Have you identified where you’re losing sales—and do you know exactly what to do to fix it?

Finding the weakest point in your sales process is only the beginning. The real growth comes from taking a structured approach to improving it. 

In this episode, Ben builds on the previous discussion by sharing a practical framework that helps trade businesses turn sales bottlenecks into opportunities for higher close rates and sustainable business growth.

By listening to this episode, you’ll discover how to:

• Evaluate what’s already working well in your sales process so you can build on your existing strengths.
• Pinpoint the specific improvements that will have the greatest impact on converting more quotes into jobs.
• Define clear success measures for every change you make, creating a repeatable cycle of review, refinement, and continuous improvement.

Press play now to learn a simple three-step framework that will help you strengthen your sales process, close more jobs, and build a business that keeps improving one percent at a time.

Take our Free Quote Quiz now to Kickstart Your Sales Growth

To see how we’ve helped business grow their sales: 

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Or email Ben if you would like to get in touch: hello@strongersalesteams.com

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 dive a little bit deeper into episode 248 and have a look at how you can improve three parts of your sales strategy to stop you risking the future growth of your trade business. 

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:

Our job today, or your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to be curious around three parts of your sales strategy that we’re going to go through that will help you future-proof the growth of your business. Now, this episode came from a quote from one of my customers a couple of years ago, actually, and this was quite a large business.

They’re about $350 million in turnover, and the quote went something like this, Ben, you push me into thinking about my strategy when I simply can’t day-to-day. Now, this was a very experienced sales leader and someone who I rate really highly in terms of their ability to not only sell themselves but to understand their market. For someone who had so much experience, I’m talking about 35 years experience in sales, to say, hey, you’re pushing me into strategy actually made me at that point in time spend a significant amount more of my time working with my trade businesses in particular around some small things they can do on their sales strategy that will help them grow their business.

Now, this episode is following on from episode 248, which was Monday’s episode. It’s a very short episode, and I would encourage you to go back and listen to that first if you haven’t already done so. So, press pause, go back to 248, and we’ll see you in about seven or eight minutes if you haven’t.

But just to recap for those who did listen is this episode was all about doing one audit or a process audit of your last 20 deals that you lost and finding out where those deals were dropping off. Was it at lead stage? Was it at site inspection stage or quote stage? Or was it at closing stage? Where was the point where your deals are dropping off? So, from there, the aim is that we actually find out exactly where customers are choosing not to proceed with us, which then gives us the opportunity to say, okay, what are we going to do about it? And today, that’s what I’d like to look at. So, how do we go about that? Well, I can certainly say that this is a process I have done hundreds and hundreds of times.

In fact, I am into the thousands of times. So, what I can say about this process is it’s one that I’ve done thousands of times, not hundreds, not dozens of times, but thousands of times. And that’s not only within my own businesses, but also within the businesses that I help improve their sales numbers with.

And what it looks like is something like this. First of all, we found the area that our customers are dropping off. I’m going to take the most common point, which is after we quote them, to use that as an example.

So, we find that, okay, we’ve quoted a customer, gone. Really hard to get them to move forward from this point in time. What do I do about it? First thing that I encourage businesses to do is to sit down and say, okay, what are we doing really well at this point? Quoting quickly, pricing well, giving our customers lots of stories, being really clear on the processes that they need to move forward, being personal, getting the quote out to them both face-to-face and via email.

Lots of cool things that we look at what we’re doing well. And what I want you to do is say, okay, great. These are the areas I think we’ve got covered.

So, it’s always good when you start these type of exercises in a positive manner because when you do start to look at areas you can improve, that can be a little bit challenging. And I like to make sure that as a business, we have the right headspace when we’re getting into this. So, take those areas we do well and just put them to one side for now.

The second thing to do is to then look and say, okay, where do we need to improve? Now, that can be a challenge in itself for businesses because sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know, right? And they’re not actually sure where their business isn’t working well. Now, that’s the point where you’ll generally go and talk to your team, talk to your customers or even more impactfully get some help, right? We’re here. We can help you as you need to with it but certainly that’s not the point of this podcast, right? Because it is an exercise.

You can certainly do the first parts of on your own. So, we’ve had a look at what you’re doing well. The second thing is to look at where you need to improve.

So, if we use this quote example as our case study for today, did you agree with the customer what you were going to do next post the quote? Did we have a job for the customer once we left, right, that they were going to do and they were going to move forward with? Did we ask them what they’d like to do next? Was our quote sharp, right? Was it really easy to read? Did we confirm with the customer that we’ve ticked off everything they needed? Right now, these are small things. There’s some larger things that says, are we too slow to quote? Is our quote itself not engaging? Our sales team not actually asking the right questions of customers so we’re doing the wrong quotes. Are we pricing inaccurately? We hate to talk about price being the reason that people win or lose deals but it’s really important to review and make sure that we are in the right ballpark with our customers.

I generally say zero to five percent. If you’re creating value, you should never lose deals. Five to ten percent.

So, to give an example of this, of an area where we might need to improve is if it’s pricing. I generally say that if we are in zero to five percent of our competition, we should be able to win every deal based on value. If we’re between five and ten percent, right, then we need to be making sure we’re clearly creating that value and then if we’re above twenty percent, then we need to be really clear with our customers around why they should be choosing us over other people.

Thankfully, most of the businesses I work with generally are in the premium space so they’re pretty well-versed in doing this but what I often find is that it’s not their pricing that needs to improve but how they communicate the value that it creates. So, there’s a slightly deeper example around an area where you might identify that you need to improve. So, we’re building on episode 248.

We’re into 249 today and it’s all about what you can do to improve where you find that gap in your sales offering. So, first of all, have a look at what you do well. Secondly, have a think about where you need to improve and then your third exercise in your last part for today is define what success looks like in that improvement.

Is it quoting within five days instead of seven days? Is it increasing the storytelling that you have across your quote templates? Is it simply agreeing with your customer on what your next steps are or confirming with them that you’ve ticked off everything they need? But when you can define what success looks like based on where you need to improve, that allows you to then go and execute the improvement, review its progress, refine and from there, you review, refine, review, refine, review, refine. It’s a really nice cycle to get involved with when it comes to improvement because certainly my experience is that when I work with a business who starts to improve, they get that appetite to want to do more and more and more and they simply continue to roll it out from there. So, 248, 249 episodes package deal here.

248 was all about finding the area of your sales process where you’re losing customers the most and episode 249 is all about what you can do to fix that. So, number one, what you do well. Number two, where you need to improve and number three, what success looks like.

So, your action item from today is if not, if you haven’t already, go and listen to episode 248 and review your last 20 lost deals. From there, I’d like you to have a think about, okay, can I find an hour where I will look at one of the areas we found that we’re not doing well, have a look at what we’re doing well, have a think about where we need to improve and then just pick one of those that you could define what success looks like. One area from your business where you’re losing customers where you think you can improve and go and play with that.

I’m always happy to hear about what that is. So, let me know. Please, it’s easy to contact us.

Let me know if you’d like just some thoughts around that. But at the same time, if you are quoting over and over again and you’re not winning enough deals, it’s getting increasingly frustrating, then I think my advice is that if you don’t change something, you’re probably going to get those results again and again and again. So, please go and take our free quote quiz audit.

It’s in the show notes. It’s super quick and I personally review every single response. Otherwise, that’s it for today.

Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.