Welcome back to Built to Sell, Built to Buy.

Today's guest sits right at the heart of something every business depends on, but very few
actually understand properly.

Now, Ben Wright, he's the founder of Stronger Sales Teams, where he works with
organizations to transform how sales teams think, how they behave, and ultimately perform.

But this isn't about scripts or pipelines.

It's about what actually drives behavior.

inside a sales team, why most teams underperform, and what separates a sales function that
scales from one that silently caps the value of a business.

Because if your sales team doesn't perform, your business doesn't scale.

And if it doesn't scale, it's not built to sell.

It's funny you talk about scripts as you were introducing me my microphone had a little
malfunction and I'm I'm nervously looking at it now to make sure it's working again, but

anyone watching on video will see the first 10 seconds with my head darting around
nervously.

The scripts is certainly not what it's all about.

But you're very, very grateful to be here.

Yeah, looking forward to this conversation, Ben.

And interestingly, every single guest that I've had on the show for about the last nine
months has either been US, Europe.

Turns out not only are you here in Australia, you're in the same part, beautiful part of
Australia, the Sunshine Coast.

And I didn't know that until about half an hour ago.

I would say you're only a kilometer or two from my mom as well, sorry to jump in on you
there.

Now, Ben, before we really jump into the meat of what we're going to talk about today,
before you had Stronger Sales teams, what was it that you're actually trying to figure out

In fact, I'm open with most things around my life.

And, and I'd say at 43, I've lived a lot of professional lives and I always struggled to
understand, I think what drove me.

I went into university pretty, pretty early.

Mucked around as a lot of us do during university.

had five or six businesses along the journey.

Some of them, or one in particular was really successful.

Got to the end of that at, oh gee, 37, I think I was.

And I was, I remember we relocated from Melbourne up here to Noosa Heads.

If you're not listening, or if you're listening and you're outside of Australia, Noosa
Heads is just, it's a dreamboat place.

People come from all over the country to spend time here, but very few international
people know about it.

And we're up here, and I remember I was in the kitchen with my wife and I was complaining.

I didn't really have a lot to complain about, because life's...

pretty good for us in where we are and what business has been able to do for us.

And she looked at me and said, Ben, go and get a job.

And I just had this sinking feeling and I think this look of horror on my face that said,
no, I'm not going, there's nothing wrong with working people.

But for me, it was something that I decided wasn't my path.

And from that moment on, I said, all right, I've really got to get back into what I want
to do.

And I think during that journey, I realized that

uh It was very much about, and for me the best experiences I'd had in selling was when
you'd been able to build good relationships, some of them lasting, some of them not, but

also learn how to create value for two sides of the equation and sometimes three or four
or more than that side of the equation.

So I think for me, when I realized that it was about creating value and good relationships
and partnerships and

and just having engagement with people that actually changed that that dial for me around
how I approach sales.

And I'd say I've done some really rapid, you know, movements and changes in how I how I
lead sales teams since that period.

So is this a point then where you pretty much realize that sales isn't necessarily a
skills problem, it's a behavior problem?

Some of them take a very long amount of time, but in my experience, particularly in
scales, in sales, the skills required can be taught and generally built on over time.

They're not skills you can necessarily pick up immediately and be first rate from day one,
but the behaviors are the pieces that are harder to teach.

Genuinely caring, listening, wanting to know,

want to know more about what your customers are doing.

So for me, think skills and behaviors are both incredibly important in the sales
landscape.

But I think behaviors are the ones that are a lot more difficult to not only teach, but
also move the dial on.

I live a lot by the 1 % better every day on a theme, on a tagline.

think behavior is a lot harder to change.

So for me, what that means is that focusing on behaviors will

generally give you greater rewards if you can move the dial because they're so hard to do.

So looking back now, Ben, was there a moment where you realized that you noticed something
in the way sales teams operate and the people within them that others just weren't seeing?

I think that probably crept up on me over time and I was able to look back at a point in
time and say, I've been building towards this for a long period.

So yeah, there was absolutely the moment where I said, hey, I now get what I've been
building to.

But over a period of probably five or six years, what I realized was that everything I'd
learned as a kid, as a teenager, as an early adult around sales is a numbers game.

some truth in that, but it's only it's one part of a number of bricks that build the house
around sales and the around being a numbers game and um focusing on features and benefits

and how you outperform the competition and, it's a hustle and all the things that I was
taught as a child and early adult that there was more to it than just that.

And I think the realisation was that it is absolutely about creating value features and
benefits and not necessarily creating value, but it's

And it's at that moment, and it probably took me three years of teaching of just pure
teaching sales strategy before I realized that I'm in sales, I was late 30s.

By the time I got to that point, I was almost 20 years in sales by then.

You you wish you had known it earlier, maybe, maybe not.

But I think at that point in time, that's when I realized there's not enough people that
are focused on creating value.

And too many people focused on all the traditional approaches to selling.

It's interesting, I've owned my own companies for about 25 years and they've all been B2C
companies and I've never been one to sell the features and benefits of something.

I've always approached sales of trying to create an emotion in someone and sell that
emotion and how they connect with that.

Now, if I asked most business owners why their sales team aren't performing, if I ran a
poll,

What do you reckon they would say is their number one thing why their sales team isn't
performing?

You know what, there's only a few answers I ever get to this.

um For the sales leader that's not involved in marketing, they'll often say bad leads.

For the sales leader that has some engagement around sales and marketing, they'll say lazy
sales team.

And for the sales leader that runs their own business, occasionally...

Why Most Sales Teams Underperform (And How to Fix It) | Ben Wright

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