Are you losing sales because your customers don’t trust you enough to say yes—even when you have the riAre you losing sales simply because you’re too busy to follow up?
If you’re a trade business leader juggling leads, quotes, customers, your team and everything else that comes with running a business, it’s easy for follow-up to become the thing that gets pushed to the bottom of the list. But those missed follow-ups can be the difference between a quote that goes nowhere and a deal that closes.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How a simple 25-minute focus sprint can help you consistently follow up quotes and opportunities before they go cold.
- Why doing your most important sales activity early in the day can prevent busywork from taking over your schedule.
- How consistent follow-up can help you win the deals that could otherwise be lost to competitors, inaction or customers simply changing their minds.
Press play and discover how to build a simple daily sales habit that keeps your pipeline moving, improves follow-up and helps you close more of the deals already sitting in front of you.
Take our Free Quote Quiz now to Kickstart Your Sales Growth
To see how we’ve helped business grow their sales:
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:
This one simple sales hack will stop you losing deals that you should be winning.
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:
If there’s one thing in 25 years of sales that I’ve seen kill more deals than anything else across particularly businesses whose sales are run by their leaders, it’s poor time management and yet I’ll stand by those words, poor time management. I absolutely acknowledge and I’ve been there across seven or eight businesses now myself where most sales and business leaders simply have too much to do.
They have more things that they need to get done in their day than they can possibly achieve. They are busy, they are hard working. I do not know many business leaders and I put myself in that camp that are not seriously hard working people and want to succeed.
But what I do see over and over again is that these trade, in particular trade business leaders, don’t prioritise the right sales activities consistently enough to get the job done. In fact, I had one of my customers at our home yesterday. He’s a terrific business.
He’s had exceptional growth. He’s had three-digit figure growth in his business over the last 12 months. However, just over the last four weeks, his quote win numbers have dropped down to about a third of what they were.
So he’s winning 65% less deals than he was only a few months ago. We did a diagnosis. We went through precisely what was wrong and it was this exact piece, time management, where he had fallen down in such a short period of time.
In a space of four weeks, he’d fallen off the rails in terms of his time management and his quote winning ratio had dropped significantly. In fact, it had dropped so much that if he didn’t make changes to what he was doing, his business was going to really erode heavily into that growth. Now thankfully, because it’s a strong business, because he built up quite a strong pipeline of sales, he had work in front of him and we’re able to quickly pivot and get that working forward again.
But this number one area is all around time management but thankfully, it has an easy fix. Okay, so let me paint a picture. You’re a busy trade sales business.
Your leads are coming in. You’re getting to them reasonably quickly or someone in your office is getting to them reasonably quickly. You’re qualifying them.
You’re getting out to site and then it all starts to get really varied. You may quote on the spot. You may quote the next day or when you’re busy, you’re taking a few days.
You may get the deal done on the spot. You may not and have to follow up and your follow-up may happen the next day. It may not happen but as soon as you get busy, that follow-up starts to really fall back and you end up with a whole pile of quotes, deals that you should be winning or certainly should be winning a percentage of that are simply not going anywhere because you’re not able to follow them through.
Now that in a very simplistic fashion is the world I see in almost every trade business leader that I work with. They’re fantastic at getting to site but once they get to site, their process becomes inconsistent and their close rates start to drop quite simply because they are not following through post that site visit or post that initial phone call with their customers. All right, so there’s a fantastic time management approach called a Pomodoro.
I’ve only learned about these over the last few years but a Pomodoro is how I have seen so many trade businesses move the dial on their time management to make sure they’re doing the most important parts of their sales activities consistently. So what a Pomodoro looks like is it’s a 30-minute block in your calendar and in that 30-minute block, you work 25 minutes focused with a 5-minute break. Pomodoros can be done back to back, so 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off or they can be done in singles and I certainly recommend for my customers they start in singles but the idea here behind a Pomodoro is that we have in our calendars 5 days a week, a 30-minute focus period where phones go off, we tell our team that we’re unavailable and we focus on our sales activities.
A 25-minute sprint on sales activities with a 5-minute period at the end where we do something that’s going to light us up. Get ourselves a coffee, go for a quick walk, look at photos of our kids, give our partner a call, give a mate a call, do whatever you want to do that lights you up for 5 minutes but it’s the reward at the end of that 25-minute sprint. Having Pomodoros set up for every day is what I recommend to every trade business I work with and then we aim to get as many of those done in a week as we can.
So, the reason I like them in there every day is because they create a habit but we then set a measuring stick that says we want to get 5 or 4 or 3 of these done. Generally, it’s not 5 actually and then we set a measuring stick that says we want to get 4 or even 3 of these done in a week. So, we aim for perfection but we accept progress and by having them in your diary, we start to build repetition and we start to build habits.
The key piece around those Pomodoros is that those 25 minutes become all about following up sales. So, getting the quotes out or following up with customers what’s going to happen next and deals keep getting won. And what I mean by that is we don’t quote deals and then lose them.
We don’t quote deals and just win the obvious ones but we quote deals and we keep winning the ones that could go either way because we’re the ones contacting our customers because we’re the ones making sure that our customers feel heard and that we’ve built trust with them. Go back an episode if you want to know what the five layers of trust are, episode 256. But we’ve built trust with them that they’re going to choose us.
So, a Pomodoro, 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, 5 days a week and we aim to do as many of those as we can. If we miss one, we simply pick it up the next day and we go again. Now, timing becomes really important.
When do we want to do our Pomodoro? Quite often I’ll see a trade leader say, I want to do this at the end of the day once I’ve got everything done. The challenge here is that I find that with many leaders and myself included is that it tends to weigh me down during the day if I know I’ve got something at the end of the day I have to do. I have less energy, I think about it and quite frankly, things get in the way.
Right, shit happens and often don’t get to those important things at the end of the day. So, what I recommend with every sales leader is set it up early, don’t make it your first job but make it your second or your third job, 8.30, 9 o’clock, 9.30, 10 o’clock, somewhere in that window that gets it done, helps fill your sales with air, right, so you’re out, you’ve done some great customer calls because good customer calls really energize a lot of people and then you go about the rest of your day. That for me in essence is the number one sales hack that will close you more deals.
It’s not about quoting better, it’s not about having more stories, it’s not about having a better quote template but quite simply having the process in your system and the habit build that says, I’m going to follow up these deals that I’ve quoted. I’m going to make sure the customer knows I’m here and I’m going to work through anything that they don’t like and I’m going to work anything that they don’t like and that I need to change. So, the deals that could go either way, go to me, go to my business and I think that’s the lens I want you to ever think about as you’re leaving this podcast today is how many deals are you leaving out on the table because you’re not following up.
The reality is if you don’t do something about that, if you don’t change that process, it’s not going to change. So, whatever your stresses are, be they money, be they time, be they frustrations, they’re going to keep happening unless you make those changes. So, I really want to make sure that you take something from today, particularly around the Pomodoro and roll it into your way of working.
Now, before we go, spoiler alert, we’ve got some really good programs coming up in the coming months. They’re going to work around all these types of parts of sales process. They’re going to be running off a wait list.
So, if you want to get notified about these when they come out, please go to the show notes, click on the link and register. That’s all you have to do. Some of the programs won’t cost a cent.
It’s only going to take you 30 seconds to do but please jump on, do it now, get it done and you’ll get notified when these programs come out. 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.