What if working harder isn’t the answer to growing your sales?
Many business owners and sales professionals pride themselves on their work ethic—and rightly so. But hard work alone doesn’t guarantee results.
The real challenge isn’t effort; it’s making sure your effort is directed toward the activities that actually drive sales growth.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- Why hard work alone doesn’t always translate into stronger sales results
- How to distinguish between urgent tasks and truly important sales activities
- The three key levers that will help you work smarter, focus on what matters, and improve your close rates
Press play now to learn how to shift from simply working hard to working effectively—and start achieving the sales growth your effort deserves.
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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 discover why working harder won’t ever guarantee sales growth for your trade business, but also the secret hack that will make sales easier for you.
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:
Today we’re going to uncover why hard work doesn’t always result in sales growth and the three levers that will help you differentiate between hard work and effective work in growing your sales business. I remember as I was growing up in the sales world, a quote from one of our team members actually where he said to me, Ben, there is nothing worse than a hardworking, underperforming salesperson.
I stopped for a moment and I thought about that. There’s nothing worse than a hardworking, okay, they’re working hard, great, underperforming, okay, they’re not hitting their sales target, salesperson. Okay, so why is that? As we’re discussing about it, what came out of it was that it’s not the hard work that’s the problem.
The hard work’s fantastic and in most cases working hard is lined up with good results. However, it never guarantees it. In this instance, we had a salesperson in the business who was working really hard but they just weren’t converting leads.
The result and the impact on the business was that we were spending good money on leads that weren’t converting because despite the best efforts of our salesperson, they simply weren’t succeeding. That really landed with me but I hadn’t thought about rolling it into a podcast until recently when one of my customers said, hey, Ben, the biggest underlying message I personally took away from your session was that discipline, planning and me as an individual taking responsibility to get the job done is so vital. This was an experienced salesperson that said this to me about three or four months ago.
As I was planning for today, I really wanted to take both of those moments in my life as inspiration to say, hey, whilst working hard is really important, it doesn’t guarantee sales growth. I think particularly in the trade industry where I would say the very vast majority of people, leaders, sales leaders, individuals that I work with in this industry work hard particularly at a business ownership level. It’s very rare that I have to sit down with one of our team, one of our students and say, hey, you’re not working hard enough.
However, that doesn’t mean they’re always working smart. There’s three things that we really instil into these businesses that help them focus not just on working hard but on being smart about where they spend their time. The first one here is going to be no surprise and that’s good systems, good sales processes.
I mention it in a lot of our podcasts and I’m not going to spend much time on it today. If you haven’t got the message around the importance of a sales process, then please go back and listen to three of the last four episodes, episode 209, 210 and 211. They all cover this and even 212 that spoke about the fuel crisis actually talks about processes as well.
Number one is having great systems and processes. Number two is something we haven’t spoken about a lot which is all around having the discipline to focus on what matters. When you look at jobs or things to do, we can often classify them into what’s urgent and what’s important.
Yes, we absolutely have times when jobs are urgent and important but I generally don’t worry about those because they generally get done. They’re urgent so they’re screaming at you and they’re important so that your brain says, hey, I need to get them done. However, delineating between what’s urgent and what’s important when it comes down to what you focus on is really impactful and I’ll give you some examples here.
What’s urgent can be when we have to return phone calls of non-sales related activities, right? Someone really needs to speak to us. What’s urgent can be completing some background admin that we got a business, right, putting some pressure on us around. What’s urgent can be a phone call from a lead who really wants to talk to you but you deep down know they’re never going to go ahead, right? And what I’ll say here is I’ve deliberately lined up urgent tasks that I would say are not necessarily important.
What’s important are things like contacting customers really quickly, getting out to site visits, understanding what’s valuable to customers, getting quotes done quickly, following up quotes. Now sometimes this clearly falls into what’s urgent as well. However, by being able to delineate what’s really important in our role versus what can be urgent, right, or what can scream at you really loudly but not necessarily be important is a really nice step to moving forward around spending your time on what matters.
And the way I’d really encourage you to do that is by having a list and we’re moving on to the third point here which is around planning is to have a list that you create at the end of each week, I do this every week myself, around what’s really important for you to get done next week. So I had three things on my list this week that I needed to make happen and each day they were the three things that I focused on to tick off to make sure we had happened. On top of that there’s also a daily list around what is really important for you to get done and the way I recommend most of our team do that is to have a power hour every morning where they focus on new leads, new quotes and following up old leads because they typically are the three most important sales activities that we need to get done to get deals closed.
So by rolling into your calendar as a power hour that has new leads, new quotes and following up of existing quotes, you get that done early, you tick it off and then you can get away onto your day. A number of my customers will have that power hour as their second hour of the day or their second thing they do in the day. So they do deal with any team-related issues first.
They get their team set up, they get them on site, they do a toolbox, whatever it may be. They return any calls that can’t wait and then they roll into that. So it might be 7 till 8.30 they focus on that or 7 till 9 they focus on that and then from 9 till 10, bang, sales activities and they make it happen.
Really nice way to look at it but for me it’s also a much more rounded perspective around ensuring we’re not just working hard but we’re focussing on what’s important. So what I’m hoping you take out of today’s first of all, the acknowledgement that you are working hard because for most people listening, I expect that’s the case. But secondly, to start to challenge yourself around if perhaps you’re working too hard on the things that aren’t as important and not quite getting to those things that are really important and some acknowledgement that it’s time to do something about it.
Because what invariably happens out of this is I find that people get frustrated because they spend so much time quoting and don’t get their jobs closed, i.e. they lose jobs or they don’t move forward. And by not changing what they’re doing, they continue to get those same stressful results over and over and over again. So change is really important.
Our commitment to podcast listeners is that we have a free quote audit that pinpoints exactly why you’re not winning more jobs or why you’re not able to focus on what’s not just urgent but what’s important and what you need to do to increase those close rates quickly. There’s a free quote audit link you can click on the show notes. It’ll get you started and it’s really simple to move forward on.
That’s it for today. Please keep that focus on being 1% better each and every day and we look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.