Are you losing easy sales simply because your follow-up process leaves too much to chance?
You’ve done the hard work of generating the lead, meeting the customer, understanding their needs and preparing the quote—but those 50/50 deals can still disappear if there’s no clear plan for what happens next.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to create a more intentional follow-up process that keeps customers engaged and gives you a better chance of winning the deals that could go either way.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How agreeing on specific next steps before you leave can make follow-up more effective and reduce the chances of customers going cold.
- Why giving customers something meaningful to consider between conversations keeps them engaged in the decision-making process.
- How setting a clear agenda for the next conversation can help you uncover what the customer likes, what they want changed and what needs to happen to move the deal forward.
Play this episode to discover a simple follow-up framework that can help you win more of the 50/50 deals you’ve already worked hard to earn.
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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:
In this episode, we’re going to talk about how not making time to follow up is going to be losing you more sales than you could ever imagine, but most importantly, what you can do about it.
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 spoke about it in episode 263, how most businesses that we work with actually don’t need more leads, but they just need to convert more of them. So today, we’re going to deep dive on how you can take one of those great leads that you’ve quoted and make sure that you are following them up so you don’t lose them, right, to make sure on those deals that could go either way, not the slam dunk deals that you know you’ve won, not the deals that you’re never going to win, but those deals that are sitting in the balance, those 50-50 deals, how you can make sure that you are following them up so you’re not losing easy sales.
Okay, so before we get into this, back in episode 257, we spoke about Pomodoros. It’s a terrific episode to go back and listen to because it’s all about how you set time in your calendar to follow up on your customers. Really good episode, 257, all about Pomodoros, right? Great name, even better process.
Today, we’re going to talk about what you can actually do when you’re in front of customers to make sure that the follow-up happens. So there’s three things we’re going to go through. Number one, super impactful, is making sure that before we leave our deal, so we’ve gone out to visit our customers, we’ve made a great first impression, we’ve given them a little gift, right, something you guys know I’m big on, right? We’ve walked around the house, we’ve identified what the problem is, what the need is, what the opportunity for them is, we’ve asked them what great looks like, we’ve created value, right? We’ve either quoted or we’re getting ready to quote fast and we’re then agreeing with the customer on what the next steps are, right? So what are we going to do from here? It’s something I very rarely see trade, small, medium business owners do well, right? They’ll often say, great, I’m going to get you that quote and we’ll go from there, right? Okay, I’ll have your quote by the end of the day, let me know what you think.
I’ll come back to you early next week, we’ll email across the quote and I’ll give you a call, right? They’re not next steps that actually engage the customer or us, they’re simply saying, right, mechanically, here’s what we’re going to do. When I talk about agreeing on next steps, what they talk about is how they’re going to come back together. So when are they going to call this customer or this prospect and what are they going to talk about? What’s the timelines around this? How are they going to do it? Is it going to be face-to-face, is it going to be by phone, right? So they’re agreeing on these next steps and very specifically when they’re going to be.
Spoiler alert here, making sure they’re short and sharp, generally one to two days is when we want to be doing it and getting some agreement that says, hey, I don’t want to hassle you but can we agree that in a couple of days’ time, we’ll talk. I’ll give you a call, if you don’t have time, let me know when’s the best time to call back and we’ll make sure that happens, right? So we’re getting really clear on what the next steps are and when we’re going to do them. Second part is they’re making sure that they are keeping the customer engaged, right? And that’s all about giving the customer something to do, giving them something that they need to think about between now and when you next meet and not just the quote, right? It might be choosing colours, it might be choosing textures, it might be choosing areas in the business or the house that they’re going to store, the equipment that you’re giving them, might be thinking about the types of the service that they really do or don’t need, it might be thinking about when they want it done by, it might be engaging with their business partner or their CFO or their husband or their wife or whoever it may be, right? To talk about what they’re going to do next but salespeople that really effectively nail the follow-up, agree on the next steps but also make sure their customer has something to do between now and then, something that they need to think about that keeps them engaged and moving forward, all right? So that’s number two.
So we’re agreeing on next steps, we’re making sure that we’ve got something for the customer to do and the third piece is that we’re talking through when we next come together what we’re going to do and the piece I love here is we’re agreeing that when we next come together, we’re going to go through what they like, what they don’t like and what they want to do next. So we’ve agreed on the next steps, we’ve given them something to do and we’ve agreed that when we come back together, what we’re going to focus on and those three things that I just said for me are super powerful. So when we talk in a couple of days’ time, we’re going to go through the stuff I’ve got right, the stuff I’ve got wrong and what you want to do from here, the stuff I’ve really nailed, the stuff you maybe want me to think about changing and what you’d like to do from this point in time.
So it’s all about setting the customer up to say, okay, this is when we’re going to come back together, this is what you’re going to do in the meantime and here’s what we’re going to talk about because certainly for me in my life, when I’m clear on what’s happening in a meeting, when I’m clear on what’s happening in a moment in time, I’m better prepared for it. It gives me time to think about, I may not spend lots of time but it gives me moments to decide, okay, this is what I want to do and whilst it’s not foolproof, while we will agree with customers on next steps, we’ll give them something to do and then agree on what we’re going to talk about when we come back together, it doesn’t always happen. Customers will still not return our calls, people will still ghost us but what it does do is increase the chances that they won’t and as we’ve spoken about particularly across episode 263, actually two episodes ago started this week, was how in many cases, it’s not about generating more leads but closing more of the ones that we have.
So in these instances where we’ve got deals that are 50-50 and they could go either way, when we’re getting really clear on these next steps with our customers, we’re giving ourselves a much better chance to close and win those deals. So that’s the key focus from today around making sure that you follow up so you don’t lose easy sales, you don’t lose those 50-50 sales that you should be winning a percentage of and the things we focused on were making sure you’re agreeing on next steps, giving the customer something to do and then getting really clear on what you’re going to talk about when you do come back together. Now, certainly number one and three, you can roll quite smoothly into one, you can argue when you get good at this, there’ll be only two, when you’re going to catch up, what you’re going to do when you catch up and giving the customer something to do in the meantime, right? But the piece I’d love you to think about as you’re walking out of today is which one of those, right? Is there something in there you can nail and make a small change about, something you can do that will help you be less stressed, that will help you work less hours, that will help you close more deals and what does it look like if you’re closing more deals? If you go from four out of 20 to five out of 20 as we spoke about on Monday, what does that mean for your business? Right now, spoiler alert, we’ve got some amazing new programs launching in the coming months that are absolutely going to be talking about this, they’re going to be running off a wait list.
If you want to hear about them, you just need to go to the show notes, put your details in there and we’ll just let you know when they come out. Some of them are going to be free, they won’t cost you a cent, right? But you’ve got to be in it to win it. So jump in, it’s going to take you 30 seconds and between now and next week, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.