Nick Loise is the Founder of Sales Performance Team LLC, a leading provider of outsourced sales and marketing leadership.  Prior to founding the Sales Performance Team, Nick served as the Senior Vice President of Revenue for Magnetic Marketing (formerly GKIC) and President of GKIC Insider’s Circle. Nick currently advises SMBs on how to accelerate sales and optimize their marketing efforts.

In this episode of The Grow Fast Podcast, Nick talks about his experience at GKIC, sales-related challenges faced by SMBs, the importance of continuous learning, and the benefits of working with a fractional CRO, sales enablement tools, and more!

You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Nick Loise here:

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This is the transcript for this episode:

Mark Shriner [0:00]

Nick, welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast, where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let's go. Hey, Nick, how are you today?

Nick Loise [0:15]

I'm doing great, Mark, and yourself?

Mark Shriner [0:18]

Awesome, awesome. It's a beautiful, sunny day here in the Seattle area. I mean, technically in Bellevue, but anytime the sun's out, it's a big bonus for us here where about you located?

Nick Loise [0:28]

So, I mean, I'm outside Chicago, Illinois, in a suburb that is 20 minutes away, 24 on the express train when I used to have an office in the city. And it's, I'm a cliche. It's a town I grew up in, right? So, it's like three generations, four generations live in this town. It's the beginning of the North Shore of suburbs of the park. So, it's a lot of fun, and it's sunny here in Chicago. And we also, you know, just get a handful of days. It's May as we're recording this, so it could snow tomorrow here, right? We don't know. Isn't that crazy,

Mark Shriner [1:02]

Yeah. So you've been in that town for that area, for a long time. Is it like when you walk down the street? Do you see people?  

Nick Loise [1:11]

You know, I see people I know everywhere. My poor wife, who married into this community, you know, she you know, my mom teases her. She can't go to the store without makeup. We run into people all the time. It's very provincial, right? Two Starbucks, right? So we're up, well, you're in Seattle, so you got a Starbucks. You're probably in your driveway. But every corner, yeah, every corner, you know, it's everything here. So, we see people all the time at the library, there's, you know, a beautiful uptown area. We're blessed, you know, people we play golf with. So, it's when you when my kids are older, but they went to the same high school. They did not go to the same junior high or grade school. I went to a different one in this community, but in high school. So, it was always eerie, like you'd be there on parent teacher days and week, you know, days and, you know, the kid that was the goof off, his dad is still the goof off, right? The cheerleader still acts like the cheerleader. Jack still acts like the jack. And we don't evolve that much through high school. I like to think that I did, but when you know, they probably say the same thing. It is also really funny when you would go to, like, somebody's barbecue or a party, or, like, the kids take a lot of pictures for the homecoming dance or the proms or all that. And you'd be standing in a house, you're like, I think I was here in a party in high school, you know, it was just so it was like, deja vu all over again. But hey, you know, we love it, you know, it's a good community, and we raise our family, and we've been very lucky, and my parents are in the same house that I grew up in, so we see them, you know, once, twice, you know, three times a week. So, I'm blessed!

Mark Shriner [2:50]

That's awesome, and I really appreciate that sense of community. We have some people in our neighborhood that have been living here for close to 40 years, and they walk their dogs three times, and there's a fair amount of continuity and community here. There's also a lot of people who are new to the area. But I've been in areas where nobody knows anybody. And then I've been in areas like when we lived in Japan, where everybody knew everybody, because they were all going to the same school, same sports clubs, and everything like that. And I really like it when you walk out the street say, hey, hey. But I can commiserate with, you know, the whole thing about having to, you know, make yourself presentable, because you never know who you're going to run into. So, it's a, you know, part of the part and parcel. Hey, Nick, you know, you have a tremendous amount of experience in sales, sales leadership, working with SMBs enterprise as well. And I want to talk to you about one of the kinds of increasingly more powerful trends, which is outsourcing sales and sales leadership from all the way from just, you know, lead development to up towards, you know, fractional CROs. But before we do that, you know, you worked as the president for GKIC, and you were with them during that transition to magnetic marketing. So maybe as a kind of like level set to, you know, talk about where you came from, talk a little bit about what GKIC see was, what you were doing there, and then the transition to to Magnetic Marketing.

Nick Loise [4:14]

Sure. Well, thanks for that. And you're very kind, you know, GKC was a community-based organization in, let's call them the marketing and education space. So, we worked with entrepreneurs, small business owners, professional service firms, you name it, and did a bunch of different levels of education on everything from lead generation to sales conversion, right? And that's where we were. We were private equity owned. It was started by two gentlemen. First Gentleman that started was Dan Kennedy, right? Kind of a thought leader, still to this day, still very active. And the gentleman by the name of Bill Glaser, who was a really phenomenal entrepreneur, and Bill was the driving force, right? So that's the G and the K in GKIC. And Bill was really the driving force, and really had his pulse on early adoption to all things internet, all things lead conversion, you know, really how to create a full cycle sales and marketing system for small business owners. And we were, we weren't into branding, right? So, we were really what works, right? So, what worked from a lead generation perspective, how did you conversion? How do you create long form copy that converts webinars, all the things that people do today, we created an arm that we called information marketing. Today, it's called content marketing, right? So, we really were big on content first to drive inbound leads for people. And so that was kind of our space. It got acquired in, probably 2011 by private equity. So, four different private equity firms were bidding on it, as well as some online education companies were bidding on it. And what we found was a lot of people wanted to talk to us once the conversion happened, because we had access to small businesses, and a lot of enterprise companies wanted to get in and sell to small businesses, but it's like herding cats, right? You know, they're just all over. It's tough to keep their attention. So we, at our highest, had a community of about 13,000 that were paying us some level of fee. We probably had a list of 150,000 plus, maybe you know, that were actively engaged on our list. We do events. We did two large events that had anywhere from 500 people to 750 people, right, depending on the time of year, and just kind of where the economy was. And so, we were kind of a full-fledged marketing education company, you know, built on the personalities of people, which made it kind of a push pull and difficult for the private equity firm, right? Because private equity firms, you know, the members, we had an affinity. The private equity firm wants the exit, right? So, they're looking out on saying, Okay, three to five years, five to seven years, right? We got to get our money out. You know, first money in is first money out. Type things with the primary investors, the PIs and so, you know, it was just, you know, an interesting thing to watch, that they were a great firm, their firm out of Evanston, Illinois, silver oak partners, great firm, really great businessmen. I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot from the board. So that was a lot of fun. I was hired as the director of sales, and I had just finished. I just had a marketing agency that we kind of built from the ground up and sold. I had angel investors. I had some partners in it. And we had done it for six years. It was time for people to kind of get their money out. Has anything with partners? You know, everybody was kind of tired of each other. Full. I take full responsibility for that just as much as everybody else. So I'm not throwing stones in any way, shape or form. And so there was a recruiter doing a recruitment for a firm that was blind, right, you know, to me, but it was GKC, and I always liked the content marketing, that type of thing. And I really thought that was where it was going. HubSpot was just kind of coming inbound, I don't even think was around, or maybe was just in its beginning phases out in Boston, and the whole content event, you know, kind of community marketing. I really wanted to learn. And so, when I, you know, when they, when they made me the offer, I jumped on it. I was still exiting out of the business, right? We had, we wanted to, you know, make a good transition for the people that were buying our business. So, they were really fair to me. I had to, you know, kind of ease my way in as the director of sales, became the VP of sales, and then became the president, right? And, you know, it was, it was interesting, because we, as private equity, right? We had a lot of people in the C suite kind of come and go over the course of time, just because it's just, it's just the nature of the business. So I kind of was the last man standing. So maybe that's why I was like, President, right? They just like, let's give the kid the keys, right? Because he's, you know, he's the one that's still around. And so we got silver oak on us, then a mezzanine investment company and lending company who had a piece of a loan ended up owning us. Also, They wanted to kind of get into the private equity space. Then they realized we don't want to be in this business. You know, it's just easier to lend out money at a very high interest rate. So let's just stay into that. They then sold us to a private publisher that published vanity books, right? So you see people that kind of go out, use what you call them, lead generation books. So it was a good match, because we told people, this is one of the things that you should do, you know. So entrepreneurs that want to tell their story, financial planners that want to position themselves, lawyers, you know, you name it, they should write a book. And that's really a good form of and a platform for positioning. So they owned us. It was the beginning of covid. Covid, right? Or it was just their core business wasn't as steady, maybe, as it was, and it kind of went through some peaks and valleys. So they then did the Rename into magnetic, they called it something else, and they renamed it to magnetic marketing, and then they sold it to a SaaS company by the name of Click Funnels. Who owns it? Yeah, so, if you're in the SaaS marketing space, you're in the marketing space, you know, click funnels, they have a large event. He, actually, you know, was kind of an acolyte of it. So it's a good fit, right? He, I don't know if he talks about this publicly, but, you know, you could figure out, and in a SaaS company, churn is their issue, right? So, you know, you get people in, it's easy to get people in. A lot of times they get in, they get bought in. Like, this is too tough. We don't want it. Maybe they start on a free trial. They don't stick around. So he wanted content to kind of keep people engaged. And so, you know, it was a huge body of work that we had, you know. And so it was, it's probably a good fit. I was just in it kind of from all those exits. I had a business plan for something that I wanted to kind of do. I, you know, did everything I wanted to do in the business. So, I stayed on for the last transition, and then, and then jettisoned out and formed my company. But, you know, it was, it's, if people are listening, it's a fun journey, right? And we go deeper into it all you can. You know, it is interesting it's faster to scale a company that's built around a personality. It's difficult to exit a company that is built around a personality, right? Because of the fact that once the personality is gone, people lose an affinity, and so it was a struggle that we had to deal with every day, especially a personality that has a strong personality. And for every person that he or she attracts, they may repel two to three people just because of their personality. And that's great for a very niche business, it's great. But, you know, private equity doesn't want to sit in each business that's going to sit around 12 million. They want to get their money out, and they want to get three times, four times, or eight times earnings. So, you know, we had to grow the business. And so therefore we had to bring other personalities into it, bring other services into it. And so, you know, we're always trying different things and always trying different services.  

Mark Shriner [12:24]

Well, it sounds like an amazing learning opportunity, professional development opportunity. And I have just a couple more questions on this topic, and then we'll move into what you're doing right now with your company. You know, I've read stuff from Dan Kennedy, and, you know, it could be 10 years old, but I still find a lot of profound information there. And I often think, Where does a guy like him or Bill, where do they go? To learn? I mean, because, you know, I mean, you're out there at the front, you're kind of trying to anticipate where the market's going. And so what would be their process to kind of continually stay ahead of the curve?

Nick Loise [13:13]

They were a huge input, right? So, they read the body of work that Dan would read would be amazing. They would, I think he told me at one time he had over 30 different newsletters per se coming to his house, right so whether and sometimes they were specific for industries that he had clients in, but he was the huge consumer of information. Um, Bill, also, Bill was a huge consumer of information. And probably, you know, Bill got in, jumped into the affiliate marketing space, if you will, right? So, you know, in a re if a traditional business would be a reseller space, right? So, people that were kind of selling it, he got into that, and he was really also the catapult into digital, online advertising, and really figuring that out and moving that through. But, you know, the other thing too that Dan and Bill both had was a number of private clients that would come to them from a consulting perspective, and so they would learn from them, as well as from their staff, what was going on, right? Because, if you do any studies, and you're a study student of Dan Kennedy, and he's, you know, still a prolific, just a prolific thinker, and a lot of that is he was grounded in what works, right? If you think about David Ogilvy, let's just jump to David, and I'll go back to Dan. David Ogilvy was a student of direct response advertising, right? And Ogilvy and Mather had a very big direct response area, right? Division, and that. They knew what worked because of that. They tested what worked because of that. If you think about Dan, his biggest client, probably an individual client, considered us a client right after the sale was Guthy-Renker, one of the largest direct response infomercial businesses. So, by being in that business as a copywriter, but also as a marketing strategist, and just kind of looking behind the wheel knew what was moving. And because he's educated, a greatly educated man, self taught, right? But also educated as a copywriter, they are always three steps ahead of trends, because they know that they have to write to those trends, right? So, what is going on in the marketplace today? What conversations are going on in yours? And I'm head of who I'm selling to, and he would always say that, you know, the research portion of the work that he did was the most important. And he never told me, but Mike, he probably had teams of people that would be doing the research and then send him that information and he would just consume it. So getting ready for a marketing campaign, getting ready for a copywriting campaign, getting ready for anything. It was the hours and hours and hours of consumption, of research before he knew where that was going, and he had a body of work and longevity that he's able to kind of pull  from to say, these are, you know, this is where it's going. We also live in a listen. We don't know our history, so we repeat itself, and we go through trends, right? And today's marketplace, if you look at, I was just talking about this with my wife, and, you know, we'll use a consumer, you know, it's very similar to what was going on in the 80s, right? If you look at the way that dresses, fluorescent colors, the shoe styles, you know, it's, it's the 80s, there's stuff going on political campuses, right? Political unrest on campuses, very similar to the 60s, right? So, we kind of go through ebbs and flows, has society, especially here in the United States. And you know, that's most of my work. And so that's the area that I have. So, you know, he was a great student of of of human behavior. And you know, he always used to say, hey, marketing is nothing more than human behavior and math, and you just put the two together and you'll win, right? And also having that body of work and all those different customers and clients that you could kind of pull from and see, I think, just made him better, right? He wasn't in one industry. He was in 15 different industries, and you can kind of piecemeal everything together. How's that for a long answer to a short question?

Mark Shriner [17:46]

No, no, it's great. And and it aligns with something that I kind of preach to everybody, which is, I don't care you know what, where you sit in the business, you need to get out and and talk to customers. And because, you know you can, you can go and subscribe to newsletters, and you can read books. But you also by under by talking with customers and understanding their challenges, you can understand, and if you got, you know, you talk to five customers and three of them, or four of them have the same challenge, you're like, Okay, here's an opportunity here, here's a trend here, right? And I, you know, I know people who run companies but do not interact with customers. And, you know, I'm like, You need to be especially in those higher-level meetings, right? I mean, you need to be there, because otherwise you're getting information just kind of filtered down through the team. So, I think that's hugely important. And the fact that he continued to manage his own clients or customers, you know, he had some very intimate relationships there, that's really important. You know, on that same kind of theme of learning from customers, you guys, you were, you had, you said, like 11,000 SMB subscribers over, it was 14,000 Yeah, so, so, I mean, I would think that you would be able to glean a tremendous amount of information about some of the sales and marketing related challenges that SMBs across America face. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that. You know? What were the challenges 10 years ago? What are the challenges today for the SMB market?

Nick Loise [19:12]

Well, it's the driver of the company, right? And so, I'll get into that a little bit later, but let me, let me tell you. So there. Listen, first off, always still struggling with a good go. One is a danger. Dan always taught and still does this day. One is a dangerous number in any business, right? So, if you only have one form of lead generation, you're going to be in trouble, right? Because eventually that lead generation is going to is going to go away, whether it's I'm going to date myself, whether it's fax machines, right or before the DNR, I've done that, by the way,

Mark Shriner [19:47]

I know if I send 50 faxes I would get three to five responses, and I would be able to close two or three of those, and it was just a number I'd get up every morning, and that's what I would do.

Nick Loise [19:56]

It just like dials, right? So, I would make the old the old thing was 30, 10, 1, right? So, 30 dials, right? You'd get what, 10 people that you could talk to, have a conversation with, and one of them would book an appointment, right? And so, you just knew the math, right? Or 10 three one was a 10-3-1 Now it's higher, right? So, it's a little bit higher because you have to put more, you know, it's tough to get a hold of people. They're not in offices anymore. More people aren't in cell phones, even in the business environment. So, the numbers don't lie, right? And so you knew your numbers. And so that's one of the things that he taught, is you just kind of get schooled in that. And that's one of the things that we would teach people. So the struggles that business owners. Had we had, you know, first off message to market match, right? And many, the first thing we would say is, hey, listen, if everybody is your customer, nobody's your customer, right? Because they all don't have the same problems and solutions. So you have to be intimate in knowing your market. If you know your market, then you could formulate the messaging for that market of what keeps them up, what, what's the real pain, right? Problem, agitate, solve, and then now you could get to the tactical thing. The tactical thing will change you and I talked about fax machines, right? That's a tactic, right? But it was a good It wasn't the fax machine. It was the good copy that you wrote. It was the letter that you wrote to the right audience that got them to pick up the phone, or that got them to scribble a response and fax it back to you. Say, Yes, I'd like to meet with you. Well, that's the same thing, right? So we would. We'll rush to email marketing, because that's like the new wave and AI email marketing, right? And listen, I have it running for myself and I have it running for customers, so I'm not damning yet. I'm just saying that that's a tactic, but it has to be really, really good messaging to the right avatar ICP market, right? So, pick your market, find out what their problem is, now then take figure out the problem, and then find solutions to those markets, and that's something that you said, Hey, you got to be talking to your customers, so you know what their problem is. Because you're going to have a product line extension to solve that problem, because you're having those conversations with people. So that's the one thing to this day that I don't think people do enough with, right? I especially founders. I think they get married in the technology, they get married in the solution, and they don't have those conversations, and then they're wondering why things aren't converting. We do a lot of work with founders, and we were usually brought in because their sales aren't conversion. Well, the first thing is, it's a pro. It's maybe not a problem. Problem fit, right? Product. Problem fit. The messaging may be off, right? And so, we have to kind of work on those things. But everybody runs the tactics today. Is it SEO, right? Is it webinars? Webinars work. Webinars don't work. It all works, and it doesn't work. It's just really, how do you one is the testing? What are the numbers? Are you or I positive? The other thing too is, do you have back ends, right? Do you have other products and services that you could, you could sell, because we would go negative on the acquiring of that customer, right? So, the subscriber, the person that was part of our community, we would go negative to the tune of, you know, a couple $100 of that. But we knew one is we had a very good sales team that could sell them products and services that we were able to kind of upsell them into different things. And then we eventually knew, for every, you know, $7 that we spent on Facebook, we could get, you know, 350 back, or something of that nature, right? So it was just, you know, we were blessed to have private equity money. So, we just, you know, we're able to spend, spend, spend, spend. So, the problem that customers have that you were saying is they don't they underestimate how much it will cost to acquire a customer. They underestimate the length of time of conversion for customers. And I've made that mistake myself, right? Of where you think it's going to be 30-day conversion, well, really, the buying cycle is 90 days, or 120 days, or even longer, right? So how much cash do we have to fold that we have a product that we become enamored with, or a service that we come enamored with, but we the the marketplace does not want it, right? Or it doesn't, the problem isn't big enough right now for them, so therefore they are not going to make the investment. They have other problems and services that they need to go, and those problems are still the same, you know, and it hasn't changed in business, right? You know, we had a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs that, you know, became enamored by their product and service on the information marketing side of the business, those guys are better marketers, right? They're better marketers and traditional businesses, I believe, and that's why it's fun to kind of work with them. They will pull it fast, right? They'll pull the plug fast on messaging to the marketplace of selling different types of products and services that just aren't being receptive, right? And they know their numbers, they look at it, okay, here's what's going on. This is the conversion rate. Um, and then they'll move. So tactics, tactics will always be there, right? The tools or the mechanisms to communicate will always be there. The key is really being grounded in who's my target audience, what's their problem that's solving? How does my problem solve? That vis a vis everything else, including status quo or not solving the problem, and how big of a problem is it? And I think that's the one part that a lot of people miss, is how on the hierarchy of all their problems, where does this rank? Is it number one, or is it number 50? If it's number 50, forget it. Move on to something else.

Mark Shriner [25:34]

Well, it's interesting. One of my kind of go to books is a book called traction. And there's two books called Traction. One that I'm talking about is how any startup can achieve explosive growth. I believe that's the full title. And basically, the author lays it out that, you know, there are essentially 17 different channels for marketing, and if you try to do all 17. So if you do content marketing and SEO and events and advertisement and billboards, or, you know, if you try to do all these, it's a recipe for disaster and failure, okay, but what you need to do is figure out what works as fast as possible, and then throw a lot at it, and when that stops working, get onto the next thing. And I think that kind of aligns with what you're talking about there. Also, it's really important to do AB testing. Is this resonating with the target audience? Is it not? And if we tweak the headline a little bit, we will it, will we get better results? And if you look at somebody like, and this is kind of in a different context, but the same theory, I've watched a podcast with Mr. Mr. Beast. You know, the YouTube, the YouTube guy, yeah, and, you know, he talks about, for years, two or three years, he had this mastermind cohort of three or four of his friends, and they would be on Skype eight hours a day, talking about, you know, if you tweak this thumbnail just like this, you'll get 10% more if you change this word, and he says, now he can look at a thumbnail, he can look at a video title and immediately tell you, is it going to be successful or not? And it's like, it's not just one thing, but he's got the kind of algorithm figured out to a certain degree. And I think a lot of that comes from from experience and trying different things. But don't just say, Okay, what's our budget for all 17 channels of marketing, figure out what you think is gonna work in test. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Well,

Nick Loise [27:25]

I think you're spot on. And I think, you know, ironically..

Mark Shriner [27:30]

I like it when somebody says I'm spot on!

Nick Loise [27:34]

I think that's the mistake that everybody makes, right? And I think that's the mistake of sometimes marketers, right? And I'm not beating marketers up, but they're not schooled. And I was just having this conversation on another podcast where they may not be schooled in the strategy of it, right? They're more schooled than the tactics. And so sometimes you go to a marketing agency and you know, they'll say, well, what do you think how we should reposition this company? They will tell you your SEO ranking, not, you know, here's the positioning in the marketplace that Trump Rice told us many years ago. And so you think about Mr. Beast, actually, they do a little snippet on him and the jolt effect. I don't know if you've read the jolt effect.  

Mark Shriner [29:23]

I’m halfway through it right now.

Nick Loise [27:34]

So, I talk about him. I'm not gonna blow it for you. But you know, they talk about him and how he just, he just, you know, dove into the minutia and did the work, and just got better and better and better and better. Now, he owned YouTube, right? He owned video. He didn't go to let me figure out XYZ and 123, and Twitter and all that. Now, you know, now they're, now they're absorbing short, you know, short form videos and doing that. But I think what you said, and it was kind of a throwaway line, but people don't spend enough time on that, is, they were on Skype for eight hours. They were evaluating everything, and we don't do enough of that. And that is, you know, like we don't listen the calls on salespeople and find out. Here's what is going back and forth, and here's what is resonating when I say this. This is what happens. No one is doing that analytical stuff of saying, I said this to the market. I said this to the prospect. They responded this way. I did it again. They responded this way. I did it again.

Mark Shriner [29:21]

You gotta change it up, man, right?

Nick Loise [29:23]

And so how do you make those adjustments, and how do you tweak that? And AB testing, right? I'm big on AB testing of scripts for salespeople, because I'm schooled as a direct response guy right from my years with Dan, and my agency was a direct response agency. So what is the headline? You're right? And there's the old analogy of just changing one word in the headline could get you an 8% bump or a 10% bump, right? I was just reading something the other day. I want to test it, especially test it for emails going out, adding in 2024, people are seeing a 10% response in headlines, right? You know, just by adding some. Something, something in 24 right? In 2024 people are seeing a response rate. So it's being schooled in all that being part of a group. I think to what he said, it was, it was him, and you know, three other guys. I don't know if they were in the company with him, or they were part of a different company or channels.

Mark Shriner [30:16]

Or they all had their own channels. The story that I that I saw, but yeah, and they all eventually became super successful.

Nick Loise [30:24]

Yeah, and so, but there's the other thing too. And I think Mark, you hit on this. And it goes back to the one thing about Dan, right? The one thing about Bill, the one thing about the successful entrepreneurs, the one thing about the other people that we talked about, they're doing the hard work. They're doing the blocking and tackling work that a lot of people don't want to do. And I think we gloss over that as a society, because everybody's an influencer. Everybody wants to get rich quick. Everybody wants to take a bunch of, you know, whatever it is. And nope, you know, I was just joking with somebody. I was talking to a copywriter that that work for the Agoras of the world, that work for a lot of the big, you know, the big things. And he was, you know, the four-hour work week. Nobody knew that Tim Ferriss worked 65 hours a week, if not 70 hours a week, right? But he glorified the four-hour work week, not taking anything away from Tim Ferriss. He's done a phenomenal job, and is bring great value to the marketplace, but we don't want to do the hard work, and that's knowing the avatar or the ideal customer profile, listening to 100 sales calls, taking the, you know, watching the video segment by segment by segment, and making changes, pouring over the data. Listen, I don't want to do it either, but you have to do it right. You know, just like prospecting, nobody wants the cold prospect, but sometimes you have to because you don't have the wherewithal, or you don't have the economic investment to be able to do all the other stuff. And the quickest and fastest way to do is get a list and start making phone calls, right, and go on to the next thing and go on to the next thing. But I think that's the biggest driver, and if I think about those that were hugely successful, is one is their students. They poured over books. They poured over, you know, webinars or YouTube videos or courses, or whatever it was. They went back and knew the history right and read the history of not only marketing and sales, but their industry. But they did it was, it's long, hard, grueling, grunt work, and nobody wants to do it sometimes, but you have to. I

Mark Shriner [32:25]                                    

totally agree with you, but it also pays off, though. I mean, it's one of these things where you get compound interest on the on the things that you study and the things that you learn. It just takes a while, but the momentum builds up. I do like the thing about reflecting on, you know, when you go into a meeting and when you say something and you have to kind of be aware of how that's resonating with your or not resonating with your audience. I am. I've tried to do standup comedy quite a few times, and it's funny that, you know, you can just change one word or just the timing a bit, and almost all sudden, everybody's laughing. And then if you change it another way, there's it's just dead. It's crickets, right? And so, you know, you have to be aware of that. And I always tell the people that I work with on the sales side, I don't care if anybody makes a mistake. We all make mistakes. We're human beings. What I care about is when you walk out of that meeting, the first thing you should do is just think about what went bad, what didn't what kind of what will I do next time? To improve on that and write it down if you need to. But make a note. Don't beat yourself up over it and say, Oh God, I blew it. No, no. What did you learn? What will you do better next time? And if you do that, and you're having three or four meetings a day over the you know, over the a few month period, you're going to improve massively.  

Nick Loise [33:40]

You know it’s interesting! You talk about standup comedy. I think a great Netflix documentary is Kevin Hart and, um, and, oh, the gentleman. His name is escaping me now, um, he got slapped at the Oscars.  

Mark Shriner [33:54]  

Oh, Chris Rock!

Nick Loise [33:55]

Kirk Rock, Chris Rocket, that goes deep. It's amazing. They talk about, and they even bring Chapelle in about how they when they were breaking in, they were doing 13 shows a night, right? And you can get feedback.

Mark Shriner [34:09]

Oh, yeah, be back always.

Nick Loise [34:12]

Then they'd run across town and do another show, another show, another show, right? They would wait, and maybe they got five minutes on, and they would hone their craft. And we just see them now selling out stadiums. But you know is, what does it look like, and how do they grow in that my so it my one of the avatars I love for hiring for salespeople are people that came up through the arts, right? So, people that were on stage, maybe they were theater majors, or they did, they have some background of theater, or better yet, that they did improv, right? Because they're used to that immediate feedback that yes and of building off of somebody and building and they're used to taking notes, right? And rejection doesn't really get to them because the fact that they're used to being told no. So, I think, you know, every comedian should take an. Every salesperson should take an improv class or two or should try open mic nights on stand up. So

Mark Shriner [35:06]

I totally agree. And the improv, one of the things that teaches you is, you know, you never shut something down. So, if I ask you a question, you don't say no! You respond in a way that you kind of hit the ball back over the net to me, right? So that's, you know, always passing it on. But when you talk about books from comedians, I read the Steve Martin book, I think it's called boards born standing up. Oh my god, that guy. He worked for years and years. His first job in that field was like working at a magic shop in Disneyland. And he was doing tricks to try to get people to buy some of the stuff there. Then he started doing comedy. And nobody got his comedy, because, if you remember, he was very off the wall, right, yeah, and he said, but I believe I was doing something that was different, but still funny. And it took him years, but after a while, it took off. And then he was filling stadiums. I mean, he was getting 50, 60,000 people out. 1000 people out at one time. He was the biggest comedian in the world, you know. But it's all that just years and years and years of work. So, yeah, I think we're, I think we're totally aligned there. Let me ask you, because you know, with your company now, is its sales performance team, right, correct?  

Nick Loise [36:17]  

Correct! Yeah.  

Mark Shriner [36:19]

So you know, you're going in and you're offering, I think, you know, consulting services, but you're also working as a fractional CRO or Chief Revenue Officer. And a lot of organizations, they kind of, you know, they might be okay to outsource maybe some of the HR or maybe, maybe different functions. But when it comes to sales, you know, a lot of organizations want to kind of hold it tight. And yeah, so, tell me a little bit about the services that you're offering and what's that conversation with companies that that are considering to have a, have you or another company come in and work as a CRO.

Nick Loise [36:54]

So well, thanks for that, and you're probably right, so if you think about the business of outsourcing or fractional right? The CFO is the OG, right, exactly the first person, HR, right, maybe operations, right, but the, usually, the sales part of it, they don't want that the company was, the company came from a light bulb moment of what we you and I first started talking about, I had the the incubator of talking to hundreds, if not 1000s of small business owners, right? And they all could get marketing. They all they were in our sphere, so that's what we talked about, right? They all got marketing. They all loved marketing, but when they were truthful to themselves, and then to us, they probably failed at hiring salespeople. They didn't know how to hire salespeople. They didn't know how to put processes and systems in place. They were the best salesperson because they were intimate with the product and services, right? So you could wake them up at three o'clock in the morning and they could do their their pitch, right? And so they all struggled with that. And so we actually created, at the time, it was with G, K, I see a seminar, if you will, and then a workshop where they paid us a lot of money, and they would come in and we would help them craft their ads on hiring sales people, and we would craft their process of hiring, then we would craft their sales process for them, right? So a proven and repeatable sales process is something that I talk about to this day, and we just honed it in. And I said to myself, well, they're paying us a lot of money to come in for a weekend. There's a business here, right? And it wasn't scalable, right? Because it was my time, and I had other things I had to do for the company, right? So I couldn't spend all my time running that so, so that's, that was the genesis of sales performance team. I wrote it on, I wrote the business plan on a, on a business trip back from Milan, yeah, I know life is hard, right? Coming back, you know, but I wrote the plan and, and then I, you know, just, kind of just kind of just took it to the marketplace, and I've been blessed that the market's been very, very receptive. But you're right, and usually what happens is the founder doesn't want to deal, I deal with founder owned companies, right, or small businesses, and the founder realizes he's got a problem in sales. Doesn't want to do the hard work of managing the sales team, because he needs to be the founder or the CEO of the business. He strategically needs to grow the business. Maybe he's servicing clients, right, and so we kind of come in create all the stuff that you need to have a really good sales process and sales system, from hiring to onboarding to training to coaching to giving real time feedback to training and development, which is different, right? And then we just then put it on autopilot for them. We also say, Listen, we don't have to be the long-term solution. We want to be a short-term solution. We love to get you so much sales that you could hire a full-time sales manager, if you will, or sales director or VP of sales. It shouldn't be at that level, right? For some of these companies, right? They go right to hiring a VP of sales. VP of sales is coming out of a large company. He doesn't understand the dynamics of a small business, right? So, it's just a mission match. It's a good fit for us, and we could either stay on or we create an environment where they, they hire their own person, they get, you know, they have the systems and the processes in place so or they're testing a market right in 2020 a lot of the work that we did was companies were trying to go to market with maybe new products and services, and they didn't want to go out and hire a sales team, or didn't want to deploy the team that they had, because they need to kind of focus on the core business, especially when people are trying to figure the way out of covid. And so that's kind of where we did a lot of shining, of saying, let's rapidly bring a sales team in. We create the scripts, create the sales process, everything that you need. You could hire the sales team, right? Or you could now switch the product line over, or if the product wasn't received by the marketplace, right, you could exit it and you're exiting with a with a company, versus exiting it with individuals. Now you got off boredom or all that good stuff. So, we do a lot of work, right? Usually, the core of our business is fractional sales leadership. We do some fractional business development work, and we do do some fractional sales for the right fit, for the right company. If we could think, we could help them identify we have sellers that are the right fit. But the, you know, 90% of our revenue really comes from fractional sales leadership, and kind of, we're roll up our sleeves, right? So I know you'd said sales, sales consulting, I kind of don't like that term, right? I don't because of the fact that, you know, listen, we're all came from organizations where they hired consultants, and you got the binder in the days now, it's all electronics, and you saw the PowerPoints and everything. But nobody had the nobody rolled up their sleeves and got stuff done with the business owner. And that's kind of where we are. That's our sweet spot. So we're going to do some analysis, we're going to create, we'll create all the decks you want. But I'm also going to roll in, and I'm going to create the scripts, and I'm going to work with the team to listen and get the feedback and adjust the scripts and follow up campaigns, or the, you know, the, let's call it the pre education, right? And just work with them that way, and get the KPIs in place, and track the APIs on a daily basis and weekly basis, and find out what's going on with the sales team, getting that feedback that the founder just doesn't have the time to do. And quite frankly, the sales team is going to give real time feedback to a sales leader, especially a fractional sales leader, versus this is the founder of the company, right? Because no one's going to tell anybody their babies ugly. We come in and say, Hey, listen. This is, this is a problem. This is what the marketplace is saying, right? We listen to 42 calls on 42 calls, 38 of them. We heard XYZ. This is something we have to address. So we love what we do. You know, we're blessed that we have a good body of work. We're always, you know, looking for more so we can help more people. And, you know, we just really, really enjoy what we do. The market is growing, right? Because there's a lot of people that are, you know, kind of maybe forced into this, right? So, but I don't, you know I'm afford. I got an abundance mentality, right? If they could help more businesses and allows founders to focus on what a founder should do, or CEO should do, which is going out and looking at the strategic direction, which is going out and building their bench, which is going out and giving massive reinvestment back to their to their investors, whether their investors are themselves, right, or their investors are, they took on institutional investors. So, you know, our job is full every day. We're fighting the battle with sales teams across the United States.

Mark Shriner [43:53]

Yeah, that's awesome. And I know that you work across a large number or variety of industries, and I'm wondering, you know, a lot of times in order to sell something, you have to have some kind of industry specific knowledge or expertise, and you definitely need to understand the product, maybe the competition. But maybe if you go in at that fundamental level where you're like, we need to get, you know, it doesn't matter what industry, there are some basic ABCs that need to get taken care of, and then we can put the product or industry specific kind of context on later. I mean, how do you how do you address that?

Nick Loise [44:29]

Well, it goes back similar how we started talking, right? It's like Dan, he had clients in so many different industries, and we get to see a lot of what works in different industries and bring that to the table. And so, you know, if you think about the goes, we talk about the OG of of fractional and the OG of of sales training as Sandler, right, for lack of good or better and different, right? Sandler, Chandler, Challenger sale on that, there's a formation of a sales process, right? And you could then pick different parts of it that work or don't work for you. But if you don't have a sales process, then you're going to be sunk, and you're going to you're not going to win the sale, or you're not going to win the amount of sales that you should win. And now, you know, at a certain point you got to do really good discovery. Then from that discovery, if you're selling a SaaS product, which we do a lot of work in that in that space now, you got to go to demo, but everybody wants to run to demo, but we don't even know what the problems and the potential problems are. And by doing really good discovery, we're doing good opening. Doing good discovery allows us to bring the product into place and having that conversation right. Usually, they have a good knowledge of who their competition is by the time they get to us. So we then could create, you know, kind of, here's sell sheets against them, right? Here's what to look for. Here's what we do vis a vis, sometimes you need an outside, third party to kind of say, Okay, well, what about this? Why is that important? Have you looked at this? So it's, you know, I think it's a benefit, not a not a problem, because of the fact that we are in so many different and I joke about this all the time. Mark, I know when a company is using a script, a playbook, that just came from another company, right? The sales leader came from another company, or they hired a consultant, or they watched, or they, or they, Oh, I like this email. Let's use this email. Or I like this LinkedIn outreach. It's the same, because they're all in my inbox, right? Because I'm on everybody's list. So everybody's you, if you're from the industry, the industry ends up being very incestual, so everybody's kind of using the sales same playbook. So, you're not your sales process isn't sticking out. It's not different. And so what we bring in is kind of creating a a bespoke sales process for you and for your team and for your offering, and most importantly, for the prospects that you're speaking to. That really moves the needle.

Mark Shriner [46:59]

You know, a lot of startups and or new companies, the first thing they'll ask is like, okay, so do I need a CRM? What CRM should I get? And then once you start going down that rabbit hole, you find out that there are all these other sales enablement tools for prospecting and, you know, ways to use AI for LinkedIn engagement or crafting emails or, you know, queuing up or reminding you about certain follow ups. Do you get asked to kind of advice in terms of what tools they should be looking at or investing in?

Nick Loise [47:29]

Usually, yes, right? And usually so, because a lot of the you know, usually they have what I call marketing automation system, so they'll have an active campaign, right? Or they'll have MailChimp or something, right, that they're sending email marketing out, right? And those historically, are not great on the sales side, right? So, we have to then put something in place, whether it's pipe drive, if it's simple, right? So just like I'll look at the economics, right? Because you don't want to build a tech stack that's now $1,000 a month per seat, right to a startup, because now you're going to start draining your cash. And so, the first thing we need to do is, is, one is, how are they conducting their sales calls? Whether it's on Zoom, okay, great. There's some great software on there. Now, where you could, you know, you could do the notes from a zoom, meeting the notes, then do really good post event summary so you could send your email. Here's exactly what we talked about. Here's what I heard. That type of thing. Olive is a really good one, but there's a lot of other ones out there now, right, that we really like. So how are they doing their calls? How is that, most importantly, that call, that information getting captured because the salesperson is never going to write the notes properly, then how is that getting into the CRM? Or how's that going into a Slack channel? Whatever it wants to go. Are they making calls? I don't want them making calls on their personal cell phones, right? So, we probably have to get them on a Ring Central or something like that. Or if they're on Zoom, we would need to get zoom for phones, right? Then they have zoom. If they're doing zoom meetings, we want to then get them into if they're using Sales Navigator. If not, they need to get Sales Navigator, then we put them on an automation system for Sales Navigator, right? We tried to do some education on LinkedIn, navigator too, for them, right? Because nobody really uses, and I'm still, you know, I still, I'm spent a lot of time learning these things for them, the automation tools, meet Alfred. There's a lot of other ones out there, right? So, but we just get a couple that we that we've learned don't break the bank and are great for startups.

Mark Shriner [49:39]

Awesome.

Nick Loise [49:43]

It all starts with the right list, right? And you're going to go to questions. I'll let you go to the question. But, you know, listen, I could I jump out of this business in a million years, if I could, if I could help people formulate the right lists, right? And I get to charge a heck of a lot more, right? So, zoom in for. Was very expensive for a lot of startups, right? So, you know, we try seamless AI, we try to, you know, there's a lot of different sources for list building, and that's the most important thing, too. And we, you know, sometimes you have to do homegrown or scrape, you know. So, we have people in the Philippines or in Pakistan or Indonesia that do a lot of our work for us and creating, right? The highly targeted list goes back to how we started. Right? It's really all about the market. Then you can worry about the messaging. Then you can worry about the tactics.

Mark Shriner [50:29]

Yeah, no, I mean getting that target right in terms of, you know, what is your ideal customer profile, and you know which organization and who in the organization, and then the message right? And that's, huge. Let me change it up a bit. If, when it comes to marketing automation, or anybody in that space, marketing automation, or, I would say sales enablement, if you wanted to put your investor hat on, and you said, this is a company that is going to go places. Do you have any top of mind?  

Nick Loise [50:59]

Yeah, I got a couple. One I use, so I'm not going to give their name, but I because they're brand new, but they are doing some really great if you want the name, I'll give it. They are just joking, K.U.L.A and they are doing some really good stuff with AI and cold email outreach. I love them. I love what they're doing, and I see the results because I use them for myself, right? And I put them once, I bet them on my own, then I put them for the for the clients. Love that I love Olive that I talked about, right? That is taking the notes, but is, it's a sales driven, right? So, it's not like fathom. Nothing wrong with fathom, right? Or, or the other ones that are just taking notes. This is really, really driven for sales, and so learns, I have three or four different ones, and I haven't fully vetted them, but one of the things that we do is a lot of talk tracks, right? So, we are looking at different AI solutions that could take calls, strip the call down, and look for commonalities of a questions and B answers, and then, therefore, we could create the best practice of talk tracks for clients. Gong does this, right? But that's for enterprise. And you know, a lot of the they don't sell to the SMBs. And I'm in the SMB market, so we have a couple different solutions that we're testing. I'm part of a group of 90 plus fractional Chief Sales officers. And so we, we try to find solutions that we could bring to our Pro to our customers, and all of our customers are in the SMB market. So that's, I think, the most important thing out there somebody that could do a great job of your LinkedIn automation that doesn't get you in trouble, right? I want people's LinkedIn to get shut down. The scraping of information and data, especially the scraping of LinkedIn, as well as just information out there. So, find a good list. Email automation, cool, as does a great job. I'm using them. I highly recommend them have the conversations, right? Have good conversations. Teach you, teach them. So now I create an LMM right, LMS system where you've got the best practices in there. You allow the team to kind of do some self pacing. Those that want to will, if not, you're gonna have to do that your one on ones, right? And now get the talk tracks. And then, you know, now you're off to the races as an organization.

Mark Shriner [53:22]

Awesome. Well, hey, Nick, I mean, you've just packed a tremendous amount of information into I think we're coming up close to an hour here, but I filled up a whole page of notes here, and I'll have my morning ritual on Saturday mornings is to get up and reread everything that I, you know, written down had that I had written down during the week or so that somebody had mentioned so I've got my work cut out to me, for me tomorrow morning. Let me ask you, do you have any do you have any closing thoughts and or, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way?  

Nick Loise [53:53]

Yeah, so, you know closing thoughts is one. Thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for having me on. Most importantly, I like the intellectual stimulation that these things provide, right? I got notes to your saw me writing notes. I like to learn. I also like to educate and teach. I used to do some teaching on the college and the graduate level, don't, you know? I don't think I could do that. Today's marketplace and today's education level, right? That's a different story or different conversation. Don't want to this allows me to do that. Plus, when I was at GKC and magnetic marketing we did, I did a lot of teaching, and it's fun, so I enjoy that. So, thank you for this second off is thank you for serving the small market, small, mid-sized marketplace, right? And large and salespeople make, giving them tools, giving them podcasts like this, you know? And really, I think there has to be good conversations about, how do we have good processes and systems around sales and marketing, and how do we become better, right? And if I think about it, I broke my teeth as a VP of marketing in healthcare, right? Well, physicians did Grand Rounds, so they presented a case, and they went deep on the case, and everybody learned from. That. And I don't think we do enough of that as sales teams. I don't think we present a case, right, and go and learn from it deep enough. And so, I love conversations like these, and I love podcasts like what you're doing here. If people want to get a hold of me, they get, you know, LinkedIn is a great way. It's Nick Loise, they could go to our website. We actually have, you know, a bonuses. We have content, right? It came from Dan. So, they could go to Sales pack, P.A.C.K, salespack.salesperformanceteam.com, I've got a book there. I've got a checklist that they could use to audit their sales calls or their team sales calls. I got a checklist of this is what we look for, right? So, they could take a look at what we do and apply it to their business. If they want to have a conversation with me or they just have a problem. Just reach out to me at nick@salesperformanceteam.com or IM me on LinkedIn. I live on LinkedIn, right? So, it's kind of the space that I'm at. I know sometimes people try to reach out to me on Facebook. I don't do good enough job of being in my Facebook, thinking that's more for family.  

Mark Shriner [55:58]

So yeah, I kind of try to keep those separate, but, but thank you for that. And again, thank you for being on the show. I will put links to your company in the show notes here. And hey, I'd like to wish you an amazing summer of 2024, that we're almost stepping into here, right?

Nick Loise [56:14]

We got Memorial Day. We got to get the boat into the water in two weeks. So that should be a lot of fun. We got a place up in Michigan. I'm in Chicago, as we started talking about so, you know, I can't wait. And you know, I wish you the best. I hope you have a good bike ride, and after you do your rereading of all your notes from the week, I like that ritual I'm starting that I am the worst about that. That is a great that was worth it for me. I learned a lot, but I learned a lot with that. So, thank you for that. Cheers.  

Mark Shriner [56:40]

Awesome.

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