ll make sure we get in touch with you.
It takes 30 seconds. Now is the best time to do it, right, and then when these programs come up, you’ll at least get prompted to start working on some of these things and at the very least be able to move the dial for your sales growth on your own, if not with a bit of help from us. That’s it for today.
Please keep that focus on being 1% better each and every day. Today was all about AI. We’ll see you for the next episode shortly.
Bye for now.