What if you could identify the biggest gaps in your sales process—and start fixing the most impactful ones—in just one hour?
When your business isn’t growing as quickly as you’d like, it can feel like making improvements requires major changes, more time and a lot of disruption. But often, the biggest opportunities are hiding in the sales process you already have.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to map your entire sales process in around 30 minutes so you can see exactly what’s happening from lead generation through to post-sale.
- How to identify and prioritize the biggest gaps in your process instead of trying to fix everything at once.
- How focusing on a handful of high-impact, easy-to-implement changes can create meaningful improvements in your close rates without creating a huge workload.
Press play to learn the one-hour sales process review that can help you uncover your biggest opportunities and start making changes that move your close rates forward.
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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:
Making change to grow sales isn’t always easy. In fact, the number of customers that I work with that say it’s harder to implement these basic changes than it isn’t, I cannot count. But if you do want to start making change in your business to grow your sales faster, this is the podcast episode for you.
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’re going to go through the three ways that you can start making change in your business without a significant headache or huge suck of your time. Now, today’s podcast comes from a workshop I ran for a team of about 15 salespeople, great business, really committed salespeople, a team that wants to learn, a team that wants to grow, and they really showed up in droves. In fact, one of the quotes that came from that day was, Ben, what you imparted on Wednesday was brilliant and will increase the sales for our company.
Thank you. I really love it when we get this type of feedback because to me, it says, all right, what we’re doing is making a difference and it’s something that we need to make sure we share out to more people so that more of these people can grow the sales in their businesses faster. All right, so where can you make change in your business? Well, I’m going to run through the framework that we did for this day.
There’s three things in it, and the good news is you can do this exercise in your business in one hour. That’s all you need, a couple of key people in your business, particularly anyone involved in the sales process, and you can sit down and make it happen. All right, so what we did with this team was number one is we mapped out their sales process.
Now, I’ve got a pre-filled template with some very common sales process elements in there. If you need that, you can DM me through the show notes to get that. All right, but what they did was they sat down, they mapped their process from first contact with customer through until what happens after the sale.
All right, nice and easy. Most sales process is going to have five steps, lead generation, meet and greet, quote, follow-up or close, and the post-sale action items. All right, five steps, map them into there.
Normally, you’re going to end up across those five sections with anywhere from 30 to 40 steps. Okay, so number one, map your sales process. That should take you about 30 minutes.
Max, set your timer, map that process, don’t sweat the small stuff, just get the big steps down, right, and do it across those five categories. Number two, go back through those five categories if you’ve got 40 items, for example, and pick the gaps. Pick the ones you’re not doing so well on.
Are you slow to contact leads? When you get out to meet customers, you’re not understanding exactly what they need. Are you not creating enough value? Are you not following the process? Whatever it is you’re not doing well, pick those gaps. All right, most businesses, when they do first pass on this, are going to end up with 10 to 15 gaps.
If you end up with more, don’t worry about it. If you end up with less, that’s okay too, but most of them are going to end up with 10 to 15, even up to 20. All right, that’s your first pass.
As you go through those gaps, and let’s say you’ve got 15 there, pick the top half dozen, the most important six that you can move a dial on. Now, if that ends up being seven or five or eight, that’s okay too. It’s all about progress over perfection here, but what we’re trying to do is find those areas in your quoting gaps that can make the biggest difference.
All right, so you pick those six. You’ve mapped your sales process. You’ve started with your gaps.
You’ve ended up with probably 10 to 20 of those. You then pick your most impactful six, and once you’ve got those six done, pick the ones that are easiest to implement. Okay, that should give you two, three, or even four things that you can work on.
In this case, this group had two things they focused on, which was over the phone, being able to take payment on the spot, and when they’re out on site. This group had three or four things that they quoted on, but it was all about how they can take payment faster, how they can quote faster, and how they can engage with their customers around a sample process in a manner that’s going to really keep them involved and get the deals done quickly. All right, so they had a few other things in there, but this group, they said, okay, these are the areas we’re going to focus on, and bang, in their first two weeks, they executed exactly what they needed to do from these, and they rolled out into their team.
Now, this all came from a one-hour exercise of quite simply mapping their process, picking their gaps, whittling them down to the most impactful, and then hitting the easiest to implement first. Sounds pretty simple. The good news is that it is quite simple.
It’s something that any business can roll out very quickly and make significant change to their results when they focus on the fast to implement, but big-ticket items. So in my experience, we normally see a bump of 20% to 25% in close rates when we can do this process and really nail it, but not bad for an hour’s work and then a bit of implementation from it. So as you’re going through this episode, what I’m hopeful you’re thinking is, okay, who am I going to bring in to this sales process review? When can I do it? Friday afternoon is a great time.
Can I do it over lunch? Can I bring in some food? How am I going to make it happen? Well, do it in the office, get those people together, and what I’m hoping you’re thinking is, all right, let’s give this a go because the reality is that if you are a business who is not growing like you’d like to or if you have stresses around your time, around your money, around your quote win rates, around anything in your business, the reality is you must change something because if you change, nothing changes. Spoiler alert from us is that’s our job. We’ve got some really cool programs that are launching in the coming months.
Some of these are going to be free. They won’t cost you a cent, but they’re going to be running off a waitlist. So if you want to make sure you get notified about these, please jump into the show notes.
There’s a link there. It will simply put you onto the list so you’ll get notified when they come out. That’s it.
Very simple, but if you’re not in it, there’s no chance you’re going to win it. So as you leave today’s episode, please keep that focus on being 1% better each and every day. In this instance, it’s finding some really strong, easy to implement sales process steps and getting about fixing them.
Get that done. It will make the difference. We’ll see you later in the week.
Bye for now.