E252: The Most Important Sales Leadership Skill to Grow Your Trade Business

I've been a sales leader for over 20 years now, and this is the most important sales leadership skill you need to grow your trade business. 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. By the end of today's episode, we're going to go through the most important leadership skill that you need to know for your trade business, and just as importantly, how you can implement it into your business to build a really strong, positive culture around each and every member within your team. Today's podcast actually came from a quote from one of our Academy team members, about 6 months after we started working together, and it went something like this: Ben, I just wanted to thank you for being there when I need you, or when I needed you most. The progression we've made in such a little time in my life has really transformed it, and I am blessed to have the opportunity to have good people like you around me. Fantastic. Great. It was really lovely, and I paraphrased that a little bit, but for me, I am so grateful when I get to receive comments like that, particularly because you know you're making a positive difference. But also because you know that the people you're working with are acknowledging that they're progressing forward. This leader, I think, in particular really embodied one of the most important leadership skills that I needed to see to grow their business. And it's the one that I think we see— certainly I see— least effectively driven by leaders across the country. And without wasting any more time on this, it's inconsistency. It's the most common trait that I see across leaders. And that's the skill consistency that for me is the most important sales leadership skill that's going to help grow your trade business. And why is it so important when there are so many other skills that you can be possessing as a leader, which of course are very important, but why am I focusing on consistency as that skill to be able to grow your trade business? Well, quite simply, it comes down to most people in my experience, most salespeople in my experience, and now at the point of overwhelm when it comes to inbound stimulus. Phones, text messages, emails, social media, podcasts. Quite simply, the, the amount of content that gets sent their way is so significant that I see a lot of these people either overwhelmed in the sales world or not able to consistently apply their craft because they have so many different and mixed messages coming their way. This is where consistency can really step in and win the day, because leaders that I work with— and I had a perfect example of this with a team that I'm working with this morning— leaders that really get this right understand that that when we are getting new messages out to our teams or to our customers, or even trying to improve on the same messages, right, the same processes and focuses that we've had for a long period of time, simply putting these messages out there once or making changes once and then hoping the team will follow just doesn't work. And it all comes back to that huge level of overwhelm or stimulus that are being thrown our ways each and every day, that it is just so hard to implement things when we've only heard them one time. And what I like about really consistent sales leaders in particular is that they pick generally the key core messages that they need to focus on and they repeat them again and again and again and again. And it's not simply saying the same thing over and over, right? We need to quote our customers within 24 hours. We need to quote our customers within 24 hours. We need to quote our customers within 24 hours. But it's also around consistently bringing in the key messages to the most important or impactful contact points that you have with your team. And there's a process here that I call the 4 Ways of Meeting that I'm going to really quickly run through because for me it really embodies how you can implement consistency as a sales leader most effectively. So if we take that skill, right, consistency is being, look, in my mind, the most important sales leadership skill to quickly grow your trade business. Let's have a look at how you can actually implement that, right? How you can tactically get that into your days, your team, and your business. So I want you to think about the interactions that you have with your sales team if you have one, or the interactions you have with other people in your business, right? In my experience, certainly with trade businesses, they're going to generally be really quick, short, sharp, punchy engagements. Something hasn't arrived, something's broken, something hasn't been installed correctly, we've got a warranty issue, or a customer hasn't paid their bill, customer's upset with something, whatever it may be, they're short, sharp, they're very tactically driven, and it's okay, here's the problem, let's get it done. So what happens then is that we don't have that opportunity to put that consistent messaging out to our team unless we're dealing with a specific problem where that message can flow through. And what I mean by that, if one of our focuses is that we are quoting within 24 hours, right? Then the times that we're going to be able to get that message across is when we have customers who perhaps are slow to move or we're not sure what they want, right? And we need some support. But there's going to be lots of other times when we're not able to get that messaging out to our team because simply the interactions, you know, are not related to that. So the leaders that I've seen really effectively implement this work around what we call the 4 ways of meeting. So I'm going to run through those quickly. If you've heard them before, it's worth listening again and asking yourself the question of, am I implementing these effectively? So the first one's all around sales meetings, and that's making sure that our sales meetings are future-focused, but also that whatever the key messaging is that we have, we get it out to our team members repeatedly. So those Monday morning sales meetings, for examples, are the times that we get to grind that axe and really consistently put that messaging out there. If it's all about quoting within 24 hours, we can build a competition around it. We can report on it each Monday. We can look at what's working, what's not working around it. But fundamentally what we're doing is reminding our teams that quoting within 24 hours is important. So your sales meeting becomes, or your team business meeting, that becomes the moment when you get to repeatedly implement or repeatedly speak about What are the most important messages you're trying to get to your team? So that's number one in terms of consistency. Number one is having your weekly sales meetings. Number two is all about one-to-ones with your team. Now these don't need to be weekly, but I'd certainly encourage them to be fortnightly. They can be short and sharp, 20 minutes only, but they also give you a forum to say, okay, we are focusing on getting our quotes out to our customers within 24 hours. What's working for you in this? And as importantly, what's not working for you in this? Are you missing parts? Are you missing products? Are you missing livestock numbers? Do we not have the ability for you to quote when you are on site? Do we need to get your iPads or tablets or something similar? But what I really like about the one-to-ones is we get to move from a group approach in the sales meetings, right? And if you're a trade business with no salespeople but you have other people in your teams, still applies. We get to move, you know, from a group approach in our weekly meetings into a personalized approach in our one-to-ones. And that personalized approach can often make all the difference, particularly when we've got a team that is, I guess, at a heightened level of stress or anxiety. They can see that you really care. So that's the second one. Third one here is all about making sure that we are sitting down and reviewing our open projects together. So we are getting together as a team or a business if we don't have direct salespeople and having a look at the open deals in our pipeline. What this allows us to do is say, okay, here's where the deal's at. Here's where Mr. Smith's deal's at. Here's what I've done. Here's what I haven't done. What are we going to do next? And it brings together the collective minds of everyone in the room to be able to say, okay, this is the approach we want to take. This is how we're going to make it happen, right? But also, as importantly, is that this is the approach we can take to other similar deals. And that's what I really like about deal review meetings, is that they allow you to not just take a strategy and apply it to one deal, but it's a strategy you can apply again and again and again to any other deals you have out in the market. So that's the third meeting. And the fourth, the lucky last here, is training. Look, it is the first meeting that I see leaders drop and the last meeting that I see them add into their sales team or their sales business cadence. But the reason it's so important is not just because we're able to impart knowledge onto people within our business, but we are also, as leaders, able to get feedback around what's working in the market, what's not working, and any potential spot fires, right, or major challenges that are coming our way. And I really like that as a leader because not only are the teams benefiting from the training, but we are are too, or I am too, when I'm leading my business. So to sum that up, the most important sales leadership skill that I think leaders need right now at this moment in 2026 is consistency. Being able to consistently impart the same messages on our teams again and again and again, because quite simply they just have so many things coming their way, right? We need to be the loudest one or the most repetitive one in front of them. And a way that we can implement that consistency in terms of a leadership approach is through 4 meetings. Number 1, sales meetings, focusing consistently on what's ahead and repeating back on progress at the end of the week or the start of the next week. Number 2 is all about making sure we're doing one-to-ones. So we're giving our team a personalized approach to whatever message we're trying to consistently get out there. Number 3 is all about deal reviews, reviewing open deals and learning together on how those deals are progressing. And then number 4, lucky last, is a training program, making sure we have a good quality training program that keeps everyone in the team learning. Because when we do that, we also get to layer in those consistent messages that we're trying to roll out for our team, right? If we stick with the quoting as fast as we possibly can, we can then run a sales training session that's all about how— or we can title it Efficient Quoting. So it's helping everyone in the team get better and faster at quoting, which is then leaning into the strategy we want to nail, which is quoting faster. So as we wind out of today, consistency is for me the number one skill that I think can help leaders grow their business really quickly. Because when they get that consistent messaging right, everyone in their team starts to focus on it. And if we're all focusing or we have the majority of us focusing on majority of the same things, majority of the time, we are going to move in a direction that's going to work for us. The inverse of this is that we have a team that is not consistent in its approach. And what invariably happens there is that they lose more quotes than they should. They don't change anything. They just work harder to try and get, you know, the same amount of money in the door through extra quotes. Get stuck working long hours, and I think the snowball impact from there is really clear. We have a 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%. It's a free quiz link in the show notes, and you can get started on it straight away, right? Takes less than a minute. But between now and next week, please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference. Bye for now.