E222: Why Working Harder will NEVER Guarantee Sales Growth for Your Trade Business, and the Secret Hack that Makes Sales Easy (and how to improve your Leadership): Sales, Leadership, Trade

Today we're going to discover why working harder won't ever guarantee sales growth for your trade business, but also the secret hack that will make sales easier for you. 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 uncover why hard work doesn't always result in sales growth and the 3 levers that will help you differentiate between hard work and effective work in growing your sales business. I remember as I was growing up in the sales world, a quote from one of our team members actually, where he said to me, Ben, there is nothing worse than a hardworking, underperforming salesperson. And I stopped for a moment, I thought about that. There's nothing worse than a hardworking— okay, they're working hard, great— underperforming— okay, they're not hitting their sales target— salesperson. Okay, so why is that? All right, and as we're just discussing about it, what came out of it was that it's not the hard work that's the problem. The hard work's fantastic, and in most cases, working hard is lined up with good results. However, it never guarantees it, right? And in this instance, we had a salesperson in the business who was working really hard, but they just weren't converting leads. And the result and the impact on the business was that we were spending good money on leads that weren't converting, because despite the best efforts of us, of our salesperson, they simply weren't succeeding. And that really landed with me, but I hadn't thought about rolling it into a podcast until recently when one of my customers said, hey Ben, the biggest underlying message I personally took away from your session was that discipline, planning, and me as an individual taking responsibility to get the job done is so vital. And this was an experienced salesperson that said this to me about 3 or 4 months ago. So as I was planning for today, I really wanted to take both of those moments in my life as inspiration to say, hey, whilst working hard is really important, it doesn't guarantee sales growth. And I think particularly in the trade industry where I would say the very vast majority of people, leaders, sales leaders, individuals that I work with in this industry work hard, particularly at a business ownership level. But it's very rare that I have to sit down with one of our team, one of our students, and say, "Hey, you're not working hard enough." However, that doesn't mean they're always working smart. So there's 3 things that we really instill into these businesses that help them focus not just on working hard, but on being smart about where they spend their time. And the first one here is going to be no surprise, and that's good systems. Good sales processes. I mention it in a lot of our podcasts and I'm not gonna spend much time on it today. If you haven't got the message around how the importance of a sales process, then please go back and listen to 3 of the last 4 episodes, episode 209, 210, and 211. They all cover this and even 212 that spoke about the fuel crisis actually talks about processes as well. But number 1 is having great systems and processes. Number 2 is something we haven't spoken about a lot, which is all around having the discipline to focus on what matters. When you look at jobs or things to do, we can often classify them into what's urgent and what's important. Yes, we absolutely have times when jobs are urgent and important, but I generally don't worry about those because they generally get done. They're urgent, so they're screaming at you, and they're important so that your brain says, "Hey, I need to get them done." However, delineating between what's urgent and what's important when it comes down to what you focus on is really impactful. And I'll give you some examples here. What's urgent can be when we have to return phone calls of non-sales related activities, right? Someone really needs to speak to us. What's urgent can be completing some background admin that we got a business, right? Putting some pressure on us around. What's urgent can be a phone call from a lead who really wants to talk to you, but you deep down know they're never going to go ahead. Right, and what I'll say here is I've deliberately lined up urgent tasks that I would say are not necessarily important. What's important are things like contacting customers really quickly, getting out to site visits, understanding what's valuable to customers, getting quotes done quickly, following up quotes. Now sometimes this clearly falls into what's urgent as well. However, by being able to delineate what's really important in our role versus what can be urgent, right, or what can scream at you really loudly but not necessarily be important, is a really nice step to moving forward around spending your time on what matters. And the way I'd really encourage you to do that is by having a list— and we're moving on to the third point here, which is around planning— is to have a list that you create at the end of each week. I do this every week myself around what's really important for you to get done next week. So I had 3 things on my list this week that I needed to make happen, and they were the— each day, they were the 3 things that I focused on to tick off to make sure we had happen. On top of that, there's also a daily list around what is really important for you to get done. And the way I recommend most of our team do that is to have a power hour every morning where they focus on new leads, new quotes, and following up old leads, because they typically are the 3 most important sales activities that we need to get done to get deals closed. So by rolling into your calendars a power hour that has new leads, new quotes, and following up of existing quotes, you get that done early, you tick it off, and then you can get away onto your day. A number of my customers will have that power hour as their second hour of the day or their second thing they do in the day. So they do deal with any team-related issues first. They get their team set up, they get them on site, they do a toolbox, whatever it may be. They return any calls that can't wait, and then they roll into that, right? So it might be 7 to 8:30, they focus on that, or 7 to 9, they focus on that. And then from 9 to 10, bang, sales activities, and they make it happen. Really nice way to look at it. But for me, it's also a much more rounded perspective around ensuring we're not just working hard, but we're focusing on what's important. So what I'm hoping you take out of today is, first of all, the acknowledgement that you are working hard, because for most people listening, I expect that's the case. But secondly, just start to challenge yourself around if perhaps you're working too hard on the things that aren't as important and not quite getting to those things that are really important, and some acknowledgement that maybe it's time to do something about it. Because what invariably happens out of this is I find that people get frustrated because they spend so much time quoting and don't get their jobs closed, i.e., they lose jobs or they don't move forward. And by not changing what they're doing, they continue to get those same stressful results over and over and over again. So change is really important. Our commitment to podcast listeners is that we have a free quote audit that pinpoints exactly why you're not winning more jobs or why you're not able to focus on what's not just urgent but what's important and what you need to do to increase those close rates quickly. There's a free quote audit link you can click on in the show notes. It'll get you started and it's really simple to move forward on. That's it for today. Please keep that focus on being 1% better each and every day, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.