E251: Copy this Sales Strategy to Grow Your Business Fast (and take control of your future)

It took me 15 years to work out a sales strategy that could really quickly grow my business, but today I'm going to give it to you in 7 minutes. 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. It's fair to say that across my 25-year sales career, I made a slow start. I think initially I was, was quite strong at sales because I was personable, I turned up, I worked hard, I smiled, and got the job done. But once I moved into increasingly complex sales and harder economic environments and more senior positions, I realized that I didn't actually have a strategy or a process around how I sold. And that was flowing into my teams as well, who didn't have a strategy either, other than to rely on their great personality and subject matter knowledge. So the strategy we're gonna run through today is 3 parts. It's gonna be 3 things that will help you grow your business really fast and one that you can simply just take, copy, and put into your business. It's not everything that you need to know in sales, but it's certainly something you can do right now that will really quickly help you implement growth into your business. And it's based on about 25 years of mistakes from me at my end and fair to say mistakes that I've seen across thousands of salespeople across that journey. So let's jump into it. I want to make this short and sharp across these 3 strategies that you can copy right now and grow your business. By the end of this episode, you should have each of these 3 written down and the decision made as to whether you want to act on them. Okay, so first part of this strategy is all about making sure that you are chasing the deals that are likely to close. And the way that I've done this multiple times across my career with my teams and with those teams that I coach is to decide where your best source of lead generation comes from. So the very first job for you in terms of copying our sales strategies is to look at your last 20 deals and find the most common lead channel that closed. I, uh, your last 20 deals that you won, have a look at where you got most of those deals from. Was it from paid advertising? Was it from referral business? Was it from repeat customers? Was it from networks? Was it from your sales team doing their own lead generation? Was it from a podcast? Was it from social media? Right, whatever it was, I want you to go back through those last 20 deals and find what most commonly closed deals. Now, if you want to get really advanced here, just cross-check that against how many deals that you lost and make sure that it wasn't simply a volume game, i.e., you had so many deals come through via one channel that inevitably you closed the most through them. So just do a cross-check, to make sure that it's not the number one because of volume, but it's the number one because it is actually the most effective lead generation channel for your business. Now, the reason we want to do that is so that, you know, moving forward, you can double down or triple down or go even harder than that if you like on the lead generation channels that work for you. Because if we are going extra hard at something that has a higher chance of success, well, then that's going to flow through across all of our sales. So the aim here is that you're going to spend No more time than you currently are on lead generation, but you're able to close more deals with that same amount of time because the quality of the leads are higher. So that's step 1 in terms of copying a sales strategy that has worked for me across 25 years. It's go and have a look of your last 20, 30, 40, you pick the number deals and pick the most common lead generation channel that closed. Okay. Second piece is once you get to the quote, so once you are ready to quote a customer, do not quote them until you know the top 3 most important things for them? Is it price? Is it speed? Is it quality? Is it how you communicate with them? Is it being able to work around a flexible schedule? Is it a color or a type of product style or flexibility? Is it making sure that they have positive references? Is it payment terms? Right, we could go on and on and on, but before you put pen to paper, you need to be able to articulate, okay, these are the 3 things that I need to get right for my customer. Once you start doing this, what happens is you're building a pattern to say, okay, I'm essentially getting a yes from my customer before I even start. I'm essentially asking my customer to tell me what I need to do to win their business, whether I'm window cleaning, whether I'm building fences, whether I'm cutting down trees, whether I'm building homes or anything, anything across the trade landscape, is by understanding exactly what's clear for our customers when they're making their decision. We're able to tailor our quote around it. It also shows our customers we're listening, so there's some great relationship building in there. But most importantly is we're actually helping the customer complete their decision-making process, right? So essentially sitting down and saying, okay, you've got lots of things to consider when you go through this process with us. I want to make sure that you're really clear on what's most important to you so then I can work around it. So actually helping our customer or our prospect get some clarity around what they want from this process. So number one, quote on the deals that win. That means we're using the same amount of energy, but we're working on deals that are more likely to close. Number two is make sure we're really clear on what our customers want. So again, we're using the same amount of energy, but we're working on deals that are more likely to close because our customer is really clear on what they want and how we're going to answer that for them. And then the third piece here is to quote as fast as you can. For some businesses, that means over the phone if that's your business style. For other businesses, that means quoting face-to-face when you're out on site. And in fact, I had a workshop last week with a team, brilliant bunch of people, really enjoyed it. But there was lots of challenging around whether or not they could quote on the spot. And at the end of the day, they're going to pilot that and they're going to try it and we'll see what works from it, right? But I'm really pleased that they were open to trying something different. However, when it comes to quoting as fast as you can, The faster you get that quote out, the more likely you are to get a quick yes. A, because you're engaging with the customer and you're building that relationship, but B, more importantly, is when you are in front of your customer, that's generally the time when they are most engaged in working with you. So if you can get something to them that gives them the chance to say yes, no, or maybe, we are going to simply get more yeses. We're not going to get all yeses, we're not going to get all nos, we're not going to get all yeses on the spot, but by putting ourselves in a position to succeed, By putting ourselves in a swimming pool with really fast swimmers, we are going to give ourselves the chance to learn how to swim faster. And in the sales instance, we're going to give ourselves the chance to get the deals done. So if you can't quote on the spot, then certainly you want to be quoting as fast as you can in return. And look, ideally face to face. However, for me, the focus here is how you can get your business, your quotes out as quickly as you can. So there's 3 things there in terms of a sales strategy to copy. Get these 3 things right and I'll guarantee that your sales will close. I have been doing this for so long and worked with so many sales teams and seen that universally these 3 things work, hence why they're there as a copy and paste strategy. If I'm to go back through those, number 1, quote on deals you're more likely to win. And the way you work that out is by assessing across your last 20, for example, deals, what the most common close avenue was, the most common close channel, and double down on that. Number 2 is don't quote until you know the customer's clear on what they want. I.e., they can articulate to you, they can clarify to you, they can verbalize to you exactly what they're looking for, and you can then build your quote around that. And last but not least, quote fast. Speed kills, right? Speed absolutely gets deals done. It kills the competition. And if you can't quote on the spot, then you want to be quoting as fast as you can afterwards. But for our teams that we work with, it's same day or next day, particularly in a trade business. Of course, if you have a more complex or larger deal, then those timeframes are going to move out a bit, right? But then becomes really important around the face-to-face piece. So they're the 3 things from today. They are a sales strategy you can literally just copy and paste into your business. So if you feel like you're a little bit frustrated spending hours or wasted time on sales quotes that you keep losing, i.e., you don't have those 3 elements of your sales strategy copy and pasted in. Well, the first thing from today that I want to say is you need to take some action. So write those 3 things down and implement one of those this week, one of those next week, and one of those the week after. Because if you don't change something, then you'll just keep getting those same stressful results over and over again, which means you're going to work long hours, not have enough money in the bank, and generally not have a business that's changing your life as you hope it will. Now, I have a free quoting quiz. It'll pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do quickly to grow your sales by that 20 to 25% plus. It's a free quiz link. It's in the show notes and you can get started now. That's it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day, because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.