Are you waiting for the big wins to celebrate while missing the small victories that actually drive long-term sales success?

Many trade business leaders believe they recognize their team’s achievements often enough—but their employees usually see it very differently.

Focusing only on major sales wins can lead to lower morale, missed learning opportunities, and disengaged teams. 

By listening to this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why celebrating small milestones—not just major wins—creates stronger sales performance and team culture.
• How recognizing progress helps identify winning patterns, improve motivation, and build confidence for both leaders and employees.
• Practical ways to embed recognition into your meetings, coaching sessions, and daily leadership routines to keep your team engaged and growing.

Listen now to discover how recognizing progress consistently can transform your team’s motivation, strengthen your culture, and help you achieve more sales success—one small win at a time.

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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: 

Recognizing progress and not just celebrating wins is so impactful for teams and businesses who want to not only keep their leaders engaged but also their broader teams. Today we’re going to jump into the simple reasons why you need to do it more often. 

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:

Growing up as a leader I have to admit that I simply did not celebrate enough wins with our teams or recognize the progress that individuals were making.

As a leader I fell into that trap that was very very common where most leaders think that they actually celebrate more than enough and then when you flip the shoe on to the other foot to the foot of their team members or the feet of their team members they actually think that businesses don’t celebrate enough or anywhere near enough and when you run stats on that it’s typically 75% or roughly that number I paraphrase of leaders think they celebrate enough within their business but only 25% of staff do. So there’s this amazing polarity and today we’re actually going to jump into three ways and three reasons that you can more effectively recognize progress and celebrate wins for your team to not only keep them engaged but also keep you going. Short and sharp we’re going to jump straight into it this is well worth the 7 to 10 minutes because when you get this right it has inordinate gigantic impacts on the culture and on the morale of not just your team but also you as a leader.

So the first area I’d like to look into here is when we celebrate and I love this saying recognize progress and celebrating wins it’s something that evolved in our business across the last 10 years and I remember distinctly the situation I was in it was a very senior sales member of a very big team 50 odd people in this team they had a revenue line of close to 5 billion dollars and he actually workshopped this line with me and that is recognizing progress and celebrating wins because his feedback was that across his career the celebrations were just left to when big deals were won you know those deals you’ve been working on for a really long period of time or the first customer of a type or even a really profitable deal that most teams waited until they happened before they celebrated and his feedback was and certainly I share this was that along the journey when you are able to recognize progress and that’s all those small things that need to happen to get the big deals done that there is a far greater chance that you’re actually going to get those big deals done because we’re ticking off little milestones along those journey right picking up little pots of gold as we are on a far longer journey so that once we get to our destination not only does it mean we have a better chance of getting to our destination but it also means that the celebration can then happen recognizing all those small steps that we’ve taken along the way so the first area I want you to think about and challenge you to think about today is how you celebrate wins do you celebrate just those big ones or do you have a system where you recognize smaller steps of progress that are really integral in getting the bigger deals ticked off now if you don’t there’s a really nice formula as to how you can really regularly recognize progress you’re welcome to contact me directly or do it via the quote quiz that we have at the end of today’s show but really importantly we need to make sure and I want to challenge you that you are thinking about not just celebrating the big wins but the smaller steps along the way and a really significant piece that comes out of this is that I would expect you to be able to recognize patterns that come from these one deals so when you start to look at those smaller bits of progress those smaller steps that happen along the journey that you’ll also see some patterns roll out that will help you not only improve your sales process and we talk a lot about improving your sales process but it will also help you find areas of weakness that you might want to focus on a little bit more to get a higher close rate and in the end celebrate more one deals so first thing first challenge for today is to think about how you can recognize progress on the smaller steps and not just celebrate wins and of course there are ways you can recognize progress with smaller gestures they don’t all need to be having those big yahoo celebration moments that we often equate or that we align with one deals but they can also certainly focus on some of the smaller steps along the way get in touch if you want to know more we don’t have time to go into them today second part okay so we’re recognizing a lot of smaller things not just waiting for the bigger wins that’s that first challenge this is a really impactful in fact more impactful than just about any cultural activity i’ve ever rolled out with sales teams but it’s really impactful on leaders of businesses so if you’re listening right now and i’ve just had this discussion with a commercial plasterer who quotes on big jobs so when i mean big jobs they are six figure jobs they’re a hundred thousand dollar type of jobs which take them two to three weeks to complete i got a couple of teams so they’re winning a job maybe once a week across their team they’re certainly not winning jobs every day but one job a week is a reasonably good week for that business and these jobs go up even even bigger you know they’re up to quarter of a million dollar even half a million dollar jobs they’re quite big jobs so for this team we had a great discussion around how do you recognize progress along these deals so that we’re not just celebrating the big win but also those smaller steps of progress and the leader from this business who we’ve had multiple conversations with has actually commented about how much it’s helping their motivation because when they get to recognize these small steps of progress it actually makes their life more enjoyable not only are they having better interactions with their team but they’re buoyed with more confidence about their own business because they’re starting to see the patterns of one deals and they’re starting to celebrate or recognize the progress of those more and more and more so the second piece i really want you to think about is that recognizing progress isn’t just great to help you work out where you have patterns of one deals or areas you can improve on but it’s also fantastic for you and your motivation and then the third area which is the most obvious leaving to last of course is your team there is absolutely no doubt the teams who celebrate together stay together we’ve heard so many lines around what keeps people motivated in businesses financial is one clear one risk is one clear one ie they’ve got a job and they can feed their family and you know and it’s a safe pair of hands where they work status is certainly one where people feel like they are recognized by their business and they are important and what they do is meaningful and the third one is around learning now the great part about this is that recognizing progress actually covers off every single one of those from a financial point of view often when you’re recognizing progress there’s small incentives that might go to it or if there’s not by recognizing progress that help your team member or you yourself close more deals or your business close more deals it’s leading to a better financial outcome for them when it comes to risk and having a safe job when you recognize progress it makes people feel as if they are more secure in the job that they do when it comes to status of course recognizing progress out loud ticks that status box that people are important and that what they do is meaningful and the last one around learning of course when we’re recognizing progress that’s a closed learning loop where people can feel acknowledged that what they’re doing is working and take the learning from that i.e. they do more and more and more of it so recognizing progress isn’t just great to find patterns of one deals it’s also great to be helping your own motivation but also your team and it really does support four of the key motivators around why people come to work so that’s the challenge for you today is to have a think about how you can recognize progress more and what are the types of activities that you can recognize progress on in your business and then how you can do that do you do it through sales meetings do you do it through one-to-ones do you do it through a regular barbecue or a toolbox talk that you have do you do it through training right do you do it through deal reviews with your team there’s a number of ways you can do it but they’re the things that i really want you to think about today as we move out of this episode because if there’s one thing i’m certain on that my job here is to help you reduce that frustration around spending hours and hours wasting time on sales quotes that’s my job i want you to be closing more deals but i’m also very aware that for most sales businesses you need to be able to change something and this should be recognizing progress and celebrating wins should be one of the things that you can change that will stop you getting those same stressful results over and over again working long hours not enough money in the bank the other thing you can do is go to the free quoting quiz that we have in our show notes it will pinpoint exactly why you’re not winning more jobs and what you need to do to grow quickly your sales and by quickly i mean 20 to 25 percent so you can click on that free link in the show notes to get started it takes you less than a minute and i personally will come back to you but that’s it for today i hope you can take something from this recognizing progress topic roll it into being one percent better each and every day because it does make all the difference