E237: One Painter Doubled His Sales Close Rate In Less Than A Month - 3 Lessons To Help Trade Business Quickly Grow Sales

We had a painter double his close rates in less than a month. That's right, doubled his close rates in less than a month. And there's 3 things that he did that I want to share with you today. Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 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. Doubling of close rates is not something that I would say lightly. It's a terrific result and I'll be really clear, less businesses double their close rates in a month than those that do when we work with, right? It is a terrific result. I normally see businesses take about 6 months to do this to their close rates, but this is one of my customers who was really struggling. When I started working with them. And, and when I say really struggling, I'll share some details in a minute, but they did 3 things that we're going to drop into today to work through what they did to not only reduce the struggles that they were having, but then help turn themselves around to having a far stronger set of sales results from their activities. So this customer that I was working with, they're very much in the trade industry, in the painting contractor world. They had close rates that were less than 15% when we first started together. Lots of things they wanted to improve on. A terrific business owner, a terrific guy, detailed thinker, open to improving. And I think this is a really important part to start with, wanted help and was very open to listening how you could do that. And so about 5 weeks later, so right on that month mark, their close rates had gone from 15% to a week where they closed 4 out of 7 deals. Now those results have continued, but I think it's really impactful to show that they were a business that was quoting what I commonly see across many trade businesses. Between 5 and 10 quotes per week. So they had 7 quotes out for that week and they closed 4 of those from 3 things that they did within their business. And look, I love case studies. I love talking about them on the podcast because for me, I think that's where the best learning comes from about being able to discover what others have done and see how we can unpack it for our business. So let's get into the 3 things that they did. The first one was that they sped up their response time from leads generated. Now in this instance, they didn't actually answer the phones on the spot. They weren't able to do that yet. We'll get there. But what they did was they had set time every morning in their calendar where they focused on new leads. And it was early in the day. It was after their urgent tasks. So in this person's case, from kind of 6:30 to 8, they focused on urgent tasks, things they needed to get done, get their team set up, deal with any raging fires that are out there, right? Anything that's urgent. But then from 8 till 9, They focused on sales activities. And those sales activities, the first task they did was to get out to leads. So straight away they are getting onto leads and they had confidence that their leads were not waiting any more than a day, which I will still argue is too long. But in this instance, or in this contractor's example, they were often waiting 2 and 3 days to get back to customers. So straight away we had them at less than 24 hours and in many cases they were less than 12 hours. Okay, so a nice improvement. Not yet at gold standard of 2 hours, but a nice improvement. So what we then had was a customer who was being spoken to when they were most interested, right? We weren't waiting a couple of days or 3 days for them to cool off. They were ready to go and ready to have that conversation. Instant engagement, instant increase in their relationship. The second thing that they did was start to leave something in hand on site. So they either took something with them to show their customers. Now they had quite a unique idea, so I don't want to share that because it was very personal to them, but I also want to encourage you to think about what's unique for your business in terms of something you can be leaving on the spot, something you can be putting into your customer's hands. If you are in the kitchen and bathroom business, right, maybe it's a fixture and fitting that you might leave there for a temporary period of time. If you're in a service business where it's less about product that you leave, such as interior designing, it might be some beautiful pictures or a video, right, or something that you can leave in the customer's hands in a digital format or certainly show them on the site. But I really want you to think about what you can leave in customers' hands when you're getting out to site. There's a couple of reasons that this works really well, and certainly in my experience why it works really well. Number one is that it gets the customer looking at some work or touching and feeling some work that you've done. And we know that certainly when it comes to learning, the more ways we can engage, in this instance, a customer around learning, the more they're going to pick up. So if we can be talking to someone and showing someone something and letting them touch and feel something, we have 3 different stimulus that they're getting exposed to when it comes to learning about you or what you sell, right? Or simply helping them understand your process. And when we're doing that, people are learning more. So they're building a better sense of engagement with us, right? So that's where the know, like, and trust piece starts to be built quicker because we have multiple facets or multiple stimulus that our customers are being exposed to. So taking samples on site helps them speed up their relationship building with you. So that's the first two. Number one, faster response time, but the important part is that they did it through a structure that they could execute each and every day. The second piece is that they took something with them to site, so they made sure they always had something in customers' hands so that they were able to build that relationship a little bit faster. And the third thing, which I think probably moved the dial as much, if not more, as the other two, was that they quoted on the spot wherever they could. Yes, I recognize that's not possible for every business, but what is possible for every business is to be able to have that price discussion on site so that you can qualify in or qualify out. And in this instance, this contractor, this painting contractor, was able to shift from a quoting process that was done offsite to one that they could almost complete as they were walking around the house. It didn't take significant software, it didn't take the use of heavy AI, it just took them to get organized and have a way of quoting that was personalized but light touch. Now what I will say is they certainly can't quote every deal on the spot. I think they're quoting about 2 out of 3 on the spot. But what that's allowing them to do is get fast yeses or as importantly fast I'm not sures. Because when you get a fast I'm not sure, that allows you to work out what's missing, work out what you haven't quite nailed, work out what you need to do to improve to get things moving your way. So to recap those 3 things, right, a 15% close rate through to a 4 out of 7 close rate, which is more than doubling, but I'll be a little bit conservative here, right? But a significant increase in close rates came about from 3 things for this contractor. Number 1, they increased the speed of their response times but made sure they could do it again and again and again. Number 2 is they took samples out to site, so they got something into their customers' hands that allowed them to really accelerate that speed of relationship building. And the third piece is that they are quoting on the spot whenever they can, right? That's allowing them to get fast yeses, fast I'm not sures, and sometimes fast nos. But by shortening that sales cycle, it's then allowing them to see more customers and get out to more deals. So that's a terrific example of how a painting contractor that we work with, and we work with now, has been able to really increase their close rates. The reality is, and this example was no different, was that he was spending hours and hours wasting time on sales quotes and only closing 15% of them. So that number was way too low. What he recognized, this contractor, was that if he didn't change something now, that those results were going to continue. So he was going to be stressed out, he was going to work long hours. And for this guy, he didn't want to be working into the night because he had a young family, but he needed to because he wasn't getting enough money on the table for all the hours he was working. So we went through and fixed obviously these 3 things. But for you, what you can do is jump onto our free quoting quiz.. It'll pinpoint the exact area why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do about it to quickly grow your sales by 20 to 25%. It's free. There's a quiz link in the show notes to get started. Takes less than a minute and I review every single survey. So you'll get my eyes across it and some contact back from me. That's it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.