Episode 83: Nick Boustead – From List Building to Lamborghini’s
Driving sales from 0 to 100 — in less than 4 seconds: like his Lamborghini Gallardo, Nick Boustead’s sales career leaves the competition in the dust.
Now Director of Sales at The Taverna Collection, Nick pops the hood on closing $400,000 deals. Shifting into management meant taking on more responsibility, longer hours, and navigating damage control.
In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Nick hands over the keys to success by sharing how to build effective lists, the top two things you need to get comfortable with to be a closer, and the best ways to stay motivated.
Guest-At-A-Glance
💡Name: Nick Boustead
💡 What he does: He is the Director of Sales at The Taverna Collection.
💡 Company: The Taverna Collection
💡 Noteworthy: Nick started a tennis racket string business in high school, sold saxophones at the music store, and ended up at UNC-Chapel Hill as a chemistry major. In college, he worked at the call center. Then he switched jobs to an SDR, was promoted to BDR, followed by a stint as an Inside Sales Executive, and today, he is the Director of Sales at a luxury and exotic car dealership. And cars are his passion.
💡 Where to find Nick: LinkedIn | Website
Key Insights
⚡The hardest part about being an SDR is maintaining a positive attitude. Working as an SDR at memoryBlue, Nick concluded that it’s crucial to maintain optimism. “Once you start blaming the clients, your lists, the customers or, ‘Other people who have easier clients than me’ — once you start getting into that mindset — I don’t want to say there’s no hope for you because anybody can be pulled out of anything, but to me that is a signal of decline. So I tried very hard to keep an opportunistic mindset because you got knocked down a lot there. ‘Never call me again; Hey, we tried your product, it stinks.’ ‘Cause you’re going to get that rejection, but being able to have that rejection fuel you and be like, ‘Hmm, he just told me my product was terrible, I need to figure out how I can better explain it in 20 seconds to somebody,’ versus, ‘Hmm, he told me my product is terrible, maybe it actually is, or I’ve got a bad client, and this isn’t fair.'”
⚡Rapport is very important for the closing job. As a closer, your main goal is to close deals and get revenue and profit for the company. According to Nick, when he ended up in the closing role at memoryBlue, it wasn’t easy, but in the end, it was a great experience. He shares what could be a key thing for development in this role. “Rapport was always important to me because it just felt so much easier. The people I couldn’t build rapport with, I found it much harder to close and do other things with them. I was always trying to be relatable, transparent, and real with people because it’s very easy to go into a role like that and just be like, ‘Alright, what’s the exact thing I need to say that’s going to have all the right buzzwords for their company?’ And ended up learning that just being real with people was way more important.”
⚡Managing salespeople is an emotional role. After SDR and BDE roles, Nick moved into the car industry and became a manager. As he notes, it was challenging for him. “My only goal is to keep the salespeople’s day frozen so they can sell their cars. I view that as my number one task. But it’s been a struggle; I’ve had to learn. I’m 28, and I’m the youngest member of the entire company. So being able to build that executive presence is something that I do not take lightly, and it took a long time to build. These people I was selling with and now managing saw me in both roles, and it was incredibly challenging. […] You get so invested in people’s lives. I know when somebody’s got a bad back, and they’re going to the chiropractor, and they can’t sell ’cause there’s so much pain, and I know when things are coming up personally, so the management has been a huge transition.”
Episode Highlights
Sales Professional With a Science Background
“To me, the chemistry major really provided two things. One, just the quantitative analysis skills — being able to dig into lists. I was used to manipulating large data sets in Excel, came and used the list building frequently, and analyzed all of that type of thing; the actual content of the major, I don’t use it all. But what I actually consider more important than that is that it taught me how to work.
In high school, I was involved in a lot of activities and did well grades wise, but I didn’t spend that much time studying and really doing the hard stuff. I was in the library. I used to clock my hours — like 45 hours a week or something — on top of going to class. That was just a huge hustle to study. So that really sounds counter-intuitive — that chemistry and hustle go together ’cause they’re not typically associated, but it really taught me how to work. So when I got to memoryBlue, I was like, ‘Only 40 hours a week. This is fantastic. I want to come on Saturdays. I want to work more.’ Because I was just conditioned by that point.”
List Building As a Secret to Success
“List building was the key to everything. I would come in on Saturdays and build more lists. I learned how to program macros so I can help. I programmed code that would just basically copy and paste for you. […] I would only call lists once or twice and then try to build new people, different contexts in the company, or what have you. Obviously, if it was a good list or one provided by the client, stay on that. But where I could, I would build more.”
Rich Experience As a Springboard for the Sales Director Role at The Taverna Collection
“I was just so primed from experience with memoryBlue to hop on. I was ready; it was the right place, right time. And when that opportunity came, I was ready because of the training, experience, confidence, and everything that I’d built up at memoryBlue. […] I was able to take what I had learned and apply it directly. I would not have been nearly as successful at the car dealership, or maybe even at all, if that call had come in my senior year of college, and I’d said, ‘Yes,’ and jumped into it. I think I would have lasted two months; I don’t think I would have been successful at all. So I go to this dealership; they don’t even have a CRM yet. I’m initially involved with picking up the CRM and building the team. But many of the things I learned were so directly applicable to building a drip and giving that structure to the dealership model, and at that point, they really had none.”
Transcript:
Marc Gonyea: Nick Boustead, from Florida, in the house. Nick, what’s up, man?
[00:00:53] Not much, Marc. How are you doing today?
[00:00:55] Marc Gonyea: I’m not in Florida.
[00:00:57] Nick Boustead: That’s fair. I was just saying that was about to get real hot here. So, you’ll be, I’ll be jealous of you in a, in a month or two.
[00:01:03] Marc Gonyea: Got Mr. Corcoran here too.
[00:01:04] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Good morning. Thanks for joining us from South Florida.
[00:01:07] Nick Boustead: Absolutely, guys. Pleasure and honor to be chatting with you.
[00:01:11] Marc Gonyea: Alright, Nick. I’m looking forward to this, for all sorts of reasons. One of the reasons is that, one of my favorite things, I think it’s one of Chris’s too, is to work with people who are smarter than us and you definitely fit that category.
[00:01:21] Nick Boustead: Beg to differ, but I’ll take the compliment.
[00:01:24] Chris Corcoran: That’s a low bar to clear.
[00:01:30] Marc Gonyea: So, Nick, let’s talk about that. I mean, I want to jump to what you’re doing now and we’ll get to that super intriguing and insightful based on what I’ve been watching from afar until you and I do catching up, today. But I think the most important thing is for us, the people who are listening to kind of get to know you a little bit.
[00:01:42] So, why don’t you hop into that? Tell us a little about where you’re from, where you grew up at, what you were like as a kid.
[00:01:48] Nick Boustead: All the way back, born on a dark and stormy night. No, I am a Chicago native. All my family still lives in Chicago, grew up active in a lot of sports. I was on the speech team in High School, which later translated that was, like, my favorite thing to do and in High School. For College, knew I wanted to major in chemistry. Started going to a bunch of different universities ended up…
[00:02:10] Marc Gonyea: So, tell me why you wanted to major in chem?
[00:02:11] Nick Boustead: I took it in, I had an amazing chemistry teacher in High School and always just thought it was really interesting, came fairly easily to me. And of all the major options that you could think of, as a 17 year old high school kid, that was the one that, that just seemed to stick out to me as interesting.
[00:02:27] Marc Gonyea: Siblings?
[00:02:28] Nick Boustead: Only child.
[00:02:29] Marc Gonyea: Only child. And would you, like, so, based upon what you’re doing now, which actually, describe the audience what you’re doing now so we can kind of take the mystery out of that, but we’ll stay with kind of your childhood, a little bit more.
[00:02:39] Nick Boustead: So, I currently run the sales team at a luxury and exotic car dealership, here in Miami.
[00:02:44] Marc Gonyea: Got it. Okay. We’ll leave it at that. You’re certainly in sales and you got into sales when you left school, but when you were younger, obviously a smart kid, did the sales entrepreneurial flair that you’ve got going on and kind of pop up at all?
[00:02:56] Nick Boustead: It did actually. That’s a great question. In high school, I was on the tennis team. That was the only sport I was ever somewhat decent at playing. And I realized that, you know, in tennis, you have to get your rackets restrung and when you play on the team, you go through those a lot and the club was charging like 50 or 60 bucks a racket.
[00:03:13] I realized that the machines are like 120 bucks and the string costs like $3 a racket. So, I started a tennis racket stringing business for a few years in High School and strung everybody on the team, boys and girls tennis teams, my mom plays in the league. I got all her friends. She was cutting me around all their houses and yeah, I sold saxophones at Sam Ash Music store, definitely was a, again, at the time, I never thought of myself as a salesperson or just in sales, but looking back, it’s easy to connect the dots.
[00:03:41] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Excellent. All right, you’re coming up, you figure out where you want to go to school. So, you’re from the Midwest but you have gone to school in the East Coast.
[00:03:47] Just walk us through that process because you went to a really good academic institution, too. So, I want to hear about that.
[00:03:52] Nick Boustead: Sure. Yeah. I basically went on a tour of a lot of different colleges. And really, second I stepped on UNC’s campus fell in love with it. I just thought it was, for me it was very different being in the south. People acted different, dressed different. I saw someone in a seersucker suit. The first minute I got on campus, I was like, “What is going on here?” So, I was just always intrigued by it. They had a phenomenal chemistry program. So, that was obviously a large draw for me. And really from the minute I toured it, it was kind of a dream school.
[00:04:22] I just thought that they had a really good community. It was a public school. So there, it was still affordable. Their out of state tuition was a lot less than some private schools I was looking at and really was a, just kind of clicked when I got there.
[00:04:34] Marc Gonyea: I want to, I know this is a current event, but UK with a, I thought they’re going to pull it off the other night against, against Kansas.
[00:04:38] Nick Boustead: I know, but that was definitely heartbreaking, another championship would’ve been great, but I will take ending coach K’s career in the final four and I can still sleep pretty well. That game I was even more anxious for it, so “Go Heels.” But we’ll get them again. First year with Hubert Davis and he’s got a lot more, I think.
[00:04:56] Marc Gonyea: Excellent. Okay. All right. So, you ended up at Chapel Hill, chemistry major. So, kind of walk us through that because that’s, I think people wonder why a guy who at the UNC Chapel Hill majoring chemistry got his gig started at memoryBlue, but then, also what you’re doing now. So, just kind of walk us through kind of that decision.
[00:05:14] And we’ll go from there.
[00:05:15] Nick Boustead: Absolutely. So, I initially and still loved chemistry, was still fascinated by it ended up completing my major, got a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. I initially thought I wanted to go into research. I did some really cool research while I was there, essentially brain surgery on rats, putting electrodes into rat brains and measuring firings of individual neurons.
[00:05:36] And I got second author on a paper, The American Journal of Neuroscience. And really loved that. But then, I worked there for a whole summer between my junior and senior year and realized that a career in that type of research is spending 12 hours a day with a rat and no other humans. And that quickly lost its draw for me.
[00:05:53] So, at that point I’d decided maybe pre-med was the way to go. I still liked chemistry. I liked talking and interacting with people, but by the time I got to senior year, I was burned out, man. You know, then I took exams and, you know, diddecently on them, but I just couldn’t and I knew I needed at least a year break.
[00:06:07] I actually met a woman named Cassie Sedon, who I’ve kept up with, at a career fair. And she was a sales rep for Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the biggest…
[00:06:16] Marc Gonyea: Okay, what, what year was this?
[00:06:18] Nick Boustead: This was my senior year of college. The…
[00:06:20] Marc Gonyea: So, senior college and you’re like, “Okay. I’m out of med school.” And then you just randomly went to a career fair or were you like…?
[00:06:27] Nick Boustead: Random, I went to a Chemistry career fair.
[00:06:30] Yeah. Literally the chemistry department had, like, a little career fair. There weren’t that many people there. Right. That’s true. I met her at a booth and I shared my dilemma with her and she said she was in a really similar spot. So, she took me out for breakfast and she went over her career and how she kinda got there.
[00:06:47] And I was like, “Hmm, I can use the chemistry degree and I can talk to people and that sounds like a good combo for me.” Caveat was they don’t hire straight out of school. They don’t hire 22-year-old, straight out of school because you’re selling a hundred thousand other microscopes and such. So, I contacted them, sent them my resume, got denied immediately.
[00:07:06] And they were like, “Hey, you need some general sales experience.” And I talked to her and she echoed that she had done the same thing. So, then I started looking for, I kind of knew I wanted to, the DC area was on my radar. This is a good job market. Chapel Hill’s amazing, but it’s basically all centered around university.
[00:07:23] And then, was just looking to get my feet in the water with a sales role. I think I interviewed at, like, Geico too, for some type of sales role there, but the second I read memoryBlue’s description of the job, I was like, “This is it. Like, it’s consulting, I get to work for different clients.
[00:07:36] I get to learn about a lot of different technologies.” And just hooked to that.
[00:07:42] Marc Gonyea: So, Nick, knowing what you know now, I just want to pause on this camp, on the science side of you, how do you relate, like, science or chemistry, what you learned about chemistry or in, being in sales? Because most sales professionals don’t have a science mind or maybe a background.
[00:07:57] Maybe they have a science modeling major, but they don’t have the background or the training that you had. Right? So, talk to me about that.
[00:08:02] Nick Boustead: Yeah. I mean, to me, and the chemistry major really provided two things, one just the quantitative analysis skills, being able to dig into lists I’m used, was used to manipulating large data sets in Excel, came and used the list building frequently and analyzing all of that type of thing.
[00:08:18] The actual content of the major I don’t use at all, but what I actually consider more important than that is it taught me how to work. That was the thing. It taught me how to work. In high school I was involved in a lot of activities, did well with grades wise, but didn’t spend that much time studying and really doing the hard stuff.
[00:08:37] And I told you I was in the library. I used to clock my hours, like 45 hours a week or something on top of going into class. That was a huge hustle to study. So, that’s really, it sounds counterintuitive that chemistry and hustle go together. ‘Cause they’re not typically associated, but it really taught me how to work.
[00:08:53] So, when I got to memoryBlue, I was like, “Well, only 40 hours a week. this is fantastic. I want to come Saturdays. I want to work more.” Because I was just conditioned, by that point.
[00:09:01] Chris Corcoran: In addition to that, weren’t, didn’t you have to have a job in college that, I think, sets you up for a strong career in sales?
[00:09:07] Nick Boustead: Yes, that’s a great memory. Yes. So, in college I worked every year in the call center, calling alumni and asking for donations. So, I did that myself as a caller for two years, then managed the call center my senior year and really loved that experience. Again, at the time, it was just a good college job, right.
[00:09:25] It was, you could study while you were doing it. They gave you, like, a stipend for books, you could eat while you were doing it. It was three and a half hour shifts. And I didn’t take it with any premonition of what the future held. But again, looking back, it’s so easy to connect the dots. I think that was actually more valuable than, you know, 95% of my classes and what it taught me about calling and talking to people.
[00:09:44] Marc Gonyea: And let’s just dig into that real quick so
[00:09:46] Nick Boustead: exactly
[00:09:46] Marc Gonyea: people listening
[00:09:47] Chris Corcoran: And they paid.
[00:09:47] Marc Gonyea: So, what exactly was the job? Like, what did you do, who did you call?
[00:09:50] Nick Boustead: Yeah. So, the company was called Ruffalo Noel Levitz. It was, they had a really good autodialer system. And you would call alumni and ask for donations, pretty simple. So you, they had a script that you had to follow, verify their information, builds a little bit of report, explained what specific school you were calling on or whatever, and then ask for a donation.
[00:10:09] And they first put you, they categorized people in terms of who had never given and never wanted any contact to people who were in contact, but never given, to people who had given a little, to people who’d given a lot. So, you started off and, by the way, UNC was in the midst of a huge scandal during this time, it was rough.
[00:10:27] Initially it was rough calling people and getting told no a lot. But then, as I did it more, I got to talk to some really cool people. People who had done well professionally, and I just loved getting to hear all of their stories and different paths people had taken. Again, at the time, I was a bit confused about where I wanted to go so it was a really cool job in terms of learning how to break the ice with people and hear about so many different stories.
[00:10:52] Marc Gonyea: When did you realize that job was going to help you in your next job? When did you kind of realize, “Well, what I’ve been doing here?”
[00:10:59] Nick Boustead: Yes, senior year, it was really seeing, I didn’t even think about it as anything other than a nice job to have while in college, until senior year.
[00:11:08] When, again, I met that lady Cass at the career fair and she told me about the sales. And then, I was like, “Wait a minute. I got, I got a great resume for this. You know, I’vebeen doing this already for three years and I can cold call. I can talk to people. Let’s do this.”
[00:11:19] Marc Gonyea: That’s interesting. So, okay.
[00:11:21] Chris Corcoran: If you were advising a college student who has aspirations of exploring professional opportunities and sales, would you encourage that person to work at the call center?
[00:11:32] Nick Boustead: A hundred percent. Every college has one and multiple of my friends there who joined, one in particular is now killing it as he was first an account executive for a web development firm, a bigger web development firm. And he’s now a relationship manager there, but multiple people from that call center with me have gone on to careers in sales.
[00:11:52] Again, nobody was really trying to, at the time. So, I would a hundred percent of, if you even just like talking to people and want a pretty sweet job. My other job in college was working in a sorority kitchen, washing dishes. So, it was way better than that. So yeah, I would highly recommend that for any college student who wants to make a few extra bucks and likes talking to people.
[00:12:12] Marc Gonyea: So, Nick, how did you do all this work? ‘Cause I don’t, I mean, Corcoran put a lot of hours in the library, in college, you know,40 hours plus, certainly a week. Hey, how did you have time? How did you manage your time doing all this stuff?
[00:12:24] Nick Boustead: I found one recently. I had schedules, I had to schedule out my days. I worked in a hospital, I volunteered in the hospital, as well, stayed over in the summers to do research.
[00:12:32] And it was hectic. I had every minute of the day planned so much so that I had to buy an old moped and fix it up so I could get to everywhere I needed to go. And yeah, just had to, I had to schedule out every minute of the day.
[00:12:44] Marc Gonyea: You were one of these guys rolling around with a moped before, like, the lift and those guys are littering the town of or wherever with these mopeds.
[00:12:51] Nick Boustead: Exactly. The OG, short distance transport. Yep.
[00:12:55] Marc Gonyea: All right. Okay. So, that’s fascinating. And just another for the people listening out there, I mean, you can do a lot in college to manage your time wisely, but that also translated into memoryBlue. Let’s talk about that.
[00:13:06] So, you ended up at memoryBlue. Thank God, for us. And how was it? Did you ever, do you remember your recruiter or was your initial DM kind of, what kinda got you there? I know you read the job ad, but what else?
[00:13:17] Nick Boustead: Yeah. So, the job ad was awesome. Again, it just, I was so excited about it. I applied to, you know,20 other places and like every senior was very anxious about just getting something.
[00:13:27] So I wouldn’t have to move into my parents’ basement. Right. So, I was, I just was very anxious to get a job, but memoryBlue, from the second I read the ad there’s always, like, the one that I knew I wanted. Tiana was my recruiter. She did a fantastic job of walking me through, you know,DC, scared of the housing market there.
[00:13:45] She helped me with tips on finding apartments and such. So, she was incredible. I did my first interview remote ’cause I was still in Chapel Hill, at the time. Yeah, it was the end of, it was the beginning of my second semester of my senior year. So, I was still in Chapel Hill, at the time and then I ended up driving up.
[00:14:02] I interviewed with Reagan Callahan.
[00:14:05] Marc Gonyea: Wow.
[00:14:05] Nick Boustead: Did the role-play interview. And again, but the complete and utter nervous wreck, you know, I had had this so-called experience, but I was like, “I don’t think this is going to translate.” I had printed the scripts and taped it on every surface in my, my room in the college house that I was in.
[00:14:21] And I stayed at the hotel that was walking distance from boone. There was a hotel right there and I just, I stayed up till like midnight, just practicing the script. I was a complete nutter nervous wreck.
[00:14:30] Marc Gonyea: Wow. Okay. What are you bothered to see? So, you got hired and then who, who’s squad were you on?
[00:14:36] Nick Boustead: Crippen.
[00:14:37] Marc Gonyea: Crippen? Oh.
[00:14:42] Nick Boustead: Exactly. He’s in Tampa now. Yeah. I’m gonna have to see him soon, but yeah, Crippen, Crippen who I still keep up with since the day he was my DM. He was a new DM at the time and I don’t know if I was fully cognizant of that, at the time, I was ready to go. I was obviously super happy to have gotten the job, you know, had just moved there.
[00:14:59] Just the idea of work in general, you know, your firstprofessional job is pretty crazy. So, I got there, Crippen was an amazing mentor to me and really helped me, you know, harness and, my energy, I got put on, my first two clients were Talk-Point and AVTEC, there was a big shoes to fill. Sadie Newberg worked on top point and absolutely killed it.
[00:15:20] So, I was coming in to this client who had seen a lot of success. And now there’s me, who’s 22 years old and anxious about the opportunity. And basically just worried I was going to mess it up. And then, AVTEC was, like, a radio communication company for trains. So, you had to call a lot of train operators.
[00:15:37] So, two very different clients.
[00:15:39] Marc Gonyea: So, you’re working for the Duke fan.
[00:15:42] Nick Boustead: I’m working for a Duke fan. I would exert already hostile work environment, yep.
[00:15:45] Marc Gonyea: Lameness Duke fan around Josh Crippen, right? Yeah, it’s a Duke coach K’s son. And then, you got Sadie, was the killer. She’s an assassin. So then, you, you got big shoes to fill. And so, how did that go? Like, what was it like learning how to do it?
[00:16:00] Nick Boustead: It went well, my mentor was Alan Cole and he and the whole team that I remember, him, Brook Mcvicker, Paul Dreyfus, Dan Bor, especially, the whole environment there was really great and helped build my confidence. I remember Dan Bor came up to me and he was like, “Hey dude, you’re killing it.”
[00:16:17] And it was before I had actually started booking meetings, he was like, “I’ve been here a while.” He’s like, “You’re going to do fine.” And just the people there really helped build my confidence because I had some coming in, but I was still completely new thing. And, as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s a lot more difficult to cold call people who are not expecting your call in the middle of their workday versus, like, alumni of your school, in the evening, who have given $10,000 to the school before. It was sometimes less friendly, but certainly rewarding.
[00:16:46] There’s a lot to be said for those small moments, right?
[00:16:49] Marc Gonyea: Like, Dan Bor probably doesn’t even remember telling you that when you started.
[00:16:52] Nick Boustead: Yup.
[00:16:52] Marc Gonyea: And, like, you’ll remember that for the rest of your life.
[00:16:54] Nick Boustead: The rest of my life, him and Brook Mcvicker, they both, within the first, like three weeks I started pulled me aside and told me that. And again, doubt either of them, remember it.
[00:17:01] But, you’re exactly right. It’s the little encouragements like that make it look different.
[00:17:06] Marc Gonyea: So, of that crew, who is the baller at the time, who’s the best besides yourself, who is really good?
[00:17:11] Nick Boustead: Yeah. I’m trying to remember. Steve Garner was on AVTEC with me and then, she didn’t start when I started, but Carly Armentrout.
[00:17:20] Oh, yeah, that came onto Crips team. And she was a little shy at first and then very quickly came out of her shell. And I was always extremely jealous of her organizational prowess.
[00:17:29] Marc Gonyea: This is crisis when I’m like, “Man, I, there’s no hope for me.” So, you’re just get on telling me you worked at the hospital, you worked the Ruffalo, the phones, you did the research, you’re washing dishes, you’re chemistry major and everything is organized and fixed yourself up a moped.
[00:17:44] So, you’re pretty, you’re highly organized and arbitrage is coming in and fluxing down on your organizational skills.
[00:17:50] Nick Boustead: Oh, absolutely. A hundred percent. Yep. Taking notes on everything, color coding and let’s just very. I think we may have worked on AVTEC together, for a bit. I don’t remember, but yeah, she was out for blood.
[00:17:59] Marc Gonyea: What did you get good at?
[00:18:01] Nick Boustead: Yeah. For me, I was always welcomed with the criticism. I would go to Crip and ask for Kali Val’s because I could tell it was something I was improving pretty quick at and really enjoyed that. So, I would say the Kali bells are huge for me. List building was also, I’d say one of the main secrets to success, list building was key of everything.
[00:18:20] I would come in on Saturdays and build more lists. I learned how to program macros. So, I could, I had help, I programmed code that would basically copy and paste for you.
[00:18:29] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, you were legendary for that.
[00:18:32] Nick Boustead: So, yeah, I knew, I just knew intuitively that calling the fresh lists you got more results. So, I would only call lists, you know, once or twice and then try to build new people, different contexts in the company or what have you, obviously, if it was a good list or one provided by the client, stay on that. But where I could, I would build more.
[00:18:51] Chris Corcoran: So, talk a little bit about, I remember there was like this “Nick posted Macro Excel kind of on the underground black market.” That you may or may not have been charging people for.
[00:19:01] Nick Boustead: I was not charging people. I did not charge people.
[00:19:04] Chris Corcoran: Okay. Share with the listeners just a little bit about what you built and how it helps you.
[00:19:09] Nick Boustead: Sure. So it was a program called Click Macros and it essentially just let you program in like keyboard clicks. So, it would let you program in keyboard clicks and then, you know, control C control Vand alt tab to switch between different programs.
[00:19:23] Again, basic stuff like a programmer would laugh if I have coding, but it was that same type of logic. And so, I would open up like a hundred tabs in Chrome with all different people from ZoomInfo and it would, it knew, I made it select the name, only the information I needed, the name, email, phone number, it, the macro would copy it, flipped to the Excel application, pasted in Excel, flip back to ZoomInfo close that tab and then repeat.
[00:19:47] So, it would just go through all the tabs and pull it all into Excel. Then you had to format it in Excel. There’s the chemistry, you know, I had this big, messy data in Excel that I then had the format down and yeah, taught a few other people, on the team, how to do that and was definitely an efficient way to build this, at the time.
[00:20:03] Marc Gonyea: Corcoran. It’s like, you remember those movies from the eighties where like, when everything started getting computerized and, like, the 10-year-old kid takes over, like, the war games, he’s got control of the nukes in Russia and the nukes Zoom’s call memorably. Like, “What the hell is going on?
[00:20:14] What’s going on over there? Like, we walked through all out Zoom don’t worry, we’re good, Nick.” But like, that’s an example of you just being extremely resourceful.
[00:20:21] Nick Boustead: I appreciate it.
[00:20:22] Marc Gonyea: Highly admirable.
[00:20:23] Nick Boustead: It was fun at the time, for sure.
[00:20:25] Chris Corcoran: Hey, so Nick, what was the hardest part about being an SDR?
[00:20:29] Nick Boustead: Great question. The hardest part was keeping a positive attitude and keeping that optimism. That’s something I, I feel I learned at memoryBlue that I’ve kept to current day because I saw, just by being there, once you start blaming the clients or your lists or the customers or “Other people have easier clients than me.” Once you start getting into that mindset I don’t want to say there’s no hope for you, ’cause anybody can be pulled out of anything. But that to me is a signal of a decline. So, I tried very hard to just keep an opportunistic mindset and always just view it because you got knocked down a lot there, you know,I, “Never call me again. Hey, we tried your product, it stinks. What have you?” ‘Cause you’re going to get that rejection.
[00:21:11] But being able to have that rejection fuel you and be like, “Hmm, he just told me my product was terrible. I need to figure out how I can better explain it in 20 seconds to somebody.” Versus, “Hmm. He told me my product is terrible. Maybe it actually is. I’m on a bad client. This isn’t fair.” So, being able to keep that mental attitude up I’d say was, was really important.
[00:21:32] Marc Gonyea: And what suggestions did you have for people to keep their attitude up? ‘Cause, you know, that happens all the time.
[00:21:36] Nick Boustead: Sure. I would say for me, a large part of what did that, do you guys still do PPM meetings? I’m not sure. Okay. Cool. So, for me, that was a big thing, if there was some talk around the office, it’s like, “Ah, Boustead got the easy clients, you know,blah, blah, blah..” Or “What have you?”
[00:21:51] I would switch to a PPM and, you know, really latched onto those as a way I could hone the craft and kind of give myself the confidence back. Like, “Hey, I can do this for any client and like work really hard on when we can book a meeting or two.” So, that helped keep the confidence up.
[00:22:04] Chris Corcoran: So, explain to the listeners a little bit about PPM and how you were able to kind of freelance and express yourself.
[00:22:10] Nick Boustead: Sure. This is my favorite part of this whole podcast is that, is champions pool still a thing?
[00:22:15] Chris Corcoran: Oh yeah. Oh.
[00:22:16] Nick Boustead: Beautiful.
[00:22:17] Marc Gonyea: Breakdown for everybody what it is from the view of an SDR champion.
[00:22:20] Nick Boustead: So, champions pool was, you guys, I don’t remember the formula you used, but you would put this pool of money, basically, up for grabs.
[00:22:29] And the way that you would get yourself a ticket into that pool was by booking a PPM meeting. So, a meeting on a client who wasn’t one of your normal one or two clients, it was extra work on top of that. So, you were still expected, you know, it would be heavily frowned upon if you booked PPN meetings, but weren’t hitting quota for your clients.
[00:22:47] That’s kind of an incentive for people who were already hitting quota, they could earn some extra cash. So, you got paid the time, I think we got paid $200, something like that, 250. We got paid a commission for each one. And there was a number of clients you could pick from your DM, would probably have two or three.
[00:23:04] So, you would go to your manager and he would say, “Hey, we’re calling on.” For me it was Tiger Analytics, a lot of the time. And they would give you the scripts and they would give you the list and you would go to town.
[00:23:13] Chris Corcoran: The great equalizer. Right?
[00:23:14] Nick Boustead: Great equalizer. Exactly. Then nobody can say you have an easy client because they had access to the same PPM meeting.
[00:23:19] So, for me, that was, I was like champions pool became a thing. I started in summer, like July or August. And champions pool became a thing that December or January, like, you know, four or five months into working there. And that was amazing. That really, because now I had this huge monetary incentive. And even at the time I was still obsessed with cars.
[00:23:41] I wanted to buy a car at the time. So I was like, ” This is how we’re going to do it.” Like, “Okay, daddy needs new car let’s book some PPM.” So, I latched onto those a lot and just came up with a methodology. Again, I attribute that a lot to list building and really enjoyed that champions pool, you know, you wouldget a slice of it.
[00:24:00] And you get two or $3,000, sometimes less, sometimes more. And it worked really, really well. And then, I figured out how to hack it, in a way, hack the psyche of it. I realized that this pattern kept happening where people would wait, nobody would book a PPM meeting like three weeks into the month, right?
[00:24:16] Nick Boustead: Nobody, because everybody was focused on hitting quota for their clients. So, nobody would book a PPM meeting for the first two, three weeks of a month, then everybody would be like, “Hey, there’s this $10,000 pool sitting there that nobody’s grabbing.” So, everybody would skirt at the end to get the meetings in. And it would usually be split like 10 different ways, 8, 10 different ways, what have you. So, I realized that this pattern was happening. So, in January of 2017 I built crazy lists, like last three weeks of January. I just built monster lists and knew I was going to call on them. And then, in February, by the end of the first week in February, the shortest month of the year, a lot of people already use that as an excuse, by the end of the first week in February, I don’t remember the exact number, but I believe I booked eight PPM meetings.
[00:25:00] By the end of the first week of February. So now, psychology wise, everybody else is like, “Oh, well, if I get one now I’m going to be splitting one ninth of it with most of them, it’s a short month. I’m just going to hit border. Let’s hit it in March.” And I ended up getting all champions pulled up on.
[00:25:14] Chris Corcoran: Wow.
[00:25:15] So, in many ways you were a man before his time. Now, in today’s memoryBlue, we have the PPM exclusive SDRs. That’s all they work. And they get paid handsomely because it’s, again, since you’re paying per meeting and you could pay addition for every meeting that you get and then we have that, they have access to all the pools.
[00:25:35] And so they are the ones that can rake in 15 grand a month. Yeah. You would’ve had a field day.
[00:25:42] Nick Boustead: That probably would’ve been bad for my health at some, somewhere. Now that, being able to just unlocking that, I mean, even though I only got the whole champions pool one month, just seeing that come in to completely change,
[00:25:53] recalibrated my expectations for what I wanted to earn. It was incredibly motivating. ‘Cause I was like, “That was amazing.” I almost immediately went out and bought a rusted out Miata.
[00:26:05] Marc Gonyea: I was like, whose Miata is that in the parking lot?
[00:26:10] What you said? Yeah, he took his shit. He bought him Miata. When she rolled up with that.
[00:26:17] Nick Boustead: I know about. What a time, and it’s money, because everybody thought about it as this like huge flex, it was $1,500. Like it, was like, “Oh, you got a sports car.” It’s like, “Nah, it’s a 1991. Miata.” The airbags didn’t work. I couldn’t get it to pass inspection. I had to drop the steering column in the parking lot of boon.
[00:26:31] It was hilarious. But then, that was also a great thing for me because I would drive it to work, top-down, you know, loved it, absolutely loved the heck out of it. And I was like, this is a, it was a daily reminder of like why I was working. So, that started my, again, I had been obsessed with cars my whole life, and that was like the reason, I now had a reason why I wanted to hit champions pool again. It wasn’t just to have a lot of money. It was to be able to buy the next car, go to a track day. And I would put pictures of the next car I wanted at the top of my computer. And that really drove my motivation.
[00:27:03] Marc Gonyea: I get it, dude. We just had some legends work at the company corporate. Like, Nick, this is legendary what you’re talking about right now. And then, I mean, this would never happen, but I just like daydream about the Clash of the Titans. If you get some of these people, who’ve been through the company, put them all, put them all on a broom, or you could just take any technology company and get them whatever they needed.
[00:27:23] Just some of these folks. All right. So, wow. I’m just taking this in right now. Be quite honest with you.
[00:27:28] Chris Corcoran: I like the strategery.
[00:27:29] Marc Gonyea: Yeah.
[00:27:30] Chris Corcoran: Of, “Hey, this is what happens. I’m going to load up early. I’m going to pick the shortest month of the year. I’m going to put eight up on the board quick and no one else is even going to sniff the pool.”
[00:27:39] And he’s just going to walk it down and walk away with the whole thing.
[00:27:42] Marc Gonyea: It’s like psychological warfare, right? It’s like walking into the office and, like, there’s guy speaking in Russian, just like talk over the microphone, say “There’s no hope for you.” It’s wild.
[00:27:53] Chris Corcoran: Hey, Dan Bor and Brook Mcvicker, thanks for the well-wishes. I’m going to go take all your money.
[00:28:00] Nick Boustead: Hey guys. Great job complimenting me and getting my confidence up. I love you. Appreciate you and hope you didn’t won champions pool.
[00:28:07] Marc Gonyea: Nick, do you have any, any, like, rivals, but, like, healthy rivals in the office? Was there somebody else who’s, like, kind of trying to gun for you at all?
[00:28:13] Or?
[00:28:14] Nick Boustead: 100% and still one of my best friends to this day, Bruce Horner.
[00:29:15] Marc Gonyea: Bruce, of course.
[00:29:19] Nick Boustead: That guy. I knew. We became friends there. We were rivals first, but I’ll never forget and I can never say enough good things about him. He’s still killing it. And again, we still keep in great touch, but I’ll never forget. It was a month he started getting champions pool as well. He joined about six months after I did. And there was a month where we had both hit champions pool. I think he had hit it more and he had killed us. We had a record month. And the month ended on a Friday, I believe that month. So, he’d just gotten this big payday, whatever.
[00:29:46] And on Saturday I came in to list-build and he was there and that’s this guy. I was like, “You just killed your quota, you just hit the champions pool as well and you’re back and on Saturday list building.” So, we would compete, but it was always the better of both of us. It was a great time.
[00:30:00] Marc Gonyea: Man. I gotta track that guy down.
[00:30:01] Nick Boustead: Absolutely.
[00:30:02] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, I could see, definitely, “I’m not gonna let Boustead boot all that money. You crazy. I’m not going to have to…”
[00:30:07] Nick Boustead: And this is, while we’re on the topic of them, I don’t know if you remember, but we had, it was Halloween and this is, I’ll jump forward a little bit, we were both on Tommy’s team. We were standing outside and Tommy was like, “I want some sales competition. Like, we got to have a bet. Who’s going to go upstairs and book a meeting? It’s Halloween.” And so, we decided that if he won, I was going to have to ride to work on my moped, wearing a banana suit, which would have been near fatal. And if I won, he’s going to have to shave his head. So, ran back up the stairs after it, sprinted back up the stairs and suffice to say he had some hair to grow back after it.
[00:30:43] Marc Gonyea: Oh, man. All right. So,
[00:30:46] very good times. So, you’re doing your SDR thing and then what did you realize you kind of wanted to do next?
[00:30:51] Nick Boustead: So, I quickly realized, just in terms of my life, at that point, going back to chemistry sales. I had thought, I had actually talked with my initial mentor, like a year in, and the more I learned about tech, the more tech was, what I realized, the place I wanted to be, in terms of sales, at that point. Because you get way more involved. This chemistry side of things is extremely regulated. You always have a technical salesperson with you. It seemed a lot more, you know, not as much room to have these different strategies and do these different things I was doing.
[00:31:23] And I was also just in love with memoryBlue at that point. When you guys have sent me on a vacation to the Bahamas where I rented a boat with two of my best friends. I mean, I was like, the gong, it’s just the whole atmosphere there. I was like, “I’m not leaving.” So, I quickly decided, Hey, that chemistry sales thing, like, maybe someday in the future, but, like, I want to kill it here first.”
[00:31:40] And then, I moved offices like 11 times, but at some point in my SDR life I moved to within range the man, the myth, the legend, Tommy Gassman.
[00:31:47] Marc Gonyea: Tommy Gassman.
[00:31:49] Nick Boustead: It took me one time hearing him walk around the office with the tennis ball behind his back on a, you know, closing somebody. And I was like, “I gotta get on this guy’s team.”
[00:31:57] I was like, “Whatever it takes, I gotta, I gotta get on this guy’s team.” So, that was, I knew the DM role interested me. I always liked coaching and did that, you know, in college, the call center, but again, literally it, oh, that’s all it took. One time of hearing Tommy I knew I wanted to be on his team. So, I kept up with him and eventually role opened up and I gunned for that role.
[00:32:16] Marc Gonyea: And what’d you learn from that role? And I just talk about how you got into closing. ‘Cause I want to definitely spend some time talking about what you’re doing now. Sure.
[00:32:21] Nick Boustead: So yeah, in that role. Again, work with just absolutely incredible people. Joey Cohen, Marco Johnson, two people I still talk to, to this day, surrounded by a great team.
[00:32:31] Shiflett was there when I was there. He helped me. He was fantastic and really loved that role. I mean, that’s where I would think I really learned my sales chops. Tommy was just an amazing, I can’t say enough about him. You guys obviously know him extremely well. I can’t say enough about him. I have, to date, never met somebody I consider as skilled as he is, in terms of sales and closing. So, that was amazing. I got to build my role, the BDE role, it was called, which was setting meetings when we lose internal team. That was great. And then, the obvious next stepping stone there was closer. So, worked really, really hard for that, but, I don’t know if you’ll remember this,
[00:33:05] there was a hitching the plan. I was gunning for closer. I was hitting my quote as a BDE. I had hit champions pool, like, two or three times. The first time I started that and then you guys were like, “Nah.” Like ” Please stop. Stop.” I was in this role, I was just gunning for the closer role and I was on the precipice of getting it.
[00:33:22] And then, we had a meeting with, I think, both of you and Tommy and the whole team, and you were like, “Hey, we’ve sold too much. We can’t fill out all the spots. We need more people.” So, you moved me, Carly and Bruce to recruit. And we went up in the second floor boone into a room with no windows, just plastic, like white plastic tables and our laptops.
[00:33:42] Three of us sitting, facing each other in a room with no windows, cold calling college kids to come get them to join memoryBlue. And again, just to show you how applicable the skills here are to every different field. That was tough at first, we all got the hang of it. We all ended up hiring three or four people, and that cemented the bond between us, that we called it the Dojo up there.
[00:34:01] Yeah, we took a lot of Snapchat through called Dojo Squad that we talk to each other. And so, there was a hitch in the plan, but did that for six months and then ended up in the closing room.
[00:34:10] Chris Corcoran: For the listeners, this was literally insular office, no windows and Bruce, and a shit-load of exercise equipment from Bruce Warner.
[00:34:20] Nick Boustead: Absolutely.
[00:34:20] Oh, is he had a Jazzercise? He was shaking doing this John muscle. Yeah, always.
[00:34:25] Marc Gonyea: I remember walking in there and slowly tiptoeing my way out.
[00:34:31] I remember looking at Carly and I was like, “It’s going to be, it’s going to look, we’re going to work through this. We got to get out ahead of this. You guys have done too good of a job.” You know, with professional services business and the people, what matters the most is edited by all these stories. Right? We’re talking about the people and you guys were really good sports about it. ‘Cause I remember you not being exactly thrilled about the concept of…
[00:34:52] Nick Boustead: Initially no, but it’s funny looking back that ended up being one of them, most fun times in my professional career. And again, we ended up being pretty good at it. You know, it was really cool to see that. That was the first time I had really seen my memoryBlue skill set applied, not just in an SDR role.
[00:35:08] So it was, it was really nice to harness that.
[00:35:10] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, they should bring people.
[00:35:11] Chris Corcoran: Talk a little bit about being a closure. What was the hardest part?
[00:35:14] Nick Boustead: There were a lot of hard, I mean, closure it’s, you know, felt like you had been swimming in the kiddie pool with, you know, an inner tube floaties and a snorkel on, and now, you know, your parent had just chucked you off a cliff into the ocean, but that’s knowledge that I can give. It wasn’t intense.
[00:35:27] It was difficult. I was not good at it at first or at least in my head. Again, going back to Tommy, being an amazing mentor that, that helped me a lot through. But, you had been setting all these meetings and kind of had like a one track mind, up until that point, you had a singular goal, which was just book meetings, and it was kind of the same process for all the meetings.
[00:35:47] It would be a little variety here or there. Sometimes you had to loop in somebody else, but at the end of the day it was pretty much the same thing. Now, you’re a closer and you still have a singular goal, which is close deals, get revenue and profit for the company, but a lot more complexities bringing in, if it was a referral or if they had to bring in somebody else’s a decision-maker.
[00:36:07] I had to know when to loop in Tommy because he was still there to help close the deals. So, it was a huge change. Loved the challenge. I mean, I remember just going call, like into a room with Tommy to do it, my next call, then I’d go into a room with Tommy to analyze it and go over all of it.
[00:36:21] And it really just opened up my eyes to the playbook of what’s possible in sales and, and was, it was a fascinating experience.
[00:36:28] Everybody develops their own kind of style. What style did you develop in that closing role? What became important to you, in terms of being good at it?
[00:36:36] Nick Boustead: Right. Rapport definitely was important to me. Always. Because it just felt so much easier. With the people I couldn’t build rapport with I found it much harder to close and do other things with. So, I was always just trying to be relatable, being relatable and being real, being transparent and being real with people because it’s pretty easy to go into a role like that and just be like, “All right, what’s the exact thing I need to say that’s going to have all the right buzzwords for their company?” And I ended up blending that just being real with people was way more important. And I still remember one of our clients, David Dukowski, I forget the name of his company, but he had a Mustang convertible and you’ll bond over that. And we ended up closing businesses.
[00:37:15] And because again, I felt partly because I had been able to connect with him. So, and the rapport was definitely important.
[00:37:22] Marc Gonyea: And what was the most important skill that you had to kind of learn going from the SDR role to closer? What was that the biggest, the one, maybe one or two things, like, you, advised you, “Hey, SDR, Cardell, here are the things you’re going to have to like, make sure you be aware of when you transition to a closing role.”
[00:37:39] Nick Boustead: Yeah. I would say, you not being afraid to talk to anybody, really, social anxiety is very common. It’s hard to talk to people you don’t know. I actually saw the master class of that from you. You’re not gonna want to talk about yourself, but I went to a conference with you in Chicago.
[00:37:53] I forget the name of it. And just watching you operate your sphere. And I was like, “Oh, how do you know all these people? Like, you’re friends with, like, 85 people.” You were like, “I don’t know them.” Like, seeing that from you was, it was really enlightening for me, fearless and talking to strangers and then, also asking the hard questions.
[00:38:09] That’s another thing that I’ve seen you do and saw Tommy do a lot. When you’re setting a meeting, you know, you’re going mostly service level, you’re digging those initial pain, boyd points and certainly not an easy task, but once you’re in a sales cycle with somebody you’ve been talking to for two weeks and the deal still isn’t closed, you’ve got to get in there.
[00:38:25] Nick Boustead: You got to ask, “Hey man, we’ve sent you over the contract. Hasn’t been signed. It seemed like we were a good fit for this, initially. Can you walk me through what’s going on in your head or where are we at?” And initially doing that is very uncomfortable.
[00:38:37] Marc Gonyea: Got it. All right. That’s good advice, Nick. So let’s talk about.
[00:38:40] I’m going to transition into what next kind of up to now, but I want to talk about. So you, Nick, smart guy, did amazing academically. I think, obviously, did well at memoryBlue, worked, crush it as an SDR, you’re making good money as an SDR, got into the closing role, but you’ve always had this thing for, obviously for selling you, but developing that, nurturing that love and that craft, but you’ve had the same with cars.
[00:39:02] So, let’s talk about the car thing. Go ahead.
[00:39:05] Nick Boustead: As early as I can remember, when I was a toddler I could name all the car brands like Chevy, Honda, you know, in my car seat,I mean, that’s just was always, my dad’s a huge car guy and my grandpa’s a huge car guy. It was always part of my life. my dad has a 1974 Cadillac, huge, you know, old school Cadillac. It was just something that I always cared very deeply about.
[00:39:26] So, after, when I was a closer at memoryBlue then went to Capterra, just had a really good opportunity there with Paul, worked with Paul Dreyfus, B.T. Brian Thompson, worked there, B.T; he was amazing mentor there, as well. And so, went to Capterra, was there for only eight or nine months before I got a call from a friend who I had been with and “Okay
[00:39:48] to transition to this now, or do we want to go over?”
[00:39:50] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, I know “We’ve gone over, what, what else did you want to go over and we’ll go over?”
[00:39:53] I’m…
[00:39:53] Nick Boustead: That’s pretty much it. Yeah. Capterra was a fantastic experience. It was a closing role. Really. Well, there was top on the international team of 20 people, November, the great company, amazing company.
[00:40:03] And if I hadn’t had a really unique and random opportunity come up, there was a chance I would have stayed a lot longer. So, I’m working there and a friend that I had met in college and this goes to, you know,knowing, surrounding yourself with the right people. He started a car dealership when he was 16 and it had to be in his mom’s name initially because he was 16, but he ran the car dealership while he was in college.
[00:40:27] He’d had like 15 cars, he had a warehouse in Florida. His mom was his top salesperson. She would sell cars from, I remember hearing him selling cars, we lived in a fraternity house and I remember hearing that and was just like, “This is nuts. This guy’s, he knows what he’s doing.”
[00:40:40] Nick Boustead: And he kept the car dealership. It was kind of a side house, but went on to a very successful corporate career at Carnival Cruise Lines. So, I was just catching up with him while I was at Capterra. And as a, “How are things going? How’s the dealership, you know, your mom’s still selling the cars?”
[00:40:53] He said, “Yeah.” He’s actually, “You know, we’vebeen talking about it for awhile. We’re going to be expanding. We’re going to try to build, you know, right now we’re literally in a warehouse. We’re going to try to build it out into a little bit more. You know, the small thing, 20, 30 cars.” And he’s like, “I’m really concerned about hiring our first sales hire
[00:41:09] who’s not part of our family and I’m going to have to hire somebody to build a team, eventually a director of sales.” And, half jokingly, I was like, “Hey man, if, you need somebody to come to Miami and sling Ferraris, like, hit me up. I got…”
[00:41:21] Marc Gonyea: I’m your guy!
[00:41:22] Nick Boustead: Patchy, man. And there was a long pause, like, “Are you being serious right now?
[00:41:25] Are you just, like, kicking around?” He’s like, “I know you’ve done well in tech and you seem to have done.” I was like, “I’m not kidding. Like that is absolutely something I would be interested in.” So, he brought me down, he flew me down and I stayed right out at the beach in Fort Lauderdale, got to see a little bit of Miami and sat the day in the dealership. Again, Santa Ferrari sent all the cool cars. And I decided to take a leap, a giant leap and go leave tech, leave the life I built in DC for about three years and move fresh to Miami.
[00:41:56] Talk about that decision a little bit more, right.
[00:41:59] ‘Cause I know it’s not, it wasn’t an easy one. And I remember you talking about it, but let’s talk a little bit more and kind of the thought process of what.
[00:42:05] Yeah, that was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I was making good money at Capterra. And, again, had a circle of friends, the people I had met at memoryBlue who were still around and, you know, had a good life there.
[00:42:17] And I just thought of this as a, it was just such a unique opportunity to enter into something that I believed was, I was just so passionate about. At the time I was like, “It’s not going to feel like work if I’m talking about Ferraris all day.” Like I just, it was kind of like “I got to do it.” You know, atleast in my initial, my initial thing was like, “All right, I’m gonna go down there for a year,
[00:42:35] sell cars for a year and then like, the memory of the network is so amazing. Like, I’m sure I can go back at some point or come begging back to Marc and Chris or…” I was like “Something, there’s something there. If it fails, I’ll be fine.” And I had a lot of great mentors, you know, again,at the time. Tommy hooked me up, talked to his dad who runs this really unique car operation with old British cars. And I talked to you Gonyea, and you gave me some really great advice about buy-in from my friend and was a very tough decision. But at the end of the day, it was like, “This is truly my passion.
[00:43:05] I had known my whole life that I was true to my passion. So, the ability to do that, even if it was for just a short time was something that I couldn’t pass up.
[00:43:13] Marc Gonyea: Corcoran, it’s rare, right? You kind of run into people. I kinda, come kind of a hater on the whole “Follow your passion” thing. So, I think it’s hard to marry those two.
[00:43:21] I think what stops a lot of people from that and I’m not saying I’m successfully done this, is not wanting to put the work in to kind of make the passion and reality. And Chris, like Nick clearly did, right? Like, you put all this work, you didn’t know it at the time, but when you’re going through the pain of like, I’m a chemistry major and I really want to get in tech sales, it’s probably not easy coming to memoryBlue, but you come down to UNC who people get all sorts of various jobs, probably.
[00:43:44] And you’re on with the pain of being on the phones and our clients are difficult because of their emerging space. And, like, you’re doing all these things and getting through all these obstacles and now you’re making money along the way and having fun, but little did you know that all that work and energy you’re putting into it and all those experiences and being in the dojo is getting you ready for, like, some opportunity that’s going to come along, that you were able to pounce on because all the work you put in before.
[00:44:05] Nick Boustead: Exactly that’s the best way. I was just so primed
[00:44:08] from the experience with memoryBlue to hop on, I was ready. I was ready, it was the right place, the right time. And when that opportunity came I was able to be ready because of the training and experience and confidence and everything that I’ve built up at memoryBlue. And I kept it.
[00:44:22] Marc Gonyea: And I kept here. Right?
[00:44:24] It’s amazing. So, I mean, you never know when that opportunity is going to present itself and with you did, had you not gone the sales ride you wouldn’t, you would have not been qualified to do the both, right?
[00:44:32] Nick Boustead: Exactly.
[00:44:33] Marc Gonyea: Talking about what’s been going on since you, so how long have you been doing it, for over three years now?
[00:44:36] Nick Boustead: Three and a half years.
[00:44:37] Marc Gonyea: To talk about what it was like when you started and kind of the sales piece of it and putting those skills to work, all that stuff.
[00:44:43] Nick Boustead: Yeah, absolutely. And this is actually the part I was most excited to talk about, on this podcast.
[00:44:47] Marc Gonyea: Besides, besides crushing everybody and champions.
[00:44:49] Nick Boustead: And that was a small part, but I got to relive the glory days a bit. But no, I feel like it prepared me so well. Your car sales, car sales is very different, right?
[00:44:59] It’s, it’s a brutal world. But, I was able to take what I had learned and apply it so directly. I would not have been nearly as successful in the car dealership or maybe even at all. You know, if my friend had called me, made that same phone call to me, he was a couple years older. So, if that call had come my senior year of college and I said, yes, and jumped into it, I think I would have lasted two months.
[00:45:21] I don’t think I would have been successful at all. So, I go to this dealership, they don’t even have a CRM yet. So, I’m, initially, involved with picking up the CRM and building the team. But so many of the things I learned were so directly, not even, you know, a little bit applicable, but directly applicable to building a drip and kind of
[00:45:40] giving that structure to the dealership model, which at that point they had really had none. My friend’s mom was one of the best sales people I’ve ever met. She’s still our top salesperson, but their system at the time was, leads were written on post-it notes and, like, put on a wall, that was the lead system.
[00:45:54] So, I got to go in, design a drip and really structure. It’s similar to a way that, you know, the structure, the amount of calls made, five calls per person to hit them right away, circle the castle where you, you know, leave avoicemail, say you’re sending an email, send an email saying you’re sending a text, send a text saying you’re going to call them, fishlining, taking something away.
[00:46:12] I mean, all of those things were directly applicable to that model. It was ridiculous.
[00:46:19] Marc Gonyea: And what’s it been like? So, you were the first, one of the first guys, right? Did you guys built up a team? You built up the inventory, like how’s the, talk about the journey, the business?
[00:46:27] Nick Boustead: Yeah, that’s been insane. I was employee number two, essentially two or three when I started there, three and a half years ago.
[00:46:34] It was me, my friends’ mom, we were the two salespeople. We had one mechanic and we had one carwash person who would also take pictures of the cars, four of us on a lot of about 20 cars. It was converted gas station with walls about this thick, you know, I can, my calls are interrupted by the sound of the air guns going for the, to take the wheels off cars and such.
[00:46:56] It was terrifying. Initially, the first month I was like, “What have I done?” Like, I was staying in an Airbnb near there, like a two month long Airbnb where the guy played video games all night. I wasn’t sleeping. I was like, “This is the most ridiculous thing.” And, you know, we were doing everything.
[00:47:12] I mean, I was having to sign the titles over. I was having to book my own transport. You had to do everything, start to finish as again, like you guys did, when you started memoryBlue, it was every single piece of it you had a hand in. So, it started with just us and we kind of always believed a much different model.
[00:47:28] We sell a more unique car, you know, the higher end exotics, not brand new, but not super old. And so, we had always done well remotely. This is again where memoryBlue comes in, selling on the phone, not face to face. So, we had always known that that was one of our life bloods we’ve, you know, in the history of the company sold about half our cars site unseen.
[00:47:47] And we started doing that. And again, just slowly build up. We slowly built up the inventory. I had to rent a lot across the street to hold more cars and then we hired one more salesperson while I was managing. So, the first, like, 18 months it was a slow and steady increase, but we were slowly carving a niche in the market and then COVID hit.
[00:48:06] And that completely changed things for us. Most dealers are not set up to advertise on a national scale, which we have been doing already, for years. And I was sending Bentleys to California, Seattle, out of the country of them, you know, number of export deals and when COVID hit and the entire East Coast shuts down, you know, Florida, we were allowed to work because cars redeemed in a central business here and it just exploded. The amount of interest and the amount of people who are sitting at home, who had planned $30,000
[00:48:35] Disney vacation, now decided they wanted a Maserati instead of their next Toyota. ‘Cause they’ve always wanted one. Have some extra cash and the whole world had got a, a shaken of view of their mortality. Everybody thought like, “This is it. I’m going to go out in style.”
[00:48:47] Marc Gonyea: Give me the Maserati and give me some COVID.
[00:48:51] Nick Boustead: Exactly. I heard many of those and this guy’s like, “Hey man, I’m 70. I don’t know what’s happening with this COVID, but, like, send me that Ferrari.” “All right. Gotcha.”
[00:48:57] Nice. We had a nice little fire kindling that we slowly built up and then that was just a gasoline. I mean, it went nuts after that.
[00:49:04] So, we were, again, the East Coast, Pennsylvania, New York, none of their dealerships could even be open. Like, they couldn’t even sell remotely, even if they had that model, which is fairly rare in the car dealership world. So, built it up from there, about 18, almost two years after I started working there, we moved into our next property, which was a lot that could hold about 200 cars.
[00:49:25] So, we were, and we started again, inventory started from 30, 60 to 80, you know, we’ve been in this newplace, right 80. And then, I slowly built the team. I was selling this whole time as well. So, I had a team of three at that point that I was helping coach and manage while still selling myself and trying to be at the top of the leader board, which was an interesting dynamic, very interesting dynamic and tough to juggle those things.
[00:49:48] And then, about a year and a half ago, I switched to full-time management. We fully built up that store to 200 cars. And again, just saw them, I mean, just to give you an idea of scale, you know, we were,me and my friend’s mom were selling like 20 cars a month, total there and now we sell between 150 and 200 cars a month.
[00:50:06] And half of those being out of state, you know, doing$75 million a year in revenue. I mean, it’s, it’s grown like I could never have planned or expect.
[00:50:14] Chris Corcoran: Hey, Nick, what’s the most expensive car you or one of the members of your team has sold?
[00:50:20] Nick Boustead: Got a number of them. We sold, about a month ago, we sold a XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, a white and red, beautiful car.
[00:50:27] And it went for around XXXXXXX.
[00:50:30] Chris Corcoran: Wow.
[00:50:30] Nick Boustead: Which was over sticker. It was a year old and it was over sticker, just to give a slight nod to how crazy the car market is right now.
[00:50:37] Marc Gonyea: What have you learned when you went from a kind of a closure to a manager? Like, what’s, what we learned about just being a pure manager?
[00:50:44] Nick Boustead: That was a huge learning experience.
[00:50:46] And I’m still learning. You’re not now managing a team of eight reps and one assistant to help with the paperwork. And that has been very challenging. It’s a lot of hours, a lot of hectic things being thrown at you. Sometimes people get cars and they’re not what they expected. And I’m kind of the cleaner of all of it.
[00:51:04] Right? My only goal is to keep the sales per people’s day freeze. They can sell their cars. Like that’s, I view that as my number one task, but man, it’s been a struggle. It’syou know, I’ve had to learn, obviously, you know, right now I’m 28. I’m the youngest member of the entire company, I’m the youngest member of the entire company.
[00:51:20] So, being able to build that, executive presence is something that I do not take lightly and took a long time to build, you know, thesepeople I was managing, selling with, well, not managing kind of saw me in both roles and it was incredibly challenging. I give you guys a lot of props because managing salespeople is not easy.
[00:51:36] It’s such an emotional role. You get so invested with people’s lives. Somebody who’s got a bad back and they’re going to the chiropractor and they can’t sell it because they’re in so much pain. And I know when, when things are coming up personally, so the management has been a huge transition, but one that I initially
[00:51:52] was unsure of, for the first six months. I was like, “I don’t know if, you know, maybe I just want to go back to closing.” Which I could have done, but then I realized “This is how I’m actually able to sell more.” Right? So, now I’ve got eight people come to me with all the problem deals and I can hop in and close 12 deals a day, talking to different people versus having to do all the work of a building mountain pipeline.
[00:52:12] So, I’ve been loving it. I transitioned from hating to loving it because now I can sell even more. It’s the role where I can just keep selling.
[00:52:20] Chris Corcoran: Now you’re the metaphorical surgeon who, all you do is walk, go in and perform the surgery.
[00:52:25] Nick Boustead: Yup. Perform the surgery. Sometimes the initial surgery has been botched and I got to unwrap the wounds, but yeah, that’s kind of what it’s, what has grown to.
[00:52:33] Marc Gonyea: And Nick what, where the things go from here? You know?
[00:52:36] Nick Boustead: Yeah. So, funny you mentioned that. We literally, Monday of this week, moved into our next property. So, we purchased a much bigger facility and we have a different reconditioning center now. So, we have a 30,000 square foot warehouse with 12 lifts and our own paint booth and all this stuff to recondition the cars.
[00:52:53] And next step is, right now we have an inventory of 200 cars and we’re going to push it to 600. So, the owner is incredibly ambitious. You know, we’rein this to build an empire, not just to make some cash quickly with one dealership. So, he’s already working on the next property. While we spin up this team.
[00:53:10] And again, I’m going to quickly go to 12 reps. So, at eight right now, I’m going to go to 12. We’ve got two starting, end of April. So, going to quickly ramp to that. And then, from there, we’ll see. I think the next plan would be hiring somebody likely internally for management roles. So, I’d be managing two managers who have teams of six and then growing both of those teams back up and get into where we’re selling four or five hunderd cars a month.
[00:53:31] Chris Corcoran: You’re in the fun spot, for sure. So, for the listeners, you once used your champions pool bonuses to buy a $1,500 Mazda Miata. Share with listeners what you’re driving today.
[00:53:44] Nick Boustead: Yeah. What I’m driving today is a Lamborghini Gallardo, convertible Lamborghini Gallardo. See, I started from us about Miatas and now, now we’re here.
[00:53:52] Marc Gonyea: How much, what would one of those set me back now, Nick, in 2022?
[00:53:55] About 125 or so when you’re 2,500.
[00:53:59] Marc Gonyea: Wow. That’s exciting.
[00:54:00] Nick Boustead: Came in on trade. I wasn’t planning on it. Came in on trade at a wholesale value. So, things are different when you’re in the market, but yeah, and I still only drive convertibles. So, driving convertibles in Miami, for me, that was the right path.
[00:54:12] You guys saw that with me, be honest.
[00:54:15] Marc Gonyea: Dude. It’s amazing. Nick, Chris, you got anything more for Nick?
[00:54:19] Chris Corcoran: This has been, been phenomenal.
[00:54:21] Marc Gonyea: We could go on for days, but the Nick’s got to go sell a bunch of, help people sell, sell, sell some cars and grow a business. Nick, I mean, Chris and I are always grateful and humble for people to come work here.
[00:54:32] Right? Everyone’s a volunteer. People can leave whenever the heck they want. You’re one of those guys too. One of those people who came through that were very, I would say humble, I’m a little humbled. Again, you worked for us for as long as you did and you took a chance on us and you allowed us to kind of help create and develop your professional sales skills.
[00:54:47] And what you’re doing with it now is just incredibly inspiring.
[00:54:50] Nick Boustead: Awesome. I appreciate the kind words and I appreciate getting to share my story. I know it’s clearly not the typical one, right? You guys set up people so well to continue in tech. And I still think extremely highly of tech sales, as an industry, but if anyone listening, or if there’s a sound bite from this podcast, I just, the one thing I really wanted to get across was, a, I’m extremely grateful to both of you, but b, memoryBlue,
[00:55:11] it’s like a diving board, right? You’re, like, building this diving board for yourself that you’re going to then jump on and who knows, you know, where you’re going to jump higher to next. I mean, I was just so well prepared for this. I mean, literally last week we got a new texting platform and I set up a drip of texts and customers using.
[00:55:26] I looked up my memoryBlue drips. I’m not kidding. Like, it is the experience I had that memoryBlue set me up so well for this random entrepreneurial. I’m not saying that everybody should quit and go to the car industry. I certainly wouldn’t have, if I didn’t have this weird, unique opportunity, but for anyone listening, especially current SDRs, if you’re in a spot where you don’t like a client very much or you can’t see that end of the road, because it’s very difficult
[00:55:51] sometimes. It’s easy to sit with both of you and look back and just very cleanly connect present day from college or before, but when you’re, it’s tough man, when you’re in it and especially because the SDR role is not an easy one, calling people, getting rejection. But I just really want people to know that you are building a well-rounded entrepreneurial sales skillset that no matter what you do or where you go
[00:56:15] it’s going to provide you with just a wealth of experience and give you a lot of opportunities. So, I view my time at memoryBlue as completely essential
[00:56:24] the next month.
[00:56:26] Chris Corcoran: Wow. All right. Thank you very much. All right.
[00:56:32] Nick Boustead: I have it delivered right to your door. I’ll, I’ll have it wrapped in Tech Sales is for Hustlers, wrapped in.
[00:56:37] Absolutely guys.
[00:56:38] Chris Corcoran: Thanks. We’re going to keep up with you, Nick.
[00:56:39] Nick Boustead: No worries, guys. Have a great week.
[00:56:45] I saw the number of employees on LinkedIn recently, so a huge, huge congratulations to both of you and certainly wish you all….
[00:56:51] Chris Corcoran: We love it. Very good, Nick. Thank you very much.
[00:56:53] Marc Gonyea: You bud.
[00:56:54] Take care. See ya.
[00:56:56] Nick Boustead: Hey, when it, when it comes time for.