What if you could close $250,000 deals on the spot instead of waiting months for a decision?
Closing deals faster isn’t necessarily about pushing customers harder or cutting corners. It’s about making the buying process simpler, communicating what makes your business different and understanding what your customers truly value.
In this episode, Ben shares how one business with a traditional three-to-four-month sales cycle began closing more deals on the spot while maintaining an average sale value of around $250,000.
In this episode, you’ll discover how to:
- Simplify your sales process by reducing unnecessary meetings, setting expectations around pricing and lead times, and preparing customers to make confident decisions when you present your quote.
- Identify and communicate your unique value by getting clear on what makes your business stand out and targeting customers who genuinely appreciate the quality and experience you deliver.
- Create value around what matters most to your customers by asking the right questions, understanding their desired outcomes and using their own language to connect your offer to the things they care about most.
Play this episode to learn how to shorten your sales cycle, win more of the quotes you prepare and turn more customer conversations into profitable deals.
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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:
After three months together, this team struggled to keep up with their inbound sales. Here’s how they did 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 remember from about three years ago a quote from one of the fantastic businesses that were working at the time and it went something like this, Ben, we are scrambling to keep up with the sales volume at the moment. In fact, we’re closing more deals on the spot than we’re not. Now as we move into today’s episode, I want to throw a couple things out there for you to think about. If you’re thinking, well, my business doesn’t work this way, this team previously had a three to four month cycle time and their average sales value was about $250,000.
Now that sales cycle came down significantly once we started working together, but that average sales number of $250,000 was still happening. So they were closing $250,000 sales on the spot. So as we get into today, if your thinking straight away doesn’t apply to me, I don’t know how I can get quotes done on the spot, I want you to straight away listen to this story and see what you can build into your business.
So we’re going to go through three levers that this team rolled out to make that shortened sales process come, to make it really come to life. So the first thing they did was simplify their sales process. They previously had meetings stretched out, but they were having three key meetings with their customers before the deal got done.
They were able to bring that down to two. So take one third of those meetings out, have a preliminary meeting with their customer, and when they came back to do their design and quotation together, get their deals done on the spot. And within that sales process, they had some really key levers to precondition their customers around decision making times.
They focused on approximate pricing before they came back with their quote, lead times, when decisions needed to be made, what was really important to the customer, creating that great relationship so that when they were coming back with pricing, the customers had some confidence and trust in how they would do business with them. By simplifying that sales process, not only did it allow them in front of their customer to have to remember less things and spend more time listening, but it allowed them to get to more deals because they were spending less time on each and every deal, which meant they could get to more deals. And in this instance, they were actually closing more.
So not only was their close rate higher, but they were getting to more of those deals. The second thing they did was got really clear on their sizzle, really clear on where they added great value to their customer. And in this instance, it was the quality of the product that they were putting out there, but more importantly, how that product made their customer feel.
So how it brought to life their customers’ lives and let them take their dreams or turn their dreams into the reality around their homes. So by getting really clear on the sizzle that this business offered, they were able to then target the customers who valued this, they were able to focus on their messaging all throughout their sales process, and they were able to articulate what that value meant for their customers. Number one, they simplified their sales process.
Number two, they got really clear on what their sizzle was for their customers. And number three, really impactfully, was that they were always aiming to create value. So the focus became less about exactly what they could deliver to their customers and more about how they could deliver to their customers the value that they wanted.
So just think about that momentarily. Delivering what you think is valuable to your customers versus what your customers think is valuable could align. But if we’re expecting that that will naturally happen, we’re throwing the big risk out there that quite simply, we’ve read the room right.
In my experience across 25 years now of sales, it is very, very rare that we can nail what the customer wants without spending time talking to them about what that value means. And that often means then reframing the value into words that work for them. We may think that we build pools that provide great lifestyles for customers.
But in the customer’s mind, building a pool is all about them sitting beside it to watch their kids play. Now invariably, they’re the same thing. But if we’re talking about a great lifestyle by the pool, that isn’t going to elicit the same emotion as a customer who’s thinking about playing with their kids.
Because lifestyle can mean so many things. It can mean parties. It can mean sunbaking.
It can mean when you come home from work that you get to jump in your pool. It can mean playing with your kids. It can mean that Hampstead style dream where we’ve got the umbrellas with the stripes across them and people with straw hats on dressed in fancy clothes, right.
It can mean so many different things. But by understanding what the value explicitly was for their customer and then creating that for them, bringing to life a pool that was all about helping their kids jump, swim, play, laugh, right, that infectious laughter that we all know people who have kids that you just love hearing from your children. But by leveraging in on that, those elements of value, they were able to build those stronger relationships and get far quicker yeses because those emotional decisions were made.
So the three things this business did to start closing more deals on the spot than they had before and in fact almost have to knock back work because they were growing so quickly. Those three things were simplify their sales process, get really clear on the sizzle that they provided to understanding what they were really good at and then tailoring that to be in a value proposition that their customers understood using the words of their customers when describing value and consistently creating that. Now they can be challenging to build on your own as a team and quite often you’ll need an objective lens to be able to focus on exactly how you’re going to create that value, on exactly how you’re going to simplify the process.
So if you’re one of those businesses that wants to grow, you’re stressed out because you’re quoting a lot, you’re not winning enough deals and you know you need some help, well we have a terrific sales and marketing workshop rolling out very soon. It’s going to be waitlist only. We’re only going to take 12 people for the first workshop.
It’s going to be priced really sharp as the first of these workshops before it then goes out to market in a far bigger fashion. So you do need to register for the waitlist. It’s in the show notes.
It’s quick and easy. Once you do that, we’ll be back to you once the programme is coming out. There’s no commitment.
It’s just an expression to say, hey, give me a yell when you’re ready. But for today, I want you to take from this session some things you could do around simplifying your process, knowing your sizzle and creating value for your customers. But above all of that, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.