A trade-construction company raised its close rate from 10% to 17% in six weeks by responding to leads within two hours and calling prospects instead of emailing them first. Ben Wright breaks down why speed captures peak interest and why voice builds trust faster than text.
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In this episode, we will unpack how you can increase your sales close rates by 70% in just 6 weeks. Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 figure trade, construction and industry 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're going to profile one of our really successful customers and how they were able to grow their close rates by 70% in less than 6 weeks. And I think the important piece that we're going to really expand on in here is that they were then able to hold those increased close rates for the months that came after that period. So it wasn't simply a blip, but how one of our customers was able to grow their close rates really significantly through only two simple changes to their early sales process. So this customer of ours, to set the scene, very much in the trade and construction industry. They're a larger business. They had a number of people in their sales team. However, the impacts or the changes that they made to their sales process are just as easy for small businesses to implement as they are larger businesses. I know this customer specifically is in the renewables industry. So very much for me in the classic trade game and the focus here was around residential customers. But again, the focus here can apply to either residential or commercial because the skills are very much interchangeable. And in fact, I'd say that if you're a business leader listening, for me generally, the skills that you need in a B2C sales environment, so straight to the consumer, straight to the resident, are very similar to what you need in a B2B environment. It's really only the last 5% that changes, but very much the first 90 to 95 is very consistent across any of those segments. So please listen into this story. It's one of my favourite success stories because this was a business that had been quite resistant to change previously, but they had a leader in now who was really gung-ho with trying to find small marginal improvements or marginal gains as we call them. And they were able to do so through a workshop that we had together with their team of about 16 or 18 salespeople in that meeting. So we were able to move a lot and in particular, we were able to move the behaviors of 16 to 18 people through this session. Okay, so what did they do? Well, first of all, yes, their close rates increased by 70% in this 6-week period. So to define this, what I mean is that their close rates from where they were at, and they were reasonably low, they were around about the 10% mark, they were able to move them from 10% to about 17% across that 6-week period. So they didn't increase rates to 70% close, but they increased from where they were to where they finished up by that 70%. Now what that meant was with the same number of leads, they were able to put 70% more sales through the door. Now that is huge. The business was almost doubling without increasing their leads. So what did they do? And I don't want to dwell on that, but I wanted to be really clear that 70% growth was off their current baseline. And then if you are only moving by small percentages within a business, it can make huge, huge differences to your top line and bottom line numbers. So first thing that this business did that was super impactful was that they returned inbound lead inquiries. If they couldn't answer them on the spot, they returned calls within 2 hours. Previous to this, they were a next day or they were an end of day returner call business. And all they did, super simple, was move from being an end of day or next day business to a maximum 2 hours. Of course, they aimed for faster than this. If a lead came in and it was a phone call, obviously they try to answer it on the spot. If it was a digital lead, email, a clicked form, whatever it may be, social media lead, they were then responding within 2 hours. So why was this so important? And I think this comes down to a concept I've explained as recently as earlier in this week around when people are inquiring about projects, they typically have the highest level of engagement or excitement early in that process. I know me, we've just gone through buying a car. We bought a Defender 90 Series. My engagement was super high in the first week. I was jumping onto everything. And then as the process went on a little bit longer, I was still excited, but not quite as excited as I was in that early stage. So where this team was able to pair or match the excitement levels of their customer by having a conversation with them as early as possible, what they were able to do was position themselves as the person they spoke to when the customer was most engaged and excited. And of course, when you're engaged or excited or happy about something and you speak to someone about it, they naturally get taken along for that journey of happiness or excitement or whatever it may be. So like very quickly returning calls, A, they beat others to the punch, but B, they were able to position themselves as the brand that piggybacked, right, or went along downstream with that excitement or that engagement. So that was number one. The second thing that they did was to reduce their outbound email load. And the most impactful piece here was that they had an autoresponder email that said, hey, thanks very much for your inquiry. We'll get back to you as soon as we can. So instead of that, they replaced that with the phone call piece. Now, very subtle difference here, but by removing the email autoresponder, they didn't reduce the customer's expectations as to how they'd get back to them. Yes, there's an argument that says it acknowledges the lead and it's great for the customer. However, because they were responding so quickly, it wasn't necessarily needed. All right, but they moved themselves away from a business communicating via email, and for some customers, receiving that email isn't necessarily motivating. All right, so they moved themselves away from that business that corresponded by email and had their first contact with the customer by email. To having their first contact with the customer by phone. So that very first impression that they generated with the customer was through voice rather than email, rather than text message, rather than any form of automation. Their first contact was voice. And of course, as humans, we crave relationships. And I'm going to really strongly argue here that this is only going to get bigger as the rise of artificial intelligence takes over a lot. Of our human-to-human conversations, right? That engagement with real people is going to become a real premium for businesses. So to recap that, number 1 is they return calls within 2 hours. Speed became absolutely critical for them as a business. And number 2 is they took away email as the first, or written, as the first point of correspondence with their customers and replaced it with voice. Now that's it. Hand on heart, that is all they did in that period of time to grow their close rates so significantly. And I think the piece that I like as a case study or a story here to tell is that it doesn't always take significant shifts to improve your sales, but it does take you requiring or understanding what the most important shift is. Because as salespeople and as leaders and as teams, there are so many options available to us to improve that we need to make sure we're picking the right one. And thankfully, we were able to work through this with this team and they picked, well, two of the right ones. Look, and I'd argue the returning calls within 2 hours was the biggest one. But by doing so have a really significant impact on their sales. So that's it for today. A terrific success story. One I love telling. Thank you. Very grateful for you listening in today. The takeaway for me from today is not necessarily to think about how you can respond to leads faster, but to challenge yourself to have a think about ways you can improve your business. You know, as we do each week, but keeping the mindset around small incremental gains or those 1% better improvements. That can help you improve along the journey. Because for me, if you're doing that as a leader, you will always find ways to improve and you will consistently increase the capability, the performance, and the results for your business. That's it for today. See you next time. Bye for now. Are you frustrated spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes that you keep losing? Without changing something now, you'll continue to get these same stressful results over and over again. My free quote audit will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. Click the free quote audit link in the show notes to get started now.
