Gene Slade Podcast Transcript
Gene Slade joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Gene Slade. Gene Slade, CEO of Lead Ninja System is a pioneering force in the realm of AI outbound sales, sales training, and business development with a steadfast commitment to empowering professionals in the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical trades, LeadNinja AI offers transformative AI packages that revolutionize the way business owners approach sales and growth through personalized responses, unlimited memory and recall, and total versatility.
Well, good afternoon, gene. Welcome to the show!
Gene Slade: Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: You bet gene love to jump on a podcast and I know we’re doing a little bit later this evening, but still love it and love to really get in and hear your story tonight. So, we’re going to jump right into your first question.
You began your career helping your dad’s HVAC company before working your way up to owning one of the fastest growing construction companies in the States. How did these experiences shape your approach to sales and marketing in these trades?
Gene Slade: Man, that’s a good question. You know, working for my father didn’t really shape my, you know, experiences from a sales and marketing perspective because I was so young when I worked with him.
But one thing that I did learn from a sales perspective that really, I didn’t even know I was learning was how to shut up. I mean, my, my father was. A disciplinarian, right? And a scary guy. So, I learned very, very young how to read his moods, read his body language, things like that. And just be quiet and listen, open up my ears and man, if that’s not one of the best things that you can have as a salesperson is the ability to listen.
I don’t know what else is. I was taught that. Our two best friends in sales are silence and questions, right? If you ask a question, you got to shut up in order to listen, in order to hear what the client says. And if you listen to a client, they’ll typically tell you how to close them. So that was really what I learned.
Growing up with my father in the industry, and then later on, I ended up finding some guys who had been a part of some best practices groups. And frankly, I’ve never even heard of a best practice. I’ve never even heard of a maintenance agreement, if you will. But that was really what began to shape my, my knowledge of marketing was when I started working for some of the guys that were involved with the best practices groups.
Brian Thomas: Love the story. We get into this. This is usually typically the first question I ask is something around the background and you know, what got you started in this? But I love that. Never heard that. But I do know listening is a skill that everybody needs to work on. And that makes a lot of sense. You learning that from your father just, you know, and I get that.
I did the same thing, you know, yes, sir. No, sir. And we, we just got it. That’s right. And that’s why you have two years in one mouth, right? So, so no, I appreciate the story really do. And that certainly resonates with me and probably a large part of my audience. So, Gene switching gears, let’s go into the next question.
The trades industry is notoriously competitive. What are some of the unique sales challenges businesses in this sector face? And how does your lead ninja system training help them stand out?
Gene Slade: And, you know, things have changed from a competitive. Aspects when it comes to having the internet around, like we didn’t have it around before.
I mean, today you’ve got all of the information, you know, at the tip of your fingers. Now, from a competitive standpoint, a lot of people think that that means, you know, having super competitive pricing. I always wanted to be the most expensive guy in town. I think a lot of that came from the very 1st air conditioning job that I ever had.
I ended up unknowingly taking a job with a company that was at least 15 to 20 percent higher than any of my other competitors in the area. And I had to learn really quickly that. It wasn’t really the money that drove people. In fact, only, I think 15 percent of our population buys solely based on price.
I mean, you tell me, Brian, do you always buy the cheap stuff? No, sir. So, and, and really, do you even really want the cheap stuff, but in the absence of some sort of additional value, price becomes the default. Right? So, I learned early in my career that I needed to sell myself rather than going out and selling an air conditioner or a water heater or an electrical panel.
I had to sell the company. I had to make them feel good about buying from me. And once I was able to get them to feel good about buying from me, I had to have a list of things that I could say to the client if they said, Hey, your price is too high. So, we had literally Okay. 33 different reasons, locked, cocked, and ready to rock if a customer said, Hey, your price is too high.
And then they said something like my neighbor got one for five grand cheaper. It was instantly. Would you like to know why more people choose us regardless of any difference in price? And then we would hammer four or five, six, 10 different benefits of doing business with us. And I think that’s where the big disconnect is nowadays is that people don’t know how to justify a difference in price. One of my favorite quotes is that a competitive driven company, one that allows its pricing to be significantly influenced by its competitors can never be better than its competitors because it can’t afford to be.
I’ll say it one more time quickly for the audience, a competitor driven company, one that allows its pricing to be significantly influenced by its competitors can never be better than its competitors. It can’t afford to be. I wanted to be the guy that was charging the most in the industry because I knew that if I did that, I could provide a higher level of service for my clients.
So, you got to stop being afraid of the money guys, and you’ve got to start Learning how to justify a difference in price by sharing things that are unique about you that maybe other sales professionals are not going to bring up. That enables the client to begin to see a difference once they can see a difference between you and somebody else.
They’re not going to want the cheap guys. So, those are like, I feel like we’re always in the trades, like, it’s a race to the bottom. Like, who can get their pricing lower and I’ve just never held that philosophy. Fortunately, because I was brought into this trade. From a sales perspective at the most expensive companies in the area.
So, I think that people should really stop focusing on the money and start focusing on what makes them different than everybody else.
Brian Thomas: Love that. Thank you for sharing. You know, a lot of people don’t realize, you know, I know they’re people are looking, especially in today’s times, looking at their bottom line, but what are you getting for what you’re paying for?
And a lot of times. It’s the, the ales, the age-old adage about you get what you pay for. And a lot of times that’s really true. So, Gene, I appreciate you sharing that and Gene switching gears to the next question with the rapid pace of technological advancements, advancements. I apologize. How do you stay ahead of the curve in terms of sales strategies and tools in these industries?
Gene Slade: Man, you know, the great question, especially with all of the advancements in artificial intelligence that have been coming up lately. I was actually. I was introduced to a new technology going on about 9 or 10 months ago. And it was the very first conversational artificial intelligence that had been created.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of artificial intelligence guys, but you’re talking about a robot that can make a telephone call to you or accept the telephone call to you that talks with a voice that’s human, like very human, like almost indistinguishable for most people that can be trained one time.
Like if you’re a business owner out there, the recruiting, the hiring, the training, all that’s a very arduous process. Wouldn’t it be incredible if you could train somebody to do something one time or train something to do something one time, like make an outbound telephone call and follow up on a sale?
So, we ended up licensing this technology for the HVAC plumbing and electrical spaces. And we’ve created the first AI conversation, or bot, if you will, that can have a real time conversation with somebody for up to 40 minutes. And all I do is install all of my knowledge into it. Every script I’ve ever written, every, every sales training session that I’ve done, I can input into this and it learns from it.
So, we decided to jump on that immediately. And now we’re making outbound telephone calls with the AI for our clients. And this comes, this is a huge, huge deal because our clients, a lot of them have a difficult time filling their, their job boards. You know, they need 3 tech, 3 calls per day for their technicians and most of them are smaller companies, less than 10Million dollars in revenue.
Right? So, and they have these shoulder seasons in the winter and in the spring, and they typically need to do outbound calling to their existing database. But by the time they can. Recruit hire and train somebody that season is over. So, we decided to build this and program it to make those outbound telephone calls to existing clients schedule appointments, rehash their customer base.
And the crazy thing is that I can do it now in about 5 minutes. If I want to fill somebody’s board, if I want to fill their schedule. Because this, this bot can make 1 telephone call or can make 10, 000 telephone calls to the existing customer base all at the same time. So, that’s 1 of the ways that we’ve been using technology for the outbound telephone call.
We’re now handling inbound telephone calls with the AI, the sales AI. We’ll be collecting reviews with it. We’ll have sales follow up bot with it that can call their clients and, and, and rehash their sales, find out why they didn’t buy. We’ll be using it to train salespeople to role play with salespeople in the morning and even create a AI sales manager so that if they have a difficult time closing a job that they can call their AI sales manager and the client won’t be any, you know, more.
Aware of it then if they were talking to a regular human. So, I mean, you’ve gotta grab a hold of the technology as it’s coming out if you don’t want to get left behind. Or sometimes I say if you don’t want to get run over by the train that’s coming. So, AI is one of the biggest things that we’re utilizing right now in order to help our clients to, to grow and to thrive in a very different economy than it has been in a while.
Brian Thomas: Oh, for sure. Thank you for sharing, you know, your perspective and your experience. Around generative AI, obviously, I use same technology as well. And I’ve seen some of the best out there where they can take your voice gene and be the sales call and make those 10, 000 calls at the same time. It’s just amazing.
So, yes, thank you for sharing, especially for those in our audience. They can certainly. Relate, relate, relate to this or, or gain a gem out of this podcast. Gene last question of the evening here, you’ve mentioned a belief that anyone can become successful as success tonight, successful sales professional with the right training and guidance.
What advice would you give someone just starting their sales career in the trades?
Gene Slade: Man, another great question. So, it took me too long to really find a mentor. I guess that would be one of the things, the first things I would tell somebody who’s getting into this trade, find somebody who’s already done what you want to do, and then just do what they say to do.
Don’t try to change it. For instance, like I talk about this in our sales training sessions, Brian, Bill Gates walked into this room and he said, Gene, you, me, and Brian, we’re going to build Microsoft 2. 0 and he sketched it out for us on a piece of paper exactly how we’re going to do it. At that stage of the game, Brian, would you or I look at him and go, you know, Bill, maybe we should do it this way.
Like, I don’t think so. I don’t think that would be a smart thing to do. The guy’s already done it, right? So just do what he says to do and trust him. So that would be huge. Find a good mentor. Find somebody who you can go to for advice. And I don’t know if you’ve found this or not, but I have found that typically the people who are successful in life, I’ve absolutely no problem answering questions and sharing how they did it.
So, I mean, I don’t think that there is any replacement for finding a good mentor, but sometimes people go out and they try to, you know, have 5, 6, 7 different mentors. They, they’re reading 5, 6, 7 books all at the same time. I, I was fortunate to have some mentorship by a guy named Grant Cardone. And one of the things Grant taught us was that.
You, when you’re looking at a mentor, you want to go deep, you want to go deep on that person. You want to try to read everything that they have written. You want to try to absorb everything that they can teach you as opposed to going wide with a bunch of mentors. And I found that to be something that’s been extremely helpful in my life compared to some of my buddies who are self-help junkies, if you will, like, they’ve always got to have the next book and the next book and the next book, and they never really do anything.
They never really take any of the principles from the books and apply them. So, I would say that that’s probably the 2nd thing that I would say is to look, go out and apply some of the knowledge, go out and. The fall on your face, try to land on your back, actually, because if you can look up, you can get up.
West Brown says, but that would be the most important thing would be to find a good mentor. Find a proven program, somebody who’s already blazed the trails for you so that you don’t have to create your own highway. You just get to pay a toll to ride on somebody else’s and that’s going to cut your learning time dramatically. It could be by as much as 90%. Don’t go it alone. Find somebody who’s already been there and just do what they tell you to do. Be humble, be hungry and just do what the mentors tell you to do. That’d be how I’d answer that question. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I appreciate that.
And mentorship has been a big part of. My career, but on both ends, right? I’ve mentored a lot of, I’ve also had some great mentors. And so, I appreciate that. And it is true. And, and just because you know, people always say knowledge is power. It’s not power until you actually take action. So again, appreciate the gems that you’ve shared here this evening, Gene and Gene, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Gene Slade: Sounds great, man.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Gene Slade Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
