Every business wants to grow sales. But in most companies, sales growth feels complicated - like a guessing game filled with big goals, busy schedules, and inconsistent results. That’s why the title of my upcoming talk, “Growing Sales Is Easy,” tends to raise a few eyebrows.

Because here’s the truth: growing sales is easy when you focus on the right things. When you strip away the noise, there are only two things that truly drive consistent sales growth:

1. Defining the right activities.
2. Improving performance in those activities.

Everything else, the motivation, the mindset, the management, all stem from how well you execute on those two fundamentals.

Step 1: Define the Right Activities

Growing Sales is EASY

Speaker: John DeRosa, Roofing Sales Coach and Trainer

Date: Jan. 21
9:45 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.

Location: W217

Most sales organizations set revenue goals or budgets for their salespeople. That’s a great start, but it’s also where many stop. They say, “We need to grow sales by 10%,” or “Each salesperson needs to sell $2.5 million this year,” but they never define what it takes to get there.

In reality, goal setting is only valid when it’s connected to a clear activity plan.

If a salesperson is expected to generate a certain level of revenue, we have to work backward to define:

• Where they should spend their time.
• How much time they should spend on each activity.
• What outcomes those activities should produce.

In other words, we must identify the actions that put salespeople in the best possible position to achieve their goals.

Defining the right activities creates clarity, and clarity creates control. Salespeople know precisely what’s expected of them, and sales leaders have measurable data to manage performance. Without that, you’re simply managing results after the fact, reacting to what already happened instead of influencing what’s happening next.

Step 2: Improve Performance in Those Activities

Once the right activities are defined, the next step is improving how effectively your salespeople perform them.

Improvement isn’t about sending salespeople to a seminar, putting them in front of a training video, or handing them a new book. While training does have value, it doesn’t create change on its own. Improvement requires engagement and accountability.

Sales leaders must be intimately involved in their team’s activities. They need to observe, measure, and have meaningful conversations about what’s happening in the field. They must identify where each salesperson is strong, where they struggle, and then coach intentionally to close those performance gaps.

Coaching isn’t about micromanaging. It’s about maximizing. It’s helping each salesperson get more results from the time and effort they’re already putting in. When sales leaders consistently focus on this improvement process, skill levels rise, conversion rates increase, and sales growth follows naturally.

The Sales Roadmap:

During my talk, I’ll introduce The Sales Roadmap - a framework I developed to help salespeople and managers visualize what effective selling really looks like. The Roadmap takes the typical six-stage sales process and expands it into 23 specific actions and behaviors that top performers master. Each step represents an opportunity to improve.

When performance stalls, it’s rarely because a salesperson “forgot how to sell.” It’s because somewhere along that roadmap, there’s a gap - maybe in discovery, in building trust, in presenting value, or in handling objections.

The key is to find the gap and coach salespeople back to the process. You don’t grow sales by telling your team to “sell more.” You increase sales by helping each person execute better at the critical points that drive outcomes.

No Easy Button

There’s no “easy button” for sales growth. You can’t outsource improvement or automate accountability. But there is a clear, repeatable path:

1. Define the right activities.
2. Coach your people to improve how they perform them.

Do those two things consistently and with focus, and sales growth becomes predictable and almost inevitable. That’s what I mean when I say, “Growing Sales Is Easy.” It’s not effortless. But it is simple when you know where to focus.