Creating Authentic Customer Connections with Nick Loise from the Sales Performance Team

Episode Transcript
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Linda Fanaras (00:00):
Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 podcast where
we'll discuss branding andmarketing tools for business.
My goal today is to provide youwith transformative and
innovative approaches that canhelp you make 180 degree shift
in your marketing efforts orcomplete reversals in brand
strategies.
Hi, I'm Linda Fanaras.
The owner of Millennium Agency,a branding and growth strategy

(00:22):
firm, and the host of the B2BBrand 180 podcast.
Today I'm excited to bring inNick Louise from the Sales
Performance Team.
Nick is a seasoned sales andmarketing expert with a rich
background as a salesperson,entrepreneur, executive, and
educator.
He has a passion for and alwayshas been enjoying helping

(00:43):
entrepreneurs, businesses, andprofessionals.
market and sell products better,faster, and more efficiently.
He has revamped the salesprocess and marketing processes,
created playbooks, andintroduced new business
development plans focused onputting the right strategies and
people in place to driverevenue.
So welcome, Nick.

(01:03):
It's great to have you heretoday.
I'd love for you to take acouple minutes and introduce
yourself, and I'll tell theaudience what we'll cover today.

Nick Loise (01:10):
Yeah, Linda, first off, thank you so much for doing
this.
I don't think in today's day andage we talk about branding
enough and creating a brand anda brand promise and how
important it is, especially onmy aspect where I'm on the sales
side, right?
Kind of the top, the bottom ofthe funnel, if you will.
Or the deal side, the strongerthe brand, the higher the trust.

(01:30):
And I do think right now we'rein a vacuum of trust.
So I always appreciate marketerswhen they talk about brand, and
I know the.
Pressure, create leads, createdeal flow, all that MQLs,
Marketing Qualified Leads andall that.
The pressure is great, butreally it starts with great
brand positioning, great brandpromising, positioning and
differentiation in themarketplace and what you do and

(01:51):
what you teach for your clients.
Is so critical.
So thank you for that.
As a salesperson, the strongerthe brand, the easier it is to
sell.
That's true.
And therefore, the easier my jobis.
And thank you for that.
As you said, you were graciousin my introduction.
I've been on the marketing side.
I had a marketing firm for anumber of years.
I was a VP of Marketing forlarge healthcare organization.

(02:12):
Branched off on my own.
Then went into a marketing andsales education company, and
then we were doing a lot of workon the sales side.
But really my passion is, themarriage of sales and marketing.
The marriage of branding anddifferentiation.
Yes.
And then closing the dealbecause of that.
And, I talked to a lot ofmarketers all day long and it

(02:32):
sometimes on certain generationspositioning is lost and branding
is lost.
So everything you're doing isgreat.

Great.
That's awesome.
So I just want the audience tomake sure they stay to listen
in, because we will hear fromNick and you will learn how to
map your ideal customer day soprecisely that the message feels
very personal.
I've written to your prospect,you'll learn how to craft
messaging that actually mirrorsthe buyer's internal dialogue

(03:01):
and that can help.
Drive immediate action.
You'll also learn why most leadgen fails and how to rebuild it
around prevalence, not reach,and you'll learn practical
strategies to show up where yourbuyers are actually paying
attention and convert.
So now for our discussion withNick.
So Nick, let's get started.
What do you think the biggestmistakes companies are making

(03:23):
when defining their ICP?
And maybe just explain what anICP is first, and then tell us
how you think you could fix it.

Nick Loise (03:30):
Yeah.
great question.
So I think, ICP in the shortform is ideal customer profile,
right?
Sometimes we call it an avatarid, it's all the same.
Who are we selling to?
What's the buyer persona thatwe're selling to?
Who are they, what keeps them upat night.
And your question is very good,because I think we don't go deep
enough, right?
So whenever I do any work withcompanies, and we are creating

(03:52):
sales playbooks, we're taking alot of the work that the
marketing team is doing, or ifthey have a marketing team, and
really focusing on the idealcustomer, right?
And what is their buyer journeylook like?
What are all the differentthings that they go through if
you're selling on the B2B side,deals are taking longer.
There's more people around thetable on buyer decisions.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
And

Nick Loise (04:14):
so what I think many companies don't do is that they
maybe have their primary ICP,but they don't map out their
secondary, tertiary decisionmaker ICPs.
So you have to have, thefinancial buyer, ICP, you have
to have the internal rabbi, ifyou will, or Sherpa ICP.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
You need

Nick Loise (04:33):
all these different buyer personas because more and
more people are around the tableand deals are taking longer.
And we talked a little bit aboutin the intro, we do have a lack
of trust in today's marketplace.
People are scared, right?
They're scared of making thewrong decisions.
And so really having goodconversations about the ICP who

(04:54):
they are.
What their motivations are.
What's their big motivation?
What's their minor motivation?
What are their fears?
What are the talking points thatresonate with them?
What's the communication styleand language that they like?
And you really have to go deepon that.
And I think that it helps breakthrough the clutter.
Yeah.
If you will.
And helps get your messaging in.

Yeah.
And I think if you look at, ifyou are looking at individuals
around the table, you might havea CEO.
And you might have a VP ofMarketing and you may even have
a COO, and they're all lookingat it from their perspective.
So to your point, making surethat you're able to position.
Whatever that messaging is, oryour ICP or whatever the case
may be, when you know the idealcustomer profile that you're

(05:36):
talking to, you can actuallybuild out that messaging.
So that's a great point.
And I know a lot of timesdemographics, I think marketers
will look at generaldemographics, but how do you go
beyond demographics and get intothe daily pressures of your
buyers' actual faces and reallywhat their needs and wants are?

Nick Loise (05:54):
I think that isn't done enough for a couple
different reasons.
One is we don't have time,right?
And so we want to go fast andfurious, and I'm gonna use this
story.
I was at a dinner of allbusiness owners, talking about
marketing and sales, right?
You know, wasn't anything funabout what's the latest Netflix
show that we're watching, orwhat are we streaming?
It was all about marketing.

(06:14):
And one gentleman owned a largeagency and was in the consumer
packaged goods, and he wassaying, he was brought in by the
Director of Marketing and butaround the table was the CEO was
the COO was the VP of Marketing,the VP of Sales.
There was all these peoplearound the table, and so you

(06:35):
really have to kind of go deepon the language that they speak.
Think about what KPIs, KeyPerformance Indicators they're
responsible for.
And he said something reallypivotal that I believe, right?
So he said the director ofmarketing, her number one
concern is that she doesn'twanna get fired.
She doesn't wanna hire the wrongmarketing firm, the wrong
marketing agency.

(06:56):
And use 12 months, six months,anything like that.
If you think about maybe BudLight is a story that comes to
mind, right?
I don't wanna go into that, butthat was just the wrong strategy
and probably look good on paper,probably look good when they're
ideating it, but just in theexecution of it.
And what And the ramifications.
It was the wrong strategy.
So think about what thatperson's number one driver is.

(07:20):
Think about the CEO he owns,right?
The entire P and L, but thenthere's probably a product line
manager that you're dealing withthat owns the minutia of that.
Then there's a VP of sales,probably a VP of marketing.
They all own different KPIs.
They all own different things,and they're all thinking of it
from their own sphere.
exactly.
Everybody thinks about, andespecially if you're dealing

(07:41):
with corporate America, they'redealing with it from their
corporate sphere.
So you gotta talk strategically,you gotta talk tactically, you
gotta talk messaging and there'sso many vehicles for messaging
in this day and age that my hatgoes off to, marketers because
how do you just evaluate all thedifferent channels just on
social alone, right?
You know, from TikTok toFacebook to all these different

(08:03):
things.
So you really need to befocused.
And when he distilled it, onehis, the number one, the
director of marketing fear was,I'm gonna get fired, right?
I don't wanna hire the wrongagency.
'Cause she had stumbled on thefirst agency'cause she had hired
a much larger agency and theywere too slow.
So now you have tactical, howfast can you get things done for

(08:25):
me?
How fast do you get thingsturned around for me?
And it's not just how do I gainmarket share?
How do I increase sales?
How do I increase awareness, buthow do you help me do my job
better?
How do you take pain away fromme?
Yeah.
How do you accelerate the waywe're gonna get things done

(08:45):
internally?
So you gotta think about it in a360 of the person.
And far too often we're justthinking in tactics, right?
Or end results.
We're gonna increase marketshare.
Oh, it's like motherhood andapple pie.
Everybody wants to increasemother share, but you gotta
really think about the person intheir seat and what they're
dealing with, along with the50,000 other things that they're

(09:07):
dealing with.
A full inbox, family pressures,all that good stuff.
So that's how you have to do it.
I know I laid a lot on thetable.
We can unpack a lot of that, butthat's really what you need to
think about from a holisticstandpoint of how do you really
deal with ICPs and differentlevels of ICPs.

So what do you recommend for the audience when
they're looking at differentICPs, like the CEO versus A CMO
versus a C?
How should they determine whattheir biggest pain points are?

Nick Loise (09:37):
one is ask, right?

Ask.
Ask.

Nick Loise (09:40):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, walk me through, right?
Yeah, you could.
Yeah.

I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
I

Nick Loise (09:44):
realize that you probably have a strategic plan
as an organization, right?
You're probably have quarterlyresults that either you have to
bring to investors or the board.
So what does that look like?
What are the pain points?
Where have you stumbled in thepast?
You don't wanna be as trite aswhat's keeping you up at night,
because that, yeah.
but you just, I think asking,but just.

(10:06):
Understand the language ofbusiness, right?
Yeah.
And marketers sometimes don'tunderstand the language of
business.
And what I mean simply by thatis the language of business
historically sits on theaccounting side, on the CFO
side, right?
So what is EBITDA, right?
Earnings Before Interest Taxesand amortization.
What is net profit, right?
What's your goals?
Usually the goals are sitting ona dashboard, sitting on the P

(10:29):
and L and sitting on the balancesheet, right?
So how do we talk through thosein different languages?
Because everybody owns differentKPIs, right?
Everybody owns different P andLs.

Yep.
So what process do you use forcrafting messaging that actually
cuts through and gets to thatideal customer in a way that
converts.
So we talked about pain points,but when once you figure out,
okay, this is the CMO, theydon't wanna get fired, they're
looking for lead generation,they're trying to prove
themselves.

(11:01):
How do you come up with thatmessaging that cuts through and
actually converts to leads?

Nick Loise (11:04):
Great question.
If we have the benefit of data.
We're gonna pour through thedata, And AI makes it faster,
right?
You could just ream through alot of different, you know, data
sets right now to look for keymessaging.
Key scripting.
Micro scripts, if they havephone calls, if they have maybe

(11:25):
inbound customer service callsor different types of calls,
we're gonna listen to those orwe're gonna comb through the
transcripts of those to see whatare people saying along the way.
We're gonna spend time on thesocials, So if you're a consumer
facing brand.
There's a lot of chatter, right?
Some of this, But there's a lotof chatter that's happening in

(11:45):
the comment section.
So we're gonna go through all ofthat as much as we possibly can.
We're gonna do competitiveanalysis, right?
What are your competitionssaying?
What are their messaging?
Where's their gap in themarketplace?
And then we just kind, you know,ideate, right?
And just saying, okay, here'swhat it is.
There's six human desires orbehaviors.

(12:06):
We have fear, right?
We wanna gain, we want differentthings in life.
So you have to make sure yourmessaging hits on all of those
six different human behaviors.

Right.
Can you kind of walk us throughmaybe a campaign that just just
nailed it, drove results, whyyou think it worked, how you
went about it.
Maybe a little bit more insighton that.

Nick Loise (12:27):
Yeah, so there's a couple different campaigns and I
think right now I'm gonna talkabout one that we launched at
our agency for a new productline that we were part taking to
the marketplace, and we dealtwith a lot of the home
improvement, home services.
So this is geared towards thehome improvement, home services.
And if you look at that in atotal aggregate, that's a very

(12:51):
aggressive demographic.
They know they need a lot oflead generation.
They know they're fighting,they're tired of paying for
leads, the same leads thateverybody else gets, or you know
that they've been called 52,000times, but they know that they
need to spend so they know whathas to happen.
And so we really focused on avery distinct demographic.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
That

Nick Loise (13:12):
demographic was new home movers.
Okay.
They all knew that they neededto get to new home movers.
So this is a B2B sale going toB2C, business to consumer.
Consumer being the newhomeowner.
And so we launched a coupledifferent products that got them
in front of the new movers, asfast and furious as possible.

(13:33):
'cause they knew that theaverage new home buyer usually
spent everything that they weregonna spend and invest in the
house within the first sevenmonths.
So you need to be there on earlystages.
But you also needed to be therebefore.
So we had to kind of get topre-move And get their messaging
in front of that.
And then when they moved in, weneeded to get in front of that.

(13:53):
So we launched a coupledifferent products.
Digital as well as in-homeadvertising to get people to
that, very successful in themarketplace because one is it
spoke to a need right.
Desirable demographic, how toget to a desirable demographic.
Key messaging.
I'm gonna get your message infront of them before everybody
else.
Yeah.
Gain market share.

(14:14):
Gain jobs, gain sales, and yeah.
You know, marketing really, Ihad a mentor tell me this.
It's really nothing more thanhuman behavior and math.
So we gotta get you in front ofenough people at the right time
that they're ready to makeforward with the right
messaging.
So they say yes.
And so that was one that wasreally successful for us.
So we really, that's great.
You know, kind of always holdthat up.

(14:35):
Now listen for your audience.
I've got five others that didn'twork right.
And I keep memories of those, soI don't make those same
mistakes.
I still have some phone numbersthat we're waiting for at least
that first phone call for thatcampaign to happen.
I always hate when people tellyou, here's all my wins in life
and never have any losers.
And I've had my fair share ofmarketing spends that didn't get

(14:56):
a good return on investment, andmany times it was outta my own
pocket.
So that's always as painful asyour consumer pockets.

Yep.
Even more painful.
Yeah.
But as a marketer, frankly,that's what we do.
We are constantly testing.
We're constantly pilotingstrategies, finding out what
works, tweaking, what's working,making it better, optimizing it.
So it's just part of.
What we do as marketers.
So I would are there anychannels that you feel are
working great right now?

(15:24):
Now let's see.
If we could just stay on infront of the B2B audience.
We're talking businesses whowould sell to other businesses.

Nick Loise (15:31):
Yeah.
it's messy.
It's messy in that space.
So I'm gonna say something thateverybody's gonna moan and cry
and roll their eyes.
The phone is working the best,right?
So the phone is workingsubstantially better than other
vehicles right now.
Correctly done.
LinkedIn messaging isoutperforming.

(15:53):
Cold email.
Cold email is messy, right?
It is just a battlefield rightthere.
And they're getting strongerabout filtering through old
school, but you're gonna, you'rea marketer, so you're gonna
appreciate that direct mail.
Now, direct mail is difficultbecause of the fact that where
are people sitting nowadays?
The only thing that are easy toget to them now are they may sit

(16:14):
from home.
Are they sitting in satelliteoffices?
Where are they at?
But direct mail, if you couldget to that, works very well in
conjunction with the phone.
Now, here's the deal.
Everybody wants the one channel.
There isn't one channel, right?
So I like a, like We call itBillet Crick, right?
So how many different channelscan I possibly use so that I am

(16:34):
breaking through all thedifferent clutter, right?
Events are working really well,Really, well in the B2B space.
I so if I'm doubling down, ifI'm a CMO right?
Or if I'm a VP of Sales, whichwe consult with all the time,
here's what I'm trying tellingthem to take a look at.
You know, everybody wants theeasy button.
Everybody wants the magicbullet.
There isn't one.
Sorry guys.

(16:55):
I'm, you know, just giving youthe truth.
Focus on the phone.
Focus on where are your events?
How can you get to those events?
Either you're at them or you'resuit casing them.
Talking to people and looking atdirect mail in conjunction with
direct mail, phone, email.
But, not really junky directmail.

(17:16):
Do it Yeah.
Impactful direct mail, figureout what you're gonna be able to
spend for a lead for a meetingand spend that in there.
So in hierarchy, the ones that Iwould go to right now.

I'm gonna ask you two rapid fire questions if you
can answer those and one or two.
That would be great.
And then we'll bring it to aclose.
So how do you test and refinemessaging to stay relevant as
buyers' behaviors continuallyshift?

Nick Loise (17:44):
You test fast and furious, right?
So you gotta go through all thedifferent channels.
Social makes it easier.
You could also test, it used tobe test really an expensive on
bing, right?
So you can see kind of whatmessaging is going through.
But socials is the easiest wayto test messaging.

And then what advice would you give to CEOs
who wanna scale lead gen withoutscaling noise?

Nick Loise (18:03):
Ah, good luck.
yeah, there is noise.
sorry.
You said that I think what yousaid was very critical.
A lot of people move past thatreally fast.
You gotta really think ofyourself as a venture capitalist
in the marketing department.
And so you're gonna have somedogs, you're gonna have some
superstars, you're gonna havesome win, and you're gonna have
some, kind of people that arejust, workhorses that are
producing.

(18:23):
And so you gotta spend, but youalso gotta be able to pull the
plug fast.
So think of yourself as aventure capitalist.
You're gonna have some channelsand some campaigns that fall, or
just like you talked about, yougotta test, you gotta modify,
but don't get married to them.
Pull the plug as fast as youcan.

Perfect.
All right, so Nick, you have abook called The Ultimate Guide
to Managing Your Sales Team, andyou have two companies, Sales
Performance Team, andYourSalesRecruiter.com.
I'd love for you to just speakquickly about your book.

Nick Loise (18:54):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's a quick book, right?
So you could read it on theairplane is what I like to say,
right?
Okay.
So it's been enough to put inyour briefcase and it's a book
that you could read on theairplane, when you're flying.
I gotta fly to Dallas today, soI would be able to finish it on
the flight, and it's really howto manage your sales department,
how to create a process and asystem, but also a platform to

(19:14):
manage people.
Because I think one of the hard,you know, everybody's gonna say
they have the hardest job inbaseball, right?
But the hardest job in businessreally is that sales leader
'cause of the fact that he's gotpressure.
He's gotta manage a reallydiverse demographic of
salespeople.
We're all a little twisted inour own way.
And I say that with love andadmiration.
So really thinking aboutleadership, thinking about
motivation, thinking aboutcreating the right playbook and

(19:37):
the right environment to have asales team that moves through
sometimes.
And we deal with small tomidsize businesses.
They can't really afford the Aplayer.
So you gotta create anenvironment that the B player
can move to an A environment andperformance, or that C player.
Which maybe all you could affordcan perform as a B player.
Yeah.
And so it's really kind ofsetting that up and really

(19:59):
hiring the right people andputting them on the right bus
and moving that bus as fast andfurious as possible.

That's great.
Alright.
Awesome.
Thanks Nick.
Thanks for sharing all thevaluable sales information and
how it ties into marketing withour audience today.
I'd love for you to telleveryone how they can get in
touch with you.

Nick Loise (20:13):
I'm on the socials, right?
So hit me up in LinkedIn, andNicholas Loise, I think is the
way it is.
L-O-I-S-E.
You could go toSalesPerformanceTeam.com, go to
Sales Pack, S-A-L-E-S Pack,P-A-C-K,.SalesPerformanceTeam.
And then we've got a bunch ofgoodies that we'll give to all
your listeners.
We're available.
You could find us.

(20:34):
And we love talking business andwe totally love talking sales.

All right, thanks Nick.
I appreciate you coming inagain.
And I just wanna take a momentand thank our audience for
listening in today.
And if you like what you heard,hit share or subscribe.
Feel free to connect with me onMill.Agency or LindaFanaras.com
or just reach out via LinkedIn.
Thank you.

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