What if you could grow your business by 25% without generating a single additional lead?
Most business owners believe their biggest sales problem is not having enough leads, but the real opportunity may be getting more from the leads they already have.
By understanding which lead-generation channels actually produce customers, focusing on what you’re naturally good at, and doubling down on what works, you can reduce the stress and cost of prospecting while improving your close rate and growing your business.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to identify the lead-generation channels that are actually producing your best customers.
- Why understanding what you’re good at can help you choose more effective ways to generate opportunities.
- How narrowing your focus to two or three high-performing lead-generation activities can help you close more deals without simply chasing more leads.
Play the episode to learn how to generate better leads, close more of the opportunities you already have, and potentially grow your business by 25% without increasing your lead volume
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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:
In this episode, we’re going to talk about how you can take the stress out of prospecting to give you a healthier pipeline that relies less on new leads being generated each and every day.
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:
With most businesses, when I first meet them, their number one comment to me is, Ben, I need more leads. My return fire is often, do you need more leads or could we simply close more deals and do more with what you have? Now, invariably, that leads into a discussion around what their close rates are, which I often find businesses don’t know, but more importantly is once we establish that close rate, one in five, for example, what it would mean to their business if they move that to one in four.
Instead of, for example, closing four deals out of every 20, that’s a one in five or a 20% close rate, now I’m moving to close five deals out of 20, simply one more, what that would mean for their business. In most instances, the math is reasonably straightforward. If you can go from four deals to five deals being closed from the same number of leads, you’ve got a 25% growth in your business.
That’s it. If you can close one more deal out of the next 20, you have grown your business by 25%. What comes from there is less around how we can generate more leads, but more around how we can generate better leads.
That’s what I want to talk through today because where we know we’re generating good quality leads, that takes a lot of the stress out of prospecting, meaning we rely less on leads coming in super consistently and, in many instances, less on marketing agencies, which is an absolute blessing for many businesses out there. How do we do it? Well, the number one thing that I recommend with our customers, and I’ve seen it work multiple times, in fact, it works more often than it doesn’t, is for them to get really clear on understanding what lead generation channels work. Is it local area marketing? Is it being on Google Maps as a local provider? Is it getting out to trade shows and exhibiting? Is it, and my particular favorite or my personal favorite, is it going to trade shows, identifying who the speakers are, networking with them, and trying to do business? Side note, that one is my absolute favorite.
I generated over a quarter of a million dollars for my consulting business from one day out on site, just simply meeting with speakers, which came from introducing myself and contacting them prior to the day. Is your lead generation activity networking? Is it asking for referrals? Is it repeat business? Is it knocking on doors? But by knowing what works, by being really clear on what your most successful lead generation tools are, that is the best and most impactful step you can take to take the stress out of prospecting. Because the results that come from that is with every lead that comes in, we’re more likely to close them because it’s a successful lead generation channel.
Now, how do you do that? Really easy. Go back through your last 20 or 30 deals, write down what each of those deals or where each of those deals came from, I should say, and then see where the patterns form. In most instances, 20 to 30 deals, you’ll see those patterns.
Sometimes you need to go out to 50, but have a look at the deals you won and have a look at the lead generation sources that were occurring most often. In reverse, have a look at the lead generation sources that are not converting. I see a lot of businesses with Facebook ads and Google paid search ads that simply don’t convert, and so they move away from those and into the areas that work really well for them.
So that’s number one. Look at the areas of lead generation that are working for you. Number two is know what you’re good at.
Now, there’s a slight difference here because many businesses that I work with will be doing lead generation activities that they think will work. Social media, right, is a huge one. Huge amounts of time posting content when that doesn’t necessarily work for their business.
I will say it’s very important and I would never recommend you stop it, but instead of relying on it for lead generation, they should be relying on it for social proof and case studies and building trust with their customers. Things like paid searches, things like Facebook ads. I see a lot of businesses doing this because they think they need to, right, but what they forget is the things they’re really good at.
So for you as your business owner, have a think about where you know you can generate leads and have big impacts. For me, I know it’s face-to-face. So any opportunity I get to get face-to-face with my types of customers, the people that I know will want to work with me, I run really hard.
I grab that with both hands and I’m there. But the reality is many, in particular, trade and small to medium business owners I work with, they don’t do this, right. They focus on the easiest marketing activities or the ones that take them the least time.
They spend a whole lot of cash on it and they don’t get the results from it. So that’s my encouragement for you in number two is to think about what you’re good at and make sure it’s part of your marketing or your lead generation activities. So just to recap there, number one is know what works, go back through your past deals and get really clear on what is moving the dial.
Number two is have a think about what you’re good at and make sure it’s in that suite. And then number three is taking those two things, what’s working and what you’re good at and doubling down on them. My recommendation to businesses is always rather than have six or eight or ten marketing activities, some of which work but spread you thin across them.
So rather than have social media, Facebook paid ads, Google search, referrals, local Google marketing. So when you come up on Google Maps for example, letter box drops, networking and trade shows. Pick the two or three of those that you’re really good at, double down on them, go absolutely a million miles an hour like a bullet a gate on those activities and just keep one or two others there that add some diversity to your portfolio.
And what we end up doing here is we often end up taking about a third of the marketing activities out of businesses so that they focus on the ones that work. What it means is those one third of activities that weren’t generating results move into the two thirds of activities that are generating results and we start to get more bang for our buck. It doesn’t mean we generate more leads but what it does mean is we close more of what we generate.
And like that example from the start of this podcast, it doesn’t take a lot to make serious impact on deals. If we’re only closing one more deal from 4 to 5 out of 20 that we quote, we’re growing our business 25%. And as we exit out of this podcast, I want you to have a think about what would that mean for your business? What would a 25% growth number mean for your business if you could simply close more deals from the leads you’re getting? So that’s all about how you take the stress out of prospecting.
Knowing what works, what is successful in your business, knowing what you’re good at and then doubling down on both. A really strong encouragement out of today is to pick one of those that you can make some changes to because without change, you simply won’t grow your business and those levers that are impacting you at the moment, working too hard, not enough money, stressful, whatever they are, they’re not going to change. Now, the good news is and spoiler alert, we’ve got some great programs coming around this in the coming months.
They are going to be waitlisted so you need to put your name down to at least hear about them. Some of these programs are going to be free. You’re not going to have to pay for anything but if you want to be in it, you’ve got to register.
You’ve got to put your name down. You can simply do that through the show notes. It’ll take you 30 seconds, very, very easy to do.
That is however it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.