Ben Wright breaks down why January sales tank for construction and trade businesses: fewer trading days, staff out, customers not buying. His fix: focus hard on your fastest-closing deals and best customers in January, then fix pipeline gaps in February.
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In this episode, you will learn how to make a super fast start to your sales results in 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. By the end of this episode, you'll learn how to overcome the dreaded January sales dip that many businesses face head on each and every year, and how you can implement these learnings to bring you sales results in January and early February. For the very vast majority of businesses I work with across the trade, construction and industry segments, January can be a really difficult period. It's tough not only because we've got team members off and we have to cover their wages without revenue coming in, but also because when they do come back, we have less of a period of time to make sales and we have customers who aren't always in that buying frame of mind. I know myself, I generally take about four weeks off over Christmas and when people are chasing me to make decisions. And it's hard because I just want to break and to be able to focus on time with my family and friends and my own health and fitness and not so interested in making, you know, purchasing decisions. However, the good news is is that often when people come back to work in January, they really are ready to get into the year ahead. They're excited, energy levels are up, they're thinking more clearly, and we have a small window in the second half of the month or a smaller window than normal to really make a difference when it comes to moving our revenue needles for this period of time. That said, I absolutely work with businesses where they budget for lower sales months in January and to an extent, I'd encourage you to do the same. But what we're talking about today is how you can make a fast start to the coming 12 months to 2026 and not be chasing your tail around low revenue numbers for the first few months of the year. I've seen it so often, businesses come in, they have a poor January and they're just scraping their knuckles along the ground for the next few months trying to get back to profitability and keep cash flow manageable. So what would I do? What am I recommending with our teams in the sold out sales teams academy? What am I recommending to them to do to make a fast start in January. Well, the focus is all around what we came out of episode 157 with. So if you haven't listened to 157 as an episode, in fact, 154 and 157 go well together. So go back and listen to 10 minutes of 154 and 10 minutes of 157 and then come back to this. But if you have done that and you've got a clear plan around your goals for 2026, what I'd encourage you to do for January is take what you know worked exceptionally well for last year. Right? Now, if you haven't done 154 or 157, you'll need to pause and do this exercise now. But have a think about where you had the easiest and best wins for the last 12 months. Was it in lead generation? Was it in closing? Was it with aged customers? Right. And now you've done that broad thinking, I want you to zero in closer around where you had success in closing out deals. What are the types of customers where you had the fastest yeses from in 2025? Was it referrals? Was it age customers? Was it new leads? Was it repeat business or past business coming back? Was it upselling existing business or was it extending current contracts? Have a think about the areas where you really had great closing results in 2025. Now, if you don't have areas that were great, think about the areas that were best for you. Because the step from here is to dive in heavily around focusing on these avenues in your return to work in January. So when you're back on board, when your team's back on board, focus on the areas from last year that you know worked really well. Everything else that isn't a big rock, that isn't a golf ball, that isn't structurally integral to your business, it can wait until February. Because if you're able to focus your attention in January onto what you know works, onto what you know the business has been successful with, and all of your energy and resources goes into that, then whilst we may have fewer customers to talk with, less trading days to be working, right, and at the end of the day, you know, a somewhat suppressed environment to be driving sales out of. What we do have is our blueprint around what works. And if we can focus heavily into that and not worry about some of the smaller, less impactful things, then we're spending all of our time with as many customers as possible to make that happen. Now, what you will also find comes out of this is if you have a Pipeline that's too small. If you have salespeople and they simply haven't been generating sales and they don't have a go to method of closing or a pipeline big enough to work, then we know that we've got some issues that we need to cover off into February and beyond. We're actually also highlighting where our potential holes are in the business. They're things we work with in the sold out sales teams academy. Right. Certainly solvable and able to be worked through. They're just a byproduct though of the focus here around understanding what really works for us and doubling down on that. So into the second half of January and early February, we can get really clear on our team to focus on a smaller number of activities and but in a higher cadence and really drive hard into taking what worked last year into some early success for this year. So to recap that January is a really difficult month for a whole lot of reasons. We simply don't have enough time or boots on the ground for a lot of the month to make it work. However, if we're able to focus on what we know works on our highest revenue generating activities from the prior year and really zero down with some diligence around that, what we're going to be doing is spending the time we have on our most effective outcomes. Because once we get that time focused on those outcomes, we are more likely to succeed than if we were only spending a limited amount of time on it. Right. So if we were only planning to spend 25% of our time on these high impact activities, but we spend 75% of our time on it, we should expect three times the results from that. It'll obviously also highlight the problems that we have with potential teams or our own pipeline. How, however, what we're going to do is take the upside from what works best and capitalise on it in January. So hopefully leaving this episode you have a path forward. It may not be perfection, but certainly progress into how you can improve your January results and reduce that likelihood that you're chasing your tail or trying to catch up into February, March, April and May. Right. So if you can take these ideas, this concept around what, what you know you can do well and what you do do best as a business, roll it out into January. I'd expect you to be able to make some positive impact on your sales numbers. Thank you for joining today. We're super grateful that you spend your time with us short, sharp, punchy episodes on how to improve your sales process. We are dropping episodes every Monday Wednesday and Friday roughly the same time. So until we see you next week, 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 to your sales results. 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.
