Most construction businesses owners think they’re in the business of building. However, they’re always also in the business of selling. Whether you’re selling your services to clients, or developers, or larger building contractors, selling is how you get contracts signed and jobs in the pipeline. 

To be effective with your construction sales strategies means first dispelling the many myths around the art of closing a sale. You may have heard some of these myths before, and we’re going to go through them below, so you’ll know them when you see them. 

The 5 Myths of Selling

Myth #1: Selling is all about the hard sell.
Wrong – selling hard triggers resistance in your prospect. Even if they buy, they’re more likely to have buyer’s remorse, leading to cancelled jobs or other problems down the line.

Myth #2: Sales is convincing people to buy
People don’t like to be persuaded, pushed or smooth-talked into buying. Even if you succeed in the short term, construction projects last months to years. Working with clients who’ve freely bought into the project means less headaches in the long term. 

Myth #3: Good salespeople are smooth talkers
In practice, if you do all the talking, your prospective customer switches off. They experience resistance and just want to get away from this person who keeps talking at them. (We’ll cover a much more effective approach in the next section.)

Myth #4: If you ask enough ‘yes’ questions – your customer will automatically say yes at the end.
This may work sometimes, but it certainly doesn’t work all the time, and usually not for large purchases. In any event, tricking people into buying isn’t a great strategy, period. You get buyer’s remorse, problem clients, and unnecessary friction.

Myth #5: ABC – Always Be Closing.
If you’re always looking to make a sale during all your interactions with clients, you’ll end up burning through relationships. Using force is not a great way to build trust, and people will end up avoiding you. 

How are Construction Sales Strategies Different?

Trying to sell using the five sales myths above really doesn’t work in construction, where repeat business, long sales cycles, and extended projects with multiple parties involved are the norm. 

In these conditions, trust is important, and therefore referrals are best prospects. If someone has had an unpleasant time being sold to, they’re very unlikely to refer you to their friends and business associates, even if the project was delivered successfully. 

The good news is that non hard-sell sales techniques are both more enjoyable for all parties, and more effective.

The Principles of Selling Effortlessly:

Instead of classic ‘sales tactics,’ the sales communication skills below will help you win business and build relationships that last.

Ask Questions

The first step to selling someone anything is to understand why they’d want that thing. You can try to guess what’s going on in someone else’s mind, but it’s far easier to just ask them. 

When you know why someone would want the thing you’re selling, your job becomes a simple matter of arranging the facts so people end up selling themselves on your solution. 

Ability to be present

An important ability for sales is to truly be in your current situation, dealing with what’s happening here and now. This is not always easy to do, because pressure will inevitably come on at some point during the sales process. 

When you don’t have the ability to handle pressure, it can take you away from the task at hand, and diminish your ability to ask the right questions.

When you are present, the other person feels that, and can more easily be present themselves. Your ability to connect, understand, and then sell goes up a hundred fold.  

Tone & delivery

A central skill of effortless selling is the ability to deliver comments in a neutral, natural tone. Resistance and aversion is often created in response to comments delivered in an unintended tone. However statements and questions given in a neutral way won’t trigger your client.

As soon as resistance is triggered, your affinity with the person you’re talking drops, and they begin to experience doubt. 

Using a neutral tone means the words themselves carry their own power. This makes it easier to have understanding, affinity, and a shared reality. 

Successfully Selling to Great Clients is how you Build a Great Company

Sales is not about getting the most clients or customers. You want the right clients. 

That’s how healthy profit margins, repeat customers and referrals happen. Ideal clients tend to refer more ideal clients. Also, ideal clients are more likely to become long-term clients. A 5% increase in client retention can increase your business’s profitability by 25% or more. Utilising our sales techniques to find these great clients will help your construction business become simpler and more profitable. 

A Case Study In Successful Construction Sales Strategies – From $1M to $10M Turnover

Kent Manos owns a business in the construction industry. With the help of ABA, he was able to take that business from a turnover of $1m per year up to $10m, in just four years. 

One of the skills he learned with us was selling, and he used that to fill his pipeline with high quality construction customers. This helped him build a business that was both profitable and far less stressful to run. 

The ABA approach to Selling

ABA does things differently from most traditional sales trainers. The founder, Mike Irving, at one time owned one of the largest sales companies in Australia. However, the sales techniques he’d been taught stemmed from the 5 selling myths mentioned earlier. They created resistance and stress. 

In response to this, Mike developed his own effortless selling techniques, and this is what clients learn when they enroll in our executive sales coaching program. 

To find out if this is something that could benefit you, click here to sign up for a one-off, no-obligation coaching call.

Mike Irving