E218: To Communicate Value and Close More Trade Sales, You MUST Know This One Thing About Your Business: Sales, Leadership, Trade

In this episode, we're going to talk about the one thing you need to know about your business to communicate greater value and close more trade sales with your customers. 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. This week we have something unique, and often when people say unique, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just gonna be some small spin on something you're doing different. But I mean genuinely unique on our podcast this week because we have a series of 3 episodes, 1, 2, 3, straight after the other, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week. Where we have a man on the show who hikes, shoots guns, wears pink jumpers. He's actually got one on now for those who can't see this, pink drink bottles as well as he, as he cheers across the way, but also grows businesses. And I mean really scales businesses. He's had businesses, a couple that have now gone to multi— I wouldn't say multi-billion dollar status, but certainly billion dollar status and also a real track record behind him around publishing. He's a New York Times bestseller. Has created his own apps, and I think fundamentally above everything else is a guy that I really got on well with when I recorded on his podcast just recently. And George's podcast has actually just gone live with me on it. So we're going to link all these together and I'll talk about these as we go. But the man that we have on the other end of the, uh, of the podcast machine right now is George Bryant. So that was very much off the cuff, the introduction there. I hope it was okay, but welcome to the show, George.

I'll take it. And it sounds better when you say it because you have the accent. I don't, but I think for your listeners, it might be the other way. I don't know.

Exactly right. Certainly there is some novelty in accents. I'm a big believer in sales teams that when we can run a pattern interrupt in there through accents or sometimes the way we appear, right? Keeping it professional, but these little pattern interrupts are really powerful in getting people's attention, right? In a world where getting attention is actually super difficult. So welcome today, George. We're going to get right into it. So we have a series of 3 podcasts today. What we are thinking and talking about, and we will go back and forward with, I think, very similar thoughts and ideas with slightly different perspectives. And for everyone listening, you know how much I talk about being 1% better every day and how just having slight subtle changes in how we present things, how we hear things, how we read about things can make a big difference to us. So straight off the cuff today, we're going to be talking about sales, trade, construction industry businesses. And we're going to start around a piece called understanding. So George, tell me, what does understanding mean to you? And what's your advice for people listening, how they can really nail trade sales?

Yeah. And because we're doing this and you're 1% better every day, so in 10 minutes each, I want to be laser and like applicable, right? So for me, and good on the pattern interrupt, even on pink shoes on Ben Wright. So like, I'm not just for people watching. They're pink too.

Yeah.

Just so we can get that out of the way. But when, when I think about it, and the reason I showed that is because what understanding is, is really understanding yourself or the identity of the business, right? Like I know who I am. I'm the bald dude with tattoos who wears pinks and teach you how to love your customers. And when it comes to like trades businesses, particularly because they're my favorite ones to help scale, what I tell everybody is like, we have no business doing business until everybody in the business knows the business. And so when I think about foundationally understanding its identity, and identity for me is made up really in like kind of 3 parts. There's clarity, then there's compliance because we're in a game and a business of doing business the right way. And then there's culture and it's the combination of those 3 parts. So clarity, and if you're listening to this, write this down because we're being laser today, but this is the one question that I always ask everybody about clarity. So you're in the trades business, you're forklift, you're, you're doing home building, you're doing roofing, you're doing whatever. If I went and asked each and every one of your employees where the business is going in 3 years, would they each give me the same answer? And would it match yours? That's clarity. For compliance, which is we have the right and we're following the rules to keep the car on the road. If I was like, can you pull up every license, insurance policy, and financial report and know where they are in under 60 seconds? Most of the time I get deer in the headlights. And then the third one is culture. And this one is the biggest one because in order for culture to work, the identity has to be there and understood for everybody, which is if you think about the business, especially trades businesses, we live in a world full of problems. Like we live in hit speed bump. Left, right, and center and bash our way down the road. But the challenge and the choke point is most of the time when those things happen, teams freeze. And so a good question to ask around culture is when problems happen in the business, does your team fix them or do they wait for you and a permission slip? And if we take the combination of those three things, that is the actual understanding of the identity of our business. It's, it's the foundation that everything's built off of. And the reason that I say it's so important is because you can get to a level of success in business without them, but it becomes the ceiling of the business. And so no matter how many times you bump your head up against that ceiling, you might, as the CEO, have this clear vision about where you want to go. And the team thinks you're going somewhere completely differently. So when you're not over them or on the job site, or they're making decisions, they're not making decisions on the same road that you're going. And so it becomes the bottleneck that eventually we always have to come back to the beginning. So those are the 3 core parts for understanding our identity for me.

Understanding identity. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Couple of things to unpack here, right? Because, because this week's all about similar ideals with slightly different perspective. All right. So straight away, if I'm a trade business owner and I'm listening to this and I'm going, Ben George, this doesn't really matter to me. This doesn't really apply. I want you to just stop. Pause and listen to this because when we know our identity, so clarity, when we know what we're doing, when we know compliance measures of our business, i.e., what we do well, right? Where we exceed standards, where we are better than the competition, that's the most important part. And culturally, even if we're on our own in terms of the sales activities or whether we have a team or not, but culturally what we stand for, what happens is that we are able to communicate that value far more effectively. It's like when someone in their life, they know that they're good on the tools, right? Let's say you are a trader. You said a re-roofer, I think was one of your examples. You may be great on the tools. And I worked with a roofer who included whirlybirds, free whirlybirds as part of all of their re-roofing, right? Some significant benefits from whirlybirds, reduce the heat in your roof, right? Reduce chances of mold depending on where you live, some really significant impacts. But whilst you may be great at doing that and great at offering that and your clarity in your business is that you are going to add this value to give people really good results. And the compliance is they're going to be, you know, installed in the right way so they last. And the cultural aspect is, is you don't want to give people just a new roof, you want to give them a better quality of life, right? When you can articulate that, the message is more compelling and your customers see value in it. When you just know it and can't articulate it, that's where you fall down. So understanding your identity helps you communicate better. And it's really important, please don't walk past this as a listener, right? To be able to articulate what you stand for. So I like that almost as much as your pink shoes, George. I do like that. Okay. So if we're talking about understanding your identity, right, we're going to keep this short and sharp. Is there anything that you would do, any practical measures you would do to step into those shoes of really understanding your identity?

Yeah, it's a great question. And the most practical place is don't ask yourself. Because you don't see what everybody else sees. Ask somebody who's not in the business, who knows nothing about the business, how you are as a business. So a spouse, a neighbor, a friend. And if they're like, I don't know what you do. Well, there's a big inclination right there. The second place is to ask the people in your organization if you have them. Because all too often we end up with top-down leadership instead of co-created management of a vision, right? The best visions, the best ideas, they're a collaboration of what we call collective genius, right? And in order for somebody to be bought into it, they have to have a voting right inside of it. And so we tend to get in this isolated chamber of like, well, I don't know how to describe it. I don't know. I'm like, ask the people that are in it with you. Is the second place to go. And then what you'll find is if you take the summary of both of those and you work together, you end up with a shared vision that everybody can buy into, and then they operate to. And to your point, Ben Wright, huge point. If you can't do that and you don't know it and you can't communicate it, then when you're in this business, people are comparing you with features and benefits, not with your identity and relationships. And so if you can't speak your value, then people are relegated to just voting on you based on what they see. Oh, how long does the roof last? How long does this— who can do it faster? But when you can communicate that value and that vision and what makes you different, they're emotionally investing instead of logically investing. So I just wanted to give kudos to what you said.

Great. Okay. So that's a really nice, neat, chunky outcome for everyone listening. Right? If we can understand our identity better, it's going to allow us to create more value for our customers. And if we're creating more value for our customers, there's more emotional buy-in. More emotional buy-in equals more sales. Right? Those lines, they are proven. They are fact. I will go toe-to-toe with anyone in this world who thinks differently to that. So the outcome, so as we're winding out of today and you're listening and you're driving or walking or at the gym, what I want you to think about is who can you ask? A customer, people in your business, friends, colleagues, family, right? Who can you ask around your identity, around what you're really good at? So one question, what are we really good at? All right, if you ask that, I'm happy. And then from there, how can you take that to articulate it in your pitch? Yes, it's a little bit of thinking, but it's quite straightforward if you just ask 5 people one question, what are we good at? And then roll that into your pitch. Now, if you're someone that's having trouble closing deals, this is going to help you. Because you can increase your value to your customers. Because if you don't do anything different, you are going to continue to quote and have trouble closing those deals. It becomes really frustrating, really stressful. So if you need some help, you know there's a link in our transcript where you can jump in. We'll do a quick review with you. We'll help you. We'll find a way to lift your sales 20 to 25% in one call. It's easy as that. Otherwise, keep listening because we're going to focus in with George over the next 2 or 3 days on more nice sharp ways that will increase our close rates. That's it for today. Keep thinking about being 1% better. It makes all the difference. Bye for now.