E240: What One Trade Team Did To Stop Sales Decline and Grow Their Pipeline by 700% (in less than 3 months) - and How You Can Too

Today I'm going to step through what one trade team did to stop not only their sales decline, but grow their pipeline by 700%. And all this happened in less than 3 months. 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 a pipeline by 700% in less than 3 months is a terrific result. And in the example that I'm going to go through today, we're talking about a pipeline that was a couple of million dollars that grew to be just north of $15 million. So now I'm not going to mention any names or industries because I've spoken about those numbers and I really value the privacy of my customers. However, what I do want to do is talk about the activities that they did. So today we're going to go through 3 activities that they did that moved the dial on their pipeline growth. Not only did it stop sales decline because some of that pipeline closed out, i.e., they won those deals, but it also gave them terrific confidence that they had some future sales coming. Because at the end of the day, when you can grow your pipeline times 7, you are going to win some of those deals. And when you win some of those deals, that just grows confidence within your business that you can then start to invest in areas. You can put more staff on, you can get some support to help you work less hours, right? Lots of different things that, you know, will run through your mind as a business owner, particularly one where you're doing the selling as well. But let's get into this because that 700% growth was a terrific result. But I would say it was a team that most importantly were listening and were ready for feedback. They actually engaged with us in our program and were ready to invest not only their money but also a bit of time, right? That was a really key driver in this, but not one of the 3 things. So the first thing that they did was they focused on outbound activity as their priority. Yeah, pretty obvious. But what they did that was a little bit different to what I see others do was that they picked 3 and only 3 activities that they knew they were really good at. Now interestingly, in this business they had multiple salespeople, so their multiple salespeople actually picked different things. But if you are in a business on your own and you're the only salesperson there, either you're the leader of the business and you're on your own, or you're the leader of your business and you have employed one salesperson. I'd encourage you to pick 3, but pick 3 that you know have worked for you previously. At the moment, there's a huge focus around using social media to generate leads, but what I'd encourage you to think about is that if it's not working for you, if it's not generating leads, that perhaps you might want to dial that down and zero into areas that do work for you. Now, I've got a cheat sheet that's got about 30 different types of lead generation activities on it. I'm happy to share it with anyone if they'd like to contact us, but the 3 that really commonly come out are things like referral networks, trade shows are a big one, networking, aged deals, past customers, door knocking when you're in a local area. So when you're doing a project on a home or a business, going and knocking on doors outside of that. And we have a terrific module in the Academy that actually talks about How to Nail Local Area Door Knocking. I really like it because I'm not a door knocker, but it's actually a strategy and a tactic that I've used myself. So a non-door knocker has used to actually door knock and help grow their business without that fear and that stigma that I certainly have felt at times over door knocking. So it's a great little module. It's in the Academy. You can contact us if you want to know more about it. But so number one is they focused on their outbound activity, just three activities. So they didn't get spread across five, six, eight different activities. But they also zeroed in on exactly what worked for them. That was the first step. The second step is that they started to search for problems in the call of their customer before they sold. Now, problems you can interchange for opportunities here, but what they started to do was find out with their customer what was or wasn't working for them or what they wanted to achieve before they even worried about what they had to offer. Now these were questions like, was their product aged? Was it not performing all the tasks well? Was it holding their business back? Was there something that they needed to use two pieces of equipment for and they could have done it with one? Was there a capacity issue? Their piece of equipment wasn't actually allowing them to get enough done each day to grow the business. Lots of questions. This is a type of machinery this business sold. Lots of questions around finding out what the opportunity was. Right? Because once they got to that, they could then start pairing their language or mirroring their language around what was going to be impactful for the customer. Because if it's in a problem or an opportunity lens, what we find is that people are generally going to engage more than being scattered with a whole lot of features and benefits of your products that they may or may not like. Sure. If it's something they're in the market for and you go straight into it, you'll nail it. Fantastic. But if it's not, then you're wasting your time. So their pipeline was able to grow by picking the 3 activity types that worked best for them. And then when they started to talk to customers, actually focusing on what some of their problems and opportunities were, but not at all what they sold. So once they got those problems or opportunities clear, it obviously allowed them to roll into that. So they focused on their best 3, and they asked before they told. Now the third thing that they did was that they got out to sites really quickly. So when they had a customer that was interested, they got out to site, met them, got either product in hand, got them to someone else that was using their product, or even got them back into their offices or their warehouses to get them seeing the product that they use. But by getting out to site really quickly, i.e., same day or next day at the latest, what they were doing was very quickly building those relationships. And when you build a relationship with someone quickly, i.e., they're there to help you, it can often really speed up the deal cycle. But more importantly, it starts to build that premise that the person actually cares, right? That belief that they're here because they give a shit about you and they want to help you solve your problem. So 3 activities. Number 1, they focused on their outbound activity. So they focused on that activity that gave them the best results. Number 2 is they asked before they told. They got to the bottom of the problem of the opportunity before they started selling. And then number 3, with light speed, they got out to site. So they were out in front of customers as quickly as they possibly could to build those relationships. Now the reality for this business is I can tell you they were super frustrated before they got to this point, and they recognized that they had to change something because otherwise things were going to break in their business. And in most trade businesses, it's either stress long hours or not enough money in the bank to show for it. So I love telling these stories, but I also like showing everyone listening that you've got an opportunity to move the dial without needing to invest heavily. And that's our free quoting quiz. It will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to quickly grow your sales by 20 to 25%. If you just click on the free quiz link in the show notes, you'll get started now. It takes less than a minute and I personally review each of the responses that come through. So that's it for today. Please keep living with that 1% better each and every day mindset because it will make all the difference. Bye for now.