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Smart Business Growth with Nicky Miklós
TheSmart Business Growth podcast is your go-to for real talk and real strategy – grounded in over two decades of sales and leadership expertise.
Hosted by sales growth expert and TEDx speaker Nicky Miklós, this show is for ambitious business owners and sales leaders who are scaling businesses – and refuse to choose between high performance and having a life.
Expect pragmatic conversations, proven frameworks, and practical tools to shift your sales culture from reactive to revenue-driving. From systematising sales to developing your next generation of confident leaders, Nicky shares the thinking and strategies that help you build momentum that lasts.
You’ll also hear powerful insights on redefining success, breaking up with burnout, and finding your own version of healthy hustle – that sweet spot of growth without the relentless grind.
It’s time to lead smarter, sell stronger, and grow without losing yourself in the process.
Welcome to Smart Business Growth. Wherever you listen to podcasts, Nicky's waiting to welcome you.
Smart Business Growth with Nicky Miklós
Is Your Team in Sales, or Just Taking Orders | Nicky Miklos & Janine Garner
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Your sales team might not actually be selling. If they're waiting for orders to come through, they're order takers. And that's pushing revenue away.
In this Quick Win, host Nicky Miklós and VIP guest, Janine Garner, best-selling author of It's Who You Know, unpack why the role of salespeople has fundamentally changed and how to shift your team from order takers to relationship creators.
You'll learn:
- The story of the highly paid sales team that wasn't hitting budget
- Why buyers know your product before they ever speak to your team, and what that changes
- "Thought hoarders" vs relationship creators: the shift that turns salespeople into revenue creators
- Janine's "magic pills": what to give a client while your proposal is being considered
⚡ Big ideas. Small time investment.
Quick Wins are bite-sized cuts from the Smart Business Growth Podcast, built for business owners and sales leaders who need insights fast.
Want more? Listen to the full conversation with Janine for the Core Four framework and the Network 10 daily habit.
Find Janine on LinkedIn or at janinegarner.com.au
Take the free Smart Business Growth Audit at nickymiklos.com
Buzzsprout tags: sales team, order taker, sales leadership, janine garner, nicky miklos, relationship selling, sales strategy, business growth, smart business growth, sales mindset
Learn more about Nicky at nickymiklos.com
Grab The Growth Code™ here!
Get your a copy of Healthy Hustle: The New Blueprint to Thrive in Business & Life at www.healthyhustle.com.au
Contact: 0403 191 404 | hello@nickymiklos.com
Music by Jules Miklos-Woodley
Janine
And just on this point, I was talking to the CEO of a major tech company this week. And his conversation with me is, Janine, I've got a really high performance, a high paid, sorry, sales team. Really high paid sales team. And yet they're not hitting budgets. My clients have told me that the sales team are order takers, that they're waiting for the order to come through. And what we were talking about was the importance of network, that the salespeople have to become the teachers, they have to become the relationship creators, the strategic partners, the idea generators. That's where the sales opportunity comes from.
Nicky
So we know that the role of sales people, whether a sales person, sales leader, business owner has absolutely changed. It used to be people would come to us for all the information on our product and service, but they know that already. They find that out through Google and AI, and they know sometimes more about your product and service than your sales reps do, or maybe you do in some instances. So really I want to challenge everybody to get curious about actually what role do I and my team have as salespeople?
Janine
We become reactive to what our clients ask for and we deliver, we respond to that. We keep our ideas to ourselves. We become what I call thought hoarders. We're like, you know, maybe the client should do, but I'm not going to tell them until they commit to that bit or till they sign off until they ask me for a proposal. We keep our ideas and our thinking to ourselves. And fundamentally what that's turning out like is as sales teams, as business owners, we're detracting revenue, we're pushing revenue away.
What we need to be is these relationship creators. And relationship creators fundamentally are thought leaders. They're leaders of thought. You're either a thought leader or a leader of thought. I.e. you're working in partnership, you're noticing what's going on, you're coming up with ideas, you're experimenting. We are proactive partners. Like, it's not about what's in it for me. It's not in it about the immediate sale. It actually comes from a perspective of, Nicky, I really want you to succeed.
I go, I wonder what's going on for them right now. I know I've given them a proposal. What else, what can I help them with whilst they're processing and making that decision? How do I become that trusted partner? So things like in my world, I call them the magic pills. It's like, okay, what is the stuff I can give them now that's going to help them see the results of what they could get if we did more work? What is the information I could give them that helps support my approach? What could I give them without them even asking for it? Because I've seen that's a problem that they're having internally. That piece around networking, from the space, the point of view of giving to support to help speeds up the sales process.
Nicky
And this links back to cutting through the noise because nobody else is doing this. And so how this helps make it easier for people to make a decision to say yes. And also we talk a lot about it's a not now. So a no is not necessarily a no. And I don't mean that in the sleazy old school, icky sales way, but reality is it's a not now. And so creating that relationship, cutting through the noise, the standout, know, our competitive advantage is the way that we think abso-bloody-lootly. And it's the way that we make people feel through observing and getting curious and asking those questions that you talked about, because people remember that so much more than all the other stuff.