I know the juggle, you’ve worked all day on the tools, you are tired and yet there is a mountain of work to do again when you get back to your office. There is the paperwork to sort, quotes to do, materials to order, stress, pressure and more stress!

Quoting is the number one time waster in most trade businesses, I say time waster because so many quotes are met with a ‘thanks but no thanks’. How can we change this process to ensure that we are quoting for clients that have been screened first? By introducing a qualifying process.

Qualifying clients not only leads to an increase in quote acceptance, but also saves mountains of time quoting for tyre kickers.

While we cannot completely eradicate the time wasters, we can have many of them opting out before we spend hours on their quote.

It begins with education, educate your clients about how long the quoting process is. You can do this with a prewritten email that explains the time involved for your business to prepare the quote. You can go a little further here and explain what the commitment you expect from your client as well. For example in our building business, our clients were expected to take part in an alignment phone call, a sales call, and a quotation meeting all before us preparing the quote.

Having a sales process within your business, no matter the size of your business, will help you and the client step through this qualifying process. From first contact there should be a minimum of 5 conversations either on the phone or via email, before moving through to the quote meeting.

These could be sales calls, emails educating the client, text messages confirming the sales call time, and alignment calls to name a few. Those clients who are tyre kicking, tend to opt out of this process pretty quickly as it appears to be time consuming for them.

Furthermore, here at Tradies In Business we advocate charging for quotes. It can be a nominal fee that the client gets back when accepting your quote, or it can be a little more substantial like we had for our building business. Either way a financial transaction prior to the preparation of a quote, will quickly sort out the tyre kickers.

The time spent introducing and preparing a sales process to qualify your clients, will quickly be recouped when you find your clients opting out of the process when not serious. Tyre kickers be gone!