The Sales System Every Business Needs | TPCP051

Welcome back. I'm so excited to have this conversation today with someone that I've known for a really long time, and this guest has an enormous amount of massive positive information that's going to move your business forward. So get comfy in your seat, get get your ears plugged

in for your treadmill, whatever, however you're listening to us, click in, because this is going to be a fun ride today. I have the honor of having Joe Pici on my podcast. Say hello, Joe. Hey. How you doing? Awesome. We're gonna I'm gonna go ahead and read his official bio, and then we're gonna dive in. Joe is so

cool. Joe has been crowned the highly coveted ranking of number one in the world of sales training and keynote speaking by global gurus. Joe Pici is a strategist for top professionals and coaches specializing in results driven training through rapport mastery. COO and co founder of Pici and Pici,

Incorporated and host of the Sales Edge podcast. Joe is a human behavior expert author and intellectual resource behind the best selling book sell naked on the phone. Yay. Hello Joe. See you. As I mentioned, I've known Joe for quite a while, and I'm really excited to have him on this podcast, because he is such

a wealth of knowledge, and he he's actually trained me, and I love everything about what Joe and Pici and Pici do. Their training is excellent, and what he does is effective, and it gets results every single time. So Joe, tell us a little bit about you and how you got here, and what they're going to

experience today.

Well, I don't want to take them all through the the whole trip, but I left coaching football, got into sales, and for some reason, I liked it. I did well at it. And then people started to ask me what we were doing. And so years ago, we couldn't find a lot of good information on skill based

training. A lot of it was motivation strategy, but when it came to actual skills, we saw a hole in the market, and so we developed our own system called rapport mastery. One of the uniquenesses of it is during the sales training, we do live outbound telephone calls, calling real people in real time

to get real results, you know. And so we've been doing this a long time. I looked the other day, and, you know, we started in this space in the 90s, and gotten better and better at it. And, you know, but I'm not here to talk about Joe, I'm here to talk about how I can help your audience. Awesome.

Yeah. And so talk a little bit about rapport mastery, because I think that's one of the things that we haven't really touched on in this podcast, is the idea of rapport, and building that rapport, and I love this is one of the most powerful things that you teach, I think that you

train on, because it is actually it's that thing that makes the difference, because People already know information. People want answers to their questions. People want solutions to their problems, but having the rapport with your clients actually takes that to the next level.

And I think rapport mastery starts with your approach. We have to understand there's really two different types of sales. There's transactional sales get to yes or no as quickly as possible. And then there's consultative sales. 86% of all sales happens between the sixth and the 15th

contact. 92% of sales professionals never follow up after the first no answer or no. And so the road along the way, you have an opportunity to build a relationship, to build rapport. And rapport is the deepest relationship you can have with another human being in business. That's where they know

you, they like you, they trust you, and they look to you as an advisor. So we've created intellectual property on, really, the steps, the strategies and the skills on, how do you develop rapport with your clients?

Yeah, and that's, you know, getting them the trust piece is sometimes the piece that people sort of gloss over and and, or and, or don't really know how to build it. So that's one of the things that you're really an expert in, actually teaching what that rapport is and why it's so

important. And I have found that it's made the biggest difference in in my sales and how I build my businesses. So I think that's really powerful. Um. Um, so talk to us. Joe and I were talking before we started the recording, a little bit about, how do you grow your business when times are good and when times are

challenging? So right now, and it comes up every now and again where there's some challenging economic times, or there's some shifts in what's going on in the world that affects then affects business. So talk to us about some tips that we can grow our business even during these times.

Okay, first of all, we have to understand that there's going to be down times. I mean, it's never going to stay great, and so most people get out of their profession or their business when things go down. So what we have found, I call them the eight non negotiables. I'm going to give them to you right

now. Okay, these are the things that we've done, and we teach our clients how to do. The number one, you got to have clarity. So you've got to put your business on a foundation of so how much money do you have to make, gross and net? When do you want to make it and why do you want to make it? So that's your

clarity model. Then above that, you got to bring two things to the table, ambition and self discipline. And I tell people, if they don't have ambition and self discipline, either get it or you need to get out of sales, and you need to get out of owning your own business, because you just you just won't

make it right. And so self discipline is the thing that helps you to say no to your low revenue producing activities and yes to your high revenue producing activities. And ambition is the thing that gets you up off the couch when you don't feel like getting up. On top of that, you have to be a

master communicator. We train a lot on communication skills. 80% of sales and good communications is listening skills. And so you've gotta be a master communicator. But the four top things you've gotta do to really keep your business growing in a bad economy, every day you got to generate prospect leads. We

have 17 ways we generate prospect leads. Okay? So you have to keep that funnel with prospects. Second thing is, every day you need to make X amount of outbound phone calls, the phone Yeah, in the modern day where cyber security is telling people do not open up unsolicited emails, and where

the open rate is about 3% or less, the phone has become much more effective. So every day you have to time block x amount of calls to make outbound to book appointments. The third one on top is how many, what we call core stories, what most people would say, sales meetings. How many quality sales meetings or

core stories are you doing every 30 days? And the fourth one on top is priority and time management, not time management, but priority and time management. You put all those together, and at the at the end of the show, I'm going to give you a gift that'll pull all that together. I got a free webinar

for you, and it'll pull this whole thing together. But if you do those eight things consistently, you will level up, and you will offset a bad economy

Absolutely, and talk a little bit about Joe, about the telephone calls, because that's one of the core things that you teach, and the way that you teach it, and the the path that you that you encourage people to use, is really effective. And I know a lot of people don't even answer

their phone anymore, and don't necessarily listen to their messages anymore. So talk a little bit about about that.

Okay, first thing we have to understand is the the misnomer of picking up the phone is it's not to sell and it's not to book an appointment. It's to find out if the person on the other end of the phone qualifies for your time, and so

stop, stop, Joe, say that again, right?

The phone is not to book appointments or to sell. The phone is to get someone on the phone and have a powerful value proposition that qualifies or disqualifies that person on whether or not you want to meet with them.

So in other words, you're most business owners, when they're thinking about like getting on the phone and making phone calls, it's because I need something from them. So that reframe of saying, No, we need to figure out if they're even worth the time to follow up with them. So that's

the first differentiation that you're making with those telephone calls.

We spend in our three day sales boot camp or our corporate training, we spend six to seven hours really digging into the people in the room. Into their target market, into their uniqueness. We build out scripting. We have a script for navigating the gatekeeper. We have a script for getting return

phone calls. We we have a script for when you get the right person on the phone, how to get the right person on the phone. And I know what you're going to say, but Joe, most people don't like scripts. The best actors in the world are Italian De Niro, Pacino Stallone, and they all use scripts, a script that is

mastered doesn't sound like a script, and it keeps the call unemotional, and it keeps it in line. So we work very hard at messaging, and I don't care if you walk into a chamber of commerce, I don't care if you're on the phone. I don't care if it's on your website. I don't care what it is. Are we leading

with the right messaging that compels people to want to talk to us?

Yeah, that's that's really powerful, because if you call up somebody and you're like, oh, I want to set an appointment, or, like, you're you're leading with the thing that they're not, they're not going to respond to then, yeah, you're making the phone calls. Are they effective? So having

that effective, having a system and having a script. The thing about a script is that it's, it's, it's a road map. It's a guide to exactly how to do something in a way that creates desire on the other end to get more information. So if you look at if you look at it as, this is my road map. This is my recipe.

Whenever you're making a recipe, right? You follow the if you follow the instructions, you measure it the way it's supposed to be measured. And if you do that, then the dish comes out the way that you want it to come out. So there's a lot of resistance, too. I don't want to be tied down to a script, and

sometimes those scripts are actually the, you know the road map, the power play that you're going to use to actually get the answer that you need to get? Well, since 2003

a couple times a year, we have a three day sales boot camp, and we only allow 24 people, okay, in there. This past one, we just did two weeks ago, we had 24 people, 20 different industries. The Ages were from 23 to 65 entry level to 35 years experience. The common denominator is they

weren't doing an outbound approach. They weren't utilizing great messaging. They didn't know how to generate leads once their lead sources ran out, but they didn't know how to convert leads into appointments in deals. So on on day three, and in the beginning, they look at you like, Joe, do I really have

to make a phone call? And I said, Well, you paid for this. You know, you knew when you came. You know it's your choice. But they all got on the phone, and over 450 outbound calls. We booked 67% conversion to appointment in the B to B market. We got through 95% of the gatekeepers. We closed 10s

of 1000s of dollars in real money, and we got 35 same day return phone calls. The right process gets the right results every time.

Yeah, absolutely. And could you just give us like your your initial phone call is very short, correct? It's not like a whole long dissertation. What kind of give us a quick sample of what a first phone call might sound like.

Okay, so you are a speaker, a coach and a trainer, right? You do that if I was calling you up, and 90% of my paid for clients are coming off of LinkedIn, and I don't send them DMS. I call them so I see you're out there and you're and you're a speaker coach, I just call you up. Ring, ring, ring,

ring, ring. Answer the phone. Hello. Yes, this is Joe Pici of Pici and Pici. Who am I speaking to today?

Oh, this is Sharon galuzzo.

Sharon, did I catch you at a bad time?

No, I have a few minutes.

We specialize in helping speakers, coaches, trainers and consultants make money with their talent and intellectual property.

Oh, wow, that's interesting. Sharon,

would it be worth 15 minutes for me to show you how you could monetize your talent?

15 minutes? Oh, Mm, hmm, oh, sure, yeah, 15 minutes is good.

Now they're not always that nice. I don't care,

because if they say yes, they're qualified. If they say no, thank you for your time. Yeah. And so when people are running all over the world, and I'm not against chambers, I think chambers are great. But if you look at a chamber luncheon or a breakfast, it takes you 45 to 50 minutes to drive there, 45 to 50 minutes to

drive back. Two and a half hours between networking and eating, you've blown a half a day I can make if I sat in my office and made nothing but cold calls, just cold calls, I would do better than you'll do, and I would have a more qualified meeting. Okay, yeah, and so, well,

something I wanted to go back to before we go on about the qualified meetings. Is something that you said, and part of this is, is who Joe is. But if they said No, Joe wouldn't care. Let's talk a little bit about how people who are not necessarily wired like you, Joe, how do how does that?

How do we get from that place of no meaning, something different than we're just they're just not qualified, and we're moving on. Talk a little bit about that.

Let me ask you this question, if I would have called you, and I said, I help speakers, coaches, trainers and consultants make money with their talent and intellectual property. And you say, Well, I'm not interested in that.

I'm not interested in that. Are

they saying no to me, or are they saying no to making money with their talent and intellectual property? That's the number one way you get away from being personal, make a business call. Number two, do we really care about the other person getting what they want. If we do and they say, No, was

it about me or them? It was about that. I've never given money back because I've never been asked to I've never talked anyone into anything. I've never tried to use some cheap clothes people buy from me, Okay, do I know how to close? Yes. Do I close prematurely? No, because sales is finding a solution to

an unmet need. In my meeting with them, if we can find an unmet need, and they trust me, and they believe I can help them achieve what they want to. We're going to do business together, and if they don't, it doesn't matter what I say, right, right? I answer your question, yeah,

I just a lot of people will take, will take, especially when they're working for themselves. They take that no as rejection or some kind of something that says something about them. So I love the way that you pulled that back and really broke it down. You're not saying, hire me, it's about me,

me, me, me, me. You're saying, Hey, would you like this result? Would this thing that I can offer you benefit your business? And if they say yes or they say no, it's not about me. So I think that's a really good thing to point out. It's the way that you're the way you're couching the language, first of all, and

second of all to you know, if they say no, that it's not personal, and a lot of people will avoid sales because it feels like personal rejection. If someone says, No,

it's true. But a lot of people are lazy too, and so if you're going to make five phone calls, don't bother okay. 80% of the people the day you reach out to them the first time are not in the buying zone. Okay? They're just it has nothing to do with you. It's that they don't even know they need what

you're doing. So your first approach to someone is like advertising, if you keep a profession. I have never had somebody get mad at me when I call them cold off of LinkedIn, because I'm professional and it's short, and they're allowed to say no. If they say no, thank you for your time, and I don't

throw them away. It took me 10 years to get Caldwell Banker. Took me 10 years to get Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Okay, so the whole follow up. So, so in our training, we start out at the foundation, most people do not even have a sales process. In fact, I would recommend your guests sit down and write out

your sales process, and if you want to call me, I'll give you a complimentary Cup of Joe, and I won't even sell you 407-947-2590, I'll let you tell me what your sales process is. I'll cut I'll give you a couple tips. Because I don't care if it's CEO, Owner, Vice President of Sales. It doesn't matter. I

hand the pen and I say, draw your sale. Process, and 95% of them can't do it.

Mm, hmm, yeah, that's so one of the things that I work with my clients on, let's the Seven Pillars of profit, and that's, that's one of them is, is, what are you doing with your what is the process that you're following? And are you doing it differently every single time? Are you just winging it. Are we,

you know, going to this thing without a plan? Or we, do, you know what? What's going on? Because there is an absolute correlation with having structure and and systems that work and being successful in business. Yeah. So I interrupted you continue. Where were we? I was hoping you would remember. I

stopped you on on the nose, like because you had talked about so we called, we made the phone call, we got the answer, and then there was the next thing. If you don't recall, then we'll just go on to the next

Yeah, just keep going on to the next one. Okay,

so, so whenever we phone calls are a really powerful thing that you do in all of your training, and then to actually have people make phone calls in the training. So you just don't tell them how to do it. They actually learn how to do it, and that can be a really powerful tool, is to be

in that awkwardness with other people, so that

it's really not because we don't, we don't set it up like timeshare, we we're usually, if we're in a corporation, people will go to their cubicles, and I'll walk around after we do the coaching. If we're in the hotel where we do our boot camps, I have permission to use different

segments of the hotel so it doesn't sound like telemarketing, right? Good. The I think the biggest thing though, is people think, Oh, the training is just about, you know, the phone. No, it's not. It's a three day intensive boot camp. It's every single aspect. It's negotiation, it's lead

generation, it's, you know, all of the different aspects of sales. So you will get a higher closing ratio, because at the end of the day, that's what you're doing it for to close business, right?

Yeah, yeah. And to and, and I don't know that we've had, like, sales conversations on this podcast like this, where we're really talking about the this, the process and the system. And it's more than just it's it's deeper, and there's more to it. Like you just said, it's not just the

phone call, it's actually, you know, having the conversations, the negotiations, the closing. And that is something that is a learned thing. I think some people will be like, Oh, I just I'm not good at sales. How would you answer someone who said, I'm not good at sales, Joe,

all right, that is one of our 10 bogus beliefs that some people are just gifted with sales. When I first started selling, I had about a 3% closing ratio. Now it's in the 90 percentile. That doesn't mean when I sit across a table from somebody, or do a zoom, or whatever, they say yes

immediately. That means within a year to a year and a half they do say yes, well, what happened? I got better. The average person looks at sales as to where they are today, and they don't think that sales can be learned. Sales is a combination of communications strategies and skills, which can all be

learned. And if a person wants to sell, I can teach them, but if they don't want to sell, there's nothing that you can do. And the average small business owner makes the biggest mistake, because they invest all their money into everything else. They get their website, they get a building, they get this, they

products, new clothes, they do it all. And then they they realize that people didn't come with that, and now they have no acumen on how to acquire, attract and retain clients, and then I call them, and they go, Joe, we're in trouble, okay? And I take them through my process, I take them through my

interview, and they'll say something like, well, could you, like, help us, and maybe we can pay you with profit. And then I nicely say, I don't need to practice. And they'll say, Well, what should we do? I say, I recommend you find the money, and before you put any more money into any aspect of your

business, you learn how to sell. And then the other thing they do, mistake they make, is they go out and hire people. The hardest position to hire is outside sales reps. 92% of outside sales reps quit every year. They spend all this money on a sales rep, give them a company, credit card, this,

this, and a person doesn't sell. And now it's like, now, what do we do? What you do is the owner should learn to sell Absolutely. There should be a sales process and a methodology. So when you hire somebody, they sell the way you are. Because here's the thought, your first line of communications with a potential

client is through sales. The wrong sales approach can destroy your brand.

Yeah, yeah. It's really important to be clear with your staff, if you have people working with you, working for you, that they fully understand how you do business and how you have conversations, and what is okay to say and what isn't okay to say, and what you know, what, what that focus is,

because so many times, like when we had the video business, there were, we had, we hired tech guys, and tech guys wanted to talk about technology, and they wanted to Talk about bit rate, and I wanted to talk about aspect ratio and all kinds. And I was like, that's, you know, that's not the language our

customers speak. So we had to retrain them into, this is exactly how you answer the phone. This is exactly how you answer these questions and and, you know, and when you're taking like so we had structures around all of that communication so that the client was was had space to be heard, because a lot

of times when they're coming in with all that, you know, technology and stuff, if the if the person isn't on the same level, the customer isn't on that same level, they're lost and they will not feel heard and seen. So we had a lot of structure around that, and all our employees knew this is the

way that you handle this Exactly. Yep, I'm with you. Awesome. So do you have another little tip that you want to share before we get into your gift?

Yeah, I think you got to get clarity on every aspect of your business. I think you have to know exactly what your expectations are. I think you have to have an accountability standards. One of the verticals I have. I do sales training, sales coaching, we do one on one, we have boot camps. But I

also operate as a fractional sales manager, where I will work with a company on a contract basis and manage their sales process and their teams. And the first thing owners are afraid of the word is accountability. They don't want to be viewed as micromanaging. I have a training and a coaching on how can you

hold your teams accountable without micromanaging or running them off? It's a whole set of things you have to do, but one tip about accountability, if there is an agreement on exactly what the expectations are, and both of you agree with it, and you stop selling the job because you need them, and you come to

an agreement that this person is willing to do what the job calls for, you'll Be able to hold them accountable more often, right?

I like that. I like

that. So let me get, let me give the gift.

Yep, that was just gonna say the gift. The gift is next. So Joe, Joe's got an amazing gift, and he's gotta

get everybody your cell phone. Just take out your cell phone, go into your text area, not if you're driving. No, she'll put this in the show notes. You're going to type the word sales edge, one word sales edge, and now that you're going to text it to 59925, that's going to take you to a Pici and

Pici link. Hit the link you will be sent, okay, a 45 minute sales webinar. It's free. There's no upsell to it. It's all yours for watching the show. Hey, make sure you go to LinkedIn and connect with me and just give me a complimentary Cup of Joe. Just call me and hey, our next sales boot camp is April, 27 2829 we

also didn't have a chance to talk about this, but we do have a three day state of the art boot camp on the business of speaking, training, coaching and consulting. So how to make money in that industry? Awesome.

Joe, yeah, and I. Can fully support and recommend Joe's trainings. I've been in many and and he's he's really, really good at what he does. Taught me so much. I learned a whole bunch again just having this conversation. So take him up on it. And Joe's last name is Pici. It's p, i, c,

I, doesn't have anything to do with the fruit. So when you're trying to spell his name, it's Joe. Are you Joe or Joseph on LinkedIn, it's Joe, Joe. So Joe, p, i, c, I, Joe, Pici. And the the text that he wanted you to send was sales edge, S, A, L, E, S, E, D, G, E, he said it so fast, I wanted to make sure that

that you understood that. So thank you, Joe for that really generous gift. And I hope that everyone will connect with Joe on LinkedIn, reach out and and make a connection, because Joe is somebody that you really want to know, somebody to have in your corner, and he is absolutely amazing at what he

does. So thank you so much for being here. Joe really enjoyed it.

I really appreciate great seeing you again.

So to get Joe's gift, all you need to do is go to profit connectors dot club. That's profit connect doors, because you're the ones making the connections to the profit in your business. Profit connect doors. Dot c, l, u, B is the website. Go to profit connectors, dot club, and inside

the club, you'll be able to find Joe's gift, ways to connect with him, his bio, all the information and a link to this episode as well. In addition to all of our other speakers and all of their gifts that are in our portal, it is free to join, all you need to do is sign in and you can get access to all

the gifts, including Joe's. So go ahead and go to profit connectors, dot, C, l, u, B, and get your gift. Thank you for coming. Remember to keep showing up. Your future self will thank you. And don't forget, it's your business and your impact. Go, make it matter. Go.