Construction sales teams often claim to follow a process but actually operate ad-hoc, with each salesperson doing their own thing. Ben Wright says leaders sabotage adoption by not using the documented process themselves. Teams that stick to the same five-step process ask better questions and close more deals.
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In this episode, we are going to cover why most sales teams and businesses say they follow a process but really don't, and how you can go about fixing that. Welcome to Sales Process Made simple. The show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade. Sales and business leaders. Finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode, we're going to drill down into the difference between a documented process and a lived process. How leaders undermine the adoption of sales processes, and most importantly, how leaders can actually make sure that a sales process sticks within their business so that they are closing more deals. As a leader, I don't know if you've ever been asked the question, do you have a sales process? I. I've asked that question hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times and I've certainly been asked it a few times along my 25 plus year career in the sales landscape. And certainly in the early days, certainly when I had my trade, it was a trade focused business that moved into renewables. We also had a business that heavily focused around temporary building supplies. I had a huge amount of experience here in the trade, construction and industry segments. I certainly used to give the answer yes very often in the early days. And then when someone asked me to actually articulate it, I really quickly fell down. And that's because in essence, we didn't have a documented sales process, but we had a lived process. And the difference here is a documented process is something that the majority of a team will follow the majority of the time in the majority of the same ways. That is, most of us are doing the same thing most of the time. That's a documented process that we write down and everyone abides by. A lived process is one that people build by experience. And the difference between a documented and lived process is very much to an individual level. And I have never ever seen a lived sales process in a business that has consistency across individuals. I've also never seen a lived process within an individual that has consistency across customers. And I think that's the most impactful message I can deliver here is it doesn't matter if you're a team or an individual sales operator, not documenting your sales process will result in inconsistency in your sales approach. And at the end of the day, that also means lower closed sales. There's a real reason that documented processes work and that's because they provide us with reminders on how to do things. They're like a set of instructions that we have for putting something together, putting a piece of equipment or machinery together. They're like a working manual as to how we go and install a product as a business. And whilst those are examples that are quite far away from a sales process, the point of those is that generally processes exist for something that has complexity. And in my experience, too many people see sales as a simple process versus one that needs to have some very set steps to really effectively engage our customer and get strong outcomes. So where I see most leaders really struggle around adopting documented processes versus lived processes is, is that they tend to follow lived processes themselves. I've no doubt been guilty as a leader of that. I don't know if, thinking through yourself, if you've experienced that same issue where you run a sales process and you tend to fly by the set of your pants, you go in with someone else in your business, another salesperson in your team, and you sit there and you have no set structure or no set plan before the meeting. If as an individual you're responsible for sales in your business and you turn up to site without having a real process to follow, and what ends up happening is that we often forget really important things or more importantly, we actually miss that opportunity to really improve. So where I see leaders really undermine the adoption of a sales process is quite simply they don't follow one themselves. And that for me is the single biggest recommendation I have for leaders listening today. Sales leader or business leader, and that is to document a process and follow it yourself. We have covered in huge detail in this podcast and we will continue to do so. Certain elements of a sales process. I'd really encourage you to have a listen to episode 176, 178, even 184 are great examples. But most importantly back at 143 where we really spoke heavily around what a great sales process looks like. So as a leader, the best thing you can do to get a documented process up and running is to get something simple out to market. Progress over perfection here, right? Think about a one page process, five steps only, and you might only have two, three or four, four things per step. But what we end up having is a document here, often a hard copy that everyone in your team or just yourself in your team can really easily follow and do again and again and again. Because one thing is for certain, across the hundreds and hundreds of people, leaders, businesses that I've worked with, those who are Able to consistently follow the same processes across most of the team for most of the time, close more deals, they know the right questions to ask. They know to align value through to their customers. They constantly remind themselves around the importance or non importance of speed. They're prompting themselves to ask customers exactly what's important to them and what the next steps of the process can look like. If they are a business in the trade industry, I don't mind if you're a plumber, if you're an electrician, if you're a landscaper, if you're a tiler, if you're a flooring company, if you're a handyman, if you're a roofer, right? By having the same questions that you're gonna ask around the state of the roof, around the state of the electrical infrastructure, around what's important to that customer to get the deal done, you will close more deals. So as a leader, the key outcome for you today is to think about a documented process being one that's written down on one page versus a lived process being one that you essentially fly by the seat of your pants on, having done so many times, right? You roll that out thinking you know that process, but without having some prompters to make you hit the same key points again and again and again. So as a leader, the biggest thing you can take, or that I ask that you take out of today is to think about how can you take a lived process or a lived sales process in your business, Document it down into the most simple, easy to understand parts, right? Think back to the episodes I mentioned, in particular episode 143. Go back and listen to that process. Create the five steps, keep it nice and top line if you need to. But really consider how you as a leader might be undermining the process at the moment. Or even better, how you as a leader can actually promote a great sales process. Thank you. Grateful for those listening, Grateful for your time, grateful for your effort. Because it's easy to listen to podcasts, but it's really difficult to go out and enact some of the outcomes and the suggestions in there. So the end of each podcast, we certainly focus heavily on what you can do next. And the key here is to go and grab your team or, or do it yourself if you're leading sales yourself and actually write out that sales process. Get the five steps down and get some basics there. Because if you do that, we'll start to see that 1% better everyday approach really flow through in that sales process. And certainly from my end, I'll be grateful. Okay, so we're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That's it for this episode. Looking forward to the next one. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales to book in, click the link in our show notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.
