Ben Wright explains why January sales slow down in construction and trades, then gives three ways to fix it: run a team-wide sales challenge with clear metrics, set individual performance challenges for each seller, and train your team on core selling skills.
Questions this episode answers
February 2 ("We're the 2nd of February.")
25 to 30%
The first three podcast listeners spoken to that week
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings
Chapters
In this episode, you will learn how to avoid a January sales hangover creeping into February. Welcome to Sales Process Made Simple. 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, we're going to unpack how January is often a troubling month for sales when it comes to most businesses. How we can then take that slower January month into a really thriving February and the three specific examples you can roll out with your team to make that happen. Well, I'm thankful January is over. Whilst I must admit I do enjoy being on holidays, I also find the month of January is very difficult for many of the businesses I work with in terms of generating sales. And quite simply, it comes down to two reasons. The first one being that we just don't have the trading days to get deals done because a large number of our customers are on holiday. But secondly, I often find that teams come back having had a really tough, challenging, busy end to the year prior and start off the year a little bit slower. They're not focused, they tend to look at things that won't necessarily grow their business from a sales lens, or they are simply distracted by a lot of the other great things going on in their lives over that month. If this was just limited to January, I think for many businesses you'd accept it and say, okay, great, we are gonna have a week January. We are going to budget for it and we will make it up across the rest of the year. Easy enough to do. However, the downside is that I often see this rolling into February and teams having a very lethargic month of February. That really does then put the pressure not only on their sales growth aspirations, but also their general business stability. Because one poor month most businesses can absorb. But a second poor month really starts to put the pressure on. And it's not uncommon for that second poor month to roll into third and fourth poor months. Because businesses start to panic, sales teams start to really lower their eyes. They focus only on the now. They get more desperate around closing sales. And all of a sudden that week, January become a terrible quarter. Thankfully, I've seen teams really effectively move through that January slump without needing to let it impact February. So January is now over and it's time to get back into the swing of selling. There's three Ways here that I'd encourage you to think about how you can rev the engines with your team and really get them firing again. We're the 2nd of February. We know that we've got a short month again. So how do we get them focused to deliver sales? There's three things here I'd focus on. You can pick all of them or you can pick one of them because each in their own right are able to move the sales dial. Number one is all about a team challenge. Get your team focused around something you are going to do as a group this month that is sales related. Close X number of deals, hit X dollars revenue, increase your returning customer sales by a certain amount. Go back through your age pipeline, get a certain number of demonstrations done, get out to X number of site visits, quote Y number of deals, whatever it is, we get our teams behind a challenge. We launch it in our sales meeting. We really regularly measure progress and report on how we're going and simply get the team all aligned behind how we're gonna hit that challenge. Nice and simple. Most people will know what this team challenge is, but my experience is that sales leaders are often reluctant to do it because they feel like the teams should be just doing their job to hit sales numbers. Well, my advice here is sales or business leaders, whether you're on your own or you have teams, don't just rely on should be. Let's do everything we can to put it beyond doubt. So number one is a team challenge. Number two is a personal challenge. So that's all about focusing on how individuals can be better at what they do. Do they need to be asking more questions? Do they need to be seeing more customers and do they need to be changing their offer? Should they be taking someone out from the business with them to help? Are they simply not working hard enough? Whatever it is, It's a very similar concept to the team challenge where we set ourselves goals that we're going to hit at a personal level and go out and chase them. Of course we measure progress and we report back along the journey. Okay. Last but not least is all about team training. The third way I see teams pull themselves out of that January slump is to focus really heavily on the core components of their job. How do you quote more effectively? How do you respond to leads quicker? How do you engage with customers at a higher level? How do you ask three sales questions so good that prospects will close themselves? If that's the one, go back to 172. How do we ask for more referrals? Episode 170. How do we make sure that we are challenging each other to be the best that we can? Whatever our training looks like, we need to focus in February on some of the core competencies that that are gonna help us deliver results. Because when we get that right, our team tend to all align on having the majority of the people doing the majority of the same thing the majority of the time. And that in essence, on its own is a really repeatable process that helps us deliver results. So January's over. We need to get back into the swing of sales. Otherwise we can risk a poor January becoming a poor February, March, April and so forth. We know we've had less trading days in January. We know that there are often distractions for our teams. So what we need to do is remove those by focusing on a team challenge or perhaps a personal challenge or training for our team around the really core concepts and principles they need to add or focus on for the coming month or even in fact, all three of them. You don't have to do just one on its own, but out of today, what I'm hoping is that you can pick one of those and go and roll it into your team and you've got a real motivation to get specific in how we're going to focus on growth this month. You as a leader can make all the difference when you get this up and running. So I'd really encourage you to take that 1% better approach, roll into one of those three and get going on it tomorrow. Thank you for today. Super grateful as always for you listening. We're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. That's it for now. Keep that focus, please, on being 1% better each and every day because. Because it will move the dial on your sales growth. See you next episode. 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 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.
