Poor Leadership = Opportunity: Wesleyne Greer

Episode 6, Tales of Misadventure with Nicole Donnelly

Founder and owner of Transformed Sales, Wesleyne Greer, joins Nicole on this episode of Tales of Misadventure podcast to discuss how a bad board meeting took her from corporate climber to business owner, the business blunder that cost her 50% of her clientele, and sound marketing advice for any business owner, entrepreneur, and solo marketer needs today!

Nicole Donnelly

Hello and welcome to Tales of Misadventure. I am so honored and delighted to have Wesleyne on the show today.

I'm so excited to have another fellow female entrepreneur in the house representing girl power. I'll just give a quick introduction to our audience about who you are and how your amazingness.

So you have been in sales and leadership for 15 years and have managed multimillion dollar teams. You married your love for sales and your passion for coaching at your company Transformed Sales and have a strong track record for driving revenue through sales, marketing, and ongoing customer support which 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. Wesley, thank you for being here.

Wesleyne Greer

Thank you. I'm excited to be here with you today.

Breaking the Ice: What does a Free Day to Do Anything Look Like for You?

Nicole Donnelly

Let's dive in. Tell me. If you could spend your day doing whatever you wanted, wherever you wanted, and with whomever you wanted, what would you do?

Wesleyne Greer

That's a good one. I am what I like to call an extroverted introvert. So I would love to be by myself. Actually, I would say me and God, as my kids said. Myself, God, reading a book on the beach.

Nicole Donnelly

What book would you be reading?

Wesleyne Greer

I am such a multifaceted person and I read so many different books. What book would I be reading? 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.

Nicole Donnelly

Very cool. I love it. I am a hardcore extrovert, 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.

Wesleyne Greer

Absolutely. I took a seven day vacation by myself and it was so good. As a salesperson, coach, consultant, and speaker, I'm always around people. I'm always talking and it really helped me to reset, and recenter.

Starting a Business Was Never the Plan

"I realized that nothing I did would ever please the leadership team, ever."

Nicole Donnelly

I would love to just like dive into your history a little bit more. When did you first know that you wanted to start a business?

Wesleyne Greer

So if you would have known Wesleyne six years ago, you would never have thought that I would be an entrepreneur, a business owner. 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, one October, I traveled from California to Florida, Norway, London, and Scotland - literally all over the world.

The month ended with a board meeting. I presented all of the fantastic things we did that year and after I sat down the leadership said, “That's it!”

“That's all that you guys have done? That’s all you have to show?

I was shocked. I just thought did they not realize that I spent like 75 nights in a hotel and flown 100,000 miles in one year?

Those were nights away from kids.

Time away from my kids.

At that moment, I realized that nothing I did would ever please the leadership team, ever. So I sat in that meeting thinking “I’m done.” Within two weeks, I formed my business.

I did continue to work in that company as an International Sales Manager for another nine months. It took the company and its leadership six months to realize I was checked out. 

This is why I am so passionate about leaders. That is my entrepreneurial journey.

Nicole Donnelly

Amazing.

So poor leadership was the catalyst that made you determined to be like, I'm going to do it better. I'm going to do it differently. I’m going to help people see what good sales leadership really looks like and help companies build up their sales leadership so that they're raising their teams the right way.

Wesleyne Greer

No one has ever really taken my story and put it into a little nugget like that. But you're right. Poor leadership is why I started my company focusing on leadership development.

Entrepreneurship Is a Rollercoaster. Was There a Time Everything Went Wrong?

Wesleyne Greer

In March 2020, I lost 50% of my contract within a two week period. Every single day, I would get a call or text or an email from a client telling me to put their account on hold or that they didn’t any money.

Everything in the pipeline dried up and I questioned my confidence as a business owner.

What am I going to do? Did I make the wrong choice? If I worked for a company, at least they would tell me to work from home. I began to think that maybe my services weren’t valuable enough.

However, I took that pain, I took that challenge and allowed the extra time I had to research the government programs that were available for small businesses. I was able to get the first round of PPP within a six month period and decided to help other small businesses get over $1,000,000 in government money.

I was like really, really good at this and it allowed me to reinvent the business. Transformed Sales today is very different than it was back then.

How is Transformed Sales Different Today?

I learned just because I'm good at it, doesn't mean I have to do it for you.

Wesleyne Greer

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. 

I'm good at sales, I'm good at marketing, I'm good at business strategy and so I was trying to do too much, and I realized I didn't enjoy all of it. I really enjoyed coaching and sales strategy.

I learned just because I'm good at it, doesn't mean I have to do it for you.

At the time, I was working with frozen custard shops,  insurance agents, and assisted living facilities. Yes, I can do all of that and do it well but I discovered the type of businesses I really love are complex B2B sales. I love working with businesses that have long sales cycles and sell big, capital equipment or things like that. That's where my passion lies and it’s what gets me excited.

Losing 50% of my clientele started out as a bad thing but it turned into a good opportunity because the clients that I lost were clients I didn't really want to work with anyways.

Nicole Donnelly

So it worked out. That's amazing. My business had a 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 and I quickly learned that it's not scalable.

Number one, when you try to do so much, you can't really do it all really well. Right? I discovered that I’m really good at content marketing and content strategy. So that's where I need to live. Do you think every business owner needs to go through that kind of experience to figure that out?

Finding Your Passion as a Startup, Entrepreneur, or Business Owner

Wesleyne Greer

I do. I think people sometimes have a  fear of missing out, right? They get the feeling they could or should be doing one thing or another and become stuck in that but I could do that, what about this? what about that? I work with more established businesses, share my story, tell them to learn from my mistakes and help them get focused.

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 are so many things we're good at and so many things that we think we can do.

What I always ask startups, entrepreneurs, and new business owners, 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.

Nicole Donnelly

My coach gave me this really great exercise. On a Post-it note, I wrote down everything in my business that I did every day and rate each task on how much I enjoyed it. I organized the notes on the floor and I was able to visually see where each task fell.

The exercise helped me get really clear on the things I loved doing that I need to do more of and the tasks I needed to delegate, automate or offload to other people on the team.

Marketing to Your Customer

Nicole Donnelly

Let’s shift gears to marketing. How have you marketed your business in the past and what's worked and what hasn't worked for you?

Wesleyne Greer

When I think about the kind of marketing that has not worked for me, it’s being too generic. 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. It was kind of like cookie-cutter copying what other people were doing.

Everyone says to try TikTok or Instagram but what works for me, now, is doing my own thing.

LinkedIn for me, my business, is the most important. I talk about sales and leadership and that works best on LinkedIn. It comes back to me not being everything to everybody and trying to copy what other people are doing.

Nicole Donnelly

You're saying to avoid the shiny objects syndrome, which I think is a lot of times what business owners do in marketing. They see shiny objects like TikTok or Clubhouse and want to do to be on those platforms but they just really need to stay focused and centered on the places where your customers are.

So start with a real of understanding of where your ideal customer eats, drinks, and plays. Instead of just trying to go along with what everyone else is doing, listen to your customers. That's really great advice!

Connect with Wesleyne on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesleyne/ and be sure to check out Transformed Sales at https://www.transformedsales.com/?r_done=1.

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