Industry playbooks
Construction / Trades sales call playbooks
These buyers run single-digit margins on jobs where the extra work gets done Tuesday and the paperwork shows up Friday, if it shows up at all — and they've already bought one platform their foremen refused to open. Practise here and you learn to sell past 'my guys hate apps' and 'software is a luxury line item' by talking about unbilled change work and margin fade instead of features.
Every call type for Construction / Trades
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Construction / Trades, the people who pick up are commercial contractors and trade shops. The titles you will actually reach:
- VP of Operations
- Director of Field Operations
- General Superintendent
- Project Executive
- Senior Project Manager
- Owner / President (specialty trade contractor)
- CFO / Controller
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
Change orders die on a T&M tag in a truck
The foreman does the extra work Tuesday, scribbles it on a T&M tag, and the tag sits on the dash until Friday — or never gets to the office at all. By the time the PM writes the COR, the owner's rep says 'first I'm hearing of it' and it gets negotiated down or eaten. On a $4M job that's $60–80K of self-performed work billed at zero. Everyone in the company knows it's happening and nobody can prove which jobs it's happening on until the WIP review at month end.
Margin fade nobody can explain until it's too late
Job starts at 9% projected. Month three it's 6%. Month five the PM finally admits it's 3% and the CFO finds out at the WIP meeting. The fade is real labor hours against unbilled scope, backcharges from the GC, and rework — but there's no field-level record to point at, so the postmortem turns into the PM and the superintendent blaming each other. Executives are managing a business on numbers that are six weeks stale.
Sub no-shows blow the look-ahead every week
The drywall crew was supposed to be eight guys Monday; four show up, and nobody tells the super until he walks the floor at 7:15. Now the ceiling grid slides, the inspector's already scheduled, and the GC is asking about the three-week look-ahead. The super's fix is 40 phone calls a day and a text thread with 22 people in it. Nothing is written down, so when the schedule claim comes at the end of the job there's no documentation of who didn't show up when.
Field-to-office is texts, voicemail, and phone tag
Daily reports come in as a photo of a handwritten sheet, if they come in. Safety observations live in the super's head. When the owner or the GC's counsel asks for documentation on a delay or an incident, the PM spends two days scrolling texts. The office and the field are running on two different versions of what happened on that job, and the reconciliation happens in an argument.
Crews will not use anything that takes more than a minute
Most companies here have already bought a platform, rolled it out, and watched adoption die inside a quarter. Guys with gloves on, in the rain, at the end of a ten-hour day, are not filling out a fourteen-field form. Foremen in their fifties who run great crews are the ones who won't touch it, and the ops leader isn't going to fight his best people over software.
Cash is stuck in retainage and rejected pay apps
Ten percent held on every job, plus pay apps that come back because backup documentation for the change work isn't attached. DSO runs 60–75 days while payroll runs every Friday. The CFO is funding other people's projects on a line of credit, and every unapproved change order sitting in a folder is cash that can't be billed.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “My foremen won't use another app. Half of them hate smartphones.”
- Then don't roll it out to all of them. Pick two foremen — one who's fine with a phone and one who's the loudest holdout — and run it on one job for three weeks. If the holdout can't do it in under a minute with gloves on, we've learned something cheap. The test isn't whether they like it, it's whether the T&M tag gets to the office same day.
- “Margins are single digit. Software is a luxury line item.”
- Agreed, which is why I'd rather talk about the unbilled work than the subscription. What's your best guess on change work done last year that never got billed or got negotiated down because the paperwork was late? Most guys your size land somewhere between $200K and $500K. If it's a tenth of that, this pays for itself on one job and you cancel it if it doesn't.
- “We already bought a platform. Nobody uses it. I'm not doing that again.”
- Fair — and I'd bet the rollout was 'here's the login, here's a training deck.' What specifically did they stop doing first, the daily report or the change tickets? I want to know because if the answer is 'both, in about five weeks,' we should talk about whether this is even a software problem or whether your supers were never held to it.
- “Talk to my PMs, they handle the field paperwork.”
- Happy to, and I will. But your PMs will optimize for their jobs and you're the one looking at fade across the whole book. The question I'd want answered before you hand me off is whether unbilled change work is a two-job problem or an every-job problem — your PMs won't tell you that, the WIP will.
- “Our backlog is booked through next year, we're too busy to implement anything right now.”
- That's exactly when the leaks are worst — busy is when the tags stay in the truck. I'm not asking for an implementation, I'm asking for one job and one foreman. If you're too busy for that, then you're too busy, and I'll call you when the fall jobs close out.
- “We do this in the accounting system already. It's all in there.”
- It's in there eventually — the question is when. If the change ticket hits accounting Friday instead of Tuesday, you're billing three days late and arguing from memory. How long, honestly, from the extra work happening in the field to a COR in front of the owner's rep? If it's more than a week you're negotiating from a weak position every time.
- “The GC makes us use their system on that job. I'm not running two.”
- You'll run two either way — their system is for their record, not yours. Your guys are already double-entering into a spiral notebook. The version I care about is the one that documents your labor hours when there's a backcharge fight at closeout, because their platform will not be on your side that day.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- T&M tag
- COR (change order request) vs. executed change order
- construction change directive
- RFI and submittal log
- punch list / punch walk
- pay app (G702/G703) and schedule of values
- retainage
- backcharge
- buyout
- three-week look-ahead
- WIP schedule and margin fade
- self-perform vs. sub'd out
- as-builts
- EMR / TRIR
- GMP and contingency
- general conditions
Metrics they are measured on
gross margin fade (bid margin vs. as-built margin, in points), unapproved change orders as a % of contract value, days from field work performed to COR submitted, DSO and retainage outstanding, over/under billings on the WIP, schedule variance — days behind on critical path, EMR and recordable incident rate (TRIR), backlog in dollars and months
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Construction / Trades buyer
A live AI prospect with Construction / Trades context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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