E226: If You’re Running With Sales Scripts You’re Leaving Money on the Table - And What to Do Instead to Grow Your Trade Sales:Trade, Leadership, Sales
In this episode of Sales Growth Made Simple, host Ben Wright argues that traditional sales scripts—rigid, word‑for‑word guides promising big revenue lifts—become a liability once salespeople move beyond the beginner stage. He explains that scripts make teams robotic, cause missed steps, and are hard to remember, leading to lost deals. Wright advocates replacing scripts with simple, repeatable sales frameworks that preserve personal flair while ensuring critical information is captured. He introduces three core frameworks used in his Sold Out Sales Teams Academy: the 3Ds (Deliverables, Decision Makers, Deadlines), the Core 3 (Speed, Value, Process), and a five‑stage sales process (Lead, Meet‑and‑Greet, Quote, Closing, Post‑Close). Through anecdotes about a roofer who forgets to confirm customer needs and a painter who boosted sales 25% by simplifying his process, Wright shows how these frameworks improve consistency, compliance, and close rates. He warns that persisting with scripts or ad‑hoc methods leads to wasted time, stress, and insufficient profit, and invites listeners to take a free quoting quiz built on the Core 3 framework, promising a 20‑25% sales lift. The episode closes with a call for incremental improvement.
I grew up being given endless sales scripts. The big change that moved the dial in selling for me came when I moved to sales frameworks that not only kept me on track, but they allowed me to be myself.
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. No doubt everyone listening, particularly in the trade landscape, has been in that situation where they have been given sales scripts. Use this script, it will move your sales by 36%, grow your sales by $650,000, or allow you to have The lifestyle where you own the boat and the helicopter and so forth, right? Sales scripts are a huge part of the landscape around the world. For me though, today we are going to talk through around why frameworks are far more impactful than sales scripts and also how they're going to allow you to show some of your natural flair that will get more deals done for you than sales scripts. So for those that have worked with us before, so the hundreds and hundreds of sales people, in fact, we're into the thousands now. One thing that comes back really commonly as a piece of feedback is that we make things simple by using some really basic frameworks. Frameworks are something that I came around to about 10 years ago, and the difference between a sales script and a sales framework is that sales scripts are really effective when you are learning a new skill, certainly for a very short period of time, because they allow you to get your head around the broad frameworks of what you're doing in any process. It doesn't matter whether you're selling, whether you are— I mean, coding's getting bigger and bigger, vibecoding as it's being called. Doesn't matter whether you're learning how to use a bookkeeping system, Xero or MYOB, or even whether you're learning how to drive, right? There are very regimented scripts and instructions that come very early with learning these types of skills. However, for me, what happens is once we move past base levels of knowledge, if we're sticking with scripts, as I said earlier, we become very robotic. But above everything else, they become impossible to remember. And teams that I see running sales scripts actually have huge variances in ticking off major, major boxes of a sales process. Because when they miss a part of a script, they don't just miss a few words, they miss entire sections. And for me, that's really dangerous because if you've asked some great questions, but then forgotten to check in with a customer if you're right and got them wrong, then you run a really high risk of losing that deal. You're right, you run a high risk of going all the way through that quoting process, and getting to the end and saying, hey, hey, Mr. Customer, I'm sorry, I got that wrong. And that's where sales frameworks can become really impactful once you've gone past that base level of knowledge around a sales process. And so for trade leaders that are listening, I want you to think about when you're out on site, if you're running scripts, if you're flying by the seat of your pants and relying on experience, or if you have a broad framework that you approach when it comes to selling to customers. The majority of trade businesses that we work with Right, we've got at the moment, latest person into our business, they are a roofer, a roofer in our business, smart, capable, but absolutely flies by the seat of his pants, has a few things that he does really well every single sales call. Like always asks customers how they are, always tries to build a personal connection, but almost always forgets to check at the end of his sales process, at the end of his site visit, if he's ticked off exactly what the customer wants, right? And he also has a couple of great bits of value that he adds to his customers that he often forgets to tell them about when he's out on site. So if we're talking about frameworks, frameworks for me, we work off, we've got 3 or 4 frameworks that we roll through our Sold Out Sales Teams Academy. Generally we'll work off 3s or 5s in those frameworks. A, because they're really easy to remember, but B, because they're quite consistent when we're rolling out the same numbers in each of these frameworks. And by having a framework, what it allows us to do when we are on site, let's think we're out at a commercial site, we'll stick with the roofing example, right? And we are quoting a reroof. What it allows us to do is if we know that there's 3 things that we have to tick off when we're on site, 3 broad categories, it allows us to grab that category and work through it, a broad spectrum at a broad level, exactly what we need to tick off to be successful. So let me give you some examples around some frameworks that we use, and I'll just very quickly touch on 3 of these, and you can have a think about where they might apply to your business. Absolutely, we're not going to go through them in detail today, but the frameworks, when they're rolled out well, are so effective. In moving deals forward. So first one's 3Ds, that's one where we've rolled out with hundreds and hundreds of salespeople have used the 3Ds and that's all focused around deliverables, decision makers and deadlines. So deliverables, what's most important to the project, decision makers, who's involved, who do I need to know and who needs to know me and timelines, when are we going to get this done? And then within each of those 3 frameworks, there's generally questions and approaches you can take to make sure that you're most effectively understanding, for example, what the key deliverables are, what's most important, what's not important, what are the things that we need to consider, and all the other important aspects that make up getting the deal right. When we go into the framework that says, hey, we've got the 3 Ds, we need to make sure we focus on these, it allows us to tick off each section and drill into those, even with notes if we need to. A lot of trade businesses I'm working with will take their iPads to site. They'll have under the 3 Ds—deliverables, decision makers, deadlines—certain things they need to tick off. And they go about it and they use the iPad to prompt them. So by having that framework, it allows them to go in with a broad process but also show their personal flair. In deliverables, it allows them to talk through common deliverables that other customers have asked for or things that the customer might want to consider, right? Or when in their experience where they've seen jobs go wrong with certain deliverables. Super powerful when we have the framework but allow a level of personalization and flair to make it happen. Second framework is called the Core 3. That's all around speed, value, and process. How we move through deals quickly by creating value in a process that we can roll out again and again and again. Core 3 is a great framework from a simplicity focus. It's the simplest of everything we have. And absolutely without doubt, we see customers moving their dial. I've had a painter recently. Painters are certainly a business that we've had a lot of over recent times, but I've seen painters. One in particular moved his sales by about 25% by just focusing on two of those three sections of the Core 3 Process, right? Then again, that gives them a process without a script. Now this painter in this example was very freestyle, was found that he wasn't actually sticking to the processes that he set himself. So we made the processes a lot simpler for him and he's found that his compliance has been able to absolutely improve. And then the last one here is all around having a sales process. So 5 stages in this, that's recognizing that we have prospects in the lead stage, the meet and greet stage, the quote stage, the closing stage, and the post-close stage, i.e., we've won the deal, what happens next? And by looking at these 5 stages, we're just able to build out what we do within the business across each of these and deep dive into one in particular when we've got gaps we find or things that we need to improve, but it keeps it really compact and really clear around what stages our customers are in. So scripts versus frameworks, to recap on this. Scripts very much tell you exactly what you need to do at every single point. Great, because if you get them right, they're amazing, right? They often will cover everything you need in a sales deal, but don't really allow personality, don't really allow flair. And when you get them wrong, you can often lose whole chunks of sales processes. So for me, I moved to frameworks about 10 years ago.. And without question, it has helped me, my business, and the businesses I work with close way more deals than sales scripts. So if you're a trade leader that's sitting out there and you are, and first of all, thank you, very grateful for you listening today. If you're a trade leader that's out there thinking, okay, I'm working off scripts, right? I think there might be a few out there or I'm running freestyle. I'm just approaching deals in whatever I feel is like most important. And there's a framework or two in there. I do a few things well, but there's plenty I can do better. I think there's going to be a huge number of you in that stage or in that part of your business, right? Or the third one that says, hey, I've got some frameworks, I follow them, but I want to check them and I want to make sure I'm doing the right thing. So if you're in one of those three camps, well, and particularly in the first two, you're potentially quoting over and over again, wasting time on deals that aren't closing or certainly not closing enough. And for me, the main message is that if you don't change something now, you're going to continue to get those really stressful results. It's going to happen again and again and again. You're going to work on the wrong thing, long hours, and really at the end of the day, not have enough money in the bank to show for it. So my free quoting quiz, that will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs. It will use the Core 3 framework. It will give you one thing to quickly grow your sales by 20 to 25%. It's free. You just need to click on the free quiz link in the show notes and get started now. It'll take you less than one minute. That's it for today. Please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day. We'll see you next time. Bye for now.
