E236: Why Celebrating Trade Wins Will Grow Your Revenue, and the Simple Reason You Must Do It More Often

Recognizing progress and not just celebrating wins is so impactful for teams and businesses who want to not only keep their leaders engaged, but also their broader teams. Today, we're going to jump into the simple reasons why you need to do it more often. Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 figure trade, construction, and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you 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. Growing up as a leader, I have to admit that I simply did not celebrate enough wins with our teams or recognize the progress that individuals were making. As a leader, I fell into that trap that was very, very common where most leaders think that they actually celebrate more than enough. And then when you flip the shoe on to the other foot, to the foot of their team members or the feet of their team members, they actually think that businesses don't celebrate enough or anywhere near enough. And when you run stats on that, it's typically 75% or roughly that number, I paraphrase, of leaders think they celebrate enough within their business, but only 25% of staff do. So there's this amazing polarity. And today we're actually going to jump into 3 ways and 3 reasons that you can more effectively recognize progress and celebrate wins for your team to not only keep them engaged but also keep you going. Short and sharp, we're going to jump straight into it. This is well worth the 7 to 10 minutes because when you get this right, it has inordinate, gigantic impacts on the culture and on the morale of not just your team but also you as a leader. So the first area I'd like to look into here is when we celebrate. And I love this saying, recognize progress and celebrating wins. It's something that evolved in our business across the last 10 years. And I remember distinctly the situation I was in. It was a very senior sales member of a very big team, 50-odd people in this team. They had a revenue line of close to $5 billion. And he actually workshopped this line with me, and that is recognizing progress and celebrating wins, because his feedback was that across his career, the celebrations were just left when big deals were won. You know, those deals you've been working on for a really long period of time, or the first customer of a type, or even a really profitable deal, that most teams waited until they happened before they celebrated. And his feedback was, and certainly I share this, was that along the journey, when you are able to recognize progress, and that's all those small things that need to happen to get the big deals done, that there is a far greater chance that you're actually going to get those big deals done because we're ticking off little milestones along those journey, right, picking up little pots of gold as we are on a far longer journey, so that once we get to our destination, not only does it mean we have a better chance of getting to our destination, but it also means that the celebration can then happen, recognizing all those small steps that we've taken along the way. So the first area I want you to think about and challenge you to think about today is how you celebrate wins. Do you celebrate just those big ones, Or do you have a system where you recognize smaller steps of progress that are really integral in getting the bigger deals ticked off? Now, if you don't, there's a really nice formula as to how you can really regularly recognize progress. You're welcome to contact me directly or, or do it via the quote quiz that we have at the end of today's show. But really importantly, we need to make sure, and I want to challenge you, that you are thinking about not just celebrating the big wins, but the smaller steps along the way. And a really significant piece that comes out of this is that I would expect you to be able to recognize patterns that come from these one deals. So when you start to look at those smaller bits of progress, those smaller steps that happen along the journey, that you'll also see some patterns roll out that will help you not only improve your sales process— we talk a lot about improving your sales process— but it will also help you find areas of weakness that you might want to focus on a little bit more to get a higher close rate and in the end celebrate more won deals. So first thing, first challenge for today is to think about how you can recognize progress on the smaller steps and not just celebrate wins. And of course there are ways you can recognize progress with smaller gestures. They don't all need to be having those big Yahoo celebration moments that we often equate or that we align with won deals, but they can also certainly focus on some of the smaller steps along the way. Get in touch if you want to know more. We don't have time to go into them today. Second part. Okay, so we're recognizing a lot of smaller things, not just waiting for the bigger wins. That's that first challenge. This is a really impactful, in fact, more impactful than just about any cultural activity I've ever rolled out with sales teams, but it's really impactful on leaders of businesses. So if you're listening right now, and I've just had this discussion with a commercial plasterer who quotes on big jobs, So when I mean big jobs, they are 6-figure jobs. They're $100,000 type of jobs, which take them 2 to 3 weeks to complete. They've got a couple of teams, so they're winning a job maybe once a week across their team. They're certainly not winning jobs every day, but one job a week is a reasonably good week for that business. And these jobs go up even bigger. You know, they're up to quarter of a million dollar, even half a million dollar jobs. They're quite big jobs. So for this team, we had a great discussion around how do you recognize progress along these deals? So that we're not just celebrating the big win, but also those smaller steps of progress. And the leader from this business, who we've had multiple conversations with, has actually commented about how much it's helping their motivation. Because when they get to recognize these small steps of progress, it actually makes their life more enjoyable. Not only are they having better interactions with their team, but they're buoyed with more confidence about their own business because they're starting to see the patterns of won deals and they're starting to celebrate or recognize the progress of those more and more and more. So the second piece I really want you to think about is that recognizing Analyzing progress isn't just great to help you work out where you have patterns of won deals or areas you can improve on, but it's also fantastic for you and your motivation. And then the third area, which is the most obvious, leaving to last of course, is your team. There is absolutely no doubt that teams who celebrate together stay together. We've heard so many lines around what keeps people motivated in businesses. Financial is one clear one. Risk is one clear one, i.e., they've got a job and they can feed their family and, you know, and it's a safe pair of hands where they work. Status is certainly one where people feel like they are recognized by their business and they are important and what they do is meaningful. And the third one is around learning. Now the great part about this is that recognizing progress actually covers off every single one of those. From a financial point of view, often when you're recognizing progress, there's small incentives that might go to it. Or if there's not, by recognizing progress that help your team member or you yourself close more deals or your business close more deals, it's leading to a better financial outcome for them. When it comes to risk and having a safe job, when you recognize progress, it makes people feel as if they are more secure in the job that they do. When it comes to status, of course, recognizing progress out loud ticks that status box that people are important and that what they do is meaningful. And the last one around learning, of course, when we're recognizing progress, that's a closed learning loop where people can feel acknowledged that what they're doing is working and take the learning from that, i.e., they do more and more and more of it. So recognizing progress isn't just great to find patterns of one deals, It's also great to be helping your own motivation, but also your team. And it really does support 4 of the key motivators around why people come to work. So that's the challenge for you today, is to have a think about how you can recognize progress more and what are the types of activities that you can recognize progress on in your business, and then how you can do that. Do you do it through sales meetings? Do you do it through one-to-ones? Do you do it through a, a regular barbecue or a toolbox talk that you have? Do you do it through training? Right? Do you do it through deal reviews with your team? There's a number of ways you can do it, but they're the things that I really want you to think about today as we move out of this episode. Because if there's one thing I'm certain on, that my job here is to help you reduce that frustration around spending hours and hours wasting time on sales quotes. That's my job. I want you to be closing more deals. But I'm also very aware that for most sales businesses, you need to be able to change something. And this should be recognizing progress and celebrating wins. Should be one of the things that you can change that'll stop you getting those same stressful results over and over again, working long hours, not enough money in the bank. The other thing you can do is go to the free quoting quiz that we have in our show notes. It will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to grow quickly your sales. And by quickly, I mean 20 to 25%. So you can click on that free link in the show notes to get started. It takes you less than a minute and I personally will come back to you. But that's it for today. I hope you can take something from this recognizing progress topic, roll it into being 1% better each and every day, because it does make all the difference.