All the time and effort you’ve spent on your marketing campaigns to stand out in the Australian trades service industry is finally about to pay off. Now that you’ve acquired leads, the next big challenge is converting them into clients. While there’s no single approach that will guarantee a sale, there are many effective sales strategies for tradies that you can use to ensure you’re consistently closing deals. Here are five of them:
Communicate regularly with prospects
Unless you’re maintaining regular communications, prospective clients can easily lose interest and fall out of the sales cycle. A simple follow-up email or phone call can remind your prospects and encourage them to stay invested in your services.
Your representatives must be constantly present to handle your prospects’ requests, questions, and concerns throughout the customer journey. Customer relationship management systems track prospective client communications across emails, phone calls, and instant messages. These tools give representatives all the contextual information necessary to seamlessly follow up with prospects and answer their inquiries.
It’s also good practice to have the same representatives interact directly with potential clients as much as possible. Consistent communication with the same people builds rapport with would-be clients and makes it easy for representatives to gauge how close they are to making a sale.
Generate excitement for your services
Hitting the right emotional notes in a sales strategy significantly influences prospective clients’ spending decisions. For trades businesses, this means grounding your strategies on the benefits you can provide to your clients. If your company is selling office renovation services, for example, your pitches should emphasise benefits like a bigger workspace, increased property value, and reduced health hazards. You can also appeal to a client’s aesthetic tastes by showcasing previous projects and proposing design ideas through vision boards and 3D modelling.
Of course, it can be tough to create excitement for less glamorous services like plumbing, asset maintenance, and electrical installations. However, the same sales strategy concept applies –- any form of trade work must sell the wider benefits of the service. Regular asset maintenance means smoothly running operations, while professional electrical installations lead to a brighter and more comfortable home. By exhibiting how your services can positively impact the prospect’s life or business, they’ll likely realise the value of working with your company.
Acknowledge needs and leverage urgency
People’s spending decisions are often driven by their needs, such as when certain issues cause major inconvenience in their lives or business. It’s therefore important to demonstrate how your services address your prospect’s needs. These needs could be anything from leaky pipes and poor ventilation to poor structural stability and malfunctioning plant equipment. Whatever the case may be, you need to appear to prospects as the perfect company for the job. Showcase your qualifications, work experience, and exemplary portfolio so clients are assured that your team can handle their requests with professionalism and efficiency.
If you’re selling services where the needs aren’t so clearly apparent, leveraging urgency can help you close more deals. Discuss how neglecting the maintenance of assets and equipment can result in even bigger problems, including increased safety risks, unexpected failures, legal troubles, and costly repairs or replacements. By framing your services as the most cost-efficient and reliable solution, you can then ensure clients never have to face these problems.
Deliver an engaging sales presentation
Many trades businesses flood their sales presentations with text-riddled slides, drawn-out speeches, and complicated data from the outset, but these will only make you lose your prospect’s attention. When it comes to sales presentations, visuals conveying your company’s capabilities and services sell. These visuals may include photos and videos of your team, finished projects, and your general brand identity.
The messaging of these presentations is also crucial. If you’re working with large head contractors, using a professional tone conveys your authority in your field. Another proven sales tactic is to shine a light on previous clients’ experiences through testimonials, interviews, and before-and-after photos of a project. Success stories highlight your company’s value and convince prospects that your services help them achieve the same results.
Quote jobs correctly and efficiently
Making a sale often comes down to how well your company approaches job quoting. To produce a quote, you must account for project time frames, labour and material costs, equipment, and location-specific rates. Then, you’ll need to strike the right balance with your service markups. You can’t propose extortionate markups because you risk driving customers away. At the same time, bidding low prices may undercut your competitors, but your projects can quickly go over budget and limit your company’s profitability. Calculating reasonable markups and profitable quotes is all about analysing market trends and previous jobs.
What’s arguably even more important is the speed with which you quote your clients. Quick job quoting demonstrates your company’s efficiency, setting the bar high for other competitors. Plus, many clients don’t like chasing tradies for estimates and expect to receive reasonable quotes within the day they make a service request.
The trick to efficient quoting is automation. Job management software like WorkBuddy generates professional quotes in minutes by calculating customer requirements and details against preestablished company price books. You can even schedule automated email reminders to follow up with clients, so your company stays top of mind amongst a sea of competitors.
Ultimately, a thorough sales strategy paired with the right tools is essential to success in the trades industry. If you need proven solutions that can help you close deals and turn a profit, WorkBuddy is for you. Book a demo today to experience all the features this job management software offers.
