How did you get started in sales? And what led you to the position you now hold and the company you are currently involved with? Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, and Gerry Hill, EMEA Regional Vice President of ConnectAndSell, are asked these very questions by our Market Dominance Guy Chris Beall in today’s podcast. Surprisingly, a common answer emerges to the first question: both guests, as well as our host, took their first step into the sales world by selling products door to door — and doing so successfully. Our guests describe the steps that subsequently led them to where they are today, and this leads to a discussion with Chris about funding new companies and the temptation and possible pitfalls of taking venture money to facilitate growth. Follow their conversation in this first of three meetings of the minds on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Is Venture Capital for You?” ----more---- About Our Guests Shane Mahi is Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, a service provided by some of the sharpest minds in sales, generating quality meetings for its customers. Gerry Hill holds the position of Regional Vice President/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, a Silicon Valley-based sales acceleration company, which provides technology that gets salespeople 10x more live conversations with decision makers. The full transcript from this episode is here: Chris Beall (01:29): Okay, everybody. This is another episode of Market Dominance Guys, and this one is special. So we've had no guests. We did that for, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 episodes, because remember those of you who don't know, we're just trying to get material for a book on market dominance. By the way, the book still hasn't come out. But I am here with Shane Mahi and Gerry Hill all the way from the UK. So we recorded a bunch with no guests. Then we had a bunch of guests and finally, we had woken up to the possibility that there really is business, including sales, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I think it's amazing that we discovered this. So I feel like, my name is Chris. So I feel like Christopher Columbus going the other way and finding out that, in fact, not only is there sales, there's a level of sales innovation going on in the UK right now that I've thought we should tap into. Chris Beall (02:24): So Gerry and Shane, welcome to the show. Shane Mahi (02:30): Thank you so much for having me. Chris Beall (02:32): And by the way, this is the first time we've ever had two guests at once. So I anticipate this is going to be a total cluster with regard to who talks when. So I'm going to try to be a good host and ask questions when at a time or whatever. But first I'd like to start with beauty and youth. So we'll go with Shane. And Shane, could you tell us how you got to here? You're running this company called Sales Driivn. We just observed you guys, your team knocking it out of several parks. I think in some games it would've been a six and others it would've been a walk-off home run. I don't know what it would've been in fencing, but somebody would've died. ConnectAndSell yesterday. But how did you get here to where we're hanging out on this podcast together? Shane Mahi (03:12): I think, I think you're being quite modest, Chris, but I got here from... There's plenty of good conversations with you around growing our business, and yesterday was a definitely an eye-opener, even for our team. We got a chance to trial the weapon. But trialing the weapon, selling the weapon, which is definitely something new for us. And we're able to achieve some incredible results based on our activity yesterday. And lo and behold, had a good conversation after. We are now partnering with you guys, and I am now featuring as a guest on the podcast. So, just really excited to be here and share our story. Chris Beall (03:51): Fantastic. Fantastic. And did you grow up in sales or did you intend to be something more productive? Shane Mahi (03:57): My dad told me one time, if you go to law school, if you go to Harvard Law School, I will get you any Porsche 911 that you want. That wasn't enough to get there. Clearly, because I did not get to that law school. But I was horrible, absolutely terrible at school. I was always a disciplinary issue in high school, middle school, college, didn't really take a liking to books. And when I got out of college and realized that I had not achieved anything in my life, I decided to sell Cutco Knives. So I don't know... In America that's a whole thing. Cutco knives, going door to door, family relatives, trying to sell knife sets for $1,500. Came to find out that I was pretty good at selling knives to parents and my friend's parents. So that obviously went into a whole rabbit hole of more selling. Shane Mahi (04:54): I ended up taking my Series 7 license, my Series 66 license to become a financial advisor, ended up getting into a different environment or walk of life and that cut that path right in half. And then long story short, I fell into sales, into event sales, then demand generation sales, corporate sales, and then oil and gas demand generation sales. And after a while of just thinking I I'm not working for a ship company, I decided to figure out a way to do things faster, better make people's lives easier. And that's when we created Sales Driivn. Chris Beall (05:31): Fantastic. Love the story. I didn't get into Harvard Law School either and I didn't try either. So, we have that in common. It's fantastic. Gerry, how about you? Here you are Gerry, by the way, runs AMEA for ConnectAndSell. He also secretly runs our most significant partnerships. He has many skills in these areas and advises me on all manner of things and corrects me on some. Here he is on Market Dominance Guys, probably the pinnacle of your career now, Gerry, I'm sure, as being on the show. But how did you get into this? You're you're a guy who's been known to do some other things. You're not the smallest person in the world or the least athletic. You've been known to play a little sport here and there. But how did you end up here overall? And specifically. Gerry  Hill (06:15): I was looking to solve a problem and I Googled some stuff and ConnectAndSell came up as a thing that could potentially solve a problem for me. And I'm not sure if you'll ever remember this, Chris, but you took the lead exchange. You personally called me up from your cell phone on a Saturday afternoon and it about 1:00 PM in the UK. I think you were probably still in either Nevada or Colorado at the time. And we probably sat down and spoke for about 45 minutes. Gerry  Hill (06:44): I was on my way out the door to play golf. I didn't play golf that day. Instead you and me had a pretty dynamic conversation about what was wrong with funding and startups, the VC code system being fundamentally broken. We talked about go to market being this flawed fabled complex exercise when it could be something really simple. And at the end of the call, you said to me, "Hey Gerry, you should do a test drive." And I'm like, "What's a test drive?" And he's like, "Oh, don't worry about what the test drive is. I'll get you over in front of my man, James Townsend, and you'll do a test drive." Like that's how I ended up here specifically. Gerry  Hill (07:17): How did I end up in perfectional selling. Same story as everyone else. Probably the smartest kid in the room meant I was absolutely terrible in a formal academic environment, messed around at college, played a lot of rugby for dollars, had a massive ego and then suddenly wasn't playing rugby anymore and needed to make a living. And the only way I could make a living was at an 18,000 pound a year recruitment shop called Robert Half where I absolutely rocked it for 18 months, but realized the recruitment model was broken and transitioned into management, consultancy advisory research, and then into software. Chris Beall (07:56): Wow. Okay. So you didn't sell door to door. No knives for you. Gerry  Hill (08:00): My first ever sales job was whilst I was still in high school. I was in my last year of secondary school, high school for the American audience for translation, and I was selling kitchens and I would work there two nights to the week after school being a demo guy for the kitchens. And then I'd be doing surveys and sizing and pricing kitchens and closing 30,000-pound deals with moms on Saturday afternoons when I was 17 years old. Chris Beall (08:32): So you did door to door also. It's kind of a funny theme on Market Dominance Guys, almost everybody that is on the show sold door to door at some point relatively early in their career, some more intentionally than others. I was probably the least intentional. I was trying to fund paying for a little gap in American healthcare called American Healthcare. And my first wife had had a miscarriage and I needed to make some money in a hurry. And the next day I found myself selling Fuller Brush door to door and that turned into... It didn't turn into a sales career, but it turned into a revelation, which was "Wow, you could do this in a really simple way that works." And that's not how most people are doing it. And then I kind of put that away. But it's interesting. Chris Beall (09:23): So I want to go to revelations here, not in a biblical sense, but in an eye-opening sense. Shane, I'm going to ask you this. There has to be a point in the process of learning all this stuff where you said to yourself, and maybe not, you can tell me if this didn't happen, where you said, "Wait a second, nobody knows what they're doing in sales. It's not like they think. It's simpler than that." Did that happen to you? Shane Mahi (09:51): Absolutely. And it was as simple as a Salesforce automation. So I was working at a very outdated intelligence agency, but mostly run on corporate hospitality and events. And it was literally a Mitel Phone, manual Salesforce. They didn't even want to fund LinkedIn, no technology whatsoever. And I came across few books and Google searches on how to make sales faster. And one of those things was just sequencing, just sequencing. And I found out through the Salesforce admin, yeah, you guys have the enterprise license, you can do that. So I started to that with my Salesforce admin. We started... And I started getting out tons of emails to people, started getting actual responses and I didn't have to do the work because this was at the time of the pandemic. And after I asked to roll it out across the team, the sales director said no. Shane Mahi (10:56): And that for me, it was just like, what can you do? You cannot be this stupid. And then more and more things. I started to learn and understand like, okay, this happened. You can do this multi-threading stuff. You can do this. You could do this. You got, you got systems that call for you. And he was just like, "We're not going to get the investment." So I closed this huge deal with Leica Microsystems, took that commission, and started my own company and said, I'm going to do it myself. Chris Beall (11:23): Alright. I love it. So you didn't just have the revelation, you had the revelation leading to you opening the door to action. Shane Mahi (11:31): Exactly. Had to. I'm an executor. Chris Beall (11:34): Well, didn't it scare the living daylights out of you to go out on your own? You got to little pocket full of commission check, but as you do the math, and I'm sure you can do the math, you realize them things dwindle like crazy over time when you're out executing. It's like watching a bathtub draining, except somebody punched a big hole in the bottom of it. Was it scary or was it just fun? Shane Mahi (11:55): I did a lot of personal development in the year of 2019 and 2020. And my life coach, she spoke to me and said, "What is the reason you're holding onto this job?" And I said, "Security." And the whole security came around a monthly paycheck that came with commissions. And she said, "Well, look at it. You are going paycheck to paycheck, anyway. You are waiting for your commissions, what they're holding from you anyway. So what security do you really have?" And that was an eye-opener for me. And I just thought, you know what, you're actually right. And do I hold onto these commission checks that are coming in or do I take a leap of faith and own my space, own my belief systems that I can do it. I know I can go make money and just go for it. Shane Mahi (12:41): What is the worst that could happen? My wife had just literally moved from Morocco. We were about to move into a new place, new things happening in my life. I asked my wife, I said, "Hey look, do you think I should do this?" She said, "Follow your dreams." And that was enough for me, my partner and myself, just going headfirst into it and saying, what's the worst that could happen? You fail. And you try again. So for me, there was no fear. I've been through too many things in my life to hold back growth for a little bit of something that could present a bit fear in my life. No, that wasn't an issue for me. Chris Beall (13:54): How about you, Gerry? You, you must have had a revelation at some point. You have a pretty iconoclastic view of sales and business, right? I do remember that first conversation actually. Gerry Hill (14:09): It's just an imbalance in the world. And I dislike the imbalance. It doesn't feel right for me. Like everyone else took the blue pill and I've taken the red pill. And I feel like I see the world in a very different context. And the context is that the model is broken. Now, I'm all for job creation, I'm all for the economy, I'm all for B2B. I'm an ardent capitalist. But the reality is we're now living in an automation first world, and those automations are becoming more sophisticated. Gerry Hill (14:34): All I really want from my talker-listers in the world, I want them to be doing their job. I don't want them to be admin junkies, I want them to be admin monkeys. The reason we allow that behavior to happen is because the way that companies are funded today, they no longer produce goods, products, inventory. You can't get rid of that inventory through a selling motion anymore. It's all esoteric. It's software. It's code. There's no real value attached to the manufacturing of those products anymore. Gerry Hill (15:05): But you take investment money, you need to be seen to put that money to work, and that money needs to go to work in two ways: The perception that we're a big company and the perception that we're a big company in two forms, real estate and headcount. And what do you get every time you hire somebody new? You get less profit per employee, because the value of that employee's contribution to the top line of your company diminishes because there's less of the pie to go around. Gerry Hill (15:32): So what the founders, what the company owners, what the people that create innovation and try to take it to market end up doing, they end up going into debt and don't realize the potential value of their own businesses because they take money from charlatans who wear [inaudible 00:15:47] and spend their life in spreadsheets who aren't executioners, who don't understand what it's like to build, run, bootstrap from scratch. So that is the imbalance in the world is this reappropriation of venture capital as another asset class staffed by investment bankers, treat companies like bets, not the vehicles for value creation, for founders, owners, original shareholders that they got the potential to be. And what do we see in the world of professional selling today? We don't see any professional selling anymore as a result. Chris Beall (16:25): That's fascinating. I'm listening to you and thinking back to the latest edition of Nathan Latka's magazine, and he has a physical magazine. It's a great way to consume the lists that he creates. Actually, I think you can't beat paper for consuming a list quickly with your eyes. I don't know why, by the way this is so, but it's sitting over here on a coffee table nearby. But this is the headcount issue. And it's kind of funny because Latka is very big into bootstrapping. Chris Beall (16:55): And even though there's a legitimate element to growth. We grew. We're bootstrapping and we grow when you add some people, but it was who grew the most in terms of headcount. And I was reading it and going, man, I always resonate with this Latka stuff, but I'm not resonating with this growth of headcount as a measure of, I kept up with the VC-funded businesses. To me, if I wanted to see how many people I could hire, if that was my goal, I don't know what I'd do. I guess I'd just make it really fun and attractive to somebody with a bunch of money so that we could hire a bunch of people and lose their money. But that sounds like the standard VC model to me. Chris Beall (17:36): So did you ever... Were you ever like on board, Gerry, with the VC model? And then I'm going to ask you Shane. Shane, did you ever get tempted by the VC model? Cause I know you could raise money, unlike me. Nobody would fund me. I mean, guys from Google actually told me you're so old, you could never be funded. Gerry  Hill (17:55): I think part of my disillusionment was when I worked at Frost and Sullivan in the advisory space, a huge number of our clients were private equity and [inaudible 00:18:03] a bit jaded by the fact that they were just fueling these big beasts, these big corporate beasts with more and more debt. And then when you go down another level, VC is essentially the same. It's the same thing. You're taking other people's money, fueling companies with debt and not necessarily realizing the benefit of that debt or, turning that be debt to value in any way, shape or form. And then I started advising companies on go-to-market strategies and helping them prepare the go-to-market components of pitch steps. Gerry  Hill (18:30): And I was going into about four or five VC pitch meetings a month. And I was just universally underwhelmed by virtually every single professional investor I met because they actually didn't care about the go-to-market stuff. Spent cycles prepping it. Spent cycles going through it. But unless you could talk about one number, your TAM and massive TAMs at that. They were the only things that they're ever interested in, even when they claim to be niche and differentiated. And then you actually get to the underpinnings of a term sheet and you realize what a racket it is. Gerry  Hill (19:05): Gangsterism. They're still going to take their two and twenty out of the fund which means that the capital that you get left with is 80, 78% of the total realized value of the investment that gets made. After that 78% has been tranched based on performance milestones, which you may or may not realize, how much capital do you actually end up with over a four-year investment from that fund or that cohort of funds. One-fourth of the total number. Gerry  Hill (19:34): And how can you put that capital to work, especially if you've got a technical deficit or you've got some fiscal issues inside the business that exists today. So by the time you've paid down that debt with the debt that you just took, your business is failing anyway. The only way you can get through that is to sell yourself out of it. And I think the biggest sort of tension that I found was speaking to CEOs going what's better, slower growth, bootstrap to profitability on a really robust sales process that's designed on [inaudible 00:20:02] rate improved with market dominance at the core, or take this money. And nine times out of ten, none of them could think more than the vanity metric of taking the investment round so that they could be featured at tech crunch. And I just got massively jaded that something's gone wrong in business. Gerry  Hill (20:17): The business that my dad used to talk to me about as an ex IBM executive from the seventies and the eighties from Xerox that used to sell things and make profit and grow shareholder value the right way versus anything .io. It just doesn't make sense to me. And one of the reasons why I'm so emboldened by the mission at ConnectAndSell is to help companies realize the potential value of their businesses, whether they're funded or non-funded by giving them the tools to cookbooks and the playbooks to become market dominant. That's the mission. Chris Beall (20:52): It's funny that you refer to it as debt, because most people think when they take equity financing, it's not a form of debt and you have nailed it. It is- Gerry  Hill (21:01): What else is it? Chris Beall (21:02): What else is it? Exactly. We give you money. You owe us. It just turns out that what you us is hard to figure out. Back when we were venture-funded, our corporate documents were that thick. And I was at one point tasked with understanding every word in those documents in order to be able to execute on some plays that were needed to essentially save the company from the VCs. And they needed to be executed very, very quickly. And unlike you, Shane, I did take to books and I can read documents like that and keep all that shit in my head and do okay with it. Chris Beall (21:39): But it struck me as I got deeper and deeper into it. I asked myself this question. In those documents, how many of the words were there to protect the VCs and how many of the words were there to protect the company? And how many of the words were there that had anything to do with growing the company? So the latter category was easy. Zero. None of the words were there to help grow the company. And I counted them up on a number of pages and you know how I am Gerry, I'll do this kind of stupid stuff. And I literally counted word by word, by word for a few pages at random in different spots and asked what were the words for? And 97% of all the words were to protect the venture capitalists against downside risk. Chris Beall (22:26): That was it. And I realized, these are salvage shops. That's what they are. They're salvage shops. And so to build something that looks like that boat behind me, but the chances of it floating are only about 3 or 4%. And so we got to make sure that we can kind of quickly get the steel and the plastic and the glass and the bones of the dead bodies that we can grind up for fertilizer and anything else we can find and sell it on and do it as quickly as possible. Because we only have so much time to focus on building another picture of a pretty boat. It's quite a while. No, Shane, I don't know if you obviously have... You haven't been subjected to as much of this as Gerry. Shane Mahi (23:08): No, I haven't. I'm thinking what the fu... I [crosstalk 00:23:08] wanted to get this. I don't want to touch it now. Gerry  Hill (23:15): Pirates in chalets mate. That's all they are pirates- Chris Beall (23:18): Well, maybe the whole purpose of today's episode was to save you from a big mistake. Shane Mahi (23:22): Well, I think it already it is because I'm sure, I'm sure I'm certain that there are so many people out there that in the midst of what's happened since 2020, I know it's just a repeated topic that goes over and over again, but I truly believe that the world was going to change after March 2020. And I'm sure there's so many people that want to go get invested because when we were starting the company or in the midst of growth with our company, I was just thinking, I want more money. I want more money to grow. I want to grow faster. I want to grow faster. I want to grow faster than somebody told me. Look, calm down. You need to organically grow your business the right way. And it's... I'm guilty of it. All I saw was green. There could be dollars that more, that account balance more zeros on the account. Shane Mahi (24:11): I can hire more people. I can buy more cool technology. I can invest in more things and even having my colleagues or people in my network say, "No, you've got it all wrong. You don't understand. Investment is there to help. If you grow, they're not there to screw you." And then you hear the flip side of things. So being educated from people who actually have been in that environment like yourself, Gerry, or even you, Chris, who's actually read through documents, it's a massive eye-opener. And I think there’s a company stage two capital macro version, a whole bunch of leaders that are running that. And their whole thing too, is don't fall into the trap, do it the right way, right? Learn from other people's mistakes. And without even a section like this, I genuinely could have fallen into a huge mistake. I've taken a whole boatload of money and losing entire control of my company, losing control of the direction and the vision that we have, and potentially sinking the business. And that's just being naive. Gerry  Hill (25:13): [crosstalk 00:25:13] I'm not being negative around why investment can be useful. Taking investment can be a good thing. But it has to be the right investor. I think the other difference, generally speaking, is most people don't understand how their valuations are calculated inside their own businesses. So if you are not in control of the valuion and what you believe your valuation to be, then how do you actually execute? Well, you've got to take third-party advice. Third-party advice isn't free. So the process of even giving yourself a gearing for valuation is tough. What's the easy thing to do though by comparison is do what you're really good at as a business. Pick up the phone, have conversations with as many people in your market as possible, down to the finest sweet spot, where you can leverage and market dominate that sweet spot as much as possible, refine your messaging, acquire enough customers in a short enough amount of time that you can then cross the chasm and go into that next market. Gerry  Hill (26:08): Now you investment rate, because you've actually got tangible things on your balance sheet that you can talk to people about. And what do we see in the world? We see seed funds that are raising series A amount of money. We see series A that are raising series B. We're seeing pretty poor products raised to $115 million in capital on billion-dollar valuation. And the big trick that the world is being played at the moment is that there's so much access to free capital at the moment. This concept that I heard the other day from my mortgage broker, I just got approved on a mortgage, which is absolutely ridiculous. .99% fixed for five years. Why? Cash is trashed. So the amount of liquidity available to venture capitalists right now to go out and fund other people's businesses and prop, them up for another five years of not getting any further forward in their actual purpose, which is to acquire customers and serve customers. It's something that we are all going to be paying for in 20 years’ time. or in 20 years’ time.

Could you name that one all-important thing that makes your relationship with your customers successful? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing, can: As he tells our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, that all-important thing is “doing the day-to-day right.” Why? Because it daily reinforces the trust your customers feel for you and your company, which incrementally builds the credibility of your services and products. And with that credibility in place, you have a decent shot at an agreement with your customer when you propose bigger, more important initiatives. Take a listen to more insights shared by Rahul, who has been a Microsoft employee for eight years, as he explains the culture of collaboration at his company, whether he stands with human intelligence predictions or artificial intelligence predictions, and what job he wanted to do when he was a 10-year-old, on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Doing the Day-to-Day Right.” Listen to the first half of this two-part interview: Empathy, Goals, and Alignment of Purpose ----more---- About Our Guest Rahul Maniktala is a technology executive, a sales engineer, and currently Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Christopher Beall (01:31): So there's a big difference in the world of just regular old sales market dominance kind of stuff. People care a lot about forecasts. I don't care that much about forecasts because I think you handle those with a portfolio and you just don't worry about it. Have a bigger portfolio, the individual deal is not that big of a deal. It happens or it doesn't. Who knows? The world's full of all sorts of crazy stuff, right? But it sounds like forecasting of a kind - prediction is a real key for you. And so when people talk about like, you've got to know what's going to happen next. You have to have that conviction, right? That I know what's going to happen next. I don't have to keep second-guessing myself and acting crazy about it. Maybe every once in a while, there's this surprise, but pretty much if I've done my job right, it kind of plays out. So here we live in a world where everything that has the word "prediction" associated with it is now associated with AI, right? So if there's a prediction, somebody is going to tell you there's some ML that can do the prediction better than us human beings. So here you are, somebody who handles relationships, there's a political element to it, there are the rules of engagement, and then there are these predictions. Do you think an AI is ever going to come in and help with those predictions, replace your right arm or a lobe of your brain or something like that? You guys at Microsoft got no shortage of AI, right? You got AI everywhere. Do you actually use AI kind of predictive capabilities in the job itself, or is that more in the bucket of things that you offer to your customer that they can use in their business, and Microsoft can use it elsewhere in the business, but they're not using it as a prosthesis or anything else for Rahul? Rahul Maniktala (03:20): We do both. Christopher Beall (03:21): Oh, now he's talking. Rahul Maniktala (03:24): The technology,  and we rely on every human being for their own AI. So the technology AI gives a certain thing with some amount of predictability, but then our own AI, which is bent on those connections and rules of engagement helps us with how we engage. And some people do it more. Some people do less. I have a little line there. Sometimes folks on the team would say that you come up with all these conspiracy theories and generally I would say, generally, those conspiracy theories are true. They come true with that element of AI. What we do, we do internally. There is a lot of in the last three, four years, we have seen those items helping us with the business as such. Christopher Beall (04:10): I can tell Corey has a thought, Corey is thinking. This Rahul, is he a bot? Maybe he's actually a bot. Corey Frank (04:18): He is right because I'm going to say that I'm a part AI. Then I've never considered myself. Certain my wife doesn't think I'm part AI. Something else starts with an eight 50. If we take Rahul out of Microsoft you become the fourth market dominance guy, right? It's like the Musketeers we have Henry, he's obligated for the third spot. And then Rahul, let's say you become an investor, private equity investor, or venture investor. And you were to give advice to organizations that are in that 10 to $50 million range about market dominance, knowing what you've learned and gleaned certainly from the Cisco days and the latter Microsoft years of working with, as you said, the 65 clients now to just one, I imagined the speed that you see in a large organization like that, managing one client, everything slows down like the matrix to you, probably to a smaller organization that you see things that maybe I wouldn't see for quite a few cycles. When you do that, when you have other buddies or colleagues say, "Hey, Rahul, would you take a look at my business and see where maybe it's wrong or a little off", what are some of the common speed bumps that you see to dominate a market that you know so well right now? It is like plain vanilla, straight down the middle; it's like stomping beer cans. It is so written to you in so many ways, but yet I miss. Rahul Maniktala (05:46): I think what I have come to realize going from a large customer base to a single customer, it's how well you can define the processes. How well you can measure the OKRs for example, right? And that's where the operational efficiencies are derived from. Now, there will be challenges obviously, large companies have their own challenges where the spark that you mentioned, 10 to 15 million, how much ever you can processize and get the execution out of those processes is the key to success. I've seen here in the Silicon Valley. I've seen a lot of companies do that, right? That they will, when they get on their growth trajectory, they're optimizing that piece of the business, highly optimizing that. Christopher Beall (06:36): And why is that? Is it that the processization frees up cycles to do things that are surprising value at the margin, or allow you to exercise insights you wouldn't have the time even to have? What is it that the processization does other than the obvious, which is keeps your overhead under control and allows you to go faster or more reliably with the same resource space? Rahul Maniktala (06:56): You're reducing the room for errors. That's it. Corey Frank (06:59): There was a video I shared with the team last week to this point, Rahul and Chris. It was with Elon Musk, and maybe you saw it. He was on the ground at the launch site with Space X. And he's asked a question about design versus manufacturing, or process versus the creative. And he had said the "simplified and multiply" is one of his axioms that he's always done. But he had said that most people think the creative, right? The frenetic flailing of arms. And let's just put a bunch of stuff on the wall and let's just see what works. That testing, that's the tough part. And the manufacturing is the easier part. And he said it's actually just the opposite. And he said, it's so low. The creative side is so low on a mathematical stale, that really it's zero. In that it doesn't matter if you can come up with this incredible Saturn 5+ type engine, if you can't manufacture it at scale and build the machines, et cetera, to do it. And it sounds like that's what you're saying is that if I'm a 10 to $50 million organization, one of the things that I shouldn't neglect is the iron clad processes in order to build those, more so than anything else at that stage, otherwise it's not going to handle my scale. Rahul Maniktala (08:22): Introducing editing is one thing, but the operational efficiency is another. You want to get that and you want to get there quickly. Corey Frank (08:29): Yeah, absolutely. Christopher Beall (08:30): Well, I got to stop doing these podcasts and go back and work on my operational efficiencies dammit, but not right now. Right now I'm going to be creative. I'm going to have to set it on my calendar. Rahul Maniktala (08:43): You've created a process out of this Chris. Isn't that true? Christopher Beall (08:47): It's true. It's true. Actually, we accidentally created a process out of this, and we've gotten to a hundred episodes without Corey and I doing anything but what you see. Everything else is processized to the max. And thank you so much for those of you who make that happen. I really appreciate it. That's actually true. I'm kind of a process freak myself. It's kind of funny though. Cause I found many times with startups that people from larger companies will come into startups and they have zero experience with creating traction. So I don't really look at it as creative versus process. I look at it as traction leading to scale, and they want to jump to scale before they have any traction. So they've been over and over in their lives in situations where somebody else got the traction, somebody else made that product stick in the marketplace. Somebody else took that idea and determined by making it and selling it enough and changing it. You know that they had Excel instead of Clippy, right? I mean, without that distinction being made, you can't do it a great deal on the processizing the... My mother said it well, "if something's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well." Right? And so I always took that to heart. But telling if something is worth doing or not worth doing is in the eyes of a customer, and the customer is going to make demands on you early that are peculiar to the situation, not to their problem. That is, it's one of those you are the observer in the middle of the experiment, messing around with it, by making the offer and trying to turn it into value for the customer. And you don't really know how much is you and how much is the product, and you know, trying to figure this stuff out. So I've found often that folks will go, "you know, we've got to design for scale," and I've always said to them, "look, first, we've got to get enough traction that we can learn from our mistakes" because early on the errors are worth a lot. And later the persistence of the errors is a huge problem. And the trick to the whole thing is knowing when to go from one to the other, because you got to love the errors early and have your ears open for them in your mind open for them always. But then you got to see if you can design them out and design them away and make them go away by design not by effort. I don't know if that - you know, that must apply though. Rahul when you came into this particular job with this big, big customer, you can't have done everything right. You must've screwed up in some ways. And there has to be that occasional evening where you just, you said to Pooja "my God, I just did something so dumb today that I don't know if I'm going to recover from it. I at least feel pretty bad about it. And I'm going to have to do something tomorrow, figure out something in order to fix it up." I'm not going to ask what that dumb thing was, or even if it was there, but what is the dumbest thing you could do? What is the category of idiocy that you could really fill nicely early on in a job like this, where you have a big portfolio and no intimacy yet? You're building the intimacy. That's like the attraction is the intimacy or vice versa. Rahul Maniktala (12:09): So there were many such evenings, Chris. Let me tell you that. But I think there were a few times where not having the intimacy and making certain moves and we hadn't made a lot of progress, right? So there were some internal things and there were external things, but at times I had some things more detrimental. When we could, given the complexity and given the engagement from a functional standpoint and the relationship from a B2B standpoint were all at stake. So yeah, I do some things like emailing one of the executives really, really high up in the organization, which I shouldn't have done. And it cost me be quite a bit; but those first 18, 19 months were fun because you've got nothing to lose. We literally did not have anything to lose, but I would go back to the point you made earlier about production without traction and scale. I think the point about, when you get to that 10 million mark or 20 million mark, you have established enough traction in the marketplace. And that's when you started thinking about, "Hey, how do I scale this out? How do I processize this so I can get the efficiencies that I want." So you are absolutely right, that initial traction, trust, is very much needed before you can really talk about process or scaling. Corey Frank (13:44): Well I would imagine that's where your personality with sincerity, as we started this conversation out with. If you lack a semblance of EQ, emotional intelligence here, when you hit that turbulence, you can depend on the math to kind of guide you in an engineering process and a project management process. But when you're dealing with the people behind the processes, that's quite challenging. Then Chris, you certainly have some experience with that, with the flight school and dealing with turbulence. And how do you take something like that? And I think certainly that last element of the flight school certainly applies in Rahul's world, too. Christopher Beall (14:59): Yeah, that is interesting. I hadn't really thought of that, but it's funny. Cause we've processized something nobody had ever processized before, which is turning a regular person into a master cold caller and doing it while they make money instead of having to spend money doing it. And that the key, by the way, we made an adjustment, we moved the turbulence segment of flight school, which used to be the last two hours. We moved it into the third slot. So there's four, two hour slots: live calling, live talking to people, getting coached on the first seven seconds of the conversation for two hours, very precise. It's schematized, which I think is a key to design is you have to have a schema, and you have to have a private language of what goes in different places. All good designs talk about things that nothing else talks about in a way that nobody else could understand. And that turbulence part was the most interesting part because we realized we had it too late. That is, the student was already experiencing the need to respond to objections. And by putting that off one more lesson, they didn't do very well in what would have been the third lesson, because they're so freaked out by the turbulence. So we had to actually process that took into account how human beings develop emotionally as they learn to do difficult things; that became part of it. This stuff is everywhere in my opinion. There's always design. That one, by the way, what happened is Donnie Crawford called me up, our flight school instructor has been a guest on our show, and he said, "Chris, I'm thinking of changing something." I said, "what's that?" And he explained why he wanted to move lesson four into lesson three, session four into session three, and kind of hesitant because I had designed it. And that's actually, to me, the most interesting thing: when process and politics get close to each other, they tend to repel each other instead of accepting each other. Now I'll give an example, or a kind of example, right? I think everybody on the show by now believes that the theory of constraints make some sense. There is only one bottleneck: go find it, characterize it, understand its investability, know its throughput, know its cycle time, and know its quality. And then do the investment in a limited way to see whether the throughput actually increases while keeping quality constant or making it better. That's kind of like how you manage according to the theory of constraints. Nobody does it because the politics, and the politics is it says that only one part of the company is worth optimizing right now. So everybody else feels bad. It's like, "I'm not important. Why aren't we optimizing my part?" Right? So there's a political pressure to optimize what is counterproductive to optimize. And I'm sure you must run into this all the time. Or a hole where there's folks who want attention. So you're looking at it. You look at through your client's eyes and go, "If there was just one thing, they could do it." So that's it, and we can help them do that and make all the difference. And over here is Mr. Squawky or Ms. Squawky going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about me? What about me?" And you've got to figure out how to handle that, so that the big thing happens, and "what about me?" doesn't turn into a roadblock. I can tell you're smiling. You must run into this on occasion. Rahul Maniktala (18:15): That's the story of my life. It's the reality, and it's the perceived reality, right? That's where I lived. The examples that I did not get into that much detail. There have been few successes on the big items when we have been able to align on those kinds of initiatives where you can really come in and make an impact, but then there is always this day-to-day. And we have to make it off the day-to-day. There's no way we can back out of that. And I'll also add this: that doing the day-to-day right, or going back to my rules of engagement, is what helps us build that incremental credibility and furthers the trust with the customer. So when it's all done and we ask for bigger initiatives or engagement on bigger, important priorities, we have a decent shot in that. Christopher Beall (19:16): Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm going to jump to a completely different timeframe. So you're 10 years old. You're looking at your life, you're looking at the future. By the time you're 10, you got a pretty good idea of your skills, right? I think we all do. We're not mystified by who we are. At the age of 12 we certainly are starting to lose track of a little bit of that because we have other ambitions that might show up. At the age of 10, we're pretty good on the skills, and we often have an ambition, like I want to be at whatever, right? What did you want to be when you were 10? And how does that map onto ... cause you have fun doing what you're doing today and you're very successful. My guess is that Rahul could buy that boat if he wanted to, but he doesn't really need a boat that big, so he buys smaller boats, or non-boats that may as well be boats. You're very successful and having fun, a rare combination, a wonderful thing. But how different or the same is this? Or what could you see in your ten-year-old mind and ambition that's playing out today, and what is it that if you told your ten-year-old self, this is what I'm doing at the age of whatever you are now, 23 or whatever. I don't know how old you are. How does that go together? Rahul Maniktala (20:28): What if I said to you that this is exactly what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old? Christopher Beall (20:34): Good God. Rahul Maniktala (20:36): I figured it out right when I was ten! Christopher Beall (20:42): All right. Well, I was told you were a freak of nature. First time we had a virtual drink together, I figured that that was probably true, but now it has been nailed down. So the lesson for everybody here is go back to your ten-year-old self, find out what that person wanted you to be. Just go be that. And you'll be as happy and successful as Rahul, unless your skills are so limited that you're going to be in a cave,  eating bugs with me. Rahul Maniktala (21:11): When you were 10, you probably figured out the skills. See, I'm still figuring out with skills. So, that is the problem. That's what the problem is. That's why I kind of knew this is what I would be doing four decades later. So we here we are, I'm still building the skills. Christopher Beall (21:28): I see. I see. So the journey is forever for you? So what you are is on the journey and at ten, you knew you'd be on the journey forever pretty much. That's amazing. That's amazing. Corey, we don't run into this kind of person very often. I'm not sure we should very often. Rarity is a wonderful thing. Corey Frank (21:47): It is. It's like your 18-year-old Macallan there. Right? You just don't, you don't have that too often. And when you do, you just want to savor it. So with that point, let's go back to maybe not you're ten, but to Chris's point, the influences, right? A little bit more on the personal side, Rahul. What do you do to stay sharp? Are you a Ram Charan guy? Execution guy? Are you a creative guy? You fill us up. What are some of those books or those podcasts that move you to continue to explore on the journey? Rahul Maniktala (22:22): I am not a podcast guy. I like to talk to people. I like to watch movies, and I've always been like that. I've always been big on movies, especially Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and then there are Indian film stars. It's always that for some reason I'm not able to disconnect from things, and movies are one thing that will make me disconnect and kind of recalibrate, rethink the things that I'm doing. And then I start connecting the dots. Corey Frank (22:54): Are you, can I ask, are you a middle child? Are you right in the middle as far as the birth order? Rahul Maniktala (22:58): I am the oldest. Corey Frank (23:00): You're an oldest. Okay. Very, very empathetic and creative for traditional oldest there. Rahul Maniktala (23:08): But to your question about Ram Charan, I'm a fan and also Jeffrey Bedford. But then I'm all about execution, do the best I can with the big picture, but I will be laser-focused on execution. Corey Frank (23:24): Yeah, I would imagine. Cause you probably have forecast calls like every three hours, right? So constantly calibrating, adjusting all the communications that come in cause certainly a position of big trust. When they talk about the stakes being large, the decisions you make, the emails you send or don't send to those who you should send to or not send to can have a ripple effect on not just one company's quarter, but multiple companies quarters. So when the folks get together for the class action, right, I'm sure you want to be as far away from that as possible. Shareholders are apt to try to find a villain somewhere. A lot of high stakes going on I would imagine. Christopher Beall (24:02): Microsoft shareholders are not looking to find any villains inside of Microsoft I can assure you. They're finding a lot of heroes, right? Corey Frank (24:10): Absolutely. Yes. A little different landscape [crosstalk 00:24:12]. Christopher Beall (24:12): That is a good thing to be is a Microsoft shareholder. I know one very well, and I think it looks like a grand thing to be. I'll tell you what, I do have the luxury of walking by sometimes when Rahul and Helen are talking to each other about business. And if somebody asked me, "what are those two doing over there?" I don't listen in, I don't come and listen for the words, but you can get the tone from a distance as you're going by. I'm doing my micro prancing or whatever. And I'd say, they're seriously having fun. They're very relaxed. It's really interesting in a game that's being played for those kinds of dollars and those kinds of stakes, how surefooted they sound. How it's serious about solving problems, but relaxed in the situation and going, "this is where we're going to do what we can." And it is very, very execution focused. And it's fascinating to me to be able to just watch and learn from the tone. So I'm impressed by it. I'm impressed by, you talk about a culture of collaboration. I didn't know very much about Microsoft from the inside, so to speak, at all. And I got to say that straight up, that culture of collaboration is real. And that's what I think might be the thing that's an absolute requirement to work successfully with these really, really big customers. Rahul Maniktala (25:39): I call her shared accountability with discrete ownership. Christopher Beall (25:45): You write that down, Corey, it goes in the book. Corey Frank (25:48): That's the title of the new chapter. Yeah. Is it like in essence, you just have this epiphany or that it's really like a consultancy, it's like a burying point, or a McKinsey in a lot of ways of what you're doing. You're trying to find those efficiencies. You're trying to romance the new features or ideas and a little bit of inception trying to make them the prospect's idea, even though it's maybe your idea. And that does sound very much like the machinations of the very employer McKinsey type of organization. Rahul Maniktala (26:18): There's a lot of internal selling that goes in what you just described. Getting what I was saying earlier, getting that alignment, it's more internal. So you can go have that kind of a conversation with the customer, not so much try, but then get that alignment on a regular basis. But it's more internal than it is with the customer. Christopher Beall (26:45): Well, for all of us who are looking to grow to be Microsoft size and then mature to being able to have the biggest companies in the world as our customers. And that would be far out for many folks, but I think it's great. It's great to know that there is a way of doing it, that there are things to focus on. There is a way of looking at things and executing on them that don't have to just do what I would have done, which is walk in and then walk out. You could actually proceed in that direction and know that it's okay. There's a step by step that you got a shot of getting there You've got a real shot of getting there if you can hire Rahul to be your guy at one of those. Whoever you are on this podcast, you don't have a shot. So don't even bother to give him a call about that. Just ask him about a good whiskey and stuff like that. But I think it's fascinating. I hope our listeners have gotten a flavor of what that world is like, because it's pretty different. It's not quite Elon Musk on Mars, so to speak, but it's different enough that most of us, we could watch it. We wouldn't even know what we were watching and those rules of engagement, we'd probably miss them. So I thank you for sharing all that with our listeners and with us. Corey and I will go off and feel dominant and significant for a while, which we're quite capable of doing. I think we have some skills there. And so just wanted to express my appreciation. Corey, what are your last thoughts? Corey Frank (28:09): Yeah, Rahul it's just wonderful. You're enjoying to talk to. I can imagine what you would be like with two and a half McCollins in you and maybe a bourbon and a half of the war stories. I think I'm just kind of a voyeur of these situations that happen in business and the different opportunities and the "choose your own adventure." What if I chose right here? What if I chose left? What if I went to the door? What if I jumped on the schooner, and what happens? And to have someone like you, has the best of an engineering mind and instills so in touch with the emotional mindset of your prospect, it's a very deft hand that clearly that you in a deft talent that you possess. So I really, really appreciate this. And especially for those folks who are that 10 to $50 million range. It's a whole new skillset that is probably underutilized, under-thought of on that processing side. Great valuable stuff. For the Market Dominance Guys, we certainly appreciate it and our audience here. Like many of our guests, Rahul, you may be asked to come back at another time, because we get a lot of requests for these episodes for folks to come back and explore different scenarios. And maybe we have a little speed round one of these days, Chris, where we get our expert panel, people like Henry or Cheryl or Mark or Rahul. And we take some questions that we've had and amassed over these almost two years of doing this thing and getting the different perceptions from someone like Rahul and his business or Henry and his business, or Cheryl, or Mark, or any of the multiple guests that we've had and put them to play. But so thank you Rahul for carving out the time. I'm sure it was a very, very busy day for you guys at Microsoft. And this is the Market Dominance Guys as we inch towards episode 100. Good to have you back, Chris, and thank you again, Rahul for the insight. Until next time, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall. Rahul Maniktala (29:58): Thank you guys.

What if you only had one account to sell to? One with a $100-million budget and a quarter of a million employees? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing has that very job. He’s today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys, and Chris Beall and Corey Frank are curious about how Rahul goes about dominating his market of one. “Behind me is the might of Microsoft,” he explains, and the culture there lends itself very well to support for their customers. In addition, Rahul’s background in technical expertise and an understanding of high-tech products, which is the basis of his customer’s business, helps him gain an understanding of what his customer wants to accomplish. After that, “[t]here are a lot of people you have to align,” Rahul explains to Chris and Corey. He always starts with the customer, employing empathy in order to understand their goals, and then works with the people at Microsoft to create an alignment of purpose between the goals of this company he works for and the goals of the customer he serves. It’s a balancing act, and one that Rahul is very adept at, as you’ll learn in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Empathy, Goals, and an Alignment of Purpose.” ----more---- Part 2 is here Doing the Day-to-Day Right   Market Dominance Guys is sponsored by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. 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Here is the full transcript from this episode: Corey Frank (01:48): Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and Chris Beal, Chris it's been a while, hasn't it? I think we've had our vacations, right. All points north, east, west European and otherwise. And we finally get together. You've had a couple of solo episodes. I've had a solo episode. They're not the same, just I love Susan, but there's nothing like having Johnny Carson in his seat. You can't have the Joan Rivers and those replayed to John Davidson and the replacement homes. So it's good to have you back in the seat as always. And we have guests, which is always some of our favorite episodes as we approach the hundredth episode of The Market Dominance Guys, Chris, we're leading up to that milestone and today, right? We're raising the bar from an interesting perspective and the topic Chris, when you hit me up on this, right, is dominating a market of one. Corey Frank (02:37): And so we're pleased to bring on and I'll let you introduce some Chris, his background, a little bit Rahul Maniktala from Microsoft and Rahul. I apologize if I butchered your last name, but we'll just go by Rahul for now. And Rahul’s a friendly, and we're fascinated because as we talked about in the previous 95 episodes, or so the different machinations of how you dominate a market and the moving pieces and how many different variables in a closed system and an open system. And sometimes it can be probably equally challenging if you're in Rahul’s situation here, can it not Chris, where you have a market of one, you have concentration risk as the private equity folks like to call it. And how do you turn that to an advantage and how do you not screw it up? So with that, Chris, I'm going to let you introduce Rahul and how you guys started chatting about market dominance. Chris Beall (03:29): Yeah. So, Rahul, it's great to have you on thanks so much, Corey. Rahul And I met through my fiance, Helen Fernutchi at a bourbon tasting event online. So it was how many of us were there Rahul, like six or something like that. And we were being introduced to Kentucky bourbons by a real master. And then afterward we had a private conversation in which we didn't say anything during the event, but here's the McKellen 18. This is more along our lines. Corey Frank (04:03): When you switched from bourbon, to you went immediately up into the scotch realm. Chris Beall (04:06): Well, we went back to our native habitat, so to speak and had a nice chat about some other things. And we have talked to each other a few times since. And what fascinates me is, we've been talking about dominating markets or addressing market needs, getting into markets, not failing all sorts of stuff in the world where there are many, many, many potential folks to sell to. So the flip of that is of course, where you have a single account that's yours, but it's so big, so complex, so changing and so embedded in not just what they're doing, but in society is large. So there's a lot of things going on and being the person for that is a completely different game. Chris Beall (04:49): It's like being the CEO of a company who has adopted a market that happens to consist of in a way hyper verticalized. It's one company after all, it can't get much more vertical than that, but incredibly complex on the inside. And I just thought it would be really fascinating to have Rahul take us on that magical mystery tour. And first thing is Rahul, thanks so much for being on. And secondly, how the hell did you get into the business of a market of one,? What's been your life trajectory that would lead you to such a strange and wonderful place? Rahul (05:21): Well Chris and Corey, thank you for having me. I think you summed it up well, right? Going from bourbons to scotch right. So that's what things are. So the way I ended up in this is having that deep technical expertise and having an understanding of high-tech, which is totally steadily getting very workable verticalized, as you said on hyper verticalized. Right? So when we look at companies, or accounts that we talk about, there's a certain specific secret sauce, as we all know how they go about approaching the market, right? So that's, that's been a passion all along. Focusing on complexity and some kind of secret sauce that these companies have and understanding how they go to market. So that's what kind of led me to looking at this single customer who in itself, as you said, dominates the market. Chris Beall (06:15): Well, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, you must have started out as a regular person, just like the rest of us doing regular human things. It be us going out and knocking on doors and doing all the crap we do in order cold calling people or whatever. I don't know if you had to do any of that. Did you ever have to do any of that stuff? Do you ever have to, were you ever at that end of the world or did you go right from the technology side, the deep technical expertise right into, okay, so here, you've got your multi bazillion dollar account, Rahul, it's all yours go for it and try not to screw it up. Rahul (06:46): I think it's technology helps, but I still do cold calling. It always starts there. So technology helps ease the conversations based on what the customer wants to accomplish, but it's a mixed bag. That's how I would put it, that there are multiple variables, technology if you are operating in a high-tech type of an environment, eases the conversations, but it's not very different from what you do. Chris Beall (07:10): Did you start out as a technologist? Like I started out, I'm a physics math guy who fell into programming because I followed the Willie Sutton theory of business and life, which is where the money is. Right? So you Rob banks because that's where the money is. I couldn't find a lot of dollars over in physics and it appeared by my predilections and nature has likely to have children, although nowhere near as many of them as Mr. Frank has had that, not everybody can be that prolifically prodigious and prodigiously prolific, but I figured they would probably need food in their mouths and living in Denver. Chris Beall (07:46): So it gets a little cold there, somebody, a roof over their heads. And I went into software and finally ended up in business somewhere along the way. Cause I got sick of people not selling my stuff, frankly, I just get sick. I'd sit there and listen to that sales guy and he'd do everything wrong. And I finally just turned around and close the deal myself and go, wait, why am I paying him for what's that all about? So how about you, you, where did your path start? And then what was that moment where you went, huh? Actually selling stuff or helping customers buy stuff or whatever it is is part of the portfolio or should be part of the portfolio. Rahul (08:19): So very much started as a technologist. But then when I saw all this, I was doing contact centers back in the day, selling to application owners and largely selling, but more consulting. And then I was just like you, I was like, I'm making money for so many people. Why can't I make it for myself, right. So that's how I ended up letting myself take control of these things and just strung with it myself. There has been no looking back since then. Chris Beall (08:45): Hmm. Interesting, interesting. Corey, what are your thoughts about this strange path that some of these technologists go on you would think we would all stay in our swim lanes and be good little boys and girls writing code and stuff like that. But I mean, you've seen this once or twice. Corey Frank (09:02): Yeah. Especially as you look at Rahul your background, you like to stay with the small companies I noticed, right. Cisco and Microsoft. Right? So just to step above the traditional market dominance companies that Chris and I work in and consult within that journey, that career journey of yours going from product to a little bit of sales. Do you miss out on having a smaller startup kind of experience or looking at the rules that you've done knowing your background? Is it really an essence having a small company within a bigger company and that's the way that you've approached it and why you've been so successful? Rahul (09:40): I think it's a combination. There is no doubt about missing the agility in smaller companies. I've been in smaller companies and things get turned around very quickly. But I think that is the beauty of working in the big machine where you, when you have large customers that you're operating with the demands are very silo so you can tap into, on your end, you can tap into those smaller operations and bring the best out for your customer. So there are elements that I do not like on days. Like today's one of them, but for the most part there's a lot of resources. If you know how to navigate on both sides, the customer side, and your side. Corey Frank (11:06): So let's talk about that concentration risk, right? I mean, if you're, if we're an investor, right, Chris, you and I and private equity and the venture side, and we look at an organization and you say, wait a minute, you're spending all of your time, all of your resources, a lot of your capital at the risk of having one client of yours say, Hey, I want to go a different direction or the leverage they have over, Hey, listen, you got to do better on your prices or the leverage they have on Rahul and you're not as handsome as you once was. I prefer a more handsome person to take over our, whatever the whim of the prospect. How do you deal with that when there is one client and there are certain multiple constituencies yourself, but that's what I'm curious about. Never having a situation like that from a market dominance perspective of just one client that you serve. Rahul (11:58): So that's an interesting question and that in the past, I've had experience with managing a territory where you have multiple customers and then you come to a single customer, it's a territory of its own. Right? So yeah, I mean, I can't change the reasoning if they need a more handsome guy, but then if there are areas, so I would always start with the customer and work backward, right? That's the logic. So when I gave you the example of, Hey, there are many operational silos that I'm dealing with on both sides. I'm trying to bring the best from everywhere to my customer. It could be one customer. It could be multiple customers. The beauty of one customer is that I know things inside out and I'm operating with that sense of urgency where I'm delivering to various needs. Rahul (12:45): There could be an invoicing issue in the modeling and executive meeting in the afternoon, and then doing a deal in the evening. So it's like juggling multiple balls, but you know, compare that to multiple customers. I had when I came to Microsoft, I had about 65 customers that you, just from the whole off Bay Area, but that time you got to pick and choose, right? Where am I going to focus on this common knowledge? So it's the same, it's the same, there are so many things going on at every given time. Corey Frank (13:15): Sure. And the level of intimacy you must have in that operation to know how the stock price is going and how everybody's feeling about their options to that with the latest super of the day is on Tuesday in the cafeteria, in Santa Clara versus Oregon, I would imagine. So there is a level of familiarity that you have to be beyond just a traditional vendor. When you have one client, Rahul (13:41): You have to have that sixth sense. That's the key, right? Common sense is not common. So the intimacy piece is critical. You are absolutely right. You got to know. You got to know it inside out and to your earlier point or question when you are approaching those areas in a single customer, you have to keep in mind all that impacts on the broader relationship or the intimacy piece. Chris Beall (14:08): Well, there's one thing that strikes me. I've been around big companies, little companies, I worked for a couple of big ones and I've sold to some big ones since not exactly like you do Rahul and that it was a single product being sold into a big company, maybe in an OEM setting or something like that. You don't have a single product. You've got a wide range of offerings. They're evolving over time. Each one has its own set of resources back inside of Microsoft that can help you or could choose not to help you, right. I get the sense you have to sell to them in order to get their attention on something. And you have to be careful not to cry Wolf too often, or you will be ignored. So the false positive problem is they're on both sides of the business. Chris Beall (14:56): Whereas like I remember when I was telling to SAP and it was an OEM deal, I didn't have any real complexity other than what's going on inside of SAP. And what was their go-to market that was around the internet at the time. So it was really very simple. I found it simplifying. I didn't have to pick and choose. All I had to do was be real intimate. The way I did it, by the way, was I sat at their headquarters for 37 consecutive days in the lunchroom until I found somebody who would talk to me about something interesting and kind of move from there. But you have this thing that's really complex. And what's interesting to me is I've thought about like, I always think what if I had that job, right? So if somebody threw me into Rahul's job, I know what I would do. Chris Beall (15:37): I'd quit and I'd quit immediately because I know I don't have a chance. Cause here I am, I've got this big customer with all this internal complexity and personalities and all that. Then I've got my own company with all of its products and they're trying to get me to sell some things more than other things that I might be able to understand that then I have all these people, they got to help me by be six or 700 of them floating around somewhere and I get to know them. And then I got a number in front of me. So I got to go make the numbers somehow and still serve the customer. So my thing would have been, I just go, okay. That was really great. I'm so glad that I know how to eat bugs because I'm going to sit in a cave and eat bugs for the rest of my life. Chris Beall (16:16): Cause that's all, that's all I can afford to do. But you did this. So I imagine I can almost imagine doing your job. I can't imagine learning to do your job because I don't imagine you were given a lot of slack in the learning part that was specific to the customer and specific to all of the stuff that's going on behind the scenes, on your side, all those people you have to sell to and Marshall and get to do things. Chris Beall (16:45): And then this is something I don't know. If all of our listeners know about big companies, but here's a fact, a big company, life, big markets, never reorganized. They never do. They do not undergo cataclysmic changes. If you have a big market, it behaves as a big statistical entity. And even when something like COVID comes along, it might change a bunch like, Hey, I sell into the airlines. Look what happened last year. Right? But they don't reorganize. Big companies always reorganize. And those reorganizations can be fraught with peril for the sales guy. How did you get started? Like you walk in the door, why didn't you quit? Like a rational person would have done. I mean, I would have left. I'm a brave guy. Why didn't you? Rahul (17:35): I spend quite a bit of time at Microsoft. And I think the culture lends itself really well to support and align with working with such a large customer. Now the customer story is very much in line with what you were saying, but I think the time I came to Microsoft and how things got realigned and readjusted from a budget shift standpoint. It Was very helpful. And it's a bunch of collaboration simply put, yes, there is always competing priorities. There are a lot of people you have to align and all that stuff. But like I said to Cody earlier, always start with the customer and have that goal. And then people start aligning. Rahul (18:13): Now you will, absolutely. Right. When I came in and did the sole customer side, however, was very different from where it is today. It's definitely in a better shape. It can be better. It's getting better. But at that point I was one one-man-band man. And I had to be like, how do I turn this out? But I knew that behind me is the might of Microsoft. So I just had to use my ADHD skills, how to best align people towards a common objective that the customer had, which kind of took me about 18, 19 months to get there. It's a function of time. Chris Beall (18:49): Okay. So, during those 18 or 19 months, this is like a startup going out and trying to find product-market fit. Now you're the product, right? And here's your market. And you got to find out where you fit in there to be helpful to them? So what was the very first thing that you did, was it to study them and understand them? Was it to just start interacting and following the breadcrumbs? What did you actually do on day one, day two, day three that allowed you not to have to turn around and go, there's got to be easier work than this with a higher probability of success. Rahul (19:23): It was hard to work for starters that's what I would say. So I did my homework prior to signing up for the rules. A lot of research, lot of external research, lot of internal research on where things were. But then I started interacting with this from day one. Like not necessarily looking for the breadcrumbs, but looking for what is the expectation of the relationship between the two big corporations, right. At least my piece of business. So once I started to get an understanding of what the outcomes were. Started alining the team accordingly and started working on some key negotiations that were going to get us where we needed to get. Chris Beall (20:06): That is one thing you had, which is you have the momentum of the relationship itself. I mean, after all your customer, it's kind of obliged in a way to buy some stuff from Microsoft as are we all, I'm looking at my Surface Pro right here while I have Microsoft software all over this thing. Probably some of it, I know some of it, I don't know. So there's momentum at least. And there's- Rahul (20:25): I wouldn't call it momentum. The relationship is one of the oldest in the industry. But it wasn't necessarily at a pretty point. It wasn't where things were automatically propelled and things would start falling in place. That wasn't the case. It was the other way around. Right. So you had to literally build stuff from the ground up. Chris Beall (20:46): Oh wow, I surely would have left. Corey what do you think about this? [crosstalk 00:20:51] Rahul (20:55): It's really something from the ground up is a lot more fun than inheriting something and running with it. I've been there, but this has always been fun. I mean, repair is one aspect, but the joy that you get when things come too close, it's very different.  Corey Frank (21:10): I was just saying that Chris would have left. I would have hidden and then they find out and then they escort me out the building that's generally when I go through it's an ugly scene. But talk about that another episode. So when you look at the basic tenants, the building blocks, we have these episodes Rahul. We often talk about kind of the key tenants. If you're a sales rep and you're approaching the beginnings of a new market, right? You need a script and you need tenacity and empathy. You need timing. You need a list. You need these things. If you were to train a big, dumb farm animal like me to come in and apprentice under you to what are the two tablets coming down the mountain that according to Rahul, that I need to have in order to at least have a semblance of hope of success to do what you're doing. Rahul (22:01): I think the two things would be empathy and goals. Empathy from a customer standpoint where the relationship has been, what they are experiencing, where they want to go and goals are yours, which goes back to my point, that I mentioned to Chris, that before I took the role, I identified my goal based on my research, internal and external. And when I came to the customer, I leaned in with empathy to understand what they want to accomplish. And then it was just an alignment exercise. Chris Beall (22:30): So simple, an alignment exercise. I'm in now. Corey Frank (22:38): But the identity that you have Rahul do you see yourself as a I'm sure there's elements that every day you probably have pieces of this, but are you a project manager? Are you a politician? Are you a sales guy? Are you a product marketer all day? Probably depends on the day, but again, how do you qualify what you do and where you need to spend a little bit more time that maybe people don't assume that you need that more. For instance, the empathy side of it. It's not just about pushing a bunch of Gantt charts or project management plans down to the appropriate folks as a traffic cop, correct? Rahul (23:14): No, it's not, it's not, it's what I call active listening or aggressive listening. That's where things open up when you're sitting down with the customer. But I think of all the four or five things that you described, you have to, you really have to be a politician, right? You have to be able to connect the dots, right? And then you have to do it on both sides. You have to, like I said, the understanding of customer goals is key, but in a bigger relationship, what it is, is what drives everything, right? On both sides, you have to budget time that you're your own one-on-one time. But you're thinking about the customer, thinking about what you're saying and how you're landing, that's where most of the time is spent. Corey Frank (23:55): Do you see yourself as this politician or someone who maybe the mothership Microsoft says, you know, Rahul, we need to reign you in. We think that you're a little too sympathetic to the client as opposed to being empathetic to their needs. And remember who signs the front of your check in certain situations, cause I'd fall in love. I would just be sucked in by my clients so much and right. Probably forget whose buttering my bread and a lot of degrees, but hey, do you want this feature, this feature, this feature let's, we can do that and then realize that I got to be a politician in my own house here too. Rahul (24:31): I mean, it's an interesting question, but it's a balancing act. Sometimes I do get there, right? Instead of empathy, it gets very sympathetic, right? And then you have to pull yourself out because of the relationship and the overall responsibility and to your point, who writes my paycheck, right? So that's all it's there. But I think as long as you're doing right by the customer things work out, things fall in place, that's been my experience. Corey Frank (24:57): So Chris, from a market dominance perspective, probably two and a half bourbons and one Macallan as you and Rahul were speaking and knowing is what you do about market dominance. What was so intriguing that you think a lot of our other listeners on more of a traditional market dominance who have multiple clients, multiple prospects, large Tams can learn from Rahul that surprised you. Chris Beall (25:20): I think it's always one of those, What's the same and what's different? kind of things. So in a traditional market tech market, especially. The key is to first of all, to know your market, which is at the very least a list, much more of a list than a description, but it's a list of folks that have no moving parts between them there. That is their relationship is essentially independent except for one thing. And that is each company on that list is if you sell to them, going to reduce the cost and the risk of selling to every other company on that list, that's the kind of the definition of a classic market. And so what I'm curious about that, what stays the same and what's different. That is what is the importance in having a market of one where you can make a list, right? Chris Beall (26:09): You can make a list of all the different parts of the business and who services them because they have their own internal service capabilities. They have a CIO and that person’s taking care of all sorts of things and so forth. So you can certainly map it out and make a list of people, but they actually have functional relationships to each other, which I think is fascinating because there are no functional relationships between the entities you're trying to sell to in a traditional market. Other than this weird one, which is they each have some confidence in the other guy, if other guy go first. It's like, all the lemmings are standing at the edge of the cliff. If one of them is just brave enough to jump into the ocean. So you kind of keep flicking them, right. And you get one of them to go. Chris Beall (26:52): But then that second lemon kind of goes, Hey, this ain't bad. I'll go to, and that's your job is to get all the lemmings into the water. So you can, I don't know what you do with lemmings in the water. You follow them in and have lemming stew or something like that. Rahul's world is both the same and different. I'm guessing. So here's what I think might be the same. I'm going to throw a hypothesis out there, your big client. How big are they by the way, how many people and how many, how many people do you care about in there that you have to interact with them, then how many dollars are involved in their business? Rahul (27:22): I mean, it's close to about a quarter of a million people and close to about a hundred million dollars. Chris Beall (27:31): So you need to identify, I think this part's the same. You've got to identify the people who count to you. And I bet you have a list. Right. You know, everybody at any given point that you're sure counts. Rahul (27:43): I know most of them, but I have a big team, right. So I got to, like I said, to go to and prioritize and yes, for the most part. Chris Beall (27:54): Yeah, you got to, I mean, you can't say, oh, I just come in every day and start randomly interacting with people at that doesn't work. So you kind of know who's who you, you know something else which is, I think interesting. I think there's an analog. So when, when we make a sale into a market, like I was talking to a gentleman today, CEO, founder of a company that's just made a big pivot and they need to get 20 customers by the end of the year in order to get funding. Right? So their market has actually got two elements to it. One is the market of customers and the other is the market of VCs. And in order to make the market of VCs comfortable enough to go to the next level with them, they need to get themselves some more customers. That's what they think. Chris Beall (28:39): And they've just done this pivot. So they've got to go through this process of looking at the whole market and talking to maybe 500 people and getting it down to these 10 additional that are going to buy from them. So they know that functional relationship is pretty much if I sell to you, this one's more likely to buy. And then the relationship with the VC is if I sell the 10, then this one's more likely to write me a check, right? You, it seems to me, you face it additional dimension beyond internal reference ability. And that is, I bet that I'm going to take a guess. Sometimes you've got to decide, I want this to happen next. So that this person over here will be appropriately influenced by the fact that this happened over here into somewhat independently or connected to your customer's business they're trying to run and having something to do with knowledge that you have of the functional or trust connections or whatever, among the people inside. It's almost like the people or the companies. That's what it kind of feels like to me. It that kind of close. Rahul (29:47): That's yeah. I mean, that's, that's what it is. People are the company. I mean, I'm not interacting with the entire 250,000 people. I got a few and there are to your point about the functional relationship there are many. And there are times where I need certain things to happen. And I just have to the point earlier about making those connections and to some extent influencing them or getting information that helps and then just ride. Chris Beall (30:21): So do you often know something that one person in that big company would like to know that they don't know that you know, from somewhere else in there and you have to decide what to do with that information. Rahul (30:30): Once in a while. [crosstalk 00:30:37] The more time you put in the more frequent that gets. Chris Beall (30:45): It's like getting lucky because you, the harder I work, the luckier I get, right. Corey Frank (30:51): By the way, for the audience, before we started recording, we asked Rahul. So there's going to be some questions we're going to ask. And based off of the nature of the sensitivity of the relationship, right? He can politely differ or politely obfuscate. So putting them on the spot and he's very elegantly deflecting here and there, I would imagine. So to Chris's point Rahul, if you had, take the antithesis that if you wanted to really boost production value delivery results, how do you go about doing that? If you said, listen, we need a 40-yard pass, right? This is, this is Corey. The small mid-sized guy speaking, right? The naivete of the larger organization, particularly two large organizations, but I'm sure there are certain times where you got to think where's the 40-yard pass downfield here. That if all of the moons were in alignment, if you could really get everything in place could really make more than a couple of basis points. Difference. Talk a little about some of those processes maybe that you would go through or those project plans, ideas, collaborations that maybe you've done in the past. Rahul (32:00): I call it rules of engagement. You have to follow all of them. There is no exception. Once you're following the rules of engagement and the relationships are in place. Not a lot of them are very specific to the question you asked, I think all the chips fall in place and that's were we have seen success. I would say a few times now in the last, maybe three years, that's how things have been. So I never, like I said, you know the political piece. So I never tried to mess things up there, but I stayed focused on the guardrails and align the team in that manner. So we're not breaking any rules. And as long as you're doing that, and then you're connecting the dots from a relationship standpoint, big things happen. Corey Frank (32:51): Got it. Rahul (32:52): That's generally not such a large relationship where you're working with a pharma customer in the past, and it was like a pharmaceutical distribution. It was very similar. It was a distributed environment where they work in now is a very centralized environment where, but the rules of engagements, we're still kind of defining how you go back. Chris Beall (33:18): Oh, that's really interesting. I would make the distinction between physics and chemistry so we can all learn physics, right? Cause it's simple. It's only four forces in nature and you throw in a little geometry and you're pretty much there, but in the world of chemistry, you have to know what goes with what, in what environments and under what conditions. And you have to respect that it's going to do what it's going to do. Chris Beall (33:40): And if you don't know, you can have bad experiences. Right. I think the phrase blow up in your face, came out of the chem lab, not out of physics lab. I'm pretty sure. So that's what it sounds like a big part of this kind of market work is knowing what those rules are, what goes with what, what you can rely on, I suppose, is that, I mean, there must be some things that would freak me out, but you'd just go, no, no, no, no, no. This is going to be kind of what happens next, because in a way it's kind of like this bonds to that, and that happens next and you dumb physicist. You'll just think they're bouncing around, but actually they hook up and these things happen next is that kind of what it's like? Rahul (34:20): It is. So what goes with what is the rules of engagement, right. And then you are connecting the dots, which is more of the relationship piece. And then you go in with conviction that I know this is what's going to happen next. As long as we have done these things, right? Things would fall in place.  

How do you improve your cold calling skills if your present company isn’t providing any sales training? Train yourself! Until you can get with the right company, borrow ideas from the best sales experts you can find (many have been guests on this podcast), take improv classes, join Toastmasters, and keep your mind open to absorb what works. Our Market Dominance Guy Corey Frank is talking in more depth about training yourself during this second part of his conversation with Susan Finch, president of Funnel Media and Funnel Radio. He advises listeners that salespeople should fall in love with their craft — not the product they’re selling. How do you do that? Care about the potential value of the meeting for your prospect and remember the “why” of what you’re doing. And what skills should you hone? Learn what moves prospects to make a decision, create a well-written script and adhere exactly to it, use the tone of voice that elicits the response you want, and most importantly, leave your own mood and ego behind when you make a cold call. Train yourself to remember that it’s not about you. When you place a call, it’s showtime! Listen to the first half of this interview here: Are You Laying Brick, or Making $12 an Hour? ----more---- Here's the complete transcript for this episode: Susan Finch (00:06): Welcome to another episode with the Market Dominance Guys, a program about the innovators, idealists, and the entrepreneurs who thrive and die in the high-stakes world of building a startup company. We explore the cookbooks, guidebooks, and magic beans needed to grow your business. Susan Finch (00:35): How do you improve your cold calling skills if your present company isn't providing any sales training? Train yourself. Until you can get with the right company, borrow ideas from the best sales experts you can find. Many have been guests on this podcast. Take improv classes, join Toastmasters, and keep your mind open to absorb what works. Susan Finch (00:55): Our Market Dominance Guy, Corey Frank, is talking in more depth about training yourself during the second part of his conversation with me, Susan Finch, from Funnel Radio. He advises listeners that salespeople should fall in love with their craft, not the product they're selling. How do you do that? Care about the potential value of the meeting for your prospect and remember the why of what you're doing. And what skills should you hone? Learn what moves prospects to make a decision. Create a well-written script and adhere exactly to it. Use the tone of voice that elicits the response you want. And most importantly, leave your own mood and ego behind when you make a cold call. Train yourself to remember that it's not about you when you place that call. It's showtime. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys. Not getting trained? Train yourself. Susan Finch (02:00): And in my own business, in the podcasting, I've watched the weasels and the people that hide, "Oh, it costs this much." Why? Why is it nine times as much as I charge? "Oh, because we do this." Is that nobody cares about that. Why is that so expensive? When, what's the benefit for the people you're promoting? If I don't make you guys look good, and help you grow, and give you confidence, you can speak better everywhere you go, I am failing. Corey Frank (02:26): Sure. Well, you have though, sales folks. It doesn't matter if they're experienced or new, but certainly, it's more common in newer folks. It's common in more mediocre folks who just go from job to job, to job, and you see their LinkedIn kind of stack up, is that they have a tough time introducing that tension that we were talking about because again, the need to be liked, the need to be accepted. And I think that leads them down a path, if they value supplication too much in the denominator that it's going to cause them to over-promise maybe a product delivery, a product feature, add in things that they know they can't deliver on. It's almost as if I would ... I wouldn't question anybody's necessarily ethics, but it's the root of, publicly people see it as dishonorable. Internally, I think that starts and it manifests into that dishonor because of a need for approval more than anything else. Would you agree with that? Or is it ... Susan Finch (03:23): I would agree with that, but I'm wondering, not everybody is this familiar with Orin as they should be, or you and Chris. Can you give us an example of building that tension with those four elements in there? Corey Frank (03:37): Well, it's an easy way. Now, this has to be delivered with the deft sense of humor and self-deprecation. But let's say we have a meeting scheduled Susan, and it's you, and it's your VP of sales, and it's your CEO, and you're my product champion. But, two or three other people, executives are supposed to show up for the demo. And you show up, of course, you're my champion, but the others do not. Or the CEO doesn't. Whoever is that stakeholder that I really need, that I was implying was going to be at this meeting, doesn't show up. It's 11 o'clock. It's 11:01, it's 11:02, it's 11:03. And Orin is famous for, let's say they show up about 11:04, then make an entrance. Now, incredibly disrespectful for the other folks who are on the line. I know they're busy. They're executives as are, but no busier than other folks. Corey Frank (04:25): Orin's way to introduce tension, as one of many example is, Susan comes on and, "Oh, Susan, you must be here for the 11:04 meeting." Right? Now, that little bit of tension. Now I can't say, "Susan, what, are you here for the 11:04?" I have to flirt with that. And I usually have to follow up with a little bit of self-deprecation to say that, "I don't take myself seriously," but sometimes that's enough to say, okay. And then usually nine times out of 10, they'll say, "Oh, I'm sorry. I was tied up," and that's all you want. Just to say ... Corey Frank (04:58): And people who start off meetings with say, "Susan, Chris, Henry, so glad you guys could carve out this time. I really appreciate, I know how busy you guys are. I really think that this is going to be something you're going to be excited about. I really appreciate you," and it's like, whoa, your status is diminishing, diminishing, diminishing. And that's going to be a little bit tougher if I start to introduce tension after I'm the nice guy, over the top, trying to build rapport, asking about your favorite sports team and your weekend. And then at the end of the call, I try to introduce some tension by, "The price goes up on Monday," close, or, "We're really busy." And, trying to squeeze you into a decision. That's the wrong place to use tension because it's so transparent, right? And so the right place to use tension is generally out of the gate when you're starting that initial banter back and forth. Corey Frank (05:59): Example two, similar to that is, Susan, we all show up, we're waiting for Chris. It's 11:03, 11:04. And I say, "Listen, I tell you what, it's 11:04. Let's go ahead and get started." And you may say, "Well, can we give Chris another minute or two?" Or, "He's coming." And I would say right, as opposed to, "Oh sure. No problem." And then you talk small talk, waiting, right? Instead, say, "I'll tell you what, Chris seems like a smart guy. He can play catch-up. Let's get started." Now I say it with a smile, but immediately my status goes up like, "Hey, listen, this isn't a vendor. This is somebody who has something critical to say." So those are two ways to kind of introduce tension into, subtle tension into the sales practice. Susan Finch (06:48): But, I do appreciate that. The other thing that you did with that, the 11:04 meeting. You've said, "I was on time. I'm just the same level you are. You are no high and mighty, extra busy person. Because I'm equal with you, I can poke you a little bit. We can play a little bit. Because I don't have to be afraid of you." Corey Frank (07:10): That's right. Susan Finch (07:11): "Because I'm no less than you." And that's what Cheryl Turner does. Corey Frank (07:15): She's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I think Chris gives her the crown of the best cool caller in the world. And I would really put the onus on anybody to try to take that title away from her. Because, but it is just that, right, Susan? It is that, her status. In a pitch anything world, right? I have true status alignment. And that is something that is also worked on here. We're better at it today than we were yesterday. And we'll be better at it tomorrow than we are today at coaching on it because you have a lot of stuff that goes on in the life of a younger grad, certainly, besides what's on the mindset of a CEO for hitting P&L, and numbers, and finances, and raising money, et cetera. Corey Frank (07:57): And so, tone changes daily based off of what happened in their life. Did they lose that Call of Duty? Did their dog crap on their carpet? Did they get their first student loan payment? Are they anxious about their roommates? Whatever it is, did their Bitcoin kind of plummet? And so, they may read the same screenplay, but they may not perform it at an Academy Award level every single day. And I think that's one thing that Cheryl does is, she's the modern-day equivalent of the Iceman. Remember from Top Gun, and Val Kilmer became, his name was the Iceman because he waited for the other person to make a mistake. He flew ice-cold. Cheryl certainly has a great personality, outsized personality, but she does not make mistakes in the pieces that normally costs other people conversions, right? It's consistent. It's amazing. Susan Finch (08:52): I truly believe salespeople, if you guys have some extra time, at the very least read a book on improv. Corey Frank (09:00): That's a great one. Susan Finch (09:01): Join Toastmasters, because you will learn many things, including how to listen and shut up. And if you can read the book on improv, see if there's a way, those of you in LA, even up here in Portland, we can take improv classes and it's mainly to get us to look for those openings. Susan Finch (09:33): Connect and Sell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. Give your fingers a rest. With Connect and Sell's patented technology, you'll load your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every single day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified, like knowing how many tears were shed while watching Titanic kind of qualified. Susan Finch (10:00): And we're back. Those are additional training skills. If you're not going to get trained properly by whomever you're working for, get trained for the next better position you're going to get, working for somebody that will appreciate what you're bringing, because sometimes that's all we're doing is biding time, until we can get to the right company. Corey Frank (10:18): Yeah. There's a lot of folks that are in this coma of complacency and they're just kind of live in this world, like a ship without a rudder, drifting from port to port. Hoping that trade winds will have them go into a port of prosperity or something, biding time. And so when we see that, because it happens, right? People get into a rut, and I think the French word for rut is routine. So, when people get into that comfort flow, we try to do is remind them again of their why. And, one of the bits we do here pretty often with newer folks is that imagine you're in the cast of Cats or Hamilton, you're on Broadway. In this, let's take Cats. It's been on Broadway for like what, 28 years or something like that. Right? Corey Frank (11:03): And there's a little old lady. She's in Mission, Kansas. Outside Mission, Kansas. And she's a widow and she's always wanted to see Cats on Broadway. She lives in mission Kansas, but she saves her egg money. People buy eggs on the side of the road, and vegetables, and a little firewood here and there. And she saves up all her pennies, and nickels, and dimes. And she gets enough to get a bus ticket, to take her from Mission, Kansas to New York City. And the only ticket she can afford is a Tuesday afternoon matinee, not a Friday night performance when all the stars are in the house. And she can't afford a seat down, she's got way up in the top of the mezzanine, right? I mean, it takes her a while to get up the stairs, but she's up there. And here it is Tuesday at two o'clock. She's clutching her purse and her ticket. And she's just giddy. Corey Frank (11:45): She has been waiting for this for 28 years. Tuesday performance. Now those performers at Cats, they're backstage, they're probably out in the alley kind of smoking it. They've done this a thousand times. The bell rings like, "Okay, we got to go, okay? Let's get into character." If you're a professional, when that bell rings and that curtain goes up, it is as if it's opening night. Is as if it is an Oscar-worthy performance recorded by HBO, because you always have to think that there's a little old lady up in the rafters who saved everything. If we can kind of get in that mindset, when we feel like we're in a routine, to shake us and say, "Wait, it's not about me." That, as you had said at the outset, Susan, right? It's there's an honor. There's a selflessness. Corey Frank (12:31): I just got back from a European trip with my son. And one of the places we went to, was going to Notre Dame Cathedral, and we saw, you could see it was burned. But, when you see that, that place started architecturally, right, 350 years in the making. That the architect's sons, sons, sons, son would barely live to see it completed, you start to see that Europe is full of these. The Colosseum in Rome, the Vatican, these mammoth projects that it's not necessarily about me. I got to be, build a cathedral. Can I make sure everything's in the right place? If it's the selfie generation, it's only about me, and me, and my comp plan. Then chances are, is we're not going to see too many cathedrals built in our lifetime. Corey Frank (13:19): So that's why I think when you look at the shows that you do, and that Funnel Media does, right? If there's one connective tissue that lives through all of them, it is professionals by professionals, true master craftsmen of their performing art, whether it be sales or whether it be the med-tech or any of the other shows that Funnel Media Group produces. And I don't think that if you're a new lead graduated, or even if you're five, six, seven, 10 years in, you can get enough of that in your life. Susan Finch (13:50): That's the community. Since we are all virtual, choose what you put in your head, choose what to surround yourself with. Do we want to surround ourselves with the negative, the bashing of this and then that, or would you rather surround ourselves with people that have done it way better than us for a very long time, and that everybody respects? Wouldn't you want to bring that into your heart, into your head, into your ears, whatever it is, because something's going to stick? Corey Frank (14:21): A mentor of mine called it, "I paid your stupid tax for you. All my mistakes, all the residue from my stupid decisions. I paid your stupid tax, so you don't have to pay it again. So just open up your eyes and your ears once in a while, humble yourself, and know that somebody else paid the dollars that makes your life and your job a little bit easier today." Susan Finch (14:43): Right? You talk about the common thread between all the shows that Funnel produces. It's deeper than ... Yeah, it's professionals and you guys all have a ton of experience, and I've learned so much from all of you. My husband, he says, "You're so myopic. All you do is listen to your guys," and I don't have any more time. So at least I have the good ones with me. But the deeper thing that all of you have in common, no matter your creed, your faith, your nationality, it doesn't even matter. You all have a servant's heart. Every one of you. There isn't one host in this group out of the 15 shows we produce currently that does not have a servant's heart and is not humble. Corey Frank (15:27): Yeah. Yeah. Susan Finch (15:28): It's huge. Corey Frank (15:29): Yeah. Absolutely. So, a testament, I think, to how you sold art. You attract that. One of the quotes that Orin says quite often is, "By the work, you shall know the workman." Susan Finch (15:41): Yes. Corey Frank (15:41): And by the Funnel Media Group, you know everything there is to know about your designers, and your audio techs, and your producers, and your hosts, and everything else. And, I think that's a testament, but that's really how Chris and I got together on Market Dominance Guys is I would call him. I've known Chris for 15 years, 20 years, almost 20 years. And I would call him periodically, always hat in hand, always a finger away from hitting record because I had a problem. And Chris would pick up in an airport, he'd pick up on his vacation, he'd pick up on a boat. He would always pick up. And that's what a dear humble person he is, to always give back. Corey Frank (16:20): I never got an invoice unless I became a client of his, then I got big invoices. But I never got an invoice for that. And I think that sets the tone of why a company like Connect and Sell, right? The fish stinks from the head down, and the opposite is also true. We got people like Cheryl and we've had a lot of his top dogs on this show, haven't we? Susan Finch (16:36): Yep. Corey Frank (16:37): Mark, and, it's a testament, I think, to not only what Chris does, but what Funnel Media does and the type of talent that they attract. Susan Finch (16:43): Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Corey Frank (16:45): Of course. Of course. Susan Finch (16:46): I mean, it's a joy. So, as a company that has helped to build and be part of this Branch 49 and this whole program at GCU, what would you put out there as a challenge to other companies, especially those that want quality salespeople in their future? What's their part then to ensure that without just vetting people to hire them, how do we get them down that path in the first place so that they are somebody we want to hire? Corey Frank (17:14): I think if we go back to your example of when you worked in the art gallery, you learn to appreciate art because you knew what the story was. And you knew that the artist laid bare his soul emotionally and manifested in the form of all these colors in this piece of canvas? You understood that creative process enough to convey that sense of emotion to the buyer and that connection was made, and then that sale was made. But you understood bio-physiology probably subconsciously before you knew it and studied why people do what they do. And I think for most employers or organizations today, is if you have a complacent sales organization or sales organizations that stop growing, or it's only growing because of market factors, not because of development factors, is how can you get your team to fall in love with their craft? Not necessarily what their product. That's going to come, but they fall in love with their craft? The nuances of voice, and tone, and pacing. The creative aspects of writing a screenplay with the right sequencing moves people. Corey Frank (18:24): Marvel is Marvel today because of Kevin Feige and because of the writers, but the consistent story journey, a reluctant hero who has a trait that he sees, or she sees as an asset, but it's really a liability. Pride cometh before the fall. Takes out their legs. They're rock bottom. A guide comes, appears. Helps them realize that no, what they saw as their liability is really their asset. And then they save the world, right? But that's, as you know, from being too, that's the cosmic addict cycle, that Joseph Campbell stuff that, we are- Susan Finch (19:03): A hero's journey. Corey Frank (19:04): We're tuned into that frequency, right? That's kind of the vicar inside of us, for thousands of Aboriginal cultures have the same narrative arc. And I think once you understand that as a sales rep and realize, "Wow, I don't have to wing it. I can actually have a system that doesn't sound like a system." And there are too many folks who put you into a system, but they don't tell you the why the system, the anatomy of what happens when I say this with this tone, versus this with this tone. And you see the reaction in your prospects, and then it gets addicting. Corey Frank (19:38): But it all comes down to breaking down the story craft, as you had mentioned, the bio-physiology of why people buy, not buy. How they're moved emotionally. The story of the little old lady. Knowing that, okay, if they can do that versus pitching a product, any organization will reap the benefits. And everyone's going to have a hell of a lot more fun, right? They're going to be smiling and building more cathedrals and saving men's souls, more than just laying brick. Susan Finch (20:03): I think that's a great way to end this episode. Corey Frank (20:06): Beautiful. Well, listen, I appreciate what you do, Susan. You're so awesome. And as we said, at the beginning of this here, we've got to put it into our contract for Market Dominance Guys that we get at least one dedicated episode where we can do all the talking. And certainly, I can do my share of talking and as opposed to just Chris and all of our wonderful guests, so. Susan Finch (20:25): Be sure to subscribe, everybody. Find Market Dominance Guys on all your favorite podcast venues. You will find them also where you start, you'll see some of the extracts and our highlights over on YouTube, on the Connect and Sell channel, and you can find them on the Funnel Media Group. So, we are everywhere. Just look for Market Dominance Guys. Get in there, subscribe, start from the beginning if you want to go on this journey, or pick and choose based on the title. Susan Finch (20:47): Thanks so much, Corey, it was a pleasure, and welcome home. You've been missed. Susan Finch (20:56): Today's show is also brought to you by uncommonpro.com. Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer or investor is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's really time to go big, you need an uncommon methodology to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through a modern and innovative sales and scripting toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious leaders in their quest to reach market dominance. It's time to get uncommon with uncommonpro.com. Susan Finch (21:26): Never miss an episode. Go to any of your favorite podcast venues and search for Market Dominance Guys, or go to marketdominanceguys.com and subscribe.  

What good is a salesperson with five years' experience if they've never been trained and have a hopscotch career of many short stops at companies that never invested in training their sales teams? Corey tells the old story, "A guy walks past a construction site and sees five people laying brick. And he goes to the first guy and says, "Hey, what are you doing?" He's like, "Building a wall." Goes to the second guy, "What are you doing?" And he's like, "Making 12 bucks an hour." Listen to the rest as Corey Frank and Susan Finch, president of Funnel Media Group and Funnel Radio, go on without Chris Beall this week and talk about the concept behind Branch49, a sales acceleration software and service that uses AI to score leads based on their preferred contact channels, while also dedicating a sales team to perform top-of-funnel and full-stack revenue generation. They discuss the obligation that companies have to ensure sales professionals are trained correctly and with the good of the prospect and customer at the forefront, how to undo bad sales habits, and how to help sales professionals who were never trained prepare to work for honorable companies who value sales skills. This is part one of a two-part interview. ----more---- Part two of this interview is here: Not Getting Trained? Train Yourself! Here is the full transcript from this episode: Susan Finch (01:17): This week on Market Dominance Guys, I'm joined by Corey Frank. Chris is off busy doing something and I'm sure we will catch up with him later, but Corey and I wanted to dive into the topic of our responsibility to help bring up honorable, terrific, trained, competent, confident, and enjoyable salespeople. How do we do that? You're going to have to listen to this episode for some great suggestions, what you needed to be aware of and how you can start to have a better sales team, not only for now, but for the future. Join us for this episode, Keeping the Weasels out of the Cathedral. Corey Frank (02:01): Then the focus of Youngblood Works and Uncommon Pro is we find companies and then we invest or we'll lead the round or we'll do a pile on round on a funding place, or we'll do like sales advisory consulting and what's your product-market fit and stuff. But then it led to the creation of the accelerator. And the accelerator is where we have organizations all across the world, like a hundred plus different mainly in cybersecurity and med-tech, where we do top of the funnel and we'll help them create their top of funnel activities, prove product-market fit. And then we'll also do full-stack. So if they want us to sell their product in their name, because they don't have a sales team, we'll do that. And that's branch 49. Corey Frank (02:43): And so branch99.com is really like if we were going out, like with maybe something like this and say, Hey, it's really youngblood Works, but it's Branch 49 is kind of the go-to-market, the B2B kind of element with regards to what we do. It's like a VSA. Remember we had Val on about six months ago. So we do similar, but we focus predominantly on cyber. And then we do all the messaging. So through Oren Klaff, who we've had on before too, my buddy Oren, that's what we do on Uncommon Pro is we craft kind of the face melter messaging screenplays for folks. We have a technical sales division where we take cybersecurity content, educational content, and that's called Tresorit. And so Youngblood Works is the parent. And then we invest and fund all these other different companies. Branch 49 is the one that's forced your main to what we talk about at market dominance, which is trust-based conversations at scale when we do that for companies. Susan Finch (03:41): I want to talk, I mean, you gave me the overview of Branch 49, of Youngbloods and things, but I want to talk about the impact that you guys are having starting people from a good starting point with good training, rather than having to correct bad habits that people learned from first jobs where people have no clue how to train somebody, and the strength and the advantage that all those people are going to have, having gone through your programs and how many of them are already on their way to successful careers as they graduate debt-free. There's a point to me, almost a social responsibility and as successful business people, if we want to keep everybody being successful and growing and dealing with successful people, we have to put our time in and our effort in to getting people to that level before they even start down some career path, starting their own businesses, whatever it is. Susan Finch (04:37): And so you guys have taken that responsibility and taken that lead. Yeah, you're making money from it and you guys are benefiting and other people are too. That's not the point. It's that long-term investment in these humans that are choosing to be a part of this program. I watched too many people that I run across in B2B, B2C that have had horrible training, no training, partial training, no support. And they have no confidence, they're shwarmy, they're nobody you want you to deal with, let alone share lunch with, dinner, or a long-term relationship, or refer anybody to. Corey Frank (05:11): Where do they learn? Is it like they're just a victim of the social more, the Kardashians and the Instagram and the selfie generation? Where do they learn that bad or not optimal sales behavior? Because they don't have enough experience to buy cars or houses or buy software yet. So they learn it from somewhere. Susan Finch (05:33): Think about the movie Tin Men. Corey Frank (05:35): Yeah. Right. Susan Finch (05:36): Okay? That's way before the Kardashians. Corey Frank (05:38): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Susan Finch (05:40): Weasels have been there all along. Snake oil salesmen, it has always been that time. It's a shortcut, it's lazy. It's survivor mode that people get in to. And those are cycles that get repeated in households and by example. That's where they see it first, no matter what the home life is like, whether it's fractured, whether it's all put together, but they watch these examples happening and they continue it. And then yes, it is further emphasized, further supported through these fantasy things that we see on television, on Instagram, on everywhere as if it's reality and the lines are kind of blurred. I hear it from people in my daughter's groups. You would almost think that they thought the reboot of Dynasty was really how it is. People are really like this. No, they are not. I'm telling you, you don't understand this is camp. I said it is not camp. Yeah, it's camp. It's campy. Corey Frank (06:39): Reality TV. Right? Susan Finch (06:41): But they don't get what campy is. They actually think it's attainable and correct. Corey Frank (06:47): And lack of moral compass. I don't know. Maybe we wouldn't have to get rid of that. Susan Finch (06:51): Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, you and I have talked about that before that all these people, I'm spiritual. I just want to have to go to church. I don't have to do this. They have no communities that they are answering to hold them accountable because that'd be inconvenient and embarrassing and make them change. And mainly that's why people don't do that. And so they use it as their excuse. I hate religion. I hate structured this. I hate structured that. Well, the more we've all fallen away from all that, whatever your faith is, but something that is not you, not the almighty dollar to guide us and for people to call us out as we don't live with all of our extended families like we used to. I'm away from all my cousins. My kids are away from their cousins. They're away from their nieces and nephews and their uncles that would call them on their crud when I'm exhausted. Susan Finch (07:38): And remember, I mean, when you grew up, when I grew up, there were people on us. We had so many sets of parents. So many people that could give their opinion could smack us on the back of the head like, what are you doing? Corey Frank (07:50): Well, maybe that's interesting than that with the whole Chris likes to really focus on the new virtual landscape of business, right? We're not going back to the office. Susan Finch (08:01): No, we're not. Corey Frank (08:02): One of the downside pieces of residue is just that in a familial if you're in a small town and you got cousins and uncles, et cetera, you steal a candy bar from a drug store, somebody's going to tell your uncle, he's going to tell your dad. If I'm working from home for you, I'm a sales rep working for my manager. Yeah, we have Zoom calls a couple of times a day, account reviews here and there. But my daily behavior is a spreadsheet. It's not what I'm doing. Maybe how I'm dressing, what time I'm getting up. What I can't observe. Our folks are 20 feet here. Here's [crosstalk 00:08:35] right? And I can see their body language, I can see when they're hunched over. I can see when they're... All those little nonverbal cues that say, I think the lead list sucks. Or I think it's time for jumping jacks or I think it's time for bringing in pizza. So maybe that's one of the downsides of having this kind of truly virtual culture is that level of accountability you're talking about. Susan Finch (08:57): So with the extra time that we're all saving from not going into the office from not having nonsense meetings all day long, just to hear somebody else yammer on what percentage of time should we invest? If we can spend three hours watching television that night, take 10% of that time, 18 minutes devoted to community. Whenever your downtime is 10%, I dare you to invest in an accountability group. Whether it's your neighbors, your friends, your peers. I have three people that all own their own businesses within walking distance from my house. We are accountable to each other. We check in, we take walks. We brainstorm in person as we're walking the dogs, as we're blowing off steam, whatever it is. But we do that three times a week. Corey Frank (09:45): Sure, sure. Susan Finch (09:46): So right there, and they'll remember and say, well, what happened to that thing you were doing? Well, how come that's not working? Oh my gosh, that's what she said? You might want to consider. Corey Frank (09:57): That's powerful. Wow. That's great. You're lucky to have that. You can't hide, right? Susan Finch (10:02): I don't want to. Corey Frank (10:03): You don't want to. Susan Finch (10:04): But there's the difference too, because I can't keep improving or succeeding or whatever it is if I am not willing to change and to look at the ugly parts. Corey Frank (10:18): That's so good. So out of principles, right? Susan Finch (10:59): Tell me some of the successes. I mean, I know there have to be so many highlights from right there at Branch 49, with everything that you're doing. Can you tell us a couple of what it used to be like, what happened and what it's like today for a few people? Corey Frank (11:13): Yeah. To take a step back for a second, the concept came from Chris's inspiration and our riffs over the years, that there needs to be a different training mechanism, boot camp, minor league system for bringing up the next generation of sales folks. And we had talked about that just a few minutes ago, is what are these cultural shackles that limit the folks from wanting to move into sales or doing it the "right way"? And so this concept of this being a finishing school for future CEOs. Susan Finch (11:52): Yes. Corey Frank (11:53): As we've heard many times on this show, with Chris and all of our guests is that if you're a CEO and you're not actively selling, there's a challenge there. I think it was Henry Ford who said the definition of a sales manager is the best damn salesperson in the place. And today, as a CEO, you can't just be product-oriented or finance-oriented. You need to be up, front and center, whether it's selling stock in your company or it's helping your folks sell products. And as we've talked many times, it's not just cherry-picking, oh, give me the good leads. It's having, as the CEO, do the cold calling so they see what the quality of the lead lists are, the quality of the tech stack, and everything in the float. Corey Frank (12:35): So we set out here at Grand Canyon to create that, and we've had kind of an interesting AB experiment. We've had students and grads from the university so fresh they didn't know anything. And then we had let's call them killers. We had the thousand-yard stare who worked with other technology companies, cybersecurity companies, sold in the past. And they came together. You would think then that this island of Dr. Moreau would happen where you have these two or these Lord of the flies, where you have these two cultures where the vets would kind of teach the younger folks. But what's interesting is what happened is we taught everybody, in the same way, is this is the books you read. This is we use the Sandler and the Oren Klaff Pitch Anything methodology. You're going to journal every day. You're going to dress the part. We're going to teach you public speaking, we're going to teach you how to read a financial statement. We're going to teach breathing exercises. So when you speak, you speak properly. Zoom backgrounds, all that stuff. Corey Frank (13:36): And you found that the killers, the ones who had experience, they really globbed onto this at a rate that was equivalent to what the new folks did because, and as you interviewed these folks after months and our performance went up, they realized that no one really taught them that before. When they started at a new organization, it was all about product training and sales training was just a small piece of it and they said, well, you guys figure it out. And- Susan Finch (14:05): Here's a list. Corey Frank (14:06): Here's a list. And so they had to really unlearn a lot of the basic cliche type of techniques. Well, I just like to wing it. I just like to have my personality shine through in the interview. Right? Susan, well, what's the strongest part of your sales process before they come on? And I'd write it down. Rapport building, relationship building. And of course, they would say, “well, probably my ability to build rapport and relationships”. I showed it to him, and was like, how did I know that? It's because most folks have this mindset to have supplicative behavior that is needy, that I want to be liked. I want to be included. I want to be part of the tribe. Corey Frank (14:46): And I think we had Oren on, what about six months ago I think it was, the Oren Klaff Pitch Anything. And he talks about, you need four key elements in every sales. Humor, you need intrigue, you need curiosity, but most importantly, you need tension. And it doesn't mean you're over the top and you're aggressive or you're a jerk. It just means your ability where I'm going to come off as equal status and not supplicative, or hat an hand. And if I come off as equal status or at least professional, knowing my world, you know your world, the success is going to increase. And so that's been one of the things that a lot of folks tend to unlearn. So from a success story perspective, that's really neat to see is that people crave a process, a regimen, a structure, more than anything else. Susan Finch (15:28): Well, and they're seeing too that it works. In short order, they're seeing that it works. Corey Frank (15:34): Yeah. Susan Finch (15:34): And like you said, you're taking people that were tossed into the ring with no training. And most salespeople are not, I mean, even in retail, business to business retail. Doesn't matter. They barely get anything. It is all about the product, the widget that you're selling, the service that you're selling, know it inside and out so you can answer any questions. That's good. That's really good because you don't want to sound like an idiot. Because why are you going to sell something to somebody you don't know anything about? Corey Frank (16:00): Right. We looked at birth order a lot too. Certainly, the firstborns are very interesting to train. So I'm sure you've had experience with it. First and onlies. I mean, they're just- Susan Finch (16:10): The singletons. Corey Frank (16:11): Yeah. Yeah. If it's not in the book if it's not in the training book, then why isn't it in a training book? And it's tougher to call audibles in general, very justice-oriented. So if you have a comp policy, you have a crossover policy with leads. If you have somebody grant a couple of hours of PTO, you better have it equal across the board. Those are firstborns, especially first [crosstalk 00:16:34]. Susan Finch (16:33): Interesting. Corey Frank (16:34): And then the last borns you're going to have the rule-breakers, the comedians, the Reverend folks. And you need a nice amalgam of both firsts and lasts. And the second borns even, they're more of the melancholy, the people Watchers. They get along to get along. The consensus builders between the two. And so obviously it just comes out in the wash that we know who's a first and who's a last and a middle. Susan Finch (16:58): It's fascinating. Corey Frank (16:59): But once we do the OMG or the Myers-Briggs and we've used them all here at the university, we can get access to all these tools, people always want the little mental pinprick, blood tests, roar shack of where do I rank? Susan Finch (17:14): Where do I fit in? Like you were saying. Corey Frank (17:16): Yeah. Susan Finch (17:17): What's my place here because I want to make sure I do my place right so I can be successful. And I think that's part of it is they're looking for that answer of, okay, what's my starting point where the expectations of me, what do you know about me? And how can I blow that out of the water? Corey Frank (17:37): Yeah, because they're all looking for their why. Even though they think they're looking for a what, because they post on Instagram, this house or this boat, or this stack of money or this trip, they think they're surfing for the what and you and I, of a certain age, of having families, and we see children and we've had a number of team members work with us over the years, you realize that, okay, there's no or little nutritional value in shooting for a what without the why. And so one of the things that Chris has helped us a lot with is helping identify where the why, man searched for me and is on the book lists that these folks have. Any person could do a what if they understand a why. Corey Frank (18:18): We tell a story oldie but a goodie I'd give credit if I knew where this came from, but a guy walks past a construction site, and sees five people laying brick, Susan. And he goes to the first guide and says, "Hey, what are you doing?" He's like, "Building a wall." Goes to the second guy, "What are you doing?" And he's like, "Making 12 bucks an hour." Goes to the third guy and says, "What are you doing?" And he's like, "Laying brick" and goes to the fourth guy and says, "What are you doing?" He says, "I'm building a cathedral." Then finally goes to the fifth and says, "What are you doing?" He says, "I'm saving men's souls." Now they're all doing the same thing. They're all laying brick, making 12 bucks an hour, building a wall. But it's the latter two who see building the cathedral and saving men's souls as the ones that probably are paying a little bit more close attention to detail spelling in their notes, pick it up a piece of paper in the corner of the office, refilling the soda machine, if it needs it. Not taking the last bagel in the morning. Those are the folks that really kind of make the culture sing. Corey Frank (19:24): And then you find a lot of the folks who weren't taught that way. They have five years’ experience, they say, but they really have like one year five times or six months 20 times. So you'd assume that the veterans would be the leaders, but it's actually the newer folks, the grads, and the current students who this is brand new, who is so enamored with the shiny object of a why finally. After four years of school, and I finally figured out what I want to do versus probably people like you and me, right, who drifted, fell into sales because we're liberal arts folks. And that's just I guess what we do. We have a good personality and it's either drive a cab 10 borrower or jump into sales. Susan Finch (20:05): One of my first jobs, my first two jobs, I didn't get myself. Corey Frank (20:09): You didn't get yourself? Susan Finch (20:10): No, my girlfriend got hired. And then she said, "I need you to come work with me because we need another person. You're the only person I could work with." Corey Frank (20:18): So you're drafted. Susan Finch (20:19): So I was drafted by two different companies. The first one was a men's clothing store in the mall to sell David James closures, and trying to sell men's casual wear, chinos, suits, you name it. And we killed it. We both quit though because some people like too many inseams measured. Then we moved on and she got a job at a health club and in the call center, oh my gosh, your name was drawn. You just won a two-week free membership. Are you kidding me? This is so great. That was my first telemarketing job, grabbing the names from the fishbowl and calling them up, and getting them excited to come in. She would close them on the tour. So we double-teamed. So those were my first two jobs. And then I went into restaurants and stuff for a while. Corey Frank (21:05): So it wasn't necessarily an intentional pathway or traverse up the mountain to say, Hey, this is what I want to accomplish. But isn't that funny though, Susan, that we talk with, and most of the folks in our profession, because there's no formal sale. Ohio University has great sales school and Texas and Baylor University, but Arizona State is getting one but Grand Canyon University where I am. But a lot of universities, don't have a sales school yet. Right? Susan Finch (21:29): No. Corey Frank (21:30): Part of communication and marketing. So you have folks who kind of fall into it and there's no LSAT or GMAT, or again, roar shack that you need to get into sales or not. It's steam this mirror, you got a good personality. It's like the old animal house. Hey, we need the dos, let's hire this person. And I think that kind of weighs... One of the other things that Oren says is 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. Corey Frank (22:00): I'm sure you have. I know Chris has, I certainly haven't... early in my career, you were interviewing for a sales position and they're hiring you 15 minutes in to the interview and first you're exuberant and enthused, and this is fantastic. And then you say, wait a minute here. Susan Finch (22:16): Too easy. Corey Frank (22:17): Too easy. And I think that's part of the downside of a lot of sales organizations. They don't make their process, their neediness shows. And it shows if I'm a recent grad and I graduate and I have a marketing major business, major economics, et cetera. And I get offered three jobs. One is a life insurance company. The other one is enterprise Rent-A-Car or the third one, I don't feel like it really worked for it like I needed to get into a top law school for instance. And I think that when I start day one, that's probably festering a little bit how valuable is this place if they'll hire anybody. Susan Finch (22:51): Right. I was telling you earlier that I went to Santa Fe. And I don't know if you know, I owned an art gallery years ago in Laguna Beach. It was contemporary Southwestern. So we visited one of the artists that I used to represent. And I was his top gallery. I was for all of our artists because I can tell a story and I was selling their stories and I only had artists in that I would want to invite into my home. It was all good people. Susan Finch (23:17): Yep, good people. And so we decided to splurge and we were going to buy a piece of art from this gentleman, Tom Wheeler, before we came back and my husband Tom was looking at a piece and it wasn't very big and it was kind of cool. And then there was one of those twice the size of itself in the suitcase. And I found myself selling that piece of art to my husband, who used to be my client in the gallery, and an easy mark. And I went right into that mode, telling him a story behind this piece that I've just seen for the first time. And see, this represents our family. And they're four stones in here and the hair up there shows humor and that's us. And they were both dying. They said, you just sold your husband a more expensive piece of art. And it made me laugh because once it's in you the right way. Corey Frank (24:10): Sure. Were you taught how to sell? Was there a methodology or who taught you how to kind of sell that proper narrative, that emotional arc that people want to be on a journey versus just winging it? Susan Finch (24:24): Well, I can say I've sold boating curves, inflatable boats, windlasses, you name it. Those did not have stories. But when we ended up with this gallery years ago, with my ex, they told stories. And that's what sucked us into wanting to buy that gallery because of the stories of every single piece of art, because they knew every artist. I realize people do not need art, but they need to justify the purchase to their friends because it's extravagant and they want a story to tell, they want to know the artist because the artist is a celebrity and I've watched this happen. And I thought, well, the more stories I can amass and listen and pull out of these artists, I can share them. And those pieces will go home, which they did. So I still do that though. I still tell stories, but that's where I really mastered it. Corey Frank (25:17): Well, look at Funnel Media Group, right? I mean, between Chris and all your other guests and all the other podcasts that you have, it's just a collection of storytellers in different industries. Susan Finch (25:27): Yes, exactly. Corey Frank (25:29): In fact, I don't think of any of the Funnel Media Group's podcast, the dozens and hundreds I've listened, I don't think he ever talks about product. There's no product. It's all about people's stories and experiences and learnings and lessons [inaudible 00:25:43]. Susan Finch (25:43): Right. And there isn't one person... I've had a few people approach us. I've actually turned down a couple of shows because I did not find them honorable. And I can't get behind and promote somebody that is not honorable or a message that isn't honorable. And that I wouldn't be proud to say, Hey, neighbor, you need them. if I'm having to protect my neighbors from my shows and the hosts and their products, there's a problem. Corey Frank (26:11): Yeah. There's certainly and even in hiring too, you see that, as you had said, from which artists you bring out or not, is that's a decency quotient. What's somebody's decency quotient? And is it something that can be taught? Is it something that you experience over time? And then you get burned enough and your spider-sense tingles and says, can sales reps be taught that with prospects? Susan Finch (26:35): Yes. They can. And I think part of it is letting go of that desperation feel. Have to get the numbers, have to get the numbers, have to get the numbers. And once you learn that it's going to be okay if that one doesn't work out, because there were four more that are better, let it go. And it gets reinforced to us when we have unscrupulous people that have taught us or that we have worked for, they didn't teach us anything, but they're forcing us, scaring us, manipulating us, badgering us to do whatever it takes to get them their goal. And it crushes our souls. It does. It just chips away, little by little. Corey Frank (27:17): It does. Susan Finch (27:18): And it takes a while for people to recover from that.

On Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall continues his two-part conversation with his fiancée, Helen Fanucci, Microsoft’s Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader. Today, they’re talking about how work-from-home experiences have resulted in a shift in employees’ attitudes about where and when they are willing to work. This is Helen’s area of expertise: She’s been managing employees remotely for 15 years, helping them grapple with their work-from-home issues. Additionally, she understands the challenges of attracting and retaining the best people, especially in today’s job market. Microsoft’s customers demand great service and support, and, Helen says, “That’s why we have to win the war to get talent. We have to keep serving our customers with amazing talent, or they’ll find somebody else who will.” And once you’ve hired talented people, how do you keep them? “Through servant leadership,” Helen explains. Describing her role as a manager at Microsoft, she says, “I am expected to model and coach, be inclusive, take accountability. I remove the blocks and barriers so that my team can achieve.” ----more---- Chris plays devil’s advocate with his question, “If you’re all touchy-feely with your employees, where does their drive to achieve come from?” Helen is ready with the answer: “When we hire the best people,” she explains, “they come with an inborn drive to achieve. Part of a manager’s job is to make sure those people feel respected. [At Microsoft], we really bend over backward to be accommodating and help employees be successful. But make no mistake about it,” she assures Chris, “We’re about being competitive and winning in the marketplace, and our results show that.” Learn all about hiring and retaining the best people on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “A Talent for Managing Talent.”   About Our Guest Helen Fanucci has been a valued employee at Microsoft for 13 years and is currently their Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader, heading up an incredible global team of seasoned sales professionals who are working with some of Microsoft's most strategic accounts.   Here is the full transcript from this episode: Chris Beall (02:35): Well, one of the things I hear you saying is that we need companies to kind of give us places to go. But there aren't places anymore that give us some boundary within which we can organize and work together and be a team. This does actually remind me of the first 88 episodes or whatever, of Market Dominance Guys, which are about, Hey, your company's job is to dominate markets, which provides a stable foundation for doing more, for servicing those customers. Chris Beall (03:07): And maybe that's one of the things that we do, as companies. Your company has done an extraordinary job, although I'm sure that there is nobody there who likes to talk about dominating markets, because when you're big and you don't need to talk about it, why talk about it? Right? But the fact of the matter is, there are markets where Microsoft does extraordinarily well. And in a way, that's what makes the home, that's the house in which employees can come. But then we better make sure that they have a good time while they're there, but it's not enough to have a good time. It's a bigger deal. Chris Beall (03:41): This is the hardest part for me. Sales management, traditionally, I'll be crude, used to consist of throwing somebody into a territory and seeing if they worked out. So, that was kind of it. And if they didn't work out, then you put somebody else in the territory. I mean, I know there's a lot more to sales management, but traditionally, I think that a lot of what folks call, sales management, has really been, checking to see if people are working out. And then, yes, there're improvement programs and all sorts of stuff and there's training and this and that, all sorts of wonderful things. But that's been kind of the theory, over time. Chris Beall (04:14): I've observed how you manage, and you actually get ultra high performance from individuals and from the team, as a result. And yet doing it with these principles, these cultural principles, things that people would say, "Oh, that's a bunch of touchy, feely. Aren't your employees just going to hang out? Aren't they just going to go for long, barefoot runs down to the beach? Why is it they bothered to work at all and do anything useful, if you're just going to make it so delightful and easy for them, and you're just trying to attract them?" Chris Beall (04:46): So, how do you achieve that balance? Because that seems to be the key to this whole thing. And I bet a lot of our listeners are going, "Yeah. Okay, great. Attract, attract, attract. Retain, retain, retain. But what about achieve, achieve, achieve?" How do we get all that to go together? Helen Fanucci (05:02): Have high expectations of achievement, but do it in a kind way, and do it in a way that helps the employees learn and grow. So first and foremost, I check in with my team and I have one-on-ones with them or team meetings. How are folks doing? But I have very high expectations and there are specific goals and objectives, including revenue performance. I do monthly forecast calls, I deliver revenue, I have quarterly revenue goals. I'm no different than any other sales leader, sales manager. Helen Fanucci (05:36): However, at the same time, I am expected, through our cultural expectations, to model, coach, and care my team. That's part of the expectation of manager. So in some cases, I'm modeling for my team, what it means to be inclusive, take accountability. I view my job as, removing the blockers and barriers for my team to achieve. And so, for example, when my team is presenting in an important customer meeting, or it might be an internal meeting where we're actually going to the board of directors, if you will. Not literally the board of Microsoft, but the discount review board, shall we say, to get a request for special pricing for our customer, my seller has been prepping for that, reviewing it with me ahead of time, getting feedback, also with a broader team. And so, is on the hot seat, delivering and presenting and answering questions. Helen Fanucci (06:40): What I do is, I listen, and sometimes I'll chime in, if there's something that I can add value on. But I'm in the background taking notes for them, so that they don't have to think about what the actions are or what the conversation was. I'm basically being their admin, if you will, or their note taker while they're on the hot seat. And then I send them the notes and we'll do a debrief of the call. Helen Fanucci (07:07): So I do have, at times, performance related challenges with folks on my team. And I think it's really important to be super specific, because it's not an all or nothing thing. I have team members that are seasoned and excellent at what they do, but they're not excellent at everything all the time. So there can be slices of things that require coaching, or as we change role expectations, because we evolve to meet up with the demands of our business so that we can maintain our competitiveness. Or as you say, "dominate a market." Although, I am sensitive to the term, dominant, because I have been at Microsoft during the consent decree period. And while we're past that, it's not a term that we use. Helen Fanucci (08:04): But I coach my team and I will do it in specific ways. So for example, "Please, next time we meet, can you review with me your strategy related to data for your customer, so that we can talk about, how are we going to really help the customer with their data backbone. Review for me, your strategy related to executive engagement so that we can get higher in the organization or more with the business leaders." Or it might be a conversation of, "Hey, I'm getting feedback that you are not listening very well in your team calls. And we need to really work on kind of, cultural expectations." Helen Fanucci (08:50): So there're things like that, but it's not a, people are either making it or not making it. It's usually more nuanced. And at some point, either the employee or myself will go, "Hey, I don't think this is working out. Let's find another role for you that would be a better fit." And that may be another role within Microsoft. It might be helping the employee to leave Microsoft. Helen Fanucci (09:18): And so, I absolutely am all about performing. And in fact, we just must. It just comes.... It's the anti-table stakes, it's the table stakes to make quota, to keep pipelines up to date, to do forecast. And it's complex. And if an employee misses their sales target for a year or two years, we've got to look at, what are they contributing? Are they doing the right things? Do they have the right impact? And at a company as large as Microsoft, sometimes we get quotas wrong. Sometimes people's quotas have a baseline in it that doesn't make sense because the customer divested a big part of our business. Helen Fanucci (10:06): So we've got a look at the bigger picture. It's not just a binary, yes or no. It's just, we're going to look at a bigger picture and it's more nuanced. And so when I interact with my team as a manager, I try to be nuanced and helpful to them so that they can excel and succeed, not only in the job today, but in their career at Microsoft. And help them build skills and abilities so that they can achieve what success looks like on their terms. Chris Beall (10:40): I think that's what's fascinating. You told me a story about somebody a little while ago, at a company that I think we should not name. And this person ultimately, as the source of their dissatisfaction, that caused them to go and become, today, an entrepreneur. Went through a couple of changes along the way, but they left that company a super talent, not just kind of good talent, but I always talk about the top 20%. This is somebody way, way above the top 20%. Chris Beall (11:11): And the way the company failed to be attractive was, they basically said, Look, you're kind of here in this job because we need a person like you in this job, because we're getting some credit for that." And this individual, she said, "I want to go do something valuable." And then they said, "Well, but if you go do something valuable for some other part of the organization, we don't get credits. So, you have to stay here and do nothing." Chris Beall (11:38): And I think a lot of people think, "Oh, that'd be fine. I'm going to hang out. I'm going to be on a weird-ass vacation, right? Where I'm just hanging." And yet, maybe part of the secret of your opening up here is, "Hey, when we hire the best people, they come with an inborn drive to achieve." And as you said, "If we can get the blockers out of the way, reduce the friction, and also make sure that they feel respected along the way..." That's another thing that I've seen. It's like that switch that, when you flip the disrespect, the switch once with an employee, you're pretty much toast. Coming back from that, where they feel like they aren't respected, or it might've been actual disrespect. It may have just been neglect or whatever. That's a tough one to recover from. And I think again, it's like, it's actually almost a format disrespect to say, "I don't expect you to perform.", because people expect themselves to perform and they want to be challenged. Chris Beall (12:34): You don't have to elaborate on that story, but I was really impressed with it. I was like, "Wow." Because I know a lot of people say, "Hey, if you go all touchy, feely, and it's all about being nice to people and empathetic, and all this stuff, where is that drive to perform? Where is the drive to achieve?" And I think that comes out of the selection of people who have a drive to achieve, and kind of nothing else, except giving them the opportunity. Helen Fanucci (12:58): Yeah. Well, delivering results is one of our values. We have three leadership principles. Deliver results, is one of them, and so that's absolutely key, and you've got to hire for that. Create clarity and generate energy are the three leadership principles. Helen Fanucci (13:13): But for sure, we hire people that have a big motor and want to get things done. And some times the latitude that we have to make changes, isn't fast enough for that employee. So in that example, yes, the person was unhappy because they were basically being used by upper management to help achieve some goals or metrics upper management had. But without having a job that was satisfying to them because things got changed in the organization, so they left. Helen Fanucci (13:50): I've recently had a situation where I had to have an employee with a big motor, big drive to succeed. And through some circumstances, she ended up moving into another team because we couldn't adapt quickly enough to keep her on my team and open up another role that would be a stronger fit for her. And so, this is where kind of the larger company situation and the lack of agility that comes into play sometimes, can hurt, I think. So then, people leave. And so, that happens. Helen Fanucci (14:27): But in the balance, I think we really, really try to bend over backwards to be accommodating and help employees be successful. But make no mistake about it, we're about being competitive and winning in the marketplace. And our results show that, if you look at the growth of our business. Helen Fanucci (14:47): And the Microsoft U.S. president just announced that she was leaving Microsoft. And in her four years at Microsoft, she almost doubled our revenue in business in Microsoft U.S. And that was on a huge base of business. And so, yeah, we're about winning and being competitive and valuable to our customers. And I think our leadership has done a great job. We're not perfect, but it's a way better place to work now, than it was 10 years ago. Chris Beall (16:01): But it's fascinating. And that is going to be the foundation for Microsoft's competitiveness, going forward. Right? It's a much better place to work, so you get great talent. And great talent is what your customers demand. But if you just kind of think of it that way, the company can create the marketplace, at some point. Right? There it is. We're dominating this market. We're important in this market. We have these customers. But the customers demand in a way that they can't really say. They can't come out and say, "We demand you give us the best talent." But directly and indirectly, they're demanding that, and they'll walk. Customers will walk, if you don't provide them with the people to interact with, that they feel like are people that are worthy of their importance as a customer, so to speak. Chris Beall (16:47): And I think to us, that's a really big deal. As you know, we've won this award from the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, that I connect and sell seven years in a row. And what are those customers saying? They're saying, "Your people are people we really get a lot of value out of interacting with." That's actually what they're saying. It's called, Service Provider of the Year award. Chris Beall (17:07): I think our customers vote every day about our people, maybe more than our products. And I think that's really interesting, as a grounds for these two competitive forces come together. If we don't compete with everybody for the people, and then give them that latitude to be great within a structure that allows it to work for the customers, then the customers are going to go, "Well. I'll go to somebody who does compete and gets better people." Helen Fanucci (17:33): Yeah, you've got to have... It starts with great people, no doubt about it. It starts with great people. And that's why you've got to win the war on talent and be the destination organization, or the destination manager, that the talent wants to work for. Helen Fanucci (17:51): You're exactly right. Every customer is grappling with technology and every customer must be a digital company and transform and monetize their data. And they're looking for Microsoft and our partners because we have a big partner ecosystem we work with. But they're looking for us to really guide them and help them along the way. Helen Fanucci (18:13): And actually, we do have customers that call up Satya or send him an email and say, "I need your A-team on this." So, that just happened. A few months ago, one of my customers did that, and they were kind of in a tight spot. And we were stepping up to help them. And they sent Satya an email and said, "I need your A-team. I need your best people on this." And he assured him that we were doing that, and we rose to the occasion. And so, that is an expectation of our customers. And we've got to keep serving our customers and serving them with amazing talent, or they'll find somebody else who will. Chris Beall (18:52): Yeah. It seems like there's a virtuous cycle that has always been there. But one element has flipped, which is, the locust of competition has moved. We can't assume that the employees that we have, or the employees in our local area or candidates, are just going to come on board because we're the only game in town. And that's an easy thing to do. Maybe that's what Apple is doing by saying, "The employees have all got to come to the campus." Is they're saying, "We're the only game in town." But I suspect, one in town, doesn't really mean very much anymore. There's talent all over the place. And two, only game? Not quite so sure anybody's ever the only game. Right? These things come and go. Chris Beall (19:34): I'd make this contention. I don't know if you agree with me or not. But if you're looking to invest in companies, and everybody's looking to get a return on their money that exceeds certainly the pathetically low interest rates out there, but exceeds the market as a whole... Is this a dimension along which the analysts, who are going to look at companies and advise us to invest or not invest in this company versus that, that they should be looking at? Chris Beall (20:03): Because I've never heard an analyst, a stock market analyst say, "You know what? That Microsoft over there, they have got the handle on this cultural issue and this way of looking at things where their flexibility and their commitment to culture, and their willingness and ability to train on empathy. And do all of these things you're talking about, that is going to take them from whatever it is, their stock price of whatever number it is today, to two X, three X, four X that in the future. So don't you worry because they're competing with folks who, frankly, don't get this war on talent." Chris Beall (20:42): And so ding, ding, dang, we have a winner over here. Put your money here. Do you think that's going to become something that the analysts from whatever they are, the Morgan Stanley's of the world and so forth, are going to start talking about? Helen Fanucci (20:55): That's a really good question. In some ways, I think Microsoft's stock is reflective of our culture. And the reason I say that is because, Satya made it a top priority when he took over, to address culture. You can't transform, you can't have digital transformation without cultural transformation. The data is really clear on that. I used to do a keynote on that topic and it just doesn't work. Helen Fanucci (21:24): And so our ability to change as a company, which has been credited to Satya and the great work he's done, the underpinnings of that are our cultural transformation. So while it may not be deliberately noted by analysts, I think it is baked into our stock price because we've been able to achieve those results. Those results are only possible by our cultural transformation. Helen Fanucci (21:54): And Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. And Satya consistently says, "We can't achieve our mission without addressing our culture and having a great culture." It is our culture that achieves our mission and achieves the return on investment. And it achieves the stock price. Chris Beall (22:21): Yeah. It's fascinating stuff. I know that there's an apocryphal or maybe true Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times." And that's supposed to mean, you don't want interesting times. You just want everything to kind of go along so you can go along with everything that's going along. Right? Chris Beall (22:36): I have a feeling you really like interesting times. That this is energizing for you, that this big change is going to be what carries you forward in your career and gives you things to focus on that are going to be fun and productive for you and for other people. Are you feeling that? Are you feeling... You talk about energy, and how energy is... bringing energy as part of the game. Is this craziness? Where some people feel like it's depressing and some people feel like it is scary, too complex, makes them want to retire tomorrow, and get out of the world of helping companies and helping people do things, you don't seem to have that response to it. It seems to me like you like going toward this sort of thing and grappling with it. Helen Fanucci (23:18): Oh, yeah. I love it. I am like, "Game on. Let's figure this out." I'm really excited about the opportunities and what the future brings. So I've been managing employees remotely for over 15 years. And I'm really comfortable with it, I'm good at it, and I think I have a lot to offer. And I also help colleagues grapple with issues, particularly as it pertains to remote work or managing remote employees. And I think it's super interesting. And I love it, and I love what I do. And I think we're just at the start of this. And I'm really excited about what the future holds. Chris Beall (23:59): Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, Helen, thank you so much. Finally, an issue of Market Dominance Guys that doesn't go on and on and on about winning sales. I know you know how to win sales. You win deals all the time. You beat your numbers, you do all that kind of stuff. But I feel that this is a pretty special episode or two. I don't know what this will become. Chris Beall (24:19): I'm sorry Corey wasn't here. Corey, dude, whatever it is that you're doing, wherever it is you're doing it, I know you're going to pronounce people's names correctly. So, that's fantastic. But Helen's here with us today. Helen Fanucci, thank you so much for being on Market Dominance Guys. We could not be more blessed. Helen Fanucci (24:36): Thank you, Chris. I am so delighted to be invited and I'm just glad that you got around to inviting me. I thought, "Yeah..." I don't know. I wasn't sure what I needed to do to earn an invitation. So, thank you for being so astute and inviting me. Chris Beall (24:52): All right. Lucky me.  

This week on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall is once again flying solo while Corey Frank is out traveling the world. Chris’ guest today is Helen Fanucci, Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader at Microsoft — and Chris’ fiancée! The topic today veers away from competing with other companies for market domination, to competing with other companies for market talent. It’s just another result of our almost year and a half of working from home due to the pandemic: People now want flexibility in where they work and when they work. ----more---- Helen explains that, because of this, managers have to manage and hire differently today, and provide the flexibility that workers might prefer. “We have to manage for outcome and results,” she says, “not just how long people are spending in the office.” Companies need to understand how to get the best out of their teams, building in that flexibility so that people want to continue to work. Another change is the necessity of asking how your team is doing on a personal level. Helen tells Chris, “If members of your team aren’t doing well, how can your company meet customers’ needs?” Employees exercise more power now with their decisions to stay at their current job or look elsewhere for a company that is willing to meet their needs, so it becomes imperative for managers and companies to be the kind of people that employees want to work for. Want to know more? Then listen to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Will They Stay or Will They Go?”   About Our Guest Helen Fanucci has been a valued employee at Microsoft for 13 years and is currently their Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader, heading up an incredible global team of seasoned sales professionals who are working with some of Microsoft's most strategic accounts.   Here is the full transcript from this episode: Chris Beall (01:50): Hey, everybody, welcome to an unusual episode of Market Dominance Guys. For one thing, we are missing my co-host, the estimable, maybe inestimable, I don't know how to estimate him, Corey Frank, who is off somewhere. I don't know if he went off on this cruise ship behind me or if he's doing something else, but he's not available today. And so we're going to have me play the host. And with me today is Helen Fanucci. And full disclosure, Helen Fanucci and I are engaged to marry each other. That's how it works is you marry each other. It's not a passive voice, like to be married, it's active voice because we're active people. Chris Beall (02:30): And Helen is working for Microsoft. She calls herself a sales manager. I think that's accurate. She is a sales manager, but she manages some really, really big strategic accounts at Microsoft. But Helen has a substantial career in sales and sales management, also in marketing and actually an MIT-trained engineer, mechanical engineer, which is pretty unusual in the world of sales. So Helen, welcome to Market Dominance Guys. Helen Fanucci (03:01): Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be here and delighted to be here with you. Chris Beall (03:05): It's pretty cool. So Helen, we've been talking on Market Dominance Guys for 80-something episodes about one thing, which is dominating markets in terms of competing for customers and particularly competing for markets. So markets are all those collection of customers that are inter-referencing, so if you sell to one, your risk and the cost of selling to every other single one within the market. Chris Beall (03:30): You have been looking at the world of successful companies, being successful and being successful as a sales manager and being successful in all these ways, in a completely different way. Basically, turning the lens around almost exactly 180 degrees and talking about something that we have literally never mentioned on Market Dominance Guys, which is how the world is structured now, with regard to companies competing with each other. Chris Beall (04:01): And your thesis appears to be that companies are now competing for something completely different from customers and it's much more important. So first, tell us a little about what that view is and then kind of how did you get to that view, and what led you there throughout your career? Why would you think such unusual thoughts? Helen Fanucci (04:22): Well, thanks Chris. So you're right, we used to compete for customers, and now we're competing for talent. And the big sea change that's happened is really accelerated by the pandemic. So during the pandemic, it became painfully at times clear that what really mattered as a sales manager, sales leader is how my team was doing. If we individually aren't doing well, we can't possibly serve our customers and do our best for our customers. Helen Fanucci (05:00): And so the expectations of employees has really changed, and we probably would have gotten there eventually. But as Satya said, a few months after the pandemic started, that we did two years worth of digital transformation in two months. And I think it's largely the same with the relationship between employee and company, employee and manager. Helen Fanucci (05:30): So when I say employees expectations have changed, there's a lot of data on that now. They expect to be known personally, first and foremost, and their whole life included, not just a work life. We used to think of going to work as to be professional at work is to not talk about personal things and just talk about work things. That doesn't cut it, and that's an outdated notion. And so employees like flexibility. So we compete for talent and the expectations have changed. Helen Fanucci (06:09): So 73% of respondents in a survey want flexibility of where they work. 92% want flexibility on when they work. And so we're a great example, by the way, Chris. The day after Amy Hood, Microsoft's CFO said, "Hey, returning back to the office," and this was May 2020, "returning back to the office after the pandemic will also have a component of choice." And so we looked at each other and we said, "Well, let's buy a house in Port Townsend because I'll have a choice of whether I go back to the office. So it gives us the flexibility of not just living in Seattle, but we can live on the Olympic Peninsula overlooking Discovery Bay and looking out towards Victoria, Canada. Helen Fanucci (07:03): So that trend is happening all over the place. And then I have employees that actually want to work from different countries from time to time. I have an employee that asked about working in India for a month. Family, he lives in California, but his country of origin is India. And so I said, "Sure," because if I don't start providing that flexibility, they're going to go work for somebody who does. And so this idea of coming back to the office is really, it's not going to happen. The genie's out of the bottle and it's not going back and employees aren't going back. Chris Beall (07:42): And the genie is granting the employees, in a lot of way, all knowledge-worker employees their ultimate wish, which is, you're in charge. I mean, you can choose for whom you want. We always used to say it's a free country, but maybe suddenly it's a free world with regard to employer-employee relationships. And that seems very new. Chris Beall (08:02): And if I was recruiting at one point in the Bay Area, I'd be either recruiting from people who already live in the Bay Area or people who are willing to move. And if they're willing to move, don't they have to move their whole family? So maybe I'm getting them before they are married and have kids or whatever it is that might be binding them together, but maybe not. And do they have to uproot their spouse, their kids, the school, all that stuff? I think that's the way it used to go, and now it's like, now the employee gets to make that call. Chris Beall (08:33): They might love me so much and "Oh, I really want to come to work for ConnectAndSell in Los Gatos, California," which by the way we don't do. ConnectAndSell, we just let you work wherever you want. But they might love me that much. But that love is a tax, right? I've got to actually raise the bar to get them to love me so much that they'll move close by to work physically together. And somebody else might say, no, you can work wherever you want, work for Helen Fanucci. She'll let you work where you want. You would out compete me in that case, all else being equal. Chris Beall (09:05): Of course, your company is much more, got a lot of good qualities. ConnectAndSell is a bit of a pain in the ass to work for. But you get my meaning, right? Are you seeing this play out in practical ways already with regard to, is it more with regard to retention or is it with regard to attracting new talent or is it both equally? What are you seeing play out already, that's really impacting folks ability to compete in the marketplace because they have the talent that they need. Helen Fanucci (09:33): Well, the first order of business is retaining talent because why hire new talent if you can't retain the ones who have? And so I think the data is four million workers quit their jobs in the month of April, and so that's huge. And every employee is probably thinking about quitting, at least checking out what's out there, because there's so many jobs available. I think it's like 9.3 million jobs or something like that available. Helen Fanucci (10:07): And so retaining is first and foremost, and retaining requires flexibility. And so a company I know that I'd rather remain nameless, is requiring their workers to come back to the office. And in fact, it's been told to me that their CEO counts cars in the parking lot. And what they're experiencing are workers, employees are quitting left and right. They're not going to put up with being required to go into the office. So counting cars in the parking lot is actually emptying the parking lot. Chris Beall (10:51): Wow. Helen Fanucci (10:52): I know. And they're having a tough time retaining talent. So that's a real example that's happening now. You may have heard about Apple and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase wanting to require workers to go back to the office. That ship has sailed, so to speak. No pun intended with your beautiful ship in the background. Hybrid work is here to stay. Helen Fanucci (11:16): We actually compete with everyone around the world for talent because we can hire from anywhere and they can work from anywhere. It opens up a competitive landscape. So while you might say Microsoft is competing with Google and AWS and Salesforce and all these tech companies, in reality, all of a sudden overnight our competitors for talent are really all companies, including ConnectAndSell. Helen Fanucci (11:45): You may offer such great flexibility and training and skill development in what you do, that I can't hire SDRs at Microsoft because you develop people in a way that we can only dream about, as an example. So then you become our competition, even though from a product point of view, we don't directly compete. So yeah, it's happening all over the place. Retaining talent is the first order of business. Helen Fanucci (12:13): Also, we're seeing municipalities, states and cities now flipping from trying to attract companies to come work for them to attracting workers to come work in their location. Just yesterday, I was on the phone with a colleague who lives in Greater Minneapolis and has a house in Northern Minneapolis. Whereas he said, there's more deer than people up there. He's now seeing job listings that list jobs in Northern Minnesota where there's not really any companies. And he says, "Oh, it's all work from home." You can work here. The job is up here where you want to live. And then the job, actually corporate headquarters or what have you, is someplace else. Helen Fanucci (13:04): The other thing that I think that we miss a lot is if we are requiring people to come back to the office or not requiring them to come back to the office, as it actually is going, as a sales manager I might say, "Oh, well, I need somebody in California next to the customer so that they can go meet with the customer." But where are the customers? The customers aren't going back to the office either. Helen Fanucci (13:30): So one of the phenomena I think we will see is that we'll probably organize travel differently. And so we'll probably have fewer in-person meetings with our customers. And when we do travel, we'll travel to bigger meetings. Maybe it's an executive briefing that's held at Microsoft corporate headquarters, or maybe it's a hotel near the customer's location or at the customer's location, but people are flying in, both the customers are flying in and the sales team. Helen Fanucci (14:06): We have an annual sales kickoff meeting that traditionally has happened in Las Vegas every year. Now, we haven't had it in person last year and we're not having it in person this year either, but those could be catalysts for meeting in person. And maybe those kinds of get-togethers end up being extended. But I think we'll see less travel overall because that's part of, also the changing expectation. People want to travel less. They want to work from home. They don't want to commute. We used to commute by planes, trains, and automobiles, and now we commute by logging in. Helen Fanucci (14:48): But there is a cost to all of that, to the logging in and working from home that has become researched and evident, that these back-to-back meetings, the data shows that 70% of workers are working three hours more a day. It's just been relentless. I notice that my calendar, when I block it, it doesn't get observed and people want to meet with me nonstop. And so, one of the things I've ended up doing is setting a default in my Outlook settings, so that when I schedule quote-unquote what was a half hour meeting, it's only 25 minutes, or an hour meeting is only 50 minutes because it is really essential for brain health and wellbeing that we take breaks. Helen Fanucci (15:40): And Microsoft research did data on that and showed the degradation of cognitive function and that increase in stress just by doing three back-to-back meetings without any break and what it does to your brain. And so we've got to work differently and workers and the talent is demanding that different expectations and different ways of working be in place in order for them to go work for the company that has the jobs. Helen Fanucci (16:17): So I think we've got to get a lot more creative. And what this also means for managers is we've got to manage differently and hire differently. We've got to think through the menu of flexibility and choices that a given group of workers might prefer. And when we're managing them, we've got to manage for outcomes, impact and results, not just showing up in the office. Activity doesn't equal results. And so I'm going to pause there because I've said a lot of things, but those are some of my thoughts about how things have changed and really what are some of the core components on the war for talent. Chris Beall (17:46): That's fascinating stuff. As I think about it, I always think about, you know me, I was thinking about what's the one thing somebody can do to screw something up or to do it well. And often when we keep doing the same things we were doing before, inadvertently when there's big changes, because big changes don't happen very often. But when there's big changes, we have a hard time shedding old habits. And so as you look at this world that you're basically saying the world is turned upside down. Chris Beall (18:14): It's almost like, I think there was an episode of Market Dominance Guys where I talked about the fact that sales has done traditionally is an outgrowth of factory capitalism. So the idea was that factories get capitalized with a bunch of equipment and enough cash to be able to have working capital in order to buy raw materials. And they had access to a supply chain, and then they made widgets. And the widgets must go. They got to go into the market, right? So what did we do? We dumped the widgets, so to speak, into the territories and the salespeople take care of turning the widgets into gross profits that then come back to the company. Chris Beall (18:55): And we did all sorts of things called discounting and having specials and bundles and this, that, and the other thing to try to move the damn widgets because the widgets otherwise pile up. And we spent money to make something that we don't get any money back for, right? And now the world has changed to where companies like yours, like Microsoft, I'd say Microsoft's leading the way. And Microsoft and Apple are probably the two leaders in this, turning the world into software. Chris Beall (19:21): Basically, software eats the world and now everything is software, including physical products become very software-like, so we don't have a lot of inventory. And so my point was, hey, here we have this change, which means which we should change how we sell. And we shouldn't just assign territories and dump inventory into it. But you're saying there's a different change entirely, which is, it's not how we sell, it's who's on our team to help us sell, whether they're sellers or somebody else. Chris Beall (19:56): And I hate to say it, people are going to think I'm some kind of a lunatic, but in a weird way, it's almost like Karl Marx is finally right. That is the means of production in the world of sales and other things, has actually fallen into the hands of the workers. It's the products that you guys make at Microsoft that let workers like me, for instance, working today with my data concierge, who's been on the show, Tom Jung, where we're working together for ConnectAndSell. Right. Chris Beall (20:25): But we actually had the power to do that for anybody without having to pick up and move. So, that power shift seems like such a big deal. So what do you see all of us failing to do, failing to shift in our own mindset or our own actions or how we organize, to keep up with this massive change? Because it's such a massive change, there's no way we're keeping up. We have to be blowing it. So how are we blowing it? Helen Fanucci (20:54): Okay. So a couple things there. So the Karl Marx analogy might be a step too far. The power has shifted to the workers, yes. However, we still need an organizing collective that is called a company to help structure and organize the output productivity of the workers. I'll just say it that way. Then it probably sounds all factory work and I don't really mean it that way. Helen Fanucci (21:28): So for example, me as a manager, I need to make sure I'm understanding how to get the best and the most out of my team, and my team as an extended team. I have about 600 people that touch my customers. I have a big territory, global strategic accounts, et cetera. And so we have a more defined set of accounts we focus on, but how we go about our job and how we organize that is really critical. Helen Fanucci (22:02): And so building in that flexibility so that people want to continue to work. And by the way, as I said, a few minutes ago, about 4 million people quit their jobs in April. And so if you have nobody to do a job, it doesn't matter how you organize the work. And so from that point of view, the workers have power. And in fact, just a quick digression or story, my daughter left her job in January of this year and she's not going to go back to a company. She left her job to pursue her dream, which is starting her own business with her husband. Helen Fanucci (22:46): And there's a very low barrier to entry. They are creating an app and an approach to help parents of young children be able to employ behavioral modification techniques to basically help the parents be better parents. And they're doing it through technology and asynchronously and enabling a parental therapy if you will, for behavioral modification at scale and at a lower price point. So she's never going back to an office. Helen Fanucci (23:25): So we've got to be sensitive that employees have a lot of choice. And so yes, they have power that way, but we have people in roles and we have coordination that needs to happen in order to serve our customers. But none of that actually is possible unless you have a foundation of a corporate culture. And one of the things that Satya did when he first became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, is he started addressing the Microsoft culture because he knew that we couldn't be competitive and change if we didn't have a strong culture. Helen Fanucci (24:07): So there's a lot of work that's done in terms of expectations, of being inclusive, hiring diverse talent. And being inclusive means that people feel included, not just they're on the team. You can hire diverse talent, but if they don't feel included, they'll leave. And so while we used to expect tellers to meet their quota, and that was sufficient, it's no longer sufficient. Helen Fanucci (24:42): So for example, you also have to behave consistent to our cultural expectations. And if you're leading a team or interacting with others, and it's not consistent with a culture of inclusion and trust and valuing others points of view, then that's a problem. And you end up, me as a manager, I end up needing to address that. So I would say that the employees have the power, but then it becomes imperative for managers and companies to be the kind of people and the kind of organization that the employees want to work for. And that includes more and more employees want to work for companies that are taking a stand on social justice issues or DACA, have principles that are consistent with their values. Helen Fanucci (25:43): It's more complex, I would say that it used to be, to attract talent and it's across many more dimensions. One of the things that we did in Microsoft US, it's an organization of about 10,000 sellers and managers is our president, Kate Johnson brought in Brene Brown and everybody from corporate vice presidents, to directors, to individual contributors, all got trained on dare to lead because we want to have more courageous sellers and leaders. And one of the things we learned is that there is no courage without vulnerability. And so what does it mean to be vulnerable? That's a scary thing for folks. Helen Fanucci (26:34): And then as a manager, how do you have empathy for your team? And empathy as distinct from sympathy is about really putting on the other person's shoes and understanding their situation. And so all of that becomes super important in order to build a culture where people feel valued, can communicate. We had a whole module on clear is kind, and being clear on expectations. And being able to, as Brene would say, rumble with vulnerability, like have tough conversations. Because tough conversations actually in a respectful way, unlock innovation and new possibilities. Helen Fanucci (27:23): So things have dramatically changed, but we can also carry that to our customers because our customers are struggling with these things too. And so I actually spend quite a bit of time talking to customers about our culture, the changes that we've made, why it matters, how to build teams, how to retain teams, how to manage teams remotely. So there's a lot to unpack here, but those are some of my, I guess, not-so-short thoughts on the subject.

This week’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast wraps up a terrific three-part conversation between our guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, and their guest, Henry Wojdyla, Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. Today, Corey asks Henry how he’s finetuned his business perspective and cold-calling technique since his recent immersion in Market Dominance Guys. “I copy and steal religiously,” Henry freely confesses. “I’ve wholesale stolen Chris’ approach.” ----more----   Henry has gone so far as to distill all he learned into a playbook, with links to related parts of Market Dominance Guys’ podcasts. He references the episode, “You’d Better Believe It,” with Matt Forbes, Head of Strategic Accounts at ConnectAndSell. “Listen to Matt Forbes,” Henry advises passionately, “to the tone he uses when he talks about belief.” Henry extolls the cold-calling virtues of Cherryl Turner, Chief Development Officer of ConnectAndSell’s new Flight School Division, in “The Secret of Her Success” episode, and the value he gained from her belief that she’s the equal of anyone she speaks to on the phone. Believe me — you’ll want to hear the complete conversation between Chris, Corey, and Henry to get the full value from this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Borrowing from the Best.” When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear Lead That Cold Call With Trust, Not Value About Our Guest Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Corey Frank (01:48): So the initial cold calls you made, BC and AD, before Chris and after- Henry Wojdyla (01:53): Yes. Yes. Corey Frank (01:54): So with the croc brain and now that knowledge afterwards, you were leading with in essence, again, talk about orange world, the cold cognitions, data-driven, assuming folks would subscribe to the intellectual attraction of a deal from the numbers, from the status of the firm. And then post, you led with what? How did you establish that trust out of the gate to have better results than before? Henry Wojdyla (02:27): Well, again, it wasn't really so much... Before Chris, BC, was not so much about, again, the firm, it wasn't about patting your chest about who we were, but it was just almost probably cramming facts down people's throats before they had the chance to finish the word hello. Now I have no shame in being honest about this. I've pretty much wholesale stolen Chris's approach, the 27 seconds, even the approach to frankly discovery meetings. Henry Wojdyla (02:53): It's really about, I think, getting the counterparty on the phone in a psychological condition. You can actually deliver something of value to them, but you can't get there without trust. So I've really become a disciple. And that's part of what drove frankly, a pretty big redraft. We have a playbook that I use heavily, but there was a lot of editing that went on to that when I really stumbled across this whole concept of leading with trust as opposed to value. Chris Beall (03:20): When you pulled up the Market Dominance Guys' part of that book and the other book when we were in Seattle, I will admit it, I shed a tear or two. Really, I was so touched. I didn't know that anybody was ever going to use this stuff. So you didn't just use it. You used it with precision and thoughtfulness and commitment. It was one of those moments that I thought, "Okay, what Corey and I have been up to all this time might actually be worthwhile," because you always looked for, "Is anybody going to get it?" Well, you went way beyond getting it. Henry Wojdyla (04:00): Well, it wasn't until I really came. Again, I really can't take any credit. I don't know if it's Oscar Wilde or Pablo Picasso or whoever I've heard various attributions to. But the idea of the best thing to do is frankly steal the best ideas. And I'm nakedly admitting that I've stolen the best ideas because they weren't my own, but it was immediately apparent upon doing that binge-listening. That was the disconnect. Henry Wojdyla (04:26): Don't get me wrong, the prior approach worked. It certainly worked, but it really wasn't a best practice. And again, I can hearken back to a few key operating principles for me. One is the constant accumulation of best practices and I'm totally agnostic to either where they came from or that they have any particular shelf life. If there's something better comes along, the prior one's gone. I don't care. Corey Frank (04:50): Absolutely. The concept of building trust. We've had a lot of episodes, probably more than half of our episodes I'd say, Chris, it comes up one form or another. And you referenced Warren and we had him on a few times talking about that certainly. And Chris has had many great episodes and riffs where we talked about tonality, and in the Sandler world, nurturing. And Matt Forbes is exceptional at that mark, here from ConnectAndSell. He's exceptional at that. Cherryl is, as you write, one of the masters of our craft at that. Corey Frank (05:21): Do you find that talking now, being aware because you can't unsee it, you can't unknow it now, is that when you're talking to other asset managers or property owners or investors, that the tonality, the pacing has changed as well as your approach and has that made an impact? And I'm asking this under the guise, Henry, of there's a lot of folks in our sales profession who say, "You can't cold call. It doesn't work." Chris and I, we love engaging in discussions with people like that. And for our competitors, you're right. It doesn't work, so don't use it. It's a waste of your time. But for those that are open, how much of what you do is this nurturing, tonality, pacing, and what difference have you seen by employing that more trust-based approach with your voice as well? Henry Wojdyla (06:25): It's an all the above answer. And speaking of feedback loops, here's another one maybe in the micro, in the framework of a 27-second cold call, hopefully maybe even less. It's the idea that if you... The other thing you guys have talked about by the way is belief, the power of belief. And I would say if the power of belief is there, it frankly takes care of the rest. And if you believe not just in the power of discovery meaning but the fact that you can offer something, ultimately a value, that the pathway is trust, it almost really takes care of the rest. And I don't mean that to be either a glib or partial answer to your question, but it all comes together, I think, in that essence. Chris Beall (07:07): I'll let you jump later. We've done the experiment. So we've done the experiment of having a group that we were in Corey's business at that time, a little bit side business of ours. And we were helping out a customer who really wanted to have somebody else call and set appointments for their people. So we had a very talented group. We got the message right. This all took about 24 hours to set up. And they went like this, fail, fail, fail for three consecutive days. So I did the statistical math and I said, "Well, okay, so now we have failed forever. I get it. We've succeeded in putting together a fail forever group." Chris Beall (07:47): And this was a pure skin in the game deal by the way. So we were going to get nothing unless we started succeeding. So I thought it was interesting. So I asked a question of the person running the group. I said, "Do these reps who are doing this calling truly believe in the potential value of the meeting that they're offering, even in a downside case for them as far as they're concerned or our customer, that no business ever comes out of it?" And I got the following back. So I thought, "Well, okay, your silence tells me the answer is no, they don't, because you would have said yes if they do. Chris Beall (08:24): Let's go find a person who attended one of those meetings who did not move forward and got value. Let them talk directly to the group about the value that they got, about what they learned." And they did that. Nothing else changed, no coaching on tonality, no change of script, no change of personnel. And we went from zero to 27 meetings the next day. So we've actually done the positive experiment which is introduce belief. In the absence of belief, we found out that technique was ineffective, and it was ineffective at a zero level. And I believe it's because of the value chain theory which is a missing link in a value chain gives you a non-value chain. It's not a chain. It's just not a chain. Chris Beall (09:11): And the anchor, I came to believe very quickly in the value chain around initiating relationships that can lead to exploring the possibility of solving problems. The anchor link on that chain is the rep's belief in the potential value of that meeting for the human being they're speaking with should no business ever happen. And I've told people this many, many times, if you were to change one thing about your team, change that. Not easy, but change that because as you just said Henry, if you take care of that, actually technique becomes almost a nice to have. It's better to have good technique than bad technique, but it's like if... Chris Beall (09:58): Here's a golf analogy. If you believe to make the ball go up in the air, you have to hit from below the ball and make it go up in the air, you're screwed for all time as a golfer. As in all cases, you can't make that happen consistently because there's this thing called the earth between you and the ball on that trajectory. And you're going to encounter it and find out that you can't actually make the earth counter rotate fast enough to not take energy away from your shot. That is when you dig in. You're not that guy. Who stopped the earth from spinning? Who was that? Corey, your Bible is better than mine. Corey Frank (10:30): Superman. Chris Beall (10:30): Doesn't some guy... No, no, no. Someone biblical. Anyway, I thought I had you. I thought you were my man. That's one of those beliefs that when you change that belief in somebody as a golfer and they start hitting down on the ball believing that that makes the ball go up, magic starts to happen because they have a shot. Now, do you work on their technique? You bet. I'd rather have more club head speed than less. How do I get it? Doing something counterintuitive. Chris Beall (11:03): I have to hinge my wrist and not control and bunch of stuff that drives you crazy as a golfer. But when you learn it, it's fun. But I think that you just hit it, Henry. Belief, correct belief takes care of almost everything and will actually take care of enough to make you be in a market-dominant position. I actually believe you can get all the way to a market-dominant position by changing one thing. Henry Wojdyla (11:30): I couldn't agree more. And it's absolute Pareto principle all the way down. It's turtles all the way down. I would encourage your listeners, hopefully the folks that are listening to this, if they haven't been familiarized with the earlier episodes, go back and listen to Matt Forbes, or as Chris calls him, big Matt Forbes, because it's amazing to listen to those episodes. And those are some of the ones that I didn't put in my transcriptions that really took it home to me. Henry Wojdyla (11:58): And I would say even on the [finite 00:12:00], there's a feedback loop there. Listen to the tone in which Matt Forbes talks about the belief in the episode. My God, speaking of biblical references, it was like Saul to Paul, listening to him. Just going through the transformation. You would hear the sincerity in his voice in your episode. By the way, the versions that I keep, the actual live documents of the transcripts, I keep hyperlinked back to the actual recordings. Henry Wojdyla (12:30): And the reason I do that is I would actually want to go back and listen to the tonality of Matt Forbes describing that or whatever episode you might choose. But to your golf analogy, it was crazy, Chris, that you just referenced that because I was thinking the same exact thought of if you could hit down on the ball, it's at least a Pareto. You're at least 80% of the way there. Sure. Are you going to be on the PGA tour? Of course not. But have you taken away 80% of the burden? Probably. And I think belief is the rough equivalent of hitting down on the ball on the cold call. Chris Beall (13:40): Wow. That's a good one. I had no idea. We've never spoken about this golf thing. This is quite interesting to me. So I've taught a lot of people how to hit golf balls. And my point is I can teach you to hit a ball that's up in the air and get all the physics of the swing right. But until you believe that hitting down in the ball is not just a good idea but is the only idea, you're screwed because the earth is really big. It's 25,000 miles in diameter and weighs a lot and it's spinning. So it takes a whole 24 hours to go around. The surface of the earth is moving pretty quick and you're not going to be able to make it move as fast as a golf ball in the opposite direction. That's if you're, by the way, hitting toward the sun rather than away from the sun, but you know that Corey. Henry Wojdyla (14:28): And if you're at the equator, it's a little bit more burdensome than elsewhere. But in all seriousness, Chris, it is really amazing that you can take the most simple or what sounds like simple principles, be it on the golf course or in the context of a cold call and the weight that it carries, the disproportional weight that it carries is profound. And the belief, I think everything stems from it. Getting back, Corey, to your question more directly, the tonality and all those things, they do absolutely matter. But I think where you can let technique move from technique to frankly more just genuine communication, when the foundation is built upon trust and belief. Trust in the part of what you're trying to establish with the counterparty and belief in what you have on offer for them. Corey Frank (15:17): Absolutely. And I think you're a testament, Henry, that it's not just germane to a manager or director level, it's that you can communicate and connect that trust vector at the highest levels, the C-levels of the world here just from those same principles and they apply. Henry Wojdyla (15:38): Absolutely. And on this second year anniversary of Market Dominance Guys, I will also make another referral. Please go back and listen to the Cherryl Turner episodes. Cherryl talks about, and Chris will attest to that fact, you frequently mention that Cherryl is the world leader in feeling she's the equal of anyone that she speaks to on the phone. That's absolutely right. So getting back to your question, Corey, it's a belief in many ways. It's a belief about what you have on offer. It's about a belief in yourself. Henry Wojdyla (16:08): And again, easier said than done, but it's applicable all the entire range, up and down the corporate stack depending on the organization that the individual works for. This does not have to be purely the domain of the senior execs or the C-suite that can execute against this type of approach. And it's more than approach. Again, it's a belief system, and I think that's the most profound thing. So anyone from frankly the most junior person with at least some modicum of training all the way up, there's really no reason why this can't be applied throughout. Corey Frank (16:43): Absolutely. Chris Beall (16:44): It's funny. Simon Sinek talks about start with why and the why of why is without the proper why, without the real why, without digging into the why, why, then your belief is fake. And fake belief is the worst kind of thing in the world. The one thing you don't want to fake is belief. And I hear a lot of stuff in business. I've heard this many, many times through my career that there's a fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. And it's always made me bristle. In fact, it's not personal, very few things other than raw broccoli make me want to throw up. I love cooked broccoli by the way, but I'm sensitive to the chemicals in raw broccoli. Chris Beall (17:23): It's a protein that's folded wrong for my system. That does. When somebody says fake it till you make it, I just think, "I just spent a little time understanding what's underneath this you don't have to fake it," because if you're in a business of having to fake it, you're a charlatan. That's the definition of a charlatan. Somebody who convinces others of value that is not there. That's it. So I hate fake it till you make it. If anybody watching this is a big fake-it-till-you-make-it fan, why don't you fake some sincerity and see if you can get me to buy your thesis? But it suggests some pre-work in the real world. Chris Beall (18:03): And I'll go back to being a fuller brush man. I used to knock on the door, and I think some people listening to this know this, I would say, "Hi, I'm Chris Beall. I'm your new fuller brush man. You probably don't know what a fuller brush is. I sure don't." And I'd stand there. Well, that was the absolute, God's honest truth. I didn't know. And then, inevitably, they would ask me, "What can I help you?" Well, that's a pretty good question to get as the very first utterance from a prospect. Can I help you? It's not bad. There's certainly stuff that's lower on the totem pole net. Chris Beall (18:33): But my point is when I got to the end of that week, because I had offered to go do some research and only come back if I found something that I thought would change their life, I did the research and I found one or two items that I thought would really change their life. That belief was what allowed me to come back, not, "Here's what I'm going to say about it. I've got this trick." So sometimes I think people look at the breakthrough script stuff that we do with ConnectAndSell and they go, "It's a trick." Well, it's a trick but when used as a trick, it doesn't work. It's like a trick that evaporates when you try to use it as a trick. Chris Beall (19:13): And I think that's the key to all of this. And I've always thought the beauty of sales is sales disciplines companies to offer value in the modern world, not the tragedy of the crossroads, in the modern world because it doesn't work as well when you don't sincerely believe in the value. So either the salesperson has to be a charlatan or a fool, or they have to be a sincere exponent of the potential value. Those are the only three positions you can take. And if you're watching this and you want to take one of those positions, some of you will want to be charlatans right there. There are a thousand books on sales that say, "Be a charlatan." Chris Beall (19:52): Many of them use the word persuade. Cause somebody to believe something that they don't believe for your convenience. That's the core idea around a lot of sales training. Some are fools. They're just happy fools and go through it. They get away with it. But actually, you as a salesperson are the selection and filtering mechanism for society to find out what's of value because you choose first what you're going to sell. And part of your job is choosing the good stuff. Henry's got good stuff. Corey? On occasion. Me? I don't know. Many people think I'm a charlatan. Cherryl certainly did when we first met. And then she thought I was a fool and then she moved on from there. Corey Frank (20:39): Was it funny that again, just to tie it back just briefly, Chris, to your point about the apple and going back to the office and this concept of going back to the office is that the belief system used to say, as we've talked about many times, is we need to be here physically to touch, to collaborate, to whiteboard, to eat lunch, to commute, to share the shared sacrifice of the accident on the one-on-one. Corey Frank (21:07): And we had to detour and that's why we're late. We had to have those shared experiences. And now for the last year or so, you're saying, "Wait a minute. That belief was wrong because my production actually went up, not down. And now you're telling me I've got to disavow that belief system that we've lived in this world for the last 18 months or so and go back to that old belief system." That's a little tough to put that genie back. Chris Beall (21:36): It is, it is. Well, it's going to be tough to put a lot of them back and they're not going back. The beauty of physics is it tells us what's going to happen. Physics is all about saying if you can give me a pretty rough setup of what the current situation is, I'll tell you what's going to happen. And we have a situation here where the physics of people and artifacts, mechanisms, systems, ideas, this thing called the internet which is still an underbet by the way, still an underbet. And here's the case where the internet was underbet because it wasn't properly bet on for its ability to deliver people to each other in business. Chris Beall (22:22): That was a huge underbet. That's probably the biggest value that we will get. It's not the ability to go on and buy something and have it show up at your house. That's really cool. But actually it's displacing something you could have done by going to Walmart. It's like a small displacement, not a big displacement. This is a big displacement. And also our circle of I'll call it trusted friends that we can do business with grows massively. And it doesn't mean we don't want to get together. Henry, what did we do after a few conversations? Let's get together. Chris Beall (22:56): But did we get together at your office? No. Did we get together at my office? Well, I don't have one so that would be difficult. We got together at a hotel that was nice enough. And we did that thing. But we don't do it every day. We also got together for brunch the other day in Denver, which was super delightful, brought a third party. And here's my first party right over there. And by the way, her assessment of you, Henry, is that I tell you, she would throw me over for you if you weren't married. I don't know how that would work out, but I'm just saying. She says otherwise but I could read it right there at the table. There're no difficulties picking that one out. Henry Wojdyla (23:33): It was an absolute pleasure getting to meet your fiancée. And Helen was just tremendous. But yes, I am a taken man. In fact, I have to credit my wife for introducing me to [inaudible 00:23:46]. If it wasn't for her, I would not know the PD goodness and the campfire in your mouth, deliciousness that is [inaudible 00:23:53]. But I do think Corey, again, just to bring some of these things back together, maybe the bigger picture in terms of the office work environment is that we've been historically getting around the wrong water coolers. It's about schlepping the work. All the agita that is getting to and from as opposed to... Henry Wojdyla (24:14): I think one of the most powerful things, honestly, is the ability to share my screen because I can share my screen with colleagues and we can collaborate in real time. And weirdly enough, some of the key team members of my group, Chris Howard, Chris you've had the chance to meet, we are most productive when we actually just get on zoom and screen share. We don't typically actually do video like what we're doing now with each other, but we screen-share. And it's imminently powerful because we can collaborate in real time. And I think that's the water cooler to get around. It's one. There're others as well. But I get it. Henry Wojdyla (24:52): On the one hand, part of me understands where Tim Cook's coming from and not because of the sunk cost bias or the hugely enormous Norman Foster-designed expensive campus. But what does become apparent is that there is something about culture for larger companies in particular, but it's not necessarily about the headaches of getting to and from work. That's not really what the culture should be built around. Like I've said earlier, I think the next year and a half to two years for a whole host of reasons, negotiating power, real estate leases coming up and due, it's going to be extremely interesting to watch how these market dynamics play out in terms of the top 20% and what their relationship is with their employers. Chris Beall (25:39): So you know that we had a whole episode with Tom Zheng. Where does Tom live? I'm not sure. I think it's Toronto moving to Ottawa. Where are Tom and I every single day for an hour of my time? The most precious hour of my workday every day is spent in the tender arms of my data concierge, letting my curiosity explore what might be true that I don't know about. And we've never met, but we have a very close relationship, as close as I think it's possible in a working relationship frankly, and it's all through screen-sharing. We keep the video on because we think it's a little earthy and it's fun. Chris Beall (26:22): And I'm often, I'll admit it, I'm sometimes still in my robe at that point. It's only 11:00 AM. If Hugh Hefner can do it, why not Chris Beall? But the idea of being able to do something as deep as that. Think about how deep that is. We're getting down into... We're taking 60, 70 million rows of data and finding truths in there that we didn't know were there. And we've never met but we do screen share about an hour a day. Henry Wojdyla (26:53): I would make a case that the screen share may be the most intimate business relationship I'm going to have in today's world, more so than the video. Chris Beall (27:00): I agree. Henry Wojdyla (27:01): Because you're putting your work product up and forward. Chris Beall (27:06): Well, you know how I sell ConnectAndSell. It's pretty simple. I get on with somebody and I say, "Would you like to see how we manage our own company using ConnectAndSell?" And everybody says, "Yes." And I just do a screen share and I bring up live how we're doing. I've never looked at it by the way. I make a point of never knowing what's going to pop up on the screen because it's more fun. We can all be surprised together. They're surprised that anybody at all could be having a hundred, whatever conversations. In a day, it might be 40 or 50. My surprise is, "Gosh, I didn't know Rob was killing it today like this. He stuffed five meetings already and it's only nine o'clock," or whatever it is. So it is that, that screen share is so much more intimate than the video. Chris Beall (27:51): The video is nice and all, but it's a little unnerving for some people, but the screen share is true sharing. There it is. It's the screen. It's the work. It's the meaning of this thing. Now let's dig in. It invites faster, deeper, more honest digging in, I think, than any whiteboard. And I made this point on another comment on LinkedIn. I have a hard time keeping them straight because I do it very early in the morning when I'm not fully awake. It probably shows in the writing. But one of the points that Helen reminded me of the other day is when you're in the physical office, certain people physically dominate. That shouldn't surprise anybody that that's true, but it should shock anybody who thinks it's good. It's not good. It's not good. Chris Beall (28:38): If you're the person who can physically dominate a meeting and you learned those tricks on the playground as a kid because that's where you learn them. You learn physical dominance on the playground. And then you're applying that at work, you're robbing the group of value from the participation of those who are physically dominated. And Henry, you're not a small guy. I can practice physical dominance pretty well. Corey tends to keep a baseball bat behind him in his office just in case anybody doesn't know what he's all about. And we feel okay about the step up. Actually, it's not okay. It's not okay at all. Chris Beall (29:20): Somebody recounted today that somebody who is blind was using ConnectAndSell today using some screen technology, not using our mobile app by the way which actually is designed to be used in a car and by people who can't see or can't see as well, but had a great experience. What I thought about is, "Wow, this isn't happening in the office. If was in the office, I don't care what you say your values are. That person who can't see with their eyes to find their way around is at a fundamental cultural disadvantage that they have to overcome." And that is not true when we're even just talking to each other. And the screen share is a little tricky because something's got to... Maybe the screen-share doesn't work so well for a person who's blind, but I can tell you the physical office is nasty. It's just bad. Henry Wojdyla (30:10): Look, zoom fatigue is real, but I personally believe that zoom fatigue is largely when people have to put on these so-called zoom mullet of nice top, maybe if anything below, but that's of really no value. It's really what's on the screen. It's the work product. It's the honesty to show what you've been working on. And I think there's a real actually very beautiful distillation that goes on in the ability to actually collaborate, truly collaborate with people by sharing screens, sharing work product, sharing thinking because that's what really work product is. Henry Wojdyla (30:41): It's really your thinking around whatever is the problem you're trying to solve. Zoom, it doesn't really matter which platform. It's the idea that you could actually collaborate in real time. It doesn't matter that they're either on the other side of the cubicle, which actually in that case, they're going to probably bias to walking around and looking at your screen, which isn't really actually as productive. So I think there's a lot of really powerful dynamics are going to begin to unfold here over time. They're starting to happen now because we've been talking about them, but give it, again, 18 to 24 months, maybe less. And I think we're going to be in an entirely different environment in terms of how the top tier, that Pareto principle, 20% Chris that you talk about is really going to be defining the terms of engagement with employers. Corey Frank (31:25): Absolutely. Well, great. Well gentlemen, I think collectively we are out of scotch and tequila, and that means- Henry Wojdyla (31:33): I still have some more. Corey Frank (31:34): We have a little bit more. Henry Wojdyla (31:34): It's a fresh bottle. Corey Frank (31:37): You got a whole bottle. Fresh peat goodness there. Absolutely. So I'll tell you what, I don't think we've had any guests and I don't anticipate any guests that we're ever going to have on Market Dominance Guys where we have this hierarchy of IQs where I don't bring up the rear. And I think this is also no exception to this one, Henry. So I always tell Chris that I prodded him to nefariously start this program on the books so I can suck all these ideas and use them in my businesses. And today is no exception with another three or four pages of notes. So I get the front row seat. Henry Wojdyla (32:13): I'm doing the same thing. I'm doing the same thing, Corey. I copy and steal religiously. Corey Frank (32:19): It's wonderful. And it's great to have you part of the Market Dominance team for the markets. We sound like we're an English company now, markets dominant team. Maybe it's a little bit more European. Chris Beall (32:27): Markets, maths. Are we going to talk about maths? Corey Frank (32:31): Maybe your friend Jerry Hill, maybe he will have another one on the other side and we'll change the spelling of one of those words to make it more UK, Queen's English if you will. So Henry, thank you very much for the time. I am sure this is not the last time that you're going to be on the Market Dominance Guys. You have way too many great ideas rolling around there. And I just love the interchange between you and Chris and that's something for all of our market dominance listeners to look forward to. So until next time, this is Corey Frank with Chris Beall and Henry Wojdyla at the Market Dominance Guys.  

This week, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank are into part two of their three-part conversation with Henry Wojdyla, Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. And what a conversation it is! Chris was surprised to discover Henry had binge-listened to every Market Dominance Guys’ podcast in one weekend. You might wonder why the rush until you hear the questions Henry was wrestling with while attempting to finetune his business: “How can I systematize what I’m doing?” “How can I maximize the efficacy of the sales practitioner?” “How can we create systems that are somehow universal?” Right here on Market Dominance Guys, Henry found what he was looking for! ----more---- One answer came from Chris’ advice about what you lead with when you are that invisible stranger calling a prospect: Do you immediately trot out your company’s value? Or do you attempt to establish trust first? Henry confesses, “I was obsessed with the idea of leading with value.” He says his approach was data-driven, data-forward. But as Chris has repeated in his discussions with other guests, “Trust always has to precede presenting your value.” Henry is a true believer now in establishing trust first and restates it this way: “You create trust by essentially alleviating the pain of who you are as the attacking entity.” Join Henry, Corey, and Chris as they explore more about calming a prospect’s fear of cold callers on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Lead That Cold Call With Trust, Not Value.”   About Our Guest Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Corey Frank (02:07): Well, we talk a lot about, there's only really three things you can do in business from a strategy perspective. You can do something with your current situation and move it from a position to a better position. You can see who you have together as team members or board members or capital and do something different with those people. Or it sounds like what you've done clearly is take what you have and make it run better, faster, cheaper, which is expanded the bottleneck in some way with your ability to kind of replicate in this iron man concept that [inaudible 00:02:40] talks about. Henry Wojdyla (02:40): Mm-hmm (affirmative) I think that's an interesting way to parse that earlier question. And to your point, a hundred percent. I think I've been an absolutely obsessed with figuring out what are best practices and putting best practices on top of each other, in a way that's cohesive. You can't just apply maybe one system that doesn't necessarily align with another, but we've been very judicious in the way we look at things. I'd say from a business perspective, if I was going to really simplify it, one of my theories I'm trying to play out over a period of years is how can I shift from opex to capex or operating expenses to capital expenses. And the way I'm doing that is by really heavily investing in systems, which can both be literal systems in terms of technological systems, but also systems of practice and systematizing the way in which I operate. Henry Wojdyla (03:26): And I think one of the things I'm really keenly desirous to prove out here in the coming years, I think with Chris, it's going to be very interesting ride here over the next 12 to 18 months with ConnectAndSell is how can we really maximize the efficacy of the sales practitioner. And to your point earlier, Corey, about the way to apply and readapt business models into other either industries, another way that's something too that I've kind of been always cognizant of in the back of my mind that we could templatize this approach. On the one hand, you're hearing me talk very, very specifically about the dynamics and the realities of the TAM that I focus on, but the systems in which we get there are largely replicable to entirely different industries or sectors. Corey Frank (04:12): Sure. Certainly the industries. When you dominate and as you continue to dominate the medical space for the asset class for real estate to medical buildings, again, this is part of what you do in your business, but are there designs the same template can be applied to other kinds of broader types of commercial real estate as well, correct? Henry Wojdyla (04:32): Absolutely. In many ways, there's a broader, theoretical discussion that I think Chris has had been [inaudible 00:04:38] on that just recently on LinkedIn, but we've had some conversations about other property types that we've been picking particularly on commercial office. That's a different topic for probably a different podcast. Suffice to say, yes, it absolutely can be applied to different industries. And that's been something that I've been, like I said earlier, I'm cognizant about, how can we create systems that are really somewhat universal in their nature. Henry Wojdyla (05:02): And one of the things that's been floating around the back of my mind is wouldn't it be interesting to not just harvest the physical assets, the physical real estate, the bricks and mortar, but actually go out and acquire these local and regional ownership groups at the corporate level, because then you can actually get some of the other services that you need to really operate a portfolio of assets, things like asset management, property management, leasing. These are terms obviously in our world, but you can go out and harvest companies in the exact same strategy that we're doing it. So there's broader principles at play. And like I said earlier, I think really one of the theories I have is that I think you can go a long ways with capital investment as opposed to operating expense investment in terms of necessarily growing headcount. I've always said from day one, when I start this business, I will never consider the success of this business based on a head count. Ever Corey Frank (05:54): Absolutely. And I think with ConnectAndSell and certainly the marketing that they have that's part of what I want to focus on is that leverage and ConnectAndSell what's been able to do for you. But you bring up an interesting point. And maybe this is a good segue too, because Chris, we have seen now with the economy on the uptick a little bit, and certainly the announcement from Apple, that they're requiring their folks in the office, what, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, I think it was. Kind of an odd amount of days. It's like why not just make it three concurrent days, if you're going to do something, maybe there's a method to that madness. Chris Beall (06:29): They're trying to get some gesture out, I don't know what it is. Corey Frank (06:31): It's got to be something like that. But certainly that's where I was leaning into the commercial real estate is that as broadly lucrative, Chris and I have done a number of episodes certainly on, especially when COVID first hit about the need for my three-pound brain to be next to somebody's five-pound brain. And what, within that six-foot proximity, I think it is, and how critical that some employers still feel that that is correct, Chris. Chris Beall (06:59): Yeah. I actually commented on the Apple thing. It's kind of funny. I just put a LinkedIn comment out there yesterday on what I think is... Well, as I said, Apple will find themselves on the wrong side of history and employers like ourselves are essentially, I will say with vis-a-vis, our employees are now ultimately no more powerful than we are. Vis-a-vis our customers. It's the same game. As employees have become full-on customers of the corporations they work for. And that sea change will not ever change. That is a done deal. It's been coming for a long time, but I needed a tsunami to wash the beach away and expose the bluff. And now it's a big step function and the employees are up there on the top of the bluff. The main players are down on the beach, wondering when the next tsunami is going to show up. Chris Beall (07:51): So these statements of you got to be in the office, beg the question of who you is and willing to include their top 20%. And the answer is pretty simple. Only if they want to. So top 20% used to do all sorts of things, make all sorts of compromises, oh, we'll go live on Mercer Island because it has a great school system, blah, blah, blah. And it's close enough to Microsoft. Well, and it's close enough to Microsoft is no longer a relevant consideration. So now the question is [inaudible 00:08:23] like Mercer island live there? And if you like Quail Creek, Arizona go live there. It's like, you can live wherever you want, work wherever you want if you're a top 20% knowledge worker today and it makes the union movements of the late 1800's and early 1900's look like nothing in terms of power, because the unions were always bustable mathematically. Chris Beall (08:47): They had a serious problem, which is the workers needed the money. They needed to make that paycheck. And you can provide some insurance, strength in numbers kind of insurance, but you can't provide enough insurance to have them make another hand gesture to the employers and continue that with a lot of stare-down power. There's issues. The stare-down power of the modern top 20% employee and knowledge work is right now infinite, and it's infinite and growing, which is even more interesting. And all employers should take note. Now, one of the things we really like about, accidentally by the way, about our own product is it makes it fun to work from home with family. So Cheryl Turner who's been on this show, goes to the park with her three year old and they play on the swings while she talks to CEOs, that would be work-life balance in reality, that is work and life truly coming together synergistically to support each other without sacrifice of either. She is the best cold caller in the world, talking to CEOs. Chris Beall (09:54): And I bet she's a heck of a mom, too, playing with her three-year-old. She can drive her 11-year-old to school, but it's her work. She's doing it while she's driving and talking to CEOs. So technology's capabilities that make that easier are going to be a big deal. But the first thing is, man, these executives running these companies got to get over themselves. They do not have the strength, the capacity, the staying power to tell their top 20% of their employees screw you, I'm going to tell you where you're going to live, I'm going to tell you where you're going to spend your time, on the road going back and forth to work, I'm going to tell you which days you have to be there because otherwise the whole thing doesn't happen. Chris Beall (10:35): At least Apple's right on that. That has to be Monday something, something, it can't become whenever you want because those other three-pound brains won't be there. So that's idiotic. So they're at least trying, but what they're trying can't be accomplished. Now, the other thing is for those who care, this is the real estate thing here, the conference business and the real estate around conferences and around meeting each other somewhere nice, that business is going to go crazy. That business is going to see a renaissance that is unheard of in the history of hospitality. And it's because there's never been anything other than jet air travel in the history of hospitality that caused every place to be in place online. And this makes every place in play because guess what? We already have jet air travel. So every nice place to get together is suddenly in play competing with those office campuses. Chris Beall (11:33): And I can tell you who's going to win. The nice places you go just to be with people are going to be the kind of funny place that had, as my mother would always say, that high school, is that a prison or a national guard armory. That's what she'd always say. They make those buildings like they're one or the other. Look at the average corporate campus has those kinds of qualities. Whereas the four seasons doesn't. The Rosewood, the Edgewater, these places are really, really nice. You want to go meet, go meet there. So there's a dynamic that I've said before on the show, people are under betting like crazy on the work from home, work from anywhere top 20% do whatever they want dynamic. That under bet right now I would say will turn out historically to have been at least off by a factor of five. Chris Beall (13:03): If you want to make money now just pay attention to this. Ignore Henry. He does hard work. He has his brain and everything, he has to think. This is the thing you can do with no brain whatsoever. Henry Wojdyla (13:15): Well, Chris, it's interesting that you're mentioning, and this has actually nothing to do with the fact that I'm in the commercial real estate space generally, or I should really say specifically. I think real estate is going to have a huge piece of this. And we all heard a million times that COVID accelerated trends that are already in place. This is clearly true here. I think in the case of commercial office space, to be clear, totally different from medical office space. If it's not mission-critical, it's fungible. And what's really interesting is I think the timeframe in which employee dynamic is going to play out in part, not in total, but a key variable is going to be the loss cost bias or sunk cost bias. Henry Wojdyla (13:54): And what you're going to see, I think, over time is as these very expensive office leases begin to expire and office leases in commercial space tend to run in larger markets, 5 to 10 years, maybe average it out to 3 to 7 as a range, but the Jamie Diamonds of the world, these large CEOs, Tim Cook's Apple, of course they own their facilities, they're a little bit different, but at the end of the day, it's as these leases begin to expire, I think there'll be a little bit less pressure on the C-suite to force people to come into an office just because they're paying rent on it. And I won't [inaudible 00:14:33] to all the phenomenal points Chris that you've made, but I think really the, as you said, the top 20% is going to really have... Really the world is their oyster. I think there'll largely be able to dictate over time increasingly over time, partly because of the real estate dynamics, where they can work with increasing conviction. Henry Wojdyla (14:52): And as you've said here and elsewhere, and if you think about just the tremendous amount of loss of time, and if there's one asset we know that we can never get back is time. We can get money back theoretically and frequently you can, you can get other investments back, but you can never get time back. And I just have always been amazed that people are willing to sacrifice so much of their lives, maybe they don't have a choice in many cases, about the commutation that they take on every day. Henry Wojdyla (15:17): And that's something that's a really big expense, not just for the individual, but actually for their employer. And while it seems amazingly obvious, somehow it seems to be lost in a lot of the C-suite at least in the larger corporations. It's kind of an institutional imperative in a different way and I've alluded to that earlier in terms of the decision or not decision to essentially sell assets. It's really the large-scale kind of institutional imperative, the inertia is something that's going to have to kind of take place over a period of time now. So it's going to be a very interesting gear shift over the next 18, 24 months in terms of how this plays out. Corey Frank (15:51): Well, isn't it fascinating that the tech stack, particularly what we've talked about a lot ConnectAndSell, reading signals from noise parallels, that same type of restriction or coming together of efficiencies that you have the top 20% team member now who can thumb his nose at his employer and now can do what Cheryl's doing at 20%, 50%, 100% higher than she was doing working for their employer by doing it now. And I have the balance to do it with my child 15 feet away on the jungle gym. Henry Wojdyla (16:33): Absolutely. Chris Beall (16:34): Yeah. And it brings up another point, which is if employers have got to learn that their employees are our customers, that means they have to play a different trust game than they're playing now. And one thing we haven't spoken of here that Henry you said was a pivotal moment of flip the pancake moment for you was you went through the process of kind of finding this and that and eventually wandering into it or being lured in or whatever to this Market Dominance Guys thing. And you need to tell the story of the binge-listening because you're the second person ever to do it that I know of. And I sure hope anybody else who so interesting that you binge listen to a Market Dominance Guys, please call Corey Frank at about 11:00 PM Pacific or later because he's free then to talk to you. Chris Beall (17:23): So you had a bit of a moment regarding this question that we've explored a lot, which is what do you lead with? Once you get past fear, what do you lead with? Value or trust? And the tradition in sales is to lead with value, which is in the first part of a relationship, a failing proposition because the other party is not ready for a value. That is trust proceeds value. You can't listen to value cleanly because in order to listen to value, I have to be prepared to confess my problems. And I do not confess to somebody I don't trust. So that's the little broken triangle that sales was built on for years and years and years. The idea of being well, you're not ever going to see me again anyway, so [inaudible 00:18:09] some value, right? That's it. That's what I call the tragedy of the crossroads. Chris Beall (18:13): The sales were made at the crossroads. The caravaners going one way, the trader is at the crossroads. You're never going to see him again. The trader has superior knowledge of the goods. They sell you crap at the maximum price. And the poor caravaner has got to get going before the snow starts flying in the mountains. So there's this old... I'll call that the old sales dynamic. The modern sales dynamic is nobody gets away from anybody just like these employers. You can't get away from your employees because you're now made of employees. Used to be made of a bunch of bricks and steel and access to raw materials and all this stuff. It's like, I'm sorry, but now you're kind of made out of your employees. That is the actual structural material of your company. And if you don't trust them and they don't trust you, you got bricks, you ain't got no mortar. Chris Beall (18:59): And it's a real serious, serious problem. And Henry so tell the audience about this trust thing because you told me about your eye-opening on that. And it was surprising and delightful to me. Henry Wojdyla (19:12): Well, I really have to credit the both of you really, for that kind of pivotal moment. But I was way over-indexing on... I was obsessed with the idea of leading with value. And again, you've kind of heard me outlining schematic format, how we've tried to really get super hyper granular with our very defined TAM and part of the reason for that was well, if we could really know who we're addressing, we can really kind of customize the data and the information and the sharing of knowledge on a very bespoke level. There's still real value in being able to do that. But the problem is you have a counterparty on the other end of the phone who's not ready to listen to that. Corey Frank (19:52): So you were front-loading in your screenplay, all the benefits of your firm and all the cold cognitions of your stats and your yields. Is that what you're saying? Henry Wojdyla (20:06): Not exactly. It was definitely vectorally in that direction. It was more so I would say more data-driven and not so much about us as a firm. In many ways, I would say probably one of my faults is I probably tried to templatize my impression of how people sell and usually do the inverse, which is kind of a simplistic way to look at it. But leading with trying to beat my chest about who I am or who Real Source Group is I don't think is of frankly any value to someone that's not familiar with us. Corey Frank (20:37): That's why I want to understand from your perspective, because you ask five different folks in a firm, they lead with value. Some could lead with status as my value, some could lead with longevity of my firm as value. So that's why I want to just try to deconstruct that. Henry Wojdyla (20:53): We were data forward. It was data forward. So it was a hyper-focus on data that was then very finitely aggregated and to different components and then partitioned out to people that we thought that those particular data points would be most relevant too. I still think that that's of some aid, but as opposed to it being the tip of the spear, when it really can't be received, the idea of leading with trust. I guess in some ways I would almost say, just talking about binge-listening, I'm actually kind of taken back to the Oren Klaff episodes that you had. Henry Wojdyla (21:23): You could say that the cold call is the micro condition of the larger psychological play Oren Klaff does in the pitch. When you've got the disparity of the crocodile brain with a higher functioning of the brain. And clearly, in the context of cold call, that is a completely a defensive posture of the part of the recipient. So as Chris has outlined many, many times the ability to create trust by essentially alleviating the pain of who you are as the attacking entity, it's almost hard to kind of overstate the... Well, speaking of value there's value there. There's value in creating trust, but it's an entirely different dynamic. Corey Frank (22:02): So the initial cold calls you'd make BC and 80 right before...    

This week, the Market Dominance Guys’ dynamic duo of Chris Beall and Corey Frank are back together again, talking with Henry Wojdyla, the dynamic Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. His company’s special business niche? The direct acquisition of healthcare facilities, particularly medical offices and surgical centers around the country. Recently, Henry was introduced to ConnectAndSell’s sales-acceleration system, and from there, he discovered Chris’ blogs and then this podcast. He is now taking the theories and techniques of marketing domination, which he learned from listening to every Market Dominance Guys’ episode and employing them to dominate his own market. ----more---- Listening in on their conversation, you’ll discover that Chris, Corey, and Henry are kindred spirits and speak a similar business language: the laws of sales thermodynamics; the self-referential dynamics of markets; feedback-loop dynamics; and tactical empathy. What these men also share is a true belief in the practice of having real conversations with prospects over what can often be a prolonged period time, so that when a prospect is ready to buy, the relationship that has been developed will lead to a sale. Borrow ideas from their insights in Chris and Corey’s three conversations with Henry Wojdyla, beginning with this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear.” About Our Guest Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers.   Market Dominance Guys is sponsored by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Corey Frank (02:08): Okay. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and Chris Beall, the sage of sales. Today, Chris, it's a special episode. It is the two-year anniversary of the Market Dominance Guys. This little exercise, where we stumbled upon a litany of my problems that I wanted to solve in the sales universe and I went to you, the sage of sales, and you systematically checked the box for me. It turned into an idea for a book, and then a podcast and then, oh, so much more. Then our new friend, our guest today, Henry Wojdyla from RealSource Group here up in Colorado, right Henry? I think that's where. Henry Wojdyla (02:51): Denver. Corey Frank (02:52): In Denver. Henry is the principal of RealSource Group and is on the buy-side of real estate assets and helps focus really into the capital placements into a really tight niche. We always talk about the riches and the niches on this podcast. Henry's got a great story about how he is employing the theory of market dominance into practical market dominance today, using some of the techniques that we've talked about for the last couple of years so welcome, Henry. Henry Wojdyla (03:22): Thank you. Glad to be here. Corey Frank (03:23): I think it's helpful, Chris, how did Henry come into our little market dominance universe? Cause I think we have your family members, your son, and I got my mom. I think we got about seven subscribers, eight subscribers. Henry was the eighth that just stumbled into our world here. How did this happen and how did Henry come to be a guest here today? Chris Beall (03:45): Well, first of all, I have to correct you and thanks so much, Corey. Thanks for being here, Henry. There was a doe walking out here in my fiance's forest, as we call it, the next door lot. I call it Helen's forest because a queen should have a forest and she has two fawns so I signed up all three. We're now up to 10 people listening to Market Dominance Guys. I don't think they will ever be guests, though. They seem to be very, very quiet and they've got a lot of work to do out there. There's a lot of stuff to eat. Corey Frank (04:15): [crosstalk 00:04:15] ethereal too. Wouldn't you say? Through the thermodynamics of sales, they let that do the talking for them. Chris Beall (04:23): Exactly, exactly. So how Henry and I came together from my standpoint was pretty simple. Somebody said, "Hey, we got this Sandler deal. We have a deal with Sandler so we have a Sandler client. He seems a little different." I said, "What does that mean?" "Well, he wants an integration. An integration? We don't do those. "Should we charge him for it?" Yeah, better charge him for it. We don't want to do integration for something like 5,000 dials for a dollar 398. Are you kidding me? Chris Beall (04:52): Well, I looked a little bit closer and then thankfully for me, Henry said he wanted us to talk and I had a conversation with him and he just blew my mind, just totally blew my mind. It was like wait a second. I'm wandering around and looking here, I'm doing, I'm looking at, oh, there's the Tower of Pisa, there's this, there's that. Then I wander into this place and there's Michelangelo painting the ceiling. It's like holy Molly. I didn't know anybody knew how to paint ceilings like that. Chris Beall (05:20): He's painting the ceiling by basically taking over an industry that we at ConnectAndSell have done more than blunted our pitch on. It's actually been maddening for me. I've done a test drive at a very large, commercial real estate firm and it went spectacularly well. I won't name the firm because God knows, I might have to talk to them again someday, but it went really well. They're calling in these places in Manhattan and basically saying, "You want to sell your building and pay me a commission to do it?" Which Henry is going to tell us why they say that. And it's just, boom, boom, boom. Things are happening. They're really professional. Chris Beall (05:55): They're on message, everything's great. We get to the end and they say, "Well, what's next?" I said, "Well, this flight school thing is next. It's going to cost you 9,500 bucks." They just looked at each other and went, "How do we ever get 9,500 bucks?" I'm thinking you can sell two of these chairs. But that was my experience with commercial real estate. Suddenly, I meet a guy, Henry, who's got not only just a plan, but he's executing already on something that when I hear about it, I go, "Oh my God." We spoke and then we've done some work together. Chris Beall (06:29): Then he was kind enough to fly up to Seattle and we spent the better part of a day together, not socially distanced properly in a hotel lot. Well, we were half and half. Discovered that he drinks Lagavulin so he's a stronger man than I but I can drink it, but I'm a weak guy so I'm here with my little Macallan. Anyway, what I realized in talking to Henry was he's taken something that could have been an idea but I never managed to articulate it about what we've been talking about with market dominance, which is time-shift your efforts into, I'll call it the closing past. Chris Beall (07:09): That is take your anticipated closing date, whatever it is, time-shift your activity so that they're well before that closing day. Build a relationship, build trust, and gather information. Do this systematically across the market because each potential prospect has got a different closing date and you get the famous portfolio. We talk about running overtime, I'll call it the John Jackson portfolio, but you get it with an information flywheel attached to it that lets you dominate in another dimension. Chris Beall (07:41): You dominate in time and relationship with trust, and you dominate with information by using your sales activities to gather information. The combination, as you can tell, me being the old mathematician, I'm always looking for something that multiplies together because through multiplication we make an exponentiation and the really big stuff happens. I was blown away so we've been working on something. That's how we came together. That's my story. Henry's story is from a different perspective. Chris Beall (08:09): Henry, would you mind telling us the story? Why are you on this crazy podcast with us? You got a Lagavulin and I've got a Macallan. We're ready. Corey Frank (08:19): Well, I think essentially, it's almost a bit of a mirror image of what you just described, Chris. It was again, a somewhat Securitas path of referrals that led me to you. The origin point of the initial referral was me looking for ways in which to speak into multiplication. Multiply myself in a way that I can cover this niche that we've built this business around, which is specifically the acquisition, direct acquisition of healthcare facilities, particularly medical office surgical centers around the country. Corey Frank (08:53): Although that is a very finite niche, there are still enough assets, prospects, and people and things to know that for one individual to cover on a national basis, it can be a bit challenging. I was determined to figure out a way to multiply myself. The initial thinking was, well, maybe we'll get a contract. Someone that's got some senior sales skills and has some experience working with large value increments of investment and use them to leverage myself. That steered us somewhat in the direction of Sandler. Corey Frank (09:28): Ultimately, what it did is it got me in your orbit because I was fortunate enough to have someone at that organization say, "Hey, what would the best thing be essentially for you just to make the call yourself?" I said, "Well, precisely that's what I'm doing, but I'm at my throughput limit right now." That's when the introduction to ConnectAndSell was made. After quickly understanding the mathematical implications, what was a lot more exciting to me, although that was impressive, was really the foundational aspects that you and Corey have been talking about because I came across your blog. Corey Frank (10:02): I came across Market Dominance Guys, and really, quickly began to understand that there's something far more profound here than simply a way to make more dials per hour. Chris Beall (10:12): Yeah. Tumbling to that is not easy. It's that you managed to do it pretty darn quickly. The thing that amazed me is you've done all this work. When we first met we were talking actually at this fairly low technical level. I mean low in the stack about certain things about making outreach work with ConnectAndSell. We've made outreach work with ConnectAndSell in some very interesting ways for some pretty big companies and it's done just right. We call it talk to sequence and it's pretty magic, but you had turned outreach into an air traffic control center for you. Chris Beall (10:46): But when you think about it, this is what really got me, is your concept was, and nobody's ever attempted this before, as far as I know, which is one man, one market, dominance. That is truly the Iron Man theme. I think back to the Iron Man comics, the movie, the whole bit, as it's one person with the Iron Man suit can go do so many things so fast, and they're so precise that person can dominate an entire movie, so to speak, or the villains or whatever. The idea of one person dominating all by themselves a significant chunk of the economy that's identifiable, that you can put a name on, you can put a number on. Chris Beall (11:31): I don't know how big that number is, Henry, but I'm suspecting it's got to start with the B because the folks behind you with the capitol don't do stuff that doesn't start with at least a B and sometimes they have to put other words in front of the B, commas and all sorts of stuff like that, right? Chris Beall (12:28): So it's not a tiny market. It's not like a banana stand. Yeah, I could probably go, if I really put my mind to it and dominate the Port Townsend Farmer's Market for hard goat cheese. Actually, I couldn't because I know who does that at the Chimacum dairy place and she's so good. No, I couldn't displace her but I could come up with something that's tiny, but you're not talking tiny. You're talking how many interesting assets are out there to be acquired? Henry Wojdyla (13:01): Well, in our universe and we control for a lot of things. So again, right off the bat, we've definitionally siphoned down the commercial real estate world into a property type or asset class, if you will that is healthcare-oriented again, as medical office and surgical centers. That definition area begins to cordon off quite a bit of the inventory that would be under the broader commercial real estate umbrella. From there, we then began to control for certain factors, in terms of size of assets, quality of assets, ownership or counterparty types. Henry Wojdyla (13:33): I can give you some specifics. In our world, we don't particularly care about properties that are less than 20,000 square feet just because you're probably never going to get to evaluation that is going to be large enough to make sense for our book of clients. You don't get any economies of scale, in terms of the capital placement. As it relates to the quality we're looking for, generally speaking, higher-quality assets, which is a fuzzy term, but we know what to look for. It's a combination of just the physical infrastructure, the quality of the tenancy. Henry Wojdyla (14:01): Then we also specifically look for the type of counterparties we don't want to interact with. In our world ironically, what we don't want to do is actually be calling upon health systems or hospitals. The reason for that is that they, like many large institutional type owners, frequently have two factors that don't work in our favor. We've identified that early on in this business. One is they are slow to move, generally speaking. They also, typically for many institutional reasons, don't tend to make, what I'll call, more entrepreneurial-driven decisions. Henry Wojdyla (14:34): And what that means in this world is they are not going to sell in an off-market basis. Somebody in accounting and somebody in finance needs to have some version of a CYA where they can say, " Well, we went out, and we made a market, and we got X number of offers and we feel comfortable with the price." It doesn't mean they couldn't have gotten the same price directly, or frankly, probably for the better price, when you began to think about all the frictional costs we take out of the equation. Henry Wojdyla (14:57): Setting that aside, we quickly learned that was a type of counterparty that didn't work well for us. None of this is negative and says that this doesn't speak ill of those institutions or groups. It's just we had to quickly distill down where is our fertile ground? When we do all of those things, getting now back to your question, there's really only about 5,000 properties across the country that we care about, maybe a little bit more. That's about it. Corey Frank (15:22): Yeah. It's interesting, Henry, I think you're leading the witness there, Chris, about how tight and small this market is with Henry, right? We led off by saying the riches are in the niches. I think when one of our earlier episodes, and this has got to be in the first six, eight months or so and Henry has them all categorized so you probably know this. Remember this, Henry, is we talked about how entrepreneurs oftentimes make the mistake, repeatedly encouraged by VCs, by the way, to describe their TAM, their total addressable market, as really vast, as some sort of advantage. Corey Frank (15:58): But it's really a huge disadvantage, right, Chris? Because the tighter your market, your first market, the better off that you are because you actually have a better chance of your product actually solving a problem that your market has. Correct? Chris Beall (16:14): Yeah. The problem with big markets is they're generally not markets. A market is defined as a set. Essentially, you can reduce it to a list and order it in whatever way you want, but a set of entities, folks, whatever, that if you sell to one, it reduces the cost and risk of selling to every other one in that set. As soon as you come to one that doesn't fit that model, that if you sell to one, that one is not advantaged. You don't have an advantage selling it out. When you have to kick them out of the market, they don't count. Chris Beall (16:50): This is a Jeffrey Moore definition of a market. It puts a skin around it. It's almost surface tension. Actually, the math is identical to surface tension, but thank God most people listening to this podcast don't know the math of surface tension so they're not plagued with the dreams I have at night. How surface tension works it holds itself together because every molecule in there is attracted to every other one in a certain way. Water is funny like this. It's this polar molecule, that one water molecule gets close to another one, it orients itself so they like each other. Chris Beall (17:24): Well, if you drop them from the sky, they make little balls. It's called raindrops. It's cool. They're not actually shaped like this. They're shaped like little balls because it holds together. Markets are like that. And by definition or by effect, it's hard to make a raindrop above a certain size. You can't make a raindrop the size of a 747, much less the shape of one. It just doesn't work. It breaks apart into pieces and then the pieces hold together. That's how markets behave. Almost by definition, true markets are always relatively smaller than people think. Chris Beall (17:57): So to your VC, what you should be saying is, "There's a set of markets that we've identified, if you need a huge investment, and they're related to each other by a common set of needs that aren't perfectly overlapping, but are similar enough that one product with small modifications can jump from market to market." And that market dominance is key because I can't get to all of them unless I can take one because the only safe position in a market is dominance so I have to go take a market. Chris Beall (18:26): We had a whole episode on this. I was talking about it with somebody today. Take one and then go, "Okay, what's next?" Then as soon as the boulder is rolling downhill. And by the way, the guy I was talking to, Matt Forbes, who you know well, said, "You've never used the boulder analogy on the Market Dominance Guys." I said, "Well, Forbes, your memory tends to be pretty poor so maybe I did, maybe I didn't. I really don't know but here's the analogy I think I used. I think I know where I was walking in the San Francisco Airport when we were talking about it." Chris Beall (18:54): But the idea is when you are trying to dominate a market, it's like pushing a boulder up a hill. At the beginning, you're at the bottom and the hill's like this. It's super steep, and super hard, and you got to work like a dog, and you keep thinking it's going to roll back on you, and all these things are going on. Your feet are slipping. Your hands are sweaty, you're afraid. As you start to get farther up the hill, the hill gets a little, the hills are like this like these volcanoes we have here like that. Then it gets a little less steep and a little less steep. Chris Beall (19:23): Then you start to feel like, "Hey, I can move this thing." There's a point where it starts rolling downhill by itself. Don't run next to it. Go get another boulder at the bottom of another hill because you were strong enough to do one. The key to markets' dominance, maybe we should have called this Markets' Dominance Guys, but I think people would have just... They already look at us funny, Corey, so it's not going to help to do that stuff. But markets' dominance is the key because unless you're offering, can address at some level or provide leverage at some level across multiple markets, you were an idiot to build it. That's the definition of a product. Chris Beall (20:03): A product is something that can have currency or meaning in multiple markets with some modifications. Now, maybe the modification is too big or that the resulting product is too low value. A Tesla as a doorstop is a weird cross-market move. They make great doorstops, by the way, but so do a lot of other things. A Tesla to tow an electric airplane in up to 60 miles an hour to reduce the amount of battery you need in the airplanes, the airplane could go 600 miles instead of 400 miles. That is a pretty cool use of a Tesla. Now, that's a very defined market. Chris Beall (20:41): How many electric airplanes do we need to get going 60 miles an hour so that we know we don't have to use that heavy battery to get them going? The battery can stay on the ground and the plane can go in the air. We don't know yet. That's a nascent market but it is an adjacent market to the electric automobile market. The product itself would work fine with a little hook on the back for the cable and stuff like that. People tend to think of markets, I would say funny or not very precisely. Henry thinks of markets super precisely. Chris Beall (21:11): What I just defined is I'm sure of this following fact. The more buildings he buys, the easier it's going to be to convince somebody to sell a building through him. Right, Henry? Henry Wojdyla (21:22): Right. Absolutely. Chris Beall (21:23): Because they see themselves like each other. It's actually the same principle when we say tactical empathy and a cold call. We want the other party to know that we see the world through their eyes. A market is a means by which each sale causes everybody else to see the world through the eyes of the person who bought and it makes it easier for them to buy. [crosstalk 00:21:43] It's powerful stuff. Corey Frank (21:48): Well, we've talked about one of the laws of sales, thermodynamics and market dominance is that the more traction I get, the less there is for my competition, and the more friction my competition in essence has, especially when I do proper follow-up. I'd imagine, Henry, that as you started this process that the exhaust or the signals, not the noise, as Chris talks about oftentimes. Corey Frank (22:14): But the signals that you're getting from these folks, who aren't quite ready to engage in a conversation yet, but they may be ready next month or next quarter, is that's part of your market dominance process, correct? Henry Wojdyla (22:30): Absolutely. That actually ties into the broader concept that Chris mentioned a little while ago of the air traffic control piece. Part of the reason I needed the air traffic control was actually to really helped me manage in two completely different capacities, two ends of the pipeline or the spectrum. On the one end, we've got the top of funnel, if we want to call it a such, which is the out there, in the trenches, engaging with market participants at a high volume of number and speed. Henry Wojdyla (22:58): On the other end, because of the caliber of the people I typically deal with, they're usually fairly sophisticated. They typically are high-net-worth individuals. The value of the underlying assets and question, I can't let any ball ever drop. I have to figure out a way to operate in both ends of the spectrum and the air traffic control piece was a big way to get there. You're right. Getting signal out of noise is a huge piece of it. We are very cognizant to always try to harvest data, either be it directly, which is of course, the best, by way of having real conversations with people over time. Henry Wojdyla (23:38): But also be able to begin to infer data, which speaks to a little bit, although maybe a different point that Chris was making, about the self-refer self-referential dynamics of markets. And as you began to more tightly define them, you begin to identify not just trends, but you can begin to understand what the cohesion is across cohorts. That helps us begin to if we can't get direct data, make some pretty intelligent, some cases guesses or assignments, if you will, of what I call metadata that we can then begin to overlay upon our TAM. That lets us really get precise in how we cross-cut that, which again, lets us then better message and better address concerns with folks. Henry Wojdyla (24:21): If we still haven't necessarily spoken with them directly, we can begin to partition that messaging in a way that's meaningful for them. There are all these feedback loops. Chris and I frequently are discussing feedback loop dynamics in many, many different ways and this would be one flavor of that. Corey Frank (24:37): Yeah, I like that. It'd be interesting, I think, for the sales nerds who are fans of this kind of show and these types of discussions that we get into a lot, without disclosing too much of the IP. What surprised you being a seasoned real estate asset acquirer in the marketplace for many years when you started looking at one man's trash is another man's treasure? And when you looked at this residue, what surprised you that maybe they never taught you about real estate in the past? Corey Frank (25:05): They never talked to you about acquisition strategies, or sales or pipeline management, et cetera, that now you can't unsee it. I think that's the thing about these laws of sales thermodynamics that we talk about is once you understand in our world, dial to connect, sales ratio, list size, who picks up the phone. Once you see it, you never unsee it, no matter what market you go into. What are some of those that maybe you now see you with these predator goggles that maybe you didn't in the past? Henry Wojdyla (25:35): It's an interesting question. It's both specific and broad at the same time. I guess at a certain level, a lot of this has been organically figured out over time by ourselves, myself specifically. There wasn't really a specific roadmap to get there, per se. As on a somewhat related but separate topic, Chris and I have also had many conversations, including with some other individuals, about really the lack of any sort of guidance or training in this particular industry. A lot of it has been bootstrapped over the course of my career to figure out the signals to look for and the indicators. Henry Wojdyla (26:08): It wasn't really a formalized, in terms of training, no really real training. It was really the necessity being the mother of invention was really the driving force here. I'm not really precisely answering your question, Corey, but a lot of it I think is what's driven me to get obsessive about capturing and harvesting data. Really beginning to understand our market in a way that is both specific in the aggregate, but also finite in the ways that we can cross-cut it, because it begins to give me the type of traction that I need. Henry Wojdyla (26:39): Not necessarily in terms of the engagement with people, but to really understand them even before we ever speak.  

This week, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, is again flying solo as he continues his conversation with business intelligence engineer Tom Zheng, an expert in the field of data analysis. Explaining the importance of a data-related topic to this podcast audience, Chris points out, “Everybody who is used to Market Dominance Guys knows we talk sales, sales, sales. But because sales generate a lot of numbers, you need a data concierge to take that information and help you generate potential insights.” As a CEO, Chris is currently using a data concierge to analyze all the numbers his company generates and to make sense of the results. What works best, he says, is to tackle this process one-on-one — the CEO and data concierge only — in order to eliminate company politics. ----more---- This depth of analysis requires skills and tools beyond the use of an Excel spreadsheet. So, on our listeners’ behalf, Chris asks Tom what you should look for when hiring someone to guide you through your data analysis. And then, from his own successful experience working with Tom, Chris adds this advice: “Your data concierge needs to be someone with clear communication skills to explain things to you in terms you can understand.” Obviously, comprehensive data analysis is not a do-it-yourself project for a Chief Executive Officer: There are just not enough hours in a CEO’s day. Thus, the strong recommendation, as the title of this week’s Market Dominance Guys commands, “Get Thee to a Data Concierge!” Listen to Part 1: Giving Your Data the Sniff Test About Our Guest Tom Zheng, a business intelligence engineer, and independent contractor is a seasoned data guru who specializes in transforming your company’s data into actionable insights. With experience throughout the entire data value chain, from designing robust data ecosystems, implementing automated pipelines, and visualizing results in meaningful ways, Tom’s unique storytelling approach will help you discover those “Aha!” moments needed to challenge traditional thinking and assumptions. He can be reached at (416) 877-5412. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Tom Zheng: Yeah, I mean, communication is definitely something that one has to develop over time, right. But one of the things that I've quickly learned is that people, generally speaking, don't like to be told what to do or what they need to do. So instead, what I tend to do is I give them the opportunity for them to come to the same conclusion that I wanted them to do in the first place. Right? So for example, you know, like, let's say if I wanted my girlfriend to clean the kitchen, right. Instead of saying "Hey, please clean the kitchen." And by the way, I usually clean the kitchen so I can use this analogy. I'll say, "Hey, doesn't this kitchen look a little bit dirty to you?" You know? And then you try to get the other person to come to the same conclusion. And then they realize, oh, you know what, you're right. I got to do this. Right. Or, oh, I got to change my assumption. Tom Zheng: So that works out to be a better play usually then directly saying to somebody no, this assumption is flat out wrong. Even if you genuinely believe that you can usually use better language to help the other person drive to this. Chris Beall: And that gives them a little bit of time to, you know we say this about cold calling that when you get cold-called your problem is that you've been cold called. And so you're trying to solve that problem by getting off the call, but you have to keep your self-image intact. And the great cold caller takes advantage of that and says, okay, I know that you want to get off this call. They know going in. You want to get off this call with your self-image intact. I will offer you a way to do that. That if you take that way, I'll get something also, which is the opportunity to say something to you. And so, we teach that, right? I know I'm an interruption in 27 seconds, tell you why I called. Chris Beall: And the purpose of that is, one, to get somebody to trust you, which is also very important if you're going to be a data concierge, you have to be trusted. And two, to give them some time to change their mind about their goal. Their goal is to get off the call with their self-image intact, but maybe their goal could be to be sufficiently curious. It could be changed to be sufficiently curious, to accept a calendar invitation for a meeting. Chris Beall: So it seems like as a data concierge, you're in a funny situation because you can see often what is needed, but just straight up prescribing it so to speak is not going to get the patient to take the medicine. You have to figure out some way without wasting time to let enough time go by with enough, the right kind of input that somebody can shift their mind. And I would imagine the hardest mind shift is away from assumptions that have been baked into the business for a long time. The way we've always done things, right. I come up with those all the time in my own business and I go, really for 13 years, we didn't train anybody how to speak up because our assumption was we're not that kind of company and as soon as we start doing it, great things happen, right? Tom Zheng: Right. I can definitely vouch for any sort of, for example, sales training program such as ConnectAndSell's Flight School because I myself have received something similar to that in the past, which is training how to sell credit cards. Because when I was in university for one summer, I had to sell credit cards for my summer job. And believe me, Chris, that was the hardest job I've ever had. But through continuous training and through learning from your mistakes, you, just a simple change in your wording to make a huge difference, right? I mean, one of the key lessons in credit card selling is never mention the word credit. Don't mention credit, unless they ask you for it, just say, "Hey, would you be interested in this card?" And if they ask you, "Oh, well, what kind of card is it?" Then you have to tell the truth, but often people won't. Chris Beall: Yeah. So I'm recommending to anybody watching this or listening to Market Dominance Guys, Hey, somehow get yourself a data concierge. And I'm going to make a strong recommendation. Do your interacting with your data concierge one-on-one and don't do it with any politics in the room. So be alone, be part of that lonely minds club of your own, but know that you've got somebody who can discern truths and let you explore truths in the data and who will be both rigorous about how the work is done, but will allow you to kind of come along, right? It's not going to demand that you make an instantaneous flip of every moment. So that's, my recommendation is get one of these. And there's a hard recommendation. I mean, now that I'm doing this, I regret not having had this experience for the past 10 years. Chris Beall: Actually, when I started with ConnectAndSell, if all I had done, if all I had done was said "You know, Sean," to Sean McLaren, "I actually don't think in my role as the senior vice president of products or chief product officer or whatever the heck I was called, I don't think I should launch right into the product. I think I need to have somebody work with me and go through the data that the company's generating and the data that's in the CRM and try to make sense out of it. Had I done that I probably would have lopped seven years off off of this journey. I think I would have. About seven out of the 10 and we'd be about seven years ahead. And given that time is nobody's friend in business, time is never your friend. I highly recommend this as an accelerant to your business as a whole. Chris Beall: And frankly, as a CEO, you need some power too. Right, you need to have the power of known truths rather than guesses otherwise your own people are going to go "Yeah but that's not the way we did it yesterday." You get a lot of "Yeah , but" back to you when you're a CEO. That's kind of like everybody's in the "Yeah, but" department. And all they're really saying is "yeah, but that's not the way we did it yesterday." So folks, are going to take me up on this, brilliant idea that I have. Go get yourself a data concierge. Where should they look? I got lucky. Our VP of customer success and master of intensive test drives, James Townsend kindly introduced me to you. And we didn't know exactly what we were going to do. And then we kind of I'll call it, shaped it up as we went along, but it shaped up pretty quickly. Now I think I know the shape, but if somebody is looking for you, but not you, what should they be looking for? And also what should they be avoiding like the plague? Tom Zheng: You want to be able to trim the fat as much as you can and avoid middleman, right? The simplest way for anyone to go about this is obviously to be able to go to a consulting firm, contact their partners, say this is what I need. And then you end up with a multi, not a multimillion, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a consultant contract. And that's not realistically what you want because you have too many people that are in the middle who are interfering with things, right? Ultimately you want flexibility and direct action. So what I would do if I was in the market, looking for someone who could fulfill that data concierge role is somebody who has experience in the entire spectrum of data, which is basically to say data analysis and data engineering, primarily. Data architecture is less needed in my opinion, but for sure you want somebody who has done both data analysis, which is somebody to analyze clean data and data engineering, which is someone to clean up dirty data and to clean data for the analysts to use, right. Tom Zheng: But the key thing though, is they should have enough business background to have strong business acumen because you'll often find people who are very technical, very number savvy, but they don't understand the bigger picture. So where I would start is looking at people who might've gone to business school, let's say, but ended up focusing on something with a data niche. Right? And so that's, I think the sweet spot in terms of intersection of the type of skillsets that an ideal candidate would want. Now, to be honest, where could you go for this? That I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm not sure there's exactly a dedicated firm out there who provides data concierge service. Hey, unless maybe I start that firm who knows, right? But simply if you were to, for example, post a job on LinkedIn or on Indeed or something, the skill sets that you would want is generally speaking, the technical experience coming from either a data analyst or a data engineering role, plus, strong business acumen skills. Chris Beall: Yeah. I think I'd add one to it. And this is one of those rare cases where an interview can get you a lot more than you would expect, which is you need somebody who can explain something to you in terms you can understand without generalizing to stuff that doesn't make any difference. And that's, I don't know how you find that, but I know how I know that would be a huge mistake is finding somebody who's got all these other skills, but the skill that a data concierge would have is the ability to work interactively. And that means clear communication and keeping their wits about them. And knowing also, this is an interesting skill. You do this extraordinarily well, knowing when to say, okay, in order to go down that path of that exploration, it's going to take me a little bit of time because, and you're always very careful about this, because I need to do X, Y, and Z in order to prepare for that. Chris Beall: And therefore I can share those results with you tomorrow. That ability to clip the conversation and say, got it. I know, Mr CEO, Ms. CEO, you're driving in this direction, but let's face it, the road we're on is getting more and more slick with black ice. And unless I have a chance to go out and put some salt and pea gravel down, we're going to go off a cliff. So let's not just keep doing this. Let's just stop here and I'll go prepare the road for you, for us. And then we get to drive down that road. That seems pretty important. Tom Zheng: It is important. Unfortunately, the only way to be able to obtain that skill is from experience right. Of working with data. Because typically what I do is before I start each meeting, right? Each service, let's say. I would prepare and massage data like a funnel. You know, a funnel only goes so wide or it goes so deep. So once you exceed the width of the funnel or the depth or the length of the funnel, however you want to call it, that's when the concierge would need more time because I can only predict to a certain degree of the types of things that will want to analyze because X, Y, and Z. And so every good data concierge should prepare some preliminary stats and preliminary data to begin with, but there will always be the time where you're going to go out of your funnel, right. Which means more time is needed. And unfortunately, to develop that skillset of knowing what type of data you should have in your funnel, as well as when you're about to exceed your funnel, that unfortunately can only come with experience. Chris Beall: Yeah. It's well let's say an exacting business. That's so valuable. I actually think this would be game-changing for everybody who's trying to run a company and succeed in the market. And I don't think anybody knows that it's out there as a way of doing things. It's one of these situations that my recommendation to folks would be find somebody that's better than you are with data. Now, most CEOs aren't bad with it, right. But somebody who's better than you are, has the ability to work with tools that go beyond Excel. I think the ability to visualize quickly to get a visualization right in front of your eyes, in order to validate or partially validate or invalidate a hypothesis is critical. The number of times you've just put something up on a scatter chart or some marching bar graph or whatever, we just look at it and go, huh, that's it like, huh? Chris Beall: I didn't expect that. Right. Getting that cycle time down, I think requires facility with tools like Power BI that we're using that kind of allow you to iterate on visualization, to go from thinking, to looking, to talking, to thinking, to looking to talking in some cycle and kind of get going with it. Because here's my guess, my guess is most CEOs bring to bear sufficient curiosity and ability to communicate with somebody that they're kind of directing that they could work with to some degree, anybody who's better than they are with data, better with the tools and that they've given access to all the data, which by the way, it's not the thing we haven't talked about. You have to have kind of all of it. You can't have just some of it. And who is kind of capable of hanging in the room with just the two of you on a zoom and that you can form a bond with, as you go along doing this, because they're going to be inside jokes so to speak about the data, right. Chris Beall: They just show up and it's like, that's one of those kinds of jokes, right. We run into them all the time. So it seems quite doable. And I would encourage folks to, in my position to jump a little sooner and see what you can do. Maybe just somebody on your staff who loves a good spreadsheet, perhaps send them off to Power BI class or something like that. And they know your business and then maybe switch their job over. By the way anybody is thinking of doing this, data concierge is truly a full-time engagement. It takes a day of work to get to an hour of interaction. Is that a reasonable cycle? Tom Zheng: I would say so. Yes. It's. I mean, another analogy that I think is quite good is it takes 80% of cooking time to actually just prep the ingredients, right. To wash your vegetables, chop it up and stuff. The actual final bit of stir fry or assembly. That actually is pretty quick, right? I mean, let's say you're doing a stir fry or whatever, right. Once you have everything done and you put everything into your pan and you stir fry, that's quick. And that's why I hate watching those Gordon Ramsey videos, right. Where it's like, oh, this delicious meal in 10 minutes. Well, it's like, dude, you already have all the ingredients prepped. Right. So yes, I would say that's used to be about right, where it takes for me, at least it takes about a full day of prep work in order to get one to two hours of analysis. Chris Beall: Yeah, that makes sense. And then you iterate again, you find something new to go after. Sometimes you just find a blocker. It's like we had the last few days involve the fact that ConnectAndSell has got a little bit of data, right. Compared to some folks. I mean, you've been dealing with millions of rows and now we're talking about a hundred million rows or thereabouts. And a hundred million rows of data is kind of challenging for some of the tools. And you have to figure out, I'll call it data engineering of the other kind. It's data infrastructure engineering, just making it work, which of these techniques will physically get this data together. But one thing you've emphasized is when you're doing that kind of work, go get it done. It might cause a delay, but go get it done and resist the temptation to just summarize. Chris Beall: Because once you've summarized, you've lost the information that, you're making an assumption, right? There's the sum in summarize, may be the sum in assumption, but there's something that you believe and that thing can turn out to be false. And then you don't have access to the detail anymore. So it seems like that's an important thing too, is before you CEOs that want to work with a data concierge, make sure that when you run into a problem that could be solved with either an insight about how some tool works or with money, by the way, suddenly the tools seem cheap, right? Because you, as a CEO, your time is very valuable and you get that. One thing you don't have to sell any CEO on is that their own time is very valuable. That's an easy one. So when you think about that though, it's like, huh, okay. Chris Beall: So I've got to bring a certain patience to bear along with drive and curiosity. Because I've got my job to do as the CEO in the data concierge relationship. And I've got to keep my end up. And part of it is like drive, willingness to clip off areas of inquiry because I know they have no business value. I suddenly realized the insight is that doesn't mean anything, right. Let's not go there. But the other insight coming from the data concierge side is, I got to go figure this thing out with regard to putting a hundred pounds of mud in a 10-pound sack or whatever it is. And I'll keep you posted. Right. I mean, all that stuff's got to happen, it's kind of a complex relationship, a bit of a marriage actually. Tom Zheng: Yeah. I would say so for sure. One thing I was going to say for any CEO's or companies who want to get started, but might be limited in their resources, either staffing or budget. The great thing about tools like Power BI is that there are lots of training videos out there for free that teach you how to use the tool, right? And so, as long as you have an analytical mindset and you have strong business acumen and maybe an ability to communicate things clearly, if it's really just the lack of knowledge of the tool that's your constraint, then I highly recommend going on YouTube or LinkedIn Learning and watching some of those videos and doing some of those tutorials because nobody is born with these skills. Tom Zheng: Everybody at some point would have had to do those training as well, including myself. And even though it does take a little bit of time, I would say, if you are wanting to pursue this path, give for example, one of your staff members one whole week, and just basically say, let me reduce your workload and just focus on completing this training module. And I guarantee you will find your return on investment of not one week of possibly lost productivity on that employee. Chris Beall: I think that's a great recommendation. And I would recommend this is something that came up in a conversation with some very senior people at Microsoft about, Hey, you know, Microsoft has Power BI, most powerful use of Power BI is directly with the CEO. Does anybody let that happen? And one of the people said, "Well, yeah, the tools are so easy a CEO could learn to use them." I guarantee you as a CEO, you're not going to do any better learning to use the tools yourself because your day won't allow you the focus time to make use of them, you'll think that you're doing something but quite frankly, what you're doing is what I call a science project. And your science project will not win the science fair. You need to do what Tom just said, which is, I would say, take somebody in your organization who has that weird facility with Excel, but they're really a business person and say, Hey, let's skill you up on the super version of Excel. Chris Beall: The one that can handle more than a million rows, the one that can do visualizations 20 ways from Sunday at a click. The one that you can preserve your work and reapply it to other situations or other chunks of data. And so Power BI is a great example. There are others that are out there for sure, but you know take that person and do what Tom suggests, which is make it their job to learn the tool that is really, I'll call it Excel to the next level because companies tend to run on Excel. That means somebody out there knows it. Somebody might know the business and then, they could come from any department. And then try that person out as your data concierge. Schedule an hour, a week or an hour a day with them. And I do think it takes about an hour a day. Chris Beall: You could do it for half an hour, but at the beginning, I think it's an hour a day. That's your time commitment as a CEO. Make sure they get all the data that it somehow be brought together enough that it lets you explore something together and get in the canoe together. It's kind of like a canoe, right? You've got the data concierge in the front of the canoe, providing all the power and you're in the back and you're providing a little power and some steering, but mostly what you're doing is you're stopping and saying, huh, you know your river running here. What do you think? Do we go down the right side or the left side or the middle? Or are we just cool and we just keep going. We don't have to get out or do we have to portage? Or what do we have to do right? Chris Beall: And that's, you're very much together in a boat. I think it's a two-person operation. It is like a canoe. A canoe is [inaudible 00:24:11] a little bit specialized, but it's not one hundred percent specialized. Everybody paddles in that there are two of you who paddle. If things go well, you stay dry and you try not to get dumped. And you do have to stop every once in a while to figure out what your next move is. And then when it's time to go, you got to get in and kind of pedal like that. Tom Zheng: Exactly. Exactly. Just going back to your point about Excel. I mean, the tool that we've been using, which is Power BI is built off of Excel, right? I always call it Excel on steroids. And so, I mean, most people already know Excel, but Power BI is honestly just much beefier, much faster and it produces much better results than Excel. So my recommendation is take somebody who you trust, who you can trust with the company's data set. Right. And if you know, they've been doing excellent analysis and reporting in Excel already, then promote them to using Power BI. Give them one week, right. Get them to take a week and just let them learn Power BI and I guarantee you'll get your return. Chris Beall: Yeah, that's an awesome suggestion. If you look at this report, that's the fake background behind me. That actually is a report it's called the attribution report, exists in ConnectAndSell. And it shows you how much money is in your pipeline from conversations you've had that have turned into meetings or conversations that were positive, or this green one over here is conversations that just happened, they didn't have any great outcome, but somehow you ended up with those folks in your pipeline. The person that I want is the person who looks at that and goes yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I like that export button up there, the one right above my head, because that gives it to me in Excel. And they would tell you what I'm curious about is, and they'll use the word pivot. And somebody who does that and they use the word pivot, that's the person that you want. Chris Beall: They think in terms of not just filtering, but also looking at the data from different angles, with different ways of summarizing because just to make a good pivot table and get it right, it takes that mental model of data that you want in your data concierge. So I'd be looking for that person. And I have somebody like that used to work at ConnectAndSell. I remember spending about two hours one day with, she was curious about Excel and really wanted to use it more for one of our customers that had a large amount of data, customers generating or consuming about 35,000 dials a day. And the question is, so what was going on with regard to problem connects in their use of ConnectAndSell? And the way to discover that was to take the raw data from the dials out for a period of time, look at the problem connects and then invert it and pivot it and find out well who had the most as a percentage of the whole and taking off some of the other connects because they sort of didn't count in the denominator. Chris Beall: And I remember teaching her to do this on a long phone call, on a phone call that turned into a zoom session and it kind of changed her career. She now is the head of sales of a pretty good size company and is doing fabulous, fabulous things. I would say the pivot is the pivot. That is somebody who loves pivots in Excel and really gets it. And they're hungry for those insights. That's the person that you want. Find out who loves the export from say, you're using Salesforce or using Dynamics. Somebody doesn't just look at the report, but they export the report. That would be my first question would be, so what's your preferred way of interacting with data that comes out in a report? And somebody says, look, I don't even look at the report. I just export it into Excel. And now I've got control, check. Chris Beall: You're coming closer. Well, what's your favorite way of figuring out what's going on in that report? You know, what's real. Well, I tend to eyeball it with some filters on it, just to see if I understand it. And then once I have a hypothesis, I'll select the data and I'll go ahead and I'll pivot. Really? Do you have an example of that? You know, and man, you're pretty close. Take that person, turn them loose on Power BI with all that extra power that's in it, I think you may have yourself your data concierge. Tom Zheng: Absolutely, absolutely. Spot on. That's where all good data analysts start from, right? Just not accepting the out-of-the-box reports of pre-summarized data and always trying to get to the truth by pivoting it themselves. And if you have somebody with a bit of a data engineering background, they can even say "You know what? I don't like always exporting to CSV or Excel. Why don't I try to connect directly to the system." Right? And then that makes things even faster when it comes to continuous analysis, because you don't have to constantly be exporting CSVs, because if you think about it, all this data comes from a system usually. And so why not directly connect to that system and link it to your analytical tool? Chris Beall: Well, we know the why not actually. The why not in general is that to do that, you have to go through the engineering department and you'll die before it gets done. But that's for a different episode. So we'll talk about that sometime. Chris Beall: Well, thanks so much, Tom. This has been spectacular. I know everybody who's used to Market Dominance Guys, we talk sales, sales, sales. Well, you do it right, you generate a lot of numbers, generate a lot of facts. You generate a lot of potential insights. If data is the new oil, you better get yourself some tools and techniques to go drilling and know which direction you're going and whether you're coming up with dry holes or whether you're coming up with black gold. And I can't thank you enough Tom I'm looking forward to our session tomorrow. I'll be in my car. So we're going to try something new. I'm driving to the airport. He's going to show me visualizations through my ears. While I drive on a road that has water on one side and big burly trees on the other that I don't want to collide with. So we're going to do this with great care, but Tom, thanks so much. This is spectacular. Tom Zheng: Thank you Chris, for the opportunity and it was great to share my insight.    

  Our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, is flying solo again this week as he meets with data guru Tom Zheng. Tom is a business intelligence engineer and works as an independent contractor in the field of data analysis. In other words, he spends his days making sense out of those large quantities of data that tend to pile up in businesses. As CEO of ConnectAndSell, Chris uses Tom’s data analysis services to guide him through the often-confusing pathways that data can create. As Chris says, because data is kept in ways that are not always optimal for analysis, business leaders need people like Tom to help make sense of it, so they’ll know if they’re dominating their market or not, or if they’re making or losing money on different parts of their business. ----more---- With education credentials in economics and finance, Tom employs his talents in data engineering, data architecture, and data analysis. Along with these skills, he brings a great bedside manner — coupled with brutal honesty — to his data-sharing sessions with CEOs. To get to an actionable truth about the numbers he’s analyzing for companies, Tom uses a series of questions that he asks himself and his clients: “Is this data meaningful? Is it true? And does it lead us somewhere or not?” Take a listen to how expert data analysis can help you dominate your market on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Giving Your Data the Sniff Test.” Listen to Part 2: Get Thee to a Data Concierge! About Our Guest Tom Zheng, a business intelligence engineer, and independent contractor, is a seasoned data guru who specializes in transforming your company’s data into actionable insights. With experience throughout the entire data value chain, from designing robust data ecosystems, implementing automated pipelines, and visualizing results in meaningful ways, Tom’s unique storytelling approach will help you discover those “Aha!” moments needed to challenge traditional thinking and assumptions. He can be reached at (416) 877-5412. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Chris Beall: Hey everybody, Chris Beall here without [Corey Frank 00:02:03], I don't know how I can get by a Market Dominance Guys episode or two without him, but I don't know I'm going to be brave and I'm going to plunge right in. I'm here with Tom Zheng. Tom is a data guru. He's a guy who makes sense out of data. He's a master of the tools and the techniques and the mindset that it takes to take those big piles of data that tend to pile up in our businesses and help you make sense out of them. And he's working with me at Connect and Sell to make sense out of our let's say 50 million rows a year of data. We call them rows in the data business. So think of it as we do 50 million dials a year. Each one generates some data. And if we wanted to figure out anything about that data, it's a couple of different ways we could go. I could have somebody do a project and go try to figure some stuff out. But what I've been doing with Tom, and this is a very Market Dominance Guys relevant is we spend some time every day exploring the data together. I've come up with a name for it. I call it a data concierge. So the CEO or a CRO, or whoever really cares about trying to understand the business and figure out what to do about the business can actually exercise their curiosity directly on the data, but without becoming an expert on the tools and have somebody to help them think through what makes sense. What's a good hypothesis. How might we go about addressing that hypothesis and get some facts. So welcome, Tom. Tom Zheng: Thanks Chris. Glad to be here. Chris Beall: It's awesome to have you here. And this is one of these things that we've talked about a lot of stuff on Market Dominance Guys, but it tends to be about sales. And it tends to be about sales as though my thesis, which is you can pave a market with trust and with trust-based conversations or trust-yielding conversations, and then harvest that market over three or four years as folks come into the decision process. It says though, that thesis just operates by itself, right? And I think that's BS actually, when you really look at a real business and then you think, "Well, how does it work?" I've got to be getting feedback from the outside world somehow that says, Hey, what you're trying is either working or not, or accomplishing X or Y, or maybe doing something surprisingly wonderful that you didn't even imagine. And that tends to be, I'll say hidden in the data in two ways. One is data is fundamentally complex. Maybe three ways. Tom might give us some more, but one is it's fundamentally complex. It represents lots of different things that happen and you're trying to figure out what does it all really, really mean and how does it go together? And the other is data is kept in ways that are not optimal for analysis. So we tend to build systems that are good for operating, getting something done, but we tend not to build them so that they're great for figuring out what was going on. So I'm just going to have a chat here with Tom, and he's kind of enlightened us about something that I think every person who cares about market dominance should be thinking about, which is, who is helping you make sense of the data in your business, such that you can tell if you're dominating or not. You can tell if you're making or losing money on different parts of the business, and you can even uncover opportunities to go and build the business where you might not have seen those opportunities before. So I'm going to ask Tom just a little bit about his background first, and then we'll go from there. So, Tom, how did you fall into this? I know you used to teach little kids how to play the piano. Has that background that led you into this direction or was it something else? Tom Zheng: Well, sort of, I mean, if you listen to studies, there's been lots of studies that show people who play piano tend to be better at math, right? Because music inherently is numbers-based. And so growing up, I've always been better on the numbers side than on the language side. And so when I went to university, I pursued a degree in economics and finance. I went to business school, but my major was in economics and finance. And so more so in the economics part, that's where you deal with a lot of data, right? So that was kind of the entryway into learning more about statistics and working with large data sets. And so when I started off in my career, I worked for a financial consulting company who specialized in helping banks revise processes and become more lean essentially. But I was involved on a lot of data-based projects and technology driven projects, which further honed in my technology skills. And after a few years of working consulting, I then ended up working in a brand new industry, which was the cannabis industry here in Canada. And so a couple of years ago when they legalized cannabis, that's when I jumped into that industry and I worked as a data engineer. And I've since left that industry and now I am an independent consultant and my specialties are really anything to do with data specifically in data engineering, architecture and analysis. Chris Beall: Fascinating, fascinating. What was it that as you went into the cannabis industry, what were the data areas that were interesting there? What was the subject of... What was the mystery that they were trying to resolve that was most intriguing to you? Tom Zheng: Well, considering it's a brand new industry with no standardizations, one of the challenges and what people were like myself were trying to fix is to create a standardized schema of how we capture our data and to design, for example how do you create a database table? What columns do you need in a particular dimension table? These are all things that were unknown because cannabis has never really been legalized at least in North America on a large scale, right? And additionally, there were no mature technology players. So everybody was designing their technology from scratch. And when people design their technology, they often didn't have a data lens to it because the idea is let's capture the data first before worrying about analyzing it tomorrow. And so one of the challenges of working in that industry is that data was often unclean and you spent a lot of time having to cleanse that data before you could even use it. Chris Beall: Oh, appropriate for the cannabis industry. A lot of cleansing was necessary before it's ready for use. Tom Zheng: Absolutely. Chris Beall: What can I say? What can I say? Something that struck me is when folks are doing sales-oriented kind of work, they tend to be using a CRM and CRMs have the endearing quality, but also frustrating that you can extend them by adding fields, adding objects and so forth. And that often is done by folks without any data backgrounds. So we have a couple of fields in our CRM that are laughable. One of them says, for instance, if I recall correctly, something like at the account level, there's a field that says 2017 revenue. And nobody who designs data for analysis or even maintenance would ever create such a field, but to the person that was trying to keep track of revenue that year, they thought, "Well, how simple, I'll just make a field that says 2017 revenue and drop it right here on the account object." Not thinking ahead to does that mean I need a 2018 revenue field and what is going to update that whatever process updated the 2017 revenue field it has to be changed in 2018 and so forth and so on. That's an innocent example, but it's not an egregious example. I would say we have, my guess is we have probably 150 data fields that have been added to our CRM over time, including some new objects. I would say 10 to 20% of those are somehow in meaningful use. So we don't know what they are. And if you try to... And some of them changed their meaning over time. So you'll say, "Oh yeah, back in 2019, the way we use this field was we put in it the number of hours that it took to sell the deal, but that became uninteresting, but we kind of liked the field. And so we decided to put in the actual cycle time of the deal itself the total number of days between first engagement and first close, and we just thought that'd be better." And there you are the analyst trying to make sense out of this, how do you tackle stuff like that? And have you been faced with this, I'll call it the extensible data model done by amateur modeling, modelers problem that's full of lots of data? What do you do with that problem? Tom Zheng: Absolutely. So this is something I see all the time and the reason why it happens is down... I can boil it down to one word, which is convenience, right? Often people will make customizations for their own convenience. And so whenever somebody adds a custom column or field, often they are just manipulating or filtering or aggregating existing data that already exists in their system, but it makes it more convenient to access. And so before I answer the question of how I deal with these types of custom columns, the first thing I will say is that as a general best practice, if you are running your company or at least the IT side of your systems company, you should always try to avoid adding these columns of convenience. Because if you use an analytical tool for example, Power BI, Tableau, or Click, there are very easy ways for you to recreate those columns of convenience directly on your report. And so it negates the need for you to actually add it into your system. Whenever I see those things, it's always a big pain because they're not often labeled correctly. And what I mean by that is as a best practice for data governance, you should have this thing called a data dictionary, which is basically a tool that allows you to add metadata to all of your data sources, right? So in your case, for example, 2017 revenue, if a data dictionary tool was used, then the original author of that custom column could say, "These were the filters applied. This is how I aggregated and transformed the data." And so as a result, the data analyst or the end consumer does not need to make assumptions or reverse engineer how that column was calculated, right? But in the absence of documentation, which is quite frequent, somebody like myself would have to reverse engineer and figure out how that column was calculated, if it's not inherently obvious. And it does take up a lot of time, but I always tend to do that before I run any sort of analysis, because I'd rather give you no information than to give you wrong information, which we all thought was correct. And you end up making wrong business decisions out of that. Chris Beall: Yeah. It's pretty easy I think to be led down the garden path, by thinking that a field means one thing, analyzing it, drawing a conclusion, and then chasing that conclusion, turning it into a hypothesis about the business. Maybe even getting other people excited about it. So now it has political implications because you've made some claim to, even as the CEO, or maybe especially as a CEO, you don't want to say something and then have to walk it back. And while we're also excited, the particular danger I see actually, as you say it, everybody believes it. You realize it isn't true. And then you can't get them to stop believing it. Tom Zheng: Right, exactly. Chris Beall: I think it happens a fair amount. So as you work through that, here you are, you're somebody who's like me who says, "Hey, Tom, give me a hand on this stuff." And you're looking into the data and you're finding these labels that are ambiguous, or they don't seem to match up with the data itself. Say you were to find two different times for an event and one time appeared to be the time at the beginning and the other is the time at the end. We just went through this today. That's why I'm bringing this up folks. And you say, "Well, let me just take a look and see." How do those spread out? So it seems like one of the first things you do is you say, "Look, let's just count all the values and just eyeball it, sort it top to bottom." And then in the case we were looking at today, you found a bunch of negative times, and we're pretty sure that time is never negative. That is directly... Duration being negative is kind of things don't take minus 10 seconds. That doesn't happen in the actual world we live in. So there you are. You now have this piece of evidence that there's an issue with the actual data itself. You don't really know is that an issue that's going to make a difference or not? Or can I just... Is it just some error that was made in data input or whatever, in some small fraction. You got to make a call there, right? How do you make that call? And then do you do that alone? Or the people... I would think the people are generally not there who had to do with creating those fields or filling them they're gone, right? Everybody's always [crosstalk 00:15:54]. what do you do and how do you get past that to start to get to the good stuff? Tom Zheng: Well, being an analyst, you have to have a degree of reasonableness, right? So with all data sets, there are going to be erroneous records, erroneous data and it's up to you often as the person on the front line to decide whether or not something is acceptable or not. So call it the sniff test. Right? So in the case of our analysis, even though we did discover negative time, the negative time did not represent a big chunk of all of the available data rows, let's say. And so in this case even if we did include it in our analysis, it would not make a grand impact. But every analyst should, whenever they discover something that seems odd, figure out the magnitude of that data, right? Figure out how much would it impact your final number if you were to include that data and if it's not statistically significant, then don't waste your time and just include it and then call it out when you actually record those numbers. That's the way I recommend other analysts go about it. Because sometimes people can go down a rabbit hole where you spend an entire day trying to cleanse a piece of data which ultimately doesn't have any material effect on your final numbers. Chris Beall: Yeah. My old chemistry professor, I remember from high school said to me once, and I think I was probably 15 years old, said something that still sticks with me, which is, "A difference, is a difference if it makes a difference." And, but of course that's tricky. You can get kind of circular on that. You can assume that it doesn't make a difference than find out that it was the thing that made all the difference. There's a lot of thinking that goes on to this. I think that going into this process. One of the ways we've been working, one of the things I'd like the audience to think about is this. If you are engaged in a market dominance play, so what you're doing is you've identified a market, you've made a list you're having yourself or your folks talk to folks on that list. You're building trust. You're trying to stay out of the red ocean of everybody who's currently in market and everybody's fighting over those deals and go to the blue ocean where you're early, so to speak. And you're going to very inexpensively use technology and good techniques and good attitude in order to talk to people multiple times. So you're doing all that stuff. I'm going to make a recommendation that you find yourself somebody who you can work with. And I mean, work with intensively to iterate on these particular matters and to allow your curiosity, to guide you into a couple of things. One is, is this data that we're looking at meaningful or not? Second, is it true or not? Third, does it lead us somewhere or not? And I think you need to iterate quickly. If you had looked to look at how you and I are working together, we're having a touchpoint every day, unless I'm on an airplane or whatever. And during that touchpoint, you're showing me what you've come up with from the previous day in the general rhythm is what's happening. And then I'm going, huh? That's interesting. That makes me think of this. Or you're saying, "When I got to this point, this didn't quite look right. This looks like this might be wrong in some way. Or I discovered something interesting." And we iterate. So we have this daily iteration cycle, but how often do you think we iterate or pivot or maneuver within say a one-hour touchpoint session? And is that normally how you've worked with folks in the past? Or is that something that's a little bit new and different? Tom Zheng: Well between you and I, we definitely pivot a lot and I actually see that as a good thing, right? It's basically the whole concept of if you're going to fail, then fail fast. So often we will analyze some data only to find out that, you know what, this isn't actually the data that we want to analyze. So a great example is when we were trying to figure out making our own analysis as to whether or not a phone number is direct or not only to find out well, why it matters if we identify a number as being a direct number or not when we should just always dial the number that has a faster navigation counter. Right? So to the audience, that example might not have made much sense, but I hope it did. But nonetheless, my point is it's important to be able to be agile, especially if you are looking into a data concierge service. Because historically speaking, most companies would treat data analysis like for example, software development, where you capture all of the requirements up to the front and then you provide a time estimate and then you develop the work and then you present it. Right. But ultimately the problem with that is that 99% of the time, people don't know what they want. Right. I always like to reference that meme or that segment of a movie from the notebook where the guy is trying to ask his lady friend, what do you want? And she's like, "I don't know. I don't know." Right. And it's become a meme where people turn up for a dinner conversations like, what do you want for dinner? I don't know. What do you want? I don't know. And it's the same thing for data as well, often business leaders don't actually know what the most important KPIs are to successfully running their business. Because you can't know what you want if you don't know that it exists. Right. Or you can't know what you want until you figure out it's statistically significant. So that's why I think data concierge is something that you've identified Chris, I think it's so important that lots of companies who do want to succeed, utilize this new approach, as opposed to the standard report building format of capturing all of the requirements upfront. Because in my past experience, 95% of the reports that I built, it looks new and shiny for the first couple of days. And then eventually nobody ends up using it. And how do I know this? Well it's because in the tool that I use, which is Power BI, every single interaction with the report is logged and I have access to those logs. And so what do I do? I run my own report using the logged data only to find out that a report gets used quite heavily initially. And then it just crickets. Chris Beall: Interesting. Interesting. So the half-life of a report with regard to its actual utility seems to be somehow inversely correlated to the detail level of the specification that went into it. So the more you specify and the more certain you are that you got it right up front, and everybody's talking about it, thinking about it, crafting it, but they're not looking at the actual data. Yeah. I'm just making this up. I have a feeling it's probably true. Then the shorter the time the report will be considered actually valuable and will be used on a daily basis by the people running the company. Tom Zheng: That's right. In other words, the simpler, the report, the more it'll actually get used. Right? So the best example is give me a sales report. Just tell me how much money have I made this week. Those types of reports, straight and simple, it's going to get used a lot. But once you start saying, give me a sales report, but only show the top five teams, right. Or the top five individuals and their sales. Then it starts being used less because other people might say, "Well damn, I need the top 10," or, "Oh, I only need my team." And so it doesn't meet everybody's requirements if you get it to be more detailed. And so as a result, it starts getting used less and less and less. And eventually as well, when it comes to your standard report building process is that you often find new data points or you find irregularities or an assumption with data, which fails your assumptions, and then you've got to revise it. And then you got to create a new report in the future and so for everybody within an organization is constantly learning because of its data. And so that's why if I had to put a number, I would say the half-life of a report is usually just about two weeks. Chris Beall: Wow. Wow. See, you spend a bunch of money. You spend even more time. You do all the specifications and you end up with something that less for two weeks, which means it wasn't providing much value in the two weeks either, because otherwise it would have been hung onto. It's fascinating. Well, I mean, I really like the way we're doing this. I actually brought it to some folks at Microsoft and asked, you have companies, your customers like Intel or Boeing, or these are big companies where I'm sure the CEO would love to have a private process where they can ask questions of the business without depending on individuals in the business to give them answers. In fact, I call it being a CEO of being in the lonely minds club. We're assumed to have no hearts. And so we can't be the lonely hearts club, but the loneliness comes from the fact that no matter how you set up an organization if you're at the top of it, your people are obliged to lie to you, whether they want to or not. That is... The unvarnished truth doesn't know how to move to the singularity at the top of a company. But the data itself contains somewhere in it, the unvarnished truth. So why not sit with somebody? And I like to do it every day. I think that's kind of the sensible amount of time to spend in iteration, right? To ask direct questions of the data. But as a CEO, I'm not going to learn the tools. And you know me, I'm not the least [toolsy 00:26:09] guy in the world. Right. I built a little bit of code in my life and that kind of thing. But when I watch you with Power BI, I can say, "Hey Tom, what do you think instead of just having the Y-axis be the number of dials on the excess as be the duration of the navigation a dial, what if we looked at the actual volume by multiplying those two together? And then plotting that against something else, whatever it is we want to plot it against. What do you think?" And you'll just go, "Sure, absolutely. I can do that. Hang on a second." And you'll go click and some things will happen. And here we are. It's very important that we're screen sharing at the time and I'll get a visual on that instantly. And I might see something in it and you might see something in it, or it could be nothing, but it didn't cost a lot of time and nobody had to write a specification and it'll spark curiosity. So it's almost like if data is the new oil, you don't want to just go drill where some bunch of people walking around on the ground said, "Well we found oil in a place once where there was a Mesquite tree and there was a cow nearby and it was noon." So here's a Mesquite tree and here's a cow and it's noon, let's drill here and spend the next six weeks drilling a hole in the ground and then find out there's no oil down there. You want to drill a ways and sniff around. I think in the oil business, they use neutron activation analysis to do this correctly. And then you want to steer the drill toward the more promising oil. And if you're running a really hard rock and you can't get through it well, maybe you want to go another direction. Right. Is that a reasonable analogy for this kind of thing? Tom Zheng: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, the biggest issue, I think with your traditional method of upstream reporting is that people can easily fudge the numbers and tell a different viewpoint of that story. I wouldn't say lying, but you can just conveniently forget a filter or hide in a filter somewhere, or present as a completely separate view of what's actually going on in the world. Right. And I mean any good data analyst will know exactly how to fudge the numbers to make the numbers look good. And I've done that for other executives as well, right? For usually middle senior managers like directors or senior directors, often I would present to them the data and the results. And they say, "Oh, no, no, this doesn't look good. Help me make it look better." Right. That's the issue with your standard method of reporting. But ultimately if your data is recorded correctly, assuming there's not any sort of catastrophic failures in your technology stock data doesn't lie. Right. And so as the CEO, you have a fiduciary duty to do what's best for the organization as a whole. So why accept anything less than the actual truth? I mean, the truth might not look good, but how can you make good business decisions if you're not presented the absolute truth? Right. So that's why I think the traditional way of reporting does need some sort of reform. But the one thing that I would be a little bit concerned about is just how many CEOs out there are really willing to commit let's say an hour each day, going through the data with the data concierge. Because I genuinely mean this, Chris, I think you are one of the hard-working CEOs who actually give a shit, because and pardon my language because lots of CEOs out there just want people to do the work and they're not intellectually curious themselves. And so if you are going to utilize a data concierge service, you have to be intellectually curious and you have to understand your business very well. Chris Beall: Yeah. That's interesting. I don't know if I'm special in this regard. I actually think here's my hypothesis. And my observation about CEOs, CEOs have a hard time getting the truth out of anywhere. And so sometimes they despair of getting it at all. And so... But I do believe, and I know very few exceptions of the CEOs that I know. And by the way, Market Dominance Guys, all about it's a CEO audience, right? This is about folks who want to dominate markets and middle managers don't get to dominate markets. Maybe they get to play. Maybe they get to sort of be the CEO of their own world. General managers are always CEOs. Some people are CEOs who carry funny titles and you just kind of go, is that really a CEO? Like I would say, [Matt McCorkell 00:30:47] over at [Case or Compressors 00:30:49], he carries this title of a manager of branch operations. Does that sound like a CEO? No, but I guarantee it Matt McCorkell is a CEO, I've worked with him and he's driving for improved results holistically for the company within the constraints as he sees them and believes them. And he is relentlessly curious. So what I find is the curiosity is there, but the pick has been blunted on the hard rock of trying to get to actionable truth that you can believe. Because you're making big bets. You're making big bets. Here's a big bet you and I are talking about, which is I'll call it the direct number bet, right. Do we have enough information in our system about navigation times, we thought it was direct numbers, but it's really navigation times in order to automatically choose the best possibility of the ones on offer for trying to reach somebody? And I find one when we're doing that and I think this might be a little difference between me and some other folks is I find it super helpful to have analogies. Analogies are soft, but there is an old experiment that was done where folks are asked to figure out from the values on some playing cards and a rule, whether the rule is actually being followed or not. Like all face cards have an odd number on the other side or something like that. Right. And people have a heck of a time reasoning through stuff like that. But if you take the same problem and you express it in terms of, there are some people at a table in a restaurant and the waiter or waitress has got to figure out who's of drinking age or not. Who they can serve the drink to and you put the same problem in those words, exactly the same mathematical problem, everybody can reason instantly. It's the phone number thing you were talking about, my example is, okay, so you're trying to get enough eggs in order to make this recipe. And the recipe calls for lots of eggs, maybe 12 dozen eggs. And you know stores that carry the eggs and you know the navigation time, how long it takes on average and the midpoint, 50% longer, 50% shorter, two, that's called the median for folks who don't like these sorts of things to get to the store. Right. And I have two forks, two ways I can go. Well, if I don't know if the store is open at all and I can't call and find out. And then once I get there, if I don't know if they have eggs today or not, what's my best strategy? Well, the best strategy is always take the fastest route so if not this store, you have some time left to go to another one because you only have so much time to get anything done. That analogy is easy to think through. Okay. As soon as I'm concrete and I have a road and I'm in my car and then get to choose the long way or the short way, and then it's like, "Well, let's go find the short ways." And always choose them if we can. Have you found that you find yourself needing to explain to somebody that you're working with in terms of an analogy, so they can think through something because they can't do it with the playing cards, but they can do it when they're the waiter or the waitress? Tom Zheng: Absolutely. Chris Beall: [crosstalk 00:34:20] problem. Tom Zheng: Absolutely. And that's such an important thing. I mean, it's not as much of a skill set as being a traditional data analyst because you're often not the ones telling the story, but if you want to be a top-notch, in my opinion, a top-notch data analysts, you need to have a good enough business background to be able to convert these data concepts into analogies as well. Because the long story short is that 90% of the people in the room are not going to be as strong when it comes to data science, as you are, that's why you work in data and your audience works not in data, right? They are business stakeholders. And so that's why it's very important to be able to translate from numbers into English. And it's funny that we bring this topic up because historically I've always worked with data scientists who are extremely smart in their fields, but they don't know how to properly convey the end result. And so as a result, they lead meetings where they just end up speaking gibberish. But people assume that what they're speaking is correct, because holy crap, this guy's using a lot of big words and statistical concepts, he must be smart, right. But at the end of the day, what are you here to do? You're here to drive business value and you want to make sure that your audience can understand the value. And so analogies are a great way to be able to deliver on some of those results. Chris Beall: Well, and I would think also there's one more thing, which is, we'll go back to that truth thing. So here I am a CEO trying to figure out what's the next great move to make for this company? And also how can I avoid screwing up in some really bad way that I'm going to regret? So we're looking at this stuff together and I come up with an analogy. And one of the things that I really enjoy about working with you is you don't just accept the analogy. You'll point out where it's flawed. Well, it could be like that... You're very gentle about it by the way, which I think comes from that piano lessons for the four-year-olds and stuff like that. So I get to be the four-year-old and I go, "Well, is it like this teacher?" And you go, "Well, it's almost like that. But if you want the cord to sound better and move this a finger over one of these keys that [inaudible 00:36:38], and then it will be a major chord and for this part of the song it sounds better because it's happy. Where as this other one sounded kind of sad and anxious." Or something. Can you hear the difference, right? You're very... But bedside manner I'll call it with still brutal truthfulness. Like "No, Mr. CEO, that analogy doesn't cut it, it's wrong." That seems like an important skill.  

This week on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their interview with Marc Hodgson, sales director at ConnectAndSell. What’s the topic? How to get the most out of a first conversation. As Marc says, “All the magic happens inside the conversation,” getting your prospect from fear to trust and then on to curiosity. But how do you take a green SDR — or even a fairly well-seasoned one — and develop the skills that get them to the level where the magic happens?   As Chris and Corey have discussed in previous episodes, first you need to have a clear idea of what the purpose of that initial conversation is: You’re not trying to sell anything but the discovery meeting. And to do that, you need to truly believe in the value of that meeting for the person you’re talking with. Once you have that belief firmly in place, it’s time to develop your skills, which start with learning a great script and how to deliver it in the right tone and with the correct pacing. After that, practice, practice, practice. As Marc explains, “It’s not enough to do it. Now you have to get really great at it. You’ve got to be frequent before you can get good.” As usual on the Market Dominance Guys, you’ll hear this and lots more sage advice on today’s episode, “Tried and True: Practice Makes Perfect!” ----more----   About Our Guest Marc Hodgson has had an illustrious and successful sales career at a variety of companies and currently holds the position of Sales Director (aka Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer) at ConnectAndSell. Marc resides happily in the Greater Boston area. ------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.   Here is the full transcript from this episode: Marc Hodgson (02:04): It's about getting there and having them have the experience, the rest takes care of itself. Corey Frank (02:11): Yeah. We've had a couple of episodes where we spoken about from a connected self-perspective, Chris, how much you love those test drives too and the look of the change that you've seen and feel on those sales floors when we could travel, if we're getting back to those test-drive days. When you think Marc about this approach, what kind of guidance would you have of a new salesperson kind of getting in. Corey Frank (02:35): And I really liked the way how you described this Chris, right, is that you have to have, get your senior folks in a red ocean, a top of funnel, and then you have your executives of one portion, and then you have this other trinity with a small T as a, as a long play salesperson. Are there certain skill sets, mindsets, prep that you would give to because you're probably a five, two-player, you can do it all. But to do this probably requires different skill set that you probably would have talked to yourself 10 or 20 years ago, "Wow". But clearly it works. The math works. What advice or guidance would you give to me as a newer salesperson, a sales gal, a sales guy to get into this, to believe in the math. Marc Hodgson (03:13): There's the math, the sales, and then there's the multiplication factor of what really works, right. You see what's happening all over the place where you look at your inbox, things are noisy. Things are, are mucky, LinkedIn, and email and all that jazz. But I think what we're really seeing now is the resurgence in not just B2B, but human to human, right. It's that conversation. And I think the newer salespeople, the best thing you could do for yourself is learn how to have those first conversations. Right Marc Hodgson (03:51): We talk a lot about being able to move from fear to trust and curiosity and all that. That's probably the core skillset that any new sales rep could, should develop, right. That's the one that is going to pay dividends. And I think a lot of folks it's a bit lost in our digital world, right. We're looking for fast efficient, "Hey, what's going to ping the most emails or touches or activities or whatnot". All the magic happens inside the conversation, right. And I think getting good at that and working on that, if that's a core skill, if you had to work on one skill and one skill only, I think it's the value of a conversation on how to have it, how to get really great at it. Corey Frank (04:34): Absolutely. And I know you guys are launching or you have launched the flight school, where you teach big dumb farm animals like me, right, to, to have the right tone, and the right pacing, and deliver this trust that we've talked about for the last couple of years, Chris, right, in seven seconds or so. And that's a school that I think that every new sales special, they really are dear to their craft, should probably learn how to do, so that's a great, that's a great one, Marc. Corey Frank (05:01): It's almost as if you got this dirty joke level, right on this one matrix, right. And on the other matrix, right, you have your time. And too often, right, a figurative dirty joke level, but you have relationships with people over the course of many months, in many quarters where, you have sat on their left and you've asked them how their week is going. And they've told you, you have no idea. And They poured out their contents of their soul. And you do that month after month, quarter after quarter, you have earned the right to have that figurative dirty joke level, and that's where that trust certainly is engendered, wouldn't you say Chris? Chris Beall (05:42): Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you, Marc. I call what Corey is doing A young blood works finishing school for future CEOs. And it's helping folks start their careers and sales by learning how to have first conversations. The most important thing you ever learn in business is how to have a first conversation with a stranger when you're not prepared for that. The specifics of that conversation, oddly enough, the preparation has to be for the generality of speaking to a human being. And if you have an idea, a clear idea of what the purpose of that conversation is, the first order purpose that is, if I could only do one thing, what would I do is, you know, Corey, I, I used to be a bit of a systems designer, right? I used to build systems of a certain size, right. I just saw the princess bride the other day. So it was like rodents of an unusual size. Chris Beall (06:33): I used to, I used to build systems of an unusual size and, the key to building great systems of an unusual size that worked is to ask this question of the stakeholders, which is, I, you know, I would do it like this. I'd go up to a whiteboard and I draw a big circle. I'm not very good at it, but at least the two pieces would come together. If not perfectly straight, they would intersect in some way. And then, I would draw an arrow out of the right side of that circle. And I put a little stick figure there. I say, okay, so if our system can only do one thing, no compound sentences allowed, what would that one thing be? And, and by the way, who is this, right. In sales, we ask exactly that question. Chris Beall (07:21): If we can only do one thing in this conversation, what would it be, and who is it for? And the answer is simple. What it would be, is we would manufacture trust, and who it's for is the person we're talking with. That's the system of sales. And I speak as a guy who's, as you know, I've got a patent or two, we just had one awarded the other day. We had one for our mobile app, my 18th patent. And this one I'm very proud of, because Dhruv Shah who was 17 years old when he built our mobile app in high school is my co-inventor. And that mobile app does one thing. It lets you talk to people without touching the device that you're using. That's the key, that's its job. It allows Cheryl Turner to go to the park and watch carefully as a good mother, her three-year-old playing on the swings and have conversations with people like the chief financial officer of Johns Hopkins, advanced physics laboratory. Chris Beall (08:29): And she actually did that. She had that conversation while at the park, making sure her kid was having fun and being safe. That's the purpose of that thing. That was what was on that whiteboard. It didn't have a name. It didn't know its inputs, but it knew the one thing, it delivered a conversation to somebody and that little stick figure was a salesperson with no hands. That was the idea, right? So in a conversation, if you know what you're trying to achieve, and you can describe it with that level of specificity, and then you learn how to actually do it. As Marc said, it's not enough to describe it. Now you've got to get good at, it sounds trivial, right? How hard is it to get trust built with somebody in seven seconds? Ah, how do I break that problem down? Thank God Chris' boss broke it down for us. Chris Beall (09:19): So it's, this is the stuff, you know, if I were to ask salespeople to believe something, in order to have great careers as businesspeople believe in precision. Believe that human psychology is a precision science. It's not about generalities, it's not about aphorisms, it's not about opinions, it's not about what your mom told you, it's a precision science. You are a brain surgeon. You're operating with two issues that are really big for brain surgeons. One, you've got to know what's what, in that massive gray, you got to be able to tell the amygdala from the pons or somebody is not going to be able to remember anything in the future. And somebody else might get really pissed off every time, a dog barks way down the street. So you got to be careful. The other is, you can't faint at the sight of blood. And most sales reps faint at the sight of blood. Chris Beall (10:16): The discomfort of being the brain surgeon of having that conversation, where you're in charge of somebody else's mental state, that's too hard for them. And they quail, and they drop to the floor and then they aren't there. That's not good. You see, you got to get over the sight of blood through practice. Corey, you let dozens, hundreds, I don't know how many people come through your program, but I think it's the greatest educational program for business on the face of the earth right now, because they get to experience what it is to actually be a brain surgeon. And you got to do it over, and over, and over. You got to know what you're doing, but it's secondary to being able to actually do it and keep your hand from shaking so much that you've cut somebody's brain apart and make them a little worse than you intended. Chris Beall (11:04): [crosstalk 00:11:04] Marc Hodgson (11:06): It's not just your dad's marketing jargon. That's real transformation. Corey Frank (11:13): Well, it's what we had talked about. Our new best friend Henry right, had been coalesced in this right. Chris and me was talking about, I think it's got to be episode two or three where we kind of talked about this concept of when everything goes perfectly in your business, how does that change your customer's life? Marc Hodgson (11:29): Yes. Corey Frank (11:31): And when you can yield that, right, when you can do that, that Vulcan mind meld in that matrix extraction, it could be that brain surgeon you're there. And so Marc, what you do clearly by playing long ball is because you're invited back into their brain every two to three weeks or whatever your cadence is, quarter after quarter, month after month, until eventually it engenders that fear to trust, trust, to curiosity. And then they'd make that leap to finally commitment. And... Corey Frank (12:02): [crosstalk 00:12:02] Marc Hodgson (12:03): They know I'm not going to cut left. I'm going to cut right. They'll be okay. Corey Frank (12:07): That's right. Marc Hodgson (12:08): I hope. Corey Frank (12:09): You can sit on their right in that bar versus sitting on their left. Chris Beall (12:16): [crosstalk 00:12:16]. Chris Beall (12:16): Great Corey, I love that. Get to the point where you can sit down on their, right. And they're going to hit you with the shoulder and say, "Hey, my week, wasn't that bad this week". Corey Frank (12:27): That's right. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So listen to earlier episodes of that, that analogy if it's confusing for some of you guys, as a core tenet of the Market Dominance Guys, approach to the illustrators. Corey Frank (13:18): That's great. So here's where we're at. We've been enlightened that there are three key roles in a sales organization between the red ocean senior folks that you need, pay light bill. You have blue ocean, long ball guys and gals, right? Who keep the valuation up, kind of de-risk the organization so you don't have to get diluted, brings up capital that is very inexpensive. And then you also have the executive team CEO or in your case, you've got a triple threat between the VP of sales and the chairman, Chris, who are also bringing in dollars and not to mention what that does to keep fresh on the market understanding. We've talked about the fact that to have that arch in, which is really a science in, in the brain surgery of developing your skills to have that first conversation is a skill that everybody should have and continue to sharpen. Corey Frank (14:17): And certainly tools and repetition, I think as our friend Warren Cleft says, "You've got to get frequent before you get good". And when you have a weapon like ConnectAndSell, or any type of weapon that can help you be frequent before you get good. Those are good things, as you start an organization. Not only from the reps increase in efficiency and proficiency, but also in understanding what you had said earlier, Marc, about getting those false positives out of the way and using that to pivot. So I think it's a pretty juicy episode here, Chris, I think thanks to you Marc for, for jumping on word and making this easy. Sometimes when I just do these with me and Chris I'm, I'm the guy that has to... Marc Hodgson (15:04): You've been having a scotch? [crosstalk 00:15:07]. Corey Frank (15:10): So this is, this is fantastic. Any final thoughts, Marc? Any other words of wisdom or things that the viewers should know there? Marc Hodgson (15:18): Well, no, I appreciate you guys having me. It's always an education to listen to you guys, like keep up the good work. I can't believe. I think you said earlier, it was, did you say 70 or 80 episodes in two years already? Corey Frank (15:33): I think it's one episode 85 times, but it's the same thing. [inaudible 00:15:36] I forget what it is. Yeah. It's a lot. It's coming up on two years since we've been on this journey here and I think we're rounding the corner, Chris. I think we actually will have some residue that is market-ready to show to our half dozen listeners here in the next month or two. So that's, that's exciting. Chris Beall (15:59): Yeah. It's pretty wild. I got a question for Marc before we go. So Marc, talk about sharpening, sharpening the tool, right. Abe Lincoln's sharpening the ax, right. So you're an expert at having first conversations, you do it all the time. You do it every single day. How often do you engage with the team in a structured blitz and coach environment and how often per year do you go through flight school, yourself? Marc Hodgson (16:27): Yeah, that's a good question. So I get to tell you, it's interesting. We didn't use to do things like that. We didn't used to participate like this. And then we go through flight school now a couple of times a year and it's a game-changer. I blitz with my team twice a week, two hours. It's on the calendar. It's mandatory unless you got something else that is, you know, supersedes it, which is a pretty tough case to make. Right. But it's been great. You know, we go through flight school, we've seen our own improvement each year because everybody drifts. Got the competitiveness you get out there, we're on a slack channel. Marc Hodgson (17:09): So we do it twice a week. We have four hours a week that we blitzed together as a team of sales directors. We're all closer to 50 than we are 40. So, you know, we're not the SDR type, but you know, it turns out it keeps us sharp, you know, and it's, it's a lot of fun. It's been a game-changer for us than just jumping in here and there. There's no excuses, Corey, there's no excuses, Chris, get out there. And... Corey Frank (17:35): Well, you know what we should do is [inaudible 00:17:37] calling you guys on the carpet, but Ryan Ricerd and, James Boughten has the SDR league, right. The vaunted SDR league sales, development rep league, where Chris, I know connect themselves and big sponsored proponent of this concept of bringing this e-sports concept to the world of outbound selling is you guys are, you guys are just minor leaguer kind of like us. I mean, you been on the wall and you, you're well past your you're a veteran contract here, but maybe we should have a little, a little ConnectAndAll SDR going at it and put them up against a take on all comers. Have another team out there that takes on the connected. So use your blitz time, but do it, do it online live. So maybe we should... Chris Beall (18:17): Well, my account executives have more dials and more conversations per week than the industry standard for SDRs by a factor of seven. That is every one of my million dollar plus quota carriers talks to seven times more people at the top of the funnel, than Trish Bertuzzi and the bridge groups say that the average SDR talks to. Corey Frank (18:47): That's right. Chris Beall (18:48): And I love the fact that SDRs are out there talking to people. But the fact of the matter is your best SDR is an AE armed with ConnectAndSell Corey Frank (19:00): That's right. And a special plug. Steve Richard from foresight and I just did that. We were in the, the octagon, the vaunted octagon. And we show that, Hey, as, as AE's, we both sell, we're both CEOs of our companies and we both sell. And we use a weapon like ConnectandSell. And I think in our little short period, we had four dials and we had three conversations. So not many places where you can do that with... Chris Beall (19:26): Wait, wait... You didn't have four dials and three conversations, you had four conversations in three meetings. Right? Corey Frank (19:31): That's true. That's true. Well no, I didn't have actually three meetings but you know... Chris Beall (19:34): I was going to say $4, anybody can do four dials. I'm going to look right now. Let's just stay on for a second here, because I'm going to look right now at my AE team. This is account executives, carrying million dollar plus quotas. And I'm going to see for today. Corey Frank (19:52): And while you're doing that Trish Bertuzzi says the average SDR does about 47 dials per day, of which half are Colt, correct? Chris Beall (19:59): Exactly. 47 a day. So I'm going to look at our time allocation report. I'm not going to share this screen. Cause Susan says I can't share screens when I'm doing podcasts, but here's the deal. So I've got myself one, two, three, oh, I got to go down to one team. So I got to hit the team cause I was accidentally including some SDRs sales team only. So sales team today, they've had 183 dials and 12 conversations over three people. Let's go back to, let's just do a month cause a month. You can divide kind of by four and figure it out and let's take a look. So my account executive team has had 1005 conversations with decision-makers in the month of May. During that time they did, and by did, I mean they didn't do cause ConnectAndSell did it, navigate 25,001 dials. The number of people on this team I will now count, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. That includes my executive chairman. Chris Beall (21:09): By the way, my executive chairman in the month of May outperformed most SDRs in terms of dials conversations and way by meetings. And our VP of sales himself at $137, 12 conversations set, six meetings. And last I checked, he, when he uses ConnectAndSell to reschedule meetings, he makes us about $242,000 a day, or an hour, I'm sorry. And our top converter Cheryl Turner, who's been on our program, converted her conversations to meetings, her 52 conversations, mostly with CEOs at a 42.3% level. So I don't want to brag too much, but the fact of the matter is your best SDR is your most senior person armed to the teeth to have conversations at pace and scale. Corey Frank (22:06): Yes, absolutely. That's wonderful. Yeah. Those are stats that in our profession in your craft are just unheard of it. So as many of us who have it backward and I think become a believer in the theory of market dominance and certainly what we heard from Marc and Chris today, I think you'll experience that yourself. So thank you for your time, Marc. It's always a pleasure. We'll have you back again. Chris is out of scotch, I'm out of vodka, and we're out of time. So until next time this was the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and Chris Beall, until next time  

The Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, had a meeting of the minds this week with Marc Hodgson of ConnectAndSell, who proudly claims the titles of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer. Chris introduces Marc as a learner, a student of the craft of selling, and a delight to work with. As Chris says, “With Marc there’s no bravado, no sales-jock stuff.” Marc is what’s known as a “long-game player,” spending his work days building relationships with prospects, not pushing for an immediate sale.   He credits fellow ConnectAndSell salesperson John Jackson with being his long-player model. As Marc explains John’s sales approach, “[He] talks to a prospect three or four times a year … and when they’re ready to buy, they buy from John.” The phrase, “Conversations matter,” is the basic tenet of ConnectAndSell, and Marc explains his adoption of it this way: “It takes time to build relationships. I have that core belief that there’s going to be value in the conversation. We’re going to learn together.” You can learn more about being a long-game player in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “When the Time Is Right, the Magic Happens.” ----more----   About Our Guest Marc Hodgson has had an illustrious and successful sales career at a variety of companies and currently holds the position of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer at ConnectAndSell. He resides happily in the Greater Boston area.   ------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.   Here is the full transcript from this episode: Corey Frank (01:39): Fantastic. We have a quorum... an official quorum. Of course, last week, Chris, in the last weeks episode of Market Dominance Guys, a quorum was one because I was indisposed. So... but today we have a real quorum. We actually have a guest and that is Marc Hodgson from Connect and Sell. And me Corey Frank, of course, and the prognosticator of profit in the sake of sales Chris Beall. Corey Frank (02:05): Chris, I'm a little ahead of myself in my skis today because Marc's joining us. And it's not often that we can chat with somebody who is... you take Chet Holmes' pyramid, the market dominance pyramid that we've talked about so much. And Marc is a living, breathing, W2-ing his off, example of somebody who lives on the bottom part of that proverbial pyramid. And so it's good to welcome you to the Market Dominance Guys, Marc. Marc Hodgson (02:35): I'm honored to be here. Honored to be here. Corey Frank (02:38): You know, Marc, I got to ask you, looking over your LinkedIn, your previous experience, you were VP of here and you were a sales director of this, but then when you get to Connect and Sell, you don't use kind of antiquated terms like that. Vice President of Sales, CRO Director. Right? You call yourself a Sales Headcount Multiplier or a Cost per Meeting Reducer. So I think that alone endears yourself, certainly to me and Chris, but of course we're biased because you're part of Connect and Sell, but love the titles. And I think that ties into what we're going to, what we're going to talk about today. Right, Chris? Corey Frank (03:14): How do you kind of get a tap into that 11 twelfths of the market dominance pyramid, or show where the dollars live, where lazy salespeople don't go. In fact, when lazy salespeople see that pyramid, it's like the proverbial Darby dragons, right? Because they don't go that far down the pyramid to actually tap in to this blue ocean. So Chris. How'd you end up tripping over a guy like Marc to join a company like Connect and Sell. And what makes a guy like Marc so perfectly aligned with some of the goals of Connect and Sell on how he approaches market dominance? Chris Beall (03:51): Well, the alignment comes from some straightforward features of our... for one he's tough, but he's pleasant and dealing with me, you better be pleasant, because otherwise, I'll be unpleasant and that's no fun at all. So that part works out. But the main thing is he's a learner. So he's a student of the craft of... not just of sales, but beyond sales and has been since the first time we ever spoke. I recognize that like, okay, we have a hard time at Connect and Sell finding people who fit in, in a sales sense, because there's a lot of folks who are transactional and that's not very interesting. There's a lot of folks who are complicated and my view, which is no solution should be more complex than the problem. And complicators like to aggrandized power actually by complicating beyond the complexity of the problem, and then they harvest the power differential between those two. Chris Beall (04:47): And those people are also generally politicians and Marc is not a politician. You know my intolerance for parasites. And so some of it's negative, he's not a parasite, which is what I find very handy. But this is a funny business because what you're doing is not obvious to anybody, even the people who are doing it, which is you're dealing with a future instead of just the present. Think about all the intent guys, right? Zoom info's out there right now, selling contacts, they sell tons and tons of contacts. They're worth $16 billion, a public company. So how do they try to keep relevant? They add intent data, but intent data only tells you where the feeding frenzy is already going on. So it's like, I want to be there minutes before the feeding frenzy shows up, because I sure hate to waste my time building relationships with people who are going to buy next year. That'd be crazy. Why I want to wait until the last second, see if I can snipe this deal. Corey Frank (05:49): Yes. [crosstalk 00:05:50] Well with everybody else who subscribes, right Marc, to that same piece of intent data. Chris Beall (05:56): Yeah. I mean, that's... he's somebody that I call when I want to think things over and talk things through. There's not a lot of people that can tolerate that. So maybe that's the last feature is he's just playing tolerant of listening to me, which I've listened to a lot of Market Dominance Guys and I wouldn't be. So anyway, it's a delight to work with Marc, and he's also a guy who... he moves consistently up the leaderboard. It's nothing... there's no flash. There's no bravado. There's none of the sales hur-rah-rah-rah-rah, jock kind of stuff. I'm sure he's plenty manly, but he doesn't act some sort of jock. And I like that. I'm a cerebral type myself, a little bit of a wimp and a sissy runs barefoot and stuff like that. And so we do well together. Right, Marc? Marc Hodgson (06:42): I agree. And it's funny, I liked how you talk about the pyramid and whatnot and moving up the leaderboard. And I think that's the thing that people miss the most. Right? You guys talk a lot about this, right? Chris, you talk about opportunities out there in the marketplace, people in the marketplace, three-year placement cycles. There's 12 quarters. There's people out there in that feeding frenzy, what 8.33% of the time that are out there doing business now and the scavengers fighting over pieces and crumbs and reducing their likelihood of success mathematically. And I think where success is really driven... if for our customers too, not just us, the sales folks, is below the water level. It's below the waterline. So the pyramid that's just poking out, that iceberg, Right? And I think that's the most important thing that I've taken from you guys, your episodes here, is the idea that you've got to consistently build trust and it takes time. Right? Marc Hodgson (07:45): You mentioned the time factor. And I think that's the key that people miss and it ties really well into market domination is that yeah, you can do it at scale, but yeah, you need time. And really the blue ocean is that that which is underneath, right? That you develop and you cultivate with trust over time over your competitors. Because I think for me personally, my successes have come from the fact that it's taken a long time to nurture relationships until the time is right. And it may even be earlier than when the time might've been right, but I've been there to help them along and we've discovered along the way. So I think that's been the most sort of fascinating journey for me is to be curious about where they are and continue to build relationships with them until the time is right. And then the magic happens. Right? It just happens. Corey Frank (08:36): Let's talk a bit about that magic. And as a refresher to those who maybe aren't familiar with the great Chet Holmes and the theory of market dominance, listen to our earlier episodes. But in essence, Marcus, you had alluded to, we have this pyramid and on the top of the pyramid, you have this three-ish percent of folks who are ready to buy now. They're in market. It's that time of their three-year bind cycle that they're raising our hand and then you have another what, six, seven, 8% or so, that they're open to it. And then you get the deep waters where you need the good tense and strength line. And there's 30% who are the market that's not thinking about it, 30% don't think that they're interested in it. And then there's 30% who know they're not interested. And you've made a living. You've made a career fishing in those waters and nurturing those little fish that turn into lunkers over time. What's your secret in doing that? Marc Hodgson (09:38): I'll give some credit to a colleague of mine. That's been here with Connect and Sell since the beginning, John Jackson. And I heard very early on when I started here at Connect and Sell, John Jackson has thousands of people in his addressable market, right? His own little market he's looking to dominate. He just talks to them two, three, four times a year. And when they're ready to buy, they buy from John Jackson. And I thought about that and I thought, "Wow." It takes four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 conversations sometimes before the time is right. And you guys talk a lot about trust and that person, that buyer, that group, that company trusts you more than they trust themselves. Marc Hodgson (10:22): And I realized John's been doing it for years. He's mastered that part of the ocean that no one dares dive down to. He owns it. That's his realm. And you know, that... I took that to heart very early on. So for me, it's about building a massive queue of relevant conversations and second conversations. And quite frankly, no one can get to them faster than I can. And no one can build more relationships because people only play that which they stay above the surface. So it's the low-hanging fruit. They pick up the apples that have fallen out of the tree. They dare not climb up and fill their bushel. Chris Beall (11:02): That's interesting. You know what fights over the apples on the ground? At any farm, what fights over the apples on the ground is the pigs. And it's not a pretty sight. Corey Frank (11:12): When you look at Marc's approach, Chris, and you see that these little acorns are turning into big trees over time. If you... because you're living it at Connect and Sell, certainly with how dominant you guys are and how dominant you are, particularly this year, the year that you're killing it here. What if you had... if I was a manufacturing or if I was in real estate or if I was in software and I had an entire team that approached in this way, I'd love your thoughts on that reciprocal effect. Because I think that as sales managers and sales leaders, we're not wired to coach our reps to process that way, to work that way. That market's working, correct? Because I have the pressures of a month, a quarter quota, here's your dial tributes or what have you. So from a leader perspective, what are the long-term gains I can expect if I play long ball, if I play true blue ocean strategy versus red ocean? Chris Beall (12:09): Yeah. What's so interesting to me. It has been for quite a while, and it was John Jackson and Shawn McLaren who taught me this as that the blue ocean is separated from the red ocean in time, not in space. That is... all you have to do is either go back in time. That is go back in their time to where the prospect is early in the process of even considering, or even not considering... to just go back there and talk to them in their time earlier, and the ocean's always blue. That is, there is no competitors. The definition of a blue ocean is there are no competitors. And it's thought that blue ocean strategy is generally around product differentiation, but product differentiation in the modern world is almost impossible. We actually have at Connect and Sell, which is kind of funny that I say that it's almost impossible, but we're an example of where it's... I tell you what, it ain't easy to achieve product differentiation and the way we've done it, we've kind of stumbled into it. Chris Beall (13:05): And then I happened to be kind of a fanatic about patents and know-how and learning how to do things that other's aren't willing to do quite frankly. And it is a dirty job. It's like, you don't want product differentiation? Clean sewers, right? You'll have product differentiation in a hurry compared to people who they're the street sweepers. They have less. And the folks who are waiting tables have less yet. And you know, the host or hostess in the restaurant has the least. There's not much product differentiation up there, but there sure is once you go down the sewers, because nobody wants to do it. And guess what? There's a lot of tricks to cleaning sewers. Once you learn how to do it, then the guy that doesn't want to do it isn't willing to learn how to do it, right? So that's the standard blue ocean theory is as a product-led theory. Chris Beall (13:50): But it turns out there's a universal theory of blue oceans that says, I don't need a whole blue ocean, just give me 11 twelfths. 11 twelfths of the whole lotion being my blue... good enough for me. So all I have to do is travel in time to an earlier point in the consideration cycle for everybody who intrinsically needs my solution and go make those relationships happen from a CEO perspective, it has profound financing implications. It means, especially if you don't want to give up control of your company, you've got to figure out how to finance from current sales, while setting up for future sales, which you can only be assured of on a portfolio basis. But as you... you don't know any specific thing's going to happen. Chris Beall (15:14): Portfolio math is the only math in business. Anybody who tells you that they got some other kind of cool math is a charlatan or an idiot. They're a charlatan saying I can control things that they can't control, or they're an idiot saying I can control things that I can't control, but I don't know I can't control them. Those are your two ends of the spectrum. When I first met Cheryl Turner, who was on one of our episodes, she came to the conclusion that I was either a charlatan or an idiot within the first probably minute and a half of me talking to her team at a primary intelligence... at a test drive. 10 minutes later, she came back in the room, made sure it was empty and said, I thought you were a charlatan or idiot, but now I actually think that you guys are... that you have the truth. They were right, because she started talking to lots of people. Corey Frank (16:00): So it was mutually exclusive, those terms that she tried? Chris Beall (16:04): Exactly charlatans and idiots... the Venn diagram has no intersection. They're like over here, right? They're just way apart from each other. Corey Frank (16:11): Okay. And for those with only a seven years of community college education here, what do you mean by portfolio math first? Chris Beall (16:17): Well portfolio math basically says this, "In the face of ignorance, we need more bets." And so more smaller bets will yield more consistently on a risk adjusted basis than a smaller number of sure things. The sure things are never as sure as you think, and a larger number of less sure things are more sure. And the math itself of portfolios is a big deal in that it's what I call the multiplicative math. That is your risk actually goes down as you multiply the risks of the individual elements of your portfolio. So your risk of one thing that's got... they call it "all your eggs in one basket," except it's actually the worst case is one egg in one basket. And then the very worst is one egg with no basket and you're holding it in your hand. And then the very worst is one egg in one basket. Chris Beall (17:07): What could go wrong? Right? And that's the... that is the... I'll say the charlatans view of the world. What could go wrong? The idiots view of the world, I'm just going to do a bunch of stuff, see what happens. So the portfolio, whether you're an investor investing in a whole bunch of businesses or in a whole bunch of stocks or issues or whatever, or you're an investor, like a salesperson, like Marc. Marc's an investor. Right? What is he doing? He's investing his time, because that's all he's got. Right? I'm not accepting his money. Sorry, Marc. Your money is no good here. Right? But his time is good here. So he invests his time. So now the question is in how many potential future deals at how many different stages, if they're all at the same stage, the risk is higher. If they're all at different stages, the risk is lower for a bunch of interesting reasons. Chris Beall (18:02): One of which is fundamentally the risk is lower because there are different stages and you have variety. The other, which is the slower ones, represent an opportunity for Marc to learn more. So one thing we tend to ignore in sales is we learn more in long relationships than in short relationships. Corey Frank (18:20): Yep. Chris Beall (18:20): And so not only do we build trust, we build knowledge. Marc knows an awful lot about his largest potential customer right now. His... he's very patient. His largest potential customer happens to be a big company whose headquarters has something to do with that flag behind you there. And that company moves at a certain pace and its U.S. operation moves at a different pace than that. And it's various pieces that they've got to make individual decisions because of the way that their budgeting and allocation process works. And, and, and, and so Marc needs to patiently wait. While he's waiting, he's learning because he keeps interacting, providing value, help, and keeps learning things as he goes along. Chris Beall (19:07): So when you play the long game in your portfolio, you're not only broad, but you're deep in time. You dominate the market earlier and more certainly. You actually know you'll dominate. We all show on this. What do you do when you know you're going to nominate, well, stop putting your top people on it, go have them go penetrate a new market because your portfolio of markets is what... that you dominate, is what reduces your risk of going out of business. Chris Beall (19:32): This stuff is, is evident and talked about among passive investors. And interestingly enough, when it comes to our time as salespeople, we are actually mostly passive investors. We're stuck in that position because we can't make anything happen. So what we have to do is engage in many places and let some things happen. The portfolio, when it's big enough, let something happen. I happen to be marrying somebody who is in her last... now how many days, what is this? A third, the last 27 days of her fiscal year. She carries a big quota. In the something that starts at the B and has numbers after it, right? She doesn't have very many customers, a few handful. She's pretty relaxed. She's going to go for a walk with me after this. We're going to go kayaking. Corey Frank (20:26): Yet another woman, [crosstalk 00:20:28] another woman who was in your life, who has decided that you are neither a charlatan or a liar, so. Chris Beall (20:34): Well, if she has decided if I'm a charlatan or an idiot, she's holding out... Corey Frank (20:38): Oh, that's right. Idiot. Chris Beall (20:39): Because my piano playing is so appealing. You never know. It could be the barefoot running, but I don't think so. So Marc, jump in here because this goes to the depths I think of what you're about. Marc Hodgson (20:51): Yeah. You said something really interesting. When you talk about portfolio math, I think people are going to jump right to my existing customers, my existing investments. Right? And yeah, I've got some risks and some long shots and big and small and whatnot. And what you're saying there, I think is, I deeply believe in you absolutely need to be running the top of the funnel as a portfolio as well. That's the game-changer. One of the things that I think is really important is the idea about the false negatives and the false positives. Right? We're so scared sometimes that it's important to explore with curiosity, to not miss false negatives, because we don't know what we don't know until we know it. Right? And it takes time, to your point, to really discover more deeply where they are and where they can fit in your portfolio. We don't manage, build a portfolio and service it, but not just in your customer base, but in your prospect and your relationship base. I think that's a gap that some people don't connect those two dots. Corey Frank (22:05): When you look at this, Marc, from a producer, from a production perspective, and Chris put your sales leader hat on. If I had to replicate this, oftentimes my investors aren't going to let me play the long ball. Right? They're not going to let me play this long game. Doesn't matter if I show them the portfolio math or not. Right? Hey, they got... we got bills. They want valuation. They see this company and they're in the space getting X valuation. And this one's aging that why multiple, how do you manage those expectations or so, and keep the eye on the long-term prize, which is again, the market domination and many of these portfolios that you can get? Chris Beall (22:49): Well, that had to be a question for me because thank God Marc doesn't have to deal with investors and that kind of crap. Right? So I'll take it first hand. If you're going to run something, make a deal that allows you to succeed. I mean, you got to make a deal with the money. And the money comes from two places. It comes from somebody writing a check and it comes from going out and selling stuff. And you've got to understand what their balance... what that balance is. And you've got to figure out how to run a market dominance play within the bounds of what the money will be allowing, not comfortable with. The money is never comfortable with anything other than an instantaneous return that exceeds expectations. That's whether it's your own money or not, but if you're going to play, make sure you're playing on a field where you have a chance. Chris Beall (23:39): I remember once I took a soccer team out on a field and we'd never lost. This was the bug squad team that kicked the ball out of bounds every single time they laid a foot on it. Drove other teams crazy. They went from never being in a game to never losing a game. And finally, they're in a game they're threatened to lose. You know why? Because the Colorado Rapids practice field is tilted toward the South by about one degree. And when you're playing uphill, it's hard. It's really hard. So don't get in a situation where you're playing uphill in advance, unless you like that kind of stuff and you're willing to eat the consequence. And the consequence might be that you have to sacrifice your time portfolio in favor of something else and you don't get to dominate. The other thing is you divide your business immediately at the very beginning into two parts. Chris Beall (24:30): And part one is the long play. That's what Marc is, he's our long play. Part two, which looks like part one, if you look at it by numbers, but it's not is the financing play. And the way you run that is you have your most senior executives sell in the red ocean, because your most senior executives can always sell. They can sell on any color, ocean red, blue, green, blood drenched, doesn't make any difference. These are the people who can go into battle that what I call, and I think I've mentioned this on a show, the sword fight in the darkroom. If you are at that point in your career, where you win every single sword fight in a dark room, then go win some for the company and bring in some cash so that everybody else can play a long game and you can do it without interference from the outside money. Chris Beall (25:26): And so that's how you actually allow yourself to play the long game is don't ask your long game players to play the short game. You play the short game. This is one of the reasons CEO's should sell. I was talking to a CEO today, Dashur, and he said, "I like Larry Ellison's phrase. If you're not creating a product or selling a product, what are you doing here?" And that's one of those things that people sometimes take as Larry being macho. But what it really is, is Larry being smart. He's saying in terms of our independence of action, our ability to execute strategy, we've got to make money today also. Corey Frank (26:08): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (26:09): But my view is don't waste your reps time, your reps are your future. They're playing long games. Their portfolio can be much bigger yours, but if you're a leader... you're a company leader and you're not out there selling for gross profit contribution, that's what you sell for. Then you're letting the team down because you're causing the situation or allowing a situation where outside money is going to control whether your market dominance team gets to run the long play that needs to be run. The sword fight in the darkroom is not comfortable for everybody, but I guarantee you, every senior person who runs a company knows how to do it. Sometimes they have to be thrown into the darkroom a few times and come out dripping and ask whose blood that is. Right? Sometimes that's the way it is, but that's what we're good at. And so that's how you divide it up. It's super simple. It's super simple, but it's not often done. Corey Frank (27:06): So in essence then, and Marc you could chime in on this, right? Chris, you're saying that you need folks like Marc on that wall as a hedge, against getting diluted by having to go to the capital markets or going to the other investor markets to get more capital, with Marc's hedge against that. And Marc, you have a CEO on the wall, right, who's a hedge to support you to continue to do what you're doing on the 11 twelfths to the market, because his contribution helps bring in those margins that allow you to keep the lights on, pay the medical insurance, advise you times you guys can live to fight another day. So I hear that as an organization, you need both those elements. Corey Frank (27:52): If you just had a CEO who sold for margin and everybody in the short game and a red ocean, that's not very effective. Chris Beall (27:59): Right. Corey Frank (27:59): If you have all three components, you have a short-term team, you have a long-term deep pyramid, a blue ocean too. And you have a mindset of a CEO, or like you have with Jonti as well, right? A VP of sales who also contributes. And I guess in your case, you would even have a chairman who contributes. Chris Beall (28:16): We do. We were very fortunate. We have three senior executives who sell a lot, but we're not... it goes on the books as cash and revenue, but in my mind, it doesn't go there. Our contribution is financing. Corey Frank (28:32): Yes. Chris Beall (28:32): And what we're doing is maintaining independence of action. Corey Frank (28:35): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (28:35): That's our job is to maintain independence of action. The action is actually not our action. The action is Marc's action and his colleagues who are building that deep, deep portfolio over time and over accounts, and sometimes even over the edge of markets where we'll... it's like water splashing out of a glass, right? You carry the glass around. If it's pretty full, it's going to splash here and there. Every once in a while, you're going to splash over into another market and you learn something. So that learning is taking place with Marc and Matt, and Seth, and all these folks. We don't have a big team, but it's a learning team. And as they execute, they're actually executing in another dimension. They're executing in deep time. Whereas my fellow executives and myself, so it's myself, it's Jonti and Shawn, the three guys who keep the lights on. We're simply avoiding. It's not dilution of money. That's not interesting. It's dilution of purpose. We're avoiding dilution of purpose... Corey Frank (29:42): Yeah. Chris Beall (29:42): By going out and winning some sword fights. Marc Hodgson (29:46): That's it, right? I mean, that provides us the sales directors the ability to go out there and stay curious and be open-minded to discovering things in new markets and new customers that we normally wouldn't if we run a very flat playbook. Right? We explore and talk to customers that you'd never think would be a good fit. And we learn this and we share this. So you're right, Chris, it frees us up to get out there and exponentially harvest learnings and markets and build portfolios that we otherwise wouldn't. We never would if we were governed to a playbook that was narrow. We get to go wide and that's fun. Corey Frank (30:31): So, Marc, how do you taste blood in this world? Right? Because as sales... sales guys and gals, right? Sometimes we'll buy your where... we want to ring the gong. Right? Every day, every week or so. And the month of the quarter and playing long ball and having a currency... an alternative currency, if you will, by building long-term relationships, now you've seen a reciprocal effect. You've seen them go though the entire life cycle, so you know how the movie ends, but how do you maintain that level of motivation and blood lust along the way with the activities that you're doing? Marc Hodgson (31:06): I'm a competitive person. I think there.. our whole team has that aspect. So I pride myself to be on the top of the leaderboard metrically, but intrinsically, I drive a lot of value from that know personally. Right? So that's part of it. That's it... and everybody here is kind of built that way, I believe, so that's a lot of fun. But I think it's more of the curiosity factor. I really, truly do. Chris has talked about this. I do have that core belief that when I get on the phone, that there's going to be value in a conversation that I can have with people. We're going to learn together, whether we ever do business together. And that's sort of my core belief throughout the sales cycle, whether it's the top of the funnel conversation, a discovery conversation, them getting the opportunity to experience one of our intensive test drive days, which is the best day that you can have because you learn so much about them as people and their culture and their process. And those are the best days that we have here, our test drive day. So for me, it's about getting there and having them have the experience. The rest takes care of itself. Corey Frank (32:24): Yeah.  

On our podcast this week, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, is flying solo with an episode about selecting the best SDR to have discovery conversations with senior-level prospects. You might subscribe to the “cheaper cold callers are better” mindset, but Chris presents some well- thought-out reasons to put your money where your telephone’s mouthpiece is. That’s right — once again, Market Dominance Guys is asking you to look at the scary spot — cold calls — and rethink what would work best. Chris’ contention is that people holding senior-level positions are much more likely to respond to and connect with someone who has the same level of experience or background they have. ----more---- Here’s what he says: “If somebody is worth having a meeting with, then have a senior person be the contact.” He means, have that person conduct each call in the sales process, from first conversation, through follow-up calls or rescheduling a missed meeting, to the discovery call. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to set a meeting or to get accurate discovery information when talking with a senior person if the caller is also a senior person. Generally, there will be a shared background or job experience that will create a connection between these two senior-level people. As good old Mom used to tell us, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” So, put your best, most experienced, highest level cold caller’s foot forward. There are plenty of other sales-related tasks better suited for your young SDRs. Yep. Doing what works: That’s what it’s all about on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “The Best Frog- Kisser for the Job.” ------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Chris Beall (02:22): Hey, everybody. Welcome to a solo episode of Market Dominance Guys. This is Chris Beall, one of your two co-hosts. Corey Frank and I, have not quite been able to get it together, to get it together and put an episode down. And it is Memorial Day weekend, so I figured I'd leave Corey alone to enjoy time with his family, and I'd come down here to the beach and tell you what I think about the world of SDRs. Chris Beall (02:51): So here's what I think. SDRs became very popular mostly because Aaron Ross wrote a really cool book called Predictable Revenue. And in Predictable Revenue he said, we should specialize, we should have folks who work really at the top of the funnel who are going out and identifying new business opportunities and engaging with them, bringing them to meetings and getting them into the funnel really proactively. Chris Beall (03:18): And back in the day, that could be done with email, and so there was a lot of email involved. It can still be done a little bit with email. It's a lot easier to do just by calling people and talking to them. Although that's not easy, because you're going to go to voicemail probably 23 out of 24 times. So then you could cheat and use something like our product ConnectAndSell. And then you push a button and talk to somebody and suddenly conversations can be how you move forward. Chris Beall (03:44): Now here's my point, is once you elect to go conversation first, use a conversation as the very first way that you interact with somebody, a whole bunch of stuff happens, and some of it has something to do with SDRs. Why is that? Well, first let's look at what happens. Chris Beall (04:02): When we talk to somebody, especially a senior person, a decision maker, and we talk to them directly, we have a problem at the very beginning and the problem is they don't want to talk to us. Why? Well, they don't know who we are. Frankly we scare them. We're the invisible stranger on the other end of the phone, a whole bunch of reasons that they don't want to talk to us. They want to get off that phone call with their self-image intact. Chris Beall (04:26): And fortunately, we can use that fact in order to get them to talk to us, or at least listen to us a little bit. And then we can, as Cheryl Turner has said so artfully, we can turn if into when, and how do we do that? Well, we do this. We say something like, "I know I'm an interruption, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" And then when they say, "Hmm, yeah. Go ahead" or whatever they say, we say what we're going to say, which is I kind of like this breakthrough script. Chris Beall (04:57): "I believe we've discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates," and then you completely eliminate some three bad things. One of them being a bad economic thing, that's time, risk or money. One of them being a bad emotional thing, often frustration, occasionally something more like fear, but fear is kind of a third rail. Be careful of touching that one, because people don't really like to be told that they're afraid of anything. Chris Beall (05:21): And then the last one is what we call strategic, which is something that's standing in their way from getting to where they want to go. Strategy is a list of steps where you want to go and how you're going to get there. So it's not how you're going to execute the steps, it's the list of steps. And if a step is becoming accessible, blocked, too expensive or whatever, and that's something where we're a difference maker, where our product or service can make a difference, then we can mention that. Chris Beall (05:46): We have to not mention of course, that we offer a known service or a known product in a known category, or they will say, "We're set". Why will they say we're set? Very, very simple reason. They're looking to get off this call with their self-image intact. And an easy way to do it is for you to blow it, tell them what your category is of product or service, and then they can say quite rightly, already got that covered. And you can't say much about that. Chris Beall (06:15): So you avoid all that. And then you point out that it'd be a great idea to finish this off by doing what you promised. "So the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar to share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available?" Say it in a playful, curious voice. Chris Beall (06:32): Now, if you go through all of that and then when they say, "Well, I don't know," or whatever, you do the Cheryl Turner play, you manufacture a no-show. No shows are the most powerful thing in business, because once you get them on the phone again, which you will be able to do again if you're using this, as Jerry Hill calls it, cheat code, called ConnectAndSell, then it's really straightforward. Chris Beall (06:56): You're going to talk to them after they don't show up for the meeting and say, "Hey, we had something on our calendar for 9:00 AM yesterday, and something must have come up for you. Is now a better time to talk about when we could get something back on the calendar?" And you have that conversation. It might take one, two, three times, but here's a funny thing, by the way, the very, very senior people will show up. CEOs show up almost every time to something that's on their calendar. It's kind of how they live their lives. Chris Beall (07:23): More junior people, they're often pulled this way in that. And so they've got a lot of reasons to talk to somebody else that day, rather than talk to you. And that moment something might've come up, they fight more fires is actually what their lives are like. And that's all right. Just go ahead and have that conversation and reschedule. Chris Beall (07:41): And remember this, you've just made a list automatically and managed a list of people who actually answer the phone. So that's pretty good, because you know they answer to the phone, they answered the phone before, and now they've answered it twice because you're talking to them about rescheduling. So all is well, they'll answer it over and over, it's their habit. And you can talk to them repeatedly until they actually show up at the meeting. At which point you can have a further conversation with them in which you actually share your breakthrough. Chris Beall (08:11): So how do you blow this? Well, one way to blow it is to put a junior person on the phone talking to a senior person. Oren Klaff talks about what we call status alignment or what he calls status alignment, and I sure call it that now. Status alignment is about making sure the other person is aligned with you and you're aligned with them regarding your status in the conversation, that you're equals. And that's a little harder to do when you're just fresh out of school. And you've been put on quote, unquote, the phones in order to talk to people. Chris Beall (08:43): You can learn it, but it's harder. It's a lot easier to do when, guess what? You already have that person's status because you have 10, 15, 20 years into the business, you know a thing or two. Chris Beall (08:56): And when you talk to them, that will come out two ways. One is in your voice, you will sound different. You'll sound confident. You'll sound like you know what you're talking about, because guess what? You know what you're talking about. The other is when they check you out before coming to the meeting or check out whoever it is that you've set the meeting with, they're going to remember very little. When they check you up, they're going to note, is this somebody I want to meet with or not? Chris Beall (09:21): So the easiest meeting to get somebody to come to, and pay attention to, is a meeting that is set by a senior person for themselves, that's an account executive, making their own calls, or for somebody even more senior, say their CEO and there's a reason for that. And this one is not obvious to most folks, but think about it this way. Chris Beall (09:44): If somebody is worth having a meeting with, because the data says they're worth having a meeting with, why don't you get off on your best foot and have a meeting with the most senior person available, maybe it's your CEO, who could spend 15 minutes and let this person know why you're really in business, how you're really trying to help people. What it's all really about. Chris Beall (10:06): Your CEO or somebody like that, will have a story or two or three about how they got there. They'll be credible. They'll be interesting. They'll share backgrounds with folks. Chris Beall (10:18): I had a meeting just this week with somebody and it turns out we both worked at Sun Microsystems and there was a lot to talk about there. But it was a long time ago, 20-something, on my case, 30-something years ago. But we had a lot to talk about there. And we had other things to talk about as a result. Chris Beall (10:35): It's not like we're going to have a social conversation. It's just that people's status align around a whole bunch of things, and familiarity, a shared past, that sort of thing can be helpful. If you don't have a past, if you're a 23-year-old SDR, you don't have much of a past, it's hard to have a shared past with a senior person. So it's more difficult to status align. Chris Beall (11:30): So you've got to get status alignment before you can get to the point of executing what Corey Frank calls or Oren Klaff calls, Corey calls it that too, a flash role. That's where you casually speak fairly quickly about something that only an expert would know, treating it as something routine. And in our case, it's really simple. Chris Beall (11:52): I'll go to a ConnectAndSell leaderboard, and we'll take a look at it. And I'll just say this, I'll say, "Well, take a look there. There's Rob. And Rob is one of our inside salespeople. And Rob has used ConnectAndSell today for three hours, 27 minutes and 35 seconds. And during that time he's had 46 conversations. And out of those 46 conversations, he's set three meetings." Chris Beall (12:16): So Rob's probably feeling pretty good today, because 2.3 meetings is his goal. And how did he do that? Well, he pressed that go button that's up at the top. And he waited a little bit. Whenever he wanted a conversation and only when he wanted a conversation. And then he waited. How long did he wait? Three minutes and 54 seconds on average. Chris Beall (12:34): Now all that is not very instructive, but it is something interesting, especially when I add, "And Rob did not have to dial the phone once. All he did was pushed a button 46 times, and in the background, what happened was however many dials, you know, 857 dials." So that's a bit of a flash role. You'll have your own. Chris Beall (12:58): But if you're a senior, your flash role is better because the fact that you are an expert, makes you sound like an expert and the idea of the flash role is to allow somebody else to be confident in you as an expert, because what is surprising and special to them, what is unusual, what would require expert knowledge is casual and routine to you, and they can tell in the way that you deliver it. Chris Beall (13:21): So it's a lot easier to run a sales play, where a senior person sets a meeting for themselves and holds that meeting, or a senior person sets a meeting for an even more senior person, and they hold the meeting together. In which case there's also something to talk about, which is the person who set the meeting, in case that's a reasonable way to use their time. And then you can pass it off to a sales person, should there be a reason to move forward. Chris Beall (13:50): So the inversion of this play in which the standard play is start with a junior person because, hey, you're going to have to go through a lot, kiss a lot of frogs, they say, so why don't you assign somebody to kiss the frogs? Chris Beall (14:01): Well, the fact is if you assign somebody to kiss the frogs, not very many of them are going to turn into princess or princesses, whichever you prefer. Those frogs are pretty much going to stay frogs, and that's not what you're looking for. Chris Beall (14:15): So find yourself a good frog kisser to have the first conversation and especially to take the first meeting. After that, everything's a lot easier. Because really when you come right down to it, you want to have the choices and you don't have very many choices if you have a meeting with somebody who kind of doesn't think that you're that interesting. Chris Beall (14:36): So leave the junior people for other work. In fact, research work is great. Learning to cold call is great, but not sure they should be calling the most senior people to set meetings. So they could be calling to ask questions or do all manner of other things. Chris Beall (14:51): And don't treat it as a training ground, because if you treat the SDR function as a training ground for being an AE, what you're doing is wasting the top of your funnel. In fact, you're wasting it in a really horrifying way. You are taking the opportunities that are most difficult to identify because you have the least information, and you're providing really an experience that is most likely to cause them to not be interested or cause you to not be interested as a company in going further with them. Chris Beall (15:21): So you're going to walk right by some of your very best opportunities, that if a more senior person had actually had the first conversation, and the follow-up conversation, and the appointment rescheduling conversation, and then an even more senior person had had the first discovery call, which would be mutual discovery, not interrogation, which is such a sad and common thing. Then what you'll do is run a very clean top of funnel, that'll give you very pure feedback about the most important thing, which is ultimately your list, because your list is the definition of your market. Chris Beall (15:55): So consider this possibility the next time that you're looking at designing or executing one of these sales plays, that your best resource to have a first conversation is a senior resource. And your best, best resource to have a discovery conversation is somebody even more senior than that. And the past can then be down to more junior people who can handle the next steps. The mechanics. Chris Beall (16:21): Say there was a demo to be done, or there's some exploration of how you would actually do business together, some due diligence. That kind of work can be done by lots and lots of people.  

In this week’s episode of Market Dominance Guys, you’ll get to listen in on part 2 of the conversation between our own Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, and our guest, Mark Roberts, CEO, and founder of OTB Solutions. These two experts hold the same unfaltering belief about the importance of the first conversation a sales rep has with a prospect: they’ve learned that the cold caller has to believe in the potential value of the discovery meeting they are offering in order to be successful at setting that meeting. Mark works as a consultant with CEOs of manufacturing companies, many of whom have voiced the lament, “Why can’t my sales department run like my plant?” Mark thinks that sales really can be a science. “There are dollars in your data if you know where to look,” he says. So, how do you get a CEO to say, “Oh! Belief really does count!”? Show them the numbers. Chris and Mark know that every time a CEO listens in on his reps’ sales calls during one of ConnectAndSell’s intensive test drives, they can easily discern the difference between reps who believe in the value of the meeting and reps who don’t — just by looking at the conversation-to-meeting ratio. They can see what “good” looks like and how much fun reps have when they are successful. Marks explains it like this: “Belief, worthy intent, and fun change the quality of the rep’s output. These things that sound ‘squishy’ are the bedrock of success.” And bringing market dominance to worthy manufacturers is the bedrock of this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “Why Can’t Sales Run Like My Plant?” ----more---- About Our Guest Mark Allen Roberts, CEO and founder of OTB Solutions, works with company leaders to improve sales and profits by leveraging a data-driven, no smoke and mirrors approach to driving profitable sales growth through assessing sales teams’ skills, motivations, and beliefs and then providing strategic development to improve their performance. ------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Chris Beall (02:22): It's so interesting. And that worthy intent part is such a big deal. We went through something a few years ago with a manufacturing company in this case also, where they asked us to do some calling for them, which is something we did for a while. And then we backed off of that and let our partners like young blood works, Corey Frank runs that company, my podcast cohost and others who want to use ConnectAndSell in a setting appointments to do it. But we were doing it ourselves a little bit at the time and we were getting terrible results for a week. And a week of ConnectAndSells it, is a lot. Mark Roberts (02:55): That's a lot of conversation. Chris Beall (02:56): Four people we... It's a lot. It was roughly speaking, 600 conversations. Mark Roberts (03:02): Wow. Chris Beall (03:02): And with four people that were working in that week, about 150 each and they were getting horrible results. And yet we knew that the scripting was good. The breakthrough script that we use, we know that it's effective if used correctly. They sounded good, but there was something a little off and over the weekend, I was out for a long run. And I suddenly thought, I know what the problem is. They don't believe. Mark Roberts (03:25): Yup. Chris Beall (03:26): These people don't believe in the potential value of the meeting as a learning experience for the person they're talking with, regardless of whether business ever gets done any further. And so, went back to the customer to the company and said, "hey, could you dig up one or two folks who would have a very clean recollection of their first discovery meeting with your company?" And they could tell our reps, our top of funnel reps, what the customer learned from that meeting that changed their life. Mark Roberts (04:00): Right. That's [crosstalk 00:04:02]. Chris Beall (04:01): And they found somebody and we had that person. The science was really something because we'd gone through this baselining without intending to. Chris Beall (04:11): And then we did this. We suspended all calling on Monday. And this person simply spoke from the heart for about 30 minutes, about how working with this company. It changed their life but the main thing was what they learned in that meeting even if they'd never moved forward that they found so valuable. And suddenly our people, same script, same list, same everything. Just add belief in the potential value of the meeting, backed up by the words of somebody who got value from that meeting. And they went from setting 3.2% of their conversations to meetings, to setting 12.6% and they did it in one day, just changing the belief switch. And I find that fascinating. Mark Roberts (04:55): Yeah. You reframe the mindset. They had a limiting belief. I'm going to go through this. I don't know if it's going to be a value. You demonstrated that it was tremendous value. And then they led with worthy intent. I applaud what you did. Oftentimes, they might have the technology, but they lack the training, but you guys provide the script and the coaching and the psychology of the call. I think what's going to ultimately happen as more manufacturers engage with you, the bottleneck is going to move. It's going to move to the conversation and it's going to move to closing. It's going to move to negotiating, but at least we'll be having conversations with people that we can serve. And we know they have problems that we can help them with. So, yeah, I think you guys really were onto something back then with the worthy intent. Chris Beall (05:43): Well, as a guest at the time, it was desperate because I'd taken on this. Basically it was like a skin in the game contract. It was such a good partner. I decided to do it. And then I realized, oh my God, talk about the tide going out. And then you look go, I forgot my swim trunks. So I felt pretty bad about having taken on that contract. And what I think is interesting is... I'm a very analytic guys. I'm a physicist mathematician by training and you don't go into those fields unless you're analytic. I don't know a lot of people that go, I think for four years, I'm going to sit here and work equations, like partial differential equations and stuff like that because I just think it's something a person should know how to do it. Chris Beall (06:31): You do it because you're naturally inclined to do it. So I'm a very analytical person and what my analysis would normally have not found. And I think most analytical people would agree with me is putting in potential ingredients, like belief, worthy intent, fun and believing that these are important, concrete, measurable, critical inputs and indications of the quality of outputs. I think funds and indication of the quality of the output that you're putting out for a mission critical business process on which their entire company's life depends. Chris Beall (07:10): I think a lot of people who become CEOs of these manufacturing companies are pretty analytical people. They've got to be. Mark Roberts (07:16): They are. Chris Beall (07:17): They go out on the floor, I've been out on the floor with tons of them and they can see what's going on. They analyze it quickly. You put the spreadsheet in front of them and they go, "yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not right" or "that is right" or "that means that's right", there like that. So it tends not to occur to them that these things that sound squishy are in fact, the bedrock of success, not for a function, but for the whole company, it just doesn't seem right. Do you find... Is that a problem as you see it to get them over that hump? How do you get a CEO to go, "oh, belief counts", right? It makes all the difference. Mark Roberts (07:57): Well, and again, I think a lot of times the strategy that I use is they want to see a business case. They want to see proof. So I asked them. Let me have 30 of your people for 60 days. Let me show you what good looks like. And once they see that, it's just like, when they're working in the plant and they're trying to improve efficiency and lower their manufacturing variance, it's a science. Well, sales can be a science if you know where to look and what data to look at. Mark Roberts (08:27): I just started a couple of videos that says, there's dollars in your data if you know where to look. And what's nice about ConnectAndSell is it gives you the data and you can constantly coach and improve. So the top of the funnel, if that's the problem you're trying to solve, very quickly, you're going to be able to adjust your message. You're going to be able to adjust your tone and in constantly make it stronger until you see a repeatable model that works. And then once you get the meeting, how many of those meetings are converting into business? Conversations that turn into revenue? Now that might be your bottleneck, but each one of these involves a training and technology and coaching. Chris Beall (09:09): Yeah. Driving that bottleneck down and measuring it and having the data is crucial but it's rare. I think it's rare because the current bottleneck for every company I've run into for years is actually, I will call it just above the top of the funnel that they measure. And as a result, there's no metrics coming to them. There's no data coming to them about the one thing that is holding them back. As soon as you bring the bottleneck down into the sales funnel, almost everybody can at least look at it and go, "oh", but until it's there and I say, that's kind of at discovery, the flow rate of discovery meetings until you make that the bottleneck, the tools. I think that most companies have, that most CEOs have at their disposal to measure progress towards new logos, which are, as far as my experiences, those the profitable logos. There before the procurement department on the other side grinds you down over the years. Mark Roberts (10:08): Right. Chris Beall (10:09): My dad used to be a head of procurement. So I got to watch what procurement did at home. My dad was ran procurement. So, that maybe that's why I'm on the sales side now. So, here's an example, how many companies, how many CEOs would be able to tell you what the prospecting output is? Flow rate is in terms of meetings set per prospecting hour for a rep? Per rep hour spent prospecting? Mark Roberts (10:40): I don't think we [crosstalk 00:10:41]. Chris Beall (10:41): Would you... have you ever met one [crosstalk 00:10:43]. Mark Roberts (10:43): I haven't met one that could do that. What they would do is they would defer to their VP of sales, ask them, and the VP of sales would have to manually try to figure it out with the CRM, but nobody can tell them for [inaudible 00:10:54] that I'm aware of. Chris Beall (10:56): Shockening, right? Because every factory you or I have ever been in, you can go to any point in the factory and ask the question, what is the flow rate? Mark Roberts (11:07): Correct. Chris Beall (11:08): That is produced at this point. And every manufacturer knows the answer to that question. At every point, every process, every machine, every workstation, all the inputs, all the outputs. Mark Roberts (11:19): Well, I think that what thrives [crosstalk 00:11:21]. That statement the CEO has make, which is I wish sales would run like my plant. They know that to be true in a plant. The good news is their sales can run like that, but it just takes a different training. It takes different tools and it takes a different mindset, quite frankly, but again, in a weird way, their gut is right. Sales can run like that and can get you predictable results, but it just needs to be run a little bit different, more scientific, more data-driven than it's ever been before. Chris Beall (11:55): Yeah. And I think a lot of people who are going up to try to do something about it, they'll look at the... What they consider, maybe the more leading edge sales companies like software as a service company, SAS companies, maybe even Silicon valley startups and say, let's emulate them. So maybe we'll hire sales, development reps or do whatever. I've got data that says that for account executives, especially those experienced once you've talked about that you can take them and.. I have hard data by the way. This is a hundreds of reps going through what we call flight school. You can take them from this number, the average when you start them out untrained, even using ConnectAndSell. And you had mentioned dials per hour, ConnectAndSell tends to run about 170, 190 dials per hour per rep. So it's about two and a half to three days of dialing. Chris Beall (12:46): So to speak, that's done for them per hour. Even with ConnectAndSell. The average number of meeting set per hour per rep is about 0.39. During training, when you take them through a script that works, teach them how to say it, they're now going through what we call flight school during the blitzes, that number goes up to 0.53, that's pretty big lift, right? Mark Roberts (13:12): Right. Chris Beall (13:13): 0.14 over 0.39. It's almost 50%. sustainably in the long run, if they continue to blitz and coach forever, that number actually goes up and up and up. And we'll stabilize around 0.72. This is the actual numbers that we have right now. And we have some companies that are in the 1.2, 1.3 range, but overall, those experienced reps, not going to sales development reps in a separate department setting meetings for them to setting their own meetings. They can do that at a rate of 0.72 per hour. Chris Beall (13:49): So if you kept 30 people and they prospected for an hour... Say an hour a day, at the end of a week, of any given week, that three... For five times 0.72, it'd be about 3.5 meetings per week that they would be able to have that you say they would hold with great competency, those discovery meetings. So 3.5 a week is that's 850 meetings a year eight something. If you have 30 of them, that's 30 times 800. Isn't that a big number? Three times 800 is 2,400, 24,000 meetings a year that it would be having. How could that not move the needle? Mark Roberts (14:33): Well, it definitely would. But again, we've got to find where the bottleneck is and I think you're right. I think when it comes to prospecting, the biggest bottleneck is just this the first conversation to get the meeting. Chris Beall (15:23): Which means that's the bottleneck of the whole company. This is the mission I've been on is to tell CEOs... I'm a CEO, right? If I couldn't go to my board and say an answer to a question, where's the bottleneck of the whole company right now? If I can't answer that question, I'm doomed. I happen to know in my company where the bottleneck is. The bottleneck in my company's in discovery. And it's a mindset issue. In discovery, when your mindset is both to take the next step and to qualify at the same time, it's an approach avoidance issue. It's like watching a horse try to jump a gate when it's not sure it can get over the gate or not sure it should. So it will tend to go around or stop and throw the rider. Mark Roberts (16:07): Oh, wow. Chris Beall (16:08): There's a commitment that you've got to have to an outcome to accomplish anything. It's like in a golf swing. Chris Beall (16:14): If I'm not sure that say, I've got a downhill putt and I'm afraid it's going to run way by the hole, that uncertainty will make me miss all putt short, long, sideways and everything else because I can't commit to an outcome. I'm not willing to take the risk. I believe in my company, my reps by and large don't want to take the risk of taking the wrong prospect through a test drive. And so that's what I get to a desk. And I would tell my board that, that's our problem. But our problem is not at the top of the funnel. No. We set 35 meetings a day like clockwork and that's way more than are needed to run the company. In fact, I've got a little slush factor above that. They spill out. Take... I get some leakage up there that's sideways. Chris Beall (17:04): Every CEO should be able to answer that question. I'm flabbergasted. If the problem is sitting right there above the top of their funnel, and that's the truth, that's the true bottleneck. Well, they resist that because they haven't seen it for so many years or are you... Because I look at a guy like you 30 years, 40, whatever. 30... How long is fact 83. 38 years of industrial experience on the sales side, a guy like you should be able to talk to a CEO and say, "hey dude, hard to break this to you. But the bottleneck of your entire company is likely to be in a place where you have zero metrics." Mark Roberts (17:47): I'll absolutely. Part of my practice is I do sales effectiveness assessments. And those assessments very quickly, we'll find that people have the will and the desire to hunt. So it's not like your salespeople are lazy or they don't want to try to sell. But when you quickly look at all the data, they lack the skills, the conversations, often technology to have those conversations. But once they have the conversation, they usually score very high in presentation skills, the ability to solve customer's problems, the ability to share insights, they score very high in that. So again, it's like you said, the theory of constraints, what's your constraint? Not many people are measuring dials that I'm aware of in the manufacturing space. Mark Roberts (18:37): I know that people in large enterprise software companies do measure outbound calls, the closure rate per call, but in manufacturing, it's not unusual for them to spend a tremendous amount of money to enter into a new market, let's say. And they've spent the development dollars. They spent the capital dollars and then they spend the marketing dollars to open up that market. But what's right in front of them is just the dials. How are you reaching out? How are you getting those conversations started? Have we gone so far as to rely a hundred percent on marketing? I think that's a big mistake. Chris Beall (19:15): It's crazy, but it's done. Mark Roberts (19:16): It is done. Chris Beall (19:17): I would say here's the number most folks don't know at all, which is on average for a manufacturing company, who's got a high end product to sell. Doesn't have to be a million dollars, but say, it's at least 50 to $100,000 per unit that they're selling, perhaps and that it's a considered purchase. How many dials should it take with a competent team, well-trained as a target to get a meeting? And the answer is across other manufacturing companies we're working with 261. So once you know that you'd think you'd want to know, well, okay, are we doing 261 of those whatever per day, per week, per month per rep or not? And yet I would contend most CEOs would look at that and go dial smiles. What's that? Who cares? Mark Roberts (20:05): Right. Again, I think we've uncovered the biggest bottleneck for most growth is simply starting the conversation. Chris Beall (20:13): So maybe the Biden administration who wants the economy to do well, because that's what you're supposed to do as president. Maybe they should be paying attention to this. They want manufacturing to succeed in America, right? Mark Roberts (20:24): Absolutely. Chris Beall (20:25): And I think what you're saying is it's [inaudible 00:20:29] got all the ingredients of success except for one little issue, which is, it's almost like, imagine. I'm trying to imagine. I'm thinking of a plant and this is happening right now, by the way, in a way, if I was running an automotive plant right now, this is a problem I would have. Semiconductors aren't coming in predictable. Mark Roberts (20:48): Right. Chris Beall (20:49): My supply chain people are going crazy trying to find semiconductors. They're looking at alternate sources of supply. They're going to designers and saying, can we substitute this chip for these two chips because I can get these? Can you redesign that board? Chris Beall (21:03): What can we do? Where are we going? Does anybody have surpluses here and there? Can we go down and quality a little bit? What can we do? And what it feels like if you're running the plant is it's fits and starts. It's like, you're the one thing that you must have to make a car now is Silicon. You have to have chips. Cars are full of chips nowadays. If I'm missing one of those chips, I can't ship the car with some critical function like the thing that makes the anti-lock brakes work, not in the car. Mark Roberts (21:35): Right. Chris Beall (21:37): That's not they we're geared. Not allowed to do that. So it's almost like you have a door that's on one of your days where you take in your raw materials in your parts in order to feed your factory. Chris Beall (21:49): And then the door has a lock on it that opens at random. And it opens every once in a while and then it shuts at random and you go, oh, I guess we got a little something. We can make it, right? Conversations with relevant prospects, play that role in every single company. So we talk about a Silicon shortage or a chip shortage and that's a disaster for the economy and everybody's freaking out, everybody's freaking out. That's all there is to it, right? And yet we've had a conversation shortage that is worse than the chip shortage, but we've just gotten used to it and decided that it's okay. Mark Roberts (22:29): One of the biggest challenges that I see is people understand, let's say prospecting, they might have some skill, but very rarely do I see a team that continuously prospects. So what that ends up being is that rollercoaster ride of great month, poor month, great month, poor month. We've got to help our salespeople constantly be reaching out, trying to get new business from new customers, as well as gaining share of wallet at our current accounts. But again, that's going to require skills and technology to do so. Chris Beall (23:00): Is there a part of the manufacturing industry, a sub sector that you think is particularly stressed right now? And therefore might be more open-minded or desperate? I like desperation. Some people, it makes them close-minded. Some people, it makes them creative and finding the creative ones is fairly straightforward. You just talk to enough people and somebody will go, "hey, wait a second. That has really been bothering me." You have an answer or a possibility in that area. I want to talk to you. Is there some part of manufacturing, the stress right now with all that's going on that you would say, "yeah, better than others to solve this problem?" Mark Roberts (23:37): Well, a number of my clients, whether they're in building supply, metals, plastics, they went from in the middle of the pandemic, seeing sales declines to now, it's the bounces is occurring. So they're struggling just to keep up and grow. But I'd have to think about that. What particular manufacturing area would have the biggest return on investment of fixing the top of their funnel. I think it's something that would benefit every manufacturer though. I've yet to go into a business plan where they didn't lay out, "okay. What's our growth plan next year. Okay, what percent of that is organic? What percent of that is net new logos?" And it typically it's the net new logos that fail year after year. Mark Roberts (24:21): You had mentioned sales is getting more difficult. I think it was insidesales.com that's been tracking what percent of salespeople are hitting quota every year. Since 2016, it's consistently gone down every year. I think we're now into the 50 percentile. 56, 53% of salespeople are achieving the quota that the CEO sold to the board and their shareholders. So I think it's just about positioning and building awareness, quite frankly, because most CEOs are very systematic, pragmatic thinkers. And I think we just need to build the awareness of the impact that this could have on their bottom line. Chris Beall (25:03): Well, you know how we do that and I'd love to work with you to help open a couple of minds, really. We do this thing called an intensive test drive. As I say to anybody, don't even think about this, just try it with a little group for one day and then we'll talk. And the reason I do that is 10 X is not describable, right? Chris Beall (25:25): It's like saying, I got a 600 mile an hour car. God, doesn't sound so good. Plus it doesn't sound so real. So I don't think you have one of them. And plus if I had one, am I going to drive a 600 mile an hour car? That's crazy. I can't do that. So we come in and we got to look. All good CEOs are from Missouri. They all want to show me, don't tell me. So it goes better than show you, let's experience it together. Do you think CEOs that you know would actually observe, listen to their reps talking, having dozens or even a hundred plus conversations in a test drive like that? Would they take... Because that's precious time for them. CEOs time is precious. Would they take 30 minutes or an hour and listen in and go. What? We're saying that? Or whatever the outcome might be. Mark Roberts (26:13): I would think most CEOs would be interested in knowing what their market facing people are saying and what with what frequency, but the test drive being free and what you're doing is basically creating the business case every CEO needs. So what does good really look like? For years, they've been told good looks like three good appointments a month. With a test drive they could see they're getting 20, 30 appointments a month. Once they see what good looks like, that's when things are going to change. Chris Beall (26:47): Yeah [crosstalk 00:26:48]. Mark Roberts (26:47): Lot of CEOs I've been told that their team is doing really good. They're doing great. Maybe they're hitting their numbers by growing their current business, as long as the main number gets hit, right? But what would have happened to your bottom line, if you would have had those net new logos or entered that new market and penetrated it and grew market share just because your salespeople were more efficient and more effective. Chris Beall (27:13): It's fascinating. Well, I'm looking forward to working with you on this. I'd like to have my top [cold 00:27:18] caller, [Cheryl 00:27:20] Turner, if you're willing to do it. Set meetings for you to meet with CEOs. Cheryl can get CEOs to come to meetings all day long. At first, it'll be a little rough because it's a new value prop, but it'd be fascinating just to see what happens if you were to have meetings with CEOs about what you're doing with them, right? Your business. And see whether any of them might be interested in the experience because I think experience beats talk any day but you got to have talk to talk somebody into having an experience. First time I jumped out of an airplane. It was also the last, but I loved it. Somebody had [inaudible 00:27:58] isn't it? They had to offer the opportunity, but also say, and here's the purpose of it. Chris Beall (28:05): This experience is going to liberate you from some of your self-limiting beliefs. And hopefully I said it won't liberate me from life on this planet as I slam into the [inaudible 00:28:15] and it's not so good. Mark Roberts (28:15): Correct. Yeah. Chris Beall (28:17): So somebody's got to have that conversation. Is that something you'd be willing to do if Cheryl were to set some meetings for you if you do? Mark Roberts (28:24): Yeah. But again, in the spirit of worthy intent, it would excite me to reach out to manufacturers and show them what good could look like. It would totally change their perception of sales and then actually would validate their belief that sales could run like a plant. Chris Beall (28:39): I think that's the biggest idea I've heard of Market Dominance of Guys. I wrote an article four years ago, five years ago, three parts or four parts or five parts and they ask this question, can sales be industrialized? And my answer was yes and I laid out though. If the math and the whole bit, right? It was not a popular article. It's out there on LinkedIn to this day. You can still go find it, it's on our blog. I thought it was a breakthrough. I thought, man, I've got it right. This is like [inaudible 00:29:11] let's ask the question. Can sales be industrialized? [Aaron Ross 00:29:14] asked this question about predictable revenue and specialization. Now the one thing you didn't think needed to be specialized was dialing in navigating the phone itself at that time way back then, that didn't seem like the thing, right? Chris Beall (29:28): So instead it was a specialization around some other functions, including getting the meeting. I actually believe the unit of specialization where the most arbitrage has to be found is right there, dialing and navigating the phone, but not talking to the person, not talking to the target. And the mathematical consequence of all that when you analyze it. So sales can be industrialized. It really can at least down through discovery. So what you're saying is, I like that you're phrasing better, which is, the why [inaudible 00:30:01]. Why can't my sales organization, my sales function run like my shop floor? Mark Roberts (30:09): And they can. Chris Beall (30:11): That's a question. And they can. We think they can. Okay. Mark Roberts (30:14): No. And I've [crosstalk 00:30:14] got you and Cheryl in demonstrating that with those free trials that you're generous to give because we're going to show them what good look like. Chris Beall (30:22): Oh. Thank you. Yeah. We call it blowing doors, blow some doors off when it is a shocking experience. And that the main thing about it is, and [Matt McCorkell said 00:30:33] this very, very clearly. He said, "you know what? Here's how I knew it was working on the test drive. And I was personally there and it's test drive in Milwaukee is plant. But some people are not at the plant at the sales office. People who had never used the phone. And I took him aside after we had brought some beer at the end and we're talking about it. I said, "what'd you think?" And he said, "I don't really have to think I'm a very analytical guy, but they were having so much fun that I know it was working." And I think that might be the thing that we'll have folks look out for because that is what happens. Mark Roberts (31:04): It's timely brought fun to prospecting. Chris Beall (31:09): It is. All right. Well Mark, thanks so much for being on Market Dominance Guys. I see you as saving the nation quite frankly, because manufacturing... Well, I'm serious. I mean, we've had a save the world thing that had to happen with the vaccines and that got done miraculously. Mark Roberts (31:31): [inaudible 00:31:31]. Chris Beall (31:32): There you go. Right? Here, we have in a way, it's not a vaccine. It's more of a food that can strengthen our manufacturing sector. And when you want manufacturing to grow, you also want to compete. You're competing with companies around the world. And so I take this pretty seriously as an opportunity and I hope we can work together and bring market dominance to where the manufacturers right here at home and make a huge difference. Mark Roberts (32:01): And the good news is, what we'll close on is elite sellers have one thing in common, which is a utilitarian trait. If I do this, I expect this. When they experience the test drive, they're never going to look back. They're going to know how efficient and effective they could be. And that sets the bar because these are like athletes, right? They're always trying to get better. So I'm excited to work with you. Chris Beall (32:27): It's got to be fun. All right. Well, thanks so much for being on the show too. And Corey, dude, you could have been here for this, the pivotal moment in the entire manufacturing sector, the future of our country. I know you're a Patriot and you're here in spirit, my friends. So thanks so much. And everybody, this has been an episode of Market Dominance Guys with Mark Roberts. How to get people get ahold of you? I know Cheryl is going to call them, but say, CEO gets a hold of this and they go, "oh, I got to talk to that mark Robert sky." What did they- Mark Roberts (32:59): I'm an old school guy, right? If you want to find me just Google the words, fixed sales problems. I'm typically number one in the world, but I prefer just to give you myself. That's how CEOs reach out to me. Three, three, zero four, one, three, eight, five, five, two. I'm an old school guy. I've got conversations with people. Chris Beall (33:17): Well, I love it. All right. Well, everybody reach out to Mark and fix sales problems if that's not something worth doing, I don't know what it is. Thanks so much and see everybody next time on Market Dominance Guys. Mark Roberts (33:29): Thanks-  

Today on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall has a discussion about first conversations with Mark Allen Roberts, CEO, and founder of OTB Solutions. Mark and Chris compare notes on how things were in the “old days” of sales, back in the 1980s when they got started in this area of business. Mark recalls that in the old days, you weren’t allowed to go out and sell until you were trained. Nowadays, though, most salespeople aren’t trained. Many don’t even know the purpose of the call they’re making: Their knee-jerk reaction to getting someone on the phone is to immediately start pitching their product. And so, they totally miss the opportunity to use the first 7 seconds of a conversation to establish trust and, thus, begin a relationship that may eventually lead to setting a meeting or making a sale. ----more---- Mark further explains why the pitch-first approach is a mistake. “When you’re reaching out on the phone,” he says, “it’s all about worthy intent. Are you reaching out to help somebody? Or are you just trying to hit your numbers?” Your prospects can tell the difference and will react accordingly. If no trust has been established, they will continue to feel ambushed and will maneuver to end the call quickly. Avoid this disaster by learning all there is to know about first conversations from these two experts in this week’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, “Worthy Intent Will Fill Your Funnel.”   About Our Guest Mark Allen Roberts, CEO, and founder of OTB Solutions, works with company leaders to improve sales and profits by leveraging a data-driven, no smoke and mirrors approach to driving profitable sales growth through assessing sales teams’ skills, motivations, and beliefs and then providing strategic development to improve their performance. ------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.  

Welcome to another episode of Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank. Today, our guys continue exchanging ideas with Gregory Smith, CEO at G Group Holdings. In this third part of their discussion, they talk about the view from a CEO’s desk. Chris, who is himself a CEO, thinks that most chief executive officers’ view of their company is often skewed by the remove at which they look at its operations. As he puts it, “They tend to be either stuck in the mud or full of fantasy.” Greg and Chris then reveal that they are both true believers in C-level staff getting out on the frontline and experiencing the jobs their employees do. ----more---- “If you want to be an effective CEO or even a VP or SVP,” Greg advises, “you’ve got to get out in the field and experience it, feel it, understand it.” He encourages all CEOs to spend the day with one staff member in each division of their business once a year. Chris agrees with this plan. “When you do that,” he says, “you grow in respect for your people who are on the front lines. You see that what they do is brilliant.” Get the details on how to dominate your market by spending time with the talented people you’ve hired in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Stuck in the Mud or Full of Fantasy.” About Our Guest Gregory Smith is CEO of G Group Holdings. He is a confident, self-motivated, multi-faceted business leader, and entrepreneur with extensive experience planning and executing strategies that result in substantial revenue and profit generation.  ------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.   Branch49- 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 term, Branch49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more branch49.com

In this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their conversation with Gregory Smith, CEO of G Group Holdings. They’re talking today about talent acquisition and development, which Greg says is about 60–80% of most companies’ expenses — and could be one of the significant reasons why some businesses don’t grow. He believes that a company is only as good as its people and the way its people treat customers. With the goal of inspiring his own team to reach for that high customer-service bar, Greg explains his approach in this way: “I’m a coach, I’m a mentor, and I appropriate the resources my team needs to be rock stars.” ----more---- The guys then segue into a conversation about the importance of bringing employees in on the reasoning behind what they are being asked to do. Chris and Corey refer to this explanation as “the why,” and you’ll hear how each of these three experts is a believer in this part of talent development. Here’s Greg’s explanation of how he uses this approach in leading his team: “First, I provide the strategic vision and make sure they understand ‘the why.’ Then, I get the hell out of the way and let them do their job.” Pause for a few moments from your own job to take in all the insights and advice you’ll hear on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Why ‘the Why’ Is So Essential.”   About Our Guest Gregory Smith is CEO of G Group Holdings. He is a confident, self-motivated, multi-faceted business leader, and entrepreneur with extensive experience planning and executing strategies that result in substantial revenue and profit generation.  ------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Branch49- 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 term, Branch49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more branch49.com

Today, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, interview Gregory Smith, CEO, G Group Holdings. Corey introduces Greg as an “M&A whisperer,” which Greg lives up to as he reveals insights gleaned from his work with mergers and acquisitions. How can he tell if a company is going to survive and thrive? Greg says that he begins with two questions: “Does your company’s product or service fill a particular niche? And does your product or service solve a specific problem for customers?” Greg then warns our podcast listeners against being a “one product or service — and done” business. As he explains it, you can occupy a great niche and have a fabulous customer solution, but you need to continue to develop and augment what you’re offering. He illustrates his point with an example from Starbucks’ early days in business and then goes on to tell a cautionary tale of a company that pioneered bacon-infused vodka. ----more---- The guys switch over to talking about customer service and how your company’s treatment of customers defines your business more than any product or service ever could. You won’t want to miss this eye-opener and other examples of what can cause businesses to succeed or fail on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “One and Done Is the Loneliest Number.”   About Our Guest Gregory Smith is CEO at G Group Holdings.  Gregory Smith is a Senior Executive with extensive experience starting, growing, selling, managing, and acquiring Electrical Distribution companies with revenues between One Million and Two Hundred Million dollars. -------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 term, 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 The complete transcript of this episode is below:     Corey Frank (02:19): Chris, good afternoon. Chris Beall (02:23): Corey, is that you? Corey Frank (02:26): Once again. We have a special edition today where this is the... Is this the drinking edition of the Market Dominance Guys? I think it is, right? So Chris, what have you got there in your glass? Chris Beall (02:35): This is would be Macallan 12. It's nice and simple. I'm just having it with my favorite accoutrement, air. Corey Frank (02:41): Air? Probably a nice soft [bree 00:02:46], okay. As for me, I am drinking a Jocko white pomegranate tea. And if you've noticed, we have a special guest in the other panel here of our discussion. We have Greg Smith. Greg, we're honored to have Greg today. Corey Frank (03:00): Greg is an M&A whisperer, a true dirt floor operator. And I think many times, Chris, when we talk about the Market Dominance Guys, we are enamored. We are seduced by people who have taken a lot of these practices and dominated a market. And I think Greg clearly as we uncover and unpack Greg's story, that he's done it again and again. Corey Frank (03:25): So he has the unlock code for many entrepreneurs and for many businesses that are just existing and not growing and how to kind of bust out. So Greg welcome, and what's in your glass? Gregory Smith (03:40): Thanks guys. It's a pleasure to be here. And I don't know about the unlock code, but I guess if you rate the number of mistakes I've made in my 40 year career, they're pretty extensive. So I guess mistakes sometimes can equate into lessons learned. So yes, I am drinking Don Julio 70 on the rocks and the secret there is two lime wedges and a splash of orange juice, just a splash. Gregory Smith (04:07): And I think Don Julio 70 is probably some of the best tequila out there. It's just nice and smooth as Blanco and Silver. So it's just nice and smooth. Corey Frank (04:16): Okay- Gregory Smith (04:18): [inaudible 00:04:18] afternoon. Corey Frank (04:19): That's right. Well, speaking of nice and smooth, Chris, I know you have a little story about how you kind of ran into Greg and we have very stringent criteria to be a guest on Market Dominant Guys, right? I mean, it's a multi-page questionnaire. And I think there's a blood palette. Corey Frank (04:36): I mean, there's all kinds of things, but ultimately Greg passed all those with flying colors. And what are we going to talk about, Chris, with Greg today in the area of market dominance? Chris Beall (04:44): Well, we usually are talking to people that are kind of out of the SAS world or the tech sales world or whatever it happens to be. Greg comes out of a different world. And I think sometimes people are skeptical about market dominance being the play, the only safe play when you kind of are not in the world of fast-moving technology. Chris Beall (05:05): And I think Greg can bring us a perspective on the importance of market dominance in industries that you would think are, I would almost say beyond commodity. The distribution industry might be the most beyond commodity industry around in a way. They're called middlemen for a reason. And generally what one is trying to do with the middleman is to do what the surgeon does with the appendix, cut them out, right? Chris Beall (05:32): And so how do you make market dominance happen when people in by and large think of you as an appendix to be cut out? Why is that important and how do you do it? And I think I disagree with Greg about the unlock code itself, or I think he's being a little coy. The unlock code literally is made out of mistakes. You manufacture the unlock code out of errors. Chris Beall (05:55): And so I'm really fascinated to hear about the big mistakes and what the learnings are, and then about the application of those learnings to situations where it wasn't obvious a market could be dominated. But in fact, that's what happened. Corey Frank (06:12): Exactly. Greg, for you to say you've had many mistakes amongst your four plus different companies that you've taken to maturity and still be there drinking Don Julio versus some rail. It's not real tequila, right? So obviously you fail your way up. You fell upward, you tripped upward. So to Chris's point, let's talk about some of those. Gregory Smith (06:34): The reason I'm still here is because I'm drinking Don Julio. Corey Frank (06:39): Duly noted. Gregory Smith (06:41): I look pretty good for 85, don't I? Corey Frank (06:44): That's right. Chris Beall (06:44): Damn frisky, as we say in these parts. Damn frisky. Corey Frank (06:49): So I'm a manufacturer, I'm a distributor today, Greg and I've been in the business for 15 years, but really I've been in the business one year 15 times. I just can't break out. You're the doctor coming in in the lab coat, what are you diagnosing me for? What are the key levers that from your purview now that you've had these challenges and you've figured it out, what likely am I doing wrong? Gregory Smith (07:18): Yeah. So, that's some great questions there. So as I look at what it takes to create market dominance for most industries, right? Most companies, most industries, there's probably about seven or eight or maybe nine, I would say, key attributes to achieving that. And I think it kind of starts with what is your solution, right? And what is your niche? Gregory Smith (07:47): And if you can't provide a unique niche in the marketplace or solve a problem or become a solution provider, it becomes really hard to scale your business if you're just amongst the masses. And I have to say, most of my career has been distribution, specifically really in electrical distribution. You can't get much more commoditized than that. Gregory Smith (08:14): Yes, there are services that have expanded within that industry over the years to allow for some elasticity, if you will, in the profits. But by and large, you're selling what everybody else sells. So it becomes very difficult to become a differentiator, and services is certainly one of the ways to do that. Gregory Smith (08:35): So, I think one of the first things as I mentioned is kind of what is your niche in the marketplace, right? What problem are you solving for a customer? If you can answer one or both of those, you're way more apt to succeed. And frankly, you're way more apt to grab some scalability of your business. Gregory Smith (08:55): I talked to a lot of folks, a lot of companies over the years, and I do a bit of consulting on the side and one of the first things I ask them is what is your USP? Or what is it that you're... What problem are you solving or what niche in the marketplace are you looking to kind of hear to? And usually what I get is a lot of blank stares, right? Gregory Smith (09:20): Or I get a lot of wordsmithing, but nothing that's really tangible that clients and customers can kind of latch on to. So that's important, right? You have to identify that. And it reminds me of that book, Wide Ocean, right? So if you don't have a niche, you're swimming in wide ocean, and the small guys are nipping at you because they figured out the niche. Gregory Smith (09:46): The big guys are nipping at you because they've got scale and volume. Manufacturers are not giving you the full attention that you should have because you don't have the scalability or the volume. You're in that blue ocean. You just churn in and you can, you can make a living. I've seen companies do that. Gregory Smith (10:03): I see a nice little 10, 15, 20, $30 million companies that have been around for 80 years that haven't really grown and they fill an itch and they're able to survive. And it's what I would call a generational business or kind of family business, right? It generates enough profits for the family and that's all they're looking to do. And that's okay. Gregory Smith (10:26): But if companies are looking to grow, they have to kind of go beyond that. And so it also reminds me of a story. I don't know if you guys remember, I actually bought it once and thought it was disgusting. But there's entire company, it was a vodka company probably maybe 10 years ago, eight, nine years ago, created an entire business model around handcrafted bacon infused vodka. Do you guys remember that? Chris Beall (10:55): That sounds good though. I'm going to go out for some right now. I'll be back. Gregory Smith (11:01): I don't think they're still around. Yeah, they might be, but... And trust me, I love bacon. I love everything bacon. Bacon infused vodka didn't taste all that good. But anyway, they built an entire model out. So the concept was good, right? They wanted to swim in a space where no one was. Gregory Smith (11:21): Now what they ended up doing, which I think is unique, is they started the flavor vodka launch if you will, right? This whole phenomenon. Now, if you go to the liquor store, you can have every flavor of vodka you want. Where they dropped the ball was concept was good, the niche was good. However, they didn't expand on it. They did bacon vodka. It kind of failed. Gregory Smith (11:51): And instead of taking it and expanding on it, they just went away. So again, it's realizing what does that niche solve a problem? And then if you can do that, expand on it. But if it doesn't quite work, tweak it and keep going. And as I think about another one, it's you got to make sure that you continue to develop your product or your service. Gregory Smith (12:15): You can't just be a one and done. You can't have, and I've seen this before and I'm sure you guys have seen this, where you've got a company that beginning up, they hit a million dollars. They're high fiving, that's great. They hit that first milestone. Then they hit five and then they hit 10. They continue to high five. But as you look at that trajectory, they start to level off or they have leveled off for five to 10 years, right? Gregory Smith (12:42): So they can't get beyond that. And there's different evolutions within companies that we could certainly talk about, and what you need to do at each level in terms of shoring up the foundation with people and services and products and all that stuff. But you shore up that foundation that allows you then to grow up to the next level, you shore up that foundation, go to the next level, so on and so forth. Gregory Smith (13:02): So, just because you have a good idea or one service in the beginning doesn't mean that it possesses that that elasticity, if you will, or scalability to continue to survive, [inaudible 00:13:15] but then continue to grow to get to some sort of market dominance, right? So this is especially true in the wholesale distribution business, because it is such a competitive business to be in. Gregory Smith (13:27): So I'm trying to think of an example for this one would be, well, as you think about Starbucks, right? In terms of how they evolved, Starbucks started out selling coffee, pretty much it. [No loss 00:13:40] for flavors and this and that and cappuccinos and all that stuff, but they quickly capped out. If you look at their public statements, they quickly capped out on revenue. Gregory Smith (13:54): I mean, they went like this admittedly, right? And then they capped out and shareholders, and I don't care if the shareholder is you guys, me, Joe around the block or stockholders, right? Either case, the shareholders are like, "Yeah, that doesn't work for us." You're trading at a 20x multiple than originally you were doing. Gregory Smith (14:58): Now coming from a distribution business and a 5% UBIT, that's pretty nice. So Starbucks also, you can look at their statements. They also obviously made a lot of money on coffee, but did two things that allowed them to continue to grow as well as increased profitability. Gregory Smith (15:17): So then I think the third one, which is really interesting that could be good or bad by the way, is what are the external forces that you don't have control over, but that you can adapt to or change with, right? So, external forces, I think is a big one and there's a variety of them. There's social, culture, economics, demographics, science, technology, you guys mentioned technology, right? Gregory Smith (15:49): Legal, political, God forbid, right? All these things. So all of these affect your business and market trends and how people buy. Look at the revolution of the e-commerce in all industries to say nothing about the industrial B2B industry, right? So that was struggling to get e-commerce adoption by its customers. Gregory Smith (16:16): And over the previous five years on average is about one to 2% of top line sales. That is a 20x, and that took five years. And in one year, it's a 20x increase, right? So this pandemic changed, it was an external force, and changed the marketplace for business. So I've said this in a couple of postings, I think industrial B2B business is in the midst of a black swan profit event. Gregory Smith (16:49): And here's what I mean by that. So you look at the convergence today, right? Of we're nearing the end of the pandemic, again, "hopefully", right? If there's not a variant that comes out that doesn't work with the vaccine or is vaccine resistant, then obviously that's a problem. There's some caveats here, but let's assume that we're nearing the end of this. Gregory Smith (17:15): By June, I don't know, 200 million out of 330 million people in the US, 200 million will be vaccinated. There's probably another 75 or 80 million that have already had it and didn't even know it, right? So we're going to get to that. Got a herd immunity phase and businesses are already starting to pick up, right? So we're nearing the end of the pandemic. Gregory Smith (17:39): The economy is picking up. Look at the numbers yesterday on unemployment claims, right? There are pre-pandemic levels and commodity prices are on the increase. Now, again, that could be considered good and bad, it depends on where it goes and how much longer it goes. But currently today, if you look within distribution, most distributors are seeing price increases weekly. Gregory Smith (18:06): And in some cases, manufacturers, now here we are April, mid April, manufacturers have given distributors, if not one price increase by now, which is pretty standard. Now they're on their second, and then some manufacturers on their third, combined with supply chain issues where you can't get products, right? So all of these things equate to a black swan profit event for distributors if they manage it correctly. Gregory Smith (18:40): That's the key, if they manage it correctly. And so that's just one example, I think of external force that can help a business. And obviously, there's external forces that hinder your business. If you're all bricks and mortar and you're not doing any e-commerce site and you're selling, I don't know, paperclips. Yeah, you're not going to be around much longer, right? Corey Frank (19:02): Greg, you go back to your example about the bacon infused vodka, right? And Chris, you and I have spoken a lot about this with Market Dominance, is that the number one... And it's interesting to hear your examples in the manufacturing distribution industry, Greg, because again, what Chris and I in our experience in what we've seen from market dominance on the SAS side, certainly expand to others as we've talked about. Corey Frank (19:28): But the number one mistake that we say in Market Dominance is that people don't go and get the meetings or the feedback before they build a product, right? Chris, you talked a lot about this as the... It's literally the proverbial cart before the horse problem that is disastrous because the cart ultimately leads the horse off of a cliff, right? Corey Frank (19:52): And then we tie into the famous chasm and we've done a number of episodes, Chris, on the chasm, Geoffrey Moore's chasm, because then you go down to that chasm and there is no revenue down there. And clearly there's no... There's loads of broken bacon infused vodka bottles, that's about it, that's down there, but here's no revenue. Corey Frank (20:14): So, Chris, what do you say just listening to Greg here is that those parallel is about they didn't test the market that built the product and didn't get any feedback loops? They thought it was a good idea in their own minds, but that was about where it stopped. Chris Beall (20:29): Well, I mean, the most common problem in solving problems is finding out whether there's a problem and then finding out whether you can solve it. And then finding out whether you can restrict those that you decide to solve it for in a way that allows them to identify with each other and say, oh, if it worked for Corey, it'll work for me. Chris Beall (20:49): That's the trifecta business. People talk about product market fit like it comes magically out of a bacon infused vodka bottle, right? Oh, well, now that we have product market fit, it's like, what in the world does that even mean? It's not some mystery. You go talk to folks and you say, thinking about doing this and you listen carefully to what they have to say and make sure that you don't tweak the message on everyone. Chris Beall (21:17): It's called thrash. Fish thrash nicely on the decks of boats after they've been brought up. You don't want to be that fish. It's not a path to dominance. You have to actually take your product as words to the market and then to a hypothetical market. And then let that experience tell you first is this hypothetical market even a market? That is what they talk to each other. Chris Beall (21:41): Think about that question that's never asked, which is, hey, I just talked to to Mary and if Mary were to embrace what we're doing, would that actually make it easier for you to take a look at it? It's a good question to ask. That's the ultimate question of referenceability. That is you don't want to solve a problem that if you solved it you'd realize you'd done nothing of value. Chris Beall (22:03): So why go into what you think is a market, which is defined as an inter referenceable set of folks that is if one buys it makes it instantly cheaper and lower risk for everybody else to buy instantly because of that first reference, right? That's what it means to cross the chasm. You get that reference. And then use that one to get another and another and another, but your market has to be in a referencing, but that's a hypothesis. Chris Beall (22:29): So until you get your hypothesis validated and the cheapest way to validate it is through talk. That's why bars are actually pretty good. That's why if you want to do this really well, find truth serum of some sort. Now, we talk about this all the time that the lie serum, the anti truth serum is the cold call. You will not tell me the truth in the cold call except about one thing. Chris Beall (22:52): And you won't even tell me the truth about it, except in your actions. Your strong desire to get off the call with your self image intact. When I cold call you, I know what the truth is. So why don't we just get that one done with and get to a meeting? Because the first truth serum is the voluntary nature of coming to a meeting with somebody. Chris Beall (23:12): I had a meeting today with the CFO of a company in the plywood industry. Now you might be asking, what the heck is Chris Beall doing meeting with the CFO of a big company in the plywood industry? And the answer is I wanted to find out whether a solution, which is our flight school packaged and thought of in a certain way, would be interesting to a CFO of a big company. Chris Beall (23:40): Because I had advice from somebody that said you should go get that information as a potential market, right? The entry point into the market. So I talked to said CFO. It was an eight minute conversation, eight minutes and 49 seconds. In fact, super conversation. And he said the following, "We have more demand than we can satisfy and probably will for the next 18 months. Chris Beall (24:04): So while I see that your product might have been interesting to me at one time and might be interesting in the future, we're not in that situation." Which lets me immediately do a little product market fit work, which is to say, ah, I'm going to take that information and make a list of a subset of the companies I want to talk to whose experts say are in trouble with demand because of the pandemic, great. Chris Beall (24:32): So I didn't find out it's not good to talk to CFOs. And by the way, that conversation costs me literally eight minutes and 49 seconds. That was the total cost. That was it. No dollars, no nothing. My time's worth nothing as everybody in the earth knows. CEO's time is the most fungible commodity in the world, and the beauty is that the numerator is zero. Chris Beall (24:52): You multiply it out and you get the same number all the time. CEOs like to say they're worth a lot, but their time actually at the margin has always cost zero. It's probably worth zero. So it's a good example right there. Plywood, right? Would you have guessed? You might have that a plywood company right now would be facing a year to two of capacity shortage. Chris Beall (25:14): I didn't know that. I learned it. So that brings me to a fourth point, which is go-to-market is more about learning than it is about selling, but the only way we can learn is to sell. And this is the conundrum that faces everybody in go-to-market is well, I have to have something to sell. You've got a problem. Chris Beall (25:34): You need to learn, and the only way to learn is to sell. Because until you're in that meeting, that scheduled meeting where they came to you... Because that CFO told me the truth, right? On a cold call, here's what he told Cheryl. He told Cheryl Turner this. Because she said, "I'll send you a meeting invite and we'll reschedule." Chris Beall (25:55): He came to the meeting. He said, "I have no idea what this meeting's about." You know what I said, Corey? Fantastic, right? Because we're going to learn together. So I think people tend to skip the learning step because most of the risk of failure hides inside of learning. Chris Beall (26:13): And we're not confident in our ability to learn deliberately, and so we skip that step and we would rather plunge into the chasm and be licking up the dry vodka hoping that the bacon flavor is bacon. Dealing with the glass cuts on our tongues and eventually becoming bones like those behind Greg there. Chris Beall (26:33): And we do that happily because learning as a deliberate process is so frightening that most entrepreneurs will turn down the opportunity to learn in favor of their urge to act. Gregory Smith (26:48): By the way, if I could just add two things to that. So, the first one is that you're absolutely correct, right? This communication to really understand the market that you want to create a product for a solution for, right? The challenge is some of that work actually does get done. Gregory Smith (27:09): However, it gets done by the people who are trying to create the niche or identify the niche or solve the problem. We all know we have biases on our belief systems, right? So my philosophy has always been hire other people to do that investigative work, right? That sales work that you call it, to ask the questions, to help identify and/or support your belief. Gregory Smith (27:37): But hire others to do it that don't have a stake in the game. And by doing that, you get a lot more information. Because again, talking with companies, talking with startups and helping startups get from point A to point B, to your point, you guys, that's one of the first questions I ask is, have you done some market studies research? Show me what you've done, blah, blah, blah. Gregory Smith (28:00): And 50% of them say yes, and here's the data. And we made these calls, we did this and we did that. And half of them were leading questions, right? And none of them are really done, I think, correctly, because now they're in this box where they've spent $1 million, they generated 20,000 revenue. And they're wondering why this thing is stalling out, right? Gregory Smith (28:22): And so they didn't really get an understanding of the marketplace and what their product or service was going to solve or the niche that they were going to be in that there really wasn't a need for. So completely agree with you. Then I would take it to the next level, which is communicating with your customer on an ongoing basis, right? Gregory Smith (28:45): Creating those conversations with your customers, not just in the beginning, but throughout really your company life cycle. So I used to do these things called customer councils and they were kind of unique, and you had to be a member of the customer council in order to come. We did them once a year. Gregory Smith (29:06): It was full blown dinner, steaks, nice restaurant, all they got, hats, t-shirts, jackets. They got some really nice swag stuff for attending. And the deal was that I was there as a leader, but their immediate, their sales team couldn't be there. Their regionals couldn't be there. Branch managers couldn't be there. Gregory Smith (29:29): Nobody that they deal with on a day-to-day basis couldn't be there, because I wanted that kind of open and honesty. And so the deal was there was a eight page questionnaire, which took them 10 minutes to fill out. We had a 45 minute conversation, open conversations with everybody in the room about what's working, what isn't working. If you were the CEO of this company, what would be the first thing you would do? Gregory Smith (29:59): How can we get better? What problems you need us to solve? And we got so much valuable information out of those customer councils. But I just use that as one example. There's a lot of different ways you can do that, but you got to constantly check the pulse of the customer and get that honest feedback to make sure that you continue. It may have worked in the beginning. Gregory Smith (30:26): Five years later, external forces change, customers change, customers needs change. All of those things change, so you've got to keep doing those gut checks to be able to do that. And there's a guy that I really like that I follow a fair amount. And this guy, Simon Sinek, do you guys know Simon? Corey Frank (30:46): Yap. Chris Beall (30:46): Oh, yeah. Gregory Smith (30:47): Good guy, right? One of the first things I fell in love with is getting to why, right? What is your USP? Why? Whatever it happens to be, but I found that extremely valuable. And I think it's true. I think as companies are able to identify the why and then get employees to understand the why and buy into it, and then equally as important, getting the customer to understand the why, right? Gregory Smith (31:16): Why did the customer buy from you? Customers have options to buy the same product from 100 different people. Actually, no, thousands of different people, right? Why did they buy from you? And that's what you really have to understand. If you can understand that, and if you can get customers to buy into that, then you start talking about exponential growth opportunity because it just starts... It's compounding, right? And it just starts building. Corey Frank (31:45): That product market fit, Greg and Chris that you guys are talking about, right? That's why, right? Get to the cynics. Why does somebody want my product? I mean, the number one reason that startup companies fail or they run out of money rather is they end up building a product that they think the market wants and the market doesn't want, right? Corey Frank (32:06): And again, we call this product market fit and everybody talks about it endlessly, as Chris was saying, and they put the cart before the horse. But what do you guys say to that from a messaging perspective, right? It seems like the message is the product and the why about what problem does this solve is the product. Corey Frank (32:29): And getting to that discovery process, that flywheel of feedback seems to be the key in to your market. So you can kind of have a relatively fail safe way, but it's a process, right? Is that what you're finding with a lot of your companies that maybe they're stumbling into this and they don't know that this is a concerted process, this flywheel attempt? Or they're kind of Forrest Gumping themselves into product market fit, so to speak. Gregory Smith (33:00): Kind of both, right? But I don't think it's ever about products. I really don't. Unless you're doing something specific like the bacon vodka, right? Unless you're doing something really specific to the marketplace, it's never... Think about Apple, right? People pay 10 times more for an Apple phone than they do any other phone. Why, right? Gregory Smith (33:22): Its features and benefits are the same when you buy a Google phone, an Apple phone, or I don't know. I don't know who's out there because I have an Apple. But people pay a lot of money because of the Apple products. And so why, right? Well, Because it's cool. It's this, it's that. Young people did it, blah, blah, blah, blah. Gregory Smith (33:39): All that stuff that generates that demand, but people didn't buy it because it was the best phone in the marketplace. They bought it because of Apple. And so what you sell is never your product. It's always you and your services and your people and the solution and the niche and all those things. Products are secondary. Gregory Smith (34:07): And I think if companies think about that differently, then your go-to-market strategy is different, right? Your talent acquisition is different. Think about all the folks that have been out of work in the last year, all your bartenders and waiters and waitresses. And I feel bad for those folks who are restaurant owners, all that stuff. Think about how those people work every day to solve customer problems. Gregory Smith (34:38): If I was a customer service company hiring people in customer service, I would have made the biggest bang and the biggest push to go out and find the best waiters and waitresses and bartenders I could find. Because they're the people that get it. They understand it. They live it every single day, right? So your talent acquisition is different. Gregory Smith (35:02): All these things are different than trying to sell features and benefits. Features and benefits selling really has never worked, and certainly doesn't work today, in my opinion. I don't know, Chris, do you feel differently? Chris Beall (35:13): I agree 100%. I've got a good example on that customer service solving problems thing. So we were out, my fiance, Helen and I were out at what's called The Grill here in Quail Creek two nights ago. And it was a pretty lazy move. It was end of a long day. I didn't want to cook. I normally cook. Chris Beall (35:35): She didn't want to cook. And so we went out and we sat down in the wind and we ordered our food, and the waitress seemed really good. She was very attentive. She was quick. She didn't interrupt the conversation. My least favorite thing for a wait staff to do is to come over and start talking in the middle of a conversation, which with me is all the time. So, it was wonderful. Chris Beall (36:00): Then suddenly it went weird and we're looking at each other going, where's the silverware? We have nothing to eat with. We have food, nothing to eat with. Where's my margarita? It hasn't showed up. I don't think it takes them 10 minutes to make a margarita and bring it over. I know I asked for the good tequila, but that's just like you open the bottle and you do the thing. Chris Beall (36:20): And so, was that a bad waitress or a good waitress? This is where I think talent management really is interesting. Getting to the underlying truth about somebody in service is challenging and gold. So I determined that that waitress who disappeared and left us high and dry for 10 minutes was fantastic. Chris Beall (36:41): And here's how. When she came back and she had put somebody else in charge and that person kind of dropped the ball. When she came back, she said, "I'm so sorry. There was a snake right over there. And I caught it and I decided to take it out in the desert and let it go, and it took me a little while to get over there and back." Chris Beall (37:03): Now, here's where she kind of screwed up as a customer service person. She said with emotion, "You want to see it?" And she reached into her apron pocket. Not good. Don't ever say, do you want to see a snake and reach into your pocket, especially not with my fiance at the table, because she is not exactly pro-snake, I would say. Chris Beall (37:21): So I said, "Yeah, show it to me." And I knew it was a video. So she showed me the video of the little snake, little rat snake, crawling all over her hands. But do I want that person on my team? Is the point to Greg's point. And the answer is yes, because that's somebody who takes the situation and situational awareness and realizes, I may leave this couple here for a bit, but that snake crawling around them in the feet of the table at 10 over here, that's a disaster for our business. Chris Beall (37:50): And she made the decision and took an action that had no immediate pat on the back from anybody and did it for the true good of the situation. And these people are everywhere if you go find them. And I agree, customer service is the most amazing of the commodities. I'm wearing my favorite shirt, right? You've seen this before, Corey. Chris Beall (38:15): This is from the AA-ISP executive retreat. And I wear the shirt because, rather proudly and I'm not proud of that many things, our company has won the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals Service Provider of the Year for seven years in a row. And we never intend to lose it, and it's the most important thing about our company. Chris Beall (38:36): And when we hire somebody, that's what we're looking for. But the best part is, I get four or five times a week, some CEO or VP of sales have called me up and say, I just have got to tell you, your people are different. Your people are different. They're not only experts, but I feel like they're more on our team than we are on our team. Chris Beall (39:00): They're more insistent on our success than we knew we should be. And that's where I think you get the big differentiator. It [isn't 00:39:10] product. And by the way, we have a very unique product. I mean, very unique as an oxymoron or an idiot redundancy or some stupid grammatical thing like that. But I'll repeat it anyway, we have a very unique product. Chris Beall (39:21): One of a kind, the only one in the world. But that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is that our people by and large will be on your team more than your own team's on your team.

In today’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their conversation about the unifying convergence of B2B and B2C sales tactics with Jeff Lerner, CEO and founder of Entre Institute. The product Jeff’s company offers its customers is empowerment for people wanting to have a better, more successful life. As he explains it, “Everyone wants an awesome life. There's nothing special about wanting one, but defining your awesome life and executing on a strategic plan to create it, regardless of personal circumstances, is something most don't ever do. You have to be committed to excellence.” In talking about why excellence isn’t pursued by most people, Chris explains, “Excellence is a form of exile from the community they grew up in — in which people mostly complained about how bad things are in their lives.” Jeff simplifies the process of switching from complaining to pursuing an “awesome” life with his offer of Entre’s blueprint, which lays out three areas of concentration — personal, professional, and physical — which he has named the "3 Ps.” Listen to Chris, Corey, and Jeff discuss the 3Ps, plus the particulars of how Jeff dominates his market using social media videos, and how that B2C approach correlates with the Market Dominance Guys’ B2B approach of “conversations first” on today’s episode, “Do You Want an Awesome Life?” ----more----   About Our Guest Jeff Lerner is CEO and founder of Entre Institute, which provides business training, inspiration, and personal support through videos, messaging, online workshops, and one-on-one interaction for entrepreneurs who want to create online businesses and awesome lives.  -------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:08): Who was it... You probably are a little bit more educated than I am in the field, but I think it was... was it Jim Rohn who said the definition of success is a few simple disciplines repeated every day, and the definition of failure is a few simple errors in judgment repeated every day? What I hear you saying is that [inaudible 00:02:28] brought half a beer, I like beer, or about to have a water. If I'm looking at number one, the physical, excellent. If I just follow that guiding light, right? Corey Frank (02:40): Right.  Chris Beall (02:41): That's simple enough for... I bet you tell your children this, I bet you talk to high schoolers about a simple roadmap compass for excellence.  Corey Frank (02:41): Totally. Jeff Lerner (02:49): And if you've got a message as big and broad as mine, you have to find language that says, "Broadly accessible." I can explain 3 P's of excellence to a five-year-old and a 95-year-old and get the same nod. Corey Frank (03:03): What would you say, Chris, are those equivalent 3 P's of excellence in our world from a B2B pitch? If I'm a business starting off, and I recently got some funding and trying to decide if I should hire a sales team, but I got to get to product market fit, what are those may be four, maybe five, maybe six, maybe one, but what are those equivalent three tablets coming down the mountain, if you will, in the B2B world that are equitable to what Jeff said in the B2C world? Chris Beall (03:34): Well, I think let's try to map them straight up and see what happens. That's always fun, right? Corey Frank (03:34): Mm-hmm (affirmative).  Chris Beall (03:38): The mathematician in may says, "Let's try one-to-one and onto." So what's the equivalent of the physical? In the B2B world, the physical is actually what we offer. It's our product, it's the offering. And we're either working on the offering to make it better or not, but that's the equivalent of the physical. And when we look at the personal, in the B2B world... This is really hard. It's true in every business. But it's our reason for doing this that actually works for somebody else's... solves somebody else's problem. Why does it make me want to do this thing and attract other people to join me to do it and to offer them a beer instead of a water, if that's what it takes? What is it that's in there?  This is Simon Sinek's why. It's the why that attaches you to the good for other people that's why you're doing it. Because otherwise in B2B, B2B is a little cold. And as a cold experience, we got to warm it up, or we can't stay engaged with it personally. So the personal warmth comes from our dedication to mission. And that is what attracts other people to join us and do anything with us at all. And we can't do very much alone. And then the professional is... what's interesting about the professional in B2B is almost all of it is, am I having a conversation with somebody from whom I will either learn something that is likely to help me help somebody else more than I'm helping them today, or I'm going to help them learn something that's going to let them either move on and do whatever they're going to do better, or even avail themselves of our services and product and to become a customer? And if we do those three things, I'm just mapping the one-to-one and onto, but I think they're close enough. And I just made that up. Corey Frank (05:36): I think that correlates pretty well. And then it does beg the question, if we're going to map those too. Jeff, from your experience, when you look at businesses that are B2B, with your B2C mindset about what you're talking about, about introducing some skepticism and what we're talking about with the culture code and building trust, and it's safe and it's vulnerable, it's a team. When you look at B2B websites, when you get a B2B pitch, another vendor's going to pitch ENTRE, a CRM system, a phone system. What do you think is missing from that initial pitch, that in your world, you just shake your head a little bit and say, "You poor SOB, you're missing something fundamental that exists in our B2C world and our best practitioners of this craft get it, but you don't?" Jeff Lerner (06:29): To me, it's a culturalist... it's a vacuum of mission/culture. So much business marketing is feature-driven and benefit-driven. And it's a cliche. And every business owner, every CEO has read a book. They've read Good to Great, they've read Tribal Leadership, they've read Start With Why. And so they would say, "No, no. We're about culture, and we're about values, and we have Simon Sinek's calls of Just Cause. And everybody at our paper mill is really aligned with the just cause of..." And it's like, "No, everybody at the paper mill is not aligned with the just cause, they're just trying not to get toxic chemicals on their clothes so they can go home and hug their kids without making them sick. That's all they care about along with the paycheck. But it's [inaudible 00:07:15] For me, because I live and die off a culture, I am a cultural offering to a world, like you said, my ultimate product is hope, I would say it's empowerment more than hope. I don't really love hope, because hope is very externally focused. It's an inwardly-focused hope, which I think is empowerment. We're going to empower you with skills, we're going to empower you with the community, we're going to empower you with tools, we're going to empower you with a different understanding of possibility out there. Fundamentally, you think, "Well, who am I competing with?" And I'm some new upstart, less than three years in the market that I... By the way, my entire budget to launch this company, all those video boosts was about 25 grand. So I built a hundred million dollar business with $25,000 startup capital and a whole bunch of chutzpah. But you think about it, I'm out there... Who am I really competing with? I'm competing from a messaging and a market perspective. I consider myself to be creating a blue ocean, but in terms of how the market would compare me, it'd be like Tony Robbins, it'd be Grant Cardone, it'd be Russell Brunson, it'd be Tai Lopez. It might be, like you mentioned, [inaudible 00:08:19] I'd be flattered for the reference. So when that conversation against those luminaries, it's not going to be about what I say, or even functionally what I offer. It's going to be about how my world's feels. That's the only way I win; is if my worlds feels... It's like buying a house, everybody has to want to move into my house. You don't move into a house because it's got, "Oh, the chimney's a little bit taller or the kitchen appliances are a little bit updated," the three of us would move in because our wives would be like, "I just like the way that feels." And we, "Okay, honey. That's the one." Corey Frank (08:56): So in a B2B world- Jeff Lerner (08:59): And B2B [crosstalk 00:09:00] sucks at creating feelings. They just suck.  Corey Frank (09:02): There you go. Chris, what would you say from your experience in the B2B world when you look at B2B sites. Here we are, consumers, we slide down our dinosaur at 5:01 And also we enter the world of B2C, what do you experience? What do you wish that some B2C organizations would adopt a little bit more that has been successful in the B2B go to market sales strategy, talking to strangers, et cetera? Chris Beall (09:32): I don't know. I'm clueless about one-to-many conversations. I'm really am. I'm the worst. The B2B world is not particularly adept at feelings, I would say, where it is. It's so unadept, it's ridiculous. That's our business, is making feelings happen through the medium, through a change of medium, which is the human voice. And the human voice engenders feelings in all cases and there's no avoiding it. And it has a bit rate to pull it off. 20,000 bits a second, you got a shot, whereas you can't get anywhere close to that in a website or an email or whatever it happens to be. What's funny though, because I've listened on Clubhouse to folks starting B2C businesses. And I tell you what, I wish they would do is just... I don't know how to put it exactly. Get a tiny bit more serious about matching up what you're trying to do with a little bit of how it's going to work. It's just funny. It's like, I'm so full of my desire to be like something else that I saw succeeding. Somebody has a certain kind of business, I've been told that I can go do that. It's like, "Okay, but do you know how business actually works? Do you know..." It's really simple. The business equation is really simple. Jeff said it earlier, maybe it was before the show. He wanted to make a difference and to make a difference yet to make a profit, because if you don't make a profit you're not sustainable. That's the business equation. You have to drive gross profit in order to be able to cover your overhead and have at least a $0 and maybe more than that leftover so that you can apply those to growth and you need some sort of a cash buffer, some asset-base so when it doesn't work out perfectly with regard to timing, you're not dead, because being dead means you can't go after your mission either. That awareness of just the basic biology of business, when I listen to people talking about starting B2C business, I think somebody should take five minutes and just demystify this simple equation. And it's not about fancy models and all that. It's, can it possibly work? Something investors think about that people who pitch to investors don't think about, is this, the investor is asking you, if it works, will it be worthwhile? That's their question. They're not asking if it'll work or not. Your question as the entrepreneur should be, "Under the range of circumstances I can control, will it work? Does the equation actually work?" And I think more people should ask themselves that before they just go, "And everybody with a dog is kind of in." And the thing that really bothers me and it bothers the Shark Tank guys more than probably anything, I think Mark Cuban really goes crazy when he hears it, is, "If I get 0.1% of this monster TAM, then blah, blah, blah." It's like, "Sorry, but you actually have to identify the true TAM and go dominate it. Jeff said, "His people. They speak your language and know the 3 P's. Do you really care what people who are not your people, who are outside of that, or I don't know, grants people or whatever, what they know about the 3Ps? Jeff Lerner (12:52): No. I- Chris Beall (12:53): Irrelevant. Jeff Lerner (12:54): No, I just care about wowing the people in my world so they'll tell their friends, honestly. Chris Beall (12:59): There you go. It's that clarity that when you're clear you know that there's limitations and the limitations or boundaries are good, not bad, because it gives you something to go make a difference in. Making a difference for everybody, sounds great, can't be done. Making a difference for some people, whether it's because they opt in or they have some characteristics or whatever, you got a shot. If that's one person, we call that marriage. If it's a handful, we call it friendship. If it's in a thousand companies, we call it business and pure changing 130,000, 150,000, 200,000 lives at a time, what do we call it, Jeff? Jeff Lerner (13:41): Call it a movement.  Chris Beall (13:43): Yeah. What do you think about that? Jeff, am I barking up a completely branchless tree here? Jeff Lerner (13:49): No. No. You guys are just so... You're intuitive landing at the same place I'm at after a few years of doing this. A few things. First of all, I just want to cover a couple things you said. First of all, the 3 P's, I think they really do map. This is a new awareness. Physical is about helping somebody do a thing... If I were going to try to map with the benefit of what you already said, I would say physical is about helping somebody to do their job easier. I would say personal is about helping somebody do their job warmer, is maybe a better way to say it, more human. It's about humanizing their job. So physical would be simplifying their job, personal would be humanizing their job, and then professional would be making their job either more profitable or more scalable, the actual business results. Anyway, that's [crosstalk 00:14:41] Chris Beall (14:41): Jeff, we could write a book. Jeff Lerner (14:43): It is, yeah. [crosstalk 00:14:44] Chris Beall (14:44): The True Convergence.  Jeff Lerner (14:45): The Unified Theory of B2C and B2C. But anyways, and then the next thing, when you guys were talking about going from one-to-many... Well, actually, before I say that, Corey, when you asked the question, what is it you think that a lot of people in the B2C world could learn from B2B? The first word that came to mind was just, for me, when you asked the question was just be a professional. It's okay to be personable, but not as a euphemism for being an amateur. Be a professional, learn to speak... And Chris, that's what you were saying, is if you want to do business, you have to operate from sound business principles, and you have to speak a language that's fundamentally grounded in and appealing to business, right? Corey Frank (15:35): Yes. Jeff Lerner (15:36): And there's just so much amateurishness. And look, I ran a digital B2B agency for six years. I helped 11,000 small and medium-sized businesses with their marketing. And usually when you're trying to help a business with their marketing, you realize very quickly you've brought a knife to a gunfight and you actually need to help them with their business. And so I did that 11,000 times in six years. I'm a pretty competent business conversationalist. And there's no fabricating that. People try to masquerade. They're like, "I got out of college last week. And I used to have a lemonade stand, let me tell you why you should hire me to consult your call floor or something." And it's like...  Anyway, and then the thing about one-to-one, one-to-many and how you scale outward, I really felt like you hone in on something there. I think that's one of the reasons the 3 P's concept has been so sticky with people; is it's not just 3 P's existing laterally, it's 3 P's growing from the inside out. So when I draw it, I draw it as a concentric model; physical, personal, and then professional. And essentially, the processional is the outer ring. I say you don't even have a right to try to get a professional result until you're first taking great care of yourself physically, because you can't take care of yourself... It's like, if you want to get married, first buy a goldfish or something.  And then the second wrong is you can't take care of the people you love, the people that you supposedly care so much about, and you're trying to leapfrog right to, "I want to make a million dollars by giving value to the market, but I'm a 60 pound overweight, hypertensive slob and I'm nearing a divorce." Really? There's no credibility in that. And so I teach first take care of one, then take care of a few, then you can talk to the market. And that maps, Corey, with what you were just saying. I think that's one of the reasons people get it so sticky is because that's my counter punch to them... that's the us versus them in the market because the whole market has everybody focused on making all this money. Corey Frank (17:29): Sure. Although I would like to hear the podcast of the 60 pound overweight going through the divorce and all those other kinds of things. That would be interesting to at least listen to, to observe. Maybe they can mask the face of everybody that goes on there. A lot of them learning the anti-hero. With that regard, it sounds like it's a journey, I can't snap my fingers, but yet you were alluding to earlier, Jeff, that oftentimes people are not professional. In our world, in the world that Chris and I come from, in the B2B, we call it brewing it out, when I'm going to try to call you as a VP of sales and I'm going to get way too casual, way too quickly. I'm going to abuse all the nationality that Chris alluded to about tone and empathy and not be aware of how that helps build trust. We had another good friend of ours in this podcast. He is a gentleman by the name of Oren Klaff, who wrote a book called Pitch Anything and Flip the Script. And he has a concept called squirrel theory. And squirrel theory is that when folks experienced new things, oftentimes a sales rep will try to [inaudible 00:18:40] that prospect over the head, "Hey, it's brand new, it's 10X and it'll save your life and cure cancer and do loads of other things." And Oren's testament is more his feeling, is more that it's like a squirrel discover something. You have a picnic basket under a tree, a squirrel about 20 feet away in a bush, peaks its head out a little bit, scurries a little closer and then goes back in the bush and then gets a little bit closer. And very cyclical finally gets the courage to look in the basket, hears a noise, and it goes back to the bush. But eventually, the squirrel is feasting off your picnic basket, but it takes a couple of cycles of this novelty to not be so angst-driven [crosstalk 00:19:19] And I think that amateurs, folks like me, I'm an amateur in a lot of things, that if I was new to sales, if I were new to sales, the propensity for me to want to brow it out too quickly is masking my insecurity that I probably have that this is a new situation for me. So I'm going to have the nervous laughter, I'm going to probably talk about the weather, I'm going to try to talk about all these things that I think are engendering trust, right, Chris? But as you had said, in that sense, it is magnifying that fear factor, pushing me farther away from trust, it sounds like. Is that what you're finding with a lot of folks in your world that try to leapfrog those different P's to the professional? Jeff Lerner (20:03): Yeah, I think that was the question for me. So yes, I'll say... The squirrel theory is exactly why I had to have so much content. Every new video in their feed was an opportunity for them to come to it just closer, but still dart back. And I just had to keep serving up more and more videos, more and more videos, more and more picnic baskets, more and more picnic baskets until eventually, they're close enough. And they're like, "Well, I haven't been caught by the animal catcher yet. I haven't been attacked by the leopard yet. So I'm just going to go down on this picnic basket." And it gets a little safer each time. So yeah, I think that's exactly right. And as far as professionalism and trust, if you want to... And this is true B2C and B2B. This is why that stuff you were saying is so ineffective. If you want to build trust with somebody in a professional context, whether it's consumer or a business, show them that you respect the value of their time. Talking about the weather is the opposite of that. And so for me, I had to focus my conversations on universal concepts that I know people struggle with.  Listen, if you talk about not having time to go to the gym, if you talk about having a fight with your wife and going to sleep and not having enough time the next morning to actually talk it through and resolve it because you're late for work, if you talk about your kid coming home crying because they struggle in school and their learning style isn't a fit for the way schools teach, but you feeling fearful that if they don't succeed in school, what hope do they have in this world because you're not aware of an alternate path that I happen to know, those are conversations that just get right into people's pains and that show them that I respect and I share their experience of the world. If you want to build rapport with somebody, talk about stuff like that, don't talk about the weather, right? Corey Frank (21:57): Yeah, that's great stuff. Your favorite sports team or [crosstalk 00:22:01] thank God it's Monday, thank God it's Friday. Jeff Lerner (22:04): The other thing I wanted to say, just so I don't forget it, when you were talking about how businesses could be more human and more warm, use video, man. Just get your most, not even your most charismatic, just your most normalized, effective, healthy communicating person in your office to make a quick 90-second video articulating the single problem that your solution solved and have all your sales reps start sending that out. And you'll, forget the term, you'll 10X, the effectiveness of everything you're doing from an outreach space. People just like watching videos now. Chris Beall (22:46): Especially if you send them right after a conversation, because they'll actually open it. Jeff Lerner (22:49): Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Chris Beall (22:53): That's the ultimate 10X cheat, right? You talk to 10 times more people, send everyone a video, and you got open rate times 10X more conversations. That's a hundred X right there, which is too scary and nobody wants to do. Jeff Lerner (23:06): Yeah. And most people's businesses would crash and burn if they actually had a hundred times more customers.  Chris Beall (23:12): They will [crosstalk 00:23:13] Jeff Lerner (23:12): Let me share with you guys an interesting anecdote or experience that you guys can maybe process in your own worlds because, presumably, you guys are also trying to advise your clients on these types of concepts, where you're trying to help them be more successful with your solutions. When I started this experiment and saying, "Hey..." I actually launched it in September, 2018. I walked out on a stage out at event with the equivalent of this; it was a selfie stick and my phone. And I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am starting over in my career. I sold my agency and with a very meager startup budget, I'm going to make a million dollars with these two things." It wasn't this, it was a little plastic selfie stick I bought at Best Buy and my phone.  I said, "I'm going to make a million dollars with a few bucks and my phone and a selfie stick. And here's how I'm going to do it." And I explained the whole concept. I said, "I'm going to go out to market and strike up conversations, build trust, create rapport, get intelligence, get feedback from people, figure out what product they want. Eventually once I have a big enough trusting audience, I'll launch a product, I'll..." I did have that much in mind. Again, I didn't know what the brand was going to be, I didn't know what the product was going to be, I didn't know all the details, but I told everyone what I was going to do. And I even sold a product at that event because I'm always a marketer. I can't help myself.  I said, "For $1,500, you can be a part of a private Facebook group with me where I will take you through this experience and we can all do it together, arm and arm and lockstep as a group. And I'll always be the lead dog, I'll be... I'll figure out the settings on the YouTube videos, I'll figure out the keyword optimization hacks, I'll figure out the types of subject matter, I'll figure out how to do the audience targeting analysis. And I'll just share it with everyone in this group. So you'll benefit from my obsessive workout thinking and trailblazing." And I think at that event, 40 people signed up. 90 days later, guess how many people were still meeting their quote of producing one video a day, even while I was out there doing all the hard work? Chris Beall (25:14): Zero? Jeff Lerner (25:16): Chris, you're a cynic. It was more than zero. Chris Beall (25:18): Okay. Well, what can I say? I just watch people try to do things every day. I asked myself, how many people have gone for a barefoot run every day since 1 January, 2007? And the number is pretty small. Jeff Lerner (25:31): Probably zero. My answer was actually overly... my response to you was overly skating because the answer was one. Chris Beall (25:37): Wow. Wow.  Jeff Lerner (25:38): So you were actually very close. Your cynicism was mostly [crosstalk 00:25:42] Chris Beall (25:43): For all we know, that one skipped a day somewhere when you were looking the other direction. Corey Frank (25:48): Well, were you surprised by that, Jeff, from when you originally issued the challenge, when you originally coalesced this group, did you assume it would be one in that amount of time? Jeff Lerner (26:00): Nothing surprises me anymore. I have completely enrolled in a philosophy in all aspects of my life of hoping for the best and planning for the worst with myself, with life, with environment, with other people, with the stock market, with investments, with error. And I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than consistently disappointed. I focus on having extremely high expectations of myself, extremely low expectations of everyone else and it seems to work out. It didn't really surprise me. I've been doing some form of on and off marketing coaching. Even when I had my agency, I was having conversations indirectly through my team with thousands of business owners, advising them on how they can improve their internal processes. Because the number one response we would get when we were talking about marketing is people saying, "I can't handle more business," because a lot of these were owner-operator, solopreneur plumbers, roofers, landscape guys, whatever. And we say, "Okay, you can't handle more business. That's fine. But could you handle more mine?" Even though that somebody is trying to be difficult. Nobody ever says, "No, I couldn't handle more money." You say, "Okay, great. Wouldn't it be worth taking 10 minutes to discuss your business? There's usually one weak link in your process where you don't get back to people fast enough, you don't know how to get the proposal out the right way, you don't have the right marketing message, you don't know how to close a deal. There's usually one tweak we could make that could probably double your capacity for new business. Or maybe it's on the fulfillment supply or distribution side, whatever. I've dealt with enough businesses. I can usually help. Let's at least try to solve that problem because I'm sure if you went home to your wife and said, 'Hey, honey, I told this guy on the phone today I couldn't handle more money.' She would be like, 'Go back to work tomorrow, call the guy back.' So why don't we just entertain it?" I had so many of these conversations and people just... they have not-invented-here syndrome. It's so ridiculous because they go out into the market looking for a better idea to do things a better way because they're frustrated with their own results, but then they reject things categorically because it wasn't their idea. I don't know if that's... it's probably ego. They don't want to admit that somebody else knew what they did and about their business. It's like somebody telling you how to raise your kid. So to answer your question, no, I was not surprised. And now who [crosstalk 00:28:13] Chris Beall (28:13): I wasn't either because I thought it was zero.  Corey Frank (28:17): Yeah.  Chris Beall (28:18): Well, you know what? It's not actually cynicism fundamentally though. Let's face it. That group of people who signed up in that moment signed up because of their experience in that moment. Had they already been signed up inside themselves sufficiently that they could actually do this thing for 45 days, 90 days, 180 days, they would have already been doing something like that. So it's hardly surprising that that's the kind of person who signs up because they're super attracted to something. It's like, "Hey, finally, something that I can do every day with somebody." It's like, "Well..."  That's why I made the comment about I run barefoot every day. I've been doing it every day since 1 January, 2007. I've never missed a day any time. Why? Well, because I'm not going to miss a day. I'm just not. And I wouldn't recommend it to somebody else because, I don't know, it probably might be a bad idea or whatever, but people who can do things, who figured out how to do things that are not easy to do every day, or maybe they are, for me it's easy, but they're already doing them. They just are already doing them. You catch an adult who's about to... in one's truth. That would be saying, "Actually, you're going to get the physical... Was their physical in shape to do something every day? Was their personal in shape to support doing something every day?" For you, it's like this great idea. I got the selfie stick, and I'm going to do this thing, and I'm going to make this multi-million dollar business right in front of God and everyone. But for them, they're still going, without knowing it, "But my physical doesn't even support that." They haven't even done that first step. So it's like, "Yeah, we just found out that you had a great experience telling you that you got to start at the beginning, and this wasn't the beginning." Corey Frank (30:09): Chris, I'm curious on the running thing, but James to you, is that the book Atomic Habits, right? Another one by [crosstalk 00:30:17]  Jeff Lerner (30:17): Yeah, James Clear. Corey Frank (30:18): James Clear, exactly. That's right. James Clear. You're talking about the physical and the personal, professional. And again, I'm still hung up on that number of group down to one and I think in Atomic Habits he talks about this cue, and then routine, and then I think there's a response, and then the reward. I think those are the four, right? Jeff Lerner (30:39): Right.  Corey Frank (30:39): Cue, craving, response and reward. And so that kind of loop, it builds your life into it. Is that the same type of principle, what you talk about in the physical and the personal, professional and that something's got to be that cue for. Something's got to be, they responded to your ad in the B2C world because, "Hey, I want a better life. I want an awesome life." But maybe it's like, "I don't want to have that awesome of a life." Maybe it's like the, "I don't feel enough pain to want to prompt it." Where do you find that that drops off? Is it because I live a relatively life here in the Western world and nothing is as bad as... "My boss isn't that bad. I don't make that little of money. My wife isn't that bad," et cetera. And we start rationalizing, as the second strongest human urge sometimes that we have. Where do you see from your experience training all these people and with regards to that habit, or do we just fall short? Jeff Lerner (31:41): Yeah. You're exactly right. Most people have built a fort of comfort with fort, is basically what comfort means. "In my fort, I'm comfortable." And so what I really try to lean on, and I will say, the problem you're alluding to got better in my favor in terms of the mission of what I'm trying to do, which is activate real, meaningful change in people since COVID. COVID shocked and scared enough people to go, "My illusion of comfort was... I'm a little more willing to admit how illusory it was. And so I'm a little more willing to respond on the basis that it might not be permanent." But pre-COVID and soon enough, we'll regress to the mean and people will be delusionally secure again. What I really try to do is create an ideology and a language and a shared understanding, a belief system about the world. And part of the way you do that is you agitate it and you develop it internally with your language. And part of the way you do it is you just attract people from the get-go that already believe what you believe, which is... And there's a lot of people in this world, and certainly in this country, that are frustrated by the lowest common denominator thinking, the idea that meritocracy is unfair, that every kid should get the same grade, every kid should get a participation trophy. Jeff Lerner (34:39): There's a lot of pent up frustration in this world around that stuff. And so, all I have to do is tap into it and say, "Listen, if you want to have an awesome life, you have to be committed to excellence. If you want to be committed to excellence, you have to be excellent. If you want to be excellent, you have to be as unlike the average as possible because there's a little camp up there on top of the mountain where all the excellent people hanging out, and there's this giant Valley at the bottom of the mountain that all the shit rolls downhill to that's called Average Camp. And all I'm inviting you to do is take the hard walk up the hill into the Excellent Camp where there's 700 of us that have the great life, but it's an open border. It's not discriminatory. Anyone can, but obviously everyone won't because most people will choose to be average.  I have that conversation so much in my world that you're either going to be repelled by the conversation because you think what a tyrannical jerk I am, or you're going to love the conversation, which means you are signing up to believe what I believe, which means it's now easy to convict you if you're not doing the work. Because I'm inviting you to self-select to excellence, so all the typical average behavior now becomes a contradiction and you guys know the Commitment and Consistency principle from Robert Cialdini. If I'm having people take micro-commitments, and I don't just think about micro-commitments as, "I bought a $5 product. Now I'll buy a $50 product. Now I'll sign up for a coaching call. Now I'll buy a $500 an hour product. Now I'll sign up for an annual bundle for 20 grand," or whatever the ascension stack is. But I think of micro-commitments as, "I posted a picture in Facebook holding a piece of paper on which I wrote my 90 days 3 P's goals. And I took a picture smiling on Facebook, and now I'm committed. I'm a little more committed to excellence and one foot out of the average camp." And I walk people through those type of micro commitments. I have a process... All my processes that are the indoctrination processes in my world, they're very personal growth-focused. I have something called the ENTRE Blueprint that walks them through very basic steps, mostly personal development. I have something called the Awesome Life Challenge. It's things like developing your success character and standing in a mirror and acting like a cartoon defined version of yourself where your best attributes are enhanced. Just like cartoon characters, they enhance certain characteristics and you minimize your weakest attributes. And I have them do these exercise and then post about the exercises in the groups. And I have them go through something called an implementation bootcamp, which is a two-week training that doesn't teach you anything other than how to be a better implementer, regardless of what you're implementing. It's like all the basic training modality. And once I've done that, people are like, "Hey, we're the few, the proud, the entrepreneurs. And we're excellent." And I don't really have to fight those battles anymore. But the reason it works for me is because I've invested the time and I take the time and I've created those resources. There's no shortcut. Chris Beall (37:41): You just said, I think, Jeff, the big reason most people don't choose excellence, and that is excellence is a form of exile from the community in which they grew up, the community in which they're comfortable, and the community in which they can have the primary conversation that people have all day, every day, which is to achieve rapport by complaining. This is the number one source of words coming out of people's mouths coming on to social media. All of the words that if you add them all up and you say, "Is this a word that's within a complaint about something or not?" You'll get 99-1. 99, it's out of every 100, are within a complaint about something. Jeff Lerner (38:30): So true. Chris Beall (38:31): And it's a lonely idea, a scary and lonely idea because we fear exile way, way worse than death. Exile is the worst punishment throughout all of human time. It has been the way that we punish those that have transgressed the most, is we exile them. If we like them a little better, we kill them. But if we really, really think they're bad, we exile them. And choosing self exile from your community of complainers is itself such a lonely prospect that the idea of going part way up that mountain and now you have nobody, you're nowhere. That truly is no man's land. There's no one living in a hut one halfway up Mount Excellence. And so it's scary. And I think you've hit the reason. And this is true. And this isn't a B2B or B2C thing. This is just when you make a company, for instance, one of the things I do when I'm asking people whether they want to join us, I make it clear it's probably a bad idea for them to join a company and work with me. And the reason is, I say, "Look, first, you don't get the comfort of having somebody to report to and getting to blame that person for your woes. We both report to the truth. And the truth is a hard task master." Every once in a while, we don't have enough information. We don't have enough time. Somebody has got to guess, "That's my job. I'm the [guesser 00:39:57] guest, sir." It's a corrupt system. I also declare we're going to guess. You're signing up for that. Sorry, the math happens to reach a singularity point of the single guesser, but everything else, we're coming to work naked every day. We're being enthusiastically wrong every day. We don't have a place to go hide from each other because there is no each other; there's the truth. We're trying to handle the truth.  And that is a lonely place to go. And I say to folks, "I recommend you don't do it because it's going to separate you a little bit from the world where you get to go to work and you bitch." Because that's the standard, you go to work and the comfort of the job is that you get to complain about the job, the boss and the customers. That's comforting. That's the comfort, Jeff. Jeff Lerner (40:41): It is. I'll tell you how I counter that. Again, you have to... Us versus them is the most powerful concept in marketing, at least from my experience. And the way I combat that is I really do have to somewhat demonize the average, perhaps unfairly. But you have to. Change is always an overcorrection or else nothing changes. I remember my mom telling me, when I was a little kid, somebody at school used the term feminazis or something. A militant feminist is a feminazi. And I was like, "Mom, what's a feminazi? She's like, "A feminazi is a very activist feminist. But the thing you have to understand, Jeffrey," because I was eight when I asked the question, she's like, "somebody has to be radical and extreme just to get enough light shined on an issue for the mean to shift a little bit towards the extreme. You have to have Malcolm X so that Martin Luther King Jr. could win," is what she was saying. And I was like, "That's true because otherwise we're just creatures of inertia and nothing changes."  So the way I have to do it is I really vilify the common environment that you're describing, this complainer society. What I do is I hearken back our tribal origins and I say, "Historically, what I'm asking you to do would have been terrifying you because it would make you less like the people around you, which creates an existential threat you'll be cast out and eaten by a bear. But the world we live in now ask yourself, 'Who is my tribe?'" And you've given me some new language here to have this conversation with because every tribe in the modern world is already basically a tribe of exiles. How many of your friends that you're sitting around complaining with are working in the family business? How many of them even grew up in the town that they're working in? How many of you actually live together in the same neighborhood? How many of you, his kids actually go to school together? All the tribal connective tissue has been completely scrapped and reworked in modern society. So you're clinging to a tribal concept that already doesn't apply. So get over the idea of needing to belong in the tribe and realizing you're never going to live in the nice hut in the tribe until you go out of the tribe, prove yourself in battle like the prodigal tribesmen who goes out and then comes back the returning neuro so you can rule the damn tribe. That's it. Right? Chris Beall (43:13): That was so flipping good that I almost used an adjective. But this is a family show because Corey's got lots of love [crosstalk 00:43:25] Jeff Lerner (43:24): I used the sh word, and I apologize for that guys. Chris Beall (43:28): Did you really? I was in a conversation with a very senior executive at a big, big payroll services company and the number of words like that she used, it made me feel pretty good. I felt like I belonged. It was excellent. Corey Frank (43:44): Isn't that a more... It'd be interesting. Just talk about that just for a second, is I got bro it out over here on the amateur scale. And then we've all been part of B2B conversations where that happens. And again, listen, hey, we're in a real world, we're not daisies or immune to power boards in the world here and shocked by subtle things like that. But it is a technique, is it not? It is a discomfort. Oftentimes where people overtly use language like that in business, it masks an insecurity, it masks something. What do you say? Chris Beall (44:25): Not in this case. But yes, I think it often does in this specific case [crosstalk 00:44:28] In this case, what... Corey Frank (44:30): The team was good and [crosstalk 00:44:30] Chris Beall (44:30): No, it wasn't pain at all. It was actually the opposite. It was a 20-minute meeting that turned into a deep exploration of the market dominance opportunity for a multi-billion dollar company. And we hit on the very thing that could be done. This is a first meeting, a 20-minute discovery meeting. And it was an hour and 27 minutes into it where all of the covers came off. All of the buckets were brought out, we looked at all of this, some of this or some of this, and then it was just, we were on the same team and just talking about how to solve a big problem. Corey Frank (45:07): Well, you hit raw nerve by this epiphany of what I've have been missing. Chris Beall (45:12): Exactly. It's one of these things that... This is why AI can't possibly work with language, because we can barely do it ourselves unless we were there. It's so subtle how language works with folks. Jeff, you talked about vocabulary. I used to be a relatively well-known in certain circles large-Scale software systems developer. I was an architect. I was the guy you brought in when... if the guys had been working or the gals have been working for four years and the thing isn't going to deliver, and somebody's got to fix it and we have four weeks and we're going to make it again from scratch. That was what I did for a living. And the first thing that I would always do is get the team together and say, "We're going to stay in this room until we agree as to the precise definition, in three different ways of defining it, of every single word that we're going to use from now, until this product is built. Let's start putting words on the board and let's decide what they mean." And it normally takes three or four days. And it's really, really just uncomfortable for people because they're going, "Why aren't we writing code? Why aren't we writing code?" And it's because until we speak the same language, we don't have a chance of writing a coherent system. And once we speak the same language excellently with precision, with deep understanding of what these words mean, and specifically what they don't mean, what they're anti-meaning is, how this isn't one of those, as soon as we understand that, it's the easiest thing in the world to write massive bug-free systems. And I think it's the same thing when you're writing, so to speak, writing or architecting a system for life. You've got to get to where the words have specific, precise, shared, resonant meanings, or it's very dangerous to talk... It's dangerous enough to talk in person like this. It's really dangerous to talk in writing when there's no one there to correct you on the spot when you make an emotional error with the word, and those are the big errors.  Jeff, you said that you had [crosstalk 00:47:14] for a while, and now a while is over. Look, I am going to work on one of my P's immediately. My barefoot running has been short today and I'm going to go make it six miles or seven miles longer. So that one is in the bag. I simply love your concentric foundations and why they are like they are. I tell you when young entrepreneurs ask me a question all the time, which is, "What's the one thing I need to do in order to be successful?"  And I say, "Take great care of your body because when your body starts to not quite support, just tiny bit, or you're not getting why it's not supporting the next level of activity, which is your personal, but when your body won't do it anymore, you won't notice it. All you'll do is fail." And entrepreneurship begs you not to take good care of your body. It just begs you to because it says, "There's always one more thing I can do at the keyboard. There's always one more thing I can do sitting down." So I'm going to go for a trot with huge, huge, thanks to you. I heard that a guy had an awesome life kind of company, but you're bringing awesome life to Market Dominance Guys today. This is simply an amazing experience. Thank you.  Jeff Lerner (48:34): I'm so glad we got to do it, guys. While we were talking, I texted two different people to move meetings out because I enjoyed this conversation so much I didn't want to cut it short. So I really appreciate you guys.  Corey Frank (48:45): Well, we got to have [Yon 00:48:46] in... In fact, we should send an invite immediately after this, Chris, but one year from today, because I have a feeling as more and more quarters and months in the next years come by, Jeff's going to be a tougher and tougher get, and Tony Robin's going to be opening up for Jeff Lerner, I think, here. Because the principals are so timeless and clearly for us to go this long on a Market Dominance episode is pretty unusual too. So we certainly appreciate all this. I got three pages of notes here. So I always live vicariously through Chris and my guests here and adopt all this new content and spend it all on myself and the teams here. So we appreciate that certainly. With that, this has been another episode of the Market Dominance guys with Corey Frank and Chris Beall. Until next time.

Up to now, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, have used this podcast as a platform addressing the topic of how to dominate B2B markets. But today, the guys are interviewing Jeff Lerner, founder, and CEO of Entre Institute, about the process he employs to dominate a B2C market. By placing daily video messages on social media about himself, his life, and his goal to help people improve their lives, Jeff proves to his prospects that he is a person they can identify with and, eventually, a person they can trust. It’s not as quick as a cold call: Jeff says it takes about six months of exposure to his messages before skepticism is diminished in his prospects’ minds and they trust him enough to be open to what his company offers. ----more----   Chris compares the arc of Jeff’s social media campaign with that of a salesperson who makes cold calls, including the ambush of catching a prospect unaware with an unscheduled call  — which is very much like what Jeff does when his videos pop up on social media, essentially ambushing his potential buyers and creating instant mistrust. Jeff explains that the more complex the problem is that you’re trying to solve for your prospects, the more mistrust there is for you to overcome. And, as he says, “You don’t build trust with knowledge or technical competence. You build it emotionally, empathetically.” Listen in while Chris, Corey, and Jeff discover more similarities between dominating business and consumer markets in this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “B2B or B2C: It’s All About Gaining Trust.” About Our Guest Jeff Lerner is CEO and founder of Entre Institute, which provides business training, inspiration, and personal support through videos, messaging, online workshops, and one-on-one interaction for entrepreneurs who want to create online businesses and awesome lives.  ----more---- This is the full transcript for this episode: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/jsn8u2/mdg-20210422-lerner-2-time-50-15.mp3   Chris Beall (02:18): All right, everybody. We got to overcome the shock of it being me, Chris Beall on Market Dominance Guys. I'm CEO of ConnectAndSell. I'm here with Jeff Lerner, who is the founder CEO of Entre Learning Systems. Broke jazz musicians done $250 million in sales. I don't know, I can't keep track and things go up into the [inaudible 00:02:42] all you can do is just kind of whip your head up and see if you can keep your eyes going. Jeff, welcome to the show. Jeff Lerner (02:46): Thanks Chris. Excited to be here. We can parse those numbers, but I'm grateful for the intro for sure. Chris Beall (02:52): Well, I tell you what, every once in a while I tell people about a deal I did back in the day and I know it was a hundred and twenty million, but when other people tell the story, it becomes 150, 180. Sometimes you just got to go with it. Just got to go with it. Jeff Lerner (03:06): I just have to say exits, run rates. They're basically all fishing stories. Chris Beall (03:11): Yeah. Oh God. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I caught a fish that was this big. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, Jeff was kind enough to have me on his podcast and it was spectacular. It was a ton of fun. We kept finding out all these bizarre things that we had in common. It got weirder and weirder and weirder in a good way. I mean, it really did. After a while, we're like, "Really? Not one more thing? You got to be kidding me." Right? So he's done me now, a double kindness coming on and let's let Corey in the room here. Here comes Corey Frank. Corey Frank is in the room. He's looking good. He's he's running a real business to. Corey, we're already on. We're already running. So I want to introduce you to Jeff Lerner. Corey Frank (03:59): Jeff, how are you? Jeff Lerner (04:00): Hey Corey. Nice to meet you, man. How are you? Corey Frank (04:02): Fantastic. Last day of the month. Last day of the quarter. Always good. Jeff Lerner (04:05): Yes, that's right. Yeah. We're all trying to break records, right? Corey Frank (04:09): Indeed. Chris Beall (04:10): So Jeff founded and runs Entre education services? I can never remember things. Jeff Lerner (04:17): Entre Institute. Chris Beall (04:18): Entre Institute. I love it. Entre Institute. And Corey runs something called Youngblood. I can't even say it because when I get to the word blood, I realize everybody's listening. Youngblood Works and it's one of those names you have to parse it and go, is it that the Youngblood Works or that the Youngblood Works or whatever, but he is bringing a whole new way of making new business happen for companies, especially in cybersecurity, but for others. And it's pretty magical stuff. So Corey is, I believe in Phoenix right now it's our Scottsdale. It looks familiar. Corey Frank (04:54): We have another store's Location in Phoenix, Arizona. That's correct. Chris Beall (04:57): An undisclosed location. Corey Frank (04:58): [inaudible 00:04:58]. Chris Beall (05:00): So what we're going to talk about today is Corey, believe it or not, we always talk about B2B. And we talk about how to dominate B2B markets by using a conversation first approach. And I talk to people about this regularly, as do you. And usually we get this raised eyebrow, like what do you mean conversation first approach? And then when we talk about building trust through conversations and harvesting the trust as you go to market in order to create massive competitive advantage and lower the friction and cost of acquiring customers until finally you're dominating that market. Chris Beall (05:31): When we talk about that, people think that's even weirder because they think you've got to talk value in order to get trust. But we believe that you should offer value and in a cold call, that value is, "I'll go away, if you let me say 27 seconds worth of stuff." In order to instantly get trust and then go from trust toward curiosity and from curiosity, ultimately to the opportunity to offer somebody value. We have here with us today somebody, in the form of Jeff, who's done this and B2C. You don't know anything about B2C, right? Corey Frank (06:05): I've purchased something on the internet in my past, at least once. Yes. That's about it. Chris Beall (06:10): Okay. All right. All right. Well I know- Corey Frank (06:12): [inaudible 00:06:12]. Chris Beall (06:15): I don't know a great deal about it either. If you asked me to run a B2C business, I would figure out a second letter, other than C. I'd run B to F or B to Q or something like that because I'm a clueless consumer. And I watched Jeff as we were getting ready for the show, go in and remake the credentials for an e-commerce site so somebody who's helping him with it could do her job. And I would just look at it like a cow looks at an oncoming train. So I got an opening question for Jeff and then Corey, we're going to let you take it away because this is about as much prep as you ever get. Chris Beall (06:51): So Jeff just high level you told me that you use conversation first approach to dominate a B2C market. I would contend that's impossible because how could you get all the conversations and wouldn't you go broke in the meantime and all that. So first of all, did that idea come to you? Like I'm going to do it this way or I'm so brilliant. I figured out this way to do it, or was it something that you started doing and then went, "Holy moly, this actually is the right way to do it." Or what? How'd you get going with this incorrect model? Jeff Lerner (07:25): It was kind of a combination of all three options. So I'll say D all of the above, but I have to focus on the fact that there was an element of presupposition that this approach would work, how it would work, how it would unfold, what it would even end up working for that kind of evolved through the process and through the conversations and through the intelligence and feedback gathering of the conversations. So for example, when it started, it wasn't Entre Institute, it was just Jeff knowing that he knew some stuff. And then at some point he wanted to figure out how to A, get what he knew to a large number of people. And obviously to do that in any sustainable way, it means to build a for-profit business out of it so that it can keep going and keep reaching more people. Jeff Lerner (08:14): So it started as just like, "Hey, I know some things that a lot of people could benefit from, and I want to scale the message and monetize the message so that I can keep scaling the message over time." And I know that the best way to start that is just start talking. And start sharing and start giving value. Obviously, when you're talking conversations B2C on mass, it's different than B2B conversations where you think of having a dialogue with a purchasing manager at a big logistics company, or I guess logistics companies don't do purchasing so that was a bad example, but you know what I mean. A LinkedIn chat. For me, a conversation was Facebook video, comment thread, 600 comments, me taking the time to respond to every comment that was worth responding to, and maybe having 35 conversations in a feed where everybody can see it. Jeff Lerner (09:05): So indirectly, it becomes a conversation with a hundred thousand people that have all seen the video by proxy of the 35 people in the comments. So I did that. Basically, I knew that I knew how to go build real businesses on the internet. I'd been doing it at that time for 10 years. And I have a good story which helps drive conversations. I had gone from 10 years prior to that 2008, I was a broke out of work, jazz musician, half a million dollars in debt from a couple sales restaurant businesses that we're all on borrowed money that they never should have given me the loan in the first place, except it was 2006 and the banks were insane. They'd loan, a 27 year old kid, 400 grand to hang himself with, but I had paid off all that debt. I'd gone online in 2008. I paid off all that debt. Jeff Lerner (09:54): At that point, I had generated close to about 50 million bucks just with total online businesses, working from home on a laptop or whatever. And they were all businesses you can start with relatively low startup capital. And I'm like, "I know that this stuff would change most people's lives." Most people are stuck in a job. They toil. They don't get what they love. They don't love what they get. What if everybody knew what I knew? So I started putting information out to market about the business side of it, but also I didn't want to get caught up in the perception of being another one of these talking head, internet business, make money online, scammy guru, people that have rented Lamborghini's and Airbnb mansions that they stay in for three days while they shoot their ad video. And I didn't want to be one of those guys. Jeff Lerner (10:41): So I really wanted to focus on a more holistic conversation and I'm married. I'm a dad. I coach kids basketball team. My favorite thing in the world is just to play with my kids. And I work out a lot, I'm really into health and fitness. I go to a lot of therapies. So I'm real into communication dynamics and healthy relationships. And I wanted to fold all of that into a conversation about the new digital economy and these business models and these business tools that are available to everyone, where you can learn how to build a funnel, create a decent offer, find a target audience, pair those three things together, throw some money at it, grow your brand and your message inside of it. Jeff Lerner (11:23): If you have something to say, and you have value to offer, you can build a hell of a business. That model is out there. There's 7.7 billion people in the world. And I think four billion of them have internet access. And that model is available to all four billion of those. And yet 96% of people self report dissatisfaction in their job. 86% of people report dissatisfaction in their lives. And I'm like, "Well, screw the doctors. I'm the one with the prescription. They can fix all these problems." So I just started giving the value. Here's how I built my online business. Here's how having an online business allows me to go to therapy at two o'clock in the afternoon with my wife so we can learn to communicate better because I don't have to ask for time off or be in trouble because I left work. And here's how my online business allows me to pay for healthy prepared meals. Facilitates a whole life, a whole quality of life, not just a big fat bank account. Jeff Lerner (12:13): And that's the conversation that I struck up on the internet. And I was just putting out video after video, after video saying, "Hey, my name's Jeff Lerner. You can look me up online. Here's a picture of my house. I'm a real guy. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just truly believe that what I know can change the world and it can change your world. Let me know if you have any questions." And over the course of the year, I put out between Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, I put out probably close to a thousand videos or re edited videos for the different platforms and stuff. Probably about three or 400 source videos of just me giving away free value. After a year of doing that, I had thousands of conversations. I had millions of people engage with my content, a re-targetable audience on Facebook of two million people that were like, "Man, I like this Jeff guy. He's really trying to help. He's not trying to sell me anything." Speaker 5 (13:36): Before ConnectAndSell, we had to deal with everything that everybody else has to deal with. Cold calls, gatekeepers, automated phone trees, dial by name directories. So using ConnectAndSell, instead of having two conversations an hour, we're having 10 conversations an hour, everybody's making money. So with that, we sell our lives cut easier, helped us increase our production by 70% because I don't have to do all this manual work. Speaker 6 (14:04): Now my reps can actually speak to more real conversations, more real customer calls and more real money. Yeah, we made money. We made seven figures off of that test drive. A sales rep, uploads the list, presses play they're connected to the customer. It is completely easy, effortless with no dialing. Do yourself a favor call ConnectAndSell and watch the magic happen. Announcer (14:36): And we're back with Corey and Chris. Jeff Lerner (14:38): They're like, "Hey, do you have a course I can by." Or like, "Hey, is there any way I can give you money to get more from you?" And it's like- Corey Frank (14:48): How long- Jeff Lerner (14:48): Well, speak of the devil. Yeah? Go ahead. Corey Frank (14:48): How long does that process take do you see to build that trust and ameliorate that fear? Jeff Lerner (14:58): It took me- Corey Frank (14:59): Because in the B2B world, we know what it is, but in your B2C experience, how long does that take? Jeff Lerner (15:03): It took me six months I would say of showing up every day to go from people ignoring me to people being annoyed by me, to people being intrigued by me, to people listening, but skeptical of me and eventually people listening to me and wanting it to be true. And then eventually winning them over that I'm not going to go away and I'm too transparent to be made up. So now you can finally trust and that was six steps I just gave you it was probably about one per month. I spent a month in obscurity and then the next month I just spent annoying people, but I kept going. Corey Frank (15:46): So once you capture that name or that prospect or that ICP, that you identify, you build a relationship, whatever your cadence is, weekly or monthly in this case. Jeff Lerner (16:00): Daily. Daily was mine. Corey Frank (16:01): Daily, daily. And a lot of it is growing value up front to go through those six steps of annoyance and acceptance and trust. Jeff Lerner (16:11): And it's got to be daily. I think probably one of the differences between B2C is B2C could also be called business the chaos or business declutter or business to crowd. If you want to stand out in the crowd, you're going to have a high quantity of content for the average person that you're trying to reach to see you the seven times in their Facebook feed, that it takes to create a memorable imprint there's probably a hundred million impressions that have gone through that feed that you have to pop up into. It just takes a lot more quantity. I used to do inbound marketing for B2B clients when I had an agency. And that was much more quality over quantity. I think with B2C I don't want to say quantity over quality, but I would say quality without quantity is almost useless. Corey Frank (16:59): Have you discovered any data or the biophysiology of why it takes that long on that process? Obviously some of them when you're trying to cast a wide net and I absolutely want a better life. Absolutely, I want to be better looking and thinner and more in shape and have a relationship and financial independence. So you may get folks where just the intersectionality of pay opportunity and preparedness like you got me at the right time. My boss just pissed on me. My cat pissed on everything, but for a person who's at rest, who you need to stimulate in a direction of moving toward your ultimate call to action, is it because it's just a by-product of so much noise in the universe now? And so many folks adopting this, but from a data perspective, why should it take so long on that B2C process? Jeff Lerner (17:53): It's a function of a few things. One, it is just the pure volume of content and messaging. I mean, I forget the statistics, but I think people are exposed four million marketing messages a day now something like completely mind blowing. And so for you to claim any tiny, memorable fraction of those total messages, those total impressions, you just got to show up a lot. Plus skepticism is at an all time high. And this goes with the high volume of marketing messages, the barrier to entry to getting your message out to someone online. And I would create one of these videos and this is an important part of the process to understand. Jeff Lerner (18:32): I wouldn't just post it on my profile or even just post it on my page because in late 2018, when I was doing this, the organic reach of Facebook page content had already started to fall dramatically. Facebook isn't going to do you any favors just distributing your business related content for free. So I would throw anywhere from 25 to maybe a hundred, occasionally 200 if I felt really confident in the video, dollars' worth of what they call a boost on each of these videos so that I could target a segment of the cold market to make sure they saw my videos. And so this was further data. Let's say I shot four videos that were roughly on the same subject or even the same video. I could boost it four different times. I could say target Tony Robbins audience, target Gary Vaynerchuks audience, target men over 45, target women under 35, whatever combination of demographics and interests I wanted to target I could, that was part of the intelligence gathering. Jeff Lerner (19:28): But it's just hard and skepticisms at all time highs so you got to win them over. And a lot of it is just the confidence. If you think about statistics, the more time something occurs, the more confidence you place in it as not just an anomaly. And there's kind of a similar effect online where not just the more times they see you, but the more different messages they see from you, the more backgrounds they see you in, the more locations they see you in, the more other people they see you with. Here's a video with me and my daughter. Here's a video of me and my wife out driving in the car. Here's me at the gym. It builds this case of, "Okay, this must be real." Nobody has the budget to fabricate an entire life with all these different facets. Corey Frank (20:14): Well, there's a great book, Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. Jeff Lerner (20:17): I just bought it. I haven't read it, but I just bought it. Corey Frank (20:19): It's phenomenal. And I think certainly talking with you, I think you'd agree Chris with Jeff is that there's certain folks who are just unconscious competence who probably do a lot of these things by their nature, by their intuitiveness, by their kind of at rest net we'll say, I think you probably fit into that. But Coyle talks about what are the imprints of a great organization, a great team, it could be a great family, marriage, et cetera. And you identified a couple of them probably. And as you said you didn't read the book yet, right? Number one is it's usually this concept of building safety. Can you build safety that it's safe to talk to me? And Chris we'll talk about this a little bit when we get your impression of the intro and how we ameliorate fear but also throw enough intrigue and humor and curiosity intention in there because they got to make a tough decision, but building safety and bearing vulnerability, which snuffs out the skepticism. Corey Frank (21:16): The more vulnerable and open I am, "Hey, listen, I'm just a real guy, flesh and blood looking at, I don't have a six pack, but I'm getting there." My life's not perfect, but it's getting there. And then the third is establishing purpose, a mission, a drive, versus a lot of folks being in this, maybe home of complacency in their life, drifting from port to port, as Uncle Zig would say like a life without a rudder and you just hope that you drift into a port of prosperity. Corey Frank (21:42): So with that, and again, probably because you've had so many repetitions doing this in a B2C world different than Chris and I come from where we don't have as big of as you do, [inaudible 00:21:55] certainly with many of the clients that Chris and I deal with, we have [inaudible 00:22:00] in the hundreds or thousands, not in the millions or so. But isn't that fascinating, Chris, with that there are some similarities with Jeff is doing even unconsciously to kind of build these great teams. But in your case, you are the brand and they're buying you and what you're about. What do you think about that Chris what Jeff has shared with us? Chris Beall (22:23): Well, it's interesting. I mean, Jeff, what you described that six step process is oddly analogous to a process that takes about 30, 40 seconds that we teach people to do on a cold call. You had to do it over six months because of the nature of the beast, because you're cold calls so to speak is to your whole audience. It's not to one person or another person, another person you're cold calling your entire audience and you need to get them- Jeff Lerner (22:51): I'm interrupting them as bad as any vocal, for sure. Chris Beall (22:54): Exactly. And it's interesting that interrupt thing, you're really ambushing, and I'll even go beyond that. They didn't agree in advance that they were going to see your video pop-up or whatever, right? So there's this ambush and the ambush psychology the way you played it forward is like a six month long cold call and it makes sense it would be six months long because you're doing it with millions of people whereas when we teach cold calling, we go, "Okay, I'll provide you with the ambush capabilities. Your Facebook is our connect and sell." So on Facebook, you get something to jump up in front of somebody. Your boost is like somebody paying us in order to push a button and talk to somebody, that's their boost. And then your opening move that you're making ends up being inevitable annoyance first, you're just showing up and then being ignored. Chris Beall (23:51): And then annoyance happens, right? Why are they annoyed? Well, they're kind of afraid of you because they think you're going to sell them something. So it's annoyance that a guy who I'm afraid of he's going to sell me something. I can see him but is he real, he could be fake. He's a visible stranger, but he might as well be invisible because I am not sure he ain't fake. It could be something else. And so, this is really a shock to me. You're taking them down a path. So we take folks down this journey, when you ambush somebody, you immediately establish trust because they start in a place of fear. So the way you establish trust is basically you own up to not just annoying them, but scaring them. Chris Beall (24:35): I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? And that's where I'm going to solve a problem that you have. And you're solving a problem they have, which is a problem of hope. Their problem is 98% down to 87% of too whatever it is, depending on how you look at it. I've kind of given up, but they don't want to give up. They don't want to not like their job. They don't want to not like their life. They want hope. So you're offering them hope. And from that, I think they're going to get some trust. We're offering them a way out of their current trap. Their current trap is I just ambushed you and you want me to go away and I'm going to offer you certainty that I'll go away. Chris Beall (25:21): That's my offer. I will go away. Certainly. And I'll tell you how certain. I'll go away in 27 seconds. All you have to do is let me tell you why I called. And then I'm gone. And by going so early to trust in your case two months and our case seven seconds, and it probably [inaudible 00:25:41]. Here's a guess. Corey, if you were to take just him divided by your Tam or my Tam and count, and then multiply it by seven seconds, I think you get two months. Jeff Lerner (25:55): It's probably right. Chris Beall (25:59): I'm killing myself here. This is the unified field theory of business. It just happened. Jeff Lerner (26:06): Yeah. The other nuance I want to add to what you said I think it's important for everyone to understand, because I think it would apply B2B or B2C is the more complex the problem is that you're trying to solve the more mistrust there is for you to overcome, which means the longer the opening salvo to build it needs to take. And here's what I mean. If you're calling a business and their problem is they have dirty water in the holding tank because they have a [inaudible 00:26:42] installed that's made of the wrong material. You can call. And in like three seconds, you can build trust by saying, "Hey, I heard you have dirty water in your tank. Let me guess you have one of those porous silicone netting wraps. And I'm here to tell you about the non porous silicone netting wrap that'll eliminate dirt in your groundwater." Jeff Lerner (27:03): Well, boom, you got them because it was such a specific problem with such a specific solution. For me, I'm going out to millions of people saying, "So you're not totally stoked about your life." Could be your marriage, could be your health, could be your job, could be your money, turned out it could have been COVID, could be your boss is an asshole, it's such a vague and multifaceted problem that it would take me a month to even demonstrate that I have enough multi-dimensional competence to even speak to them and potentially relate to whatever their particular subset of all those issues actually is. And half the time the reason people think they're not happy, isn't even why they're really unhappy. You see what I mean? It's just a way completely different obstacles set to overcome. Jeff Lerner (27:53): And you nailed it though. This is, I think goes to a lot of sales mistakes. You don't build trust with knowledge or technical competence. You build it emotional. You build it limbically and empathetically with people. You can build more trust in a conversation with a guy commiserating with them about how his kid wants to play little league, but is scared because he doesn't think he's good at sports. And you have a shared experience and you can speak to that experience as a father, that's going to build more trust with some high level CEO, than expounding on the technical issue he's dealing with in his business. Corey Frank (28:35): Do you find Jeff that as you've tested these messages, because you are selling, you're selling a better life. And as you had said, when you asked 10 people, what is a better life mean? They may have different answers. So you have to sell kind of abstractly, but also big enough and specific enough where there's enough of a honeypot to want to learn more, walk us through that journey of how you tested different messages, because you can't go, "Hey, 10X man." Right? Sometimes that works for some folks, but some are like, "10X? That's too concentrated. I'm happy with 1.5X." How do you go through that in a B2C world? Because you're dealing with so much more volume and your data probably comes at you much faster than it would for Chris or I in the B2B world. Jeff Lerner (29:27): Yeah. And I didn't think about it in these terms in the beginning, but I can say based on how it unfolded and now looking back, this is exactly what I think the right answer is. B2C is all about controlling language and creating meaning in words, words that mean something to you. You need those words to become memes, packets of information, to convey complex ideas. And somebody at some point had to create the word streaming. Now if we go on and we say, "We're the world's fastest streaming service." That's a whole set of information bundled in the word streaming. But somebody had to create that understanding across culture. Jeff Lerner (30:12): So for me, I had to, and this happened again organically because at first I was. I was jumping all around trying to find my messaging, trying to find my consistent group, because I'm talking relationship dynamics and all these theories that I'm pulling from things I've studied. Positive discipline with my kids, responsive listening with my wife, things I learned from Gottman at The Love Lab things I learned from Tony Robbins and Unleash the Power Within things I learned from Zig Ziglar on old YouTube videos. And it becomes this hodgepodge of accumulated wisdom, the Six Principles of Persuasion from Robert Cialdini so from that cloud had to emerge my vernacular, my vocabulary that people could start to attach to just like a logo or a brand conjures up feelings and a robust understanding of something. Jeff Lerner (31:00): When you're just a guy talking on the internet, you're not a logo. You're not a brand. You have to find words that can accomplish the same thing. And what I ultimately honed in on and this is it. If somebody said, Jeff, to what would you attribute the fact that in the last three years, you've sold over 130,000 paying courses, paid students enrolled into your school. That's not really a school, but Entre Institute. You're the fastest growing. And one of the largest private education companies in the world, and less than three years ago, you were an unknown dad in a small town in Southern Utah, driving around in your car, shooting videos on your cell phone. How did you do that? I would say, it's this. I found one really powerful mnemonic theme that everybody resonated with, which is if you want to have an awesome life. My first brand wasn't Entre Institute, it was actually School of Awesome. Basically I honed in on a set of words, the key to an awesome life is a commitment to excellence. Jeff Lerner (32:04): It's not about money. It's not about love. It's not about good luck, it's not about a six pack. It's about excellence because progress is happiness and excellence will drive human system progress So you want to have an awesome life. You have to be committed to excellence, but excellence is a big, scary word for a lot of people. So what we're going to do is we're going to chunk it into the three PS of excellence. And this becomes a heuristic that you can apply to every second of your life to make sure that you're either doing something that serves you or you're doing something that subtracts from your goals and there shall never again be a middle ground between those two poles. Jeff Lerner (32:41): The three P's are, is what I'm doing right now, productive of physical excellence, personal excellence, or professional excellence in my life. If yes, keep doing it. Do more of it. If no, stop doing it, do something that is. Period at the end. Do that now you'll have a better life a year from now. You can thank me later. I didn't even try to sell you anything. And again, it took me probably 200 conversations before I converged around that core idea. But once I had it, then I could start riffing in variations on a theme from there. Every conversation I've had since then, maybe two and a half years ago, it's been a variation on that same beam. And now I have people posting, "Yo, yo, my three Ps [inaudible 00:33:22]. I worked out this morning. I took my daughter out for lunch and I made $4,500 in my online business." Three Ps, woo-hoo. It just created a rallying cry around that concept. But without that, you're just noise.  

On this week’s episode of Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall continues his conversation with Cherryl Turner, Chief Development Officer of ConnectAndSell’s newest division, Flight School. Together they talk about why it is that of the four sales outcomes — Yes, No, Not me, or Not now — the response that dominates is “Not now.” As Chris explains, “It’s the nature of life.” People are busy. Things come up. Priorities shift. But when a prospect says, “Not now,” what’s a sales rep to do? Push harder and try to squeeze his pitch into the conversation anyway? Or should he relax and bow to the prospect’s protestations that it’s a bad time to talk, by graciously saying, “No problem. I’ll give you a call next week.” It’s an unusual reaction in the high-pressure world of “Make that sale,” but this may be one of the keys to Cherryl’s success in her career: as Chris says, she handles the rigors of cold calling with grace. It also takes grace to handle the frustration of a no-show. But Chris’s surprising reaction to a cancelled appointment is, “I heart no-shows! They’re my favorite thing in business!” A no-show, he says, makes the relationship more real, because now it’s less perfect. It creates a more-even footing for the next conversation, as well as an opening for a prospect to reveal an insight or two about his business as he explains the why behind his missed appointment. So, when a rep or AE is faced with a no-show and is able to relax and say, “Hey, I understand. I’ll call you back later so we can find a time that will work better for you,” then that improves what Cherryl calls the “trust-o-meter.” She has learned that being persistent with call-backs to “Not now’s” and “No shows” lets her prospects know that she believes in the potential value of what she is selling. And you can believe me when I say, you’re going to want to hear every minute of this week’s episode of Market Dominance Guys, “I Heart No-Shows!”   ----more----   Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. Here is the complete transcript from this episode: Cherryl Turner (02:46): Well, I think of the way that my husband and I met. It was an ambush conversation. We were sitting next to each other, and it was that other moment, right? If he had pushed, "I've got to know that you want  me," right at the very first conversation, I would've said, "There's the road. You can take a long walk on that one." But it's not. (laughing). That just kind of came to my head. I was like, "Oh, we can apply this to any part of our life," right? Which is true. It's the same with cold calls. It's an ambush conversation, and however you want to turn it, if you are a full cycle rep going after a targeted list or if you're trying to crack into a new market or if it's just high-volume cold calling, it applies across the board, because you always have to have initial first conversations, regardless if you're trying to continue to build relationships or if they don't know you from Adam. So that is critical. So if that relaxation and that confidence, you take that on for them, they feel that over the phone and this exchange of emotion that you're having with this person. It allows them freedom to, "Okay," and they'll want to actually meet with you. It's okay if it takes two or three or four conversations to get there. I honestly believe that meeting will end up being more productive, because they already know you have their best interest at heart. Chris Beall (04:10): You were willing to call them again. I mean, face it. Cherryl Turner (04:10): Exactly. Yeah. Chris Beall (04:15): People like attention. They like somebody who cares enough about them. That first time that they don't attend the meeting, that could be just a little tiny test that's not ... You think about this. It's like, "Does somebody care enough?" I was watching a couple of mourning doves that were having a discussion this morning about whether they should be making mourning dove babies. He flew up on the roof, and that's kind of like, "Well, are you going to come up here or not?" (laughing). Cherryl Turner (04:41): That's awesome. (laughing). Chris Beall (04:43): It's such a basic thing. If it's so true for mourning doves, maybe it could be true for the rest of us. But yesterday I was having a nice chat with Pat Lynch, who is running sales enablement for LivePerson at the moment in global sales enablement. He was reminiscing with me about when he had come to connect in Saul's office in Denver and witnessed something. He stayed all day and watched people work, and I left so that I wouldn't inhibit him. He was doing work for CSO Insights, and so he was getting some chief sales officer insights by observing. When I came back from my going away and talking to customers, I asked him, "What'd you see?" He said, "Chris, I don't know how to tell you this. We've got to go in the conference room and shut the door." We went in and shut the door, and he said, "See that guy right there?" I said, "Yeah, that's Jordan Dufour." He goes, "He's the inventor of 27 Seconds. He's a famous dude." He said, "He did something I've never seen before. A CEO that he got on the phone said, 'Hey, I'm busy. I've got to go into a meeting right now.' Instead of trying to get more out of him, he just said, 'Oh, that's great. Okay. I'll call you next week. I'll give you a shout on Tuesday.' Boom. He just moved on. I went and asked him, 'Why? Why didn't you try to get a meeting with him? You had a CEO.' He said, 'Well, what do you mean? I'll talk to him next week. I have ConnectAndSell.'" That was when Pat said, "I didn't realize that a mechanical change of just being able to talk to 10 times more people would result in an emotional change, where the rep is relaxing." He said, "And I see it around your office. Then it creates a cultural change." That's the one everybody's trying to get to. Cherryl Turner (06:23): Absolutely. Chris Beall (06:25): So here you are, doing it, but I still don't think we've solved this problem. Now, I'm wondering, is it possible that the SDR as a separate role has a built-in problem that people aren't realizing, which is that as an AE, as a full cycle rep, as the chief development officer of ConnectAndSell's Flight School division, you are free to do anything you want? You can set those meetings, and if they don't happen, you don't have any trouble then, right? You just put them in your followup, and then you get on and make some more cold calls. What's the difference? You don't care when you're cold calling. But if you were two people, one of whom is serving the other with meetings, and it's not a pure relationship, because you can have an easy peer relationship with yourself, right? Then when you set a meeting with your counterpart and it doesn't happen that they get to point the finger at you and say, "You're setting meetings that are not happening. You better improve the show rate." Yet, to improve the show rate, they have to sell after the close, which is the one thing we tell salespeople never to do. Have we built in a problem that leadership has got to address one way or another to make the SDR, BDR thing work, given that they could be converting at 75% like you and Scott Webb? In fact, they're converting at 3%. Maybe it's because they've been told, "Don't convert." Maybe we don't know we're telling them this, but we're saying, "Don't convert unless it's perfect," and nothing's perfect. Is that possible? Cherryl Turner (07:57): That's just it, right? We think it's got to be a perfect scenario. It's got to be a perfect fit. What is intriguing is I've been on both sides of that table. In fact, the majority of my career, until I came over to you, was the SDR, right? So as as a consultant and partner of yours, I've worked for PE firms, and I've worked in every industry you can imagine, helping either to build pipeline or help them develop, sales development, or get a process in place, et cetera. Many times, I would have to prove the process, to show them, "This can scale. This does work," et cetera. In the beginning of my career, well, and even right before I came over, I would support executives or CEOs themselves, and there was a little bit of pushback when I said, "You have to trust the process. They don't show up, then it's better, because you would have crammed something down their throat they weren't ready for. If they're worried about some other meeting they have to go to, they're not listening to you. That's not going to be a productive conversation. If they are squeezed, then you wait until it is a good time." So when you are armed with AI, that is what ConnectAndSell offers, you introduce a new level of efficiency for SDRs and BDRs. I would also add to that, and this is where a lot of my passion comes from, but that's not taught. It's almost the BDR, SDR role as a pit stop to, "I've got to hurry up and learn this so I can go into marketing or I can go on somewhere else." Now, if that is someone's passion, that's one thing. But I didn't realize that BDR, I could create a career or build a career around this, and I have. It's been an amazing journey, an absolutely amazing journey. It's been constant friction, because that's what we're told. We're told it can't work if we don't have them 100% qualified, and that is never the case. Like you said, Chris, nothing is ever 100%, and the prospect is never going to be 100%. No one is ever an end all to everything, because that's not the way life is. So if we can take that fear and allow reps to say, "You know what? I had a good conversation with them. I expressed a certain amount of curiosity and trust enough that they will show up eventually. So just let me call them back, AE, sales director. Let me call them back. I'll put them back in my list, and we will get them back on the phone," because guess what? They answered the phone the first time. They will a second or third or fourth or fifth time, right? It shows them, "I am persistent, because I do believe in the potential value of this meeting for you, human being." That is the tone, and that's the approach. They feel that. If sales leadership allows, you aren't changing the conversation, Chris, because this is something that has been kind of bugging me throughout my career, because I always see it. Regardless if it was a new company I was helping, it's like rinse and repeat. You're like, "Oh, here we go again." That's because you won't know that until you have probably several conversations with them, because that's also a process. They're not going to divulge everything on the first discovery meeting. I hope you have more conversations on this as far as leadership, allowing SDRs to set meetings in that approach. If they do have something like ... Actually, there is nothing else like [inaudible 00:11:31], so there is ConnectAndSell. That's it, because it is different than ... We're not a dialer. It is unlike anything else. What I love about Flight School is when you pair the two, the coaching with what Flight School does with ConnectAndSell, you're unstoppable, that relaxation, and you're able to focus on, "Hey, change this a little bit, and you'll see an uptick in interest." In fact, that's what Tony Crawford did to me the first time I was on. He was like, "Hey, I noticed ... Have you tried this? Here's this other point." I was like, "No, I hadn't even realized." He was like, "Hey, try this." I was like, "Okay," and it changed. It was awesome. Chris Beall (12:09): It's amazing, isn't it? It's amazing how the nuances of the conversation, the nuances of our mindset have profound effects on results. Now here's this new one I'll call it. I'll call it I heart no-shows. Cherryl Turner (12:24): (laughing). Right? Chris Beall (12:26): Right? I want the title of this episode to be I Heart No-Shows, because when you come right down to it, I mean, I do heart no-shows. I love them. I think I might've told this story on this show before, where I was walking down the street with my fiance, and she's a much bigger deal in sales than I am. So I get on with somebody from a big hotel chain, and we have a scheduled meeting with three people from that company. That's a nice thing for ConnectAndSell, And I still sell. I suppose people probably know this, but we finance our company by selling. I realize it's a bizarre notion in Silicon Valley, but that's how we do it. We kind of do it by having the folks at the top sell without taking commissions, because if I took a commission, by the way, I'd act just like everybody else. I'd want every deal. So I just can relax, no commission, just sell. But anyways, a pretty important-sounding meeting. I got on with Marjorie, who was the person who was from the other side who was going to put this together. She said, "Oh, Chris, I'm so sorry. Both of the other participants just had something come up." I said, "Fantastic. I'll shoot you an email, and we can get something else on the books when it's convenient for all three of you. Thanks so much for letting me know right now. We would have figured it out eventually, but I really, really appreciate it." She kind of changed her tone and said, "Oh, well, do you want to talk a little bit right now?" I said, "We could, but I really think this is something where we should all explore together. So let's just get something where all three of us are on. That'll be great." I hung up, and Helen turns to me. She says, "Oh, a no-show. That must have been disappointing." I said, "Are you kidding? It's my favorite thing in business," not just in sales. It is my very, very favorite thing in business, is a no-show, because in a funny way, it just makes the relationship more real, because it's less perfect. Cherryl Turner (14:31): What's interesting is when you approach that, Chris, what you just said, some people call that ... I was thinking through this, actually, over the last week or so. I was like, "What is it about Scott? What is it?" James Johnson's also very good at this, listening to him. I don't want to get in trouble with me dropping his name in this, but what I love about it, that it's a mindset of abundance or scarcity, and I think that's where the problem is with senior leadership in sales. What is sad is I think many could-be awesome sales potentials are lost because they think, "If this is the grind I have to consistently go through, why bother?" I was up against a lot. I had managers that didn't leave until ... Oh my gosh. I have stories beyond stories. But what I held true to was there is something here. So gratefully, I had kind of the personality to stick through it and to be open to adjusting and learning and pivoting. I have been nothing but blessed with that, but it's consistent friction of this mindset that leadership tends to have that if it's not qualified, doesn't count. Then that puts so much pressure on the rep, and you don't find out the talent you have because of that mindset. Organic growth goes out the window. You could have just lost probably the best thing that ever happened to your sales department if we continue to maintain this attitude, and I hope this does end up changing the conversation in the industry, because it is important. It's still constantly out there, right? You see it on LinkedIn. You see it everywhere, but it really changes the trajectory of the conversation and the relationship, and I would dare say that it improves the trust-o-meter I mean tenfold, if not more, when the rep is able to relax and say, "It will fall into a time when it does work for them," because companies are constantly in and out of looking for something, right? "This didn't work. There's got to be a better way." Well, that's why you're calling them, right? They don't know. What is interesting is a lot of people, especially prospects, come to the table thinking the meeting is going to be about one thing, right? They've already categorized you prematurely. But what I love is, I mean, the meetings we've had with the Flight ... "This is nothing like what I thought it'd be." That's fantastic. I'm glad that that's the case, right? It wasn't a death by PowerPoint. In fact, I had to like, "Oh, do you have something to show?" I was like, "No, we're just going to talk. I just want to find out what you're doing, what's important to you and important to continue talking. We will." She said, "Oh, okay." Then what's crazy is this isn't rocket science. We have been conditioned to not act like humans in sales, especially in business development. Cherryl Turner (19:11): I would hope that there's more women out there also, Chris, as a woman, right? I hope there's more out, because I think we also have a certain touch that brings, I think, a refreshing approach to sales also. Anyway, it really is fascinating, to be honest. So with this approach that we were talking about, Chris, it's kind of an excavator. You put the claw in the ground. You goop it up, and you put it through the hopper, right? Whatever crunches through. If they show up, great. If they don't, that's all right. You put it back in the hopper, and eventually, it will stick. Eventually, it will run into a time that's good for them. That's what allows a rep to relax. Chris Beall (19:47): Yeah, and what I love about that analogy is the alternative is ... This is, I think, the modern sales stack. We arm the reps with all this tools and all this technology. Cherryl Turner (19:59): Oh, I know. Chris Beall (19:59): Then when they get up there to the point where they're going to have that big claw come down and take a scoop, they take the scoop, and then they shut the machine off and get their gold pan out. They go through, swirling and looking for a nugget and looking for a nugget. Sure enough, only 3% are nuggets, and the rest of it's bad. It's just ore. That's the nature of the beast, whereas they could have just said, "Look, I don't know what might be right or wrong. This is the only ore we've got right now, so I'm going to scoop it up. I'm going to put it in the crusher. I'm going to let it go through its process, and whatever comes out the other end, that's great. Whatever doesn't, I'm going to process it again"- Cherryl Turner (20:40): Exactly. Chris Beall (20:41): ... "because I've got this crusher here, and it can just crush," right? When I hear people talk about crushing their number, I think, "Well, I don't think you're crushing your number. I think you're panning for the occasional little gold nugget, hoping that you can run with it over to somebody and say, 'I got this gold nugget here,'" whereas it's not the nuggets that make the business. It's what's in the ore overall and your ability to process it. So it's so interesting to me that you talk about being human. In a way, it's being human that lets us make a sales machine. Cherryl Turner (21:18): Yeah. It really is mind-blowing. I mean, it's not and it is at the same time, right? You're like ... (laughing). Chris Beall (21:19): (laughing). It's totally unsurprising and totally mind-blowing. Cherryl Turner (21:26): Right. It's crazy how much we complicate this, right? We do. But why? What I love about this mindset of abundance with just let whatever falls through fall through, that is a mindset of abundance. That is belief, going back to the Forbes podcast, right? It is true when he said it's this inner belief that, "You know what? Just let it fall where it falls." Whatever falls off, just put it back in, and it will get polished enough to where it will be the right time. It will stick, and you'll have a great conversation when that happens. Yes. It really is amazing. Chris Beall (22:06): Yeah. We say sales conversations have four outcomes, yes, no, not me, not now. We say not now dominates because of the nature of life. When we look at we're selling a meeting, not now should dominate that also. So if not now dominates, then let's float the question of when, rather than insisting that when be nailed down, and then let's provide ourselves with something else to do whenever there's a meeting that is a no-show. I think that might be the other magic of ConnectAndSell. So a meeting is a no-show, I know you always do the same thing. Well, you don't do one thing. You don't complain. You do another thing. You fire up your followup list, and you have that person on it and other people. You talk to them or whoever, and you make good use of that time. So I think the other thing is in the abundant sense, people who are selling, they feel like, "I set aside time for the meeting, and now it's a no-show." Well, first of all, they probably over-researched for it. So for that 15-minute meeting, they probably researched 30 minutes, and then when the meeting doesn't happen, it's like, "Oh, I wasted that research, because I won't remember it." Well, in that case, maybe just don't do the research, and be prepared to hold an honest discovery conversation and let somebody tell you what they know. Chris Beall (23:26): But then the other part is and then when the no-show is a no-show, how can you heart no-shows if you don't have anything to do when they no-show and you want to be efficient? Well, the answer is just push the button and talk to somebody else. You are the constrained resource. You are always the constrained resource. So just go ahead to the resource unconstrainer, which is this thing called ConnectAndSell, and push the button and have some more conversations, because they're moving the ball forward, too, somehow. You just don't know exactly where or when. Cherryl Turner (23:58): I mean, thinking over, just listening to your podcast with you and Corey and some of the brilliant minds you've had on so far, you always talk about market dominance, right? So this idea of I heart no-shows, that is what enables also the undercurrent of what helps you dominate your market, because if you're not in consistent motion, that's what allows the consistent motion, right? When you require reps to, "You've got to make sure it's way past the line before you can call it qualified or you can count this meeting," or whatever, mentally, it is not for the faint of heart, right? Cold calling never has been. But when you introduce a mindset of abundance and allow it to you, "You know what? Did well, do your best, it will fall into when it's time that's good for them." That is the undercurrent that enables market dominance, is that coupled, right, with ConnectAndSell and Flight School, because you're able to adjust and pivot in real time and become better as a human being, right? Talking to another human being and making those connections, improving people's lives, right? With what you do offer. There's a lot of awesome that's out there in the market. We just get in our own way, because we feel like it's got to look a certain way or the conversation has to be exactly a certain way. That's not the case. Chris Beall (25:30): Oddly enough, there's the other great irony, right? You need a great script in order to relax enough to be a human. Cherryl Turner (25:37): Yes. (laughing). Chris Beall (25:39): Isn't that funny? I mean, some people equate scripts with being a robot. I take the opposite point of view, which is the script liberates you to be yourself. Cherryl Turner (25:48): Yes. I still have mine. Just like Matt Forbes was saying, "Oh, my wife laughs at me," my husband does, too. So it's right there, and when I'm at the park with my kid, I have it with me. It does liberate you. It takes it to a whole new level. You feel it as a rep, and that's what fuels you, because you begin. It just takes you to a whole new realm, I would say. It really is an awesome place to be when you can get to that point. Chris Beall (26:16): Yeah, and the script, I think, is to the rep. I've always said the script is the surfboard and the rep's voice is the surfer. But there's another analogy, which is the script is the checklist for the pilot. Without the checklist, you'd be one worried pilot, especially if you had people onboard that airplane, including yourself. So the checklist doesn't turn the pilot into a robot. It frees the pilot up to do the human stuff that's really important, which might include reassuring the passengers that the airplane does go up and fly and come down, Flight School style, and it comes down in a controlled way and you can handle the turbulence and all that. But it's also like if you want to bring your complete self to a situation, you need to not be inventing your response to the known parts of the situation as you go along. That's kind of wild, right? It'd be kind of like saying, "Here's how I drive my car. I get in, and I have no idea what I do next, because I just want to be so expressive." Cherryl Turner (27:15): (laughing). Chris Beall (27:15): But, I mean, it doesn't make any sense. It's an order of operations. It's a script. I get in. I close the door. I put on my seatbelt. I put the key in ... This car that I drive, you still put a key in a slot. I know for a lot of people, this is odd. It's a Subaru that can hold 24 cases of wine, so it's really, really a good car. Check the handbrake, and you've done your walk-around. Make sure there's no children behind the car, or make sure you live in a place where there aren't any. If you do these things, you don't just go, "Oh, I just don't feel like a very human driver, because I do things in a certain order and I know about it in advance." It's just allowing you to take the predictable parts and turn those into something that you don't have to worry about. I think that's what a script does, is it reduces our worry level about what we're going to say next and lets us then respond appropriately in tone of voice, in cadence, and in responding. When somebody says, "Well, Cherryl, tell me more," you need to be in a pretty special place to say, "We've learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this isn't a fair setting to talk about something this important. I'm a morning person. Are you? How's your Wednesday?" That takes real stance, right? The surfboard has just been chomped on by the shark, and you've got to have some real balance to do something about that, other than just fall in the water and enjoy your relationship with the shark. Cherryl Turner (28:49): Splashing all around, trying to ... (laughing). Yeah. Chris Beall (28:51): Yeah, which tends to be what happens. So, well, I tell you what. I have a funny feeling about this episode. I think you've said nine things during this episode. Each one of the nine things could be a chapter in a book on how to handle the rigors and handle them with grace that come with cold calling, the most important thing that we do in business. I know some people are saying still cold calling shouldn't exist, right? Well, in a competitive world, having first conversations that build trust is probably going to be around for a while, because competitively, it's superior to waiting. It's the time game, just played the other way around. So I just want to thank you for coming on. I know that this is not your thing. I can tell you're fabulous. You have no idea how good you really are. So it's just [crosstalk 00:29:46]. Cherryl Turner (29:45): Oh, thanks, Chris. I would like to add one more thing, Chris. I've been brainstorming in real time. You asked what made the difference, right? I have been fortunate enough to have leadership, senior leadership, mostly CEOs, that have believed in me enough to allow me to do my thing when it came to building pipeline. That built my confidence, and when I had a CEO that was in Belgium and he ran a company that he built from the ground up, digital asset management, and I was the first introduction of outbound sales development, completely foreign to this company. The way that he led, he taught belief in what they sold. I've been fortunate enough that the CEO that brought me on for this company also ran his leadership that way, and I've learned from you the same. So I've been fortunate enough to rally around like-minded mindset of abundance, right, leadership that taught that way. When leadership begins to think that way and believe in their SDRs, we will begin to see a shift in market dominance as we know it. It really is. So I feel nothing but blessed with the networks, the connections I've made throughout my career. Just love and enjoy, soak everything in in learning from them, right? They all have something to offer. That really is something. So I think when we can allow ourselves to be taught and to teach and believe in each other within sales organizations, we can begin to relax and begin to dominate our markets. It will make a difference. Chris Beall (31:29): I love it. So Cherryl, I want people to know how to get a hold of you, both selfishly, because you're selling something that I hold near and dear to my heart, which is Flight School. I actually think Flight School is the most transformative product I've ever been associated with in a fairly long career of transformative products. I thought ConnectAndSell was special. I still do. I thought the Breakthrough Script was special as a form of technology. You're one of the very first people ever to have heard it in the wild. You were exposed to the wild-type virus called the Breakthrough Script years ago. In fact, I was with you in one place in Utah when James Townson and team unleashed the Breakthrough Script somewhere else and got a 15 times improvement in conversation or meetings per day. But I actually think Flight School is maybe more special than anything. Admittedly, as you and I both know, it rests on ConnectAndSell, and it rests most easily on the Breakthrough Script. That's not required, but it's something that just kind of makes it easier. Breakthrough Script is plenty good enough to run a Flight School, I guess is how I would put it. But if folks want to get a hold of you, I can tell them how to do that. Cherryl, C-H-E-R-R-Y-L. See the two R's? That's because she's special. 40 miles south of here, we'd be rolling those R's, and we'd call you Cherryl. Cherryl Turner, T-U-R-N-E-R, because she will turn your entire world around. If you want to explore Flight School, she'll talk to you, even if you're a smaller company, but she might pass you off to somebody else. Her job is to actually help the biggest companies in the world embrace something that's a little bit hard because of change management, which is going 10 times faster and being 10 times more effective. But if somebody wants to experience 100X, 100X doesn't come along every day of the week, and it'll sound like something else entirely. You'll come to the meeting, and you'll say, "This isn't what I expected," just like Cheryl said, but reach out to her, [email protected]. I'm sure on LinkedIn, she's find-able also. Failing all that, I think people watching this know how to get ahold of me. I'm Chris Beall, and I'm just really tickled to be hosting Market Dominance Guys today with Cherryl Turner. Thanks so much, Cherryl. Cherryl Turner (33:56): Thank you, Chris. It's an honor. Appreciate it.

In this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, Chris Beall conducts a solo interview with Cherryl Turner, Chief Development Officer of ConnectAndSell’s new Flight School Division. In the first episode of this two-part conversation, Cherryl relays to Chris how she got started in cold calling and about the important experiences she had talking with prospects — experiences that helped shape how she approaches cold calls and conducts meeting-setting conversations today. As an example, Cherryl recounts a pivotal moment during a call with a prospect, in which she had the impulse to stop talking and just listen — instead of pushing to make the sale — and how the whole tone of the conversation warmed up after that. This was a career changer for her! Chris alludes to this when he describes Cherryl, touting her practice of conversing with each prospect as a peer and the way she is constantly looking to understand and help them. Feel free to borrow everything you’ll learn in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, as Cherryl Turner shares “The Secret of Her Success.” ----more---- About Our Guest Cherryl Turner is Chief Development Officer of ConnectAndSell’s new Flight School Division, a four-session, cold-call conversation training program for sale reps. Previously founder and CEO of BDPro Solutions, Cherryl’s extensive expertise encompasses sales and business development. Here is the full transcript from this episode: Chris Beall (01:41): Hey everybody, this is Chris Beall, and I am actually going to be the interviewer on Market Dominance Guys today. Corey Frank probably was available, maybe not. I don't know. He's a busy guy off there running Youngblood Works and doing all manner of other things. I just thought today, a conversation that I was having earlier in the day with Cherryl Turner was worth expanding on for this audience.  I think as everybody knows, Market Dominance Guys is all about the nuts and bolts of dominating markets and doing so with what we call a conversation-first approach. Cherryl has been a master of the conversation-first approach to dominate everything as far as I've known. For a number of years before I met her, she did that kind of stuff for a number of other companies, including InsideSales.com, now XANT.  We stumbled across each other, I would say, at what we call a test drive of ConnectAndSell where she was participating in the test drive, rather skeptically I would say. She can maybe tell us a little bit about that. It didn't take very long for us to realize that we were kindred spirits and believed the same kind of stuff. One thing led to another, and just recently, very recently, five weeks ago, she joined ConnectAndSell as our chief development officer for our Flight School Division.  We're taking our world-famous Flight School out into the world as a standalone product. Cherryl is our head of sales for that and head of marketing and head of thinking things up and making the scripts actually work, and all sorts of things. She's kind enough to bring me into an occasional meeting and I yap a little bit. I'm Chris Beall, not Corey Frank. I'd like to introduce you to Cherryl Turner. Cherryl, welcome to the show. Cherryl Turner (03:44): Thank you, Chris. Always a pleasure. Chris Beall (03:46): It's truly an honor to have the real deal on this program. Corey and I could be accused of a number of things, but I don't think either one of us is going to be considered the real deal when it comes to cold-calling. We just have reputations. I'm going to guess that you have cold-called somebody on an average of more than, oh, I don't know, 20 times a day for each day, except for weekends and time off with family and so forth.  I don't know if you do that, in the last, what? Five, six, seven years? Maybe beyond that. How did you get into cold-calling? Why are you attracted to something that is so repulsive to so many people? Cherryl Turner (04:27): It's a fascinating story actually, Chris. I really started my career ... You mentioned InsideSales.com. I was just an entry-level BD. In fact, when they hired me, when I got interviewed, I didn't even know what a CRM was. I came from Vivint, selling alarm systems to B2C markets. What I did know about myself ... I wasn't concerned that I didn't know what a CRM was, or didn't know I need to know what a CRM was, but I did know who I was. So I always enjoyed proving the impossible possible.  That's just something that runs through my blood. That is what I sold what was going to be my boss. I ended up blowing 'out of the market', or in our department. Not only that, but spearheading new companies that InsideSales.com ended up acquiring, even though none of the sales reps really knew what they were about, so I did my own research and just hitting 250/300 quota. Chris Beall (05:28): That's interesting. I hadn't heard this story about you spearheading the go-to-market thrust and the growth trajectory of new acquisitions. I mean, that's really hard to do. Did you have to learn everything about their product before you were capable of setting meetings to sell their product? Cherryl Turner (05:45): No. I actually learned with each conversation. After that, I almost was ... I wasn't editing myself on calls, but as I was listening to people and learning about what was important to them, I went back and did research on my own time, because I wanted to talk to as many of these people as possible. Then I adjusted to what and learned as I went. I would not say I was an expert per se. I did do my due diligence and learned as much as I could about the company that they had acquired. Then I even had senior leadership come to me, including ... I don't know if I can name-drop, but Jim Steele, they had brought Jim Steele in. He said, "What are you doing? Are you doing this?" It ended up being their leading product because of what I was able to create for the company. It started with a belief. They gave us a one-pager on it, and the little I did know, I found it fascinating. I was like, "Well, this is interesting. This is new. What does this little company do?"  What they did was pretty unique and interesting to me. I believed in what I learned of them at that point and then I brought that to the conversations when I was talking with people, and then pivoting and learning as I was going through that. The more conversations I had, the more I fell in love with it, because I realized at the end of the day, people want to be successful and they're still human beings, right?  They still have insecurities. They still have things that they have to accomplish and look good in their roles. We're all the same at the end of the day. It was fascinating to be a part of that. That's I think the passion that ran through my veins, if you will. Chris Beall (07:34): Oh, that's fascinating. As you said, we're all the same. I've always told people when I talk about you, "Cherryl sees herself as an equal of everybody on earth. So when she's talking to somebody, she's always talking as a peer looking to help them and to understand them." I think that's really remarkable. I think most salespeople, all of us in fact, have got some degree of, "Well, I'm the supplicant. I'm coming. I'm asking you to do something for me." Because after all the salesperson's setup, so to speak, is, "If everything goes well, eventually we get a deal. I make quota and I get commission. Therefore, you're doing things for me." How did you come to this point of view? This is a really different point of view than I run into. You said you came right out of alarm system sales. Was that door to door, by the way, or was that by the phone or what? Cherryl Turner (08:26): No. It was just in Provo, the Vivint down in Provo, just call it part of the outside sales department there, just an entry-level team. Yeah. I started there and not really talking to people, but when I got to InsideSales, that's really where my career began to take shape, if you will. Talking with these entrepreneurs, these CEOs. I was calling in to senior leadership, and I really enjoyed talking to senior leadership. I came from a world that not many understand. They're always on. Their brain is always on, "How can I tweak this or improve that in my business? How can I create organic growth and what have you?" I always love learning from those people. When I was at InsideSales, I think the shift, Chris, to your question happened, I was calling it. It was just high volume calling. People that downloaded whitepapers or looked at something on our website or what have you. The initial entry was, "Hey, we noticed you had downloaded a whitepaper. Just calling to follow up on that. Did you get a chance to read that? I'm interested in what's going on in your world." I don't remember her last name. I don't remember the name of the company, but her name was Karen, and she was the CEO of this company. They were about mid-level actually, I do remember that. For the first time, and I'd probably been in about three weeks in, I had the most amazing conversation with this woman because something inside of me clicked and said, "Just stop and listen." I had an agenda. I had to make quota. I had to, "Hey, yeah, let's get you over to a hot lead, a hot transfer." Right? I was push, push, push. We had just barely acquired this other company so I was still in this other position, this entry-level BD position. Karen, when I was talking with her, it was the longest conversation. I think we ended up talking 15 minutes or so, which is almost taboo. You don't want to be on the phone that long. I said, "You know, Karen." I said, "After listening to what you've told me." I said, "I don't believe that this other core product of this company fits you, but we just recently acquired a new company and this is what they do."  What I have learned that they do, right? We just acquired them. I explained this to her. I said, "Do you think that may be beneficial to you just based on what you told me?" Immediately her tone changed. She wasn't sounding desperate, but she was frustrated and I could sense that in her voice. I took the insecurity that she was ... Not insecurity, but the uncertainty, if you will.  I said, "Here's something that might possibly help you. I don't know if it will or not, but here's some information. We can have a conversation." She said, "Actually, that does intrigue me." It was a hot transfer, but what is interesting, as a sales rep, full cycle sales rep, didn't even know how to pitch it. I was like, "Just listen to her." I'm like, "We just acquired this company." That is the switch.  That was the switch that I realized these CEOs were all the same, essentially. Also, something interesting is I always cared about who I was talking with, because we are human and it does matter. End of this big blue worry parent, as you like to say, Chris, it does matter. That's how I really started. Chris Beall (11:58): Well, that's fascinating. It resonates with me as a door-to-door salesperson who had to make some money quickly back in the day. I realized very quickly in that process, on about door three or four, nobody was going to buy anything from me. They opened the door into the desert heat in Arizona, but maybe I could do something for them. Maybe we could just have a very short human conversation, very short because the door was open and you know, in Arizona, we're talking five bucks a minute when your door is open. The air conditioning pumping out trying to cool off the entire desert. I think that transition is the transition that lets people go from okay and somewhat unsatisfied as salespeople, to it being, I wouldn't say effortless, but in a way it is. Like, what's the effort that goes into talking? Not much. But the effort that goes into listening could be substantial and maintaining that listening posture, right?  I mean, can you think back to any deals where you heard something during a conversation? This might be impossible by the way because I can't remember these myself, but put me on the spot a little bit. Can you think of any situation where you were talking to somebody and you suddenly realized that you hadn't quite listened to them? Then it's like, "Hang on a second." You ask them a question or you replay it in your mind and end up going somewhere that turns out to be relatively important for them and maybe good for your company. Is that an experience you've had, or is that something that you've been such a good listener from the get-go you don't trip up like that? Cherryl Turner (13:43): Right. No. We always trip up. I think becoming good in sales is not an episodic event. It's always a journey. I don't care how seasoned you are. If you're always open to improving, it shines through in your approach and your tone with them because now you care. To answer your question, if I had a quarter for every time that I experienced that, that's always going on. We're human. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to rush through it. We're going to talk too fast. I flap my lips sometimes too much, you know? That's okay though. Before my conversation with Karen, I was, I think focused ... There was this pressure. She downloaded the whitepaper. This person downloaded this. Did you get it over? Did you get a totally qualified lead, right? Or whatever you want to call it. Every company calls it different. It was worry that I've got to get this person through so that I can meet quota. When you remind shifts, it all falls into place because that comes through. You take the uncertainty that they're feeling and you eat it yourself as a rep. You're not concerned even if they show up to the meeting, because when you're empowered ... And I'm going to go to ConnectAndSell, because before coming on with you, Chris, I was a partner of yours and brought it into many companies because I saw the power of it and was a believer. When you are empowered and not have to worry about, "Am I going to get this person back on the phone?" Well, the answer is yes, you will. That concern and that pressure is taken away so you can actually focus on listening. You can focus on improving the conversation. Getting those tidbits of information. They need to hear enough to want to accept a meeting with you. If they can't, nine times out of 10, it's not because they don't like you. It has nothing to do with you. It really has nothing to do with you. It has to do everything with them and everyone is busy, but there's always time when they can make time and that concern disappears. There are several times where I edited in real time and I blew it so many times, and still do sometimes, but that's okay because you learn from those. Because I'm constantly listening to calls. I was listening to Scott Webb this morning and his team. I was listening to James Townsend and Donny. Donny Crawford, the Yoda of Flight School and Matthew Forbes. I took some tidbits from him actually in my redirects from my script. I love learning from my peers. I love learning from those who are excellent in doing certain things in their approach. Chris Beall (18:28): It's interesting right there, so when I called you today, I called you back. You dialed me and it was a very short call and it rang once and then you weren't there. I was actually in a meeting doing something to do with something completely different. It had nothing to do with sales and everything to do with how systems worked and this and that. Then when I called you back, in the background I could hear someone talking. I thought, "Oh, how interesting? It doesn't sound like somebody that I know in Cherryl's house." You eventually learn many of the voices over time. You were listening to calls from somebody that you knew was doing something different. I know you must have seen the numbers. This is somebody who is converting conversations to meeting at about a three out of four pace. Frankly, he feels like that's not enough. I know that he feels that's not enough, that he thinks [crosstalk 00:19:25]. Cherryl Turner (19:25): [crosstalk 00:19:25] I know [crosstalk 00:19:25] feel. Chris Beall (19:27): [inaudible 00:19:27]. Yeah. A hundred percent, right? You were listening and you hit the pause button and we talked about actually what was going on in those conversations. The reason I wanted to have you on today is that we had Matt Forbes on recently. Matt was talking about the power of belief and what happened to him inside and what happened to his results as a result of that transformation inside of himself. When he finally, I'll say crossed the chasm from uncertainty and self-interest, to belief in the potential value of the meeting that he was offering for this human being that he was talking with, regardless of how that meeting might go, what might happen or not happen as a result. He described that in a pretty compelling way. Scott Webb, the guy you were listening to, I got a call from him once that said, "I'm going to try something. I think there's a mindset shift that will make a big difference." Folks, anybody listening to this, Scott Webb is not just some guy walking down the street. I mean, he's a chief development officer of a multi-billion dollar insurance brokerage. Number four in the world. I would predict soon to be number three, then two, then one, on organic growth alone. God knows what'll happen when the inorganic power of the organic growth starts to get whipped up.  He is personally using ConnectAndSell and leading his team through Flight School, which is what Cherryl sells. He's doing blitz and coach stuff. We help. I don't know why we help, because he's so good. I think we're learning from him, not the other way around, but what was it about what Scott was doing that made you want to listen to him? Then, have you tried any of it? Because it's kind of crazy stuff. If you really think about this mindset shift of insisting that someone take the meeting for their own good, it seems to have these vast implications, especially if you have the power of connection, which does one thing really, really well. It gets people on the phone, especially people you've talked with before, because, hey you know they answer the phone. That's why they're in your follow-up list. Tell me that story. How's that gone? Cherryl Turner (21:45): Yeah. This transition has happened I think just in the last week, kind of the same thing that happened with Forbes, which by the way, I love that podcast because I think I've listened to it like two or three times now, but it's true, everything he'd said. The approach that Scott had ... And he's teaching his team, and you can tell the transition over time too. He's not overly concerned if it's a hundred percent written in blood, "I'm going to show up to this meeting."  It is an insistence that, "We'll find a time. I'm going to shoot this out to you. If it works, great. If not, we'll move it around. I'm not concerned necessarily if this is a slam dunk or not. If you show up, great. I know the importance of this meeting." That comes through in his tone. That's what Flight School does. It really teaches us the belief in the breakthrough you're offering these people you're talking with. That has to be present, but he says, "Look, okay, we'll just send you out something and [inaudible 00:22:53]." People are like, "Uh, sure." This has happened a couple of times and I was like, "Wow, that's fascinating." They didn't say, "Oh, yes, yes, yes. I'm definitely going to be there." I think sometime ... Actually not sometimes. Most often in order for it to be qualified, we've got to make sure that there's, "Okay. You're not going to be anywhere else, right? You're going to show up to this meeting if I send you an invite, right? Okay. Okay. Perfect. Okay. I can count them." It's a shootover. "If it works, great. If it doesn't, I know I can put you back in ConnectAndSell and I will get ahold of you and we will find a time that ends up working out. Whether that is two, three, four, five times conversations later, we need to reschedule, great. If not, that's okay." First time works out, great. If not ... And that actually feeds your passion because you realize that's how a lot of people were. They're like, "Okay." A lot of people aren't in front of the calendar. Actually, no, I'm not. I'm in a meeting or I'm stepping out or I'm walking with my dog. I do cold calls when I take my son to the park during the day, right? [crosstalk 00:24:00]. Chris Beall (23:59): How do you do that? Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait. You can't cold-call [crosstalk 00:24:03]- Cherryl Turner (24:03): This is life, Chris. Chris Beall (24:05): ... you're carrying your computer around and you got a phone and then when your son needs something, what do you do? Throw it all up in the air? How do you do that? That's craziness. Cherryl Turner (24:15): It's actually awesome. It has changed my life in several ... Just ... It's amazing. No, it's the ConnectAndSell mobile app that you guys have. I was honored to be able to try it out. It's amazing. I still carry [Miskirk 00:24:36] with me. We have a park that's just about nine blocks from our house. We have several actually, and he is like a farm dog. He needs to be outside and run around or he's going to drive us all nuts. It's in between, after my meetings and in between cold calls. In front of my computer like, "Hey, we need to go take a breather." I take my son on a stroller. He's got his little balance bike. He loves taking that thing out. We go to the park. While he's playing on the swing and slides and going, "Weee." I'm cold-calling. In fact, there was this ... I was doing that on Friday, last week, a couple of times. There was another mom there with her kid and she started talking and when I started talking I said, "Hey, I need to let you know, I'm doing some cold calls right now for my work." She was like, "Oh really?" I was like, "Oh yeah, it's fabulous." She couldn't believe it. She was like, "I don't even know what that is, but okay." While we're talking, I put my hand out and then I talked to the person and then it was fabulous.  That is life. That is our new norm. We have people that still have to run a business. Now it's almost harder because kids think when you're home, "Oh, you're just at my disposal, or this is ..." Not even just kids. It's spouses or whatever, or family that just don't understand. Yes. That has been my new weapon of choice. It's been awesome. I really enjoy it. Yeah. I mean, going back to your initial question, Chris, the two meetings I had set this morning were like that.  It was, "Hey, I'll send an invite out for two weeks out. That works well for you, great. If not, just send me over some alternatives and we'll move it around." They're like, "Okay." I'm like, "Perfect. Moving on." It's awesome. Chris Beall (26:33): This brings to mind something. If you were working as a BDR, right? And you were setting appointments just for somebody else, this would be a hard technique because you would be putting appointments on your AE's calendar. Say it was paired up one to one, some people do that. You've got an account executive you're working with and you're doing the important part of the job, which is getting them in the meetings, getting the meetings and they're doing the easy part, which is holding discovery meetings and closing business, which anybody can do.  I actually believe that. Anyway, here you're doing that and now you're setting a bunch of interesting false positives. That is people who are not qualified, who would be showing up, at least you might've thought they weren't qualified if you quizzed them further and got the truth out of them, which I don't think actually happens in ambush calls, but we can pretend that it does.  Then you are also setting meetings, a lot of which are going to be no-shows, because in fact, they're going to be no-shows and declines and all sorts of stuff. Because your view is ... If I can encapsulate it correctly, you believe, now that you've listened to Scott Webb's approach, that operationalizing the relationship and going from if to when is the key to generating more relevant activity, which is thoughtful conversations, real conversations that go beyond the ambush. Therefore, you're not letting the ambush conversation carry the load of qualification, or even of assurance of attending the meeting. You're just letting it open the door sufficiently that you go from an if, if we're going to meet, to a when, when we're going to meet. It reminds me of something I experienced this Saturday. Helen and I went down to a Mesquite furniture place, but it wasn't a furniture place. It's actually a mill.  They have these Mesquite logs. I don't know if anybody listening to this knows what a Mesquite tree is, but it's really hard, very heavy wood, really beautiful, full of all these swirly patterns. If you want a dining room table that you're going to treat as a piece of art in your house that you just bought here in Green Valley, Arizona, you definitely want a Mesquite table. I go with Helen down there, and here's what Valerie, the owner, did. She asked whether we were seeing what we wanted or whatever. There's just pieces of wood around and then some examples of some finished tables. Helen said, "Well, yes, we're looking for a dining room table." She said, "Oh, okay." Then she flipped open her order book, took a pen and had it in hand and said, "So what are the rough dimensions?" It was not asking the qualifying question. After all, all dimensions of tables are qualified, right?  Big ones, little ones, and so forth. It wasn't the question. The question was kind of irrelevant. It was the fact that she went from, if we were going to buy a dining room table from her to, when are we going to do it? Let's get going on the process. She did it very gently and then went into a flash role a little bit later, as Oren Klaff would call it, about Mesquite.  By the time she was done describing where the Mesquite came from, how they caught it, what the challenges were, what the three kinds of table edges are, how they use five layers of tung oil in order to make the table last forever, why the butterflies and the joints in the table lasts longer than even the wood and the wood is incredible, what some of the considerations might be, how you might go about buying.  You might let us select the wood. You might come down and do it yourself. You might let us select it and you could come down and have a look. Some people like to see the project as it's being done. It'll take about this long, but these are the three considerations that would make it shorter and longer. By then, it's like we're in the hands of an expert and she's operationalized the relationship by having the equivalent of the calendar, in this case, the order book, in hand and she's writing in there.  When we were finished with the conversation, here's the piece of paper that looks suspiciously like an order for a table that doesn't cost much more than a small car. Here we are just going, "Huh." We ran into somebody else later, a different furniture store I won't mention and it's like, "Oh, yours are cheaper? Well, they must not be as good as Valerie's are." Right? Through this whole process, right? She did that and I was really impressed. I discussed it with Helen afterwards. I said, "That is the opposite of selling after the close." I think when we're setting appointments, especially in a BDR role, our boss is telling us to sell after the close because the close is that little yes or the not not no. The not no, not not now, but not no, that allows you just to say, "I'll send you an appointment and if that doesn't work, we'll figure it out." Cherryl Turner (31:45): Yeah. Chris Beall (31:46): That it's a step on the journey instead of a, I gotcha. Do you sense the difference between what you do now? You're a full cycle rep setting appointments for yourself. Does that give you freedom to engage the way Scott Webb has figured out how to engage? Which by the way, everybody ... Okay. The average conversion rate among reps out there is 3% conversation to meeting. Scott's is 72.4%, but that's only because he's dragging along an early tail of those that were only 25%. His current number is more in the 80s or 90s perhaps. If you think about that, any of you boss types watching, think an AE setting appointments for themselves, getting two appointments a day in about 30 minutes of work, two or three a day in 30 minutes of work, has this freedom to do this. If you're managing BDRs and SDRs, maybe you should let them have that freedom too. How would you do that though? It's tricky, isn't it? Cherryl Turner (32:52): It is. I think because of the mindset of where most leadership is, right? There's always this pressure that is pushed up and down the chain as kind of .... You know those Chinese finger traps? That's what it feels like sometimes, because they've got to hit certain numbers and you're representing them. Then they've got to send that up the chain and then the chain isn't happy so they send that back down. So there's this constant conflict that I've experienced in my own career with that. I knew there was a better way. I wasn't necessarily coached that way, but I knew there was a better way because we're not robots talking and doing business with robots. I don't care how much great AI a company has. We're not going to be replaced by robots. This fear that ... It's not, because we are human. If this freedom ... In fact, before I even came on with you, Chris, over to sell Flight School, you and I had a conversation because I was talking about this other company I was wanting to bring in on to ConnectAndSell. There's this freedom that almost empowers you almost like a sense of liberation that, "Now I can relax and do what I do well, which is selling." Most reps that are in a position, they do. They are good at selling. They just are awkward with the first conversation and they can't get out of their own way if they can't get past that. If I'm okay to show you, prospect, that we will find a time when it ends up being okay for you, that shows them, "Wow, I'm actually talking to another human being." It lowers the stress level on their end too. That's [crosstalk 00:34:48]. That's okay. You're totally fine.  In fact, the meeting that I set this morning, that was the case. He was like, "Yeah. I'm sorry, I got pulled into this other ... I'm covered for a manager." Et cetera. I said, "Totally fine. That is the end of this work." He's like, "That's perfect. Yeah. Go ahead and set it for this week." It was, "Okay. Awesome. Good luck with the remainder of your week." It allowed them to relax also. What is interesting is there's this pressure you've got to qualify in advance. That's what I was brought up on my sales career. You've got to know they're almost too qualified before you get them on the discovery meeting. There is no possible way you can find that out before a discovery meeting. Sometimes it takes two or three of those to find that out because they're still warming up to you.  They don't know if they want to completely trust you to divulge the skeletons out of the closet and everything else that's going on internally, and especially with COVID and all the disruption that's happened in the market, that's even more so. I hope that any senior leadership that is hearing this one would allow ... And the AEs respectfully, if you have an SDR setting for an AE, respect the SDR to know if they don't show up, we'll get them back on. Chris Beall (36:11): Yeah. [crosstalk 00:36:11]- Cherryl Turner (36:11): If you are using smart technology like ConnectAndSell, right? It's- Chris Beall (36:15): Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I think this is the main thing ConnectAndSell enables, this relaxation into the situation where you can both be human. I really do think that that's like the hidden gift, which shouldn't be considered to be hidden because it's the essence of being able to forge new relationships that could lead to something of value being exchanged.

“Everybody knows that the flow of discovery meetings is the constraint on their business.” So states Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, as he and Corey Frank, our two Market Dominance Guys, continue their interview with Matthew Forbes, Head of Strategic Accounts at ConnectAndSell. Together, they explore the epiphany that is behind Matt’s recent 4-times uptick in his call-to-meeting ratio. So, what is it that increased that flow for Matt recently, and how can others adopt what he learned so that they too can increase the number of meetings they set? “I think we let people off the hook,” Matt says, “because they’re busy.” It’s second-nature to get apologetic or back down when the prospect starts making noises like, “Not now” or “Call back later.” But Matt’s epiphany about his true belief in the value of the discovery meeting and in the value of ConnectAndSell for the person he’s talking to, has changed the way he delivers his message. “You’ve got to have the right words, but the words only get you so far.” As Matt explains, if you truly believe in what you’re offering, your tone of voice will communicate that belief. As you’ll hear in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “This Is What Makes All the Difference.” ----more---- -------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (01:39): At my last company, I think Chris, you were there a number of times, you walk in, and one of the things I had on the sales floor was a big sign in all caps that said "No tourists." And we find in our profession that there's so many tourists who like to dabble. "Well, I can get five grand across town on an extra base over here, Hey, they're paying an extra 12 points on a rip on a commission over here. I'm going to end, right." And you have, these tourists would just kind of go, and the product's irrelevant. And so they're mercenaries, they're tourists. And because there's no barriers to entry in our profession, right? There's no MCAT, or GMAT, or LSAT, we had to go through. You have to go through an interview with another salesperson. Maybe there's a personality test, we slide through. And it sounds like the baseline, the table stakes is "Can I convert 5% of my conversations to meetings?" And for Matt, your client that you were mentioning, for that gentleman to do 28% versus five, they're doing over five times the head count on one person. And then you combine that with the weapon ConnectAndSell, I mean, forget about that. I mean, you have an amplific effect here that is staggering. Matthew Forbes (02:49): Well, I'll tell you I always enjoy ConnectAndSell. I like talking to people every six or eight minutes and not doing any of the nonsense work, but I really liked it on Friday. Now granted there was a couple of dollars on a spiff on the line, and I'm slacking and everybody else and making fun of them, because I've been here for nine years and I have that personality and that was fun. But that was the most fun I've had on ConnectAndSell in an awfully long time or ever. I think people would hear this and go like, "Oh yeah. Okay. That's that sounds pretty cheesy. Like, yeah next. I believe in your soul. Yeah. I believe like, okay." You have to stop and inspect. I don't think I've ever spoken to any of my bosses or Chris, or any CEO of any company and actually like sat down and reflected. I don't think I meant to. I just, I had a scotch, there was a fire and that's all I could think about for a couple hours was like, "Do you re like ... You know you do." It, wasn't a question of whether I do or not. It's almost like the self awareness of no, no, no, you do. You really do. How come you're not coming from that place? And it was like, "Okay." And I don't think it's so simple. And I think a lot of people are going to go, "Yeah, whatever." I can tell you right now, it's different. It's really, really different. And anybody who's willing to spend the time and reflect on that, even if you think you believe, really sit down, grab a scotch, maybe two, you might have to really question yourself in a way that I didn't think I was going to. Again, I've been here for nine years. How could I not believe, Corey, come on. I'm sitting there telling Chris like, "Oh, of course I believe, Chris, don't be silly." And I did, but I was unaware of how deep that really was. So it's kind of hard to explain to people. Corey Frank (04:33): A lot of folks would say belief system is either based off of increased curiosity, or it's based off of outcomes, or that this epiphany is now that, hey you are truly in charge of your own future. Or as you had said, Matt, that you grew an altruistic bone in your body overnight, and you realize that you're a little bit of a savior, a prophet, in your own world, and these folk desperately need it. Where would you say that emanated from? Because you're selling the same product for nine years, you woke up one morning and you ... Matthew Forbes (05:04): I think we let people off the hook. I think we talked to somebody, and we have a conversation, and we let them off the hook because they were busy or they did this or that, or the other thing. And I don't think I let them off the hook. I think that my tonality in our opener was different. I mean, it wasn't like, "Hey, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough." I mean, I slowed it way down. Right. And I really hit those notes, and it made a difference. And I think it would be an altruistic bone. It'd be a big bone Corey, I'm 68. I don't know if it's necessarily that, but there's a little bit of that. Whoever I call who has never heard of us, should hear about us. It doesn't mean it's right for them. It doesn't mean they should run out and buy it or go do a test drive. I mean, as a sales guy, I suppose I hope they do, but truly they just need to hear about it. They just need to know that it exists. And that piece of me came out in the last week, and it was growing. That's why I looked at those numbers. And the Friday afternoon blitz, by the way, was five meetings for 14 conversations, in an hour and 45 minutes. I was looking at the whole week before. But I got to tell you, five meetings. I mean, I got off the phone, and granted, it was the most ridiculous day, I had actually made a LinkedIn post about it. I had eight or 10 meetings lined up. I mean, my brain was mush, but I got off the phone. I'm like, "I know I booked two test drives. Life is good. I closed a deal. And I set five meetings. It's a Friday. You've got to be kidding me. If I could do half of that every day of the week. I wouldn't be the number two guy. I'd be the number one guy." Maybe I will be the number one guy. We'll see. Chris Beall (06:48): We will see. Well, what's interesting, to me, about this is this I went to kind of a new level with the whole question of the impact of belief, when one of our customers, a recent customer. And I don't know if he wants me to say his name, so I'm not going to say his name, but he's the chief development officer of a big, big company. And he and one of his people in his business that he works closely with really believed that nothing happens in business until somebody has a phone conversation with someone. So we had done a test drive and halfway through the test drive, his team had produced zero meetings. That's okay in a ConnectAndSell test drive, but it wasn't okay in this one, for me. It just wasn't, there was something about it. With this kind of leadership. I just thought, "Hey, let's just go ahead and introduce the breakthrough script a little tighter. Let's tighten it up a little bit." So I went through a mini messaging workshop with them in the middle of a test drive, at lunch, and they set five meetings in the afternoon, and that was nice. And afterwards they said, "Well, we're big. We want to buy a lot. Like we don't want to buy a quarter million vials a month." And I said, 'no, you're not good enough. You're not good enough. I listened to your people, and they're good, there's a lot of talent, but you guys could do better. And I really want you to just take a little flight school. $9,500, let's put six people through flight school. Choose your six best. And let's see what we can do. Let's make a shining star." So that shining star will sustain us as we go through the difficulties of bringing in something new, because we'll know what can be done. So we went ahead and did that. Here's what surprised me. The chief development officer was the lead user in the flight school. And he called me one day. And I was out for, guess what, a barefoot run up in Port Townsend, Washington, along Discovery Bay. And he said, "Chris, I just had kind of an epiphany." And I said, "What is it?" He said, "I just, that I don't believe sufficiently in the potential value of the meeting for this person, to insist that they take the meeting. So I'm going to shift my mindset right now. I'm about to get on ... " And get this. I mean, this guy's a big, big dog, at a big company. He gets on ConnectAndSell with his team and leads from the front, always, a hundred percent of the time, including when he's in airports and all sorts of things like that. He says, I'm going to get on. I'm going to see what happens with the mindset that goes like this, "It is wrong of me. It is my failure to help somebody, if I allow them to not take a meeting, take 15 minutes of their life to hear what it is that we've discovered." And he called me back in 35 minutes, four for four. Since then he's converted 78.5% of his conversations to meetings. Corey Frank (06:48): 78%. Matthew Forbes (09:52): [inaudible 00:09:52]. Chris Beall (09:52): 78.5%, 78.5%. Now he does some other things though. He believes so much in this, that he doesn't insist that they super commit to the meeting, just that they will accept an invitation, because he's going to pour those invitations back into ConnectAndSell, and talk to them if they don't attend the meeting. So he believes so much, that he's even going to let them off the hook and put them back on the hook and, and eventually talk to them. He's patient about it. So his net show rate is 85%, which is remarkable. We all know that getting net show rates above 75% is quite challenging, right? So it's a kind of funny act of faith to say, "I'm not going to insist that you swear in blood, that you're going to come to the meeting. I'm just going to go ahead, and we agreed that you're going to come to the meeting and I'll send you the invitation, and by the way, I'm busy. I got something to do. Boom, I'm out of here. Right?" So it's, it's very interesting. When you see this point of view taken to the extreme, and this guy's an extremist. I played golf with him the other day, and I got a picture of what that really means. So he's an extreme kind of guy, right? And he expresses this in the insistence mindset that goes to the meeting, through the meeting, and forever, and it's all about making sure that this person has a shot at learning something that will change their life, or might change their life. And I really think that's not what we teach in sales. It's just not. Matthew Forbes (11:25): No one talks like ... Who talks like this? Nobody. Turns out, this is actually the stuff that really matters. You've got to have the right words, no doubt. And we're really good at teaching people, the right words, Chris, at this point, but this is definitely the next level. Corey Frank (11:42): The other side of the card. Is that the words are gets you so far Matt, right? But I think today's customers want more than just a talking brochure, and a brochure doesn't necessarily have belief. We've talked about this. Chris, how many bits of information are in an email? How many bits in a brochure, how many bits in a website, versus how many bits in a conversation, and how many even more bits to get to this elusive 600,000 bits to trigger that trust factor, RNA insistence minded, a belief minded conversation. And I think that they want to feel that connection, that part of the ... That as Oren, our previous guest talked about this. Can you introduce enough skepticism, where you understand that you have their care and feeding of the buying process is acknowledged, they're looking for signals that it's safe to engage in you in a dialogue, all of that thing goes into this thing of trust here. And it sounds like with the right tone, Matt, that you've established, and Chris, and what this gentleman does for the 78.5% is, could you argue, you as a scientist Chris, that the level of entropy, if you will, if I nail the screenplay, and if I nail the tone, my variables of entropy are dropping significantly, and I'm making this a whole heck of a lot less complex than it needs to be? Chris Beall (13:07): Yeah. I think you're taking variability out for the prospect, and that's what they need. Oren says this all the time. The prospect needs certainty. They need certainty. And certainty comes from the removal of uncertainty, because nothing generates more uncertainty than being cold called. I mean, that's a lot of uncertainty, which way this thing's going to go. And so what do you do? You seek certainty by getting out of the call with your self image intact. That's the starting point. We always go back to that ambush moment, where the problem at hand is you. You are the problem. And by the way, believing that and believing that's a good, most reps never get past that. Believing that it's the greatest thing in the world, that you are the problem you, the calling rep or the problem, that that is the rock that you stand on, that you were the problem. It's like, there are different sorts of religious beliefs out there, right? There's all sorts of foundations of religion. There's one that starts with the notion that birth, sickness, old age, and death, there they are. That's bedrock. Now what? That's how Buddhism works. And you can't kind of say, "Well no. I'm not going to be born, and I'm not going to be sick. I'll never get old, I'll never die" So there's good bedrock there, right? So, the fear that the ambushed party has of you, the invisible stranger, who's ambushed them, and the certainty that what they want, they all want the same thing, to get out of this call with their self-image in tech. That's what they're looking for, right? Chris Beall (15:16): And your willingness to accept that position in their service. This is the problem. When I tell people, "This is what you need to accept.' And they go, "Okay", and they try to trick themselves into it. I'll try to make some mental tricks happen. It's like, no the why behind it is, in their service, because you truly believe in the potential value of the meeting that you're offering, in all circumstances, including the one that you'll say six minutes in "There's no reason for you to continue to even learn this." Corey Frank (15:47): Sure, sure. Chris Beall (15:49): Even that one, because it's potential value, not certain value. If you want to offer the reduction of uncertainty for somebody else, you have to eat a massive amount of uncertainty of yourself. That's the service that you're doing. You eat the uncertainty, so that the prospect doesn't have to experience uncertainty. That's the essence of sales. That is what you do. You gobble up uncertainty, and you endure the pain of the uncertainty, so that the other person can advance towards the unknown and make it known. That's what you're doing, as a sales person. That's the fundamental core act of sales. And yes, you're right, Matt. People don't talk like this. But if they're serious about the stuff they do talk about, they talk about winning, and they talk about putting up big numbers, they talk about killing it, crushing it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you're really serious about that stuff, you kind of owe it to yourself to look at how human beings really work. Corey Frank (16:46): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Hustle porn is a dangerous thing, and it has absolutely no nutritional value. Kind of like the old fruit Stripe gum. Remember we used to have as kids, right? You just go through a whole pack because you'd take a couple of bites and all of a sudden the sugar is long gone. It looked good, it smelled good, but you wouldn't want to have it for dinner. And the study of bio physiology and why people have their bones in their nose, and why paints left and right, and all the stuff that we talked about, Chris, early on in our [inaudible 00:17:14]. I think that's the key to kind of discovering this part of the craft that unfortunately it's tough. Those are tough truths. Those are tough truths, Chris, that you had mentioned. I think you'd agree with me, Matt, that I am the bearer of this uncertainty. I have the burden of this uncertainty. I willingly do it every day as a cold caller. Our colleague Ryan Recert, I think is one of the unsung heroes of our profession for eating the frog every day, publicly. And James Thornburg, the granddaddy, the King of cold calling himself, what he does every day. And it's folks like that who are pushing sales thought leadership beyond just "I love uncle Zig Ziglar." But beyond just fire up in the morning or Gary V videos. Matthew Forbes (18:01): So, well, I tell you while we were talking, I looked at some of the other guys on my team. Was this just me? Was this just an aberration? Did this just happen? Is this going to go away next week? I'm getting my second COVID shot on Thursday. Like, will, I wake up on Monday and not be able to set meetings? Oh my God. So here's the story. Rich, great guy, great sales guy. Last year booked meetings at 8%. Rich, hopefully, you don't care that I said that. Rich, on Friday, after going through flight school, now does rich believe what I believe in my soul? I don't know. But he went through flight school and they changed his tone. They changed how he was attacking the script. He went from 9%, on Friday Rich booked meetings at 28.6%. So it's not just me. Mark Hodgeson 7.5% last year, Mark Hodgeson, 19%. Does not suck when all you're talking about is going through a flight school and having someone talk to you about the psychology of the script you're already using, and what's important and why. And then I think what I came to was sort of that next-level piece of it. But yeah, I think you and Chris's perspective, I think you can manufacture this stuff. I think you really can. Corey Frank (19:17): So manufacturing, meaning, if you had a new team of BDRs that are starting under you Matt and Chris, and a killer product, I can even learn again, the breakthrough script, pre play, the 27 seconds. What's the piece that I absolutely positively have to show up for that from an atomic weight perspective has more to do with eliciting that extra three, five X, that Mark and rich top-shelf sales folks, for sure that, that they got out of this thing? What would you say it would be? Matthew Forbes (19:52): Yeah, it's the flight school. I mean, Donny Crawford explaining the Psychology. I mean, it's our script for heaven's sakes. We should know this stuff. I mean, come on. I mean, we do these things all the time for our customers, but to really sit us down and say, "Here's why you say this word." I wasn't even on the first flight school I was in Florida on vacation. I said, "Okay, honey, I'll go back. I'll watch the call. It'll be an hour." It was over two hours. I think it was two and a half hours of Chris just talking about the script, and spending 20 minutes on it, why did we say this word? And here's what it means. And here's the reason and the why behind it and let's get into it. And why not that word? Here's this. And just going through that process and understanding that makes a huge difference, and really coming in vocally. I'm not going to say that everybody faked it, the tonality piece. I think we changed their tonality piece, but I think that's one step closer to, yeah I'm not letting you off the hook. Not because my boss is watching. Not because I want to book a meeting and it's good for me, but because it's good for you. The words Chris has used, I mean it's Chris. I mean, I have to listen to these podcasts twice. I work for the guy, right? But Chris, what do you always say? The potential value of the meeting for the person you're talking to. Like, that means very little to me as a sales guy. I've heard that a lot. And I think this is of it. Chris Beall (21:14): Matt, because we see meetings, as a sales guy, we see them as a form of currency. It's a form of validation of [inaudible 00:21:22]. You pay your mortgage off with the meetings. And sometimes we forget to have that empathy on the other side, I believe, Matthew Forbes (21:27): Oh, a hundred percent. But I just never really dug deep. And like, do you really believe that? And this is what I say to my customers. In their soul, why does that guy 28? And the other guy is 10, my customer? Because one guy bleeds green. That's the only possible reason because the second you start talking about what you do and you use category language on a cold call, you're off the cold call. You're going to get "I'm all set" all day long. That's just how cold calling is. So it's not product knowledge, right? It's literally one guy bleeds green, and does not let the other guy off the phone. And not in a Jordan Belfort way, not like that. But he really believes that he's going to help that school. Because that's who he calls. Because he does. And if anybody's listening, and they can get their team to that, you just bought yourself double the amount of inside sales reps you have. Chris Beall (22:20): At least. Matthew Forbes (22:20): Because they're going to book 2X, for sure. Corey Frank (22:23): Absolutely. You have to fall in love, it sounds like what you're saying is, and Chris you've talked about this too is, can you fall in love with your craft? Can you fall in love with the individual nuances of your craft? I don't own a Ferrari at this particular moment, but I took a Ferrari tour when I was in Italy. And it's not a big factory for those who are listening, who've taken the factory ... But every aspect from the stitching to Enzo Ferrari's vision, that he really didn't even want to radio in the first couple of Ferrari versions, because it would diminish the sound that you hear when you are shifting from second to third to fourth, that was music enough for Enzo Ferrari. What do you want to pollute it for by listening to Drake, right? If you don't buy a Ferrari to get from point a to point B, you are a true connoisseur of the craft of motor racing, of motor movement, of engineering excellence. And to hear the shifting and the nuances, and the horsepower, you are falling itself, and you're falling in love, every time you downshift, or you hit that clutch. And I think that from our profession to almost ... Matt, you almost sound like you're describing an out-of-body experience, where you separated yourself from Matt, listening to Matt, while Matt is delivering the phone call, and you're able to judge yourself, in real time, and correct, if needed, in real-time, an out of body truly experienced. And I think that's clearly ... I can see you getting from seven to eight in a couple of days, maybe your list gets in the jet stream, and you get to 10, 11%. But to have top-shelf rep after top-shelf connoisseur goes to 27, 28%, let alone 78%, there's a there's something in the water. Matthew Forbes (24:19): Yeah, there is. It's listening to Chris for two and a half hours, and then actually listening to Chris. I can't believe I actually listened to Chris like deep down inside. [crosstalk 00:24:30]. Corey Frank (24:31): You can hear Chris, or you can listen to Chris. Two different things. Matthew Forbes (24:35): Might be the first time I've ever heard him. I don't know. We'll see. Corey Frank (24:39): Well, listen, I don't know how many hundreds of hours I've had to listen to Chris in the last couple of [inaudible 00:24:44]. But, we won't ... Now that we're up against the clock, and we're going to get the hook on time here any minute. So I think everybody has done listening to ... Certainly, well past done listening to me, Matt, it was an absolute pleasure having you on. A journey of promise now, I'm sure. The way you made money, the way you service your clients, and the reciprocal way that you make money, last year, last month, is the enemy of how you make money today, and going forward. Matthew Forbes (25:13): I believe that. Corey Frank (25:14): And that is the villain of meandering, touristy, you don't have nine years of experience. You have one year, nine times, right? Or you have six months, 18 times. Like a lot of us go in and out of love. And I think you found the secret portal to basically do the cloning of formats over the period of a Friday afternoon. Matthew Forbes (25:36): It's like 1200 pounds. That's a lot of mass. I mean, let's be clear. That's a lot. Corey Frank (25:41): [inaudible 00:25:41] 30 feet, six-foot. What are you? 6'8", right? So that's like- Matthew Forbes (25:44): [crosstalk 00:25:44] I mean, as far as tonnage goes, it was a very productive- Corey Frank (25:47): Well, if it doesn't work out, you could probably get a job at a circus. So that's the one thing- Matthew Forbes (25:50): Oh, my middle name is Carney. I mean that's enough said, right? I mean, there you go. Corey Frank (25:55): That's right. Well, beautiful. Well, thank you Chris. Thank you, Matt. This is another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. Thanks for listening.

This week, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, interview Matthew Forbes, Head of Strategic Accounts at ConnectAndSell, about an epiphany Matt had that increased the meetings he set by almost 400%. Wow! What could possibly change that would explain that kind of increase? Well, it’s actually a simple change, but it’s a very necessary one: Matt came to truly believe — deep in his soul — in the potential value of the discovery meeting for his prospects, even if they were never going to do business with ConnectAndSell. His messaging script didn’t change at all. It was his belief that did. Listen to today’s Market Dominance Guys episode, “You’d Better Believe It!” to learn how Matt came to make this meeting-setting leap. ----more---- -------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.   The complete transcript of this episode is below: Matthew Forbes (01:20): I have a friend who I used to work with. We discovered 16 years ago who was like, "enough of me looking at your crap online. You've got to tell me how you're doing this. I need to go talk to more people." So, we went through it very, very quickly, but it would not be Insperity. It would be just him and plausibly could grow from there, but I think they were once a customer. Corey Frank (01:43): Flight school has not been grounded. Flight school is taken off. I love it. We're going to talk today. We're going to interview big Matt Forbes about belief. Chris Beall (01:53): So here's the little story Mr. Forbes and I had a conversation three or four weeks ago, right before I bought this house. And it went on for a couple hours. He refers to it in one way. I refer to it in another. I'll let him describe it, and something happened inside Mr. Forbes that changed his conversion numbers to the point where he is now the gold medalist on two consecutive flight school experiences across one of the most experienced ConnectAndSell calling teams on earth, our account executives. And he didn't win by a little- Corey Frank (02:33): He cheated. Chris Beall (02:34): He won by a lot. [crosstalk 00:02:36]. He cheated. He did cheat. He cheated by believing in the potential value of the meeting for the human being that he was talking with. Even if there's never going to be any business. I know, he's been deeply corrupted. I thought it'd be great to have Matt share his story while we listen. Corey Frank (02:52): Okay, Matt, are you a Sales Director at ConnectandSell? What's your specific title? Matthew Forbes (02:58): Oh, I'm the Head of Strategic Accounts, Mr. Frank. Chris Beall (03:01): I was going to say you remember the guy at the end of the Rocky and Bullwinkle and everything goes down and the guy with the broom, comes out, and sweeps everything off? Corey Frank (03:08): Yes, he's the one Chris Beall (03:10): That guy. Corey Frank (03:10): He's the one. I love it. Okay. All right. Welcome to another episode of the market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and as always the prophet of profits, the head of the market domination department for many companies, even though they won't admit it, Chris Beall, the CEO of ConnectandSell. Chris, good afternoon. Chris Beall (03:32): As always Corey, it is a good afternoon when I'm here with you. Corey Frank (03:35): And we have a guest, Chris. You know how we feel about guests. We don't have to repeat it, but I think this is a very appropriate guest for what we've been talking about the last few weeks, which is the system of the cheat codes. I think it sounds like what you and Matt had been cooking up here is probably the Occam's razor of cheat codes. I think you could say, because it's right in front of you, but you have folks trying to make things a lot more complex than they are. And we have Mr. Matt Forbes, who is the Head of Strategic Initiatives over at ConnectandSell. And we're going to talk to Matt about an initiative that sounds like he not only spiked the ball, but spiked the ball, picked it up, threw it in the stands, then went and grabbed it and then spiked it again, based off some of the results that you've had. And so I know I'm on bated breath to find out what some of this data is, and cause Chris knows, Matt, that my MO for the last couple of years, as we've been doing this 75 plus episodes is to take anything I get from anybody smarter than I, and claim those ideas as my own. That's what I do. I'm a shameless, shameless thief. So with that, Chris, talk a little bit about the background of Matt, the project he was working on, and exactly what he uncovered here. Chris Beall (04:51): The project has been going on for a few years. I would say it was punctuated by various things. A lobster dinner in Boston once I remember was kind of a little slice of it. Matt and I have been talking for a long time about the relationship between what goes on inside of us and what happens on the scoreboard. As you know, and I think the ... I don't know how much of our audience has bothered to plow through my endless diatribes on the subject. But it's my deep belief that we are seen as what we believe as, as who we are, by what we believe in, how we say what we say, and we're unaware of that connection. And I go back to a time when one of our big customers asked us to do an outsource project and Corey your YoungBloods.works doing outsource projects, right and left and helping people get lots of appointments and move forward with their businesses. And we took on this project with a company that we're very, very familiar with. We knew exactly we thought how to be successful setting appointments for them. Mind you not ConnectandSell's normal business, but we were asked to do it, and we gave it a whirl. So we took our own SDRs and applied them to this. And they were terrible. Even though we got the script right, we got all that stuff right, they were terrible. So about three weeks in, I asked this question, which is, do our SDRs believe in the potential value of the meeting that they're offering to these human beings they're speaking with, even if there's never going to be any business. And the answer was well, how could they? They've never spoken to anybody who attended a discovery meeting for this particular customer and could come away and say, "You know what, here's what I learned. And it changed my life." So I went out and I found a couple of those customers and had them speak to the SDR team directly and say, "this is how that discovery call changed my life, independent of buying that product." And voila, immediate four times improvement in output measured as meetings per hour and yet no change at all in the script. There was a force hiding inside these people, and I just needed to go in and find it. And the way we found it was by having them talk to somebody who had experienced the value, then they could believe in the value of the meeting and they could sound like they believed in it. And so I've been on a little bit of a kick ever since then, but it's the hardest thing because sales reps are naturally inclined to want to do things that produce results that go in the direction of producing results that eventually produce commissions. That is they have quota to make, and we incentivize them that way. And then we kind of hope they will put that aside and instead do something that might be more effective. And we did a whole episode on this, the dog, the piece of meat, and the chain link fence, a whole episode on it. And we know what a dog does in those circumstances. All of us are dogs when it comes to sales. We look at a piece of meat or smell it on the other side of the fence, and we try to go through the fence instead of backing away from the fence and finding the gate, which is generally about 10 feet to the right. So what do we get? A bloody nose, lots of frustration. So Matt and I have been talking about this for years on various, in various levels. And I don't know what kind of conversation I would characterize it as, but it was a long one. Cause I was out on a barefoot trot that went long, long, long- Corey Frank (08:18): Hang on a minute. Did Chris just say that he had a long conversation? I mean stop the presses. Matthew Forbes (08:24): It's shocking. It's absolutely shocking that 10 minute call went about 2:20. Yeah. Who knew. Chris Beall (08:30): 2:20. And the next thing you know, Matt's going to tell you what the rest of the story is because it's, it was quite remarkable. And he told it to me a few days ago and I, it brought tears to my eyes and not just cause a cold wind was blowing out of the Southeast here in Green Valley, Arizona. Corey Frank (08:49): And you were wearing a kilt, right? Exactly. Matthew Forbes (08:50): Exactly. I've worked with Chris for nine years and you know Chris, right? Lot of abstract concepts and they don't, some of them are perfect and some of them are over my head as just a dumb old sales guy. And we had this two hour and 20 minute conversation about what do you believe and not, what do you believe? What do you believe in your soul about what you're selling? Do you really believe that someone should take a meeting with you that everyone should take a meeting with you? And of course, as Chris is being Chris, I'm like, "Well of course I believe, Chris, I truly do love ConnectandSell. I think people should use it." And after the call, I kind of got to thinking, do I actually believe that? And I do, but do I believe it in my soul? Like deep, like truly. And I don't think I'd ever realized the fact that I really do believe that deep and that in turn, I think lets a lot of people off the hook when I'm talking to them on the phone. Corey Frank (09:52): Is it a change in tone? How would you dumb it down to a guy like me, Matt, of same phrase used without belief and maybe a same phrase used with belief. You have, you're Never Split the Difference book there and our friend Chris Voss, right? The inner partner, right, Chris? From many years ago, talked about that's right versus you're right. Talks about that in his book and how a lot of folks, when they talk, they're waiting to hear for "You're right. You're right. You're right." Which in essence means "just go away." I don't believe [inaudible 00:10:26], but when you say "That's right," now I have some trust built up. So what, what is it that you've discovered in this that could help a guy like me develop a belief mentality, an intention mentality? Matthew Forbes (10:38): First, you really got to decide what you believe as a sales rep. I mean truly you have to actually ask the question cause you inherently should believe. You sell it. You work there. But even me at nine years, I really had to ask myself the question. So the script didn't change because unlike a lot of sales directors and certainly some at ConnectandSell, I read the script. It's right there. I mean I physically, my wife makes fun of me. Right? I get on a call and the call starts here and I turn and I read because I do know that an opening script works word for word and you shouldn't stray. So it's not the words. We know that for sure. It's really the belief. There's some tonality difference, but there's a piece where when you try to get off the phone with me, I'm not going to have it because I want to truly help you. You're lucky if you take a 15 minute call with me, I'm going to teach you something you don't know. And it may just change everything for you. It may not, don't know, but you're going to learn something. And that's when things started to change and I ran my numbers. So here are the stats, Corey: Matt Forbes, last year, 42,000 phone calls on ConnectandSell. My meeting booked rate was 9.2%. And that's a blended rate between first calls and the second calls, right? It's about 60% first and 40% follow-up. Matt Forbes last week was meeting booked of 26%. Something changed. Matt Forbes on that Friday call blitz was meeting booked at 35.7%. I went five for 14 on net new calls, same list, same script, same everything. Now there was ... we're in a flight school. So there was competition. And I admit that the competition is just so valuable. It's ridiculous. But those numbers, when I look at where the other reps were, they didn't go up as high as I did as a percentage, not even close. And I really think it's that last notion of it's not that I don't want to let you off the call because I want to book a meeting. It's I don't want to let you off the call because you deserve to hear what I'm going to say. It literally could change how you go to market. I mean, I believe that in my soul, I think I always believed it, Chris. I don't think I recognized it. I don't think I was willing to come out and say, "Look, here's the deal." And that's what changed. And honestly, it's different now. Corey Frank (13:14): How long of a time frame was that, Matt, again that you were on the phone for those five meetings? Matthew Forbes (13:19): Session dial time: two hours and 29 minutes. Talked to 26 people- Corey Frank (13:19): That's incredible. Matthew Forbes (13:23): Went seven for 26. Yeah. That's insane. That's a Friday afternoon, but that's a Friday afternoon. Corey Frank (13:30): Friday afternoon. You know Chris, I think probably one of our first episodes, we talked about this concept of the promise is that the market is always on fire. And that... Think you had said, Chris, that the message is water, right? And that that's the mentality you need to have is that the proverbial go to the person at the end of the bar on his left side at the end of the day, "How was your week?" Right? You have no idea, right? They're on fire, and the message is water, but it sounds like we need to make a little caveat to that. Now, certainly after talking with Matt here, right? It's not just the message is water, right? But the delivery or this belief, this intention messaging is the fire extinguisher. Right. Water's good. But as you know, Chris, from working in a restaurant, we've heard this many times, you don't put water on a grease fire. Chris Beall (14:22): That is so true. I know somebody just the other day who burned themselves by making that mistake. I shouldn't laugh, but they survived. Corey Frank (14:30): What do you think of the tonality difference versus the ... I mean, Matt, you're calling it something internally that there was a, sounds like it's more of a, a switch than a dial of belief. Like, listen, I'm trying to help. Right? I have a belief that my discovery call will open up. Whether you buy my product or not, the discovery call has a cape on it. And you just need to show up for the discovery call, whether you buy my product or not, you're going to find something new about the industry, you're going to learn something new about your business, et cetera. Is that bottled? Can that be taught? How would you teach it to a new sales guy like me where I'm reading, what you're reading, Matt, I'm reading your script that's on my wall. I'm holding it on every call, but I'm not getting the converts that you are.

Over the years, how salespeople make an initial contact for a sale has changed. In these modern times, it has come down to a choice between making a cold phone call or sending a cold email. It seems to be a matter of choice. However, if you’re trying to break through a prospect’s initial fear of being sold to so that you can engender that level of trust necessary to set a meeting or make a sale, which approach should you put YOUR trust in? The human voice? Or a digital communication? Today, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, talks with podcast producer Susan Finch about this very question. As CEO of ConnectAndSell, Chris is an impassioned believer in phone conversations first as the most successful tool for setting appointments. Why? Because with your voice, you can employ timbre, tone, pacing, and emotion. In a one-on-one conversation, you can pause for a response, share humor when appropriate, or convey that you understand the other person’s situation. However carefully crafted, an email message can never do as a good a job at interacting with another human being. In pursuing the all-important goal of engendering trust with a prospect, initial phone conversations win, hands down! Listen in to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode as Chris shares his well-honed opinions on “How to Warm Up a Cold Communication.” ----more---- -------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.   The complete transcript of this episode is below:   Susan Finch (00:06): Hey everybody, Susan Finch here. I am the Producer for Market Dominance Guys, and I was invited by Chris Beall to join him on today's episode. Chris, what are we going to talk about? Chris Beall (01:00): Well, let's talk about something we've never talked about, which in 70 episodes or whatever is a little bit hard to find but this turned out to be easy to find. So I've been doing some radio advertising recently and we've been doing a lot more work with what we call talk to send, which is sending an email after each conversation and talk to sequence and talk to cadence or whatever people call these things in case it's not just an email that might be triggering a sequence. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about how does a conversation first approach work with all of the other media, all the other ways of having information flow between you and your prospects. I thought that might be kind of fun. Susan Finch (01:46): It is. It's dizzy you know. And new players and new shiny things, as you brought up clubhouse earlier today, are coming into our spectrum of time sucks and we don't know whether they're effective or not. And we don't know where they're playing or where they're hanging there or invest in time over there is really worth the time. And how do we measure it all? Chris Beall (02:11): Yeah, there you go. So I think measuring it is really, really, really hard. But I think there's a principle we can apply that's really simple. There's only two kinds of communication we can have with somebody; one is communication with somebody we have no relationship with and the other is communication with somebody we have a relationship with as I often say. And sometimes derided for, that's just math, right? In fact, it's a branch of math called Logic which is not that popular here in our country, but every once in a while somebody takes it up for a few minutes and they get some good out of it. So it's just two possibilities. And what's so interesting to me is that when you divide the world of communication with prospects and customers into those two categories instead of into other categories, you find something out really quickly. You may not get it at first, most of us don't, but it works like this, all communication of a digital form with somebody we don't have a relationship with is open loop and doesn't produce trust. And that's really interesting because in the world of business to business, we only get information back when it's closed loop. So say I send you an email and say you retired from your company five months ago but your company keeps your email alive so that they can make sure that should somebody send an email to you, a very important senior or vice president of whatever, that email gets proper attention will come back to me as you opened that email. That's the it because email is fundamentally open loop. And even if I put little tricksy things in it little pixels or pixies or whatever they happen to be, they're going to notice and they're going to send something back and say, "Oh, they opened it." Or even if I'm looking at bounce rates. In both cases, it's not going to bounce and the pixies and the pixels and all that are going to say it was opened. And then what will happen? Well, say you're a data seller like, I don't know, Zoom info, you're going to report to the world that this person works at this company still even though they left five months ago. And in fact there's a great mystery among the data sellers and people who buy data and actually use it like we do and our customers do to call people, talk to people. It's like, "Huh, why are there so many retired people in this dataset?" And it's because email is open loop. It sometimes tries to be closed loop and people put fancy things in it to try to make it closed loop but it's open loop. And so we can't really trust the information that comes back. And then the other part is, it doesn't matter if it's email, if it's social, if it's whatever, billboards which are actually analog, digital media open loop, we can't build trust through digital communications alone. There's not enough data. And everybody thinks there's enough data cycle. It's digital. It must have more data, but there's almost no data in a digital communication that gets through. Maybe a picture quickly forgotten. Susan Finch (05:26): You remind me of somebody that I respect a lot, Linda Zimmer. And she is into data security and speaks on it throughout the world. But she always reminds me that data is not truth, but it is sold as truth. Chris Beall (05:41): Oh yes. Yes. And oddly enough to get to truth takes a lot more data than the amount of data that tends to be sold as truth. That is, the data that's important for building trust is data that speaks to parts of ourselves we're not aware of. That's why they're called unconscious and subconscious parts of the mind. Those are just fancy names for, oh, Sigmund Freud wanted to say something. Although Sigmund Freud was kind of a weird guy, wanted to say some things, right? Not all of which were that savory, but it's just simple which is, there are things that go on inside of our noggins and our bodies that we're not aware of that are really important when it comes to us making decisions. And in fact, when we make the big decision, the biggest decision we ever make, do I trust this person? That's the biggest decision because when we screw it up and we get it wrong, it can be fatal. So here we have this really big decision, a blood decision, and we make it based on lots of data, lots of information actually, going into our unconscious and subconscious parts of our brains and our bodies. And that data, that information just isn't available in digital media. We just can't get there from here. Email, 5,000 bits roughly in an email, conversation, 20,000 bits in one second of that conversation, in one second, it's for emails. So now we're into a world where well, how many seconds does it take to get trust? Chris Voss, FBI's hostage negotiator for many years, I think the world's foremost expert on getting trust in a sales conversation. I asked him once, "How long do we have to get trust in a cold call?" And a cold call is just a name for an initial voice interaction. We haven't spoken before and I'm the ambusher. So I'm the ambusher, how long do I have to get trust from you? And he just looked me in the eye and said seven seconds. And when I playfully said, "Really? Our research says eight seconds." He said, "Your research is wrong. It's seven seconds." At which point, I was pretty sure that his research was research and mine wasn't. And I asked him, "What do we have to do in those seven seconds?" He says, "Oh, that's easy. All we have to do is demonstrate to this person that we see the world through their eyes and show them that we're competent to solve a problem they have right now." I said, "Well, that's a lot to do in seven seconds." Susan Finch (08:25): You guys have talked about this a lot, the seven second rule and how long and what has to be packed into that time. And I played through in my head, so many people that are not customers of connect and sell and some of your reputable competitors. But what I see is, four of those seconds gets wasted as that transfer happens, that hello, hello, hello. And the seconds tick away and you're almost done before you even heard a voice and what a waste. Chris Beall (09:01): Exactly. And then when you, yes, the time goes by. And then by the way, most reps just waste the time that they have. So they say, "So Susan, how are you today?" And I was like, "Okay." So now you talk for six or seven seconds and we're done. And that's not enough to get the job done because we didn't show the person that we see their world through their eyes. "Hi, how are you today?" Is not seeing the world through their eyes. "Did I catch you at a bad time?" It's a little bit closer because you referred to a bad time and it is a bad time because it's always a bad time but they did answer the phone. So it was probably a good time actually for a conversation, just not with you. Susan Finch (09:44): My time is so precious that how much time do I want to allot to something unexpected, a stranger or an annoyance in general. Because me might even know the annoyance and they may have called us before and how much time are we willing to devote to that to actually pick up the phone? My time super precious. I won't do that many times. Chris Beall (10:05): Yeah. And what you will do in general is you'll trade a little certainty. I'm off this call in 27 seconds, thank God, in exchange for a little courtesy. Yeah, I'll listen to why you called. That exchange is very, very easy to sell. That's one of the easiest sells in the world. I know I'm an interruption. "Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I've called?" And if I say that, you might decide that your self image is so robust that you're just going to say no. Or you might decide you're so afraid of me or afraid of your own tendency to go along with what people say to you that you will say, "No, not right now. I'm busy." Which is kind of silly because you did answer the phone. You aren't that busy. You were expecting something that was going to take, oh, maybe 27 seconds. But for the most part, people would chuckle and go, "Sure, go ahead." And the reason they chuckle is that people chuckle and they laugh when their fear is relieved. That's how jokes work. Jokes make us nervous about a particular way it could go and then when it goes another way, that thing called the punchline, we're relieved and we laugh. Laughter is a way of expressing relief and the departure of fear. So when we get called, we're afraid. Why are we afraid? An invisible stranger just ambushed us. That's pretty scary. And how do we express our fear? Annoyance and desire to get out of the room, so to speak. But what is our constraint? Oh, darn. It's an interaction with another human being and if I treat them too badly, my own self-image will be harmed. I'll hurt myself. So I don't want to do that so I'm a little bit stuck. Oh, you're so kind. You offer me a way out. I know I'm an interruption. "Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I call?" Said playfully. And sounds like a deal. Now what's funny about this is, right there you've accomplished the purpose of a cold call. You're done. You have trust. Oddly enough, fear is a great foundation for building trust because by relieving fear, you'll always build trust. Not sometimes but always. And if you just left it at that and you didn't actually fulfill the 27 second promise, then you'd have trust that got eroded because you didn't fulfill your promise. But if you fulfill your promise and tell him why you called and then let them go if they want to go, they'll trust you and you can talk to them again. However, and this is the big point, then you can also send them an email. Then you can send them an email which they will open and read because you can say in the subject line of that email, thanks for our conversation just now. And that's a completely different email because it's within a trust relationship that actually exists and is very fresh. And so when you look at digital media, and podcasts are like this too by the way. Somebody might be amused by us in our podcast, right? And they might learn something. Sometimes they'll reach out to me and say, "This changed my life." I'm getting a fair amount of that, but they actually won't quite trust us yet. Not Corey, not me, but if we have a conversation with them. So say I have a conversation with somebody. I had a conversation with a very senior sales enablement head from 3M today. And by the end of that conversation, which was longer than 27 seconds, it was actually 17 minutes and 38 seconds, I could send this person an email and this person is going to open that email and actually read it and probably reply to it and say thank you for the information you provided, blah, blah, blah and here's how I'd like to proceed or something like that, right? That same person, a cold email would have gone right over into the cold email trash file where cold emails go and I'd have to then resort to a clever subject line. Oh, did alligators eat your toenails? Or some nonsense like that which people do in hopes of raising themselves up above the sea of noise called email. It's not really a sea of noise. It's trusted email from people. I know you sent me a house warming gifts to Helen and I via email.  I didn't see it because it was in a sea of untrusted email and somehow it just slipped by me but when you reminded me of it, I went right over there and opened it, forwarded it to my fiance and voila, we're grateful, we're happy to have a house warming gift. Thank you so very much. We really do love our new house and all that is good. Had you just been some stranger sending me a house warming gift, first of all, it would have been weird. Secondly, I would have been suspicious of it as like, what are you trying to sell me? And thirdly, I missed this one. I would have missed that one forever one. Susan Finch (15:01): You definitely wouldn't trust the click. Chris Beall (15:04): I wouldn't trust the click and you wouldn't be able to know. Susan Finch (15:08): No, but you- Chris Beall (15:09): You wouldn't know what had happened to it. Susan Finch (15:12): But you're coming back to something. With that subject that you said about the alligators. With the piece that you brought up earlier about a joke and a punchline, there is a piece to building these relationships. And maybe it's just me because I appreciate a good sense of humor, but I find when people have a good sense of humor and know how to fine tune, it's, this is normally done, this is why I talking to GoDaddy for a hosting company as opposed to some of the other competitors of theirs because it's so sexist. The guys answer, the guys have a sense of humor. The guys get any humor I have. And there's a report immediately because you get me. You find me funny. And if you find me funny, I'm probably going to hang out with you a little bit more and trust you more especially when I have a stupid joke to say. And I want to talk a little bit, I know this 27 seconds are so valuable, but even from that moment and in that little space, there are ways to drop those disarming pieces of humor, of relatability, of vulnerability. How important is that? Chris Beall (16:19): I think it's crucially important in discovery, crucially important. I think it's also crucially important in your voice when somebody accepts your 27 seconds, because you can say you can actually just chuckle along with them. You don't have to say anything about it. It's just funny. Can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? It's kind of funny. Listen to James Thornburg say it some time out there on his many, many, many LinkedIn videos that he makes of himself cold calling using that opener. And you look at his face and he's ready for humor, for action, right? But for humor action, for humorous interaction. I think humor when shared is, that's the first dish we share with somebody that shows that we trust them. We'll find what they said that is intended to be funny funny. That's trust. That's why comedians make a lot of money because they can stand up on stage with an audience that doesn't trust them to start with, that's why they're heckled also, is to test their ability to punch all the way through to the other side and get to the trust regime. And it's why when they bomb, they call it dying, died up there on stage. And I don't know if you've ever done standup. All of us who've done classroom teaching have done lots and lots of standup. I've spent thousands of hours stand up. And the number one rule is, until the class laughs with you and at you a little bit, you're just not there. You're just not there. But once they do, you're probably pretty good. So it's also true that follow up email. So self-deprecating humor in a cold email is incredibly dangerous. You actually don't even know who you're making fun of, them, you, somebody else. It's very dangerous. But on a followup email, it's really easy. It's really easy. You can say, "Oh, about that conversation we had today." Ambushed again, and I know it was awkward, ambushed again, it's kind of funny so people don't think of ambush. Unexpected word makes you nervous. The punchline is it was really something that they understand. There's a million ways to tell a joke, right? One word, two words, any words, no words. But in a trust relationship, the joke is understood or attempted to be understood. People will laugh at your jokes when they trust you even if they don't get the joke. Susan Finch (18:56): I agree. We were just having this conversation in our house last night, my daughter's pledging a sorority and they want her in the sorority because they think she's hilarious while the other three of us in the house that are funnier than she is disagreed, which she didn't appreciate it. We all agreed who is the funniest and it's my son but she said, "You don't understand. I'm really funny." She said, "You don't understand. My friends think I'm the funniest person they know and I tell them they need to up their game with their friends then. If I'm as good as they have, they need somebody better." Chris Beall (19:33): I'll make some interest. Well, at least she's funny enough. Susan Finch (19:36): She is. Chris Beall (19:38): And actually this brings up another point. It's a point I call above threshold. We haven't really talked about it on Market Dominance Guys. Once you're above threshold, within some element of a relationship that's sufficient to allow you to advance the relationship then it doesn't make sense to keep pushing that particular dimension of the relationship. And this is the classic failure mode of all salespeople. It's called selling after the close. But most people think the close is when the deal is signed. That's actually not the close. The first close is, did they chuckle at your 27 seconds? The second close is, did they actually listen to you when you set the next part? Really listen. The third is, do they come back and say something to you? Now you've had three closes. The fourth is, did they agree to take the meeting or did they tell you the truth about their situation? Now in an ambush, nobody will really tell you quite the truth. There are very few people with the plum to do that. It just is tough, right? So in sales, we're always doing these little tiny closes and what a close means is that's done, it's okay to move on. That's actually what it means. That's done. And people who can't close have an emotional issue concerning their confidence in the relationships they build. So a closer such as say, myself, and I'm a pretty well-known closer, right? Not a deal closer. I do close deals, but that's not... What's interesting it's like, once we get to point X, if I think we're there and you act like we're there, we're there and we're moving on. This is why I can propose to somebody two days after meeting them, which had happened in the case of this particular fiance and me and why I can be confident doing it because we were there and it was okay for me to say it and then I didn't have to keep going back and saying it. There are three things that I said. I'm not going to repeat them here but they were really important and then we could move on to the next part, which was me going back to my hotel. So it's really fascinating, when you watch great salespeople, they will close 30, 40 times in a discovery conversation in little tiny ways. Susan Finch (22:07): Yes. Chris Beall (22:08): And it's because, having built trust, it's okay to risk the relationship by moving forward as long as you have reasonable confidence, that you'll be told that you're being inappropriate, which happened by moving forward. And so he says, "Hang on a second." And that's great, you go, "Okay, wait a minute. We weren't really close." But that's called a false positive on the close, that you got the false positive. It wasn't actually an okay situation to close in but you have enough trust that the other person is going to catch the false positive and they're going to give it back to you as information and this is what you can't do in digital media. You can't catch the failure to close. In fact, you can't detect the micro close. It's not there. Where am I going to detect it? Between the first sentence, second sentence, third sentence of the email. I don't know what's going on in you. But if I see you and hear you and then you trust me enough to tell me when I've screwed up, then we can collaborate and move forward. And this is the essence of all sales, people who learn it, have fun and make a lot of money. And people who don't learn it drive the rest of us because it's like- Susan Finch (23:17): They make their family crazy and their friends crazy. They make everybody crazy because it carries through. If you don't see where you have been given permission and encouragement to go to the next thing and you can't recognize that and you do stay stuck in those same; you've met the people at parties. They say the same stories every time. When you see them at the same party, they're telling the same stories every time and they never are able to move on or out of the past or out of the college days or out of, the one time they met a celebrity 55 years ago. They're still talking about that because nothing's come up since or they haven't learned how to move it forward. It's embarrassing. Chris Beall (23:56): Yes. Or they don't have the confidence. Because there's a funny thing, what we do when we're closing and it's a really, really awkward thing. It's the hardest thing in the world. We're potentially sacrificing the relationship for the collaboration. As a pure socializer, and some people are pure socializers, were I up here socializer and all I value that was the relationship, I could never get a deal. Because I have to come to a point of saying, "But the purpose of these conversations was to collaborate on doing something together that we can't do alone and we can't do separately so I have to take the risk of sacrificing the relationship and trust you that you are going to catch me when I fall and I moved too fast." And that's where the trust ends up being a two way street. You have to trust me to have your best interests at heart. And you have to believe that I know more than you do about what it is that we're trying to do otherwise I wouldn't have ambushed you, you would have ambushed me. I have to trust you to correct me when I'm moving too soon in a deal, too soon to the next step of collaboration, whatever it turns out to be. And that's the trust that the non close of the socializer never has. They don't trust the other person to keep them from blowing the relationship up so they stick on this point and just keep hammering it. Susan Finch (25:25): It's like my husband on his computer when it's not doing what he wants, he just keeps clicking. He's like, "Stop. Stop it." It can't even catch up with what you're doing to move on and do the next thing because you keep clicking. Stop clicking. Chris Beall (25:37): Oh, that's a good one. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. And of course it is really hard to trust technology. But the point of all, this is, look, there's an easy way and a hard way. The easy way is also the most awkward way which is you have to ambush somebody because it puts them in a state where you can build trust quickly in seven seconds and therefore you have a foundation for all future interactions; verbal, digital, billboard put outside their office, sending them a note in the mail, offering them a gift. All that stuff within a trust relationship is actually trivially easy to do well and hard to blow. And so if you do the awkward thing, that's awkward, it's really awkward to throw yourself under the bus. It's really awkward to say I'm a bad thing, but you must because you are. You've ambushed them. You're bad. So just own up to it. It's really awkward to do it fast enough. I know I'm an interruption. So I'm so glad that I caught you. Now I'll be brief. I know I'm an interruption. It's like, boom, done, dead. Boom, dead. Susan Finch (26:49): What's that phrase? I'm so glad I caught you. I feel like a prisoner already. Chris Beall (26:54): I caught you- Susan Finch (26:55): Like a tiger [crosstalk 00:26:56]. Chris Beall (26:55): You didn't catch me at all. Susan Finch (27:00): Right. Chris Beall (27:00): You haven't caught me. What are you talking about? But if you told me you know you're an interruption, I hear the bus go over you like this, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. And I'm good. I don't have to back the bus up. I don't need six more thumps, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. I'm good. Thank goodness you ran yourself over. Now if you fake it, if you say, "I know I'm a bit of an interruption." That means I didn't really mean it. I got near the bus and when you couldn't see, I pretended I was run over by the bus but actually I just squealed and jumped back and now I'm just another faker in the world and you're not going to trust me. And so it's a subtle business. This is very subtle, but if you're willing to do it, digital media open up, including advertising. Interestingly enough, it's a delight to see an ad for a company where you just talk to somebody that you now trust about what they do. That's fun. Oh, look, I just saw their ad. I just talked to that guy this morning, that gal this morning. That's really interesting. What a coincidence. So suddenly retargeting is different. I talked to you. I can retarget everybody around you, including you. And most of them, it just goes, eh, whatever. But somebody might say, "Have you seen that ad?" And it's like, "Yeah. I talked to those people yesterday. You know, it was really actually an interesting conversation." Boom, everything's different. Same with social outreach. I reach out to you on LinkedIn after talking with you. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. I know we didn't have a lot of time and I guarantee you I will never pitch you on anything on LinkedIn. That would be an exception to the current rule which is, everybody pitches everybody all the time, because- Chris Beall (29:28): Clubhouse is fascinating. I think clubhouse is the most interesting thing going on in the world today because it's basically this, social media where you can't be rude. Susan Finch (29:37): And you can't be recorded and you can be reshared. People figure it out how to but for the most part, yeah. Chris Beall (29:43): Yeah. Susan Finch (29:44): And the bios, have you seen the bios and what people do in there? Their bios are about nine inches high and it's filled with every keyword phrase, offer, pitch, discount, every possible link, where to find them with emojis and little this and little that. It's the most decorated. It would make somebody who builds professional resumes just cringe because it looks like a four year old had a party with emojis and just blasted them all over anything incredible about you. Chris Beall (30:17): It's like a four-year-old had a party with emojis that were served as sushi and they got sick, threw up all over that thing. It's like emoji vomit. Susan Finch (30:28): It really is. So it's an interesting thing, and I find myself attracted to the smaller rooms because I like deeper conversations. I like collaborative conversations rather than the grand standing from the larger rooms and the bigger names where they're pontificating on stuff that I've already heard them say everywhere else. So it is an interesting venue, but I do agree with you, my experience so far has been, it's been a very gracious kind venue at this point. Chris Beall (30:57): And it will stay that way because we actually don't have mechanisms in us that allow us to be rude with our voice when we have been identified, especially to a group. That's why panel discussions are such frankly pablum. When I'm invited to be on a panel I always say, "You realize I'm actually going to speak my mind." Susan Finch (31:22): Yeah. That happens to me too. Chris Beall (31:26): But I'm not going to be mean to anybody. I'm just going to act they're not there, but I will recognize them and say like they said, I'm actually going to be much more polite to the panelists if they're were up on the panel with me than, I don't know, if we were just having a private conversation at a bar. Why? Because I don't want to embarrass them and I don't want to embarrass myself and so we're built to be polite in voice conversations, especially in groups. Susan Finch (31:52): You're not because you're just not capable of it. You get kicked out or muted. So it's okay. Chris Beall (31:57): Exactly. It's got the appropriate controls and the appropriate hands. I think clubhouse is fascinating and it tells us two things; I think one, text-based communication or pictures, unsolicited, whatever tends to be noisy because it's cheap to do, cheap to reproduce, cheap to copy. And therefore everybody does it for nothing and it's not working so well. And it's actually even worse with work from home where you're already agitated about your kids, your dog, I love your dog, but your dog, whatever. And then on the other side, this video thing is oddly wearing and people are trying to figure out, it's wearing enough that it has a name, Zoom fatigue. And here's this little slice that's actually the biggest field of all, which is the human voice. The thing that speaks to our insides, that it borders on song that lets us sing to the other person. But somebody once said to me after I came out of a board meeting and it was funny, it was one of my direct reports. He was invited to the board meeting. He said, "What did you do in there?" I said, "What do you mean?" He says, "You saying to that board of directors, it was done with the voice, it was done with the tone, it was done with the cadence and the note and they gave you three million dollars." And I said, "Well, singers make a lot of money." Susan Finch (33:21): Yeah. Chris Beall (33:21): They do, if you heard. Rockstar means something man, it means something. And the human voice has got this amazing deep ancient range. We just discovered by analysis of the skulls of Neanderthals that they heard the same way that our ancestors and we here, including being able to distinguish certain sounds the sound t from shh from ss from k is really, really hard for most animals to distinguish because of the way their ears and their skulls are constructed. Susan Finch (34:00): Right. Chris Beall (34:01): But here we have these two branches and we have the [inaudible 00:34:06], we have all these other branches of our family tree that we're finding and language goes back at least that far because that's what that difficult to attain bunch of shaped bones allow us to do is to make these distinctions that are peculiar to language and not very relevant in the worlds of natural sounds. You don't really need this tell a t from a k from a shh from a ss out there in the woods, but you better be able to tell the difference between sit. You know what I mean? Susan Finch (34:46): Oh man. You did a post a couple of weeks ago where we were participating in one about spontaneous phone calls and people picking up the phone and being irritated by people that actually call and don't set an appointment to make a phone call first and what has been lost so much in communication. And I think, yeah, we just talked about it with clubhouse and the value of conversation and the gifts that you get from that, that you can't get from data, that you can't get from email from other things because there is no replacement for a conversation and the time that it saves to have a 30 second conversation as opposed to 15 emails to say the same thing. Chris Beall (35:29): Or to fail to say the same thing. Susan Finch (35:30): Yes. Chris Beall (35:32): That's really what the issue comes down to as I read these email threads cut back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and I ask, "Okay. So what is this the equivalent of in a conversation?" And normally it's 30 seconds in which there are five interactions, two of which are corrective, one of which is expansive, and one of which makes a fine distinction that needed to be made in order to get to where you got to go. That's what we do with each other. We correct each other. No, no, that's not what I meant. Imagine that in an email. No, that's not what I meant. Oh, now you're insulting me. Whereas in the live conversation, that's polite. It's like, "No, no, no. That's not what I meant." And there's a big difference between no in an email and no, no, no, that's not what I meant. No, no, no means I'm trying to help you now. Susan Finch (36:28): Right. Chris Beall (36:28): I'm working with you, right? They're totally different concepts. Even though one of them has three nos it has a lot less no in it than one no in an email. So this stuff's magic and to abandon the magic in favor of cheap reproduction and absentee landlordism, I don't want to be there. I don't want to have to actually do the dishes. I just want somebody else to take care of everything. So you take care of delivering it and they'll take care of reading and I don't have to do anything and I'm going to go write another one. No, I'm not even going to do that. I'm going to use a template. I'm not even going to do that. I'm going to have a sequence. My sequence know more than I do. In fact somebody is AB tested every sequence in the world. "Really? How many would that be?" "Well, do the math. There's more interesting sequences of emails you could send them. There are oh, Adams in the universe. It turns out." So I don't think they've all been tested. Pretty sure, but everything in conversation has been tested. It's been tested over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. It's all been tested. When I say it's all been tested, I'm saying something very different from, it's all been tested. Those are very different things because that's been tested. Susan Finch (37:50): Correct. And when I think back, you were just covering that. How many emails are always restating something, finding something, telling somebody where to find it, where you already told them where to find it, where to look for it. I can't think of three conversations in the past month that I've had to have it corrective, and definitely not on video. I haven't had to backtrack on anything. And if I do, it was so not memorable because it was so minor and quickly resolved, it doesn't stick in my head. Chris Beall (38:23): Exactly. Because we're urged on the insight to do the correction in real time. Susan Finch (38:28): Yes. Chris Beall (38:30): It's a closing. Every correction is a little mini closing and we do them all the time. We do. We have catchphrases for them. We all know how to do it. Well actually what I was trying to say, right? We say that. That's a known phrase. I can go look it up on Google, actually what I was trying to say. But if I looked it up on Google, I find a little bit. But if I looked it up in the transcripts of every conversation, if I had them all that had been had in the last day, I'd find 100 million. Actually what I was trying to say. Susan Finch (39:06): Yeah. Chris Beall (39:06): You know, now that I think of it, it seems to me, huh? Susan Finch (39:12): That just reminded me. Chris Beall (39:12): That's another one. Just reminded me. Well, at the end of the day, we have these phrases- Susan Finch (39:20): [crosstalk 00:39:20] not that. Anything but that. Chris Beall (39:22): And it's a bad one, right? But these phrases, even the overused ones, they're ways of saying, this isn't going exactly as I expect it to where I understand it at this point. We need to back up a little bit. Let's back up. Let's slow down. Let's get this right before we go to the next thing and let's do it without any rancor because we need the relationship. So we're just about to break the relationship through a misunderstanding. Let's not do that. Let's let it be a little rubber band, snap it back gently and then we'll fix it up. Get on the same page. How funny that the one thing we can't do with text is get on the same page. Susan Finch (40:04): No. Chris Beall (40:05): In a conversation we get on the same page easily. We got to make sure we got on the same page so we got off the email where the pages were and we went to the conversation where there's no pages. I think that's a church reference by the way. That's referring to singing the same hymn as everybody else, I think get on the same page because everybody did that. It was a community activity where you needed to be on this or people start doing it, I suppose. Yes, exactly. So let's get on the same page. This stuff to me is fascinating and what's really fascinating is the entire innovation economy depends utterly on it being mastered by salespeople. Susan Finch (40:45): Yes. Chris Beall (40:46): We have nothing. We have nothing in terms of our ability to move forward, unless salespeople master all of this stuff, which thank goodness they mastered 98% of it just by being humans and learning to speak. Susan Finch (41:01): So I think this is a great place to wrap up this episode. Chris Beall (41:03): I love it. Let's do it. Susan Finch (41:04): All right. Chris Beall (41:06): Oh. We're closing everybody. We're closing. We're moving on. Susan Finch (41:11): We're going to wrap up this episode of Market Dominance Guys and I'm acting like I'm the host. We don't know who the host was today. We just know we were on it together. We had a great conversation and you can find out more at marketdominanceguys.com. You can also find this show in any podcast venue that you favor, and you can check Chris Beall out, he's over on clubhouse. Look for it when he's there. Set up those alerts. Follow him so you know when he's participating in something. You may want to hear some bonus materials or give him one of your burning questions and let him answer it. Maybe he'll have one for you. We will talk to you all soon. Thank you so much. I'm Susan Finch. I'm the producer of Market Dominance Guys with the esteemed Chris Beall. Chris, thank you for having me on. Chris Beall (41:54): Delighted as always Susan.  

On this week’s episode of the Marketing Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their conversation about the middle phase in the creation of every startup or new product — being stuck. That’s the stage when things aren’t working out the way you’d envisioned them. That’s when prospects aren’t embracing your concept as you’d hoped they would. That’s when you have that sinking feeling that this whole project might be a terrible, terrible mistake. Something’s wrong! Panicking isn’t going to help the situation, but neither is denial. That can lead to faking that everything is just fine — when you know darn well it isn’t. Listen to Chris’ warning: “It’s hard to be honest once you start faking it.” Corey and Chris encourage you to face the truth, because as they say, “The truth is the boss!” Come listen to how to use your resources to get an honest assessment about why you’re stuck so that you can start moving toward getting your project back in flow. You’ll learn these details and other great advice in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Stuck in the Middle with Denial.”   ----more----   The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (01:40): Oh, yeah. But what do we do when we're stuck for too long? We go back and we fake flow? Corey Frank (01:56): Yeah. Chris Beall (01:56): That's what we do. We fake flow and faking flow is the death knell of a start-up. You're dead if you fake flow because where you're going to go is somewhere and where the gold is somewhere else. Corey Frank (02:08): And also you have these quarterly or every eight weeks or so meetings with your board as a start-up, right. And we both been there where you got to give him something, you got to shoot a hostage, you got to give him some red meat, you got to make a virgin offering or something or you have to fake it. And that's the worst because you're an ear inauthentic in all of those and it sounds like... Which is probably going to butcher it. I think it was Lao-Tzu who had this Zen syllogism he says, "I know nothing, I know everything, I know nothing." Chris Beall (02:46): Yes, yeah. Corey Frank (02:46): And the stages that folks go through, right. And some folks will never get past the first or the second stage. So when you look at that from the makeup of a start-up so we drill a little deeper here. That has to be a safe place for Cherryl to be able to go to the CEO of the company in this new position she's in and say, "Hey boss, I'm just not feeling it. I think we need," "What do you mean it's not feeling it?" Right. And then there's got to be a level of humility there to incorporate other folks. So how do you, you mentioned earlier that a start-up of one it's a tough and lonely proposition to do and arguably you could say that the success curve is a little more elongated than one with multiple folks but what are you doing to kind of surround yourself with those kinds of folks? We talked early on and at some of the earlier episodes last year about politics and bcc'ing emails and all that kind of stuff. We don't have to go into it now but right now if I'm going to start-up and I don't necessarily have those types of folks, what can I do to get it? How can I navigate those waters to showcase folks that, "Hey, maybe I'm stuck and we need to break out of this otherwise we are faking it". Chris Beall (04:04): Yeah. I think that the trick to start-ups is like the trick to everything. One is tough, one person it's a tough business, right. I used to be as you know pretty serious rock climber mountaineer. That's a very, very, very dangerous game to do alone. Not only because there's no rope to catch you but primarily because you can't trust your mind and you think you can but where are you going to check it, right. Where are you going to check it? Where are you going to figure out whether you're doing something based on fear, on self-induced bravado, on you're tired you just don't want to think about it anymore so you're going to try it. It's a dangerous, dangerous world. Start–ups are a lot like that, we did an episode in which you brought up the Free Solo your pitch, right. Alex, up there climbing a El Capitan's- Corey Frank (04:56): El Capitan's, yeah. Chris Beall (04:57): Free Soloing it. Well, if you watch the movie you see that he's not really alone, alone in that endeavor, right. He's got people that he talks to, he's a kind of guy who can trust his own mind by the way almost but he's too smart to trust only his own mind. So he has other people to talk with and I think that even that kind of thing it's not the rope, it's the relationship that allows you to go. And what do you have to have? You got to have somebody who sees the world a little differently from you is on your side. And is sincerely going to come forward with their own enlightenment and their own ignorance and you can put the two together and you got a shot, you really do have a shot. It's like trying to walk on one leg, it's just a problem. You're not really built for it, we're really built to go in pairs and go do things. You and I doing this show is a good example. I can do one of these by myself, you can do one by yourself, that'd probably okay but I don't think we'd be on episode God knows whatever we're on here, 70 or whatever it is by now. There is the covering of each other's weaknesses but there's also the knowing that there's somebody you can go to in order to get unstuck. Because if you really look at these flow states, at these three states, right. The flow, the stuck and the waiting, we don't need much help waiting, we can always find something to do, we just need to know that when we're waiting you need to find something to do, right. We don't need a huge amount of help in knowing that we're stuck as long as we're honest but it's hard to be honest once you start faking it. And so when you have an external audience like a board of directors like you said or whatever... I remember when I joined this company something happened here which is I joined as a head of products and a few days later sort of the whole engineering team, which is fairly small up and quit. And a few days after that there was a board meeting. Well, between those two we didn't fake it, we actually did some things. We hired a couple of people, we read all the code. I spent a weekend, we read 300,000 lines of code. We built the system repeatedly, made sure we can build and start it, build and start it, build and start it, knock it down, kill it, start it again. That's the kind of stuff you want to be able to do in a live system that's servicing lots of people and went to the board meeting. That's pretty tempting in a board meeting like that to fake it. "Hey Chris, you lost your whole engineering team, what's up?" I was like, "Well, what's up is, here's what we're doing, here's why I'm pretty sure that we can do things, start it, stop, keep the thing a live, here's what we don't know but here's the recommended course of action." But it is so tempting under that kind of pressure to either cave into somebody or- Corey Frank (07:39): Oh, for sure. Chris Beall (07:41): Else or whatever and so part of what you're hiring for or partnering with is somebody who has the drive, they got to have the drive without the engine this whole start-up thing is stupid you can't do it, it's just too hard. Corey Frank (07:55): Right. Chris Beall (07:56): Not to think a lot of people are going to help you. You got to have that big motor and the motors got to kind of be willing to turn by itself. You get up in the morning if you don't feel that every day and you haven't felt that every day since you were pretty young, don't do start-ups it just doesn't work out, it just doesn't trust me. But say you do, you've got to get another person with that kind of drive and then the next part about the relationship that's got to work is, you've got to have a framework for talking about being inflow, getting stuck. You have to have the words for it. You have to have words about things like, "When are we guessing?" You have to use words like ignorant. The word I use today with Cherryl was I said and was talking to her and got Jon Campbell and I said, "We're just doing this like total idiot. We're just like dummies here. Obviously the thing to do is to talk to somebody else and here we are talking to each other. Let's not do this the hard way, let's go the person that we would be selling to, except we already sold to that person and talk to that person," right. Well, but you have to use the words if you don't use a word like, "We're being idiots here." Corey Frank (09:06): Sure. Chris Beall (09:07): Then nobody feels safe coming forward and saying, "I feel like I'm a little stuck or I'm being an idiot or whatever," Right. You have to use the vocabulary of truth. Corey Frank (09:17): Well, and you as the leader, right. To be the first one to level a degree of humility that it's safe to be humble, it's safe not to know allows you to probably have that outcome's raiser level of clarity to say, "Wait a minute it's probably right in front of us, let's look elsewhere." Chris Beall (09:38): Yeah. And when I hire people this is throughout the whole process I always tell them this I say, "Look, you're going to love it here or you're going to hate it here. If you're going to hate it here let's figure out how to have you not join." So you wouldn't be talking to me unless you're qualified because people don't get to talk to me unless they're qualified. That's another process I don't go through that, that would be crazy. That's like qualifying on a cold call, right. The list got to be good or not good we're not going to find out if we qualify on the cold call, that's crazy. We got to set the meeting and let qualification happen in discovery. This is the same problem. So here we are now, we're in discovery and we're going to discover something, you're going to discover whether you want to work for somebody like me in an organization like this because we can't avoid that you're working for me. There's nothing, no words are going to make it go away. I'm the CEO, you're stuck or we're stuck with me. We can't make me not be that guy, right. But I can tell you how it works and how it works you might love and you might hate, it's about a 50, 50. And you might love it because you'll think, "This is just what I've always wanted," you might hate it and think, "Wow, this feels really kind of exposed and maybe a little harsh." And one of the things I tell folks is, "Look, we don't really report to each other. This is not the strict hierarchy that's about you tell so-and-so what you did, they tell you what to do that's isn't here." We report essentially to our real boss which is the truth as we can ascertain it. The truth is a pretty good boss and the truth will evolve along with us. So it's a boss that keeps up, it doesn't fall behind. The truth by its very nature will keep up with changing circumstances, changing markets, COVID can come along, you still can have the truth as your boss the day after the pandemic hits just like you did the day before. You might not be able to ascertain it so easily, you may have to go through more effort to find it but it's still the thing that we could report to. However I tell them, "When we're out of time and we got to make a decision and we're just out of time, we don't have enough knowledge to make the decision that's the definition of being stuck, we guess and here's how we guess, I guess." I guess that's it. And here's the corrupt part, am the person who says that we're stuck and we're out of time, we don't have a... I declare the guess that it's totally corrupt I get it. Corey Frank (12:02): Right. Chris Beall (12:04): But it's a singularity and you have to accept that coming in and if I ask- Corey Frank (12:07): Risk it i guess. Chris Beall (12:10): And I'm guessing. Well, but first of all I'm going to call it a guess. We're not going to wrap it up and say, "Our analysis shows this, this consultant said this." Maybe we did an analysis, maybe we have a consultant but if we're guessing I promise you I will tell you that we're guessing and we delegate the guessing to me. And then I'm going to guess and we're going to treat my guess as a fact of the world as the truth regardless of whether it is or not. And that's your commitment when you come on board because the alternative is we can't get unstuck when staying stuck is fatal. Corey Frank (12:49): Yeah. Chris Beall (12:49): Staying stuck can be fatal. I don't know what to do and the right thing to do is to stop the car before you go off the cliff, you drive off the cliff. Corey Frank (12:57): Sure. Chris Beall (12:59): So, fatal mistakes are the ones that we should try hardest to avoid through design, right? Corey Frank (13:03): Yeah. Chris Beall (13:04): Don't avoid fatal mistakes through diligence, always avoid them through design. Corey Frank (13:08): Always through design, yes and I think that's again the impetus of the show is the failure to dominate markets. Chris Beall (13:16): Yeah. Corey Frank (13:17): Always will lead, let's add this new axiom to the pile as well so. Chris Beall (13:21): Yeah. Corey Frank (13:21): Okay. Chris Beall (13:22): It's an interesting thing. So the cycle time thing around going from... And using the words, use your words as they say to little kids. The word flow is a good word, we're inflow that's a great word. The word stuck is a great word it means something, it's a term of art it actually means we don't know enough to continue moving forward confidently. Corey Frank (13:42): Yeah. Chris Beall (13:42): Just a term of art, right. Waiting is waiting, we're just waiting, we're waiting for something. We need something because until we have that something we can't move forward. Now some people are always waiting because they think they need everything before they can do anything, don't hire those people. Such people are problematic, right. Corey Frank (14:01): And by the way I know the truth from what I hear you saying the truth is your boss. Chris Beall (14:06): Yeah. Corey Frank (14:06): But I know that come five o'clock, right. You have a different boss and that is your bride and it's her birthday today so we will be wrapping this up in a minute because I think Helen's birthday trumps the truth, Helen's birthday is the truth. We always talked about the next book after Market Dominance Guys, or the subtitle for the Market Dominance Guys' book was going to be called Pivot Jesus Pivot. But I think maybe the subheading the Pivot Jesus Pivot would be stuck inflow waiting and faking it in start-ups today. I'll tell you what that would be, that'd be a title then- Chris Beall (14:43): That'd be pretty good. Corey Frank (14:43): Tell me. Chris Beall (14:43): Ideal on the title, Pivot Jesus Pivot. I don't know if anybody gets that but if we were to tell everybody what the joke behind the punchline or whatever it is, is it's like If God were a VC he'd be saying, "Pivot Jesus Pivot." Corey Frank (15:01): That's right, "Not enough people are buying into your products." Chris Beall (15:04): Yeah. Corey Frank (15:05): "You probably need to take a look at it." So I love it. Want to tell you what Chris, this was supposed to be a two-parter and we'll continue the next part because what we want to springboard into what we talked about today about these different states in making progress also is tied into what we want to talk about next time, which is discovery calls. And discovery calls for a start-up because many of the aspects that you're talking about, about being stuck or inflow or waiting or humility or authenticity or status alignment is just as critical when we get to the discovery process. So I think that's what I'm going to look forward to next time on the Market Dominance Guys talking to you, again the surge of sales, the profit of profit and again my personal favorite, the resputing of revenue so till next time.

  This week, the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, walk you through the three states of cycle time for start-up businesses or for any company that’s trying to launch a new product or service. There’s in flow. There’s stuck. And there’s waiting. Using an example from his own company’s experience launching Flight School, their brand-new sales-rep training program, Chris tells what happened when they thought they were in flow and ready to set meetings for discovery calls, but soon found that prospects didn’t respond as enthusiastically as expected to what his company was offering. In other words, they were stuck. But what was the problem? It’s a great program! Why weren’t their prospects seeing the value of what was being offered? Chris explains that it’s often necessary to put your own narcissism aside in order to clearly look at all the possible reasons why you’re not moving toward success as quickly as you think you should be. Only then can you be open to exploring and utilizing all the resources that might help you get unstuck. As he says, “You need to plumb the depths of your ignorance! You need knowledge!” As practical and helpful as usual, our Market Dominance Guys offer advice on this common problem encountered by almost every startup company. Join them for today’s episode, “How to Get from Stuck to Unstuck.” -------------------------------- ----more---- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:00): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the ... I used to say the sage of sales and the profit of profit and the duke of discovery, but I think what we're going to talk about today, Chris, it's more like the Coronado of closing, the Pizzaro of profit, and let's say the Diaz of discovery. And so we're going to talk a little bit about exploring and discovering things, and the process of maybe persistence and cycling. Corey Frank (02:34): And before we even get to that, it's funny because, Chris, you and I were talking before we hit the record button, that you needed to turn off your phone because it was discovered by you that even if your phone's in airplane mode that you can still get calls. I believe the phrase was, "Let me turn off my phone, because it's in airplane mode, and I can still get calls when it's in airplane mode." Corey Frank (02:59): And we were joking that if that was a phrase mentioned at a cocktail party 15 years ago, I think there'd probably be a different phrase that people would be saying to you. What would they say to you if you mentioned something like that? Chris Beall (03:13): I think somewhere between the loony bin and burn the witch. Corey Frank (03:18): Burn the witch. Indeed, indeed. So I think this concept to discovery, Chris, and we've talked about this off air many, many times, you've helped me with this in my various startups that I've created here, is that the discovery process and even the top of funnel cold calling breakthrough process, it's different for startups than it is for more mature companies, is it not? Chris Beall (03:44): It is, it is. Everything's different for startups, because of the depth of your ignorance about your own offering and what it's worth to anybody, even whether you can truly deliver, because if you don't really know what it is, and who might want to take advantage of it, you actually don't quite know if you can deliver it. You're starting with kind of a conjecture, I'll call it a narcissistic conjecture, right? Chris Beall (04:06): So what's narcissistic about it? Well, you believe it, nobody else in the world does and the only thing you really know about it is I came up with it so it must be great, and that's pretty narcissistic, right? And then the conjecture is a conjecture, you don't really know. It's somewhere between a conjecture and a hypothesis, but you come up with something and you either are foolish enough to actually build it, or you're smart enough to go talk to people about it and see if they'll buy it before you build it, which is a really good idea. You're throwing darts in a dark room, and you're hoping to hear a squeal every once in a while. Corey Frank (04:39): Right, right. Well, this concept, this process that I go through, right? It is a little bit of the states of the unknown, unknown. I don't know what I don't know, certainly. But once I realize that there is something that I don't know, how do I go about maybe these cycle times? How do I know what state I'm at in order to potentially make progress? Because I may not even be aware that I need help, or how many cycles do I use in the same screenplay or the same discovery process before I realize, "Wait a minute, I may be a little stuck here." Chris Beall (05:13): It's interesting because there's a numbers outcome, right? I mean, if you're trying to set meetings, and you go 35, 40 conversations and you can't set a meeting, there's a mismatch between your message or how you're delivering it and your list. If you're pretty good at the message, and by the way, using a non-calibrated person to do early market exploration is just dumb, right? Chris Beall (05:33): It's like hiring a sales person is the first thing you do when you think you have a product. You're not testing your products fit in the market, you're testing whether you're any good at hiring salespeople. And that's not a very interesting question, that's not the first order question of a startup, am I good at it at a hiring salespeople? The first order question is, anybody out there seeing a value in this to try it and pay me for it? Chris Beall (05:57): I mean, that's kind of it, right? The first step there is, will they take a meeting? And if they're not taking meetings, you know you're stuck. That's really, really simple. And by the way, the three stages that I see all progress being in, the phases that they get into, are three. I wish there were four, but this is the case where three is the right number. Number one is you're in flow. Chris Beall (06:18): Usually you can tell you're in flow because the emotional state that goes along with being in flow is that you don't notice you're in flow. So if you don't notice you're in flow and things are just kind of moving along, you're probably in flow. That is, you're doing the next thing that makes sense, you're doing the next thing that makes sense. I'm not saying you're optimized, by the way. Optimized is completely different. It isn't a state of making progress, it's a state of the machine itself, in which you're trying to make progress. Chris Beall (06:46): My machine is optimized, my process is optimized, but I, myself, I'm in flow, it's going. Like right now, I'm talking, I'm in flow. You know me, when I'm talking, I'm in flow 99.97% of the time, and other people wish that I would get out of flow so they can get in flow. Corey Frank (07:03): Well, as I always say, you put the quarter in Chris's machine, you got to listen for the whole song, so that's how it works. Chris Beall (07:08): That's right. So the next state that we tend to get in is stuck, and stuck is a funny state and we did a whole episode on this once. Stuck is the state where I actually can't move forward, I'm not moving forward because I am missing knowledge. I don't know something that I need to know to move forward. And one of the things that'll take you out of flow is getting stuck, realizing that it's not quite working well enough, you're not really flowing, or even more commonly among startup people you're fooling yourself. Chris Beall (07:40): The narcissistic part tells you you're doing better than you are. They call it happy ears in sales. Happy ears is when you're hearing good things, and an objective listener is going, "Really?" That just sounded like politeness to me, I don't think they really are resonating with your message. I think they're just being polite, right? Or you're talking to somebody who doesn't know how to say, "Uh-huh (negative). That doesn't make sense to me." Chris Beall (08:05): So you feel it though, and then you get to a point where it's like, "Okay, I'm actually stuck. I don't know what to do next, I need knowledge." And when we get stuck, we've got to do something special. And then there's waiting, and when we're waiting we should find something else to do. That one's really easy, but most people don't have the emotional stamina to accept a waiting state, and so they keep gnawing on the bone that doesn't have any meat on it. It's just time to stop and go somewhere else. Chris Beall (08:33): By the way, this is a total aside, one of the cool things about our product ConnectAndSell, is the waiting state is a literal state. You push a button and you wait to get to talk to somebody. So you actually get to practice waiting, and if you're really, really clever or optimized, then what you do is you do something while you're waiting, something else, preferably something that can be interrupted because you're going to be interrupted. Chris Beall (08:59): So the other day, for instance, one of our premier users, probably the premier user of ConnectAndSell, is the chief sales officer of one of the largest insurance brokerages in the world, was using the ConnectAndSell mobile app as the first user in the wild to use it in anger. And he was talking to, having conversations with the CEOs and CFOs of all these SPACs. So, SPACs, Special Purpose Acquisition Company, these things are bags of money that are seeking a company to acquire or to combine with. They call it an initial business combination. And then I guess they have special insurance needs, the risk needs, I would call them. Chris Beall (09:41): And so he's using our mobile app and he called me up and he said, "Hey, just had a really interesting experience. I found out that by using my waiting time on the mobile app, I could get something really, really valuable done." I said, "What's that?" He said, "I could talk with my daughter while she's cooking." She said, "Whenever I was trying to get ahold of people before I'd be heads down, dialing, navigating, whatever I'm doing, and I couldn't talk to her, now I'm waiting to be interrupted, all I had to do is hold this thing up and say, "I'm in this application, I'm waiting to be interrupted, is it okay if we talk until that happens?" Chris Beall (10:16): He says, "We had a great conversation for an hour and a half, reconnecting with my daughter in a way I wouldn't have." So waiting time is super valuable, as long as you don't keep gnawing on the bone, as long as you back up and go and look for some beans to eat or something. There's something else to do. The troublesome one is stuck. And the reason stuck is hard is you've got to decide you're going to learn. You've got to decide to stop doing and not switch to something else, because when you switch to something else and you're stuck, you're just avoiding the real situation, which is you're stuck. And you're not going to get any less stuck by just going to do something else, maybe it'll come to you, but usually you don't. Chris Beall (10:57): So the question in a startup is, "When I'm stuck ..." Because I'm often stuck as a startup company or a startup effort, as a state of manifest ignorance, right? You start the big pile of ignorance, and you get a spoon out and you start moving ignorance around in the plate to see if you can find what's inside the ignorance. And eventually, sometimes you run into something go, "Clunk, what's that?" And that's like product market fit, or don't do that again or something cool like that. Chris Beall (11:22): So here you are all ignorant and trying to make progress, and you recognize I'm stuck, what do you do? So we had a great, great example today of the number one thing to do when you're stuck, which is with a very short cycle time, try to learn something. So how can we learn things? We can learn things from books, we can learn them from podcasts. I've heard there's a podcast out there about market dominance. Somebody said they learned one thing in 15 hours of listening to it, that's fabulous, right? So we can learn from various sources. Chris Beall (11:58): But the number one source we can learn from is another person who might be an expert or have been there done that, or whatever, and we have a conversation with them. Now, the typical way of doing this is long cycle time. You come up with a list of people you can learn from maybe. This is if you're real smart, right? You actually say, "I'm going to go and I'm going to learn from them." And you send them an email and then now you're in a waiting state, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, while they get back to you. Chris Beall (12:26): The problem with learning is it's something that works best, not like revenge. Like revenge is a dish best served cold, right? That's what they say. But learning is a dish best eaten hot. The hot conversation is going to catch you in the frame of mind where you're going to ask the best questions, because they're the questions that come from your deepest ignorance. Chris Beall (12:50): When your ignorance is right in front of you, when you're stuck, and you ask somebody to enlighten you, it does something to them. It causes them to want to help you, because you're so manifestly in trouble. You're just such a weak little puppy dog. "Help me, help me." You don't have to even put it like that, you just be straight up, and people like to help people. Chris Beall (13:13): And so that cycle can be really quick. And today we had a super example. So today we're launching a brand new product, actually we launched it on Tuesday, brand new product. It's called Flight School. And what Flight School is, is something we've been doing for a while, and we've decided to put a wrapper around and say, "Let's kind of take the ConnectAndSell thing and put it inside of a class instead of take the ConnectAndSell thing and have people use it, and then maybe bring them some instruction." Chris Beall (13:44): They're very different ideas, they're similar, but they're very different ideas. And I've resisted it for years. Manny Medina, the CEO at Outreach, gosh, four years ago, three years ago, something like that in Seattle, he asked me to come up and have a drink with him. The drink was bourbon, and this was back before my fiance had taught me how to drink bourbon. So I only knew how to drink single malt scotch whiskey. But he said, "No, you drink it. They put these bitters in it and this and that." And I'm going, man, my idea of mixing a drink is you pour it a little bit, have a little bit. Chris Beall (14:18): But I tried and I listened to him and he said, "You've got to start a training company, man." I said, "Why is that?" And he said, "Well, because all of our customers are stuck." He actually said they're stuck, because their reps need to learn to talk on the phone. And you guys clearly are experts at talking on the phone, so start a training division or something, please?" And I said, "Nah, I'm not going to do that, plenty of trainers out there, tons of trainers. Everybody trains cold calling, this doesn't make any sense." Right? Chris Beall (14:47): And so I left him, he was all disappointed. I don't think he's ever bought me at bourbon since, but he might have. Still a good friend. And so it kind of gnawed on me though, because he's a really, really smart guy. Obviously very successful, he has raised a ton of money at Outreach, they're doing really well. We partner with them, we love them. So I was like, "Wow." It's still bothering me, right? Chris Beall (15:09): So then we start delivering training a little bit at a time, and then we have this epiphany with a bankrupt company in Texas that needed help, and I offered a Monday and Friday unlimited for a small amount of money for a month, because I wanted to see if we could help him keep the company open and keep their employees employed. And suddenly it's like, "Oh, well wait a minute, if we're going to do that on Monday, we better train the living daylights out of them on Fridays." Chris Beall (15:34): And suddenly we had this four sessions of blitzing coach, with a lot of preparation in between, voila! Four sessions, first one's the first part of the conversation that we're working on. The second one, that's the seven seconds everybody talks about to get trust. The second part is what we call the 27 seconds, the value piece, we called it free flight take off, free flight. You see the picture is starting to emerge, why do we call it flight school? Chris Beall (16:01): Third one is, how do you ask for the meeting, practicing that, landing the airplane. And the fourth one is handling turbulence, right? There's always lots and lots of objections. And so we said, let's offer this thing, but we didn't package it. It was just something we did. And we did about 30 of them, and the effect was profound. There was a company in the industrial air compressor space that took the entire group of professional sellers, I think about 100 of them, through this Flight School program, and they'd never really sold on the phone before, and they were effective and they had fun and they made money during the training. Well, money in the form of fresh new business, new meetings. What kind of training delivers money? Chris Beall (16:46): So we're really excited, we got to package this thing up, I need somebody to sell it. Now I am established as this guy who can actually hire a salesperson. So it's safe. Do not try this at home. If you're not sure about the step, you got to do it yourself. But I was pretty sure I'd been through 30 of them. I'd sold a bunch of them myself, so I hired a professional seller. Her name is Cheryl Turner, she's as good as anybody in the world, maybe better than anybody. By the way, her secret power is she feels quite correctly like she's anyone's peer. So when Oren Klaff talks about a status alignment- Corey Frank (17:22): Status alignment, yup. Chris Beall (17:22): She can status align up or down anywhere, because she naturally, correctly, morally, ethically, deeply, personally, professionally feels like she is the peer of any human being on earth. And therefore it comes across in her conversations. So given that I'm going out and I don't know, we're going to call on managers, I want to go after big companies. Why? Because it's kind of hard to get something like ConnectAndSell, which goes so fast, it causes process change, to get embedded in a big company. Chris Beall (17:52): Some have done it and they've done it well, but it's a little hard, so why not offer something a little easier that they still get the good effect, which is this blitz and coach kind of training. So I need somebody who can go all the way up, sell to CEOs, come down, sell to managers, Managers at big companies are like CEOs of little companies. In fact, I'm a good example, I'm a CEO of a pretty small company, some double digits, millions of dollars with some number other than a one at the beginning. Chris Beall (18:19): And my fiance is sales manager, is what she calls herself, at a big company, one of the biggest in the world. Well, my quota is whatever it is that I, as the person running the business, trying to do next year. So I think, I don't know, more kind of, I guess eight figures in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight figures kind of stuff, but not nine. Hers is 10, okay? She's got like three commas, that's just her patch itself. So she gets the office and I get the spare bedroom, as you can see, because we go by natural hierarchy, the producers get the good stuff anyway. Chris Beall (18:59): So anyway, it's interesting you don't know where you're going to call, so you need a really robust caller who sees themselves as a peer of anybody's not going to be put off their feed. But you know what else do you need is somebody who doesn't have happy ears, but goes after it. So that's really, really tricky. So I got that, Cheryl does that. Boom, she goes after, she set three meetings in her first morning and then calls me up and says, "I don't know if this is working." Chris Beall (19:30): Now, imagine that. So Tuesday, she gets in the company, I'm really bad as an onboarder, so it takes her like an extra day. Get her some lists, she starts calling yesterday, that's Thursday. Three meetings in the morning, but she feels it's not quite in flow. Now, that's how you know you have a real profession. It's not because they're hesitant or have any reluctance or any of that stuff, it's like this could be clicking better and it's early. Corey Frank (20:40): It's not necessarily dial the contact, dial the meeting type of rates, it's how would you describe that, Chris? What is it, you get a feeling that Cheryl has or that folks like that have to know that they may be stuck, and they don't necessarily know that they're in stuck. Or worse, or excuse me, better is they're stuck, but the other folks in their party on the team don't agree? "What you mean you're stuck, you've got three meetings?" Chris Beall (21:12): And I was that other person. I'm going great, three meetings, and she says, "Uh-huh (negative). Nope, boss, not quite there. I'll keep doing it, but I want to give you some feedback." So that's what she said. And it's kind of interesting, there's a way of doing startups that's really paradoxically odd, shall I say? And that is, you got to have drive energy going somewhere, but you have to be ready on a dime, not to start on a dime, turn on a dime, but often to stop on a dime just for a moment to assess. Chris Beall (21:49): I recall going sailing with Helen the very first time I went sailing with her, and that she's a real sailor, and I'm a sack of potatoes, right? But hopefully I'm a sack of potatoes that if you put a personal flotation device on me, I'll be a floating sack of potatoes, which is better than the sinking kind. And so there was a little problem with something up on the mast and the main sail and all this, of which I've learned since, but I didn't know anything at the time. Chris Beall (22:17): And she went toward it fast and then stopped. And I thought what's that about, right? Most people when they run towards something, they're going toward it like it's an emergency. All she was doing was getting close enough to see the details and assess the situation. She was going to close the distance in order to get the maximum information and then stop on a dime, assess, and then take a hypothesis and act on it. And it was remarkable to me as an example of a very effective startup style of problem solving. Chris Beall (22:48): So you have this drive, but you're not just dumb, just beating your head against a wall, but you don't give up either. It's really tricky. This is why startups tend to fail actually, is that having this combo, right? Drive, but without bullheadedness, how do you get that? And the way you really get it is you got to have somebody else. This is why very rarely do one person startups succeed. They're like marriages in a sense that you got to have somebody cover your weakness and your blind spots. Chris Beall (23:19): And we all have blind spots. When you're busy doing this, it's kind of hard to do this and vice versa. So anyway, Cheryl came to me, and said, "I'm kind of stuck." And we went through this process. And the thing I wanted to get to is the cycle time. So the normal thing in corporations that I see is, I need to know something. I go out and I find some people that might be able to help me. I might write an email to them, because I already know them, they're going to answer me. Chris Beall (23:43): And the cycle time for getting to the first conversation where somebody might help me might be a day or two days, or if it's a weekend, calendar time, it might be three or four or five days because people are busy. They don't hear that in your voice, and you're trying to be polite, "Hey, I could use some help. I'm facing this situation." We've all seen those emails. I get more of them than the average person probably, but we all see them. We see them both ways. We do them and we see them. Chris Beall (24:10): But I think in a startup, and actually in any situation, because every situation is a startup, all we really do is startups, everything worth doing is something relatively new, because otherwise it'd be old hat and somebody else would be doing it. So here we are, we're doing something new, we're not quite sure that it's right, that we know enough to do it well. We think we're in flow, but are we sure we're in flow? Chris Beall (24:31): And what we did was I said, "Let's bring somebody else into the conversation, right now, while we're talking in the Zoom." We're in a Zoom, boom, "John Campbell, come on in." Why John? He's our head of product, but he's a former head of training. So maybe he'd have a perspective, because we're selling a training product, right? We don't really know how to sell training products. "John, if we were selling to you, what would this be like?" Get him involved, we're still not there. Cheryl's a lot like, "That's interesting, but it's not enough. We've changed some words, we've done this, we've done that, but not quite enough to make me feel like, yeah, I should just go do it again." Chris Beall (25:09): Still have everybody on, add one more person. I finally go, "Huh, wait a minute, there's this person who works for Sharp electronics." And I won't use her name right now, because she might not want me to, but she might later. And she's the head of all the sales training there, she's absolutely brilliant, hard driving, and I've been on multiple test drives and flight schools with her, and Flight School is a thing that is kind of a thing over there at Sharp Business Solutions, and they're sort of rolling it out. Chris Beall (25:39): So I thought, well, that's who we successfully sold it to before, and we didn't even know we were selling it. Let's find out what she would think as the buyer in a cold call. So we'll go back in time and say, "Imagine somebody's cold calling you, how should they get you intrigued in a meeting? What should go into the breakthrough line?" And we did that. Did we come up with something? Almost. Chris Beall (26:04): But Cheryl's still like, "Almost, but I feel like that's the stuff that would go in discovery, not the stuff that would go in a cold call." And then we have the breakthrough and the breakthrough is, "Cheryl, your own story is a story, you used to be the number one appointment setter at insidesales.com, but now Zand. The CEO, Jim Steele, came to you to find out how you do what you do, why are you killing it, and other people are killing it less? So you are that person, you are that go-to person. When you experienced ConnectAndSell in a blitz and coach session, it was a test drive, not a flight school, what was your experience like, how did it change your life? Because that's your story, and you can tell it undeniably and answer to an objection. And you can say at the very least, this is what it feels like to go through it. This is what it did for me, so much that I joined the company and now I'm making my career selling this." Corey Frank (27:00): Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. Chris Beall (27:02): So that's where we got, I think it's a good answer. We'll find out, right? But at least for Cheryl- Corey Frank (27:07): It's authentic. It's authentic and it's empathetic, it's novel, it's all the things you look for. And frankly, there's just enough tension in there too where, "Listen, I'm already on this journey and on this path, and look at me now, your team could be me." In essence, right? So as we know from Orin as well, right? You need humor, intrigue, curiosity, but a fair amount of tension. And I think what you guys have discovered there, certainly has all four. But that cycle time in a traditional organization would have been weeks or maybe even months. Chris Beall (27:47): And maybe never. Corey Frank (27:49): And maybe never. Chris Beall (27:50): Maybe never, because when you're stuck for too long, there's pressure to do something, and to do something is actually the fourth state that I don't even put in my list, because I don't accept it. It's called faking it. I hate to say it, but I think that phrase fake it till you make it drives me nuts. Because faking it is not a way of getting to making it. Doing it as well as you understand honestly, and then understanding whether it's working or not as best you can, and getting other people's viewpoint on that, that is not faking it. Faking it as when you're doing it as best you can, and you claim to yourself and others that you're really doing it, because it's about how they think about you. And I'm not a fan, but what do we do when we're stuck for too long? We go back and we fake flow. That's what we do, we fake flow. And faking flow is the death knell of a startup.

Chris Beall and Corey Frank, our Market Dominance Guys, explore the subject of artificial intelligence taking over jobs held by humans. It’s an emotional issue, to be sure. But instead of looking at this as an either/or concern, the Market Dominance Guys take a different tack by asking,” What do humans do well? What do machines do well? And what can they do together?” You may be thinking, “Wait a minute! Using AI will help us run our business much more cheaply than keeping all those humans on our payroll.” If so, Chris asks you to take a few steps back and look at the big picture by asking yourself, “What’s my main goal here?” In other words, should you be concentrating on how to operate your company more cheaply, or should you be thinking about what will help you dominate your market? And what skill sets are required for your company to do that?   Using a sales department as an example, Chris and Corey discuss the different cluster of skills needed for each type of job in that division and which ones can be handled by either humans or artificial intelligence — or by a combination of both. As usual, you can trust the Market Dominance Guys to steer you in the right direction when it comes to dominating YOUR market, just as they do on today’s podcast, “The Right Skills for the Job.” ----more---- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell - ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter. and Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (01:57): Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the indomitable, [inaudible 00:02:05] of sales, the profit of profit, the rasputin of revenue. How about that? That's a new one, the rasputin of revenue, mad monk rasputin and the controversial Chris Beall. And today, one of our topics we're going to tackle is this little thing called scale, Chris, you and I were talking the last several weeks about this going back and forth about AI and the advent of machine learning and can human scale? A human with all its faults can it compete with a fully automated, fully mandated machine learning algorithm that learns on the fly? And when you consider human scaling at the same rate as maybe software, how does that play into what folks want to do from a market dominance perspective? So I figured we could start there. Corey Frank (02:54): This will be a fun one. We have a lot of folks of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle businesses that depend predominantly on humans. And we certainly have our share of folks who are on the tip of the spear so to speak on folks who are really focusing on the AI side particularly when it comes to sales, will we ever be out of a job, so to speak? So let's start there, Chris, what's your opinion on scale using humans versus machines and a profession from top of funnel all the way through discovery, to closing? Chris Beall (03:27): Sure. It's a very interesting topic. I've been obsessed with it for I don't know, 40 something years. This question of what do humans do well? What do machines do well? And what can they do together that they can't do separately that's of high value? I think that's actually the interesting question. I think in the engineering world, there's an either or mindset that tends to show up. It's like, I want to make the humans go away. It's almost like a science project. I want to make them go away to show I can make them go away. And as though that last human, that last drop of blood running through the system somewhere is going to carry a fatal disease. And yet when you come right down to it, any system that can do something marvelous without any human involvement can do something better with human involvement. Chris Beall (04:15): Even if the only thing it does better is throws out the silly stuff that the machine has come up with because of some limitation and its training set and the algorithms that it's developed so far. A car that has a human in it, who somehow stays alert very hard in it self-driving cars or semi-autonomous cars. But somebody who pays attention all the time, never runs over somebody who kind of looks like a pedestrian, but not quite enough in order to have the self-driving car, having seen one of those before and so boom. And that happened in Tempe a few years ago, as you well know. And it's one that when you look at it and you say, "Would a human have hit that person driving a car?" The answer is, "Not, if they were sober." The machine was perfectly sober, but it just hadn't seen those lighting conditions and that kind of combination of somebody walking in front of it and somebody died. Chris Beall (05:04): And I think that problem at the margin is always there, but I don't think it's always at the margin. I think the problem is actually more in the center. So I run a company that has humans in the loop doing something that almost everybody imagines a machine could do. They say, "Well, you have a dialer." Sure. Okay. For legal reasons, my quote unquote dialer, which it's not, when it makes dials in parallel, which is what makes it fast. One of the things that makes it fast. If you're doing five things at a time you're five times faster than somebody who's doing one thing at a time and the same thing, it's all there is to it. It's just pretty simple, right? Somebody once asked me by the way is [inaudible 00:05:40] always faster? I said, "No, it's not always faster. It's only faster on days when five times three equals 15, all the other days, it's not really faster at all." Chris Beall (05:49): Because if five things at a time or six at a time times a unit rate of three times faster, because we specialize specialists are always faster. You ever watch a specialist do anything they do it in a way after they're experienced in a way that kind of freaks you out. You ever sat down at a blackjack table? Remember the first time you ever did that in Las Vegas, it's like these dealers are really, really fast. The game is going much, much faster than you're comfortable with. And eventually I used to play blackjack for a living. So I went through that process and eventually it slowed down. So this whole question of a person in a loop is very close to my heart so to speak in my professional life, because we do it. We employ roughly speaking, 500 people. And those people navigate phone calls on behalf of salespeople. Chris Beall (06:39): Now, why would you divide the labor between navigating phone calls and dialing or whatever that is that we expect reps to do? I mean, people often say reps should pick up the phone. It's kind of a moral thing. Like pick up the phone you wimp and when you come right down to it, when a rep picks up the phone, 95% of the time, they end up navigating a fun system to nowhere voicemail. There's no point in navigating to voicemail, unless you think leaving voicemails is a great idea. And even if you're going to do that, you may as well then have somebody else navigate to voicemail and leave the voicemail for you unless you think your brilliant personalization of the voicemail is going to make the difference in which case you're living 20 years ago and kind of catch up with the times. Chris Beall (07:18): So navigating to voicemail is essentially a wasteful activity for a sales rep, but it's a necessary activity if you want to talk to anybody, because there are people out there to talk to. And if you navigate 25 dials to voicemail, somewhere in there on average, you'll probably talk to one person. It'd be three. It could be 57. It could be 11, whatever it happens to be there's some ratio out there for that moment in the day for that particular or target market that you're going to hit. And the alternative is to leave those conversations to your competitor. This is where all of this really comes down. It's not a theoretical exercise. Like, "Hey, what's cheaper?" That's not the question. The question is what dominates markets. If you want to be cheap, don't start a business. That's the cheapest thing to do, you spend no money whatsoever. Chris Beall (08:08): And you've succeeded in the world of cheekiness, right? I didn't spend any money. I sat back and I watched the market go by. Maybe I'd make some passive investments. And that's it. If you have an idea and the idea that you think is helpful to businesses and there's enough of them to sell to, and you think they're going to get enough value and you can provision that solution at a reasonable price that gives you gross margin. That's high enough that it's worth doing then you kind of have only one question, which is, who's going to dominate that market? You or somebody else? That's really the question. That's why we're doing this podcast. That's why we're writing this book. It's all about one thing. Hey, everybody, let's focus on this. Failure to dominate markets equals going out of business. You just don't know when. Chris Beall (08:54): So it's basically a question of what can you do that's high enough value that somebody will take you up on it, choose you first before they choose the other guy, and will find value and stick with you? So the cheapest thing is rarely the thing that provides the most value. If you put a human in the loop, even just to handle stupid exceptions. There's just stupid exceptions. So ask a computer to tell the difference between a dog and a cat. It'll tell you some things are cats that clearly aren't cats. If this weren't true, those little captcha things, and you're logging in and says, which pictures have a truck in them? If that was an easy problem for computers to solve that wouldn't be how a captcha works because they're trying to figure out if you're a human and it's trivially easy for most people. Chris Beall (09:43): It's not for me because I have to go get my glasses. And I can't see the little tiny things that 22 year olds who programmed this stuff think that you can see really, really small pictures, but that's okay, eventually I get through it. I don't have difficulty recognizing a truck compared to a picture of a truck on a billboard, for instance, or on a car that's clearly not a truck, but it has some boxy characteristics on it. And it has something behind it that looks like a trailer. And maybe the Subaru Forester with the trailer on it might look like a truck, but it ain't a truck, right? AI might get that wrong. And that's what they're trying to weed out. Weeding out silly stuff is just one thing that humans can do exceptionally well. Chris Beall (10:29): And in concert with machines, whether the machines a AI, or it's just a sorter or a search mechanism or whatever. We used to do a product back in the late 1990s did it from 1992 to 2001 or something like that two different products and what their job was among other things was taking all the world's product and service information and putting it in a catalog that could be searched by any company, according to its subset of the catalog, the products that they wanted to buy, not everything across all vendors and do it in a way that would globally. So we published it in 14 languages every night. Chris Beall (11:09): Now that sounds like you could have a lot of automation in there and you sure can, but getting something wrong is the same as hiding it. So putting the bolt in with the cars, because there's a Chevy bolt is a mistake. The quarter inch hex head of stainless steel bolt is not a Chevy bolt and vice versa. So we put humans in the loop and have the machines do the first level kind of, I'm absolutely sure of this with some human QA sampling downstream, but whatever we had ambiguity, we had an efficient means of putting a human up and say, "Better one, better two, or not any of us." And the human and that about a ton could do that. Corey Frank (11:52): I think you gave the example when we were talking earlier about voicemail, how quickly can we recognize a voicemail for human versus some of the statistics that you gave versus having a machine do it so I can either transfer that call or I can move on to the next call, et cetera? Chris Beall (12:11): Yeah. Nobody knows what the theoretical limit is, but we have a pretty big training set. I mean, we called 380 million people or something like that. So pretty good big training set to figure out what sounds like a voicemail, what sounds like a person and it includes by the way, a disposition on every single call saying whether it's a voicemail or a person. So our training set is perfect. It's pristine for making this distinction because it's what we do for a living. We navigate dials. And if it's a person we transfer and if it's a voicemail, we don't, and we navigate them. We don't just call direct numbers and hope for the best. It takes care of all this other stuff, dial by name directories, and this, that, and the other thing, human gatekeepers and everything else. Chris Beall (12:51): How do you tell the difference? Well, we don't know how our machine tells the difference, but we have a machine that tells the difference and it's great. And we can just about use it, but we want to have a human in the loop because it takes almost a second and the human takes 192 milliseconds. And it's a race. The difference between a second and two tenths of a second is big, eight-tenths of a second it's five times. So going five times slower, I got to have a lot cheaper people. And there are folks who are just attracted to cheap. It's like, Oh, if I can get the cost down low enough, that's the right answer, but that's not. Corey Frank (13:31): So you would believe this technological singularity of AI, other folks will say that it's imminent this singularity, the singular moment where machines will be preeminent in sales or discovery, but from your perspective, that will never happen. There will always be a control joining of these two forces. And certainly that's farther down the loop simply because of these nuances that machines can do only a certain part and humans can do others? Chris Beall (14:04): Yeah. I am not looking in a practical sense to a day where machines do everything that's required in selling, identify who to sell to maybe they'll do pretty well with that, actually, because that can be based on a lot of data, having a conversation with somebody and causing that person to trust you. Well, we did have ELIZA up back in the fifties, a program that everybody trusted because ELIZA would use what's called Rogerian non-directive therapy approach, and answer your questions with questions that kind of sounded pretty good. And you'd kind of go for it. Most people actually bought ELIZA. Maybe ELIZA would still make a great salesperson for all I know, but ELIZA ain't much of a closer. So knowing when to close, when is that moment and doing it correctly, that might be a little bit tricky for machines to do. Chris Beall (14:57): Getting to the edge cases, which is where business is interesting noticing opportunities that were not in the playbook. That's extremely hard. I mean, not in the playbook means machine learning has a tough time dealing with it. The thing is business is vast and multi-dimensional, and it's ill characterized. It's very, very hard to make a training set in which you've captured everything that's relevant. And then you truly know the outcome of it on some crude closed one versus something else kind of outcome. And very little of sales is understandable from what ended up being closed one, the interesting action was before the end. So for instance, we've just learned of a way to extract the gut feel from a rep about the seven key relationships in any deal, along three dimensions, to get that out of a rep by a machine asking the rep the questions is really hard and a human interviewer can do it really easily, super valuable. Chris Beall (15:58): The machine can calculate whether this collection of answers equates to 78% chance of close or 23% chance of close. Machines are really, really good at that. It's not great at interacting with the rep in a way that is curious when the rep says something in a funny tone of voice that the machine goes, "Huh? That didn't sound quite right." That causes me to go down this Y path and ask, "Well, why do you think that's true?" And it's the key part of the entire process is knowing when to ask why. So these things are bound throughout all of sales and anyway, being cheap in sales might not be the main thing. So as long as you're defeated by somebody who wins the deal, you don't win in a zero sum game or a winner take all game. We talked about this once in a episode. Sales is a winner-take-all game, but it's not a winner take all game in the classic sense. It's a winner take all game in which the habit of the winner taking all becomes dominance. Chris Beall (17:01): It's a runaway, it's like a nuclear explosion and it's not good to be on the wrong side of it. So losing being in a hundred races and losing a hundred races by one second is really bad. Being in a hundred races and losing one by a hundred seconds and winning 99 by one second. It's really good. And so we tend to forget in business and sales as the spear point of business, it's truly about winning or losing. It's not about imagine this I'm going to lose every single deal by 2%, but I'm going to do it at one-tenth the cost. Announcer (17:45): 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. Chris Beall (18:24): Well, I lose the market. I might as well stay home. Corey Frank (18:28): Right? Right. So I think in the classic sense, Chris, where folks will push back and say, that is it on scale on humans versus machine is in my tech stack, right? I have this plethora of tools that I can add to make my folks each have an iron man suit, but at the end of that equation, I still need somebody to pull the trigger. But the advent of intense tools of what time people are picking up their phone, what time they're answering an email, what's the best day of the week, what cadence works, that type of nuanced behavior to help in collection of all these basis points into real close rates. We're seeing that a lot in the face today. It's not necessarily just adding more bodies, it's adding more pieces of technology to each of those bodies. Chris Beall (19:25): Yeah. Which makes it harder to be the rep. Because now in addition to learning how to sell, which most reps actually don't know how to do and could stand to be taught. And I'm not saying that cruelly. I'm just saying, the most contained part of selling was the cold call and we teach cold calling now, why do we do that? Because we noticed after 14 years that most reps didn't know how to cold call. And if you give them technology to let them have 30, 40, 50 conversations a day, finally, you may as well teach them how to cold call, right? There's a very simple thing. It can be done in five sentences. There's a certain framework. There's a tonality that means something. There's an emotional journey that's well understood. There's a way to handle it when it goes this way, that way or the other way, none of this is actually theoretically, particularly hard and it be hard for me to even say it's interesting, except it's pretty interesting when you dig into it, right? Chris Beall (20:15): So here you have a human, who has a hard time with something that doesn't require any technology, other than a way to talk to he a remote person for a remote cold call and that's hard for them to use. So when the telephone itself, after the connection is made is hard to use because sales is hard and sales is hard because it's essentially a psychological game played against this very troubling backdrop of time. That is even when played perfectly you're only at an 8.3% or 8.6% or whatever win rate, it gets really, really hard to interpret the data, putting more tech out there, just as more variables, the more variables you have, the harder it is for you to understand what's making a contribution and what's getting in the way. Chris Beall (21:02): But you know, one thing for sure, each piece of tech has to be learned. Each one has to be wired up to all of the others or some of the others in some way, all of the data has to be consistent. They haven't made any tech in the tech stack yet that can deal with the fact that Mary says busy call back. And Joe says not interested reason given on exactly the same conversation. There is no tech that can make sense of that. I don't care what somebody says on that one. So we have this problem that data is not consistent and can't be. It's naturally variant. It's variant both in form and in meaning, but the syntax and the semantics will vary. Then it varies over time. Folks have different meanings for the same field. Oh, we stopped using this field, but we didn't want to make a new one. So what do we do? Now you actually take this value and you put it in this field. Chris Beall (21:55): You don't use these other two anymore. And when you say this it actually means this, and then you look over here to see what the real value is, because we also didn't want to add an object to the Salesforce at that point, because we have a rule against custom objects. You ever heard that before? I mean, I think everybody's for that one. So tech stacks are fundamentally attractive because it seems like there's all these jobs you can make easier, but they don't make the job easier, the job of being a rep. In fact, I would contend and I get feedback on this every day that even a CRM makes your job harder. And if you have to put data in and keep a CRM up to date, it means you have to know all the rules for putting the data in. The rules have to not change out from under you in interesting ways. I mean, I have a hard time in our CRM putting in an opportunity. Why? There are about three required fields that I actually don't understand. Corey Frank (22:53): Right. Chris Beall (22:53): I don't understand what they're for. I run the company, right? And I sell a lot. I sell [inaudible 00:22:57] six million a year, so it's not like I don't have any reason. So I do something simpler. I delegate that to somebody who's a specialist. That's the answer to the tech stack is it turns out there are distinct jobs that have sort of clusters of skills around them. So the sales rep job has a cluster of skills around talking, listening, empathy, and problem solving in the moment and a knowledge base around the resources, internal and external that could be brought to bear to help a customer. Those are the five skill areas that cluster around somebody being a sales rep. And when we think of making a sales rep better, we think of helping them say the right things in the right way. Listen for things where they kind of adjust what they're doing next in a way that's useful, recognize the difference between no and not now, and not me, those kinds of things. Chris Beall (23:54): So we need for them to do those things. When they get down to problem solving, we need them to have a problem solving mindset. So that they're thinking what is the customer's problem? And they have a mental model of the customer's problem, and they know how to do the talking and listening to validate. We look at those skills, right? Well, do any of those skills, including... And I'll just go with ConnectAndSell parochially. Do any of those skills include navigating a phone system, being an expert at using a dial by name directory. Is that part of any of those skills? No, it's not. That's part of a different skillset. That's around getting a conversation with somebody. There's another skill set around updating your CRM. We try to keep reps out of the CRM, make the data go in, but the data goes in with the robot doing it. Chris Beall (24:40): So our robots take the data in you finish a ConnectAndSell call. You take your notes, you hit your disposition, busy, call back, interested, send information or whatever you put in your followup date if you want to talk to them in the future. And you're little teleprompter so you know what to say, when that pops up on the screen three months from now or whatever, when you decide that's when you want to talk to him and you get ahold of them again. So all of that, should you go over and type that into the CRM after navigating down to the task record, knowing that you set it up like this in order to show a complete telephone test, no robots are really good at that. Chris Beall (25:14): So we delegate that to a robot great, but then when it comes time to understanding these conversations took place I wonder if I don't see quite the right close rate of conversations to meetings. I wonder what that means. Well, then I put a human back in the loop to listen to the conversations, but I use the data and the machine to say, but these are the good ones to look at. So machines are really good at looking at data and saying, "This is probably more interesting than that." Humans are really good at actually looking going, no, it's not, but as long as you don't make the human, do that hard work of calculating what might be interesting and let them just take a look. And humans are especially strong when it comes to visual stuff. So we're doing something right now at ConnectAndSell internally that's really fun. Chris Beall (26:05): We're taking all of the data about all of our customers and putting it up in a single chart that a human can look at and say that customer is having a problem with this particular thing say their dial to connect is increasing suddenly compared to the last say, 30 days. And they're really important because their bubble is big and they're not getting very much economic value because it's red. I want to go hover over that and see, what's true about them yesterday, last week and last month, and I don't want to click, if it looks interesting, then click. All of their humans, then turn into bubbles and it's the same evaluation. There's the person that is most responsible for most impacted by this. And they're important because in our case, they're using a lot of our product. Chris Beall (26:58): And so expectations are high because somebody's spending a bunch on it. I think everybody can do stuff like that and the human visual system, how hard is it to say that's up there, that's over there, that's green, that's red, that's big, that's little? Nothing to it. You see it all at once. That's a hard one for the machine to pick out because at the margin, it doesn't quite know what you know, like yeah, but that's these guys and they are always like that I don't worry about them. So it's those kinds of things. Corey Frank (27:30): Well, you think about it. What I hear you saying is that you look at the skills that go into a professional, simple sales person. Forget about complex sales, but just keep it in simple sales for a moment. And that a specialist will always trump a generalist. And when you look at what is asked for, what is expected of, most sales reps today is to do cold calling. Well, that cold calling seems to have two distinct skill sets. One is the process before I actually talk to somebody, navigating phone trees, [inaudible 00:28:11] screeners, et cetera, cadences. Corey Frank (28:14): And then the second one is actually once somebody who is on my list, who picks up the phone, that's a completely different skill set. Then after that, I have the discovery skill set, which we'll talk about next time and next call, I know we're anxious to talk about what goes into an ideal discovery call. And then you have kind of the closing and the pursuit pattern. And yet it does seem a bit challenging today to have, or to expect a sales professional, to be a specialist in all of those areas when clearly there can be machines that can help them with certain pieces of that to optimize their success. Chris Beall (28:58): Yeah. And it's really easy for a specialist to learn, to use a machine that they use every day or a tool they use every day. It's trivially easy, right? Even difficult to use tools are easy to use one. It's what you do all the time. And anybody's ever worked in a kitchen knows this. I used to work in a kitchen. There are some tools in there that are actually very difficult to use really, really well. But if you use them every day, they get pretty easy. The most challenging of them all is a chef's knife. Most people never master it. And as a result, they're slow, they're clumsy, they're cuts aren't even blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? So here's a machine that as a specialist that I use it every day and it just starts to make sense. You have that feel as it slides down the fingernail of the middle finger of your left hand, that slight touch that tells you it's where I want it to be. Chris Beall (29:48): You've got that pullback feel where you're making that next slice with the left hand, pulling back, you know what you're controlling. So even hard to use machines are complex machines. Jet fighters are probably pretty complex and yet smart kids out of school are taught to fly these things in combat situations relatively quickly. And they get used to all the complexity because they train and they train and they train and their specialist and they use it all the time. If you threw them in a helicopter and they hadn't flown one, well, it's hard. It's hard to train for both at the same time, right? So that's why we specialize. There's fighter pilots and there's helicopter pilots. And maybe they start out with similar skills, but some are better at one than the other, in some ways. And in sales, we have a funny situation where a lot of the things that need to be done can be done by very low cost labor that loves doing them. Chris Beall (30:41): It fits not only their skills, but their temperament, which is important and navigating phone systems as an example. There are people who love to navigate phone systems, but would never want to have one sales conversation from now until just after the day they die. They really don't want to have sales conversations because it's uncomfortable for them. There are people who can have sales conversations at the top of the funnel very comfortably, but they have an issue talking about money. And so for them to set appointments is easy. They can believe in them. They can get those appointments set, no problem. But if they have to close for money, then their family issues, the way that they were raised, the way money was seen in their family can block them. Chris Beall (31:22): So if you want to hire SDRs, one of the things you want to do, if you want them to be with you for a long time as SDRs, top of the funnel, BDRs, whatever you want to call them, hire people who have the skills that are needed there and have an anti skill, which is the ability to talk about money because you're actually hiring from a more specialized cohort. You'll get a better price, so to speak and you'll get better performance and you'll stay in the seat longer, which is a big deal too. Corey Frank (31:49): That makes perfect sense. That's great. Yeah. The chef's knife example is also a great analogy, too. It's a simple tool, but in the hands of a Emeril or Gordon Ramsey they are just a maestro with their ability to slice an onion without losing a couple of inches of their left index finger. Sure. I could see that. So in conclusion here, Chris, we're going to wrap this up here. When you look at, and I know you hate this question every episode when we talk about it is first feel the prognosticator, right? Corey Frank (32:19): Is where do we see it today? Will machine learning with all the equations, its ability to defeat Kasparov in chess, its ability to navigate the NSA security codes in a matter of minutes, and to map the human genome, but yet where are also the opportunities that you see that didn't quite wide-scale enough yet where machine learning and AI can really help what we're doing in getting maybe top of funnel folks on the hook faster? Or have we reached again that singularity with regards to machines or sorry, humans and machines will really be focused more on other things such as data or dialing technology and things of that nature. Where do you see it? Chris Beall (33:09): Well, I don't see the machines anytime soon, taking over the conversation. Trusting the machine with your career, which is what must happen in B2B sales the buyer must trust the machine with the seller, with their career, who would ever trust the sellers machine? Oddly enough, we will trust a human being because it's our nature to do so. But if we knew that somebody had made it a machine whose purpose is to sell it to us at all costs, no matter what, we're not going to trust it, it's just the way it is. It's like here's a machine that is better at manipulating you than any human. It can manipulate your emotions, but I can't hide the fact that it's a machine. So it's very machiness is going to mitigate against it being successful in creating trust and trust is the essence of the B2B equation. Corey Frank (33:56): Sure. Chris Beall (33:57): It's hard. That one's a hard one. Data? Man machines are great at data and they can find candidates to talk with like nobody's business. They're really good at keeping up with changes in the data world, which is so hard for a human to do. A machine, could look at everything that happened on LinkedIn yesterday and do it with no issue whatsoever and do it quite quickly and find you out of all the people who've changed jobs in all 27 of them that you should probably talk with, but the machine won't be able to talk with them as well as you can. And I think that's a distinction that's going to be made for quite a while. And machines are better at data than we are. They still do silly things. I actually think that's a psychological issue for sales reps. Chris Beall (34:45): Some sales reps hate to have one conversation that day that's with somebody they obviously shouldn't talk with. I can tell you right now, I'm about to close a quarter million dollar a year business with somebody who was introduced to me by somebody who I never should have talked with. [inaudible 00:35:00] somebody turned into a brilliant customer of a very niche kind and fell so in love with our product, that's sitting in first class on a flight at random, told somebody else about connected cell and there's the quarter million dollar deal. I don't think any machine would anticipate that. And I was going a little bit on, I really liked this guy. I want to help him. Corey Frank (35:21): It would have been classified as a false positive, sorry for slipping through the cracks. It would have been the data elements somewhere, but another man's trash is another man's treasure. Chris Beall (35:30): Exactly. And you have to actually dig through the trash which we do with conversations. Corey Frank (35:34): Absolutely. Well, excellent. Well, great, Chris, I'm glad we finally got a chance to talk a little bit more in detail about this. I know how strongly you feel and especially where a lot of the noise in the industry is moving towards this direction of putting folks like me out of work and putting us on the street. I can't handle a chef's knife. So the only thing I do know how to do is pick up the phone and talk to strangers and ask them for time or money. So it's good to know that at least I have a runway of another few years or so, this has been another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall. Until then.  

  Our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, continue their discussion about churn and its various causes. Today’s topic is about how a company’s growth is managed. Are the guiding forces going after traction first? Or are they jumping right into how to scale before they have worked out their product’s kinks? Chris and Corey talk about the tragedy of designing for scale before you have traction. As Chris will tell you, it’s a fool’s errand. If you have no traction, no conversations with your buyers, then you’re not going to learn anything about what your customers need or about why they may not be coming back. Once again, market dominance is achieved when you investigate your churn! And that’s done with conversations. Today’s podcast winds up with a question of “Who’s in charge here?” when it comes to how to steer a company toward success. Is it the investors you’ve taken money from, who may be pressuring you to scale quickly? Or is it your customers, who, if asked, will tell you what they do or don’t like about your product or service, guiding you toward what you should do to keep them renewing? Listen in to what Chris and Corey think about this important matter on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Which Comes First? Traction or Scale?” ----more---- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell - ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter. and Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (01:54): How I think a lot of folks start in this profession of sales, right? We're talking about churn and SaaS, and there's certainly churn in your team. And what do you see when the landscape today, particularly all the implementations ConnectAndSell as part of? I would imagine it saves a lot of careers though too. When you have the right tech stack with the sales rep, who maybe again is in this existential crisis, that tech stack can revitalize or reclarify, re-energize that what they thought sales was doesn't necessarily have to be what sales will be. And they have a sense of promise of future potential, of hope again, I would imagine in quite a few instances, true? Chris Beall (02:41): ConnectAndSell in particular, I think has a place in that hope equation, in that if you didn't really recognize that your issues had to do with the fact that you just weren't talking to enough people to even have a shot. It's like if somebody put you to the task of driving a car up a hill, because you've got to deliver something, or trucks, say you're an Amazon Prime delivery person, which I believe is now one out of three Americans. So, your job is to get this truck up the hill. Well, if the truck has the horsepower and it has the gearing and it has tires on it and it has a steering wheel, it's connected through some coupling mechanism to the front wheel so that they'll still both point the same direction at the same time, this seems really straightforward. Chris Beall (03:28): It may be that the hill is steep or windy. It could be like the hill that led up to the geodesic dome I used to live in up in the Santa Cruz mountains where people would visit us once and never come back. That was pretty common. We had very few dinner parties after a certain point. It's like, "We're never visiting your house again." Chris Beall (03:46): "Why?" "Because you can't see where you're going on that hill and there's a cliff." "Okay, got it." I don't see the cliff anymore. But if that's your job, and your boss says, "Go do it." And then the problem is that there's something on the hill, say a little skiff of snow or a little wetness or a little oil or whatever, that friction issue in this case, that lack of friction issue is going to manifest itself as 1,000 things you're going to try, none of which are going to work, because unless you have enough fundamental friction between the tires and the hill, it doesn't matter what else you do. And I think in sales, the role technology can play is to reduce the friction, or to provide enough traction, enough grip between the rep and the market, that the rep can start to do their job, they can drive up that hill for the first time. Chris Beall (04:41): And before then they don't realize they were doing 100 things, but they didn't really have a shot at doing their job, which begins in the conversation. It doesn't begin in the research. It doesn't begin in the strategy, reps shouldn't be handling company strategy anyway. Why we give company strategy to reps is one of the great mysteries of my life, but people still do it. But by the way, the reason we give company strategy to reps is there's no consequence since they're not going to talk to anybody anyway. So it's a fine thing to delegate since there's so little traction between those tires in the road, that doesn't really matter. Corey Frank (05:20): Yeah it's true. Well, let's also clarify that most organizations don't understand, or maybe haven't had the pain enough that the list is your ultimate strategy. I can strategize product market fit, I can have great product research, I can have the best engineers, I can have the full feature set, great UI, award-winning UX, everything, but if I leave that to chance to my reps to, "Just go in the market, you'll find some buyers out there." That's probably where most are, correct? From that approach when you talk about strategy and leaving it to chance. Chris Beall (05:59): It is. And when it's left to chance, when you don't have engagement, real engagement, where you have traction, and it's like you're building a business. In all businesses, you should seek traction before you seek scale, always. Corey Frank (06:14): Seek traction [crosstalk 00:06:15]. Chris Beall (06:15): Dreaming about scale before you have traction is a fundamental mistake in designing a business, because the big question is likely to be, what does it take to get traction? Not, what would it take if I had traction to get scale? And I've been through this argument with people for 40 years, and say, "Well, what you're doing doesn't scale. Well, what I'm doing is getting traction now because of without traction, thoughts of scale are pointless. If you think that I'm too dumb to realize that there's a point where we now have traction, and by the way, flowing cash coming into the company in excess of our overhead, and we could redesign around scale, if you don't think we're going to do that, you're wrong." Chris Beall (07:01): But designing for scale before you have traction is a fool's errand. And we see this in SaaS companies every day, most are designed for scale and they fail before they get traction. Corey Frank (07:13): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (07:15): It's the most fundamental quality of business. If you have no traction, for one thing, you're going to die, for another thing, you're not going to learn anything about what your customers really need, you're going to live in a fantasy land of your own making. You're going to find yourself having internal meetings about why your customers are not coming back, right? Internal meetings on churn are a joke. Just talk to your customers, the ones that left and find out why they left. And then after the fact categorize those, and whichever category has got the most in it, that's probably the one you should address, right? The data, the conversations will tell you the answer, and your internal discussions are probably not going to help very much. Don't do the schema in advance, have the conversations first, do the schema later, this by the way, is the same rule, conversations are attraction, schema is scale. Corey Frank (08:03): But is that a new phenomenon over the last unicorn era or is it a better remnant for quite a while? Is it exponentially connected? Is there correlation or causation because of the venture money that's poured into the marketplace about designing, especially these SaaS companies for a scale versus traction, would you say? Chris Beall (08:27): I think it's an investor-driven phenomenon, has been for quite a while. That is not a very informed opinion because I started doing companies myself in 1983 with Silicon Valley venture money, even though I was living in Boulder, Colorado. And this argument came up very quickly. So first product that I built with another guy, we built a bunch of different things. We had a relational database built from scratch, and I do mean a relational database, DVMS, where it was the pre-Oracle version of this stuff, quite fast. And we had to decide was that going to be our product, while we had this MRP thing, now you call it ERP. We decided to go that route, but was it okay to specialize into flow manufacturing instead of all manufacturing? Well, we decided for traction reasons it was because flow manufacturers, folks who put stuff in one end of a... Instead of a production line, they've got a trough, those folks who worked with tanker cars full of stuff, they were underserved. Chris Beall (09:27): And so we went down that road. And our venture capitalists, at one point in about 1986 said, "We don't see how this scales. So what we want you to do is shrink wrap it, put it on these new things called PCs, and we'll pump a bunch of money and you can sell it to little companies." Little companies didn't need what we had. It was just a top-down view where scale was given priority over traction. And we took what I think would have been the next SAP perhaps, you never know, we might've failed at it, right? But it certainly had a shot. We had big customers. We had lots of very happy customers who were getting something they couldn't get any other way. They were paying us a lot of money, but that desire for not just scale, but scale now, overwhelmed. Now look at SAP, SAP is a company that fundamentally you would say couldn't scale, because every implementation was effectively custom. The software standard, but the implementation was custom. Chris Beall (10:27): But they found a way to scale in the US. They stumbled on it a little bit, but they embraced it in the '90s, which was to let Anderson Consulting take them into the market. They gave up a certain amount of revenue, but they got scale another way and still preserved the very fundamental qualities of an SAP offering, which is, it's going to work in your company because somebody is going to fit it to your company. You may pay the consultant more than you pay the software guy, but the software companies can end up being capable of creating the richest man in Europe. So, I think that people get confused and it brings up this question of patience. It's extremely rare to make a great business, in fact it's almost unheard of to make a great actual business in less than 10 years. This is rare. And yet the, the lifetime of most venture funds is 10 years. Corey Frank (11:23): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (11:25): So, if you take money from a venture capitalist five years into their fund, yeah they're going to stick with you after those five years, but the level of patience is going to be... Shall we say their level of patience or their kind of patience is going to be distinct from the patients the market might have with you. It may well be that you need to hang around longer and solve more problems with more customers in order to really figure it out. And that's the market's patience, the market continue to keep you in business, but unfortunately you gave up control to somebody whose timeline is different from yours. And they're looking for 10X to 100X and you aren't it yet. And so, you made a deal you didn't think that you had made. And that one I think ends up being, often I think tragic, not in that people aren't going in eyes open, but there are some really good solutions to some serious problems that have been thrown into the ash heap of history and they're left to be rediscovered. Chris Beall (12:25): I talked to a CEO today of a company who's basically doing a superb job. This company is building something that I happen to be involved in, building something similar in 2008. I think it's wonderful that they're doing this now, but the thing probably could have been kept going in 2008, it's just the venture guys get impatient and they wanted a consumer product. Corey Frank (12:48): Sure. Chris Beall (12:49): Well asking me to do a consumer product is totally idiotic, not because a consumer product is not a great idea, they're great ideas when done well, but because I'm an idiot when it comes to consumerism. I mean, I suck as a consumer. Corey Frank (13:03): You could even run a restaurant. Chris Beall (13:05): Yeah. Restaurant, thank God, I understand food. That I get. I get food and I get service. Those things I could have done all right, it just wasn't my adventure. But I do think these things all go together, the traction and patience and solving real problems, and then somehow making the money equation work, and then the question of churn and whether it's good or bad churn, and the whole product, this stuff all goes together. And when somebody complains about a company, that it has too many moving parts... I remember when I left Requisite Technology, I was asked to leave, I believe because and given that it followed the next day at 5:30 in the morning, because I had made the strong suggestion that I should be the CEO and that I had a plan. Chris Beall (14:27): And I thought my plan was pretty good. And they thought a better plan was that I would clean out my desk that day. So, I- Corey Frank (14:43): Just a difference of opinion. Yes, right. Chris Beall (14:45): Yeah, it was a difference of opinion. And their opinion obviously counted more than mine since this is just how this stuff works. They were on the board, and the CEO by the way, who put the note on my coffee cup that said, "Chris, see me," Lou is still a very close personal friend. So, it does show that you don't have to take these things personally. In fact, I still really appreciate what he did for me and how he did it. But when I look back on that situation and think, "Okay, what happened next?" Well, they got a new CEO in there eventually. It took a while, but they got somebody in there. And he called me up the second day on the job and said, "Chris, this thing's incomprehensible, that you built here. It's got so many moving parts. I can't understand how they go together." And I went and had lunch with them and drew some pictures on napkins and stuff like that, and offered my help. Chris Beall (15:42): And it turned out, I think to be too hard to figure out. But my point is, the moving parts are already there, they're built into the world as we find it. There isn't a situation in business that's simple, that everyone that's of any value has all these dimensions, that they all have a money dimension. Your overhead is that racehorse that eats while you sleep. It will break you eventually unless you can figure out how to make the cash equation work. And the cash equation runs off the gross profit flow in some way, or off a funding flow in some way, and you've got to figure that out. And there is the whole product problem, it's all there. Corey Frank (16:26): Over capitalization, we can talk about this here because it's a natural trajectory here. Over capitalization in business, how much harm does that do to CEOs and managers versus what you're saying, which is, "I got to learn to live within my means. I got to learn to live lean. If I have a company that's seven, eight, nine, 10 years, that may had been through a few cycles versus if I continually go from series A to series B to series C, I never really have that tight cash crunch crisis, three in the morning, can't sleep because how do I feed this race horse?" And maybe talk a little bit about your opinions on that, because I think that... I have a good friend, I think we said that many times, that Tim Crown, chairman of Insight, him and his brother started it. And he always said, "The best ideas for me come when I'm around porcelain." As a CEO, talk about existential crisis, he always said, "The best ideas and the best solutions to my problems come when I'm hanging around porcelain in the shower, brushing my teeth, shaving in the toilet, wherever it is." Corey Frank (17:38): And is capital sometimes too easy to get? Just because you can get it, should you? Because you miss out on really trying to figure out how these problems can be solved in more creative ways versus just adding more capital. Chris Beall (17:53): I think too much capital is the biggest problem, at least in tech. There's, always more money that wants deals, and there are smart things to do with it at that instant. And it's also provided in these chunks, these big chunks. And it's because as Matt Melymuka over at PeakSpan says, "These funds have got too much money and too few partners. And so, they got to seek unicorns. They've got to seek that huge exit. And they're going to sacrifice lots of good companies in order to do it." It's not intentional. There's no bad will involved in any of this stuff, it's just math. Like so many of the bad things in life, it's like viruses are just math. They just are. And I don't know, if somebody thinks the virus isn't math, I can have a private conversation with them about the nature of viruses and math, but I guarantee you a virus is an inevitable piece of math based on how cells reproduce and that's just the way it is. Chris Beall (18:53): So, the fact is there's money over concentrated or over piled up in the hands of a smaller number of money managers who call themselves venture capitalists and growth equity guys. And it's because if you have money in, say you're a pension fund or whatever, who are you going to put it with? The one who had the big exits and big successes in their previous funds or not? It may be pure superstition. After all, if you just roll dice or flip coins, half of them are going to be better than the other half. And investing in the half that are better by luck is a bad idea, but no worse than idea than investing at random, except they'll come in at a higher price, which they take out of your head. I think the problem with money is actually not the quantity of it, the problem is that it shifts the customer from being the customer who gets economic value from actually using your product. Chris Beall (19:48): And this is B2B, again, I've told you, I know nothing about consumers. Literally I know nothing. I don't know that that glass I'm drinking that Macallan 12 out of it is the wrong glass. It is not. That's not me. I know that I have a fondness for the Macallan 12 and I can afford it and that's about it. So that's the level of sophistication that this consumer goes for. But in B2B, I've been around a little bit, and I know a little bit about how it works. And what happens in B2B is your customer has fundamentally got two qualities that you have to take into account. One is that the buying person or committee, but the buying person in particular, is afraid. And we've talked about this at length on Market Dominance Guys. They're afraid, they're cautious, they're nervous. Say it however you want, there are consequences to a bad buy for a business that are not there in the case of a bad buy for yourself as a consumer. Corey Frank (20:49): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (20:50): And that's part of it. The second is, businesses vary in more interesting and important ways regarding a product helping them, than individuals do. Individuals are bound tightly by biology, and relatively tightly by culture by the society that they live in. And then somewhat tightly by demographics, how do they fit within that society. And so, in consumer-oriented businesses, we can segment, and when we find a hit, we double down on the hit. That's the rule for consumer-oriented businesses. You segment, you micro segment, you find a hit, you'd strike a cord, boom, go, be prepared to make more of that and market the living daylights out of it. It's not how it works in B2B, because our names for the different kinds of companies and different kinds of roles and different kinds of problems they have, don't map very cleanly onto the actual companies and their variety and the actual kinds of businesses they're in, and the actual roles. Companies are not constrained by biology. It's always the wild West. Chris Beall (21:57): And so, when you go to solve a problem for a company, you have to be prepared to do more different things other than simply say, "Here's the product." And those different things are opportunities to learn what might be the future product, what might be the ancillary services, what might be the partnerships that would help, and where to say no. All of these things are the things that you must practice every day when you're evolving and nurturing a B2B company. You're always paying attention to the stuff. The intelligence that comes back from your interaction with customers tells you what not to do, guides you toward what to do, and basically also freaks you out about what you might be able to do, both positively and negatively. Chris Beall (22:46): And guess what? None of that stuff makes any difference to your investors because they weren't in the thesis when they invested. So when you take too much money, your investor becomes your customer. And here's how you can tell you have a serious problem in a company, serious problem, when you spend a whole day, once a month, six weeks or a quarter or whatever, preparing for a board meeting, and it's an investor board. Your investor board is not going to benefit sufficiently from that extra bunch of preparation compared to just sitting down with them and telling them what's going on. Corey Frank (23:25): Yeah. Chris Beall (23:26): It just are. So you're putting on a show for somebody. Well, why are you putting on the show? Because you want that next round of financing? That's why. And that next round of financing becomes your next deal. So you go from a company that might have 100 deals or 1,000 deals or 10,000 deals, and deal with all that variety, get all that intel back and use that intel to make your product better, your services better, decide what to invest in and what not to invest in, and what kind of people to hire and what your attitude is going to be towards offering help to your customers, all that stuff, which is where real business is run, and you're going to forget that. And what you're going to do is prepare for the next board meeting because you're putting on a show for somebody. Corey Frank (24:07): So true. Yeah, you're dancing with the wrong person at that party, right? Chris Beall (24:09): You're tight, you're dancing with their mom, and she's not going to marry you. That's all there is to it. I'm sorry, you're both 17 and you're going to be a little bit clumsy, and next year you'll be 18, and eventually, maybe you'll be able to get married, but dancing with her mom is not going to help you, I hope. Corey Frank (24:36): It's illegal in 16 states too, so it's fine. Chris Beall (24:38): Yeah. But it's fascinating that the best of the best, and there's nothing wrong with taking money fundamentally. I mean, I actually believe that putting capital to work in companies is the smartest thing you can do with capital. It's why private equity is such a big business, but private equity is careful, they tend to be a little later stage. Private equity invests in businesses, venture capital invests in a company, but it really is a combination of an entrepreneur and idea, and their own sense of how that might play out, which is a category that everybody else is investing in. They're very different games. And folks like Matt Melymuka can come, and PeakSpan can come into a world that's like venture capital, but they're bringing a growth equity mindset. Chris Beall (25:26): They're saying, "Everybody succeeds. 100% of our investments are going to yield. They're going to yield positive outcomes." That's very different from 5% or 10%. So I really admire folks like that, that are looking at a way to bring capital to bear on good companies and even potentially great companies with a sharp eye to how not to ruin those companies inadvertently through excess capital or by becoming the customer. Corey Frank (25:58): Well yet again, Chris, in our hour-or-so conversation, somehow we've made it a point to talk about what it seems that so many of our 60-plus episodes are about. We always get a little bit of rock climbing in there I think somehow. We always talk about capital, we always talk about churn, SaaS, and then we even dosed a little bit of existentialism in there. And maybe what we should do in next episode is we can have a throwback machine where you can grow your hair out, you can have your Jean shorts and we can reminisce, tell the listeners here that, "I have a running tally of how many different positions Chris has maintained and has communicated throughout these episodes." I think we're up to 18 or so. So I'm sure there's a few more, that there's always some good lessons that come from you, either rock climbing or hanging out at the wrong place at the right time. And so, more to come, hopefully with many episodes. Corey Frank (26:52): So with that, Chris, it's always been a pleasure chatting with you. And until next time on the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall, the sage of sales.  

Our Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, are back this week with an episode about “churn.” No, they’re not talking about butter-making here. They’re addressing business churn — a measurement of cancellations or non-renewals of your company’s product or service. Are you thinking, “Churn: What can I do about it?” If you’re like many people, you may look at your company’s churn rate, give a philosophical shrug, and go back to hunting for more prospects to replace those MIA customers. But is it really easier to find new customers than it is to figure out what went wrong? As the folk-rock band, The Byrds, might have sung in the 60s, “To every cancellation (churn, churn, churn), there is a reason (churn, churn, churn).” Corey points out that some churn is inevitable, but not all churn. Examination of cause and effect is needed! In a spirit of solidarity, Chris comes clean about what unexamined churn cost ConnectAndSell, the company he works for. He explains that he had to put arrogance aside and face the fact that their customers weren’t getting the full benefit from ConnectAndSell’s sales- acceleration platform simply because reps didn’t know how to successfully conduct a cold call. And, thus, a training program was born. Yes, it’s shine-a-bright-light-on-the-problem time on the Market Dominance Guys in today’s episode, “All Churn Is Not Created Equal.” ----more---- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell - ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter. and Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (01:58): So here we have my friend, Chris, and we have nobody on Johnny Carson's couch today, buddy. It is just you, the Carnac, and then me. I don't even think [inaudible 00:02:08] Ed McMahon, I'm probably even like Doc Severinsen. I don't even know what I am to your Johnny Carson, so. The production assistant to feed you the little three by five cards that you do your Carnac the Magnificent, so. Corey Frank (02:19): So here we are today, and we were talking before we jumped on, we got yet another story of a lesson learned from your life about one of your first jobs. How you hung out at the right place at the right time, and almost owned a restaurant. And that led us talking about, sometimes when we are thinking about our profession, how many times are we really tourists in our own profession? Where I think this is what I'm supposed to do, be promoted to a sales manager, or assume this more... This bigger territory, the VP or the CEO sits down and seductively presents it to us. Right, Chris? And I guess that's what I'm supposed to do, and then I very quickly realize that I don't know if I like this. And so, you shared kind of a couple of stories about that, but what do you think about that epidemic in our profession? That just because you can, should you? Chris Beall (03:19): Yeah. I think the answer is generally... Well, I don't know if it's generally anything, actually, now that I think about it. I mean, my whole career is built to these things, and there's two flavors of it. One is like the one story I told you, of coming up out of the desert on a warm day. And I was out rock climbing by myself, bouldering, not dressed particularly for company. A pair of cutoffs, a pair of climbing shoes, and some geeky glasses that I wore. And long hair, and a headband pulled down behind my back, and that was it. And- Corey Frank (03:49): So, you were the Matthew McConaughey before there was Matthew McConaughey? Sounds [inaudible 00:03:53]. The outfit you're describing, that sounds very much like something he would... And bongos in your backpack or something, probably. Chris Beall (03:59): I didn't have even a backpack, and I still have this bad habit, I didn't even take water with me. So I used to go climbing out in the desert for three, four hours at a time with no water. I heard a sound and I didn't know what it was. I walked over a ridge to check it out, and there's a guy in a suit. Nobody wears a suit out in the desert. I mean, it was a hot day, not hot for the desert, it was probably 97 degrees or something, but cool enough to boulder. Bouldering being climbing stuff that you think you can jump off of. Right? And every once in a while you find out you shouldn't have, but I was pretty practiced at taking some pretty long jumps. I'd practiced up to 22 feet, and then being able to land reliably on something. Chris Beall (04:35): So I felt... Feeling pretty, kind of worn out. I was bleeding here and there, because the rock there was pretty sharp. I walk up to this guy, who's standing there looking at a building, and I think it was the first time I ever really wanted a job. I had a job already, but I never had to get that job. But I wanted a job at that point, because I wanted to buy some climbing gear, and I was kind of starting to formulate this idea of taking a year and climbing all over the West. And so, that was going to take some capital. And in my world there was only one way to get money, and that was to work. I suppose there are other ways in other worlds, but that's kind of how we did it. So I walked up next to this gentlemen and stood there, quietly. And we watched what was down there, which is this nice, new building. Chris Beall (05:21): And it looked like a restaurant, and as I mentioned to you, my family really didn't go out to restaurants. We went out to Bill Johnson's Big Apple out there in Phoenix, which by the way, is the last place that I took my dad the night before he died. And so that was kind of coming full circle. And I suspected this was a restaurant, in Carefree, Arizona. Right? What else can it be? And the gentlemen, his name was Joe, he's just standing there. And finally, I asked the right question. I asked, "Is this yours?" And he beamed with pride. And he said, "Yes." And I said, "What's it called?" And he said, "The Elbow Bent." And I thought for a moment, and I said, "Need any help?" Chris Beall (05:57): That was my value prop, for I... "Need any help?" And that was the entire interview. And he said, "Yeah. Truck's going to be showing up in about 20 minutes, and would you like to help me unload it?" And we just had a great time that afternoon, setting up the kitchen, and setting up the freezer, and learning where everything went in the bar. And he offered me a job in the front of the house, as they call it. I could have been a bus boy. Now this turned out to be a very high-end restaurant, and a busboy would've made a bunch of money, but I told him... I asked him what I had to do. And he said, "You have to cut your hair." I said, "No. I'm not going to cut my hair." Chris Beall (06:30): So that was a little crossroads, that little piece of arrogance on my part ended up back in the kitchen. But the kitchen fascinated me, because the kitchen was where the mysteries were. The kitchen was technically complex. It had to do a job that, done imperfectly, resulted in really nothing. In a place like that, I could tell, you couldn't make a 90% good meal. You had to make a good meal, and you had to get kind of everything right. So I spent a long time back there, for me as a kid, 10, 11 months, working every night in that restaurant, six days a week and going to school, going to high school. And at the end of my tenure there, he took me aside, took me to the bar, poured me a single malt whiskey, very much like this. In fact, it was the Macallan 12, it's exactly what's in this glass. I didn't really realize he's the guy I learned it from. And told me a story about his restaurant career, and what his aspirations were. Chris Beall (07:25): And then hit me with a blockbuster, which is, "I'd like to give you this restaurant." And I said, "That's a very strange thing to say. Why are you saying that?" And he said, "Well, I don't have any heirs, and you seem like an unusually... A different kind of business person. And you've done a good job in the back, you've helped in the front some, and you can talk to people, obviously. And I get the sense that you know numbers." Well, I knew numbers, that was pretty clear, right? As a participant, put it modestly, in the National Math Contest several years in a row, and did all right. So I thought it over. I told him, "I'll tell you tomorrow." And I thought it over, but I just thought, "That's not my adventure." That's really what it was for me, is this, this isn't my adventure. This isn't what I'm made for. I could do it, I'd probably be pretty good at it. It's fun, but I really was a tourist. Chris Beall (08:14): And what did I take out of that job? I cook now. I cook a lot, and I love to cook. And I learned how to handle a knife, and assess a recipe in progress, and taste things, and go fast when you need to go fast, and pay attention when you need to pay attention, all the things you do in the kitchen. And so I love to be in the kitchen. I love to cook, and that was the part of the adventure that was my adventure. But running a restaurant wasn't going to be my adventure. And so, I reluctantly told him no. I was flattered, I was blown away. I was only just 17 years old, and [inaudible 00:08:49] to have to work there for five years, etc., in order to get the place. But I still think about it every once in a while. I would have been your neighbor out there in Carefree, maybe we'd still have the restaurant. Corey Frank (08:58): Yeah. Chez Beall, whatever you'd call its, or something. Chris Beall (09:01): It would have had some crazy name, I would have renamed it. Corey Frank (09:06): But it's interesting with that, it wasn't what you were called to do. It wasn't your adventure, you knew you were a tourist. He didn't, until you told him. So the question then is, as a sales leader, and as a CEO of many companies, as an investor, can you build a sales organization with a bunch of folks who are in an existential crisis? Who am I, what should I do? Do you want... Does it matter? How much of the companies that you've built, or the companies you know that are successful... First of all, do people care? Right? Because hey, I'm filling a role, a busboy, a dishwasher, or front of house, back of house, a sales rep, a field rep, a BDR, BDR manager. Corey Frank (09:42): But everybody is kind of going through these, maybe little, mini-existential crises, especially as the company grows to different stages. Do I want to stick around for series A? Do I want to stick around for acquisition? Do I want to stick around after the layoff, do I want to take this territory? Do I want... How do you deal with all of that, and should you really care as a CEO? And especially, maybe how it's evolved today, where some of the younger folks entering into the market, who seem to be laden with these existential crises all the time. Chris Beall (10:14): Yeah. Yeah. I treat it for myself the same way I treat all, what I call, fundamental churn. Everything in life involves things changing, people going through changes, people making decisions, people staying or moving on. I never really give that a great deal of thought. I think persuading somebody to stay when they want to move on doesn't make a lot of sense. Great to explore it, great to figure out if it's just something stupid that you're doing, or some misunderstanding of the situation and how it's evolving, that's causing somebody to want to leave. But when somebody wants to go because they do want to go seek their adventure, I think that's great. And I feel that way about customers, too. I think there's this obsession we have, especially in SAS, with holding on to every customer, and almost forcing them to be a customer forever. Even if it requires extraordinary acts. Chris Beall (11:01): Discounting, I think, is a bizarre and extraordinary act. I see discounting as making a lot of sense when you're trading cash today against cash need tomorrow. I think it's a form of financing, and that's fine. Money always costs money. And if discounting is how you're going to get that transaction to happen, so to speak, and it's at a time in your company's life when you'd rather do that than raise money from a VC, or some other dilutive, or control losing kind of proposition, then discount. Right? But discounting to keep a customer just to keep a customer, maybe you should ask yourself whether that's a really great relationship. And it's okay if they move on, and I- Chris Beall (12:16): And I think in SAS, we do SAS upside down and inside out. The upside down part is, that we tend to do it from the top down. We tend to make a model, and I just did this the other day, by the way, so I know what the lure is like, and I'll tell you what the model is here in a second. But we'll make a model, and the model has certain assumptions in it. And one of the big assumptions that drives the big numbers three years out, four years out, is this churn assumption. So we have a customer churn, and then we have kind of a net dollar churn that people care about. And then you also have got these other numbers, a little easier to lay your hands on. Cost of acquiring a customer, you're probably going to be closer on that than a few things. And then, what? Your... Corey Frank (12:56): [LTD 00:12:56]. Chris Beall (12:56): Your ARR per net new customer is, and stuff like that. You're probably going to be within bounds, but churn is a funny one because it operates like compound interest, but the other way around. It's inverse log that you're going to run, and it's going to be really ugly when the churn is high. So we're afraid of this thing, and we manage our companies at the margin often, to artificially reduce churn temporarily, so that no one draws the "wrong conclusion," which is the right conclusion. Sometimes they come, sometimes they go, and that's the way the world works. So in our business at ConnectAndSell, for instance, it's a naturally churn-y business, in that we sell to vice-presidents of sales often, and vice presidents of sales have pretty short half-lives. About seven months after you meet them, they'll be gone. And it has nothing to do with you, right? It doesn't involve us at all. Chris Beall (13:48): We sell to somebody, and it's just the nature of the beast, because sales management by and large, consists of hiring somebody, giving them a territory, or if it's a sales manager, giving them a team, and a number. And then if it works out and they make the number, which is pretty much a roll of the dice most of the time, it has very little to do with what anybody does in their first year. But if they do okay, we keep them for another year, and if they don't, we replace them. Same thing with territories. So there's a lot of survivor bias, survivorship bias, built into our analysis of sales situations and sales outcomes. You wrote a very good piece once, I really liked it, in which you were asking yourself the question, "Why do I sometimes celebrate lucky deals?" That's like the dumbest thing to do in the world, is to celebrate luck. Chris Beall (14:33): You take your natural superstitious-ness, which will already celebrate luck on the inside, and then you amplify it publicly, forcing yourself to believe that what you did was material, when in fact it might've just been luck. So you have the same thing on the churn side. I think that another way of looking at churn is like this. When folks leave, whether it's employees, or whether it's customers, for a good reason, then you just improve the quality of the remaining stock. And quality is a harder problem to solve, quality of your employees, quality of your customers, is a harder problem to solve than quantity. So if you have a mechanism that naturally solves the quality problem, probably shouldn't fight it really hard. You can go ahead and let it run, which means you need to run a very robust top of the funnel, both with regard to getting new customers, and getting new employees. Corey Frank (15:22): Sure. Chris Beall (15:22): It's like a pot of water that's boiling away. It's a really good idea to have some more water around to put in there, but just putting a lid on it, and saying, "Sorry. No boiling today," is not really the right answer. So, that's kind of how I feel about it. Corey Frank (15:36): [crosstalk 00:15:36] All churn is not created equal, and there's certainly healthy churn. And the focusing on the churn that you have by discounting, and giving away dollars, etc., it's better off firing up the new customer engine, and keeping that going to find the folks that fit your profile a little bit more jointly, than trying to save, or salvage, or create a hostage situation with an existing client. Chris Beall (16:01): Yeah. There is, however, another side to it. That another reason that churn occurs in both employee situations and customer situations, and who knows? Maybe in personal situations, the churn we call divorce, for instance, those sorts of churns. Corey Frank (16:15): Right. Sure. Chris Beall (16:15): It has to do with something else, which is what Geoffrey Moore calls, "the whole product." So when we think about the whole product, say, what does somebody really need in order to get the full benefit of what I have on offer? What is all of that? It's tempting to say, like we said at ConnectAndSell for many years, well, when it comes to training reps to speak on the phone, you know what we do, we let people talk to 10 times as many folks, right? So I can look at my team today and ask this question, which is, "Well, how'd they do?? Right? Well, how they did was, in a big number sense, they said 28 meetings, and they converted 9.37% of their conversations to meetings. Chris Beall (16:51): Is that good, or is bad? It's above threshold, it's good enough to keep us in business, but when you come right down to it, and you look at it and go, "Okay. So what is the important factor here for us, or our customers being successful with ConnectAndSell?" It's not really delivering all those conversations. That's a brute force, mathematical thing, it's always going to happen. Somebody once asked me, "Well, when does this product not work?" And I said, "Oh, it's simple. It doesn't work on all days where three times five doesn't equal 15. Those are the days it doesn't work. But on days where three times five does equal 15, it really works quite well, because it works simply by multiplication of three times five." Actually it's five times three, I suppose, at five times as many people making the dials as you do. Chris Beall (17:38): And since I have a level of automation, you can't afford for your individual sales reps and specialization, they're three times as fast. And when five times three is calculated, it tends toward 15, whether it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. So that's not the interesting question. The interesting question is, what do your reps say, and to what effect, when they get somebody in a conversation? Now we used to just say at ConnectAndSell, "Well, the ecosystem will take it." Right? The training ecosystem. They know all about the cold call. Why should we have to be the guys to teach it? And then we stumbled onto, once, a situation where we were obliged to teach it. It was an emergency to help save a company, to help save a customer of ours, who will remain unnamed. But they were in bankruptcy, in Chapter 11, being managed by the bank, the receiver, and somebody had taken many, many millions of dollars out of the company without permission. Chris Beall (18:33): And it had come to light late, and they had a problem. And I felt for him, and I made an offer. It was a really weird offer. I said, "Well, I've got extra capacity on Mondays and Fridays. So, how about if we just use a fixed price deal for a month? You pay me a certain amount of money, and you guys can use it all you want Monday and Friday." It was like, "Yeah. We'll do that. But now it's really focused on two days, we need to be really good." And next thing you know, this thing called Flight School was born, where the first Friday they prepped like crazy, and trained, and did all sorts of [inaudible 00:19:07]. And then Monday, they ran in production, but being coached. It was a blitz and coach thing, and just being coached on the first seven seconds of the conversation. Chris Beall (19:15): One of my colleagues and I just, literally, made this up on the airplane, like, "Well, let's do the first seven seconds in the first session, and call it takeoff. And let's do the value portion in the second two hour session, we'll call it free flight. And then we'll do the asking for the meeting part in the third session, and call it landing." And then, this was the clever one, and then handling objections. What do you do when somebody asks the famous question, "Well, tell me more," or they have some other objection. We call that turbulence, handling turbulence. So Flight School was born. Well, we didn't think it was a big deal. It was just like, this is going to help this one customer out, but we started to feel it. And we must've felt it more than we thought, because we made a logo for it. James [Townsend 00:19:56] Actually built a logo on a flight, so now we have this logo. That was years ago. Well, this last week we launched Flight School as a product, right? Chris Beall (20:04): Two, three years, maybe three and a half years, to get to the point of finally saying, "You know what? The ecosystem's not going to do it." So we were having excess churn because of our failure to see that part of our responsibility was to take the learnings from millions, and millions, and millions of conversations on our own use of our product, and put those learnings to use in a way that would help our specific customers with their specific problem. And the specific problem is, by the way, they are ambushing people 30 to 40 times a day. That's a very specific problem. Not they're ambushing somebody at all, you're ambushing... Each rep is now ambushing somebody 30 or 40 times a day, that's a new problem. Sometimes quantity makes a difference, speed makes a difference. You get something new. Chris Beall (20:48): It's like, we were talking about those big ships out there that have all the containers on them. And I got to experience the wake of one of those that goes a lot faster than the other ones. Well, it made a difference. A one foot high wake is very different from a four-foot high wake coming at you in the back of your little sailboat, when you're not paying attention. So I think there's good churn that just happens, and improves things, and then I think there's chronic bad churn, probably for a reason that you don't understand. And the resistance you will have as entrepreneurs, especially if you're funded, to doing the best thing for that other churn, for the one that you should have been providing more and you weren't, is you'll say, like I said... Chris Beall (21:29): And I said it on Tony Safoian's Cloud N Clear podcast, we don't want to be a training company. And that was a small minded thing to say, rather than just saying, "Our customers really need the opportunity to learn from us, and take that group of reps, and get them in the top 5% of all reps, in terms of cold calling." Corey Frank (21:48): Sure. Chris Beall (21:48): But we wouldn't... We didn't do it. I was stubborn, and I had this view of revenue multiples for evaluation, and a bunch of other stuff that got in the way of clearly seeing just first order. What does the customer need to actually succeed by their standards? Not some BS I made up because my spreadsheet said it would look good. Corey Frank (22:09): Right. Exactly. Vanity. Chris Beall (22:10): It is a kind of vanity. And so I have a spreadsheet I did just yesterday, and the day before, on this whole Flight School thing. And the spreadsheet says, that if certain occupancies of capacity is filled, and an instructor does this, and we charge this much, and we use this many dials, and we have this blah, blah, blah. Voila, with two instructors, I got $500 million evaluation. And I had to look at that really carefully, and say, "Well, that's good to have done the calculation. Now, put it aside and forget about it, and ask this question. Which is, on the Flight Schools that we're going to be offering, are they going to provide what the customers need in order to be successful?

On today’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Jason Beck, Vice President of Sales at Enerex, by addressing how sales got a dirty name. Chris explains that in ancient times, the salesman met the buyer face to face, but the encounter was usually a one-time transaction. Then, the camel caravan moved on, and if the buyer wasn’t happy with his purchase, there was no one to appeal to for a replacement and no one to lodge a customer complaint with. Ancient sales was a hit-and-run relationship that frequently left a bad taste in the buyer’s mouth about salesmen. But in modern times, the sale is never over, because the telephone and the internet have created an ongoing relationship between sellers and buyers. The modern salesperson needs to understand that you can run, but you can’t hide, which makes it imperative that reps provide value to their customers. Jason and the Market Dominance Guys segue into a discussion of what type of personalities are best suited to be salespeople and what types should definitely NOT hold this job. The attributes of being pro-active and persistent are touted, as well as the importance of being in sales for the right reasons. As Jason puts it, “If closing the deal at the end of the day isn’t what you live for, then don’t be in sales.” This team of sales-savvy guys wraps things up with a discussion of the cycle of the sales process for a new product and why it works — as this podcast’s title says — to Strategize, Execute, Evaluate, and Repeat. ----more---- About Our Guest Jason Beck is Vice President of Sales at Enerex, retail energy's trusted data platform, providing secure connectivity to the entire value chain — brokers, suppliers, agents, customers, and utilities — to drive efficient transactions. Their flagship service, Sparkplug, is the #1 retail energy sales platform in the world, powering over 10% of US commercial and industrial (C&I) transactions. -------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.    Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:16): Sales is so delicate because we have to ask first what do they get out of it? And as an expert, can we be an honest broker and be on their side? Because it's actually imbalanced. I know more than you do when I'm selling to you. Therefore, I have to take your side in the transaction. Otherwise it's imbalanced. That's just simple. That's just a fact, right? And an imbalanced transaction will always come back to bite you because at some point there's a further relationship, except 2,500 years ago, sales done at a crossroads and the silk road or 1500 years ago or whatever, never see me again. That's where sales got the dirty name. Chris Beall (02:51): You'll never see me again. That's not the modern world. So I think of sales now, I'll call modern sales as different from ancient sales. Ancient sales was a transaction between strangers haggled under the time pressure that somebody's got to move on. The guy in the caravan has got to move on the guy at the crossroads, the trader, gets to stay, but has got to dump the inventory. At some point, a deal is struck and it's over. In modern sales, it's never over. Corey Frank (03:19): No, especially- Chris Beall (03:20): And that's the difference. Especially in tech. Right. Corey Frank (03:24): It's an ongoing relationship. And it's really... Maybe we shouldn't be coming up with... You're not a VP of sales, you're the VP of relationship management, right? At the end of the day. But that's really what it is. It's that relationship. I agree. And then I always thought that was very interesting, asking for the close comes so easy for me because if you talk upfront about somebody's problems, you discuss what different alternatives and how... What they're valuing besides you and or evaluating, right? Besides you. And then you pitch your solution. The last thing is, "Okay, now, now that I've showed you value and I've answered all your questions, can I have your commitment?" And that's never been the hard part of sales. I think, where it gets to the dirty connotation is simply it's on that upfront. It's on what you guys do. The best, Corey, right? Corey Frank (04:09): In terms of opening those doors. And I think that's the hardest part of is people don't want to be quote unquote, "sold to." It's great. Well, there needs to be a reason that we're here today. You have a problem, right? And understanding that problem first. So that was really eye opening to me Chris is how you talked about too that how important we are as salespeople. I think most sales people either feel they're super egotistical, right? And I'm the coolest thing since sliced bread or they kind of feel if they're not getting those transactions and they're not having success, that they feel a little minimized, right? But the level of importance that you just shared on that is is we're the crossroad, sales is the crossroads between how the economy continues to grow. That's a great way to phrase it, man. I'm going to steal that one. [crosstalk 00:04:56]. Chris Beall (04:53): Well, everybody depends on sales, right? Yeah. See, I keep it. I hold a few patents as Corey knows. One or two or 16 or what, I don't even know what the number is, right? Some of them are, I would say important. Some of them are ancillary. The ones that were important were of no value without sales. The ones that were ancillary, ancillary. But even the ones that were important, in fact, the more important they are, the more dependent the actual value is on sales. And also think about this. When you patent something, it has to have three characteristics. It has to be novel. It has to be useful. And it has to be non-obvious to one skilled in the art. Well, novel means you can get people interested in it, but they're repelled by it because it's novel and therefore has not been tried, right? Useful is great, but things that are useful are solving problems that are already being solved. You don't get to solve new problems. You only get to solve old problems. Non-obvious means scary, right? And somewhat insulting. Like I didn't think it up. Chris Beall (06:00): So now you have this problem, the more valuable the innovation, the harder it is to sell. And therefore sales becomes ever more important. Corey Frank (06:12): Well, it seems Jason, then with that perspective on sales, how do you think if we really put you on the couch here, how do you do so well with this profession of sales, where the connotation and the denotation of what it means maybe is a little bit sullied to you or it's a little bit not as clean as, "Hey, I'm an engineer," "I'm a product marketer," et cetera, but yet you do it so well and you were obviously attracted to do it. What's that end result that kind of polarizes you to do a profession as well as you're doing it clearly. Jason (06:51): Well, cheers, thanks again for those kudos. I'm pretty big on personality profile tests. I really do believe that there are traits that we have as individuals that make us kind of who we are, right? As a person. By the way, anything that's about your personality in certain situations, it's a positive and in certain situations it's a negative. So for anybody who's watching this, like don't think just because it's part of your personality, it's always a bad thing or it's always a good thing. That's how you judge yourself. And yes, there are certain times where you have to take something in your personality, like my example is that I really care what others think about me. Now, I'm not fearful. Fear is... It's the end of that. Like it's the far end of that spectrum. I won't even talk to somebody because I'm fearful that they won't like me. Jason (07:38): No, but I really aim for everyone on the other side of a conversation with me to walk away that they got some sort of value, even if it wasn't a transaction, that they learned something. And I know you guys feel that same way, right? You're... I'm in it. And I'm in this game of sales because I want to provide value to others. And when they gain that value, I want them to remember, "Hey Jason, he was right. He came through on what he said, right?" And the Anarex team supported all that vision and this pied piper mentality that I have in our industry is to try to move people along. So listen, at the end of the day, if closing a deal is not the most exciting thing to you in the world, don't be in sales, because that is really what we live for at the end of the day. Jason (08:23): That is why we get to celebrate. I am in it for providing value to people, but I also really enjoy when there's a sale made and then that customer is happy. When we have our NPS score, which we just rolled out for the first time and it's 44, and it's like, "Wow, we're actually getting customers that are happy and they are willing to promote us," if, you know, for all those who know what NPS is. Right? That's fantastic. Right? And that's kind of why I'm in personally in sales, but that personality side of things, I do believe there are certain personality types that should never try the profession. And then there's other types that would never even know that they should try the profession and really should, right? And there's more of those I think. I think sales is something that can be taught. It can be learned. It is a skill set. It's not tips and tricks though. It's relationship and you got to be in it for the right reasons. Corey Frank (09:16): What are you working on as a sales professional now in your career. And then also, what do you see that as you were coming up through the ranks that you wish you would've learned now from a sales trait or from a perspective or from a talent or from a habit? Jason (09:33): Yeah, it's a really great... So one of my best skillsets personally, I think is, everyone will tell you this, so I have a funny story about this, is persistence. Persistence, I think is the one thing that a lot of people don't have that drive, that high D personality in the disc profile. That's only 10% of the personalities tested out there is the high driver mentality. And that's definitely my biggest skill set. I am more persistent. If you tell me that you want, you know, that, "Hey, call me in two weeks," you're going to get called in two weeks. Jason (10:04): Like to the day, to the hour, to the minute. I joke around with people and say, you know, "My bathroom breaks are scheduled on my calendar." Back to persistence for a second, my story with persistence is that my wife, I asked her out freshman year of high school and that was when we were, what, 15 or so. And she said, "No." And nine years later after college, somebody mentioned her name and I reached out to her on Facebook and then we had a couple of dinners and then we got married. So don't give up ever. Always be [inaudible 00:10:35] in everything you do. Jason (10:35): And so first off, I would say my number one skill set, and what has carried me through so far is the fact that I produce more than most because I am so proactive and I'm so driven. And I'm really trying to move things along constantly. You asked an interesting question though, which is, what did you want to learn earlier? Or what do you think you didn't know? So my first real job out of college, I ran my own company for a year with a friend of mine, but the first real job was Constellation New Energy. Constellation is a Fortune 500 company. It is the largest retailer, still as of today, I believe, direct energy and energy just merged together so they're going to be one A and one B now, like two of the top five just merged. Anyway, getting into a company like that as a 22 year old and learning the sales training. There's a gentleman named Tom Freese who write Question-Based Selling and a whole slew of other books. Jason (11:35): He came in and he, I mean, he's a high dollar trainer. Like if I was going to say, if I had a Chris or a Corey to come in and train my sales team, right? These are high dollar, high paid top tier consultants. And so having that training early on, that was invaluable. And I thank Constellation so much for that portion of my early career. And I think that did help set the stage for my... I started off in marketing. I was doing flyers and actually running them through the mail machine to make sure that they got out to tell the market and then my transition to sales was we were having so much success with the lead generation, the sales people were like, "Oh no, that one's too small." It was still a $10,000 transaction. What do you mean small? That's still a big transaction in my mind. Millions of dollars in business that we could be gaining. And so the thought was is start up a small SMB team. And that's what we did. And how I made my transition into sales and honestly it was right in the sales management. Jason (12:34): It wasn't even in the carrying a bag. And I said to myself, "You know what, I got to carry a bag," right? I got to do this cause I don't... How can you train somebody on what you don't know how to already do? So for two weeks, I called and just made sure that I could actually do this, but lots of confidence in myself and yeah, it was successful. And then honestly, throughout my entire career, I really didn't get back into sales, specifically carrying a bag and having a quota, et cetera, until this last role. Everything else was really sales management and leadership. Now it is this whole pied piper and I'm the one that's responsible for the revenue at Anarex and carry that weight on my shoulders and my team's shoulders. So- Corey Frank (13:49): Just to clarify, you are a sales leader or leader of your company who actually does sell. Chris, that's an alignment, I think, with some of your philosophies [inaudible 00:13:59]. Chris Beall (14:00): Well, who's your rep, Jason, at ConnectAndSell? Jason (14:02): Oh, that's a good question. [inaudible 00:14:07] Don't even know. I don't even know. Chris Beall (14:10): Yeah. So I'm your rep and yeah. Jason (14:14): [crosstalk 00:14:14]. Chris Beall (14:14): I mean, yeah, that's the answer, I'm your rep. And I believe that the intelligence flame front of a business takes place in the sales conversations and the sales outcomes that are happening every day. And as a business is evolving in the marketplace, if you're not out there selling in the front lines yourself, you will lose touch in my opinion, with how the business has evolved and you'll leave gaps for competitors to walk into. They get ever bigger with every day because the business is changing. The only way you can learn what's really going on is to clean off the windshield, drive the damn car. Jason (14:51): You have to. Yep. You got to be on that frontline, again, carrying a bag and I knew it was important early on. That was a great learning... But now with what we're doing at Anarex, I feel my role on the sales team is always to sell the new product, right? Because that, there is no playbook for it. Nobody's sold it. How do you even know how to sell it? Well, again, I come back to what I really truthfully believe in, which is, by the way, strategy is nothing without execution. Execution is the most important part of my cycle. It's strategy, it's execution, it's valuation repeat, and that execution part... I think there's a lot of people out there that come up with really great ideas. How do you execute on them? And can you have that iterative cycle? And can you fail fast? Jason (15:37): Can you make that process quicker so that you can get onto that next thing? And then once you have a pretty good way of doing it, it's time to hand it off to somebody who can make it even better. When I hired Doug and even when I look back in my career, I always say, I'm really good at getting that car from zero to 60, but then once it's at 60, somebody to take it from 60 to a hundred miles an hour, that's a totally different skillset, right? To improve upon an already existing process, I always think that that actually takes somebody that's slightly different. Again, this could just be me as a personality. I'd love to hear you guys' take on this, but I'm really good at figuring out what's not been figured out before. Once it's figured out, I think it's working. So it could be better, by the way. Jason (16:22): I'm not so cocky that I think my way is the right way. No, my way is a way. And somebody can improve upon that. So I like stepping out of the way at that point and then giving my baby, right? Or car over to that next person who can take it from 60 to 100. That's proven out three times in my career so far where that person has been successful at driving even faster than I have. But I'm curious, do you guys feel that that's different somebody to do something that's never been done before versus somebody that can improve upon a given sales process or selling of a product? Chris Beall (16:57): I think that the ability to take something from scratch, an innovation from scratch to market is a completely unique, I mean, very different kind of skillset because your cycle times for that cycle you described, which is the strategy execution evaluation cycle and then back to strategy again, has got to be really, really fast. And you have to be passionately cold and it's very hard to be passionately cold. And so it's not your baby. You kill that damn thing three times a week, but you come across to other people as highly committed and highly passionate and really, really interested in the outcome. So you commit a hundred percent to the execution that's associated with that particular strategy and implied by it. But your evaluation is a cold, cold, sharp knife. And when you cut, it's gone, and you go back, you tweak the strategy and you execute again. Chris Beall (17:55): I think that mix is rare and belongs in that zero to 60 part. There's another cycle time that's just longer. That's required to take something bigger if that's up and running and do the same thing, but to do it and have the patience to watch it play out. I don't have that patience. I just don't have it. Jason (18:18): No, by itself. Chris Beall (18:19): But if... I'm pretty good at what you do. Give me something new. I'll take it up to the point where now it's running, it's functioning and somebody else will do a better job than I do at taking that to the next level of big. Now, when you look at enterprise health, the issue with the enterprise is always that you have two things to conquer. You have markets to conquer with your current innovation, and you have the natural next innovations, which are never obvious to turn into something worth conquering markets with. Chris Beall (18:53): And if you don't do both of those, you just go out of business. We have a whole podcast episode called All Dead Companies are Equally Uninteresting, and it describes the process by which companies become dead companies by failing on one of these two fronts, right? So I think these are two different kinds of horses. I think the main difference is what is the cycle time you're comfortable with going from strategy to execution? So for me, strategy to execution cycle time is about a day, because I can't imagine working on strategy for more than part of the day. You exhaust the possibilities. It gets uninteresting. It's like, "I'm going to cross the river. I'm going to go with this stone, this stone, this stone, this stone, or maybe this one, this one, this... They look about the same. I'll pick this one. Okay. Now let's go give it a go, Oh, wait a second. That one rocks. My foot got wet. I almost fell in. Let's come back now. What? Okay, let's try this one," right? That to me is natural, but for some people it's not. So I think it's a big part of it has to do with your natural cycle time for running through that. Chris Beall (19:57): I also agree with you that execution is the key for a funny reason. And it is that the strategy itself will end up ossifying, it'll end up becoming a thing that is like set in bone or stone and becomes the subject of discourse, whereas the subject of discourse needs to be what happened when we did it? Not did we do it and did it work? Which is a completely different question, but what happened when we did it? And you got to execute cleanly, the very, very clean execution and not cheat in the middle of the execution. Jason (20:37): Example is this. I've told you about this. When you're executing cold calls, you must not qualify. The reason you must not qualify is that you dirty the execution on the strategy which is your list. The list is the strategy. And if you qualify during the execution, which is the cold call, then you're not actually executing. You're fixing the list at the same time. So you're modifying the strategy on every single conversation and therefore you get no iteration and you have a broken process and you can't evaluate and you can't go back and tweak the strategy. So done correctly, cold calling is the execution mechanism to take market hypothesis, which is the list and immediately turn it into something you can evaluate but I think that is horses for courses kind of thing. Corey Frank (21:21): That's right. That's right. In the last few minutes together, I think there's a good springboard into this concept, Chris, about being a specialist versus a generalist. Because I think with what we're hearing from Jason is that in order to kind of build this trust that he has in the marketplace, right? It's okay even though they're in competing industries or quasi-competing industries, et cetera. But Jason seems to come off as a specialist, which means it's... Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, right? It's okay. A specialist can always teach a generalist and then it's always all right for you to approach a generalist because you know you're secure enough in yourself image to take advice from a specialist versus another generalist. So what do you think of that, Chris, from what you've heard, Jason as far as how he's approaching the market from his vision, as, again, as this pied piper, it's regards to specialist versus generalist. Chris Beall (22:22): Okay. In all cases in B2B, the idea of sales is to allow the buyer who is a generalist to be safe. It's a risk reduction exercise. So the buyer needs to become convinced that it's safe to buy from somebody and that means they have to trust the specialist. If the buyer were the specialist, they'd just go ahead and buy for themselves. They wouldn't need anybody, right? So the salesperson by definition is the representative of the specialist and must be a specialist themselves. Now there's one exception and the exception is at the very top of the funnel, the seller is selling the meeting and the meeting is a universal product. So the seller is selling the temptation or the curiosity about meeting with the specialist, meeting with the expert, but they don't have to be the expert themselves. And that's why the only bifurcation, we get a function in sales, that makes any sense at all is if we decide to have a specialist in setting appointments and a generalist at taking somebody into discovery. That one can work, but you have to be very, very careful with it so that you're not qualifying because as soon as you qualify, you're saying you're a specialist. Jason (23:37): So true. You know and it's funny because I was going to ask before... Thanks for answering that query, Chris, because I was kind of interested how did you mean that, right? Because as a entrepreneur, when you start up a company by definition, you're a generalist. I wore part of a marketing hat. I wore part of a customer success. I wasn't just doing sales, right? So many more things that have to be done to really stand up a business. And then as you get to hire new people and bring new A-players into your organization, right? You naturally become more of a specialist when it becomes to what the role you do with inside your organization is. Having said that, when you look at it from the transaction or the discussion with the customer, if you don't have expertise and you're trying to actually sell the product, I don't think you can sell that product. Jason (24:22): You have to understand it better than the consumer like Chris just said, and I do find it really interesting, you guys take on this top of funnel, it's why I'm here. It's why we had this discussion. It's why what Corey and Chris were doing actually worked on me when I got that phone call and I said, "Oh wow. Yeah, I got 27 seconds. Let's go, let's talk." And then it ended up being 15 minutes, but it opened the door. And I really believe that that top of funnel activity, what you're talking about, that doesn't need a specialist. It needs the person who can actually execute on getting the meeting, right. And taking that next step. You want to talk to the specialist and I love that what you guys do with that top of funnel activity. It's fantastic. Chris Beall (25:02): It's also very delicate and it fails for the same reason time and time again, which is that instead of just selling the meeting, the rep sells the product or the promise of the product and the meeting is just about the curiosity of what might this be. And then a certainty, and the certainty is they'll learn. When the prospect comes to the meeting, they're going to learn and what they're going to learn is known in advance and therefore that's what you're selling. That's why we recommend that the breakthrough script has got these three pieces. One of them is economic. One of them is emotional. And one of them is strategic because in the breakthrough discussion, which is called discovery, you're going to learn something economic, something about handling some of the emotions that come about in your business and something about where you're trying to go, which is strategy, which you can use, whether or not you ever transact with us. And that's the key, it's the whether or not you ever transact with us that makes the meeting and the independent product with its own features and its own value. Until that happens, you have a problem, a psychological problem, which is an approach avoidance problem. That is you're approaching somebody and scaring them and asking them to trust you at the same time. And they avoid you. And what do they do? Well, they enter a state of confusion and a state of confusion they exit. And that's the false negative problem that plagues all of sales. Corey Frank (26:29): Very well said. Very well said. I love these conversations. I really do. Chris and I have had now four or five conversations. I've loved it and Corey, just... Everything you guys are doing. This breakthrough script that you guys use at [inaudible 00:26:41], I love it. And for all those, not that this was ever asked for, and the check's not going to be in the mail, but if anybody's trying to save time from their sales force, I'm a firm believer in what ConnectAndSell is doing. It is going to... I'm very excited to see what it does for my sales team, but it's going to alleviate this time that they really spend, the time that they hate, which is actually getting somebody on the phone. And that's a lot of time. And I'm very excited to see what it's going to do for our organization. Corey Frank (27:08): We need, we need to give Susan that little clip, don't you think Chris? From Jason and [inaudible 00:27:13] podcast. Jason (27:16): [crosstalk 00:27:16]. Corey Frank (27:16): [inaudible 00:27:16] Dollars will come rolling in. Thanks for that, Jason. This is always the fastest hour in the podcast world for me. And I listen to a lot of podcasts and Chris and I know. We, besides my mother, we also listen to our podcasts a lot. Often times you plug Chris in and you feed him a cookie and you listen to the whole song here and all these nuggets come through. So well with that, Jason, thanks for joining us here in the hot seat on the market dominant guys. And every time we flip on our lights or pay our gas bill, we'll be thinking of you and all the help on crossing the chasm from all your other brokers and clients out there. So with that, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall for the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time.

The Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, welcome a new guest this week: Jason Beck, Vice President of Sales at Enerex. Or as Corey dubbed him — the Pied Piper of Retail Energy. The topic today? What leads to the adoption of a new product or service. Jason is a big believer in the role of trust in establishing business relationships that will lead to adoption. “Trust is so hard to gain,” he says, “and so easy to lose.” In gaining trust, it’s a two-step program, Jason explains. First, be honest in the claims you make about your product’s value — not as you hope it will one day perform, but as it performs today. And second, find out what your prospects fear most and make sure you and your company are none of those things. If you’re trying to dominate any market, Jason continues, you need to be working toward that tipping point where your initial adopters, whose trust you have successfully gained, will begin vouching for you to your new prospects. Chris, Corey, and Jason end the podcast with a frank discussion about that dirty word “sales.” They talk about the negative reputation sales acquired and why people fear being sold to. You’ll want to listen in for Chris’ insights about how to turn that frown upside down by shining a brighter light on the necessary role of salespeople in the B2B world. Join us for this episode of The Market Dominance Guys: I’m Not the Salesman Your Mother Warned You About. ----more---- About Our Guest Jason Beck is Vice President of Sales at Enerex, retail energy's trusted data platform, providing secure connectivity to the entire value chain — brokers, suppliers, agents, customers, and utilities — to drive efficient transactions. Their flagship service, Sparkplug, is the #1 retail energy sales platform in the world, powering over 10% of US commercial and industrial (C&I) transactions. Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter. Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:06): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and my very handsome co-host, with the Howard Cosell headphones on this evening, Chris Beall, the Sage of sales, the prophet of profit and the Prince of the P&L. And today, Chris, we have yet another guest. Do we not, the incomparable, Mr. Jason Beck, VP of sales for Enerex. And we'll have Jason certainly tell a little bit about his background, but most you could say at the very least he's a VP of sales of Enerex, but he's also bigger than that. He's an entrepreneur and he's an innovator and he's probably a gadfly of the status quo. How about that? I think we can probably describe, Jason better [inaudible 00:02:52]. Jason Beck (02:51): What is [crosstalk 00:02:55]. Corey Frank (02:55): Yeah. It's not just a bad thing to give and it's a good thing to give. You see you're proverbial fly in the ointment of many a mouse trap that you have come across. Mr. Beck. Great to have you on the Market Dominance Guys here, Jason. So Chris, why is Jason sitting in the hot seat with the Market Dominance Guys today? Not only is he one of your newest, best clients I have connected [inaudible 00:03:17] of course, but over the course of the communication and the relationship with Jason, there's something about Market Dominance, is it not that we said, we got to have Jason here on the show? Chris Beall (03:27): Well, Jason represents the world that I lived in forever, which is the world of what I'll call pure innovation, where you come up with something that's really new that people said, "Yeah, I don't know." And then you go out and you make it so. And so I've been doing that stuff as you know for way too long. And what's interesting about innovation, pure innovation and market dominance is they very rarely go together. So it's a wonderful thing to innovate and the stronger the innovation, the more dimensions that it has that are different from the status quo, the harder it is and the less likely it is that you're going to succeed and take those to market. Chris Beall (04:07): Well, Jason and his team have already succeeded in taking theirs to market. And he's done other ones before that. So I figured we could talk about this big, big question, which is you got something new and it really does change everything, maybe not everybody in the world, but for a defined audience, how in the world do you cause them to see the world in a new way and adopt your new thing? So that's what I'm interested in with Jason. I don't know what Jason, does that make a lick of sense to you? Jason Beck (04:37): Oh, it makes a ton of sense to me. In fact, I love talking about this kind of stuff. I think when you're ever trying to change the world or change just a portion of the small world that we live in and ours is retail energy, it really starts, a, with having a strategy but b, I don't think there's ever a right way to do it, that you strategize, you execute, then you evaluate. And if you did something wrong, that's the evaluation process so you can restrategize and do it again the next time. It's an iterative cycle and our story here at Enerex, I think absolutely prove that out in what we're trying to do in retail energy. Corey Frank (05:11): And what's broken about retail energy, Jason, that... You have this pied piper approach where you see a challenge, you try to fix it. And as Chris said, you get a bunch of fish to try to follow you around to see the world as you do. So maybe we can start with what was broken about retail energy that had you wake up in a cold sweat and say, "I got to fix this." Jason Beck (05:31): Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And interesting to hear your guys' take on this as senior salespeople, right? People who have sold many more things than I've ever sold in my life. My background is I was in retail energy from the get-go first job out of college, worked for Constellation, the largest energy supplier in the country. And I was working on the supplier side of the business. Retail energy is a two-sided market. You have your suppliers, right? Those that are producing power or some them are just buying wholesale and selling retail, but you have your suppliers who are taking responsibility for that power. And then you have what has emerged as a very, very robust broker market. 82% of all CNI deals or commercial industrial deals are sold through a retail energy broker. Why? And that by the way that's changed over the years, over the last 10 years, it's gone from 40% to 80 plus percent. Jason Beck (06:20): And the reason is, is because it's a complex sale. It's the same reason why you would have an insurance broker or a financial broker. Energy's not incredibly easy to understand. All the different components that go into it. So just to give you that background is two-sided market theory. Okay, great. I mean, we have a lot of other two-sided markets in this country. I just named a few of them. And you also look at things like travel, which used to be a two-sided market, right? And now is more dominated by online shopping and online websites. I don't think technical sales ever gets there, but for our technical sales, what was the problem? And to get to your answer to what's broken the communication between brokers and suppliers is emails and spreadsheets and PDF documents, and just really old school stuff that, how do you automate and how do you get quicker and faster? Jason Beck (07:08): And how do you look better in the eyes of the end use customer, who you're trying to serve as an industry? Definitely not through old processes, archaic processes that don't lend itself to new technology and with APIs and cross system communication. And that's what we set out here to do at Enerex and realize that in retail energy, the only thing and what Chris talks about of this innovation, the only thing that existed is shopping websites. So a broker who would say, "Hey, I'm a broker. Hey, all you other brokers come work underneath me." Everyone wants their own piece of the pie if you will. Jason Beck (07:46): We're a bunch of entrepreneurs in retail energy, and that's not the way I think the industry comes together. It comes together by having a trusted third party that is friends with brokers, is friends with suppliers not competing against either one of those. We have a phrase here that says to be the market, you can't be participating in the market, right? Yeah. So and I really do think that's kind of part of the secret sauce but for again, when we talk about this introducing a new concept, that was the hardest part. We looked at it and said, "There's a better way to do what we're doing. How do we get from where we're at today to there?" And it's a seven-year big, hairy, audacious goal of ours to become the source of trust for retail energy. Corey Frank (08:30): Chris and I talk about this quite a bit. One of our earlier episodes, Chris, we talked about innovation, did we not? Where we talk about the bottleneck of innovation is go to market, not necessarily invention in its pure form. So it's been a seven year startup journey, but obviously it looks exponential where you may have this new mouse trap, but to actually get it to market and show this innovation economy, right? The friction is so great. But once you get out to the market in great scale, you said the key term, trusted relationships, trusted conversations, right. It gets easier. So from that perspective, a little bit on the journey of being this pied piper share with us a little bit about kind of what it took to have people see your way. You talked about the challenges, talk about some of the grease skids here that you've been able to achieve. Jason Beck (09:23): Yeah, that's interesting too. This journey, we set off three and a half years ago as PowerMatrix. And PowerMatrix, my business partner and our CEO Deepinder Singh, and I really grew PowerMatrix and the market dominance was Nate Richards and Nate Richards ran a company called Energy Frameworks. And our goal in the beginning was to serve the broker side of the community with great software. Now I'll stop there for a second and say, that was always our dream. Always our vision was we will serve the broker side of the market and then bring together brokers and suppliers. But when we talk to suppliers early on about this idea of API communication, a secure data platform for retail energy, they all said, "Well, when you get enough brokers to adopt that vision, call us," but that's who we're after, right. Just saying that you have a solution or showing a solution and no one's using it out on other side. Jason Beck (10:16): And this is why I think a two-sided market is so interesting because you really have to kind of get one side to buy in before you get the other side to buy-in right. But taking you back on that journey, that was always the vision. But we knew we had to serve the broker side first and Core was the Energy Frameworks product that Nate Richards was running at the time. And we caught his eye by growing really fast. And then basically two years after the start of our journey. And I remember it like it was yesterday because it was actually two years ago, three days ago. And Nate said, "Hey, Jason, let's get together for lunch." We're both down here in Houston and it was very quickly, why are we fighting each other? We both have the same vision and you're growing fast. And I have all this 10 years of experience. Jason Beck (11:00): Why don't we work together and dominate the market. And overnight, then we did become that. We now serve 100 customers, today we serve 120 on the broker side. And that was when that tipping point. And I think that's what you look for always when you're trying to dominate a market is the tipping point for the suppliers, it was always let's see you serve 100 plus brokers. And if you do that, I don't think there's any reason why we wouldn't talk to you. Now, we sit here today, again, halfway through our journey. We do have supplier clients. We're proving out this out data can make the process so much easier of a retail energy transaction. And that's really in 2021, what we're doing is proving out those efficiencies, but we have now participants on both sides. And where does that start? It starts with providing value to the consumers that you're providing software to. And that's what we focused on with the broker side to start off that journey. Corey Frank (11:55): Got you. Chris Beall (11:55): It's an interesting problem, right. I was intimately deeply involved in the world of marketplace, B2B marketplaces in '98 to 2001. I supplied the electronic catalog and technology as the CTO and then the chief strategy corporate development officer of a company called Requisite Technology. That was kind of we dominated the world of electronic cataloging for B2B. And what we found was that the chasm crossing exercise for marketplaces was fundamentally more challenging than it was for two set of marketplaces than it was for regular companies, because you had to make a choice buy side or sell side, so to speak, and then you had to make it stick. And until you made the choice, made it stick and provided the independent value. You as an intermediary were of no interest to anybody who in particular was on the sell side. So they wouldn't see you as being big enough, liquid enough or whatever to play with you. Chris Beall (12:56): It sounds like you you've done that move a little bit differently from most. You've taken us in a situation where somebody was across the chasm with the 10 years and you guys are approaching it at warp speed and you built a bridge of trust in order to call it a gossamer bridge and skipped across what normally would have cost a huge amount of money. How did you get to the trust point where that's even possible in that relationship? Normally that's like preying mantis city. Somebody's going to eat somebody's head before somebody else is going to have sex with them and it's just... Corey is used to this. So how did you do that? I mean, it's like you described it, but something tells me if you remember it like it was yesterday, then it's a little bit more than, hey, let's get together and have a little chat, right? Jason Beck (13:52): Trust is so hard to gain and so easy to lose, right? It is one of the hardest things to gain and the easiest things to lose. And when I think about trust and I think about how great relationships get formed, it is first do what you say you're going to do, right? You got to be accountable. So if I promise that let's say a broker of ours and it's like, "Hey, here's our value proposition. This is what the software is going to do for you." If I was talking about all these pie in the sky features that the software actually didn't have today, but it was, "Oh, it's coming, it's coming. Don't worry. Don't worry." And I wasn't as a sales person, very articulate about, "Hey, this is our roadmap." And a roadmap can change, but here's what I can do for you today, right? Jason Beck (14:32): That's the first part about the whole gaining the trust factor of this and why we've moved at warp speed. I also think that merging the two companies is another really... That's a how do you sign up 50 customers overnight, merged two companies that have 50 customers, right? So that was a big part of why we're here where we're at. And we've had very supportive customers in that. But I think the other part of trust, and I get back to this whole forming a relationship. Once you know your customer pool or your target market intimately, you have to figure out what are their fears? What do they fear about a relationship with you? And you need to make sure that you're none of those things. And when I say none of those things, I mean, not even the semblance of it and specifically in our industry, what does it mean, a brokerage book of business. I'm not selling widgets. Jason Beck (15:17): I am a consultant of sorts. I'm a value added resource. I'm a knowledgeable expert in retail energy as a broker, right? And I'm serving my end use customers. So what's your true asset? It's your brain, right? What the knowledge you have in your head as a retail broker, but it's also your data. It's your customer book. It's the accounts, the meters, right. It's all those type of things. And so why would any broker trust another broker with that data? So for Enerex, it was incredibly important that we have no broker licenses. We're not competing against you, Mr. Customer. In fact, we are trying to do everything we can to be your guide on this journey and let you be the hero. Jason Beck (16:39): As some of these [inaudible 00:16:40]. They're marketing new stuff that talks about that, right? Being the guide as the software provider, not being the hero, I don't need to be the hero. Yes. We might make this marketing incredibly more efficient. And if that makes a lasting impression on retail energy, I hope it does. But my main focus is how do I have happy customers, right, of our software programs. And that's just doing things that maybe they didn't even think they knew could exist and bring those things to market across the two sides of our marketplace. Chris Beall (17:09): So you had to defang yourself? Right in front of God and everybody. Jason Beck (17:12): That's right. Yeah. Hey, we're not that wolf, right. Chris Beall (17:15): Yeah, lets stay calm. Jason Beck (17:15): [crosstalk 00:17:15]. And it's funny because it's not like... We have one company that I would consider them as close to a direct competitor as I can consider them. And then there's a lot of indirect competitors that are trying to approach this, that whole broker of broker route. And there is such a need by the way, for brokers, we serve some of them. Broker of brokers are needed in the marketplace because how do you attract new talents, right. That person that's an accountant, but "Hey, if I have accounting clients, can I sell them electricity?" It's not a far stretch. I'm looking at your bills. I see your bills are high on utilities. Let me help you out with that. Jason Beck (17:54): I know somebody write the referral partners. So I think there's a huge need for those folks in the marketplace. I just don't know that they're going to bring together this solution, this trusted architecture of broker, supplier communication. And so that's kind of where we saw the need to be filled. By the way, realize you're giving up on short term earnings. A lot of short-term earnings by doing it this route. And your play is to continue to just build value with your clients versus trying to take a piece of each transaction today. Chris Beall (18:30): Yeah. I remember back when we did requisite, we had to do our own schema for all the world's product and service information, because we needed to catalog it in a way that allowed a buyer to have their catalog from multiple suppliers, but be easy to use and consistent to use for every one of their users. Jason Beck (18:48): You have a product that [crosstalk 00:18:49] SIC codes out there, right? Probably different [crosstalk 00:18:51] products. Chris Beall (18:50): Oh, yeah. Jason Beck (18:51): What a challenge. Chris Beall (18:53): Yeah. And we came right down to the product category in a way that was understandable and searchable and all of its attributes that were relevant for purchase. And we codified all of that. So it wasn't just SIC codes. It was right down to, this is a one half horsepower compressor motor with a capacitor start. It was that kind of stuff. And when we took that step, we thought we were entering into a world where we would be more trusted as a result. But then the community decided that because we controlled the schema, we were less trusted. And we made the mistake of naming the schema after ourselves, even though we just called it, Russ, everybody knew it was the requisite unified schema. We should've called it UNSPSC2, after the United Nations Services and Products [inaudible 00:19:41] and taking advantage of the fact that their trademarks were weak. Do you have something like that where you're doing the right thing and you know it's the right thing. But the impression that some people have might be [inaudible 00:19:57] they say it's the right thing, but it feels a little bit like a power grab to me. Jason Beck (20:00): But then I hope my client who I talked about this yesterday gets to see this podcast and I'm not going to do a direct channel, but I speaking to somebody the other day, great client of ours and he said to me, "Jason, I'm telling you this because we're friends. How many other clients do you think you have that aren't telling you this?" And I said, "Great point. That's a great point." Which is that fear of wait a minute, if you become the marketplace, do you just get rid of me, right? Do you even need brokers? If you guys have all the data, you have all the transfers, can you just go to the end-use customer? And by the way, the answer is, yeah, absolutely. We could. Now again, where I keep coming back to is the fact that you need that expertise in certain, specifically in commodities, things that you can't touch and feel, and the consumer product goods much easier, right? Jason Beck (20:48): I always say it's like a travel industry. He brought up the concept of the floral industry, which until this week, I didn't even think about that, right. But you had the same thing that happened in travel to all the florist in the country, right? You had Teleflora and FTD and they basically just started taking a piece of every single transaction. Oh, well, I can give you this and I can give you this. And then all of a sudden, well, I'm just going to go direct to the consumer. What I continue to tell people in retail energy and Cory, I love that. I'm going to steal that [inaudible 00:21:16]. Jason Beck is the pied piper of retail energy, trying to move it forward. And I have so many folks that have been backing me up on this journey because I know we can be stronger together, but it's this aspect of retail energy is incredibly detailed and it's different in every single state. Jason Beck (21:34): And it's also different in every single utility. Pennsylvania has six utilities in and out by itself, just that one state and it's different. The components of the energy transaction is different. And so if you're comparing, what your supply contract is going to be on the electricity side or you have to do nominations on the gas side, either you're an expert or you need an expert. And that's kind of where I say to myself, yeah, I understand the fear and I can't do any... I'm not going to like sit on a piece of paper and say, we will never replace... No company is going to literally handcuffed themselves for what the future could hold. But I continue to keep saying, and I really truly believe this, that in certain complex sales, you need an expert. And if you don't have an expert, it's very hard to navigate those sharky waters. Usually those are the people that gets their lunch eaten. Chris Beall (22:27): You're an expert, but you need an expert you can trust. So how do you get to the point of trusting that expert. Because expertise, confers power, right? So I'm an expert, I'm very powerful. And I'm very powerful if I'm on your side, that's great. If I'm on my side, you don't know if my side is your side. So it's uncertain and if I'm not on your side at all, I'm against you, then everything's very clear and we fight. So the position that is most dangerous is the one in the middle where it's like, "Well, are you on my side or not?" So how do you get them to believe, to know, not believe incorrectly but to know for certain. You said something really fascinating earlier, you have to remove everything that they would be concerned about, including the appearance, the image, the thought, the nascent sense, incipients. I love that word of becoming that thing that they would be concerned about, right. And how do you do that? What's step zero. What is steps there? Yeah, go look up incipients, it's a heck of a word. Jason Beck (23:27): Yeah, I will. I got my vocabulary [inaudible 00:23:30] really good. No, that's awesome. I think that when you are trying to... Is that everything you're 100% right. And I don't think you're ever going to dispel people's beliefs, right? They know if it's still a possibility, it's still a possibility but the way you really do that is you focus on the value that you're providing. And for the service that I am providing you, right? The cost I'm providing you at, and it's today, right? Don't worry about the future. The future is going to hold what it is, but today is that value 5X, 10X, 20X of what I'm costing you. And if you look even at the risk of the future, right, that you're talking about again, although we have nothing that could let us sell to end use customers today. Jason Beck (24:19): Again, no broker licenses, no supplier licenses. We just focus on software and technology. Is that a viable risk for you, Mr. Customer? And then they have to make that decision. And that's the tough part. I would say, you got to focus on the value you're providing for that customer. And if today it's just exponentially more than what the cost is or the future risks are. It's an easy decision to make for most customers. I also live in an industry that has not adopted technology incredibly quick and fast. So even still, even though when we say market dominance, right, Chris and I talked about this, we have 120 retail energy brokers on our software here on Enerex, our nearest competitor has between 25 and 30. Corey Frank (25:02): Yet already condition the market in your favor and against all these other competitors, current and future. And Chris and I talk about this a lot. I interview him and Chris, right. You know that the most reliable way to establish trust is to get to every relevant person in that market. And you as this pied piper, right, conditioning the market with forwarding, with trust, not with an email, not with a voicemail, not with a mere website, right. We see your website there, but in Jason and what you offer. I think that transference of the bits of what Jason has to say is truly why you're... He's following the playbook, Chris, what you say as far as how to get to a market dominance in this... The riches are in the niches. Well, you definitely are on the way there, Jason. Jason Beck (25:58): Well, thanks so much. I really do appreciate that. And when I was talking to Chris about this and I saw both, young blood in what you guys are doing in training up fresh people, right. Fresh out of college and giving them a really strong career in sales. I was one of those... I still don't even like the word sales. I don't know how many sales... That's another quick topic I'd love to transition to is this world of sales, right? Tell me how you guys feel about that in terms of I'm trying... Nobody wants to be sold something, right? So when we talk about this, I've developed trust because I've been in the industry for 15 years and I can prove trust out to you. And then those first few clients, you get them to be referrals for you. Jason Beck (26:40): And then you have the eighth person called the first in the 40th person called the 10th person. Right? And that's how you continue to grow is as you have really good relationships, but that's just happened naturally for me, calling, discussing, having those conversations, grabbing that trust, moving them to a transaction. And I get to represent a fantastic team of 70 behind me in this marketplace. But I will candidly still say that I don't like being called a salesperson. It has too many negative connotations. Now by the way, I actually love being called a salesperson when people are like, "Man, you're a great sales person." Thanks. What should work? Was that serious or was it? Right. So I'd love to hear kind of your just thoughts on that, of this dirty word of sales. What's Cory and Chris's take on that dirty word of sales? Corey Frank (27:29): Well, if you'd listen to any of the prior 63 64 episodes we've done. Chris certainly has sold his share products from fuller brush, et cetera. So I'll let him, I'll defer to age before beauty here, because he's got such an exceptional background that sales as a term may have a denotation as such, but the connotation of sales over the years, especially how Chris weaves it in and out of how the fuller brush experience has led to him being the innovator that he is at ConnectAndSell. I think really stems from whether you sell him fuller brush or spider repellent in the garage to talking with CEOs of... And private equity firms has to do with the trust factor that you're talking about here so adroitly here, Jason. So Chris, what would you say that Jason's concept of sales as a profession and the denotation that exists out there in the world today? Chris Beall (28:27): Well, I don't like sales either. So to me, sales has a bag of tricks, tips and tricks. I gave a talk once at American Association of Inside Sales Professionals event in San Francisco. And it was an unusual talk, my normal talk is about market dominance or about using the voice or about stuff like that. But I decided to tell these inside sales folks that they were the most important people in the economy and here's why. And so I broke it down for them, how the entire economy is built around B2B. And because businesses have to make stuff before consumers can buy them and all government can do is tax. So if you follow the money, you start with the innovations in business that turn into ultimately things that consumers can do. And so here B2B has been transformed from I'll call it, run around knocking on doors to accessing larger markets, which means more of them as remote. Chris Beall (29:25): If your solution doesn't have a geographical boundary around it naturally then inside sales, which is really just remote sales done professionally becomes the thing. And therefore, you're now at the beating heart of the entire economy. And perhaps you at the bottleneck of the whole economy, which means, hey, inside salespeople, your skills and your professionalism are the limiting factor in the growth of our economy for everybody who's alive. Corey Frank (29:53): Wow. Chris Beall (29:54): So take it seriously. So take it seriously, right. So I gave that talk, right? And I came off the stage and I won't say which of the people who was at the AISB because they are dear friends of mine took me aside and said, "Don't ever give a talk like that again, they want tips and tricks." They want tips and tricks. And I actually shuttered a little bit because the last thing in the world I would ever want to do is to use a tip or a trick. Now I know some tricks, here's a trick. If you're ever doing any public speaking, use the word blood and you'll get the audience's entire attention, 100% of the audience for about eight seconds. They will never forget the next things you say, that is a trick. But if you use that trick against your audience, instead of for your audience, you're a charlatan, you're a thief, so- Corey Frank (30:45): You [inaudible 00:30:45] every single bit of trust that you thought you were getting, right? Chris Beall (30:47): Exactly. So the trick of sales without sales being dirty is to literally think of it as a service business, where you have the luxury of becoming an expert in an area where the buyer doesn't have the luxury of becoming an expert and therefore you have the opportunity to advise them. And that advice given rationally with any kind of reasonable timeframe around their need will lead to a transaction. And then you just have to be willing to transact. The hard part about sales emotionally is that there's this thing called closing and closers are people like me who are willing and I'm telling you this straight up in business, I am willing to sacrifice the relationship as it's developing for the transaction that leads to you getting value or deciding you don't want to move forward. Chris Beall (31:42): I'm willing to do that because time is too precious. And that's a hard thing to do with somebody you like. And I think that makes sales very, very difficult because we have to do two emotionally impossible things. One is we have to ambush strangers with an expectation of helping them. And the other is we have to sacrifice relationships with the expectation of getting clarity as to whether it makes sense to transact or not. We don't like either one of those, they're both bad things in our personal life. In our personal life, we approached people that we wanted to have relationships with on an ambush for your own good basis. And then we sacrifice those relationships based on the fact that time is running out and we got to transact or not, then- Jason Beck (32:24): What do I [inaudible 00:32:26] right? Yeah. Chris Beall (32:26): Exactly. So it's very... Sales is so delicate because we have to only ask first. Well, not only, but we have to ask first, what do they get out of it? And as an expert, can we be an honest broker and be their side? Because it's actually imbalanced. I know more than you do when I'm selling to you. Therefore, I have to take your side in the transaction otherwise, it's imbalanced. That's just simple, that's just a fact, right? And an imbalance transaction [crosstalk 00:32:52].

Join us on the Market Dominance Guys as Chris and Corey continue their conversation about sales enablement with CEO Roderick Jefferson of Roderick Jefferson & Associates. This week, the guys address the challenge of hiring the right people for this function — people who have a certain level of sales credibility within the company. Roderick explains that in order to be a respected voice and get a vote when it comes to providing sales enablement tools and processes to support the sales team, you need to bring people on board who have extensive sales experience. Now, don’t get him wrong: Roderick is not advocating a perpetual continuation of “Do sales the way we’ve always done sales.” Instead, he suggests hiring those who understand that what really works in sales is helping clients maintain their customer roster, and aiding clients with increasing THEIR profits, reducing THEIR costs, and mitigating THEIR risks. In other words, your need to hire a sales enablement team dedicated to having conversations with prospects about business outcome. Roderick states that to do this, sales people have to stop giving presentations and start having conversations — true discovery conversations. ----more---- Chris, Corey, and Roderick then discuss how diagnosing a prospect’s pain is only a first step in what we should teach sales reps. “Isn’t it a miracle,” Chris says, “that most salespeople act as though whatever a prospect’s pain is, their product will fix it?” The guys wind up this Market  Dominance Guys’ session in agreement that sales reps should be taught how to get out of the way when their solution is NOT a solution. You won’t believe your ears at some of the eye-opening, jaw-dropping ideas in this week’s podcast! About Our Guest Roderick Jefferson is CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, a global sales enablement consultancy that uses cutting-edge technology to enable its clients to decrease time-to-revenue and increase productivity.  Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter. and Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:06): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and my very handsome co-host, with the Howard Cosell headphones on this evening, Chris Beall, the Sage of sales, the prophet of profit and the Prince of the P&L. And today, Chris, we have yet another guest. Do we not, the incomparable, Mr. Jason Beck, VP of sales for Enerex. And we'll have Jason certainly tell a little bit about his background, but most you could say at the very least he's a VP of sales of Enerex, but he's also bigger than that. He's an entrepreneur and he's an innovator and he's probably a gadfly of the status quo. How about that? I think we can probably describe, Jason better [inaudible 00:02:52]. Jason Beck (02:51): What is [crosstalk 00:02:55]. Corey Frank (02:55): Yeah. It's not just a bad thing to give and it's a good thing to give. You see you're proverbial fly in the ointment of many a mouse trap that you have come across. Mr. Beck. Great to have you on the Market Dominance Guys here, Jason. So Chris, why is Jason sitting in the hot seat with the Market Dominance Guys today? Not only is he one of your newest, best clients I have connected [inaudible 00:03:17] of course, but over the course of the communication and the relationship with Jason, there's something about Market Dominance, is it not that we said, we got to have Jason here on the show? Chris Beall (03:27): Well, Jason represents the world that I lived in forever, which is the world of what I'll call pure innovation, where you come up with something that's really new that people said, "Yeah, I don't know." And then you go out and you make it so. And so I've been doing that stuff as you know for way too long. And what's interesting about innovation, pure innovation and market dominance is they very rarely go together. So it's a wonderful thing to innovate and the stronger the innovation, the more dimensions that it has that are different from the status quo, the harder it is and the less likely it is that you're going to succeed and take those to market. Chris Beall (04:07): Well, Jason and his team have already succeeded in taking theirs to market. And he's done other ones before that. So I figured we could talk about this big, big question, which is you got something new and it really does change everything, maybe not everybody in the world, but for a defined audience, how in the world do you cause them to see the world in a new way and adopt your new thing? So that's what I'm interested in with Jason. I don't know what Jason, does that make a lick of sense to you? Jason Beck (04:37): Oh, it makes a ton of sense to me. In fact, I love talking about this kind of stuff. I think when you're ever trying to change the world or change just a portion of the small world that we live in and ours is retail energy, it really starts, a, with having a strategy but b, I don't think there's ever a right way to do it, that you strategize, you execute, then you evaluate. And if you did something wrong, that's the evaluation process so you can restrategize and do it again the next time. It's an iterative cycle and our story here at Enerex, I think absolutely prove that out in what we're trying to do in retail energy. Corey Frank (05:11): And what's broken about retail energy, Jason, that... You have this pied piper approach where you see a challenge, you try to fix it. And as Chris said, you get a bunch of fish to try to follow you around to see the world as you do. So maybe we can start with what was broken about retail energy that had you wake up in a cold sweat and say, "I got to fix this." Jason Beck (05:31): Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And interesting to hear your guys' take on this as senior salespeople, right? People who have sold many more things than I've ever sold in my life. My background is I was in retail energy from the get-go first job out of college, worked for Constellation, the largest energy supplier in the country. And I was working on the supplier side of the business. Retail energy is a two-sided market. You have your suppliers, right? Those that are producing power or some them are just buying wholesale and selling retail, but you have your suppliers who are taking responsibility for that power. And then you have what has emerged as a very, very robust broker market. 82% of all CNI deals or commercial industrial deals are sold through a retail energy broker. Why? And that by the way that's changed over the years, over the last 10 years, it's gone from 40% to 80 plus percent. Jason Beck (06:20): And the reason is, is because it's a complex sale. It's the same reason why you would have an insurance broker or a financial broker. Energy's not incredibly easy to understand. All the different components that go into it. So just to give you that background is two-sided market theory. Okay, great. I mean, we have a lot of other two-sided markets in this country. I just named a few of them. And you also look at things like travel, which used to be a two-sided market, right? And now is more dominated by online shopping and online websites. I don't think technical sales ever gets there, but for our technical sales, what was the problem? And to get to your answer to what's broken the communication between brokers and suppliers is emails and spreadsheets and PDF documents, and just really old school stuff that, how do you automate and how do you get quicker and faster? Jason Beck (07:08): And how do you look better in the eyes of the end use customer, who you're trying to serve as an industry? Definitely not through old processes, archaic processes that don't lend itself to new technology and with APIs and cross system communication. And that's what we set out here to do at Enerex and realize that in retail energy, the only thing and what Chris talks about of this innovation, the only thing that existed is shopping websites. So a broker who would say, "Hey, I'm a broker. Hey, all you other brokers come work underneath me." Everyone wants their own piece of the pie if you will. Jason Beck (07:46): We're a bunch of entrepreneurs in retail energy, and that's not the way I think the industry comes together. It comes together by having a trusted third party that is friends with brokers, is friends with suppliers not competing against either one of those. We have a phrase here that says to be the market, you can't be participating in the market, right? Yeah. So and I really do think that's kind of part of the secret sauce but for again, when we talk about this introducing a new concept, that was the hardest part. We looked at it and said, "There's a better way to do what we're doing. How do we get from where we're at today to there?" And it's a seven-year big, hairy, audacious goal of ours to become the source of trust for retail energy. Corey Frank (08:30): Chris and I talk about this quite a bit. One of our earlier episodes, Chris, we talked about innovation, did we not? Where we talk about the bottleneck of innovation is go to market, not necessarily invention in its pure form. So it's been a seven year startup journey, but obviously it looks exponential where you may have this new mouse trap, but to actually get it to market and show this innovation economy, right? The friction is so great. But once you get out to the market in great scale, you said the key term, trusted relationships, trusted conversations, right. It gets easier. So from that perspective, a little bit on the journey of being this pied piper share with us a little bit about kind of what it took to have people see your way. You talked about the challenges, talk about some of the grease skids here that you've been able to achieve. Jason Beck (09:23): Yeah, that's interesting too. This journey, we set off three and a half years ago as PowerMatrix. And PowerMatrix, my business partner and our CEO Deepinder Singh, and I really grew PowerMatrix and the market dominance was Nate Richards and Nate Richards ran a company called Energy Frameworks. And our goal in the beginning was to serve the broker side of the community with great software. Now I'll stop there for a second and say, that was always our dream. Always our vision was we will serve the broker side of the market and then bring together brokers and suppliers. But when we talk to suppliers early on about this idea of API communication, a secure data platform for retail energy, they all said, "Well, when you get enough brokers to adopt that vision, call us," but that's who we're after, right. Just saying that you have a solution or showing a solution and no one's using it out on other side. Jason Beck (10:16): And this is why I think a two-sided market is so interesting because you really have to kind of get one side to buy in before you get the other side to buy-in right. But taking you back on that journey, that was always the vision. But we knew we had to serve the broker side first and Core was the Energy Frameworks product that Nate Richards was running at the time. And we caught his eye by growing really fast. And then basically two years after the start of our journey. And I remember it like it was yesterday because it was actually two years ago, three days ago. And Nate said, "Hey, Jason, let's get together for lunch." We're both down here in Houston and it was very quickly, why are we fighting each other? We both have the same vision and you're growing fast. And I have all this 10 years of experience. Jason Beck (11:00): Why don't we work together and dominate the market. And overnight, then we did become that. We now serve 100 customers, today we serve 120 on the broker side. And that was when that tipping point. And I think that's what you look for always when you're trying to dominate a market is the tipping point for the suppliers, it was always let's see you serve 100 plus brokers. And if you do that, I don't think there's any reason why we wouldn't talk to you. Now, we sit here today, again, halfway through our journey. We do have supplier clients. We're proving out this out data can make the process so much easier of a retail energy transaction. And that's really in 2021, what we're doing is proving out those efficiencies, but we have now participants on both sides. And where does that start? It starts with providing value to the consumers that you're providing software to. And that's what we focused on with the broker side to start off that journey. Corey Frank (11:55): Got you. Chris Beall (11:55): It's an interesting problem, right. I was intimately deeply involved in the world of marketplace, B2B marketplaces in '98 to 2001. I supplied the electronic catalog and technology as the CTO and then the chief strategy corporate development officer of a company called Requisite Technology. That was kind of we dominated the world of electronic cataloging for B2B. And what we found was that the chasm crossing exercise for marketplaces was fundamentally more challenging than it was for two set of marketplaces than it was for regular companies, because you had to make a choice buy side or sell side, so to speak, and then you had to make it stick. And until you made the choice, made it stick and provided the independent value. You as an intermediary were of no interest to anybody who in particular was on the sell side. So they wouldn't see you as being big enough, liquid enough or whatever to play with you. Chris Beall (12:56): It sounds like you you've done that move a little bit differently from most. You've taken us in a situation where somebody was across the chasm with the 10 years and you guys are approaching it at warp speed and you built a bridge of trust in order to call it a gossamer bridge and skipped across what normally would have cost a huge amount of money. How did you get to the trust point where that's even possible in that relationship? Normally that's like preying mantis city. Somebody's going to eat somebody's head before somebody else is going to have sex with them and it's just... Corey is used to this. So how did you do that? I mean, it's like you described it, but something tells me if you remember it like it was yesterday, then it's a little bit more than, hey, let's get together and have a little chat, right? Jason Beck (13:52): Trust is so hard to gain and so easy to lose, right? It is one of the hardest things to gain and the easiest things to lose. And when I think about trust and I think about how great relationships get formed, it is first do what you say you're going to do, right? You got to be accountable. So if I promise that let's say a broker of ours and it's like, "Hey, here's our value proposition. This is what the software is going to do for you." If I was talking about all these pie in the sky features that the software actually didn't have today, but it was, "Oh, it's coming, it's coming. Don't worry. Don't worry." And I wasn't as a sales person, very articulate about, "Hey, this is our roadmap." And a roadmap can change, but here's what I can do for you today, right? Jason Beck (14:32): That's the first part about the whole gaining the trust factor of this and why we've moved at warp speed. I also think that merging the two companies is another really... That's a how do you sign up 50 customers overnight, merged two companies that have 50 customers, right? So that was a big part of why we're here where we're at. And we've had very supportive customers in that. But I think the other part of trust, and I get back to this whole forming a relationship. Once you know your customer pool or your target market intimately, you have to figure out what are their fears? What do they fear about a relationship with you? And you need to make sure that you're none of those things. And when I say none of those things, I mean, not even the semblance of it and specifically in our industry, what does it mean, a brokerage book of business. I'm not selling widgets. Jason Beck (15:17): I am a consultant of sorts. I'm a value added resource. I'm a knowledgeable expert in retail energy as a broker, right? And I'm serving my end use customers. So what's your true asset? It's your brain, right? What the knowledge you have in your head as a retail broker, but it's also your data. It's your customer book. It's the accounts, the meters, right. It's all those type of things. And so why would any broker trust another broker with that data? So for Enerex, it was incredibly important that we have no broker licenses. We're not competing against you, Mr. Customer. In fact, we are trying to do everything we can to be your guide on this journey and let you be the hero. Jason Beck (16:39): As some of these [inaudible 00:16:40]. They're marketing new stuff that talks about that, right? Being the guide as the software provider, not being the hero, I don't need to be the hero. Yes. We might make this marketing incredibly more efficient. And if that makes a lasting impression on retail energy, I hope it does. But my main focus is how do I have happy customers, right, of our software programs. And that's just doing things that maybe they didn't even think they knew could exist and bring those things to market across the two sides of our marketplace. Chris Beall (17:09): So you had to defang yourself? Right in front of God and everybody. Jason Beck (17:12): That's right. Yeah. Hey, we're not that wolf, right. Chris Beall (17:15): Yeah, lets stay calm. Jason Beck (17:15): [crosstalk 00:17:15]. And it's funny because it's not like... We have one company that I would consider them as close to a direct competitor as I can consider them. And then there's a lot of indirect competitors that are trying to approach this, that whole broker of broker route. And there is such a need by the way, for brokers, we serve some of them. Broker of brokers are needed in the marketplace because how do you attract new talents, right. That person that's an accountant, but "Hey, if I have accounting clients, can I sell them electricity?" It's not a far stretch. I'm looking at your bills. I see your bills are high on utilities. Let me help you out with that. Jason Beck (17:54): I know somebody write the referral partners. So I think there's a huge need for those folks in the marketplace. I just don't know that they're going to bring together this solution, this trusted architecture of broker, supplier communication. And so that's kind of where we saw the need to be filled. By the way, realize you're giving up on short term earnings. A lot of short-term earnings by doing it this route. And your play is to continue to just build value with your clients versus trying to take a piece of each transaction today. Chris Beall (18:30): Yeah. I remember back when we did requisite, we had to do our own schema for all the world's product and service information, because we needed to catalog it in a way that allowed a buyer to have their catalog from multiple suppliers, but be easy to use and consistent to use for every one of their users. Jason Beck (18:48): You have a product that [crosstalk 00:18:49] SIC codes out there, right? Probably different [crosstalk 00:18:51] products. Chris Beall (18:50): Oh, yeah. Jason Beck (18:51): What a challenge. Chris Beall (18:53): Yeah. And we came right down to the product category in a way that was understandable and searchable and all of its attributes that were relevant for purchase. And we codified all of that. So it wasn't just SIC codes. It was right down to, this is a one half horsepower compressor motor with a capacitor start. It was that kind of stuff. And when we took that step, we thought we were entering into a world where we would be more trusted as a result. But then the community decided that because we controlled the schema, we were less trusted. And we made the mistake of naming the schema after ourselves, even though we just called it, Russ, everybody knew it was the requisite unified schema. We should've called it UNSPSC2, after the United Nations Services and Products [inaudible 00:19:41] and taking advantage of the fact that their trademarks were weak. Do you have something like that where you're doing the right thing and you know it's the right thing. But the impression that some people have might be [inaudible 00:19:57] they say it's the right thing, but it feels a little bit like a power grab to me. Jason Beck (20:00): But then I hope my client who I talked about this yesterday gets to see this podcast and I'm not going to do a direct channel, but I speaking to somebody the other day, great client of ours and he said to me, "Jason, I'm telling you this because we're friends. How many other clients do you think you have that aren't telling you this?" And I said, "Great point. That's a great point." Which is that fear of wait a minute, if you become the marketplace, do you just get rid of me, right? Do you even need brokers? If you guys have all the data, you have all the transfers, can you just go to the end-use customer? And by the way, the answer is, yeah, absolutely. We could. Now again, where I keep coming back to is the fact that you need that expertise in certain, specifically in commodities, things that you can't touch and feel, and the consumer product goods much easier, right? Jason Beck (20:48): I always say it's like a travel industry. He brought up the concept of the floral industry, which until this week, I didn't even think about that, right. But you had the same thing that happened in travel to all the florist in the country, right? You had Teleflora and FTD and they basically just started taking a piece of every single transaction. Oh, well, I can give you this and I can give you this. And then all of a sudden, well, I'm just going to go direct to the consumer. What I continue to tell people in retail energy and Cory, I love that. I'm going to steal that [inaudible 00:21:16]. Jason Beck is the pied piper of retail energy, trying to move it forward. And I have so many folks that have been backing me up on this journey because I know we can be stronger together, but it's this aspect of retail energy is incredibly detailed and it's different in every single state. Jason Beck (21:34): And it's also different in every single utility. Pennsylvania has six utilities in and out by itself, just that one state and it's different. The components of the energy transaction is different. And so if you're comparing, what your supply contract is going to be on the electricity side or you have to do nominations on the gas side, either you're an expert or you need an expert. And that's kind of where I say to myself, yeah, I understand the fear and I can't do any... I'm not going to like sit on a piece of paper and say, we will never replace... No company is going to literally handcuffed themselves for what the future could hold. But I continue to keep saying, and I really truly believe this, that in certain complex sales, you need an expert. And if you don't have an expert, it's very hard to navigate those sharky waters. Usually those are the people that gets their lunch eaten. Chris Beall (22:27): You're an expert, but you need an expert you can trust. So how do you get to the point of trusting that expert. Because expertise, confers power, right? So I'm an expert, I'm very powerful. And I'm very powerful if I'm on your side, that's great. If I'm on my side, you don't know if my side is your side. So it's uncertain and if I'm not on your side at all, I'm against you, then everything's very clear and we fight. So the position that is most dangerous is the one in the middle where it's like, "Well, are you on my side or not?" So how do you get them to believe, to know, not believe incorrectly but to know for certain. You said something really fascinating earlier, you have to remove everything that they would be concerned about, including the appearance, the image, the thought, the nascent sense, incipients. I love that word of becoming that thing that they would be concerned about, right. And how do you do that? What's step zero. What is steps there? Yeah, go look up incipients, it's a heck of a word. Jason Beck (23:27): Yeah, I will. I got my vocabulary [inaudible 00:23:30] really good. No, that's awesome. I think that when you are trying to... Is that everything you're 100% right. And I don't think you're ever going to dispel people's beliefs, right? They know if it's still a possibility, it's still a possibility but the way you really do that is you focus on the value that you're providing. And for the service that I am providing you, right? The cost I'm providing you at, and it's today, right? Don't worry about the future. The future is going to hold what it is, but today is that value 5X, 10X, 20X of what I'm costing you. And if you look even at the risk of the future, right, that you're talking about again, although we have nothing that could let us sell to end use customers today. Jason Beck (24:19): Again, no broker licenses, no supplier licenses. We just focus on software and technology. Is that a viable risk for you, Mr. Customer? And then they have to make that decision. And that's the tough part. I would say, you got to focus on the value you're providing for that customer. And if today it's just exponentially more than what the cost is or the future risks are. It's an easy decision to make for most customers. I also live in an industry that has not adopted technology incredibly quick and fast. So even still, even though when we say market dominance, right, Chris and I talked about this, we have 120 retail energy brokers on our software here on Enerex, our nearest competitor has between 25 and 30. Corey Frank (25:02): Yet already condition the market in your favor and against all these other competitors, current and future. And Chris and I talk about this a lot. I interview him and Chris, right. You know that the most reliable way to establish trust is to get to every relevant person in that market. And you as this pied piper, right, conditioning the market with forwarding, with trust, not with an email, not with a voicemail, not with a mere website, right. We see your website there, but in Jason and what you offer. I think that transference of the bits of what Jason has to say is truly why you're... He's following the playbook, Chris, what you say as far as how to get to a market dominance in this... The riches are in the niches. Well, you definitely are on the way there, Jason. Jason Beck (25:58): Well, thanks so much. I really do appreciate that. And when I was talking to Chris about this and I saw both, young blood in what you guys are doing in training up fresh people, right. Fresh out of college and giving them a really strong career in sales. I was one of those... I still don't even like the word sales. I don't know how many sales... That's another quick topic I'd love to transition to is this world of sales, right? Tell me how you guys feel about that in terms of I'm trying... Nobody wants to be sold something, right? So when we talk about this, I've developed trust because I've been in the industry for 15 years and I can prove trust out to you. And then those first few clients, you get them to be referrals for you. Jason Beck (26:40): And then you have the eighth person called the first in the 40th person called the 10th person. Right? And that's how you continue to grow is as you have really good relationships, but that's just happened naturally for me, calling, discussing, having those conversations, grabbing that trust, moving them to a transaction. And I get to represent a fantastic team of 70 behind me in this marketplace. But I will candidly still say that I don't like being called a salesperson. It has too many negative connotations. Now by the way, I actually love being called a salesperson when people are like, "Man, you're a great sales person." Thanks. What should work? Was that serious or was it? Right. So I'd love to hear kind of your just thoughts on that, of this dirty word of sales. What's Cory and Chris's take on that dirty word of sales? Corey Frank (27:29): Well, if you'd listen to any of the prior 63 64 episodes we've done. Chris certainly has sold his share products from fuller brush, et cetera. So I'll let him, I'll defer to age before beauty here, because he's got such an exceptional background that sales as a term may have a denotation as such, but the connotation of sales over the years, especially how Chris weaves it in and out of how the fuller brush experience has led to him being the innovator that he is at ConnectAndSell. I think really stems from whether you sell him fuller brush or spider repellent in the garage to talking with CEOs of... And private equity firms has to do with the trust factor that you're talking about here so adroitly here, Jason. So Chris, what would you say that Jason's concept of sales as a profession and the denotation that exists out there in the world today? Chris Beall (28:27): Well, I don't like sales either. So to me, sales has a bag of tricks, tips and tricks. I gave a talk once at American Association of Inside Sales Professionals event in San Francisco. And it was an unusual talk, my normal talk is about market dominance or about using the voice or about stuff like that. But I decided to tell these inside sales folks that they were the most important people in the economy and here's why. And so I broke it down for them, how the entire economy is built around B2B. And because businesses have to make stuff before consumers can buy them and all government can do is tax. So if you follow the money, you start with the innovations in business that turn into ultimately things that consumers can do. And so here B2B has been transformed from I'll call it, run around knocking on doors to accessing larger markets, which means more of them as remote. Chris Beall (29:25): If your solution doesn't have a geographical boundary around it naturally then inside sales, which is really just remote sales done professionally becomes the thing. And therefore, you're now at the beating heart of the entire economy. And perhaps you at the bottleneck of the whole economy, which means, hey, inside salespeople, your skills and your professionalism are the limiting factor in the growth of our economy for everybody who's alive. Corey Frank (29:53): Wow. Chris Beall (29:54): So take it seriously. So take it seriously, right. So I gave that talk, right? And I came off the stage and I won't say which of the people who was at the AISB because they are dear friends of mine took me aside and said, "Don't ever give a talk like that again, they want tips and tricks." They want tips and tricks. And I actually shuttered a little bit because the last thing in the world I would ever want to do is to use a tip or a trick. Now I know some tricks, here's a trick. If you're ever doing any public speaking, use the word blood and you'll get the audience's entire attention, 100% of the audience for about eight seconds. They will never forget the next things you say, that is a trick. But if you use that trick against your audience, instead of for your audience, you're a charlatan, you're a thief, so- Corey Frank (30:45): You [inaudible 00:30:45] every single bit of trust that you thought you were getting, right? Chris Beall (30:47): Exactly. So the trick of sales without sales being dirty is to literally think of it as a service business, where you have the luxury of becoming an expert in an area where the buyer doesn't have the luxury of becoming an expert and therefore you have the opportunity to advise them. And that advice given rationally with any kind of reasonable timeframe around their need will lead to a transaction. And then you just have to be willing to transact. The hard part about sales emotionally is that there's this thing called closing and closers are people like me who are willing and I'm telling you this straight up in business, I am willing to sacrifice the relationship as it's developing for the transaction that leads to you getting value or deciding you don't want to move forward. Chris Beall (31:42): I'm willing to do that because time is too precious. And that's a hard thing to do with somebody you like. And I think that makes sales very, very difficult because we have to do two emotionally impossible things. One is we have to ambush strangers with an expectation of helping them. And the other is we have to sacrifice relationships with the expectation of getting clarity as to whether it makes sense to transact or not. We don't like either one of those, they're both bad things in our personal life. In our personal life, we approached people that we wanted to have relationships with on an ambush for your own good basis. And then we sacrifice those relationships based on the fact that time is running out and we got to transact or not, then- Jason Beck (32:24): What do I [inaudible 00:32:26] right? Yeah. Chris Beall (32:26): Exactly. So it's very... Sales is so delicate because we have to only ask first. Well, not only, but we have to ask first, what do they get out of it? And as an expert, can we be an honest broker and be their side? Because it's actually imbalanced. I know more than you do when I'm selling to you. Therefore, I have to take your side in the transaction otherwise, it's imbalanced. That's just simple, that's just a fact, right? And an imbalance transaction [crosstalk 00:32:52].  

Today on the Market Dominance Guys, you’re invited to join Chris and Corey and their guest, Roderick Jefferson, the CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, a global sales enablement consultancy firm. This trio of sales gurus outlines the whys and how's of providing sales teams with the information, training, content, and tools that reps need to successfully engage buyers throughout the buying journey. This is known as “sales enablement.” Sounds like a pretty simple “follow the blueprints” process, doesn’t it? And, yet, as Roderick informs us, if you ask 10 people what sales enablement is, you’ll get a multitude of answers.   Chris and Roderick discuss this quandary and, more specifically, how the pandemic has impacted training and overseeing sales teams now that each rep works from home, physically away from their manager’s watchful eye. Roderick relates this problem to that of an orchestra whose conductor is missing. Like so many other things now, sales enablement must be fine-tuned to this new situation. In order to orchestrate and conduct a sales team so that each rep plays their part and uses the provided resources in a collaborative manner, a major change must take place in how they are managed. If you’re a follower of the Market Dominance Guys, you know that this episode will have you nodding along with the opinions of Chris, Corey, and their guest, and jotting down notes from their insights. Stay tuned! They aim to help you dominate your market!  ----more---- About Our Guest Roderick Jefferson is CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, a global sales enablement consultancy that uses cutting-edge technology to enable its clients to decrease time-to-revenue and increase productivity.  Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.   Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:19): Well, welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank, and the sage of sales, Chris Beall. Today, Chris, we have yet another guest, I think. And our booking agents finally found time to get on the calendar with. In fact, I think he's probably the only guest we've had that can say they have a lifetime achievement award from anybody. Right? Well, actually I got a lifetime achievement award from Luby's Cafeteria, but Roderick has one from selling power that he got. Corey Frank (02:49): And so, Roderick Jefferson, the sales enablement OG of all OGs is with us. We'll talk a little bit about it, but sales enablement at Oracle, and at Salesforce, and at Marquetto, and way back even to Siebel. In fact, I think you did sales enablement before it was even called sales enablement, right? [crosstalk 00:03:06]. Roderick Jefferson (03:06): I did. As far as I know, I'm the guy that actually created the nomenclature sales enablement. Oddly enough, there's one other guy that claims it. He could have it maybe, who knows. Corey Frank (03:16): Well, we have the right guest for the Market Dominance Guys then today, certainly, Chris. But I am curious, before we start though, Roderick, and we talked about this on the phone the other day, is when you get a lifetime achievement award, is it assumed that they put you out to pasture, and there's no more content coming out of that grape of yours, and there's no more good ideas? If you do happen to create anything that's good, that's fresh, that's new, what do they call that award then? Roderick Jefferson (03:41): You know what they say about assuming? So we're not even going to go down that route. Let's not assume anything. I think if there's anything else, maybe it'll be really cool to have something named after me. Other than that, who knows? Corey Frank (03:54): Like a Lombardi trophy. There you go. Perfect. Roderick Jefferson (03:56): Like the Lombardi. Kind of like that, yeah. The Jefferson. Corey Frank (03:59): Chris, do you have an award named after you, by chance yet? Chris Beall (04:02): Even my children aren't named after me. Corey Frank (04:08): Well, that's good. I think I've known Roderick for almost as long as I've known you, Chris. So it was great. And Roderick was one of the first clients that I had, that actually took my call before the pre 27 seconds. He took a cold call from me and actually bought something from me. And he hasn't been able to get rid of me in 15, 20 years, or however long it's been. Corey Frank (04:27): So it's great to have both of you guys on the Market Dominance Guys here, Roderick. So I appreciate you taking the time with me and Chris. Since we do have a short amount of time, I just want to jump into this concept of Sales Enablement 3.0. I hear some guy wrote a book on it, right? So you just released your worldwide bestseller. They're making it into a movie, I hear. Corey Frank (04:46): But Sales Enablement 3.0, when you told me that, I'm a little panicked. Because I barely mastered sales enablement 1.0, let alone 2. I completely missed 2.0 and right into 3.0. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what is sales enablement 3.0? And what did I miss? Roderick Jefferson (05:04): Yeah. I don't think anything's been missed. And that's exactly why I wrote Sales Enablement 3.0, is the fact that we have been doing the same things the same way, for 20 plus years that I've been in sales enablement. And I was looking at things from a new set of lenses, like all of us now with COVID. Roderick Jefferson (05:20): And I'll say the best thing that's happened, personally, to come out of COVID, is the fact that ... It's done two things. One, it's separated the practitioners from the theorists in sales enablement. And, secondly, it has made all of us get comfortable with being uncomfortable. We now have new technology. We've got all this great innovation around us. But we're still running programs the same way. Roderick Jefferson (05:42): Then comes COVID. Guess what? You can't do that. You don't get to go stand in front of folks anymore. You don't get to build that rapport out at dinner, or having cocktails, or out playing golf. Some do, but most don't get to do that. Roderick Jefferson (05:55): So I was really looking at what are we going to do different, and how are we going to do it different? But more important ... And both of you guys know me, I'm about the why. Why do we have to change? Well, the first thing that came to mind was we've got to stop being seen as a cost center. We've got to stop being seen as the fixers of broken things, and broken people. Roderick Jefferson (06:11): And so the thing that came to me was you train animals and you enable people. We literally have to get to the point to where it's not just about training, it's really about enablement. It's those five Ps: the programs, the platforms, the processes, and the people, that all just jump out at me. Roderick Jefferson (06:27): Here's the problem with sales enablement, big problem I have. And I love my vertical. I love my space. But we've gotten away from realizing that we actually are about people. We're about getting people bigger, faster, and stronger. So, at its core, Sales Enablement 3.0 really comes down to taking an innovative approach, focused on increasing sales productivity, through what I call a systematic approach to support the content, the tools, and the people, to drive increased revenue. Roderick Jefferson (06:55): So when I wrote the book, I wrote it as a blueprint. Because I wished I would have had this as I was coming up the ranks. I've been fortunate to do every role inside of sales enablement, from coordinator, to program manager, to owner, all the way up to executive level. So the book will actually provide folks with a blueprint, that'll help them to navigate the twists and turns that ultimately lead to designing, deploying, measuring, and iterating a world-class sales enablement organization, not just program. Corey Frank (08:03): Chris, to you, over the years, running and leading entire organizations, let alone sales organizations, what have you kind of seen ... We've talked about this a couple of times on the Market Dominance Guys, particularly alignment or misalignment between sales and marketing, and training and hiring, etc. Corey Frank (08:21): But what are some of the more advances that you've seen in the sales enablement 2.0, 3.0 world that we're living in, that adds to what Roderick is saying, that would've made the life certainly easier 10 years ago, 20 years ago, versus today, where you have these types of blueprints available? Chris Beall (08:38): Well, necessity is the mother of pretty much everything, and certainly mother of invention and getting it real when it comes to things like sales enablement. And sales enablement is broad enough that anything can drift in there, right? So you can have a big old, bright sun in there, and then you can have a little planet out there circling way, way far away. And you go, "Oh, it's all sales enablement. It's a big house." Chris Beall (09:00): But, to me, it's always been like this, if it doesn't address the bottleneck in the business, you shouldn't be investing in it. And one of the challenges I've seen, it's not just sales enablement, but everything it's about getting better, is everybody wants to be important. And if everybody wants to be important, that means everybody wants to have their thing be something that needs to be improved. But most things don't need to be improved. There's one thing that needs to be improved, it's the bottleneck. Chris Beall (09:25): And if you don't take step one, and go find the bottleneck, you're just messing around. You're just putting people to work. It's like, "What are you doing?" "Well, I'm grading the side of this road." Well, does the road ever need to be built? That's somebody else's problem. I'm busy grading the side of the road, because somebody gave me a ... Back when I used to work at McCormack Ranch building that thing, some Hungarian dude was yelling at me, and I had a rake and I had a shovel. And he said, "Chris, shovel you the concrete." Well, I shoveled the concrete, my friend. Chris Beall (09:52): That's what I did, right? Did it make any difference? Was there any why in it? Who knows? Because when you operationalize why ... You operationalize why by finding the process bottleneck that responds in this way. We make it bigger. We make stuff go through it faster at the same quality, we get more out the end, revenue. If that's what we want, it's revenue. Chris Beall (10:15): And sales enablement, because of COVID, has finally had to face the necessity of being more relevant and addressing the bottleneck. Because the bottleneck conveniently moved, in a moment, to a new place, which was communicating with your sales people how they're supposed to do their job. Because it used to just eat it up by osmosis out on the floor. And now suddenly there ain't no floor. So now it's like, "Oh, we actually have to do this thing." Now, it's still hard to figure out what you're measuring when you do that thing. But at least you had to do it. And that's necessity. So I think that we've had a really interesting transition. Chris Beall (10:55): You've always been a systematic guy, Corey. I could go out on your floor and I could see systems. I could walk out there. And I could say to the person with me from ConnectAndSell, "Look at that. See what those five guys are doing over there? I guarantee you, they do that every single day, that five right over there. Because this is a Cory Frank shop." So that's what happens, right? You've always done systems. But, for most people, they don't do systems. They just let osmosis do its job, and then they want to take credit. Corey Frank (11:25): Tim Ferriss handles the Titans. It's funny, Chris, we were just talking about that with the team over at Youngblood Works today, said very ... He interviewed Seth Godin, and talked about that very thing that you and Roderick are talking about, that departmental goals or vanity metrics, Roderick, which I've heard you talk about many times, right? Chris and I talk about that. Roderick Jefferson (11:44): Butts in seats and smiley sheets. Corey Frank (11:45): That's right. But, those departmental goals, those are for average organizations. But top tier organizations have systems in place that are replicable over time. And how many different ways can you attack a territory? How many different ways can you hire a sales rep? How many different ways can you go to market? There's a handful. There's not an end amount. Corey Frank (12:09): And so after years and years of sales in the digital world today, I think that, if you don't have a system, even if it doesn't work, it sounds like you're missing out, if you are stovepiping or tiering your organization into these different fiefdoms, marketing, versus sales, versus recruiting, versus training, retention team, account management team, etc, without a system to get them a snug ... And I think you used the analogy of an orchestra, which I'd like Roderick to kind of describe all this, correct? Roderick Jefferson (12:40): Yeah. It's collaboration. It's communication. It's orchestration, which, standalone, sounds like a lot of fluffy marketing terms, but it's not. And I'm going to dig deep ... But I want to double tap on something that Chris said earlier, is we don't do enough of finding the why at sales enablement folks. And we've got to go deeper on that. Roderick Jefferson (12:58): And to the point around the vanity stats, yeah, I believe there are two different types of metrics when it comes to sales enablement, one that enablement influences and impacts, and then another set that we own. On the sales side, the pieces that we influence are the typicals of average deal size, collateral frequency, deal velocity, pipeline creation, and velocity quota attainment, time to revenue, all those. Roderick Jefferson (13:21): And I'm going to say this directly to my sales enablement folks that may be listening, stop saying that you drive revenue unless you carry a bag. You do not. You influence and you impact revenue. The things that we own are the things like the accreditations and certifications, the needs analysis, the programmatical bills, the tools, the processes, the programs, those things, and sales. Roderick Jefferson (13:42): And then, on the success side, a whole other set of metrics that some claim we own, and I don't believe we do, I think we impact and influence, adoption rates, annual recurring rates, customer churn rates, red account reduction, those kind of things. And so how do you come about understanding how to get those metrics right, and who you need to work with? That's where the orchestration piece comes in, that you were just talking about, Corey. Roderick Jefferson (14:06): And it's literally the analogy of we've got all of these different pieces to an orchestra. You've got strings, woodwinds, percussion, brass, etc, that come into play in trying to do the right thing, and make this incredible orchestrated sound. Now, let's now akin that to the lines of business. You've got sales, sales enablement. You've got marketing, product marketing, engineering, product management, etc. And they're all trying to do the right thing for the customer or the prospect. Roderick Jefferson (14:33): The problem is they're stepping over each other. Sometimes they're playing sour notes. They're just a bit off. Until one person or one organization, the orchestrator, which I believe is sales enablement, steps up, taps the stand, and now all of that chaos becomes a beautiful sheet of music. That's what enablement does. Roderick Jefferson (14:50): And something else you said earlier, Chris, that really resonates with me, and that is there are so many different definitions of what sales enablement is. And I think if you ask 10 people you'll get 12 answers. And I don't know that any of them would be wrong. The problem is enablement does not have standard nomenclature, similar to what PMI has for project management. Roderick Jefferson (15:11): And that's kind of the goal of sales enablement society is to put that all together. I don't think we've hit that target yet. I think we've hit all the spots around it, but I don't think that target has been hit. So what we've got to do is understand what sales enablement means in your given company, based upon the maturation cycle of where your company is today, and also what the goals are of where you're going. Corey Frank (15:32): Chris, with a weapon like ConnectAndSell, you have a front row seat, oftentimes, of people who ... Their mindset, their goals, their heart may be in the right place, but implementing a weapon like ConnectAndSell flushes out all these misaligned enablement pieces in an organization, does it not? Chris Beall (15:55): Well, yeah, down to a certain point. Not all of them. Really, all ConnectAndSell is generally used for is to create discovery opportunities. It has other uses. But you have to be so sophisticated to make use of those other uses, that they all look like one-offs to me. They're fun to look at. I go, "Oh, how pretty?" But I don't go off and tell somebody to try it. It's like, "No, really? I don't think so." Oh, chasing down people who went dark before the end of the quarter. Okay, some guys use it for that. Great. Chris Beall (16:24): But I like the ones who go, "You know what? We got 250,000 folks in this market. We want to talk to 137,300 of them in the next three years. We want to set appointments with and hold those appointments with 62,150 of them. And we want to do that over this fixed period of time. We want to convert 18.7% of those to first deals. And we want 9% of them to turn into deals after a year or so, when the timing's finally right. Therefore, let's talk to a whole bunch of them. Therefore, let's not qualify on first calls." There's all a bunch of therefores that fall out of it. Chris Beall (17:04): What's funny about ConnectAndSell is the 10X. Because the 10X is weird. I mean, 10X's are really, really not comfortable to wield, right? They're not. It's like, "Hey, I'll give you a sword. It's 10 times more powerful. Let me show you how to use it in the house." Well, I don't have a house anymore. And now I've got to go live somewhere else. That's not much fun. So you got to be careful with something this fast, and you got to make sure you're applying it to where it can make a difference. Chris Beall (17:29): And the big thing I've seen is that most people don't know what would make a difference. They really don't. What they do in their budgetary process is everybody raises their hand, says, "I want some." And then the assumption is everything makes a difference. And everything doesn't make a difference. It just doesn't. Right now, only one thing can make a difference. And the hardest thing to do is to go find it. Chris Beall (17:52): And when you got something as fast as ConnectAndSell, you either find it, or you wrap that Ferrari around a tree. Those are the only two possibilities. And it's really quite dramatic. So we get to see that quick, violent bifurcation between aligned situations, or aligned enough, that you're actually doing something for a reason, that is you're going to move a real needle. Or whether you're just doing it because somebody said, "I want more. I want more. I'm like The Little Mermaid. I want more." Corey Frank (18:20): Is there one department more than another, when Robert talks about the different pieces of the orchestra in an organization, that you've seen Chris, over the years, that needs to embrace, albeit reluctantly so, this concert strategy more than another? In other words, I'm used to working in an independent arena, and everybody else supports me. Chris Beall (18:43): Well, it's sales. I mean, sales is the land of the lone wolf. And we take people into sales development roles, and say, "The only reason you have to do this job is so you can be a lone wolf someday." I mean, we do that. We literally do that. We say, "This job sucks, but if you do it for a while, we'll let you go lone wolf it up, and you'll have a lot of fun. And then you can just do things your way. You can reinvent sales. I mean, after all, it's a discipline that's only a few thousand years old. Maybe you'll come up with a new flavor of it that'll knock everybody's socks off. You be the person." So I just think it's really interesting that there's this whole sales and marketing alignment problem, that I think I mentioned once maybe on the show. Chris Beall (19:25): I talked to John Neeson way back when, founder of SiriusDecisions, co-founder. And I asked him, "John, what's the maximum conversation coverage you've ever seen on inbounds? Somebody's generating the inbounds, marketing's got them coming in. What's the maximum percentage you've ever seen spoken with at one of your clients?" And he just said, "9%." Long pause on my side. I said, "So, John, does that mean 91% of all marketing budgets are wasted, because sales doesn't bother to talk to the leads?" Long pause. He says, "Never say that to anybody." Chris Beall (19:58): You didn't hear it here, but marketing generally will do their job within parameters. And their job is harder than is right, because they're trying to take a stew of information out there, publicly available information, and turn it into some kind of a list of folks worth talking to. I mean, really that's what it is, right? Sales tends to approach the job like this. Eh, I don't like that one. Why? Well, I assume it's no good, because it looks kind of like this other one I didn't like. That's where the variety shows up first. And we encourage it, and fan the flames all the way through the sales process. Roderick Jefferson (20:31): Chris, you're absolutely right. And, for so long, it's been the nomenclature of sales is the sun. And the further you get away from the sun, the colder it gets, which there is some truth to that. But, at the same time, I love what you were just saying. Too many times in my career, I've seen where marketing says, "We give so many leads to sales, and they never do anything with them." Sales in turn says, "Yeah, you give us leads, but they all suck." Roderick Jefferson (20:56): And I've asked one question, and that question is, have you guys ever actually sat down at the same table and defined and agreed upon what a sales or a marketing qualified lead actually looks like? Long pause, to use your words. And the answer is, generally, why would we do that? We know what they need. And sales says, "We know what we need." Yeah. But have you actually ever told each other what those are? Generally the answer is not yes. Chris Beall (21:23): Generally, the answer is not yes. And what's really interesting ... And, Roderick, I come from a weird background, right? I'm a physicist who used to build big software systems. That's what I did for a living, right? So here's how I build big software system. I draw a big circle on a whiteboard. I draw a line. I'm going to do this from your perspective. It comes out from the right-hand side. It's got an arrow on it. I put a little stick figure at the end of it. I say, "Here's what we're going to build. Here's its only output it's allowed to have." Chris Beall (21:47): Right now, in our minds, we're only allowed one output. No compound sentences need apply. There's somebody that's an actual human being somewhere on earth, nowhere else. They got a title, they got a job, they got responsibilities. And then I put a little dollar sign over it, goes, "When one unit of this output goes to this person, how many dollars are saved, or how many are made by them, or the organization they're responsible for?" That's a why on a system. Real simple. Chris Beall (22:14): Then you ask the key question, which is what is the minimum input ... What are the minimum inputs required to make one unit of output? How good do they have to be? Now, if you can answer that question in sales, you're golden, right? You're golden. Sales is a system that produces an output, called a deal. Somebody makes money off the deal. What are the minimum inputs, and are they available. That's what nobody asks, are they available? Chris Beall (22:40): So sales goes, "Well, I want inputs that I want it to be good." Well, what if good's not available out there? That is, what if the information required to get past what you're getting right now isn't available? Well, you got to finish it. And that means, among human beings, you've got to talk to somebody. So my suggestion would be this. They should get together, just like you said. But how about if they got together with 20 perfect prospects, one at a time? Roderick Jefferson (23:08): Absolutely. That's step two. They've got to get past each other first. Right? Then sit down with that perfect prospect together. Yeah. Chris Beall (23:17): But do they do it? No. And I think the reason is politics. When you come right down to it, budgetary politics, rules, organizations. Somebody gets the money, right? So if I say that I need you, then I'm implicitly saying, "I need you to get some of the money that's coming to me." Chris Beall (23:36): And that I think is the big problem that keeps ... I think that keeps sales enablement from being appropriately at the table, more than anything else. Because it's like, "Well, we already how much money there is. So now we're kind of done." Roderick Jefferson (23:49): Yeah. That's like trying to go to a client after the hour, and P is already written. A little late now. Chris Beall (23:55): That's a great example. A little late now. Roderick Jefferson (23:58): Yeah. A little late now. Thanks for the input. But it's already in ink. Chris Beall (24:02): Where's the CEO, is my question. You want results as a CEO, why aren't you at that meeting? Roderick Jefferson (24:09): Oh, great question. And, as a sales enablement practitioner, that's one of the things that I always push for. And that is we cannot have sales enablement initiatives. We have to have sales enablement woven into the fabric of the company. And that only happens from the top down. Roderick Jefferson (24:23): If this is one of their top three or top five initiatives for the year, then you get movement, because you've got some wood behind the arrow. But if it's sales enablement saying, "I need you to do this," or in some cases, "It would be really nice if you kind of sort of maybe might think about doing this," then you're not going to get anywhere. Because now you're a nuisance, and you're bringing no value. Roderick Jefferson (24:44): The value comes when it comes from C-level down, and they say, "This is the direction we're going. And in order for us to hit these success metrics, it requires that each of you communicate, collaborate, and orchestrate together. Now, go play together and figure out how it's done. And if you can't figure it out, then I'm going to have to jump in and help you figure it out. And that's not going to be nearly as pleasant of a conversation." Chris Beall (25:06): Yeah. Well, there's a fun one there, which is ... And this nobody will do, but I like to throw it out there, because I do it out of probably personality disorder, or some other illness that has not yet [crosstalk 00:25:17]. Roderick Jefferson (25:16): Your crazy idea of fun, Chris? Chris Beall (25:18): Yeah. I got a funny idea of fun, which is, when the CEO goes and sells, and sells real deals, just like everybody else, little ones, big ones, not swoops in on the big ones, but actually sells, sources new deals and sells new deals, you find out what sales enablement needs to provide in a hurry. Because that poor sucker needs what he needs, or she needs, and that stuff's going to happen. Chris Beall (25:41): And then the question is how do you keep it from being idiosyncratic? How do you keep it from being a one-off for the boss? But if you can take that information back, which is like, "Wait a minute. I got one, right?" That happens to me all the time. I finish a process, part of a process. So I sell a little bit. And I finished part of the process. Chris Beall (26:02): And I go to put that information in the CRM, and there's a required field I don't know the answer to. In fact, I don't even know what it means. I literally do not know what it means. And when I asked somebody, they say, "Oh, we always put X in there," whatever X is. I said, "Well, why do we do that?" Well, because that way the required field's filled in, right? Roderick Jefferson (26:21): Then required becomes relative. Chris Beall (26:23): Right. And I think we have a lot of stuff like that, that if the CEO is selling, you find out in a hurry that there's a lot of things we ask salespeople to do that are utter nonsense. And then we don't provide them with stuff that is utter-esence, that's the essence of getting the job done. So have the CEO sell, that's my recommendation, Corey. Corey Frank (26:49): Have a company of all former CEOs, and they become the sales organization. That's it, right? Chris Beall (26:55): Poor guy doesn't have to sell forever, but I don't like CEOs just selling big deals, the swoop swoop. I just hate that [inaudible 00:27:01]. If I'm going to do it, my thing is give me little ones, give me the trash, throw me the stuff nobody else wants. Roderick Jefferson (27:08): Because can't set an example by being a super closer, right? If you only come in and swoop in on the big ones, then you really have no idea what it takes to close those. And, to your point, if the internal pieces actually talk to each other, beyond just the CEO, right? Roderick Jefferson (27:22): And I think that's another one of the key values of true sales enablement, is that we're what I call the translators of dialects and languages. So we've got to be able to speak marketing, product marketing, engineering, HR, etc. As an old sales guy myself, and I'm back here, I loved going out. And miss those pieces of being able to go out with sales folks. Roderick Jefferson (27:44): Because I could go and listen to 10, 12 prospects, customers, and come back and say, "Hey, product marketing, marketing, loved the company pitch. But we get the slide seven, one of two things happens, either no one uses it, or I've heard it described 10 different ways. Can you either smooth that thing out or get rid of it?" Then I can go to product management and say, "Hey, I've had eight different prospects asked for the same feature. How do we get it moved up on the release cycle?" Roderick Jefferson (28:09): Then I go back to sales and to HR and say, "Folks, what I'm realizing is we've got our ICP, our ideal client or customer profile nailed. What we really lack in is we don't know what our IEP is, our ideal employee profile. Because we're not in a different maturation cycle, and we're still hiring like it was yesterday. So what we need really is to look at and identify and address where we're going. Maybe we need a more senior person. Maybe we need to go and hire folks from different verticals or different companies, or even the BDRs, SDRs. Let's look outside of those top 10 schools that we always go and look at, and we're not getting what we need. If we keep hiring the way that we did, we'll get to the edge of the chasm, but we'll never get across." Roderick Jefferson (28:52): Now, bear in mind, you've got to have a little level of credibility to be able to say these things. But if you don't say it, then you're a theorist. You're not a true self enablement practitioner.

In this follow-up to last week’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, “Your Sales People Are Brain Surgeons,” Chris and Corey have another conversation with ConnectAndSell’s customer success manager, Donny Crawford, about using the telephone plus your beliefs to gain market dominance. First things first, they discuss how to get prospects on the phone who are the most likely to set a meeting with you. It sounds like a numbers game — more dialing equals more people picking up the phone, which equals more meetings set, right? But as every sales rep knows, you can lead a prospect to a conversation, but you can’t make them link you to their calendar. That rate of success is fairly low. In his experience calling on prospects, though, Donny discovered an amazing way to increase the dial-to-meeting conversion rate: make more calls to people on your follow-up list. He found out that if at first you don’t succeed, call, call, call again. Wait till you hear what his success rate is — and then listen to the story Chris tells about follow-up calls, which corroborates Donny’s experience. ----more---- Donny also shares the most important key for success in a cold call, and then he lists for you all the other ingredients in his proven recipe for successful conversations with prospects, one of which is his practice of listening to his own recorded cold calls to hone his ability to sound human. As Corey says in the wind-up to this interview, what we’ve got here is “another great, fantastic episode of the Market Dominance Guys!” We sure do! About Our Guest Donny Crawford is a Customer Success Manager for ConnectAndSell. He is responsible for providing Flight School training to sales representatives of ConnectAndSell customers in order to help them become more effective and successful when cold calling.   The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:15): There are some weird sub lists that are out there, but you're right, Donny. The big question is, do they trust you? If you handle the first seven seconds of the first conversation right, they trust you for the rest of their life, and it's not a voluntary thing, unless you blow it. Corey Frank (02:31): Well, that's true. We talked about that many times, about the trust. I'm curious about... Let's talk some turkey here on some actual conversion rates. Just ballpark conversion rates here, Donny, of what you've seen from maybe dial to meeting. Implementing this practice, if I didn't, if I'm an average inside sales leader on the street, and maybe I use a dialer. Maybe I don't. Maybe I use ConnectandSell. Maybe I don't. I'm probably in the what dial to meeting range, would you say? Just an at rest, average inside sales team? Donny Crawford (03:12): I don't know. Chris, would you say probably somewhere in the 500 to 700 dials to get a meeting range? Chris Beall (03:17): Yeah, it's pretty normal to see... 500 is a reasonable cold number. Corey Frank (03:22): Yeah. That's what I would say. Maybe a little bit higher for tougher gets, if the persona or ICP is higher, and then my contact conversion rate. For every hundred people I talk to, for instance, on a given day, what should I expect? Four? Five? I don't know. Maybe a little bit more, a little bit less? What do you generally see? Donny Crawford (03:44): I would say the less trained sales rep who's on their own doing what feels comfortable is, on average, going to set meetings around maybe 3% of the time on a first conversation, maybe 4%. The well trained, the well honed in skilled cold caller, the person who is having those initial conversations, I think that can rise up to 5% to 7%, 7% to 9% for a first conversation. For a first conversation, most of the time, the majority of the time, probably 90 out of 100 conversations, they're not going to turn into a meeting that first conversation. It's okay. Everyone needs to be okay with that. Corey Frank (04:29): Okay. What have you seen after you go to the flight school to implement this process that... I love the fact that a lot of it was implemented under duress. You had this Damocles plan hanging over to you, all the best ideas. I had a friend... All the best ideas come from being in the vicinity of porcelain in the bathroom, in the shower, or wherever. The second best ideas come under duress under stress. It sounds like this concept of the follow-ups here. What have you seen from some of the ratios, some of the ranges of a conversation percentage? When you have a proud graduate student of the Donny Crawford Academy, what can I expect to see? Donny Crawford (05:15): What's nice is that you can almost break it down to the actual follow-up number. On a first conversation, if you're scheduling at about a 5% rate, then you can almost expect that the second conversation itself will be around a 10% to 11% rate to schedule meetings on just the second conversation with the prospects that you're reaching. On the third conversation, if you actually happen to be able to get a second follow-up in there, you're going to convert at around a 16% rate on a third conversation with the prospect. Corey Frank (05:51): With those numbers, I don't want to lead the witness here, but for Chris had Dottie, is that a great equalizer? Even if I'm a rep that maybe struggles with my empathy, my pitch, my messaging, the fact that I am still following this process, you don't have to sell it. You don't have to be a Tony Award winning actor on stage to sell it. Just following this methodology, I'm going to see a 3x from what I would if I was just purely calling cold. Donny Crawford (06:25): Conversation to meeting conversion, you'll see a 9x dial to meeting conversion. The reason is, you'll be calling on a bucket that's three times more likely to answer the phone. Corey Frank (06:37): Exponentially. Donny Crawford (06:38): I actually had a customer who called me once. They're a very important customer, a customer I just signed a deal with yesterday for something that had a fair number of commas, and some zeros, and stuff like that. I felt good about it at the end of the day. It made me think back to very early in our relationship where we'd done a little tiny deal with them. We were just a few weeks into it. I got a call from a guy who reported directly to the boss who's the son of the person whose name is on the company. He said, "You got to get up here." I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, we'll tell you when you get up here." I jumped on a plane in San Jose and I got off in the appropriate city, and went over to the place, and was ushered into a boardroom where I got to sit for a little while and cool off. Then, a bunch of people came in, none of whom were on my team, all of whom were acting pretty serious. Finally, the big guy came in. He sat down and he said, "You lied to us." I said, "Well, so I'm curious. Which one of my many lies I chose to tell you?" He said, "It was a big one. You told us we would get three times lift on follow-up calls." I said, "Well, from what I'm seeing, you're getting about 3.4 times." He said, "No, we're not. We pay for dials. We're getting nine times lift. Why didn't you tell us? We would've focused harder on it. The reason we called you up here is to get a detailed step-by-step instruction manual on how to make maximum use of follow-ups, creating them, and using them, and maybe retiring them." I said, "I don't have to talk to you about the third one. You never retire. You never do." Corey Frank (08:26): All I had to do was have you come to Scottsdale and show me that manual? That's all I had to do? Donny Crawford (08:32): All you had to do was allow me to fulfill the request I made to come to Scottsdale [crosstalk 00:08:40]. Corey Frank (09:20): [crosstalk 00:09:20] I bought the technology and I knew what I was doing, Chris. I didn't need no stinking training school, come on [inaudible 00:09:29]. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I was waiting for me to get up here, but what are you going to do? Chris Beall (09:36): Donny couldn't shut up. You would've listened to him. Corey Frank (09:42): That's right. That's amazing. Three in nine x time. Obviously, if I do all the other things that we've talked about, Market Dominance Guys, such as empathy and tonality and screenplay writing, and I implement the logistical processes of Donny Crawford here, that I can obviously expect to get some pretty impressive numbers. Getting out of the Gates in Q1, it seems to me that this isn't a really complex... There's not many barriers to entry to actually start doing this. It's not like I need to do a lot of plumbing, correct? Chris Beall (10:20): To do Blitz and Coach, there's no plumbing, right Donny? [crosstalk 00:10:24] Do you have an Excel file where you wind up in an hour to be annoyed by Chris Beall for an hour in order to get to the point where you finally believe in his breakthrough script approach? Is that it? Donny Crawford (10:36): Yeah, exactly. I think you have to narrow down on what truly valuable theme are you offering this person you're reaching out to for the first time. If you break it down, and we've heard Chris talk about it a lot. There's three values. If we can touch it, if we can find those three values, economic, emotional, and strategic value that we're bringing to the marketplace, and we can just clearly identify that in simple to use words, and just a very simple phrase, and say it with belief, and believe in the value of the meeting that we're going to set up with this organization, there's no problem. If you can figure out that thing that you're offering the marketplace that's a breakthrough, and then you have a list of people that you need to tell all about this, and you're excited to do it, and you have the belief and the sincerity in your voice, and a little bit of skill. The little bit of skill is actually not what you have to begin with. The skill comes when listening back to your own recordings of these calls because when I listen to myself, I'm like, "Oh, why did I say it that way?" The next time I deliver it, I'm not going to say it that way anymore. I'm going to practice it and listen to myself, and I'm going to hear how I'm coming across. Do I sound human? That's what I need to actually get across. You can learn that in one blitz, absolutely. You listen to yourself and you're like, "Oh, freak. That was horrible." The next time you come to the next blitz and you're calling those same people, delivering the same value prop to them, you're going to be able to say it in so much more. We actually have organizations who are doing blitzes and by their third blitz, they've increased from about the 5% conversion rate. Some of our customers that I've worked with, they're setting meetings on first conversations around 15%. 17% we've seen sometimes, just because they truly believe in it. They have that natural way of interacting with someone that they've learned after a few blitzes. It's really pretty [inaudible 00:12:50]. Chris Beall (12:51): By the way, I'm going to make an analogy here that both of you guys will understand, and I won't. I'm going to do it anyway. You guys have both been to church once or twice, right? Donny Crawford (13:00): I have, yeah. Chris Beall (13:02): Just checking. Think about it. When you think about believing and the key to success in sales is believing in the value of what you're offering, and what you're selling here is a meeting. You have to believe in the potential value of this meeting. Not certain value, right? There's a little faith here. Potential value of the meeting for this human being you're speaking with, whether or not you ever move forward and do business with them. When you really believe that, this whole thing becomes very, very easy. Think about the setting of church. It's a lot easier to believe when you go to church and it's full of other people, than it is when you go to church all by yourself. You go all by yourself, it's a little tricky to have it not be a building. When you go with a whole bunch of other people, it's actually a little tricky just to have it be a building. Corey Frank (13:57): Yeah. Chris Beall (13:59): That's what these blitzes do, I believe. They allow us to believe together. That belief shows up in our voice. This is the ultimate surfer's question. I'll switch from surfing to rock climbing, and show an example of a power of belief. There was a rock climbing problem that I used to work on at the end of Campbell Avenue in Tucson, Arizona off the north end. There's a little thing called Campbell Crag. There was a very obscure part of it that had a very obscure problem that very few people would attempt, because it was so ridiculous. I would go over there every single time when I showed up. As soon as that was warmed up, I'd walk over there and try this thing. I would fall off at exactly the same point. This went on for two and a half years. I went out there probably five times a week. I never got past this point. One day, I was on my way over there, and I realized there was a line. That is, there was one guy at the bottom already. I didn't know him. Never seen him before, and he blazed up this thing. I did not learn one thing technically from him, but I did learn one thing from him. It could be climbed, and I raced up it like nothing. He watched and said, "Oh, you've done this before." I said, "Well, kind of. Just never past this point." Belief inside of yourself drives the opportunity for belief, which is the foundation for change inside of another. When we sell what we're asking for or hoping for, what sincerely want is for another person to change the way that's useful for them. Until we believe they won't believe it. It's hard to believe when you're alone. There's a show on TV called Naked and Afraid. After the third day on Naked and Afraid, nobody believes anything, except bugs are really bad and they're getting hungry. If you remove one of the two people on that, they tap out, as they say. The other person generally just folds up after a day or so, because they don't have anybody to sustain their belief that they're going to make for those 21 days. Corey Frank (16:14): How did you do it then, Donny? Again, if you have this plan, this great sales leader that you had, who poked his stubby finger in your chest to say, "Listen, I'm going to get it out of you." Donny Crawford (16:25): Very skinny finger, by the way. Corey Frank (16:27): Skinny finger. Okay. Gotcha. Like a Mr. [crosstalk 00:16:30]. Donny Crawford (16:30): Oh my goodness, he was [inaudible 00:16:32]. I mean, it was just ridiculous. Corey Frank (16:35): Gotcha. He believed in you when you didn't believe in you, and this process that you used, did the process give you belief, and then that compounded to the point where now it was a switch versus a dial? Let's talk a little bit about how this epiphany happened for you. Donny Crawford (16:56): I think that the act of sandbagging follow-ups to Thursdays, if we're returning back to that experience, sandbag... I'm saying I could have called these people on Mondays and Tuesdays and probably set meetings, but it wasn't going to be financially beneficial to me during the blitz if I set meetings on Wednesday instead of Thursday. Literally, in the truest sense, sandbag these are follow calls to Thursdays where I would get a better advantage. A better outcome. I know that putting a large bucket together of people that I was going to be incredibly comfortable talking to because I had talked to them before, the cold call feels uncomfortable. I like it. I don't mind it, just because I know exactly how to manipulate people's minds. When I get into a first conversation, I'm so good at it. I enjoy meeting new people, and I know what I need to say and accomplish that I'm okay with it. It's way more comfortable to call someone who I've already spoken to before. My belief in the power of the follow-up when I was sandbagging [inaudible 00:18:09] into my blitzes became solidified in that moment. Not only was I able to win the little competition and get some Amazon cards or whatever, but I was also able to see the concentrated effort into a follow-up list would produce a lot of meetings. I was able to be taken off a plan after a month because I knew that I was going to produce and start overproducing even what the expectation of me was. The belief came pretty soon. It was a revelation right type of thing that if I attack and even structure my regular calls... What the beauty of blitz is, and I think I can even relate this to flight school, is that if flight school takes place on one day a week, every single week, repeating for four weeks in a row, on the first week that I'm making calls, and I find a couple of people who are just busy on a call. They can't talk right now. They're not giving me the time of day, but I put a follow-up to next week, I can come back to my second week of calling, get a couple of those people online, and actually make something happen with a second conversation. You can actually build belief in this. Even within four weeks, you can already start seeing the production value of following up with someone. It's pretty cool. Corey Frank (19:31): If it goes through the snake as you load it up, then that's where the exponent occurs. Donny Crawford (19:37): Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Corey Frank (19:40): That's beautiful. What a great story. I'd love to have you back again and again here, Donny, sharing some other war stories of... These percentages that you're seeing, the 3x and the 9x or so in the conversation conversion rate, and the dial, that's pretty sexy stuff. I think for anybody listening who wants to boost their Q1 without an investment in the tech stack, I don't want to have to do any more email, no more SEO, SCM. I don't have to invest in any virtual trade shows. I can just give Donny a call here and he can walk through the process. Certainly, if you want to use ConnectandSell, you amplify those types of results. I just think that's a simple process that every sales leader should be adept at, especially moving into these tougher times to get prospects. With that, this has been another great, fantastic episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank. Until next time. Chris Beall (20:43): Thanks, Corey. Hey, Donny. Thanks for being on. I know one customer today I talked to, they wanted me to send some thanks your way, too. That was a great blitz today. Donny Crawford (20:51): I appreciate it.  

What do you do if you have a group of 25 or so folks on your sales team, and you want to really make a splash in the first quarter of the new year? Due to the on-going pandemic, we all  know that connecting with customers face to face at trade shows is no longer an option. No doubt, your reps are still working from home, most of them researching their prospects and trying a little social media marketing, but all of them eventually doing the traditional dialing, dialing, dialing, and praying, praying, praying that someone will pick up the phone. How, in the name of all that’s financially holy, are your reps going to help your company dominate its market if they simply continue to use the same old methods during this brave new year we are entering? Our two Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, along with this week’s guest, ConnectAndSell Customer Success Manager Donny Crawford, diagnose the problem of what’s keeping companies from the market domination they desire. These three cold-calling practitioners offer their insights into what works best to get the greatest number of conversations with decision makers — despite cold call outcomes like “Not me,” “Not now,” “Not interested,” “Call back later,” or even the dreaded hang-up. Wait till you hear Donny’s proven method for how to turn repeated hang-ups from a prospect into the appointment you’re after. Chris compares the work of a salesperson to that of a brain surgeon, first cracking open a company’s “skull” by getting that first appointment, and then exploring what’s wrong inside the “brains” of a company by having a discovery conversation. Join Chris, Corey, and Donny as they guide you through that operation during this episode of Market Dominance guys, "Your Sales People are Brain Surgeons." ----more---- Listen to Donny's previous episodes: The Power of the Anti-curse to Overcome Rejection Three Reasons Sales Reps Don’t Follow Up   About Our Guest   Donny Crawford is a Customer Success Manager for ConnectAndSell. He is responsible for providing Flight School training to sales representatives of ConnectAndSell customers in order to help them become more effective and successful when cold calling.   Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (00:43): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and your co-host, the Sage of sales, the prophet of profits, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. And today we have another guest. I think we're on a roll Chris. We've had, normally we say, I think we had a rule, no guests, but in the last couple of months or so we had Oren Klaff, had certainly Ryan Reisert. And so we're going to dig deep into the connoisseurs of our craft in your own backyard. We have Donny Crawford, the customer success manager over at ConnectAndSell. And Donny's been with ConnectAndSell for several years, I think over five years, I think you had mentioned Donny, and you're originally from the main streets of San Jose, but now you live in the rarefied air somewhere in a nondescript location in Utah, having spent we'll get out of them. Corey Frank (01:37): But one of the talk with Donny today, Chris, I think too, we were talking about market dominance, certainly for the last 60 plus episodes. Can't believe it's over 60 episodes now. And one of the questions we get oftentimes is, well, how do you put this actually into practice? Can we interview and talk with somebody who puts ConnectAndSell into practice? The theory of market dominance into practice and who lives it at scale? Now, Chris and I, Chris was my guide and my Sherpa here in the days of my previous company, where I was a degenerate gambler. And when I got ConnectAndSell, I just kept spending and spending and spending those dials and eight, nine hours a day. And now I understand from Donny that there's a right way to do it. And I was doing absolutely the 179 degrees away from the right way to actually properly use ConnectAndSell, if I'm going to have an internal team, that's going to be coached up here. So Donny, welcome to the Market Dominance Guys. Donny Crawford (02:41): Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Corey Frank (02:42): Great. So Chris, I think we can probably throw it over to you. And when you look at a lot of the folks who are trying to be practitioners of our craft of market dominance, especially if they have their own internal and they want to hit some of these numbers, they're looking at a new year coming up and say, do I need to hire five, 10 more folks? Do I need to take my trade show dollars that are going to be used in 2021? And maybe put them into SEO. Maybe I should put them into what obviously there's a lot of red meats there. And I think that he can set Donny up here by talking a little bit about, what would I do if I have a team of 25 or so folks on the inside? Maybe 30 or 40 folks. Corey Frank (03:31): And I want to really make a splash in Q1 and I don't want to do the traditional digital. I don't want to just throw something at my tech stack. I can't do trade shows any longer. My field reps are really working from home and now they got to use the phone, but I still need this thing called market dominance. What are some of the things that maybe we can tee Donny up since he sees it every day to kind of guide the average person like me on how to get to the next level? Chris Beall (04:02): Thanks Corey. Yeah. That's, it's fascinating putting this stuff into practice ain't easy, right? Otherwise, there'd only be one episode of Market Dominance Guys, which we'd say is pretty much let me review the bidding here. Talk to everybody in your market, generate trust in seven seconds, harvest that trust over a three-year period. Turn it into meetings when you can and turn it into follow-ups when you can't, that's it. Now that you get into subtle stuff off, if it doesn't work, tweak the message. Corey Frank (04:32): Right. Chris Beall (04:32): If that doesn't work, tweak your list. I think we're done. But obviously, we're not done. Corey Frank (04:36): If that doesn't work call Youngblood Works and we'll do all that for you. Chris Beall (04:39): Yeah. That's exactly right. So the next possibility is, well, maybe it's not that you're doing it wrong, maybe you're just the wrong folks to be doing it. And what you really need is somebody to open the market for you. I compare this to brain surgery. So your salespeople are the brain surgeons, but opening somebody's skull isn't brain surgery, it's just different. And Corey's folks over at Youngblood Works are specialists at getting in there with the drill and the saw and everything and opening the patient's skull without killing them so that you, the brain surgeon can then go in and do the cutting that is going to cause them to have a new personality or a little less cancer or whatever it is that they're looking for that day. So that's great. You can do it that way. I highly recommend it. Chris Beall (05:23): If you don't test drive with Corey's group anyway, you're probably kind of not seeing the whole picture, but so you want that level of intimacy, I suppose, that comes from having your own people, have those conversations or say you want to hybridize and you want to use Youngblood Works folks that we would call, by the way Youngblood Works it's called finishing school for future CEOs. In case you want to know, because you can't become a CEO, unless you can have conversations with strangers and they polish up some of the best business graduates in the world at Grand Canyon University to become those CEOs by going through a program where they learn how to cold call by really doing it. Great. They get a lot of calls. They use ConnectAndSell. Life is good, but say you want to have your own folks doing it. Chris Beall (06:08): There's sort of two ways to go. One is that you're going to just say here, just go. And there you go, you get what you get, right? Here's what you likely to find out. Some of them are what we call weasels. They don't want to talk to people. Some are what we call faux weasels. They say they don't want to talk to people, but they really do want to talk to people. They just don't know what it would be like to talk to people because they haven't tried it. So those are like fake fur, it's like fake fur weasels, right? So those exist too. Then we have these people we call pigs, conversation pigs, and they're hungry for the next conversation, no matter what the last one tasted like, but some pigs can sing and some pigs can't sing, that is some pigs can use their voice to great effect. Chris Beall (06:52): As we've said, the script is the surfboard. Your voice is the surfer. Well, if the pig squeals an ugly squeal, you're not going to get many meetings and you're not going to get a lot of trust. So the question is what is really, it's better than just turning them loose. And we learned this really fast. It only took us 13 years to learn that, after doing this for a while, really folks need the help. And so Donny is our lead at ConnectAndSell on providing that help in two ways. One is structured learning through a messaging workshop and a multi-session thing we call Flight School that I'll let him describe. He's the master of delivering that. And second through structured blitzes. And interestingly, I think Donny, you have a story going way back into your past when you were a young buck sales rep and you were on plan. Chris Beall (07:46): And I don't know, I've never been put on plan before guys, by the way, never. Whenever anybody gets close to that with me, I get a note on my coffee cup like I got in 2001 that said, "Chris, see me, Lou." And what it meant was you're fired. Nobody ever puts my on plan. They just fire me, immediately. But Donny is such a great guy that he had a sales job once where he was put on plan. And you can tell us that story. So Donny, welcome to the show. Market dominance, you do it every day. You're a true practitioner. You help other people do it. So what's that story. Donny Crawford (08:24): Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. I appreciate that. You're right. I was really new to tech sales in San Jose and I was in a team of probably seven to 10 inside sales reps. We were supporting a senior sales team and setting appointments for them. And I'm telling you, the pain you feel every day coming to work and having to make 100 manual tiles is just, it wears on you, right? I mean, at that point, I was super burnt out of it. Yep. You're right, I was put on plan by a new inside sales manager, total stud, I really enjoyed working with them. And he, I think did it because he did like me, but he wanted me to succeed and needed to put a fire under my belt. So I needed to make sure I stepped it up and I'm glad he did it because there's nothing worse in my life than knowing that I'm not performing like I should. And I was pissed. I need to step it up. We also, fortunately, just recently before that had started adopting ConnectAndSell. Donny Crawford (09:30): So our team and our fantastic, one of our first sales reps at ConnectAndSell John Jackson sold it to our company. And Sharmeen was our customer success manager and taught us how to perform really well on the ConnectAndSell platform. And our inside sales manager instituted a weekly blitz. And this is when I really became a really big believer in the power of ConnectAndSell in the weekly blitz, there was a cash prize or gift card at the end of each of these two to three-hour blitzes that we would do as a team, every Thursday. And I learned very quickly how to manipulate winning almost every single one of these blitzes. Chris Beall (10:11): Really? Donny Crawford (10:12): And that's how I did it. And then it actually ended up making me become a massive believer in ConnectAndSell. I started sandbagging every single one of my follow-ups to be run on Thursdays during the blitz. The rest of the team would come to the table with a bunch of cold calls, the big list, the Excel sheet of numbers to call and try to get ahold of people. I put every single person that I had spoken to before and I intended to speak with again, and I called those during my blitzes. Donny Crawford (11:20): And lo and behold conversion happens with follow-up. And if you get ahold of someone you've spoken to before, and you just say, "Hey, what's up, we talked a week ago, we talked a month ago. We'd love to get some time with you." People are more readily open to actually set a meeting with you and- Corey Frank (11:35): These are the folks you talk to, maybe weren't ready to fall in the bucket of a demo. Just needed to be romanced a little bit. You would set all those follow-ups for the same time on Thursday or for the same day on Thursday. Donny Crawford (11:49): Every Thursday. Corey Frank (11:50): And then just knock them down. Donny Crawford (11:51): That's right. Every Thursday. And so I look at the world very simply. There's two kinds of people in the world. It's weird. You're going to classify the human race. Yes. There's two kinds of people. People I've never spoken to and people who I have spoken to, that's it, that's all that matters to me. If I've never spoken to you, I know exactly what I want to say to you, to introduce myself, give you some value and hopefully introduce you into my process of learning something valuable for your business. The second class of people are all the follow-ups, it's all the people who I already spoke to before. So I don't need to worry about the cold-calling angst. I'm just going to call you again. You know me now, all you have to do is just get to know me a little bit more and accept the fact that I want to help your business within this follow-up call and just trying to schedule that appointment. Corey Frank (12:39): See where it sounds like where I screwed up at scale because I do everything at scale. Even my screw-ups are at scale, is that I just used, if I get an email system, if I get outreach or if I do anything, a HubSpot or an act on, I'm going to just throw a ton of money at it and just do that one thing. Chris Beall (12:57): Right. Corey Frank (12:57): And it sounds like what I screwed up with ConnectAndSell is I just did the cold calls and I did bucketize if you will the follow-up process. So how effective is that? Ryan Reisert, I know, our colleague and he's been a guest here. He's a big advocate. Sean is a big advocate. So talk a little bit Donny from your perspective as the flight manager, you're on the flight line directing, how many companies come to these flight schools? 10 at a time? How many can it handle? 20 at a time? Donny Crawford (13:31): Yeah. Yeah. We can handle a lot of reps in a Flight School. So, I mean, we are basically training reps in a series of four, very closely orchestrated coach and blitz sessions with anywhere up to 20, 25, 30 people in a flight school blitz in that program, we could probably even cross a few different companies to introduce them into a blitz. Corey Frank (13:56): Even though there's all these different industries with all these different organizations in the Flight School, the fundamentals of cold calling and follow up and using it as a strategic blitz. Let's talk a little bit about that. Maybe some of the results that you've seen from doing this. Donny Crawford (14:13): Yeah, absolutely. If you are really intent on increasing the productivity of your team, especially let allowing them to learn together, we believe true social selling is not going necessarily into your social network and sending LinkedIn invites and things like that. You can do that and you should, but true social selling is getting together with a bunch of sales reps and selling together, like being social with your team about this, get your management involved, your leadership involved, get them excited about actually now hearing the conversations that the team is having, not just one at a time one-on-one focused information, but now with ConnectAndSell, you essentially are able to get a team together, listen to 50, 100 conversations in an hour from your entire team, and really start to diagnose whether some are capturing the vision of the initial conversation with someone. Creating effective followups and hearing the differences in the styles, the tones, the tempos, the belief that your team is able to actually portray during a first conversation and then diagnose whether they're being truly intentional on how they're going to follow up with prospects. Donny Crawford (15:37): We as sales reps, we oftentimes feel like objections are rejections. So when we get someone to hang up on us during a cold call, we're like, Oh, that guy doesn't want to hear back from me. No, in a month they're not even going to know who you are. So follow-up with them. Corey Frank (15:49): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Donny Crawford (15:50): Teaching sales reps, how to do that has actually, it's a lot easier than I think leadership realizes. It's just necessary to be repetitive and to be teaching very simple and executable principles. And I think that's what [crosstalk 00:16:07]. Corey Frank (16:06): Just so I understand. So when you said you see the world with two sets of eyes, right? One people who you haven't talked to, you've spoken to, people that you have. Once I've spoken with somebody, whether they're a hangup or reject or not now, or you caught me in the car driving my daughter to softball practice, or what have you, they go into the buckets, they go into the process that needs a little bit more conversational nurturing. Is that what I under understand you to say? Donny Crawford (16:40): Absolutely. When you have an initial conversation with someone, you get so many bits of information about the type of person that person is when you've had a conversation with them that you actually, all of us instinctually have this gut feeling on the right time and way to approach someone else. It's instinctual. We all get it. Sometimes it's just like, I would not set up an appointment with that person in three days, if my life depended on it, because they're just going to recognize me and they're going to yell at me if I call them back in three days. So that gut feeling tells me, Hey, let me make sure that I design a strategic way to go after that individual again. If I have a call with them, "Hey, I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" And they're like, "No, I'm not interested," and they hang up on you. Donny Crawford (17:30): It's like a lot of sales rep would be like, that guy I don't need to talk to again. I don't want to, but my gut tells me, Oh, that's a perfect person to approach in a month. And what am I going to say to that person in a month? I'm going to say, "Hey, on December 11th," or whenever it was that I spoke with the person, right? "Hey, when I talked to you on December 11th, I think I caught you at a bad time is now a better time." And they're going to be like, "Oh yeah, I got a little time now, what was this about?" You can just go into that conversation in a nice soft way where you actually have informed them I've spoken with you before. We know each other. Corey Frank (18:10): That trust factor as Chris talks about that, that meter's moved a little bit closer. Donny Crawford (18:15): Absolutely, it has. Corey Frank (18:16): You're not an abject frigid stranger. You're still a little bit of stranger, but you drop something social from the conversation we had. And I think more importantly from your kind of bucket analogy here, Donny, it sounds like I know they're a picker-upper. Donny Crawford (18:31): Absolutely important. Corey Frank (18:31): I don't know what the technical name is for that, but I want to separate the picker-uppers because not everybody who has a phone who's on my Zoom or Lucia or SalesIntel list is a picker-upper. Donny Crawford (18:42): True. Corey Frank (18:43): So it's nice to know who picks up. Even if they're going to yell at me, they're still a picker-upper and they have a higher score than maybe who doesn't. Donny Crawford (18:50): Yeah, absolutely true. In fact, In my follow-up bucket of lists of contacts to go back after, I have notes for individuals who have hung up on me in January 15th and March 11th and May 21st. I have a list of the times they've hung up on me. And at one point during a follow-up, it's like, "Hey, so-and-so. I'm so glad I got you on the phone again here. On January 15th, you hung up on me, on March 11th you did. You're a really busy guy. Every time I get ahold of you, you just don't have time to chat. I'm curious when a better time to talk to you would be." I don't even mind letting them go again, because when you bring their mind to the fact that you're not going to give up on them, there's a certain amount of respect people start to give you. When you come across as a trusted advisor, someone who truly is invested in helping them and won't give up on them. Even if they're being really, really difficult. Corey Frank (19:52): Well, I'll tell you what, if we ever create a way back machine or uncle Rico perfect it, I'd bring it back to my high school days because calling the girls, trying to find a date for prom, that approach of keeping track of the hangups I could have cleaned up. So maybe you moonlight a little bit as a high school guidance counselor, right? To show guys that- Donny Crawford (20:12): Just like wear them down. Corey Frank (20:13): Of course- Donny Crawford (20:14): And eventually, you'll get that date. Corey Frank (20:15): But do kids even call each other in high school anymore? I don't know Chris. It sounds like they probably do Instagram or something. They don't even pick up the phone and the gauntlet of getting past the father to ask the daughter. I don't know if that angst exists anymore for these poor kids. Chris Beall (20:32): I actually think those who do use the voice, dominate their markets, just like in any other market. Donny Crawford (20:38): That's true. Corey Frank (20:39): It doesn't matter if you're dominating the father of your target or the person you're trying to get ahold to in IT. Chris Beall (20:46): Well, let's face it, what Donny's talking about here is predicated on something that in a way, if I were just listening to this, I'd go, well, still Donny, you're kind of crazy, right? So you're going to let somebody go and then you're going to have this task that's in Salesforce. And now you have to go look at the task when it shows up and then you're going to dial them and then they're not going to be there and you're going to get their voicemail. And then you're either going to leave a voicemail or not, and then give yourself another task. But clearly that's not what you're doing. So are you saying that ConnectAndSell has a mechanism in it that sort of does this for you? That as this the task exists, let's talk to this person in the future, starting on this date would be one I'd like to try, here's what I'm going to say to them, but you don't have to execute the task. By some magic does ConnectAndSell thing does that for you? Donny Crawford (21:37): Yeah. If you recall, even from Ryan's discussion, the buckets are so important. And even with his buckets, you can segment into two groups. One is a cold calling bucket or an initial conversation bucket. People who you've never spoken to before, but you've verified and it's been a good bucket. The next bucket are people who you have spoken to. And that the priority of going after that list is so highly important. And yeah, luckily in ConnectAndSell it's literally just running your open tasks until you get ahold of those people. And it's just automatically running. It's just, I'm going to be able to call on them and if they don't pick up the first time and I try to attempt them, that's fine. I'll call them tomorrow. I'll call them tomorrow two or three times until they pick up. Donny Crawford (22:22): But it's important for me to always go after this list because it's always going to convert higher. And luckily there's a mechanism that even if I don't get ahold of them two times, five times when trying to get them back on the phone, 10 times eventually they're going to answer the phone and I will have a little mechanism called the teleprompts. I think Sean McLaren is the designer of the teleprompts. It's like giving a speech to the person when you get them on the phone. And it's exactly what you want to say to them. And if you design that the right way, the teleprompt is honed in exactly what you want to say and the purposes of the call, it's magic. That is your magic list. That is the best bucket you could ever go after is your follow-ups. Chris Beall (23:04): Actually, it's not, I disagree. The best bucket you cannot ever go after are the folks that you went through a discovery process with and did not move forward with you because now you have something really special. You know a lot about them. So with regard to getting them into a process, that is the best list. The very best list is your closed lost. Donny Crawford (23:28): I agree. Chris Beall (23:29): The very best of all. Donny Crawford (23:32): But if you were to simplify the two buckets of people I've never spoken to, and people who I have, even those closed lost are going to start to fall into our followups. Chris Beall (23:42): They're all in that one, they're just the cream of the crop. Donny Crawford (23:44): Exactly. Chris Beall (23:44): The other cream of the crop that people don't call, which is in the first list is folks who are inbounds, that they haven't spoken with. Donny Crawford (23:53): [inaudible 00:23:53]. Chris Beall (23:53): Because they tried them once or twice and gave up. And remember, we did an experiment once, an experiment, we did a diving catch once with a company down in Chandler, Arizona. And they told us they were 750 meetings behind per month to be able to make their business plan, which called for this going public. When I visited them, they had a football field inside of a building set up as a football field for entertainment purposes, for people to exercise. That's how much money they were spending, so sure they were going public, but at 750 meetings a month behind plan, it wasn't so great. So I asked him a question. I said, "Do you have a list of folks that came inbound, that's more than a year old that you never spoke with?" And he said, "Well, why would you want that? That's just garbage." "Well, we'll find out if it's garbage, I've got some guys over here are willing to do some calling on your behalf." We had scheduled 735 meetings for them in 11 business days. And why? Because these are people who are fundamentally interested and all they needed was a conversation.  

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, we’ll dissect that sales process called the “discovery call” and diagnose the problem that is keeping sales reps from making a successful one. Chris, Corey, and Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, share their opinions on the subject, and lament the unfortunate fact that most sales reps have no set method for conducting a discovery call that includes true discovery. As Oren describes it, “Selling is a bit icky, and [salespeople] want to retreat quickly back to the relative calm of their normal lives. Once a salesperson hears one thing [from the prospect] that’s an indicator of interest, they want to hit the buzzer” and immediately jump to the sales pitch so they can end their own discomfort. As Oren sees it, this cut-to-the-chase method is the primary reason many discovery calls fail. Instead of truly finding out what problems the prospect or his company might have, which the product being offered might solve, reps skip right over the creation of a relationship that might help them eventually make that sale. Chris is convinced that salespeople can actually be coached on where they went wrong during a discovery call and how to do it in a way that works. In this podcast, you can listen to the two questions that Chris begins his own discovery calls with — and then find out what the heck “the dog, the meat, and the chain-link fence” have to do with this subject. Who knew that a discussion about discovery calls could be so insightful and entertaining? If you missed the first half of this conversation, you can get it here: https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/getting-prospects-from-fear-to-commitment/ ----more---- About Our Guest Oren Klaff is managing director of Intersection Capital, which provides training, management, and advisory services in the areas of technology banking, healthcare investment banking, and asset-backed securities. Oren is also the author of Pitch Anything and Flip the Script.   Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.   Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Join us for this conversation in progress from the previous episode. Chris Beall (02:17): Which by the way, is not we've got the inside track on watching this, right? We do more of it than everybody else in the world put together. We don't create meetings. We just help other people do them. Corey's team is one of the sets of other people. We just help them get first conversations and follow-up conversations and if you're doing right, you can take the market in terms of meetings and meetings are good leading indicators of the potential of the business, as long as the message happens to correspond to the value in some way. Chris Beall (02:43): What we're doing is we're pushing the bottleneck down to discovery, and what we're finding is nobody can do discovery. So I'm fascinated with what you're doing because I've been looking for a long time for some blockbuster, some stick of dynamite I can stick into the discovery process that regular people can learn, like your North Dakotans, right? They can actually learn to do it and where you can analyze where they're going bad, where it's coachable, because that's the other thing we're not seeing is... We're not seeing methods that are specific enough that you can say, "Right there, you slipped into the sorcerer. Dude you were dead at that point." Oren Klaff (03:23): Yeah, so I think in discovery, what happens is people don't like being in discovery and then with discovery tends to rhetorical questions. Chris, would you like to make a million dollars by just going to the mailbox and collecting the mail and cash and checks? You just rolled your eyes. Chris Beall (03:23): Two million. Two million. Oren Klaff (03:44): You just rolled your eyes. You literally just rolled your eyes. Unconscious sub-communication. You rolled your eyes. And so that's what discovery is. It is just one big rhetorical question, because you basically know the answers to the questions largely in discovery. Discovery tends not to be a real process. Chris Beall (04:08): Yep. I agree. Oren Klaff (04:08): Right? And so one idea to riff off of, and I know what we do is we give a sense that we've solved this problem a thousand times. This is boring. Instead of telling people, "We're good at it. We're the number one company. Microsoft uses us. We have 500 people. We've got the best customer service. Our CEO is friends with Elon Musk." Instead of telling people, we find a way to show them that we solve this problem, this area all the time. We fall asleep while doing it. And then when we say, "Tell me what's going on with you," and then prompt that with sort of three, five, seven questions that cover the territory. Right? So circle the territory, then they'll fill in discovery. So we're talking about abstractly, let's just talk about copiers, right? People don't even sell copiers anymore do they, Corey? Is that a thing? Chris Beall (05:06): I've got one of the biggest copier sales companies in the world. Oren Klaff (05:09): Okay, great. I don't know anything about copier sales, but we'll abstract on it. So the new copier's cinema file, they automatically in cross-correlation, send it out, fax, email, send, produce, bind, put it on your desk, FedEx and anticipate exactly. Try to giving you an example. Microsoft had a file that had to go out for a company that they were doing something with. We sent over the file and started getting emails. Before anything else had happened, they had already been at the CEO, CFO, and delivered. And everyone's saying, "Thanks," before they even knew the file had been sent. Today, that's not even a thing. Anyway, some technical description of a master solution that that company would be dreaming of. Right? Somebody wants something copied, right? They wink at it. It goes to the copier. The copier bills the right accounts out. It gets to the desk. It's in FedEx and the account assigned and it's in DocuSign and back on the desk. Right? And then the question, the discovery is, so what are you guys looking for? Right? What's going to make a difference over there? Cost reduction, rapid correlation, distribution, getting the DocuSign or placing copies of the facility. What's going on there with you guys? What hurts? What doesn't? Where are you? So the open-ended question is what hurts? What doesn't? Where are you? You can't just ask that without circling the territory. Right? So the territory is cost reduction. This is what I'm guessing for copiers, cost reduction, maintenance, uptime, volume, ease of use, right? So you circle that territory and you go, "What's going on with you? Where are you guys? What do you want to make happen?" And then, because you've given them context and you've given them a channel to go down, the discovery will unfold. As opposed to you asking, "Are you looking for cost reduction?" It's the same process. But when you ask that, they're very resistant in discovery to give you the real information or to give you information at all. Chris Beall (07:06): I think it's the biggest issue in discovery and it's huge enough, we can figure out how to teach it to folks so they can do the whole thing and resist the horrible things that they do in discovery, which is the whole rhetorical question thing is the worst. Oren Klaff (07:22): Right. Chris Beall (07:22): There's no doubt about it, right? You're taking away autonomy. You're saying, "I'm going to put you in a corner of my choosing, and then I'm going to wear you down until you finally decide that you're going to say yes to my next step." That's what people [crosstalk 00:07:35] Oren Klaff (07:36): I think it's giving the example of the best possible of all, or utopia and making utopia feel like a day-to-day thing that we just do here all the time. Chris Beall (07:47): Yeah. So there's a question I ask in discovery. So I do about three discovery calls a day in ConnectAndSell because I think CEOs in themselves... Oren Klaff (07:54): Oh. Wow. Chris Beall (07:55): ...have no idea what they're doing, right? And I sell a little bit. I sell about 6 million a year. I'll probably do a little better at this year. It's kind of a spare time gig, but it's one of those things that I figure if I'm not out there, what do I know? And I ask two questions and they're kind of weird questions. I want to get your take on them. But they're strange. The first question is a very simple question. It's a little bit of a kind of a status tip up, but it's a little bit... It's subtle. I just ask "So where are you on the surface of our blue whirling planet today?" And I ask it exactly like that. And I get the most amazing responses. But all I'm really trying to do is two things, get the person to see that we're together and get them to speak with pride. Because when people speak with pride, they start to open up and everybody's proud of where they live. So it's really simple, but it's amazing what happens. And then when they get done with that, I say, "So... And I went out to your website... I try to understand..." I always try to understand businesses. I think I'm pretty good at that actually. I'm one of that guy who reads the... I read the K-1s and all that kind of stuff. I didn't read that junk but I'm always wrong. A hundred percent of the time when I really learned about the business, I'm wrong. So tell me about this. When everything goes great in your world and your business, when it's the perfect customer, it's the perfect situation, their budget's in place, their need exactly matches your product, your customer's success, people don't mess it up, engineering doesn't do any bad about it, the whole thing works perfectly, how does your product change that person's life? And they will hold forth and they will hold forth sometimes for 15 minutes. Oren Klaff (09:34): Yeah. Chris Beall (09:35): At which point, a lot of discoveries happen and I haven't had to ask any rhetorical questions because frankly, I don't know the answer to either one of those questions. And frankly, I don't kind of care about the answer, but I do care about the psychological process, which is speaking with pride as an equal and then speaking with pride about their mission without using the stupid word mission and getting into mission statements with our company says things like, "Why are you doing this? Why are you taking the precious moments of your life and spending them doing what you're doing?" Because you must believe it's good for somebody. Oren Klaff (10:10): Yeah. So I give you my take on it. I was called into a pretty high volume motorcycle parts, sort of a BikeBandit, RevZilla kind of company. And so the thing about motorcycle parts that's so challenging is they're low volume, relatively compared to cars, relatively low volume, but there's so much variation in parts. So even a correct part number can be a half year so you can... BikeBandit can send out what they believe is the correct part based on the numbers and the catalog number, which is very complicated. The user gets it, goes to put it on his bike and it doesn't fit. It can be on the guy doesn't know what bike he has. Right? He believes he has a 2004 Kawasaki KR1000 and it's a 2004 Kawasaki K1000R. I don't know how the motorcycle industry works, but they make minor model derivations in the same year. So they have three of the same model. It's just motorcycles are very intelligent specifics. Anyway, the part comes, it doesn't fit and BikeBandit hasn't been a malicious or malevolent and they don't want... But the guys call and their bike is down, right? And people are very passion [inaudible 00:11:35] and they're screaming and yelling and frustrated and threatening and all kinds of stuff is going on. And so I came in there. I'm going to say I was doing sales stuff, but on the other end, I saw this going on and I go, "Just ask the guy what kind of bike he has." Right? Just tell him, "Hey, can you tell me about your bike? It looks GSX-R600. How do you have it set up? Tell me about the bike." Well, the problem became the other way where the guy would just exactly like you're saying, he'd want to talk about his bike for 45 minutes. And I thought about this just the other day because behind me, I have all my bikes and I was talking to a guy who was selling me, trying to get me on his membership program. And we were doing a video call and I walked by. He's like, "Oh, hey, are those your motorcycles?" Right? And I go, "Yeah. Yeah." He goes, "Tell me about them. I'm really into that." Right? And then I went on for 40 minutes, right? And then I realized... And I know the guy, he doesn't care. He doesn't care at all. But he used this and I am familiar with it. So I'm a million percent in agreement, if you can get someone to talk about their motorcycle, they're completely off of the pain they're feeling as they're describing the thing that they love. So when you could get somebody describing the thing that they love, it's for discovery or any other sales or customer service process, it just creates magic. Corey Frank (13:01): But that process alone, Chris, that you're using, I think, or maybe an echo that there is novelty in that process because it precisely is antithetical to how most big, dumb farm animals like me would conduct a discovery call prototypically based off of my feel, felt, found solution selling type of script. And you certainly have status as a CEO to go in, but that pattern interrupt about that novelty approach, I think, is what works with that because you're authentic, I think, in your tonality and in your pacing and your empathy that you're emoting, I think, that gets people to open up and I think the question, right? Certainly, or is can you... To Chris's earlier point, can you teach that at scale? We have this kind of top layer, which is stopping on beer cans, which is creating appointments. And then if the next bottleneck is in the discovery and you have a hundred people doing biz dev and SDR, and you got 10 people doing sales, is that also an acquired gift or traits and can that be screen played out? Oren Klaff (15:03): For me, the screen playing it, and to be fair, we work at a pretty high level, right? Is to just square away the seven variables. So he's buying a house, right? And you're doing discovery on what their needs are. You can paint in the variables, right? Square-foot, build quality, schools, road-noise, price range, parking. Corey Frank (15:29): Sexual [crosstalk 00:15:30] neighborhood. Oren Klaff (15:30): Amenities. And now I'm starting to run out of stuff, right? So maybe a couple of other things. And so then say within that, and these are variables. We do this all the time. Put a hundred people in a house of 3,000 to 5,000 square feet, amenities, pool, no pool, perfect for the school. What are you trying to make happen? And now you've laid out the variables. And in my experience, they'll self-discover if you give them the variables. And I think that is pretty scalable because you're creating a sandbox. And now if they're outside of the sandbox, you can push them back in. Right? And I think it's the same as Chris's question, which is in your best day, dream of dreams, best outcomes, what needs to happen here? What are you trying to make happen? Chris Beall (16:29): [crosstalk 00:16:29]. Oren Klaff (16:28): Zig Ziglar, if you could wave a magic wand today and say, "Oren, go make this happen," what is it we should do? Chris Beall (16:39): I think I used to actually bring a magic wand by the way that I made into our big customer meetings, where we bring all the customers together and then have the elite group advise us. I would make a magic wand each year out of three plants in my yard and tie it together with the right color thread and hand it around. So you've got the magic wand. You could [crosstalk 00:17:00] Oren Klaff (17:00): You have it in your [crosstalk 00:17:01] as well to go with it? Chris Beall (17:02): I did not. That would have been special. Something that I found pretty consistently in discovery that's I think a big challenge that I see with our reps having is instead of wanting to find out, they want to get the other person to do what they want them to do. And it's a challenge. There's an implicit assumption, which is, "I want you to buy my stuff, whether you're right to buy it or not, whether it makes sense for you to buy it or not. Right? I just went through this with one of my reps the other day. He said, "So I'm trying to apply your techniques for selling and it's working really well, but it's really, really hard because I find myself over and over wanting to jump ahead an extra step, because your process requires patience." And in my process, I operationalized the relationship at the end of discovery and stop selling entirely. It's like if you want to learn more, we do an intensive test drive. It's free. It takes you some time and a day of your people doing it. You'll either produce results or not. Sometimes people get amazing results. Usually, they just have a bunch of conversations and find out they suck, but even that can be worthwhile and it's a learning experience and I highly recommend you do it. And if you want to do it, I'll introduce you to my VP of customer success and boom, I'm gone. I'm gone. There's no selling that's going to happen from then on ever until the very end where they've had all the experience and then the question is, "So now that you've got the experience, do you see anything here that's worth doing?" I see one thing, which is I think your people aren't very good. And I think maybe doing some small sort of engagement to get them better might be a worthwhile activity. What do you say? Give them a little... That's my one variable, right? Because that's always the variable that people always suck. Everybody sucks. So I got an easiest... It's like all the houses we're going to sell have the same problem. They all face north and everybody wants a west facing exposure. Unfortunately in this neighborhood, all the houses face north so you're not going to be able to watch the sunset. Sorry. Oren Klaff (19:19): Well, I think... And as we're around the corner, I have to watch the clock here, Chris and Corey. I have a seven-year-old's birthday party here in eight minutes that I also have to get to. So I think a thing you said triggered interest in me, which is salespeople don't naturally want to invest in that discovery period. And once they hear one thing that sounds good, that's a leading, an indicator of interest, then they want to hit the buzzer like in American Idol or one of those things. Right? And then end the song early and go, "I love her. Send her through. I don't have to hear the rest of this. That was amazing." Right? You're juggling nine balls and everything. They're like, "Send him through. My vote is yes." Right? Or this is the worst thing ever so they want to hit that button early. And so one thing we try and do is give a sense both to the buyer or the prospect and ourselves is, "Hey, listen. I'm excited. We don't really need a... right? But I'm excited with working with you. Everything looks... This is the kind of company that we work with. We've done this exact same thing 15 times in the last year, but at the same time, there's some things here that make me nervous or that are confusing. Got to sort all that out in my head. Look, I'm going to invest some time with you. Bend over backwards. On one hand, we're busy. Don't care what happens, right? If it works out, it works out. If it doesn't, we're named in Rolodex, we'll meet another day. But for the meantime, I'd love to be involved with this project, if everything makes sense and there's some things to clarify, I'm going to invest some time here to figure this out." And so if it's contextualized and it is an investment in time, then that's a different process for I'm waiting until I hear an indication of interest to bounce out to the next, right? So let's invest some time together and figure these questions out. Right? And that is more process-driven than I'm waiting to hear a hot button that I can pounce on. Chris Beall (21:48): Yeah. I call it the dog, the meat and the chain link fence problem. As soon as the dog smells the meat, it tries to go through the fence and it becomes unaware that the gate is 10 feet to the right and salespeople are dogs, to go back to our animals. [inaudible 00:22:06] I got to get through there. Oren Klaff (22:08): Yeah. Chris Beall (22:08): Through the damn fence, and you're going to hurt your nose. And you're not going to get the meat most of the time. But every once in a while, they get a taste and they go, "That'll work." And that reinforcement, I think, is pretty damaging. We tried to engineer a sales process at ConnectAndSell where the next step is an investment on our part and it's a serious investment. It's an investment that we actually go into business with them for a full day of production and real things happen. Real things like Tony Safoian and over it, SADA, Google Cloud's number one reseller. He laughed on his podcast. When I was a guest, I asked him, "Didn't you make like a million dollars on our test drive?" And his VP, Billy Franz laughed and go, "We made tens of millions that day, Chris." Tens of millions. Well, it might happen. It might not. But we did put in that investment. I got on a plane. I actually took my fiance. We all went down to Austin and we did the thing and it takes seven, eight hours plus back then flying. I'm not flying anymore. Right? COVID times. But I deeply believe the next thing that makes sense and I hate calling it the next step because that's salesy talk about the next step is something I gained control over you with, bothers me a lot. But here's an investment we can make. You bring the people. You bring the lists. We'll work on a little message together or not, depending on if it makes sense. Usually, I say no, and here's why, but sometimes that can work out. Sometimes we do it. Spooks the reps and they confuse the message that they don't know how to deliver with the product and then they say the product sucks because they suck. Now that could go wrong. So we probably won't do that, but we'll see what happens. A lot of things are likely to go wrong. People would be afraid. Some of them might go home sick. We've had a guy have what looked like a seizure once, throwing up in the garbage can, had a panic attack. I had to call an ambulance. It was all right. Medical help was available, but usually everybody survives and we learned something together. Oren Klaff (24:06): [crosstalk 00:24:06] Chris Beall (24:06): So we're willing to make that investment if you are. Corey Frank (24:09): A podcast that you're on with Tony and that test drive, millions of dollars. That is nothing on the podcast here that we just put in the can over the last hour. So we're going to let Oren get to Asher's birthday party here. I'll tell you what. This is like... I remember watching the Black Belt Theater as a little kid here. We got the Northern Shaolin Temple against the Southern Shaolin Temple. Right? And we're going to kind of explore this maybe in the next episode where we talk about discovery and tone and how to do that properly again a little bit more in detail. Oren Klaff (24:43): Hey Corey, how am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to do that? Corey Frank (24:47): What would you like me to do next? Oren Klaff (24:49): Yeah. Corey Frank (24:51): What do you want me to do? Oren Klaff (24:51): Right. Well... Corey Frank (24:55): It's on your third book that's coming out. Right? [crosstalk 00:24:57] Oren Klaff (24:58): Right. Okay. Well... Chris Beall (25:00): Your book is awesome. I heard a testimonial for it today from Jared Robyn who's got this thing called the... They're doing an outbound club thing where they're doing e-sports as cold calling or cold calling as e-sports. He said, "I read Flip The Script, then I read Never Split The Difference. Then I went back and read, Flip The Script again." And he says, "Now I feel like I know something." So you're inspiring folks out there. And I think actually making a difference when the hardest thing in the world, which is to get people to sell in a way that makes sense for human beings and can be done for all products. So I think it's just simply awesome. Oren Klaff (25:36): Well, I think the last point... My goal is that people should not feel like selling is a thing that they have to do, but it is a bit icky and they want to retreat back to their normal life. And then they have to go all those chores or... but having to clean it, take dishes, to then wash the dishes, or it's this thing that yes, you have to do it. You've signed up for it, but you have to get out of yourself and go do it and then come back to yourself when you're done. And that is one thing I was hated feeling about selling and so it should be so integrated with who you are really, your values, what you believe, what you would do in the normal world, what makes you feel good and so that's what I want to give people is a sense like I'm working in a space that I'm myself. I'm not trying to be someone else or do things that other people do. I'm just myself and I'm doing things that make sense for me and I'm selling and that is magic. Chris Beall (26:47): It truly is magic. Well, I'm on your team now. So let's say if you can use me for something. Oren Klaff (26:53): Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Corey. Corey Frank (26:55): Thanks. Take care. I appreciate it. [crosstalk 00:26:57] Market Dominance Guys. Oren Klaff (26:57): Have a great weekend guys. Corey Frank (27:00): Right. Happy birthday, Asher. Oren Klaff (27:01): Oh, thank you. Thank you.  

You’re about to make a cold call, hoping to get a commitment out of your prospect. What are you feeling? A little trepidation, perhaps? As all salespeople know, that’s the fear of rejection. But have you ever considered that your prospect is feeling some fear too? It’s true: most prospective customers feel the fear of having to talk to an invisible stranger. That’s a lousy way to start a conversation with someone you’re wanting a commitment from. So, how do you, an invisible stranger, get your prospect, an unknown person, to go quickly from fear to trust, then from trust to curiosity, and, finally, from curiosity to commitment — all in about a half of a minute? And how do you do it so the call doesn’t end with a disappointing outcome? Chris, Corey, and today’s Market Dominance Guys’ guest, Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, tackle this challenge with a discussion about trust and how to manufacture it, especially at the speed and scale necessary for startup founders to glean success — before their new venture runs out of money. Listen to the continuation of this passionate conversation: https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/why-cutting-to-the-chase-in-discovery-calls-fails/ ----more---- About Our Guest Oren Klaff is managing director of Intersection Capital, which provides training, management, and advisory services in the areas of technology banking, healthcare investment banking, and asset-backed securities. Oren is also the author of Pitch Anything and Flip the Script.   Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.   Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (01:54): So, we're going to jump right in on the recording, because we got the great Oren Klaff. Oren, I am listening to Flip the Script. It is making me a little sick actually, when you come right down to... I'm getting a little ill because I keep going, "Oh, shit. I do that. And I didn't have a name for it. I'm such a dope." Oren Klaff (02:14): Yeah. It's funny. I get calls from guys at Goldman Sachs, and they'll go, "Hey, listen. Listen. That's a great book. Just want to tell you it's great. But we do that. You didn't invent that." But, it doesn't say I want to tell you about the things that I invented. Chris Beall (02:30): Right. [crosstalk 00:02:30]. Oren Klaff (02:30): All it says is you should do this, or well, you wrote it down good, we just didn't have time to write it down. Yeah, okay. Well, that's why you don't have a book. Chris Beall (02:39): I was just talking to a guy named Jared Robin, who started the thing called RevGenius, and they have a thing called the Outbound Club. So we signed up to sponsor it, and we're going to provide unlimited ConnectAndSell to the participants. And we're making an e-sport out of cold call. And your e-sports story with the sniper was what I just finished listening to. And I said, "Look, dude, what we're going to do is we'll make an e-sport out of this. We're going to give Mark Cuban a call. He's an e-sports guy. I'm going to say finally, an e-sport for business." Oren Klaff (03:08): That's awesome. Yeah. Chris Beall (03:09): It's time [crosstalk 00:03:10]. Oren Klaff (03:10): That is awesome. Man, I wish I was smart. Corey Frank (03:13): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm the Paul Shaffer, the perpetual Ed McMahon, Andy Richter. On this couch today, as I was preparing for this to finally get two of my good friends, two of my good mentors in one virtual room at the same time, I was telling Oren earlier, about 90% of the soundbites and riffs that I've used over the last couple of years I think has come from one or both of your sources, and the tank is running low. So this is a purely selfish endeavor to fill that tank and to shamelessly steal all this information, [crosstalk 00:03:48]- Oren Klaff (03:48): Oh really? You need a sound bite? You need a sound bite? Here's a good one. Just tell your kids, "Hey, I brought you into this world. I can take you out." That's a good soundbite. Chris Beall (03:55): That is a good one. Corey Frank (03:56): I think that was in Pitch Anything. I've used that before. We had one of the titans of... Don't step on my lines, here. One of the titans of sales thought leadership, author of a few best-selling books. Pitch Anything, which is one of the top five sales books of all time. He is a consummate craftsman, constant alchemist of our profession, and has done more to advance the boundaries I think of sales thought leadership than almost anyone in the field today. We have the one, the only Oren Klaff to go along with the Sage of Sales here on the market dominance podcast today. Chris Beall, please welcome Oren Klaff to the program. Oren Klaff (04:38): Thank you. That was nice. I just wish I had more people saying nice stuff about me. Corey Frank (04:44): Today, it's great to have, because I think especially we were talking about Flip the Script and Pitch Anything, and Chris, you're knee-deep and Flip the Script right now. One of the things we talk about on the Market Dominance podcast, Oren, is this concept of cold calling, and how do you get and manufacture trust at scale? Corey Frank (05:03): One of the things that Chris and I talk about is the state of a prospect. When we first call, their natural state as this invisible stranger who's calling them, right Chris, is that fear. That's their emotional state. And so how do you get from fear to trust and then trust to curiosity, and that curiosity and turn that into commitment? Corey Frank (05:26): So, I think as Chris and I were talking about last week, it'd be great to ask you your thoughts of how you manufacture trust. And do you agree that it can be manufactured at scale? And how do you attack that concept that somebody who is not expecting a phone call, yet we need to penetrate that veneer, that barrier that they have in order to get some trust. Oren Klaff (05:55): I mean, this is going to be a very fast entry into the world of Pitch Anything and Oren Klaff. I mean, it would be good for people to scale into it. Oren Klaff (06:05): But basically, I mean, this presumes that trust is a valuable state, all right? This presumes that them trusting you is a valuable state for them to have. And I think that is a good, common assumption that's been in sales for over the last 50 years. The problem is that I think if you really look at trust, not academically, although you can look at it academically, not in conversation with guys like us who dabble in this, but in your own life, where have you ever manufactured trust rapidly? One function of true trust is time. Time is ball of wax choking on a splinter. Oren Klaff (06:47): So time. And so I think in my worldview, you're really looking at a proxy for trust. Something that stands in for trust because you don't have, in five seconds, 10 seconds, three minutes, five minutes, 11 minutes, 59 minutes. In my mind, that is not enough time to get real, defensible, robust, high quality, leverageable, you can trade on it, put it in your pipeline, this is going to happen trust. Oren Klaff (07:17): And give you an example. My partner Jack called me up today, and I go, "Jack, I don't like the way you sound today, because we're doing a deal, and you don't sound happy." Right? "And so you're going to make a couple million dollars here. You should be coming out of your sneakers, or whatever it is you're wearing over there where you are, and excited and we're making money. And you're making me nervous, because you're not happy about making more money than we've made all year. What is going on?" Oren Klaff (07:43): He goes, "No, no, I love the deal. I just don't know that the money is going to show up, the two million bucks is going to show up." I go, "Listen to me. Write this on your arm. Oren Klaff is delivering two million dollars for this deal. And go on the weekend and get yourself happy, because I can't take it, this unhappiness." And he goes, "Okay, I'll do it." Oren Klaff (08:03): Trust. We've been working together for 10 years. Now, he makes his next phone call, and he goes, "Mumble, mumble, mumble," right? And the guy goes, "Hey, what's going on Jack?" "I don't know if the money is going to show up." And he goes, "Don't worry. I'm going to make the money show up." And he's just going to go, "Mumble, mumble, mumble," because he doesn't trust the guy. Trust takes years to develop. You need a proxy for trust. Oren Klaff (08:23): And so, I'll tell you a quick story. We go to rent a... Because at some point in my career I [inaudible 00:08:31] book, and a lot of people love me, and then the podcast and everything like that. And we go to rent a studio in Los Angeles. 10,000 square feet, because Oren Klaff's big head needs a 10,000 square foot studio to be filmed in. And they have a crane that zooms down, and cameras, and audio gear. Because that's when I thought that really mattered. Maybe it does. Oren Klaff (08:50): So anyway, so we walk in and we're in the green room. No, we're in the lobby, we're not in the green room, and the guy, "Listen, we have another thing film..." Just when we were going to check it out to hire it, right? Because it's whatever, $10,000 for the day. It used to be real money back in the day, Corey. And so the guy goes, "You can go back and check it out, the space. There's another film crew back there. Just wanted to let you know, watch out for the line." And we go, "Well, okay, so it's Los Angeles. Fashion line, fishing line." Watch out for the line. We go, "Yeah, we'll watch out for the line, great." Oren Klaff (09:17): We walk back there. Whoa! It's a lion! L-I-O-N. It's a lion. All right? But don't worry. And so they're filming the lion for a vodka or a watch commercial with a half-naked woman. But she's not with the lion, right? That's not how, when you see that in a magazine... Sorry, Chris, I'm taking over your podcast, but when you see a woman with a lion, the woman is not there with the lions. The lions are dangerous. And so there's no safe lion. You guys know that, right? Oren Klaff (09:49): So anyway, we're talking to guys and he goes, "Shit," very softly. "You don't want to upset Major." I'm like, Well..." And so they go, "Don't worry. Major, there's an invisible fence. There's an invisible fence that keeps Major from hopping out on the crew and everything like that. But you just don't want to move fast and look like prey and everything like that. So just keep it down and don't move fast." Oren Klaff (10:11): And then I'm talking to one of the crew, he's like, "Yeah, the invisible fence works a hundred percent, right? Unless Major gets mad, and then he doesn't give a shit about the invisible fence," right? Oren Klaff (10:21): And so I feel like these rules here that are in place are this invisible fence. And you want to find things today... Because everything's changed. Let's not get into the change, Zoom, and COVID, and not meeting in person, and number of contacts, and data and machine learning, and databases, and AI, and constant ringing of phones, and look-alike audiences and all that stuff, right? So all that change. Oren Klaff (10:46): So I think the stuff leftover from the 1950s of trust and value proposition and a trial close, you can get your inner Major, break out of your invisible fence and try some of that stuff outside of the line. And so, then I will take you somewhere that I got by getting mad and breaking through my invisible fence, and a proxy, I think, for trust. But by the way, we're talking quite abstractly. Maybe we should just mock up a call so we can just mark what trust is. So Corey, I mean, you're great at this. What would a trust script sound like? Corey Frank (11:23): Well, we happen to Chris, you want to talk about the breakthrough script, since this is what the folks at ConnectAndSell use on the phone millions of times a year. So let's walk through the steps on this. And Chris, you had Chris Voss from Never Split the Difference certainly give his thoughts on this. So now we have another titan in the arena here, let's get some of Oren's impression on this. Chris Beall (11:47): Sure, absolutely, Oren. I love it. Chris Beall (12:32): By the way, Oren, I used to play with a lioness when I was a kid. My mom worked at a veterinarian's office, and they boarded this lioness every year. And my mother actually encouraged me to stick my hand out, and this animal would take my entire hand up to mid-forearm in her mouth. And I quote, she would say, "Ahhhhhh." Oren Klaff (12:54): Oh, that's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah. Chris Beall (12:59): So I made sure to use my left hand just in case my mom was wrong. Because then at least I could have a shot at life after that [crosstalk 00:13:08] my mom. Oren Klaff (13:08): Oh no, I mean, those animals... My parents are from South Africa. Those animals are gentle, beautiful, kind, loving, sweet. Until they're not. Chris Beall (13:21): Until they're not. Oren Klaff (13:25): It's not like me at six o'clock, "Hey guys, I just want to let you know I'm getting irritable, okay? Everybody stay out of my way. Just let me eat dinner, read my email, get work done, and go to bed. But clear the hell out of my way." You don't get that from a lion. I mean, they're like wolves. Oren Klaff (13:41): Anyway, I know this is not an animal show, but wolves, they take these baby wolves, right? And they've never seen anything but a human. So they raise them in contact with humans 24 hours a day, right? They don't have contact with her, with the parent wolves. And they raise them to be socialized with humans. They're never out of contact with a human. And even then, I saw a whole, not 60 Minutes, but whatever the... Discovery Channel thing on it. Even then, a young pup Wolf with a human that he's been in contact with hundreds of times, for a hundred hours, his main contact in the living world, will just snap and attack. Chris Beall (14:16): Let's just play. Yeah, that's the world I grew up in. Chris Beall (14:18): Hey, so the context here for this particular trust thing that we've been exploring on Market Dominance is about two alternatives, two different ways of approaching large markets. So this isn't deal at a time kind of stuff at the beginning. This is how do you go from, "Huh, I think I should be selling to somebody out there of these thousands," to figuring out who you should actually be selling to, to actually doing it at pace and scale? And doing it with people you can hire. This is the Silicon Valley problem, I'll call it. Oren Klaff (14:50): Sure. Chris Beall (14:51): But it's a problem that others have. We work with a company, and I was just talking to him today, and he said, "Don't say our name." So think German air compressor company sells to factories in the U.S. and in Germany, obviously. Chris Beall (15:06): So the question on their mind was, well, we got these door knockers, right? Got about 72 people in 17 branches, and then knock on doors. And then this internet of things comes along and they can't knock on doors anymore. Every factory starts to put up fences, put up a security guard. Now you got to get an appointment. So how can we teach our door knockers to get an appointment? Chris Beall (15:27): So the amount of trust that's required is kind of like the amount of trust that's required when my mom and the lioness's owner, said, "Go ahead. Let her play with your hand," right? It's not the amount of trust that's required for me to say, spend a night in a company of that lioness when she was hungry. It's not that depth where I can put my life in her hands. Not like my buddy Jim Haggart sent me a birthday card two days ago, and [inaudible 00:15:52] said, "You've got a pretty deep relationship with this guy." I said, "Guy saves your life more than 150 times, you're going to have a deep relationship. That's literally trusting you with my life." Oren Klaff (16:01): Right. Chris Beall (16:03): But this is a little bit different. What this is, is when you look at the beginning state, which is, we don't know who to talk to. And then you look at the information paucity. We don't have enough information to tell us who to talk to, so we're going to have to have a conversation in order to get a conversation about having a conversation. So now you're in this problem, and then you're trying to figure out how do I do this at pace and scale before I run out of money. Which is the big issue with all these Silicon Valley guys and even a German air compressor company. You don't run out of money. You're the boss. You run out of keeping your job, right? Oren Klaff (16:34): Yeah. Chris Beall (16:34): Because you didn't get it done. So as we looked at this, and we get to look at it scientifically. We deliver a few conversations a year, about two and a half million. And so we have a fair amount of grist for our mill. I don't know what two and a half million squared is, but it's a big-ass number. So, we have statistical significance against a big number of two and a half billion squared, roughly. Chris Beall (16:57): And when we looked at what folks were doing, they were trying to do the old-fashioned thing of leading with value. And so they're leading with value. First, they lead with rapport, like me, then value, business value, and then they're hoping to get in a relationship that has something to do with the value. Chris Beall (17:13): And what we found was this guy in Denver that we had, name is Jordan [DuFour 00:17:20], was leading a different way, and it made everything better in the sales cycle. He worked for us. He was selling ConnectAndSell, using ConnectAndSell, works for us. And he was leading like this. "Oren, I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" And that two-sentence thing he was doing, which we all thought was goofier than the goofiest thing we'd ever heard. He is a goofy guy. Jordan, if you're watching this, you're kind of a goofy, dude. He has a very great skill and asking people for things. He has no hesitation, right? But he would have better results all the way through the sales process, and that was the only thing he did different. Chris Beall (18:00): So we asked ourselves, well, what happens when other people do it? I just blindly tried. Good science, right? Just spread it around and see what happens. And so we did that and it had the same effect over and over and over. But only if they got the tone right. "I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called?" And we still didn't understand the damn thing, but we spread it around. Chris Beall (18:19): And then this guy Noah Blumenthal comes along, and I help him get his company's named sold, a big company in Redmond, Washington. They called up one day, didn't say who they were. I figured out who they were. I was advising this company $1.1 million in one day. So now he's got a little bit of money. He's not going to go out of business. He's got a product, and not much product, interesting concept. And he's going out to sell it, and he hires a sales guy. Calls me up, says, "Oh, I hired a sales guy. I'm so proud." I said, "Great. So now I'm going to fire you as an advisor. I'm not going to advise you anymore. Because what we're going to learn is you don't know how to hire sales guys. Which we already knew. So you're spending money to find out something you already knew. That's stupid. Let's not do that. You got to sell this damn thing yourself." Chris Beall (19:05): He said, "Well, how do I get the meetings?" I said, "You're going to cold call the CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies." Oren Klaff (19:10): Sure. Chris Beall (19:11): He said, "I'm going to do what? I've never cold-called anybody in my life." We argue, we argue, we argue. Finally he says, "If I'm scripted, I can try it." I said, "I don't do scripting." This is back when I was ignorant of scripting. I said, "Well, so what?" And he says, "Well, I do scripting. I do it. I do it for TEDx talks for other people. I'm an expert." I said, "Okay, let's script you." Chris Beall (19:34): He scripts himself up five hours, three sentences later, and he comes up with these three more sentences. He tries it out. He gets three times the appointment rate we've ever seen. And he's lame-ass on the phone. Lame-ass. Noah, my forgiveness, but you will agree with me if you're watching this, that you sound like you're reading the script because you're reading the script. And he gets meetings with the chief operating officer of Dell Technologies and stuff like that. Chris Beall (20:02): So now we're going, "Holy moly." We got a technology that delivers 10 times more conversations. This guy has just proven you can be lame-ass and get meetings on a curiosity-based script whose main feature is this weird opening that he didn't invent, someone else invented it. Chris Beall (20:21): And then I asked Chris Voss about it at a dinner one night. And he says, "Oh yeah, all we got to do is we got seven seconds to get somebody to trust us in a hostage negotiation phone call. Seven seconds is all we got. It's too late otherwise. And we got to show them we see the world through their eyes and we got to prove we can solve a problem that they have right now." And I thought, "Holy shit, I'm the problem they have right now, and I know I'm competent to solve that problem." Chris Beall (20:46): And so that's the smidge. It's a sliver of trust. It is not bet your house, do a deal with me. It's just enough to reverse the standard equation, which is I'm going to get value into your head first. After all, I ambushed you. I'm an invisible stranger. I'm like the worst thing in the world. I showed up from across the river. You paint your face vertically, I paint mine horizontally. You put a bone in your nose, I'm the idiot who puts them in my ears. I'm horrible. And when I show up, I'm invisible, it's nighttime, and I'm here to change your demographics, right? Chris Beall (21:20): So that's the little tiny sliver that we're talking about. And you know what? What's weird is it's teachable in zero time to non-salespeople who can then actually get meetings that people show up at and are shocked. Oren Klaff (21:38): I have to hear what comes after it, but I would have to test the assumption that it's creating trust. Chris Beall (21:44): Yeah, we could be lying to ourselves. Oren Klaff (21:46): Well, yeah. I mean- Chris Beall (21:47): [crosstalk 00:21:47]. Oren Klaff (21:47): I think what it's creating is novelty. And so it could be that you could get very similar results by saying, "Hey John, it's Oren. The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe." Chris Beall (22:00): Could be. Oren Klaff (22:00): So think, so that would have to be checked, because the net result, and I think you agree, you said it yourself, is now you've left yourself in a very low-status position that you've got to claw out of. Chris Beall (22:13): I don't think so. I don't think so. Oren Klaff (22:14): So if we're chasing trust, right? And so I think there's some other things that could stand in as a proxy for it. One thing I was going to go to is serendipity. So when you use serendipity, you're going to get the same impact of, "Yes, I'm willing to stay on this line, hear what's next." Oren Klaff (22:39): So serendipity is normally we have here at [inaudible 00:22:43], "Hey Chris, it's Oren from Intersection. Normally, my admin would be calling you on this, but I took a quick look at this, and see, I'm the managing director here, and I decided to jump on this account." Okay? A lot of words. So serendipity is normally you would have talked to somebody low status, but I took a quick look at this, and I realized you guys need a managing director to talk to you. Oren Klaff (23:11): So, I'm not sure that's perfect for all your situations, but that kind of serendipity is very attractive to people, and we're not sacrificing status. Saying, "I know I'm in the interruption," is now a hole that we then have to fight out of. Chris Beall (23:27): Actually, I haven't seen that. It depends on how it's said. If you say it right, the upfront, "I know I'm an interruption," and then you go to playful curious, "Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" You're not asking permission. Somebody says may, they're screwed. If they say please they're screwed. If they ask a question of fact, then you can get to serendipity and you get to it really easily, which is the very next thing. They always say, "Go ahead," by the way. This thing, this is proven to work, and they say it with a chuckle and it's not a downward social chuckle. It's pretty much straight across. You've got to listen to some of these. Oren Klaff (24:03): I hear that, but it's an eye-roller, right? Chris Beall (24:06): Ahhh.... Oren Klaff (24:07): It's an eye roller. Chris Beall (24:09): You and your emotional responses to this. This is science, man. Oren Klaff (24:13): Yeah. Chris Beall (24:13): Eye rolling or not eye-rolling, this is science. Oh, by the way, John T. McLaren rolls his eyes when he hears you read your book. Oren Klaff (24:18): Yeah. Chris Beall (24:19): I just hear it and go, "That's Oren. Sounds great." Oren Klaff (24:21): Yeah. Chris Beall (24:24): Here's the thing. We're trying to get regular people, not MDs. Oren Klaff (24:28): Yeah. Chris Beall (24:28): To be able to cause a senior person, much more senior than that, to take a meeting. And serendipity is in fact the key to the whole thing. Because the next thing they say, and I was listening to Flip the Script and you use this word many times, you used the word discover. We've discovered. Chris Beall (24:48): "My team and I," you say, always. You say, "My team of linguistic psychologists or cognitive psychologists or whatever they are, there's hundreds of them and they're ranked back there, have discovered blah, blah, blah," right? Which makes you innocent. We don't have to have any psychological reactance. Because you found it. You were lucky. It's serendipity. We're so happy for all of us. We want to rub shoulders with the lucky dude, right? Oren Klaff (25:14): Right. Chris Beall (25:16): And so we teach these people to raise their status immediately to being somebody to be curious about, somebody who has discovered something new, and somebody who's a little ambiguous in terms of who they are. Which you do also, you say, "My team and I," right? You never just say, "I have discovered," right? Oren Klaff (25:34): Right, right. Chris Beall (25:34): You never say that. Oren Klaff (25:34): Of course not. No. Chris Beall (25:35): We teach people to say this. To get their attention they say, "I believe." So that's the established... When I say, "I believe," you should listen, right? "Oren, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough." That completely eliminates, and then we say some really bad-ass thing that it completely eliminates, right? And the bad-ass thing is normally something economic like cost or risk or something, something emotional like frustration. Oren Klaff (26:02): Yeah. Yeah. Chris Beall (26:03): And something, we call it strategic, like you're trying to go somewhere and there's a blocker, and we've discovered a way of doing something about it, but we're not going to tell you what it is, we're not going to tell you what business we're in, and no matter how often you ask, we're not going to tell you that shit. We're just not going to tell you. So for us, we say, "I believe we've discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all. And the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar to share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available?" Chris Beall (26:36): And what is interesting and surprising is this shit works, right? And it works a funny reason. Because the journey, you can call it trust or something else, the journey is from I ambushed you and you don't like it, probably because you're afraid of me. And then I relieve the fear, so maybe it's relief, but you're willing to go a little farther. And then I go immediately to serendipity, to curiosity. And then I let the curiosity sit there and see if you're willing to make a commitment, which is not to do something but to tell me something. If you happen to have your calendar available. It's just a simple question. Most people do. It's a question of fact. Chris Beall (27:19): And we haven't found anything better that's teachable to regular people so you can hire them, like Corey does, and have them producing money that day, which is what our goal is. We want to hire regular people and have them producing money that day, regardless of the business. Oren Klaff (27:40): Yeah. Chris Beall (27:40): So far, eh... Now what I want to do is take my guys because they're in discovery and take my customer's guys and gals because they're in discovery and teach them to flip the script. Because I think we push the bottleneck down there now, because we can manufacture meetings [inaudible 00:27:57]. Oren Klaff (27:58): That's where we live. We think today what has happened is leads are available. We don't have anybody who really can't produce leads, or can't get leads, or can't go with ConnectAndSell and Corey. And so conversion is... I think the larger issue today is you can get on a call, you can get on the calendar, there are efficiencies either on the pure technology funnel side, on the advertising, on the intent-based side, or the outreach, as you're discovering and using is creating efficiencies in the lead creation, right? Oren Klaff (28:37): So then we get the 15 minutes. And then we get the value proposition out in terms of the... And then we get to an offer. And then conversion, then, is a higher-order skill set that we need these same efficiencies in. How can you take a regular person and get them to improve on conversion on the leads? So that's the next I think goal in terms of scalability is scaling conversion once you've got lead generation or appointment generation scaled.  

Every single thing that happens in sales is about learning — on both parties’ parts — and this includes presenting and discussing value metrics with prospects and with customers who are up for renewal. What works best? Adopting an attitude of rampant optimism or one of friendly skepticism? Should the value metrics you present be the same, or should they vary when you’re talking with inbound prospects versus outbound prospects? Is it most effective to emphasize only one appealing value, or is it better to trot out several beneficial metrics?   In this third Market Dominance Guys’ conversation between Chris, Corey, and Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, this trio of experts discusses how to price your company’s offering, how to handle discount requests, and what to do about a prospect’s fixed-budget limitations. Most importantly, they delve into the reality of what happens when you have successfully convinced a prospect of the value of your offering — to the extent that he is now a champion of your product or service — but when he carries your banner back to his company, he is faced with a bunch of skeptics who haven’t had the benefit of hearing your pitch. Since 98.3% of all sales decisions are fought internally, you’ll want to hear the strategy Chris, Corey, and Mike suggest for arming your prospect with the value metrics that will help him win that battle. ----more---- About Our Guest Mike Genstil is co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, an innovative company that enables B2B sales and marketing professionals to easily create and share visually compelling value propositions with prospects and clients. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, even when working 100% from home since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com where conversations matter.   Uncommon Pro - 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 sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.   The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:19): Every single thing that happens in sales, up to the point where somebody signs a contract, is learning on the part of both parties, every single thing. And so the only question up until the point where you sign a contract is, is it worth making the time investment to continue to learn together? And pessimism is a wonderful tool at that point because saying, "I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what this is worth," it's actually more than pessimism. It's a kind of, I'll call it, friendly skepticism. You've heard me so famous or world famous Intensive Test Drive a few times. Right, Corey? Corey Frank (02:57): Of course. Chris Beall (02:58): And what do I say? I say, "I have no idea whether having a bunch more conversations is going to make any sense in your business at all. I have no idea." And I'm being honest. I too have no idea. It could be great. It could make you seasick. I don't know. I don't know, but it's pretty low cost. It's kind of like a zero-cost option for you, a little bit of time. It sometimes produces actual business value. Every once in a while it's a lottery ticket that pays off as Tony Sephonian said on his podcast when I was a guest. We made tens of millions of dollars during our test drive. Okay? So maybe, but you know what I'm selling? I'm selling, "I don't know." And you know what my reps have a hard time selling? I don't know. They have a hard time saying, "I don't know," because they want to be the rep that says, "It's going to be great. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be huge. You're going to have a..." It could be that, whatever, right? I tell you what, it's a lot easier to sell I don't know and stand behind it than to sell huge. Now, at some point they sign a contract. The beauty then is it's reduced to numbers. And now you're at the point of saying, "Okay, we're not just learning anymore. We're exchanging dollars. Dollars are going to change hands here." So somebody's got to put their career on the line to go get those dollars. So think about that person. How much of their career? Very much of it. We had a situation recently involving a very, very large company. It's a multinational, and they're headquartered in Japan, and their US group told us quite clearly, "Hey, guess what? At $27,000, we don't have to go to Japan for approval. At $27,001 we do." Right? So what do you think the first deal was struck at? And that's the stuff, that's why sales is not marketing. Marketing can't take that into account in a generic way ever, because it might not even be a concept that plays, or it might play at a really high level, but it plays a high level in terms of design of a sales process. At this point, we ask ourselves a question. How much friction do we want in the deal from approvals? If the answer is zero, make sure the person we're talking to has the authority to approve the deal without going and talking to anybody else. If it's okay to have more friction, which by the way, shows up as both delay and risk, then it's some other number. So there's a big difference also between deals and first deals, deals and next steps. We take educational learning next steps together for quite a little while. Then we transact. But that transaction itself should be sized not just to value, which is super important, but to what fits, right? And it's never smooth. It's always a step function. Right now at United Airlines, my understanding is anything over... I believe it's $50,000 goes to the CEO. Well, is anybody here dumb enough to offer United Airlines a $50,000 plus $1 deal? Because I can assure you United's CEO's pretty busy right now. Corey Frank (06:11): Right. I think we're all familiar with Aaron Ross and predictable revenue. I think that one of the things that Ross talks about is similar to what you were saying about PI, personal impact, earlier, Chris. Is that Aaron talks about ask yourself when you're talking to a prospect or a soon to be client, what can you eliminate, automate, outsource or delegate? And I think from the perspective of helping that... If I say, what can I eliminate, automate, outsource or delegate? Mike, your advice certainly would be to have something that's not just quantifiable, but also visual as well to really kind of contribute to all the senses and to do the job that a CFO or a VP of sales or whomever your buyer is to do anyway. Because if I got to sell to my boss after the sales person sells it to me, I got to justify it. If you can help me do my job by thinking in those languages, eliminate automate, outsource, or delegate, I'd imagine there's just going to be a tighter affinity there, even if my price is more because you're speaking my language. Mike Gentsil (07:25): Yeah, again, I think this gets back to the persona discussion where there will be personas that will absolutely be excited about that value proposition because they want to focus on the stuff that is the higher value added activities, and they know what those are. And I think where this gets tricky, back to Chris's point on what marketing can conceive versus what sales does, is there's a difference between an inbound prospect and an outbound prospect. And this is really important to kind of talk through here because if I receive a lead, an inbound lead, and they're looking for something very specific, I could come to them with this value prop of eliminate, delegate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they might say, "Okay, that sounds interesting, but I'm just looking for something that does this." And that this thing could be walk like a giraffe. "And we think your website says you have a tool that walks like a giraffe. Can you show me that feature?" Well, that's what that person is trying to buy today. And this aspirational, visionary stuff around eliminating, delegating, et cetera, et cetera, might be interesting to somebody in that organization, but this person today wants this specific feature set. And so when we're coaching folks on dealing with inbound versus outbound workflows, on the inbound side, you've got to play this dance. And it's a hard, hard job to figure out what the person really is interested in learning about. They called you. They're taking their time to meet with you and address that need, but also educate them. And this gets into challenger sale a little bit where I'm teaching, tailoring, taking control of the conversation. You have to address the things that they care about, but then educate that they also have these three other problems that cost X, Y, and Z, which may be solved by delegating and eliminating, et cetera. But we also do the thing that you want. That value prop then has elements of quantification that solve the current problem, but then solve these other problems. Whereas in an outbound workflow, somebody may not be looking for you car doors that open like this. The person is not looking for that, but you send them a video of car doors opening like that. And you give them an image and a vision so they can do things differently that they never imagined. And that delegating thing just happened to hit them at the right time. They weren't looking for that service, but you hit them with the right image and the right word and the right quantification of that. So where it gets fun, frankly, is enabling people to experiment. They're using tools, outbound tools like Outreach and SalesLoft and Yesware, et cetera, that are giving me the ability to do this rapid experimentation. And what we're trying to insert into that for these outbound workflows is images and quantification and value that really make it come to life for that buyer that may or may not have a project that's got budget attached currently, but it can reach those aspirational, visionary things that may be latent. It's addressing that latent need that you may find budget. Chris Beall (10:25): This is brilliant stuff, Mike. The latent need might not be with that individual. It may be elsewhere in their organization. And what you're doing is you're actually letting them know that when that becomes the relevant part of the conversation, when they've got to go to Mary and Joe and Marissa and have that conversation, you're giving them something that they can be confident in, even if they don't care about it at all. And there's a technique for doing this in sales that salespeople, I think, would be wise to learn. And it goes something like this. So, Mike, as far as I can tell, the only thing that you care about, the only thing at all that we do that could even move the needle in your business is we help you see how your sales reps are doing at home. That's it, because you had to send them all home and it's a nightmare, but we do these other three things that sometimes people get pretty excited by. And I just want to make sure, because I think they have no relevance to you whatsoever. And then I'll tell you the other three things, and you feel good because I've recognized that you don't care about those three things, which means... Because if you never tell somebody what you think they don't care about, they'll think that you're just smorgasbording them. Mike Gentsil (11:45): Right. Chris Beall (11:46): Like, "Oh yeah. You like the salmon," right? Therefore I'm going to assume that you also like whatever it is, right? The soft cheese. But it turns out that if I say, "Mike, I suspect the salmon is really your thing and the soft cheese just going to make you sick." Chris Beall (12:41): "You really hate that stuff. But it turns out we have really great soft cheese here. And am I right, that you just can't stomach that stuff, that it may as well be a pregnant person because soft cheese really doesn't work for you?" And you go, "Wow. Chris actually understands me." However, Mandy is into soft cheese, and now I have that in my pocket, which by the way, don't ever do a soft cheese. But this is where I think a lot of times, Corey, this goes back to my analogy of the dog and the meat and the chain link fence. Salespeople make, by and large, average salespeople make this mistake repeatedly. They make the mistake of going for the win before the game is even set up. They just go for the win right now. They go for it. Like, "I got Mike, I'm going to pander to Mike, I'm going to cater to Mike." But even if Mike's the CEO, which in this case he is, Mike's got other people he's got to deal with. And say Mike's CFO happens to be a pushover when it comes to cost savings of a certain kind, not unit price, not value oriented, but just chunk size. He's a chunk size guy. He's looking at the amount of money in the bank and going, "I'm not very comfortable when we get above a $23,000 investment at a time." And so if I said to Mike, "Mike, one of the beauties of ConnectAndSell is you can actually get in the game for 9,500 bucks and find out if it makes any sense to you." And Mike's thinking, "I don't give a damn about that, but my CFO just might care about that one. Thank you for arming me for future battles I'm going to have to fight." Because in sales 98.3% of all of the battles are being fought internally. They're not you. You're not on the other side with your champion. You're on the same side with them. They're on the other side with a whole bunch of skeptics who haven't heard what you have to say yet. Mike Gentsil (14:42): Yeah. Corey Frank (14:42): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mike Gentsil (14:43): I do a variant of that technique, Chris, where you said these three things probably don't apply to you. I say a version of that, which is, "If you can spare five more minutes, I'd like to show you two other things. One to two times out of 10, this is the coolest thing that people have seen. I don't know that that's going to apply to you, but I'm only going to ask for five minutes." And then you show it to them and they're like... Then they go down the path. "Huh, that's really cool. Bob would be interested." And often it's actually more than one or two times out of 10. It's closer to three or four or five, but you've got to give them confidence that what they're going to see isn't going to take a lot more time and you're not going to go too far afield from what they cared about. Chris Beall (15:19): Yeah. The number one reason that enterprise sales fail is that your champion loves you, but doesn't have enough confidence to put their ass on the line in championing you all the way through. Corey Frank (15:30): And then keep that, following that statement, what generally happens as a salesperson. And we can finish up by talking about discounts, right Chris and Mike? So I would imagine my champion loves me not enough to put faith in my solution because I didn't arm him with enough data. And instead I'm going to panic as the sales rep, try to panic and pop smoke here. And I'm going to try to drop my pants and drop the discounting lever to try to give him a little bit of ammo to grease the skids seemingly when that may not be important at all. And so can we say to that, I mean, is there an atomic weight, like we say to these ROI elements of hard cost savings and risk mitigation, et cetera, that Trump's discounting? Is there this natural force where the unseen force, the sales manager who's managing that sales rep, they're only hearing from the sales rep that, "Hey boss, if we get another 10% or 15%, I think I can get the deal from Mike." When the reality is, is they haven't been speaking the language that Mike needs to perpetuate this value prop throughout his organization. Mike Gentsil (16:45): Yeah. I see a couple variants of discount requests. One variant of a discount request is there simply is fixed budget. The CFO has told the head of marketing, "You've got a hundred thousand dollars to spend on marketing this quarter. You can spend that however you want." And the CMO says, "Okay, well I've already spent $75,000. I've got $25,000 left to spend. I can give you 25 or I can't do the deal." Now, theoretically, you could say, well, let's go back to the CFO together and try to get more money. That's theoretically possible. But the CMO is probably not... They can do that maybe once a year with a CFO. And they're just not going to want to play that card today for this product that they haven't used before. So that's variant number one, they've got fixed budget, and we address that a certain way. The second is there's a competitive offer, which actually is less expensive. And so you'll say, "Hey, your offer is $40,000. I've got a competitor over here that's charging me 25. I like you guys better. But my boss, my boss's boss said 'Well, listen, money is tight. Let's spend 25K.' And if you can't match it, I'm going to go with an inferior but less expensive alternative." And that's a tough one to sell into. And that's where ROI tools... I'm going to address this one first, can be very, very effective because you can, in that case, put a picture in front of both of those folks in the management chain that says, yes, the inferior offer is 25,000, but the incremental value that you're getting for this incremental $15,000 is $2 million because we have these features that they don't, and we cannot discount. We're sorry, and it's $2 million in incremental value and that might win the deal. And that's high stakes poker. But that is a good way to preserve your price when you know that you have incremental value. If you're selling a commodity, it's a little bit trickier. In the first case where there truly is fixed budget and you believe your buyer, and that's what they say, then what you try to do and what we coach and we do this a lot ourselves as is construct a multi-year deal, a two or a three-year deal, which escalates. Say, listen, understand you've got fixed budget right now. We both agree on the value of the solution, if it works, is $4 million. Right? Right. Great. Well, let's give you the price today, but we're in this for the value that we're delivering. So let's construct a two or a three-year deal where we're going to get to those bigger prices if those metrics are hit in the first year. We both got skin in the game. We're going to go for those metrics. And if we get them, we're going to go to the next level next year. Right? You can get that deal done. Sometimes, in that case, you do have to meet with the CFO and walk through it, but that's a good conversation. You want to establish that. Those are the two main ones. It's less, somebody just shows up. It's like, "Ah, you quoted me 20. How about 17,000?" I don't see that as often. I'm not sure. It's not the buyer's money in the first place in a business, in an organization. It's more, if they're moving budgets around, then they've got realities there. But that's what I see. Chris, do you see a third variant or how do you address those? Chris Beall (19:58): Well, one way to address them... I love both those. One way to address this whole discounting question is to make it abundantly clear that you are the lowest risk party to deal with because you have the expertise and the skin in the game approach. That's going to provide a kind of guarantee that the individual that you're dealing with is willing to buy off on and to allow that, and the chunk size question, of course. I mean, there are budgetary chunk-sized questions. They just exist out there. So try to preserve your unit price while adjusting the chunk size. When you're doing this, think about this all the way back to when you think about your product. If your product doesn't have any units in it, then there's no unit price. And if there's no unit price, well, you got a problem, right? So if somebody says, "Oh, I only got 25,000," well, it turns out that really we get the best results when we only work with a subset of the users and then I'll come all the way back to adoption. Your VCs might hate you for only taking on 100 users instead of 1,000, but there are 100 best users by definition. This is just- Mike Gentsil (21:11): That's right. Chris Beall (21:13): Anybody who doesn't believe that, go to the calculus, right? Every function's got a minimum. So there are the 100 best users out there. So let's just say, look, we get the best results this way. And we actually prefer to start smaller because that way we can focus on getting the best business results, measuring them carefully and making sure, before we go to higher levels of adoption, that we have solid results, solid processes. You're doing your part, we're doing our part. What do you say we fit this deal inside that? Now your unit price stays right where it was. Your chunk size is the right chunk size. It's very rare that somebody has a unit price budget. It's very common that they have a chunk size budget. So work with it. Mike Gentsil (21:55): Yeah, that's smart. Corey Frank (21:57): Wow, this is just a great step. Chris, I don't know. I think you probably agree with me that in the Beatles world, right, as an analogy, I think Mike Gentsil is the Brian Epstein of the Market Dominance Guys here. So he's the force behind the force. And, Mike, we'd love you on anytime that you're free. This is great. You clearly speak our language. And, man, I think we have a whole couple of new chapters in the Market Dominance Bible here that Mike just wrote in the two sessions we had together. So we appreciate that very much, Mike. Mike Gentsil (22:29): Thank you, Corey. Really enjoyed it. Thanks, Chris. Chris Beall (22:32): Thanks, Mike. This was tremendous. And thanks, Corey, as always, you seem to have come back from the brink of death, and you're back with us. You know what we say about all dead companies, they're equally uninteresting, but you know- Corey Frank (22:43): That's right. Chris Beall (22:44): ... not all dead people are like that, but we still love you a lot. Corey Frank (22:48): Well, as I think the quote goes: I wasn't dead. I was just in Texas.

As a follow-up to the recent Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, “Vanity, Vanity, Thy Name Is Value Metrics,” Chris and Corey continue here with part two of their conversation with Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI. Mike and Chris share their insights into value metrics and how to construct and present statements about value propositions and returns on investment. These market dominance experts explain that it’s all dependent upon the job title of the customer rep being addressed, as well as where in the sales cycle you are with that company. Is risk mitigation the most appropriate metric? Is it perhaps better to talk about productivity gains? Or would a statement regarding cost savings be more enticing as a promised ROI? And, as Corey asks, whose job is it to craft the appropriate statement for the value prop or ROI? ----more---- Mike cautions listeners about the importance of being careful in the representation of value when talking to a prospect or customer, because it’s necessary that the stated ROI be credible. He then gives examples of formulas for determining what you should charge a customer by relating it to the amount that company will gain by using your product or service. As with all Market Dominance Guys’ podcasts, you’ll find this sales-related topic both enlightening and helpful in your quest to dominate YOUR market! About Our Guest Mike Genstil is co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, an innovative company that enables B2B sales and marketing professionals to easily create and share visually compelling value propositions with prospects and clients. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:07): Welcome to a part two edition of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall. I am not on camera today to save precious bandwidth because I would not want to have any iota of bytes or exabytes or terabytes wasted on looking at me when we have Mike and Chris, these two experts here where I'm going to try to get out of the way as much as possible. Last time, I think in part one of our exercise with Mike Genstil hear from VisualizeROI, we were talking a little about a lot of vanity metrics that big dumb sales farm animals like me use to try to justify or dazzle their board with how we're doing in sales. Certainly was a important episode, you should go back to the listen to in part one, but part two I thought, when we kick it off today gentlemen, let's talk a little bit about how that spark happens between sales reps and actually the prospect when we are in the language, we are right in the heat of battle so to speak of trying to communicate ROI during the sales process. Oftentimes we'll talk about features and benefits and things of that nature of course, but how do we in a VisualizeROI world, they talk about justifiably earning Mike, the available budget and this value-based messaging that you talked about so eloquently in part one, how do you communicate that? How do you go beyond just a traditional budget type of conversation to paint a picture of how or why the ROI occurs? I think that would be a good place to start as we enter into the next episode of the Markets Dominance Guys here. Good to have you again Mike. Mike Genstil (03:50): Thanks Corey. We tend to help organizations who are trying to engage buyers around value. Think about four buckets of value, hard cost savings, revenue acceleration, productivity gains and risk mitigation and every buyer that you engage with, if they're truly interested in your service or solution, they will have to create a business case internally that will touch on at least one of those points and often it's several. The favorite one for buyers and sellers is hard cost savings, meaning you're spending X with this certain vendor today and you're spending Y with another vendor. If you shift that spend to us, you'll actually be able to save costs and that's dollars back in your pocket and the CFO will appreciate that argument as well as the advocate that you're selling to. You go down the line, most B2B organizations are selling something that gets productivity gains and productivity gains are a little bit tricky to quantify the value of, because you get a lot of hours back for people avoiding certain activities. What are those hours worth and it's hard to quantify that sometimes depending on what those people do. For salespeople, if you get hours back from routine tasks, well, theoretically that's more time spent selling, which allows them to actually achieve their quotas more effectively. You could say those productivity gains equate to incremental revenue booked and that's going to appeal to every VP of sales, as well as CFO and CEO in that buyer decision-making unit. The next one is risk mitigation and so you've got every organization is making certain amount of mistakes, both in their internal accounting, internal processes as well as the product and services they offer to their customers. Everybody's making mistakes. Some of those mistakes are easily measured. A good example of it is an assembly line. People typically know the error rate on their assembly line. If I produce a thousand widgets, typically a half percent have something wrong with them, if I could reduce that, that would be a good thing. To your point though Corey on visualization, there's two sides of visualization here. The first is the images themselves that the marketers are already doing a good job creating. Most B2B organizations that we engage with have marketing teams that are very effective at creating sales materials in the form of PowerPoint presentations or Google slides or other imagery that has very powerful images that describe value proposition, reduce carbon emissions and a picture of a cloud, reduce this, improve that, and those images are very powerful. What we do is we equip sales reps to overlay numbers on top of those powerful images that the sales reps are already using in their discussions. That's part A, overlaying numbers and data on top of good images and making that data dynamic and then part B is charts and graphs. Depending on who you're selling to, some people appreciate images with data and others appreciate bar charts or pie charts, lets say you were spending X, that's coming down to Y. The best visuals that we equip our customers with are a combination of beautiful images with numbers as well as bar charts and pie charts and line charts, showing cost savings and revenue growth over time. That's kind of in a nutshell, how we think about it. Corey Frank (07:04): When I look at our cost savings or risk mitigation or productivity gains or into the other, is there one that you found Chris, maybe even from your world too in the ConnectAndSell world, that when I'm speaking the language of ROI that is more alluring or sexy or powerful than another, for instance is hard cost savings may appeal that this person, this persona, productivity may... are they all really kind of different heads at the same point? Chris Beall (07:31): I can speak to this from long experience, not just in ConnectAndSell but other companies. I've done consistently selling productivity gains that free up people's time. That sounds great until somebody thinks it through a little bit and then the question is, well, are they going to fire people in order to also save money? Probably not, and what do they thinks going to happen with that time? I remember the general counsel of General Electric once took me aside and said, when we were selling some productivity kind of oriented stuff and he said, Chris if it doesn't save a dollar that the CFO can see as a dollar, don't talk about it, we call that water cooler time and we value it at exactly zero. That was fortune one at that point and very sophisticated viewpoint, somehow I managed to listen to them well enough to change the message around from the sole savior engineers two and a half hours per part that they find to this will save you $50,000 of vendor certification each time they find a part and 11 divisions of General Electric bought our product and we became important in the electronic catalog and space for engineering. Getting that right and getting over where that hard dollar cost savings was something that Mark [inaudible 00:08:49] needed. The chief counsel of all of General Electric could stand behind as he spoke with the CFO, that was really important. Now later in our relationship, he pounded his fist on the table and said, Chris, you are destroying the General Electric company, we had a different conversation but that was the conversation we had to get in and then there was the later one. The other thing is people respond differently at different points in the sales cycle to different things. So very early in the sales cycle, there was an attraction to upside that is not followed through later and there is a distress, an emotional distress with risk that when risk is emphasized early, it's a wonderful thing. That is, if you say we completely eliminate, I believe we've discovered a break trip through that completely eliminates. The fundamental risk of X, whatever X is and then you'd say something that's emotional and the frustration with Y allowing you to do Z. That's pretty good. If you're trying to get a meeting, that combination works pretty well because completely eliminating fundamental risk, this is surprising after all it wouldn't still be there and be fundamental if that were easy, so that's a bold claim and wiping out an emotional stressor, which is always frustration by the way of business, always, always, always frustration. Everybody's frustrated all the time in business because they're trying to do really well. You know what Deming taught us that's right. People have pride of work from show and they feel like they never quite have the time, the resources or the support to do their job as well as they hold themselves accountable for. Then they're trying to go somewhere and that's the upside. But if it's the upside of like and it makes you more dollars, that's probably not as appealing as it will let you accomplish the thing that's been sitting on your plate for three years, you've been unable to move toward because you're so busy doing other crap. Mike Genstil (10:44): Yeah. I think Chris, you talked about the persona and the different stages in the sales cycle and I think the way you articulated it was correct, where the CFO, particularly in conservative companies like GE are going to need that hard dollar savings, but to get to that CFO, you needed to get through some middle management layer. That middle management layer may or may not care about the hard cost savings because it doesn't affect their job and so as you're appealing to that person, you need to say, what is the job you're trying to do? You're trying to get more widgets through the assembly line more quickly, more effectively with fewer errors, at reasonable prices. You might talk about higher throughput and a lower error rate, those metrics that person might get as bonus based on those two things, throughput and error rate, so yes, the whizzbang thing that you're selling, today you're here, going forward you're here on your error rate reduction, et cetera. But then when you get to the CFO you flip the thing and you compute the actual hard cost savings per your metrics, it's vendor certification. To kind of tie it together, you kind of build a matrix of persona on one axis and then the actual KPI's on the other and your business value story needs to be able to show the right metric to the right persona at the right time through the sales process. It's pretty elegant and sophisticated and you kind of need software to do that which is where we come in, but that's kind of the Holy grail because you have to consider the entire decision making unit and what each person cares about and putting the right numbers in front of right folks is tricky, but I would agree with Chris's point on hard cost savings is the number one thing. Chris Beall (12:22): We're certainly number one at the end, right? Mike Genstil (12:25): At the end? Chris Beall (12:26): But I love this. This is so important because often in sales, we get locked in to what we consider to be a value proposition. I remember walking into Sean McLaren's office when I first joined ConnectAndSell. I've been with the company for maybe a day and he was officing out of some company where he had made an investment because Sean's too smart to rent his own office so he was getting some sort of trade out office space. I walked into his office and I just wanted to sit with the guy. He's a genius and why not? I could learn a thing or two plus actually I'd been under the impression for years that he was dead, so watching that dead guy work is so cool. So I go and sit down and he's got a whiteboard and it's got two letters on it. This whole whiteboard in big letters, they're like three feet high, PI, and then I said, what's that? He says personal impact. If you don't know what the personal impact of what you're offering is to the person you're speaking with right now, you will never make consistent progress through the sales process. So that's what this is about, is ROI is kind of abstract, PI is like PI personal impact is right now, but they're related to each other. They're related in a somewhat subtle way. The software that Mike's company provides lets you actually make a PI statement, personal impact statement that makes sense out of what would otherwise be an ROI generalization. Corey Frank (13:57): I love that. I love that. Contrary to rumors he's not dead, right? Chris Beall (14:04): Not very, not very at all. Every time I talked to him, he's very lively. Corey Frank (14:08): That's good a little bit. So to the point, Chris and Mike, who creates this as it come from, we talked I think a few episodes ago, Chris, about sales and marketing alignment, right? I think we've had 50 or 60 episodes in sales and marketing alignment, always seems to creep in there once in a while, but from your perspective on these value statements, these ROI, these PI statements, do they come from the messaging from the sales side best practices, should they come from marketing and this is what they use to empower all of their messaging. How does something like that spark or create, cause this is a philosophy but now I can point my finger and say, great, who's going to create it, marketing has all the content. Hey, sales guys, we don't do that kind of thing or do we? Where does it originate from? Mike Genstil (15:00): Yeah. It ends up being a bit of a hybrid responsibility Corey, is what we're seeing. If you think about the evolution of a new company, imagine a company being started or founded by a founder, that founder is going to go out and acquire his first customers and his first investors and he's going to create a pitch or she's going to create a pitch, which is visionary. It's going to describe problem areas that customers tend to have and how those problems can be solved with this revolutionary new thing. It'll have imagery that talk about these problems sizes and then benefits. It may have a couple of testimonials of people that have tried it and had success, et cetera. On day one, you've got a visionary founder and then that person brings on some marketing folks that are really building out the story and the message. So you've got this nice compelling visionary message, which is largely qualitative, some nice images and problem statements and then a couple of testimonials. Over time then as you hire and scale a sales organization, you're getting past those early visionary customers to the early majority kind of coming back to crossing the chasm and then the late majority and the crossing the chasm was right, we should still talk about it more these days, I believe. Those buyers aren't as effective at getting budget for a very visionary concept, they need proof points. They need to see these ROI stories and then the CFO will need to be basically agree with those. What we're seeing is the people that are building that quantified message inside of organizations to supplement the visionary value props that were designed during the founding days and then in those several quarters after that tend to come either from product management. These folks tend to be highly analytical and quantitative, so sometimes they'll build the quantification. Sometimes it's product marketing, the product marketing folks tend to think about segments of customers and the value of segments per customers and then there's also, some of our customers in emerging function which is called the value analyst or the business value analyst. We're seeing more and more companies that have these folks on staff used to be companies like SAP and Oracle, had small armies of business value analysts and now alumni of those organizations are heads of value at hundreds and nearly thousands of companies. These people have a day job of building and refining value quantification for typically they get started on the biggest deals that the company is selling into and then over time they're scaling themselves by building self-service tools, sometimes through our platform, to make it accessible for the average rep and the average deal. But at scale, what we're seeing is a hybrid approach where the marketers are still generating beautiful slides with beautiful images and as the company releases new products with different variants of the value proposition, the value prop, there'll be different approaches of quantifying and describing the value prop, then overlaid with actual hard calculations from either again the product manager, the product marketer or the business value analyst. Chris Beall (18:28): That's what we're seeing. As we go through the sales process, it's interesting how these capabilities and the artifacts that come out of them are best used. Some sales job is actually to do two things. One is an assessment. Should we, does it make sense for us to move to the next step or not, to do more together? Should the relationship evolve or should the relationship stop evolving? That's the number one job of a salesperson. When they're testing that with somebody, these kinds of tools are incredibly valuable because if you're the salesperson and you reach into your bag of, I'll call them ROI tools or valued tools, and you pull out one that you think makes a lot of sense, you populate it with the relevant data that applies to the situation for this particular person that you're speaking with and their situation and they yearn well, you just learned something. What you might've learned is, huh, we really don't have anything here for them or you might've learned, huh? I didn't get it. I need to go back into the tools and find the other one that they care about. I have a classic example, I mean it is true of almost every VP of sales. Corey, you've run sales organization, so you've heard me say this to you when you were my customer, Corey you got 102 people. I think 23 it'd be a better number. What do you think? You've heard that from me, right? What did you say? Chris ain't no way, right? Corey Frank (20:02): All of the limited self-worth I have as a man, Chris is all coalesced into the number of salespeople that I have under my payroll. I think I said something along that lines maybe not that eloquent, but that's basically what it meant. Chris Beall (20:16): Yeah. I think NFW came to mind, therefore this, Hey, here's this efficiency that will let you save money through reduced head count, I could show it to you all day long and it wasn't going to get anywhere. So I either had to find something else or we had to disengage one or the other, so that's sort of thing number one. Thing number two is, but if we go to the next step, new people get involved, new things happen, expectations are set and maybe expectations need to be met. So one thing that's different between marketing and sales involved in all this is, marketing paints a picture that can be arbitrarily large in value along the four dimensions that Mike mentioned. Sales must constrain that picture to being just large enough to take the next step and do larger. It's really important for a successful sales cycle that you don't overstate value early, regardless of who you're talking to. So one of the jobs of sales is kind of odd, it's to not to attenuate an artificial way, but to be careful in their representation of value, whether it's risk reduction, whether it's cost savings, whatever. So that it's just enough to move to the next step and not so much that they get and this is a really good phrase for those of you who've ever done it physically out over their skits. Mike Genstil (21:36): Yeah. The way we address that is we always coach sales reps to say the first thing you need to find out before you do anything else is roughly what is the revenue of your customer? Because if you've got a customer you're selling into this doing $20 million in revenue, you can't give them $10 million in value next year, unless you're going to create a rocket ship, you're going to put the whole team in a rocket ship and send them to the moon and back and that's worth $10 million in value to them. You'd be lucky for a $20 million company, if you add $1 million in value, which is 5%. It would be phenomenal that there're another one to $2 million on top of that. Now, if you sell something like ConnectAndSell, which dramatically improves their sales results, well maybe you'd be getting on top of the 20 million and extra one, two $3 million in value. But you should not say 10 million because it's not going to be credible. Now you might get those results, that's fine. We find that sometimes these models don't have these [inaudible 00:22:32] in them, as Chris said, you can't overstate but you also can't understate, so for that same $20 million company, to tell them they're going to get $20,000 in value, the CFO's probably not going to care at that point and your solution better be better cost no more than $5,000, if you're going to get $20,000 in value, maybe hopefully a little less than that. But the point would be, Hey, try to get that $20 million revenue company, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in value to a million bucks and charge them 20,000 bucks for that. That's a good exchange of value. I'm going to give you a 20K, you're going to get a 100 to 200 to 400K back. That's worth a couple of percent on top of your $20 million in revenue. That's a story that you should be trying to tell and that's what we train against, starting with what's your price, what's the value and what does that relate to their overall top line and profit associated with that? There's variants of that, but that's kind of how to think about it. Chris Beall (23:26): Wow Mike, do you actually train this stuff? Cause I don't see anybody being trained like this. I mean, it's like talk about one size fits all. Every rep wants to say, you're going to get the sun, the moon, the stars, three galaxies and the unicorn and that's just the greatest thing in the world and what you're saying is you actually train folks. That's how we train reps too. We train them in a five sentence way of having an okay conversation, right? First conversation. We do it because our software quote unquote works, but it doesn't deliver as much value unless the conversation is good. So you're saying your software quote unquote works, but it doesn't do as much good unless they have a conversation that makes sense for that kind of customer. Is that what you're saying? Mike Genstil (24:10): Yeah. Every B2B rep is in the business of getting meetings and ultimately quoting prices and trying to get contracts on. When we do the training, we say, well, what's your average deal size? I'll say my average deal size is $50,000. Great. So then I'll ask the question to the room. Okay, what do you think your customer needs to get in terms of value, for that $50,000 to make sense? They'll say, I don't know, a $100,000. Well maybe, what would be better? $500,000? Yeah. 500 to a million bucks. 10 X to 20 X is a good story to tell, it's credible, it's reasonable. It's a good story to take to the CFO so it's okay, let's agree it's a million dollars in value for your $50,000 investor. How are you going to convince the customer there's a million dollars in value? Do you believe it? How would you prove it? Let's say you've got two minutes in an elevator going back in the old days, when you rode elevators with the CEO of the company, how would you tell that CEO you're going to get them a million dollars in value. You better know to be able to talk to that pretty quickly as a function of the things that he does, what he's selling, how much revenue he's making and you go there and when we frame it that way, Chris as part of the training, it actually resonates because they're quoting prices and they've never really stopped to think about, huh, what should the value be? And it's simple math. Once you kind of get them thinking that way, it's easier to get the adoption and change the culture around value selling. Corey Frank (25:30): Yeah. I think we are wired. I think our good friend Oren Klaff from Pitch Anything, Chris where he talks or runs a big advocate of leveraging pessimism in your sales process, because I think Chris says you were alluding to, I mean, what type of professionals in the world are the most optimistic you've got entrepreneurs, especially when they're trying to present to an investor, their product and you've got salespeople. I mean, their job by definition is to seed optimism. They're programmed to promote this vision of the future while your biggest problems are solved, as he had said and you can live in the moon and the sun, as you're saying so. Given the nature, though what you're saying, Mike and Chris, I mean it's counter-intuitive because given the nature of our profession, salespeople like me, we're not programmed to be pessimistic. We're programmed to be optimistic and push you in that direction too. I think this optimism that bubbles up from our emotional core, I think it sows those seeds of doubt, doesn't it Mike. Where it actually creates stress for the buyer you could say, because it's unbelievable. My goals and Chris, you talk a lot about this in the messaging about after the breakthrough, we do X that does Y and Z and some of those are emotional pieces of the messaging and some of them are logical, but so that pessimism does wreak. You need that pessimism. I think what you're saying to get a little bit more credibility. They shouldn't fight that as a salesperson. It sounds like giving them that autonomy to question. Yeah. That's reasonable. The goal of the value, the ROI that you're saying, I can buy into that and that gives me a little bit more autonomy and trust to move the conversation along.  

Change is the obvious hallmark of the current pandemic. And, as most of us know, change rewards innovation and punishes those who stand pat on tradition. This is especially true in the winner-takes-all world of sales. Most people believe that true innovation springs from the use of technology. But is innovation mostly about taking a technological product or service and then marketing and promoting it to the stage called “user adoption” — or even to the more desirable stage that we’ll call “user embrace”? Or should innovation be more cultural than technical? Join Chris as he makes the case for pursuing innovation during the pandemic and talks about the difference between strategy and tactics during this pursuit. Chris is joined by his friend, Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power, Inc., as they discuss the role of empathy in sales and its importance as a leadership tool. ----more---- About Our Guest Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and CEO of Selling Power, Inc., a multi-channel media company that produces Selling Power magazine, the leading periodical for sales managers and sales VPs since 1981, and conducts Sales 3.0 conferences, which provide sales leaders with strategic insight and best practices for improving sales performance and revenue growth.   The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (01:43): I'd like to talk about something that frankly I stole from my fiance, Helen Vannucci, she had spent a lot of time researching what turns out, I think to be the big question in the world of sales, which is sales culture. And she was looking at it from a digital transformation kind of viewpoint and discovered that culture was really the issue that needed to be addressed around digital transformation, much more than technology. I wanted to know is it possible for innovation, doing new things and valuable things in a pandemic to coexist? Just to remind us all, sales is a winner take all business. That's kind of all there is to it. Sales is peculiar in that regard. So marketing's not like that for instance, it's not winner take all. In fact, it's really hard to tell in marketing who the winner is. Every once in a while, something happens that's so spectacular in terms of an advertising campaign, as Gerhard referred to the 66 million ads that... Facebook ads that the Trump campaign used in 2016. I'd say that was a winner take all situation, but it didn't show purely in the marketing. You have to go tear it apart there. Certainly in research and development, product development, it's not winner take all at all. Products come and products go, there were a brilliant products that hit product market fit at least for a while and in a marvelous way. But in sales deal by deal by deal, there's only one winner. And I think that puts a huge amount of pressure on innovation because there's only two situations you're in. You're in a situation where you just won the last deal, in which case your inclination will be to continue to do whatever you did before. Whatever you think got you there, might not be what got you there, but it's what you think got you there. And that works against innovation. How can you innovate against success? And yet in the case of failure, we tend to either cast about, try one thing, try another thing, another thing, another thing which also gets in the way of innovation or we kind of hunker down. And I think in the pandemic, there was a lot of hunkering down. There was a lot of Fox holing. Let's go and get in the foxhole, we seem not to be winning. So let's just kind of banker fires and do nothing. And the problem is that change when it happens, demands innovation. That is, if you don't innovate, you're actually going backwards in a changing world. And here's what the pandemic looks like in a changing world. This is a 20 cows that didn't get out of the way of a high-speed train. A high speed train is a pretty good metaphor for what just hit us all in March and April of this year. And I think people are finding out that the high speed train is continuing to be a high speed train. It hasn't really slowed down. And being a cow who didn't get out of the way of that train for any of you who know the weird Al Yankovic song Albuquerque, he refers to us. I think his mother is looking at him like a cow looks at an oncoming train for a certain part of the song. Well, you don't want to be the cow looking at the oncoming train. You've got to innovate, but in which direction to get off the tracks, to the left? To the right? Go into the bushes? Do you jump up in the air? What do you actually do? One thing, you know, you cannot do and you must not do is stand Pat. But what do you do? I mean, what's a positive way of looking at innovation. There's a tough picture to look up by the way I was a vegan for quite a while. And I used to raise cows too. So what can I say? This didn't work out well for these cows. You don't want to be one of these cows. You want to move in some direction that makes sense. And you certainly don't want to stand pat. If you stand Pat, and you just kind of stare out there into the world and kind of are just made of whatever it is that you get from yourself, so to speak, but you don't want to stand Pat. You want to move. And the question is, how can you move in a direction that makes sense? Or that might make sense? I mean here's one of the other problems with innovation. You can only move in the direction of your hypothesis. You can't know what's going to work in advance. That's simply impossible. If somebody comes and says, I know this is going to work, they're either diluted or lying in our business, actually Connect And Sell, we've enshrined this principle into a thing we call the Intensive Test Drive, which is, "Hey, we don't know what's going to happen. We know you're going to talk to a lot of people. We have no idea if that's good, bad, or indifferent, for all we know you're going to go fast and wrap our Ferrari around a tree and it's not going to be wonderful. Why don't we actually safely do the experiment, production for a full day?" So that's an idea that we had around innovation, but I think every innovation has to think what's a step I can take in the direction of learning more, a step of action not of contemplation, in the direction of learning more safely in the environment in which I find myself. When folks talk about innovation and sales, they generally talk tech stack. As an old software developer, you know, the idea of a stack actually is sort of a real idea. It's... The fact is there's stuff down in the stack, closer to the operating system or in the operating system. There's apps up at the top, and... By the way, human beings kind of live way at the top of the stack as users. And there's, all sorts of real ideas of stack. We kind of use the term a little bit more, I would say, loosely, not in the world of sales. Could you pick the one that's going to make the difference. That's safe to go down the road with, and learn more. How would you do that? So you've attempted to do that. You attempted to say, we don't want to be hit by the train. Let's go and talk to the folks at Bigtincan about sales enablement and get our content managed in a way that makes sense for our sellers. Or let's go talk to people at Vidyard or BombBomb and start to use video in our outbound selling or let's go to see if we can get some automated lead engagement, have conversations because a bot actually write our emails for us and do the engagement or whatever it happens to be right? We could look at all of this, but it's a little hard to know two things. One is, is it the right thing to do? And the question is, will you quote unquote "adopt the technology?" I think adoption is actually kind of a silly metric. The real question is, do you embrace the technology, whatever it happens to be or the innovation? And do you feel like it changes your life? Like it changes how you feel when you're doing your job? And does it change it in a way that you see this being sustainable, working for you over time? I think people have really embraced zoom here. We are on zoom video. So people have embraced it and that's really what made it work. And even though we complain about zoom fatigue, it's only because we use too much, but then I'm sure they're busy doing something about zoom fatigue. So there was a case where the embrace was easy and it was also however forced. It was forced by that high-speed train. If you didn't come up with or use a way to talk to people that's more intimate and exchanges more information than email. And even a phone call. Well, you were going to get hit by the train. So the real question here is, is innovation mostly about taking a technology and getting it beyond adoption, getting it to embrace? I'll tell you, I don't think it is. And this is what my fiance Helen taught me. And I've been paying a lot of attention to it. I think here is the real issue. Peter Drucker said it this way, a long time ago, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Well strategy eats technology as a snack. I mean, if, without strategy we're simply doomed, there's just no hope. Strategy is basically a list of steps that are positions that we could get to new places to go on a journey that is to where we really want to go. So a strategy is not how we take the steps, that's tactics. It's not the shoes that we wear so to speak or the hiking poles that we have, or our backpack. Strategy is more like the rocks in a river that we've chosen, I'm going to step on this one and this one, then this one, and then I have to step on this one, even though it appears to come back toward the bank that I'm already on, because I want to get to this one. And from there, I think I can jump over to the other side. That's strategy. Strategy is as a bunch of wares put together in a list, and tactics are the how's, and then technology is the what's that we're going to use either like shoes to defend our feet against the ground. So if culture eats strategy for breakfast, it certainly eats tech. And so the thing that we've got to pay attention to is how do we get a culture of... [inaudible 00:11:20] have a culture of innovation or use culture to innovate in a world where our sellers have gone home, so our sales teams, our home, our customers have gone home, where businesses have been wildly disrupted, but some of them have been wildly improved. What do we do with all this change? And the answer turns out to be empathy. Chris Beall (12:25): And I think we all get empathy. We tend to get it wrong. We think that empathy has something to do with how we feel and with caring. So I want to make a sharp distinction, how we feel about somebody else, whether we feel their pains, whether we feel bad for them or bad about them, that's sympathy. Our feelings are sympathy. And they could be very powerful sympathetic feelings, or they could be weak, or they could be non-existent, but it's not empathy. So, let's put that aside. Empathy is also not caring. That is I could fail utterly to see the world through your eyes and still care for you. In fact, I had something, a little medical procedure done and just had some stitches taken out of my face yesterday. You know, I didn't really concern myself with whether the nurse who was doing that work, whether she had empathy for me, that is whether she saw the world through my eyes. My concern actually was, are we going to get this over quickly enough that I can make my four o'clock call? That was my concern. I didn't care if she had that concern, knew about that concern or whatever. What I cared about was that she did a great job professionally, that the stitches came out, that whatever amount of damage that might've been done was going to be minimized. And then we'd get it over with, I mean, let's get this over with and get me out the door. So I cared about her caring for me, caring is something that you do for somebody. You actually take care of them. You do something for them. Empathy is another thing entirely. Empathy is actually going through the effort, trying to understand what somebody else is thinking, how they're seeing the world. And Christopher Voss talks about it really well. And we use it extensively at Connect and Sell when it comes to thinking about cold calling. So I'll just use cold calling as an example. I want to point out that the big issue here is not seeing your customer's world through their eyes. That is huge, by the way, you've got, you've got to be able to do that all the time in sales, but that's not new. That's not the bullet train. The bullet train is you actually have to do this. If you're a sales leader, you have to do it with your sales reps. And the old world of saying, here's your number, make your number and we're going to maybe provide you with some quote unquote "coaching" most of which is relatively, I think, disjointed to put it politely. The thing that's required now, if you're going to work with sales teams that are remote, and if you want to have a cultural foundation for innovation, is to actually see your sellers, your sales people's world, through their eyes, as they're working from home, as they're adapting to the different ways that their prospective customers and customers are responding to them, how are they seeing that? So if you want to do that, you kind of have to do something similar to what you do in a cold call. That is you have to go from a state where the other person is afraid. That is the general state of other people. Is that in a cold call, the other party is afraid. They're afraid of you the caller, because you're an invisible stranger. In the world of have I been left at home to sell, fear tends to predominate. And if it doesn't at one point in the day, it likely will at another point in the day, that is fear tends to show up on bitten and it really hampers performance. And so, getting the understanding that your reps may be starting from a place of fear and taking them on a journey where they actually trust you, where they think you're on their side, one of the things you have to learn to do or do organizationally, which is how we do it, is coach without any intention of evaluating. And this is incredibly important. If you're evaluating while you're coaching, you're in big trouble because you're creating fear. Deming told us way back when W.Edwards Deming said, first drive out fear. If we want the truth, we need to drive out fear. So how do we actually do that? So the idea here though, is to show empathy. You can teach empathy. That is if you're not being empathetic, acting empathetically with empathetic intention, to understand your sales reps, I'm talking to sales leaders here. And understand what it is they're experiencing and see the world through their eyes, they're going to have a hard time doing it with their prospects. And given that tactical empathy in action with prospects is the key to being the winner rather than one of the very many losers in sales, this is super important. So I believe this should be your primary focus of innovation. Number one, just like in a discovery call, ask the damn question. And don't just ask it once. And don't just ask it one way. Ask your reps, how are they actually dealing with all this change in a practical sense? That is what are they doing in terms of a place to work? What are they doing with interruptions? Do they have kids at home? Do they have a dog that needs taken care of every once in a while so that they can't run back to back? Do they feel like they're being run harder than they used to be or harder than as right before them, do they feel breathless? How are they dealing with this change? What are they doing practically? And how are they feeling about it? Two is, don't take all those answers for an answer. I actually go do their job. And I know this is something people are advised not to do is like, "Oh no, you're a sales manager now, you're a leader, don't sell". I actually think no matter who you are in the organization, the most important thing to know is, how does the world look through your seller's eyes. Go do their job, a week is enough, but take a little mini quota. It could be meetings that you set might be hard to close deals, do some cold calling. I mean, if you're not doing cold calling, you're not getting to the source of a lot of their fear. And go do the job. And then be curious, not that judgemental with regard to the data. Look into data and ask yourself, what is it telling me before the pandemic, after the pandemic, for instance, what is it telling me, about how my reps are seeing the world what's going on? And then go with your reps on calls that is get joined them on a zoom. You don't have to say anything. You can just be the intro and see what their buyer's world is like. And then discuss it with the rep. Don't discuss the deal. Ask what did we learn about what our buyers are seeing, how they're seeing the world. And then fifth slowdown. Everyone is running really hard right now with all this stuff that's going on, slow down. This stuff takes time. Your reps are alone. They're alone with a bunch of people, could be their kids, it could be their dog, it could be their mother-in-law, whatever they're alone in the sense that they're working without physical human contact with their own tribe. And it is the loneliest way to make your number. So when you're alone, the mindset that tends to predominate has a lot to do with fear. I think we all have to figure out what to do with fear. And the main thing we want to do fear is first, just admit it, admit that it's there. Reps are often encouraged to be brave, rough, tough, hard to bluff. But when you're talking to your team, start with, what is it you're afraid of? This is what I'm afraid of, be transparent about it. This is where my fear is. Explore their fear and let it be okay. And then figure out how to drive out fear. Because once you drive out fear, you can actually set up a cultural situation where you can innovate around culture. And if you innovate sufficiently around culture, you already have gotten off the track. You're not going to be hit by the bullet train, but now you're free to actually look at technology and think, is there something here that would be helpful that we could embrace and that we can embrace it in a way that really makes sense and is on a solid cultural foundation. So that's kind of it. Gerhard (20:48): Chris, are you still there? Chris Beall (20:50): I'm here. It's 9:08, am I done? Gerhard (20:54): No, you're not. I think we have a few minutes, like two minutes, but I want to make a couple of comments. One is I love that you highlighting the fact that sales... In sales you're measured by your wins, and winning in sales is so important, and it's so challenging right now. Secondly, I love that strategy eats technology as a snack. Never heard that before, but I totally agree, strategy is so important. And I like that you talk about empathy and it reminded me of a saying that I heard a long time ago. If you want to know what John Doe buys, see the world through John Doe's eyes, empathy is a leadership tool. It is a product innovation tool. It is really a tool that makes our society, our world a little bit better. And I thank you for that. Chris Beall (21:53): Well, I thank you, Gerhard. You are my empathy hero. Every conversation I've ever had with you, you have made a point of trying to understand further what I'm thinking, how I'm feeling, where I'm going. And I think that when we do that with the people who work with us on our team, we help them to do it with our customers. And I think that's where the winds come from. Gerhard (22:20): This is exactly what is so hard to teach salespeople, which is taking a half a step back in a conversation with a client and see what is really happening emotionally with that person in the present moment, and really tuning into that mental state of the customer and sensing the emotions. And before you interpret, the more you are able to suspend the pre-occupation with the sales, the more you can tune in to the state of mind of the customer and open the conversation to a deeper level or to a higher level, or to explore a new perspective. And that's what I think co-creation is all about, that as kids, we all want to play, and as adults, we want to transform that drive to play to co-create and explore possibilities. Chris Beall (23:24): If you could change one thing about yourself to be successful, to be really, really successful, here's what I suggest it would be, totally lose interest in closing deals, totally lose interest because your interest, your desire, the deal is getting in the way of your ability to pursue the truth with somebody else. And when you pursue the with somebody else, you have a chance of co-creating. Otherwise, you have no chance. It's so delicate that, one little finger on the scale saying, I want the deal, that's the thing that kills the deal.

In the modern SaaS economy, adoption metrics abound. Sure – they measure something that VC investors care about, and sometimes something that product recommenders and even decision-makers want to track. But does adoption speak to business impact? One thing for sure: when it comes to business impact, adoption metrics are pure vanity. A business doesn’t measure return on investment by asking how much time its employees are spending as “users.” Horror stories abound of products that suck up time due to their own internal inefficiencies, sending employees on wild goose chases to figure out what to put in that so-called “required field,” or how to coax a shiny new SaaS product into spitting out a coherent report on what it did for you — or, more likely, what you did for it. At its worst, a focus on adoption invites corruption, as the SaaS vendor needs to make a claim that their goodness is spreading throughout your organization and the buying committee needs to justify, and feel good about, their purchase. ----more---- Join Chris and Corey as they talk with Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, and analyze the practices and dilemmas of determining adoption, the difference between theoretical value and harvestable value, what a QPR has to do with renewal, and the role of a VP of Value. About Our Guest Mike Genstil is co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, an innovative company that enables B2B sales and marketing professionals to easily create and share visually compelling value propositions with prospects and clients. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:07): Well, here we are altogether for another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall, the Sage of Sales, and Corey Frank. Chris, as you know, we don't have guests on too often, but we seem to be saying that more and more often that we don't have guests on often. But we just keep running into so many interesting folks, smart folks, that we want to get on the air. Some of the information, some of our conversations that we've had are just too powerful to have just in our little own Zoom world. Chris, we want to certainly welcome our newest, oldest friend here, Mike Gentsil, CEO of VisualizeROI. Is that the name of the company? Is that the tool? Is that a little bit of both, Mike? Mike Gentsil (02:44): VisualizeROI is the application that our company sells. Yes, that's the name of how we market ourselves. Corey Frank (02:49): Well, fantastic. Well, welcome to the Market Dominance Guys. Chris, how about you tell our audience a little bit about how you came across Mike. Especially in our topic today, which I think is so captivating, which is customer success and customer adoption. And some of the flypaper, and stickiness that we all as sales leaders are trying to get at, and some of these vanity metrics, as we talked about that people chase. But yeah, let's talk a little bit about how you tripped over Mike, and why he's such a pertinent guest for us here at the Market Dominance Guys. Chris Beall (03:21): Sure. Absolutely, Corey and welcome, Mike. This is going to be fun. Mike and I ran into each other a few years ago, right? Three years ago, something like that? Mike Gentsil (03:28): Yeah. Chris Beall (03:29): And started working together with us as a client of VisualizeROI, to figure out how we can take our test drives and turn them into ROI-centric case studies. And we do hundreds and hundreds of test drives every year. I've been frustrated through the years with our lack of, shall we say, sophistication and compelling presentation of the value and the return on investment for our customers. Now, their investment in the test drive, of course, is just three or four hours of their people's time. Nobody pays for our test drives, but still you want to be able to show business impact. And our conversation has evolved over the years to be much more about this big question of the business impact of what you buy in business, and measuring it, and making it abundantly clear. Both from the vendor's perspective, they'd love to be seen as having big impact, but primarily from the customers' perspective. We were just having a discussion the other day about this. Mike and his team were taking what we call our attribution report, which is a lame name for what did you get out of all that ConnectAndSell you bought, right? How much pipeline value did you generate? How much directly, how much indirectly, and how much kind of, maybe, sort of? We shipped off some data to them. His team put together something that was just awesome that allows for an interactive QBR. We started talking about what is the role of the QBR? What does it all mean with regard to renewal? Mike said something to me right as we were wrapping up, which was, he said it kind of hesitantly. He says, "I'm not a hundred percent fond of the adoption metrics that people use," and I just jumped out of my skin and I said, "I hate them. I think they're corrupting. I think they're terrible. I think that they're misleading." "I think they're gameable. I think they're for venture capitalists to care about something that they should be more careful about. It encourages people who build SAS companies to lie about their business." I gave him an example. There is a company that will remain unnamed in our space that we're in the same account with. The people at the account said, "These guys at this company, they measure adoption. If you send one email using their tool, that's adoption." We don't see it that way. You guys talk to us about business impact. I said, "Yeah, but we fail to actually quantify it for you." I said to Mike, "You hate it, I hate it. Let's talk about it," so here he is. Corey Frank (05:56): That is a setup. I think the first question then, Mike, with that is I remember working at a drugstore when I was in grade school and I had to stack the Sunday papers. Remember those coupon sections that came in the Sunday papers, and on the bottom of every coupon, they always said no cash value. Or they said cash value one 100th of a cent. And it seems to me, Chris, what you're setting up Mike on is these vanity metrics where one man's trash is another man's treasure and certainly vice versa. But a lot of these adoption metrics, if you really look closely from a venture perspective or a valuation perspective, I can't pay my employees with coupons. I can't pay them with adoption rates, and so who cares about that? So let's talk a little bit about what are some of these other adoption metrics that you've seen, certainly in your years, that have that cash value of one 100th of a cent, or maybe nearly nothing to the rest of us business owners? Mike Gentsil (06:56): Yeah. I think the impetus for this discussion is when you think about as a vendor, getting a renewal from a customer. So often what you'll hear from your contact is, "Well, we did an internal survey and we learned that the adoption was okay or it was great and other tools or other services have more adoption." And you're like okay, well, that's interesting but the value of the adoption is what? Let's say that you give your employees free crackers and they love the free crackers. And you do a survey, hey, what's the value of the free crackers? Well, everybody loves the free crackers. What's it worth? Should I continue to spend money on the free crackers, or if I have to make a choice, should I spend money on something like an automatic dialer that actually gets connections with people where I grow my business? I think CFOs want to spend money on services and solutions that create value and ROI, that's how they're wired to think. But the metric that they're given by the business owners of these solutions typically is just an adoption metric because there's nothing else that they are trained or capable of providing to the CFO. So I think that kicked off the discussion around how do we bridge the gap here? Because the seller wants to communicate the ROI. The buyer wants to understand it. But in the meantime, the only thing people are looking at is adoption. I think it spans all of the main services that people are spending money on from a procurement perspective in B2B. Corey Frank (08:27): So there's a lot of noise out there of what really is determinant of true ROI. Very few of them, it seems actually have a dollar associated with it. Instead, it takes a little bit of extrapolation to get to the actual real value of what the impact is to that business. Mike Gentsil (08:45): Exactly. The good news is it's relatively easy to measure adoption. Then the second piece of good news that Chris and I have been discussing is if you roll up sleeves a little bit, you can extract and extrapolate some kind of value calculation, whether you're subscribing to an invoice processing service, or an automatic dialer, or a service that helps you reduce fuel costs. If you actually do the math and make some basic assumptions, you can get to a value estimate. In that case, you're going to make everyone happy. The CFO's going to be happy, the business owner is going to be happy, and then the vendor is able to quantify the ROI and communicate that to you. The work can be done. We just need to roll up our sleeves as buyers and sellers and do it. Corey Frank (09:31): Chris, when Mike struck that nerve on adoption or so, what were some of the vapid metrics that you've seen over the years that prompted the visceral reaction that you gave? Chris Beall (09:46): Well, most of it's been adoption. That's the one. The fact is, it's not considered that but it's considered essential. With hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being invested based on these adoption numbers, which seem completely, well, not wholly uncorrelated. After all, if you get no adoption, nobody uses your product, you're probably going to fail spectacularly, right? In much the same way in our business if you were to buy ConnectAndSell as a service, and then nobody pushes the button and talks to anybody. It really doesn't matter how great those conversations would have been and how much business they would have led to. This is the quantity, quality thing. At quantity zero, the quality is always the same. It's zero by default. It's not like it's a totally dumb metric. It's a highly gameable metric. Gameable metrics suffer from inflation on one side. Whoever is going to make the most money at the margin by gaming the metric is going to game it in an inflationary kind of way. And then discounting on the other side. So then CFOs and other people who, with flinty eyes and green eyeshades will look at it and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And so you get a runaway process of discounting versus gaming. And eventually, you just end up with is goo, which has no intellectual integrity to it and really no predictive power. What's kind of funny though, is on the other side, if you look at any estimate of ROI that's rational. Say you're measuring something, you're measuring a real something and at the end you get dollars. Dollars are invested, and dollars have come out, whether in the form of savings, or in the form of gross profit contribution. The two ways that dollars move around. Could also be in the form of risk, which is the trickiest of the dollars to measure, this big industry around doing something about that one. Every once in a while, they get shocked and surprised by something like, I don't know, say a global pandemic, or a hurricane that's a little fiercer than normal. For the most part, it's cost savings or it's this other side of people call it revenue, but it's really gross profit contribution. If you get a measurement going, the beauty is, say you love it now. You love what you're getting from Mike's company. I'm using VisualizeROI, everybody's happy, and we feel like we're getting something good. When we measure, we get a five. And the next time we measure it, we get a seven. It's the same measurement. We probably can rely on that being a 40% improvement over the five. By the way, if the five were five percent, and seven were seven percent, most salespeople would report that as a twp percent improvement, which shows that they could use a little math education, as could many people. But it's a 40% improvement over a baseline that was established as being above threshold for investment. We can rely on real measurements of dollars in and dollars out to some degree in the absolute, but really, really strongly relative to a baseline that we've established. We cannot do this with measurements like adoption. Chris Beall (13:13): Where the marginal increase tends to be, shall we say frothy? Mike Gentsil (13:27): Corey, let me give you maybe a different example because probably everybody on this call recruits candidates. Part of your candidate recruitment you probably have an HR platform. You might have Google Sheets. You might have some, there's a number of other platforms. Now, if you are the VP of HR, and you're subscribing to one of these recruitment platforms, some people call it applicant tracking software, for example, and we have customers that sell this kind of software. The VP of HR might say, "Hey, our applicant tracking software system was great last year. We had 2000 candidates submit their resumes into our software and we hired a hundred people." Great. She could say, or he could say, "We love the software, but guess what? What if it so turns out that those hundred candidates are on average, lower quality than another set of a hundred candidates they could have hired?" And what if it took them five months to hire those candidates, versus what could have been three months with a superior platform? They might think this is a classic vanity metric. We used it a lot. We submitted a whole bunch of candidates. We actually hired people. But what you really care about, as the VP of HR, and the CEO, and the executive team is hiring high quality candidates that can add value on day one, and hire them quickly at the right price. That's a valuable system. You're not overpaying the market, you're not overpaying recruiters, et cetera. If you were the vendor of that applicant tracking software, you would want to communicate, "Yeah, you used it a lot, but the value you got was substantial," and you would quantify all those pieces, and we'd back into how you could do that. I can give you a couple more examples where you want we could... Corey Frank (14:58): Yeah, no, that value communication, right, I think is key. And even what you were alluding to earlier, Chris, on discounting, I think Mike is appropriate, right? Because again, I'm a big, dumb farm animal. I'm a sales rep, and I've been a sales rep for a long time. Sometimes I have a tendency to discount when I don't need to discount. Mike, you're my boss, you're my VP of Sales. You think, "Gosh, Corey does a pretty good job selling," but am I really, because I'm giving away the farm when I don't need to. How would I be able to kind of track that? I maybe think I ran into some pain and I have to discount, but I think that's also a metric that maybe is a little elusive for companies, that would be wonderful to be able to determine if I run into resistance is proportionate to discounting, true? Mike Gentsil (15:45): Absolutely. Corey, I think you're referring to a pre-sales process. I think it would also apply in a post-sales case. Discounting is a problem, both in pre-sales and in post-sales. In pre-sales, it's a problem because that rep, who is high velocity, likes to close sales, likes to hit the number at the end of the quarter, is very quick to give discounts. And truly the VP would be happy to take the deal at 80% of the price. It helps him get over his number versus if we had simply quantified value and quantified pain, we probably could have gotten 95% to 100% of the price. On the renewal side, we have the same challenge. What you run into there is in an average or above average case, the customer will say, " Yeah, the adoption was pretty good. Bobby and Susie love your product, and we want to keep it, but we've got some bad news. The bad news is we're in a recession. The CFO's looking at everything very carefully and we have been asked for across the board, 30% cuts on everything." I'm like, "Okay, well, that is bad news. I understand. I'm glad you're happy with the product." Now, what would I ideally be able to do in that case? I'd say, "Well, I appreciate that CFO's perspective. What would be great, because I'm not sure I can get that discount across the board. We can't tell our investors that we've lowered our average revenue per customer. Why don't we take to your CFO, the value that you've realized from the solution and perhaps you guys should buy more of it next year. Maybe you could redirect some span from some of those other solutions that are getting less ROI. Why don't you cut two of those a hundred percent and redirect that over here, because there's real ROI." That's the discussion you want to have. If you've set that up over the course of the year, through your quarterly business reviews where you've associated adoption with value, you're in a strong position to do that. In the best case, you're actually paying that CFO somehow quarter over quarter. "Hey, by the way you used our solution 222 times and it generated $5 million in value." And he's like, "Who are these folks?" And then you'll raise the awareness. Then you're in a much better position at that last minute, and you wouldn't have to do the renewal. Corey Frank (17:44): To your point, Mike, where does this live? Chris, where would you and Mike see, ideally, is this a new role, a VP of Customer Success, a VP of Value? Because it seems like this discussion traverses so many different roles in an organization. Is it worthy of its own little responsibility? Is it an enablement? Let's talk a little bit about that. Mike Gentsil (18:07): I'll give you a quick perspective. What we see across our customers is there is a growing number of customers that do have a title VP of Value. That VP of Value can report into the chief revenue officer. They can report into the head of solution engineering, in some cases. They can also report into the CFO, in some cases. The more important point I think is not where they report, but the person that quantifies that value inserts those value estimates at every step in the customer life cycle. There is a version of value calculations for marketing people, who are trying to entice people to become a lead. There's a version for your inside sales team that's trying to get you to take a meeting and you're quantifying value as part of that. There's a version for the sales person, and then there's a version for the customer success person. I think the VP of Customer Success, and the VP of Sales, and the VP of Marketing, they should be able to quantify value for their motions. They should extract that quantification from that function. That function again, could live in its own silo or they could report to any of those folks theoretically. But each customer facing functions should be able to extract those calculations and use them to their purposes properly. Chris Beall (19:18): Wow, VP of Value. I got to go and apply for that job. That sounds like fun. Mike Gentsil (19:23): Not an easy job. You better love Excel. Chris Beall (19:26): Well, I do have a certain fondness for the occasional spreadsheet, as Cory knows. So yeah, it's interesting. In our company, we do something a little funny, which is our VP of Customer Success is actually evaluated based on the customers getting the maximum amount of business impact, which we tend to measure in terms of meetings that are set. Now, people will argue and say, " Oh, the meeting set might not have happened, blah, blah, blah," but I guarantee you over time, it's linearly related to value. And that's the main thing is that you need a linear relationship between whatever you're measuring and whatever you're getting out, so that should it trend, the trending actually will represent a linear increase or decrease in the value that's being achieved. James Thompson, our VP of Customer Success, is held directly accountable for the value that our customers get per dollar that they spend with us. His job is to minimize the dollars that they spend for the same unit of value. You could look at it two ways, but the easiest thing to hit is always costs. He's always looking for opportunities with his team to keep folks from using too much ConnectAndSell. You might've experienced this, Corey when you were our customer and I was acting in that role of VP of Customer Success. When you were a customer at StormWind and I was telling you to use less. Corey Frank (20:44): Here's a guy that didn't want me to spend. "Spend less, Corey. Spend less with me." Chris Beall (20:48): Well, it's not altruistic. I think it's like, look, we put a keel on a sailboat, not in order to make it go faster, but so that it can go the direction that you want and it doesn't ever tip over and leave you upside down turtle in the water, right? It actually slows the boat down, ticks down in the water, but try sailing in rough seas without a keel on your boat, and you get a little bit nervous. I believe that this attachment to maximizing the customer value per unit spend, that is their ROI with us and focusing on it because we have the inside track. The thing that vendors, I think, need to realize is look asking your customer to do this is asking them to do something really hard. If they provide you with a little bit of data, you can provide them with a lot of insight, as long as you both agree what you're trying to do, which is to get them to spend the least with you to get the maximum business impact. That's what I hate about this whole business of adoption because it leads to exactly the opposite. I want the marginal adopted user, think of it this way. If I have a SAS solution and for 10 core users, it provides for every $100 spent, it provides a $1,000 of value per year. Then for the next 50 users for every $100 spent, it provides $200 of value. Then for the next 1,000 users for every $100 spent, it provides no value whatsoever. I run out of the users that are really the high-impact users fairly early, but I'm under pressure to extend the usage beyond that group. That's what I'm referring to as the corrupting influence of the adoption metric on customer success. It runs counter to the mission to help the customer be successful for the least amount of money that they need to spend. Then you can find their budget. And by the way, they're likely to reward you next year in a funny way. They'll discount less. The discounting of price is irrelevant compared to the discounting of value, as skepticism will cost you more than transactional discounting over time, every time. If you can dispel skepticism by being upfront about the value that's being created and transparent about it, transparency is a big movement in business. Lay it out and say, "Here's what we're doing." And by the way, there's a big difference between theoretical value and harvestable value like at ConnectAndSell. I can tell you, I can save you money, right? After all, you can have a smaller team. Well, what if you don't shrink the team, then you didn't harvest that value. Are you likely to shrink the team within the timeframe that we're talking about for harvesting the value? If not, it's illegitimate of me to talk to you about the cost savings. I need to talk to you about the opportunity, about getting more on the top line. A little bit more painful, but I got to go there. Maybe in the next budget cycle, you won't grow the team as much. Mike Gentsil (23:35): Chris, that was a fantastic example of that distribution or histogram, if you will, of value by user. A good example, perhaps for folks listening, is you think about a service like LinkedIn, where if you've got a team of a hundred sales reps, sure. They're all going to want access to LinkedIn. Now of those hundred sales reps, 10 of them, for example, are going to use that so effectively, they're going to find the best contacts. They're going to generate half a million dollars in pipeline per month because they're able to use LinkedIn so well. The bottom 10%, they're going to use it, and they may or may not pay for their subscription at all, because they're not as connected already. First degree connections, secondary connections, they're not as skilled. So as a VP of Sales Operations, subscribing to LinkedIn across those hundred users, if push comes to shove, you have to become a little bit tough and very analytical around, well, maybe these guys got a premium subscription, maybe these guys get nothing at all, or that's where it gets very tricky. Then the customers, to Chris's point, the customer success rep for LinkedIn managing that account, should be ensuring that the high value users really know all the great features, so they're getting more, and more, and more value. Maybe even be able to charge them more for more features. Whereas, they get the people at the end of the histogram, at least to a point where they can prove to themselves and the CFO they're getting value out of it. That'd be very sophisticated customer success. I have to believe that's where we're going as an industry. Corey Frank (24:55): Well, I think so too. And that's a great way to kind of end this part one session with Mike from VisualizeROI. And I think maybe in our part two, Mike, we can expand on this that you and Chris were talking about this. As sales guys, like me, the goal is to create a compelling narrative that sparks creativity and inspires that prospect to make a buying decision, a purchase. But often, I'm going to focus on what my product can do for the prospect's business, but I don't spend enough time demonstrating how it will actually make an impact. I think in our part two, we'd really like to hear you and Chris expand on this evolution from moving from traditional, how do I justifiably earn an ROI and how I process that to more value-based messaging, which I think what you and Chris are talking about. And how that value based messaging can take ROI and go beyond just merely budget conversations. I think that's a good place to stop session one here, and to thank Mike for his time on this. Tune in next time to part two with Mike Gentsil from VisualizeROI with more on customer adoption.

In the last two podcasts, When Operational Excellence Hits a 9-Foot Wall and Myths and Misconceptions of the Cold-Calling World, Chris, Corey, and Valerie Schlitt, CEO and founder of VSA, have been discussing various aspects of striving for operational excellence. In this third and final podcast on the subject, these three sales experts turn to the topic of coaching. Listen to what they have to say about how coaching works best — and the challenge of doing it in today’s work-from-home world. Valerie explains that what she misses is the way coaching worked before COVID, when she and her team were in the same office, with many of them calling on the same program. And they would sit next to each other, and listen to each other, and hear what went well on each other’s calls, and then copy it. This passive coaching among co-workers isn’t available now. And though active coaching by management isn’t impossible right now, it has to be done in a different way. ----more---- In the past, using ConnectAndSell, Valerie’s team at VSA listened to call recordings together and then dissected calls as a team in order to teach and learn what works and what doesn’t when cold calling. Like so many aspects of working from home, coaching is so much more difficult when your team members are scattered across town. As with most Market Dominance Guys’ podcasts, the conversation often wanders into related areas of sales. Hear what these three have to say about the often-misaligned purposes and practices of two related departments — Sales and Marketing. And then listen while Chris suggests a cure for the misalignment. Yep. You’re going to want to hear this! About Our Guest Valerie Schlitt is the founder, owner, and CEO of VSA, a B2B call center that helps clients generate leads and produce new business. Valerie also heads up the Philadelphia chapter of AA-ISP. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:25): Empathy as Chris and I talked about in many, many episodes of how it could be taught. Could it be beaten out of you? Can I take a pill? But how can you create that or engender that in a conversation with a stranger? And we don't have many tools at our disposal, right? We have our tone, we have our pace, we have our reflection, we have our intonation, or we have our pauses. And the right combination of that, like a good musical selection of notes. You can't just go to the waltz and say, "Give me a G, give me a B flat, give me an E and let me just throw it together." You got to kind of play around with it. And I think as Chris has said with his new keyboard here, sometimes you just going to just play, and then flow and then pretty soon you have a nice harmony and a nice melody and before you know it, "what do you plan?" "Well, I'm just playing my own thing." But it sounds like it's something. "Who wrote that?" "I did. I'm just meandering on the keyboard." But it sounds like something. And sometimes the trained ear, right? Can hear that more than a newer rep and we need that power of that coaching to say, "Wait right there, that stammer that you incorporated, that's the right level of empathy and aw shucks and toe in the sand and vulnerability. That's what we want. Now do it another 25 times today. And make it sound like it's the first time he ever did it." And that's what's challenging, but that's what's fun if just like a good Broadway actor, knowing their farewell performance in cats has to be just... And hit the marks as they're opening performance of cats on Broadway three years earlier. Valerie Schlitt (04:02): That's true. Chris Beall (04:03): Yeah, Valerie how do you guys coach? I just heard somebody who has listened to a webinar this morning. I had to get over a bias that I have. I'm working on this bias, which is the modern way of speaking, especially the way that imitates California speech in which everything is a question and we can't say anything definite. Corey Frank (04:25): Upspeak. Chris Beall (04:25): I'll keep asking one question after another. And we use the word like a lot, because we don't want to say something is, but we can kind of say it's like, and so if we say like seven times in a sentence and then we sound really uncertain, then we're not offending anybody and everything's fine. Well, I'm sure I'm caricaturing a perfectly legitimate way of speaking that I'm just uncomfortable with and then it makes me think that somebody doesn't want to stand behind what they're saying. And so I was listening to this this morning and the substantive part was that only 20% of managers and sales do any coaching whatsoever. Now I believe the number is above 3%. Actually. I'll be completely Frank. I think almost nobody, coaches almost never so to speak and they think they're coaching, but what they're really doing is just holding a conversation at the end of the week, in order to say how they used to do it back in the day when they were rough and tough. And maybe they'll listen to something or whatever, but how do you do it? Has it changed over time? Or how does your team do it? I mean, I guess drift is everywhere. I listened to Seth Weinstock, who's one of our top reps. He's not an SDR. This guy carries a big quota and makes it stick. And I listened to him today on a call and he opened it like this. "I know I'm a bit of an interruption" whose deaf. May as well put a gun to his head right? Yet there was no way that that's the same as "I know, I'm an interruption." That was the retreat into comfort and comfort is the enemy of performance in everything that we do. And so here, what one of the best in the world had done that. And I guarantee you, he's totally unaware of it. I guarantee you that this is like a hitch in his back swing. He is totally unaware that that elbow came out and that club crossed the line and there was no way it's going to any way, except dead, dead left into the water after this, right? But he doesn't know it. So how do you guys do it? How do you formalize the continuous tuning that's needed?- Valerie Schlitt (06:25): I will say that we don't do it enough. I look at our operation here as... Okay, we've now worked with ConnectAndSell, we have a great list source, we have great hires and now we're a little tilted because I think we can be coaching more. We do coach this way. We have someone who's responsible for listening to taped calls for giving, then setting one-on-ones with our reps and for coaching them. And they're supposed to talk to everyone. So this is one person that does this and we have about 50 people. So they get to everyone once a month. That's not enough. By the way, we are hiring someone right now whose only job is going to be to do that. Because as we look towards operational excellence, that is one of the things we need to bring us all up to the next level. So the table's not tilted anymore, but we also have team meetings for each client and we play calls for everybody in that team meeting. And we listened to good calls, bad calls and dissected the calls as a team. So there's one group effort, that's the one-on-ones with each individual agent and that is not frequent enough, and then the other one's once a week where there'll be some sample calls that will be either sent out earlier or actually played at the meeting itself. And we dissect those and talk about what went well, what didn't go well. What I miss is before COVID, we were in the office and since we have a team-based approach, we could sit next to each other and many people were calling on the exact same program and they could listen to each other and see what went well and "How did you do that?" And then copy that. And we don't have that now. So that's one of the deficits of this COVID environment that we need to make up for. And hopefully this new hire will... A lot is riding on him. So we'll see how that goes. But that's basically how we coach. Chris Beall (08:23): Yeah. It's fascinating as a challenge, right? Coaching is so interesting because sales is so athletic and top of the funnel sales is the most athletic part of sales, where split-second timing, management of your internal states, of your emotions, I compare it to facing major league pitching that the main trick apparently to being a Major League hitter is to hang in there against that curve ball that looks like it's going to hit you in an uncomfortable place. And it's the management of your emotions and your expectations. And they call it "picking up the spin." What you're really doing is trying to figure out if you've got to bail out, or if this is a great opportunity. And that's a tough one in sales, and we do it all the time. We have to do it really, really quickly, which means we have to have practiced. So it suggests that coaching is more... A lot of coaching is about what's in the moment. And how do we do that without getting close to the moment? It's like doing it the next day saying to me, "Hey Chris, yesterday in this call, you sounded like this." Like, "Yeah, but what did I feel like then? Why did I feel like that? Is not probably why I did that, it's more about what I feel and maybe even about what I believe? My beliefs might've moved out from under me a little bit." And so I just think it's the most fascinating part. And you guys are always working out of both of your companies. I see you essentially as this; you get talent, you put talent into the seat and make sure that they're equipped, you get a problem for them to solve, which is "Here, talk to these people and get appointments," and then you deal with the fact that they're human beings. That's kind of like the four-step process. The fourth is dealing with the fact that they're human beings. You're both experts at this, right? Do you feel that that's kind of a fair characterization and the bulk of it is step four? Dealing with the fact that their human beings? Valerie Schlitt (10:23): So, yeah. There's only so much you can control with automation and with getting the right lists. And then you have, as you just said, the people, but- Valerie Schlitt (11:12): ... honestly, in some ways it's beautiful because someone might come up with a wonderful idea and a wonderful way of opening the script that I hadn't thought of, or the program manager hadn't thought of, or even the client, or whoever's putting together that message. And then everyone can incorporate that or even the timing, but you can't control it. You're exactly right. And even the best people have bad days and that's the hard part, but it's also could be the beautiful part. Corey Frank (11:39): I think it's more the latter. I think it is the beautiful part because you think about the 10,000 years ago, right? There was a caveman who wrote out a wall somewhere and ink dye and berries, et cetera. And he wrote this picture of reindeer, right? Running in a meadow somewhere. So of all the things that they could write. So even 10,000 years ago, we are wired, right? For beauty, we are wired for reflection. He saw it, he experienced it, it was beautiful enough in his own home to say, "Listen, you know what could go over our fire here is I need a .... His own version of Van Gogh and 9,500 years before Van Gogh. And he, and he created it. And I think if we can get the reps, our teams, ourselves as sales professionals to come above ourselves and see what we do and how we perform it as an art form, as did I... Chris's example of the pitcher with the curve ball and watching film, "Why did that curve ball just hang a little bit too much over the plate and they took it 405 yards or 405 feet out of the park?" "Well, I think I came a little late on the delivery. I think maybe I didn't hunch my back and get enough spin into it." And so it's about the technique. "Why did I get the bad review in variety because of my play on Broadway?" "Well, the song that I just... I was a little flat, maybe the orchestra overpowered my vocals." And I think as a sales rep, and you'd say it's really about the performance. And once the rep feels comfortable that it's not about Valerie Schlitt or Chris Beall or Corey Frank, it's about the performance. "And don't worry, I'm going to get another audience in tonight and you have another shot and don't worry if you screw that up, because I got another audience coming in. I can keep bringing people in front of you. Don't worry about that." And by the sixth week, the 10th week, we're going to be ready for the Tonys." So I think if folks can get beyond themselves, this bias that we have, get this mental toughness, this grit to realize that it really is... I'm not going to law school, I'm not going to medical school. What I do is I am a professional salesperson and these are nuances that I want to learn. And so help me, Valerie, help me, Chris, as my coaches helped me learn these, so I get better and better. And I think when you can kind of move beyond that, where it's an art form, I think reps seem to perform to those standards. Valerie Schlitt (14:09): Yeah, I agree. I think also it goes to the part that we need to be with other people to make things work. And when success starts coming and that sense of accomplishment, and enthusiasm, and even the adrenaline, that's contagious to other people, it infuses an entire organization to go up another level. I do want to give a little story about myself here. I come from a family of professionals. My father and three siblings are all pediatricians. So being in sales was really shunned. And I remember when I started my job and I realized I was going to have to sell. I think I went through a depression. So I thought, "Oh my God, you don't just open up the door and then people come to you, you actually have to sell." So I have really become a convert. It shells. If there was no one selling, we would not have this economy. We would not have any work for doctors to do. I think what we do is the most important thing ever. Chris Beall (15:15): I agree. This is actually, if somebody will ask me, given my background, what are you doing running ConnectAndAell? Like what's that? And run innovation at companies and built products and a ton of all this kind of stuff? And my answer is that we live in a world that has an ROI in a funny place. It's rely on innovation. We literally, as a society, we rely on a pace of innovation to deliver what it is that's going to allow us to continue to live together and thrive in the challenging conditions that earth always provides for us, regardless of whether we think it's easier or not. All you have to do to see all hard it is, go watch that show Naked and Afraid sometime and see what people are like without their technology, which includes their clothing by the way, and just see what it's like because that's only 21 days and it ain't good most of the time. It's really not good. They were highly dependent and reliant on innovation and innovation generally doesn't make it to market. And it is the point at which it founders is sales. I was talking to somebody today who has a company that they have a great innovation, but he said, it's kind of a crowded space and they're just getting going. They have the product, but they're just getting going. They're building their sales machine. And he recognizes as the founder that the sales machine is going to make or break the company. And so he's out talking to people like me about how do I build that great sales machine? And of course my advice to him was, "Well, before you build the sales machine, it's good to have one set of facts, which are what happens when you actually talk to people in your hypothetical target market?" And I'm hoping that he'll go ahead and do that because I think it's a tragedy to take something as great as what they're doing at this company and not be able to take it to market in a way that allows that to happen before they starve. It's like Naked and Afraid, right? They got 21 days before they run out of money. It's not 21 days in this case, it may be a little longer, but it's not very long before as a company... I'll go back to the COVID thing. We ask our CFO. "CFO, how long before we run out of money?" That's a big question in business and it's sales that saves us from becoming irrelevant. And I think you guys, you two and your organizations and the others that do similar kinds of work essentially are bringing lifeblood to innovations, which are of great value ultimately to the people who buy them. And I think it is the most important job. What we call the SDR BDR job or whatever it does certainly defeats the CEO's job I can tell you, in terms of importance. You could probably replace the CEO of the cardboard cutout for about six weeks and you're not going to notice, right? But if you replace your top of funnel outreach people with cardboard cutouts, well, it's not good. We had one of our customers sort of do that once. And so they fell 11% behind plan and [inaudible 00:18:31] 12 weeks, and they decided to go back and do it the other way. Corey Frank (18:36): Well, weasels in essence are made of cardboard. We could agree on that. Chris Beall (18:42): [crosstalk 00:18:42] When I get done with ConnectAndSell, I'm going to start a band and it's going to be all keyboards and they're not going to be hooked up to anything. And we're going to call ourselves the Cardboard Weasels. Corey Frank (18:58): No.I like it. So last question, Valerie. And then the hostage is officially released from the Market Dominance Guys' holding cell here. But you've been a leader in the AISP for so long. You got to lead the chapter there and Philadelphia, which is no easy task. A lot of folks will say to participate in a chapter is one thing, to actually lead it a chapter, be an officer chapter that is a job in and of itself. So I'm curious, just for kind of our folks who are listening today is what are you seeing across the chapter that maybe the rest of the country as a leading indicator, maybe either some nice technologies, some new techniques, some common issues, some common shared wisdom, kind of as the chapter head there. What are you seeing that the rest of us should be aware of from your purview as an inside sales professional? Valerie Schlitt (19:50): I will say, I'll just contribute this. We are having our third annual conversation on the alignment of sales and marketing. And we've had this obviously for two prior years, and now this year. This year, we're actually getting professionals from within corporations, not coaches, not consultants or trainers, but people who are actually within the organization who have a responsibility to marketing or to sales, talk about how there's alignment, because there's often that conflict, that tension. And I think especially even in the field that I'm in which overlaps, sometimes sales and sometimes marketing, having that alignment is really, really important. So that's just been a theme that's been really, really interested, gotten a lot of interest from the Philadelphia membership, so. And I think the whole automation of marketing and whether that helps or doesn't help in providing leads is a great topic. And everyone has a different perspective. So anyway, that is what I will leave you with. Corey Frank (20:56): Yeah- Chris Beall (20:56): Wow. Can I jump in on this? Because this is my favorite topic of all. Valerie Schlitt (21:01): Yes. Chris Beall (21:01): Sales and marketing alignment. I think I've probably told the story on Market Dominance Guys. I'll tell it again. I once asked John Neeson, SiriusDecisions founder, what percentage of leads that are generated by marketing ever get a conversation? What's the highest number he's ever seen? And he said 9%. My comeback was, "Well, I don't think we have a sales and marketing alignment problem, I think we have a leakage problem." And my analogy was this, if I'm at the Talisker Distillery and the Isle of Skye and I'm visiting and I'm taking a look and say I'm a whiskey distilling consultant, and they're showing me their operation. And over here in one building, they're making the mother liquor, which is essentially beer. And it goes up through a pipe that goes along the ceiling and goes over to another building, because distillers sometimes blow up. And when they do, you want them far away, right? So it's going over there. And I witnessed that there was like a flood of the mother liquor coming out of the pipe and 91% of it it's on the floor, would I say we have an alignment problem, or would I say we have a leakage problem? And I'm pretty sure we have a leakage problem until we're talking to a majority of the leads, probably 50, 60% of them, rather than talking to 9% that are cherry picked by somebody, according to their tastes. Really it's what it amounts to. In fact, we tend to talk to the 9% that are the easy ones to get ahold of, whereas the best ones are the hard ones to get ahold of because they're busy people. So I'm fascinated by that topic. And I have a cure for it that your companies can both provide that I'm going to suggest that you field as a potential product. It's called the VSA young blood work sales and marketing alignment workshop. Guaranteed to produce results. And here's what you do. Take the marketing folks and train them to be cold callers and have them do it for a week. You'll be done. It'll be the most brilliant product on earth. And I guarantee you that all of the sales and marketing alignment issues will go away immediately. And it's not because they'll fail, it's because you'll make them succeed. They'll realize that the language of sales is fundamentally psychological. And the language of marketing is fundamentally about where products fit within an evolving markets. And there are two completely different worlds. And once a marketing person experiences being a sales person at the top of the funnel, they'll be able to make that distinction and alignment will be easy. So I'm going to beg you guys, please go come up with this product and save the world. Corey Frank (23:46): I don't know if there's enough... 91% of the market, I don't know if there's enough leakage yet. Let's wait for there's a little bit more pain, right? Chris Beall (23:52): Well, that was the best case. Corey Frank (23:55): That's awesome. Well, Valerie, Hey, it's been a pleasure. You're at vsaprospecting.com. One of the pioneers in the space and one of the true experts in the field of top of funnel. So really appreciate your time. And again, I think next time we have Valerie on we'll change it from Market Dominance Guys, to something more Market Dominance Legends. How about that with Valerie and Chris and [inaudible 00:24:19]. Valerie Schlitt (24:18): Legends. Great. Corey Frank (24:19): Yes. We appreciate it. Valerie Schlitt (24:20): This has been delightful guys. Thank you. Corey Frank (24:20): Thank you, Valerie. Chris Beall (24:23): Thank you so much, Valerie. This is just, I know we were long in planning this. It was yesterday and then you came today, but hey, all of our planning has paid off. Valerie Schlitt (24:36): Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed it. I've liked meeting you Corey, and this was delightful. Chris Beall (24:42): All right.

Chris and Corey continue their discussion with Valerie Schlitt, CEO and founder of VSA, which began with the Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, When Operational Excellence Meets a 9-Foot Wall. Making another observation about operational excellence, Chris begins this session with the statement, “A big part of operational excellence is recognizing that you don’t always have the resources that you need to get the job done perfectly — or even well.” Valerie thrives on solving problems just like this one and is adept at addressing problems in unique ways. Together these three sales experts tackle the issues of maintaining operational excellence while running a business — either before or during a pandemic. ----more---- As their discussion progresses, they debunk several myths about the best way to plan a cold-calling campaign, they tear apart the misconception of how much time it takes to onboard a sales rep, and they share some of the unexpected employment backgrounds that have made for the most effective BDRs. Always intelligent, often irreverent, Chris, Corey, and Valerie delve into what works — and what doesn’t — in the world of sales. You won’t want to miss their insights!   About Our Guest   Valerie Schlitt is the founder, owner, and CEO of VSA, a B2B call center that helps clients generate leads and produce new business. Valerie also heads up the Philadelphia chapter of AA-ISP.    The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (01:48): I think a big part of operational excellence is recognizing that you don't always have the resources that you need to get the job done perfectly or even well and sometimes you just have to guess. And if you don't have a formal process for entering guessing mode and then doing the guess and then treating the guess as a fact, I think it's really hard to do. And I think it's a distinguishing feature among operationally excellent leaders, is that they know that they're the guesser and when it's time to guess, they're upfront about the fact that they're guessing. Corey Frank (02:26): So would you say Chris that all most operational mandates, operational posits, facts today have its origin story in a guess yesterday? Chris Beall (02:39): Usually yes. And COVID's a great example. When COVID hit, we were suddenly all out of time and didn't have very much information. How did we know we were out of a time because we could ask our CFOs when we're going to run out of money? Corey Frank (02:52): That's right. Chris Beall (02:55): That was the March 22nd question this year. You got to the CFO and you say, okay, so in scenario number bad, right, where all of our customers can't pay us, 22 million people die. When do we run out of money? And then you can reason your way to all sorts of stuff but you don't have enough information to tell you what to do and so you take a guess. And you got to do it fast, the brick's been thrown at your head. I mean, COVID was a pretty quick little brick. And so we guess. And I think that's where the great stuff tends to come from because when we're doing what we know how to do, we're doing what we already did. So it's not comforting. It's not comfy at all. I mean, the people often ask me, what's the deal with leadership? Aren't you the leader if people following you? And I would say, not if they're just following you on a trip to the ice cream store. No. You got to be crossing the freeway with the busy traffic and in the dark with a dog chasing you. Then you find out if you're a leader. If they follow you then, maybe. Announcer (04:11): Let's talk about that operational excellence theme about guessing, right, in terms of Valerie at VSA, right. It's a top of funnel firm and you talk about... Chris that should we do everything as a leader, as a CEO, as a VP of sales, as a sales manager? And certainly Valerie, a company like yours and Chris, certainly a weapon like ConnectAndSell, right, are two such vehicles where... I've got across this little chasm here, I've got to... I'm faced with this nine foot wall. Do I want to go down? Do I want to just stick with mountains or do I already have a predictable pathway? You chose to go the path not traveled, right, the way not mapped yet. So Valerie, from an operational perspective, when somebody lands at your doorstep as a VP of sales, what do they... Say Valerie I need help. I cannot do X anymore. I've reached the limit of my potential with my team and why? I don't want to hire any more folks. I want to try this new particular market. I want to test some new messaging. What state do you find a lot of the folks emotionally when they arrive at your doorstep whether to engage in VSA or not? Valerie Schlitt (05:29): As you probably know they arrive in all different states, but I would say the most common state is they know they have a problem, they don't want to or have any idea how to fix it and they have hope. They are optimistic and we've developed trust. So from there... I mean, obviously what we do in helping people set appointments, a lion share of it, I don't know, 75% of it is the same for every single client, but that other part makes a big difference on whether we're going to be successful for each individual client and that is the messaging or the team that we put on a program or the cadence that we call with, the list that we choose, all of those things. And I think of it as this big multi-dimensional puzzle that you have here, where there is part of it that's the same and all the rest can be switched around in different ways and always need to be switched around. It never stops. You try something in the beginning and, okay we're going to go with this message with... So we have a team-based operation, which means that we have three or four people on a certain client that comprise one full-time equivalent. And the reason for that is we recruit people in a very different way than other people do, other firms do. And that we are not actually looking only for sales people, we're looking for people who have great communication skills, can engage, they're inquisitive and they also often only want some kind of a part-time job because they have other commitments. So there's this whole group of talent that cannot work in the traditional nine to five role and we get them. So we put them all together in this team and they share their feedback, they share what works, what doesn't work and they get kudos from each other and bravos. There's a whole team orientation that we talked about earlier. They're not doing it alone. And that way we can also see who is producing, who's not producing and if someone's not producing then we can take them off and we know it's not just key person dependent. But who we put on that team is going to be dependent on who fits well with that particular client's problem. It could be what the outcome of the call is, it could be the industry, it could be the type of product, whether it's a service or an actual offering product. All of these little things have to be put together and you take your best guess based on 19 years of experience and start off a program that way. Always telling our client being transparent that we are going to be making changes as we go forward, because there's going to be things that are not perfect in the beginning and we're going to have to make adjustments. And then comes the fun part, I think, which is making adjustments and seeing what actually leads to improvement. And then you want something that in the long run is pretty smooth sailing, always knowing that there is room for growth even after we've optimized as much as we can. Did that answer your question? Corey Frank (08:48): Yeah. So what is that common myth that you've seen over the last 19 years that can be most easily debunked or demystified, right? Chris talked about, hey listen, I can't do it all. And you have to kind of cross this mental chasm to get to another layer, another level of maturity, of business maturity, I can't do it by myself. But in relation to VSA and the business you've built over 19 years, what you find is that one or two big common areas that are debunked about an outsourcing firm, about a telesales front, about a top of funnel firm, that it doesn't take you too long for them to run your Jedi mind tricks to say no. In their whole world inception just comes tumbling down. That they thought it was a tree hugger about this for years, you come in, debunk this theory that they had and it opens up an entirely new world. Valerie Schlitt (09:47): There's so many, but I'll go through some. We don't need to know everything about your product or service in order to be successful and deliver qualified appointments. Chris Beall (09:56): My favorite. Corey Frank (09:59): Well you don't understand Valerie. My product is different. Valerie Schlitt (10:04): Exactly. You're so unique and so... We treat every client as though they are unique and every client is unique. But we need to know enough to connect with someone and give them a reason to want to talk more. And we have to be really good at that and not go any further because if we go further then we're going to ruin it. And that's... No one wants that. Valerie Schlitt (11:05): Another one would be that you have to have seasoned salespeople on the phone in order to be successful and we have proven that you don't need that. You need a certain personality, a certain inquisitiveness, confidence. They can't be afraid to talk to someone on the phone but we make them really excited to talk to people on the phone after they've been with us for a while, but at least they can't start off afraid. So you don't need a seasoned sales person. Cold calls really do work. People think that they might not work. Although by the time they come to us, they're open to it. Corey Frank (11:41): Valerie, I think just those three alone Chris, we should probably have Valerie out irregularly and change it from Market Dominance Guys to Market Dominance People, Market Dominance Prefect. I mean, this is... you're speaking the language that Chris has taught us over the last year. This is great stuff. So keep going. This is a great list of these debunked myths here. Chris Beall (12:02): You know there was this big ramp time thing and we had a funny thing the other day where [Sean Cece 00:12:07] who is working with us for a while and is now still working with us but he's outside the company, he posted something on LinkedIn that had actual numbers of him ramping to set his first meeting for a brand new client on his own outsourcing business. And he had it broken down to detailed minute by minute kind of thing. And his conclusion was, yeah you can ramp a rep and a new message to be effective with a business they've never seen before setting appointments in two hours. And I think it was the most controversial thing that I've seen anybody say in a while. A a lot of experts came in and said, but what about what, but what about, but what about, but what about, and it's like folks, I published the actual numbers. Here's the recordings. It's right here in front of you. [crosstalk 00:12:56] Yes, but you're really good. Well yeah, we weren't talking about starting from when a person is conceived and then they're finally born, we are starting with a human being who can talk on the phone. Corey Frank (13:08): I just finished an interview right before we jumped on here with a potential candidate to come on board here at young blood. And Chris and Valerie, you're going to kick in this because Chris, one of the questions that John and I my buddy here, we were asking him is, "Tell me about your last position." He was a BDR and SDR at a FinTech firm out of California. So I was like, well that's fascinating. And I ask him, "So you didn't do full stack?" He was like, "No. I was just a BDR." And I say just, but he was a BDR there for... he did quite well. And so tell me about your onboarding process. Well, we had two months of sales training before we hit the phone. And I said, "I'm sorry. I miss my trick here. Did you say two months of sales training?" He's like, "Yeah." I said, "You mean product training?" He's like, "Well there's a little bit of product, but a lot of it was sales." And I said, "Were you hired as a sales rep and then a BDR?" He's like, "No. This is for all the BDRs go through this." Valerie Schlitt (14:00): It's unbelievable. Corey Frank (14:03): We went over MEDDICC and BANT for two months and I was like, wow. I think that Chris or I should get Sean, get the name of that firm and have sent Sean Cece over there right away because, how would you'd like to take instead of 60 days down to two hours we'll give you the benefit of the doubt, four hours, and your folks could be on the phone to one of the myths to buttress what you were saying Valerie about. You don't need to know the product to be effective out of the gate here. Just be intriguing, you listen, some curiosity, establish some trust and some curiosity and you'll be pretty well on the way. Valerie Schlitt (14:43): Yes. Absolutely. That's amazing. Two months. That's a lot of investment that you could have used someplace else. Chris Beall (14:51): Yeah. There's a lot of opportunity cost hiding in there too when you really think about it. Everybody looks at this like, well I spent two months and that's pretty normal. I think two months is pretty normal onboarding for new BDRs out there in the tech world. And then the washout rate is about 60% over a four month, five month period. So now you have to take your two months and divide it by 40%, right. So you're going to multiply it by two and a half. So now you're five months equivalent on the mean and in five months I would expect a new BDR to set 2.3 meetings per day. So at 2.3 meetings a day times five months, that's 46, 47 meetings a month. So that's 150 meetings roughly speaking for three months and now we're out to another 70 or so 75. So we're in a 200, 250 meetings that didn't happen. And the value... [crosstalk 00:15:46]. Corey Frank (15:46): Chris, they did happen. They happened for your competitor who's using ConnectAndSell. Valerie Schlitt (15:49): Not the case. Chris Beall (15:54): It's interesting how people do this math. And when you challenge them on it and say, "Well why are you doing that?" They generally will say, "Well, I read it in this book that onboarding works like this and blah, blah, blah." And what they're really saying is this, the longer this process is and the more elaborate it is, the more important I am. Because the biggest impediment to operational excellence in my experience is in politics. It's in the politics of importance. And it's very hard to be operationally excellent when the focus is on people being seen as being important, because importance, that sense of needing to be important or seen as being important has its own inflation built in. It's got its own version of, whoever's law you want to take or it could be Parkinson's law or some other law that says stuff expands to fill whatever it is out there to expand into. And the need to be seen as an important player expands and expands and expands. I also think it's the reason that we tend not to see very many organizations operate based on the theory of constraints. Now, theory of constraints tells us that we have one bottleneck in our current process and it would be a really good idea to go find it, inspect it, characterize it, come up with an investment hypothesis, test that hypothesis and if it makes sense, if it works out, then make the investment and then stand back and watch the system settle down and see where the constraint goes. Well the problem is, everybody feels like they're unimportant because the constraint isn't in their department. And so they fight it. And at budget meetings you very rarely hear say, "You know what, the stuff we're doing is going really well. I actually don't need any money next year beyond just resources to make it." But if you can get the politics out to the point where you can go after the constraints, and in this case the constraint is a false constraint around time. If you invested in this correctly and end up with the two hour ramp or the one day or whatever it happens to be, it's really challenging to get folks to say, "I'm part of the team. It's important that I do my job, but it's not important that I'm important or seen as important right now. It's okay that I'm just part of the team right now because my stuff's working." You guys ever see that or am I crazy? Corey Frank (18:35): I think it's part and parcel of the profession though. I don't want you to think about this Valerie, right. And you have a lot of part-timers, right. You say you have people who are... I'm secure enough in being a stay-at-home dad where I have a window or I'm secure enough to be a student who's going to law school where I have a window. It's my identity versus my role like Sandler talks about. And I think though that a lot of us who are full-time in sales, especially coming from the bigger organizations where you have the great equalizer is what's on the board. Or if I'm a sales manager, the great equalizer is how big is my team, right. It's the sense of importance, the sense of alternative currency is different than... And it has to do with people and time versus probably results in investment and growth. And I think which ties back to our theme on operational excellence, right, is this element of developing a mindset where you don't have to put eight hours a day and talk with three people and spend 47 dials and send out 1000 emails. It's okay to feel your worth about how many people you talk to. Did you grow today? Did you learn something today? The word I think Chris had been stealing from you from a few months ago is ruthlessly curious. I think that's the word that you use that you try to perpetuate in your organization, correct? Chris Beall (20:07): Yeah. I'm a big fan of ruthless curiosity. And by ruthless, I mean, almost like a three-year-old asking why and not taking because I said so as an answer. And I think that that's a hard thing to have in an organization because it roots out politics all by itself, but it can also be used as a political weapon. And therefore it has to be managed. You can go around and ask why for the purpose of wielding power over people or you can ask why because you're genuinely curious. There was another element to this because some people are like that by personality, they're genuinely curious. Valerie, I'm really curious about this. When you're going out to hire folks, do you find... The CIA and the NSA in particular, they love to hire people who come out of either theology backgrounds or philosophy backgrounds of some kind or music, musical people who are musical performers in order to be computer programmers on this really hard stuff that they work on, because those two kinds of backgrounds happen to be consonant with the skills that it takes to do that puzzle kind of work that you do in those organizations with software. And often it's surprising where the skills tend to aggregate in college, what people are interested in. And I've seen an example of the best cold caller I've seen in years and years and years, was a therapist. I got to see her on her first day as a cold caller. Never done it before and never thought about doing it before and these very smart people in Philadelphia thought that maybe it'd be a good idea for her to give it a go on very specific ConnectAndSell test drive. And she approached us at the therapist. She listened like a therapist. She intervened like a therapist. And she set meetings at a pace that generated more than $120,000 an hour for their business of [inaudible 00:22:11]. so I got a glimpse into that and I thought, are we missing? We should... I mean, the psychology departments are full of these people who get trained in this stuff, but mainly they were attracted to it. They were attracted to it and therefore, maybe it's a magnet for a certain type of person that we could go and say, "Hey, you've got a couple of hours a day?" Valerie Schlitt (22:36): Fascinating. In the beginning, we somehow got through this network of people who worked in a preschool and a lot of the teachers came and worked with us. And very quickly I realized that if you are a preschool teacher, you have a way of talking that gets people to listen to you right away and do what you want them to do and you can talk to a lot of people, a lot of different temperaments. I forget what all the commonalities were, but there was a lot of commonality between being a preschool teacher and being someone who can talk on the phone and capture attention and secure appointments. And that was really an eye-opener. Chris Beall (23:22): Do you still do that? Do you recruit... I mean, there must be preschool teachers that are like Venture Capital in Silicon Valley, the streets must be a wash in preschool teachers, right. Valerie Schlitt (23:33): Probably are. We don't do it purposefully anymore. We kind of happened into this little network, but I'm sure that the same qualities of some of the people that we bring on are similar to that. Chris Beall (23:43): Who was the common nectar that you... [crosstalk 00:23:47]. Valerie Schlitt (23:46): There was one person that came to the organization. She wanted to, and not everyone works part-time, she wanted to work full-time. So she worked full-time but she had these buddies that she said, "Come on, this is a great place to work. You got to come." You have to convince someone though who's talking to kids that this is really very similar and it's a nice place to work because it seems kind of scary. You have to make all these telephone calls and talk to strangers. But then little by little they came over. And I think we have had probably about five. Chris Beall (24:16): Now how about the flip on the other stuff. So I have an example, last year where a friend who is running a company doing some sort of a... It wasn't outsourced cold calling but it was for himself. And I looked at his business and I said, I think that you ought to give my first wife a try with regard to calling. And it just seemed to me, I mean, I knew her well, we were married for quite a while and I have a huge amount of respect for her capabilities. And it was just the most horrible experience in the world for her. It created this anxiety. And here, I'm saying, ConnectAndSell, lots of fun. You push the button and you talk to somebody. And she said it was something really horrible like anticipating putting your finger in an electrical socket kind of horrible, not when she pushed the button but waiting for the conversation. And so here's a case of somebody who seems like a good match, smart, articulate, hardworking, courageous, used to run around business at a bookstore and built it from nothing, and it's the worst job in the world for her. And do you find that sometimes you think you're increasing the operational excellence with a particular hire and their eyes are bigger than their stomach when it comes to stomach and cold calls. Valerie Schlitt (25:36): I can't think of anyone in particular but I do want to translate to, as we've migrated over to ConnectAndSell and putting people on ConnectAndSell, people were really afraid at first that these calls were going to come, they weren't going to be able to study all the notes. I mean, you can see the notes of course, but you don't get to see, I don't know, six months worth of notes. And they were going to come shooting at them, how are they going to address it? Everyone loves it but change is hard. And that part of our journey towards operational excellence, it really didn't take that much adjustment, but it did take people being convinced that they would be fine if they get put on ConnectAndSell and now everyone loves it. Chris Beall (26:19): It's the scariest product in the world. It still scares me. It does because what you're doing is you're putting yourself in a known vulnerable situation without the precise control over timing. You don't know if the beeps going to be one second from now or 10 minutes from now. It has a little bit of a horror movie quality to it of being in a dark room with something bad in there and you don't know if that bad thing's going to get you or not. And then when the lights turn on, it's a surprise party and they're [inaudible 00:26:54].

Operational excellence is achieved when every member of an organization can see the flow of value to the customer and fix that flow before it breaks down. But as a manager of people, you know that this isn’t an easy goal to achieve — especially if your team members are now working from home instead of working together in one building. As Chris explains in a story about his experience mountain climbing and running up against a 9-foot tall stretch of wall, “We make a great plan — and then we run into that blank wall. The COVID pandemic is an example of that wall.” In this podcast, Chris and Corey have a conversation with Valerie Schlitt, founder and CEO of VSA, about what to do with the problems this wall has created for her team members and those of her clients. Valerie holds a Wharton MBA and has 19 years of experience directing a great team of her own who use their skills to help VSA’s customers develop their businesses. “Collaborating with people is one of the biggest sources of ways to solve problems,” Valerie explains. But with the work-from-home movement, how can you maintain that same group problem-solving? ----more---- In talking with Valerie, Chris and Corey ask for her expertise and share their own experiences in managing these challenges: How do you motivate your team to rally around a radical decision? How do you get everyone on your team to recognize the value of the expertise and talent of the other team members? How do you help your team members see where they themselves are deficient and then learn to bolster that with other people’s talents? How do you encourage everyone on your team to respect other team members when people are so different? How does self-importance get in the way of operational excellence? As usual, Chris and Corey create an atmosphere of camaraderie with their podcast guests. You’ll enjoy the flow of conversation and the information these three experts share. About Our Guest Valerie Schlitt is the founder, owner, and CEO of VSA, a B2B call center that helps clients generate leads and produce new business. Valerie also heads up the Philadelphia chapter of AA-ISP.   The complete transcript of this episode is below:   Corey Frank (00:34): So today, we have Valerie Schlitt from VSA Prospecting. Valerie, it was great to lasso you or corral you into this. As Chris and I say, we don't have guests often, but when we do, it's truly a hostage situation. So, you will develop the Stockholm syndrome probably within 15, 20 minutes of talking with us. And so your hours to glean all this nectar of wisdom here, especially the topic today, which is operational excellence, which you're the perfect person. We have a Wharton MBA, right, Valerie? Valerie Schlitt (00:34): Yep. Corey Frank (01:05): You went in Wharton. So, I'm the lowest IQ person on this phone call by a great factor and... Valerie Schlitt (01:11): Not really sure about that but... Corey Frank (01:13): ...And then before that you were at KPMG. Valerie Schlitt (01:15): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Corey Frank (01:15): So, impressive. How do you manage these type of wicked smart kind of guests here where we're talking about operational excellence. Valerie falls from the sky from VSA, one of the top of funnel firms in the country, been around for about 19 years right, Valerie? Valerie Schlitt (01:30): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yup. Corey Frank (01:31): And the perfect person to talk and to be Chris's foil here as we talk about operational excellence and with that, welcome Valerie. Great to have you at the moment. Valerie Schlitt (01:41): Oh, it's lovely to be here. It's great. Thank you both. So I'll tell you exactly how I got started. Corey Frank (01:46): No. That's the origin story [inaudible 00:01:47] Valerie Schlitt (01:48): So I have this Wharton MBA, as you know, and I really thought I was going to be a corporate person my whole life. I was climbing the ladder. Here I was, several different companies, marketing management, and consulting. And then I found myself laid off in 2001 during that downturn. And I decided to venture off and do my own thing. But unlike everything I learned at Wharton or at consulting or in marketing, I had no business plan, no Rolodex, no funding, no nothing. I sat in my family room. I met some people. They asked me if I could do something and honestly, I discovered this is my modus operandi in everything I do, I'm responding to what I say the market needs. And that's how I started to VSA, just responding to one request after another and building up our client base that way. And we've done a lot of twists and turns along the way and now we're in a group. Corey Frank (02:41): That's fantastic. Fantastic. So the thought of actually using the phone to create conversations at scale. Valerie Schlitt (02:48): Yeah. Corey Frank (02:49): What a crappy business idea. Right, Chris? [inaudible 00:02:51] Valerie Schlitt (02:52): Honestly, I often say, "Who ever thought of this business?" But I love it. It's real. It's great. It's real. I gravitate toward something that it really is tough and you have to just do it over and over and over again and then you make a difference. You make a difference. We make a difference in our client's lives and in our life. Corey Frank (03:12): Well, it's funny because when Chris and I were talking about trying to cajole you to coming on the show here, right? The first thing that we talked about was how many influencers, and I don't want to disparage anybody, but the influencers on LinkedIn and right, Chris? That "I'm an expert. I'm a thought leader." And then you have someone like Valerie who has been around for 19 plus years, quietly going about her day with her great team, growing this incredible business, right? Who probably doesn't... You have a day job. You don't exactly post on LinkedIn every hour of the day, certainly. So, if anything that Market Dominance Guys can do is hopefully kind of nudge you a little bit that you have so much to offer to the greater community. And I think that's certainly why I like doing these things with Chris and some of the guests that we have and all the great thought leaders that are connecting sellers. There's so many younger sales leaders, and even guys like me that you need help and it's a small community of folks who are crazy enough to pick up the phone and talk to strangers and ask them for money or time. And sometimes, we need all the help we can get from authentically real and genuine and experienced folks like yourself, who've done this for more than a couple of cycles. Valerie Schlitt (04:22): Great. Well, I hope to give you some advice. I can offer- Corey Frank (04:26): Well, first, let's talk about operational excellence today. So, how about you kick it off a little bit since that done, on your recent trip from Reno to Washington, you had a lot of windshield time and this thought of operational excellence. I get a text out of the middle of nowhere, say, "Oh, the topic operational excellence. I got it. This is a good one. I got to rip." And then we just happen to have Valerie. So we have lightning in a bottle here, hopefully. Chris Beall (04:47): Well, I blame it on the smoke. There was a lot of smoke I was driving through. And when you're driving through smoke in Oregon, apparently the smoke has got a lot of sources and not all of it is forest fire. So that may have just kind of crept in past my protective gear that I had on it, altered my thinking a little bit, but I've had this thing in my head for a long time, probably goes back to my long career in rock climbing and mountaineering, which is that if you can think of anything you want and you can stand at the bottom of any mountain or any big wall that you're looking at. And you can, you can think, and you can plan, you can get the binoculars out and you can look at the route. I remember once up in the wind river range, my partner climbing partner, Jim Haggart, and I spent three days trying to get a glimpse of this thing called Golden Eagle pinnacle to see if we could plot a route up because nobody had ever climbed it. And we were really, really diligent about taking a good, hard look. But when you came right down to it, about 1600 feet up, there was a nine foot dead blank wall that you couldn't see with the binoculars from across the valley. And that stopped. And I think that's pretty typical of what we often find in business is that we make a great plan, we look carefully, we talk to people, we think it over, we make spreadsheets. And then we run into that nine foot blank wall and I don't know if you've never really tried to climb anything. Nine feet is kind of a magic distance, right? You can't reach that high even I'm not the shortest guy in the world, but I can't reach up and grab something nine feet above my head and blank means blank. Like there's no holds on it. And that's when the operational excellence question really kind of rears itself up in business, I think, and in climbing and stuff like that. It's always easy to do the easy stuff, but all the easy stuff has already been done by everybody that is competing in a commodity basis. And you have to deal with the nine foot blank wall with great operational excellence with precision operation in order to be able to get all the way to the kind of summits we try to get to whether in business or climbing. And I'm curious in this talk and that's actually why I was thinking it over. When I was driving up here, I was thinking everything I've ever done that I looked back on and said, "That was worth doing." There was some point in the doing where there was something that had to be overcome and it had to be overcome operationally. So I think a lot of times we think operational excellence is just repeating something we know how to do, but often I think it's not, I think we're more often in problem solving mode than we think. And we sometimes know that, when we're solving a problem, we're fighting a fire or doing something that we wish we did less of, we wish we could just repeat and turn the crank, right? But it's hard to make a machine where you just turn the crank, even a machine like connect and sell there's problems every day. Chris Beall (08:21): To address the problems and I'm curious about that Valerie said. Okay, you started this business with no business plan, just responding to people's problems. So it's problems all the way down to start with. Do you recall any times as you were going along or even recently where you kind of came up against it and went, "Huh? How are we going to get this done?" And then you had to figure out how to not just solve it that one time, but operationalized that solution to make it part of the business. Do any of those come to mind? Valerie Schlitt (08:52): Well, I think that if you have a business for 19 years and you both have businesses, you are constantly facing that nine foot wall. It's not every day, but probably six times in my 19 years, I've faced that wall. And I guess one could be just recently, COVID. All of a sudden here we are, we're faced with COVID and things are changing and we're saying, "Well, okay, what are we going to do?" And I personally think that coming together with people, collaborating and getting minds to come together and thinking and bouncing ideas is one of the biggest sources of ways that I've come to identify how to solve problems. I do not work well autonomously, and I think most people don't. And when it came to COVID, it was really saying, "Okay, what do we do really well? And how can we leverage that in a different direction? What else can we do? Or what's working for us that we can leverage because these other things are not working? So it's like going up that nine foot wall where you're saying, "Okay, I can't go up it, but maybe I can go around. Maybe I can have two people helping me." And that happens all the time. I'm not being very specific, but all the time. And I think, really had leaning on the people in the organization, I had such great people who are always problem-solving also, and as you know, Chris, we work with your firm quite a bit and we are constantly saying, "Okay, these clients that we used to work with on a regular click and dial, and now we're using with ConnectAndSell." That has been a game changer for us and we've been able now to retain so many more clients and gain more clients that way as well. So- Chris Beall (10:31): That's interesting. That was the solution to our nine foot blank wall by the way, we did something we had never done before and never did ask her on a climb, which is literally the boost. You know, you're a kid and you can do this, right. You get down, you lock your hands together and somebody stands on the hand and it was my turn to lead. And it was pretty freaky quite frankly, not because I was depending on Jim's hand strength, which is quite remarkable, but because he had to belay me and be my foothold at the same time, and I was kind of thinking, so if I blow this move and I'm off and away, we all go and it was some ways down. I did get a sense of this is the empire state building plus about 500 feet of vertical below our feet. So it's not like nothing's going to happen if you could aim at that direction. But I remember we spoke at various points in this COVID process. You and I did Valerie. And one thing that really impressed me about speaking with you about the challenges that you had is you have a way of reaching out to somebody with the very specific requests, like there's something that's on your mind and it's really specific, but you're very open-minded about the nature of how somebody responds to that, including if somebody and I often do this, it's Corey and I says, " I don't know if that's the question." And I think that's pretty unusual. So, looking at COVID, what was it as you saw it all happening that kind of made you think, " Oh my God," did you ever think, "Oh my God, we could lose the business."? Valerie Schlitt (12:10): I didn't think we would lose the business because we have a lot of diversification. So there are other sources of revenue. However, I did think about the employees a lot. That was my driving force, is that I have a team of such talented people and they are counting on me to be on and creative and thinking about their future and the company's future. That was incredibly motivating. So, that is probably what is the single biggest thing that propelled me. But I think also innately if you're a business owner or anyone who's a leader in business, who said that, Chris, I think you, that we are problem solving more than we're not or more than we think we are. So, this drive to say, "Okay, how can we overcome this?" So what was happening in our business is we have a lot of clients who are in healthcare and in healthcare, we all of a sudden heard people say, why are you calling me? We are dealing with the pandemic, don't call. So that meant a lot of our clients would say, we're going to pause. And therefore we had to think, "Okay, well, what else can we do? What other industries are open? What other services can we offer so that we can actually keep our people in business and thrive?" And actually, honestly, this nine foot wall is kind of also a thrill, it's a little bit of adrenaline boost. So, you want sometimes this nine foot wall, because it propels us to do things that we might not have done otherwise. So for us, it was trying to go into contact tracing and use all the skills that we already had, but in a different area. So that's another line of business that we have opened during the pandemic. Chris Beall (13:55): No, that's fascinating because there is nothing scary in a business than going into a new market. I mean, this show's called Market Dominance Guys because market penetration is so hard that you better dominate a market once you penetrate it or you got to get really good at penetrating. Choosing to go penetrate other markets is I think the scariest thing to do in business. It's the biggest of the unknowns. It's the Christopher Columbus equivalent of sailing off to the West and hoping it turns out okay because you really don't get to see very well. As you looked around and said, "Okay, we have to go and go after some more markets." And contact tracing is pretty far away in certain ways from helping folks get appointment, right. Really, it's pretty far away. What led you to believe that you had the operational chops to, let's say, yes, you had the dog chasing the car, right? If you catch the car, how do you think you can put your teeth around the bumper and grind it through a halt? Valerie Schlitt (14:57): Well, I first want to say, I knew I had a great team who was going to keep us on the track of getting appointments for our clients. So that was never going away. We were going to, and we have stayed in that business and healthcare is starting to come back. And that is where the lion's share of our businesses. But, I think it goes to this operational excellence. Really, the entire process of what we do every day is all about doing something really well, knowing how to engage and talk on the phone, so that someone wants to talk back to you. So you're delivering the right message, but you're saying it in the right tone, a lot of what we've learned from you, Chris. Also, having the right list, knowing when to call, how often to call, those are all skill sets that you need in contact tracing as well. So a lot of the operations of what we do is in fact directly transferable. Some of these skill skillsets, even empathy, it's more alike than you think. So it was not that big of a leap. And I'm really committed to communities and helping communities. So it fit my own personality and what I like to do and in helping, not only employ people, but now help people so that they can stay alive. Chris Beall (16:15): Yes. That's a good one, it's pretty cool. Corey, did you ever think about adding contact tracing to what you guys are doing over there at a Youngblood Works? Corey Frank (16:23): Listen, eight years of community college, I'm no Wharton man, and I copy ideas, I don't pioneer them, you know that. So there's [crosstalk 00:16:32] one. I am curious though, Valerie, we like to ask this to a lot of folks, I've asked this to Chris over the years, how do you think as a leader? Because it's a scary proposition, right? Even to Chris, Chris, you and Jim on that wall, you have a couple of choices. Number one is to do nothing, basically retreats, go back down and say, "Well, that didn't work." Number two, is to try an incremental approach. And number three is just to go for it. Who stopped? You got one shot, one shot, one kill pronged, the stakes could be higher. But did you guys talk about that to deliberate it? You mapped it out. So Valerie you go in a contact tracing, because if you're wrong, it's not going to take down the company, but it's certainly going to be an expansion. You expend capital and you expend hope because there's a lot of folks during COVID that we're trying to grasp for different things. You only have a finite amount of wishes from the genie, if you will, where they follow you. "Yes. Valerie, we're with you. We'll do this." But if that didn't work, then maybe a couple of people like, "Well, I don't know Valerie." So how do you and your team kind of rally around a decision? Is it collaborative? Did you analyze it to the ends degree? Do you trust your guts? Did you test it a little bit? Or do you just, like Chris and Jim, just go for it and say, " Listen, I know it and we're going to rally around this battle cry here." Valerie Schlitt (17:58): Well, when I started the business, it was much more incremental. I just took baby steps. As I've become more seasoned as a leader, or looking at the future of the business. There's something that propels me that almost there's no going back, you can't go back and you can only change or go right or left or something, but there's no going back. And so honestly, there's just a vision that I glom on to and I'm going to somehow address it now. You bring up a good point because we went into the finals in New Jersey for the contact tracing. And at first, no one believed that we could actually make it. But as we kept on going further and further and further, the whole team was like, "Wow, we're really doing this." And then they're like, " Valerie, we knew you could do this." And then we didn't get it. So that does expand a little bit to me that said, "Wow, we got that far. That means the next time we can get further, it would be like going up to eight feet and say, next time it's going to be nine." But maybe there's some people that will lose a little faith. I think that's on them. I think taking risks is really important. And really I look at everything at what is the benefit if it works out and what is the downside if it doesn't work out? How bad could it really be? It can't be that bad. So we just stay the way we are. That's okay. But if we have the opportunity to try something else that's could be really cool and make a mark in this society. That would be great. And so let's go for it. Chris Beall (19:29): Question about your past. We kind of went back to the Wharton thing and all that. I think that as you know, I'm engaged to the incomparable Helen Nucci and she's she went to MIT on her own back, right. She figured out how to get in. She figured out how to get through, very similar to you in certain ways, by knowing how to reach out and ask for help from people and ask for advice. I think that's one of the greatest skills in the world is to be able to do that. I'm very poor at it myself, which is why I thrashed around like a fish that's been brought up on a boat for a long time, but you're really, really good at that. When did you realize when you were, I'm assuming it's when you were a kid, that things that other people struggled with, that you could actually do? There has to be a point somewhere because now you do it and talk about it like, "Yeah, we go for it." Right? But at some point when you were a child or somewhere, there has to be an experience or something where you went, " Huh, that's interesting. These other folks are kind of going, I don't think we can do this and I think I can do this." Did that happen to you? Can you remember that? Valerie Schlitt (20:40): I remember one time, but it was not when I was a kid. So I think I was a very, very humble person. I didn't think anything I did was quite remarkable. I thought I was just doing what I was supposed to be doing. And then at some point, someone remarked on my problem solving skills. And I had just thought that was natural. I did not know that they were different than anyone else's skills. And from then on, I think I realized that I looked at problems and address them, maybe not so differently than other people, but in a unique way or that I actually thrive on it, that it's a passion of mine to solve problems. So that's the only thing I can actually say. And I don't think it has anything to do with being particularly smart or being particularly brave or being a technical capability. It's just a mindset of solving problems. Chris Beall (21:33): You just like them? Valerie Schlitt (21:34): Yes, Chris Beall (21:38): I do too so I think pretty fascinating. Valerie Schlitt (21:39): I don't like it when people make things out to be so simple because I'd like to find out, well, what is hard? Let's try to solve the hard ones. Chris Beall (21:47): That's really interesting. Well, when you were in school and you were taking the classes that have problems in them, like math is often one that, in our English classes, we're asked to write stuff in our math classes, we're asked to literally solve problems. That's what they're called. They're called problems. Right? Valerie Schlitt (22:04): You're a genius in math. I am horrible in math. So I have learned that I need, Oh, here's a good example. I have learned through my experiences. I went through the Goldman Sachs program. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's for small businesses, you take a course that Goldman Sachs put together. Even though I had my MBA from Wharton, I still went through this. And through there, I realized at the end, I really need to get someone to help me with the finances because I'm struggling way too much and I can use my capabilities someplace else. So now I have a great CFO, a fractional CFO who works with us and his honestly, if I didn't have, his name is Steven, we would be struggling, trying to solve certain problems that he can solve in an instant. So I think that's another one of reaching out. I guess we find out where am I deficient? And I am very deficient in very many ways and bolster that with other people's talents. Chris Beall (23:04): Well, what a talent that is. I've often bristled at the notion that we should all be doing everything. And it's often implied by these self-help types that are out there. It's like, "Do this, do that, be strong about this." And to incite, well, it's almost always a team game and the main thing we do in a team is we cover each other's weaknesses because we got them. So let's be as upfront as we can be about our weaknesses and then cover them. As you know, I sucked so badly, simple logistics that you can't hope to have me show up at something scheduled two weeks from now. And it's a conference talk or whatever. If Shelley Morrison, doesn't make sure that I know that I've got to do it and it's on this day and somebody took care of PowerPoint or one slide that we do and all that I'm hopeless. Right? And so I'm just thrilled to be able to have somebody help me with that stuff because I could work on it the rest of my life and I'd still suck, there's no doubt about it. So, I think that ability when we're talking operational excellence, I think we often think about the individual, but the cheapest way to get it is to get a team together of people. Each one of whom is very strong in one area and let all the others be as weak as they want to be, and then make sure that everybody respects each other and lets whoever's great at whatever, take that thing and do it. Valerie Schlitt (24:19): I think that the idea of letting everyone respect each other is really important and hard. And I'd love to hear how you've been able to do that, to get other people, to respect differences because a lot of people look at other people and they want them to be just like themselves. Chris Beall (24:35): It's a tough one. It's easy to do for me and my areas of weakness, because then I can just model what I want by holding a problem-solving meeting with somebody who's superior in that area and making it abundantly clear that I see that person as the leader. I think that leadership shifts around appropriately based on the moment and making it abundantly clear. I am following now, this person is leading and being very explicit about it makes a big difference and I'm big into explicitness. Anyway, here's a story from my deep past. So I was hired at a company called CAD Information Systems that we changed the name to CADIS fairly shortly to build the world's first engineering oriented electronic catalog system that would allow an engineer to find a park that they needed to reuse in a design from the panoply of parts that might've been already sourced in are hiding and the MRP database or ERP database or whatever you call the item master. And the first thing I did when I got the team together, there were just three people, as I said, we're going to sit in a room until we know what all the words mean. And we're just kind of put words on the whiteboard that we think are relevant to this business. And until we have an ostensive definition where we can point to one formal definition, where we can describe it in other words, a comparative definition, we can say, it's like this, a distinctive definition where you can say, it's not this, it's not this, it's not that. And do it for every word that we're going to encounter in the next 10 years of doing this. We're not leaving this room. And of course the software developers thought I was out of my mind. But to me it was the essence of operational excellence in design is to know what you're talking about. And so get explicit. And it was painful. People yelled at each other and stuff. But when we were finished, our distinguishing feature is we had a common language of discourse forever and we could call each other out on using a word in precisely. That was a term of art in our business. I think that we do this in a way with each other, but allowing people to be precisely understood in terms of their capabilities and say, this is so-and-so's thing because they're really, really good at this. And therefore, when we're doing that, they're the leader.

When we’re performing in the presence of someone we know to be more expert than we are, our performance usually suffers. In the world of sales, managers often put this pressure on salespeople, although often unwittingly. They may approach their sales rep with every intention of being a helpful coach, but too often they slip into the role of a critical evaluator instead. And as soon as a salesperson thinks they’re being evaluated, fear sets in — their stomach sinks, their voice tightens up, their intended flow of words gets backed up — and there goes their normal, relaxed performance. In this podcast, Chris talks with Susan Finch, president of Funnel Radio, on this topic and then segues into the benefits of how a mutually beneficial relationship between members of the company’s team (sales, research, engineering/manufacturing, customer support) creates the best possible means of serving customers. Chris and Susan then discuss how showing appreciation and respect for the behind-the-scenes team members keeps those people from feeling invisible, motivates them to perform better, and to willingly offer support to the people on the front line. Join Chris and Susan for another relaxed, entertaining, and informative Market Dominance Guys podcast as they explore what works and what doesn’t when managing salespeople and dominating your market.   ----more---- The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (01:54): Sales is a game ultimately of dissonance and irony, ultimately of dissonance and irony. There's very little of it where you get to play it straight up because you're operating in the field of other people's emotions and their factual vulnerability. They are vulnerable to you if they let you begin to pitch them, and so there's resistance, "psychological reactance" is generally what it's called, and they can't help it. Then if you respond to that by being offended that they're rejecting you by raising an objection, you're toast. Jeb Blount wrote a whole book on this called Objections. Here's the book. I mean, it's a brilliant book. Don't take my synopsis and say, "I've read the book," but here's the book. Inside, we hear objections, which are reasonable things for people to say in their circumstance, as rejection, and rejection is the toughest thing that happens to us because it creates embarrassment for us. How we handle hearing an objection and dealing with our inevitable emotional response internally that it's rejection is the key to handling the hard part of sales, which is what to do when they say no and they don't mean it. What do you do when they say no, but that's not what they mean, because you can't say, "You didn't mean that"? What do you do? Jeb makes this point, which is you do a thing called "ledging." I'm an old climber, as you know. My game growing up was rock-climbing and mountaineering and a ledge, when I just heard the word for this first time, "ledging," a ledge is a safe place. Ledges are where you sit and belay, they're where you sleep, and they're where you don't need handholds anymore. When you're climbing, sometimes you can go through extended periods of time where one hand or the other must be very active on the rock holding on, or else bad things happen, right? For certain kinds of climbs that can get worse than others. It's always a game where you can't make an awful lot of mistakes. It's kind of a tense game. A ledge is where you can relax and that's his point. How do you ledge? You just have to have a word or phrase that you say out loud at that point that tells you that you've had the reaction of rejection to an objection so that you can have a little bit of time to regain your equilibrium, assess the situation, categorize the objection, and know what kinds of things you might want to be addressing at that point. My ledge is the word "fantastic," so when somebody calls me and says, "Our number nine production system just went down for the second time this week," I say, "Fantastic," because that feels like rejection by the system to me. It's like, "Oh, man, did it go down? Our users need it. It's down. That's not a good thing." I feel bad on the inside, so I go to my ledge and my ledge is the word "fantastic." It sounds good to me, "fantastic." I love the way it sounds. It's poetic. It's three syllables, it's like a little haiku: "Fantastic!" It's real easy to say with an exclamation point on the end and not be sarcastic. Susan Finch (05:24): But that is the key, too: It takes practice. Chris Beall (05:32): Yes. Everything takes practice. That takes a lot. You golfers know this, right? The hard thing in golf is not hitting the shot that you know is your weakness when trouble is on the side that you tend to go, so all of us have a tendency to either hit the ball left or hit the ball right. There's nobody who has a tendency to hit it down the middle. That doesn't exist, even the great golfers. "My miss," it's referred to as "my miss." My miss is a hard hook and it goes left. Lee Trevino said this very well. He said, "You can talk to a slice, but a hook just won't listen." He might've said, "You can talk to a fade," to make it more polite, "and a hook just won't listen." I love that. You can yell at a ball that's going to the right and it'll listen to you because it's not going that hard to the right. But when you hook it, it's coming down. It's not just going to left, it's coming down, right? Well, when trouble's on the left and it's a game situation, so to speak, it's important, it's the club championship, or it's just you're going to break your own record or you care or whatever, that's when the hook comes up for me. That's when it comes out and it's because in my head, I have failed to say, "Fantastic, it's out of bounds to the left. OB to the left. Fantastic." Right, and treat that as a clarifying moment. Susan Finch (07:01): On the last episode, Chris and I have been talking about scarcity and abundance and economics. Let's go on with our conversation from last episode and continue it because I think this is the only way for us to break cycles as sales professionals before we really can get started. For those of you that have to sell, but you don't think you're a sales professional, you still need to know how to break these cycles. Chris Beall (07:26): Yeah. I mean, everybody has to sell. Everybody has to sell and most people get pretty locked up when they're trying to do it when it counts. Most people are actually pretty good at it when they really believe that the outcome is a good outcome, even if it's just for them. As little kids, we're really good at it. We're really good at whining at mom when we're in the grocery store to ask for the candy bar that we know we're not supposed to have. We've become quite effective little sales monsters at that point, right? All of us, except for a certain class of person that none of us happen to be, thank God, we get tight when we have to perform in the presence of somebody we know to be more expert than we are, and so when the pressure is on, we might be able to perform, but when the pressure is on and the master is there, it's hard to perform. That's evidence that we have a hard time performing in general anything. If you've learned to juggle three balls and then you're in the presence of somebody who can juggle five, your three-ball juggling goes to hell in a handbasket. That's all there is to it. I experience this on occasion. COVID has really saved me from it because we live in splendid isolation now, so I have this beautiful little Yamaha electronic piano that is sampled from their big concert grand, so it sounds just like the big concert grand, at least in my mind, and I can sit down and play quite comfortably in the evening and my fiance will listen to me and she'll say she loves it. That's easy. All you have to do to make me into a horrible, halting, unsure piano player would be to have my sister's boyfriend, who is a brilliant pianist and a piano tuner, walk in the room, or just tell me that he's coming to visit, and I will suddenly not know what the major third of an E flat chord is. I'll know it, but I won't be able to execute it. I'll be unsure of myself, and that little feel I have, which is, "Where is that? Oh, that's the one between those two black keys that I feel here with this finger," that feel is going to go away like that. I think that's what happens when we get tight is we lose access to the feel feedback and it's overwhelmed by this performance expectation feedback. Salespeople often put that on themselves, and worse, sales managers often put it on salespeople by showing up. When they should be in a coaching role, they're in an evaluation role. If you want to ruin somebody's performance, and especially in something athletic like sales, all you have to do is make it clear that you're evaluating their performance while they're trying to perform and you will guarantee the outcome that you already knew was going to happen. That's why it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of scarcity. Getting over that is hard, and one way to do it organizationally, and I'm a big believer when you can do something organizationally if you have the money for the extra person, or you can figure out how to allocate, go with a part-time person or whatever in a role, do it rather than doing it through personal transformation because personal transformation is long, it's expensive, and your overhead is burning a hole in your pocket and your company. For instance, an example is the difference between managing and coaching. In the NFL, we manage out of the front office, there's a person called a "general manager." They choose the players. The coach has input, but the general manager is responsible for making sure the right players are hired to be on the team and whether they're fired or not is their choice. The coach decides whether to play them or not. That's a different thing. The coach also trains them, teaches them, helps them, gets inside their head, understands when their problem is a psychological problem or physical problem, does all that. But the coach doesn't hire and fire. They have some influence on that, but they don't actually do that. In sales, which is more athletically demanding than NFL football by far, we make a mistake when we coach out of the leader's position, when we're confusing the person we're coaching with, whether we're coaching them or evaluating them because as soon as we're evaluating them, we're ruining their performance, they tighten up, and in sales, when you tighten up, you're toast. You're just toast when you tighten up. The scarcity mindset, it's something that we tend to say we must address it within the individual by fixing their mindset. We can help with that. We can encourage it. We can provide. Go to Gerhard Gschwandtner's Peak Performance Mindset Retreat and jump out of an airplane, drive that Ferrari. Now, have somebody help you understand where your beliefs come from so someday you might be able to do something about them. But we can also do it organizationally, and sales is a team game, even when it's played alone. That's something that I think we often forget because sales in history was done like this: "Here's your territory. Go get them, tiger." That's it. That was sales management forever and ever and the salesperson was a business person who owned a territory and they kept that territory. They bought that territory by making their quota and then the territory itself had an increasing value by increasing the quota. It was actually pretty simple, right? Asset must increase in value to be worth the investment. The way it increases in value was we keep raising the quota. The salesperson who wants to keep buying that territory keeps buying it by hitting that quota. That's the old model. That's not the new model. Software ate the world. There is no inventory anymore to be disposed of, of significance. There are engagements, there's helping, there's this whole new world where there's no inventory, so sales immediately became a team game, and it's hard for folks to recognize that. The most important team relationship is between the player and the coach, but the coach is best, I won't say only, but is best a coach without hiring or firing authority and kind of keeping out of that, kind of keeping out of it. Let the facts speak for themselves, including the performance facts, the recordings, all that kind of stuff, but let the coach just be there to help performance, help you get better. Susan Finch (14:14): What about the other players, though? How do they factor in? To the individual performance of one salesperson, you're saying the team is a big thing, it isn't just the coach. Chris Beall (14:24): No, I mean, it's a lot. There's a lot of players on the team. There's whoever is the expert on the product. How do they interact with the salesperson so the salesperson is knowledgeable about the things that are worth being knowledgeable about and confident in the product's ability to carry those out for the right prospect? Chris Beall (15:30): How does that happen? Product knowledge is inferior to product confidence, so how does that happen? That needs to happen in the relationship between the product team and the salespeople, so if the product team is very engineering-focused/oriented, they're engineers, they tend to see salespeople as these inferior beings who aren't smart enough to build products, and therefore, they talk down to them. Well, when you talk down to a salesperson about a product, you actually reduce their confidence in their ability to represent the product correctly, so you're actually hurting yourself when you do this. Those are key members of the team. Support is key members of the team. Things go bad. Things are going to go bad. In the modern world, everything is support-oriented and having a relationship between support and sales that is supportive and where sales is not using support as an excuse for future failure. That's a two-way street because sales really owes support their support and support needs to be thinking, "Hmm. Instead of just running the regular book here, is this a case where I could take the extra minute and inform the salesperson responsible for this account what I'm doing and get a little guidance about the business context?" Maybe there is no renewal immediately coming up, but there might be a renewal discussion that's happening because of an upsell opportunity. You wouldn't know that as the support person. You'll find it out if you ask the salesperson, "Is there some nice to be thinking about before I do this?" Because I could support like this the regular way, or I could do the extra effort and get in a screen-share and actually help them. It'll take a little bit more time. Is this person really important to you, o salesperson? It's a team game on the support dimension. It's certainly a team game on the information dimension. You're getting information about who to go and call on. But by the way, I highly recommend that the information team, the data team be separate. Why? That's actually for a different reason. It feels bad to do work you can't do very well and it reduces your confidence and most don't do data work very well because their brains are not organized for data work, so they don't see it. They don't see the data at all, or it's hard for them to see. The same thing with writing. Most salespeople were not the person who in the English class raised their hand and was the best writer in class, so support in these areas for different elements of the job let the salesperson be free to execute. Susan Finch (18:17): I agree. I can tell a difference within a minute when I call a support team that is in the position of being the punching bag and when you call the support team that you know they have this level of confidence that, "No, we're the ones that keep everybody happy. We're the ones that bring back more business. We're the ones that hold this all together," and whether it's true or not, they feel it, and it comes through to where I know I can relax because they're handling this for me, they'll solve my problem, which builds my confidence in the company overall to trust the salesperson the next time they suggest something to me. Chris Beall (18:52): Yes, and as management, we need to be careful about what we celebrate. Corey wrote a brilliant piece recently about trying to train himself away from celebrating luck, because after all, if something happens by luck, you're not really looking to repeat the run-up to that. That's just depending on luck, right? If hope is not a strategy, luck really sucks as a strategy, right? Rely on luck, ROL. I don't think so, so let's keep it more in the ROI, a little bit earlier in the alphabet, right? It's an issue there, but there's another issue, which is the issue of celebration, so when a deal gets done and everybody can see it, at our company, everybody can see it because it's a DocuSign that goes around and it's been signed and then it gets posted and everybody can see it. We're virtual, so we don't have a bell to ring, and it could be in the middle of the night somewhere, right? We could do a deal in the evening here and in the UK, it's middle of the night. I'm not going to have Jerry Hill wake up to some idiot bell that wakes him up, right? But we even have a tendency as a company, which I try to work against every day, to celebrate the salesperson: "Wow! Great deal, Jerry. Fabulous that you brought that one across the line." Well, what about customer success who ran the test drive? What about my research team, Jaidev Anand, who put together the fabulous list that was used in that test drive, because that was one where they needed data? What about the support staff that took a situation where four people showed up late for the test drive that we didn't even know about and within five minutes they were administered into the system, blowing the minds of whoever it is? I can think of a case where actually the team from the big OEM showed up not intending to use ConnectAndSell at a test drive of their biggest reseller and they showed up and they watched what was going on, and this is a big OEM. We would all recognize this company. Very, very big. The leader of that group said, "What is this?" and the leader of the reseller said, "Well, this is ConnectAndSell. We're testing it today. It's called an 'intensive test drive.'" There was some listening that went on for three or four minutes and then the question, "Can we join in?" Well, gosh, it was seven people and we didn't know who they were and the lists had already been divided up among everybody so there was no extra data. All the ice cream was gone. You'd scoop all you want, but there was none left in there. I asked our head of customer success to see if we could accommodate and he never says no to anything that's doable, but even he hesitated just for a moment, and then jumped in and I put it on the clock. Within seven minutes, everybody on that team was administered into the system, they had data to call on, and they were trained. That was better than the test drive, even though it was a different team and they weren't going to buy in the whole bit, that was better than it going well. Who deserves that deal, which has turned into a fabulous relationship for both ConnectAndSell and for that customer? Well, it's not the rep. I'm the rep, I think. No, I think Jonti McLaren is officially the rep, but I was the one on the ground there that day. The tendency to celebrate the hero who was in the front without extending that celebration by name, not in some general way, but this person, this person, this person, if possible, that's a bad tendency, and it causes a feeling of less abundance among the people who are behind the scenes. Then it's harder for them to execute because they have to overcome the emotional barrier of being behind the scenes, even though by personality, they probably prefer to be behind the scenes, right, they still want recognition. Everybody wants recognition. Susan Finch (23:09): It's a little different than the embarrassment thing that we talked about in the previous episode. You don't forget those feelings, but you also don't forget the feeling of being invisible. Chris Beall (23:20): Yeah. Yeah. Susan Finch (23:22): Nobody wants to be invisible. Even if you want to be subtle behind the scenes, you still want to be seen a little bit. Chris Beall (23:29): Yeah. This is one of the main reasons that I suggest that CEOs sell, but also that they get involved in product at a detailed level. Not so much that they're going to make a great contribution. Maybe they are a product person. I mean, that's my background. I'm a product person, engineer, and all that kind of stuff, so it's kind of legit when I do it, but that's not the only reason I do it. The other reason is the people on the front lines on product have a scary job, the scariest job, which is they do work that nobody knows it can be done or not and they're treated as though they're doing work that's simply a matter of doing the work.