Adopting a Sales Mindset

Rethink Selling by Shifting Your Mindset

Developing a sales strategy framework is one of the most important things that your trades business can do to improve sales performance.

However, creating a winning sales strategy may first require a company-wide shift in how you think about selling.

That’s where adopting a sales mindset—one that that focuses on your customers—comes in.

What is a Sales Mindset?

A sales mindset encourages staff to think more strategically about how they engage with a prospect and how they can help find the right solutions. A sales mindset is not about the hard-sell, being loud or pushy: it’s about positive connections.

There’s a lot more to winning business than simply having the ability to complete the job. Your competitors will likely have the same technical skills as your team, so it’s important to ask what it is that should make people choose your business, instead of theirs.

But by adopting a sales mindset, you can shift your thinking to both recognise and prioritise the many aspects that affect a customer’s decision to do business with you.

Any new sales strategy you implement will be underpinned and driven by this foundational mindset. This will improve how you interact with customers, get their attention, and help you win more work.

The first step to adopting a sales mindset is to understand and acknowledge that what your business does is selling.

Whether you’re in plumbing and heating, HVAC, maintenance, electrical installations, fire and security, or any other trades industry, the one thing all of these businesses have in common is that they sell.

They sell products, services, and most importantly, they sell themselves.

One of the biggest traps that trades businesses fall into is believing that the simple act of sending a quote is all that the sales process entails. That’s a negative sales mindset and couldn’t be further from the truth. If this is how you view sales, your business needs a new, positive sales mindset, one that helps you to stop quoting, and start selling.

But… aren’t they the same thing?

Quoting (or estimating) is the basic process of sending a price, list of parts, and perhaps a brief summary of the work to be completed to the potential customer.

Selling is a much more comprehensive process. Selling encapsulates everything from attracting leads, consulting, sending a proposal, effectively following up, and ultimately closing the deal.

By being more proactive and less passive, your business can develop a winning sales process that reliably grows your revenue.

Your next (and perhaps greater) challenge will be to get the rest of your team adopting a sales mindset, too.

Selling requires a united front.

Each team member has the capacity to impact your sales in one way or another, which is why it’s vital that you are all on the same page.

Whether it’s the person who answers enquiries, the in-field surveyor (or as we’d call them, a salesperson), or the engineer who completes the job, everybody contributes to the lead’s or customer’s perception of your business and their likelihood to choose yours.

A sales opportunity management platform can help your entire sales team accurately track specific details for individual deals. This means information is always available and can easily be shared. Further, it enables team members to action tasks quicker.

If everyone is aligned with the same sales mindset, it allows your team to be more consistent, more efficient, and ultimately help you to secure more revenue. It will give you the best chance of your sales strategies improving your sales performance.

What Should Your Team Be Aligned on to Achieve a Sales Mindset?

• What the sales process looks like from start to finish (plus what all those sales terms mean)
• Who is responsible for which steps of the sales process
• When each sales action needs to occur
• How to communicate the value of your services at each touchpoint
• Why the sales strategy impacts your company goals (and what those goals are)

What if Only One Person Handles Sales?

The reality is many smaller trades businesses won’t have multiple people dedicated to selling. If you are solely responsible for sales in your company, it’s still vital that you align your sales mindset with your objectives. Do you know what you want to achieve when it comes to selling and do you have a plan to achieve it?

What Comes After Adopting a Sales Mindset?

With this sales mindset adopted, your business will have a renewed focus on how you plan to grow and increase revenue through selling. A sales strategy framework that aligns your team will ensure employees can understand how they contribute, can work more productively, and may stay more motivated too.

Of course, you still need to define how you’ll implement your sales strategy and how you plan to manage the process of selling in your company.

Keep reading: we’ll show you how to master your sales pipeline in Chapter 2.