Closing the Sale Begins Before You Ask for It

Five communication habits that make customers want to say yes.

By Chuck Kile

I spent most of my working life as a tradesperson in a nice, comfortable, introverted shell. I worked on people’s houses and did not have to talk to anyone often. I loved it.

You know the guy on the crew who talks all day, and when he is not talking to you, he is on the phone talking to somebody else? I am the opposite of that guy. I have no problem not talking to anybody, ever.

Therefore, everything I know about communicating with customers I learned the hard way. I learned it because I ran into problem after problem, lost jobs, lost clients, and finally worked backward to figure out why.

For the last eight years I have also owned a marketing company that works mostly with contractors and tradespeople. That means several people a day reach out to me for help, and I get to watch how they communicate from their very first message.

After thousands of those conversations, one thing is clear: The contractors who communicate well are successful.

It is not always easy for them, but they make money and they work things out. The ones who communicate poorly and never get better do not go anywhere. They may get plenty of leads. They just don’t close them.

Closing a sale is not a trick you pull off at the end of an estimate. It is the natural result of a relationship you have built since the first phone call. The following five ideas on closing sales are habits I’ve gathered over a lifetime of service work. Doing just one or two of them consistently will make it easier for you to close deals and provide better relationships with clients.

1. Respond right away, even when you don’t have an answer.

When somebody emails, calls, or texts my company, we respond immediately. My team pushes on this harder than almost anything else.

The response does not have to be the answer. It can be, “Hey, I got your message. I can’t get to this right now, but I’ll take a look and get back to you later today.” You are simply letting the person know their message landed.

Here is why this matters: Most of the frustrated customer calls I have taken in my career came from one situation. Something happened, and the communication was not there. Now the customer is upset, and I must spend 20 minutes talking them back down and explaining what went on. If I had sent one text right before or right after the thing happened, none of that would have been necessary.

I try to field questions before they become questions. If there is any chance your customer is going to wonder about something, answer it before they ask. Assume they do not know what is going on and need you to explain every little thing. Keep doing it until they specifically tell you to stop. If a homeowner says, “You don’t need to text me every time you’re on the way, just show up.” Then fine. Stop texting. Until then, overcommunicate.

Under-communicating looks like your customer sitting at the kitchen table asking their spouse, “Have you heard from Jim? Is he coming to work on our well today?” If your customers ever wonder what you are up to, that is a problem and what I’m talking about.

Overcommunicating looks like this: Your customer knows what is going on 100% of the time. Maybe they even laugh occasionally and think, “I didn’t need to know he’s eating a burrito for lunch. But it’s good to know he’ll be back on his rig in 15 minutes.”

I will take that laugh every time.

2. Create engagement points on purpose.

I did not have a good name for this, so I call them engagement points. An engagement point is any opportunity to interact with your customer.

If I am going to be at someone’s property at 8 a.m., I text them at 7:45: “We’re on our way; there in 15 minutes.” or “Stopping for parts on the way, we’ll be there between 8:30 and 9.” It does not matter what the message says. Every single time I go to a customer’s property, I send a message, and I am looking for the response.

If they do not respond, that’s fine. But they do a lot of the time, and that is another small point for me. I got confirmation. I got engagement.

The more interactions you stack up, the tighter the relationship gets. Eventually you are almost friends with your customers. Later, when you ask them for something, like a review or a referral, they do it. I have clients I’ve been working with for decades. They are friends at this point, and this is how we communicate.

I saw this firsthand not long ago. My company had about 75 online reviews, and one of my guys said we should push for 100. I picked up my phone, scrolled through my text messages, found every client I had been talking with over the last couple of months, and sent them all the review link. Within two hours, every one of them had left a review.

That did not happen because I asked nicely. It happened because we had been interacting constantly and the rapport was already there. If I had texted a client I had not spoken to in six months, it would not have gone so smoothly.

Engagement points work the same way on an estimate, which is where the sale is actually won or lost.

You go out to a property, look at the situation, and get the information you need. As you are leaving, you say, “I’m going to work on this estimate and have it to you by the end of the day tomorrow.”

Ten minutes after you leave, you text: “Thanks for meeting with me today. I appreciate your time. I’ll have that estimate to you by end of day tomorrow.”

The next day, sometime in the morning or early afternoon, you text again: “Working on your estimate right now. Quick question for you . . .” It almost doesn’t matter whether the question is important. The point is not the question. The point is the customer is now thinking, “This guy is working on my stuff. I like this guy.” You are in their head again.

If there is any chance your customer is going to wonder about something, answer it before they ask.

Five o’clock comes. You email the estimate. One minute later you text: “Just emailed the estimate over to you.”

Perhaps they do not respond. The next morning you text once more: “Wanted to make sure that email came through and to see if you have any questions.”

Count them up. That is four or five touch points between the site visit and the customer’s decision, and none of them was a sales pitch. By the time the customer compares your number to two other bids, one of which arrived three days late from a company they have not heard from since, the decision is not really about price anymore. It is about who they trust to show up.

We do this deliberately at my company. We schedule touch points into our process, so nobody has to remember to do it. I recommend you do the same.

3. Be where you said you would be.

Have you ever dealt with a cable company or an internet provider? They tell you, “We’ll be there sometime between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.” Very helpful, right? Then it hits 5 p.m. and they call to say they will not make it today.

Do not do that to people.

Tell the customer what time you will be there. Then communicate throughout. If you are going to be there at 3, text them at 2 and say: “Still on for 3.” If you are running behind, text them at 2 and say: “Looks like closer to 4.” Whatever is happening, they should know about it.

As a remodeler, I work with people over long stretches of time, so I get a lot of natural chances to engage. Many of you are in a different situation. If you are doing pump service or a repair call, you might be in and out of a customer’s life in a day or two. That means most of your engagement points are going to be about punctuality. It is the main thing they will judge you on.

Some of the best service companies I have hired as a customer have an automated system that texts me: “John is on his way, he’s 13 minutes out,” with a map showing where the truck is. You know how good that feels compared to sitting around wondering whether John is still coming and not having heard a word?

You get to choose which of those situations you put your customers in. Choose the first one.

4. Write like a professional.

I have to include this one, even though it feels small. Punctuation and grammar.

Look, we’re not all good writers. But there is no excuse anymore. Every one of us has apps like ChatGPT on our phone. You can talk into it, have it clean up what you just said, and paste that into your email or text. Sending broken messages that do not make sense is shooting yourself in the foot.

Let me show you how this looks from the other side of the table because I am on the other side of it every day.

When someone contacts my company, the first thing that happens is they get a text from me. The form they filled out tells them to expect it and asks them to respond.

About half of the people never respond. Fine. I move them out of my system and stop thinking about them.

Of the half who do respond, maybe three out of 10 have great communication skills. They respond quickly. They write in complete sentences. They use punctuation. They are clear about what is going on. I can have a fast conversation with them, and we both understand where things stand.

The other seven? I get one-word answers to questions. No capitalization, no punctuation. Maybe the message doesn’t even make sense. I will be honest with you: I am testing them from the first moment because I want to know whether I want to work with this person. If someone takes eight hours to answer a text or writes in fragments, that is a signal that I might not want to spend a lot of time on them.

Your customers are running the exact same test on you. They may not say it out loud. They may not even know they are doing it. But every message you send is evidence about what kind of contractor you are going to be when their pump quits on a Sunday.

5. Answer the phone.

You could file this under responsiveness, but it deserves its own section because it is that big.

I still hear it all the time from the contractors we work with. They pick up the phone and the caller is surprised. “Oh, you actually answered. I called two other companies and got voicemail.” How many jobs have they won for no other reason than that they picked up?

We all carry cellphones. If your business line is also your personal line, this will be harder for you, and I would recommend a dedicated business line so that when it rings you know to answer it every single time.

If you truly cannot answer, at least have a voicemail message that tells them why you can’t talk, when you will call them back, and then really call them back at that time. I used to have a voicemail message that told people we were in the field and if they’re interested in working with us, to go to our website and fill out the form. It worked great.

The point is to make the first experience when someone calls your company a positive one. Usually that means answering the phone but there are other ways too. A voicemail that says your phone number in some automated fashion is not a good customer experience.

What Changed When We Got Serious About This

I have lost plenty of opportunities and plenty of clients to poor communication, which is why I feel strongly about it. Some of the losses were embarrassingly simple. A customer’s billing changed and nobody told them why they were getting a certain email, and now they are on the phone upset, saying, “I didn’t want to cancel this, I don’t know what’s going on.” Every call like that is a red flag that we under-communicated.

My company started paying real attention to communication at the beginning of 2024. Our clients have us on monthly retainers to manage their marketing, and at the time, we were losing about six customers a month. We got it down to about one. Nothing else changed. We just started communicating all the time, knowing our clients’ needs, and engaging with them constantly.

You can do the same thing, and you do not need a system or software to start. I will give you the same challenge I give the contractors I work with: Pick one thing you are doing wrong right now and fix it today.

Text one of your customers and let them know what time you will be there in the morning. Make sure they know you are working on their project, that you care about it, and that they can reach you when they need you.

Do that consistently and something interesting will happen. You’ll stop having to close sales. Your customers will start going out of their way to work with you.

Chuck Kile is a remodeling contractor and the owner of Adapt Digital Solutions, a marketing company that works with contractors and tradespeople, and Chuck the Contractor on YouTube. Kile can be reached at chuck@adaptdigitalsolutions.com.