E184: 3 Early Sales Mistakes That Force You to Compete on Price (& what Successful Sales Leaders do instead)

In this episode we are going to focus on the meet and greet sales mistakes that force trade leaders to compete on price. Welcome to Sales Process Made simple. The show helping seven to eight figure industry, construction and trade sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode we are going to focus on getting you as a leader, you as a business away from competing on price. And to do that, we are going to zero in quite heavily around the most impactful part of any sales process that we see. And that's that first meeting, that on site meeting, that part when we are meeting customers over the phone or over video calls. And we're going to have a look at three simple mistakes that sales and trade, business, industry, construction, business leaders make that force them to compete more on price and less on value. So we're going to dive into these by just having a think about the last time you're in a sales meeting. Your first meet and greet, the time you went out and spoke with a customer left that meeting thinking, wow, I'm not sure I'm going to win this one unless I go in really hard on price. I've certainly been there. I recently worked with a painting contractor where we still work together. And in the early days that was his biggest issue, is he was just too expensive. They were his words and wasn't winning enough deals. This painting contract, I've actually spoken about him before. He has now quadrupled his business and very rarely do we have that conversation around him being too expensive. In fact, he's put his prices up. He's about 10 to 15% higher than when we first started working together about 12 months ago. So we're going to dive in hard around these three areas. We're going to start with the first. First. And the biggest issue that I see particular, particularly trade, industry and building segment leaders mistake is that they rush. They rush the first part of the meet and greet, they tear into that meeting, they're late, they're not necessarily dressed well, they've just had an issue they've got off the phone trying to solve. Shoes off at the door, in they go. And they try and pump through that quote as quickly as they can. Fundamentally, that is the biggest mistake that I see leaders make that causes them to need to compete on price. And the reason is they're simply not spending Enough time to build a relationship with their customers. They're not showing their customers that they care. And in the end, their customers don't actually care how much they know. So for me, the antidote to this here is having a process that makes sure you slow down, you take your time in those early stages of a quote, make the customer feel comfortable, important, special, and that you are giving them your full attention. Because when we start those first stages of building that relationship, slowing things down and taking our time, that creates value through a relationship. And when we have value through a relationship, most people will bear differences in price. I certainly, working with the hundreds of businesses I speak about really regularly have a general rule with these businesses that if you are between 5 and 10% difference in price, it should have zero impact on your close rate. If you've built the right relationships, once you're more than 10% more expensive, well, we need to throw in quite a few more or you need to throw in more value items for that deal. But really impactfully, if you are within 10% of a competitor, you should be able to cover that through having built a relationship around. Trust in particular that you'll deliver a really good job. So that's number one, they rush through that first part of the sales process. Number two comes down to actually understanding what the customer wants. And I'm going to go through a really nice example of this that just this works so well across many of the businesses that we work with. But the key message here is around actually slowing down. So we are building on point number one here, around not rushing, but taking the time to ask the customers the right questions around what is important to them. Now, there's two parts to this. The first one here is that they actually need to make sure they've written those questions down and they can ask the same questions at each and every sales visit that they go to. Right? The great trade building industry segment leaders or sales leaders or even salespeople have their questions preset before, before they get to a meet and greet so that once they're in there, they're able to ask the right questions and find out what's really important to their customer. Because once they've found out what's important to their customer, they can align the value that that business offers. So if you are a business that is all about creating fixtures and fittings or stone cabinetry for a new build, that you've asked the right questions of your customers to be able to highlight what you do really well, are you generating higher quality products at the Same price. You're not then competing on price because you're delivering more quality. Do you have longer warranty periods? Do you have a better design process? Right. If the design process is really important to your customer, then fantastic. We talk in detail about that design process. If the quality of product is most important to your customer, then we can talk in detail about the quality of those products. But the key piece here, when it comes down to creating value, is knowing what questions to ask so that we can align the value that our business delivers to what the customer is looking for. Right. So that's number two. Number three is all about making sure that before they leave that meeting, that quote meeting, they're really clear on who's doing what and when they're doing it. And the real pro tip around this is that if we are lining up the value that's most important to the customers with who's doing what around it, then we're not only combining alignment around next steps of the process, but. But we're also making sure we are fundamentally aligned on what's important to the customer. So where this works really well, and let's take in a B2C environment, for example, here is when we have uncovered that the most important elements to the painting of a house is all about the quality of the paintwork and making sure it's delivered on time. What we can then be talking about with our customers as we're closing out our meet and greet, is understanding the time it's going to take to deliver that product, to deliver the real high quality, and when the customer needs the job done by. Because often if we have, in fact, we've almost got some competing priorities here, job needs to be done on time, but it needs to be done to a high quality. So that may result in this instance in the customer needing to make a decision by a certain point in time to have the quality of work guaranteed for delivery by the timeline that they're looking for. So a salesperson here that's really making sure they're not competing on price, or a business leader that's making sure they're not competing on price and is lining up the quality and the delivery dates into their quotes. Here's how we're going to deliver great quality, here's how we're going to deliver it on time. Price becomes less important because we are creating some confidence for the customer that we are generating a quality product at the right time, which are their two most important levers. So when it comes to meet and greet sales process mistakes that are Forcing trade leaders to compete on price. There's certainly lots of them out there. But the three most important ones we've gone through today are that the businesses or the people on site, they rush through their quote and don't take enough time to build the right relationships. They don't understand the important bits of value to the customer rather than what they can simply deliver. And to rehash here, it's all about making sure that what the customer wants is what we communicate around. And the third piece is around aligning next steps. What do they need, when do they need a buy and how do we get there? Just a really nice, clear process that says, hey, thanks for having me today. Here's what we're going to do next. How does this meet with your timelines? What's the best way I can be in contact? Let's make it happen. So they're the three areas and what I'd like you to think about today as we're leaving out this podcast is not so much which one of these you want to be working on, but as I was going through that podcast, if any of these really elicited a gut reaction from you that went, oh yeah, we might not be right there because I'm a big believer in listening to your gut. I suspect for most businesses there's going to be something in there where, you know, you can straightaway optimize, have a think about that gut feel, sit down, write down just one thing you could do to move the dial positively on that and get about going to do it if you're still really short. We have a terrific program and I don't talk about it too much during these podcasts, but we have a terrific program that will sort that out. And in most instances we'll get 20 to 30% growth from businesses and generally one sale covers it. So get in touch with us and we can talk through that. But that's it for today. Thank you. Very grateful for you listening. We're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That's it for today. Keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it will make all the difference. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we spend speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales. To book in, click the link in our show notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.