Episode 157: Your 2026 Sales Growth Roadmap: What to Double Down On, What to Fix, and What to Drop

In this episode, you will discover how to take the successes and failures of 2025 into a roaring success for 2026. 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'll learn how to take the progress, or lack of progress in some cases from 2025 into a really successful 2026, what to focus on to allow you to do that, and what to leave behind that will make that future growth even easier for you. Hopefully Everyone listening tuned into episode 154 last Friday. It's only seven days ago or three episodes back if you're listening in for the first time. But I'd strongly encourage you to go back and listen to that episode first before we get into episode today or episode 157 today. Because in there we really set up a nice structure around how you can reflect on 2025 to make sure that you fly into 2026 and make it an absolute roaring success. So stop now if you haven't listened to episode 154, go back, it's only 8 to 10 minutes long, listen into it, do the exercise and come back and we'll jump back into episode 157. This one here, right? But if you've already done that, let's keep plowing ahead because in that episode you should have sat down and said okay, what are three to five things I've done really well this year? What are three to five things that have a pass mark but I'd like them to do better on next year? And very importantly, three to five things both critical and non critical, that haven't worked well in our business this year. So what I'd like you to think about here is that sales is not always about making drastic significant changes to what you're doing. I mention this quite regularly, but often small incremental improvements are where we see teams make huge successes. In fact, I've had teams do anything from make small changes to their on site quoting protocols through to bringing together a design and a pricing meeting into one design and pricing meeting through to simply increasing the speed with which they contact customers and the simplicity of their quotes. And all of these activities have moved the dial in double or well into double digit, sometimes triple digit figure percentage growth so we're talking serious growth from some minor changes. Of course, we've had teams completely rip things up and start again. But the point of the anecdote here is that it doesn't always take big changes to be able to make progress. And that's what we're going to be focusing on today. So first thing I'd like you to do is from that list from last week is to take the three things, or three to five things that you did really well at last year. I want you to write them down as key priorities for 2026 for us to invest more heavily in. So if throughout the year you were really effective at getting leads into your pipeline so that you had a healthy pipeline to be able to quote on, we want to make sure that whatever you were doing to make that happen, be it referrals, be it network, be it past customers, right? Be it digital advertising, be it social media, whatever it may be, I want you to think about that and write down exactly how you did that so that we can once again focus on using those same methods to generate in 2026. If you were really effective at finding special requirements for jobs that helped you have a successful close rate, or if your pricing was bang on what the market needs to be, or if you were able to increase your margins successfully over the year, then I want you to write these down and we're going to focus on these again for 2026, or whatever you were. I want you to have a think about why you were successful at it. That is the first step, because we're going to take that into next year and double down on it. Second thing I'd like you to do is take those areas where you weren't successful, they had a pass mark, work out what went well, and then work out what didn't go so well. Again, the thought behind why this did or didn't work or why this was an average success. And I want you to have a think about what you'd need to change to make this successful. All right, that's it. Nice and very straightforward and linear so far. We're talking about small improvements here. So far, you're going to be up to kind of six to 10 action items in your strategic plan. That's it. We like strategic planning to be nice and tight. The third thing I'd like you to do is have a look at what didn't go well. Now, anything that didn't go well that is not impactful to the business or can be substituted through something else, I'd like you to remove that from 2026. So if you used a certain lead generation channel and it just didn't work and your cost per lead, right. So the cost for every lead you brought into the business or your cost per conversion, so the number of leads you had to buy, how much they cost to convert into one deal, right, whatever that was, right. I want you to remove them and we will replace them or supplement them with more of what worked really well. If you were not effective at getting through to customers via email and phone was most effective, then we're going to reduce our email load for 2026 and focus on phone. So I want you to take any of those non critical ones that just aren't working and can be supplemented by something else and let's stop them. It's more than okay to stop. It's more than okay to move away from an activity as long as we can bring something in to replace it. And then lastly, anything that was business critical from a sales point of view that wasn't working, I want you to have a think about if you've already got something covered in the what was successful and what was a pass mark. If you have something in there, then we can again we can step back from that and use what works to supplement it. Or if you haven't, I want you to have a think about again very similar to what received a pass mark about what you could do to change that and improve that. So by now you should have 6, 8, 10, 12, maybe even 14 things to focus on for the year. Right? Which is essentially one job. If you've got 12, one job a month. If you've got less, it's slightly less. If you've got more, it's slightly more. And what you now have is the broad basis of your strategic planning. If you have 12, you might do two a month and get them done in the first six months. But we have the broad areas that we can focus on this year that will move the dial in a very, very simple fashion. We don't need to go into a heavy strategic planning phase. We don't need to make significant changes to the business. But this is a terrific spot to start when it comes to strategic planning. Now I recognize that you're going to have other things you want to achieve and grow in your business. But if you do nothing else other than to take this roadmap here, this 6 to 14 odd points and plan to work on those and start to really implement and double down on what succeeded, improve what was an average performance and either Remove, mitigate, or also improve what didn't work, then you are well on your way to sales growth in 2026. Because by removing what didn't work and by focusing more intently on what did, we can expect those improvements to continue to flow through into the next 12 months. So that's a really nice, compact manner in which to look at how we can use 2025 to really leverage into 2026. Right. We know what we did well, we know we didn't do so well, and we know what we passed on. Let's take those, double down on what we did well, improve what we did okay at, and either remove, mitigate, or fix what we really didn't do so well at for the last 12 months. But if you can take those and start to think about exactly how you can improve them now, I recognize there's some thought that goes in from here, but what you've built is your framework. I'm hopeful that you can leave this episode with a sense of calm that you have yourself well on the way to sales growth in 2026. Because if you can take that sense of calm, you're nice and relaxed, you know, across this break. I hope you're getting a break across this period. Right. Our industries generally tend to shut down a little bit. You can take that into a nice, relaxed break, come back knowing that you've already got a head start on the next 12 months. So thank you for joining in. I'm very grateful that you're giving us your time. Right. To really think about how we can improve your sales process and sales results. We're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We've got a little mini series happening here on Fridays. We're going to roll into some New Year's res very shortly as well. But please go back, listen to episode 154 if you didn't before this. And in combination, 154 and 157 are some nice, powerful ways for you to really launch into 2026. Until next week, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it will make all the difference to your sales growth. 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.