In this solo podcast episode, Ben Wright explains why a three‑month forward sales pipeline is an optimal target for trade, construction, and industry businesses and provides a step‑by‑step method to achieve it. He begins by describing the balance between customer wait times and operational stability that a three‑month pipeline offers, then outlines the three core metrics every business must know: monthly revenue target, close rate, and average deal size. Using a concrete example ($500,000 monthly target, 30% close rate, $10,000 average deal) he calculates the required quoting volume (≈150 quotes/month, or about 4 quotes per salesperson per day). Wright shows how to extend a current two‑month pipeline to three months by running a short, intensive “sprint” where quoting activity is increased (e.g., from 4 to 6 quotes per day) for a two‑month period, while temporarily delegating or pausing non‑essential tasks. He highlights additional levers such as reaching out to aged customers, upselling, referrals, improving close rates, and generating new leads. Throughout, he stresses that the sprint is temporary and should be followed by a return to normal cadence. Finally, Wright offers a free 20‑minute quote audit (linked in the show notes) to help listeners diagnose why they’re not winning enough jobs and to provide actionable steps to extend their pipeline.
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In this episode, we are going to unpack how to book out your sales pipeline 3 months or more in advance. 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, 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. So today we're going to unpack why 3 months is a really nice number for trade businesses to be booking out their forward pipeline, what you need to know to be able to do that, and then how you go about it to make it happen. And today's podcast all came off the back of a customer quote that went something like, We are now booked out in advance the furthest we have ever been. This quote came from a customer, a lady who's based in the southern states of Australia, actually in the medical industry, something a little bit different to the trade industry, but one that also works on jobbing, i.e., they quote jobs, they win job or lose job, right? But this business was able to book themselves out months and months and months in advance. It was a reasonably high ticket item, about $15,000 to $18,000 was the average spend, a very personal service. So when we had this quote come through from them, which was recently, they were booked out well into the next months. It was almost 6 months where they had a theater running at full capacity. So they were stoked, I was stoked, but I wanted to share today exactly some more detail around these mechanics. So first of all, why 3 months? 3 months is a really nice sweet spot for me between not keeping customers waiting too long, but also giving us some confidence to run our business in a very structured, repeatable fashion. I.e., we're not panicking because our sales pipeline's too low. If we have a bad month of sales and our pipeline shrinks from 3 months to to 2.5 months or even to 2 months if we have a really bad month of sales, we still don't need to be hitting the panic button. If we have a second month of bad sales, we've still got some time. Yeah, of course, we're certainly upping the ante, right? But it gives us space to be able to run our business in that methodical way. And then at the same time, on the other end of the coin here, we don't have customers waiting too long. 3 months for a project that you want to make happen, be you residential, B2C or B2B, is generally okay. Now it's not always okay, and certainly there are times when more urgent jobs need to happen, and depending on the industries we're in, we need to be allowing time for that, right? And a blend of this is often that we are booked out 3 months in advance, but we have 1 day a week left to flex for urgent jobs, right? And, and those 1 day, sometimes that 1 day can consolidate into 2 or 3 by moving jobs around if we have a slightly bigger project coming, right? But we have a pipeline that is mostly booked out at least 3 months in advance. Which blends between customer wait times and us being able to run our business. Now to do this, we need to know 3 things. What our appetite for monthly sales are, i.e., $500,000. What our close rate is, i.e., for every 10 deals we quote, how many do we win? Is it 30%? So we'll use that for today, right? For every 10 deals, we win 30% and we need to be doing $500,000 a month. And then the next thing that we need to know is what our average deal size is. So let's say for this business, the average deal size is $10,000. So we need to be doing half a million dollars a month, which is 50 deals. We're closing at 30% and that average deal size is $10,000. So from there, what we can do is work backwards to say, okay, so for each month to close $500,000 in sales at an average sale value of $10,000, we need to be doing 50 deals. We're quoting 1 in 3, so we need to be quoting out 150 deals a month. Now this is probably an example for, and sorry, I should say it's slightly more than 150, that's 33%, but let's keep the numbers nice and round for today. Now this is probably a business that either, that has really fast quote turnaround times, or probably, and more likely is that we have 1 or 2 salespeople. So perhaps the leader of the business and a salesperson out on the road. Now it doesn't matter whether that's you or not. Because as long as you know how many quotes you need to be doing a month to be hitting your target, that allows this exercise to work. So in this instance, we need 150 quotes, which is, you know, the best part of 40 quotes a week, not quite 35 quotes a week, right? So across, you know, 2 people doing deals, that's 17, 18 per person per week, which is running on 3 to 4 a day. So to make things really easy, 4 quotes per day per person, and we're hitting that number of $500,000. Per month in sales. Okay, so we've established how many deals we need to be doing per person per week, in this instance 4. Let's pick a business right now that has, say, a 2-month pipeline. So we have 2 months of sales ahead of us and we want to get that to 3. So we need to not only sell our monthly sales, which is $500,000 or 150 quotes or 4 per person per day, we actually need to sell an extra $500,000 worth of sales to pump that up to a 3-month lead time. So the way I encourage you to do that is look at having a short sprint whereby you'll say, okay, for example, over the next 2 months, we need to add 1 month worth of sales into our pipeline. So instead of doing $1 million of sales over those next 2 months, $500,000 in each month, we actually need to do $1.5 million of sales. So instead of doing 150 quotes times 2, which is 300 quotes, we actually need to be doing 450 quotes, right? We're looking for instead of 2 lots of $500,000 sales, we're actually looking at doing 3 lots of $500,000 sales. So we need to be doing not just 150 quotes, right? Times 2, we need to be doing 150 quotes times 3. So instead of that being 4 quotes per person today, we need to be doing 6 quotes per person per day. So what we end up doing is having a really finite focus period where we remove some of the tasks and some of the actions that are currently sitting on our team members, on our salespeople, on ourselves, just for a short for a short period of time, 2 months, we delegate some of these tasks, we perhaps delay them, or we even stop doing them for a couple of months. Focus heavily on sales, aim for our 6 quotes per person per day instead of 4. And then at the end of that 2 months, we've hopefully built that pipeline up from a 2-month advanced pipeline to a 3-month advanced pipeline. Now please, if you have any questions on this, let me know because the, the numbers aren't always easy to get your head around, but my main messages that are coming out of today is that to build up that pipeline to the target that we want it, I'd really encourage you to be doing it in short sprints. Now that doesn't always mean we're having to generate leads and I won't go into it today, but it does mean we go back to aged customers. It does mean we look at upsells, right? Which can soften the blow as to how many quotes we need to do. It does mean that we go back to, or we go through with existing customers who have just completed jobs. So halfway between an upsell and a referral, if you like. It means we look at how we can close more of our leads. And yes, it looks at how we can generate more leads too. There's lots and lots of levers we can pull here. But my main message is to say 3 months is the healthy pipeline I see across so many trade businesses that I've worked with, right into the hundreds now. So many of these businesses, we see that healthy pipeline being about 3 months. If you're short of that, the way that we can do it is by understanding your metrics, what you need to close per month, what your close rate is and what your average deal size is, so that we then can be really clear on the number of quotes we need to be doing per day or per week or even per month. We can then find the gap that says, okay, here's what's missing to get from our current forward pipeline to our desired forward pipeline. Step up the number of quotes that we need to be doing for an agreed period of time. Reduce some of our other workload, get those quotes up to speed, get those sales up to that pipeline, and then step straight back into your normal cadence. So that short sprint stops. We don't do it forever. We jump back into a normal cadence and away we go again. Whilst it may seem simple just talking through that, in practice it can be really difficult. So if you're someone that is perhaps frustrated that you're spending lots of time quoting and you're not closing enough, or that even that your pipeline's not forward advanced enough, right? You've only got 6 or 8 weeks there and you know you need to build it up to 3 months. I think importantly what I'll say is that unless you change something, you'll probably keep getting the same results. So for me, my offer to help people in this podcast is that I have a free quote audit that will help you pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs or how you can extend out that pipeline a little bit further. And exactly what you need to do to go and make that happen. It's 20 minutes. It's just simply a free quote audit link that you can click on in the show notes. It's right near the top. It's super easy. I cannot remember having one of these sessions where I didn't give someone something really tangible to move the dial on their business. But it's there. I'd love you to take advantage of it. If for nothing else than to get some ideas around how you can increase your pipeline. Thank you very much for today. I hope you are taking away some really clear outcomes around how you can increase your pipeline. And the importance of doing so. That's it from me. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.
