Are you treating every prospect the same—even though some are ready to buy, some are just looking, and others have already bought from you?
Not every lead needs the same sales approach. When you treat a prospect who is simply researching the same way as someone ready to make a decision, you risk pushing too hard or completely forgetting customers who could buy from you again.
By recognising where each prospect is in their journey, you can spend your time more effectively and generate more value from your existing customer base.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to identify and nurture “seedling” prospects who are just looking so you can build trust and create future sales.
- How to recognise customers who are ready to buy and give them the speed and attention they need to get the deal done.
- How to keep your mature customer relationships growing through repeat business, maintenance, and referrals instead of letting valuable opportunities become forgotten.
Play the episode to learn how to tailor your sales approach to each type of prospect so you can close more deals, build a healthier pipeline, and get more value from every customer.
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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:
This business changed how they quoted and closed more deals on the spot.
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:
Okay, so on Monday, I set this up around what we’re going to do today. It was a short, sharp, punchy episode.
I hope you enjoyed getting those few minutes back in your day and use them really productively. But today, we are all about talking through what one of our great customers did to allow them to quote more deals on the spot and in the end, grow their close rates significantly. Okay, so this is a trade-based customer, right, that works more broadly in providing products to both homes and businesses.
Their average sales deal is about $3,000. Okay, so it’s a nice sweet spot in terms of being able to get deals done quickly, but also they’re a business that quoted deals up to about $70,000, $80,000, even $90,000. So, they had quite a variance in their deal size, but their average sales deal was $3,000 and their median in terms of sales was closer to the $10,000 mark.
So, what I mean by that is they did a number of small deals, but when they’re out on site, right, the average was at least $3,000, but they’re very, very commonly quoting deals in that $5,000 to $10,000 mark. They rolled out a process to quote more of their deals on the spot and were able to impactfully grow their close rates by about 10%. So, what did that look like for them? Well, this business rolled out three things that enabled them to quote more effectively on the spot to get these deals done.
The first thing that they did was they spent a little bit more time in their qualifying and what I mean by that is they were a lot more confident in what the customer wanted before they got to site. So, they were asking things like, are you just looking or actually ready to pick a supplier, right? Are you just interested in understanding more or are you ready to go? So, that was number one. Number two, what are you looking for? They got really clear on what the problem they were trying to solve was, right, or the opportunity they were trying to capitalize on.
Number three is they started to talk broadly around budgets. What are you looking to spend? How much do you think this project is going to cost? What’s the return on investment you’re looking for, right? And they started to have those early conversations around investments. Number four is they started to talk about timelines, right? So, when they’re understanding what the customer needs prior to getting out to site, when do you want it done? And number five is they got them ready that they were able to quote on the spot.
Hey, we’re coming out to site, we’re talking about some of the key things you want, your budgets, where you are in terms of wanting to move forward and then set the expectation that when they were on site, they were going to try and quote for them then and there. So, what we had was a customer who’d had a little bit of time with this business, they were able to get really clear and articulate what they wanted but they had the headspace or the mindset that when this customer came to site, they were going to give them a solution then and there, right? So, they were ready and open to seeing what the quote was, which naturally meant they were ready to look at saying yes or no. So, number one is they got really clear on what the customer needed prior and set the deal up to succeed.
Number two was they pre-filled as much of their quote as they could, customer details. They entered some products that they were like, this is a product-based business, right? They entered some products that they were more likely to then work with the customer on because they’d done that pre-qualifying. They pre-filled out time for delivery.
They pre-filled out some broad pricing, right? They had everything they needed pre-filled on that quote to be able to quickly make adjustments when they’re on site to get the deal done. Now, I fully recognize this isn’t possible for every business but what I would encourage you to think about is what are the things you can pre-fill and most businesses can pre-fill customer names, they can pre-fill addresses, they can certainly put a rough idea for products in there. Of course, I’ll acknowledge this isn’t possible for every business but in most businesses I work with, it’s possible for if not all of their products or services, at least some of them.
There’s a part of their business that they can quote on the spot, be it maintenance, be it small projects, be it simple projects, be it projects with customers they’ve worked on before who know who they are. But I want to really challenge you to ever think about what projects you could quote on the spot because without doubt, the number one bit of pushback I get is, oh, that’s not for us. All right.
So, at this business, just to recap, they’d understood what their customer needed prior, so they were coming in with some momentum built. They’d started on that trust journey. The second thing is they pre-filled their quote.
So, when they got to site, they didn’t need to spend time doing admin. And the third thing that they did was that they took samples with them to site. So, they got something in their customers’ hands.
Not going to work for everyone but again, I challenge you to think about what you could put in a customer’s hand, be it brochures, be it spec sheets, be it physical products, what they could get in their hands so the customer felt really engaged in that journey. Colors is a great example. Textures is another one.
Sizes is a third. When you can take in bits of carpet that customers can feel and look at, it really helps them move through that process faster. So, by taking in samples on the back of setting the customer up that they were going to quote on the spot and pre-filling their quote template to make it really quickly is they were then also able to engage the customer.
And the piece I really like about this is they were able to leave some of those samples with them to have a look at, to have a think about what they did the last little bit of admin work they needed on the quote. Now, the gold standard here is you have a tablet or a Surface Pro in front of you and you’re filling this out as you go and then it spits out your quote. Terrific if you’re using something like a PandaDoc.
But where you can’t and you still need to do it manually, you need to buy yourself those four or five minutes to sit at a desk in the business or sit at the kitchen bench of that customer or the table. By having samples or something in their hand, that gives the customer something to focus on and keeps them engaged. So that is literally all this business did to get quoting on the spot happening.
And as I said, it was about a plus 10% impact on their close rates from those three simple things. So as you’re going through the end of this episode, I want you to have a think about what are these you could implement in your business to speed up your quoting process. Could you better qualify and get customers prepared that you’re going to be quoting when you come to see them? Could you pre-fill your quotes and be more organized when you’re getting to site? Or could someone in your business, someone in the admin team do it for you? And number three is what products can you get in your customer’s hands? A classic example I worked with is a painter when they said, hey, I can’t take tins of paint.
I can take swatches, but they’re small and hard to work with. For me, what this business did was roll out a number of different sample panels that they kept in the car across their top 10 most common colors and they were able to take them in. So they were bigger than swatches, but they weren’t necessarily rolling a wall or rolling a sample.
So as you’re going through this, what are the things that you can change in your business to get you quoting on the spot? Because if you’re not getting the sales results you want, you have to change something. Otherwise, you’ll keep getting those same results, working long hours, not enough money in the bank, not closing enough deals, stress, whatever it may be. I’ve lived every single one of them across businesses, across my seven or eight businesses.
And if nothing else, you’re starting to think about what you can do. Now, a spoiler alert, it’s our job to help you with these. We’ve got some amazing programs launching in the coming months that are all going to be running off a wait list, some of which are going to be free.
So if you want to make sure you at least get notified by them, it’s not a hard sales pitch, but if you want to get notified when this stuff rolls out, make sure you jump onto our show notes, click on the link and register because we’ll then let you know when they’re launching. And the good news is it’ll only take you 30 seconds. Okay, that’s it for today.
Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.