Do you know exactly where you’re losing sales—or are you just assuming it’s the price?
Many trade businesses spend countless hours chasing more leads when the real issue lies somewhere in their sales process.
In this episode, Ben shares one simple but powerful exercise that helps uncover where deals are falling through, making it easier to focus your efforts on the changes that will have the biggest impact on your close rate.
By listening to this episode, you’ll learn how to:
- Audit your last 20 lost deals to identify the stage where prospects are most commonly dropping out.
- Spot recurring patterns in your sales process so you can fix the biggest bottlenecks instead of guessing.
- Focus your improvement efforts on the areas that will deliver the fastest gains in close rates and overall sales performance.
Press play now to discover the one practical exercise that can reveal why you’re losing deals—and help you start closing more of the opportunities already in your pipeline.
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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:
Are you not closing enough sales? Well, today I want to talk through one process audit that you can run to find the gap that is really impacting on your sales growth.
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:
The aim of today’s short and sharp podcast is to help you walk away with one action item that will immediately improve your close rates. Big statement, right? But it’s a big statement because I have done it so many times with so many businesses and seen it make the difference with almost all of them.
Let’s get straight into it, right? We’re going to make this really short today so that you can get busy improving your sales. The key thing that I would encourage or I do encourage every single trade business that I work with to do when they start to look at how they can increase their close rates is to find the spot where they are losing their customers the most. Is it at lead qualification? In fact, is it a lead not even answering? Is it once you qualify a lead but can’t get out to site? Is it once you get to site and you feel like you’re losing them in your site order? Is it post quote, like you quote them and you never hear anything back? Is it after you ask for the business? Is it at a certain period, right? A certain time period? Is it a certain size deal? Is it a certain type of customer? But what I really encourage any trade business to do that wants to increase their close rates is to go back their last 20 or 30 deals and have a look at where they think they’ve lost them.
Now, for those in the Sold Out Sales Teams Academy, we actually work through this in a slightly different manner. We go through it step by step and we tend to, well, I tend to pinpoint those with them once we get to know their business. But for you who’s out there doing this on your own, what I’d really encourage you to do is to pull up the last 20 deals that you lost and go and have a look at where you lost them.
Was it at the quote stage, right? The landscaper that we worked with down in Melbourne was losing too many deals between their design presentation and their quote presentation, right? The engagement was just dropping. So we put in a solution there to help them bring that to life. We had a solar business that was losing their customers at the decision-making time and not because they wouldn’t make a decision, but because the decision-making process was going from one person that they were presenting to, to a committee of five or six people.
And they simply weren’t getting known to that committee of five or six people. So the deals were either stopping because that committee didn’t understand what was happening or they were going with someone else. We had a painter who was losing lots of deals at lead qualification stage.
So they were simply trying to quote everyone, which meant they were spending too little time on their quotes, which meant the quotes felt very robotic, which meant the quotes were poor quality, which meant the quotes were slow to deliver. So the end result was that they were quite simply quoting a lot, but not closing a lot. Now there’s three examples.
For you, your hole could be anywhere. But if you go through your last 20 deals, I would be very surprised if you didn’t find two, three, or even four key themes that came out around where you were losing your customers. The key is what do you do next about it? And we’re actually going to go through that in episode 249, which is coming up later in this week.
But to give you a sneak peek, what we really need to understand is at that stage, what you’re doing well and where you need to improve on. That’s all I’m going to say for today. I just want you to go back through your last 20 deals.
That’s your action item or your choose your own adventure challenge for today is to go back through your last 20 deals, find out where you lost them, and find similarities or common patterns. I will say that most people, when they put down the phone or after a conversation with me, or they stop listening to these podcasts, will let tomorrow get in the way of today, i.e. they’ll get back into their day and not do this. But I just want to reiterate just how powerful it is to find out where you’re losing your deals.
It is an exercise that if you spend the hour on now, you will never ever look back in terms of the improvements that it can make to your business. Because the reality is, if you’re not closing enough deals and you don’t do anything differently, you are going to have those same frustrations again and again and again. You’re going to work long hours, you’re not going to make money, you’re not going to have the right cash flow, and your business is going to control you.
If you’re not prepared to go and do that process audit, at the very least, please go and have a look at our free quote quiz. It’s in the show notes. It’s very easy to do.
It takes less than a minute and I’ll respond to each of those personally. That’s it for today. Really short and sharp.
Please go and have a look at where you’re losing deals, find the gaps, and we’ll talk a little bit more around what you can do with them in Episode 249. That’s it for now. Look forward to catching you next time.