Episode 370: Breaking the Sales Ceiling with Nicole McNamee

Every distributor starts out hungry, chasing new business. Then the accounts pile up, you slide into maintenance mode, and the new business habit quietly disappears. How do you rebuild it and start growing again? Or if you're new to promo sales, how do you build a consistent new business development habit? Well, on today's show, we're exploring what it takes to grow consistently. Welcome to the Skewcast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby Lehew. I'm glad you're here. Nicole McNamee spent more than 20 years in promo, ranking in the top 1% of salespeople with over $50 million in career sales. She now works as a fractional executive and sales coach, stepping in as your part-time VP of sales or chief of staff or COO with a hyperfocus on growth. And she is now a Common Skew partner. Join us as we talk with Nicole about auditing accounts you already have to find quick wins and the fortitude it takes to land big clients. For example, Nicole spent 3 years chasing a single cruise line and turned it into 500 buyers. We talk about breaking through sales ceilings and also time, focus, and how AI is impacting your sales life, like time blocking, email hygiene, and using tools like Claude to turn a 6-hour analysis into 15 minutes. Today's episode is brought to you courtesy of us at Commons SKU. Over 900 distributors powering $1.8 billion in network volume rely on Commons SKU's connected workflow. Process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commonssku.com. Now here's my chat with Nicole. Nicole, welcome to the SKU Cast.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

As I promised in the intro, we're jumping right into the heart of this topic about growth because I know this is going to be a very popular episode because this is something we all want more of, is sales growth. And since sales is all about growth, there's a stat that has been floating around for years that 85% of business is based on referral. So growth usually starts with the clients you already have. So when a distributor wants more from their existing account, where do you as a growth expert start with them?

The first thing I do is Look at their client list. I audit their accounts. And we have a calculation that I've come up with over the years that half a percent of total revenues is what is available for print and promo at an account.

Hmm.

Now it gets a little wonky if you're talking about billion-dollar companies, but if Joe's Auto Body down the street, and it may not be public information, you have to do a little research to figure out what a normal auto body shop might have in Memphis, Tennessee, where I am.

Yeah.

As far as revenues. But once you figure that out, you take the half a percentage. And now we can use AI, which I know we'll talk about that a lot today, to calculate what that available market spend is. And we just kind of compare that to the current sales data. Then we prioritize what is the lowest hanging fruit, the quickest wins we can get, and start tackling it that way. There's Autobody has more revenue that we need to get. We know that it's there. Let's go ask them for more business.

That's fantastic. At least you have some sort of figure to add to it. And though it might not be 100% accurate, it's close enough to get us thinking about it. Do you also go through categories? Do you look at what they've sold? How do you break that part of it down?

Yes. So the second part of the equation, if you will, is what departments are you in? Now, at someplace like my example, Joe's Auto Body, there might just be one buyer. Larger corporations, of course, we check and say, are you in procurement? Are HR, even IT, every single department orders promo, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So get away from the normal marketing buyer and let's see what else there is out there you're not tackling.

Nicole, you and I are very familiar with this pattern of sales in the business. Typically the pattern is rep gets into the business or business owner starts a business as a distributor. They grow their business and they begin with this very hungry muscle that they developed to go land new business. But then you began managing accounts. And what happens is you shift from this sort of hunter mentality to this farmer mentality where you're trying to maintain or grow accounts. We talked about this where a rep hasn't prospected in a while, they sort of get to lose that muscle. So sometimes you'll get on a call and actually do that with them. How do you help someone start to redevelop that muscle for new business development?

You just have to rip the bandaid off and I'm guilty of it myself. We all get comfortable. It's human nature to do what's most comfortable and the easiest things on your to-do list. Which is the order taking, right? To sit and be reactive. So stopping your day and having someone, whether it's me or a colleague or your spouse that says, hey, did you go out and make a sales call today? They get out of the habit. And I've certainly, I like to be on the call. Sometimes I can just either we record it or I can be there live as a pretend person on their team and give live Feedback.

That's good. Just that real-time coaching is great. This is kind of an interesting tangential thing. Well, I'll ask you about what does make a sales call mean in today's world where it's very tech-driven and AI? Are we still in a position because technology has become so important that this sales call might have room for a special place in our repertoire of selling?

Yeah, for me, I would say 70%, maybe even higher, is online. calls. Zoom. If you're not comfortable with Zoom and Teams and Google Meet, just add that to your to-do list over the weekend to work on that. But certainly you've got to go out and meet with them too and have that touchy-feely, that experience of showing the product. That's what we do. But there is a lot of coaching. I talk to people about what do they wear on the calls. I was on a call one time where somebody had on a t-shirt that said jailbreak. I was like, oh God. We don't need to be on a bloody call. That's funny. And maybe it was a Friday and it was casual Friday or something, but let's dress for what you want the customer to expect.

Yeah. Lots to cover. This is why sales coaching is so important. One of the biggest topics I hear from distributors, whether they're $1 million, $5 million, $20 million, $50 million, it doesn't matter, is breaking through the sales ceilings. And this happens a lot in this business where you hit a plateau. So when someone comes to you and they're trying to diagnose where they're stuck, you sometimes find that they think the problem is in sales, but sometimes you find it's in other places. Like, how do you diagnose what's going on?

Yeah, it's a common problem. If you've never been at $10 million, you don't know what $10 million looks like and how to get there. So if you don't know where you're going, you're definitely not going to get there, right? So I think that what I see most commonly is at $2 million and under, the biggest problem is cash flow. They're more worried about AR and the roller coasters of paying for the goods and the sales that have come in and then collecting on AR. So for them, we take a step back and we look at who's handling the AR and maybe they're not comfortable. They're great salespeople, but they're not comfortable asking for money. So we work on those types of things and potentially delegate that piece off once we get a rhythm in. For the $2 to $5 million distributors, it's the CEOs are still doing a lot of the sales and it's time to start taking the non-revenue generating things off their plate. It's time for that first hire. So we look and see, maybe it's an overseas resource from Office Beacon or someone like that, or maybe it's an accountant we need to hire, HR, different things that they don't need to be doing everything.

So that's executive coaching at that level. When you get to a certain growth level too, and this can impact $1, $3, $5 million, it can impact $10 million. Is it also a service level assessment too of what they're trying to— so often you get an RFP, for example, and you'll Realize that you can provide 80% of the services, but you can't provide the other 20? Is part of it also just refactoring their business model a little bit?

Absolutely. Do you need to have in-house decoration or should you contract that out or contract out warehousing, all of that? And we have so many resources in our industry.

Yeah.

It's great to pick and choose what you're good at and help build out your strategic advantage and then contract out where you're not. There's no shame in that.

Right.

Contracting out, you're not good at.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Because the industry changed post-COVID. There were a lot more services brought into distributors. And so we started doing a wide breadth of services. And I think one of the smartest paths is outsourcing that, but sometimes you have to bring it in-house. Getting past a plateau is rarely something people do alone. How much of this comes around to leadership building more around them? You mentioned them, the stop-doing list of things that they should stop doing and things that they should start doing. Is it also around team development, executive team development? What does that look like?

Certainly hiring for your weaknesses, right? So when I built out my team, I hated selling apparel and it was just, I didn't like to do it. I don't understand it. Whatever the snags on the different pieces, I couldn't, I can't. So another person on my team, they were an expert in that. And it was like, whenever any apparel questions came up, it was like, talk to Hunter. He's the guy on the apparel. So Whatever that may be, building up people around you that are smarter than you are is the way to go.

Yeah. This, this is such a reactive business. So let's talk a little about time, cash, and focus. One of the hardest disciplines is to protect your time for work that matters. I mean, this industry, it's funny, as many gains as we've made, and we're a workflow platform, so we've helped customers make those gains, and we're starting to see this in the numbers. You're starting to see folks that have been on the platform 3 to 5 years are seeing Pretty significant gains compared to the average. And so we are seeing and helping distributors scale. But one of the hardest things to do, as in whether it's an independent salesperson, whether you are a salesperson and not an executive leader, it doesn't matter, is protecting your time. Because this industry is a deadline-driven business. Nicole, you and I have taken those orders, we've responded, we've hustled to contact the factory. We've done that many, many times over. So what's the first thing you talk about with someone when you're coaching them? In regards to their time?

We need to time block. So that Friday morning from 9 to 11, it's back to the basics. It seems so simple, but me holding them accountable for, did you block out that 2 hours on Friday morning to prospect, to collect on AR, whatever it may be? Also something that I point out often is the number of emails that we all get. When I was producing multimillions in sales, I had 600 emails a day. When you start thinking about, let's say you only work 8 hours in a day, you divide that out, you've got to read more than one email a minute to stay on top of your emails throughout the day. Now compound that with everyone on your team is copied on that email. It's, it's a common distributor problem. They have distribution lists. It'll be like promo at whatever, or customer service at whatever your company name is. And it'll go to 6 people on your team and now everyone is spending time reading those emails.

Yeah.

So I say the first thing we need to do is who gets what emails? And the leader or the top salespeople who are good at selling do not need to be getting 600 emails a day. That needs to go to someone else. They need to be selling.

That's spoken from someone who has managed a multimillion-dollar book of business. We've been doing these AI roundtables with customers and we try to pair folks that are sort of similar sizes. And one interesting thing, so we're gonna segue a little bit into AI and daily habits and things like that, because email hygiene is, sounds so basic. Oh my God, it's so critical. The other reason it's critical, Nicole, tell me if this is your experience. The industry saw this very collapsed sales role for the longest time where it was the salesperson and maybe an account manager or something like that managing the account. Then the more services you include, then the more interoperability has to happen amongst colleagues. And so with you managing large accounts, I mean, you can't get to a multimillion dollar book of business without managing a large account. That has multiple colleagues involved in it. So talk a little bit about how technology and AI is changing this.

Well, from a sales perspective, I think the quotes are getting quicker.

Yeah.

AI is helping you even with ideas. If you're wanting to put in, in chat, what are some good ideas for certain types of buyers? It's crazy that it'll come back for you. But for me, AI really came around after it stopped selling. When I'm analyzing financials of distributors, what used to take me 6 hours, my, my initial audit, I can now do in 15 to 30 minutes.

Yeah.

'Cause I, I drop everything into Claude is my preferred.

Yep.

And it kind of now knows what I look for in average order size and margins and the size of the accounts. And it does all of the analysis for me and it's 15 minutes.

Yeah, that's amazing. That's significant because one of the things you've probably no doubt learned is, and we've learned talking with so many different distributors, is yeah, we're in the same business, but wow, we have some different structures, clients, and a lot of our clients and the verticals we serve dictate the type of business that we're gonna become. Um, and just like average order size, you can talk to a distributor one day who has a $3,000 average order size, and the next day you can talk to somebody who's got a $750 order average and That's a significant way to recalibrate your business. Let me jump back to something that when you said it, I'm sure we have a percentage of our audience that wants to ask this question. And that is, as I mentioned in the intro, you've run a multimillion-dollar book of business. When you have people ask you, how did you get to that? And I know it's an oversimplification, like there were days, hours, years of learning. When you look back at your history, can you point at 2 or 3 things that you're like, I did this, this, and this, and this was a big factor?

Sure. So I'm into hospitality and tourism and I'm passionate about travel. So I called on Carnival Corporation and just, you know, I was in Miami one time. I saw it coming in from to the Miami airport. I was like, oh, that's my target. I'm gonna go after it. And it took years. So while I tell people to target something they're passionate about, if you're into snowboarding, go after ski resorts or target some big fish.

Yeah.

But it's going to take years. And it took 3 years and I ended up having 500 buyers because Carnival Corporation has 10 accounts. But I went to, you start slowly ticking away and connecting with them on LinkedIn, sending emails. When you have a neat product, you send it in the mail, make sure you put your name on it somewhere because everyone is sending neat products in the mail to clients like this.

Right.

And slowly when one person says yes and you have that meeting. Then you tell everyone else you're in. Oh, I'm already doing business with them. So it's kind of, it's a unique way, the herd theory, you know, they, they, meanwhile, do not forget. I see this a lot where they start, people start going after huge accounts and they forget about the Joe's Auto Body down the street, which pays the bills.

Yep.

You must still keep calling on the small and medium-sized businesses while you target the big fish. And have, just have that running in the background your Friday mornings at 9 to 11 AM when you have to do your outreach sheet to those guys.

I love those 2 big tips there. One is it takes longer than you think it's going to take, and the persistence is going to matter in that game. And the second is once you do get in the door, leveraging that as much as you possibly can. And that takes time too. And the third piece that you mentioned about different types of accounts, I was talking with Drew, the CEO president at PPAI. He had a really good example. I'm going to forget the 3 stratifications, but he had like strategic accounts and then a middle layer and then the bottom were transactional accounts. And you and I were probably selling at a time. I mean, you're working with salespeople all the time, but my story goes back several years now as a distributor. But when I was selling, but we had a very industrial market, we were locked into a geographic, right? Whereas now you're not so much locked into a geographical area. But you have these big insurance finance, I always call the boring clients that I love selling to because they, the B2B companies that are boring, buy a lot of merch. But we had these factories and industries and those folks were like the bread and butter because they would be one client Christmas jacket order at the end of every year or employee order at the end of every year. It could be a $5,000 to $10,000 order that was fairly manageable compared to a large complex program. So you're saying pay attention to that book of business. That you are developing and it's not just, I'm gonna land nothing but big fish.

Correct. You, you need to diversify.

Okay.

And eventually, hopefully you land the big fish, multiple big fish, and you drop off the smaller ones or you, yeah, add rep and you pass it on and it's this beautiful, yeah, pyramid of sales.

Every time you mention something, it makes me wanna ask more questions. So diversification, is that a big problem in the industry? Do you see diversification of whether it's industries or Imbalance with clients?

What I see is that there'll be 1 or 2 buyers at a large account and all of their eggs are in that basket.

Yeah.

So I've worked in sales through the financial crisis and the pandemic. And I think that the distributors, especially the newer ones out there, forget, they don't realize how much that can really crush their business. So important to have, of course, healthcare and automotive, and then And hospitality and just mix up as much as you can.

Yeah. So true. Let's jump back into AI for a little bit. There's a lot of the deep thinking, busy work that it can take off of our hands. What do you see we as salespeople need to get better at that we didn't before? One of my premises is, and you tell me if I'm heading the right path here, and that is I was talking to a distributor, to protect their identity, she was about 60, ran a very successful business, and she was at an age where Often you see a stereotype where people, their tech adoption atrophies a little bit. In this case, that's not what's happening with AI. AI is becoming an easy-to-adopt type tool, and particularly we're seeing older folks adopt it faster than younger folks as a macro. This distributor told me, very successful, has a great team, runs a, I'm gonna guess a $10 million book of business, said prior to AI, I was wearing the HR hat. The CEO hat, sales leadership hat, and a little bit accounting type help and doing all 4 roles poorly. Then I was able to augment HR and accounting with AI and then refocus my role. Are you starting to see that with folks? Because here's why I'm asking. I'm rambling through a really bad question to get to this. There's a danger with AI too, is that you can get absolutely buried in it and not get back to the essentials and fundamentals of growing your business.

Right. And AI lies too. So one time it did an analysis and it gave one of my sales reps their last name that I had never told it its last name. I was like, who is this person? Does she have a maiden name I didn't know of? So you do have to be careful. On the other end of the spectrum, I've certainly, when I'm writing NDAs or scopes of work depending on a client and you're adding a new company store, you want them to have skin in the game and you've gotta write.

Yeah.

sort of legal document. It's a great starting point. I wouldn't rely on it 100% for legal or HR matters, but it is definitely helpful and can speed things up before you give it to your attorney.

Yeah. Our new partnership with you means Commscue customers can now work with you in a really cool partnership to help them. It's interesting that your role, you're a sales advisor, you're a sales coach, sometimes you're a therapist, because Sometimes leading a business can be a lonely job, even though we are a pretty, um, collegial industry. But for someone who's curious about a sales advisor, but nervous about bringing in outside help, what's the easiest way to start working with you?

Well, just email. We set up an intro call. The lowest level would be 1 or 2 hours a month just to have someone to bounce ideas off of. What does $5 million look like? What does success look like for them? Oftentimes when I start an engagement, I say, what do we want to accomplish? Where do we want to go? And they don't know. So it's taking a step back and saying, where do I want to go in 5 years? You know, is it more time with my family or is it more sales or is it redistributing the talent on the team? Kind of, they need to have a session themselves. And so sometimes it's just the first couple of meetings where we figure out what the goals are.

Do you think this business, because it's so reactive, doesn't allow us to project that far in our business? So trying to think that far is kind of hard for us?

For sure. But again, you have to protect that time and however you can go out and think big, whether you're, you like to hike or go running, you need to take that time for yourself and block it out saying, I'm going to spend this time thinking big.

Yeah. Yeah. Because—

Visionary for my company.

Yeah. And as someone like you who has managed a very large book of business, you know how all-consuming that can be. So when engagement works really well for you and the customer, what's that look like? What's the rhythms? What are you both gaining from that?

Well, success is growth in sales. So far so good. Everyone I've worked with has grown sales.

Great.

Um, the, so we, whether it's 1 hour or sometimes people want me to train an entire team, so that could be 10 hours. So it's clearly defining the KPIs that we want to achieve and working. Sometimes it's 3 months. My average engagement is 6 months, but I work anywhere from 3 months to 2 years. And at the end of the day, you don't necessarily want to stay on with your therapist forever. I'm hopeful that I can teach them to fish, train them on the tools they need to get to that next level, and then I leave. Now, maybe we decide that a sales manager or some new person is needed and I can help find someone to hire for that role if it's permanent, full-time is needed.

That's cool. I love the frame and the contextualization around that. You mentioned working with teams. I'm just curious what you do as a starter with teams. Is it the same thing you do with executive leaders, but on a more macro scale?

Yes. I like to have one-on-ones and group sessions, you know, depending on the size of the team and what's possible. But what I normally find is that there's some self-limiting beliefs and they don't know it until we get in the weeds. You know, they're, oh, I'm scared to call on so-and-so, or I didn't think that was possible. And We just, again, rip the bandaid off. I say it is possible and we practice, we role play. Then we together, as if there's multiple salespeople that I'm working with, we'll have a monthly call and we talk about what they've learned or their sales goals and just best practice sharing.

Sandy Gonzalez said something to me one time with Sandy with Made to Order. I asked her if she saw a trait that was similar in salespeople that were brand new and salespeople that were 20, 30 years in the business. She said yes, and it's confidence. When you talk with salespeople now, since you're working with both executive owners, you're coaching them, you're coaching their sales team, are you seeing similar traits?

Yes. Well, 2 things. I joke that, I don't know if everyone has TJ Maxx, but here in the South we have TJ Maxx. And so it's kind of a discount store. And I know within 5 minutes of walking in there if I will be buying something from the store. And I feel the same way with sales reps. I know within 5 minutes if they are going to be successful. sales reps and it's a combination of grit, determination. So many people, especially with the digital age, you get things that you want really quickly now.

Yeah.

You know, Amazon, everything delivers fast. So when people don't get what they want really quickly, they give up. And so you can see that in their eyes and how hard they want to work. And the ones that will put in the elbow grease and day after day and try 100 times to get into a big account. That they, the clients that are successful.

Yeah. Grit, fortitude, determination, all of those. That is huge. I know that has become for our industry too, where you have so many quagmires in terms of nice shiny things that can distract you from the core business of growing your accounts. How does having an outside perspective shift the emotional weight of just running a business or managing a book of business?

I think just, I'm an accountability partner.

Yeah.

Having, if it's not me, it can be your church group or Just being able to have someone, you just get in the weeds and you can't see the forest for the trees.

Yeah.

It's helpful to have someone that's not, I have no skin in the game. I'm actually trying to help.

Yeah. That's a great point. When we would recruit speakers, sometimes we recruit speakers who are professional speakers and sometimes we recruit speakers. Most of our speakers just come from the industry and they're running a business and they've got a story to tell. And I'll often send them an email that says, why does LeBron James need a coach? If he, the, one of the greatest basketball players ever lived, why does he need a coach? And that whole perspective and being able to see the game from a different angle as opposed to being right in it, driving down the middle for a layup. You can see other things that are going on the court that we typically can't, particularly in this business where it's high pressure. What do you enjoy about doing what you do?

It's super rewarding. I have a sign in my hallway, it's Shakespeare, and it says, the meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away.

And, mm-hmm.

Though, after my years in sales, I realized I was successful at it. I'm good at it, and I want to teach other people the same. Love it.

When you look back at your career, very successful career running multimillion-dollar book of businesses, I keep mentioning just 'cause I think it's important to understand the scale of what you were managing. What do you think was the biggest mistake that you now realize you would change and alter if you, you jumped back in the game today? And then what was like the biggest thing, you know, you did Well, but you can only really see that in hindsight.

That's tough. Biggest mistake. I probably hired that first person on my team too late. As soon as I hired them, it freed up so much more time to sell.

Yeah.

That was probably my biggest mistake.

What was the thing, you know, you did well then looking in hindsight?

That was, you know, LinkedIn. I kind of came of age During that time. And I think incorporating multiple touchpoints, you pick up the phone, it's still relevant today, email and LinkedIn messaging, or, 'cause emails definitely go to spam, right? So sending them a LinkedIn message saying, did you see my email? I sent it to your work email address.

Yep.

Just having that multifaceted approach and not giving up.

Yeah. You can tell we both came of age during LinkedIn because it's still so vital. I always suggest that people have to have a LinkedIn Premium account. You have to pay. It's an investment in yourself. And the other thing now, they have Sales Navigator and there's so many tools available now. Who knows what they're about to release with all the AI technology that you can layer into that. So, Nicole, is there anything I didn't ask you that you wanted to talk about?

I was thinking that in sales you have 60 seconds to win someone over and the elevator speech, we've all learned that in business school, and it's true, you have 60 seconds. So how you dress, what you say, be memorable in 60 seconds and preparing for the client in advance, knowing where they went to college, something that you can relate to them really quickly. For me, I'd like to tell people that I was the mascot for the University of Tennessee and I want to be memorable very fast. And so somehow I try to work in college football into the equation. In 60 seconds, especially during football season.

Yeah.

So just be memorable and that will help you down the road staying in touch with your clients and prospects.

I love that because being memorable and being remembered is huge and it's a fundamental, but it's so critical, especially since the world's gotten noisier. Nicole, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.