Hi, Jon from Small Fish Business Coaching.

I’ve worked with a lot of tradesmen and they have all disliked quoting. It takes too long, you waste shitloads of time on it and on quotes that you don’t end up winning.

When your time is money, wasting it on people who end up buying the same thing from someone else instead feels like crap.

So wouldn’t it be good if you could spend less time doing it and win just as much work?

Course it would, who wouldn’t like that?

I don’t have a magic wand to wave at your customers so they’ll just buy whatever you want but I’m going to show you how to do just that – spend (waste) less time on quoting and win more work.

I’ve helped a lot of trades businesses with this types of problem, mostly because, when we’re doing our coaching together, this stuff comes up when I ask “what’s your biggest frustration?”

I run a specialist coaching program for trades businesses which I’ll tell you more about another time.

For now, let’s stick to quoting.

This is a short video so I can’t go into too much detail but what I want to ask you to think about is this – Qualifying out.

I was a salesman for 16 years in the IT industry before I found business coaching and thought “I could do that”. And it took me probably ten years to learn, on my own, that qualifying out is a good thing to do.

So you can jump start yourself ten years by getting your head around this simple concept and by getting a bit disciplined about actually doing it.

The main point is this: You can’t know if someone is going to buy until you ask them but there are ways to spot if they aren’t early in the piece.

Qualifying out means spotting those who aren’t going to buy and deciding NOT to quote them instead of wasting all that time.

There’s no need to be rude about it or make enemies but you can respectfully (to them and to you) explain that they don’t meet your criteria or that you don’t think they’ll buy so you won’t give them a quote because they take you three hours to prepare or whatever fits.

Let’s not get too far into it – we haven’t got all day.

For now, think about trying to spot people who will never buy from you and how to tell them you won’t be doing that quote they want.

In the Trades Business Coaching Program (which will get a better name, I promise) we’ll go into detail about how to spot these people and how to let them down gently.

Down the track, I’ll explain how you can find out more about the program but I haven’t written the webinar yet so, for now, if you can’t wait, send me an email and we’ll have a chat on the side

Cheerio

Jon
Small Fish Business Coaching
Tradies Toolbox