In this episode, I interview Joe Pici of Pici & Pici, Inc., an award-winning sales trainer, business coach, keynote speaker, and co-author of the book, "Sell Naked on the Phone," on how businesses can "Recapture Lost Revenue in Difficult Times."
Lots of great advice shared from this year's recipient of the covenant "#1 Sales Trainer" and "Sales Training Program" ranking by Global Gurus Internationally. In our interview, we cover topics such as:
Joe's Podcast: "The SalesEdge" is available on all Podcast platforms
Joe's Golden Nuggets: Text SalesEdge to 55678
Have A Complimentary Cup of Joe: (407) 947-2590
Website: www.piciandpici.com
In this episode, I interview Joe Pici of Pici & Pici, Inc., an award-winning sales trainer, business coach, keynote speaker, and co-author of the book, "Sell Naked on the Phone," on how businesses can "Recapture Lost Revenue in Difficult Times."
Lots of great advice shared from this year's recipient of the covenant "#1 Sales Trainer" and "Sales Training Program" ranking by Global Gurus Internationally. In our interview, we cover topics such as:
Joe's Podcast: "The SalesEdge" is available on all Podcast platforms
Joe's Golden Nuggets: Text SalesEdge to 55678
Have A Complimentary Cup of Joe: (407) 947-2590
Website: www.piciandpici.com
Roy Richardson (Host) (00:00):
Good day, everyone. It's Roy Richardson here at Aurora InfoTech. I want to welcome you to another edition of the Dynamic Business Leaders Podcast. You know, this podcast is really about you and bringing, you know, business leaders of central Florida and other areas together to tell their story, we want to hear about your journey. We want to hear about the struggles you went through. We want to hear about the, you know, the things that worked well for you. And it's really about sharing knowledge, with other business leaders and business owners that are out there. And today I'm extremely excited because I have someone here who I've met over the last year or so, and have come to admire. And, you know, he is a keynote speaker sales trainer, a business coach, and an author. He happens to be this year's recipient of the covenant number one sales trainer ranking by global gurus internationally. And his sales development program has voted the best in the world. He's the host of the popular sales edge podcast. He's also a co-author and intellectual resource behind the book sell naked on the phone. And he happens to be the CEO and co-founder of PICI & PICI together with his wife, Dawn. They didn't gentlemen, welcome Joe Pici, Joe.
Joe Pici (Guest) (01:10):
Right. It's so good to see you, man. It's been too long.
Roy Richardson (Host) (01:13):
It's been too long. It's been too long. And you know, the problem is with everything that we got going on now, it's, it's hard to get out there and see people, right? And, and so in your line of work where you're actually, you know, bringing people together and teaching them how to not, you know, how it's, how to interact without being face to face. I think a lot of people are going to take away a lot of value from today's session based on, on, on some of the things that you're going to, you're going to share with us.
Joe Pici (Guest) (01:41):
Yeah. You know, it, it, we have been doing business for 30 years and I've been selling virtually for 30 years, probably 80% of my client base don't live here in central Florida. So from a selling standpoint, from a business acquisition standpoint, our business was built for this. Not that we like it, but we've been able to continue to grow during this time.
Roy Richardson (Host) (02:05):
That's amazing. And so let me ask you, you know, w what, what, tell us a little more about your business. What does PICI & PICI do and who is your target market? Please share with us.
Joe Pici (Guest) (02:15):
All right. Well, number one is our real focus because just like any business over the course of time, you develop other silos and other areas. But, but what we're known for globally is we do consultated tactical sales, coaching, and training. And what I mean by that is we're not transactional. We're very, cause you know, most sales happen between the sixth and the 13th contact. And so we were more consultative in our approach. However, 80% of our training skills. One of the uniquenesses that we do is in our training, we do live outbound telephone call training, booking appointments. And so we don't believe in role-playing because I think that's the part of the business is being able to get face-to-face with your target market. And so we've built the whole business around that. So when you say target market, because our niche is application-based training, then we worked in various areas, for example, insurance, cybersecurity, real estate franchising, any business that wants to increase their client base.
Joe Pici (Guest) (03:28):
We work with because our approach is mastering processes and skills. We even have another vertical where we work with speakers, coaches, trainers, and consultants, not on how to speak, but how to build a profitable business, how to generate a six-figure income, because most speakers are great on stage. They may not be great on the business activity. So in our verticals, our whole approaches, how can right now what we're doing with our clients and future clients, we're helping them recapture, lost revenue. How do you go back out and make your money back? So did I, did I answer that for you?
Roy Richardson (Host) (04:07):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. And, and so, and that's, that's, that's amazing. So, you know, just from the standpoint of teaching people, how to do cold calls and how to make those sales calls over the phone, I can tell you from, from back in my early days in training, I mean, that's the barrier that wall that we, we automatically put up, right? It's, it's almost like it's on a, on a switch and the minute we need to go to do that, that wall comes up and we kind of forget all, everything that we've, we've been taught. So how, how are you getting past? And, you know, getting people past that wall that they sort of put their way. Right.
Joe Pici (Guest) (04:43):
And that's a great question because they do put walls up, but they put walls up because their whole life in sales, they were taught what in Y motivation, all goal setting, but very few sales trainers sell themselves. Not that they're not good people. They're great people. And they're great at what they do, but they may not be the ones that are out there getting their, their own clients. I don't believe you can teach what you don't do. Okay. And so I make 150 outbound calls every week. Now that doesn't count follow-up calls that don't, that's two new clients. Well, because I do that, I can train it. So we have a process that we take people through. I don't sell scripts, I train and help people develop them. And so one of the ways that fear dissipates is understanding, what am I saying? Who am I saying it to, why am I saying it?
Joe Pici (Guest) (05:43):
Okay. And so I think companies tend not to equip their people with the real skills. I mean, a week from today, and this will air later. So we will have already been there. I got a three-day Sales Bootcamp. I only allow 20 people. There'll be 18 different industries on day three, they're all going to make outbound calls. We usually do 70 to 75% conversion to an appointment. We usually get through 92% of the gatekeepers. And then the afternoon of that call session, we'll get 60 or 70 returned phone calls. Now people say, how can you do that? Well, it's one of our focus areas. I know, for example, you are an expert in the security world, in cybersecurity. I mean, that's what you do. And because you do it and do it and do it, you've become an expert. So one of our expertise areas is we know how to get people to their target market for the right reason at the right time. That's
Roy Richardson (Host) (06:43):
Is that, that is, like I said before, that that Walnut comes up is really what stops and blocks a lot of people and catches them up. And then you mentioned the other thing where a lot of people follow a lot of scripts and sometimes even, you know, and I got a lot of calls here. And, and to be honest with you, when I'm calling, I, you know, try to be as natural as possible, but you do, you can tell when people call you and you're, you're, you know, they're following along a script and all of a sudden you ask a question that's not in the script and, and you've sort of derail their whole process.
Joe Pici (Guest) (07:13):
Well, let me, let me say this about scripts, there are good scripts and there are bad scripts. And I was sitting with a CEO two weeks ago and this, he said, he said, Joe, my salespeople hate scripts. And I went, Hey, the best actors in the world are Italian. You got Brando, you got Pachino. And I went down the list. I said, they all read the script, but they know it's so well. And they know how to make adjustments to ad-lib because they know it so well, that's when the script becomes powerful. If you have to make it up a new thing every time you talk to somebody, good luck with that. Yeah. There's no process there, right? There's no, and I don't believe in selling from charisma or talent because these are two things that were not given to me. So I had to build out processes. We rely on three things, processes, communications, and skills. And so once you have that in your toolbox, then it's just a matter of how hard do I want to work?
Roy Richardson (Host) (08:09):
So Joe, tell me a little bit, let's, let's go back a little bit in time here. How, how did you, how did PICI & PICI come about and, and
Joe Pici (Guest) (08:18):
An accident? I mean, I was the football coach. My wife was a voice teacher. I got fired from a college job. During that time, Dawn was ill. We showed up in Florida, you know, 350, $380,000 in medical debt. I was raised by an old Italian guy that said, you pay your debts. Didn't know anything about business in 1992, not knowing anything about anything. I signed up for the direct sales business. They didn't teach us to sell. They didn't teach. All they taught us to do was sneak up on people, which was not my behavior style, but I knew I needed to learn some skills. I knew I knew had, I had to learn how to generate quality leads. I had to master the skill of booking appointments and I had to have a good sales consultated meeting. That's what I focused on. And in five years we paid everything off.
Joe Pici (Guest) (09:10):
Wow. Because of that, they were throwing us on stage all around the world. And we were doing these big keynotes, you know? And, and then we'd be training about 2004 we're in, we're in count. Now, so we're in Canada, we're speaking at a convention. We go up to our room and I said, we're done with this. I don't want to do direct sales anymore. We have built skills that not only can we speak from the big state, but we've become elite trainers and coaches. So tomorrow we're going to go full-time in PG and PG and make it a speaking coaching training consulting firm. Okay. And we knew the people were in direct marketing. We're not going to come with us as clients because the fees were going to change. Right. And so in 2004, we kicked off PG and PG as a trainee speaking coaching business.
Joe Pici (Guest) (09:58):
But we don't speak on all things, right. I mean, I don't do leadership training. I don't do motivational things. I'm not a life. I am not a life coach. Okay. He wouldn't come to me for life coaching. I don't have that gene. So we got very vertical. Dawn is ranked in the top 10 women on LinkedIn to follow. She's not a social media expert. She is an expert on how to mind leaves in your target market. On LinkedIn, 35% of our business is coming from that. So now we have 22 ways of generating Lisa. So how this whole thing has happened is the only thing we will train and speaking coach on is what we do to grow our own business. Now we've backed it up with content materials, PowerPoints, the whole nine yards, but we're teaching from what we do. So now we've been doing this since 2004 full time and, and we stay vertical.
Roy Richardson (Host) (10:49):
Cool. That's an impressive story. Thanks for sharing it. So in other words, what I got, or is someone coming to you are going to learn the processes, the skill sets, et cetera, to be able to make the cold calls and to be able to improve their skill, their sales skills. But on top of that, I gather that there is a part of that. That's also maybe some training and lead generation and generating leads via LinkedIn, et cetera. Is that what I,
Joe Pici (Guest) (11:16):
Well, here's the thing. Number one, I want you to, without correcting you, I want us to get out of the mindset of warm, cold, and hot calls. They're all the same. The only difference is you might have an introduction, but at the end of the day, even a warm call has, is not any better closing ratio than a cold call. Believe it or not. In fact, my lowest closing ratios when somebody calls me, cause they're usually wanting to pick my brain. Okay? So our sales process covers everything from communication skills, which involve a lot of listening to how do you sell each behavior style to 20 ways of leads, LinkedIn being one of them to how you build out your entire messaging, whether you're using it on your website, your LinkedIn, whether using it verbally over the phone, what comes out of your mouth? Okay. To making the calls, to doing presentations one-on-one group, or now we're into this virtual selling thing. So we have a whole training on how do you sell virtually and not let your closing ratios go down. And then we wrap the whole thing up with priority and time management. So the biggest thing about our world is when somebody wants me to work with them, they want X results, but they want to tell me how long it's going to take. I won't take that contract because I don't tell a doctor how to fix my
Roy Richardson (Host) (12:39):
Leg. So
Joe Pici (Guest) (12:42):
It's it, it's amazing because most companies spend so much money on marketing and on websites and on this. And they leave very little for sales. And yet it's the only thing in business that makes you any money at all.
Roy Richardson (Host) (12:56):
That's true. I mean, the rest of it is the fluff and puff that builds a bit of brand awareness, et cetera. But it's the, it's that personal interaction. That's really that rapport and relationship building. This is what guarantees that opportunity. Sure.
Joe Pici (Guest) (13:12):
Yeah. Yeah. People buy from people they trust that's the bottom line.
Roy Richardson (Host) (13:15):
Yeah. So you, you, let me ask you one, cause I do want to, I don't want to ask you one on the, on the virtual you know, the transition here, but before we get to that, you mentioned before something interesting. So next week, and like you said, this will probably air later, you're hosting a Bootcamp. Tell us a little bit about that. And, and, and is this something you do
Joe Pici (Guest) (13:34):
Or, or we actually do it twice a year. We actually, you know, it was funny because we actually did it in June. We were the first live event in Florida. Now we got 2000 square feet. We only allow 20 people. So everybody had a hundred square feet to themselves. We were safer than Publix. Okay. And they all had their own table, but twice a year, we have these boot camps. Now we do corporate training all year round and coaching twice a year. We have three pieces of training in one week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is this intense sales training from eight 30 to five. And people come from a, I mean, this next one knocked October. I had people coming from eight States. All right. Then Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we have the business of speaking training and coaching. And then in the evenings on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we do disc certification training, the human behavior model. So we run three separate pieces of training in one week live. And some people go to one, some people go to two, some people go to three, it just depends on what they want.
Roy Richardson (Host) (14:35):
Have you seen that? And that's pretty impressive. Have you, have you seen where, and I, I told you I wanted to transition a little bit into the virtual aspect and how this whole, you know, this new setting that we're in. When we look at that boot camp that, that you're running there, where you're running three different pieces of training one week, I'm assuming that the importance of that as being in-person right. You don't envision taking that on.
Joe Pici (Guest) (14:57):
I understand that there are certain things and we do a lot of virtual training, right? A lot of my, most of my coaching clients are done virtually and have a big coaching business, but there are certain things that are not going to translate. You're not going to duplicate that live outbound telephone call through zoom. And so we want to hold the integrity of that training. I had a guy at con call me late last night. I reached out to them first thing this morning. I went through my process. We went to the proposal. I'm giving him an opportunity because he wants to live calls. He can either come to the Bootcamp or he can fly in and work with me. One-On-One actually be two of them. And so I give people options. We have multiple ways we can work with people. You know, another thing we do is thanks to my wife. She launched S M V, which is our sell more virtually membership program. So on Thursday night, I do live training or live coaching virtually. There's a lot of downloads, it's a membership platform. And so that's another way we can serve our clients or future clients. So we, what we do is very niche who we do it for and how we deliver is vast. Did I answer your question?
Roy Richardson (Host) (16:12):
No. Yeah, you certainly did. You certainly did. So, so in this realm now of, and certainly understand that you do the vast majority of your coaching and stuff like that as online. So I would say that you know, and that's, we do a lot, a lot of remote work as well, right. And, and have been for many, many moons. And, and with customers, you know, the world over how has this, you know, this new era that we're in the pandemic scenario with, you know, businesses closing down and people working from their homes and different things that how has it affected your business?
Joe Pici (Guest) (16:47):
February 21st, in 30 minutes, I had two contracts canceled to the tune of $85,000. Wow. But you remember the old submarine movies when the destroyer was coming, dive, dive, dive, Joe, and Dawn PQ been doing what we've been doing a long time. As we say, here at BGP, we got a lot of water under the bridge. We have a whole process for crisis time. We didn't panic and we don't have a board to report to. So we just said, okay, what do we do virtually that we can make money with? We made all our money back in three weeks. Now we took the content that we knew would deliver results virtually. And then I have a complete virtual selling process. Okay. Let's put that into gear, kept selling, kept delivering virtually. So that was in February. We're, we're still growing. I mean, we took a shot, but we're still growing.
Joe Pici (Guest) (17:46):
And we're realigning our business in a way, what we do, certain things are going to translate better virtually. And we knew most of what we were going to do was virtually, but then I looked out and I said, we were having our boot camps in May. I said you know why? By June, we'll probably be at level two, that's 50 or more people let's move our Bootcamp to there. Cause we only have 20 and we're able to have, and the people were ecstatic. They called it the PICI Island. Well, nobody has gotten sick from it. They were, they, and here's the thing. We booked a couple of hundred appointments on Wednesday when people said nobody's answering the phone, they were answering the phone. There were people that wanted to do business with those people. So I think one of the things is P when all is said and done more said than done, people are trying to figure this thing out, instead of saying, what do we do that will translate virtually? Let's sell that.
Roy Richardson (Host) (18:45):
And, and, and you're absolutely right on data on all aspects and not only in sales, but I, you know, we see it and, and other realms as well. I think people are not very good at adopting or adapting, I should say. You know, and as you said, you know, realigning themselves to current situations, right. You took a step back and you said, okay, let's, let's take a look at, what's going to work. What's not going to work. And, and what do we need to tweak to make sure that we can survive and move forward, but yet you speak to a lot of people out there and everybody's talking about, for the most part, you know, getting things back to the way it was. And, and, and I don't, I don't think that's ever going to happen. And the longer that people stay within that little bubble, the quicker that bubble sorts of, you know, [inaudible] what, what's your, what's your thoughts on that?
Joe Pici (Guest) (19:35):
No, I, I think one thing is part of the reason why people froze up, you know, they were spending so much time in front of the television. They had time on their hands. They were spending so much time listening to the news and I'm not, I'm not monitoring. I'm just saying that they were listening to this. They were in abject fear. Instead of saying, they're shutting me down, we're getting ready to do shut down. Is there anything we can do? She out of, out of crisis comes new ideas and opportunity. We were new. We didn't have a virtual site up. I mean, PG and PG. We w we did a lot of virtual training, but we didn't have a virtual platform for membership. And so, you know, in March we made a decision. I said, Dawn, I'm not taking my foot off the gas. I'm going to continue to grow our business.
Joe Pici (Guest) (20:27):
We're going to get it all back and we're going to grow. So she took it on, we worked with a platform out of Australia, and I know a lot of speakers and trainers. You'd take some, two years to go to market. I mean, we were up and running on August 1st. Nice. Okay. But again, we're being very proactive. We weren't waiting to see if the media says, okay, everything's okay. You can take off your mask. This was all a hoax in 2008 when economically the bottom dropped out of my industry, 90% of the people who were speakers trainers, or coaches either went part-time, got out, or partnered up with other people. We tripled our business that year. Not because we weren't famous. We, we weren't international brands. I have eight non-negotiables for business growth. We execute our eight non-negotiables good economies, bad economies. We're going to grow now, are we growing this year at the rate?
Joe Pici (Guest) (21:30):
I wanted to know, but you know what? We have a healthy business because we're proactive on solutions. Now I'm not being insensitive. There are some businesses out there we're not allowed to do business. I'm not speaking to those people. I'm not speaking to the people, the hotel industry. I'm not speaking to the people in the convention business. I'm not speaking to those bars and restaurants that were closed. I feel bad for those people, but there are a lot of businesses out there that if people would have focused on focus, instead of fear action, instead of anxiety, they would have at least moved the needle. Okay. And began to recapture some moments.
Roy Richardson (Host) (22:09):
You know, I, I think this is a, is a, you know, in, in my line of work, we, we often talk about business continuity and disaster planning. Right. And a lot of people equate that to, Oh, well, you know, back up and, and et cetera. But it's really about looking at holistically at your company and saying, okay, I equate it to being a tabletop exercise. Right. And it's a, what-if scenario, what if this happens? Okay. If this happens, we're going to have a plan for that. And that's what I, that's what I, I just heard from you in terms of what you and Don had in place. Right. What if that happens? Well, we have a plan for that. And so we're not waiting until an emergency actually takes place to them. Start coming up with a plan. I often share with people, you know, I'm a, I'm a licensed pilot.
Roy Richardson (Host) (22:53):
When I was doing flight training the instructors would take us out, put a covering over our faces so that we could not see the horizon because we used peripheral vision. Right. And then, of course, take us through all these loops and turns, forcing you to rely on the instrument panel that's in front of you. And the whole reason is, is that it's not a matter of if you will ever experience a scenario where your engine cuts out, but if you do, or if you get into something called spatial disorientation, where you have no vision, that memory muscle needs to kick in. Right. so yeah, I hear you. And I think what is coming out of this, I hope is that a lot of businesses now hopefully will start realizing, you know, what, we need to have that business continuity plan.
Roy Richardson (Host) (23:36):
We need to have that plan B not only from our technology perspective but from a sales perspective, from, you know, marketing from our, our, our communications in terms of the messaging we want out there, the whole nine yards and put that together so that they can execute it in difficult times. Sure. You know what, let me ask you here. What would you recommend to our listeners and viewers in terms of, you mentioned several times, you know, and, and I know this is one of the themes of your training and stuff like that, but explain recapturing loss revenue, and what would you recommend to our listeners on how they can go on these, these difficult times to recapture lost revenue?
Joe Pici (Guest) (24:13):
I think the first thing they have to do is they got to look at their business. Now we're talking about recapturing lost revenue. The only way you can recapture lost revenue is to get clients. That's the bottom line. So let's talk about that aspect underneath that heading, there are certain things that you have to do. I mean, and so if you're out there and you're listening, you're saying, I want to recapture lost revenue. The first thing you want to revisit is where are my leads coming from? Are these good leads? Am I, am I spending a lot of time fishing in the wrong hole? Okay. Most people do. I mean, I think networking is good. However, you spend a lot of time. And if you're in the wrong networking group, you spend a lot of time. So you want to really look at your lead generation. Then you want to say, what are our strategy and our skill and our ability to get an appointment with that one.
Joe Pici (Guest) (25:00):
I mean, once you can book appointments, the game is overall this, all this, I need to change my brand. I need to change my marketing. No, you need to make money for, you know, that the first three years Don and I, our first year, without a brand, without anything, without PowerPoints, without all the fancy things we have now, we made a solid six-figure income because we knew this leads, appointments, sales meetings. Yeah. So if you want to recapture revenue, you want to assess what's my lead generation. How good am I at getting appointments? And what is my sales presentation look like? Because if the client is not doing 80% of the talking, you're not selling. And so if I'm coaching, one of you people out there that are listening to this thinking, this guy is crazy. If you can tell me three more important things on recapturing loss revenue, please let me know because that's what we did.
Joe Pici (Guest) (25:56):
We literally said, okay, we're in a climate up. I said, Dawn, our top three lead generation, the top three ways we generate leads. I'm going to give them to you right now. I'm not going to hide them. Linkedin being on somebody else's podcast and outbound cold calls. Those are the top three ways I generate leads. Believe it or not. So I said, don't forget all these other ways. We're generating leads right now. You don't. When I was a football coach, it was always amazing. You get your butt whipped on Saturday and your Sunday meeting. You'd stand up there and go men. We're going back to the basics. Well, if the basics work, why did we leave them? All right.
Roy Richardson (Host) (26:37):
So, so interesting there, because you, you, you brought in football, you brought in your, your, your, your top lead generating areas, which brings me to an important point here is that you're constantly measuring everything and, and you're measuring and making adjustments, which, which is the football coach of you inside of you as well. Because, you know, I mean, at the end of the day on Sunday after the game, what are you looking for? You're looking at the stats, right? And you're looking at film and stats.
Joe Pici (Guest) (27:07):
Well, here's what I know about you. Your business is data-driven. Your whole world is data. When I learned that everything we did had to be measured, the game was over. We measure everything. We measure the costs of acquiring our client. I watched people spend so much money to get a client, but they go, well, the product was this much. They paid this much. That was our margin. No, your margin was everything. And so that, that's why we do have a B2B business and a B to C business. Okay. And so our B to C are small business owners. You know, that type of thing, our B to B is the fortune 100. And so, but again, I don't care what the situation is. We measure the cost of doing business. We measure everything. I have a whole chart. I'm a metric guy. I'm a chart guy.
Joe Pici (Guest) (28:02):
I love charts. In fact, last night on our SMV pro I rolled out our focus forward to them. And, and it's like, they're gone. And you got the certain behavior styles, the people-oriented, they're all over. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, we have a focus board. Oh, this is going to drive me crazy. Listen, the single number, one thing that gets you through a crisis is focus. And I don't have time to listen. I mean, people call me up and they go, have you heard this known? I don't want to, I've got to generate X amount of, I got a family to take care of, you know, and with my clients, my role in my client's life is to equip them and help them get in front of their target market. End of story. And so all of our energies go to that.
Roy Richardson (Host) (28:56):
Interesting, interesting. That's, that's pretty interesting. You know, it takes me back to a discussion I had recently with someone, and while you were talking, you jogged my memory. A lot of times I've seen business owners, particularly when they're looking for salespeople, they hire people and put them right on the phone and they're expecting this super miracle to take place.
Joe Pici (Guest) (29:20):
Oh yeah, yeah. It's no if they were that good, they don't accompany. Look, here's what I want you to understand. When you're thinking about hiring a salesperson, number one, most people make mistakes, hiring the wrong salesperson because they don't ask them the right questions, the interview, and they don't tell the person they're interviewing. This is what you're going to be doing every day. This is what you're going to be held accountable for. They actually talk people into taking the job because they won't ask for much money right now. If I owned a traditional company where I was hiring a salesperson, the single, and I'm not saying this to sell your sales training, but I want, I want you to stay with me here. The single number one point of contact with your potential client and with the world is your sales team. And they get the least amount of restrictive training.
Joe Pici (Guest) (30:18):
They're allowed to say whatever they want. They're allowed to make it up. You spend thousands of dollars with some branding expert. You spend thousands of dollars with some marketing expert. You build this gorgeous logo, this beautiful brand you get in the building you can afford. And then you let sales. People say whatever they want, and they will destroy your brand. In one sentence, when I go into a company and I asked the salespeople, tell me what you say. I cannot believe that none of them say the same thing. None of them have any type of understanding, on what it takes, because I say, look, you are the first point of contact you are building or destroying this company's brand. That's true. It's scary.
Roy Richardson (Host) (31:06):
Yeah. It, it almost takes you back to, you know, my mom worked for the airline industry for many, many years. And, and you know, one thing with the airline industry, at least in the past is they were very, you know, upon their training and the messaging and the way they approach things. And everything was, as you mentioned before, everything was process-oriented, you know? And, and it's, it's funny because sometimes I have discussions with her and she relates to me, for example, experiences that she's going through in today's day and age. And she's like, my God, I can't believe that this is what they call customer service today. This would never have flown back in my day, you know? Exactly. But, and, and that's, you know, that, that I digressed a little bit with the customer service, but it's the same thing with sales. It's the same thing. People just say whatever they feel like, and you're right, you'd speak to three different people in a company. And, and you got four different, you know,
Joe Pici (Guest) (31:59):
Summer service customer service has a lot to do with future sales effect in the top 10 reasons why people buy from you, price is number nine. Customer service is number four. Okay. The way you treat people, the way you talk, the way you'll look. I have a policy, whether I'm sitting with you, one-on-one, whether I'm walking into your corporation, whether I'm a keynote state, people always want to know where I stand on social issues and politics. And I say, Hey, I have, I have a policy that I don't talk about. Sexual persuasion. I don't talk about politics. I don't talk about religion because I got a 50 50 of losing you as a client. And I smile and they smile. I cannot believe how many things people bring to the table when they're supposed to be getting a bit, building a business, and growing clients, look, I'm going to an offensive guy, just by the way I looked. The last thing I need to do is throw something else on the table.
Roy Richardson (Host) (33:02):
No, but I, I hear you. I hear you. And I, I, yeah, I, I know like some discussions, sometimes business discussions go to the side where you really scratch your head. But I, listen, I, I subscribe to those same principles, you know, no religion, no sexual talk, no politics, you know? Your beliefs are your beliefs and mine is mine. And, and, you know, Le let's just keep them under the hood. Right.
Joe Pici (Guest) (33:26):
People pay me for one thing results. Yeah. And somebody said to me, Joe, number two, through 30 on global gurus spends millions of dollars in advertising. You spend nothing. How did you get to number one? I don't know. Other than every result we deliver, we post it and anybody can call any of our clients. And if we don't deliver what we promise and more, I tell them not to hire us because we'll stand on our results because really in business, that's the only thing you get paid for. Yeah.
Roy Richardson (Host) (34:01):
Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so I got to, to where we're rounding up here on top, but I got two questions for you. And the first question is, you know, your entire journey, you, you, you've had a very successful journey. You've, you've hit your head a couple of times, you got up, you never let it bring you down. You, you learn from it, you dust yourself off, you move on. The people are going through some very, very difficult times right now with it. And, and as you rightfully put earlier I said earlier, sorry. You know, there, there are some businesses out there that just, you know, can't help it, but there are others who could, right. Or who may have been different in a different position? Had they, had, they taken a little bit of a different approach. What would be two nuggets that you could leave with, with business people today in terms of, you know, in these difficult times in terms of turning their business around, or maybe even growing, and, and, and
Joe Pici (Guest) (34:53):
Before I give you the nuggets, I'm going to tell them where they can listen to a podcast. And it handles that topic in its entirety. The podcast I recorded at Oh, dark 30 this morning was in the assessment on the last eight months. Did we do these things? And here are some things we can do. My podcast is called sales edge. It's on all the podcast hosts. I also have a gift for you. That's going to answer some of those questions. If you take out your cell phone and you put in the text bar sales edge, one word, some I-phones, we'll break it up. It's gotta be one word, text that to five, five, six, seven, eight, five, five, six, seven, eight. It's going to take you to a PG and PG link, which will take you to a splash page. The first thing you're going to see is to recapture lost revenue through virtual selling.
Joe Pici (Guest) (35:40):
It's five free videos, no upsell. You're not going to be hammered by me. Now, what happens is you're going to put your first name in and your email. They're going to send the videos to you. You can watch it on your phone, your email. If you scroll down, there are links to our free podcast Sales Edge. There are also some free downloads. The information that's on that, right there is going to help you navigate these troubled times. Now from another aspect, what can you do today? The first thing you want to do is limit the number of things you're thinking you're doing and make sure you're going to work in your highest priorities. There are, that is going to get you through this. Not everything you do is going to affect change. The only thing I know about business, the only thing that affects business is cashflow. That's true.
Joe Pici (Guest) (36:28):
We, we look, I do all the sales training. I do all the travel training. Dawn does the three-day speaker boot camp with me, and she does private LinkedIn training. But by and large, I'm doing 99% of the training, but I'm doing all the sales. So if I'm not training, I'm selling now, are there some things that need to be done that don't get done? You better believe it, but I haven't seen too many businesses go out of business when cash flow is more than outgo. If I would focus on a minimum amount of things that are going to get you momentum.
Roy Richardson (Host) (36:59):
Nice. Nice, nice, nice. So to round us off here, Joe, I got to ask and I, and it's a question I throw out often to, to to, to my guests. If you could pick three people living or dead to form a special board of advisors to you and Don, who would they be and why?
Joe Pici (Guest) (37:18):
Wow. Lee, that's tough. That's really tough. If I could create a board around
Roy Richardson (Host) (37:24):
Around me and they could be, you could, you know, people who are alive or are, you know, people from the,
Joe Pici (Guest) (37:29):
Yes, I think Zig Ziglar would be one. I think Zig Ziglar was the ultimate and attitude. Right? I will tell you that you better have your attitudes straight. And I don't know about another speaker in the history of professional communicators that did that better than Zig. I would want Paul from the Bible because nobody had a tougher road and he kept going. And I'm about, you know, I'm, I'm just average when things are good. I'm great. When things are bad, I want him in my corner to just have the wisdom of God, keep going, you got to keep going. A third one. There's, there are a million people that can be a third one. I think of, of some of the giants, you know, I think of Winston Churchill might be, I mean, he had a lot of flaws and you and Winston Churchill have a similar demeanor and personality style. You're very people-oriented, but you're also very driven. And when we think about what Winston Churchill did during one of the darkest times in our history and how he inspired and influenced through the spoken word, I mean, he literally pulled England through the darkest time in their history by being a leader of action. So those right off the top of my head,
Roy Richardson (Host) (38:50):
Wow, that's a pretty impressive board there. And I would say, I would say if, if you know, you're, you're, you're, you're in the number one position. I can see why, because they're there, they're probably on your shoulder, but no, Joe, this, this has been great. And thank you for sharing that. Thank you.
Joe Pici (Guest) (39:09):
You, I, I've been looking forward to reconnecting with you. We, we met that one time, then we had coffee and then your business went off and we were focused on tripling our business and this brought us back together. So we need to stay in contact.
Roy Richardson (Host) (39:24):
We will, and we'll, we'll have more decent together because I, you know, I really, really enjoyed, first of all, I admire you and, and, and Don and everything that you guys do out there. And, and thank you. And secondly, thank you for coming on the show and
Joe Pici (Guest) (39:38):
In front of your audience, we're going to be inviting you to our show. We have a huge audience, and I think it's important for business people to understand the importance of security. And so I will contact you about how we do that and get some dates, but we'd love to have you on our show.
Roy Richardson (Host) (39:56):
Awesome. Awesome. I look forward to that and I look forward to having you back in the future so that we can, you know, get you, you know, share some more nuggets and, and, and help people along the path here. And so thank you very much. Joel, always, always a pleasure and keep doing what you're doing and focus. Thank you very, very much for joining us. This has been another spectacular podcast, great having Joe on here, and happy that he was able to shore share some of his nuggets with us. I will put in the text down below the information on, you know, where you need to go to get the free gift that he gave you.
Joe Pici (Guest) (40:30):
And, and, and the other thing, you know, you can put my website on there. Also, if you're on LinkedIn, please send me an invite. And it's Joe Pici. You'll see me. I look Italian cause I am. And, and the other thing is if you ever just want to have a complimentary cup of Joe, call me at four Oh seven nine four seven two five nine. Oh. And we'll talk,
Roy Richardson (Host) (40:52):
You go, there you go there, man. Set it all. Thank you very much, folks, have a wonderful week. We'll catch up on the next one, stay safe and keep crushing it.