E224: Want to GROW Your Close Rates By 50? Listen to My Sales Lessons to Save You Years of Trial and Error: Sales, Leadership, Trade

So many trade businesses rush the sales process and rely on their experience to get deals done, which ends up in really low close rates. Thankfully, certainly in my experience, there's some basic habits that can very quickly turn this around.

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 the very early days of my sales career, and when I say early days, I'm talking about the first decade. I'm 25 years now into my sales career, and in the first 10 years, I absolutely relied on my experience to get deals done. And looking back, was always in a rush, always in a hurry to get customers from, hey, I'm interested, to let's do the deal. And it's not a surprise to me now at all, but my close rates then were substantially lower. And when I mean lower, I was closing 20%, 25% of deals, and I thought that was a reasonably strong result. Fast forward now, 25 years in the industry, and my close rates are generally above 50%, certainly higher in some of the segments I work in. In some of my larger parts of my business, my close rates are more like 75 to 80%. But in the type of business that is very similar to what trade businesses rely on, it's certainly around about the 50% mark. So having had a serious amount of experience now in the sales industry, one of the jobs that I take really seriously is trying to short circuit the experience needed for, particularly for sales leaders to get good at selling. Because in my experience, they're often really, really good. And think of this in your own situation, really, really good at their job. Great tradies, generally pretty good at running their team. They care for their team and want to see them succeed and generally really competent at doing the base parts of their business, but tend to fall short on time as the primary lever. But then when it comes to their knowledge around sales and sales processes, they tend to rely on their experience in the trade, in the industry, i.e., their technical skills to get deals done. And that often ends up in sales deals getting rushed. And I mean, look, you can think for yourself about where you sit in this area, but If you're one of those businesses or people that finds you are rushing between appointments, you are walking in, you're often not clear when you're walking in the door around what you want to talk about. So you feel not uneasy or perhaps a little bit uneasy, but certainly not certain about which way you need to take the deal. Go in, do your quote process, do your audit, get all your information, bang your quote out, and then end up looking a lot of instances with customers either saying, hey, I'm not ready to go, I don't know what's next, or just ignoring you. If you're in that kind of camp, then I think the message for me is that I was in that point, certainly in the early parts of my careers. And the good news is that there are some basic habits that can help you turn this around really quickly. So today is very much around a mindset focus. So how we can adjust our own approach to selling to help us consistently build good practices. It's less so on the technical piece. We have so many episodes of this around technical selling and how you can grow that. Look, I'd encourage you to certainly to go back to the last 6 weeks of podcasts. But if you want to start somewhere in terms of how you can really make a difference, go back to episode 209 and that'll give you some technical elements. But today, from a mindset point of view, there's 3 things that I focus on really heavily with myself, with my sales teams, and in particular my trade business leaders. So number 1 is all around work ethic. And yeah, it's easy to say I work hard. I don't know many trade leaders that don't work hard, but working hard is not about the hours you put in. It's about the hours that you focus on what's important. And in my experience, certainly when I was running my own, you know, renewables trade electrical business, I tended to spend too much time on what was urgent rather than what was important. And for me, the way that I've been able to work through this, particularly with trade leaders now, so trade leaders in 2026, is around actually compartmentalizing or separating out times of the day when they get to focus on what's important. So from a sales point of view, the key lesson for me that made a huge difference to close rates was diarizing, so putting in your calendar an hour every day when you're focusing on sales. And what happened from there is that the teams are then able to focus on new leads, quotes that they need to get out, quotes that they've got out in the last couple of days, and then deals that have moved a little bit slower. And in that order generally is where trade leaders are focusing. So that work hard piece actually comes down to working hard on the right things. And a significant, significant reason that I've seen a lot of our, particularly our landscaping, particularly our painting businesses, those two in particular, really, really improve close rates is by getting really regimented in spending an hour a day on your sales process, generally in the morning. So generally they'll do that first. They'll do the most important urgent activities, right? The, the, the big stuff that's banging on the door. Someone hasn't turned up to site, we've got a problem on site, deliveries haven't arrived, customers are changing their scope, whatever it may be. Then they roll into sales, right? And they focus every day on that sales process. So that's number one where I've seen a significant impact in moving sales because you are consistently showing up to do your sales work. Number two is all around a focus that business actually is personal. It was a piece of advice I got really early in my sales days and it went something like this. Hey kid, don't worry about it. It's nothing personal. Now that's something that I call complete nutter. I don't know if you can actually swear on podcasts. I don't think I've ever done it before, but I won't start it now. But I can call that out as crap because in my experience, the best salespeople and the best business leaders behave in business like they do in their personal life. And the reason that I think it's so important to acknowledge it is because in people's personal lives, I generally see them have true care for those around them. They want to look after their family, they want to look after their friends, they want to do the right thing by people in the street. They see someone struggling with something, you know, someone, particularly an older generation struggling with something, they'll go up and help them. They hold doors for people, they pull chairs back for people, they're courteous in a line and let people go in front of them. And this is certainly not exclusive to any type of industry, but I think the trade, in fact, I think tradies in general, in my time in the industry and those that I work with, are generally towards the politer end when it comes to these things because they just recognize that life is so uncertain because of the industry we work in and how agile we need to be out on job sites. So the approach in our business is personal. For me, where it's really impactful at a mindset point of view is to recognize that we can be ourselves when we're in business. When we go out to site, we can talk to people like we would talk to people in our personal life. And when we show that genuine care like we would in our personal life, it means something to customers that we're dealing with. It means something when we turn up to the door and we ask people how they are. We take our shoes off, right? In fact, I'd say trade businesses in general are very good They're taking shoes off, right? But when we ask them how their day is, we ask them what's important, we ask them if there is anything that we need to make sure that we're taking into account for whatever their project is, right? Genuinely slowing down and finding a reason to talk to someone is fantastic. And for me, the areas, if you are trying to think, okay, how do I make business personal, right? How do I bring my own personality to customers? I would absolutely suggest that it comes down to the start of your conversations. When you are looking for areas of common interest. The two most common areas of interest that I see generally people work around: family, particularly children, and sport. And it's very easy for you to lead those conversations when someone asks you how you are, to roll in with what your morning entailed. So for me, this morning I had a 6-year-old who decided that having some money on her tuckshop card was absolutely imperative to getting the day started. Right? And that, I mean, you can guess how that one went from there. So for me, that's a great conversation I can have with people today. How's your day? Well, it started with my 6-year-old holding me to ransom over $40 on a tuckshop card. Right? And you'd be amazed at how often that opens up conversations at a personal level. And when you build that personal relationship, people are more likely to want to do business with you and close rates tend to rise. Now I will say on a note here, what's really important is that it's genuine conversations that are a little bit disingenuous, i.e., conversations that you are clearly thinking about moving into the sale rather than actually listening to the answer. They can do as much damage as genuine relationships do in reverse. So my encouragement is if you're going to ask people how they are, if you're going to try and make business a little bit personal, just make sure it's genuine. Okay. So the third area for me, from a mindset point of view around how we can really rapidly grow close rates, is all around progress over perfection. So that's acknowledging that we don't need to go and roll out a perfect sales process. In fact, I'd argue that the perfect sales process is dangerous because it can make us a little bit too rigid. But if we focus on progress and then on those small wins, that 1% better approach that I talk about in huge amounts across this podcast— and in fact, I mentioned Atomic Habits and 1% Better to one of my clients the other day, and, and he actually pulled his book up off his desk and put it in front of the camera quicker than I could, than the one that's near my desk. So I love it when those moments happen. But from a progress over perfection point of view, it's all about small wins. Finding little things that work and just continually building on them. Because what happens over time is when you layer those base changes in as habits and you do them again and again and again and again. I've seen this across my 25 years of my career where I've very consistently built in little things like asking a customer how they are, about remembering to slow down when I'm in the middle of a sales consult, around making sure before I leave I ask the customer for their timeframes, around making sure that when I send a quote through, I Put a phone call with it if I can't get face to face, right? All these little things that on their own don't magically increase your close rates, but when you add them together, that cumulative impact, they certainly do. So there are 3 areas where there is no doubt that I've seen significant impact to close rates, not only at a personal level, but also in the businesses that I've built and the trade businesses that I've worked with over the last 5 to 8 years. So if we recap those, number 1 is all about working hard on the right things. Right? So to avoid us rushing sales and rely on our experience to get deals done, if we start to build these 3 mindset habits, number 1 being working hard and focusing on the right things, right? We should expect to see close rates rise. And for me, they're now sitting at above 50%. Working hard. Number 2 is business is personal. Bring your personality, bring your own personal morals and ways of living and approach to life to your business and to your customers. And if it's a good approach, right? If it's an approach that lives life, caring around others, living it to the fullest, right? Everything that I see so many business owners do certainly in their personal lives, right? Then it's absolutely going to help you build those relationships and get deals done. And then the third one, last but by no means least, is focusing on progress over perfection. So that's building on small wins, doing little things again and again and again, and adding to those as time goes by. So they're 24 years of sales lessons that have grown my close rates to over 50%. And on paper, you can think of 50% as being, wow, that's high. How am I ever going to get there? But it's not uncommon. And across the trade businesses that I work with, I have a really large number of businesses now that are moving to that 50% close rate. And certainly if not there, they're into the 40s. And I think for most businesses, when you have close rates in the 40s, we are really starting to talk about successful businesses that need to rely less on growing leads, right? And see their natural business growth come from there. Okay, so if we think about today, if you think about that you have close rates that are low, you feel like you're spending hours of wasted time won quotes and you're not losing them. So exactly what we're talking about around the antidotes of today. Well, my message is that if you don't change something, you're going to continue to get these same really stressful or frustrating results over and over and over again, which results in working long hours, right? Working hard, but not on the right things. And in the end, there's not enough money in the bank to show for it. So what we have rolled out now is a quoting quiz that's going to pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs. It's framework-based. It will find one thing for you that you can change right now to quickly grow your sales by 20 to 25%. It's free. There's a quiz link in the show notes. You can really quickly get started. It takes less than a minute to get the outputs. That's it for today. Please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.