EP261: Nikki Rausch - 5 Steps in a Sales Conversation Every Bookkeeping Business Owner Should Know

Nikki Rausch: It's horrible when we meet somebody who's selling to us and they just treat us like a wallet. Like, I'm just trying to get into your wallet. I don't really care about you as a person. So making sure that you're establishing that positive first impression is really, really important. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success. To help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fantastic one. Our guest is a sales expert and founder of yoursalesmaven.com who has over 25 years of selling experience to many companies and organizations, including Hewlett-Packard and NASA. Nicki Roche, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you, Nicki. And sales is such a great conversation. It's so needed. You can never get good enough at it. And when you do get good at it, great things happen in your business. And so, Nicky, it's great to have you here. But before we get into talking about sales, let's hear from you about your career journey leading up to this point.

Ad Read: Okay. Well, again, thank you for having me. I'm so honored to be here. You mentioned in my bio that I've been in sales for over 25 years. I started in tech sales, so in technology. And did that for many years. I was a traveling road warrior for many years, covering a very large territory, selling to some of the bigger companies that you mentioned a couple in, in the bio. And during that time, while I was traveling and selling and building all of these relationships, because the way that I, I worked at the manufacturer level, so at the manufacturer level, we, our customers were kind of multitiered. We had distributors that we worked with who then sold our product to dealers, and dealers then sold it to end users. And then we also had direct dealers that we supported. And then we also would go out and work with end users who wanted to understand about our product, learn about our product, and then we would hook them up with customers. So I'm, I'm used to working with people at multiple levels and building relationships along the way. And during that process, I got really interested in