Ben Wright shares what he learned from 250+ salespeople: stop assuming social media generates leads, stop confusing busy with effective, and kill initiatives that don't work. Double down on referrals, SEO, and repeat customers instead.
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In this episode, you will discover three things you should leave behind in 2025 for faster 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 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 will learn three things that can make a significant difference to your sales growth in 2026 if you're prepared to leave them behind in 2025. We'll focus around lead generation, number one. Number two, all about how being busy isn't necessarily great for business. And number three, what dead weight or areas of your business that aren't performing can do to drive your growth. They're the three areas that we'll focus on for the coming 12 months to leave behind. And what I will acknowledge is that absolutely the list of what to leave behind in 2025 could be bigger than what we're going through today. However, what I have seen across a number of businesses in the last 12 months is that those who have been able to find their position, position on these items or leave them behind have started to succeed with more rapid growth, particularly businesses in that one to $50 million mark, particularly businesses in that trade, construction industry. Segments, right? It's a pretty big segment, right? But you know who you are if you're in it, right? And particularly those leaders who are ready to adopt and make change. So let's go through what those are. So number one things to leave behind in 2025 is the drive that social media must be something that generates leads for you. Social media can be a terrific segment for many businesses, no doubt about it. But for a large number of businesses, it also doesn't work. I can think of a dozen activities that work better for many businesses over social media, such as referrals, aged pipelines, SEO, repeat customers that come back again, increasing the spend of current customers, working with partners, networking, personal networks. Now, I'm not sure if I've gone through 12 there, right? But the list goes on and on. Social media is not the be all and end all for every business. And I strongly encourage you not to think that it has to be in your remit for 2026, because if it's not working for you, it can simply become a form of social proof where you have a lighter touch and you start to dive more heavily into lead generation processes that Work for you. So that's number one, Social media is not compulsory when it comes to lead generation, right? It might have some out there, you know, perhaps questioning that as a piece of advice, but for others, if it's not working for you, focus on the areas that do. The second one, being busy is not what it's all about. When it comes to sales. I work with a number of salespeople who you would call hard working but underperforming, be they leaders of businesses or be they salespeople themselves. These are salespeople who focus so heavily on being busy rather than serving those customers that they look after best. And what I mean by that is getting really clear on the customers that are likely to close, qualifying those customers to make sure that they're ready to buy now and then engaging with them around what's important for them. Because simply if you are chasing every lead and every deal out there again and again and again and you're not getting through or you're not closing deals, then being busy is irrelevant, right? We end up having a focus issue here. I speak a lot about effort, talent and strategy, right? Not concepts I built myself, but an aggregation of lots of knowledge that I've learned across the last 25 years of selling. I speak a lot about these three concepts as being really important as a pyramid for success. You can have someone working incredibly hard, so ticking off effort, but their strategy may not be right. They're approaching their own customers, they're quoting the wrong products, they're not listening to what they have to say. So if there's something you're going to leave behind outside of social media, it's using busy as a way to measure progress of your sales team. I have a three box model that the sold out sales Teams Academy works around, which is a really beautiful set of metrics that helps us focus in on not just effort, but also the talent and strategy behind our team. So we need to be equally managing not just how, how busy our team are, but also what they're focusing on to make sure they're growing their sales. And last but not least is dead weight. Right? Things that are not working, I'd be encouraging you if they are not working and you have spent considerable amounts of time, energy and effort on them, that next year may be one to leave them behind. The reality is that for many of us, we have more on our plates, more emails, more phone calls, more requests, more things to do in our businesses than we have time for. So by leaving behind things that aren't working that frees us up the time to work on those that do. I certainly we spent a bit of time in our last episode 154 thinking about what worked for our business and what didn't work. As we move into the next 12 months, being prepared to leave behind things that don't work for you, I'd encourage you to see that as a power stance, as a power move that will help you grow your business. Being prepared to say, no, this isn't working, we're going to stop it rather than continuing out of obligation or because we've always done it is powerful, right? It will take some time or a step of courage in many instances, but I really encourage you to write down what they are, have a look at what you can remove, and if you're not ready to drop them all at once, if you identify a number of them, just drop one at a time. So what we're talking about here are things to leave behind in 2025 for faster sales growth. There's three areas we covered. 1. Social media. It isn't compulsory. It doesn't have to be a lead generation source for your business. It certainly can be. But my encouragement is to focus on what works best for your business rather than what you think is most popular. Number two, wearing busy is a badge of honor. Hard working, underperforming salespeople won't generate the numbers and we need to be focusing on the types of customers and deals and approaches and questions and offers that will generate results for us. And we can do that by getting clear on more than just number of quotes, but measuring across multiple metrics how our salespeople are performing. And number three is getting rid of dead weight things that are not working for your business, right? If you've given them a good run, be prepared to stop them. Move your focus on the things that do right and then you can be doubling down on what you know works and leaving behind what doesn't. So after listening to this episode, we are roaring into Christmas. I hope that it can start your brain thinking about things that you want to be doing slightly differently differently next year and give you a sense of real positivity moving into 2026. Super grateful that you're with us on these shows even as we come roaring into Christmas. Here, we're going to continue with three episodes a week the whole way through Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In the meantime, until we catch up again, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it will make all the difference. 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 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 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.
