In this solo podcast episode, Ben Wright addresses the costly problem of wasted leads caused by distraction and a lack of consistent sales processes for trade, construction, and industrial sales leaders. He opens with a story about a customer who arrived at his home visibly distracted, illustrating how prior negative interactions can hijack a salesperson’s mindset and degrade customer engagement. Ben shares a personal anecdote from his early career when a threatening encounter over a $7,000 payment rattled him, leading to poor close rates for the rest of the day. From these examples he argues that when salespeople are not fully present, their body language, tone, and communication suffer, putting the customer at the mercy of the salesperson’s mindset. The core solution he proposes is an automatic, repeatable sales process—an “autopilot” that functions like driving a car, with default steps (greeting, value discovery, quoting, follow‑up) that can be executed even when the mind is distracted. He explains how such a process breaks the “doom loop” where wasted leads increase stress, which in turn creates more distraction and further lead loss. Finally, Ben offers a free quote audit (linked in the show notes) to pinpoint why listeners are losing jobs and to help them quickly improve close rates. The episode ends with a motivational reminder to focus on 1% daily improvement.
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Today we're going to unpack how you can stop wasting good leads and more consistently engage customers to grow your sales faster. 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. In this episode today, we are going to talk about how your customers should not be at the mercy of your mindset and some practical ways that you can make sure you are always present when you're walking into quotes. As I started to prepare for today's episode, in fact, the motivation to get me to prepare for today's episode was with one of my customers who came to my house a couple of weeks ago. I could see as soon as that customer— they're a terrific business, I'm not going to say their industry because they're a listener and they might know who they are, but they came to my house, they're a terrific industry, they're growing really fast, they've got plenty of opportunity ahead of them, right? And the world is absolutely their oyster. But I could see from the moment they knocked on that front door that they were distracted. And despite me doing my absolute best to unpack that distraction, to clear the zone, to clear the room and get them back on track, For the whole session that we had together, I could see there was, you know, there were thoughts and there were moments where they went across to whatever was distracting them. And again, I won't go through it because, you know, because these are deeply personal things as business owners. But what I can say is that it's a pattern that I've seen across sales leaders, business leaders, even salespeople multiple times across my journey. And that is all about the previous interaction that they have had getting in the way of their next. And whether that previous interaction gets in the way of a phone call with a customer, a discussion with their team, a discussion with their family, being on the tools, whatever it may be, it's just so often that we see these previous conversations or these previous interactions getting in the way of what comes next. Now, when it comes to sales, this can be really dangerous because when we're distracted, our customer ends up being at the mercy of our mindset. And what I mean by that, and by the way, this is a great quote that I just had from a podcast of The Mind of George, right? Which is launching about the same time as this. I'll share it with everyone through socials because it was one of the best podcast recordings I think I've ever done. So stay tuned and I'll get that out. In fact, in our next podcast, I should be able to reference it for you. But having the customer being at the mercy of your mindset is really dangerous because when we are not there to deliver our best selves, people can generally see it. When we're distracted, when we're not completely present, when we're not giving everything of ourselves to that moment, it comes across in your body language. It comes across in your demeanor. It comes across in how you communicate and how you pronounce your words, right? It can be so impactful in a customer engagement that as salespeople and leaders and business leaders, we have a responsibility to make sure it doesn't happen. Now, that's the easy part. That's the theory. The difficult part in practice is that we are all so busy. And I uniquely remember the moments in my life when I've had these issues. In fact, a really particular example was I remember I had to go collect some money. It was $7,000. It wasn't a lot of cash, but I was determined to get it. And I walked into this customer's site. They were building a new premises, and this customer said, come in with me, come in, come in. Right? He walked me up the stairs. He walked me into a back office. And as I walked into this back office, I was like, oh, this is strange. There's no windows in here. Now, in that office, he had 6 of his crew, and the 6 of his crew stood around me as I walked in. I was like, this is not great. I am not— I am not a big unit that's going to fight my way out of these, and B, it's just not in my nature. But it was a clear act of intimidation when that circle started to close in on me and he said, I'm not going to pay you. And, you know, and that for me was a situation where I felt really threatened. And of course, he got the message across. And, you know, most of us are going to walk away from that guy. All right. You know, I've possibly dodged a bullet there. But the fact of the matter was, right or wrong, what happened there is not important. But I took that interaction because it rattled me. I was young. I think I was 29, 30 at the time. And to have 6 big blokes kind of surround you saying, you're not getting your money, you know, do you get it, son? Right. You know, not a great moment to be in, but that interaction impacted me for the rest of my day. And I had sales calls for the rest of the day. And I can't remember my exact close rates from the deals that I had, but they certainly weren't high. Because for the rest of the day I was worried about that interaction. I was annoyed about the $7,000, but more importantly, I was worried about what could have happened and how business can be really personal at points in time. And so for me, what I learned from that moment was that having a default process that you can lean onto is really important, right? So that when you get rattled— I, and I use the example of driving a car back in episode 209, but When you're rattled but you have your defaults as sub-automatic, right? So they're things you just do without thinking. So we're driving, we brake, we accelerate, we turn, we look in our mirrors. All of that you do by default. When you have a sales process that you follow by default, the customer that you deal with is far less likely to be at the mercy of your mindset. Because when you do have things distracting you, you can flick the autopilot switch on to an extent and roll through your process. Arrive at the front door, smile, be well presented, ask them how they're going. Walk into the door, ask what's special, work through what's going to create value, decide if you can quote on the spot or not. Right, once you've prepared the quote, follow up effectively, booking your next meeting, make sure decision makers are present, right? So now I roll through that really quickly because it's a process that I know inside and out and I can do with my eyes closed. For you as a leader, my encouragement is to really think about how you can make sure that you roll into every single sales interaction with an automatic process that just happens even when you're distracted. Because the reality is that when you don't, good leads get wasted. Good leads go and buy from someone else because they haven't got the best from you. You waste money on your marketing channel, you waste money on lead generation, which means your profit levels drop, which means you need to quote more deals, which means your stress rises, which means your distractions also increase, and you end up more and more distracted in more and more calls. Right? So it's what I, I call a doom loop where you are just chasing your tail, bad after bad after bad, where you can break that cycle by having a process that's really consistent. And that's the message clearly from me today is to make sure you're building out that process, but where you can have that really consistent process at play, it takes away a lot of the stress when you're not quite present. So that's the ask from today. Of course, I'm very grateful that you've been listening. If you are someone that is feeling like you are spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes, right? Particularly where you're distracted and can't quite dedicate all of you to those sales meetings and those customer visits, well, it's likely that if you don't change something now, you're going to continue to get those same stressful results over and over again. So our commitment to our podcast listeners is that we have a free quote audit that will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs, i.e., you're distracted without a process, and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. It's free. There's an audit or a free quote audit link in the show notes, and that'll get you started now. Thanks very much for listening today. Keep focusing on being 1% better each and every day because it does make a difference. Bye for now.
