Corey and Chris continue their discussion about inertia and constraints. How can leaders identify hidden constraints shaping their strategy? What fosters innovation: centralization or decentralization? Can classic texts offer counter-cultural wisdom to elevate leadership today? Pulling insights from ancient to modern thinkers, Corey and Chris tackle these questions and more. They argue consolidation often hinders progress while decentralization promotes healthy competition. Chris advocates "divisionalizing" to optimize strategy. They explore conquering inertia, maximizing strengths by pruning the unnecessary and structuring for change. The curiosity continues in part two of this engaging conversation in this episode, "Pruning the Unnecessary to Focus on Strengths."   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- There's been, yeah, I think with this concept of innovation in limitations, it leads to [00:33:00] I think a natural progression to the next piece that Rami had spoken about was finding customer limitations. And he had three, and you talked about one earlier that you find customer limitations through the customer eyes, through the market's eyes, and then through the product size.  Corey Frank (00:33:22): And so what are your thoughts on that? Because as a sales, a leader here and as an entrepreneur, [00:33:30] certainly sometimes, and he says in order too, it should be customer market and product. But as you know, and we've talked about many times too, Hey, I built the product so I'm going to start from the product. If I build it, they will come. Because many customers don't understand the limitations. They can't foresee the reality of a product without this limitation before connect and sell came around. Certainly folks didn't complain about [00:34:00] the real limitations because they didn't know a reality without the limitation of, wait, I just press a button and I don't have gatekeepers and everything else. Or the Henry Ford, if I asked the customer what they wanted, they'd all be still driving or still riding horses. So what do you think about that with customer market and product and as far as a blueprint, if you will, to find customer limitations for innovation?  Chris Beall (00:34:26): Well, I always think of it in terms of what's the unit of change? What's the cost of change? What's [00:34:30] the probability of change? So the unit of change, you got to know what's the unit of change. The customer got to change their mind, their business, their point of view, the value that they're hoping to get, what's going to change there? The market always interesting. The market is going to say, Hey, here's some alternatives. Here's ways of looking at this. Whatever my way is, they're going to have some other ones. So the unit of change is they don't go with me, they go with somebody else or they do [00:35:00] nothing. Which is the most common one. The product is the most interesting one in this regard. You can design products for change or you can design products for perfection, for great fit. And they're two different things.  Chris Beall (00:35:14): So the whole idea of software is so to speak, all software products are designed for change. This is why software is eating the world. You can do tricks with software. Think of the Tesla. Teslas download new software [00:35:30] all the time, and they keep getting smarter. It's not that the car was delivered to you smart. It's that the car's getting sitting out there charging in your garage right now. So Elon Musk identified a unit of change. It was super valuable, and customers are delighted in it because it's like, wow, look at that. Well, how does the car show that it's smart? It has a big whole screen and it can show you new things on it so it can make its new smartness obvious. [00:36:00] So designing for change is hard. Nobody in design classes teaches design for change. When you're writing code. The way I've always been a fanatic, and as you know, I've been writing code since 68. I know people laugh when I say that. It's like 1868. I'm exceptionally well preserved, 1968. Sure. So maybe 1768, anticipating some events on the eastern [00:36:30] seaboard of the us. But I've been writing code for a long time. I'm not very creative when it comes to writing code. I don't like tricks. I don't like some tricky way of doing something. I did for a little bit, and then I decided, but the main way that we design code for change is just to make it readable.  Chris Beall (00:36:50): To make it readable. So you could read it to your mom. So my rule always when I hire great developers is we get in a room and we do two things. One is we decide what all the words mean. All [00:37:00] the words in the business need a formal definition. They need a comparative definition. It's one of these and not one of those, right? So you have positive and negative, and it needs an extensive definition. There's an example of one and every word that we're going to use of significance, and the business goes on the whiteboard with three definitions. It generally takes about three days. Everybody is so impatient during this process. We hate you, we hate you, we hate. That's  Corey Frank (00:37:27): An example Chris would be, what? A [00:37:30] good lead or an ideal client. Is that what you're  Chris Beall (00:37:34): Speaking? Yeah, exactly. Or in our case, it's like, what's a dial?  Corey Frank (00:37:38): What's a dial?  Chris Beall (00:37:39): Let's, what's a dial a connected? So we have a very, very specific definition of what a dial is. What does navigated mean when it's applied to a dial? These are very formal, tight type concepts. When somebody misuses one of those words because they're fresh to the company, they'll get corrected by the C E O, because that's the most [00:38:00] important thing is that the language we speak is within our own time domain, hyper precise. There are no colloquial terms used to describe anything that we do because the language is, the language expresses the tolerances within our machine. We want tight tolerances so we don't have sloppy action, and then we have lubrication so that it doesn't burn up. Lubrication tends to be we're funny with each other. [00:38:30] That's the lubrication is humor. You want tight language tolerances. You want something that loosens it up a little bit and cools it off because it is tight. But readability is the equivalent of readability. Is there in every product, is it easy to tell how it does what it does so that when we need to use it a little differently in a customer situation, we can without violating [00:39:00] what it is?  Chris Beall (00:39:03): That is the tough part of design. And enterprise products are really unusual in this regard. They have long, long, long survivorship. I have enterprise products in the field today that I designed in 1983 that are still being used. The lock-in on enterprise products is extremely long. And so now the question is, well, do we know how it [00:39:30] works? Do we know that's not just enough to go, oh, it has this feature or this function, this trick and so forth. The constraint on change, the unit of change is somewhere inside of that. So we have a situation right now at Connected itself. It's a customer who is at the edge of B two B, and they're kind of doing some business to consumer stuff, and they need to do something really important, which is to take credit card information over the phone. Well, everybody knows that Connect and Sell is not a call center outbound system.  Chris Beall (00:40:00): [00:40:00] So do we have that built in? Well, we do have something built in, and it's something that is very easy to apply in a certain way, but only across a whole organization. So now what's the unit of change? Do you take one organization and say it's two in a connect in self sense that is we divisionalized so that each one can innovate separately? Or do we say no, it's more efficient to have them together, or now I have to have more if then else kind of statements, tricks in [00:40:30] order to do one thing rather than the other, where my tendency is, which is split 'em and eat the inefficiency so that you gain the flexibility that comes from knowing how the damn thing works. But there will always be arguments on both sides and when any and all gold GRS are talking about, when they're talking about the theory of constraints, ultimately you're talking about the theory of change [00:41:00] because okay, I've identified the constraint. Now if I didn't change, what's that all about? That about, oh, fantastic, Chris, you can see it.  Corey Frank (00:41:11): Yeah. He talks a lot about identifying it as this concept of the tail and the dog, where once you see tails in the world, once you're trained to see the tails in the world, just like what you had just [00:41:30] explained with the product and how you look at code, you're always in search of the dog. And so one of the examples he gave was with GoPro, the GoPro camera, and the tail was the following, the inventors, the innovators of the GoPro camera. They were already video cameras when GoPro came around, but they observed that surfers in the Southern California, Carlsbad area and the surf, they were taping, wrapping [00:42:00] their video cameras in plastic and waterproof containers to get right in the heart of the action as you're going through a tube, as you're going through getting started on the wave and take these incredible shots.  Corey Frank (00:42:15): And these same folks were the same type of extreme athletes that wanted to strap 'em to the front of their mountain bike as they're going through these precarious trails and record the motion in a mere traditional Sony Handycam wouldn't do. And so they [00:42:30] jury rigged all these other protection mechanisms. And so the tail was a small group of customers who spend extensively a lot of money and effort to satisfy a specific need that they had, and what's the need that they're trying to satisfy? Well, and then is that need potentially relevant for other customers? The size of the dog, if you will. Is it a [00:43:00] big dog or is it a small dog? And then how much effort does the market, does this company, does this innovation need to do to satisfy that need? And so he says that there's oftentimes companies that have these tales that end up being a small doc.  Corey Frank (00:43:24): He also said something very humorous I thought, which says a tail plus a tail plus a tail plus a tail is not a dog. [00:43:30] It's a bunch. And the example he gave on that is Botox, where Botox people, Hey, Botox, everybody wants to feel younger, but he wants to get rid of stretch lines on their face and the culture and be accepted. Or maybe it's if you're a Hollywood starch and you want to do all these things, but the limitation, the reason why it's not a dog yet, it's still a tail, is because needles, because the molecules are too big to have something that you can rub [00:44:00] or pill you take. So you still have the barrier of putting a need, and a lot of people don't want to do that. So it's not a dog yet. It's still a tail because it's ostensibly a small group still of folks who are willing to do it.  Corey Frank (00:44:14): And so when you look at what your market is as Clayton Christensen, the Innovators development, you come up with this software, this weapon that folks didn't know that this limitation of getting rid of gatekeepers and voicemails [00:44:30] then even conceptualize that that could be a possibility in the world of sales. You guys created it, and that's the tail. And the dog is look at this industry that as a result of that. But do you see that? Have you experienced that tail and dog and other industries? Certainly with a lot of the clients that you deal with, you probably see it pretty often.  Chris Beall (00:44:55): Yeah. I mean, I think the tail and the dog is kind of everything, and [00:45:00] you got to start with the tail and you're guessing about the dog. You got to pull the tail towards you to go, okay, how big is this dog? Or is it just a funny shaped dog that's got a big ass, but little stubby front legs?  Corey Frank (00:45:17): That's right. That's right. He says, you ultimately remember you want the dog, not the tail. So if you're trying to create something, don't live in the world of trying to make the tail better. You're trying to go for the dog,  Chris Beall (00:45:30): [00:45:30] Right? But you got to make the tail good enough. So I mean, if this stuff were easy, everybody would do it, right? Everybody tries it. Most people are smart enough not to do it. They recognize that 90 hours a week is a long time to work, and neglect to your family has its limits. That becomes the constraint. Actually, we call that a backend constraint,  Corey Frank (00:45:51): A backend.  Chris Beall (00:45:52): It's over there. It's like, oh, no. Now Corey, I'm sorry. You're only allowed to have zero children and you can't interact [00:46:00] 'em because you don't have time for either one of those activities. I don't know the algorithm for that. I know that it comes like everything else. It comes down to costs and time and more time than costs. That is, you only have so much time to figure out something. And if you haven't figured it out in a certain amount of time, you have a big choice to make, which is, are you going on faith that you're going to figure it out, or are you going to go change tails, right? And try to [00:46:30] figure it out. You're  Corey Frank (00:46:30): Talking about when you're stuck.  Chris Beall (00:46:32): When you're stuck and you're always stuck when you're at the tail, you're just plain all stuck. Yeah, you're stuck about the dog. You might not be stuck about the tail, but Oh, look, we put this thing together and it turns out it needs a mounting capability that goes on somebody's head, and now that we have that blah, blah, blah, okay, fine, right? Oh, but that tends to slip down and get between their nose and then they hate it. And okay, we got to have another little thing that's a strap on the back. Great. We're in tail land. We're tailing it up, right? Yep. [00:47:00] Getting to this question of is it a dog, one of the issues with that is there are people who want it to be a dog. It also comes down to this, what does somebody want it to be? What do they believe that it's, and then who's willing to look at the evidence? How much does it cost to get the evidence? How much time do we have to get the evidence? And by the way, we're busy putting another strap on that damn thing, or making it a different color or using it for [00:47:30] some slightly different purpose. I actually think this is where markets take care of what we cannot, and we tend to be somewhat victimized by them. And it's also why the folks who build these incredible products are not exactly, everybody's friend.  Chris Beall (00:47:48): Steve Jobs is not everybody's friend. Do you think you could name, at the time of his death, could he have named 50 people who are close personal friends of his?  Corey Frank (00:47:59): Yeah, [00:48:00] for  Chris Beall (00:48:00): Sure. That would help him out in any situation that he could call. No, that wouldn't happen because his genius, and I'm speculating here, but his genius was he was pretty insistent. And people who are pretty insistent have fewer friends. I insist. I insist if all you say is I insist, and then you fire people who disagree with you, well, you don't have that many friends. But I think that is sometimes as we look at all of these factors, [00:48:30] we don't take into account this fundamental human factor, which is, and we say it about salespeople. We say, oh, well, the need to be liked, that's pretty bad in a salesperson. Oh, really? And exactly. How do we go in and do surgery on somebody's soul so they no longer have a need to be liked by other human beings?  Corey Frank (00:48:49): Oh, for sure. Chris. Yeah.  Chris Beall (00:48:51): Come on. Give me a break here.  Corey Frank (00:48:52): Well, it's funny you bring that up here. As we come up against the top of the hour is so this old book here, right? And [00:49:00] for those at home, it's the Tau te Ching, the book of the Way, written by our friend lasu circa what? Chris? Five, 600 bc. I think something along that a long time.  Chris Beall (00:49:13): We call that a while ago.  Corey Frank (00:49:14): Yes. I don't even think you were coding back in 500 bc.  Chris Beall (00:49:17): Well, I can tell you, Mike, I was writing in Fortran,  Corey Frank (00:49:20): But exactly what you said, I think we're going to end on this note. This is from one of his lessons, number 27, where he calls hidden values and talk about the need to [00:49:30] be liked and the value of inherent value inside of the folks that inspire innovation. He says, good hikers need no maps. Good speakers need no scripts. Good counters need no abacus. Good guards need no locks. The wises trusting and goodness see the potential in others treating no one as an outcast, trusting, and goodness. They redeem all things. Nothing is worthless [00:50:00] to them. They recognize the real hidden value. The whys take the lost, the seemingly lost under their wings. And so the seemingly lost become newfound treasures of the wise. Each is valuable to the other. This is the significance of spirituality. And when you talk about what we've talked about with the constraints, dealing with the false negatives as well as the false positive, the exhaust, the signals, the innovation, knowing [00:50:30] what to say no to, I think that you really conceptualized exactly why connected cell is so successful, why you're such a great mentor, and all the people you've taken under your wings, the Toms of the world, and everybody in your skunkwork projects, et cetera, because nothing is lost.  Corey Frank (00:50:48): All these folks have signals and exhaust that can deliver to the bigger picture. So I thought that was very, I was like, I got to find a way to bring this in. And what did you do? You brought it right home [00:51:00] to Ru. So final thoughts, Chris, on the theory constraints, Mr. Lasu, in this episode here, this fanboy episode on ROI Goldratt.  Chris Beall (00:51:12): Yeah. Well, thank you ROI Goldratt for carrying on this work. It is a boulder that we never get to the top of the hill. It never, this is one of the rare things. Well, not that rare. There's a lot of things in life like this, right, where it never rolls downhill for us, where if we [00:51:30] want it, we have to push it up the hill and theory of constraints is one of those things that will never roll down the hill.  Corey Frank (00:51:37): But that's the juice though, isn't it? Effort. That exercise is the juice which keeps knuckleheads like you and I still doing this over and over and over again, versus we like the occasional mi Thai in Margarita. But to me at least, I don't want to speak for you, the sage of sales here, but isn't. That's a little bit of the driving force behind it, is that that endless,  Chris Beall (00:51:59): It's a huge [00:52:00] part. If it were a trivially solvable problem, it would be solved. The understanding of the theory of constraints is fairly straightforward. The acceptance of it is harder. The application of it is idiosyncratic. That's the nature of it. Every system is different from every other system in many, many ways, except for one. They all have one constraint. And so we can count to one, but that doesn't give us the answer. It just tells us we need to go look, [00:52:30] that we need to go look. And it's so difficult in a world where we must value ourselves as others value us. We don't have an alternative to that. We're not very good as a species in playing loner. Some people are better than others, but nobody's perfect at it. And so here we are in a world full of people who need to feel important with a theory of how systems work, a true theory of how [00:53:00] systems work. This is like a unified field theory. It's a done, done that basically says, most of us, most of the time just need to be carrying on, carrying on. We're not that important except to the degree that we're building flexibility for change. Change tricks, not do tricks that sit in our inventory when it's our turn.  Corey Frank (00:53:24): I love that, especially the aspect of being loners. I'm glad you're not a loner, Chris. Otherwise, this would be the market [00:53:30] dominance guy versus market dominance guys. And so it's always Chris, we're going to let you get back to the fetching, miss Ucci and all the stuff that you guys do. The brilliance that you come out of your dinners and your wines and your walks and everything else in the sales world is much better for it. So for the market, Dominus guys and Chris Beal, this is Corey Frank. Until next time.  Chris Beall (00:53:58): Alright, Austin, all yours.  Corey Frank (00:54:00): [00:54:00] Thank you, Chris.  Chris Beall (00:54:01): We're coming your way. Austin. We're headed down Thursday.  Corey Frank (00:54:05): Oh, there you go. There you go. Great stuff, Chris. As always, I have this meeting with  Chris Beall (00:54:11): Sue. I love it. That was so good. That was making my heart go pity, pat. That was really something.  Corey Frank (00:54:18): Yeah, trusting and goodness. I mean, because all your people, you think about the skunkworks project, you started how many years ago doing that, just even with Galen, the stuff that you do, right? It's like he's not classically trained as a data scientist [00:54:30] and everything. Tom's a musician for gosh sakes, and yet you trust in goodness. They redeem all things. Nothing is worthless to them. One man's trash is another man's treasure, in other words. And so, yeah, I love how counter-cultural that is. I wish it was cultural, but unfortunately it still is counter-cultural and  Chris Beall (00:54:51): It'll always be. It'll always be. And the forces that move in one direction are moving at all times. Otherwise, the stuff [00:55:00] wouldn't be written thousands of years ago. And still it'd be like, oh yeah, we live in that world.  Corey Frank (00:55:06): Yeah. Well, it's amazing that just even as a sales leader, this stuff is 3000 years old, nearly 3000 years old, and we still haven't figured out how to manage somebody to their utmost potential. It's like all this stuff we are talking about idiosyncratic to manage those idiosyncrasies, [00:55:30] what do you call it? Idiosyncrasies of all of us. I mean, that's marriage, that's fatherhood.  Chris Beall (00:55:38): Well, it turns out that as a matter, of course, I suppose when there's complexity, when we're trying to do stuff together, there are almost no short ways. There are profound ways. There are ways that we can understand 'em when we see 'em, but [00:56:00] there's no short ways. There just aren't. And yet we have a constant striving for short ways, and we read stuff and we consult and we put something on the wall and we think that's it. But that's it. It's very different from, that's it in execution. Think of your body. 50 trillion cells have got to collaborate, and they have to collaborate hundreds of thousands of times a second in order just to have you be [00:56:30] an organism and not complain about something. Yeah, right. Exactly.  Chris Beall (00:56:38): And we have such odd ideas, these odd hierarchical ideas. I'm reading an old book, 10 years old, not thousands, by this guy, Lipton. It's called The Biology of Belief, and basically the thesis of the book is pretty simple, which is book, [00:57:00] let's face it, big organisms like us, 50 trillion cell organisms have some specialization going on with regard to this nervous system that its job first and foremost is tell you when to dock. That's its real job. You ever have somebody throw a brick at your head, it'll do its job before you know that it's done its job, and then you'll tell yourself a story about how you always saw it coming. In fact, if you're still there afterwards, you saw it coming a little bit late, but you still [00:57:30] got out of the way, right? Yeah. We have this superpower, which is to control the actions of subsets of these cells right down to inside of them, how they express the genetic material they have as proteins and how those proteins are folded.  Chris Beall (00:57:49): And he makes the point, the membrane of a cell is the brain. The D n A is like a recipe book, but the membrane decides what comes in [00:58:00] and what must go out under what circumstances. And that's the definition of intelligence. What do I accept in and what do I exclude? The thousand things. I exclude the one thing, and is it time to go for stuff, or is it time to protect myself? Wow. What circumstances I find myself in, I've got 50 trillion cells right now, and so that are each working on that principle at this moment with little proteins that can fold and unfold a thousand times a second. So to think that we kind [00:58:30] of get it and reduce it to an aphorism on the wall, that aphorism might make us think in a way that is good according to us, which is probably as far as it goes, and according to people that the other organisms that we hang with you and me together and so forth, the influence is not small. We think. It's not like, oh, it's a miracle that our subconscious [00:59:00] mind controls the expression of whether we heal from a cut. That's a miracle. No, that's actually the only way it could be. Actually wouldn't work another way. There's not like, well, your finger is not detached from you. If I cut off my finger, then cut my finger, it doesn't heal itself.  Corey Frank (00:59:23): Yeah, that's fascinating. It sounds like the next evolution of sapiens, right? After you read Sapiens, you got to read [00:59:30] Lipton.  Chris Beall (00:59:30): Yeah. Lipton is kind of a crazy radical guy. He is a molecular, he's not a molecular biologist, cell biologist in some sense. He's out there until you really think about it. Then you go, no, actually, this is the most commonplace way to understand things.  Corey Frank (00:59:48): Oh, I got to read that. I love  Chris Beall (00:59:49): That. And I ask people sometimes to do this thought experiment, which is so, have you ever had a jalapeno pepper? You were bitten into one. [01:00:00] Think of that right now. Did you salivate?  Corey Frank (01:00:04): I  Chris Beall (01:00:04): Did imagine biting into a jalapeno. Nothing happened. There's no jalapeno, right? But your salivary glands we're convinced, completely convinced that you're biting into one of those things right now.  Corey Frank (01:00:19): Yeah, the brick is coming. The proverbial brick is coming duck.  Chris Beall (01:00:22): Exactly. So anyway, I'm finding Lipton be desire, really fun to read and meaningful, and [01:00:30] kind of gets me doing different things, which is I think what we need from others is like, get me unstuck a little bit. I find myself repeating myself.  Corey Frank (01:00:41): Yeah, no, no, I agree. Chris. No, this is such great stuff. It's such great stuff. I'm going to send this to Rami and this episode I told him that, hey, you probably got two guys in the States here who probably talk about you more than they should, and so [01:01:00] I'll send this. So he was interested in that. So I'll send him this episode here when we post on LinkedIn, et cetera, and see how he responds. But great stuff as always. How's business otherwise good?  Chris Beall (01:01:13): Yeah, I mean it's, lemme do this. Bye Austin.   Corey Frank on LinkedIn Branch49 Chris Beall on LinkedIn ConnectAndSell  

The guys are back together! Join our master salesmen Corey Frank and Chris Beall as they dive into this discussion on business strategy inspired by a recent event Corey attended featuring Rami Goldratt of the Theory of Constraints Institute. Discussing key concepts like inertia, identifying constraints, and the politics involved, they provide insight for sales managers and CROs looking to break through barriers to growth. Chris explains how constraints manifest on the buyer's side, in their emotions and feelings of possibility. On the execution side, he advocates building key elements in advance to avoid delays. He and Corey cover divisional vs departmental structure, M&A pitfalls, and more insights. Join them for this episode, “Divisional vs. Departmental – Structure for Sales Innovation.”   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Corey Frank (00:00:04): Here we are once again. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank, and of course the Sage of Sales, the prophet of Profit, the Hawking of Hawking, Chris Beal. Chris, it's been a minute or two since the two of us have been in the same virtual room. How are you?  Chris Beall (00:00:23): I'm doing great. We must be like busy little bees out taking our flowers to task and doing our  Corey Frank (00:00:30): [00:00:30] Thing. Exactly. We don't have the time. I wish we did to post prolifically on LinkedIn, but I think you and I both have businesses to run sometimes, so that gets in the way, doesn't it?  Chris Beall (00:00:40): Sad business. Indeed. But you know what? Somebody's got to do  Corey Frank (00:00:44): It. Oh, hey, listen, we depend on the Gerry Hills of the world and the Ryan Reiserts of the world and the Sean Ceases of the world to write so prolifically and so poetically and so elegantly, and then steal their ideas at scale. So [00:01:00] that's certainly what I do. I speak for myself, of course, but I love their writings in particular and there's many, many, many more out there. Hey, in the meantime, since the last time we had spoken and met a lot of folks, I know Taylor Swift has been in the news on a concert tour and then the Rolling Stones have had a tour that was kind of going and then interrupted and it's starting again. And then Ed Sheeran also was recently on tour, [00:01:30] but I think although both of us, we kind of like music, we had a different tour that I figured that I'd share with you, and I sent you my picture, my Taylor Swift, our Taylor Swift, our Mick Jagger, and our Ed Sheeran. And that of course is Rami Goldratt from the Theory of Constraints Institute. He came to town on a special concert tour, and of course I had to drop everything and send you a selfie with a master himself because that's how we roll, [00:02:00] right? As the other eight listeners on this podcast, I think that's what we care about is anything and everything with regards to market dominance and certainly the theory constraints plays a big part of that, doesn't it, Chris?  Chris Beall (00:02:11): Oh yeah. I mean the whole market dominance concept is built on the theory of constraints. As you know, I have a disciple of fanatic, and the trick with these things is they give you a framework to think, but you still need to think and you still need to do experiments, and you also need to look into your own mind and your heart and say, [00:02:30] am I looking at this objectively or am I playing mind games with myself? So that's what makes it so interesting.  Corey Frank (00:02:38): It does. It crosses, although as you had educated me all those 10 plus years ago on Eli Gold Rat and that it was meant originally for the manufacturing space, I think what we've done here on the market dominance guys, certainly with your tutelage, is open up the minds of so many sales professionals like myself [00:03:00] that this transcends the manufacturing space into what we do in running sales organizations. Correct?  Chris Beall (00:03:07): To me, sales is actually manufacturing. I mean, we're manufacturing the opportunity to solve a problem and supposedly we've come with a potential solution. Somebody has a problem that we could potentially help them with, but manufacturing that opportunity to solve a problem and to do it in a way that works for everybody. The other constraint, if you're going to do it over and over, [00:03:30] it's got to work for everybody. I mean, some folks in sales have been known to wear out their welcome a little bit here and there, but that's not sort of the ultimate game. So yeah, I'm a manufacturing oriented guy. I used to build manufacturing systems and software and spend a lot of time on factory floors and out in distribution centers, and when you make it physical, it gets real. That's one of the interesting things about the whole world of software is as soon as you make it physical, it gets very, very real. [00:04:00] And as you know, I'm married to Helen Ucci, who herself started her career as a manufacturing engineer. She's a M I T trained mechanical engineer. So you can imagine around our house on a Saturday morning when we're talking shop, it's pretty good if everybody else just stays home and NAS on a bagel.  Corey Frank (00:04:20): Absolutely. Oh, for sure. Well, that's what I think we want to talk about here. If I could indulge you and indulge again our eight listeners here on diving a little deep, I want to [00:04:30] throw out a couple of observations from the two and a half hours that I was privileged to spend with ROI Goldratt and get your reaction. I was giving you a little bit of play byplay afterwards and certainly sent you some pictures, but I'd like if I could just kind of get some reaction and of course to level set the audience for some of the folks that haven't listened to probably about half our podcast. We talk in one form or another about the theory of constraints and business innovation. And one of the things that [00:05:00] Rami does to set to level set everybody is that if you look at your business as a whole and understand what governs the flow and constrains the business growth, that's how you should think about what we're about talk about here in the next few minutes with Chris Beal. So Chris, what Rami says and what Eli stated in the goal in the other books is that typically there's one or [00:05:30] two constraints, and I think you just hit one when you're talking about the development of software, he says that there's one generally constraint in the creation of value, and then there's another typical constraint in the execution of its delivery.  Corey Frank (00:05:45): So the creation of value and the execution of delivery. And obviously part of it is focusing on elevating these constraints because these are those leverage points that help the business. But what do you say with [00:06:00] that in a sales world when you talk about would you agree with that in the creation of value and then in the creation of its delivery? And how would you square that circle for us in sales when it comes to those two constraints that we're faced with pretty often?  Chris Beall (00:06:17): Yeah, it's so fascinating. I look at it from the buyer's side. And so where is the value going to be created in a relevant way in sales? It's actually inside the buyer's body, it's [00:06:30] inside their emotions. And so if the buyer responds to what the salesperson is saying to them, and it's generally saying that does it, we don't do a lot else. We don't take dance for them and we don't give 'em a massage and we don't do any of these other things that we might consider doing. We're pretty much in the saying business when it comes to sales, fortunately saying is enough to get some motion in that other person's body, but for the buyer, [00:07:00] the value shows up in what is really a feeling of possibilities, a feeling that, hey, this could go in a direction that's worth taking another step. And that's really interesting because sales is all about management of uncertainty.  Chris Beall (00:07:17): And when we're in a theory of constraints world, there's this big question which is, well, where's the bottleneck? Right? Where's the constraint? And the answer as we start in a sales relationship from the buy side is, [00:07:30] I don't know, it's your job as the salesperson to guide me toward my constraint so that I have a feeling about it that includes the following. Oh yes, there it is, and we can do something about it. We can do something about it. And maybe it's just, I can do something about it. Thanks for educating me, but we can do something. When it comes to delivery, what's the equivalent of delivery and sales? So the value is created inside me as a buyer, and [00:08:00] it's an emotional state. It doesn't have a lot of intellectual qualities to it. I just feel like here's somebody who seems to be an expert and they seem to be on my side.  Chris Beall (00:08:10): And we know from Oren's work, the stuff that happens within a pitch helps the buyer to get to the point of saying, yeah, this is an expert and they're on my side with the flash roll establishes you as an expert and the kind of offer, the fact that you can help that person, show them how to get through [00:08:30] the buying process because you understand it well, that shows you're on their side, you're going to show them sort of the easy way, but then you actually have to do it. And I think a lot of sales folks can talk that game that gets somebody to feel right, but as the steps start to be executed, then the question is, well, we still don't know where the constraint is because a sale is, this is where manufacturing breaks down as an analogy. [00:09:00] So Gold Wrap wrote a very, very good book that I think that most folks don't dive into very far.  Chris Beall (00:09:09): So everybody's into the manufacturing analogy. I love the book Critical Chain, critical about projects, and it basically says this, I'm going to paraphrase it badly. Go read the book, don't listen to me now, go read the book and don't listen to me. But having stuck around this long, you're listening to me. So listen to me, and this sounds a little [00:09:30] obstru, but just bear with me. The constraint on a project according to Gold Rat is the critical path of the project itself. So you lay out the steps and the critical path is like, this got to happen and this got to happen, this got to happen, this has got to happen, or you don't get there. So actually in a sense, there's that tie between the critical path and strategy in a business. Strategy is a set of steps that if we take a step, it reduces the cost and the risk of taking the next step [00:10:00] that gets us closer to our goal kind of sounds like a project we complete part of the project, it gets us closer to with regard to risk and cost the next step, which gets us to the next and the next and the next.  Chris Beall (00:10:13): One of the things that is so interesting to me and utterly ignored by most folks in sales, and yet it makes or breaks almost every deal is the feeders. So the critical path is what you must manage, and one of the [00:10:30] ways you manage it is you pre-build the inventory that it needs to consume. So say you have a contract that you're going to have to get to at some point, a really smart thing to do is to pre-build everything about that contract, including the specifics you're learning along the way. So when you get to that point, the cycle time between, Hey, we need this contract to move forward in a physical form, it might be a DocuSign, it may be a Word document or whatever, [00:11:00] but we need it. Oh, do we have to go make it? Now that introduces cycle time and brings Murphy into play.  Chris Beall (00:11:08): Murphy's law is going to always prevail over time. And the critical chain, we're told, Hey, take the last entire third of the project and just make a buffer. Don't buffer the individual steps buffer the entire last third of the project because Murphy's going to show up. But the way we fight Murphy is to pre-provision the feeders [00:11:30] and a contract's, an example, a demo schedule as an example, having a resource that you've pre briefed rather than briefing them at the last second so they can help on a deal as an example. And I think great salespeople know how to manage the feeders that are coming into the critical path while they personally manage the critical path itself. We often just say to salespeople, get a next step, get a next step. But what if the next step requires something that comes in from the side? [00:12:00] Did we have it staged? Is it ready to go? So that's the execution part to me.  Corey Frank (00:12:07): No, I love that. One of the quotes that Rami put up for his father is a great value does not sell itself. And when you look at the steps that you just outlined here, how many times have we spoken about the product folks? We'll build something that they think is ready for the market, throw it over the fence [00:12:30] to the sales organization and the sales leaders get frustrated at the sales reps because they overhired to account for the quota that they need to hit on their spreadsheet to deliver to their board. And so I'm managing by a spreadsheet and say, Hey, I have five reps. I'm over spreading the quota, so really all I need is three of 'em to hit 80% and I should hit my number. And then when all of 'em hit 40 or 50%, then they start to panic and then they say, wait a minute, this product [00:13:00] is good enough to sell itself.  Corey Frank (00:13:02): And I think part of the realization, certainly from talking with you all these years is that quote from Proust, I think it is, he says, the real voyage of discovery consists in not in seeking new boundaries or new landscapes, but in having new eyes. And when you can go into an organization and not seek new landscape and boundaries, [00:13:30] but just have a fresh set of eyes on this and math of sales, breaking it down to the ludicrous conversation, conversion rate, demos per hour, right? The epiphany that all these things we've talked about all over these years is those are new innovations, if you will, in our space, in our sales space just by having new eyes.  Chris Beall (00:13:53): Yeah. Well, novelty is a very inexpensive way to get option value, novelty of perception [00:14:00] of somebody else's point of view. You don't have to do much. It operates in parallel and everyone has an opinion, so they give it to you very inexpensively, unless they're an expensive consultant. Some people come in, they give you the really great stuff. I'll never forget being in a room where Jeffrey Moore walked in and gave us the most valuable two days of consulting, which boiled down to this, you guys are not across the chasm. You're a pre chasm company. Your product is pre chasm, adopt a pre [00:14:30] chasm strategy. Now, he could have just said that that would've been straightforward, but it had to be a new set of eyes that were opened in us. Our eyes had to become new. That's what great consultants do, great teachers is they give you new eyes. And we could tell we had new eyes. We started having arguments about stuff we didn't argue about before we had disagreements about the non-obvious.  Corey Frank (00:14:55): Well, let's talk about that because I think this is one that you've certainly [00:15:00] waxed on many times and that is dear to the folks in the theory constraints is the concept of inertia. So I want to get a couple of riffs from you on inertia and that in business we sometimes oftentimes too, oftentimes act in the same way even when we need to change. And we're caught in this inertia. And you had said something very wise to me several times, is that the [00:15:30] best breakthroughs happen when you are stuck,  Corey Frank (00:15:35): But yet you talk about Jeffrey Moore coming in and this new fresh out of eyes. But what do you have to say when certainly a lot of the businesses that you deal with that call you in, they're arguably at a state of inertia. They need a force to act upon them, to get them in motion oftentimes, and they're out of novelty. They have no more novelty left in the [00:16:00] tank to create the illusion of motion, and they're stuck with their board and their numbers. So what do you do in those situations? And do you agree that a lot of businesses that are in this state of sales, they're going to hire more sales folks or they're going to do all these other things, but in essence they're really at the state of inertia?  Chris Beall (00:16:19): Yeah, inertia is stuck, I think are really related to each other because when we're, first of all, just to remind anybody who didn't catch whatever episode we talked about, the three states [00:16:30] one can be in companies are in these states often, which is you're either in flow, which is rare or wonderful and just stay there or you are stuck, which is the hardest one to recognize. You're stuck. That means you need to learn something to move forward. You don't need to do something to move forward. Now, you might need to do something to learn something, but your issue is lack of knowledge. You don't know what to do. And then there's the last one, which is waiting. Waiting [00:17:00] is very rare. Waiting is actually what critical chain is about, is don't put in a state where you're waiting. If you could have avoided waiting by building a feeder that is staged early, the problem with being stuck as a social problem, and it's a problem of recognizing that it's time to put your self-image aside just a little bit, and the need to be seen as all knowing and admit that you're not knowing [00:17:30] because this is the obvious problem of being stuck in.  Chris Beall (00:17:34): And the problem of inertia come down to the same thing. Why do we have inertia? Well, we repeat what isn't working because at least we're acting knowledgeably. We're acting like we know what's going on, and our reputation is worth way more to us than any results. There is nobody in business except for maybe Elon Musk who says, reputation be damned. I'm just going for it. Right? That's [00:18:00] actually the characteristic of these people who produce these astonishing things. The Steve Jobs is the Warren Buffets, right? Do you think Warren Buffet cares about his reputation compared to just making great investments? He writes that brilliant letter every year that looks like he cares about his reputation, but in fact, it's a means for him not to have to care about his reputation because he's basically laying out transparently how he thinks. And his reputation, therefore, is of somebody who lays [00:18:30] out transparently how he thinks, and you can trust him.  Chris Beall (00:18:33): And therefore, if you want to buy a share of stock, which is now worth, God knows how much in his company, well, you can go ahead and do that. And by the way, he's not waiting for you to do it. He's fine if you don't. So those two are really together. I think the main role of somebody from the outside and only somebody from the outside can do this, by the way, no man is a prophet in his own country. The job of a consultant is to come in [00:19:00] and allow the team to recognize, especially their leader, to recognize we're stuck. And that's okay. So the first thing the consultant really ultimately does is says, look, getting stuck like this in whatever language they use for it is pretty much inevitable. It would be weird to be in flow forever, and it would be strange to be waiting and not doing anything.  Chris Beall (00:19:23): So you're doing the same thing over and over. It feels like progress, but you note the numbers say it's not progress, [00:19:30] and you're tired of telling yourself stories about how it's progress when it's not progress. And so you're stuck. And now let's step back, get a little bit of slack, and in that slack we'll do something that corresponds to learning. Now, one of the problems with different kinds of companies is like our company, we're bootstrapped. So a bootstrap company like connect and sell never feels stuck because every day [00:20:00] you're off selling for two purposes. One is the simple-minded purpose, I'll call it the banana stand purpose, got to sell enough bananas to keep the lights on or keep the permit. It allows us to stand here on the corner and sell bananas. We have to pay the tax. We have to, I don't know, pay the protection money, whatever it happens to be.  Chris Beall (00:20:23): The other one is, but wait, we're going somewhere. We're going somewhere. And that's [00:20:30] the reason the bootstrap companies are so difficult and also so admired when they pull it off is how do you go somewhere when you're also just trying to keep the wheels on the bus? That's a tricky thing. And it comes down to just recognizing you're stuck faster. There has to be an element of what feels like a little chaos at the edge, which is really the exploration of your stuckness to get you out. You can't hire a consultant every time you're stuck. Love to  Corey Frank (00:20:59): Steve [00:21:00] Jobs. One of the quotes that Romy talked about is Steve Jobs says innovation is saying no to a thousand things.  Corey Frank (00:21:09): And these bootstrap companies like you and I and have had, and I think all of your companies and all my companies have been relatively bootstrapped. Occasionally, if you get vc, you just spend it like drunken sailors and high mountain blueberries and Brazilian te Quin tables and all the necessities of life. So you think, [00:21:30] but you talk about this innovation, Chris, that companies have go through, especially as banana stand companies, where you have this expansion and you have this convergent knowing when to do this and knowing when to do that. How do you still focus on knowing which limitation, which constraint is the one that's holding your business back a lot of noise. You still have to hit payroll, you got to hit [00:22:00] your cash number, you got to still grow. And you as, again, any devotee of this podcast knows is that if you're a c e O and you're still not selling, that's a problem at least several times a week on the phones. So how do you balance all that knowing that job says it's saying no to a thousand things. There's a constraint. You know, want to kind of exhaust the novelty factor your pre chasm. How do I innovate to determine what is my guiding true north to know [00:22:30] that I'm on the right path?  Chris Beall (00:22:32): It's a tough one. I think the main thing that we need to do, if we want to innovate, we have to innovate. We have to innovate just means doing new stuff that makes a difference. So if we just keep doing the old stuff, our issue is not that the old stuff will stop working. Our issue is that somebody else will figure out the new stuff. And in modern markets, unless you have physical control over your market, I sell hot dogs in Northeast Anchorage [00:23:00] on Tuesday afternoons maybe, but somebody will come along and go hotdog and brats. Oh, brats beer. So those are innovations in that kind of business, and it's difficult to control markets, and this whole program is about controlling markets. So if you don't innovate, your real issue is somebody will, and when they do, they'll do something that you will retreat from.  Chris Beall (00:23:28): This is the whole innovator's [00:23:30] dilemma problem. That is if you're first, you're the innovators, the innovator. I think it's funny, I probably said this before, folks read Clayton Christensen's book, the Late Great Clayton Christensen wrote a book, the Innovator's Dilemma, and then some others that were the solution and so forth, and they think, oh yeah, the new guy's the innovator. That book is about you are the first guy, you're the innovator, and now you're going to be attacked by a disruptor. So if you're first, [00:24:00] we were first in this industry with the push a button, talk to somebody thing, we are ripe for disruption because whatever we're doing is whatever we're doing is more than is required because we had to do things and do other things to do other things. And they accrete, you don't throw away very fast. So jobs used to throw things away with a certain ferocity, I would say, and that's when he rejoined Apple. Somebody said, well, what's going to happen? [00:24:30] I said, A whole lot less is going to happen than you think and one new thing's going to happen. You didn't think of. Yeah,  Corey Frank (00:24:35): Get rid of open docs. One of the famous decisions at Apple is getting rid of the open docs and how disruptive that was when he came back.  Chris Beall (00:24:44): The fact is there's a reason the theory of constraints itself is hard to apply in business, and it's because it's exactly this thing about the thousand things. Your business has one constraint, one a system, and systems can only have one constraint. [00:25:00] This is what everybody hates about the theory of constraints. They hate it viscerally. It says this, everybody else has got to keep on keeping on. While, by the way, if you're really clever, very inexpensively building some inventory of things you know how to do, should it be your turn? Should you become your organization? What you do becomes the constraint. So you have this preparatory work to do that has no payoff whatsoever. Now, [00:25:30] if you were to apply it, it doesn't move the needle because you're not the constraint. So you're suddenly politically impotent hunt because you're not the constraint. And a wise company finds the constraint, characterizes the constraint, understands it's cycle time, it's throughput, it's quality, figures out how to invest in it, what the investment would yield, does an experiment to find out if that's in fact true and then goes and makes the investment widens, the constraint flow goes through and the constraint moves one way or the other.  Chris Beall (00:25:59): It moves downstream [00:26:00] because they can't handle it down there or moves upstream because it sucks down in all the inventory that you had that you thought was so great and now you're out of inputs. Right? Okay, so they're doing that. Who likes it? Who does it make look good?  Chris Beall (00:26:18): Well, if you're under the microscope, at least you're getting attention. Yes. If you're not, you're feeling neglect. And the politics of attention and neglect are highly asymmetric in [00:26:30] a company with regard to folks feeling about their own future. Therefore, the theory of constraints always is rolling a rock up a hill, up a hill of influence, politics, and how hard is it to sabotage the notion that there's only one constraint? So the standard fight against the theory of constraints in sales or in business is this, no, no, no. There's many constraints. Well, mathematically, there can only be one [00:27:00] in some curve, somewhere. There is one minimum. I mean, trust me, it may be a little difference, but there's one, and folks hate it. They hate it. It makes them feel insignificant unless they are at the point of constraint, at which point they feel under too much pressure.  Corey Frank (00:27:20): Really? That's fascinating. That's fascinating. So that's the political ramifications, that's the political reality, the [00:27:30] psycho reality of identifying a constraint. It's difficult to identify it enough on a spreadsheet, but now that you have these personalities, right, department heads, marketing production, product delivery, finance capital, whatever it is, that makes it even more of a political landmine, which probably makes it easier for an outside consultant to navigate that versus doing it internally.  Chris Beall (00:28:00): [00:28:00] Exactly. And one of the structural ways to address this is divisionalized instead of departmentalized. So we seek leverage in departmentalization, this department's going to take care of this function. Well, one of the problems with that is now you only have one thing in the company to work at, which is whatever the constraint is, it's now in one department, if you divisionalized and accept the inefficiency [00:28:30] of having some replication of function, you have a joy that shows up incredible power. You get two constraints. It's not one system, it's two systems. Divisions operate sufficiently independently that each one gets to act like its own company. And if it has a supplier upstream called the corporation or downstream called the corporation that it buys on transfer prices or whatever, then well, that's its problem. It's not the [00:29:00] corporation's problem. So you end up with this very interesting situation, and there are extremist companies in this regard.  Chris Beall (00:29:07): Thermo Electron is one of 'em. Three M is one of them companies that basically said, we're going to divisionalized at such a fine level that we're just going to absorb the inefficiency through the power of what is essentially an odd thing on the balance sheet, which is the power of innovation. And we're going to just have faith [00:29:30] that the innovation is going to sparkle here and there sufficiently that it's going to allow us to be a little less efficient when we seek efficiency. We drive multiple systems down to one system. If you and I decide, oh, we're not going to do this podcast anymore like this. What we're going to do is the podcast where we both get together and agree about everything about the podcast, that it's podcast core from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, we only have one constraint in the podcast at that point.  Chris Beall (00:30:00): [00:30:00] We better agree on it. And if it makes you feel unimportant or me feel unimportant, or Susan or Austin or whoever, you got a problem. So we have a pipeline where we come in independently, we talk, each one of us gets talk as much as we want, although I talk more than you do, Austin does. His thing is, as long as a podcast shows up, a recording shows up, there's work to do. And that's interesting because that [00:30:30] allows his and Susan's business to move to turn the crank that one time. That's a key input and the thing kind of works, right? So there's a tendency, and this happens in m and a. So in m and a, the big mistake that folks make now in m and a is to consolidate the C R M systems. It's the standard error. It's like the standard model in physics has all these funny particles and all this.  Chris Beall (00:30:57): The standard error in mergers and [00:31:00] acquisitions is this, well, since our thesis is we're going to cross-sell two kinds of m and a, but one of them tends to involve cross-sell, right? One of 'em is tuck-ins, and you just get market from buying customers. And the other is the cross-sell thesis. So in the cross-sell thesis, which is the power thesis, we go, oh, we're cross-sell this company, we buy its products are going to be sold to our big base and vice versa. Isn't that great? [00:31:30] Well, we better consolidate our CRMs because until we do that, we have the same customer representative, multiple CRMs. Well, as soon as you consolidate your CRMs, what you tend to do is to create a situation first after a lot of time and expense that yields nothing. You create a situation where you're now bottlenecked somewhere inside that C R m and nobody knows how that works, and it's no longer allowed to change.  Chris Beall (00:31:59): It [00:32:00] was so hard to get it to where you wanted to get it. That's where the sunk cost investment issues. So the gamblers paradox or fallacy or whatever you want to call it, tend to come in. It's like we put so much into that, we can't change it for sure. So it's a huge mistake when you buy a company. One thing you should never do is consolidate the C R m, let the C R M stay with that company, figure out cross-sell through a friendly relationship between now two companies that happen [00:32:30] to be together and by the way, be prepared to pay compensation to multiple salespeople. Or before you had one, that's the tax you're going to get ready to pay it.  Corey Frank (00:32:41): One plus one equals one or one plus one equals three, or one plus one equals 11, right? Those are exactly  Chris Beall (00:32:46): Really  Corey Frank (00:32:47): The alternatives when you do that. Yeah, that's fascinating. 

Corey Frank continues his interview with Susan Finch as they talk about perfecting your craft and the importance of a supportive and evaluative community in the journey. This leads to an insightful discussion that draws parallels between renowned comedians and training sales professionals. Corey uses the example of comedians like Jim Gaffigan, Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld testing new material in heartland towns to underscore the significance of knowing your audience and how practicing your craft in smaller venues can sometimes offer more genuine feedback than large, more famous platforms.  Listen in as Corey recounts the story of hotdog-eating champion Kobayashi, drawing lessons on questioning the conventional and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. They emphasize the power of not just aiming for more but seeking ways to make the process more efficient. Join them if you're keen on exploring the intricacies of the sales profession, the art of feedback, and the significance of pushing boundaries in this episode, “Making Seinfeld Laugh: The Sales Professional’s Aim.”   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Susan Finch (00:00): When you were saying about dressing, my mom taught me when I was a child. I mean, she did not leave the house without makeup and dress to the nines, but that was a different era. But that's how I was raised. I do not go to my kitchen table without teeth, brush, makeup on, dressed ready to go. And I had one bad experience where I was seen on C N N in a bucket hat in the rain, and I will never do that again and leave my house without being presentable. It was a parade, but still  Corey Frank (00:30): [00:00:30] Camera ready.  Susan Finch (00:30): It did not look good. But it's also out of respect when your team shows up that way, they're respecting each other and they are saying, our business that I have an effect on that affects your bottom line, Joe, Bob, Gina, I'm going to show you that respect that I'm here for you too, and I will show up because we are all in it. And I want your clients to know that I respect you, and they can see that even if I'm just walking around the background on a call, [00:01:00] they can see that everybody has that same mindset of respect for each other, respect for the brand, respect for the client. And it puts us, I don't know if you remember when I was in school and we had school dances and stuff, we love the formal themes best. I was in leadership because everybody behaved better than when they dressed up as babies or animals or whatever. It was some crazy hair day for spirit week. But when they dressed formally, [00:01:30] they all behaved better.  Corey Frank (01:36): I do remember that. And I guess I didn't see the correlation back then, but yeah, we had dress up day versus dress down day or Hawaiian shirt day. Right, right. That is interesting. Yeah, I like that analogy a lot. I think it's probably a little outdated in our sales world today. A lot of the clients that we have when we show up on the call immediately, they apologize for not dressing apart, not putting [00:02:00] a tie up, putting a jacket on, et cetera, which is interesting. And we use that as indicative of, okay, folks want to rise to a higher level. And we encourage folks to turn on their camera when we're talking and it says, Hey, unless you believe that the camera somehow steals a portion of your soul, if you put it online, turn on your camera and let's have a conversation. The screenplays that we present, which ties into a little bit what you're saying too, because it's all about authenticity.  Corey Frank (02:26): It's all about presenting yourself. And what Chris and I talk about all the time is the [00:02:30] building, the power of trust in seven seconds or 27 seconds and the replays that we use, we try to incorporate a number of verbal disfluencies, s and ums. Think of the way Ellen DeGeneres talks this way. Bob Newhart certainly made a career of having the stammer. And we believe that Nicole call that it's not a TED talk, it's not a Toastmasters event. This is a serendipitously created Kramer like engagement. I barged [00:03:00] in and I'm a stranger. I'm the invisible stranger. You may be fearful. And if I start becoming a silver tongue devil and no ahs and ums and come off very strongly in spite of what my product may be, you're not necessarily going to get the conversions. So part of our approach is that we look the part, but we're going to come in very softly, but also very confidently.  Corey Frank (03:27): And we want this to feel like this is the first [00:03:30] and only call I made today, not the 150 second dial in conversation I've had today where folks will lose trust. The analogy we give Susan is the first time you see a superhero movie, maybe early on when you're a kid, you saw maybe I could see the strings holding Superman up. It was terrible, c g i, but at that age you didn't care because we had no c g I, and it helped create the illusion that Superman could actually fly. Now you look [00:04:00] at the Marvel movies today and the green screen and it's seamless. And then you see behind the scenes where these folks really have to act because there isn't this big universe and spaceships around and they're just acting pantomime in front of a green or a blue screen. But you always had the kid that say, I know how they did that.  Corey Frank (04:19): Think of the magician. Oh, it's up your sleeve. Oh wait, hang on a minute. It's in the hat. And when you're a sales professional, especially a newer sales professional, and you don't have the care and feeding [00:04:30] of your voice and your intonation, your inflections and your modulation, the prospect has a diminished illusion of what's happening as if they can see the strings. And so this whole illusion that you have comes tumbling down because people don't talk without s and ums and hers when you're meeting somebody in a bar, you're meeting somebody serendipitously sitting next to you in an airline seat at a restaurant waiting at a train stop. And so we try to embrace that as a philosophy. And so for a lot of folks, again, it's [00:05:00] antithetical to how they assume is that you have to be crisp and polished. But as both have a religious tradition, and one of my old priest said, never trust a man who doesn't walk around with a little bit of a limp, is that if you don't walk around with a little bit of a limp, no one's that polished.  Corey Frank (05:17): That's why the problem with the TikTok world, the Instagram world, right? So you're tough to trust those folks and in a pitch, if you don't have some Ss and ums and Ss, you too are also going to stumble a little bit. So what are your thoughts on that? You pride [00:05:30] yourself on being a particular communicator and a brand ambassador? So is that off base a little bit When I think of cold calling versus approaching someone like you, a c e O of a successful company as a marketing thought leader, if I came off with more ahs and ums and EHRs throughout the presentation,  Susan Finch (05:49): It's an interesting thing because I'm also coming from an editor's perspective and where video and in-person is so different than straight audio. So straight audio [00:06:00] because the expressions are not there. And the process in your eyes when you're looking to the left or the right to search for the answer, to grab it, to create it. If you can't see that, will I edit out most of that? Yes, A lot of it for that reason, just to be respectful of the listener in person. I agree. I mean, I do those things because I am searching and I'm spontaneous. I'm not coming to you with a script. I'm letting the conversation flow and that natural flow [00:06:30] will include for me, it'll include some pauses like that because I'm looking for it. But I was raised by a father who presented and he taught us not to do the, like you knows the avoid the ums when you can, but was the biggest thing, lose the likes, lose your nose.  Susan Finch (06:59): No, I don't know. I [00:07:00] don't know. Why don't you tell me? So I had some habits broken when I was quite young and they slip in when I get tired or something, but in a real conversation I get excited. And so I start with my and thens because I'm vibrating with excitement to be able to share an idea, and I'm trying to keep my mouth shut so I don't miss what you're saying. And so yes, I agree with the naturalness of that. I also though don't have a huge [00:07:30] appreciation when I can tell that it is also put on, and maybe I'm just hypersensitive to things, but I can tell  Corey Frank (07:38): When you see the lines, when you see Superman pulled up by the cables, I see the cables, I see the rabbit up your sleeve, the whole illusion comes tumbling down.  Susan Finch (07:46): It does. So it's from both ends though, from the ultra polished and from the, let me make it seem ultra casual and spontaneous. Either one can betray you and can diminish trust.  Corey Frank (07:59): Yeah, [00:08:00] yeah, for sure, for sure. That's why we screenplay it in. We actually will have a screenplay where it will insert to say the ah and the do your nose and make senses and those amateur hour kind of trial closes. You're absolutely right. Those are very hurtful to the overall illusion that you're trying to build up. There's certain points that it's a straight road with no bumps, and there's certain parts of the screenplay that are 10 miles an hour doing a European [00:08:30] turn. And that's where you need to lean on a lot of the S and erms and Rs. And so we track this certainly the effectiveness of the conversation conversion rate, and we see it. And we've had a couple of linguistics professors who've commented on some of the things I've posted on LinkedIn that are fascinated by the fact that you can use this in sales communication, the power of of the introvert.  Corey Frank (08:53): Chris and I had a couple of episodes on that where we talked about how introverts make the best sales folks. And one of the [00:09:00] common traits of introverts is that I struggle sometimes putting together a sentence that is as streamlined as it should be. And a lot of introverts struggle with that. So if you scream to play that in that it's okay to act, be like an introvert here, and then it's okay to be on a straight line where it's okay to go 60 miles an hour. That's what keeps the engagement levels high, particularly out of a cold call that Chris's big advocate certainly of [00:09:30] tone on this as well, the Triton resonance, tri tonal close. So those are the things, the basic building blocks as we started off our conversation, Susan, where we can take somebody who's right off the boat, somebody who's new to sales, maybe an introvert, never thought they would be interested in sales, and start with the inside and then work your way out.  Corey Frank (09:51): What do you want to do? What's your personal legend? How should you act towards the world? It's the Jira way of can you fall in love with your craft? Can [00:10:00] you truly say that there's honor and dignity? As Martin Luther King said, if you're destined to be a street sweeper, be the best street sweeper you can be. If you're destined to be in a B D R or sales or sales leadership or data management or rev ops, et cetera, then fall in love with what it is that you do. And I think that there's too many folks who are just in the next thing versus trying to master the craft of what they're doing today. That's very zen, that's very introspective. And again, that's probably not real popular as well.  Susan Finch (10:30): [00:10:30] Well, I find the best salespeople, I talked to you earlier about when we kicked this episode off about the tools and things. Not one tool have you mentioned is something that you purchase. It's all things you learn to do. They're all craft building items that you physically have to put the work in to learn and work through it and practice and practice. And you cited Toastmasters. And a big thing at Toastmasters is pace and varying your pace. And what you were talking about is [00:11:00] precisely that because it can get dull when people have that same pace. I lose interest, wake me up again, get me back on track to hear what you're saying because you might have something really helpful for me, but I zoned out because you have that same tone, that same pace, and there's nothing jarring to make me, what's that? To spark my curiosity as the prospect.  Corey Frank (11:24): I think a lot of that though, Susan, is that when folks are getting cold called, or even during a discovery pitch, they're trying to figure you out [00:11:30] as well, is just like when you walk into a room and maybe your spouse is watching a movie on Netflix and you're not quite sure you join maybe five, 10 minutes afterwards, you don't want to interrupt. So you're trying to figure out is this a comedy? Is this a romance? Is this an action movie? Is this a documentary? You're going through that. And a lot of folks who join cold calls or discovery calls, they're also saying, okay, this person who's pitching me, is this somebody I want to be close to? Is somebody I want to learn more about? Is this somebody who I see as [00:12:00] an authority? Is this somebody who has more status? Can I predict what they're going to say?  Corey Frank (12:04): Is this somebody I can learn new vocabulary words for? All of that I think goes into that soup to help with the status and the trust. And if you're not cognizant of that, if you're just going through your 48 slides without any performance art associated with it, without any Scorsese director's notes by, Hey, at this point, break the fourth wall and look at the camera, the office, Michael Scott [00:12:30] kind of stuff. That's all effortlessly seen by us as the consumers of that content. But Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant and all the people associated with a show like that, they were very meticulous about camera angles, directions for the actors, correct. And yet, for a lot of us in sales, we don't do that. And we just say, here's what you should say, and then here's your list. And then I'll see at the end of the month when I'll decide to put you on a pip [00:13:00] or not. And so you lose the fun aspect of the performance art when you don't help guide people that that's how they can master their craft is by realizing that whether you like it or not, you're being judged on that aspect of your performance.  Susan Finch (13:15): Yes, definitely. Oh man.  Corey Frank (13:19): And I think that helps keep newer folks engaged that you're performing for everybody else. The example we give is that if, I dunno if you like comedians. Let's say you had Jim [00:13:30] Gaffigan, let's say you had Chris Rock and let's, you had Jerry Seinfeld and he had the three of them go on tour and they're testing new material out and they're going to Ottumwa Iowa and they're going to Dubuque and they're going to La Crosse, Wisconsin, and they're going into Minnetonka, Minnesota. They're not going to New York practicing the material. And let's say Jim Gaffigan gets on stage first and Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld are in the back at the bar sitting, drinking a beer, watching their buddy [00:14:00] go on stage in front of 28 people on a Tuesday night. And a question we gave to the folks, to the sales team here when we're doing our training program is who is Jim Gaffigan performing to?  Corey Frank (14:14): A lot of folks will say, well, he's performing to the 28 people and that audience on a Tuesday night. I said, no, because what do they know about comedy? Nothing. But if I can make Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld laugh from one of my bits or one of my [00:14:30] riffs, now I got something. Now I got something that's a nugget, a gold nugget here that I'm going to use in my next H B O special or when I'm doing live at the Hollywood Bowl. And so I think as a sales professional, when we had mentioned before on air, how can folks work from home in this profession?  Corey Frank (14:51): I need to know in a mosh pit here, if I'm performing something, did it make my jury Seinfeld or my Chris Rock laugh in my audience here? The prospects, [00:15:00] what do they know? I got thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Some of them don't think I'm funny. Some of them will never think I'm funny. They're going to comedy show. They don't laugh. So I think if you're conscious of that, of who is your audience, it's not necessarily the prospect. Your audience are the other connoisseurs of your craft. And if they're at a high level know their personal legend, have their goals are well-read, take notes, try to diminish and diminish and diminish before they grow, are very candid, very honest [00:15:30] with giving you the protector like feedback that you're so good at. That's the alchemy right there. That puts the soup at a high plateau. So again, but that's how we run our shops here.  Susan Finch (15:43): But it's also though human nature and ingrained in us as a species that we are better when we are answerable to a community, when there is somebody to not only support us, but to evaluate us, to lift us, to teach [00:16:00] us, to usher us through, to show us an example when we have to account for ourselves and our performance and everything else to our community. So for you, it's your mosh pit there and they can all hear each other and it's like, and maybe three of 'em go, dude, no, let's try and redo that one. Let's talk about that or how'd you feel about that? But because that community, as we talked about with the protector thing, they all [00:16:30] have the same goal though, for you to succeed, for us to succeed as a group for the benefit of the clients that will trust us and do more with us because we have done better by them.  Corey Frank (16:46): Yeah, for sure. I think it's the old axiom. It's by the work one knows the workman.  Susan Finch (16:53): Yes.  Corey Frank (16:53): And every aspect of the email with the right grammar, with the right tonality, [00:17:00] with the right follow-up, with maybe even again, the professional Look, my laundry isn't in the background. My feet aren't up at the desk by good posture. All that matters. I don't think any one thing will diminish the sale. But there's a series of these things that will certainly tear it down. And one of the stories, I think we told this on a recent podcast, Susan, is with the story of Kochi hot chapter and the autumn, was it 20-plus years ago. [00:17:30] And he lived, his girlfriend entered him into a competition. They couldn't afford their rent, their electricity. And so she signed him up for a contest that paid $5,000 to the winner of this eating contest. And Kobe was five eight, a hundred and thirty-five pounds soaking wet. But he had a good stomach and a good appetite, and he won.  Corey Frank (17:54): And then afterwards he focused on the July 4th, the Coney Island, Nathan's famous [00:18:00] 4th of July hotdog eating contest. And for years and years and years, the most hot dogs that any one person could eat was like 25 and maybe a couple of bites. So 25 hot dogs in like 10 minutes. And that was the rules is how many can you eat in 12 minutes? And Kobe entered the contest. And again, if the goal was 25, that was the leaderboard year after year after year, 24, 26, 24, 23, it's he entered and he ate 50. [00:18:30] And how did he do that? Why was he so much better than everybody else? And when we look at what we do, what connect and sell does, what our folks do is why are we as modest as I can be here? Why are we so much better than everybody else? It's never one big thing.  Corey Frank (18:47): He just observed that most of the eaters used a similar strategy, which was essentially a speeded up version of how the average person eats a hot dog at a backyard barbecue, right? You pick it up and you cramm [00:19:00] the dog and you put it in the mouth and you chew it from end to end and maybe a little bit of water or beer to wash it down. But he said, there's got to be a better way. Nowhere was it written, for instance, that the hot dog must be eaten at end. What if you broke it in half? Or what if you did the bun? And so the point I'm getting at is that his competitors we're asking the question, how do I eat more hot dogs? How do I get more meetings? How do I make more business? How do I get more x, more widgets, et cetera.  Corey Frank (19:29): Cohi [00:19:30] asked a different question. He said, how do I make hot dogs easier to eat? And the second lesson, how do I make hot dogs easier to eat, has to do with the limits that we accept or the limits that we refuse to accept. When he started training, he refused to acknowledge this legitimacy of the Coney Island standard 25 hot talks and just like the four minute mile, just like what we were taught in other limitations of our professional. And so [00:20:00] we had a gentleman last month who did a hundred meetings, and he's been with us for about four weeks. And that a hundred meeting, that vaunted a hundred meeting mark has only been done a handful of times by some of our most esteemed veterans who've worked with us for years and years. He looked at this very much like Khi is what did the best reps do and how can I break it down again to get rid of these limits that we accept or refuse to accept of how do I make hot dogs?  Corey Frank (20:30): [00:20:30] How do I get more demos, easier to eat? But I don't think that he could have done that. He may disagree, but I think we know him. If he didn't go through the Alchemist, if he didn't go through Gerald dreams of sushi, if he didn't go through his journaling training, his goal board training, wondering what I'm working for, why I am doing this, and having a team around him of protectors that constantly nudged and guided him to the point where everybody celebrates the hundred that he hit last month, not just him. [00:21:00] I think that ties a lot of what we were talking about here, about taking somebody new, turning water into wine, and what are some of the processes that, at least on our side of the ocean here, that we advocate and what we've seen results in.  Susan Finch (21:13): I appreciate that you guys are in person. I love working from home, don't get me wrong. I love my commute that is 50 steps out my door and rain or shine. It's a short commute either way, but I also see the importance. I watch people on my own team [00:21:30] Hunter who wants to come visit you guys, and I look at those folks that have just graduated and they've not had the benefit that you and I had that Chris had of being in person with people. And to have that available to people. You are training CEOs there. I mean, these are the leaders that will come because they will have so many experiences of real people to be able to pull from and apply to whatever role they're in a company, [00:22:00] because there's nothing that sits with you more than being in person with people and remembering, oh, I remember that conversation. I remember that. And those little sparks come back and they can't, if you're not there with them.

Corey Frank welcome Susan Finch to talk about humility, sales training, and sushi. If you've ever wondered how to turn water into wine without being at a wedding in Cana. Today's discussion is all about nurturing the greenhorns and newbies by diving into how to nurture the budding talent fresh from school or those having a "Is this my life?" moment. Corey expounds on why humility isn’t just for monks in monasteries but crucial in the sales world too. Drawing unexpected life lessons from the likes of the book 'The Alchemist' to 'Giro Dreams of Sushi' - yes, a sushi documentary, because why not? - this episode promises a roller coaster ride through the heart of sales strategies. Listen to the first half of this conversation, "Humility's on the Menu: Serving Sales Success Sashimi-style!"   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Susan Finch (00:21): Hey, everyone, Susan Finch here, and today I have the pleasure of sitting with Corey Frank, and we have two parts of this visit. If [00:00:30] you've ever wondered how to turn water into wine without having to be at a wedding in Cana, well, you want to join us for this episode. Today's discussion or the first half of this two-part visit is all about nurturing the greenhorns and newbies by diving into how to nurture the budding talent, fresh from school, or those having a "is this my life" moment. Corey expounds on why humility isn't just for monks and monasteries, but crucial in the sales world too. (00:58): Drawing unexpected life lessons from [00:01:00] the likes of the book The Alchemist to Jiro Dreams of Sushi, yes, a sushi documentary. Because why not? You know these guys. This episode promises a ride through the heart of sales strategies. Listen to the first half of this discussion, humility is on the menu, serving sales success, sashimi style. (01:30): [00:01:30] Some of the things that I notice because you are in the trenches with newbies, new salespeople that are not cluttered with bad habits, and you are able to from the get-go show them based on your experience, of course, the best way to learn as a group, to mentor each other, to make use [00:02:00] of some of their talents. One of the things that you guys have talked about before is give me the dyslexic ADHD person and I will make a great salesperson because they are the good ones. That always cracks me up because there I am. (02:15): I love hearing because neurodiversity is such a big topic right now and what it means to people. It's the quiet stuff we don't see. It's that silent diversity, the quiet diversity, however you want to word it, but it's what we don't see in [00:02:30] personalities. Some people are highly functioning with all of those assets, those quirks, however you want to call it. And yet there are some qualities that actually are way better for sales than they are for many other professions. (02:50): I wanted to talk to you about that a little bit, and also to see two things, and you can go as far as you want with this because we can just record this and chop [00:03:00] it up too, how to build a sales team from scratch for small to mid-size businesses. Which comes first, the people are the tools? And if it's tools, I mean, we know ConnectAndSell, of course, but what are your must haves that there's no deal without it, you must be using something to the effect of these tools because otherwise this will happen? (03:23): And then finally, I wanted to talk about the importance of a mentor in sales, especially when people are only remote. [00:03:30] I have seen the difference when people are trained in person. There is no substitution for that. As much as I love working from home, I also had the benefit though of mentors early on. I would not be successful, I would not know what I know today without being in person working alongside people, bumping along, reacting, responding, and pivoting. Those are the topics I was thinking about. Corey Frank (03:57): I don't know how people do [00:04:00] that. It's got to be tough to start your sales career and work from home that way, right? Susan Finch (04:06): I would think so. Corey Frank (04:08): There's nobody to the left or the right and am I doing it? Yeah, it's got to be tough. Susan, what we do here at Branch 49 is we certainly with the help of folks like you and Chris and the Market Dominance Guys' philosophy is how do you turn water into wine? You and I have had a lot of conversations over the years. One of the things that we [00:04:30] like to call Branch 49, and I think this should be the aim of any organization that aims to hire folks right off the boat, right out of school, maybe career changers, is how do you arm them? (04:43): Chris calls it a finishing school for CEOs. When you look at maybe the traits of what we would all want to see as a nearly finished product or a product in progress of development, the biggest one that we see is humility. [00:05:00] It's probably counterintuitive from a sales perspective is that don't you want your sales folks to be killers and to put them in the field and run through that wall? The Goggins and the Jocko and all that stuff has its place. Certainly. What's the axiom? I think the old Zen proverb is, I am nothing, I am everything, I am nothing. (05:21): And that approach where I have to start knowing that even though I have a degree, even though maybe I have five, 10 years of sales experience, but if I come [00:05:30] into an environment like this like we have, is that I know nothing. Certainly one of the hallmarks of that is what we talk about at market dominance guys, which is when a call starts, is that mental state that we have to have of true tactical empathy when we run up against a stranger. If I don't have a level of humility to want to be curious, how can I be empathetic if I'm not curious? (05:56): To me, they're counterintuitive. I think that's the biggest [00:06:00] one that we see in that we try to test. We use OMG. We use Sandlers and Dave Kurlan's OMG. We certainly use DiSC. We use Shawn Sease's Humantic.AI platform. I look for every edge that I can get to bring folks in. The second part here as we talked about is what we may have jus a little different interview process, but after they take the OMG or the Humantic profile, we give them an assignment and we give them an assignment to do two things. (06:28): Number one [00:06:30] is to listen to The Alchemist, great book by Paulo Coelho. It's probably 20, 25 years old or so. It's told in a parable as a young shepherd who is on a quest to find his personal legend. It has nothing to do with sales, but it has everything to do with sales. This shepherd boy goes on this journey from Spain to Africa, eventually thinking [00:07:00] he's going to find the treasure at the foot of the pyramids. And through a series of adventures and off-ramps, he eventually realizes as he makes his way back to where he started from home is that that's where the gold is, that's where the treasure is. (07:17): Sometimes we can set forth in a career. You and I, when we first met, we talked about this is that society wants you to set forth into a career of sales or marketing or management. [00:07:30] I guess I'm supposed to be happy doing that, but no one ever asked me if I'm happy. They just shuffle you out the door, right? Austin's going to school for engineering and hopefully he'll be happy at that. But no one talks about the personal legend, which is what will make you the most fulfilled. (07:48): Some folks will have 10 years of experience, but we say it's one year 10 times, or hey, I have 20 years of sales experience, but it's really 10 years two times, and they never fulfill their personal legend. They hit numbers. [00:08:00] They go through the motion. But as far as really finding that inner quest as something intriguing, exciting, something to be unwrapped over the years, they just go through the motions, and they just meander through life. That's the first one is Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and the second one is one that I've used for years too, and it's a movie called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. (08:23): It's an incredible documentary, Susan. It's probably out about 10 years ago or so. It's about the only [00:08:30] Michelin rated three star sushi restaurant in the world, and it's in the subway station, the Ginza subway station, in Tokyo. The restrooms aren't even on premise. It's like down the hall. But here you have the hustle and bustle of going in a subway station, and it is a Michelin rated three star restaurant. Now, there's only a couple dozen of those in the world. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary about the proprietor, the founder of the sushi restaurant. (08:58): It only seats nine, [00:09:00] nine folks, but it is a Michelin rated three star. I think we only have, what, three in the United States, I believe, I could be mistaken, Michelin rated. It'll show you how rare this is. The movie has, again, nothing to do with sushi, but everything to do with life. If we have a candidate who goes through the process and they think they want to embark on a career in sales or even a career in a startup world, The Alchemist and the Jiro Dreams of Sushi is the key. You'll see this, it's highly recommend it. (09:30): [00:09:30] The documentary talks about loving your craft. This is a person who's now 87, 88 years old, and he's dedicated his entire life to what should be the simple nuance of making sushi. But everybody from around the world, from the top French chefs to the food critics around the world, realize that something so simple can yet be so elegant the way he does it and how he repeats himself over and over again. (09:55): Those are two big ones I think as a topic that you and I have spoken about for many, many [00:10:00] times, as well as Chris, on taking a candidate and bringing them to a state mindset that they've got to reduce themselves, reduce again in order to build themselves up. Susan Finch (10:12): I believe that what parallels with that is that openness that goes with the curiosity. Voiceover (10:18): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. ConnectAndSell. [00:10:30] Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. And we're back. Susan Finch (10:53): The ego left at the door. I mean, humility and lack of ego, they're similar, but they're a little different. [00:11:00] We can be proud of what we do, but that's not ego. Because it's like if I can employ everything you have taught me and do something great for a client and give them the solution they needed, I'm proud of myself that I was willing to be open to the process to learn how to do that to get them there. That's a different type of pride than the one that comes hand in hand with ego. Corey Frank (11:30): [00:11:30] When you were training me and Chris this concept of the podcast, I think the students were willing, but you gave us and guided us and shepherd us to doing it better and better, from the speaking to the stepping on each other's feet, to the audio, to be mindful of your background, all that stuff. Where does that come from? How do you find, determine the clients that you want to bring on? (11:56): Because we're a representation of your brand certainly. As [00:12:00] you and your team promote podcasts like Market Dominance Guys out in the marketplace, people say, "Hey, great. Who's your producer?" Obviously that's part and parcel of if we put out a poor quality product, which we haven't always hit them out of the park, but how do you go through that discernment process to find out if the student is willing, if there is that level of humility from even somebody who may be seasoned as an executive? Susan Finch (12:22): That is a great question. I am fortunate. Maybe I should be less picky, because then I would have people banging down the doors [00:12:30] to want to be on the network, but I have to be able to get behind them 100%. If they are not willing to listen to improve, then I can't do anything with them. That won't make my brand good. It won't make them happy. It won't make the people they answer too happy. There has to be that willingness, that desire to be open to improvements, to consider things, and that trust in me that I'm not doing it to make me sound good. (13:00): [00:13:00] I am 100% doing it from caring. The three of us have talked about this enough, and with Helen too. If you guys don't trust that I come from love for everything I do for you, then we don't have enough trust to do business together. You guys had that from the beginning, and you knew that we were the real deal and we just want you guys to sound great. We want people to listen to the shows. We want you to build your audience. And to do that by hand, not just [00:13:30] automating everything, not sending it away, we wanted that personal touch. (13:34): That's why Austin has been your editor since day one almost, with rare exception when he has too late of a night studying or something. Corey Frank (13:42): Sure, sure. Susan Finch (13:43): Because he's invested in it too. He's very protective. He comes from my background with my nonprofit, with Binky Patrol. I'm an advocate at heart. I'm a protector. I protect children. I protect babies. I protect. I protect kids and their creativity when I was an art [00:14:00] teacher. I protected the kids at youth group. I protect my clients. I do that. That all comes into play. Corey Frank (14:09): Interesting. That's where the protective instinct to I care about your brand even when you don't want to, and that's why you may not agree with me, but I'm trying to protect you from you. When you do X or Y or Z, Mr. CEO, you're diluting, diminishing your brand in the marketplace, so to speak. [00:14:30] Do I have that correct? Susan Finch (14:31): Yes. I might not always have that title and have as many people under me as all of you, but nobody's going to protect you more. I do take that to heart. It matters to me. It matters to us here at Funnel Media Group that you're proud and your guests are proud and they're not embarrassed. Because if somebody's embarrassed, who's going to share the show? Nobody. Corey Frank (14:56): That's right. That's right. Well, that's one of the things that my first mentor, Jamie [00:15:00] from 25 plus years ago, this is why we wear the monkey suits today. Those that are listening to this, everybody here at Branch 49 still wears a jacket and a tie. You can say, "Come on, it's Arizona. It's 100 and something degrees. Do you really need to do that? You're doing full work." Our answer is always, yes, you do need to do that. Especially us as an agency model, we're responsible. Talk about being protective. (15:23): We're protective for the care and feeding of our client's brand in the marketplace. If we're making a cold call [00:15:30] in a t-shirt and tube socks and short shorts with our feet kicked up on the table, drinking a half a can of Bud Light, you probably aren't going to have the same level of intensity of care and feeding, of just being aware of what exactly you're protecting that if somebody who dresses and acts the part. Now, that may be a little counterintuitive, especially today in today's counterculture, that hey, you got to be comfortable, you got to work from home, you need your mental well-being. (15:57): I would argue that you should embrace the hard, difficult things, [00:16:00] and it is hard and difficult. We start early here. We do a lot of development work, the books to read, the journaling. These are things that are "encouraged to do." In other words, we allocate time that we pay for as a business to sit down and do your journaling and do your goals for the day, goals for the week. We have our goal boards prominent posted for everybody in the organization to see, so we know who's working for what. (16:28): And now I then have implicit permission [00:16:30] if I see Susan slacking off a little bit to say, "Susan, you have on your goal board a Disney World trip for your kids. You have a new Tesla model Y. You have a down payment on your new house. You have save at a 529. You have $1,000 commission. But it's my job to care about your goals when you don't want to. Right now it doesn't appear that you want to." I have to step in as that protector, as you had mentioned, and give you a little nudge in the ribs. (16:58): From our client perspective, [00:17:00] the client facing, when we're on Zooms and they see the ties and they see the books and they see the people all doing what they should do, certainly they feel a little bit more at ease knowing that their jersey name is in the front, our name is in the back, and let's not forget that, is that we're calling on behalf of Cisco or Abnormal or whomever the cybersecurity or UCaaS company is, and we want to leave that person in better shape than how we found them, even if they don't accept a meeting, even if they don't [00:17:30] take sale. (17:31): I like hearing that you're a protector. I think that's probably why, certainly Chris, we know our friend Chris Beall is being a protector of the dignity, integrity of our profession, how much of a thought leader he is in the space. I wonder if that's a common trait amongst other entrepreneurs or leaders is that protector trait, because I haven't heard it much the way that you had explained there, Susan. Do you remember this, Susan? What's on the screen here for our folks who are [00:18:00] listening? Susan Finch (18:00): View-Master. A View-Master. Corey Frank (18:04): View-Master. Susan Finch (18:04): Just about a dozen memories on one reel. Corey Frank (18:10): There's 13 of those little windows on a circle, on a disc that goes into a plastic viewer, right? For those of you, google View-Master, what it is. For a lot of us, you, me and Chris growing up, hey, we saw there was cartoons on here. If you wanted to see Paris, you could see 13 different images of Paris [00:18:30] and you learned. Well, when I was at Goodwill, this is a View-Master that I saw, and it is how to break-dance. Susan Finch (18:42): Oh my gosh, that's so funny. Corey Frank (18:44): Somehow with the limitations that were out there, somebody said break dancing. This is probably '81, '82, '83, I would say somewhere around there. This is probably 30 plus years old, but there was a three real set of how to break-dance now. Susan Finch (18:59): Those [00:19:00] moonwalk footwork, back spins, and windmills Corey Frank (19:05): And windmills. That's what says on this particular View-Master. Now, what's interesting is I'm sure if I hired these folks out for a bar mitzvah or communion ceremony or a graduation for entertainment and I wanted to find or test out their bonafides, I wouldn't probably expect them to say, "Well, I learned to break-dance by View-Master." A lot of folks who try to learn sales [00:19:30] by working from home are really, in my world, my impression is learning by View-Master. I thought that was appropriate. (19:40): As David Sandler, Sandler sales method, title of one of his books is, You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar. I don't believe that you can teach folks how to master their craft remotely. You can't teach the next generation of Jiros how to make sushi unless you actually cut and work [00:20:00] in a sushi restaurant. (20:02): For all those who are, "Yeah, but I want to work from home in sales," I would just challenge you as you're embarking on your career that you may be one of those folks who have five years of sales experience, but really it's one year five times because all five of your sales years of experience, you're working remotely for an organization. There just is no substitute versus being involved and being on a sales floor. Susan Finch (20:24): I agree. Thank you for that. Corey Frank (20:27): That's all I have to say about that. [00:20:30] This is overdue. Who needs broken down Chris Beall on these things, right? He's out of all fresh ideas. No, he's not. But Susan, it's been great chatting with you, certainly as I learned something new as a protector, that makes a lot of sense of how you care about the Funnel Media Group brand, and certainly all the clients that you have and companies, little brands like Market Dominance Guys continues to go up into the right. (20:53): We certainly appreciate all the guidance and the mentoring and the Sherpa-ing, if that's a word, that you do for folks where this isn't our [00:21:00] day job is getting out there and branding the marketplace. Our day job is talking to strangers and asking them for time or money. Susan Finch (21:06): No, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Folks, you know where to find it. Go out to Market Dominance Guys and find all your favorite podcast apps. You need a Salesforce? Go look up branch49.com because they are the real deal. They will get you where you want to be. 

In this episode, Chris dives deep into the intricacies and pitfalls of sales tooling, questioning the effectiveness of piling on more tools and the notion of an 'Uber tool.' Chris explores the impedance mismatch between the world of sales tools and the neurodiversity of salespeople, highlighting the challenges faced by salespeople who switch attention frequently and the toll it takes on their productivity. With references to a recent Forrester article, an insight into sales conversations, and a sprinkle of Beall's Laws, Chris delves into the complexities of sales processes, the importance of meaningful conversations, and the hurdles of creating a one-size-fits-all tool. Tune in as Chris discusses the present and future of sales technology, neurodiversity, and the search for an optimal toolset.  Join us for this episode, "Decoding the One-Stop Shop Sales Tool."   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:23): In this episode, Chris dives deep into the intricacies and pitfalls of sales tooling, questioning the effectiveness of piling on more [00:00:30] tools and the notion of an über tool. Chris explores the impedance mismatch between the world of sales tools, and the neurodiversity of salespeople. Highlighting the challenges faced by salespeople who switch attention frequently, and the toll it takes on their productivity. With references to a recent Forrester article and insight into sales conversations, and a sprinkle of Beall's laws, Chris delves into the complexities of sales processes and the importance of meaningful conversations. As well as [00:01:00] the hurdles of creating a one-size-fits-all tool. Tune in for a discussion on the present and future of sales technology, neurodiversity, and a search for an optimal tool set. Join us for this episode, Decoding The One-Stop Shop Sales Tool. Chris Beall (01:23): Hey everybody. Chris Beall here without Corey Frank. He's probably available, but it's a Tuesday [00:01:30] afternoon raining here in Port Townsend, Washington. I don't know, I was just in a mood to hold forth on something. So here's the something. I read yesterday, it was a LinkedIn post I believe, that pointed to a Forrester analysis that said basically the number of sales tools keeps going up and sales performance keeps going down. And asking the question, "Are they related to each other?" And [00:02:00] I think the answer is yes, but not for precisely the reasons they stated in the article. So the idea in the article was pretty simple. More sales tools means more stuff that the sales person has got to work with, or is tempted to work with. And it's hard to become an expert at anything at all in this world, actually. Let's face it. But it's particularly hard to become an expert in something that you use occasionally and use a little bit. (02:28): So the idea is, [00:02:30] hey, you're having to jump around from tool to tool to tool. And the suggestion is a one-stop shop that does everything, is going to get the job done. That is, you want one tool to rule them all. And it's interesting. This to me, reminds me of the whole world of enterprise resource planning as it eventually came to be called. And you grew out of a thing called MRP, Manufacturing Resource Planning. And then MRP 2, which was a subtle twist [00:03:00] on all of that, that actually went and closed the loop between outputs and inputs. That is, you were actually talking about making stuff and ultimately maybe even shipping it. I only know about this because I was a architect designer of an MRP 2 system way back when. Which turned into, with a little bit of help, into a distribution management system to run a big automated warehouse full of all sorts of things. Humans and robots working [00:03:30] together. (03:30): And people who know me know I do love my humans and robots working together. Especially if the robots don't have much physical form, if they're just software. That's what we do here at ConnectAndSell, is humans and AI work together to solve the problem of getting a conversation with somebody, which is a positive thing. And getting to ship the right stuff out on an order and not make any mistakes. That was a pretty good one too. So the reason I bring that up is, there was always a dream in the world [00:04:00] of ERP. And that dream has been repeated over, and over, and over in enterprise software land. Folks come up with something and say, "Well it's just ridiculous that we're using general purpose tools." And they will generally point to email and Excel, unless they choose to say it in the other order. And then it's Excel and email. (04:22): And then they might throw in something like, I don't know, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, or nowadays, some Google tools or other. [00:04:30] And say, "Wouldn't it be great if instead of using this general stuff, we could use specific stuff that was wired together to solve all the problems that are faced by all sellers?" And so these tools come out, first as point solutions doing this, that, and the other thing. And then somebody says, "Hey, let's bring them all together and make something that works for everybody." It sounds marvelous. It really does. It has a problem. [00:05:00] And this I think is one of the problems with tooling in general in the tech space, and much more specifically or in a more profound way, in the sales space. And the reason is, trying to make stuff work together assumes that you know what working is. That is, you know what the inputs are. You know what the outputs are. You know what the transformations are. You know what quality means. You know what it means for [00:05:30] an output to not meet up to standards and have to be sent back for rework. (05:36): You know what customer value actually is. That who gets the value of the thing that you're producing at each step, and how do they realize that value. You know all of that stuff supposedly. And then you can make a system that says, "Oh, I'm going to represent these inputs in a database in this way, or put them on a screen so you can see them. I'm going to maybe animate them so that you can [00:06:00] watch them move, and get an idea of what's going on. I'll give you analytics of pictures that show you what's happening. Lines marching up under the right, or whatever it happens to be. Won't it be great?" It sort of ignores a glaring fact of life, which is we actually tend not to know exactly how things work. I was listening to a conversation today with four extremely smart people, who are extremely deep in their business, talking about [00:06:30] just how one thing works, or how it could work. Which was, "What are we going to do with these inbound leads now that we've changed our ideal customer profile?" (06:42): Now the keywords there are one historical, what are we going to do with...? And then it talks about something in the past. So the past is the past. You can't do anything about it. So the inbound leads come as they are, however that is. Somebody built some system to take care of them. Somebody [00:07:00] built a process to take care of them. That was all full of all sorts of assumptions. It was tuned by experience. And I bet at some point it involved an Excel spreadsheet, regardless of what they might say. So even if it's just for analyzing the outliers, somebody probably extracts data from that thing every once in a while. Puts it in a spreadsheet, takes it through some manipulations. If they're any good, they do something brilliant with a pivot table. If they're not so good, they probably sort [00:07:30] three or four of the columns and leave the other ones unsorted. But they're happy because nobody ever looks at the data anyway. And then, well, everything's just fine. (07:37): The beauty is, the spreadsheet provides a buffer against how things are in the real world, and how you would like them to be or like to report on them. Putting them in different categories, totaling this, that and the other thing. So that buffer is like grease in the machine. It provides lubrication for a [00:08:00] process that is not perfectly well understood. That is, doesn't mesh perfectly. You can never make a machine a physical machine with perfect tolerances. There's always a little scraping going on, a little friction. I used to be a Volkswagen mechanic many, many years ago. And I tell you those things don't run very far, last very long if you run them out of oil. Even though they're pretty precisely manufactured, they're just not that precise. And by the way, when they get hot, they get less precise [00:08:30] because parts swell up. So when you look at processes, and think about them. And think, "Oh, I know exactly what's going on here and therefore I could automate this process." You're probably wrong. (08:44): You're probably ending up with your automation needing to be supported by some kind of a buffering mechanism that allows you to take things that aren't quite described perfectly. "Oh, this particular thing works when we're only shipping boxes [00:09:00] of the size, but now it turns out there's a new product on the shelf and it's in a weird shape box. And it doesn't fit in the pallet anymore. And our process assumes everything goes on a palette in a certain way." Or whatever. Anyway, this is where spreadsheets get involved and everybody throws up their hands eventually and says, "We got to stop running on spreadsheets." Well, if that worked, we would've stopped running on spreadsheets a long time ago. So that's kind of thing number one is, it's really hard to describe [00:09:30] a process, even one in the past. And then there's change. And change is the big deal, and sales processes are very, very prone to changing. (09:42): They're also very, very prone to being executed in ways in the field that are significantly different from the way they're drawn up. They're not like NFL plays, they're more like broken plays. That is, you can put the little chalkboard up there and you can draw X's [00:10:00] and O's, and swoopy lines that show where the wide receiver's going to go. And who's going to legally pick off whom. And all that kind of good stuff. But on the real field, in the world of sales, your opponents are not the other folks. Maybe they are. After all, you have a whole bunch of things working against you. You have time working against you. There's no fixed amount of time. There's no real rules of engagement, although people kind of stylize some of them and go, "Oh, we'll have this discovery meeting first [00:10:30] and then we'll do this demo next." And so forth. (10:33): Those things are all talked about a lot, but there's no real regularity to what I would call the playing field in the world of sales. And so it's hard to describe it digitally, and we end up kind of having to describe it in various ways that work. And out in the field, the motivated salesperson is always going to find something that works rather than do the thing as prescribed. [00:11:00] So that's part of the problem, there's just variability out there in the field. Lots of things are going on. Folks are doing little things, and big things differently from each other. Another problem is that in sales, the actual play that's being run is not the play that's drawn up. It's more like a real play, like drama. Maybe even a musical. I had the privilege the other night of going to sit with some people who are musical theater folks, and listen to them talk about their craft. (11:30): [00:11:30] And I tell you, that is high precision, very athletic stuff. Whose primary principle is, something's going to go wrong, and you the actor, are going to have to adapt to it from your deep knowledge of the story. Well, this is what happens in sales. In every sales conversation, something goes wrong. And by wrong I mean, the other party doesn't quite get what you're talking about, or you speak at the wrong time. Or you say something that kind of makes them bristle a little bit and it wasn't the part where you wanted them to bristle. [00:12:00] Or whatever. You can't predict what the other person's going to do, all you can do is adapt. So while your sales process is trying to figure out ultimately how to get you into a conversation with someone, out of which is going to come a decision. Now, sales does have one beautiful thing going for it. (12:21): There's only one thing that's really happening, which is conversations. And each conversation takes place one at a time. That's marvelous. You're not going to hold [00:12:30] three conversations at the same time, I hope. Please don't do that. And out of it comes a simple decision. What is what we call the next step? That is, do we move forward, or do we disengage? So now we're trying to describe all of this action and getting to the conversation and what happens next and all of this, in some sales tech that assumes that it knows how it all goes together. Susan Finch (12:57): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. [00:13:00] Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employ a successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire team, Branch 49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to [00:13:30] ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. And we're back. Chris Beall (13:46): And the fact is, it sort of can't. So we end up in a jacket that's so to speak, too tight, it doesn't fit us very well. And that jacket starts to feel like a straight jacket. [00:14:00] And then management gets in the position of saying, "Well, you must do X, Y, and Z. You must put this data in the CRM." By the way, CRMs are notable for two things. One is, they explode with fields. Over time, more and, more and, more fields get added. None of these fields tend to be added, very few of them by professional data modelers. They tend to be added by somebody who's just in a hurry to have a place to put something. It's kind of like you have a place, you're trying to set up a picnic. And you don't have enough room on the table, but there's [00:14:30] this stump over there that's been sawed off. And well, it kind of looks like a little table, and it's sort of a pain to get it over near the table. (14:37): But if you sort of roll it over and stand it up, and fiddle with it, you can get it to be kind of like, well, an extension of the table. And you can put potato salad over there, or something like that. So that's what we tend to do with CRMs, is we put stumps and other things around them, extra fields. And even extra, they're called objects or whatever people want to call them, in order to have a place to set [00:15:00] something down so we can come back and get it later. Do we know exactly what it means? We kind of feel like we do, but we don't. And we change our minds over time, and then we change something else. And this is what makes it really hard. We change the players on the field. So the world of sales is kind of like, "Oh, Lipton teabag." They called it flow through. So what's flowing through? People on the sales team tend to be flowing through. They just don't last [00:15:30] long enough that you can really say, "Hey, this person knows exactly how this process works." (15:37): So now you have people who are learning as they go, they're hoping to be able to stay. Or maybe they're already tired of it, and they're looking to get out and go to their next gig. And you're trying to have those people adapt to a system that was built by folks who were basically kind of just trying to make something work in the moment. And so now you have all of this [00:16:00] kind of mismatch going on, but where's the grease? Where's the lubrication? Well, it turns out the lubrication in sales is provided by this oddity called sales compensation by commissions. That, as human beings we'll go to extraordinary steps, extraordinary means, in order to get paid. At least variable pay, they'll do what they need to do. So you have an interesting situation where there's kind of action at the edge. (16:26): There's, "Oh, here's the stump, but instead of putting the [00:16:30] potato salad on it, I think what I'm going to do is move the potato salad off of it. And I'm going to put this pie that is not yet cooked on it. Because later on the oven's going to open up and I can put the pie in." In sales, there's a lot of "later on, the oven's going to open up and I can put the pie in". We're almost always waiting for something over in the customer side. And so now our nice fields, our little stumps we put around, get full of all sorts of manner of things. They get pies, and pickles, and brownies and God knows what on them. [00:17:00] And then you don't know what's what. Meanwhile, the salespeople got to get the job done, because time is not their friend. Everything's running kind of quarter, by quarter, by quarter. They're trying to get the job done. (17:10): And you get this very interesting conflict between the systems and processes, and the execution itself. I guarantee you over time the execution tends to win. And then there's this pushback by the very organized folks who go, "But why is it so chaotic?" And the reason it's so chaotic is it has to actually be adaptive [00:17:30] to a situation that itself is not smooth, no matter how you draw it out. (17:35): So let's add in one more confounding factor. What do salespeople work like on the inside? And I mentioned this before. There's a lot of what would be considered neurological variance, or just the differences among people with how their brains work, how their nervous systems work. Probably their gut microbiome, their biome, their vagus nerve. God knows. We're complex beasts. And some [00:18:00] people are very, very good at calmly reading things and writing them, and so forth. So now I have this system, the sales system, that describes a process. And the way I learn about it is to read about it. And I'm a salesperson, and I don't know if I was the greatest most natural reader. I may have made myself into an okay reader, but it's probably an effort for me to read. And then to pay attention [00:18:30] long enough to what I'm reading to be able to put it into practice, and patiently try whatever I'm supposed to try. (18:38): And by the way, have you ever used a digital system that didn't make you go, "Why did they design it like this? I tried this and it doesn't work. I get this stupid error message." Well, we know that that's the case. Because that's why there's tech support, and tech support is always pretty much overwhelmed. So now I've asked a person whose natural variety, their neural diversity [00:19:00] so to speak, might lead to them away from sit, read, and think, and apply patiently and then deal with it. Toward, "I'm just going to figure out how to make this thing work well enough in order to get onto the next step and away I go." So we have sort of a mismatch between this whole world of sales tools, which tend to be read this, do this, read this, do this, read [00:19:30] this, do this. And how real salespeople tend to be constructed. Which is have a conversation with somebody, do this very athletic, delicate set of things in that conversation in order to maximize the probability of making a good decision with regard to the next step. (19:48): That's their core skill. And that skill is often exercised with what seems like some... I'll admit it, I'm not being clinical here, but maybe some attentional issues. [00:20:00] People talk about hyperactivity and ADD and this kind of stuff. I don't know about those things. I think people use those terms pretty loosely. But I tell you the ability to switch your attention very quickly, and micro pivot in a sales conversation emotionally with your voice, with the words, with your body language. Being able to do that stuff on the spot and do it really well, but not know exactly that you were going to do it one second before. The ability to do that [00:20:30] can be enhanced quite frankly, by having a neural setup that allows you to pay attention to something new very quickly. That's not true multitasking, but it's kind of like flip-flip-flip tasking while you're maintaining focus on the other person. (20:47): So it's very interesting how great salespeople work. They focus strongly on the other person, but they move very nimbly with regard to what might happen next. What might be discussed next. And they're very firm in their desire [00:21:00] or their intention, and their willingness to work toward a good outcome, which is making a good decision as to a next step. So now we give them more tools. So each one of those tools requires switching attention. Hey, that sounds pretty good for somebody who switches attention a lot. But switching attention to something that isn't that easy, which is reading and understanding and being reminded, "Oh yes, at this point, this is the required field. Oh yes, at this point, at this exception in our sales process, I'm supposed to send this to so-and-so instead [00:21:30] so-and-so. Oh, I need to fill out this here, basically a form." It feels like you're filling one out in a doctor's office or something in order to be allowed to go to the next step. (21:41): These things don't line up that well with how salespeople work. And I'm in the business of sales technology, so it's a challenge for us every day. How else are you going to put up the instructions, except by saying read them? So we try to simplify it down to, "Once you've done this once or twice, what do you do? You click on [00:22:00] a list, you click on a button that says sell, and you talk to somebody." At least you're in your element, you're talking to them. But a lot of sales process now works through, "I've got to write an email. I've got to do this. I've got to adapt and text. And I've got to read a lot." And frankly, it's tiring and it doesn't produce results much faster. Who it satisfies are the folks who want to see a very uniform, a very clean description [00:22:30] of a system. And get a lot of clean data out of it that tells them what's going on. (22:35): So there's this mismatch, and in some circles it would be called an impedance mismatch. And therefore the more tools we pile on, the harder it is for somebody to switch among them. And I think this is what the Forrester article was saying is, it's harder to switch among them. And then when we do switch among them, well, it's kind of harder to keep track of what we did. And then it's hard to make them [00:23:00] work together. And we go back and we tend to do rework that's about the tools themselves, and then we run out of time and energy. And that's one conversation, or two conversations, that we could have had that we didn't have. And that drives down the sales results. Because frankly, sales results are driven in time by a flow rate of conversations that are with relevant people, held by skilled people who are trying to honestly determine, "Hey, does it [00:23:30] make sense for us to move forward or not?" (23:31): That is, shall we make a decision of the next step that's either to do something next together, or explore further, or close a deal or whatever. Or back up and disengage. And maybe wait, come back together in some future time. So sales tooling, the more the worse. And I'm not sure that putting it all into one big package solves the problem. Because having one big package actually [00:24:00] solve all the problems, so you don't have to go to your ancillary tools. Your Excels and your emails. Doing that is really hard too, because whatever the big design is for the big one-stop shop tool, probably doesn't fit your people and your process, and what you're selling and your history perfectly. And so it's just a tough area, and people argue about it a lot. And they invest billions of dollars in companies that [00:24:30] have the next thing. (24:31): There are thousands and thousands of sales tools, even just for B2B that have been created. Now, we've been doing our thing for 17 years. So I don't know if that means it works. Or I don't know what conversations, I guess maybe do matter. But it's a pretty tough thing to actually solve either at the level of one big thing, because that one big thing is going to be too rigid. And if it's not too rigid, by the way, it's programmable. And if it's programmable, it may as well be a spreadsheet. Or [00:25:00] a whole bunch of little things working together which scramble the attention of the rep. They have to keep learning stuff. And it actually causes them to go get another job faster, and to underperform in the meantime. So those are my thoughts on this topic. That Forrester article, I thought was excellent, but I think it didn't quite get to the whole thing. (25:20): It basically got to one part, which is, "Hey, the complexity, the switching cost, the paying attention is tough." But it didn't really get to [00:25:30] sort of the other thing. It sort of suggested, "Hey, if we had one big über tool, then it'd be great because people don't have to switch around." It didn't address the fact that that thing's going to have to be programmable in some sense. And I have a law, I don't know which of my laws it is. Beall's Law, there's a ton of them. Remember my first law, the smartest person in the room gets to fix the other person's network. That's the first law. But this law goes something like this. As soon as something is [00:26:00] sufficiently configurable to solve a problem that you didn't anticipate, it is sufficiently programmable that you'll spend all your time debugging it. And very little of your time using it. So with that Chris Beall, Market Dominance Guys, and happy hunting out there.

In this episode, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, discusses various challenges faced by B2B sales leaders in the modern business landscape. With Corey Frank, CEO of Branch49, absent from the co-host chair, Chris invited ChatGPT to take a seat. He starts by introducing the idea of asking ChatGPT about challenges in B2B sales. He touches on the challenge of coaching sales reps, particularly their first failure points in conversations. Chris explains how technology, such as the one developed by Symbl.ai, can help identify these first failure points and support reps in improving their performance. Chris stresses that addressing these challenges requires a combination of strategic thinking, technological proficiency, people management skills, and deep industry understanding. Some of the challenges covered include: Adapting to Technological Change Understanding Customer Needs Compliance and Regulation Maintaining Quality Lead Generation Managing Sales Team Performance Pricing Strategies in a Competitive Market Cultural and Geographical Differences Integrating Sales with Other Business Functions Economic Uncertainties   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:22): In this episode, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell discusses various challenges faced by B2B sales leaders in the modern business landscape [00:00:30] with Cory Frank, CEO of Branch 49. Absent from the co-host chair, Chris invited ChatGPT to take a seat. He started by introducing the idea of asking ChatGPT about challenges in B2B sales. He touches on the challenge of coaching sales reps, particularly their first failure points in conversations. He explains how technology such as the one developed by Symbl.ai can help identify these first failure points and support reps in improving their performance. Chris stresses [00:01:00] that addressing these challenges requires a combination of strategic thinking, technological proficiency, people management skills, and deep industry understanding. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, thriving in market, turbulence, tech tango, and global jigs. Chris Beall (01:24): Hey, everybody. Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell and co-host of Market Dominance [00:01:30] Guys. Corey Frank seems to be otherwise occupied today. And so I've decided to go ahead and do something we haven't really done before, which is to ask ChatGPT a question, we call them prompts, and see what it has to say about the challenges that are being faced by B2B sales leaders today. And who knows, maybe as I go through these, I'll have something to say. I just got primed for all of this by wonderful lunch with [00:02:00] Dan Nordale, who is the chief revenue officer over at Symbl.ai. And he and I were talking about one of the challenges which is coaching, and specifically the challenge of coaching first failure, so I'm going to put that one out there, is coaching sales reps helping them become better is very, very challenging. (02:23): And one of the reasons it's challenging is that it's very difficult to find that moment where [00:02:30] they have a first failure in a conversation and just coaching that moment and doing so in a way that allows them to repeat the performance under pressure. So think about discovery calls, if we were to coach a discovery call and point out, "Hey, the first point where you actually failed, where you came up short was about 37 seconds in. And the issue is that you went ahead and plowed forward into the value that your solution [00:03:00] provides without having the least idea of whether the other person has made that transition from their initial emotional state, which is apprehension to some other emotional state that might be suitable and supportive for them to listen to what it is you have to say as an expert." So we were talking about that and how the technology that they use a symbol could help with that because it listens to conversations and shows [00:03:30] that first failure rate if you choose to have it do that. (03:33): But then how long before they get to repeat the performance? If I'm teaching somebody how to serve in pickleball, for instance, well, I can have them serve and then I can note their first failure point, the place where they could try something different and they could try another serve. It's just a matter of hitting the ball again. But in discovery calls, our next opportunity might be tomorrow or it might [00:04:00] be later in the week. And so that's even in a good case, right? So how do we get that situation set up where we not only can provide feedback as to the first failure, but we can actually have the person perform again and by the way, perform under pressure. And so that's very difficult. Now, here at ConnectAndSell, we have the ability to help folks have lots and lots of conversations. And so these are not discovery calls, these are first conversations, [00:04:30] we call them ambush calls or cold calls, whatever you want to call them. (04:33): And we have an opportunity to coach that first failure point and then have them go right back in the batter's box and try again. And within two or three minutes there they are, another shot at trying out the first seven seconds, that conversation to see if they can get trust. So that's one of the things Dan and I were talking about and the technology that they have developed at Symbl.ai is particularly suited to supporting [00:05:00] that kind of, "Hey, find out where the rep needs help." And by the way, why first failure point? Why not get all of the failure points? Well, it's pretty simple. The first failure point is generally the root cause of the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth and so on. That is, it's not that the rep needs different technique later, they just need to avoid screwing up earlier. (05:22): And this is true of almost everything in the world of what I'll call ballistic athletic activity. That is if you're doing [00:05:30] something, throwing a ball, hitting a golf ball, you watch Ted Lasso, you're taking a pass downfield and you're catching it with your foot or your chest and getting that ball under control, these things are happening pretty fast and if you screw up part of it, instead of taking that ball with your chest and stopping it, it bounces off of you. Now it's going upfield. Well, your next failure is going to be because you failed on the first task, the first subtask, that first moment. So in stuff [00:06:00] like cold calling, especially when you fail in the first 3, 4, 5 seconds, you're playing catch up in a game that you literally cannot win at that point, there's no way to recover. So you may as well take that failure, take that input, and use that input in order to attempt to perform again. (06:19): At some point you're likely to actually nail it, and once you nail it, the cause of the second failure has been removed because it wasn't you. It was the first [00:06:30] failure. But let's go into the list that's given to us by ChatGPT. I love how we can just ask ChatGPT a question and get an answer. I need to call it my faithful dog. It just goes ahead and gives it a shot. So I asked, what are the top 10 challenges facing B2B sales leaders? Now, ChatGPT normally talks about how it's back in 2021 in September and it doesn't know very much anymore, but it didn't give that warning to this particular prompt. [00:07:00] It just started right in after saying that it would give me a list. So here's number one in the list, adapting to technological change. (07:09): With the rise of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies, sales leaders must continuously adapt their strategies and tools to remain competitive. I think this is both true and false, true in the sense that things do change. You've got to keep up. False in the sense that what's really underlying [00:07:30] sales and sales success and therefore some of the things sales leaders should be considering are the following two things. One, as a sales leader, are you supporting your sales reps to be able to execute in the circumstances in which they find themselves? That could be actually in a sale. They're working with a customer, trying to understand a problem, trying to put forth a solution, trying to negotiate a transaction, trying to work through the complexities [00:08:00] of the buyer buying process or trying to get approval internally in their own firm or getting what they need, the investment from their company in the form of maybe discounts or extra help in order to get this particular deal across the finish line. (08:16): So all of those kinds of things are not actually technological in nature. They're rather ancient, and they have to do with how human beings work and particularly how they make [00:08:30] transitions from one dominant emotion to another one. If you think about sales in general, sales is the process of helping someone else on an emotional journey make the move from a dominant initial emotion to one where they can consider the possibility that you, your company, your solution might be worth exploring further and then making a decision together to take that next step. So that emotional [00:09:00] journey doesn't have a lot to do with technological change except to the degree that folks' emotions can be triggered by technological change because it might scare them or make them feel inadequate or feel like they don't know what they're doing. Or in fact, they might not know what they're doing. (09:16): Right? Try to use ChatGPT without a little experience doing prompt engineering, and you'll find yourself at C fairly quickly. But a little bit of experience goes a long ways. Two, understanding customer needs. [00:09:30] B2B sales typically involve complex solutions and understanding the precise needs and pain points of each business customer can be challenging. That is simply a universal truth. That's not just now. That's forever. And the primary reason we don't understand customers' needs is we're too concerned with our own need to get a deal done, get a transaction done, and for some of us, it's venal enough to get a commission or keep our job. So [00:10:00] it's really difficult to take a stance and take the actions to understand customer needs when we're too busy paying attention to our own needs. Complexity is not our enemy. Complexity is inevitable. Customers have complex needs because there's a lot of moving parts to almost any business. (10:21): We don't understand those moving parts in advance, even if we are experts in some element of doing something about them, fixing them so to speak, or making [00:10:30] them work better. So we have to have these conversations that basically allow us to get a feel for the customer's needs and then to check to see whether that feel, that sense is accurate before we move on. It's actually a version of the first failure problem. That is our first failure in understanding customer needs is when we assume we know that what the customer needs before we have both assessed it, we've gotten it out of the customer and validated it in [00:11:00] some conversation with them. So number three, ChatGPT says, is compliance and regulation. Adhering to industry-specific regulations and global compliance standards can be complicated, especially when selling across different markets and jurisdictions. So this is a matter of both what you do and what you're perceived as doing. (11:20): There's a lot of branding that goes on with regard to compliance and regulations. And let's face it, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, whether it's [00:11:30] something like SOC 2 compliance or whatever it happens to be. If in your industry you need it, you need it, and hopefully you have the supportive folks who can see that compliance and regulation adherence is actually a product feature. Number four, one of my favorites, and this is because of bias, maintaining quality lead generation, generating high quality leads is essential for sales growth, but doing so consistently in its scale can be very difficult. [00:12:00] Now, I'll speak to this. The issue with lead generation actually goes back to technology. (12:06): So we have technology that makes it very inexpensive to believe that we are putting an opportunity in front of somebody, and if they only were to read that ninth email that we sent in the sequence or to accept that offer to connect on LinkedIn, if only they would do that, well, then we could get into a conversation with them, help them. In fact of the matter [00:12:30] is the technology makes it so cheap to send that information out that all of that information simply becomes spam. Speaker 1 (12:40): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. ConnectAndSell, welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight [00:13:00] to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible, whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Chris Beall (13:23): This is where there's an irony built in to the entire world of lead generation. We need to do it at scale, [00:13:30] not at arbitrary scale, by the way. We don't have the ability to consume an indefinite or infinite number of leads. We need to pay attention to quality, that's targeting really. We need to assess timing, which we can only do in conversations. I don't care what anybody says about high intent, that's something people talk about like we can tell your intent from your internet behavior. Well, I can tell your intent and you can tell mine in a conversation much more effectively. And we need to do so [00:14:00] with scarcity as our friend. So by using something that's scarce, which is human to human conversations, live, synchronous that means I'm talking, you're listening, I'm listening conversations. We actually can cut through most of the quality issues that are brought to the fore because of technology, making it so cheap to put a message in front of somebody else, and therefore so common for them to ignore that message and move on. (14:30): [00:14:30] Then we have my wife, Helen Fanucci's favorite, managing sales team performance. As some of you know, she's written a book called Love Your Team, a Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. And her point is pretty simple. As the manager, you're not the performer. Your sales team members are the performers. Are you supporting them in a way that allows them to perform and that means in their professional world, but also in their [00:15:00] life and in their emotional world? So ChatGPT says, "Training, motivating and maintaining a high performing sales team requires significant time and resources. Dealing with varying performance levels and ensuring alignment with company goals is a constant challenge." It sure is. Now, training's fairly straightforward except we don't know if it sticks, most of the time it doesn't. Motivating, motivating is actually mostly a matter of supporting [00:15:30] and getting out of the way and helping where it makes more sense for you to be the actor than for them to be the actor that is recognizing they have limits. (15:40): Can you pitch in? One thing Helen does is she takes notes at meetings where her reps are presenting. Why? Because then they can focus on their presentation and she is actually getting a deep view, a real-time view, and for herself, a motivated view of what it is that they're [00:16:00] trying to achieve in the presentation. And between the two of them, they have something to talk about afterwards. And maintaining a high performing sales team actually means dealing with change. We sometimes act as though employees who are working with us as our colleagues, may be reporting to us, are living what I might call a flat life. That is, it's always the same the next day. Now in fact, their worlds are changing every day. And there's not just varying performance [00:16:30] levels, there are varying circumstances for each person. So if we don't allow and help them to adapt to their world, they're not going to be able to perform in the world that we're working in together. (16:42): And that's a big part of managing sales team performance. So having those conversations and making sure that you have them regularly, that means mapping them out, putting them in calendar, taking the time to have them, and then being efficient about them. That's really key. So then we have number six, pricing strategies. In [00:17:00] a competitive market, defining the right pricing strategy that aligns with the value delivered and also considering competition can be a complex task. That is for sure. There are small differences in pricing that can make huge differences in outcomes. It's very rare that it's the price. It's often the perception of what this particular offering delivers value-wise compared to others and how it compares to what folks have paid in the past. So there's [00:17:30] actually a disadvantage sometimes in being an incumbent. Your own future pricing is tied to your past pricing. That's fantastic in one way, but it can be a problem when a disruptive market entrant shows up and says, "Hey, I'm going to use price as a weapon. (17:47): I'll price at one third of your price and offer something that is almost as good." And being able to respond to that in a way that works, especially when you have a big customer base, is very, very challenging. Seven, [00:18:00] long sales cycles. B2B sales often involve lengthy decision-making processes, necessitating persistent follow-up and a long-term strategy. So persistent follow-up is actually fairly easy. Talk to people until they're ready to buy. So when you look at this dynamic, this is what Market Dominance Guys is all about. As a podcast, the dynamic is 1/12th of your market is in market right now in this quarter, 11/12ths is out in the future. Why? Because the replacement [00:18:30] cycle for B2B products is about three years. It's not the sales cycle that you need to pay attention to first, it's the replacement cycle. The replacement cycle of three years means 11/12ths of your market is out in the future. (18:45): If it's five years, it means there's 20 quarters in five years. 19 out of those 20 quarters are not this quarter. And following up, being useful, being there and also learning what's going on in their world [00:19:00] through those quarters it takes until they're ready to actually make a decision to replace their current solution, that's key to market dominance. Then there's eight, cultural and geographical differences. Navigating cultural nuances and understanding different business practices across regions can be perplexing, particularly for organizations that operate globally. Yes, yes and yes, and it can come down to a single word. Do you know what the word revert means? [00:19:30] It depends. Revert means go back to what you were like, but in some cultures it means get back to somebody. It means reply. So even knowing those nuances is absolutely crucial. And then there are many, many more. There is of course the question of male and female diversity. (19:50): How does this other culture think about men and women with regard to their roles? You're a little bit stuck sometimes. You've got a notion of what you believe [00:20:00] and your notion may be both morally and culturally correct where you live, and it might not fit in where you're trying to do business. So being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, so to speak, and at least understand where they're coming from, quite challenging, quite important. Then there's integrating sales with other business functions, ensuring that sales strategy is aligned with marketing, customer service, and other departments requires seamless communication and collaboration, which is often easier [00:20:30] said than done. Man, is that correct ChatGPT. First of all, sales and marketing alignment. I have an idea. Sales and marketing align within the humble cold call. Why? It's simple. When we talk to somebody, when we ambush somebody in a cold call, we're going to follow up. (20:47): What we're looking to do is to see whether it's time to initiate a sales cycle with someone for whom a sales cycle would be advantageous, both for them and for us, at least we think it might be. [00:21:00] Well, none of that is marketing. The marketing question is, can we condition the market so that more sales cycles arise out of it and those that do are successful? So some combination of targeting and stimulating interest and activity in the market is needed. Interestingly enough, the primary thing that happens in an ambush call, in a cold call or in a follow-up call is that person in the modern world, let's go back to technology for a moment, [00:21:30] they actually go to your website most of the time. They actually will respond to an email that you send them most of the time, especially if you send it immediately after the conversation. (21:42): So there's a case where technology, not yours, but the technology of the world comes together with the potential for alignment in order to make things work better. But only if you think about it correctly. Same thing with customer service or customer success. [00:22:00] I mean, one simple thing is try not to offer things that you can't deliver. Now, I know this is tempting in sales, there's always a temptation to say that one extra thing, that one extra piece of value that you believe is going to get the deal done. You might be overstepping the situation with regard to can that really be delivered. And a lot of times I see customer success blame for churn. I was in an event the other night where a customer success expert, [00:22:30] a legitimate one, one I really believe in, she said, "Look, if you're depending on customer success to do something about deals that are about to renew but might churn, you're too late. (22:43): You need to take care of that in the initial engagement. You need to make sure that what they're buying is what you're selling and that you have clarity around that." So seamless communication and clarity is yes, easier said than done, but super important. [00:23:00] Finally, ChatGPT says, "Economic uncertainties. Global economic fluctuations can have a direct impact on B2B sales. Sales leaders must be nimble and act to adjust strategies quickly in response to changes in economic conditions." Well, let me tell you, not just sales leaders, but business leaders. We've been through a simple change. It was about 15, 16 months ago. We are out here in August of 2023. So in the spring of 2022, [00:23:30] the Federal Reserve changed interest rates from zero to something else, a positive number. Tech valuations immediately collapsed, money dried up. Runways were, well, shall we say, shortened. And suddenly there was pressure to do things that might or might not be possible. (23:50): We're now starting to see where that pressure leads. So companies are now for sale that thought that they would be able to raise and raise and raise, get more money and [00:24:00] go out into the marketplace and dominate. So is that an economic uncertainty? You bet. One way to buffer against uncertainties of course isn't a sales function, it's just a function. It's called cash. Another one is to actually be capital efficient in your sales. Capital efficiency means you actually acquire net new customers and net new dollars in a way that doesn't spend that many. Most sales leaders don't think very hard about that one, capital efficiency in their sales process, [00:24:30] but it's capital efficiency that gives you runway when your company is under economic pressure because of global macroeconomic fluctuations. So seek capital efficiency and ask yourself in sales and ask yourself, "How little can we do in order to acquire that next customer? (24:50): And are we trying to acquire customers that aren't really great next customers who at the margin cost quite a bit both to get and to serve?" So ChatGPT [00:25:00] wraps it up and I'll wrap it up with the same. These challenges require combination of strategic thinking, technological savvy, people management skills, and a deep understanding about the specific industry and the broader business environment. By addressing these challenges head on, B2B sales leaders can position their organizations for success in a complex and competitive marketplace. Now that sounds super challenging for one individual person to come to the table with strategic thinking, technological savvy, [00:25:30] people management skills, and a deep understanding of specific industry and broader business environments. (25:36): Wow, sounds like a team game, doesn't it? So being able to work with other members of your team, some of whom might be better strategic thinkers than you are, some of whom might have a better handle on the tech than you do. Some people in your team could be great at people management and setting up situations where folks who you really need, who have deep skills want to stay with you and apply those [00:26:00] skills. And then there's the deep understanding of the industry and the broader business environment. And I would say specifically of what you can bring to customers that they can't do for themselves. Because that's why us, B2B businesses exist. We exist to do for customers what is too expensive or too inconvenient for them to do for themselves.  

Today's adventure is a jaunt on the high seas with Chris Beall's wife, Helen Fanucci, the sailing extraordinaire (before she even became his better half). Now, my sailing skills are on par with a landlocked pirate. But no matter because this story isn't just about boats and briny waters – it's a tale of drive, insight, and a dash of brilliance that'll leave you pondering your business compass. Picture it: a sun-soaked day, a boat called J80, and Helen Fanucci – a mechanical maestro with a thirst for precision. Amidst the waves, she spots a teeny metal tab on the mast, having a bit of a tiff with its groove. But here's the twist – she didn't pounce on the problem like a hungry seagull on a French fry. Oh no! She executed a strategic dance of action and contemplation. Think of it as a chess grandmaster swapping their knight for a piña colada mid-game. The result? A symphony of decisions, a triumphant "click," and a lesson that'll rock your business boat. Join Chris for the full story in this episode, "Sales Insights Using Sailing Strategies for Business Success."   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:21): Today's adventure is a jaunt on the high seas with Chris Beall and his wife Helen Fanucci, the sailing extraordinaire before she became his better [00:00:30] half. Now, I must confess, my sailing skills are on par with a landlocked pirate, but no matter, because this story isn't just about boats and briny waters, it's a tale of drive, insight and a dash of brilliance that will leave you pondering your business compass. (00:44): Picture this, a sun soaked day and Helen Fanucci, a mechanical maestro with a thirst for precision. Amidst the wave, she spots a teeny metal tab on the mast, having a bit of a tiff with its groove. But here's the twist, she didn't pounce on the problem [00:01:00] like a hungry seagull on a french fry. No, no. She executed a strategic dance of action and contemplation. Think of it as a chess grandmaster swapping their night for a pina colada mid-game. The result, a symphony of decisions, a triumphant click and a lesson that'll rock your business boat. (01:18): Join Chris for the full story in this episode, Sales Insights using Sailing Strategies for Business Success. Chris Beall (01:30): [00:01:30] Hey everybody, this is Chris Beall and this is Market Dominance Guys, the podcast, without my cohost, Corey Frank who, he must be out doing something important because he couldn't make it today, and I've decided to put something together that hopefully it'll be of some value to you. So let's see how I can do without Corey Frank, but with my favorite monstrosity, the Ovation of the Seas, [00:02:00] which this is my commemorative picture of it, showing up after COVID, the first cruise ship to show up in Elliot Bay in Seattle, reopening the world of cruising after it had been shut down by COVID. You can have a lot of opinions about whether cruising should be banned or not, as they've done, certainly in Amsterdam, they've decided it's not a great idea to have these big things show up. But they're kind of cool, like a giant hotel, city block long, so to speak, and [00:02:30] out there going from one place to another with other people on the water. There is something about it. I'm not a huge fan, but I'm fan enough, so there we go. (02:39): What I wanted to chat about today is this whole question of the delicate balance between drive and myopia. I'll tell a story. So this is a story, as y'all know, I like to sometimes [00:03:00] tell stories about my wife back when she was my fiance, but this is before we were even at that level. She was taking me out sailing on this very body of water here, actually, not Elliot Bay per se, but for the north, just a place called Shilshole, and there was something about the boat and something on the mast that she thought was not quite right. It was just a little tab like object. (03:25): Now I don't know anything about sailing. I mean, I used to sail Sunfish in [00:03:30] Boulder Reservoir in Boulder, Colorado, but to call that sailing is an overstatement. (03:36): So this boat is, I think, called the J80 or something like that, and she was in a group that raced them, Seattle Sailing Club, so she was a sailboat racer, but hadn't really taken one out by herself. So she goes through a checklist, MIT trained mechanical engineer. Very, very thorough, very professional in the way she handled all that. I felt very comfortable getting on the boat. [00:04:00] I'm good on water anyway, I figure I can swim and how long are you going to be hanging out in the water anyway? (04:06): So we go out, there was a little mishap in that the bow line that connected the boat to shore hadn't been loosed, and so we had a hard time getting going with that in its position. But that got resolved and out we went onto beautiful Elliot Bay. It was a lovely day, light breeze, really, really nice. But we were just getting going. And she [00:04:30] noticed something that was up on the mast a little ways, and it was like a little metallic tab that didn't look like it was inserted correctly in this groove that went up and down in the mast. I don't know anything about sailing. (04:42): What she did was she ran, literally ran, from the position in the back of the boat. As skipper, she was back there making sure it was going in the right direction, up to the mast and then put on the brakes. When she put on the brakes, she was close to the problem, to [00:05:00] the mystery, but she didn't just keep going and grab it and start manipulating it. She got close, stopped and looked, and she looked at what this little tab was attached to, what it might be doing, what its degrees of freedom of motion might be, and so forth. Made a decision, took an action. Action didn't quite work. Adjust it a little bit, it clipped into place whatever it was, and back she went to take care of making sure we [00:05:30] were continuing to go in the right direction. (05:33): I thought, what an interesting way to approach problems, and one that we could learn from. So there was a lot of energy, not waiting to see is this a problem or not, but application of a lot of energy toward the problem, and then slowing down, broadening the vision, looking around and then making some decisions to [00:06:00] do some experiments, and then figuring out what needed to be done. In this particular case, taking action, being satisfied that the action was sufficient to resolve whatever the situation was and going back to whatever she was doing. I think there's a big lesson in business and in sales in particular around that. Speaker 1 (06:21): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (06:24): Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. [00:06:30] So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. (06:43): From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch 49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at [00:07:00] branch49.com. (07:09): And we're back. Chris Beall (07:11): So we've talked on Market Dominance Guys about the problem of the dog, the bone or the piece of meat and the chain link fence, so I'll repeat it. So this is fairly common behavior among dogs and sadly among salespeople. (07:23): If you have a dog and the dog is hungry, and all dogs are hungry at all times, [00:07:30] and you have a nice juicy piece of meat and you put it on one side of a chain link fence and the dog on the other side. So you release the dog right near the fence where it can smell the meat, and there's a gate only 10 feet away to the right of the dog, easy to go through, wide open, what's the dog going to do? The dog's going to try to go through the fence, over the fence, under the fence in order to get to the meat. The dog wants to solve the problem. The problem [00:08:00] is the problem of not having this wonderful juicy piece of meat in its mouth so it could make more dog that way, so it could become more full and stronger and more powerful and capable of going through the world and doing what dogs need to do. (08:16): So here's what the dog didn't do, and that dog never does, and nor do most salespeople. Frankly, nor do most business people, which is to get close to the fence, but then ask this question, "What's around [00:08:30] here that could be interesting, that could be connected to this problem?" (08:35): Well, backing up a couple feet, one might look to the right and look to the left and say, "That looks different over on the right, I think I'll take a quick little trot over there and check it out." Go over and check it out. "Oh look, it's the biggest hole possible in a chain link fence, it's called the open gate." (08:51): So the gate is open, dog goes through, not too hard to navigate with a dog's nose over to the meat, life is great. But most of [00:09:00] us have the dog that tries to go through the fence. So rather than approaching the problem and apprehending what's hooked up to what might be in play, and then taking a look around, we tend to keep going. So we let our energy turn into drive to solve the problem. (09:22): One of the things I think is true is in the interviewing situations, when we're interviewing somebody to be, say, a sales [00:09:30] rep, an individual contributor in sales, we love drive. So when somebody shows a lot of drive, when they show that they can just keep going forward to get something done, we think that's fabulous. And we tend to rate that person and rank that person higher than others who might seem to be a little more circumspect. (09:50): We might go, "Oh, Mary here has huge drive. I love Mary. I want to hire Mary. Whereas Janine, she [00:10:00] seems like she wants to think about things a little bit, that seems like analysis paralysis to me. I don't like that so much, I'm going to hire Mary." It might work out, it's possible that Mary's got drive, but also can slow down, look around, figure out what's going on and make a good decision. (10:22): But more often than not, a person whose energy can turn only into drive, and not into apprehension and consideration, [00:10:30] that is apprehending the situation and considering the possibilities, that person who only has drive, ends up pounding their head against the wall, pounding their nose, bloodying themselves in that chain link fence and telling you, the manager, the boss, that they're making progress. After all, look at all the blood. "I'm bleeding, I must be doing the right thing." (10:55): So I think it's something for us all to think about and act [00:11:00] on when we're interviewing is to ask ourselves the question, "Is this somebody who can use their energy?" Because they need energy. Without energy, we have nothing. So, "Can they use their energy to approach problems? But do they have the discipline to slow down, take a good look, think about what's going on and then, choose a path that might include that gate that's wide open 10 feet to the right?" (11:28): When you think about it, this is actually [00:11:30] the biggest advantage of taking difficult situations and simply talking them through. Because everybody's at a different distance from the problem and looking at it from a different dimension, different angle. If somebody's over there by the gate, they might say, "Hey, by the way, there's a way across to the other side of the fence. If we got over there, do you think we'd be closer to the meat?" (11:53): Now somebody might say, "No, no, no, we're farther away. I'm only two inches from it here, whereas if we go over there, we're 10 [00:12:00] feet away and then we end up being 13 or 14 feet away. Wow, that's a ridiculous thing." (12:06): But we also might go take a look and take a look at what somebody else's thoughts indicate. Might be a solution to a problem that's challenging to us. So when we find ourselves in a situation, as individuals or as managers, where energy is turned only into drive, and drive becomes myopia, we have a contribution we can make. And the contribution [00:12:30] is, "Hey, let's talk about it. Let's have a conversation. Let's slow down a little bit. Let's back up two steps. Let's look a little more broadly and see whether there's another path, a strategy." (12:42): Because as we've talked about in this podcast before, a strategy is a series of steps, each one of which reduces the cost and the risk of the next step that might get us closer to our goal. Think of it as a way to across a river. (13:00): [00:13:00] So you have a raging river and it has rocks in it. The rocks are dry or maybe a little splashed on, but if we can find a path rock to rock to rock, it might not go straight across the river, but if each one of those little jumps is a jump that we can make and land safely, we have a strategy for crossing the river. (13:20): It's very, very rare in business, very, very rare in sales, that straight ahead... "Damn the maneuvers, go right at them," as Lord Nelson [00:13:30] famously once said, is actually the optimum strategy. The world doesn't arrange itself so politely for us in that way. So if we can back up, after getting close, great. If we don't have the energy to get close, we're screwed anyway. (13:46): So when we're hiring, good idea is to hire for energy. But listen for stories about where somebody brought that energy to bear, got close to the problem, broadened their view, maybe with the help of others, [00:14:00] and chose a path that resulted in a positive resolution without getting all bloody trying to go through the chain link fence, which isn't going to yield to the nose of that particular dog.  

In this episode, we step in with the AI sales tango. Corey, our tree-hugging sales champ, questions if AI can replace good old empathy. Our resident sales physicist, Chris chimes in, revealing AI as your trusty confidant, not a sales rival. Chris dishes out AI secrets: it's an emotional prosthetic, erasing self-doubt and boosting confidence. It's like AI saying, "You've got this!" Corey and Chris tag-team AI's power in sales—providing insights, suggesting next moves, and extinguishing self-doubt. AI's not stealing the spotlight; it's your backup dancer, complementing your sales swagger. They salsa through the AI-human tango, admitting AI won't replace human connection magic. But it's the GPS guiding you through the sales maze. The bottom line? Episode 191 busts the myth: AI isn't your enemy; it's your trusty sidekick on the sales stage. Join us for this episode, “Boosting Your Sales Swagger with AI As Your Backup Dancer." Linked from this episode: Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Branch 49 ConnectAndSell   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:39): It's an emotional prosthetic erasing self-doubt and boosting confidence. It's like AI saying, "You've got this." Corey and Chris tag team AI's power in sales providing insights, suggesting next moves, and extinguishing self-doubt. AI's not stealing the spotlight. It's your backup dancer complimenting your sales swagger. [00:01:00] They salsa through the AI human tango, admitting AI won't replace human connection magic, but it's a GPS guiding you through the sales maze. (01:10): The bottom line, AI isn't your enemy, it's your trusty sidekick on the sales stage. Join us for this episode, boosting your sales swagger with AI as your backup dancer. Corey Frank (01:27): Our last topic then let's jump into just real briefly [00:01:30] my beef, my hang-up, and maybe it's more emotional, maybe I'm more of a tree hugger on this, but you're an old physicist, so maybe you can figure out an equation to help me justify empirically why I may be a tree hugger in this, in that I've tried chatbots, right? You and I've worked extensively with ChatGPT in the book with Susan, certainly. As I say, I'm a degenerate gambler where I, in most of my sales career, have tried [00:02:00] any tool weapon that I could, even if I get mere basis point increases. I was the guy that wanted to be the early adopter. (02:07): I was the one that Jeffrey Moore talked about that I am in the far left quadrant of the far left quadrant to say, "Give it to me because I got a number to hit and I want to do more, more, more." But when it comes to the rubber meeting the road, I'm still old school enough, Chris, where empathy and attention and [00:02:30] eye contact and hepatics and nuances and speech and listening patterns and mirroring and all the NLP stuff, all the Sandler, all the Orrin, all this neuropsychology that I've been inundated in my sales group of mentors, such as yourself, that that matters to help establish trust with the prospect and ultimately get them to buy or not buy or to be postponed, but to have you as a trusted advisor. (03:00): [00:03:00] And with AI tools out there, do you see us crossing that bridge with deep purchases? I can see transactional purchases if I'm buying tires online, if I'm commoditized by buying, should I buy this Lego set for my son versus this Lego set? I get that, but what do you say about AI and the advent of it when I'm trying to cling to the fabric of my profession by saying, "Well, this industry does need guys like [00:03:30] me because I can connect well," or are my days numbered? Chris Beall (03:35): Well, your days are numbered, in any case, I hate to... Corey Frank (03:39): [Inaudible 00:03:39] Chris Beall (03:43): Yeah, sorry to break it to you. Corey Frank (03:45): I didn't mean existentially. I meant. Chris Beall (03:52): My days are numbered also. I don't know what the numbers are exactly though. It's a countdown to somewhere, but we don't know where we are in the countdown, [00:04:00] so I'm good. I actually think in sales we tend to forget that, in B2B sales especially, what we're doing only counts to the degree or to the effect of it moving what somebody else is feeling. We do in sales to change what somebody else feels. That's our job. (04:23): And while there are AI chatbots you might choose to help you work your way through your own emotional [00:04:30] issues, it's very unlikely that a buyer is going to choose an AI chatbot to work through the emotional issues that you need them to work through, which is they don't yet trust you. This is the whole issue in B2B. That Anthony Iannarino quote, out of Elite Sales Strategies, people buy from people they trust to make a decision they don't trust themselves to make. (04:58): Now mind you, Anthony [00:05:00] was actually quoting me and he was kind enough to put my name after the quote, which I discovered after he'd signed the book, which I found a little bit interesting. Point is, in B2B, the risk never changes. The risk for the buyer just doesn't change. No chatbot. You won't be able to say as the buyer, "Hey, I know we bought the system XYZ and brought it into our company. It turned out when we hooked it up, it destroyed our production floor. [00:05:30] It's not my fault, it's the chatbot. The chatbot made me do it right." (05:36): That argument's never going to work. That one is never going to work, and yet it's the dream of automated B2B sales that the buyer will trust the chatbot or trust the AI sufficiently to throw their career into the ring and risk their kids' college education and their retirement and their reputation with nothing more to back it up [00:06:00] than, "This chatbot recommended that chatbot. This is a recommendation chatbot here. This is actually a help to buy this thing chatbot. All the chatbots say I should have done like this. (06:12): The fact that it destroyed our production facility, that's not my fault. It's not on me." It is on you. How do you overcome that? Well, the buyer needs to go on an emotional journey with regard to this one transaction and it starts somewhere [00:06:30] and it's got to get to trust. In the denominator, we still have time. Now, we're told by experts, and I'll accept Chris Voss and the FBI and Harvard Business School and all these people who did this testing, that the amount of time we have to pull that off is seven seconds. (06:47): That's actually the most salient little denominator piece in all of sales. We're still going to need you, Corey, because only you are a safe partner to help somebody on a journey from where they are to [00:07:00] trusting someone. That's you. That's what's interesting. You got seven seconds to do it. That's kind of it. Imagine in one way you could say that the role of a salesperson is to get somebody else to trust them with regard to a specific proposition, buying and implementing whatever it is I sell. (07:21): It's really a seven second process to get to the point where the most important part is accomplished or not, which is the trust part. At that point, you [00:07:30] could bring in the chatbots. In fact, I have a good example of that for myself. I engaged with ChatGPT the other day in order to examine the price and value equation and the parameters around that for our two basic products, our Connect on Target product and our Connect on Live Voice product, and we sell them at different prices and they have different underlying costs, and I have all the numbers. (07:57): I got 50 million dials a year [00:08:00] and all the outcomes of all those dials, 3.3 million conversations, on and on and on. I got all the numbers in front of me. How was I going to think this through and understand, oh, if I were to tweak this price this way, given what actually happens in the real world based on all the data that we have, will a customer get more value or less value, and will they pay more or pay less, and all this kind of stuff, right? Well, I asked ChatGPT. [00:08:30] I just took a table of all this data and just dumped it in and said, "Imagine, here's this bunch of financial data." (08:38): I trusted myself enough to take the recommendation that I interact with the chatbot, and it walked me through this process of thinking about something. Now, it did a really good job of selling me on some different price points, but first, I had to trust the salesperson. That was me. I had to trust myself to go and do that. I think once we get trust, [00:09:00] AI can really help us. This will happen in the future, by the way, where the salesperson will say, "Well, let's talk together to the chatbot and do that with the prospect." (09:13): You had this question, let's ask it. And now you have a third party who's an authority, because people really do love that. They'll take as authoritative output both the good stuff and the hallucinations that come out of a chatbot. I remember we got some great hallucinations out of ChatGPT [00:09:30] for the book. We asked it to give us some endorsements, and it gave us six great endorsements, all of which were made up, but they were really credible. It's like, this is the stuff these guys would've said, right? (09:45): But it hallucinates fine. We don't have to accept the hallucinations, but the reasoning and the quality of the writing and that third partiness is really worthwhile. It helps somebody make that next [00:10:00] emotional state change. They go from trust to actually they're now curious. Well, now the curiosity can be fed and satisfied through the process of interacting with the chatbot. Do you have to leave them alone to do that? No. It's a great way to hang out with somebody in a Zoom. Do the screen share. (10:18): Bring up the chatbot. Let them ask their questions. I've done it with a doctor, by the way, who was wondering like, "Well, what is this chat stuff?" I said, "Well, here." We're in his kitchen. [00:10:30] It's a friend and spent the night at their house and breakfast wasn't ready yet. He didn't know anything about ChatGPT. I said, "Well, let's ask it some questions. Ask it a question." Then I would type the question in and I'd read him the answer. He said at the end of about 30 minutes, "It's a better doctor than anybody that I work with at my clinic." (10:51): He says, "This thing really knows its stuff. It didn't make up any. It was really, really good." It's like that changed his mind with regard [00:11:00] to a lot of different things. It could have not been about his profession, but that interaction where two humans are playing with the chatbot, we're going to see tons of that. Folks are going to figure that out, but they have to believe now that the vendor's bot is not biased. Voiceover (11:17): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. [00:11:30] ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing. As you know it connect and sell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at ConnectAndSell.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Corey Frank (11:59): It's [00:12:00] our old friend, I think Aristotle. We talked about the four causes, the material, formal, efficient, and final. Is the final cause for AI in sales, is it to coming full circle from what we talked about? Is it to reduce time as you were saying? Is it to increase efficiency? Is it to reduce headcount, reduce costs? Or is it to ultimately increase sales? (12:28): I think until [00:12:30] we understand that, that the final cause should be to create profit, create sales, that we're messing around with a lot of these other uses for it and either a formal cause or an efficient cause, that I don't think really matter to the business as much as should. Any thoughts on that? Chris Beall (12:52): Yeah. Well, there's a tendency with all technology when it's new to want to jump to its potential [00:13:00] end state and give it a whirl. Corey Frank (13:02): Yes. Yes. Yes. Chris Beall (13:03): The potential end state is the tech sells for me. Owners love that because owners of businesses really are uncomfortable fundamentally with the fact that these humans, these salespeople that they hire, are independent agents effectively no matter how you integrate into your company and your future depends on them. They have the ability to screw you up in various ways, including [00:13:30] getting hit by a self-driving car. We have a tendency to go, "Well, wouldn't it be great if the bot could do the selling?" (13:41): We try it. We tend to jump to that state. In most cases where the system settle down is where the emotional and the process cost algorithmic stuff come together, and the emotional tends to come to [00:14:00] the fore when you're working with somebody else. Almost anything you do. I'm an old climber, as you know. I've done two kinds of climbing. There's the kind you do with a partner and there's the kind you do by yourself called soloing. Well, the difficulty of soloing is not that you're going to fall to your death, although it does cross one's mind on occasion. (14:23): The ground doesn't look any different between your toes. It's still way down there. You could be soloing and self-belaying, so maybe [00:14:30] you're not going to fall all the way down there. You're just going to fall a little ways and hang there on the rope and figure something out. But psychologically, the difference between soloing and climbing with a partner is truly night and day. Corey Frank (14:43): Interesting. Chris Beall (14:44): They don't resemble each other in any way whatsoever. When you decide to go solo, you take a very, very deep look at who you are that day and you decide, do I want me as a partner, because I'm going to... Corey Frank (14:58): Well, could you argue then with [00:15:00] that, Chris? Sorry to step on your lines, but could you argue that a lot of the... We were joking about The New York Times article, I'll read it again, is that it assists people with their wellness and emotions. Is that part of the introduction to a lot of these tools? It may be not necessarily the final cause, but it could be a cause nonetheless, is that I feel like I have a partner in my climb. I am not free soloing because I have a tool for outreach [00:15:30] or for cold outreach. I have a tool for email. I have a tool for dialing. I have a tool for looking at my pipeline, et cetera. Chris Beall (15:37): This is where I think a lot of this is going. I've been writing some pitches recently or just toying around with them, like company level descriptions and stuff like that. I found it super helpful emotionally to be able to start those just by asking, by spitting out a bunch of stuff at ChatGPT, typing kind of mindlessly, and then saying, "Please summarize [00:16:00] or please write a 20 slide deck." The fact that it will do it makes me more comfortable with the process. And now I'm editing, I'm not creating. (16:15): I know it's seen a lot of decks before, so I trust it to do something that's deck like. Yeah, it's an emotional prosthetic for me that also happens to know a lot about some things that I don't know a lot about. How often [00:16:30] do we make decks for a company or whatever? Some people do it all the time. Most of us, it's a fairly rare event. Being able to ask a chatbot, "So here's what's going on in this deal. So far I'm talking to this person and they said this and here's the transcript of this meeting and blah, blah, blah. What do you think I should do next?" (16:51): If you're really good at prompt engineering, you ask questions like this. What are the eight steps that are most likely to lead to this [00:17:00] outcome or help me qualify or whatever? Just having someone else, even though it's a bot, tell you that stuff will make you more capable of executing it because you take an element of self-doubt away, which is what these therapeutic bots do. I think those are big uses. What's funny about it is, that stuff's free. Free enough. Corey Frank (17:22): Is it called cognitive resonance? Is that the term where I feel better about my decisions when I know that they're socially supported [00:17:30] by others or reviews and restaurants? Is that really what I hear you say? Chris Beall (17:35): Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think what's also interesting is the recommendation that comes from a chatbot that's a good one, a modern GPT style chatbot that's got a lot of data in it, that recommendation is easier to take from the bot. You can go back and forth without embarrassment and ask for clarification and say, "I don't understand what you mean," or whatever, [00:18:00] than it is from a person because you know you're not going to give up power to the bot. (18:03): One of the reasons we don't like management, as employees, we don't like managers, is they tell us what to do and we don't like being told what to do because we lose agency. We lose that feeling that we're running our lives. Now, frankly, I think we're kind of more like ChatGPT. We just spit out the next word that comes to mind and then we justify it. We tell a story about how that was profound and deep and fantastic, and mostly it's just regurgitation. (18:30): [00:18:30] But being able to do what you're told without giving up power to whoever told you because they're not a real who, that's pretty liberating, oddly enough. And in sales, we need emotional liberation because we get stuck on the emotions of sales, our own emotions more than anything else. Most sales books are about how to overcome your own emotional limitations and go ahead and sell. You could summarize 98% of all sales literature like this, [00:19:00] just get over all this stuff that's making you hesitate and just go ahead and tell somebody about something. Corey Frank (19:06): Well, it's true. That's true. Maybe the empath goal that we all have certainly will help us in our trust abilities and our cognitive connection abilities with our prospect to feel their pain and understand their solutions, but that also is a curse, because from a coaching perspective it sounds like. (19:26): Maybe the best blend is the higher form you get as a sales [00:19:30] professional with this ability to establish trust with your neural empathetic skills. But me, myself, it'd be nice to have agency over my chat sales manager to tell me what it is that I need to improve upon so I can still sleep well enough at night secure that I'm not that bad. Chris Beall (19:49): Yeah, I'm not that bad. There's a reasonable next thing to do. I was told about a reasonable next thing to do. Oh, that sounds pretty doable. I go around a lot of my life. As you [00:20:00] know, people walk up to me on city streets and ask my advice. I don't know why this is true. It's somewhat embarrassing actually, but I'm willing to help somebody. I think it's helpful anyway. Sometimes I think about that. It's like, what am I doing for that person, because I'm very rarely telling them something they don't know? (20:19): What I'm doing is reassuring them that what they know is perfectly reasonable and they should go ahead and do it. That's kind of it. That's the role. Well, we're all uncertain [00:20:30] all the time. Everybody's uncertain. Somebody who says they're never uncertain is covering up for their uncertainty, for sure. We're all uncertain and uncertainty is somewhat paralytic. And yet in sales, time is the enemy. If we can act now in a way that's reasonable and doesn't box anybody in, that leaves some options open, we're going to do better than the person who's hesitating and trying to figure stuff out. (20:56): I think a big role of AI is to give us an idea [00:21:00] of something to do that seems like a reasonable next thing to do. I don't think this is going to come out of these really fancy tools that have looked at every conceivable thing that somebody might do in this particular circumstance. I think it's a little more like that ELIZA program. It's going to bring out from ourselves what we already knew we should do, and it's going to reflect it back to us, with maybe a couple nuances or some minor insights. (21:25): Or maybe we're going to go, oh, I thought I should do it in that other order. Oh yeah, this makes sense. I [00:21:30] should do that first. It's almost always the order. Very rarely is it the things that's almost always the order in which you do them. Corey Frank (21:38): Sure. But those nuances build trust. It's easier a little leaven if the whole loaf versus a 40 yard bomb downfield risk on every play. That word reasonable, I think, is key, Chris. What is a reasonable next step that I can get from some guidance, counsel, wise advice from this [00:22:00] machine who has built many a deck, who has been in multi-exponential sales situations, who's analyzed them and said, "This is the nets logical, reasonable step to take?" I would accept that. I would accept that. Chris Beall (22:13): It works for me. When I did that pricing exercise, I tell you, when I was done with that, it was 45 minutes on a Saturday morning asking all of this stuff. I finally went, that's about as good an answer as I'm likely to come up with. Copy paste [00:22:30] to the team. Here's all the analysis that was done. It's kind of like I had done it, but I hadn't done it. I actually didn't do any of the analysis. I just kept asking. It's like, huh, but what if we did this? Just in English. I came up with something I was pretty comfortable with. It was reasonable. Corey Frank (22:49): Well, I think we're at our reasonable endpoint for this particular episode. Those are many reason, rational thoughts and steps for us [00:23:00] to think about using AI and other tech tools and weapons in your ecosystem. Thanks, Chris. That was incredible as always. Any final thoughts before we turn the page to another topic for next week? Chris Beall (23:14): My final thought is always the same, which is the denominator is your friend. Go in there and kill it. Corey Frank (23:21): Knowing your math. Well, excellent. Well, for Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank with the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time.  

Are you looking to gain a competitive edge in your sales process? Are you interested in understanding what lies deep inside your sales funnel and pipeline to drive more revenue? Then you don't want to miss this episode! Join our Market Dominanc Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank, as they dive deep into the world of sales technology and AI-powered tools. Discover the true advantage of understanding and optimizing the flow rate within your sales projects. Learn why it's essential to focus on time as the denominator when measuring success rather than vanity metrics like conversion rates. They provide valuable insights on discerning whether a tool truly de-risks your sales path and reduces friction or merely adds to your tech stack inventory without tangible results. Explore the fascinating concept of "speed beats free" and why pushing time on the denominator matters more than dream outcomes in sales. Join us for this episode, “AI for Sales? Don’t be ‘Candy Crush’ Complacent    

Chris Beall and Corey Frank take us on a nostalgic journey through the evolution of sales tech and the intriguing world of AI. They start with a blast from the past, reminiscing about a 1960s AI program called Eliza, which acted as a non-directive therapist, fooling people into thinking it was a friend. Fast forward to the present day, they question the true value of CRM systems, pondering whether they actually help make money or just keep salespeople organized. Corey shares a road trip story of stumbling upon racks of rock salt in Alabama, sparking the idea of the right people selling the right tools. Chris passionately emphasizes that onboarding salespeople should involve engaging them in discovery meetings from day one to boost their success. This episode encourages sales managers and CEOs to rethink their sales tech strategies, focus on revenue-generating activities, and find the perfect balance between the human touch and AI. Join us for “Rock Salt & Roll: Unraveling Sales Tech's Mystery.” Linked from this episode: EP9: How to Harvest Authentic Trust in your Discovery Calls Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Branch 49 ConnectAndSell        

Chris unravels the enchanting world of manufacturing. Gone are the days of painstakingly crafting artifacts one by one, like our Stone Age ancestors. Now, we're immersed in the art of flow manufacturing, where tanks channel the flow of chemicals, and even discreet manufacturing dances to the rhythm of flow. It's a symphony of efficiency where our sales teams manufacture opportunities, creating the invaluable currency of option value. Chris urges us to view our sales organizations as factories where identifying bottlenecks and maximizing flow rates are the keys to success. In this world, conversion rates become the icing on the cake, but only after we've mastered the flow. Finally, Chris challenges the age-old debate of quality versus quantity and reminds us that we're left with nothing without quantity. Join us for this episode, "Bottlenecks Beware: Flow Rates Coming to Crash the Party!" Links from this episode: Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Branch 49 ConnectAndSell   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:19): In this episode, Chris unravels the enchanting world of manufacturing. Gone are the days of painstakingly crafting artifacts one by one like our Stone Age ancestors. Now, we're immersed in the art of flow manufacturing, where tanks channel the flow of chemicals, and even discrete manufacturing dances to the rhythm of flow. It's a symphony of efficiency where our sales teams manufacture opportunities, creating the invaluable currency of option value. (00:49): Chris urges us to view our sales organizations as factories where identifying bottlenecks and maximizing flow rates are the key to success. In this world, conversion rates become the icing on the cake, but only after we've mastered flow. Finally, Chris challenges the age-old debate of quality versus quantity, and reminds us that without quantity we're left with nothing. (01:11): Join us for this episode, Bottlenecks Beware. Flow rates coming to crash the party. (01:20): Hey. Everybody, Susan Finch here, sitting in for Corey Frank on Market Dominance Guys. I'm here with Chris Beall. And today, we're going to go a little bit deeper on the topic of flow rates, conversion rates. Time is the denominator that counts, not the dials, not the emails, not whatever else you think it might be, not the voodoo, whooo, magic, whatever. Chris, you really wanted to get into the specifics, the specifics of flow rate. So let's really go into that one piece of it. Chris Beall (01:54): You bet. So I'm an old manufacturing guy. I come out of the world of manufacturing software. I used to write build systems for manufacturers. And when you get into manufacturing, you realize that what's amazing about it is, hey, folks have actually figured out how to build stuff through flow processes, not just through one at a time building something, that is through most of human history. If there was an artifact, somebody made that artifact from end to end. Susan Finch (02:24): Right. Chris Beall (02:24): And they would shape a spearpoint or something. I just saw a picture yesterday of some people who still are living that life, that Stone Age life, and they're making those spear points out of dirt or flint or whatever they make them out of, flaking them and doing this. Susan Finch (02:39): Yeah. Chris Beall (02:40): And it's a shaping process where what you just made determines what you can make. If you break your piece of stone that you're using inappropriately in the wrong place, well, you got to start over. Susan Finch (02:52): Right. Chris Beall (02:53): So now, we manufacture things through... Even discrete manufacturing, which we would consider to be one at a time. You're making something like an iPhone, or a computer, or a chair, or whatever it is, and I'm distinguishing that from true flow manufacturing. So a company like Huish Chemical that I used to work with in Salt Lake City, they were a flow manufacturer. That means they had tanks into which things would flow and they'd flow down sort of a channel and get mixed with other chemicals, and it would flow, right? Susan Finch (03:25): Right. Chris Beall (03:26): But even discreet manufacturing where you're taking parts and putting them together one at a time, two at a time, three at a time, robots, all that kind of stuff, it's still a flow business. And if you want to make it better, we always want to make our sales better, our sales process, our sales teams more efficient, we need to look at it like manufacturing. Because what we're doing is we're manufacturing opportunities in the pipeline. That's the main thing that we should be doing in sales in our company. We might think of it as manufacturing customers or manufacturing deals, but those are both unreliable processes with incredibly high scrap rates and a lot of variability in terms of what goes in to make that thing work. (04:10): But if we're manufacturing enough opportunities in the pipeline, life is good, because we have choices. And when we have choices, we have what's called option value. The greatest value we get in business is always option value. So there's a thing called a zero-cost option. You don't pay anything, but it's worth something. Well, pipeline is not a zero-cost option. It costs something. You have to pay people to do things like call people and stuff like that. But improving flow rates themselves that is making your pipeline work better by going to the bottleneck and doing something about the flow rate there makes a big difference. (04:47): Now, here's how people think about sales, especially at the top of the funnel, where the shape of the funnel tells you it's getting harder, I have to squeeze more stuff through there, and I got to get stuff out of there and do all that kind of stuff. So it's like, okay, so here I have the top of the funnel, and we're working the top of the funnel, and they care about conversion rates. They want to know for a certain number of inputs, say, a account of records that are coming in. I buy a bunch of data from ZoomInfo. Or I make a bunch of phone calls to those people. What percentage of those converted to the next stage? That's what folks get obsessed with. Susan Finch (05:22): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employee successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM Branch49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. (06:10): And we're back. Chris Beall (06:11): And I deal with this every day. In my job, I talk to folks who are using ConnectAndSell to call lots and lots of people. And they'll say, "Does your product affect our conversion rates?" And I say, "No, it doesn't. It doesn't at all." And they go, "Well, why would I bother to buy something that doesn't affect our conversion rates? I want to know that we're going to get more meetings per conversation or more conversations per dial." And I say, "Well, we don't do anything about that. What we give you is more conversations per hour, per rep." And that's the constrained resource. The rep who's capable of talking to somebody during given period of time, and taking them from, "We don't know anything about your company," to "Now we're more interested than we were before," on our way to engaging or actually engaged. So that's a flow rate question. (07:03): The denominator is time. The denominator is not the number of calls, it's not the number of emails. All those things are treated, I think, incorrectly as being somehow fixed. So for instance, the notion that we could only make so many dials. Well, actually, that's not true. You could have more resources making more dials at the same time. There's other ways of cracking this problem. Just because you used to walk doesn't mean that somebody else can't invent a car. Once the car is there, you're going to compete to get somewhere. You better get yourself a car. Walking ain't going to get it done. Right? Susan Finch (07:40): Right. Chris Beall (07:40): Good for you. So flow rates are where it's at. And conversion rates are nice once you have flow rates. But looking at conversion rates first gives you nothing, except it makes you go in circles. You keep trying to squeeze more out of something that you could have just gotten more of in the first place. And I find it a little bit frustrating, I guess, to talk to people who are very sophisticated in the world of building sales pipeline who will only talk about conversion rates. "We send so many emails, and we have this open rate." That's a conversion rate. And then they go to tools that'll let them send more emails, but there's limits to that and called spam at some point. Susan Finch (08:26): Right. Chris Beall (08:26): So it's fascinating to me. If you think of your sales organization as a factory and you think of your sales process as a manufacturing process, you'll look at it in terms of, "Can I find the bottleneck? What's the flow rate through that bottleneck, the number of units per hour it's producing?" And then in the case of manufacturing meetings, for instance, "Well, what are the number of meetings per hour you're producing? If it's conversations that might lead somebody to your website, how many conversations per hour are you producing?" Those are the flow rates. And the conversion rates, well, once you've got flow rates kind of maximized, or where you want to them, then you can tweak conversion. You have something to work with. But you don't have anything to work with until you got the flow. Susan Finch (09:13): I hear what you just said from, not just people that are into sales prospecting, sales training, it's maddening because they don't back it out enough. Well, what led to that? Okay. Well, what led to that? And it does come down to the same thing, how are you increasing the effectiveness, the efficiencies of your sales force? Chris Beall (09:37): Yeah. Yeah. The order in which to do things is to increase efficiency first. Susan Finch (09:42): Yeah. Chris Beall (09:42): Because that gives you your raw material to address effectiveness. And I hear this one all the time too. I've probably done a whole show on the quality versus quantity thing. (09:51): I think I wrote an article once, the title of which was Quality Versus Quantity Versus Nothingness. And the point of the article was, look, just because it is easy to talk about quality and quantity as though they're somehow independent, and you could raise quality arbitrarily without quantity, the fact of the matter is that without quantity, you've got nothing. There's nothing to improve the quality of. (10:15): This is why markets get flooded first with cheap cars, and then people work to make them better and better, but the ones who got the cheap cars there first win. This is why the whole SaaS industry exists. All SaaS products are built on this premise, which is, "We're going to get a lot of it out there, and then we're going to get feedback, and we're going to work to make it more valuable across the many," rather than, "We're going to go find one big fantastic customer and work with them for 50 years, and it'll be great." Well, it'll be great, and you won't be worth much. So if it's a hobby, go ahead and do it that way. But you need quantity first, and quantity over time is flow. Simple as that. Susan Finch (10:58): I think that that is a great wrap-up to this episode. This was... We wanted something targeted, and you did it. This is all about flow rates. If you want to find your bottleneck, folks, you got to be looking in the right place. You have to be looking back a little bit further than just counting those conversions, than just counting the emails that are opened. Whenever you consider a conversion, that isn't where it starts.  

The game isn't won with the buzzer shot. The game is won by endless hours of preparing for the buzzer shot. Chris and Susan dive deep into the often-overlooked topic of prospecting costs and return on investment (ROI). Chris's passion for the subject shines through as he challenges conventional thinking and emphasizes the importance of time as the ultimate business denominator. He reveals that traditional efficiency metrics like conversion rates and ratios have little to do with business success. Instead, he argues that prospecting is about maximizing the value of every hour and building a robust pipeline. Chris expertly breaks down prospecting ROI, highlighting the investment in time and the need to attribute pipeline growth back to conversations. Throughout the episode, they share pro tips and emphasize the need for a strategic and holistic approach to prospecting beyond research and follow-ups. This engaging discussion is a must-listen for sales professionals looking to unlock the true potential of prospecting and boost their ROI. Join Chris and Susan for this episode, "Prospecting Costs and ROI: Dollars Spent, Dollars Missed." Links from this episode: Susan Finch on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Funnel Media Group ConnectAndSell   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Susan Finch (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beal from Connect and Sell, and Cory Frank from Branch 49. Hey everybody, Susan Finch here. I am sitting in for Corey Frank on Market Dominance. Guys, I'm with Chris Beal and he tossed out some topics that we are going to be tackling one by one. And the first one we will be covering is prospecting costs on return on investment, which means dollar spent, dollars missed. So Chris, let's just get right into these because I am really excited and I know you're excited because then I will stay off your case to record shows for a few weeks.  Chris Beall (00:53): I do have a few things going on, Susan, so let's be great.  Chris Beall (00:59): But this is one of my favorite topics. I'm kind of a fanatic about this and I keep finding myself thinking, oh, other people must think like this about prospecting, and then I get the same blank stares over and over, which it indicates to me maybe they don't. So what I find is when folks are thinking about prospecting, they're thinking about things like efficiency, like well, how many dials does it take to get a conversation? Or how many emails does it take to get somebody to open an email or to act on an email, or what's our conversion rate when people come to the website? So there's a lot of rates and ratios that go on, and to me, none of that has anything to do with business. The denominator in business is always time, right? So time is the thing you can't do anything about other than get as much out of it as you can possibly get out of it, right?  Chris Beall (01:50): Money, you can go get more money, you can get talent, you can have ideas. You might even wake up being creative one day. I highly advise just go back to sleep, but you can't really do anything about time. And the main thing is we have a whole show that's dedicated to this is time is overhead, so it's eating up your costs. It is the thing that just basically if you just sit around and do nothing, if you don't prospect, then you don't have a pipeline. If you don't have a pipeline, then you don't have future business. And if you don't have future business, then out in that future you don't have gross profit to cover your overhead and you will go out of business eventually or sell in a fire sale or whatever. So one part of prospecting is obvious, which is in as little time as possible, you need to build as much pipeline as possible.  Chris Beall (02:39): And pipeline built now is worth more to your business than pipeline built tomorrow. So going fast actually counts because of the nature of overhead. I think we used the phrase once. Overhead is like a race horse that you buy like a race horse that eats while you sleep. It's absorbing your bank account regardless. And Susan, you run a small business and you know the feel, right? This is why business owners act differently from agents. Agents never feel this the same way. Even CFOs don't feel it at the same level. So that's part of it. But with prospecting, there's another hideous cost that shows up, and this is multidimensional cost. That's like the worst of the worst and it's opportunity cost. So in the world that you can't quite see from in inside your own business, there are out there multiple competitors. There are competitors like you, and then there are folks just solving problems themselves. And then there's folks putting off solving problems, which gives time for a competitor like you to come in or for that person who thought maybe it was worth solving to go away and now that company won't even bother to solve that problem. So time is your enemy in this other dimension, which is the dimension of opportunity cost, and the I'm  Susan Finch (04:02): So, I'm so glad you brought that up. Oh my gosh, I was, the whole time you're talking about this, I was thinking constantly that silent behind the scenes in your sleep race against your competitors, which is where time, what are they doing? How are they handling it? Are they more efficient with their time than I'm being with my time?  Chris Beall (04:20): That's pretty much it. And so to me that says that prospecting return on investment, the investment is in time, how much you're getting per hour, and now you come down to, well, you got to break it down. It's not just per hour of the day, but it's per hour of prospecting capacity. So what is prospecting capacity? Well, it's somebody, a person generally doing something that raises the probability that within a fixed period of time or a known period of time or an average period of times, some other buddy, somebody out there in the world will engage and be willing to learn from you how you might be able to help them solve a problem that they have that they would pay for. So when you look at it that way, you're now down to a person in your organization. So that person is essentially being paid by the hour no matter how you pay them.  Chris Beall (05:13): You can always go back and divide it up and go, oh, it was so much per hour. In my case, as we well know, it's we what we call a burger flipper wage, but we have other wages we could be paid. So here we have this hour of this person's time has gone by, I call it a rep hour or prospecting hour. So how much pipeline did you build? Well, that's often treated as a big mystery like, oh, how could we possibly know? And the answer is, it's not that hard. You go to your C R M, you pull out the opportunities, you find out which opportunities were influenced by the actions of this person. So the easiest one is a conversation. Did a person on our team have a conversation with somebody and the customer's team that proceeded the opportunities close date? Why do I say close date instead of create date?  Chris Beall (06:07): Because opportunities get influenced not just to get created, but along the way there's a number of interactions that'll occur and everyone counts. So trying to figure out which ones count as a big mistake because then it's like, well, was it that conversation? Was this other conversation? Was it the you go crazy doing that stuff. What you want to know is in aggregate is the investment that I made in these people and whatever else I bought for them. So if they were working with us, maybe who knows, maybe they graced them with the opportunity to talk to many people an hour using connect and self. Or maybe there's some other thing, an ad budget or whatever that you spent. But whatever that stuff is, just go back from the opportunities backward in time and go back and find out what did you spend on that you paid for by the hour?  Chris Beall (06:58): That's people that influenced these opportunities. Now it's a simple matter of division, by the way, numbers that can be achieved, and I have a big long list of customers of ours who achieve these numbers. You can achieve numbers like $10,000 an hour of pipeline building. If your pipeline coverage then is say everybody says three to one, but say it's more realistically four or five to one. So say it's five to one, you're actually getting $2,000 an hour of future revenue out of that particular rep while they're prospecting. So now the question is, well, how much of their time are they spending prospecting? General answer, once you know that you could be getting $2,000 per prospecting hour, probably not enough, you probably undervalue their prospecting time because you've never put a dollar number on it. Multiply that 2000 an hour times your gross margin. So say you're running a gross margin of 70%, so now it's $1,400 an hour of opport. That's, this is opportunity cost by the way, because pipeline represents opportunity that you're giving up to somebody else to go out and win that business. So every hour spent prospecting is a valuable hour, more valuable generally than time spent. Closing. Closing is something that happens relatively naturally if you have enough in the pipeline, but I tell you for sure, deals that don't ever go into the pipeline, they don't ever close. Oh, wait a minute, they do. Somebody else closes them.  Susan Finch (08:33): You're right, you're right. People get so worried about the last piece of it all, or not the last, but the first closing,  Chris Beall (08:40): Right?  Susan Finch (08:41): Because we always want to keep going and keep closing on more things as we go along, but they get so focused on that that they forget that they have to keep replenishing and keep replenishing and revisiting and reconnecting and all the pieces. That all comes down to great conversations.  Chris Beall (08:59): None of it is of it. Easy is easy and very little of it happens at the end. That counts. You know what people are like though? We all highlight reels. Nobody has a video of Michael Jordan practicing dribbling with his eyes closed when he was in high school. That should be on a highlight reel. It's the shot made at the buzzer, and then we all go, well, that must be where the game is being played. Well, no, the rest of the game was being played both off the court and on the court, and almost none of it was the shot at the buzzer, right? You have to set stuff up and you prospecting is how we set stuff up. And unfortunately or fortunately, the thing I like about business, actually, I like competition a lot as some people who know me know that's somebody once said, that's why you can afford to be such a nice person, isn't it? Yes.  Susan Finch (09:46): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break.  Susan Finch (09:58): Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employee successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM branch. 40 nines modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn [email protected]. And we're back.  Chris Beall (11:23): Yes, because I'm actually out of my mind with regard to competitiveness. It's ok. I can afford it. Nice. But what I love about business is that the rules are simply the rules of nature and the law, and to some degree, social propriety, Elon Musk is demonstrating to us that perhaps that last one doesn't count at all and he's doing okay. Last I checked, he's made more than a hundred bucks. So it's really interesting when you think about what field you're playing on, it's a field that you are actually discovering while you're playing the game. You're discovering it by talking to people primarily. So prospecting does one more thing, which is really interesting, and that is it puts you in contact with the real world that you need to deal with and it puts your organization in contact. Literally the number of conversations you're having and the quality of those conversations times each other is going onto your balance sheet that's actually going in as goodwill.  Chris Beall (12:28): That's what goodwill actually means. It's like the folks, ultimately it's the market that will do business with you times your gross margin attenuated off into the future because of the cost of money and a bunch of other stuff that business people think about. But when you come right down to it, that's going on to your balance sheet. If you're having more conversations, you're actually becoming not just a better company in terms of your ability to do business. That is not just something that's going to be on your p and l, but it's actually going on your balance sheet as goodwill. You ever wonder what Goodwill is? It's all those folks that you've talked with that would do business with you preferentially to somebody else.  Susan Finch (13:08): I had an interesting thought about that too. I teach podcasting classes. You guys teach things you train, and the other piece of that goodwill, when we help somebody, when we, when we present the questions that come back, unless you're having those conversations with everybody, you would've never heard all these other perspectives too.  Chris Beall (13:30): Oh yeah, yeah,  Susan Finch (13:31): All the, I mean it's like, man, I wouldn't have even thought of that. And it's some unique situation, but suddenly it's applicable to many people, which adds to our value, which adds to our prospecting success because we have more to bring to them. So conversations, just because they don't end up in our CRM immediately, doesn't make them not valuable.  Chris Beall (13:54): And I think they should go in the CRM in the sense that we should be thinking about what we're doing, what we're influencing, but also about what we're learning and all this conversational AI out there is actually quite interesting in that regard. My new favorite thing is to get an email, which I get now from a conversational AI product. It's chorus. Yes. And it sends me an email synopsis. Every meeting that's had in the company, it takes me less than 30 seconds to read one of those. It would've taken 30 minutes to go to the meeting, and I can get about 90% of the meeting value out of those 30 seconds. And I don't have to go to an app to fetch it. They kindly send it to me as a summary in an email that if I want to click through and listen to, it's fine.  Chris Beall (14:42): I always say that it's the tone of voice, the cadence, the prody, all that stuff that makes a difference. But the fact is, once I know my reps, I know what their voice is. Like right now I'm trying to get 10 to, well, what's happening next? Do we actually have a next step? Is the next step one that I would anticipate? Or am I going to learn something new? Because some surprising next step shows up and it's amazing how good those summarizers are. Chat G P T showed it. It'll summarize anything you and I had. It summarized podcasts and it did a great job. Didn't make a great book, but made a book in two days, which saved a lot of time,  Susan Finch (15:20): But wasn't the point. That wasn't the point.  Chris Beall (15:22): Yeah, I know. I loved it when somebody called it a cheap cash grab. I'm going, so where's the cash? Yeah, so it's pretty interesting. But when I think about ROI for prospecting, the investment is the dollars you're spending for the people who are doing the prospecting and any tools and data that you provide them with. The R is in the pipeline. The pipeline needs to be attributed back to the conversations in order to connect the return to the eye. And the surprising route, which the value that comes to you in your pipeline is going to take, is the route that didn't go through a meeting. So we always think conversations lead to meetings, meetings lead to discovery meetings, discovery meetings, lead to demos, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is in your world as you're selling. But in fact, what really happens is conversations lead to somebody knowing that you're worth checking out.  Chris Beall (16:15): And it's so cheap now to check folks out. They're going to check you out. They're going to check your company out just during the conversation. If you want to be super extra brilliant in getting a high return on investment, instead of having your rep, just send them a follow-up email. By the way, most first conversations and follow-up conversations that are done through cold calling, they get zero email afterward. But it's the one email somebody will always open, thank you for our conversation of the day. And nobody bothers to send it, which I find shocking. It's like, well, they didn't take the meeting with me. They must not be interested. It's like, do you actually believe that their company might benefit from your solution and send them the email? But if you want to be super brilliant, here's like the pro tip to end all pro tips and that have the boss send the email.  Chris Beall (17:04): So set your automation up so when your SDR R or BDR has the conversation, an email comes from the boss with the personalization from the conversational AI that listened to the conversation and it has a subject matter, a line that says, thank you for speaking with my colleague today. Who's not going to open that? And you're a gracious boss. You're like a love your team kind of person, like Ucci or something. I mean, I don't know if you love your team like she does, but at least you're kind of on the board. And these things are straightforward to do with modern automation and they're not what's being done. What we tend to do is instead of having the conversation, we tell people to do a lot of research because that's easy. Also, there's two things that are easy. Following up is easy. That requires a little thought.  Chris Beall (17:58): Research is easy and requires no thinking whatsoever. You just look at one thing and look at another thing and look at another thing. Draw some conclusion about somebody. I'm going to talk to Chris Beal about Arizona State University because he went there. Go Sun Devils. Little did they know. Well, I also went to the University of Arizona. So go cats. I got a fight going on maybe between devils and cats. Do you want to be in here? I don't think so. Devils and cats altogether in the same brain. No. So don't talk to me about the devils and the cats, but you think you accomplished something with that research? If you just call me out of the blue and tell me that you've discovered a breakthrough about something I care about, I care about, maybe I'll give you a few minutes. So as we think about R O I, we need to really break it down.  Chris Beall (18:48): It's like what is that person doing? That starts with a conversation and ultimately leads to engagement where the engagement is expressed in the CRM as an opportunity. And by the way, don't just count the closed one. This is another huge mistake folks make in our OA at Eyeland. They go, oh, all that counts as the closed one really. Does your business run on magic? Is this Hogwarts? I mean, you don't get to wave a magic wand and make business come into being. You have to actually go find folks who are first of all, fundamentally qualified to buy your product. And secondly, in market now. Now only one 12th of your market's in market now. So 11 twelfths of the time, you have to fail anyway. So now you we're down to what are you going to do with the remaining 8.66%? Because that's all you got in this quarter. All you've got is one 12th of your market. So it's not a magic wand thing. It's actually got to talk to a whole bunch of folks. So it's so interesting to me when I talk to somebody who says, well, I'm a bottom line guard, or it's always a guy, by the way. Thank God it is. Say this, all I occur about is results. Really, you think if you pound your fist on the table long enough, something will happen, or hard enough, you fire enough people or whatever.  Chris Beall (20:07): I don't think it works like that. I think you actually, it's like being a, I'll go back to basketball. It's like being a John Wooden or something. You have to break it down. You have to break it down, and it's going to come down to a person doing something with the limited time they have. And you need to be able to go measure what happened looking backward from the opportunity to that thing that they did. And my guess is the best thing for them to do is to hold a conversation with somebody who might be worth engaging in your business.  Susan Finch (20:38): Fantastic. Chris, this was perfect. So we're wrapping up prospecting costs on return investment, dollars spent, dollars missed. I think you have told us all the ways we've been missing it. The way we're not thinking properly. Yeah. The way we need to rethink what it actually means and the value and importance of pipeline. Not closed deals. Not signed contracts. That isn't what keeps you going because once those are done, they're done. And you need to keep replenishing the pipeline. Connect and sell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it, connect and sell. Patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible whopper kind of qualified. Learn [email protected]. Never miss an episode. Go to any of your favorite podcast venues and search for market dominance guys, or go to market dominance guys.com and subscribe.

Chris and Corey asked me to prepare you for a mind-expanding journey as we take Dr. Goldratt’s theory of constraints beyond its traditional boundaries and revolutionize the way you approach sales. Discover the art of identifying the true constraint and learn why pulling together as a team can sometimes snap the traces. We uncover the secrets of critical paths, buffers, and the profound impact of time in the fast-paced sales arena. Embrace your inner rebel and challenge the norms by seeking fresh perspectives from other disciplines. But wait, there's more! Get inspired by the legendary story of competitive eater Kobe and his unconventional strategies that shattered records. We'll show you how to think outside the bun and achieve unprecedented sales success. Join us for this episode covering mastering sales success by unleashing the power of constraints and revolutionary strategies but we’ll just call it, “Hot Dogs and Hot Deals: Devouring Sales Records!" Links from this episode: Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Branch 49 ConnectAndSell   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:21): Chris and Corey asked me to prepare you for a mind-expanding journey as we take Dr. Goldratt's theory of constraints beyond its traditional boundaries and revolutionize the way you approach sales. Discover the art of identifying the true constraint and learn why pulling together as a team can sometimes snap the traces. We uncover the secrets of critical paths, buffers, and the profound impact of time in the fast-paced sales arena. Embrace your inner rebel and challenge the norms by seeking fresh perspectives from other disciplines. (00:53): But wait, there's more. Get inspired by the legendary story of competitive eater, Kobe, and his unconventional strategies that shattered records. We'll show you how to think outside the bun and achieve unprecedented sales success. Join us for this episode covering mastering sales success, unleashing the power of constraints and revolutionary strategies, but we'll just call it Hot Dogs and Hot Deals, devouring sales records. Corey (01:24): Well, here we are again. Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and, as always in the sales throne, virtually next to me, Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the profit of prophet and the hawking of hawking. Chris, you look tan and rested. You must have been somewhere where there's water and sunshine and fetching Ms. Fenucci and celebrating something. Correct? I see- Chris (01:49): Celebrating something. Our first anniversary, we got married last year. This is being filmed... It's not filmed, but whatever we call it nowadays, Zoomed here on... What are we on? July something, or the 6th of July 2023. Corey (02:04): Wow. Chris (02:04): We got married on the 2nd of July 2022, and we went over to Hawaii to the scene of the crime where I proposed to her. I call it the second proposal. Oh no, the third, she calls it the second. She claims the first one was a proposition. This is where you can disagree about terminology, but agree on a course of action, in our course of action with this. So yes, back here in Seattle right now where it may as well be Hawaii. It's 90 degrees and the sun is shining here as well. So why did we go anywhere? Corey (02:36): Indeed, indeed. Well, as long as you're back here, both in front of the microphone where you belong, where we can talk about all things market dominance, and of course. Right before we hit the record button, it seems, Chris, that every time I come whining to you about a business problem that I may have, or other folks who climb the mountaintop to pick your brain about a course of action and what state they may be in, which you can talk about that certainly as a great review, we end up always coming back to the good and fine Dr. Eli Goldratt and his theory of constraints. And I think if we had a heat map of how many times we've talked about the theory of constraints in our episodes, but I think the real answer is it's not enough. Already- Chris (02:36): Not enough. Corey (02:36): Not enough. Chris (03:20): Not enough. Kirsten, not enough there. Corey (03:24): Kirsten not enough. So I bet a guy like you, Chris, you see the theory of constraints in everything, not only in businesses and restaurants, but you probably had an episode or two when you're on some boat or on some surfboard in Hawaii where it probably came up as well. Chris (03:41): Yeah, it's interesting. We were just out the other day on a little boat tour. You get on one of these big catamarans and you go out somewhere. And if you're lucky, it's the kind that is not Coast Guard certified, therefore you can only have four couples on it, and then two of them cancel, so then there's only two couples. And then you got white pineapple, which is like candy, so then you're really doing well and they have some other things. (04:04): And I had a conversation with one of the captains on the boat, not the captain captain, but the mate who wants to go around the world on a cruise for three years in a sailboat. Serious stuff. And he's a serious guy and he's preparing for it seriously. And we had this discussion about what's the constraint that needs to be understood and needs to be characterized, and you need to invest in you as a system before you go out and attempt to do something kind of nutty, which is to sail a sailboat 25,000 miles except it's further because you don't get to go just around the earth, you have to kind of go all the places, continents in the way and crap like that. (04:42): We had a brief conversation and I told him, "I believe the constraint for you is in this value chain or this action chain that goes on that says, everything's going okay, now it's not, what do I do?" So something happened, now what do I do? So when everything's going okay, you're probably in a state of flow, so there's nothing to invest in. Whatever it is, you're doing it, pay no attention to it, just keep doing it. (05:11): But when something happens that draws your attention, you need to know which of the other two states that you can be in as a system. And that's what I was telling you I was, "Look, just think of yourself as a system. You're going to go buy this system that's going to be able to... or build it and it's going to be able to go around the world without dying or getting lost or whatever, and you're going to deal with a lot of stuff." (05:33): So number one state, flow. Great, wonderful. Number two state, however, is you're stuck. You don't know what to do. There's something bad happened. An orca off the coast of Portugal has got your boat's rudder in its jaws and is looking over at its buddy going, isn't this fun? I'm so glad we invented rudder fighting or whatever they call it in orca land. And this is going on a lot off the coast of Portugal right now. Well, what do you do? Well, you're stuck. So even though you might feel like you have to take immediate action, you don't know what action to take and you need to learn. So when stuck, switch modes to learning and that link in your value chain will be getting the attention that it needs. (06:23): And then the third one's the tough one, which is you're not stuck, you're not in flow and you just have to wait. And this happens a lot of times when you're doing things, like I used to do mountaineering, doing sailing or whatever. When the world is bigger than you are, sometimes there's nothing to do but just wait. And you can find something else to do and go get in flow doing that. That's why you should always keep puzzles around that you don't know how to solve, because you don't need to solve them, but you need something to do to help you be in flow when you're waiting. That's a real key, because waiting is the hardest thing of all, in business is the very hardest. Just waiting, waiting for the right time to talk to somebody about a deal, waiting for that moment. There's externalities and you have to wait. And the best way to wait is to turn yourself away from waiting into a state of stuckness about something that has nothing on the line. Corey (07:24): Well, let's talk about that learning. I think that's key. Certainly as an impatient guy and salesperson, I resemble both of those pejoratives, if you will. There's a book from a few years ago, Think Like a Freak, the authors of Freakonomics. What he talks about, Chris, which I know you'll appreciate, is this concept of don't be embarrassed by how much you don't know and how much you don't act. And he has this simple story that he uses. And here's the story. A little girl named Mary goes to the beach with her mother and her brother and they drive in a red car. And at the beach they swim, they eat some ice cream, they play in the sand and have sandwiches for lunch. (08:09): Now the questions that are given are what color is the car, and did they have fish and chips for lunch? Did they listen to music in the car? Did they drink a lemonade with lunch? And so now let's compare the answers in your mind, in our listeners' mind with what a bunch of British school children aged five to nine who were given the same quiz, what they said. Now, nearly all the children got the first two questions, the car was red and they went to the beach. But then when you start asking other questions, such as did they listen to music? Did they build sandcastles? Most of the kids will try to bluff their way through it. Those are the kids that become salespeople, right? Chris (08:55): Oh, exactly. Corey (08:57): But we used to always say that the hardest words in English language are to say, I love you. But the authors of Think Like a Freak say the actual hardest word to say is, I don't know. Because you often can't admit, especially in business, you can't admit what you don't yet know. And so he talks, he postulates that in order to really get out of these stuck states, you have to think like a child. And we've talked a little bit about asking small questions versus trying to ask the big questions and how the small questions by their very nature are less often asked and investigated the simple questions. But they're virgin territory for true learning. So what do you think about that when you're asking the ship captain or even some of the experiences with some of your clients here in the last couple of months or so, when I'm stuck, what are the questions I should be asking? Because how do I know if I'm stuck or if I'm waiting, which one is it? Chris (09:54): Yeah. Well, that's a great question. How do you know if you're stuck or you're waiting? After all, that's a process itself. That's a process in which you could be in flow figuring out if you're stuck or waiting, or you could be stuck about being stuck or waiting. You could be waiting to see if you're stuck or waiting, right? All of the above could be going on. (10:14): The safe place to go always is stuck. Always is stuck. Because it turns out, even if you aren't stuck on this particular thing, you're stuck on so many things because you don't know hardly anything. I don't know hardly nothing is what we should all wake up. When I interview people to work in any one of the various companies that I've done over time, Time being one of those really big concepts now. 40 years, right? (10:43): One of the things that I tell them in the interview, well, I tell them first, you wouldn't be talking to me if you weren't qualified for the job, so I have no interest in hearing about your qualifications. And they usually are a little shocked. It's like, look, I have people to do that. If you're not qualified, you're not talking to me. So now you are talking to me. So the purpose of this conversation is to allow you to have a clear picture of what kind of horror show you might be joining. (11:11): So I want to just put out a couple of things for you. One is we're probably going to fail. That's a starting point. Because if this were something where you're probably going to succeed, we wouldn't be doing it. Others would've already done it. So everything that is worth trying that might be a very high value, is high likelihood of failure. (11:31): So first, you have to get happy with the idea that you're joining up with likely failure. Think about that. Secondly is you're likely to find out when you come here that you're wrong most of the time. This isn't because we're mean people who like to point out that other people are wrong. It's because we recognize we're all wrong almost all of the time. And the trick is to stay enthusiastic when you're wrong. And the way you stay enthusiastic is you treat being wrong as an opportunity to learn rather than opportunity to cover up. (12:05): And a lot of folks kind of look at it like, whoa, that's doesn't sound that great to me. And it's maybe a third of the candidates come through the interview and decide to join. And I always just say, "It's up to you. It's not up to me." You want to join up at a place where you come to work naked every day, where we just know we're wrong, we know we're wrong from the get go, we will learn little things. We don't make sales in order to get folks money, we make sales to have an opportunity to learn from the experience of being in a customer relationship with somebody rather than a prospect or stranger relationship because we're trying to help them. We'll find out, Hey, we're wrong. We have to improve. That's how we're going to learn. So we'll be stimulated to learn, as the customer's problem is the wolf at our door. And when the wolf is at your door, well, you do something. You don't just sit there, right? What do you do in this case? You try to learn. (12:55): So I think that there's a safe place to go, assuming you're in flow. Faking flow is really common. Folks love to fake flow. I'm going to do today what I did yesterday. I'm comfortable doing it, it doesn't matter how dumb it is. It's like, I am going to tend my beach side garden during the tsunami siren. Well, it's a bad idea. Speaker 1 (13:24): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (13:27): Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire tam, Branch 49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. (14:06): And we're back with Corey and Chris Chris (14:16): During the tsunami siren, it's a good idea to think, what do I know about tsunamis? I better learn pretty quick. Oh, I've heard they can only go so far uphill. I think I'll start going uphill, then get in flow going uphill, right? Tending your beach side garden because you did it yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before, and your mom did it and your dad did it, and your dog did it and everybody did it. And it's a tsunami morning, my friend. It's time to leave the beach side garden alone to see if it can fend for itself for a day while you get yourself uphill. Because getting tsunamied is not that great, right? Corey (14:51): No. Chris (14:51): Waiting is a bad place to go also, by default. And some people do that. That's considered to be conservative by a lot of folks. That's like, we'll just wait and see. Wait and see is considered to be a conservative phrase. Wait and see is like radical risk taking. After all, if you're waiting, you have spare resource, you may as well use it to learn. Learning always reduces risk incrementally and sometimes exposes value, opportunity. So in general, you should let the winds of change buff at you, but you should fall into the hole of stuck every chance you get. Corey (15:31): Okay. I think we had said in one of our episodes from a few years ago, so I'm going to paraphrase you to you, right? All great breakthroughs in business happen when you're stuck. Did I say that correctly? Chris (15:43): Yeah. Yeah. When you're in flow, nothing happens other than you make progress. Folks love progress, right? It's like, oh, here's my progress report. It's like, you should write a stuck report. Corey (15:54): Write a stuck... Chris (15:57): Progress is like, that would've happened anyway. Who cares? Corey (16:00): Let's talk about a little bit more into our good friend, Dr. Eli Goldratt. And again, you talk about the book, The Goal. That came out in the mid-early eighties, I believe, right? And it was meant for manufacturing. But what we at The Market Dominance Guys, with your leadership, Chris, we've, I think, perpetuated that theory of constraints across business and inside sales beyond just the traditional supply chain, reducing lead time, et cetera. So hopefully that continues to prevail. (16:30): By thinking about the theory constraints, and maybe I have this wrong, but if I have a constraint, let's say I'm a sales VP and sales are down, maybe meetings are down, maybe whatever the symptoms are that come to you as the doctor, what's the disadvantage of working on all the things in my business. So I talk with my counterpart in finance, my counterpart in marketing, my counterpart in HR. If everybody collectively works on what they think is their constraint, is that good for the business? Is that not good for the business? What are some of the repercussions if I do that? Because to me, that's just naturally what I should be doing. Chris (17:09): Yeah. Everybody wants to pull, right? Everybody wants to pull their weight. Well, you pull your weight, you'll snap the traces. I mean, there's a weak link somewhere in there. You don't know where it is. So if everybody pulls, you'll break the weak link. And now you're in a world of hurt. And now you no longer have a system. Now you have two broken parts of systems that have got to be put back together, and that's really, really hard to do. It's hard enough to find the weak link. It's hard enough to characterize it. It's hard enough to understand its investability. (17:43): I love the picture of the chain with the paperclip in the middle of it. But once you identify the paperclip, there's a lot of things you could do. Here's a non-obvious thing. Get 50 more paperclips and add them to that paperclip. Now you might have a weird looking link, but at least it's strong, right? There's stuff like that that can be done, but it can't be done until you say, we're all looking at the paperclip. Because then the question from finance is, do we have enough capital to afford 50 paperclips because that's what it's going to take here. Or then we might go off the operations folks and say, 50 paperclips showed up on the dock. Could we actually get them in here? And how do you put one more on? And then you go engineering and say, well, if we were to modify the paperclip a little bit so that it was already somewhat open, is it okay? Is it still strong enough if we bend it and they'll do some engineering stuff, right? (18:34): You can do all of those things with everybody once you've identified the one thing that's worth paying attention to, and thank goodness it's easy. I mean constraints, it's easy in manufacturing, it's harder in other disciplines. And if you're going to read Goldratt, make sure you read Critical Chain, not just the manufacturing books, the project books, because most of the time... The project book, right? Critical chain is about application of theory of constraints to projects. And in projects, the constraint is the entire critical path of the project. And the basic rule is critical path is there, it's step by step, step step. It's linear, but it has feeders, it depends on things happening. So feed early, build inventory early, and make sure that the feeder doesn't end up delaying the progress along the critical path. (19:31): And then as you plan, don't buffer the steps, only buffer the final outcome. So add a buffer. If it's going to take two months to do something, add a buffer one month to the end. But if it's going to take a week to do something, two weeks to do something else, and they're all lined up, don't add buffers in between them. If you divide a project up into enough small pieces, then the buffers themselves will stretch the project out to the point where you shouldn't do it, even if it works. (19:59): And this is common in software development. It's common in sales. It's common actually in a whole bunch of disciplines that are not manufacturing. Manufacturing is funny because it has these stable, intermediate outputs. When I make a part that's going to go into the next part of a process, it can sit in a bin for a hell of a long time before it becomes crap. This is not true in sales. When you put something a bin in sales, every moment it sits in that bin, it's like a drop of water on a hot griddle, man, that thing is going somewhere. It's jumping around and it's getting smaller. (20:32): So you've got to pay attention to time in a different way in projects. And sales is always a project, always a project. We can manufacture intermediate results like this. I talk to you, you go on my follow-up list. As long as you are not interesting now, you are actually a stable part of my future system. Right? Corey (20:51): That's right. That's right. Chris (20:53): As soon as you're interesting now you're within the quarter, the period of consideration. Now you're inside of a project with timelines, we have to figure out what is the critical path for us to move forward together to a potential resolution in one of the feeders, and we have to invest in the feeders early. I mean, it's kind of funny because some folks disdain formal education when it comes to real business, right? Real business people here, we don't do things. But this part of one's formal education should not be neglected, which is understanding the application of the theory of constraints to projects and then understanding the most fundamental thing about theory of constraints, which is what not to do and what not to do, is to do everything. What to do is to go into stuck mode and say, "Well, we don't know where the constraint is," and we are going to go find it together. We're going to learn. Corey (21:48): Yeah, it's just a couple days after July 4th, and it made me think of somebody who has busted through, the Roger Banister, if you will, of competitive eating, and it's the Joey Chestnut. But even before Joey Chestnut, there was this young man named Kobe who went to university in Japan, and he lived with his girlfriend, who signed him up for an eating competition because the first prize was $5,000 or something like that. And without telling him, signed him up and he entered. It was a contest where you had four stages, you had boiled potatoes, and then you had a seafood bowl and maybe a Mongolian bowl and then noodles. And he watched previous years and he tried to think, how could I outthink the competition? And so long story short, what he did was just ate just enough to get to the next round. And then the final round after he conserved a lot of his energy and his stomach capacity, he would win. (22:57): And then, having taste a little bit of success, this is where I think our friend Dr. Eli and Dr. Beall come in, is he wanted to go pro, and he did the Nathan's famous 4th of July hotdog eating contest, which rained out for a little bit, but I think it just happened in... I think the winner was 62 hotdog, I think it was. But in 2001, when Kobayashi decided to enter the contest, the record stood at 25 and a half, in 12 minutes, 10, 12 minutes. And so for months, he trained in obscurity and he arrived at Coney Island as this... I mean, he's five eight, he's very slight. He's skinny. And one of the contestants mocked him and said, "Your legs are thinner than my arms." (23:40): So how did he do? In his first Coney Island competition, this is in Think Like a Freak, they talk about this. He smoked the field and set a new world record. He did 50. This 20-something-year-old skinny Kobayashi essentially doubled the world record. And so everybody thought, okay, are you cheating? Are you using stones to expand your stomach? What are you doing? Why was he so much better? But he observed and he learned, and he said that most of the eaters had a similar strategy. Think of this, how most callers have a similar strategy, most sales organizations have a similar strategy. And it's really just a speed it up version of how an average person eats a hotdog at a barbecue. You pick it up, you cram the dog in and the bun into the mouth. You chew from end to end, maybe you chug some water. And he said, there's got to be a better way. (24:32): Nowhere was it written, for instance, that the hot dog must be eaten end to end. What would happen if he broke the dog and the bun in half? And this gave much more options for chewing and loading. And then he said, okay, the bun itself is a problem. What if I dunk the bun in my free hand and I squeeze all the water out of it and I eat that as well as the bunless dog broken in half. So he systematically broke down, it sounds like he was listening to some of our Market Dominance Guys or reading some Dr. Eli. (25:05): But what are your thoughts on stuff like that? Because you see that in business over the time where too many sales reps are trying to eat the bun like a backyard barbecue, and you have the VPs who are saying, I want more and more and more meetings, for instance. When Kobayashi went through a different process, not how do I get more meetings, I want more meetings, but how do I get better meetings faster? By being more efficient. Chris (25:29): Yeah. I think there's a great principle... I love that story. I mean, he identified the constraint essentially as saliva production, and he faked the saliva. And you're eating the bun, you've got to wet it down with what comes out of you. And he goes, ah, I just dunk it. Corey (25:44): Yeah, yeah. Chris (25:45): Get rid of that problem. And the other thing, I can basically almost swallow hole if I can get a couple of chomps into it. So I mean, that's a brilliant application of theory of constraints. Corey (25:53): How do I make hotdog easier to eat versus just eating more hot dogs? Chris (25:57): Exactly. Well, we have the same problem in our company. So for years, we offer this thing called an intensive test drive. And the test drive was a breakthrough. It was an accidental breakthrough, like so many good breakthroughs. There was a customer, name's Melody. Melody wanted to talk to me a lot. And I finally said, "I never want to speak with you again, because we will go to our graves, both of us having never done business together, having a lot of enjoyable conversations under our belt, so to speak. How about if I get on a plane tomorrow, fly across the continent, and we'll actually use our product in production with your team, one person, 20 people, whatever, live, no demo, no conversations, no nothing, just do it. Your rep will have conversations. We're just going to watch, we're going to enjoy." It's like, "Oh, okay." So we did that, right? Corey (26:45): Yep. Yep. Chris (26:46): So we thought we were so brilliant. We had this... The intensive test drive we call them ITVs now. It's so important, we shorten the name and they do marvelous things. No demos, just use product and production. Woohoo. Well, we wanted to make sure that when we did that. Early on, we're being conservative,. So you have to sign a little contract. Yeah, it's $0, but it's DocuSign. How hard can this be? (27:12): Well, it turns out after seven years, seven years? Eight years of doing these intensive test drives, I started to think the constraint of our entire sales system, this machine that we've built, is getting that little $0 contract signed. And if we just said, let's just do the test drive, we'll sign all contracts later after the test drive should we decide to go commercial together. If we just did that, we'd be dunking our hot dog. So divide it into two pieces, change the order of operations and dunk the hot dog. Corey (27:49): I love that. Chris (27:50): We increased the flow rate of test drives on the books, just signed, by a factor of two in one day with exactly the same staff. That is from a Friday to a Monday, just by changing the policy. No contract required. Suddenly, just an NDA, simple little NDA, everybody signs NDAs, nobody's ever enforced one in the history of NDAs. So they're willing to sign a simple NDA. We won't steal your stuff, you don't steal our stuff, right? It's kind of it. And suddenly we doubled the flow rate of the one thing that was constraining the entire growth of the company. (28:31): Now, that is separating out the bun from the dog and dog from the bun, right? Reducing friction. And it's interesting to me how often the big breakthroughs are, and I shouldn't say it like this, but I'll say it like this, nothing more than breaking something that was one thing into two parts, and then reversing the sequence in which the two parts would've been used or interacted with or consumed within your process. (29:02): And if you kind of go into your stuck situation with this paradigm, which is, can I break this into two parts? And if you ever say anything like that, you'll get every sacred cow response known to mankind, all of which come back to, we've always done it like this, which is the desire to stay in flow and tend the seaside garden, beachside garden in the tsunami warning. That's what it is. But it's like, but the garden, look, in the past, the garden's always been great. Yes, but there's a tsunami coming. How are we sure it's a tsunami? It hasn't been a tsunami before. Why, I heard something that sounded like that siren once, and it was nothing. I think they were just testing the tsunami siren, et cetera, et cetera, right? You will get the most strong negative reaction from the thing that you should most strongly consider as action. Corey (29:56): Really. So that's how you're over the target? Chris (29:57): That's how you know you're over the target. Corey (30:02): The other thing that Kobayashi did, Chris, which you're talking about, is they said that he would make more room in his stomach by jumping and wriggling while he ate. Something that no one would think of, because you're hunched over, you're eating, you're doing everything else. But what you're saying about getting the meetings and how you have to ask the questions is, here's an idea. If you stand up and we talk about this, certainly what you advise in flight school, is when you stand up, you talk with your hands, you're emotionally comfortable, you're going to sound more conversational and authentic. (30:34): Well, I tell you what, Chris, we've done almost 200 of these, and it's really a joy to do them with you. This one should come with maybe a parental advisory warning for explicit truths or explicit lyrics for sales professionals and folks, because I don't think that you can read the goal nearly enough. I have a buddy of mine who we know, Robert Vera, who reads it every year just to keep himself sharp and certainly Think Like a Freak and Freakonomics are ways to help us all think like children, which we don't do enough of, which is asking the small questions. What if we dot, dot, dot, as opposed to trying to stay in flow state, try to always maintain, cover our ass, ignore the tsunami siren that is blaring, we seek not to hear it. And just by those things alone, we don't need to spend any more money on tech stack tools or hire any more folks or add any new magical CRM snap ins to radically improve our business. Chris (31:33): Yeah, it's extremely rare that you're in a situation where you can't double your business by simply finding the constraint, breaking it in two, and changing the order of operations. Corey (31:44): Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Well, we are up against the clock. We have market dominance things to do to pay the market dominance bills. So Chris, final thoughts on our revisiting yet again, our good friend Dr. Goldratt. Chris (31:58): Here's a thought. My thought is, whenever you find yourself doing something that you're comfortable doing, and you're doing it because you're comfortable doing it, ask yourself this question. Am I just covering up for being stuck? Because that's what we do. When we're stuck, we pretend to know the answers. And the more rigidly we do what we did yesterday, the more certainly we can be characterized as needing to go learn something new. Corey (32:30): Or as our good friend, Uncle Zig Ziglar said, feed your family or feed your ego. You can't do both, right? Chris (32:35): You can't do both. Corey (32:37): Can't do both. Well, that's a great mini summer edition, post honeymoon, one year anniversary edition of the Market Dominance Guys for Chris Beall. This is Corey Frank. Until next time.

Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Dr. Mindy Weinstein, as they delve deep into the psychology behind scarcity and its profound impact on consumer behavior. You'll uncover invaluable insights on how scarcity appeals to different generations, especially the younger demographic, and how you can leverage this powerful phenomenon to drive sales success. Drawing from their wealth of experience, Corey and Chris share practical strategies on positioning salespeople as indispensable resources in a scarce market, fostering authentic connections, and building trust through genuine expertise. By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with actionable tips and powerful communication techniques to elevate your sales game and unleash your full potential. Don't miss out on this opportunity to transform your sales approach—tune in now and unlock the untapped potential of scarcity!  Join us for this episode, "Using Scarcity Tactics in Sales: GenX vs. GenZ Psychology." Links from this episode: Dr. Mindy Weinstein on LinkedIn Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Branch 49 ConnectAndSell   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:23): Chris and Cory continue their conversation with Dr. Mindy Weinstein as they delve deep into the psychology behind scarcity and its profound impact on consumer behavior. You'll uncover invaluable insights on how scarcity appeals to different generations, especially the younger demographic, and how you can leverage this powerful phenomenon to drive sales success. Drawing from their wealth of experience. Chris and Cory share practical strategies on positioning salespeople as indispensable resources in a scarce market, fostering authentic connections and building trust through genuine expertise. By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with actionable tips and powerful communication techniques to elevate your sales game. Don't miss out on this opportunity to transform your sales approach. Join us for this episode using scarcity tactics and sales, Gen X versus Gen Z psychology. Corey Frank (01:20): Yeah, I think when we were meeting last week, I think one of the examples you gave, or maybe this is in your book, is you're not going to find Christian Dior clothes, purses and et cetera at the corner Safeway or the grocery store. There has to be an element of scarcity and exclusivity to get these items. Chanel doesn't mass produce these items, and it's interesting. I wonder if Chris, if we've ever done any discussions or if, or the good doctor can comment on selling or buying from a younger generation. (01:56): We have a lot of folks in the 25, 30 or even younger or so that are in the marketplace that we sell our goods and wear's to, Chris certainly, and that are consumers. I'm curious if there's any studies on that approach, doctor, or experience that you've had maybe, Chris, where younger folks, they're used to these drops that happen from Supreme or my 10-year-old lets me know when Lego's about to do a drop two weeks in advance, and does that affect the buying behavior or the selling response for old salts like me and Chris here later on when we're selling them into the marketplace? Dr. Mindy Weinstein (02:36): Well, I can tell you, I mean there is a difference based on age with all of this. So I will tell you the older generations, so more, I think we're retirement years, they're not going to be drawn to something that shows this is in high demand or the most popular because most likely they're going to be like, I'm good with the product I'm using or the company that I've already been hiring, why would I switch? That's not an incentive." And actually it could even backfire. "Well, then that's going to be really crowded. I don't want to go there," if it's an event or something like that. Now with the younger generation, so when I say younger generation, I'm actually talking about Gen Z and millennials, so Gen X is kind of just in the middle. It just depends on a lot of other factors with them. (03:16): But for Gen Z and millennials, very much anything that is a supply related scarcity draws, or a limited edition, which is part of supply, draws them in a lot because they're in a generation where very big on social media, very big on showing the latest thing that they have. They're self-expression based on what you wear, what you drink, where you go, the experiences. And so they're very susceptible to that and interested in that. They want to be unique, they want to feel like they are special and that they can show showcase something. And so going with the drops, that's why Nike's brilliant when it comes to that or Supreme, they have done such a phenomenal job because not only do they do drops, but if you've ever been to one of their stores, the first time I ever went was in San Francisco and I just thought they didn't have a lot of merchandise available, like, "Oh, they must be running out of stock." (04:09): And so I was there with my oldest son, so I asked one of the salespeople there, I said, "Oh, are these the only sizes you have?" And they said, "Oh no, we have a lot more in the back." So they don't even put everything out. They purposely make it look sparse. And then so you kind of get that feeling of like, "Okay, I need to get this now." And they have all this stuff in the back. So very interesting, but very much that younger generation, they like supply related scarcity and limited edition. Corey Frank (04:37): Chris, what do you see from being CEO of a company over these last 15 plus years and certainly being in academics as well? Do you teach your sales teams to sell different folks differently generationally? Chris Beall (04:53): Nope. We're not that sophisticated. We're not. It's kind of funny, it's something we should think about more, but your Branch49 folks, how do we sell them on old calling something that people in their early twenties aren't drawn to naturally? And it's by offering them something extremely scarce and therefore valuable. We call it finishing school for future CEOs. And so is what's that? Oh, I get to learn something other people don't learn that might advantage me because I want to have a good career and I don't know what's coming. That's a very simple example, but it's a powerful one, and it's the one that we actually conceptually kind of built the attraction of Branch49 around is, hey, you're going to learn something that is very rare and is very valuable. You're going to learn to hold conversations with strangers. The one thing every CEO has in common, they can speak comfortably and with value to strangers, you're going to come learn it, which is very different from we're going to pay you more than a burger flipper to talk to people who are going to yell at you and say no. (06:09): So same product, but packaged in a way that indicates that there's a supply issue, you're not going to learn this anywhere else, and there's value built in because well, who doesn't want to get closer to being a CEO? By the way, for those of you who thinking of being CEOs, the only reason we have the title is that the word janitor has a lot of letters in it and people just can't remember all the letters. They can't spell it, so they shortened it to CEO. You can figure out how that worked. Corey Frank (06:43): So it is primal in a lot of ways that, and certainly Mindy, I think you're saying that as well, is that a lot of these response stimuli are predictable. We have to be careful, like any weapon. One of the expressions that Chris has used, maybe this is the title of our next book here, is that with ConnectAndSell, it's a weapon that amplifies the volume of conversations that a sales rep can have. But if that sales rep is not armed with the right things to say and the right tonality, then the expression that Chris uses is then what you're doing as a sales leader is you are amplifying their suck. And I can see if I use scarcity poorly, I can amplify the suck as well. So this is a how-to manual, but it also could be a cautionary tale if used in the wrong hands with the wrong intent, correct? Dr. Mindy Weinstein (07:41): Correct. Absolutely. Well, and hopefully this goes without saying, but I'm still going to say it is that you have to be providing something great. You're going to do all the scarcity, but if your product is subpar and you're like, "I'm just going to use all this psychology that I'm learning and just to get my sales," well, that's not going to work out for you long term either. So we have to think about that. But I even just love the conversation that you were just having, talking about younger people and working at Branch49 and all of that, is that the way that you're wording it is setting them up that they are going to be special, they're going to be an exclusive group of individuals that are going to be very much sought after and desired because they have a skill that not everyone has. (08:28): And I think that's a huge thing, and it's just like you just said, it's the wording and you're doing that. So we just need to think about a lot of times in our sales approaches, what type of wording are we using? Because it doesn't have to be manipulative, it's just really what is someone trying to get? So with what you said, yeah, it's primal. And I didn't even bring up FOMO. That's a huge thing about scarcity is we don't want to miss out. (08:50): And so that's again how our brains are wired. Now in psychology, it's not referred to as FOMO. There is loss aversion and then there's like another way to explain it. But really what happens is we don't want to miss out on something. And that's again, how we're wired because that's primal to us, so we don't want to miss out. And so that goes to why we value things that are harder to get, or while we'll focus on it or make that quick decision, because we don't want to be told no, and we also don't want to feel like we missed that opportunity. And so that's just another thing to keep in mind, but use it the right way. So don't be cheesy about it with FOMO, but it does work. Announcer (09:31): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (09:43): Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, an employee successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch49s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branchfortynine.com. (11:07): And we're back with Corey and Chris. Corey Frank (11:10): Well, it's funny, Chris, when the good doctor and I had met, one of the interchanges we had through email was we're talking about pitch anything. And our good friend, our good mutual friend, Oren Klaff and Oren has his three legs of the bar stool. People want what they can't have, people chase what moves away from them, and people only place value on that, which is difficult to obtain. And Mindy shared that she was on a podcast recently, a marketing podcast, and the host said, "Oh, Oren Klaff, yeah, he's my favorite. I love his book." And we decided to keep it as just a secret because we don't want Oren to be any, company more insufferable than he already is by knowing that. (11:49): So certainly Oren, if you're one of the nine people who listen to our podcast, I don't think he is, he'll do that. But what the similarities that we, so we talk about pitch and anything and flip the script, Chris, certainly what you have with your vaunted sales experts inside of ConnectAndSell and a lot of interesting overlaps in that that I think we're onto something these experts and certainly as a doctor of finance, and Mindy certainly is a doctor of psychology here in tapping into mere lays salespeople like us and what makes us tick. Chris Beall (12:22): Well, one of the funny things that, people don't talk about this very much, but sales is interesting. I'll make a comparison. So accountants don't join companies that have great products. They might care about the product, they might not care about the product, but the fact that a great accountant works at a company doesn't cause you to trust that product more. But when you interact with a great salesperson who is an expert, who is sincere, who is on your side, that immediately tells you, this must be a great product because this person could sell anything and they chose to sell this. And that actually creates instant scarcity because great salespeople are naturally scarce. They just are. They're like, if you're building a basketball team and well, you could get ahold of somebody who's seven feet tall, has great athletic moves, great stamina, and 165 physical IQ, that's scarce. (13:21): Without watching them play, you'll probably draft them. And without watching you play, folks will buy from you because you're an expert, you're sincere, you're on their side, and you're handling them, so to speak, in a way that they like to be handled. It feels right to them. And somewhere in there it says, oh, this person could be selling anything and they're selling this, so this stuff must be good. It creates a relationship between sales and I don't even want to call it skill, it's just sales quality and product quality because there's a fluidity, a liquidity in the sales world. (14:02): Salespeople are the only people in business who can just go work anywhere. If you're really good at sales, you can work anywhere. I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I've sold Fuller Brush door to door. I've sold a little spider spray in my day and I sold Helen on marrying me in two days. She asked, she said, "That's an interesting problem. Is it you, the salesperson or you the product? I can't really tell." Now that's a case where it converges and you have to be skeptical, which fortunately she's good. Corey Frank (14:35): Sure, yeah. As a good friend, Brad from Ferguson, from Sandler Sales says, "You have to learn to become the product of the product." And I think certainly Chris, you do that and what you talk about ConnectAndSell, and certainly you do that as the sage of sales, as we all know you. Well, as we're up against the gun here, final thoughts, Mindy, on scarcity, and especially when, as you know what Chris and I have been talking about for the last, gosh, I think four years, coming up on four years or so, Chris, is market dominance. And I know we talked about it briefly last week, Mindy, when you visited us here at Branch49, but any final thoughts on scarcity and how we can under-use it or overuse it or how we should be better using it today as professionals in our craft? Dr. Mindy Weinstein (15:21): Yeah, three things to think of. Number one, when we are talking about the whole idea of scarcity, just think about the words you're using and how are you communicating? Because it's not necessarily something brand new to bring to the table, and it's this shiny new sales tool. It's just the words that you're using. So how can you just change your vocabulary to show that there is some true, so authentic, you want to be genuine scarcity that exists. And then the second thing, which I alluded to this, but don't try to use just randomly, "Oh, I'm going to try this scarcity approach." Know who you're trying to reach to make sure that that form of scarcity is going to be something that's going to resonate with them. And then three, and I'm actually, just as our conversation, actually is making me think about this, three, have that confidence and value of what you are providing because that comes through and that's going to show that you know what, you can be trusted. And so those are three things, very tangible. Again, it's just how you're going about it, is the biggest thing. Corey Frank (16:28): I love that. We certainly are going to make the power of scarcity part of our curriculum here. I think it's a perfect add on. And as Chris knows, I haven't had an original thought since 1998. So any ideas that we glean from the power of scarcity will certainly be in our Branch49 curriculum and client book. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (16:48): Good. Corey Frank (16:48): Chris, final thoughts on your side from chatting with Dr. Mindy here? Chris Beall (16:52): Well, first, thank you. Fantastic to have. You're hitting the real stuff. You've actually taken what it is that makes us tick and helps us make a decision. And in a way, when somebody speaks to us as in a strong sense, when they speak to us in a way that lets us recognize scarcity, short circuit our decision process, and then make a good decision, that's a gift. They've given us time, and then they've also given us the outcome of the decision. And that's our job in sales, is to give folks that gift. If we don't know how to give the gift, wrap it up and put it in their hands in a way that they'll go, "Oh, this is worth opening and I'm going to have a look at it," we're actually dis-serving them. So it's ironic in a funny kind of way that we're obliged to understand to the level where we could manipulate in order to deliver value without manipulating. And I think that's kind of the essence of the whole thing, and that's why this stuff ain't easy and doing it well, is itself, scarce. Corey Frank (17:55): Yeah, for sure. Well, excellent. Well, thank you as always, Chris, for your insight and your partnership over these last four years. Thank you, Dr. Weinstein, for the great insight and carving out the time on your day. You're also, in addition to a much in demand speaker, you have your own CEO and marketing consulting firm. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (18:18): Yes. Corey Frank (18:18): Market Mind Shift. Well, Dr. Again, the Power of Scarcity by McGraw Hill. Get your copy today. And for Chris Beall and the market dominance guys, this is Corey Frank. Chris Beall (18:28): Thanks so much. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (18:28): All right. Thank you. It's great to meet you, Chris. Chris Beall (18:29): Thanks, Mindy. Talk to you soon.

In this episode Chris and Corey are joined by the brilliant Dr. Mindy Weinstein, marketing expert and author of the bestselling book, "The Power of Scarcity." If you want to boost your sales game, this episode is a must-listen. Dr. Weinstein breaks down the secrets behind scarcity and its four types: time-related, demand-related, supply-related, and limited edition scarcity. Learn how to tap into the psychology of scarcity and motivate your customers to take action. Together, they explore the dynamics of scarcity in business and the impact it has on sales and marketing strategies. They also emphasize the importance of trust and credibility. Don't be that professional who abuses scarcity—build genuine relationships first! Join the Market Dominance Guys for a an insightful exploration of the power of scarcity in sales, in "Cracking the Code: Scarcity Strategies for Sales Success."   About Dr. Mindy Weinstein Marketing is her passion. Over the last several years, she has trained 15,000+ people how to effectively approach marketing and sales in today's climate. Through webinars, workshops and conferences, her goal is to educate the business world one person at a time. As part of this goal, she has been researching, teaching and consulting about marketing psychology, with a special focus on the power of scarcity. In fact, that’s the name of her bestselling book, The Power of Scarcity: Leveraging Urgency and Demand to Influence Customer Decisions (McGraw Hill 2022). Links from this episode: Dr. Mindy Weinstein on LinkedIn Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Branch 49 ConnectAndSell   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:24): In this episode, Chris and Corey are joined by the brilliant Dr. Mindy Weinstein, marketing expert and author of the bestselling book, The Power of Scarcity. If you want to boost your sales game, this episode is a must listen. Dr. Weinstein breaks down the secrets behind scarcity in its four types, time-related, demand-related, supply-related, and limited edition scarcity. Learn how to tap into the psychology of scarcity and motivate your customers to take action. Together, they explore the dynamics of scarcity in business and the impact it has on sales and marketing strategies. (00:57): And they also emphasize the importance of trust and credibility. Don't be that professional that abuses scarcity. Build genuine relationships first. Join the Market Dominance Guys for an insightful exploration of power of scarcity in sales in Cracking the Code, Scarcity Strategies for Sales Success. Corey Frank (01:22): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and as always, Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the profit of profit, and the hawking of hawking. But Chris, even though you have those three vaunted titles that we've used as your nom de guerre, I guess you could say, for the last several years, we have somebody who rivals that little triumvirate of a title. And that is Dr. Mindy Weinstein. You were named as one of the top women in marketing globally. Put that in your hat, Chris, sage of sales, profit of profit. (01:58): We have Dr. Mindy Weinstein, MBA from ASU, Professor of Marketing here at Grand Canyon University, and the bestselling author from McGraw Hill of The Power of Scarcity. Chris, that's why we wanted to coerce, cajole, albeit probably subtly threaten Dr. Mindy Weinstein to finally jump on an episode of the Market Dominance Guys so we could talk about scarcity since we've talked about this as a backbone of sales at the crossroads for many, many of our nearly 200 episodes. Welcome, Dr. Weinstein, to the Market Dominance Guys. Chris? Chris Beall (02:36): Hey, what can I say, we share something, Mindy or Dr. Weinstein. My dad got an MBA from ASU also. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (02:44): Oh really? Chris Beall (02:45): I spent my childhood almost literally crawling the stacks in that big library there. That's how I grew up was in the ASU library when I was 12, 13, 14 years old. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (02:59): It's not a bad way to grow up, that's for sure. It's a good school. Well, I'm so excited to be here today. Corey Frank (03:02): Well, it's good to have you. You've been promoted and recommended, and you are also a student of the great Dr. Robert Cialdini. Chris, we were talking several times certainly about pre-suasion and persuasion and the power of influence and how that affects many of our theories and our principles here at Market Dominance Guys. (03:25): Doctor, talk to a little bit about the relationship that you have, certainly with the good Dr. Robert, and influence and how that helped mold what you turned from a dissertation into your bestselling book, The Power of Scarcity. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (03:40): It actually started out several years ago. It was over a cup of coffee. That's even the first chapter in my book is talking about the cup of coffee with Dr. Cialdini. I had just heard him, gosh, now it's been probably almost 10 years. I was at a conference. I loved his message. Always had a strong desire to understand motivation and influence because I'm in marketing. I mean, that's what we need to do is understand people and what really drives them. When I realized that he was local to me, and as I got into my Ph.D. program, I'm like, I'll just reach out and just to see if I can meet up with them. He was so gracious. (04:19): He met me for a cup of coffee in Tempe, Arizona, and we talked about influence and all the different factors. I was telling him some of the things that I was considering pursuing as I was looking at my dissertation topic. We talked about different gaps in research and what do we see out there. Scarcity was one of the things that was mentioned. But even after I left that conversation, I was like, okay, well, that's interesting because I think like a lot of us, we feel like we have scarcity figured out or like, "Oh, I'm doing that, playing a little hard to get, or I have some type of restriction. I get scarcity. I don't need to really dive into that that much." (04:56): But after I had that meeting and the more I was doing my research and started doing my testing and experiments, I realized it is so much deeper and more complicated than almost all of us realize. That's why I went down that route with my dissertation, then I turned it to a book. And then Dr. Cialdini was very gracious again and read the whole book too and gave me a very nice glowing recommendation. I put that on my book too. You could see that on the front cover. Corey Frank (05:26): Yes, a true gem, I believe, is one of the accolades that he mentioned. Chris, you, of course, been in sales and certainly in the catalog business are no stranger to scarcity. Certainly as a historian, as a practitioner, as well as CEO of ConnectAndSell, what's your relationship with Dr. Robert here and the power of those books, the Pre-Suasion, and then also tying into the topic at hand, which is scarcity in business today? Chris Beall (05:55): Well, scarcity, it's quite fascinating because I believe they're in marketing especially, but in sales also, there's a Gresham's law. Gresham's law of money says bad money drives out good, but it's not actually that it's bad money. It's that it's abundant. Counterfeit money is cheap to make, and therefore you get a lot of it, and therefore the good money goes under the mattress and the counterfeit money stays in circulation. And until something happens, and the something usually is violent, lots of people die. Isaac Newton was involved in this. Us physicists are always up to no good, I think, is one of the problems. (06:34): In sales, this phenomenon repeats in waves, the Gresham's law phenomenon, which is cheap, easy communications drive out scarce, valuable communications, drive them into the corner, so to speak. It turns out all the business is done in the scarce valuable conversations and the other cheap stuff gets the label spam. It's happening right now with ChatGPT, right? You and I and ChatGPT and Susan wrote a book. Well, that book is crap. It's a wonderful experience to take two days to write a book based on our podcast because it was fun to use ChatGPT, but we know damn well that that book is as close to spam as possible for something that's based on actual human beings speaking with each other. (07:24): The reason is because it took me from 6:00 in the morning on a Saturday until 10:00 in the evening on a Sunday, the same weekend, to get this book all the way done and to Amazon and rocking and rolling. It took the scarcity away. And if I compare it to my wife's book or, Mindy, to your book, my wife wrote a book called Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. That book is scarce. It's hard to produce. The scarcity is, are you going to spend 11 months of your life while working another job and planning a wedding and a honeymoon and dealing with some guy who shows up in your life doing something unfamiliar and exhausting? (08:11): You know it if you edit the book. I don't know how many edit passes you had. On our honeymoon, I personally did seven edit passes of this entire book. I mean, it's the essence of the nature of value. The flip is interesting, which is in sales folks get so excited when the next cheap thing comes along and they don't think about what the consequence is, which is it drives down the value of them as sellers to use cheap means of communicating. Mass personalization with no effort whatsoever. Spam. We see this now. (08:51): In my company, what we're doing is we're taking something that's become so scarce that people don't do it anymore, which is getting live conversations between somebody with a problem and might have a problem and somebody who might have a solution. We make them practical, but still scarce. The way that they become scarce is the price goes up. You can dial the phone for a penny, but you have to pay us a lot more in order to have a conversation with somebody. Corey Frank (09:17): Yep, yep, that's right. Mindy, what do you think of that as far as we're talking about? You certainly talked about the four different types of scarcity, which we want to talk about. I think Chris hit about three of those four that he's experienced there. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (09:30): Yeah, okay, well, I have a lot of thoughts because you also threw out ChatGPT in there too, because you have a very interesting point, and this actually all ties to why I think scarcity is such a fascinating topic, is that you talked about personalization, and a lot of times we want to just do something mass. I actually just this week, and I sent a screenshot to my husband as a joke, this week I got an email talking about how to handle my taxes per my divorce. I screenshotted it and sent it to him. I go, "Did you not tell me something? Did I miss the papers you sent me?" He laughed. (10:05): And then I kid you not, an hour later, I got an email from that mass email that it was sent out to from the accounting firm saying, "We apologize. We thought we segmented our message to a certain audience." But I thought, there you go. It's an example of what you're saying. I even feel like for scarcity, what happens too, the easy way to do scarcity is just to say, "You know what? I'm going to slap a discount on this, or I'm going to put some kind of for this period only terminology and it's just going to reach everyone. Everyone's going to be happy, and I'm going to get all these sales." (10:39): Well, not necessarily, and I think it goes to what you're saying, personalization. Well, who am I trying to reach? Am I trying to reach a customer who really wants to feel like they have something that's exclusive and different than everybody else that they want that premier or premium service that I can provide? That's important because it's going to change how you message things versus someone who is just after the deal and it's a commodity and they don't really care. Well, yeah, then let's absolutely use time related scarcity. (11:07): I think even going with the personalization, if you really want scarcity to work in your business and in your sales, you have to know how the different types of scarcity interact with different people. If you don't mind, I'll just throw out the four types, which we already mentioned, but I'll just put a label on them so we're on the same page. But you have time-related scarcity. I mean, that's sales, any kind of time restriction. You have demand-related scarcity. That's, of course, a lot what we saw during COVID, huge demand. (11:34): All of a sudden everyone wanted toilet paper, but then that led to supply-related scarcity, which is any shortage, but the supply-related companies also can control that a bit too. We see that a lot with luxury. And then limited edition. They just work differently. I think that if you want to be successful, you can't just throw a one size fits all and I'm good. Check the box. I incorporated scarcity into my message. Corey Frank (11:59): We do this as sales reps, right? As an amateur sales rep, I still fall into these techniques, Chris and Mindy, because they're seemingly easy, but they hurt my credibility, don't they, in a lot of ways? If I try to introduce scarcity maybe a little too quickly or a little too unelegantly, what happens when I do that? We talk a lot about this, I think. But what happens, Mindy, when we do that as sales folks? Dr. Mindy Weinstein (12:27): And that's a really good point, and that's something that I try to call out in my book too. It's that for someone to listen to that scarcity type message, they have to trust you, which means you have to prove your credibility and your expertise. Well, how do you do that? Well, if it makes sense that you are talking about something being scarce and you wouldn't know that, well, they're going to listen to you a bit. But if you all of a sudden just out the gate you're like, "Well, during this call only will you get this deal," well, they don't know and trust you yet. You have to build a little bit of that. (13:00): That's a huge thing. We've seen a lot of studies that just even bring that point home even more, which it's not going to be shocking. But there was one study done that showed that when people were presented with different financial messages, so things that had to do with investing their money, if there was an expert quote or recommendation next to one of them, they just blindly followed that because now they're like, "Okay, I can let my guard down. I can trust this person." Announcer (13:30): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. When it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. (13:52): From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire team, Branch 49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Dr. Mindy Weinstein (14:20): You have to take that time to build a bit of the trust, and it also can't be the unexpected. It has to fit what you're selling. I had a situation where... Both of my stories today I realized are accounting stories. Go figure. But it was an accountant that I had contacted because I wanted to hire a new accounting firm for my business. One had connected me on LinkedIn, and so I reached out. I get on the phone with him and he was going through, "Here's what we provide to marketing agencies." (14:49): It was a great conversation. And then he goes, "And this is our retainer." He goes, "But if you agree to the retainer right now on this phone call," I kid you not, he said this, he goes, "Then it's this price." I was a little shocked because it's not something that I would expect in that type of scenario of why is my accountant doing high pressure sales on me? We don't like that. You have to think again about where are you coming from with your business, who is your audience? High pressure is not going to work in that situation. (15:16): What would've worked better, this would've got me to hire him, is if he was like, "It's really good timing you called because we're able to take on one new client right now." That would've had me. I tell you, that would've had me. I'd been like, "Okay, cool. I want in you. Let me in," versus here's for your price. And by the way, I said no. And then I kept getting emails of, well, I'll extend that offer to you. It just left a bad taste in my mouth. Corey Frank (15:39): Well, Chris certainly is one of the more preeminent voices in trust in sales today, and I think it ties in a lot, Mindy, with what you're saying and certainly what we've talked about at least half of our 200 episodes, I think, Chris, don't you? Chris Beall (15:54): Oh yeah, at least half. I mean, it's so interesting to me when you break stuff down like you're breaking this all down, Mindy. It's so interesting, because I mean, we break down this first few seconds of a relationship and try to get an answer to the question, how do we build trust in the amount of time we have to build trust before it's too late? We were doing it for years and not understanding it. And then Chris Voss at dinner one night, I was lucky enough to be seated with him, and I asked him, "How long do we have to get trust in a cold call?" (16:28): He said, "Seven seconds. Just like that." Now, that alone, the fact that he gave me this rare piece of information and he is credible made me trust... I already trust him. I read his book three times, but it was the way he delivered it, that certainty, which is very rare when you ask somebody a question like that. Normally, well, it depends, right? This was the opposite. This was the scarce opposite of it depends, which is here's a gift, seven seconds. And then I did something that is not scarce in my world, which is I made a joke and I said, "Well, that's funny because our research says eight seconds." (17:08): He said, "Your research is wrong. It's seven seconds." At that point, I mean, I'm convicted. The FBI's got me like this. Then I asked him, "Well, what do we have to do in those seven seconds?" Because to me, until you have trust, you have nothing. You're doomed. Anthony Iannarino's recent book, Elite Sales Strategies, opens with this quote that says, "People buy from people they trust to make a decision they don't trust themselves to make." That's the essence of why they buy, especially in B2B where they're risking their career. (17:43): Sadly, the quote was of me, he didn't tell me, so he just put it in the book and then I saw it. He signed the book. I was looking at it that night going, "I think that's me," which itself was, of course, not rare for Anthony Iannarino. But the idea that all commercial success is based on trust, and therefore to me, sales itself is a very civilizing influence on all of us because we're obliged to go through that scarce trust needle, the eye of the trust needle, in order to be able to ultimately transact when transacting is the right thing to do, and then we have to do something else that's as scarce as hen's teeth. (18:26): I always loved that phrase. I used to raise chickens. Duck don't have teeth either, but anyway. The question now is, well, okay, so what percentage of the people that we're selling to are actually capable of buying our product right now, even if they're capable of buying the product by category, by what they call ICP, ideal customer profile? The answer is really scarce, it's 8.6%. 11-12th of them are not in market now because they bought something like that to solve that problem too recently. (19:04): You have another scarcity thing going on there, which you need to deal with, and you need to deal with it through nurturing and patience and allowing this trust to stay in place long enough to finally get to the point where, yeah, it's time to replace that car. It's time to replace that, whatever it happens to be. I think this interplay between scarcity and trust is the essence of business. I think that's it, right? Things that are abundant or free, things that are free can't be transacted at a profit because your gross margin is zero. (19:36): Overabundance leads to zero margins, to true commoditization, and everything that's purchased requires trust to be built before somebody's going to risk as a consumer their money, or as a business professional, something more valuable, which is their career, their kids' college education, their retirement. It's the whole game. Corey Frank (19:59): Well, I'm curious, Mindy, what happens in the brain when we're faced with scarcity? Because if we understand what's happening in the brain, the quote that Chris just communicated with Anthony Iannarino is that you have to have that trust. But deeply from a biology perspective, what's happening in the brain why we respond to it and why it's so important not to abuse what you're trying to create, which is scarcity, which is to build trust so they eventually buy? Dr. Mindy Weinstein (20:29): Yeah, yeah. No, good question. And that's actually what I was thinking of because we were talking about value, because value is the word that keeps coming to my head, Chris, as you're talking, is that for customers who want to move forward or clients, I mean, there has to be some type of value there. And that's one of the things that scarcity does. This is something that we've seen in neurological studies through MRI scans, so the actual brain's itself hooked up so we can see what's lighting up and what's not. (21:00): There's two different studies that I want to bring up. One has to do with the valuation process. Participants were brought in, hooked up to MRI machines, and they were shown different scarce conditions. There was also one done for decision-making. And in both of those scenarios, they were faced with, like I said, a scarce condition, but the scarcity had to do either with a promotion, so a product was on sale and it was going to be this percentage, or an auction simulation. Those were the two things, so think eBay. (21:30): In those particular studies, what the researchers found was that when faced with scarcity, the part of the brain that has to do with valuation, so valuing something, lit up right away, showing that when faced with scarcity, we assume, our brains do, just automatically, that is more valuable and the value goes up. Now, for decisions, and this is the one where you really too have to be careful because it's so powerful, is that the part of the brain that has to do with decisions lights up right away, but what we've seen in those scans is that the normal steps that would be taken to get to that decision are just skipped. (22:09): But it makes sense when you stop and you think about it, because if something seems scarce, meaning either there's only so many left or the restrictions are there in some form, is that our mind now thinks this is urgent. It's not going to deliberate over all the different choices and the alternatives and wait, let me stop and think. It's all automatic. The thing about everything I'm talking about, this is all subconscious, it's happening. We're not necessarily thinking through this. We can't stop because it is subconscious, meaning you can't stop and be like, okay, whoa, whoa, what am I doing here? (22:43): We just don't. The way that our brains are wired is we're constantly looking for mental shortcuts where we can value something right away or make a decision, offload the burden of making a decision to that expert that we trust because they're telling us that this is the situation, we're going to believe them. That's what makes it so powerful. But I do want to add on that, because. Corey, you said something related to this, is that you have to be careful because knowing this I feel like is really powerful. (23:14): I remember as I was writing my book, I'm like, am I giving everyone just all the tools they need to manipulate everybody else now? I was really concerned about that. The thing about it is it needs to be authentic. It does. It needs to be authentic and natural. But the way that scarcity works, and I broke it down to the four different types, I guarantee there's some type of scarcity in your business somewhere. Whether it's you, the team can only take on so many more projects or so many more clients, or there's some supply issues going on, or you did a limited edition package or product. (23:47): I mean, it can naturally exist. When you do that and you just communicate it because you've already built that trust, that's where you see positive things happening. You can have fun with it. You can make excitement. You can build relationships. Because even if that particular client or customer is not ready right now to make that decision, staying in contact with them and communicating any type of scarcity, that's going to help too. There's one business I was just thinking of that has been doing that. (24:18): They'll do events and they can only have so many people in that event. Even if someone hadn't come to their event before, they'll still have them on their list and say, "Hey, this upcoming one, we have five seats left, four seats left," and it's true because you can only put so many people in the actual building. You can have a lot of creativity with it.

Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Ben Sternsmith of Sybill AI . This episode covers how AI is revolutionizing the sales process, making it more precise and empowering for sales professionals. Discover how AI analyzes tonality and body language, equipping salespeople with unparalleled accuracy in assessing deal progress. They discuss the importance of building trust with clients and how AI can support but never replace the human touch in establishing meaningful connections. They also explore the resurgence of cold calling as a powerful strategy in the digital age and introduce Dealy. This innovative AI-driven solution enhances CRM systems by analyzing customer interactions and providing valuable insights. Join us for this insightful episode that explores the synergy between sales and AI, offering practical tips and inspiring ideas for sales professionals.   Links from this episode: Ben Sternsmith on LinkedIn Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Sybill AI Branch 49 ConnectAndSell About Sybill AI Sybill AI is an AI company that originated as a Stanford project three years ago. The founders, frustrated with the limitations of remote teaching, developed a behavioral AI engine over Zoom. This innovative tool records calls and analyzes body language to determine engagement levels. Leveraging the power of large language models like GPT-4, Sybill AI offers generative AI for salespeople. It automatically generates call summaries, writes AI-powered follow-up emails, and even appends CRM data.   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:22): Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Ben Sternsmith of Sybill AI. This episode covers how AI's revolutionizing the sales process, making it more precise and empowering for sales professionals. Discover how AI analyzes tonality and body language equipping salespeople with unparalleled accuracy in assessing deal progress. The guys discuss the importance of building trust with clients and how AI can support but never replace the human touch in establishing meaningful connections. They also explore the resurgence of cold calling as a powerful strategy in the digital age, and introduce DealSync, an innovative AI-driven solution that enhances CRM systems by analyzing customer interactions and providing valuable insights. Join us for this insightful episode that explores the synergy between sales and AI, offering practical tips and inspiring ideas for sales professionals. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, sales mastery, body language and AI Giving You the Edge. Chris Beall (01:26): Imagine this, imagine Sybill gets to the point of being able to do tonality as accurately or maybe more accurately than body language. Now you've got multiple people you've interacted with. So now the question is, how does the tonality of various parts of the conversation go together to make a whole with regard to the progress of the deal? Where's the landmines? That's what we always want to know, we're working in the enterprise. Where's the landmines? Where's the thing that indicates they're listening to the competitor and not you? Where's that stuff going on? That's what, as an enterprise salesperson, which is where the big money is, right? That and where the big committees are and where people come and go, and where circumstances change and where their stock price can affect you. Anybody sold recently to an enterprise where its stock price is down to 5% of what it was 15 months ago? Holy moly, that's a different game. (02:18): So bringing all that together with AI and coming, I'll call it up in the deal, up out of the interaction with the individual and into the whole of what's going on. I think that's where the stuff ends up going, and I actually don't think that's a very long clap. Ben Sternsmith (02:34): Yeah, I think you're right. It's moving pretty fast right now and what we're describing is not science fiction. A third of it we do today and where it's only 2023, so exciting times. I think it's exciting time to be in sales. A lot of people are fearful of how AI's going to take over and I feel like this goes fast and it goes slow all at the same time where we're still going to be needed. AI's not going to take your prospect out for a steak dinner and build trust. It's not going to happen. So you still got to do that, but you can sure as heck give you more time at the dinner because you're going to have to write up a follow-up note, send it off to your boss. So anyway. Chris Beall (03:12): Yeah. AI already does sous vide better than I do. 95% of the cooking the steak will already occur with the AI. Now I have to sear it and get a little sizzle and a little smell on it. Corey Frank (03:23): I have a feeling you can order a drone steak by Amazon and you can have the degrees of well done, medium rare, et cetera, and it'll come in a hot pocket via drone to your doorstep. But Chris, you have a good buddy of ours of the podcast or so that was one of the first pilots in Top Gun and was there actually when they filmed the Top Gun with Tom Cruise. That's your buddy Rich, I believe, right? Chris Beall (03:45): Rick Brennan, Yeah. Corey Frank (03:46): That's right. And one of the things that Rick, I remember we chatted about was he said, I said, what is the most important trait of a pilot? And he didn't hesitate for a second. He'd said, oh, easy situational awareness. And Ben, I know your team is a big proponent. You phrase it a little differently. You call it reading the room. And so maybe you can talk a little bit about that, about if I'm a terrible reader of room, if I don't pick up on nonverbal cues or so because I have a pretty good product, does it really make a difference? Will it make a difference beyond a couple of basis points of me getting a deal or not getting a deal if I don't have the situational awareness of this all powerful civil engine monitoring what's happening between the lines? Ben Sternsmith (04:33): Well, I mean, I don't think it's going to close your deal for you, but I think Chris kind of nailed it when he was talking about the silent, we call it a silent champion sitting in the room. So we can see that they're nodding because they're engaged, but they don't say anything. So a lot of our calls that we record with large buying committees, there's at least three people and an eight-person call that say zero. So if you're using traditional technology, you have zero recall of what the meeting was like. And in most call recording solutions, they don't record that person because they record an active speaker, which is whoever is talking basically if zero recording of some of the most important people in the room, which are usually the economic buyers, say very little or nothing. And with our technology, you can find that silent champion because they're rated for you. (05:18): All the nods and smiles and moments of engagement non-verbally are captured. And if they're sitting their arms crossed, they're not paying attention or shaking their head, we pick up on that too and then we rate them poorly. Because you can go back and on that critical call, let's say it's a closing call, really dissect and this is what the enterprise sellers do because if they don't close that deal, it's probably one of two in their pipeline for that quarter that's going to make or break, go to club, or no. And it's a binary outcome. And so in my opinion, the bestsellers are de-riskers of deal outcome. They're great forecasters of deal outcome, but they make things happen by taking risk out of the equation incrementally as the sales cycle closes. (05:59): And I personally would go back and pour through that thing two or three times and Sybil will help me go to that moments of disengagement where I could be like, Bob was not into what I just said right there. And that was a critical moment I need to go work on Bob and I will try to get Bob off by himself and try to make sure he heard any access point I could to de-risk the fact that Bob could torpedo my deal. And that's how our technology can assist the rep. But the rep still has to go do all the work, but it's signal to maybe areas that you missed on the live call because you were too busy demoing or doing your job. Corey Frank (06:37): Yeah, I like that. And if those sales reps maybe that are those rogue elements, right, Chris and Ben? In an organization where they just bring the carcass, they just bring the scalp, they don't want the accountability because they hit their number, they probably exceed their number, they probably leave a wake of bodies in their midst. But as far as us as a sales leader, we're only seeing that hey, they're 110, 120, 130% of number, every single month. And so I would imagine a weapon like this and some insight to actually give me some guidance on how I interrupt, maybe how I talk too much. I talk too little, I don't answer somebody's question and I can see it in their face that a lot of those signals are missed. That I can see at again, the edges, the poor performers, but also the top performers probably really, really taking advantage of this type of AI. Ben Sternsmith (07:34): The smartest reps will see this as a weapon. I mean, I talk to CROs all day CEOs too, especially those that are getting into conversational intelligence because believe it or not, 80% of the market doesn't record calls today. And they always ask me, well, how am I going to get my team to use this? And I tell them, once they realize what additive value this gives them in their cycle to figure out these signals from the customer, they will fight to record, keep camera on, read body language, record the call in general, not have you kick out the recorder like a lot of people fear because the output is so valuable to the rest of the cycle and they will end up fighting for it, I guarantee it. (08:12): And there's some change management in there, but for the most part, that's what ends up happening. Even with the most skeptical reps that says, ah, my customers don't want me to record calls. It's because they know it's a weapon and it's a different amount of data than you ever had in the previous 30 years of your career, definitely is for me, and I've only been at this 24, so. Corey Frank (08:35): Well certainly Chris, you as CEO of one of the most powerful weapons on productivity, you get the weasels the weasel factor, again, as we come back to that where yeah, I don't want an autodialer boss. No, I don't want to, I'm fine. I just call my own accounts boss. All the reasons about why an increased level of accountability is always a bad thing and never a good thing. Chris Beall (08:52): Yeah, you know the fan club for accountability, the global fan club for accountability is waiting for its first member. Ben Sternsmith (09:04): That's good. Well, for what it's worth, I think cold calling is the new weapon, like Chris said, to ambush people, there's no other way. I think the digital ambush is really tired, is my personal opinion. I've worked with the Branch folks, Branch 49's been great for us, getting people that still pick up the phone. It's amazing what that has now come full circle. From cold calling in 2000, Oracle, the old way Chris, dialing for dollars. I would've loved a parallel dialer like ConnectAndSell back then, but God, had to do with the hard way. 50 calls a day, Oracle Direct, and to what it is today I think people, it's the pattern interrupt in my opinion, in this whole digital tide of spam and now AI personalization, I mean it kind of does work, but for the most part, I think cold calling is absolutely back in vogue and actually pattern interrupt to traditional methods. So good on you guys for helping us do that. Chris Beall (09:58): For sticking with it for 17 years. No, it's kind of funny. My wife, the one and only Helen Fanucci, the author of Love Your Team, a Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a hybrid world. She tried ConnectAndSell a few weeks ago, and of course she's been listening to me on about it since we met, so she knows a lot about it. But after she did it, I asked her, what'd you learn? She said, well, first it's you don't have to go to the gym. It's probably greatest weight loss program in the world. Your heart rate goes up to 160 and kind of magical. You get a full day of exercise in the first call you wait for. But she said the second thing is what she didn't realize until she did it was that you have an instantaneously open direct pipe into another person and you have their full attention. (10:48): So you get the full attention, the undivided attention of a human being that you might be important to in their business and vice versa. And you get it right now, whenever right now happens to be because you're ambushing yourself also with our technology, you push the button, you're ambushing somebody else, but then the fact that they answer ambushes you because God knows you could be petting your cat, drinking your coffee, whatever. You got to talk right now. That idea that you can get the undivided attention to somebody, compare that to the digital outreach world. Can you get anybody's undivided attention? One of the people at our company sent me a very interesting email two days ago about somebody who might want to do business with us in a great way. He didn't back it up with a phone call and he didn't back it up with a text either one of which I'll pay attention to. (11:40): Do you think I saw that thing with whatever funny subject line it had internally among the 1,137 emails I get per day, almost all of which are generated by robots? I mean no. And the other part is when you think about the vendor's bot, at which point in your life are you going to say, okay, I'm there. I trust every vendor's robot to be on my side, to have my back. That ain't going to happen. You know the vendor's robot was programmed by intelligent people to manipulate you. Oddly enough, a salesperson may be programmed by somebody to manipulate you too, but you can still trust them because you have channels in your brain that cause you to trust other human beings when they do certain things that indicate that they're trustworthy and you can't turn those off, but you can't turn them on from the bot side either. (12:32): As soon as you recognize it's a bot, you don't trust it. Now when it's following up, great, it's just a better writer. I mean, sales reps are horrible writers for the most part, and Sybill's using technology that frankly is a much better writer than any of us. It just is a really good writer. So it writes fast, it writes effortlessly from our perspective and it writes well, and it can be trusted because it's actually speaking on behalf of the rep. That's a very different game from cold outreach where the bots after you. Corey Frank (13:03): That's right. That's right. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Well, that's great stuff. Ben, any predictions on where this is going to continue to go? Chris had mentioned he thinks, again, the tonality certainly as a weapon like Sybil may indeed help with tonality over times, but what are some of maybe the skunk works, if you don't mind sharing that Sybill's working on that the market is certainly ripe for? Speaker 1 (13:28): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (13:40): Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, an employee successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch 49s, Modern and Innovative Sales Toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Ben Sternsmith (15:08): Yeah, I mean, we touched on it a little bit, but I'll double-click. Our newest product is called Dealsync, and Dealsync is basically a pending CRM systems with multiple calls and emails that have been between the sales rep and the customer or the CSM and the customer. And layering those in to a structured framework, whether it be MEDDIC or SPICED, working with the winning by design guys on that. So pick your flavor of qualification framework, bant, even for the front end of it, using something like ConnectAndSell. All of those things that we report on in the enterprise will become enriched via Sybill's Dealsync technology. (15:46): So it's really exciting stuff. We're in beta today, so definitely excited to get GA with it, but I think it's a hard problem to solve. It has not been solved by anyone to date, at least at scale, but I think we all could benefit from technology like this over time because it basically enriches our systems to be more valuable to read again. Whereas a lot of them are just warehouses of stale information that we had kind of discard like, oh, I'll pick on Salesforce. The market leader, ah, Salesforce never up to date. That world is about to be turned on its head very rapidly. I think that will change faster than most people realize. And then we'll slow down on things like AI taking over our sales reps jobs because I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Chris Beall (16:29): Yeah, I think AI's going to generate more products to sell so fast. I mean, you think about it, that's really what you can do with AI is make new products and you can make new products very, very quickly by taking existing buried treasure troves of data and turning those into harvestable experiences. Harvestable value. So I was playing with our CRM over the long weekend here, and what I was doing was basically synthesizing revenue out of bookings in different circumstances in different ways so I could examine some scenarios and talk to some people in a more useful way. And the main thing I noted about the CRM was only one field, and I sort of did the rough math. One field out of 43 was being maintained. So 42 out of 43 fields in general had been put in by somebody at some point thinking it was like a hot tub or a gym membership is a field in a CRM. And you put a field in Salesforce thinking it's going to be some great thing, it's going to be maintained, you're going to get value out of it. (17:36): And then at about the amount of time that it takes for you to decide that you're not going to go out to the hot tub or go to the gym anymore, it's abandoned. It's used for a little while and abandoned. So most of the data in the CRM is actually, it's not just that it's not kept up to date, it's no longer relevant, but somebody thought it was relevant, that data is hiding in there somewhere. So if Sybill can figure out how to figure out what's important, like what's significant in there, what speaks to deals being done or speaks to targeting? Which is a super important thing to understand or speaks to renewals. Oh my goodness, that's a good one. Most of our deals now in the world of SaaS are actually renewals. They're not net new logo captures. Just finding what in that data is currently being used. So I don't have to go in and have big project to take my CRM apart and fix it because I won't do it, but I can treat it as though it were intelligently built. (18:31): I think that's sort of the promise, is letting all the junk in the CRM be used as though it had been intelligently designed and built so that it comes into service for us. I think that's really a big, big exciting moment. And then we'll have so many new products to sell as salespeople. We can just pick the best. Corey Frank (18:50): Yeah. Ben Sternsmith (18:50): Totally agree. Corey Frank (18:51): I love it. And Chris, I think the 200 plus episodes we've done, I don't think we've had more than a handful of vendors on, and when we do, it's because of products that we use currently in our own ecosystem. We endorse or people that owe us money. No, I'm just kidding. Or it's folks that we know that really believe in the same philosophy we do. As you had mentioned, Ben, which we appreciate and we're a believer in, is the power of the cool call. There's a really cool technology. I got a cool call from today called Quiler, Q-U-I-L-I-R. It's a presentation software that takes your boring stay at presentations and bring them to life. But Ben, Chris is a picker-upper, I'm a picker-upper, and I'd say that's interesting area code. So Colorado, who do I know in Colorado? It's Chris is, you know. (19:37): So I pick up the phone and it's a sales rep from Quiler, a new biz dev rep, and I asked him, I was like, do you use phone as your primary vehicle of prospecting of cold outreach? He's like, no, they want us to do a LinkedIn first and then they want us to do an email and then a phone call. But I found that the most successful is just a phone, pick up the phone. I said, schedule me for a demo, have your sales manager on it because I'd like to talk about that because that is just brilliant as what you had said, Ben earlier about just the noise of the digital outreach is just so superfluous and sometimes a conversation bust through it all. Ben Sternsmith (20:17): Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it is the new weapon. It's just coming right back around. But you must use technology if you're not using a parallel dialer to do your cold calls, you're just not paying attention. So that's why one of my cold callers talking to people, not leaving voicemails, not dialing numbers. So you got to be smart about it. But I think it is absolutely the game changer in the sea of digital paralysis that we're all in. I mean, can't believe how many emails you get Chris per day, but it looks, so my inbox is a fraction of that, and it's still so hard to sift through the noise, and so I just don't pay attention to it. Corey Frank (20:51): Absolutely. Well, excellent. Well, Ben, hey, thanks for carving out the time, sybill.ai, S-Y-B-I-L-L dot A-I is where to go. Chris, any final thoughts for our newest old friend, Ben Sternsmith? Chris Beall (21:07): Well, I have a final recollection. So we did a podcast episode Corey, with Helen, you and I and a live audience, which was pretty fun, the live kind of behind us and asking some questions. And the thing that stunned me the most about that day was you showed me that in a matter of some minutes, you turned that podcast discussion that we had into a course of study for your people at Branch 49, and you did it with Sybill. That was amazing because that shows taking a medium that we tend for it to be instructive and that audience obviously consumes it, but transforming it into something that they could consume efficiently in a different way by reading and having that happen with, I don't know how much effort on your part, but I know you, Corey, you're not going to put in more than 2.7 ERGs per day of energy to use. I'd have to get you another bowl of pasta or something. So I don't have that kind of money. Ben Sternsmith (22:12): I'm not sure if this is a business podcast or a comedy show, but it's somewhere in between. I very much appreciate you guys having me on and I hope you guys have a great one. Corey Frank (22:20): Well, I bring that up, Ben, because when we had Chris's future podcast partner, Mr ChatGPT help write our book, I'll let Chris tell the story of when you asked it for some anecdotes and some quotes and some testimonials of what happened, you know speaking of comedy show. Chris Beall (22:38): I said to ChatGPT, my prompt was, could you go find some complimentary quotes about The Market Dominance Guys that we could use as blurbs on the book? And boom, it came out with 12 of them and they were all spot on and they were from people that I know, and that Corey knows some of which have been on the podcast, some of which aren't. I don't think one of those quotes was ever said by a single one of those human beings, but they were so good that in context they were usable. And I decided since ChatGPT was writing the book, it would've been disingenuous of me not to use the quotes it made up. Corey Frank (23:13): That's right. Chris Beall (23:13): So are they really quotes? Well in the world of generative AI, what is really real? Corey Frank (23:22): That is right. Yes. The Abbott and Costello of Sales podcast, I think that was one of them, that ChatGPT came up out of nowhere. Chris Beall (23:31): It did come up with that one. Yeah. Corey Frank (23:31): But I have a feeling with our eight listeners, I don't think any of them know who Abbott and Costello are, so that's probably a little moot. So Ben, thanks once again for jumping on another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank for Chris Beall. Until next time. Ben Sternsmith (23:46): Thanks guys. Take care.  

The guys welcome Ben Sternsmith of Sybill AI delves into the benefits of AI in sales, such as freeing salespeople to be more engaged and focused during customer interactions. Ben shares his experience of being able to concentrate on customer needs without the burden of note-taking or manual follow-up tasks. As Corey, Chris, and Ben explore the possibilities opened up by AI in sales, they discuss the challenges faced by sales professionals and the potential for AI tools to streamline and enhance their work. With tools like Sybill AI and ConnectAndSell, sales reps can offload repetitive tasks and focus on building genuine connections with customers. Join Corey, Chris, and Ben on this captivating episode as they unravel the fascinating world of AI in sales and its potential to reshape the industry in this episode, “Harnessing Generative AI: Revolutionizing Sales Strategies and Results”. Links from this episode: Ben Sternsmith on LinkedIn Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Sybill AI Branch 49 ConnectAndSell About Sybill AI Sybill AI is an AI company that originated as a Stanford project three years ago. The founders, frustrated with the limitations of remote teaching, developed a behavioral AI engine over Zoom. This innovative tool records calls and analyzes body language to determine engagement levels. Leveraging the power of large language models like GPT-4, Sybill AI offers generative AI for salespeople. It automatically generates call summaries, writes AI-powered follow-up emails, and even appends CRM data.   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:22): The guys welcome Ben Sternsmith of Sybill AI. They delve into the benefits of AI and sales, such as freeing salespeople to be more engaged and focused during customer interactions. Ben shares his experience of being able to concentrate on customer needs without the burden of note-taking or manual follow-up tasks. As Corey, Chris, and Ben explore the possibilities opened up by AI and sales. They discuss the challenges faced by sales professionals and the potential for AI tools to streamline and enhance their work. With tools like Sybill AI and ConnectAndSell, sales reps can offload repetitive tasks and focus on building genuine connections with customers. Join Corey, Chris, and Ben on this captivating episode as they unravel the fascinating world of AI and sales and its potential to reshape the industry. In this episode, harnessing generative AI revolutionizing sales strategies and results. Corey Frank (01:16): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and as always, the sage of sales, the profit of profit, and the Hawking of Hawking. Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. Chris, good afternoon. Chris Beall (01:30): I tell you what, the perils of a physics degree, my friend. Corey Frank (01:34): That's right. Well, speaking of smart kids, right, which I am definitely not. We have a very special guest. We have Ben Sternsmith. Ben is the CRO currently over at Sybill.ai, which we're going to talk about, but I think he harvested in the same tall cotton, Chris, that you come from up in the Bay Area, former VP of sales over at Salesforce, former VP of sales over at Lyft, and other assorted CRO recruiting stints and most recently over at Sybill. So welcome, Ben, finally, to the Market Dominance Guys. Ben Sternsmith (02:08): Great to be here. Thanks, Corey. Thanks, Chris. Corey Frank (02:11): I've been threatening you for a while that we're going to put you on, and I finally made do with my threat. You thought this was a sales pitch, and instead it turns into a podcast recording with me and Chris. So how about we start, Ben, a quick synopsis of Sybill.ai because that'll lead, I think, into our next topic that Chris and I want to talk to you about, about where all this stuff is going. But let's talk a little bit about what is Sybill AI and why do I need it? Ben Sternsmith (02:39): Yeah, Sybil is really an AI company at heart. We started the company as a Stanford project about three years ago. Our co-founders were lecturing at Stanford, and really, in 2020, we all went to these Zoom boxes, as you guys know, and they got really frustrated with not being able to understand who in the class was paying attention and who wasn't, who was engaged. And so we built a behavioral AI engine over Zoom that basically records calls, just like most conversational intelligence tools you may use today. And then we could really read the body language of the people that were on the call, at least in part, and to figure out who was basically engaged and who wasn't. (03:16): And since then, with the dawn of these beautiful large language models, specifically OpenAI, we use GPT-4 today like a lot of applications. But we've been at it really early since, I think, December 15th, 2022, when this whole thing, ChatGPT, and that craze launched on us all. We started incorporating that into our product on top of the behavioral AI to produce some unbelievable results. So today with Sybill, it's really built for salespeople. We call it generative AI for sales. You can record a customer call or prospect call, and Sybill will send you a magical summary after the call's over and write your AI email follow up for you. And even working on, we're to beta right now, the append CRM automatically. So things like MEDDPICC and all the things that sales reps dislike doing, but have to, we append those. So that's sort of us in a nutshell. Corey Frank (04:11): So you amplify the discord where there's a gap in what sales reps are doing today and try close that gap certainly by using a weapon like AI to maybe make it a little bit more consistent across the board from a summary perspective, from a data entry perspective, from an email summary perspective. Ben Sternsmith (04:32): 100%, yeah, it's amazing when you have an algorithm sitting on your shoulder taking notes for you, you can be way more engaging on the call. So, I mean, I started my career about 23 years ago at Oracle, cold calling folks with no video, having to do the demo, ask the questions, take the notes, walk, chew gum, all at the same time. And today, you don't really have to do that. You can just focus on the customer and ask those engaging questions, be very, very front and center, and it takes near-perfect notes for you and sends it to you and your colleagues about an hour after the call, so. Corey Frank (05:12): Hang on a second, then. Chris, if ConnectAndSell, as we've talked about many times, does all my screening activity, does all my pre-calling, now it actually prioritizes with fast phone numbers, whom I should call and when, and Sybill AI actually takes away the notes and the CRM entry, and the follow-up emails. What the hell am I going to do as a sales rep? You're taking away all the stuff that I can hide and tell my boss that I'm actually working when I'm not. So Chris, what's up a weasel to do in the sales? Chris Beall (05:41): What's a weasel to do exactly. It reminds me of something Edward Abbey once wrote, which is, "If you want people to be good drivers, strap them to the bumper of the car." And that's what it does is it straps them to the bumper of the car. There's not a lot of places to hide, folks hide behind emails. They hide actually not in space like you do with the car, but they hide in time. So it's like, oh, I'm busy doing this, therefore, it's okay that I'm not talking to anybody, right? It's like they hate the mechanics. Salespeople hate the mechanics of sales, and yet the mechanics of sales provide them with hiding points. (06:25): They can go and say, well, I had to do this. I had to fill out the CRM, I had to do this stuff. So I think it ends up in a funny way at the level of the products that are out there today that you could sell, if you hold that fixed, you need fewer salespeople, and they're the better ones because they end up talking to more people and asking better questions and caring more about somebody actually getting value from the solution, and all that. Now, if you turn it all the way around, and I think this is what I was talking about with Susan on the last episode of this podcast, it turns out that all this AI will build so many more products to sell that we'll need mediocre salespeople again, right? Because we'll just need too many of them, but they'll all be strapped to the bumper. We'll have the Sybill strap on the front that says, sorry, all you get to do is drive in traffic. Now, get good. Corey Frank (07:18): So there's hope for me yet. Chris Beall (07:22): Not in your case, no. Corey Frank (07:23): Yeah, that's good. So with that, so, Ben, in your world of Sybill, you've had the opportunity, certainly with your weapon, to collect a lot of data on a lot of phone calls. And Chris at ConnectAndSell and his team, they have data on over 190 million phone calls, as you can imagine, and that's a lot of signals that can be fired in to look for the patterns in the tea leaves. Would you mind sharing with us just in a few years at Sybill, what have you seen that, especially as an executive at Oracle, an executive at Salesforce, an executive at Lyft, that maybe surprised you a little bit about sales folks or validated what maybe your gut told you as a sales leader? Ben Sternsmith (08:07): And how maybe AI is changing that? Corey Frank (08:10): Yeah, just the patterns. Do we hide the time between calls? We're inherently terrible note-takers. We spend too much time between calls. In this new world of Zoom, we don't know how to operate a background, have eye contact, we're too distracted, things of that nature. What's some of the residue and the signals that you've been picking up? Ben Sternsmith (08:29): Yeah, I think salespeople are extremely adaptable. And as AI incorporates itself into all of our lives, both in consumer and enterprise, it's just going to free us up to do the things that we actually enjoy doing the most. So I feel like I get to be more human on the calls that I'm on with Sybill than I was before because I had to be such a multitasker that you're frankly just distracted. I mean, there's lots of studies out there that validate the brain can only really work on one thing at a time. So if I can really focus on the customer, which is my job ultimately to listen to their pain and then try to match my product to that, or maybe keep going because it's not a good fit, I think it just frees us up to do that in really a neat way, in a really automatic way. (09:10): And there's no salesperson I've ever managed, or when I was an IC myself, never enjoyed taking notes. I never enjoyed updating CRM systems, and I never enjoyed forgetting to follow up or writing the actual email. All those are just not the fun parts of the job, and today we just don't have to. You can buy your way into that with technology and then spend more time being human. So I think some people do spend time hiding behind some of those tasks, and that will quickly find its way out of their habits or out of the organization if they're not the right fit. And tools like this will just continue to help and expose that those aren't needed tasks to do anymore, so. Corey Frank (09:53): Chris, from your perspective, when you look at a lot of the weapons and the tools that are out there, even including ConnectAndSell, which is the mother of all amplification weapons from a productivity perspective, what are you seeing just in the last, now that we're out of COVID, we're coming into it, people are actually jumping on planes again, but they still have to do presentations. What are some of those signals or some of those tea leaves that you're interpreting about pipeline that are very prescient about where we're going as a profession? Chris Beall (10:22): Well, one of the things people talk about all the time is the sales and marketing alignment thing. And I think we're finally making progress in that direction by being able to identify where we're getting marketing impact, in particular from sales activities. It's interesting that good salespeople have always been marketers. You had a territory, you managed the territory over time, and marketing is the business of managing stuff past this quarter or past a sales cycle. (10:50): If your sales cycle is 90 days and you're doing anything that's intended to produce a result a year from now you're doing marketing, you're not really doing sales, and somebody probably thinks they could nurture that away, so to speak, and you could just focus on this quarter. But if you ever owned a territory, you know damn well that's your living, and you're cultivating the present and the intermediate future, and the deep future in a holistic way, it's meaningful to you. I think one of the things that we're seeing now with these tools is we can dig into the activities and find out what the outcomes actually are. They're not always just sales outcomes. It's like, yeah, you do work, right? So your notes go into your CRM, almost everything goes into a CRM is a dead letter. Very rare that it comes out and makes you money, right? Oh, my God, I made $400,000 last year because my notes were so good. Speaker 1 (11:41): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (11:54): Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch 49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. (12:34): Strategies and results. Sybill AI is an AI company that originated as a Stanford project three years ago. The founders were frustrated with the limitations of remote teaching. They developed a behavioral AI engine over Zoom. This innovative tool records calls and analyzes body language to determine engagement levels, leveraging the power of large language models like GPT-4 Sybill AI offers generative AI for salespeople. It automatically generates call summaries, writes AI-powered follow-up emails, and even append CRM data. (13:18): And we're back with Corey and Chris. Chris Beall (13:21): Had my notes been a little less good, I would've only made 100,000, right? It's just not the case. We actually end up feeding these monsters, and then we find ways to feed the monsters more cheaply to generate monster food to feed the CRM or to feed the reports that management needs, or whatever. The flip of that is that we can now go inside the conversations and between the systems and start to map what is doing what. So here's an example that we've talked about a little bit. Cold calls are the ultimate marketing weapon. They happen to have a sales side effect. The sales side effect is you get meetings that generate some pipeline. The marketing effect is you generate trust that you are going to be able to harvest over the next three, four years. So can you see that in the data? (14:07): You can't really see that in the data unless A, you're collecting the data, which is both the easy stuff and the hard stuff. What Sybill is collecting is really hard stuff. It's inside of conversations and it's nuances. So okay, can I take those nuances, and can I say this one actually, when it goes like this, we make this much more pipeline. We can actually do that nowadays. As soon as you tie sales activities to future pipeline, not from deals right now, then you've actually converged sales and marketing. You've created sales and marketing alignment, but you got to bring it out so that we can get ahold of marketing budgets. Otherwise, guys like Ben and I have to end up going around with begging bowls, right? Because marketing has all the dollars in technology, whereas sales has got the headcount. And what we tend to do, his company and my company tend to do is reduce the need for the headcount because you make it more efficient because it's doing less grunt work. (15:04): We both are in the grunt work removal business, taking notes, grunt work, sending the follow-up email, and just especially if you're salesperson, writing might not be your strong suit. I noticed that my friends who didn't raise their hand a lot in class and didn't write their essays and turn them in early tended to become salespeople. So I say male, left-handed, color-blind, ADD dyslexics become salespeople. Well, look at all the tasks that we ask them to do that male, color-blind, left-handed, ADD dyslexics would not like to do. So Sybill's going to take all those tasks off their hands, and then ConnectAndSell takes a bunch of other grunt work off, which is navigating phone systems and hanging up on voicemails, and just doing stuff when you could just be hanging out. So I think what happens is we are starting to get an understanding, maybe for the first time, of how sales and marketing can work together as a system to produce results. (15:59): And the results are in the form of customer value actually being delivered. Because even measuring pipeline is weak when you think about it. I got this chart behind me, right? It shows pipeline built through conversations, but that's pretty weak. What you really want to see is value derived by customers that are associated with those conversations. Now you're getting to the real economics, right? We're finally getting to the point where we're starting to be able to discern the connections and make investments based on those connections. The investments can be dollars, or they can be organization and structure, or they can be simple things like training, like teaching some people to do some tricks they didn't know before. Whatever it happens to be, without the connections you don't know where to invest. And I think we're starting to see where to invest. Ben Sternsmith (16:43): Yeah, so well said. I really feel like we're at a golden age, or just in the precipice of golden age for that connection between sales and marketing and more importantly, the value of CRM systems. Honestly, I spent a lot of my career at Salesforce, like Corey had said, and really the early days, so '09 to 2015, and my old VP, Mark Wayland, used to say CRM systems had usage patterns similar to hot tubs and gym memberships, right? Really high in the beginning, and then they peter-off, right? Always made us chuckle, but it was also very true because the CRM system didn't really have a lot of value over time because people weren't appending it with really current information because it was hard and time-consuming. (17:23): And it's a no-finish-line sort of thing. Today, if the CRM system had the objective customer voice from emails and calls and marketing connections, and even cold calls, I think there's a huge case you made, Chris, on the initial touch with the client. If we could even incorporate that with AI, you have full cycle from first touch to last touch, then all of a sudden I'm going to Salesforce or HubSpot or wherever I'm going for the information because I know it's accurate and it's subjectively appended at least 80% by an algorithm. Isn't that interesting, right? Totally different world. So it's fun to be a sales rep these days. I think, like I said, we're adaptable, but we will figure out a new way to work, and this is definitely an assist to change that up. Corey Frank (18:12): Let's talk a little bit on the, Chris had brought this up earlier with the nuances, and Ben, if you're one of our nine listeners to our podcast, we talk a lot about tonality and the use of empathy and tactical empathy specifically, which is conveyed in not just what you say but how you say it. And in your world, especially if you're recording me right now, what are some of those maybe non-verbal, behavioral AI elements that, as a sales rep, whether I'm using Sybill or not, but if I'm doing a Zoom call tomorrow that I should just be more aware of because it matters, and you have the data and you show the hundreds of thousands of phone calls that are recorded that it does indeed matter? Ben Sternsmith (18:57): Yeah, I mean, video is really powerful. Body language, humans are complicated, and we give off over 30 non-verbal cues in every statement we say, and it's been documented as well over 90% of what we are saying is non-verbal. And so that's why we decided to focus on it from the early days. Because we believed in that, and we continue to chip away at taking the human non-verbal reaction, the 30 plus cues, and turning that into useful information for salespeople, CSMs, et cetera. But I don't know about you guys, but if I'm on an audio call today, I do a lot of Zoom calls, but if I'm on an audio call without video, it's really hard to jump in, to find the timing, to understand how you're saying something. I rely so much on the cues I get over video, which the same as in-person sales, things are coming back a little bit there, but it is so valuable into, I think, selling understand how your prospect is trying to convey themselves. (19:54): Managing a large buying committee. All those are so important over video, and I'm inherently reading those non-verbals live with my eyes. Now, let's just say I wasn't on the call. Let's say I say something like, "Oh, it sounds great," and I crossed my arms. What am I saying? I'm being sarcastic. I'm not happy about it. And if you're not picking up on that either live or on the recording, or with hopefully a behavioral AI engine we have, I don't know. It's something to be desired. So I don't know. That's the way I view the world it is today over VC. I think video is so important. Body language is so important because that's how we communicate as humans when we're in front of each other, and when we can't be, this is the second-best thing. Corey Frank (20:37): Chris, what are your thoughts on that? You obviously- Chris Beall (20:41): Yeah, it's true. The only use I know of for audio, really just pure audio is in handling a situation where you can't have video. So you can't ambush somebody with video because what if they're in the hot tub? And that could be a problem. So not as big a problem when they're at the gym, but it's a problem at the gym. But it's a real problem if you ambush them that one time they ever use the hot tub in that first week. And there turns out to be this issue around forming relationships with strangers. That as far as we can tell, there's probably a million ways to do it that nobody's found yet. Somebody came up to me the other day with a really good one, but at scale, it's really hard to avoid the ambush. It's just like trying to fix somebody's blown Achilles tendon without cutting into their leg. (21:27): It's like you'd love to do it, and maybe some people think they can do it, but I'm glad that somebody was willing to endure the sight of blood and cut into my leg when I blew mine, right? So the ambush is a place where all we get is audio, and we want to keep it short as a result, and we want to control the emotional tone. We're not going to get to read much or we're going to be able to provide a fair amount, and we have to rely on an algorithm and the algorithm as a framework associated with it. Like where's the other party starting emotionally? Where could I get them to emotionally that's a useful next place for them and for me? From there, where can we go, and where should we not go? Where is it dangerous? Where is it safe? And maybe in 30 seconds, we get to the point where we agree to have a meeting on video. (22:12): To me, that's about it for pure audio. And I don't hold very many audio meetings anymore that are pure audio. I occasionally do, but only with people I know well. And if I know you well, then I really don't need to be reading your body language that much. Corey, you and I have known each other for, I actually looked up on a calendar the other days, for 371 years, two months, four days, and five hours. And so since the first time that we ever spoke to each other, and this will surprise some of our audience because, I think, can't those guys make more than a couple of hundred podcasts in that many years? But now, whatever, never hardworking. So when I speak with you on the phone, I'm good because I have learned, like any good AI engine or eye engine, or human intelligence. I've learned your patterns, and I can see you when you're not there. (23:07): But with strangers, it's harder. And I think where we're going to go with AI is actually into the buying committee. I think we're going to go in a different place than people are talking about. Getting the individual who's talking is nice and all. But one of my favorite things in the world of buying committees is I used to sell big stuff, big tech that I invented to big companies. So you're in that presentation, and there's usually 13 people in the room. You're one of them, and there's 12 more. I don't know why there's always 12 more. Maybe they're apostles or something. I don't really know. And there's always one of whom who doesn't talk, and it's usually male. He sits at, from your perspective, in the back left corner, always, back left corner. And that person's job, according to themselves, is to wait until you're done and you think you're doing fine. (23:57): And then to ask that one question that chucks a sharp, poisonous spear into the center of your chest right in front of everybody, that's their job. They're called the technical objector. And their job is to raise the single technical objection that blows your entire thesis out of the water, puts you on your back foot, and even if you're going to do a deal with them, you're not going to get as good a price. That's what they do. Your ability to read that fact that that person is that person, that's something we don't do very much of today. Zoom actually makes that really hard to find that person because they're not in the room anymore in a specific spot, and we don't get to watch them as well, oddly enough, we're distracted with the other people. I used to have a sharp eye on that person. (24:43): And getting the timing of asking the question before they ask the question is really, really hard. And I think AI's going to help us in that. I mean, I've got a situation we've been working on recently where we got a superstar CEO who loves our product, but it's a family business. And I know that at some point, and I believe it's about happening, somebody is going to bring in somebody and put them in a position to reign in the CEO. And CEOs are really hard to fire, as we all know. They're not like CROs, man, like Ben, they get bounced out. They're there to take a bullet. That's their job, right? CEO gets to put two bends out there for every time he or she gets shot. That's like, look, I got a really good one. Oh, we didn't make the number. Shoot that one. (25:30): Okay, we got another one, right? Well, being able to read those situations, the politics, within organizations and see those patterns and help a sales rep navigate, not just here they all are. You figure it out. It's like, look, here's probably going on here. Here's what's probably going on. Have you thought about this interaction? I think that's where we're going to take some of this AI. And you know what? ChatGPT is really good at this kind of stuff. You just have to know how to ask it the right prompts, and it'll actually tell you about potential interactions because it's super imaginative. It has an advanced degree from MSU, right? Make shit up. So it will hallucinate things that you need to be thinking about where your hallucination capabilities have come to their edge. And it's like, what if Mary over there, what if the real issue is her professional relationship over here with Joe? (26:25): What if they hate each other? Have you thought about that, right? You might not have defined it. Well, maybe your AI can tell you. So I think companies like Sybill are going to start to take us not just down into the nuances of voice, which is where you were going. And I do think we'll get into the nuances of voice because voice is mostly gestures, very little of voice is words. What we do with our hands, we're also doing with our voice, and we can see our hands, but we can actually hear our voice do the same. Whatever that thing is, it's going on in the inflection, in the tone. You can't gesture with your hands without changing your voice. (26:59): You can't. And the text captures such a tiny, tiny amount of what's important in the conversation. The big part is in the tonality. But yes, Sybill will go down into the tonality eventually and annotate the notes. Some letters will be bigger. When we read the transcript, they'll be bigger and they'll have colors, and we'll be able to interpret them without having to listen to them and go, Ooh, there was where he was off. That's Corey in red ink. Big, pulsing, right? Corey Frank (27:27): Well, Chris, you're a musician, and we've talked about this as a musician. What is the, and I'm ignorant in the language of music, but when you have fortissimo and you have the little dot over one of the half notes, is that what you're talking about where I can not only hear it, but I can actually see the emphasis of the tonality? Or I can see as, Ben, as your example is, yeah, that sounds like a good idea, versus, I've read the transcript, I'd be like, Hey, Sybill is a great idea, but the tonality of it maybe is not necessarily certain.

Chris Beall is on the road in Seattle, attending the annual Microsoft Build conference. Amidst thousands of software developers learning about the latest advancements, Chris and Susan discuss the impact of AI on sales and address common concerns about its effects on job security. Drawing an analogy of material science advancements to the evolution of building materials, Chris explains how new technology creates opportunities for salespeople rather than making them obsolete. He predicts an explosion of new products and businesses as companies leverage the power of AI to enhance their offerings. With an optimistic outlook, Chris emphasizes that salespeople should embrace the possibilities brought by material science advancements and look forward to a world of new products and increased sales opportunities. Join them as they explore the exciting potential of AI in sales on this episode, "Unleash the Sales Kraken: Fearless, Innovative, and AI-slaying!"   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Susan Finch: Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high-stakes, speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market. With our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49. Chris is on the road in Seattle, attending the annual Microsoft Build Conference. Amidst thousands of software developers learning about the latest advancements, Chris and I discuss the impact of AI on sales and address common concerns about its effect on job security. Drawing an analogy of material science advancements to the evolution of building materials, Chris explains how new technology creates opportunities for salespeople rather than making them obsolete. He predicts an explosion of new products and businesses as companies leverage the power of AI to enhance their offerings. With an optimistic outlook, Chris emphasizes that salespeople should embrace the possibilities brought by material science advancements, and look forward to a world of new products and increase sales opportunities. Join us as we explore the exciting potential of AI in sales on this episode of Market Dominance Guys. Unleash the Sales Kraken: Fearless, Innovative, and AI-slaying. Hey, Chris, you are on the road with a whole bunch of people. Can you tell us where you are and what's going on? Chris Beall: Yeah, so I'm in Seattle, not very far from my wife's condo. Everybody knows Helen, the author of Love Your Team, A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid world. A Amazon bestseller, by the way, in four categories. Anyway, she has a condo here. Now, she has been known to call it our condo now that we're married. But I always say, "Helen, read the prenup." Right? I'm kind of a stickler for these things. And so anyway, we came over here to Seattle to go to Microsoft Build. Build is their big annual conference for developers. Now, you might wonder... Susan Finch: You froze. Chris Beall: And that Helen Fanucci doing here at this conference. Well, that's what I wanted to talk about today, is why would a couple of senior people who don't write a bunch of code... Now I used to, but I don't anymore. Why would we come and hang out with thousands of software developers learning about the latest and greatest that Microsoft has to offer for building software? That's where we are. So we're at the Summit Center. It's a big beautiful convention center. And one of my favorite things about it is, it has not only escalators and elevators, but it has stairs going all the way up to the top level. And of course, the young people, they take the escalators and the elevators. But us older folk, we're wise enough to take the stairs. So that's been part of the day so far. It was a brilliant kickoff this morning. Satya Nadella started it off and kind of took us through a little bit of the history of all the stuff that's going on with AI. I myself built my first AI system in 1992, which is going back a little ways, so I'm kind of familiar with it. Basically laid out sort of a revolution in two hours, with a number of very senior speakers and topics, many of which are important to our company. And it made me think about something. Because I've been reading tons of articles about sales and AI, especially ChatGPT. And some of them say, ChatGPT will make sales go away, or salespeople unneeded. And some of them say it makes your job easier. And some say, "Well, you could just send spam like five times faster than you could before. And it's even personalized spam." And, "Wow, that'll work really well." Which I think everybody knows my opinion on that. But what struck me was, this is very natural for human beings. And I'm not criticizing, I'm just pointing it out, that when people think about AI, they think, "What's it going to do to me? What's it going to do to my job?" Susan Finch: Right. Chris Beall: Right? And they think about it, I'll call it first order. So they think, "Well, I do X, Y, and Z. I send emails and I talk to people. What if some AI could send emails and talk to people? Oh my God, they won't need me anymore." That's sort of the first reaction. And one can go down some very deep rabbit holes by following that reaction. Because now you're in the world of, frankly, I'll call it abject speculation. What's going to happen? Who knows? Whenever there are new capabilities, jobs change. If you were a milkman at one point, and you had a horse, and you had a nice cart with four wheels. Maybe a wagon. And you went, took the milk from the farm, and you went around and delivered it to people's houses. And then this internal combustion thing happened. And somebody else said, "Well, I'm going to deliver milk in something that doesn't involve a horse." If you said, "Oh well, that doesn't affect me, I'm just going to keep using the horse." At some point, the horsepower is going to overwhelm your horse, because the other person's going to deliver faster, cheaper, whatever. And you can complain about it all you want. But you're going to have to adapt, or you're going to have to go into another line of work. Susan Finch: Exactly. Chris Beall: So this is kind of the obsession, but what I'd like to talk about is exactly the opposite. Precisely the opposite. Having nothing to do with how you do your job, but having to do with why you do your job. Susan Finch: Oh, okay. I love it. Chris Beall: Yeah, so like, hold forth, Chris. Go for it, dude. Susan Finch: Well, I'm curious because I'm constantly defending AI to friends that are paranoid. To friends that are scared. To people that don't really try and think of the better applications, and "Oh, no, no, no, this makes me way more effective. This makes me way more necessary." So I want to hear what you're going to say, because this is a conversation I have all week long. Chris Beall: Well, I'm going to throw out an analogy here, and it's one that I've used many times in other contexts. So for anybody who feels like it's worn out, I'm telling you it's not. It's a great analogy. This may be the best analogy of all time. So here's my analogy. You know, one point in the history of the world, in cities, we built big buildings with bricks. They can only be so big. You can only go so high with bricks. First, they can only go so high because how many flights of stairs can you go up? And then this guy, Otis or whatever, invented the break on the elevator. So the passive break, that meant that you could have a little room that goes up and down on a rope. Or cable as the case may be. And if the rope breaks, it won't take you all the way to the ground at an ever-accelerating rate. It'll act with a passive mechanism that goes "cunk", and stops it where it is. Now, you still need to be rescued and stuff. But much better than being a little crumpled mass, oozing blood out the doors and stuff like that at the bottom of the elevator, with a plume of smoke coming off your ashes, so to speak. So that was great. We could make some bigger buildings, but at some point you kind of get to the limit of brick. Brick building are made by stacking bricks on top of bricks. And then somebody came up with a really clever idea, "Let's use steel in order to make buildings." Now, there were a lot of arguments against steel. "Oh, it's horrible. It rusts after all. Do you know it has iron in it? You ever seen it after a while? We don't want rusty buildings. We got all the brick buildings. They stand forever and they're fireproof." Hey, steel is pretty fireproof too. Yes, you can light steel on fire, but you kind of have to powder it first and get yourself a lot of oxygen around each little, tiny, tiny bit of powdered steel. And don't ever do this at home, by the way. Don't anybody take and say, "Oh, Chris said I should go powder some steel and light it on fire." Do not do that in your house. Thank you. So steel changed everything. Cities look like they look. The building I've been in all day today is not a buildable building without steel. And so when you think about that, it's like, well, what changed? Everything. So if you were a bricklayer, you might say, "Oh, they've invented a way of making buildings with steel. What's going to happen to us bricklayers?" Well, you're probably going to either become more decorative in what you do. So now your bricks are to make things look like bricks, not to be bricks. Or for smaller buildings, hey, they need them too, right. But your five-story brick walkup kind of became a thing of the past because you could make it out of a steel skeleton and hang some glass off of it. And it looks like all the condos over in West Seattle. That's what they make them out of. They pile bricks up, make them things. So this is my point is, when material science changes, when we can make new things, two things happen. One of them turns out always to be alarming and small in retrospect. Who sits around and talks about, "Oh, and the bricklaying jobs to make the big buildings, they just aren't around anymore." What they do instead is go, "Oh, look at the vibrant cities we've created with these big buildings that can have 20 times as many people and businesses in them. And allow a greater concentration of value. And it's hyperefficient." Yes, they come with their little problems. Every once in a while you'll have a global pandemic and nobody can work together in them. But, if you wait a few years, you kind of get that back together. The people do adapt. But it's not about bricklayers, it's about the city. It's about everything else. It's about all the other businesses that thrived. Because we used material science, there was an advance that led us work with steel. And we could make buildings primarily out of steel and glass. And that's pretty stunning. Concrete, by the way, played a certain role as well. Susan Finch: Right. Chris Beall: That's an old Roman invention. And their concrete's better than our concrete, and we have them figured out why. But we think it has to do with, I don't know, volcano. So here we have the same thing. So here you're a salesperson and you're going, "Oh, well, I'm so scared. I might not have a job sending emails that nobody answers. I mean its activity. They pay me for it. It's good. And sometimes they do answer. And I think I'm a pretty good salesperson. And when I get somebody to answer, I'm great. I have a conversation with them. Or maybe I'm crazy and I use ConnectAndSell, and I push a button and talk to people. And what if some bot can talk to them or whatever?" Well, first of all, trust me, don't worry about the bot thing. But I'm not going down that rabbit hole. If a bot could talk as well as you, it would have to fess up that it's a bot. It's something that, actually, the nice Microsoft people have figured it out. They call them watermarks. So audio watermarks that are put in the generated content. Isn't that great? So you can actually have another piece of code, look at it and go, "This was made by a bot." And then John, the gatekeeper, who's protecting Mary, the executive, can have it pop up on the phone and say, "Bot calling. Bot calling." Because we'll look at the watermark, listen to it and know it's a bot. That's not what I'm talking about. Here's what's going to really happen with salespeople. Here's my confident prediction. I'm in a confident predictive mood. I've been hanging out with very confident people this morning. And I think they're right in their confidence. And that is this. There will be an explosion of what? New products. How many new products? Well, I can tell you, they're introducing 50 of them, today, in the morning, at this conference. This is just Microsoft. And they don't make this stuff for themselves. They make it for others to build. Microsoft's business has always been, "Here's some code you use to build other code." Well, now they got some code. And a bunch of data. And a bunch of whatever it's done in order to learn its tricks. Including its hallucinations, and its issues around security, and all the other stuff that comes with it. But all of that goes together so that this thousands and thousands of people I'm sitting with today can be unleashed to make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of new products for you to sell. So in a market dominant sense, if you were already out there with the product and you're not taking advantage of the latest material science to build a better version of your product. And that doesn't mean just like, "Oh, here's steel. Let's just put a steel flagpole on the top of our brick building and call it AI." No. It's like you actually got to figure out how to use the new material AI to make something useful for your actual customers. Or hey, better yet, even for new customers you couldn't reach otherwise, because they had no interest in your product. Maybe now you can put some cool stuff in there that will make it more valuable for those customers that you don't have. Or that you do have. In any case, as a salesperson, you should be going, "This is the best of all possible worlds." Not only does my job get easier, but there's new stuff to sell. And salespeople not only [inaudible 00:13:01] new stuff to sell, they also thrive on new businesses. And here's the other thing that happens. With every advanced material science. I'm using material science loosely here, right? Susan Finch: Right. Right. Chris Beall: I mean something new you can use to build new stuff. That's why it's material science, not just like science science, right? Science is new that you can go, "Wow, that's really interesting." Material science is like something that's used as a material to build new stuff. So for instance, a browser in the 90s was material you could use to build new stuff called applications that didn't run on your computer. But they ran in a browser that ran on your computer, and therefore were more ubiquitous. Did that lead to more or less opportunity for salespeople? Well, I would say the entire internet economy's been really good for salespeople. Because while there's hundreds of thousands of millions of products out there that have been sold, and guess what else comes with products, the best thing of all? Money. Susan Finch: We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with 8 to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified. Like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. And we're back. Chris Beall: Money's the juice that goes around and goes, "Well, where's their opportunity to make more money?" There's nothing funny about money. Money is kind of biological in that sense. It's always looking for an opportunity to make more of itself. But it uses a funny approach. We, human animals use one approach, which we kind of like. And build some, I don't know, poetry, and industry, and art around, and sort of seek it out. Well, money seeks out the opportunity to turn money into money by being a more advantaged investment with a little bit of risk, or a lot of risk, and with no risk. That's what people do with money. That's what money does with money. Money says, "I'll take a little risk if you will make me, more of me." Right? That's the money thing. And occasionally the risk gets into an overhang and you get a Silicon Valley bank or whatever. That's just natural. Risks pile up, and then risks fall down. But overall, money goes up and up and up. And what drives up and up over time? It's actually material science. It's actually always material science. It's very rarely brilliance. It's very rare that somebody's so smart, they figure out something that nobody'd ever thought of before with the current materials. That happens for a brief period after a new material shows up. So here's a new material, ChatGPT and it's friends. So you get all of this large language model stuff. And you get all these wonderful tools that people can use to make new stuff that they couldn't make before. And they never like to say that. It always sounds like improvements. But truly, you can't make a hundred-story building out of bricks. It will lean and fall over. Susan Finch: Right. Chris Beall: You have to use steel that flexes and that you can anchor deeply in the ground, if that's the way you do it. Unless you're in Chicago, in which case you float your buildings. But let's not talk about that. Because it makes people nervous when the building is floating. Who wants to know that kind of crap, right? So new material science drives investment at the margin, risk investment. And we're not talking about a little bit of money. We're talking about trillions of dollars, that sit there, on the sidelines or near the sidelines. The biggest change in the last 20 years, which is generative AI. Where you can make your own models, you can train your own models. Our company, for instance, one of the senior people over at Microsoft said to me, "Your company has the biggest and the best, as far as we can tell here at Microsoft, training set for business to business contact data. Because yours must be closed loop." After all, it's used for calling people. And those people to actually either answer or don't answer. And then they have things that provide more data. And then they have outcomes that provide more data. And then they're linked to each other. Because you could have follow up conversations or other conversations at the same company. Then they're tied to commerce. That's more, "Oh my goodness, that's a lot of data." And yes, mind you, we know you only do it 200,000 times a day. But that's still a lot of data. It builds up, right? Well, that's a good point. But without the material science of all this AI, you can do something with it. But you can't do something as cool as say, make an application where you can say to it as a human being, "Tell me, which of my sales reps would do best calling on a market that consists entirely of the CEOs of companies in industrial kind of sectors, that the company's making more than a $100 million a year." That's a cool thing to be able to ask. Imagine being able to ask that of a community of thousands of sales reps. You could say, "Who's the best at this?" Well, that's coming. How long's it going to take? Susan Finch: Oh, I can't wait. Chris Beall: Yeah, that's like a week or so. Because this new material science, I'll call it. Which is this ChatGPT and it's friends. It lets you do stuff like that. And the folks over at Microsoft just dropped 10 billion with a B, dollars into OpenAI and then basically pivoted their whole company around it. And they're pretty big. Think hundreds of thousands of people who are now organized around making this new material available to folks who develop products. Now, I don't develop products anymore. Okay, maybe I do, but don't tell anybody. So I reach out and look out the window and pontificate about sales. But these products are going to be built, they're going to be built fast and money is going to chase them. Already this is the hottest new area for investment. It is the hottest sector for venture capital right now. And so when venture capital comes into the marketplace, it does it for one, and only one reason. Or purpose. And the purpose is to buy salespeople. To buy go to market. Nobody invests in companies to build anything anymore. The stuff's already built in the garage. It's built in minutes. It's built from whatever was there, but this is the new material science. It's like, "I'm not going to pay you to glue this to that. You got super glue. You do that on your own time. Then you come to me as an investor." I'm not an investor, so everybody, I'm playacting here. "So come to me as an investor and I'm going to go, 'Ooh, you're going to take that cool thing you built to market.' That's fabulous. I'll give you your million, your 5 million, your 10 million, your 20 million, to go take that to market." Well, where does that money go? Guess what? It goes to salespeople. That's where it goes. Yes. It also goes to marketing. So it goes to marketing people. Yes. It also goes to marketing companies. So that's all I have to say on this. And I actually have to run right now, because some money wants to talk to me. Susan Finch: I love it. Thanks so much, Chris, for popping in and catching us up. Talk to you soon. Chris Beall: You bet, Susan. Thank you.

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall reviews how artificial intelligence and machine learning will impact the future of sales. Beall shares his thoughts on how decision support using AI can make it easier and faster to figure out what to do. He gives an example of a prospective customer who wanted to talk to CEOs of companies using the entrepreneurial operating system popularized in the book "Traction." He was able to use ChatGPT to find the names of CEOs running companies that were probably following EOS. In just a few minutes, he had a list of CEOs, company names, and phone numbers. Chris believes that AI and machine learning will help sales teams be more efficient at finding the folks they want to talk to. They will be able to understand their sales teams better, which will help sales run better. In addition to AI, he covers inbound and outbound marketing strategies and which one is more effective. Finally, he explores the power of negative conversations in driving pipeline and how they can be more effective than positive conversations. Join us for this episode, “Sales Success in the Age of AI and Emotional Intelligence.” Here are 12 provocative questions answered in this episode:  How do you think the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning will impact the future of sales?  What's your take on the debate between inbound and outbound marketing strategies? Which one do you think is more effective? Can you share a story about a time when you failed at something in your professional life? How did you bounce back from it? How do you stay motivated and focused when faced with challenges or setbacks? What's the biggest mistake you see salespeople make, and how can they avoid it? How do you think technology changes how sales teams work and collaborate? What's your opinion on the role of emotional intelligence in sales, and how can salespeople develop this skill? How do you measure the success of your sales team, and what metrics do you use? In your experience, what are the most effective strategies for building strong relationships with clients and customers? How do you ensure that your sales messaging resonates with your target audience? What advice would you give to someone who is just starting a career in sales? What are the biggest challenges facing sales leaders today, and how can they overcome them? Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Chris Beall  (00:11): Hey everybody. Chris Beal here, co-host of Market Dominance Guys with another episode of Market Dominance. Guys, I find myself today all alone. I'm here in West Seattle looking out at the water, watching ferries go by water taxis, an occasional harbor seal, hoping for a cruise ship, but haven't seen one yet. And my co-host, Corey Frank, is super busy right now building Branch 49 and servicing customers, and I've got a little time this afternoon, so I thought I'd just do something with, instead of Corey, I'd do something with our friend chat, G p T. So I asked chat G p T to provide 12 provocative questions that a podcast host might ask. Chris Beal, c e o of connect and sell and co-host of the Market Dominance Guys podcast. So chat G P t's going to be kind of our host interviewers so to speak, and I'm going to answer these questions as best I can.  Chris Beall  (01:09): Now, one thing that I thought was pretty impressive was the speed with which chat g p T came up with these 12 questions. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time and it thinks things over might take 10 seconds, 20 seconds. This was like there is your 12, so I thought that was very interesting and we'll just jump right in. So this is Chris Beal, a glass of wine, a beautiful afternoon here in West Seattle and chat G P T asking provocative questions. So provocative question number one, how do you think the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to impact the future of sales? Now that's what we call a big, big question. So I've got some ideas. I know some of these things are going to seem a little short term and some are kind of long term. The short term ones I'm pretty certain of mostly because I'm already doing them, the long term ones we'll see.  Chris Beall  (02:10): So the short term ones have to do with just making it easier and faster to figure out what to do. I'll call it decision support. So I have an example, I have a prospective customer who would like to talk to CEOs of companies that are using the entrepreneurial operating system as popularized in the book traction. That's a really hard problem to solve with something like ZoomInfo or Apollo or whatever and it's not really solvable with Google. Now you could find folks that had attended an online event or physical event who are into the traction concept, the e o s as it's called. But hey, how about asking chat G P T for the names of CEOs who are running companies that are probably following e o s? Well, I tried it and I'd actually tried it during the time that my prospective customer asked the question and in about, oh, I don't know, three, four minutes, I had first name, last name, I knew the title c e o of a bunch of companies and I had the company names.  Chris Beall  (03:19): I ran them through our list enrich process and voila, I had a list of folks that could be called on the best phone number known for them from actual experience and it was really, really straightforward. So artificial intelligence in this case with a whole bunch of knowledge built in because chat g p T's got this immense amount of knowledge, mind you only up to September, 2021, but still things don't change that fast gave me a great answer and so it did something that I'll say was not practical to do some other way and it got us into a calling state and in a calling state, as soon as you're calling the list you learn an awful lot and you learn it really fast. In the long run, I think a bunch of other things are going to happen and I think mostly they're going to be around being able to be more efficient at finding the folks you want to talk with.  Chris Beall  (04:15): So there's the whole idea of intent. Now I'm a little, I don't know, I'm not a hundred percent bullish on what most people call high intent. I think it's a little strange competitively to choose to dive into a red ocean, highly competitive red ocean with everybody else who has the same intent signals and think that you're getting an advantage. I think sometimes folks forget that it's always competitive in sales and I'm thinking B2B sales, but it could be any sales, but B2B especially, it's a zero sum game. Nobody's choosing you and your competitor to solve the same problem. Why would you want to be late? I don't know. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to help us be earlier. I also think it's going to help us understand our sales teams better. It's very, very difficult and it's kind of subtle to figure out what's really going on with your sales team before you've spent an awful lot of money finding out what's going on with your sales team, being able to understand what's actually happening, ask questions of your data in a way that you can understand as a sales leader or a business leader, I think is going to be a big, big impact or have a big impact on sales that as sales will run better because you'll have teams that consist of folks who are doing better because you can ask questions to find out who's really doing better and it's not just who made their number last quarter or last year.  Chris Beall  (05:42): Okay, number two, what's your take on the debate between inbound and outbound marketing strategies? Which one do you think is more effective? This podcast is called Market Dominance Guys and anything could  Chris Beall  (05:56): Be used to dominate markets, but I think it's a question of timing. So in most markets, at least as a market hypothesis, you have an idea of who you'd like to talk to. Well, it's a lot easier and faster just to go talk to people that you'd like to talk to and get information back from them as to what they think of your offering, of your concept, of your product of you than it is to wait for people to come to your website because you did some advertising. So by the way, outbound is also very powerful. Marketing is not just an outbound sales. When you talk to somebody, they're very likely to go to your website on the spot that makes your outbound calling into inbound response. And so you get a response of somebody coming inbound and then by the way, they answer the phone because you called them to get them to come inbound and then you go back outbound.  Chris Beall  (06:53): One thing that's not obvious to most of us until we look at the numbers and we have to look at them back from backwards, from the opportunities back to the conversations that preceded them is negative conversations or negative outcome. Conversations are actually more powerful in driving pipeline and positive conversations. Positive conversations are great, you get a meeting or you get a follow up and you move forward. But interestingly, once somebody's within that safety, that zone of it's okay, I'm not on that call anymore to do what they want to do. Often what they want to do since you interrupted them is they want to complete looking at your website, which you got them to go take a look at. So which is more effective? It's really a question to me of which goes first. You want to do outbound first because you can make a list, which is your market hypothesis, go talk to the subset of that list that answers the phone, get information back sooner, adjust your hypothesis, adjust your message, which is your product at that point and tune faster and more cheaply than you can in AB testing a bunch of messaging on inbound.  Chris Beall  (08:06): So at some point, however you get to the folks who don't answer the phone, fortunately if you use a conversation first strategy, you've already dominated that market and the inbounds come to you because you're the standard. All right, number three, can you share a story about a time where you failed at something in your professional life? How did you bounce back from it? Oh my goodness, I have so many of these. So there's one that comes to mind. I don't know if I bounced back exactly, I suppose I did. I went off into another industry once and tried to run a software style, I'll call it business in a services business that was heavier. It involved floor finishing. It was high tech but not as high tech as software and it was, it's not as light software software businesses are very, very lightweight and you're not carrying equipment, you're not carrying leases, you're not carrying offices.  Chris Beall  (09:03): This particular story, we got up to 22 offices open around the country in nine months. We were growing at 30% a month and we had a product failure across our entire portfolio and I had not raised enough money to buffer ourselves against that product failure. We managed to resolve it in a few days, but a few days wasn't fast enough. We ended up selling the company and how did I bounce back from it? I wasn't feeling very good. It wasn't feeling very good about myself. A dear friend of mine said, reach out to somebody that you know can help and once they accept your help, you'll feel better. So I did that. Somebody happened to be a very dear friend of mine who's a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, and what do you know, a few days later I was in Silicon Valley talking to some folks at a company about their product.  Chris Beall  (09:55): I kind of gave a very firm criticism of the product. I think I said it was a fake and next thing I was running product at that company. I was the E V P of product and I went from being deep in the hole personally and probably feeling that way professionally to having a job, didn't have a car, rode the bicycle to in the dark in the mornings over to light rail and that was all great adventure actually and just kind of grounded out and came back out of that hole and that company actually, we ended up kind of spinning another company off and then the VC in question, they decided to shut it down. I just bounced back from that by going to do some things for some of their other companies and just kind of keeping on how do you stay motivated and focused when faced with challenges or setbacks?  Chris Beall  (10:54): Now this is an interesting question. I've never had a motivation problem. I don't know why. I don't know if I have a focus problem or not. I probably do a lot of different things interest me, but I've never had a motivation problem. So to me, I actually like having the wolf at the doors. I call it, I don't know why. I've always felt more comfortable when I felt like I was under some kind of either time pressure or financial pressure. Both, thank goodness, those things just naturally show up. You don't have to work very hard to bring time, pressure and financial pressure into your life. They will show up. So your life is like a racehorse that eats while you sleep and the wolf will come to your door. The wolf has an incredibly good nose for where there's things that need to be paid attention to.  Chris Beall  (11:47): But I don't know, I've just always been the kind of person who goes, Hey, there's people to help and problems to solve and I'm still alive. So give it a whirl. What is the biggest mistake you see salespeople make? This is question number five and how can they avoid it? Now I'm reading a very good book right now that I highly recommend called the Jolt Effect, I think is what it's called, or Jolt Impact or something like that. It's by the challenger sales folks. And I think it points out this huge mistake that salespeople make and we all make it, which is when somebody is indecisive, when the prospect of inde is indecisive, there's an assumption that they just need to hear more from you. You need to make it more obvious that your solution has value that they're going to miss out. If they don't take that value, maybe throw a little fear, uncertainty and doubt in there.  Chris Beall  (12:38): And I think not recognizing that what you need to do is recognize that this person has a hard time making a decision right now, de-risk the decision for them in some way. Can you take some of that pressure off in order to let them stop backing away from you into an indecisive mode? And that's difficult to do because as salespeople, we all want the deal. So how do we stay sincere and on the other person's side when we want the deal? And then how do we not waste our time? If sales was easy, everybody would be doing it well, but most people don't do it well. But the big mistake I see is exactly that. I call a version of this. I have a whole episode on it called the Dog and the Bone and the Chainlink Fence. And it salespeople often act like a dog who's trying to get to a juicy bone on the other side of a chainlink fence and instead of recognizing that the path to the bone is to go 10 feet to the right and through the gate, they just keep pushing their nose into the fence.  Chris Beall  (13:45): They get so close to what feels like success that they can't back up and see that there might be another path. And that path often has to do with the emotions of the other person. So it's something to think about. Okay, so number six. How do you think technology is changing the way sales teams work and collaborate? Two different questions. There's work and there's collaborate. I think collaborate technology is doing a little better at than work. I think technology often makes sales teams do more work because much technology, software technology, CRMs a good example, says like Audrey, the mediating plant at Little Shop of Horrors feed me. And you feel like you're feeding the technology data all the time. And then the question is, what's it doing for you? And yo lafa notice when management is frustrated with their view of what's going on in sales, they demand that more data be put in the C R M.  Chris Beall  (14:54): So how does it work for you? Not quite so obvious. So I actually don't think technology tends to change the way sales teams work in a way that reduces work would be, which would be great. I think it is useful for collaboration mostly in ways that we don't recognize the ability to share a document with somebody else, send it to them, have them make some comments on it and bring it back. In particular, collaborating with buyers I think is easier now with technology. And imagine if you had to go to somebody's shop and take that big binder out or that folder, remembrance, I don't know. Most of you probably don't, when slides were something you put up on an overhead and you drew on. I know technology has just made it a lot easier to have conversations now using whatever support you need in terms of images and in terms of data than you could have before.  Chris Beall  (15:50): Now, does this always make sales go faster? Probably not, but sometimes it does. And I think in a collaboration sense with the potential customer, I think we collaborate a little better or easier I guess with technology seven, what's your opinion on the role of emotional intelligence in sales and how can salespeople develop the skill? Read Jeb Blunt's book Sales eq. That's my recommend recommendation. Anybody listening to this, he wrote a whole book on the subject, emotional intelligence is the number one thing you need in sales. It's probably number two and probably number three also, again, I'll go back to this jolt effect or jolt impact. If I remember the name of the book, I wouldn't be, well maybe I'll ask chat g p t what the name of the book has. Anyway, when I go to look at that, well, the first thing in jolt is J, which is judging whether the difficulty somebody's having making a decision is because they love the status quo or because they're indecisive.  Chris Beall  (16:55): Well, this requires a lot of emotional intelligence to read the cues, to read those T leaves. And it requires a lot of emotional intelligence to tell if somebody is concerned that you're not going to deliver or concerned that you're not on their side or worried that perhaps they're going to look bad by making a decision with you because you're not the preferred number one. Everybody goes with that kind of stuff, requires emotional intelligence. And the sooner you can detect what's going on with the other person emotionally, the better reading the room is another situation. I've been in lots and lots of meetings in my life where it took a fair amount of emotional intelligence to recognize that person. Almost always a guy in that back left corner who didn't say anything. That's the one who's going to ask at the end of this presentation that's going to feel like a spear being chucked into my chest, right?  Chris Beall  (17:54): They've got something that they're going to try to kill me with. And having the emotional intelligence to recognize that and then kind of arrange so that the room is on your side before that happens or so that person realizes it's a bad idea to expose themselves through that question, that those are high skills. That's where the deals are made or not made, failed in the big enterprises. So developing the skill, mostly it requires that you look at yourself, you look at your own behavior probably with somebody else helping you and figure out where is it that you get bound up inside yourself that you can't feel free about noticing how somebody else feels and being able to label those feelings. Learning to label your own feelings, which is something Chris Vo talks about and label the situation and the feelings of somebody else is really key.  Chris Beall  (18:55): Until you can label emotions, you probably can't reason about them. And if you can't reason about 'em, you're not going to be able to use emotional intelligence. Number eight, how do you measure the success of your sales team and what metrics do you use? Well, the most obvious one is are they making the number? But I mean you didn't need chat G p T to ask this question to me, right? Everybody wants to know are you making the number? What I'm particularly interested in from a metrics perspective are flow rates. So I'm interested in the flow rate of conversations with relevant people and those are first conversations, they're follow up conversations and then they're scheduled meetings. If those flow rates are not continuing for at least smoothly or growing because your business plan calls for them to growth, you got problems. And so right now, for instance, I am thrilled that the flow rate of test drives at connect and sell.  Chris Beall  (19:53): We do a thing called intensive test drive. It's a full day of production of our system. It's mind blowing. People love it. It's not a demo, it's like full production. They're talking to real people, they're setting meetings, they're learning stuff from the feedback from prospects, and they're building pipeline. So you know what? What's not to like? Well, I don't know, everything's got friction and getting somebody to like it enough to do it. And we took some friction out of our way of selling these free test drives and voila, we suddenly had twice as many coming in per day or at least being signed. So that's a good thing and that's one of the ways I measured. I like to look at sales as though it's manufacturing. That is you're moving something through a system and you're processing it along the way at different stations, just like manufacturing workstations.  Chris Beall  (20:47): So I want to know where is the bottleneck right now? So one of the metrics I use is where's inventory building up? We increase the flow rates of test drives that have been signed. Well, does that mean there's now a bottleneck right in front of test drives that are being delivered? Probably. I mean, after all, why would we have had twice the capacity for delivery in advance? It's normally the case that if you increase the flow rate of something upstream in a process, you'll move the bottleneck downstream. So the metrics I'm using, there are the backlog of test drives pretty simple, but then you've got to really dig into the data and make sure you're not just accepting glibly what some report says. You've got to make sure that whatever the distinctions are that are made in the report, they're actually correct that they're distinctions based on real data.  Chris Beall  (21:38): And you've got to make sure you don't fall into what I call the counting problem where it's like, oh, I have five of these, but are they all equal sized? So you have counting and then you have measuring, and they're two different things and it's easy to get them kind of confused with each other. So those are some metrics and the others are productivity metrics that I expect and want to have running pretty smoothly. And if they don't run smoothly, then something's up. So for instance, how many meetings are being set per hour per rep when they're prospecting? So our S D R team prospects at just about 0.51 hours per rep per or meetings per rep hour. And I look at that every day and in fact, I'm going to look at it right now, you can't see this, but hey, take my word for it.  Chris Beall  (22:30): So here we are on the 10th of May, 2023, and I can go into my connect and sell system and I can click a couple of buttons and I can get an answer to that question. So the team has set 25 meetings today on 403 conversations, and those conversations took a total of 55 hours and four minutes and 18 seconds, and in order to get those conversations, it took 7,562 dials, which by the way, the team didn't do. So what are the meetings per rep hour today? They're at 0.45. That's a little bit off. So then I ask myself the question, what is it off due to? Is it off? Because the conversations per rep hour is low, it's 7.32 today. That seems reasonable to me. Is it the conversion rate? Now the conversion rate is down a tiny bit today it's 6.20. This team tends to convert in sort of the mid seven range, seven plus percent.  Chris Beall  (23:30): It could be that we've unleashed some new lists on them and they're very cold or cold, less convert at a lower level than less efficiently than follow up lists. It could be that their wait times are a little, and in fact they are, they're four minutes today. So then I can look into, well, who is that true? For one of the reps, it's 11 minutes and 12 seconds. For the rest it's around three. What's going on with that rep? You see where this goes, right? The metric leads you toward root causes if you have the data. I like data that tells me how many units of something are being produced per hour because all we have at the end of the day is the day and the day only has so many hours. So that's what I prefer and kind of what I look at every day.  Chris Beall  (24:21): I frankly don't know how CEOs run companies who don't have access to this kind of information, but apparently they do. But I think they're kind of stuck looking at trailing indicators. I like looking at leading indicators. In your experience, what are the most effective strategies for building strong relationships with clients and customers? Number one, be on their side. It's so easy in customer situations, client situations to say, well, I represent my company so I've got to be on our side, and everything's got to be very transactional. Get all this kind of talk when you come right down to it, to me anyway, if you want to have a strong relationship with somebody and you're the expert in what they're buying and they're the expert in what they're doing, you need to be generous with your expertise. And so it means going that extra mile, that little bit farther with regard to providing help and you always can provide more help.  Chris Beall  (25:26): It's one of the reasons I prefer not to have lots of paid professional services in my company. Some people love that, but I think kind of it gets you in a position of saying, well, you're transacting for every hour of our time and we're not going to give you anything at the margin. The fact is there's a lot of unknown in any complex relationship. You're trying to accomplish difficult things together. You're going to run into unknowns. Who's going to step up and try to learn what that unknown is and how to resolve it first? I think that as the seller, it's smart to be first to step up, first to go toward the problem rather than conserving or hours in your resources. Now obviously you have to make money and you have to figure out what is okay to give. And if somebody's using you and I'll use that word, then you've got to stop letting them use you.  Chris Beall  (26:28): But that's not the normal problem that we run into. The normal problem is clients and customers over time start to feel transacted. They start to feel used, and if they're feeling used, they're going to look around for somebody who's going to help them without using them. Alright, so here's an easy one for me. We have episodes on this in market dominance guys. Number 10. How do you ensure that your sales messaging is resonating with your target audience? It's actually pretty simple. Your sales messaging, first and foremost, as got to set meetings, it needs to compel the best and repel the rest. A meeting setting rate of about 5% on cold calls tells you that for that particular audience, for that particular target audience, you're doing okay, you're above threshold. You can run 5% on cold calls and eight, nine, 10% on follow-up calls and make sure you have rescheduled meeting calls because meetings get blown and you're doing all right.  Chris Beall  (27:33): Now your conversion rate of downstream activities is a little bit different. And at every level you've got to check, one of the things you should be looking for I look for is across the team, are the conversion rates similar? If they're highly variable, then we have a hidden variable somewhere. There's something we need to go in and figure out. It's not the messaging obviously, maybe it's how it's being delivered. Maybe there's a subtlety in somebody's voice or in how they respond to questions or how they ask questions in discovery. So that's where you're getting down to using performance issues around what's not messaging, because the messaging is locked. Using those performance issues to find out where you could be doing better. Because wherever you have those gaps, those are opportunities to learn to do better. Number 11, what advice would you give to somebody who's just starting their career in sales?  Chris Beall  (28:31): If you can sell something you believe in, because when you don't believe in something, you acquire very, very bad habits. In sales. I mean, sales is not a profession that should best be built, unprofessional, lying or tricks or manipulation. What you're really doing is you're becoming an expert in something so that you can help somebody else understand whether the solution that your company offers is the one that you would recommend as an expert. So it's very difficult to get yourself in the position, the strong position of simply saying, Hey, based on what you've said so far, what we've discovered together, my strong recommendation is that you do X. That's the ultimate thing to be able to say in sales. You want to be able to say that frankly every single time. By the way, X could be that you don't do anything at this time or that you don't work with us.  Chris Beall  (29:30): But if you're representing something that you believe in and your qualification process has any chops at all, you're going to more often than not be able to honestly recommend that they take a next step that makes sense, that includes working with you and your company and moving forward. So choose carefully because if you choose to represent a product that you don't believe in or that you anti believe in, you'll acquire acquire very quickly. All of the worst habits of a salesperson and your career in sales will end up struggling as you're dealing with two things. One is the ineffectiveness of tricks. Sales is not a bag of tricks. Two is your own feelings about your profession. You may rightly or wrongly start to feel like you're not being straight up with people. And so pick carefully. And by the way, one of the reasons that buyers in B2B especially tend to go with who they think is the best salesperson is they believe that the best salesperson has their pick of the products and therefore they pick the best product.  Chris Beall  (30:41): So it works the other way around. Pick a product you believe in and then don't worry so much at the very beginning about how much you're being paid. Be concerned with how you can learn to be an expert on something that allows you to be helpful. Well, as Anthony Ior Reno says, staying one up, that is knowing more than the other party. Number 12, what are the biggest challenges facing sales leaders today and how can they overcome them? Well, Helen Fucci has been on this podcast a couple of times, and she wrote a book called Love Your Team, A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. So I'm going to map this question about leaders on the managers, and here's the issue, it's today, it's tomorrow, and it's forever. Your success depends on your team's performance and your team's performance actually depends mostly on whether you support them, whether you support them, and by the way, as a team.  Chris Beall  (31:43): So if you have somebody on the team that's underperforming, you owe the team really, really good performance management of that person and you owe that person and yourself an open mind with regard to what's going to happen as a result of that performance management. So becoming a great performance manager is a huge challenge. Very few sales leaders are capable of doing great performance management, but if you don't do it, the rest of your team will feel like, Hey, apparently we don't hold ourselves to high standards here. Somebody is able to do whatever and kind of get away with it. And so it's stuff like that. It is, how can you get to the point quickly where your team, which is now going to be hybrid and quite capable of moving on, your best performers can move to another company and sell another product in a heartbeat.  Chris Beall  (32:37): So how can you keep your team intact? How can you keep them being effective? And how can you do it without manipulating them? Well, I advise that you read Helen's book and it doesn't matter what kind of manager you are, and think about this, that love your team is the answer to the big challenge. And the challenge is these days the talent can walk out the door without taking a single step. And always as a sales leader or a sales manager, the performance of the team determines your success. So those are my 12 questions. I thank chat g p t for so quickly writing them up. I hope that my answers are of some value to the audience here. And had we had Corey Frank around on this, he would've done a much better job than I did of asking these questions. But on the other hand, hey, Corey, coming up with great questions is one of the things that you do and chat g p t, not as subtle as you, not as many fantastic historical and literary references, and I know your poetry is much better, but hey, not bad. Not bad. So until next time, for Corey Frank, this is Chris Beal, market dominance. Guys, go out and dominate.

In this episode Chris Beall discusses the common mistakes made by CEOs when seeking funding and how venture capitalists (VCs) make their decisions. Chris explains that VCs are in the business of pattern matching, meaning they compare the characteristics of a company seeking funding to those of successful companies they have previously funded. However, this approach can lead to the exclusion of companies that do not fit the pattern. He uses his own company, ConnectAndSell, as an example, explaining that his company's reputation and the age of its founders did not match the pattern favored by VCs, but the company was still successful. He also notes that VCs often encourage companies to spend their funding on headcount, specifically sales development representatives (SDRs), who set meetings for account executives. Beall calls this a "comfort" for VCs, but emphasizes that it may not always be the most effective use of funding. Join Susan Finch as she takes the host’s chair with Chris as her guest for this episode, “Conversations Over Headcount: What VCs Should be Counting.”   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Susan Finch (02:35): Okay. Well, Chris, I know this is near and dear to you, and you have a lot of experience in this, and you've had many successes and maybe a couple failures along the way, but that makes your successes all the more sweet. I'm wondering, what would your advice be for CEOs as they're seeking to get funding, and what are the biggest mistakes that they make thinking that it's an obvious, oh, that's obvious. You need to do that, or that's obvious you need to do that. What are those assumptions that they make that it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. How can you guide them with a small checklist, what they need to be aware of, where the common pitfalls are and how to avoid them?  Chris Beall (03:18): That's a fantastic question. When you take money as a founder from VCs, especially venture capitalists, you're taking money from folks whose business is pattern matching. So what they do is they match your company as you describe it, and as their due diligence reveals it to other companies that they have seen that are in the same categories or similar categories to yours. And if the patterns match enough with previous success, then they might be inclined to fund you. So I'll give a counter example. A few years ago, about three or four years ago, the head of strategy of Google Cloud called me out of the blue. Now this is somebody I actually had met at a conference. We'd become friends. I'd actually sold connect and sell to Kaizer Compressors before his eyes at the conference as kind of a demo. What do you do? I said, I won't tell you what we do, point to somebody at lunch and I'll sell it to them and you'll learn what we do.  Chris Beall (04:16): So we became friends. And a little while later, a couple months later, he called me and he said, we're Google As, and I said, yes, I'm fully aware of your goos. And he said, well, so we know everything. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. And he said, I mean literally everything. And I said, yes, you are creeping me out now lj. So get on with it. And he says, well, I just want to tell you, we've come to the conclusion that Connect and Sell is the most interesting company in Silicon Valley. And I said, well, that's a very weird word to apply. Interesting. If my children use it, I say, try another adjective. So you're going to get away with it because as you say, you're a Google, but what do you mean? I said, well, for one thing, your reputation is just bizarre.  Chris Beall (05:05): It's like off the charts strange five Sigma to the right of everybody else. I said, that's not very interesting to me. He said, okay, well, here's something that might be interesting. You're very, very old. I said, no, we're not. We're like a 13 year old company. He said, not your company, human beings who run, connect, and sell are so old. And this is the pattern matching part. So old, there is no chance that you've ever been properly funded in Silicon Valley because you don't match the pattern for founders. Founders are predominantly these young-ish thirties males who that's kind of it, who went to Stanford or whatever it was, and they've got an idea, but they look like each other. And this is why women I think, have such a hard time getting funded as they're sort of like human beings have got some real skills at telling people from people according to their perception of somebody's gender.  Chris Beall (06:09): So my point is, here's a pattern matcher. In fact, there's a whole cadre of 'em. They go up and down Sandhill Road, and what they're doing is they're matching patterns of companies they've seen and they believe, everybody believes that whatever works for step A of A process must work for step B. Step A is deciding who to invest in Step v B is helping them along the way. As a helpful board member, you're a vc, you're on their board, and now you're going to say, here's how you help them. I want to see X, whatever X is. What's your plan? How are you going to use our money? Well, the pattern of using venture money is to spend it on headcount early in the cycle. You spend it on headcount. And headcount is therefore a good thing to a vc always has been. And it's a comfort.  Chris Beall (07:04): If you're a venture capitalist, it's a comfort when one of your portfolio companies buys heads, they buy people. Why? Because you can count why they're called head count. Otherwise they'd be called human beings. But nobody calls 'em. Human beings call 'em head count. Okay, I count 'em. And then if you can claim you're getting leverage, because everybody in the financial world loves leverage. I get a two for one. What's that? Well, I hire them and I hire them as sales development representatives, SDRs, and they set meetings for my current crop of account executives and thereby give them more work to do, so to speak, more companies to sell to that have been selected by our SDRs through their research and their outreach. And that sounds great. I wrote a book about it called Predictable Revenue. It's got to be good. It's like, here's the reasoning pattern.  Chris Beall (08:01): Salesforce successful salesforce.com. How was it done? According to this book, it was done by this specialization thing. Let's do more of that. So VCs love to measure what can easily be seen because they don't have very much time is their constrained resource, not money. I was just talking to somebody yesterday. I said, oh, and therefore, and he said something about what a VC we'd want, assuming that what they're trying to do is to have a higher proportion of their investments, of their portfolio succeed. And I said, you don't get VCs. VCs want that one in 10. They want the others to go away relatively quickly to free up their time so they can go get another 10 of which one will be a unicorn. That's their model. These are not, they're not nurturing. What they're doing is pruning like any good gardeners do, right? Oh, it  Susan Finch (08:56): Sounds so dark and evil.  Chris Beall (08:59): Well, it is it, and it isn't actually a legit way of thinking about how to make a whole bunch of money at the edge of innovation as you get the mega innovations and then you salvage the rest. And by salvage being over dramatic but not much. Right? Read the financing documents from any VC sometime and ask about each word. Who's this word for and what's it for? And most of the words are for what happens when things don't work and when things don't work, these words protect the VC so they can salvage value out of the company, and then they recycle the people. So if they're all suicide missions, some of which fail that is they don't reach suicide, they reach unicorn status, and then you recycle the people. And so everybody's working for, I'll call it VC Inc, right? Well, here's your problem as a founder, if you go down this path, you are going to get advised or we're going to get advised until very recently to lay on headcount in the form of sales development reps who will become account executives.  Chris Beall (10:01): That's your two for one. Not only some meetings, but hey, look, I get free recruiting. I got 'em already, right? The problem that you're going to have as a founder is for your own good, the good of your company, which you have a fiduciary responsibility too, for your own good. That capital efficiency is fantastic. That is, if you had a choice between 10 reps having four conversations a day and one rep having 40 conversations a day, you would do the math and you'd take the one rep every time the VC does the pattern matching, takes the 10 reps every time. And so the 10 reps are going to have four conversations a day. And that, by the way, is pretty standard, right? Okay. And now your scaling mechanism, say they always talk about scaling as a substitute for growth, scaling sounds great and multiplying numbers together.  Chris Beall (11:00): That's so much better than adding. So let's scale. So let's go from 10 to 20. Let's go from 20 to 40. I had this conversation once with the head of business development company called Zenefits. I think they're still around. They got in some trouble at one point. His job was to hire and train onboard, et cetera, et cetera, 250 SDRs in Phoenix. From scratch. From scratch. And I asked, I was alone with them at lunch. And I said, well, that's a lot why? And he said, well, it's what the VCs want because we're, we do the math, you put it in a spreadsheet and each one of these people produces so much output per day, and some of them become AEs, and that provides us with our flow of future account executives, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I asked him flat out, I said, I could show you how to do that job with 25 people instead of 250.  Chris Beall (11:58): What would you say? And he said, I'd say no. Why would you say no? He said, well, the VCs want us to hire to show we can hire 250 people to scale the business. This sounds to what I'll call a normal business person in say, middle American. Say you're running any kind of a thing like running casser compressors and your name's Matt McCorkle and somebody says, your job is just to hire lots of people in order to scale the business. You'd brawl your eyes and say, not here in Milwaukee. We don't do that right across our country, but in Silicon Valley land, this is regur. And yet just, I just want to say for you, the founders, the money wants you to do what the money is comfortable watching you do. So they want it to match the pattern that they're comfortable with, and they want it to be visible, easy to count. So here's something that's easy to count, head count, but you know what else is easy to count? And it's on this picture right behind me here is actually conversations, relevant conversations. Now, weaning your VCs from headcount conversations is probably really hard. But before you take on the headcount, think about establishing the conversation flow of the business as the replacement for the headcount. How many conversations per day are we having with potentially relevant targets?  Susan Finch (13:29): So I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. Then when I'm seeking I'm A C E O, I'm seeking funding, I'm seeking VCs. They are not going to see that logic. They only want it done their way. Even though the way that you're proposing would be way more profitable, the company would be stronger and more stable, and it would grow at a very realistic, manageable pace. But I'm going to have to fight for that with the VC to actually get them to understand this concept. Or they don't care.  Chris Beall (14:02): Yeah, they're not, you're going to do worse than fight with them. You're going to be, you're not going to get funded. That's all there is to, I mean, the now times are changing. So we've entered a period of, I'll call it a desire for capital efficient go to market even among venture finance companies, because now they're all looking at what they call runway extension. So think about these terms, right? Runway is the amount of distance an airplane has to get in the air. So they're saying their companies are not in the air, they're not flying. They're just trundling along the ground, bouncing along, trying to gain enough air speed to lift off. Well, what keeps you from lifting off? Well, weighing too much. There's a reason that I just saw hummingbird go by. It can fly. SPI can't. I can flap really, really fast. I could put some wings on, but you know what?  Chris Beall (15:00): 225 pounds going that way? That's all there is to it. There's no heaven above and hell below, but I'm staying right here because I can flap until every bit of flapping is done. But they have this notion of runway. So what they're doing now is saying to their companies, Hey, funding is going to be tight for the next round. Probably won't happen. You guys need to become capital efficient and extend your runway. So now is the time actually when as a founder ceo, E O or just a plain old c e o, because they got rid of the founder and you're now on a series C or D or whatever, and it's like, well, how are you going to extend your runway? Well, one thing you can do is radically shrink your top of funnel team. In fact, I was just talking to Sean C who was talking about big company, and they completely eliminated their SD R T, and now the AEs are expected to prospect.  Chris Beall (15:55): Well, that's actually a good thing, but only if the AEs are given the means to prospect. Because here's another problem, folks add all these tools to their stack. So that's the other thing that the VCs will tell you. Tools in the stack, tools in the stack, you got to have a sales stack. You'd think that this stack goes out and sells for you. But what they like about it is you can see it. You can name it like, oh, there's an outreach or a SalesLoft. There's a sales force, there's a sixth sense, there's, there's that. They're names. People are comforted by this kind of stuff. So the stack is going to go do the work. Well, here's a rule to apply as a C E O to every single element of your stack. Does it allow somebody to do something valuable, somebody in my sales team or marketing team or whatever to do something that has measurable value that otherwise they would not have done?  Chris Beall (16:45): Notice I didn't say, does it reduce the time that it takes to do something of value? As we all know, when you free up time, every leader of every company knows this. When you free up time at the individual level, you generate what we call used to call water cooler time. That is now there's what is this law? Law, right? Work expands to fill the time allocated. Well, it works the other way around too. If you shrink the time required, the work will, the amount of work will just stay the same. You'll just shift the time into idle time, which is interesting. But if you have technologies that enable something to happen that literally would not have otherwise happened, and that thing's of value, that's a valuable part of your stack because then you can measure what it does and say, I have this. I wouldn't have had it at all.  Chris Beall (17:37): Right? So that's immune to Parkinson's law. It's in and it's inverse. So it's kind of funny. Think about conversations. So if you were to take your average AE team and say, sorry, no more sales development or business developed BDRs or whatever, nobody's feeding you. So unlike bears at the zoo, having meatballs popped into your mouth, you now have to go out and do some foraging. You're going to have to turn over some logs and lick some ants up, and you're going to have to go stand on a river with your mouth open and hope a salmon jumps into it, whatever it is, you're going to have to start doing that stuff like you did back when you know, can barely remember, right? Well, if you do that, your issue isn't that they will do more or a less conversational word calling, for instance, ambushing people than they did before.  Chris Beall (18:30): They'll have to go from zero to something, right? Because they're doing zero right now. So if they're doing zero and you want to have to do something, then providing a means to do that something easily will actually move the needle because they'll do it rather than not doing it. That's the key. When you think about your sales stack or whatever, any of these stack things, just categorize 'em like this, does this, let one identifiable person over here do something of value for our company that I can measure that they would not have done before at all. That's how you think about your sales stack in a safe way  Susan Finch (19:13): That really thins out the list.  Chris Beall (19:15): It thins out the list,  Susan Finch (19:16): Holy cow. Because if we, as soon as you take out the, does it just save time? No, no, no, no, no. Is it something new of value only,  Chris Beall (19:26): Something that wouldn't have done?  Susan Finch (19:28): Oh my gosh.  Chris Beall (19:30): And that. So if you apply that rule and now you think about capital efficiency and say, well, what do I need? What is the one thing I need? I need conversations. I don't think anybody actually disagrees with this. This is not a Chris Beal controversial statement like, oh my God, that guy bee, he's saying it again. What is this? With the conversations already, what about just like having closed one business walk in the door? Well closed one business doesn't walk in the door. Very many places. I mean, we went out to sirens last night here in Port Townson and had a nice margarita and looked out at the water and watched the river rotters, which we don't have sea otters here. We walked in the door, but they had to pay the rent in advance, right? Well, in regular innovation economy businesses, ain't nobody walking in the door.  Chris Beall (20:16): You got to go out and get 'em. And you have to introduce them to an idea. So now the question is, what is the most capital efficient way to do this? And the reason I have this little thing behind me, which people not watching this on video, can't see, it's called an attribution report, is it shows something shocking about capital efficiency. And it says, if you enable your people to just have conversations with targets who are probably in your target market, they're good hypotheses, right? Something magical happens that you're completely unaware of in advance. And that is not only do you have conversations, do your people have conversations that lead to meetings that lead to net new business? No one's obvious conversation leads to meetings, leads to business. That's what you were trying to get with your SDRs. So say you say no, everybody's going to be their own SD R, but I'm going to provision with them with the means of effortlessly having conversations with relevant people in a way that the boss can actually see happened.  Chris Beall (21:18): I can listen to them, I can think about them. I can analyze the targeting, and I can do it all without a lot of help. I can use some primitive product, I don't know, Microsoft Excel or something to do this. So say I do that, here's what I'm going to find, the positive conversations, the ones that, so super conversations that set meetings actually are, the least benefit that I'm going to get is a company from net new conversations. Most of the benefit is going to come from the advertising impact of talking to people. So for every meeting that's said, and if you look at these people can't see these numbers here, but I could probably arrange to see them. Just  Susan Finch (22:01): Give us an example. Give us a  Chris Beall (22:03): Few. So our, so I'm looking at ConnectAndSell's own numbers here over a period of time of I think three years. So during this time, we generated, our team generated 128 million. So pipeline, by having conversations, that means conversations that led to meetings, and those meetings led to opportunities in the pipeline. And those opportunities turn into all sorts of stuff. Some expire, some are lost and all that. They got to get in the pipeline before you have a chance. So 128 million in the pipeline based on 5,671 opportunities generated from 220,000 conversations. Okay? That's our team. So that sounds pretty good. Those pipeline dollars are being generated and get this number, $4,152 per rep, hour per hour that a rep spends in just one conversation after another, including taking notes, wrapping up, waiting for the conversations. On average, about three minutes and 20 seconds each. It's about $4,000 an hour.  Chris Beall (23:16): When I look at what, but what about the negative conversations? What if I throw those in the mix? So I have the ones that set meetings, and then I have the ones where they said, Hey, they're interested or whatever, but they don't take a meeting. But what about all of them? Well, I go from 128 million to 177. Where does that extra, roughly speaking, 50 million of pipeline come from, by the way, that came with an additional four point something million of closed one business. Where did it come from? Came from talking to people who then went to our website. Did they love the website or hate the website? We don't know. All we know is it was better than a Google ad because we were talking with them and they went to the website. Why is it better than a Google ad one targeting? They were on our target list.  Chris Beall (24:11): We're not idiots. We put people on our target list that we're targeting. That's why it's called targeting. So it's better targeting than you get from advertising. Conversations are better targeted than advertisements because they can be, right? It's just like they can be. Secondly, there is trust influence. When you have a conversation with somebody and you hold it with any amount of skill and its purpose is to build trust. Now you have a person who trusts somebody at your company actually looking at your website. Now, there's a third thing that happens. If you send them an email, they open it. Why? Because the email says, thank you for our conversation today. Or the really powerful email comes from the boss and says, thank you for speaking with my colleague today. Yes, it's very personal. It's actual gratitude. You talk to one of my peeps, I love you.  Chris Beall (25:05): And guess what? That comes with a link to the website. And so now you have a new relationship that's formed. You have an extension of trust over time. Those mature, we all know from all of us market dominance. Guys know, right? That only one 12 of your market is in market right now. 11 twelves is out there in the future. So now how are you going to get 'em in the future to become the present? When the present rolls around, well have a relationship with them, but it's not an abstract relationship. It's concrete. It starts the conversation. And it's not a vacuous relationship. It actually has content because they went to your website. In fact, think about this. When you speak with somebody, the biggest mistake you can make other than blowing the trust part of the conversation, the first seven seconds, seconds is telling them what you're all about.  Chris Beall (25:59): Why? Because they'll say, we're all set. Well, when they go to your website during the conversation, your website says what you're all about. So when they say, we're all set, it might not be because they listened to you. You might not have blown it. Your website blew it. Your website was obliged to say what you do. And they look at that and they go, it looks like with connect and saw, they go, oh, it looks like a dial. I don't need no stinking. I already got a dial of some kind. What do I want? This thing? But then, well, then this information comes to them in the form of an email. It says, thank you for the conversation today. It's like, that's different. They actually followed up with, then you talked to them a quarter later. Did they take a meeting? Not necessarily, but they're reminded now. So the ultimate drip advertising campaign doesn't drip content onto somebody in a Chinese water torture fashion. And that was not anything about people. Chinese, it's just a phrase. We'll just say water torture, which is drip, drip, drip. I don't know why we use Drip to say that we're doing something to somebody That's good because it's not good.  Susan Finch (27:16): Does not sound good  Chris Beall (27:18): In our house. The toilet is dripping on the floor. Oh, so great. I don't know. Why did marketing people choose the word drip? I have no idea. But if we really want to drip some love on somebody and talk to 'em once a quarter, that's the consideration cycle. The replacement cycle for products is three years. The consideration cycle is a quarter. Therefore, we talk to 'em once a quarter. Every time we talk to them, they're not going to just jump in a meeting. We're going to go from 5% to 10% taking meetings. But more and more often they end up visiting our website more and more often. They sign up for our podcast. So that's a kind I wanted to talk about. The money will drive you to do something dumb, do something smart, have fewer people, lots more conversations, and take advantage of the fact that negative conversations drive more pipeline even than meetings.  Susan Finch (28:18): I think that's great advice. Getting back to one wrap up point though, I'm going to ask the question again. How, or rephrase it. How do people seeking funding, CEOs seeking funding, help find the VCs that are actually interested in this type of logic rather than just headcounts?  Chris Beall (28:38): Oh, it's a tough one right now here, here's the key to funding. Don't need it.  Susan Finch (28:42): Yeah.  Chris Beall (28:43): The key to funding, really the key to funding is turn on capital efficiency at a very high level early. Except that your growth is not going to be instantaneous. You don't need to pattern match either, unless that's your biz right. Now, the other thing you can do is you can kind of do it like this. This is what I call the slow roll. So you take the money, but you turn on the efficiency immediately anyway. Nobody's going to tell you not to do that. And then it turns out you're generating the conversation. So mix the conversation flow into your board package. This quarter we had this many conversations with decision makers, right? So don't leave it out. Don't let the head count and the stack be what somehow magically did the work, right? Provide that little link in between. That said, we had this many conversations and here's our efficiency metric around them.  Chris Beall (29:40): And even better go with an attribution capability that looks at your pipeline starting from day one and point back at the conversations and say, pipeline influenced by conversations that set meetings pipeline influenced by conversations that had positive outcomes. Pipeline influenced by any conversation. Put that in front of your board every quarter or however often you meet six times a year or whatever, and get them accustomed to thinking about capital efficiency and go to market in concrete terms. And after a while, they'll start to get a little okay with the fact that you didn't hire 30 SDRs that you only ended up hiring. Fa.  Susan Finch (30:25): Love it. That's great, Chris. Well, we're going to wrap up this conversation because I think we can do a part two at another point. Cause I would like to tackle a few more questions and give some action items to people because a lot of people are new. But I love the way to actually way it's easy for you to say don't need it, but to be able to give a checklist of you might need it if you might need it. If I think that'd be a great follow up episode.  Chris Beall (30:56): It would be. And there is an actual program. We have the folks at Partner Tap doing it. So Partner Tap was introduced to me by Helen and it's, this is Cassandra who's at the heart of the Fem Empire, which is the thing that Helen has been doing now. You must have seen it, right? She does these dinners and she gets invited to them by Cassandra. Well, she, intro Helen introduced me to Cassandra. Cassandra said, I'm going to hire 10 reps. I asked her, how many do you have? She said, none. I said, you're seven years in and you're succeeding in this business and you have no reps,  Susan Finch (31:33): Right?  Chris Beall (31:34): Why are you going to hire 10 reps? Well, I've got to scale the business. I said, okay, so do me a favor. Instead of hiring 10 reps, let's take an intermediate step. You are the rep, right? Yes. Let's get you more meetings. I'm going to introduce you to Cheryl Turner. Cheryl Turner will work with you where you can learn to get more meetings on your own, but she will also set meetings for you, I believe. Feel free to go do a deal with her that where she'll help you. And then you'll have a pattern that you can use for the behavior of the first rep you hire. Then you have a success pattern. So it's not like hire a rep and hope it's hire a rep who is going to do specifically what Cheryl is doing, which is hold conversations, get meetings, and they'll bring you in in order to be the closer. Then you'll wean them over time from being the closer and they'll set meetings for themselves. And then you can hire a second rep. That's great that that's a success program and you can't sort of can't fail. And she said, whoa. I said, you do realize you'll destroy your company if you hire 10 reps. We're going to learn that you don't know how to hire 10 reps. And guess what? I already know that.  Susan Finch (32:55): Yep,  Chris Beall (32:56): Great. Can't be done.  Susan Finch (32:58): Yeah. Scaling up. People think it only means one thing. So of reframe it to the ultimate goals times. You do have to step back and just throw that old plan away. And like you said, all the patterns.  Chris Beall (33:10): Yeah, yeah. If you substitute conversations for headcount and you make that your focus every day, how many conversations are we having with whom? And then you start asking what's happening as a result, but not what are we forcing to happen as a result. Exactly. So it's that relaxation in between that says, let's see what's happening from these conversations.  Susan Finch (33:33): That's hard for people to do. It is can kind of sit and watch. They just want to keep making it happen. Making it happen. Yeah.  Chris Beall (33:39): Yeah. All the forcing. All the forcing only forces one thing to happen. Anxiety. Anyway. Well, thanks so much. It was really fun.   

In this episode, Chris and Corey discuss the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and its potential impact on the startup ecosystem and the broader economy. Chris explains that the venture capital industry is important for occasionally making an important company, but most of what Silicon Valley funds is R&D for unnamed corporate investors. He thinks debt will become more popular in the future because it has advantages for both parties, and he expects debt to be democratized more. They guys also discuss how the innovation economy depends on innovations that diffuse through the economy through various means and how the VC industry operates as a salvage yard for VCs in advance of failure. Finally, Corey and Chris predict that debt will become more popular and democratized in the future as more debt players come in to help companies and the pure equity games become trickier to play. Join us for this episode, "The Salvage Yard: A Hidden Gem of Silicon Valley."   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Chris Beall (00:00): We knew one thing for sure. The first time interest rates were raised by the Fed, the tech economy was going to lose a big chunk of its value. And when you lose a big chunk of value fast, more value goes out immediately because of the fear that all the value is going to go out, it's going to zero. So as soon as the Fed raised interest rates, the entire world of tech, which is predicated on zero interest rates, the valuations as a multiple of revenue went down, how far should it have gone down? Who knows, right? But it went down 70% or something. So Silicon Valley Bank as an example, it's customers suddenly lost 70% of their value in 24 hours. And that was predictable. That was completely predictable. So that effect had nothing to do with inflation, because what Silicon Valley companies charge for their products is not relevant in the economy.  Chris Beall (00:58): Trust. It doesn't cause anybody to have to pay more for a grapefruit. It just doesn't. So there's this tight coupling within Silicon Valley of the companies and how they're correlated. There's this centrality of mechanism. It's kind of like, why have two banks when you can have one? Sure, sure. PCs don't like variety. So who wants variety? Let's just, then there was even more correlation and coupling. Oh, wealth management. We'll do that for you, right? We'll give you your line of credit. We'll, all this good stuff, right? We'll value your company. One of the big deals in the world of tech is a 4 0 9 a valuation. That's right. That thing's used, done once a year, probably takes some amount of time and they charge some large amount of money for it. It's become an industrial process and it allows you to set the most important thing about a company's compensation in Silicon Valley.  Chris Beall (01:54): The strike price of your employee's stock options. That's right. That's right. Okay. So with Silicon Valley bag involved in that, sure. Bought a company that does that, put the brand on it and the way they went. So they're doing all this stuff. So I look at it like this. There was a center of correlation in tech called Silicon Valley Bank because the money from the checks that were written to these, I still think younger and less experienced than might have been ideal as cash managers, since that's not their job. Their main job is growth at all costs, right? Your job, Corey, grow as fast as you can, by the way. Manage the cash really well. Yeah. What does that mean? Let's get the highest interest rate for it. Why? Well, it sounds good, right? I don't know. My mom said to do that or something like that.  Chris Beall (02:43): Is it really a great idea to get the highest interest rate? Yeah, probably not. Probably not. Interest rates and risk always go in the opposite direction. And if your upside is in your growth, you shouldn't be trying to get more upside from this little bit of money kind of nutty. If that was a great thing to do with money, they shouldn't have given it to you in the first place. I mean, that's crazy, right? Let's invest in a company so they can put the money in the bank and see how fast they can grow it as kind of a weird idea. Put the money in the bank yourself if you wanted to do it. So we have a centrality of correlation in a part of the economy that is non-linearly hypersensitive to interest rate changes. And in specific the change from zero to some other number that's positive. It doesn't matter what that number is. Quarter point, half point doesn't really make any difference because the valuations are predicated on not being able to make any money with your money. So at least these things in a portfolio will make you something and they'll make you lot actually. So suddenly there's a hurdle that shows up. That's right. And the hurdle runs now forever and it cuts the legs out from the entire evaluation system, which happened in a day.  Corey Frank (04:02): Maybe we should ask our friend chat GPT how this all ends and what is her opinion on it.  Chris Beall (04:09): I asked it this question today. Oh,  Corey Frank (04:11): There you go.  Chris Beall (04:13): Well, let's ask it right now. Okay. So what are the probable consequences for the, let's ask about the broader economy. Economy of the collapse of svb. Okay, let's see what we get. You could do episode after episodes, just reading what says, okay, so it talks about S V B and it says, well, SVP plays an important role in the startup ecosystem. Its collapse would not necessarily have widespread consequences for the broader economy. However, there are a few potential ways in which the collapse of S V B could impact the economy. By the way, anybody who doesn't think that chat, G P t, writes like an angel doesn't know anything about writing. So one loss of financing for startups if SVB were to collapse. By the way, chat, G P T doesn't know that S VB has collapsed even though Very  Corey Frank (05:16): True. Very true. That's right.  Chris Beall (05:18): Cause that's  Corey Frank (05:19): 2021,  Chris Beall (05:19): September, 2021. If S V B were to collapse, it would likely result in a loss of financing for startups and other high growth companies that rely on the bank services. This could make it more difficult for these companies to grow and innovate, which could have a negative effect, effect on the overall economy over the long term. That's worth paying attention to, right? Two, disruption to the startup ecosystem. SVB is an important player in the startup ecosystem providing not just financing, but also mentorship and other services to help startups succeed. That's interesting. If SVB were to collapse, it could lead to a disruption in the startup ecosystem, potentially causing a ripple effect that could impact other players in the industry. Three potential loss of jobs. If SVB were to collapse, you could result in the loss of jobs for the bank's employees as well as for the employees of the startups and other companies that rely on the bank's financing and services. While this would not necessarily have a significant impact on the broader economy, it could be devastating for the individuals and communities affected. So that's what CH G P T has to say on that subject.  Corey Frank (06:23): Very sage prognostication there. I would say  Chris Beall (06:27): It's pretty good. And that doesn't  Corey Frank (06:29): Even matter. And that's after one prompt, right? Imagine if we kept drilling it down to a couple, it would say. So  Chris Beall (06:36): These are interesting times. I'll give you a personal view. I have always, not always, ever since my first funded startup, I have felt that the venture world, how venture capital works is incredibly important for occasionally making an important company. The flow rate of important companies that come out of that system is pretty low. Maybe, I don't know, three a year, two a year.  Corey Frank (07:09): I  Chris Beall (07:09): Run it for 30 years and you get 60 important companies and then you get a bunch of other stuff that's going on. What is the other stuff? The other stuff is actually, and I've always made this claim and I'll make it right now, most of what Silicon Valley funds is r and d for unnamed corporate investors. That's just what it is. Because if you look at the innovators dilemma, the problem is that if you are a successful large corporate, you are structurally no longer able to innovate. And it has to do with the fact that whoever controls the p and l of your most successful product will psychologically, they can't resist it. They will crush all attempts to innovate in ways that cause that product to be less relevant in the marketplace. They will not sacrifice their bonus for the company's future.  Chris Beall (08:05): It never happens. It will never happen. And people who think it should happen should probably pay attention to the fact that it won't happen. Just get over it. The late great professor Clayton Christensen wrote a book that everybody in business should read and understand, and it basically says you're kind of toast when it comes to innovating once you get successful. Okay, so now what are you going to do? Well, he recommends that you spin off stuff to start things and so forth. But actually what really happens, what really happens is you go to the supermarket called they didn't quite make it Silicon Valley companies. And you take comfort in the fact that the documents that govern those companies read like salvage plans for the VCs. Read one sometime and ask yourself of each word in that document, who is this for? And what does it anticipate? Who it's for? The guy's writing the checks, what does it anticipate? Failure. Got it. Beautiful.  Corey Frank (09:18): I think that's almost chapter one. I think it was one of our first episodes, I believe. Right? They're written on the seller stack, the conversations, right?  Chris Beall (09:27): So this is exactly there. Yes. So even though the book's watered down a little bit, because chapter wasn't given us a chance, but this is the key, is that the innovation economy itself doesn't depend on successful Silicon Valley companies. Yeah.  Chris Beall (09:45): It depends on innovations that diffuse through the economy through various means. So if you think about it, why should an innovation result in the company? It actually makes no sense. Everything worth making should be a company. It's a non-sequitur. It makes no sense. Every worth making should get in the market in a way that allows it to be used in useful ways to reach its potential, but should be a company that's just craziness. And the VCs recognize this by setting up their businesses as salvage yards in advance of failure, and they push the companies to go big because the 60 or so that you're going to get out of 20 to 30 years of this all went big or go away, give us our time back. Because being on the board of a company, that's the living dead.  Corey Frank (10:51): Yep.  Chris Beall (10:51): Yep. Want that. Right? So that's really going on. So it's really valuable what was happening. It's just people we're not comfortable with the idea that jobs could go away because a company goes away. And we probably shouldn't be comfortable with that idea cause it's very discontinuous. We probably shouldn't write checks. I don't care if they're 35 years old. If I'm running a company, why do I need a 10 million check to be written to me? I just need the money to run the company.  Corey Frank (11:20): Yeah.  Chris Beall (11:21): So why do I have to do the cash management? How am I adding value by taking that check? Well, it's because we use this system called equity in order for somebody to have interest in a company that includes upside. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it like this. We haven't thought of a better way to do so. Anyway, these are my thoughts on this subject as I  Corey Frank (11:47): Do. No, this has been a great episode, a very timely episode. Chris, it's great that we had Ryan on there. We're going to get Ryan on there again. And we'd also love to have Robert Vera from the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on his opinion too, since he's on the front lines of working with a lot of these startup companies that are at the nacient stage of funding. And they're at these multiple crossroads here, again, of revenue and debt and equity in which path indeed should they choose. So great stuff as always. Chris, I think we have our naus series is continuing of our market dominance guys, collateral a book. And any final thoughts here on this? We're going to listen to this episode like we did in our COVID episodes a couple years from now. So if I crack this episode a few years from now, what is the landscape does it look like after this little ripple in the markets?  Chris Beall (12:40): Well, I think the very next thing that's going to happen, and it's already happening today, we're only five days into this or whatever, is that debt is going to become popular because there's a lot more folks who play a debt role to help companies then can sensibly play an equity role. Debt has huge advantages for both parties if done, and I think you're going to see, I'll call it non venture debt or debt as venture. I really like what Ryan's company is doing. I've spoken with them about maybe working with them. So smaller chunk sizes, they get you to be a little bit more cautious. Cycle time being shorter. I mean, equity has a cycle time on it. You want to see those T-bills as long equity is forever.  Corey Frank (13:28): Right?  Chris Beall (13:29): Then that's what we found. So it's like we have this sandwich, we have a risk sandwich, which the T-bills are long and the risk is in their length, not in anything else about  Corey Frank (13:39): Oh my gosh. Yeah.  Chris Beall (13:40): Yeah. And I mean there's been a leapfrogging by that. So I expect debt will become popular. Debt is something that will happen in a much more, I'll call it be democratized more. You're going to have a lot more debt Players are going to come in and try to help companies and it's going to be a little trickier to play the pure equity games that are played with the pedal to the metal stuff. It'll come back, but it's a little bit trickier. It's not like Silicon Valley VCs, they're not going to run out of money. I mean, good god, right? Pension funds and others have got to put their risk money somewhere. Sure. Sure. But I think that's one of the things that's going to happen. I don't think you're going to see a big change. In a way, it's one of these things that if you're running a company and you're highly tied up with svb, then thank goodness for you, you didn't have to leave your money behind. At least you get your cash back. But it creates opportunities for all the other places that cash could go. And some of that cash actually could go to servicing modest amounts of debt.  Corey Frank (14:42): Yeah, I think that that's stead on. And you and I and our teams we're bigoted towards the revenue side and some of those metrics to track, especially comparison to what both connected cell and Branch 49 could do to organizations versus what we saw from the great Trish Peruzzi on what the landscape looks like. You do have to innovate or die because those numbers in the traditional S D R world just do not sustain any long-term growth. And your attrition alone will cost you because no one's going to want to do anything except put a gun in their mouth with those type of activity numbers. So I see it. Well, Chris, another great episode for the market dominant guys and Chris Beal. This is Corey Frank at Till Next Time.  Chris Beall (15:27): Yeah, so it is funny when you think about it, it's like those numbers tell you no company that is living in that world. They might have been Financable, but they should not have been Financal.  Corey Frank (15:38): Oh, it's a train wreck. And they're, you can see why these companies lay off hundreds or thousands of folks with minimal impact except to the p and l. They don't suffer from sales. They don't have, besides meta who does a one-time drawdown of 2.4 billion. But I don't think a sales force necessarily is going to suffer proportionate to how many people they cut their sales are, they're going to decrease, their sales are still going to be relatively strong. And they just had a hiring bloat and productivity point here,  Chris Beall (16:11): Right? Well, they were speculating that people were capital. That was the speculation is that you could pile up people in the same way that you can pile up money in a bank. It's like meta, apparently they hire, this is the word on the street anyway, is they hired a lot of people who then just said, I don't have a job, but I have no work to do, but I have a job, I guess is the point. And when you look at that, and we've seen that before. I got hired by Martin Marietta back in 1980, and they didn't have any work for me to do. They just hired me because they needed engineers. Corey and I are just having a chat after the podcast. Hi, Helen, Sean. Oh, I want to hear about this before I have my next copy. Oh, I do too. Yeah.  Corey Frank (17:00): Well, Chris, all these good stuff. Yeah, book looks good. Are you sending these? I just ordered a bunch of 'em and I've been sending them to clients just with a little hello, et cetera. So I know it's an expensive thing to do.  Corey Frank (17:18): Yeah, I prefer the stop, but still, I think it's something that, and we've been promoting it. I just think it's a great credibility thing. It's long overdue. And I really think that every few months there should be another one released market dominance. And we could have whatever the theme is, it could be on go to market, it could be on metrics, it could be on whatever. And if we edit these here as they go forth and have a little compendium, a little series. So when we're on Jeb Blunt next time, you can have your stack of books next to Jeb Stack of books, and  Chris Beall (17:56): I can make 'em faster than him now. That's right. I'm like, I once saw a fascinating show on TV very late one night. It was, I don't know what, probably an e s, ESPN N. This is a long time ago. It's like 1985. And it was illuminating. And I think that's just, we could get that situation with the book. So here it was, they put a family sedan, it's like a Ford Taurus on a Formula one course, and they gave it a headstart. And when it was halfway around the course, they unleashed this Porsche sports car, right? Very fast sports car. These all had professional drivers, all top champion drivers. And then when that car had caught the first car, which is now three quarters of the way around the course, they unleashed a McLaren Turbo Formula one car, and it beat 'em both.  Corey Frank (18:53): Really?  Chris Beall (18:54): Yeah, it was. And they're doing this whole thing from a helicopter. So you're watching it just going, and I quote, no fucking way. Right? It's like, come on, they're almost done. And then this Formula one car goes,  Corey Frank (19:09): Wow.  Chris Beall (19:10): And it wasn't even a contest screaming  Corey Frank (19:11): Around the corner.  Chris Beall (19:12): So I believe we now have the Formula One car of book publishing, because we spent on this almost all the time in formatting and in dealing with the experimental nature of the first summarizations. I can have all of that done by people who literally, I could have Galen write one of these a week. Wow.  Corey Frank (19:36): Well, there's certainly enough content that's pretty damn sure. So  Chris Beall (19:39): There is enough content and there's enough themes, and we could make it better. Galen's become a very good prompt engineer. So he's, he's got stuff like, give me a chart of blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. What are all the titles that are used by these companies when they're selling? What are the Yeah,  Corey Frank (19:55): No, I love that we're using that on the data side. That was a great tip for Josh, by the way, if you talk with James in the near future, just give him a little nudge that we're trying to get some time with him. So  Chris Beall (20:10): He's on vacation. There you go.  Corey Frank (20:12): That's what I needed to know.  Chris Beall (20:13): Another question. Are you around next Wednesday? We're coming up for another Fmre thing that Helen's speaking at. Of  Corey Frank (20:19): Course.  Chris Beall (20:20): Okay, so I'll tag a log. Yeah,  Corey Frank (20:22): We'll get you a conference, whatever. You can work here everything you need now  Chris Beall (20:27): And we can digest.  Corey Frank (20:30): Yeah.  Chris Beall (20:30): Conversation she just had and some other things. It'll be quite interesting. There's the solution to many interesting problems. These solutions may be coming together.  Corey Frank (20:42): Nice.  Chris Beall (20:43): Getting the, let's face it. Connect and sell has been waiting for a downturn for a long time. We were built for one, we never knew it would come attractively packaged first as a global pandemic, and then as a banking crisis in tech. This is the ideal for us. You could not have written this book better for us. This,  Corey Frank (21:09): So you, Ty and Sean are the three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. That's what I hear you saying.  Chris Beall (21:17): So yeah, Manny would probably give him some weird, oh, Manny,  Corey Frank (21:19): There you go. Okay, so you got all four of you guys. All right. Well, maybe it's you. Perfect. Maybe it's you. Yeah, I'm writing the, the burrow, the borough just behind me trying to keep trying to keep up.  Chris Beall (21:30): Oh, it's such an interesting situation because let's face it, what we do, you only would do if you can do or must do the math and very few must do the math. And of those very few can do the math.  Corey Frank (21:52): Yeah.  Chris Beall (21:53): So why do we have so few great customers? Well, we have the desperate s a p Concur, totally desperate. They were like, how are you going to grow from 400 million to 1,000,000,004 years when it took you 22 years to get to 400 million? Right. One desperate person, crystal Beamon. And we're still there. I just did an $865,000 deal with them yesterday.  Corey Frank (22:21): Come on.  Chris Beall (22:22): I did. I got That's wonderful. Right here somewhere. Yeah.  Corey Frank (22:26): That's beautiful.  Chris Beall (22:27): Yeah, I mean that, I did the deal a while ago. It's actually a million dollar deal, but they had some credits coming into the year, so it's $865,000 dealer. So they're desperate. I don't mean they're not smart, by the way. They are smart. But they were smart enough to take their desperation and took a flyer on my first offer to them, which was, Hey, why don't we do this instead of you hiring 400 people. So when you put it like that, it's less absurd. It's like you can't hire 400 people. Right? Then you have the really smart fisher, and Fisher is so smart. They're one of the smartest companies. I've never seen people like this organized into a company. Smart, disciplined, determined, amazing. And so the, there's that. But that's kind of all we got is those kinds. And we have a few, Intuit, super smart Intuit set, 772 meetings yesterday. I mean, that's smart. These are smart.  Corey Frank (23:24): And what's the third category? The occasionally curious the  Chris Beall (23:28): Well then we have the flow through. We have those that want try it, and some of them are super smart. They'll come out of connect and sell RingCentral. Kyle Green used to be an sdr, now he's a vp. We should have him on, by the way, how many SDRs become vice presidents public companies in a short period of time? He was an sdr. We hired him after I became c e O. He now is the vice President of Global Sales Development over at RingCentral. Wow.  Corey Frank (23:59): It's impressive.  Chris Beall (24:00): Janie. Janie Wall, one of our customer success people is now off as vice president of Defense Storm. So I mean, these people are like, they come up through the process and they get it cause they're inside of it. But it's not like this is a tough business for a bunch of reasons. And the main reason is nobody can do the math. They can't make the math stick. Even if you do the math form like Ryan does all the time, it doesn't make the math stick. Right. It's much easier to believe in almost anything to believe that there's noms out in my yard that make the waterfall go. It's easier to believe that than to believe this math.  Corey Frank (24:43): Robert just popped in here too, just by the way. So say hello.  Chris Beall (24:46): Oh, Robert.  Speaker 3 (24:49): But the problem with Chris is that the math, they're doing the math wrong. So let me explain to you. Oh,  Chris Beall (24:53): You, wait, wait, wait. I've got to talk to Paul Whit at the Alliance of CEOs, and I'm three minutes later. Well,  Corey Frank (25:00): We'll, we'll, we'll get Robert on next Wednesday as a guest. Okay.  Chris Beall (25:03): Yeah. So I'm coming to see you next Wednesday.  Corey Frank (25:06): Okay. Yeah.  Chris Beall (25:07): And I look forward to having my math corrected.  Speaker 3 (25:10): No, your math is right. It's the discount future value of the company that people don't add in.  Chris Beall (25:15): Oh, yeah. I don't ever add  Speaker 3 (25:17): That more now or in seven years from now. Yeah.  Chris Beall (25:19): Yeah. They don't right  Speaker 3 (25:20): Now. Doesn't really matter that much, right?  Chris Beall (25:22): Oh, nobody does that.  Corey Frank (25:23): All right. Best to Helen. We'll sign next.  Chris Beall (25:25): Okay. Okay. Time value of wisdom. That's all we're doing. Value of wisdom. Okay.  

Chris and Corey discuss the dangers of correlation in the tech industry and the impact it can have on valuations. Chris explains how the venture capital industry is focused on headcount as a metric for success, leading to inefficient practices among funded companies. This correlation can create a house of cards effect, where the collapse of one company can trigger a chain reaction that affects the entire ecosystem. They also touch on the pre-chasm state of companies and the importance of finding visionary buyers who can provide the necessary funding without relying on rounds of financing. As a sales professional, it's important to understand the broader industry trends that can affect your company's success and plan accordingly. Chris and Corey's insights offer valuable perspectives on the challenges facing tech companies and how to navigate them. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "The Problem with Correlation in VC-Funded Companies." Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Branch 49 ConnectAndSell Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:21): Chris and Corey discuss the dangers of correlation in the tech industry and the impact it can have on valuations. Chris explains how the venture capital industry is focused on headcount as a metric for success leading to inefficient practices among funded companies. This correlation can create a house of cards effect where the collapse of one company can trigger a chain reaction that affects the entire ecosystem. (00:46): They also touch on the pre-chasm state of companies and the importance of finding visionary buyers who can provide the necessary funding without relying on rounds of financing. (00:57): As a sales professional, it's important to understand the broader industry trends that can affect your company's success and plan accordingly. (01:04): Chris and Corey's insights offer valuable perspective on the challenges facing tech companies and how to navigate them. (01:10): Join us for this episode, the problem with correlation in VC funded companies. Chris Beall (01:20): That's it. I mean, in our company, the flow rate that we shoot for meetings attended is about 30 a day, and we have a more precise number. And being precise doesn't help you here by the way. It's just 30 is as good as 29 when you come right down to it, but it's not the same as 36. So, you've got a flow rate of meetings that are happening, and they're happening somehow. So, the question is what's the flow rate of meetings per dollar that you're spending overall on sales and marketing? What is it? (01:55): Before you go for revenue and say, "Well, how much revenue am I getting?" First you got to know, "Am I getting in the neighborhood? Am I getting meetings?" Because meetings are that thing that must happen before you have business. And again, very rarely, can I ask somebody? So, hey, what's your flow rate of meetings per day held? Held meetings per day, what is it? And they just go, "Uh. I don't know. Sometimes we have five, sometimes we have sixes." I'd say, "Flow rates aren't about sometimes. Yes, there's variation. It's a flow rate, and you've got to know that that flow rate supports your business plan. (02:32): Or say you convert. We convert the fairly small portion of meetings. We have a high flow rate, 30 a day. We have a flow rate now of the next thing which we standardize at ConnectAndSell. It's called the test drive, and it is the next thing, and it's always the next thing. That is, you can have three meetings, but the next thing that's a new kind of thing is always this thing called the test drive. And all test drives are the same. You actually use the product in production, and you have the experience and blah, blah, blah. (03:05): Well, we know what the close rate is on test drives. That percent that turn into something. 39% of ours turn into deals. That average $24,200. Got it. That's easy. Okay. Do I know the step before that? What is the percentage conversion of my flow of meetings to my flow of next things? (03:28): Ryan talked about something really important which is knowing your cost of acquisition numbers. I think you've got to actually know in addition, the actual elements of acquisition- Corey Frank (03:38): Without a doubt. Chris Beall (03:39): ... And know how that works in the real world. And then, you got to find the levers, and there're probably only one. There's probably one lever because the theory of constraints says there's one constraint. So, you got to find the lever. What is it? More stuff at the top, higher conversion rate, what is it? That takes real thinking. A lot of experiments. Corey Frank (03:56): Well, I know our friend, Trish Bertuzzi for The Bridge Group. She just released the latest state of the SDR industry here. And the one on the screen right now, I'd like to get your opinion on, Chris, is what Trish and the folks call quality conversations per rep per day. You talk about going up the funnel and measuring some of the key factors here. (04:20): It used to be back in 2014, according to Trish's cohort, that a team, a rep would average eight quality conversations per day. I guess, that's when people seemingly thought that people picked up the phone. And now, today, in 2022 was down 55% to 3.6 per day. (04:41): Now, I imagine most of these folks have not heard of ConnectAndSell or Fast Phone numbers or Phone Ready Leads or any of the other optimizing weapons that are out on the market. So, unfortunately, the people who are conducting these type of phone calls and engaging in these type of efforts, man, say a quiet prayer for them every evening because they certainly need it. That is a tough gig, Chris, to do every day, to only talk with 3.6 people a day. Is it not? Chris Beall (05:14): Well, it's actually worse than this, which is what's interesting. So, let me read. You have this on the screen. It's really super. I love this chart. This is my favorite chart in the entire world right now because I don't experience it. I just love it. Corey Frank (05:28): That's right. Do you know how the movie ends. Chris Beall (05:30): I know how another movie ends. So, let me read the paragraph. It says another useful metric is the number of quality conversations QCs per rep per day. We define a QC as... Listen very carefully here. A connect or response where at least one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information is learned. So, if I get an email back from somebody that says, "Hey, this makes no sense to me whatsoever," or "Stop pestering me," or whatever. Anything comes back, that's a response. (06:03): So, the emails that come back that you've never spoken with the person, and you now think you have one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information, which is by the way, wholly unreliable because it comes from somebody whose purpose is unknown to you, but their purpose is probably to make you stop sending them emails. So, if you really think about it, am I disqualified for what Corey has to offer because I'm getting tired of being inundated with emails from Corey? Think about that for a moment. That's a nonsense concept. It actually makes no sense. The fact that I respond to being flooded by everybody's emails, including Corey's, and maybe I have the hope that if I send it back an email that says, "Stop sending these," that I can reduce the flood into my box here. (06:55): The idea that that's a quality conversation within a sales context in which there's qualifying or disqualifying information that's learned is crazy, but it's in the definition. So, the numbers vastly worse than people think. And if you go to... Let's try this. A QC... I'm going to redefine it, is a connect with a potential customer. Somebody you think has potential where trust is increased as a result of that connect. Now, that number on this chart goes down to zero for most of these SDRs. Corey Frank (07:31): Yes. Chris Beall (07:31): So, it would have started at whatever the number would have been, and then, it goes to zero for almost all, which means almost all that investment is placed in. Because in the world of B2B, without trust, you don't make any progress. And I'll go back to what Chris Voss's taught us. Seven seconds. So, how can a chart that shows these things happening, almost none of which actually engender trust. How can that talk about the future of your pipeline? Corey Frank (08:05): Well, Chris, but I'm sending out a whole bunch of emails in LinkedIn and SMSs. Those are activities as we send from the other chart here that the wonderful team at Bridge Group put together from Trish is we're looking at the median number of activities per day per SDR by type, phone, email, LinkedIn, and SMS. And the total is 104 for all those activities, and only one of these... I think Chris, you would obviously I would lead the witness here, but probably validate kin and gender trust. Chris Beall (08:38): Certainly, an email is not a trust building thing. It might lead to a conversation. You can actually stimulate conversations on occasion through an email. I think they call us getting lucky, but I responded to one. (08:51): Right now, looking at some situations where if somebody sends me a particular kind of email, I will probably respond to it because I've got something I'm interested in right now. Okay, fine. I won't say what it is. Otherwise, these podcasts last for a while and you'll be sending me emails. (09:08): So, activities, it's funny to add them up. It's like saying, "I'm going to add up the following. The number of steps I take in a day, the number of cuts I make with a knife, the number of times I say hello to somebody, and the number of times I blink my eyes and I'm going to add those up and say there's 372 of those things." Corey Frank (09:31): Yeah. Chris Beall (09:31): There's a rule in the world of adding, of stating what numbers mean which is you cannot add together non-commensurate items. You can't add phone calls to emails, to LinkedIn's, to SMS texts. There's no such thing as an activity. There isn't. I mean, when I run around in the morning, I go out. You know me, I get my 20,000 30,000 steps before breakfast. Is each step in activity? Is it professional? Well, in my brain it is because I'm thinking of things. Do we count those activities? Should I go to the board of directors and say, "Oh, I engaged in so many activities this morning because I was thinking, and I was also writing something down, and then, I typed it with a keystroke on my computer." It doesn't make sense. These things, literally adding them up, you can do it because we can do funny things with numbers. But look at this chart, I think it's cool that the numbers are left justified. If we really think they're real numbers, we write justify them, so the zeros add up, the ones place adds up, the tens place. Remember we were taught that as kids? Announcer (10:39): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (10:47): ConnectAndSell, welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandselldotcom. (11:16): And we're back with Corey and Chris. Chris Beall (11:20): These are clearly names of things. They're not really numbers, but there's only one of them whereby getting lucky, you can succeed 100% of the time, and that's getting somebody on the phone. I was talking to some very nice people who sell for IBM the other day, and we were out in Atlanta, and talking to a great group of people, very sincere, mostly young, but little bit farther along in their careers than you might run into it in a lot of SDRs. Very well-trained, big mission. I won't say what the mission is, but it's got big, big numbers they're going after. Loved it. (11:57): And so, we were talking to them about ConnectAndSell. The LinkedIn people were talking about LinkedIn. ZoomInfo was talking about ZoomInfo and so forth and so on. And I said to them, because I was last up, "Hey, here's the deal on B2B. B2B is built on trust, and it's built on trust for a funny reason. Your buyer is afraid for their career. It's not their money. And you should have seen looking around the room with these smart, sophisticated people, how many eyes got big." And then I said, "And this is the shocking part. When you cold call, you succeed 100% of the time. If you're skilled enough, as long as your goal is to get trust. If your goal is to get a sale, to get a meeting or something else, you may fail. But success builds on success, so why not succeed 100% of the time by setting your goal to getting trust and then become a master at getting trust." Corey Frank (12:54): Yeah, for sure. Chris Beall (12:54): First you have to deserve it, and second, you have to do something skillful to get it, okay? Now, how many of those should you have per day? Now, let's build our funnel from that. So, my view is that the number of trust building conversations a rep should have per day. If they're an SDR is something around 30. Out of those 30 conversations per day, you'll get a flow rate per day of about 10% of those that will flow downstream into meetings. So, that's about three meetings a day. So, your flow rate of three meetings per day is going to run into a attendance rate, a net attendance rate of about two meetings per day for somebody. That immediately tells you what your ratio of SDRs to account executives should be. (13:45): If your account executives have got room in their calendar on average for two meetings a day, then, each one of them should be probably paired up with one SDR. The reason they should be paired up is then the SDR could say, "No. I can't recall a single time when somebody told me that meeting with Corey was a waste of their time." Never happened that I recall. So, it improves your ability to close for the meeting because the meeting product includes the person that they're meeting with. So, okay. They're meeting with an expert. The expert's an important person. You want them to look up the expert on LinkedIn. "Oh, Corey is an expert on this," that kind of thing. (14:25): So, that tells you immediately what your investment level in SDR should be if you're having an SDR led approach to getting meetings. Now, if you expect your AEs to get one meeting a day, then, it's different. Then your ratio changes. One SDR could serve as four reps- Corey Frank (14:43): That's right. Yep. Chris Beall (14:43): ... Not quite four. You have to be very careful when you do the math. So, it's that kind of thing. You got to start with the number of trust building conversations. My issue... And I love The Bridge Group. You know that I love them. Trish Bertuzzi has always been very kind to me. She wrote a great book, the Sales Development Playbook. And she corrects me every time I golf with her. And she tells me how to park the cart, and how far away... The stuff that I suck at. (15:12): So, okay. [inaudible 00:15:14], right? But I see why The Bridge Group chose QC, that definition because it's an extensive definition. You can point at one and say, "See, you got an email back, and you got this data and so forth." And it corresponds to reality. But the reality that we miss is that to analyze correctly. We have to bifurcate the context into those who build trust and those that don't build trust. That's what we really have to do because the eye of the needle that we got to get this camel through is the trust needle. We've got to get that prospeq who's big through the eye of the trust needle. (15:54): And sadly, or unsadly, or whatever it happens to be, when we talk with them, we have seven seconds to do that. This is according to Chris Voss not according to me. And he's told us what those seven seconds have to have in them, and why they're in there. And it makes a lot of sense. And we have hundreds of thousands of millions of data points that say, "Yeah. He's probably right." (16:16): So, that's what I think is interesting about these times, and we tie it to the whole SVB thing. What's happened is, venture capital likes to put money to work because they got more money than they have time. They prefer that their portfolio companies do things that are the other portfolio companies and all the other portfolio companies because variation doesn't help. That's crazy. You're trying to make a machine- Corey Frank (16:44): My playbook, the Vista playbook, thou shall run your SAS model like this. Yep. Chris Beall (16:48): Exactly. You want to put money in one end and get something out the other end. So, variability is considered to be not a great thing if you're a VC. So, what's the simplest thing to count? The simplest metric is headcount. Money buys headcount. Headcount produces results. Therefore, things that happen per rep per day, or per rep, per whatever, since you can hire them, you can onboard them, train them, do all this stuff people talk about. And then, eventually, in six months they start actually producing something. You can figure it out then, "Oh, this is just a money problem." And if you pour money in, keep track of the headcount, and then, what the production of the output is, you're probably good. You're probably good but you're not necessarily efficient with regard to not needing as much money because that's not the problem of EC solving. They're solving the problem of what would you do if you had enough money like all the other VC funded companies. That's what you're being compared to. (17:51): So, if you want to be more efficient, you might have to choose to change some things, but you might get pushback from your VCs at least during good times because that become, "Well, you're not helping me put money to work." (18:04): Same thing by the way, this is not about this go-to market, but visionary deals are like this. So, when you're in the pre-chasm state, which most companies and their founders will never admit that they're in, ask Jeffrey Moore, "How many people you talk to that you know are pre-chasm will raise their hand and say, I'm a pre-chasm." Corey Frank (18:23): That's right. Chris Beall (18:24): Zero. "Oh, we're post-chasm. We're doing this." Corey Frank (18:27): Oh, yeah. Yep. Chris Beall (18:29): Like a simple test. Do you sell by reference, or do you sell by persuasion? If it's persuasion, you're pre-chasm. If it's for reference, you're post-chasm. Got it. So, you're usually selling by persuasion, or I'll call it what would they call spray and prey luck. You're getting these folks who are seeking whatever they're seeking. They're all buying for different reasons, and there you are pre chasm. It's like, "Wow, what should I do here?" Well, the temptation is to treat it as post-chasm and to get across the chasm. Just for those of you who haven't read the book. You essentially buy your way into your first true post-chasm market, and you do it by "pricing down," which doesn't mean you reduce your price by the way. It could, but it could mean you provide extra services, you help more, you're nicer, whatever. You smile more and things like that. So, in that post-chasm state, you get all these flows, and you can pay attention to all that kind of stuff. (19:27): In the pre-chasm state, you should be paying attention to one thing. And that is, can I get so much money from a visionary buyer? Visionary customer who's seeking competitive advantage that I actually don't need a round of financing to cross the chasm. I just got it from my visionary. ell, no VC on earth is going to encourage you to do that deal. They're going to talk to you about scale. "Oh, that doesn't scale." Well, of course, it doesn't scale. By the way, nor does a single round of financing. It doesn't scale. You pay. It's a chunk of money that goes into a bank like Silicon Valley Bank was, and then, you're burning it off hoping to get to the next round. That's why it's called a burn rate. It's called a build rate. It's called a burn rate because you're burning. Corey Frank (20:14): That's right. Chris Beall (20:15): This was the point I was making earlier with Ryan about correlation. So, now you've got all these companies doing stuff the same way. They're all doing it inefficiently because that's okay. It's the way to do it is inefficiently, so it can all be done the same way, because to get efficiency, we have to tune to the circumstances. (20:33): And so, now, you have this high degree of correlation among these entities that created, and then, they're buying and selling from each other. So, how much of their revenue is fake effectively, or how much of it is contained within the system? And if the answer is a lot, then, for purposes of understanding the fragility of that system, we have to take that revenue out. It's like the Icelandic trade. (21:01): I have a dog. You have a cat. I tell you, my dog's worth a billion. You told me, the cat's worth a billion. We each take out loans for a billion dollars. I buy your cat. You buy my dog. Look at us now. We each have 2 billion. It's fantastic, right? So, you get a version of the Icelandic trade that's going on systematically among these companies, and it's not bad. They're not doing it for a bad reason. They're just doing it because overfunded companies are easy to buy from, and tech companies make stuff other tech companies tend to like. So, it's easy to sell to somebody who's flush with money, who's being encouraged by their venture board to spend that money on the stuff that could grow the company. They're easy marks. Corey Frank (21:43): Yeah. That's an echo chamber in a lot of ways. Chris Beall (21:45): It is. It is. So, now we have the problem of correlation. And correlation is what causes modest sized risks to turn into disasters, collapses, houses of cards. The house of cards, all of the cards are correlated with each other. Here's how we can tell. Take one at the bottom out. That's what correlation looks like from a risk perspective. And some people were talking in an interesting way out there on the internet, Twitter or whatever. It's like, "How could this happen so fast?" Well, because these things always happen that fast. They always happen that fast because what you see is the culmination of something that was building up. It's like an earthquake. You don't see the earthquake for the... I was there in California for the Loma Prieta quake. How long do you think that pressure built up before that big monster went off? Corey Frank (22:41): Well, I think our friend, Robert Vera who runs the innovation center here, who cajoled our friend, Ryan Edwards to jump on our podcast. He was saying his thesis was that the Fed was terrified of a meltdown that was triggered by their interest rate increases that were triggered by unrestrained inflation that was triggered by near zero interest rates for years. So, did that happen overnight? It happened slowly at first and then all at once, I think is the phrase goes, right? Chris Beall (23:12): Yeah. And I think the situation was even worse in one way. We went through this pandemic thing that went both directions at the same time. So, it boosted some industries, like everything that helped people work at home and all that kind of stuff boosted. It hammered other industries like hospitality, and it really confused some other industries like commercial real estate where in the city centers it got worse, but out in the suburbs it got better. All of the stuff's going on at once. And then, it also created mechanical supply chain disruption because moving stuff from one place to another requires that the people in both places can work. And they have to be able to work in the place where the things are moving from and too. We don't yet have robots moving everything. So, these ships have got to move around, and containers have to be on them, and people have got to be involved in at least operating the equipment that gets the containers off and driving the trucks, and we were short of truck drivers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It goes on and on. (24:09): Can you tell as a policy analyst, the inflation that's due to the low-interest rates for a long time? And the inflation as though that's what it is, that's price increases in various things moving around in the economy due to supply chain disruption. I guarantee you nobody could tell the difference between those two. You can tell it conceptually, and then, they feed on each other, so you can't tell which one's being driven by which other one. There's cascade effects. So, what happens? Well, I only have one thing to do with inflation interest rates. Treated as a monetary phenomenon and interest rates. So, okay, we knew one thing for sure. The first time interest rates were raised by the Fed, the tech economy was going to lose a big chunk of its value. (25:01): And when you lose a big chunk of value fast, more value goes out immediately because of the fear that all the value is going to go out. It's going to zero. So, as soon as the Fed raised interest rates, the entire world of tech, which is predicated on zero interest rates for its, the valuations as a multiple of revenue went down. How far should it have gone down? Who knows? But it went down 70% or so. So, Silicon Valley Bank as an example, its customers suddenly lost 70% of their value in 24 hours, and that was predictable. That was completely predictable. So, that effect had nothing to do with inflation because what Silicon Valley companies charge for their products is not relevant in the economy. Trust me. It doesn't cause anybody to have to pay more for a grapefruit.  

In this episode Corey Frank and Chris Beall discuss the impact of recent market shifts on businesses and the advice they would give to CEOs and CROs to adapt to these changes. With tightening debt and equity markets, businesses must focus on efficiency and go-to-market strategies to maintain profitability. Chris emphasizes the importance of go-to-market efficiency and being disciplined in investing resources wisely. Their guest, Ryan Edwards, Managing Partner at Prospeq, shares his thoughts on the investment side, highlighting that businesses should prioritize investments that drive revenue growth, instead of focusing solely on product improvements. In the face of uncertainty, Chris advises companies to aim for profitability and avoid making hasty decisions. They also cover key metrics that businesses should track to stay on top of their performance. Chris suggests focusing on meetings per rep hour, net meetings attended per hour, and the net show rate as essential indicators of a company's go-to-market efficiency. Ryan emphasizes the importance of understanding client acquisition cost and lifetime value, especially for businesses with mixed revenue sources. As businesses navigate these uncertain times, focusing on efficiency, profitability, and key metrics will help them maintain a strong footing and continue to grow. Join us for this episode, "Growth, Profitability, and Pivoting in Economic Turmoil." Links from this episode: Ryan Edwards on LinkedIn Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn Prospeq Branch 49 ConnectAndSell   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:23): In this episode, Corey Frank and Chris Beall discussed the impact of recent market shifts on businesses and the advice they would give to CEOs and CROs to adapt these changes. With tightening debt in equity markets, businesses must focus on efficiency and go-to-market strategies to maintain profitability. They are joined by Ryan Edwards, managing partner at Prospeq. He shares his thoughts on the investment side, highlighting the businesses should prioritize investments that drive revenue growth instead of focusing solely on product improvements. (00:55): In the face of uncertainty, Chris advises companies to aim for profitability and avoid making hasty decisions. They also cover key metrics that businesses should track to stay on top of their performance. Chris suggests focusing on meetings per rep hour, net meetings attended per hour, and the net show rate as essential indicators of a company's go-to-market efficiency. Ryan emphasizes the importance of understanding client acquisition cost and lifetime value, especially for businesses with mixed revenue sources. As businesses navigate these uncertain times, join us for this episode, growth, profitability, and pivoting in economic turmoil. Corey Frank (01:41): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, the profit of profit, the Tom Cruise of sales, that's the new one, and the Hawking of Hawking, Chris Beall. Chris, how are you today? Chris Beall (01:55): If I were any better I wouldn't have bothered to come on with you, I'd just do something else. Corey Frank (01:59): Well, the lighting is just perfect today. Very, very soft. Barbara Walters like lighting today. We have a special guest on his way. Welcome, Ryan Edwards. Ryan, good to have you. I'm going to edify you a little bit, Ryan, and embarrass you. In addition to Ryan being co-founder and the managing partner on the tech and venture side over at Prospeq, which is a venture lending bank, he spent almost 15 years at Silicon Valley Bank in the latter half dozen or so plus years in charge of the Southwest. And of course he's very active in the community here in Arizona with his chairmanship and support for Invest Southwest. So welcome, Ryan, to the Market Dominance Guys. Ryan Edwards (02:39): Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm glad to be on here, Cory. Corey Frank (02:42): By the way, I see the swag on your left sleeve there, if I'm not mistaken, in the camera. So you are representing your former peers at the bank? Ryan Edwards (02:50): Yes, absolutely. Corey Frank (02:51): So I figured we could start. Chris, what do you think if we just a review of the basics of what happened at SVB because obviously you have some your colleagues over there, you have some folks that have been affected, and you have a lot of investments active in prior investments here in the Valley and across the US that still use SVB. So right from the horse's mouth, what's happened in as a tech investor and as a CEO or as a CRO for an organization? How should I take this series of events? Ryan Edwards (03:21): Well, I think that there's a lot to unpack with that. How should you take that as a tech investor in this ecosystem is one thing like what happened over there is kind of whole other story. I obviously was not at Silicon Valley Bank for the past close to a year now, so I'm not necessarily in the weeds of all the things there, but I certainly felt like the dominoes that kind of fell as that thing transpired with the way that SVB communicated was pretty poorly on their investment strategy that I think was a bit flawed and problematic with the market, but I think that it was not necessarily a reason that they would've gone out of business or gone to the point at least where they are. (03:56): I know they're not technically out yet, but I think that the more important point there, I think, is around how this is going to impact things because SVB is the largest lender in the venture space, they're also the largest company working with venture capital as well as venture funded companies. So the biggest impact and the biggest concern I have as kind of someone who's involved in that ecosystem is around, does that get replaced and who comes in to replace that? And at this point I would say if SVB completely goes away at this point, which we're still not sure if a buyer comes in or something else changes. If they were to completely disappear, I don't think there's anyone currently in the market that will come in and replace that capital when you talk about half of the deals in venture being done out of that location. So I think that creates a significant void right now over the next probably year, but I would say likely multiple years before even some of that can be replaced. (04:58): The banks that are kind of stepping in right now and taking the deposits, I would say almost none of them want to fill much of that void, if any of it. And so at this point you sort of end up in a situation where a lot of companies that were reliant on capital and follow on financing and things through debt has just gone by the wayside. Not to mention SVB did also do a lot of direct equity within venture funds in the market too, where they had fund to funds, investments and other things where they were directly involved with a lot of funds and capital going on that side too, which I don't think that's going to hinder the overall venture capital market, but I do think it's notable that they were making a lot of those investments as well. (05:42): So to me, the biggest concern is around how many companies that are reliant on continuing to be funded, continuing to rely on some of the debt that they were getting through SVB, and if that disappears, I think that we see a shrinking of the market in the near term because of that lack of capital. Corey Frank (06:00): Before we went on, Chris, you were chatting about how... And Ryan, I think you can buttress this is that funded tech companies tend to sell to other funded tech companies, Chris. And so with that, what do you see as this reciprocal effect with sales cycles and impacting other business functions, et cetera, from your perspective? Chris Beall (06:22): Well, it's interesting. I mean one of the phenomena I've seen, and I've been at this, I don't know, the first tech company I did was in '84. So I go back a little ways working with Kleiner Perkins, I don't know who we were banking with, can't even remember back then, but been with SVB a couple of times. Looking back, I've always been nervous with any of these companies when I felt like we were selling not just other tech companies but other kind of go-go companies. I've never been in one of these, put the pedal down sort of things except maybe requisite technology where we did it a different way anyway. We did this 120 million deal with SAP for a source code license that replaced a couple of rounds of financing and let us do what we wanted. (07:06): But even then, here's an example, the B2B marketplaces went crazy as a concept in 1998, 1999, 2000, Ariba was suddenly worth 64 billion as the first of the companies to go out and go public to ascribe for 64 billion of value to Ariba when SAP was worth something like 10 billion was absurd. When you come right down to it, it was craziness. And the idea is, "Hey, this particular thing," in this case marketplaces, but we have these over and over and over, "is going to take over the world. It's going to be everything." Those companies tend to get heavily funded, and as a result, the popular concept ones and as a result they become attractive to sell to. And the lesser tech companies that are making, I'll call it the sort of tools, the tooling, the things that are more service like maybe they're looking to get pulled up into these companies, they tend to sell to those heavily funded companies because it's easier, they're funded, they're run by people who quite frankly have never done cash management in their life. (08:09): I mean if you were to ask me what's the weirdest part about venture capital, the weirdest part is that we actually write checks to these companies. It's like flipping the car keys to an 11-year-old having shown them... You keep them up three nights and you show them how hangover and hangover part two, and then if that doesn't work, you show them fast and furious, then you flip them the car keys and you make a bet that they can get to New York them back from San Francisco before the other battle. That's kind of what it's like in a 28-year-old who's founded a company, the odds of them being a great cash manager exactly zero. There's no chance they're even thinking cash management. Cash management starts and ends with, I put it in SVB, I'm done. Ryan Edwards (08:53): That it's interesting you... I'm sorry to interrupt there, but I mean I think a lot of... if you look at the data on founders, that perception of the majority of founders being 20 something is kind of still out there, but I think if you look at the data, most founders now at this point are a lot older honestly, that are especially the ones getting funded. So the ones that are getting that capital and being told like, "Hey, let's see if you can do it." Most of them are kind of more in the late 30s and 40s age now if you start to look at some of the data, so that 20-year-old in a garage mentality where they just rate got $20 million from Sequoia just because they had a cool idea, I think is definitely a rarity compared to where it was when you looked back in the late 90s or early 2000s timeframe. Chris Beall (09:42): I mean there's always been changes in this. I mean LJ went over at Google. Pete called me one day to say, "Hey, we're Google, right?" And I said, "Yeah, LJ, I get it." And says, "So we know everything." And you know that I said, "God, what is... like some disclosure statement?" He's such a good friend. It's like I'm still listening. He says, "I just want to let you know that ConnectAndSell over at Google. We've assessed every company in Silicon Valley and you're the most interesting company in Silicon Valley." I said, "That's most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. We're not even funded by an EVCs." And he says, "Well, that's not what's so interesting. What's so interesting is that you're old." And I said, "The company not that old. It's like 14 years old." And he said, "No, no, not the company. You human beings are really, really old and therefore unfundable, nobody in the Valley would fund you because you're like..." At the time I was like 64. Announcer (10:34): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (10:42): ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Chris Beall (11:16): Great. This is of no value whatsoever, but it's amusing. I'll try to remember it. My age, it's a little hard because memory goes... well, I wish I could remember where it goes. So I guess my point is though, it's interesting when you look at Silicon Valley and you think about how it works, it's much more of a highly correlated system than we tend to think when we're creating investment portfolios that are robust against change. (11:43): So they're selling and buying to each other. There is banking of all sorts, including a bank actually like Silicon Valley Bank investing directly in companies indirectly fund to fund through lending, doing wealth management for founders, all sorts of things. LOCs, we had our LOC there, all that kind of good stuff. And when you think about it, it's like did anybody really know how correlated it all is for real? Really, how correlated it is? And then in doing that analysis, and I'm thinking regulators should do this kind of correlation analysis because it could be important with banks. Did they look ahead and say three years ago and say, "So, what's the situation like if interest rates go from zero to some other number? What would happen?" I'm sure somebody was doing that, right? I mean they had to be, weren't they? Ryan Edwards (12:38): You would think that most of the banks would look at that sort of thing that most of the banks were having those decisions of, "Okay, let's run sensitivity on all these different types of scenarios, especially where rates were." I know being at SUV for as long as I had been there that there was discussion constantly about when rates go back up. So it feels like that was certainly within the sector I was in, which is more focused around loans and how that impacts loan portfolio and everything, but that's obviously the revenue generator for the bank in a lot of ways. (13:10): So how did that impact them on the other side and the balance sheet side and the deposits? So obviously you have to start paying more for deposits and the adjustments on that side. I think that... I know that discussion and that thought process is happening there and I'm sure it's happening in all the banks, but I don't know that clearly at SVB they were not doing a good job of, well, how do we manage the deposit book in investment side because they went out real long on some investments, and T-bills, and things that just didn't make sense compared to what would happen in the market. (13:44): I mean I think it would've been understandable if they had done that with a small percentage of their assets that they were investing, but clearly they had 90 billion of investments into some T-bills that were not probably the smartest things to put in for the timeframes that they had them set up to. So I'm certainly confused at how that went through and I'd love to get the story as we continue forward over the next several months, or maybe it's a year or longer before we get all the details. But I really want to understand how that decision making's happening. And then I think why you're seeing all the other bank stocks dropping is because people are realizing that nobody's really involved in these banks right now. So all of them could be doing that. (14:26): And I'm guessing it's similar to VC whereas you mentioned, VC sort of its groupthink, right? Where they go, "Oh, well, I like this sector, and well, I do too now." And everybody sort of goes, "Well, that's the cool sector, now, lets all invest in ChatGPT because that's what's out there." And then you kind of go into with the banking side, I'm sure you have all the banks talking to each other about, "Well, what do you invest in and what should we be in? We're in this T-bill thing and you have all those investment advisors having discussions with each other around a lot of the large banks too." And so they end up going to similar assets as well. (15:00): So I think that's why we're seeing the fear-based stuff in the stock market now is because I would guess that a lot of them are having those similar conversations with each other because they want to feel like I'm doing what everybody else is doing. So how much of that was done that way and when are we going to find out about other banks that were also copycatting each other because of this mentality that, "Hey, rates are probably going to be going for a while, let's get some money invested." Corey Frank (15:26): What do you think as a CEO, Chris and Ryan, especially your perspective Ryan on investments, what should a founder CEO, CRO, what type of pivot should I be adjusting to? Should I double down on my tech stack investment to try to get more with less? Do you see additional headcount right sizing? Do you see, "Listen, we've got to diversified and we got to penetrate new markets"? What is some of the advice that you would give? Because I got the debt and I got the equity markets pretty locked down and tight and restricted for now. So all I have besides debt and equity is I have revenues. So what type of advice would, Chris, you and Ryan, give to these CEOs and CROs to pivot and adjust? Chris Beall (16:10): Wow. I mean I've always given the same advice to them, which is efficiency has unusually high yields over time and especially go-to-market efficiency. I mean it's always shocking if you really work the numbers and you know me, I'm an old math guy, you work the numbers on go-to-market efficiency and you work them over four or five years. It's generally you could avoid an entire round of financing just by paying attention to your go-to-market efficiency, which is not normally done in venture finance situations. There's go-to- market speed, can we scale? I hear a lot of talk about scaling even before there's traction. There's pseudo traction that people get into. So pre chasm traction, which they think that means something. Every pre chasm dollar you get is a delightful ruse. It's making you think you have a market that you don't have and gulling you into investing in that market, you need to, I think, be very disciplined around those kinds of things. (17:07): But most of the money that goes into these companies is for go-to-market, and most of that go-to-market money in my opinion is wasted just because it's go-to-market's incredibly inefficient. And I think there's also a question of speed with the company that I don't want to name, but I chant that I ended up with at one point we didn't have any money. The previous folks since had the spending rate up to a couple million a month and we had nothing. And it was considered by some people to be an impossible intractable problem. It's actually a simple problem. We describe it in one of the episodes. It's like figure out what's coming in on a flow rate basis, figure out what your gross profit is from that and cut your company to that expense level. (17:51): Now you have infinite runway. Okay, take a deep breath and figure out what you're going to do from there. But the dream that somehow you're going to round that corner while your tires have lost traction. And if I just hang in there, I'm going to make it. I wouldn't advise that, especially right now where your next funding of any kind is highly uncertain, both in terms of size and in terms of timing. I mean, my advice is get profitable now. Which by the way, pretty much any company can choose to do. It's just a choice. Corey Frank (18:24): Ryan, what do you think? Ryan Edwards (18:26): I always think that, I mean, the investment side and what you're going to push forwards is what's going to drive the revenue piece the best, right? So you mentioned kind of basically product improvements, engineering stuff, things like that, proficiency. Of course there's a desire to get more efficient, but is that going to drive more revenue and better revenue or things like that, what you're doing? I think a lot of times people invest a lot in engineering and product changes and things that they're not certain on what the improvement is going to be. (18:54): And that's where I think the problem is. That's an easy decision when you're early and you have almost no revenue that people are like, "Oh, I want to improve the product or make it. I got to get your product ready to sell, of course." But I think as people are growing and scaling, I think there is a lot of times that too much capital is spent within that pivot, changing the product, adding a new feature and things like that, and not enough in how do you be efficient in your sales, your ad spend, your what you're going after to actually acquire the user and your customer base. So that's I think where customers are not there. (19:26): And then to your point, Chris, as you kind of said, I think there's been a significant shift to that profitability focus because capital is not feeling like they can just throw money everywhere and it won't matter. So the growth rates are not as big of a focus as they were. I think people now want to see, "Well, I still want you to grow, but I want you to grow efficiently and prove to me that you can grow with less money and without having as big of a burn." And I think that's where the challenge is, is nobody's done that for so long because we've been in this 10 plus year cycle of faster growth and grow because the outcome is going to be a higher, if you can worry about the growth and who cares how much you're losing because as long as you're growing fast, I'm going to pay you a 10, 12, 20 X multiple on that growth rate versus paying you on profitability. (20:18): There's just so many businesses that are not built that way anymore where profitability is the focus because they've been taught that if you want the biggest outcome, nobody in that space cares about the profitability. They care about the growth rate and the size of revenue you've gotten to. Corey Frank (20:33): Well, I know you have to run here, Ryan, I'm sure your phone's ringing off the hook with you and Philip over at Prospeq with a q.co, if you want to get ahold of Ryan and his team. But last question, are there any key metrics in this new world, in this new era that I should be tracking from my business, especially as you and Philip and the team are looking that maybe CEOs, CROs aren't tracking today? Ryan Edwards (20:57): I don't know about that they're not tracking today, but I think that a lot of the stuff on the acquisition cost side is becoming even more important. Where I think the client acquisition cost has always been something people are focused on lifetime value, client acquisition cost, especially within SaaS companies. But I think that I run into a lot of companies that don't have a great grasp on that, especially companies that don't have 100% of their business in SaaS where they're selling something else, or maybe they're selling a product, or they're have a service component, or other things. And I don't think they always have a great grasp on what it's actually costing them to bring on their clients. (21:34): So without that information, you really can't determine what you should be selling for. Are you ever going to be able to be profitable? Are you able to scale with what you have? So those really digging into where you're getting your clients and how much it's costing you to bring them on, no matter the business that you have and what product or service or software that you're selling, I think is really important that I've seen a lot of businesses that don't have, I think, the best understanding that. Corey Frank (22:03): Well, when the dust settles, we'd love to have you back on again. We're going to cut you loose. And, Chris, we're going to continue the conversation here if we will. So thanks for joining the Market Dominance Guys, Ryan. Ryan Edwards (22:14): All right. Chris Beall (22:14): Yeah, thanks so much, Ryan. I think all that business is going to come to you actually. Ryan Edwards (22:20): Hopefully we'll be able to scale quite a bit. It'd be nice. Corey Frank (22:23): That's all right. Okay, we'll let you go. Chris, same question for you. When you look, especially your very metric driven organization, certainly at ConnectAndSell, one of the new gold standards that we've adopted here that we got from you a few months ago was average demos, average meetings per hour per rep work, which is a good one. In this kind of a new potential tectonic shift that's happening. What are some of those other metrics or keys that I should be tracking that I have the residue, I just don't have the visibility or the KPI created that I should be watching this, my odometer, my speedometer, my oil pressure, my gas tank. What are some of those that you see? Chris Beall (23:07): Well, I mean I think meetings per rep hour is actually... Let's dig into that one a little bit because I think almost nobody looks at it. I think it's number one, maybe two and three when you're really trying to figure out are you in control of your go-to market. And by the way, there's two ways to look at it, there's meetings per rep hour on a per rep basis, which is a rep performance indicator, and generally is determined by conversations per hour times conversion rate. And then you've got to net that out, so it's actually net meetings attended per hour. And so now you've got to bring in what are you doing about your rescheduling? We have podcast episodes on this subject. Cheryl Turner was on saying, I Heart No Shows. Well, you only heart no shows because you think it's a great opportunity to get back ahold of somebody that you've spoken with before, having advantages you didn't have the first time when they accepted the meeting and now they didn't attend. (24:03): So I would put that under the general heading of, are you processing your exhaust in a way that maximizes the return on all the hard work you did to get the exhaust? And I think a lot of times we look at exhaust like its exhaust, it's gone. People who design cars with turbos in them, they don't know it's not. I remember as a kid, I might have mentioned this on an episode once, maybe I didn't, but as a kid I read Harvey McKay Swim with the Sharks. And I still remember reading that and I was probably, I don't know... Do you have it around somewhere? Corey Frank (24:35): I probably have it around here somewhere. Yeah. Chris Beall (24:37): Yeah. So it's a very engaging book. Harvey's incredible leader, and writer, communicator. And I remember reading as a kid, something that really shocked me and I thought about it a lot, which is the money to be made in the envelope, business is not in the envelopes, it's in the non square or non-rectangular cuts that you have to make to make an envelope. It's in the scrap paper. You're going to have an immense amount of scrap paper in the envelope business because envelopes are not... they don't come off a roll, right? You got to actually cut these funny shapes and fold them up and then you have scraps. So how much money do you make on the scrap paper? That was his point is that's the differentiator in that business. Whoever sets that up the best makes a business out of their scrap paper, paper does really well. (25:24): Well, in the world of B2B, our scrap paper is what happens to the, let's say 93% or 94% if you're running a pretty good shop of conversations that did not lead to meetings. And the simplest metric to get off of that, the number one is, well, how about the ones that did lead to meetings that weren't held? Okay, so what's your processing rate on that? What's your success rate? How many of those are being spoken with every day? And there's a metric out there that is very rarely tracked, which is your net show rate. So almost everybody looks at growth show rate. I scheduled a meeting with Corey, did Corey show up to that meeting. This is all part of the wonderful shortsightedness of sales. (26:09): I mean, in the world of sales, we look at this quarter and then we look shorter than that. Now we're down to this meeting and they didn't show up and now I'm offended. Screw that. And they're out of here. They're disqualified. So that's number one, because the value is so high. One of our guys, John T McLaren, when he calls personally, he makes the company about $240,000 an hour. Corey Frank (26:34): On his no show list? Chris Beall (26:36): His no show list. Corey Frank (26:37): On his net no-show list? Chris Beall (26:39): At his no-show list. So that exhaust is processed to the point where it's actually very high value or, and it tends to be discarded by most organizations. I have actually never, in all the time I've been a ConnectAndSell, run into a company that already had a defined, and executed, and measured process for calling no shows. It was catches catch can. If the meetings with Corey, Corey takes care of it. If meetings with me, I take care of it. Corey Frank (27:11): Because we already know they picked up once. And so why wouldn't you have yet another serendipitously powered conversation? Because they're probably going to pick up again and you can have a deeper conversation because you already have the moral authority in that, as word from the- Chris Beall (27:28): The deeper conversation you can have is, "Hey, I see we had something on the calendar for yesterday at 9:00. Something important must have come up for you, when would be a better time to talk?" It's like the ultimate sales conversation you cannot need. It has every dimension you're looking for, including the call to action built right in because, well, there was already a decision to act together. You're in a collaborative mindset at that point and you're not offended, you're just moving forward. Same thing with everything that happens other than an appointment set, are you reprocessing it? (28:01): So for instance, everybody who says simply no or hangs up, say one of your people calls somebody, it's a two second non-conversation. The prospect hangs up or the prospect yells, "Don't ever call me again." And hangs up, but they didn't really say, don't ever call me again like don't ever call this number again. They were pissed. What do you do? Well, it cost me a lobster dinner two, one night to convince one of our reps what you do, which is its just a conversation. You put them in your list, you put them out, I don't know, two, three weeks, and then you talk to them and you say, "Hey, when we spoke on this date and we spoke back on the yards of March, you didn't have time for a conversation, is now a better time?" It's a very simple script. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. You're not backing them into a corner. You're not saying anything bad about them. They've forgotten you already. They forgot you a long time ago. And what's going to happen as a result? You'd be surprised. I mean, you wouldn't, but most people would be. (29:04): So fact of the matter is you can't be efficient if you throw away most of your input on the first attempt to process it in sales because if you're processing through ambushes, you have a pretty serious problem, which is most of what you're going to get back is an ambush response, not a response to the potential value that you could provide. So you kind of have to keep going and work through that. So those are two things. The third thing that I would pay attention to is here's your investment in sales or in sales and marketing. Stuff you are doing, proactive spending. So it's all speculative by the way, anybody who thinks the spending on sales and spending on marketing is not speculative, doesn't know what the word speculative means. (29:51): So you are speculating that this spend is going to turn into future business. You have some notion of what the cycle time is from any given sort of outbound motion, attempting to call somebody, or whatever it is, to finally getting some sort of a deal. Fact of the matter is all of those cycle times will be different. So what you end up with is what we call a flow rate. At some point you have a flow rate of meetings that are happening, so that's an interesting thing that's going on. Well, take that flow rate of meetings, which is just it's a flow rate. I like it as meetings per day that are attended and then say, "Hey, am I measuring that flow rate?"

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys podcast, Chris, Corey and Helen Fanucci discuss the evolution of the internet, from its early days as a way for messages to move across networks to the democratization of global information through the browser and search engines. They also explore the capabilities of ChatGPT, including its ability to generate email responses and interact with customers using personalized prompts. They highlight the potential of ChatGPT to save time and improve the quality of communication for sales professionals. Join us for this idea-filled episode, "How ChatGPT Can Improve Sales Enablement."   Four ideas on how sales professionals can benefit from using ChatGPT for follow-up: Personalized Follow-Up: ChatGPT can help sales professionals create personalized follow-up messages for each customer based on their preferences, interests, and past interactions with the sales team. ChatGPT can analyze the customer's conversation history and provide personalized responses that feel like a human wrote them. Lead Nurturing: ChatGPT can help sales professionals nurture leads by sending automated follow-up messages to potential customers at regular intervals. These messages can be customized to meet the specific needs of each customer, making it easier to keep them engaged with the sales process. Schedule Meetings: ChatGPT can help sales professionals schedule meetings with potential customers by automating the process of finding a mutually convenient time to meet. This can save the sales team a lot of time and effort by eliminating the need to go back and forth with customers trying to find a suitable time. Provide Instant Customer Support: ChatGPT can be used to provide instant customer support to customers who have questions or concerns about a product or service. Sales professionals can use ChatGPT to respond to these inquiries in real-time, providing customers with the information they need to make a purchasing decision. This can help increase customer satisfaction and improve the chances of closing a sale. The Evolution of the Internet and Digital Communications 1960s: The concept of hypertext is introduced by Ted Nelson. 1980: Tim Berners-Lee develops the idea of a "mesh" network of hyperlinked documents and begins working on the WorldWideWeb (WWW) project. 1990: The first web page is created by Tim Berners-Lee. It contains information about the WWW project and how to use a web browser. 1991: The first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, is developed by Tim Berners-Lee. It was a text-only browser and was only available on the NeXTSTEP operating system. 1993: The first graphical web browser, called Mosaic, is released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. It was a huge success and helped to popularize the web. 1994: The first search engine, called WebCrawler, is launched by Brian Pinkerton. It was the first search engine to index entire web pages rather than just titles and headings. 1995: Netscape Navigator is released by Netscape Communications Corporation. It becomes the most popular web browser and sets the standard for web browsing features. 1996: The first version of Internet Explorer is released by Microsoft, marking the beginning of the "browser wars" between Microsoft and Netscape. 1998: Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their search engine quickly becomes the most popular and sets a new standard for search technology. 2003: Skype is launched, becoming one of the first and most popular VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services. 2004: Mozilla Firefox is released by the Mozilla Foundation as an open-source alternative to Internet Explorer. 2008: Google releases the first version of the Chrome browser, which quickly becomes popular due to its speed and simplicity. 2009: WhatsApp is launched, providing a new way for people to communicate via instant messaging and voice calls over the internet. 2010: Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9, which is considered a major improvement over previous versions. 2013: Google's Chrome becomes the most popular web browser, surpassing Internet Explorer for the first time. 2021: The current versions of popular web browsers include Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Opera. Popular search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. VOIP services like Skype, Zoom, and Teams have become critical tools for remote communication in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Worldwide Web continues to evolve and expand, with new technologies and innovations being introduced regularly. 2022: ChatGPT from OpenAI.com takes the world by storm and changes how we write and communicate forever.   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Chris Beall (00:00): Internet is a funny thing because when it was being built by some people, I won't mention any of them, back in the late, very late seventies and early eighties, it was really just a way for basically for messages to move across networks that were interconnected. That's what it was called, the internet. It was sort of affected messages, and then there was this protocol, TCIP's still around that allows these messages to move around and then get reassembled in the right order. And it made sense of, by the way, when you use voiceover internet or we do what we're doing here, it's shocking that this works because the internet doesn't have a lot to do with packets being delivered in order, and so they've got to be reassembled and put in order. This is why when you're using your VoIP phones here, do we have VoIP phones here?  Chris Beall (00:46): Ah, what kind do you have? Oh yeah, we have, yeah, there everything's void, right? There are delays built into VOIP because voiceover IP requires that the receiving side, the part that's going to play the sound in your ear, it's receiving just data. It has to wait for the enough packets to show up to put them in order out of order. Packets are called jitter, and there is a buffer that's built in to avoid phone or receiver. That's called a jitter buffer, and that's what its job is to do, is to wait long enough. Otherwise you have dropouts that are called chop and you'll hear it, right? So when you're using dialer using connection cell, you're even just on a call. What's going on is pretty complex and there's actually delays that are built in from the technology itself. So big jitter, buffers give you very high-quality voice, but width, long delays, potentially long delays depending on how much jitter their system.  Chris Beall (01:41): That's the internet. The thing that made the internet popular was actually the browser, and the browser was built on top of the worldwide web, which had nothing to do with browsers either. It was just a way for a bunch of scientists to talk to each other in Switzerland to get some stuff published. If you were there through all of this, it's each part was big. The biggest thing that happened in the internet was the browser, because the browser democratized the access to global information. And then the next biggest thing that happened was big search engines because the search engines made that information actually available to us. This is the next big thing, which is the ability to interact with something that learns and to make your own environments in which it's learned what you care about. So imagine the chat t p t like capability.  Chris Beall (02:33): You can take a knowledge base, the Market Dominance Guys podcast. You can put that together and somebody can come interact with it by asking questions That's remarkable and different. I tried the other day, a very simple thing. I was, what was I looking for? Something really simple and I tried it. Oh, I was looking for ah, complimentary quotes about the Market Dominance Guys podcast, right? Cause I some quotes to go on the book and everything has to be written by chat. G P T and I stupidly went out and used Google to do it. 15 minutes later, I'm thinking, I'm not going to find any complimentary quotes about the market dominance, guys. It's just not happening. Apparently, nobody feels good about this. They don't say anything about it. We suck. So before I went down that road any further, I thought, wait a second, this book's written by chat, G P T. I think I'll give it a question, right? So are there any complimentary votes about the Market Dominance Skies podcast? And by then it learned it was ours dot Nathan Lotts. Oh yes. And it starts out with one quote after another. Then I started investigating, and some of them I'm thinking, why can't I find this actual human being who said this? But after a while, I gave up and said, yeah, ChatGPT says it. Its job is to write the book. Quotes are going on, but you have to check it out. So  Helen Fanucci (03:52): There's another use case that you guys might be interested in. We have a product called Viva Sales, and there's a capability in chat G P T that we're calling copilot at Microsoft. So let's imagine you're on the phone with somebody or somebody asks you for a product quote, quote me on, I want to buy 3000 widgets. What co-pilot will do is write the email, pulling data from c r M system, write an email response to the individual on behalf of the rep. The rep just has to review it and approve it or make whatever changes. Think about that. It's so much easier to review something and approve it or tweak it than to have to generate it from scratch. So that's capabilities going into all the Microsoft's products into Bing search. So that's all powered by the open AI track G P T capability. That's another example of a use case.  Chris Beall (04:51): Yeah, this one's really big for two reasons. One is getting access to all that information and the world of sales enablement. It's all about providing the information you need is a sell it, right? The only problem is it all piles up if you can't find it anymore and you don't know what's current and all that. To be able to ask chat, g B T to finish a sentence, so to speak, an answer a question, or have it look at what you're already writing or what came in it. Anything could be a prompt. Anything. It's not always a question. It's just, it's like pushing a sled off the top of a hill. It's like, where's it going to go? I don't know. Let's find out. Right down it goes. That's the prompt. So it's really, really interesting when you think about that. The other reason it's so powerful is it's a better writer than anybody in this room because it's taken the entire history of writing and learn from it.  Chris Beall (05:35): So it's a really, really good writer and you can ask it to write in different styles. So I know a lot of salespeople, as we've mentioned on the podcast, have, how to put this politely, are left-handed colorblind and, dyslexic? Those are their advantages. That is, their advantages are that in some parts of their not, this isn't true of all salespeople, but I know a lot of really, really, really good salespeople who have 1, 2, 3 or four of these characteristics or more, and they learn to talk and they learn to listen. That's how they got a through school. Well, these are the smartest people who have difficulty with how the modern world is constructed in terms of textual relationships. Well, but you got to have textual relationships. So lowering the cost of writing that email from 30 minutes to five seconds, that's a lot of time. 

Welcome to another episode of Market Dominance Guys! In this third installment of our Road Trip visit series, we join Helen Fanucci and the team at Branch 49 as they discuss trust-building, gratitude, and top-of-the-funnel strategies. Helen Fanucci shares her experiences with cold calls while using ConnectAndSell, adjusting her approach to engage prospects effectively. Her customized calls-to-action cater to each prospect's unique needs, leading to successful completions even when the prospect isn't the right person or ready for a meeting. The experts also explore the value of cold calls in generating website traffic, comparing it to targeted Google ads. The conversation emphasizes the power of trust in maintaining lasting relationships, highlighting that trust endures indefinitely, provided it's not undermined by sales pressure. Join them for this episode, "Boosting Website Traffic with Cold Calls." Links from this episode: Branch 49  Sean Snyder on LinkedIn   Corey Frank on LinkedIn  Microsoft  Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn  Helen's book, Love Your Team  ConnectAndSell  Chris Beall on LinkedIn  Chris and Corey's book, Market Dominance: A Conversation with ChatGPT   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps, and off ramps of driving to the top of your market. With our host, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49. Welcome to another episode of Market Dominance Guys. In this third installment of our Road Trip Visit series, we join Helen Fanucci and the team at Branch 49 as they discuss trust-building, gratitude, and top-of-the-funnel strategies. Helen shares her experience with cold calls while using ConnectAndSell, adjusting her approach to engage prospect effectively. Her customized calls to action cater to each prospect's unique needs, leading to successful completions, even when the prospect isn't the right person or ready for a meeting. The experts also explore the value of cold calls in generating website traffic, comparing it to targeted Google Ads. The conversation emphasizes the power of trust in maintaining lasting relationships, highlighting that trust endures indefinitely, provided it's not undermined by sales pressure. Join them for this episode, Boosting Website Traffic With Cold Calls. Corey Frank (01:19): I love the concepts of gratitude reciprocates. And were you thinking the same thing? The fact that part of the challenge that we have, and an agency model like us at Branch 49, but I think this is endemic to, if you were a qualifier or an SDR or a Microsoft and you took that lead from that person and you threw it over the fence to your AE, they have the notes to read. And maybe they'll give you a call, "Helen, tell me about this one," but most of the time that never happens. They're just going off of the notes and maybe they'll be intimidated by the title. Maybe they'll be surprised that, "You actually got ahold of so-and-so? Oh my gosh, this is great." And they're going to go through their own emotional machinations about how I should prepare and relax because now I'm going to be under pressure in this discovery call. (02:04): And we always talked about, Chris, that the natural state of somebody in a cold call is fear. And the natural state, something they came up with a few months ago, the national state of somebody in a discovery call is that one of apprehension. Because I'm about to get sold something and I'm not quite sure if they're going to use the Ivanov gambit opening move or they're going to use the Belarusian gambit to come off from the ... what are they going to do? But I know it's coming. It's interesting to diffuse that by saying, "I know I'm an interruption, [inaudible 00:02:40] thank you. First off, before we get started, I just wanted to thank you for talking with my colleague, Helen." So is that a hot tub epiphany as well, because I really like that. I think that could be very powerful for starting a discovery. Chris Beall (02:55): Yeah, I think it'd be amazing in discovery. It'd be amazing for a follow-up call. It actually harmonizes follow-up calls and discovery calls, even though the follow-up call is always an ambush. Never forget on the other side of an ambushed, they're always in the same emotional state. I want to get off this call with my self-image intact. You have an animal in that state 100% of the time. Unless you call me, in which case I answer cold calls by going, "Great, I have a cold call here. I get a chance to make a sales rep's day." Not very many people- Corey Frank (03:31): That's empirical evidence of what your cold call picker-upper score is. Chris Beall (03:34): It's pretty good. My best phone number scores 94 out of 100 and I'm pretty busy most of the time. That's not pretty good. Helen Fanucci (03:42): But you also ambush everybody or you boomerang everybody. Chris Beall (03:46): I have been known to point out to cold callers that perhaps their job is harder than it used to be. Because, sincerely, I do think their job is harder than it used to be. I always ask, "So what did you use to call me today?" They call this a honeypot strategy. It sits right there, it's my cell phone. But yeah, this is the kind of stuff, when it comes to the top of the funnel, understanding is continuously evolving. We were talking earlier about, here's something you might not know about cold calls. When you cold call somebody, or follow up call them, it doesn't make any difference, they will almost always go to the website of the company that you mentioned. Almost always. But what's that the equivalent of, in the economy? Those are Google Ads, right? Companies buy Google Ads hoping somebody will click on them to go to their website. (04:38): Well, you just got a more targeted person, because they're on a list, to go to the website. So you provided something of the equivalent value of a Google Ad click, or a highly targeted person, just by having the conversation. Even if it didn't lead to a meeting. So when we measure looking at opportunities, and threading back to conversations that preceded them, we find that for every dollar that comes through setting meetings, a $1.80 comes through the website. Just from the conversations. This is just being learned in the world right now. This is an example of something that folks are just figuring out. We call it an attribution report or an attribution interaction. And we see cases where, for say, I don't know, 250,000 conversations. And we have some customers who have that many. They might produce four or 500 million dollars of pipeline. But if you go back to what came through the meetings, it might only be 100 million dollars. (05:40): So you look at that combination, you go, "Well, where'd all that extra money come from?" Well, they come to the website. So can you amplify it further? Sure, send him an email that says, "Thank you for our conversation today." The only subject line in history that will be opened every single time, other than, we're holding Jimmy hostage over [inaudible 00:05:58]. That's a bad one, don't use that. I think people try to use that on me on occasion. There's one about alligators, doesn't work either. But think about that, you've done a targeted advertisement by simply having a conversation. Now what's important about that advertisement? Trust. Trust. You have seven seconds to get trust. I was out with some IBM folks a couple weeks ago in Atlanta, and I think I shocked the group by saying, "You cannot actually fail in a cold call." If you have skill, you cannot fail because your goal is to get trust. And you will get trust 100% of the time if you have skill and you'll apply your skill. (06:34): That's the bar. It's trust. You win. Why? Because trust is durable. It's durable. Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference guy, book's right over there. I asked him at dinner one night, "How long do we have to get trust in cold call?" He said seven seconds. I said, "Really? Our research says eight seconds." He said, "Your research is wrong. Seven seconds." Okay, what do we need to do in those seven seconds? He said, "Oh, that's easy. We just need to show the other person we see the world through their eyes and then we need to demonstrate to that person that we are competent," Listen carefully, "competent to solve a problem they have right now." When he said right now, starbursts went off in my tiny brain. I said, "Well, right now, I'm a literalist. It means right now. What problem do they have right now?" Me. Can I solve the problem that is me? Yes, I am competent to solve that problem. I can go away. Wow, I'm in a really good position. This is fantastic. (07:31): I do those two things, I get trust. How long does the trust last? That's the next question I asked him. He said, "Forever, until you blow it." How do you blow it? He said, "Try to sell to them. Start selling to them, you'll blow the trust." That's that energy thing we're talking about. Put too much tension on the line, you'll break the line. So this stuff all goes together. Helen was experiencing it from the position of being a vastly experienced salesperson and sales manager. But in this funny arena, the seven-seconder, where the game is played very, very, very differently because the emotional stakes are so high for the other person. And it makes you nervous because you're the ambush. Or you don't like it, it feels bad. I don't like doing this to somebody. (08:21): But you have to know why you're doing it, by the way. I don't know if you guys all think about this. You need to set your mind in one place, I am only pushing this button for one reason, in hopes of helping somebody. What am I going to help them with? I'm going to help them go from whatever state they're in to a state of being more willing to learn about something that might possibly change their life. I know people think business-to-business products don't change people's lives, that is utter bologna. These are the products that change people's lives even more than any consumer product. The only thing you can pitch that'll change your life more than that is, "Hey, you want to get married?" That's a pretty good one. I got the energy wrong on that, thank God I did it better the first time. Corey Frank (09:09): What questions for Chris and Helen? Sean Snyder (09:12): Okay, so when you're on calls or [inaudible 00:09:18] did you get to the ending of your work script or your extreme clip? Helen Fanucci (09:21): Yeah, so my intent was to set up a 15-minute call next week to get their feedback on the future of work and employee engagement. And that did not happen, however, it got navigated differently. So one woman, "I'm not the right person." And so she's referencing me to other people. Another one was, "Well, I don't really have time to do that." And I said, "Well, would you be interested in participating in a HR round table with your peers in a form for us to talk about the feature of work challenges and get feedback?" Oh yes, I'd like to do that. Can you send me an invitation? Yes, I will. So it just kind of navigated that way. Chris Beall (10:08): I listened. She got- Helen Fanucci (10:09): I don't know. Chris Beall (10:10): The person who was trying to push her off, she asked for the meeting, it was fantastic. He was on ice. He had no idea who he was dealing with. He could tell that ... Because she didn't even say anything about, "Hi, I'm Helen Fanucci from Microsoft." I can almost feel his fingers clicking on LinkedIn. How do you spell Fanucci? Who is this person? Because he could tell, he just was, I don't like this because I can't tell. This isn't somebody junior. But she didn't say what her title was or anything and it put him in a fantastic place to stay engaged. It was that energy. He was going to tug, but he wasn't going to run. And finally it was like, well, he wouldn't take the meeting, not immediately. And so then the conversation went a little further, but it did go all the way through the screenplay. You just didn't know it. I mean, I listened to it. You weren't thinking about, in terms of where you were getting, because this is technical cold-calling stuff that weirdos like us think about. But you did get all the way through it. Helen Fanucci (11:08): Okay. Yeah. And he told me I should tell him my title after he gives me permission to tell him why I called. Okay, that I run Customer Success Organization. I didn't think about that at the moment, but that was a learning ... Yes, I had a couple different calls to action in mind, and so, one of them was to see if he would be interested in this HR Roundtable. Because we do these forms to build peer-to-peer connections and stuff. So I don't know the screenplay thing, but yeah, I had some ideas about where to take it and got there. Sean Snyder (11:41): So it would be like, at Branch, we like to call those completions. If it's a wrong person, it's a completion because now they're out of the list, right? Helen Fanucci (11:49): Yeah, right. Sean Snyder (11:56): They ask for an email, they're going a booking. So every, time for us, we review those as wins, just like [inaudible 00:11:56]. Helen Fanucci (11:56): Yeah. Yep. And then I have people on my team that actually follow up with the invitations and stuff like that. And then I include them on the follow-up email, it's a brief, and I say, "If there's anything Angela or I can do," my person, "anything we can do to for you and your team, just let us know." Sean Snyder (12:57): Any idea of your release date ... Chris Beall (13:00): Oh yeah, we do have a new book. The book got released on Tuesday. Actually, Helen bought the first ebook copy of it on Kindle on Monday night, I think it was. Was that Monday night? Not from a hot test, that would've involved risk to electronic equipment. But the book is kind of unusual, anybody who wants to check out the book, the idea behind this book is that everybody's talking about AI and ChatGPT in particular. And I just had a curious moment on a Friday two weeks ago where I said, "I wonder if the work that we've done together on Market Dominance Guys ..." Which was supposed to be a book, it was never supposed to be a podcast. (13:37): So Corey just called me up once and said, "I'm going to drag a book out of you. And the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to interview you every Thursday morning for an hour and a half until we have enough material for a book. Then we'll throw it to an editor and we'll get a book." And well, here we are, three plus years later, almost four years later, and hey, no book. So it's like, okay, so what do they call that? Either delay or frank failure? He's Frank, so we'll just call it delay. And I've taken three runs at the book, by the way, and I will admit I'm not one of those people who get stuck writing. Go read my blog sometime, I wrote all that crap. And so, why wouldn't the book come out? And I thought, hey, maybe ChatGPT would like to write the book. (14:20): So I just thought, well, let's give this a whirl. Let's take 25 episodes of the podcast and see what ChatGPT has to say about. So we'll have ChatGPT summarize them. So we just fed it the text, the transcript, and said, you summarize. So it wrote it summaries. The summaries are a little soft, I would say. If you read them, you won't quite hear the edge that some people say they hear in the podcast. And these are the early episodes so it's just Corey and me. So this is the book writing episodes so they're even edgier because we're really getting into the stuff that other people don't believe, much less care to talk about. Corey Frank (15:02): Don't make the spiders angry. Chris Beall (15:03): Yeah, it's that kind. So we're getting into the edgy stuff. So ChatGPT gave it a whirl, wrote some summaries, and then about each summary I asked a single prompt. It's called prompt response kind of thing. And ChatGPT's job, actually, is just to keep putting one word after another based on probabilistically what makes sense. This is statistical AI package. If you want to read about it, Stephen Wolfram wrote a brilliant article that explains it in a way that, every once in a while you're going to want to skip some of the math, but it's still pretty compelling to read. So anyway, just gave it a whirl. My boundaries for the experiment were 6:00 AM Saturday morning until midnight Sunday night. That's all the time. And I wanted it done in two days, end to end. And so, most of my effort was copying and pasting. Just getting the cover Art from Dall-E, which is ChatGPT's artistic cousin, was not trivial. So I'm down to 11 credits. I've only got 11 prompts left before it cuts me off. And then I came up with the one- Corey Frank (16:18): And since it's so obvious on the folks, tell them how many prompts it took to describe your co-host here. Chris Beall (16:24): Well, here's the term we used. Here's what I asked for, I said I would like a book cover for a six-inch by nine-inch book, done in a minimalist Madison Avenue advertising style, that shows a ... Now this sounds pretty bad, guys, but I had to do this. A tall, brown-haired businessman and a stocky, dark-haired businessman. Sorry, Corey. And a futuristic robot. Actually, the robot was the hardest part, because it kept giving me robots that looked like they were out of the 50s with square heads and all this. I finally thought, how about a futuristic robot having a conversation around a table. And it gives you three images and one of them was just, boom, that's it. It's like, you know it when you see it. So I snagged that one, sent it over to Susan, Susan did all the summarization work, by the way. (17:21): And Austin, our podcast editor, was the one that got her started doing stuff with ChatGPT. And my conclusion from all of this is that, what's really interesting is not what comes out of ChatGPT when you start, but what it will learn if you tell it new stuff. So when we started, it thought Market Dominance Guys was a podcast by Nathan Latka. Now Nathan Latka is a fantastic guy, he's out there doing great things and we would love our podcast to be as popular as his. But in fact Market Dominance Guys is our podcast and so I simply said to ChatGPT, "Actually Market Dominance Guys is a podcast with co-hosts Corey Frank and Chris Beall that explores blah, blah, blah." (18:07): And ChatGPT said, "Oh, I apologize for my error before." And then it explained to me what I just explained to it. So it does tend to talk a little nice. It started adding a paragraph of caution now. That's a new feature I've noticed, that no matter what you ask it, after it does the, I don't really know very much about this, and then it tells you a bunch of stuff. And then it says, "But don't be so certain of this, you should check it out to yourself." Corey Frank (18:37): Ask Tennessee to embellish. Chris Beall (18:40): I have a degree from Stanford, apparently, which I have since corrected. I let it know that my degree's actually from Arizona State University in physics and education. ChatGPT said, "I'm trying very hard not to be disappointed to find out that Chris Beall doesn't have an electrical engineering degree from Stanford." No, it didn't say that. So anyway, the book is out in ebook form in Kindle, supposedly coming out in paperback and hardcover. It is not 1/100 as important as Helen Fanucci's book, Love Your Team, which is eternal. But it was a good experiment and I learned a lot. I'm still learning about prompt engineering. Very senior Microsoft person, when I described what I was doing, said, "Don't ever say that again. Use the phrase prompt engineering." I said. "Aye, aye, sir." Prompt engineering is the new software development. (19:35): And you might have noticed, Microsoft made a little bet on this, about 10 billion dollars, three weeks ago. I'm going to make a prediction right here on the podcast that that bet will turn out to be one of the smartest things anybody has ever done in the history of business. This is quite remarkable. I mean, folks are using this technology to write protein sequences for novel proteins that kill bacteria because they just used the ones you already have and use them like a book. A little story. I have three applications that are in my head right now for using it to write stories about things like, well, what kind of people buy what kind of products, for instance? Or who should you maybe talk to next? (20:22): There's some stuff you can imagine. ChatGPT's thing is next, next, next, next. There's a lot of problems that you can solve by saying, "I know this much so far, what's next?" And that's how it works. So I highly recommend getting yourself one, buy the Pro edition because you can do more with it. It's cheap. And open AI, you can thank me for it, you don't need any help from me anymore. But yeah, try to read the book. The book will be like the podcast so you'll keep going, "I thought those guys were a little harder-edged than that." It's like, thanks, ChatGPT, you made it sound like nice dudes. Corey Frank (20:59): We'll have it like the [inaudible 00:21:00]. We'll increasingly get more and more attention as the story ... Chris Beall (21:06): As the lion gets more fangs and claws. Corey Frank (21:10): It'll be the unabridged version. Chris Beall (21:11): Yeah, the unabridged version. Well, let's see, we have 150 more episodes that we can do this. So there's plenty material for us. Corey Frank (21:20): Yeah and about 200,000 words in the transcriptions thus far. Chris Beall (21:23): Is that all? Corey Frank (21:24): Yes. [inaudible 00:21:26] talk last time. Chris Beall (21:28): Yeah, there are more coming out right now. Corey Frank (21:31): Any other questions for our guests here this afternoon? Helen, where's the best place to find [inaudible 00:21:40]? Helen Fanucci (21:41): Well, I have a box of books to give to everybody here. And I'm happy [inaudible 00:21:46]. But amazon.com is where people are buying the book. It's also in audiobook format, but I'm happy to sign a book for all of you. Chris Beall (21:58): The audio book is awesome, by the way. Helen Fanucci (22:00): There's auditions and we picked a great narrator. And coincidentally, she happens to live about five miles from my condo in West Seattle, so that was completely a coincidence. Chris Beall (22:15): And our book, by the way our book Corey, myself, Susan, and ChatGPT, the book is entitled Market Dominance: A Conversation with ChatGPT, and we will have it read by a robot on the ChatGPT side. And since I asked the questions, I'll provide the voice of the prompts. Corey Frank (22:35): Fantastic. Well thanks again, Helen and Chris, for visiting- Chris Beall (22:39): Thank you, Helen, for using ConnectAndSell. It only took almost four years.    

As our Market Dominance Guys continue this road trip book signing tour with Helen Fanucci, Chris emphasizes the significance of practicing sales conversations in order to become a high-performance salesperson, with the script being the key to unleashing creativity in sales. Helen tells the story of her experience cold-calling using ConnectAndSell, a script, and how it affected her Fitbit. Additionally, Chris talks about the energy transfer that takes place in a sales conversation, and how BDRs need to provide energy but also listen carefully to the emotional response of the prospect. Helen shares her experience of working with a coach and learning from the best in the world to improve her sales skills, and the importance of being objective about oneself to become a great salesperson. This episode provides valuable insights on how to engage customers effectively to build lasting relationships. As Chris says, "You are a performance athlete with your voice. That's what you are. That's what you have to work with." Join us for this episode, “What Do a Fitbit and Surfboard Have in Common with Cold Calling?” About Our Guest Helen Fanucci, Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft is the author of Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. Helen's book is available on Amazon: LOVE YOUR TEAM A SURVIVAL GUIDE for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn Corey and Chris' book is also available on Amazon: Market Dominance: A Conversation With ChatGPT Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn ConnectAndSell Branch49     Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Helen Fanucci (00:01): So that's what I got. Any questions or Corey? Anything that,  Corey Frank(00:05): Well, I want to go back to the cold call.  Helen Fanucci (00:07): Alrighty, let's go for it.  Chris Beall (00:09): Me too. Me too. I like that.  Corey Frank(00:11): Chris, since you and Helen originally met, there was no, I think you met at a conference where it was very clear that this person was the ConnectAndSell. Helen Fanucci (00:22): Yeah.  Corey Frank(00:22): And that was what, four years  Helen Fanucci (00:24): Ago almost? Yeah.  Corey Frank(00:25): So from a sales cycle, Chris, what I'm looking for is like the forecast. Did you keep that? You're married now and you're most of the time in the same household when you're not traveling. But it took until last week to close the deal for her to actually use ConnectAndSell.  Chris Beall (00:43): Well, I've prioritized which deal I was trying to close. Oh see. And I did a pretty good job on the first deal. I believe I was two days into the sales cycle and did okay on what she calls the proposition and I call it proposal. I see. So that one I prioritized. It brings up a good point though, and b2b. So this isn't a B2B sale, although it kind of is. I mean in a way because she was calling us as Microsoft, right? And Microsoft's not the easiest company in the world to get to do business with you. I went to Fargo, North Dakota and a December day a few years ago thinking we were going to get a test drive, a free test, drive up Microsoft. After seven hours there we walked out and had a nice dinner after the weirdest, coldest, slipperiest, Uber ride I've ever been on.  Chris Beall (01:31): And a truck that we had to climb up into and no test drive. So here we are. You want to see a long sales cycle. That was quite a while ago. Yeah, that's the Microsoft sales cycle. But when b2b, the replacement cycle for pretty much everything is three years. That's kind of like if you bought one, whatever it is, you're not going to buy another one of those for three years. Think about it. You're in a company, you're the one who wants X, Y, or Z to help the company do its thing better. Are you going to come back the next quarter to your board, to the committee and say, oh, just kidding, that thing that we just bought X that out. Let's get a different one. Right? Doesn't go like that. You might do that as a consumer on occasion, but think of it more like buying a car as a consumer.  Chris Beall (02:18): You're probably going to keep the car for three years, four years, or in my case 24 years with my big red Ford excursion, which Helen thinks is a bit of an eyesore and dangerous. Other than that, it's all right. So think of it as a three year cycle. Now, the consideration cycle for a product, a category of product is about a quarter. So the products that give you intent, like Bombora 6 cents, and I guess LinkedIn's doing it now and ZoomInfo is doing it, they actually have their intent window generally set at seven days. That is if you learn that a company is spiking in looking at a particular category, you got seven days to get in there according to experts who sell that stuff. So think about that, how tough that would be. So you start calling on day one, how long is it going to take before you actually have a conversation with somebody and at some point they're out of cycle.  Chris Beall (03:13): So when you look at how much of your market, your ideal customer profile, your total addressable market, how much of it in the perfect case is in market this quarter? It's math, one quarter out of three years, which is 12 quarters. So one 12 of your market, say you have the perfect list, awesome list. Every single person on that list is working for a company that needs your product eventually. A hundred percent. So what percentage of them need it this quarter and are going to even engage? Well, one 12. Can anybody do that math? So we got mathematicians in the group. They go far. So they are, yeah, exactly. Yeah, they came from somewhere. So that's your actual addressable convertible engageable market. And you've got to engage early. So there's this whole intent thing, by the way. Sounds great. But what you're basically saying is, I want to be late.  Chris Beall (04:10): I want to be late with no relationship instead of early with a relationship. That's what you're actually saying. And yeah, if you can close deals in two days like I did, then you can maybe afford to be late. But this is what really modern B2B is all about, is forming trust relationships over time that can turn into stuff. So Helen had a conversation with somebody, a pretty big company, and this somebody is a modestly big somebody and it's conversation she had on Monday using connect and sell. And that conversation may or may not lead anywhere for Microsoft in the next quarter, but that relationship is durable and the trust within that relationship's durable and the digital channel she opened to be able to send that email that they'll actually answer is durable. And the opportunity to reach out LinkedIn and actually have it not treated as modern spam, which LinkedIn as invites have just become another form of mechanized spam as the bots take over. I mean Corey and I use bots to write books because books frankly are ethically harmless, but LinkedIn invites maybe not so much. So that's fascinating to me. And when you think about somebody of first stature pushing that butt and having that conversation, she might have been, were you a little nervous?  Helen Fanucci (05:28): Oh my gosh, I think it is the best diet program around. Cause there going my Fitbits zones are going, yeah, I was  Corey Frank(05:37): Microsoft, you're an executive at Microsoft Macon Cole call. All you had to say is this is Helen Fucci with Microsoft. And they've probably said, well how much time can I have with you? Wonderful. Right? I imagine because that's, it's what how you cold call as an executive with Microsoft is probably completely different than what we experience us mere mordo cool  Chris Beall (06:00): College. Correct. Okay. Okay. I was listening cause I do that and like a little mouse going around the house. Listen, Helen's having a conversation and I can tell you everything is to what you guys are experiencing when you ambush another human being. They are not prepared to process information about who you are. They're not. They're only capable of processing this information. Am I going to learn something in the next half, second to two seconds that will allow me to get off this phone call with my self image intact? That is what they're processing who you are. That's why you can't take it personally because you're not a person, you're just an ambusher at that point. Doesn't matter. You could be Satya Naela, say you got a phone call, Hey, this is Satya Nadela from Microsoft. Oh yeah, right. Saja, how's hanging, right? I don't think so. That's not what's going to happen. So it's a very interesting world that you guys live in. It's the most human part of sales where you're right at the edge of somebody being just an animal, a scared animal and an actual human being that you can speak with. And so  Sean Snyder (07:13): I have a two part question. So on your last podcast, obviously you have a very unique voice and so to you, Helen question for you as well, but it said there was a transfer of energy taking place on the call. Yeah. Right. So how would you suggest for people not to be like a second grade, Chris Beal or via third grade, Corey, Frank or Helen on the call. And then the second question was to Helen, what need to corporate at Microsoft? So just important for people to be,  Chris Beall (07:48): Wow, I was going to sell the actual package being a second break. Chris, be discount. You wouldn't believe because I think that's a hot product Anybody wants to buy that you just shoot me a note, sec sec. Second rate. I can even do second, right? I can do second rate Chris be.com. That's my new business. It is interesting, the energy transfer thing. I don't know who here has ever worked with animals. I used to work with horses and yeah, dogs, goats, cattle, whatever. And working with small children is the same kind of thing. B. Yeah, BDRs, it's like fishing for big fish on very, very light line that can break real easy. So you have to provide the tension, but you can't overwhelm the fish because you'll break the blunt and they'll swim away. So you need to provide energy, but you need to listen really, really carefully for the emotional response.  Chris Beall (08:46): You have to feel it. Do I go up a little bit or do I mean up in energy or down a little bit? And you'll have your natural energy state that you are in which you flow energy to others. And you know what it is by the time you become an adult. Exactly. When I interact with somebody for the first time, do I feel like I'm actually providing the energy in the conversation or do I tend to be riding their way? So when you're in sales conversations and especially cold calls, but discovery and everything else, you've got to primarily number one, pay attention to your responsibility to keep that energy tension there, but not break the line. And that is the essence of sales. If you can do that, it's actually impossible to fail. You cannot fail in sales if you can do that, but you have to pay attention.  Chris Beall (09:38): And that requires being a little bit objective about yourself, which is the essence of becoming a great salesperson is becoming objective types like Helen was having these conversations. Well, we're a couple of kind of business nerds. We sit around and talk about 'em in the hot tub. It's like we were sitting in the hot tub last night and we're talking about the dynamics of these sales conversations and she's learning learning. What about this? What about that? What about that? She's taking an objective view of herself even though in the performance we can't in the moment. We have to be subjective. We have to just be human, we be very reactive. But in the post thinking about it and discussing it, we have to try to raise our objectivity. When you're doing that, always think of this, when I look at it from an energy transfer perspective, where is the energy going? And was I doing my job of keeping that little bit of tension on the line so that it's going somewhere but not forcing it and break? And I think that's actually part of every culture is like, are you participating or are you trying to force things to happen? If you're trying to force things to happen, they'll break.  Helen Fanucci (10:49): Well, the other thing I would say about the cold call too is that I am, I know I don't know anything. So I happen to be married to Chris who knows a lot. I have Cheryl Turner, one of the best in the world, who is listening in and coaching me. And so even on my follow up email to the guy I talked to on Monday, I sent him an email and then I sent it to Cheryl and I said, do you have any feedback for me? Because I don't assume, even though I've written zillions of emails in my life, that I'm doing it in a way that's most impactful. And I know that she and Chris know the science of engagement, particularly with a stranger that I just talked to on the phone. So I'm always asking questions and I don't assume I know much of anything. Although I would do also give my observations like, well, why about this Chris? I can see why people don't want to do it. Why don't you just have the SDRs it because it's such a long time to wait in between calls. And she goes, well, everyone does their own thing in between calls. I go, well, I'm not an emotional skate that I can do that. Maybe other people can work in between calls while their machine's going, but I can't. Not yet. Anyway,  Chris Beall (12:14): So well this is a great example. Helen gave you all what I think is the best piece of advice ever, ever, which is, and what you're doing here, it's always learned, learn broadly and don't assume that because something is something you're supposed to already know how to talk to somebody in a certain circumstance that you actually know of. There's always somebody to go to. There's always something to learn from. And having somebody observe, like Cheryl was observing and listening, Helen didn't know I was listening because I'm just like, if it come right around the edge of the kitchen, I can actually hear through the door there. But having somebody coach you and listen to you helps you become objective and high performance requires objectivity, and then it requires eria and then it requires objectivity and then it requires immersion. Anybody here play any sports? Anybody been coached?  Chris Beall (13:07): This is the nature of the coaching relationship. You go out and you perform. And there's two kinds of coaching was coaching in practice, and then there's coaching that has to do with being under pressure in the game. And some people can get to a certain level in practice, but nobody can become great unless they can become objective about how they perform in the game under pressure in our game, it's our voice that breaks down, voice breaks down first, it gets tight, get a little higher. Our dynamic range goes down and we might get a little bit more forceful than we need to be. Some people also get timid out under pressure in our game. Our voice breaks down under pressure. In golf, your putting stroke breaks down. It gets weird and tight. That's what happens. We get weird and tight under pressure. So having your coach listen to that and then go back over a recording and then this is the real key.  Chris Beall (14:06): And then repeat that exact thing you are trying to say until the muscles get used to it. In sales, we have to wrap the musculature of our tongues, of our throats, of our breathing around this art that we are engaging in. So if I have an example, I probably used it on a podcast once, I'll use it again here. Years and years ago, 1973 in February, I decided with a friend after long consideration that involved some beer that we would get on the train in niga and we would go down on Feil del Pacifico and take, you know, go over to Mexico City and get somehow up onto this mountain and climb this mountain. So there's two mountains that we were going to climb. They're in a national park. I could say one of them, I could actually say it after the third time. But the other one I kept reading it.  Chris Beall (15:04): P O P O C A T P T E P, tl. I couldn't say it. So I finally said to myself, I will be damped if I am going to climb a 17,882 foot mountain or whatever the Darden thing is with volcanic stuff coming out of it if I can't say its name. So stood in front of a mirror and then decided I didn't like how I looked. So I went outside and it stood all alone outside in nature and I repeated the name over and over and over until I could say, P, you have to get there with every single word. This is why we're scripted. This is why we do screenplays. This is why you practice these. It's not enough to read 'em. You have to practice them to the point where it's like, okay, I'm a tennis player, I'm at the net, the ball's going over here.  Chris Beall (15:58): I don't think, right? I've got to be able to go over it and hit that backhand ball. I have to be able to do it because I've done it hundreds of times in practice. I think a lot of people in sales don't get that. You are a performance athlete with your voice. That's what you are. That's what you have to work with. And you need to practice not at the big level. You need to practice at the little level and be okay with learning how to say something you say over and over in a way that keeps that energy flow and that allows you to relax frankly. Because otherwise you're going to be tight and it comes out in your voice. So that's what scripts are for. We have an entire episode on it, but that's what they're for. And that's why scripting is the key to unleashing creativity in sales because the creativity is around the energy flow.  Chris Beall (16:50): The energy flow lives within the boundaries of script. Without a script, we don't even know what we're doing. Some people think I'm a very natural speaker, I can stand up in front of any group and talk about any topic. Trust me, every single thing I say has been practiced a lot. People wonder why a micro pr so I can trot around in the morning for two hours. Good things going on in my, yeah, everybody by the way, anybody in the audience, you want to learn something special, learn micro printing. Just send me a note. Two,  Sean Snyder (17:22): The performance athlete thinking the podcast, you a really good surfing analogy. You remember what it  Chris Beall (17:31): Was? Well, the script is the surfboard. Imagine you're going to learn to surf, right? Oh, Corey did this once, right? He left Wisconsin and went to California and became a world-class surfer. That's right. And you can tell he is got the body of a world-class surfer inside the body that he has now. It's hiding in there. It's all  Corey Frank(17:55): Funnies. Like you said, everything has been practiced over.  Chris Beall (18:05): So think about it. You're going to go surf, right? You're going to make your own surfboard. You're out of your mind. That's a hundred years of trial and error have gone into shaping surfboards. It is a non-trivial matter. Almost nothing works as a surfboard except an actual surfboard. And they have to be made correctly. So there are people who are called shapers and they shape surfboards. You as the salesperson and you're going to make your own script. Are you out of your mind? There's a hundred years of learning that has gone into what the next word might be and how you might say it in a way that works in this situation. You're trying to help another human being. You're trying to help them get to the point where they can start to listen at some point to the possibility of value. And you've got to kind of go through this path.  Chris Beall (18:53): And the path is like, well, you got to pop up on the surfboard. That's your opener. You've got to get your balance and actually get the right part of it to be cutting into the wave. That's the whatever that part is. We call it the 27 seconds. You got to kind of get into it. You've got to get the curiosity going. That's when you're actually moving on the wave and you're feeling like, yeah, I kind of got this. I'm getting what's going on in this particular ride. And then you've got to get off alive because I mean, what if it's a big wave? It doesn't want you to live. It kind of wants to pound you into the bottom and sort of see if you can still breathe. So you got to get off alive and ask for the meeting. So it's very much like that.  Chris Beall (19:33): And the two features are, well, one is I got to have the surfboard. So who's the surfer? It's your voice. It's your voice. That's all you got. This is why cold calling is so much better as a thing to learn in sales than anything else because you put your voice under pressure. You put yourself under time pressure. You've normalized the beginning of the opening situation, which they're afraid of you. So you are always starting from the same place. You know what to do. I call it compressing the diving board. It's like you're diving, you're now, you've jumped, you're the bottom of that compression. All that energy's there from their fear. What are you going to do with their fear? It's a gift to you. And you're trying to give a gift to them, which is the gift of learning about something that might change their life.  Chris Beall (20:19): That's your job is to hope, try do things that might let somebody overcome the situation you've put them in, which is ambushing them so that they could learn about something that could change their life. That's the entirety of sales. There is nothing more to sales than trying to do that in the innovation economy. That's why it's everything's almost, nobody wants to embrace innovations, but they don't. So that's your job is to help them go the state of reluctance, fear about something new to the possibility of learning. Not even the learning yet, just the possibility of learning. And the instrument that you do that with is the voice. The script is the thing you're going to stand on that will reliably, it won't ride the wave for you, but if you learn to ride it, you can make beautiful things happen. I think that analogy holds, we came up with it when we were in Australia and on January, February, 2020, I remember, cause I was rotting around Sydney, we were talking about this dark thing. And I still think it's the best of the market. Dominant skies, analogies, script is the surfboard. Your voice is the surfer, and you're not just going to stand up on the board. You're going to have to learn to use your voice and stay in balance.  Corey Frank(21:39): So with that, when you were cold calling then Helen, how were Ed? Chris, we're listening in one ear tied, but how was the latter calls versus the first calls? What did you notice is the difference from that? The muscle tension and the breathing and the quality of the calls. Fuck takes on a little bit of your journey?  Helen Fanucci (22:02): Yeah, so well, for one thing, I switched lists. So the first list were the more senior executives. I started there and I was more nervous that, and here I'm doing something new, but I also knew they were more senior and a lot of them, I got voicemail. I didn't get voicemail, the system got voicemail that, so it was actually fewer conversations than I wanted to have. One of the guys I talked to was confused a little bit because I think he was afraid of hanging up on me because I sounded coherent and okay, but then it's a cold call, so I gave him an out. But anyway, so I kind of navigated that in a okay way where I said, Hey, let me send something to you. I'll follow up, blah, blah, blah. I think my voice was better on the second list, the second day, the second hour. Because one, I knew they were lower level people, even though they're vice presidents and senior directors. They're not chief HR person. So also I know that I need to practice the opener. I know I'm an interruption.  Chris Beall (23:22): You should hear her walking around the house doing this, by the way. It's pretty funny.  Helen Fanucci (23:25): Yeah, I  Chris Beall (23:25): Know,  Helen Fanucci (23:27): I  Chris Beall (23:27): Know. I'm an interruption.  Helen Fanucci (23:28): And the other thing though that I will tell you I have great confidence in myself is navigating a call kind of on the spot because I have deep background, like a woman I talked to at one of our large accounts. She's like, well, I'm not really the right person for this. You do this. I go, well, are you finding this? I was in a meeting with your c I o and I understand this to be true. Are you seeing that? And blah, blah, blah. And then she ended up by the end of the call offering to refer me to the right people that I should be speaking to. So then I said to Chris, I go, maybe it's actually better to call lower level people and then have them help you get higher. Which is a strategy I learned as a sales rep early in my career for large account selling, was to do research at lower levels, find out the business issues and use that to navigate higher up. So that's what one of the hot tub conversations was. What did you think about that idea, Chris? Oh yeah, that's an effective strategy. So it was a different list and just that a little bit more confidence. But it does make me think it might be smarter call lower level people that you could actually speak to and navigate up.  Chris Beall (24:51): It gave me a new idea, which is funny. I've been at this now at Connect itself for a little while, right? Almost 12 years. And it hadn't really occurred to me before that probably the best people to do follow ups are actually the account executives rather than the SDRs. And the reason is you have these three advantages that you'd be bringing in. One, you're a new person, but you're a new person with context, which is interesting. Secondly, you get to actually thank them for something, which is a great way to open a conversation, but it's for something about someone else. So you're exhibiting generosity by thanking them for speaking with your colleague who you esteem highly. So that is the next piece. And thirdly, they're more likely to show up at the meeting because when they do agree to the meeting, they're more likely to take it, but more likely to show up because they've agreed to the meeting with a peer.  Chris Beall (25:43): And it's always a little bit tricky to know that you have an agreement with somebody that you haven't established status alignment with. Oren talks about status alignment as one of the important things that you've got to get in a sales relationship, sales conversation. So we're from Helen's conversation and our post conversation, we're actually going to try something at connect and sell. And all we have to do is just take one of the follow up lists and instead of having it called by the person who originally had the conversation, just have it called by one of our AEs. And it's, it's pretty simple, right? See what happens now we measure everything at connect and sell. I mean, it's frightening when you, it's, I'm an old physicist myself, so it's even worse than mechanical engineers when it comes to measuring everything. And so we will just do that and then measure the results, get statistical significance, and see whether this hot tub idea turns into a new practice that then we can help our customers.  

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, author Helen Fanucci joins Chrisand Corey. Helen suggests that when thinking about the first job, you should consider the industry you want to work in, as it can set you up for future success. For instance, sales tech is a great industry for those passionate about sales and technology, while cybersecurity is growing rapidly due to the increasing sophistication of hackers. The importance of building your network is another crucial aspect of a successful career, as it can provide exposure to others' work and broaden your horizons. Helen emphasizes the need to develop a point of view and post original content on LinkedIn to distinguish yourself. Helen also stresses the need for continuous learning and growth in our role. By intentionally meeting people in other parts of the business and getting exposure to their work, one can learn and grow. Join us for this episode, "Intentional Choices: Mapping Out Your Sales Career." About Our Guest Helen Fanucci, Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft is the author of Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. Links for this episode: Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn Corey Frank on LinkedIn Chris Beall on LinkedIn ConnectAndSell Branch49   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:43): The importance of building your network is another crucial aspect of a successful career because it can provide exposure to others' work and broaden your horizons. Helen emphasizes the need to develop a point of view and post original content on LinkedIn to distinguish yourself. Helen also stresses the need for continuous learning and growth in our roles. By intentionally meeting people in other parts of the business and getting exposure to their work, we can all learn and grow. Join us for this episode, Intentional Choices; Mapping Out Your Sales Career. Corey Frank (01:19): Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys on tour, the roadshow episode with Corey Frank and of course, the sage of sales, prosperous prosperer, the Hawking of Hawking and the prophet of profit. Chris Beall (01:34): That's it. Corey Frank (01:35): Right? Here we are at the HQ and the home base mothership of Branch 49 with our Branch 49 team on Taco Friday, not Taco Tuesday. We do not like alliteration. We're against all kinds of alliteration here at Branch 49, so it's Taco Friday and we are here with Miss Helen Fanucci and of course, the fetching spouse of the also famously fetching Tom Cruise of sales, I forgot that one that we talk about too, Chris Beall. Helen, of course as most folks know from our previous episode, is a Microsoft leader with 15 years of experience at Microsoft. Runs the customer success team 10 years over at Sun Microsystems and went to a little college called Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the degree in mechanical engineering. We're pleased to have Ms. Fanucci here talk certainly about her most recent bestselling book, Love Your Team, and to impart her wisdom with some snide commentary from Chris Beall and of course myself here along the way. So with that, Helen, welcome to the roadshow edition of Market Dominance Guys. Helen Fanucci (02:38): Great. Thanks, Corey. I appreciate it. Hi everybody. Nice to see you again. So as Corey said, I am at Microsoft. I've been at Microsoft almost 15 years, and mostly in the sales capacity, the in sales teams. I've hit quotas of over a billion dollars, well over a billion dollars, in excess of actually, one year, over 30 billion, but that's a whole nother story. As Corey said, I recently completed and launched this book, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World, and it's been super successful and well received, and in fact, there's some CEOs who are making it required reading for their whole management team, not just sales management as well as venture capitalists, so that's been super exciting. But how did I get here? So I graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1982, and back then, frankly, there weren't many women graduating with any engineering degree. (03:48): When I was graduating, I had job offers from like nine companies in different industries; oil and gas, consumer goods, companies like Chevron, Procter & Gamble, Boeing Aircraft Company, and I decided to take a job... I was drawn to high tech, so I made a deliberate decision to go with an industry that I thought had a future, and as it turned out, high tech's been pretty good to me. I got a job working for IBM in Silicon Valley as a mechanical engineer, manufacturing engineer in thin-film heads, which are the heads that read really big disc drives that attached to mainframes that used to be the state-of-the-art in tech at that time. I was in that job for a year or so, and I really decided that so much was happening in Silicon Valley that I wanted to make a transition from engineering into marketing or sales because I wanted to be out in front of customers helping them use technology for business value and benefit rather than in the back room making the technology. (04:59): My boss in the manufacturing facility had no idea how to help me, and so actually, it was through my personal network that I was able to meet somebody who was an IBM manager in marketing, and I ended up getting a job in Los Angeles in CAD/CAM marketing, computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing marketing. I still wanted to be a seller though. At that time, IBM had an 18-month sales training program, and so, I was part of that program. Now, in those days, if you can believe it, the philosophy at IBM was a job for life, and they meant it. They invested in you, they trained you up. I had great training, not unlike the training that you're getting here from Corey. World-class sales training, practices, skills coaching. That doesn't happen in industry today. Companies don't make that investment. (06:04): It's just amazing what you guys are doing here. I was able to get a sales territory, and then again, the prescribed IBM career path was to do a stint on the East Coast near their headquarters and then come back with a more senior level job and things like that. Well, I didn't want that. So I left IBM and went to some startups, and then one of the companies I worked for was called Metaphor Computer Systems, and they were building decision support software product. We call it a SaaS product today. They were porting it to IBM's operating system called OS/2. What's important about that is if you look back at history, IBM originally used Microsoft's operating system, so this was a big deal. IBM, the big computing company, was moving off of Microsoft into OS/2. (07:02): So sometimes people ask me, "Have you ever met Bill Gates?" Well, I did. Here I am now, 26, 28 years old, and I go to an IBM executive conference because I am the marketing person for IBM for this program, and my boss is a guy named David Liddle, who's chairman of the board of Metaphor. We're at this IBM executive conference in Florida, and Bill says to my boss, "Hey, can I have a demo?" He says to me, "Helen, give Bill a demo." So here I am at 28 years old or 26, whatever I was, giving Bill a demo. That's how I met him, and then a couple of months later, there is a launch of this product at IBM in New York City, a big launch event. I'm on the airplane going back from New York to San Francisco because I live in Silicon Valley and I decide to upgrade myself to first class. (08:00): It was like $60 to upgrade myself to first class, so I get on the airplane, and mind you, because I worked for IBM and then IBM was my customer, I knew by visual face the senior executives at IBM. I am getting to my seat and I notice that the president of IBM is one row in front of me in the seat over, and he has a empty seat next to him, so I sit down in the seat next to him as if that's my assigned seat. What's the worst thing that can happen? I get kicked out or I get to spend five hours on the airplane talking to or sitting next to the president of IBM, which is what happened. He had heard about our company and he knew that that product had just gotten launched by IBM. (08:55): He says, "Oh, I love talking to engineers and developers," so I went back and told my boss, "Hey, I just sat next to Jack Kuehler, the president of IBM, and he loves talking to developers. Why don't you invite him to come out to visit us?" He says, "Okay, great, Helen. Write the letter and I'll send it." That's what happened. Anyway, fast-forward, I go work as a seller after that launch, work as a seller in London for the same company. I end up going on maternity leave, having a baby, and my company got purchased by IBM at that point. I like to think that I had something to do with the purchase of Metaphor because I took the opportunity to sit next to the president. Anyway, that's a long story, but in my career, I worked for Apple Computer, I worked for Sun Microsystems and now Microsoft. (09:49): So mostly always leadership, sales management jobs. As it turns out, I have managed hybrid teams, so in the office and remote, both internationally, worldwide teams, nationally, what have you. I decided to write this book really in July of 2021 because at that point in time, about 4 million people a month were leaving their jobs. I was doing a keynote at a conference for sales leaders about retaining top talent because I'm not sure if you're aware, it's super expensive for a manager if their top talent leaves. Here's the math real quick. First of all, let's say that seller has a quota of a million dollars. It takes them three months to replace, so that's $250,000 that you're out, and then maybe six months to get up to full strength. That's another 500 K, so you're $750,000 out of that million dollar quota that you are out as a manager if you lose your top talent. That's only if the seller works out, which they don't always work out. Announcer (11:05): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with 8 to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day, and when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. We're back with Corey and Chris. Helen Fanucci (11:48): It was about retaining top talent, and anyway, so I said, "Okay, what are the keys to retaining top talent?" I thought supporting your team, caring for your team. What was authentic to me was to use the word love your team. So loving your team matters, and that means supporting your team. Like all of you guys are sellers. Supporting you to be your best, and that could look like, gee, my seller says, "I'm really having a hard time getting a meeting with a chief financial officer," so maybe I can get that meeting because I'm a more senior executive than my seller is, or maybe we know somebody who knows that person or our CFO perhaps will go meet with that person, so helping the seller, remove friction, use your positional power. Here's something else that I do that I don't know of any other managers that do. (12:47): I really empower my team to do the whole job. That means that if they are presenting to a customer executive in a big, really important meeting, or maybe they're doing a pitch to get a discount or an investment of services that the customer's looking for as part of an negotiation. What I do is I turn off my video because it's all about my seller doing their job, and I take notes in the background. I want to make sure that they can be present for the conversation, not have to worry about action items, and then it also gives me the opportunity to coach them, debrief, talk about what went well, do we make our objectives or not. That's another example of supporting the team. Couple things about the book and the feedback that I've received. (13:45): One is feedback from early in career people. I never intended or thought about that audience, but here's two things. One is, "Gosh, I have a new job. I have a manager. I'm not sure what managers are really supposed to do. What does good look like?" The book gives them a framework to think about what good management looks like. Secondly, they may be aspiring managers. What skills... Abilities do I need to be promoted to manager? Having a point of view of why you as a manager, and this could provide a framework for helping you as you grow your career. That's also been super effective and surprising. As I said earlier, the fact that VCs and CEOs are making it required reading more broader than just sales, that was super surprising to me as well. The book, really, the big idea is about supporting your team because a manager's success is directly related to the success of the team. (14:58): While this is common sense for me, it's not commonly done. Some people have been surprised by that orientation. The other thing that I learned is that many sellers feel they have an adversarial relationship with their manager because the manager's pressuring them to make quota. They are afraid to say, "This deal might not come through even though I forecasted it," and so, they're robbing or the manager is robbing themselves of the opportunity to have that seller say, "Look, this deal is going off track and I need your help," because they have that tension. People don't do their best work if they're afraid. They're just going to leave and people leave their manager, not their company typically. This book is really designed to be a handbook for managers to help them be successful, whether it's a remote environment or frankly, whether it's a in-person environment. It works both ways. Corey Frank (16:07): Hey Helen, quick question. Do you find most folks, particularly in the tech world, because you're hiring folks from all walks, like right out of school, maybe all the way to mature, is the default mode to operate under a sense of fear or is it the default mode because it's not prevalent to have these safe, secure, collaborative environments like you had just described about putting all the distractions away and really listening? What do you find the mindset of most folks that you hire today coming from their other environments? Helen Fanucci (16:39): Well, people come to Microsoft because of the culture. I don't have any statistical data on that. I've heard horror stories, so for sure, they're out there, but I don't know how to think about how prevalent it is versus Microsoft. Also, there's different pockets of culture within Microsoft. I think it comes down to the individual and their philosophy and point of view. I think it's very, very common that managers do not help their sellers succeed. They hire people, they put them in the territory, they give them rudimentary training, maybe product training, and then tell them to go make quota. In fact, a lot of people use LinkedIn and email thinking that's the best way, particularly at Microsoft, to connect with people. As I told Corey earlier, I used ConnectAndSell this week for two hours. It's the first time I'd ever used it. (17:42): My team was having difficulty reaching HR executives, and I thought, "Well, let me give it a go," and I had some conversations. I had hangups. One guy go through my little intro and say, "Can I get a moment to speak with you? Do you have a moment? Can I have a moment?" "No." He hangs up. I said, "Yeah, I get it," but why the quick no. He didn't say anything and hung up on me. So then Chris said, "Oh, that's perfect. You talked to him. Send him a follow-up email, then he'll get who you are, and you can call him again," and what have you, but yeah, so it's exciting. Anyway, what I want to do is I want to leave you with advice, three pieces of advice. Okay. The first one is, when you think about where you might go for your first job, think about what industry you want to work in, and what I mean by that is like cybersecurity, that is a big one. It's going to grow. (18:49): The bad guys are getting more sophisticated. You guys are all in sales tech. Sales tech would be a great industry for everybody because you're doing it. You're using the technology. You're all in sales tech. I'm partial to high-tech. If your passion is education, education tech, great, rock on, but I would say be intentional because that can set you up for your next step in your next career. As I said, I was intentional about high-tech. You can always pivot, but it's nice if you think about and know where you want to go. Number two, build your network. As I mentioned, it was through my network that I was able to navigate from engineering into marketing and then sales. Let me ask all of you. (19:38): So how many of you are on LinkedIn today? Everybody. How many of you have posted original content in the last months? Like your own thoughts. So a few of you. Yeah, that's trickier. It's easier to repost, but to have a point of view and be known. So think about that. How are you going to distinguish yourself? Think about that. The third piece of advice is, and this might sound obvious, but it's not always done, is learn and grow, particularly in your new role. I have early in-career individuals on my team that don't work directly for me, but they work for managers that work for me, and so some of them will put time on my calendar, ask me if it's okay, and once a quarter, every two months, something like that. It gives me exposure to their work, but then they're also really thoughtful about looking for my input or how I see a situation. (20:45): Also, they're very intentional about getting to know others in other parts of our business. You can be tunnel vision on your day job, but to begin to learn pieces of the business that might be adjacent, like a customer success team helping customers be successful, but what about the folks that are straight-up account managers, or what about the people who do the licensing negotiation? Or I have one guy on my team who wanted to meet with some of the product engineering people to understand what they do. Thinking about it's a way of building the network. It helps you as you think about pivoting to more jobs. Also, you're able to bring more to your day job by having a bigger-picture view.

In this episode, Gerhard Gschwandtner compares ChatGPT to a painter's palette with an infinite amount of colors, and salespeople are the artists who must decide how many colors to use and when the painting is finished. The hosts discuss the role of technology in sales and how salespeople can use ChatGPT to harness its intelligence to make more informed decisions. Chris describes a practical example of how he used ChatGPT for list creation for a company called Partner Tap. He was able to ask it about the specific job titles used in senior roles in companies and generate a table of titles for each company. Gerhard suggests that salespeople can tap into their internal ChatGPT to discover great ideas and pursue meaningful work. Chris mentions how they are exploring the use of ChatGPT in developing a new data product and using it to summarize the best conversations that set a meeting with different types of executives. Key points from this portion of the episode include the power of ChatGPT in harnessing technology to make more informed decisions in sales, the importance of pursuing meaningful work, and the potential for ChatGPT to be used in various aspects of sales, from list creation to conversation summaries. Corey reminds us, "You have to be willing to put in that work, do your research and know that it's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. It's really about understanding who your customer is and what they care about." Key points from this episode: ChatGPT can be used in various aspects of sales, such as list creation and conversation summaries. Salespeople can use ChatGPT to harness its intelligence and make more informed decisions. Pursuing meaningful work can lead to greater happiness and success in sales. The better the "why" behind what you are doing in sales, the easier the "how" will be. Prompt engineering is a method for developing ChatGPT responses that require careful consideration of the language and wording used in prompts.

Chris Beall and Corey Frank welcome Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO of Selling Power and an advocate for non-verbal sales communication. Gerhard emphasizes the importance of being aware of one's own energy, as sales is a transfer of energy. They talk about the challenge of losing cultural underpinnings when not being on-site with customers and how finding the right connections that can help you learn and grow is important in gathering energy. Chris, Corey, and Gerhard's experiences and insights provide valuable lessons for salespeople and individuals looking to improve their energy and become their authentic selves. They emphasize the importance of being aware of one's energy, using technology as a natural extension of oneself, finding the right connections to learn and grow, taking action and engaging with the world to build self-discovery, and accepting mortality to improve energy and focus in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "Sales energy: The Importance of being an omnichannel salesperson."   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:23): Chris and Corey welcome Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO of Selling Power and an advocate for nonverbal sales communication. Gerhard emphasizes the importance of being of one's own energy, as sales is a transfer of energy. They talk about the challenge of losing cultural underpinnings when not being on site with customers and how finding the right connections that can help you learn and grow is important in gathering energy. (00:47): Chris, Corey, and Gerhard's experiences and insights provide valuable lessons for salespeople and individuals looking to improve their energy and become their authentic selves. They emphasize the importance of using technology as a natural extension of yourself, finding the right connections to learn and grow, taking action and engaging with the world to build self-discovery, and accepting mortality to improve energy and focus. In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, sales energy, the importance of being an omnichannel salesperson. Corey Frank (01:25): And we are off once again. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the hawking of hawking, Chris Beall, and of course yours truly, Corey Frank. We've had a lot of guests. Not going to embarrass a Gerhard a little bit, but I don't think there's many guests that we've had in 170+ episodes, Chris, where I actually had pictures on my wall as a young aspiring sales rep of the product of Gerhard's here. So we'll welcome Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO, founder, sales thought leader extraordinaire for, gosh, a lot of years, probably back since, what, 1980 or so, I think, Selling Power has been around, right, Gerhard? (02:09): So welcome to the Market Dominance Guys, thrilled to have you. Of course, Gerhard, not only Selling Power and thought leader, one of the original members, the OGs of the Sales Enablement Society, and I think the founder of probably the most timely conference in our profession today, Sales 3.0 up in Vegas, usually it's where it's, right? So welcome, Gerhard. Chris, what did you have to bribe, promise, cajole Mr. Gschwandtner here to get him to come back again? Once wasn't enough, back again to our humble little podcast here. Chris Beall (02:43): Well, I promised him I would actually burn a copy of the rules of golf on the first tee the next time we play so that there is no evidence of the existence of the rules of golf. Because he placed by his own rules that involve enjoyment, and I just don't want to get in the way. So that was my bribe. Gerhard Gschwandtner (02:59): I second that, because I will not allow official PGA rules to interfere with my natural excellence. Corey Frank (03:10): Well, those are live rules, I think, right? You prefer the live rule book, I think is, it's a whole new addendum to the old PGA stodgy rules. So how did a physicist and a sales thought leader here, how did you guys even stumble across each other? Is it pre-Connect and Sell? Is it during Connect and Sell? Let's talk a little bit about that. Chris Beall (03:28): Oh gosh, Gerhard, do you recall how we met? Because I do. You probably don't. Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:33): I probably don't. Chris Beall (03:35): Boston, I think 2011, very, very early on in my career at Connect and Sell, and it was a Sales 2.0 ... Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:43): Sales 2.0 conference. Chris Beall (03:44): And we were sponsoring, Connect and Sell was sponsoring. We had met and chatted a little bit, but the shocking thing was, I was about to present in a breakout. And back then breakouts would have some people in them. I think I remember counting something like 87 people in this breakout, and I always count the people in a breakout. Whether I've ever told you this or not, I'm a former card counter. So I have this thing about counting things. So I count these 87 people, and I'm about to go up on stage, or in front of them, it wasn't an actual stage. And Gerhard walks in, sits down in front of the audience, and says the following. He says, "There are X products in the world of sales technology or sales enablement, something like that right now." It was a big number, it was like 637 or whatever. And he said, "And there's only one of them that works, Connect and Sell. Listen carefully to what Chris Beall has to say." And he walked out. And I tell you what, Gerhard, I have owed you ever since that day. Gerhard Gschwandtner (04:48): Wow. I remember that session. And people stayed in your session and they walked out impressed. Chris Beall (04:55): Well, I yelled at them. It helped. Corey Frank (04:57): That's right. Gerhard Gschwandtner (04:59): You are offering a solution that really pays for itself. I call it a no-brainer. Half an hour before this conversation here I was on Connect and Sell and connected with people. I use it all the time. Chris Beall (05:13): That warms the cockles of my extremely black heart. Corey Frank (05:19): There you go. We expect Crisp Beal on the cover of Selling Power, the virtual magazine, here in the coming months, the coming quarters, I'm sure. So we've got a couple things to talk about now that we have Gerhard and then Chris fresh off the pre-release of the Market Dominance Guys book, which we can talk about. It's advancing technologies in sales. And Gerhard, you were an early proponent, advocate, shedder of light in the non-verbal sales communication methodologies. The NLPs has always been a big piece at a lot of your conference sessions, we talk about that. And it'd be interesting with Zoom, and Chris, I know you have some opinions on this too. When the old school, "I'm going to sell Gerhard something, I'm going to show up at his office and I have my wares and you're behind your desk or you're in the conference room and I'm standing up." You could read a lot about non-verbal communication there. (06:12): And then we moved to the past two years or so, 2+ years or so with COVID and Zoom. So let's start with there before we get into the advanced ChatGPT and how that's affecting sales, but what did you see that maybe was lost from the traditional non-verbal communications that us sales folks have that maybe we missed moving to COVID, and how do you get back to that after COVID now that people are actually seeing people face to face again? Gerhard Gschwandtner (06:42): Well, I think that salespeople need to be aware of two things. One is their own energy, because selling is a transfer of energy. And the energy can come in person, but also the energy can also travel digitally. So when I send you a little video with me shaking hands with a cat in a caption, "Deal closed?", then it gives you a jolt and you smile. So I think that what we need in the future is proficient omnichannel salespeople that need to use technology as an extension, as a natural extension of their own personality. Corey Frank (07:27): Mm-hmm. Chris, you saw certainly your team went to the face-to-face test drives, where you would fly in, parachute into these larger organizations, do one-day test drives, shake everybody up, and then hit the button and then everybody would leave. And you had to transfer a lot of your business to do that virtually. What do you say with what Gerhard is saying as far as that transfer of energy? Because you have the vehicle that is creating this, it's this kinetic energy machine, and then you have the dynamics of your entire team going up and down the aisles and watching the ticker go up. How did that change for your business and what do you have to say to that? Chris Beall (08:06): Well, it's kind of funny, because we made that transition on essentially the 1st of April 2020 to 100% virtual. And we did it on the same day that, I wasn't even paying attention to it, because it was the same day that our entire team in India went home. And that was much scarier, because the infrastructure in India in people's homes and apartments for doing their jobs was much iffier, much more varied. Pretty much all we do in business is variety management, right? If there were no variety, we wouldn't have to do any management. So the more variety there is, and then the closer it is to the beating heart of what you do, the more attention you pay. And if you're not capable of doing anything about it, the more freaked out you are. So I paid no attention during that entire first week to anything other than, "Are we up and running?" (08:55): And the answer turned out to be, miraculously, yes. I have no idea how it happened. It's just really good people. They prepped for it, they had no time, they got it done. Then I looked at the results from the test drives, and we did that week, if I recall correctly, I think we did nine test drives. So nine virtual test drives. Test drives are, I don't know if we've talked about them here on the show, but it's a full production experience of Connect and Sell. Connect and Sell is like, once Gerhard provided me with the opportunity to jump in the driver's seat of a Ferrari 455, that's the car I chose, and take seven laps around a sort of simulated Formula 1 course. And I can tell you that that's a special experience. It's not just that it flattens your eyeballs, but there's somebody yelling at you, "Brake, brake, brake hard, brake hard," and then you're supposed to hit this thing called an apex and God knows what's going to happen. (09:47): And after about three laps you start to settle in, and by lap seven it's like, "Can we just keep doing this for a long time?" And the answer is, "No, we only paid for seven laps." So our test drives are like that. You hop in, you're nervous, flattens your eyeballs, you go crazy, lots of things happen, and then everybody settles in. What was so interesting to me is, the action of talking to other people instead of us simply took over anyway. So it turned out that there's never been a difference in close rates or anything else. All that's happened was we saved $55,000 a month in travel, and we lost one of the cultural underpinnings of our company, which was not being on site with the customers but being on site with each other. And so we worked very hard afterwards to keep the energy up in the company that was lost because we weren't hanging with each other the night before and we weren't postmorteming at the bar afterwards. (10:47): And that cultural disconnect was much, much more challenging than the change in the sales process itself, whether we interacted with the prospects locally or remotely. And we had to do something about that. Because we were already virtual. We were virtual in 2014, when I became CEO I sent everybody home. And I was very comforted by the fact that customer success and sales would be in the field every day in different mixes because you didn't get to decide who you went with. And so it was a mix and get to know party. And I was on the road back then 110 to 120 days a year, some conferences, mostly test drives. And so I also had my finger on the pulse. So Gerhard talks about energy. The challenge of energy is, you've got to find it somewhere. Some of us wake up with more than others, but you've got to gather it around you before you bring it forward. (11:42): Gerhard puts on a peak performance mindset, or used to, I don't know if you still do it, retreat. And really what happens at the retreat is, everybody gathers energy from each other and from special people like John Devore, the world skydiving champion, the captain of the Red Bull skyflying team or whatever, who sadly was terribly injured recently. And Gerhard tells me he's now walking again. But those connections that you make when you're on site with people, those are the cultural glue that allows you to bring the energy and transmit the energy. And I think that's where the big challenge is. Gerhard Gschwandtner (12:16): I think that everybody needs to connect with sources of energy. And it is amazing to me, every time I interviewed somebody for a cover of Selling Power, like Corey, you mentioned earlier, Brian Tracy, you get into that mindset of that other person. And spending time with people like Oprah or Bill Clinton or Donald Trump or Malcolm Forbes who was on the cover, it gives you a glimpse of their perspective of the world. And I think we need a more nuanced and differentiated perspective. The way we look at the world is one point of view. And in order to help a client, we need multiple points of view. Larry Wilson once said that your point of view is the point from which you view, therefore you don't know where you stand 'cause you're standing there. So to me energy is a question of connections, the right connections that can help you learn and grow, but also exposure to the right amount of ideas. You get a different level of ideas from TikTok than you get from Aristotle when you read it. Chris Beall (13:37): Ooh, has anybody done Aristotle as a TikTok? I bet they have. Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:42): Well, he was invited and he declined to show up. Chris Beall (13:45): Oh God, that guy, so closed minded. Corey Frank (13:48): He's down at the [inaudible 00:13:51], he was down at the sea. Fascinating, Gerhard, about the energy and all the folks, the Mary Kays and the George Foremans and the [inaudible 00:14:00], et cetera. Trying to think, Anthony Robbins, all these over the years. When you did the face to face interviews, did you feel the energy right when you were sitting down? Did you ... Gerhard Gschwandtner (14:12): Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I remember exactly where I was sitting in Tony Robbins' castle when he was pounding his chest and energizing himself and talking about making money in his sleep. Or I remember the biceps of George Foreman in New York at a studio. It's really humbling to shake hands with someone where you think you're a midget in comparison. Announcer (14:37): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. Connect and Sell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. Connect and Sell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Chris Beall (15:18): Let me tell the audience something about Gerhard. So I have had opportunity to greet Gerhard very, very many times, dozens. These are always first time at the conference or before the conference. And every time I am shocked by the same thing, which is, I give him a hug and I go, "Oh my God, I've never felt anybody's shoulders and back and all that that are as rock hard as this guy." It makes me actually jump every time. I flinch at his fitness, which is, the George Foreman effect doesn't require having massive biceps. You can also simply be looking like, "Yeah, I'm just standing here being a normal guy." And then you realize, "Oh, oh, no, no, that's made of marble or something underneath there." Gerhard Gschwandtner (16:04): Since you bring it up, that energy when we get together, I remember at the mindset retreat you came in spite of the fact that your wife had recently passed. And I checked into my hotel room, and it was a Four Seasons, and usually there's some books in the room. And among the many books, I picked one up and it was a book of poems. And I opened it up and I got to one poem, and it made me instantly think of you and your sorrow. And then I took the book with me and pushed the elevator button, the elevator door opened, and who was in there was Chris Beall, and there were four other people. (16:54): And I handed him the book and I said, "Look at this page." And he was reading the poem, and all four people in the elevator there were totally floored by that experience because it was so spiritual, so moving, because that poem offered a perspective on life and the arc of life in a zen-like way that there was healing. And I had no idea how I thought about doing that, but it felt like the right thing to do. And Chris, how did you feel about that? Chris Beall (17:33): Oh, I'm still moved by it, I can barely talk right now. It was the combination of your thoughtfulness, the material itself, and then what would have generally been seen as a coincidence. I'm not a believer in, there's coincidences that have magic behind them, but I think when you bring the energy of life to your everyday experience, especially in sales when we're bringing energy to others, many, many interesting things happen that would not have happened otherwise. That is, those who don't pick up the book like you did or don't have that thought or don't take the action, they don't have any magic coincidences either because they're not out there. That was one where we got to stick to each other, and it changed everybody in that elevator. They were just there. They were just on board. We were all in the same little room. As one of my Vietnamese friends said, an elevator's just a little room that goes up and down on a rope. (18:34): So we were in that little room going up and down on a rope, and the door opens and there's a moment of lifetime magic. It wouldn't have happened without you being who you are. And if we go back further, it wouldn't happen without us having many times come forward in situations where others might have hung back, with each other or with people that we were around. Gerhard Gschwandtner (18:57): Right. I think that opens another dimension. I remember doing an interview with Dr. Wayne Dyer, who wrote the bestselling book Your Erroneous Zones. And he said, "We call ourselves human beings, but we are spiritual beings in a human body." Corey Frank (19:15): Yeah. Well, this turned into the Lenten episode here about our own mortality very, very quickly. I love those stories. Chris, from the times that you meet Gerhard, and Gerhard, you've been on stage in front of thousands of thousands of folks and certainly interviewed some of the titans in our space. Can people get better at that energy awareness? Especially in our profession, because part of it, I may have a killer product, I may have a incredible presentation that my marketing team gave, I have the latest Mac, I've got the best lumen projector. It's the perfect day out, it's a 10:00 meeting, there's plenty of time left for lunch, but yet I just don't transfer that energy. Can I get better at that? Have you seen folks that you've met over the years turn and tap into that? Gerhard Gschwandtner (20:04): See, the energy is always there. What is also present in many people's minds is a lot of noise, and the noise comes from the past. NIH has a study that shows that I'm experiencing 60,000 thoughts a day, and 80% of those thoughts are automatic but also 80% of those thoughts are negative. And the negative thoughts come from the circumstances of your childhood, where you create a narrative as a child and you tell yourself, "This is the way the world works." However, the story that you fabricate is actually not true because your brain wasn't formed completely when you were a child. So you need to go to multiple revisions of the story of who you really are. And most people have what I call a guiding fiction for their lives that's faulty. And we need to challenge that fiction and rewrite the story of who we really are. So once we become our authentic selves, the energy flows freely. But if we are not, we have that energy interference in form of negative thoughts. And that is a difficult situation to be in, because your best version of you is dampened by your faulty story. Corey Frank (21:45): Wow. Yeah. Chris, what about you? Did you see folks get, as Gerhard said earlier about the right connections, the right type of people, the right information, the right books, the confidence? You can build that energy. Do you see that with folks certainly in your world, hiring salespeople over the years and meeting with clients, that they're different, they exude a different power, energy as you see them over the years? Chris Beall (22:13): Yeah, I think there's so many ways that we go about learning who we are, and one of the ways that we go about learning who we really are is by finding out what we can do and that we might not have thought we could do. So Gerhard's peak performance mindset retreats, there were people who didn't know that a thing that they could do is jump out of an airplane. In fact, I was with somebody in an airplane who was pretty convinced she could not jump out of that airplane, and we were up there 10,000 feet in the air above a beautiful, lovely field below. But there were a lot of things in her that said this wasn't a good idea. And it's not a big skill, by the way. She wasn't jumping out of the airplane in a way that required a great deal of skill. It took some, you had to get your feet out. For me that was a little hard because it was a little tight. I've got long legs. (23:04): But she needed to do that to exercise, that was a skill of courage or a skill of commitment, and she was quite transformed by it. When we got on the ground and we spoke afterwards, she was quite transformed. 'Cause that was something that let her meet herself through doing, which is I think something that's really important for us. Because Gerhard says, well, we're spiritual. We're also animals and we move, and the animal brain is built for movement. A sentence is pretty much a little more than taking the movement we do in the world and reducing it to sounds that represent different parts of the movement and how we would interact with them. So the idea that these nouns and verbs and all this somehow float free out in the world makes no sense. They have to do with us as animals moving through the world. (23:53): That's the difference between us and plants, right? Plants defend themselves with chemicals, animals defend and offend as we do through motion. We don't stay in one place and wait for the action to come to us. So that process, I think, is when we do guided action, like flight school is like this, right? Flight school is not a theoretical exercise that we offer. It has a speaking component at the very beginning, which is, just get confident that somebody else knows a good way to talk to somebody that you just ambushed. But it's in the doing that our flight school students actually find out who they are. And when they find out that they are that person who can do the hardest thing in sales, which is to turn an ambush into a triumph for the other person, that you can be of service to somebody by ambushing them, when they do that and they do it and they do it, it changes them because they then find out who they are. (24:54): The narrative now includes, "I can do this. And I can do it and I can enjoy it." Which is yet another part of what we might learn about ourselves, is something that we can enjoy that we didn't know that we can enjoy. So I've often thought these are very deeply introspective situations, behaviors, action settings in which we engage in self-discovery. I think that's not generally the case. I think sitting around and introspecting tends to lead you into the same thoughts that you were having beforehand, except more of the negative ones are likely to show up because you don't have the world helping keep you sane. You might have heard this from me before, Corey. I'm reasonably convinced it's our interactions with the actual world out there, people, things we're trying to do, that actually give us sanity. Gerhard Gschwandtner (25:46): I cannot emphasize enough the fact that our strivings are fantasies. Our thoughts are really driven by the unconscious. So in the case in point with Chris Beall, when he moved to Arizona from Baltimore as a kid, he discovered something totally new, nature, and he was out there alone. But he found something in his house, that there were books everywhere. And he was curious and he opened the books, and he was reading adult books as a six or seven-year-old. So he tried to understand and explore the world outside and inside, inside the mind. And all those explorations driven by his curiosity, driven by his relocation, moving to another state, created a mindset that is always expansive, that always looks for new wonders like ChatGPT. Chris Beall (26:55): Yeah. Well, there's two things. Corey Frank (26:59): [inaudible 00:26:59] to me last night, Gerhard, she said, "Don't ever stop doing this crazy stuff that you do." Gerhard Gschwandtner (27:05): Yeah. Corey Frank (27:06): Because I think the older we get, for me anyway, and I know some people see it differently, I think it's easier to be curious and to engage and explore things that are new and interesting than when we're younger. And it's because we're on a more solid stance with regard to who we are.  

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Susan Finch discuss their experience using ChatGPT to write a book based on their podcast, and the benefits of using AI to create content. They delve into the limitless possibilities of machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, and how they are transforming various industries. Chris and Susan also share their insights on the process and the excitement of seeing the AI learn and improve. Chris and Susan talk about how ChatGPT can generate various versions of a prompt, and the different approaches they took to refine their requests for better results. They also reflect on the human-like interactions they had with ChatGPT, and the Eliza effect that makes people treat the AI as if it were a person. Ultimately, they highlight the efficiency and creativity that AI can bring to content creation, and the potential for using ChatGPT to write more books in the future. Tune in to hear their fascinating discussion on the intersection of AI and writing in this episode, "How ChatGPT is Writing a Book: The AI and Human Collaboration."   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:24): In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Susan Finch discuss their experience using ChatGPT to write a book based on their podcast, and the benefits of using AI to create content. They delve into the limitless possibilities of machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, and how they're transforming various industries. Chris and Susan also share their insights on the process and the excitement of seeing the AI learn and improve. They talk about how ChatGPT can generate various versions of a prompt and the different approaches they took to refine their request for better results. They also reflect on the human-like interactions they had with ChatGPT, and the ELIZA Effect that makes people treat the AI as if it were a person. Ultimately, they highlight the efficiency and creativity that AI can bring to content creation and the potential for using ChatGPT to write more books in the future. Tune in to hear their fascinating discussion on this intersection of AI and writing. (01:23): In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, how ChatGPT is writing a book, the AI and Human Collaboration. Chris Beall (01:33): So Susan, you and I did something remarkable that started, I believe, with your own work using ChatGPT in a podcasting setting, right? Susan Finch (01:47): Right. Chris Beall (01:47): A podcasting setting, about a week, 10 days ago, something like that, you were doing some experimentation. I was getting ChatGPT up by various people, including some very interesting people at my wife's company where she works, a little company called Microsoft, seems to be very interested in this area. And it occurred to me, based on your work, that we could maybe take the Market Dominance Guys podcast and turn it into a book written by ChatGPT. (02:19): But first, how about, how did you get started with this? What stimulated you to go all AI? Didn't you used to own an art gallery or something like that? People who own art galleries don't go all AI on us like this. That's for crazy techy people and guys like Austin and me. So what's up? Susan Finch (02:35): When Austin first brought up ChatGPT to me say, "Well, try this, try that," and I love the idea of creating on the fly, and to challenge it and to ask variations of the same questions to see what the difference would be. It was like a game and a creativity experiment at the same time. So I loved that. And I was really surprised though at how much of a variation you could get just by tweaking a couple of phrases, or as you and I experimented over the weekend, by lumping the aspects of the query properly. I am known to have misplaced modifiers in my writing, and some lines have to be edited. So my queries were the same, and when I tightened it up, the results were so different and so much more enjoyable. It was a lot of fun. I mean, I love to create. I have to create every day, or I am bored and miserable. So every day, I have to create something, and this gives me an outlet and saves me some time for the grunt work, and then I can go back and refine it how I want. Chris Beall (03:41): Well, it's really something. So what did you apply it to first? Clearly, not Market Dominance Guys. You were doing something with another podcast, right? Susan Finch (03:48): I was doing something for Asher Sales Sense, because John Asher interviewed Judy Schramm, and Judy Schramm was talking about ChatGPT and the ways that it could be used for marketers, or some of the ways, I should say. There's no way it could be all the ways. And she had some great ideas though on how to apply it to your LinkedIn profile and how to define the audiences. "Who do you want this to appeal to? Who is the goal?" So I thought, "I'm going to start playing with my own." So I started to do that right there. And because in the spirit of the topic, I had ChatGPT also come up from the transcript from that episode with the introduction and variations of the title until we found one that we liked. Chris Beall (04:30): Wow, that's really cool. So what are the things that so far have been easy? And what are the things that have been hard? And what are the things that have been maddening? And then what are the things that you think, "Oh, now that I know this, I'll do that"? Susan Finch (04:45): The maddening part were the limitations, because, for me, I like to go fast. So if I have a transcript in front of me, I don't want to have to do it in two parts. And if I put the whole transcript in there, ChatGPT chokes. So that too much stuff, and I can appreciate that there has to be a limit somewhere. And I have to learn how to refine my request, because I put too many parameters in there, and then I have to go back and say, "Now rewrite it again, because you didn't listen. I said to do it between 500 and 700 words. Now, do that part," because it was ignoring that. So those were the frustrations. They weren't huge. Chris Beall (05:22): Yeah, that thing, did you find yourself experiencing... There's two variants of it. So there's a program called ELIZA, many years ago, I'll use it as my base, many, many years ago, back in, I think it was written in the, I don't know, fifties or sixties. And ELIZA was an experiment to see how people responded to text interactions, chat interactions. I know this sounds weird that it was, what is that now? 50, 60 years ago? Susan Finch (05:50): Right. Chris Beall (05:50): But many young people actually are unaware that the earth, actually, is older than a hundred years, by a fair amount. Not everybody agrees with this. Some people think the earth is flat and is made out of a plate, and elephants stand at the edge of it to keep us from falling off. But it turns out, even back in the fifties, people were thinking a lot about this stuff. (06:12): And computers, they were big and they were slow, but they weren't as slow as a person. And I've always said, "Computers go fast and don't get bored. People go slow and do get bored, so we're perfect companions for each other." We can help each other out, as long as the people do all the judgment and the computers do all the fast stuff. But then now, you have the question is, "Well, what is fast about ChatGPT?" It connects dots, statistically, lots and lots and lots of dots. Susan Finch (06:41): Right. Chris Beall (06:41): And it makes us think with our brains, because we're used to thinking somebody else is a human, that we're talking to a human. And ELIZA did this. I think ELIZA consisted of less than a hundred lines of code. It simulated a Rogerian non-directive therapist, which oddly enough was a topic I studied, for reasons that none of us will ever understand, in high school. And I was very interested in the work of Carl Rogers and the kind of therapy that he did called Non-Directive Therapy, where a therapist doesn't direct the session. Now, here we are with ChatGPT, we're in sessions. What happened with ELIZA is people just bought into it. I mean, it was less than a hundred lines of code, and people would spill their guts to ELIZA. Susan Finch (07:26): Interesting. Chris Beall (07:27): ELIZA became their best friend, cared about them, et cetera, et cetera, all of which had to be coming from, not from ELIZA, because ELIZA was a hundred lines of code. So it's really interesting. I call it the ELIZA Effect, named after Eliza Doolittle from- Susan Finch (07:44): Pygmalion. Chris Beall (07:44): Yeah, from Pygmalion. Yeah. So did you experience ever that you got frustrated with, or spoke aloud to ChatGPT while you were using it in a way that made you think, "I'm kind of treating this like a person"? Susan Finch (07:59): Even my queries treat ChatGPT like a person, and it's just a habit I have. I'm somebody though, who, if I belch in a empty room, I still say, "Excuse me." So it's just a manners thing for me. I'm always saying please, and thank you, praising ChatGPT, because to me, we're part of that learning process. So when it's done right, I want to make sure, "Yes, that was great. I appreciate that. Thank you so much." I'm overly polite a lot of times. A lot of times I'm not, but most... You've seen that. But sometimes, I've just found it's easier for me to do it that way, because I feel that we are part of this learning experience. And at some point, humans are going to be looking at this analysis. And I want to praise that and be kind about that, because I also want ChatGPT to learn to be kind. Chris Beall (08:53): Ah. And we imagine, you imagine, because I imagine the same thing, that these interactions are helping ChatGPT learn to be a better ChatGPT. Susan Finch (09:03): Yes. Chris Beall (09:06): It's inevitable, for me. I found with ELIZA, I did the same thing. I was introduced to it in 1983 at Bell Labs, and I found myself just playing with it, and then going, "Oh my God, I'm actually telling it stuff." Right? Susan Finch (09:21): Yeah. Chris Beall (09:21): It knows me. It knows me, which is pretty funny. And I found myself with ChatGPT, doing the same thing, saying, so for instance, at one point, I said that my prompt was something like, based on the following summary of an episode of Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, Chris Beall, then I'd ask the question, "What are the five most important things that you must do in a cold call?" And then I would put the summary. Susan Finch (09:49): Okay. Chris Beall (09:49): Because you had ChatGPT summarize the transcript of parts of episodes, and then put them together for me. And it started coming back with just titles after a while, kind of like, "I'm tired of doing this for you, Chris." 17 times in a row, I get some really cool output, and then I'm copying and pasting it into this Word Doc, so that ChatGPT can write this book we're writing together, you and Corey, who isn't even here, and he's somehow doing it. Corey's going beyond AI. He's like AI as in absent intelligence. He's that AI, right? Corey, you're not even here. (10:30): And it's like it got bored with me and just started spitting out a title to see if that was enough. I'd say, "Good title. However, would you..." And then it would give me more. I'd say, "That's very interesting. But what I'm really interested in," and I'd tell it more, and then it'd give more. I was like, "It didn't used to do this." Susan Finch (10:51): Right. Chris Beall (10:51): Earlier in the chat, it didn't do this. It's like it's become a slightly... It's like it's jaded. It's tired of this content. It doesn't want to keep repeating itself. I don't know. But I don't know. That's going on inside of me, and I thought that was really interesting. Susan Finch (11:08): Now, are you starting a separate chat for each episode? Chris Beall (11:12): No, I'm putting them all one after another after another, because I want to generate... In my imagination, I have all the documentation that has been released for developers, because I told open AI that we're building a product, and I am probably building seven products or something like that. Susan Finch (11:29): Right. Chris Beall (11:30): I thought it'd be fun to do a book first as a warmup exercise and a demo like, "Hey, plus, Market Dominance Guys was supposed to be a book." Susan Finch (11:39): I know. And none of us have gotten around to getting it done. Chris Beall (11:42): Exactly. So this shows off the efficiency that you were talking about. It's really efficient. We just got a book written on Market Dominance over 25 episodes, which we anticipated 25 episodes would squeeze the toothpaste too dry. Turned out not to be the case, but it's a lot of it is there, and you see repetitions, and then 25 prompts and responses from ChatGPT. It was a simple idea for a book. You have the heavy stuff in the back, and then the Q&A in the front, and then have it write an intro, and have it do all the titles, and have DALL·E, ChatGPT's artistic friend, give us a book cover, at least cover art. And then we have a book, and then let's put it up on Amazon and have a Kindle book and have a hard cover and have a paperback, and then give them as gifts to people and stuff like that. So that was the idea. (12:33): So I said I want to keep them all together, because I want to see, "Can I ask questions without asking about a given episode anymore, and will it go back through all of the stuff?" This was five hours on Sunday that I was doing this. And the answer turned out to be, actually, yes. It turns out... And I have an example right here, if I can find it. Here we go. Where I asked the following, I said, "Please write a 5,000 word introduction to the book 'Market Dominance: A Conversation with ChatGPT', based on all the summaries and prompts in this chat so far." And ChatGPT answers thus, "I'm sorry, but as a language model AI, I am not able to produce a 5,000 word introduction to this book, et cetera based on the summaries and prompts in this chat. However, I can provide a summary of the key points discussed in the Market Dominance Guys podcast that could be used to form the basis of an introduction to a book on Market Dominance." Now, is that cool, or what? Susan Finch (13:41): That is very cool, because it wasn't just, "Can't do it." "Try this instead." Chris Beall (13:46): Exactly. And then it went ahead and just did it. I didn't even have to ask, and then it just jumped in. "Market Dominance Guy's podcast is hosted by Chris Beall and Corey Frank and focuses on the importance of market dominance in today's business world. The hosts discuss various topics related to sales, marketing and business, and provide insights into how companies can achieve market dominance. One of the key topics discussed in the podcast is the evolution of sales and how it has changed with the advent of technology. The hosts explained that modern B2B buyers demand real through and timely information from salespeople and that salespeople must focus on building trust and sincerity in their interactions with buyers to be successful." Susan, that's like... It's creepily good. Susan Finch (14:39): But that is from those summaries. I mean, I'm hearing familiar phrases, and yes. It- Chris Beall (14:45): It went back over the whole thing. Susan Finch (14:47): Yeah. Chris Beall (14:48): And I didn't know that... Anyway, I was hoping that we were building a corpus. I didn't know we were doing it. Get this next paragraph, as we are going to use this as the introduction, "Our rule"... Anybody gets this book, the rule is ChatGPT had to write every word in the book, except the prompts. And that was because I didn't want to spend a week on a science project to figure out how to get it to write the prompts, even though had I not been such a wimp, I probably would've had that done in 15 minutes on Saturday morning. So anyway, that was the rule. (15:18): So here's the intro. So it did write the intro, just not so long. Here's what it says, "Another important topic discussed in this podcast is the role of tension in a sales conversation. The hosts explain that tension is essential in a sales conversation as it helps to build trust and establish a relationship with the buyer. Salespeople should address the buyer's fears, build curiosity and elicit a commitment to attend a discovery call during the cold call process." Holy moly, Susan. That's all Corey and I have been trying to say for 165 episodes. Susan Finch (15:54): Yes. Chris Beall (15:55): Is that something? Susan Finch (15:56): That's wonderful. That's perfect. Chris Beall (15:59): It's amazing. It's amazing to me that I could just ask that question and it picked the good stuff. I love this paragraph, "The podcast also touches on the comparison of sales to tennis and explains how the player who is just 1% better will almost always win in tennis. The hosts explained that this comparison can be applied to sales, as the salesperson who is 1% better will also win, as they will dominate the market." Whoa. What can I say? Susan Finch (16:33): So the beauty of it though is you just gave an example where it brought in specifics that are unique to you and Corey. They're unique, your analogies, your comparisons, some of the things you say are very memorable. And I would actually love to see the next time I do an experiment with your podcast is to say, "Please include a couple of quotes," a couple of metaphors, because those are so memorable, and it can do it. Chris Beall (17:05): Yeah. And I never got onto asking for quotes or metaphors. That's what's so cool about this. Here we are, you and I both over the age of, I think, 30, maybe 35? Susan Finch (17:12): Maybe. Chris Beall (17:15): Conceivably and kind of depend on how you think about it. So we went through the browser wars, and the browser wars were really about building applications. The idea was, there are these things called websites, and then somebody said, "Yeah, but what if they did something." Because websites were originally kind like fancy billboards or something, and it was like- Susan Finch (17:35): Brochure, right. Chris Beall (17:36): Look at a brochure. And then it was like, "Oh." And I was a pioneer in this area of applications. Did an application in 1990, what was it? I think six or seven, that was on top of a browser, and it won these IndustryWeek Technology of the Year Awards. Actually, no, it was '95. That was a long time ago for those of you who can count and subtract. And what was exciting about those times was we didn't know what the limits were. And I was a wimp, so I actually had my team split into two. One built our application in Java, which is really just a modern version of traditional programming languages. Real programming just got ifs and thens and analysis and loops, all that crap. And that was the cool stuff that was going to work. And then I had another person, who was pissed off at me probably until his untimely passing, who I asked to do it in HTML, which seemed primitive and weird and clunky and horrible, because it wasn't interactive. So we made it interactive by building a program in C, actually, that spit out HTML on the fly. Susan Finch (18:54): Got it. Chris Beall (18:54): This was back before you could buy that. This is one year we rolling on our own, but not smoking them. And this reminds me of that. We're in the year 1996 with regard to- Susan Finch (19:08): Oh, I remember. Chris Beall (19:08): ... the web. Susan Finch (19:09): Programming then. Yes. Chris Beall (19:11): Right. When it seemed really exciting, but you didn't really know what you could do with it. And you kept going, "Whoa, that's so... We did this right?" And then six months later, that would be below table stakes and come for free in the browser. And I think that's where we are. And this thing called prompt engineering, which is what you've been doing and I've been doing this weekend, and for you a little bit longer, where you craft the prompts, because they aren't questions, they're prompts, and you note the response from ChatGPT, and then you try to make the prompt something that's going to elicit the response that's more useful. So you shape the prompt. (19:49): And I was taught this phrase by Eduardo Kassner at Microsoft. He said, "Don't ever describe what you do. It's called prompt engineering. Just say prompt engineering." He's right. I didn't know what it meant until we did it all weekend. So I think we're at that stage, but I could be wrong. I mean, what do you think? You've been around a while. Does this feel like that again? Susan Finch (20:09): It does. And I'm glad you brought up 1996, because it takes me back to before BMW was one of the first to have a build-your-car online thing. And the company I worked for worked for a dealership, and we built that. And what it became, and this feels like that, this feels like, building utility bills online, this feels like the beginning of those things that just took off. (20:33): And I see the possibilities as endless, but we need to be trained a little bit better how to elicit what we're looking for without having to do it 17 times, without having to say, "Well, we'll try this, we'll try that." And we get to know those nuances and the phraseology to save the time and to allow ChatGPT to drill it down to exactly what we're looking for. That's just one of the tools that's out there. But this is, right now, the most powerful tool, the most flexible and the most trainable tool. I was doing all your summaries as separate prompts, because I didn't want to lose track as I'm scrolling up and down and things. And for you to put it all into one, to allow that consideration. Chris Beall (21:18): Well, let me correct you there. Susan Finch (21:20): Okay. Chris Beall (21:20): I actually put them in a separate prompts within prompts, because I don't know how to do this very well. So I just did my question, and then I do a shift enter in order to stay in the same box, and then I copy the- Susan Finch (21:31): Yeah. Chris Beall (21:32): ... summary that you provided to me that I'd go pick up with copy paste. So it's a very primitive process. But what's interesting is ChatGPT put it all together in a thing it calls a chat, and that goes on and on and on and on. Susan Finch (21:46): That's what I mean. Yes. Chris Beall (21:47): Start another one, and now, it'll answer questions about all this stuff like, "Yeah, I've been listening to Market Dominance Guys since I was a little chatbot," and this stuff is like... But it also combines it with what I'll call conventional, because I think what Corey and I talk about is statistically unconventional. We're not saying do it like the other folks. A lot of the pieces are the same. You have conversations and stuff. But we're saying, "Leave value aside. Go from fear to trust." Well, that's unusual. (22:16): But ChatGPT goes, "Yeah, I got that, but then I'm going to put in some conventional stuff that I know about too when I'm not so sure." And it's fascinating that it goes back and does this. And this was my dream about it. It's like, "Oh, I don't have to build all the knowledge. The knowledge is built on top of its knowledge and the model that I'm providing, or you and I together are providing, which was provided by Corey and myself, and then guests, and you and Austin's editing, and all this stuff has come together. What episode are we on now? 160 something. Susan Finch (22:48): 168 or something. Chris Beall (22:50): Yeah. It was never supposed to be a podcast, and here it is, doing its thing. That big collaboration that went on for three years with hundreds and hundreds of hours of people talking is now boiled down like maple syrup into this concentrated thing that is now inside this model. Now, what bugs me is you got one model out of doing what you did with the transcripts, the chunked transcripts because they were too big to put in as whole, I did mine based on the summaries of those transcripts, and I don't know how to bring them together. But what if in the background, what if in the background ChatGPT is learning about Market Dominance Guys, and now some naive third party can come in and ask a question. Because remember, when we asked about Corey and Chris before, it was like, "I never heard of these guys." Susan Finch (23:47): Right. Chris Beall (23:49): Right? Susan Finch (23:49): Yeah. Chris Beall (23:50): Because my data collection ended in 2021, and it actually said, when I asked it about Market Dominance Guys, it said, "Oh, that's Nathan Latka's podcast." Nathan, I'd love you like a brother man, but- Susan Finch (24:01): Not yours. Chris Beall (24:02): ... it's not your podcast. But you're better known than I am, because you're out there and I'm not. So do you think it's learned back there behind the scenes, or is it just learned in your model and in my model? Or have we actually been helping each other? I mean, isn't that what's crazy about this is that the learning... I mean, we've agreed to make this information as we're interacting with ChatGPT that it gets to go into whatever it wants, right? Susan Finch (24:33): Yeah. Chris Beall (24:33): We're not doing it and saying, "No, no, it's just ours." Susan Finch (24:35): And I'm wondering though too, should we remind ChatGPT, "Please save all this information you've learned about Market Dominance Guys for anybody to access." Chris Beall (24:49): That would be really interesting. I'll do that right now. Here, let me do that. I'm going to say, "That was fantastic. Thank you. Can you save..." We'll see if I can type. I just have a hard time when my keyboard's a little high. "Save all these prompts and responses about Market Dominance Guys in your model of the world?" Let's see what it says. It's generating. "Yes. Yes. I am designed to retain information from all interactions. So all the information and responses shared in this chat will be stored in my model of the world and can be used to respond to future related queries." And now, we just figured out why this freaks Google out so bad. It's a vacuum cleaner for knowledge in the form of these interactions. And now, we can test that. It's like, okay, so it's like is it good for Market Dominance Guys podcast to be better known to ChatGPT? You bet. Is it good for ConnectAndSell to be better known to ChatGPT through this kind of interaction? You bet. As from Branch 49, they have so much business, they don't need any help. Speaker 1 (26:22): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (26:30): ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn [email protected]. (27:00): And we're back. Chris Beall (27:03): How do we publish this book on Amazon? I'm going to ask ChatGPT. And guess what? It gave me step-by-step directions, and answered my questions to where I can get it. So now, I'm thinking, I think I missed the whole idea, which is I should have asked ChatGPT how to interact with ChatGPT like, "Hey, can you write your own prompts?" I never asked it, because I'm not in that head space yet. Susan Finch (27:30): No, I'm not there yet either. But I thought of another thing. If we wanted to learn about ConnectAndSell from all your summaries, ask ChatGPT what it is learned about ConnectAndSell. Chris Beall (27:41): Oh, let's ask it right now. Okay. "So what have you learned about ConnectAndSell from the Market Dominance Guys podcast episodes?" Oh, this is... That's so good. That is such a good one. Okay. (28:02): "From the Market Dominance Guys podcast episodes, I've learned that ConnectAndSell is a tool that can be used by sales reps to improve their follow-up process in sales. According to Chris Beall, many sales reps believe that manual follow-ups are more effective than using a tool like ConnectAndSell. But there are several drawbacks to manual follow-ups, including the time it takes to prepare, the fact that preparation may not result in any live conversation, and the fact that the rep may not be ready for the live conversation when it finally happens. On the other hand, using a tool like ConnectAndSell is faster and allows reps to talk to more people per day, which is crucial for searching for potential customers who might have a problem that the company's solution can solve. Chris believes that the choice between manual follow-ups and using a tool like ConnectAndSell is a trade-off that each rep has to make explicitly based on the benefits and drawbacks of each approach." (28:54): How about that? Susan Finch (28:55): That's pretty cool. Chris Beall (28:57): This is fascinating. How do you feel about this book project? I mean, I came up with it, when? On Friday, I think. That's Friday the... What is today? Today is Monday the 13th of February 2023. I had this crazy idea, I think it was Friday. Was it Friday? Susan Finch (29:14): It was Friday. Chris Beall (29:15): Or was it Saturday? Susan Finch (29:16): No, It was Friday. Chris Beall (29:17): Friday. I went to Helen, and I said, "Helen, I got this crazy idea," and she said, "Go. Do." Okay. So we started working it on Friday. The book is in, I'll call it a weirdly done state that is. Susan Finch (29:29): Right. Chris Beall (29:29): It's roughly a hundred pages. It's got 25 episodes, it's got 25 prompts and responses. It has a cover, it has a title. Everything is titled. It has links to the podcast episodes. It needs some QR codes for the physical book. It needs a table of contents. I don't know how to get... I think, actually, Word will write one of those for us. Susan Finch (29:48): Word will write it for you. Chris Beall (29:50): It needs font work and stuff like that, because it is as ugly as sin. But that's pretty remarkable for two days. Susan Finch (29:59): Right. Chris Beall (29:59): Shocking, actually. What do you think about this process? How are you going to use it for other projects? Susan Finch (30:05): I'm thinking about it. And yes, in a way, it's been two days, but you and I have kept track of every element of the podcast from transcripts to summaries to everything the entire time. So we were fortunate that, for us, it was quick to be able to pull some of this stuff together, because we had the repository of all of it. That helped. Chris Beall (30:27): It did help. Susan Finch (30:29): It helped a lot. Chris Beall (30:29): It did. Susan Finch (30:30): It saved a lot of time. I love the idea though. I mean, we watch friends that we know produce eBooks all the time and small books, and I'm publishing other books, 50 pages of some advice and stuff. But to be able to give something meaty like this, to have that option for people, we know that books are a calling card. Books open doors for you to have something you can put in somebody's hand that's very current, that isn't things you've been researching for years and years, like right now, this is current. Right now. It needs to be done now. Chris Beall (31:02): Yeah. Susan Finch (31:02): Because there will be imitators, there will be people inspired by what you've just done, what we've done, to continue this. But I love the idea, and the process was a blast for me. I told you, I need to be creating all the time. So it's a lot of fun. And I am not an illustrator. I'm a graphic designer, but I'm not an illustrator. So to get that little help, too, from DALL·E was wonderful. Chris Beall (31:25): Yeah. Susan Finch (31:25): And you're being able to massage the prompt for what it gave us. We were both kind of sitting there messing with it, and it wasn't quite there. But again, with my misplaced modifiers, you were able to hone it in and get our two characters, our three characters for the cover. Chris Beall (31:42): Yeah, I got super specific. It is like, "I want one person like this, one person like this, a futuristic robot sitting at a table. I want it to be a six by nine cover. I want it in black, white, and red. I want it in the style of a minimalist Madison Avenue advertisement." Susan Finch (32:01): Yeah. Chris Beall (32:01): Because I figured those kind of ideas would be in there, right? I mean- Susan Finch (32:05): I was thinking Mad Men too, but I could not- Chris Beall (32:07): I almost asked for Mad Men- Susan Finch (32:08): Yeah. Chris Beall (32:10): ... and then I thought... I was down to 11 prompts left with DALL·E before I'd have to wait till March 11th, my son's birthday, to get more DALL·E. I think that might still be true, even though I upgraded to Plus. I'm hoping Microsoft will save me, because they're really being nice to us right now. But it was so interesting, because I'm not a graphic artist of any kind. I don't think I have much of an eye for stuff, but I've been trained. It's interesting. I've been trained in art, art history, and I'm like a colorblind person who's coming to advise you on the painting of your house. Because when we were in Shetland, and we were in a yarn store, and you're supposed to know that these colors are cool and these are warm, means nothing to me. But I could point at them with my phone, take a picture of them, go to black and white mode, to noire mode, and I could see which ones were warm and which ones were cool. I'm that kind of idiot. That's the level [inaudible 00:33:05] (33:04): But I could look at this thing and go, "That is book cover stuff." My recent experience with Helen's book was helpful, black, red, and white, where the accented stuff is red, the big stuff is black, and negative space is used in order to convey the other message. When people see the cover, they'll get this. The negative space among the people's legs and the robot's legs under the table is really interesting. Susan Finch (33:35): Right. Chris Beall (33:35): It's interesting shapes, and it kind of conveys the message like a puzzle, like pieces coming together. So that spoke to me. And as soon as I saw it, I said, "This is the one." Susan Finch (33:45): Yeah. Chris Beall (33:46): So I didn't feel like I created anything, but I kind of did. Susan Finch (33:50): You were the art director. I mean, Tom's an art director, my husband, so he knows how to direct and to give the word pictures, and somebody else can execute it. And you gave the word picture, you gave the elements that needed to be brought together, and that's a skill in itself. We talk about the engineering of the prompts. A lot of it is being able to really see what those goals are and knowing how to articulate it. So it isn't for the everyday person, always, to get a great result that people will enjoy, learn from, read from, be inspired by, get what you're trying to say. You still have to know how to ask. Chris Beall (34:35): Yeah. And you got to curate the results too. Susan Finch (34:37): Yes. Chris Beall (34:38): But even though a hundred percent of the words, other than the prompts in this book, "Market Dominance Guys, a conversation with ChatGPT" are ChatGPT's words, not yours and not mine. Susan Finch (34:50): Right. Chris Beall (34:50): The words came out of Market Dominance Guys episodes, plus its own words that it threw in. The prompts came from me. And the curation that's hidden, you can't see it as a culling process, because some of the responses were like, "No, that doesn't make any sense." Susan Finch (35:08): Right. Chris Beall (35:08): So I just didn't include them. Sometimes also, by the way, I put so much specificity in the preamble to the prompt that I cut that part out and just used the second half of the prompt. Unless you have this corpus already put together, this model put together, you wouldn't get the same answer, which is fine. It's like- Susan Finch (35:26): Right. Chris Beall (35:27): ... you wake up in the middle of the night, and I might tell you something different about whether I'm hungry. It's just the way it is. Everything changes over time. But there's an explicit process of, we'll call it crafting of the prompts. There's a learning process, a co-learning process, where we learn. I learned from how ChatGPT responded, so I crafted different kinds of prompts. DALL·E, especially because I mean, I looked at that stuff and went, "Holy Molly, that's... Ah." And I was down to 11 of them, and I'm panicking. And it's like, "Oh, that's the one. Stop, stop, stop. Get it, get it, get it." (36:00): But there's also on the DALL·E side, there are four times, whatever it is, 20, 80 images that I rejected. So you only get to see curation, that artists work like that too. And I watched artists work. Susan Finch (36:15): Yes. Chris Beall (36:15): There's this continuous curation process that's going on, where, and inventors work like this too, as you know, I hold a boatload of patents for some reason, and what you see in those whatever 22 patents I have is the tips of many, many icebergs under the water is all the crap that I threw away. So I think curation is a big part of it, and having an eye and a feel and the emotional set to curate, to be ruthless, but engaged. Susan Finch (36:47): Right. Chris Beall (36:48): So I think this prompt engineering thing, which when Eduardo Kassner said to me, this is a thing says, "Don't use any other phrase," I'm really indebted to him for that. He was stern with me. He made it very, very clear last week, "Don't say this any other way." I'm now realizing website design was a big thing. Prompt engineering is the big thing now. Susan Finch (37:07): It is. Chris Beall (37:08): And you need to learn it. If you want to be relevant for the next 10 to 20 years, you better either learn prompt engineering, or learn how to appreciate it. Susan Finch (37:20): I agree. Or learn how to find somebody else and recognize that they know how to do it. Chris Beall (37:23): Exactly. Exactly. I've encouraged at least one of my kids to become a prompt engineer. I think that it's a true deep skill, and I think on your resume it's going to be very meaningful. Susan Finch (37:34): I do too. Chris Beall (37:35): And that was my big lesson over the weekend. It's like, "Wow, we can make a book in two days." Two, the book is pretty substantial. Three, occasionally ChatGPT gives me insights about my own stuff, or Cory's stuff, or whatever that I was unaware of. But four, the big lesson is this thing is for real, and prompt engineering is what you need to learn in order to- Susan Finch (37:59): Yes. Chris Beall (37:59): ... get a lot out of it. And my recommendation to anybody in this audience is, "You may think that you're a CEO, like me, or like Susan, or that you're a salesperson, or you're a whatever, this is something to delve into and get dirty and find out where its edges are and your edges are, because I think you'll be shocked and gratified and relevant."  

Welcome to the continuation of a conversation with Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. This episode delves into the world of sales and coaching for sales managers. Hitesh shares his experience and insights on coaching by the numbers and how to effectively manage and coach a sales team. Corey and Chris share their thoughts on how to analyze sales data and determine the strengths and weaknesses of individual sales reps. They stress the importance of getting granular with data and looking at it with a critical eye. By understanding the patterns and details of sales interactions, sales managers can take the necessary steps to help their reps improve and drive better results. Chris also offers his advice for new sales managers on how to stay up-to-date with fast-moving sales trends and how to effectively manage a sales team in a fast-paced environment. He suggests starting the day by looking at sales data and focusing on the critical details of sales interactions. So whether you're a seasoned sales manager or just starting out, join us for this exciting episode as Chris, Corey and Hitesh help you take your sales management, training, and sales skills to the next level in this episode, "Get Granular to Boost Your Sales Performance". If you missed the first half to this interview, you can listen here: The Power of Childlike Curiosity in the Digital World of Sales   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:24): Welcome to the continuation of a conversation with Hitesh Shah, the CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. This episode delves into the world of sales and coaching for sales managers. Hitesh shares his experience in insights on coaching by the numbers and how to effectively manage and coach a sales team. Cory and Chris share their thoughts on how to analyze sales data and determine the strengths and weaknesses of individual sales reps. They stress the importance of getting granular with the data and looking at it with a critical eye. By understanding the patterns and details of sales interactions, sales managers can take the necessary steps to help their reps improve and drive better results. (01:01): Chris also offers his advice for new sales managers on how to stay up to date with fast-moving sales trends and how to effectively manage a sales team in a fast-paced environment. He suggests starting the day by looking at sales data and focusing on the critical details of sales interactions. So whether you're a seasoned sales manager or just starting out, join us for this exciting episode as Chris, Corey and Hitesh help you take your sales management, training and sales skills to the next level. In this episode, get granular to boost your sales performance. Corey Frank (01:38): We had a great conversation the other day informally talking about your cataloging experience, Hitesh and Chris, and we were talking about the, and I'm going to butcher it, was that the items lead you to the category. The category doesn't lead you to the items. It's very easy when you're trying to deduce causation versus correlation. We've had a number of conversations about this, but when you have, let's take a real-world problem, how do you determine if the items that data is leading to a category challenge or is the category going to lead you to, it never leads you to the items I believe that you had said. Maybe you can clean up that butchering of your nuggets of wisdom that I just fed back to you. Chris Beall (02:19): Well, it's pretty good. You just got 12 of my patents right there. Hitesh, what are your thoughts about this? You and I have both built a lot of classification systems that do automated or semi-automated classifications, all with at some point with humans in the loop either early, middle, or late or cleanup. You did it in the world of jobs at a level that nobody had ever done before, figuring out how to match people to the jobs that are out there in the world. I've done it in the world of products and parts also.  Hitesh Shah (02:55): When you think about what Corey just said. I think the most interesting example that comes to my mind is coaching by the numbers, Chris, in terms of dispositions. So Corey, in ConnectAndSell world, every call is disposed with a disposition. What happened. I got a referral, I got wrong target. The person is not interested. Right timing. Not me. Talk to somebody else or whatever. Chris started noticing this very peculiar pattern where interests and information would suddenly start dominating your disposition pie chart. (03:26): So we a have pie chart which shows what's the spread of your dispositions, and it turns out that people who are not very good at communicating a value prop or are super nice on the phone, so you don't feel like blowing them off, you don't feel like telling them off. But at the same time, they don't give you a compelling enough story or a pitch for you to say, "Yes, I want to learn more." (03:45): So guess what? The easiest thing to point to is, "Send me some information and I'll get back to you," and Chris, I still remember the grid that we looked at on the whiteboard in the San Mateo office where you came up with this technique of saying, "Okay, here's how you stack rank your disposition outcomes, and the moment interest and information starts bubbling up for a given rep, that means that person needs coaching on how to open the call in a way that you actually end up moving to the next phase of the sales cycle." So- Corey Frank (04:17): That would be perceived as a positive. "Hey, we got through to somebody who's on my list." My marketing people said, "See, I told you that list is good. These people are crazy for information and crazy for propaganda we send," but that category doesn't necessarily lead back to the item necessarily. Correct? Hitesh Shah (04:35): Yeah, exactly. Exactly Chris Beall (04:37): That's a great example, Hitesh. The truth is always in the details. The details are always a pain in the because you got to figure out what the patterns are and you will see patterns where there aren't any. These are the hard things about hard things. This is why some people do work like this and others do sensible work. You actually know what the outcome is going to be. So that's a great example where there's something that emotionally leads you in one direction, "Hey, this rep must be pretty good. They're getting a lot of interest." In fact, that tells you something about the rep. This rep can't close. They can't close a meeting, and so now that they need coaching or replacement, well, let's take a coaching step, because that'll tell us if they need coaching or replacement. We had one the other day that was really funny. (05:19): Now everybody's obsessed with mobile numbers. Mobile numbers, mobile numbers, mobile numbers. Because, well, they have higher connect rates. So the mobile number is the category and the connect is the thing you're trying to get to inside. Kaeser compressors, Matt McCorkle had been on this show before and was an outstanding guest, and Matt wanted us to actually build a list for him, for experimental reasons. We do crazy things like actually build a list for people sometimes. And so we built a list for him and we made an assumption, a categorical assumption that mobile numbers would be great. Well, Matt's team was calling plant managers in factories. And the plant managers in factories who are in the factory answer the company number when it's actually routed to them by navigating the phone system and all that. (06:10): Because you're a plant manager, you're not going to ignore a phone call that comes from the inside. It could be really important for the running of the operation, but when they answer their mobile, it means they don't work there anymore. [inaudible 00:06:22] you call during business hours and you call them on the mobile number, you're actually deliberately calling the wrong people that ZoomInfo or LinkedIn or whatever says are the right people, but their data lags a little bit behind. And so the category [inaudible 00:06:38] us, and the facts came back and said otherwise, and by the way, the connect rate was beautiful. It was 14 to one with wait times of one minute and six seconds on paper. I looked at it and I said, "Ooh, ooh, ooh." And then Matt gets back on and says, "Man, that really pissed off our reps and wasted an entire two hours of flight school." Corey Frank (06:58): Yeah. Well, speaking of flight school, it's almost as if Hitesh and Chris, we've talked about flight school several times on this call on organization, whether you're using ConnectAndSell, which you should, but even if you use any other dialer that the premise and the basic building blocks and the spirit of flight school is, regardless of whether you're using any type of weapon like ConnectAndSell, but what we were thinking about talking about here is almost like a air traffic control school. So if I'm a sales manager and I don't have, maybe my enablement person or my marketer is just doing my Zoom data, maybe keeping my sales force up and going, this concept of traffic school is analyzing the traffic patterns in the residue, like we were saying, is what your dialer is trying to tell you. (07:43): How do I get better at that? What do you guys suggest on, where do I learn that from. On this call? I think I have a below number of patents for the three attendees on this call. I think clearly, meaning zero. I think combined between the number of patents and the number, you guys are very modest, but the number of phone calls, who has claimed to view and be more of a thought leader, an outbound calling in the nuances of it than you two guys? Nobody, just from the hours and the millions and millions of dials, but I'm a sales manager. I'm a relatively new sales manager and I have reps and there's a lot of moving parts. Chris, your quote, you said is that, "It takes a long time to learn about fast stuff." There's a lot of fast-moving stuff. I got a board that's breathing down my neck. I got funding that expires in a few months. I got end of quarter. How do I learn to just stop and look at the residue in the exhaust with a critical eye? What advice do you have for somebody like that? Chris Beall (08:41): Man, I have a lot of it. Here's my number one piece of advice, and it depends on what kind of systems you have that tell you what's going on, but one is, get granular. Just get granular. Looking at stuff from a high level tells you nothing other than what you thought you already knew. You're just going to get confirmation bias. So, that's one. Two is, before your day starts, and I always say before breakfast, and I have two things that require effort before breakfast. (09:15): One is, I try to get in 4,000 micro-prancing steps because 4,000 steps before breakfast means I'll hit my goal for the day. The second is, I look at the data in the same order every day. So I bring up the previous day's results for our team, and I look at them, [inaudible 00:09:34] from top to bottom. By top, I mean early in the conversation to later in the conversation, because everything in the world of calling is conditioned by what happened right before it. Therefore, if it goes bad, it goes bad early. (09:47): So I'll just go in and say, "Okay," so yesterday, because wait, I can do this in real-time, but I'll get distracted. So yesterday, who had the highest busy callback rate as a percentage of their total conversations in the team? And then I'll click through and get granular. I'll listen to two conversations, one short and one long. I'll look at the amount of time. That cycle right there, that whole cycle takes less than three minutes, and now I know who needs the most help on their opener, because they get busy callbacks. (10:21): I'll do it through five stages of the conversation. The entire thing takes me 15 minutes. I know some people say, what are you as a CEO doing this? Well, gosh, selling stuff's really important to my company and it comes from the top of the funnel. It starts at the beginning. So just doing that in much the same way that I would do my 4,000 steps in the morning before all the stuff starts going. I think a moment of structured looking at a level of granularity that you're familiar with but not turning your mind off. It's like you're really looking, and I know Hitesh, you do stuff like this with the systems that you build. You have parts of the day where it's easy to get pulled away, where you pay attention to things worth paying attention to. Hitesh Shah (11:07): Yeah, absolutely. In fact, in the context of what you are saying, Corey, every dial that you make, there are three levels of insights coming from [inaudible 00:11:18] that you get back. From ConnectAndSell and from any other dialing system. The [inaudible 00:11:23] number one at the simplest level is, was the phone number right or not? And their data providers that do, DiscoverOrg used to be really good at this. You used to see from ConnectAndSell, you could tell if a customer was using DiscoverOrg or not in a heartbeat, because their bad data would be less than 2%, believe it or not, Corey, versus some of the other data providers that go often up to 15 and 20%. (11:46): So one is just the quality of the data in terms of whether the phone number actually worked or not. The second level, if you go one step above that is the actual titles that you are targeting that you thought, and this is something I wish our customers did more of, Corey, to Chris's point, in terms of being granular, because at the end of the day, blended, a thousand people list will blend everything in. But if you start looking at cohorts of titles that you now start correlating to the call outcomes or dispositions, you start generating some very meaningful insights. (12:20): If you start noticing a high number of referrals, that probably means that you are actually ending up targeting the wrong function within that company, for whatever reason. And maybe that particular industry is not very well organized in terms of how it feeds into the hierarchy or there's something off there, and we've seen this not very often, but enough that it does matter. So the data quality, the targeting, and then, most importantly in terms of the feedback loop, in terms of what is working well, what you should be doing more of, and what's not working well, and what you should be doing less of. (12:59): So this whole closed loop feedback system in terms of doing more of what is working across from the vendor that you are using for your data acquisition to how you're using the vendors to build your list, and especially targeting, both in terms of companies you target and the people within those companies that you target. And then lastly, in terms of navigating the buying center, regardless of who you ended up with. Because the buying center is a collection of people, and especially true of anything that's not [inaudible 00:13:34] and maybe even lower in this environment, and as you go up [inaudible 00:13:39] plus into the mid-market plus enterprise segment, because you're not just going to be talking to one person, it's going to be a community decision. Announcer (13:47): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. (13:55): ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. (14:25): And we're back with Corey and Chris. Corey Frank (14:28): And having that childlike curiosity as well is key to finding out, what if I pull on this thread, what if I pull on this thread, in getting down, it's okay to fall in love with getting in these little rabbit holes about what it's going to lead you in. To that point Hitesh, you have a mature sales manager that maybe doesn't necessarily analyze their business. There's no rear view mirror. It's all about just dial the phone, more dials, more data, hire more people. (15:01): Is that condition terminal? How would you reform somebody like that, like me, who... I don't have time to, 4,000 steps, Chris? Come on, look at me. I don't take four steps. I'm sitting behind the desk and I'm managing my... How can you reform somebody like me to say, "Listen, this is why it's critical to your business." If anything, there's KPIs, there's one number you should look at in your organization more than anything else that has an atomic weight equal to all these other vanity metrics that you think you're using on your Salesforce system. What guidance advice would you have for somebody like that who's in that condition? Hitesh Shah (15:39): So that's a tough one, Corey, but I think Chris came up with this concept of meeting per rep hour. I think that's probably where I would start. Chris, feel free to chime in. I think it's a brilliant invention. I think it's frankly in the company's history, at least that I know of. It's especially for the aspect that Corey is addressing in terms of that one thing. If you go to the dentist, the x-ray does it. You show an x-ray and then you go, "This is how bad your teeth are." Unfortunately, for us, the closest to that x-ray that I can think of, Corey, is the meeting per rep hour metric, because in the end, the time element of it gets lost in terms of meetings set, but the amount of time that you're spending prospecting and within that time how productive you are in terms of, and that encompasses everything from list quality to rep quality to follow up hygiene and all that thing together. Corey Frank (16:27): Yep, yep. Hitesh Shah (16:29): Would you agree, Chris? Chris Beall (16:30): Yeah, your biggest source of variability is the processors themselves, the reps. And so it's difficult to predict what will happen from activity metrics, because the processor itself is not uniform. It's like I'm putting in what I think is the same inputs, but I've actually got a very different processor and it's one of a kind. There is only one copy of it in the entire world. And so if you want to find out quickly before you run out of money, run out of time or get shot, which is, that's the COO's job, is to take the bullet for the CEO. I think we've talked about that a couple of times. (17:08): Then, you need to very quickly find out where the production is, what's really going on. So assuming you have control over your targeting, now you're down to, what's the output? Well, waiting for closed one doesn't work, because it's too slow. You can't learn about fast things by waiting for slow things to happen. By the time the slow things happen, you've lost your opportunity to learn more about the fast thing. So what's a fast thing that happens? It happens on day one. The very first day you turn on some dialing system or whatever it is that you're encouraging people to do, for outbound, there's a question. (17:43): My input, my cost is the hours, an hour of a rep, that unique [inaudible 00:17:49] processor. The output is meetings set. It tells you about your list. Because if you can't set meetings across the entire group, the issue isn't the processors. The issue is your targeting or your messaging, one or the other. So now you go back and ask yourself the question, "Well, does this message have a shot, or is the list problematic?" So you go to the list and you ask yourself this question, which is, if I break the list down by meetings per rep hour, which titles are taking the meetings and which aren't? (18:18): So maybe I have a list that isn't dense enough in the titles that are taking the meetings as an example. It's that thing. You need to have a place to start. And meetings per rep hour is to me the place to start. We used to push a lot of stuff back in Denver. We were pushing, [inaudible 00:18:36] enough dials in the day? Well, that's a system thing. With ConnectAndSell you might have 1500, 2000 dials. But then [inaudible 00:18:42] said, "No, no, you're not." Did you have enough conversations in the day? And so we went into that for a while. And these things, these were things that we drove on, do this, do this, do this. That was, when, 2014, 2015, it's now 2023. (18:54): About a year ago, I was looking at the data and I just said, "This is crazy. Where's the money going?" It's going to feed the racehorse. What's the output of a cold call that is diagnostic for targeting, for messaging, and for effectiveness of the rep? Meeting gets set, meetings per hour per rep. Oh, Hitesh says it's brilliant. I think I'm a total idiot for not coming up with this in 2011, quite frankly. But when I look around and I ask folks, "What are you measuring?" Nobody is measuring meetings per rep hour. It's the one thing that they should be measuring if they want to get a very quick handle on, "okay, where do I go for improvement? (19:37): Because if you're forward looking, where do I go for results? And then if I'm getting results or I'm not getting results or whatever, where do I go for improvement? It's right there. When we engaged, when you were at Stormwind, and I was trying to make a point to you, which is, your talent spread is huge, and there's an issue, and I actually showed you, you're the first person, Corey, who ever saw meetings per rep hour. That was actually how I brought this back. I said, "Look, below this threshold, you should have no ConnectAndSell, cut them off." And you said, "Chris, I can make them better," because that's your mindset. And the answer is maybe you could make them better, but it was going to take a while, and the question is, how long did you really have? Especially given how much you were paying us. It's a fascinating thing, and I'm glad you brought it up, Hitesh, because this is the one metric to rule them all. It tells you everything. It tells you where to look, or it tells you to look. Corey Frank (20:37): Absolutely, because everything else is a lagging indicator, that's causatory based off of that one, because if it's meetings per day, ah, but meetings per hour and then combined with these other granular items, Hitesh, that you and Chris were talking about, the, busy, call back later's or, send information, that's the one string. So the one string to pull on the sweater is, if somebody's beyond the norm of meetings set per hour per rep, Chris Beall (21:08): Yeah. So let me clarify. When I say meetings per rep hour, I mean per prospecting hour. Corey Frank (21:13): Yes. Right. Sure. Chris Beall (21:15): So taking eight hours in the day doesn't work. You've got to- Corey Frank (21:17): No, no, exactly. Chris Beall (21:18): ... say, "I know they're prospecting for this amount of time." And one of the advantages of dialing systems like ours or others is they actually tell you literally how long somebody's prospecting. When I look at our system right now, which we never do. We don't do it in podcasts to look look, right because it's an audio medium. But if I were to look right now at our team today on 1/26, and I'm just going to look at our inside sales team because they do more prospecting, and I can go top to bottom on meetings per rep hour. So our top performer, Josh Layman, using ConnectAndSell today for one hour, 11 minutes and 36 seconds, has set three meetings, and his meetings per rep hour is 2.51. (22:04): By the way, for those of you who want a benchmark, 0.5 is the magic number. So we've always said that there [inaudible 00:22:11] a magic number for market dominance. There's a conversion rate that you can go, "Oh, that's pretty good. That's going to get me there." If you're over 0.5 meetings per rep hour as a rep and you can sustain it, you're a keeper. Now, somebody might say, "Well, what about the list [inaudible 00:22:28] the right meetings, [inaudible 00:22:29] meetings, people show up for," those are all things that can be controlled either in making the list, which should be the companies, not the reps, or in handling the aftermath of the meeting being set, rescheduling, and all that kind of stuff. (22:43): So ours today, by the way, I'm very happy, is 0.76 meetings per rep hour, and I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 people that are above that today. So there's variation day to day, but that one tells me where to look. I have two people at zero. Now, that's one day. So now you'll look back over a week, and this is also key. You got to be fine grained, but you can't be twitchy. You can't be reacting to everything. You got to know, "okay, this is for real. But now I go to meetings per rep hour for the team as a whole, and suddenly it smooths out. The top is 0.87, and the bottom is 0.35 this week, and the average across the entire team is 0.56 so I guess we can stay in business. Corey Frank (23:30): Gotcha. Well, it'd be interesting to see with that, and I'm sure you have the data, certainly proprietary, ConnectAndSell is such a thought leader in this space with your team, but what is that danger zone? If I'm an organization that has X and Y and Z, pay my reps, most folks pay their SDRs with some variable disparity there, but what is a danger zone that, "Hey, listen, stop what you're doing," like you said, "Unplug whatever machine that you're plugging and look at those points that you had mentioned." The data or the target or the ICP or the rep training. Maybe they need to immediately go to flight school. What are some of those numbers that you see? Is it 0.25? Is it 0.1? Chris Beall (24:13): Well, Hitesh is in the danger zone because he's an important guy, has to go to another meeting. It's amazing that we had him for this. He's the real Tom Cruise here. Hitesh, do you have any parting words about danger zones or your feeling about when should you be reactive? Hitesh Shah (24:26): I think the number one, in terms of danger zone, is burning your leads, Corey, to me. So if you are seeing dispositions that are overly negative, that all is almost always indicative of something that you're not doing right in terms of either training the reps or targeting or whatever. So other than that, like Chris said, you want to maintain the ranges for each of those metrics that you are watching, for incremental improvement. But if there's one overarching thing, it's just, if you're looking at a pie chart that's showing more than 75% negative dispositions, then you have a problem there. Corey Frank (25:03): Well, that's fantastic. Well, I tell you what, Hitesh, it's great to finally have the brains behind the operation at ConnectAndSell on these podcasts. I've been schlepping with Chris Beall for the last three years or so, and it's clearly you've been having the earpiece in Chris's ear as I ask him all the questions over the years, so, to have an organization like you have Chris, and that you and Shawn McLaren have built where you have people like Hitesh as your right hand guy and supporter and cheerleader and analysis and debater and work wife, it's a gift to have that much intellectual firepower in one organization under one roof, focusing on the same goal, so thank you Hitesh for finally breaking free from under Chris's thumb here on all the other projects that he has you working on to jump on this podcast. For the Market Dominance Guys, Chris, any parting words here on this episode with the brilliant Hitesh Shah? Chris Beall (25:51): All I got to say is the system must be really, really in good shape for him to be comfortable to come on because this guy doesn't let anything slip by. Corey Frank (25:59): The medium is the message. That's right. [inaudible 00:26:03]. Until next time, this is Corey Frank with Chris Beall on the Market Dominance Guys. Hitesh Shah (26:07): Thank you. Thanks.   Links from today's episode: ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com  Branch49 - https://branch49.com  Hitesh Shah on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiteshrshah/  Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/  Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

So, what's the biggest challenge in sales? Today, the guys have a special guest, Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. As Hitesh puts it, it's the fact that we don't like to be sold to. That's why sales is about helping, not selling. And if you want to succeed in sales, you have to understand who your target audience is and what their business problems are. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up, building relevance and trust with each person you talk to. Hitesh says there are two things, one is always trying to understand what happened. And, when it goes against your instinct -  what did you expect it to do? Be open to the possibility that you may have missed something. Corey says that this requires a level of humility that doesn’t exist in high quantities in sales, even though it should. One of the things these three have learned over the years is that when something starts working when it shouldn't, it can be scary. But in the digital world, everything is deterministic. There are causes and effects, and there's no such thing as waiting or hoping that something fixes itself. As Hitesh puts it, you have to have a childlike curiosity and naivete, especially in the digital world where computers are deterministic. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “The Power of Childlike Curiosity in the Digital World of Sales”   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49. (00:21): So what's the biggest challenge in sales? Today the guys have a special guest, Hitesh Shah, CTO and CPO of ConnectAndSell. As Hitesh puts it's the fact that we don't like to be sold to. That's why sales is about helping, not selling. And if you want to succeed in sales, you have to understand who your target audience is and what their business problems are. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up building relevance and trust with each person you talk to. And when things don't go your way, Hitesh says there are two things. One is always try to understand what happened and when it goes against your instinct, what did you expect it to do? Be open to the possibility that you might have missed something. (01:03): Corey says that this requires a level of humility that doesn't exist in high quantities in sales, even though it should. One of the things these three have learned over the years is that when something starts working when it shouldn't, it can be scary. But in the digital world, everything is deterministic. There are causes and effects, and there's no such thing as waiting or hoping that something fixes itself. As Hitesh puts it, you have to have a childlike curiosity and naivete, especially in the digital world where computers are deterministic. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, the power of childlike curiosity in the digital world of sales. Corey Frank (01:44): Excellent. Hey, here we are. Welcome to the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and Chris Beall. Chris, we got a new one for you, right? As we talked about the other day, we have the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the Hawking of hawking, and the Tom Cruise of outbound calling. Chris Beall (02:00): That's so embarrassing. Corey Frank (02:02): Well, hey, I said it just like you wrote it, right? The Tom Cruise of outbound calling I think it was. Well, if that's the case, well, it's good to have you, Chris. We have a very special guest, internally inside those four virtual walls of ConnectAndSell, the brains behind all of the effort and engineering and all of your good ideas, the origins of all your good ideas probably over the years, Hitesh Shah, who I would say is maybe not the Tom Cruise, the Amitabh Bachchan of ConnectAndSell of outbound calling. (02:31): So welcome, Hitesh. It's long overdue to actually have you here on the Market Dominance Guys podcast. Hitesh Shah (02:37): Thank you. Glad to be here, Corey. Corey Frank (02:39): I don't think we have any episodes, Chris, one of these days we got poll between the two of you, a legacy version of Clipmedia. Because for ladies and gentlemen in the audience, I am on the phone here, we're on the podcast with Chris Beall and Hitesh, who are the inventors, the co-founders of Clipmedia, an old product that is the precursor to, man, all things Zoom, all things GoToMeeting. If we would've only stuck with that product 15 years ago, holy cats, 20 years ago it's been around. Chris Beall (03:11): Yeah, it is. Corey Frank (03:11): What do you think, Chris? Can you dust that off? Yeah. Chris Beall (03:14): Yeah. Hitesh and I met at a company that a venture capitalist asked me, a very good friend who had actually worked with me at one company back when he was an operator, and he asked me to take a look at this company. Wouldn't tell me what the name was, he gave me an address in Silicon Valley. I was in Iowa at the time. So I came out and I stayed in this secure corporate guest house, this apartment, and I actually walked over to the company and they put me in a room. It was weird. I'm sitting in this room and they bring me coffee and I'm just looking around, it's a conference room. And then these guys all start coming in and I had an immediate impression of one of them, Hitesh, and I said, "If my job here is to make some changes in this company, there's one guy is going to stay, and it's that guy." [NEW_PARAGRAPH]And it was before he ever opened his mouth. It was just the way he walked into the room, it was dead obvious to me that he was honest and he knew what he was talking about and that he was really smart. And we came to a certain point in the presentation where they asked me what I thought and I said, "Your product's a fake," and I took them to through why it was a fake and everybody else got weird and Hitesh had this, "I told you so," look on his face. And we've been together ever since. That was in 2005, so a little while ago. Corey Frank (04:29): Well, if you got that impression before he opened his mouth, holy cats, after he opened his mouth, sounds like you weren't disappointed. So anyway, it's good to have you Hitesh. With our eight listeners, it's good to expand their horizons a little bit on beyond just market dominance, but getting actually into some of the weeds and some of the tactics. That's the fun stuff, certainly for me and Chris and some of the guests that we've had over the years. Right, Chris? And I think right before we were on air, we were talking about one that I found fascinating and maybe the eight other listeners will too, and that's a couple things called jitter. But even before we get to jitter, let's talk a little bit about the conversation you had about everything that in outbound sales and Hitesh get your thoughts on this too, is actually counterintuitive and how you approach it. And maybe set up the conversation that you had and what led to that nugget to that young sales manager. Chris Beall (05:21): All yours Hitesh, everything's counterintuitive. Funny thing is Hitesh is so smart, he's the guy to whom it's all intuitive. Corey Frank (05:30): He's so far beyond the curvature of the earth, he comes around the other side. Chris Beall (05:34): Exactly. Hitesh Shah (05:35): Yeah, if you start from the basics story, as you know, us techies especially, we don't like to be sold to. So the number one contrary thing about sales is you shouldn't be selling anything. You should just be trying to help. And if you go down from that path into the world of who you're targeting, the mechanics, the nooks and crannies at the end of the day in terms of what you're trying to actually achieve by calling a list of people, you'd often find that the list of titles that you put together that you think are the ones that are going to end up buying your product, you start calling on them and then you realize the people at the high up who have the money, they don't have the time or an inclination to listen to you on the first go. (06:18): So you often have to start at the bottom. You have to tailor your message to what the business problems that company's facing, make it more relevant and then elevate your pitch up to the top. So I often find in our product, especially people go after economic buyers only to burn themselves because they can't hold ... Especially in a cold conversation, it's very hard. Unless you have the gravitas that Chris often brings or you often bring to the table because of your experience in the industry, it's very hard to open a conversation and come across as somebody who's more knowledgeable than you are, and who can literally open your eyes to things that you'll want to do differently for your own business. Corey Frank (06:57): [inaudible 00:06:57]. Hitesh Shah (06:57): So that's [inaudible 00:06:58] thing. Corey Frank (06:59): As we dive into even, it's incredibly helpful, even a big dumb farm animal like me needs to keep that in mind is helping versus always pitching and selling. But let's take a scenario, Hitesh and Chris about where I think I know my business and I see a blip. Hitesh Shah (07:15): Right. Corey Frank (07:15): And I see a blip either in contact rates or conversation conversion rates that I didn't expect and I can't explain. What's the thought process that typically I would have, and how should I maybe approach that problem? Because otherwise, is it okay just to guess if my board or my senior managers asked me, "Hey listen, why did you hit X amount today? Or Y amount yesterday? Or why did this blip here or why did this blip here?" How do I go about analyzing what the rationale, what the reasons are to deduce can I do it again or is it just the jet stream and I got lucky? Chris Beall (07:51): One of the funniest things about business, I'll jump in on this one, is that there are people who see everything as negative. So everything that's unusual that happens as a harbinger of doom. And there are other people who see everything as positive, but then everybody shares this thing when good things are happening, they don't question them. And the key to market dominance is when good things are happening, find out why. You need to be as aggressive and curious about good surprises as about what you think of as negative surprises. Because neither one conforms to your model, which means your model's wrong. (08:33): They're both telling you the same thing. Your model is wrong. And until you understand the relationship between your model and the world, you can't safely even make the short term predictions that allow you to do sensible things. Hitesh and I have built a lot of stuff together and one of the scariest things is when something works when you think that it shouldn't or it starts working when it didn't used to, and the lay people always do this, it's like, "Well, I guess it didn't work 87% of the time, but now it works 58% of the time." (09:08): It's like, "No, we live in a digital world, man." The world that Hitesh and I live in when it comes to technology, I'll tell the audience, I'm embarrassed to say it because I'm not very good at it anymore, but I used to be a fairly serious technologist, but in the digital world, everything's deterministic. Everything's deterministic, and statistics will therefore apply in order to understand stuff that the fact of the matter is that if statement somewhere down inside that computer, it went one way or it went another, it didn't go somewhere in between. And on Tuesdays it does one thing and a Wednesday it does another. There are hardware problems in the world. Corey Frank (09:47): So Chris- Chris Beall (09:47): In the world of software, everything has a cause. Corey Frank (09:50): So for the Pittsburgh Steeler fans out there, what do you mean by deterministic? Chris Beall (09:53): I mean there are causes and effects. Say you've got to start your car and your car goes [inaudible 00:10:00] and you think, "Oh, but if I keep trying, it'll start eventually." Well, it could if your car is old enough because maybe there's some physical condition that you're changing by running the starter. But if you have a digital car, like Hitesh has a Tesla and it doesn't start, if you can reboot it, good, but if you can't reboot it trying over and over, it's not like looking at the phase of the moon or something. It's got a state inside of it and that state is stuck. And this is a extremely hard thing for folks to understand, laypeople who don't build it, who deal in the digital world. And Hitesh, you must have spent a lot of your life trying to explain to somebody, "No, it's not a matter of trying or waiting or hoping it fixes itself." We actually have to stop and we have to dig in. And I know it's a disappointment, but we have to stop and we have to dig in. Hitesh Shah (11:00): Absolutely. Yeah. Especially coming from a country where there's a temple around the corner on every street, you're always hoping and praying. Talk about counterintuitive Corey, that's another thing that's counterintuitive. But to Chris's point, you almost need a childlike curiosity and naivete. At the end of the day, especially in the digital world, computers are deterministic because they take a specified set of instructions and then they execute them in a specified way and they always produce a consistent outcome. This is why computers and people, people are funny. You never know what reaction a given action will invite. Whereas for computers, it's very different all the time. So if you take the view that my set of beliefs are just that, those are beliefs and they're often validated by their data because your beliefs come from experience, so many of them will actually hold true and they will be confirmed by what you find. (12:00): But at the same time, there's always, always, always an element of surprise in pretty much everything from what you expect out of certain call or what you expect a certain list to do or what you expect a certain person to respond. So to Chris's point, Corey, for me it's all about curiosity and naivete. So two things, one is always be trying to understand what happened and when it goes against your instinct or grain in terms of what it did versus what you expected it to do, always be open to this possibility that there is something that you missed or have missed for a very long time versus trying to dismiss it away as an anomaly or something that only happens rarely or whatnot. Corey Frank (13:28): That's fascinating. I bet you see that trait of not just trying to understand what happened, but to admit that you probably missed something. Hitesh Shah (13:28): Yes. Corey Frank (13:39): That's a level of humility that probably doesn't exist in too much quantities in sales, which is counterintuitive itself because it really should. As you had said, if everything is good, I don't have to do anything. I don't have to analyze anything because everything is good. What do you say to that, Hitesh and Chris, is how do you teach that? As sales reps, it's always the client's problem, or the prospects. That's why they didn't buy or was my data, that's why they didn't pick up and why they didn't convert. Rarely do I have that engineering mindset in sales, but it sounds like it could be really helpful if we did. Chris Beall (14:10): Hitesh, you make such a great point about naivete. What's so funny is cultivated naivete is the key to maintaining curiosity in the face of mysteries. You get a mystery and you need to be deliberately naive so that you return to an earlier state where you're not so confident that you understand it and then you go after it. In sales, the issue is it's very difficult to return in public, in front of a prospect, to a naive and curious state because the prospect themselves is on a knife's edge when it comes to having confidence in you. And so we're allowed to ... With each other, Hitesh and I used to commute together in the Bay Area. I'd pick you up every morning at your house. Hitesh Shah (15:04): [inaudible 00:15:04] Chris Beall (15:04): In my little Chevy Volt. We'd drive the long road up to 280 and all that stuff up to San Mateo, and we'd work all the way up. And it was very freeing because we were going through the world looking in the same direction and questioning everything. That's really what you do when you build technology, is you question everything. You can't quite do that with a prospect because it does have a predictable result with regard to the prospect's confidence in you. So it's a bigger challenge in sales than it is in technology. The technology doesn't care. I remember I had a meeting very early on at ConnectAndSell where our engineering team had gone to do something else, and a board member asked me, "Well, what are you going to do when the system goes down?" And I say, "It's not a dog, it's inanimate." (15:50): It's not going to whine by the front door and wonder when it's masters coming home. You just restart it. It has no feelings. But when you're in sales, the other person does have feelings, and in fact, their feelings are the primary input and output of the entire sales process, and you're just a processor of their feelings. Corey Frank (16:11): Yeah, I love that. Chris Beall (16:12): It's more delicate, and I think the top salespeople in the world take Hitesh's cultivated naivete and pull it off in front of the prospect in real time in a way that enhances confidence. And if you can do that, you can sell anything. Of course, you will only sell stuff you sincerely believe it, but for the same reason. I don't know, what do you think about that, Hitesh? Is that a boundary that between the inanimate, you and I don't have to give a damn about what the system thinks about us because it doesn't think about us, but we have to care about what the prospect thinks about us, but still be curious. Hitesh Shah (16:50): Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, so Corey, interestingly, for the first time that Chris brought up the idea of ConnectAndSell, you go, "It's a no-brainer." You 10X somebody's conversations, you'll get 10X the output. And sure enough, to Chris's point, we always notice this CT as a classic ABC. The A players, they immediately realize that something that's coming at you so fast, you have to adapt. You may not have the time to research, you may not have the time to understand who you're talking to. You pick up the conversation from, "Hi, how's your day going?" Or, "Happy Tuesday," or, "Happy Friday," or whatever, to the point of engaging you with what you are, discovering that during the call and then layering in your expertise and how you can help. Then you have the B players where they get the call to a point where the call isn't awkward, but then really it's not a sales call, it's all about just back foot. (17:51): I got somebody on the phone, let me try to talk to them and see where the conversation goes. And then of course, we have the C players where it's deer in headlights, the stage fright. So talk about counterintuitive, for me to discover that for ConnectAndSell to be effective and as powerful as it's meant to be you needed good list, you needed good reps, and more importantly, you needed reps who could easily be put up on the stage in front of an audience impromptu and improve upon their pitch and skill or whatever, the conversation talk track or whatever. So I think that is key. There's another thing that I wanted to mention to you, Corey, in terms of we learn these things more often than you would like. As smart people like to think we figured things out and we know it all. (18:37): So typically you have a product and you have a personal in mind. You are selling it to a CTO or a VP of sales or VP of marketing, or what have you. There are often these instances that we discovered few years into the business where the person at the other end really is not a stable title. And SMBs, this is a great example for SMBs, who picks up the phone is typically not the decision maker. You have to ask for the decision maker, and that becomes your contact. So you're essentially always asking for referral query. (19:09): So in that case, your perfect list is not the list of people that you thought that you want to target. It's anybody that can pick up that form and then you have to rely on your skill to understand who the decision maker for your particular offering or product is, and then talk to them. And that becomes your real list. So there's almost this notion of a first order list that's not a real list that gets you the actual list that you create. And in that case, your targeting and everything is very different. So that's an example I wanted to bring up. Corey Frank (19:40): So from an analysis perspective, I think we talked about this the other day when we had met, is this concept of what your list is trying to tell you, bingo. When I look at that, your dialer, I may see residue, Hitesh, that says that, "Well, my dial to contact rate is doing really well and my conversation conversion rate is doing really well." But if I'm not ultimately talking to the right person, then I'm going to get pipeline bloat and I'm going to think it's the sales reps problem when it really probably originated maybe in my list. Is that what you're talking about when what you're dialing looks like [inaudible 00:20:22]? Hitesh Shah (20:22): Exactly. In fact, Chris might be able to ... Chris, the breakthrough script, you probably should walk Corey through what that did for us and why. And I think that's a phenomenal example, Corey, of just the opening tactic that can make a world of difference. And we have data point after data point after data point to illustrate that. Chris Beall (20:41): Well, yeah, the whole breakthrough script thing actually was an accidental discovery. We had a rep in Denver, who the dataset, he was doing better than everybody else, but everybody's intuition said that that can't possibly be the case. So call it, what happens when you walk into a room and the family dog is juggling three balls? What do you say to yourself, that you don't understand juggling, or is that a dog? It's a difficult problem. And so one of our people, Chad Burmeister, who was running that outfit at the time, had a brilliant idea. He said, "I'm going to put this guy in one room. I'm going to put the second best guy in terms of numbers in another room and just do a natural experiment. Let people listen to them and then see how those people behave." I don't think I ever would've thought this one up, by the way, because it wasn't mechanistic enough. (21:32): It was like, "Let's just see what happens and gather some more data." And what happened was one of the people in the room with the guy who was doing really well started saying a different thing at the beginning of the conversation and all of his results, not the rest of the conversation, but all the way through, all the way to closing of the deal, everything was better. And I was like, "How could that be?" Well, that's where you have to question yourself. I didn't know dogs could juggle. Is this dog or do I not know what juggling is? How could it be that the first seven seconds of the conversation could condition the close six weeks later? It seems impossible. In fact, this entire podcast is about that fact. The fact that the first seven seconds of the conversation will actually condition the entire relationship. (22:24): And we didn't know why, but we went with it. And I think that's another part of being really good at anything where you don't know very much. And I think the key to all this is you just have to admit you don't know very much, is when you find a fact of some kind or a correlation of some kind, stay open to the possibilities of what might be the cause and what might be the effect. But go ahead and push on it so you generate more data, but don't just accept it. So this took about two and a half years before I stumbled onto part two of the breakthrough script, which was a person who is a CEO who wanted to hire salespeople. And I will never allow a CEO who doesn't know how to hire salespeople to do it. I just say, "What are we going to learn? We're going to learn that you don't know how to hire a salesperson, but we already know that. So let's not do that. How about if you sell yourself?" [NEW_PARAGRAPH]"What do you mean?" "Well, you do the cold calling yourself." "Well, oh, I can't do that." So I forced this poor guy to do his own cold calling using ConnectAndSell, and he said, "I need a script." I said, "I don't know anything about scripts." And he said, "Well, I do. I write scripts for other people's TED talks." And we spent four and a half hours on a Saturday morning writing the second part of the breakthrough script, not for the world, but for one guy who needed a script, and he happened to be a script expert. Those two things came together, five sentences came out of it. I wrote a relatively well received article called Five Sentences That'll Change Your Life. And then it was another two years later when Chris Voss told me why it worked. Now that's the kind of patience it takes. It's ironic, you're in a world where things move really fast. The cold call, boom, boom, boom. To learn about stuff that's happening fast. You have to be patient because it's going to be slow. (24:18): It always takes a long time to learn about fast stuff. It just does because it goes by, and it worked or didn't work. Well, what really happened? Who knows. You need better instrumentation. It's a funny thing, and it's very similar to what we do, ConnectAndSell or Hitesh and I and others who put together this system as a realtime system. Things happen in it really, really fast, billion times a second stuff's going on in there. Performance is everything if you want smoothness. And so it's fundamentally a system that is very slow for us to understand. Today we have something going on. Today suddenly connect rates for two days in our own shop with our own people are twice what we've seen before. We don't know what that means. Corey Frank (25:07): But that's a good thing. That's great. Chris Beall (25:08): No, it's a bad thing. It's a bad thing. It's really good in that we set 48 meetings today, our average has been 22 meetings, and recently since we introduced fast phone numbers has bumped up to about 30, but 48. So it's a good thing that it's happening, but it's a bad thing to accept it and just blindly move on. Corey Frank (25:31): The dog knows how to juggle, just deal with it. Chris Beall (25:33): Well, the dog's [inaudible 00:25:36]. Corey Frank (25:36): When you were at work, the dog was learning to juggle. That's what happened. Some things are out of your control. Links from today's episode: ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com  Branch49 - https://branch49.com  Hitesh Shah on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiteshrshah/  Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/  Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

In part two of this series, Barry Trailer, Chris and Corey bring a touch of humor to the conversation on the topic of sales and how it relates to the corporate business world today. Barry emphasizes the importance of establishing and elevating relationships over time, stating that sales isn't about predicting anything but rather bringing people together. He compares the unpredictability of sales to the unpredictability of a baseball game, where even the best players are out 70% of the time. Chris Beall adds that the desire for predictability is a universal human desire, but sales is about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. There is even a reference to fortune tellers, who are able to convince people to believe in the impossible. They guys agree that while the game of sales has not changed, the tools available to do it have improved, and the ability to access and share information has greatly increased, making sales performance level much higher today than in the past. If you haven't listened to the first half of this series, we highly recommend you to check it out, "The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.”   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our hosts, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49. (00:22): In part two of this series, Barry Trailer, Chris and Corey bring a touch of humor to the conversation on the topic of sales and how it relates to the corporate business world today. Barry emphasizes the importance of establishing and elevating relationships over time, stating that sales isn't about predicting anything, but rather bringing people together. They compare the unpredictability of sales to the unpredictability of a baseball game, where even the best players are out 70% of the time. Chris adds that the desire for predictability is a universal human desire, but sales is about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. There's even a reference to fortune tellers who are able to convince people to believe in the impossible. Listen to this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, The Sales Cycle: Lengthening Is Not Always A Bad Thing. Barry Trailer (01:19): Now, I'll just say this. It took me a while to get to this place, and I think it's worth saying. Way back when, when I was at Oracle giving that talk, one of the things that I was saying then and still say is, "I think business is just an excuse for us all to hang out together." And people would hear that and they'd say, "Oh, you really are from California." And it wasn't until I was invited into Salesforce around 2015 to give a talk on innovation that I came up with a second part of that, which is, "Hang out together to do what?" And I think the answer is to do good, to make this a better place, to establish and elevate relationships over time. That's our definition of selling. And if you can make a difference, if you can connect folks, add value, move this thing along, I think that's a job worth doing. Corey Frank (02:16): For sure. No, that's beautiful. I like that a lot. I think, Chris, you certainly in your team with the Flight School, to what Barry is talking about, you've probably been part of many organizations and many individuals that maybe have been in sales one year five times or one year three times. And all you do is teach him the basics of Flight School, that it's okay to have turbulence. It doesn't mean you did something wrong to have an objection or to have a stall. Maybe you talk a little bit about that and how it ties into what Barry's saying, because you see that I understand it now and I can actually fall in love with this profession after so many years of doing it poorly. Chris Beall (02:59): Yeah. Flight School's been interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One is I'm an educator by background. My degree is in education and physics. People tend to think of me as more the physics type, but then they go, "Well, how is it you do this other thing?" Well, sales and education are highly intertwined, both in the training part of sales, but also just in doing it. I mean, you're bringing people together. If they're not having new thoughts and they're not thinking about doing new things, no sale is going to occur. Corey Frank (03:27): There'd be no sale. Chris Beall (03:29): So, it's essentially an educational discipline in that sense. And it's also, and I've told you before, Corey, why I in this particular situation I'm in, I believe that sales done well is how we reduce the friction at the bottleneck of the innovation economy, and its innovations that allow us to live together peacefully. And so that's the essence of the society we live in, is that we innovate in order to bring sufficient convenience to many people that they can psychologically, sociologically, and economically coexist with people that aren't perfectly like them, like are not in their family. (04:15): With the dissolution of the village throughout most of the world many, many years ago, we have to figure out how to live with each other. And interestingly enough, it's innovation that does that, that gives us the ability to do that. And sales is what brings innovation from idea back there in the lab somewhere to reality and actually being used. So, to me, it's a sacred trust to pursue. When I think about things like Flight School, I always think about cycle times. And I come out of the world of manufacturing where we had to think about stuff like cycle times and quality and throughput. Corey Frank (04:15): And scrap rate. Chris Beall (04:57): Yeah. And then you try to figure out what can be addressed. And it's always, if you're a theory of constraints guy like me, it's always the bottleneck has got to be identified, characterized. You have to understand it's investability, and then you make the investment and then you sit back and watch and you see where the bottleneck moves. That's the cycle of business improvement that some people believe in, and I certainly deeply believe in. The beauty of Flight School is all of that happens within four sessions. And so you have short enough cycle time to know what happened because you're tying causes to affect when you can observe the actual intermediary, which is the actions. (05:38): In sales, I think, one of our biggest problems is deal cycle times themselves are long, but that's not what is interesting to me that creates the problem. It's also the opportunity. I've been measuring cycle times between conversation and pipeline build and first conversation, and the average cycle time, "Oh, I can do it this way," I went back and looked at one month, the first conversation was from January 1, 2019 to January 31, 2019, and asked, "What percentage of the post-2019 pipeline for all of our customers was built in conversations that started 11 months or before ago/" that's an interesting thing to look at, and the answer turned out to be 64%. Corey Frank (06:25): Really? Chris Beall (06:26): So, when you look at that and ask, "Okay. So, now how long is that compared to the anticipated tenure of the people who are going to be in there making the sales," you realize the most of the making took place well before their time, and they're unaware of the connection between that conversation that took place on January 17, 2019 and the deal that was won or lost or whatever in November of 2022. That connection is not understood. And when you combine it, it's not measured. We're measuring it, I think for the first time, actually. I don't think anybody's ever seen it before because you have to actually have machinery that says, "The conversations are all delivered through the machine so that I can measure the damn things." (07:15): So, you combine that with the short duration of employment, which I think is a consequence of that, by the way, and then you combine it with the agency problem, which is that most folks in sales are agents, not owners. And so their responsibility is to their own future, not to the company's future. Most of what they're working on will benefit the company in a future that they will not personally experience, and therefore they compress it down to the number. And there's a lot of luck involved. What I think's so interesting is how much luck is involved, because these timeframes don't come together in a way where you can make the connection, close the loop and make predictions. Barry Trailer (07:58): Well, you said a couple of things that I think are pretty interesting. One, I didn't know you came from manufacturing, but one of the lines that we used to use all the time was, "If the head of manufacturing took over the sales organization, the first thing he or she would do is shut it down because the scrap rate is unbelievable." I mean, the scrap rate is ridiculous. The outcome of forecast deals is less than 50%, and that's a fraction of the stuff that was accepted into the plant to work on in the first place. Chris Beall (07:58): I know. Barry Trailer (08:30): So, the scrap rate is nuts. And the other thing is this whole notion of cycle time. I mean, I don't disagree that we haven't measured it before, but I also don't think it matters. Everybody thinks reduced cycle... In manufacturing, reducing that is a good thing. But in sales, we're not just talking about machinery. And if the deal is closing this week, whether it's been in process for six months or six weeks or six hours doesn't really matter if it closes this week. If you had to work on it for six months and nurture it along, then that's a reason to reduce cycle time. If you are vulnerable to competition coming in and snatching this at the 11th hour, that's a reason to reduce cycle time. (09:22): Let's just imagine that instead of four months from blissfully unaware through awareness and education and deliberation before we get to negotiation, let's just say if that takes four months and we're constantly pressing people to, "Let's get to a decision, let's close this baby out," what if it turns out that just leaving the buyer alone for a month yielded higher close rates? I mean, that could happen. (09:59): They actually play with it for a month and say, "This is awesome. How did we ever live without this? Boom. Let's do this thing." But we don't have that because we aren't measuring in a consistent way, in an accurate way, and everybody's trying to jam it and get it done and get it in this quarter and all that nonsense. But it may be that lengthening the sales cycle in some cases is great if it doesn't increase your vulnerability and it doesn't increase your cost of sales and it does increase buyer satisfaction and all the I's are dotted and so on. What the hell? It's closing this week. Celebrate. Chris Beall (10:35): Yeah, celebrate and broaden your portfolio. I love long cycle times, but I love variable cycle times by their nature because they represent reality. Everybody should realistically be working at their own pace, so to speak, with regard to making big change decisions. And if you're selling anything less than a big change decision, go get a better job. So, if you encounter early, like our friend Henry Wojdyla... Henry runs a business called RealSource and he's been a guest on the show and he's one of my customers. And what Henry does is he buys medical office buildings way, way off market way early, and he builds relationships in order to do that. And he has conversations to initiate and sustain and nurture those relationships, and to gain intelligence that allows him to make good decisions as to where he applies his time. Interestingly, here is a guy who works in 15-minute increments that are precisely managed for maximum productivity because he is the machine. (11:39): So, we provide the Iron Man suit for the machine, but he asked us, and nobody's ever asked us this before, "What are the exact 15-minute intervals on each day of the week when I should be talking to investors or developers or physicians or nobody?" And Thomas Young built him a beautiful chart and he works to that. So, here's a guy running huge cycle times, highly variant, no control over them. You can't make somebody want to sell a medical office building. "I'm sorry, you've got to do this today." He's trying to get them well before necessity and succeeding at it, and yet he's managing his own day with very tight time constraints because he knows that that's the cost element that is going to run as it runs also. (12:29): As we say, overhead is a race horse. It eats while you sleep. And so you are that racehorse when you're a lone contributor out there doing this stuff. So, it's always fascinating to me that somebody like Henry, who is a genius, looks at that and says, "Therefore, broaden your portfolio." His instinct and his math is exactly right, which is don't push what's in front of you. Get more going on and let it flow and make sure that your closed loop with regard to the information flow coming back from all of those elements of your portfolio. That is, keep an eye on it, but don't spend too much doing that. And I think that his theory is superior to most. Barry Trailer (13:56): Well, to me, the heart of all of this, back in the day when I was running and teaching Miller Heiman programs, the only concept that was in every program was win-win. And I've done, if anybody goes to our site, salesmastery.com, we have all these videos, no charge, you can just watch them, and the four parter is Win-Win. The first part is introducing the idea and then the rules for playing win-win and then how to make it operational. But the last part is coming from abundance rather than scarcity. To play win-win, you need to have both courage and compassion. And to do that, you need to be coming from abundance. When you've got to have it, when this is the only deal and this is either going to make or break you and it's all or none, you're screwed because you're desperate. (14:51): And I talk about, in the video, it's kind of this perverse law of nature. When you need it the most, you get it the least. And when you need it the least, you seem to get it the most. And part of that is winners want to go with winners. And so if they feel, sense, smell your desperation, they start asking more questions like, "What's the matter with this guy?" If it's like, you know what? No wine before it's time. If you're not ready, we want to make sure that you've got all your questions answered, that you understand why we're doing this. You understand the risks of delay. But we understand the risk of you not having your questions answered. So, let's get there together. (15:31): And if you've got tons of deals you're working on called pipeline and you're in touch with folks and you're staying in touch and you know that people will call you when they need you, then it's a pretty good living. And most people universally, their pipelines are anemic. They do not have enough good stuff going. And so they drag all this other crap along hoping against hope that somehow it's going to turn into business, and it doesn't. And everybody's like fingers crossed and voodoo dolls and whatever. It's just nuts. It's nuts. Corey Frank (16:08): Yeah. Well, you talk about those, I believe in one of your research works, talking about world-class firms. And I think, again, I think the number was about 94% of the world-class firms that your firm talked to and surveyed agreed with an understanding of what good looks like, best practices, similar. Chris, I think certainly what ConnectAndSell and what Flight School does is flush out probably more of these best practices that should be informed to the world, such as looking back when the pipeline originated. That meant that's a good best practice. But Barry, when you look at these 94% that they know what good looks like, and I think what you were saying before we jumped on air here was that less than 6% of actual firms flush out as being world class. Barry Trailer (17:02): Well, 6% of our survey population. Corey Frank (17:05): Granted. 6% of your samples said that. Barry Trailer (17:08): We had 900 firms in that survey. So, yes. Corey Frank (17:13): Well, that's still a pretty large sample set though. I would- Barry Trailer (17:15): Yeah, I think it's a reasonable reflection. And they have an externally informed definition of what good looks like. In fact, I think it's Kevin Dorsey. K.D. Corey Frank (17:25): Yep. Barry Trailer (17:26): Kevin Dorsey, aka K.D. He's a funny guy. I like his stuff. Anyway, he calls it WGLL. What Good Looks Like. Corey Frank (17:38): Yep. Yep. Good Looks Like Barry Trailer (17:38): W-G-L-L. Corey Frank (17:39): And then everybody knows what better looks like too, right? It's like, "Hey, this is what good looks like, and I know what my better looks like." Barry Trailer (17:39): No. Corey Frank (17:39): No? Barry Trailer (17:46): No, I don't think they do. Corey Frank (17:48): No? So they- Barry Trailer (17:48): I don't think they know what either of them looks like. And also- Corey Frank (17:52): Well, here's the question. So, if I struggle with knowing what good looks like and I just want more. It could be more pipeline, as you were saying. It could be better quality sales people. It could be having my recruiting team get better people. It could be, "I need better systems. If only, if only, if only if I had X." When you look at those things, those requests from those 900 in that sample size from your most recent survey, which one stands out in your mind, and Chris, I'd care to get your impression on this when Barry tells us, of the one that casts the widest swath, the biggest net, to fix the biggest thing? Obviously I need to figure out, listen, there's 12 World Class criteria in the sales mastery world. Is there an 80/20 where, "Hey, this one thing will ameliorate 80% of what ails me"? Is there one that stands out more than another? Barry Trailer (18:47): Well, did the SPS survey and we had 850 responses to that, and it's a year newer than the World Class. And when we looked at all the variables and all the permutations, we weren't running AI on this, I don't want to make it sound like more than was, but we looked at dozens and dozens of combinations. The winning combination that got the highest revenue attainment I think was 106%, had the highest percentage of reps meeting and beating quota was over 70%, had the lowest turnover and so on. There were four things they did. Number one, they were coaching. Their managers were coaching in a consistent manner. So, I'm going to say a coaching culture because that doesn't happen. And I'll tell you, the room always gets quiet when we ask who's coaching the coach. So, a coaching culture says everybody is on the journey. (19:42): Everybody has a coach, including the sales leader. So, number one was coaching, consistent coaching. Number two, they were formal sales process or above. So, we have formal, agile and customized. They were at least formal, which means, "We have a sales process. Managers and reps are exposed to it. They're expected to use it. That use is reinforced and enforced. It's the way we do business around here." And there are other things that can add to that, but that was number two. Basic sales training was above average or exceptional. That is they had sales training, basic sales training. And training on the usage of the technology they had was above average or excellent. You have these tools. Why not train people on how to use them? Corey Frank (20:34): Yeah, gotcha. Barry Trailer (20:35): What a concept. Those were the four, and that blew everything else away. Corey Frank (20:39): Chris, what do you think of that? I mean, I listen to all these here, Barry. And Chris, we've had many guests over the last three years, four years on Market Dominance Guys who are certainly key practitioners of their craft. Is it wrong, Barry, that none of these blow me away, that I'm thinking there's got to be one elusive, mountaintop Kilimanjaro that I'll never be able to attain to hit the world class status? And instead, it seems to be things that, Chris, certainly you teach these in Flight School. You've been a CEO for a while. Barry Trailer (21:13): I just gave it to you. I just gave it to you. Chris Beall (21:15): I mean, what you're saying is what? There's no silver bullet? Barry Trailer (21:19): Yeah. Chris Beall (21:20): By the way, most people, they don't know where that comes from. It was The Long Ranger. He always had silver bullets, the latest bright shiny object. This will do it. And if that one didn't, the next one will. And I think that, by and large, and we have lots of friends, we have sponsors that are solution providers, but I think by and large, the conversation has been hijacked by solution providers who are providing technology. And the answer is, yeah, technology is an enabler. It's an augmenter. But coaching, training, practice, these are all elements of mastery. That's why we call it that. There are five keys to mastery, and coaching and practice and surrender, those are all part of it. And here's the thing that I say all the time when I'm giving the sales mastery presentation. In fact, I'm going to record it and put that up on our website. I'm going to go back. I'm going to close on what I talked about earlier, the big lie. You are your number. (22:32): I got into an argument one day with the VP of sales that 90% of reps don't know how they're doing. And he said, "That's crap. They absolutely." He said, "That may be true in other areas in McKinsey's study, but not in sales." And I said, "Okay, fill me in." He says, "Come on, bear. 60% a plan. You're doing lousy. 120% a plan, you're golden." And I said, "That's good information, but it's not the answer to the question, how are you doing? 60% a plan, 120% a plan or whatever percent of plan is how you've done so far. How are you doing? And the real question everybody really wants the answer for, how are you going to do? What's the forecast? (23:16): We say forecast accuracy is an oxymoron because people are still just shooting anywhere. But here's the deal. Quota is a company's best guess at an account or a territory's potential. Quota, the number, your number, is the company's best guess at an account or a territory's potential. It has nothing to do with your potential. So, I hear plenty of people say, "I'm 110% a plan." I've never heard anybody say I'm even 100% of my potential. That's the big deal, Corey. That's the amazing thing. People are amazing. And if they would just focus on that mastery, self-mastery, who knows how great we could get here? Corey Frank (24:13): Wow, that's a beautiful thing, Chris. And it's a beautiful way to look at any profession, whether you're a ditch digger or whether you're serving Starbucks, or whether you're slinging cold calls, or whether you're a politician. That ties in that approach to the higher value. So, I tell you what, Chris, we got to have Barry on here at least once a quarter, I think, if anything. Because all the other guests and all that we're so lucky and blessed to have on board, but our profession, you're the oracle. That's where you started back in the day. But truly, Barry the oracle to see... I love that differentiation of how are you doing versus how are you going to do? And I think, Chris, certainly having Barry on regularly, he can tell us how is our profession going to do, not just a reflection of what we've done, but where we're going to go. So, Chris, any final thoughts here as we come to the close of another powerful episode of the Market Dominance Guys? Chris Beall (25:14): Well, yeah. Here's a final thought. Sales is similar to a lot of other stuff where there's high variability in outcomes even if you have low variability in performance and inputs. It just is. In that sense, it's something like being a batter in baseball. You have a lot of control over what you do, but you don't have that much control over what's coming at you. And the difference between good and terrible is an eighth of an inch or a quarter of a second or whatever it happens to be. And in worlds like that, what we find is that those who do well apply mastery over reasonably long periods of time without a great deal of good feedback. That is, there's an element of belief that they have to have in order to stick to something sufficiently to be either a good coach or to be coach-worthy, and to be somebody who can take training or give training without getting an instant attaboy out of it. (26:26): When you think about sales, folks are hoping to be able to predict outcomes. There's no evidence that outcomes are individually predictable, and there's not an awful lot of evidence among honest people that outcomes are even generally predictable. Try predicting the outcome of Q3 2022 in Q3 2021. Just give that a whirl sometime. Go back and ask people what was going to happen. Those outcomes were not particularly predictable. And try it again in 2020. Same thing, go Q3 to Q3 the year before. Your predictive ability is pretty shallow. Your ability to maintain a buffer, a financial buffer, so that you can go from here to there because you intend to actually get there, and a buffer of will and willingness and camaraderie and friendship and the stuff that keeps you going, that's really what's going to determine over time who is left standing, who is doing well, who is admired. (27:35): And it's just the nature of the beast. And this desire to come up with predictability, it's a universal human desire. We believe in fortune tellers. Have somebody read your poems sometime who is very sincere about it, and you'll find yourself believing stupid shit that can't possibly make sense. And you'll believe it a year later and five years later and 10 years later because of our deep, deep inherent desire to be able to predict what cannot be predicted. Sales isn't about predicting anything. It's about doing things that have a reasonable shot of bringing people together so that problems can be solved that would otherwise be left unsolved. That's kind of it. That's kind of it. And if you're not doing things that bring people together, you're probably not going to be able to do very much good in this profession. And it's simpler than we think, and it's subtler than we think. Barry Trailer (28:36): Well, I think if you use baseball as the analogy, and there are a lot of it, if you hit 300 you're in the Hall of Fame, which means you were out 70% of the time. Well, maybe if you hit 400. Ted Williams is the only guy who did it for a full season, 400. But still, one and a half times you were out as you were successful. But I think if you look at any sport, baseball included today, and now they've got all these stats with exit angles and velocity and everything else, it's just amazing, they're playing at a higher level than they did 50 years ago and 100 years ago. Same game, but Moneyball and all the rest of it, the sabermetrics, everything that's been brought to bear. (29:26): If you look at gymnastics today versus the sixties, particularly women's gymnastics, it's unbelievable the difference in performance. And I think the same is true in sales. I think the ability to access information and to share information and the speed at which it's happening, and it's still the same game. It's connecting people. It's establishing and elevating relationships over time. But how you do that and the tools available to do it, and all of the- Corey Frank (29:58): We love the stuff, Barry, this is phenomenal. Again, I think we may boost our couple of listeners with this kind of insight that we've had over the last hour. Barry Trailer (30:09): Maybe both of them. Corey Frank (30:09): Both of them. Barry Trailer (30:10): Double them up. Corey Frank (30:12): So, Barry, thank you again so much for the time. We will absolutely have you back in the hot seat here. We can listen to you all day, get a state of the state of our profession. So, for the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank for Chris Beall and the ConnectAndSell team. Until next time. Links from this episode: Sales Mastery - https://salesmastery.com/ ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com  Branch49 - https://branch49.com  Sales Education Foundation - https://salesfoundation.org/  Barry Trailer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/  Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/  Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

Revealing the scarcest commodity in corporate business, especially in America today, first requires an understanding of how we got there. Today Barry Trailer, Co-founder of Sales Mastery, joins Chris and Corey. He reviews the four levels of process implementation: the percentage of revenue, the target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting or beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, and rep turnover. These are real numbers. But higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation lead to higher levels of performance. And the numbers are just the numbers They continued talking about the turnover. There's a huge contributory factor to the failure to implement significant change on the part of most sales organizations other than the change that a new leader brings in. What is common is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO, the new VP of Sales, comes in and kills the cubs. They attempt to prove that whatever was being done before must not be done anymore. Because I've come in with my new way of doing things and territory must be marked, I was brought in to do something in a new way, and away we go. When the performance isn't there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn't want to take. But the only reason is that there's been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we make the numbers, you'll stay out of my sandbox. Listen to this episode to see where your company falls in place in, “The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.” Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps, and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our hosts, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49. (00:25): Revealing the scarcest commodity in corporate business, especially in America today, first requires an understanding of how we got here. Today, Barry Trailer, co-founder of Sales Mastery, joins Chris and Corey. He reviews the four levels of process implementation: the percentage of revenue, the target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting and beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, and rep turnover. These are real numbers. But higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation led to higher levels of performance, and the numbers are just the numbers. (01:00): What's common is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO or the new VP of sales, comes in and kills the cubs. They attempt to prove that whatever was being done before must not be done anymore. When the performance isn't there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn't want to take. But the only reason is that there's been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we're making the numbers, you'll stay out of my sandbox. Listen to this episode to see where your company falls in place in The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today. Corey Frank (01:40): Here we are once again. Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and, as always, the sage of sales, the profit of profit, the hawking of hawking, Chris Beall. Chris, good to see you once again. How are you? Chris Beall (01:56): It gets me every time. I was just reading about a black hole, 600 billion suns, taking a chomp out of something every day, and thinking, "The hawking of hawking." I wish I could- Corey Frank (02:04): The hawking of hawking. I'll work on a fourth here. Give me a couple of beers, football games here, and we'll come up with something else. Right now, it'll have to stay at the hawking of hawking. With us today, we have Mr. Barry Trailer. If you don't know Barry and his organization, Sales Mastery, he's been at the epicenter. He's the Kevin Bacon of sales, thought leadership, I think, probably for the last 20 years or so. So, if you don't know Barry, you certainly know the wake that he leaves with his experience as an executive CEO over at Miller Heiman, at GoldMine, at FrontRange Solutions, and of course, CSO Insights, certainly a publication that I've used, Barry, throughout the years to make me sound much smarter than I am, to defend my actions against the board's machinations, to say, "No, no, no, no, hang on. CSO Insights says this is the direction it's going, versus this." That's saved me many quarters. Barry, good to be with you here. Barry Trailer (02:57): It's good to be here, and it's really good to hear you using the data in the way it was really intended. Not just because we like running surveys, but to support chief sales officers, chief revenue officers, heads of sales- Corey Frank (03:12): They need backup. Barry Trailer (03:13): ... their asks or their actions. So, yes, I- Corey Frank (03:16): Oh, of course. Of course. As we've said many times in this podcast, right, Chris, I haven't had an original thought since 1998, so anytime something like CSO Insights comes out and I can claim those ideas with the defense of all the research that your fine team did over the years. Now, CSO Insights, that also got purchased by, I think it was Korn Ferry, correct? So, over time. Barry Trailer (03:36): Yeah, it's an interesting deal. So, Miller Heiman acquired us in 2015. We had a two year earnout. That went well. Everybody did what they said they were going to. And then in 2019... Well, and Jim and I went off and started Sales Mastery in 2018 when our gig was up there. 2019, Korn Ferry bought Miller Heiman and by extension CSO Insights, and over the next year, year and a half proceeded to lay off or have all the analysts quit. And so I got in touch with them and with Byron Matthews. He was still there. And we entered into a joint research agreement where Korn Ferry was gathering the data, Jim and I would do the analysis and write up commentary, and then we would jointly release reports. And we did one on virtual selling. We did a buyer's study and we also did their world class study. (04:34): I think the last one was in, I'm going to say 2021. They're a big outfit. They don't move particularly quickly. It took longer than we felt it should take to get stuff out. And they didn't know exactly. They have the Korn Ferry Research Institute, but it's mostly around HR and talent and comp. I don't think CSO insights really fit into their wheelhouse. So, we agreed to part ways and I had actually asked them to sell CSO Insights back to us and they said instead they were just going to basically shelve it. And so if you search csoinsights.com today, you get 404 error. Corey Frank (05:19): Oh, that's too bad. Barry Trailer (05:20): And I think they're also letting the Miller Heiman brand basically fade away as well. So, it's disappointing, but it's the way it goes. Corey Frank (05:29): Well, you can take Barry out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of Barry, it seems. You're still doing all kinds of research with your team. In fact, the Sales Performance Scorecard I think came out just recently that was published by Harvard Business Review. So, congrats to that. Barry Trailer (05:29): Thanks. Corey Frank (05:42): That's a great wealth of information if any of the sales professionals listening have not reviewed that. But Chris, obviously you cast a pretty big shadow yourself as you know, from [inaudible 00:05:51]. Chris Beall (05:51): Four ways didn't win. Corey Frank (05:51): Yeah. Four ways didn't win. So, how did you and Barry get together and what kind of bribe or check do we have to cash to get him? Because he showed up at this podcast with our seven listeners here, so I need to know. Chris Beall (06:07): Barry texted me. He texted me and we talked, and it was just yesterday. I was just so pleased to hear from him. We've had so many great conversations over the years, but often punctuated by long silences while we're off doing our own various things. Actually, I owe Barry and Jim Dickie for this. One of my neighbors here in [inaudible 00:06:24] and very good friend is Pat Lynch, and he was the CSO Insights rep who signed me up as a subscriber for the first time and discovered that I'm pretty picky about data, but I kept on, as a subscriber. Actually CSO Insights was the only information source about sales that I have ever remained subscribed to from one end of its independent existence in- Corey Frank (06:49): Really? Chris Beall (06:49): ... my experience to the other. And the reason for that was, I'm very skeptical of survey-oriented data work, as you know, Corey. I like data that comes directly out of machines and has no opinions associated with it. But CSO Insights did such a remarkable job of coming to meaningful conclusions with data that fundamentally at the individual data point level is a little squirrelly. It moves around from under you, but they did the real statistical work and the insight work in order to turn it into something that I could apply and that I could also recommend to others, which is in a way more important to me because as you know, I'm not capable of doing what other people tell me to do. (07:36): No one's ever figured that one out yet, including myself. Like, "Hey Chris," I say to myself, "let's have two eggs for breakfast," and then I find myself with the oatmeal 10 minutes later. But the ability to actually confidently say, "Hey, look at this." The thing that struck me is still there, it's there today in the work that Sales Mastery is doing, is the stuff is not way up here, and it's not down here at the level of tiny tactics. This is really important, and if you don't do it, you're dead. And here's how to think about it and the kinds of things to do, and it comes from data. And I don't think anybody else has that. I think it's unique. Corey Frank (08:16): With that regard, is there anything that comes to mind, Barry, over the years, put on the spot here, from a perspective of just bad advice? Or just because more people believe that there's a flat earth and then empirically the data that you and Jim and your team put together definitively snuffed that out and said, "No, this is not the way it is. It's this versus that." When you talk about sales methodologies or you talk about maybe approaches, is there anything that comes to mind over the years that is so inherently bad advice that it needed somebody with the voice of CSO Insights to say, "Barry, come down the mountain with two tablets. This is how it should be"? Barry Trailer (08:56): I don't know that it was inherently bad. I think sales, historically or inherently, was instinctual, tactical, gut reaction to things. And I think that sales execs and sales reps prided themselves on that history of being instinctual tactical animals. And- Corey Frank (09:23): I can wing it. I'll let my personality shine. Barry Trailer (09:26): Well, I think not necessarily just winning personality, but we're going to be in the moment. And I don't know that they always called it winging it, but I think in large part that would describe what often happened and still happens. And we have been doing, Jim started this back in '94, started doing surveys and CSO Insights, we've now been doing it for 20 years. And I think it's still true that people are not acting in a data-driven way. And increasingly you hear boards and executives talking about being data-driven, but I think that means different things to different people for sure. And I think a lot of people who are saying that don't know what it means. (10:06): It's the current thing that they're saying. Chris was saying our data was squirrelly. We never said it was squirrelly, but we always admitted that it was squishy because it was self-reported and they were, in most cases, educated guesses. People don't really know what their cycle times are. They don't really know what their conversion rates are from one stage to the next to the next. But when you have several hundred or a thousand responses that normalizes, and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. We had better data than anybody, and it was consistent over time. And I think that was one of our hallmarks. And the other thing Chris was saying that I think we made it accessible and had some real boots-on-the-ground perspective and still had a management lean to things. (10:54): The thing that we brought to the party, brought to the table in 2007, and it stood up over the years, and you mentioned the Sales Performance Scorecard. What preceded that was the Sales Relationship Process Matrix, the SRP Matrix, and I had defined five levels of relationship back in '94. Jim wrote an article for Forbes in 2000 defining four levels of process implementation. And our joke was it only took us seven more years to figure out we could make a five-by-four matrix out of it. But I had guys tell me after presentations I'd done or trainings or anything, they would come up and they just loved that model. People understood it. It just went on like an old shoe. Announcer (11:46): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live, qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Barry Trailer (12:27): And the thing that was great about it was that we had four metrics that we tracked, and those were metrics that people were not guessing at. So, the percentage of revenue, target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, not pipeline, but forecast deals, won, lost or no decision, and rep turnover, voluntary and involuntary. So, total rep turnover. Those are numbers that people had. Those were real numbers. And the SRP tracked those. And what we saw over time, I don't know if this says it was the biggest mistake, but higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation led to higher levels of performance. And the numbers just were the numbers. And they stood up again over 15 years. (13:22): We're now, instead of SRP, we're calling it the SPS, the Sales Performance Scorecard, is now a five-by-five matrix. We've redefined, and relabeled three of the levels of relationship. Instead of approved vendor, we're now calling it transactional vendor. And then we have preferred supplier and solution consultant. And then instead of strategic contributor, we have strategic collaborator. And the highest level instead of trusted partner or trusted advisor, we're now calling it trusted co-creator. And it's not just wordsmithing. We think those words actually reflect the change in the balance of power, buyers and sellers, and culturally what's been going on in the marketplace for at least the last five years. Corey Frank (14:10): Well, I think you talk about that in one of your trainings is even the term moving from persuasion to collaboration. Barry Trailer (14:16): That's correct. Yeah. Corey Frank (14:17): And just how we identify with that as a sales training organization. I'm curious for Chris too, Chris and Barry, is when you think about the organizations that know those numbers, their attrition rate, their forecast rate, their conversion rate, et cetera, is it more or less a can't or a won't? Is it stemmed from the CRO, the VP of sales down? Does it come from enablement? Does it come from the board level down? If you have a good board that is going to have these really tight controls over the aspects of the KPIs of the business, does that trickle to sales? What are you guys seeing? Because if I have a squishy board or a squishy CEO or a product-driven CEO or board, I may not necessarily have the rigor that comes down from on high to want to put this type of thing in place. Chris Beall (15:06): Well, this is a hell of a topic. I think there's a huge contributory factor to the failure to implement significant change on the part of most sales organizations other than the change that is brought in by a new leader. So, the pattern that I'm seeing a lot of, and I get to see maybe more of this than most because of the way our business works, we're too much change already. Let's go from not talking to people, to talking to people and then getting good at it and then actually tracking that all the way through to how much money you're making. That's a lot of change. That first one, especially. Let's go from not talking to people to talking to people and getting good at it is all of mine. What we often see, almost always see, is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO, the new VP of sales comes in and kills the cubs. (15:54): Whatever was being done before must not be done anymore, because I've come in with my new way of doing things, and territory must be marked. And I was brought in to do something in a new way, and away we go. The challenge I see in folks getting that stuff to stick and work, even if it's correct, even if it's backed up by data and makes sense and then you got a shot, is the average tenure at departure is 17 months now for top sales leaders. And there are not very many things you can do in an organization in 17 months. There just are not. You have more drag, more friction than you're aware of, and then everybody's looking for you to leave anyway, right? I've often said CROs are people who are brought in to take the bullet that the CEO would prefer not to take, so they get one chance. That's actually why the C was put in front of it. Barry Trailer (16:50): Well, I'm going to jump in. Because two things. I now have the answer to the question you asked earlier, Corey, but the other thing is, I agree with you that when the performance isn't there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn't want to take. But the only reason is because there's been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we are making the numbers, you'll stay out of my sandbox. And because of that, the sales organization for far too long has been this black box that the board looks at and puts money in and hopes way more money comes out. And as long as that's happening, everybody's cool with it. And if that stops happening or they don't get as much money out as they expected, then this thing you're talking about taking the bullet or falling on this sword or however you want to describe it happens and it happens over and over again. (17:51): I think the biggest mistake, Corey, the answer to your question and the big lie, and I have been saying this for a long time now, and I mean it as much today as I have ever meant, is the big lie that is told to reps. And I remember when I first said this at Oracle, the entire audience cracked up. You are not your number. You are not your number. And the audience at Oracle laughed me out of the room. Your number is a reflection of what you do and how well you do it, but it's not you. And this whole thing about good number, good rep, bad number, no donut is crap. And people who buy this lie, I consider this the big lie, is you are your number. It's just not so. And where I've seen that go all the way telegraphed clear to the top, a friend of mine became a new CSO, and he was a big believer. (18:51): He came out of Oracle. He was a big believer in process. And when he got his new job, I said, "Danny, this is the time. Bring us in now." And his comment was, "I want to bring you in, but first I have to make my number." And I said, "As soon as you do that, they're just going to turn around and say, 'Do it again. And do it again. You don't need process. Just do it again.'" And I think this notion and the other part of this, it's funny, I wrote this up for an HBR article that did not get published, but I did use it in a presentation, it's November, and the executive committee is in QBR, and the VP of sales stands up and says, "We're 20% behind plan, and I don't know how we're going to make it up by the end of the year." (19:36): And the head of HR and the head of legal are both sitting there thinking to themselves, "Man, I'm glad I don't have to give that report." And they're all thinking it's sales number. It's all their number. Everybody should be sitting there thinking, "Is there anything we could do in legal to help simplify or speed things? Is there anything we could do in HR or with talent to help out or to improve things?" And I think this goes all the way back, Chris, to where I interrupted you. When sales is always saying, "Hey, if we're making our numbers, stay out of our sandbox," that's great. Then when we're not making our number, everybody's like, "Too bad, pal. It's your sandbox." I think that's a huge mistake. I think everybody thinking, "It's sales number," and sales thinking, "I am my number," I think all of that is serving nobody well. Corey Frank (20:31): Where does that come from? Does it come from the tunnel, the stove pipe architecture that a lot of organizations came from where there's always going to be an everlasting amount of money? These larger organizations where there's lack of accountability at the individual level? When you see these large layoffs, Goldman 3,200, Salesforce 10,000, where does that fall at the feet of? Are people walking around saying, "Well, if sales only would've closed more dollars," or, "If HR wouldn't have spent so much on recruiting," or, "If product wouldn't have spent so much on a email system that no one's using"? Where do you think stems from, that whole, "Not me. I mean, I'm glad I'm not that guy"? Barry Trailer (21:12): Frank Cespedes is a name you might know. He's been an adjunct at Harvard, and he and I were presenting years ago at a conference. And he started by asking, "What is the scarcest commodity in corporate business or in American business today? What is the scarcest commodity in American business today?" And his answer was, "Accountability." And I guess I would add to that, transparency and maybe flexibility or authenticity or something. When sales are good Steve Heiman used to say, "Rising sales hides all sins." And it's just, I think that the notion that when the sun's shining, let's make hay and everybody's great and we're killers. And I think the answer to your question really, Corey, is it's just ego or hubris or something. And why'd we get the deal? Good selling? Why'd we lose the deal? Bad pricing, bad product. Corey Frank (22:13): I would've said pride myself. The scarcest commodity is pride. I know starting with me, right? Because it's such- Barry Trailer (22:19): I don't think there's any [inaudible 00:22:21]. If there's a lack of pride in sales, I missed it. Corey Frank (22:26): Yeah, exactly. No. No, it should be. But Chris and I talk a lot about the punditry class that exists in our profession because there's no barriers to entry. I didn't have to take a GMAT or an LSAT or get into Harvard, et cetera, to be in our profession. I just had an aunt when I was at my graduation party who picked your cheeks and says, "You've got a great personality. You should be in sales." And before you know it, you're in sales and you're selling plastics, right? So, because of that, I think that there's no understanding of science and physics and gravity, even though it exists. (23:02): And I think that's one thing, Chris, right? You've talked about certainly in educating me on market dominance, that there are forces, whether you believe it or not, gravity exists. Gravity believes in you. And what you've certainly done so well for our community is, Barry, is the CSO Insights is the data. It was like these are the celestial forces that are making you believe that you are a killer. You yourself are not a killer. You're crushing it. It's because of these celestial mathematics. And you have to understand those. Am I being too melodramatic or so about our profession? Barry Trailer (23:37): Well, perhaps. But before we got started here, I was talking about the SEF, the Sales Education Foundation. And Howard Stevens started that I think 20 years ago. And if people aren't familiar with it, I'll give you a link to their site. And they have their annual magazine coming out here in a couple of months. But Howard always started his talks with, "What do you call the person who graduated last in their class at medical school? Doctor." Corey Frank (24:07): Doctor. Barry Trailer (24:09): And the reason is because they passed. In his opening salvo following that was, "For professionalism you need standardization, certification and specialization." And in sales, we don't have much of any of that. And so anybody can say they're in sales. And that could be somebody who just got their first job out of college and is a BDR or an SDR, and they're working hard to get into it, and it could be a strategic account executive that has been there for 25 years. They're both in sales. And you know what? I think that's okay. There's a lot about this that I think is great. My background was civil engineering. (24:55): I'm a registered civil engineer in California. Not everybody who graduates in engineering gets to say that. I can say that. So, I get it with professional ethics and canon and registration and all of that. And I also think that one of the things that's marvelous about sales is that you don't have any of that, and you can still get in and you can still do great. What I think is missing is the feeling that it is a great profession. And by the way, I think it continues to be supplanted by, "Man, get in this. You can make a shit ton of money, man." Corey Frank (25:32): Yeah, for sure. Barry Trailer (25:33): And I think that that's selling our profession way short. I think that's a crying shame. I really do. And I think sales is such an awesome profession. I don't even want to say responsibility. I think it's just an awesome way to make a living and connect folks. Links from this episode: Sales Mastery - https://salesmastery.com/ ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com  Branch49 - https://branch49.com  Sales Education Foundation - https://salesfoundation.org/  Barry Trailer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/  Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/  Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

In this follow-up to last week’s, “The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream” Chris reminds us that all talent problems are wrapped up in lots of politics. And it turns out the key to all of this, whether you're like Corey and Chris and your company provides a discontinuous innovation. Something that naturally could bring change too fast or if you are the leader and something needs to change because it's the constraint and it's time to go after it no matter what. If you fail the finesse test, you fail all the tests. Because then the politics turn on you. And quite rightly, by the way. Finesse is a very elegant way of describing the search process, reading the signals, reading the tea leaves, and understanding where the constraints are. Understanding that in this discontinuous innovation process, you're going to have of extraneous pipeline that's going to come in very rapidly at a flow rate that you’re not used to. And finesse is, as a way to almost like when you see a bullfighter, they have this big two 3000 pound beast that's bearing down at you and bull bullfighter. And he just finesses his way from one to the next and dances and it's a glorious thing to see in action where internally they may be sweating. People underestimate the power of finesse and the reason that you need it. We are all machines when we sell, we're a machine that turns a potential opportunity into something that's taking a next step. That's all we do. So the more mathematically you are, that is, if you're listening to this and you're going, yeah, gold red theory of constraints I'm in, I'm in. Right? You probably need to spend more of your life thinking about and exercising the finesse components.  Listen to this episode, “The Power of Finesse and the Bullfighter.” If you missed the first part of this conversation, "The Theory of Constraints" you can catch up here.   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49. (00:21): In this follow-up to last week's, “The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream,” Chris reminds us all that talent problems are wrapped up in lots of politics. It turns out the key to all of this, whether you're like Corey and Chris and your company, provides a discontinuous innovation, something that naturally could bring change too fast, or if you're the leader and something needs to change because it's the constraint and it's time to go after it, no matter what, if you fail the finesse test, you fail all the tests because then the politics turn on you. Quite rightly, by the way, finesse is a very elegant way of describing the search process, reading the signals, reading the T leaves, and understanding where the constraints are. Understanding that in this discontinuous innovation process, you're going to have an extraneous pipeline that's going to come in very rapidly at a flow rate that you're not used to. (01:12): Finesses as a way to almost like, it's almost like when you see a bullfighter that has two 3000 pound beast bearing down on them and he just finesses his way from one to the next and dances and it's a glorious thing to see in action where internally they may be sweating. People underestimate the power of finesse and the reason that you need it. We're all machines when we sell, we're a machine that turns a potential opportunity into something that's taking a step. That's all we do. If you're listening to this and you're going, "Yeah, glory, the power of constraints I'm in and I'm in," right? You probably need to spend more of your life thinking about and exercising the finesse components. Listen to this episode, The Power of Finesse and the Bullfighter Corey Frank (02:01): Because that reduction in the conversion rate is certainly, as you and I have spoken about and other folks, other guests on this show that are in the business of martech stack tools and weapons is the intent of how the weapon, the tool was used. Well, ultimately, Chris, connected. It's just not doing that well. It's started off really well, but now it's just not doing that well. So tough time really justifying the ROI and instead what I hear you saying is those are signals that we should be understanding, being aware of tracking to addressing that our symptoms of where that constraint lives. Chris Beall (02:40): Yes. Yes. The discipline, the intellectual discipline which needs to be turned into a management discipline is actually quite simple. Ignore all ratios, only pay attention to rates. By rates, I mean things like flow rates. So here's a flow rate conversations per hour per rep. Here's a different flow rate. Conversations, same targets, right? Per week or whatever it is. I like weeks because every week has got five days except the recent ones around the holidays. But conversations per week for the company as a whole. So you always want to have two flow rates. You want to have one for the unit of work, the machine, the person, and you want to have one for the system. So it's like when you're building a factory, you have what is my flow rate, my throughput at max, sustainable capacity of this machine. There it is, right? Well, how many machines do I have, and can I run them all the time? (03:44): Then I get my throughput for that part of the system as a whole. We can produce so many of x and I need to have a standard for time and my standard for time for a machine like a rep and sorry about ... Your reps out there, the reason I'm calling you a machine is you're playing that role in the factory that we're trying to make called a company that provides value to folks. Right? It produces something. So we are all machines when we sell, we're a machine that turns a potential opportunity into something that's taking a next step. That's all we do. We take this situation that's come to us probably as a company prospective customer associated with it. It has some idea of what we might do for them and what we take some action and mutually we decide to take a next step. (04:32): As salespeople, that's a hundred percent of our lives. We're a machine that just does that cycle over and over and over. That's why to be a good salesperson you have to be very disciplined because it could get boring. Right? So look at the flow rate at the individual rep level of the first thing, which is conversations. Then look at the flow rate of the second thing, which is meetings. How many meetings per hour of prospecting for a rep? How many meetings per week for the team? Then go one step beyond that and look at the flow rate. Now we're over onto the side of a new act door, which is the sales rattles, we've gotten out of the world of sales development or business development. It doesn't matter whether the same person's doing both jobs or not. People get hung up on that, that's irrelevant. What's relevant now is in the role of an account executive of a rep who's trying to go from, "Okay, this is really worth working to. We're either going to get to a deal or we're not going to waste too much time not getting to a deal." (05:37): I've got the same two things per rep now is it per hour? It's interesting. Sales reps are funny beasts. Their world has got a lot of time management in it. If you set the unit too small, the unit of time too small, they can't do their time management in there. I'll tell you, here's a side story. I used to be the chief technology officer at a company where our rhythm was once a week you turned in your code, your code was checked into the system and on Monday morning at eight o'clock we pushed a button and we built the system. It was a piece of software we sold. The reason we did that was a week consists of five work days, but it actually has this miraculous buffer called a week cap sitting on the end of it. (06:23): So if your work which was calibrated at three and a half days, if all went well, if it didn't all go well and you had bugs or you had to fix stuff or you found out concepts were wrong or whatever, you effectively had another half week the other half of the week to fix it. So for years we went along, we released product like this. Every Monday, we had a new release every Monday. Then they got a new guy in and they said, "Chris, you don't know how to do this stuff. You're fine. Very relaxed form of management, we don't like it." So we got a guy in from big co and he said, "Well, you're doing this all wrong. We have to do it by the hour." Well, for a software developer, an hour is not enough time to do meaningful time management trade off within the hour. (07:13): So if you have something you have to do every hour, you're going to find yourself with things that didn't get done in the hour. Now those things create chaos because they have to be handled later, but they weren't scheduled for that next hour. Right? So when you're looking at sales reps, your unit goes up from an hour, which is natural for we're having conversations setting [inaudible 00:07:34], you got to go up to something bigger. It's either a week or a month. It can't meaningfully be a quarter unless you just have a handful of huge strategic accounts. But think about it this way, I want to know the flow rate of transactions because now that's the end state in this unit of time that has enough time management flex in it that I can hold the rep and they can hold themselves accountable for managing that time in such a way that the outcomes will occur predictably, right? It's called making quota. Corey Frank (08:11): Yeah. Chris Beall (08:12): So I do it for the individual and then I do it for the whole team over another time unit that is more externally focused. So it's probably a quarter. That's kind of all you need is flow rates. Conversion rates will delude you because you'll believe that your historical conversion rates were not associated with choices that folks were making in the process that are called quality choices. So if I'm running a machine in a factory and I take every blank that comes in and it goes into the machine, and I hit the button and see what comes out, I get one conversion right. If I allow the machine operator to inspect each blank and compare it to the other ones and file a little bit off and do this and that, then I get another conversion rate. Actually, unless my material cost is high, I don't care. I don't care. (09:08): What I care about is the flow rate because downstream I can depend on flow rates at a known quality, but I can't depend on having this, I like this one better than that one process which is highly variant across the processors. So we have to do this when we pick customers. You and I are in peculiar businesses. We're in the business of saying, "So grandma's 15 miles an hour was probably good enough for you because it kept things calm." What do you think of 150 miles an hour? Well, sounds so good, but we actually have to ... ... a little back and we have to flow rate match with the downstream flow because it can only change so fast- Chris Beall (10:29): What is our cycle time for minor change, and what's our reliability? Which is with this case quality? What are the odds of us making a minor change and actually achieving the goals of that change? What is the cycle time for major change, and what's our reliability for major change? If you're a young company, you don't have an answer to the second question, right? You don't. The major change was you created your company. Corey Frank (10:57): Yeah. Chris Beall (10:57): In fact, you're still alive and people sometimes think, "Oh, Chris. You're kind of over-mechanized in this stuff." Well trust me, the world itself is highly mechanized and it operates according to rules. That's like gravity. Right? You don't have to believe in it. It believes in you. Corey Frank (11:10): That's right. Chris Beall (11:11): Theory of constraints, you don't have to believe in it. It believes in you. Corey Frank (11:15): No, that's fascinating stuff, Chris. Because we certainly talk about that in I think virtually every guest in virtually every episode that we've had over these years, right? Hope spring is eternal and we all unwrap that new gift of whether it be outreach or Zoom or connected cell or branch or PRLs or it doesn't matter what the new flavor of the day is. We all as sales leaders, as executives, we write that check, we get our CFO to pay that man his money, pay that woman their money, they're due cause this is going to be worth it on the backend. Trust me, I believe in that certainty that they have that this is going to help. Right? We do it with bankers. Of all the bankers, I'm going to pay that man his money because he's going to help me take me to the promised land and raise my three and a half million on a 20 million valuation, right? Chris Beall (12:06): Yeah. Corey Frank (12:06): We believe that. Knowing that, Hey Chris, I went through 50 pitches and I don't have any money yet. What's going on? Are you the right banker for me? Is this the pitch? Is this ... You know what I think it is? Maybe I should choose bank two different jockey. Maybe it's a different horse. So it's so prevalent. But what you've certainly taught me over these 15, 20 years that we've known each other, right? Is just believe in the math. Don't get emotional about the math. The math is just math. But what are you going to do? You can bury your hand in the sand about what the math tells you because it doesn't fit your narrative. It doesn't fit what your confirmation bias as you set out to be and which is certainly another dangerous thing. Right? You and Jerry Hill certainly talk about confirmation bias a lot. We're in the business of disproving confirmation biases, certainly with what it is that we set out to do oftentimes. I think theory constraints is an evil step twin to that theory. Chris Beall (13:02): Yeah. Confirmation bias and survivorship bias are both incredibly powerful phenomena and they're very common and we exercise them together ignoring the fact that there's only one constraint is another. It's a version of those things. Corey Frank (13:18): Yes, for sure. Chris Beall (13:20): Then it gets hard. I mean systems have constraints, but projects they do too. Change is always a project, but it's not a project that has a constraint like a system constraint. A project has a constraint called the critical path. If you don't have practice in understanding the nature of that constraint, you won't do what you need to do. I mean, here's a lesson on projects. Anybody wants to know how to do projects, here's it. Identify the critical path and overfeed the feeders to the critical path early. It feels wasteful, but it's the only way to buy insurance against Murphy's Law. And Murphy's Law is inviolable. So you either do it that way or you deal with delays, but it's kind of your choice. But the constraint isn't going. It is the constraint. Imagine a project without a critical path. It's a nonsense concept. We're a little easier with that, although it's harder to manage. We're a little less comfortable thinking a system has a constraint because the system always has people involved in making the system work. The politics around the constraint is people feel like you're saying they're unimportant. Corey Frank (14:35): Yes. Chris Beall (14:36): Because you're not working. You're not investing on their part of the business. What teams need to know is this. If you're managing the stuff and you're the leader, this is kind of a show for leaders today. So if you're the leader, your job is actually to go, "Hey, we're going to identify the constraint, we're going to characterize it, we're going to figure out what's investible. We're going to invest in it, we're going to watch the flow rate increase. We're going to make sure the quality doesn't go down because that's one way to increase the flow rate too. That's the cheaty way to do it is reduce quality. Then we're going to step back and our discipline's going to be to watch the system until it shows us its next constraint." It'll do that by having inventory build up in front of that particular step in the process. It'll be start downstream. (15:22): We're going to do this over and over and over and our competition is not going to do it quite as rigorously as us. We will crush them in the end as long as we make a point of not running out of money. That whole episode about that overhead. The racehorse that eats while you sleep. Right? Okay. So great. But wait, the whole business of doing that implies that everybody else keeps doing their job. Right? So Corey is going to fish, we're going across the ocean, we're going to go across the Pacific in a rowboat. But it turns out there's a project every once in a while called get some food for the crew. That project requires that our most skilled fishermen are Sicilian, Corey Frank, go get us some fish. So while Corey is fishing, the rest of us need to keep rowing. It doesn't do any good to say, "I sure wish I were the fishermen." Right? Corey Frank (16:18): Yes. Chris Beall (16:18): Now we haven't or we have to row and if we don't keep rowing though, our boat loses way and one boat's lose way, they can't be steered. Then we have a serious problem because Corey can't even fish because he's saying the fisher are over there and we can't steer the- Corey Frank (16:32): That's right. That's right. Chris Beall (16:34): So this is actually the deepest trick of leadership is in a world where, as a matter of fact, we must address only one thing in our business at a time. We need to establish a culture that says for almost everybody, I'm okay keeping on, keeping on. It'll be my turn someday. That's hard. Corey Frank (16:56): It is. Especially if you're a biz dev in an organization who says, "Hey listen, I've listened to Chris's calls, I can do a discovery process as good as he can. I know more about the product that he does and all these guys want me to do is just dial the phone and talk to strangers and ask him for time. I don't even get to ask them for money. I get to ask them for time every day. So I can imagine, especially for those that weren't promoted last year, a lot of managers are probably hearing from their folks or if they showed up at all this week. Sometimes people choose to talk with their feet and maybe they're at a different zip code here coming into the new year just because of that. Chris Beall (17:33): Yeah. Shawn McLaren once walked up to a whiteboard. He is our executive chairman, he was CEO founder of the company. He and I were just getting to know each other and I had a kind of niggly problem I was trying to solve. It was a political problem that manifested itself as a wrong personnel doing what needed to be done, the talent problem. But all talent problems are wrapped up in lots of politics because everybody knows each other and they've been around and I'm the new guy I just joined. I was probably, I was a week and a half in and I'm pretty impatient for change. So I'm saying, "Hey, we got to make this change, this change and do this and think about this." I'm kind of ragging on him and he doesn't see a word. He gets up from his desk, walks up to the whiteboard and writes up in large, you have to ... No Shawn, it's pretty fun to watch him do this big block letters. Not the most beautiful handwriting in the world, but very clear and very emphatic. (18:28): He had to erase part of the word because he had stuff all over it. One word, it's finesse. It turns out the key to all of this, whether you're like Corey and me and your company provides a discontinuous innovation, something that naturally could bring change too fast or whether you are the leader and you know something needs to change. Because it's the constraint and it's time to go after it. No matter what, if you fail the finesse test, you fail all the tests because then the politics turns on you. Quite rightly, by the way, this isn't complaining about politics. It's like saying, "Gosh, I sure wish there were no people in my company. That's just ridiculous." Speaker 3 (19:14): That's right. I love that. Finesse, that's really a very elegant way of describing the search process, reading the signals, reading the T leaves, understanding where the constraints are. Understanding that in this discontinuous innovation process you're going to have of extraneous pipeline that's going to come in very rapidly at a flow rate that I'm not used to. It's first going to become novel and then it's going to become very, very, very stressful. Finesse is really like that term, Chris is a way to almost like when you see a bullfighter, they have this big two, 3000 pound beast that's bearing down at you and a bullfighter isn't sweating. It's just finesses his way from one to the next and dances and it's a glorious thing to see in action where internally they may be sweating. But that bullfighter example of finesse, I think is very appropriate for what you're describing. Chris Beall (20:14): It is. I think people underestimate the power of finesse and the reason that you need it. So the more mathematically inclined you are, that is, if you're listening to this and you're going, "Yeah, yeah. Gold breath theory constraints, I'm in, I'm in." Right? You probably need to spend more of your life thinking about and exercising the finesse components. Corey Frank (20:39): As a leader I would imagine, right? Chris Beall (20:40): Yeah. I mean because you're now going to become part of, become the other problem, which is using the word, "Should." Well, you should or shouldn't care about the fact that I'm ignoring all of you and we're only paying attention to this. Well, when you find yourself using the word, "Should," in business especially about either your employees or your customers, you're making a pretty substantial error, which is you're basically saying, "Well, they should," it's a moral term by the way. It's not an operational term and they aren't therefore they're bad. They are the problem and I am the solution. When you kind of turn that ratchet long enough, you get dysfunctional autocracies that can't solve real problems. Now, every once in a while you'll get somebody who can shoot it out, so to speak, and just rule over everybody by some dint of personality and the fact that they don't care about people or whatever it happens to be. (21:43): If you're trying to make a real organization that's robust against a whole bunch of things that are happening, you have to allow people room to make decisions, especially about managing their time. Really, the main thing you're allowing folks to do when you're saying, "My organization is going to be highly functional," is you're saying, "I trust you to manage your time so you can apply your skill." It's not I trust you to apply your skill to the tasks I assigned to you. That's not it at all. It's like, no, within bounds of what we can stomach together of being able to measure some flow rate somewhere that tells us whether it's going or not going, right? Corey Frank (22:22): Yeah. Chris Beall (22:22): Within that, I'm going to let you manage your time. In fact, I'm not going to interfere with that at all. That's why I'm not a big fan of having lots of regular meetings because they take away from people's ability to manage their time. Corey Frank (22:34): Yeah Chris Beall (22:35): You're managing their time for them. Corey Frank (22:37): Yeah. Chris Beall (22:37): Shawn of Speaking of Sean McLaren, Shawn McLaren is calling me right now. So why don't you wrap up, Corey. Corey Frank (22:43): Well, I think it's very appropriate that yes, the executive chairman calls and says, "Hey, what are you doing? Spending all the time on the podcast?" So for the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank with Chris Beall in a very brief but timely episode of the Theory of Constraints. Chris, until next time... Chris Beall (23:01): Thanks, Corey. Loved it. As always.

We've heard the phrase, "Be careful what you wish for..." It's not unlike wanting to build pipeline quickly and how it relates to a kid in an ice cream store. What is the goal? Build as much - eat as much as possible to gain as much success and pleasure as possible. Think of the system of building pipeline like a child who isn't sufficiently mature enough to handle all that ice cream. Belly aches will ensue. So the issue with too much too fast is you can't find the bottleneck anymore. And if you can't find the bottleneck anymore, you can't manage. In this episode, Corey asked Chris to visit the theory of constraints. Businesses are artificial, in the sense, that we say we're going to do something for others, and they're going to pay us money for it.  And then the question is, what are the inputs to the business? And whenever you have a system with inputs and outputs, you always have exactly one constraint within that system. That's what the theory of constraints says.  The reason that people like Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musks, and the like are such outstanding business leaders is they put their eye on the bottleneck regardless of the noise that's produced by the change that they are willing to induce in order to improve. Most of us can't do that. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream."   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market. With our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49. We've all heard the phrase, be careful what you wish for. It's not unlike wanting to build pipeline quickly and how it relates to a kid in an ice cream store. What is the goal? Build as much, eat as much as possible to gain as much success and pleasure as possible. Think of the system of building pipeline like a child that isn't sufficiently mature to handle all that ice cream, belly aches will ensue. So the issue of having too much too fast is you actually can't find the bottleneck anymore. And if you can't find the bottleneck anymore, you can't manage. (00:55): In this episode, Corey asked Chris to visit the theory of constraints. Businesses are artificial in a sense that we say we're going to do something for others and they're going to pay us for it. Then the question is, what are the inputs to the business? And whenever you have a system with inputs and outputs, you always have exactly one constraint within that system. That's what the theory of constraint says. The reason that people like Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the like are all such outstanding business leaders is they put their eye on the bottleneck, regardless of the noise that's produced by the change that they are willing to induce in order to improve. Most of us can't do that. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, the theory of constraints and ice cream. Corey Frank (01:48): And here we are once again. Welcome to the latest episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and as always, in the throne of wisdom, the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the hawking of hawking, Chris Beall. Chris, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year to you. Chris Beall (02:04): Hey, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year to you. That hawking of hawking thing always gets me. You know my background's in physics and- Corey Frank (02:11): Absolutely, yeah. Chris Beall (02:12): And Stephen Hawking's one of them guys that I just think is marvelous. Sad he's no longer with us. Corey Frank (02:16): Yes. Yeah, I will think of... It's a new year. I should probably think of a fourth honorary title here, so give me some time, but I'm still in my post-holiday eggnog funk, but the Market Dominance Guys rules on. Here we are in another year, 2023. Was this year number four of the Market Dominance Guys, is that correct? Chris Beall (02:34): Eventually, we'll just write the book and be done with this, but in the meantime, people have to put up with us. Corey Frank (02:38): That's correct. And so Chris, I know it's a new year for your company, for our company as well, and couldn't resist having a quick episode with no guest, old school, just me trying to suck the marrow out of your brain here and try to selfishly use that wisdom for my own business, which is the intent. Not a book. Not a book. It was all for my own personal gain, you know that. Chris Beall (02:59): Oh yes, I forgot. Corey Frank (03:01): As I tell everybody, I haven't had original thoughts since 1997, so this proves it. So but Chris, I thought what we talk about today is something we were talking about off air was the theory of constraints and how we teed this up was this concept of when you look at pipeline maturity and a lot of organizations are going into the new year, they're planning their sales kickoff probably in the next few weeks or so, and we've all been there as a sales rep, as an executive, as a CEO, CRO. We're going to saddle our folks very quickly with a number and that number is going to be 2 3, 4, 5 X what my quota is, right? And that's the number for pipeline. (03:43): Hey Corey, if you want to hit your number, which is a number generally it's picked like that, I need you to do three extra pipeline and you should be fine if you do that, or four extra pipeline, et cetera. And so we go through these machinations of as sales leaders, as marketing leaders of building pipeline for our folks. But it led to kind of a re-imagining of what we've talked about several times here, which is a theory of constraints. So I thought we would jump in and talk about that. You had a nice analogy with ice cream too, and little kids, you just had a new granddaughter, I think. Chris Beall (04:15): Yeah, granddaughter. Corey Frank (04:18): Your granddaughter. So very soon she's going to be grabbing you by the hand and walking down to the Port Townsend ice cream authority there and she's going to want some. And I think that plays very nicely in what we're going to talk about with New Year with constraints in sales pipeline. Chris Beall (04:33): Fantastic. So theory of constraints to me, and I've brought this up many times before, is this, it's a very simple, in a way, very simple mathematical view of life, which is that life consists of systems that are trying to get things done. Businesses are one class of those systems in which we come together in some way, or you could do a business by yourself, but they're attached to the outside world in a funny way. So as organisms we're attached to the outside world by having these inputs. We have food, we have water, we have the chemicals we generate when we exercise, which by the way I recommend everybody think that way when you exercise or taking good drugs and love all sorts of things like that. Those are our inputs. And our outputs tend to actually go back sort of in some similar directions, our relationships, people that we help. Outputs might be that we live for another day, whatever it happens to be. We do the things that we want to do. (05:28): In businesses we're a little more constrained. Businesses are artificial in a sense that we say we're going to do something for others and they're going to pay us money for it. So we put that sort of paradigm on it and say, okay, we'll limit ourselves to stuff like that. And then the question is, well, what are the inputs to the business? And whenever you have a system with inputs and outputs, you always have exactly one constraint within that system. That's what theory of constraints says. And the theory of constraints can't be wrong actually, although every time I say this to anybody, the 99% response is, oh no, no, we have lots of constraints. I'll repeat this, I said it in an earlier episode, when you say there's lots of constraints, you're either a leader who's trying to mollify your people by saying that they're all important. (06:14): You were to say, "Oh, only Corey is managing the constraint within our system." Then everybody else would feel bad because well are they important? And there is an actual challenge thing there, which is the number two part, which is, oh by the way, once we identify the constraint in our system, of which there's only one right now, it's the point where inventory builds up before it and you're starved downstream from it. That's it. And once we identify it, that's where our investment has to go. Otherwise, we'll invest in stuff that doesn't make a difference because all investments in non-constraints will not increase the throughput of the entire system if you hold quality constant or the quality if you hold throughput constant or some favorable combination of those two things. And so people don't like the theory of constraints. Corey Frank (07:07): It's a hard truth. It's a hard truth. Chris Beall (07:10): It's a hard truth and it's like in business, I think it's the hardest truth because it fights all of our political feelings about everybody should be important. Helen wrote a book, right? Helen Fanucci, Love your team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. And Helen's point is you're going to kind of have a hard time identifying as a manager of constraints and working on them, but trust yourself by trusting your team, knowing that they'll find the constraints which are buried, there are many of them in deals. They could be internal, they could be external, they move fairly quickly because deals themselves are very simple systems and they're evanescent, they come, they go. So she works in a world where the relationships are pretty long-term, but that's one approach. But as people who are leading companies, we can't quite do that. (08:04): We can't just say, hey love my team now you guys go figure it out. We actually have got to work together and say what's the real constraint here? Otherwise, a competitor will do that hard work and face that hard truth and we'll be screwed. Now here's one of the difficult parts about it for you and me Corey. We both provide a service. You have Branch 49 in a comprehensive service and us ConnectAndSell in a simple way. Our simple way is push a button, talk to somebody. In both of our businesses we fairly quickly in all cases take a current constraint, which is universal, which is at the top of the funnel and relieve that constraint, increase the flow rate of equivalently qualified, that means same quality, prospects or opportunities down funnel. And we sit back and smile and go, "Man, that's a great thing." Right? Corey Frank (09:00): That's right. Yeah. Chris Beall (09:02): And we don't think about the fact that we've just put a burden on that customer, your customer or my customer that comes with urgency because now we've helped them build a whole bunch of pipeline. But is it real pipeline or not? And many are skeptical of it and their answer will be, well the proof is in how it goes through the funnel. That is when you turn the funnel into a pipe, how much flows, right? That's the real question. And smart people are uncomfortable with our businesses when we apply them to them because they know that it is like a kid going to an ice cream store. It's like, "Well what's your goal?" Well it's to have as much pleasure as possible here per unit time. Okay, "How much ice cream should you eat?" As much as possible. Corey Frank (09:55): That's right. That's good. Chris Beall (09:57): Is that a good answer? Not exactly. Because the system that we call the child isn't sufficiently mature to handle all that ice cream. Chris Beall (10:50): Sure at some point the ice cream creates more of a problem than it solves and sometimes that happens with, you have a fair number of children. I've had a few myself and we've both been around a lot and we know that there are a bunch of problems that can occur, all of which would look from a business perspective like churn. Corey Frank (11:10): Well then Chris, to that point when you look at that, because I've been there, in fact when I was a client of ConnectAndSell at my previous company, I was the proverbial kid in a candy store, in the ice cream store and you showed me one scoop and just take that and I'm like, no, no, no. Give me a scoop of that. Give me a scoop of that, give me and took it all. And I'm sitting in a corner rubbing my belly cursing Chris for giving me so much ice cream. (11:35): And certainly there must be a problem with the ice cream. Not the problem with my ability to consume that over an X unit of time. So when you look at that, is there a formula or a best practice roster, a cosmo quiz, a cosmopolitan quiz that we should take as sales leaders, as executives to say, well where do I stand? How much can I actually consume knowing that a weapon like ConnectAndSell, an organization like Branch 49 will get you a lot of ice cream if you're not careful in your ability to digest that per a unit of time, per a unit of how many sales folks is something you should be mindful for on the front end. Chris Beall (12:18): Yeah, I think there are some things to be looked at and understood, some answers to the quiz. One is, does a firm that's about to generate more opportunities discontinuously? Because that's the problem with both of our businesses. We don't come in and go, oh, over the next six months to two years we will slowly ramp your opportunities. It's like, no, next week you're going to have four times as many meetings. Corey Frank (12:42): That's right. Yes. Chris Beall (12:44): It's always like really, and the bad news for you and me is that it's impossible to believe that this kind of speed could descend on you, and therefore why prepare for it? We often get skeptical people buying from us ready to believe and they find out, yes, this is true. It goes really fast and you get a lot of opportunities and yeah, it might suck your data dry a little bit or it might expose some issues with your talent with regard to their ability to actually set meetings, but fact of the matter is you generate the meetings or we generate the conversation, something happens almost immediately. But did we ask the question if something happens has the next step or the next part of the system that has to absorb that something which in this case ultimately is meeting set with equally qualified prospects, is that part of the organization well enough understood that you know how to invest in it in order to scale it? (13:53): And do you know what the cycle time is between a decision to invest in that next step and the next step actually being capable of higher throughput with the same quality? And that's generally a tough one. How many folks have actually scaled the next unit down? And often what I find is really, really small companies where the only salesperson is the CEO, these are the easiest as long as you don't make this one mistake. So the mistake would be let's hire a salesperson. And as I once told the CEO of a startup, here's what we're going to learn. You don't know how to hire a salesperson but we already know that. So why do the experiment? There's no reason to do it. Let's do this instead. Let's couple you with somebody who's going to advise you on this flow of opportunities business and let's pair you with this person and have them work with you just a little bit, say an hour or two a week and increase the flow rate of meetings for you because you are a resource or CEO who also sells in the early days of a company. (15:06): And the early days could be three, four years in. You actually know how to scale yourself because you're an excellent time manager. And so you'll be able to shift time around in your schedule to deal with this increased flow and then we can add a salesperson to be your assistant sitting in with you on discovery meetings, picking things up. And then we've split you, right? It's like biology. We're actually going to take the cell and we're going to fatten it up a little bit and then we're going to split it in two and then we're going to do that again and now we have three. That's scale. Scale is when you go from one to two to three, not when you go from 1 to 1.4, right? That's not scale. Scale is always doubling or something like that. Really mature organizations have less trouble with this because they've already figured out how to scale that next part of the process and they're overweight. So there's no way they're lean, they have too much sales resource. (16:04): And so the way that you deal with the excess flow in a big organization is you just aim it at your best reps. There's nothing to it. I mean really you just have to kind of make sure that when you generate additional opportunity flow in the early days of that opportunity flow you must aim it at your very best reps because they look just like those CEOs. They're great at time management, they're great at qualification and they can adjust within themselves like a valve that can get bigger or smaller and it doesn't bust. It's all the ones in the middle that are the problem. If you have a small sales organization, say you have three people, do you know who your best is? Do you know, are they good enough to take two X best person, and what would happen if they took two X? Is your organization, I'll call it politically and psychologically stable enough? Has it been through enough cycles of changing compensation, having new people come and go, dealing with change in the marketplace that you are not going to blow it up, they're not just going to run away. (17:14): Your two up-and-comers are going to leave, but you're trying to scale. It's those semi-mature organizations in the middle, the guys like you and I or anybody in this audience who sells discontinuous change you've got to look out for. Companies that are in the process of evolving to be great dominant beasts are in one of two states. They're either incredibly robust because they're so small that they can't be anything but robust because the flexibility is built into the founder or they're incredibly robust because they're so big they can't be anything but robust because whatever change they've adapted to is now reflected in the way they run the people who are there, the processes they have and they've got slack built in because you can assign stuff to different people, but the ones in the middle, especially the lower end of the middle, when one's going to two to three, those are fundamentally fragile and you need to feed them small amounts of ice cream. But they're the ones who are going to want the most ice cream. Corey Frank (18:19): Yeah, right. That's a great self-assessment if you will. Because it's much like the US military sending equipment to our partners, sending them to Saudi, sending them to Ukraine, these high Mars missile systems. That's a powerful weapon that can rapidly cause a lot of destruction, fire off rapid amounts of armaments. But in the hands of an amateur, in the hands of an inexperienced team, it's also very dangerous. And I think what I hear you saying right is when you generate pipeline, you may have the aspirations, there's all new shiny objects on the [inaudible 00:18:59] stack under the tree this Christmas that came and everybody's unwrapping them. Everyone wants to take them outside. You and I, especially you are sitting, hey, you're going to shoot your eye out, careful if you use too much of that one thing wrongly. Are you sure you have the right mechanisms in place to digest this? But does it really matter. If I'm getting more pipeline and if it's fallen off the table, if it's being wasted, I'm still netting out additional sales, why should I be so concerned about this? Chris Beall (19:31): It does bad things to your organization if you're still learning how to just run and grow because whether you're bootstrapped or whether you've taken venture capital or whatever, you're always learning how to run and grow and grow and run. It's a back-and-forth kind of thing. And so you grow a little, you run a little, you run a little, you grow a little and there's a reason companies that grow really, really fast look crazy when you get into them. There's a reason why you, and you've mentioned this to me before, when you're working with certain sales tech companies, it seems that they have a new person supporting you every week. It feels like that. Why? Because they have a new person supporting you every week. Is it possible that person really is much smarter than you are about their product? You've been using it for a year, they've been with the company for a week, they've been through a training program, you've been to a school much more rigorous than their training program called using their product in anger with your business on the line. (20:29): So you growing really, really fast is fundamentally dangerous. And we see it all the time. In our own industry we watched one of the companies grow really, really, really fast. They took in hundreds of millions of dollars. Their ideas sounded great. It was a robust company made of people who were sincere, knew what they were doing, but they didn't know what they were doing as soon as they started to add people at a certain rate because that's a new thing and you haven't done it before. And if you haven't done it before, you haven't made those mistakes in that context and you actually don't even know if you're working on the bottleneck. So the issue with having too much too fast is you actually can't find the bottleneck anymore. And if you can't find the bottleneck anymore, you can't manage, you literally cannot manage. (21:16): You're just doing what my sister used to say, playing business. You're the kid, you're put in the big shoes and you're sitting at your mom and your daddy's desk. Back in the day you'd be picking up the telephone. You have one right there and pretending to talk to people. And the fact is nothing's actually happening. You're like standing at the tiller of this boat we were on for five days off of Hawaii standing there looking like a captain. And I'm looking at the tell tales and yeah, I'm not doing nothing, but you could have replaced me with an autopilot and we would've done a little bit better. The real sailors knew how to make that boat work because they'd made a thousand mistakes and everything in their world was very orderly. But I'm the one who's playing at being captain. And you can easily find yourself playing at being a company leader when you have so much flow that's unanticipated into one part of what you're doing. (22:10): In this case, it would be opportunities in the pipeline that all of the noise that comes out of that keeps you from being able to actually run the company. Your new thing will become this by the way. As soon as you have too much opportunity, somebody will raise their hand and say, oh my god, our churn levels have gone up, or our conversion rates have gone down. Right, one or the other depends on your cycle times. Well duh, right? I mean, if I had an infinite amount of additional opportunity, by definition, since I can only serve a finite amount of final business, my conversion rates go down. So you take your eye off of what you really care about, which is the flow rate of opportunities coming out the other end of the funnel. They turn into transactions, those turn into customers you actually get to service. Those turn into customers that are getting value. (23:05): Those customers that are getting value turn into renewal opportunities and referral opportunities. My goodness, look at the marvelous things that happened. If you just could keep your eye on that and go, yeah, it's okay. I spend a little bit more, but I got a clear focus on my bottleneck and I'm not going to pay any attention to these other two things everybody else is paying attention to, which is my conversion rates and my churn rights. But nobody can do that because all those little voices will be out there. Now, there's certain kinds of leaders that ignore all those little voices. They're just few and far between and they have names. (23:42): They're the Steve Jobs of the world, the Elon Musks of the world. These people just go, yeah, whatever. Thank you very much. Love that you told that to me, that got three-quarters of a second of consideration. We're done with that now. Mark Cuban style. Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it and they go on, right. The reason that they're such outstanding business leaders is they put their eye on the bottleneck regardless of the noise that's produced by the change that they are willing to induce in order to improve. Most of us can't do that. And when we're picking our customers, we have another problem, which is we're not in charge of that. We're the vendor. Corey Frank (24:24): Yeah.

Scientific methods have a place in sales, whether it is to keep existing customers happy or to continue building the pipeline. David Dulany of Tenbound says, “You create a hypothesis of what your messaging is going to be, and then you run an experiment on it and report on the results of the methodology that you're using, do a little bit more research, change it up, make a new hypothesis, and run the same structure over and over again basically for the rest of your life.” Unless you are willing to reevaluate what is working and what is not continuously, it will all stop working, and static growth or loss of business is inevitable. Chris, Corey, and David have solutions for you.  They suggest you look at the efficiency of the people, the processes, and the current technology you currently have in place. Many of these companies have a tech stack, and they don't optimize it and look at it from the perspective of setting it up correctly to really be able to get all the juice out of it. Evaluate the value of what's on hand versus coming up with some new silver bullet that will solve everything. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “Science, Silver Bullets and Evaluating Variables. ----more---- Here are the first two episodes of this interview: EP 160: Prospecting, Inbound, or Pipeline Problems; Should You Hire an SDR? EP 161: Hiring Pipeline Builders Who Can Build Trust About David Dulany He is highly-skilled and knowledgable in the SDR/BDR space. His training courses are personable, easy to understand, and most importantly- actionable. At a strategic level, he has the ability to effectively blueprint the entire Sales Development function.  From there, recruit, hire, build, mentor, inspire and lead a team of Sales Development Representatives to exponentially grow new business revenue and new logo attainment for start-ups or more established companies. He considers himself a lifelong student of this craft.  About Tenbound Tenbound is a Research and Advisory firm focused and dedicated to B2B SaaS GTM Sales Development Performance improvement. The Sales Tech industry has exploded over the past few years; however, expertise in the subject is still rare. Tenbound aims to uplevel the profession through cutting-edge research, high quality events, and highly practical online training programs for all levels of the Sales Development team.   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes, speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market. With our host, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Cory Frank from Branch 49. (00:18): Scientific methods have a place in sales, whether it's to keep existing customers happy, or to continue building the pipeline. David Delaney of TenBound says, "You create a hypothesis of what your messaging is going to be, and then you run an experiment on it, and report on the results of the methodology that you're using. Do a little bit more research, change it up, make a new hypothesis, run the same structure over and over again, basically for the rest of your life." Unless you're willing to continuously reevaluate what is working and what is not, it will all stop working, and static growth or loss of business is inevitable. (00:52): Chris, Corey and David have solutions for you. They suggest that you look at the efficiency of the people and the processes, and the technology that you have in place right now. A lot of companies have a tech stack that they just don't really optimize, and they don't look at it from the perspective of setting it up correctly, to really be able to get all the juice out of it. Evaluate the value of what's on hand, versus coming up with some new silver bullet that's going to solve everything. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "Science, Silver Bullets, and Evaluating Variables." Corey Frank (01:31): From a sales methodology structure, as Chris had said about the conversation earlier, what do you see out there? And from your position as a thought leader, having a purview of 40,000 feet to see what seems to be working, you can see the curvature of the earth, so to speak, in the space, more so than a lot of us who are myopically focused on today and today's dials. So what is an effective structure to run a cold call at a tactical level that, if I'm a BDR manager, I should start to employ for my team? David Dulany (02:05): We kind of boiled it down, and there's a blog I can give the link to you guys, into applying the scientific method to sales development. And essentially, if you think of the ancient scientific method of, you create a hypothesis of what your messaging is going to be, and then you run an experiment on it, and report on the results of the methodology that you're using, do a little bit more research, change it up, make a new hypothesis, and run the same structure over and over again, basically for the rest of your life. (02:42): And so taken down to a practical level, if you're an SDR manager and you're sitting there, you have to start somewhere. So what is the script that has potential, and that you can hypothesize is going to work in your market? And for example, Chris, the 27 seconds script, right? Let's start with that, and roll it out, and get enough conversations to be able to have some data, see what's working and what's not, and then report on it, make changes, and roll it out again, in a different format, until you can find something that starts to work. And then you got to start over with a new hypothesis and roll it out again. And if you think about it, it's really applying just basic project management to script development and cold calling. You got to just keep doing it over and over again. Chris Beall (03:40): It's interesting though. There's a very interesting dynamic, and I'm an old physicist, as you know. So what goes on in the lab is not a mystery to me, at least from direct experience. The hardest thing about science is controlling the variables sufficiently that you can evaluate the experimental results. (03:59): Like hypotheses are easy, setting up experiments is mid-hard. Evaluating experimental outcomes is very, very hard, because you don't know if you've controlled all the variables going in. (04:12): And when it comes to human interactions, the number of variables and the range of values that they can take is stunningly large, stunningly, like the variables around tone of voice within the first seven seconds of phone call. If I were to attempt to break it down and get a handle on it and say, "What are they?" I've got the words and then I have the timing, and then I have the tone, the up and down that's going on, then I have the loudness. I have all this, right? (04:45): So what do I get? Probably I'm going to take a quick guess, 500 million interesting variations in the first seven seconds that could make a difference. So now I've got to make an assumption. A bunch of them don't, but I don't have experimental evidence that says they don't, because I couldn't control them in the first place. So I end up in a very funny place when I'm trying to do what I'll call "good science" in a hard field, where the variables are just a bitch to put under control. (05:15): I once measured the speed of light in a room about the size of half of this condo. Now light goes really, really, really fast. So how are you going to, you can't use a stopwatch. It took me four months every day, for four hours a day to set that experiment up to the point where I could push the button and try it, and it took another two months to analyze the data and see whether I found anything. That's easiest, of just a beam light going down and coming back. (05:45): And I'm not the worst scientist who ever lived. I'm not the best either. I'm not a great experimental scientist, but I'm not a total doof ball at the stuff. I love the idea. But then I think, so where do our sales managers come from? Are they the ones that hung out with me in those advanced physics and math classes, and thought a lot about experimental protocols, and never go with the temptation to change two variables at the same time? Because, tell me, what could go wrong? (06:15): I have an example today, right now, today. I'm looking at it on the screen. My team is doing an experiment, and the idea of the experiment was to have four of our SDRs operate in a different regime, which we call "connect on live voice", and do so with only what we call fast phone numbers, which is people that evidence from our 200 million phone calls most recently, tell us our real answers of the phone picker-upper types, right? Do you think that experiment was done cleanly? This is my shot. David Dulany (06:48): No. Chris Beall (06:49): I'm looking at it right now. They're supposed to be running all on "connect on live voice".  I go over to the session type. Let's see if anybody ran on "connect on target". The opposite. Yes. Why? Because they thought it would work better, and they get paid for meetings. (07:05): This is a hard field in my opinion. It's such a hard field, that any of us are unlikely to reinvent very much of it during the 17 months we have before our asses are fired. David Dulany (07:23): That's true. Yeah, that's true. Chris Beall (07:26): So I think you're recommending a great program, but when I watch it's a little bit like, it has a funny feeling. It's like, "Hey Chris, why don't you become a world-class Sudoku player, but you're not allowed to watch the YouTube videos of that dude." (07:39): And you're going to be in a tournament for 17 months and if you don't win, we kill you. David Dulany (07:46): Easier said than done for sure. And if you look at the way that it's done now in a lot of organizations, is they're just either doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, which we know is the definition of insanity. Or they're out there learning, and they're getting feedback from the market, or getting utter silence from the market, but they're not putting that learning into practice and trying to improve the message. So there's just really no, even if it's a loose project-managed experiment over the course of a couple weeks... Chris Beall (08:26): It's better than nothing. David Dulany (08:27): Yeah. Chris Beall (08:29): I love "better than nothing." By the way, we have a whole episode on something. David Dulany (08:33): It's better than nothing. Chris Beall (08:34): I mean this podcast is really about hoping that some people will say, "Oh, those two old mothers are on that thing. It's entirely possible. And they both seem like they read a lot, and think a lot about stuff, and they've done something. Maybe if they say, 'don't ever do that thing', even if it works, it's a bad idea." Corey Frank (08:57): Yeah. It's funny you say that, reading. So to your point, so this is my new latest read here. Maybe you've seen the podcast with Jerry Seinfeld? "Comedians and Cars." And one of the elements they talk about here is this, they're going to butcher it, but with George Carlin? The famous comedian who passed several years ago, and he was interviewed, Jerry Seinfeld who was interviewed, and he said, "How many times can you really kill as a comedian? Like slay it on stage? People are bent over just laughing, tears. Just kill." And that's their definition of a meeting, is, "Did you kill?" Not to just go out and just perform your set, but, "Did you kill?" (09:36): And Carlin says, "I believe that at the top of our profession, a comedian has no more than seven good hours of material inside of them." (09:47): That's it. Seven good hours of material. Now Seinfeld and Don Rickles and Zach Galifianakis argued that Carlin had much more, because he put out a special every year, for year after year after year. And you see how voluminous some of these comedians are, like Kevin Hart, and the content, and Jerry Seinfeld still going on the road. (10:05): And the point is, is that in our profession, sometimes as sales leaders, BDR leaders, we think there's nothing really new invented under the sun. I don't have seven hours' worth of new material, like the best that's going to kill. I just have seven hours of mediocre material, does it really make a difference? (10:24): I'd rather lean on the marketing quality of the leads, the cleanliness of the data, to really drive my success. And what happens, I think, David, you see this more than anybody, is it probably reaches to the level of a VP of sales or a CRO, or a CEO, and they say, "If this is the best we can do for these folks in order to hit this number, I guess we got to hire more folks." Hey Chris, you see that all the time? Corey Frank (11:34): So how do you combat that for your clients, David, in your content of saying, that's a tree hugger mentality to say, "I just want to add people." Now they cut all these people, we just talked about that in the last couple of months, but I still got to replace it. Am I giving the money for headcount to marketing? Is that what I'm doing? Hey, just make the phone ring or just give me more inbounds or double down on SEM, and what do you say to that? David Dulany (11:59): Well, right now they look at the installed base, and we work in the software as a service industry. So they're looking at the customers that they have right now, how do we keep them and make sure that they don't cancel their subscription? So they're really starting to look at customer success, and taking that seriously, and turning away from pipeline development, which again, as we talked about, is not going to serve very well in the next few months, if you take your eye off the ball there. (12:27): And what I would say also is look at the efficiency of the people and the processes and the technology that you have in place right now. Because a lot of these companies have a tech stack, and they just don't really optimize it and look at it from the perspective of setting it up correctly, to really be able to get all the juice out of it. There may be tools that they don't even use, and they don't even know that they have, and they need to get rid of, and open up more budget for more effective tools, and try to wring the value out of what's on hand, versus coming up with some new silver bullet that's going to solve everything. Corey Frank (13:08): Yeah, for sure. Sure. Chris Beall (13:10): Well salespeople are gamblers, so for Silver Bullet, pretty popular. Corey Frank (13:16): That's right. Well hey, David, where do we find your information? How would companies use TenBound today? If I'm a software as a service company in cybersecurity, or UCaaS, CCaaS, how do I use TenBound services, and how should I engage with you? David Dulany (13:33): The best way to do it is just go to TenBound.com and sign up for the newsletter. We put out a newsletter every Tuesday, that's just jam-packed with resources in this topic area to help people. And we put on a ton of events and different activities to activate the audience, and get people the value that they need. And that's the best place to start, with the newsletter. Corey Frank (13:59): And you put on SDR workshops, SDR as a Service training workshops as well at TenBound? David Dulany (14:05): Yeah, we do. They're online self-paced modules. You just go to TenBound.com and you can take them at your own pace, and do either the SDR training or the SDR Manager training today, right after the call. Corey Frank (14:21): Well, excellent. Well, Chris, it's always great having a thought leader, again, the folks who see and feel the tectonic shifts under our feet here, and are able to dumb it down for those of us that are in the trenches. (14:32): So David, thanks for coming on. We can certainly talk shop all day. Love data like this. I think as you and Chris were riffing earlier, anytime that we can get some certainty in our trade craft about what works it doesn't, by minimizing the number of variables in the system versus trying to fix too many things at once, gives an element of security and predictability, reliability into the machine here that we're trying to build. And as our friend Robert Viera, Chris, right, he says is, "What we're trying to do is build machines, not statues." And too often, new SDR, VPs of sales, CROs, new funding, is they're trying to build these statues, especially in the Silicon Valley area versus a machine. And we'll take a machine coming from the manufacturing world. I know that sings to your heart, Chris. Chris Beall (15:21): Well, you know what I say? When you get something that actually works, you don't have to know why it works, but it's a really good idea to keep using it and refining it slightly, very, very slightly. It should become conservatively aggressive at that point. That is conservative, don't imagine you know anything great, but aggressive tweaks here and there. (15:44): It's like a guy with a, or a gal with a bad grip and a bad swing, and you're out on the course with them, when they're playing better than you, don't ever bet against them. That thing works. [NEW_PARAGRAPH]Don't ever don't go over there and go, "I think you could improve by going to this little more conventional grip." There's combinations of shit that work. David, you mentioned the 27-second thing. That was a complete accident. We didn't know that it worked. We didn't invent it. (16:13): Like the guy was doing it. We didn't know that's what he was doing that was different. The science we did was much cruder than most sciences. Put some people in a couple of rooms, have them listen to the two top performers for a couple of hours with ConnectAndSell, that 16, 17, 18 conversations and see what happens. This is actually Chad Burmeister's idea and it was very good. Well, one of them caught measles, and started producing like the other guy. Then we went and compared and said, "Oh, the only thing they have in common is the 27 seconds, let's use it." (16:45): It took five years before it was explained to me by Chris Voss why it works. You don't have to know why things work, but in a complex world, I mean prospecting, building pipeline is similar to hitting a golf ball. Corey Frank (17:01): Well it's funny you say that, Chris. Just on LinkedIn today, there was an influential influencer on LinkedIn who casting aspersions, casting some stones on the 27 seconds. He referred to it as "37 seconds" and how it couldn't work. It's cringe, it should work. You diminish trust, and everybody has a right to our opinion. Certainly it's not mathematics where it's binary. (17:24): Chris Voss would disagree that there's certain alchemy equations that can produce trust and they're not all definitive, but the millions of phone calls that we make every month, the tens of millions of phone calls, Chris, that you make every month, I would have to respectfully disagree from my fellow connoisseur of the craft, because I don't think that this particular person has ran a team or himself made thousands of phone calls using the 27 seconds permission-based opener the right way. So we get a lot of that, and that's what I really enjoy, certainly, David, about your content, about your thought leadership. (18:00): This doesn't come from an ivory tower. This comes from a respective of being in the trenches. You have the scar tissue to prove it. As you said, when something works, it's two tablets coming down the mountain that David Dulaney and TenBound says does work or it does not work. [NEW_PARAGRAPH]And that level of certainty in our profession, backed by a practitioner of the craft. When Seinfeld says something is funny, he's been in Ottumwa, Iowa in front of four people at 3:00 AM doing a set. And if they laugh or they don't laugh, he knows it. (18:30): And when David or Chris Beall and folks like that, in our profession, a Trish Bertuzzi, we have to stand up or sit tall, a little bit straighter in the saddle to say, "Oh my gosh, time for a hard right turn, or a hard left turn, based off of your feedback." So I appreciate that. But Chris, I thought you would appreciate that. I'll send you it afterward, what this particular influencer is saying about if it's not working you could have cooked me over the last couple of years. Chris Beall (18:55): My dear friend Anthony Iannarino did two things this year that I found to be delightful. One is he signed a copy of his book, Elite Sales Strategies, when we were together at the Outbound conference. And he just signed it and handed it to me. I bought it, by the way, because I will never let him off. Give me a book and sign it. I always go buy it and ask them to sign it. So he was very kind and he signed it, but he didn't say a word. (19:20): And then in the book there were two things. One is, he says that anybody uses something like that 27-second thing is a clown and won't be taken seriously, and he's right about that in a certain context. It was actually a context question. (19:37): And the other is I opened the book to the introduction, and it opens by saying, "People buy from people they trust to make a decision they don't trust themselves to make. Chris Beall." So he quoted me to open the book, and then made fun of the 27 seconds in it, and did so correctly. It was all great. I loved it. Every last bit of it. (19:59): The fact is, we're in a complex field. It's also very, very important. The work that David is doing is in the most important part. Your closers will not save your company. They will not. Your pipeline will save your company. (20:14): Your pipeline is the equivalent of a big fat ball of venture capital, that you don't have to give away control of your company to get. You just don't have to go create it. And it's pretty straightforward to do. And if you have any sense at all as a practitioner, you join the TenBound community as a member. (20:33): And if you got a lick of ambition and you want to go have that audience listen to you, whether you are a service provider, or whether you are a vendor of tech or whatever you happen to be, you should really consider, as you look at your budget going into 2023, consider, here's a place you can put some sponsorship money, where you're getting into a community that is focused on the one thing that can save your company. (21:01): Because there isn't another, there is only one. And that is a fat and reliably growing and flowing pipeline, which is what David's all about. (21:11): So I'm going to make a simple recommendation, which is just go sign up, and if you got something to sell to those people, then go see if you can make a deal with this guy. Maybe he'll let you do a sponsorship for a dumb lesson, and he'll buy me a cup of coffee or something. David Dulany (21:29): Chris, I am saving this recording and I'm going to post it regularly. So thank you. Chris Beall (21:36): Put it out there. It's the God's honest truth. There's not much that makes a difference. What you are doing makes a difference, and making a difference is kind of all there is. David Dulany (21:47): The religion of pipeline, and we're converted. Chris Beall (21:51): Right. Pipeline's a machine, not a statue. David Dulany (21:55): Yes, I love it. Corey Frank (21:57): Beautiful. Well, David, once again, thanks for carving out the time to sit in the Market Dominance hot seat here with me and Chris. It was fun. (22:05): So, another episode in the book, or maybe a couple of episodes with all this content, Chris, that you and David concocted here. So hopefully we'll do wonders for organizations as they go into Q1. So for Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank with the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time. Announcer (22:23): Be sure to listen to the first two parts of the session with David Dulany, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank. The first one is episode 160, "Prospecting Inbound or Pipeline Problems: Should You Hire an SDR?" And the last episode was, "Hiring Pipeline Builders Who Can Build Trust."

CROs, VP of Sales or VP of SDRs need to be able to persuade like Atticus Finch, write and email like Tarantino, and perform like DiCaprio. You’re actually looking for people to have a decent conversation with somebody that is built on trust and authenticity. You can’t solve that if all you want to do is hire more SDRs. David Dulany continues his conversation with Corey and Chris. He says, “The number one recommendation that I would make if people were asking is do not hire five SDRs First, hire a really good operational person that can connect the dots and set the stage and set the foundation between all the technology and the processes and the playbook to get that in place and then start to layer on the people that can actually execute on that. “  If companies have a good sales operations person that has the bandwidth to be able to help the SDRs, it makes a huge difference in helping them quickly learn how to create that trust. There’s more to this success plan than this, but you’ll have to listen to get the details on this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “Hiring Pipeline Builders Who Can Build Trust.” ----more---- Link to the first part of this interivew: Ep 160: Prospecting, Inbound, or Pipeline Problems; Should You Hire an SDR? About David Dulany He is highly-skilled and knowledgable in the SDR/BDR space. His training courses are personable, easy to understand, and most importantly- actionable. At a strategic level, he has the ability to effectively blueprint the entire Sales Development function.  From there, recruit, hire, build, mentor, inspire and lead a team of Sales Development Representatives to exponentially grow new business revenue and new logo attainment for start-ups or more established companies. He considers himself a lifelong student of this craft.  About Tenbound Tenbound is a Research and Advisory firm focused and dedicated to B2B SaaS GTM Sales Development Performance improvement. The Sales Tech industry has exploded over the past few years; however, expertise in the subject is still rare. Tenbound aims to uplevel the profession through cutting-edge research, high quality events, and highly practical online training programs for all levels of the Sales Development team.   Full episode transcript below: ----more---- Announcer (00:05): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our host Chris Beal from ConnectAndSell and Cory Frank from Branch 49. (00:22): CROs, VP of sales, and VP of SDRs need to be able to persuade like Atticus Finch, write an email like Tarantino, and perform like DiCaprio. Actually, you're looking for people to have a decent conversation with somebody that is built on trust and authenticity. You can't solve that if all you want to do is hire more SDRs. (00:42): David Delaney continues his conversation with Corey and Chris. He says, "The number one recommendation I would make if people were asking is, do not hire five SDRs first, hire a really good operational person that can connect the dots and set the stage and set the foundation between all the technology and processes and the playbook to get that in place. Then you start to layer on the people that can actually execute on that." (01:07): If companies have a good sales operations person that has the bandwidth to be able to help the SDRs, it makes a huge difference in helping them quickly learn how to create that trust. There's more to this success plan than this, but you'll have to listen to get to all the details of this episode, Hiring Pipeline Builders who can Build Trust. Corey Frank (01:36): To your point, David, about Q1, it will be really interesting, Q1 and early Q2, to see with some of these cuts and changes in layoffs that folks are having, they're moving away from a pipeline-first culture, which is where they really should be. Chris obviously lives this. Chris has one of the best weapons on the market to control your own future as an organization, to deliver the greatest ROI they could imagine to their investors, and of course, what we talk about, which is the namesake of this podcast, to dominate your market, because it's just all math. (02:07): As Chris knows from the physics side of it, a blood pressure of zero over zero is dead. The pipeline pressure is a privilege that many deny. When you stuff more water or oil or gas or leads into the pipe, the law of physics takes over. And substances that move through the pipe, it's flow, it's F equals Q divided by T. Flow requires a pressure gradient between two points such that the flow is directly proportional to the pressure differential. (02:38): Higher pressure, more leads, will certainly drive greater flow rates. And I find that that's fascinating when folks are trying to target an ABM strategy, which certainly has its place, as a replacement for general brute force ballistic SDR activities. Wouldn't you say, David? David Dulany (02:59): Yeah, big time. I just heard that Warren Buffet has $100 billion in cash right now. And if you think about market domination, this is the time over the next 12 months when companies market dominate, if they really go hard on this. Because if you think about it, if everybody's battening down the hatches and inverting because they're trying to save money and the CFOs are taking over, then that means, and especially when you think about ConnectAndSell, there's nobody out there actually having conversations. (03:32): That's the thing, it's all account-based and product-led growth and we can get rid of all the salespeople, we don't need sales people anymore. That's the trend in the software industry. So, if you zag it the other way, and this isn't just a pitch for ConnectAndSell, honestly, if you're out talking to people and having conversations and engaging the market, you're queuing yourself up for market domination when the economy turns back around. Chris (04:00): Yeah, it'd be hard for me to agree anymore than I agree with that. I'd have to really work at it. Corey Frank (04:07): Even if you didn't have to agree, you would agree. Chris (04:09): Even if I have to agree. It's- David Dulany (04:11): You've got to do it right. You can't just throw people at the problem, which is what, when we had a lot of money in the bank and everything was up and to the right and money was cheap, yeah, you could hire a team of 10 SDRs and hopefully they would produce something even if they didn't have any management or operational support. But you can't do that anymore. (04:32): You really have to work with them and set up everything correctly on the backend from an operations perspective to support them, give them training to be able to have those conversations, plug in the tools to be able to do it, and do it right. So, that's the simple message of the stuff we do at TenBound. It's, don't be a dumb ass. Corey (04:58): Great tagline, "TenBound, don't be a dumbass." Corey Frank (05:01): Well, let's talk about a bit, because Chris and I like to, certainly with the sheer volume of phone calls and conversations that Chris' weapon allows you to do, we're certainly a connoisseur and a practitioner of Chris' methodology here at Branch, but there's no spot price on the price of a conversation today or there's no spot price on a demo meeting scheduled. So, maybe you could talk a bit about some of the research that TenBound has done. (05:28): This is what I love about Trish Bertuzzi and the Bridge Group, and you wait, like we used to always wait for the J.C. Penney Christmas catalog every year, you wait for that report to come out from Trish on what's the state of our industry. So, from your perspective, on the view of an SDR, what have you seen the last couple of months? What are you looking for from conversations to methodologies to conversion rates, things of that nature that some of our listeners will appreciate and calibrate, especially in Q1? David Dulany (05:57): Yeah, it's changed a lot in that, if you think about it, even just a few years ago, SDRs didn't have the cadence capability that they have now with the tools that have come out over the last few years, and we've essentially turned them into many spammers. And this is, even if you went back like 10 years, marketing would be in charge of the tools that would automate email and outbound touches like that. (06:26): So, we've taken that technology and given it to a very new unskilled people who are just blasting the market with mainly email messages. But now it's going into LinkedIn and any other things, Twitter and any other places where there's executives gathering. So, the point I'm trying to make is that the conversion rate of non-conversational tools has plummeted. You are talking under 5% of emails are even being delivered, let alone being opened by executives. (07:04): And you guys probably feel it when you wake up in the morning, you have a 100 emails that actually get to your box, and then you got a 100 emails in your spam that never even get to it. In that spam folder there's some SDR out there going, "Wow. Any minute now Chris is going to reply back to my email and I'm gonna be able to set up a meeting." So, those channels have been so saturated that the conversion rates are abysmal right now. (07:31): So, again, people realize that you have to have conversations in the marketplace, and so you have something like ConnectAndSell. And you also have a number of technologies that are being developed that basically put the same spamming capability into the hands of the SDR that are phone calls spammers, basically. So, you can press one button and send 500 phone calls and hope that one of them clicks over, and those are starting to catch on now. So, now that channel's being worked over. So, those are a few of the trends that we see. Corey Frank (08:06): Well, that's powerful, because Chris and I have said that to be in the profession today, what a CRO or a VP of sales or VP of SDR, okay, you got to be able to persuade like Atticus Finch, you better be able to write an email like Tarantino, you better be able to perform like DiCaprio, you better be a technologist savvy like a Zuckerberg. You're looking for the unicorns to do all those functions well, right, Chris? And when the root, the lowest common denominator, the epicenter of what we really ask them to do is, just have a decent conversation with somebody that's built on trust and authenticity, right, Chris? Chris (08:48): Yeah. It's funny that, to go back to the beginning of what I'll call the earliest part of the SDR movement, it was predictable revenue, it was Aaron Ross's book, and basically said "specialize". I used to have wonderful discussions with people about specialization. And as you know, Corey, my background is in building manufacturing systems, and if anything's about specialization of tasks, it's manufacturing. (09:14): When you're building a factory or a distribution center or whatever, nobody does everything, everybody does something, and the number of somethings you do is relatively small unless you're building Volvos in 1974 and then everybody does everything and then the Volvos fall apart. So, it's really interesting that what's happened with the SDR function, to me anyway, is it morphed in a truly bizarre way into a generalist function. (09:43): So, do research. First of all, identify our market. We have some words, but you go figure out who the targets are. So, do strategic marketing research, do tactical marketing research, got to come up with the people, do organizational analysis, figure out where they are and who's most likely to respond or buy or whatever. Then, do message development, think up what you're going to say to them, and then do it in multiple media. (10:12): So, write it in an email, put it in a video, put it on LinkedIn, blah, blah blah, blah, blah. And please, do all of this extraordinarily well and you've been here for a month. So, it strikes me that it's an oddity to me of the SDR function, which is, to me, a dead obvious function. We need human beings to create trust with other human beings because trust is the only thing that takes us forward in B2B because B2B buying is so risky that as a buyer you need to trust somebody more than you trust yourself. So, somebody better start that trust process. (10:47): Turns out the main feature they need is to be human, which is something that can't be taught to a machine, and then you need to help them have conversations and then coach them on sincerity and conversational effectiveness and that odd conversation, that ambush conversation. (11:03): Then, what we did was we turned around and said, "Yeah, let them do everything," or have them do everything. First of all, do you agree with that assessment? Do SDRs have a lot of different things they're supposed to do, because that's what strikes me. David Dulany (11:17): That is spot on, spot on. And I'll flip it around. The number one recommendation that I would make if people were asking is, do not hire five SDRs. First, hire a really good operational person that can connect the dots and set the stage and set the foundation between all the technology and the processes and the playbook to get that in place, and then start to layer on the people that can actually execute on that. And nobody does it like that, but some people do. (11:53): But if they have a good sales operations person that has the bandwidth to be able to help the SDRs, then it makes a huge difference. A lot of their time is set to other sales operational activities and not necessarily the SDRs, but if they have a bit of that foundational support. Then, the other point that you made is the specialization of people's focuses, because you have to be able to analyze the conversion rate of what they're doing, which is more of an analytical position. (12:26): Then, you have to have someone who can really write effective messaging and help them with the scripts and the playbooks to make sure that they're on point. And even beyond that is an enablement function to be able to have some training. A lot of them get absolutely no training. After a couple of days on the job they're just, like you said, they're set out to do a generalist position with five different jobs, and they really struggle. (12:52): The other quick thing is that they only have a short amount of time to produce. So, if they're not regularly setting up meetings and building pipeline, within three months they're put on a PIP and shown the exit after six months of being there. So, they're set up to fail in a lot of cases. Chris (13:13): Does that mean that if they succeed, they're shown the exit in eight months and they're sent off to be a [inaudible 00:13:17] AE? David Dulany (13:18): Well, they're promoted. Chris (13:22): One exit for another. David Dulany (13:23): So, the economics are tough. Salesforce.com, they have somehow worked out this assembly line of getting the brightest applicants in, getting them into a great SDR function. It makes sense financially. Then, they're either up or out. And they've got this machine set up, and it's worked for a number of years, but a lot of companies try to replicate that, and like you said, they end up with a generalist who's really not very good at anything. And if they can somehow figure it out, they hang on long enough to get promoted to be an AE or in a different position in the company. But a lot of people unfortunately are either let go or managed out or stuff like that. Corey Frank (14:09): Well, the downside of that is, it's these large organizations that probably have that type of structure, David and Chris, from a Salesforce or Zoom, et cetera, these larger organizations, that they get the best and brightest, is from a client perspective, we don't have any continuity from an account management perspective. I don't know how many different Salesforce introductions for, "I'm the new Arizona territory manager," that I've had between Zoom or Outreach or Salesforce just in the last three years. (14:38): So, internally that may make sense, but customer-facing, I'm thinking, "Gosh, you guys got a hell of a lot of turnover. What's going on over there?" And it may be upward a turnover, it may be not necessarily the wrong kind of attrition, but from a customer perspective, there's not a lot of continuity and knowledge transfer there. David Dulany (14:56): And the prospects don't like being qualified by somebody and asked a bunch of questions and then they finally get to it and then they get on another call with an account executive and they have to answer all the questions again. They're, "What did I spend half an hour with the other guy for?" Corey Frank (15:11): I think we have about 20 episodes on the proper way to conduct a discovery call. It is not for you as the seller to discover whether you have any money, whether you have a fit for me, but nevertheless, that's what a lot of folks do, right, Chris? Chris (15:26): Right. Announcer (15:27): We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So, when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employee successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. (15:49): From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch 49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. And we're back with Corey and Chris. Corey Frank (16:19): On the flip side though- David Dulany (16:22): Somebody has to be prospecting and somebody has to be reaching out and engaging the marketplace constantly to build the pipeline. So, it may not be the best situation on both sides from the consumer and company, but on the flip side, we've got to have three to four X pipeline going into each quarter or we're going to be in big trouble. So, we need somebody doing this. Chris (16:47): Well, let me jump in on this with my big question. This has been my question about SDRs forever. I remember going to somebody who's still are our customer. They've been our customer now for nine years. They're the folks I was looking at the data this morning who built a $100 million of pipeline, and about 12 people, two years of talking to people. That's pretty much what they do because they talk to people. David Dulany (17:09): Wow. Chris (17:10): And they dominate their market and they're now a public company and they do quite nicely. But I remember asking the head of that group about eight or nine years ago, "How do you actually square the circle on this dual mission?" So, your mission is to identify and groom new fresh account executives to go into the front lines of the business, and to generate pipeline. (17:34): And those seem like they're contradictory missions, because if I were grooming account executives, I'd be having them understand the business, understand the customer's problem, learning how to do great discovery calls, getting into the time management that's required to be a great AE, because that's number one, two and three things you have to do as an account executive is manage your time because that's the big hard part. And yet here they are, they're scrambling to make pipeline every day. Don't those seem like contradictory missions? (18:04): And she told me, "My number one mission is to identify and groom new account executives. The SDRs are essentially fodder for that process." She didn't say it like that. I said it back to her like that because you know me, I always try to clarify, hopefully. Here's my hopeful clarification, "They're fodder for that process, aren't they?" "Yes." David Dulany (18:27): That's true. Chris (18:27): I have a different view of the importance, and I just want your reaction to this, my view of the top of the funnel is, it's your life. In fact, the theory of constraints says your business has one constraint and only one constraint. Now, the only question left for management is, where is that damn thing? Where is the constraint? Because managing anything but the constraint is always wasteful. This is a mathematical truth. This isn't like some Beal opinion influenced by whiskey or whatever. (18:55): So, you can't have two bottlenecks, you can only have one. That's what it means to be a bottleneck, something is always the constraint. If the constraint is right there where we apply the SDRs, then wouldn't it make sense to apply the most stable, competent, high performing professionals there and not let them leave, make it worth their while to stay? (19:18): To me, it's, the best one I've ever seen, the best I've ever seen, Israeli cybersecurity company selling into hospitals to protect the equipment inside of the patients' room from malware attacks, including ransomware. Can you imagine having your father or your mother or your child, their life literally held ransom by somebody in a foreign country somewhere, could even be in a non-foreign country, but they're foreign to me if they would do this because they've managed to hack into the machines that are keeping that person alive, right? (19:49): Well, there are people who do that. There are people on our planet who seek to make their living by holding whole hospitals hostage or individual people. So, this company that we were working with has a way to prevent that. As a great mission, we were really excited by it. They hired three SDRs. The average age, the median age of the three, because there were three, you could compute a median by picking the one in the middle, was 67 years old, one year younger than I am. (20:20): So, we had one that was about 60, one that was 67, and then one of them was about 78. The mean age was higher than 67, the median was 67. These three SDRs produced, in five months, 68 million of pipeline, and the company sold for $300 million from a standing start in six months. Now, that to me is the SDR function. That's what it's for. It's for market dominance. (20:47): So, if the first part is correct, the constraint's just above the top of your funnel. And if you own that, you characterize it, you know how to invest in it, you can make flow happen, high quality flow happen there, and you can do it sustainably. You own markets. Then, why do we put junior people in that role? That's like asking a junior physician, somebody who's in med school, "Look, my heart is really important, but my brain is an even bigger deal. So, you're the brain surgeon." David Dulany (21:16): That's so true. And I think you can sleep at night if you have a healthy pipeline. And the vetting candidates for your AE team and building your sales team over the long term, it's great. And it's been a successful strategy for very successful companies. And I point back to Salesforce because they're the ones that have been huge proponents of this. (21:40): But if you have to choose between one or the other, wouldn't you rather sleep well at night and have a healthy three to four X pipeline rolling into the quarter and be able to talk to the board about that versus, well, we just found this terrific SDR and promoted them to be an AE and they're going to be great, they're going to last a long time at the company. (22:02): It's just, from a business perspective, I'm with you. The whole thing needs to be professionalized and run in a way that's predictable. That's the dream. And you're not going to do it throwing the program together and hoping for the best, that's for sure. Chris (22:18): Or populating it with the least likely to succeed. David Dulany (22:23): You go back to recruiting, even the root of the problem is, what's the recruiting process for getting people into the role? How did you end up being an SDR? Not you Chris, but I meet some of these people and it's just, have you ever been in sales? Have you ever sold anything? Have you ever done door-to-door- Chris (22:39): Door-to-door. David Dulany (22:42): ... or any of that type of stuff? And it's just completely foreign. It's just, where are we getting these people? Chris (22:48): We're getting literature majors- David Dulany (22:49): Right. Chris (22:50): ... and we're getting Poly Sci folks who can't get a job in Washington because their party out of power. And we're getting a lot of that stuff. We had a guest on this show once and we talked about "hire a grandma". I wrote an article long time ago, 2012 I think it was, that basically said, the biggest untapped resource in the world of modern B2B sales is people at the end of their careers who are retiring, retired, or semi-retired, who would love to talk to people during the day, especially people in the field they came out of. And they're out there. (23:26): So, you can't really say, "Oh, they're too expensive," because trust me, down at Quail Creek where Helen and I have got another place, there are out of 2,400 houses, there's probably 1700 women over the age of 65 who would love to have a few conversations a day with folks and ask them if they'd like to have a meeting, and I guarantee you they would be hunter killer head-hunters. There would be 20% conversion rates to be looked at, and they're not going to leave. (23:57): So, when I talk to people in Silicon Valley about this, well, as with many topics I talk to people in Silicon Valley about, and remember folks, I am a legit Silicon Valley CEO, but when I talk to people in Silicon Valley about this, they just look at me like, it's not just the two heads and five horns, I'm now up to 16 heads and 18,000 horns. It's, "What is wrong with you? Don't you know that it's all about hiring the youngest most able people you can, throwing them into the thing and seeing if they reinvent whatever?" (24:28): And it's, "Well, but we know how to set meetings? Haven't we been doing this for, oh, I don't know, a 100 years or so? Don't we know the craft and the rules of the road for setting appointments? Why are we trying to ask somebody to reinvent that because there are some other tools around that you could use somewhere in the process when we have, I don't know, 25, 30 million people we could draw on who'd be happy to do this job, and they'd stick with you." Again, nobody's listening to me on this one. I'm just saying it's an untapped resource. David Dulany (25:03): And I think you hit it right on the head in that you have to look at it from the problem and reverse engineer it back on building the sales development program at your company where the problem is, we need more pipeline, we need three to four X pipeline, and that is the problem that we're trying to solve. We're not trying to solve for the age range of the SDRs, we're not trying to solve for a promotion path, we're not trying to solve for all these things that are just the dogmatic approach of Silicon Valley companies. We're trying to solve for that pipeline problem. (25:37): So, let's build the program back from that and really figure out the best way to do that. It might involve plugging in ConnectAndSell, it might involve hiring people that don't fit in the program, it might involve training programs and different things like that. You've got to start at looking at from the position of a business owner versus, okay, we've got some money now, let's just build it the same way as everybody else. Chris (26:02): Yeah. Oh, man, what can I say? There is nothing that produces repeated utility more effectively than a flood of money asking you to do what the last person who took money did. David Dulany (26:18): Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like you said, they look at you funny when you bring this up, but I think that if you try to go outside of the set Silicon Valley playbook, you're looked at a little suspiciously because it's, wait a minute, you're not following the benchmarks and the plays that have rocket-shipped these other companies from the last few years. So, they look at you funny. (26:44): And that's one of the things with running a business, being a business owner and not having any investment funds, you look at things completely different than I think if you're a 25-year-old tech genius who just got a big funding round. So, you've got to look at it from a business owner perspective. Chris (27:03): Yeah. Well, you don't get a lot of that from sales leaders because they're only going to be there for 17 months. So, when you meet a- David Dulany (27:10): Sales don't stick around, yeah. Chris (27:11): ... you meet a sales leader on average, just random, and eight and a half months left in their job. David Dulany (27:17): Yeah. Chris (27:18): They're actively looking two months from now. So, short timer doesn't even cover it, as long- David Dulany (27:26): That's true. As long as you get a 1.5 to two years at a place, you can be at five different companies in 10 years, or whatever the math is, and nobody looks at that funny. So, you're just surfing the wave of company to company, picking up some equity and a nice fat salary, and do what everybody else does. Then, you come in, Chris, and you're, "Hey, sensibility and logic, and my pipeline reports behind me," and they're just, "What? I don't get it." Corey Frank (28:03): How much of that is just lack of proper structure? We always say here that structure precedes culture. You can't have culture without a proper structure otherwise it's playtime with the ping pong tables and the unlimited PTO and the pre-lunches and the perks, and people try to force-feed the culture, particularly they dumb it down to the lowest common denominator, "Hey, I have a bunch of young people who are BDRs, so let's make the place fun." And it's just adult daycare. I think everybody really- David Dulany (28:33): That sounds awesome, dude. I want to work there. Corey Frank (28:36): Well, the Google offices with slides in the office, it's, "Come on, be a grownup. Can you just be a grownup and handle..." It doesn't mean you can't have fun, but I think that pervades it a bit why if you had a BDR manager who's a couple of years removed from being a BDR themselves, now they have to hire someone who is a rent-a-grandma or hire a grandma, hire somebody who had this esteemed career in software. I think that's probably part of the chasm there. Wouldn't you guys agree? David Dulany (29:09): Yeah, big time. Talk about going out of the norms, if you were a 25-year-old BDR manager and you walked in to the VP of sales and said, "I just hired a 65-year-old lady in Arizona to do our calling," that would be an awkward conversation. The other quick thing that you mentioned is, with all those ping pong tables and foosballs and everything, you're seeing the flip side of that right now because there's massive layoffs happening in the SDR world. And I think we're flipping to more of what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter now of the grownups are taking over going, "Wait a minute, what's going on here," and making big changes. So, that kind of thing can't last long in a more difficult economy it seems.  

How are you tracking your pipeline’s success? If you are only looking at one quarter or two, you are missing the larger picture of the attribution. Most of the results are going to be 3, 4, 5, and 6 quarters later. Is it the SDRs, advertising, phone calls made, or conversations you’ve had? If you wait too long to look at where the pipeline is coming from and where it is weak, you may be behind by an additional three to six months at that point. Companies are cutting back on prospecting teams without fully appreciating the long-term effect on the pipeline. David Dulany, Founder and CEO at TenBound, joins Chris and Corey for the first in a three-part series on Market Dominance Guys. In this episode, you’ll hear why a vendor is like someone with one leg of a giraffe and the other of an octopus tentacle. How do you walk with those? Or is it like Wile E Coyote running into the tunnel the Roadrunner painted on the side of the road?  Chris sums up this episode, “Failure to prospect today will turn future good times into bad times that are worse than today.” How will you avoid this position? Listen to “Prospecting, Inbound, or Pipeline Problems; Should You Hire an SDR?” to find out. ----more---- About David Dulany He is highly-skilled and knowledgable in the SDR/BDR space. His training courses are personable, easy to understand, and most importantly- actionable. At a strategic level, he has the ability to effectively blueprint the entire Sales Development function.  From there, recruit, hire, build, mentor, inspire and lead a team of Sales Development Representatives to exponentially grow new business revenue and new logo attainment for start-ups or more established companies. He considers himself a lifelong student of this craft.  About Tenbound Tenbound is a Research and Advisory firm focused and dedicated to B2B SaaS GTM Sales Development Performance improvement. The Sales Tech industry has exploded over the past few years; however, expertise in the subject is still rare. Tenbound aims to uplevel the profession through cutting-edge research, high quality events, and highly practical online training programs for all levels of the Sales Development team. Full episode transcript below: ----more---- (00:22): How are you tracking your pipeline success? If you're only looking at one quarter or two, you're missing the larger picture of attribution. Most of the results are going to be three, four, five, and six quarters later. Is it the SDR's, advertising, phone calls made or conversations you've had? If you wait too long to look at where the pipeline is coming from and where it is weak, you may be behind by an additional three to six months at that point. Companies are cutting back on prospecting teams without fully appreciating the long-term effect on the pipeline. (00:52): David Dulany, founder and CEO at TenBound, joins Chris and Corey for the first in a three-part series on Market Dominance Guys. In this episode, you'll hear why a vendor is like someone with one leg of a giraffe and the other of an octopus tentacle. How do you walk with those? Or is it more like Wile E. Coyote running into the tunnel the Roadrunner painted on the side of the road? You'll have to tune in to find out. Chris sums up this episode. "Failure to prospect today will turn future good times into bad times that are worse than today." How will you avoid this position? Listen to Prospecting, Inbound, or Pipeline Problems. Should You Hire an SDR? Tune in to find out. Corey Frank (01:35): Alrighty, here we are again. Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the prophet of prophet and my new favorite, Chris, the Stephen Hawking of hawking. And we are here today with David Dulany. David, we were creeping on your profile beforehand. Certainly, we've shared many of the same conferences, but I haven't had the courage enough to introduce myself. This is the first time for me. It's a thrill. Chris, I know you know David for a while, but David is the CEO and the founder of TenBound, which is a research and advisory firm. Certainly, David is one of those rare breeds you find nowadays, Chris, on LinkedIn, where you're not just a poster of content, you are a connoisseur and you are a practitioner. You cut your teeth at Act-On and Cisco and Glassdoor, so you know what you're talking about. And Chris and I on this show, the guests that we have, you have to know what you're talking about to get in the hot seat with the Market Dominance Guys. Welcome, David. Welcome. David Dulany (02:37): All right. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited. I've got a PhD in the school of hard knocks, so hopefully I can keep up with you guys. Corey Frank (02:45): You can certainly keep up with maybe Chris. We'll see. Depends how many fingers of scotch he has had. It is four. There it is. David Dulany (02:52): Oh guys. Corey Frank (02:53): So, we'll- David Dulany (02:53): Where's mine? Come on, guys. Corey Frank (02:55): That's a custom on the Market Dominance Guys. You have to have... I thought our producer may have got with your producer and crept you for the... So, a research and advisory firm, TenBound. Chris and I have talked about this a couple of times when we've talked with other folks in the research space, and I mean, this in all the endearment possible, but we always say, "Don't rely too much on research because it can be used like a drunkard uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." However, looking at some of the downloadable material, a wealth of material, the Gartner of the SDR space, I certainly appreciate the very narrow focus, the trade craft, the juicy nuggets of the SDR world because, as Chris says many, many times, the SDR, the cold call, that is the most athletic part of sales and certainly the most overlooked in a go-to-market channel. So, anyway, welcome to the program. And let's talk a little bit about what TenBound does as a research and advisory firm. And do you support the drunkards or is it more for illumination? David Dulany (04:01): That's a good way to put it. I'm happy to be the lamppost. Use it as you wish. From the get-go, we tried to make content that's useful and something that you can print out and have at your desk and actually use to figure out the problems that you're trying to work on. And five years ago, there wasn't a lot of great information for either the practitioner or the executives running an outbound or an inbound SDR team on how to do it and how to do it effectively. So, I had some experience in that and thought that this was a place where we could really help people and add value. And so hopefully peo,ple use it as a force of good versus just something to get a raise or convince the board of something, that type of thing. Corey Frank (04:52): Yeah, yeah. Well, Chris, since you've known David a little bit longer than I have, how do you see TenBound right there in prominent in the industry? Talked about everywhere, the conferences, et cetera. The research they do for SDRs, how do you see that really augmenting or raising the bar for what we need sales leaders, CROs, maand rketing folks to understand about inside sales and specifically about the BDR function? Chris Beall (05:16): Well, I think there's two things that TenBound's doing. One is by focusing exclusively on the sales development function, therefore on the top part of the funnel. And there's some question as to how far down you end up going, but it's, I'll say, up there somewhere. They're actually addressing the mathematical constraint of almost every business in the world. So, there's a lot of folks out there talk about sales, and what they really talk about is, "Hey, how you, the sales rep, can make more money." And that's really it. I mean, my friends at Outbound even do that. It's like, "What's the pitch?" The pitch is, you want to take home a bigger paycheck. That's the pitch. And then it's like, "Do this, do that or do the other thing and then be brave and strong and all that other good stuff and things will happen." I happen to believe that the math is clear. Fat pipes outperform skinny pipes for one reason, and that is they come with a portfolio effect that lets you, the company, make choices among who your customers are. (06:16): And they also allow you to go through difficult times with less stress on your business than folks who have skinny pipes going in. That is, a fat pipe is like a savings account. It's an asset. And that asset yields not obviously in good times, but yields hugely in challenging times, which are where competitions are won and lost. So, you want to find out which football team's the best? Go play in Green Bay in the winter, right? You'll learn a few things. I think that's super important. The other thing that's super important is the whole sales development function became real hot, and things that become hot go insane. And by insane, I mean, they actually lose their minds and you have a flood of money and attention and fads. And fads come and go, and you get what I call not just a breakdown of specialists, but a fragmentation of hopefuls. Everybody's throwing something out there. How many sales development tools are there in the world, David? David Dulany (07:14): We can tell you, yeah. Over 500. We have the market map for those. It has been crazy, for sure. Chris Beall (07:21): So, what David's doing at TenBound is providing a way to actually talk about that stuff while it's happening, but allow the practitioners over time to guide this into a useful channel. So, the stuff that works and the stuff that's useful actually will end up coming out the other end. And it's not a magical one-second process. It takes years. The third feature of David is, thank God he's willing to hang in there for years doing something that, as I told him... David, you'll forgive me for this, but David's in a business that's somewhat like this. It's got two legs. It's a two-sided marketplace. So, you have on one side you have all the practitioners and companies that SDRs and sales development heads and all that. On the other side you have vendors like us. And it's like waking up every morning and looking down and going, "One of my legs belongs to a giraffe and the other one is the tentacle of an octopus. Now, how am I going to walk today?" David Dulany (08:16): Great analogy. Yeah. Chris Beall (08:17): So, David, you've decided to do this. So, my question is this. I'll put it politely. What possessed you? Was it the giraffe side, the octopus side, or a vision of a giraffetopus that you had that possessed you to look down into what was either beautiful warm water with bubbles in it to dive into or a painting of the bottom of a swimming pool? David Dulany (08:47): It's like when the Roadrunner sets up a painting of the road and the coyote goes right in it? Chris Beall (08:53): Yeah. Why'd you plunge into the tunnel there? David Dulany (08:56): It's funny that nobody's ever asked me that. That's an interesting question. I had been sort of a wantrepreneur for a long time. A long time. Because I had been in the tech industry and in the working world for 20 years and always read about and thought about entrepreneurship as something that I wanted to do. And as you get older, you get the golden handcuffs. And I had the kids and the mortgage and all that stuff and it becomes harder and harder. But I had an opportunity because I got into two companies in a row. I won't name the names, but very difficult experiences from the get-go. (09:35): And I was in between things and I looked at this industry and you hit it right on the head. It's an exciting industry and it's growing and it's very complex. And I saw a lot of opportunity in helping the people on one hand that are trying to figure it out and then working with the tech ecosystem to try to connect them to the audience. And for me, it looked like a great opportunity. And it has been really every day in the last 5+ years that I've been running this, every day I've gotten up with interesting new challenges and it's been amazing. On the flip side, entrepreneurship is really tough and I've got a lot of scars to prove it. And my wife is still around, hopefully somewhere. Chris Beall (10:25): Is she over there? Are you waving to her? David Dulany (10:29): I'm hoping that. I hope so. It's an amazing experience and we could go in any direction there. But the industry itself, there's a lot of energy behind it and it's fun for me. And so here I am. Corey Frank (10:41): So, when you started TenBound... By the way, what does the name come from? I always like to ask, is there a story somewhere? Chris Beall (10:48): He counted his toes and then he realized, "Oh my God, they're going to be in my shoes. They're bound up. Oh my God." David Dulany (10:53): That was a good one. Yeah, it's funny. And people who know me have heard this, but- Chris Beall (10:59): [inaudible 00:10:59] Dead Monkey Handout. Good name. Corey Frank (11:01): Dead Monkey Handout. David Dulany (11:43): I'm still thinking of those two legs. That's such a great analogy, Chris. But the name, it was interesting because when I thought about outbound prospecting and all the things that we do in sales development, I wanted to call it AllBound because it encompasses everything. But that name was taken. And I was sitting in 10-minute parking at the BART station in Daley City and I said, "I wonder if TenBound is taken?" And also 10x your pipeline, right? By coming to TenBound. So, it was not taken, and- Corey Frank (12:18): I took it as 10 fingers to do outbound because you're doing this the old school way, right? David Dulany (12:24): Okay. Dialing manually. Yeah. Corey Frank (12:29): So, when you started TenBound, I bet you harken back to the first couple of pieces of content or interviews or research would be stuff or germane around the things that you wish you had when you were running those operations at Cisco or Glassdoor or Act-On. Is that a true statement? David Dulany (12:48): Yeah, exactly. I mean, the first couple of things that I came up with were a SDR 101 training program. And actually scratch that. Before that it was a SDR manager 101 training program and just a brain dump of everything that I would've needed as coming in as a middle manager. And usually they're promoted from an SDR to an SDR manager after six months. And it's like, now- Chris Beall (13:20): Then they get to be LinkedIn influencer shortly after that too. David Dulany (13:22): Oh right, right. That's it exactly. I followed that pattern, so exactly. So, that was just a brain dump. And that actually ended up becoming a book that finally we released last year, and it's gotten a good reception. It took way too long to write, but it's out there now. Corey Frank (13:41): Did you hear that, Chris? It took way too long to actually write the book. Chris Beall (13:46): Oh my God. For the innocent in the audience who haven't been with us for all seven episodes, this podcast is a lameass attempt to write a book, and so far we've got 160 episodes and no book. David Dulany (13:59): Oh my God. You guys, I wish I had the silver bullet there, but all I could say is you just got to grind it out, and it took way too long. Corey Frank (14:09): Yeah, we're having too much fun talking problems to death versus actually doing the research behind it. It's a different story. David Dulany (14:14): There you go. Corey Frank (14:15): No, one of the analogies, Chris, I don't know if you've ever talked with David, particularly if SDR manager and leadership and 101, but how about, let's talk about the surfer and the surfboard. We've talked about it several times in our episodes. But David, did you get this impression about how we see the world of an SDR and you coming from a very finely tuned mind on breaking down a methodology? But Chris, what do you think about that? I think David would be interested in hearing that. Chris Beall (14:42): Well, the analogy that I came up with, I was watching some people surf one day actually, and what can I say? I was in Southern California and I thought, "This is really interesting. Not one of those people out there surfing made their own surfboard." And if they did, they'd surf pretty poorly, even if they were good surfers. Because making a surfboard is very, very different from surfing. In a way they're unrelated, right? The expert at making the surfboard is drawing on 50, 60, 70, 80 years of tradition, knowledge, material science, what works in what waves. They've learned from masters. But the surfer has to learn to get on the board, use their balance, be courageous, get some artistry in there. And to me, in my narrow analogy, the surfboard is the script and the surfer is the SDR. (15:27): But I think there's a bigger analogy, which is that the surfboard is all that's being provided by management and the surfer is the SDR. In my analogy, my original one, it's not that the surfer is the SDR as a human being, it's their voice. The voice is what surfs using the script. But what do you think about that? Because management's job can be a lot of things. Helen Fanucci, my wife, wrote a book called Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in the Hybrid World. Her view is it's all about the team because she starts from the proposition, they're not on your team unless they know what to do. But I think in the SDR world, we could start at the opposite end, which is they're on your team because they don't know what to do. And- David Dulany (16:12): That's a good point. Chris Beall (16:12): ... hence starting with management training as your first offering. Well, as you think about that, first of all, does the analogy make any sense? Is it management's job to build the surfboard because they know how. If they were a rep three months ago, maybe they don't. So, maybe that's an issue there. But as you think about it, if that analogy is apt, what are the pieces that you think a manager should focus on providing so that their SDR team members can learn how to and eventually actually execute beautiful rides? The conversation is like the ride. It doesn't last long, but it's a thing of beauty when it happens and the audience goes wild. David Dulany (16:54): Yeah, it is. It's a good analogy. And I would go one step further, that a lot of SDRs are just sent out into the water with a foam piece and some epoxy and a cutter thing, and they're kind of floating around out there trying to actually shape and create the surfboard so that they can then get a ride. And it depends on the company. And if you're talking about a company that has a sophisticated pipeline generation program set up, then yes, they have a well-made surfboard and guidance and suggestion to go out and catch rides. But if you go to the other end of the spectrum with a startup, you're basically on your own, kid, and there's sharks in the water. You know what I mean? And when people think about SDRs and pipeline production, I think they come at it with, "I have a problem. We don't have enough meetings on the calendar. The sales reps are not prospecting enough. There's not enough marketing inbound, and we don't have enough pipeline. What do we do? Boom, let's hire an SDR." And then they're, again, depending on the company, either supported or not, to be able to execute on the ride that they're on. And a lot of times they really struggle and come up short. And now in this economy, it's easy to look at that team and go, "Wow. I mean, we're paying a lot of money and paying for a lot of things for this team to be in place and they're not producing the pipeline that we need. So, let's cut them." Chris Beall (18:31): Yeah, I have a story about that from today, by the way. From today. So, I spent today, not the entire day but most of it, I also took a little walk down to Marination and had some kimchi fried rice with sexy tofu, as one should, but I spent the rest of the day working on showing one of our customers what their SDRs have actually produced. And it has some shocks in it. And I want to get your opinion about some of these shocking elements. So, here's the number one shocking element that I found. The outbound calling that this team did in 2021, so for those of you listening to this, this is now December 14th of 2022 is the date we recorded this, so in 2021 they had a team of about 12 people, SDRs, and they were using our product, ConnectAndSell. So, they're having a lot of conversations. But the basic impression that management had as they started to look into the future is, "Well, 2021 conversations create 2021 meetings." (19:31): So, I went and looked at the 2021 conversations and only looked at the pipeline generated from them in 2022. So, the conversation was last year, or the conversations. Some of them continued. The first conversation was last year, pipeline this year. They had produced, with 12 people, 56 million dollars of directly attributable 2022 pipeline from conversations that started in 2021. So, when you look at that, then this is about out of 98 million dollars of total pipeline created. So, the majority of the pipeline was created from conversations from last year. And yet I would bet the mindset of almost everybody listening to this right now is, "That's not how it works. You call or reach out on email or do something and you get a meeting and the meeting, it's linear. The meeting turns into an opportunity, blah, blah, blah." (20:32): But what we see in the real world is these very, very long positive tales from SDRs, and therefore when you fire your SDR team or shrink your SDR team, my opinion, and it was strengthened today, you actually don't know what's going to happen. You don't know how much your future is tied to the tail of what they're producing today, because you're looking for in quarter results, and yet most of the results are going to be three, four, five, six quarters later. Do you see that or am I just the guy with too many numbers in front of me? David Dulany (21:04): No. I mean, the charts behind you, right? Attribution is a really tough problem to solve. And knowing what really caused the pipeline to be established and to close, it's really tough. Because you could attach SDRs as one thing. You've got advertising. You've got phone calls that have made. You've got conversations. And so I think in the near term, if you're looking at your pipeline and it's unhealthy, you're almost three to six months too late at that point. That's the thing. With everybody cutting back on these teams and not having anybody doing any prospecting, I think it'll be even scarier in the first couple of quarters because now there's nobody prospecting. And it's like, you think your pipeline is bad right now? Think about it. If you don't put any energy into this activity and it takes three to six months, to your point, to really see the progress being made, then the Q1, Q2 of next year is going to be pretty scary. Chris Beall (22:08): You made me think of a phrase. Failure to prospect will turn future good times into bad times that are worse than today. David Dulany (22:17): Yeah, exactly. And it's like, "Okay, well what can we control right now?" I think it's taking a step back and looking at your pipeline production process from strategic level and recalculating and putting emphasis back into it versus just cutting the team.

A company’s leadership – the lead singer, picks up the pieces and fills in the holes in a performance. Their drummers keep the rhythm of the deal moving forward so everyone can stay in time. But what about the sale professional making the calls – the lyricist? The correct tone of a single syllable can make or break a conversation before it starts. Corey and Chris continue their conversation with Paula S. White of Side B Consulting. They compare the ways different cultures start a cold call. We have more in common with all of our varying cultures than you may think when we start the call admitting we are an interruption and that we have never met the prospect on the other end. Paula takes us through the skill of being an unexpected listener and where that is valuable in every business encounter. The good news is it can be learned, like a memorable piece of music or a favorite song that takes us back to a favorite memory. Join these sales musicians in this episode, “Join the Band – How Sales Professionals Are like Lyricists.” ----more---- About Our Guest Paula S. White is the Leadership DJ of Side B Consulting in New Albany, Ohio. Side B Consulting helps leaders combine their business-minded skills with their relationship-based people skills to more effectively lead their teams.   Full Transcript here: A company’s leadership – the lead singer, picks up the pieces and fills in the holes in a performance. Their drummers keep the rhythm of the deal moving forward so everyone can stay in time. But what about the sale professional making the calls – the lyricist? The correct tone of a single syllable can make or break a conversation before it starts. Corey and Chris continue their conversation with Paula S. White of Side B Consulting. They compare the ways different cultures start a cold call. We have more in common with all of our varying cultures than you may think when we start the call admitting we are an interruption and that we have never met the prospect on the other end. Paula takes us through the skill of being an unexpected listener and where that is valuable in every business encounter. The good news is, it can be learned, like a memorable piece of music or a favorite song that takes us back to a favorite memory. Join these sales musicians in this episode, “Join the Band – How Sales Professionals Are like Lyricists.” Corey Frank(00:00): So what are these challenges that you see in companies? Cuz I would bet that there are folks maybe at the C level who wanna be more in touch with side B to communicate, to retain talent, to inspire more creativity. And you probably have folks who say, Hey listen, I didn't sign on for this. I thought you hired me for my resume. I thought you hired me for my experience. How do you help workshop that out? So they do sing the same song.  Paula White (00:29): So interestingly enough, it again all comes down to culture and you're gonna see resumes changing very, very shortly where some of those things, those side B traits are starting to show up on resumes. They're looking for cultures of accountability, they're looking for cultures that are going to give back. They're looking for cultures who believe in their people. So how do you take what you have now and ensure that everyone is singing on the same page? I think it's just getting in the studio. We have to get all ideas out on the paper or the whiteboard and start coming together as a band and making sure each instrument is represented for their own strengths.  Corey Frank(01:28): How is that facilitated? Do you expect that the leaders will drive that facilitation? I know certainly that's what your practice is all about, but when the conductor leaves the building such as you and your team, how am I empowered or instilled with this sheet music to make sure that hey, drummer plays this, bass player plays this, et cetera?  Paula White (01:53): That's a great question because after most workshops, people do tend to forget, right? Facilitating something really takes time. And there is a monthly plan that I do connect with the CEO or the leader that put the workshop together to ensure these things are still happening within the organization. But the most important part is really taking the survey for each person to understand what their intentionality and what they are on the inside is brought out. And if that is known by everybody, then we can hold each other accountable to being open-minded creative, to being experimental, to being laser logical. If we have a person who is laser logical, let's use that and let's create it together so that everyone knows what their skill sets are. Yes, it sounds great in a workshop and it can facilitate afterwards. And I tend to take the next six months and we take the next six months to ensure that that continues to go through the organization.  Corey Frank(03:08): , . No, that's great. I think I keep coming back to this element of having the courage to do it. Yeah, because we read, right Chris, we read a lot of books, we listen to a lot of podcasts, we adhere to the philosophies of a lot of speakers where it's about technique and not necessarily the connection. And certainly what Helen talks about and certainly Paula, what I hear from I understand from what your practice does is really we try to have that catalyst, that spark of that connection. And that's what certain people are better at it than others. How do I develop that connection, that intentionality that you spoke about earlier?  Paula White (03:54): Well first you gotta really understand what that connection is within you. And we talked about that a little bit. It may not be vulnerability. Your connection may be that you are helpful or that you like to experiment with ideas. So understanding yourself first gets to the point of seeing yourself what hasn't been seen before in this survey . And we take those three essential traits and three desirable traits and then we kind of pie fit them. What resonates with you? How are we to get you to be more open-minded because that is what is in you. So how do we get that to connect with your people? And we have different questionnaires and different things that people can do to become more open-minded, right? There's different lessons in all of that. And I think what you're asking mostly is one of the part of the workshops that I absolutely love is understanding how to become an unexpected listener.  Corey Frank(05:07): Unexpected listener.  Paula White (05:10): There are levels of listening. So the first phase of listening is listening. You go in ready to defend your ideas and all you're listening for is an opening. Next level is active listening. You're gonna actively listen to somebody, show them that you care. But you still have that little ticker tape going down at the bottom of the screen that is in your back of your mind, but you're listening to them cuz they're up on top of the screen . And then the unexpected listener actually reacts on what their people are saying takes the time to do, takes the time to react and do what is being asked of or listening to what they need.  Chris Beall (06:04): I always have this question about anything where there's change. So when you're working with a leader, are you working with individual leaders or you working with the whole team?  Paula White (06:13): So interestingly, if I do both, I look work with individual leaders, but for the most part my workshops are with high potential emerging leaders throughout organizations.  Chris Beall (06:25): So within an organization they'll bring together the high potential is their idea who's high potential,  Paula White (06:32): And that's a whole nother topic.  Chris Beall (06:35): , yes. I always say there's, if you wanna find out what's going on, look at the filter first before you look at the processing.  Chris Beall (06:45): So you have these folks together, you're working with them, you are listening to them hopefully in an unexpected way, but you're finding out that you've brought whatever you brought to the party that day. Also you're just another human being. There's got to be in a pattern to what happens in cuz there's always patterns to what happens and somewhere in a pattern. I always look for that thing that I call the first unit of change. . It is what actually is something that changes, that's concrete that you can say, okay, that actually changed. I could validate it, I could test it, I could be concerned that it's going to change back. That's one of the ways that I can tell that the unit of change is a real unit of change is when it bothers me a little after it happens that I'm concerned it'll flip back whether it's in myself or somebody else. What is it that you are looking for listening for? Probably listening more than looking in a group. Say you've got seven emerging leaders that together you're at the end of the first whatever it is, hour, two hours or sometime when you're hoping that there will be a change of a kind, what is that unit of change? What's the thing you're looking for listening for that you would be worried or concerned later? I hope that doesn't flip back over to side A.  Paula White (08:10): So I'm always listening for diversity of thought. Do I have seven drummers in there or do I have a full complete band? Do I have two vocalists that are dominating the whole session? and I really listen for what does their band or what does their group consist of? What is their talent? And then how can we cohesively work together to bring out everybody's talent to add loyalty and creativity and innovation, right? Because that's really the meat of emerging leaders are that's where you're going to get your creativity, your innovation, your next level thinking for the company to move forward in five to 10 years. The people who are in the seats now are already thinking five to 10 years out. So now we need the next group to start thinking five to 10 years beyond that.  Chris Beall (09:25): Which is interesting given the way the world works now, right? Because five to 10 years far exceeds most people's anticipated employment with any given company.  Paula White (09:34): I mean exactly.  Chris Beall (09:36): We're running a funny operation here at ConnectAndSell where the average tenure company's 15 years old and the average tenure is 17 years. So we flipped, I dunno how we did,  Paula White (09:47): But think about everything. Think about if you could actually, cuz I've been with four companies throughout my entire 30 years, my career. And if you could retain that type of loyalty, that type of belief, that type of innovation for the long haul, what that would do for a company, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and people, the bands that weren't one hit wonders, they have a legacy and we need to leave a legacy for the people that we serve. And so as we continue to grow that the only way that you're gonna do that is by hoping more people stay loyal and not leave the company and have that type of culture.  Corey Frank(10:54): Interesting. I wonder if Paula, in your practice to that point, if you have I'm sure you've seen CEOs that were more the drummers or maybe the CFO was more of the lead singer which is counterintuitive to I think how most people think, right? Chris, when you have those roles and what have you learned from those type of dynamics that it doesn't necessarily match up with the archetype of the org chart and they're not right outta central casting as you had thought. Marketing isn't the drummer rather it's a financial person. Maybe it's not a good thing to have the drummer be the CFO, but I dunno, maybe it is  Paula White (11:37): Actually the way that I did this and I worked with a neuroscientist, a psychologist, a musician, and myself. The four of us worked together. So we took the position of the drummer because we've been talking about the drummer and we asked ourselves, what is the primary role of the drummer? The primary role of the drummer in a band is to keep the beat, to keep everything moving forward, to keep the song moving forward. So what would be the side a side A is usually the visionary, the forward thinker, the person that is always ready to move and keep moving . So what their side B would be is curiosity, because they need to understand as a visionary what's happening in the market, what's happening with their people, what's happening with their customers. They're always curious to move forward and innovate. So we did this really so methodically that I think it would be interesting to see if it's not based on title necessarily, but what their skill set is. So the lead guitarist,  Corey Frank(12:54): ,  Paula White (12:56): When you think of a lead guitarist, what do you think of? What is their primary role?  Corey Frank(13:03): Getting the groupies in the drugs.  Paula White (13:05): They   Corey Frank(13:07): You talking during, you're talking when they're on stage, not after. I thought we were talking about  Paula White (13:12): They're pretty close though.  Corey Frank(13:15): Probably  Paula White (13:15): Guitar riffs, right? Yeah.  Corey Frank(13:17): The riffs that have the unique sound that is the band. You think about The Edge, you two has a unique sound. Led Zeppelin had a unique sound because of the lead drummer. Right? Exactly. That's the  Paula White (13:30): Lead guitarist. So you've got that lead guitarist and they are so passionate about it. , . So passion is the side B trait.  Corey Frank(13:41): You can't be a tourist in a band and be the lead guitarist, right? You don't just show up. I mean you are committed,  Paula White (13:51): You are 100% committed and you take initiative and you're enthusiastic. And you're even authoritative. , right?  Chris Beall (14:02): . And you're most likely to be pissed off if somebody else blows it.  Paula White (14:07): Exactly.  Chris Beall (14:08): Explicitly guitarist. That's the most pissed off.  Corey Frank(14:10): Yeah.  Paula White (14:13): And for the optimist or the vocalist, think about the vocalist for a moment. What is their primary role?  Corey Frank(14:25): What is the primary role of a vocalist? I suppose mean if we've all been parts of bands or watching bands at bars where the musicians are incredible, but the lead singer is horrible. And also where the lead singer is incredible and maybe the band isn't up to tune. So I would say it's, it's really the face of the band. It's the identity of the band. Everybody knows Bono up front or Axle Rose up front, right? Or Mick Jagger front I. So I would think it's really more the branding but I don't know. What do you think Chris?  Chris Beall (15:01): As a singer myself, and this is something I actually even think I react to when I'm here at home. I've got my piano right over there and I play and sing most evenings. And I think as the vocalist, I feel as the vocalist, what I'm doing is I'm telling the story, I'm helping the audiences emotions move with the whole song. Cuz the song includes the lyrics, it includes the tone as the vocalist. I have a bigger range than any of the other instruments in terms of subtlety. I can do more things with my instrument than they can do with theirs.  Paula White (15:42): That is why their side B is advanced business acumen because they do the whole thing when they're on tour, they're providing direction, they're providing clarity, they're getting people set up. They know when the song ends. They analyze the pit balls in the audience. I mean, I've been in a concert recently where the vocalists literally stopped the concert because he saw someone pass out in the mosh pit and get help and get them. So it's that type of brain.  Chris Beall (16:24): Yeah, that's interesting. It's a funny thing. I mean it's also a big power position. I mean the drummer can drive the thing like an engine, but somebody is gonna decide when they're gonna slam on the brakes, when they're gonna make a hard turn. And there's a lot of power in that. And that always comes from the vocalist. The vocalist also ends up catching and basically gluing things together when it didn't quite work. One of the problems with pure instrumental music is when it doesn't work, when it's a little off. And this is especially true when you're listening to jazz, jazz trios, when it's a little bit off, it's really bad. It falls apart and there's almost no way to catch it. It's like, who's gonna catch it? What are they gonna do? And what you do is you simplify down to something that continues to work. That is you actually lower the qualities so to speak. And jazz, the quality comes not just from the execution but also from the imagination. You reduce the imagination, lower the temperature and let the music come back together. But if you add a vocalist to that trio, when it starts to fall apart, they can actually pull it together with their voice  Chris Beall (17:39): , and then everybody can get back together with the vocalist without having to abandon their imagination or tone it down. I mean I really like, this is some interesting stuff, so I kinda know Paula, so everybody feels differently about music as a consumer of it, but more similarly to each other than the fact they might like some genres more than others. I didn't know that I loved rap until I went to a play yesterday, I think it was day before yesterday called. It was the Christmas Carol done as the Q Brothers Christmas Carol. And I realized what, that's what I really like about that music. Even though I don't like the music now, I really like it because it was funny and it told a great story and so forth. As consumers of music were all similar in that we all know how to consume the music that we like  Chris Beall (18:34): As producers of music. Whether it's just your voice when you're speaking or whether it's actually making music by yourself or with others. I think we diverge a lot. I think that there's a lot of issues around performance anxiety when it comes to music, especially . You were raised giving piano recitals at the age of four. There were, it's like, how scary is that? It's not that scary cuz you just don't know anything. But for some people it's okay to perform musically. For some people it's not. And yet when you're bringing out your side B in a sense, you have to be okay. You have to learn to be okay performing, so to speak, from this other side of yourself. How do you help people do that? Cuz that's a wide divergence of capabilities that are built in and then hammered in through childhood. That's just hammered in it's some people are way over there and they'll say, I could never sing or I could never play. I could never do whatever. And some people will walk into a room having a tune the like or break out into Broadway show music, a regular basis, diovan, .  Paula White (20:02): It really is getting people to see really. So I am not a vocalist. I am a lyricist. I've written six songs for my book and produced those with great musicians. But it's really seeing the unseen and once somebody sees that they can be what they are truly within themselves, bringing their whole self to work, it's easier because that's what they're used to. For example, I was a competitive swimmer. I naturally leaned into music because I didn't hear anything or rhythm really. Keeping my strokes in rhythm, keeping my beat going, breathing at the right time. I would make up songs in my own head. So when we're doing that, those songs in your own head are just these voices of chatter. We're just trying to change that language to your side. B  Chris Beall (21:13): , . I love that you used a rhythm of, was this going on in your head, the songs? It  Paula White (21:19): Was absolutely going on My head actually in seventh grade, I'm gonna give you a little tip here. Seventh grade, I wrote a whole play Broadway play for Billy Joel's album. The Stranger. What I did with it, I don't know, but I wrote it about the Italian restaurant, the red wine, the white wine, the Brenda and Eddie. And I had the whole scene mapped out in my head. , I know because I love music  Chris Beall (21:56): By the way. I played from that play which somebody stole from you and put on Broadway. I was just playing from it the other night. . Yeah, it was very songs. I didn't know you wrote that stuff. That's fast.  Paula White (22:08): Oh no, no. I wrote it in my own. Oh, I wrote it. I never gave it to anybody, but I wrote one when I was in seventh grade.  Chris Beall (22:19): I think probably the early, well by the way, the power of rhythm I think is really quite astonishing when it comes to stabilizing performance. So as some unfortunate to among our eight listeners, I do barefoot endurance running for fun. And some people think that's oxymoron. How could that be fun? It's actually kind of a gentle relaxing activity for at least the first few hours. And I recall once because I always have a song in my head and it's always challenging to find a song that will help you, that really will go along and help you. And I did a 50 K once in the almond and Quick Silver Mountains behind my house two weeks after running the big serve marathon. So this was not a good idea. And these mountains are really up and down and up and down. And I did it on a whim and I ate the wrong thing beforehand.  Chris Beall (23:15): And so I had these sort of stomach cramps for the first two, two and a half hours. And this thing took nine hours to run. And what I found helped me for especially about the last five hours, oddly enough, was the odd rhythm of take five. And the reason was it kept my mind occupied because at the end of ever measure, you were on the other foot. Really? That sounds ridiculously stupid, but it never got boring because when you you're doing a run like that, it's hard to keep your focus. Some things are going on in your body and your mind. But there was just something about going, I wonder which foot it's gonna because I'd forget. Right.  Corey Frank(23:58): Well what is that? Let's see, Breck, I mean four is all kind. I don't know what the time is  Chris Beall (24:04): But Well it's got five beats. It's five four, so it's quarter, it's quarter notes, but there's five of them in a measure. And so it's got this extra beat and that extra beat I kept falling into. That's what I felt like is I can always fall into that fifth beat and then the next measure starts. I did that for the last five hours or so and then I finished the run and had a nice piece of peach pie and went home . I'll never forget that. The power of the music and I don't listen to music when I run. I don't let it come in through my ears. It's always inside of me. But I'm a big believer in that I actually think that music runs inside of us in a way to maintain our sanity.  Corey Frank(24:49): Wow.  Paula White (24:50): Wow. I would agree with you because music also is the only form that allows us to use both sides of our brain simultaneously.  Chris Beall (25:01): And we remember it differently. I mean otherwise why would there be named that tomb? We talk on the cold calling technique world of market dominance guys, which is all about paving the market with trust by effectively, by singing to somebody in seven seconds, you have seven seconds to get your voice to do something magical inside of that person. And when you're thinking about like, well what's really going on there, , if somebody were to say, well what's really happening there? What's happening is the words, we have a thing, we had a whole episode on this. The words are a surfboard and the voice is the surfer, the artist. And somebody has to shape the words. We probably shouldn't be shaping our own words when we're out in the world of repetitive performance because that's right. The words, unless there's a whole bunch of 'em, we're probably not gonna get it quite right.  Chris Beall (25:59): But we can incorporate the words as poetry and then sing them. And it's like name that tune. Why could name that tune ever be a show. Think about it. It's crazy, right? Oh, right now that tune in one or two seconds and yet if you walk around in the world and you hear the beginning of a song, it make a mistake. You might think it's one of three, but you'll, you'll not think it's one of a hundred. It's very, very quick. We can't remember our children's name. Well, I have a problem remembering names after 3 27 in the afternoon. I have real issue with that. But the ability to remember that this is that song, even if you can't name it, you can continue it. Sure. That is deep. Deep memory stuff. And when you think about relationships we have with people, what we're essentially doing is we're building memories with them. And it's those memories that are the glue of the relationship. It's like when we are remembering before the show here being on at this conference and then going onto this little podcast that was happening, we were actually reinforcing our relationship by remembering something together. , . And that is the essence of how we build businesses, is we create what we call culture is actually a matrix of shared memories that are interpreted in a common framework  Chris Beall (27:26): That's deep.  Corey Frank(27:28): It's funny, Chris, I just had a client of ours came and pay us a visit and she is of Japanese heritage and we were talking about the phone here and the phone that I was keeping the back. And now when we pick up the phone, we always say hello. And we were talking about this very thing about the surfboard and tonality and the musicality that you have to have the right. It's like if a lyricist as Paula, sometimes you just looking for the right word to hit the right beat if it's too short. We all know those songs that it could use another word or syllable here, . And in Italy, when you pick up the phone, you say Poto, right? And she's saying in Japan, cuz I was talking about cold calling in different cultures and the musicality of what we try to do here in the US and would it translate well to Italian when it translate to Japanese.  Corey Frank(28:25):    hajime-mashite   And she said a beautiful thing. She said, the Japanese, when you answer the phone from a business to business, not mushy, mushy when it's more informal, but that a traditional first encounter and the word actually means, the phrase actually means greetings with a first encounter. It's Hajimemashite! Which means nice to meet you first encounter. It's almost like now I would never do it. So the first time we meet Paula, let's say Hajimemashite!, right? Corey Frank, right? Nice to meet you. First encounter Corey Frank. And it was just something Chris that was, I thought was just very beautiful about our profession. That the person on the other end of the line, instead of saying, listen, this is a cold call, you can hang up if you want Chris Vos stuff. Or it's really a variance of the 27 seconds. I know I'm an interruption. Yes. Labels you as the monster. You as the invisible stranger. When you say that Hajimemashite!, like this is the first time we've spoken and had she was speaking in Japanese, she just had such a musicality of it that I thought was such a beautiful tradition to connote. I'm the stranger. You're being vulnerable here right now by picking up the phone. I want you to know that we've never met before.  Paula White (29:46): Wow. I love that. Wow.  Corey Frank(29:49): Yeah. And talk about that vulnerability that you have to have in business. We talk about it. Paula, here as we wrap up about the vulnerability you have to have to explore your side B, right? The person I have talked for years now about the vulnerability that you have to show, the courage you have to show because of this highly athletic act of cool calling here that we do here, . But I tell you what, Paul, I love to learn a little bit more. I think there is so much to be learned from these things about ourselves and the synergies and the opportunities to talk with you and Helen together. Chris, that would make a wonderful episode to have the love your team and the side B consulting here, experts in action. So Paula, we would go to paula s white.com if we wanna learn a little bit more. And side B consulting, are you on the Twitter verse everywhere else? And  Paula White (30:44): Connect me on LinkedIn. Paula S White, Instagram side B, and YouTube side B. What's your legacy?  Corey Frank(30:54): What about,  Paula White (30:56): I am not on TikTok. I still believe that there's more to say than 15 seconds.  Chris Beall (31:05): Is that what TikTok is? 15 seconds. I was unaware. Thank you for that  Corey Frank(31:09): Education. I don't think that would work for us then. Chris. 27 seconds is all we need. That's  Chris Beall (31:14): Gotta have 27, 27  Paula White (31:17): Seconds.  Corey Frank(31:17): Well Paul, it's been a pleasure. We look forward to hearing from you again on future episodes of the Market Dominance guys. And for Chris, be the sage of sales, the profit of profit, the Hawking of Hawking. This is Corey Frank. Until next time,  Paula White (31:29): Thank you so much.

What helps make someone an effective leader? According to our guest, Paula White, the Leadership DJ of Side B Consulting, it’s all about employing a leader’s human side along with their business side when they connect with their team. Using music and musician metaphors, Paula helps leaders discover the aspects of their flip side — Side B — which define their humanity, and how they can combine their Side B aspects with their business side to become intentionally connected with their team members. Our hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, bring their own experiences as team leaders to this topic, discussing with Paula how an imbalance of power can often impede an honest exchange between a leader and his team members, and how the application of a leader’s Side B traits can diminish this. Curious to discover your own Side B? Get some insights from today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Your ‘Side B’ Is a Leadership Tool.” About Our Guest Paula S. White is the Leadership DJ of Side B Consulting in New Albany, Ohio. Side B Consulting helps leaders combine their business-minded skills with their relationship-based people skills to more effectively lead their teams. ----more---- Full episode transcript below: Corey Frank (01:20): We're back, post-Thanksgiving version of the Market Dominance Guys. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and, as always, the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, my personal favorite, the Stephen Hawking of hawking, right, Chris Beall. And here we have another incredible special guest. We have Miss Paula White from the Leadership DJ, raise your leadership style, and always, Chris, because generally you sit with the most interesting people at either trade shows or on a plane, or you're introduced to some of the most interesting people in sales and sales leadership today, so I can't wait to hear how you met Paula. But first, Chris, how was your Thanksgiving, good time all around? Chris Beall (02:05): It was grand, it was grand. And, Paula, it's fabulous to have you here. Paula, we can try to remember how we met. Paula's the only person who's ever succeeded in getting me to jump on a plane and go to Columbus, Ohio, just to have breakfast Corey Frank (02:20): Really? On purpose? Wow. No coercion, nothing. Paula White (02:24): No coercion, just maybe the Ohio State Buckeyes. Yeah. Corey Frank (02:31): Perfect. And so this breakfast was what a breakfast it was. Chris Beall (02:35): And a graduate from the Ohio State University, who has a PhD in clinical psychology, cooked our Thanksgiving turkey. There's a connection right there, Paula. Paula White (02:48): There it is, right there. That person cooked your Thanksgiving turkey and, unfortunately, the Buckeyes did not win and lost to Michigan, the state up north. Chris Beall (03:01): Well, that's actually fortunate for me because Sean McLaren, our executive chairman, is a Michigan guy, so I have to deal with him on more occasions than Paula. Paula, I'm so sorry- Paula White (03:16): Well- Chris Beall (03:16): ... but out of self-interest. Paula and I met recently at the OutBound Conference, which is a tremendous conference that Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino, it used to be Mike Weinberg, anyway, but the Sales Hunter, Mark Hunter is there. And we met and just were having a bunch of conversations about something that's near and dear to my heart, which I'll call it the other side of sales, and she calls it Side B, and Paula's an aspiring DJ or a practicing DJ. I don't know what you are- Paula White (03:46): Yeah, yeah, right now, I'm aspiring. Chris Beall (03:53): ... just as good a DJ as I am a piano player. We were just talking about a whole bunch of stuff, and it also came together in my mind in part with what Helen is doing with her book, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World, Amazon bestseller in multiple categories, and so it was like, "Hey, why not get on Market Dominance Guys?" Because we talk all the time about what I'll call technique, right, but, when we had Helen on, we talked about this other side, which is the human side. We do a lot of the human side on Market Dominance Guys about what's going on in that person's mind and their gut in the first seven seconds of a conversation? Paula is helping folks discover their own human side so they can bring it into the arena, so to speak, and be a whole person and still be a fantastic performer. I think that that just led to this. Here we are. Paula, welcome. Paula White (04:47): Well, thank you. What an amazing, amazing introduction there. Although I will say, Chris, that our very, very, very first meeting was seven years ago at the AAISP Leadership Summit. Chris Beall (05:04): Was it the leadership summit or the executive retreat? Paula White (05:07): Oh, the executive retreat. You're right. Right. Chris Beall (05:09): We were sitting at the same table- Paula White (05:11): Same table. Chris Beall (05:12): ... when we were being challenged to solve some problem of the world that I can't remember. Yes, that was exactly right. And we were, from the speaker's vantage point, in the back on the left table, you and I [inaudible 00:05:29]. Paula White (05:28): Pretty close. Chris Beall (05:29): I was to your right and you were two seats over and then we started talking. And, Corey, that is what's wrong with me, right there? Corey Frank (05:37): There, there. It all came back in a flourish, right? You just had to unlock the right little [inaudible 00:05:42] cube in there, the brain, and now it all comes forth. When you say become a rockstar leader, and I really like this phrase, I want to learn more about it, called you intentionally connect to people. Paula White (05:56): That is correct. Corey Frank (05:57): What does that mean versus just a bumbling fool like me who accidentally connects with people, or what do you mean intentionally connected to people? Paula White (06:06): First, let me describe, if I may, if you remember these old 45s or old 45 records that had one song on it on Side A and, Side B, they recorded it, but unpublicized it, right? You had a Side A, Side B in these 45 records, and RCA started that about 1942. I decided I would think of your leadership as a Side A, because, as you know, many, many, many great hits came from Side B recordings. Your Side A is your resume building skills, all those things that you do with negotiating and budget planning and sales growth and all the things that you would put on a resume. Side B, I call your hidden hits. That's your humanity, your relationship-based, your people skills, and that's where you really start to intentionally connect with your people. And, when I say intentionally connect, it truly means understanding what your gift is as a leader, because all people are not, and I hate to ruin this or say something out there, but not all people are empathetic or vulnerable. (07:32): There are other Side B traits that we could tap into without making people feel that they have to be empathetic and vulnerable. There's curiosity, there's courageous, trustworthy, passionate, and once you understand what you are internally, this comes up from how you were raised, then you can intentionally connect with your people. If you are the drummer and of curious behavior, you're naturally going to be open-minded, experimenting, and communicative. What do you do? You ask a lot of questions. That's what curious people do. They ask a lot of questions of their teams, of their people, of their environment, and that's how you intentionally connect as the drummer. If you are the vocalist, then you are optimistic. You intentionally connect people with sheer optimism. That's what I mean by intentionally connect. It's really finding out what your Side B trait is. Corey Frank (08:41): A guy like me, with no discernible talent whatsoever, I just play the tambourine, do I have a [inaudible 00:08:47] on the side? Paula White (08:48): You do. It's an assessment that I have that I worked with the Harrison Group on. But we take 175 traits and we narrow them down to what your traits are specifically. You may be a drummer, even though you only play the tambourine. Corey Frank (09:06): Yeah. What about Chris? Now that you've spend some time with Chris, what position of the band ... is it the roadie? Is there a roadie or there's a- Paula White (09:12): There's a roadie? No, not a roadie this time. But, if I were to really take Chris into everything that he is, I would look at Chris as being very gracious, right, and so being gracious is just one of those skill sets that is so hard to come by. But I want to get my list here, as I'm talking to you about this, because it's so amazing. Being gracious is one of those things that we come by and he is always thinking how he can help other people. Wouldn't you agree? Chris Beall (09:54): No, I'm not allowed to agree with this. Paula White (09:59): You're not allowed to agree? Corey Frank (10:01): I would [inaudible 00:10:02]. Chris Beall (10:04): It is true that, when I get up in the morning, that is my number one concern actually. I'll never forget my mom saying to me, when I was about four and I was being a little pisser, she said something that really stuck with me, she said, "Chris, there are," and I believe, at the time, it was true, "there are three billion other people in the world. There's only one of you. Do the math." Corey Frank (10:27): That's right. Chris Beall (10:28): It is true that we have a lot more opportunities to help other people than we do to help ourselves and that's a steadying thing. It's like you don't have to worry, "Gosh, I wonder if there's anybody I could be helpful to." It's like, "Eh, probably run across somebody soon enough." Paula White (10:47): You will. And here's the beautiful thing is the graciousness, or as I call the saxophonist because, if you think of a saxophone, it's rich and deep in tone, those essential traits that Chris taps into is open and reflective, warmth, and I'm going to say it and, Corey, I'm ready for you to come back at me, diplomatic, right? He really likes to develop and is open to a lot of different things. There are traits to avoid in these as well, and I don't see him as defensive or self-critical. Corey Frank (11:30): No, very, very curious, and, if you're a regular listener, which all eight of our listeners are, I think, over the years, right, you'll understand that that level of curiosity that Chris has has helped him be very successful in multiple professions and avocation as well, from mountain climbing to selling bug spray to selling Fuller Brush door to door and waiting tables. We could go on. We should do a show, as we've always threatened, one of these days, just to do dirty jobs of all the jobs that Chris has had over the years. (12:00): With this, Paula, my first instinct, in this hardened world of ours or so, is this, these are really, really soft, small S soft. Does that make me a weaker leader? Do I cry with my people? Because I still have this stigma where I've got to be ... we were talking about somebody, before the recording here, I don't know what role they would play in the band, Chris, it would probably be more like the one-man band. They try to do it all and they don't believe in this stuff at all. What do you say to that? Can I succeed in business or is it I have to have my B Side and my A Side to succeed in business today? Paula White (12:37): Well, I'm so glad you asked that question because I would love to answer that. I get that question a lot. And that's why I say you have to be both business savvy and intentionally connected because you really have to be both, taking the both/and approach to business to be successful today. Employees are looking to be valued and respected. That doesn't mean that, if their dog goes missing, that you shut down the office and go help them, but you can add a level of accountability with kindness at the same time. (13:19): If you were all Side A and all resume, I'm going to say, most of the time, your employees are going to think of you as very blunt, very rigid, and really not want to work with you. If you're Side B all the time, you may be seen as weak and soft and really not respected because they can get one over on you, right? The balance of both, and having that accountability with kindness or that discipline with graciousness, is really the effect of taking it to the next level where you're going to get loyalty, you're going to get productivity, you're going to get retention, which, in business, all leads to the bottom line, profitability. If we don't have that, people are starting to churn. Employees want to be respected. They want to be connected to their leaders. Corey Frank (14:26): Chris, I think it's so interesting. I'd love to have Paula and Miss Fanucci on a podcast too. I remember, from Helen's book, and I think I have a product placement as well, Love Your Team- Paula White (14:40): Nicely done. Corey Frank (14:42): ... [inaudible 00:14:41], but she talks about the categories ... Paula, I don't know if you've had a chance to tackle Helen's book yet, but there's 17 different conversation chapters and they're broken down really succinctly into five categories, and the first category mirrors a lot with what you're talking about. It's called Conversations of Connection. And because the first thing, right, as Helen talks about, is that a manager, a leader, needs to do when they take on a new team, for instance, is make sure that they're connecting with that team, and you can't do that with just A Side type of content, I'm hearing you say Paula White (15:15): No, you cannot, and I usually call that, the first 30 days, a new leader needs to listen, learn, and observe, right? They need to listen to their people. They need to observe and learn, right, and get connected with them, learn about what's going to drive them. Because I'll tell you what, money doesn't drive everybody, but if I know one of my employees is looking to buy a new house or is looking to go on a vacation, I am now going to motivate that person with that connection, right, because that's where they want. If you hit your number early, my goodness, what if we gave you an extra day vacation for that vacation. Corey Frank (16:01): Yeah. Chris, I think Paula's on to something here too, certainly, I know Helen is too, with this concept of loving your team and focusing on the leadership style of a DJ with A Side and B Side, right? Helen talks about the two ways a new leader should talk to someone, right, when you're talking about what a traditional sales manager would do and then what a love your sales manager would do. You obviously talk ... love your team and had a conversation with Paula about this. You see a lot of the similarities there, that I think maybe this is prime for business today. Chris Beall (16:35): Well, I think there's two things that are interestingly similar. One is that, while we have conversations with a lot of people, a lot of the conversations we have are with the people we work with every day. In a leadership position, I think there's a fundamental deep, deep issue with those conversations, and those of us who end up with the no good deed goes unpunished, we get made CEOs or it comes to a head, so to speak, which is what I call the Lonely Minds Club problem. When you're in a leadership position, your conversations are fundamentally asymmetric and you're a little bit stuck with that, right? If somebody wants to ask me, "What's the problem with being a CEO?" and it's like you have nobody to tell you the truth. You just don't, right? And you're not obliged to tell anybody the truth, but how can you be helpful leading people if nobody's going to tell you the truth? (17:25): And I don't mean they never do. I just mean that, at the margin, folks are obliged to protect themselves and their careers and you hold an excess of power as a leader, which is inevitable. It's just built into the position. You can't pretend the power is not there, but you have to figure out what do I do with this asymmetry? And there's a lot of how-to in that. We'll teach you how to read P&L, right, a profit and loss statement, in business school, or we'll teach you how to even something like go to market, right? There might be step, step, step. (17:59): But what's the how-to that allows you to bring out the side of yourself that allows folks at the margin to tell you the truth and to allow you to help them without them being suspicious of your motives, because that's actually how you take teams to the next level. That's where the magic is is you can't abandon the position. The position is fundamentally corrupt. The position of leader is fundamentally corrupt because you have access to power that other people don't have and, therefore, at the margin, you're always tempted to use it. Now you can't deny that position, but what do you do with it? (18:38): And something that Paula is suggesting, I think, in a strong way, and something Helen talks about, is counter that problem that you have of being the leader with a solution that includes who you really are, and that's a different approach. Helen's approach is very much ... it's a cookbook, "Here is the step-by-step," remember, she's a mechanical engineer, Here's the step-by-step to handle this kind of conversation, this kind, this kind. This is when you do it and this is how you do it and this is how you know if they happen," right? She doesn't talk much about what's inside of you, other than to say, "If it's not there, don't do the job, right? If it's not there, self-select and do something else for a living," right? (19:20): Paula is actually going about it from the other side and saying, "Well, know what's inside of you so you can consciously and intentionally bring it out in connecting with other people," knowing that the connecting with other people, the building of relationships, the ability to work together honestly, which is the hardest part of business. How do you work together honestly, when you have too much power with somebody that has less power than you? It's always a runaway train. It's the boulder that wants to go down the hill. You know where it's going to go, right? How do you do that? And she's suggesting, "Well, flip the record over and play the other side, not your greatest hits, how you got here, but who you are, which is still in there somewhere." Chris Beall (20:45): I think. Right, Paula? Is it something along those lines? Paula White (20:50): Exactly. You are speaking my language, exactly. I say Side B as a metaphor, but also as a tool, because I think sometimes we need to understand who we are on the inside, and not just by words, but by feelings. And what's the best way to feel, it's to listen to music, and music because it is the universal language. Now some people like to paint, some people like to do other things, but music is around us every day. (21:23): When you're grocery shopping, intentionally listen to the music that they put on their sound system, when you're in a restaurant. Those are specifically there to set a mood, right? When you're getting ready to go into a big meeting, let's say, with your boss, with your people, I talk about taking that one song of yours that's going to get you in that mood so that you can enter that room from a place that's authentically you, bringing your whole self in, and not ready to defend your position, but to listen, right? Corey Frank (22:03): It takes a little bit of courage though, doesn't it? If I'm not around necessarily, somebody's got to go first. From a cultural perspective, there could be a lot of risk inherent to that. How do I bypass that? How do I find that cheat code to just ... it's okay to be my authentic self on the Side B? Paula White (22:20): First thing to do is put together your leadership playlist, right? Write down the moods that you select or that you're fully aware of while you're at work. Would it be that you're disrupted, that you get angry, that you're joyful? What are those specific moods that you have? You're stressed, you're overwhelmed. And find one song that's going to get you out of that for each one of those moods and create a leadership playlist. It should not be longer than 10 songs because the last thing we want to do is go down a rabbit hole, right? Start that way. Another way is to play your favorite playlist on your way to work to get yourself prepped for that. Then, on the way home, play a playlist that's going to get you prepped for home. Those are the ways that we can use music as a tool. (23:15): But, as a metaphor, I'm not sure we're going to be able to change the culture as it is right this minute, but we can start with our emerging leaders, the ones who want that respect, who want that value, who want to be seen, and we start coaching them on their Side B skills and their Side B traits and how to understand that those can be used and, actually, when they are used, they're very powerful. If I'm talking to a CEO today, the first thing I'm talking about is bottom line, profitability, productivity, retention. They're having trouble keeping people. Why is that? Well, people don't like to work. People want to be flexible. People don't want to come back to the office. That's not necessarily true. People want to be seen and valued. (24:16): Again, it's not that you're going to go out and hunt for the dog, but you're going to care about that dog when that person comes in, right? And, yes, some people will strike the iron saying, "You're weak. You're motherly," I don't know how many times I've been told I was motherly, "You're nurturing." That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you've got to use both. You've got to use both your business savvy skills and your intentionally connected skills, and you're going to get the retention, you're going to get the profitability, and your P&L is going to look a lot better. Corey Frank (24:57): Well, Chris, you come from the venture world, private equity world, entrepreneur-in-residence, hired gun as a CEO. You probably had to turn around many cultures that you've been a part of, or asked to participate in, either as a board observer or member or an investor. What do you say to that? How do you get that sense where a culture is just missing the Side B and that usually is maybe one of the largest constraints that they have in that system? Chris Beall (25:27): Here's a test that I tended to do. It's like let's look at the problem that we're solving. And somebody just told me, "Draw the circle on the whiteboard and have no name in it. This is us, right? This is what we do. A little arrow comes out of it and there's a little stick figure. Who is that person that we help? What is that thing that we provide? How much money do they make or lose when that little arrow ships something to them, so to speak?" I'm not really asking the question. Usually, it's a pretty obvious answer. What I want to know is, can we talk about it together? It's like making music together. Can we talk about it harmoniously? Can we enjoy the conversation? Can we agree and disagree? Can we be confused? Can we do all the things that it takes in order to start to work together within a conversation? (26:20): I'm much more focused on the mood. Are we being honest with each other? Is it fun? Can we poke fun at each other? Do people know each other's little foibles and, without being mean, can they point them out in the way that people who are really on a team can do? Everybody thinks somebody else is funny in a particular way, right? I just think that that's the essence of making teams work. Teams work when teams can work together. And, most of the time, when things aren't going well, folks retreat into their own corners and then they can't work together on the hard stuff. They can only work on their own job. But, until you can work together, you can't really work on the hard stuff, and the hard stuff is always out there. It's always there. It's either something competitive, or you've run into the limits of your ability to make the system that you've built build, or you've got a scale issue, or you've got a quality issue or whatever it happens to be. How do you work together on it? (27:18): You got to learn to sing together. And I actually think the song that I listen for, in a group like that, is honest laughter. When you come right down to it, if you're not having fun, you're not taking it seriously enough. And getting to the point where you can have fun together is the essence of making teams actually work. There's no such thing as a grim team working effectively together, right, "I hate you, you hate me, but we're going to get this done," kind of thing, right, or big boss is hitting us with the whip and making us go in the same direction. Well, at some point, we're going to cut the traces and we're going to go somewhere else. (28:02): But I love this idea of Paula's about the music, by the way. As you know, Corey, I'm an occasional musician, right? As I asked Helen on the podcast the other day, I said, "You got married this summer, didn't you?" And she said, "Yes, and it was so nice of you to show up and play the piano." [inaudible 00:28:19]. I'm not a very good musician, but I'm a big believer in the power of music to get inside of us without us having to invite it in. (28:32): And it's something we talk about on Market Dominance Guys with regard to the nature of the cold call and information. When we speak with somebody, the music of our voice goes directly into their mid-brain at 20,000 bits a second. That's four emails a second that are going into that person. It's mostly in the song and very little of it's in the lyrics. That is the words we put in the script are a very small part of what we communicate to somebody with a purpose, and the purpose is to help them trust us enough that we can explore helping them with their business problem. Step one is trust. Act zero is ambush. We go from between ambush and trust. Well, we sing to them. (29:20): I remember being in a board meeting once at a company that I was asked to come in and help, and this is a company that I wasn't allowed to know who it was. I was given an address to go to. And so I went to this address and the person who opened the door expected me and they put me in a room and I sat in the room for half an hour and then some people came in and I listened to what they had to say. And, when it came time to ask me and a couple other people what they thought, they got to me and I said, "Well, your problem is your product is a fake, right? It's completely fake. It's just a bunch of fancy slides and there's a fake." (29:59): They hired me and stuff like that, and I went to the first board meeting and came out and this brilliant guy I worked with said, "What did you just do to those people?" I said, "What do you mean?", a venture board, he says, "You changed your voice and you sang a song to them that caused them to decide not to shut us down." And I think that, to me ... music done by professional musicians is especially compelling, that's why they're professional musicians, but when it comes to actually interacting with people and helping them along the way of working with us, it's actually the music of our voice that is going to carry the burden. We can't actually go to the professional musician, say, "In the meeting today, what we're going to do is we're going to listen to Stairway to Heaven and the P&L is going to go crazy." But we do sing to each other all the time and we feel different and can act differently and can actually be a little bit different when somebody helps us out with the way they use their voice with us. Paula White (31:15): I agree with that 100% because it's like being in the recording studio. Everyone that comes in needs to check their ego at the door and whatever comes out is the best idea and that is really where it comes to. If you were to go into a boardroom and ask them, "Name a song that describes your company right now," they would be all over the place, but, by the end of the meeting, you want them all singing that same song and that song being the same.

When you’re nearing the end of the quarter, especially the fourth quarter, do you tend to panic and offer a discount in order to close any deals hanging fire? Oren Klaff, New York Times bestselling author of Pitch Anything and Flip The Script, discusses the downside of this neediness on today’s Market Dominance Guys podcast. Our two hosts, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, explore with Oren what happens to the status you have so carefully built with your prospective customer if you blatantly display just how needy and desperate you are to close the deal. Does showing your soft underbelly increase your chance of closing the deal? Or does your neediness kill the deal altogether? Oren’s advice is to stick to the sales process — and HOLD, no matter what. Join these three sales analysts as they caution the sales reps of the world about the pitfalls of a needy mindset when a sales deadline is looming on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Hold Everything!” ----more---- More Marketet Dominance Guys episodes with Oren Klaff here: https://marketdominanceguys.com/category/guest-oren-klaff  About Our Guest Oren Klaff is one of the world's leading experts on sales, raising capital, and negotiation. He is the New York Times bestselling author of two sales-related books, Flip The Script and Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal. Employing his securities markets experience in capital-raising advisory leadership, Oren is Managing Director of Capital Markets at the investment bank Intersection Capital, where he manages its capital-raising platform. Since 2005, Oren has grown the firm to approximately $2 billion in aggregate trade volume across a diversified portfolio of companies and transactions.   Full episode transcript below: Announcer (00:05): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys. A program exploring all the high stake speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch49. (00:21): When you're nearing the end of the quarter, especially the fourth quarter, you tend to panic and offer a discount in order to close any deals hanging fire or in clap. New York Times bestselling author of Pitch Anything and Flip the Script discusses the downside of this neediness on today's Market Dominance Guys Podcast. Our two hosts, Chris Beal and Corey Frank, explore with Oren what happens to the status you have so carefully built with your prospective customer if you blatantly display just how needy and desperate you are to close the deal. (00:51): Does showing your soft underbelly increase your chance of closing the deal? Or does your neediness kill the deal altogether? Oren's advice is to stick to the sales process and hold no matter what. Join these three sales analysts as they caution the sales reps of the world about the pitfalls of a needy mindset when the sales deadline is looming, on today's Market Dominance Guys episode Hold Everything. Corey Frank (01:20): And here we are. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, the prophet of profits, the hawking of Hawking, does that make sense? And we have, Oren, I'm sorry I don't have any nicknames I've rehearsed in my shower for the last few weeks for you, we have Oren Klaff, best-selling author of Pitch Anything, Flip the Script, and Sales Connoisseur. I don't know, that's all I got. So welcome, Chris, we got to a great special guest in the hotseat today and what brings the three of us together? What could possibly top the last podcast we did? Oh I don't know, a short six, eight months ago or so. We probably have something to announce, do we not, Oren, Chris, that we could talk to a little later in the podcast? Chris Beall (02:07): I think we do. For one thing, let me just point out, I recommend some sales books but I don't force any of them down anybody's throat except for Flip the Script. And the reason I do is Flip the Script says, "Don't force this book down somebody's throat," and I just love the delicious irony of utterly failing to apply every single principle in this book while pushing this book on people. I don't know, the dynamic tension in that just works for me. Corey Frank (02:36): It's like don't push this button [inaudible 00:02:39]. Chris Beall (02:39): Yeah, it's like peeps, look, if you have only two books you can read in this coming year and for some of you that is a stretch, read Flip the Script and learn how to do simple things like get a little status alignment going and learn how to flash roll. I'm still trying to teach our people how to flash roll. They tend to want to drift into teaching at that point. Learn how to flash roll. And then when you're done with all that and you realize that you're not going to do all this, that you're a manager and your people are going to do it, pick up Helen Fanucci's Love Your Team and go and read that, and you put those two together, and I don't know, I'm not going to be responsible for you failing, I'm just not going to be responsible. Oren Klaff (03:18): In the military, those super sauced up guys, so calm guys, they have these banana clips they put in the clip, and then they shoot the 28 bullets or where the 30 bullets are that clip, and then they flip it right around, and then they shove the next clip in because it's already attached. I feel like Flip the Script and then Love Your Team, you shove that in, you shoot all those 30 bullets, you're out, then flip it over, and then Love Your Team flips in. Corey Frank (03:42): I love it. That's right. Well, hey, I thought getting you two fine gentlemen together, here we are coming up on the end of another quarter and the end of another year coming up in Q4, and Oren, we always talk about no neediness, right? I think what you've hit me over the head for the years we've known each other. Chris, certainly that's what you talk about on this podcast many, many times. (04:04): But here we are coming up at the end of the year and so I wanted to grab you two gentlemen and talk, certainly maybe about a pending event that we have coming up, but also what do you do so we don't just drop the price and create all these insulting kind of promotions to finish the year strong but still have a little pipeline left going into Q1. So, from a neediness perspective or what are you going to think to that? Oren Klaff (04:28): I like to think in visuals. There was this movie, The Perfect Storm, towards the end they're like going up this wave and however, they shot this wave is like a thousand times bigger than the boat, and they're going straight up it. The captain's telling the kid at the wheel to hold because he wants to turn it, and he's going, "Hold!" And they're climbing up this wave and it's just terrifying. He wants to turn, "Hold, hold, hold." That's what I think is like [inaudible 00:04:52], is you want to turn the boat, you want to turn around, you want to run to safety, and you need Corey, or me, or Chris get saying, "Hold, don't turn the wheel, just hold." Right? And you get yourself in this impossible situation in which there's no possible way to get out. But you have somebody who's been in that situation saying, "Hold, don't be needy, don't turn the wheel." And then it becomes, "Now! Turn the wheel." (05:23): But you have to be able to hold through that period where most other people would cave, collapse, run away scared, start discounting. So, if you could remember, hold your position. If you built the position but then you're afraid of the position you built and back away from it, you haven't done any good. You cannot be needy. I don't care if this is the last account on earth for you, because the other side of being needy is it definitely will not close. You have to hold strong, hold. Get a tattoo on your forearm. I mean, I'm not advocating that you get a tattoo, but go ahead and get a tattoo that says hold, based on this podcast and Corey will sign it for you. I don't want my name on it because I don't know who you're married to, but you know. Corey Frank (06:15): All right. Chris, from your perspective, you have obviously ConnectAndSell. You have a weapon that brings more prospects to your doorstep, more than they can even handle. So, what do you tell your clients, your fellow CEOs, your fellow CROs, CEOs, VPs of sales, when they come to this time of the year that, "Hey, I can bring you the prospects, I can bring the conversations to you, but be careful you don't do x." Chris Beall (06:42): Well, one of the things is there's a mathematical thing, right? It's like driving on a one-lane road. You have a problem. And that is if anybody's slow in front of you, then you got to decide to either be as slow as they are or go off-road. And sometimes you got to go off-road, and sometimes you got to go up the wave, and sometimes you got to hold and hold and hold. A really good idea, and it's getting a little late, but a good idea is to just, if you widen a little, you widen a lot. That is, if your portfolio is a little bit bigger, it's a lot bigger. And that's just the way it is. With risk management, we all think, "Oh, if I add one more opportunity to my one opportunity, I've reduced the risk by something." You don't know what it is. (07:29): You've cut it in half, my friend. But you add a third one and you actually cut it two less than a third. Now, you've cut it to one over three to the third. Ooh, you've cut it to by 26, 27th. Life gets a lot better because you only need one lane to go down. Now, do you need it or not need it? Well, you might need it but you better not act like you need it because it's like Oren drives the best cars. And when Oren shooting a gap between two cars or he's making a decision to pass in someplace that's a little tiny bit marginal or whatever, once he makes that decision, he's got to actually hold that line. He can't kind of half unmake the decision part way into whatever it is that that maneuver is, right? (08:19): There's just a rule in all, I'll call them ballistic acts. A ballistic act is where the performance outcome, the thing you want, depends on what came before, therefore what came before, therefore what came before. It starts somewhere and once you commit to it you're really screwed unless you go through with it. I used to be, Corey, and Oren keeps trying to forget, I used to be a very serious rock climber mountaineer, and there's a word used in climbing and there's a word that's used as an adjective and it's used as a noun. As an adjective, the word committed. That's a really committed route means once you start you better finish it or you're toast. You start that move, you got to finish the move. That's like the same thing. It's like look, once you're here and you're in a committed situation, you have to ignore all outcomes and you simply have to go; that's just a truth of the world. Oren Klaff (09:16): And so I think what happens is ultimately we tell people run the process. And so if they go, "I forgot the process," or, "What process?" Then there's a problem. But if you have a process and you just go, yeah, outcome independent, don't be needy, run the process, trust the process, and then if you don't like still the nervousness that brings with it, then have Chris bring you lots of other pipelines. So, we run that process in a very high stakes, high tension situation where there's a couple of leads, we got to close two out of four. And it's very challenging. (09:54): That's where we learned this never be needy, but if we know Chris is going to bring us another 18, then we're flipping. We come to meetings in T-shirts, we say things we wouldn't, we take risks we otherwise wouldn't take. We come late, we come early, we do what we want because we're like, "Yeah, that didn't work out. Let's not do that again. But still, Hey Chris, bring that wheel barrel over here. Jumps some more leads off." We just figured out a couple of things that are not going to work, so the great thing is if you have a process you can run it, that allows you to hold and stay the course. But if you can run a process and you've got pipeline, there's a name for that. (10:29): I'm not sure how it's pronounced in German, or Swiss, or whatever you speak, Chris, but in English we call it a business. Where you have prospects, you have a process, you've got a technique in which you can close them, and then you also have new leads coming in case something goes wrong, you don't close the lead that you wanted to. That's called a business. Corey Frank (10:51): Oren, talk a little bit about with neediness, we've had a number of conversations about this, you need some status with that neediness. And I think that if you built up a good status in your previous conversations with this prospect, with this company, with this executive team, you're expecting that status is going to hold, right? But as you've always talked and you've written about, it's temporary, and so you need to establish it throughout. And it seems like a lot of sales reps will abandon all that status they've worked to hold and maintain at the last month of the year, the last few weeks of the year to try to get a deal. Oren Klaff (11:29): Yeah, I think there's one way to address this. Okay, yes, we're having an event... Sorry, what was your question? (11:42): Let me try to run this down. So, Chris, Corey, and I said let's have an event and it was in June and it became July and then it became August. Back then in August, August we could've had any event, like Chris and Corey debate politics and crypto, and that would've been a good event. Then it became September, end of the year, busy. We didn't do the event. So finally we got serious. We said it's now. (12:06): All right, December and we're still having an event. And then Corey pointed out, it better be really good if we're going to have an event in December. So yes, we're having a really good event in December. Actually, it's too good because when you hear about it. The event's too good when I don't want to speak at it, I just want to go to it and benefit from the event. Because like hey, my business can use the event, but I'm actually in the event and part of it, but I'm too busy to do what I'm doing at the event for our own business. So, this thing is amazing and I really want to be there. So status. Oren Klaff (13:32): I think what happens is salespeople very carefully and intuitively curate their status going in. And so they appoint themselves well, they give a good presentation, but now you're sort of a move out of your domain into their domain and people come out of nowhere that know more than you. It's like a video game. You're going up higher levels and bigger bosses come out. My favorite analogy, as you know, is you think you're fighting the boss to win the level and this giant foot comes out of nowhere and crushes the boss you're fighting, right? The big boss cares so little about... He just crushes his own team, and what's going on here? And that's where salespeople lose their status is where somebody who has much stronger frame, much more expertise, much more knowledge, and actually controls the contract comes out of nowhere. And that's where status goes to die. (14:29): And I think it's not a status event, but we're definitely covering how to hold your status not at the beginning, because there's like no teaching about status that you need at the beginning, right? Yeah, I dress good. I talk politely. I have a presentation. Everybody can hold it together at the beginning until the stress comes on. And then the things we're talking about, never be needy, hold your status together, make sure you've got pipeline, widen your lane, stuff that Chris and Corey know how to do really come together once you're later in the deal and there's real stressors. (15:05): And if you think about it, last thing then I'll turn back over to you, you're at the beginning of a deal all the time, right? There's a lot more first downs than there are fourth downs, I think. I'm not sure. We'll have to check that. But anyway, you're at the beginning of deals all the time and so you're good at the beginning. Chris and I had a call with Andreson, one of the big venture firms today, which is great, but how often are you on a call with Andreson Horowitz versus on a call with somebody about something? So, you're good at beginnings, but how good are you at controlling those later stages when status falls apart, you fall apart? Chris Beall (15:41): [inaudible 00:15:41]. That remind me of a story by the way. Corey Frank (15:42): Go ahead, Chris. Chris Beall (15:43): There's a story [foreign language 00:15:44]. Oren Klaff (15:44): A story about our event? Chris Beall (15:46): Yeah, this is a story [inaudible 00:15:49]. This is the kind of thing you learn at this event is to do what's in the story. So, first of all, this event is so important, I might actually show up. I might not because I have a very dear family member who's having surgery the day before and might need my care, and I'll be approximately 1400 miles away, but I could be there. The story is sometimes you have to be somewhere else in New York. You find yourself at the end, you don't even know it's going to be the end. So this particular story, I was called by the general counsel of the General Electric Company who told me, "I need to talk to you and I need to talk to you tomorrow." (16:23): And so it was a Sunday. I went and did my usual thing. I was living in Denver, went down to the airport, asked them at the red carpet club where I was going. They told me. I got on an airplane, I got off, I went into a building up there in Connecticut. And the general counsel of General Electric put me in a room, a big boardroom, the one right under the CEO's office, right under Jack Law's office. And he sat down and he dressed like Mr. Rogers, which I think was one of his best tricks. And he literally pounded the table, which I thought was hilarious. (16:54): I almost laughed out loud, but I held it. "You are destroying the General Electric Company." Now, that's a case where you're kind of at the end because this had to do with a huge renewal opportunity for 11 out of the 12 general electric companies. Now, what are you going to do there? You must have something wired into you that allows you to hold your status. And I have a fondness for humor. I just said, "Well, there must be some amount of money you'd like to pay me to get me to stop destroying the General Electric Company." It's an example. Oren Klaff (17:29): That's where he pressed the button underneath this desk, and security came in, escorted you out the building. Chris Beall (17:34): No, no. He started laughing. And you know what? We ended up doing the deal I wanted to do. Oren Klaff (17:39): Oh, I have a great story about the other call that I have to be on right now [inaudible 00:17:48]. The good news, well, so the bad news is it's not a good story. The good news, it's a very short one. Corey, can you run down the dates of the event and a little bit of information for people and then I will call both of you in a while. Corey Frank (18:00): Yes. We are going to do this on December 7th and December 8th coming up here in a very short period of time. And what we're going to do is we're going to put you and your existing sales process through the ringer. We're going to take and rip up your sales script, turn it into a screenplay, and start from scratch building up a brand new December Q4 sales machine for you with a screenplay that's tailored to your business. And Chris's team, Oren's team, our team, the Branch 49 team, we're going to walk you through step by step through this Pitch Anything formula, through the best practices and how we create a screenplay, and apply it to the industry and business. So the best part, Chris, right, Oren, as you know, is we're going to perfect your pitch and you're going to practice it. (18:45): If this is your first time at Fight Club, you will fight. If it's your first time dialing with ConnectAndSell, you will dial and we're going to jump right on the phones right alongside you. And by the end of the event, you're going to have a brand new pitch process. You're going to have a brand new screenplay that drives qualified leads back to you that are ready to buy. And we are going to guarantee that you're going to close enough meetings to at least equal the cost of the event, or Chris's team, orange team, our team, we're going to work with you until you do. That's a pretty good guarantee, would you say, Chris? Chris Beall (19:20): That's crazy. Corey, has anybody ever in the history of, I don't know, life on Earth, have they ever actually done this particular kind of event? This exact thing. Corey Frank (19:32): I recall when you visited our sales team at my previous company, you swooped in with the jump boots and one or two of your cohorts, and you walked us through a mini version of this. I think this was one of the origins, I know you've had others, of the flight school because as soon as we started utilizing the weapon of ConnectAndSell, and I think it was the first monosyllabic construction we put together, you said, "Stop. What are you saying? Stop. Don't ever say that again." (20:00): And you completely deconstructed and then built up our screenplay to an effective breakthrough screenplay that changed the trajectory of our business. And hence, since many thousands of folks in flight school later, many thousands of folks at our Pitch Anything events later, many thousands of events or phone calls that we've made here at Branch 49, I think we're pretty dialed in on how to do cold outreach. Chris Beall (20:27): And it's fascinating to me because some people don't like that word, cold outreach. They think it implies, well, I don't know, it's December and it's cold or something like that. Or maybe you don't like people, you're so cold when you're reaching out. Of course, it's technical. It's a term of art. It means outreach to people you haven't spoken with before. And if you have half a brain in your head, these are people that you would like to speak with. You have a hypothesis and that is a conversation with anybody on that list of people, anybody in that target set has a reasonable shot of moving forward to something better than where you are than talking to a random person. That's not a big hypothesis. That's an important one. What's so interesting to me, and this is what this event is going to be about, is it doesn't have anything specifically to do with what you're selling. (21:15): It has to do with one universal truth, which is you're speaking to a human being and that is bedrock. That's the thing I always come back to and somebody goes, "Well, does it work in this industry? That industry?" We don't want to come to this thing like that because what we do is we sell something so high value, customized, so bespoke, so thought through, that nothing that you guys could teach us or that we could practice in an event like this could possibly fit us. (21:46): But you know what? It's kind of like a pair of gloves. As long as I know you have fingers, even if you're missing one or say, you have an extra one because well, maybe you do. Maybe somebody killed your father and they should prepare to die, but you still have got something that pretty much looks like a hand, it's going to fit pretty much in a glove and you're about to go pretty much out into 20 below and you're better off with gloves than with no gloves. You're going into a world where it's better to have something on your hands. And that's really where we're taking it, that's what's cold, is that world you're going into. I think it's going to be quite a fascinating experience for folks. I dearly do hope I can physically show up. It's extremely inconvenient. Corey Frank (22:32): Well, it's your weapon. It is your weapon and probably a member or two of your team. So, ConnectAndSell will be represented fully in spirit and in practice. And you're mentioning cold outreach, Chris, I think maybe we could finish with this concept because we've talked about it a lot. I know the esteemed Jerry Hale posted something on LinkedIn several months ago about this concept of survivorship bias and particularly how germane that is probably to Q4. Listen, we've always done a discount at the end of Q4. We've always extended our contracts for another month to allow our folks to make it easier to jump on board. So, maybe just talk a little bit about not just cold outreach in the approach, but how survivorship bias really kind of diminishes your opportunity to grow as a sales organization because of that's how we've always done it this way. Chris Beall (23:25): Survivorship bias is funny because everybody I think, I hope they know the story. It was invented as a concept looking at the damage done to bombers that were flying over Germany in World War II. And the ones that came back that where they had the holes in them, what they were doing is basically saying, "Well, this is where they got hit. We should put armor there." And that's incorrect. This is where they got hit and they made it back. So, those places don't need armor. Put more armor in the places where they got hit and didn't make it back. (24:00): Now, it's a little actually more challenging to figure out what that really means, but anything's better than putting armor in a place that you didn't need it, because we know it always adds weight. So, when we come to the end of a quarter or a year and we're looking at last year and we're going, "Well this worked last year." What worked is like a plane coming back, it "worked." (24:26): Do we really know which part of the plane went down? Or the ones that didn't work and are maybe it was one of those that would've made it? Did we even select correctly which deals to focus on and where to put our armor, so to speak? Survivorship bias is the most insidious, I think, of the intellectual failings that we embrace in groups. So, groupthink is bad, but groupthink is amplified by survivorship bias because we can all see the same thing and seeing as believing. We reason in very simple ways about these situations and the simplest way is let's do what we did last year. Corey Frank (25:06): Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've talked about false positive versus false negatives and how most organizations... I think we talked about this with Jeb when we were on the phone, is that how most organizations look at false positives and they should be, similar to survivorship bias, looking at the false negatives, correct? Chris Beall (25:22): Yeah, false negatives kill businesses. False positive, they cost you a little something, you have to do some work that you throw away. Dying is not as attractive, frankly, as doing some work you throw away. Now, the fact of the matter is management of ignorance is what it's all about. And it's really interesting. If you want to hold, you want to do it what Oren said, which is hold, one of the things you oddly have to do to be so committed is you have to embrace your ignorance. You have to admit you don't actually know based on the information you're getting right now, what your reaction should be. (25:58): And since you don't know, your best course action is probably to be proactive, to run your process. P-R-O, as the beginning of both of those words because your lack of knowledge is actually your savior, in this case. It's like, "I don't know, so I may as well do what we decided to do, whatever that happens to be." And it is that change of course. It's like, "well, what if we offer them a discount right now?" I have a couple of them right now. I've got a couple of deals that are... One of them, one of my very best customers will expire at the end of the day. I'm sitting here talking to you. Corey Frank (26:38): That's right. That's right. Well, I'm sure the rep on the deal is... Chris Beall (26:42): I am the rep. Corey Frank (26:43): Oh, you're the rep, too. Even better. Chris Beall (26:44): Well, we have another principle here, and I think a lot of people practice it, but we're pretty hard over here at ConnectAndSell. We all sell from the front lines and we don't sell the special deals. We just sell deals. And in fact, I sell the most experimental deals. The ones that are the weirdest. People turn their nose up at and go, "Why'd you do that?" Because I can endure the most reputational damage without being damaged. Being the CEO, as long as you hold and people make fun of you like, "Oh, that's a stupid deal. That was idiotic." It's like, yeah, well, it's part of my job is to explore the possible on behalf of all of us. Som I get to go to the top of some mountain that turns out there was nothing over on the other side that was worthwhile, but I'm kind of a sunk cost, right? As the CEO, you kind of a sunk cost. (27:30): So, we sell from the front lines, but one of the reasons we do it is that there's a hidden set of signals that go on in a company that cause reps to waiver. And it's this thing that says, "Hey, do the right thing in the deal. Go do the right thing." We all know what that is. Oh, and by the way, make the number no matter what. It's like those are a little bit at odds with you there and that's fine. I mean, dynamic tension is the essence of good stories, but at some point you have to decide what are we going to do as a company? What's our real goal? Was it to make this number? (28:07): It's very rare, by the way, that making a specific number on a specific date makes all the difference. I'll never forget my eldest, and I think I told this story once in a previous episode, we were in a meeting and everybody's talking about it, making this number on this date and all these numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. And we came out and my eldest kid, Serenity, at the time said, "So, dad, I have a question." I said, "what's the question?" She said, "Well, do they think by talking about the numbers, they're going to change them?" (28:43): And I said, "Yes, they do." And she thought for a while said, "That's really sad," and walked off and led me over to Starbucks for hot chocolate. Talking about the stuff is actually a bad habit. Talking about what's going to close, talking about when it's going to close, talk, talk, talk, talks a bad habit. Go run the process and take your spare time and fill up with other opportunities because they'll make you stronger. Corey Frank (29:09): One of my good friends, our good friends, Robert Vera always talks about you can't out exercise your fork. So, as much as you want to do a lot of activity, you got to make sure that the biggest constraint in your system is tackled and it takes... You're a mathematician and a physician. It takes 3,500 calories to burn every pound of fat. These are the laws of thermodynamics. The same for celestial mathematics and the laws of physics. And those exist in client acquisition and revenue. And you have to eliminate that biggest constraint in your system, as we've said time and again. And for most folks, it's establishing that trust-based conversation game at scale and no conversations, no product-market fit, no conversations, no core Q4 achievement, no ticket, no laundry, right? And so if you're not doing five to six pitches in your tam, as you said many times, guess what? Somebody else is. Chris Beall (30:05): And those are the good ones. Corey Frank (30:05): [inaudible 00:30:07]. Chris Beall (30:07): Most are the good ones. It's prima facie evidence that they're good. They're actually happening. [inaudible 00:30:16]. And it's so fascinating when folks talk about the quality versus quantity thing, and there's all these sort of notions that people have like, "Oh, if I just think harder about the quality, then there'll be better meetings." Embrace your ignorance. Your ignorance is your friend. Freedom is your friend. Just go in knowing nothing and have a conversation. (30:38): I mean, you know one thing. You have a range of capabilities, you have a range of things that you could bring to bear. You're representing your company, that's why you're called a rep. You're representing what your company's capable of doing. Now, you know what that range of capabilities are, but you really don't know where the problems for the other person or the challenges, the gaps where they are. Okay, your ignorance is your friend. That's what enables you to be curious and ask those curiosity-based questions. And when you're needy, you want to see where neediness shows up first. Neediness kills more deals in discovery, then it kills at the end of a year by a lot. Not a little. Corey Frank (31:23): There you go. Absolutely. Well, I think we also need to mention the event one more time since Oren's not on here, right? Chris Beall (31:31): Yeah, when is it? Corey Frank (31:33): December 7th and December 8th at the Top Gun Studios in Carlsbad, California. Chris Beall (31:37): Wow. Corey Frank (31:38): Yes. Sunny, sunny California, right on the beach. You've had many events over the years there, Chris, you've been there many times. We'll try to maybe take a few of the cars out for a spin, maybe a couple of Ducati's since Oren's not on here, we can guarantee that. We'll have a blast. We're limiting it. If you would like some more information, please reach out to me at [email protected]. Go to orenklaff.com, go to [email protected]. christ.beall, correct? Chris Beall (32:06): Yeah, chris.beall. Corey Frank (32:09): [inaudible 00:32:09]. Okay, great. And with that, Chris, I think we're going to put together another episode in the can here, since we do have our own Q4. Of course, you're not sitting around, you're waiting for the prospects to come to you. So, if he buys, he buys. It's only your number one client. We'll wait to hear how that story ends in the next episode. So for Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank with the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time. Chris Beall (32:34): All right, thanks, Corey.

“It costs five times more to get a new client than to keep one you already have.” Today, Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, elaborates on his commitment to customer retention and to his company’s practice of over-delivery with our Market Dominance Guys’ host, Chris Beall. Rick believes that building relationships with clients is vital to any company’s success, so he begins by onboarding each new customer himself, answering all the frequently asked questions, and personally checking back to make sure the customer’s initial experience with Simply Noted’s products and services is a happy one. “When you’re truly on your client’s side, they’ll hear it in your voice,” Rick explains. Listen to this podcast, and you too will hear the commitment to customer retention in Rick’s voice in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Focus on Over-Delivery.”   About Our Guest Rick Elmore is founder and CEO of Simply Noted in Tempe, Arizona, a company that utilizes software and robotic technology to create personalized handwritten notes for its 300,000 monthly users. ----more---- Full episode transcript below: Announcer (00:06): Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys. A program exploring all the high-stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49. (00:23): It costs five times more to get a new client than to keep one you already have. Today, Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted elaborates on his commitment to customer retention and to his company's practice of over-delivery with our Market Dominance Guys' host, Chris Beall. Rick believes that building relationships with clients is vital to any company's success, so he begins by onboarding each new customer himself, answering all the frequently asked questions and personally checking back to make sure the customer's initial experience with Simply Noted's products and services is a happy one. "When you're truly on your client's side, they'll hear it in your voice." Rick explains. Listen to this podcast, and you too will hear the commitment to customer retention in Rick's voice in today's Market Dominance Guys' episode, Focus on Over-Delivery. Chris Beall (01:20): Pretty fascinating. Here's a modern problem. So we have this massive work from home thing that showed up in 2020. We actually got to watch it, the day everybody went home in our customer base. We knew what day it was. It was like everything still worked, which was pretty cool. We thought that was amazing. Our people who navigate these phone calls all went home too. That shocked me that that worked. We dodged more than a bullet that particular day, because at 200,000 plus dials navigated a day by human beings. You got to have people who can navigate those styles and suddenly there are centers they were working at. We didn't know that had happened. But now I'm kind of looking at it going, okay, everybody's going to work from home. My wife's book, Love Your Team, A Survival Guide for sales managers in a hybrid world, in a hybrid world means a bunch of people are working from home. (02:06): How do you solve that problem of knowing how to get to them working from home? People send stuff to me in my office in Los Gatos and I will go there, something on the order of twice this year maybe. Partially because when you set foot in California, they tax you for that day of work, but for some other reasons too. What do you do there? How do I get my customers or even my team? So my innocent team right, there they are, I got 10 SDRs and I got 10 AEs and they're talking to say 85,000 people a year. How do they get that physical note to the right person? Rick Elmore (02:43): Yeah. Chris Beall (02:43): How do they get the address part to happen? Rick Elmore (02:45): So most of our clients have addresses already. Work with tons of nonprofits, political affiliation, political action committees, real estate, mortgage, insurance. All these people usually have those addresses, but there are a lot of creative ways you can find people's address. What we've seen people do, we don't do it, is they'll find a list of people they want to contact, at least the city they live in, and then they'll hire VAs to scrape list off of Reference USA match names and addresses or Data Axle or PropertyRate. I mean there's tons of ways to find someone's address, but I would say majority of our clients already have this information. But if there is a need to find it, you can get creative and find it. It's just a little extra work but [inaudible 00:03:30] off of Upwork or Fiverr, give them a list, tell them here's the three web addresses to use to scrape and match names in cities, and they do it. They do a good job. Chris Beall (03:39): Interesting, interesting. So in the B2B world, we live in B2B right. We have a couple of customers use ConnectAndSell for B2C. We're not hugely enthusiastic about it, even though it works great because the regulatory surround on phone is non-trivial, right? And on business call somebody. So B2B is kind of funny because getting their work address is probably easy, getting it to their desk is probably easy. Are they ever at their desk is probably an unknown. Now I suppose we could ask them, but what do you see in B2B? I want to get it to their home probably, I think. Who's doing B2B and how are they doing it? Rick Elmore (04:15): B2B is a lot of medical software, corporate gifting. A lot of those types of companies, they usually have addresses and they're sending straight to the buildings. But if they want to get addresses, we just point them in the direction of how to do that. I'm trying to think of a good case study of somebody going B2B. Yeah, we had this CRM company for veterinarians and what they did is they just sent a handwritten note to every veterinarian office and just said, dear office manager, dear doctor, whoever was registered at that address. But if you have a more specific question on B2B, what type of industry, I can probably pull up an example of some client we've worked with over the last four or five years. Chris Beall (04:53): Sure. We can always be pioneers. Rick Elmore (04:54): Yeah. Chris Beall (04:55): I mean in this space we may as well try yours, right? No reason not to. I think it's fascinating actually. I mean we're all about this human touch element and breaking through the noise with the human touch. So this what you're doing, we're doing it with the human voice, which goes straight into somebody's mid brain. Rick Elmore (05:10): Yeah. Chris Beall (05:11): I mean you can't turn off a voice once it's coming in your ear and now it's down to your skill. It's down to your tone of voice. It's down to you. Do you have a message that works? Do you know the psychology of the first seven seconds of the cold call? All that kind of stuff. Rick Elmore (05:24): Yes. The psychology behind a handwritten note is a hundred times more impactful than you believe. People appreciate it. You stop them in their tracks for seven to 10 seconds, right? You're engaging them on a level that they're not being engaged by anyone else. You're competing somewhere, no one else is competing. But it's super impactful when you put something down that's tangible that they can hold in their hands and that's shelf life too. (05:46): So we're going into the holidays right now. We're sending out tens of thousands. I think we're going to do somewhere near half a million holiday cards in the next six weeks. These have six to eight week shelf lives. What piece of material can you get in front of your customer's hands that's going to sit on their fridge, their counter, their mantle for eight weeks. Where they walk by and they're going to constantly see that and be reminded of you. Like that's real estate you can't buy in any other type of marketing form. And it's personal, it's impactful, and it can be measurable if you get creative with the QR codes and call tracking and driving traffic to landing pages and stuff like that. Chris Beall (06:20): That's fascinating. It's fascinating. I really like it. Gosh, you got my little tiny wheels and my little tiny brain turning here. As you look into the future, you're doing pretty big numbers already. How big is this? You're attempting to bootstrap your way into what looks like a billion dollar TAM. Is that, am I getting that right? Rick Elmore (06:40): So we've been completely bootstrapped so far. We should make that aim 5,000 this year pending a couple orders. But the purpose of never getting funding was for a few reasons is one, how big can this be? I didn't want to give up too much too early. I knew that this was something that could be special if it was built right. And we've laid the platform for getting the engagement, the footprint. We have the largest web traffic of anybody in our niche going to our website every single month, plus the technology. But my goal is to get it to somewhere close to eight figures in yearly revenue before we go get funding. But in order to go from eight to nine figures in revenue, we're going to have to have a much more advanced platform and have more product offerings outside of just handwritten notes. A little bit maybe more gifts or something more digital. Something that's more built out as an engagement platform where the handwritten notes is one of the tools that we offer. (07:33): But yeah, I mean we're 11 full-time employees. We're small but mighty and I think we've only had one employee leave our company in the last three years. So everybody's really committed. It's a really strong family atmosphere here. Everybody looks out for each other. We use tons of VAs. I have this method, trying to remember who it was, but they taught me basically like you mind dump all your information you need done about a job, you wait 30 minutes, you come back, you reorganize it, you build systems and processes and just scale your work that way versus trying to come on and try to hand teach everybody. So Michael E. Gerber Built To Sell really impacted me work on your business versus working in your business. (08:09): So yeah, we're just excited. We're way too early to think about funding because we're just getting done with a huge project of building our machines into manufacturing now 30, 40, $50,000 checks I was cutting for engineering. Now we can put that into operating expenses, growth capital, PPC. My PPC budget's been only $800 a month for the first four years. Literally nothing. We have people who spend $50,000 a month. So we're excited. We're just scratching the surface of our potential for sure. Chris Beall (08:40): Well fantastic. By the way, our PPC budget is zero, so. Rick Elmore (08:43): Oh really? Chris Beall (08:46): Yeah. I remember we met with Google once, we were once called over to Google and they wanted to talk to us about something we'd done for them and something we'd done for them actually helped them shut a business down. So they prevented themselves from going too far down the road. Because when you talk to people, you get quick intelligence as to whether a business makes sense. And they finally decided not to compete in that particular space as a money loser. So they wanted to tell us, this is Google's idea of an award. They wanted just have us come over and say, "Hey, you're our vendor of the year." What do we get for that? Well, nothing we just wanted to tell you. Rick Elmore (09:21): That's what you get yeah. [inaudible 00:09:23] Chris Beall (09:25): Yeah. It was funny because during that conversation their very, very, very, very senior guy who was there said, "Do you realize you're the only Silicon Valley company that we're aware of that doesn't pay Google one penny?" Rick Elmore (09:37): Wow. Chris Beall (09:37): And I said, "Yes and we intend to keep it-" Rick Elmore (09:39): I had a mentor once, tell me Google is God. There's a lot of power there, but a lot of scary power. They have the power to take away a lot of traffic. I remember two years ago we signed up an SEO company, just organic stuff and they were doing some shady backlinking and we actually got dinged and they literally tank you. And it's just overnight we are getting all this traffic and it goes down to 90% less. It scares you. Chris Beall (09:39): Oh yeah. Rick Elmore (10:01): And Google did it. They just stop indexing your stuff. They take it off, they push you down rankings and it's just like, oh my gosh so yeah. Chris Beall (10:08): Yeah, it's tricky and then there's an element of independence that you want to keep from that but you need it anyway. We've avoided it because the nature of our, we just call people. Rick Elmore (10:17): Yeah, relationships. Yeah, that's the thing. You got to get people to believe in you. Buy into you. Chris Beall (10:22): Yeah. Rick Elmore (10:22): And that's the thing, we're really lucky... we don't have a... you do have people that are price shoppers, but my background was building relationships. I obsess when we bring on business accounts, I call them, I onboard them personally and it's probably not the right thing to do, but I have to make sure everything goes good and call them after the order. What did you like? What didn't you like? Obsessed to make sure everybody's happy. Chris Beall (10:43): Well to me, you're doing it right. It's obvious I've been doing this stuff for three quarters of a million years and I still am involved at that level in the business. Somebody the other day was saying, "We kind of like CEOs that put their feet up and look out the window and think big thoughts." I'm going, well when I put my feet up and look out the window, I have a blank mind. But when I engage with something like why is this person getting hung up on? I had one yesterday. Guys getting hung up on. Mind you 200 and something thousand dollars a day, there was a lot going on. But there was something about this one that I just thought, this is not a tech problem. There's a subtle problem hiding in there and I won't learn it unless I jump in and have a look. (11:23): So I went in and had a look, listened to his conversations. It turned out, on his follow up calls he was getting hung up on the easy calls. Why? Because he was so confident on the easy calls. He was talking for eight to nine seconds before he let the other person say anything and he was getting hung up on. Is he aware of it? Of course not. So I made a little coaching email for him, showed him the wave forms. This is where you're talking. By the way, when you're on a cold call, you let him talk in three quarters of a second, actually it's about a second half. But on these follow up calls, the easy ones, you're going too far. I learned something, which is now I've got one of my data engineers looking through all the data for a particular pattern of short call, long call, but nothing in between. And we'll go find those and then we'll be able to proactively help those customers. I don't think you learn anything in business by having somebody else do something and tell you how it went. Rick Elmore (12:15): You got to get your hands dirty right. You got to have that experience. So when you talk about it, you can talk confidently about it. So you talk from an understanding, not from just memorization or somebody else telling you what to say. Chris Beall (12:26): Yeah. When people put together presentations for you, you know the purpose of the presentation right? And it's not to move the business forward. So that's all there is to it. I mean you'd love if it were true, but what's in it for them? Well, you're the boss. As I say, we belong to the lonely minds club here in the CEO biz. At the lonely minds club means people think we have no hearts. We do, but we don't dare to let them simply rule. Bring them out, but you can't let them rule. And second is, it's lonely because everybody who works for you, regardless how close they are to you personally or professionally, is obliged to lie to you at the margins in ways that do not feel like lying. They're obliged to because you have this concentration of power that's fundamentally corrupt and there's nothing they can do about it except adapt for their own safety. Rick Elmore (13:14): Yeah. Chris Beall (13:15): It's a problem. It's a problem. Rick Elmore (13:16): It is. I like that lonely mind club. I like that analogy. Chris Beall (13:21): That's what we're in. Rick Elmore (13:22): From being on the other side to not being on this side. I totally understand what you're saying. Chris Beall (13:26): Yeah, well some of us can't kind of handle that thing where we're reporting to somebody, whatever that means. I always thought that was a funny term anyway. What am I reporting to? Rick Elmore (13:35): Yeah. Chris Beall (13:35): What am I supposed to not know it myself? As you look at the next stage of this, you mentioned adding products, that's one kind of thing. Do you operate truly globally now? Do you feel like people are writing notes in French and everything else under the sun? Is all that happening? Rick Elmore (13:51): Yeah, we can. I would say 99% of our business is here in North America. But yeah, we definitely would have to expand globally to reach the ambitions that I have for this company. But to do that we would need to expand globally as well. So we would need a production facility in the UK, Australia, China, just so these are not having national stamps on them. So if you ship from the US to Australia, it has a ginormous international stamp right and that's a problem because it's be like, why did this handwritten note from John who lives a mile from me be shipped from the states and it took three weeks to get there, but then it takes three weeks and it has a big international stamp on. It doesn't make sense. So in order to expand globally, revenue's going to have to be a lot higher. We're going to have to have some channel partners spread out throughout the globe to make sure that happens. But yeah, that's definitely a vision. Chris Beall (14:41): Yeah, it's always so tricky to get to that unit of expansion. When you're expanding globally, it's suddenly you're carving out part of the overhead of the core business. You're adding a lump of pure overhead because it's always going to take a while to get going. And then you're also adding the risk of unfamiliarity. The things you don't know that you will find out. How you'll know if you don't know them. Rick Elmore (15:02): And that's the thing, I think we would expand through acquisition because there are some smaller little mom and pop companies trying to do this across the globe, but they're using really outdated technology. And what we would do is basically come in and basically give them a business in a box and say, "Hey, here's our technology, here's our systems, here's our software. This is how we have built an eight figure business." More like a franchise and say, "Hey, we'll start feeding you business, but we're going to acquire you in your business but we're going to make your business a lot better with our technology and our platform." So yeah, I mean that's definitely the pie in the sky where we want to go. But there's just so much business just here in the US. I mean there's like 60 or 70 billion with a B, pieces of first class mail sent here in the US and that's not including marketing mail. So if we get to 50 million pieces a year, it's a fraction of a fraction of possibilities. Chris Beall (15:02): Yeah. Rick Elmore (15:53): Yeah and we're excited about it and plus it's a new tool. That's why I always tell our clients, your clients put food on your table. We always try to tell them to work on the relationship, right? Because it costs five times more to acquire a new client. If you have good customer appreciation, you make them feel appreciated. They're going to make repeat purchases, they're going to tell their friends, they're easy to upsell. It's easy to sell a new offering to a current client who feels appreciated. And then if they don't, they just... They'll go price shopping and go somewhere else. So yeah, we think we have a cool tool to build relationships and build loyalty and trust for sure. Chris Beall (16:25): Yeah. Yeah. Might not even be a tool, might be a weapon. Never know. Rick Elmore (16:28): Yeah. Chris Beall (16:28): That's what we're into. Rick Elmore (16:33): Yeah. Chris Beall (16:33): Tools, that's for gardening. We use weapons to dominate markets, right? Rick Elmore (16:36): Yeah. Chris Beall (16:37): That's where it's at. Chris Beall (17:18): So I have a question about the thing that came up last night. So I was talking to somebody who was here having dinner and for her own privacy, I won't say who it is, and she said that's such a cool idea. I once got a job based on one and only one thing, which is I wrote a handwritten note and nobody else did back to the person I interviewed with, but I wanted it delivered that day. So I couldn't get that to happen easily. So what I did is I hand wrote the note and then I took a picture of it in my hand and I sent it to the person and said, Hey, I would send you this but it's going to take too long to get there. And I just wanted express my appreciation for the interview that we did today and for the thoughtful questions you have and blah blah blah. It was something intelligently handwritten. (18:01): So it struck me as the most unusual hybrid. It's in a way it's guaranteed to have been personal because she's holding it in her hand and taking a picture of it and yet the delivery was instantaneous and it was a B2B thing even though she was... She's a business so to speak. Does anybody do that kind of crazy stuff? Rick Elmore (18:22): So that's what I'm talking about expanding our platform is having a digital aspect, engaging them through text or email or socially. I mean there's a lot of cool tools out there now that we can leverage APIs to scrape information and pull it into our platform to engage them with a personalized email somehow with some type of creative copy or message or picture, send a text message, hit them up on LinkedIn or their social account. So I think that's a really creative thing to do. Write the note, take a picture, send it, right? It's kind of witty and personal at the same time. But that's what I'm talking about expanding our platform is doing something like that where you can have type in your message, our system would create the note, impose it on a mock up image for you where it looks like it was just handwritten and then you can send a text message. So yeah, that platform idea is definitely the future of expanding and growing this to a much bigger business. But yeah, that's just a really cool way that that person stood out for sure. Chris Beall (19:12): I can think of some twists and turns around this. For instance, a book in Kindle, like when my wife Helen's book comes out on the first right, I'll buy a Kindle edition for 99 cents because that's what you can do for up to the end of the week. And they have the ability to make a little poster. So the Kindle app, I use mine on my iPhone and I can highlight a sentence or whatever and then go share it and they'll make a little poster and post it on LinkedIn and it comes with the citation of the book and a link to the book so you can buy the book. So it's kind of a full viral loop. The posters cool, but the poster is just whatever font they have and whatever. If the poster were handwritten, if it were actually handwritten and it were a picture and it went up on LinkedIn, that would be cooler, I think. Obviously you're doing runs of a few, I mean literally can you do a run of one where it's completely unique? Rick Elmore (20:05): Yeah, so we help you send one, send hundreds, thousands or automated. So our website's more like an eCommerce platform. Go on there, pick card, type your message, check out. That's really not a big part of our business. We make some money on that, but it's not really the money makers. Really why we do that is to allow people to try us out, send one or two, see how you like it before you really kind of dive in with two feet. It just gives them the ability to get a good feel. Yeah, I would say the majority of the people we work with are businesses. I would say it's like the high 80% of our clients are businesses. We're working on projects with them, they're automating it, seasonal like things, holidays, anniversaries. Yeah, we definitely allow anybody to use our platform as of right now. Chris Beall (20:45): Got it. Do you follow or know Stu Heinecke? Okay, so Stu has written a couple books. He wrote a book called How to Get a Meeting With Anyone. He wrote another book, just wrote it called How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed. I think you'll really like this book and I think you'll like Stu. Stu is the guy who will send you a foam board with a cartoon that he's drawn on it. That's funny and it's about you and he'll send that to a senior executive to get a meeting, that kind of stuff. He's a genius about this. He's a Wall Street Journal cartoonist. He's one of the nicest human beings on earth, by the way. Highly recommend. Just reach out to Stu and tell him that- Rick Elmore (21:20): I have to write his name down. I can we get them with this. Yeah, I'll get that from you. Chris Beall (21:25): Stu Heinecke. And just seems like a lot of what you're doing fits in with the Stu Heinecke way of looking at the world. Plus you've done your business his way. His point is look, weeds figure out how to grow in the middle of cracks and freeways. Get over it. Rick Elmore (21:39): You know what, I always look at that when I'm on runs, you'll see those and it's actually to me really inspiring. There's a will, there's a way. We've fought through a lot of challenges over the last four years, but I've always felt that way and when I see that, that is a nature's example of exactly what I'm going through right now, there's a will, there's a way and that hits home for sure. Chris Beall (21:58): Yeah. Checked out his business, his book and check him out. He lives up on Whitby Island up in part of the Olympic Peninsula off the Olympics and the San Juan's. Brilliant, brilliant guy, nice person, and you're doing it, which is what's so interesting but you're also enabling him. I mean it's an example of kind of a seed pod strategy. Stu is a guy who would talk about your business and that's an awesome thing and he would talk about it in the right way too, because he's got a huge audience. So I highly recommend reaching out to him and kind of seed podding up so Simply Noted become something that he use an example. Because when Stu uses an example of how to grow your business like a weed and it's you, people are going to go after it and he's kind of speaking to your audience. Those businesses that have a lot of outreach to do in order to get things to happen. So highly recommend. Rick Elmore (22:49): Nice. Awesome. Chris Beall (22:51): But I want to come by some time and watch the robots do their thing just down the road in Tucson so we'll do that. Rick Elmore (22:57): Great. They're a little pen wielding army. It's a little army of robots you'll love it. It's really fascinating for sure. Chris Beall (23:03): That'll be cool. And then someday we should do a little test drive. You said you'd do a little cold calling before we got on? Rick Elmore (23:09): Yeah that's one of the major ways that we started this business was just getting on the phone. I mean I went through the BNI, the Chamber of Commerce, some of the EO stuff for networking, but really it's... we've used our product, a lot of social, email and cold calling. If we have nothing to do, we're on the phone smiling and dialing. I need to talk to you about what you guys are doing because it's definitely something that is a major cornerstone in our business for growing. Chris Beall (23:34): Yeah, I mean what we do is so simple. We can talk about it, but it literally is you push a button, talk to somebody in your list in a couple minutes and while that's going on, you don't have to do anything. You can do something else. Rick Elmore (23:44): Yeah, I mean we have a dialer. I mean you can make a hundred calls an hour, but there's a way to make it even more efficient. Chris Beall (23:49): Oh yeah. A hundred calls an hour. That's crawling. We don't talk about little numbers like that. That's too weak. Plus you got to pay attention when it goes to a voicemail or whatever. You got to be paying attention. Rick Elmore (23:49): Yeah. Chris Beall (24:01): You pay it no attention. You just hit the button. I was on with small business up in Canada today. We do this thing called an intensive test drive and it's basically you get it for a full day of production and it's live. We don't do demos, we don't do any of that stuff. It's live, it's your list, it's your people or you or whatever. And one of the principles I asked him, "Did you hate it?" And he said, "I didn't hate it but it scared me pretty bad and I'm still sweating." Yeah. Rick Elmore (24:30): Sounds intense. Chris Beall (24:31): Yeah. We call it the intensive test drive for a reason. Now you'd really like it with your approach to things. You'll have a blast with it and the fact is, that sincerity you talked about, being on their side, it comes through in the voice and it is the one thing when you kind of look at it, people don't make buying decisions based on the facts. They make buying decisions based on one thing, which is they grow to trust you more than they trust themselves with this decision. Anthony Iannarino opened his latest book, it's called Elite Sales Strategies and he actually quoted me without telling me which shocked me. So the opener of the book is a quote from me that says, "People buy from people they trust to make a decision they don't trust themselves to make." Rick Elmore (25:13): Yeah. Chris Beall (25:13): That's why they buy. And we know that trust is a subtle psychological thing. It's not, it's such a big deal. It's so dangerous to trust somebody that we're wired to not do it, but we're also wired to do it when it's done right. And just listening to you and thinking about how you truly are on their side and they'll hear it in your voice. I mean your successful career in sales, a lot of it's got to be predicated on that. That first conversation. When they're done, they're gone. Hey Rick Elmore knows what he's talking about and he's on my side, he's an expert and he's on my side. I trust him more than I trust myself right so that's what our whole thing is about. Rick Elmore (25:55): Yeah, I just focused on over-delivering. I'm going to make it right no matter what. Make sure you have a good experience. I remember when I first got into sales, my first manager at Striker, he sent me to a Dale Carnegie sales training thing and I learned a lot there. Like you were just saying, people will listen to people they like, but they'll buy from people they trust. I remember that's something they taught me. But yeah, that's definitely a 100% true in sales. Anything in business people are going to buy from people they trust for sure. Chris Beall (26:19): Right and how much they trust them. This is something I'm convinced that we've kind of figured out. Everybody always said, you got to be trusted more than your competitor. Your competitor is always do nothing. So how do you be trusted more than do nothing? That's really interesting. Rick Elmore (26:33): For me. I invest a lot in social proof. So it's getting good reviews, getting out there and having people seeing us. People talk about us that aren't us. So even if I'm telling you something, go out and search it and see what else somebody else is saying about us. That's another good thing. When I was a rep it wasn't really as that important, but when you own a business, you got to make sure other people are doing nice things about you outside of your own walls, inside your building. Chris Beall (26:58): Inside the echo chamber. Rick Elmore (26:59): Yeah. Chris Beall (27:01): Well Rick, thanks so much for coming on to Market Dominance Guys. Corey didn't join us. He must have business he's doing, he's always off there hustling too. Us old guys continue to hustle. There's no age limit to it. When you come right down to it, you don't build these things to sell them, you build it because frankly we don't know what else to do ourselves. So we just do it. And I'm super excited about your business and gosh, you don't need my good wishes, but I'll wish you all the best anyway because I think you're just going to blow it all away. Rick Elmore (27:29): I appreciate it, Chris. It was an honor to be on your show and share this with you guys, so thank you so much. Chris Beall (27:35): All right, well until next time, and we have no idea what episode this is. Might be two, might be three of them. This is Chris Beall for Rick Elmore. Thanks for being on and the absent but brilliant, Corey Frank, and I'm sure we'll see him again someday.  

Who would have guessed that hand writing a note to 500 prospects would be a highly successful marketing campaign? Our guest, Rick Elmore, did! Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, Rick joins our host, Chris Beall, today to discuss his career path from college, to professional NFL football player, to a job in medical device sales and marketing, to a startup company now in its fourth year. It was the success of his handwritten-notes campaign that encouraged Rick to found his own business, offering this same service — now automated — to help individuals and companies utilize the personal touch of what looks like a handwritten note to reach out to their customers. Rick and Chris talk about the open rate of these notes versus the open rate of cold — or even warm — emails. You’ll want to hear it with your own ears on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Duly and Simply Noted.” About Our Guest Rick Elmore is the founder and CEO of Simply Noted in Tempe, Arizona. Simply Noted is a company that utilizes software and robotic technology to create personalized handwritten notes for its 300,000 monthly users. ----more---- Full episode transcript below: Chris Beall (01:20): Okay everybody, this is Chris Beall. This is yet another episode of Market Dominance Guys. You'll note that at the moment, I am not here with Corey Frank, and those of you who are used to Market Dominance Guys at this point, know what we talk about. We talk about the practical world of dominating markets using the human voice, but today we have with us Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, and it's actually analogous, I believe. I'm going to have Rick talk about it, but we're into the human voice. We believe you have conversations, you create trust, and you can pave markets with trust and harvest that trust at your leisure while your competitors try to get in where they can't go anymore because the market trusts you. Rick's actually got a very similar business. Rick, thank you so much for jumping on Market Dominance Guys today. I am really, really excited to hear what you have to say. Rick Elmore (02:14): Thanks so much, Chris, for having me here. This is great. Chris Beall (02:16): Cool. We run a pretty informal show here, so here's the informal show part. I know you have a very, very interesting background. We both went to school at the same place. You for real, and me, did it for three years and then went off and became a professional blackjack player for a while. Your background is unusual, I think for anybody, much less in business. It's something people want to hear about, but then, I also am dying of curiosity, as a guy who bought probably the second or third HP 7470A sweet lips pen plotter in the world, back in 1981 or two, I believe. I am fascinated with the use you have found for using a pen plotter to create artifacts efficiently that generate trust and more, so tell me the story. Rick Elmore (03:07): Yeah, well thanks for the intro. I appreciate it. My background's actually in athletics. I went to the University of Arizona and played football for Mike Stoops back in the early 2000s. Lucky enough to have a good career, went to the NFL and played three years in the NFL, had the typical journeymen struggle to survive. Just super competitive there, but was fortunate enough to stay and thrive and play for three years, but then when I got done, like most competitive athletes, they're looking for that competitive environment still, so reached out to some people who made that transition. Got into medical device sales, was rookie of the year my first year. Then I was top 1% or number one rep for the next five years. And then, just felt like there was something more. Saw that chip in my shoulder. I wanted to do something big. (03:54): So in 2017, went back to Eller, that's University of Arizona's Business School, got my MBA, and I was in a marketing class and a marketing professor was going over just all the success rates in marketing. Everything was super nominal or marginal, super low from cold calling, knocking doors, print mail, email. Everything was either single digits or low double digits, and being in sales myself at the time, I was trying to figure out what the competitive edge is and waiting for him to kind of drop the truth bomb and hallelujah moment, but at the end of the lecture, he said half jokingly, "Hey guys, you know what still works nowadays, even more now than ever, is a nice handwritten note. It has a 99% open rate," and I was just like, that is a no brainer. Why aren't we doing that now? It's obvious, because nobody has the time, but I was like, why isn't there a business out there doing this? (04:46): I got to researching. There was a company at the time named Bond, but they were focusing on the worst segment. They were funded with a million dollars and they were focusing on the wedding industry. I was just like, you're dealing with Bridezillas. Why would you focus only on weddings? I've been married, tons of people have been married. Everything changes all the time, last second, delayed. This needs to be a business tool. Again, my background's in sales and marketing. It's not in software. It's not in robotics. We actually tried using a plotter at first. Nice little AxiDraw plotter, holds a pen, does what you want it to do. Our technology's much more advanced than that, but we worked with the mail house here locally, talked to them just about what we can do, our ideas, how can we get it done. (05:28): We sourced product from all over the world, south America, China. Worked with some Autopen companies, but over the last four and a half years, we've grown our platform to over 300,000 users a month. Going to make the Inc. 5,000 this year. We've developed our own technology, our own robotic technology from the ground up. We're going to have six patents on it. We're really excited about it. I'm really proud of it as well because we've done this with no funding, no investors. The product has always paid for the company, been cash flow positive since month one, leveraged my sales and marketing background. And then, I've really launched a pretty cool little business here in the last four years. Chris Beall (06:05): Well, it sounds like it might not be so little. 300,000 monthly users is actually a pretty big number. When you say monthly user, what is a monthly user? Rick Elmore (06:12): Just somebody who comes to our site and uses our site for whatever they needed to do. We've invested a lot in SEO over the last 18 months and we just drive a lot of organic traffic. Our conversion rate is anywhere from a half a percent to one and a half percent. It really just depends on the month and where the traffic is coming from, but we're driving a lot of interest. People who are searching for products that we are selling, they're coming to our page. We're not closing every one of them. They're not all making purchases, but they're coming to our platform, signing up, requesting samples, sending one card. They're just actively engaging with our website every month. Chris Beall (06:46): Got it, got it. Well, I've been to the site and it's a thousand times better than ours, so I admire it. Rick Elmore (06:51): I appreciate it. Actually, the bane of my existence is building websites. It's just so frustrating. Little things get tweaked all the time that cause problems. Chris Beall (07:00): It doesn't take much. Well, you know what we say about networking, which is bad enough. It's two bits away from not working. I think there's a corollary over there on websites. Rick Elmore (07:09): Absolutely. Chris Beall (07:09): I don't have a good little poem for it or something, but we need an aphorism for website development and it's like Murphy's Law on steroids. Rick Elmore (07:17): Oh my gosh. Anything in software, Murphy's Law for sure. What can go wrong will definitely go wrong. Chris Beall (07:24): Well, software is funny in that sense. It's fundamentally brittle and I've been building it since 1968, so to give you a sense of how the first time I ever put my fingers on a keyboard and wrote a line of code was in '68. Rick Elmore (07:37): Wow. That's cool. Chris Beall (07:38): That goes back a little ways. Some people probably think- Rick Elmore (07:41): That's fine. I'm fine. Chris Beall (07:42): You aren't dead yet? Rick Elmore (07:44): I'm actually going through a Harvard CS50s class right now, a little computer science introductory course and a Python course, just so I can get really well versed in this type of stuff, just so I can communicate and work with my developers better. There's just so many opportunities within software and what you can get it to do in automation and APIs and machine learning, and all this stuff applies to our business, which fascinates me even more. Chris Beall (08:08): Well, it's funny. You're doing the right thing. In my opinion, most people who are founder CEOs don't bother to learn what's under the covers and it's what's really- Rick Elmore (08:08): Ignorance costs a lot of money. Chris Beall (08:19): Well, what's funny about it is, you nailed it. The communication with developers is communication with anybody, which is that once you have a common language, now you're down to how many iterations are you going to have to do in order to get to a finished product? Until you get to a common language, it doesn't matter how many iterations you do, you never get to a finished product. Most founder CEOs, I believe, end up in what I call the world of the flying car. That is, they don't know how the stuff is made, so they keep asking for flying cars and then after they get told over and over and over, "Sorry boss, you can't have a flying car." Then they stop asking for anything and the engineers take over and then you get an engineering run company, which is- Rick Elmore (09:00): That's a good thing, that's not the case for us because I literally understand... I've done everything with this company from building our websites, being engaged with the software team, the handwriting engine team, the robotics team, the sales and marketing, building out all of our case studies, all of our marketing materials, working... I guess that it is a bad thing if you don't understand the depths of your business for sure. Chris Beall (09:21): When folks talk about software eating the world, they don't actually consider the possibility that the senior executives who are running things are further divorced from how things run than they've ever been in history, and it's a problem because I don't know, you can give orders, you can tell people what to do, but if you don't know what underlies it, you're just [inaudible 00:09:41]. That's all there is to it. You just got to fucking do it. By the way, I'm a huge Python fan. I taught myself Python on a Saturday morning in 2006, I believe it was. Yeah, 2006, when I just got off at my own developers at a company that I joined in Silicon Valley because I wanted a visualization of this graph network thing that I thought of, and none of them would write the damn thing. So I said, "Ah man, I don't write much code anymore, but I'm going to do this," and I went and found a package to help that was done in Python and I thought, I'm going to hate Python because it likes white spaces and it's white space sensitive, which I used to teach programming languages to people, and here I am taking something I hate, which is why [inaudible 00:10:26], but why does it care about white space? I fell in love and about 10 minutes. I think it's one of the best languages ever. Rick Elmore (10:31): No, we can have a whole podcast talking about just the challenges of working with developers and why it's important to understand this and Python so far... I'm taking a course through Michigan right now in Python, so I'm only three weeks in, but I'm excited. I'm like the worst person to compete with because when there's a challenge, I just run through walls until I figure it out, so I feel bad for my competitors because there's no give up in me. If I need to know something, I'm going to figure out a way to understand it, even if it's at the expense of my time. Chris Beall (10:57): Well, I don't care about your competitors. I want to be crushed by you. Rick Elmore (11:01): I appreciate that. Chris Beall (11:03): That's what this whole podcast is about is dominating markets. Our [inaudible 00:11:06] is really simple, which is either you dominate or you're in peril. That's it. And then, you trump the markets you dominate and the more markets you dominate by count, the less peril you're in. It's just because after that, it's portfolio theory. It's like each one, if I have five markets, I dominate, all five have got to go away before I lose the ability to adapt the simplest way, which is to reduce overhead to match gross profit flow, which is the key to everything in businesses. You got to make your overhead just barely below, or well below, your gross profit flow and then grow. That's kind of it. There's not much more to it. (11:44): If they have all those business courses, it's like, guys, you get money from folks. There's your cost of goods, there's your gross profit, it flows into business. You have to reduce your overhead to being below that. Your final unit of overhead is your own salary. Figure that out. It's not that hard. Figure it out. It sounds like you've done that. Month one, month two, month three, there you were putting this thing together. You say, "Let's go." What did you do in month one in order to become cash flow positive? That's hard. That means you have to collect money from human beings for something they didn't pay for before, and human beings hate to buy stuff they didn't pay for before. They like doing today what they did yesterday. Rick Elmore (12:27): My background's in sales and marketing. I'm extremely competitive, extremely driven, but we started researching this in 2017 when I was going to school, and in 2018, we really started messing around with product, different machines, Autopens, the axidraw plotters, and getting samples. I was talking to my current clients, current business executives that I respected. My wife works in fundraising development, so she works with a lot of businesses, so we're really well connected here in the Phoenix market with people who run their own businesses, but prior to ever getting started, I probably had over 50 conversations with people that I respected, friends, family and business leaders, and when we finally got kicked off, I was just really excited about the product and people can see how excited I was about the product. I believed it down to my core, and I believe if your clients can see that in you, they get excited about it with you. (13:16): And then I was just obsessed with making sure those first clients that we had were successful. Even if it was at our expense, I wanted to make sure that they had a good experience because those first few clients that you have can make and break your business. You got to make sure they're fans about your business. They're lighthouse customers. They'll refer their friends. They'll keep buying from you if they know that you have their best interest in mind. So those first few months, looking back now compared to what we have now, it was a crappier product, but people just believed in it, and I talked to them about the problem that we were solving, connecting them with their clients in a personal way, in an automated way, in a more efficient way because if you think about it, everybody now is competing digitally for everybody's attention. It's all social, it's all SMS or MMS or LinkedIn or Slack or Twitter. (14:05): Nobody's competing in the mailbox, and with that high of an open rate and with how rare it is to receive a handwritten note and how expensive it is to require a new client versus just keeping a current client happy, it was actually a pretty easy sell to somebody who would listen, but now we have a much more complete platform. We have tools that automate it. We have better robots, we have higher capacity, we run our own printing press in house. That means faster, same day order deliveries. We have capital equipment that allows us to push out 10, 15,000 notes a day. We're just a lot more mature, but early on it's getting peoples excited about your journey, your product, your passion, your vision, get them to buy into you because they're not going to buy into a product they know nothing about. You really got to hard sell them on why they need to do it. Chris Beall (14:52): Yeah, you do. What was the point, before you actually launched somewhere in there, you went from, hm, interesting to, I'm going to go do this. Chris Beall (15:48): My experience is, that's what I call a mousetrap. It snaps. You don't grade into it and go, Oh, I think I'll do it. Maybe it's like, at some point you go, okay, I'm doing this. What drove you to that point? What was that like? Rick Elmore (16:00): I call it the entrepreneurial seizure. When you had that aha moment where you're literally, your whole body gets rushed with hormones where you just feel so good at, you had that moment, but when we were still testing this out in 2018, we were using plotters back in the day, and it took me forever. It took me weeks, I think it was four or five weeks to write 500 handwritten notes, but I was in medical sales at the time. I had a large territory across Arizona and Nevada. Again, I was in my class, my professor said a 99% open rate, and I was like, man, if I can get in front of my client 99% of the time, that is going to make me more successful. I wrote out 500 handwritten notes, basically pitching a product to doctors who never bought anything from me and really was really clear and concise who I was, how I can help them, can I buy them lunch and tell them more about it? (16:48): From those 500, I had over 30 people respond, which to me was new. I was just like, holy crap. People are calling me about a product and are about wanting to learn more. I always had to knock on doors and get people to sit down. And then from those 30 people, I sold $280,000 in equipment and it was $20,000 in commission from literally, from 500 handwritten notes. Literally, for that four or five, six weeks, my quota of monthly was $39,000, so when they saw $280,000 come across in six weeks, my whole company went crazy. My VP of sales were like, "Rick, what are you doing? It's working. We got to get everybody doing this," and I shared with them what I was doing, and really from that moment on, my business went on autopilot until January 2019 where I jumped in two feet with this. (17:35): But I saw it work firsthand and it was an idea that was kind of incubated during an MBA where we put a lot of work into just finding stuff that make it work, a lot of tinkering, and then weeks of getting this product together, and then I saw results and I was like, man, if we're seeing results now, let's solve a problem, build a platform, build the best technology, and we're going to have a really good company down the line that we can sell. That's really been my vision for this company, is to solve a problem, make it easy to use, build a robot, which we just did, and then scale it and sell it. We're really excited. We're only four years into this, but the next four years are going to be amazing. Chris Beall (18:11): Is it fun to watch the robots do their thing? Rick Elmore (18:13): I am obsessed with it. I was on a different call earlier today. I'm in here sometimes 11 o'clock at night, and I'm just still amazed seeing these little pen wielding robots. We build our own pens. There's a lot of technology in this company. We build our own pen inserts, we design the pen insert. It has 300% more ink so it writes longer. Also, you can control the quality of the ink. This is how geeky we got into this. Chris Beall (18:13): Love it. Rick Elmore (18:38): We've really thought of everything. The viscosity, viscosity's like how wet it is and how much it'll smear, so we have full control of it. Chris Beall (18:47): Remember, I have a physics degree from the University of Arizona. Rick Elmore (18:51): We've gone everywhere from the pen to the robots to the software, to the handwriting engine, to the website. Everything's been built from the ground up, which I'm extremely proud of. Chris Beall (19:00): That's so cool. Do you show videos of the robots doing their thing? Rick Elmore (19:03): Yeah, there's tons of them on my LinkedIn. I have them pinned up on the top. If you go to our LinkedIn, you'll see them. The website that we have now is actually being rebuilt. It's a two year old website. We're actually rebuilding the web app and then just the front facing design. We'll have a lot more of our technology highlighted on our website soon. Chris Beall (19:21): How personalized is the handwriting to me? I have a use case in mind right now. My team talks to 85,000 VPs of sales a year. I want them to follow up on every single one of those conversations with something- Rick Elmore (19:34): Automated. Chris Beall (19:35): Because once you talk to somebody, you may as well do something. We can actually get people even to open email, which we don't like very much, but when you talk to somebody, you send them an email, 10 minutes later, five minutes later, three minutes later, it's an email from somebody you just talked with, so we have the ability to scale the conversation side, but our follow up is, in my opinion, relatively weak. It's email and then we have a follow up conversation mechanism for people we want to talk to more than once, blah, blah. All that's built out. We put like, $55 million into this thing over time, so it does a lot of tricks, but it doesn't do your trick, so if I want to do your trick, how do I do it so that it feels like it's me writing that note, so I'm comfortable with it having come from me? Rick Elmore (20:21): Everything we do is custom to you guys. From your campaign, we'll completely set up custom, but the magic is automating it. Depending on what software you use, what CRM you use, we actually think our automation's a perfect follow up sequence. Say you had a call today and you book it and you want to set up an automation so once that trigger happens within your CRM, you would be notified same day either through an API integration or a Zapier integration, and we ship most orders same day, but it takes three to five days for them to be delivered. We actually think from that call to that landing in their mailbox within a week, five, six days, is actually a perfect follow up sequence for sales. Again, my background's in sales, so I'm always thinking about ways to engage prospects to get them on board. Even though we try to sell this as a tool for appreciation and thank you because again, cost of acquisition is five times more than just keeping your current clients happy. We just automate it through a Zapier integration. Super simple to set up. Just create an account on our website, we give you an API token, you log into the Zapier app, set up the automation, you never think about it again. It's pretty awesome. Chris Beall (21:26): Cool. We use Salesforce, so we know what's going on and then we pull it out of there. I'm sure you have that pre-wired, right? Rick Elmore (21:31): Yeah, Salesforce is one of the most flexible integrations we have. Chris Beall (21:35): Absolutely. Well, that's really interesting. How about on the handwriting side? It's me. How much is it me or is it a choice? It's like choosing a voice narrator for an audio book. Rick Elmore (21:46): This is a geeking out again, but the reason we had to build our own handwriting machines is these Axidraws or Autopens, they just have patterns when they write. It's impossible. They don't have super strong handwriting engines. They were built in the 80s and 90s, but can use your handwriting if you want. We can give you a handwriting conversion form, but what's powerful about ours is, not only do we have the ability to build you an unlimited sized handwriting style, so if you want to give us 100 As, 100 Bs, 100 Cs, we can create a very custom handwriting style to you, but we go well beyond that. We go into ligature style, so how your T connects to an H, what two T's look like together. What's an E at the end of a word versus an E at the beginning of a word look like. (22:28): It takes about five days for one of our graphic designers to convert your handwriting style and create your handwriting style, but there's a lot that goes into it, but everything about your campaign is completely custom, especially on our enterprise level accounts, stationary design, custom inserts, shift cards, business cards, bags of seeds, lumpy mill. You get really creative of what goes in an envelope, but we set up your custom campaigns. Really, when people come to us, they tell us about the project they have in mind and we show them the path of least resistance to get it done. Chris Beall (22:58): Got it. Well, it's very interesting. Our customers pay, they'll say an extraordinary amount of money to talk to people and follow up is everything, as you and I both know. I'm new to sales. I've only been at it for maybe 60 years, but as far as I can tell, I've learned very little and one of the main [inaudible 00:23:16] I've learned is follow-up is everything. Rick Elmore (22:58): Oh it is. Chris Beall (23:18): If you don't follow up, nothing ever happens in this world, and there's another thing which is courses for courses. We're calling people on the phone, not that you use a phone when you use ConnectAndSell. You push a button, you talk to somebody on your list, but to them it's a phone call. Then the question is, well, did you get everybody? You can get, roughly speaking, initially, you can get about 35% of the market on the phone right away. They're phone answering people, and it's not all about their mobile. It's actually all about what they actually answer on, and we do 60 million dials a year, so we know what everybody answers on, so we've got all of that information, but on the other side, what about the people, not just following up with the ones you talk to, but what about the people you can't reach? What about that note? That's still 60% of the market, roughly. You're saying to my customers right, and I have a fair amount of them that pay attention to this podcast, that if they want to reach the other 60%, that I don't know what the open rate will be. At a 99% open rate, is that still the case or whatever it happens to be? Rick Elmore (24:27): Yeah, there's tons of studies published online. We actually verified this. We took six different types of envelopes. One of them was handwritten, the other ones were print, different colors, different sizes. What we did is, we put a $10 check inside and told them what we're doing. "Hey, just scan this QR code. We're testing an open rate case study, but here's a $10 check," so we confirmed it by checks being cashed and then QR codes being scanned, and over 99%. We verified it, but there's tons of case studies out there as well showing the open rate is 99% as well.      

Most sales reps think discovery isn’t sexy: Closing the deal is. But “Deals are won or lost in discovery,” cautions Sales Gravy CEO Jeb Blount, today’s podcast guest. This successful author of 15 sales-related books advises that “80% of your time in the sales process should be in discovery,” especially during a recession, when the discovery call becomes even more important. In this second of two interviews with Jeb, our Market Dominance Guys’ hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, share sales-success nuggets taken from Jeb’s most recent book, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. You’ll want to listen closely as these three like-minded sales gurus explain their own discovery-call practices for establishing trust and how they get prospects to open up to them. All of this and so much more in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Discover the Power of Discovery.” ----more---- Listen to the first half of this interview here: Ep153: How to Dominate Your Market in a Crisis with Jeb Blount About Our Guest Jeb Blount is CEO at Sales Gravy, Inc., which is a global leader in sales acceleration and customer experience enablement solutions. He is the author of 15 sales-related books, including his most recent release, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. Jeb is also the host of the Sales Gravy Podcast, the world’s most downloaded sales podcast. Full episode transcript below: Corey Frank (01:19): Getting to discovery is one of the things that we certainly do here at Branch 49 and Chris's insistence all those years ago is we're not just a revenue ops agency, top of funnel, but we also do discovery as a service. And Chris has identified that years ago as one of the key frontline bottlenecks in organizations discovery. So I was pleased buttress by the fact Jeb, that you dive quite deeply into this as well, is that if you say that deals are one and lost in discovery, not in a presentation or the closes or even the negotiation, but in you have to learn to increase sales to do discovery better. And so let's talk a little bit about that, Chris. I know you have some opinions on that too, but what do you mean by we have to learn to discover better and to do discovery calls a little bit better than we're doing today? Jeb Blount (02:10): Well, let's start with the reason why we don't do them. Discovery is the weakest link in most sales processes because it's not sexy, it's boring, Sexy is closed the deal. Sexy is do the presentation. Walk into any room of salespeople and ask them what would you like to know? And they'll what to say. They want to know what words should come out of their mouth that are going to suddenly woo everybody and wow everybody into saying yes to them or complying with a request. But the truth is that in sales a question you ask is more important than anything that you will ever say. But that's boring. It doesn't make us feel good to ask questions and listen. So discovery has a tendency to get put on the back burner even though 80% of your time that you spend in sales conversations and inside the sales process should be on discovery because what you said, Corey is true. Deals are won and lost based on the questions you ask and the information that you get. (03:12): It's really no different than if you think about attorneys, lawyers going to court. If you've ever been in a case, you know that you went into depositions and there was a ton of discovery that was done up front. Pretty much cases are won and lost during that period of time, not in some spark of inspiration in the middle of a courtroom. That happens on TV, it just doesn't happen in real life. In sales there's typically not this magical plays where like in a movie scene, you push the pen over to the buyer and say, "Sign here", and you've delivered some amazing message to them and they just comply, sign it and you go out and you celebrate. It doesn't really work like that. (03:53): Typically, the deal is closed somewhere in discovery because you ask a question that provokes their awareness that they need to change and then as you're listening to them, you're making them feel important. You're learning their story. And so as you build your business case, you begin to build these value bridges. You're connecting the dots between what you learn in discovery about their aspirations, about their pain, about the problems that they have to solve and you're connecting it to what you can do for them, but you're using their language. That's the point where they begin to feel like you get them and they begin to trust you and you begin to close more deals. Now as we move into recessionary period, discovery becomes even more important and it becomes more important because, as we're in an economic downturn, buyers begin to change their buying behaviors. The most important change that they're going to make is it going to be much more risk averse. (04:48): They're always risk averse, but in an economic downturn, in a crisis, in a time where they've got to be very careful about the decisions that they make because it could impact their job or impact their company, you've got to build a much better business case in order to mitigate that risk, in order to lower their fears and show them the value of doing business with you. The only way that you can build that business case, a business case by the way that is laced with math to show them the outcomes that they're going to get from your business proposition, the only way you do that is through discovery. (05:24): So it's always important, far more important in an economic downturn than in any other time because that business case truly matters. They are not going to give you their money unless they feel like the risk of giving you their money is low relative to the gains that they'll get from giving you their money and the return on the investment for doing business with you. But otherwise you're dead in the water and you're not going to be able to talk your way out of that. There's not a close or an objection turnaround that's going to talk a buyer off the cliff if you haven't demonstrated that the value or the outcomes that they're going to gain from doing business with you, they're going to derive from doing business with you, are a lower risk than spending their money with you in an economic downturn. Six months ago, they're throwing money at you. Today, not going to happen. Corey Frank (06:18): Yeah. Chris, we've spoken about that several times where a half wounded Jeb, what do you think about this theory, that a half wounded prospect, when they have a poor discovery interview thrust upon them and maybe that sales rep trips over one or two compelling questions that makes that prospect think or two, but then there's no follow up, there's no elegance. That prospect is at risk of being taken off that chess board for three years, average life cycle of a SAS deal, 36 months. And so to do poor discovery, does it mean there is a zero sum game there? You lost that opportunity to convert that prospect. Chances are that pain still exists, that prospect is going to get zapped up by somebody who's much more confident. Did I say that correctly, Chris, from some of the things we've been talking about? Chris Beall (07:10): Yeah, I mean there's a reason that some years ago I gently suggested that you put together an agency that would go all the way through discovery because it's clear to me, has been for quite a while, that discovery actually doesn't have a lot to do with your product and therefore it can be done generically. Somebody who is great at discovery, could do discovery for anything that any of us sell and do it with very, very little preparation around what that thing is, how it works and blah blah blah. Except they need to know basically what are the classes of problems that it solves, what are the knobs that get turned and what are the outcomes that might happen as a result? And then they should stay away from all of that except to ask the questions that might clue them in as to how this works. And I think, I love what Jeb said and what language they use in order to talk about their world so that you can talk about your potential to be helpful to them in the language that they know how to reason it. Something that there's been a lot of research done on how language changes, how we think. I was just talking to somebody the other day who spent some time in part of Africa where in that particular place, people didn't talk about left or right. They didn't have words for left or right but they had very, very good words for north, southeast, west, northeast and so forth and so on. So you wouldn't say, you would get a snake that's right off your right foot. You'd say you'd have a snake that's right off your north foot. It changes how your brain works when you use language in a certain way and you have the big problem in sales. If you want to succeed, you have to be able to adapt to somebody else's language so that your brain works like their brain works. (09:00): And the way to do that is to ask questions and get into not just what they say but how they say it, what's behind it, where they get confused by the question. All that stuff is of huge value to you and is the differentiator between them being willing to part with their risk. I mean, Jeb says their money, but actually I think unless you're talking to a business owner, you're never talking about their money, you're talking about somebody else's money, but you're always talking about their risk and their risk is so much higher than the owners. It's easy to sell value to owners. You cannot sell value to agents, to functionaries. You must sell risk reduction to them. Jeb Blount (09:40): And that's a good point because when people are asking a simple question, "Do you get me"? So there's five questions that people are asking of you in discovery, "Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me and my problems when trust and believe you"? And Chris is right, in most cases when you're in sales, you're selling to someone who is using someone else's money to solve their problems. So when we are giving a business case, there's really three outcomes that we want to be able to demonstrate. There are personal outcomes. So for that individual stakeholder, what do they get from that? What is important to them that's going to help them and their life be better, their job be better? There are emotional outcomes. That's things like peace of mind or less stress. What does that look like? (10:22): We talk about pain a lot. I'm not a really big fan of pain in sales. I know it's a Sandler thing and I know that everybody likes to get ahold of it because it's an emotional thing. But pain is not the only reason why people buy. It's sometimes a reason people buy. And then there are measurable business outcomes. That's the math. We have to talk about all three of those things. So what discovery does is it helps me understand, it helps me get that person. This is very, very important. And let's just take the context that Chris said. When you're dealing with a business owner, it's one thing. When you're dealing with people who are typically buying, which is most of the time you're not dealing with a business owner, you're dealing with someone else who is using the business owner's money to solve problems. (11:06): This idea of get matters greatly. Think about it like this. The most important, the most valuable relationships you have in your life, you describe like this. This person gets me. Those mean more than anything else. So what Chris was saying about language, which is just brilliant, is that language is a way to demonstrate get. You'll never have that level, like the level of get that I have with my wife, you're I'm not going to have that with someone I'm doing business with. But the same psychological blueprint is in play. Does the person feel like I get them or at least that I'm trying to get them? So Corey, let me back you up real quickly. You are a salesperson and you ask a good question, but you're so focused on the next question that you ask, using your words, Corey, I'm not being eloquent about it. (11:55): So rather than ask a follow up probing question that demonstrates that what I just noticed was important to that person and allow them to talk more, which makes them feel important and significant because I'm trying to get them, I just move onto the next question that's on my list. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the tattoo. I was 24 years old, I was just reading questions off of a list. So I don't demonstrate that. But if I do the follow up question, if I probe, if I listen deeply to what's being said behind the words and I'm get all that together and I start repeating it back to them, it's amazing sometimes when I say something back to someone in their words, they just look at me and they go, "Wow, you're the only person that's really listening to me". (12:37): And I'm like, I just literally took the words out of your mouth and gave it back to you. And you feel that I get you. Yeah. What you're doing with language is you're saying, and when I say outcomes, pain is one of the outcomes, aspiration is an outcome. The chance to capture an opportunity is an outcome. An opportunity to, if you're a business owner, I want be at the same level as my competitors. (13:02): That's not a pain, that's an aspiration. It's something that I want to accomplish. So if I start repeating back to you, we can help you do these things. You told me, Corey, that when you were in this situation, it made you feel this way and that was awful. I can't even imagine what that was like. What I can do for you in this particular situation is if we deploy these three solutions, it'll solve that problem for you and it'll reduce the chance that you're going to feel that way again. How do you feel about that? (13:35): How people respond to that is extraordinary because all I did was use their language. Language matters. It connects us as groups and it taps into the human similarity bias that is always in play. No matter how hard we want it not to be in play, it is in play. We trust in people who are more like us, but because we sell in a diverse economy to people who are not like us, the easiest, fastest way to tap into that is by speaking their language. And their language is their language of their company, their language of their jargon, their language of their team, their language of their aspirations and their pain. (14:15): The only way you get there is through great questions in discovery that compel them to tell you things that get them to the point where they stop thinking about hiding stuff from you because you're the salesperson and they begin opening up and allowing you to get below the surface where they teach you their language and then you bring that back. You don't get that if you're doing shallow discovery or you're so caught up in what you're going to say next, you only get that organically when you're in the moment and when they begin to lean into you. And that takes, I love the word eloquence, it takes eloquence, it takes nuance. But the real key to doing it is essentially just being a good human being and stop selling and start just really listening to them and allowing them to express themselves and then coming back with how you're going to help them achieve their desired outcomes. Corey Frank (15:09): Love that. I mean that's a book right there. What you say, Chris? That's number 16 right there, we get it. Forget 60 days, you just did it in six minutes. Corey Frank (16:01): But Chris, a lot of things that Jeb's talking about, we're in a different world than maybe five, 10 years ago where I jump on a plane and I go see a client. Right now a lot of clients don't even turn their Zoom on because they're afraid that the Zoom gods will steer their soul or something like that. But they don't turn their camera on or we have the cold call. Chris, how do we, and Jeb, how do we deal with that extrasensory perception that we have to have on the pauses or listening for the typing in the background. What do we do to awaken that empathy, that great amount of empathy that you talk about? And Chris you've talked about for years. Chris Beall (16:35): I do discovery in a funny way. That's all I got to say, because to me everything in sales is always about the other person's emotional journey. And my favorite book of Jeb is Sales EQ. And Sales EQ has to do with, it's not so much our emotions, it's their emotions. And it's the same. Jeb works with animals, he works with horses. I grew up in a world of all animals. It was, I didn't have any people, I just had animals. And when you're working with animals, especially animals bigger than you are, you realize the only thing that counts as their emotions, that's it. They have their capabilities which tend to be substantial and multidimensional in ways we don't understand and every once in a while they surprise you. I didn't know that one could bite so hard, for instance is a good one. (17:24): But when you come right down to it, it's the emotions. The emotions move fast when they move. They tend to be stable islands. And then when they move, they move fast. To me, what Jeff just said is you want somebody in discovery. Your only goal, in my opinion, is you get to the point where they start opening up to you. That's it. If there were another goal in discovery, I think I would've found it by now. The goal is, and we have a whole episode on this somewhere in the archives called The Confessional is now open. You want to get into the confessional, you want them to tell you their truth. And what I've found is oddly easy. It's just like cold calling. Cold calling's very easy in one way because you know where they start emotionally. They're afraid of you. You've got to build trust. You got seven seconds to do it. Great. There's a lot of ways to do it, but you better do it otherwise the emotional journey towards curiosity and commitment just ain't going to happen right, until they trust you that little bit. (18:20): I think the emotional journey and discovery starts with apprehension. They're apprehensive. They're pretty sure you're going to try to sell them something. They're pretty sure you're an expert, may aren't. And they're pretty sure that they don't want to have you have the better of them. So they're apprehensive. They don't want to go into the room, they don't want to go into the confessional. How do you get them out of apprehension? You have to replace it with another emotion. I mean emotions are always there. So the question is, well what's the replacement emotion? The one I choose is pride. Because everybody, if you think about it, it's impossible to be apprehensive and proud at the same time. (18:54): It's actually like they're incompatible emotions. You can't have both. So it's very easy to provoke pride in somebody in a very innocent question. Mine sounds funny. People think like Anthony and Arena would laugh at me for this and think I'm a total idiot. But when you see the results, you might think otherwise. I just ask a simple question. So Corey, it always helps me to know where somebody is in the physical world. Where are you right now on the face of our blue whirling planet? And I ask it exactly like that. And then I wait and I can go 25 minutes listening to your answer and I'm happy because you're in a place of pride of place. And pride of place is a universal for human beings. Every human being has pride of place. I don't care where you live, you're proud of it. And then I want to go from pride of place to pride of mission. (19:48): Because until I know why they're doing their job, why they get up every day and go and do that job, I really am going to have a hard time getting underneath all of that to the confessional. Why are they even doing this? It can't be for the money. Nobody does anything for money very long. They give it up. I don't want to deal with them anyway, so then I ask this other question which is, "Hey, when everything goes great and it goes great, it's fantastic, product is right, timing is right, the budget is there, everything's great. Your people do what they have to do, other guy does what they have to do. How does your product change that person's life"? And then I sit back and wait. (20:24): A lot of people think that's two stupid discovery questions, right? Oh Chris, you're trying to get empathy, blah blah blah blah blah. The fact is, most of the time after that second question, somebody after they've confessed their mission, pride of mission is there, they will start to talk about what's in the way of them accomplishing that mission. And that's where you want to be because that's where you want to be. You don't know is it economic, is it emotional, is it strategic? It's something, because everybody is frustrated that they can't do their job as well as they hold themselves accountable for. Corey Frank (20:58): That's beautiful. Can you teach that curiosity, Jeb? Can you teach that or is it what you had said earlier about prospecting that the way to do it is just to do it and to say the questions and eventually you'll start meaning the questions. Or is there another bio life hack that you'd suggest to engender that level of curiosity and empathy? Jeb Blount (21:22): Yeah, you can teach it. I mean there are people who shouldn't be in sales. Let me get clear about that. There are people who should not be in sales, but people who have a core set of talent, you can teach that. The problem for younger salespeople is they haven't developed the emotional intelligence yet to have the patience that Chris does to allow the answer to begin to build. They step on it. You can teach people how to control their emotions. A lot of cases what'll happen is the person's in the middle of telling you where they live, are telling you what's important to them. And you blurt out what's important to you too. Because when you're talking, it makes you feel important. And when you're not talking, it makes you feel unimportant. So with salespeople, you can teach that. You can teach the patients. I learned it. I learned it from masters like Chris who taught me these things and sometimes through a kick in the rear end. But I learned it. (22:11): You learn it through trial and error, but you mostly learn it by just learning human skills. One of the ways I teach people this is just through science. So Chris did two things there in those questions. One is he recognized something called the negativity bias, which is when people start telling you about something that's good, they'll almost always tell you what something is bad. So if I say, "Tell me what you love about your competitor", they'll go blah, blah, blah blah blah, but they don't do these things. I know it's going to happen every single time. I don't got to worry about it. It's always a pattern. He also stumbled into the self-disclosure loop. And this is pure science. When a person is talking, they are getting a dopamine hit to the pleasure centers of the brain. It makes them feel good. Some people, it's harder to get them into that state than others, but you can get every single person to that state because it's science. (23:02): They talk about themselves and they get the dopamine hit. They talk about themselves, they get a dopamine hit. So what I teach young salespeople is if you will learn to have the patience to pause, to allow them the space to talk, in most cases they'll continue talking, continue talking, continue talking until they cross over what I call the TMI zone. But they move into this place and Chris describe this, where they begin pouring out their soul. And even when their brain consciously says, you shouldn't be saying all these things, they can't help themselves, but because they're so hopped up on brain crack that it's like they're almost uninhibited. And so when you get them doing that, they start telling you all these things. And then Chris left out one little part of this, which is pre-framing or framing. When he initiated the conversation, where on this great blue planet world are you? (23:58): They knew why he was there. They made the meeting with them. They know he is from ConnectAndSell. They know it's a conversation about their salespeople. They know it's a conversation about software. So Chris is right, I don't have to talk about any of that stuff. They'll do the work for me. All I got to do is ask them an open-ended easy question that they have pride in, like they enjoy answering. And I get out of the way because they are pre-frame to talk about ConnectAndSell, talk about more meetings, talk about prospecting, talk about their sales results. If he just waits long enough, they'll bring it full circle and start telling him all the reasons why they need him and their business. So it's almost a game. And Chris, I don't know if you play this game, but the game that I play is how few questions can I ask to get the most information from a prospect? (24:48): And it's like a symphony plan. When I see it happening, I see them starting to roll downhill, sometimes on a virtual call where in situations where I can do it, I just look at my salesperson and go. "It's coming, you can see it's happening". And so the art of doing this, and this is really is an art. There's science in it, but it is an art to be organic in the moment. You can absolutely, totally teach salespeople that. And by the way, you asked about virtual selling. I did write an entire book on this on how do you leverage empathy in a virtual call. It's the same thing. Once everybody gets over, "I'm on a camera", look at us, we're all having a conversation. I'm not even thinking, gosh, I'm on a camera. Once we get over that process and we start paying attention to those emotional cues and all the probing questions we ask around those cues, it gets brutally simple because science does all the work for us. Chris Beall (25:45): Yeah, it's like a boulder rolling down a hill. All you have to do is get it started. You don't have to figure out which ones it's going to hit if something's going to happen and you're going to get to the bottom of the hill. Jeb Blount (25:56): And that's what we call a self-disclosure loop. Because then that boulder's rolling down the hill, the only thing is going to stop it is you throw yourself in front of it. Chris Beall (26:02): Right. Corey Frank (26:04): Well yeah. Was it Uncle Zieg? I think Ziegler said, "Feed your family or feed your ego. You can't do both in sales". And I think as your point, Jeb, as a lot of us as young pops coming up, we want to, "Hey, my managers gave me all this stuff. I got to say my marketing people gave me all these decks and I want to showcase how much I know about the industry even though I'm a 23 and a half year old person and I step in the way of the prospect way too much and I can't build that trust or that empathy", it sounds like. So man, great tips galore. Got to ask, of the 55, I think we only went over one right? One tip so far. But of the 55, two, there's got to be one that has a greater atomic weight than the others. I mean, we love all our children as parents certainly and certainly all 15 of your books. But of the 55 ways to stay motivated and increase sales in a time of crisis, what's the favorite? Jeb Blount (26:59): Let's ask Chris that first because he's read the book twice. Chris Beall (27:05): Here's my favorite. It's the opening chapter of part two. "The pipe is life. Talk with people". And here's why it's my favorite. In a crisis, we tend to clam up, we tend to clam up, we tend to go internal, we tend to, companies, to have internal conversations in a crisis instead of external conversations. You only have so many hours in the day. You only have so much emotional juice you. You've got to actually deal with a lot more stuff in a crisis. One thing we didn't really talk about is everybody goes home to something that wasn't as good as before the crisis. And so they gave it the office, but they got to give it a home too. It's going to be challenging. So I love that the simplicity of chapter 14, the opening, I think it's 14 if I remember correctly, the opening of this entire section, and by the way, "The Pipe is Life" is a mathematical statement actually. (27:58): It basically is a statement that everybody who's an investor understands. You have two things you can do as an investor and all you're doing when in sales or businesses you're investing. You're investing time in order to hope to get some sort of a return. As an investor, everybody knows when risk is high, portfolios must be broad. That's just a truth of every market back until the beginning of life. I mean, way before there are humans investing, if you are in a high risk situation, high fundamental risk, high external objective risk, you must have a broad portfolio because you don't control outcomes and you don't control timing. But you need outcomes within the amount of time you have available to cover your overhead so you don't starve to death. (28:50): That equation's running at all times. And so in really great times, you can sometimes narrow your portfolio and go for some big thing, whatever it happens to be that you really believe in. But in tough times you got to talk to people because that's step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 million to broadening your portfolio and otherwise you are living in fantasy land. You're going to walk into that risk buzz saw and observe your parts all over the place and look at the blood on the floor and then realize, maybe I should have been talking to more people. Corey Frank (29:25): If there was only a weapon out there on the market that allowed you to talk to more people, Chris maybe should- Chris Beall (29:32): If only. I wouldn't use it. Sounds like shocking to me. Sounds like [inaudible 00:29:39]- Corey Frank (29:38): Like grouch marks, you would never belong to a club that would accept yourself as a member. [inaudible 00:29:42] Jeb Blount (29:42): But what Chris does at ConnectAndSell is he facilitates conversations. The more people you have conversations with, the more you were going to sell. It is just that simple. It truly is a mathematical equation. My favorite chapter, by the way, following up from that is "Be the squirrel". I think that in a downturn in a crisis, I'd look in my own pecan trees in my backyard and look at the squirrels in the trees. They're relentless, they're unstoppable, nothing holds them back. They fall on the ground, they hit their back, they get back up, they do it again. They 24/7, 24/7, all they think about is prospecting for nuts and seeds and stacking them up for winter. And the great sales people during a crisis are going to be focused 24/7, dialed in. They're going to broaden their pipe, they're going to fill it up and they're going to be relentless, unstoppable prospectors because when all is said and done, no matter what we say, all of the noise around sales, in sales, persistence always, always finds a way to win. Chris Beall (30:46): Yes. And creativity. When I read that chapter at Jeb, I was beyond smiling. So here's a blog that I wrote in on May 16th, 2017. Here it is. Jeb Blount (30:57): Oh really? Look, there's [inaudible 00:30:59]- Chris Beall (31:00): Go nuts. Think like a squirrel. And it came about from watching squirrels get to our bird feeders in the backyard. And I would devise extremely diabolical means to keep them from doing it. Now, I have unfair advantages. I have a degree in physics. I know some stuff other people don't know, but guess what? I don't know anything a squirrel doesn't know. They can get by everything, Jeb Blount (31:24): Anything. And that's wonderful, wonderful videos on YouTube of like you said, diabolical ways of keeping them out. The problem is that you would think about the way and then you would go to work, and you were thinking about something else. The squirrels, the only thing they thought of all day long, all night long is how am I going to get past this thing that Chris erected to keep me out of the bird seed? And that's how they beat you because they just figured out a way around it and they would work at it until they would. And that's the problem for a lot of salespeople right now is that they have been living large, they've been doing so well. We always talk about how hard sales is. I mean, every time somebody says to me that selling now was harder than it's ever been before. I just laugh at them. I'm like, "You got to be kidding me". (32:14): For the last 18 months, if you showed up at work and you could fog a mirror, you were probably going to make your quota. You were probably going to be able to survive. Right now, that is not going to happen because folks, nobody is going to call you and the sales people who have been living in that fantasy land of everything is good, suddenly they're going to start hitting those obstacles. If they pack up and go home, if they complain about it, if they whine about it, they're going to fail. (: But if they become the squirrel and they say, "Okay, I hit that obstacle, I got to figure out a way around it, under it, through it over it, or I'm going to tear it up. Well I'm getting to the other side of this obstacle". Those are the folks that are going to make it rain during this terrible time that we are moving into and we're going to go through. They're going to win. And by the way, if you're a salesperson and you're listening to this, look around you on your sales floor. Half of the people that are there with you right now aren't going to make it because they're not squirrels. Corey Frank (33:13): So instead of Sales Gravy, I think it should be Squirrel Gravy for the next 1824 years. Squirrel. Gravy, I think [inaudible 00:33:21]- Jeb Blount (33:20): Well, I'm from the south Corey, so let's just be careful. I've actually had Squirrel and Gravy. It's one of my favorite things, like with some homemade biscuits in the middle of it. Down here where I'm from, we call them tree chickens. Corey Frank (33:34): I love it. Well, beautiful. Listen Jeb- Chris Beall (33:37): We got a... You got a title now for this episode? Corey Frank (33:41): Yeah, I do. [inaudible 00:33:42] Chris Beall (33:42): Be a Tree Chicken. Jeb Blount (33:42): That's right. Be a tree chicken. Corey Frank (33:44): Be a tree chicken. Right. We'll give that to Austin when you hear it. We'll give it, Be a tree chicken. I love it. Jeb, it's an absolute pleasure to finally get you on the podcast here with Market Dominance Crew here. I think we got to have you back and talk about the other 51, 52 we didn't talk about yet. Jeb Blount (34:03): That's right. Corey Frank (34:04): But by then you'll probably be ready for your book number 16. So for all that want to get ahold of Jeb, obviously best selling author, Fanatical Prospecting, in Sales EQ, Objection Selling in a Crisis, and 10 others. So go to salesgravy.com, jebblount.com. For the esteemed Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank from Branch 49. Until next time.  

What changes should you make when you’re selling in an economic-downturn period? Today’s podcast guest, Jeb Blount, is CEO of Sales Gravy and a successful author and podcaster. With 15 books to his name, including his latest, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times, it’s obvious that Jeb knows what he’s talking about when discussing sales techniques during these troubled times. His suggestion? You’ve got to pay close attention to patterns, as well as the signals you’re getting from prospects and customers. In this first of two interviews with our Market Dominance Guys’ hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, Jeb shares his advice about selling a price increase to customers, and about honing and re-honing your message as fears about the current economy’s impact are revealed in your prospects’ objections. Jeb’s also a firm believer in selling alongside his sales team and listening to his reps’ calls to provide just-in-time coaching. Get ready to take notes as this master of selling practices lets you in on what works and what doesn’t in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “How to Dominate Your Market in a Crisis.”   About Our Guest Jeb Blount is CEO at Sales Gravy, Inc., which is a global leader in sales acceleration and customer experience enablement solutions. He is the author of 15 sales-related books, including his most recent release, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. Jeb is also the host of the Sales Gravy Podcast, the world’s most downloaded sales podcast. ----more---- Full episode transcript below:   Corey Frank (01:38): Great. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening everybody. This is Corey Frank on behalf of Chris Beall and the Market Dominance Guys. We are once again with you for another exciting episode of what it takes to succeed in your market. And not just succeed, but to dominate your market. (01:55): And as always with me in the virtual studio is the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the Stephen Hawking of hawking, Chris Beall. So Chris, good to see you once again. So I don't know if he owed you money in a poker game or what, but we were able to wrangle Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy, founder, author of 72 sales books... No, 13 sales books. Best selling- Jeb Blount (02:22): 13? 15. 15. Corey Frank (02:22): 15. Jeb Blount (02:24): I worked hard to get that number. Corey Frank (02:26): I'm misinformed. Chris Beall (02:26): [inaudible 00:02:29] Corey Frank (02:28): I'm misinformed. Yes, I will tell our producer that the data that I have is old, including the new one. So welcome, Jeb. Chris, how did we were able to lasso the esteemed Jeb Blount and his Sales Gravy team to our little podcast? Chris Beall (02:45): Well, so Jeb, it's so exciting to have you here. I haven't seen you for a couple of weeks. And it's like, I miss you, man. (02:56): So I was sitting down by the fire with Helen over here, we're down here in the desert, and I had been fortunate enough to go online at Amazon and buy a copy... Oops, a copy of Selling in a Crisis. And I love the title. (03:09): I was reading it, and it's a very easy read. It's 55 chunks that you can do something with each individual one, which I really like. My only complaint about it is, I prefer the number 108, as you know Corey. But Jeb got a little tired after 55, and figured that's enough and cut it off. (03:27): So I went out to review Selling in a Crisis, and just say how fabulous I thought it was, and Amazon wouldn't let me review it. So I sent Jeb a text. And it was fairly late at night, Jeb, right? It was like, I don't know, 11:00 something your time or whatever. Jeb Blount (03:42): Yeah, I was in bed. Chris Beall (03:43): You were in bed. [inaudible 00:03:45] Corey Frank (03:44): He's working on the 16th book, that's what he's doing. Number 16. Chris Beall (03:48): And he gives me this answer immediately, and basically says, "Well, there's kind of an issue with Amazon." And he explained it, and I didn't understand it. But I realized I just have to settle down and try again every day until I can finally review it. (04:00): But he said something interesting to me too, which is that, "I'm glad you liked the book. I wasn't 100% sure if people were going to like it." I think that's what you said, Jeb. Something like that, right? Jeb Blount (04:09): Yeah. Yes. Corey Frank (04:12): Well, I know it's tough enough, Jeb, and we can probably start with this as we turn the attention over to you, and as we have pen in hand as you spew all this wonderful wisdom for these 15 books, and all the wonderful seminars. Including the number one sales podcast in the world, I believe right now, right? Jeb Blount (04:28): Yeah. Corey Frank (04:28): With the Sales Gravy? But selling is tough enough. Now you're going to tell us, I got to learn a whole bunch of new things to sell in a crisis? So maybe we can talk about what was kind of the impetus and the rationale. (04:40): Because you have the pulse, you and your team have a pulse on what's happening in the sales world, the outreach world, et cetera. What were some of the little reverberation, seismic things that are happening beneath the surface saying, "Okay, we've got to gird our loins, and we've got to adjust for this Winter is Coming type of moment." Jeb Blount (05:01): Well, all you got to do is be a good observer of the world. I read the Wall Street Journal every single day, and you start seeing patterns. So if you read every day, and you look at legitimate business news sources every day, you begin to see the patterns stack up. (05:14): It's no different than when, it was right before Christmas, and I was seeing all of these clients coming in asking us to teach them how to go out and get price increases, that I was like, "This is tipping. We know that the inflation is there, but to get this many people coming in..." And I wrote Selling the Price Increase. (05:32): And then, as soon as that book was coming out, you began to see that you've got some recessionary issues that are coming into play. Maybe not in every single economy. And by the way, not even in every single state in the United States. It's just a pattern that you see emerging. (05:46): And when you start seeing a pattern emerging, the question is, are you going to be behind the curve or ahead of the curve? So by paying attention to what's happening, you start thinking, "Well, there's something there." (05:57): This wasn't a aha moment, I need to do this book. It was much more of a, I'm seeing things happening. I had just finished Selling the Price Increase, which was an intense book. It's a detailed textbook on how to go get price increases. Really, really, really detailed. Probably one of the most detailed, wonky books I've ever written. (06:20): I'm not thinking I want to write another book. I'm thinking I want to go sleep for about a year. Because I pulled that book off in about 60 days, and it's the longest book I've written in terms of pages. (06:31): So I'm sitting down, this third week in June in New York City. I was up there doing a gig, and met with my publisher, Wiley. And we're just having a conversation batting around ideas, and they're like, "What have you been thinking about?" (06:43): I said, "Well, I've got this content I've been working on for a while, and I don't know if this is the right time, but it's called Selling in a Crisis. And as soon as I said it, the antennas went up, and they're like, "Oh, that. How soon?" (07:00): I had the summer blocked to write the follow-up to Fanatical Prospecting, called the Fanatical Prospecting Playbook, which is out on Amazon, but there isn't a book yet. And they said, "Send me this stuff." So I left there, send them my ideas, and had a contract the next day, and said, "This is what we're going to do." (07:18): So that was really the impetus. And I had the time set aside, so I was able to get the book done. The way the book turned out though was kind of weird. I didn't start at this point with the book being the way it is. I'm really happy the way it is, but it wasn't my point. (07:33): But that's how it came about. But Corey, I think that the way that I've written books over the last few years, when you look at Virtual Selling, Virtual Training, Selling the Price Increase, and now Selling in a Crisis. It's really the way that good sales professionals should be looking at their marketplace and looking at their world, is you got to be paying attention to patterns. (07:54): Because if you can get ahead of the curve on the activity, on the messaging, on how you're changing. Even changing markets. Part of this book is, you've got to go where the money is. So if you're shifting into a different market because you know that that market's going to go there, there's Chris with the book. (08:10): So most people in the world are reacting. You don't have to be. You can be proactive. You have to pay attention to what's happening around you. Corey Frank (08:18): So with that, Chris and I talk in our Market Dominance podcast certainly, a lot about the signals we get from prospects. The pauses, the not-pauses. The signals they give you by not responding to emails, ghosting, et cetera. (08:33): When you look at particularly selling in a crisis, what are some of these... We talk about 55 ways, but what are some of these ways? You said to pay attention to the patterns. What are some of those patterns that you're talking about? Jeb Blount (08:45): Well, when you think about prospects teaching you. That's the way I look at it. A prospect teaches you what's happening in their world. Those lessons come in a couple of ways. (08:53): If you're brand new... So for example, if you're running ConnectAndSell, and you're having lots of conversations, probably the easiest way to learn how to have a conversation with a prospect is to have lots of conversations with prospects. Pretty soon you kind of figure out, this is the things they're interested in. These are the things they're not interested in. Especially if you're going down a market vertical. (09:11): That's everyday work. If you're in a crisis, or in a disruptive period, economic downturn. It could be energy crisis. It could be any of the things that are impacting companies today. You've got to pay attention to what questions your prospects are asking you. You've got to pay attention to how slow they're moving, or how fast they're moving. (09:32): So for example, in selling in a crisis, one of the things that we know to be true is that, when you're in a situation where people feel stressed or overwhelmed, or they feel like making a decision to do business with you is super risky, time is not on your side. You don't have six months to work a deal. You've got to advance that deal micro-step by micro-step by micro-step. (09:56): And if they're not willing to match your effort and move along with you, it's a pretty clear signal that you may not have a deal there. The most expensive thing that you can do during a crisis period, during a recession, is to invest a lot of time in the wrong prospect. (10:11): So the signals that you get from prospects along the way are, "Hey, am I really in this with you? Am I really interested in working with you?" Along the way, you've got to pay attention to the people that you are dealing with. Because, as we start moving into an economic downturn, as winter starts coming on, decision-making authority begins to shift and move inside organizations. (10:33): Right now, it's typically at a middle level to a low level. As the crisis heats up, as the recession comes on, it'll begin moving up higher in the organization, and you're not going to know when that's going to happen. So you have to start paying attention to when you ask those prospects to do something, what do they do? How do they do it? How do they respond to you? (10:55): You have to pay attention to cognitive dissonance. You have to pay attention to their body language. All of those things matter. And a good salesperson, a good sales professional, lives in the land of awareness. Because they understand that you cannot be delusional and successful at the same time. And if we ignore those patterns, we begin to live inside of delusion. Corey Frank (11:16): So Chris, you, as the CEO of ConnectAndSell, you see several million phone calls a year. If you look at, we're talking about flight school, IFR and VFR type of ratings, right?You not only have the visual flight, by being on the ground with your clients, Chris, and seeing kind of the residue and the body language over the last few months. But you have the IFR, the instrument ratings as well, to see what's that residue that shows up in all the ConnectAndSell reports from the data. So with what Jeb is talking about, are you seeing many of the same things? Chris Beall (11:51): Well, one of the ones we have seen... Yeah, we do see some things. One of the ones we've seen is, we get a signal back that says people have left their job, and it's called person left remove in our world. And that signal has gone from a 2018 level of about 3.3% per month, and it went up during this whole great reshuffle, et cetera, et cetera, up to about 5.2% per month. (12:15): And we can look at it by how senior the people are. As Jeb said, the decision-making authority is likely to move up in organizations, and it moves up very, very fast. The reason it moves up is somebody has a meeting and says, "Okay, CFO's got a lot of power." (12:31): During a crisis, CFOs have a huge amount of power in organizations. In fact, you can generally say that the power shifts from the CEO to the CFO in a crisis. That's what really happens. And the CEO's left trying to figure out what to do with the resources they're allowed to have. (12:47): I know a lot of people think CEOs are like big powerful beasts that do everything. Actually, kind of they're both reporting to the board, the CFO and the CEO effectively. Unless the organization's put together kind of funny. And you get these power shifts that are going on. (13:02): And they tend to be represented in reality by, suddenly somebody who could spend $50,000 has got to go get approval for $10,000. Or for anything. That's a fairly common one. (13:15): What we don't normally see in sales, and we have to learn to adapt to in a crisis, is not just continuous change and staying on top of stuff, it's discontinuous change. So there's continuous change going on like, "Hey, now if my deal takes three months, I have a 15% chance the person I'm working with is gone before the end of the deal." (13:36): Think about that. So you're better off doing a deal that can be done earlier, and then cementing it as best you can to somebody who's likely to still be there and start delivering value, than to see if you can do a better deal in three months, which you might have been [inaudible 00:13:51] Corey Frank (13:52): So are you saying [inaudible 00:13:53] take a smaller price deal? Is that what I hear you saying? Potentially [inaudible 00:13:56] Chris Beall (13:56): I always make the distinction between price and chunk size. So price is price. Your unit price is your unit price. Whatever it is, you're probably not going to move off of that. Chunk size has a lot to do with what you can get done in a amount of time you have with the people that you're working with. (14:12): And chunk size, in a crisis, it's often wise... It feels funny, but it's often wise to actually come down in chunk size, spread your portfolio, and take market share. The best thing you can do in a crisis is while everybody else is trying to keep the lights on, you take the market. (14:29): And they wake up when it's all [inaudible 00:14:33] "What happened?" And it's like, "Well, I took the market." Then that's what our show's all about, is market dominance. "I took the market while you were worried about the deal." Jeb Blount (15:33): Yup. By the way, that's exactly what we did at Sales Gravy during the last downturn. It wasn't a very long downturn, but we put pedal to the metal, and we sucked up market share and quadrupled the size of our company by not being afraid to lean into it. (15:48): And a lot of it was exactly what Chris is saying. Really wise words. We just broke the chunks up into smaller pieces. And it turned out that when we were delivering value, they said we want more of those chunks. (15:59): So one way of looking at this, and Chris, I don't want to put words in your mouth, is, when things start hitting the fan, you've got to make it really easy for people to do business with you with a lower risk to them, so that they don't feel like they need to hold off on something. Because time is not on your side. (16:19): If you think time's on your side, you are dead wrong. It is not. It will slay you. I love the stat, 15% of the people are leaving within three months. And that's real. Chris Beall (16:30): Yeah, and a buying committee, it's even worse. Because say you've got a buying committee of four folks, right? You're almost at a 100% chance that one of the four will leave. And as soon as they leave, that committee goes into paralysis. (16:42): It's instantaneous paralysis, because their buying mechanism was the vote among those people. And there is power games being played inside of there. You can never see them perfectly. You're an outsider, they're insiders. All that power is flowing around inside. But something broke down power-wise, because that person left. (17:00): And it's not always that they're fired. Sometimes they're the smart ones. The powerful person who says, "I'm getting out of here, I'm going to where the grass is going to be greener, or at least the sprinklers are still going to be turned on tomorrow." (17:11): So I think speed becomes a huge, huge issue. Getting cycle times down, and friction out. Those are hard things to do, because we cling to the big deals, the one that's going to make everything happen. And we cling to our friction elements, because we think they provide us with proof of progress. And yet, we have to let go of that stuff if we really want to dominate in a crisis Corey Frank (17:34): Yeah, for sure. You know, one of the things, Jeb, you talk about certainly in a lot of your books, is activity is everything. Especially in a crisis, Chris, certainly you have a powerful weapon like ConnectAndSell that helps you amplify, and certainly modulate, upscale your activities is everything. (17:52): But Jeb, with that in mind, in these 55 ways, is there such a thing as, do I have to prospect smarter? Or is it, do I have to prospect more? Or do I have to prospect differently? When you talk about, again that broad axiom of activity is everything, how can we frame that in towards the crisis mentality here? Jeb Blount (18:13): All of the above. You have to get more prospecting done, in less time, with greater outcomes. And so you have to prospect faster, and you have to get more done. Which is why ConnectAndSell's such a great product. (18:27): You have to have more conversations with people. And you have to do it, and you have to compress the time. Because you've got to get much more prospecting done during a crisis period, because there are going to be fewer buyers. It's just necessary to sift through all of the soil to find the gold. (18:46): But you also have to do some things different. I mean, you have to maybe change your message a little bit. That's going to be important. You're going to face a little bit different prospecting objections. Most of it's going to be deferment objections. "We're not buying right now, we're not doing anything right now." (19:02): You're going to have to get through those. And you're going to have to pay attention to Willie Sutton. Willie Sutton is the namesake of Sutton's Law. Sutton's Law simply describes, you have to go where the money is. (19:13): So you're going to have to begin shifting what you consider your ideal qualified prospect as we move into a down market. And that just simply means the money's going to be moving someplace. It may not be moving in the market you've been calling in, so go find another market. (19:28): And then you've got to be prepared multiple times to shift. Because sometimes that money will move into one segment, and then move to another segment. It might move into a certain size company, away from other size companies. (19:40): This goes back to knowing your market, knowing your business, knowing your customer base. Knowing what's happening at the macro level and at the micro level. It means studying, being an expert. (19:52): But you have to do all of those things. You have to prospect more, you have to be more efficient. And sometimes you have to be different. Different messaging, different ways of dealing with objections, and into different markets. Corey Frank (20:06): And Chris, in your world, when you look at, again, the weapon of ConnectAndSell. Dial-to-connect rates, conversation / conversion rates. Dial-to-meeting rates. What kind of residue and signals are you seeing? (20:19): Much like what you talked about earlier with the folks who are no longer employed. You saw a little bit of blip a few months ago, that was a leading indicator. What are you seeing from dial-to-connect, dial-to-meeting rates that kind of buttresses what Jeb's talking about? Chris Beall (20:34): Well, I always look at the most calibrated reps, right? So you look at, over time, who produces certain number of meetings per prospecting hour. Because that's really what the number is. Time is not your friend. Time goes tick, tick, tick. You've got a prospecting hour, what do you produce? (20:48): A fabulous number is, well, we know some folks who can go two and a half, three meetings per hour that they can produce like clockwork. Most really good, top-of-funnel folks who other people would say are good, they're going to be at about 0.6. (21:05): But if you take that top person, and you see that meetings per rep hour go down, all things being equal, you have got to move. And if you don't have a calibrated person, you're kind of screwed. Because now the question is, "Well what's really going on?" And what's probably going on is actually what Jeb talks about in chapter 44. (21:23): Chapter 44 is Control Your Emotions. "Selling in a crisis can push you to the edges of emotional extremes. These emotional extremes become your Achilles heel. Unmanaged, they betray you, make you weak, cause you to lose self-control, and make it impossible for you to effectively influence buyers who are likely being impacted by similar emotions." (21:44): The death spiral in sales is when your emotions start to be affected by their responses. When they're affected negatively, you become less effective. And the place you become less effective is at the opener of your cold call. (21:59): That's where you go to crap. That's where you go to hell in a hand basket. Your voice tightens up, you're a little bit off, and everybody wants to hang up on you. So that's what I always look for, is that first hint. (22:12): It's a very athletic business. Think of how you do it with athletes, right? If it's a wide receiver, you're looking for the guy who's breaking a little bit late and gets hit in the side of the helmet by the ball. It's like, "Why weren't you looking back for that?" Because he's tight. That's why. Because he's tight. And as soon as you're tight you can't execute. (22:33): So I look for that tightness in that number. Which is a discontinuous, or rather quick change in meetings per rep hour from a highly calibrated top performer. And then you kind of go, "That's the market." Go down in the organization, you're going to see it from their own emotions. Now you've got a coaching thing that you've got to work on. Corey Frank (22:54): You bring up a great point. We have to do a plug to our friend Brad Ferguson and then Dave Kurlan from OMG. Because the OMG sales assessment tool, they have a metric in there, a measurable aspect, that says your ability to stay in the moment. And can you take a punch or not, right, Jeb? (23:12): I'm sure that you see this in... It's tough enough in cold calling, when you're doing prospecting. You talk a lot about it, I know, in the discovery, which we're going to talk about a little bit later here. But how do you coach that, from your perspective? (23:26): From your team at Sales Gravy, they go out, and I'm somebody that, I'm going to get turned off my focus here. Because the prospect is maybe a little bit more antsy, a little bit more animated, a little bit more agitated. How can you coach me to stay in the moment, om, Spock-like, keep the game going? Jeb Blount (23:45): It's more of a pattern of things. It's not going to be one call. So it's going to be multiple calls that are going to start pushing salespeople to change their pattern, and the way that they approach prospects on a cold call, because they become emotional. (23:59): In other words, they begin anticipating that they're going to get hit in the head, essentially is what happens. They get tight. They're like, "I'm going to get punched in the face." So they come off more insecure, they lose their confidence. (24:10): And in a cold-call situation, because you're moving so fast. I mean, essentially it's verbal judo at 100 miles an hour. If you're tight, you're going to get nailed. So the downward spiral becomes, they get hit in the head, it hurts, then they flinch again, and then they get hit in the head again. Then it hurts. And then it just gets worse and worse and worse in the way that they're approaching them. (24:31): So if you're a sales leader, first of all, what Chris said is exactly right. Go watch your salespeople. Calibrate. Look at your top salespeople, look at the people in the middle. Pay attention to what's happening to them. Listen to their calls. Be present. Pay attention to them. (24:46): You can't lead this from sitting behind a desk looking at your email. You need to be there and listen to calls. In my case, I'll go get on calls with them. So I'll go make calls with the salesperson, have the same conversations, see what they're experiencing, and then sit back and say, "Okay, we're getting this objection from a customer or from our prospects. How are we going to handle that?" (25:10): And then we're going to coach the messaging, build the messaging, replay the messaging, role-play the messaging, and then we're going to go get back on the telephones again. Because all they really need is just to know how they're going to handle that moment. And how are they going to handle their emotions when they get punched in the face. (25:26): But sometimes you forget. If you get hit enough times, you just forget. A really good way of looking at this. And Chris, this is kind of a connection to what you're saying. (25:36): Most people know I'm just big into horses. It's my thing. And I had a horse last spring that refused a jump on me really dirty, real bad, and it broke my foot. Then I get on another horse, and I get on another horse, and suddenly I feel fear because I think those horses are going to do the same thing. (25:57): Now this is all happening at the subconscious level, and I'm tight. Well, if I'm tight, what I do is I change the horse's behavior because of my behavior. (26:07): What my coach did for me was say, "Hey Jeb, guess what? Let me show you a picture of what's happening. Here's a video. This is you on that horse going over the jump. See how far forward you are? See what you're doing?" (26:20): So if you're a coach, you have to sit with your salespeople, and then you have to help them become aware of the way they've changed their behavior. Because usually when they start changing those behaviors, they don't know it. It's just one little thing at a time. (26:33): And then you have to sometimes get on the calls with them and show them it's going to be okay. But more than anything, you want to help them with their messaging. You want to listen to what they're doing, and you want to get them back in track. (26:45): It's no different than the coach with the wide receiver that's cutting just a little bit early. You're going to show them some game film. You're going to say, "Here's what you're doing, now let's go out and practice it."And that's how you get them better. It's not like the person's talent took a hit, it's their emotions that took a hit. As the coach, that's what your job is, is to fill and close that gap. Corey Frank (27:03): I think an example that you talked about, I believe it was on your blog recently or one of your podcasts, you talked about your son conducting one of the seminars. And a gentleman in the audience raised his hand and says, "Hey, this whole fanatical prospecting thing, is it even relevant today? Does that stuff even work?" (27:21): Now talk about getting a signal that there's some fear there, right Chris? And I'll let you tell the rest of the story if you recall. How did your speaker, how did your son, handle that particular question? Jeb Blount (27:30): He just pulls out his list and picks up the phone. He just rips off 20 outbound prospecting calls, he sets a few appointments. And he just looks at him and says, "Is it relevant?" That was it. That's the truth. (27:43): So he covered that gap by showing them that what they were fearing was all the wrong thing. I mean, all they really wanted him to do was to let them off the hook. And Chris, you'll love this, that the phone didn't work anymore. (27:56): I mean, it wasn't about whether fanatical prospecting was good or not. It was whether or not they should be talking with people in real time, in synchronous conversations, on the telephone. Or should they just sit around in their sales enablement platform and spam people with a bunch of crappy emails. And he just shut the whole thing down, just in that moment. (28:16): And my kid, by the way, looking at patterns. When he was in high school, I used to make him come in, and I would give him a list of people to call and we would practice messaging. I'd have it on speaker phone and all I wanted him to do was get objections. (28:31): So I wanted to hear all the objections that he got. Then we would change the messaging, and he would come in and we would do it again the next day. And we would change the messaging until we would hone it, and we would start getting fewer objections than we were getting conversations. (28:47): You're always going to get objections. But if I can improve the probability that I get a conversation and reduce the probability I get an objection, I'm going to get more meetings. If I get more meetings, I'm going to sell more. (28:55): So it's the same thing that Chris was talking about. As a leader, you've got to listen. Pay attention to what's happening around you, what your patterns are. You cannot hide in the sand. (29:05): And Chris, I'd love to get your opinion on this, but I've got to tell you, I think a lot of leaders are frightened to death of coaching prospecting activity. I think it scares them. I don't think that they like it. I think that they will do anything to stay away from it. I think it makes them feel uncomfortable. (29:22): And I can tell you that, if you're a leader and you will go sit down next to your rep, and you'll make dials with them, you'll be the greatest hero in the world. They'll tell everybody what you did. Because most leaders are afraid to do that, because they're afraid that they'll get rejected. They're afraid that they'll fail. They're afraid that their reps will see them fail. (29:41): I do it all the time, Corey. I make egregious mistakes. Every once in a while I'll sell something. I mean crazy as it sounds, I'll get a deal. I'll get somebody on the hook. But usually I'm crashing and burning right next to it. (29:52): They don't even notice. I'm the guy that wrote Fanatical Prospecting, and I'm messing everything up. All they see is that I'm sitting there on the phone on a list. Corey Frank (30:01): Yup, yup. Chris Beall (30:02): Yeah, I've got an example of this that's quite illuminating. So Scott Webb over at HUB International, chief sales officer of the Central Region there. He's figured out two things I think that everybody should think about a little bit when it comes to this question of the emotions and prospecting. (30:18): One is, he doesn't let anybody prospect using our weapon unless it's in a group setting. And the group setting is all Zoom, but it's a group setting. And it's like, you come to this, you come, we start on the second. It's at 9:00:00 it starts. And it ends at 9:59:59, and whatever's left, and it's over. (30:44): And you've got to earn your way in. You've got to earn your way in by converting it greater than 10% conversation to meetings. And you have four sessions in which to do it, after which, "Sorry, you're out." (30:55): But he does another thing, which is he leads from the front. And he leads from the front, he's on every one of those. He's calling with them. He has somebody else who's paying attention and coaching. We provide that person. (31:06): And as a result, it's sort of like a no excuses world. You really don't expect the head coach to go out there and run that pattern better than the wide receiver, better than that first round draft pick. But he does it. (31:18): He converts, by the way, at 100%. And he does it using techniques I've never seen before [inaudible 00:31:24] Corey Frank (31:24): 100%. Come on. Chris Beall (31:27): It's what Cherryl Turner has adopted called the insistence close. It's quite fascinating, and it takes care of a lot of emotions. But the big emotional thing is, look, we don't like to talk about it, but we're kind of herd animals. (31:40): A lot of salespeople think they're not. They think, "Oh, I'm [inaudible 00:31:44] I'm this independent, I'm lone wolf, blah, blah blah." Fact of matter is, people are braver in groups than they are individually. And once you get that sort of herd thing going, now you can coach to first failure very easily. (31:57): And we're big advocates of coach to first failure. Never coach the second thing, because it's the first thing that screwed up the second thing. Just coach the first thing. Push the damn button, have another conversation. See how you do. (32:09): But I mean, I've coached a lot of stuff. You know, Corey, I used to teach people rock climbing. The second failure tends to be really bad when you're climbing. It's the one that starts with the word falling ends with the fall. It's the failure before that, that causes the fall. It's not the one on the move, it's the one that was going to set up the move. (32:28): And that's true in sales too. It's the previous thing that you didn't quite get that left you in an awkward position, left you out of balance, left you too far forward on the horse. Whatever it happens to be. It's that first failure you've got to coach to. But you've got to do it under pressure. Because when they're not under pressure, they all perform. Corey Frank (32:46): Mm-hmm.

Most people look at a potential job from the standpoint of “What am I going to earn?” Austin Finch, Funnel Media Group’s podcast editor and today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys, talks with our host, Chris Beall, about an additional and very important way of looking at any new employment you’re considering. They suggest asking yourself the question, “What am I going to learn?” Austin cautions job hunters that even a high-paying job can be a dead-end job. When you’re looking at a new job — whether it’s in sales or another field —  Austin suggests that “If you can gain experience, and move on to gain more, then there’s no reason to hold yourself back.” Listen to the whole podcast for more words of career wisdom from Chris and Austin in today’s insightful and helpful Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “What Am I Going to Learn?” ----more---- About Our Guest Austin Finch is an in-demand podcast editor for Funnel Media Group. He is currently a senior at Beaverton High School in Beaverton, Oregon. Chris Beall (01:16): It's really interesting. Helen is always really thoughtful about whether the job she has or a job if she thinks about taking one, like moving from one position to another in Microsoft, her number one thing is always, what am I going to learn? It's really interesting. And Helen is younger than I am, but not by five decades. And that attitude, that the main thing about a job is what are you gonna learn while you're doing it? I think that is refreshing. It's something to be intentional about for people who can. I know a lot of people it's like, "What am I gonna earn? But even a really high-paying job can be a dead-end job. And so, I love your view on that. (01:59): There's another thing you are getting out of this that you may or may not be aware of, you probably are 'cause here we are sitting here doing this. People go off to really expensive colleges, not hoping to get a great education 'cause they're pretty sure when they're 18, 19, 20, 21 years old the limiting factor in their actual education, their academic education is the fact that they're at a really bad age to get an academic education. I mean, it's just like you couldn't pick a worse age range to imbue yourself in the deep knowledge that's been gathered over the centuries, or whatever the leading stuff is that's coming out of laboratories, or whatever it happens to be than between 18 and 22 when, for not everybody but for a lot of people, there's a lot of, we'll call it, biologically amplified social interest. I think that's what I should call it, BASI, I could put a C on the end, that'd be pretty cool. Biologically amplified social interest . (02:59): But they do know they're getting one thing. Why do they spend a bazillion dollars to go to, you name it Ivy League School? And the answer is the network. It's why I didn't do it by the way. Now, I'm not saying I could have gotten into one of those places, but some people thought I could because they were recruiting me. But I didn't want that network interestingly enough. I don't know why, it's a freaking nature of my personality and I was wrong. Not that I should have gone to one of the schools, but if you know 10 people who are well placed in the world of whatever it is, and in the case of like Corey, and myself, and Helen, and all of our guests, you think about it, every single one of our guests would take your call. Every single one of our guests would take your call. (03:47): Now, think about who those guests are. That network, that's a bazillion dollar network. That's worth a Harvard education right there in terms of network. I mean you even know somebody who runs a really cool set of hotels up in Canada, the CEO of that company. You could call her up and go, "Hey, this is Austin Finch, I'm the editor of the podcast Market Dominance podcast you were on blah blah blah and I just wanted to tell you how much I really, I went back and listened to it and tell you how much I really enjoyed what you had to say there, especially X, Y or Z." You have an entry point throughout. Do you think young people think about that network-building effect while they're working in their first job, second job, third job? Austin Finch (04:29): I think in the first job it usually gets overlooked, unfortunately. But I think by the second it starts to really hit you. Because I have a lot of friends that quit their first job because the hours were bad or the pay was bad, whatever it is, the usual surface-level reasons. And then, when they were looking for their second job, they had a lot more in mind in terms of who that manager is and what companies that's connected to. Because, like you said, I mean if you can build a gazillion dollar network, why wouldn't you try to? Just the guests I've heard speak on this show alone are in so many different business sectors that any field I could have someone to talk to about it. Chris Beall (05:15): Yeah, you can talk to Oren Klaff, one of the most brilliant minds and practitioners in the world of how we should sell, who's now in the business of helping companies raise capital. (05:25): In fact, I'm working with him right now, literally today, on raising capital for our company. And the world of investment banking, and how all of that works is so cipher to most of us. And he's a phone call away for you. Also he is the only guy in the show who's ever had the good graces to argue with me, which I thought was just fantastic. Austin Finch (05:46): It was memorable. Chris Beall (05:48): It wasn't good. It's the kind of thing that people who don't like that sort of stuff would go, "Ooh." We had a lot of fun on that show. That was really fun. So that's fascinating. (05:58): So where do you go from here? What are you gonna do? You don't have to divulge it all to the audience, but do you have kind of an idea, direction? You gonna run companies? You seem rather entrepreneurial to me or is that like, "No, that's crazy stuff. People go broke doing that." Or what are your inclinations? Austin Finch (06:17): I look a lot at my mom's career and how it's evolved several times and I think my priority one is to choose a good entry point. And the second priority would be to not be afraid to change 'cause she's changed complete directions of her business several times just since I've been old enough to notice and talk to her about it. And every time she gets something new out of it, whether it's knowledge, or a new career opportunity, every time it's new contacts and that's building that network as well. So I don't want to be blind to the possibility of changing, or get locked in one career forever. Chris Beall (07:37): I love it. I love it. I think a lot of people think that they should get on some sort of a treadmill 'cause my mom always thought I should do that. I remember, I went through a big change in 1988 where on a Friday I went to the guy who was running the project that I was working on, title was director of engineering, or product, or something like that at the software company. But, in fact, I built the product and I'd sold the source code. It was Sun Microsystems, they were gonna use it as a foundation for building these automated distribution centers. And I went through a big change between a Friday and a Sunday. I went to the top guy and I said, "I'm gonna quit my job on Sunday at midnight. Do you want me here, Monday morning?" I was living in Boulder and working in California. (08:24): And I'll never forget my mom's response to that. I went from making $62,000 a year to making $260,000 a year over a weekend. So it was a big deal. And I was out on my own. I was suddenly an entrepreneur in the tech space, tech services effectively. And I'll never forget, my mom's reaction was, "You left that good job?" 'Cause her view and many people of her generation, their view is, "My job is a lifeline and you get one and keep it forever." Your view appears to be do stuff that's useful, be good at it if you can and learn a bunch and be open to change. And I think that's a much more robust way of looking at not just career but life 'cause they're pretty intertwined, I believe. (09:11): And your mom is a great example. And I'll never forget the lunch we had when she had just acquired Funnel Media and that was a scary move. That is not a trivial thing to do. You have to have a certain amount of activity to keep the lights on, and make things happen and how do you grow the business? She was so brave in the way she did it. And I thought really, really creative. So that's a great example for you. But I think your attitude is just dead on. It's just absolutely dead on. And I suspect it's more widespread than most people my age think among folks like your friends. I mean, would you say that it's more the norm among your circle of friends that they have this attitude, rather than, "I got to latch myself onto some job that's gonna take me to retirement and then I can sit around on my butt the rest of my life?" Austin Finch (10:02): I think it's kind of hard to tell because especially since all of us still live with our parents, you have so much influence from sometimes much older generations that are attached to that idea of if you find a good job, there's no reason to ever switch. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, that whole kind of thing. (10:19): And there's also that whole sense of loyalty to a company and to an organization where it's not that I don't feel any sense of loyalty, but it's if you can gain experience and move on to gain more, there's no reason to hold yourself back. And like you were saying, even a high-paying job can be a dead-end job. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. Chris Beall (10:39): That's interesting. Yeah, it's a big part of what Helen does in the Love Your Team system is to help people move on, not move out of a group, or something like that. After all, the idea of it is to form high performing teams and have the best performers want to stay and work with you and really produce wonderful things. But she does it by paying attention to people's aspirations to their lives, to where they really want to go. And help them along on their own journey rather than demanding some sort of loyalty to this abstract company. And I think that's a big deal. (11:14): I think that the notion of loyalty to a company is a little bit odd when you think about it. The company is a bit of an abstraction. Loyalty to a bunch of people you work with while you're working with them, and friendship with them afterward, and maybe good feelings about what you did and all that, yeah, those all make sense. But I don't know, I think it goes back to when the idea was, hey, you had the local whatever they were, the duke, the king, the Lord of the castle. They're keeping you from the other bad guys coming in and doing bad things to you, and therefore, you need to be loyal to them and just shut your eyes and do that. I think that's a bad idea in modern business. (11:51): You need to be loyal to the truth. That's sort of a different matter. But maybe not so much to a given company. And I don't think anybody's gonna refuse to bring you on board because you're not pretending like you're a slave to their organization for the rest of your life. So I love the attitude. (12:08): Do you find, as you're interacting with the school you go to the teachers and all that, what do you think about their awareness of this particular dynamic of here you are at your age, you're working at something, you're going off ultimately away from the school to do other things. Does the school get it? Do the teachers get it? Do you feel like they're looking out for you in that sense? And I don't mean all of them, but even some of them. What's your experience around that part of society? The [inaudible 00:12:38], the education part. Austin Finch (12:39): Well, I heard a lot about high school before I got there from my older sister, so that was kind of the background knowledge. But I feel like the focus has shifted a lot in recent years towards really gearing us up for a career and for college. I mean, for a while it seemed like the focus was mainly just work as hard as you can in high school, graduate with the highest GPA you can, and then we'll see you never. And good luck with your career. And now, I definitely have a fair amount of teachers and staff members that when I talk to them about the classes I'm taking, or the plans I have, they genuinely want to help any way they can to help you succeed on whatever journey you want to pursue. Chris Beall (13:25): That's hopeful and fantastic. (13:26): And, on that note, I think we should wrap this up. That's like the most hopeful, coolest thing I've heard in quite a while, Austin. I'm gonna feel good about the world for a little bit here because of what you just said. (13:37): And I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. And I know you're gonna do a fantastic job editing it. God knows what sort of things I threw in there that you can go pluck something else out. And I think you're gonna have some fun listening to your own voice. You have a fantastic voice, by the way. And the thoughtful nature of your speech, of how you talk, and it's clear how you're thinking from how you speak, I think is a wonderful thing. It's an inspiration to me. I'll try to be more thoughtful in the future. (14:05): Thanks so much for being on and have fun editing this show. Austin Finch (14:08): Thanks for having me on it. Chris Beall (14:10): All right, fantastic. (14:11): And for Market Dominance Guys. Corey Frank, not here. Chris Beall with Austin Finch. Hey, 'til next time.

Who’s behind the curtain making the Market Dominance Guys the great podcast that it is? It’s Austin Finch, an editor at Funnel Media Group, which produces Market Dominance Guys. In listening to this conversation between Austin and our host, Chris Beall, you would never know that Austin is the youngest guest ever interviewed for this podcast. Currently 17 years old, he has edited Market Dominance Guys for several years and has recently added Helen Fanucci’s “Love Your Team” podcast to his editing responsibilities. In talking with this intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful young man, Chris asks about the challenges of podcast editing, including the pruning and grafting necessary to increase a podcast audience’s understanding and to decrease the distractibility caused by any audio glitches or guests’ faux pas. Austin loves his job and sees his editing work as that of a translator for the hosts’ and guests’ messages, and his goal as “Helping to Get the Message Across,” which just happens to be the title of today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode. ----more---- About Our Guest Austin Finch is an in-demand podcast editor for Funnel Media Group. He is currently a senior at Beaverton High School in Beaverton, Oregon.   Full episode transcript below:   Chris Beall (01:22): All right, so here we are with another episode of Market Dominance Guys and this is Chris Beall flying solo on my side today without my wingman that I normally am with, although we've flown solo a couple times each direction. Corey Frank is off gallivanting around in Greek Islands, or God knows what. I get a video from him every once in a while and wonder why he's there and I'm not there, but that's just the way it is. (01:48): And I'm here today with a very, very special guest, Austin Finch. And none of you know Austin probably, unless he's secretly more famous than he lets on. But Austin has actually been I think the most important member of the Market Dominance Guys team, because he's worked, not behind the camera, but in this business on the other side of the screen turning whatever junk Corey and I spew out of our mouths into those episodes that people have been saying nice things about. So Austin, welcome to Market Dominance Guys, funny thing to say to the guy who actually causes it to go from a bunch of raw stuff to finished production material. Austin Finch (02:30): Thank you for having me on the show. Chris Beall (02:31): Spectacular, what fun. We in the form of I, came up with this idea at lunch the other day in Portland. I got to ask a preliminary question though because the audience is going to be all over this question which is, Austin, so we have a bunch of grizzled business people on, and then we have some lovely business people on, and then we have even some fairly young business people like Tom Yang has been on so that's been interesting. But I have a feeling that you might be the youngest guest we've had in terms of chronological age, although I think in terms of perhaps wisdom and maturity, you got Corey and me both beat. I don't want to ask you your name unless you're comfortable spitting it out, but are you roughly speaking 50 years younger than me? Austin Finch (03:15): I don't know quite how old you are, but I'm sitting at 17 right now. Chris Beall (03:20): 50 years it is. I got five decades on you. The audience can be stunned that I've learned so little in five decades, or you've learned so much in 1.7. But just an opening question, I've told people for a long time that you're the guy who makes our show real. Susan, your mom, says, "Cut it here, cut it there," and then you go and go way beyond cut it here, cut it there and turn it into something. When did you get started, because we're going to talk podcasting here for a while, a subject about which more than I. When did you get started editing podcasts? Austin Finch (03:57): In the summer of 2019, I had just bought a computer for the first time, a desktop computer and I was looking for jobs I could do at that age, which are pretty limited around here, almost everything wants you to be at least 16. And for years, since I was old enough to understand what she did, I'd always talked to my mom about what she did for work, or she'd asked me questions about, "Should I make this choice, or this choice?" And she goes up to me one day and she goes, "Well, do you have any interest in editing podcasts, that's the way a lot of people are getting interested in the business right now?" "Sure, I'll give it a shot." And she asked me what I'd want to do in terms of content and this one sounded interesting, because she said you guys were very knowledgeable and that your topic was cool and I'd have to agree. So it's been a little over three years. Chris Beall (04:46): Well, lucky three years for Corey of me, and for everybody in the audience who's been enjoying these podcasts. What was it like? That sounds like, "Hey Austin, here's a diving board and down there, somewhere, we're calling that a swimming pool. There's no water in it yet, but if you dive off we'll get some in before you hit." What was it like? Was it like, "Oh my God," or was it like, "Oh yeah I could do this while doing three other things?" Austin Finch (05:10): Well there's always that safety net of my boss being my mom, so she's not going to just fire me for no reason. So that's one plus. And then the other nice thing was that she would teach me all the tips and tricks as I was going along. So I was learning more about it. It wasn't just hopping into a software I'd never used, because the Adobe Suite is not exactly self-explanatory. Chris Beall (05:34): I will tell the folks at Adobe that. I have tried to learn a couple of Adobe products in my life and I have concluded that I'm a no-hoper when it comes to that stuff. I mean even the simple ones, they're just entirely beyond me. They seem to have a mental model that conflicts with my view of the world. Was that part challenging for you, or did you pick up the mental model of the... And what are you using? You're using the Adobe Creative Suite, is that what it's called? Austin Finch (05:58): Yeah, the Creative Cloud. I'm using Adobe Audition for all these. Chris Beall (06:02): I showed my age there. Austin Finch (06:05): I'm still learning something new every once in a while, but I feel like I've got most of the things I need for podcasts down. Chris Beall (06:12): So what's the routine part? So we get done with the podcast, like we're recording right now. I record it in Zoom into the cloud. Susan, your mom, read me the Riot Act 2, 3, 4 times about how I should set up the recording correctly so that the fidelity is good, and the sound is decent. I don't have a fancy setup here. I don't even have headphones. I probably do, but I think they're sitting on the window sill behind the piano in the Seattle house and we're down here in the Arizona house so you can only have so many of everything. (06:42): And I just talked to this here, Microsoft Surface Pro and I don't know, it seems to do an okay job with those array microphones it has on them. Maybe it's because it's got a couple of them and they got some distance between them. I don't know why it works so well, but I just record and then when I'm done there is a link that shows up and I send it off to Susan and copy a couple of people including Corey and my sister Shelly so that they can have it for some reason. (07:08): Then what happens in your shop? Austin Finch (07:11): Between Shelly and my mom, Susan, they read the transcript and Shelly makes an intro and then one of them gives me somewhere to break it, into two episodes or three, depending on how long it is. Sometimes only one. And beyond that it's pretty much just make their message clear and don't let them cough into the mic. Chris Beall (07:34): So what do you do about that? It sounds like there's an easy part with just, "Okay it goes from here to there." But then there's another part which is, "Okay, but it's got to be right," because Corey and I, God knows what we do. Whether they're drinking whiskey and doing all manner of things. So is there a part of it that's that's really challenging where it's like, "Oh my God guys did you have to do that?" And then you've got to figure out what to do. Austin Finch (08:00): The hardest part is to probably audio glitches and when two people are talking over each other and one says something that you really don't want to in the other one says something that if you take it out the sentence makes no sense. And what usually happens there is I have to take words from other parts of the file and piece them together by copy and pasting them, which you have to choose from the right area. So you end up with a completely different pitch or volume and it just sounds like you slammed a bunch of pieces together instead of repurpose them well. Chris Beall (08:29): I had no idea you did that. That's fascinating. So we should just spit out a bunch of words said in a sort reasonable way just in case. We should make a word library for you. Have you ever gone so far as to choose a word from a different podcast like something Corey or I said and go steal it from another episode entirely? Austin Finch (08:49): I've never had to do that, but maybe I should have a file of you guys reading the entire dictionary and I can just go grab him catalog perfectly when I need to. Chris Beall (08:58): The Oxford English dictionary. We might get Corey to do that. Corey has beautiful elocution. I think he speaks much better than I do. So I love listening to him and it's one of the reasons that I do this. Fascinating. So I didn't know you did that. That's really interesting. Do you do audio wave form trickery to go, "Oh well this was a little quieter and I don't like the way it sounds. I'm going to take it from here to there," and I'm here everybody who's not watching this on video and I'm going to turn a knob, it's a figurative knob, maybe it's an actual knob, I doubt it, and make it match up. Are you using your ear in order to blend stuff together? Austin Finch (09:39): Yeah, sometimes I'll pull up the graph of the frequency. So the normal one it just shows volume and then I'll also pull up the pitch under that. So I'll take out the low notes or something, to make it sound more like it was part of this sentence. Or maybe take out the high notes because someone got a notification on their computer. So it's a lot of that. And then sometimes I have to close my eyes, or turn my head away from the computer so I can't see the audio in front of me so I can only hear how it would hear to the audience. Chris Beall (10:08): Wow. Okay so hello does it take to do one of those, because they tend to drop the next day. We're always stunned. It's like your mom is going, "Come on Chris, get the recording to me, get the recording," because for those who don't know me, I tend to do things, Oh shall we say, when the opportunity arises. And so that's the polite way of saying it at the last minute. And so she would rather have a schedule that, or they're dropping on a regular basis, because audiences are used to that and so forth. You seem to turn these things quite quickly. How much time goes into making a 20, 25-minute episode from us yapping to something ready to go out the door with the bumper music on it, mom's intro and the commercials in it and all that good stuff. Austin Finch (10:52): Well I tend to edit when the opportunity arises as well. So I get where you're coming from. And it really depends a lot on what the subject matter is and who the guest is, because oftentimes a guest who have never been on a podcast before, or they have very little experience. So every once in a while you'll get a guest that's been on radio for 20 years and they speak perfectly and eloquently and sometimes you'll have a guest that's never had their voice recorded with you can't expect them to be doing perfectly. And the other thing is if it's a three-part episode, the first part will be worse than the second, which will be worse than the third, because you guys warm up to each other and you get more in the groove of that back and forth, especially getting past technological issues. Chris Beall (11:34): Oh that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that, so that's really interesting. So as we get going we become more regular conversationalists and less the stilted scared bunnies that we are as we began episode 142 or whatever. But it is interesting, because the guests do need to get in the groove. I think Corey and I might start in a groove, but I'm not sure, maybe we don't, you would know, because how can we be objective about this? That is really, really interesting. So do you know anybody else's podcast? Your mom runs a podcasting company, so are you like the guy? Austin Finch (12:12): I'm not quite the guy but I have my two shows that I manage yours and the lovely Helen Fanucci. Chris Beall (12:19): Ooh yeah, lucky me. Lucky you too. We'll see what goes on with Helen's. Helen is not quite as enthusiastic a podcaster as I am. For me this comes completely naturally and while it shows that I never prepare, it turns out to be okay, I guess. She I think is more of a craftsman. She works at what she does, which is why she's so much more successful than I am, I think. Plus she's smarter and better looking and a whole bunch of other things. But I didn't know you did her show also, so that's pretty cool. Without saying anything too bad about Corey and me, just be gentle with us. But what do you see as of the differences between the two shows that you work on? Austin Finch (12:59): Well I thought it was really interesting to see when you had her as a guest here on Market Dominance Guys. It highlighted where hers is mainly an internal conversation and yours is a whole lot of external output things, in regard to business and sales. And hers is a lot more... It's called Love Your Team. It's a lot more about internal teams and how you manage those and it comes through in how you guys talk about other topics too, that hers is more focused on that aspect of it. Chris Beall (13:28): Yeah, it's really interesting. The distinction with regard to direction was one that I hadn't actually thought of until I ambushed her the other day and asked her to be a guest, because quite frankly your mom was putting a lot of pressure on me to get the show out and I said, "Hey Helen, want to be my guest?" She goes, "Yeah, sure." And so we just set up and did it and we do it from opposite ends of the house so we can't hear each other, which I think is pretty important, because as she says, I am really, really loud no matter how non-loud I try to be. And I just thought of that first question, second questions. We got past the bit where I asked whether it was true that she had something big happen in the summer. And for those of you who don't know, Helen Fanucci and I got married on July 2nd and then promptly went off on a long trip, a working trip, mostly working only nine weeks. (14:15): So I suddenly realize, my goodness, we've been talking about talking to customers and prospects for 140 whatever episodes and here's somebody who's coming and trumping all of that and saying, "Yeah, that's all nice. But a really important conversations are the ones you have with your team." And so here you are, somebody who's listened to in detail 60 hours, or something, taking you, you didn't answer the question of how long it takes, but I'm going to guess it takes an hour to put out 20 minutes, but maybe it takes two hours. I don't know.   Chris Beall (15:40): You have like 150 to 200 hours of interacting with our material, which is all about out talking to customers, talking to customers, and suddenly here's this person who comes along saying she's not saying that's not where it's at. She's saying your team takes care of that. You need to take care of your team. Was that a surprise to you? I bet to a lot of people it would be. That would be a big difference. How'd you feel about that? Austin Finch (16:04): Well a lot of what I've learned about business, because I haven't really been in that scene at all, has been from you and Corey and all your esteemed guests. So then when I started editing Love Your Team, because that was so much newer, I hadn't even thought of it that way. It was a completely new perspective and I thought it was really interesting at how well you guys obviously get along with extremely different approaches to a similar topic. Chris Beall (16:32): It's interesting isn't it? That's good. Well I think that happens a lot in relationships. Our economic strategy is similar, we call it a dumbbell strategy. It's got a lot of weight [inaudible 00:16:42] not a lot in between. So she's a very successful executive who her earnings are commensurate with her responsibilities and I'm an entrepreneur who's basically hanging out on the edge looking for the big wins. And so I guess that can happen a lot. It's interesting to see that in the context of as you pointed out in business and in relationships. (17:03): So as you think about either one of those podcasts and you think about, okay, so you're, roughly speaking, 17. You've done well in your career already. You've got real work, you do real stuff, people esteem your work, in fact worship it. You've accumulated enough capital, I've heard, to get a two wheeled form of transportation that would scare the living daylights out of me, which I love the way you described it. (17:28): You can drive a car with one finger, but once you're on a motorcycle, you're on an animal, on a wild animal and you got at tame it. As I look at it, I think about our audience. I think our audience tends to be people who are probably kind of well along in their careers, not everybody, but kind of. But you seem to have benefited from listening to this stuff. But maybe you haven't, maybe it was like I'm stuck listening to junk, but would you think that, should we try to expand our audience to people in your demographic, or would they just go, "Yeah, I'm not. Austin, screw you guys, this stuff's not interesting." TikTok me up maybe. Austin Finch (18:03): I think as much as people want to easily lump a certain age group into that category, I think the vast majority of people I'm friends with and talk to would want something like this marketed towards them where they can actually learn about entering the workforce the right way. Not just going into a job that you don't care how it progresses your career. Because like you said, a lot of the people that listen to the podcasts and come on and share their thoughts are far into their careers and have done a lot of development. But it's also interesting to see the side of it of how did they get there? And not just in like, "I worked hard," in all that sense, but also what were the stumbles and the missteps on the way. Chris Beall (18:48): Well that's really interesting. I think you make me think about what Corey is doing down at Branch 49 from where I am up at Branch 49, I'm now down south of Tucson. So that's going on in Phoenix, where they actually do listen to Market Dominance Guys, it's part of the curriculum. I think it is at this part of Grand Canyon University, Branch 49, where they're learning by doing. But also there's classroom learning and there're books that they're reading and all that kind of stuff. I've given an impromptu guest lecture up there, which just means somebody got me in a room with people and didn't tell me to stop talking and seemed to me, and these people are just a little bit older than you. There may be two years, three years, four years older. It seems to me that among those people there's a great hunger and appetite to get real but also get underneath what's real, really know what's going on. (19:38): Not just do a job, because you're told to do it, but to understand it and not just progress like, "Oh I'm being promoted," but progress like, "Yeah, I get what's going on and I could go do this in another setting. I could go start my own business," that kind of thing. Is it just that old people, like people my age just don't remember, do you think? Or is it that they always are trying to figure out how to put younger people in a box so they can feel better about themselves? What do you think is going on there? Austin Finch (20:05): I think a lot of younger people, as soon as they're coming out of high school, like you said, they're looking for something more real. They've done years and years of, here's a textbook way to do this. And I'm not saying textbooks aren't valuable, but you need the hands on with it, because with that pair then you have real experience. And after you do years of textbook learning and reading about what other people have done, you want to get your hands dirty and really see what your capabilities are and what you're interested in, because it's hard to tell if you're just reading about other people doing it. Chris Beall (20:39): Yeah, man do I believe that. And somebody wants to ask me one evening in Des Moines, he was a guy that we were considering to be CEO of one of our branches at this company. It's called Finish Line Floors that I started with a couple of ladies in Des Moines, Iowa. And this wonderful guy, Rich Emery funded it out of his business. And here we are coming along and I'm in an interview with this guy that we think of hiring and he says, "Would you take me through your entire resume?" I looked at my watch, it's like, "Dude, it's 9:00, this bar shuts in two hours. I don't think we're going to pull this off." And when we got finished and it did take the full two hours, he said, "Why did you do all that stuff?" And I answered the exactly what you just said, which is, "How do you know what you're really going to love until you just try a whole bunch of things?" Because there's always positive surprises and negative surprises. (21:34): Like in this whole podcast editing thing, what's the biggest negative surprise? Do you sometimes just go, "Oh geez, do I have to do this? I'd rather do X, Y or Z." Or is there a piece of it that you've grown to hate over time, or do you just like it. You seem very adaptable to me. You make a point out of liking what you're doing, if I'm guessing correctly. How does that go in your world? Austin Finch (21:55): I don't know if I agree about always make it a point of liking what I'm doing. I'd say I'm pretty close-minded at things I don't enjoy. But I do genuinely like doing the podcast, because I feel like it's a type of media I rarely consume and I feel like I'm skilled at interpreting what people are saying even if they're not wording it in the form of a speech, or something super formal and presentable. So I really like being able to get their message across to anyone who would listen, whether they have that skill or not. So I think that's the cool part to me, is almost being a translator for a message. Chris Beall (22:31): I love it. I love it. And a message with ideas in it. I never would've described your job like that. So anybody's listening to this, I think it's often the case by the way, when somebody really is doing something that they've learned to do, that they know how to do, and that they love doing, it's often surprising what the actual job is if they were to describe it. I love that as a description of the podcast editing job as you're helping people who are just having a conversation, maybe they're nervous, maybe they're not used to this kind of speaking, they're a guest for the first time or whatever, but helping them get their message across. (23:08): I told people when they're a guest on Market Dominance Guys, before we hit record, I say, "Look, just relax. Austin's going to make us sound great." And I mean it, because it's hard to relax when you're being recorded. You want to make somebody sound horrible, just tell them they're being recorded and immediately they'll go into robot mode and sing-songy or God knows what. And so that's really interesting. So your job really isn't just cut it up and make it work, technically, so to speak. It's actually to listen and to have the finished product get the message across that you are hearing. So it's funny, the podcast is going in through your ears and coming out through your hands in a way. Austin Finch (23:51): Essentially, yeah. So I guess if I'm interpreting what you guys are saying wrong, it could go a completely different direction than what you had in mind. Chris Beall (24:01): I'm you blaming from now. "Oh, I'm not a total idiot. That's Austin's fault. He didn't get it. What I meant was..." No, I don't think that's going to happen. Well that's pretty interesting. Would you recommend this, or have you recommended this kind of thing, editing recorded media to anybody that is in your circle of friends? Does anybody else do it? Austin Finch (24:23): I don't know anyone else who does it. I don't know if it's for everyone, honestly. I think if I was editing podcasts of a subject I didn't find interesting, or people I didn't find interesting, I wouldn't really enjoy it. But I like you and Corey, and I like Helen, and I like all the guests you guys pick out. So it makes it a whole different story, because you're there in the conversation when you're able to hear the tone and all the different pauses and everything. It's totally different from reading the transcript, or a book of someone trying to summarize all their thoughts, because you hear all the little nuances of how you speak to other people that convey way more than just the words you're saying. Chris Beall (25:03): But that's interesting too. I really appreciate that, because all of Market Dominance Guys is actually about how to use the human voice, not the words so much. The words are part of the game, but the human voice in order to pave markets with trust and then harvest that trust at your leisure and completely dominate markets as a result. Only we hesitated to use that dominate word. (25:24): But the fact is it's a zero-sum game out there in business, especially when you have innovation that you're bringing to market. It's going to be you or somebody else. And now it's a race, who's going to be first to the finish line And the question is, "Well what's the magic?" And the magic is that point where somebody trusts you. And then what's the magic behind that? People ask me what's Market Dominance Guys about? I was just asked this the other day, I said, "It's about how we can dominate markets with the magic of the human voice." And what you've just said is, it is about the voices. It's about not just the words, it's not the beef jerky, it's the dripping stake with the blood still coming out of it. Austin Finch (26:07): I think that's another thing that I've learned throughout the few years I've been editing the podcast, is not only the importance of the way you speak. When I first started I didn't quite understand that some pauses needed to be long and some need to be short. I would just try and make it concise. And I've learned since then, because through listening to it and the experience of editing it, I feel like I've learned a lot about that language that's separate, completely from what you're actually saying. Chris Beall (26:37): They talk about that in music. That's really interesting. And when I was growing up, I had an opportunity to learn to play the piano. It was called, I took piano lessons because I had to, but I was very, very young. I was four and change when I started playing the piano. And what my second piano teacher really emphasized was the white space, was the pauses. And I've never gotten good at it, by the way. I think there's something very juvenile in my playing. But hey, and you heard me play for the wedding as far as I go. When I think about it though, with regard to holding conversations with people, the pauses, the hesitations, that moment when somebody's thinking before they speak, that thing that we do when we're not speaking ballistically, we're speaking thoughtfully. I think that conveys a lot. And I think a lot of people sort of don't get that. (27:29): They think you can squish it all down. And I object to, myself personally, I know some people love to do it. To listening to podcasts at one and a half or two times speed. To me it loses the feel of the thing better to me to spend the time and let your own mind and your own feelings flow along with the conversation, because if it took that long to say it, maybe it's okay if it takes that long to listen to it. In your case it probably takes twice as long, or more, because you have to do a bunch of stuff with it. But that's a really, really good point. So I got to ask, obviously you're not on camera doing this. Have you had any friends hang out with you while you were editing? Austin Finch (28:09): No, the extent of my audience has been, when I first started, my mom emails me the file for a episode and comes in and sits and watches me edit it. She goes, "I think you'll do all right." And that was a pretty quick trial. So for the last two and a half years, there hasn't been anybody keeping me in check, I guess. Chris Beall (28:32): Well you've been doing great. Where does this sort of thing lead? I'm not saying you should predict the future of your life, but I'm a huge believer in working real jobs when you're in your teens. And for me, a big part of my life was having a real job with real responsibility when I was 14. And the responsibility was taking care of a bunch of animals. It was a small, medium and large animals, if count horses as being large, and I thought they were. It was a display of all things. It was a marketing piece at Hall Craft Home in North Scottsdale. They set up these two model homes and said to my sister Cresta now, Cindy at the time, and I, "Would you like to take care of these animals?" And we're looking out and going, "Well what animals?" And they said, "Oh well you'll go and buy them and you'll get all the pens built," and you guys are experts this stuff, because you have so many animals, because we had horses and goats and this, that, and the other thing in a million dogs. (29:29): And I look back on that as the most important part of my career. That responsibility, and we were thrown into it just like you were. We were thrown into it. We weren't allowed to go and drive to all the way to wherever it was. It was actually south of Mesa in order to pick up a goat, because she was 15 and I was 16. You couldn't drive by yourself until you were 16. But the rest of it was just ours. And I still think of a long entrepreneurial career. Sometimes an executive at a real company, every once in a while I try to avoid, that it came back to that first job. And it's something that happens I think in your teens when you're working and it's real. Do you experience it that, because you're really responsible for this Market Dominance Guy's show. All we do is yap. You turn it into an actual finished media product that is out there now. If you Google it up, it's like everywhere, these things spread like crazy. What has it done for you, or to you, if anything, to take on this responsibility? Austin Finch (30:36): It definitely makes me consider more where a job will lead me than just what it is in the moment, because this one, I feel like I'm gaining a lot of experience both in the actual technical part of it and the computer software and all that. And of course the conversational knowledge and the business knowledge. But it makes me want to avoid any job that isn't going to give me a skill. And I understand that skills can be really different from what it seems like they're applicable for. But I don't want to do something that I worked the job for a year, go off to college and forget about it. It never impacts my career again. Chris Beall (31:16): Yeah, that makes sense. That really makes sense.