What if you could grow your trade business by 10% or more this year—without spending another dollar on marketing?
Many trade business owners assume more growth requires more leads, bigger marketing budgets, or higher advertising spend. But often, the fastest path to increasing revenue is maximizing opportunities that already exist within your current customer base.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- How to use project variations strategically to increase revenue while delivering more value to customers.
- A simple referral approach that can create a steady stream of high-quality opportunities from existing clients.
- Why repeat business is one of the most underutilized growth strategies and how to unlock additional revenue from past customers.
Listen now to learn how small improvements in variations, referrals, and repeat business can create double-digit sales growth and put more profit back into your business.
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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’re going to unpack how you can grow your sales business without spending more on marketing, but absolutely increasing your top and bottom line along the journey.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you 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, we’re going to unpack the challenges that every trade and sales leader and business leader, in fact, that I’ve worked with has had to focus on across their journey, and that is growing sales. We’re going to look at three levers you can pull to grow your sales without needing to invest more money in marketing, without needing to pull money or cash out of your bank, and without needing to worry about the quality of leads you’re generating. Let’s dive straight into it.
We want to make this nice and short and sharp on a Friday, but there are three ways that I see businesses really actively grow their sales. When I say really actively, I’m talking about double-digit growth here. I want you to have a think for a moment that what would double-digit growth mean to your business this year? What would 10% growth at a baseline mean to how your business looks in 12 months’ time? If you’re turning over $3 million and you can generate another 10% this year, another $300,000 without more marketing costs, so it is simply gross profit that can flow the majority of it straight to the bottom line, what does that do for you? What does that do in terms of changing your business, in terms of changing how many staff you can put on, in terms of changing profits that you can generate out of it, in terms of your life? What does that extra cash mean for you? Is that money that becomes available to putting kids into different schools or new opportunities or extending the house or going on holidays or quite simply putting in the bank to pay down on your mortgage? I want you to think about that as you go through this process because my experience says that when we can leverage, and yeah, I’ll be really clear that when we can leverage the purpose for us as business owners to something very personal, we are far more likely to roll it out.
So, let’s look at these three options. Number one is variation. Variations is far and above one of the most effective ways I see businesses grow revenue without marketing.
Now, we spoke about variations back in episode 199 and not being a business that deliberately quotes low, leaves out prices and hits customers with variations that you knew about each and every time. But what we talk about here is variations that we can be rolling out with our customers that either highlight early potential project variations so that when they do come about, we don’t have significant conflict with our customer. Two, increasing in scope of variations so that when we are with a commercial business and we are designing a new fit out and we logically see some extensions to that mid-project, we roll them out.
Or number three is the extension of projects. Once we finish, we’re at a residential house, we have just gone and developed, we’ve rolled out some new windows for that house that we suddenly see they have some really old louvres there that now look out of place and we need to go and replace those too. So, variations is number one.
Super effective way to grow a business. If you can have a 10% variation from 30% of your customers, there’s 3% business growth just like that. 3% business growth if you simply have 10% from one in three customers.
The second one here is referrals. So, asking for customers and again, we spoke about referrals back in episode 198 but asking for customers if they know anyone else that would be interested in talking to you either at the time of sale, at the retention point, so when they’ve just started to see the benefits of what you’re doing or once the project is completed. But asking them if they can introduce you to someone else that they know.
Now, if you can get a referral from 10% of your customers and one in three of those close, there’s another 3% top line onto your business. Only 10% of your customers giving you a referral and only one in three closing and I’d argue that you can certainly get more than one in three from referrals. There’s another 3% growth to your business with zero cost.
And the third one here comes down to repeat business. So, this is going back to customers to ask them to do more work with you. Regardless of what industry you’re in, there is almost always ways you can go back to the customers to ask for more business.
If you’re in windows and you’ve gone and done a whole lot of new windows in your house, it’s very rare that I’ve seen a business or a residential house that replace all the windows. There’s almost always opportunities to do more down the track. If it’s a new build and a customer and you’ve done the windows with them, there are extensions down the track.
There are buying investment properties down the track. There are times when they sell and they buy new houses. And again, and look for me, this one’s really, really simple.
So, if one in 10 of your customers come back for the project and that project’s only half the size, so it’s only 50% of the value, then there’s 5% growth for your business. One in 10 customers come back for a project that’s 50% of the size. Now, those one in 10 customers don’t have to come back every year, but each year we’ve got to have one in 10 of those return.
That’s it. It’s as simple as that. We get one in 10 come back with a project that’s 50% of the size, there’s 5% in business growth.
So, if we add those numbers up, 3% growth in variations, 3% growth from referrals, and 5% growth from repeat business, there we have 11% growth for our business. From some very small numbers and very easy questions. I’d certainly argue that if you just did one of those on its own, that if we went out for variations and we had 50% of our customers, 50% of our customers had their projects grow by 20%, well, there’s our 10% variation.
If we had one in three of our customers offer referrals and we closed one in three of those, there’s 10% there. If we had 50% of our customers come back for a project that was 20% the size of what they did the first time, there’s 10% growth there. These are really easy levers that you can pull to be growing your business without having to spend money on marketing.
Again, I want to repeat as we finish up today that it is very, very rare that I work with a business that does this. Occasionally, I see one doing one of those or even two of those, but never do I see one doing all three, particularly around referrals and repeat business. So, there’s an opportunity in there for you to grow.
It’s with you today to have a think about which of those levers you could do better at or simply just roll out to your business. Again, it’s very much in that 1% better everyday approach. That’s what I’d love you to leave and be grateful for you to roll out and implement from today.
That is it for today. Really looking forward to our podcast next week. We’ll see you on Monday.
Thanks very much for tuning in. Bye for now.