What if the key to unlocking record-breaking sales in 2026 isn’t what you add to your business—but what you’re finally willing to let go of?
As we approach the end of the year, many business owners and sales leaders are feeling stretched, unsure what to double down on—and what to ditch. This episode dives deep into three overlooked habits that are silently holding your sales back and shows you exactly how letting go can drive serious growth in the year ahead.
- Discover why chasing social media leads might be hurting—not helping—your sales strategy.
- Learn how being busy can actually sabotage your team’s performance (and what to do instead).
- Identify and eliminate “dead weight” in your business to free up time, energy, and profit potential.
Tune in now to learn the three critical shifts that could dramatically accelerate your sales growth in 2026.
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Episode Transcript
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you’ll discover why reflecting on the year just gone is so important in setting you up for a terrific 2026 of sales growth.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Process Made Easy, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you will learn three things that can make a significant difference to your sales growth in 2026 if you’re prepared to leave them behind in 2025. We’ll focus around lead generation, number one, number two, all about how being busy isn’t necessarily great for business, and number three, what dead weight or areas of your business that aren’t performing can do to drive your growth.
They’re the three areas that we’ll focus on for the coming 12 months to leave behind, and what I will acknowledge is that absolutely the list of what to leave behind in 2025 could be bigger than what we’re going through today. However, what I have seen across a number of businesses in the last 12 months is that those who have been able to find their position on these items or leave them behind have started to succeed with more rapid growth, particularly businesses in that $1 to $50 million mark, particularly businesses in that trade, construction, industry segments. It’s a pretty big segment, but you know who you are if you’re in it, and particularly those leaders who are ready to adopt and make change. Let’s go through what those are.
Number one, things to leave behind in 2025 is the drive that social media must be something that generates leads for you. Social media can be a terrific segment for many businesses, no doubt about it, but for a large number of businesses, it also doesn’t work. I can think of a dozen activities that work better for many businesses over social media, such as referrals, aged pipelines, SEO, repeat customers that come back again, increasing the spend of current customers, working with partners, networking, personal networks. Now, I’m not sure if I’ve gone through 12 there, but the list goes on and on.
Social media is not the be-all and end-all for every business, and I strongly encourage you not to think that it has to be in your remit for 2026, because if it’s not working for you, it can simply become a form of social proof where you have a lighter touch and you start to dive more heavily into lead generation processes that work for you. That’s number one. Social media is not compulsory when it comes to lead generation. It might have some out there perhaps questioning, that is a piece of advice, but for others, if it’s not working for you, focus on the areas that do.
The second one, being busy is not what it’s all about when it comes to sales. I work with a number of salespeople who you would call hardworking but underperforming, be they leaders of businesses or be they salespeople themselves. These are salespeople who focus so heavily on being busy rather than serving those customers that they look after best. What I mean by that is getting really clear on the customers that are likely to close, qualifying those customers to make sure that they’re ready to buy now, and then engaging with them around what’s important for them. Because simply, if you are chasing every lead and every deal out there again and again and again, and you’re not getting through or you’re not closing deals, then being busy is irrelevant. We end up having a focus issue here.
I speak a lot about effort, talent, and strategy. Not concepts I built myself, but an aggregation of lots of knowledge that I’ve learned across the last 25 years of selling. I speak a lot about these three concepts as being really important as a pyramid for success. You can have someone working incredibly hard, so ticking off effort, but their strategy may not be right. They’re approaching the wrong customers. They’re quoting the wrong products. They’re not listening to what they have to say. If there’s something you’re going to leave behind outside of social media, it’s using busy as a way to measure progress of your sales team.
I have a three-box model that the Sold Out Sales Teams Academy works around, which is a really beautiful set of metrics that helps us focus in on not just effort, but also the talent and strategy behind our team. We need to be equally managing, not just how busy our team are, but also what they’re focussing on to make sure they’re growing their sales.
Last but not least is dead weight, things that are not working. I’d be encouraging you if they are not working and you have spent considerable amounts of time, energy, and effort on them, that next year may be one to leave them behind. The reality is that for many of us, we have more on our plates, more emails, more phone calls, more requests, more things to do in our businesses than we have time for. By leaving behind things that aren’t working, that frees us up the time to work on those that do.
And certainly, we spent a bit of time in our last episode, 154, thinking about what worked for our business and what didn’t work. As we move into the next 12 months, being prepared to leave behind things that don’t work for you, I’d encourage you to see that as a power stance, as a power move that will help you grow your business.
Being prepared to say, no, this isn’t working, we’re going to stop it, rather than continuing out of obligation or because we’ve always done it, is powerful. It will take some time or a step of courage in many instances, but I really encourage you to write down what they are, have a look at what you can remove. If you’re not ready to drop them all at once, if you identify a number of them, just drop one at a time.
What we’re talking about here are things to leave behind in 2025 for faster sales growth. There’s three areas we covered. One, social media, It isn’t compulsory. It doesn’t have to be a lead generation source for your business. It certainly can be, but my encouragement is to focus on what works best for your business rather than what you think is most popular.
Number two, wearing busy is a badge of honour. Hardworking, underperforming salespeople won’t generate the numbers and we need to be focussing on the types of customers and deals and approaches and questions and offers that will generate results for us. We can do that by getting clear on more than just number of quotes, but measuring across multiple metrics how our salespeople are performing.
Number three is getting rid of dead weight. Things that are not working for your business. If you’ve given them a good run, be prepared to stop them. Move your focus on the things that do and then you can be doubling down on what you know works and leaving behind what doesn’t.
After listening to this episode, we are roaring into Christmas. I hope that it can start your brain thinking about things that you want to be doing slightly differently next year and give you a sense of real positivity moving into 2026.
Super grateful that you’re with us on these shows even as we come roaring into Christmas here. We’re going to continue with three episodes a week, the whole way through Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In the meantime, until we catch up again, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it will make all the difference.
Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you’ve reached the sales ceiling, are involved in every deal or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that’s you, that’s exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams programme to help you get month-on-month sales growth with less stress.
In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25% to 30%. That’s just week one.
For the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we’ll offer you a bonus one-on-one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster, which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales.
To book in, click the link in our show notes. It’s a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.