Do you ever submit a quote and your customer goes all quiet?
I'm sure you do and I'm sure that happens to you
quite a lot - it happens to most of us; happens to me.
It's frustrating and it kind of leaves you hanging
and to me it leaves you feeling a bit disrespected.
I think it feels rude and frustrating.
I'm Jon. I'm from Small Fish Business Coaching.
I run a program called the Tradies
Toolbox Coaching Program. It's for trades business
owners who want to grow and scale and part of that
is fixing up problems like this. Stopping this s%#t
from happening. Fixing up your sales process
and your sales activity, so this happens to you
somewhat less. I'm sorry to tell you, you never really
completely eliminate this but you can reduce it
quite significantly so that you waste less time and so
that you have a better win rate on your quotes.
Now what you need to do to reduce the incidence
of this happening is earlier in your sales process.
Now once you've submitted the quot ,
and they've gone quiet it's too late, you need to do
something earlier in the piece to reduce the incidence
of this, right? Before I tell you what they are, (you know
they're written there) 2 things are going on.
You're doing quotes for people who were never going
to buy or who aren't going to buy in the near term
(and I'll come back to this in a minute).
And the other thing is, if people aren't going to buy
or they aren't quite ready yet, well they can't quite decide
or they haven't got any kind of specific urgency
to a decision. They don't kind of ring you up and politely
say, "this is the situation." They just go quiet.
It's a bit confronting and a bit embarrassing
to have to ring you up and tell you
you know they don't want to do it or they don't want to
do it yet. So they just tend not to right? That's a natural
human thing to do which is the going quiet part,
which is the bit that pisses you off.
So unless they want you to do something for them
like do the job or refine your quote,
they're unlikely to be picking up the phone to make you
feel better. We're stuck with those two things,
you're doing quotes for people who are gonna buy and
if there's any doubt they are people that either not make
a decision at all and not call you up . Or they'll make
a decision and not call you up. If it's not,
"please do something new for me." So what can you do?
Well there are two things right? These two things here.
You can qualify properly and what I really mean here
is qualify out figure out the people you shouldn't waste
your time doing a quote for. And I'm talking about
a proper you know detailed quote, the one that takes
a long time. And the other thing is a pre-contract
and that's where you ask them to promise
to give you a decision within a certain amount
of time you know a day, a week, 30 days. 30 days
is probably the most that I would give people to make a
decision. You might ask them to make decision in about
30 days. Quotes, you know go out of date right? We might update
materials, prices change, all the quotes should be valid
for 30 days and no more. Let me explain both.
I'll start with qualifying. The idea is that you don't do
the time-consuming quote for people who aren't likely to
buy within say that 30 days, it's a waste of time.
In order to buy, people need these four things
right? You should only do a quote if they have these
four things, if they have the money to do the job, right?
let's face it if they don't have the money to do the job
they're not gonna buy, you shouldn't do a quote.
If they don't have the authority to make a decision on
their own and what I really mean by that is,
if someone else is going to be involved in the decision
with them, you need to be doing your sales pitch to
them first before you scurry off and spend 5 or 10
or 20 or 30 hours preparing a detailed quote.
They need to be able to do it more or less immediately.
You know if they're only thinking about doing it in
6 months time, a detailed quotes not the answer right?
Maybe a ballpark is the answer.
And they need to have the need. They need to have
a need for the kind of trade that you are.
They need to have a need for all those things
that go around the price that you put forward.
All the context for the price you know the fact that you're
punctual or on time or you'll do quality job or rather than
a quick job. The kind of trade you are. They need to have the
need for that if they don't have the need for that,
a quote is a waste of time.
There's not really time here
for me to go into this in detail. If you really want to know
how to ask the questions to get the answers to
these questions. How to ask that without
the awkward questions because they're quite
confronting right? Asking these questions. I'm here
to tell you, you can do that. You can ask these questions
without offending people and and while being
professional and grownup.
And I can teach you how to
work it out. I'm not going to do it now. Maybe
I'll make it the topic of another video.
The second thing.... oh really, if you really want to know.
get in touch with me. Make contact through the website
or Facebook and I'll spend a bit of time with you
one-to-one, and help you put together a little
questionnaire for how to do that. That's what I do with my
coaching clients. The second thing is the pre-contract.
Asking people to commit to give you a decision
within a certain time frame and that addresses a
couple of things. That addresses their
readiness to kind of defer a decision if they don't
have any urgency because it puts
a stop you know.
"I said I would tell him by Tuesday so I will." People like to
do what they said they were going to do. It's a known
factor in influencing our behavior. So if I say
I'm going to do something, pretty much I want to do it.
Alright so if you say someone, "can you give me
a decision by the end of the week?" If they say yes,
chances are they'll try quite hard to do so.
So which is good for you right? Then they're gonna
give you a decision whether it's a yes or no at least
it's a decision. If you can't get them to make
a commitment to making a decision, I don't think
you should be writing a detailed quote.
And again, maybe a ballpark is enough for them
right. If they're not ready to buy, a proper quote
is not required and a ballpark or some other discussion
of how much it's going to cost is probably what they need.
Before I know, I go rather, remember this,
the reason we asked for a quote
is because it's kind of
all we know how to ask for. If they're kicking
tyres and they just kind of want to know how much it's
going to cost. They still ask for a quote. If they really go
we need to decide which trades company to go with,
they start, "I'll ask for a quote." So whatever they're trying
to figure out, they usually just go, "can you give me a
quote please?" And if you just rush off with your
tape measure and spend hours, and hours preparing one,
you're kind of missing the point. You're missing
the opportunity to do your actual selling and
you're leaving yourself open to wasting all that time
doing quotes you don't win. So do me a favor, comment below
or in the Facebook, if you're watching this on Facebook,
about your experience of this, about doing quotes
when people got quiet
and how frustrating it is.
See you.