"That's too expensive." Know what to say next.
You give them the price. There is a pause. Then: "Right. And what would it be just to patch it up for now?"
What you say in the next ten seconds decides whether you do the job properly, do half of it, or drive away with nothing.
This is an audio discussion built around your services and the objections you actually hear — not a script to memorise.
Your Sales Conversation Audio Playbook — $197 on its own, or free as your first choice. One per plumbing business. No payment details.
Nobody ever taught a plumber how to have this conversation.
You learned the trade. You did your apprenticeship, your licence, your hours. Not one of those days covered what to say when someone flinches at a number.
So most owners work it out by feel, and land on one of three habits.
The first is defending the price. You start explaining your costs — the insurance, the van, the compliance — and now the conversation is about your overheads, which the customer does not care about.
The second is dropping it. "Look, I could do it for eight fifty." The job is saved and the margin is gone, and worse, you have just taught that customer your first number is never real.
The third is going quiet, letting the silence sit, and hearing "I'll have a think about it." They do not ring back.
None of that is a confidence problem. It is not having a better sentence ready.
What the interview covers
You talk to an AI assistant for a few minutes. It asks about the business and about this topic in particular. What you say decides what gets looked at.
- —The jobs you quote most often, and what they run to
- —The objections you hear word for word — bring the real ones, not the polite versions
- —What you currently say back, and where the conversation usually goes
- —Who else is quoting against you locally, and how they price
- —What you want to change: fewer discounts, bigger jobs, or less dread before the call
What you get back
An audio discussion built around your business
Your services, your prices, your objections, talked through properly. Listen in the van between jobs rather than reading a PDF you never open.
Five tailored objection responses
The five you actually hear, each with language you could say out loud without feeling like a salesman. Adapt the words to your own voice — that is expected.
A written prompt sheet
One page. Phrases for explaining what the price covers, and for asking for the job at the end. Stick it on the dash.
Being straight about what this changes
It will not make you the cheapest, and it does not try. If you win work on being the cheapest, better wording will not help — that is a pricing decision, not a conversation.
Some customers are only ever going to ring five plumbers and pick the lowest number. You will not talk those people round, and the playbook will tell you how to spot them early and stop spending your evening quoting for them.
And nothing here works if you do not say it. Reading it once changes nothing. That is the honest reason the rehearsal exists as a separate report.
Who you're actually dealing with
Two blokes I've done this for. Neither is a plumber — they're cleaners on the Gold Coast — but both were paying for leads before we started, and neither is now.
I sold perfume door to door for five years. I thought I was good at it. I wasn't — what sold the perfume was the fragrance. I turned up and held the bottle.
Your website is supposed to be the fragrance. You're already doing the turning up: the van, the ads, the hours, the callouts at 2am. What's written on that site is the bit that has to do the persuading when you're not in the room.
Two businesses I helped build and sold went on to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. I moved to Australia in 2000 and have been building websites and generating leads for local trade businesses for the last ten years.
We used to spend up to $1,200 per week on Google AdWord campaigns for a steady workflow. In a matter of three months Hilton managed to get us ranked in the top position of the Google Map pack for multiple primary keywords, and implemented software that increased our reviews from 18 to over 100. No more AdWords or looking for customers.
I'd been paying for leads from Jim's, HiPages, OneFlare and word of mouth. Hilton promoted my page so that it appears in the Google 3 pack across a wide area for different keywords. This has totally transformed my business — I no longer pay for leads and have withdrawn from both HiPages and OneFlare.
Straight up: neither of those is a plumber — they're cleaners on the Gold Coast. Same game though, and both of them were paying good money for leads before we started.
Bring the conversation you keep losing. Let's work out what to say instead.
Choose this one, or look at the other five first — whichever you pick, the first one is free.
[[NEEDS INPUT: the real booking link for the interview. Until it exists this button rings Hilton on 0488 845 404.]]
One free report per plumbing business across the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Tweed Heads. Prices in Australian dollars, including GST where it applies. Back to all six reports.