Are you overlooking the easiest sales opportunities already sitting in your customer database?
Many businesses spend time and money chasing new leads while neglecting the customers who already know, trust, and have bought from them.
This episode explores three free, high-impact ways to generate more sales without increasing your marketing budget.
After listening to this episode, you’ll discover:
- How reconnecting with past customers can become your most reliable and profitable source of new business.
- Why asking for referrals at the right moment dramatically increases your chances of winning qualified leads.
- How a simple maintenance strategy can create recurring revenue, strengthen customer relationships, and uncover future sales opportunities.
Hit play to learn how a few simple follow-up strategies can unlock more repeat business, referrals, and recurring revenue—without spending a dollar on new lead generation.
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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:
There is one type of customer sale that is easier than any other, and spoiler alert, it’s free.
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 are going to have a look at three ways or three types of customers. I know I said one in the title, but I’m actually going to give you three.
We’ll start with the biggest one first, three ways where you can generate customer sales easier than most others and how they’re all free. For me, I actually spoke quite clearly when it came into episode 247, so that was about a week ago. I spoke really clearly around how I go about qualifying my leads.
I spoke really clearly about how I go about generating my leads. The area that came up and the one I want to talk to today because we’re getting straight into this, there’s no need to fluff about, is repeat sales. It is the single most successful way that I grow sales in my business and has been in every single business I work with.
It’s also a topic that I mentioned to every single member of our Sold Out Sales Teams Academy and get the same response from every single member of our Sold Out Sales Teams Academy. I’m going to role play it and it goes a little bit something like this. Ben says, hey, Sold Out Sales Teams team member, can I tell you the most successful way that I generate new business? A Sold Out Sales Teams Academy member goes, yeah, tell me.
Ben says, past customers, Sold Out Sales Teams Academy member goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. They look at me, roll their eyes and go, I know, I know this is a great way to do it. From there, what we end up doing is talking about why they’re not doing more of it.
The reality is that for most businesses, particularly trade sales businesses, is they are just so damn busy that they don’t have time or they don’t prioritize the time to go back to past customers. Now, when we talk about past customers and this is number one of the three I’m going to go through, when we talk about past customers, these are people who have bought from you before and may need your service again. They may have bought a new house and need your services again.
They may have expanded their business and need your services again. The services or products that you provided to them may have expired and they need your services again. They may have consumed all of your services or products and need to buy from you again.
They may have gone to the end of their useful life and they need to buy from you again. But the reality is the very vast majority of our trade sales customers that are in the academy and that I speak to do not do enough work with their past customers. The fix is very simple.
It is to quite simply set up a process where they are regularly contacting these customers to see how they’re going. This is one of the most simple ways that anyone in the trade game can change their sales business quickly because for the majority of the team members that we work with, they have past customers. They just simply don’t have the time to go and talk to them.
So past customers is the freest, quickest, easiest, most impactful way to grow your sales when you have them within your business. The second and third areas that I’d like to talk about quickly today, second one being referrals, I’ve mentioned this a lot but I want to just do a slightly different tweak on this and that is to actually go back to our past customers and ask them when you’re talking about if they need more work, if they don’t have any for you, if they know anyone who would benefit from working with you. And it could go something like this.
Hey, fantastic. I hope you really enjoyed. We’ve had landscaping gardens as a theme for the last few podcasts so let’s stick with that.
I hope you’re really enjoying your brand new landscape garden. And then following with questions along the lines of, is there anything that you need to do more to add to it, right? Did we not quite get everything done? Really impactful when you know you quoted someone who couldn’t do the entire job at once, right? Do you have any other properties or any other businesses, right? Or anything else that we might be able to do to help you with your landscaping, right? And then we’re going to jump on to another question you can ask in a moment. But when you don’t get the answers you want there, that’s when we’re able to say, look, for example, we are a family-run business.
We get most of our work from customer referrals. Is there anyone you know in your family or your friends or your colleagues or other businesses that you think we could work with? It’s a nice soft way to do it. It prefaces that you’re a family business rather than a big corporate, right, which generally people are going to be more willing to help, right? But also gives the customers some ideas, family, friends, colleagues, other businesses, right? And when you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do more work for them by asking them for referrals or if there’s anyone else you can talk to, that’s where things can get really interesting because generally, referrals will close at a much higher rate, right, than newly generated or outbound generated leads.
Okay, so number one is all about going back to your past customers. If you’ve eye-rolled and said, I know, well, then I want you to challenge yourself and ask the question, do we do enough of it, right? And if you don’t, please get out and do it. Number two is when you are going out to past customers, if they don’t have more work for you, it’s asking if anyone else does.
And number three, which won’t necessarily apply to everyone but should apply to most of you, is what you can do around maintenance, particularly in the trade business. What are the things you can do like checking smoke alarms, like maintaining a garden, like coming in to check structural integrity, like plumbing and making sure water pressure is right, right? There are so many different things that you can be doing for maintenance with your customers that I really encourage you to think about if you’re doing that. Again, most trade businesses I work with skip past the maintenance steps because they aren’t big, juicy sales like the rest of the business.
But they do have some benefits that are not only free but also really tangible. Number one, they bring in small amounts of revenue, which generally means small jobs that you can slide in between bigger jobs. So they help increase the usage rates of your workforce or what you can do when you have adverse weather or delayed projects or things that are out of your hands.
So maintenance can be really powerful there. Number two is they keep you in touch with your customer. And when they keep you in touch with your customer, they can open up new opportunities at the right times.
So the repeat sales tend to come more regularly from maintenance work. And number three is they’re often really highly profitable. And not only are they profitable, right, but they’re generally things you can set and repeat.
I had some new garage doors installed here at year one, light clockwork, bang, they messaged me around about my service. I didn’t hear from them around year two. Now, this is a business that was on top of their game in terms of systems.
But I look at that and say, wow, what a wasted opportunity to come in and get maintenance with me because at the same time I actually was interested in building an additional garage and I would have spoken to them about the doors. So it’s not just about doing the maintenance, earning the income, it’s also about being there at the right time. So the number one type of customer sale, without doubt, that is easier than anything else is going back to your past customers.
The challenge from me today for you is to think not just, okay, I know that, Ben, but what are you doing about it? Are you actually out there engaging with past customers to see what else you can be doing for them? Number two and number three flow on from engaging with those past customers and they are asking for referrals, particularly when you don’t have repeat work with a customer, it’s nice and easy to ask. And the third one there being maintenance, making sure you’re going back to your customers to serve them again and again and again, not just from an income point of view, but also to help them really enjoy their product and to be there when future potential sales arise. So as I said from today, please have a think about what you’re doing here, right, and any areas you might be missing, but if nothing else, start with just getting back to your repeat customers at least once per year to check in with how they’re going.
Now if you’re not doing that, but also not closing enough sales and you’re getting a bit frustrated that you’re doing the same thing over and over again and it’s not working, probably my message is that it’s unlikely to change unless you make some process changes yourself. All right, we have a free quote quiz that you can jump on. It’s very quick.
I’ll look at the answers myself and we’ll come back to you with any personal suggestions that I have, but above everything else, there’s no obligation around it. So I’d encourage you to jump on the show notes, get that done. If not, really look forward to seeing you next time.
That’s it for today. Bye for now.