How Sheralee Sold Her First System Build, Without Ever Pitching It

Sheralee can walk into a trades business and find what is quietly costing it money in about an hour. Twenty years on the inside will do that. What she could not do was the part in between seeing it and being asked to fix it.

She is a ServiceM8 Partner, so the platform most trades businesses run their jobs through sends owners her way. Warm introductions. People already using the software, already stuck somewhere inside it, already halfway to needing her. She had been taking those calls for a long time and they were not turning into work.

So she did what generous experts do. She gave more. More detail in the quote, more of the plan up front, more of the thinking handed over before anybody had asked for it, on the reasoning that if the owner could just see the whole picture he would understand what it was worth. Every quote was the full build, priced properly, sent off, and then nothing.

That was a completely reasonable way to play it, because the alternative on offer looked worse. The only version of selling she had ever been shown was the pushy one, and she hated being on the receiving end of it. Tried and tested, taught everywhere, and on her it fitted like somebody else's clothes. She was never going to do that to a tradie. So the choice looked like pushing or giving, and she chose giving every single time.

She felt stuck.

We stripped it back to simplicity. We built a conversational sales process that felt good to her and her clients. We made the value easy to spot without asking to be shown, and the entire job of ‘sales calls’ became to find out quickly and honestly whether the two of them should be working together. Any work undertaken would need to benefit everyone. If she wasn’t the right person for them, she offered a generous recommendation of what to do instead and said good luck.

The introduction calls were the first thing to change. There’s no persuasion or ‘objection busting frameworks’ and that is the point of it. Sales doesn’t have to be me vs you and the first one to blink loses in the deal. Instead, it’s just two adults working out whether there is value in working together. That feels much better than talking somebody round, and it turned out she was already very good at it. We then cleaned up her offers to make them easy to understand.  

The first owner she ran it with came back to her, and what he came back with was essentially ‘yes, of course I want that, how do we start?’. Not because he had been talked round. Because by then he could see the plan for his own business written down in front of him, and he had watched her work inside it. There was nothing left to be convinced of. The only thing left to sort out was timing. Two new clients arrived in the same stretch, and one of them, never scoped as ongoing, has since asked to keep going.

Then it happened again. And Again. Three more owners arrived through ServiceM8, the same introductions that used to go nowhere, and all three booked and paid without hesitating. One even asked her to get to work on the introductory call before the scope of work was even fully discussed "yep, let's get started, you build it for me, too easy done." A fourth did not go ahead with a full build because it wasn’t the right product for them at the current time. They did buy a set of templates instead though and appreciated the shared understanding of not being the right fit and not being pressured. They loved the quick and easy template fix. Four leads. Four pieces of paid work. Where twenty of them used to produce three.

Today, Sheralee offers the work on introductory calls without the long run-up she used to need, because the call is not a pressured sales pitch and both people know it. She is not selling harder than she used to, and for the first time the process fits her instead of the other way around. She is letting owners see, early and on purpose, what twenty years of this looks like pointed at their business. They are better off for it too, because nobody is being asked to back a stranger on faith.