Are the growing pains in your business a sign that something is wrong—or proof that you’re actually making progress?
Growth sounds exciting in theory, but for most trade business leaders it often feels uncomfortable in reality.
Whether you’re working longer hours, investing more money into the business, or pushing yourself to win new customers, growth can create uncertainty and pressure.
By listening to this episode, you’ll discover:
- Why feeling uncomfortable during periods of growth is often a positive sign that your business is evolving.
- The three most common growth challenges trade business owners face—and how to manage them effectively.
- A practical framework for measuring success and knowing when to push forward or pause to strengthen your foundations before growing again.
Listen now to learn how to navigate the discomfort of growth with confidence and turn temporary challenges into long-term business success.
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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 grow your sales quickly through a very consistent approach to measuring and engaging your team for great sales performance.
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:
Great quote from one of my customers the other week, as a team, we are getting so much better at selling. Senior leader, 35 years in business and has a small team around him, but a team that does very large average sales sizes.
One of the things that came out in our conversation that came after that quote was just how impactful for them being able to consistently measure and frame what progress means to their business has been able to help them. For me, I love the saying around what gets measured gets done. It’s worked so well for me across my life, but so often, I work with businesses, trade businesses, sales leaders in particular who say that measuring progress can be too complex for them and they don’t want complex measurement metrics, they don’t want complex tools or they don’t have time to be really following significant systems.
I certainly understand that. I’ve been in a business that grew. We doubled every year for six years.
We ended up being a $40 million a year business eight years from startup and we won some fast growth company awards along the journey. Terrific business, so much fun, but it got hard to measure progress across three divisions when I was frantic trying to manage the 80-odd staff that we had in the business and not to mention the 200 subcontractors as well. However, this is a process that has worked so well for me at a personal level across my 25 years in sales, so well that I wanted to make sure that I shared it with everyone today.
The first thing to do when you’re wanting to look at how we can measure that progress and really set ourselves up for success is to use the three-box model. We have gone through the three-box model on this podcast a number of times. If you’re really interested in knowing more and you’re not sure about it, go all the way back to episode 15 about three years ago.
It’s a terrific episode that talks through the importance of these three measurement tools which is essentially, in fact, I’ll let that episode go through it in detail for you, but very first thing to do when it comes to wanting to consistently increase sales performance in your business, in my experience, is to sit down and set the targets. Get really clear on what you need to do to succeed and the three-box model is a great way to do that. Now, for me, this is where a lot of trade businesses fall down because in many salespeople that I’ve worked with along the journey, they find that measuring progress is not something that fills their sales.
It’s something they see as a contracting experience rather than one that expands them and makes them excited. Now, I have quite a unique perspective. I think it’s unique because not that many people agree with me at the outset on this.
Well, I think it’s unique because not that many people share the same approach to measurement as I do. However, once I have this discussion with them, I find that many do convert and that is that measuring progress, so holding ourselves accountable to the targets that we set, for me, is fundamentally one of the best ways to grow a business and, of course, the response can be, hey, close checking, not so good. It doesn’t engage me and motivate me.
The conversation that I have in return with any salesperson or sales or business leader goes along the lines of, okay, so tell me, what does it mean for the business if you hit your KPIs or we hit our KPIs? They say great success, fantastic. What does it mean for the customer? Well, normally, it means we’re helping more customers, right? They’re getting more of our product and if we’ve got a good product or service, then that’s a positive. Great.
What does it mean for you personally, either as a leader or a salesperson in a team? Well, it means I’ve got a happy employer or it means my business is healthy or it means I’m getting my bonus. Some people will say my commission. I say fantastic.
So, all of those are positive. Yes. Yes.
Great. Okay. So, why wouldn’t we measure ourselves against those and really drive hard to make sure we’re doing everything we can to tick those boxes off, to hit those targets so that everyone’s happy? I start to see, I get an initial response from that and I think that where the real positive kicker comes in is when we talk about how if we measure those but we do it in the right manner with the right mindset, that we have a positive environment coming from it.
I think this is where many leaders fall down is that they will set targets and when the targets are not hit, the comments come from a negative space. Why haven’t we done this? What do you need to do more of? What’s the reason we haven’t got enough quotes out? Why aren’t we closing them? Versus, okay, let’s talk through what’s getting in the way. What’s getting in the way of making this happen so that we can close more deals? What’s the things that we need to focus on to help us be better as a business? Where can we make progress? Where can we grow? And when we come from that curious mindset rather than which is more the carrot approach rather than the stick approach that looks at all the things that are going wrong, then measuring progress can be a really fulfilling journey for anyone in a business.
And that’s the second place where I recommend people go. So first of all, start by setting your targets. Then move into measuring progress against them, being really clear on exactly what we’re going to do when we don’t hit those targets.
And the third piece which I’ve just alluded to is defining measurement as a positive experience. I think that’s the piece where I’d expect most people listening today to sit down and go, uh-huh, I get what you’re saying. We know how to set targets.
We know how to measure against them. But how do we make sure the measurement process is positive for everyone? How do we make sure that as part of our journey to chasing our dreams as a business owner, as part of our journey to hitting our sales targets if we’re a salesperson or a sales leader, how do we make sure that that is an enjoyable process even when it’s not working? And I call this recognizing progress and celebrating wins and I think there’s another whole podcast that we’ll need to do on that. And in fact, I’ll do that in the next month or two.
But the three areas that I see teams consistently increase their sales more often than others is when they set targets, measure progress against them, and define that measurement as a positive. So if you’re not sure on setting targets, just go back to episode 15. I know it’s a long way back but it will clearly step out for you in some detail what you need to do then.
If you’re not sure how to measure progress, well that’s where you should be contacting us but there’s a terrific another group of episodes we’ve done which is called Four Ways of Meeting and the Four Ways of Meeting is a really effective way to embed those into exactly how you measure your progress. And the Four Ways of Meeting was also covered in one of those earlier podcast examples so get in and do some podcast binging if you’d like to go back to some of the really meaningful strategies and frameworks that we recommend to all of the businesses that we work with. But if we can get those three things right, setting targets, measuring progress, and defining the third piece here that measurement is a positive experience, that’s where I see teams really consistently increase their sales performance.
So that’s the takeaway I’d like you to get from today. To consistently increase our sales performance, we need to set targets, measure progress, and make sure it’s a positive experience. If you can take that from today and do something about it in your business, then I’d expect you to see some really positive results come from it.
At the same time, if you find that you’re not getting the results in your business, i.e. you’re not growing quickly enough and it is a little bit frustrating, well not changing something is going to lead to that. To continue to be frustrating, for you to continue to throw lots of time at it, and at the end of the day not have enough profit or money in the bank to show for it. So we have our free quote quiz in our show notes.
It’s free. It’s very quick for you to experience. Jump into the show notes and have a go at it.
You then follow up with some time with us that will without doubt move your sales and in most experiences, they’re 20% to 25% growth that we see when people implement some of these really consistent and key changes that we put forward to them. It’s there. It’s in the show notes.
Jump in and we’d love to hear from you soon. But between now and next episode, please keep that focus on being 1% better each and every day. It does make all the difference.
Bye for now.