How to Increase Your Close Rate in Home Improvement Sales

Every business owner I speak to wants more leads. More ads, more appointments, more quotes going out.

Fair enough. But if your lads are already sat in front of customers every week, the quickest money in your business is in your diary, not in Facebook. It's your close rate.

Say your team sits 40 appointments a month and closes 10. Get that to 15 from the same 40 and you've grown sales by half without spending another penny on marketing. I'd take that over a bigger ad budget every time.

First, measure it honestly

Most companies I look at measure it wrong. They count quotes sent, not appointments sat. A price emailed to someone you never met isn't the same thing as an hour at their kitchen table.

They also lump everyone together. Your overall figure can look all right while one rep closes half his appointments and another closes one in ten. And referrals close very differently from cold online leads, so split those out too.

Sales divided by sat appointments. Per person, per lead source, every month. That's your starting line.

Spend 70% of the appointment on the WHY

When I listen back to recorded appointments, the pattern's nearly always the same. The salesperson does ten minutes of chat about the weather and the dog, then forty minutes on the product. Glass specs. Frame colours. How long the company's been going.

The customer doesn't care about your company history. People only really care about themselves. What they want to know is whether this sorts out their problem.

So I coach a simple split. Roughly 70% of your time on the why, 20% on your offer, 10% on the close. If you get the first bit right, the close takes care of itself.

How do you get the why? Tell, Explain, Describe. "Tell me what made you call us now." "Explain what happens in that room in winter." "Describe how it'd feel to actually use it all year round." Then let them talk. They'll tell you everything you need.

Deal with the five reasons before the price

There are only five reasons people don't buy. No need, no desire, no money, no hurry, no trust.

If you leave any one of those hanging until after you've given the price, it'll come back as "we need to think about it". If you've dealt with all five on the way through, the close is just the natural next step. Nobody's surprised. Nobody's pressured.

Rapport is not enough

I'll say something that might sting a bit. Being a nice bloke isn't a sales process.

I coach plenty of reps who are lovely with customers. Great chat, great rapport, customers love them. And they still lose deals, because there's no structure and no authority. The customer gets to set the pace, and the customer's pace is usually "we'll think about it".

You want them to like you, of course. But you also need to be the one guiding the conversation, like a good doctor. Examine first, then prescribe. A doctor who prescribes before he's asked where it hurts isn't someone you'd trust.

Don't discount your way out of it

When the numbers drop, the reflex is to cut the price. It feels like doing something.

But every pound off comes straight out of your profit, and the customer learns your price wasn't real in the first place. Own your price or it will own you. If they haven't seen enough value to pay it, that's a selling problem, and it's fixable.

Reading isn't the same as doing

You can nod along to all of this and still go out tomorrow and do exactly what you did last week. I've seen it plenty of times. Under pressure, in someone's living room, people go back to old habits.

That's why I listen to my clients' real appointments with them, line by line, and we fix the bits that are leaking. It's what my 7 Steps to Sales Mastery is for: Frame, WHY, Offer, Objections, Pre-close, Close and Consolidation, practised until they're second nature.

Want to see where your close rate is leaking? Take the free 2-minute Sales Leak Assessment and book a free 30-minute discovery call with me.