E209: The Simple 3-Step Sales Framework that Will Convert More Sales and Grow Your Trade Business

In this episode, we will uncover the simple 3-step sales framework that will convert more sales and 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, 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. Today we're gonna be looking at the Core 3 Conversion System, exactly what it is, the 3 steps in it that are so important to growing the sales of any business, but particularly a trade business, and a couple of ideas as to how you can implement the Core 3 Conversion System immediately into your business to have that impact straight away around growing your sales. But before we do so, I'd like to share a story around how the Core 3 Conversion began with me and probably more broadly how my focus on systems and frameworks and really simplifying the sales process to be in a format that everyone can follow day in, day out began. For me, I remember I was in my late 20s. I was meeting with a customer. I thought I'd prepared well. I thought I'd done everything right. I'd spent so much time getting ready for this meeting, and about halfway through, the customer stopped me, right? And look, I was in my late 20s, the customer here would have been in his late 60s, and he said to me, Ben, we're going to end this meeting today. Just to give you some feedback, I'm old enough to be your grandfather. I've been in this game a long time, and I don't need you coming in telling me how to run my business. And I thought, wow. We ended the meeting, obviously, and I thought, wow, that hurt. A, it was a little bit humiliating, but most importantly, I thought, gee, I thought I'd really done the right thing. I'd come in with the right intent. I've always been about learning. I've always been around trying to look after customers. But that was a real wake-up call for me that says, hey Ben, maybe you're not quite doing this the way you should be. And on reflection, what I realized was that whilst I've had lots of good mentors around me across my journey, I haven't always had someone by my side. And this was a moment where perhaps I'd had a slightly extended period without having someone by my side, and I'd fallen into some bad habits and had forgotten some of the really important and impactful processes or frameworks or systems, call it what you like, that I need to draw out with selling. So two things came out of that moment for me. Number one was, I was, A, I'm probably not where I need to be, so I need to go back and get some more help. And two was, well, hang on, how do I start putting what I need to do into frameworks that are really repeatable and frameworks that I'm going to be able to remember when I'm under pressure, right? And deliver day in, day out. To get good results, right? And when I say get good results, often we can be distracted when it comes to a sales process. So I wanted to make sure that I started to think about frameworks and ways that I could always keep myself on track, even maybe when the environment wasn't going to help me do that. And I should say, before we get into the, the Core 3 Conversion System, I did go back and meet with that customer. They were worth about half a million dollars a year to our business. We did re-sign them. We sorted everything out. So it's not all bad when you get things wrong in meetings. You can certainly recover. But for me, that was a really pivotal moment in my my career where I really started to focus on making sure I've got help around me, right? And B, as importantly, getting frameworks in front of me and memorized so that I could really consistently deliver the results I needed to selling. So what's the Core 3 Conversion System? Well, this system works off 3 levers: speed, value, and process. Each of these levers you would have heard from me in isolation if you've been listening to the podcast. But what I want to do today is break down another layer of each to really show how this Core 3 conversion system is so simple, but also so powerful and effective when it comes to dealing with particularly new leads, but also increasing our close rates. Because at the end of the day, I want to be really clear is for most businesses, it's not a lead problem that they have, i.e., they don't need to generate more leads. It's a conversion problem, right? They don't necessarily have bad leads, right? The leads just get quoted by someone else quicker or more effectively. So they go elsewhere. So let's have a look at the 3 steps here. Speed. So speed is all about clearly what I've referenced a number of times, which is how quickly you respond to leads. But it's also about how you engage with these leads. Because at the time when these leads call you, it's generally going to be when their energy is highest, right? When their engagement is at a point where they are ready to really talk with you. And if we're getting back to them quickly, but also talking to them rather than responding with emails or text messages or processes that are a little bit mundane, right? I.e., not engaging customers. If we can get back to them not just quickly but also in a great modality, i.e., on the phone, and that's the normal way I'd recommend, then we're able to have that conversation with lots of energy and lots of engagement and start going on the journey with them. And I think that's the bit that gets overlooked around speed to lead, is that it's not about beating competitors to talking with our customers, but it's about talking to them when they're engaged and ready to talk with us. And if we can do that by not just getting back to customers quickly i.e., answering the phone when it rings, or maximum 2 hours or 2 business hours when a lead comes in the door, getting back to them, right? And then do that by phone. Then we're really matching our energy with them and we're going to see close rates rise. That for me is unequivocal. And any business I've worked with that's done that has seen their close rates grow. So the second piece is around value. So value, I mean, clearly in that example I gave you with the customer who was in italics old enough to be my grandfather, I hadn't created value in the right way. And the most important advice I can give you here is to ask questions around creating value. So never assume. Assumption is the mother of all stuff-ups, right? You can go cruder in the words if you want, but when we go in and assume we know what a customer wants, it's a really dangerous game because we don't know that customer very well. Generally, we don't know them very well at that point in time, right? We've spoken to them on the phone a few minutes, we've got to their house, we know our product, we know our service, we know what often happens in the industry. But we don't know exactly their situation. So asking questions to determine what exactly is most important for them is critical when it comes to creating value. If we want to get that value proposition right, we need to be prepared to ask questions, listen to those, and then repeat back to our customer what we think's most important. Now, third and last is all around process. So speed gets us in the door, Value keeps the conversation going, but process gets the deal done. And the reason I say that is that often when we go into sales calls, we've got so much going on. We could be distracted by a number of events before we walk in the door. And perhaps think about yourself. If you're distracted by operational calls, you're distracted by the phone having just rung, you're distracted by cash flow, distracted by your family, your kids, your friends, right? The sunny day, whatever it may be. You're late. There's so many things that can distract us. But by having a really good process, what we not only do is start with a good impression, but when our mind is busy with other things, we can default back to something that we do repeatedly. So the running of the process or the rolling out of the process becomes almost routine. It's almost automatic, and we can do it on autopilot without needing to think about it, right? Like riding a bike, like, dare I say it, like driving a car, right? These are things that a lot of the basic skills— stop, start, turn— Use your mirrors. These all happen automatically even when we're distracted with other things. That's where a good process and a simple process comes in, in that it allows us to do the same thing over and over and over again. And there's generally only 4 or 5 things that we really need to get right. But if we get those right when everything else is going on in our crazy world, right, we can be confident that we'll deliver a great process. Now that Core 3 Conversion System is out of all the frameworks that I have, the most impactful when it comes to moving the dial on your sales without complexity. And what I mean by that is that it's the simplest to roll out to get some results for you and your team. So coming out of today, and thank you for listening, I'm always grateful to have such a great audience and I really appreciate you taking your time to listen to this podcast. But coming out of today, what I'd really like you to think about is number one, is this the line in the sand moment where you're really clear that you need to progress your sales process into something that's repeatable. And if it is that moment, or if you're certainly really aware that you can be doing a lot of things better in your business, then the Core 3 Conversion System is a really good one to roll out. At the same time, if you're probably beyond that point and you're really frustrated that you're spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes and you're probably not winning enough of those, then I want you to have a think about what you need to do to change. Because if you don't change something now, you're going to continue to get those same results, which can be pretty stressful, over and over and over again. A way that you can get through this is have a look at our free quote audit. It'll pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and then what you need to do to increase your close rates as quickly as you can. It's in the show notes. If you just click on the link, it's super easy and it'll roll you straight through to catching up with us. That's it for today. Keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day because it will make all the difference. Bye for now.