Tales of Misadventure with Nicole Donnelly

Poor Leadership = Opportunity

• Nicole Donnelly • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Who knew that 100,000 miles, 75 hotel stays, a lot of missed family dinners, and one soul-crushing board meeting could turn into the opportunity of a lifetime? On today’s episode, Nicole chats with Wesleyne Greer, founder and owner of Transformed Sales, about the "aha" moment that launched her entrepreneurial journey, poor sales leadership, the blunder of trying to be everything to everyone, and the marketing advice that every business needs.

ABOUT WESLEYNE GREER
Wesleyne is a seasoned sales and leadership professional with over 15 years of experience managing multi-million dollar teams. Inspired by her love for sales and passion for coaching, she launched Transformed Sales to help businesses achieve sales goals by providing sales leadership training and developing good B2B sales leadership. With a strong track record for driving revenue through sales, marketing, and ongoing customer support, Wesleyne has earned numerous accolades, including multiple Sales Team of the Year and Sales Excellence Awards. 

HIGHLIGHTS

  • 1:52 - How an extroverted introvert spends a free day 
  • 4:29 - Poor leadership equals opportunity and turns a steadfast employee into a fierce entrepreneur
  • 7:42 - The mishap of 2020 that transformed the heart of a company and revealed Wesleyne’s superpower
  • 10:12 - Nicole shares her aha moment
  • 11:15 - Niching down in your business
  • 13:17 - Don’t be too generic - Wesleyne shares some of the best marketing advice out there

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Hey there. Thanks for joining us for Tales of Misadventure, a podcast all about business blunders on this podcast. Nicole Donnelly, founder of DMG Digital, talks to entrepreneurs and learns how they turn their lemons into lemonade. DMG Digital is a content marketing agency focused on helping manufacturers attract new buyers through digital self-serve. Nicole Donnelly is a fourth generation entrepreneur, a girl mom and an avid traveler. Now let's head into a Tale of Misadventure with your host, Nicole Donnelly. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tales of Misadventure. I am so honored and delighted to have Wesleyne on the show today. Wesleyne, how are you this morning? I am fantastic. I'm so excited to be here. Very cool. I'm so excited to have another fellow female entrepreneur in the house representing the females. Yes. So awesome girl power. And I know you are a fierce boy mom. I love seeing all of your posts with your very handsome boys on LinkedIn. It's amazing. So. So I'll just give you a, I want to give a quick introduction to to our audience about who you are and how, your amazingness. So what you have been in sales and leadership for 15 years and you have managed multimillion dollar teams and married your love for sales and your passion for coaching at your company Transformed Sales and Wesleyne has a strong track record for driving revenue through sales, marketing and ongoing customer support and has earned numerous accolades including multiple Sales Team of the Year and Sales Excellence awards. Man, that's amazing. I'm honored to have you on the show today, Wesleyne. Thank you for being here. Thank you. I'm excited, excited to be here with you today. Yeah. So let's dive in. So I like to start with the first question I like to ask is just completely non business related. Or it could be, I guess, depending on your answer. But Wesleyne, tell me if you could spend your day doing whatever you wanted, wherever you wanted, and with whomever you wanted, what would you do? Ha, That's a good one. I am what I like to call an extroverted introvert, so I would love to be by myself. Really? Absolutely! By myself. I would say me and God, as my kids say. Just myself, God, reading a book on the beach. Literally, that is what I would be doing. That's amazing. Now, what book would you be reading? Whoo. You know, I am such a multifaceted person and I read so many different books. What book would I be reading? I would probably That’s if you’re reading the Bible. I was going to say, because like what I have on my desk right now is a book that I am in the midst of reading, and it's called Discerning the Voice of God, recognizing when He's speaking. So I might be reading that. I am also reading a book right now called The Power of One More by Ed Mylett. I love Ed Mylett. He is amazing. He has his podcast. Every time I listen to his podcast, I’m so, I just feel so empowered afterwards don’t you? So pumped. Yeah. Very cool. I love it. So you're an extroverted introvert. Sometimes I can relate to that. I am a hardcore extrovert,- Absolutely but I love my alone time too. So I'd be on the beach with you just sitting quietly. Leave me alone and let me be in my book. Absolutely. I took a seven day vacation by myself in December, and that's what it was. It was so good. I mean, because, you know, as a sales person, as a coach, consultant and speaker, I'm always around people. I'm always talking. And so it really helped me to reset, recenter and just, you know, it was so good. Oh, that's so nice. I love it. Well, cool. So I would love to learn more about kind of how you decided that you wanted to start your own business. Right. I think starting a business is is not for the faint of heart, you know? So I would just love to hear your story. Our podcast is really all about, you know, really celebrating everyone's entrepreneurial journey and celebrating the mistakes and how how like kind of flipping the script on mistakes and regret as seeing them as opportunities rather than, you know, these failures that are setbacks that, you know, set you back. So I would love to just like dive into your history a little bit more and just, when did you first know that you wanted to start a business? What what took you there? So if you would have known Wesleyne six years ago, you would never have thought that I would be an entrepreneur, a business owner, because I completely thought that at this point in my life I would be the global VP of Sales, Chief Sales Officer at some large corporation. However, there was a period in time where it was October of a year, and I remember this very distinctly because on Halloween I was on Facetime with my kids in Norway. So I can distinctly remember this. But this period of this month of October, I literally was from California to Florida, Norway, London, Scotland. Like literally, I was all over the world. And so that month ended with a board meeting, and I presented what the team had done for that year. All of the fantastic things we’ve done. I sat down and they were like, That's it. That's all that you guys have done. That’s all you have to show. And I was like, Oh my goodness, do you realize that I have literally spent I think at that point I spent like 75 nights in a hotel. Like that year. And I'm like, those are that's nights away from my kids, I’d flown 100,000 miles that year. Like that’s time away from my kids. And so in that moment, I said nothing that I do will ever please you. Ever. And so literally, I sat in that meeting and I was like, Yeah, I think I'm done. And that's when my friends say, when Wesleyne is done, she's done. And so within two weeks, I formed my business. Now I will say I still continued to work. I work in that place. I worked as an International Sales Manager for nine months. It took them six months to realize I was checked out. So this is why I am so passionate about leaders, because it took my boss six months to realize I was only giving them 100%. I wasn't giving them 150 or 175%- Yeah. like I did before And so, yeah, that is my entrepreneurial journey. Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. So it really it was kind of like the catalyst for you was poor leadership. And you were like, I'm going to do it better. I'm going to do a different I'm going to show ... I'm going to help people see what good sales leadership looks like and I'm going to help those companies build up their sales leadership so that they're raising their teams the right way. That's super inspiring. Yeah. Literally it was and nobody has ever really taken my story and put it in that little nugget like that. But you're right, poor leadership is literally why I started my company focusing on leadership development. Yes, I love it. Very cool. So. So how many years have you been in business now? Has it been five years, you said? It has been five years. Yes. So I started in 2018. That’s amazing. So I'm sure in those five years you have had your fair share of mishaps, mistakes, blunders, failures, all of that, right? Like, entrepreneurship is absolutely a rollercoaster. So let's let's take a trip down memory lane. I want you to tell me. Let's open up the book on Transformed Sales Wesleyne, tell me a story about a time that just where everything just went wrong. What did it ... What happened? So in March 2020, I literally lost 50% of my contracts. Like within a two week period, literally every single day, I would get a call or text or an email from somebody like, Oh, we're going to put this on hold. Oh, we don't have any money. Like, no, no, no, no, no. And everything in the pipeline dried up. And so I literally was at a point where I was like, Oh, my goodness, what am I going to do? Did I make the wrong choice? If I worked for a company, at least they would be like, work from home, like, you're good, you're a remote employee, just stay and work from home. So that hit my confidence that as a business owner, I was like, maybe I didn't make the right choice. Maybe my services are valuable enough. However, I took that pain, I took that challenge. And what I did is I really allowed the extra time that I had because I know a lot of extra time and I got focused on the government programs that were available for small businesses- Nice. and I I got the first round of PPP and literally within 2020, like within a six month period in 2020, I helped small businesses get like over $1,000,000 in government money. Like, I was, like, really, really good at it. That’s amazing. And because I had that breathing room, I reinvented the business. Like Transform Sales today is very different than it was back then. What was what's different? What did you do differently? So when I first started my business, like so many people, I thought I could be all things to all people. I thought I could do it all. And I was like, Oh, I'm good at sales. I'm good at marketing, I'm good at business strategy. I'm good at this. And so I was trying to do too much, And I realized that I was ... I didn't enjoy it. Like, the part I really enjoyed was the coaching, the sales strategy, that piece specifically. Just because I'm good at it, doesn't mean I have to do it for you. And I also realized the type of businesses that I like to work with, like, yes, there are like I worked with frozen custard shops. I've worked with insurance agents. I worked with assisted living. And yes, I can do all of that and I can do it fantastically but what I really love is that complex B2B sale. I love working with businesses that have long sales cycles big, you know, they're selling big capital equipment or things like that. Like that's where my passion lies. That’s what gets me excited. So I was able to let go of that. So literally what was a bad thing actually ended up being good because the clients that I lost were the clients I didn't really want to work with anyways. So it worked out. That's amazing. I have to tell you, I've had a very, very similar. My business is this is my three year anniversary with my business this month and same very similar experience. When I first started, I was like, I can do it all. I'm fractional marketing. I'm going to run your whole marketing department. We're going to do everything. We're going to do your email marketing. We're going to do content marketing. We're going to do all your paid search. We're going to do it all for you. And I quickly learned that, yeah, it's not scalable, number one, and when you try to do so much, you can't really do it all really, really, really well. Right? And so I had a very similar thing to where, you know, I just had to, you know, realize over time I was like, you know what? I'm really, really good at content marketing. Like, that is my zone is like content creation and content strategy, and that's where we need to live. So that's so funny. So I think for any new businesses out there, I wonder, though, do you think every business owner needs to go through that kind of experience to figure that out? I do, because I think if you get like sometimes people who start so, so niche, they they get their fear of missing out, right? Like they get the FOMO, like, Oh, but I could do this, but I could do that. But what about this? But what about that? And so, like now I don't, I work with more established businesses, but when I have friends or people that I know and they're in that startup mode, I really help them focus on like, you're going to burn yourself out. And here's the reason why and here's my story. Like, learn from what I did, don't make the same mistakes too. And I think that if they have somebody who's leading them and guiding them along that path, they'll do it. But most people aren't going to just do that because we're dynamic. Humans are dynamic. There's so many things we're good at and so many things that we think we can do. But I think for me, what I always ask startups or entrepreneurs or new business owers is what is that thing that you can do for 100 hours a week, not get paid and still love it? That is the thing you need to do in your business. That is what you should focus on. So my coach, she she gave me this really great exercise, Wesleyne, where she had me write on a Post-it note. Everything in my business that I did every day. And I had to rate them on how much I enjoyed that task. And it was like super helpful for me to just see on the floor, like everything I do, like visually and rate it, and then I kind of like organize them, and it helped me get real clear on what those things that I loved doing that's what I needed to be doing more of and the things that I didn't love doing, I needed to figure out a way how to delegate, automate, you know, offload this, those things to other people on the team. So that was like a real eye opening experience for me. So I think that's great advice. Okay, so I have just a few more questions for you. One is how have you marketed your business, in the past and what's worked and what hasn't worked for you? Oh, man. Marketing. You know, I used to think that I was a marketing person and that was one of the business blunders that I had. Right. And then I was like, Oh, no, no, no. This is not like a for real thing. Like when somebody's website goes down, I don't actually care that it goes down. Like that doesn’t affect me? And they're like emailing and I'm like, Yeah, this is not my thing. So I had to completely let that go. So when I think about the kind of marketing that has not worked, it being too generic, right? So when I first started, I would look at all the things everybody out there was doing and I would try to pattern what I saw. And I'm like, Oh, they're doing this. I'm going to try that. Oh, they're doing that. I want to do that too. And so it was kind of being like that cookie cutter copying, seeing what other people were doing. And so what works for me now is like doing my own thing. Like everybody's like, Oh, I don't even know if Clubhouse, is still a thing. Oh, like, TikTok is a big thing. Like, you should get on TikTok, Oh, do Instagram. Oh, do this. Oh, do that. I'm like, Yeah, that's just not what I'm doing, right? Like, LinkedIn for me is where it’s most important. Now I'm working on a personal branding type thing where, yeah, that's more of the Instagram kind of crowd. So yeah, I'm going to use that. But for what I talk about, sales and leadership, that's LinkedIn is where I need to be. So that being everything to everybody and trying to copy what other people are saying and also listening to these fly by night people who've never actually done things in their life, like I'm like when I look at your bio, your history, like you were a marketing associate at a tiny startup for three years and now you're trying to tell everybody how to market everything. So like those, I would say our marketing blunders that I've overcome. Yes. So you're, you're saying avoid the shiny objects syndrome, which I think is a lot of times what people do in marketing is they see the shiny object like the TikTok or the Clubhouse and like I got to do that. And just really stay focused and centered on, like you said, LinkedIn is a great place for you because that's where your customers are. Your ideal customers are on LinkedIn. So starting with really understanding and knowing who are my customers? Where do they like to eat, drink and play? And I need to be where they are. And, you know, instead of just trying to go along with what everyone else is doing. Listen to your customers. That's really great. Love it. Wesleyne, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I'm so grateful for your time and I would just love to if you could just share your contact information. If, how can people reach you if they want to connect with you, get to know you and get to experience more of your magic. The one best way is LinkedIn. So I'm just Wesleyne. The only one there is on LinkedIn. Follow me. Connect with me. Let me know that you heard me on the Tales of Misadventure. Thank you. And thank you so much for joining our show. We wish everyone out there a wonderful, wonderful day. And just make sure you see your failures as opportunities switch, flip, flip the script on your regret and see them as blessings and you will go far. Tales of Misadventure is produced, edited and moderated by Julie Basello with Basello Media Music by Marcus Wei. Special thanks to our amazing guests and the entire DMG digital team. Visit us at DMGDigital.io. to get access to all our podcast interviews and other helpful resources. And if you'd like to get updates on the latest and greatest, please sign up for our email newsletter. We'll see you next time for another episode of Tales of Misadventure. Until then, keep falling forward.

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