What if the reason you’re losing deals has nothing to do with your offer—and everything to do with your state of mind?
As a business owner or salesperson, you don’t walk into every conversation as a blank slate.
The problem? Your customers can feel it. When you’re not fully present, it impacts your communication, your confidence, and ultimately your ability to convert.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How your mindset directly impacts your sales performance and why customers should never be at the mercy of it.
- Why distractions from previous interactions can quietly sabotage your close rates without you realizing it.
- Practical ways to build a simple, repeatable sales process that keeps you consistent—even when you’re not at your best.
Press play now to learn how to stay present, take control of your sales process, and close more deals regardless of what’s happening around you.
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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:
Today, we’re going to unpack how you can stop wasting good leads and more consistently engage customers to grow your sales faster.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry sales and business leaders finally in 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 and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s Get Started
Ben Wright:
In this episode today, we are going to talk about how your customers should not be at the mercy of your mindset and some practical ways that you can make sure you are always present when you’re walking into quotes. As I started to prepare for today’s episode, in fact, the motivation to get me to prepare for today’s episode was with one of my customers who came to my house a couple of weeks ago.
I could see as soon as that customer, they’re a terrific business. I’m not going to say their industry because they’re a listener and they might know who they are, but they came to my house. They’re a terrific industry.
They’re growing really fast. They got plenty of opportunity ahead of them, and the world is absolutely their oyster. But I could see from the moment they knocked on that front door that they were distracted.
Despite me doing my absolute best to unpack that distraction, to clear the zone, to clear the room and get them back on track, for the whole session that we had together, I could see there were thoughts and there were moments where they went across to whatever was distracting them. Again, I won’t go through it because these are deeply personal things as business owners. But what I can say is that it’s a pattern that I’ve seen across sales leaders, business leaders, even sales people multiple times across my journey.
That is all about the previous interaction that they have had getting in the way of their next. And whether that previous interaction gets in the way of a phone call with a customer, a discussion with their team, a discussion with their family, being on the tools, whatever it may be, it’s just so often that we see these previous conversations or these previous interactions getting in the way of what comes next. Now, when it comes to sales, this can be really dangerous because when we’re distracted, our customer ends up being at the mercy of our mindset.
And what I mean by that, and by the way, this is a great quote that I just had from a podcast of The Mind of George, right, which is launching about the same time as this. I’ll share with everyone through socials because it was one of the best podcast recordings I think I’ve ever done. So stay tuned and I’ll get that out.
In fact, in our next podcast, I should be able to reference it for you. But having the customer being at the mercy of your mindset is really dangerous because when we’re not there to deliver our best selves, people can generally see it. When we’re distracted, when we’re not completely present, when we’re not giving everything of ourselves to that moment, it comes across in your body language, it comes across in your demeanour, it comes across in how you communicate and how you pronounce your words, right? It can be so impactful in a customer engagement that as salespeople and leaders and business leaders, we have a responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen.
And that’s the easy part. That’s the theory. The difficult part in practise is that we are all so busy and I uniquely remember the moments in my life when I’ve had these issues.
In fact, a really particular example was I remember I had to go collect some money. It was $7,000. It wasn’t a lot of cash but I was determined to get it.
I walked into this customer’s site. They were building a new premises and this customer said, come in with me, come in, come in. He walked me up the stairs.
He walked me into a back office and as I walked into his back office, I was like, oh, this is strange. There’s no windows in here. In that office, he had six of his crew and the six of his crew stood around me as I walked in.
I was like, this is not great. I am not, A, I’m not a big unit that’s going to fight my way out of these and B, it’s just not in my nature. But it was a clear act of intimidation when that circle started to close in on me and he said, I’m not going to pay you.
And that for me was a situation where I felt really threatened and of course, he got the message across and most of us are going to walk away from that going, all right, I’ve possibly dodged a bullet there. But the fact of the matter was, right or wrong, what happened there is not important. But I took that interaction because it rattled me.
I was young. I think I was 29, 30 at the time and to have six big blokes kind of surround you saying, you’re not getting your money, do you get it, son? Not a great moment to be in. But that interaction impacted me for the rest of my day.
And I had sales calls for the rest of the day and I can’t remember my exact close rates from the deals that I had but they certainly weren’t high because for the rest of the day, I was worried about that interaction. I was annoyed about the $7,000 but more importantly, I was worried about what could have happened and how business can be really personal at points in time. And so for me, what I learned from that moment was that having a default process that you can lean on to is really important, right, so that when you get rattled and I use the example of driving a car back in episode 209 but when you’re rattled but you have your defaults as sub-automatic, right, so they’re things you just do without thinking, so we’re driving, we brake, we accelerate, we turn, we look in our mirrors, right, all of that you do by default.
When you have a sales process that you follow by default, the customer that you deal with is far less likely to be at the mercy of your mindset because when you do have things distracting you, you can flick the autopilot switch on to an extent and roll through your process. Arrive at the front door, smile, be well presented, ask them how they’re going, walk into the door, ask what’s special, work through what’s going to create value, decide if you can quote on the spot or not, right, once you’ve prepared the quote, follow up effectively, book in your next meeting, make sure decision makers are present, right, so on. Now, I roll through that really quickly because it’s a process that I know inside and out and I can do with my eyes closed.
For you as a leader, my encouragement is to really think about how you can make sure that you roll into every single sales interaction with an automatic process that just happens even when you’re distracted because the reality is that when you don’t, good leads get wasted. Good leads go and buy from someone else because they haven’t got the best from you, you waste money on your marketing channel, you waste money on lead generation which means your profit levels drop which means you need to quote more deals which means your stress rises which means your distractions also increase and you end up more and more distracted in more and more calls, right, so it’s what I call a doom loop where you are just chasing your tail bad after bad after bad. Where you can break that cycle by having a process that’s really consistent and that’s the message clearly for me today is to make sure you’re building out that process but where you can have that really consistent process at play, it takes away a lot of the stress when you’re not quite present.
So, that’s the ask from today. Of course, I’m very grateful that you’ve been listening. If you are someone that is feeling like you’re spending hours or wasted time on sales quotes, right, particularly where you’re distracted and can’t quite dedicate all of you to those sales meetings and those customer visits, well, it’s likely that if you don’t change something now, you’re going to continue to get those same stressful results over and over again.
So, our commitment to our podcast list is that we have a free quote audit that will pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs, i.e. you’re distracted without a process and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. It’s free. There’s an audit or a free quote audit link in the show notes and that will get you started now.
Thanks very much for listening today. Keep focussing on being 1% better each and every day because it does make a difference. Bye for now.