E246: How a Trade Landscaper Booked Themselves out 3 Months in Advance

In a really special episode today, we are going to go through step by step how a trade landscaper books themselves out 3 months in advance. 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. Today we're going to have a look at the 3 ways that a trade landscaper booked themselves out 3 months in advance and how you can think about applying a similar format to your business to give you a larger booked-out pipeline of work. For this trade landscaper, 3 months in advance was certainly new territory. Prior to this, they were week to week, or month to month is probably more appropriate in terms of winning their work. Now for some businesses, they're gonna say, hey, I actually don't want to be 3 months booked out in advance. I'd like to be 6 months booked out in advance. And the formula and the theory we go through today will apply for that business as well. But certainly for the majority of trade businesses that I work with, being booked out 12 to 16 weeks in advance is about right. Their customers generally won't wait longer than that, but also having work booked that far in advance gives them reassurance that their team will be in work and that their business will continue profitably. And probably most importantly, they're gonna have cash in the bank. So the quote from this trade landscaper, that essentially springboarded for this podcast went something like, hey Ben, we're booked out for the next 3 months. When we started with you, we couldn't even fill the next month. And this is a very young business owner. He's certainly in the very early start of his career, but has a terrific appetite for learning. And I will say that as you're listening to this, you really need to open your mind to be curious about how you can improve your sales process. Because certainly my experience with trade businesses, be they painters, be they electricians, be they landscapers, be they pool makers, right, builders, whatever they may be, is that the key ingredient in improvement is curiosity, right? And followed then by that willingness to really implement some of the great changes that we suggest for our businesses. So let's have a look specifically at what this landscaper did. You know, this landscaper has an average deal size now. Oh look, in general they're doing deals anywhere between $15,000 and $120,000. So a lot of you listening will be in that same camp. And if you are, certainly then this is gonna be super, super relevant to you. Okay, so the first thing this landscaper did was they speeded up the deal cycle process. So what I'm not talking about here is necessarily how quickly you contact leads, but what I am talking about is how quickly you take a qualified lead through to one that is having a decision being made. For some businesses, that is simply a phone call, quote on the phone to a yes or a no. But for many businesses that are in this $15,000 to $150,000 range in terms of their average sale price, it involves things like qualified lead, site visit, quotation, follow-up questions, follow-up discussions, and then a yes or a no answer. So what this landscaper did that was really intelligent was they actually condensed what was previously a 3 or 4 step process into a 1 or 2 step process. And what this essentially involved was finding things that they could shorten their own lead time to complete that allowed them to engage more quickly with the customer. So to give you a rough idea, they took their sales cycle process from about 2.5 weeks to 3 weeks down to one that's more like 7 to 10 days. And what this allowed them to do was stay really engaged with their customer so that when they met them on site, their customer was certainly engaged in speaking with them. Then they were able to talk to them as they were preparing their quotation and, and their design and everything that goes through with it. And then finally get in front of their customer and get the project or the quote right in front of them really quickly so that they could make decisions on it. So that was number one, they sped up their deal cycle process. What does really good look like? Look, for me, deals up to, and I'm speaking very generally here, but deals up to that $20,000 mark, even $30,000 mark, certainly recommend businesses try to get quotes done on the spot wherever they can. Yes, it doesn't work all the time, but where you can, it's very powerful. And then for projects larger than that, an absolute maximum of 1 week. And ideally when you have projects larger than $30,000, you're presenting them face to face or at the very least via a video call. Certainly have a rule with my teams and that is no email quotes ever, ever do quotes go out via email only. But where you can get it out within, within that week, you're generally in that up speedy deal cycle process. So that's number one. So have a think about if you have a deal cycle process that matches that, and if you don't, what you can do about it. And more importantly, if you're still not sure, that's when you give us a call. Okay, so the second thing they did was they improved their quote. And I have had episodes specifically dedicated to how we can improve quotes, and that episode specifically is number 241. It was only a couple of weeks ago, so you can jump back to that. But certainly improving quotes absolutely comes down to making sure they're personalized, we're storytelling and we're explaining the process in there. So go back to episode 241 if you'd like to have a deeper dive into that. But by improving their quote, what they did was paired not only a faster deal cycle process, but a better quality of presentation in front of their customers. So they weren't doing simply a zero dump or a tradie software quote dump that went straight out to the customer and it had some text and T&Cs. They were already doing a little bit more than that. But what they were able to do as we went through in episode 241 was really personalize that quote without it needing mass amounts of work at every stage, i.e., a personalized quote that didn't require a personalized amount of effort to build. Really important because when we're quoting in reasonably large numbers, as so many of our customers do, we need to make sure they're efficient, but also that we're getting across the main things that our customers need to cover. So number one, they sped up that deal cycle process. And number two, they improved the quality of literature, if you like, that was going with their deals during this faster process. Okay, and then the last piece that this Tradelandscaaper did to get themselves booked out 3 months in advance was that once they finished a quote, they agreed with the customer on what was going to come next, who was going to do what, what was left uncertain, what needed rework, what needed new pricing, what customers liked, what they didn't like, right? When decisions were going to be made. And there's certainly a format to this for those that are unsure around how we can step our customers through it. And look, when it comes down to following up quotes and how you close them. If you haven't listened to Monday's episode, episode 245, then I'd really encourage you to jump back and do that because that will certainly give you some ways on how you can follow up quotes really effectively. But for this member of our Sold Out Sales Teams Academy, what they really focused on was before they left site with their customer, agreeing on what would happen from here. So the process that they were both going to go through to get to a yes or a no answer. So they're the 3 things that this landscaping member of our Sold Out Sales Teams Academy did to really help grow their sales. Number 1, reduce their sales cycle time. Number 2, improve the quality of their quotes. And number 3, get really clear on what they're going to do next with their customers once they finish that quote meeting. Now for me, that is a strategy that's helped them reduce lots of hours wasting time on sales quotes. But also it's happened because they've been prepared to change something. And in my experience, most businesses that we work with, particularly trade businesses, really struggle to make small meaningful changes to their business because they're just so busy quoting. So that can get super stressful, results in long hours. And at the end of the day, and not enough money in the bank to show for it. So we have a free quoting quiz that will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and help you grow your sales really quickly, right? We look for 20 to 25% from a handful of major, easy to improve sales process changes. So if you click on the free quiz link in the show notes, you can get started on that now. It takes less than a minute for you to do. But that's it for today. Please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.