Unlock Effective Sales Strategies with David Fastuca, Growth Forum

What separates thriving businesses from struggling ones? It's rarely the product or service quality alone. David Fastuca, CEO and co-founder of Growth Forum, reveals how effective sales frameworks create sustainable growth regardless of industry or size.

From starting his first design business at 14 to achieving a $30 million exit with his tech company Locomote Fastuca's journey demonstrates how mastering sales transform business outcomes. His refreshing perspective challenges common assumptions about business growth, particularly the misconception that adding more products automatically increases revenue.

Beyond theory, Fastuca shares practical frameworks for systematizing sales, building healthy pipelines, and creating predictable revenue growth. Unlike relying on "rockstar" salespeople who typically leave within two years, his approach creates sustainable systems that scale with your business. These frameworks provide structure while still allowing for individual style and personality, ensuring consistent results that don't depend on any single person's talent.

For business owners overwhelmed by sales challenges, Fastuca introduces his new book, "The B2B Sales Playbook," designed as a practical resource that can be read chapter by chapter based on immediate needs. Whether you're struggling with messaging, objection handling, or simply maintaining consistent outreach, this conversation provides actionable insights to transform your approach to sales and business growth.

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Chapters

• 11:37 [Ad] PodMatch
• 12:16 (Cont.) Unlock Effective Sales Strategies with David Fastuca, Growth Forum

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip, advertech Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pegeau, and today we're joined by David Fastuka, who's the CEO and co-founder of Growth Forum, and he's coming to us from Melbourne, Australia. Hi David, how are you today?

David Fastuca: 0:33

I'm fantastic, Gary. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Gary Pageau: 0:38

So you work with businesses to improve their sales. That's your charge in life, that's my jam. How did you get into that business of of saying I want to help other businesses grow their businesses?

David Fastuca: 0:52

Yeah, I think it's a. It's a bit of a funny story. So, like I'm a, as we're talking earlier before hitting the good old record button, I'm a designer by background. Um, love drawing and and into graphic design, then into web design. But in order to do the things I love, I needed to sell. So it often started with friends and family, the low hanging fruit. That's nice and easy. And then once you sort of explore and finish all those sort of projects, it's then going out to people who have never heard of you before. So that's when I started to learn the art and science of how to position myself, how to pitch myself and basically how to sell my services. And then over a period of time, I just started to fall in love with the whole sales and marketing part of the business and then just sort of went all in on that side. That's my love for the game.

Gary Pageau: 1:48

So how long have you been in that piece of the business until you founded Growth Forum?

David Fastuca: 1:55

So I started my first business when I was 14, back in high school in graphic design, and so it sort of lead oh, like three years ago yeah, I wish Fast forward a few more years three kids and lots of gray hairs. I've been in it for quite a while. So any business that I've started or run, I've always led the charge on the sales and marketing front. It's just something that came natural to me. I'm a bit of a control freak and it's something where I don't like to point fingers and make excuses where high-pressure a area of the business, of course, because you know you live and die by your last sale and how the business is growing and the buck stops with you. And I sort of just liked and embraced that pressure and, knowing that I had control over it, things weren't working. It was in my world. So I dare say from the age of 14, without you know, really knowing. That was when my sort of sales and marketing business worked here so what was that first business?

Gary Pageau: 2:59

Was that a graphic arts business? Or were you selling candy door-to-door? What were you doing?

David Fastuca: 3:02

No, it was. It was a graphic design business. I'll never forget, I was literally in class and instead of doing the school project, I was doing my own project and using a school printer to print my own business cards, laminate them myself and cut them out, because I didn't have money to get 100 or 200 made. And then the teacher came up to me and goes David, what the heck are you doing? This is not the project. And I told him and, to his credit, he was like I love this. He goes you fine, you just do it. Um, you just do your thing. And so that that's when. That's when it all started. Back then, so lucky, I had a great supportive teacher and, if you're listening, tags, thank you well, I'm sure that that person's among my many hundreds of people.

Gary Pageau: 3:43

yes, so tell me Growth Forum kind of the services you provide for that and who is like your ideal customer for that?

David Fastuca: 3:53

Yes, it spawned together in 2023 with my co-founder, Luigi. So he actually trained and coached me in the whole sales front when I was a previous co-founder of Locomo, which was a business travel tech company that I co-founded with my cousin. Yeah, so, from tech to also from design to technology, I love that space. We moved into that because we wanted to build a product of our own, something tangible that we could, you know, continually resell, which, you know, a lot of the people listening today have that sort of product ties business, which is great. So I enlisted the help of my good friend, louis to really help me systemize and structure this out, because I wanted to build a team. It was a business where it couldn't be just me. If we wanted to grow to the heights, we wanted to grow the business too. So, you know, through that sort of teaching and learning, through that process, again fell in love with that and the help that it could provide to other business owners.

David Fastuca: 4:49

They can, you know, systemize their sales process. They can build a team underneath them that they know to a high level of confidence they're going to execute, because the founder or the business owner has run the playbook themselves. So they know that you. You know the system works. You just need to execute, you just need to put in the sets and the reps and and you'll get there and you'll grow the business. And for the right person, they love that. Um, they get fulfillment out of helping the business grow themselves, growing because they're learning. It was just it's a really fulfilling which might sound fluffy, uh, operation that we run, but it has a real impact because you can have the best product or service in the world, but if no one knows who you are, if you can't sell it, then the business is going to quickly die. So we help unleash that growth.

Gary Pageau: 5:35

So do you think sales is in most cases, because we're going to talk about some different cases, but do you think it's more of an awareness thing or an education thing or a relationship thing? Because it sounds to me like you're talking more about the awareness thing.

David Fastuca: 5:52

It's all that, unfortunately, because that means there's a lot of work and marketing has its job there, and I was CMO of my previous company, the tech company that I was talking about, so I get it from a marketing perspective now. Our role as marketers is to make sales easier. People need to, you know, be great if people knew who we are when we're reaching out to them cold. So it's it's, it's it's the lifeblood of any business, right, it's the engine, the sales side of things, and I like to think of it. You know, I'm second time founder now, so I exited from from locomotes and then in 2016, then we brought it back. That was a great exit. It was a 30 mil exit for myself and my co-founder and the shareholding team. But then we bought it back during, covered and then built the pipeline up, relaunched it and then I was never really, I didn't really love business travel. It's not a industry that's uh, not lights my fire, sort of things. I exited from that, started growth forum, uh, with my co-founder, uh, luigi now. So I like this back to the point of second time founders.

David Fastuca: 6:56

First time founders focus on the product and the service because they've got this great idea right and just want to get it out there second time. Founders always talk about distribution, where you can have a half-baked idea, something that obviously needs to provide value. But if you've got the right sales strategy, the right channel strategy, you can become a much bigger, larger, happier business than if you don't have that component. So whenever I'm talking with business owners and founders, I'm really trying to get to the core of how are you going to grow this business? What is the strategy? What are the partnerships you need? What's the sales numbers look like? What does the team makeup look like? Because you might have a goal and a number in mind, but unless you've got the framework and the systems in place, your chances of getting to that number and to that dream objective are really slim.

Gary Pageau: 7:48

Now, you mentioned that phrase a couple of times framework or system or something like that. How important is that for sales to have a regimented process? For you know, let's say you're a business, you got three salespeople and then you get five or seven right, so you're scaling that piece of the business. How important is that to have some sort of process?

David Fastuca: 8:13

It's critical. If you look at any successful business, the thing that allows them to scale to the heights that there are is the systems they put in place. Right, McDonald's, any sort of manufacturing business Right. They're able to produce consistent quality through the systems that they put in place. Right Now, with sales, you're going to have an individual that has a bit of nuances to themselves and a little bit of aura.

David Fastuca: 8:37

That's hard to replicate, of course, but what we like to do with the framework and systems that we teach it's giving them the guardrails. Here is the guidance, here is the framework. Now you can add your little spin here and there to it, but here's the messaging, the process and the steps that take place in order to close the deal. Don't move to this step unless you've done xyz. Now you might add a bit here and there, but the framework is there for you to follow. So it's's critical to enable you to then consistently grow. Otherwise, if you rely on you know the creativity and intuition of an individual, it's hard to hire and clone. That you know across the business.

Gary Pageau: 9:15

Sure, well, that's one of the things you always see is like you know, quote unquote, superstar salesperson or the hotshot or you know. I mean I don't know if they have that in Australia, but over here you know, of course you always see that in the in the TV shows. Right, you got the yeah, the hotshot sales guy. But what you're saying is that that may not be actually the best solution for every organization because you can't scale that guy specifically.

David Fastuca: 9:39

True, and it's a risk, right? So, while it's great when they're nailing it, but what happens when that person leaves the company and moves on? Because the average tenure for a rockstar salesperson the data shows it hovers around a year and a half to two years before they're looking at a new opportunity to tap the new market, bring their relationships over to something new. You might get a quick, a quick win, but over the long term, it's just not sustainable, right? So it's something that you really need to think about, um, and if you've got a rock star in the team, it's like cool. Maybe you can build the system, the framework around what they're doing, right? You know dissect, you know the steps they're taking, how they're doing it, and then try and build a framework around that for the other team members to follow. Right?

Gary Pageau: 10:26

Because I mean, you know clearly if they're quote, quote, rockstar, unquote, they're doing something right to either reach the audience or meet the clients that know how to build relationships or connect with people or something like that Correct.

Gary Pageau: 10:39

So let's talk a little bit about one of the issues that you know I know runs rampant in my audience with the photo printing people and people who are providing output services, where they may have dozens and dozens of products that they want to sell Right, because literally you can print on almost anything now by sixes piece of paper, and now we're printing on canvas and billboards and and glass and metal and all these various surfaces and different devices and all kinds of crazy things. So that's a lot. How do you suggest coaching a team or something that has all of that stuff in the arsenal, all of those products they could possibly sell, which are overwhelming to the, to the prospect and difficult to narrow down? Do you pick it on like the profitable that you want to pitch, the more profitable products which are probably maybe better for your bottom line but maybe of less interest to the consumer, for example?

David Fastuca: 12:08

There's a bit of a fine art to that. Now I'll bring up a story that was recently told to me by a good friend of mine. So he was giving me this scenario where a friend of his took over the CEO role for this multinational chocolate business. Now chocolate business had been around for I think it was close to like 80, 90 years, so great established business. But they were on the decline right. Their sales year after year for the last 10 years had declined. So they moved out. The ceo got a new one in. So new ceo comes into play and immediately looks at all the, all the SKUs, all the products they've got. They had a range of like 150 different types of chocolate that will sell them out, because it's easy you have success with one, let's build another one.

David Fastuca: 12:52

Let's build another one. Right, exactly right. It's easy. You have success with one, let's build another one.

Gary Pageau: 12:53

Let's build another one Right Exactly.

David Fastuca: 12:55

It's that a little of more products equals more revenue and happy day. But the effect that it was having was their marketing spend was getting diluted across all these products. Their messaging and what they became known for became diluted because they had to talk about all these new initiatives and all the new products that they'll come in now, and it's only so much that the audience, your customer, can really take in and understand what the CEO did. He just looked at everything, looked at the numbers, looked at what they were known for, how they grew in the early years and did a bit of a survey with their customers on what's your favorite chocolate, what's your favorite flavor, and they end up reducing their SKUs from I think it was around 150 all the way down to 30. Massive cull.

Gary Pageau: 13:45

Yeah, five acts and just cut them.

David Fastuca: 13:47

Yeah, yeah, the board was against it. You know it caused a lot of arguments because some of the products might have been an idea from one of the executives or a board member.

Gary Pageau: 13:58

Exactly.

David Fastuca: 13:59

That's right. It always comes from I think we should do this and you go. Okay, but he got his way. He's like you got me here, ceo, let me do my job Right, and if it doesn't work, you can find me Right. And the end result was the company is now on the incline because now they focus back onto their core offering Right, and the messaging becomes a lot simple because they're only talking about, you know, a limited amount of products and 30 is a lot of products If you think about it.

David Fastuca: 14:26

It's still a lot. That's right, yeah. And their marketing now goes down into just 30 products. So now say they were spending a million dollars per product across 150. Now that's 5x across those 30 products. So they get more exposure. So everything becomes easier, right, your systems, your process, what your sales team need to talk about.

David Fastuca: 14:49

It's easy to complicate things. It's very hard to simplify things and I think apple does an amazing job on the simplicity factor. Sure, now they're probably. Ever since you know the passing of of the late steve jobs, you know they've added more skews and things like that. But one could argue they're super successful still, which they are right, but that's only comes after once they've truly nailed a sector, before you start adding things on there. Yeah, it becomes too easy just to add another five SKUs, another five products, because, hey, like you said, I can print on the t-shirt Now I can print on glass, now we can offer everything to our customer. Right, but why did your customer come to you first? Why did they come to you and not the other person down the road that can do the same thing or 50 other things?

Gary Pageau: 15:36

You know, because I think the R industry got kind of swept up in sort of the long tail thought. Right, remember Chris Anderson, the long tail, yeah, you know you got to offer it. Even you know the example you used was you know MP3 downloads right, you know you got your most popular songs and it goes down to you download it three times but it's still that's three sales you wouldn't have gotten if you didn't offer that song right. And I think the reality is, when you're dealing with a physical product and you're trying to gain mind share in today's customer, that limited approach is actually probably more vital now than ever.

David Fastuca: 16:17

Yeah, I think most companies the companies that we're seeing, that are really on a tear and succeeding are the ones that really niche down and focus. They focus on two or three core things that are super tightly related and they focus on a specific industry, solving a specific problem, and it's almost like self-selection. If I once I'm aware of this brand, if I'm in your ideal customer profile, you're talking to me, the message hits me half the sale is already done, right, right, which is great. It's like going to a restaurant and they sell pizza, pasta, then indian food and chinese food.

David Fastuca: 16:55

Instantly, you're thinking how good can all this you know different type of cuisine be, versus going to one place and all we sell is pizza and pasta. You know, it's like a perception that I'm going to get a great meal here. Yeah, and it's the same as if someone's trying to hit me up to sell marketing services and you know they claim to be the best in paid advertising, but they also do websites, they also do SEO, they also do this. I'm instantly and they might be great at it I instantly just put them in the bin because I'm like you can't be great at all those things. It's impossible to be that good at it. It just doesn't work in this day and age.

Gary Pageau: 17:33

Well, you know, it's just kind of interesting because you know, look what's happening in, like fast food, for example, you know, used to be the fast food brands were very much. They had a very specific perception of what they were right mcdonald's was this, burger king was that, taco bell was this, kfc was that. And now when you look at their menus, you know Arby's is serving Italian subs and euros, you know, and I just, I just wonder, like you said, they could almost like pair that back where probably the most popular chain here in the US is Chick-fil-A and they probably have like four things on their menu. That's all they do.

David Fastuca: 18:09

Yeah, but look at it from a whole business perspective. When it comes to hiring someone at chick-fil-a, their systems are really down pat and there's only a few things they need to know. Right, the sales team there's only a few things they need to sell. When, when a customer comes in to store, it's less intimidating because there's only a few things I can choose from. Right. So everything becomes simple, from internal factor as well as external. And if I'm going into a Chick-fil-A, I know pretty much what I'm going to order before I go in. Versus going into somewhere where they've got 200 things on order. You get the information paralysis. Things become harder. We just want to make things simple for the people that work for us and the people who we want to buy from us.

Gary Pageau: 18:52

So why do businesses do that? I mean, it seems to me like the data is there, everyone can see it that the most popular and successful companies, at least in most industries, you can pretty much pigeonhole what they do in four or five things or products. You can kind of pick out what they are. And I'm not talking like a Walmart where it every product on the planet, but I'm talking about, you know, brands that are selling specific things. But when you see, like you know, coca-cola now has I don't even know how many flavors of Coke. It's ridiculous. And Pepsi is the same thing. They've, you know, and it's like.

David Fastuca: 19:37

it's like like don't they realize that that's actually probably increasing their costs and lowering their sales because there's a lot of overhead with each one of those brands. True, but a lot of these smart brands, the ones that execute really well, treat as each of these products as pretty much its own business. Right, and that's the smart way to do it. So if you think about a product line within your business, let's look at Coke, right, so they've got the energy drink division, the water division, and then they've got their hero division. Now, each one of these areas within the business would have a let's call it quote unquote CEO or head of director, their own team, marketing team, sales team, their own marketing budget, and they need to succeed on their own. If they don't, then, like any business, they get shut down or sold off.

David Fastuca: 20:20

I'll look at it like this in our business. So we've got, obviously, our core offering, which is our training program that people go through. Then we've got our podcast, our newsletter, our upcoming book. Each one of these takes up a crap ton of effort. There's pretty much almost a micro business in itself and that effort that goes into it. So we could easily go hey, we should be doing SEO, hey, we should be doing this, but I'm like the time that we can give each one of these things is finite. So let's just pick off the two or three that we can give the right amount of time to, the right amount of budget to, and let's just become great at those before we even look at anything else. Um, it's just too easy to keep adding more and more on, but what happens is you dilute your time, effort and budget and then everything becomes, you know, executed poorly because you just can't execute all that well.

Gary Pageau: 21:12

Just say that I looked it up while you were talking I was kind of being rude, I apologize that there are over a hundred different flavors of Coca-Cola available. Now I'm talking about energy drinks, I'm talking about just Coca-Cola. Now that's crazy, that's like to the extreme. So let's talk a little bit about your process, your sales strategy process. So let's talk a little bit about your process, your sales strategy process, because I think you know, for a lot of the people in my audience who may be retailers or service providers or folks like that, you know they may have gone to a seminar, they may have seen a workshop or something like that and maybe this stuff didn't sink in. What makes yours more effective than maybe something like that?

David Fastuca: 21:53

Yeah, no, that's awesome. So look a lot of those sort of events and they're great. We love going to events, but the truth of the fact is that after I think, you only consume around 20% of what's spoken. This is like data that's out there on, you know education and learning events, and then, as each day passes, it's diminishing returns on what you retain, unless you actually execute on that which, let's be honest, not many of us execute on what we've seen in such quick time. We go back to a normal day-to-day in our operations.

David Fastuca: 22:22

The difference with Growforum and how we operationalize the business is that one, Luigi, my co-founder, he's been doing this thing for over 25 years. He's actually trained me in the program and we're running the same process ourselves to grow our own business Right. So while we have a team that are in sales and do that work, we're on the tools as well. So we've got like our heart on the beat. We understand what's working, what's not working. So we provide that daily guidance.

David Fastuca: 22:51

Two, we provide a framework and a system that people will go through to execute out.

David Fastuca: 22:56

We coach and guide them, so it's not just here's a course, go through it and then, on your way, we stick with them until they execute, provide them guidance on how to execute and then make the adjustments with them to ensure that they get the result that they came in for.

David Fastuca: 23:13

And then the third component, and the key difference, is that once they've proven that the system works in their world, in their industry, we can then help bolt on outsource salespeople into their team, Okay yeah, that are trained up in a growth forum way, that understand everything. They understand how to build the playbook, so they know everything. That's been done. All that needs to take place is that the business owner founder and they just need to educate that individual on their product and their service, and then they know with a high level of certainty that this outsource resource is going to execute quite well because the playbook is proven. Now you've got someone that's going to work on this eight to 10 hours a day, five days a day, five days a week, just for you. So that's the difference. We provide the coaching and framework, the guided execution and then the resources to take that off your plate once it's ready.

Gary Pageau: 24:03

So tell me your most exciting success story you had with this the client that came in that you were like I don't know if this is going to work, but then they bought into it and they were successful.

David Fastuca: 24:16

Yeah, love it. So it's a. It's a well-known brand name. They created the term inbound marketing, so you probably guess who that is. I'm happy to share that HubSpot. So they get an abundance of inbound leads, right, they're very lucky. But I'm just that lucky. They have spent the time and effort to generate that. It's still, you know, an inbound lead, and what I mean by inbound? This is someone that just comes to your website or inquires directly on your form, on your site, because they know who you are and they want to inquire more. So you've done the outreach to them. Now one would assume that these people are easier to sell to, and yes and no, but they still require the same amount of follow-up. They need to go through the process of whatever it is within the business. So HubSpot initially had the approach where these people will come in. We'll just run them through a demo and they'll sign up, right, I've been through a couple of Hub'll sign up.

Gary Pageau: 25:13

Right, but after time I've been to a couple of HubSpot demos. That's exactly what they did to me. At least that's right.

David Fastuca: 25:19

And look, it's not cheap. Hubspot has increased their prices over time because they've got a great product, which is fine, but now there's a lot of competition in the space Absolutely that compete with them. So it's not an easy sale, no more. So the biggest win there was then, you know one admitting to that, two adding their, their sales team members to the program. And then those sales team members have been with us for you know, since, since inception, and zero churn, because they get in the value, because we provide that continuous learning.

David Fastuca: 25:49

It's not you go through the program and then, on your way, it's we. We run weekly sessions. They can reach out to us if they're having a bad week or a bad month. We can diagnose what they're doing wrong or what they need to move on and help them. You know, get back up there. It's like any sort of coach, sporting and the like. You just need to continue to do the reps, do the exercises, and you're going to have those times where you go through, you know, a bad patch and you need that motivation and you need someone with a bird's eye view to say hey, you know you're just missing out these two or three fundamentals. You know you're skipping them. Get back on Twitter, get them and you'll get the results back. You know someone that's not in the business that can see that and be really black and white with them. It's not everyone's cup of tea that sort of approach, but we're not for everyone.

Gary Pageau: 26:36

So how many steps are there in this process that you go through? Now, if I understand, it's a kind of a two-step process where the business learns about you and then there's the process the salespeople go through. So what are those like when you're onboarding a company? What's that like you through? So what are? What are those like when you're onboarding a company? What's that like you're?

David Fastuca: 26:54

you do an audit for example, what they're doing, right, correct. We do an order just to get a lay of the land. You know what sales look like within your organization, who's doing it, how's it been run, what process do you have in place, what technology do you have in place? And then that gives us a good lay of the land to say, okay, cool, then we can prescribe a bit of a learning journey. And here's what you need to do, first and second, before you tackle the call offering here, and then from there we understand where they are and then we can help them develop their journey towards getting a robust system in place. And it might sound like a long and arduous task, but effectively we try and push our members to go through to learning, to execution, so when they're actually running the sales system and play within two weeks okay so it's like you're here, you've got a problem.

David Fastuca: 27:43

Let's fix this now and quick. Let's dedicate the time and then let's once rubber hits the road, let's actually. That's when we're going to get the real learnings once you're customers, once you're getting rejections, once you're getting approvals so we can understand what's learning and then tweak it so we can quickly help scale this out for you and the team.

Gary Pageau: 28:03

What are some of the things that salespeople are doing day-to-day that they could be improving on?

David Fastuca: 28:11

It's just the simple things. It's ensuring that you're blocking out time within your calendar to do new pipeline generation and what I mean by that is reaching out to new prospective customers that haven't heard of you yet and just getting on their radar. Ensuring that you're blocking out time every day for that. People always cut corners when they've got a thin, skinny, unhealthy sales pipeline. What you want to do is build enough deals and opportunities within your pipeline that are the right profile for you and nurture those people through. So just blocking out that time to ensure that, before you do any other task, you're knocking that out, and if you do that, it will compound over time and it's like the best tool in the world is compounding Just ask Mr Warren Buffett and once you've got that into play, you will never struggle to close deals on the regular basis if you do that and it's the hardest thing to do Well, that's what I was going to say Mentally that's the hard thing to do, because that's where you're hearing all the no's right, that's right.

Gary Pageau: 29:17

It's easier to talk to a warm prospect or a current customer to see how they're doing because they already have a relationship with you. But you know if you're doing any kind of cold prospecting, you know you're going to hear a lot of no's and a lot of people don't like that. Now I know there's people who get excited about that. They go. You know every no I hear is a is is the brings me closer to yes. I've heard that a thousand times but for a lot of people it's difficult.

David Fastuca: 29:42

Yeah, it is, and I like to look at it as like yes, I've heard the same saying and often give it out, but it's also okay If someone says no, reflect on that. Okay, or ask another question, go, cool, you know quite quite. If you've lost the deal already, just go, you know, interrogate a little bit more. You know why. No, like, was it something I said? Was it the messaging? You know, is it something you don't need right now? Try and get a data point, try and get something from that. No, that can help you.

Gary Pageau: 30:12

Just don't take no for an answer. But you're not necessarily trying to sell them. You're trying to find out what the objection actually is.

David Fastuca: 30:18

Exactly Like. I had one literally yesterday where they're like Dave, we like this, but you know it's not the right time for us because we're looking at execution and I hadn't spoken to them yet about, hey, when you're ready, then we install someone into your business and I'm like, oh, okay, cool, mark, I didn't explain to this yet because you know we haven't jumped on our discovery call, but once you've built out the system and process and executed it and got some wins, then we help take that off your plate by putting someone into the business. I go is that something that you know sounds like what you're looking for? Because for him it was an education that I hadn't provided that person yet, based on his core need, where I want sales now, but I don't want to do it. I'm like, okay, you know, so this is the approach that we need to take.

Gary Pageau: 31:05

Right right.

David Fastuca: 31:06

So there's always a learning that you can get from that. You know if you're going to get a no. Get a learning that you can make the next one easier.

Gary Pageau: 31:12

So when you get that feedback where I think this runs into a brick wall perhaps let's say, for example, you're a salesperson and you're talking to somebody and then you get this great feedback there has to be a system in place to record the feedback and act on it Right. In a lot of businesses there's a disconnect because the salespeople are providing feedback that they're getting from prospects and current customers, and maybe production or marketing or somebody or the other people who could act on it are dropping the ball. So does your system kind of account for that?

David Fastuca: 31:51

That's always a tough challenge. I like to. Whenever I'm hearing a no and getting some feedback. What I'm doing personally is I'm taking responsibility for that. I am writing these issues down on like a Google Doc. Then I can run it through some AI to give me okay, over the last month, what have been the no's, what are things I need to change in the business? And then I'm presenting this to Luigi and say, okay, these are the things that we need to change in the business.

David Fastuca: 32:18

Now, if you're relying on other people in the business production a CEO or someone else that's internal sales, same process. So how would you approach it? You need to get them to change something. They think that what they're doing is right. You need to convince them of change, and there's going to be a monetary investment somehow, of time or effort and hard dollars for them to make a change. So just because you're talking to someone in the business doesn't make it any easier. You need to have the same sales system to sell internally. And if sometimes it's often harder because there's a lot of emotion in there, it's well. I've been doing this for years. This is what works and you'll go well. No, this is what our customers want. So the more data that you can present back to that team that needs to make a change just helps your argument and then try to pull the emotion out and bring it back to-.

Gary Pageau: 33:15

Sometimes hard in smaller companies. Right, because you got the family we're on the same journey here.

David Fastuca: 33:20

We want to grow the business. This is what the market's telling us, you know. So let's trial it right. So a light touch could be. Let's, instead of changing everything, let's just trial it for the next five or six and let's see what results we get and then we can make a decision as a team. Right treat is like a beta test. Everyone loves the ab testing and let's just treat it as a little test and let's just see what happens and we can squash it quickly if it doesn't work right. So it's a low risk. It's almost like getting someone, a customer, in on a free trial. Or hey, try the camera out now, try the printer, see the quality. You know, get them involved, almost like the ikea effect, where they now feel like they own it, and then get their buy-in and then, once they've tried, tasted the offering, then they're like okay, cool To move forward with the sale and or the change within the business. It's a lot more palatable.

Gary Pageau: 34:07

That's interesting because I hadn't thought about it as sort of like internal sales. You're trying to sell your coworker using many of the same principles right To find what their feedback is, respond, provide information, do all those things but you're doing that internally to sell the change you may want.

David Fastuca: 34:29

Yeah, like one of my good friends, michael Margolis, over in the States. He literally has got a business and he trains basically people within the business to sell internally and these are like big like it's. He's talking like dealing with people inside of meta to go ask mark zuckerberg for two billion dollars to work on project x. You're right, there is a process to get that right and to convince mark to. You know, invest some heavy coin in doing a project right. So there's a whole dynamic behind that and a process to it as well.

Gary Pageau: 35:01

You've got a book coming out.

David Fastuca: 35:03

Yes, we do.

Gary Pageau: 35:03

We haven't even talked about the book yet. This is crazy. We've been talking almost 40 minutes and we haven't even talked about the book yet.

David Fastuca: 35:10

Tell me about this book, the book it's called the B2B Sales Playbook Boring name but filled with a lot of I'm sure you did a lot of A-B testing on that name, right?

David Fastuca: 35:21

We just want to make sure if someone looks up B2B Playbook, we're number one, right? So here it is. If you're seeing this, it's a nice and simple stands out. It's basically has everything that I spoke about on this call, everything that we train about in our program, as well as all the resources, templates, everything. In the first few pages we say enter your email here to get the resources, and then there's even coaching, chapter by chapter, on what to do. We spent the last 15 months working on the copy in the book and Luigi and I are super proud of it. It's a way for us to impact a lot more people than we can service within the business. Our goal for it is to be the little black book that sits on every business owner's desk, whether they're B2B or B2C.

Gary Pageau: 36:10

And you hope they're actually reading it and not just sitting on the desk right.

David Fastuca: 36:13

Well, that's right. We want people to read it, and the good thing about this book is that we designed it where it doesn't have to be read from front to back. The chapters are very pointed out as to here is what you're going to learn in this chapter. So if you're having a particular problem this month, just go in and just read that chapter, get the insights, get the coaching, get the resources and apply it to the business. You could be that person who loves to read from front to back Awesome but if not, it's a choose-your-own-adventure style of book. There you go.

Gary Pageau: 36:42

I love that.

David Fastuca: 36:44

I love that, so you can get the book read one chapter and this is my ask for the audience. It's live now, as you listen. It's only $2 for the Kindle version, so grab it. We'd love for you to leave a review. If, for whatever reason, you don't have an Amazon account or can't invest into it, find me on LinkedIn and I'll give you a copy for free.

David Fastuca: 37:06

We just want to impact more people. I just want people to read the book, execute and then share with us. David Louis, this really helped me in the business and that's enough for us. So where can people go for information on Growth Forum and or the book? Very simple, so for the book, just go to growthforumio forward slash book and then that will point you in the right way to collect it, and then on the same site as well, and within the show notes, you have my LinkedIn URL. If you want to connect with me there, it's just David Fustuka. You'll find my mug on there with a nice green background. So yeah, I invite you to connect with me. Ask me a question. If you need a copy of the book, I'll send you a copy of the book. We just want this in the hands of as many people that we can impact as possible. It's a bit of a legacy project for us. Is that two dollars australian or two dollars?

Gary Pageau: 38:06

us two dollars, us, okay, two dollars globally, depending on how the the market is at the moment. It's a, it's a bargain. There you go and that's out like this week, so that's awesome.

David Fastuca: 38:10

It's brand new, fresh stuff, the ink is launched this week well, let's see a little bit of steam coming off the, the printing press and yeah, for those in the in the printing industry, yeah, criticize the, the print quality, tell me about the design. I love to hear it all awesome.

Gary Pageau: 38:26

Well, david, it's great to meet you. Thank you so much for your time hope the book is a huge success. I will be plugging it, like you won't believe, and I may even read it myself, so thank you so so much. Appreciate it, thank you Bye-bye.

Erin Manning: 38:40

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