What if speeding up your sales process could help you close more deals—without putting more pressure on your customers?
Long sales processes can mean more time spent on every project, slower decisions, and fewer opportunities to move through your pipeline.
In this episode, Ben shares how one trade business streamlined its sales process, increased sales by 34%, and freed up more time to work through additional opportunities—all without relying on a hard sell.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How getting clearer during the qualifying stage can help you understand exactly what customers need before you even arrive on site.
- Why preparing customers for a fast, well-organised sales process can help create momentum and support quicker decisions without applying pressure.
- What to take to every customer appointment so you have everything you need to build trust, answer questions, and move the opportunity forward.
Play this episode to discover three practical steps you can use to speed up your sales process, close more deals, and spend less time on every opportunity.
Take our Free Quote Quiz now to Kickstart Your Sales Growth
Sales & Marketing Workshops with Ben Wright:
https://space.1111studios.com.au/workshops-waitlist
To see how we’ve helped business grow their sales:
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:
Today we’re going to unpack how this trade business sped up their sales process to land them 34% more sales.
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:
In this episode, we’re going to go through the three steps that one of our fantastic trade customers went through to really speed up their sales process, so close more deals, right? It landed them 34% more sales over the period that we measured, but more importantly, it allowed them to get through more deals because they were spending less time on each and every project. Certainly for me across my experience in my sales life, the easiest thing to do when it comes to a sales process and engagement with a customer is extend it, is go long, right? Because there’s a natural, certainly for me, there’s always been a natural tendency not to want to upset someone by going too hard too early and risk burning, if you like, the deal.
However, what I’ve learned in particular over the last five or six years as I’m doing such a volume of sales strategy and coaching is that a faster sales process can be done without any pressure. So we can move our customers from start to finish in a much more economical and faster fashion without needing to do the hard sell. So this comes from a business who, and I’ll quote, sent me a message saying, hey Ben, we booked a $73,000 job in the first week of our program with you.
It wouldn’t have happened without you, right? And in brackets, by the way, we paid back our investment multiple times in just that week. So I really like that quote because what it said was, I took what you’re putting out there, I thought about it, I learned from it and then I implemented it and in the first week, I got a $73,000 job that I wouldn’t have got otherwise. And of course, I’m pretty stoked that he paid back his investment within, I think it was six days, within six days of starting the program.
So great result. But I want to talk through exactly what he did to help speed up that sales process. So there’s three things I want to focus on amongst a few other things that this business did.
They’re in the outdoor trade business working on homes just to give you an idea. So they’re very much the B to C type of landscape and they’re working outside the home rather than in. Now, whenever I’m talking about dollars and cents, I need to be a little bit discerning in terms of the exact type of business but certainly a trade business, certainly dealing with homeowners and certainly working outside the house.
So three things that they did. Number one, they got really clear during their qualifying process what the customer needed. So what we did with this member of the program is we sat down and wrote their five most important qualifying questions.
And the questions were generally built around understanding if a customer is ready to go now or they’re still looking, qualifying where they are in terms of geographic location, house size, right, and all those general demographics. Number three, getting clear on their scope of works. So what a really good outcome looked like for them.
Number four, scoping roughly some budget ideas. So we knew that before we got there. And number five, getting clear around when we need to get to site and what’s going to happen next.
So we scoped those questions out really clearly and before we even got to site, we knew what a customer wanted. So that was number one. Second thing they did was that they prepared their customer that they were going to come in and work through a project with them and get them to a point where they could make a decision quickly.
So this wasn’t about asking them to make a decision quickly but saying that they were going to prepare them so they could make a decision quickly. The subtle difference here is just because you have the information doesn’t mean you have to make the decision quickly. But by getting it to a customer quicker, in many cases, we’re then going to have a quicker decision.
The delays we have to get to site, to get to quote, are often reciprocated by customers. That sense of urgency is often reflected in return. Whereas in reverse, when we’re out to site quickly and we’re preparing customers that we’re going to be able to turn around things for them pretty quickly because we’re going to do some work before we get there, then that gets them also often, not always, in the mindset to say, okay, let’s match that style.
But it’s that whole analogy around when you’re in interviews, job interviews, you’re matching your pacing, you’re matching your body language, you’re matching your body position with the person on the other side of the table. Works just the same when it comes to a sales landscape. So number one, they got really clear during the qualifying process what the customer needed.
Number two, they prepared them to make a decision. And number three, really obvious this one but so often doesn’t get followed through, is that they took everything they needed to site. So they took with them any samples they needed.
They took with them all the gear to measure up, to show the customer any product samples, to talk through any visuals, any inspiration. They had this on their iPads. They took customer referrals, social proof, everything that the customer could possibly want to talk through in that first visit so that they were able to step their thinking process forward.
By having everything there, we’re able to build momentum. We’re able to really work on those five layers of trust that we’ve spoken about across the business and essentially say to the customer, I’m on top of my game. I know what I’m doing.
You’re in safe hands and you can trust me. So those three things to recap. One, they got really clear during qualifying what their customer needed.
Number two, they prepared them to make a decision. And number three, they took with them everything they needed to site. So as you’re working through this episode, I deliberately run the same format in these podcasts because I want you to be leaving them with some structured thinking.
And the first thing I’d like you to think about today is what could you do in your sales process to speed it up? I don’t want you to necessarily go through these three items, but I want you to have a think and go, okay, what are the obvious items I could tap into to speed up my sales process? And then lean into these three things. Get clear during qualifying what your customer wants. Write the questions down.
Number two, prepare them to make a decision. So preempt that you’re going to be out there and moving fast for them. And number three, make sure that your vans or your trucks or your cars are loaded up so when you do get to site, when you do have an appointment with your B2B or your B2C customer, it doesn’t matter who it is, that you’ve got everything you need.
So these are some great steps to help you obviously speed up your sales process, but ideally land you more sales. Because to grow businesses, we need to make sure we’re leaning into the change. And then what comes with leaning into change are things like working less hours, more cash in the bank, less stress, right, all those triggers that we speak about quite regularly.
We’re launching some new programs that are specifically focused about this. They’re a couple of months away, but they are going to be by waitlist only. Some of these are going to be free.
So you need to be on the waitlist to hear about them. The easiest way you can do that is jump into the show notes, click the link and register. That’s it.
That’s all you need to do and we’ll let you know when these programs come out. That’s it for today though. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.