What if the fastest way to grow your sales wasn’t getting more leads — but making more from the customers you already have?
Many trade and service businesses automatically chase new leads when sales slow down, but that approach often increases costs, consumes time, and delivers lower close rates.
Here are three overlooked strategies that help businesses grow revenue more efficiently by maximising existing relationships, reactivating past opportunities, and generating higher-converting referrals.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How increasing the average spend of existing customers can create significant revenue growth without extra marketing costs.
- Practical ways to turn past quotes and previous customers into new sales opportunities quickly and efficiently.
- Why referral-based leads consistently close at higher rates — and the simple systems that generate more of them.
Tune in now to discover three practical sales strategies that can help you grow revenue faster, improve close rates, and reduce the stress of constantly chasing new leads.
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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 the three ways that traders can grow sales without more leads and how you can do it no matter what business you are in.
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 our experience, when businesses are trying to grow, they often default to more leads. The number of conversations I’ve had with sales and business leaders around growth needing to come from more marketing leads or more sales leads, I couldn’t count on the number of days between now and Christmas.
As we record this, we are in May, so there are plenty of days ahead. However, there are so many other opportunities to grow your sales without more leads and we’re going to go through three of those today. To keep today nice and really short and punchy, I’m going to jump straight into those three ways to grow sales without getting more leads.
As I do so, I’d really like you to start to think about how expensive new leads are for your business. We pay money in many instances for marketing generated leads or when they’re generated through a sales team, we invest time, like their time to go and generate these leads. What’s even more impactful is that for every new lead that comes in the door, we invest time qualifying them, meeting or speaking with them, meeting with them, quoting them, engaging with them after the quote to invariably have a yes or a no at the end of that engagement.
I will certainly argue that in my experience, new leads have the lowest close rates of the three opportunities I’m about to go through. For me, where we can grow our business without more leads, we are absolutely able to find ways to reduce cost to our business, i.e. grow our margin. Secondly, reduce time, particularly time invested into new deals that don’t proceed.
Thirdly, grow our close rates. Of course, when we grow our close rates, it means we’re being not only more efficient with time but generally we’re seeing higher net profit lines because we’re able to spread a lot of those fixed costs that we have in our business across a more effective sales process, i.e. the dollars that we can’t change, they get spread over bigger deals because we’re selling more, more effectively. But certainly, those first two, reduce costs and reduce time, are absolutely super impactful to growing businesses, growing revenue, and growing bottom line.
So, the three ways, let’s look at number one. Number one is all around existing customers. So deals that we are doing right now, deals that have said yes to us, hell yes, I want to work with you, and how we can increase the spend of those customers.
So examples of these can be things like maintenance deals, particularly for businesses that provide a product that’s going to need ongoing maintenance, gardens, pools, roofs, window cleaning, lots and lots of examples of products and services that need maintenance. So providing maintenance deals that increase that average spend. Increasing the scope of works, particularly when a contract is signed but also when we’re midway through deals or through projects where customers say an opportunity to take advantage of what they’re doing with you now to get an even better result.
Really common in anything that’s being built, really common when we are buying products that are being consumed, i.e. to buy more products that we will consume over a longer period of time but where we can increase the average sale price of our existing customers that is very high gross margin levels and really importantly is free. It very rarely costs us more than a little bit of time but to get variances or growth on existing projects is something that grows sales significantly. Now, if I throw a number out here, if we can get a variance on 20% of our projects, i.e. customers spend more with us, so if 20% of our projects increase their sales by or their spend with us by 10%, very small number, only one in five customers increase their spend with us by 10%, pretty small.
That’s a 2% growth in sales but if we can get 30 to 40% of our customers, so let’s run with a slightly higher number here, 30% of our customers increasing their spend with us by 30%, so 30% of our customers spend 30% more with us, that’s a 9% or almost 10% growth on our business. Now, that’s impactful, growing your entire sales for the year simply by having 30% of your customers spend 30% more. Now, I see plenty of businesses have numbers between 20, 30 and even 40% growth in customer spend after they’ve started with them and I see numbers anywhere between 10 and 50%.
So it’s a very powerful way to be increasing sales without more leads and it all comes down to strengthening and broadening your relationship with your customers. The next piece here is past customers. I’m privileged to work with businesses who have often hundreds but even more frequently thousands of quotes in their database, sometimes tens of thousands and on the rare occasion like one of our larger customers at the moment, hundreds of thousands of quotes in their pipeline.
Existing quotes and past customers, so be those numbers either existing quotes or past customers but going back to revisit those is a really powerful way to generate sales. It’s very rare that I will see a business not invest time into past quotes or past customers. A, to see if those past quotes are ready to go now, particularly ones that did not proceed at all and B, for past customers, seeing if they need any of your services again and I want you to think about the first example here where we’re increasing the average spend.
When they’re going back to these customers, a really powerful way again to grow sales without invested money. The customers generally know you, there is a level of trust there and often these deals are able to proceed forward quickly because they’re simply a repeat purchase or an extended purchase or they are a saying yes to some of that hard work that you did during the initial quote. So number one, increasing the spend of current customers.
Number two, going back to past customers, be they one or be they those that didn’t move forward and number three is around referrals and look, this is on the list of every single sales leader I speak to and the very vast majority of business leaders I speak to and that’s around how they can get more of their customers to refer them more often. This is often ground where sales people and leaders in particular aren’t prepared to go down because they’re worried about either upsetting their existing customers or probably more impactfully, they simply don’t remember or don’t have the time to do so but experience from having worked across hundreds into thousands now of sales people says that when we ask for referrals and they happen, close rates are very, very high. It’s rare I see a business whose close rates for referrals aren’t significantly higher and it’s almost never that I see close rates from referrals being equal, just equal to close rates from new deals but they are always higher and almost always significantly higher.
So where we’re able to roll into our systems that we are asking existing customers for referrals, be they through emails, be they through text messages, be they through phone conversations, be they through smart leave behinds or be they through simply asking our customers if they know anyone else who might be interested and we can go and do the work ourselves. This is where we see really strong impacts to businesses growing their sales without more leads. One of the really clever and canny ways that I’ve seen businesses do this is actually where they’re certainly doing all of those things around referrals but when they’re looking for a really easy entry point and one for you to think about is to mention to a customer when you’re finishing their project that you are going to drop flyers in their street and if anyone asks them about you, would they be happy to reference that you’ve done a good job and those flyers get created as hey, we’ve just completed some work in your street.
We’d love to speak to you. Is there a moment that we can catch up and certainly the message there can be played with but what I really love seeing is it’s a referral that’s being asked for without any real proactive effort from the customer. Hey, I’m going to do the letterbox drop.
I’m going to reference we’ve done some work in the street and certainly the gold standard of this is beyond the letterbox drop and knocking on the doors but I’m going to reference that I’ve done some work. Will you put in a good word for me? Certainly in the street I live in, I have seen so many suppliers introduced to people in the street. In fact, I’ve seen suppliers that are almost living in our street because they’ve been able to ask the question around who else needs work done.
So yes, that’s a very specific example but I’d like to leave you with something really commercial that you can implement immediately from these podcasts but certainly today, what we’ve done is focus on three ways that you can generate more sales without new leads. New leads are expensive, new leads are really time consuming and they are not the only way to grow. So we’ve spoken about increasing what your current customers spend, we’ve spoken about how you can go back to past customers, be those who went with you or didn’t go with you and the third one around how we can increase our engagement with customers on referrals.
Four or five different ways we can do this ending with a simple one such as door knocking or letterbox dropping. The reality that I see across a lot of trade businesses is that generally, the focus goes on to new leads. They are so busy that their focus is on new leads.
New leads come in the door, they respond to those and close rates are generally not as high as they want to be. They’re so busy, they just cannot get enough yeses from what they quote. Now, this is a process that without focus and attention on it is unlikely to change or you need to do something about it.
So we offer a free mini sales process audit, a quote audit for all of our podcast listeners. It’s super easy for you to access. It’s in our show notes links.
You can click on it. It sets up the meeting, one click and you’re there and we will help you move your sales or find a bump in your sales of generally 20 to 30%. Take away that frustration of quoting a lot of deals and not getting enough yeses and help you grow your business.
That’s it for today. We really look forward to talking with you next time. Bye for now.