Ben Wright, a sales leader with 25 years in trades and construction, breaks down the three metrics that actually matter: quotes or meetings generated, pipeline size, and dollars sold. For equipment sales, add product demos, which can push close rates from 20% to 70%.
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In this episode, we're gonna learn the 3 sales metrics you need to track to grow your trade business. Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 figure trade, construction and industry 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 look at why sales metrics are so often overcomplicated in sales businesses, and more importantly, the 3 sales metrics that you can track yourself to quickly ascertain exactly where your business is at and then how you can grow it from there. And as a little bonus, we're going to have number 4 in terms of a metric that for some businesses is really quite impactful. So let's start at the beginning. I've been in sales for 25 years, have worked with hundreds or thousands of salespeople and dozens and dozens and dozens of teams. And one thing that is as certain as death and taxes and life is that teams have a CRM dashboard that is super complicated. 8, 10, 12, 14 dashboards or reports that they're measuring against. Lots of different ways of assessing team performance. And above everything else, a sales team that's looking at their reporting going, oh, this is too hard. I am so not motivated to get in and do my reporting around this. I can't remember ever working with a business or a sales team that didn't fit that criteria. Ever. Not one. Not a single business that didn't have an overcomplicated amount of sales metrics. Thankfully, from working with so many and being in this game for so long, I'm really clear on the 3 metrics that work. And I can also confidently say that I've worked with so many businesses who have been able to take away those complex dashboards and those complex metrics and replace them with these, at the very least from a day-to-day basis. Many of these businesses, if they've got investors or board, or even if they're private family-run businesses that have other people involved, right, they're often reporting more broadly across greater metrics. But when it comes to sales and moving the dial on sales, 3 and 3 only with a little asterisk around a bonus 4th that works for some. So what are those 3? Number 1, far and above is looking at the number of quotes or number of meetings that that business is having. If you're a business where a meeting normally turns into a quote, right, we normally measure meetings. If you're a business that doesn't have the majority of meetings, i.e. 70, 80% or more turning into quotes, we normally measure quotes. But actually looking at the number of quotes that they're putting out across a period, generally a month, but some businesses do them as a week. And what we're looking for here is the effort, how hard the teams are working to get out, or the salespeople are working, or the leaders are working to get out and get quotes on the board. And with every business I work with, and those listening should know this, they know how many quotes they need to be doing a week to be filling that pipeline. Because in some instances, and certainly at a baseline level, numbers are important. We need to do a certain number of quotes to be able to win a certain number of deals. And of course, they have to be quotes to the right people at the right situations. But where we're able to be really clear on how many quotes we need to do across each period, that simply, very simply drives us to making sure we hit those numbers. The second metric here is around pipeline size. And this all comes down to knowing your close rates, knowing how long on average it takes for you to be able to close out deals. To then determine how big that pipeline needs to be. But for many businesses, it's 2 months worth of sales in that pipeline, then divided in by their close rates. So if you're a business that closes, let's make it really easy, 1 in 2 deals, you want to do $100,000 a month, well then you should be quoting $200,000 per month. However, if you've got a 60-day cycle, right, then we need 2 lots of those months. So we should be having $200,000 quoted a month and $400,000 sitting in our pipeline. We've got a great resource that's available on strongersalesteams.com/resources. We'll put the link down into the show notes as well, right? But it really helps understand particularly this part around pipeline. But number 1 here, most importantly, is number of quotes. How many quotes do I need to be getting out each period? Number 2 is what size does my pipeline need to be? How many deals or real deals, real deals that are a normal size? We take out the big ones, the big Hail Marys, But real deals need to be in here to give me some confidence in moving my pipeline forward long-term. And then number 3 is dollars sold. Very obvious, right? Measuring how much we've actually sold. So often we see businesses glance past it without actually understanding that, hey, dollars sold across periods is really important. We want to see the trends. Are we going up? Are we going down? Are we stagnant? Right? Have we just sold a lot? And do we need to have a look back at our pipeline? Right? How big is our pipeline? Have we squeezed our pipeline to be too small given that we've just sold a lot? So it's more than just saying, hey, I hit that target of $100,000 or $1 million or $10 million in the month, but also looking at it with some context and saying, all right, what have I given up to be able to have a great month of selling? What do I need to focus on next? Well, my numbers are down, but hey, how are my other vitals looking? And do I now need to zero in and focus on closing? Right? I've got heaps of quotes in there. I've just got to spend the time getting them over the line. Right, there's lots of different ways that we can look at the numbers that we've sold to help drive us forward. So to repeat those 3 metrics, number 1 is number of quotes, how many we're getting out across a period. Number 2 is our pipeline size, right, how much have we actually quoted. And number 3 is what have we sold and what does that mean for our other 2 levers in what I call the 3-box model, quotes, pipeline size, and dollars sold. Now bonus number 4, for a lot of businesses where you're doing demos, I really encourage you to be measuring demos. Set a target per month, decide how many demos you need to be doing and get out and go after them. Because in my experience working with particularly businesses who are in equipment sales, right, machinery sales, products that get into hands, so products more than services, being able to get product in hand and do a really effective demo drastically increases close rates. And when I mean drastically, it takes businesses from 1 in 5 to, you know, to winning 7 out of 10 deals, right? So from 2 out of 10 up to 7 out of 10, 8 out of 10 just from doing demos. So measuring demos is another great metric that you can roll through your team. Okay, so to recap, the 3-box model, 3 things to get your business growing fast when it comes to metrics is number of quotes, knowing how many you need to do each week or each month and getting out after them and measuring them. Number 2 is what pipeline size you need to have. So we might be working really hard to get the quotes, right? But are we quoting the right people with the right strategies? So that is the size of your pipeline. Is it holding or are they quickly dropping off or do we need to jump in and close more out. Number 3 is how much we've sold and how that can impact everything else within our business. And the bonus number 4 was all around demos. So those metrics I have rolled out with so many businesses now and they've made such a difference. And I know some of you listening are part of those businesses and if you're not focusing on them as much as you can, please give them a little bit of that refresh. If you're not using them at all, start with the first one, number of quotes, work out how many quotes you need to do. At a certain close rate to hit your numbers and get out after them. That's it for today. Next episode will be early next week. Looking forward to it. Keep focusing on being 1% better each and every day. It does make all the difference. We'll see you next time. Bye for now. Are you frustrated spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes that you keep losing? Without changing something now, you'll continue to get these same stressful results over and over again. My free quote audit will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. Click the free quote audit link in the show notes to get started now.
