E194: The 1 Lead Qualification Rule That Stops Your Clients Ghosting and Closes You More Sales

In this episode, we will unpack one of the best lead qualifying questions that stops your clients ghosting you and closes more sales. 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. Last week, we went through how to get a hell yes, an instant hell yes from our customers when we're first talking with them. Today, we are going to focus on unpacking exactly how you can reduce clients ghosting you from 1 Simple question. I've been in sales now 25 years, 43, started when I was 18. In fact, you could argue I started at 12 and a half as an illegal cash-in-hand worker, just trying to earn a bit of pocket money. But certainly formally, I've been in sales for essentially 25 years now. And this is something that, or certainly a question that, gee, I really wish I had have learned so many years earlier. It would have stopped so many customers wasting my time and would have helped me close so many more deals. But that's life. Sometimes we learn lessons the hard way. And for me, this one took me a long time to learn, but it's one of my favorites in working with our customers now to help them close more deals. So put yourself in a situation here where you are first talking with a customer. It's on the phone, it's on email, but it's that very first engagement. You're asking lots of great qualifying questions. Conversation's going well. Conversation's not moving anywhere. It really doesn't matter because for me, this question is the one that really determines if we have a ready-to-buy customer or not. And it goes something like this: Are you looking to move forward with your project now, or are you still deciding if it's going to work for you? Are you ready to go, or is this a project that you need to have more conversations with someone else about? Are you still thinking about whether or not you want to do this project or do this work, or are you ready to lock in and looking to move forward straight away? When are you looking to get going with this? Is it now, or is it something you still have some questions you need to answer? Are you just browsing or are you right now looking to move forward? Is this something you've been thinking about for a while and that's now a case of working out who you do it with, or do you need some help deciding whether or not it's viable for you? Now I could go on and on around how we ask these questions, but essentially what we're trying to do here is clarify if our customer or our prospect is ready to buy now. Importantly, it leads us to a second stage when we don't get the answer we want. So let's step this through. Easy, nicest, best answer. Are you ready to go? Yeah, I'm just looking at who I want to do this with. Fantastic. We move into our process of building rapport and getting clear on what they want, getting clear on objectives and so forth, right? That really standard refined process that we work with all of our customers in Sold Out Sales Teams with, and hopefully you've got yours too, right? We move down that path and away we go. If not, if we get an answer that says, yeah, look, I'm still, I'm looking, I'm thinking about it, I'm inquiring, I want to see what's possible. For us, there's two things that come from this, two paths. Number one is we need to be really careful around the resources that we spend on this project. Yes, there's an argument that says the more time you spend with them now, the more likely they are to work through or to work with you when they do decide to move forward. Yes, that's absolutely true, but we can do that without necessarily needing to invest a significant amount of time. The second path that we follow down here is to actually discuss with them, well, what needs to happen to get you to the point where you are ready to go. And I'll take an example I spoke about with one of our customers in, let's call it broadly, the real estate industry. They were working with a customer who was looking to move premises and they had a meeting set up with them. So this person, if they're listening, they'll know who they are. But, you know, I think to be somewhat general about the example without giving away anything impactful on this business is that they're having meetings with customers around potentially looking at different types of premises, right? Be it residential or commercial, doesn't really matter. And they were finding that at times they were spending spending a lot of their time with customers who didn't necessarily move forward. And the beauty of being able to ask that question, are you ready to go or not, was that when they got a yes, fantastic, you charge forward. But when they got a no, it was then, okay, well, what follows through here? What are the key things that we need to be asking the customer to help them along their journey? Are you not sure if you want to move because of budget? Are you not sure if you want to move because you don't know what you need? Are you not sure if you want to move because you've got other people that you need to involve? Are you not sure if you want to move because you don't know where you want to go? Right. But by asking some of these simple questions, you can often get some really straightforward answers, which are often, to be fair, we actually want to understand how much this is going to cost and then we can decide if we can afford it, or then we can decide if we're going to get the returns within our business, or then we can decide if we've got the amount of free cash flow that we need, or if we can finance it on balance sheet, off balance sheet, right? But when we ask these questions, A, they'll often come down to understanding the budget to see if they can make it work. We're able to help move that customer before we get out to site, before we spend huge amounts of time with them, before we really invest what is our most precious commodity, and that's time, right? Before we really invest heavily here on our time or our team's time, we get to try and step them from I'm interested to yes, I'm going to go forward. And of course, a secondary or tertiary benefit that comes from here is that when we're working with customers during this period of understanding or you know, of educating themselves, we can often be seen as the one that's most valuable, most trusted, right? We've helped them across that journey and they'll often come to us just for help. We've gone through some building approvals, some certification approvals, and we've had a great certifier that's given us lots of advice before we even engaged him. I won't go anywhere else. When we need to get that, the certification work done, I will go straight to the certifier, right? He'll get the business because he's helped along the journey. So for me, there's quite a few little benefits here of asking this great question. So to repeat it, that question is, are you ready to go or are you just looking? So are you ready to move forward now or is this something you need to do a bit more work on? When they're ready to move forward, you just walk straight into that standard process you run. But if they're not, we try to help them get from that point where they are just looking or still deciding to ready to go. And by doing so, by helping them understand exactly what they need to decide on to get to a, yeah, we're going to do this. We can then be positioned as someone that essentially is trustworthy. People buy from those they know, like, or trust, right? We can tick off one of those categories. And then when we get to quoting, we know exactly what they want and how we can make sure we deliver that to them. So that's it for today. Very grateful for you listening in. The recommendation from today is to make sure you're asking that question. It's really simple. It's very much a 1% better every day theme. You can roll that into your sales process from today. From your very next phone call, your very next lead qualification, you can roll this in. If you do that, I'm even more grateful. Of course, if you don't, we've got lots more podcasts where we're going to keep repeating this type of stuff. So I look forward to talking to you when we're on next. That's it for today. 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.