What if two tiny changes in your sales process could boost your close rates by 70% in just six weeks?
Most trade and construction businesses struggle to convert leads efficiently, often leaving revenue on the table. In this episode, we break down a real-life success story of a business that transformed their results—not with massive overhauls, but with two simple, smart tweaks to their early sales process that made a huge impact. Whether you run a small team or a larger operation, these insights apply to almost any sales environment.
By listening to this episode, you’ll discover how to:
- Respond to inbound leads in a way that captures customer excitement and engagement at the peak moment.
- Replace impersonal email autoresponders with high-impact voice calls to start relationships off strong.
- Achieve measurable improvements in close rates without increasing lead volume or overhauling your entire process.
Hit play now to hear how simple changes to speed and human connection turned a struggling sales process into a 70% growth machine.
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This podcast helps the entrepreneur, founder, CEO, and business owner in the trade, construction and industry segments, regain focus, build confidence, and achieve measurable results through powerful sales training, effective sales strategy, and expert sales coaching—guiding every sales leader, sales manager, and sales team in mastering the sales process, optimizing the sales pipeline, and driving business growth while fostering leadership, balance, and freedom amidst overwhelm, stress, and potential burnout, creating lasting peace of mind and smarter decision making for every California business and Australia business ready to scale up with excellence in sales management , through refined sales processes, proven trade sales techniques, and strategic sales leadership that strengthens sales process execution, accelerates sales team development, builds stronger sales teams, improves time management for sales, drives resilience and results, increases team results across the construction industry and wider industry sales sectors, and supports sustainable trading growth that continues to drive results through an effective management process in modern trade sales.
Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
In this episode, we will unpack how you can increase your sales close rates by 70% in just six weeks.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry 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, we’re going to profile one of our really successful customers and how they were able to grow their close rates by 70% in less than six weeks. And I think the important piece that we’re going to really expand on in here is that they were then able to hold those increased close rates for the months that came after that period. So it wasn’t simply a blip, but how one of our customers was able to grow their close rates really significantly through only two simple changes to the early sales process.
So this customer of ours to set the scene very much in the trade and construction industry. They’re a larger business. They had a number of people in their sales team.
However, the impacts or the changes that they made to their sales process are just as easy for small businesses to implement as they are larger businesses. And now this customer specifically is in the industry. So very much for me in the classic trade game and the focus here was around residential customers.
But again, the focus here can apply to either residential or commercial because the skills are very much interchangeable. And in fact, I’d say that if you’re a business leader listening for me generally, the skills that you need in a B2C sales environments are straight to the consumer, straight to the resident, are very similar to what you need in a B2B environment. It’s really only the last 5% that changes, but very much the first 90 to 95 is very consistent across any of those segments.
So please listen into this story. It’s one of my favourite success stories because this was a business that had been quite resistant to change previously, but they had a leader in now who was really gung-ho with trying to find small marginal improvements or marginal gains as we call them. And they were able to do so through a workshop that we had together with a team of about 16 or 18 salespeople in that meeting.
So we were able to move a lot and in particular, we were able to move the behaviours of 16 to 18 people through this session. Okay, so what did they do? Well, first of all, yes, their close rates increased by 70% in this six-week period. So to define this, what I mean is that their close rates from where they were at, and they were reasonably low, they were around about the 10% mark, they were able to move them from 10% to about 17% across that six-week period.
So they didn’t increase rates to 70% close, but they increased from where they were to where they finished up by that 70%. Now, what that meant was with the same number of leads, they were able to put 70% more sales through the door. Now, that is huge.
The business was almost doubling without increasing their leads. So what did they do? And I don’t want to dwell on that, but I wanted to be really clear and that 70% growth was off their current baseline. And then if you are only moving by small percentages within a business, it can make huge, huge differences to your top-line and bottom-line numbers.
So first thing that this business did that was super impactful was that they returned inbound lead enquiries. If they couldn’t answer them on the spot, they returned calls within two hours. Previous to this, they are a next day or they are an end-of-day returner call business.
And all they did, super simple, was move from being an end-of-day or next-day business to a maximum two hours. Of course, they aimed for faster than this. If a lead came in and it was a phone call, obviously they try to answer it on the spot.
If it was a digital lead, email, a clicked form, whatever it may be, social media lead, they were then responding within two hours. So why was this so important? And I think this comes down to a concept I’ve explained as recently as earlier in this week. Around when people are enquiring about projects, they typically have the highest level of engagement or excitement early in that process.
I know me, we’ve just gone through buying a car, we bought a Defender 90 series. My engagement was super high in the first week. I was jumping onto everything.
And then as the process went on a little bit longer, I was still excited but not quite as excited as I was in that early stage. So where this team was able to pair or match the excitement levels of their customer by having a conversation with them as early as possible, what they were able to do was position themselves as the person they spoke to when the customer was most engaged and excited. And of course, when you’re engaged or excited or happy about something and you speak to someone about it, they naturally get taken along for that journey of happiness or excitement or whatever it may be.
So by very quickly returning calls, A, they beat others to the punch, but B, they were able to position themselves as the brand that piggybacked or went along downstream with that excitement or that engagement. So that was number one. The second thing that they did was to reduce their outbound email load.
And the most impactful piece here was that they had an autoresponder email that said, hey, thanks very much for your enquiry. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can. So instead of that, they replaced that with the phone call piece.
Now, very subtle difference here. But by removing the email autoresponder, they didn’t reduce the customer’s expectations as to how they get back to them. Yes, there’s an argument that says it acknowledges the lead and it’s great for the customer.
However, because they were responding so quickly, it wasn’t necessarily needed. But they moved themselves away from a business communicating via email and for some customers, receiving that email isn’t necessarily motivating. So they moved themselves away from that business that corresponded by email and had their first contact with the customer by email to having their first contact with the customer by phone.
So that very first impression that they generated with the customer was through voice. Rather than email, rather than text message, rather than any form of automation, their first contact was voice. And of course, as humans, we crave relationships.
And I’m going to really, really strongly argue here that this is only going to get bigger as the rise of artificial intelligence takes over a lot of our human-to-human conversations. That engagement with real people is going to become a real premium for businesses. So to recap that, number one is they returned calls within two hours.
Speed became absolutely critical for them as a business. And number two is they took away email as the first or written as the first point of correspondence with their customers and replaced it with voice. Now that’s it.
Hand on heart, that is all they did in that period of time to grow their close rates so significantly. I think the piece that I like as a case study or a story here to tell is that it doesn’t always take significant shifts to improve your sales, but it does take you requiring or understanding what the most important shift is. Because as salespeople and as leaders and as teams, there are so many options available to us to improve that we need to make sure we’re picking the right one.
And thankfully, we were able to work through this with this team and they picked or two of the right ones. Look, and I’d argue the returning calls within two hours was the biggest one, but by doing so have a really significant impact on their sales. So that’s it for today, a terrific success story.
One, I love telling. Thank you, very grateful for you listening in today. The takeaway for me from today is not necessarily to think about how you can respond to leads faster, but to challenge yourself to have a think about ways you can improve your business and as we do each week, but keeping the mindset around a small incremental gains or those 1% better improvements that can help you improve along the journey.
Because for me, if you’re doing that as a leader, you will always find ways to improve and you will consistently increase the capability, the performance and the results for your business. That’s it for today. See you next time
Bye for now
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