What if the key to making change actually sticks in your business isn’t a bigger plan, but a simple 30-day process?
Change is difficult when new goals and behaviours aren’t built into the way your business already operates.
In this episode, Ben shares a practical three-step approach to implementing change in a sales team—so you can turn a goal into daily habits, track whether it’s working, and give yourself enough time to create real momentum without committing to a permanent change from day one.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to define clear, measurable goals so your team knows exactly what change you’re trying to achieve and how progress will be measured.
- Why embedding new behaviours into meetings, one-to-ones, deal reviews, and training can help build momentum and make change part of your normal routines.
- How weekly measurement and a temporary 30-day commitment can make change easier to implement, test, adjust, and ultimately stick.
Play this episode to learn the three-step change process you can apply to one important goal in your business over the next 30 days.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you’re going to learn how to make change in your business that actually sticks.
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:
I remember standing in front of a group of about 18 to 20 salespeople talking about change management, and one of the people stood up in that group, this was about four years ago, and he said to me, Ben, you’re talking about change management and making improvements to our team, but you don’t really have the qualifications to do it. Big hairy thing to stand up and say in front of a group of people.
In that moment, I thought about it and let that comment slide, and the actual session ended up being quite successful, and the team made some significant improvements. I sat down with that person after the workshop and had a conversation about exactly what he meant by that comment. He opened up to me and said, look, I have a PhD in change management, and so does my father.
Straight away, I was like, okay, this is going to get heavy. What actually came from that conversation was some really curious questions from me around his knowledge and his understanding as to how much change management actually sticks. We got there in the end, but the response was essentially two out of three change management initiatives don’t work.
Two out of every three things that we as individuals, that we as businesses, that we as big groups of people go out or set ourselves out to try and change don’t actually stick. My response to this person at the time was, well, given that, is there any reason why I would follow the conventional wisdom around change management given so much of it doesn’t work? The conversation continued. There were some robust moments in there, but by the end of it, we agreed that a different approach to change management wasn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as we could embed into that process some consistent things that we know do work.
Despite two out of three change management opportunities not working, that we could roll in a couple of things like building momentum, for example, into change management processes like building momentum, for example, that would give this the best chance of success. Anyway, the point of this story is that there is so much literature out there on change management, but the reality is that the majority of changes that businesses and people try to implement don’t actually stick. The good news is I’ve been going at this for a very long time, particularly making change in businesses around sales goals, and I’ve worked out, through trial and error, through thousands of people that have gone through this process, ways of change management that do have a significantly larger chance of succeeding.
Now, I don’t have the statistics. I haven’t measured it over thousands of people, but what I have seen is dozens and dozens and dozens of businesses grow their sales quite substantially from following the programmes that we run. So today, I want to go through the three-step method that you can implement to make change in your business.
There’s only three steps. They are very straightforward, but they work, and I have teams rolling this out right now as we speak who are seeing significant improvements to their businesses. So here’s how the process works.
Before we get into the three steps, we clearly need to define what our goals are. Are we looking to do more demos? Are we looking to get out to more leads? Are we looking to quote in a period of time? Are we looking to increase our close rates? Whatever that goal is, we need to define it, set something that’s measurable next to it. So if we’re wanting to increase close rates, we’ll pick the number from 18 to 23 percent.
Are we wanting to do more face-to-face demonstrations? Fantastic. Four a month per person. Eight for the business, whatever that may be.
Are we wanting to get out on site and see more people? Fantastic. Three per day. Whatever those goals are, we need to define them and set something to measure against, because until we do that, what we’re actually doing is measuring thin air.
And what I mean by that, a little bit polarising I guess, but what I mean by that is unless we know what we are measuring against, i.e. a target we’re measuring against, then we don’t have anything to keep us in line or keep us charging towards. We set health and fitness goals. We set family goals.
We set learning goals. Very much the same when it comes to any changes we’re trying to implement in the sales processes of our business. So three steps, but before we do that, we need to define the goals and set exactly what we want to achieve out of them.
So as we move into step number one, the very first thing that I recommend every single business do is embed the changes into your daily routines. For most businesses, that means four meetings. And I run a four-way meeting with every business that we work with.
The four meetings generally being your sales meeting, your one-to-ones. If you’re in a business on your own or you’re the only sales person in your business, that will mean your one-to-ones across other team members. So your sales meetings if you have them, your one-to-ones across anyone in the business, how you review your deals and how you run training.
All of those can be applied whether you’re a small business or a large business, but by embedding the changes you’re trying to make into your meetings, what you’re doing is building momentum. So if our change we want to make is to let’s run with more demos. So more demonstrations, more active product in hand for customers.
And we’re setting ourselves a target of four per week. We can run that into our weekly team or sales meetings. How many demos did we do last week? How is this week looking? We can roll them into our one-to-ones.
So when we’re meeting with other team members, perhaps an operational team member if we’re a sales person on our own, we can sit down and say, okay, what got in the way of demos last week? Was there anything operationally? What worked well? What didn’t work well? When it comes to training, we do training for the team or even training for ourselves. We upskill as an individual on how to do better demos. There’s heaps of literature out there where we go and do courses, right? We go and get involved in workshops.
And the last one is when we are reviewing our deals, be they deals we’ve run or deals we’ve lost, we go through that process to see what demos were being done. So step one, embed it into our daily habits, our daily rituals. Number two is to measure progress weekly.
Really, really easy. But we make sure that a week doesn’t go by where we don’t measure our progress. So what we’re doing is holding ourselves accountable to that target by bringing it to be very visible in everything we do.
Throw big signs up across the business. Use whiteboards. Use blackboards.
Gee, I sound old then. I don’t know how long since I’ve seen a blackboard. Use whiteboards.
Use blackboards, right? Set post-it notes. But whatever you do, make it visible and measure it across the business. Very, very simple.
But when we’re embedding it regularly into our day-to-day rituals, and then we’re measuring it really commonly across our business, we’re making sure it’s super visible. And the last one is to ask for a temporary commitment from either yourself or your team. So rather than making a change that says it’s going to be permanent, because when we make permanent changes, they can really elicit strong emotional responses.
But instead, when we ask for temporary commitments with a promise that we can reverse it if it doesn’t work, we’re asking people to buy in for a shorter period of time. Go and exercise every day this week versus go and exercise every day forever. Read to your child every day until they turn 12 versus every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for this term.
Don’t eat sugar ever again versus stay off it for five days and see where you land. These short-term commitments are much easier to stick to. So when we can give ourselves or ask our teams for a 30-day commitment to a change, it gives everyone the opportunity to try it.
But if it doesn’t work, undo that change that we’re trying to roll out. Or hopefully, move into a different method of that change with some slightly altered goals. So that’s the three-step method that I know works.
Fundamentally, I’ve seen it work dozens and dozens of times across the thousands of people that I’ve coached. But as a recap, it is to first of all define your goals and set clearly what you’re targeting. Then follow three steps.
Embed it into your rituals within your business as often as you can. Meetings, reviews, learning programmes, lots of different ways we can do that. Measure it regularly, ideally weekly, so you can keep track of progress and make the small tweaks you need to as you go.
And finally, give yourself a 30-day commitment to get this done. You don’t have to do it forever, but we do have to give it a period of time to trial. So that’s it for today.
As you’re leaving this podcast, I’d love you to take one thing you want to change in your business and roll these three steps against it. Give it a go, and please keep letting me know how you’re going with these type of implementations because they’re so impactful when you can get them right. But if you’re someone who is looking to grow your business and you’ve got the pain of low close rates or quoting people again and again and again who just aren’t closing, well, I know how stressful this is.
I’ve been there so many times. I’ve worked with so many people who have these same issues. They simply can’t roll out change, for example, into their business.
Well, the good news is we are about to launch a brand new sales and marketing workshop. It’s going to cover sales and it’s going to cover marketing, and it is brilliant. I have a brilliant partner with me in doing this.
The process is going to launch very, very soon, but the first cohorts are invite only. So you need to let us know you’re interested. There’s a link in the show notes.
That’s all you need to do is click it. There’s no commitment. It takes you 30 seconds, but if you do that now when we launch the sales and marketing course, you’ll get informed of it straight away.
But before we leave today, keep please thinking about being 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.