Business Innovators Radio - The Power of Sales Coaching and Sales Playbooks: An Interview with Nick Loise

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

In this episode, Nina Hershberger interviews sales leader and entrepreneur Nick Loise on how small to midsize businesses can improve their marketing and sales processes.With his expertise in sales coaching and playbook development, Nick shares valuable insights and strategies to help businesses increase their sales and achieve sustainable growth.Nick Loise has a wealth of experience in sales, entrepreneurship, and leadership. As a successful salesperson and author, he has been recognized as a President’s Club winner and has worked with industry leaders like Frank Kern, Russell Brunson, and Dan Kennedy. Nick’s mission is to help small businesses improve their sales processes, systems, and playbooks, ultimately driving their success.During the interview, Nick highlights the importance of having a well-defined sales process and playbook. He explains that successful salespeople adhere to a repeatable process and emphasizes the need for businesses to create their own customized sales playbook. Nick shares examples of how he has helped businesses in various industries, such as a junk removal company, leverage referrals and establish effective inbound and outbound sales strategies.This episode is a must-listen for business owners and sales leaders who want to enhance their sales team’s performance and drive business growth. Whether you are looking to improve your inbound conversion rates or explore new outbound sales opportunities, Nick provides actionable advice and practical tips based on his extensive experience.If you’re ready to take your sales and marketing efforts to the next level, listen to this episode with Nick Loise. Learn how to create a winning sales playbook, improve your conversion rates, and navigate the challenges of a competitive marketplace. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain valuable insights from a seasoned sales expert.To find out more about Nick Loise and his sales audit visit his website at salespack.salesperformanceteam.com.You may also find his book, The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your Sales Team: a No BS Guide For Business Owners” on Amazon.If you want a detailed roadmap to improve your sales, reach out to Nick via email at [e-mail] to request a complimentary audit of your sales process. Get ready to supercharge your sales and achieve remarkable business growth with the insights shared in this episode!MegaBucks Radio with Nina Hershbergerhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/megabucks-radio-with-nina-hershbergerSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/the-power-of-sales-coaching-and-sales-playbooks-an-interview-with-nick-loise

Welcome to Megabox Radio. Conversations with successful entrepreneurs, sharing their tips and strategies for success, real-world ideas that can put Megabox in your bank account. Here's your host, Nina Hirshberger. Well, welcome to today's call. This is your host, Nina Hirshberger. And on the show today, I have Nick Luisi. I've been practicing that, Nick. Did I get that?

I'm pronounced properly. You did it great. You said it like you're from the old country. You did it perfectly. Well, you know, I had to write it so it would sound like I would say it. Nick is an amazing person. We go back a long way. But he's a sales leader, a salesperson, a successful entrepreneur, president's club winner. You know, the list goes on and all. He's written books. He speaks. He does everything. But what he does is he has a mission focused on helping small to mid-sized businesses improve their marketing and even the most important, their sales processes, which include their systems and their playbooks.

So Nick, welcome to the day show. Oh, yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for all that you do for small businesses, the small business community, which we have really a burning passion about helping them. And they are the backbone of every community. They're the backbone of every industry. And, you know, anything that I can do to help them as well as your mission,

help carry your mission for it. It would be great. So thank you for having me on. Well, my pleasure. Let's go back in time. Nick, how did you get into the sales arena? Give me a little more background on you. Well, it was a great time.

Yeah. So, you know, I started out in the late, late 80s, early 90s in sales. Back then, I had graduated from college and was recruited into a management training program for a very large corporation, Fortune, you know, 10, 100 corporation. And it kind of went through the management training program of all departments. And I said, that's fine, but I want to end up in sales, right? So that's my end result.

And at the end, they're like, okay, great, you know, by the way, nobody in their 20s goes into our sales department, you have to be in your 30s, 30 plus, right? So you're going to be an analyst, you're going to do something else. And I said, I said from day one, I wanted to be in sales. So I quickly left that and got into what I really enjoyed and still to this day enjoyed, got into financial services sales, insurance sales, and, you know, didn't know any better. It was a, you know, commission only sales job. And it sold. I started with the one card system. so anybody that's a little age that's listening to your podcast will know what that is. There wasn't a CRM or anything like that.

And I learned the tools of sales and had great mentors and had great sales leaders and did and made a lot of mistakes, but learned from them. And then just kind of kept on that. I did that for a while, built a good book of business, then went into a couple different other industries where I focused on sales. and it's really kind of been the linchpin of every career that I had. I joke when I was a VP of marketing. I was probably one of the worst VP of marketing,

but I didn't know any better than just go out and make sales calls. So our sales grew, our market share grew, just because I was going out and talking to end users and customers, and they ended up buying all of our products and services because of that. So, you know, I like to say I'm a salesman first. I've always been a salesman, and it's helped me with everything I do. It's helped me launch a couple different companies, too. But, you know, Nick, so we've got to go back a little further in time.

Did you grow up in like a Boy Scout selling stuff door-to-door or popcorn? I mean, what made you so intrigued with sales? Great question. So my kind of grew up in a family on both sides that were entrepreneur. And my mother and father went into corporate America because it was just the time, right, and my dad was in the high-tech industry, and that you really, you know, really were able to make a name for yourself

that was working for as a W-2. But my grandfathers, my uncles, all of them were entrepreneurs and small business owners. And I joke that, you know, one side of the family, we are in the produce business, which is the worst business in the world to be in because, you know, as soon as you pull away from the dock,

your inventory is starting to spoil. So you've got to sell what you got in the truck that day. So I learned that. And if I look at kind of the folks that I had an affinity for, the guys in the community, the older adults in the community, they were all salespeople, right, or entrepreneurs. And so I kind of knew that's what I wanted to do. And yes, I was a Boy Scout. We sold everything.

I had my first company at the young age of 13, where I delivered the flyers that you get on your doorstep. and in your mailbox and I had guys working for me. And so then I kind of went out and hustled to other companies so that we always had something to deliver every day. And, you know, just you name it. We sold it if we could. You know, I've always had been a fan of direct response marketing. So when you look at the back of the magazines, the mad magazines, and the comic books,

I like those ads a lot better and was always trying to find things to sell. And then, you know, just you, you know, as young, men, you know, in your teens, maybe you get off of that a little bit, and you start focusing on, you know, sports and girls, and then go back to college and then kind of find your way back to selling. No, I knew there had to be a backstory to all of that because that's, you know, you can't just wake up one day and say, oh, I'm going to go into sales. So that's terrific.

What did you major in in college? I had a double major. I was in. I had a business degree, specializes. and marketing, and I also had a degree in hotel and restaurant management. And the thought was, the family was in real estate on one side of the business, where we owned apartment buildings and that. And so I wanted to, part of my study was in the real estate business, you know, the economics of real estate, but also, you know, focusing on, you know, was I going to get into the hotel and

the restaurant business? Quickly realized a lot of capital was needed. I didn't really want to kind of run around and run other people's hotels. And really, the hotel business was really driven by sales and marketing. So some of that, you know, business and salesmanship really helped me. And I ended up working for a REIT, which was focused on all of our investments were in hotels. And all of our investments were, we had some Japanese investors. So it was really a sales and marketing drive. Okay.

Okay. Well, and I know you've been on the stage and spoke with some pretty famous people, people like Frank Kern and Russell Brunson and Dan Kennedy and, you know, the list goes on and on. So how did you get into the speaking area then? So, you know, you and I come from a gentleman by the name of Dan Kennedy, one of the best business minds out there. You know, and I found my. away to Dan through, I took a sales team in Arizona to what was then, what I think they called them the success events. And we went there to go see Ziglar, Brian Tracy, right? There was a couple

of sports guys. And the last guy on the stage running around passing out flyers was going to talk about marketing. And I have affinity for marketing. And I'll make this story quick. And so he had a product that was called magnetic marketing. I bought it. We put it into practice. for the sales team to self-generate our leads. It worked, right? And so fast forward, I became a member of the No BS Community G-K-I-C. It was called, you know, read the newsletter, bought his products or services. Back then, he had, you know, it wasn't as large of the businesses it is now.

But it worked. And then I had an agency, right? So I had a direct response marketing agency from 2006 to 2012. And we were growing it, but, you know, magnetic marketing, Dan's teaching was part of our core philosophies. And I got that magazine, that newsletter each and every month as well as bought all the products and services. Well, there was a recruiter that was doing some work for then GKAC, which we had just been bought by a property equity firm out of Evanston, Illinois. They bought it from Bill Glazer. and they were looking for then a director of sales, BPS sales.

And when I was reading the ad, I'm like, oh, that sounds like GKIC. And I always wanted to get into the info marketing business. We used information marketing to drive our agency. And the agency, I had been doing it for six years. I had investors and I had partners and I was kind of tired. So I had a conversation with the recruiter, had a conversation with the folks that were at the corporate office and got hired on. And so that's kind of how I found my way to larger scale, a scale stages to work with the Frank Hurons, the Dan Dennedy's, the Russell Brunson's, all those. But I always use speaking to kind of grow the business.

When I was growing in the agency, there was a very robust, and you may recall this, the magnetic, the GKIC IBAs, right, independent business advisors, they were always very gracious to allow me to come to speak on their stages, right? So I spoke to the local communities. Everybody wants to learn about marketing. Everybody wants to learn about how to get better at sales or get their sales teams better. So I had topics that were very in vogue. And people were always very welcoming to invite me onto their stage or to speak to their small groups, which is fine by me too.

As long as it was small businessmen and women, I didn't care. Yeah, well, I did not know that. You were part of the Peter Lowe and that you found him in the Peter Lowe. Actually, I never went to the Peter Lowe event, but I found Dan, there was through Jay Abraham, actually. There was a, he had a multi-page ad, and well, as Jeff Paul and Dan had how I made $4,000 in my kitchen and my underwear. Sure. And I went to a Jay Abraham seminar, and I pulled that ad out of the magazine, out of Success magazine. And at one of the breaks, I said, who is this?

And they saw that Stan Kennedy and Jeff Paul. And that was my first introduction back in the 90s to what Dan teaches and all of that. So, Nick let's turn the corner. So obviously, you've got a terrific background, and you have seen a lot of successes with small businesses. So now you're really helping a lot of them, not in an agency way, but also primarily with their sales team, if I understand it right? That's correct, Nina. So one of the things that we saw, especially the work that we did at magnetic marketing,

probably the best name for it now, right, because that's what it's known has, was most small businesses, I mean, they understand they need lead flow, right? They understand, in effect, the clients that we work with, they've got lead flow coming in, or they need to come up with alternative sorts. of lead flow, if their leads are getting too expensive, and I'll go into a couple stories about how we work with them and really drive that. But what were they struggled with was the conversion of the sale, whether they tried to do it all electronically or they try to just do it with inbound folks. They struggled with salespeople, right? Because salespeople, and I am

one, right, so I could kind of hold the mirror to myself as we're pains and the, you know what, every now and that kind of manage and deal with. And most business owners just don't have the bandwidth to do the coaching for them, to do the management of them, to do the kind of the strategy, if you will, as well as putting together a sales process, right, a repeatable sales process. Because it's really, sales is really, you know, though people think it's charisma, it's the guy, you know, back slapping and telling jokes, it's the best sales people have and adhere to to a sales process on a daily basis, right? So every lead that they go through, they take them through that. And so what we do is we help businesses create that sales process, so now they have

a phenomenal asset for their business. When they hire people, they have something to bring them on, to onboard them with. But they also know that everybody on their team is selling the right way and the correct way and moving the sales needle by doing it. And a lot of the work came through, webinars and as well as conferences that many conferences and workshops that we use to run, bring people in, creating the playbook for them, creating the sales process, creating the scripts, creating the onboarding plan for their salespeople, writing the ads for them so that they could really get out there and hire the right salespeople, but also have the mechanism for managing the salespeople, coaching the salespeople, and using that to drive.

their success with the sales team. And it's been a passion of mine because I wasn't good at it, right? So I use the analogy many times business owners and I was one are really great salespeople. That's, you know, they become the number ones. That's how they did it, right? Maybe they were the number one salesperson in an organization. They used that knowledge and flipped it over and created their own business. Maybe they were distributors. Maybe they saw a niche in the marketplace that their businesses didn't want to go after, so they went after that and brought their products and services to the marketplace. And they're phenomenal.

They just intuitively know what to do. But they all struggle with translating that into a process to teach salespeople. So salespeople sometimes are set up for failure because they get brought in. One is a lot of business owners have too much on their plates, not that's their fault. They're just focused on growing the business, adding enterprise value, building their equity, building their value and their net assets. And so the salespeople don't get that chance and don't get onboarded properly, but most importantly, don't have the intuitiveness that the owner does.

I like to say to an owner, when you're sitting in front of a prospect, you intuitively know if they ask a question at three minutes in, that you have to say something at eight minutes in, so you don't get an objection at 27 minutes in. And it's just a need to you. And so what we try to do is take that and create the flow chart, if you will, create the sales process, if you will. I like to say I translate ownership speak, right?

Owners speak in the sales process so that the salesperson has scripts that work, objection handling tricks that work, opening that work, and really good discovery processes that work and good follow-up that work. So we create that playbook for them. And many times businesses... I want to jump in just one second. So is that playbook pretty much similar for each of the industries or are it customized for each one? So, you know, think of...

My wife and I went out and we had a phenomenal meal this week. And it was our... It's a blizzard here in Chicago, but we still buried it. And our driver was safe and got us there and got us back. And it was a phenomenal meal. We had finished it up with a souffle, right? Now, the suflay, the recipe for the souffle, everything. So for most businesses, the core components of their sales playbook is the same, right?

There's discovery questions, but they all are different depending on the niches that they're selling to, the product and services that they're bringing into the marketplace, the length of time for the sales process, right? How many people are part of the buying process? So the core recipe is the same, if you will, the building block. of the playbook are the same, but everything is customized for that individual and for that individualized businesses. So we really go deep on who their avatar is, who are their ideal customer profile, right? Every industry uses different names.

We go deep on who they are, what their drivers are, what type of personalities they are. And we build playbooks for that. What's the right discovery model? What are the openings? What are the sales scripting look like? What are the follow-up emails? What are the email approaches? We do three-step email approaches, right?

We do three-step LinkedIn approaches, right? The business that you and I know, you know. So we build it all. The foundational of the playbook is going to have the same chapters, if you will, Nina, but everything is customized for the client. Interesting. So give me some examples of how you've done that in businesses. Well, we use a really fun one because I have a passion for the home improvement home services.

So we did some work for a junk removal company. And, you know, they were, you know, a heavy inbound shop, right? They knew to run SEO, Facebook ads, all that stuff and just take the inbound call. But what we realized was the cost of lead was going up and up and up and up. And we also then kind of dissected their business and went deep and realized that their business, not only from the consumer standpoint where that business came from, but let's say from a business to business standpoint came from three to four to five different sources. So we went out and hired phone salespeople to go out and source leads for that sources.

So we looked at from where the referral source happened and went out and did presentations or made sales calls to real estate agents, brokerage houses. commercial relending officers, construction people. These people all had a need for that service, but never a one thought to have a partner, per se, or no one ever really went to go talk to them. So they just used anybody that they could find when they just went to the Google, right? In the old days, it'd be the white pages. And so we dissected their business, looked at who they should sell to,

have the consumer business where it was, right? It was still heavy on inbound leads, taught them some tricks of the trade on the conversion, right? So now we work with them on their scripting on the inbound leads. We listened to the calls together with their team on the inbound leads. We looked at the scripting. We adjusted the scripting. And then from the outbound, we created five different pockets or avatars, if you will, that we went after, created specific scripting, as well as email, follow-up, texting, follow-up for those specific.

scriptings for this business and then watch them really flourish in a highly competitive environment. So when you say, oh, bow, and you're talking about, so those are referral sources, and you're talking about how to get those referral sources to pay attention? I guess I'm not clear on what that meant. Yeah, so if you think about usually when somebody is moving out of their house, Let's use one of those referral sources, if you will. They have a bunch of stuff that they are not going to move, right?

It's just, it's dated, it's old, it's been sitting in the basement or the garage or the shed forever. They just don't have a need for it. Or they're downsizing, right? They're moving into a smaller house. They just don't have the thing, the space for it. And so the real estate agent could act as a trusted advisor by saying, don't worry, I have a source for you for that. fact, we have a special program with XYZ company that will come here, take care of everything for you, and either, you know, we have a special discount for being part of our real estate

agency or the real estate agent themselves might pay for the, right, as a way to really differentiate themselves in the marketplace. So that referral source became a feeder, if you will, for the removal of all the junk, I had to call it junk. It's people's stuff that they just don't need anymore, right? And that became the number one source. Another good source was there was a number of construction workers. Construction workers, maybe they didn't have a big enough job that they needed dumpsters, but they had a lot of debris that they needed to have moved, right? And so they had to find ways to get rid of it. They put it, you know, they had to take it to the dumping place in themselves. And so what we realized is, hey, let us take care of that. You have highly skilled workers, i.e., your

craftsmen, you could barely find the craftsmen to begin with. The last thing you wanted them focusing on removing all of this stuff from the construction site, it's not enough that you could afford to put a dumpster on the site, right? We're going to take it away from you. We're going to take it away and make it a turnkey for you, right? So those were two specific business lines, if you will. Both needed the same result, but both went about it in two completely different ways. And, you know, they're just used to no one ever approached them, right? No one ever approached them about a partnership. No one ever approached them about, hey, if you do X amount from us, we'll give you as, you know, a stared discount. Let us be your, you know, one point of contact, right? One telephone number, one text, one email,

we'll take care of everything and will make you look good in front of your clients, right, as the real estate agent. Or we'll make sure that you never have to worry about what's going on in the property from a junk removal from a debris removal from the construction guys, right? And it just became phenomenal partnerships. Yeah, you know, that's interesting. I think it's really, you know, to me that's more like understanding marketing as much even as sales. You saw an opportunity that they weren't even thinking about, which was go out and make

those relationships, go out and get those referrals instead of just probably the inbound, like you said, was coming from SEO or, you know, they had their website or whatever, and it was the hope method. They hoped that the phone would ring, and you took them and made it more of an assertive, an aggressive kind of thing. So that's what. Yeah, we put an out. 100%. We put an operon coach to it. Second thing that we learned, and we talked, I talked quickly about it, is we took their inbound team and really put what we would call the sales coaching element into it. So we listen to their calls, right? And we worked on changing their scripts, adhering to the script, coaching on the script, and we got them to an increase of 20% on their conversion, right? So,

their inbound conversion from people saying, hey, I want to know about your services, taking them through a really quick, you know, three question discovery process, building some bonding and repouring, right? And then, you know, sticking with the script and getting the conversion. And their phone people were very, very good. So, well, don't want, you know, but, but, and the most importantly, though, they adhered to coaching, right? They adhered to the scripting. They adhered to not using 52 words, right, when five words would work, right? And so what we learned was just by focusing on that, listening to the calls, we could kind

of build a best practice forum, just like you would in a sales team of here are the rebuttals, right? Here are the objection handling. Here's really good questions to ask, right? here's how to understand what's going on. And some of it is, goes back to how we first started, the owner just intuitively knew how to handle these phone calls. And so we broke down his scripts and his calls, and he took some calls and we recorded them.

And that became kind of the model that we used in coached and trained the salespeople to really improve the closing ratios for the inbound calls, as well as setting up an outbound sales process. So. Yeah, no, that makes sense. perfect sense. Yeah, I had a client one time and they were a cosmetic surgeon and, you know, I mean, you listen to their calls and you think, oh, no. And so scripting is critical. Did you have any pushback from the salespeople that you were training? Yes, always. And, you know, some of them became,

until you went at it, you know, this, we're coming from love, we're coming, you know, we're not trying to single out anybody. We're not trying to make anybody, you know, we're just, you know, we're We just want, you know, it's costing, we give them the business case, Nina. So we said, listen, here's where we're at from an inbound lead cost, right? It is going up. And we showed them over the course of time what that looked like on a pie graph, right? This is what's happening to the business. Also, there's some compression because there's a high level of competition in the marketplace.

So we shared that with them. And we're like, this is why we have to get our conversion rates up, right? And then we just tracked the conversion rates, put those on a daily scorecard, right, or weekly scorecard for everybody to see. We reported those out. And we just built the case study, the business case study for them,

as well as then, you know, kind of shared with them why. But yeah, people get defensive, right? You know, I'm doing a great job or I've been doing a great job. And once you explain to them that it's not, I'm not trying to signal anybody out. I'm just trying to make it better for everybody.

And here's the facts in front of, of us and here's why we have to get better. You know, then they, they softened up. Well, if there's commissions involved, I mean, their commissions will go up to, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're economics. Now, they were inbound, right? So their commissions were a little bit lower, but they did have a commission structure, and there was a bonus pool structure for everybody.

And then the outbounds had more of the traditional commission structure that a sales team would be under. Okay. So if somebody is interested in, you know, they're listening and they're saying, this makes sense. What kind of process do you go through if you've got a new client who's reached out to you for the first time? So a lot of it is we try to figure out what's there. Why did they get to us?

Right. So what's going on in the world? What is it they want to do? So the first thing, sometimes they give us a call because of the fact that they don't have a sales process, a sales play, a sales system in place. And they need salespeople because. because they are thinking about selling in three to five years. And if they don't have salespeople, their value of their company is going to be lower than

if they had a sales process and a sales team. Others are just struggling, right, because the economic pressures in their marketplace, they just aren't responding as fast and furious as they needed to. So they just need a different look. Some are brand new, right? And they want to get it set up from the beginning. So the first thing we do is, okay, what's going on with the business? Why do you need, what brought you to this call?

What's going on? From there, we do kind of an audit like we've talked about. We take a look at a number of different key drivers of the business in different categories and go deep, right? And then from there, we then start building the playbook and testing the playbook. And then, you know, nothing is perfect. Nothing's, you know, you have the direct mail piece, right? You have a control piece and then you test different pieces against the control.

So once we get the control playbook, we also do start testing, right, different scripting. Once we get it to a base level and we get the performance where we want it to be, we always are testing to making sure that we're doing the right things and that we're constantly winning every sale. Build the playbook out, put everything in place. We could stay on and help them manage it, right? So a lot of times companies hire us as a fractional sales leader for their business where we stay on and monitor it or a fractional sales leader where we kind of just come in

in a consulting basis on a monthly meeting with the ownership or the executive team or with, you know, with the sales leaders, right, kind of coaching them up. And then we're off to the races. So it's, it's, it's, it could be fast and furious if they need that to be. It could be an elongated process and built on a partnership where we're in the business each and every day and helping them move it forward because they just can't afford a full-time sales leader so they need a part-time or a fractional sales leader. Well, and you know, every high-end athlete as a coach. So, because you're in there as a coach doesn't mean they're doing wrong things.

You're just elevating what it is. How successful have you seen companies that you work with grow their business? anywhere from 25 to 35% some have seen substantially higher but they were just in all fairness train wrecks to begin with and you probably don't have people that are listening to your to your show that are that are train wrecks and they just kind of needed to really re-up everything and so we were able to kind of take them from you know cash flow negative to cash flow positive and double-digit sales growth but on the most part of they see anywhere from 25 a 55% increase in sales.

If they follow the playbook, they follow our mechanisms, and they allow us to put a, like you said, a coaching component. The coaching component is really what drives the volume, right? The playbook, descripting, all that's important. But, you know, you could have, you know, you could have the best actor in the world read the script and it's going to sound substantially different than somebody that is, you know, a high school drama kid that hasn't had the years and years and years. of practice and hasn't had the years and years of years of coaching. So that really drives it.

If anybody that's listening to this is trying to figure out the secret sauce, I say one of my missions for 2024 is get stuff off of the plates of your sales leaders or sales managers or whoever is working with your sales people on a daily basis. Get things off their plate so they get spent time on coaching the sales team to the scripts and to the processes and to the systems in place. and you'll watch your sales soar. And if you don't have the time to do that, if they don't have the time to do that, give us a call. We'll kind of share with you how to set that in place, but that will drive your business.

Well, in fact, you just said 2024. Well, you know, you have a crystal ball, I think. What is these happening going forward? Well, I think 2024 is going to be a very interesting year. One is, I think you have a lot of companies that were probably, up with PPE money and propped up with COBOL investments and we're kind of what I call zombie companies, right? And these are business owners that just, you know, we're kind of keeping their business afloat. And I think they're going to shut down or they're going to get sold

for pennies on the dollar, right? So there's going to be some opening of the markets per se, right? There's a lot of competition. A lot of people got into different business lines because they just had to get into different business lines to keep their business flow. So I think that. I think you've got the zombie companies or underperforming companies that will either close or be sold this year and for different various reasons. The second thing is I think as we get closer and closer and closer to November of 2024, it is just going to be a proverbial S-storm with messaging and what's going on in social media.

I think if you're getting your leads from social media, that average cost is going to continue to go up. It's going to be more and more expensive. There's going to be so much noise on Facebook, on YouTube, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok, you name it. Because all of the various political folks will be buying up as much as they possibly can and trying to capture as much attention as they possibly can. Politics aside, I have no dog in that race. I'm a capitalist. I only care about that. But you've got to watch that as a business owner's. And I also think a confused mind will never buy. And as there's more noise in the marketplace, people will wait until the election is over before they start making major purchases, right? Whether it's investments in their homes. If you deal with a lot of home improvements, home services like I do, right? Those guys are going to see a little bit of slow down in, Q3 and Q4 until that noise clears up, right?

So I think that's going to be happening. I think there is a lot of salespeople on the ranking files, especially from SaaS companies and from technology companies that will continue to see themselves redundancyed out or downsized out. So you have a lot of salespeople that will be going into different marketplace that came from different environments. The problem is that they came from environments that were maybe heavy. inbound environment so it won't know how to prospect. They won't know how to do that. And so that

is going to be problematic because business owners will be hiring them, not realizing that they are not set up for success because they need, they came from a completely different sales process, sales model, and environment. And I think from a sales perspective, which is the world that I live, and from a marketing perspective, which is the world that I live in, I think you're going to have that. As you get closer to the end of the year, deals are going to take longer to push through depending on what industries you're in. Businesses are going to be a little bit harder. But I really, really think at the front of the year, those that have their act together

are going to see great strides. Well, yeah, that probably makes a lot of sense. Well, Nick, I am looking at the clock and we are out of time. Oh, my gracious. All right. I think there's going to be some people. Well, that's because you're so interesting. I'm sure there's going to be people that are.

are going to want to reach out to you. They say that, no, this Nick, he makes sense. How would you, is there anything that you would like to offer first as a gift to anybody that's listening and then how could they reach you? Yeah, so there's a number of different ways that we could, you know, have the first thing, if they kind of like what we do, we put all of our philosophy into a book and they could find it on Amazon. And it's a really quick read and the investment is small.

It's really for business owners. And it's really what I call a quick book, right? Because business owners maybe don't have the time to spend a lot of time. And it's the ultimate guide to managing your sales team, right? And it just kind of teaches you through everything that we think about and we look through to kind of build that up. They could also go online and it's called they go to salespack. Dot sales performance team and we'll put those in the show notes for everybody. Salespack dot sales performance team.

We have a bunch of goodies, right? So they have a couple of different white papers that we've written. There's a 100-point checklist that we've created of the high-performing sales teams and businesses that they could do a self-audit as well as just some other things that we look at when we're building our sales playbooks for our customers. So if they want to do it themselves, they have all the tools. They want to reach out to us they can. Just email me at Nick at sales performance team. We also have some things that we do where we kind of do a really detailed audit for folks.

We normally charge $500 to $700 plus because there's a lot of time in that. But for your listeners, we're going to give them part of it as part of our give back to the small business community. We're going to get to them for free. And we really go through all the different stages of their sales process and really give them a really detailed road map of these are the top 10 things that you've got to fix ASAP if you really want to make your sales better. So those are the best ways to kind of get to us and look at us. And it's, you know, we're here, even if they have a question, I love, you know, I'm a teacher at heart and, you know, doing these interviews and talking to folks as part of my give back. I don't think I could teach at a college, you know, university in this day and age. But, you know, I do like working with small businesses and giving them, you know, whatever question they have, especially on the sales side, because we see so many different options and opportunities.

Give us a call. Interesting. In fact, the top ten, that could be another radio show. That sounds like that would be fascinating. So, Nick, thank you again so much for your time, for your knowledge, for your generosity with these specials that you're going to be given to people. I truly appreciate it. I truly appreciate you being on the show. Well, thank you, first off, for everything that you're doing.

Thank you for your passion for small businesses. Thank you for being such a phenomenal. source. The work that you do and this podcast and everything that you provide for the community is phenomenal. So you'll really thank you for everything that you're doing. Well, you're welcome and it's, you know, a mutual society of an admiration here. And the next time, this is Nina Hirshberger saying go out and make it a great day. Thank you for listening to Megabucks Radio with Nina Hirshberger. To learn more, more about the resources mentioned on today's show or to listen to past episodes visit megabucks

radio.com.