What if the best way to sell more isn’t learning another sales technique—but leaning into what already makes you great?
Too many salespeople try to become good at everything, follow someone else’s sales style, or hide their personality behind a “professional” persona. But after 25 years in sales, this episode explores three powerful ways to set yourself up for better results by playing to your natural strengths, building more authentic relationships, and getting clearer on what your customers actually want.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to identify your natural sales strengths and focus more of your time and energy on the activities where you perform at your best.
- Why showing more of your personality can help you build stronger relationships and make selling feel more natural.
- How getting clear on the outcome your customer wants can help you create better solutions and increase your chances of winning the deal.
Play this episode to discover three simple mindset shifts that can help you sell more by becoming a more confident, authentic, and effective version of yourself.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
I’ve closed $6 billion in sales across my career, plus what my teams have done on top of that. I still have three clear ways that I lean into to help me sell more, and today we’re going to go through those.
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:
Today, I’m going to go through the three best ways that I lean into to sell more. Now, when I mean the three best ways that I lean into to sell more, I’m not talking about specific, necessarily, sales skills, certainly two of these, right? What I’m actually talking about is mindsets and ways of going about your sales craft that set you up no matter what you say, well, within reason, that set you up to be successful before you even open your mouth is a better way to phrase that. Look, these are based off 25 years of selling. Look, closing $6 billion of sales, that’s great, right? It doesn’t mean anything to most people.
I think the more impactful piece is that I have had six or seven businesses. I worked in corporate careers. I have now trained thousands.
I’m into the thousands of salespeople. So, there’s a really strong baseline of social proof to me to see what works across many, many, many salespeople. And I think these three things are achievable for everyone, but they’re often forgotten about or even more specifically, they’re shied away from because people have a slightly different persona in how they run business as to how they are at a personal level.
For me, looking back into my 20s, gee, I wish that I showed a lot of these earlier, particularly the first and the second ones. So, let’s get into them. Okay.
So, number one is to lean into your strength. Every salesperson is different. Not all salespeople are created equal, and it’s very, very rare that I see a salesperson who is effective at everything.
And what I mean by that is a salesperson who’s really effective at lead generation, really effective at hunting, really effective at building relationships, super detailed to go and do the scope of works and quote the project, relentless in their follow-up, and then an amazing key account manager to get more business out of their customers post-sale. Super rare, right? Occasionally we see a unicorn, but for the majority of us, there’s things in there we don’t do well. And often where I see these lining up is that you’ll see someone that is great at quoting detail, great at process and great at your post-sale key account management, perhaps not be as strong as creating those initial relationships or hunting.
I’ll often see hunters who are terrible on detail. I’ll often see people that are really process-driven but don’t have the ability to really step the gears up in their sales processes to hustle when they need to to get deals done. So lots of different types of salespersonas out there, and my recommendation is lean into your strengths.
So being in an industry where if you are a great key account manager and you are fantastic at process, being in an industry where that really works, right? And those type of industries are ones that are regulated, ones that have repeat customers, right? So if we’re talking about trades at a residential level, gardening, lawn mowing type of businesses, right? You turn up, you just need to make sure you keep rolling those projects forward. Those that are great hunters, for example, they’re going to lean themselves more heavily into winning big building contracts, right? Like in the commercial space or quoting on large machinery deals. They’re the ones who you need to get out and win those big deals.
There are fewer of them, so you are so reliant on building those great relationships. And the reason I say that leaning into your strengths is so important is because then you get to bring your natural self to work. And bringing your natural self to work generally means people are happier, they’re more engaged when they turn up to work, and their performance is generally better because they’re working on things that they’re really good at.
Now what I will say here is that doesn’t mean stop learning. That doesn’t mean don’t try and improve the things you’re not good at, but what it does mean is really double down on those things that you are and try and improve where you can on the other areas, but above everything else, prioritise where you’re great. So number two, and it leans straight off number one, is to show your personality.
For me, when you’re playing to your strengths, it’s a lot easier to show your personality. So me personally, I have strengths in some forms of lead generation. And I should say that when we lean into strengths, that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily not great at any form of lead generation, but you’ll have certain areas that you’re better at.
And I know that personally, my skills are really strong in networking. Once I meet someone, I’m able to work through with them to a solution and also expand that relationship into other people, into other businesses, into repeat business, into lots and lots of different strengths across that relationship. And I know that when I am networking, when I am at trade shows, meeting with speakers, for example, I know that I am at my absolute best and my natural personality comes out more.
Cold calling, cold calling particularly door to door, cold calling is not one of my strengths. For whatever reason, I don’t seem to be as good at it as when I’m meeting people through a general networking environment. Now, I’m not sure why that is, but I also find my personality isn’t as strong.
My normal personality doesn’t come out as naturally in those situations. So I lean into trade shows and networking over door to door sales, for example, over cold calling on the phone, and it works really well for me. And that’s my recommendation for any salesperson is find your strengths and then allow your personality to show from that.
Because when your personality shows, you’re more natural, relationships tend to form more quickly and deals get done from that. When you’re not and you’re in areas that you’re not great at, so I am not super strong at phone based sales. So I lean heavily into video and face to face type of projects and for me that works really well.
And when I lean into that, people get the best of me. So if you’re out there thinking, okay, what are my strengths? Well, the best way you can do that is to sit down and write them down, right? And then try to find where you can lean most heavily into your sales activities around them. Of course, there’ll be some areas that are critical to selling that you may not be strong at, i.e. your ability to learn a quoting system.
Sometimes these are skills you’re going to have to learn, right? But you just need to get them to a level that’s acceptable rather than where you excel. And then you lean into those excelled strengths and lean in really heavily to show your personality through them. So the third piece there, the first two are very much behavioral.
The third one absolutely still is, but has a little bit of technical execution in there and that’s making sure that I’m always challenging myself to agree on the outcome with my customer. Now, the technical piece here is that you are set up with the questions to ask, but the mindset or the behavioral piece is that you never leave a quoted deal, so you never essentially start off these projects without being really clear on what the customer wants. Because when you’re clear on what the customer wants from it, you’re able to design a package that is so much more effective for them.
And when you design those packages that are effective, you get more yeses. Customers are more willing to engage. They’re more willing to talk to you about exactly what’s working and what’s not working.
And from there, very much like in episode 269, from there you can build greater results with your customers, greater projects with your customers, and of course you get those yeses. So the three things here in terms of my three best ways that I go to or I keep myself in check to sell more, and certainly from a behavioral point of view, is to number one, lean into your strengths, number two, by leaning into those strengths showing your personality, your natural way of being, and the third piece is always challenging myself to agree or to understand what the outcomes our customers are looking for before I dive heavily into what’s next. So that’s it for today.
As you’re leaving this podcast and thinking about what do I do next, I’d suggest you start with writing down what your strengths are and then checking in if you’re focusing on those enough. And if you’re not, what a terrific opportunity to go and have some fun over the coming weeks because from that fun will generally come positive change and that’s going to be a happier you at work and all the great things like money in the bank, profitability, happy staff, they all follow from that. If you’re needing some help around it, we are launching new programs in the coming months.
They’re waitlist driven so you need to be on the waitlist to know that they’re coming. We’re not going broadly out to the market with them. The only way to do that is to jump onto the waitlist via these show notes.
It’s easy to do. You just click on the show notes. It’ll take you 30 seconds and some of the programs aren’t going to cost you anything either.
So please do that. Otherwise, keep your focus on being 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.