What could happen to your sales if you could quote faster—and start winning or losing deals sooner?
Slow quoting can create delays, extra follow-ups, longer sales cycles, and more time spent on every opportunity. In this episode, Ben shares the results of a six-week trial where one sales team tested quoting on the spot and saw a dramatic improvement in their close rate, while also uncovering ways to shorten deal cycles and free up valuable selling time.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How quoting on the spot can help you uncover pricing, product, or scope issues immediately and make adjustments before the opportunity stalls.
- Why getting quotes in front of customers faster can shorten your sales cycle and help you win or lose deals sooner.
- How saving time on each quoted opportunity can create more capacity for prospecting, follow-up, referrals, and reaching more potential customers.
Play this episode to discover how you can trial faster quoting in your business and turn shorter sales cycles into more deals and more time to sell.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
They started quoting deals on the spot and their close rates jumped astronomically.
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:
One of the discussions that I have with almost every sales team that I work with is around the speed of how fast they’re quoting. Are you quoting on the spot? Are you quoting quickly afterwards? Are you quoting the same day or are you quoting days if not weeks later on? And invariably what we end up with is a point where we throw out the same challenge that says what does it look like if you quote faster? So today we’re going to go through a trial that one of our customers did around quoting on the spot, the three things that came out of it and I think what this means for you as a business when it comes down to trialling this yourself.
So let’s look at the situation here. This was a customer, they are in the direct to end user market. So whilst they’re selling to businesses, they’re selling to businesses who will be using the products themselves.
Their average sales value is about $5,000 and they’ve got a team of reasonably experienced and certainly very capable, very talented sales people but they have a team with some breadth of experience across that. Now what this team did was trial quoting on the spot. So what I mean by quoting on the spot is they got out to their customers, they pre-prepared a quote template, got to their customer, tried to not only find out everything they needed but also complete the quote and run through it with them then and there on the spot.
They did this over a trial period, over a six-week trial period and it was a small number of quotes. So we’re not talking about 100 quotes here but a smaller sample size but the results were simply outstanding. They actually closed 100% of those deals that they quoted on the spot.
I’m going to jump in on myself here and say that that is a really high number and I don’t expect that number will hold for the long term. However, it was a significant increase from their existing quote close rates which was about one in three. So they took their close rates from one in three to 100% and I’m expecting that they’re going to fall back and let’s say they end up about two out of three is where they end up closing.
That end result for them is a doubling of their close rate from quoting on the spot. So the other key piece I’ll add here is that they didn’t actually close those deals necessarily on the spot but either then on the spot or later at a later time, they were successful in 100% of those deals that they quoted on the spot. There were three things that really came out of this trial for this business.
The first one is that when they quoted on the spot, they were actually able to find out any significant issues with their quote then and there, any products they’d missed, if they counted numbers wrong, if quite simply the pricing was just way out, if the pricing was close but needed to come down a little bit and really specifically for one of these customers, it was their threshold, their internal threshold as to when they needed to go out to market and get more quotes. So they were actually able to slightly reduce the price of one of their quotes by a small percentage figure but got it under that threshold and they’re able to move that deal through to the end result. So number one, they actually found out exactly what was great and what wasn’t so great about the quote that they’d put out to their customer.
Super powerful because knowledge is obviously power and when they could understand what was going on then and there, they were able to quickly pivot and make some changes. So that was number one in terms of things that came out of these on-the-spot quotes. Number two was that they were able to speed up the deal cycles.
Recently obvious this one when you think about it, if they’re finding out issues then and there on the spot, then at that point in time they’re able to address these. So they’re saving time in that feedback loop that would normally take longer when they take a day for example to quote and then a couple of days to get feedback or invariably those times when you simply can’t get in touch with customers to get their feedback. But what they did was they closed down, what they did was reduce the time on their sales cycles.
So not only did they close more deals but they found out the issues quickly and they were able to close more deals more quickly. Now the third flow-on effect that came from this was that by quoting on the spot and finding out issues on the spot to speed up the deal cycles, what they did was save themselves time. So the average time they spent on deals decreased.
Again makes logical sense when you think it through there, not having to quote after the quote so they’re able to do it then and there which is highly effective and efficient. They’re speeding up deal cycles so there’s less follow-up calls, less emails, less contact points back and forward which means that they are saving time per deal. Now when you’re able to save time per deal what then happens is there’s more time available to go and do other things, more time to go and prospect, more time to go and chase up the deals that are a little bit too slow, more time to go to past customers and get them back to your business, more time to ask for referrals.
It becomes this beautiful deal cycle where not only are you closing more deals and saving yourself time but you are actually able to get to more deals. So instead of getting to 10 quotes in a week getting to 11 quotes for example in that week. So not only are close rates rising but also the number of deals they’re quoting are rising which means actual quote numbers closed are rising too.
So these are three beautiful and almost poetic results that could come out of this team that quoted on the spot and for me it’s one I wanted to really share with you listening because if you think through your quoting procedures now the challenge that I want to leave today is how do you think of ways to speed up that quote process. If it’s not quoting on the spot how can you get quotes in customers hands faster so you quote faster and you win or lose faster to not only find out issues more quickly to not only speed up your deal cycles but also to save you time when it comes to getting to your quoted deals. That’s the challenge for you to think about and absolutely if you can find a way to trial by all means just set yourself a 30-day lens to trial but if you can find a way to trial this method of closing over these next 30 days I’d love to hear from you around what the results come.
Okay so that’s it for today that’s the key output. Go and think about how you can quote faster. We are absolutely getting very close now to rolling out our new sales and marketing workshops.
There’s a link in the show notes for you to click on if you want to register to be told about those. They are going to be invite only and they are going to be capped at very small numbers so jump onto the show notes and click on those but if you do nothing else from today have a think about how you can speed up that deal cycle. That’s very much around the 1% better each and every day theme.
Stick with it. It works. We’ll catch you later on this week.
Bye for now.