Episode 154: How to Reflect on 2025 to Drive Strong Sales Process Growth in 2026

In this episode, you'll discover why reflecting on the year just gone is so important in setting you up for a terrific 2026 of sales growth. Welcome to Sales Process Made Easy. The show helping seven to eight figure industry, construction and trade sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode, you're going to discover why reflecting on the past 12 months is just so important for helping us grow into next year and beyond, and how you can really effectively reflect on the past 12 months to give you something strong and concrete to build into into 2026. There's no doubt that 2025 has been a year of tough wins and even tougher losses. For many businesses in the trade, construction and building industries, price pressures have been strong. Customers, whilst willing to move forward and spend, have been more closely watching their budgets, whether it be residential or commercial builds. The market has still been super competitive, but for those who have been willing to work hard, there have been plenty of opportunities. And we've worked with some terrific businesses, particularly in the trade industry and construction spaces, who have managed to double and triple their businesses across the course of this year, as well as some businesses who have had more modest growth but growth nonetheless, particularly at their bottom line, right at that net profit level, the amount of money they're taking home each and every week. We've certainly seen lots of successes there, but I haven't worked with too many businesses this year who have felt that they've done it easy, like done it so easy that they could just coast into next year and know that everything is going to be okay. That's where reflection on the prior 12 months comes in and is so important in helping us get ready to grow our businesses in the coming 12 months. Because when we can reflect on the areas of the businesses that we've done well in, and perhaps not so well, it provides us with a beautiful blueprint as to how we can operate as we roll into 2026. Because I'll be really clear from having worked with thousands of salespeople, thousands and thousands of salespeople, and hundreds of leaders, there is not always the need to completely reinvent the wheel every year. Finishing up in this instance in 2025 and then rolling into 2026 can be as simple as making some small changes to our business that when you pack them on or Stack them together can make all the difference around future growth. We talk a lot about being 1% better each and every day. And right now we're going to go through exactly how you can reflect on 2025 to come back charging into 2026 and make it the best year of sales and and profit growth ever for your business. So there's three things that I'd really strongly suggest you do when it comes to reflecting on this year. Just gone. What I will say is you'll need to find some quiet space, some time to do this where you can just have 20 minutes to yourself without being interrupted. So find that time, book it into your calendar. It might be early morning, it might be end of day, might be once the kids have gone to bed. It's certainly the case for me. But carve out that time to really reflect on the past 12 months. And the three things that I'd like you to really think about is number one is what's gone really well for my business this year. Put yourself back into a moment in the year when maybe you did feel like you were in a flow state or in a more black and white manner when things were a little bit easier than other parts of the year. And what worked well for you? Was it a particular type of customer? Was it a particular segment? Was it a project size? Was it a project length? Was it working with certain people? Was it projects that had certain lead times or had anything special about them, like needing to have certain payment terms or needing to have stage one completed now with stage two completed later, or working with other particular types of industries or trades or businesses? Right. And this doesn't matter if you're residential or commercial in terms of your space. Have a think about the top three to five things that worked really well for your business this year and write them down right now in this game, we want to be focusing more on sales rather than anything else. So three to five sales and or marketing activities that helped you really work well in your business this year. I'd expect to see some things here that come to you quite easily and you might need to take a moment to think about some things that perhaps aren't as obvious to you. Hence why we want to make sure we give yourself time and space to think about this. All right? That's number one. Number two is I want you to now think about things in your business that went okay, that passed. Right? Think about getting a C if you're back in school, but you'd like to really succeed more on over the coming 12 months. It might be speed that you contacted leads, it might be the number of quotes you won, it might be the profit you made per job. It might be your ability to get out in front of customers. If you have a sales team, it might be someone who performed okay, but you'd like them to do better. And again, I want you to write three to five of these things that you've worked on this year that went okay, but need some time to improve next year. So once you've got that done, the first one, what went really well, take a moment to think about it. The second one, things that went okay, give you a pass mark. And the next thing I want you to think about is things that didn't go well this year, right? And on this one here, I don't want to set a number. Look, if you end up with three to five, that's fine, but if you end up with a lot more than that, that's okay too. I want you to have a think about things both critical and non critical that didn't go well this year. So you may not have delivered well, right? Your jobs may not have been installed correctly. Now they don't have a specific sales focus, but I'm happy for you to get them down on paper. Now I want you to think about things that maybe weren't super impactful in the business but didn't go well. You're like, you spent a certain amount of money on lead generation sources that didn't work. Facebook advertising didn't work for you. You tried to get referrals from partners and that didn't work for you. You were too slow in quoting or your quotes were overly complex and they took you too long to get out to the market that didn't work for you. I want you to think about things particularly from a sales point of view that really held back your business. Now as we go through this, if you need to pause and go back to them, absolutely go for it. Right? There's no harm at all in doing that. But what I'd like you to get to by the end of this is three to five things that have gone well. Three to five things that have gone just okay, they got a pass mark for this year and at least three to five things that didn't go so well, both critical and non critical to your business. Now you've got that list. What we're going to do is we're going to skip forward in a week's time into episode 157. And the reason I don't want to do this now is I want to give you a bit of time to think about it over the next week or so and come back and add or adjust or change to this list. When we come back in episode 157, same time next Friday, we're going to talk through about how you can plan into 2026 using this information that you've got there. So that's the key takeaways from today. Why reflecting on 2025 is so important, right? Primarily because it helps you launch into 2026 by recognising what you are and aren't doing well. Three things that have worked well, three things that have a pass mark or three to five things that have a pass mark, and at least three to five things that haven't gone so well. Now we've got all of that written down, but hopefully you're feeling that you've been able to compartmentalize or bring together some of your thoughts. Right? You don't necessarily have solutions or answers. That's okay. But I want you to have written down some key thoughts around where your business is at now. Gonna give you a week to just sit and think about it, let thoughts ruminate or run around in your head. And then in a week's time we're gonna come back and go through this again. All right? So thank you for joining in today. Thank you for doing that exercise. I'm very grateful. Sales is a difficult game and finding the time to spend on it is not always easy. But we're going to be dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, same time each week that are going to help you build sales process and really move the dial on your sales performance. So between now and our next episode, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because at the end of the day it will make all the difference. See you next week. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real safe sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first time, three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales. To book in, click the link in our show notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.