The theory of constraints dominates the world of business, and yet it tends to be ignored by almost everybody in business for a pretty simple reason: it's politically unpalatable. The theory of constraints says your business is a system, and every system has one and only one constraint. And that's the only thing you should be working on right now: understanding that constraint, characterizing it, coming up with an investment thesis, making the investment, or observing the results of the investment. The investment is something like better cycle time, increased throughput, more units that are doing the work, or better quality. Those who employ this practice will dominate markets. ----more---- What we tell you here at Market Dominance Guys is that there’s an environmental constraint on businesses, which is gaining the trust of your prospects. How do you do this? In other words, what’s your investment? Have conversations with them! Do you have to wait till they're ready to buy? No, have the conversations now, and the relationships you create will begin paving the road to trust, which leads to eventual sales. The main challenge as you narrow your focus down to this one constraint is keeping all the human beings in your own business happy and willing to allocate enough resources from the business to solve this one constraint issue, one bottleneck at a time. Join Chris, Corey, and Jake Housdon as they discuss this challenge, as well as how to successfully employ the conversation-first investment. About Our Guest: Jake Housdon is CEO and co-founder of SDR League, the world’s first esports league for salespeople.  The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank: (00:35) So welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall, with us today. We are very pleased to have Jake Houston. And Jake, for full disclosure, is Canadian. So we will have subtitles as appropriate. Susan we'll add those where needed; when he uses words like a boot or a lift or whatever else you guys do. So Jake is the co-founder of the SDR league; which we'd like to talk a little bit about today; certainly, which is the world's first E-sports league for salespeople. Something that before I had a bad shoulder 20 years ago, I'm sure I would have participated, right Chris? Chris has kind of gimpy knees, but we were kind of the older guys. Maybe we can come in for an inning or two of relief, but we'll see. We'll leave it to you guys, like you and Ryan and the younger guys, to set the records. All of Chris and our records are in the books.   Corey Frank: (01:31) You and Brian and the new guys will have a little asterisk next to yours. You have weapons like ConnectAndSell and Outreach and everything else to talk to more folks. We had rotary dials, so our fingers are all knuckled up. So before Jake did the SDR league, it was a CRO of an EdTech company and currently your director of SDR development at dialogue. So we're pleased to have you today, Jake, and Chris and I do not have guests on very often. So when we do, certainly expectations are very great, but we know that your reputation precedes you very well, Jake, and I think we would just jump right into it.   Corey Frank: (02:07) As we were talking before we hit the record button, Chris was talking with you, Jake, about the theory of constraints and the series of constraints that's germane to us as salespeople today seems to be the sales reps, rattling the marketing cages and rattling the SDR cages and said, "Hey, where's my leads? Where's my demo's." And then God forbid, we actually fill the top of the funnel and then what happens after that, right? Chris, how would you frame that up for you and Jake here, since we were talking about it just a few minutes ago about this very same issue.   Chris Beall: (02:45) The theory of constraints dominates the world of business and yet tends to be ignored by almost everybody in business. And it's ignored, I think, for a pretty simple reason, which is it's politically unpalatable. When you think about a theory of constraints of your business, a system, every system has one constraint, one and only one constraint. And that's the only thing you should be working on right now. You should be investing in either understanding that constraint, characterizing it, coming up with an investment thesis, making the investment or observing the results of the investment. The investment has always been something like better cycle time, increased throughput, more units that are doing the work, better quality. And the reason we don't like it; none of us like it, there's not a human being on earth who likes it except for Eliyahu Goldratt; the guy who came with it; is that it says there's only one thing right now to invest in.   Chris Beall: (03:34) Therefore, here's the parentheses; it's probably not what you're doing. It's probably what somebody else is doing. And so that makes everybody feel that, right? Imagine a budget meeting if we said we're going to address one constraint next year. Just one, right? That would be an improvement for most businesses, by the way, if they get up from zero to one, that'd be pretty good. So we're just going to do one. So Jake, we suspect by all the measurements where we're doing the inventory in the form of prospects builds up in front of the sales development function and the discovery function is starved. So we think you've got the constraint and we want to go in and characterize it and you go, "Yippee!"   Chris Beall: (04:18) So great. You're going to focus on my stuff. And that means, Oh, by the way, the salespeople who are doing discovery, you're going to ignore you completely. The folks who are providing the data, we're going to ignore you completely. All we're going to do is focus on Jake. So now Jake's important and he gets all the budget money, and everybody else gets to sit around and wait until 2021 or two or whatever it happens to be. Right? So nobody likes it. But those who practice it dominate markets. And in fact, when you look at market dominance, guys, the whole of what we're saying is there's an environmental constraint on businesses, which is the people who need to trust you, trust you yet. The answer is not enough of them. So go get them to trust you. How? Have conversations with them. Do you have to wait until they're ready to buy?   Chris Beall: (05:05) No. Have the conversations now. Cheat, right? Condition the market, pave the road, cheat. That's how it works. And you said, right, as we were coming on aren't that analytical? I'll tell you. That's not the problem, even though it's true. The problem is doing it right is politically unpalatable because it feels de-powering to everybody else. And then as soon as you do it right, you get this problem. You create a flood of output from your constraint, usually, assuming there's enough input, and whatever the next function is downstream becomes the constraint and they don't like it. They wanted it to be easier. They didn't want to be under the spotlight. That happens a lot. Have you ever seen it?   Jake Housdon: (05:53) Yeah. When you depict it that way, Chris, it seems like the main challenge then is sort of keeping all of the human beings happy as you go about narrowly focusing on the single constraint, right? Because Ryan and seemed to debate this one a lot; whether it's process before people or people before process. But at the end of the day, these organizations are just groups of human beings. And it'd be nice if we could just sort of sweep aside all of their sort of feelings and everything else and just kind of drill down on that.   Jake Housdon: (06:20) But I think what you're saying is that the challenge is that the political factors at play with everyone's sort of different wants and desires within the business is what makes it difficult for leaders to take that focused approach, to identifying and characterizing that bottleneck and then addressing it and then following it and allocating enough resources from the business behind solving that one bottleneck at a time. It seems like it's probably a kind of human problem more so than anything based on what you're saying, which makes a lot of sense to me.   Chris Beall: (06:55) You've nailed it! Isn't that something? Corey, you nailed it. I'm setting you up to be CEO of my next company cause I'm always the constraint and, yeah, you've nailed it. My fiance goes on stage and talks about the years of research that she's done on digital transformation. And she works for Microsoft. She was a global digital transformation leader; their sales leader; and her conclusion was it's culture. Ultimately, the technology can't get the job done without the culture. And I think you've just put your finger on what the cultural issue is, which is that it's like an Uber constraint and everybody's got to feel good enough.   Chris Beall: (07:34) That's fascinating. So how do you do that? Corey is the master. How have you been Corey? How have you kept everybody happy?   Corey Frank: (07:41) Everybody knows within the sound of my voice, that how I fix it is hang on, let me get Chris Beall on the line and let me tell if I can get the answer. But then if you're busy, I'll call Ryan or I'll call Steve Richard. So that's how I've been able to do it. I think, Jake, what you were leading to when some of the correspondence we had prior to this to answer Chris's question is that the revenue problems seem to start upstream in a business and with this conversation flow and this mystique that, "Pipeline cures all, right Chris?" How many books have we talked about that? It just gets more pipeline. But then what happens if the pipeline is a little sickly, right? What do you do in that regard?   Corey Frank: (08:23) What cures sickly pipeline, would you say? This is what Chris and I were talking about, jake, before you jumped on, is talking with another gentleman whose colleague, a former board member of Chris's and talking about some of the clients that he deals with and that as soon as the SDR, the BDR function fills that pipeline as Chris was iterating on the constraint. Now the sales reps go from, "Well, I just want any conversation" to "Well, I want a particular type of conversation." They try to be in search of the perfect pitch as opposed to getting frequent before you get good as we talked about with Oren Klaff and a lot of the things that we do on flip the script.   Corey Frank: (09:04) So have you seen that, Jake, is where you do such a great job and you get all the budget as Chris had iterated, and now you find downstream that the sales reps are saying, "Jake, the thing is I know you put 20 on my calendar this week, but I talk with 12 of them and six of them, if they could just be a little bit more X or a little bit more Y, then you nailed it, buddy. So keep those flowing, will you, but don't send me the other ones."   Jake Housdon: (09:32) I think that's a massive problem. And I think that it's been succinctly stated by Chris. I think that it's really people think that the cold calls are the Google search, but that's kind of absurd. And it's actually the discovery is the Google search. And ironically, the discovery is where all the best discoveries are made, right? I think what it comes back to is just the prominence that the eight-year-olds have given within the sales org. And I think that's something that is just because they're closer to stroking the cheque that people elevate the AAE role to an extent where they kind of put down the SDR role a little bit, frankly. And I think that you end up uncomfortable to have conversations that are less perfect, let's say, right? And so I think that again, human beings just naturally shy away from that discomfort.   Jake Housdon: (10:20) And when the authority level is sort of in the hands of the AAE, then that's where you get a lot of that bad behavior and stuff like that. I think we're seeing that change where people realize the whole pipeline cure it's all we've heard that forever. Outbound, just getting harder, I think, maybe? Maybe it's easier with amazing tools like ConnectAndSell now to your point about the asterisk earlier, but to Chris's point about the emperor being naked with emails and sales engagement platforms and things like that. Now you've got a lot of SDR teams where they feel like they're doing their job by just kind of clicking a bunch of buttons on a, on a platform or something. Right. So I just think that outbound is getting really hard. And as a result, the most effective thing now is the most uncomfortable thing, which is making the cold calls, having the conversations. And so it just leads to people, even not wanting to have discovery meetings that are less than perfect. I think we're seeing shift though, where people are like, wow, I, I see how incredibly important my outbound machine is.   Corey Frank: (11:17) Let's take that for a second. So for Chris and Jake, let's say I did listen to my sales managers and my sales reps, and I wanted to alter tweak, change, quote, unquote, improve my SDRs to get them much more perfect discovery calls. What's the, in what's wrong with having my SDRs engage in a little, maybe instead of one band, maybe my effort is to get eight bat questions, right? I'm going to get two B's and two A's and two ends and two tees. And I'm going to put this massive freeform notes section, and then I'm going to put the ball on the tee. So my sales may get fewer conversations, but man, are they going to be qualified? What's what's real harm in that. Well, I think you're going to crank down the trust that you have in your Tam and the amount of relationships you have with people. Right? Because another thing that I absorbed is just that relationships, third binary, and I know that's something you talk about Chris, like either have one or you don't. Right. So I think that this notion of, I don't know, spamming your Tam or things like that is flawed thinking and that instead it's the whole nail-shaped pipeline instead of the wedge and all of that stuff that we should aspire to. Because at the end of the day, like we said, in the beginning, human beings are involved in business and speaking with them is how you go from that zero to that one. And if you try to sort of crank up the perfection and you, you end up cranking down the relationships and trust that you have, which are really the currency of business in the first place, right? So that's how I think about it.   Chris Beall: (13:30) Yeah. Corey, I think about it in the very similar way would, when you think about it in detail, and this is one of the hard things about not as in manufacturing, it doesn't do much good to sit around at the coffee shop and talk about how your factories running, right. You've got to actually get in there and watch it run. And you've got to measure yourself and you've got to listen to it. And you, you got to be surprised. You got to be open to, Oh my God. I didn't realize that at that point. And on that conveyor where it turned on that little corner that you can't figure that out at Starbucks, she looked at the details and the deep conversation, cold conversation. There's a flip on the side of the prospect. Hopefully not on the side of the rep. The rep has to have their emotions and their beliefs in line beforehand.   Chris Beall: (14:14) They're the machine. You can't have the machine changing its characteristics while it's processing the part. It's the part that's changing its characteristics and shapes because it's being processed by the machine, right? So the reps, the machine processing the part and the part isn't ready yet for the, so the next process say the next process is a kneel and you're going to put another, make it really hot and hard, right? So it's got to be shaped right? First. Otherwise you're kind of screwed. You put it in the oven and now it's too hard that to work in sales, we don't have enough trust built in order to go to the confession part until somebody shows that they're ready to confess by saying, they'll come to us. So when we ambush somebody, they are not by definition, ready to confess. There are exceptions and folks will hold those up.   Chris Beall: (15:02) Oh, I had a great conversation with so-and-so first conversation. They told me everything about the business, blah, blah, blah. That's how you can tell you don't have a decision maker, right? You have a socializer. It tells you everything about their business because they're lonely and they want to talk. You know, but if you're talking to somebody serious, the evidence, the number one qualifying evidence that you're going to get it's that they agree to come to the meeting. And the number two qualifying evidence is that they come to the meeting. And the best thing for you is for them not to show up at the meeting the first time. So you can talk to them, furthering the relationship within the context of them being obliged to you because they didn't come to the meeting. So the best sequences, brief conversation, we talked about how to do it.   Chris Beall: (15:49) Enough curiosity, to agree to the meeting, too busy, to go to the meeting. That means they're important. Call them back, reschedule the meeting. Hey, I don't know something must have come up for you. So when would be a better time to talk. And that is by the way, the biggest emotional problem that reps have is doing that. I'm offended. You didn't show up at my meeting. Well, I'm trying to find busy people. Of course they don't show up at meetings. That's how busy they are. They’re doing things more important than that. Today. For instance, I'm supposed to pick up a trailer today over at U-Haul and I'm going to drive my Chevy bolts up onto the trailer, put a bunch of paintings and stuff like that and hook it up to my excursion and drive it through Oregon back to Washington. But Hey, Oregon's on fire. I'm a busy guy. You think I'm going to pick up the trailer   Chris Beall: (16:33) And I'm the customer.   Chris Beall: (16:34) And you know, if they want to run a really good business that Uhaul and I love them. And they're going to, they're going to say Mr. Bill, but we're so sorry that you were unable to execute your mission and we're here to help you. Let's move this. When would you like it? Oh, next Friday. No charge. Right? And they have the moral advantage on me because I'm thinking I didn't pick up the trailer, right? So that's the advantage you want. Your ultimate way to build a pipeline is to have conversations with, with people you really want to meet with objectively in an ambush conversation, in a cold call, the prospect is not ready to confess. We don't have enough relationships. So we want that nail-shaped pipeline, that funnel and they'll shape the funnel. So when we're trying to generate a quality product at scale, the quality product is for folks to buy our product.   Chris Beall: (17:25) We need to start with an input. And the input is the best list that we can put together in a short amount of time. And we shouldn't ignore timing. That's why going after going after timing, it's like the dumbest thing in the world. You want to talk to your whole market before anybody talks to any of your market. Therefore you need to talk to everybody and timing must stop yet concern. Secondly, we need to avoid the fantasy of believing that folks will confess to us before we have a relationship that is strong enough for them to actually tell us their business truth. The evidence for that relationship is that they will come to a meeting. So the ideal sequences, we talked to everybody that we believe intrinsically as qualified to buy our product, regardless of timing, and to make use of it. By the way I make money off it, we talked to them.   Chris Beall: (18:14) We said as many meetings as we can, and we hope they don't show up. And the reason we hope they don't show up, then we can talk to them again. And that's evidence that they're busy people by the way. So we can talk to them again and say, Hey, you must've been too busy to attend this meeting. Can we reschedule? Eventually you will end up having the discovery meeting with them. And that discovery meetings quality has to do with how clean is the confession not did it lead to a deal? So one of the problems we have is we comp our account executives on the deals, but part of their job is just to discover. What's true. We look at the world in a quarterly timeframe, but in our customer base in our Tam 11, 12, set them are not possibly in a consideration cycle this quarter.   Chris Beall: (18:58) So who's going to do that discovery work. I suppose we could reorganize and have sales development do discovery. And that could be done by the way, Jake. I bet we could do this experiment. If your organization was willing to do it is to train sales development on how to do product-free discovery and then pass off great stuff. So you have two kinds of conversations, one to set the meeting and then you would be holding meetings and then you'd be passing off, essentially done deals. And everybody would love you. Of course, you'd be doing the whole job too, but that's okay. Everybody would love you. And the account executives could just sit around and go, Oh, look, I got a check   Jake Housdon: (19:35) Hundred percent. And that I think is what ends up happening with all of these forces at play? Is that that becomes the move, right? Because like you said, people want perfect timing. The compensation is based on closed deals, depending on how long the sales cycle is. And all of those things, the eight ease sort of appetite for how far out that timing might be in all of those things, then just impedes the trust-building in order for their confessions to happen and, and everything that you're saying. So I think that naturally what ends up happening is that sort of quest for perfection for the perfect meeting takes so much power that it like forces what you just said to happen, where, okay, well the correct model then to make our business function properly, if that's going to be your expectations is to bring something that's already had great discovery done and, or there's been a few truthful confession spilled already, and then sort of bringing that to the account executive and that model can work too, right? It's, it's a very different culture in terms of your organization and the trouble with it is what you said. It's that we're asking you a heck of a lot out of the SDR, right. And the pay that they make, usually doesn't reflect that in most organizations either there's the open, the close, right.   Corey Frank: (20:48) So good. Are you at 50 50 in terms of the importance that, that each role has? Right. So that's some of the issues I play for sure. Well, it's difficult. I would imagine Jake too, in person, I've spoken about this in several episodes, that to develop that level of curiosity, which can carry the conversation to any real deep level of insight. Anyway, it's one thing as we always talk about to get from fear to trust and then trust to curiosity, and that chasm is large to get from fear to trust. Right? Chris, Chris and I have certainly we've talked about it. Certainly if Chris Voss, et cetera, it's about seven seconds, seven to 15 seconds or so, but that next chasm, that next hoop that I have to jump through to get from trust to curiosity, oftentimes that's where the empathy and the tone come in.   Corey Frank: (21:34) And certainly the screenplay, if it's a great message, but a lot of it is really contingent on that, that BDR, that SDR to drive a sense of conversationality through their own curiosity. So it becomes a conversation and not an interview, not a hostage situation. So in that scenario, Chris, that you and Jake just outlined, that's a tough trait to train on. That's a tough trait to hire for, but yet is really contingent on if I wanted to change my whole organization to much more quality discovery at the top of the funnel versus just cold calls. Correct.   Chris Beall: (22:14) So you got me thinking here and Corey, I, I think that we could do this in your business. Why don't you hire a good therapist and teach them enough about business, that they can hold a product-free discovery call, just think about it. You could do it and I could do it right. I could, I I'm confident that I can hold with, Oh, say two hours of education in a particular field, but I don't know anything about that. I could learn enough to hold a product-free discovery call. That was a lot of fun for the other person that was very educational for them because I'd have my three insights that are special that have to do with my company. I just joined two hours ago. Right. And I'm not motivated by anything other than learning the truth, because one of the problems you, you hit on it.   Chris Beall: (23:01) One of the problems in discovery is the motivation is not to learn the truth. The motivation is to get to a deal. And as soon as, as an AEC smells that there might not be a deal. They either abandoned or begin to persuade. And to really bad things to do in sales are abandoned. You start to lose interest and then you sound like you've lost interest and nothing's worse than talking to somebody who's lost interest in you. So the other party is like, what's going on or you start to persuade to start to sell and it's discovery. It's not selling. Right. So I actually think these people are out there and they're out there in the boatloads of highly hireable need to learn business acumen. They need to learn to feel and think business while remaining open to possibilities. And that might be the missing role. Jake, we may have just had, we may have discovered a breakthrough   Jake Housdon: (23:56) May have a breakthrough that completely eliminates the lack of trust in discoveries, right.   Corey Frank: (24:04) Person in the think business. Yeah. I mean, what do you think about that? Curiosity trade, all the folks that you've had working with you over the years as CRO and VP of sales director of a biz dev, is there a proportionate connectivity here between curiosity and success or curiosity and their ability to maybe move into a sales role and the success they have there? Do you see any correlation?   Jake Housdon: (24:32) Yeah, well, I certainly do. And I think that one of the things that's extremely difficult for people is that as they sort of get further in their career and learn things and become more experienced, it takes them further away from a nice Zen Buddhist word called shoshin, which is the beginner's mindset. Right? And I think that becomes one of the most difficult things is to really do good discovery. You truly need to be curious and sort of naive in some way as well, because as you get more experienced, you're fighting with yourself on the fact that things that come up, you're going to think you've heard this before and you know where this is going, and you're going to steer it a certain direction, which causes you to miss out on a whole lot of clues that, that ought to be discovered and potentially not create the right environment for people to spill their beans in that confession in an ineffective way,   Corey Frank: (25:24) Like water as Bruce Lee would say, I love that Shoshin   Jake Housdon: (25:28) Shoshin. Yeah. Shoshin beginner's mindset. And this is a whole other topic, but I think a problem in sales is beginners are, are often sort of looked down upon and, and stuff like that a little bit. And I think that sometimes they have some of the more valuable insights for your business. And so maybe in that way, it does make sense for SDRs to be doing discovery, right. Because they are usually more so beginners. Yeah. It's pretty interesting.   Corey Frank: (25:52) I think it was from a Lao-Tzu or Confucius or a fortune cookie that I had, but a mentor of mine would always say kind of the evolution of a great salesperson is a three-step process. It's number one, it's ironic that we're talking about this that says I know nothing. And then number two is I know everything. And then number three is I know nothing. And I think some of us stop at maybe the second piece, maybe some of us stop on the first phase. But I think certainly the practitioners of the craft, the true searchers that we know, and we admire right. Continue with all three.   Jake Housdon: (26:33) Yeah. A hundred percent that reminds me of something else it's on a slightly different gear, but it's these extreme dualities, right? That you have to grapple with. The other one is the whole notion of detaching from the outcome. You know, that, that we like to talk about it. And Josh Brown, he talks about commission breadth and, and how people can smell your commission breath and all these things. And it's the same thing where you have to close the gap between yourself as a human being and yourself as a human being with a sales quota, strapped to your back, that you're gunning for it. Right? And the best people in the world that I've seen, they close that gap, very elegantly. And, but what it is is this dance of thrashing between the two, as you learn, because at first you have to learn certain sales tactics and how to have a cold conversation and these things, cause they're not natural necessarily ways to speak to people, right.   Jake Housdon: (27:16) It's kind of different than the way we might have a normal conversation. So you need to be strategic like that, but you also just need to remain yourself. Right. And that's the real tricky part. And then I think that's maybe why you land into third place again, of not knowing once again, because you had to, you didn't know, then you had to learn stuff and then that stuff messed you up a bunch along the way, because it messed up your ability to do certain things. But then at a certain point, you've done that stuff so many times that it just becomes like part of your soul. And I think that's the promised land to get to. But the thing I was talking about with detaching from the outcome is you simultaneously have to care everything about trying to help that person, but you also need to care nothing at all about whether you actually can't. That's a very weird thing for people because we're emotional creatures.  

How long will it take to get the meeting? You have three steps first: 1. Make the list. And review that list and eliminate the dumb titles. Chris is a fan of Zoominfo. 2. Write the messaging. Remember, one turn of phrase can kill the meeting. Marketing language kills a sales call. Subtle nuances make or break the call. 3. Talk to people in that market, those that are intrigued enough to hear what we have to say. Who does the talking? Find and hire the ASKERS. Tune in for this short episode of Market Dominance Guys: Change the Message or Change the List ----more---- The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (00:41): Hey there, Market Dominance folks. I'm here today without my brilliant and amusing cohost Corey Frank, and I'm just going to do a little practicum, I guess you'd call it. A little kind of look at the nuts and bolts of market dominance. Chris Beall (00:57): So in order to dominate a market, we've got to have the goods, obviously, we have to have something the market needs and wants. We have to have a notion of a market which we need to turn into a list. So key to market dominance starts with obviously a market, and a list is defined as a whole bunch of companies, if this is a B2B, a whole bunch of companies. Maybe two, maybe 50, maybe a thousand, who knows, maybe 10,000. That if any one of them on that list buys from us, then all of the other ones will be slightly more inclined to buy from us sooner rather than they would have otherwise, and at the price that we want to sell to them at. Chris Beall (01:38): So it's kind of a self referencing or inter referencing list. So we need to make that list. So that's step one, it's a practical step. And I'll talk a little bit about that. Step two is we have to have something to say to them, and we have to have a purpose in saying it. So we'll go over that too. We'll call that messaging. Step three is we've got to actually talk to people in that market. And we need to find the ones who are intrigued enough with what we have to say, that they decide to come and attend a discovery meeting, or what I call a confessional meeting. So how do we do all of that in the practical day-to-day way, and how long should it take? Chris Beall (02:22): So let's start with step one. Let's make the list. Thankfully, there are many, many list providers out there. I have a great fondness for the folks at ZoomInfo. And really you can make a list, which is nothing more than a hypothesis about your market. A list, not only of companies, but of people that you might want to talk with. So it's titles at companies. Try to keep the companies more or less the same size that is within a band because small company titles are different from big company titles. At small companies, a title like mine, CEO, might be somebody you want to call a broad range of things. But when you get a Microsoft size company then you're not going to call Satya Nadella and talk to Satya about, say for instance, oh, having the Microsoft employees have a lot more sales conversations. You need to find somebody who's responsible for that. Chris Beall (03:15): And that might be a manager title at a large company. So get your titles lined up with the size of the company. And remember it's a hypothesis. How long should this take? Well, it's hypothesis. Doesn't take that long. Actually, you can get a list that's worth calling on about 30 to 45 minutes at work, let's say an hour on ZoomInfo, and now we need to validate the list. So how do we validate the list? We're going to have conversations with the folks on the list. Those conversations have got to be about something that's relatively consistent, otherwise we won't get a very good signal out of our validation. And so what we're going to do is construct a message. The message will have essentially two parts. Part one is simply being in a position to have a conversation with the person. Chris Beall (04:00): We've ambushed somebody, these are going to be cold calls and or follow up calls. The beginning they've got to be cold calls because you can't stop somebody a second time unless you've talked to them the first time. So we're going to have, what we call, an ambush call or a cold call. That's a conversation with somebody that is not expecting us to ring them up on the phone. And in that conversation, first, we need to get them to trust us a little bit. And the way we do that is through what's called tactical empathy. We start from a position of knowing that they're afraid of us as an invisible stranger. We offer a solution to that fear to the problem, the problem is us. And we offer that solution in a way that indicates that we're competent. Competent to solve a problem they have right now and therefore we are worth trusting. Chris Beall (04:46): So here's a situation where we can say a few words. I know I'm an interruption, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? And while you might want to cast around for a whole bunch of other different ways to start a conversation, that one is good enough. It's above threshold. So my recommendation is don't try to become the cleverest person on earth putting together the first two sentences. The first two sentences, or first seven seconds, are the most important part of the conversation. And there's a bottleneck of all of market dominance. So it's worth getting them right. It's worth getting the tone right, and it's worth having the underlying belief right. The underlying belief has to be a belief in the potential value of the meetings that we're offering to this human being in the case where they're never going to do business with us. And I know that sounds a little funny, sales folks and business leaders always want to go right for it. The fact is, it's the hypothesis. Chris Beall (05:40): We don't know what should happen, so we shouldn't presume that what should happen is that they should take the meeting. We need to have an open mind, but we also need to have confidence that the meeting itself is a good product. It's the universal product of business. Let's understand the value from the meeting that they will achieve. And then let's just say something that is interesting and intriguing to get some curiosity going. And let's have it be positive. I believe we've discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates, and name a bad thing that you're going to take care of that has an economic value to them. A bad thing that has some sort of emotional value, and a bad thing that's keeping them from getting where they want to go, call that strategic value. Do that without mentioning what category of product that you offer, without pigeonholing yourself in order to avoid getting the, we're set, objection, the deadly objection, and move on from there and just ask for the meeting. Chris Beall (06:39): So you need to have your people learn to do this, or you need to do it yourself. Kind of depends on how big you are. I highly recommend you do it yourself first to get a feel for it. And asking for the meeting is just a question of asking something like, 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? And that's it. And then you both, you take your belief, which is, this meeting really is going to be of value to them, they're going to learn a lot. And you let that guide you for the next little dot. Chris Beall (07:10): Now day-to-day, say you've hired the right people. So what are the right people to have these conversations? They're people who are sincere. People who believe in the mission that you're on. They don't have to understand it deeply, they just have to believe in it. People who have good voices. People who are comfortable asking rather than having people guess what it is that they want. That's a good way to look at this is that there are askers and there are guessers. There are families that work like this, cultures that work like this. You want somebody from an ask culture or an ask family, where people ask for what they want and it's okay if they get a no, that's a real key. And that's a fairly easy thing to ascertain. In an interview you can find out, did they ask you for things? When you're interviewing them, did they ask you for things, not just ask you about things, but for things? If they do, and they're comfortable getting a no for an answer, and they're capable of being an asker, they can probably ask for the meeting because that's what they're doing. Chris Beall (08:08): First, they're asking for the 27 seconds and then they're going to ask for the meeting. So find askers, hire those askers. And how long does all that take? Well, if you're doing it yourself and you're an asker, it takes no time at all. And you're actually talking to people on day two. Otherwise you've got to find somebody. And I would recommend finding two somebodies, but that's because it's hard to test anything with the two different ways of doing it. And then train them up. So let's say it takes a week to find and hire two people, good voices who are askers. Train them up means they learn the message, that takes about one day, and they need to practice it. How often? About 30 times. So 30 times in a row, just getting the message out, and then they need to practice answering the natural objections. Especially what we call the Venus flytrap objection, which is, hey, tell me more. Chris Beall (09:02): And when somebody says, tell me more, you have to get really comfortable saying, you know, we've learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this isn't a fair setting for talking about something this important. Are you a morning person? How's your Wednesday? So getting to that point should take no more than a day. So now we have a day of putting our list together, a week of hiring, and now we have a day of training up our new hires, and then we want to have them talking. But from now on, they're going to talk to people in a coached way. Now, how often should they talk to folks? My view is, lots. And I sell a product that lets them do that, so maybe I'm biased. But my people today, for instance, my 12 people have had 170 conversations. And my top conversationalist has already had 27, and it's 12:49 in the afternoon here on a Wednesday on the west coast. Chris Beall (09:53): So I'm most concerned for my team, and you should be most concerned for your team about whether they're having enough conversations. You probably gave them a good list. If the list has titles on it they shouldn't talk to, if you can take care of just by inspecting the list, I recommend pivoting it on title and looking at the count. Sorting descending on the count of each title, and getting rid of the dumb ones, that's all you have to do. So now they're not calling dumb titles they're calling ones that might be pretty good. And now we need to find out, are they having good conversations or not? Remember, that the first seven seconds is where it tends to go bad. So what we want to do is we want to find out, well, who's having trouble in the first seven seconds? Thankfully, there's a call outcome or disposition that tells us that. It's the busy call back disposition, or busy call back outcome of the conversation. Chris Beall (10:46): So I could look at my sales reps right now, which I'm going to do. Our team has had 7,913 dials today. And I think there's 13 people involved, 170 conversations. They've set 17 meetings and they're converting at about a 10% conversation a meeting rate. It's hard to get people on the phone today for whatever reason. 46.55 dials, thank goodness our people never have to make any of those dials. And they're dialed to meeting, which has kind of an overall metric that says, how well are we doing economically? It's a little high today, 465 to one. But not a lot we can do in one day about the fact that people are hard to reach. So I'm going to just say, let's forge ahead. Converting at a 10% rate is pretty darn good. Getting 77 follow-up opportunities, which our team has done also, and eight referrals is also pretty good. Chris Beall (11:39): But I want to find out, how to keep the car on the road? And my analogy for this is, if you're driving a car and you close your eyes, or just look down at your GPS, it doesn't matter how good your GPS is, you're going to run into things. You're going to run into things, animate and inanimate. And that's a serious problem. You've got to have your eyes on the road and you have to make the little steering motions, breaking motions, and use your brain in order to drive a car on any road. It's the same thing about driving a company on a market dominance road. We need to look at the road, and the road consists of, interestingly enough, the outcome of conversations. So what we want to do is find out who's having the most trouble keeping people on the phone? If we find somebody who's had 22 conversations and 40.9% of the time they're getting up busy call back later, and that's the top of the heat for busy call back later, that means they aren't keeping people on the phone quite as well as they might. Chris Beall (12:36): Maybe it's their voice. Maybe it's the list. Who really knows until we listen to the conversations. Because most likely it's the voice, and most likely it's in the first seven seconds. So we want to listen to the conversations of our reps who are having the most difficulty keeping people on the phone. And then we want to come back around to them, speak with those reps and say, hey, let's listen to this conversation together. They might be off script. A common thing to do is to change some of the words around. Change, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called, to, do you have 27 seconds so I can tell you why I called? Very different effect. So the subtleties are important. Chris Beall (13:14): This an athletic kind of thing and we have to coach in real time every day. Fortunately at 30 conversations a day or so, that's pretty straightforward to do. Now if we do all of this and then we note our conversation and meeting rate, if it stays about 5% forge ahead, forge ahead, forge ahead. If it starts below 5% and doesn't come up to 5% as we tune our message, then our message needs work, or our list needs work. And that's the primary adjustment. Chris Beall (13:43): One is to change the message, which is the most likely thing that has an issue. You probably put some marketing language in it and marketing language kills sales conversations, for sure. So you might've succumb to that temptation. But whatever it is, you change the message or change the list. That's a little bit of a bigger task to change the list because you have to decide to go after a different market. So that's pretty much it. Iterate, iterate, iterate, talk to lots of people, keep tuning and coaching and market dominance actually will come to you fairly naturally. So that's a very brief episode of Market Dominance Guys for this week. Thanks everybody, appreciate it. Corey Frank (15:09): CEO's who sell or don't sell because what you're, even at Connect and Sell, it's unusual that you, as CEO, your esteemed VP of sales, Jonty, and your chairman all still make regular sales calls and sell. And in fact are some of the top producing folks in the company. Why continue to do that? Don't you have the market figured out by now? Isn't your time, or Jonty's or even Sean's, at the chairman level? I mean, you guys are dominating your market, you're growing at a great rate every year. It seems that there shouldn't be that many changes to the marketplace, or are there? Chris Beall (15:58): You kind have a choice when you come in as a hired gun. You can choose to be what we call Mr. Monkey, in my circles. Mr. Monkey, you know those little monkeys that, the toy one that you get that you wind up and it's got the cymbals that it bangs together? And that's all it does, it bangs the cymbals together and it makes this noise, right? Corey Frank (16:15): I used to work for one. Yeah. Chris Beall (16:17): Yeah, yeah. Sort of a cheerleader monkey, right? And they're just doing the same thing over and over. And then if the company grows under them, they take credit for it. Much like [crosstalk 00:16:26]. Corey Frank (16:25): Oh absolutely. Know them well. Chris Beall (16:28): Stockbrokers, they'll take credit for, you know, they'll bring you a bunch of stuff and some of it's great and they take credit for that, and stuff that's not great suddenly they're just bringing you new stuff. Just keep banging the cymbals together. So you can be Mr. Monkey and you know, you'll probably do okay. I don't object to it. Now Mr. Monkeys tend to negotiate hard for themselves, and as a result they tend to do okay. And there's kind of a desperate shortage of people who are willing to be CEOs, regardless of what everybody says about the job. It's not actually that popular for some pretty good reasons. It isn't the very, very, most fun job in the world in a lot of places. That's one way to do it. Chris Beall (17:05): But even if I were Mr. Monkey, I would do this. I would take one discovery call per day. One. Not curated, just one out of the mix and I'd have it assigned to me, one per day, half an hour. That's what I would dedicate to my sales activity. And then I'd pass it off. Because frankly it's in discovery that we make the greatest discoveries. So kind of learn a lot in discovery. I'm going to learn what our sales process is like at the tip of the spear. Finding out what customers need. I'm going to find out what my flow is like. Can you imagine if I came into a company, I said, give me discovery call a day. And they said, boss, we don't have one, right? We don't have one for you. We're going to have to work at that. It's like, really, that tells me something already. Corey Frank (18:00): Yeah, or five no shows in five days, or whatever, you know? Chris Beall (18:05): Exactly. You'll gain more information through that half-hour than all the staff meetings you will ever hold in the entire year. You'll gain credibility because you'll be out there executing discovery calls. And if you're really good at taking credit, you can take credit for the deals that come afterwards. Now, it's kind of funny because all you are as a filter, but if you're a pretty good filter, if you can discover need and the need turns into something that happens downstream turns into business, you know, those are your deals. So you'll be an actual player. But what you'll learn is stuff where you can move the needle with very little effort. It's always hiding in there somewhere, no one's going to tell you. No one's going to tell you, did you know that we have three extra steps in our sales process, that we inherited from five years ago, that drive away the best customers? Right? Chris Beall (18:57): Why? Well, because somebody once said that if we make them sign the contract first, rather than whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And when you're the rep you're going, are you kidding me? That's crazy. You know, I could feel it, right? So you'll find the points where you can have the maximum impact with the minimum disruption. And the credibility factor is huge. One of the things you need as a CEO in all cases is either credibility or the illusion of credibility. And real credibility doesn't hurt the illusion. So if you're an illusion kind of Mr. Monkey, then this'll help. If you're not, and you're a reality kind, then this will help. So the one thing I would advise any CEO to do, and by the way, if you're a VP of sales, chief revenue officer, whatever you are, including if you are that director of business development, take one discovery call per day on your calendar. 250 discovery calls a year will transform you and will transform your business. Corey Frank (19:58): That's exceptional advice. And today, if you had to guess, right, since I've done all those roles and I failed in all those roles, and that's such an incredible piece of advice, Chris, like I said, we've known each other for a long time. You've seen some of the organizations that I've been a part of, and that I created. And I can tell you that I fall into those, a lot of those same traps. Hey, I only want to be on the big deals or, you know, just, you know, just kind of save me for just the ones that, you know, have a lot of meat on that chicken wing. And I've been doing it completely backward. So that's so incredibly, you know, embarrassing, cringe-worthy for a sales guy like me to hear that something so simple, outcomes raiser in that regard, that's just one a day. So today from, I mean, you talk with sales organizations, you and Jonty, and Sean talked with sales organizations, VPs all day long, how many are doing that today, would you think? What percentage? Chris Beall (21:00): I'd be shocked if it was 5% of CEOs, I'd be shocked if it was two. I'd be shocked if it's 2%. The easiest, cheapest thing in the world to give yourself information and organizational power, including by the way, board power. Because when you're in a board meeting and those numbers are up there and somebody's poking at the numbers, do you want to be held hostage by your VP of sales is the only person with the story? Corey Frank (21:25): That's right. Chris Beall (21:26): Right. That might be the person you need to fire tomorrow for all you know. And so you better have something around stories and they better be firsthand, not secondhand. And so, you know, 250 stories to choose out of, for a year or so, a lot better than maybe zero or one whale that you're going after you were called in on the big deal or whatever. Corey Frank (21:45): As always, it never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our values. So thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank  

The sales lead discernment process is similar to search results. The ones that come up on the first page are the ones you interact with. It's like a discovery call.  A discovery call's purpose isn't to say, "I'm going to buy." One of the biggest mistakes sales trainers make is relying on role-playing as the method to gain confidence. Role-playing is not designed to get you calm and confident. It's a "gotcha" setup. Rehearsal and practice are a better training method to allow the salespeople to get comfortable enough they don't have to think about how they might fail. You need to have it be a reflex to get to the underlying emotion. The underlying emotion that needs to come through is curiosity. ----more---- As for the introverted sales pros we talked about in an earlier episode, public Rah Rah adulation is of little value. Giving these professionals a private rah rah is more effective in keeping them motivated. Get these and more insights in this episode of Market Dominance Guys: Sales is a Collaborative Exercise in Search. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (00:41): When teaching the golf swing the way I do it anyway, and I've had a lot of success with this in 15 minutes, somebody goes from never having swung a golf club to hitting little 100 yards, right to left seven irons with one hand. And the reason that they can do that is that the impediment is their desire to make the club move fast and get the ball the way,their mind tells them it needs to happen. And by taking the ability to execute on that desire away, they have a chance of feeling what it's really like just swinging golf club, or have a golf club swing now. And I think in sales, the way we do this is pretty simple. One is the script. The script is really important because it gives us a chance to practice our way into the emotional state that we need to begin and to do it without the scary part there, which is the other person. So a huge mistake that I see sales leaders make is that they think that the sales conversation is a contest between the seller and the buyer. And this is actually fairly commonly taught that buyers are liars and all these kinds of things are out there as concepts that folks have been told as though what you're in is a little war with the buyer. And when you win they buy. And in fact, modern sales is the opposite. It's a collaborative exercise where you start with search, you're searching for somebody who potentially has the ability to get value from what you do or what you provide. So that's all that cold calling and prospecting stuff as a form of search and the search results. When you do a Google search, right? The search results that come up on the first page are the ones you might interact with. The interaction equivalent is the discovery call. And the discovery calls purpose, just like when you click through a link on a Google query, isn't to say, I'm going to buy. You don't do a query. I did a query yesterday, trying to find a particular hotel up in Birch Bay that happens to be associated with the timeshare that I own, right? I wasn't simply going to click through and buy it. I was going to click through and check to see if the dates they had available, matched up with what I'd like to do in the first week of September. The idea that I need to qualify beyond the fact that they showed up on the first page of the search is kind of ridiculous, right? I need to look into things a little bit further, and it's good that I've practiced, searching and go. That I practiced clicking. I didn't have to spend 15 minutes girding up my loins to be able to click on a link. I know that it's pretty safe, right? But I've got to practice the safe stuff in a way that gives me a chance of succeeding in the micro, in the moment. And then I need a teacher to say, "Hey, that was good." Even when the result isn't there. And that's the real key. It's the key to the golf swing is the key to anything. If you want to learn something complex, you need a teacher to be there to tell you when it's working before it's producing results. So there's two huge errors that people make in managing sales teams. And if they just stopped them, life would be much better for everybody. One is role play. Role playing is not designed to get you calm and confident. It's a gotcha situation. We're going to role-play. And we're going to show where we can trip you up, where you should have done this, where you should have done that, where don't do this. Don't do that. All that does is it gets you all knotted up. So when you go into the real conversation, your mind is going, should I have done that? Should I have done that? I shouldn't do this. I shouldn't do that. And then there you go, waters on the left, you've hooked another shot out of balance, right? And then the other thing that needs to happen is in the practice, replace role-play with practice, just practice, just rehearsal. Rehearsal is needed in order to make the sounds come out of you automatically so that you're free to express the underlying emotion. And the underlying emotion is actually curiosity. So you're curious, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? So you are showing that you're competent to solve a problem this person has right now, that is you, the invisible stranger, the scary beast in the dark, but you're also saying it in a playful, curious tone. Notice how quickly curiosity enters in the relationship in the second sentence, it enters into the relationship. So if you're curious, you're naturally relaxed. When you're curious, you're waiting for information to come through to you. You stimulate it. And then you're waiting. It's like waiting for the golf smile, waiting for the club to get down, to get to the top before it comes back around, you just have to be relaxed in order to do that. You get relaxed by practicing the thing that works, not the thing that doesn't work. And you need the teacher to tell you, "Hey, that was good." Not, "Oh, look at that. You whiffed it." It's like in the golf swing, it's like half an inch lower. That thing would have been beautiful. You did everything right. Let's do it again. Corey Frank (05:29): As an instructor, as a mentor, as a teacher, you need to be able to give guidance. And as a student, you need to have a teacher that can tell you that something is working, even when you may not feel that it's working in the wild just yet. Chris Beall (05:46): Yes. And when you're listening to the conversation. So the way we run our flight school is like this. So we run this thing at ConnectAndSell called flight school and flight school takes pretty much any human being and turns them into a top 5% in the world, cold call, and does it in four sessions of two hours each. So step zero is to develop the message. And we've been through all of that, walking into the bar, sit to the left of the person who's your ideal customer and ask them, how's your day. We listened to how their day went. We come up with three things out of that. One of them is we'll call it economic. One of them is emotional and one of them is strategic. We put them in a very simple sentence. I believe we've discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the bad thing, the bad thing and the other bad thing. Or maybe it's got some other variations in it. And then we move forward and we avoid a couple of things there. Okay. All that's great. We've got to have that. Now, how do we become great at it? Well, first we've got to get great at the first seven seconds. It's like a prizefight. If I go into the ring and I get knocked out in the first seven seconds, it really doesn't matter how good I would have been. Right? It just doesn't matter. Flat on my back on the canvas is the same and almost every cold call is lost in the first seven seconds. And the reason it's lost in the first seven seconds, is the voice doesn't support the concepts that are in the script. The idea, the flow of emotions in the script are not supported by the voice. So I play a little bit of piano, as you might know, and many people think I'm much, much better than I am. I'm actually a very poor piano player. I would rank myself among people who play the piano regularly in the bottom 20% easily, but I'm quite capable of playing freely the emotions that I feel in any piece. And then what did I do to do that? I took my left hand out of the equation, so I don't have any mechanics associated with it. And I simplified things. So I can express myself in the melody of my right hand. It's actually the same as the golf swing. Take the part that doesn't work so well out. Do the part that does work and then getting encouragement for the stuff that is working before it's producing results. And so in flight school, what we do is you do a two-hour session with ConnectAndSell. That's like 15 to 20 conversations, all hot, all live, all live fire. In those conversations, there's going to be a coach listening to you, and you're going to get coached not after everyone, but after most of them. In session one, you get coached only on the first seven seconds, because that's the important part. That is, it's what you need to get before you can go on. And then afterwards, there's a listening session. We go around the classroom and everybody gets to listen to their best. Why do we listen to their best? Because you want to know what you did right. And you want the encouragement from the teacher that says, "Yeah, that was great." Don't worry that they hung up. The guy hung up, so what? The lady sounded pissed. So what? You sounded perfect. Let's listen to your voice again. Listen to that playful, curious, listen to your voice go up twice. That was great. Then in the second session we do what we call the breakthrough part. So we call it Flight School because the first session, the first two hours is takeoff. And then there's freight flight. We're in the middle of it. We're going somewhere, right? It's the, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough at the completely eliminates whatever it is. And it's their message. And they've had time to practice it and rehearse it. And again, can they get the tone right? I believe we've discovered a breakthrough. Does the breakthrough sound like the hero and the hero's journey? Do they believe the breakthrough is an actor? Is doing something? Does the breakthrough slay the three dragons in their little story? Does it sound like a story? Does it sound like a pitch? Coaching us on that. That's session number two. Session, number three, we've got to land the airplane, right? It's flight school. You got to learn how to get it back on the ground. So we have to ask for the meeting. It's very simple. The way to ask for the meeting, we just say, the reason I reached out to you today, was to get 15 minutes on your calendar, share this breakthrough. I haven't rehearsed every single. So you got to get that part right. You got to land the plane and then you got to deal with turbulence. The objections, they're inevitable. How do you handle, they tell me more objection? The Venus fly trap? What do you do? You've got to practice that the most awkward of handles in the world. And the most honest, which is we've learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this, just isn't a fair setting to talk about something that's important. You a morning person? How's your Wednesday? Getting that stuff right is a matter of practicing with the teacher, paying attention and getting encouraged when you do it right. Getting feedback that says you did it right. Especially when it didn't deliver results. And then occasionally you'll hook one up with results and you'll see that works too. But there is an element of faith in all of this. And the element of faith is you actually have got to go into learning, to be great at anything believing in your teacher. If you believe you're the teacher, then the teacher's not the teacher. Somebody got to be the teacher. It's just the way it is. And so in the same way that we shouldn't bring our ideas too deeply into discovery, we shouldn't bring our ideas too deeply into learning something as delicate and chilling as cold calling. It's like when I learned to drive a race car, I got in that car and I tried to forget everything I knew about driving and just let my eyes take me where I was going to go. And instead of responding to the screaming of the guy in the right seat, telling you what to do, is responding, don't tell me what to do. I really tried to just do what he said, brake hard, brake hard, brake hard. Meant stomp on the brake, as hard as I can. And then his feedback was great. It was a young guy and he gave me incredible feedback. So the first time I did it right, which was on the third lap, turn one, we're going in. And finally I wait long enough and I brake hard enough. And guess what? We kind of spin out a little bit. We don't quite lose the car, but almost lose the car. Corey Frank (11:58): [inaudible 00:11:58]. Chris Beall (11:58): Completely. Oh, the way race cars work. It's like, [crosstalk 00:12:01]. Corey Frank (12:02): But there's the fighter flight. You want to disavow everything he's saying, because you, who are a residential driver driving 11.2 miles over the speed limit, right? Who's been doing this since 15, 16 years old. You want to resist that feedback. So how do you trust that teacher? Right? Even though you're in the same environment you thought you were in before at driving to the racetrack, but now everything is accelerated. You don't have to have a conversation as a person. How is it different than having a conversation as a salesperson? Chris Beall (13:23): That's really good. That's exactly the equivalent. And it's up to the student to come with an open mind. It's up to the teacher to coach the actions or elements of performance that next can lead to success without getting ahead of themselves, without coaching the next part, don't teach the part after this part, just teach this part and just paying attention to whether it was done correctly. Not the result. It's really quite simple when you come right down to it. And in sales, we have this conceit. I see it all the time out there on LinkedIn. Whereas some, for instance, I'll post some numbers, right? You know how I am. I like to post the numbers about number dials, which are done for the reps and the number of conversations and the number of meetings, which are the wins and all that good stuff. There will often be somebody that comes in and says, "Yeah." But what about the revenue? What about the closed one? Well, so what, right? Unless we get the meetings, there's not going to be any closed one. I mean, these are all small percentages, mostly working against us. So I'm not going to win a lot of races in that Ferrari, probably take me 20 years and having nobody show up for me to win one, but I can learn that I really do go all the way up to that cone before I break. And I really do break as part as I physically compress on that pedal. And I really do just aim the car at the apex. And I know it feels really weird, but I do it. And my instructor was great. When I came out of almost losing the car on turn one on left three, there was a straightaway. And so we had a little bit of time and he ignored the fact that I forgot to shift it to sixth gear on the straightaway. He just ignored that, which would have been a natural thing for him to pay attention to. That's the next thing, what he said was, "Great job." That's what he said. Great job. And I thought, okay, I did that right. And then the next time I did it right, but with a little more awareness of this other little piece he told me, which was kind of be a little bit more gentle as I changed the direction of the car, going to the apex in the turn. Corey Frank (15:29): [inaudible 00:15:29]. Chris Beall (15:29): So yeah, I mean, there's a sort of a thing that does a little physics in there somewhere. So I think our sales managers really, really need to be great teachers. We talk about coaching all the time and I think coaching is correct. I think that's what we're really doing, but I'll make this warning. A lot of people in sales came out of the world of athletics and there are two elements of coaching. There's a teaching element, learning to execute, the thing you need to execute to perform. And then there is sort of an energy motivation level of coaching, getting folks up, keeping them up, keeping their spirits up and all that. And I think that's the one people remember having been coached and they think their job as a coach is to go all rah-rah or to go all yell at you, to go all Vince Lombardi to say winning isn't everything. It's the only thing, whatever he said. Right? And it's just not the case. I mean, when you're coaching NFL players, you can say that they're all really, really good. Every one of them already knows how to execute all of the moves through all that stuff. But guess what? They still get taught and get taught. Tom Brady actually gets feedback on technique, not just whether he was in a good frame of mind, whether it was a hopped up on excitement on adrenaline or whatever. And I think that coaching often sounds like let's do some rah-rah. Rah-rahs have such little value in sales. It's just a such little value, including celebrating the wins. There are certain personality types that need to do that. Go ahead, let them do it, right? Introverts who make the best sellers tend not to be encouraged or they like a private rah-rah. If you're the leader of a company and you have an introverted salesperson, especially at the top of the funnel, recognize their good day privately at the end of the day, do that. Corey Frank (17:24): That's great. So I think we had talked, when I was in the Uber and we were chatting about something else the other day about reps and today's generation on this career cycle to eventually become CEOs. And what is the ideal career track, right? To be CEO development program, workout regimen, if you will, over the years to be a next-generation CEO? And similar to what I've heard you say here in the last 30 minutes or so Chris, is that if you have a great teacher, as a rep, you are naturally going to learn how to teach from your teacher, which will contribute to your skills as a great CEO. You are going to learn how to evoke a curious nature in a conversation, which as a CEO is, you clearly need, you're going to have empathy, which we had talked about in several episodes already, and you're going to learn presentation skills, but we're also going to learn metrics. And you had said something to me the other day that the CEOs of today, can't just sit at the top of the food chain. They have to get intimate with the inner workings of every silo of their business. And it seems to me that what we're talking about here is that if you have a solid rep BDR development program, as an organization, you are setting your organization up for much success that will trickle into every department, or trickle up, if you will, if you want to use a hierarchical example, your SDR/BDR team will trickle up a level of success and it should not be an afterthought. It should not be a place where they get residual marketing or sales training dollars. It should be at the front lines and be treated as such because of, I think the reciprocal effect of doing that really, really well from not just a numbers perspective, of course, but from a leadership development perspective throughout that organization, Chris Beall (19:23): I think this is a really big deal. Well, first of all, there's two ideas in here. One is what is a modern and future CEO like? And they've got to have two characteristics. Big time. One is they have to be systems thinkers. They have to be able to see a system as a whole and understand how that system interacts with its environment. When you run a company, a company is a system and it's a system that at that moment is designed in order to help some folks in database and companies do things more cheaply or do things more effectively or conveniently than they can do for themselves. So that's what a firm is. That's why we make companies. We specialize in something that others might need, but they don't need it to the degree of becoming it. So we get to be it and concentrate that specialization. And we create this system called the company. And if you don't know how a system is put together in the inside and how it works, it's very, very hard to reason about where it could go next. And in particular, where it might be breaking down. The systems break down easily and small things inside of systems can become big things. We had a small thing recently in our system at ConnectAndSell, unfortunately, we test extensively on ourselves as Guinea pigs, before we let anything out in the wild and the very small thing that we'd changed, created a very small delay in not transferring to the user of ConnectAndSell, but transferring to the agent who is navigating. And that very small delay caused a misunderstanding, kind of at a statistical level by agents of what they were hearing in voicemail greeting, and whether it really belonged to that person. Corey Frank (21:01): Really? Chris Beall (21:01): And that caused a miss marking of some of the phone numbers that we were calling as being main numbers instead of direct numbers. And that caused a miss execution. So we polluted our own data, but we didn't intend to, we did everything as designed and in a lot of companies, I would assure you that a quarter second delay causing what looks on the surface like, "Oh my God, where do our direct numbers go?" Would have created a witch hunt to go out and find who's responsible for the bad data. And the bad data actually grew like scum on a pond. Nobody was responsible for it. We just let the temperature of the pond get half a degree too warm. And it grew scum. And we caught it in a day and fixed it and went back and fixed the data and did all that. But that's the CPR. [crosstalk 00:21:53] Corey Frank (21:53): And I think it, you caught it because you just happen in the course of your day as a CEO. One of the things that you do is you just look, almost like a beautiful mind. You look at 100 different KPIs and metrics and maybe it just takes a couple of seconds. Yeah. It's on track. Yeah. That's on track. And you said that you noticed something a little bit peculiar, which led to a deeper dive, a deeper dive, a deeper dive. And that's how you found it from the systems type thinking. So you work from backwards up because you knew what the metrics were going to be. And when they're off slightly, that's where it's time to dive in. Chris Beall (22:30): Exactly. And I didn't diagnose the, what's going on under the covers, but I could smell something was going on under the covers. And it was in one set of numbers. And it was simply the order of the outcomes. The most popular outcome is voicemail reached for after navigation. The second, most popular is voicemail reach direct number, call a direct number, which was third is gatekeeper as target, but not available. The number two and number three were flipped. That was it. And they were flipped day after day after day, starting on a particular day. To me as a systems kind of person, I look at that and go the odds of that happening spontaneously statistically are zero, right? So as a CEO, you also have to understand the nature of probability and all that. Then there's this other job which has got to talk to people. I mainly listen to them and kind of move things ahead. But without presuming that you know all the answers and I believe the best place to learn that is as a cold caller. So I look at cold calling like what you guys are doing at Youngblood Works. As truly finishing school for business graduates, where they've learned a whole bunch of things. Maybe even learn some things about teaching from their best professor. Why do we go to college? Because one of our professors will be so good. We'll learn about teaching. And maybe we'll do some of that ourselves later in life. It's not the content. It's the actual experience of being taught effectively. And if you go to a college, there's enough teachers. Eventually one of them is going to be good enough that you'll go [inaudible 00:23:54] I work for me. Right? And then you might want to learn more about that. But I think what you guys are doing at Youngblood Works where you're taking these very, very talented people, high ambition folks who are coming out of a program or still in a program, interested in business, probably have CEO in their minds, somewhere in their future. And the natural finishing school. Back in Victorian times, you had to learn how to dance certain dances, or you were toast in society, right? In Victoria, in England, if you couldn't dance these dances, I mean, you couldn't go, you couldn't do anything. You couldn't hold conversations with people because you had to do it out on the dance floor. Right? And so how do you learn the dances of the future, which happened in conversations? Well, you got to go to a dancing master and you got to do it on the real ballroom floor. And that means talking to real people with real coaching going on. Because if you take the emotions away, the fear emotions, you'll never find out if you're performing right. So I just see that there's a way of looking at the SDR/BDR role that folks are not quite getting. They think they're preparing future AEs and getting them to that as fast as possible. Corey Frank (25:06): Exactly. Exactly. Chris Beall (25:06): Makes no sense. They should be looking at this as the best way to bring anybody into their organization. Even engineers, is to have them come in and sit in the seat. Anybody can learn the script. Anybody can learn to believe in the potential value of the meeting for the human being they're talking with, regardless of outcome, anybody can get their voice to go up and down in the right places. Anybody can be coached to silence. And these things are very straightforward, right? They just have to believe it's worth their while. Well, do you want to be a CEO someday, including a CEO of your own life? Learn to have conversations with invisible strangers. [inaudible 00:25:46] Corey Frank (25:46): I know a lot of Marines in my life and I work with some and my son is becoming one. And the John Darby who works with me at Youngblood had said, "Listen, as a Marine veteran, you're taught that whether you're a cook or you're a attorney, or whether you're in logistics, you are a rifleman first, a Marine is a rifleman first." And it sounds like if you're an engineer in an organization, you're a CEO, you're a VP of technology. This new world order of starting out as a biz dev as an SDR, learning how to script from the ground up is everybody needs to learn these traits of curiosity, these traits of empathy, the systems backwards and forwards to be a true contributor to that organization. I know where we're running up against the clock here for this episode, but I think that we still have a lot. I have a lot to milk from you. Certainly. I think we can cover this topic next time on the traits of a CEO. I know we've touched on it in a few episodes here. Chris Beall (26:49): Yeah. I'm glad that we've hit this one. I think that this is sort of the big deal that we have a lot going on in our society right now with the pandemic and all that we have, a lot of folks are looking around and asking, what am I going to do? Well, what you're going to do is going to be limited by what you're capable of doing and what you're capable of doing will have a lot to do with what you've learned how to do, right? You've got to go explore. And I would recommend anybody who wants to check out their future CEO ness, go ahead and become a cold caller. But by the way, don't become a cold caller who spends all day, not talking to people it's much better to talk to 30 or 40. Corey Frank (27:25): Well, fantastic. Well, it has been another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and the Sage of sales, chris Beall. Thank you Chris. Until next time. Keep dialing. Chris Beall (27:34): Thanks, Corey.  

CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider odd possibilities. You need input from the market you don't have yet. This is why a CEO needs to be selling to understand what is actually happening. Their job is to feel the ice rather than just sending your reps to drive the road. Put yourself in there as CEO, don't absorb the friction, find the root cause. The marketplace is always changing. CEOs love to harpoon a whale, but they need to experience every aspect of a sale. They need to be in the mix and feel what is behind the numbers. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, It's the CEO's Job to Feel the Ice Rather than Harpoon the Whale. ----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 (00:35): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of Sales, Chris Beall, with all things markets dominant oriented. Chris Beall (00:45): This is something that drives me a little bit nuts when CEOs stop selling and they cut themselves off from the only information flow that counts, which is what's happening inside of a discovery conversation that indicates to you that something needs to be different, something about your positions, something about your product, something about your company needs to change in order to stay current and stay ahead of what's going on in your marketplace. As you go through the process of dominating market, things change. One of the things that changes is some things get easier, and so if you keep doing certain things the hard way, you're wasting money and time. It could be that there's an easier way to move ahead at that point. So who knows, but unless you're out there on the front lines, and particularly, very specifically, CEOs need to engage in discovery conversations. Chris Beall (01:38): Discovery is discovery. Discovery is not discovering whether they need your product. That's what sales people tend to think of discovery as "I'm going to discover that you, Corey, need to buy my thing. You know a miracle that every discovery conversation has the same outcome. You should buy my stuff", it's like, "Really?" I thought we were going to discover the nature of the problem that you think you have. And then we're going to examine that problem in the light of different ways of looking at it, thinking about it, that might reveal a solution to the problem that you hadn't considered before. It may well be that that solution is something we can help you with. It may well be otherwise. That's why it's called discovery. And it's actually been flipped on its head. It's like, "We're not discovering what we're doing is hoping. We're hoping that you want to buy something because I going to make my number." Right? Chris Beall (02:27): It's kind of funny that we call it "making my number", when I get lucky enough that the hope turns into an outcome. So as a CEO, I want to know what's going on. I'm driving on a road that hasn't been driven before. By definition at all times, my company is going into new territory. Even if all we're doing is going into the easier part of this market, how do I know for instance, something we've talked about which is, when I've gotten far enough into one market where it's time to seriously consider a foray into an adjacent market. Well, I've said before, it's stunned by the numbers. But in fact, I'm lying when I say that. It's actually done before the numbers. There's a point in the process where a discovery conversation with the wrong person shows incredible opportunity. Chris Beall (03:12): And it's only when it's with the wrong person, which is why you must eat false positives in the discovery process. You have to put false positives and it says you don't know there are false positives. You just need to be a little bit promiscuous. As you throw opportunities into the discovery process, you have to be a little bit tight. And I've said before, on a different episode, 15% false positives, that's a pretty good number. Corey Frank (03:36): That's right. Chris Beall (03:37): 10% is light, 20% is okay, but a little bit wasteful and 50%, you probably don't know what you're doing. So if you had about 15% and you have like, "I'll look at our team again for the day. Let me just see how we're doing." What would that mean for us? So today, so far we have just to take a little peak here. We've got 20 meetings and so 15% of 20 meetings would be... Three of those meetings would be with people we shouldn't speak with. Chris Beall (04:07): So say three of those happen a day. So every week we're going to speak with 15 people we shouldn't speak with. So say one out of 15 of those people actually has a problem we can solve. That's nice. That's a problem we can solve, even though they're not correct with regard to our idea of the market and say, that problem turns out to be a problem. It's fundamentally interesting in the sense that it represents a market opportunity, not a one-off. Well, how are we going to know that? My salespeople aren't going to report that back to me. And if they do, we're going to say, "Hey, focus on the ones that want to buy what's in the bag" right? We're not going to say, "Hey, great. You brought us something weird." So who is going to take an appropriate action called thinking in the face of something weird. Chris Beall (04:57): There's only one safe place to do that. That's a CEO position. Corey Frank (05:00): That's correct. Right. Chris Beall (05:01): CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider strange possibilities and maybe bring them forward and have them argued, shut down, whatever. You kind of get used to it as a CEO and you get used to your team kind of saying, "Really, again? Nutty I... Didn't we do that before and it didn't work?" That's a very common [crosstalk 00:05:20] CEO, right? We tried that in 2013 and it failed in a spectacular way. Well, sometimes you end up prophesizing something that is different from what happened before and kind of outcome, but you need the input from the market. And I don't mean the market you're selling to, I mean, the market that you're not selling to. The one you don't even have yet. So CEO needs to be out there doing that. Chris Beall (05:45): It's kind of like, if you're driving a car and you're driving on a road you've never seen before. Say it's the middle of winter and back in the day, you were going to come up and visit me at my house up Pine Needle Notch, for extra effort. You weren't aware because you've never driven that road before. You're a desert guy, right? You weren't aware of that sometimes there's a stretch of the road just above long canyon. Then when everything is great, sometimes has a little ice on it and it's outward sloping. And it's about a 950 foot drop down into that canyon. Don't you want to actually feel that ice rather than just checking the outcome. "Did Corey make it?", that's how we do it in sales. We say, "How many deals did you close to how are we doing?" That would have been, "How often did you make it to my house?" Chris Beall (06:32): "Oh, well, why didn't he make it?" The answer is there's a 26 foot stretch of road that tends to have ice on it, that tilts to the outside. And somebody forgot to tell Corey, "Hugged the cliff a little bit, angle the car over there, slow down and by the way, you can't have tires that can't handle this. Where's your form of threat?" So it's the CEOs job to feel the ice, to feel the difference. And then to kind of be the early warning system or the early opportunity system to close the loop from back. CEOs who don't sell also have another problem. They don't know where the friction is in their sales system. All systems have friction. Every system in the world has friction. Some dumb thing, right? It's just there, every single one. How do you know? Well, your reps will complain. Chris Beall (07:17): Really? You're going to listen to all their complaints. No. You're going to dismiss their complaints because reps complain because their reps and they're looking for excuses, right? And they're in a game where it's like golf, you and I played a little bit of golf. What do you do when you start around a golf? You assemble the most important club in your bag. Your number one excuse for how you're going to fly. That's the most important club because you know it's not going to be great and you got to have a good excuse. So right now mine would be, "Oh, I haven't played since last September", more rough. And it's, "You know, I've had some issues with my back as I've gotten a little bit older" but you've got to have an excuse, right? Salespeople need an excuse because they're in a game that has a lot of law and a lot of failure, so you stop listening to them. Chris Beall (07:59): But when they're telling you about legit friction, be great to listen to them. I tell you what, you put yourself in their as CEO and you absorb that friction. You have to eat it. It's wasting your time. Suddenly it's like, " Oh I'm worth extra zillion dollars an hour. Why am I spending my time doing this? Why is my show rate this low? I had two meetings scheduled today. They didn't even show." Well, okay. You just experienced it. Now, let's go find the root cause maybe nothing can be done about it. Maybe something can be done about it, but you're the one complaining now and when you're done complaining, we'll figure it out. Corey Frankl (08:31): Well, I find it interesting. You're listening to the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Chris Beall of ConnectAndSell and Cory Frank of UncommonPro. Corey Frank  (09:29): I've always been fascinated, right, as long as I've known you longer than the ConnectAndSell days, of course, but since even at ConnectAndSell, it's unusual that you, as CEO, your esteemed VP of Sales, Jonti, and your chairman, all still make regular sales calls and sell and in fact, they're some of the top producing folks in the company. Why continue to do that? Don't you have the market figured out by now. Isn't your time or Jonti's or even Shawn's at the chairman level. I mean, you guys are dominating your market. You're growing at a great rate every year. It seems that there shouldn't be that many changes to the marketplace or are there? Chris Beall (10:14): Are there? Yes. There are. Always are changing, unless you do regular sales. So CEOs love to do this kind of stuff, "I'll go sell something big. I'll go harpoon a whale. I'm a whale harpoon. Right? Well, I got a couple of little whales that I've harpooned and I kind of liked them. They didn't start that way. However, they just started little. And since they're my accounts, I have to pay a lot of attention to what happens every day. And so I'm in contact with all the way through the process, through renewals and particularly through customer success. And why, because my customers really feel free to call me, right? I'm the CEO. They don't like something. They know that they're going to get something out of a calls. Give me a call and say, "That guy you sent over for the messaging workshop the other day, it wasn't as thrilling as you. What's the deal?" Chris Beall (11:03): Well. Whatever, right? I get to hear it. So that's the most important thing is you have to hear it all the way through, but it's not about the whales. It's not about bringing in the big deals. It's not about any of that. It's about being in the mix and feeling what's behind the numbers so that we can have rational discussions with each other about it and goes, " That real is that not realistic, it's just my emotions", by having all three of us sell and we do sell a fair amount. It's pretty beefy numbers that we put up and we compete a little bit. Jonti caught me by 10 grand on December 31st, last year. I'm not saying he's a sandbagger. I'm really not. I'm just saying that he's a guy who knows how to get you by 10 grand on December 31st at 11:00 PM. Right? I'm not bitter about it. Chris Beall (11:49): I just think it's a good thing, right? But what are we really seeing? We're seeing the flow of the business every day, at every stage so that the numbers can be interpreted in the light of shared experience. We can get together and say, "Are you seeing X, Y, or Z? Are you noticing that more people that we talk to seem to be interested in an outsource solution of having somebody else, like Youngblood Works, actually have their conversations for them at the top of the funnel. And do you know why?" "Yeah. I am seeing that. Well, why do you think that's going on?" "Well, I talked to this one and I got this particular enlightenment." "Really? Can we go back and talk to that person again? Maybe we can take them into a different sales process. Maybe we can do an experiment." Chris Beall (12:36): So when you're running something... If you think you're running against stasis, you're out of your mind. You're running against continuous change and everything you think about it that's interesting is wrong. Everything you think about it that's uninteresting may or may not be wrong, maybe you think a bunch of correct things, but the interesting things are the ones where you're wrong. And when you're out selling, you feel it and you go, "Wow, that bothers me. The way that conversation went, bothers me." A salesperson kind of go, "I didn't get them. You're going to go that bottles." Corey Frank (13:06): That's right. So in other words, what I hear you saying Chris is never trust a CEO who wears flip-flops. Chris Beall (13:12): Absolutely. The ones wear flip-flops will not go very deep in the canyon. The barefoot ones, you can trust. Actually, there was a personal note, I was just told by my fiance the other day, she didn't tell me. She told somebody else that she hasn't seen me in any footwear other than barefoot and flip-flops since March 13th of this year. So yeah, don't trust me. I will never go past the flip-flop line. That's all there is to it. Corey Frank (13:40): Correct. How about so professional CEOs, right? You reach a certain stage as a venture-funded company, or even a private equity-backed company, if we go up the food chain a little bit more, and you're a hired gun Chris, right? I'm from XYZ Venture firm. Corey Frank (13:57): And the CEO is now going to become the Chief Visionary Officer or Chief Strategist or whatever title that they deemed because the CEO got us to 25 million. And now we're thinking of a new change, a hired gun to come in and take us from 25 to a hundred million or so, what should the CEO do and not do in those types of situations, because the ownership of the company is still very much alive. Those founders obviously, still care very much about that. If they're humble enough to bring in or let their VC bring in a CEO or a hired gun, or was placed by a PE firm. And let's talk a little bit about that as we kind of expand this concept of what should the CEOs be doing in the sales role, obviously under the guise of making sure that alignment is tight functionally between sales and marketing. Chris Beall (14:50): Well, for one thing, I mean, those people are real-life professional CEOs. They're not like me, so I don't really know, but I have observed a few of them and some of them are my friends, so I have a sense of what their challenges are. You kind of have a choice when you come in as a hired gun, you can choose to be what we call Mr. Monkey, in my circles. You know those little monkeys that the toy one that you get, that you wind up and it's got the symbols that have bangs together and that's all it does. It bangs the symbols together and makes this noise, right? [crosstalk 00:15:20] Sort of a cheerleader monkey, right? And they're just doing the same thing over and over. And then if the company grows under them, they take credit for it, much like stockbrokers- Chris Beall (15:33): Stockbrokers bring you a bunch of stuff and some of it's great and they take credit for that and stuff that's not great. Suddenly, they're just bringing in new stuff, just banging the symbols together. So you can be Mr. Monkey and you'll probably do okay. I don't object to it. Mr. Monkeys tend to negotiate hard for themselves. And as a result they tend to do okay. And there's kind of a desperate shortage of people who are willing to be CEOs, regardless of what everybody says about the job. It's not actually that popular for some pretty good reasons. It isn't the very, very most fun job in the world and a lot of places at. It's the Lonely Minds Club because they have no hearts. That's one way to do it. But even if I were Mr. Monkey, I would do this. I would take one discovery call per day. One. Not curated, just one, out of the mix. Chris Beall (16:18): And I'd have it assigned to me, one per day, half an hour. That's what I would dedicate to my sales activity. And then I'd pass it off, because frankly, it's in discovery that we make the greatest discovers, kind of learn a lot in discovery. I'm going to learn what our sales processes like at the tip of the spear, finding out what customers need. I'm going to find out what my flow is like. Can you imagine if I came into a company and said, "Give me one discovery call a day" and they said, "Boss, we don't have one", right? "We don't have one for you. We are going to have to work at that." It's like, "Really? That tells me something already." Corey Frank (16:52): And five no shows in five days or whatever- Chris Beall (16:54): Exactly. You'll gain more information through that half-hour. Then all the staff meetings you will ever hold in the entire year. You'll gain credibility because you'll be out there executing discovery calls. And if you're really good at taking credit, you can take credit for the deals that come afterwards. Now, it's kind of funny because all you are is a filter. You're a pretty good filter if you can discover need, and the need turns into something that happens downstream, turns into business. Those are your deals, so you'll be an actual player. But what you'll learn is the stuff where you can move the needle with very little effort. It's always hiding in there somewhere. No one's going to tell you, "Did you know, that we have three extra steps in our sales process that we inherited from five years ago, that drive away the best customers?" "Why?" "Well, because somebody once said that if we make them sign the contract first, rather than whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah." Right? And when you're the rep you're going, "Are you kidding me? That's crazy." Chris Beall (17:54): I could feel it. Right? So you'll find the points where you can have the maximum impact with the minimum disruption and credibility factor is huge. One of the things you need as a CEO in all cases is either credibility or the illusion of credibility and real credibility doesn't hurt the illusion. So if you're an illusion and kind of Mr. Monkey, then this will help. If you're not, and you're a reality kind, then this will help. So the one thing I would advise any CEO to do, by the way, if you're a VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, whatever you are, including if you are that director of business development, take one discovery call per day on your calendar. 250 discovery calls a year will transform you and will transform your business. Corey Frank (18:39): That's exceptional advice in today. If you had to guess, since I've done all those roles and I failed in all those roles, and that's such an incredible piece of advice Chris. Like I said, we've known each other for a long time. You've seen some of the organizations that I've been a part of and that I created. And I can tell you that I fall into a lot of those same traps, "Hey, I only want to be on the big deals" or just kind of saved me for just the ones that have a lot of meat on that chicken wing. And I've been doing it completely backwards. That's so incredibly embarrassing. Cringe-worthy for a sales guy like me to hear that something so simple, outcomes raiser, in that regard, that's just one a day. I mean, you talk with sales organizations, you and Jonti and Shawn talk with sales organizations, VPS all day long. How many are doing that today, would you think? What percentage? Chris Beall (19:30): I'd be shocked if it was 5% of CEOs... I'd be shocked if it was two. I'd be shocked if it was 2%. The easiest cheapest thing in the world to give yourself information and the organizational power, including by the whiteboard power. Because when you're in a board meeting and those numbers are up there and somebody poking at the numbers, do you want to be held hostage by your VP of Sales? That's the only person with the story, right? That might be the person you need to fire tomorrow, for all you know. You better have some of your own stories and they better be firsthand, not secondhand. And so, 250 stories to choose for a year or so, a lot better than maybe zero or one whale or whatever you called in on the big deal or whatever. Corey Frankl (20:10): That's malpractice insurance, as far as I'm concerned, what you're just communicating here. I've certainly been guilty of it for many, many years. Chris Beall (20:17): It's massive. And it's simple. It's easy. It's executable. And guess what? It's also fun because one of the problems at CEO job is your office, if you have one and you might notice I tend not to, for this reason. Somebody once asked me, "Why aren't you ever in the office?" I said, "Every time I go there, there's no customers." I tell her I don't see anybody that's interesting there, because I know you guys and talk to you anytime, but no customers, right? When you think about it, it's like your office as a CEO goes from being a place of discourse to an echo chamber, because people will want to tell you what they think you want to hear. And the one-party who won't tell you what they think you want to hear is a prospect. They'll tell you the truth, but at least they'll tell you the truth. Chris Beall (21:01): If you're humble enough to do what it takes, to get a confession out of them. So if you can do that, you'll get the truth. And the truth will set you free. Shawn McLaren always repeats that. Anytime somebody goes down, one of these perceptions is reality paths, or they don't want to know the truth. He says, "Just repeats that", know the truth. Truth will set you free. Corey Frank (21:22): That's right. Chris Beall (21:23): So here's the simple way of getting the truth, with variety. What's statistical variety? 250 is a pretty big number. I had 200 squared. If we just had 200 a year, 200 squared as what? 40,000. Your market is 40,000. You just did a clean sample in a year with statistical validity. You got to hear all the different things people are going to say. And every once in a while, you're going to find something. Chris Beall (21:45): I found something three weeks ago. I let people just jump onto my calendar and ask the Sales Development team to really load me up, because I wanted to see what did it feel like friction-wise to have 10 discovery calls in a row back to that? I wanted to see how bad was it. Would I have time in between them? How much research does it really take? What's the handoff like? How much logistical work do I have to do? I wanted to drive myself crazy. It's not obvious, but I'm a really impatient person. I frustrate relatively easily. I know a lot of people, " Oh, you're so patient. You're so mellow." "Yeah, exactly." Get close enough sometime. And you'll find out that's not always the case. And I know myself pretty well, so I wanted to see what's it like. Beat me up. I want to be in the ring. Chris Beall (22:28): I want to have one fighter after another. Come in. Boom, boom, boom, boom. So the first one was at 7:00 AM, if we did 10 in a row, it's only five hours. Corey Frank (22:36): That's right. Chris Beall (22:37): Done by noon, really think about that. 10 discovery calls finished by noon, kind of nothing to it. And I was tired by the time we got to the eighth line and I was concerned that I was starting to not pay attention very well. And the eighth discovery call was an individual and I didn't research this person very well, but she turned out to be somebody who had worked as a consultant to one of our most interesting customers, who was in a new vertical that we hadn't played in very much. And so I did this discovery call and what happened? She says, " Oh, I want to start a company using ConnectandSell as the core in a vertical that I believe I know an awful lot about. And I want to set appointments in there and I'm going to create this company on these foundations. What do you think?" Chris Beall (23:19): Now, that was just a lucky hit, but it gave me a thought and it actually comes back to what you're doing at Youngblood Works. Maybe it's time for us to consider how hard it is for folks to take conversations at pace and scale and turn it into results and have a smaller number of folks who do it professionally, included with all the customers who do it themselves. Let's not just offer a do-it-yourself product. Let's offer something more package, but not just by happenstance. Maybe we should go out and start looking at this as a go to market. Now, had I not had that conversation? I might've gotten there eventually, but I tell you it stimulated me because there was somebody passionate about starting a business. Chris Beall (23:58): And when I pushed back and said, "I don't know. That business has got some dirty qualities to it. Be pretty rough. Customers come and customers go." I call it the chocolate chip cookie business. You promise them two dozen chocolate chip cookies with 12 chips at each one. One of them has 11 chips. They say, "Take the entire batch back and give me another rep." Right? Corey Frank (24:20): That's right? Chris Beall (24:21): And then, she pushed back on me and said, "No, I believe and this is why I believe. This is what I've done to prepare for it. What do you think?" And I said, "You know what? I'm willing to do that experiment." So now we get to do an experiment, looking at a new market as a possibility, a whole new go to market, which you're already pioneering for us in a very pure [inaudible 00:24:39] with somebody I don't know. I know you, so it's a big variable difference and would I have discovered that otherwise? No, so now I'm getting lucky, but that's important too. Chris Beall (24:49): It's important too to get lucky. I don't know what CEOs are thinking of. What are they going to do? Talk to their staff. I mean, they have work to do. We don't want to be bothering those people all the time. Track? Yeah. Look at spreadsheets? Well, that's a good one. And that's why God made weekends, so that on a Saturday morning, we can take a glance at a spreadsheet. And if something jumps off of that, ask a question or two. But really staring at data, doing analysis, reading endlessly, all that. Sure. Take half an hour a day. All the discovery call that's legit, just like any one of your other sales reps. Again, no cherry picking. And by the way, don't complain about the false positives. That's part. Corey Frank (25:30): As always. It never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our value. Thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Bealls and Corey Frank.  

Marketing can step in and help sales overcome it. 1. Beginning: listen to discovery conversations. 2. Middle: look at support tickets to see the unvarnished truth. 3. End: work on getting the pipeline to be seen as an asset, it belongs on the balance sheet. Ask to be measured on the value we are contributing to help steer my efforts based on results that are being produced. 1. I want to know upfront what's going on - attribution 2. in the middle - discovery 3. at the end - support tickets and we should want to know this first hand. BONUS SEGMENT: Introverts tend to make the best salespeople. Why? They have time to THINK before they act and put deep thought into their approach to securing the meeting. Listen to the second half of this episode to confirm why you want more of them on your sales team. ----more---- Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell and UncommonPro 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 (00:35): Yes, it's kind of funny. Sales and marketing alignment as an issue has an assumption. And the assumption is actually the inverse assumption that is if sales and marketing were aligned and by sales and marketing alignment people mean, do they share the same goals, do they have the same metrics, the metrics interlock? So if marketing does their thing and they do as much of their thing as they have committed to the company to do and if sales does their thing and they do enough with marketing's leads that they generate, their marketing qualified leads, as they've committed to do, then all good things happen, but there's one good thing that doesn't happen and that is information flow coming back from sales attempts to turn marketing qualified leads into actual sales opportunities, and marketing's attempts to go out and get more marketing qualified leads. That is, it's an open loop process. And the reason it's an open loop process is twofold. One is just raw, and that is only up about 9% at maximum of marketing qualified leads of MQL, so never spoken with, never have an actual human conversation. Corey Frank (01:48): In sales and marketing alignment, we'll end where we started with the virtual world that we live in today with companies. I can't just go down to the marketing team and the marketing team can't just sit on the sales floor. What do you see here? Is it easier now that we live in the world that we do? Or is it a little bit more challenging? Certainly, I would think that you can get better than 9%. So there's arguably only one way to go there. But what's your final thoughts on that? Chris Beall (02:21): Yeah. I think that there's always developments that are going to improve stuff. We have one of them for sales and marketing alignment. People don't think of it as that. Some people think of it as a sales tool, which is I bristle at. I insist on calling it a weapon of [crosstalk 00:02:35]. Corey Frank (02:35): Absolutely. Absolutely. Chris Beall (02:36): But say you did consider it as another tool that's out there and say, "Well, what does it do?" Well, let's talk to a lot more people, but it also lets marketing people listen to what salespeople are saying. That alone, to have marketing folks listen to what salespeople are saying so that they can take that information and do two things with that. One is the obvious which is improve the marketing message. Now, generally, people think it's the other way around, marketing needs to improve the sales message. But we know that sales psychology forbids marketing language from entering sales conversations safely. Marketing language in a sales conversation has the quality that it tends to be insulting and telling that person that they are not doing their job particularly well, or they're not diligent and they're not competent because they don't know about this thing everybody knows about. After all, marketing language starts the category. Category is always broad. If I'm telling somebody they don't know about the category, I'm really insulting them. And if I'm saying you don't know about this important differentiated offering in the category, I'm telling them they're not keeping up. They were waiting for me to come along. So you'll tend to get the weird set objection. And the weird set objection is the worst objection in the world of customer interactions. Because now to fight that, you kind of have to say, "No, you're not." And you're telling somebody that you know more about their world than they do. And that's not a good place to go in a sales conversation. But marketing can make huge use of what they learn in sales conversations, huge use. They can find examples. They can find nuggets. They can find stories, opportunities for amplification and by the way, people to go back and talk to in order to get deeper understanding. One thing marketing has a hard time getting is primary research. Primary research, when you go to the source and you talk to him and who better to talk to than folks your sales folks have already talked to? You got some information back. Now, go have those conversations. So I think that would help. It'll also help marketing's credibility. So these recording technologies like Chorus, Gong and ExecVision are really powerful because they are generally used in discovery from marketing, to listen, to discovering conversations and see what's being discovered. You're discovering truths from customers and what could marketing value more than truths from customers and prospective customers? It's kind of similar to ticketing systems. Now as a CEO, one of my marketing jobs is to know what's going on so that I can direct our future regardless of how we're going to position. So I read every support ticket and some people think that's just crazy. We're not a tiny company. As you know, we're pretty active. Once you get up to 50 or 60 million of something you do a year that people pay for, you probably have a lot going on. Corey Frank (02:36): That's right. Chris Beall (05:26): And then those kind of [crosstalk 00:05:27] some things that didn't work that well on any given day. But I read those tickets. They take two or three seconds in order to just kind of look at it. And I'm looking for insights like where are we missing it? Where are we doing something that adds friction that might go away? And where is there something fantastic happening that everybody else might see as negative, but I might see it as different, I might see it as an opportunity? So that's something that I can do. It's very inexpensive. Marketing people can do it too. If I were a marketing person only and I am a marketing person in addition to a bunch of other things, I would start with two things. I would listen to discovery conversations and pay a lot of attention to those. That'd be number one. And then I'd also be looking at support tickets because I'd want to find out what are the truths that are flowing in the interactions with our customers when it's not varnished? And they're telling the truth. And then another thing I would do is I would work on getting the pipeline to be seen as an asset. And this is something we could do a whole episode on and probably should. Your pipeline ought to be on your balance sheet as a number. And I don't mean adding up all the opportunities. That doesn't make any sense because the early stage opportunities have a lower probability of close. But if you multiply each opportunity by its eventual probability of close, and by the way, the probabilities you have on today are BS. You have to go back historically and see what the actual probability of stage one closing, stage two closing, et cetera, et cetera. If you'd look at that and just add it up, you can actually tell whether your marketing is doing any good without waiting for closed one business to happen. That cycle time is too long to be usable. If your cycle time to learning whether your marketing program has an impact is the marketing program was run, the median of that run so that's a six week program, so now three full weeks in, and then I've got to start looking at results, but I have to wait until they turn into closed one business, I'm screwed. But if I don't look at the magnitudes, I'm screwed also. So how do I do it? Well, all I have to do is look at the opportunities, look at the lead source for the opportunity, map it back to whatever the activity was and voila, I can actually say I invested X in this marketing activity and I got Y out. Now, some people will complain and they go, "Oh, but you're going to double count." Yes, you're going to double count because guess what? If I say hello and I shake your hand, I don't know which one of those made the difference, but I'm not going to be able to do the easy experiment of saying hello ad well, now I could do it without shaking your hand. We could elbow bump, or we could stay in Zoom. Right? Well, back in the day, I was going to do both. So it's okay for me to say my investment in this yielded X, my investment in this other thing yielded Y and not have my two investments add up to this total investment yield that X plus Y yields the union at the sets X and Y. That's just how set theory works. Corey Frank (08:31): That's right. Chris Beall (08:32): And I'll get myself a really good idea of what's working. So as a marketing person, I would go to the CFO and say, "Hey, I want to be measured based on the value that we're contributing. And I want to be measured in real time, not at the end of the year, because I think that the company needs to be able to steer my efforts. And I need to be able to steer my efforts based on results that are being produced. And since my results are in the pipeline, in the creation of pipeline, ultimately, I want to know." So what I'm saying is I want to know up front, what's going on. That's that particular thing, attribution is what it's called. I want to know in the middle of what's going on, which is discovery. And I want to know at the end what's going on, which is support tickets. And I want to know firsthand and all of us in our roles should want those things. If I'm selling, I'm the head of sales, I want to know upfront what's going on, that's the conversations that are happening, relevant conversation, the flow rate of conversations. I want to know in the middle of what's going on, because I want to listen to discovery conversation and see if we're holding them well. Are we being open-minded? Are we being curious? Are we allowing the prospect to talk to us about their world? Are we getting everything or only are we getting what we're looking for? That's a question that I would be asking in discovery. And then I want to know at the end what's going on, which is actually interestingly enough in the support tickets again. The closed one is easy. That's part of the process. If I do a great job everywhere else, I'm going to close a bunch of business. I might want to pay attention to that, but that's probably not it. So everybody has three things they could be looking for, something at the beginning, something in the middle and something at the end, probably take... Well, here's my investment. I like to overcook the discovery meetings. So my average per day is three. So I prescribed one. I actually execute three. It's like my prescription for barefoot running is I think anybody who has feet should get out there and run maybe a half a mile barefoot a day. But I prefer to do about eight miles a day because I think it's really good for you. I think discovery meetings are really good for you. So three a day is better than doing one and one [crosstalk 00:10:50]. Corey Frank (10:50): That's right. That's right. Chris Beall (10:51): I read probably 70 support tickets a day. I want to see what happens to those. Some of that's of interest. And with regard to the what's going on at the beginning, what's going on at the beginning is really one more exploratory, right? I want to have just for me, and this a CEO thing perhaps, I want to have one exploratory conversation per day that I'm pretty sure it's going to lead nowhere. Just if I have a day without that, I'm disappointed. I want to have one that on the face of it, if I had to explain to somebody why I was doing it, I'd be embarrassed. Corey Frank (11:27): I do that a lot with many of the functions that I operate on throughout the day. So it sounds like if we had to condense the last couple of last 90 minutes or so, it's your perfect day, one thing we know is eight miles barefoot, is a helping of support tickets, a healthy ladle full of discovery calls and three fingers of scotch. And if we had to look at all the different problems we've solved in the world here or addressed today, we went from sales and marketing alignment to the value of your pipeline, to CEOs making calls, to how to make scotch and of course, with flip-flops in this elusive and very important and scientific line of demarcation, which is now called the flip-flop line, I think we've covered quite a bit here in these episodes, Chris. So as always, it never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our values. So thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank. Corey Frank (13:23): Welcome to another episode of the market dominance guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall with all things market dominant. I'd be curious to see from a CEO perspective, because a lot of us, right? We've talked certainly several times now about the change in organizations when they're moving remotely and the role in sales where I have to be around your, as you say, my three pound brain has to be around in the vicinity of somebody else with a three pound brain and particularly in sales with the collaboration and the energy and the day activity tracking. But I'm curious, it would be interesting to explore what that does to the CEO as well when his whole entire organization is virtual now, right? You're used to it certainly at ConnectAndSell. You guys have had a headstart. But for a lot of CEOs, right? They're used to having the security blanket of a staff around them to kind of go from meeting, to meeting, to meeting, to have this echo chamber as we called it, right? Of feedback flowing up. And now I wonder if CEOs actually have more time on their hands. And so there's even less of an excuse not to make these types of discovery calls or customer calls to kind of fill those gaps. Chris Beall (14:44): Well, they certainly have more time that they're not traveling and I can speak as... Maybe I traveled an unusual amount, but I don't think so. I was on the road in business 108 days last year. So that's a lot of time. Now you could say it's productive. Time to read, time to talk to people. I met random people here and there and not a small number of deals get made. I have a certain propensity for picking up deals in bars, so to speak, but still that's a lot of time. Think of each trip. There's a half an hour to an hour to get to the airport. There's an hour and a half to go through all the junk at the airport. There's the occasional missed flight. There's the four hours plus. To get to the other end, there's the Uber, there's this, there's that. Yes, all waste. That's all pure waste. So that time has been freed up. By the way, that money's freed up too. So in our company, $40,000 a month of travel is freed up. Corey Frank (14:44): That's right. Chris Beall (15:40): 40,000 a month's a lot of money to find. Talk about change found in the couch cushions. Oh, look, there's 40 grand. I wonder if we could do something with it. Well, let's put it away for a few minutes and then think about that attack, right? Corey Frank (15:55): Right. Right. Right. Chris Beall (15:56): So the time is certainly there. And yes, I think that one of the things is there's an egalitarianism of a good kind that shows up in these Zoom meetings. Zoom flattens the meeting. The meeting's no longer in my office. One thing I always hated when I moved, so to speak up, I never could figure out why I call it up, in organizations is you get the big office and I hated the big office. I've always hated the big office. I remember I had a big office at a biggish company I worked at, not big by anybody's standards you think you know, a company that had been a billion dollar a year company that had kind of moved into being sort of under secular pressure from the internet of $350 million a year company. I was hired as the head of innovation. It gave me this big, big office, big corner office on the eighth floor overlooking, I don't know what, like a cornfield or something. And I'm pretty sure I went in there six times during the year I worked there. And one of them was on the very last day when we sat around drinking some Chinese whiskey, because I had all Chinese team, the most wonderful team I've ever had in my life and they were very kind. So that was one time. So five times to do anything else, but I refused all the meeting in there because why do I want to encourage people to lie to me? And that's a terrible thing. The hardest thing to get is the truth. And you might get it at lunch. You might get it at somebody else's desk, but you're not going to get it on your own turf in that big office. So now nobody has a big office anymore. So maybe there's a little more truth flowing around. There is also who talks. You want your introverts to dominate the conversation over time. They're the most thoughtful people in your company. Corey Frank (17:44): Oh. Okay. Chris Beall (17:45): They're also your best salespeople. So your introverts actually didn't like it in the raw, raw sales floor that you would run. So your best salespeople tend to be introverts. Your best salespeople really cringe at all that banging of the gong and high-fiving and all that stuff. They'll go along with it but they have to go relax and then try to kind of rest afterwards because that stuff hurts when you're an introvert. It really does. It's like, "Oh my God, I have to do that." And yet introverts tend to make the very best salespeople and on your staff, they tend to have the most thoughtful observations. After all, they have thinking time. They're introverts, right? Corey Frank (18:24): Yes. Yes. Chris Beall (18:25): They get their energy from kind of inside, from what's going on inside. So I think that's flattening. I'll call it the Zoom flattening that's occurred is a good thing. And that everybody tends to get to speak, they're all in the same office, right? It's also in each person's phone, which has got an interesting intimacy. Some folks complain, "Oh, the kids walk behind. I had to take a moment." But that's the good stuff. That's the human stuff. That's where we soften up with regard to each other sufficiently to maybe tell our own truth or to listen to somebody a little bit differently because until we're empathetic, we're not much. And it's hard not to be empathetic with somebody who's got the same problems that you have, the problems of home. In the big office, I don't have any problems. You come into my office with all the staff, meaning you sit there and you sit there, you sit there. The pecking order is established by all of that. We go in a certain order. The important stuff is first. The dog meat stuff is at the end. And if we run out of time, you don't get to talk. Whoever you happen to be, you weren't important because you're probably the introvert who had the most valuable thing to say. Corey Frank (19:37): That's right. Chris Beall (19:37): So I think we've gotten a lot of good, not just in the raw productivity that Prodoscore is measuring and that Microsoft is measuring in Microsoft workplace analytics. They measure definite productivity increase in meaningful activity from work from home. That's at the individual level, nobody's come up yet and measured what's happening at the socio-cultural level with regard to what I'll call the Zoom egalitarianism and the Zoom flattening. I am going to make a prediction that when somebody does this work, they're going to find out that introverts are making a bigger contribution than they used to and a bigger contribution than the extroverts.  

Only 9% of all MQ's (marketing qualified leads) every result in a conversation. Worse than that, you have now stimulated your target audience to explore and investigate your competition. 91% of all marketing dollars are a waste. This is because Sales only contacts a prospect two times, rather than the 6 times requested or required.  That leaves 91% for your competitors to speak to. But the good news is, everyone else is doing the same thing. It may all work out. ----more---- Sales says the lack of reach means low-quality leads. Marketing says good targeting means good quality leads, but without feedback, they'll never know. Marketing says, "You know, those salespeople, they won't talk to our leads!" Sales says, "Your leads suck!" which is translated to "we can't reach them. The best leads are those who are busy and important. The easy ones to reach aren't the best leads, yet sales is asking for precisely that - leads that are easy to reach. What you really want are the ones that are most likely to need, value, pay fair prices for what you have and work with you and your team to solve their problems. Don't mistake the dog who comes up and licks your hand with the one who will defend your house. Tune in to this episode to hear a story about single malt whiskey, the mother liquor, and leakage to the distillery across the road. 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 (00:35): Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of sales, Chris Beall with all things market dominant-oriented. So today, Chris, we were chatting a little bit yesterday after your appearance on Sales 3.0, with our friend Gerhard. So we can certainly talk about that, but I think a little piece of peanut butter that was stuck to the roof of our mouth that you and I kind of riffed on before this was this topic of sales and marketing alignment. You're very kind and you let me wax philosophical for a while, a few minutes. You're an excellent listener. And then you very respectfully and gracefully said, "You know, Corey, sales and marketing alignment is a myth." And I said, "Well, that's a topic for our podcast." What do you mean by that, Chris, sales and marketing is a myth? I thought sales and marketing alignment is the goal as the reality companies like serious decisions make a living off of that type of data. So let's start there. Chris Beall (01:38): Yeah, it's, it's kind of funny. I mean, sales and marketing alignment as an issue has an assumption. And the assumption is actually the inverse assumption. That is, if sales and marketing were aligned, and by sales and marketing alignment people mean, do they share the same goals, do they have the same metrics, do the metrics interlock? So if marketing does their thing and they do as much of their thing is they have committed to the company to do, and if sales does their thing and they do enough with marketing's leads that they generate, their marketing qualified leads, as they've committed to do, then all good things happen. But there's one good thing that doesn't happen. And that is information flow coming back from sales attempts to turn marketing qualified leads into actual sales opportunities and marketing's attempts to go out and get more marketing qualified leads. That is it's an open loop process. And the reason it's an open loop process is twofold. One is just raw and that is only about 9% at maximum of marketing qualified leads if I'm QL has ever spoken with ever have an actual human conversation. Corey Frank (02:50): Wait, wait, wait, I just want to make sure my mic is on properly. Did you say 9%? How'd you get to 9%? It sounds like a very specific number. You didn't say the crispy align now doesn't say around something, he says specifically 9%. So I'm sure there's a mathematical formula behind that. Chris Beall (03:07): There is, and there's also a set of observations. I want us to ask John Neeson, this question. I called him up. John Neeson's one of the founders of Sirius Decisions. I was a customer/client, I suppose what you'd call us. And we were having fun talking about a bunch of things with the Sirius Decision folks, Jason Heckel in particular christening the connect and sell weapon as the Iron Man suit of business, which I really liked. And I think we continue to riff on that through the years that I think Jerry Hill talks about this a lot of the Avengers, there's only one who actually just human, like the rest of us and that's that's Tony Stark. And what does he do? He puts on the Iron Man suit. And yet he is the one most likely to save your planet when it's in trouble or whatever it is Avengers do for a living. Chris Beall (03:53): I've been enjoying the relationship with Sirius Decisions, but I really felt like I wasn't getting a lot of fresh information during this one period. This was a long time ago. And so I called up John Neeson and I said, "Hey, John, I got a question. I've done this kind of work in my head." And I had, it had been from 1:00 in the morning until about 2:30 in the morning, lying there in bed, calculating in my little pea brain. And I have a number in mind. And I'm wondering if the number has anything to do with what you're observing. And the number I'm curious about is what is the conversation coverage of MQL? So of marketing's output in terms of lead in particular? What is the maximum conversation coverage you've ever seen as a firm among your clients? And he said 9%. And I said, "That's interesting because my theoretical maximum is 9%." Chris Beall (04:43): And he said, "Well, how do you calculate your way to 9%?" I said, "Oh, it's easy." The policy for most sales groups that are doing anything with inbound leads is they're going to call them to try to get a conversation. And they're going to call them six times. The fact is they call them two times and each one of those calls has a one in 22 chance of generating a conversation. So 2 in 22 is 1 in 11, right? And 1 in 11 is well, 9%. It's actually a slightly different number, but close enough, if you start throwing all them decimal points out there, people get [inaudible 00:05:24]. 9% it is. And I asked him, "Is this for real? You don't ever see anybody with 36% or 21% or whatever." He says, "No, no." And I asked him, "Does that mean what I think it means?" Chris Beall (05:37): And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, does that mean that 91% of all marketing budgets are pure waste?" And there was a long pause and he said, "I would prefer not to answer that question." So, that was where the conversation ended. And I agreed with him answering that question wouldn't be good for anybody. But I thought about it, and I came up with this analogy and I had just been with the family to Scotland. And we'd been over to the Isle of Skye and you know, Corey, I do not despise a good single malt whiskey that comes my way. Corey Frank (06:12): At least three fingers, four fingers. Yes. Chris Beall (06:15): I don't turn up my nose at it. In fact, I tend to put my nose fairly close to it as part of the process of enjoying it. And we'd been over to the Isle of Skye and visited the Talisker Distillery. And, a nice family event, both of my boys were old enough to visit the Talisker Distillery at that point, just barely. Had they been in the U.S. this wouldn't have worked out so great, but we were in Scotland. So it was just fine. So we drove down one of those little, one lane roads, the kind where you have to pull off to let somebody go by and they have the big poles that are showing you in the distance, the distance being about two or 300 yards away where the next pull-off is. We went down to the Bay, came back, went to the Talisker Distillery and watched them making the Talisker. Chris Beall (06:59): And they make it in two buildings. So in one building, they have, what is really beer, I suppose they call it the mother liquor. And, mind you, I'm no expert on this stuff. I know how to drink it, but I don't know how to make it, right? So they have this little machine that's grinding up the the grain in question and they're malting it and they're doing whatever they do. And then they're taking that product in pipe, the pipe goes up and across the ceiling and through a hole and it goes into another building. I asked why. And they said, "Well, the mother liquor doesn't explode, but the still sometimes do." Well, that's good. So you keep that in another building, so you minimize your losses, right? Chris Beall (07:38): And I thought about it and this 9% thing. And I thought, okay, so here's the mother liquor. It goes up, it's pumped up across this pipe. And it goes over there to the stills. And it's turned into this really, really valuable product by the pound. A good single malt whiskey is pretty valuable product for something that is mostly water. Well, actually at that point, it's not mostly water. The 57 degree North is actually mostly alcohol, but regardless it goes up and goes across. And I was thinking about it and thinking, so if I had looked up there and instead of seeing that pristine pipe without a single drip coming off, then going over there, and instead of 91% of the mother liquor was pouring out on the floor, do you think, I'd say we have an alignment problem. Of course I wouldn't. I'd say we have a leakage problem for us. [crosstalk 00:08:21] Chris Beall (08:21): And do we know how good the mother liquor is, if only 9% of it's getting over there. What if the leakage is not at random? Or even what if it is at random? So, how do we know how good the product is unless we can actually use the product. And so here we have a wonderful product for all we know, which is marketing's contribution in terms of MQLs and sales does turn their nose up at it by and large. And they do it because people are hard to reach. Chris Beall (09:51): They actually do it for the same reason. It's as though, when the mother liquor got over there, you wouldn't even put it in the still because it's liquid. And you don't want to put a liquid in there. But that's the nature of it. It's the nature of interesting people who are worth talking with that they're hard to reach. In fact, the more interesting and valuable they are, the harder they are to reach because [crosstalk 00:10:10] people are busy. It's so simple that the mother liquor is liquid, important people are busy, and this is not accepted by the individual sales rep who says the following, "I tried to call them. They didn't answer. They must not like us. They must be disqualified." So you think of the idea of disqualifying an inbound because they didn't answer the phone is very popular and applied to 91% of all inbounds at random. But it's worse than random. Chris Beall (10:46): It's actually selectively applied to those that are the best. So the best leads are the ones least spoken to because they're the most important people, and they're the most busy people. So the way I came up with that 9% was, as I said, that the policy is always calling six times. The policy is in the hands of the reps and the reps call them twice, if they call them twice. If they're not busy taking a call somewhere else in order to make some sort of a ridiculous activity number. Guess what, by the way? When you do call somebody and you do get ahold of them, they tend to also still be busy. So there is a problem though, and the problem is not any efficiency problem or any of those kinds of problems. The problem is that it makes an open loop process. So your entire marketing budget's purpose is to generate MQLs that might be of value. And to convert them, you have to talk to them. You can't not talk to them. And B2B, nobody does business with you without talking to somebody. So without talking to them, they go away. They leave. Corey Frank (11:49): So the purpose of marketing is to do what again? Chris Beall (11:52): Is to generate leads, which are contacts with people who are potentially worth talking with. Corey Frank (11:58): So when I thought you said. For who, for you? Or for your competitors, because you had an interesting riff the other day when we talked about this, that the majority of the marketing expense. 91% not only are pure waste, but that 91% of the marketing budget for your team is likely contributing to the success of your competitor. I think you were riffing about. Chris Beall (12:26): Oh yeah, Corey Frank (12:26): Because it was very compelling. Chris Beall (12:27): Well, think about it. You've stimulated somebody at this moment to take action. You're out of your mind if you think the only action they took was to come to your website. That doesn't happen. Anybody who is interested in addition to being interested in whatever brilliant piece of content you put out there, your white paper, your this, your that the other thing, right? If they're interested, if they're worthwhile in the question of whether somebody can help them solve a problem. Now, you might have zero competitors and no other way to help solve the problem. None whatsoever. That's possible. That's probably not a very interesting business. I mean, even we have competitors here at ConnectAndSell for what they're worth. So, what happens when you stimulate action? When somebody starts to take action, they're more inclined to continue to take action. Until they take action, they're pretty inclined to do nothing. Chris Beall (13:19): I just was asked by some piece of software to take action that involved getting my phone and seeing some digits that were on it so I could do a two factor authentication. But I didn't do that because I was here about to start talking with you. Now, the chances of me taking that action have gone to zero, right? Had I done that, that action would have been followed by other actions because once you start taking action there's action momentum. You do one thing after another. So here you've stimulated somebody to take the action of checking out you and your competitors. [crosstalk 00:13:53] And now you chose to not speak with them other than working for your competitor at that point. Corey Frank (14:00): So to further your analogy of going to Scotland, it's as if that leakage that you saw overhead was somehow being directed to the Macallan factory that the frog or the, the NSC or wherever else that extra mother liquor is going to some other competitor. They're generated it, they put the facility in place. They have the people who are putting in the raw materials, but it's just going right downstream to fill in somebody else's coffers. Chris Beall (14:34): Yeah. And not only that, it's going downstream, probably in a pipe that somebody put together and there's a tour bus out there waiting me to the other distillery to buy their stuff. Yeah, it's really pretty appalling. And the only good news is everybody's doing it. And so, you know, you get lucky, right? You get lucky because if my 9% is fighting everybody else's 9%, then maybe we're all going to do okay. So maybe I'll, [crosstalk 00:14:59] maybe all I'm doing is wasting 91% of all the dollars. Now, if you're a venture finance company, then that means that you're giving up that additional part of your company to the venture finance folks. So you're actually, you're giving away the company. The multiple of revenue you would've gotten as valuation that you're giving up by having that 9% be 9%, instead of say 60%. 60% is actually achievable. Chris Beall (15:25): Very straightforward. So let's say you had 60%. What does that times nine that's, roughly speaking, [inaudible 00:15:33] so here I got the 60%, right? It's not quite seven. And so I got, I would have seven times more revenue, assuming everything's linear. Assuming that there's no special thing about the 91% you're not talking to. Turns out there is, they are better than the 9% you're talking to. But say there weren't a special thing. Say they worked better. So they're just the same. So now the just the same times six you could have had, but you chose not to have that, right? So that means the valuation impact of your marketing budget, which is often 20, 25, 30% of your company's entire budget to what you were hoping for, which is maybe, I don't know if you're a SAS company, there'd be four or five, six, seven times revenue, right? Chris Beall (16:19): So now you're giving that up. So say it's six times and you're giving it up at six times revenue, right? So you're giving up $36 for every dollar you fail to talk to, so to speak. You spend a dollar on marketing, you fail to talk to them, and you give up 36 bucks evaluation and you do it in the name of increasing valuation by spending money on marketing. So the response is to keep spending on marketing and keep spending on sales at the top of the funnel where you're overspending also probably by a factor of six, because you're not talking to enough people. And then when that doesn't work, you go and you talk to the experts and say, "How can I get sales and marketing on the same page?" It doesn't matter... Corey Frank (16:58): Or worse. Let's keep hiring sales reps because we have an abundance of marketing leads, or so they think. But they're really only being attempted once or twice. Chris Beall (17:09): Yes. Yeah. And remember always it's the conversation flow rate, the flow rate of relevant conversations that drives the value of a business and drives its move into a marketplace that it wants to dominate. It is never anything else other than the flow rate of relevant conversations. And what do you have to do with them? You have to make them quality conversations. How do you do that? You focus on psychology, not on product. How do you do that? You build trust. We've we've been through all of that kind of stuff, right? Build trust in the first seven seconds, don't blow it over the rest of the relationship. There's a bunch of things you can do, but until you speak with them, can't do any of those things. So you're either going to waste money, spin your wheels. Literally it's like spinning your wheels, smell the smoke, join the squealing and then put up with grief because your marketing people are going to say the following, "You know those salespeople, I think, we'll talk to our leads." And the sales people are going to say, "Well, the leads suck." By suck, the salespeople mean I can't get ahold of them, right? And, by great, the marketing people mean they're about as relevant as we can make them, given the information that we have. Chris Beall (18:15): So they're talking about two completely different things. The misalignment actually isn't the definition of something completely different. Sales says lack of reach. I can't get ahold of them is low quality. Marketing says good targeting. As far as we can tell, it was high quality. Without the feedback flew from coming from conversations, marketing, we'll never know if they're telling the truth. And without talking to those prospects, those leads, sales will never know if they were any good. Corey Frank (18:46): So how do you fix it? Chris Beall (18:50): Talk to them, [crosstalk 00:18:50] talk to them. I mean, it's pretty simple: talk to him. And you're not going to talk to all of them. But talk to the ones that will talk with you. Chris Beall (18:57): So sure enough, you, you want to send them emails and do all that good stuff and you're going to harvest whatever you're going to harvest. By the way, your competitor's doing exactly that. You want to win where your competitor is not winning. You want to take what they got, fight them over there, right? Take the freebies. The free part of the market for you to dominate are all those folks your competitors are not talking to. So the ones that answer the phone generally, the first time they're called, maybe everybody gets those. The ones where it takes two calls, maybe a 50% of everybody gets those. Now we're down to the ones that takes three or four. Now we're down to the busy people. The more navigated phone calls it takes to get ahold of somebody, the more valuable they are as a takeaway from your competitor, because your competitor is not going to go down there. Chris Beall (19:44): My climbing partner, Jim Hagar, I used to used to go hiking and climbing a lot in your neck of the woods, except up North. Up in grand Canyon. So we'd go down in there and wander around, go down one of those trails, like the hermit trail. And I go over and see whether we could climb something ridiculous like this thing called the Monument. Don't ever go climb the Monument, by the way. It's rotten at the base and scariest all get out, but we'd go around looking for opportunities to stand on the summit of things, pointlessly and look around and say how beautiful it was. And then make ourselves shake in our little climbing shoes as we were felled off some crappy anchor that we managed to put together up there. And we noticed something really obvious, but it's the same phenomenon. As you're coming back up out of Grand Canyon, you run into a line and we called it the flip-flop line. Chris Beall (20:34): And the flip-flop line is the farthest the tourists will go down into Grand Canyon. And it's comically close to the rim. Now, thank God for the tourists. It's close to the rim because that is a dangerous place down there, especially when it's hot. You are on the rim, you're at whatever that is, 6,000 feet, 7,000 feet. Everything's great. You start down, it gets hotter and hotter and hotter and a lot of tourists tend to show up. And some times a year that are pretty hot and they're galled into it and I would go down. But fortunately, most of them turn around by what we call the flip-flop line. All the beautiful places, all the cool places are way past the flip-flop line. So we had those to ourselves. We had market dominance when it came to the most beautiful parts of Grand Canyon and as consumers of that beauty and of the fear that came with it, we wanted that dominance. Chris Beall (21:29): So we were very happy that our competition, which was the tourists who'd come out of the tour buses would only go down to the flip-flop line, which by the way, it was just past a half a mile down into the Canyon. And so you've got to go about 11 miles down the Bright Angel Trail to get down to the bottom or 6.2 if I remember correctly off the top of my head. This is going back a few years here, of course. [crosstalk 00:21:52] Going down the South Kaibab Trail. That's the rule. Now of course, if you went out to one of the least frequent of trail heads, that is, you've got a great marketing department that goes where the other people don't go, flip-flop lines, right at the top. Nobody even goes down those, right? So the more valuable the resource. In that case, the beauty of the Canyon, in this case, those really good prospects, those leads that are hard to get ahold of. The more valuable they are, the less likely you are to talk to them. Chris Beall (22:22): And now you get a skewed marketing signal back from sales. Sales will accidentally tell marketing the following, "Go get more of the ones that are easy to reach." That's what they'll say. Corey Frank (22:34): That's right. Chris Beall (22:35): But that's not what you want. What you want are the ones that are worth the most, that are most likely to need what you have to offer, value it, as it should be valued, pay a fair price for it, and, best of all, work with you and your team to get the maximum value out of it, so they'll become a great reference. And they will work with you and for you to help you dominate the market. So it's all perverse. Where 'is it easy' as being mistaken for 'is an important', which I believe a lot of people do in almost every area of their life. But in this one, that's particularly devastating. When applied to [inaudible 00:23:13] Corey Frank (23:14): It is common nature, human nature to say, listen, I confuse sometimes activity with kicking butts. And if I'm a sales rep and I'm getting a lot of low margin, high volume, one bagger, easy type of leads that are closed and converted, I get a pat on the head from my sales manager. My sales manager gets a pat on the head from the director and so on up the food chain. And we somehow think probably from a false positive perspective that we're actually dominating our market, we're well on our way, we're beating our numbers. But what I hear you saying is that, listen, clearly there are different flavors of customers based off of margin or ideal customer profile, which is a misnomer as, as it is, which is a conversation we can have too, one of these days. Corey Frank (24:04): And so the more rich the nectar, the flavor is deeper and those tough to reach prospects are worth it. That's where the gushers are. Those are the market makers. Those are the clients that are the influencers that have the reciprocal effect to tissue and the direction of market dominance. So don't necessarily be fooled at the early stage when you can convert a lot of the quote-unquote easier. In other words, your sales conversion rates may be too high early on, and that may not necessarily be a positive. Chris Beall (24:42): Yeah, there's a problem with low hanging fruit. Everybody else can pick it too. [crosstalk 00:24:48] It's hard to compete based on being the best, low hanging fruit kicker in the world. Sure. You got to go get it. No reason not to, but you make market dominance happen a little farther up the tree. Now we have a situation just like you referred to where one of our very, very best customers in some ways, our very, very, very best customer I connected to. And if I look back and I have looked back over the amount of time it took to get the first conversation, to have that conversation, and to have the followup conversation of the followup, to the followup, the followup to the followup, and then finally the meeting and then it got harder. And I will never forget until I forget everything. I have it strongly in my memory, a five-hour conversation that I had with two people at that company that went through Thanksgiving dinner. Three hours on one side and two hours on the other side. Chris Beall (25:47): And I was talking to him the whole time and I finally finished and came down and said, "I'm glad that Turkey's just as good, cold as warm cause that's how I'm going to be eating it." But it was worthwhile. And maybe somebody else wouldn't have had that conversation. Maybe they would have been more sane than me, but the best customers tend to be the ones who asked the most questions, who are most interested in exploring most deeply. And they also tend to be the ones who are most busy. Chris Beall (26:17): There's actually a correlation. It's a soft correlation, but it's a legit correlation between hard to reach and important and between good customer and not so easy. And so there's a lot of let's go the easy way in sales. There's also the flip, which we've talked about, which is the dog trying to get through the chain link fence to get to the meat and sort of backing up and seeing that there's a gate. So I'm not advocating being stupid and just mulling your way through every situation. So be circumspect. Think about it. Stand back every once in a while, look at your situation. But don't mistake the dog that comes up and licks your hand for the one that's going to defend your house.  

  Part 2 of the interview with SADA CEO, Tony Safoian. Questions answered include How is Google going to support my enterprise business better than its competitors. Needs have changed, demand for "bat phone" support is now part of any proposal. Every customer is different in their behavior than they were four months ago. If you're an organization that doesn't know how to meet your customer where they are now, your organization is dead.  ----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:   Chris Beall (00:34): Welcome everybody to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and with me, as always, is the sage of sales, Chris Beall. Today we have the CEO of SADA, Tony Safoian. Tony Safoian (00:47): It's not even about, like, is this point solution from this vendor better than that vendor, is the cloud thing real. It's, what is the transformational impact and outcome to my business. If I choose Google versus somebody else, how is Google, as an enterprise, going to support me versus somebody else? And I think that's never been truer or more compressed in the context of digital transformation, as we're facing right now, because every customer is different in their behavior than they were four months ago. So if you're an organization that does not know how to meet your customer where they are, which is online, or in their, home or whatever, then your business model is dead. Chris Beall (01:32): We don't have many guests, but when we do, we have the best. Corey Frank (01:36): Of course, the name of this podcast is The Market Dominance Guys. We have to talk some market dominance, but Chris, I think you'd agree that what Tony... And Tony, certainly, you're in a business and in a market that you're not just competing with the other non-Google-Cloud providers, you're competing with other Google Cloud providers. How do you square that circle, as you see, because clearly Sada is it can bud here from a market dominance perspective. And maybe, what thoughts would you have, Chris, for Tony, on market dominance when you kind of have that split sector, if you will, where he doesn't have just one guy with a mask, you got a couple of different folks from different areas, all gunning for Assata here. Chris Beall (02:15): Well, my advice is always the same, which is manufacture trust to pace and scale, harvest the market at your leisure, stay sincere. That's kind of it. I mean, if you have the goods and you have the will, you really don't have to add a lot of ingredients. If you're the most trusted, which always starts with the human conversation and then it moves forward by doing what you said you were going to do. And then it moves forward further by how you handle the first crisis together with that customer, because that's the eye of the needle in every relationship, is when it goes through the crisis, whatever that crisis is. You know, if you do those things, you create a god-awful problem for your competitors. And it's a simple problem. It has to at the asymmetry of trust, once somebody trusts you, they automatically distrust anybody who tries to displace that trust they have in you. So the cycle time to go from stranger to trusted friend, from invisible, scary stranger to trusted stranger, the quicker you can make that cycle time, and the more often you can apply it, the more insurance you buy at the lowest conceivable price. You want to insure any company against the vagaries of time, so to speak, where things happen that we don't expect, like the occasional pandemic, and there'll be another thing we don't expect. There's scandals, there's everything else in the world that happens, right? Bad stuff is always out there waiting to happen. How do you ensure yourself against that? Well, the currency of insurance for a business is trust. It's not true in the consumer world. This is the asymmetry consumers buy based on what's going to work for them, and the risk is generally their money. So I buy that Tesla and I take it off the lot. And I discover one day in that I hate it. Unlikely, by the way, because all my friends who own Teslas have the opposite experience, but I'm going along, I bring that thing home and I just go, oh, I didn't even know, I live in a house without electricity. I can't even charge this thing, right, to own this vehicle. What am I going to do? I have to buy one of those Peloton things and generate electricity for it? I'm here in the Pacific Northwest. We don't have sunshine. I can't even do solar. I guess I got to dump the Tesla, right? So I go to dump the Tesla. What am I out? Five grand, 10 grand. It's just money. I do the same thing for my company. It doesn't matter what my job is. I buy the company Tesla and it turned out to be a disaster. It doesn't matter if I'm a CEO, I'm toasted. My reputation has hurt and I've put my retirement in risk. I've put my future work in other companies that might want to hire me after this one blows me out for making that idiot decision. I might go into the doghouse somewhere and not be allowed to make any more decisions. Worse than being fired, in the penalty box and a company that is one of the worst place in the world to live. I got put in there in 1996 in August. I quit three days later. You don't want to live in the penalty box, trust me. To me, it always comes down to this. It is so scary to buy a B2B. And what Tony's company sells, what SADA sells, is the single scariest thing you can buy in the current world, which is a decision to go or not go to the Cloud. It's not really who you go with. It's a decision to grow or not go. It is so scary. When you've asked your IT people any question over the last 10 years to do anything of interest to anybody in the business, their answer has always been no. They have 157 different ways of saying no. You could build the matrix. It will take you a long time to go through it, but they're all no. That's what they're going to say, right? So now, you're trying to get a yes all the way around because anything can break. So it's the scariest decision. So they have to trust you, Tony, really it's you, more than they trust themselves. How did they get to that point of trusting you more than they trust themselves? Well, a whole bunch of them trust your people. Your engineers, that's tied to them, that they've met, that they've had a conversation with. That salesperson introduced them to and they were nervous about it, and they thought it was going to be crap, and you thought you were going to be insincere, and that you had another agenda, and blah, blah, blah. Right? All that stuff had to be overcome. Engineers are the most skeptical people on earth, and Missouri is so taxed so high with engineers I'm amazed there are anywhere else. It's just the show me, you've shown me, show me, show me, right? Tony Safoian (06:32): You're right on. And the and the factor of trust, which is, again, the last two years, especially, is what Thomas Kurian and Company has really worked on building with customers, existing and prospective customers. Because you're right, these decision-makers and their entire teams, they're betting their career on this dice roll. And needs to not feel like a dice roll. It needs to be clearly the best decision. And it also happens to be... What we're discovering is we're being pulled up market. And there was one article that mentions a particular dollar amount for Manheim in New York. Not only are they betting their career, they are betting their company, a lot of these digital natives, right? And a lot of the enterprise. I mean, Manheim's $50 million commitment to Google Cloud? There's not going to be a bigger economic commitment that this company will make ever than it's bet financial bet and strategic bet on Google Cloud. That is a tremendous amount of responsibility if you're SADA and you're signing your contract. Chris Beall (07:32): Now, I did it, by the way. I bet my company on Google Cloud and on SADA. We move 14 production systems. You know how many production systems we have? 14. We moved them all. That means certain large companies that depend on us... We had one the other day, they called us up at 6:29 in the evening on a Sunday and said, "PPP loans are going to be released by Congress on Tuesday. We'd like to put 335 new people on Connect and sell tomorrow, and have 75,000 conversations next week. Can we do it?" If one of my Cloud instantiations of ConnectAndSell can't handle that, I've just said yes to the CEO of one the most powerful companies in the world about something he really cares about. They ended up talking to 98,000 people that week out of the 75,000. They had 98,000 conversations. Tony Safoian (08:28): Wow. Chris Beall (08:28): It was a successful week. I didn't worry a bit. Okay, so maybe I had a half an ounce of blends that evening stared out the window for a moment, and contemplated the world. But I didn't worry any more than that, that the trust that I've put in Tony and his team in a Google cloud was going to result in a good outcome. I know what it feels like to bet a company on you. I've done it. And it's not the company like my internal infrastructure. It's a company like this- Tony Safoian (08:59): It's a whole company. Chris Beall (09:00): ...what we deliver on. It's the whole company. When that's gone, we have literally nothing. Chris Beall (10:01): We don't exist anymore. Corey Frank (10:03): So Chris, it's not just all pragmatism, and cold cognition, and facts, and data sheets, and speeds, and feeds. There's an element. And Tony, you had mentioned this in your VP of sales, right? There has to be an element in the culture to create this certainty, to create this trust. So how do you instill that? What have you done to teach that? How does that work? Because Chris, I've known Chris for almost 20 years, he's not exactly an easy sell. And if there's more than one choice, I am sure there was a matrix that Chris has had. So in order to cross that chasm and get him from the cold cognition to the feeling of trust and competency is no easy task. How did you do that? And how do you do that at scale? Tony Safoian (10:45): The scale is the tough part, right, because as any business grows, you hire many, many more people. And now, I mean, everybody's distributed, but imagine you're in a traditional cadence, you're growing up markets, you're paying people thousands of miles away from headquarters, and you're trying to export that culture, and methodology, and way of thinking, and allow people to have their market idiosyncrasies. And they need to. Yes, Quebec is very different than Chicago, and they should have a little bit of their own culture. But I think it's first and foremost, having a culture and a proven track record that is recognizable and credible. You can point to SADA turns 20 years old on August 16th. We've been growing at 65% KGR, or whatever, for the last 15 years. And the people you have leading the charge are themselves credible and trustworthy. So when they hire, enable people, and put them through the school of Joe Kosco, or the school of Dana Berg, or the school of Miles Berg, or the school of Rokita or [inaudible 00:11:40], they are going to create an amplification effect of what is their essence, of what has made them successful to date, right? Getting the credibility with customers at scale... And here's another beautiful part about cloud, and you could argue ConnectAndSell itself is a Cloud service, and it is. The ability for customers to put vendors in a position that they have to prove and earn credibility over time is a relatively new construct in the world of enterprise software. Because back in the day, customers could do a proof of concept of some kind. It was almost never production grade. It was almost always full of smoke and mirrors. And that ended up in a massive, multi-year, very expensive commitment that you were stuck with for three to five years, and that you paid for upfront. And I think, 90% of the time, the plethora of what you bought and never got implemented. I think what's beautiful about ConnectAndSell as a SAS platform, or Google Cloud in general, is that we can actually engage with customers with very heavy pre-sales engineering effort, and resources, and enterprise class methodology. Sometimes we charge for that, sometimes we don't, sometimes Google funds it, whatever. You're not trying to minimize effort at that stage. We're actually trying to maximize effort. You can do a POC where you have to validate what you're proposing in a small, low-risk environment. It happens in almost every sell cycle, especially with customers that have a distinct desired outcome. They're like "Oh, Google Cloud can do this and your engineers can deliver that? Show me in the small sandbox." And you actually go and do it, Corey. The beauty that when you do it, and then you win the hearts and minds of moving one workload or one system, you have to keep proving it. But the beauty of the business model in cloud, and in SAS... And as Chris's customer called and said, I want to put this many more agents on and make this many more calls... Our expectations with every one of our customers, if we continue to prove value over their lifetime, their consumption, and therefore our revenues related to that customer will continue to grow at a pace that gives us the investment capacity to give the customer more and more attention over time, but also just clearly aligns incentives. Meaning we have to be there. What if something happened on that weekend, or on that Monday, and ConnectAndSell did have a problem. GCP did have a hiccup and Chris had to call me or my head of support. How responsive are we going to be? Are we going to use the bad phone with Google to fix Chris's problem because he has his credibility on the line. We get tested over and over again for the lifetime of that customer relationship, which was very much not like how enterprise software was delivered before. Chris Beall (14:10): I agree. I mean, enterprise software and shelfware have been synonymous forever. It always would have been cheaper to go ahead and just pay the license fee and not even try to implement because you were going to fail anyway. You were never going to get to the finish line. And now that's no longer the paradigm. And I think folks are shifting to, and have to shift competitively, to a do it together and then make the decision as whether you're going to partner together. Cory's doing this in his business. He's got the first ever what you might think of as an outsource sales business, cold calling as a service or whatever, that's ever existed on the face of the earth, where a fully transparent, full production experience, much like your team experienced with ConnectAndSell but he's doing it, coming up with the message, putting the people in. He had guys in an RV last week parked outside the building so that they could come in at 5:00 AM on a... I kind of think of it as a competitive test drive with four similar companies to him and the end customer, all seeing how many meetings they could set- Tony Safoian (15:12): Wow. Chris Beall (15:12): ...in a day. And Corey wanted to make sure that this team had a little psychological advantage. So they started at 5:00 AM. and by the time the next team came on, these guys had already settled up in meetings. They said 41 out of 40, which when you're playing against four other competitors, you get 31 of the points that are available on the board. It's actually kind of a done deal, right? Think about that, an old business like appointment setting, the transformation in that business that has now taken place with Youngblood Works is this. They will actually do a full production test drive up, but with results as the idea, and they'll do it with you watching with full transparency. So it does keep rolling into older and older parts of the business world that it turns out doing is much more important than saying, and giving PowerPoint presentations, and making claims, and having testimonials that may or may not be completely valid, and all that kind of stuff. All those things still happen, but I think we've entered a doing as part of selling... And not part of, that is the essential part, doing together before we partner together. I think that's kind of like do together before we partnered together and make something measurable happen that we can all look at, feel like this makes sense. Now let's go a little bigger. Tony Safoian (16:37): And to your earlier point around trust, it might actually end up that it's not the right thing to move forward. That you shouldn't buy this from me, and that's okay. Chris Beall (16:45): It is okay. We only convert 37% of our test drives. That's about the right number, as far as I'm concerned. That's something I learned a long time ago in the math world, when you're sampling, if you're not getting into false positives, your samples aren't very good. When you think you're perfect... People try to build sales funnels and at the very top of funnel they go, "I only want ideal customers coming in." Well, you can't discover their ideal customers until you have a conversation with them. So we had a chicken and egg problem here. I better have more conversations than there are ideal customers, or I'm leaving the very best one. Corey Frank (17:19): The one that we use, and I've used for a long time... And again, I'm at the floor of Grand Canyon University right now, which is the largest Christian University in the country, so I think this is an appropriate aphorism here, is that Jesus Christ was the best sales person that ever lived. And he didn't close everybody. And he had a better product, arguably, than any software, or ERP, or Cloud-based system. And so the Son of Man himself will not have a hundred percent close rates. So because of that, Chris, you're absolutely right. 37% of your conversions on your test drive, that's admirable. Maybe JC himself would probably have 38 or 40% and that's exactly how it should be in nature. Chris Beall (18:00): Many are called, but few are chosen. Well, I guess we've come to the end of what looks like an hour. Tony, this has just been exactly better than I even thought and I thought it was going to be tremendous. Thank you so much for coming onto Market Dominance Guys. We don't have many guests, but when we do, we have the best. Tony Safoian (18:19): Wow. Thank you. I don't know if I deserve that, but it was a pleasure. It was fun to be on this side. Let me tell you, we try to put out podcasts weekly and it's nice. It's a relief. It's fun to be on this side, where you get to be the guests. And Corey, it was a pleasure to get interviewed by you. Loved your questions. And I can't wait to listen to your episode.

  The rate of growth SADA has experienced gives them credibility when their CEO, Tony Safoian explains that in order to scale you have to manufacture trust at pace.  SADA does one thing exceptionally well, they transform companies into a cloud solution partnering with Google. Yes, that's paraphrasing, but as a Google Cloud Premier Partner, SADA Systems has gained global accolades as an exceptional service provider with proven expertise in enterprise consulting, cloud platform migration, custom application development, managed services, user adoption, and change management. They do what they do REALLY well. They do it so well that ConnectAndSell turned to them to move from AWS to a better solution on the Google platform.   Learn from Tony in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, then join us for the next episode where Corey and Chris continue the conversation.   ----more----   The complete transcript of this episode is below:   Corey Frank (00:34): So welcome everybody to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and with me, as always is the Sage of Sales, Chris Beall. And Chris, you know that we don't do this often, but when we do, it's usually because we run out of things to talk about. No, it's usually because we have a interesting, compelling, face melting guests that usually has something to offer to the community, which is growing every day. And today we have the CEO of SADA, Tony Safoian. Tony, did I pronounced that correctly. Tony Safoian (01:09): Perfectly, Corey. Corey Frank (01:11): Great. Tony, as the CEO of SADA is able to lasso all the mystery and complexity and value of the Cloud, where all the bags of money and blood live in a world without... and we're all laughing, we'll talk about the key word that we use there in a minute. But Tony runs one of the top Cloud consultancy service providers in the world. In fact, I think, Tony, wasn't it a year or two ago that you were Google's Top Cloud Partner of the Year. I think it was, so as modest as I'm sure you are, Chris and I, like to get the accolades out of the way at the top. So I think Chris, turn it over to you, how did you meet Tony and why, because we talk about a lot of folks we come in contact with in our world, that Tony should be in the hot seat for the Market Dominance Guys today? Chris Beall (02:06): Well, I just got lucky. I'm a customer of SADAs, made a big decision to move from AWS to Google Cloud, based on the fact that the Google Cloud folks will actually join in with us and help with the marketing, and ultimately, maybe, even the co-selling of our product, which is something we didn't see out of the other guys. And it provided another bunch of wonderful things, too, cost savings and superior technologies, superior speed. You know how speed centric we are, we're really speed centric. So we had a great experience working with SADA, effectively, as the folks who brought us into Google Cloud. So they were our vehicles, so to speak, to get there and get there successfully, and very quickly. We moved 14 production systems over there in a matter of a few weeks. And then the great-great insane, good fortune of getting to go down to Austin and participate in a test drive of ConnectAndSell with Tony's team. And I can only report, it was a riot. It was really fun. They killed it. There were dead bodies everywhere. Talk about blood. There was blood on the floor, it was flowing. They actually, unlike test drives, they didn't just do it, but they made money to do it, I believe. Corey Frank (02:06): Really. Chris Beall (03:22): I'll have to leave it to Tony to say if they really made money doing it. And so now we're each other's customers. And then he kindly invited me onto his podcast, Cloud N Clear, and we had a lot of fun there. And so I got to tell all my stories there, but Tony didn't- Corey Frank (03:35): Oh, love it [crosstalk 00:03:35]- Chris Beall (03:35): ... get to tell all his story. So now it's your turn, Tony, how did we get into this craziness? Tell us [crosstalk 00:03:42]- Tony Safoian (03:43): I don't know. I love the hot seat, that's all I got to say. Thank you for inviting me. Chris Beall (03:47): We're lucky. We're lucky to have you. Corey Frank (03:49): And I'm curious, Tony, when you saw a weapon like ConnectAndSell in the test drive, I always like to get into the blood and guts and of the dials and the epiphany and the exponential amazement that happens as it creeps across the floor, as people realize you can talk to more than one person an hour or so. So that was kind of where the test drive was, and what are seeing thus far? And in a business perspective, I'm just always curious to see a little bit of Inside Baseball of how you've been able to adapt to this new type of a weapon that you have on board? Tony Safoian (04:23): So to be able to independently source pipeline in the Google cloud ecosystem is not a trivial task. We've been partnering with Google for 14 years, now, for many of those years, us and the rest of the Google ecosystem was completely dependent on the Google sales organization to introduce them to customers. And we knew this was a risk. We knew that it was, maybe us not being the best possible partner in the world, meaning delivering value at that part of the value chain at the pipeline side. So a few years ago, we started doing marketing pretty well and developed some inside sales capacity capability, but 12 months ago or so, we had the desire, 10X that impact. We went out on this journey to build the most prolific, active, successful, most active inside sales dedicated organization, really, for the first time. And we found this gentlemen, Billy France, who is well known by Chris, to say the least, he has this incredible team has built from scratch 15, 20 folks. And they use a lot of traditional tools and methodologies, and they were very, very good at it. And some of it is a wide net and other part of their approach is very, very targeted. And in a short amount of time, we started breaking all sorts of records. Nobody at Google in the ecosystem had sourced the amount of pipeline, the number of opportunities. And these are very well vetted, they have to be submitted into a platform that Google has to approve and the field has to okay, and validate that, yes, this is a new opportunity. Yes, it's qualified. So there's a lot of rigor behind it. So the pressure I was putting on Billy was immense, and of course he was delivering, and Matthew on his team, just a great add to his leadership structure and all of that. But they were seeking the best tools in the business, period, because these days it's important to be multichannel. It's important to build great content and awareness, but nothing is as powerful as the phone call. And there just has never been a very efficient way to do this, especially now when people don't pick up the phone. I don't think I have a phone. Do you pick up the phone? I generally don't pick up the phone. So when this concept of this platform, which on the surface is like, well, this is not inexpensive, in nominal terms, this is an enterprise class investment. When the premise behind the technology was revealed and Billy was so gung-ho, I mean, he was so gung-ho, he was like, "We have to do this." Matthew's like, "We have to do this. It's game-changing." I was like, "Really? It's 2020, what do you mean game-changing? You mean there's something that hasn't been done? How's it possible? Enterprise sales have been around forever." And then, of course, I got to know Chris better, and he explained even farther, the genesis of the platform. I know that at that test drive that we did, and by the way, it was in Austin, near the Google offices, we had Google folks come in from the Cloud organization, field sales managers, and sellers kind of joined in, like, what is this spectacle that is about to happen? I mean, it was an unbelievable experience for that team. They felt super human. They felt emboldened. They felt powerful, productive, and they just could not believe the efficiency behind it. And Chris and I talked about this on my podcast, but the adrenaline rush, man, the adrenaline rush, somebody picking up that phone, and you have a few seconds to ensure that they stay right? Corey Frank (07:54): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Tony Safoian (07:55): It's almost like the ROS form of sales, execution ability, which so many of us have forgotten, but actually, that's how I cut my teeth at a dotcom in the late '90s, early 2000s. I went from being extremely fearful of the phone to loving it in the early days, and a platform like ConnectAndSell, that took a lot of that efficiency out, the ROI is just... it was unbelievable. So of course, we're a big customer ConnectAndSell, ConnectAndSell is a big customer of ours and Google Cloud. And I look at people like you, Corey and Chris, and I'm grateful that this level of thought leadership exists and is happening, and it's in the ether and we're talking about it. Because I think without pipeline, none of us could be in business, that's where it all starts. Corey Frank (08:41): Without pipeline and without trust-based conversations. Chris, I think it's worth repeating, I know Tony, you're a believer just like I am, but Chris, the number of bits in a phone call versus everybody talks about cold calling is dead. How many episodes have we dedicated to that? How many LinkedIn posts, Tony, do you see, cold calling is dead? I think there was another rash of them this particular week of this insanity. But when it comes to trust-based conversations, Chris, I always try to poke the bear and get you to riff and wax loquacious here about the value of a phone call versus a simple email, just from a scientific, from a bits per second perspective. So, maybe that would be helpful for the audience, setting the stage, and since you already have two believers in me and Tony, here on the line, too. Chris Beall (09:24): They got to access all of their company's information, which has a bunch of bits, and they have to do it with a bunch of computer programs, which has another bunch of bits, and they got to do it without having a breakdown in all that happening. Well, if all the bits are behind a wall, isn't it funny that we call those firewalls? Like, what's trying to get at my bits is a fire that's going to burn down the house. It kind of is though, if you just let anybody, in bad things happen. But when you keep everybody out, bad things happen. And you get the bits outside in a safe place, where they're accessible by everybody, including folks working from home, the bits can participate in saving the economy. And by the way, this is something I truly believe has happened. I think it's happening right now. I think it's not recognized widely that it's happening, and companies that Tony's team is working with, are kind of getting it. Tony told me the other day, those who didn't move to the Cloud are kind of wishing that they had, right? Tony Safoian (09:24): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (10:20): So it's always about [crosstalk 00:10:22]- Tony Safoian (10:22): Big time. Chris Beall (10:23): ... here's the simple info, an email fully read email, carefully, read, somebody's thinking about it while they're reading it, has about 5,000 bits of information on it. That is one quarter of one second of a live human conversation on the phone, quarter of a second is 5,000 bits, and it takes a lot of bits, not to get somebody to know what you know, but to believe that you care enough about them, that they're going to trust you with their secrets. And that's what sales is all about, is getting somebody to trust you with their secrets, because their secrets are pain, and nobody wants to share their pain with the world. So it's the same thing as the Cloud. The Cloud itself, I believe, has saved the economy. I think it should get the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize for Economics. The Cloud should be Man of the Year on Time Magazine, if the had magazines, but [crosstalk 00:11:20]- Tony Safoian (10:23): Yeah. Chris Beall (11:19): ... now. The Cloud should be all those things. And the fact is the human voice is the one thing that carries enough information, I'll call it, in the other Cloud, because the long distance phone calling was the original Cloud. It was the Cloud that made the latter part of the 20th century work, where we could actually talk to people far away and do business with them, because they could trust us. So the long distance phone call was the second Cloud. The first Cloud was the telegraph, and then came along to the phone, which wasn't a Cloud, because you were always behind the firewall of being just local phone calls. And then it got released, and became the Cloud. And then that Cloud contracted inside of voicemail, 2003, '04, '04, and has had a hard time getting out, that's our job. But then Google, and there are other folks that they're similar to, provided sort of the next generation, except it was the long distance phone call for every application, every system, every archive who worked together with the human beings all over the earth, in an unlimited way. And it's saved the economy, it literally has. And I think we should like do this. Tony Safoian (12:30): Cannot disagree. Cannot disagree. I think it's quite remarkable. Chris Beall (12:36): I mean, to me, Tony, you guys are on a mission that is interesting, because at one level is so nuts and bolts, it's so... I mean talk about workloads, a workload is a workload is a workload is not a workload. It's not trivial stuff. Everything in the world of software and everything in the world of hardware as a result, is tangled up together. They don't call it spaghetti code for nothing. Tony Safoian (13:01): That's right. Chris Beall (13:02): It's all tangled up and you have to help folks get that stuff up from where it is, where it's all stuck and glued into all these different systems, and nobody even remembers how they're tangled up, and help that come out and move to a place where it's all accessible by people like me, working from home. What was the key? Why are you guys so good at it? Because it's one of the hardest things in the world. Selling it is one thing, but you guys have to actually do it. Why did you embark on such a crazy adventure? Tony Safoian (14:30): Part of it is, I think, just being on the right side of history for a long period of time. As you both know, selling and delivering something you don't believe in is a very hard endeavor. So when the Cloud started to become a thing in the mid-2000s, and we had a very on-premise related view of the world, like everyone else did, when a thought started to come together, it wasn't a debate for us, whether or not that's where it's all going to end up eventually. So just creating a culture around that journey started with email, it was the first thing we worked on. 2006, '07, '08, '09, then went to maps and geolocation services, then enterprise search, and then voice link to the Cloud. It was like, "Look, this is going to the Cloud." And then on-premise, custom applications and the data center was next, and there's four trillion dollars worth of this stuff out there, in the old paradigm, and I think, if you get the general methodology of what the journey to the Cloud looks like, yes, it's in part technical, but a lot of it is cultural. So if you get the cultural piece, right, like, yes, this is a difficult decision for customers to make. It is something that engineers that work at our customers are either afraid of or unaccustomed to. And so, that's part of the work streams. It's not just convincing the CIO or the CTO or VP of Engineering that this is a good idea, but we need these engineers to come along. In the early days, when we used to migrate email, the biggest barrier was, the team that ran the email backup exchange administrators were like, "We don't want to move to the Cloud. Our whole job is defined by this box that's sitting here." So just 100X that, and that's sort of the modern data center migration conversation. Engineers are an interesting bunch to recruit, to nurture, to retain, to motivate. They want to do cool stuff and they want to work with other exceptional engineers. So bringing in, just over a year ago, now, the best CT on the planet we could find, which is the gentleman who ran the global solutions architect team at Google for five years, and he did that also at AWS, four years prior to that, was a huge step forward for us, in terms of engineering culture within SADA. And of course, now, other top engineers that are interested in this space, just want to work in that orbit, so recruiting engineers actually has never been easier for SADA. But even prior to that, we understood that engineers are generally not like salespeople at all, and they're not like a lot of other folks within any companies, they're not coin operated. You can't say, "I'll pay you more, if you move faster." Or, "I'll pay more, if you stay." That's actually almost irrelevant to most engineers, it's, there's a hygiene factor of comp and benefits and all that stuff, but they want to work around other engineers they admire for their engineering ability and acumen and experience and contribution to open source and other things that engineers kind of measure each other by, but they also want to do meaningful work at the edge of technology innovation. So that's why, when we go into a typical customer who has engineers, and let's say this customer is not very tech forward, those engineers are bored. They've gone in to maintenance mode. Maybe, they're building some cool things. But our approach is, well, our engineers are on the outside, we see hundreds of environments, tackle the most complex challenges, so we come in with a different perspective of experience. But where the SADA approach in the market is different is that we compete in the enterprise at a space that's been traditionally dominated by the global systems integrators and the outsourcers. And the way they like to engage with customers is they want to come in and replace those people. They want you to outsource this thing to them. And we come in with an orientation of, I don't have a 100 people I can put on staff there for three years, I have four ninjas, who are the or the best in what they do, with project management and program management, and then all these other folks, they're going to come in, help you get started on this journey, lay the critical foundation of security and architecture and make sure it's all done right, and then spend a lot of time on the enablement piece, so that your engineers, which they will surprise you, are going to get enabled to take you most of the rest of the way. And I think customers really resonates to that. Engineers that we've ended up having to work with at our customer sites, love the opportunity to go get certified and learn big query or Kubernetes or whatever it is, Anthos. And then our engineers go in and they see the direct impact on those people's lives, and also the company that we just helped transform, and it just fills them with tons of fulfillment and meaning in the work. And I think that's where we have to continue to win as an organization. We have to have a tremendous amount of exceptional engineers. Because the selling side, I love how you always frame it, which is value at every interaction. And if your intent is pure, and it is, you're there to help. In aggregate, there's actually unlimited demand for the work that the Cloud providers do, and then the partners do. In fact, globally, the demand greatly exceeds the supply of all the engineers in the world and all the partners like SADA that could do this work. So having that meaningful conversation after you get good at it, that's not going to be, ultimately, the limiting factor in a customer's journey. It's going to be other things like their trust, do they trust you? Can you really save them money? Are you on their side? Are you going to be there for the next five to 10 years to support them in this path? And that trust really starts with that first phone call. Chris Beall (20:22): That's fascinating. This whole question of culture is something that's discussed a lot. The culture and its role in digital transformation of all kinds as much discussed here at the dinner table. This is what we talk about. Now, my fiance's talk that she gives publicly is about how, in her journey of trying to figure out what digital transformation is really about, what are the constraints, what she discovered the constraint is always culture. I mean, enabling technology, so to speak, is always culture and cultural change. It's fascinating to me that you've delved into engineering culture, both as a supplier of engineering culture and a consumer of it in a funny way. That is, you consume your customer's engineering culture as an input to your process. It's fascinating. I've never heard it described like that before. As an old, I don't know if I'm an engineer, I'm one of those guys who's written more than a million lines of code, and I still don't think I ever became an engineer. I don't know how that happens, but it does sometimes happen in the world. I don't think I ever had that mindset completely. But that one piece that you talk about, which is what Deming used to talk about, people work for pride of workmanship, not for cash compensation or anything else. And even sales people do. Believe it or not, sales... I mean, we all have to know this right, really, sales people who say they're coin-operated, I'm sure, never are. They just never are. They're just trying to hide behind that shield, so that they don't have to be accountable for what they would prefer not to be accountable. Tony Safoian (22:00): So they don't have to update the CRM system. Chris Beall (22:00): Exactly. Corey Frank (22:00): That's true. Yep, that's right. Chris Beall (22:06): Which would keep them from having to do anyway, so that's all right. That's quite something. So where in that process, you described where you got to, and the big draw of the Cloud is out there. I had the same experience, I think, in 1983, when I knew that Unix was going to take over the commercial computing world. And I quit my job, and I did my first startup, which was a Unix-based ERP system written from scratch. Tony Safoian (22:31): Wow. Chris Beall (22:31): So that was like, it was [crosstalk 00:22:32]- Tony Safoian (22:33): That not ambition at all Chris. That's not ambition. Chris Beall (22:35): I had an orange crate to put on, so it was quite comfortable. At little terminals banging away, we built our own relational database management system from scratch, from the ground up, from bits. And went after that, but why? Because you didn't have to be a genius to figure out that that glow in the East that you can't read by yet is eventually going to bake the landscape. Whatever that thing is, it's got to be really bright to be glowing that much before it gets up over the horizon. And the Cloud must have felt like that to you, way back in the early 2000s. As long as you don't go out of business and you agree to operate internally by principles that are sufficiently deep, that you're not going to end up having no keel and being blown every which way, you sort of can't lose. Now, you guys have gone way beyond can't lose, sort of gone into the magic place. Is that how you felt? Or were there moments along the journey when it's like, yeah, I get that we can't lose, but we could lose. Tony Safoian (23:40): I think it's healthy to operate in this infinite game mindset, which Simon Sinek talks about, and I'm a huge fan of his. We're just sort of visitors into this time and place of enterprise software sales or sales or technology, whatever you call this space. And we're players in the game, and if you think in infinite terms, it's not a game that has a finite end or some kind of scoreboard that you can point to at the end of a quarter or a half or the season, and say we won or lost, per se. So I think with this mindset, that, look, we're blessed and we know we're blessed, and we're so fortunate to be in an environment that's growing, in a market is growing 50, 60%, anyway, that has unlimited demand, essentially. We're on the right side of history and we have a little bit of a headstart, that we really just only have to focus on getting incrementally better every day. If we get incrementally better every day in the areas that become clear to us by virtue of enough customer conversations or internal debates or feedback and input from Google, et cetera, we shouldn't really ever have to exit the game. And that's actually, when you lose an infinite game, the closest definition to losing a game like this is exiting the game. Simon Sinek makes a lot of references to, I don't love war analogies, but he calls it like the Vietnam War, or let's say the Cold War. The biggest mistake that the United States made, when the Berlin Wall fell down, is thinking that they won the Cold War. It never stopped. So as Corey said, it's almost like, so what that we want the Global Seller of the Year award two years in a row, it's not like game over. It's actually so early in this transformation journey that I don't know if we can win because it's an infinite game, but we certainly can mess up. And if we do, shame on us, because I feel like most of the destiny is clearly in our hands. And I think a lot of that has to do with a lot of humility and self-awareness, but certainly a focus on just customer obsession, a focus on incremental improvement, reinvestment, which a lot of business founders, especially bootstrap business founders or others, forget. I think the part that we're well beyond, as you're defining it, is we're well beyond the lifestyle business. It's no longer about, what's in it for me. This is like, we have this amazing opportunity to make something big in a way that's never been done before, and, boy, can we impact thousands of lives and hundreds of companies, if we do it right. Corey Frank (26:19): Well, I think if you look at where the Cloud is, is that it's maybe started out where it's not, like you say, "I don't believe in gravity." Well, because gravity believes in you, right? Tony Safoian (26:31): Right. Corey Frank (26:31): You could say, "Well, I don't believe in taking my servers and moving them out into the Cloud, because of extra security or why, et cetera." Well, the Cloud believes in you and it's going to zap you up. So how much, Tony, would you say now versus early on versus today, you were probably doing a lot of educational advocacy, educational missionary work, and they were maybe crying and screaming to move versus today, you may have more of, "Hey, here's my specs I need in order to move"? and you've probably seen that on an X and Y axis, probably, move a little bit less, but nevertheless, I know a lot of the fun and the culture, especially what you're seeing in the engineers, is still in the educational advocacy, the thought leadership that a company like SADA plays. So how do you kind of balance that, where you have kind of the laggards who are coming, but you still have the cool kids who are the early adopters, who are your core clients, and constituency at SADA that want you to say, "Okay, what's next, Tony? What's next? What's next?" And to balance those two on the curve from the late adopters to the visionaries has got to be a challenge. Tony Safoian (27:35): It's a challenge, and the work there is changing, but Corey, we're very accustomed to working in a environment where we knew and had complete conviction on what the right destination was going to be. But we've operated in a period of some level of doubt for at least 15 years. So in the beginning, to your point, mid to late 2000s, it was, you were selling the customer on the premise of Cloud. You were trying to convince them that cloud was not a fad, that it was here to stay. And back then with email, in higher education, if you believed in Cloud, the answer was Google, because they were the only ones doing it. So it wasn't like... We weren't so much selling Gmail to universities, we were just convincing them this it's not a fad. And then, Microsoft got their acts together in the Cloud, then we have these two disparate businesses, and there was still a lot of like, "Well, which one's better than that?" Or, "When do I make this migration?" But in the early days of partnering with Google, you can imagine, that that was not, that Cloud was real, because, okay, fine. Amazon proved Cloud was real. Salesforce proved Cloud is real. And now, even we believe in Cloud now, but is Google really cloud? Are they serious about the enterprise, because they're really an ads business? We've dealt with that for many, many, many years, and in the last, certainly two years with Thomas Kurian coming on board, and Rob Enslins, Kirsten Kliphouse, and Janet Kennedy here in North America. I don't think... Really, since Diane Greene arrived and consolidated things and built this great 13,000 employee organization within Google, that was the Cloud, we haven't gotten that objection so much anymore. But now the conversation is, okay, we know the Cloud is real and Google is serious, but Google is number three. And we're like, yes, that's true, but it's so early. And they have the best technology. And as engineers, it seems obvious to us that customers should always just pick the best technology. And probably if you're Google, which has consumer roots, you're accustomed to a market dynamic that always shakes out such that the best technology wins. Google Maps won, because it was better than MapQuest, simple. Gmail was better than Hotmail. There's no selling, there's no training or there's no migration, it just happens. Now, Instagram. Consumer technology is always defined by, look, just make the best stuff, you'll get the most users. And I was talking to Janet Kennedy yesterday, who runs US and Canada, and she's been through like the IBM enterprise days and the Microsoft enterprise days. And she was at IBM, early days, when it was like, OS/2 versus a Windows NT, and IBM had this big campaign of like, NT stands for not there. IBM arguably had... OS/2 was way better than windows, technically, and that's just one story. There's been story after story, and Chris has been in the industry for a long time. It's very often the case that the best technology has not won. So what is the conversation with the customer today, and what TK and all these sort of enterprise experts who are coming into the space are realizing and are helping partners execute the same way, which is, it's really about risk. That's how the enterprise buys. Yes, they want transformation, but nobody wants to lose their job for picking Google. They don't care if it's the best technology. They'll take the third best technology, if it means that their decision will not be questioned. So how do you have those transformational conversations? It has to do... Yes, you have to be at least as... pretty much every time. But what about your commercial contracting ability? What about your enterprise support? What about professional services? What about product roadmap? What about my direct access to Google executives or SADA executives? That's what the enterprise engagement today looks like. And Google's also gotten smarter and more capable, since TK has arrived, to have a much broader strategic conversation with the largest customers. If you look at Activision going Google, that was not about, oh, you can run Call of Duty in our data centers versus yours, and that's better. It might be better, yes. This is about, we're going to transform gaming, with Stadia and everything else, and YouTube, and we are going to have a comprehensive strategy to transform Activision's business. Saber, Deutsche Bank, these 10 year, multi-billion dollar deals, that's about completely revolutionizing the banking experience for customers at Deutsche Bank. And them being able to do with the data, things that they just could not do for the last a 100 years, running on mainframes. Sabre was like, transforming the travel experience from the moment you're searching for your flight on google.com. Not about, oh, you should move out of this data center and go to that data center. So I think more and more that's what customers are looking for, at least in the enterprise, or it's not even about, is this point solution from this vendor better than that vendor? Is the Cloud thing real? It's like, what is the transformational impact and outcome to my business, if I choose Google versus somebody else? How is Google as an enterprise going to support me versus somebody else? And I think that's never been truer or more compressed in the context of digital transformation as we're facing right now, because every customer is different in their behavior than they were four months ago. So, if you're an organization that does not know how to meet your customer where they are, which is online or in their home or whatever, then your business model is dead. Chris Beall (33:14): We don't have many guests, but when we do, we have the best.  

This episode of Market Dominance Guys starts with Chris recapping the numbers from the previous episode on the tremendous infusion of savings Work From Home creates as knowledge workers are no longer required to go into an office to be productive. Quite the opposite. The data supports they are as much as 47% more productive working from home - ending the commute economy. ----more---- After the recap, Corey and Chris talk about the other aspects and concerns of potentially returning to the office, why it's a bad and wasteful idea and how we can all benefit by allowing knowledge workers to continue to work from home. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys - All Mitigation is Untested - Work from home or return to the office?   Market Dominance Guys is Produced 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 (01:24): So 48 million knowledge workers commuting for a little less than an hour a day each, that's 210 hours a year. It is a lot of labor hours. It's about 10 billion labor hours, and a 50 bucks an hour that's about $500 billion of waste time. And then you add on top of that at the standard government reimbursement rate of 57.5 cents a mile, how much they drive and that driving per year is about 7,000 miles. Again, multiply that by those 48 million people, and you get an additional $194 billion approximately. So it's really quite a bit that's being wasted entirely on commuting. And you add those numbers together and then throwing something like childcare. Say 40% have childcare costs and at $8 an hour for that commute time, that adds another 32 billion plus dollars. And you get about $731 billion of waste right there, just on the knowledge workers commuting. That's their labor hours. That's the cost of the commute itself and I threw in one childcare thing for 40% of them. And then look at the rest of the workforce. There's 62 million people, approximately commuting in the rest of the workforce. They're going to be kind of $35-an-hour labor. And that's it an awful lot of commute hours per day. That's 53 million, almost 54 million commute hours. And so say they got a 25% improvement from all those knowledge workers being off the freeways and off the streets and out of the parking. Now you're down to a pretty big number again, $114 billion of additional savings in total. It comes up to about $846 billion. That's already being saved directly by commuters in the form of labor and in the form of expenses. Corey Frank (03:38): For a company who is struggling thinking about moving their team to a work-from-home model. Oftentimes the gate is open, the spreadsheet I think that you walked us through here is just walk around the gate, "Come on in the water's fine." The downside that a lot of the hesitancy that a lot of companies would push back on Chris is the culture and the continuity and the three-pound brain. There is some benefit from being next to another three-pound brain. And that's my feeling of involvement by feeling of social status and things of that nature. And I think we had a lot of those could probably get addressed if they listened to last week's episode with Sushi Paremo and the wonderful culture that he's building with his organizations. But what do you say to that just briefly when you know, "Okay, I can go around the gate. I see the hard costs. It makes sense from a P&L from an EBITDA perspective but man, there is real atomic weight from that three-pound brain being next to another three-pound brain." Chris Beall (04:50): Well, we're going to have to try it for a while because going back to the office is expensive and dangerous. In fact, dangerous in a funny way. And the plaintiff's bar is itching to go after an employer who forces people to come to the office and watch these people get sick. I mean, they're armed and ready to go. And anybody who's familiar with how the plaintiff's bar works and how class action works knows what is about to happen. So folks voluntarily coming back in, still there's some legal risks just is, because who knows what assurances you may have inadvertently provided. What warning labels you might've had to have, what mitigations you could have done that you failed to do and not knowing about them by the way, might not be a defense. So you're about to learn something auto manufacturers have known for a long time, which is that you're responsible for safety if you offer something where there are safety issues that are different from what was expected. And since no one knows what to expect, this could be problematic for anybody who's bringing folks back. Secondly, every mitigation is untested. There are no tested mitigations. I saw a beautiful article in the Puget Sound Business Journal that showed a picture, an infographic, and it showed the 11 mitigations that you should consider before you bring people back to the office. And they were things like coming in with the new HPAC system that had different kinds of filtering and it circulated air differently. Really? For a year and a half or two years of benefit. I mean, if you're going to bring them back, okay, but really new HPAC so that the three-pound brains can sit next to each other, but not infect each other. Do you think anybody's ever tested that? I don't think anybody's ever tested that, right? Not one of these mitigations has been tested. Coffee machines that you operate with your smartphone. I don't think anybody's ever done laboratory testing or in real-life testing of the impact of that on respiratory virus transmission, right? So this is just stuff people are going on and they're kind of waving their hands and saying bup, bup, bup, bup. I remember there was a finger on the scale, which is the other side of those big leases. So you should expect to see a lot of stories about how essential it is and possible it is to bring people back into the office. But I tell you from a scientific perspective, again, all 11 of those mitigations have got to be done and all 11 have got to work and then you have to not get a little bad luck. Well, it turns out they stood next to somebody in the Starbucks downstairs. And so it's unlikely, you're going to have to learn to live with it anyway. Culturally, what do you do? I know in sales, what you do, it's simple. For your sales team, nothing is more energizing than talking to people. Corey Frank (07:52): That's correct. Chris Beall (07:53): This is our team today. And here's an SDR that's talked to 25 decision makers. So at one meeting, so they had a moment of excitement at 14 followups, it's Friday. People tend to be a little busy on Friday. I got two referrals and had five minutes and 24 seconds after pushing the button on average, before he talked to somebody. Josh Philemon did. And I'm sure during that time he was doing something else that's useful. So it's kind of funny. We talk about culture. Culture is about ping pong tables or it's about, I don't know, drinking beer in the conference room or whatever it happens to be, which I think people gave up a while ago too, for safety reasons. So the fact of matter is people, as Damon told us, they worked for pride and workmanship and if they have good work to do, and they're having fun doing it, and they're being managed in a way that's fair and reasonable and encouraging, then the core of culture is there. And that's the number one thing, is work culture actually can be about work and it can be about what somebody loves to do. If you're in sales, you hopefully love to talk with people. And so if you're with my team today, they've talked to 168 people as you see down here. Corey Frank (09:13): Wow. Chris Beall (09:13): That's a lot of conversations, right? Here's is what also is culturally kind of good about this. They didn't have to make those 5,655 frustrating dials and navigate those phone systems, that was done for them. So that's kind of pleasant. And then another thing is people like to be able to help. And they like to be helped. If you need help, you're stuck. You need to learn if somebody notices you need help and there's a lot of ways to do that. So say your boss or your coach could come in and say, "You know what? This guy, Sean McLaren, he's our chairman. Man, he's got a lot of busy callbacks today." By the way Sean McLaren really is our executive chairman who really does talk to people. "So today he had six conversations inside one meeting. That's pretty good, but he's having a hard time keeping people on the phone. I wonder if Sean's got issues today? Is it a little slow or is his voice bad? This one can't be corrected? It's a minute-long conversation. So maybe he just coded it wrong. These are short. I have a feeling if I listened to one and we're not going to do that right now, respect for Sean's awesomeness. But hey, if Sean needed a little help, just thinking about his state of mind today, his mood or whatever, then you we can help him." And then here's another thing is it's fun to do work that counts. It's not much fun to do work. That doesn't count. So today this team it's $5,655. And now it's gone out by a couple, it's only three in the afternoon after all. Would that have been culturally marvelous for them to just go under voicemail 1,825 times today or navigated to voicemail 1,567 times? Or been told by a gatekeeper, "I'm sorry Corey is not in today." I am not available. None of that looks like fun. So culturally that's part of it. Now the rest of it is this, human beings actually don't have a sense of smell like the other animals and they have the other mammals. So your dog can smell you across town and I'm speaking literally here. I had a dog once that freaked out, and ran off in a thunderstorm and she went all the way back up to our mountain home, which was 17 miles away of complex navigation involving roads and trails and God knows what. And she went to every neighbor's house and sort of knocked on the door to check, to see if we were there because we were out of town. Imagine that. Corey Frank (11:53): Well, she knows that there's a bunch of Milk-Bones on the other side of the fence. That's probably why that she could get to. Chris Beall (11:59): Exactly. Well, what was she really doing? She was following a scent trail and that she had mapped a scent map, not a trail. She had mapped the scent. She'd only been up and down that road one time in her life. And the one time up one time down. That was it. This is a dog never been to town before, before we moved to town. So she remembered how to get back to that complex mountain home by knowing the smell of everything along the way. So dogs are really, really good at this. And you go to the airport, they don't have a trained human who's going up and down in the security line, sniffing everybody that have a dog, right? Corey Frank (12:34): Right. Chris Beall (12:35): Humans are not the most brilliant in the world at smell on each other and figuring out if they're sincere or to be trusted but we are geniuses like dogs will never be at hearing each other's voices and seeing each other's faces. And the voice and the face are the two ways that we express ourselves in terms of what really counts, which is do I care about? And if you want to have a great culture, let your people know you care about them and let them tell you, they care about you and about the mission. And then you just do it natural ways, in the normal course of business, like getting on these Zooms, by just talking on the phone, everybody in your company who is physically capable of hearing and seeing, and that's not everybody I get it, that's really tough for folks who have vision problems and hearing problems. But of the rest, of the mass of folks at your company who don't, they're so good at interpreting sincerity and good intentions and meaningful direction from tone of voice. For the same reasons, cold calling works, it's possible and easy to project fantastic culture to a remote workforce. And in fact, you have more time to do it during the two hours you would have had commuting. Let's break it down, I have a team in North America personally of 28 people. So in two hours, how many, five-minute conversations are there? There's 24, that's pretty cool. Think about that. That's 24 times that I can spend having five-minute conversations. And in those five minutes, each one of those minutes, here each second is carrying 20,000 bits of emotional information. Terabytes of emotionally-important information can be transmitted. Having meetings where everybody gets to participate. This is one of the beauties of Zoom. In a standard conference call, the standard of conference room participation is dominated by the physically most dominant person. They stand, they take over the room, they interrupt, they talk, they go to the whiteboard, they dominate. In a hybrid where there's a speakerphone in the desk or the table in the conference room, you get a two-tier economy, a two-tier culture, people in the room and the people in the mushroom. People in the mushroom don't have a shot. They don't exist. They will never have the floor in any significant way. On a regular conference call, just voice only. It's tricky. You need a good moderator, but in a Zoom call, it's so natural. Everybody sees each other's face. And normally the contribution level for person goes way up and people feel more included. So I think making an inclusive culture is actually easier. And some of the biases that we have about people are a little, shall we say, muted in this environment and biases are not the greatest thing in the world. So I actually- Corey Frank (15:42): ... happened 10 years ago, then you could argue that the urgency to go back to the commuter economy would have been so much more urgent, but because the tech stack is so much more in place and plumbed and accepted that there really isn't many excuses to go back to the way were. Chris Beall (16:03): When you work the numbers, it says, "Don't do it." When you work the culture it's says, "Don't do it." If your work productivity it says, "Don't do it." We solved this problem a long time ago. We would never have designed it like we had it. Clogged cities with roads you can't get through on. People frustrated, not seeing their children, not getting enough exercise, not eating well, stopping at the bar on the way home, sucking down the lattes because they're bored. Let's face it. That was not healthy. It wasn't economically healthy and it wasn't otherwise healthy. Then it's tragic what's going on with all the cases of people getting sick people dying. But I do believe that a bunch of people worked hard to create a situation where we can work from anywhere and we can contribute to society no matter who we are. I believe there'll be a next wave that we haven't even touched yet, which is inclusiveness across society. There are so many smart people who don't contribute, don't get to contribute because they don't live where the rich businesses are. And I've done some experiments around that about back in 1991 and '92, that proved to me for sure that there is no difference in talent among all of our different communities that we have in this country or anywhere in the world. And I think one of the side effects of work-from-home and work-from-anywhere is going to be that more people are going to find great careers as knowledge workers who are currently being left out. And I think that's another wave that's coming and nobody's seeing it coming. Corey Frank (17:44): That's great. Okay. Well, we have a topic to discuss for next time. In the meantime, I'm going go search for my share of the $7.5 trillion that you say is buried somewhere in the Ether and the virtual couch cushions of America. So until next time [inaudible 00:18:01]. Chris Beall (18:03): ... talk to you later. Corey Frank (18:05): Beautiful. Thanks, Chris.

    There's a whole bunch of commuters that are used to driving to cities. And I think it would be good and very timely talk a little bit about some of the things that we've learned and this massive economy that is forming from the non-commuter economy, the non-commuter economic forces. Chris will perhaps give us a little bit of hope, as far as what the trends are with this new stay at home economy. ----more---- In downtown Seattle, there are office buildings and those office buildings right now are pretty much empty as of today, July 14, 2020. And a lot of people thought this whole COVID thing would be over by now. I think with a record number of cases per day coming in or individual states like Florida are now number four in the world is where the country is. There's a kind of sobering up going on with regard to what’s happening. One of the interesting things is that we talked about it a little before is that the big companies always lead the way on this sort of thing for a bunch of reasons. One is they've got the best information. Two, they've got the best lawyers and their lawyers advise them as to what's why somewhat safe to do. Three, they can often work the numbers better than the rest of us. And so what to us might be a small saving to them can be quite material. Here's what we have today, roughly 48 million knowledge workers in America and they used to commute by car about 26 minutes each way. So that's .87 hours of car time commuting. Anybody who's lived near a big city and commutes knows that is an understatement. That's just over 200 hours spent commuting by car which adds up to about 10 billion hours for those 48 million knowledge workers. This has been time boldly wasted. Commuting and that multiplied by the $50 an hour that most knowledge workers are paid, which clearly is less than they're worth and nobody ever gets paid what they're worth. That's $505 billion of labor that's being wasted commuting. And then if you throw in the car and just take the federal government's mileage reimbursement rate of 57 and a half cents per mile which accounts for gas, maintenance, wear and tear, tires. And you take the number of miles committed 29 per day. It's about 6670 miles a year. That's $193 billion of commute costs and that's just raw costs again in the economy that's considered to be positive. Well, then it must have been worth it to them. But you know, it's not worth it to anymore. Let's throw in a little something here for knowledge workers with children. This is really an illustration. It's not a huge number, but it's a big enough number. Knowledge workers with children are at about 40% and you've got to have some childcare costs averaged at $8 per hour. That alone is $33 billion. The direct commute costs, just for the knowledge workers, which I will call pure waste is $731 billion. That's a big number. And then if you look at the rest of the commuting workforce -  62,000,000 other people and they commute about the same amount of time each way. But what if we could actually improve their commute by 25% and what if they're being paid an average or they're worth an average of $35 an hour and you multiply those numbers together with those 53,940,000 commute hours. Times $35 an hour and you take 25% of that you get yourself another $114 billion. And so if you had $114 billion for the non-knowledge workers up with the $731 plus billion for the knowledge workers, the direct savings, we're getting pretty close to a trillion dollars - $845 billion dollars of direct costs. It's a big, big number. And it was considered to be essential, but we just have to do this right, and it's not considering everything else is not considering the environmental impact. It's not considering the geopolitical impact and what it means to have an economy that generates such a dependency on oil which doesn't always come from exactly where you would want it to come from, neither is the money always used exactly like you would want it to be used. Ignoring all that it's $846 billion roughly that could be saved and is being saved. Today, this isn't a suggestion or something we do in the future. This is just saying, look what happened, look what's happening right now that 813 billion dollars is effectively being put in the pockets of consumers, one way or another, mostly as their own time. But we know that people figure out a good things to do with their time - the gig economy is about that. But people they value their time and we should consider them when their time is saved. They're getting value.   Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by: 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 (00:37): Somewhere in the Northwest is Chris Beall. Chris, how are you? Good afternoon. Chris Beall (00:42): I'm doing great. Yes. My undisclosed location is here in Port Townsend in Washington, where one more time, I'll look up the sky there and tell you that they say the blue hole lingers longer here. And apparently it does. It's pretty sunny. Corey Frank (00:58): Well, that background does not look like Port Townsend. So, that is false advertising at its finest. And I have a feeling we're going to get a bait-and-switch here. Pretty soon when you get around with all of your spare time to putting up a new virtual background, but today, maybe the point of that virtual background is to talk a little bit about all those people. Because if you look over your left and your right shoulder, I can see all those little commuters and I can see all those little commuters taking the ferry and maybe driving in, maybe trying to find some parking and maybe, trying to fuddle with their face masks as they go up to the third floor and try to put their face masks back on as they go to the Starbucks. So there's a whole bunch of commuters that are used to driving to cities much like the one over your shoulder there. And I think it would be good and very timely talk a little bit about some of the things that we've learned and this massive economy that is forming from the non-commuter economy, the non-commuter economic forces. And I think we were talking a little bit about that before we hit record here. Let's just dive right into that Chris, and see if we can maybe give them a little bit of hope as far as what the trends are with this new stay at home economy. Chris Beall (02:13): Coalino downtown Seattle, pretty much office buildings and those office buildings right now are pretty much empty. Today is the 14th of July 2020. A lot of people thought this whole COVID thing would be over by now. I think with record number of cases per day, coming in where individual States like Florida are now number four in the world where there're countries sobering up going on with regard to what's happening. One of the interesting things is that, we talked about it a little bit, for the big companies always lead the way on this thing for a bunch of reasons. One is they've got the best information. Two is they've got the best lawyers and their lawyers advise them as to what's wise and what's safe to do. And three, they can often work the numbers better than the rest of us. And so what to us might be a small savings to them can be quite material. So, the big companies in the Seattle area, I'm thinking of Microsoft and Amazon in particular, but there's a lot of others have pretty much declared that work from home is going to be an option. And maybe even permanently, I know at least one of them, their official principle is number one safety and number two choice. And there was no time limit put on that. And in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm here in Port Townsend that it freed us up as a couple to move to where we would want to be together, having no concern whatsoever for the commute just having a concern for the quality of life and having to have good internet, right? That's our new highway that we commute on, but you can drive through Seattle right now at what would have been rush hour and there's no rush hour anymore. And I think it's going to stay that way for a while. And I decided, why don't I just go ahead and I'm going to share my screen here. And Susan Finch gave us some... She did a great job on this, and it was really quite something. I had an orange spreadsheet that I put up on LinkedIn, and it actually had a pretty good sized error in it. But even when you correct the error, you still get numbers that are so big they're mind blowing. So, Hey Corey, so let's take a look here at what it really costs to commute or what it used to cost to commute for everybody, and then how much we're saving. So there's 48 million knowledge workers roughly in America and they commute by car about 26 minutes each way. So that's 0.87 hours of car time commuting. Anybody who's lived near a big city and commutes and knows that this is an understatement, but let's just take it as the number. And so it's a little bit low, but we'll accept that's almost 200 hours. It's almost 10 billion hours of commuting, 9.568 billion hours spent. And I will say boldly wasted commuting. And that multiplied by the $50 an hour, that most knowledge workers are paid, which clearly is less than their worth, right? Nobody ever gets paid at their worth. That's $505 billion of labor that's being wasted commuting. And then if you throw in the car and just take the government's number, the federal government's mileage reimbursement rate of 57 and a half cents per mile, and you take the number of miles committed 29 per day. It's about 7,000 miles a year. That's $194 billion of commute costs, which I would call pure waste, totally not 731 billion. In the economy, that's considered to be a positive, right? Somebody spent all that money for gas, they spent all that money for wear and tear on their car and for tires and this and that. Well, then it must have been worth it to them, but it's not worth it to you anymore or if you don't have to commute. And then I thought I'd throw in a little something here for knowledge with children. This is really an illustration. It's not a huge number, but it's a big enough number and knowledge workers with children and can say 40% have them and you've got to have some childcare costs at eight bucks an hour. That alone is $33 billion. So the direct commute costs just for the knowledge workers, which I will call pure waste, that adds another 32 billion plus dollars and you get about $731 billion of waste. And then look at the rest of the workforce. There's 62 million people, approximately commuting and the rest of the workforce, they're going to be kind of $35 an hour labor and that's it an awful lot of commute hours per day, that's 53 million almost 54 million commute hours. And so say they got a 25% improvement from all those knowledge workers being off the freeways and off the streets and out of the parking. Now you're down to a pretty big number again, $114 billion of additional savings in total. It comes up to about $846 billion. Corey Frank (07:03): So if COVID has been going on, one of the bright aspects of COVID from an economic perspective is certainly that it has forced these numbers to the top and the only people that perhaps are a little bit better are the parking lots and parking attendant, parking meter and oil change workers of America here. But these are real dollars that can go back into the economy, go back into the environment, go back into industry, go back into better tool sets, better technologies to enable workers to perform probably at a higher rate at a higher productivity rate than they did even before they jumped into the steel coffin every day. Chris Beall (07:49): Yes, exactly. You know, getting in that 3000 pounds of steel to move your three pound brain to get it closer to somebody else's three pound brain after there are 3000 pounds of steel move that somewhere is a little bit weird when you think about it, right, as a way of getting things done, you and I didn't have to move any steel at all. And we had this conversation here today, and nobody who's listening to us had to do it either. It shows that you can exchange information and get work done. It also shows something else. That's interesting that predict something else, I'll predict that anyway. I don't know if it does, but I'll just go ahead and predict it. And that's this, that money is primarily going to end up flowing into local communities into neighborhoods, because if you're not committing to a distant place, well, by definition, you're staying in a nearby place and you'll still be buying stuff. So the notion that you're buying more good stuff, that's of value because a big chunk of it involves your car and 26 minutes each direction really doesn't make any sense, it doesn't hold water. If you've got extra time, you're to be using that time locally, if you don't have to commute. And that means we'll have a flourishing of local businesses. And I think this whole question of what's happening with restaurants and bars and all that stuff and hair salons and so forth is you're going to see just more of them doing better in local neighborhoods and more people walking to dinner. Maybe not always eating at home like we do here, but walking to dinner or walking over to have a drink or walking over to get their hair or their claws done or whatever it is that they want to have done. Maybe even walking to get groceries like I used to do in Reno. So I think it really ends up being a flowering of neighborhoods that comes out of this. Corey Frank (09:38): So getting those three pound brains more collectively, more localized, it's big money, it's big business? Chris Beall (09:44): It is. And it's big economy. Yesterday, we've been here in port Townsend, living out in Cape George for two weeks and three days and yesterday our neighbor brought over, we just met our neighbor day before, brought over to big wonderful Dungeness crabs all cooked up and ready to eat. Now there's economic value in that. And the fact is if we were commuting, if either when my fiance or myself or commuting or on a plane right now or doing any of those things, there'd be nobody to bring those crabs to and that economic value of those two big Dungeness crabs, which by the way, were just, they're pretty delicious when they came out of the water above, I don't know 45 minutes ago, and somebody cooked them up and brought them over to your house. That's real economy too. And I think we have forgotten a lot of the facts of economy. It's about what are called satisfied services. It's about what works for people, not just about how much money to spend for it. So there's an assumption that it's all about transacting, but sometimes it's just about doing things for each other. And people do that more when they're around each other, as neighbors than they're likely to do with the more or less strangers that are at the other end of their commute. Corey Frank (10:54): So I'd imagine that there's another reciprocal effect in temperament, if not blood pressure alone? Chris Beall (11:00): Yes. Last time I was in San Francisco, this was pre COVID. It was an hour and 42 minutes to get from Downtown out to a freeway. After that, fortunately, I only had an hour and 16 minutes home, so it wasn't too bad in a three hour commute. And that mental health thing I think is really important too, and it does come down to dollars and cents at the end. I know somebody's a member of the family works as a clinical psychologist with kids with behavior problems. And he says his caseload has dropped by more than half because kids are home with their parents and what the parents learn to do with the kids to help them out, to help their behavior can actually be a plot because the parents are there. Now think of what we spend overall on mental health and what helping kids with behavioral issues earlier in their life could do 50% maybe of an overly large number. This is just one therapist's experience, but 10% would be a pretty big number in terms of economic impact and improved mental health for the nation's children. Chris Beall (12:57): There is a contrarian view to all this, which is folks like to be in the office because they like to talk to people in the office. And I think that's true of some people. My guess is those are the people that are actually not there anymore when you're working from home, so that you can have this productivity gain of 47% as measured by Prodoscore. So Prodoscore is an amazing company offering an amazing product that actually measures productivity at the desktop level. And some people would say, well, clicks and sending emails and doing this and doing that. That's not a real measure of productivity. And they're thinking in the micro sense, but if you have a measurement of everybody on your team before and after the day, they want to work from home and you knew how much they did, how much did they read? How many emails did they send? How many spreadsheets did they work on and how much did they do with and all that stuff before and after is always meaningful when it comes to productivity. While you can quibble over an individual and say, "Oh, that's just busy work." That tends to be by the way, people like me who don't work very hard and go "oh yes, I'm so brilliant that I can just sit around and produce value by getting on podcasts or something like that." In reality, before and after means a lot and Prodoscore measured before and after work from home to the day and found this surprising number of productivity gain, obviously for knowledge workers of 47%. Primarily this is speculative because those people are not dealing with what I call social Sam. Sam is a nice gender neutral name for that person who comes over to your desk four or five or six times a day. And just has one little question or one little tidbit to share with you. So they turn your desk into their water cooler. And 47% is a big number. And when you do the numbers here, they get really big, really fast. So yes, social Sam hates it when they don't get to go to the office, they prefer a shorter commute, they sure want to have all people there to chat with, now they don't. So say those people that they want to chat with, knowledge workers generate or are associated with average revenue of $200,000 per year per employee. Again, we got the same 48 million of them. And that means that there is increased revenue potential just from that 47% increase in productivity of $4.5 trillion. Those are trillions there. I didn't get that wrong. And someday I'll tell you what a trillion dollars is in hundred dollar bills stacked up. I guarantee you, it goes well past the orbit of the moon. It's a big number. And so, if you consider that the average gross margin of companies that employ knowledge workers is about 47% itself, that's kind of funny, isn't it? But productivity gain, average gross margins rate is about the same, so you're multiply 4.512 trillion times 47% and you get $2.12 trillion of profit dropping into those companies from the productivity gains from these workers. Now, how are they going to harvest that profit? The way you always harvest profit, that you harvest it in the form of growth, you do more, you do better or in the form of cost savings. And if there are cost savings, we know that always produces dislocations and dislocations produce economic pain for individuals that have got to be managed by something. Governments tend to manage them by pumping money into the economy. But at the end of the day, productivity is a good thing for the economy and it's a good thing for the companies that execute in it. So now I add up the commute savings to that $2.12 plus trillion of productivity gains, and you have yourself just under $3 trillion of total impact from work from home. And if you compare it to various other things, it's a lot bigger than the stimulus of 2008 by a big margin, it's almost as much as the total outstanding debt of US companies. It's more than the college loan debt. It's some pretty big numbers here, but we come right down to it. This is the big surprising number is we stopped commuting and we're more productive on a per hour basis by the way. Now, some people will say, "well, we're working longer hours, wearing ourselves out." That's not what this is. This is productivity gain on a per hour basis. That's what Prodoscore is actually measured. And I know anecdotally, a lot of people I talk to say, "yes, it is weird. I'm getting more done." And I think they're getting more done because we all know it takes 26 minutes to go back to doing what you were doing when you get interrupted. Well 10% of the workforce goes around interrupting people and they do it several times a day. That's a lot of interruption. That's a lot of 26 minutes to get back online, get back on track. So anyway, I just thought I'd share that with everybody. And you can quibble with the individual numbers, but I think directionally and magnitude was we're talking about the biggest injection of value into the economy. Yes. In some interesting ways, cost savings on one side productivity and another with the profits driven productivity. But the biggest one you and I have seen in our lifetime and fast is already happening, that's what I want to emphasize. This is not a tomorrow only thing. And one more thing is interesting as people are saying, "yes, but..." Yes, we're stuck at home and it's terrible. Well, that's the COVID related disease management, a form a risk management. I guess I'll call it diseases not what's happening at that point. It's a risk. It's the management or mitigation of risk of disease. That's gone someday, we don't know when, but it's gone someday. When it's gone this commute economy, the lack of commuting and the work from home will still be around because the big companies have spoken and everybody has to compete with the big companies for talent and now talent can work from anywhere. And I'll make one final prediction. There is a lot of concern about social and economic justice nowadays. There's been a lot of concern for quite a while about wage disparities. How much do people make doing different things in different places. The fact of the matter is it's got to be good for all of those issues with talent anywhere can work anywhere because that kind of liquidity simply makes more opportunity for people who are talented and hardworking and want to get the job done, whatever the job happens to be. They don't only have to be limited to the jobs that are right in their area. Now mind you, there has to be improvements in many places in terms of infrastructure, access to internet, so forth, but it's a lot easier to improve access to internet than pick families up and move them across the country to places that they're not familiar with, that maybe they won't feel very comfortable at. Corey Frank (19:59): That's great point. I'm sure we're going to hear over the coming months of who does this, we've had the man-cave people would put up man-cave, porn about the beautiful flat screen and the jerseys in the fridge. And imagine we're going to have the same type of thing with a the office cave, the ideal office scenario, social collaboration amongst what's the best chair and the best height and raised desk let alone productivity tools. Because yes, I can imagine especially those that are in deeply collaborative positions where they're on Zoom calls or conference calls much to the day where previously they had conference room sessions or whiteboard sessions. Those are the ones that are going to maybe struggle the most from a collaborative type of work environment. And it's going to be clear that there's going to have to be some new breakthroughs and some sharing of best practices when it comes to making those as comfortable and as creative as possible. Chris Beall (20:55): You know what's funny about work from home having done it for a long time is, I'm not a fan of regular meetings, right? Holding weekly meetings, they tend to proliferate. They tend to attract parasites. And so I don't think they're great. It's easy to get away or to dispose of some of those regular meetings when they don't have the ritual of the office around them. And to let people pull information when they need it. It's one of the principles that our company runs on us. If you need to know something and you don't have that information, you need to know it from somebody else in the company, they don't owe it to you, you owe it to yourself to go get it from them. And so there are short interactions that are easily scheduled when you send a request to somebody for something, and they're working from home and they're in say a Zoom meeting. Well, they finish that meeting. They can take a minute or so and satisfy your request for information. And they may do that with the phone call. Don't underestimate the power of the human voice, not just with those invisible strangers, but with your invisible or visible, that's what we do with Zoom, friends. The people you work with, it's amazing how much information you can get to move around with voice. And if you don't pack the day with meetings, people have time to get some of those interactions to happen. Think of it as like the oil in an engine. A little bit of room around the meetings, lets this cooling and friction reducing oil in the form of conversations flow and people will figure out how to talk to each other. And you want to get de-siloed, I'll tell you when everybody is working remotely, the silos go away and people start talking to each other more which is a wonderful thing in a physical office, it's very hard to avoid physical sorrow. Corey Frank (22:41): Right, I love it. This is fantastic stuff Chris, even with these numbers am going to check myself on the number of zeros here, because this is massive. And even if I'm an average size $10 to $25 million company with 50 inside sales reps and 10 field reps selling B2B, this is a brand new way to think of an increase in my bottom line in my top line for doing something that most folks want to do naturally anyway, which is just being more productive. I think one of our first episodes, we talked about the need to have people feel like they're accomplishing more and to feel like they're really doing a good job and it's in its inherent. No biophysiology to feel that way. And in too often, I think a lot of the encumbrances that we've placed on the work from an office environment burdens us to feeling our best sometimes because of all the things that don't really matter, the political, the manifestations of org charts, and promotions and elbowing and all that other stuff. And this certainly just allows me to feel good about my productivity in a different way. Doesn't it? Chris Beall (23:54): It does. I mean, Deming said that we work for pride of workmanship and the ability to get more done. That's meaningful to us without interruption or unnecessary interruption, I think just helps our professional mental wellbeing and helps us personally. There's another thing too, which is just a lot of evidence that says, hey being outdoors, being in greenery, so to speak, I'm looking out here right now and all the trees that surround this place that I'm living now over that direction somewhere, there's a Rocky beach that I can walk down to, there's nothing to keep me from taking my phone, plugging in an air pod or two into my ears and having some meetings yesterday, I had two and a half hours of conversations with people while trotting around barefoot. And is that good for my mental and physical health? You bet I'm not exactly a young buck. I'm 65 and change years old. And for me to get a couple hours of exercise and while talking to people is a great thing. And that is very hard to do at the office. Corey Frank (24:54): We'll leave it there for this episode. This, this was a heady one lot of numbers, lot at stake, and certainly a lot to consider as we move forward with hopefully an end to COVID insight. Regrettably the cost has been extraordinarily high. What you're doing here, Chris, and certainly with what the ConnectAndSell team continues to do is have to look for that axle grease to at least help them make the best of a real tough situation for folks. So great stuff has always with that, that ends this week's episode of the Market Dominance Guys for Chris Beall. This is Corey Frank from UncommonPro wishing you a great and successful week.  

  (aka: The Problem Is Making Your Numbers) Running your sales program with a conversation-first approach delivers needed information to you. Naturally, this is important to your sales department. After all, utilizing a conversation at the beginning of the sales process tells your sales team almost automatically if it’s worthwhile to have another conversation.   So, why should a CEO be selling when he has salespeople to do that job? Because there’s important information a savvy CEO can glean from having conversations with prospects. Information about how things are changing for prospective companies due to competition or demand for their products, about new leadership within their companies, and about the adjustments prospective buyers have had to make to meet the challenges of impactful events — like this pandemic. In these preliminary conversations, a CEO can truly keep his finger on the pulse of prospective buyers and detect how his own company’s product, service, or even sales message might need to be changed to better meet buyers’ needs.   In this podcast, Chris will also explain his take on a different result that has surfaced due to the pandemic. He begins with, “There’s a bad, bad disease in our economy, and it’s called commuting.” Listen while Chris expounds on his conclusion that the massive collapse of the commute economy is real — and that the effects of it have huge economic value. ----more---- Market Dominance Guys are 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 (00:35): So you have this issue that has to be solved, but it's very rare that the company's issue of staying in business is actually tied tightly to individual rep's need to make the number. Where that came from was as a way of assessing performance within the territory that had been granted, is actually a way to buy the territory. That is, if I make my number this year or exceed my number, then I get the territory for next year and I get a bigger number. Why do I get a bigger number? It's assumed it's easier to grow a territory than it is to [crosstalk 00:01:09]. So it was actually a purchasing mechanism where this independent business person called the sales rep, purchases the territory in addition to enough compensation for their own business to stay alive, and they do it through "performance" by making the number. So there's an agreement that this territory is worth selling to you if you bring this much revenue.  Then maybe in clever schemes, some of it has to come from this product and some from this product, then you put all these cool features in the comp plan, so to speak, but none of those features actually have to do with solving real customer problems. The assumption is, the product solves the problem and caveat emptor, buyer beware. Buyer beware doesn't work very well in the B2B world where the buyer is increasingly less expert than the seller because products are increasingly complex and interdependent. So the buyer must truly be able to trust the seller. And when the seller corrupts out and says, "I'd rather make the number then tell the truth," problems happen. And they are problems, not for the seller, they're problems for the business, the buying business and the selling business. The seller might make out, the person might make out. It's one of those things that as sales management and as business management, I think we should be acutely aware of. And it's one of the reasons, by the way, I think CEOs should sell. We could do a whole episode on that. Somebody once asked me, "Why do you sell so much? Why do you spend hours a day on the frontline selling? I assign myself a kind of a soft quota. It doesn't have anything to do with my compensation, probably does actually in some subtle way having to do with stock options and God knows what, but my quota is about $6 million a year last year. And this year it's maybe $7 million and change. I've got a lot of other things going on. Why do I do that? I mean, isn't it distracting me from the core of the business, which is ... I don't know what it is because I'm not that good of a CEO. I guess sitting around and talking to people, I don't know, doing stuff like this. Corey Frank (03:04): Staring at spreadsheets. Yeah, exactly. Chris Beall (03:05): Staring at spreadsheets. Yeah. I'm pretty fast on spreadsheets. The reason I do is, a business fundamentally is a means of solving problems for others that are inconvenient or too expensive to solve for themselves. That's the purpose of the business. And unless you're hearing the problems with your own ears and it's coming into your own brain, very, very hard to integrate the information about your customers as it changes over time. And it changes over time even if nothing happens. It's obvious. Competitors show up, your customer's businesses change, innovations show up or substitutes are happening, there may be some other way of doing the job. Who knows what it is? You can have a pandemic show up. I know that sounds almost impossible, but what if the whole world kind of went home overnight? Well then what?  So how do you learn as a CEO unless you're out there selling? And the CEO has a real advantage as a seller. They can sell honestly. It's really easy to sell honestly as the CEO, because you're not tempted by the transaction. You're forced to take a holistic view. Unless the transaction is the one that's going to help you make payroll and you're on that edge. Then you got to be careful. These games are life or death games at that level, so it's a different kind of thing.  It's fascinating to me that when I sell something, people go, "Oh, you just sold that because you're the CEO." I don't know. I can't unbecome the CEO. I guess I could. I could quit and see whether they'd hire me back as a sales guy, but they probably wouldn't. They just go, "Well, you only sold $6 million last year, and you did that because you're the CEO, so we're not going to hire you." So I'd have to do something else. Go to work for you, maybe, or something like that. That'd be funny. It speaks to this very basic question, which is if you're using trust to dominate markets, you actually have got to be honest. And if the transaction temptation is too much for you, you're going to get dominated by somebody who figures out how to be honest. It's a huge competitive differentiator, is being straight up with folks. Then that means you've got to target well. You've got to target well and you have to be very efficient. So your sampling techniques to find out if you're targeting's any good, I've got to run really, really fast. This is actually the core of the Market Dominance Guy's thesis, is the reason you run conversation first is because it delivers information to you, and every conversation tells you almost automatically whether it's worthwhile having another conversation. So it's conversation first, not conversation lots, right? And a conversation as a sampling mechanism that allows you to reliably answer this question. Should we move forward or not in this relationship? That's the question on the table at all times.  So now the question is, how short a conversation can you have? How frequently can you have it, given that you cost money and your salespeople cost money in order to get that question reliably enough answered? Not perfectly answered, but sufficiently, reliably answered that you don't have a false negative problem that really hurts your business. That's why I always talk about the flow rate of conversations as being important within the math of sales. But it's also important for a completely different reason, which is, if you're not sampling the marketplace continuously, you are ignorant of change. Say your message stops resonating. This happened to us. When the COVID thing hit, everybody went home. Our standard opener was still okay. It needed to be changed a little, but our value prop, what we call the 27 second part of the pitch, and this is just a cold call. Not that important, but pretty important. And it went from something that people could listen to, to something that people couldn't listen to. It went from, "Hi, I'm the guy tapping you on the shoulder at the gas station and saying, 'Here's the additive that will get you a 10 times better gas mileage,'" to saying, "Hi, I'm the guy with the additive that gives you 10 times better gas mileage," and saying it to somebody who's just been on a roll over accident in a 100 car pile up. It's the same message, just the context has changed. So we needed to change our message.  We changed it to talk about something that we do help with, we think, at least you could be curious about, which is the problem of managing a work from home sales team. Totally different. "Your car is upside down, but I think I have a couple of hooks here and a jack and I get your car back up on its wheels." Having done that your car is drivable again, you have the freeway to yourself. Would you like to be able to go faster? It's actually a very different thing, but you're not out there in the front lines as the leader and you're just staring at spreadsheets or numbers, you'll miss this stuff. And this is where the competition is. Somebody once told me, a business fundamentally is a sword fight in the dark room. The only time you see anything is when there's a clash of steel and enough sparks to get some dim outlines. So you better be in the fight. You can't be outside just listening to it. Corey Frank (08:00): Well, speaking of taking advantage of opportunities, we have talked before we started recording here about this massive amount of capital that is seemingly invisible to the economists and the journalists and the politicians today that is pouring into the United States. I think now would be a good time to chat a little bit about that, Chris, because I think our listeners would certainly want to kind of see again that high mountain air, the second piece that has really kind of inspired you as of late to see the invisible, so to speak. Chris Beall (08:34): Yeah, let me share my screen here, because this is really kind of shocking, at least to me. So I got up a few weeks ago, I think it was three or four on a Saturday. And sometimes on Saturdays, I don't know what it is about Saturday morning, but I'll wake up sometimes and think, "There's something really bugging me." And I was listening to and watching all the doom and gloom going on out, and I thought, "I'm not seeing the world this way, but I don't have any numbers to back it up," so I thought I'd go get some numbers.  So the way I was seeing the world, and that I'm still seeing the world is that we had a bad, bad disease in our economy called commuting. And you would never have designed it [inaudible 00:09:11] ever. Nobody would ever say, "I've got a great idea. We have a lot of ways for people to interact with each other, with voice and with video and they're pretty much universal that can reach into almost every home. Gosh, we got all this, but I have an idea. I think, let's do this. Let's take 3000 pounds of steel and put some rubber tires on it and an engine in it and then take 30 minutes or there abouts each day and sit in that thing with some danger to ourselves and let's sit in that thing and let's all get together so that our three pound brain can be near some other three pound brains so that we can look at each other when we talk to each other, but we could even do that with video. So I guess maybe so we can smell each other or touch each other, because those are the two things that you can do for sure up close and personal. And we can sit in conference rooms together, except some of the people on the other end of the speaker phone will feel left out." So you would never have designed it. So my question was, "Well, what if it went away? What if it's gone away?" And I know a lot of people are saying, "Well, this is COVID and it's temporary," and so forth. I became pretty convinced that the massive collapse of what I call the commute economy is real and it's done. And I looked at it from two perspectives.  So one is, what do CFOs really not like? By and large, they don't like leases for office space on the balance sheet. And if you've ever tried to get out from under a lease, when for whatever reason, your business, you had ... we did it back in 2014 when we left our San Mateo office and decided that having all those people together didn't make any sense. That was pretty painful. It's always painful to get out from under a lease. The liability is just not fun to have. And CFOs don't like it.  The other thing CFOs don't like is just waste, depending especially on head count. So I just went out and started researching this question, which was so ... are the really numbers that tell us that the commute economy had costs? And what about productivity? Are people more productive in the office? And I'd run into this, and not even a study. Just these guys at Prodoscore that I happen to know, P-R-O-D-O-S-C-O-R-E. You should go check them out if you want to know whether people are being productive or not. They'd come in and tested us as a company. And by the way, they found out that John T McLaren, our Senior VP of Sales rep, he's also the President now that I think about it. Anyway, John T was the most productive person they'd ever seen, is what they said. I thought that was pretty interesting. They have automation that measures productivity, and whether it measures it absolutely or relatively, that is even if it's not an absolute number, it would be able to tell if productivity had changed up or down.  So they said that they had a 100 million data points that showed that there was productivity gain of 47% from people who had gone to work from home because of COVID. 47% productivity gain is insane. And there's no consultant on earth who wouldn't dominate the entire planet if they could offer a 47% productivity gain across any workforce, people seek 3%, right? 4% is a big number, but 47%? And this is measuring what people actually do. So, that was shocking.  But then I also thought, "Well, what about the cost of commuting? What if the knowledge workers just in the US didn't have to commute?" So I went out to the government sources and here and there, and I put together this spreadsheet that you're looking at. And it's out there on LinkedIn. You can find it. It's in a post that I did back then. And I'll probably repost it, maybe we'll repost it and make it easy to find, but pretty simple. It says there's 48 million knowledge workers, and they commute for 26 minutes on average each way, as we all know in bigger cities it's a lot more than that. So I just took it up to hours and said, "Okay, well, $50 an hour, times 48 million knowledge workers, times 199 hours. What is that? 9 billion labor hours and $478 billion of labor that's wasted commuting." And that's kind of crazy, if you think about it, right? It's hard to find $478 billion. That's bigger than the bail out on the Great Recession of 2007, '08, '09, whenever that thing was. That bail out was $250 billion, $300 billion, depending on how you count it. Right? Then they have to drive all over the place. And I thought, "That's no big deal." And then I calculated it out, and it's like, hey, just at the standard 57.5 cents of mileage reimbursement, that's another $184 billion. And then I decided to just throw in something as an ancillary, kind of get a feel for it more than anything else, which is, so what percentage of those people have kids and those kids need some care when parents are commuting just when commuting. And the answer's probably yes, that's $33 billion. So the direct costs are $695 billion, right? But the rest of the workforce also was delayed in commuting. So what if they were spending 25% too much time, actually 33% too much? What if they can save 25% of their commute time? Everybody who has to commute just by commuting on roads that aren't full of knowledge workers. And I think that's pretty realistic. We're all seeing it now. And the answer is, there's another $117 billion of savings. So the commute savings both directly from knowledge workers not commuting, no labor and mileage, then I threw a one childcare thing. I bet I could have much more if I felt like it. And then the impact on others from us knowledge workers clogging up the roads with our 3000 pounds of steel, and I'm not even by the way, getting into what comes out of those cars and all of that, just ignoring that. Corey Frank (14:45): So the rental costs for commercial real estate and all the office supplies, all those hard G&A that also contribute to this is incredible.   Chris Beall (15:55): Yeah. And this number looked big to me. And then I went over to the productivity number and just looked at, well, how much revenue to companies make per employee? And for us knowledge workers, that's about $200,000. So the revenue potential from work from home is $14 trillion just improve productivity, $14 trillion. And I said, "Yeah, but the companies only get to keep the gross margin, gross profit." So gross margin average for US companies, 47%. So it's only $6 trillion, and we add that to our $813 billion of savings. And you get $7.445 trillion of free money for the economy.  Now I hear people already saying, and some people say, "Well, it doesn't get spread around." Of course, it doesn't get spread around immediately. It ends up, a lot of it in the hands of companies, and what do companies do with it? They tend to reinvest because they're ambitious, and they reinvest in things like hiring people and they go out and try to expand their market. Some of them might even choose to go dominate markets. You never know.  So the fact of the matter is, it's a lot of money. How much? Well, $7.5 trillion is just too much to think about. So 2008 stimulus, oh, I'm sorry. It was only $152 billion. So it's 46 times as much money as we spent to bail out the economy in 2008. It is a little bit less than the total debt, $9.5 trillion of all US companies. The one I really like is total 2019 government spending $4.4 trillion. So this is bigger than the US federal government, almost twice as big. And it comes into our economy, it's already happening as far as I can tell. No economist has weighed in on this. I'm not an economist. This could be completely wrong for some reason I don't understand, but I think we're seeing it already. And I think it's going to surprise us. What is it going to produce for business? Well, the opportunities for dominance go way up. That's for sure. Because as the economy gets stimulated, I suppose is the right term, by the $7.5 trillion a year coming in, I should have broken it down by the minute. It's a fair amount of money per minute at that. I mean, here people are freaked out about $1.5 trillion of student college loan debt. So one year of these savings would pay that off six times. [crosstalk 00:18:16] Corey Frank (18:16): That's incredible. That's a hidden $7.5 ... you found it in the virtual couch cushions of America. Chris Beall (18:24): Yeah. The virtual couch cushions of America. I think one of the things that we don't understand about our economy is how it really works. So we measure it by GDP and all these old measures that kind of don't really capture it very well. But one thing we know that economists and economic models are built to not do is they're built to not recognize the impact of sudden change, because one thing that can't happen in economies, except from suddenly declared war and it has to be big and fast, is sudden change. So the economic models make a lot of assumptions, that nothing has changed, but what if something changed that's really positive and made a big difference, like suddenly people like me can live in port towns in Washington because my fiance doesn't have to commute to Bellevue. Think about the economic impact on port towns, and I have a couple of people who, we do well in life and we'll spend a lot more money here. What does that mean to the local economy? Well, I guarantee you one thing, it wouldn't have happened without the collapse of the commute economy. Corey Frank (19:32): We started this conversation, and this is where we'll probably end it today is with the Milk-Bone and the dog at a gate, and you've come full circle here in that for a company who is struggling thinking about, perseverating about moving their team to a work from home model, oftentimes the gate is open. The spreadsheet I think that you walked is through here, is just walk around the gate, come on in, the water's fine.  The downside that a lot of the hesitancy that a lot of companies would push back on, Chris, is the culture and the continuity and the three pound brain, there is some benefit from being next to another three pound brain. And that's my feeling of involvement, my feeling of social status and things of that nature. And I think we had ... a lot of those could probably addressed if they listened to last week's episode with [inaudible 00:20:29], and the wonderful culture that he's building with his organizations. But, what do you say to that just briefly when, okay, I can go around the gate. I see the hard costs. It makes sense from a P&L, from an EBITDA perspective, but man, there is real atomic weight from that three pound brain being next to three pound brain. Chris Beall (20:48): Well, we're going to have to try it for a while, because going back to the office is expensive and dangerous. Dangerous in a funny way. And the plaintiff's bar is itching to go after an employer who forces people to come to the office and one of them happens to get sick. I mean, they are armed and ready to go. Anybody who's familiar with how the plaintiff's bar works and how class action works knows what is about to happen.  So folks voluntarily coming back in, still there's some legal risks, just is because who knows what assurances you may have inadvertently provided, what warning labels you might've had to have, what mitigations you could have done that you failed to do and not knowing about them, by the way, might not be a defense, right? So you're about to learn something auto manufacturers have known for a long time, which is that you're responsible for safety if you offer something where there are safety issues that are different from what was expected. And since no one knows what to expect, this could be problematic for anybody who's bringing folks back.  Secondly, every mitigation is untested. There are no tested mitigations. I saw a beautiful article in the Puget Sound Business Journal that showed a picture, an infographic, and it showed the 11 mitigations that you should consider before you bring people back to the office. And they were things like coming in with a new HVAC system that had different kinds of filtering in it and circulated air differently. Really? For a year and a half or two years of benefit? I mean, if you're going to bring them back, okay, but really? New HVACs so the three pound brains can sit next to each other, but not infect each other? Think anybody's ever tested that? I don't think anybody's ever tested that, right? [crosstalk 00:22:35] Not one of these mitigations has been tested. Coffee machines that you operate with your smartphone. I don't think anybody's ever done laboratory testing or in real life testing of the impact of that on respiratory virus transmission. So this is just stuff people are going, they're kind of waving their hands and saying, "But, but, but, but, but." Now, remember there's a finger on the scale, which is the other side of those big leases. So you should expect to see a lot of stories about how essential it is and possible it is to bring people back into the office. But I tell you from a scientific perspective, again, all 11 of those mitigations have got to be done and all 11 have got to work, and then you have to not get a little bad luck, like, well, it turns out they stood next to somebody in the Starbucks downstairs. It's unlikely. You're going to have to learn to live with it anyway.  Culturally, what do you do? I know in sales what you do. It's simple. I'll show you. I'll show you. Let me go show you, because I have it right up here on my screen right now. So here is an answer, and I admit this is a commercial. I apologize for it. But it's an answer. For your sales team, nothing is more energizing than talking to people.  Corey Frank (23:50): That's correct.  Chris Beall (23:51): This is our team today, and here's an SDR's talked to 25 decision makers. Set one meeting, so they had a moment of excitement. It's had 14 followups. It's Friday, people tend to be a little busy on Friday. I got two referrals, and had 5 minutes from 24 seconds after pushing the button on average before he talked to somebody, Josh Lyman did. And I'm sure during that time he was doing something else that's useful.  It's kind of funny. We talk about culture. Like culture is about ping pong tables or it's about drinking beer in the conference room or whatever it happens to be, which I think people gave up a while ago to for safety reasons. Fact of the matter is, people, as Deming told us, they worked for pride of workmanship, and if they have good work to do, and they're having fun doing it, and they're being managed in a way that's fair and reasonable and encouraging, then the core of culture is there. And that's the number one thing is work culture actually can be about work, and it can be about what somebody loves to do.  If you're in sales, you hopefully love to talk with people. And so here, my team today, they've talked to 168 people as we see down here. That's a lot of conversations, right? Here's what also is culturally kind of good about this. They didn't have to make those 5,655 frustrating dials and navigate those fun systems. That was done for them. So that's kind of pleasant. And then another thing is, people like to be able to help and they like to be helped. If you need help, you're stuck. You need to learn. If somebody notices you need help, and there's a lot of ways to do that. So say your boss or your coach could come in and say, "You know what? This guy, Sean McLaren, he's our chairman. Man. He's kind of a lot of busy callbacks today." By the way, Sean McLaren really is our executive chairman who really does talk to people. So today he had six conversations and set one meeting. That's pretty good, but he's having a hard time keeping people on the phone. I wonder if Sean's got issues today? Is it a little slow? Is his voice bad? Well, this one can't be correct. That's a minute long conversation. So maybe he just coded it wrong.  These are short. I have a feeling if I listened to one, and we're not going to do that right now out of respect for Sean's awesomeness, but hey, if Sean needed a little help, just thinking about his state of mind today, his mood or whatever, then we can help him. Right? Then here's another thing is, it's fun to do work that counts. It's not much fun to do work that doesn't count. So today this team, it's 5,655, and now it's gone up by a couple. It's only three in the afternoon after all. Would that have been culturally marvelous for them to just gone to voicemail 1,825 times today or navigated to voicemail 1,567 times, or been told by a gatekeeper, "I'm sorry. Corey is not in today. I'm not available." None of that looks like fun, right? So culturally that's part of it.  Now the rest of it is this, human beings actually don't have a sense of smell like the other animals, the other mammals. So your dog can smell you across town. And I'm speaking literally here. I had a dog once that freaked out, ran off in a thunderstorm and she went all the way back up to our mountain home, which was 17 miles away of complex navigation involving roads and trails and God knows what. And she went to every neighbor's house and sort of knocked on the door to check to see if we were there, because we were out of town. Imagine that, right? Corey Frank (27:29): Yeah. Well, she knows that there's a bunch of Milk-Bones on the other side of the fence. That's probably [inaudible 00:27:33] that she couldn't get to. Yeah. Chris Beall (27:34): Exactly. Well, what was she really doing? She was following a scent trail. She had mapped a scent map, not a trail. She had mapped the scent. She had only been up and down that road one time in her life, one time up, one time down. That was it. This is a dog who had never been to town before, before we moved to town. So she remembered how to get back to that complex mountain home by knowing the smell of everything along the way. So dogs are really, really good at this. You go to the airport, they don't have a trained human who's going up and down in the security line, sniffing everybody. They have a dog, right? Humans are not the most brilliant in the world at smelling each other and figuring out if they're sincere to be trusted. But we are geniuses, like dogs will never be, at hearing each other's voices and seeing each other's faces, and the voice and the face are the two ways that we express ourselves in terms of what really counts, which is, do I care about you? And if you want to have a great culture, let your people know you care about them and let them tell you they care about you and about the mission. And you just do it in natural ways, in the normal course of business, like getting on these zooms by just talking on the phone.  Everybody in your company who is physically capable of hearing and seeing, and that's not everybody, I get it that that's really tough for folks who have vision problems and hearing problems, but of the rest of, of the mass of folks at your company who don't, they're so good at interpreting sincerity and good intentions and meaningful direction from tone of voice, for the same reasons cold calling works, it's possible and easy to project fantastic culture to a remote workforce.  And in fact, you have more time to do it during the two hours you would've been commuting, let's break it down. I have a team in North America, personally of 28 people. So in two hours, how many five minute conversations are there? There's 24. That's pretty cool. Think about that. That's 24 times I can spend having five conversations. And in those five minutes, each one of those minutes pays seconds carrying 20,000 bits of emotional information, terabits of emotionally important information can be transmitted.  Having meetings where everybody gets to participate, this is one of the beauties of zoom, in a standard conference call, the standard conference room, participation is dominated by the physically most dominant person. They stand, they take over the room, they interrupt, they talk, they go to the whiteboard, they dominate. In a hybrid where there's a speaker phone in the desk or the table in the conference room, you get a two tier economy, two tier culture. People in the room, and the people in the mushroom, people in the mushroom don't have a shot. They don't exist. They will never have the floor in any significant way.  On a regular conference call, just voice only, it's tricky. You need a good moderator, but in a zoom call, it's so natural. Everybody sees each other's face. And normally the contribution level per person goes way up and people feel more included. So I think making an inclusive culture is actually easier, and some of the biases that we have about people are a little, shall we say muted in this environment and biases are not the greatest thing in the world. So I actually [crosstalk 00:30:58]- Corey Frank (30:58): Happened 10 years ago, then you could argue that the urgency to go back to the commuter economy would have been so much more urgent, but because the tech stack is so much more in place and plumbed and accepted that there really isn't many excuses to go back to the way we were. Chris Beall (31:17): When you work the numbers, it says don't do it. When you work to culture, it says don't do it. If your work productivity, it says don't do it. We solved this problem a long time ago. We would never have designed it like we had it. Clogged cities with roads you can't get through on, people frustrated, not seeing their children, not getting enough exercise, not eating well, stopping at the bar on the way home, sucking down the lattes because they're bored. Let's face it, that was not healthy. It wasn't economically healthy and it wasn't otherwise healthy. Corey Frank (31:48): Well, if that's the case, then I tell you what, since we're up against the clock here, Chris, by the next time we do this, then your background needs to be changed to the new virtual commuter economy. And I expect, I think all of our listeners expect a view of Discovery Bay for port towns, as opposed to the crowded streets there that we see behind you now. Chris Beall (32:11): Exactly, you're going to be looking out towards a Protection Island, and I think we got a lot of protection that's actually built in. It's tragic what's going on with all the cases of people getting sick, people dying, but I do believe that this bunch of people worked hard to create a situation where we can work from anywhere and we can contribute to society no matter who we are. I believe there'll be a next wave that we haven't even touched yet, which is inclusiveness across society. There are so many smart people who don't contribute, don't get to contribute because they don't live where the rich businesses are. And I've done some experiments around that about, oh, back in 1991 and '92 that proved to me for sure that there is no difference in talent among all of our different communities that we have in this country or anywhere in the world. And I think one of the side effects of work from home and work from anywhere is going to be that more people are going to find great careers as knowledge workers who are currently being left out. And I think that's another wave that's coming, and nobody's seeing it coming.  Corey Frank (33:23): That's great. Okay. Well, we have a topic to discuss for next time. In the meantime, I'm going to go search for my share of the $7.5 trillion that you say is buried somewhere in the aether, in the virtual couch cushions of America. So until next time. Chris Beall (33:40): I'm going to go load up with the [inaudible 00:33:42]. Talk to you later. Corey Frank (33:40): Beautiful.  Chris Beall (33:40): Thanks, partner.  Corey Frank (33:44): Thanks, Chris.   

The problem in sales is that the desire for the transaction puts most salespeople already behind the eightball. When he was growing up, Chris' family put up a chain-link fence originally for the goats, but a few years later it helped with the dogs and inspired an experiment. Chris opened the gate 30-40 feet away from where he put a dog bone over the fence. His dog tried to go over, under, and through the fence, but couldn't get to the bone. But it also didn't back up enough to see the open gate. This is what most salespeople do. ----more---- Use your expertise to back up and explore rather than trying to drive their nose through the fence to the juicy steak, the commission on the other side which is counter to the role you want to be in. Most salespeople are screwed up, and most sales compensation programs are screwed up. They encourage people to go through the fence rather than looking for the gate. 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 (00:34): Welcome to the episode of the Market Dominance Guys, where the best in sales today comes together. We have Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. So Chris, first of all, good afternoon, got a lot going on in your life, which we may get to in this episode. But before we click the record button, we're talking about sales. And the problem in sales today is the nature of sales in and of itself, is the fact that the desire for the transaction, which most salespeople are already behind the eight ball. So why don't you set that up a little bit better, just so I understand what that high mountain air has given you from the latest riff. Chris Beall (01:18): Actually, no high mountain air here. We're moving from Seattle. We're moving to Port Townsend because we can. And part of that is, I'll call it, the great work from home migration, where folks are able to live wherever they want now, if they're knowledge workers. Employers have lost the moral authority to tell people to come in and risk their lives in order to get their three pounds of brain physically closer to another bunch of three pounds of brain by moving 3000 pounds of steel for 26 minutes each way. Corey Frank (01:44): That's correct. Chris Beall (01:45): That was a strange idea to start with. You never would have designed it that way. If you'd thought about it for a minute, you'd never have said, "I got a great idea." People could talk remotely to each other and do all sorts of things, collaborate and do stuff. But, I got a better idea. Let's move 3000 pounds of steel for 30 minutes, in order to get those brains close enough, that the way they talk to each other's right through the air, rather than through the telephone, it's finally been shown by necessity to be bankrupt, and we're never going back. But the problem with sales, remember one of my reps once asked me in Denver when I'd come back from flying across country. Remember when we used to do that? Corey Frank (02:27): I vaguely recall. Yes, absolutely. Chris Beall (02:28): Yeah. We were all sitting together and talking about how to get better. And he said, "What's the one thing you would change about us, to make us like you, as effectively as you do?" And I said, "Oh, it's simple. I would have you believe in the value of what we do, or the potential value of what we could provide, for the person that we're talking with as much as I do." So I get it. And then they buy more. So no, it's the purpose of you believing that is for them to buy more. It won't work unless you're a psychopath, it doesn't work. Corey Frank (02:59): So it's not just product knowledge. Chris Beall (03:01): No, it's the opposite. And product knowledge is, actually, you need to have confidence that the product that you represent has an above average chance of being part of a potential solution. And that you might explore it, you might find part of within the next conversation. And the next conversation could tell you enough, to tell you to move forward or not move forward. That's all you could do. And I call it the dog, the fence, and the phone problem. So when I was a kid, I grew up out in the desert, North of Scottsdale, what is now Scottsdale. But back then it was way out there. And we finally put up a chain-link fence, cause our goats were a problem. And they were a problem, like they'd climbed up on this realtors convertible T-Bird. They have sharp hooves and it's not so great when they're dancing around them on the convertible roof. And that costs my parents a little money. Then they went next door. We had one neighbor, it's kind of funny, within a mile and one neighbor and they were next door and went into their garage and sort of started up fire. And this guy's ham radio set, it wasn't that great, right? So we put up a chain-link fence, and that meant our dogs were inside the fence. And one time I did an experiment, it was a very cruel experiment, but I was kind of an experimental kind of kid. I think I got it from my mom, the woman who used to say, "Chris has a lot of room out in the desert to bury a child." I thought, "I'm going to open the gate over here. And then I'm going to come down about 30, 40 feet away and put a dog bone, one of those milk bones, on the other side of the fence and see what my dog does." And the dog tried to go through the fence, tried to go over the fence, tried to go under the fence, but never got the idea that it should back up and look around and see the open gate and go through the open gate. I think that this is how, sadly, most salespeople behave. Rather than trying to find the opening that may not be there, and if it's not there, use your precious time to go find another fence. The opening that might lead to a place from which a mutual solution can be understood. You're taking the role of the expert. You're the specialist, but not using that role in a corrupt way to, to try to manipulate or force somebody into a transaction. Just using that expertise in order to explore; that means backing up as often as going forward and not just trying to drive your nose through the fence, cause there's a transaction on the other side. That juicy steak on the other side, that transaction that commission, often make salespeople behave in a way that is directly counter to the role that they might claim that they're staking out as a consultative salesperson. If you're being consultative, the first thing you have to admit is that there's a reasonable shot that you can't help. Qualification is really answering the question. Does it make enough sense right now, from what I understand, to answer the question maybe in a positive way, maybe yes. That's worth going forward with the next conversation. If not, they're disqualified. So all the normal qualification dance, and all that, is just garbage, it makes no sense whatsoever. If you sell anything interesting, then I don't have a budget for it. I mean, that's just ridiculous. The idea that somebody has a budget for something that actually takes a salesperson to sell, you have to have a budget for it. They can go click on it and some online, whatever, and buy it that way. And even then if they know everything about what you're selling, you definitely can't be the expert. You can't be providing the value of knowledge, and then the value of a willingness to explore. So I think most salespeople are screwed up, but most sales compensation programs are screwed up this one way. They encourage the dog to go through the fence instead of to look for the gate. Corey Frank (06:52): And then, so that desire for the transaction generates maybe alternative behaviors that are not conducive to establishing trust. Let alone curiosity. Chris Beall (07:04): Yeah. I mean, they're fundamentally dishonest, right? If I tell you something for the purpose of getting you to do something, instead of for the mutual purpose of us understanding something, getting it on the table and being able to talk about it, how is that different from me physically grabbing you and forcing you to go through a door I want you to go through or... [inaudible 00:07:24] Chris Beall (08:23): There's really no difference. I'm saying, I'm in a position of superior power and that I know more than you do, and I'm going to use that power to cause you to do what I want. Now I could say sincerely, what I want is always good for you, but that's unlikely to be the case. Honestly, it's unlikely to be the case and, discovery, I think is a funny term. In discovery, we tend to think, what are we discovering? Let's discover the stuff about this person that helps us sell to them. Let's discover their pain. Maybe their pain isn't what's relevant to them right now. Maybe there's some surrounds some context, some way of understanding the situation that will lead to a realization: "Hey, there's something much bigger that we could be doing now." So I think the false negative problem is the one that dominates sales, not the false positive problem. False positives waste your time, false negatives waste the marketplace. There's a big difference between the two, a false negative means I left the best deal, potentially, to my competitor. It's a negative to me, because I didn't ever engage in a way that gave it a shot. It's a positive to my competitor cause it's so good, and now I've walked away. And yet we do nothing in sales about the false-negative problem. And that goes all the way back to something we've talked about before; the original purpose of sales was not to dominate markets, and to shape the valuation of companies. The original purpose of sales was to dispose of inventory in generating flow of gross profits. And when those two come in collision with each other, the old one tends to win because it's tied to the compensation plan and the belief systems of salespeople. So every sales book you pick up , by and large, will tell you to do something, to manipulate somebody in order to get them to transact with you. And don't worry. It's okay. Corey Frank (10:14): So, but that's pretty widespread. I mean, that's what we train newer sales reps to do in order to be successful, especially in a commoditized environment. If I'm selling whatever the commodity of the day is, let's just go back 15 years ago, long-distance services or transport services or a Microsoft service provider, for instance. I can get the various types of services from many different types of providers. And so why does it engender that type of inauthenticity in order to sell? Is it because of the pressure of how do I differentiate? Chris Beall (10:53): I think so. The fundamental failure of not being differentiated or not knowing your differentiation, I actually have never seen a real commodity. I don't know what they are. My example is always my breakthrough script for coffee beans. If I'm the coffee bean guy, and I'm delivering the coffee beans it's probably something like this. I believe we've discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the fundamental risk that your most loyal customer is going to walk away disappointed because you didn't have their favorite grind. Does that sound undifferentiated? Of course not. Corey Frank (11:29): No, not at all. Chris Beall (11:30): It makes you think that, maybe, there's something different. Not about the beans, although you do get the idea that I will have a selection that makes sure that your customer's favorite grind is either in there right now or will be discovered. It does give you the idea that my deliveries will be accurate and on time, because otherwise you might be out of that particular kind of bean. Corey Frank (11:52): So in other words, Chris, if I hear you correctly, whether you're in a commodity or not, is less relevant to the fact that how you communicate the messaging around an economic, a strategic or an emotional message, that really is where the differentiator happens. So even if you do find yourself in a commoditized situation, your superior messaging work should be able to pull you out of it. To communicate to the prospect where I don't necessarily have to be inauthentic. Chris Beall (12:25): I don't need to be inauthentic in any way. I'm trying to sell one product, which is the meeting. And the reason is the psychological difference between me, coming at the prospect, talking to the prospect, and then coming with me on a journey of exploration is radically different. It's possible for somebody to comfortably confess in a conversation that they voluntarily come to. And it is a matter of confession. Even when we talk about folks' pain, they don't wear their pain on their sleeve. They really don't. In fact, in business, your pain is a secret, because it's a weakness and folks in business don't advertise the weaknesses. So you must be trusted before somebody is going to tell you their weakness in business. You could use it against them. You could go out and tell the world, that Corey's coffee shop is located on a corner that doesn't get any traffic, and the Starbucks across the street is killing him. Right? Don't go to Corey's. If you confess those things to me, I could be the enemy. I could take that information and do something bad with it. So if I'm coming to your coffee shop, Corey's Clever Coffee, and I don't have an open mind about your business and you don't have a willingness to trust me to tell me what is true in your business. Maybe what's true in your business is this: "Chris I'm really frustrated. And over there at Starbucks, they got the big line going out the door. I have confidence that when you come into my coffee shop, not only get better coffee, but it's quieter. A lot of people are annoyed by the music over there, and by all the people going in and out. There's better places to sit, I got more comfortable chairs and they're set up in a way that promotes conversations." "And I don't throw you out in 30 minutes if you've been hanging out too long. And, by the way, my WiFi is really fast. It bothers me, that folks aren't coming in here." Now, that's an interesting conversation. You're confessing a bunch of weaknesses about your coffee shop. And if I'm the really smart coffee guy, I say, "So is there ever a problem? You're trying to run this really quiet shop. Those espresso grinders are really loud and I've heard some people complain about that is the other shops. Is that something that, given that you're trying to have a quieter environment, that is a problem for you, or have you handled that?" "Oh, let me think about that," says Corey. Well, it turns out that I know somebody who has an ultra-quiet grinder and it works really well with all the beans that we sell. In fact, we roast them a little bit extra and they grind a little bit quieter. Now that's a coffee person listening to this, I'm just making this stuff up. I don't know anything about grinding coffee. I do know about sitting in coffee shops, I'm wishing it was quiet. That's just me. My point is, where do you get to the point, Corey, where you're willing to confess that weakness or those problems to me somewhere inside that discovery conversation with that exploratory conversation? And if I'm bucking for a transaction, why would you do that? If you think my purpose is to get you to buy something, why would you confess to me? And if you don't confess to me, how do we have any problems to work on? Corey Frank (15:44): If I sold you, Chris, are you an easy sell? Do you see yourself as an easy sell? Do you see yourself as pretty uncomplicated emotional mechanism to get to that trust? Or are you a natural, typical left brain, maybe cynical, and I want to buy and I want to be sold? How do I sell to Chris Beall? And for those who are listening, this is probably something you should take notes because this guy is the CEO of a very large company with an unlimited budget. Let's get everybody the keys to the kingdom. So how do I sell Chris? Chris Beall (16:20): Well, first of all, you do have to approach me as something that makes me think just a little bit. I have to be intrigued. I have to be curious. Secondly, you've got to do it in a way that is open about what it is that you're doing. I really object to somebody who's asking me the five tricky questions that box me into agreeing with them. Well, wouldn't you agree, Chris, that it's superior to have your children left with some money after you die, then being destitute and on the street? I've actually experienced that recently, and I'm not an easy sell once you do that. Once I decide you're trying to manipulate me, I'm really, really difficult. But, if you want to talk about business and the challenges that we might be having, I'm easy. Now, I'm not easy to come up with a big first transaction. I tend to want to try the relationship out. Because a lot of stuff that sounds great, turns out to be harder than you think. I don't often think people are deceiving me. I just think things tend to be hard. That is, solved problems are less hard than unsolved problems. So by its very nature, the problems that I have that are currently unsolved are the hard ones. And therefore, they probably don't avail themselves to easy solutions. So when somebody offers me an easy solution, I think that, "Could be so, but this problem could be a hard problem for some other reason." I'll flip it around. So, when we sell ConnectAndSell, we sell an easy solution to having lots more conversations, but that's not the problem. That's not a problem we're solving in and of itself. It is an advantage to have a lot more conversations, no doubt about it, but it gets us into the world of sales. And selling and dominating markets is not an easy problem. If it was, we wouldn't have this podcast, right? If, that were a trivial problem, "Oh, I think I'll just dominate this market." Oh sure. Choose a market of one. You've got a pretty good shot. Once you get to two people, it starts to get a little diverse. At 10, this starts to get pretty hard, right? So it's a fundamentally hard problem. I have a belief, all fundamentally hard problems have fundamentally hard math at their core. They either have some chain that everything in the chain has got to work. And so the probability of the whole thing working is the multiplicative outcome of taking all those probabilities in the chain and multiplying them together. So if I have a six-step chain, and then it's a 50% chance that any given step will fail, the odds of success are very, very small. Here's my chance of succeeding: one over two times, one over two times, one over two times, one over two times, one over two times one over two. What is that? Well, that's one over 64, right? So one out of 64 times I'll get all the way through that chain of events with only six events in it and a 50-50 shot at each one working. but it's only one out of 64 times, the whole thing works. And I just have to think about the world that way. I think people in business should think about the world more in terms of probability or bets and not the single debt, but looking at value chains and asking about dependencies. If this has to happen in order for this to happen. If I must get Corey to come to a meeting, and then if I must get him from that meeting to accept a test drive. And if he must actually show up for the test drive with his people, which he has to provide us with the data. And if he can get his legal team to actually sign the test, drive DocuSign. And on and on and on. I go down there and I say, "Well, what is dependent on what?" And there's a problem that people have. This is one of the other problems of business: salespeople want to just go one step to the transaction, but analytical types want to see how many steps they can put in a process because it shows they're really thorough. Corey Frank (20:32): Sure. Oh yeah. Chris Beall (20:33): And if you put enough steps in a process, one thing that's guaranteed; process will never be executed successfully in a finite amount of time. Corey Frank (20:42): You got your too many variables into the system and it's going to be challenging. Certainly right. VCs are notorious for that or private equity. Hey, fetch me another rock. Hey, if you give me the cohort of this year, and this year's worth of revenues, then bring it back. And meanwhile, they're going to use that as the cramdown, as we've talked about in the previous episode. So I think that's a good springboard into the math of sales then. As we've always talked about, as you've always taught me here in these 40 odd episodes, right? Is that the limited variables in a system, I can predict if I put my major constraint or my main constraint in the business is trust-based conversations at scale. And so if I add that to the top of the funnel, it's logical that every other piece of the funnel, the math should restrict down to whatever the output is. And if I don't know or care about any of those variables in the system, then I'm going to be pretty much relegated to just sell more. Just whatever my marketing team is able to throw from an AdWords perspective. And, for this journey to be authentic, is only as strong as the weakest link. If my math isn't right, if my focus on the math isn't right, then maybe that's why sometimes I'm a little bit more inauthentic on my sales calls. Because I'm going to try to fix or try to artificially create some ratios in my calm, dial the conversation, conversation to page pitch, to meeting, et cetera. That really isn't naturally there. It's not naturally water-falling down. But, if I can be a little bit more manipulative, maybe I can help with some of these other ratios. Chris Beall (22:28): Exactly. I mean, that's such a perfect description. It is exactly analogous to the machine and the machine shop. Or are they in the factory that's supposed to take the blank and it's supposed to turn it into a tube, or whatever. I remember being in shop, a few years ago, that did that. And the blank was a titanium blank, and the tube was the barrel of the world's lightest sniper rifle. So it's less boring than [inaudible 00:22:54]. A sniper rifle you can hold at arms length on one hand, and balance on your thumb. That was a remarkable product. But, somewhere in there, this titanium blank comes in and it's got to be grilled in a very precise way to turn it into a tube. So, say instead of accepting what the machine does, the operator decides, "I'm not getting the yield I'm supposed to get. Out of every 100 of these that come in, 97 are supposed to go out as tubes that are good enough to be a barrel. But I'm only getting 92. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take the ones aside that didn't turn outright. And I'm going to take them over here, and I'm going to work from by hand. That's what I'm going to do. Why? Because, I want to make my number. I want to make my number." Well, do you really want to be the person who buys that sniper rifle that happened not to be making a standard process, but was rejiggered along the way by somebody who's trying to make his number? And that's how we make bad business in business. We force deals all the time, in order to make the number. Sometimes it's done through discounting. Sometimes it's done through overpromising. Sometimes it's done through downright lying. There's a reason that salespeople have a reputation, by and large, in the large, as not being truth-tellers. Because the focus on making the number provides a lot of temptation to not run the system, not run the process, and to instead rejigger the output and maybe fake it. Say, "Well actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the testing, so that now this appears to be within tolerances. Instead of being out, it's going to be in. And I'm going to ship them downstream." And, this is a problem that plagued manufacturing for years. And it's the problem that, I think, has actually finally been solved in manufacturing. I'm sure there's backsliding all over the place. But in manufacturing, where I used to live, you didn't mess around with the running process by intervening. And you went back and said, "Okay, what is it? What's the root cause?" This is like, this is what the Toyota production system taught everybody. And it's even used in hospitals now, and all sorts of places you wouldn't expect . They say, "Hey, let's report to the truth. Let's not report to a desired number. Let's report the truth." But sales is this last bastion where, since trust is such a big deal, and since the number is held out as the result, what's the number, right? What gets sacrificed? Well, we sacrifice trust in order to make the number. And we do it by producing false deals. We take good customers and turn them into bad customers. And, by doing the wrong deal, we do this. Everybody does this, by the way, because everybody has constraints on the business. One of the constraints is, you have to make enough money on the business. And, if you fail to do that, it doesn't matter how good you would have been. All prizefighters that are knocked out in the first round are equally good in the second round. That doesn't matter how good they would have been. They're all terrible. They win the same number of championship belts, zero. Corey Frank (26:07): Yeah. Zero, right. Chris Beall (26:09): So, you have this issue that has to be solved, but it's very rare that the company's issue of staying in business is actually tied tightly to individual reps needing to make the number. Where that came from, was as a way of assessing performance within the territory that had been granted. There's actually a way to buy the territory. That is, if I make my number this year or exceed my number, then I get the territory for next year and I get a bigger number. Why do I get a bigger number? It's assumed it's easier to grow a territory than it is to grow investors. So it was actually a purchasing mechanism, where this independent business person called the sales rep, purchases the territory in addition to enough compensation for their own business to stay alive. And they do it through "performance" by making the number. So there's an agreement that this territory is worth selling to you, if you bring this much revenue. And then, maybe, having clever schemes, some of it has to come from this product, and some from this product. And you put all these cool features in the comp plan, so to speak. But none of those features actually have to do with solving world customer problems. The assumption is: the product solves the problem and caveat emptor; buyer beware. Buyer beware doesn't work very well in the be-to-be world, where the buyer is increasingly less expert than the seller, because products are increasingly complex and interdependent. So the buyer must truly be able to trust the seller. And when the seller corrupts out and says, "I'd rather make the number, then tell the truth," problems happen. And they are problems, not for the seller, but problems for the business, the buying business and the selling business.  

In this episode, Corey and Chris continue their conversation with a high Beta Market Dominance Practitioner MaxSold CEO, Sushee Perumal. aka "the skinny kid from India," MaxSold CEO, Sushee Perumal starting with why he felt he could successfully start an airline and his escape route when that failed. We open with Chris tying together his tapping of the bells analogy and plunging into Sushee's story which ultimately leads to MaxSold's growing success through a path of science, rather than simply tossing out millions of marketing dollars hoping it will work. Chris reminds us, and Sushee agreed strongly that sometimes we have to wait before we can celebrate a win, funding, goals achieved. ----more---- Some of the questions Corey and Chris ask Sushee include: What do you do to regain laser focus on business? What does the end in mind look like? How do you get unstuck with your team? Sushee answered, "That's the hardest thing. The psychology of moving the people to the other side, how do we as a unit make the decision? It's not a force of will. Have we considered all the pros and cons of the lists? How can we articulate all the things that go into trying to make that decision? One big voice can overpower to convince people their way is the right way, but you still need to consider and hear from everyone to get their input. What are the unknown unknowns?" Market Dominance Guys are 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, 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 (01:04): Discover is whether you should continue to engage because the only currency we run out of all the time is time. And we get reminded of that all the time when something happens that reminds us, all we have is time, right? We've all had events like that in our lives. And so I just think it's fascinating that we often think it's about money, it's about data, it's about analysis, but when you come right down to it, it's usually about being humble, believing in what you offer as potential, that you are an expert at something, you have some value, and then having conversations to find out where the fit is. I call it tapping the bells. I think that we've said this before, but I'll say it again, if somebody presented you with the problem, I have a thousand bells, but only 10 of them are bells. 990 of them just look like bells. And we're going to put a bell up in the bell tower and it's going to have to ring once an hour on the first hour, twice on the second hour, and by the time we get up to noon, it's got to ring 12 times, and if it's made of clay, it's going to fall apart. Your job Sushee, without being able to do anything other than interact with the bells, is to figure out which ones are made of brass and which ones are made of clay. All you can do is tap the bells, right? That's the conversation. All you can do is have the conversation and see if it resonates. If it resonates, then it's worth moving forward and finding out if you like the other features for the thing. And I think you've just been exceptional at doing that through your career. Did you do that in the airline business? It seems to me, if you would ask five people for advice about starting an airline, six of them would have told you not to do it. Sushee Perumal (02:41): Absolutely. And I think that's the skill, as you said before, I tried to gather as much data as possible, and then decide if I'm going to do it anyway. Same thing with the airline, I was talked out of it by practically every single person I talked to about. And I said, you know what? I have all this data and all this information, so what's the worst that can happen, right? So I did exactly the same thing this, as I did with that, which is maximizing the opportunity while minimizing the risk. The escape route is this, so the worst that can happen is I need to wind things down and I've learned a few things. Similarly, with the use of the proceeds, we are trying to minimize risk with Rich, and the next conversation I'm going to go with him is asking him Rich, this sounds amazing, you're clearly an expert with it. What can we do with third of the budget that's been presented. Could we do it? Could we work on a component that you're the most confident in so that we can execute on that, show some wins and then double down on it. And then before we spend millions on radio and TV, let's try to figure out the economics and the map, the science behind this. Once we get that formula, then the problem shifts to figuring out if this thing can scale. And at what point are we getting the diminishing rate of return? Get back to the question about the airline, I made sure that similar advice I got from people who are strategy consultants, I reached out to the founder of WestJet, I've read every airline book that's ever been written and figured, Oh man, there is a lot of risk to it. But being a pilot, having the accessibility, let's start small. And I started small. I just put people into the Cessna 172, which was built in 1974, and did a viability test for flying people to the surrounding areas. This thing has legs, there was demand, and now let's get this financed. And that's when we entered the last 2007, 2008 financial crisis. And then I figured, this has been [inaudible 00:04:57] or put it on hold because it costs a bundle of money to finance an airline. Corey Frank (05:03): Does that mean you're going to have an airline for us later? Sushee Perumal (05:05): Absolutely. Corey Frank (05:06): It sounds like it still burns inside of you to do that. Sushee Perumal (05:10): Oh, it does. And mostly because of the accessibility I have. I want everybody to have it. Chris, in the last podcast, talked about going from Port Townsend to British Columbia and he was looking to... do I swim there? Do I get up on a paddleboard? I'm like, Chris, I can fly you up in 20 minutes. Corey Frank (05:34): Yeah. Sushee Perumal (05:34): The local convenience and the accessibility. If the opportunity is still there, and I need to go back at doing an industry scan and all of that, but I use the plane that I have access to on a regular basis. That's how we built MaxSold. We use a Cessna, like Chris uses ConnectAndSell. It's like how do we shorten that time to market dominance? Corey Frank (05:56): That's brilliant. Sushee Perumal (05:57): How do we get in front of as many people as we can to shake hands, kiss the babies, and learn and see how we can help solve their problem? And when you get face to face with somebody, when you're actually doing a tour of these houses or places they want to sell, we make this go whole lot faster than by any other means, than putting salespeople on the ground, training them, telling them about our approaches, all of that is just making those discovery calls in-person face-to-face, is what we were able to do with the Cessna. Corey Frank (06:33): That's brilliant. So when you look at MaxSold and the airline, I think for a lot of the folks who may not be that familiar with you, Sushee, they're going to assume that you come from a very wealthy family. You have access to unlimited streams of capital. You were born with the proverbial silver spoon. I think it would be helpful to frame exactly what kind of great story this is. Let's start at the beginning. Where did you come from and how did you end up as Auction King of North America? Sushee Perumal (07:03): Not quite yet. I'm a skinny kid from India. We lived in place that's no bigger than half the size of this room with not very much at all. And strangely enough, I think that fueled a lot of my entrepreneurialism because I saw my dad go from a super tiny place with not much at all to being able to golf every day and having chauffeurs and having the luxury, so I knew that... I've seen the evolution. Every three to four years, we would trade up, move up, live in better places, drive better cars. And I remember going from being on a bicycle, which is a very big... I think he had a motorbike, but not a nice motorbike, to having nice cars and that didn't happen overnight. It took many years. That's my beginnings. Not just learning and going back to what's the how can we do more with what we have? Because that's all we are going to get. Nobody's going to magically hand you a few million dollars to start a company or do things. We just have to use what we have and go at it incrementally, iteratively, and slowly build up Corey Frank (09:20): So you learned a lot of these traits from your father, then how did your father's influence and the role model that he was set you forth to inspire you to do the airline, and do all the other things leading up to MaxSold? Sushee Perumal (09:35): Growing up and I've read a lot of books where the prevailing mentality is stay within your lane, live within your means, but what I've been brought up with is it's not when everybody would start Mary had little lamb, I will start think big. What's the biggest swing you can take to... the world domination, market domination has been drilled into me as a child, right? When I learned the alphabet, and it was like, think big, world domination, you can achieve anything. So that gave me an incredible amount of confidence where I was able to reach beyond my levels of intelligence, and reach beyond what I think people have as artificial walls and boundaries and ceilings around them. So I never looked at those kinds of things as limitations. I called up the founder of WestJet, the airline, and this is a multi-million dollar publicly traded company. I called him up and figured out a way to get to him via networking and other things. And because that wasn't a boundary or an artificial thing that I had in saying, Oh, that person is unaccessible and who am I to call him? I just said what's the worst that can happen, right? That answer your question, Corey? Just the principles that I've been given and taught is to think big and do the market... And that's why Chris and I connected so well, because world domination. Corey Frank (11:01): I think of one of our earlier episodes, Chris and I talked about nature versus nurture from an entrepreneur perspective, and clearly the environment that you grew up with, your parents gave you that raw material, that raw DNA to fuel. And so when a market dominance message from the likes of Chris Beall come into your world, it's already a snug fit. It's already a fully snug locking mechanism, if you will. From your perspective on market dominance, knowing that Sushee is a fully high beta market dominance practitioner now. When you see you're a dealer in math, you're a dealer in exponents. So what do you see is the path that Sushee has as he's on this market dominance? What can he expect from continue to adhere to these principles, so to speak, just from a theoretical laboratory perspective, as an early practitioner here as he's dominated some of the markets that he's entered? Chris Beall (11:58): The first thing you can expect is that the parasites are going to try to come in because he's raised money. The number one risk hidden in every market dominance play is its attractiveness to parasites. So if I were to give Sushee one piece of advice, it's, you're the immune system, keep the parasites out. And you know exactly what I mean, right? They come cloaked in talent, in pedigree, and in a huge amount of self-interest. You can tell a parasite when they say they're a team player. That's a guarantee in an interview. If somebody says they're a team player, they're guaranteed to be a parasite. That's really very safe. That's the spiky proteins on the outside of the virus that tell you, it's bad. Don't take that one in. Don't breathe that in, that one's going to kill you, right? So that'd be number one. Number two is, and I think Sushee already knows this, but it's really interesting. Look at cycle times before you look at throughput for anything that you're experimenting on. Dominance comes in general, from driving denominators down rather than driving numerators up. Whatever cycle time you have now for some key activity, for whatever the bottleneck activity is, it's customer acquisition would be an example. You want to figure out how to get the cycle time down and paying attention to throughput. How many of them I can make per unit time is a secondary thing. Get to throughput after you have dominated cycle time and you really understand the cycle time issues around the bottleneck. There's only three things we can control in business other than our attitude and the company's attitude is generally controlled by the leader's attitude and the absence of parasites. The leader's attitude gives you everything you need as long as the parasites don't come in and suck the life out of it. So leader's attitude, no problem for Sushee. But Sushee has a really complex situation because he's got to do regional execution. It's an on-the-ground business. I've run one of these. I know what it feels like. I'd call it inherently heavy in a funny way. That is, even if the individual operating units are light, the nature of the business is that it's heavy because it has to be anchored in some place. There are cycle time issues around everything in that place, and there's cost issues that come with it. He figured out how to drive cycle time down in terms of using that Cessna, right? That's the thing you keep playing. The denominator is your enemy. Drive it to zero and you can get to infinity. That's what the math says in business. The numerator actually takes care of itself. The numerator's where you get more of something. You get network effects, you get market dominance effects through referenceability, you get scale effects. All those effects show up in the numerator, but dominance shows up by driving the denominator down. You'd get a lot more bang for your expended effort. And so cycle time may be on acquiring a customer, or a cycle time on setting up a new regional unit. Those things are going to be really key. If you can really stay focused on that, because every piece of advice you're going to get as a market dominance practitioner is going to be what I'll call it, numerator advice. Go get more of this, go plan for more of that, go to the channel because the channel is bigger than you are. Just all manner of things, because everybody is used to grinding on the numerator. That's why, by the way, if you don't understand this, those little- Sushee Perumal (15:33): Billboards. Chris Beall (15:35): Yeah, exactly. It's really an interesting problem because our minds go to what we can see, and we can see growth in the numerator, and the denominator is invisible. We don't really see cycle times, but we only have cycle times, throughput and quality. That's all we got. So once you figure out the quality equation, which you have to figure out first. It's like what's above threshold quality, and then stop thinking about quality immediately other than maintaining it. The next equation is how do I drive down cycle time on the core duty cycle of this business? Whatever it is that if I could wave a magic wand and have more of it, instead of seeking more of it, let's make the thing that makes it go faster. That would be it. Other than that, keep your experiments small, because big experiments yield confusing results. It's not that they're expensive, which is a problem, it's that they're confusing. We had this just happen the other day here, where we're doing an experiment around cleansing data, or calling in advance to make sure that you only have to call on the good stuff, right? And we conflated that experiment with three other variables, and somebody wanted to see if they could get this particular business value out of it internally, and blah, blah, blah. And next thing you know, we got bad science, right? So keep your science clean. And that means small experiments, because small experiments give clean results, so at least they have a shot. That's it. That's all I can tell you, Sushee, you got everything. Sushee Perumal (17:00): Well said. I'm going to replay this several times to my team when the podcast comes out. Corey Frank (17:07): It does bring up the next tangent we can finish here with is, the business as you've taken it over, and as you... we've talked about culture a little bit offline last week, and things that you're trying to do, certainly on the capital raise, things that you've been successful at, when you feel overwhelmed, or maybe a tad bit unfocused on all the different parameters or variables or inputs in the business? What does someone like Sushee do to level set and regain that laser focus on the business? Sushee Perumal (17:43): I look at it from a goals perspective. What is it that we are trying to achieve? What does the end in mind look like, and I just work backwards. Whether it's a way to market dominance, whether it's making a decision on where we're going to set up a call center, any of those things. And if it's overwhelming, I try not to introduce too much more information. I just look at what is the end state look like? How do we go at it with that end in mind, and then work backwards to figure out what are the pros and cons. What are we missing from the decision that needs to get made? Chris Beall (18:16): That's interesting. That's the essence of strategy, right? We've talked about strategy on Market Dominance Guys before. Strategy is always a list of steps, and it's essentially a plan to get to a goal. And the plan is not the tactics, the tactics are how you execute the steps. It's actually the intermediate steps, I call them resting places. If I get here, then I can see how... If I were there, I could get over there. And if I were there, I could get over there. I compare it to crossing a river. I used to spend a lot of time with a backpack on my back in the big mountains without any support, other than another guy and my legs and what was in the backpack, right? And you think the mountains would be the big obstacles, but it's not the case. It's the rivers that are the big obstacles. And when you come to a river, it's always unique. I'm talking about places where there are no bridges, right? No bridges at all. No human beings live there, and nobody's ever built a rope bridge. And so your biggest obstacle is always figuring out how to cross a river, because swimming with the backpack is a bitch, I can tell you. And talk about risk, there's downside and there's no upside. You aren't coming back if you ever go face down in the water with 90 pounds on your back. And the big strategy question was, Okay, is there a series of rocks? Even if three out of the first five steps come back toward the current shore, as long as the ultimate path across the rocks leads to the other side, I don't need to get closer to the other shore with each step. I need to get to a place I can stand from where I can go to another place I can stand that ultimately leads to the other shore. And I think you're describing that process of saying, my goal is the other shore now. But the easy thing is jump, right? Evel Knievel it. But generally, that's not... If it were that easy, somebody else has already done it. Who cares, right? But you've got to figure out a path. I had a question for you about this. When you're trying to do that, how do you get stuck? And by stuck, I mean in my classic model, right? The one some people heard before, which is you're either inflow stuck or you're waiting. So when you're figuring out strategy, you're stuck because you don't know the path. So now you think you've got part of the path, but now you're stuck. What do you do with your team to get unstuck when you don't know what to do next? Sushee Perumal (20:39): And that's probably the hardest thing that I'm often facing, which is the psychology of moving the people to the other side, or the psychology in trying to figure out how do we, as a unit, as a team, make that decision so that it's not a force of will, it's not somebody's opinion dominating. It's have we considered all the pros and cons and the risks so that we are not going face down into the water with a 90 pound backpack on our back? How can we articulate all the things that go into trying to make that decision? Well we've all been there. There could be somebody in the team that has a big voice that they're trying to influence everybody that their way is the only way. But as a leader, as a facilitator, I see my role as making sure that every opinion is considered, and I would probably run it by you, Chris, or by somebody saying, here's why we are stuck. Here are the pros and cons, all the inputs we have, what are we missing from this picture? What have we not considered? What are the unknown unknowns, because that's often what gets us, doesn't it? Looking at the unknown unknowns. So the team and the psychology or... That's really the hardest component is to make sure that's all well articulated. Chris Beall (21:58): So there's something brilliant hiding in there that I just got to get this out. Sorry to jump on it, but I just wanted to say this to all you entrepreneurs out there who are crazy enough to raise money. To open the poison closet and pull out a bottle of poison and say, I'm going to survive it. I have built up a resistance to iocaine powder. That's pretty good for you, Corey, especially. Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Corey Frank (22:27): Absolutely. Chris Beall (22:30): Here's something that I think is a fact. Most entrepreneurs see this as exactly the opposite. The moment that money hits your bank account and you've closed that financing, I guarantee which state you're in. You're stuck. That's just a fact of the world. There is no way it could be anything else, because you're no longer waiting. As you're getting toward a close of any deal of any financing. There's always a period where you're waiting. That is, it's all done, but it's not done, right? That's why we have all this, it isn't over until it's over kind of talk because it reminds us that sometimes we just have to wait before we start celebrating. Celebrating is not anything other than just preparing for the next thing. We're saying that's behind us, that something's in front of us, but I guarantee you, we're not in flow. We can't be in flow because being in flow means that I'm doing what I was doing before, and I'm continuing to do it in a way that's effortless because I practiced it and it's me now, right? But it's you, that's a previous you. Now you're the funded you and therefore, you're stuck. And I think that most entrepreneurs just don't get that. They go, I've got the money. I put a plan in front of the investors. I must know what to do, let's go execute that plan, which is the single stupidest thing you can do when you take money, is to immediately execute the plan on which you raised the money. Corey Frank (23:59): Or I must be a lot smarter than I thought I really was, and everybody else saw through my ruse. Now, what do I do, right? The money is a validation for my clear intelligence. Chris Beall (24:11): I'm so impressed by Sushee, because you anticipated being stuck, and you started calling around. You put up a website, so it'd be easier to talk to people, have the right people talk to you. You reached out to a number of us, and you started really anticipating being stuck as soon as you were waiting, which is the smartest thing in the world to do is as soon as you're waiting, and you know you're going to be stuck, switch to learning mode, because the waiting is a waste, unless you do something else. And the thing you should do is the thing that helps with the next thing. The next thing is guaranteed stuck. Stuck means I've got to learn. So you've just switched on learning, knowing you were going to be stuck, so why not just act like you're stuck? And I thought that was... I just had to bring it up, because I've never seen it before that in anticipation of a raise, you freaked out appropriately. Sushee Perumal (25:04): We had a number of proposals lined up so that we can hit those buttons and execute on those micro-experiments. As soon as the cash hits the bank. Chris Beall (25:16): That's pretty smart. When the cash hit the bank, you weren't stuck because you'd actually treated yourself as stuck earlier. That's just so unusual. I highly recommend that to anybody foolish enough to raise money. Corey Frank (25:27): I have a feeling that Sushee at this episode, your Sushee Perumal website, you're going to be hit with a lot of folks who are going to be hitting you up for mentoring advice I think, because you have so much to teach us all. Sushee Perumal (25:40): It was really set up so that I can learn from folks like you, Corey, and Chris, and Oren, who I can hopefully get introduction to, so that I can continue to get all the way up to Richard Branson. Chris Beall (25:53): There's guy who knows when he's stuck.  

Chris and Corey's guest, Sushee Perumal, CEO of MaxSold tell us to take cautious steps when the tank is full of funding. Some of the highlights in this episode include: Driving the concept of MaxSold's tagline, "From the sponge under the sink to the Ferrari in the driveway, we sell everything in two weeks." concept is the fact that live auctions were not and are not meeting the market needs. Sushee is the perfect example of Market Dominance, as well as a very likable person to know and work with. Hear this first of a two-part interview about the shortest path to market dominance. From owning an airline because he wanted to cut his teeth in entrepreneurship, to dominating the market in relocation and downsizing services. Chris noted, "This is the end of the commute economy." This is because the relocation option we have completely turned this upside down in the recent months of COVID-19 - work from home forever. Sushee explains how he chose to maximize the opportunity by minimizing the risk. Just because you have magic technology, doesn't mean you can execute new business. Chris asked him, "Does this assessment process take 10 years before you put gas in the tank?" You'll have to listen to the surprising answer. How did he make the transition? He learned that you don't dominate by hiring a bunch of C-Suite staff. He also learned from his failed and struggling competition that you don't throw expensive parties as part of your ROI plan. Be incremental. Be resourceful. Ask for advice - humbly. It helps that he embodies the value of being humble and likable. ----more---- ---------------------- 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 to learn more. 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 (00:37): Excellent. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall, and Corey Frank. So today I've put on a jacket, Chris combed his hair, and we actually have a guest that is worthy of the Market Dominance Guys to pretty up. And it's said that the things you own often end up eventually owning you. And I think if that's the case, Chris, then certainly our next guest has found the unlock key, if you will, to setting free your world again. MaxSold. We have Sushee Perumal from MaxSold, CEO and Founder. MaxSold is one of North America's largest and fastest growing relocation, and downsizing simplification firms, auction houses. And simply put, if you got transferred to Omaha, and Sushee is going to tell us a little bit about this, you get transferred to Omaha, God forbid, and had just inherited a great uncle's estate in Vermont, or you simply want to declutter or to simplify your life, MaxSold is the answer. All you have to do is engage with them and they'll do all the work, and they send you a check. And so the CEO of MaxSold, Sushee Perumal, is with us today and his story, I think what Sushee and I have talked about, his story is up to this point, one that's probably worthy of at least a Joe Rogan roll cast, Joe Rogan podcast, I should say. But since we can't do that, he's going to have to settle for a couple of broken down sales guys like us. So welcome to the Market Dominance Guys, Sushee. It's a pleasure to have you. Sushee Perumal (02:03): Great. Thank you, Corey. It's a pleasure to be on the show. And I'm a big, big fan, and probably put in about a hundred miles listening to your podcast, and often I'm hitting replay, I'm doing that 15 minute rewind so that I can re-listen to what you and Chris say, because I just wish I was running with my notepad so that I can take notes. Corey Frank (02:23): It would look funny though. Sushee Perumal (02:25): The follow up date, the founder is it's a second generation auctioneer and he lives eats breeds auctions, but the live auctions are not meeting the market needs. He came up with this concept as, "Hey, we have the things call the internet. Why don't we leverage that to be a replacement for live auctions?" And so that's when I entered the picture and I transferred the phone number from my airline onto MaxSold and created a website, got the team going. And now we are just under 500 people on the ground to do the cataloging, photography and all of that. And I think Chris gave me this line, "From the sponge under the sink to the Ferrari of the driveway, we sell everything in two weeks." So being able to come in and vaporize everything, it's a huge burden off of their shoulders. For those that we serve. Thank you for inviting me for the show. Happy to be here and looking forward to learning a lot. Corey Frank (03:24): Well, that's great, I think- Chris Beall (03:25): Fantastic. It's great to have you here. You're the only guest we've ever had? We don't have very many guests, but you're the only one who's ever been able to say, "I transferred the phone number from my airline." I take it that doesn't mean the phone number you were using to call Air Canada, but that you actually had an airline. Is that true? Sushee Perumal (03:42): Correct. Yeah. So I decided to cut my teeth in entrepreneurship by starting an airline. Chris Beall (03:48): Why not? Sushee Perumal (03:49): Said, "Why not? Let's give this a shot." And the reason is I was trying to combine my passion for flying and the accessibility it gave me saying, "Hey, more people should have access to this." And I said, well, that was a time when the very light jets were coming out. Companies like Eclipse and Cessna was getting into this, Embraer was getting into this. So they've been creating planes that cost a fraction of your Gulf stream jets at a far better accessibility in terms of operating costs. So figured why not start a charter service with this? Charter airline service with this? This was my attempt at failing big and I succeeded at it. Chris Beall (04:30): That's a beautiful thing. Well, now you have a service that I think is suddenly even more important than it was before. Obviously crucially important for life changes, right? When somebody is retiring, when they're downsizing, when somebody passed away, when somebody has been transferred, all of those things were your bread and butter before, but now we have this sudden thing that's happened. And I don't think everybody's recognized it. I published something on LinkedIn the other day that said, "This is the end of the commute economy and between the savings on commuting and the productivity increase already being measured from work from home 47% productivity increase for people who are knowledge workers. We should see instantly actually already flowing about seven and a half trillion dollars a year into the US economy." Which is significantly bigger than the federal budget. It's almost as big as the entire debt of all us companies, right? It's enough in one year to wipe out all the debt for US companies. Here we have this phenomenon that is occurring. And one of the side effects that I've noticed and I'm actually participating in is relocation to where it's desirable to live before retirement. Think of this as acting retired from a place perspective, 10, 20, 30 years before you retired, because you can now work from home and work from home forever. So suddenly the Ferrari in the driveway you thought was so important for your commute might be replaced with the four-wheel drive that is a great thing to have when you move to the mountains. Or in my case, my fiance and I are moving to Port Townsend, two plus hours away from her office. My office has always been an in house, but she works for Microsoft. They've worked from office company. Suddenly it's all choice, choice forever. So people are suddenly moving and you just took down, my understanding is some funding ignoring my advice, of course, because If a guy spends a lot of time with me, learns to ignore my advice. It's actually its a skill that they acquire. Oh, not in going back 15 minutes to listen again and say, "What the hell was that guy saying?" So those are two really important skills you've picked up, but you've ignored my advice, you've taken money, but now you're suddenly armed with some cash going into what I call a high beta situation, where there was a lot of volatility. I'm not talking about market volatility in the financial markets, I'm talking about energy in the system. Think of it as lots of entropy. It takes a lot of information to describe what's going on now, which creates entrepreneurial opportunities because the big companies can't move were moving is required to be fast and small. And so you can do anything you want now. So now you can do anything you want better than an airline. So what are you going to do with that money to dominate? Sushee Perumal (07:18): Right. I spent a lot of time thinking about it while listening to you and Corey, Chris, as well as while reading books and other things. It's simply like, how do we maximize the opportunity at the same time minimizing the risk because there's few States are entering into the second wave, with the lockdowns are being lifted. And luckily we have a 10-year foundation of bootstrapping the business, finding out how we can create elasticity in the operations and the execution. So we can go from zero to a 100 or from a 100 back to 20, depending on this evolving situation we are in. So we want to make sure that continues. We all of a sudden don't want to blow millions of dollars on a TV and radio campaign, because if we are not able to execute on it, then we would have blown a bunch of money- Sushee Perumal (09:11): ... oh as I was saying, what's the best way to maximize the opportunity to minimize the risk? By taking really cautious steps, but the tank now being full and having the luxury of having that. Chris Beall (09:21): Interesting. So let's talk about risk first. People who raise money in Silicon Valley, they don't really talk about risk. The risk to the business is the risk you can't raise more money. And that has to do with making what's called progress, which is kind of a euphemism for doing whatever the VCs at that moment think is pretty cool. Nowadays, it's gotten different, everybody's talking capital efficiency and unit economics. So that's how we control risk generally as by being efficient with our capital and managing the unit economics. But it sounds like you intend to do all of that while taking advantage of a market opportunity and dominating and doing it with the dominance, not being I'll call it, store bought. That is you're not going to buy the revenue, you're going to go earn the revenue somehow, but you're going to judiciously use this money in order to lubricate that process somehow, is that kind of how to look at it? Sushee Perumal (10:12): It is. Oh yeah, absolutely, Chris. Like I would say looking at the shortest path to market dominance, we want to... I like how you said it earlier in other podcasts about looking at your market as lists. We are constructing a playbook with all these lists that we can execute on and seeing how do we maximize the opportunity and minimize the risk? Because if we start executing on the lists, if we can't deliver on the product, then we would have blown a bunch of money. So we are trying to figure out how to manage that cautiously. Chris Beall (10:42): Interesting. What does this spring to mind for you, Corey? Do you think that the amount of time that Sushee and company have spent really figuring this thing out 10 years, is that necessary? Or can you figure out one of these things in 10 hours? I mean, it's taken us more than 10 years. We've been at this 14 years, I figure tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to figure out ConnectAndSell. That's my fantasy, because on Saturday, every once in a while, I think, "Oh I got it." Right? But it seems to be a much more incremental and iterative process than that often with what can only be described as a little backsliding here and there, where your brilliant idea becomes something that was so... Our example is we started a thing called Outbound on Demand and it was just going to do outsourced appointment setting. And it was so easy to sell if we didn't recognize that just because you have magic technology doesn't mean you can execute a new business, right? So we were very poor execution player in a crowded market that was oddly easy to sell because everybody will try a new outsourced appointment center. It's the nature of that business. It's a chocolate chip cookie business. If you come out with some cookies, everybody's going to try a cookie. And the question is, are they going to buy a hundred million cookies? And the answer turned out to be, I don't know, we didn't stay around to find out. We retreated. We back slid, so to speak into our core. So Corey, you've seen tons of this. And Sushee, you must have done some of this. So let's start with you, Corey. Do you really think it takes 10 years to figure out or some amount of time to grind it up and figure out the execution side before you should put gas in the tank and hit the accelerator? Corey Frank (12:14): It's funny, Chris. Ryan Reser and I had a conversation about this just the other day, about how seemingly sophisticated organizations that at its surface, you would think have all the math of sales already instituted. They must have the math of sales because they're excise and they've raised Y amount of dollars and they have Z amount of team members and reach. And then in talking with this particular prospect, who's thinking about coming on Uncommon Pro, you realize that a lot of it has just been, I don't want to say luck, but it's certainly hard work and grit, but they didn't understand the why of what got them there. And because you don't understand the why or the metrics of what got you there. I think you're kind of just a ship without a rudder, just drifting from port to port, hoping the certain winds will take into a porter prosperity. And when that happens, just because of riding the trade winds, I think once or twice, I think a lot of us, and I've certainly been there. You start to believe that you're actually better than you are, but you're not able to define the process or the science of it. Certainly what I'm curious from you, Sushee is when you looked at this business that was 10 years old and took, took it over and you infuse it with capital and culture. As we talked about the other day, what science, what process did you use as you have all the risk pieces on the board, so to speak, and you say, we going to deploy X amount of armies here into this market and X amount of armies to do this market. Chris and I threw a little bit of that thought process of how do you start? Because there's tons of auction houses out there and you guys have seem to really find a niche. Sushee Perumal (13:53): Absolutely. And there are other auction houses that entered the space tens and millions of dollars of VC cash. And so studying them, we figured out what not to do, which is hire a bunch of CMOs, CROs, VP of sales, going to every market with five or six sales reps that are from high-end auction houses and high-end real estate companies. We also figured out from studying the competition, not to throw $30,000 parties with the hopes of getting a return on investment. It's very much been an incremental and iterative process to figure out the science and the mechanics of things. So we, as an example, with buyer acquisition, we figured out what the cost per acquisition is, how long it takes to get to an ROI, what channels do they come from? And also the scale up limits, but several channels. So it's the same sort of path we are on in this next phase is to figure out whether we can increase those limits, whether that math scales. So if its acquisition through search engine marketing, there's only so many people searching to try to figure out how are they going to solve the problem of having a house full of things to sell. So once you're maxed out on search engine marketing, then what do you do, right? Then let's go to channel two and figure out here are the scale-up limits. And here's what the payback period looks like. And then we go to channel three, which is outbound. And that's how I bumped into Chris. When the problem that we are trying to solve is, "Gosh, it takes so much time to call real estate agents. We have 20,000 real estate agents in a city calling them is going to take years or decades. So how do we short circuit figuring out whether or not this channel is going to work and the science of that particular acquisition channel?" So that's what led me to ConnectAndSell, so that we can get the math of sales figured out in really short order. And we figured it out. We figured it out within a week, whether or not this particular channel was going to be a factor or not, which is real estate, realtor outreach. Chris Beall (13:53): Within a week. Corey Frank (16:09): Within a week? Chris Beall (16:09): And we figured out. Oh, I'm a hundred percent. Like I was floored that we could figure out this, something that would take us months, if not years, we were able to compress that timeline. So the channels that are working, that we have the math and science behind it, but there are scale-up limits to those. So we need to tackle other channels and we can't run out of gas or we can't organically fund tackling other channels, which is why we took on this raise. We did this fundraise so that we can go at market dominance faster, so that doesn't take us another 10 years to figure out. So that we can first two things. One, scale up the things that are working and second tackle other channels so that we can scale those up as well. So instead of only being able to afford 10 or 20 grand on radio advertising, I can all of a sudden afford more. And if it works, I can put fuel to that fire. Rich Kagan will be a happy guy if that works out, huh? I'm going to be watching this carefully because I've been talking to Rich and we're in a similar situation without the raise. We're actually doing a little raise right now. Maybe by the time this goes to air, we will have raised, maybe not. Who knows? I think our story is always a little bit tricky because we're so unusual, but this is another thing that I think is fascinating is that it's just sharing information with other entrepreneurs around what's worked. Like you and I spoke about something the other day that it just turns out I have a weird part of my past involving a floor finishing company that I created. It's kind of like an airline. If you think about it right? And a national skill floor finishing company, trying to fix all the floors in every hospital in America. So it's a little more prosaic. I think jets are cooler when you think about it, but yeah, floors they're all right. But we had a little kind of a legal structure and a financing structure that is very, very unusual. And I don't know if you're going to use it or not, but it's something we could share just by talking. And I think something that folks should keep in mind when they're going aftermarket dominance is while this might be your first rodeo in a particular channel or a particular market dominance challenge, it's probably not everybody's, but without conversations, we can't really discover, like there's no catalog, there's no ontology of market dominance stuff, right? I mean, we have a trick, "talk to lots of people." And we know how to apply that trick, like magic acid to dissolve a raft of problems, but not all problems. And so I think one of the things I think you do exceptionally well, maybe better than anybody I've ever met is you are very humble and open about reaching out to other people and getting advice. You just make it abundantly clear to all of us that it's a good idea for us to help you. And I think that's a remarkable skill. Where did you learn that? That's really uncommon among entrepreneurs. They tend to lone wolf that a little bit. Sushee Perumal (19:00): That's a great question. Well, I think maybe being a business analyst as my first job out of engineering. So I went into this Telekom, The Bell and I was asked to tackle as people assumed I was more intelligent than I am. Right? So they gave me all these responsibilities. I'm like, "Holy cow, how am I supposed to get this done?" So I just ended up picking people's brain. Now I'm like, "Can you help me with this? Can you teach me how this works? Can we figure this out? Can you show me the lay of the land?" And I remember my leader telling me that the one time I thought everybody does this. And apparently they're surprised they're doing this, which is, I reached out to a vendor they'd given a system to test, but there was no support at all. So long story short, I reached out through this really weird way of great to the engineering team that had built that product. And even Dave was surprised like, "How did you get my number? Like how did he get my contact info?" So I'm like, "Well, this is what I'm trying to achieve. So can you help me with this?" So I think it's just being resourceful, being frugal, trying to figure things out. And I thought everybody had the same skill set, but I'm just starting to figure out not everybody does. Not everybody goes to people for advice and tries to get this whole thing figured out. Chris Beall (20:16): Remarkable. Corey has it also. You guys are both just super exceptional at being humble. And every once in a while, I've worked with Corey where he thought he knew. And it seems to have been disabused of that notion over time. But you both have this incredible ability I think, to actually just humbly ask somebody for advice and not just do it, kind of like a, "what do you think?" Like they do it in a way that challenges them and makes them want to go deep with you and see what you're really asking. And I think is an under understood, under-taught part of the market dominance equation. We've never really talked about it, Corey, that we've kind of talked about it, like go ask the market through tons of conversations. Right? Corey Frank (20:58): Sure. Chris Beall (20:59): But that's one thing to do, but you could actually use the same conversation first approach to go ask for advice. And I think that you guys are really masters of that. Sushee Perumal (21:09): Yeah. And one of the podcasts, you talk about salespeople having this confirmation bias that's overwhelming. And the only reason you would be curious is about the timeline and the budget. They don't go into a discovery call genuinely wanting to understand and learn. So, that resonated with me. And I think that's the approach I'm taking is, "Let's figure this out. How can you help me with this?" And that's from your... You talk about knocking on doors as a full of brush salesman. And that's what you were asking. Right? You were doing discovery calls. Chris Beall (21:41): Yeah. It's an interesting question. I mean, I told salespeople all the time in sales and I think sales as semi-interesting market dominance is very interesting and sales has a role and market dominance. But I tell them all the time that you need to believe, but you must not sell. And what you need to believe is that what you have is of potential value and that you don't know how that might work out for this individual. If you believe those two things, then you open up a path to have conversation about what their situation might be. And you can discover for real, whether you should continue to engage, which is the only thing worth discovering is whether you should continue to engage. Because the only currency we run out of all the time is time. And we get reminded of that all the time when something happens that reminds us, all we have is time, right? I mean, we've all had events like that in our lives. And so I just think it's fascinating that we often think it's about money, it's about data, it's about analysis. But when you come right down to it, it's usually about being humble, believing in what you offer as potential that you are an expert at something, you know, you have some value and then having conversations to find out where the fit is. I call it tapping the bells. I think that we've said this before, but I'll say it again. If somebody presented you with the problem, "I have a thousand bells, but only 10 of them are bells. 990 of them just look like bells. And we're going to put a bell up in the bell tower and it's going to have to ring once an hour on the first hour or twice on the second hour. And by the time we get up to noon, it's got to ring 12 times." And if it's made of clay, it's going to fall apart. Your job Sushee, without being able to do anything other than interact with the bells is to figure out which ones are made of brass and which ones are made of clay. All you can do is tap the bells, right? That's the conversation. All you can do is have the conversation and see if it resonates. And if it resonates, then it's worth moving forward and finding out if you like the other features for the thing. And I think you just have been exceptional at doing that through your career.    

In this episode Corey asks Chris, "The other leaders that you've observed from being an investor or executive or being you know board member CEO, do you want to surround the issue and debate for the sake of maximizing all the different off-ramps that you could take or is it genuinely from a science level scientific level that you have your flag?" This leads to Chris talking about the three stages of your business or career, he says, "I'd like to think of myself as the guy who insists that we go science first. And if you're going to go science first. That means you have to be ready to do experiments and experiments are very well understood. We know how to do experiments been doing a lot of science for a long time. That means you've got to be math first because doing experiments that don't have a shot mathematically is ridiculous and you shouldn't do that. ----more---- So you got to keep the number of experiments down to a minimum and cram them in a small amount of time for a small amount of cost. I'm not a fan of internal debate for a long period of time. I think you debate just long enough to determine one of three states. And I think we should all consider this as a way to run our lives. Not that I'm here to tell people how to run their lives, but what the heck. So we're in one of three states. I think this is sort of mathematical truth or truth of life state number one is we're in flow. And when we're in flow, we should stay in flow. That's, that's just a great policy when it's working. To start to invent new thoughts or new strategies or new ways of holding the racquet in tennis, you need to adjust, you go change your shoes so you can play better. You're in flow, and you stay in flow. What would be the point of developing great skills and I'm not continuing to use them. When the road keeps paving itself in front of you, all you have to do is stay on the path. Don't fall, don't talk about it. Don't think about it, just go do it and keep your eyes open, but go ahead and crash into something that's okay. That takes us to the second state we're in often. That is a state that I call stuck. I love the word stuck because it actually colloquially means what the state means which is, 'I'm stuck.' I actually can't move forward, but it's not normally because I've lost my motive power. It's not like my legs fell off. It's because I don't know which way to go. And when we're stuck. We can do something and it's really clean and organizations have a hard time doing and individuals have a hard time doing it but organizations have a harder time because we have to admit, we're stuck and stuck is synonymous with. We don't know. We don't know what to do. And if there's anything that I would advise young entrepreneurs. to get comfortable with, it's the fact that often you don't know what to do and a thing to do. That's incredibly effective when we're stuck is to say we're stuck." Listen to this episode to learn how to embrace stuck and then what the third state is all about. 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 (00:32): Or imagine a dog sled, how many dogs would have to pull sideways to ruin a dog sled. It's only one. You got to lead dog and you got a second dog. If the second dog pull sideways, you are toast. You don't have a chance because there's a lot of leverage up there from a parasite anywhere near the top is tough, so keep those out. And then take in folks who have a proven track record of talking sense into other people. You don't want to know their answers. You want to get access to their impression and their negative wisdom and positive wisdom, but you want the negative wisdom first. You certainly want them to say something too. It's like, it seems to me, somebody who says "it seems to me" is probably a pretty good bet. Somebody who says, "I think you should" probably a pretty bad bet. It seems to me that the way that you're anticipating deploying capital, you're going to run out well before you achieve dominance. So what do you think is the right thing to do at that point? And you're going to answer them. "Well, I'll go raise more money". Okay, so what's that going to look like? What's that going to feel like? So saying it takes twice as long to get there as you usually would, as you plant. Right? So now it's a two X time and now you're raising money. So some folks are tired and it's not. What's that like? "Oh man, that is not so great". So you kind of have to work your way into, well, what might we do differently today? And it's almost always in the model and there's only kind of three things to do, right? One is to reduce my burn, my overhead. Another is to accelerate my acquisition of new customers that are going to bring value over time. And the third is make my product fit the situation better so that it provides more value or is easier to buy, or one of those various things, like three dimensions to the whole problem. The fourth one, which is just add money, is almost never a right answer, almost never. Chris Beall(02:26): But yet you see that in so many companies that are struggling or stagnant stalled, they may have a negative burn rate and their answer isn't necessarily to focus on product market fit, or certainly they've nibbled, maybe some costs here and there, but it's usually focused on, we need to raise more money. Otherwise, we got to pop smoke and get a chapter to lift us out of here. Corey Frank (02:48): Right? Well, folks, I think there's a kind of person, kind of entrepreneur, but they're really working for VC Inc. And that's what the audit do. Okay, figure out how to raise some money. Some sort of a bridge somewhere and somewhere might be a salvage and I might be a lucky hit, but at least then they go on and get another job with another VC company. And that's perfectly fine. It's the career choice. There's nothing wrong with it. It's like working for a big company is just different. It's working for a series of small companies and occasionally you get a win and it's lots of fun. You get to have small teams and all that smallness is great. It's not quite the same as being an entrepreneur who is trying to build something and it's strapped to the bumper and driving in traffic, that's a different thing entirely. And in that case, you've got to look at those three dimensions. And if it does turn out, you need to raise money, then raise money. It's much better to raise money, to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity than to cover up an unexpected hole in your finances. A case like this right now, we have this horrible thing going on in the world at this month. We're recording this in the time of COVID and lots of things are different. So is it a great opportunity or not for any given company? So actually the first question you should ask about any change is not what's this going to do to me, but does this present a great opportunity and an unprecedented opportunity for us? Because if you don't ask that first, you'll never get around to it because everything offers lots of problems. So once you start talking about the problems, you just talk about the problems forever, right? The answer to that question tells you, "Well, what should my stance be? What should we be looking for?". If it's possibly a great opportunity situation, how can we explore that inexpensively and quickly? How can we find out if it's a great opportunity? So for our company, for instance, it connects and sell. This whole COVID-19 thing is probably a great opportunity. Why? Well, because hundreds of thousands of salespeople got sent home and their managers can't tell what they're doing. And people have crazy ideas, like security cameras to spy on people and click trackers and all this nonsense, right? Which everybody thinks for 10 seconds, notice is never going to fly. You can't compete for talent and say, "And by the way, the number one thing we do is spy on you". That's not really going to work, right? Because some competitor will say, "No, we'll trust you". It's like, I'm working for that guy. You missed your spike. Right? But it is important to see what folks are doing or you can't help them. So when there's change though, big change and business is all about adaptation and change. What we need to do first is ask, "Is this a big opportunity?" and if so, "How do we characterize it quickly?" and then ask the question, "Does it advise us to get some capital together in order to take advantage of that opportunity?". That's a great reason to raise a little bit of money. Maybe even a lot. You never know, maybe something. And so the changes I tend to create my problems by addressing are the ones that are, I call them, kind of model level at some people might call them paradigmatic. It's such a loop that even seems like we got the model wrong here. Nobody ever wants to hear that kind of crap. Right? I mean, really, who wants to even think about that. But every once in a while you do have a model wrong. They're a hundred percent fatal when you get the model wrong, which is why I'm kind of risk-averse. So oddly enough, you know what I used to do for fun, right? I used to climb mountains and stuff like that. And I still do certain things that people would think are not zero risk. Risk-averse, people can do those things. That's how you get to the age of 65 and you're still alive if you do stuff like that, you better be fundamentally risk-averse, which means oddly, you need to be open-minded to the possibility that what you're doing is wrong, because that's where the big risks hide and continuing down a path that goes off Niagara falls. And you just thought it was a rock concert that you were going to, right? Well, it was the rocks were at the bottom of the falls and you will be in concert with them rather correctly. So anyway, the other is I can be a little bit argumentative. I don't think in a negative way. I just don't roll over very easily in the face of what I think is an illogical argument. Chris Beall(07:04): Do you want to debate? As a leadership style from, again, not just you, but certainly, we'll pick on you, but all the other leaders that you've observed from being an investor or executive or being board member CEO, do you want to surround the issue and debate for the sake of maximizing all the different off-ramps that you could take? Or is it genuinely from a science level scientific level that you have your flag, you have your banner and you want to teach and the stakes are highest for you, so to speak? Corey Frank (07:35): Well, I'd like to think of myself as the guy who insists, we go science first. And if you're going to go science first, that means you have to be ready to do experiments and experiments are very well understood. And we know how to do experiments, been doing a lot of science for a long time. And that means you've got to be math first because doing experiments that don't have a shot, mathematically is ridiculous. It shouldn't do that. So you've got to keep the number of experiments down to a minimum and cram them in a small amount of time, small amount of cost. But to do that, [inaudible 00:08:06] stuff away with logic. And I'm not a fan of internal debate for a long period of time. I think you'd debate just long enough to determine one of three States and I think we should all consider this as a way to run our own lives. Speaker 2 (08:24): Connect and sell. Welcome to the end of dialing. As you know it, Connect and Sell 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 connect and sells powerful platform. Your team's effectiveness will skyrocket by using connect and sells teleprompter capability as they'll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. So come on, give your fingers arrest with connect and Sell. Visit connectandsell.com. You're listening to the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Chris Beall of Connect and Sell and Corey Frank of Uncommon Pro. Corey Frank (09:21): Not that I'm here to tell people how to run their lives, but what the heck? Right? So we're in one of three States, I think this is sort of mathematical truth or truth of life. State number one is, we're in flow. And when we're in flow, we should stay inflow. That's just a great policy when it's working. If you're on the tennis court and you're lacing those down the line backhands, and those cross-court forehands that are winners over and over and over, it's a bad time to start to invent new thoughts or new strategies or new ways of holding the rack or go change your shoes. You're in flow, you stay inflow. Again, I'll go to our product. One of the great things I love about Connect and Sell is, it lets you get into flow with regard to conversations and stay there for hours because you're either having one or you're hyped up about to have one that's not very far off. So staying inflow is the key to performance, right? What would be the point of developing great skills and then not continuing to use them when the road keeps paving itself in front of you. It just, "Drive, baby". Right? Chris Beall(10:27): All you have to do is not fall out. Corey Frank (10:29): Don't fall. Yeah. And just don't talk about it, don't think about it. Just go do it and keep your eyes open, but go ahead and crash into something. That's okay. The second state we're in often is a state that I call stuck. I love the word stuck because it actually colloquially means what the state means, which is "I'm stuck. I actually can't move forward", but it's not normally because I've lost my motive power. It's not like my legs fell off. It's because I don't know which way to go. And when we're stuck, we can do something and it is real clean and organizations have a hard time doing, and individuals have a hard time doing it, but organizations have a harder time because we have to admit we're stuck and stuck as synonymous with we don't know what to do. And if there's anything that I would advise young entrepreneurs to get comfortable with, it's the fact that often you don't know what to do and a thing to do that's incredibly effective when we're stuck is to say, we're stuck. Just verbalize it, "We're stuck". It means we don't know what to do. And if somebody says, "no, no, I know what to do". They're probably not right. They're probably guessing. And there is a role for guessing and we'll get to that in a moment. But the first thing we do when we're stuck, as we stop pretending we're in flow. Stop pretending we're in flow. Sure. We still got to eat. We got to sleep and do a bunch of these necessary things. We still have to sell stuff. We're going to keep the wheels turning on the business, but let's recognize we're stuck. And this COVID thing actually for a bunch of companies suddenly made them stuck. And instead of saying, "we don't know what to do", they said, "Well, let's start doing stuff". But that leads to the next part of stuck, which is you have to ask yourself then, if it's as bad as it looks, whatever that is, that means my overhead is burning my capital and it's burning it at a higher rate, so I might run out of money. That's the worst one. Look at the date when that might happen and ask yourself the question, "Is that the amount of time we have to get unstuck. And if it is the amount of time we have to get unstuck and it's long, then let's go learn. When you don't know, learning is the way to know, how do you learn through science? We do experiments. So the next natural question is what experiment is going to yield the most information about our stuck situation in which direction we might go the fastest at the lowest cost. And that's a very concrete question to debate. And when you get down to the debate being difficult, then you no longer have to debate anymore. Cause as soon as it's difficult, whatever it is, it's two options. Well, as soon as it's hard to decide between them, it's easy to decide between them. There's nothing to it. Just pick one. And that's the role of the CEO. That's the role of the boss. The role of the boss is to guess when you don't know, and there's more value in making a decision now than there is and making a marginally better decision later. And that could be even a big decision where you have no information, but you have no tie, so the CEO guesses. That's why I call the CEO role, "The Guesser". And when I hire people, I say, one thing you got to know is in our organization, I'm the Guesser. And this is really bad because it's also corrupt. It's completely corrupt because the Guesser guesses when we're out of time and we don't have enough information, must make a decision. And the Guesser who also declares that we're out of time, we don't have enough information, must make a decision. So it's a totally corrupt role. And I'm sorry, but it's like a mathematical singularity. We can't get away from it. There's no escape. As Edward Abbey once said, "We'll find out who a philosopher is compared to a practical person. When you throw a brick at the head of a true philosopher, he doesn't duck". Well, the rest of us duck, right? And so you're depending on the head, no one wanted to dock. And that's why you put a person in the CEO position that you trust to guess. That's the one thing, they're not going to steal that is do things for themselves and they're not going to guess. I mean, they are going to guess when the time is right, but then there's the third stage that's really important. And this is the one that people just blow a hundred percent of the time. You never see anybody put this right, ever. And it's the state many, many companies are in right now. And it's kind of an ironic state. It's a state of waiting. We should wait for something. Now I'm not saying the COVID thing means we should all be just sitting around, waiting in the foxhole. All contrary, we're burning, right? Most companies can't afford to wait, but certain big companies can wait. They got the capital to wait. And if you don't know what to do or you know what to do, but you have to wait for a resource. It's like trying to go through a door before you've opened the door is a dumb plan. If somebody else is going to open the door and that's a great idea is to have them open the door. You have to wait. Now there's a wonderful thing about waiting. Unless you're single-threaded on everything in your world, you can take the wait time and you can use it to go learn about some other things you're stuck on. So waiting is truly waiting and it's the hardest of them all because it's an emotional impossibility for a group to wait, cause somebody is antsy and wants to go and that person's going to agitate for it. So go find something else for you all to go and stuck on and research. Chris Beall(15:35): It's not progress even. It's not the implied mode of progress, either moving forward or playing your arms or activity. Activity, sometimes in a business, just connotes you're doing something. Waiting is, I feel like I'm being overpaid as to wait, but I'm reminded of Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, I think at 1947. When he started, I think I seem to read somewhere that he had a simple phrase written on all of his executive board room, whiteboards or green boards at the time chalkboards at the time. It was one word and it just said, "Think". Just to the point where sometimes just thinking or waiting or processing is working and you don't have to have this implied or perceived activity to be justified by the powers that are earned in your key. Sometimes it's simply waiting for the door to open. I think that's beautiful, Chris. So in other words, and also it seems like from a starter perspective, state number two of being stuck where you talk about, "I don't know which way to go", "We should probably test", "We're definitely not in flow", "I need to evaluate how much capital I have", that's the state of most startup businesses as it's a force needs to become in motion versus a force already in motion tends to remain in motion, Corey Frank (16:55): All startups start stuck. Speaker 5 (16:58): All startups start stuck. I love that. Corey Frank (17:00): All startups start stuck. That's the starting state of all startups. The flow state you want to get into is the flow within the first experiment. And when the first experiment yields enough information, stop, then you go back into a state of being stuck and you design the second experiment. Maybe you already have it designed, but I hope not because if you don't take the information for the first experiment, use it to design the second, you are sort of throwing away the primary resource you're trying to gather, which is information about what the market, as a list might want and pay for in order to solve a problem that they have today and we'll continue to have in some future. If we don't recognize that startups start stuck, it's a beautiful place to start. It's why actually most startups fail. They start stuck and they unstuck. And in between, they flail around thinking that activity is going to get them unstuck. But what gets you unstuck is experiments, because that's the only way to find out about the world, what's true. So the tendency is to have internal debate. I've had a lot of founders tell me, "I spent six weeks working on this business plan and I've thought of everything". And I always think back to a company that we did call finished line floors, where the idea came to several of us on a Friday by looking at a floor that was outside of a Starbucks in Des Moines, Iowa. And somebody asking a question of somebody else, "How long do you think this beautiful, shiny floor has been down here?". I said, "What does that even mean?". I was the somebody else. And the answer to that question back and forth revealed a possibility of a multi-billion dollar business. So I went home and wrote a business plan. It was pretty detailed. Big spreadsheets going on and on and on because what I wanted to know was if we do it, is it worth it? Cause I don't know anything about floors. And by Sunday evening I convinced myself that it was worth presenting to somebody with some money to who might be interested to say, "Yeah, I think this, if we can pull it off, I think it's hard, but I think it'd be worth it. What do you think?". And he wrote me a check at dinner for about 300,000 bucks and we started the company on the spot and started operating the next day. So that was between a Friday and a Monday with the drive back and forth to Boulder, Colorado and Des Moines, each way. I had a very fast car. So it was all right. But that's an appropriate amount of time to build a business plan and appropriate number of people, which is one, after all, it's only an exercise to answer this question, "If this works out, would it have been worth doing?". At that point we could say, "Okay, now we're stuck, right? Isn't that great? We're stuck". Here's what we don't know. We don't know actually how to put one of these floors down. Okay, well let's do some experiments. So, who's the manufacturer of the product? What do they recommend? Can we get some experts who put other kinds of floor finish down? It was a water-based Euro thing. What environmental controls do we do they think we need, can we set that up? When we set up in two days and experimental test bed of a floor with some control over airflow and stuff like that. When an expert roll the floor in our cycle time for, is it working was one day, cause it took six hours to dry. And then we were getting information, right? And we got that information in a series of experiments. And at the end of a week and a half, it's like, all right, this can be done under these circumstances. "Just be open about it, man. You're stuck. Get good at being stuck. Chris Beall(20:28): Ray reminded Chris of Ray Dalio's book principles here. And he has this image of the proper evolution of a business, which sounds exactly what you're talking about here, right? Is in flow and stuck and then keep experimenting. And one thing Ray says here is evolution is the single greatest force of the universe. It is the only thing that is permanent and drives everything. And it consists of adaptation as inventions that provide spurts of benefits that decline in value. So these benefits or values seem to have a half-life that what got you in flow state doesn't necessarily maintain that flow state permanently. Corey Frank (21:10): High flow can never be permanent. It's wise to treat it as permanent while you're in it. And it's also wise to keep financial buffers and emotional buffers against its inevitable failure. It's just like the business cycle. The business cycle is built into the very nature of how we invest in businesses. At the beginning of a business cycle, it seems like there are some opportunities. So investors come in and they do some investing and the investment has returned. So there are some opportunities. So there's more investment. That's not the issue. The issue is how much risk? Well, if it keeps working out, we must be able to buy more risk. So keep buying risk, combined risk. But the information about how much risk we have doesn't come into the future. So when it does come in the form of failures, then we go, "Oh my God, we must have gotten past the edge of the risk" and all investments stops and the economy freezes up and then look, it's rethought by like capital liquidity coming usually from government. And we go through it, right? We got to the same thing. That's the same cycles. I love Ray Dalio's picture there. And we go through them in life. Look at how we work as animals. We're not particularly active in the night as a species, right? Some people are, I mean, not so much now because they can't go to bars or maybe they are gone to bars. I hear in some places they do that again. But there's a period during which we're not stuck. We don't need to do experiments and we're not in flow. We're actually waiting. We're waiting for our body to get back into a state where we can execute and we have to wait. We call it sleep, kind of close. Right? And it looks just like that, right? Because the value of the activity decays over time. And by the way, those decays often look like cliffs because this is another fact of the world. There are very, very, very, very many ways for a system to fail a system that consists of 10 interacting parts has more ways to fail than there are atoms in the universe. There are very, very few ways for a system to work. Everything's got to work. So even small amounts of friction or little misalignments, or you take a big machine, that's got a bunch of gears and you take one gear out, you shave the teeth off of it, or you freeze it up. All of us who've ever worked as mechanics. And as you know, I used to do that at one point in my life on air-cooled engines. You know that the whole thing has to work. And in most random States, it doesn't. Right? It just doesn't. If you throw out a cup of sugar into a gas tank, [inaudible 00:23:42]. Adding carbohydrates to other carbohydrates looks good to me. I get an engine that doesn't work anymore. And there's just one of the very little water. Water's good. Gasoline's water, waters. I mean, water is a fluid. Let's put them together, maybe there'll be great. Well, it doesn't work anymore. Right? Almost everything doesn't work. And everything of value as a system, every execution unit of value is the system. Companies are systems. So companies have a marvelously large number of ways to not work. And they have almost one way to work. And when they stop working, sometimes you need to just oil them. Cool them down on oil, like sleep. You cool it down, you oil it, you put a little fuel in it, right? Make sure it can go the next little bit. And that's just fine. Sometimes you got to replace a part and sometimes you realize that the system is no longer designed for the terrain it finds itself in. And you've got to put more wheels on or paddles instead of wheels or tracks instead of paddles or rotors, so you can get above the terrain or something in the design cause it doesn't work anymore because the circumstances for which it was designed are no longer those that obtain. And without having these paradigms to think about, these comparisons. I think the stuff's really, really hard. I mean, if somebody says, I. Sometimes people complain about me a lot is what's with all the damned analogies, right? Well, Chris Beall(25:06): You've had so many jobs and from the age of a lemon, I think you can draw from most people think it's an analogy. It's actually a basis in reality. Let me tell you, it looks like an air-cooled engine or it's like a can of bug spray. You ever use a can of bug spray for a black widow? There's no light. There's no metaphor. It really is. Right? It's a simile. Corey Frank (25:27): It's like being held up at gunpoint, at a theater that you work at North Tucson. We'll leave that one alone. Chris Beall(25:38): I haven't heard that one before. Corey Frank (25:40): We'll [inaudible 00:25:41] that out sometime, but there's some, I found out that insurance investigators are superior to the police when it comes to solving certain classes of crimes. Chris Beall(25:48): Well, they have a higher motivation. They have a higher value to motivation to do as such, so. Corey Frank (25:53): And greater freedom of action. Chris Beall(25:55): And greater freedom action. True. True. Well, I like this. I like all market nondominant companies are equally uninteresting and all startups start equally stuck. And I think that will go into the lore as well. Corey Frank (26:08): Well, thanks Chris. I think this episode, I knew we were going to draw plenty of nuggets from hearkening to your past to help other people in their future, particularly when it comes to getting their businesses off the ground. So again, we'll just keep throwing up those questions and keep milking that wisdom. This is great stuff. Chris Beall(26:27): So until next time on the market dominance guys, this is Chris Beall and Corey Frank (26:32): Corey Frank.  

Businesses are not evolutionary endpoints. Businesses can be endlessly inventive. Why is it that putting a bookstore on the internet would lead to the world's richest man? If price isn't your differentiator, you'll work really hard to find one and fail. A business plan tells you if it's worth doing. Will this have been worth doing? What's the smallest thing I can do in the shortest amount of time that will give me evidence to confirm or disconfirm my core thesis? Root in your own experience, not in somebody else's business book. Your experiences are your core differentiator. That's what you're bringing to the party. The person screwed on price wins on convenience or timing. I want a startup because all the cool kids have a startup. Really? Every new business is a start-up. ----more---- Chris's advice on starting a new business? LOW OVERHEAD. If you can ever get your overhead covered 100%, you should immediately go start a business. OVERREACH. Don't be too creative when you don't need to be. PROTECT. Keep the parasites out. TIMING. Look at the timing of when you want to expand your market. Is it worth doing? Well, the business plan says it's a good idea. But looking back, it was a bad idea. Here's the story of Chris and Corey's friend, Sushee Perumal.  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 (00:33): Before this call, we were talking about one of the aspirations that you have, the super power you have is the ability to see a business and to deconstruct it in front of the founder's very eyes and build it up again about how to kind of eliminate some of the pratfalls or painful financing lessons that most founders and startup businesses have. So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. Chris beall (00:54): Sure. It sounds like fun. Corey Frank (00:56): So when you look at a traditional business, right? How many businesses have you helped over the years and just, "Hey Chris, can I buy you a beer? Can I grab 20 minutes? I'd like to run this idea by you." So imagine the nightmare scenarios you've saved people from. I know I count myself on that list from preventing me, saving myself from me, I guess, is what you do best. So what are some of these common challenges that guys like me when I want to start a SAS business, and I have dreams of getting the series A and raising my three, four, $5 million and setting forth on this path to prosperity. What am I not thinking of? Chris beall (01:32): Oh, yeah. Corey Frank (01:33): What do guys like you have being on the trenches and having that 1,000 yard stare. What do you do to prevent me from hurting myself? Chris beall (01:40): It's a great question. I don't know if I know the answer. I feel like I respond on the spot to different people's challenges, different business challenges. I don't know the answer to the first question, by the way, I suppose it's in the 100s because I like other people's businesses. I just do. I'm fascinated by them and I'm attracted to the courage and I want to talk to people have a slightly naive courage to plunge off into the unknown. Pretty sure that they've got something, but also pretty sure that they should probably talk to a few people before they just put it all together in detail and then wonder why it didn't work. And I do think one of the biggest errors that folks make is they business plan for the wrong purpose. So they business plan for purpose in general of mapping out half that they're going to take and saying, "It'll be glorious. Here's how it will be glorious." And the amount of confirmation bias that goes into business planning, like stunning. And the other thing that they tend to do is take the intermediate products of the business plan, which are something like, "Oh, if we do A, B and C based on the size of the market, then we'll have growth that's of such and such a percent per year." And then they use that growth of such and such a percent a year as though that's the fact not the actions that are required to get it. And then tend to back into using canonical means and therefore we'll spend a certain percentage of it on marketing and a certain percentage of it on sales. And we'll hit this mark here in two years because other people do and all that kind of stuff, right? It's all canonical. And one thing I think I mentioned on a previous episode is that businesses are more different from each other than people are from each other. Because businesses are not evolutionary endpoints. They didn't come from anywhere except out of the mind of somebody within the constraints of the society, in which they live. The laws, the mores, the available resources. So businesses can be endlessly inventive. I mean, look at Amazon, there's a business that's so bizarrely invented in its concept that to this day, I think if you took any sane business person back through the premise, except for Jeff Bezos, who is clearly insane in a very good way, you wouldn't be able to get from where it started to where it is today on any path you could have predicted or even wanted to go now. Why is it that putting a bookstore on the internet would lead to the world's richest, man? Why? Well, whatever it is it had to do with the core belief that he had, which is something along the lines of. I have a business idea that has to do with a couple of things. And I'm guessing I'd never met him, but I'm guessing one of them is, we could exchange profits for market dominance and we could demonstrate market dominance in a market by sacrificing profits, but it has to be a market which price is important. And in order to make that, so it's got to be a commodity, well, books are a perfectly fine commodity. And new ones are born every day and they need to be promoted and they need to be sold. But at the margin, buying a book from one guy and buying it from the other or the same thing, you get the book in either case. So now we're kind of down to price. As a bookseller online, especially, if price isn't your differentiator you're going to work really, really hard to find one and you're going to fail. So I said, "Well, how do you do that?" Let's see, I got to buy him for something. So I run a really cheap operation with wooden doors for desks and all this cheap stuff, right? Intelligently cheap, keep your overhead way low, keep the operating costs of delivery way low, looked for economizing and savings everywhere. And then, oh, last trick take no profit. And the stock market will reward me with more money than the profit I could have taken over any given period of time. That is the increase of value of the stock will recognize that I can do this over and over and over and grow. Right? It's that kind of inventiveness that I think is so interesting in business. And I think sadly, a lot of people who have those kinds of ideas, don't pursue them in a clean way, because instead of asking themselves the right kind of question, which is, what must I never do in this business? If I believe what I believe, what must I never do? Right? If I truly believe what I believe is the why behind this business, what must I not do? Instead they back their way into something that they know damn well, they shouldn't do. And they do it because somebody says, you have to do it. Somebody says you have to raise money. Somebody says, you have to have an office. Somebody says, you have to have a VP of sales. Somebody says, you need a technical co-founder, whatever one of those things happens to be, right? Somebody says something. And instead of thinking it through from first principles, how do I know that? In fact, why even pay attention to that? The question is, what do I need at the minimum to confirm my thesis, the reason, my why. To confirm it or disconfirm it with the smallest negative impact and the fewest people, especially people that I care about. And it comes down to, well, now you're in the business of doing an experiment. So now you're doing science and the opening of every business is passion. I want to do it, follow it immediately if you do it really well, with a tiny bit of math, is it worth doing if it works? That's the purpose of business planning, by the way. The purpose of a business plan is to answer this question. If it works, would it have been worth doing? It's actually a retrospective done in advance. It allows you to look at the future and say, "In the case where it all works great, would it have been worth doing for me, for the other stakeholders and for the world? Would it have been worth doing?" And that's what a business plan tells you. The first sort of business plan, especially one that you're ever going to present to somebody to raise money. But since you're the first investor and your time is worth more than anybody's money, for sure your time is worth more than anybody else's money. Right? You got to ask yourself the question, am I going to invest the time? Well, you got to see the future. That not accurately. You must not see the future accurately. That's a really bad idea. You have to make a business plan that answers this one question. So if it all works out, will this have been worth doing? Then having done that, you throw that business plan away. Now that you've convinced yourself to make the investment or somebody else in case you really, really, truly believe you need somebody else's money, which in general, you don't, but maybe you do. And then you ask yourself the question. What's the smallest thing that I can do in the shortest amount of time that's going to give me evidence to confirm or disconfirm my core thesis? And in general, your core thesis is somebody needs something that they don't have today, and I think I can provide it based on an insight or some other advantage that I have due to my background or my circumstance. If my circumstance or my background, doesn't give me advantage to provide something for somebody who has a problem that I can solve, I don't even know why I'm in business. So that's rule number two is, root in your own experience, not in somebody else's business book. Your experience is the core of your differentiator. That's what you're bringing to the party. You could be bringing your circumstance. Maybe you were born rich or something like that. Some people say you're 6'8, and you weigh a lean 265 pounds. And you can put your elbows over the rim. Well, maybe you should invest in learning how to play basketball. You never know what that might pay off, right? Like can be a good one. Your circumstances may have not have been over your own creation. That'd be a version of being born rich, no matter how poor you are is if you happen to have a super skill, you're a mathematical prodigy, right? You're a sales genius. You're a psychopath who can talk people out of their money for reasons that they will never understand. That's a bad one, but it would be a gift that you could use to start a business. And many people have used that last one as a gift to start business. Corey Frank (09:54): True. Chris beall (09:55): Bernie Madoff may well been a guy who did that and the best of the ones that talked themselves into it. They believe they're doing good stuff, man. That's a really good disguise. So, [crosstalk 00:10:06] those are the two things though. And they're generally not done. Corey Frank (10:09): And instead what's done is take a heaping load of confirmation bias and discount. Both of those two rules, big time. Chris beall (10:16): Yeah. Big time. And then following a formula. And there was a modern version of this and Silicon Valley was super popular. I used to talk to lots of young people. Who'd come to me and say, "I want to do a startup." It's like, what does that even mean? Corey Frank (10:30): Yeah. Chris beall (10:31): Well, I want to do a startup. But why? Because startups are where it's at. Well, there's no such thing as a startup. That's a nonsense concept, right? It doesn't even mean anything. All businesses at some point start, that's not a unique characteristic of a business that it starts. They all start. That's like saying, instead of saying, I want to be president of the United States. You say, I want to have been born. Well great. Wonderful. We've really accomplished something here in terms of our understanding of what to do next. Right? So I want to do a startup. Well, okay. So in what? Well then they'll get usually to something that's in their core. I know the young man come to me of somebody close to me. And he had a passion about how the relatives of old people who were sick, got screwed in medical pricing, medical services pricing. Corey Frank (11:24): Okay. Chris beall (11:25): And that the family members couldn't figure out how things should be priced. And when you can't do price discovery, and you're a buyer on a short timeframe, you tend to get screwed. That's one of the great principles of life, right? If I got to buy now, it's like the seller who's moving. And I know somebody right now is moving from her house to Tucson. So she's got to get rid of her stuff by the closing date. It's got all the ducks in a contract, right? Corey Frank (11:50): That's right. Yep. Yep. Chris Beall (11:51): So she going to get the best for that white couch? No, somebody's going to get that white couch for 100 bucks. And I guarantee you that white couch is worth a lot more to someone, just not to anybody she's going to find in that amount of time, right? So being a buyers, is the same thing when you're under time pressure and you can't ice discovery efficiently, you get screwed. Chris Beall (13:11): That's the definition of, I was like the number one mechanism. That's why the economy also is some people are under pressure time pressure devise. Some are under time pressure to sell. In neither case, do they find the price, the correct price, the market, whatever the correct market price is. And there's a transaction and somebody wins and somebody loses, but that's okay because the person is screwed on price, wins on convenience or timing or whatever it is. Right? So it's kind of funny though, when you say, okay, so you want to do this startup. So this guy wants to do a startup. And I said, "Well, what do you think your first step is?" He says, "Well, I've got to find a technical co-founder." "Well, why is that?" "Well, because I don't know how to write code." "Okay. And how do you know this has something to do with writing code? Do you know enough about this to know that it's worth writing the code?" "Well, I know that people in the circumstance gets screwed." Got it. We started with the passion, go write the business plan, that shows why this is a great idea in the future looking back if, it works. And then you'll have some sense of what it is, but no, your problem isn't finding a technical co-founder, that's not your problem. And your desire can't be this type of startup because all the cool kids have a startup. But you see a lot of that in business. And then you'll get folks who are at the opposite end of the spectrum. We were talking about our mutual friend, Sushee Perumal, right? And Sushee runs a company called MaxSold. And I don't think he'll mind us talking about him because the guy's just absolutely a dear. Corey Frank (14:42): He's the only one that listens to our podcast anyway. Chris Beall (14:44): That's right. He said he listened to every episode, at least once. He said he binged on us, Corey, he binged on us. Sushee, thank you so much. That's why the numbers went through the roof last week. Corey Frank (14:54): That's right. That's right. Chris Beall (14:55): Listening over and over. But he has a brilliant business, brilliant, brilliant business. And he went about it the right way. Step-by-step starting with, is it worth doing? And this is a guy who has tried various things, starting an airline. You can go to susheeperumal.com or wherever he out there and check it out. His story is unbelievable. It's told beautifully. He must have talked to somebody who told them how to tell him a good story, because a good idea. Sure it wasn't me. But he's kind about the step-by-step. Now he's taking a little bit of money right now. That is a very, very considered thing to do because he's figured out who needs it. They buy it all the time and they just got to figure out, okay, so how do I spread this out? How to escape it. Corey Frank (15:39): Wait, hang on. Did you say that a founder of a business actually has a business that's running and throwing off cash, and then he's looking for money? I thought Chris had happens the other way around. You actually have the money first. Chris Beall (15:50): Yeah. Different approach, different approach. It's a very, very much a bootstrapped approach. And the beauty was he had an insight and then he went out and validated, or I would have been not happy, but content, I suppose, or accepting of a hard disk confirmation. It says, this is a bad idea. Business plan says, it's a good idea in retrospect that from the future, looking back on it, if you were to make it great, but the facts of going out and exploring the needs, it's a bad idea. But the fact said it was a good idea. In fact, right here in little port towns in Washington, where I live, we were walking along one day, about seven months ago and saw somebody with an apron with his company's name on it. And that apron said, MaxSold and she was standing in a driveway. And I went over and asked her, "What is this?" We're out in one of the outposts of the world. This is the Quinn for peninsula. If you go that way, 300 yards, you are swimming to Canada. The picture behind me is Seattle. I'm a little ways away from that. And I asked her, "What do you think about this thing that you're doing? Whatever it is." And she said, "I do estate sales for a living. I'll never do another one. This is the only thing that I will ever bring to my customers." She didn't know that I knew Sushee. I just asked her a question. Clearly he's found, he struck a nerve out there. And we'll need to get rid of their stuff. And I don't know if he came up with it and, he acted surprised when I said it today. I say to people, "Okay, Sushee's business, MaxSold. What does it do?" It sells everything from the sponge under the sink to the Ferrari in the driveway and gives you the money. I mean, that's pretty good, right? From the sponge under the sink to the Ferrari in the driveway, we sell it and we give you the money. Corey Frank (17:33): We'll get him on as a guest. Chris Beall (17:34): Yeah. We'll get him on. He really is great. He's great. He can't even fly to the US right now, even though he has an airplane and all that good stuff from the airline he started, which didn't work out, but learned a lesson or two, and it's on his site. But my point is going through the motions of starting a business is not starting a business. And going through the motions of starting a company, a VC funded company is almost surely not starting a business. It may be starting a company, which as we've talked about before is an R&D.Lab for a future acquirer. But dominance plays don't come out of their, dominance plays they come out of figuring out a real need, figuring out something to do about that, that can fit within everybody's cost parameters now, and for a long time to come. So there's profit. And then figuring out how to scale it. Now today Sushi and I were talking about scaling and that's the flip side is you can create demand, but what if you have to service it locally, can you create enough local service centers, capability, or whatever you want to call it in order to scale? Well, that becomes a fundamental business problem. And you need to then understand finance at another level because each one of those is a unit of being finance. How are you going to finance it? You have to think that stuff through. This is where talking to people who built similar shaped businesses is worthwhile. If you're going to be a four-legged animal, talk to the other four-legged animals, don't talk to the kangaroos. Don't talk to the monkeys that hang from the trees, talk to the other four-legged animals and say, "How did you solve this particular problem? And there's no business books that'll tell you that stuff because there's too much variety. In this case, I happen to have some experience from the past around 2003 and making that kind of financing and operational equation work in the real world. And so I could share that with them, not as some mentor or whatever, but as a guy who put one of his, another four-legged animal, right? Running ConnectAndSell is not like that. It doesn't resemble it at all. It's just completely different animal. Corey Frank (19:36): So when you look at, with that Chris, when you look at all the businesses that you've been a part of, either as an investor, a board member, an executive or CEO, and you see that when any of those businesses that maybe didn't do as well as you'd like, was it personnel? Was it operational? Was it financial? Was it plumbing? What do you see when you get above the trees and you look at maybe the businesses that you've been a part of, or again, affiliated with or invested in, what's the residue that maybe you've learned, certainly going to be different for everybody, but from what makes Chris Beall Chris Beall today, right? The Market Dominance guru here is the collective residue of experiences that enables you to now take a left turn when it previously took a right turn and to learn why it's important to take the right turn. What would you say is the collective aggregate of those experiences? What would you say to us? Chris Beall (20:36): Number one, I'll go chronologically because it's easy to do for me. Because I can go back to when I was pretty young, because I started, starting businesses and one sort of another one, I was probably 11. First one was super successful. People needed it. They needed to have work done around their house and in their corral and stuff like that. And a couple of hardworking kids with some tools and razorblades and whatever could do anything and priced it right, sold it right, knocked door to door. As my first door to door sales job was selling our own stuff and it was super successful actually. It was a very successful business. Key to success actually in that one, low overhead. I lived at my parents house and [inaudible 00:21:12]. So I had the energy from the food and time on my hands and I could go make a business. By the way, if you can ever arrange to have your overhead covered at 100%, you should always immediately go start a business. It's always better than having a job. Always. I would recommend this to any kid who's thinking about college. Who's not a big fan of college. There's a bunch of them. Corey Frank (21:34): Sure. Chris Beall (21:35): So tell your parents, instead of me costing you 100 grand a year, how about you put me up at home and I'll go start a business and it's going to be a grinded out business of some kind, because that's how you do things. Go, [Walmart 00:21:47] , Cuban. Yeah. Corey Frank (21:49): If you get your GNA covered, that's a big piece of that. Chris Beall (21:52): You're good. You're good. And that's the number one thing to do actually in any business. Number one, not is so what do you believe when you're not believing? Right? I mean a business or life is like a racehorse. It eats while you sleep. How much does it eat while you're sleeping? So that was one that worked really well. It eventually ended because my business partner took up other interests. We aged out of it, I would call it. And went and did other things. And then on another business that went, a software business, I was in I'll come forward, quite a ways that went bad. It was very sad. It was the first Unix-based ERP company. So think in 1983, '84, imagine on Unix, which nobody built commercial software on at the time, the vision was Unix and it's whatever comes after it turned out to be Linux, same damn thing really. Will dominate commercial software because it lowers the effective cost of software development by letting a developer spread their output over many kinds of computers. And at the time there were many kinds of computers. So one developer suddenly becomes 40 and that arbitrage was too irresistible. So instead of thinking up some brand new ERP system, we took one that was fairly popular at the time and just went ahead and looked at it and said, "Well, at least this thing's useful. Let's just build this, but in Unix land." And we did it and it was superb. I mean, it was built in a beautiful way, made every release on, every Monday morning, we would release software. Always worked pretty much bug free, got customers like Honeywell and all sorts of wonderful brands, right? Motorola, folks like that. [Shewish 00:23:32] Chemical out of salt Lake city was a big customer of ours, found a niche in continuous flow manufacturing because some of the things we did in our underlying mathematical model could handle units other than one, two, three. It could actually count to 0.5 or 0.3726, right? Corey Frank (23:49): Which lesson was target the niche? Chris Beall (23:52): No, that was. The good lesson was, don't be too creative when you don't need to be. You don't need you stand at your genius on this damn thing. Right? So the genius was in seeing that this could be a differentiator that's really fundamental with regard to being able to develop what the market needed. And then the chase, which was smart was down this continuous flow manufacturing route, but the company blew it and we blew it because the venture money that was in, which was some of the smartest venture money in the world, firm is still around. I won't name them because I'm a nice guy, but they're big and they're still around. And I had friends have gone to work there as VCs, since they got impatient and wanted to make it go faster and be liquid. And that was only three years into it. So what was wrong with that? Well, it wasn't that kind of product. So while we had product market fit, we didn't have investor and company product type fit, an ERP product. You want to treat it like SAP did. As an infinitely long road, you're going to go down and you're just going to become more and more dominant as you solve more and more problems in the world because nobody else can get to your stage of understanding of those problems and having the code, the integration of services on the customers that allow you to be able to go solve the next problem that is go vertical to vertical. And so they got impatient and they decided to shrink wrap the software and sell it as a standard package, fast, fast, fast, and nobody wanted it. So they actually created it. And the investor impatience created per product market non fit, where there was already product market fit. Corey Frank (25:32): So that disconnect between the investor and the founder in that disconnect on the thesis and the breakup strategy is what should have been ameliorated or talked about at the beginning? So arguably that wasn't the type of investment that was a snug fit in their portfolio, but they did it anyway. Chris Beall (25:52): They did it anyway. And they expressed their dissatisfaction by bringing in professional management. And that's a standard failure mode for all these businesses because professional management is the rough equivalent in many VC situations, ventured back situations of a salvage job. So a kind of a hatchet job, right? You come in and you trim costs and you arrange for the thing to be sold. It never got sold except the software got sold to a big company and became the core of a series of very exotic, automated distribution systems that were kind of second to none, a 20 year ahead of their time kind of things. But the business as a result went away. And there you go. I mean, it was ahead of SAP, who knows? You never know how these are going to play out. I mean, but it's a game that, the game needs to be played out over 90 minutes, turning it into 90-second game is a bad idea. Corey Frank (26:45): Yeah. Chris Beall (26:45): That's just all there is to it. And then I've seen that another standard failure mode is overreach. So when times are good, these things can fail because somebody thinks that, one of the businesses I was involved with, we had an opportunity to sell the business for a lot of money, billions and billions, really a lot of money on a very lucky set of circumstances where a company that didn't have that much money into it. It was perfectly positioned at a particular time in the market to sell to a public company in an all stock deal with no lockup. And it was a one-week-long plan to a close and the whole bit, but that ran counter to the notion of the company's liquidity path, which was to an IPO. So when 2000 came along and the beginning of the tech crash happened, the IPO was no longer viable and the company could neither be sold appropriately nor could it go IPO. And so it got trapped. It's just, what are those two, the two not quite mythical water feature Scylla and Charybdis, right? You get caught between those two. And it's if you turn this way, it's bad. If you turned this way, it's bad. And so some billions of dollars of potential upside were lost and the company ended up selling for, I believe in 2005 for 19 million, with 11 million in cash, still in the back. So that's a mistake of just an overreach. It was just a moment where there was so much boldness and certainty that liquidity was ours that instead of taking the money, and this is really common with us, right? [Rich Plumage 00:28:16] told me years ago, am I a corporate lawyer, one of those companies many, many years ago, he told me on a round of golf once and I'm afraid. I said, "Rich, it's clear. You're a wonderful human being. And you're a great professional, but it's clear you haven't spent all your time on the golf course." And he said, "Well, maybe not." I said, "Well, what have you learned all these years? 40 something years of doing this stuff, helping companies with finances?" And he thought for about four holes and then stopped me and said, "One thing, take the money."  

Most sales professionals are familiar with the journey of a cold call. It starts with fear. From fear we move to trust. From trust we move to curiosity. From curiosity we move to commitment, and from commitment to action. In this episode, Corey and Chris remind us that there is only one discovery call or meeting. And a true discovery call or meeting doesn't have a destination in mind. Welcome to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "Sales Professionals - stop worrying about the deal." ----more---- 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, 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 (01:04): I did a debate the other day. Corey Frank (01:06): Yes, at University of Texas, correct?  Chris Beall (01:09): Yeah, and the subject was fascinating. We spoke about two different views of sales development. As you and I have been speaking, we've been speaking about the sales development function, that first conversation, the follow-up conversation, and ultimately the discovery meeting as being the essence of dominating markets. Because if you do that right, you can do the math, so to speak, and you can dominate a market.  Scott [Gillum 00:01:39] was taking the other side of the debate because in his view, it's simply too expensive to talk to people. So it's better to use low-cost mechanisms, such as digital, media, search, advertising, that kind of stuff, and digital content, social media perhaps, in order to get people to come to you and then be the last company to have the first conversation. And my view is you want to be the first company to have the first conversation. So a very divergent view, but the difference in view is actually based on a different understanding of the cost of a conversation.  It's fascinating to reflect, for me anyway, on this debate, two rational people taking 180-degree opposite views of what you should do. One based on optimizing cost, the other based on optimizing market dominance, but each one coming from a different perspective with regard to the cost of having a conversation. So Scott's view was, well, a conversation is... He opened with quoting Chad Burmeister, who by the way I had just been with the day before talking about the same subject, and saying it takes 30 or 40 dials to get a conversation. That's too much to waste early because you'll be trying and you won't get ahold of the person, and then they won't be ready to buy or they're the wrong person, the wrong company, whatever. So wait until they show up and you know they're ready to buy, then have your first conversation because it's so expensive.  So it's fascinating to me that the cost of having a conversation, both actual and perceived, can cause a 180-degree shift in the idea of how you should go to market or what's practical with regard to go to market. Yet the difference at the end is, if you wait to have the conversation, your only way to dominate a market is by having superior advertising, which is a hard position to maintain. Corey Frank (03:35): Sure. If I have superior digital means, superior digital fire power, superior digital messaging, efficiency, at least that's the top of the funnel in order to dominate a market. That view is interesting. It's very pragmatic, right? It makes sense. Chris Beall (03:54): Well, it sounds pragmatic. It has an issue in that the entire fight is out on the table. When you're choosing to get into a fight for a market with competitors known and unknown, it's very hard to do it in a way that's anything but transparent. Your search terms are all transparent. And by the way, at any given moment, Google is busy selling your perfect competitor the exact search terms that will put you out of business. Their model is to go and find your perfect competitor and once a year, each one of you gets a shot at the good words, so to speak. That's going on and your advertising is out in the open, and your website, and your LinkedIn work, and your Facebook. Whatever it is, is out in the open.  Whereas when you're having a conversation one-on-one with somebody, not only can it engender trust in a way that digital can't, but it's private. Any information that you receive from that conversation is proprietary. And it's hard to imagine sustainably winning a fight by having no information advantage whatsoever. Corey Frank (05:01): Let's talk about that for a moment. I had a conversation with Andy Paul yesterday. Andy, if you're listening, I'm about to break apart your messaging and about to butcher it. But from Andy's conversation that I had with him, we were talking about the biz dev and then the sales role, and I believe one of his paramounts is that the biz dev, if I get a person, if I get a lead on the biz dev call and I've created some trust, that trust does not transfer to the sales person. So if I set a discovery call as a biz dev for you as my sales rep, Chris, and I've established some trust, I've been able to create a couple hundred thousand bits of information to create to turn that fear into trust and to be able to expand that trust into a discovery call with you, you as the sales person has to start all over again. You don't start from step two. You really start less than that. So we're not talking about optimizing cost. We're trying to optimize some trust when we have another cook in the kitchen as well, are we not?  Chris Beall (06:01): Yeah, I think Andy's exactly right. If you do a hand-off from one person to another and do it with the simple assumption that the amount of trust that was needed in order to get to curiosity, remember the journey. And we'll just go back over the journey for the cold call and ultimately for the follow-up call, too, the unscheduled follow-up call. The original journey in the cold call is from fear to trust, trust to curiosity, curiosity to commitment, and commitment to action.  The action is actually showing up at the discovery meeting, and the person you show up to the discovery meeting with could either be the person who you set the meeting with; that is, the sales person is doing their own biz dev function and they are setting their own meetings. And in that case, you already have built that little bit of trust. You probably would be wise not to rely on it being there. Why squander it? But to go through a process of re-meeting the person a little bit, and that's why, as I think we discussed in one of these episodes, I love to start with the question, "Where are you on the surface of our blue whirling planet?" just to have that sense of us being together.  There is a need in every conversation to re-initiate the relationship a little bit and re-establish the trust. But you have an advantage in a 15-minute meeting that you don't have in a cold call, and the advantage is the person has decided to come to you and confirmation bias tends to kick in. If I decide to come and meet with you, I'm doing it of my own volition. So my interpretation of the meeting, especially the early part of the meeting, is going to be conditioned on my decision to come and meet with you. That is, I will be looking for confirmation that this is a good thing for me to do with my time because I'm doing it with my time. I value my time. I believe that I am a good custodian of my time. I have voluntarily chosen to come and meet with you, and therefore, I'm going to be more likely than not to interpret that investment as a good investment and therefore you as a person worth meeting with, which is very, very different from a cold call.  So yes, you can blow it by acting like a sales person. You can get into interrogation mode. I was told to ask questions. Let's just start right in with the questions. Time's a-wasting.  And I know that Andy Paul, it's funny that he's a master of time and Zero-Time Selling was his first book and one of the most brilliant sales books ever done, and Andy and I have talked at great length about it. He's not advocating hurrying up in the conversation though. He's advocating getting to where you need to go or deciding not to go there in the minimum amount of calendar time and in the minimum amount of elapsed time or rep time actually. So his unit that he cares about most is the sales rep hour. And the question is, what are you getting done per hour of your time? I think that's quite brilliant. What happens in a discovery conversation needs to be as efficient as can be while taking into account that you're establishing or re-establishing a relationship with somebody, and that needs to happen because otherwise you may run the risk... and you will run some risk, but you may run the actual risk that this person's going to say, "Hey, I came to this meeting in good faith and you're abusing my trust."  So the sales person who abuses that trust can lose it, but they still start with some. And they start with some for a funny reason. It's not a transfer of the trust from, say, the business development person who called them to the sales rep who's holding the discovery meeting. It's a transfer of trust back to the prospect who trusts themselves enough to invest their time wisely and come to the meeting and, therefore, the meeting is going to be interpreted at first flush, at the beginning, in a positive light.  Chris Beall (11:00): You can blow it for sure. Sales people blow it every day. I have neighbors who listen to me listening to some of our sales reps' calls. I use [Chorus 00:11:09] in order to listen to those calls, and I do it often while trotting on the trails here in Reno because I can get two things done. I know it's supposed to be impossible to multitask, but you actually can walk and listen at the same time or trot and listen at the same time. And I am living proof of it. I do it pretty much every day. Corey Frank (11:28): Just as long as you have no gum in your mouth. Chris Beall (11:31): Yes, as long as you have no gum. And breathing turns out to be relatively automatic, especially when you're going up these big hills here. My neighbors believe I own a dog, and the dog's name is... Well, the polite version of the dog's name is shut the heck up. That's actually not the dog they think I have. That would be [crosstalk 00:11:51] brother or sister. Corey Frank (11:51): Sure. Chris Beall (11:51): What I'm saying is if you keep talking at this point... I'm just shouting at the air because I have no more sense than to do that, and then I'll try to take a note by sending myself a text message by talking to my phone. But the point is, you can abuse somebody's trust by going on and on about something that you care about instead of letting them talk and listening. It's still very different from interrogating them. If you're curious about what their situation is and you're willing to learn what their situation is, before you map their situation onto the amazing coincidence that your product is the perfect fit for them, if you can just listen, get them talking about something that they care about and listen, then you are doing the right thing with their trust.  And that trust can lead, again, to curiosity, but in this case it's your curiosity. You're being curious about their situation as a sales person. And from there, you can have mutual curiosity. They could become curious about how you might be able to help them, and from there you could have exploration, and exploration tends to be the next step that you're looking for... exploration or stopping the exploration, deciding there isn't any reason to. We call that disqualification, which is I think an unfortunate term. It's nothing more than just deciding not to go on another date. Corey Frank (13:14): The shut the heck up reaction is from the sales rep abusing that trust that was first created by that biz dev in that conversation, the overwhelming confirmation bias that that sales rep has that you are a fit. You seem a mere QED, you must be a fit for my product, and I am going to continue to try to talk about the things that I'm interested in without curiosity at all, with potentially the exception of my only curiosity will be how you're going to answer the questions that I need to have you answer... time, need, budget, fit, bant, what have you... in order to fit into my funnel.  Is it a lack of empathy? Is it a lack of genuine curiosity? Is it a lack of awareness that the sales rep shouldn't be selling the product in that discovery meeting? And as you've always said, there's a product, irrespective of the product that you're selling, that is innately built into that discovery meeting, and that is what should be sold. That's the value that should be distributed to the prospect on that phone.  Chris Beall (14:25): Exactly. I mean, it's a whole bunch of things that work together to get this standard behavior. For one thing, we make our reps believe that making quota is everything, and then we reason backwards and say therefore selling to this particular prospect is a perfect outcome. And in a market dominance sense, that tends not to be true. But even in a sales sense, it tends not to be true.  We wouldn't call it discovery if it only had one outcome. We wouldn't go on a voyage of discovery and say, "And oh, by the way, here's what we're going to find, just to let you all know." Right? We're going into these little wooden boats and we're going to sail across this big ocean and, oh, by the way, what we're going to find is a mall with a Starbucks and so forth and so on. And it's going to be shaped like this and it's going to look like this. We're going to be able to buy this. That's not a voyage of discovery. Discovery has to do with the unknown. And yet we tell reps, "No, no. You've got to know because if you don't know what the answer is, you won't get to the answer. And if you don't get to the answer, you won't get the sale. You don't get the sale, you don't get the quota. You don't get the quota, you don't get the commission. So let's just focus on that." And I think that arises from two sources. One is it's the tradition of what I call sales at the crossroads, one and done. Once we sell to you, we're strangers and we will go our separate ways. It's transactional, I believe is what that kind of selling is rightly called. But the other is when we only have a few opportunities, when our flow rate of conversations and our flow rate of meetings is low, then we're desperate to make the most out of each one. So if we have enough conversations, it's very easy to take the attitude, at least it's practical to take the attitude, that says let's just have a good conversation. Let's explore this one question, which is does it make sense to move forward together? In order to explore that, as a sales person, I need to tell you what it is that I think might make a difference, and you need to tell me what resonates with you, if anything. And it's back to something that's economic, something that's emotional, something that's strategic. If nothing resonates, well, there's no reason to explore it. If something resonates, let's take that element and explore it further in the conversation.  So if the desire is to have a good conversation that has the right result... the right result being either moving forward or not depending on the degree of fit, timing, and maybe other factors that are out there... then it's a simple job to hold a discovery meeting. But it's hard. It's a hard thing to execute on an intermediate step. It's like if you're a football player... it's NFL season now here in the US, the American football guys are out... and I'm trying to become a better wide receiver, and I've got to learn to run a particular pattern, whatever this pattern is. I'm learning to run this [inaudible 00:17:25], and there's a cut in it. I actually need to focus on making the cut before I focus on catching the ball.  If I just think about catching the ball the whole time, well, for one thing, my back is to the quarterback for part of the time and catching the ball isn't going to work during that period. And I've got to make the cut correctly at the right time in order to get to the right place to catch the ball. So focus on making the cut. Focus on having a good run with the right speed, planting the correct foot, and doing the right stuff with my upper body in order to support the cut and also to see if the cornerback is covering me or whoever's on me. And if I focus on that, my chances of being open to catch the ball go way up. If I'm just focusing on catching the ball, I'm probably not going to make a very good cut.  What I'm doing in the discovery call is more like getting to the point where we can be open to consider a transaction. So how do I do that? Well, I need to focus on the conversation itself, and that's what's hard to do because it's not the end goal. I've often heard managers say, "I don't care how you do it, just get the deal." And "I don't care how you do it" is like saying our approach here is to hire people and fire people until we find one that can do it.  Corey Frank (18:42): Well, that's right. Andy and I had a conversation about that yesterday, Chris, it's funny, about quotas, and his premise, which I really like, is that quotas are not good. When the measure becomes the target, Andy says, the measure is no longer valid. You miss out on the humanistic element of the problems you're trying to solve for your prospects it seems.  And I really like this idea, I think we should tackle it next call, about discovery. Discovery is not a destination. Discovery is a state of mind with the unknown. It's not an iterative process where I already know the destination with my heavy confirmation bias as a sales person. Certainly, I've been guilty of that, is that, listen, because you fit my persona of X... You're persona number three, Chris. You're a CEO of a SaaS tech company over X million dollars with Y amount of margin. Therefore, you must fit the product that I am trying to sell and not having any budget, you have to be a fit. So my discovery is already tarnished or biased in its performance. It's kabuki at that point because I already know where I'm going to try to take you, and as the prospect, you probably already are feeling a little bit like this is a hostage situation as we're going down our questioning funnel.  But it's not genuine from the sales perspective, correct? Because it's not a true discovery of let's find out if it makes any sense to explore this together because I already have my finger on the scale. Chris Beall (20:23): I think that's exactly right. The hardest part about sales... And I'm speaking with these students at University of Texas, Dallas... Dr. Dover's brilliant program down there. Dr. Howard Dover runs this amazing advanced sales program down at UTD. I had a group of students that were around me and one of them asked me, "Well, what should I do or what can we do that would make a difference in our sales careers?"  And I said stop caring about the deal. Just stop caring about the deal. Just be willing to execute the process of exploring with another human being what might be possible, knowing that you only have one set of things you can provide. You're not a consultant there to have a conversation with them about everything, which is why you allocate a specific amount of time for the discovery meeting. You allocate that time in order to clip the investment. And within that investment period, that 15 minutes or 30 minutes, whatever it is that you set on the calendar, you want to have it go as well as it can with regard to discovering the truth about the potential fit between that person's situation and their challenges and what it is that you offer, especially your most plain vanilla, this is down the middle offer, the thing that's really in the bag, so to speak.  If there's a great fit, or even might be a great fit, to the degree that it's worth exploring further, then you have the next step. That's what sales really is, is navigating a series of next steps that are very concrete and doing it with an investment known in advance, time investment. This is where Andy Paul's entire approach is so spot on. You're going to have one discovery meeting, and in that discovery meeting, you're going to determine does it make sense to move forward to the next step? And the next step is not another discovery meeting. It's something different. In our world at ConnectAndSell, the next step is what we call an intensive test drive. It's an actual experience of our product in production with a sales team. And that is the only next step that is prescribed in our sales process coming out of a discovery meeting. There is not a next step that says let's meet again. The error that many sales people make is believing that- Corey Frank (22:42): That's right. Chris Beall (22:42): ... continued time investment is progress. Corey Frank (22:45): That's right. Chris Beall (22:45): It's generally waste. Corey Frank (22:46): Well, that's great. Well, we're going to end it there for today's session, Chris. I think we have four more topics just from the last five minutes of your little riff there, one of which is I need to lasso Andy Paul and be the bystander, the fly on the wall, and let you two guys duke it out on the definition of trust, I think.  So I think the discovery call as a destination is a misleading term from the prospect's perspective it sounds like. So if we're going to call it a discovery call, then we have to be authentic and genuine and really mean what we say about a discovery call versus having the destination in our mind and we're going to do everything we can to get them there when it's inauthentic to say let's just see how it's going when I already know where I'm taking them. So that's incredibly valuable. With that, Chris, until next time? Chris Beall (23:42): All right, Corey. This was a good session for the first one in my 66th year. Hopefully, I can stand up to the pressure going forward.   

This is the continuation of the conversation with Donny Crawford about sales follow up, overcoming rejection, and likening sales to Google search results. Thank people for the conversation no matter how it went. This helps keep your emotions in check and allows you to move forward to the next call, even if you were rejected in the previous one. Get some very applicable and practical techniques in this episode of Market Dominance Guys - The Power of the Anti Curse to Overcome Rejection. ----more---- If you missed the first half, you can catch it here >  Three Reasons Sales Reps Don’t Follow Up 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. This is the full transcript to this episode:   In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Donnie Crawford talking about sales team follow up and why they don't do it and what you can do to change that bad habit. The first thing they talked about were the three reasons reps don't follow up. We pick up in part of that conversation so it makes sense for the rest of it. And we talk about search and how search and sales are so closely related. Sales and your ability to solve a prospect's problems are no different than Google giving you the right results for what you're looking for. You just have to be able to sift through the junk and know that there's more than the story that's being presented to you. Chris Beall (01:13): If you were advising somebody else and you were just looking at the business impact, how would you advise them? Oh, I'd have them call them. Why? Well, because something good might happen. That's part of the why. But the rest of the why is, guess what? This is somebody that we know something about that's incredibly valuable. This is somebody who answers their phone. And the cohort of folks who answer their phone, if we had known in advance, they answer the phone without having to call them, we would have just called that list. Donnie Crawford (01:44): Yeah, just that list. Exactly. Chris Beall (01:48): But now we know that list. They coughed up that information to us, answering the phone. And we don't know how often they answer the phone, but we know they answered it once, which is a lot more than zero times. So we have... Psychology tells us, I've been rejected. I don't want to talk to somebody who rejected me. The fact is they made an objection. They didn't care to talk with you. They didn't have time or for whatever reason. And they objected strongly enough that they hung up on you. Donnie Crawford (02:20): Yeah. Chris Beall (02:21): And so if you can take that objection and say, "You know, that's fantastic." And this is the key to the psychology. When somebody hangs up on you, non-sarcastically, you need to say to yourself, fantastic. This is somebody that I know answers the call. I'm going to talk to them again. And I'm going to talk to them about a week from now and see how it goes. That's open-minded. And then you put in the teleprompter, that thing I just said, which is, "When we spoke on this date, you didn't have time for a conversation." All the other ones compared to that one psychologically are super easy. Donnie Crawford (02:58): Totally. Chris Beall (02:59): Because you had a further conversation. However, there's another psychology element. And this comes back to don't know how and don't know why. Which is when somebody says something to you that is any other objection, that is not indicating to you definitely that they're intrinsically disqualified, you should talk to them next quarter. Donnie Crawford (03:21): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (03:23): Because there's only four possibilities in a sales conversation. Yes, no, not me, not now. And we lump everything about not knowing that some prospect is disqualified into not now. Why? Because until we talk to them, we don't really know anything about them. So we can't talk to them in the past. We must therefore talk to them in the future. And then that's the definition of not now. How far in the future? One quarter. Why? Because the basic unit of time for considering any new category of offering, not your offering, but any new category of offering, is about one quarter. Donnie Crawford (04:03): It's happening quarterly. Right? Chris Beall (04:05): Yeah. If you're going to buy something, you're going to consider it within a quarter. So put it out one quarter. Don't think, put it out there. And that's another thing is don't think. And then write a teleprompter that says, "When we spoke on this date, you said whatever and I'm curious about whatever." Donnie Crawford (04:26): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (04:27): And that's it. Donnie Crawford (04:28): That's it. Chris Beall (04:30): And then you let the conversation flow. So a big part of the psychology is you don't want to do what you don't know how to do. And if you don't really know how to do it, you really don't want to do it. Especially if your emotions are involved in a negative way. And so you need a ledge, as Jet Blunt calls it, an emotional ledge to clean to when the objection comes, that feels like rejection. The worst one is the hang up. So your ledge is a word or two that you say to yourself or say out loud. Don't say to them, they're gone. But you say it out loud, listen to yourself say it and set the follow-up. So what I say is "fantastic." Just exactly like that. Donnie Crawford (05:17): That person answers the phone. Chris Beall (05:18): That person answered the phone, I'm going to talk to them again next week. Donnie Crawford (05:24): Yep. Chris Beall (05:24): That's your ledge. And you need that ledge the same way that you need something to say to yourself. Say you're weightlifting and you know you're to the last rep that you can do before failure. You need to encourage yourself in that. Donnie Crawford (05:39): Absolutely. Chris Beall (05:40): It doesn't happen by itself. That weight doesn't jump up off your chest or wherever you're trying to get it all by itself. This is the one that you're going to have to push until then. It's like "Eh, no biggie." Right? And then when you're... This is why we have spotters. So when we lift, because you might dropped. Donnie Crawford (06:00): That's our managers, making sure we keep doing it. Chris Beall (06:02): Exactly. Managers spot us when we drop the weight on their chest and somebody needs to help come get it off. Donnie Crawford (06:09): Yeah, yeah. Chris Beall (06:10): But in general, we should be able to talk for ourselves and get that weight up one more time. And we need self-talk and the self-talk needs to be completely routine, setting the right tone of voice, very positive. And by the way, it has to specify why it's positive. Because when we're talking to ourselves, it's just like we're talking to a prospect. If we don't say why, they don't believe us. So if we don't say why to ourselves, we don't believe ourselves. Fantastic. Here's somebody that answers their phone. I'm going to talk them again next week. Donnie Crawford (06:10): I love it. Chris Beall (06:49): You're done. So that's kind of it. Now why do people believe that their follow-ups can be done manually more effectively than ConnectAndSell? They believe it for two reasons. One is they feel like they need to prep for the follow-up. What was the last conversation about? What do I need to think about before I talk to this person? They have to ready themselves. And there's some truth to that, but you're going to make a trade-off. And that is, say it took 22 dials on average to get somebody on your list on the phone. Now you've got somebody who answers the phone. So your "answers the phone" list is now down to busier. Right? So they don't always answer the phone. You don't know. So say your new dial to connect for that list, it takes 12 dials. So now here's the trade-off. If it takes 12 dials, still can navigate to failure, 11 times. Your mood is going to be pretty poor by the time you finally get somebody, it's still going to be a surprise because you don't expect to talk to them. So now you're going to have a different problem, which is your preparation didn't prepare you for anything, but leaving a voicemail. And leaving a voicemail, it's a one-shot thing. You can't leave voicemails over and over and over for somebody just because you had one conversation with them a quarter ago. Donnie Crawford (08:07): Right. Chris Beall (08:08): We didn't earn that many voicemails. So you have another psychology problem on a performance problem ahead of you if you decide to manually call. You won't be ready for the live conversation when it happens. And that's a serious problem. So what to do about that? Well, to get the other side of the bat, which is if I could talk to somebody on my follow-up list, and now it's going to take me two minutes instead of four minutes. So that's kind of nice. I get a little reward, it's faster. And I know what to say, it's right there in my teleprompter. All I have to manage is my attitude, my mood. But I always have to manage my attitude, in both cases. So instead of peaking for the big conversation, that doesn't happen, the big conversation that doesn't happen, the big conversation that doesn't happen. I don't have peak at all. I can just relax and know that my teleprompters can tell me what to say. I'm going to say it. Donnie Crawford (09:02): Yeah. Chris Beall (09:03): And that's... Yeah. So it's a trade off. And that trade off, it's got to be explicitly made by the rep. So then now I know why I shouldn't do it manually because I still haven't on in 12 chance, or one in eight chance or whatever, and I'm not going to be as good. And by the way, it's going to cost me half an hour. Half an hour is a lot more than two minutes. So what could I have done with those 28 minutes? Well, I could have talked to four more people- Donnie Crawford (09:28): Talk to more people. Exactly. Chris Beall (09:29): I could have talked to four more people. Given that sales is search, have to talk to people. So if I talked to more people per day, that's good. My follow-up list let's me talk to more people per day, which lets me search more of the space for someone who has or might have the problem that my company offers a solution for.   Chris Beall (10:47): So it kind of all comes down to the psychology of the here versus the future. I'll call it the ant and the grasshopper. Salespeople tend to be grasshoppers. They don't do anything for the winter. They just eat right now and hope for the best. They kind of hope winter is not coming. So that's a problem for management. How does your compensation help them? How does you're talking to them help them? How do you show them data and evidence that helps them? And how you help them hold themselves accountable for doing what they know needs to be done? You'd be on that rowing machine right now, Donnie. If you and I had a relationship where you said, "Chris, I want to make sure that I hit this rowing machine every day. Can you help me?" And I'd ask you every day, "Hey, Donnie got on the rowing machine yet?" One or two answers. "I haven't, but I'm jumping on-" Donnie Crawford (11:37): Yes or no. If no, get on it. Chris Beall (11:41): Yeah, Donnie. We can still hold this conference call when you're on the rowing. Donnie Crawford (11:47): Just get on there. Chris Beall (11:48): Get on it. I don't think you're going to transmit any viruses or anything. Donnie Crawford (11:50): Oh, shoot. Chris Beall (11:52): So accountability is always assisted by other accountability. And we need to manage to that because we know this stuff is hard for these three reasons. Donnie Crawford (12:02): Yeah. Chris Beall (12:02): I don't know the how, they don't get the impact, and the psychology works against them. And then there's one more thing, which is, everybody loves a cherry on top. Everybody loves the extra, the freebie, but wait, there's more. And here's the more for follow-ups, when you talk to somebody, you can actually send them an email with the logo. You can actually reach out to them on social and they might accept your invitation. As long as you do it correctly, which is you thank them for the conversation. No matter how the conversation went, they gave you a gift and you must acknowledge that gift and do nothing else. Donnie Crawford (12:42): Right? Chris Beall (12:42): So if you acknowledge the gift and sell to them, you're actually violating a social contract and you must not do it. But if you acknowledge the gift and simply thank them and then offer them a gift, maybe a piece of fairly neutral information that's of value that you know about, then you're approximately balanced. So with regard to social transactions, social exchange theory. So you follow up with an email instead of it being ignored as cold spam, it's an email from someone that just spoke with. And all that email has to say is thanks. Donnie Crawford (13:21): Yep. Chris Beall (13:22): So that's it. Donnie Crawford (13:22): That's it. Chris Beall (13:25): Now, what do the numbers say? The numbers say that follow-ups outperform cold calls by a factor of something on the order of three. They're easier to reach and they convert to meetings more readily because you have better conversations. And because your timing is likely to be better because you can't move into the past, only the future and all of their purchasing is going to happen in the future. So you're getting closer to the date where they're going to buy Donnie Crawford (13:52): When you started to really think through the Market Dominance stuff and the making sure you're falling within that cycle, I think that big idea was that is the ultimate reason for following up. I mean, it's completely the, that's the big idea, the important idea to keep in mind. So hopefully I can relate that to them. By the way, on the fantastic piece. Chris Beall (14:19): Yeah. Donnie Crawford (14:19): I remember actually doing flight school with them and on the fourth call, the fourth blitz with Olive Caser, there was one group where we were talking about fantastic. We were talking about that word. Like any objection that comes your way, it's almost like you can just answer "fantastic." That's fine. Great. I do like the answer of even people hanging up with you, fantastic. That person answers their phone. Move on. That's great. I'm going to follow-up with that person later. Chris Beall (14:47): Yeah. Donnie Crawford (14:48): There was a rep who used the word "fantastic" five to seven times in one call with every single objection he got. It was hilarious. And we even got on, Matt and I, heard this guy saying fantastic over and over and over again. And his whole attitude about these calls was just magical. It was just amazing. And it was just because he was treating these calls as, not as a scary cold call, but as something that he can learn from and learn how to handle objections and have the right attitude when handling them. It was actually really a beautiful thing. Chris Beall (15:28): That is fabulous. I mean, that is... Self-talk is funny, right? Because self-talk like, I'm going to come up with something I say to myself is not effective. Donnie Crawford (15:38): Yeah. Chris Beall (15:39): It has to be almost like cursing, right? It's anti-curse. Donnie Crawford (15:46): It is the anti-curse. Chris Beall (15:49): We need to have something come out of us that's kind of like... Cursing comes from a different part of the brain than speaking. It actually is a completely different part of the brain. Donnie Crawford (16:00): Yeah. Chris Beall (16:00): It's not related. It was barely related to speech. Cursing is more closely related to physical action. Donnie Crawford (16:07): Yeah. Chris Beall (16:07): Like punching the door or something like that. Donnie Crawford (16:08): Totally. There's actually a physical energy that comes out of it when you curse. There's actually a psychological effect, physical effect to it. Chris Beall (16:17): Yeah, cursing, self-talk that allows us to reposition ourselves for action after something like that. Donnie Crawford (16:24): Yeah. Chris Beall (16:24): And it's important that people do it. It actually is really important. And it lets us know something about how somebody else feels, that they're serious, that this means something to them. This is the anti-curse. This is saying "That thing went bad, but cursing is a bad idea right now because I need to be in a different psychological space." So you need a knee jerk reaction, but it's just an expostulation that allows... And it's said in a positive way and you need to practice it. One of the beauties of ConnectAndSell is you'll get to practice that many times a day and you'll get really good at it. [crosstalk 00:17:05] Donnie Crawford (17:04): That's a big idea too, Chris, that's a really good idea. That's a podcast. Chris Beall (17:04): Remind me- Donnie Crawford (17:09): That's a podcast. Chris Beall (17:13): That is a podcast. Donnie Crawford (17:13): The anti-curse and you have to practice them Chris Beall (17:17): First thing in anti-cursing, right? We learned how to curse when we're young and we become very good at it. As teenagers, we practice it. And then as adults, we really, really have got it down. But we don't really learn to anti-curse because why? Right? We lose... After all, if we do that in public with people that we're trying to get to help us, here's the deep dynamic. When we're young, we're in a power struggle with our parents. We need their help, but we want independence. We have to have independence because we have to become adults someday. So we're doing this really awkward dance with our parents and that dance involves power. And we have to be careful about not giving up too much power to our parents, too early. And parents, this is why it's tiring to be a parent because you're in a power struggle with your children all the time. No matter whether you think you are or not, because they have to be on an evolutionary journey where they take independence and you lose power. Because at some point you're dead and they're not, and they need to continue to function. Right? So if you have all the power and they never managed to get the independence, it doesn't work out so well. Right? So there's this journey that we're all on. And you would think that we would get to the point where we're no longer fighting everybody around us in order to keep them from having too much power. But in fact, we all do something in order to gain power with others around us, the way we used to with our parents. I call it the baby bird syndrome. We open our mouth and show the pink interior and say, "feed me." So we complain. We complain in order to restore a power relationship that we like, which is our power over our parents by us squawking. And we don't have to do it with our parents. We can do it with strangers. The way this dynamic really, really goes down all the way is in sales we have a problem. And the problem is we have to be the adult. And most people can't give up the power that comes from not being the adult and having people do things for you because you complain. Those who do by the way, are a master salespeople. The definition or the hallmark of the master salesperson is somebody who is so grown up that they have no, inclination to complain about bad things that happen. In a sales situation, they have mechanisms that they've adopted. Anti-cursing is one of them in order to maintain their status as the adult in the two person relationship between seller and buyer, the buyer must never be the adult. The buyer has to complain. Donnie Crawford (20:03): And then you're there to provide the solution and the guidance and to be the trusted adult and parent to lead them down the right path. Yeah. That's interesting. That's interesting. Chris Beall (20:15): Exactly. So it's totally different from what folks think, which is, "If I'm strong, one of the things I get to is I get to say, 'Hey, that wasn't good enough. You should have done more, whatever it happens to be.'" Right? But as the adult, with a bunch of kids, that's a ridiculous thing to do unless you're trying to get them to understand and grow. In a sales situation, we're not trying to get the other person to grow. Donnie Crawford (20:38): Yeah. Chris Beall (20:38): We're trying to get them to explore with us, whether it's wise for us to work together from their special knowledge, which don't have. We have to have access to their special knowledge about their situation. We have knowledge about our solution that somehow those could come together in a conversation we could figure out, "Oh yeah, this is something we ought to do." But it doesn't work so well if we can't access their knowledge and we can't access their knowledge, if we're complaining and making them do stuff for us. We're accessing their resources. Donnie Crawford (21:10): Well, parents and child relationships are the same way. A lot of times the child's not going to open up and not going to provide the information until they realize the parent is really there for their safety and their guidance and they can trust them and they're not just going to spew out feature function to their kids. They're going to listen and understand and be honest with whether their advice or their product or their solution is going to even be valid in a situation or not. You have to be willing to say, "Yeah, we don't apply to you at right now at this time. I can't give you advice right now at this time, because it doesn't make sense for you, but in four months in may." In four months- Chris Beall (21:57): Exactly. Because I can see your evolution from my experience. Yeah. So I think what we tend to do is simply play these... We play these old scenarios out, depending on our level of maturity. And in sales learning how to act more mature than you are, is a key to making progress. Donnie Crawford (22:20): It's interesting. Chris Beall (22:21): And therefore having words that you can say to yourself that cause you, or help you act more mature than you are, is very useful. Donnie Crawford (22:29): Yeah. When I was 19 or 20, I was on my mission. Me and my companions were all trying to be really good, like really good people. Like, I mean, just... I've never tried harder to be as good of a person as I could possibly be than I was in those two years when I was on my mission. And there was a companion of mine who lived a very colorful life before joining... To be going on a mission. And he was a bodybuilder. He lifted weights even on his mission. And it was hilarious, him trying to be good. The time I knew he was really, really trying was when he dropped free weights onto his foot and he yelled, "Yes. Yes." And he just was screaming at this, his cuss word was a positive. Right? It was exactly the anti-curse that was like... And it filled him with endorphins and it took the pain away actually. But it's a perfect example of the "fantastic" that guys will answer the phone. It was- Speaker 1 (23:33): I love it. I love it. Well, this is the essence of the whole thing. And I think we got to it here in this stuff about follow-ups. As the essence is the hardest stuff, which is deciding to overcome our need for emotional distance and retreat when we feel rejected, that's the hardest part of sales. That's why Jet Black wrote a whole book about it. So the hardest part is where we need the most help. And we need the help from others and each other and ourselves... I mean others in ourselves. And we got to have something that we do when it gets hard. Donnie Crawford (24:10): Yeah. Speaker 1 (24:10): And that's going to be talking to ourselves and we better say the same thing every time with the same tone of voice. Donnie Crawford (24:17): I like it. I'm absolutely going to use fantastic. This person answers the phone for this. I will incorporate that. So.

  This is a continuation of the conversation we started the last episode with Mandy Farmer, CEO, Accent Inns. Chris asks Mandy the question of what's next after you have firmly decided that fun is the core of building a great business, and nothing will push me off this. How do you attract and retain the right people who hold these same values? Corey likened the tone of the company to something like the people who make Cards Against Humanity. Even their company contact info on the game sets the tone for their irreverence. They are the same all the way through from the product they make to the people who support it and lead the company. There is a box of awesomeness that is given to each new hire at Accent Inns. They know in a short period of time who is embracing their values and who is faking it. She does the fakers a favor and cuts them loose quickly, out of kindness to them and to her team. She says, "Fire fast, hire slow." Learn more about her success ideas in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "How to retain the people who want to save men's souls." If you missed the first part of this interview, please listen here > ----more---- Presented 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 full transcript for this episode is here:   In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, we're continuing our conversation with Mandy Farmer, CEO of Accent Inns. Be sure to listen to the first episode to hear all about fun being key to your success. This continues the conversation where we're talking about how to attract and hold the right people. It goes back to an old sales anecdote where a guy was walking down the street and he saw some brick layers. And he asked the first bricklayer, "What are you doing?" he said, "Laying bricks." The next one he asked, "What are you doing?" he said, "Making six bucks an hour." He asked the next one, "What are you doing?" "Building a cathedral." And he asked the fourth one, "What are you doing?" and he said, "Saving men's souls." This is how you find and retain the salespeople and the team members that want to be saving men's souls, not just the bricklayers. Tune in for this episode of Market Dominance Guys. Chris Beall (01:18): So you went through all of that. When were you, "Okay, now Natalie, is this what I have to do, but this is what I have business faith in?" So to speak. There has to be a point in there somewhere it's like, "I'm compelled, I must do this, I'm doing it, trying, it's sort of working, sort of not working." and then, "Now I'm so convinced that fun is at the core of building a great business, that nothing will ever be able to push me off that, even if a global pandemic, which probably is never going to happen, were to come along and blast my industry to smithereens, I'm not moving off the fun position. The fun spot is going to be mine." When did that happen? Mandy Farmer (02:00): I think it first started happening maybe about five years ago. Before that, I always knew that fun was a part of where I wanted to go. So I always knew, "Okay, here's where I want to go and it involves a lot of fun along the way." But we weren't there, we were way down here. So the first thing for me was, I was getting the right team and so slowly but surely, I made sure we crafted the most amazing executive team. We couldn't call ourselves an executive team because that is a no fun name. So we're the Care Bears. So our Care Bears are... They're phenomenal. And I truly believe that crafting that team has been without a doubt the thing that I'm most proud of stuff, because they're phenomenal. So with them, we can do whatever we want. So once we had the Care Bears in place, the next step was making sure that we've got the right GMs in place like, Natalie. And that was hard, right? Because it's going to mean getting rid of some people, but also making sure that you can attract the right people. We've got this amazing general manager in place and then of course it just trickles down. But once we have the Care Bears in place, the thing that we did after that was we sat down and the team, including all of our general managers and our frontline employees, we sat down and we crafted our values. So as much as I really wanted to say to them, "Guys, it's fun, it's fun, right?" I can't do that, I can't say that. It's got to be organic and we all need to come up with what our values are. So of course they're your real values, they're what makes our company great. So I didn't even need to suggest fun. Fun is going to be right up there, because it's already how we're living our values. But the thing is, once we've got it in place, that alongside our other three values or our four values in total, then what happens is that when someone comes into our organization that's new, and the very first day that they're with us, they get a box of awesomeness. And it's a beautiful, awesome box. And that box of awesomeness has four things in it. And all four things relate to one of our values. So immediately on a first day, people understand, "Oh okay, I've got a Kazoo, why do I have a Kazoo?" And it's because we have fun, right? And we celebrate success. So it's just a touch point, but it's one of those things that is brought in on day one with people. Then they start training and they see that our training is also fun, because our values have touched every single thing that we do. So if, even if it's our policies and procedures, look at it through the lens of fun, they still need to be tight. They still need to be very specific, but they can still have... You can put your goggles on and look at your policies and procedures. So that's just what we've done, is we've really made sure to look at everything through the lens of our values. Chris Beall (05:04): Corey, your buying heads should just be spinning at this point. So Corey, what, in your experience in your career, who's come closest or what situations come closest to Mandy's approach? Or have you ever seen it tried other than any certain crazy friends you have? Corey Frank (05:24): I think... And you and I have spoken about this offline a few times, Chris, is when it... And Mandy, you're touching on it... Is when fun is mandated, when it seems forced, when customer service, the customer comes, number one. When it becomes more just a slogan that is in the employee break room, versus lived from the top down, that's where I think the customers and the certainly, the prospects can feel it. I think of cards against humanity, right, that game. And when that came out a few years ago, there's no other word I could think that, but it's a reverent enough, where even on their customer service line, if you had a problem with one of the card decks that you ordered, or you wanted more, it was this concept that they could still get business done, but they're not going to have this lead with ego. And having pride in your brand does not mean that it's an elitist concept, necessarily. I'm thinking of some of the other hotel brands that, they're very nice. You feel very different when you walk in, but "comfortable" isn't the word that I would use, because they're almost so over the top elegant, the folks are more like butlers or maids than they are like people that you want to hang out with after shift and have a beer. Or, I don't necessarily trust them to say, "Where's the best place to go for a pizza and a hot dog around here?" Right? So I think Chris, right, what we've seen certainly in our inside sales teams over the years and all the teams that we've looked at and consulted with and been a part of, is sometimes the drudgery of making the dials is a challenge. One of the stories that comes to mind a mentor told me, was pretty famous story, right? A man walks past a construction site and sees a number of workers laying brick. And he goes through the first worker who's laying brick and says, "Hey, what are you doing?" he's like, "I'm building a wall." And goes to the second worker, "Hey, what are you doing?" and he says, "I'm making six bucks an hour." Goes to the third person, "What are you doing?" he's like, "I'm building a cathedral." And then he goes to the fourth person says, "What are you doing?" he's like, I'm saving men's souls." Now we all have worked with each of those four different types of folks, but it's probably the latter two people and particularly, the latter person that are saving men's souls that has this attraction, this endearment to, like you had said, Mandy, "To jump out of bed before the alarm clock goes off every day and get to work." So how do you go about... Right, Chris? I'm curious. How do you go about recruiting these type of people? Did they come from referrals? I think I noticed something on your website that you have folks that have been there over 10 years and you probably don't lose people, I would imagine, even though you're probably not the highest paid hotel or hospitality chain in the area, specifically in a nice area like DC. So how do you recruit, how do you retain and how do they weed themselves out? So they're not parasites, because they probably look around and say, "Dude, I don't believe in saving men's souls." and, "I don't believe in building cathedrals, I'm just here for the six bucks or I'm just here to make a wall and then go home and slide down my dinosaur at the end of the day and go back to my family." So you got to have this business's personal mentality. I think this big picture, it's... How do you guys do it so well at Accent? Mandy Farmer (08:40): Well, I can tell we're on the same page and I think it's really important to get rid of the bad apples. So I've always said that, I've always supported my team to let them know, "You what, it might cost us money, it might cost us money to get rid of these people." So if that's the case, I support you because it is no fun working alongside one of those people, they will ruin your day. So it's worth paying that money. It really, really is. So I've always said that, "Fire fast, hire slow." So they know that I've got that support. But the other thing is, is that we've got a really amazing people culture, whereby yeah, we have fun, but we also do things right. For me, fun is also doing a really good job. So doing a really good job means that you are coaching your team. So you're sitting down with them on a regular basis. You're giving them feedback, you're coaching them along. And if they don't meet the milestones, then we say goodbye. So that happens pretty quickly. We give them lots of opportunities and lots of training along the way, but if they're not going to cut it, then it's really not fair to the rest of the team that they stay on with us. And they're probably going to be better suited. I have fired people who I know are leading better lives because I fired them, because they just weren't going to be happy working in my weird world. So now they're in a great other place. So that's such a good new story when something like that happens. So with our recruitment, we do ask for referrals. We pay for referrals because you know what, if we hire someone good chances are they're going to have good friends, right? And if they bring their friends into work then, again, that family fun atmosphere just gels more, right? You want to work with your friends, you want to work with people you like. So that's one trick we use. And then we will put on job fairs. That sounds so boring, doesn't it? But not how we do it. We actually do fairs, right? So there's cotton candy, there's a dunk tank, and again, it just shows like, "Hey, here's what you're going to get." Right? "Right off the bat, come join us, we're fun? And then, before you know it, you don't have to advertise for people because the word of mouth starts going and you become known as an employer of choice and you don't have to hire as much because so many people stay with you. I've got a lot of people on our team that have been with us for a really, really long time. And that feels so good. Chris Beall (11:25): It does. We just [inaudible 00:11:27] private celebration with our head of research this morning and sent him a note. This is his 10th anniversary with the company. And the main thing that I'd told him was, "It's such a pleasure and it's so much fun working with you." And we've never met, he's 11,000 miles away. And we work together every day on different kinds of stuff. It's a blast and that's the main thing. It's just, I don't think any of us stay doing anything for very long if it's not fun. Even the parasites have a hard time and they just have parasite fun, which is a different kind of fun. It's that taker kind of fun, but it's like, "Yeah, but the rest of us, it doesn't work for." But it's a sure sign, I think, that you're succeeding in using fun as a competitive weapon of business quite frankly. When what you're really competing for, which is talent, ultimately it's the people in business and into my business. It's always the people and you're competing for them every day. And if you have a competitive edge for the ones you really want, so they qualify in because they're referred and they qualify in, because it's no fun to work for a company that really values fun if you don't. It's the worst thing in the world. Chris Beall (13:34): So you were pelting invaders fairly naturally. Every once in a while, there's a psychopath who really work hard to worm their way in if they see enough value. And you can normally tell. I can tell anyway when they ask for a big title, because it's not fun to have a big title, it's ridiculous to have a big title. So that's like, "okay, you need a big title, you're not going to be hired, right, that's all there is to it." "Oh, I needed to do my job." "Really? Well, that doesn't sound like fun." But it's fascinating to me. So all these folks come to your property... I come to your hotel and I have this experience, do you have business people who show up that then go... They go off into their lives and they come back to you and say, "Hey, Mandy, you're doing something different over there, can you help me bring that into my business? What is this magic? I came into the room, I saw a bunch of cool stuff, it was all fun, I had great experiences of the people. Even the people who were cleaning the room, they were fun. How'd you do that? Can you help me understand that?" Does anybody ever come and ask you that? Mandy Farmer (14:48): Well, strangely enough, I'm actually doing a webinar tomorrow. And it was a company, they've asked me to come and talk to their group. And I think it's because right now, so many people are, or they're in that fear mode and they can see that I'm not. So they want to help their team get into that positive brainstorming like, "Okay, where are the opportunities here?" So I'm happy to help any company do that. So yet just this week, last week I did one and it really fuels me as well to the point where just yesterday we started talking about, "Should we actually put together something? Should we put together a leadership retreat for when this is all over, we can actually welcome some people to some of our properties and put on like a really good in-depth how to do this, how to thrive no matter what life throws your way." So it was just yesterday we started talking about that. So I'm really glad you're asking me that question. Chris Beall (15:56): That's so funny. I was talking to Natalie just yesterday and I said, "So are you guys thinking of using your property as a magnet for learning about fun and applying fun to business? Because it just seems like such a natural go somewhere, you have fun, you learn about fun?" And people who actually do it, not a bunch of consultants who come in and have no fun and claiming to make you fun, right. And come away with both easy stuff from the hard stuff, because the easy stuff is like, "Let's have fun." The hard stuff is, "Oh, and guess what? You're going to have to fire a bunch of people." But that doesn't sound like fun, right? It's like, we're all CEOs on this little podcast here and it's kind of funny that I belong to a CEO group that's called the Alliance of CEOs. And I love these people, I just love when we get together. Now, every Friday we used to just do it once a month and it's virtual. So it's easy to travel. It's a gray area thing, I'm up here. I'm now in Port Townsend. I'm probably not that far from you. If I were a really good swimmer, I bet I could get- Mandy Farmer (17:03): I could see you [crosstalk 00:17:03]. Chris Beall (17:04): If I go over to the top of the bluff over here, I can wave a little, "Hi." Mandy Farmer (17:07): Such a cute show, love that [inaudible 00:17:10]. Chris Beall (17:11): We'll be right over as soon as the border opens back up, although I don't think they're going to detect a swimmer. I think that that gets [crosstalk 00:17:17]. I'm not good enough on a standup paddle board and it's too comical, actually. You could make major league YouTube videos. I can defeat any cat video by watching me try to get up on a paddle board. That's my- Mandy Farmer (17:29): I think you should do a podcast from a paddle board. Chris Beall (17:32): It would be very short and shaky. Corey Frank (17:35): I think we should do a podcast from one of the Accent hotels when this clears up Chris, right? I think we go out of location. Chris Beall (17:43): So anyway, the Alliance, we get together and we talk and it's kind of funny. But this always sounds [cringe 00:17:48] but I think it's actually funny, I call it "The lonely binds club". Because, it's not lonely hearts, but CEOs have lonely minds. You were the person who was working on the business all the time, even when you're sleeping. If you don't think you are, if you jam on your dreams carefully, you'll probably find out that that's what they were actually about, right? It's trying to figure out the business because business is dynamic, because as I've always said, "People are only different in a small number of ways. Businesses are different from each other in a nearly infinite number of ways." And while we have balance sheets and P&Ls and all that, they don't really capture how we're different from each other, how dynamic businesses are. So we're always working on them. So here we have these lonely minds and we get to meet and talk like this and we'd be with our Alliance of CEOs, but it's CEOs talk to CEOs and they can connect at the mind level, because we have to work on the same crazy stuff, right? And what folks don't often realize is that even if fun is core to your business, getting to fun involves doing things that don't sound like fun, but you got to make them fun. To that's the hard part, right? I don't have the luxury of waking up someday and saying, "You know what, I'm not going to have any fun today. I'm going to take a non-fun attitude towards the parts of the job that other people might think aren't fun." They have to be fun too, even though they have these other qualities, like letting somebody go or doing a tough deal with a customer in a difficult negotiation. Whatever it happens to be, I got to be having fun doing that. Whereas somebody else might have to have fun having cold calls, which is a lot of what our company does, right? So I just think that's such a big part of this, is if you want to have fun, be part of your business, you got to take it really seriously without being grim. Seriousness is seriousness of purpose and grimness is a bad attitude and [inaudible 00:19:59] tease that apart. Do you ever run into that where it's so important to have fun that sometimes it's like, "But I got to do this part thing?" Mandy Farmer (20:07): Oh yeah. So another thing we do is we use strength finders. So we know our team intimately. And so what might be fun for you might not be fun for me, but maybe what the things that I don't find fun, Corey is going to find really fun. And so that's how we do it. We know where each one of us thrive. So that for me, I'm the big thinker brainstormer or cheerleader. But when we get down to the nitty gritty details, I'm not that very good at it. Whereas I've got people on my team who just cannot think big and they just, it scares them when someone says, "Oh, we're going to do that." So they're the ones that are actually going to implement that. And they really thrive in it and have so much fun doing the implementation part. So while it is hard to let people go and as a CEO, I need to be there. If let's say I'm going to let one of my team go, I would be there. But I'm also going to have someone there with me who, they're good at this and they also know that they're actually liberating someone. So even though it's hard, I know deep down, if it isn't the right fit, I am actually really helping that person. So there's a way for me to feel good about it. But I really believe that it's about talking about what your strengths and what your weaknesses are so that you can team up, because I know all my weaknesses, I'll procrastinate on them. And if I am held accountable with my team and they know what my weaknesses are, someone will help me and they'll take the lead on it. And I'll just follow along with them. Chris Beall (21:51): I think that's such a huge principle. I'm a big believer that the main thing we do in teams is we cover each other's backs, because our backs are weak and we're all weak in different ways. A team can be strong and have fun where the individuals will sometimes but won't often because doing stuff that you suck at isn't fun. Corey Frank (22:11): Well, it's liberating, I think. Two, you had mentioned this earlier, Mandy, coming to work for the first year or so as a CEO taking over the company, trying to put your own stamp on it. I think the word you used is "authenticity", which I like, is that one of the reasons I love my podcast partner here so much over the years is he is the same over a beer as he is on stage, as he is on a $5 million deal. And that is true authenticity. There's no trying to think, "What role am I supposed to play? Am I supposed to play this role for this title or this role for this title?" And I imagine if you have a culture of that, like you do at Accent, that it's liberating for your team members to feel that way, is that somebody wants to work with me and collaborate with me throughout this 9.00 to 5.00, or whatever this period of time I'm at work, because of me, of who I am, not for my education and not for what, but because of who I am first and foremost. Somebody could have the same degree that I do, the same GPA, the same experience, but that's not as personal as what makes me laugh or what makes me burn the midnight oil on a project or makes me go the extra mile. I think trying to harness that and trying to... As in a aerosol spray that you spray when you walk into the hotel, is it an injection or an IV treatment when they go through the hiring process? But I imagine whatever it is at Accent, it's clearly working. Mandy Farmer (23:43): Yeah. We joke about it because we can tell like with the new hire, it takes a good couple of months to where they really go, "That's for real?" And then finally it hits them and they're like, "Oh my God, this place is for real." And then they realize- Corey Frank (23:59): And then they come out, then they're really, really excited. Mandy Farmer (24:02): Yeah. And then it's just they drop all their pretenses and they're just like, they've drunk the Kool-Aid and it's exciting when we've reached that moment. And what I've noticed over the years is, it probably... I remember maybe three years ago it took six months, a solid six months before I saw that, "Yeah okay, they drank the Kool-Aid." And now we're down to, I think one or two months where it's just, they're starting to realize. And I think it's because all those previous hires they'll actually say to them, "Yeah, it's for real, like seriously, let your guard down. It's cool. We're all cool here. You're safe here." Corey Frank (24:36): You're safe. Mandy Farmer (24:37): Yeah. Corey Frank (24:38): So I've got a question for both Chris and you Mandy. One thing I want to ask Chris for so long, so is there a book or a movie? Just one book or one movie that if I was going to work for you, Chris, at ConnectAndSell, or if I was going to work with you, Mandy at Accent, is there a book or movie say, "Listen, don't look at the website, don't look at our collateral, don't look at our P&Ls, don't look at our investor docs. Read this, or watch this and you'll get me after doing that." Is there one that comes to mind for both of you guys? Chris Beall (25:08): There's one for me. I would have you read, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, which is the autobiography of Richard Feynman. If you want to get me, read that. Corey Frank (25:20): Surely... And what's it about? Chris Beall (25:21): It's about one of the physicists who made the 20th century what it was and made some of the greatest discoveries ever. And he had more fun. I mean, the title of his autobiography is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! This is somebody who took the hardest intellectual work of all in the most fraught situation that mankind has ever faced, which is the creation of the atomic bomb and made it fun. And not just made it fun like a joke, but made it fun like the fun was the key to getting the work done. And he's also the guy that figured out why the Challenger crashed, the guy who pulled that little O-ring material out of the ice water, the congressional hearing, and got the congressmen to understand what had happened. And this was a guy who put fun front and center. And if you want to listen to something you might not understand, but it's worth listening to. Listen to the finding lectures on physics. I realize that sounds pretty bad and it doesn't sound fun. And I sound like a physicist, which I am, but I tell you what, just listen to Richard Feynman and you'll get how the most serious stuff in the world can be built on a foundation of fun. Corey Frank (26:35): That's perfect. That's perfect for you. Mandy, what do you think? How about in your corner? Mandy Farmer (26:40): I'm going to go with three books. So one book that really, really influenced me in creating a product that was so different, that really gave all of us permission to have more fun. It was a book it's Purple Cow by... I think it's by Seth Godin? Corey Frank (26:59): Seth Godin, mm-hmm (affirmative). Mandy Farmer (27:00): And that really made me realize like, "Okay, I need to do something different here." So that's when we created hotel Zed. Then hotel Zed was still wacky and weird that it allowed Accent to really blossom as well. So that's the first book that I think, to really understand my brain, that one gave me permission to really seek out differences. On leadership, I'm going to say Brene Brown, Dare to Lead. I love that book. I love all her wisdom on being an authentic leader. It's on my bookshelf, in fact, I got it one foot away from me right now. And it's one that I can pick up, I skim to any page and go, "There it is, this is it." Then the third one is also a foot away from me and it's called, The Culture Code and it's by Daniel Coyle. And I love a thriving alive culture. To me, that is what so excites me. If we can create that workplace that just, as soon as you walk in the door, you feel it as a customer, that's what really motivates me and really gets me going. Corey Frank (28:09): That's awesome. That's great. Well, I tell you what I think we're out of time for today that has been incredible discussion. Thank you, Mandy, for coming. So from what I understand, right, it synthesized a lot of the tips that you have for fun is, "Go fun or go home, bring your true, authentic self to work, no parasites," certainly you and Chris are aligned on that. "Find your Wolf pack in your organization," which I really like that concept of the rebranding. "Always look to help." Then of course the one, if I could put an explanation point on what all the things that you've said today, it's ,"No fear." So, really appreciate the time and I think Chris, we have a regular guest here in the making. I don't think we have standing guests almost like they had on the Johnny Carson show, but I think Mandy should definitely be one of those. And especially if we can shmooze her to maybe do an onsite in a few weeks here, a few months up North at one of her properties too, what do you think? Mandy Farmer (28:09): I absolutely love it. Chris Beall (29:07): Mandy, I'm going to be right up, it's not very far from Port Townsend and I'll be seeing you soon. Mandy Farmer (29:13): I looked forward to it, Chris. It was great to meet both of you. Chris Beall (29:17): Thanks so much for being on, I really appreciate it.  

Corey Frank and Chris Beall just had the fun privilege of recording a Market Dominance Guys podcast with Mandy Farmer, CEO of Accent Inns on the most important value in her business (and ours also, it turns out) - fun. This is part one of this interview with Mandy. Take a break and enjoy some lightness, as well as considering a new approach to help secure employee retention while growing your bottom line and see why she and her team are thriving in the hospitality industry while her competition is going through massive layoffs. As soon as the border opens up and we can cross the border, our team will take the ferry north to have fun learning more about the crucial role of fun in business - the best way, by direct experience! Thanks, Mandy, for being our second guest ever, and for sharing the business power of fun with us today. And thanks, Ryan Reisert for introducing me to Natalie Corbett yesterday. I'm so glad we took the opportunity to have these conversations. Conversations Matter. Fun conversations matter even more! Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys. ----more---- ---------------------- 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, https://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 (00:28): Great. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and the esteemed patron of honor here, Chris Beall as always to my virtual left. Today, we have a very special treat for everybody because we don't have guests usually, Ryan [Riset 00:00:52] made it just under the wire from a few weeks ago, but we're honored to have Mandy Farmer who runs the Accent Inns. It's a family owned and operated group of hotels in the British Columbia area. And I think you'll agree after our chat with me and Chris today that their approach, the Accent Inn approach, of taking fun seriously is a core value for any company, especially in today's environment. So welcome Mandy to the podcast. Mandy Farmer (01:24): Glad to be here. Corey Frank (01:26): Chris, so how did we get to know Mandy here? Normally it's just Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, Ed McMahon, of course. And we decided to have some guests and an esteemed one at that, so how did we get to know Mandy? And how does this have to do with Market Dominance? Is fun a dominant trait for businesses today? Chris Beall (01:43): Well, yeah. So what happened was Ryan Riset, somehow, and you know how many people we talk to at ConnectAndSell. If you haven't had a conversation with us, you probably are hiding somewhere pretty well. Somehow he had a conversation with Mandy's colleague, Natalie Corbett, and I don't know how that came about, but he told me about it, he said, "These guys are doing something in the hotel industry that seems impossible and yet they're just doing it." And they're doing a bunch of something. So one of them was they're providing accommodations for essential workers. And that really resonated with me because my son, Galen, is an essential worker in Reno. And I know the effort that he goes through just to get into the house, because there's other people in there and he has to come home and strip down in the garage and put his clothes in a bag and sneak in through a known path that he takes quickly into the shower, and the whole bit. This essential worker business is a non-trivial undertaking and actually, he had an experience the other day that it would have been very nice if he could have gone somewhere else because he had a seizure at the office. He's the assistant manager of the FedEx office in Reno, and just some combination of some medication that needed to be adjusted and as a result, lack of sleep and the stress of dealing with the public, on the front lines of public, that by the way, is not always a very kind to these essential workers, basically saying, "Hey, you're not at any risk, this is some kind of a hoax or whatever." So it's not a nice thing to hear during the day. So anyway, it would have been great if he could have gone somewhere other than having to come from the hospital all the way home and do all that. And so I heard about that and I got into a conversation yesterday with Natalie and what jumped off the page and maybe what was wildest, you know my way of doing business, right? I say, if you're not having fun, you're not taking this seriously enough. That's our number one thing. And every company I've ever built, every company I've run, every team I've ever run, number one, we're going to have fun. Number two is we're still going to be enthusiastically wrong every day. We're just going to be so wrong so often and we're just going to maintain our enthusiasm, not in the face of being wrong, but our enthusiasm for being wrong. And if we can do those things, then a whole bunch of good stuff's going to happen. We don't know what it's going to be, but a whole bunch of good stuff is going to happen. And those are not easy things. And then we're going to keep the parasites out. I don't know if Mandy cares about that, but I care about it a lot. No parasites allowed in the company. If you're not willing to get in the row boat, row with us and [inaudible 00:04:24] like. If you've got a yacht over there a little ways away, and you're willing to sink the rowboat to go over to your yacht, that one doesn't work, right? And I've got my ways to doing that. So I heard this flown in first as a core value thing, and I thought, this is the missing thing you and I have talked about, but we have a whole episode about it. We have an episode that says the best surfer is the one having the most fun, right? So we actually hit on it, but we've come at it peripherally through the fact that we think the conversations are the key, but in Mandy's world, something else is going on. It's like a major business invention, putting fun at the top of the value chart, the value of the company values and then letting that provably drive business results that are effectively impossible for others with the proof being that when her whole industry went like this, her company came out of it in a couple of days with new offerings that made sense, that were being fielded, that were on the street, the people who are using with new stuff every day, coming back. And then it turns out if you go to the past, they were already doing stuff like that. It was a continuation. So fun as an instrument, an essential foundational capability of market dominance we've never explored and here we are with Mandy. Sorry. That was kind of long Mandy, but did I catch it? Mandy Farmer (05:51): You did. Yeah. And I think obviously we speak the same language, we are cut from the same cloth. Chris Beall (05:57): What's wrong with us? Mandy Farmer (05:58): I love it. The fun is so important and I think that it's a really crazy thing to actually be talking about right now because we're in the middle of a pandemic. It's almost like we're not allowed to have fun right now, but for us, my company, we are thriving right now. Yes, revenues are down. Yes, I'm worried about our bottom line, but my company is thriving and we're thriving because of our values of having fun and taking care of each other, making sure we've got the community's back. And so even in great times, we thrive, but I can tell right now, we're on fire right now. Corey Frank (06:41): You know Mandy, one of the things I noticed from your website, first of all, two things, I love it says that pillow fights are optional. So you're putting that kind of irreverence fun tone at the forefront. But the other thing is, and I'm sure you notice this too, Chris, is that the images that you have on your website are of active people utilizing the property, not just of the property. A lot of hotels, you're just going to see the beautiful room with nobody in it. You're going to see the pool with nobody in it. You're going to see the expensive restaurant with nobody in it and in your imagery, it feels very family-friendly, it feels that fun is a preeminent value. Where does that come from? From a thesis or a theme as a core value, as Chris had said, of your company? Mandy Farmer (07:30): Well, really, one of our other core values is authenticity. And so we call it, being real and for us, fun has always been such an important part of my personal values in that I really want absolutely every single one of my team to come to work and to have fun and to enjoy their jobs. And so it's really important that we embrace that in absolutely everything that we do. So when you're talking about the language on our website, when you walk into one of our rooms, we have actually sat down and thought about how do I make this pen fun? Okay. You walk into the bathroom, how is it going to be fun? It's just going to be a boring hotel bathroom, but we've actually brainstormed. No, no, let's just think outside of the box, let's throw really bad ideas at everything. Let's have a laugh because these ideas are so bad that we're just going to laugh and have fun, but then you know what, one of us will go, "Oh, actually it's not bad" Yeah. And then before you know it, we're implementing it and we're doing it. I know that if I'm having fun, when we welcome people into our hotels, they're going to have fun. And what I love is that, especially this really dark time, it's really important that people have that brightness in their day. So one of our themes is we're big onto ducks. We've got ridiculous rubber ducks and they're the craziest rubber ducks you've ever seen. My favorite is the lumber duck, and he's got this really big beard and he's holding a chainsaw. Why? I don't know why. And so people see that and it just brings a smile to their face. They'll look on the phone, and there's a joke on the phone, when you look at like dial zero for the front desk, there's jokes in there that are hilarious. And what happens is if people might be attending for a funeral or they might be in a subtle worker and they've had a really hard day and suddenly we've just given them a reason to smile and to just not take themselves so seriously and not take this whole, like everything so seriously. And just to have a bit of a smile brightens people's day. Chris Beall (09:40): Wow. So how'd you get here? How'd you get to... where you raised fun? [inaudible 00:09:48] I was kind of okay, so here's my fun story, I'll just throw it out there. My mom was a great practical joker. Now her practical jokes tended to be extreme. So here's an example of one where I went to the school bus stop in the morning, I grew up near where Corey lives now in Scottsdale Arizona, but it was way out in the desert. And I went to the school bus stop in the morning and the kids were obviously teasing something that was on the ground and that something turned out to be a big rattlesnake, big, big thing. Big around as my current arm, not my skinny little arms back then, and I was probably 14. So I thought this is bad news. I got to do something. So I ran home, got my rifle came back. Can you imagine doing this now? Came back. I was thinking of getting a shovel or something, but I thought, I think I can kill the snake. And we didn't kill snakes, by the way, our family had a... One of our family values was not killing snakes, but this snake definitely was a problem. So I come back, now with the rifle, you can be at a distance, right? Hold it at arms length and that was my mom's gun, actually that she'd given me. Shot the snake, took it home, put it in the refrigerator because I thought we might need it because it's a snake. It was a lot of meat, right? We lived in a tough area and what did my mom do with it? She curled it up on the top of the garbage and put it out for the garbage man, but she went to the effort of propping its mouth open and propping its fangs out individually with little toothpicks so the things are sticking out like this. And I found her waiting for the garbage man to show up and I said, "Mom, they'll never come and pick up our garbage again." She said, "It'll be worth it." So, that was the kind of fun that went on in my family. It was a little [inaudible 00:11:42] came right down to it, but I was otherwise raised by a Western Massachusetts person who had lived through the depression, and basically thought that we were all going to go broke and die tomorrow. Corey Frank (13:02): So I wasn't raised with fun, but something in there, something lit up in me and I've been into the concept of, through my whole career, whether it was the rock climbing and mountaineering part of the career at doing big walls or whatever, the whole idea is don't ever let it be grim. If we're going to succeed, we're going to have to have fun because this is... I guess my view is, life is hard, we better have fun or it's too hard. That's kind of it. So I was raised in a tough kind of situation like that, [inaudible 00:13:32]. How about you? How did you get to this weird position? Mandy Farmer (13:35): Well, I'm in a family business, so I'm third generation. We started off as a construction company. So it was my grandfather that started farmer construction and my dad worked in that field and he didn't like it. He was not happy. And so as a kid, I saw him not really enjoying his job. And then one day he pitched to his partners, "Hey, why don't we take this field where we keep a lot of the construction equipment? Why don't we build a hotel there?" And they thought he was crazy and he kept pursuing it and eventually it happened. And I literally watched my dad change overnight where he became this really excited, happy, passionate, enthusiastic man. And it was because he found the right job. He found the right career. So I ended up in the hotel industry too, never thought I'd join the family business. And to be honest, I needed a job when I came out of university and started in sales at the family business and eventually worked my way up because it was fun working with my dad. And so he really allowed me to take over the company, but in a family business, it can be challenging to take over because you often approach it feeling like, "Oh, I only got this job because I'm a daughter." Like, I was given this job. And so I really felt like, "Oh, I've got to prove myself. And I've got to be just like him." Or I've got to be the stereotype of a CEO. And so for the first few years of my leadership, I really thought, "Okay, this is how it's supposed to be and I'm going to be this way." And I realized I was not bringing my true self to work. And this really upset me. And we had some parasites and I knew that if I was really going to bring my true self to work, which is really a bit of a weird and wacky and fun loving, big hearted person, there was going to be some big changes at work. And so it took me a number of years to really figure it out. But it meant cultivating the right team. They have been the secret sauce to my success without a doubt, making sure that I'm surrounded by people who inspire me, who I want to be around, who are fun. I want to enjoy coming to work. I want to wake up on a Monday morning and go, "Yeah, I'm going to work today." And so, it was them that really motivated me. And I knew, I really sat down and spent time thinking about what is my ideal workplace? How am I going to get there? What am I going to do? And for me, that's bringing my weird and wonderful self to work with no qualms about it. Corey Frank (16:19): So what's the hardest part of being, not just fun centric, but fun foundational. What's the hardest part about keeping the fun going or keeping the company going? Mandy Farmer (16:31): Whew. Well, first off, when we first started implementing fun, people didn't get it. They were like, "Well, how are we supposed to do fun?" And they wanted to know, tell me how fun is. And I realized this isn't something you've mandated. It's got to be really authentic and real and grassroots. And so it took a long time to cultivate our sense of fun. We tried training on it and I was like, this isn't working, this isn't real. And so eventually it grew, but it's about leading, leading with fun and making sure you hire people that are fun and with big hearts. So that was probably one of the hardest things we've ever had to do. When people ask me, how do you do it? I often think I just can't really give you a recipe because it's got to come from within. But basically everyone knows, when I talk about a company's success and why we're thriving, it's because I'm actually looking at it in terms of fun. And so I'm often not talking about it in terms of the bottom line and for many businesses out there, they're like, "That is nuts, that makes no sense, you're going to fail if you aren't looking at your bottom line" Of course, I am looking at it, but what it is is fun comes first. And then what always happens is your bottom line is actually going to be even better because you've got all these engaged people coming to work. And not only do you have an engaged workforce, but then you've got engaged customers because they see you having fun and they're engaging on your social media and they're sending you sales leads because they want to see you succeed. So suddenly your bottom line is beyond what you ever imagined, because you've actually focused on the one metric of fun. Chris Beall (18:11): So is that what you would say is what the big guys are missing, is they're using probably hospitality as it's a destination, a clean room, a great restaurant, friendly staff. And you have this little secret that maybe is a little slightly irreverent because I can't measure it, but yet you're thriving. And yet you get referrals from your existing customers who seem to be a pretty fervent in their desire to continue to stay at Accent every time they come to the BC area. Mandy Farmer (18:41): Yeah. When I think about my competitors and some of them, they're big boys, right? Like Holiday Inn, Marriott, all of these guys just so big that they almost are a little bit heartless and we're all about heart. We were just one big gushy heart, right? And so for them, they have a share price that they need to maintain. I don't have a share price. So I don't have to focus on those metrics, I can focus on different metrics, but strangely enough, if they actually focused on my metrics, I think that the share price would go up, but it doesn't work that way, unfortunately. And so for us, compared to our competitors, they were all about, "Oh, whoa, we have to cut. Right now, they went into fear mode. We have to cut, we have to reduce everything. We have to cut our sales team. We have to do all this. And for us, we took a different approach. We were first off, safety. Safety of our team. We can't have fun if people don't feel safe so let's make sure that they all feel safe. And so that's when we went over our safety protocols and all of that, the second thing I didn't cut my sales team and all of our competitors did and their business fell off. It just completely fell off. And instead what happened with my sales team was they decided to rebrand. So we no longer have a sales team. We have a Wolf pack and they are hunting, and they are fierce and they are... I have never seen them more, just connected in bumbling and bursting up. They're a real inspiration to all of us, our whole team. So yeah, just this whole different approach. Fear-based versus love-based. And then once we had got in place, we decided, okay, well, how can we help in this time of craziness? How can Accent Inns help? And so that's when we realized, okay, we can actually house the essential workers, any of the frontline workers to keep them safe, to keep their family safe. But then we realized that there's evenmore that we can do there. And so we partnered with a charity. We raised money so that all of those expenses were covered, these stays are free. So that if you are working, let's say in a grocery store, we need grocery store clerks, right? We need to keep them safe and healthy. We need their families safe and healthy. They can't afford to pay rent twice and stay in a hotel. So by doing what we're doing, we can actually wrap our arms around them, keep them safe. And then what happened in the communities was people started donating food to them. We started dropping off Easter chocolate for them. We have schools writing them letters. And so we stick these little love letters from elementary school students on their doors. And suddenly now, we're all the whole community is doing something good and positive and we feel great. Corey Frank (21:35): It's just tremendous. It's just tremendous. I got to ask a very specific question, I heard about this Valentine's day thing you guys were doing. I don't know when it was two years ago, whatever it was. Can you tell us that fun story? I think we all need a fun story right about now. Mandy Farmer (21:53): You bet. So we have two brands and they're both our brands. I don't franchise. I don't buy it from holiday and they are brands and it allows us to do weird and wonderful things. So one is act [sentience 00:22:05], but then the other one is Hotel Zed. So in Canada, the last letter of the alphabet is Zed. And so Zed is a wonderful cousin to Accent, we still have humor and fun, but it is really out there and it can push boundaries and limits. And so it's a retro chic boutique motel. So it's got all the throwbacks to the 1960s. It's a really, really fun place to say. So on Valentine's day, it was years ago, we started off by running a Nooner promotion. And so we decided that Valentine's day, a lot of times what people do is they [inaudible 00:22:46] bouquet of roses, they pay way too much for roses. They try to get a reservation at the restaurant, but they can't get in. And it's just, you often Valentine's day can fall flat. So we decided, well, why don't you surprise your Valentine's day with your gift of your sexy self? And it's a Nooner, so you check in at 11 o'clock and you check out at two. Corey Frank (23:07): That's fabulous. Chris Beall (23:07): That's awesome. Mandy Farmer (23:12): So we started doing this and we run it every single year. And so this year, we always put a little slant on it. So this year, this slant was a baby maker and we thought, okay, so here's our Valentine's day nearest promotion. But if you actually make a baby at Hotel Zed, we're going to give you Valentine's day stays at any one of our locations for the next 18 years. Corey Frank (23:39): Wow. Mandy Farmer (23:43): [inaudible 00:23:43] CNN picked it up and then when CNN picks up something, it goes around the world and it's translated into Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian. It was crazy. Went around the world, TMZ picked it up. And then before you know it, they're doing a spoof on Saturday night, live on the weekend update. Corey Frank (24:02): Wow. TMZed. Mandy Farmer (24:04): Right. Chris Beall (24:04): TMZed that's right. And so, how many folks have... So it's been two years now, right? Or a year or so? I bet that everybody just flacks to the Valentine's day promotions this year, than at every hotel, that's incredible. And how many babies, any baby updates as for us yet? Mandy Farmer (24:26): We're still waiting for confirmation, but so far, no, it looks like we went and struck out this year. Chris Beall (24:33): Wow. Well. Hmm. So we'll be right up, but no, no babies. Not in the forecast on this particular Valentine's day or the next one or whatever, but that's just fabulous. So when you're in the process, when you made the decision to go fun, go fun or go home, right, so to speak? Mandy Farmer (24:59): Yeah. Chris Beall (25:00): And you're in that process and you're trying to figure out how to do it. And you're trying all the things that people might be recommending and let's bring in the consultants, let's do the training, let's do all that stuff. You got your parasites gnawing away at you because there's always parasites unless... In fact, I'll make a contention. In my companies, fun is how we keep parasites out. It's the number one part of our immune system, because the parasites have to fake that they want to come and have fun. And it's easy to find out they're faking before it [inaudible 00:25:34], usually easy before you hire them because they are parasites and parasites don't want to have fun, they want to have whatever they want to have. They want to feed off the organism that you've created and it's power and put some of it in their pockets, so to speak. So you went through all of that, when were you like, "Okay, now Natalie, is this what I have to do because this is what I have business faith in, so to speak. There has to be a point in there somewhere, it's like, I'm compelled, I must do this. I'm doing it. Trying, it's sort of working, sort of not working and then pop. Now, I'm so convinced that fun is at the core of building a great business, that nothing will ever be able to push me off that even if a global pandemic, which probably is never going to happen. Where we were to come along, and the last of my industry is smithereens. I'm not moving off the fun position. The fun spot is going to be mine. When did that happen?  

Corey and Chris talk about when to hire the right people, how to hire the right people, and horror stories. It starts with the tension between talent and alignment. There are three scenarios you don't want to end up with a new hire. You always want people that are talented and aligned, or else you either don't hire them in the first place, or accept this and fire them now. You may have a candidate that is talented and capable. You think talent will take over and they will become alignment. Never happens. Lack of alignment may be due to a fundamental insincerity and sucking out of the company what they can. Yes, I can do that, hey can I have that corner office? Next, you may run into the candidate that has no talent and no alignment. First, why would you EVER hire that person? If you did - time to fire them. The final is the tougher one. They have alignment, but why only have some of the talents you need, but not enough so they lack performance. They just aren't catching on. Join Chris and Corey for this episode of the Market Dominance Guys: Construct Your Company So It Is Unappealing To Parasites. ----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 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 (00:34): Hey Chris, great to chat again. One of the things that I think we were talking about last time in abbreviated detail was when to hire the right people, how do you hire the right people, and maybe some horror stories of when the people that we hire are not in alignment with what our values are as a business, particularly in this market dominance role. So I think it'd be interesting to hear from the master here, hear from you about, when you're knee deep in market dominance growth mode, and you have your systems, firing on all cylinders and everybody's in their respective swim lanes. How do you go about hiring and adding to the team where we both know that sometimes adding one person that is not culturally aligned can bring down the entire kingdom, so to speak, or at least set us back many, many, many months? So what have you learned from the market dominance growth patterns that we've seen and you've seen in certainly so many of your client companies and how it relates to hiring the right people and what are some of the processes folks used to make sure that they're hiring the right folks? Chris (01:45): Well, it's a fascinating question, Corey. I mean, we know that there's always a tension in every company, between talent and alignment. At General Electric, they used to talk about this, that you had the folks who were essentially talented and aligned, and of course those people are golden, and then you have the people who are talented and capable, but misaligned, and you tend to keep them because you keep thinking that their talent or their skill or whatever, is going to take over and somehow maybe they'll get aligned and then that doesn't ever happen and you finally end up firing them. I mean, they used to talk about fixing that, but I don't know very many cases where somebody whose lack of alignment is due to fundamental insincerity as a human being and they're just kind of in it for themselves and seeing what they can suck out of the company. Ask not what you can give to the mission, they ask what's your pot of gold is going to look like at the end of the rainbow, and by the way, can I have that corner office please with this nice view? And then there was the easy one, which is the no talent, no alignment. And how in the world did you hire that person? So there's your hiring processes, your recruiting and hiring processes be able to avoid, but anyway, that's easy. And then there was the tough one, which is the person who has very well aligned, but they seem to have some of the skills, some of the talent they need, but it just doesn't come together, and so you're getting a performance, really it's not alignment and talent, it's alignment and performance, you're not getting performance. And what do you do about that? Well, what do you do about it? Well first I think is you construct your company so that it is unappealing to parasite. The funny thing is, to where you can do... Corey (03:21): Parasites? Chris (03:26): Parasites, yeah. You're probably wondering what is a parasite? Corey (03:30): I saw the movie, it was fantastic. So I'm on bated breath here. Yeah. I'd love to hear about that. Chris (03:35): It's so funny that movie came out. I haven't seen it, and then it won all these awards, and people are talking to me about it, and I've been yapping about parasites for 35 years and it's, wow, finally, somebody else thinks they should make a movie about these creatures. But parasites are funny, and businesses, in all systems, if you have something that is valuable and robust, that means it'll survive a fair range of experiences, including injuries and insults, then that something, whatever it is, is likely to be parasitized because one business model, so to speak, is to attach yourself to it and just suck good out of it, right. So our bodies are like this, by some count, most of the cells that are in me right now, in my physical body, from the tips of my toes, to the top of my head somewhere, and a lot of them in my gut and on my skin are actually different organisms, they're not my DNA. If there is such a thing as my DNA, and I'm not sure I bought it anywhere or whatever, but it is certainly whatever I got from my mom and dad, that DNA is not their DNA, these are other organisms and they're living on me like I'm some sort of a planet or a country, a state or whatever it happens to be. And they have their own lives and they have their own concerns and their own wars going on. You know, when the war and your gut gets bad between some creatures and some other creatures, you might feel ill. People are finally figuring that stuff out. And well why is that true? It's because my physical body and its relationship to the world is such that I will survive a wide range of things, including this load of parasites. Some of which are good for me, some of which are bad for me, but they're all living off me. I've got to do the eating, I've got to go out and find something to eat, and they ultimately are eating what I ate in some form. Like maybe out of my gut, maybe out of my blood who knows what they're doing but they're living. They don't have to find a meal out in that world, they get to find a meal in this world, which is me. And companies are like that because companies are pretty robust. If you have a company that's achieved market dominance, for instance. So let's posit that you've been following this program and you now are dominating, are in the process of dominating one market. You look pretty delicious to somebody outside who would love to come and join your band and enjoy the fruits of the hunting that the company does as the company finds new customers and goes through those first conversations we talked about and those followup conversations and builds trust. Think of the company's trust goodwill in the market as an estate that the company owns, it has farmland, so to speak, that it's created, it's taken the stumps out of the soil and can grow crops, right? So why not join up with that company instead of having to go and do your own hunting. As an individual, join up with the company, and that's why people join companies. And one of the reasons is, hey, they're bigger than me. It's why my mom always told me to join a company, she said, "You know, why would you ever leave 'that good company'?" Of course, my mom lived through The Great Depression back in the '30s and a company looks like an island of safety to somebody who's been through that, compared to being an individual on your own. When I went out as a consultant in 1988, my mom was horrified because I was leaving the safety of something that was bigger than me and more robust, and I was going out in my own little rowboat to do well. Now I went from making 60 grand a year to a quarter million a year between a Friday and a Monday, I thought that was pretty cool. My mom thought it was terrifying, the fact that I had a one-year contract for a quarter million dollars, it's like, are you kidding me? That's not a long enough contract. What happens after that? I go, "Mom, it's four years of what I was making." She says, "Yes, but what if you can't find a job in those four years?" Really, I'm telling you. So it's very interesting. So the attraction is toward the robust entity that you can feed off of, and yet what you want in your company aren't people feed off it, you want people to contribute to it. That is everybody at a company has to be, from the bottom to the top, has to be fundamentally underpaid. That is, we all need to contribute more to the mission than we take out of the company economically. And at the top, so to speak, if you call it the top, I don't really think it is, but if you look at the traditional hierarchy, then you say all a CEOs sitting there at the top of the company. Well, that should be the most underpaid person, that should be the person whose contribution exceeds the value of their taking out by the most and whatever that equation has got to be set. And that's pretty easy to do with founder-led companies. Actually, it's one of the reasons that founder-led companies do so well, it's because the anchor for the entire anti-parasite mechanism that you want to put in, is to make sure that the top person is not the top parasite and the worst hire in the world that you can make, and I've made, it is to bring in a very talented person with the pedigree, who's joining your company as CEO in order to milk the company. And you can tell you have one of those when they talk a lot about their sincerity and what a team player they are. As soon as somebody in an interview process, as soon as somebody tells you they're a team player, you know they're a parasite. It's a certainty, because the team players don't talk about being team players, it's like saying to somebody that you meet over coffee, "Oh, by the way, I breathe oxygen." Corey (09:18): What do they talk about? What should they talk about? Chris (09:21): What should they talk about is they should be very curious about the company's mission, about the good that it does for customers, that the company does for customers. How it achieves that and how it operates on the inside in order to be able to continue to create that value for customers and how it is financed. They should be interested in that because that might affect what happens next, like are we financing by selling or as a gross processor? Are we financing by stock appreciation? Those are the curiosity that a person would show, sincere curiosity in the company, is an indicator of potential alignment. Now, of course, there could be a curiosity that's like Little Red Riding Hood's Wolf. Very curious about how good Red might tastes but it's a fine line, that's why hiring is tricky. Now there are a bunch of things in the world of biology that are very tricky. That it's kind of amazing when you think about that they've ever been figured out, that eating is one of them. Think about how dangerous it is to eat, that you're putting something inside your body. You better make it pretty good choice of what's going in there because it might be bad. It has an advantage, whatever it is from being on the inside, and you've decided voluntarily to stick it in there, put in your mouth, chew it up. Corey (10:44): Well Chris, we spent a lot of time in person and if it truly was dangerous to eat, then I'm living on the edge. I have for many, many years so. Chris (10:56): Exactly. I think that we... Obviously, biology has solved that problem, and organisms have figured it out, all sorts of things, how to eat each other too often, how to procreate without one killing the other, although in the world of spiders, that's a little tricky and we all know the praying mantis' fate. And so there's a lot of trickiness to this whole business of interacting with other creatures. And when you're a company, you're a creature and you're going to hire somebody, they're a creature. If you're going to eat a really big, dangerous meal, like a CEO, you better make sure it's not going to eat you from the inside. Corey (11:29): If I'm hiring a senior person like a CEO or a senior leader, don't I want to know about their previous team and how they interacted with their previous team? Isn't that a leading indicator or a positive indicator? Or is there danger in asking a question like that? Chris (12:46): I used to think that you learned a lot from that sort of thing. I'm learning by getting to observe Amazon's senior hiring process. It's something that's very interesting. Over there at Amazon, as far as I can tell, they don't really want to know about what your team did, they want to know about you, they want to know what you did, because that's who they're hiring, they're not hiring your previous team, and they don't want anybody who got lucky and a lot of people get lucky in business because you can join something that succeeds and you had nothing to do with it. Maybe you were even harmful, who knows? And then you put that on your resume. And do you ever see anybody in LinkedIn put in their profile, "I joined this company in 2016. It took me two and a half years to figure out what I was doing. By the time I figured it out I don't think I'd made much of a contribution but the company got sold for a lot of money." Nobody says that. It's a common true story, but nobody says it. Nobody comes right out. So what they do at Amazon is they ask these probing questions. They go down, down, down into their leadership principles. They asked the many why's, what did you do? What did you do? What did you do? And they encourage you to talk about you, I, they want you to use I, and they want to find out a couple of things. One is, do you believe or have simpatico with their 14 or whatever this leadership principles, especially the big ones of customer obsession, of big thinking, of going deep? You know, they've got these principles and they coach you, by the way. It's really interesting. The Amazon process, they coach you, it's not like a trick thing of figuring out, oh, did you get lucky and figure this out? And they say, look, this is how we hire, and this is what we're looking for. And then they probe like crazy in the interview process. And then, and did they make a quick decision? So my point is, knowing about the person and how aligned they are with your principles is much more valuable than did they get lucky once or twice. And by the way, if you get lucky, once you might be hired into other situations where you get lucky. I know a kind of person who has come in to companies I've been at, whereas no longer there, and their job is essentially to auction the company off. They get a big carve out and the company sells no matter what because it has value, and they're just like, oh, they get another one of those. Well, what were you as CEO of three successful exits, really? Or were you the butcher? So it's really interesting if you look at that. But let's take the more mundane hires. Not mundane, but the less scary ones. They're all scary. How do you get somebody on board who aligns with your mission? Well, they better be curious about your mission and they better dig it. They got to think your mission is worthwhile because they're going to work really hard at aligning with other people. Like at ConnectAndSell, our mission is to enable companies, to dominate markets by a conversation-first approach to business. So if you were to come to me, joining ConnectAndSell, and you really said, "You know, I don't believe in that conversation's first crap. What's that? I believe that what you should do is advertise like crazy on social media. And if you have to talk to somebody, I guess that's okay. But you know, so what, right?" You might still love the idea of the connected self thing. Like I like this company it's growing, it's profitable, blah, blah, blah. I want to be part of it, and so I'll answer the questions in the interview and have it in a benign way and then we'll point to my previous successes and you'll hire me. And then I come on board and I don't even like the mission and I'll start kind of edging away from the mission, right? So hiring somebody who doesn't dig the mission, doesn't get the mission, isn't curious about the mission, there's a real problem. And the younger the company is, the scarier it is to hire somebody who believes in another approach. And I've been at many companies that have done this, I've made this mistake repeatedly, or I've participated in making this mistake, or you hired the person, and the more senior, the role, the worse whose actual beliefs don't align with the very purpose of your company's existence. You're hiring somebody who wishes you were dead. But what they really wish is you or someone else, right? That's a problem. And then the other one that is, okay, the hiring process. So you get it all really, really good, and you have these probing interview questions and everybody's trained interview, and you do it like Amazon. It's the most awesome process I've ever seen in my life. I'm still in awe that I got to see a little chunk of it yesterday and it's like, wow, what an amazing thing they do over there. And say, you get that right. Well, what if your company isn't designed for action, for achieving the mission? What if it's designed for parasites to grow and multiply in their power? Well that would be a problem because then if you get somebody who's got a little bit of parasite in them, they're going to rule the roost over time. So here's something I've done. Two things I've done over time that most people would disagree with but I think it's worth folks thinking about it a little bit. One is I don't allow standing meetings except for a meeting that's called the forecast call. That's actually, it's a sales best practices call, but a regular meeting or once a week meeting that kind of thing, that people have to be at, those are outlawed in my world. And the thing I'm trying to avoid is the failure to sunset the regular meeting, to say the status meeting on a project. So a new project starts up, we're going to, let's say, we're going to figure out whether we can enter a new market. So we spin up a little team to go look at that market. At ConnectAndSell, the way we would do that as we'd say, well, the market hypothesis is a list. We can make the list, we take a couple of people who are our best top of funnel colors, we come up with a candidate message in the form of a breakthrough script, we train those people up on the breakthrough script, our top of funnel people, we turn them loose with connect. So, in the script, they have 30 conversations a day, we listened carefully for what those conversations sound like, we look at the appointment setting rate, and if over the next two weeks or, however long it takes us to achieve conversations equal to the square root of the number of estimated participants in that market. If that number is above 5%, we look at that market and go, that's pretty good, otherwise not right. Little project. Now, one thing to do is to keep the project short and by keeping it short, great things happen. Let's say you have a check-in meeting, once a week on that project. So now the project gets delayed for some reason or said, it takes a couple of months or whatever any project could go on for a while, the check-in meeting, the status meeting and the status reporting, say we have status reporting also. So somebody has to write up a little status report. How are we doing on our project? And they write that up and they publish it every week to the people on the project. Oh, but they also have to publish it to senior management, including people who are just kind of interested or who don't want to feel left out or whatever it happens to be. And so now a bunch of stuff starts to happen and encourages parasitism. One is the meeting itself becomes more important than the job, so whether we're making progress, it's also becomes easier, it's easier to attend a meeting than it is to accomplish the goal. Why? Because attending a meeting just requires showing up at a meeting, whereas accomplishing the goal, it requires doing the unknown. After all, if it's known, we wouldn't have a project around it. Projects are only built to address the unknown, so the unknown is scary and uncertain, so why do scary and uncertain one when you can do the certain. Thirdly, you offer an opportunity for somebody to play holier than thou. You were one minute late for the meeting, Corey, isn't punctuality important to you? So now things like punctuality, which of course are important, become more important than actually achieving the mission. So you get this thing that happens with standing meetings where officious parasitically inclined individuals. So maybe they might've just had that in their upbringing, that they're kind of more comfortable or when everything is super structured and mom and dad are in charge and that kind of stuff. That meeting becomes a new entity, it's like having a new employee in your company, that meeting, is it like a demon employee that you didn't hire carefully, that you can't figure out how to fire. Like, how do you stop having this stupid bidding? So my approach is just to say, no, no, you can't put meetings on the calendar on a regular basis, you can hold a beating. The only people allowed to add a beating or people who are going to contribute, actually make something happen, but you can't have next week, same time, right? You and I have this particular meeting that we try to do on Tuesday mornings, but that meetings outside the company, not inside and we abandon it on a regular basis when we have other things to do. It just turns out. So that's part of it is no standing meetings and this is considered anathema, right? I don't have an executive staff meeting that we have every week. We do try to get together and talk strategy, maybe on a more regular basis that I'm comfortable with, but that's about it. And so the second thing is, and this is really big. Email is the vector. Maybe even email is the medium in which parasites thrive. And it's for a very simple reason, actually for two reasons. One is, it's very easy to use email for politics, everybody knows this, I'm not saying anything new to anybody, right? Email is a wonderfully political instrument because you can copy people on an email or worse blind copy them if you're a well parasite, and you can do it for the purpose of pointing fingers, laying blame somewhere, setting somebody up for a fall, making it perfectly clear that you're doing your job, but maybe they're not doing theirs, whatever, right? So all you have to do is copy a few of the right people, and then you have the right tone in an email, in a way you go and you look better and the other people look worse. So that's a common parasitic track and you see it all the time. Well, what can you do about that? Since email is necessary for internal communication, although some companies have banned it, so maybe they just are doing something so brilliant that all it can do is worship them and that, but they might replace it with something else. The other thing is text-based communication. It comes with a default emotional interpretation, that's negative. So when you read an email and its tone is neutral, your emotional reaction will be slightly negative. You will see, even a completely benign email that's just neutral as critical of you or potentially critical of you. The reason for that is simple, because email can be used politically, it can be copied to people, secretly or openly. You're having a conversation with folks you haven't agreed to a conversation with as a recipient, that is they know that you're reading what it is that you're reading, and you're interpreting that simply. What do I think about this? But what do others think of me because of what's in this email. And so... BDM that's right for political exploitation, and parasites operate primarily through intra inside the company politics. So my rule is simple. You're not allowed to copy somebody in an email unless you can prove, and the burden of proof is on you, that they needed that information to do their job. And if you were wondering about whether that's true or not, call them and ask whether they want to be copied on the email, tell them what it's about and see whether they want to be copied because they could say yes because they need that information to do their job, but it's your call as the email creator, and you're answerable to the company, that would be me. And I fire people on the first offense, I tell them this in the interview process... Corey (24:44): [crosstalk 00:24:44] ego-driven activities of parasites. So this is your first parasite theory of market dominance driven companies, is that you got to get the politics out of business, is what I hear you saying. And that is core with understanding that the alignment more so than even talent or capability, but alignment is key, right? Summarize that. Chris (25:08): Yeah. Alignment is key in terms of your hiring. Talent is key in terms of the contribution they're going to make, you can hire untalented people all day long, you get nothing. I see you really are trying to hire folks who are obviously talented, that's not actually very hard to figure out. Obvious, talent is obvious, but to completely avoid the parasites, you've got to check the alignment process carefully through your hiring process, and that means your interviews need to probe and go deep and they need to go deep into what was this person really like? And specifically, what have they done in the past? They have done that. What their teams have done? And does it hold up to scrutiny and how did they go about their business that doesn't hold up to scrutiny? But on the design side, you can actually design a business to be robust against parasites by, from my standpoint, avoiding two things. One is where the parasites thrive in terms of I'll call it time, and the time that's dedicated to meetings, to standing meetings, which grows essentially to fill the calendar and grows to fill these status emails forever. You just design that out. So we don't have those standing meetings and we'll just live with that and miss a meeting needs to be called. Somebody can call they are meeting and that's one meeting, and then it's over. All meetings are sunsetted after their first occurrence, so that's kind of, yeah... And they live for one, whatever, one hour, half hour, one day, whatever. And then the other is that the medium, we call it the medium in space and communication space that breeds parasites is email. And you simply forbid copying folks on emails, unless you can prove they needed the information to do their job. And no [inaudible 00:26:52] seeing if anybody was at a company, there's no reason ever to blind copy anybody within a company except, to advance your political agenda, secretly. So if you do that, you're dead meat. And that's kind of it though, those are two simple design principles.  

In this episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their conversation with the co-author of Outbound Sales, No Fluff, Ryan Reisert. Chris shares a view that is a bit unpopular but rings true. He states that "This pandemic will civilize our society. This is part of the civilization of our society by which matching the need to the capability of a solution it will be done without lying, tricking, and pushing. It's a big honesty bath that will cleanse a lot of us off." Corey dives into the concept of a repeatable process and leadership vs. luck and leadership. The latter option scales well. For a guide on how to come out of this restructured sales environment with everyone working from home, join Chris, Corey, and Ryan for your tips of the week. This Market Dominance Guys episode is called The Culling of the Non-Professionals. ----more---- --------------------------------- 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, https://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.    

In this episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank welcome co-author of Outbound Sales, No Fluff, and Sales Director, Ryan Reisert. In these uncertain times, sales pros are faced with waiting for the dust to settle, then try to regain their market or take this time to learn new skills and technologies. There is a third option and that is to reframe conversations compassionately, patiently and gain control of your market. For a guide on how to come out of this restructured sales environment with everyone working from home, join Chris, Corey, and Ryan for your tips of the week. This episode is called #WFH Sales Pros - Wait, Learn, or Dominate Your Market.  ----more---- --------------------------------- This channel 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  

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall talks with ConnectAndSell's Customer Success Manager, Donny Crawford drilling it down to the three reasons Sales Teams don't follow up. When we hire people to sell for us, whether it's to sell meetings or whether it's to sell deals, we tend to put them under a compensation regime that emphasizes this quarter. Need happens at this moment to match up with what you can provide. And in order to determine their need, you have to have a discovery conversation with them. And until you have a discovery conversation, you don't actually know whether they need your offering at all much. As we know that mounts the pressure to meet numbers of calls but doesn't usually accomplish closing more deals. Learn how yes, no, not now affects our emotion tied to rejection and perception of rejection - the ability to keep our emotions in check. This is part one of a two-part session. ----more---- 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below:   Chris Beall (00:43): Record away. Are we recording? Corey Frank (00:45): Oh, yeah, we're recording. Chris Beall (00:46): Fabulous, I'm so glad we're recording. I'll read your notes back to you. Corey Frank (00:49): There you go. Chris Beall (00:50): All right, so here's the thing about followups. When we hire people to sell for us, whether it's to sell meetings, or whether it's to sell deals, we tend to put them under a compensation regime that emphasizes this quarter's results. And then we say, well, next quarter's results will come as a result of work that you do now, which is pipeline building, and work that marketing does, which is bringing in new leads. But we don't tend to emphasize as management, the number one reason that you will do well in the next quarter, and the quarter after that, and the quarter after that. And it has to do with having multiple conversations, about one per quarter, with everybody who's relevant in your marketplace. And the reason we need to do this, and this comes up to a fairly high level, is that in your market, say you've got a thousand folks in your market. In that market of a thousand, there's only going to be about 1 in 12 that are in market to take a meeting and potentially buy your product in this particular quarter in which you find yourself. And that's because the replacement cycle for almost every B2B product or service is about three years. That is, if I've just bought a CRM, I'm not looking to buy another CRM until at least three years have gone by. In that case, it might be more like five to seven. If I've just bought anything, any service whatsoever, I'm probably not in the market for that service again for about three years. Now this varies by product, but the average is about three years, and three years have 12 quarters in them. And so, by math, only 1/12 of your market is coming into a part of their consideration cycle for your class of offering every quarter, 1/12 is coming into the consideration cycle every quarter. So that means you have two choices. You can either wait until they're ready, and talk to them for the first time, or you can talk to them about once a quarter and catch them in every quarter, in which they might be considering buying an offering like yours, or thinking about an offering like yours. The former, which is wait until it's just the right time, has a problem. And the problem is, until you have a conversation with somebody ... Corey Frank (03:21): How do you know? Chris Beall (03:21): ... you don't know when the right time is for them. So that comes back to a higher-level idea, which is, sales is actually a form of search. You don't make things happen in sales, you find opportunities in sales where somebody's need happens in this moment to match up with what you provide. And in order to determine their need, you have to have a discovery conversation with them. And until you have a discovery conversation, you don't actually know whether they need your offering at all, much less what they need it now. So how do you get discovery conversations? You have calls to people in which you attempt to set a meeting, whose purpose is to educate them with regard to something in your market, preferably to offer them some information about something that is of economic value to them, which is about risk, time, or money, or something of emotional value, which might be about frustration or disappointment, or even fear, or something of strategic value, which is about where they're trying to go and what stepping stones they need to step on in order to get there. And in that discovery meeting, you're going to explore down those avenues. And if something resonates, then you're going to come up with next steps, and you're going to follow that process through to either a transaction, or a decision that they make either to go with a competitor or go with nobody to solve their problem. And so, here you are as a sales rep, you're thrown into a situation where you were encouraged to focus on the current quarter, but your opportunities, 11 out of 12 of them, are in future quarters. And so, what are you going to do about that? Well, it turns out the easiest thing to do about that is simply to talk to every relevant person about once a quarter. And when they finally do take a meeting you know that their interest level is high enough that they're worth doing discovery with, and then you can go down the path with. So that's the big reason to do followups is, unless we speak to everybody in our market once a quarter who's relevant, then we have a problem. And the problem is, when they finally are ready to buy and we haven't spoken to them, they're more likely to buy from somebody else. So in a sense, our education of anybody that we don't follow up with, when we're educating them now, but not following up layer, we're actually working for our competitor. Because we're doing the competitor's work of educating the market, everybody has to educate the market, and then we're leaving the business to the competitor when it's finally time for the prospect to buy. So that's the big high-level reason. Now, why don't reps do it? Well, one they're not comped to do it. It's a speculative, [inaudible 00:06:12] investment time. They put their time in and they don't know if the investment's going to pay off. So that's part of it. So they're not sure that they should do it because they don't really understand the impact. And in particular, they don't look forward to quarters and ask, hey, if I'd follow it up with everybody from two quarters ago and talk to them the next quarter, except those that I disqualified and those that I actually held meetings with, what would my pipeline look like now? Well, it'd look a lot richer because it would include folks who are getting closer to that point in time when they're ready to consider your product. They pile up, and as they pile up, more and more of them convert. But if we're not speaking with them, they don't pile up and therefore, they don't convert. So that's the why from the rep perspective is, if you look out two, three, four quarters, and you look at your paycheck, you'll find that your paycheck will be much, much bigger if the conversations that you're having with people in that quarter include more people who are ready to buy. And by definition, if they're going to buy some time in the next three years, they're more likely to buy between now and three quarters from now than they are in the past. So that's just simple math, but it's hard to kind of comprehend, especially when you're being effectively paid on making quarterly numbers or even annual numbers, which don't tend to line up with how people buy. So part of it is management, not compensating in a way that makes sense, so the rep has got to take it on themselves to make the investment. The investment is of their time and they don't know the impact. Part of it is they don't know how. And by don't know how, I don't mean they don't know how to click the button and connect themselves. That's- Corey Frank (08:04): Sure. They need the mechanics, right? Chris Beall (08:05): ... I want to talk to them. They know the mechanics, they might know the mechanics, but they're not in practice. We don't ever do anything regularly that we don't do regularly. It's like your rowing machine. If you are rowing every day, then rowing every day is easy. But when you never row, you don't go over there and start on the rowing machine. Starting things is hard, and continuing things is easy. That's why we tend not to start things because we don't like the commitment that comes from knowing that we'll then continue it. So- Corey Frank (08:30): And it's painful to start back up if you haven't been in the habit of doing it. And so you actually don't realize the benefits. You slowly are benefiting it over time because they start to actually come into play day after day after day. And that's the only way to realize how beneficial they are, is by actually experiencing them. Corey Frank (10:00): I like that quote that Sean [inaudible 00:10:04] put on one of your posts, and it was a quote from Blount. What was it? Basically, he said something about the 30 days, right? It's, the work you do in this next 30 days is actually going to pay off 90 days away from now, which is three months, which is so far in the future, but you got to do it now in order to really start benefiting from them 90 days out. And Blount was saying that in a particular way. He said, "I'm thinking about not just the next 30 days, but I'm thinking about what's happening in three months, in six months in nine months", that kind of thing. Chris Beall (10:46): ... And it's up to management to sit with reps, or now get on a Zoom video with reps, and say, hey, let's look back and note, when you did follow up, how much good it did and how much money you made. And all they have to do is say that, and if the answer is there is none, it's because you didn't follow up. So let's start now. You have to plant a tree before you can harvest the fruit. So let's plant that tree now and then let's pay attention to it, and watch it grow and nurture it. And look back from that future, from that 90 days out 120 days, 150 days out, and ask, what does it look like back to this time? And we're likely to see good results. But they don't know how in that, if you don't do it all the time, you don't even recognize that this is a followup situation that should be taken advantage of. The most common one is the short call or the hangup, or the angry exit. So most reps don't like that because of the third point, which is the psychology. They're offended. And Jeb Blount wrote a book about this, and it was called Objections. You've read it, and I've read it, and we all think it's important. And he basically says, take objections, and we teach them ... We treat them unconsciously, inevitably, as rejection. And until we learn to handle that reaction, we will end up walking away from opportunities because we don't have our emotions in control, and our emotions lead us away from optimal action. The optimal action when somebody hangs up on you is to set a followup for a week out, and make a teleprompter that says, hi, so-and-so, when we spoke on this day, you didn't have time for a conversation. Is now a better time? And the fact that you were caring enough to call them back, the fact that you know, the date, the fact that you claim to have had a conversation with them, which they don't remember at all, right, will allow them to more easily open up and have a conversation with you. They might ask you a question. When did we speak? And you say, oh, I called you at 2:38, and you were really, really in a hurry, and it made sense to me. You just got off the phone really quickly. And so I think that ... what I want to talk to you about is I think just amazingly important for almost everybody's business, but I don't know if it's important for years. And then ... Corey Frank (13:23): And then let it go. And then let them determine whether they're going to hang up on you again or not, right? Chris Beall (13:28): Yeah. That's why I want to talk to you. Well, what is it that you offer? Oh, well, the way we like to say it is that, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough. And then you do your breakthrough. So that one is the one that's hardest. Matt Forbes- Corey Frank (13:43): Psychology [inaudible 00:13:44], yeah. Chris Beall (13:44): ... and I spent a long, long set of lobster dinners one night to get him over this hump, because he just said, well, they hung up on me. They hung up. Nobody hangs up on me. I said, well, actually, a lot of people hang up on you, man. Because a lot of people hang up on everybody. So if you were advising somebody else and you were just looking at the business impact, how would you advise them? Oh, I'd have them call. Why? Well, because something good might happen. That's part of the why, but the rest of the why is, guess what? This is somebody that we know something about, that's incredibly valuable. This is somebody who answers their phone. And if [inaudible 00:14:26] folks who answer their phone, if we had known in advance they answer the phone without having to call them, we would've just called that list. But we don't. Corey Frank (14:33): Yeah, just that list. Exactly. Chris Beall (14:36): But we know that list. They coughed up that information to us answering the phone. And we don't know how often they answer the phone, but we know they answered it once, which is a lot more than zero times. So our psychology tells us, I've been rejected, I don't want to talk to somebody who rejected me. The fact is, they made an objection. They didn't care to talk with you, they didn't have time, or for whatever reason. And they objected strongly enough that they hung up on you. And so, if you can take that objection and say, that's fantastic. And this is the key to the psychology. When somebody hangs up on you, non sarcastically, you need to say to yourself, fantastic. This is somebody that I know answers the phone. I'm going to talk to them again, and I'm going to talk to them about a week from now and see how it goes. So that's open-minded, and then you put in the teleprompter that thing I just said, which is, when we spoke on this date, you didn't have time for a conversation. All the other ones compared to that one psychologically are super easy because you had a further conversation. However, there's another psychology element. And this comes back to don't know how and don't know why, which is, when somebody says something to you that is any other objection that is not indicating to you definitely that they're intrinsically disqualified, you should talk to them next quarter. Because there's only four possibilities in a sales conversation, yes, no, not me, not now. And we lump everything about not knowing that some prospect is disqualified into not now. Why? Because until we talk to them, we don't really know anything about them. So we can't talk to them in the past, we must therefore talk to them in the future. And that's the definition of not now. How far in the future? One quarter. Why? Because the basic unit of time for considering any new category of offering, not your offering, but any new category of offering, is about one quarter. Corey Frank (16:51): It's happening quarterly, right? Yeah. Chris Beall (16:54): Yeah. You're going to apply something, you're going to consider it within a quarter. So put it out one quarter. Don't think, put it out there. And that's another thing is don't think. And then, write a teleprompter that says, when we spoke on this date, you said whatever, and I'm curious about whatever. And that's it. Corey Frank (16:54): That's it. Chris Beall (17:18): And then you let the conversation flow. So that's a big part of the psychology is, you don't want to do what you don't know how to do, and if you don't really know how to do it, you really don't want to do it, especially if your emotions are involved in a negative way. And so you need a ledge, as Jeb Blount calls it, an emotional ledge to cling to when the objection comes that feels like rejection. The worst one is the hangup. So your ledge is a word or two that you say to yourself or you say out loud. Don't say it to them, they're [inaudible 00:17:55]. But you say it out loud, listen to yourself say it, and set the followup. So what I say is, fantastic, just exactly like that. Corey Frank (18:05): A fat person answers the phone. Chris Beall (18:08): [inaudible 00:18:08] person answered the phone. I'm going to talk to him again next week. And that's your ledge. And you need that ledge the same way that you need something to say to yourself. Say you're weightlifting, and you're to the last rep that you can do before failure. You need to encourage yourself at point, right? It doesn't happen by itself. That weight doesn't jump up off your chest, or wherever you're trying to get it all by itself. This is the one that you're going to have to push. Until then it's like, eh, no biggie, right? And this is why we have spotters, so when we lift ... because we might [inaudible 00:18:46]. We may [inaudible 00:18:48]. Corey Frank (18:47): That's our managers. That's our managers making sure we keep doing it. Chris Beall (18:50): Exactly. Exactly. Managers spot this when we drop the weight on her chest, and somebody needs to help come get it off. But in general, we should be able to talk for ourselves and get that weight up one more time. And you know, we need self talk, and the self talk needs to be completely routine, set in the right tone of voice, very positive. And by the way, it has to specify why it's positive. Because when we're talking to ourselves, it's just like we're talking to a prospect. If we don't say why, they don't believe us. So if we don't say why to ourselves, we don't believe ourselves. Fantastic, you're somebody who answers the phone. I'm going to talk to them again next quarter. Corey Frank (19:33): I love that. I love that. Chris Beall (19:36): You're done. So that's kind of the idea. Now why do people believe that their followups can be done manually more effectively than ConnectAndSell? They believe that for two reasons. One is they feel like they need to prep for the followup. What was the last conversation about? What do I need to think about before I talk to this person? They have to ready themselves. And there's some truth to that, but you're going to make a trade off, and that is, say it took 22 dials on average to get somebody on your list on the phone. Now you've got somebody who answers the phone. So your answers the phone list is now down to a [inaudible 00:20:15], right? So they don't always answer the phone, you don't know. So say your new dial to connect for that list is, it takes 12 dials. So now here's the trade off. If it takes 12 dials, still 12 dials can navigate to failure 11 times. Your mood is going to be pretty poor by the time you finally get somebody. It's still going to be a surprise because you don't expect to talk to them. So now you're going to have a different problem, which is, your preparation didn't prepare you for anything but leaving a voicemail. And leaving a voicemail is a one-shot thing. You can't leave voicemails over and over and over for somebody just because you had one conversation with them a quarter ago. You didn't earn that many voicemails. So you have another psychology problem and a performance problem ahead of you if you decide to manually call. You won't be ready for the live conversation when it happens. And that's a serious problem. So what to do about that? Well, take the other side of the bet, which is, if I could talk to somebody on my followup list, and now it's going to take two minutes instead of four minutes. So that's kind of nice, like a little reward. It's faster. And I know what to say, it's right there in my teleprompter. All I have to manage is my attitude, my mood. But I always have to manage my attitude, in both cases. So instead of peaking for the big conversation that doesn't happen, the big conversation that doesn't happen, the big conversation that doesn't happen, I don't have to peak at all. I can just relax and know that my teleprompter's going to tell me what to say, and I'm going to say it. And that's it. So it's a trade off, and that trade off has got to be explicitly made by the rep. So then, now I know why I shouldn't do it manually because I still have a 1 in 12 chance or one in eight chance, or whatever, and I'm not going to be as good. And by the way, it's going to cost me half an hour, and half an hour is a lot more than two minutes. So what could I have done with those 28 minutes? Well, I could've talked to four more people. Corey Frank (22:17): Talked to more people, exactly. Chris Beall (22:18): I could've talked to four more people, given that sales is search, I have to talk to people. So if I talk to more people per day, that's good. My followup list lets me talk to more people per day, which lets me search more of this space for someone who has or might have the problem that my company offers a solution for.  

By any measure, you can confidently claim that the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team is the world’s most successful team in the world. Famed for starting any game with their intimidating black jerseys and dramatic and culturally symbolic Haka – which is a traditional, Maori warrior challenge to the playing opposition, they have amassed a track record that is truly unequaled by any other sporting team. In more than a century of playing – they started in 1903 - the All Blacks have won almost 75% of their 580 plus matches in history. It is often said that the All Blacks remember their defeats more than their victories! They accomplish this domination despite New Zealand having a population of only about 4 1/2 million people with their financial and player resources being dwarfed by the likes of other nations who compete at a high level like England, France, Australia, and South Africa.  They truly punch above their weight class and make every match, every player, and every training session count.   And just to show you that domination in your market does not have to equate to inflated egos or the proverbial “spiking of the football,” the All Blacks continue to enjoy enormous global success with their grounded sense of humility and character. And one of the most dramatic illustrations of this was at the end of the 2015 rugby world cup when New Zealand soundly beat Australia. At the end of the match Sonny Bill Williams, one of the All Blacks best players, gave his winning gold medal to a young boy named Charlie Line. Charlie had snuck onto the field at the end of the match to celebrate and was soon swarmed by security guards. Feeling sympathy young fan, Sonny stepped in and promptly gave his hard-earned medal to young Charlie - a kid he had never met before. He later said, 'Rather than have the medal hanging up and collecting dust at home, it’s going to be hanging around that young fella’s neck and he can tell that story for a long time to come!” The players on his market-dominant team are driven not to become merely a good All Black but a GREAT All Black.  ----more---- And in this week’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Connect and Sell’s broken down version of their own Sonny Bill Williams, my co-host Chris Beall, takes us on a logic filled journey of how Market Domination happens on an exponential level...and NOT in a linear fashion. The All Blacks clearly recruited, trained, and play their competition in exactly such a manner and it has shown results for 116 years.  So welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode, “Would it help if I perform a Haka before my cold calls?" 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (03:58): Markets work by a process that says if you win one, your opponent is weaker across all future games you're going to play. When you win two, your opponent is a weaker yet. Why? Because you have two references and they have zero. When you have three, they're weaker yet. It's harder for them to get their first one. And then, they've got to go to the margin. It's like being a stallion controlling a harem of mares. The other stallions, the guys who don't have a harem, are out on the outside. They get an occasional make a fall here or there. You're dominating the market. Why? Because the mares like to be around the guys dominating mares, that's why. It's safe for them. It's a good play. And market dominance works like that. Market dominance works non-linearly and yet sales compensation, sales plans, business plans, all this stuff are linear. They miss the main point. The main point is not to go, "Oh, we're going to have this growth that goes like this because our activities go like this." It's, "Oh, it gets easier, lower risk, cheaper, faster; the faster we go at the beginning and our denominator is time." Corey Frank (05:22): So, if you had... and this is a conversation for another time too, is redesigning the comp plan for the future, the sales comp plan, the sales leadership comp plan, the CEO's comp plan. What I hear you saying is that it should be designed more or less from what we were talking about earlier about the myopia that most folks have when they start a company about their own numbers, their own goals, and instead, more of globalist perspective on compensated on their penetration for market share. Chris Beall (05:57): Yes. Corey Frank (05:58): That will inherently help the individual, the organization hit its goals, but if you're not setting your comp plans out, your incentive plans based off of market dominance, you're living in your own world when there's other visitors in your own universe and you choose not to accept it. Chris Beall (06:16): Yeah. You're simply hoping that somebody doesn't go faster than you within your market. Corey Frank (06:21): That's a great point [crosstalk 00:06:22]. Chris Beall (06:22): It's a capturing lockups. Hope truly is your strategy, if you execute a standard go-to-market. All standard go-to-markets are based simply on the hope that somebody else doesn't get in there and go faster than you. Because it's a run away. If they win, they win. If they start to win, unless they blow it, they're going to win. And so, what should you compensate for early? Logo capture, referenceable accounts. So, your hunter should be compensated for capturing logos and your customer success people should be compensated for turning those logos into referenceable accounts. And you need to be objective about both of those. And by the way, your pricing model should be designed to capture logos. And your financing plan is a consequence of the application of that logo capturing pricing model applied to your market. So, once you go out and you figure out how many... say you're doing this with the phone, how many dials does it take to get a meeting in this market? How many meetings does it take to get a net new opportunity in this market? Right? How does that really work in our market? "Oh, look, now I have those conversion numbers. I can take those numbers and say, these are the worst case. This is my early case. This is only going to get better. It's going to get easier because I'm going to have my referenceable customers." Applied time to referenceability from first engagement. And what are the issues around referenceability? Am I addressing all of the issues around referenceability or hoping somebody else addresses some? So, at ConnectAndSell, for instance, we made a serious error of omission in our own go-to-market. We said, "Well, certainly it's obvious that there's a big factor," which is when somebody's using ConnectAndSell and we've amped up their number of dials and therefore the number of conversations, "Surely they will be able to handle those conversations and do as well with them as they do with their current conversations." Well, first of all, we found out they weren't having enough current conversations [inaudible 00:08:26] to know how they're doing. Secondly, we found out, "Oh, their messaging is terrible." Thirdly, we found out there was a huge talent spread between the top and the bottom, which suddenly was material. The best reps were actually producing at a rate that would allow market dominance to take place with no problem whatsoever. But unfortunately, most of the pool of reps was not doing that or anything; we call them the zeros. You've been through this with me. Why do we have the zeros? Why do we tolerate the zeros? And so we went through a process of... it took years, by the way, we were so dumb at it, of learning the ecosystem, our customers, the trainers, the books, the online information, this desire of people to be better. All that's done enough. It turns out we got to bite the bullet and do it. We did something radical. We said, "Okay, if that's needed, it's needed in order to get referenceable customers for the acceleration effective ConnectAndSell, not for something else, therefore we're going to provide messaging workshops, which I personally do. Why do I do those? Because I'm really not trying to get their message correct. I'm trying to get their management to decide that this was worth managing too. So, I have to get a mindset change almost like a religious conversion place. In management, where they say, "Oh, I get it a cold call that works from a foundation of recognizing that the starting point is fear. And I've got to turn fear into trust and trust into curiosity and curiosity into commitment and commitment into action. Once I know that, and I believe it, then what the words are and how the words are said means something to me as a business and now I'll manage to it and I won't be tolerant of drift." That's actually why I do the messaging workshop; is to get management to the point where they'll work with us. So, I'm trying to create a piece of the ecosystem... management that works as a piece of our infrastructure for their market dominance, because if they don't take that point of view, the alternative, which we've learned the hard way, is the refs. Corey Frank (10:41): How often do you do those? Chris Beall (10:43): I do an average of two a day, 2.5 a day. So, I'm manufacturing converts. I normally get three to four people on these, sometimes more, but 10 people a day. So, it's about three, 4,000 people a year who are going through this process of going from, "I think I know what a cold call is or what it's all about, how the dynamics work," to, "I have a completely different view of that whole process and I get that it's... I could be under my control and I could use it as the spear point for market dominance." Corey Frank (11:19): Can you invite me to the next one that you do? Chris Beall (11:22): Sure, absolutely. I can also give you tons of recordings. Corey Frank (11:26): Oh, yeah, I'd love to- [crosstalk 00:11:27]. Yeah, sure that'd be great. Chris Beall (11:28): Yeah, we could take one of those recordings and take it apart and anonymize it. Just edit it down and let that be probably four or five episodes. Corey Frank (11:40): Well, that's what I have on here is I have part one and part two, the messaging workshop podcast in that or four parts. Jocko just did an incredible podcast with probably... You all hear war stories and you hear folks who are in precarious situations and got out the nick of time and the Huey lands and they're hanging on to the rift of the skiff as they're flying away. And then Jocko had a four-part... He took his podcast divided into four parts. So, it's about five hours with this incredible guy named John Stryker Meyer. And Stryker, or Tilt as they call him, was in covert operation in Laos. So, much of what he experienced he couldn't communicate until recently. But those stories are just cliffhangers and the hours fly by. And I imagine a messaging workshop that is pertinent to a lot of the data and the cold cognition data that you talk about and now to see how it comes into place, like you had said to prevent drift. So, you don't just employ a technology, drop it off and then pop smoke, and then get out of there. There is a fair amount of training on the why, not just a what and that training on the why is as critical as the, what otherwise drift will occur; your math won't work, right? You're going to fill up your dataset. Chris Beall (13:08): Exactly. It's got to be polluted with performance numbers that are coincidental, not driven. Corey Frank (13:16): That's great. Chris Beall (13:17): Sometimes you get lucky, right? The blind pig and all that. Corey Frank (13:21): Yeah and you start falling in love with chance. And you assume that chance, with no statistical validity, is the new normal is the [crosstalk 00:13:30] path Chris Beall (13:30): I love that phrase, "You start falling in love with chance." I believe the entire sales profession is fundamentally in love with chance. That's why they celebrate wins. In our company when somebody closes a deal and there's a win and there's all this jumping around, congratulations. First of all, I noticed that the congratulations always go to the sales person, not the customer success person who was actually on the ground [crosstalk 00:13:55] in the test garage making it happen. And secondly, I noticed that I never say anything about it. Because to me the wins are the lucky outcomes from the thing that really counts, which is, "Did you push the button? Did you have the conversations? Did you convert those into meetings? Did you eat the false positives and do that with grace and in an uncomplaining way?" Because they have to be there and we should do a whole session on just false positives, the importance of false positives; why you must have them, why you must not try to get rid of them. In fact, I'll jump onto that for just a moment. This is the single biggest fallacy in the entire world of sales. I was talking to somebody who really knows the stuff. The other day, I was talking to Roy Raanani the big exit conference. And we're just standing there in the hall, kind of catching up and we're talking about qualifying in a cold call. And he said something about how the good rep qualifies in the cold call. And I said, "Roy, if you qualify in the cold call, you destroy the integrity of your list." And he said, "how's that?" I said, "Well, the list has a certain quality associated with it." If you decide to change that quality, say you have 10 reps and each one is qualifying. Each one has a little bit different idea of qualifying and then the emotional state of the prospect is different because you've ambushed them. So, some are more or less ready for those qualifying questions. Some will tell you the truth and some won't. So, you have this huge amount of variety you've just introduced in a process. And meanwhile, one step downstream in discovery, you have a hundred percent fidelity for qualification. So, you jumped the gun and tried to qualify with variety of inputs, with variety of circumstances, with variety of processors. And what you've done is you've effectively made your original list, which had one set of queries or one set of processes to make it. And you're now effectively turned it at random into 10 or 50 or a hundred different lists of which the quality is completely unknown because you weren't patient enough to wait for the step of a process where you actually can qualify this designed for qualification and you've done it because you want to manage the emotional state of your sales rep of your account executive, but they don't have to do the company's work. They can only do their work. And you need to remind your folks, "There's a reason we pay you a base salary to do the company's work." It's not like a welfare state. You don't get a base salary because, "Well, people need money to live off," you have a base salary because we are paying you, Dear account executive to do the company's work and one of the most important things we need to do is we need to assess the quality of our list because our list is the expression of our understanding of our market. And if we don't understand how well we're expressing an understanding of our market in the form of this list, we can never improve our list. All we can do is celebrate luck. Corey Frank (17:07): So, if I have a house file of 2.5 million, but I'm not able to articulate any demographic, SIT persona data in that 2.5 million, on prow that I have a house file of 2.5 million, when really it's just noise, it's garbage, it's names; it's not a list. You just say, "what is a list?" A list truly is... I like that. Your list is an understanding of your market. Chris Beall (18:39): It's a hypothesis and the processing list is simple. What you're trying to do is to get elements of the list... the people who are on the list, into a process where they can be qualified or disqualified. And if they're qualified, there'll be interested in moving forward... By the very nature of it; if they're qualified and you have something of value, it's not very hard to move them forward. And discovery is where we can qualify because of the trust relationship. That's different. When you ambush somebody, they don't trust you. They fear you. When they fear you, they won't tell you the truth. They'll tell you whatever it takes to make you go away. So, qualifying questions fundamentally can't work in a reliable way in an ambush conversation. Therefore, we should not use an ambush conversation to qualify. Unless qualifying is unimportant, if it's unimportant and we should do it all the time. Corey Frank (19:34): But most sales managers would say... and I'm sure you had this conversation, right? Devil's advocate and the hallway is, "Listen, Chris, I understand that I may tarnish my list, but they were interested and they were open. They were receptive. They wanted to. They asked me questions about the product and they showed interest enough where I could venture in the cold call, into the discovery and have that blended into one sit-down session. Why is that so wrong?" Chris Beall (20:06): That's a different error or action. So, that error is the error of trying to hold the entire discovery conversation by a quick transition from ambush to a mutual agreement, that's really bad. There's the flavor of it though, which is to go from ambush to quick qualified, "Let me ask you three qualifying questions. Oh, Just to make sure the meeting's great, right?" Well, I'm making an assumption. My assumption is you're going to tell me the truth. Now, there is a place you can pull it off right after they accept the meeting and they put it in their calendar. You're actually on a ledge where you can explore that safely, if you're really good at it. But the fact is, it's pointless. And the reason it's pointless is you still getting quality information relative to what you would get in discovery. So, take it into discovery and be consistent. There's a rule in manufacturing. I don't ever split a process between two workstations; one of which feeds another. I execute a process for the workstation, I produce an intermediate output and that output, with known characteristics, goes to the next workstation in my assembly line. I don't say, "Oh, wait, I have a few minutes. I know the next station is supposed to be the one that stamps the head flat. But I got a minute. I'll go grab a hammer and whack it a few times and see if it works." You don't make stuff like that. You don't do things in manufacturing because I have a minute, because I happened to have that part in hand, you do it with [crosstalk 00:21:36] the machines that's designed to do it. Corey Frank (21:37): But there's this insecurity that I'm going to elongate the sales cycle when I don't necessarily need to. Chris Beall (21:44): Yeah, you are. False positives in all manufacturing processes. False positives are a requirement. They're a mathematical requirement because at every step of the process, you're gaining information. So, you can't pretend rationally that you must've had that information before. When I make the list there's information I don't have. When I invite somebody through a five sentence process to come to a discovery meeting, I learn one thing: are they interested enough to come to the discovery meeting? I manufacture that one piece of information, which is actually pretty valuable because 95% of the list isn't interested and won't attend the meeting. So, now I've got this amazing 20 to 1 improvement. I don't really need to make it like 20.3 to 1. I got my 20 to 1. Is there going to be some stuff in there that we'll discover won't move forward the next step? Absolutely. Should there be? There must be false positive. Corey Frank (22:43): [inaudible 00:22:43] market. So, this is good stuff. This is another topic I just wrote down there. Are you saying that in most situations, B2B software selling products, it doesn't have to be... the truck, a client of yours is a good example. But in B2B is that I should never do... When I'm doing cold calling, I should never have a one call, one discovery call process. Chris Beall (23:11): Exactly. Corey Frank (23:11): Yes, I need to do in order to have developed that fear into trust and move that flywheel, as we talked about before. Chris Beall (23:22): Exactly. The point is, process at each step what that step is designed to process and produce outputs from one step to another, that within the boundaries of what you need to know about that output; its characteristics, most of the time, you're within some set of parameters. You make it ostensive. Keep your opinion out of it. Taking a meeting is objective. Having an opinion about whether it's a great meeting or not that's going to happen, is not objective. So, when a rep says, "I had a great meeting," I go, "That's nice. Did you get a test drive?" "Well, no. They said they had to go back and talk to somebody." Like, I had a meeting today and you would have listened to that and gone, "What a great meeting." Anybody would say it was a great meeting, "Wow. That guy's got... he answered all the questions, they moved in their understanding, they seem to have a need, they express with a tone of voice that indicates they're going to go forward." That meeting produced nothing because it didn't produce a test drive, which is what the discovery process is designed to do. So, now the process is going into one of its alternative forms which is, "They're going to get back to me. I failed as a sales person to get the next step." But if they come back now, that meeting, after the fact became a great meeting. Why? Because it produced a test. That's it. Everything needs to be objective, as you go down, opinions don't need to apply. No opinion needs to come into the process. I don't know why sales managers listen to the opinion of their reps on any subject whatsoever. It's of no value. Chop your process up into pieces that produce intermediate outputs that are completely objective and have to do with the prospect's action, not your response to what they said. Corey Frank (25:21): The subjective nature needs to be in the presentation; in the pitch. The objective has been ironclad since the manufacturing age about what that equals. Chris Beall (25:31): And the manufacturing revolution was built on a few great concepts. One of which is, push quality upstream. My vendors must... my suppliers must deliver to me stuff that's of high enough quality that I don't have to inspect it. That's the objective standard. I can use what they deliver to my dock without inspection. How do I discover that? I don't discover it by inspection. I discover it by looking at yields.  

Federer, Nadal, Serena, Martina, McEnroe, Borg, Court, Navratilova…a roster of some of the best tennis players the world has ever known.  But add one more name…Esther Vergeer to that list. Because she may actually be the most dominant and successful tennis player that you have never heard of. She won 148 career titles, 48 Grand Slam titles in singles and doubles, 23 year-end championships and seven gold medals.  And she did it from a wheelchair.  Esther Vergeer has used a wheelchair since she was 8, when an operation to correct hemorrhaging around her spinal cord left her paraplegic. So she took up tennis and shortly began to string together a list of titles that would be the envy of the tennis and sports world.  From 2003 till retiring in 2013, Esther didn’t lose a single game. Not even one bad day. In these ten years, she had won 120 consecutive tournaments that amounted to 470 consecutive matches. And over the course of all these matches, she lost only 18 sets and was pushed to a match point only once. ----more---- Richard Krajicek, the 1996 Wimbledon champion, called her "perhaps the most successful sportsperson of all time." And with a record like hers, it’s tough to disagree.  And surviving in your market…especially in today’s uncertain and volatile markets with the world’s challenges of the coronavirus means taking a lesson from Esther on how she approached her training…and why she thrived and won.  It’s not about the 10X rule or playing full-tilt…it’s simply about 1%.  Can you be 1% better than the market, your competition, and yourself?  In this week’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris takes on through the math of this 1% and all the preparation, thoughts, and rationale behind some of the shots you need to take to survive and thrive in today’s business climate.  From a defensive lob to buy time, to a blistering cross-court forehand, there’s a shot for every situation. And dominance, as Esther knows very well, doesn’t start with doubling your competitor’s headcount or raising 5X the capital, it starts with focusing on the simple 1%. That approach – with math on your side – is more than enough.  So welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode, “You only live once, but you get to serve twice.”   The Market Dominance Guys are produced and 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Well, the answer to your deeper question is, how do others measure their success or lack thereof in their first two or three years or starting a business? They only measure their success against themselves. Right? Most of the time. Chris Beall (04:05): Yeah. Corey Frank (04:06): And maybe their Alexa rank or who knows whatever it is, any goofy arbitrary marketing stats. And I don't start out of the gates, knowing where the goal line is, oftentimes. I do only, in respect to what my financials are that I gave to the board. Chris Beall (04:24): Yep. Corey Frank (04:25): That's the goal line, that's a fore goal line. That's not the real goal line. Right? And that's what I think what's so powerful about what your premise is here. Is why isn't people asking about this? Is why are they being so myopic about their own business or about their own goals? As opposed to missing an entire part of the equation, which is what is the market telling you, what your goals really should be? You may pat yourself on the back for hitting 12 and a half percent growth for the year and throwing off 10%. When the reality is that you have three or four or five other competitors. Right? That are actively taking market share that you are missing out on because you were so focused on yourself versus the market as a whole. Chris Beall (05:11): Yeah, that's interesting. I saw a presentation the other day. I think it was at the Sage... Big exit conference that basically said the only thing that counts, it wasn't the big exit conference it was actually an Alliance of CEOs meeting. And I have to look up who the guy is, but he made a really strong point, which is relative growth, growth rates relative to the competitors for the same customers, which means the same market are ultimately what determines valuation and that's it. Because [crosstalk 00:05:45] there's a compounding effect, Corey Frank (05:47): Your cohorts versus their cohorts. Chris Beall (05:49): Exactly. Exactly, because it's a zero-sum game. That's actually something that I brought out and I'm trying to figure out to do with this stuff. I have two, maybe three long, long, long recordings that I did solo while I'm trotting around. I took a 17 mile run the other day in Seattle and recorded this almost the entire run I recorded. Corey Frank (06:14): Oh that's awesome. Chris Beall (06:15): Some stuff. Right? And what I was trying to do was to start at the beginning of the book and get to the real fundamentals. And I didn't know what they were so they had to evolve as I was trotting along. This wasn't an exposition. This was an exploration. But what came out of the exploration was a core concept that we haven't hit on yet, and it's the concept of... Or maybe we have, but I really went deep on it. It's like, this is why this stuff works so to speak or why almost everything doesn't work. Then I made the distinction between two different kinds of games, the games like tennis and chess that are pure zero-sum games. And if you're a little bit better than your opponent, you make them a little bit worse. If I'm better than you or you're better than me, let's have you be better than me at tennis. Not in that some general sense. We're going to go skill by skill. So your service percentage is 1% higher. Your service placement is 1% better. Your serve speed is 1% higher. You're getting the ball in play is 1% higher on a return. Your ability to hit the down the line forehand... Chris Beall (08:32): A, 100 matches. You're going to win 98 of them. I'm going to win two. And the reason is your 1% make me worse. Because when you hit that down the line forehand, now I have to actually get the ball back with my backhand. And if my backhand is whatever it is X. Right? You just made it a little bit worse because I've got to chase this thing down. So you've made me worse by being a tiny bit better. And then over time, what happens is I get worse. I recognize that I've got to compete and so now I try to do things that I'm not really very good at. I must. Right? Desperation sets in. And making your competitors desperate. So that's why it's such a great signal in the marketplace when a competitor tries to underprice you, it tells you that you're winning. It tells you that you've forced them into a position where you should... Whatever you're doing, keep doing that because your 1% or 2% or whatever that's causing them to lose is causing them to become desperate. And the unit is really interesting too. I think tennis is the best example. I think the entire world of tennis is exactly like business. So a couple of players dominate the grand slams. They are just dominant. Right? If you go back over the last 20 years and you list winners of grand slam tournaments on the numbers that they've won, it goes like Federer a million, Nadal a million, nobody. Right? Occasional freak of nature. And then you go back and ask the root cause. Federer injured, Nidal [inaudible 00:10:12] Federer getting divorced. Whatever it happens to be. Right? It's always that the guy who is 1% better, who is probably really only 1% better is now for whatever reason, temporarily not 1% better. And you run into a little lucky draw. You find yourself as the US Open Champion, but you're never going to do it again. In golf it's very different. The other players have no impact on you whatsoever other than if you get behind, then last nine holes of Sunday, you might start to do desperate things. That's the only place that converges. Golf's not a zero sum game. Everybody can score. Everybody has that the course is the course. Yeah, morning might be a little easier, the afternoon wind or something else like that. But the course is the course. But in tennis we play competitively and we play a lot of points. That's again, where it's like sales. Sales we play a lot of points. We have a lot of meetings. We have a lot of conversations. We have a lot of opportunities to choose our shot. Am I going to go after this one or this one? We can allocate our time the same way it is in tennis. Knowing I'm running down a Fort in my forehand corner, going to the right, I have three categories of shots I can choose from. That's like I have three different kinds of prospects I can go on. I can try to hit that down the line, passing shot. I can try to put something deep in the corner, cross court my safest shot if my opponent's staying back. Because if I think I've got to recover and get back to the center of the court, I want time. And I want the longest possible distance on the other side of the net. And I want the lowest point of the net. That combination says hit this cross court shot. Or if my opponent's coming in, I recognize that situation. And I might decide, Hey I'm too far out of position to do anything, but hit a little defensive lob. So I make my choice. That's like choosing what prospects do I go after in the marketplace. It's very, very similar and my chances of success depend on the kind of prospect for that [inaudible 00:12:16] I can choose to go after the big whale and see if I can take some share with one deal. I can say, no, I'm a little bit out of position. I'll go and do this easier mid-market play where they've already expressed some interest or I can hit the defensive lob, I can just live off my inbounds. See what happens if I go after my inbounds for awhile, but I had my choices. Right? But if the other guy's a tiny bit better than me, my choices keep shrinking. His choices keep growing. And over time, and it's not the accumulation of points. It's the fact that we get two points. They're called matches where that's the market where we win or lose. And once we've won the match, it's over. We have the position we move forward in the tournament, the other guys out. So when we dominate a market, we move forward. We get to go try to dominate another... And when we lose, it's bad, because now we got to go enter another tournament, we have to go figure out what's wrong with our game, we have to decide if we want to keep playing professional tennis or become a coach or a commentator. This actually what happens with businesses. Right? All these other options open up in the face of failure. But that tiny fraction of being better when it's just amped and ramped allows dominance not sometimes, but effectively every time. And that's why professional tennis records look like they do. They don't look like anything else in the world. It's not the tournaments that are won that's interesting. It's the match records. If you look at the match records of Federer, of Nadal, those kinds of people, of Serena Williams, their match records are absurd. If you took those match records into golf, it being nutty. Tiger Woods at this point would have run 130 majors, but you can't do that in golf because you can't make the other person worse. That's the deep math behind this. The linear math and therefore what do I need to do? Is actually a consequence of how markets behave. That's like, what do I need to do in order to win this tennis match? Well, I sure better get my first serve in. That would be a bad idea not to get my first serve in, but it's got to have pace in placement, but it doesn't have to be perfect because I'm at a huge disadvantage if I don't get my first serve in. The number one thing that causes folks to lose [inaudible 00:14:45] you lose your serve because your percentage of first serves is too low. It's actually a flow rate. It's how many first serves do I get in per unit point that I play? It's like a conversion rate. So I have to do that. I have no choice. I can't go to zero. When somebody says the quality versus quantity thing, I always think, well, wait a second, if you were playing tennis, are you saying the quality of your service has to be so high you'd be willing to accept the probability of actually having it happen to go to zero. And then you're going to sit on your quality [inaudible 00:15:19] of the one perfect serve that you didn't make. Zero is a bad number, man you multiply it by other numbers you get, zero. You have to actually have volume because if you don't have volume, you have nothing statistical going on at all. You're just relying on luck. Without volume all we have is luck. Corey Frank (15:41): If you have volume without skill, you have the [inaudible 00:15:45] suck. And so that's a good topic for another time as well. Chris Beall (15:50): Yes. That's the pity pat serve. Right? Even though you're better off with the pity pet serve than you are with the perfect serve that never went in. Corey Frank (15:58): Yeah. Chris Beall (15:58): Some percentage of those, your opponent is not going to be able to do well. Just because they have to execute now, and their execution has some probability to failure, but there's somewhere in there where it's enough. Enough in a market is I have discovery meetings with 60% of the market over two years. Three years, it's like three sets. It's like that's what's going on, is I got three sets. I got to do something in those three sets. What do I have to do? Well, I know one thing I have to do, I've got to engage in real points that are played out so that if I'm better, I have a shot. If I'm not better, I got to find out sooner rather than later. Cause I got to go get my coach to go to the practice court and we got to get some film going. We've got to find out where is it that I'm 1% less where I need to be 1% better? That's really what I'm looking for. So the insight from thinking this through and talking to myself about it was the deep math is very non-linear. The linear math is I need to talk to 60% discovery meetings. How do I do that? Well, I have to have a certain number of conversations, 20 in order to get a discovery meeting. Okay. Well the math behind that is linear. Oh, I have to have a certain number of dials, navigated dials to get a conversation. So I know roughly if I take 400 and I multiply it by 60% of my market, that's approximately how many dials I'm going to have to have in order to get all those discovery meetings. That's just linear. Right? Anybody can do that math. That's third grade math. I multiply a number of times a number. And then I take that number and multiply it times another number I'm done. That's how many fully navigated dials I need? How long will take? Well, now I have a choice. How do I do it? I can do it with a telephone. Okay. So take that number and divide it by 42. That tells me how many man days I'm going to need. I can do it with ConnectandSell. Take that number and divide it by a 1,000. Now I know how many man days I need. That's it. I mean, there isn't anything more to the math. We're done with all the math. It's not even deep math. The deep math is in the runaway process. An avalanche can start with a pebble. Small, small thing that you can do. I once started at an avalanche accidentally, which fortunately didn't hurt anybody. And it was doing something I shouldn't have been doing at the Monarch Ski area in Colorado. I went out of bounds on my cross country skis, way up high on the mountain that overlooks highway 50. And I'm out there on the slope and everything's nice and peaceful and quiet. I remember hearing a chickadee in the middle of winter. Chickadee, dee, dee. Mountain chickadee I thought, how peaceful. And then there was a sound. Kind of sounded like, I don't know... If you were to get kicked in the gut it sounded like that [inaudible 00:19:04] that sound, and it was just cup crystals underneath and breaking woods. There was a layer in the snow, probably about this deep that was made in these little domes they are made of ice. And they're very delicate and they're very beautiful and they're not very strong. And when they start to collapse, all the ones around them feel it and they get weak and they collapse and then boom the whole slope goes down and then it fractures right below my skis. And I mean right below like two inches below my left ski, I'm basically right on that slope. Corey Frank (19:35): Oh. Chris Beall (19:36): And then this thing starts to happen. And by the time that thing is going, we have an airborne powder snow avalanche that covers some large amount of room. It's probably moving 120 miles an hour and it goes down covers highway 50. And thank God doesn't bury anybody. No cars at that moment. I'm up there going, Oh my God what have I done? Right. Well, what had I done? I had initiated a cascade. And in the world of mathematics, real life, there are cascades. Now then when you push a boulder off a cliff, it's unlikely to be alone when it gets to the bottom. Other boulders will come with it because one dislodges two, two dislodge three. Nuclear fission works like that, it's a cascade. One atom splits, neutrons come out of it, they go poke themselves into other uranium atoms or plutonium or whatever you have. They make those two unstable one makes two the two are unstable and split. Oh, now I have four neutrons. And pah, pah, pah, pah. The next thing you know, a city is destroyed or you control it by absorbing some of them and but you're walking... That's why nuclear power is exciting. Right? Because you're always walking on the edge. Always walking on... It's like, "Oh, those control rods are in. But if they're in too far, it goes" and if they're out a little bit, it goes, like this. Sales... Itself isn't like this. Sales is highly linear. Sales itself is a linear process. Or with my market. I talk to the market. I talk to individuals. I do it at some known flow rate. That flow rate is per whatever, per day. Anything that's per day is linear. Do I get more conversations tomorrow? Because I had more yesterday. Nope. I got to go get them afresh. Right? I turn the crank. It's like, if I were crushing grapes in order to make wine, I don't get to a point and say, "Hey, I crushed enough grapes yesterday. I don't need to crush any more today." Nope. Dammit the fruits still got to be crushed linearly. Right? And it goes through a linear process as I'm making wine. Linear, linear, linear. Until now, I've got all the juice and I destemmed it and done whatever else I need to do. And it sat for it's 12 hours or 24 hours, 32... However long it's got to sit in order to be like, "Oh, we're all happy. And we're all the same in here in uniform." Then I add the yeast. That ain't linear. When I add the yeast market dominance occurs, the yeast dominates that market. Whatever other little organisms are in there trying to play the yeast goes, "No, I got a little quicker game here." Right? It knows how to make more yeast based on how much yeast is already can... Made by the making of yeast by the eating of the sugar. I know yeah there's a by-product called alcohol and a bunch of other things that come out of it, but it's a runaway. And if you watch that graph you know this is what people... Everybody uses the phrase exponential they have no idea what it means. What it means is the more I have and the faster I'm going, the more I'm going to get and the faster I'm going to go without doing anything. That is it's built into the process itself, that it behaves like this. And nothing entails the [inaudible 00:22:50] not one thing that behaves like this, but market dominance behaves like this. Corey Frank (22:58): Yeah. Chris Beall (22:58): Market dominance is not the consequence of the linear acts and sales per se. It's a consequence of how markets work. Markets work by a process that says, "If you win one, your opponent is weaker across all future games you're going to play."

The earliest civilizations on earth developed between 4000 and 3000 BC when the rise of agriculture and trade allowed people to have surplus food and economic stability. Many people no longer had to practice farming which allowed for a diverse array of professions and interests to flourish in a relatively confined geographic area. The use of fire, the advent of the wheel, learning to domesticate animals, and come up with this cool thing to record progress called writing, all of these became milestones as we climbed the “civilization tree.  Later, in the colonial rush in the mid 16th century, the Western Europeans brought even newer technologies, ideas, plants, and animals that were new to the Americas and would transform peoples' lives – some not necessarily for the better: Things such as guns, iron tools, and weapons; But also Christianity and Roman law; sugarcane and wheat; horses and cattle all became hallmarks of a “civilized” society.  ----more---- But what about our sales profession? Can you say that Sales has tracked at the same arc as the rest of civilizations trademarks? After all, one can argue that our craft of sales hasn’t changed much in the past few thousand years. As our Market Dominance Sales historian, Chris Beall is fond of reminding us, Sales used to be an interaction among strangers at the crossroads between two people who likely would never see each other again. One may get miles away from the city after interacting with a salesperson only to release that the thing that they purchased doesn’t do what the salesperson said it would.  But there were no Amazon or Yelp reviews to post after a discouraging interaction. Only more fear and suspicion from that sales experience that, in turn, the next salesperson needed to overcome to secure a sale.  But today, in the Market Dominance Guys laboratory, we believe that Sales does indeed have a shot at civilizing the world. How? By forcing trust and sincerity to the forefront of how humans interact and conduct commerce. And they've never been there, says Chris. Sure, we had to have all sorts of societal mechanisms things like duels – we spoke in an earlier episode about the Colt 45 Peacemaker as an indispensable tool to keep and hold politeness and honor in check. Because, simply, if you weren't polite to another man, then you'd be challenged to a duel. And if you were in enough duels, the math would eventually play out that you're eventually going to be dead.  But in the current world, we have the anti-duel - we have the internet where no one can be impolite in business for long.  But it’s the B2B buyer who will actually challenge you to the duel in today’s world. The B2B buyer, because of their strong need to not get fired due to the information gap between buyers and sellers is motivated to get information real and true information. Nobody can (or should) ever be as educated as any salesperson simply because of the nature of specialization. But if you insult that sales prospect or you're insincere or untrustworthy or exaggerate - and you give them any reason not to trust you, they are going to “kill” you. And they have the easiest way in the world of killing you and it's got a great name: It's called ghosting. And Chris reminds us that they are not the one who becomes the ghost; YOU become the damn ghost because you're already dead to them! So in this week’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, we learn why we're at the cusp of true importance for the role of sales in society today and need to understand that the “game” has to move on from being a mere primitive game and instead becomes be a sincere set of human intentioned actions based on universal principles. And the most universal of these is that somebody has to actually be part of the conversation at the point of fear. And if you can generate trust out of this fear, then you win as long as you don't blow it. So grab your Rosetta stone, your flint, and welcome to this week’s episode of Market Dominance Guys, The Rise and Fall of the Sales Empire. The Market Dominance Guys Podcast is Presented 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Speaker 4 (06:22): As an SDR, if I have an SDR team, my average handling time, my average call time per call should be a minute and a half-ish, maybe two minutes. If I have an SDR team that has more than a two minute average conversation, then I'm getting too deep in discovery and they're going too far down the funnel. And that's probably why my conversion rates are or were they are. Chris Beal (06:46): And your show rates are probably too high. Speaker 4 (06:48): And you show rates are too high. Yes. Chris Beal (06:51): What you try to do is, you want to get enough curiosity in order to get some energy coming towards you. You don't want that energy to be high enough to always get over the hump. And the reason isn't that you don't want it there, is that the process of getting there overspends the trust that you've had, and therefore yields an unreliable result. That as you ended up cherry picking and leaving a good part of the market for your competitors. As soon as you walk away from a situation that where they should have for their own good attended the discovery call, and you don't give them the chance to make that choice themselves, you've done work for your competitor. You have actually introduced into that person's mind some new thinking about a problem. And now when your competitor shows up, they have an advantage. So if you want to work for your competitor overqualified during cold calls. You're spending- Speaker 4 (07:41): Overqualified [inaudible 00:07:41]. Yes. Chris Beal (07:42): You're spending money to work for your competitor at that point. You just don't know when they're going to harvest the result. Whereas if somebody doesn't attend to your meeting, they're not going to attend the other guy's meeting either. It's fine. Let it ripen. They will ripen and you'll get 60% of them over three years to attend your discovery calls. And then you own the market. It's not which 60%, but this is the other thing that's really funny. 40% will never attend your discovery calls. Great. That's just fine. That includes the ones you're talking to now. So the fact that you're talking to somebody other than that, you should do your best to get them sufficiently curious to commit the commitment is when they go to their calendar, commitment isn't is an action. The action is the jump over to actually attending the discovery call. So there's four steps we do in a cold call. Three of the four steps we do in a follow-up call. So cold call. We do fear, fear to trust, trust to curiosity, curiosity to commitment, commitment represented as something on your calendar and my calendar. So, that's what we're trying to accomplish. Speaker 4 (08:51): Fear to trust, trust to curiosity, curiosity commitment. Chris Beal (08:55): Yep. And that's, as far as we want to go in the cold call. The prospect may want to turn that into action, but the setup is bad for action because the trust isn't high enough. We need more trust. They got to qualify themselves further. By showing up at the meeting. The horse must approach me. I'm never going to chase the horse. The horse is always bigger than me. The horse can run away. And even when it's back has to me, it can kick me. It's a bad place, right? They got stuff on both ends. I don't want any of it. I don't want [inaudible 00:09:27] to bite me. I don't want them to kick me. I don't want any of that. I want to live at another day because by the way, I'm just like every other big animal I have to be careful of myself. I got to make sure I stay, but so I wanted to generate this little sequence right on the cold call on the follow-up call or the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth conversation. I don't have to start anymore with the fear. There's no fear. I actually get to start with whatever trust I have in the bank account from before. Then I amplify that trust slightly by referring to the previous conversation. You're important. I remember when we spoke and what we talked about and what you said. A lot of you in there. We, includes you. We includes you again. And what you said is just you. I'm kind of a little more trustworthy when you answered the phone, you were neutral. I remind you of the previous conversation, which I don't expect you to remember, but the reminding process should tells you that I care about. [inaudible 00:10:28] I remembered, [inaudible 00:10:29] I remember [inaudible 00:10:30] hearing act. That's why do Memorial services. Even the dead preferred to be remembered and this person is still alive. So then when we get into discovery, we're in a completely new world, because there's enough trust that they came to us, if we're really smart in discovery, we don't actually start spending that trust right off the bat, by asking interrogation style questions. We actually don't. First of all, we remind ourselves, what are the three things that this person is going to walk away with? Even if it's only one of the three that will be a value to them for the rest of their life, no matter if we ever do these things together. Because that's what I sold them. I sold a meeting where they're going to walk away with something of value and it's not going to be a gift card. Somebody called me the other day and said, "what do you think Chris, if we gave out [inaudible 00:11:21] what if we gave out a gift card for attending the discovery meeting?" It's like, well, I don't know. Did you marry your wife or do you just like pay her on a regular basis? It kind of depends on what kind of relationship you want, but if you're going into business with somebody, because you're really going to help them over time, you probably marrying them. If you want to have a prostitution relationship with somebody, start with the gift card, but you better keep it up because if it takes a gift card to do one, it's going to take discounting [inaudible 00:11:56]. So I'd be ready. I'd put that in my budget, right? Lots of gift cards going down this road. But they trusted you enough to show up without a gift card or what if it is [inaudible 00:12:07] improve my show rate. You don't want an improve show rate from gift cards. You don't want that little speed bump in the way now they showed up. The best way to open, and we could have a whole section on discovery, the best way to open a discovery call is first to remind yourself the most important step on a discovery call is inside yourself. It's like when I did that run on Sunday morning from here to Reno, the most important thing wasn't making sure my feet were taped up and making sure I had water in my backpack. And then I had enough bars to eat on the way and all that. Most important thing was the gut check, is to look inside myself and ask myself fairly seriously, is this an undertaking which has an unknown amount of effort, pain and uncertainty and maybe danger. 64 years old. I don't have a cardiologist. My friend Jim Haggard sent me a note, does your cardiologist approve of you cavorting around doing this? Right? And I had to answer my cardiologist, whoever he, or she might turn out to be in the future. [inaudible 00:13:16] I have to be my own cardiologist. Right? So what if I was endangering myself? I'm endangering myself. What am I doing to the future of my kids? What am I doing to Helen? Who really kind of thinks it's right to live the rest of our mutual lives together in some long kind of way. So I had to do the gut check. That's what I do before every discovery call. I don't go research this person. I don't research their company. I check inside myself. I put in the sincerity dipstick. I want to know, do I sincerely believe that the odds are good. That whoever it is I'm meeting with has kind of learn something, in the economic realm, in the emotional realm and in the strategic realm, even just one of those three sufficient that it will be worth their 15 minutes, even if we never do business together. That's the key. That's the product. So as an SDR, I need to know I'm selling that product and what those three things are. And those with three features of the product. I don't have to say them, but I have to know them. I have to believe them. And how often does anybody ever teach their SDRs the three things somebody is most likely to walk away from a discovery meeting with that will benefit them for the rest of their life and have nothing to do with buying our product. Speaker 4 (14:30): You're talking about the economic and emotional and strategic realm? Chris Beal (14:33): Yeah. Something you might learn. [crosstalk 00:14:35]. Does anybody think about teaching their SDRs the importance of believing that the meeting itself that they're selling has value independent of the product or is the meeting a stepping stone on the way to selling them a deal? In which case we know who it's for. It's not for them. It's for us. And as soon as we start selling for us, not for them, we're toast. That's a mistake Jesus wouldn't have made. Speaker 4 (15:00): Yeah, that's right. Chris Beal (15:01): Right? Speaker 4 (15:02): That's right. Chris Beal (15:03): I mean, that's an error. That's an error of kind that is commonly made and it's made due to the ancient tradition of selling, which is sales was an interaction among strangers at the crossroads. You would never see each other again. So almost all sales in the ancient world were done where two roads came together. And therefore there was enough concentration of traffic that it was worth setting up your stall. And the salesperson always feigned sincerity and haggling became the order of the day. And all it was, was how desperate's your need, what am I willing to part with this for? I know my inventory and my ability to replenish it. You don't know how much you're going to need. We're going to exploit the information asymmetry and send you on your way. And you're going to find out how bad the product was I sold you later. Three days camel ride out. Sales as a profession was built at the crossroads. There are no crossroads anymore. We don't say goodbye after the sale. The sale is the beginning. That's to say hello. So sales has exactly the opposite meaning now than it used to, but we hold the old traditions. Actually, if you think about Sandler, Sandler was a breakthrough approach that said, and remember it came about from door to door, I might see the person again. It's like, what if we did door to door in a way that allowed us to sell the same person again? That was the Sandler breakthrough. Speaker 4 (16:23): Yeah. I love Sandler. I think the school of sales, like for, this is a course, what you're talking about. And again, the sales theory, this unified field theory of sales is a new generation of how to sell with that I can't hide from you anymore. I'm on LinkedIn and even if I go from Cisco to Avaya and I try to call you again, I can pull up, "wait a minute. This motherfucker he tried to screw me at Cisco but now he's over here" and "oh, I see. Hey Chris, I see that. You're connected with John Mueller over here. Hey, listen, he called me again." "Oh, I remember that guy." So there is, like you said, there's no crossroads any longer where you're camel... There's, no camel ride that's long enough where it's too far to reach you again. So this concept of reputation, even in SDR, I get a cold call from an SDR. I can pull you up on LinkedIn and say, "listen, you've been there for a month. Your company's been in business for two years." The ability for me to get any information on your organization is so readily available. What do I have left?" Chris Beal (17:29): Right? Every STR has a story about how they came to believe. Speaker 4 (17:34): That's a good one. Chris Beal (17:35): That's a key. They have to have a story. If you want to cheat. And your company's been around, keep your SDRs and keep them because they believe in the mission. The most important people in the entire company to believe in the mission of the company, are the SDRs. When you look at your investment in employee development, you should be weighting your investment heavily in your SDRs', believing in the overall offering. And specifically that sincerity of overall mission, right? Alignment with the mission as a whole. And then specifically as a skill, very specific like point by point scale, they need to understand and therefore believe in the potential value of the meeting at it's feature level of benefit level, which is, what are the three things that somebody is likely to walk away with If they pay attention to the meeting? Well, then they're all learners. So oddly enough, there's only one universal product now, which is value through learning. That's all there is. That's the first product. The ultimate, monkey paw. Right? The meeting itself is the ultimate monkey's paw. And it's the way to destroy or hurt the value of that meeting is to turn it into a sales meeting. In which case now the poor SDR has nothing to sell. As soon as the purpose of the meeting is to push somebody to a deal, the SDR no longer has anything to sell sincerely. And that's a broken value chain and broken value chains, open up gaps for competitors to walk in. And it's always the same, which is, it doesn't matter if it appears to be working for you. The question is, what if your competitor did it all the way? What if your competitor ran this program precisely? Because a small amount of competitive edge results in market domination, Chris Beal (20:19): Because the basic theory of market domination is, this is the new England Patriots approach to business, right? Why are they such a difficult team to deal with? Because they always play a long game. They play a long game. It's a multi season long game. And then within the season, it's a long game. And then this game itself is going to be played as a long game. They just play a long game in which small advantages accumulate over the game in order to resolve the high probabilities of outcomes, especially seasoned level outcomes and dynasty level outcomes. Folks who do that dominate markets. It's pretty simple really. Accumulate small advantages and build on them as a strategy because every advantage gives you a new place from which you can accumulate more advantage. It's not exactly hard to understand. It's very rare that you're Genghis Khan and you're the only guy with a bunch of people on horses. And everybody else [inaudible 00:21:11] Speaker 4 (21:12): [inaudible 00:21:12] Today that doesn't much anymore. You're right. Chris Beal (21:14): It doesn't. It's hard to be Genghis Khan now. So at some point, when we bring all this together and bring it all down to the big why, the big, why is market dominance without which we won't have survival. That's, what's so interesting. Our alternatives are attenuated and being attenuated more, which is [inaudible 00:21:32]. We just don't get to play that game anymore like we used to. I just talked to somebody, [inaudible 00:21:37] a company that sells to manufacturers. It's called a strategic pricing SPA. And what they sell to manufacturers is fascinating. They sell the benefits of raising your costs. And so if you're facing, especially if upcoming potential recession, we can increase your costs in a world where everybody is cost plus, and you [inaudible 00:22:00] sell effectively. Then your margins will go up. Speaker 4 (22:03): Well, the math works. In the restaurant business, you see this all the time is that two schools of thought. My business is going down, it's Arizona, it's the summer, what do I do? I have Groupon happy hour specials, try to cut cost, which is the opposite of what you should do. Because my traffic, which is the constant is now down. I have to now have four times the level of traffic to make up. Versus if I just increased my prices with the same little folks that would make it up. Chris Beal (22:32): Right. And if you increase your cost a little bit, so your cost might be, for instance, what are you spending on how the restaurant presents itself the moment you walk in? So say in order to make your restaurant more attractive in Phoenix in the summer, what you do is you put, and it's on a street with a lot of other folks and say, you're the first one to go all Palm Springs. And you put some little mist sprinklers out there, and those things cost you 5,000 bucks to install. Your cost went up and therefore your prices can go up. Speaker 4 (23:09): So you're saying that costs go up to make the prices go up. Chris Beal (23:12): Yes. And it's very [inaudible 00:23:14] intuitive but if the volume flow is going to be similar or even down a little bit, a slight increase in cost in a competitive world where everybody's competing with each other, right? Manufacturers all competing with each other and distributors are the worst. So these guys first order they sell to distributors, right? And so that's their first product, but their second product goes to the manufacturers and says, "we're going to help your distributors, who you don't want to have, make more money. We're going to help them make more money because then they'll actually pay [inaudible 00:23:43]." so there's a hidden part of the equation, which is really how much money are you collecting dear manufacturer, not how much do you think you're selling volume wise and how much money are you making? So we're going to go, you give us your distributors. We're going to allow them to increase their costs so you can charge them more, by the way. And as a result, their business is going to be more profitable. And it's like, whoa, it's mind blowing, but they take you through the numbers and you go, yes. But I asked him, what's so important about this for manufacturers. And he said it's simple. M&A is getting killed. The manufacturers have got to move into markets now through organic growth because it's getting too expensive to buy competence. And so now they're actually getting investments from private equity firms. The money's flowing the other way. They're the ones being invested in. Now they've got bosses, Oh my God, the bosses are impatient. And meanwhile, their way out the side door, so to speak, which is to buy another company to grow their business is being out competed by the private equity guys who don't have the pain of integration and have a huge amount of money because of the concentration. The fact is the ultra consultation wealth and society now has made private equity super strong because at the margin, if I've got a ton of money, how am I going to put it to work? Well, some of it's going to go to work more as risk capital venture, some as less risky private equity and some over here where everybody else is competing, how do I get an edge? I'm going to choose a hedge fund or a private equity fund is going to help me out, right? I'm at least get [crosstalk 00:25:13]. You had this, this macro things happen in society, which is liquidity of information, power of technology, the ability to close loop on regulations of laws. What happens when you have money, you can buy boats. All that stuff has led to this bubbling up of money, into the smaller numerically, smaller set of people. Those people have access to the whole market. One of the places they must put their money is where money is made, which is companies doing real work. That's called private equity. Private equity out competes corporates every day of the week, because money that doesn't have anything that it's beholding to except it's buy, sell value, is always more liquid than business, which means I have to buy your company and integrate it by operation somehow. So I can no longer as a manufacturer reliably play the market expansion game and buy the markets that I dominate. So now I must dominate them through organic growth, which means sales is no longer the old sales, not only in the crossroads sense, but in the disposal of inventory sense to keep my machine. Now it has a new role, which is to get me market so I can survive. I know I'm not surviving so well on the private equity guys, get to buy into me. That means I'm not getting enough money from the market and I'm having to take their money. I know I'm not going to leave this for my kids unless I put a growth engine on it that's got [crosstalk 00:26:36] and that's why I built it in the first place. So I'm about to blow my 35, 40 years of legacy work on a change of circumstance. So I must learn to sell. And what got me is that the SPA guy said, "this is the theme in manufacturing now, is organic growth has become a requirement of business." And that's fascinating to me because it means that this unified field theory, like everything, it's got to have a place to apply it, right? So it's like nuclear energy was interesting in terms of scaring the living daylights out of people by dropping a couple of bombs and then freezing the world up for a while with regard to global oppression. But what made it really wild was the fact that you could make electricity and the world needed a lot more electricity because factories run on it. 80% of all the electricity in the world is used to turn machines in factories to turn motors and nuclear energy is just one heck of a cool way to do it. Now I didn't [crosstalk 00:27:36] reputational issue and all that. But the reason that, that's [inaudible 00:27:39] in the fifties was not that we scared the living daylights of everybody and I managed to use it to Institute this cold war that froze up a bunch of latent, voluntary, aggressive power that would've gotten unleashed on the world. We would have, I'm sure would have had world war three by, I don't know, 1962, because Korea was an attempt at it to get it going. And it's like, no, we're all too scared. We can't do that. Sorry. So that was a nice effect. But the real effect was you can manufacture electricity for nothing. And that's an amazing thing. Now, solar is the new nuclear because when the cost came down enough, you can manufacture electricity for nothing [crosstalk 00:28:18] solar [inaudible 00:28:20] solar is now like 32% of great Britain's total energy supply and was predicted at this point to be like 2%. Why? Because when the time comes, the time comes. When the time has come for a sales theory that addresses the problem of directed organic growth. It's a different business problem that you're solving with sales directed, organic growth must result in market dominance if it's going to increase survival. And so what do you base that on? What's got to be based on 100% reliables. It's like nuclear energy is 100% reliable. Statistically, whether it's made of uranium 235 or it's plutonium, either one statistically will behave exactly the same as you predict. That is I can't say I know this atom is going to fission, but I can say that I know the rate of fission. That's going to be in this collection of atoms if they have neutrons of certain velocity. I can say that to a point [inaudible 00:29:26] decimal points. I can say how that's going to work. We need a unified theory of sales that tells us statistically, what's going to happen so that we can direct that energy beam that we can create with that level of certainty at a market. And oddly enough, the twin pillars of this thing are trust and sincerity. The thing I believe about all this is that sales finally, if the conditions continue to obtain, sales has a shot at civilizing the world by forcing trust and sincerity to the front of human interactions. And they've never been there. We had to have all sorts of societal mechanisms. Duels. We talked a little about Romeo and Juliet. How did we use to enforce even just politeness? Well, because if you weren't polite to a gentleman, then you'd be challenged to a duel. And if you're in enough duels, you're going to be dead. They have to [inaudible 00:30:25] out of this now. Musicals, just to remind us of what that's like. Well, in the current world, we have the anti duel. We have the internet. Everybody can be impolite. Now the question is where do you have to go above politeness all the way to sincerity so you get trust? Only in sales. You can design products without sincerity. You can manufacture products without sincerity. You just have to be good, right? Technically good. You can assess need without sincerity. You can statistically analyze [inaudible 00:30:55] responses on the internet. You can do all this stuff without sincerity, but the B2B buyer because of their need to not get fired, because the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers that obtains now and will always obtain, no buyer can ever be as educated as any seller. Impossible because of the nature of specialization. The B2B buyer is the guy who will challenge you to the duel in the modern society. The guy with the sword is the B2B buyer. And if you insult that person, you're insincere. You [inaudible 00:31:29] many reason not to trust you. They're going to kill you. And by the way, they have the easiest way in the world of killing you. It's got a great name. It's called ghosting you. We [crosstalk 00:31:39] say ghosting like they become a ghost. They don't become a ghost. You become the damn ghost because you're already dead to them. Speaker 4 (31:47): That's awesome. You're the ghost not them. Chris Beal (31:49): That's the big surround [inaudible 00:31:51] the unified field theory. Otherwise, it's unimportant, but it's actually, we're at the cusp of importance for the role of sales in society. And the game has to go from being a game, to being a sincere set of actions based on universal principles that have to also be true. And the most universal of them is, somebody is going to actually be able to start at fear. If you can make trust out of fear, you win. As long as you don't blow it, but you have to do it sincerely. And the rest of this is nothing more than how to make a nuclear reactor. Don't just pile up a bunch of uranium and hope for the best. It doesn't work out. There's only two States [inaudible 00:32:36] one is called meltdown and the other was called nothing. Warm. [crosstalk 00:32:42] Can't make money off those little puppy [inaudible 00:32:43]. But if you can assemble the nuclear reactor, which you make up out of the pieces we've been talking about, you can actually go and... You can survive in a very, very tough world. So that's what [crosstalk 00:32:59] it's interesting and I don't know how we package all of this. It works but once we get the book together, it's going to be really interesting because I'm practicing now a 22 minute talk that I've now given at dinner. So I'm going to do a lot of dinners, [inaudible 00:33:14] breakfasts where people generate their own breakthrough script a little lighter. Like here's the basic theory, now let's do it. Right? because at breakfast time, people are capable of doing that kind of work. Dinnertime [inaudible 00:33:25] that work. All they can do is listen, then have a discussion and then see if they remember anything after all the alcohol. Right? But the dinner speech, the idea is that it starts with an assumption that no one will challenge, which is market dominance is required for survival. All the reasons that we got there, they're very light, they're just touched on [inaudible 00:33:46]. Like, Oh yeah, because primarily, because the old way of doing it, which is M&A is being impinged upon by private equity. Everybody knows private equity has too much money for comfort. If you're a buyer of companies and you're not a private equity firm, they have too much money. They have too easy a job because they have to buy it. Kind of do a couple of little things and sell it, whereas you got to buy it integrated. So the price is higher for you and your costs are higher to get to the same point. And then you still don't have the option they had, which is just to sell it because you kind of ruin it. It's overhead is the problem you're going to solve when you synergize it out. But you sell it, you have to sell it with the overhead because it's not a functioning company. Right. So that [inaudible 00:34:25] gone. That doesn't take long. That takes like a minute, minute and a half to get into it. And that's like, so what is the implication? And what does it all come down to? And the surprise answer, the first seven seconds of a cold call on the telephone. That's the surprise. And people get it. [Inaudible 00:34:42] Whoa. They don't know what to do with it but it's like, Whoa. And that's what I want out of this book because I want people going, Oh, and then there's a cookbook. You can actually do this. Yeah. And it's not easy. Speaker 4 (34:54): There's a Terrence Malick. I don't feel like him as a director and a writer, right. I think he's just genius. He did a movie a few years ago with Brad Pitt and this dynamic with his father and he did Thin Red Line. He's got a movie coming out in December about a Austrian saint who was conscientious objector in the Nazi army. And when the Catholic tradition became who's about to become a saint and is beatified and... But he has this habit in these movies to take the eye off of the... The camera off of the character and then move to something in nature and study it. And in this movie with Brad Pitt, it went from this dynamic with this father, the son, and changed to like 10 minutes of the big bang theory and the universe in its creation. And for some folks it's like way too esoteric, right? And he just kind of had to study, it's like why? And it's going to the origin of, like you were saying, the origin of sales is that two strangers come against each other at this crossroads. And one wants something that the other has. And in order for survival, they both have to come to some sense of fairness and then go on their merry way. And because they're a stranger, they have to either fame this sincerity, or it has to be genuine. And I like what you're saying that really what we're talking about here is also this origin story of trust. And you think about all the things in technology, the tech stack, I can have 50 things in my tech and my marketing stack. I can have $40 per square foot, real estate overlooking Lake Travis in Austin, or overlooking the golden gate bridge. I can have Zig Ziglar, the reincarnation of himself come and be my Monday morning motivating spiritual guide. But when it comes down to is seven seconds with you and your voice and your tone. It's so human. It's so counterintuitive at that point, that the very definition of your ability to dominate your market in 2019 comes down to the very same thing that it came down to in 2019 BC. Chris Beal (37:12): Exactly. In the village, but not at the crossroads. That's what's so interesting. At the crossroads we fake it. In the village we can't because there's nowhere to go. And we're all in the village now. There's nowhere to go. [crosstalk 00:37:24] We're stuck in the village. So the question now becomes, how do you civilize a village with seven billion inhabitants? What is the repeatable requirement? The repeatable benefit, the repeatable principle to be applied that could civilize a world where that is essentially a village with seven billion inhabitants. And I believe the answer, oddly enough, it's not B to C. B to C sales doesn't do it. It's too transactional. It's too cold. The irony is when I buy products for myself, I'm not risking very much. You have to have risk on the table to have tension and the fundamental risk that will remain in society for a long time is the risk to the individual decision maker buyer in business to business. And that risk ain't going anywhere. And it sets up the entire thing. The whole thing is set up from that. And from there, you can actually the rest of it, you can reason your way to, with no experience about anything, except for knowing one thing for this particular solution which is, human beings are afraid of human beings they can't see that they don't know. That's pretty obvious, but people tend not to think of as [inaudible 00:38:35] but it turns out to be what's important.

The United States may stake its claim as the first country to land on the moon but Russia can boast that it is the first country to drill the 2nd deepest man-made hole ever recorded here on Earth. Since the early 1960s, scientists have attempted to drill down to the Earth's mantle. Why the mantle? Because we’re told that scientists only have a "reasonable" understanding of what it's made from, and how it works.  In 1970, Russia entered the race to dig. But unlike the Moon landing, Russia achieved more than the US. Over the next 20 years, a Russian team of scientists drilled down 40,230 feet into the Earth… That's 7.6 miles. The hole, known as the "Kola superdeep borehole," is only nine inches in diameter. Nearby residents around the dig have said they could hear souls screaming in hell coming from the depths as the team dug deeper and deeper. Take advice from the Market Dominance Guys, if you find yourself in a sales hole, stop digging. ----more---- But the drilling – and the screaming - stopped in 1992 when the temperatures below became too hot and the drill bits quickly melted one after another. In fact, temperatures reached 356 degrees before they had to cease operations. And, despite reaching such incredible depth, Russia still never got close to the mantle. But for those of us in the sales profession, there is still a deeper hole here on earth that we dig. Everyday. We dig it in our own cold calls. It’s called the Trust Hole and it’s truly the deepest hole on earth if we fall into it. It is truly inescapable. And we fall into it with our prospects when we say we are only going to innocently tell them why we called…and then blow past the initial trust allotment they’ve given to us, further test it, and then finally abuse it by pitching them your entire presentation.  Vs simply building and investing the trust we have earned to get a Discovery Call.   So in this week's episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris speaks of the cautionary tale that envelops us all too frequently on our cold calls. Because if you do the right thing and say the right thing on your initial cold call, you'll have some trust built in all of seven seconds. And if you do the right “next” thing, that trust will be converted to sufficient curiosity for them to take your Discovery meeting. If they are not interested in our initial pitch, the simple math of Market Dominance says to leave them alone…just come back later in your list cycle and restart the process. Don't attempt to squeeze any more from the call. Once you're out of trust, you're out of trust. There's no cash advance or check you can write to get more. Because you can never climb out of the trust hole for the rest of the relationship with that human being. So put the hardhat on, tread lightly, and let’s start exploring this week’s episode entitled, “The first law of sales holes: "If you find yourself in one, stop digging!" This episode is sponsored by ConnectAndSell as well as UncommonPro. 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (04:47): So, Oren in Pitch Anything. He talks about four key components in any successful call that is memorable is having curiosity, humor, intrigue, and the most important one is tension. He postulates that most weak-minded sales people avert tension because of supplicative behavior, need for approval, want to be liked. Certainly you see that in the emails that you just talked about. And so are you postulating that email is not effective as a prospecting tool mainly because there are no stakes for the other person? There's no tension. I can create some intrigue and curiosity maybe a little bit, but I'm not involved in this process. So don't use emails. Two tablets coming down the mountain from Chris Beall, do not use emails from a cold perspective to generate your leads. You will not get to market dominance one email at a time. Chris Beall (05:50): And it's for two reasons. One is it is absolutely less effective than other approaches. And two is your competitor might choose to use tension. The real issue with market dominance is it's a relative thing. You've got to win before your competitor takes the market. I always call them your fiercest competitor. Whoever that is, is going to combine having the goods, having the will, and being smart enough to put together a plan of action and execute that plan of action. That competitor is your issue in terms of taking a market. So now the question isn't might... So, here's a way that people commonly think of it. I send a bunch of emails out, and I have some hope for response rate. And I get responses either within my band of response rates I hope for or not, and I tune the emails until I get the response rate I want. And then I use those and I get some meetings, and I'm getting what feels like traction, right? I am getting traction. So that's interesting. Of course, after a while I find that that gets harder and harder because I can send emails to everybody. And once I'm sending to everybody, then the ones who are going to reply, or if I've already replied and now I'm kind of... It's too fast, right? So for any market, I can saturate the communication part, the initial communication with email too easily, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is my competitor might choose to do something that works, not just at the beginning and not just for those who are inherently curious and social or whatever. But it works in the general case. And that is something that starts with the tension of a fear relationship. If you choose to start with fear, you're in the driver's seat. As long as you know how to convert fear into trust. So if your competitor chooses to go down the fear route, because the ultimate tension is just to inject fear into the situation. Fear is the emotion that overrides all other emotions, ask anybody who's ever tried to jump out of an airplane. I did it a few weeks ago. Now, it didn't scare me, but my life background conditions me not to be afraid of stuff like that. It probably did scare me, but I don't recognize it. I don't actually- Corey Frank (08:05): Driving Ferraris, jumping out of airplanes, running up mountains. Chris Beall (08:09): Yeah. You can condition yourself to have a different kind of response envelope around stuff. My dad used to tell me, "Fear is incredibly valuable. It tells people what to stay away from so they can survive." And my counter-argument was, "Great. Love it in others. I'm going to substitute for fear, assessment, reason, and cold calculation. So that's going to be my fear." And I was very deliberate about it. I said, "I'm going to choose something else to do the work of fear, because I don't trust fear." My view was in the modern world, we're going to fear things that it doesn't make sense to fear. And if we're wise, we let fear play a role to create tension in a relationship that we can then resolve. All stories require attention. And if you think about story writing, and every deal has a story, every new customer relationship has a story, we start with somebody wants something. Then we have to have some obstacle. Something is in the way of somebody getting something, right? But somebody wants something, we call that our hero in the story. And the things that get in the way we have a bunch of names for, but they're the challenges in which the plot of the story is that the hero is going to go through a series of adventures. And those adventures are going to ultimately result in either the hero getting what they want, those are the happy stories, or not, which are the tragedies, right? So Romeo and Juliet, we can work our way through that story. Somebody wanted something, and everybody ended up dead. That's why we call that a tragedy. Along the way they almost got it. In fact, they almost got it, and then un-got it, and then almost got it again. And then damn, everybody was dead. All because of a little communication error. But very telling actually, when you think about it. They were in a situation where the way they lived was at the edge where fear could be reality. Because that was back when, as we saw in the opening of the play, someone gets killed. And they get killed just for saying something. That was back in those days when you could... The discipline of society was exercised at the tip of a sword among individuals. So it was a different world. We don't live in that world anymore. So my choice, and frankly I think if you can pull it off, it's not easy to do by the way. But if you can pull off substituting for as much of your own fear, substituting reason, and testing that and getting help, having people give you good information, knowing how to get information. Knowing when you're going too fast and you need to slow down and think, knowing when it's time to act right now and you better do something because that's what reason tells you to do. Now sometimes reason actually creates urgency, which is something that folks often don't think. So if you want to dominate markets, you have to be the adult in the room. And if you're the scared person who's just running around and going, "Oh my God, I'm not going to make my four, I'm not going to make my number. I might get fired," you can't dominate market. All you can do is get lucky a few times. And then eventually something's going to catch up. Whereas your opponent, a serious player who wants to dominate this market, who says, "I'm going to put fear to work for me. I'm going to let the fear that's inevitable in a cold call," not a cold email outreach. Not walking up to somebody to conference, by the way. There's no fear in that because you see the person, they're a visible stranger. Corey Frank (11:30): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (11:31): If a person walks up to you and they hold their hand up to shake your hand saying, "I'm unarmed," then we're good. Corey Frank (11:31): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (11:39): We don't fear that person. We may not like them. We may be thinking, "I've got something else to do." And so we can use a conference, for instance, in order to do useful things to advance our business. But we don't have the ultimate control position. The control position is to engender fear and the other person, and then resolve that fear as quickly as possible. Corey Frank (12:03): Yeah. Chris Beall (12:03): And it's a place from which you cannot lose, but you have to develop the skill in which to do it. And then you have to not blow it because you're going to take fear and turn it into trust. And the trust is a currency. As you spend trust, you don't get more of it. You have to keep building more. So you get a little bit of trust. And now what do you spend it on? You spend it on curiosity. And once you get curiosity, you've rolled the boulder off the cliff at that point. All boulders rolled off cliffs, get to the bottom. You just don't know what the path is going to be. That's why it's curiosity. So now you got another problem. If you over-engineer. The next part, that is once the curiosity turns into discovery, you want to have a period of, "Okay, approach me now." That's why you want to set the meeting. This set the meeting, hold the meeting is so important compared to have the meeting in the ambush call. You can never climb out of the trust hole. For the rest of the relationship with that human being, you will never climb all the way out of the trust hole that you put yourself in, or the mistrust hole. I always tell people, "It's pretty simple. If you do the right thing, you'll have some trust in seven seconds. If you do the right next thing, that trust will be converted to sufficient curiosity to take the meeting. If it isn't converted, leave them alone and come back later. Restart the process. Don't attempt to keep squeezing." Once you're out of trust, you're out of trust. There's nothing more to spend. There's no credit card that you can pull out and go, "Don't worry, I'll pay you back later. You can trust me later. I'm going to do something right now that'll make you not trust me. But it's okay, we'll get it back later when you see how wonderful my offer is." I don't care how wonderful your offer is. Corey Frank (13:43): But that's what happens, right? We're going to be rolling in trust when you take this 30 minute demo call for me that, "Hey, we have time right now. Let's just jump right into it." Chris Beall (13:53): Exactly, exactly. So you need to have the horse approach you before you try to put the bridle on it. You just have to have it come to you, and that means you need a separation. And you actually want things like, you want there not to be 100% show rate. That's actually your best qualifier. Your best qualifier really is, they have a declaration of a willingness to do something. But the intention to actually do it and overcome all those obstacles, then you have a new hero by the way. The new hero is your prospect, and their journey is to come to visit your land, your world. They're going to come into your house, and you're going to share something with them. Hopefully something of value. You're going to teach them something that is going to help them understand their world economically. It's going to help them understand their world emotionally. And that's going to help them understand their world strategically. The three things that we need to be able to get help with in order to navigate through the world. You're going to give them that stuff, right? But they have to come into your house. Chris Beall (15:50): So they're going to your house, which is the discovery meeting. If they're not ready to come to your house, fabulous. We'll push the button for that 15 minutes and have more conversations. This notion that, "Oh my God, nobody showed a meeting. They no-showed a meeting." That's wonderful. That's great. The ones that no-showed are the ones you weren't going to move further with right now anyway. Now, call them back because maybe it was something that's just in their world that came up. And they're going to love you for calling them back and saying, "You know, we had this meeting on the calendar for the 15th at 8:00. Clearly something came up with you. I remember you said you were a morning person. How about if we do Friday? Can you go even earlier, maybe 6:30, 7:00?" Whatever it is, it's okay to do all that stuff. It's also okay if they don't show. Qualification before discovery is an error, but there's one form of natural qualification you get for free without even having to work. Did they show up at the meeting or not? And being petulant about a no-show is ridiculous. You were offered a gift, they didn't show. That's a gift of time, and to be all pissed off about it as just to be a child. Corey Frank (16:58): I asked Burmeister, It's a common question I would ask when I was at Stormwind, was what's a good show rate? Or what's an acceptable no-show rate? Chris Beall (17:09): 60% is a good show rate. Corey Frank (17:11): 60%, so- Chris Beall (17:12): That's a good show rate. Corey Frank (17:14): So the son of man himself, Jesus used ConnectAndSell, it's impossible to get 80, 90, 100% show rate? It's just not possible? Chris Beall (17:24): It's wrong. It's possible to do it, but it's wrong. Corey Frank (17:24): That's a better word for that, it's wrong. Chris Beall (17:30): Jesus is a lot smarter than that. Corey Frank (17:34): That's great. Chris Beall (17:36): I mean, Jesus would have been so happy if 40% of all those who could've showed up, but weren't really going to take it seriously didn't show. Corey Frank (17:43): Yeah. Chris Beall (17:45): I mean, he had the same problem we have, right? There's only so much time on earth to get the job done. And we all have that problem. Corey Frank (17:52): It's funny. Maybe you planned this, Chris, is that he had three years to get to market dominance. Chris Beall (17:58): Maybe he planned it. Three years, as far as we can tell, is the replacement cycle for everything. If you're going to take up a new set of health habits, how we started this conversation, and you're really going to be able to say, "Okay, now I do things differently." So say you decide you're crazy and you decide to become a barefoot [inaudible 00:18:18] runner. The time during which you're going to actually stick to it if you're serious about it before you replace it with something else, probably about three years. If you go past three years, you're going to be really hard to sell to. But for the most part, we turn over our cars. We turn over our jobs. We turn over the system that we bought to do X, Y, and Z, which is the most part for selling. Whatever it is, our habits- Corey Frank (17:58): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (18:44): We turn them over about once every three years. And so if you want to dominate a market, you have to eat that cycle. That cycle is built into the market. It's not you, it's them. Corey Frank (18:53): Yep, I know. Chris Beall (18:53): Then you get the ones who are going to go today, the ones that are going to go at quarter from now, the ones who don't even need to meet up. You got to go through 12 [inaudible 00:18:59]. It's just the way life is. That's a fact of the world. And maybe your market's weird. People always tell me that markets are different. My market's different. The whole thing is going to be over in 12 months. Corey Frank (19:09): Really? Chris Beall (19:10): Show me some examples of where that happened, where you know all the facts. Where you actually know when they started, when you actually... Not the news stories, not the dressed up documentary, not the BS. How it actually went. Go back even to a [crosstalk 00:19:25]. Corey Frank (19:24): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (19:25): One of the huge, huge successes. Look at the first three years. That's what it took. It takes three years, right? During that three years, you are going to manufacture trust over and over and over and over and over again. You don't ever get off the hook. You never get to go, "Oh, look, we're so good at this. We're 15 months in. We don't have to be in the trust manufacturing business anymore." Sorry, you got to keep manufacturing trust at a steady flow rate. The flow rate is represented as units. The unit is discovery calls held per unit time, or quarter or whatever, for folks are offensively in your target market, because that's what you're trying to dominate. And your target market is always identified based on publicly available information. That's competitive, because you and your competitors have access to the same publicly available information. Corey Frank (20:16): Yeah. And that is the unified field theory, as far as you're concerned, about dominated the market. The math works out. Chris Beall (20:23): The math is the math and the glue on` the hidden particle, the thing that... Like the discovery of quarks, right? Couldn't figure out how atoms worked until somebody finally came up with this crazy idea about quarks. And then the whole key to quarks is, well, what keeps them together anyway? Why don't protons just... As far as we can tell, protons will last the length of the universe, why don't decay? Well, they just have this peculiar relationship among the quarks. Which, it's like we're just going to play the same game back and forth. "Here, you get the blue out, and give it back to me. You get it." You know, they don't get bored on that game. Whereas everybody else occasionally they'll kind of slip on out and there'll be a decay that occurs and something will become too [crosstalk 00:21:05]. Corey Frank (21:05): Right, right. Chris Beall (21:05): So yeah, the unified field theory is this. The essential fundamental particles, so to speak, of this entire thing is trust. And the certainty is fear. And so what you do is you trigger fear, manufacture trust, turn that into curiosity, turn the curiosity into commitment, the commitment into action. And you just run that cycle over and over and over. You run at the lowest cost you can, add as tight a target as you can. And this is the number one reason you must never qualify in a cold call, because you screw the whole thing up. When you qualify, you're saying, "My target market is not my target market. It's actually a subset of that, that I'm going to discover, but I'm not going to discover it during discovery. So I'm going to try to discover it when there's not an... I'm going to spend some of my trust currency to try to make this thing go away." Whereas all I really have to do is set the meeting and have them not show up. It's so simple. Corey Frank (22:08): So trigger fear to manufacture trust. Chris Beall (22:12): Yes. Corey Frank (22:13): And then- Chris Beall (22:14): Spend that trust on curiosity. Corey Frank (22:17): Spend that trust on curiosity, and repeat. Chris Beall (22:20): And then that curiosity becomes commitment, right? But not yet action. And then commitment becomes action. And there's attenuation rate on each one of those, right? The curiosity, it doesn't always become commitment. It only becomes commitment maybe 6% of the time, 7% of the time. For a whole bunch of reasons, right? You've just injected yourself into somebody else's life. Curiosity is actually relatively weak as a motivator, but it's the best we can do. Corey Frank (22:50): So trigger fear, manufacture trust, spend that trust on curiosity, and then hope manufacturer spark catalyze that curiosity to become commitment. Chris Beall (23:02): Yeah. Corey Frank (23:03): And that chemical reaction, curiosity becoming commitment, is probably very heavy on tone and language. Chris Beall (23:12): Yes. Corey Frank (23:12): The choice of my words, the pacing, the performance piece. Chris Beall (23:12): And luck. Corey Frank (23:17): And luck! Chris Beall (23:18): So once I, once I optimize, now I'm down to luck. Luck number one, timing. Am I going to get a meeting? Let's try this. So say somebody cold calls me on June 27th, 2020. I'm getting married on July 5th. Following that wedding, there are going to be two days probably in the penthouse over there at the hotel right across the water, which is where we're getting married. Then there's going to be a month in Iceland. Corey Frank (23:53): [crosstalk 00:23:53] Iceland! Oh that's fantastic. Chris Beall (23:54): Then there's going to be an additional month in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and the Shetlands. Then there's going to be three weeks in the Nordics. And then there's going to be two weeks on London's West end seeing plays. And then I'll consider a meeting. The pudding is, no matter how much curiosity you get out of me, I could be like [crosstalk 00:24:15]- Corey Frank (24:14): You're shut down until Thanksgiving, basically. Chris Beall (24:16): Shut down until Thanksgiving, and that's just luck on your part as the cold caller. And that's the real world. We don't know what somebody is available to do. And curiosity is very weak as a motivator. It's just the strongest motivator that we can find. And curiosity can be about economics, can be about making more money, not losing money, reducing risk. All economic concepts. It can be about emotions. It can be about reducing frustration or reducing fear. Very occasionally it can be about the emotion that we, quote, read. It can sometimes be about envy. But usually it's just frustration or fear. The twin emotions that we get to use in business regularly are frustration and fear. You're frustrated with the way things are going, or you're afraid of bad things going to happen. That's kind of it. Corey Frank (25:05): That's it. But you're saying Chris that because of this intersection, this confluence, this convergence of luck, timing, tone, choice of words. If I have that, and that is performing at a high level, I still can only expect to get one out of 12, one out of 13 proceeding to accepting a discovery call. Chris Beall (25:27): Yes, at the beginning. Corey Frank (25:30): At the beginning. Chris Beall (25:30): And that number gets better over time because I'm actually taking those out of the market and I'm pressing the remaining market into the remaining quarters. So the concentration goes up a little bit over time, and I'm also improving my approach slightly because now I'm talking to you for the second time. If I have an aggregated trust, I get to start from the trust position. I don't have to go through the whole fear bit. When I call you the second time and I say, "Corey, when we spoke on August 20th," all I have to do is say that. "When we spoke on August 20th, you said," whatever. You immediately trust me. Cause I'm not a stranger. You might not remember the conversation, but you have to make a decision now. Corey Frank (25:30): Yes. Chris Beall (26:19): I'm either a liar who's pretending that we spoke on August 20th, and that's way too specific. Only the greatest con-men in the world would ever say that, right? Or, wow, I'm actually not a stranger. This is why everything always comes... This is the weirdest math, right? The funnel is the concentration of effect on the first seven seconds of a cold call, because that's where you have the invisible stranger effect. Which guarantees fear, which allows you to make the move to trust within seven seconds. After that, don't blow it. Corey Frank (26:57): Yeah. Chris Beall (26:57): This is like fishing for a fish of unknown size and strength. And the strength of your line is always exactly the same. I'm fishing on seven pound test line. Okay, well if it's a big fish, I better let it run a little bit. The biggest fish is the one-on-one, take the meeting now. Corey Frank (27:16): Yeah. Chris Beall (27:18): So I have to adjust how much tension I put on the line, how hard I try to get them into the meeting, depending on how strong the fish is. And I don't know. So all I can do is ask the fish. "You going to come with me? Ooh, I guess not, catch you later." Right? So then you go catch them again. You play catch and release over and over and over. Corey Frank (27:41): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (27:42): This is what's ironic about it. The bulk of the market is captured through followup calls. Second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth conversations. But the key skill is the cold call because followup calls can't be executed until you have a cold call. And if the cold call isn't executed in a way that you leave them with the possibility of trust when you call them back in the follow-up and say, "Hey Corey, when we spoke on August 20th, you said that you were headed to whatever to do whatever." Corey Frank (28:10): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (28:14): "You didn't have time for the conversation with me." Even if you hang up on me, by the way, I'm going to say that. Because you didn't have time for a conversation, otherwise you would have talked to me. So this is the strange thing is cold calling itself only generates this very modest yield. If you generate 5% conversation of meeting in cold calls, you're doing really well. There's only eight and a half percent of the market's in play in any quarter anyway. Corey Frank (28:37): Oh right, right. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (28:40): Four and a quarter is halfway. So you're above 50%, and above 50%, you can dominate the market. But you have to persist because the market is not ready. They're not ready because your product's new or whatever, but they're also not ready because it takes three years for the market as a whole to consider a new offering because of the replacement cycle of existing solutions. So you got to talk to people over and over. The skill required to have a second conversation is very modest. The skill required to execute the first seven seconds of a cold call is monumental. Huge. There's nothing easy about any part of it. The point of the call where, say it's... So I'll do the ConnectAndSell one because I'm familiar with it. Corey Frank (29:18): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (29:20): So I do the whole thing from scratch. I don't know if we've done this from scratch, but I'll do it from scratch. Corey Frank (29:24): That's good, that's good. Yeah, okay. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (29:26): So I say, I haven't heard your voice, it's a ConnectAndSell call. So I just have a beep in my ear. Corey Frank (29:30): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris Beall (29:31): So I say, "Hey, this is Chris from ConnectAndSell. Corey, I know I'm an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds, tell you why I call?" You're going to go- Corey Frank (29:40): Sure. Yeah, sure. Chris Beall (29:43): That's right. And I'm going to say, "Corey, 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?" And you're going to say something along the lines of, if you're interested, "What, what are you talking about? Tell me more." Corey Frank (30:07): Yes, yeah. [crosstalk 00:30:09]. Chris Beall (30:10): And I'm going to say, "You know Corey, we've learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this just isn't a fair setting to talk about something that's important. Are you a morning person? How's your Wednesday?" Corey Frank (30:20): But what is it? Is it X? Is it Y? Will folks try to come back to you a second time, or that's so strong of a response that most of the time they'll just say, "Okay. Yeah, I'll bite"? Chris Beall (30:32): Well, the reason for that response being worded like that is it makes two things perfectly clear. Remember when I told yo. I know I'm an interruption, I'm reminding you that I agree with you that I'm an interruption. And if you're trying to change this to a conversation about what it is that I'm offering, which is not what I told you I was willing to do, by the way. That wasn't the deal, the deal was I'd tell you why I called. The reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar, not to explain what we do. Now I'm telling you why I can't explain. I shouldn't explain what we do, it's wrong. It's ethically wrong. It's not fair. It's not fair to you and it's not fair to our offer because it's too important. I'm establishing myself immediately as your peer. We're on the same page. We're looking to do the same thing, which is have whatever happens next be what should happen next. And certainly what's unfair shouldn't happen. So Chris Voss talks about the F-word, says you should almost never use it. And I agree with him because as soon as you imply that the other person's being unfair, the amount of reactants are going to get as crazy. But if you're saying, "If I were to do that, it would be unfair to you and to me." Then it's kind of okay. Corey Frank (31:42): So that's the proper way to use fair? Chris Beall (31:45): Yes. Corey Frank (31:46): Is in the potential negative connotation, the self-deprecating connotation versus fair enough, or does that sound fair? Chris Beall (31:54): Exactly. When you use it the other way, you're basically saying, you know what? I'm about to accuse you of being unethical. Corey Frank (32:02): Interesting. Chris Beall (32:02): Fairness is an ethical term, not a moral term. When you accuse somebody of being unethical, you're not saying, "Hey, you violated a moral." You're saying "You're a bad person." Corey Frank (32:11): So that's been in Vogue for a number of years. And now you're saying that it's time to retire that word. Chris Beall (32:17): Always has been, it's a very dangerous word to use. And it's used unskillfully a lot. When somebody says, "that's fair," think about when somebody says that to you. Whatever it is, they say, "that's fair." What are they really saying? They're not saying anything about fairness, right? They're saying "I'm going to withhold my assessment of what you said until it's convenient for me." They're refusing to engage with you at that point. When somebody says, "that's fair," that's simply, "I'm not ready to engage." And people say it all the time. When they say, "that's right", they're saying, "I'm ready to engage. We've now made progress, and this is something we both agree on." It's objective. That's why it's, "that's right," rather than, "you're right." When they say, "you're right," they're saying, "at this point, I can't defeat you in this argument based on what I know in the position I'm in. So I'm going to say your rights so I can get away from you." So there's a big difference between "that's fair," "that's right," and "you're right." And folks that use them interchangeably get in trouble and they have no idea why. Then I'm morass at that point. Corey Frank (33:25): Yeah, I think it emanated from Sandler. I know Matson uses it a lot, but I think even David Sandler used "fair" in a lot of his early recordings from kind of the late 80s, early 90s or so in some of his screenplays. But that's interesting how- Chris Beall (33:41): It's super desirable as a state. And therefore, you're playing with fire when you're playing with "fair." The other F-word. Corey Frank (33:47): I love it. Chris Beall (33:47): But it's okay in this case, because a little fire as needed. When you asked me for more information, turns out, you're not really asking me for more information from your curiosity. You're of two minds. One is you might want to know a little more. The other is you want to say, "We're set." You want me to tell you enough so that you can say we're set. And then you're out of the conversation through the back door. I don't want to let you out through the back door because I think it's wrong. I think you'll benefit. I think you'll learn one, two, or three things of immense value to you if you just come and attend the meeting. I believe that deeply, that's my product is the meeting. I believe in my product. I think you'll learn something about the potential for reducing your costs of having conversations. I believe you'll learn something about the potential for having your life as a manager be easier because you're [crosstalk 00:34:47] do something that you want them to do. And I believe you'll learn about the potential for dominating markets or getting on a path to dominate a market, which is fundamentally going to allow you to keep your job, or if you own the company, to survive. I believe you'll learn about those things regardless of whether we ever do business together. I believe in my product. Corey Frank (35:06): That's beautiful. Chris Beall (35:07): The product is the meeting.

Seth Godin, of Purple Cow fame, writes, “Trust and attention – these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.”  I’m obviously fairly partisan on this issue but would certainly add “Fear” to his list as well. Or, specifically, how do you embrace and leverage “fear” in your systematic effort towards Market Dominance? No one said Market Dominance would be easy. It’s diligent and deliberate…it’s a three-year marathon where one of your end goals is that you end up having discovery meetings with 60% of your market. It’s both ambitious and arduous to set a course for market dominance. But the results are irrefutable…IF your inputs are consistent. For instance, understanding that the constraint of your sales system is not headcount, sales methodology, or even price point. It’s the flow rate of conversations with relevant people that you have at the top of your funnel that is so commonly the real constraint to success.  ----more---- But as entrepreneurs and Sales Leaders, knowing what we need to do to fix this top of funnel constraint is often a dreadful and fear-inducing exercise. Because we know what this real constraint is called: It stirs in the bellies of sales professionals everywhere. It’s not the bogeyman, or Baba Yaga or Pennywise; it’s the “Cold Call.” This king of all top of funnel constraint leads many teams to displacement…or the simple avoidance of what truly needs to be done by doing something seemingly easier or far less friction.  Like sending email.  Or better yet, sending an email campaign.  Or doing SEO, lots and lots of SEO... Anything but jumping on the phone and talking to strangers.  Even in our own sales community on LinkedIn, there are countless and doggedly argued threads every week where a new sales “expert” likes to wax on about the final death knell of the cold call. Or that having your reps Cold Call is a colossal waste of both capital and goodwill.  They’ll spin compelling data about pick up rates, dial to conversion rates, and even quote rep turnover percentages to win minds to their side. Cruelly enforcing this medieval and antiquated exercise in futility must stop in our sales craft.  Because “Fear.” Fear of employing a practice that is seen as dated. Fear of people leaving your organization. Fear of doing something that doesn’t get results.  And mostly, though, we fear the experience of making cold calls ourselves. But if we’re committed to be Market Dominant, we'd be wise to let fear play its healthy role with our competition. Let your competitors embrace that fear and refuse to use an indispensable tool like the cold call. Fine.   But we are also wise to let fear play its role in the cold call itself. With the prospect. Because we want to use it to create tension in a relationship that we can then resolve.  And, according to the Van Helsing of GoToMarket strategies – my partner on the other side of this microphone, Chris Beall - the way you properly run a cold call is acknowledging you that you start from a position of fear. Because the other person is indeed afraid of you. They're afraid of you because you're an invisible stranger and an invisible stranger is the worst possible thing in the environment of evolution. Those are the people from across the river paint their faces wrong…they put a bone in their ears, instead of their nose…and maybe they even talk funny. Their drumbeats don't sound quite like yours …and you would really prefer they stay on the other side of the river where they belong.  We have this inherent fear with invisible strangers. And when we cold-call somebody we trigger that fear and they may express that fear in “pushback.” Feelings like annoyance, anger, dismissiveness… whatever it happens to be. But when we're afraid, something interesting also happens, too; We tend not to run away. We want to get away, but instead, we put a little defense mechanism…a little squid ink, so to speak. And that’s the point where we need to embrace fear in the call. And so this episode, we learn from Chris how to properly use fear and how to ultimately turn that fear into trust…and then that trust into curiosity…and then that curiosity into real commitment.  So turn off all the lights, light a candle, and cue the macabre organ music…This is The Market Dominance Guys and this week's episode entitled, “Don’t Look Under the Bed: How to Make Fear your Friend in Cold Calling.” The 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 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: Announcer (06:04): I can always tell when you're about to speak wisdom, your posture changes, everything else, so I want to make sure I capture this though. Corey Frank (06:30): Well, actually I think it does map onto this whole concept of market dominance, they're both marathons. And market dominance is a three-year marathon, where you end up having discovery meetings with 60% of your market. Got to try. You're never sprinting, you're never pushing, that whole end of month end of quarter, all that stuff means nothing when you're going after market dominance. You're just jogging at a trot. You're not pushing, you're not discounting. Sure, when you're doing the market entry part, you always discount. Usually you discount by adding services so that you don't charge for. The best way to discount as always to simply do more and make sure you don't charge for it. The temptation is to say, "Well, since we're doing more, this must be part of our business, folks are valuing it. If you don't charge for something, people won't value you and therefore we should charge for it." But that is a mistake when you're doing the early part of the chasm crossing for a particular market. When you're chasm crossing, you have to buy your way into the market and you can either buy it with a lower price. You can buy it with greater services, which is lower price. And the smart way to do it, is to hold your price point, your guest at price point for the core offering and add services that you don't name, because that's another key. When you name the services, then you feel like you have to charge for them, you just provide them. So in our case, for instance, for our company, the services we provide have always been extensive as you know. We do this immense amount of consulting, we do analysis along the way, how are your reps doing? What's your talent spread like? Recommending best practices, going in and offering to do coaching, all of this stuff that everybody else in the entire world of sales services, training, consulting and so forth, they charge for. We don't even give a name to them, because if we give a name to them, then it would be tempting to package them and charge. Announcer (08:21): It would, yeah, right. Corey Frank (08:23): And there's two problems with that. Problem number one, is you forget what it is you're trying to do. You're trying to dominate a market with an offering with scales and whatever the service thing is probably isn't an offer that scales, maybe it is but you don't know and it's not like you set out to do. So, that's one, two is as soon as you charge for services, somebody is going to end up owning that part of the P and L internally, you have to have a sales head or a business head of GM or something for that part of the business. Announcer (08:53): Functional services. Yeah, right. Corey Frank (08:54): Exactly. That stuff is easier to sell from your core product because it has no edges to it. There was never any edge to the services you'll provide. If somebody says, "Well, does the service include x?" The answer is always, yes. Because it's a service and at the margin, we could do one more thing and one more thing, wouldn't be a big thing in this particular case. So you end up putting your product boundaries, so to speak around your services through policies, whereas your actual product has natural bounders. If I've sell you a Tesla, you might say, "Well, I could use it as a doorstop." But it's not going to fit very well through the frontier year of your house or into your office. You're not going to be too tempted to use the Tesla as a doorstop, which is a low value use of Tesla or to use it as a planter for your tomatoes. There's a natural boundary around your Tesla but there's not a natural boundary around my service to drive you wherever it is you need to go, because you just might decide, "Hey, you know what? Instead of flying to San Francisco, I'd like to be driven there." I didn't put that in my business plan, that I was going to be gone for so long that done so far away, I couldn't pick up another passenger. And by the way, he's going to buy my Teslas now. It's a horrible mistake that's made in market dominance plays to price down incorrectly but you must price down. To enter a market, you have to offer something that overcomes the natural hesitancy that people have toward buying something new from someone that they haven't done business with before and by the way, doesn't have a single reference. And you can't use your precast and references, because they were buying your stuff, not as product to solve a broken mission, critical business process. They were buying it for competitive advantage and we'll not talk about it. And by the way, by the time you get to this part of the process they hate you, so they're not going to say nice things anyway. But they're not going to say anything, which is the good news. So it's, they hate you but so what? They don't hate you by the way and think your stuff is bad, they just hate you because they had happy years about what they could do competitively. And some other part of their value chain broke down and they asked you to help fix it and of course you couldn't because you can't fix whole companies. And so you end up always in this relationship where people in the pre chasm market, companies in the precast market are buy in for, this extraordinary reason which is, I need to go kill the competition. And they can't kill the competition most of the time. And so they just keep piling up the requirements and the pressure on you, the provider of the magic beans, the magic technology, and eventually you get everything you need out of it, if it definitely works. Thank you very much, dear visionary customer you've forced me to make my technology work, now I need to package it as a product and take it to market across the chasm, which means I have to price down. The chasm gets wider, the higher the price of my offering relative to the certainty of value that a customer is going to get out of it, my first customer. That just widens the chasm, so I want to narrow the chasm by allowing that first customer to buy at what feels like a lower price and the best way to lower your prices is to add services. I will do more for you and the worst mistake you can make is simply to package those services and say, "Hey, this is a new product." We finally gotten to the point of almost packaging flight school. But flight school has the funny quality for us as a permanent pre-chasm resident. We sell competitive advantage, so we don't ever get to cross the chasm correctly. And so what we have to do, is seed the pre-chasm to the point where anybody else who wants in has got to get through our wall of fire. Everybody who is properly addicted to connect and sell for competitive advantage is taken. And if you want one from that worth bit, we have to scorch the earth on the other side. But we have a beautiful little post chasm offering called, flight school. It takes your reps and turns them into the top 5% of cold callers in the world and it does it reliably. Announcer (13:05): But that's not a standalone product? Corey Frank (13:07): It's not, because it only works with the ConnectAndSell stuff because otherwise you're not having enough conversations. You can feel good about it but being an expert at having three conversations a day, it's just ridiculous. I'd say making a race car driver out of somebody and saying, "By the way, we go to 7/11 once a week. Corey Frank (14:22): When I was a little kid, we moved out into the desert, North Scottsdale. What is now, you would see this as way down in town but back then, it was way out in the middle of nowhere. So think Cactus and 68th street. Announcer (14:37): I'm about a block away from there right now. Corey Frank (14:39): So you know the area, well, this was all open desert back then, we were one of the first houses in the area. The big deal was that you got to was zoned for animals. It was actually zoned, believe it or not. It wasn't un-zoned, it was all part of Scottsdale. Scottsdale, was Annex all the way up to Pinnacle Peak way back in the day. Scottsdale is the most visionary annexation in the history, actually is still thinking in the U.S. you would classify it with Jacksonville and a couple of other towns, that figured this out earl, which is we're in a place that's naturally going to grow as the economy changes over time. And so let's take all the land we can and put it inside the city boundaries and let that be our... It's like pre making a legacy, it was very, very clever and people knew it by the way, it wasn't unconscious. It was controversial but it wasn't unconscious. We were the people who are going to buy into this vision and move out into the desert, which is what we did. So we moved from Camelback and Scottsdale road, where we were in 1957 and 1963, something like that too. We moved out there to '68 that it's actually Jenan and between 67th and 68. A long block South of Cactus, and we're zone for horses. And part of the idea was, that we were going to have horses and there was no limit, you could have 20 of them if you wanted but who would do. And we were on an acre and then we bought the acre behind us so he had an acre for the homestead itself and then we had an acre of training horses. Then we had cavalettis and barrels and everything out there. So I was the youngest of the family, when you're the youngest and you have four older sisters and the oldest is a horse expert it's intimidating. And yet I had to have a horse. I had this horse, which I shared for a while with my sister, Cindy, his name is Tim. And Tim was a big gentle, quarter horse gelding, 16 hands, big stocky animal, very, very gentle but it's a horse. It was big enough, he could outrun me all day. He could hurt me if he wanted to and I was a little kid, so I'm like seven, eight years old. And I've got to learn how to put a bridle on a horse by myself, because there was never anybody around to help. So how did I do it? Well, I was taught by one of my sisters, how to do this, which is you come up to the horse and you hold your hands about this far apart and palms down, fists closed and you have like a carrot in each hand. But the horse doesn't know and horse's sense of smell is pretty good, but not strong enough to be able to tell which hand do you have the carrot in and anyway it's in both, so they don't. The horse has to make a choice and that's what you're trying to do is to take this fear relationship, because they're prey animals, they're afraid of anything approaching. They have a stereotype set of responses as humans do also to being approached. And until you can get the bridle on the horse, you have to get the horse to approach you. That's why we cold call and have unscheduled follow up in- [bridge 00:17:55] Calls in order to set a meeting but we never hold the meeting, that's putting the bridle on, in that call. Because as soon as we do that, we aggregate the trust that we set up for them to come to the meeting in the first place, that is, they haven't come to us yet. So, Thornburg talks to his victims before their ears have come up and are facing forward. The horse tells you that it's ready to consider your proposition when instead of laying it tears back, which is to listen for the saber tooth tiger behind it, that's going to jump on its back and drive its fangs on other side of its withers, which is why their damn fangs are so long. It takes a lot to penetrate a horse on the back and swipe the big dagger is there as part of doing the mess. But horses don't like things behind them, so you have occupied their attention in front of them, so they listen behind them. That's with their fear response. They're smart, they got to work 360, you're a prey animal and your body is precious to you. They have very low reproductive rates. Animals with low reproductive rates are extremely cautious about their corpus, about their body because it's worth a lot. You're a merry you might have six falls, seven falls, eight falls in your life, that could be it. It's a really big deal to die. Whereas there's some animals dying is no big deal, but they already had 43,000 babies last year, so what? They're promiscuous with their bodies and the big animals with the low reproductive rates, whether they're carnivores or whether they're prey animals, all have the same strategy which is never get injured. That's their strategy, never get injured. And they don't like to get in fights that's why bears do what they do, they act in a certain way you really watch carefully in the site. They're really trying not to get hurt, even when they fight each other, that's the only time that they are willing to risk it because they're fighting directly for reproduction at that point. It's a one for one game, I win somebody gets pregnant. That one they'll fight for but they won't do it in order to take down prey, unless they're starving because it's not worth it. It's just not worth getting injured, because you get injured and you go into this downward spiral. So horses are like this, there is go back and all this. To get the horse to come to you requires curiosity. The way you run a cold call is you start from fear, the other person is afraid of you. They're afraid of you because you're an invisible stranger and an invisible stranger is the worst possible thing in the environment of evolution. Those are the people from across the river, who paint their faces wrong, put a bone in their ears instead of their nose. They talk funny. Their drum beats don't sound correct. Everything about them is just uncomfortable. And you would really prefer they stay on the other side of the river, where they belong. And if they show up and are invisible, that means it's night. And people who show up in the middle of the night uninvited to your village are not your friends. They're not bringing you a bud light. They're there ultimately, for reproductive purposes to take over the situation. You've collected something of value and now they're coming to get it. And so we have this inherent fear of invisible strangers and when we cold call somebody, we trigger that fear instantly and they express that fear as push back, annoyance, anger, dismissive. Whatever it happens to be, everybody has a different way within a characteristic set of ways of handling fear. When we're afraid, we tend not to run away, we want to get away, but we want to put a little defense up, a little squiddick. So you see this on almost every cold call, it's not, "Hey, I'm so glad you called me." It's just not. And yet why not? After all, I mean, it could be something wonderful. And we all say, it's about the fact that we've interrupted them and blah, blah, blah and they're busy. Really, have you ever watched somebody in their day? They ain't doing. They're not doing anything most of the time, they're pretending to be busy, they would love a break quite frankly. Their job bores them, it irritates them, all sorts of things are going on they don't like, a little break might be nice to talk to somebody. However, you ambush them. If it had been a good friend who called they'd act different. Because you're not an invisible stranger, you're just an invisible friend. An invisible friends, friends in the dark are just fine. Strangers in the dark are presumed to be enemies. So that's the big issue we have with cold calling, so Thornburg, actually goes through that process well. I mean, the guy spent, he took an hour and a half lesson from me one day, one-on-one. So he got most of it and he just went off to apply it. So he's good at the beginning because he goes through the fear to trust part really well. But then the question is when you get a little bit of trust, how do you spend it? So with the horse, how you spend it, is you spend it on curiosity. So you get trust by just standing there and not approaching. You approach, you trigger the fear, you wait, the fear decays. Then the question is what next? And the answer is curiosity, which is why you just stand there with your hands out, palms down, fists closed. And eventually the horse will exercise that curiosity and they'll make a commitment. The commitment is to one hand over the other. When they do that, you turn the handover, there's the carrot, they get busy with the carrot. You reach behind yourself to where the bridle is. You pull the bridle around, you don't put the bridle on them. You touch them on the side of the face, which they like. Because once you're touching them and not hurting them, you must be one of them. Because there's only one thing that touches a horse and doesn't hurt it and that's another horse, a friend and we're the herd. So you actually become a member of the herd through touch and you're feeding them. And so then you've got a twofer and then eventually the touch is allowed to come up high enough to get the bridle, to put it around their muzzle and get one loop over the ear and once you're there, then you have a second thing you got to teach them to do, which is separate, which is get the damn fit in their mouth. That's like, "Okay, food bit." And you have to do that, that's getting to the close. That's done in discovery but my point is, there's a strict separation, which mean approach, triggering fear, moving that fear to trust. So with the horse, we do it through inaction, because if you're still and you're not continuing to approach them, you're acting exactly the opposite of a predator that's close and within view. So for a horse, you signal untrustworthy just by not moving. With a human, we signal with trustworthy, by telling them we see the world their way. I know I'm an interruption and then we show them a path for solving the problem. The problem is us, we are the fearful thing, well, how do I solve the problem? Listen to me a little bit. And I'll go a way with a simple offer. I know I'm an interruption, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? And if you say those two things exactly like that, just exactly those words, not some other words that make you comfortable, they're words that allow somebody to say, "Wait a minute, you see the world my way you are an interruption." If you want to blow it, all you have to do is just say this, "I know I'm interrupting your day." So you throw the circumstances under the bus and you're saying, I'm not the problem. Announcer (25:24): Why the 27 seconds again? I know it's a playful tone, we've talked about that, is it too cheesy? Is it to diminish your stature or your status at all? Or does tone matter in how you sell that 27 seconds? Corey Frank (25:42): Tone matters a lot, you have to say the 27 second ask is playful, curious, come along with me, come along with me. It's almost offhand, "Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" Let's just root disconnect between, I know I'm an interruption. And then the natural next thing to say is, and I'm sorry, I'll hang up. But instead of saying that, you offer an alternative plan. And when you offer a plan to somebody you're offering the plan, you're not demanding the plan, you don't think you have a right to it. So you use a tone of voice that says, "Come with me, it'll be fun." So now I have first order purpose, which is let's have some fun. So it's very, very gentle but it's like, "Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" But you are asking for something, can I have? You're not asking, may I have? By the way, you're not asking for permission. You're asking a question of fact, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called you? You're saying, you're in charge. You could choose to give me these 27, if you do, I'll tell you why I called. If not, I guess you won't know. I mean, this is what's so interesting to me about market dominance, I've been through it... We'll have to go through this over and over and over to get it across. Announcer (26:57): That's great, solid. Corey Frank (26:58): Way over here is controlling the market by having discovery calls with 60% of the market for three years. Most people don't want to think that but that's the way over here. I go through the process of how do I get a discovery call? Well, I need to talk to somebody. Why do I need to talk to them? Because, they have to trust me enough to decide to spend 15 minutes with. How am I going to get them to trust me enough to do that? Well, I'm starting from fear. My alternative is to let my competitor go down the hard road and start from fear. So I could start just from curiosity, send them an email. Email is not scary. It seems like a superior opening move. I send you an email, you're not afraid of me. However, there's no tension in there to create anything out of, there's no energy. How much does it cost to me self image wise to dismiss an email? I think I'll do it right now, let me find one. I'm going to find an email and dismiss it right now. Announcer (27:57): How do you feel? How do you feel? Any tension in doing that? Corey Frank (28:00): This is not bothering me in the least. Somewhere in here, there will be one. Here we go. For your team, we work together with accounting and finance, temporary help in your department and do hope we can work with you again. To make this possible I'd like to offer you a $400 invoice credit. Well, it's gone. And that's even somebody who claims they know me.  

A lot goes into building a surfboard. In fact, depending on the expertise and the quality of the board, there can be upwards of 39 steps from start to finish. It’s not a fast process and takes a skilled surfer on the shaper to know what a particular board size or shape will do in the water. Take Dick Brewer, the undisputed 83-year-old grandmaster surfboard shaper from Hawaii. Dick has designed boards surfing legends all over the world…the big guys like Laird Hamilton and Garrett McNamara. He says he has made more than 50,000 boards in his lifetime. McNamara says, "He makes the boards that I can trust my life on." Dick doesn’t take that trust lightly since Garrett regularly hunts waves of 100-feet plus to ride. Today, Dick hand-makes about 200 boards a year, putting his crisp, neat signature on each of them with a pencil and some of his custom wood boards sell for as much as $12,000. Dick’s fundamental innovation was to shape the nose and tail of the board into a teardrop rather than an oval, allowing the board to cut into the water more precisely and help surfers ride inside the tube of the wave…this was revolutionary at the time and is credited with helping explode the skills and confidence of the big wave riders and also help newer folks try their hand at the sport. Tune in for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "The Best Surfer Out There is the One Having the Most Fun." ----more---- In the previous episode of the Market Dominance Guys, we compared the surfboard to the words or scripts that are used. And the surfer – the professional salesperson who wields and performs those words with an exacting tone, pace, and delivery.   And so in this week’s episode, I ask our own grandmaster and sales-pitch shaper – Chris Beall, about the critical nature of the focusing on the first seven seconds of your call to establish true trust and how that simple revelation was akin to Dick’s innovation of shaping the tail of a board into a teardrop and brought about a very similar revolution into our sales craft.  This is the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode entitled, “The Best Surfer Out There Is The One Having The Most Fun.”  Dick’s fundamental innovation was to shape the nose and tail of the board into a teardrop rather than an oval, allowing the board to cut into the water more precisely and help surfers ride inside the tube of the wave. This was revolutionary at the time and is credited with helping explode the skills and confidence of the big wave riders and also help newer folks try their hand at the sport.  ---------------- The sponsors for our show are: 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (03:45): When Chris Voss said, right now, to me that evening, when he said, "You need to show this person that you're competent to solve a problem they have right now." It was the words right now that blew my [inaudible 00:04:00] up because I just suddenly realized, wait a minute, the problem this person has right now is me. And it turns out the secret to the whole damned thing is for me to actually say, "I am the problem." And to offer a solution to the problem that is me and that moves the trust needle every time. And this is where our customers, we teach them this get confused because they then go back to the traditional model and say, "Yeah, but did it produce a meeting?" And that's not the point. The point is 103 million, right? I said, 100 and this little test drive here, and 103 or 108, I think it was, million bits of information. Chris Beall (04:53): Most of which were not in the words. This is the other part that's hard for people to understand is within those seven seconds, I can only get out so many words. I can probably say 40 words, right? So let's try to see how many words there are. I know I'm in an interruption, that's five and I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called, that's 11. So 16 words are emitted during that time. So those 16 words average in this case, I think six, seven characters each. So 16 times, six times, eight, right? 16 times six times eight. That's only about a 768 bits of information. That's not very much, right? 768 bits. And yet those 16 words took seven seconds. And in those seven seconds, there are 140,000 bits of information that I've emitted. Well, all the rest of it's tone of voice, it's pros to what do I sound like? Chris Beall (06:02): It's who do I sound like? Is do I sound like somebody you can trust? So this brings down the talent issue to something that's really people don't think about, which is the quality of the voice. I'll call it the obvious sincerity of the human being who is having that first seven second conversation, is the key to market dominance. This scripts purpose, the 768 bits of information, its role is to be like a surfboard. The job at the surf board is not to ride the wave. Pro surf boards in the ocean all day long and you will not have very many artistic wave riding experiences. Surf boards just bop around and do whatever they do. And every once in a while, one of them kind of comes in on a wave and stays on it for a while. Nothing very interesting happens. Chris Beall (06:52): You put a surfer on the surf board, constrained by the surf board, right? They can't walk around anywhere else on the water. They can only walk around in that little tiny little floaty thing that they got underneath them and a fairly small amount of that. But if their skill is high and their courage is there, they know what they're doing, within that script, that is the surf board. They can express their personality. Corey Frank (07:14): Well, let me talk about that for a second. I love, first of all, I love that analogy. The script is your surf board. The surfer is the tone and the sincerity and who wields that tool. Chris Beall (07:24): Yes. Corey Frank (07:25): So James, what's the gentleman's name? James Wahlberg? He does the videos. I love his... Chris Beall (07:31): [inaudible 00:07:31]. Corey Frank (07:31): [inaudible 00:07:31] . Right? And I love his breakthrough script, but his value prop that he delivers that I think that's where the hiccup is because his tone is exceptional. Right? Very empathetic. His pacing is a masterclass. His body language just gets into it. Right? I mean, he doesn't have 100 calls, right? He has one call a hundred times. I mean, he is just the iceman. He does not leave his wing man. I love it. But it just seems that the far be it is for me. I don't know. I, I respect the hell out of him for doing it, but seems like he could do some help on his, on that initial big idea. That seemed to be where he's missing a lot of his success. Now, granted, it's not the sexiest product, but I still think that's irrelevant. Chris Beall (08:21): Yeah. Well, if it's a pure trust product too, I mean, it's got the issue that it's a funny kind of software, right? It's something to do with this analysis, he is reluctant to talk about a breakthrough because of his own personality. I've actually taken him through the entire messaging workshop. And this is what I do a lot of now is messaging workshops. And the more sophisticated somebody is, the less likely they are to like the message that we come up with. Corey Frank (08:50): Yeah. [inaudible 00:08:52] It's close. I think really he's so close. Chris Beall (08:55): He's close. But I'm happy to have him out there amusing masses, right? It works like crazy, but it is true that the surf board constrains the performance, but I'd rather have a master surfer on a shitty surf board than the other way. Then me on the best surf board in the world. You put me out there on a wave and you're not going to get much because I won't even get up on the board. Right? But it does say that our talent management is we should be looking for, the guys at 511 Enterprises do this. So they hire people who are graduates of a couple of the religious schools up there in Redding, California. And they hire them because they were on a mission to help these people stay in the Redding area. And so if they could get them sales jobs and put them in this inside sales organization, that they run on the outsource spaces, then that would help their mission. Chris Beall (09:51): So they're kind of a nonprofit for a while. And then they became a profit-making entity and now a serious business. And what we call it is packaged sincerity on steroids. So they hire people who've been through a sincerity filter. It's not average people who go to school in these places, these are people who are above average sincerity. And then these people can be scripted. They can be given a surfboard and taught to surf, but they have good balance. That's like sincerity is like good balance, right? If you want to be a great surfer, you got to have good balance. Now this analogy, I think plays all the way out in a fascinating way. And again, it is the exact opposite of how people think about it. I had a nesting workshop yesterday with the manager and some other people and his paradigm was this. Well, my reps need to be themselves. They need to be creative. Chris Beall (10:46): Well, they need to be themselves. They need to be identical each time. And it's their voice that's going to carry this. Of the, how many bits did you? You get a lot of bits in here, 140,000 bits in a seven second conversation in which less than 1,000 of those bits are the words. Corey Frank (11:04): Yeah. Be yourself. I work a lot with Oren Klaff, his new book comes out today, great by the way. And he has a bit that he uses, he was on London reel with Brian Rose a year or two ago. And Ryan says, "You know Oren, in a high stakes sales pitch when this is your craft and your profession, can't you just be yourself?" He said, be yourself, terrible idea. You're not that good. Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld do not go on stage for a three minute set at the comedy store or in Carson and be themselves, right? It takes 30 hours to condense it to three minutes. Like Mark Twain. Mark Twain used to go through his words and his manuscripts. And if he could take out words, every other word, and it still made sense, he would leave the words out. And he took the word and it changed the fundamental meaning of it. Like Hemingway, every word is very compact and appropriate versus [inaudible 00:12:03]. Corey Frank (12:04): Tarantino? You could create, you could exude three minutes of different scripts. It stays the same, the art isn't there, but the meaning is still the same. So yeah. Be yourself, terrible idea. Chris Beall (12:15): Terrible idea. Express your true belief in something? Absolutely a great idea. This is the other part that I find so fascinating. This sales person has to be selling something. So first they have to get trust. That takes seven seconds to move the trust needle. Then they have to sell something. And the question is, if I want to consistently go through a market and own that market. I want to dominate that market. I'd better be selling the same thing over and over. Chris Beall (12:42): That thing can't be my product because my product being software, no matter what it is now is always software is too adaptable. So it can't any longer say, "You know what Corey? See this, this you got to have one of these. The reason I have got to have it, it's got a little cover on it. And that texts the inside and it's orange. So it's easy to find because you're misplacing things all the time and you look at it and you go, "That's interesting, but you know, what you can do with those is I can use that as a doorstop. I can swat a fly with it. I can toss it across the room to amuse my dog and have him fetch it. Chris Beall (14:16): You know it's software, right? These aren't software, but everything we sell nowadays as 1,001 uses or 10,000 or 100,000 micro uses. Why do we have to configure software products? We're making the product that is the product. I don't have to jump out of the box of work except ours, actually, for a funny reason, it's because our product is not a product. Our product is the conversations that it produces. And so those are consistent because they're ancient. They go back 500,000 years or quarter million years or whatever it is that people, whenever people started talking to each other, that stuff so old, I don't have to worry about whether it's going to slip out between my fingers and become something else. The conversations are ancient and they're very reliable, but the sales person is still once they get that little bit of trust, they have to have something to sell. Chris Beall (15:06): The product that you can sell consistently is the discovery meeting. And when you sell the discovery meeting, you must believe in the product, which is the discovery meeting. So the key to everything in market dominance is this, make sure you get the first seven seconds right, by showing the other person that you're on their side. I know I'm an interruption. So one way of doing that and then showing them that you're competent to solve a problem they have right now, the problem I have right now, or they have right now is me. So let's solve me. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? And that's how we're going to solve me. You do your thing. You listen, I do my thing. I tell you why I called and it takes 27 seconds. And so we've solved the problem. Now, the question is, what am I going to sell you in those 27 seconds? Chris Beall (15:56): I'm going to sell you something I have to truly believe in, which is not my product will solve your problem. It's my meeting we'll teach you something. That's what I have to sell you. And to sell you that I have to know what that something is. All good discovery meetings teach something in one of three dimensions. There's an economic dimension. They teach you something about your business with regard to, or your own situation with regard to risk or with regard to time, or with regard to money out of getting it or saving it. There's an emotional dimension, usually around frustration, occasionally around fear, almost never around anything else. Those are the only two emotions. The third one is... Corey Frank (16:39): Is it economic and emotional? Chris Beall (16:43): Economic emotional. And then the third one is strategic, which is you're going to learn something about another way that you might not have thought about, or you didn't know it was possible or safe or whatever of going from where you are to where you need to go. And you're going to learn all three of those things to some level in this discovery meeting. Therefore, since I know that, I believe in the potential value of that discovery meeting for you, the human being who's going to attend it because companies don't learn. People learn even if we never do business together. Chris Beall (17:13): If I have that belief, and then I say anything that doesn't make you not want to attend the meeting, that's all, that's really, what's funny about it. It's like a negative rule, if I don't use the category of my product at all. So I keep you from being able to say, "Hey, you know what? That's great, Chris, but we're set." If I can avoid you making that fatal mistake of saying you're set, which you will always say, if you think, you know what I'm selling. Why will you say that? Because the alternative is that you're incompetent and you don't want to be thought of as incompetent. So you don't say, you say... Corey Frank (17:50): Large amount of time. Wordsmithing, nuance, pacing, tone. Role-playing around how to describe this discovery meeting that you're offering. Chris Beall (18:01): Yes. Corey Frank (18:02): As opposed to, "Hey, let's take 15 minutes and tell you a little bit about what we do and how it can help your business team save time, money, and whatever it is." Right? And so folks spend all this money on lists in their tech stack and their sales rep up a fucking ping pong table in the hoopla. And when it gets down to it, ConnectAndSell, they flip on the switch and they have just a terrible surf board that doesn't take them where they're riding terrible waves, if you will. Chris Beall (18:31): Yeah, they look ridiculous. They look like me on a surf board, right? They look like they're lying down or, you prefer, I hope a shark eats that one. I don't ever want to watch that again. It's that kind of thing. So I'll give one example and then I'm going to go talk with my friend Fallon at Node. Because she's got the answer to something. She's going to call me in five minutes. So we'll just wait for her call. So this is why our pitch sounds like it sounds. So ours is, Corey 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, and share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available? Chris Beall (19:14): No, every word in there, that's five hours of work to come up with that original set of words. Now it's down to one hour for somebody to learn the framework and maybe to believe in it enough to manage to it, which is what our challenges is. Please manage to this new framework. And why do we care about it being precise? Because every word counts in the surf board, it's like, do you want the surf board to have a fin on it? Because if it doesn't have a fin, when you move your weight a little to the side on the back part and nothing happens, it spins, we don't want it to spin. We want it to cut into the wave at that point. Oh yeah. But I don't like the fin because when I'm carrying the surf board, the fin sticks out in a funny way and it's harder to put it on the roof of my car. Chris Beall (19:59): Well, screw your issue with the fin, surf boards need fins, right? The reason for this word here, the reasoning for, I believe in here as uncomfortable as it is, is that's the fin on the surf board, I believe allows you to come back later and move your weight a little bit and change the direction of the conversation. So that's why we put it there. Right? So when we go through this process with folks, it only takes like Sean McLaren says, "Oh, it takes me three minutes to work somebody's message." And I say, "It takes me an hour." It's like, what do you do for an hour? I say, come watch some time. And so he came and watched and just sat in and I did one of them and afterwards he said, "Oh, that's different." I said, "Yeah." And yet the part where they do the only three minutes and all I do to get them to do the message is this, you walk into a bar. Chris Beall (20:53): I take him into the bar. And there in the third bar stool from the left is your person. They're wearing their ICP jacket. It says ICP, that looked like a motorcycle game, kind of person with patches and stuff. They're drinking with their right hands. You have to sit down to their left because right-handed people want to be free to punch you with the right hand or strangers. And then you ask him, "How was your day?" And they said, "You have no fucking idea." Then they give you the litany. And it's, Deming's litany. It's always the same. I didn't have one of the three things I needed and I didn't have the time, the resources or the support that I needed to do my job as well as I believe it should be done. Chris Beall (21:34): The only thing we have to sell in the world. Sadly, that's not the meeting. We have to know that that's out there or else we don't build our product. We use that personal thing is it that their feelings about that day as the bridge to the meeting and we do that by taking their feeling and turning them into negative words that follow the phrase, I believe we discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates. And then we put that in there and then before they can screw around with it, because that will hurt them, we got to actually do something obvious. One, tell him why we called. Two, use the extra few seconds to set up a meeting.  

You can learn a lot about market dominance by sitting in the sand…and watching surfers on the beaches of Southern California as they hone their craft. As a land-locked kid from the mean streets of Milwaukee, I would visit the beaches of Venice, California every summer and attempt to ride the relatively modest waves of the warm Santa Monica waters.  Time and again I would bite it and tumble into the surf…learning a little bit each ride about balance…about the feel and the connection to the board beneath you…about timing.  And later committing to a career in sales revealed many of the same techniques that I tried to master as Midwest kid first learning to surf. Certainly meeting with the Sales version of Point Break’s surf-master Bohdi, Chris Beall, over 15 years ago, has helped guide me in search of both riding the perfect wave and executing the perfect sales call.  In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris argues that it’s the quality of the voice of the sales professional…and the obvious ability to emote sincerity of the human being who is conducting the first seven-second conversation with the prospect, which is really the key to market dominance. You are the surfer. And the scripts you ride – its purpose – with its first bits of information - is to be like a surfboard. Working with both a high-quality tandem is the only way to achieve dominance.  But let’s remember that the job of the surfboard is not to ride the wave; that’s the surfer’s job. As I found out after many a spill, it simply can not ride the wave without a competent surfer. Having a Martin Scorsese-written script alone doesn’t guarantee success in your cold calling.  ----more---- That would be like chucking 1000 surfboards in the ocean…what would happen? Watch all day long and you will not have very many artistic or higher level wave riding experiences from doing this in spite of how expensive or expertly crafted your board is. The surfboard would just bob around at the pleasure of the waves. But every once in a while one of them could kind of come in on a wave and stay on it for a while… but nothing really very interesting happens. BUT…you put a competent surfer on the board – who is now constrained by the confines of the surfboard (the script)…and if their skill is high enough and their courage is great enough, and they know what they're doing with their balance - or within that script - they can truly express their personality and establish trust…all in the first seven seconds. Their tone of voice, the prosody, what they sound like, “who” they sound like…all factors in the emotion that the prospects feel such as, Do you sound like somebody they can trust? Hey…no one said Market Dominance would be easy. So welcome to this week's episode entitled, "Surf’s Up - We all stand equal before a wave." 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (04:13): This is what I asked [Chris Bosch 00:04:15] at that dinner that I was so kindly invited to and he had a very clear answer. To begin to move the trust needle, you have seven seconds. So that's a decay curve. When you encounter somebody, there's this time of ambiguity where they're neutral. And as you begin wasting their time, they begin trusting you. If you don't achieve trust after a while, you go into the, "Meh. I don't really care about this person." So his point is you got seven seconds. And during those seven seconds, you have to do two things precisely. One thing is you must show this person clearly that you see the world through their eyes and you're on their side. You understand their situation and you're for them not you. You can still be for you. I don't mean to them the exclusion of you,? But you're for them, you're on their side. And so you can't be on somebody's side unless you know what their side is. You have to show them that you see the world their way. And then the second thing he said you need to do is establish with this person that you are competent to solve a problem that they have right now. And that's actually where the cold call comes in. What's so interesting about this whole equation, right? What happened to capitalism equation and why did sales become such [G&A 00:05:34]? In the capitalist world, that now becomes the manufacturing of trust. Corey Frank (05:40): Well, you started off this conversation by saying, is it okay to tell a sales rep how to do their job? Chris Beall (05:46): And the answer is if a sales rep is... If their job is to manufacture trust across a subset of the market... So say I have a market of 10,000. So I have 10 sales reps. So each sales rep has got a thousand people... Whether I assign them or not, doesn't make any difference. Their burden, so to speak, that they need to carry is a thousand trust relationships. So really, what I'm asking them to do is to hold an initial thousand conversations if they can, with their thousand and then have this process start to occur. The most important part is the thousand conversations, not the process. The process that leads to the sale is not irrelevant, but it's really close to irrelevant compared to the essential manufacturing process that needs to be run, which is some trust between every person in that thousand and that rep. And this is one of the reasons that sales teams should be relatively small when they go dominate markets, because it's hard to find that many people in the world that folks would comfortably trust. You actually have to hire salespeople for trustability. Exactly the opposite again. That's what's so fun about all of this, right? Everything that we think about the classic salesperson, they're slick, they're smooth, they're fast-talking, they're this, they're that. They're the least trusted profession in the world other than politicians who are simply salespeople of futures that they never have to deliver. They make Elon Musk look a guy who's on the hook. So we have two kinds of salespeople people don't trust. Politicians and salespeople. And here we have this paradigm that says, "No, what we need to do to dominate a market and therefore stay in business..." Let's always come back to, is there any safe place in business? There's only one. Market dominance. If you dominate one market, you're pretty safe. If you dominate two, you're four times as safe. And if you dominate three, you're nine times as safe. So your safety factor goes with the square of the number of the markets that you dominate. So if you want to have a company that produces value for your heirs, so to speak, a few generations from now, you need to dominate probably four or five markets. And then you're 25 times a safe. And you take the business failure rate, which tends to run failure in four years and you go, "Oh, for four times 25, that's a hundred years. My business not might be around a hundred years from now." Especially if we can establish a traditional market dominance because then you have [crosstalk 00:08:37]. Corey Frank (08:37): If you look at someone like [GE 00:08:37] who had dominance in capital, they had dominance in airplane [hitches 00:08:42], they had dominance in consumer goods. And in a span of one generational leadership... Not even, a couple of years, they've ended up selling off all those divisions and becoming fairly irrelevant. Chris Beall (08:53): Yeah. They managed to make the classic mistake, which is they mistook the flow of revenue. The best way to get revenue at GE was to load up on GE capital and say, "Go, go, go." So GE capital became this bigger and bigger part of it. And they lost their taste for dominating the real markets that they were in. And then having thrown the anchor through the bottom of the boat, they ended up doing a lot of bailing. And it's hard to get out of that situation. Actually, it's impossible to get out of. It can't be done. But in the general case, if you care about your company and you care about its future existence, you need to dominate. You come all the way down to, "How do I do that?" Well, the unit of change, which in any business process or any process, the question at the core is what's the unit of change? What must change and what are the inputs... What is the probability of change given the inputs and the magnitude of the inputs? So say, I say the unit of change is that a square foot of floor gets clean when the input is a broom or a vacuum cleaner or a dustpan or whatever. I apply the inputs. There's some probability of getting the change to occur. I multiply that all out. I figure out what the cost is of doing that. And I say, "Oh, well, if I want this big change from not dominating a market to dominating a market, for instance, I have to have this many units of change." And what are they? Well, the unit of change is the fact of someone who is a potential buyer in that market, trusting a salesperson. And they're on a path to trusting that salesperson more than they trust themselves. That is, if the point of purchase can't occur until the buyer trusts the salesperson more than they trust themselves because the buyer's conservative... Why are they conservative? Because in B2B, you're putting your long game, your career, on the line for something short, which is the purchase of something that solves one problem. So you've got to be pretty motivated to risk your career for a purchase. Corey Frank (10:50): So the gentleman that you were talking about before, that you were talking with right before this conversation, very large multi-billion dollar company, probably fairly entrenched in the sales enablement, sales operations role wants to trust the product, but doesn't trust it enough. Wants to trust you, but doesn't trust you enough. The status quo, the devil I know is better than the devil I don't. Chris Beall (11:14): Well, in this particular case, the product is sold, but there's another sale that needs to be made. So this is a big customer of ours. They consume a million and a half dollars a year. They're a serious big customer, but their paradigm is the ancient paradigm, which is the salesperson makes the decision as to what tools they use and what techniques they use. Given that, it doesn't really matter if he trusts me because there's no way that they're going to change their paradigm until they change their paradigm. So our problem becomes to find a part of that particular company that is in enough trouble, that they will risk some senior manager, a general manager, CEO of one of those units, will risk their career on a new sales paradigm, which they're free to do. It's not like this is a religion to them. It's just a habit. The old sales paradigm, which is the salesperson does whatever they want, as long as they produce the number, everything's cool. And we only start to manage them when they don't produce the number. That's the old one. And we manage them... Effectively, it's called managing someone out. Just because of modern restrictions around firing people. That's the old paradigm, but that paradigm doesn't allow you to dominate markets. And the reason it doesn't allow you to dominate markets is you can't manufacture trust as fast in that paradigm as a competitor can by using an alternative technique, which is talk to everyone. That's the real problem. The real problem is that if you want to be in the innovation economy, which means you've got to bring new stuff to market, which brings into play the chasm. So if you can't just sit there and stand pat on your old stuff, but you've got to go, you've got to do new stuff because there are disruptors coming in because software is eating the world. So software will eventually eat you no matter what it is that you do. Did the car industry ever think software would eat the car industry? Imagine that. And you know what? Software ate the car industry. Corey Frank (13:21): Well, look at Siebel and Salesforce. I mean, there was a time when I first got into sales where Siebel was the dominant player in the marketplace. Nobody else was even close. And in a matter of a couple of years, this upstart Salesforce usurped them from this heavy integration, heavy software piece for sales automation software. And before that was Brock. Remember Brock was the big one and then Siebel came and then now Salesforce. And Salesforce has been able to continue to innovate, continue to throw new things at it, to maintain their position. Chris Beall (14:51): Yeah, this happens over and over. Whatever's heavy gets displaced by something lighter. The definition of software is it's lighter. It's lighter, it's more liquid, it moves faster and it opens up possibilities at the margin, business model possibilities. Salesforce's business model that was so radical was you could actually try it for free. And there was no install. I switched from Oracle to Salesforce in about a week. Million-dollar Oracle CRM implementation. Been going on and going on as part of this big ERP thing that we were doing. And this guy, Kevin Stoffel, who worked for me as my insights sales guide, a little team of four people, five people, whatever. He came to me one day and said, "I know we're doing this Oracle thing. I know that we're really working hard at it. I know we have this big investment going on. Is it okay if I try something else from my team because I'm tired of waiting." I said, "Well, it's Kevin. I know you, you wouldn't be asking this question unless you already tried something else and it worked. So what is it?" He said, "Okay, this is called Salesforce." And I said, "Did you put data in it?" And he said, "Absolutely." "Is it delivering value?" He said, "Yeah." "You want to show it to me?" He says, "Yeah." He shows me a running CRM that his team's using every day and has been using for a week because he could upload a spreadsheet into it. Million-dollar Oracle implementation gets turned off immediately. That was in the unit of change. The unit of change was you could try it for free... Because Salesforce was softer software than Oracle. Oracle was hard software. We had to run it on our machines. We had to integrate it with this and that, programmers got involved, project managers... Imagine a little company, really a tiny company, $42 million a year company with more than 20 million a year of that being from cutting two gold master CDs a year and sending them to Germany, needing to go through a year of consulting and integration and whatever. And here this guy comes along, this unassuming kid from Iowa, Dubuque of all places. If you can imagine somebody coming out of Dubuque and doing this. And he goes, "Well, I just tried this thing over here and it seems to work pretty well." Boom. Done. And then what is the next unit of change? Somebody, me, who believes in that company's ability to deliver in a wider range of circumstances. So I go and start Finish Line Floors. Do I go build an ERP system? No, I took Salesforce. I spent... And I logged this. I spent 16 hours and 33 minutes working on Salesforce in order to make it into a full-blown ERP system for a floor finishing company, including data gathered from the field and pictures coming in and analysis and the whole bet. So softer software. because it was even softer in another way. And it was configurable and programmable and I didn't need programmers, blah, blah, blah... Ate something else. It ate an ERP system that I never bought, which I probably would have had to buy or build. Software eats the world because of its liquidity and flexibility and ability to have short cycle times to value. Look at our company. Our cycle time to value is the shortest in the history of business. One day you go from not touching it to at this moment, at this very instant- Corey Frank (18:11): They say, "Listen, Chris, I've done all this work. I've had all these conversations. I'm still not getting market dominance." And you can say, "No, but you can look at this different view, Corey. It looks a scatter chart. It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, and it needs to be more focused on a particular market. You think you're having conversations that are concentrated or that all conversations are pretty equal. The conversation that has greater atomic weight when they are focused on a particular market. So you have a list problem, Corey." As an example, right? Chris Beall (18:45): Or I could say, "We can analyze these conversations," for the cold ones in particular, which are oddly the most important because you only have seven seconds once. You have one shot to move the needle. Now, fortunately, if you fail, as long as you don't fail in a memorable way, thank God you're not memorable, then you can go take another shot, but it's effectively a cold call, even though it will be in this followup list. Corey Frank (19:17): As long as you don't fail in a memorable way. That's crazy. Chris Beall (19:17): I mean, thank God salespeople are not memorable. But if you fail in a memorable way, when you have the follow-up, you could have a problem. But so it comes down to, are you talking to a list that makes sense? That's your 808 dials here. When you talk to them, to those individuals, do you talk to them in a way in which you establish that you are on their side, that you see the world their way and that you're competent to solve a problem they have right now? And this is where this whole different anatomy of a cold call comes about. We really need to get into it because that's... I mean, I keep saying it's interesting. To me, it's just fascinating that we're at a point in history where the capitalist revolution is over because there's no longer any need for capital to do the classic thing we did in business, which makes factories. Software is eating the world. Innovations and the pace of flow of innovations is up, but the process of taking those innovations to market has gotten more difficult rather than easier. And if you can take innovation to market as a whole product and dominate that market, you'll mentally live to fight another day, but you might be able to dominate another market. And if you have the ability to dominate markets as a core capability of your company, then you can do anything you want in business, including acquiring other companies and all this other stuff. Because you own this innovation engine, the real hard part, which is taking it to market. But when you come right down to it, you have to manufacture units of trust. And to do that, you have seven seconds. And within those seven seconds, you have to do two things. And one of those things requires, in the traditional paradigm, requires guesswork. And the guests that we traditionally make is that the problem we solve is the problem that is on this prospect's mind at this moment. When Chris Voss said, "Right now," to me that evening, when he said, "You need to show this person that you're competent to solve a problem they have right now," it was the words right now that blew my brain out. Because I just suddenly realized, wait a minute, the problem this person has right now is me. And it turns out the secret to the whole damned thing is for me to actually say, "I am the problem." And to offer a solution to the problem that is me. And that moves the trust needle every time. And this is where our customers, when we teach them this, get confused because they then go back to the traditional model and say, "Yeah, but did it produce a meeting?" And that's not the point. The point is 103 million... That was what I said, a hundred and... This little test drive here, at 103... or 108 million bits of information, most of which were not in the words. This is the other part that's hard for people to understand is within those seven seconds, I can only get out so many words. I can probably say 40 words. Let's try to see how many words there are. "I know I'm in an interruption." That's five. "Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" That's eleven. So 16 words are emitted during that time. So those 16 words average in this case, I think six or seven characters each. So 16 times six, times eight, that's only about 768 bits of information. That's not very much. 768 bits. And yet those 16 words took seven seconds. And in those seven seconds, there are 140,000 bits of information that I've omitted. While all the rest of it's the tone of voice, it's prosody, it's what do I sound like? It's who do I sound like? Do I sound like somebody you can trust? So this brings down the talent issue to something that real people don't think about, which is the quality of the voice. I'll call it obvious sincerity of the human being who is having that first seven-second conversation, is the key to market dominance. The script's purpose, the 768 bits of information, role is to be like a surfboard. The job of the surfboard is not to ride the wave. Throw surfboards in the ocean all day long. And you will not have very many artistic wave riding experiences. Surfboards just bob around and do whatever they do. And every once in a while, one of them comes in on a wave and stays on it for a while. Nothing very interesting happens. You put a surfer on the surfboard, constrained by the surfboard. They can't walk around anywhere else on the water. They can only walk around on that tiny little floaty thing that they got underneath them and a fairly small amount of that. But if their skill is high and their courage is there, they know that they're doing within that script, that is the surfboard, they can express their personality. Corey Frank (24:42): Let me talk about that for a second. First of all, I love that analogy. The script is your surfboard. The surfer is the tone and the sincerity and who wields that tool. Chris Beall (24:51): Yes. Corey Frank (24:53): So James... What's the gentleman's name? James Wahlberg. He does the videos... I love his- Chris Beall (24:57): [Thornburg 00:24:57]. Corey Frank (24:57): Thornburg, right? And I love his breakthrough script, but his value prop that he delivers, I think that's where the hiccup is because his tone is exceptional. Very empathetic. His pacing is a masterclass. His body language just gets into it. I mean, he doesn't have a hundred calls. He has one call a hundred times. I mean, he is just the Iceman. He does not leave his wingman. I love it. But it just seems that... though far be it from me... I don't know. I respect the hell out of him for doing it, but it seems like he could do some help on that initial big idea. That seemed to be where he's missing a lot of his success. Now [Brandy 00:25:46] is not the sexiest product, but I still think that's irrelevant. Chris Beall (25:49): Yeah. Well, it's a pure trust product too. I mean, it's got the issue that it's a funny kind of software. It's to do this analysis. He is reluctant to talk about a breakthrough because of his own personality. I've actually taken him through the entire messaging workshop. And this is what I do a lot of now, is messaging workshops. And the more sophisticated somebody is, the less likely they are to like the message that we come up with. They're still thinking [crosstalk 00:26:20]. Corey Frank (26:22): I think he's close. I think really he's so close. Chris Beall (26:23): He's close. But I'm happy to have him out there amusing the masses. It works like crazy, but it is true that the surfboard constrains the performance. But I'd rather have a master surfer on a shitty surfboard than the other way... than me on the best surfboard in the world. You put me out there on a wave and you're not going to get much because I wouldn't even get up on the board.

The United States of the mid 19th century is ripe with stories of its timeless legends and colorful characters who helped weave the historical events that defined the Great American West. The stories and movies about the adventures of lonesome cowboys, men with black hats, or brave lawmen of the Old West who clashed frequently in conflicts such as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the duals in the dusty streets of Virginia City, and tales of quick justice in Dodge City, continue to capture our imagination.  When we talk of cowboys and other figures of the Wild West, we immediately picture a man on horseback. But no cowboy would roam the West or walk the streets without a gun…and such a gritty figure would most likely wield a very distinctive long-barreled revolver called the Colt 45. In fact, no gun in the Old West was as important or left such an indelible mark as the Colt Single Action Army Revolver, or more widely known simply as the Colt Peacemaker.  It was said that "God made man, but Sam Colt made them equal." And why it was called the Peacemaker and the “Great Equalizer” is as related to business and market dominance today as a cowboy is related to his boots.  The Colt 45 leveled the competitive playing field because it equalized the relationship among fighting males…especially in the strong honor culture of the Old West, where discipline was enforced through one on one combat and duals deriving from even the faintest slight. So much so that the reason people used to be more polite back then could be argued that it was not because they were nicer people, it's because you might get killed otherwise. And that, as my fellow co-host Chris Beall would say, was considered to be a great inconvenience. join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys. ----more---- --------------- 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (04:35): Question is is it okay to tell a sales rep how to do their job, what tools to use or technologies to use, process to follow? And it comes all the way down to this ancient question about what is the relationship to sales itself to a company and its strategy. So under the old paradigm, which came to us from, as we were talking about before the roots of capitalism, where capital is deployed to create the means of production that is factories full of machines with people tending the machines, or maybe it was some people doing things by hand or whatever, but capital is deployed in order to build something repeatably in that something turns into inventory, finished goods inventory, and that inventory must be disposed of and turned back into cash in order to make the cycle work. Right? So what that always suggested was well sales is this external function that just sits out there somewhere in the world. And as long as they dispose of the inventory in a way that's reasonably efficient and they don't take too big a cut, then it's not really relevant to the future of the business. The inventory must be disposed of, sales must be good enough, but we certainly don't want it inside the company, because then it turns into overhead. That is when there's nothing to sell, then we carry the sales person. So, and the classic evolution of business through, I'll call it the capitalist revolution that occurred as a concomitant of the industrial revolution, hand in hand, we ended up with this model of the salesperson as effectively kind of an independent contractor. And it shows up in how we compensate salespeople, where we compensate them with variable compensation, with commissions based on what they sell. And the ultimate, most respected kind of salesperson is the pure commission rep, who is a lone wolf who does whatever they do. And they run their territory the way that they want to run it. And it doesn't really matter if some mix of their Rolodex, their charm, bribes given and taken, whatever it happens to be. Now that's in the form of say nice dinners or whatever it happens to be, right? It doesn't really matter because ultimately if the sales rep decides to put more of their own money into selling and take as a result, [inaudible 00:06:48] who really cares, right? And so in this new formulation where there is no finished goods inventory, where all interesting products are manufactured instantaneously at the point of consumption, which is what's true of software... Back to the question, I guess.. Remember who's it is, it was somebody, Seth Godin or somebody talking about software... Maybe it was Marc Andreessen said, said software is eating the world, right? And what it means is software eats the world because there is no need to carry finished goods inventory. That's at its core why software eats the world because you don't need any of it. Actually, there never is any software in that sense. It doesn't exist as a deliverable, you just experience it by interacting with it and then since software has moved into the cloud, you don't even need the damn hardware anymore. So now it's a magic trick where you say, "I want some, now I could go out right now." In fact, we're doing it right now, we're in Zoom video. I don't recall ever becoming aware of or interacting with or downloading or getting a machine for any software for Zoom Video. It never happened, right? And yet we're consuming something that is as sophisticated as any remote video experience ever was. The kind where you would buy a screen and put it up in a conference room and you'd have hardware to do this and that. So software eats the world primarily because it doesn't exist, which has is its main strength. But it blows up conceptually, the relationship between sale and the company that's trying to make money from its innovation and that needs to dominate a market in order to stay alive because with increased fluidity, as software goes and eats the world, software also basically says, and anyone can attack anyone in business. Everyone's armed with... Software is the equivalent of six shooter and the Colt 45. Now the gun that tamed the West, right? Why? Because a little guy without an awful lot of physical fighting power suddenly was the equal with any man. That's why it's called the great equalizer, right? The great equalizer was the Colt 45. It equalized the relationship among fighting males. And in the honor cultures out of which the United States drew it stock, it's rootstock, came out of a number of honor cultures where discipline was enforced through duel. And so the reason people used to be polite was not because they were nicer people, it's because you might get killed otherwise. And that was considered to be a great inconvenience. So there was this sort of universal discipline mechanism, which is you get your honor is questioned and something had to happen, right? So here we came out of that culture and we had an equalizer and now software is the great equalizer among business and businesses that don't understand this, that think that they're protected by the old protection which all looked like capital and access to supply chain, and being threatened by businesses that have no need for supply chain, that have no need for capital. In fact, you're seeing that even in the venture finance software world, nowadays. Venture capitalists will no longer fund the creation of software. How about that? 20 years ago, venture capital was the primary way we funded the creation of innovative software. The software revolution was built... I'll go back to the beginning of my career. So I did my first startup in 1983, and we had a little bit of software that a guy had written in his basement, so to speak, actually sitting on the edge of his water bed in Boulder, Colorado. And it was just enough to intrigue one of the top venture capitalists at that time. In fact at the top of the class of 83, it was a fund called the Masters Fund in Boulder, Colorado of all places, right? And Boulder became and still is the number one per capita software shop in the world. Corey Frank (10:39): Really? Chris Beall (10:40): Yeah. Still is. And it all came out of that period in 1983 to 19, probably 88, 89, when there was this flowering of software companies and the venture capitalists at the time knew that the trick was to get them early and fund the development of their first product. So ideas were funded and turned into products backed then and then software ate the world so bad so to speak that even that little piece of inventory building went away and now anyone can build anything. I just hooked up a relationship between a 17 year old software developer and a very experienced kind of really [inaudible 00:11:22] entrepreneur out of the investment banking world who wants to revolutionize something about investment banking. And late fifties, almost 60 year old guy, who happens to know everything there is to know about algorithmic valuation of companies. And it's entirely possible that the three of them will end up building a multi-billion dollar revolution out of nothing more than a 17 year old's time that he can find while going to school, still going to high school, and an old guy's knowledge of how to solve a particular problem using algorithms. You think about that. Think about the entire investment banking industry could be blown up, destroyed, by that little triad of people coming together with no venture capital whatsoever, until their product is filled, until they know that it works. And until it's dangerous, disruptive, you want to see a Colt 45 play the role of a Gatling gun. So that change, what's so interesting about that in the sales world is sales is still run as though we live in a capitalist society, but we live in a post-capitalist society where there's actually no role for capital in production anymore. Capital plays almost no role in production. Now, if you're Elon Musk, you need capital in order to do something else. Look at Tesla that the capital in Tesla isn't tied up in Tesla's factory. The capital is tied up in the speculative nature of how they sell their cars. The fact that they sell their cars ahead, they actually reversed the inventory flow completely, backwards. You sign up to buy a Tesla two years from now, when you're getting a leading edge Tesla. And so the orders are already there and cash is already there, but you need more in order to de-risk the production cycle itself. The question is no longer, "Can we make the cars?" It's no longer, "Can we dispose of the inventory?" There is no inventory. The inventory is in Elon Musk's hand. It's a rate of production of a car that has never been built. Copy number zero doesn't even know. And so in his head, which he sells to the stock market and sells to the people buying the cars, there are these future cars. Want to buy my car that doesn't exist. So the car itself looks exactly like software at that point. It's a specification for a product that doesn't exist that will be delivered just in time when it's made to you often some [inaudible 00:13:36] future. Please pony up a hefty deposit and I will use that deposit and go leverage that up in the stock market in order to see if I can build this car in time for you. And if I don't, you wait, and all this flex occurs, right? So we have this... And what did they do with their sales model? They just basically said, "Oh you know the old sales model where the car dealership is the territory, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Not going to do that." Chris Beall (14:57): We're just not going to do that. You can just go online and buy a Tesla. That's how you do it. You can go to a little showroomy thing, right? But there's no sales force in there to sell to you. They don't even know how to sell a Tesla. No human being knows how to sell a Tesla. So Tesla's their software and so there's an industry where you'd think, "Well, I still need the whole capital thing for the supply chain. I need all this stuff," but it turns out you don't. You need believers in the potential value of having this piece of software that happens to roll around on four wheels. Corey Frank (15:28): So believers, not capital. Chris Beall (15:28): Yeah. Corey Frank (15:28): The believers are the new capital. Chris Beall (15:29): The believers are the new capital and sales, the job of sales in the innovation economy, is to manufacture believers. Corey Frank (15:35): So the job... Say that one more time. The job of the- Chris Beall (15:38): The job of sales in the innovation economy is to manufacture believers. Corey Frank (15:42): That's huge, Chris. To pivot on a different type of currency, right? So what we've talked about last time is that I have to wait for this congruence of the prospect and the sales person to hit. And if they don't buy at that intersection point, right? Most sales folks will trash that prospect, but what's the percentage of, is it one out of 12? Chris Beall (16:05): One out of 12 are in market at any given quarter. Corey Frank (16:07): Right. So my job is to make believers of the 11 of 12 that aren't buying and eventually close the one of 12 that is. Chris Beall (16:16): Exactly. Corey Frank (16:16): But the 11 of the 12 still have a currency that doesn't show up on the immediate balance sheet that I have to be aware of, hyper-aware of. Yes. And we can actually... It's possible to measure the shadow balance sheet. This is a [inaudible 00:16:31] shadow asset, and you measure it simply by the outcome of conversations and the probability of future conversations, that each one of those individuals you talk with, you can come up with a probability that they'll still be around when you talk to them again, probability that they come into market. So one out of 11 turns in to one out of 10 to one out of nine to one out of eight. Eventually you compress them against the end of that cycle. Where it's like counting cards. I used to be a blackjack player. And as you get down to the bottom of the deck, eventually every card will be dealt, right? If you're dealing all the way through in the abstract, right? And in the real casino, of course, they shuffle early in order to avoid this problem. But the statistically compressed deck scares the casino because the counter can know too much. And this is a silly story, but I remember sitting there at the old what is now The Stratosphere, I'm trying to remember what it used to be called. And in third base and playing my two hands, I think I was playing at the time, I was being polite because there were some people at the table and every card in the deck that was left was a 10 and the dealer was showing a six and I knew it. So I'm just splitting in halves, right? And people are freaking out. I mean, some guy wanted to get in a fist fight with me, which I can assure him there were better ways that we could interact about this question of whether I was an idiot, but he was convinced that I was an idiot. And I didn't have to think, I just happened to know every single card left in the deck and said, "I can't see it's a 10." And therefore I'm taking 10s until we run out a deck. Right? Well, this is what happens to that cycle. At first, only one in 12 cards so to speak, one in 12 of the people I talk to is potentially in market. And now I need to turn as many of those of the one out of 12 into believers as possible in order to fuel my movement into the market, because I need to have real customers because my customers within a market are my units of referenceability and referenceability is how I lower my marginal cost and marginal risk of entering that market more deeply. Every time I get a customer and a customer is successful with my product, he just bought my product and was not successful, right? That fact makes the next customer easier to sell, the next prospect easier to turn into a customer. So I have a manufacturing process where I'm manufacturing believers and an ever lower cost and an ever increased value. So that asset has this weird quality. This is why exponentials are exponentials. The rate of flow of that asset, the net new customers that are coming in and becoming customers, actually increases the flow rate. And when flow rates get multiplied by increases of flow rate, that's the next [inaudible 00:19:08]. That's where the curves go like this and the amount of time it takes to dominate the market has to do with when that curve crosses a particular threshold, which is kind of the 50% plus one is what people say. It's not really the case. It's really a probabilistic thing. Are you going to own main street is the real question. Are you going to become the standard? When you become the standard, you own that market, and you really should reduce your sales effort and take your best salespeople and put them on another market. Bad habit to leave salespeople around in dominated markets. It's almost like, you ever play Monopoly and there's couple of different types of people who play Monopoly, right? The traditional way to play Monopoly is that the Atlanta or Continental or Baltic, and you don't buy it, you're saving your money for the Marvin Gardens and the- Chris Beall (19:54): Park Place. Corey Frank (19:56): Park Place, right? And there's those folks that just wait for chance, just wait for simple chance of the marketplace that they're going to land and they're eventually going to get a Monopoly on those yellows or those greens or the Park Place of the world. And then with the aggressive, kind of the new way that you play Monopoly, is wherever you land, you just buy it, because you never know when the light blues or the pinks, et cetera. You're going to monetize every role of the dice today. [inaudible 00:20:24] but maybe on your 17th turn, monetized your activity on your second roll of the dice. And I almost see kind of what you're postulating here, right? Is that saying, it's that, listen, stop trying to look at the marketplace as this one in 12 congruence of time, of fate, and that your success is hinges on that one in 12 chance. No matter how good your messaging is, no matter how good the timing is, you could still only close one of 12, but the activities behind [inaudible 00:20:58] interactions still have a currency, still have an atomic weight that you have to see in the abstract, in the higher level, in the strategic view, if you will. And that's what I love about what you're postulating here. Chris Beall (21:11): It's so interesting because it comes down to then the question of how do we manage sales? Because if we're managing sales for the quarter, which is what is the tradition, then what we get is the behavior that is within the quarter, that is the sales person's effort goes to making their number. And when they make their number, we're happy, right? And this is what I just heard from this sales manager, actually was a sales ops guy, but it was somebody in that world in this big company and their theory is, "Well, if the reps like it, they can use this tool," this ConnectAndSell tool as they call it, "Then they can use it. And if they don't well, that's up to them, but if they don't make their number, then we're going to encourage them more strongly to use this technology." Right? And the reason for that isn't that they're foolish. The reason is they're just living in an old paradigm. The old paradigm being the rep has the territory. The rep manages the territory. And the goal is to dispose of the inventory. And so, as long as the rep is disposing of the inventory, which is it makes the quota, then we're all good. And it doesn't matter how they do it. It doesn't matter if they wave a magic wand or drive around in circles, it just doesn't matter a matter. But the real question at any given point is what are you doing with the 11 out of 12? What you're doing with the one out of 12 is you found them and they're probably going to buy, unless you're an idiot. So then the question is, well, what are you doing with the 11 out of 12? And the answer is, if you want to dump in a market, the 11 out of 12, when you speak to them, anybody in that set, you need to move the trust needle in your direction as a human being. That is the classic other answer is, "Well we'll give them information." The 11 out of 12, right? "We'll give them information. We certainly don't want to waste time in a discovery call with them. Discovery conversation would be a total waste. Oh, we might spend 15 minutes or half an hour talking to them. And then they don't buy. That's such a failure. So sad." Right? So let's send them some marketing information, some collateral, and this and that. Well, nobody has generated a trust relationship ever with a brochure. Like, "I trust this brochure," is a nonsense statement. It just doesn't happen. People trust people and, by the way, people trust people and people only. We are wired to trust carefully and then we're also wired to trust increasingly until somebody shows they can't be trusted. So it's a threshold. It's a very funny looking curve, right? Trust works like this. It's generally negative. And then if I decide that I trust you, it goes way up like this, but I'm strongly biased in favor of interpreting everything you do as good till you betray me. And when you betray me, then my trust goes to hugely negative and I never trust you again, right? How does trust work in the long run? But that's not the company's problem when they're going to market with an innovation. The problem is no one knows them and no one trusts them at the beginning and they need to exchange about 600,000 bits of information with everyone in their market that they can talk to with one and only one purpose, which is to move the trust needle above where it is today through an interchange of information, which starts with somebody making the approach, right? This is just classic sales. If you want to control your market, you have to make the approach and you have to initiate an interchange of information designed to get the other person to correctly trust you. It's so simple when you think about it, right? And when you think about what do we measure salespeople for? Exactly none of those things are measured. Not one of those things is measured. Do we measure how many people that they interact with, how much information they interchange, whether they move the trust needle or not. And if so, how much? This is the essence of peeling your market off against competitors and this is actually why at the beginning of a market domination exercise, you should talk to more people per day than toward the end of it. For two reasons, one is you start running out of them because you're selling to some and then learning that others are fundamentally not in your market and whatever your idea of your market is, which you turn into a list, ends up having false positives in it. And it must have false positives because you can't know in advance the conversations and getting the information back.  

Almost 400 years ago, in the early 17th century in Europe, tulip bulbs were considered hard currency. 200 years ago, many islanders of the South Pacific used bleached seashells to flaunt their wealth. 100 years ago, many Texans measured their success by how many heads of cattle they ran. And today, my 8-year-old measures his wealth by the rare skins and VBucks he accumulates through his Fortnite gaming efforts. But today, if you’re a CEO or senior business leader in B2B tech markets, you may also have an alternative form of capital that should be leveraged in every way that the currency in your bank account is currently deployed: If you have created the function of an SDR team – regardless of the size - they are indeed a source of capital that operates in many ways like traditional capital and is also liquid. Since our focus at the Market Dominance Guys is lending a hand to companies and offering techniques and insight to market penetration, transitioning to NEW and additional markets may be something that isn’t at the top of the list. But, Geoffrey Moore argues – as we discussed in an earlier episode about his book, “Crossing the Chasm” - that breaking into any market is an aggressive act. And as such, Moore proposes a specific and consistent and testable strategy for moving from one market to the next with success. And testing and entering a new market is often a much more simple exercise than many realize…especially if you have the alternative capital – SDRs – to invest in it. It is through your SDR team, after all, that is the means by which you're going to identify the ripeness and opportunity that exists in a new market.  With their number one job to be an instrument of market exploration and their number two job to be an instrument of market expansion. That’s why, in essence, the mighty cold call is the essence of this entire market domination thing. Namely, can you hire and train and coach your SDRs to speak empathetically enough to get the prospect to trust them enough in 30 seconds and be curious enough that this curiosity can be transformed into commitment, and that this commitment will turn into the action of actually showing for the meeting. In this episode, we explore the power of deploying SDRs…how, how many, and when…and why the more markets our SDRs can validate, the less our chances are of going out of business. This is the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode, “How Many SDRs does it take to Change a Lightbulb?” ----more---- ---------------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is sponsored by ConnectAndSell and Uncommon Pro 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Speaker 4 (04:03): The cold call today, done by an SDR who believes in the potential value of the meeting, for the human being that they're talking to, in the downside case where there's no business to be done ever, not just today, but ever. That cold call done by that SDR is the equivalent of the assignment of a territory to a good rep in the past. So my unit of go-to-market the past was get a good rep with a Rolodex, and give them a territory. Why the Rolodex? Because the rep is referenceable within the Rolodex. So it's like, "Why not?" Right? I get myself a market. What's a market? The rep's territory. That was the brilliant act of the past. No longer even interesting. The brilliant act of right now, is one cold call by one competent SDR into a list that is a hypothesis about a self-referencing market. Why is it so important? Because without it, without that cold call, we can't have a shot at getting enough information back and forth between us and somebody else to get them to come to a meeting where they might confess their desperation. It's a chain of value that goes along. And if you break that chain by refusing to do the cold call, you cannot dominate a market by starting with a list. And you have to rely on your product being magic. And occasionally products are magic and it fools everybody. So SaaStr is all about. The whole SaaStr thing, go to SaaStr. What is it really about? Let's all go into a room that may or may not have dart boards in it. Let's close our eyes and throw the darts really, really fast. And every once in a while, we'll hear a little satisfying thump and somebody will say, "Bull's-eye." That's it. That's it. And then they dress it up with a bunch of words about what you might be doing. But the right thing to do is, to go find a room where there's just a couple of you in there, turn the lights on. But you still can't see the [inaudible 00:06:13] and you're not that good at throwing darts. And here's the dart board I'm going after and go, "Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop" With good technique. And eventually you'll get a bull's-eye. Darts are funny, they're magnetic. So now future darts will tend toward the bull's-eye because they're attracted to the first one. And over time you get a big cluster there, and now you can blindly throw darts, and they're all going to go in there. At which point the right thing to do is find another room. So it's a different world we live in because of software. Because everything is software now, whether it says it's software, it doesn't say it software, it's all software. And software moves liquidly through the world. And I need to overcome the challenge that it appears to be good for everything. So this brings you to the next thing, which is when somebody says... I have one today, by the way, there's a test drive we're doing today with a company. They do root cause analysis, training, and software. And what do they say right there on their website? "This can be applied in any domain." Therefore they're going to stay small, and be a consulting business. Because as soon as you say it's for everything, it's for nothing. Speaker 5 (07:24): As soon as you say it's for everything, it's for nothing. And so many businesses fall into that. Speaker 4 (07:28): Yeah. Speaker 5 (07:29): Or worse, they'll do that in the VC pitch. What's the application, what's the use case? "Oh, any market whatsoever." Yeah. Speaker 4 (07:35): And even worse, VCs will encourage it. I've got somebody in my CEO group, has this incredibly powerful technology, but they apply to trading, high-frequency trading. It's a nuclear weapon for high-frequency trading. It's a way of turning software into hardware. Reliable, by pushing a button, it turns software into hardware that executes with a thousand times less latency. I'm sure there's other domains for it. The VCs looked at it and went, "Gee, that's a little narrow, just trading. Show us that you have more imagination that you can apply it to other things." So the poor entrepreneur looks at it and goes, "Oh, I better go develop some of that stuff." Okay. Well, what's the biggest thing that shows the most imagination? Smart cities. Can you imagine selling a smart city? I can't even conceive of what you would do. Who would you approach? [crosstalk 00:08:28] these smart cities? Speaker 5 (08:30): The sales process alone would bankrupt the company. Speaker 4 (08:37): Exactly, [inaudible 00:08:37] VC. Speaker 5 (08:37): You're talking three years. Speaker 4 (08:38): Yeah. Three years to get the first proper meeting, and then God knows what's going to happen. It's an opaque. So anyway, so to come back to all this, what's interesting to me and the talk that I'm now giving over and over is this: way over here is strategy, and we used to execute strategy by M&A, because you buy the territories, and you buy the product lines. It's wonderful, right? Speaker 5 (09:02): Yep. Speaker 4 (09:03): I bought another company. I'm in the Western US, they're in the Eastern. It's more common. The buyers in the East, somebody has done a similar thing in the West, and you buy them. You get all the territories. Yay. It's wonderful. It's just the coolest thing in the world. That used to work, right? How do I do that in a world where it's now software, my territories all overlap, the geography doesn't mean anything. What am I doing? And then how do I compete with private equity, which doesn't have to integrate. Their risk of failure in private equity is very low. My risk of failure when I buy a company and integrate it into mine is essentially 90%. So private equity spends 10 cents on the dollar for the same product, once risk adjusted. So they don't even have to have more money than me. Then they want machine that's looking for them all the time, so they see all the good stuff, and I'm an amateur part-time guy with my little Corp Dev group, going out, looking for what they can get. You just can't compete with that shit man. You can't. And every example that says you can is a false example, that's the false positive. "Oh, look, that one worked for so-and-so." Well, you're not in there. You don't know what really is going on. It's probably a mess. It's probably not working they're just dressing up because they don't want to look like a failure. There you are with strategy. Got to take more markets. Why? Because my market that I'm dominating now will eventually be subject to either competitive or secular forces. Probably secular change of technology or changing economy. And I will be unable to cover all my overhead from the gross profit flow of that market. If I'm down to one. This is that game of risk where you don't want. Speaker 5 (10:49): I've been there. Speaker 4 (10:51): So eventually I'm going to lose, but at least I'm alive now. If my number is zero, I got another problem. So going back to your original question, what do you do first? Find a market that you currently dominate, and ask yourself what the gross profit flow is off that, and how big your company could be. That's contingency plan to shrink to that size if you ever need to. Speaker 5 (11:14): There you go. So that's the triage that I have to do. I may have to cut off a limb or two to save the whole body. If I find myself in that position, where listen, I'm not growing. I'm growing 10 to 12% a year, minimally. Whereas my competitors are getting noisier, my sales reps, my SDRs are running into that more and more. I thought I had a head start and I blew my head start. I blew my capital on initiatives, or marketing, or websites that don't mean anything. Speaker 4 (11:44): SDR teams calling people they shouldn't be talking to. False top of the funnel. You're top of the funnel should be this big around, because it's like, "We're going after this." They go, "No, talk to everybody." "Why?" "Because we ran out of people to talk to you." "What?" And we have the team. The team is now the factory. When you hit it directly, the SDR team plays the role of the factory. That is they spend money, but they don't produce anything. They don't produce a product. Speaker 5 (12:10): But that's a fundamental error, is that the top of the funnel with a company that has SDRs needs to be as narrow as possible, not as broad as possible. Speaker 4 (12:19): And the tip needs to be the smallest possible. Speaker 5 (12:24): And the smallest possible. Speaker 4 (12:24): I mean, this is kind of why we're in business. We let you run that SDR team. Like we won't put this in the book who it is, but we can say it here. (Bleep) They're using an STR team of 11 to take the entire (Bleep) services market, which is projected to be a trillion dollar market. They're smart. If you just did the math on that, instead of you have to talk to, your SDR team would be, it'd be the same size as (Bleep) is going to be, which is 450 people. The difference between carrying 11 people and 450 people is not a difference of size. It's a difference in time. Speaker 5 (13:01): Yeah. Speaker 4 (13:02): You're a radically different company. This is what happened, in addition to everything else to... What was that insurance company that everybody loved so much out of Silicon Valley, they were going to revolutionize the... I can't even remember their names. Are they still in business? I talked to the guy who was going to Phoenix to hire 300 people. And I asked him, "Would you like to get the job done with 20?" Announcer (14:12): And he said, "No, the VCs have told me my job is to hire 300 people." Speaker 5 (14:17): Well, there's currency in large teams for these companies. Look at the Silicon Valley model, we see at Chris here in Phoenix. When [inaudible 00:14:26]. You have companies, obviously this is off the record, but you see companies like (Bleep) and (Bleep). As these companies, they get all this capital and they grow the footprint. And (Bleep) ultimate downfall was they tried to go into show many markets their sales, their SDRs, were working in hallways and three to a desk calling people from LinkedIn, sourcing people from everywhere, just trying to get... And they were poorly trained. They didn't pass their licensure. And it was one thing after another and it just kind of fell apart. So they didn't have a narrow scope out of the gate. They just wanted to cross that chasm, and parachute airdrop to the other side, by thinking, we're just going to throw cannon fodder at it. And that's exactly what led to their downfall. Speaker 4 (15:16): Yeah. They ran good slight twitch, which was they had not had the experience of the relationship between the rate of regulatory compliance as needed, that is the creation of people who are allowed to sell, and their behavior in the marketplace, to the market's demand. They didn't understand that. They just made it up. It was like draw a line on a graph. And then when you're off by a little, you're carrying this huge weight. It's like building a factory for a product you don't know that anybody needs. You're deploying capital, and the capital is going to... Speaker 5 (15:49): Yes. Speaker 4 (15:50): And your ability to get rid of it fast is pretty limited. It's where what's above the line actually plays the role of overhead. If I don't apply the steel to make the car, I don't have to pay for the steel. The excess that I happen to have an inventory, my buffer, is my risk. That's all I've got. And I can, I can sell it. I can salvage it out. I can sell it to somebody else at 40 cents on the dollar, 20 cents on the dollar, or whatever. So I am only liable for the net, times the time it's going to take me to offload this when I realize that I don't need it for production. We don't execute with that discipline on the top of the funnel sales process. We don't treat those people like a bunch of steel that's sitting there in inventory for cars that it turns out nobody wants for our Edsels. Speaker 5 (16:35): Right. Speaker 4 (16:37): We don't do it. We kind of do it like this, "Well, I guess that didn't work." Speaker 5 (16:42): Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Well, I think a couple of things as we're getting to the top of the hour. So I think next time let's continue to explore how do I unscrew this light bulb? How do I reverse these effects of aging? I think that's a good exercise because that that'll give people hope that I don't have to just start a new company. That's like, "I don't have to take apart all the Legos. If I missed a step. I can create something still pretty sensible out of the legal pieces that are already built." Speaker 4 (17:17): Exactly. And I think this is a beautiful thing that you can really do that's so cool. And this is actually why we're in business again. It's what you can do is you have liquidity if you have SDRs. SDRs look like capital in a whole bunch of funny ways. One of which is if they're good, they're liquid. So the time it takes to ramp an SDR to sell the same product into a new market, is zero days. Because they're not selling the product, they're selling the meeting, and the meeting is a consistent product. It may be that the three things that somebody takes out of a meeting in the new market are subtly different, but the SDR only has to believe in the potential value of the meeting. They're not even going to get into its feature set. The belief is within them. So if you have good SDRs, and you keep the numbers down, when you realize you don't need them anymore in order to dominate your current market. You're already dominating it and now it's time to get a second one. Because dominating two markets, your chance of failure is one fourth. Dominating three markets, your chance of failure is one ninth. It goes with the square of the number of markets that you dominate. If you dominate five markets, your chance of business failure is one twenty-fifth of where you are when you're dominating one market. It's kind of like Metcalfe's law of the value of a network, but this is just math. You're probability of failing for... Now I'm going to make an assumption here. The assumption is that your financial buffer is sufficient to withstand say 95% of the secular horrors that you might run into in some reasonable period of time. The time it would take to acquire additional capital. But your gross profit flow from dominated markets will continue in downturns. They are your actual buffer against a recession or anything else. Nobody ever goes out on business because the market that they're dominating with a legitimate post chasm offering, mind you, not a pre-chasm thing that's dressed up like post chasm, but a real post chasm offering. It is hard to go out of business. You might find yourself at the margin expanding more slowly, or not expanding at all, or whatever, but you can shrink your overhead. You don't really need it for that much. So, when you look at it, the number one thing you want to do, as soon as you find what market you truly dominate today, is to find one that you have a shot at dominating and reallocate your SDR resources only. The best of them, the very best, maybe two or three or whatever, to going over into that market with a message, and finding out if you can dominate that market. What we do, this is the Connect and Sell magic, and that should take a week. Speaker 5 (20:07): Hmm. Speaker 4 (20:08): So that's your response to unscrewing the light bulb is, find out if you can make the light bulb turn at all, then ignore the light bulb, and take that hand off of it, and go find out if there's a light bulb you can screw in and the room next door. And first you got to get a ladder, that's your STRs, and if you can get up there and reach it and go, "Ooh, look the pitch of the screws about the same. And I think this is electricity. I think we'll be good." Then after just turning it a couple of times, you go, "Oh, we can do this. We can get this light bulb all the way in. We're good." Right? But if you just sit there in the other room and you keep unscrewing it, seeing whether a different one fits and all of that. Well that rooms only that room, it comes with risk. It's actually a simple, simple program. Now when you have huge bloated SDR teams, you can't actually reallocate them. You don't even know who's good. When you have SDR teams whose purpose is to incubate AEs, you're really screwed, because your SDR team is the means by which you're going to identify the new market. The next market, the one that's going to reduce your risk by 75%, your risk of business failure. So it better be an SDR team that does it like it means it. Speaker 5 (21:20): Versus a temporary, stop holding bin, AE and probationary period before I move forward, that's a position in and of itself that has value in and of itself. Inherent in itself in the whole cog. It's a cog in this entire wheel to market dominance. Speaker 4 (21:36): It is in fact the true spear point without which you cannot dominate a market. You need to have the SDR function. If you embedded into your AEs, they need to be extraordinarily disciplined, and you have to motivate them appropriately so that the future is important to them. One of the beauties of an SDR team is they can keep setting appointments for people you've talked to before. They don't mind. But you got to pay them for the appointments. You can't pay them for the sales. That's not their job. That's not their job, morally, that's not my point. It's not their job, their role in your survival is to be the shock troops who can go in and determine that there is a market here. Once you've determined there is a market you can apply resources to dominating. It turns out those same troops can go and do that next thing, which is get the discovery meetings. Speaker 5 (22:29): And the point if I paid them on the sale versus the meeting, it's not one customer or a handful of top customers are not going to get me to market dominance. And so what I'm shooting for is off. I need numbers. I don't need dollars necessarily. The numbers will produce a dollar. I like that, that's great. Speaker 4 (22:51): This is a new chapter we didn't even think about. And I'm glad we came to it, which is, there was a chapter in here, the mission critical role of the professional SDR. And this isn't a matter of taste, which it tends to be like, "Well, I kind of liked to have SDRs that turn into AEs because otherwise I have to recruit AEs." Really you can't... Okay, so you're saying their job is unimportant, but when their job is not done, you can't explore markets. STRs number one job is to be an instrument of market exploration. Their number two job is to be an instrument of market expansion through the production of meetings where trust can actually grow. Between the AE, not the SDR, but between the AE, there's a transfer of trust. I have a conversation with you and I get you into a meeting with Jonty. Your trust ends up being between you and Jonty. You forget me, the SDR, which is great. I'm fungible, I'm liquid. So I can be used to have another conversation. My skill is to get you to trust me enough in 30 seconds and be curious enough, that that curiosity will turn to commitment and the commitment will turn to the action of showing up to the meeting. That's my job. I'm spinning in a little 32nd cycle. And when you try to catch me and stop me, I break free. That's my objection handling. And eventually I drill just far enough into your heart that you go, "Okay, I'll take the meeting." Because you like me a little bit and you're curious. And I believe in the value of the meeting and you hear that in my voice. That's my job. As an SDR, I need to repeat that little duty cycle, 30 times a day. And nothing else. So people in the SDR world say often, "Oh, the SDR should be held accountable for the sale." How is that? Well, they should be picking the good ones. Oh, so that we don't actually have to make a list that's our market. We'll let the SDR make up the market. And that's another chapter, which is, are you letting your SDRs do your marketing, your market analysis? Because that's the standard. The standard is we don't really have a list that we believe is the market. We have this thing, we call an ICP, which we derive through argument, internal argument. We talk to each other endlessly. And then the ICP, our Ideal Customer Profile, we turn it into a list, or we turn it into search criteria or whatever. We do a bunch of stuff. This is the modern thing also, do everything because it might produce something. Swing at every pitch. Don't just use the bat, take your hand and wave it at it, reach back and take the catcher's mitt, and throw it at the pitcher, just do everything. Because something might work. Speaker 5 (25:40): Because of the pressure of the overhead. Because I have a warehouse full of good that I need to get out on the street, and I need to turn them into cash as quickly as possible. Speaker 4 (25:48): Yeah. And the irony is they're not proper inventory. Speaker 5 (25:54): Yeah. Speaker 4 (25:55): They're actually supposed units of future demand. It's business run backwards. Software is eating the world. Okay. So fine. Just recognize software's eating the world and we have to make one simple adjustment. We can't use territories as markets anymore. The Rolodex no longer means anything. We have to actually do the work upfront to make the list that is our potential market. And then with discipline, call into that list with zero qualification. We must not qualify otherwise we take the signal that would come up, the negative signal, which is these don't belong in the list and we would hide it from ourselves. We need to know if our list is any good, but we don't need to be rigorous about making sure we don't talk to the wrong people. It's okay. Talk to the wrong people. It's a cost. You should talk to about 15% of the wrong people so that we know we're talking to all the right people, because we're trying to find the one who's desperate enough to buy early. And if we fail to explore it all because we get all picky about it. Well, my AEs don't like talking to those people. It's a waste of their time. Well, sorry, but this is a market exploration machine that's going to turn into a market exploitation machine and it's not about you, Billy Bob. But we pay them like it is about them. When they bitch about this I just say, "Let me just remind you of something. Take a look at your paycheck and ask this question. How much of that is my base?" Because whatever chunk of that is your base, you owe the company that proportion of that work 100%. Speaker 5 (27:30): Yeah. I tried- Speaker 4 (27:31): That's my work. You're doing that for me. Speaker 5 (27:34): Certain things you get paid a base for, and there's certain things that you get commission for. Speaker 4 (27:37): And you don't get to go like, "Hey, no I'm paid on commission. I'm coin-operated." Really? Take zero salary. See if I'll take you on as a contract salesperson. I may or may not. Speaker 5 (27:49): Yeah. Speaker 4 (27:50): It's a new discussion. Speaker 5 (27:55): I like that.  

The classic book, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, is a manifesto, a field manual, and sales’ version of Dr. Spock’s book on “company rearing” for new entrepreneurs…all in one. To level set for a brief moment – and Googling an image of Dr. Moore’s chasm graph may be helpful for the episode here - marketers have traditionally identified different kinds of B2B tech buyers: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and finally the Laggards. The traditional model assumed that, in the lifespan of a product, the market is first dominated by the innovators, then the early adopters etc. down the line. This model implies a level of inevitability in the flow-through of one of these categories from another to another…as your business continues. Good in theory but not so easy in practice. The reality of entering and competing for markets today, gaps exist between the categories in this model that are large enough to derail the most promising startups as they transition from one category of customers to the next. And the biggest gap Moore writes about is the one between Early Adopters and Early Majority. This is where both bags of money and companies go to die. Because the GoTo market & sales strategies that win deals in the Early Adopters group, won’t necessarily work so well for the Early Majority group. Instead, you may find yourself at the bottom of a valley looking up at an el Capitan-like sheer vertical wall of market climbing ahead of you. The sales team by your side that did well in the early stage of capturing innovators and early adopters now find themselves often overmatched and underequipped by the challenge and technical nuances of a market wall this big. Since it is vastly different market types, moving from early adopters to early majority requires new tools, new approaches, and a lot of new thinking. So what is the new thinking? In this episode, I ask Chris about the simple differences in the type of team and skills and techniques you need to climb this wall and continue moving down Moore’s market path. Building trust is the core requirement – and without understanding how and why you need to manufacture it to scale this wall, you’ll be left floundering and eking for survival with other amateur but well-intentioned climbers at the lower reaches of this meager market wall. So once again welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode, “All dead companies are equally uninteresting.” ----more---- --------------------------------------- Market Dominance Guys is sponsored by ConnectAndSell and Uncommon Pro 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below:   Corey Frank (00:49): The classic business book, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, is a manifesto. It's a field manual and it's a sales version of Dr. Spock's book on company rearing for new entrepreneurs, all in one. And to level set for a brief moment, googling an image of Dr. Moor's graph may be helpful for our episode here today. But marketers have traditionally identified different kinds of B2B tech buyers. You have the innovators through the early adopters, through the early majority, the late majority, and then finally, the laggers. The traditional model assumed that in the lifespan of a product, the market is first dominated by the innovators and then the early adopters, et-cetera, down the line. And this model implies a level of inevitability in the flow through of one of these categories from another to another as your business continues. Certainly good in theory but not so easy in practice as many of us can attest to. Corey Frank (02:04): The reality of entering and competing for markets today, gaps exist between the categories in this model that are large enough to derail the most promising startups as they transitioned from one category of customers to the next. And the biggest gap that Dr. Moore writes about is the one between the early adopters and the early majority. This is where both bags of money and companies go to die. Because the go to market and sales strategies that win deals in the early adopters group, won't necessarily work so well for the early majority group. Instead, you may find yourself at the bottom of a valley looking up at an El Capitan sheer vertical wall of market climbing that is ahead of you. The sales team by your side that did so well in the early stage of capturing innovators and early adopters, now may find themselves over-matched or under equipped by the challenge and technical nuances of a market wall of this big. Corey Frank (03:11): Because since it is vastly different market types that you're after, moving from early adopters to early majority requires new tools, new approaches and a lot of new thinking. And so what is that new thinking? In this episode, I ask Chris about the simple differences in the type of team and skills and techniques you need to climb this wall and continue moving down Moore's market path. Building trust is the core component and without understanding how and why you need to manufacture it to scale this wall, you'll be left floundering and perhaps eating for survival with other amateur but well intentioned climbers, at the lower reaches of this meager market wall. So once again, welcome to the Market Dominance Guys. And this week's episode entitled, "All dead companies are equally uninteresting". Chris Beall (04:21): 8.5% of your market is in-market this quarter. So if sales is the means by which we engage the whole market, because we have to have human conversations in order to get trust. And we have to have trust in order to have somebody trust us more than they'll trust themselves, and until they trust us more than they'll trust themselves, they won't buy anything. They won't buy a damn thing until that happens. So we've got to engage the market with regard to how we deal with its future, which has always at any given points, 11/12 of the available market. If you look at it on a per quarter basis 11/12 of the market is out of market right now. We can't engage them with advertising and all that. That doesn't cause them to be loyal to us compared to somebody else who might choose to engage them with human conversations. Chris Beall (05:10): So the vulnerability you have in market, even if you're the natural dominant player, you have huge vulnerability if you do not explicitly use sales as your means to engage the 11/ 12 of the market that is not in market right now. There's no other means to do it. And therefore discovery conversations, 11/12 of them have to be about the future. And they're simply for the purpose of establishing a trust relationship that someday you'll harvest. Next quarter, the quarter after, the quarter after. So, it's a multiplicative factor in market dominance. So if I've got the goods, I've got the inner reference ability, my delivery is good and all that good stuff, I still got the problem with time. And we compensate our salespeople as though we don't have a problem with time. As though their job is to harvest as much as they can this quarter but then who's going to take care of the future. Chris Beall (06:06): I know how we used to do it, simple. We assign a sales person to a territory, and if they're good they get to keep it long enough that they do this work. These territories and markets used to look like each other. When products were geographically constrained in the sales approach, territories and markets looked like each other because the market was a circle of trust. And so the sales person, look at the classic field sales person from 25 years ago. What did they really do with their day? They didn't run around and just try to get deals. That would've been crazy. They knew that there were folks who wouldn't buy this quarter. And they talked to them. They allocated their time between the present and the future sufficiently that they could dispose of the inventory mostly through discounting and they could get a future that got easier and easier and that's why it was so wonderful, if you're a successful salesperson with a rich territory. Chris Beall (06:59): Those people that have big houses. Their kids go to nice schools and this is actually the number one mechanism by which folks from I'll say, lower and middle class backgrounds in America gained wealth and entered the monied class, by money I mean the top five or 10%. Not the top half of 1% that tends out near the factor. It was simple, somebody with the personality, the drive, the willingness to learn and whatever got a territory. So they had like a little company. They would go out and use whatever it was to dominate that territory. You ever met a successful salesperson who owned a territory 20 years ago, he owned a territory for something, tires, or feedstock or whatever it was, who didn't actually have a pretty comfortable professional life once they got that coin? Chris Beall (07:50): Market dominance is, so we have the wonderful example of it. It just doesn't happen to fit the modern world where our territories being geographic doesn't make any sense anymore. And maybe even being aligned around industry sometimes doesn't make sense, although it usually does. So we actually have a wonderful model that tells us how to do this. And what did we do as people who ran businesses? Make sure that our best highest potential territories, which were our markets actually are being serviced by somebody whose life is getting easier. And if we're going to go after a new one, we have a certain kind of rep that we put in there if we really care about it. And we all knew this, everybody knew those people ran businesses like this, and it's why sales got to sit outside the company. Because who cares what the relationship of all that is to the company? It's your role. Companies produce inventory. So now they can do it a different way. Corey Frank (08:47): I think just for the sake of capturing this is, many of the times when we chat, it's just so fricking obvious. It is like Occam's razor, it's right in front of you sometimes, but when you iterate it, it's so clear. And I see how many mistakes I've made in business, just by saying, I'm not running this play. Actually, why didn't I run this playbook, 20 years ago? So specifically when you say that the average product life cycle of a product rate is 12 quarters for three years. And at any given time, only 11/12 of the market is ready to buy. Chris Beall (09:25): 1/12. Corey Frank (09:28): Actually 1/12. And so the value of the discovery meeting like we started this conversation with is one of the potential topics is that sales leaders, CEOs, chief revenue officers, Sales reps, are shortsighted when they're trying to do the transactional model in, and of itself to call closes, where I SDR the call, and then I do the presentation or discovery, and if they don't buy, they're gone. And I miss out when I don't offer a valuable discovery call that is beneficial to the prospect, even though they're not buying because that's going to create an affinity for them to perhaps buy easier, or be more aware of my company down the road when their particular need matures enough to match with being in that quarter where I'm going to attack them now. Chris Beall (10:22): Yes. Corey Frank (10:23): So this is to review that, I get it I think, that's very helpful. Chris Beall (10:26): So in the nature of business products, nature of all products to some degree is, recency of purchase it has a radical effect on desire for another unit, especially from someone else. I buy a car, I'm not in the market for a car tomorrow. I'm a little bit more in the market for a car the next day, even though you can't notice it. And once I get out there about three years, I'm actually looking for a car. That's just the way it is. Most products, it's not the product life cycle, it's the replacement cycle for most products is around three years. Your mileage may vary, your product it might be four years or five years. If your product happens to be a power plant, maybe it's 20 years, but most products that we sell that we bother to have a sales force around it's about three years. Chris Beall (11:14): And when you think about what needs to happen in those three years, your goal within market is to become the trusted go-to person for everything about that problem. Not about your product, but about that problem. So as this individual company, they bought something, and now we're in quarter two, after that quarter three and quarter four, you need to be interacting with them, not heavily, but interacting with them, bringing them new stuff, bringing them new information. Not for the purpose of making them smart about your product, but just to use the asymmetry of information. You're the expert, you're the vendor. Vendors always know more than buyers about a problem, because you were immersed in that world and they're busy doing their own stuff. So that information and the renewal of trust, you know how trust works, right? You only have to be gone from somebody for a day, to have the trust start to decay for this weird reason, which is nothing more than lack of interaction. Chris Beall (12:24): You're not quite sure who that person is because they might have changed. So your deepest best friends when you get back together after 20 years, 10 years, five years, there's always this surprise, which is like, it's like we were never apart. If the trust factor didn't change, that wouldn't be a surprise. When we rediscover that person as the person that they became in our head, we're delighted. And we go right back up to where we were trust wise, but it actually shows us the trust you gave in your opinion, very silly, right? Well, these are strangers for crying out loud. Corey Frank (12:59): So the trust has a half-life dependent on each person then. Chris Beall (13:04): Exactly, and its cycle. And then you have another problem, the person you're dealing with, they themselves have a half-life. Chris Beall (13:57): So whoever it is that you're dealing with today, there's some probability that a different person is going to be responsible for that, it's the person best worth talking to. So you also got to keep re-engaging in order to just stay current with who, because you have to start from scratch again with these trust relationships. So your target company is going through their three year cycle to finally get to the point of being interested in buying a product to solve the problem that you solve. The individuals in there might change, so you have to keep up with that. Even if they stay the same, you've got to keep the trust relationship going. And the threshold is not to stay ahead of your competitors, although that's an absolute requirement, but the decision point requirement is you have to speed more trusted on this problem concerning this problem, than that person trust themselves. Chris Beall (14:51): The threshold for action in B2B as a buyer is I must trust the seller more than I trust myself. This is actually the core of the entire B2B conundrum. All of this other stuff is just math. The rest of it, you could compute, you could just throw it out there and compute the entire thing. But there's one part of it you can't compute, which is the radical risk especially as the purchase gets big, that a B2B buyer is taking in making a decision. Therefore your competitor and market at all times, your number one competitor at all times is no action. The younger, the market, that is the fewer of you guys are in there solving this problem, the bigger the power of Mr. Non-action, we're not going to do anything. When Jeffrey Moore draws that curve, that beautiful bell curve with the chasm in it, the reason for the chasm, if you think about the chasm mathematically, it's kind of funny. What it says is, hey, when you get over there into, trying to get onto main street, you're trying to get out where folks buy because other folks bought, you're at the bottom. Chris Beall (16:05): I think what people do when they look at the chasm is go, well, I go up this and then I jump up, [inaudible 00:16:10] you go up this and you go down to zero revenue in market because your market's on the other side of the chasm. And now you come over and you have to spend your way up that vertical wall in order to [inaudible 00:16:23] the customer and spend your way up that vertical wall with sales effort, backed up by appropriate marketing communication to support the sale. And you've got to get somebody to trust you so much that they're going to buy without a reference. Chris Beall (16:40): That's a crazy hard thing to do. People look at this picture and they go, oh, there it is. I like this one with the yellow over here, because we can see the yellow. That should be flashing red actually. So here we are and we're starting to sell some stuff and these are early adopter lab. It sounds pretty good, look, we're growing sales, therefore we're growing what you talked about, which is the sales engine. Which plays the role of the factory that must have its inventory disposed of. But now it's inventory consists of nothing of value, except sales capacity that's learned how to sell in a different market of folks who are not referenceable, across the chasm. Just no referenceability crosses the chasm, it's like the blood, brain barrier. No referenceability crosses the chasm. Chris Beall (17:31): And so now we're down in the chasm, a big, scary chasm. I always think this is drawn wrong, the chasm should be wider than the entire curve. And we get to go down there and we're on foot, in our canteen and we're shaking a gun and still have enough water in it. It's a lot like the bleached bones of folks that didn't make it, that's pretty bad. And then we get over here, and we have to take our imagination and go, oh, I'm at ground level when I start with the early majority, and I have to climb a vertical wall, that's this big. How do I do it? Well, does my vertical wall climbing team look a lot like the teams that sold to early adopters but a completely different reason? And are not referenceable at all across the chasm? Yikes. So this is your problem. Every market, you have to do this work. Every- Corey Frank (18:24): Is it a false positive that I happen to succeed with the earlier markets, or with my earlier product? And I get confident, I'm going to raise money off of that. Because, look at the success that I've had in this particular case here with the innovators, or the early adopters, not knowing that it's a false positive, and if I really want to go and dominate my market Chris Beall (18:51): Well, it is. It's not a false positive. You simply need to be careful how you interpret it and how you spend. And when you decide to cross the chasm, you have to see it as... So it's not a de novo activity, it's not like you didn't learn anything. Your early adopters, especially your visionary customer, the one that overpays you wildly, if you're smart and demands proprietary advantage, if they're smart. And if you're both smart, you go with that deal and you actually make a little company over there. That little yellow thing is actually a little company. It's a real, it's a business. It's a business whose purpose is to help somebody else dominate their market. That's its purpose. That is it sells competitive advantage for a living. And it might sell one unit or two units or eight units. Chris Beall (19:44): One is optimal. And the reason one is optimal is it's probably enough to force you to make your stuff work. Whatever your stuff is, doesn't actually work because it's not a whole product. It doesn't solve the whole problem. You haven't seen the whole problem yet. But if somebody is trying to use it for competitive advantage, they're going to beat the living daylights out of you until you make it work. And that's their job. And you have to extract as much money as possible from them because you're about to cross the chasm. Now you can use it as a demo for venture capital. You can go say, look at this demo. I have something that works and solves an actual problem. I don't understand the whole problem yet, but somebody was willing to pay me a fair amount to solve this problem for them. For them, it happens to show up as something that they can use for competitive advantage, but I believe there's another market this early majority over here, this thing to the right, that needs it to solve a broken mission, critical business process. Chris Beall (20:45): And that's a completely thing. And if you give me some money, I'm going to take my capability and what I've learned and build a new go to market from scratch over here using maybe some cool stuff that I could claim about these other guys, but they're not real references. That's, marcom. Use the fact that big co if they'll let me talk about it, the big co embraced my stuff, in order to impress and speak to folks in the early majority, but that's not why they're going to buy, they buy it because they're desperate. On the left side, they buy because they want to win, but let's ignore the innovators. The innovators buy because there are folks whose job is to figure out what's going on. What's coming next up. They're relevant, but not to this discussion. Chris Beall (21:34): The big challenge is this, when you build a sales team that assumes sales and marketing team and expenses around it, but assumes there no chasm, the chasm is going to be filled by either nothing, but as you die, or by venture capital or something like it, in which case given the true with the chasm, you lose control. If I'm a VC, I never have to worry about whether I gain control of companies, I just let them execute correctly, which they all do. It's a happy situation if I'm the money guy, and that's why the term sheets for venture capital are written essentially as salvage management documents. And the docs themselves, the corporate docs, when you actually do a round of financing and you read all the way through them, the big step, those series B financing, that's the one that normally looks most like this, just read through it and take a yellow highlighter. And when a sentence speaks to salvage, just highlight and then take it and put it up, and then just flip through it and go, okay, what was the point of all this? Chris Beall (22:41): Well, the point of all of this is we're going to have to salvage value out of this company, usually in the [crosstalk 00:22:46] that's the point of the damn thing. And why? Because when you try to fill the chasm with venture capital, it's tempting to keep your original sales force and your original sales approach that you used pre chasm, and just keep it and keep trying to make it work. It is truly, that's a wall and you're going to throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. Corey Frank (23:09): So I'm already donating your organs, doing a prenup and writing your will, right out of school. When you're at your most promising, and you have the highest zeal and the most intensity, oh, here's where your kidney's going to go. Here's your will. Chris Beall (23:26): And by the way, I think your dog might make pretty good dog food. It really, it's true. And it's not mean or anything. I think people just don't, they don't get what the nature of the beast is. The chasm is the nature of the beast. And it has teeth. If I really wanted to animate the chasm, it would be like that creature in Star Wars, the thing in the [inaudible 00:23:52], I don't know what that thing is called, but they would fall down there and it wasn't pleasant, right? Corey Frank (23:55): Well, Joseph Campbell and the cosmogonic cycle, the hero, there's a Harold, and there's a Coleen, and then there's a McGuffin and there's a guide, and there's always a false guide as well. And that guide will take you into the underworld. And sometimes you're not going to get out of the underworld until, and Joseph Campbell's wrote, you defeat your father or the nature of your father or the monster. And then you can come back into the real world armed with all this wisdom, and this glory, and this promise, and this potential. So it's funny how fact meets fiction here [crosstalk 00:24:30] Chris Beall (24:31): So what's so interesting to me about this, and this is why when I talk to people about it I say, look, your strategy, let's go all the way back to the beginning, your strategy has to include top, front and center, survival. All dead companies are equally uninteresting. They just are. In it to say well, we learned something and we failed, and all that, to me it's just ridiculous. Corey Frank (24:58): All cadavers are equally poor conversationalists. Chris Beall (25:03): And they compost, but that's about all you can do with them. You can't converse with them, you can compost them. So if you're trying to rotate or something, cadavers are great. But if you want to actually go for a walk with somebody, and when you get there, have two of you, you got to have living beings, right? So all dead companies are equally uninteresting, and therefore your number one imperative is survival. And this is actually the number one thing that venture capital does to companies, as they say, well, it's actually not, our number one imperative is that you produce some value that we can salvage in the nine out of 10 times, that we're going to be salvaging. We're running a boneyard over here, and I'm not going to show it to you, but if you pay attention, you would read it in the docs. Chris Beall (25:50): Why is that sentence there? If we all thought we were going to succeed, why is that sentence there? And the answer is, well, sometimes things go wrong. No, it's not true. They always go wrong in the same way. Every once in a while, a product offering is so oddly compelling to the early majority. They're so desperate that the sales force that you built pre chasm can actually sell post chasm. Chris Beall (26:16): I'll say that's an example of a product like Slack, Dropbox, or Salesforce that you actually could cross the chasm with your pre chasm sales team. But if you go back into Salesforce's history and see how close they came to going out of business, it was really, really close. And the reason is you take this expense you build, because you don't know how to get rid of it. And then you repurpose it to go after a real market. And you're really depending on the chasm being narrow and getting a [inaudible 00:26:50] effect where you could jump across it, because your product is so needed by somebody that they figure it out themselves and go, I actually don't care how much I trust you because I hate the situation I'm at. I'm an example for Salesforce. Chris Beall (27:05): So a guy named Kevin Stuffle will came to me in 2000, 2001. He was running my little inside sales team in Requisite Technology. We had our big field sales team about [inaudible 00:27:18], we've made a choice between Oracle and SAP for our enterprise system, including a CRM. We chose Oracle. Why? Because somebody thought they would influence Oracle to do a bigger deal with us even though SAP was paying us, say $20 million a year for two gold master CDs for source code. What can I say? Did they overreach? It's pretty common in business. This is not peculiar to this conversation. The overreach is pretty much the standard play for most ambitious CEOs. If I do this, then I can get this. And we see, I'll go back to the game of risk. There are people who play risk like that. And the overreach is what kills them. There's the Russia strategy, hold the Russia that kills you by being divulged to death. Chris Beall (28:00): There's the overreach in which you put that amoebic harm out there, and then it gets cut off. And it's like, oh, [inaudible 00:28:06] so we did that. And then this guy, Kevin Stuffle comes to me one day and he says, Hey, Chris, is it okay if I try something new with regard to how we do our customer tracking and stuff? I said, what are you talking about? He says, well, there's this thing called Salesforce out there, and they have this way that you can try it for free. And I said, well, you do you want to try it for free? He says, well, I already did that actually. And I actually have all the data for my team loaded into it. We're using it every day and it's really easy to use. And this Oracle thing, we're a year into implementation, and as far as I can tell, we're no closer to having a running system. Chris Beall (28:46): So I brought this up in a day, time to value, by the way is a wonderful thing. What was I desperate for? Some way of knowing whether we were cutting ourselves into a real market, because we were a company that did a spectacular job of extracting money pre chasm. It's not very often you get more than a hundred million dollars out of your pre chasm sales activity with one sales rep. That's pretty good. It's not good for going to market, but it's good from a financing standpoint. And it does your product work standpoint. Chris Beall (29:17): And I happened to be the rep and I sold four deals. I sold Granger, in this order, Corporate Express, little tiny deal of $250,000, Granger mixed deal, $10 million of investment, A million and a half dollars was source code, $2 million of engineering services, Oracle a million dollars flat, one day, one check, you get the code. And then SAP, 15 million, 17 and a half, 20, 22 and a half, and 25 over five years with unlimited top end and more products to sell, all pre chasm. So how much sales team do you need to do that? If you put together a plan, most people would go, hey, I think I'm going to need to have all this stuff. What you need is, it's four assassinations, you need exactly one ninja. The number of ninjas for four assassinations is one. Chris Beall (30:11): And if you have zero ninjas, it's hard to do very many assassinations. That's one way of doing pre chasm. And it works well under certain circumstances where you really have got something radical. So there's a deal you can do that involves source code, and exclusivity, and IP rights and engineering services. It's a very easy deal to do. If you don't like venture capital, and you have [inaudible 00:30:36] you've got real technology, you go do that as your pre chasm deal. And you avoid the problem because you don't have your factory in the form of all these people, access DRS and this, that, and the other thing, you just got your Ninja over here, and then you're a little heavy on delivery, but that's okay because your pre chasm customers will pay two and a half times market, not cost, but market for delivery services because they're seeking competitive advantage. Chris Beall (31:04): They like the fact that it's expensive. That's good for them. And they like the fact that they're sucking it up and others can't have it. That's wonderful for them. So say you fail to do that deal. So now you want to go after it more conventionally, which to me is like crazy, but what the heck? So you want to go after it with a sales team, a pre chasm sales team. Now your issue is that sales team, when you come up to the edge of the chasm is all expense and boom, no revenue. And they wonder why is it getting harder to sell? Well, it's because that early adopter market is small and not self referencing. It's not actually a market. It's anti self referencing. When I sell to Granger, I can't sell to Graybar for competitive. If I sell a tool to Granger, I can sell it to Graybar. If I sell a weapon to Granger, I can't sell it to Graybar. Chris Beall (31:59): This is actually our company's problem. We sell weapons. By the very nature of what we sell, we sell a weapon. And so it's not particularly referenceable for two reasons. One is it works really, really well. And therefore people don't want to talk about it. And two it's, well, if that guy is using it, I want something better. In the early market before the pre chasm market, before the chasm, all you can sell is enlightenment, which is to the innovators, and weaponry. And you sell weaponry by choosing sides. When you cross the chasm, you sell tools. Tools that solve broken mission, critical business processes, and you sell them packaged as a whole, so the problem actually ends up being solved. Chris Beall (32:53): And once you do that, it's a simple process. Make a list, call everybody on the list, find out who's desperate enough to buy from you, even though you don't have any references in that market. Make that bridge, the mini chasm. Bridge the mini chasm with human trust. The mini chasm is between the guy who's so desperate he needs your product and his feelings about whether you're just selling to them or whether you're helping him, and you've got to bridge that. And you bridge it with this huge amount of information, about 600,000 bits just to get started in a 30 minute conversation. A 32nd conversation, by the way, it's got 600,000 bits. A 30 minute conversation has got millions and millions, of millions of bits. That's why discovery is the essence of the game. Because in discovery, you can have so much information go back and forth, not the information about your product, the information about you. Chris Beall (33:52): Can you trust me? And now if you have a need right now, well, you'll buy right now. Might I have to discount? Yeah, because I don't have the references. What's the purpose of the discount, to make the sale? Kind of, but not so the rep can get the commission so that you can get your first reference customer in market. So by the way, Jeff Moore taught all of this years ago, it's been a seriously ignored as though there's another course that people take called how to ignore the fact of the chasm and all of its consequences. I think there's a lot of PhDs being awarded in that particular field. Corey Frank (34:30): So whether you believe in gravity is irrelevant, because it believes in you. Chris Beall (34:34): It believes in you. [crosstalk 00:34:38] And this is the unified field theory of modern business, it's not true back in the past. When I could assign a sales person to a territory, I had something to sell. I can sell it at a discount if need be, I'm disposing of inventory, completely different universe. All business processes and structures and how we do accounting, how we finance businesses, all that's built on a paradigm that is no longer relevant. Those products are no longer interesting. What's interesting is software is eating the world. The reason it's eating the world is software is liquid, and travels at the speed of light. So it can go around the world and find out what's good to eat. It's like a swarm of locusts. Software's always going to have a meal. Now, the question is, are you going to make any money off it? And the answer is, well, you better shrink down your goals at the beginning in order to be able to dominate. And when you do dominate, this is coming all the way back to why does the cold call the essence of this entire thing? Speaker 1 (35:48): You've been listening to Market Dominance Guys Radio sponsored by ConnectAndSell, right here in the Funnel Radio channel for at-work listeners like you.  

If you want to dominate your market, here’s an inexpensive tip: Head down to your local Goodwill and buy a used version of the classic board game Risk… It seems that you don’t need AI, Machine Learning sims, or dozens of third-party load-tested and validated forecast models to predict how your business will perform in the next 24 months. Sometimes you just need to remember how you played a game that many of you probably haven’t picked up since you were 12.  Risk was a board game that taught many of us about basic market dominance…each player sits and views a map of the world where each player has a finite number of armies placed randomly in a territory. The goal is to budget – and risk – your armies to conquer your neighbor’s landmass – while also leaving some troops to defend the territories you already have won from attacks that soon come on other fronts. The player who conquers all the armies on the map is the winner.  No less of a result than we’ve talked about on these episodes.  Consider that at the outset of every turn you simply ask yourself, “What am I going to risk in order to boot somebody out of a territory, so that I can dominate it from which I can launch another campaign when I'm strong enough to dominate and adjacent territory?”  It’s the same theory in business – except deploying real dollars and resources vs placing your surplus of plastic pieces in Greenland (never a good idea).  If you and your leadership team just played Risk all day long, I guarantee you will see traits and ideas and lessons to be applied to your current business.  Because this math and exercise in risk and reward – and you’ve really got to do that kind of fundamental math if you haven’t already done so – is kind of like the game theory of business that must be done before we can figure out the real role of sales. So let’s jump right into this episode of the Market Dominance Guys entitled – Parker Brothers gave me my MBA.  ----more---- Market Dominance Guys is produced by ConnectAndSell and UncommonPro 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (03:24): Two states of a company that you were talking about is either they're dominating at least one market or they're dominating none, which is very binary or they're in the process of dominating one or dominating none. But I think it would be helpful today maybe to spend a little time talking about, "How do I do a reset? I'm not dominating my market. I'm getting my ass kicked. Is it time to hang up the spurs because I already lost? Or is this an irreversible condition? Is this a reversible condition? What are the steps that I would have to take as a business to start my path back to market dominance? Or is it the company that if they do this correctly, who are dominant, will never have any ankle biters again?" But what's a company to do that finds themselves asleep at the wheel, wakes up after their C round and realizes that, I'm only going to grow by 12% this year. IEB does only going to grow by about 4% this year. I'm in this purgatory, where, what do I do? Do I double down? Do I re-engineer my sales department? Do I re-engineer my marketing department? Do I introduce new products? Do I try to look for a strategic M and A record and pull the plug? So we'll be talking about that because as in session four and five, we talked a lot about discovery and how discovery is a destination strategy and it's just a step to get to the next step. And that reps need to believe in this discovery meeting in and of itself. And which is also an interesting point Chris, is that most sales methodology is actually, I take that back. Most sales organizations, sales managers, if you're a new rep, the teaching that I give you performing the discovery meeting is to get me the answer to these four questions. Chris Beall (05:20): Yes. Corey Frank (05:21): I don't care how you do it, but get me the answer to these four questions. So they're not even taught that this should be a benefit to the prospect, they're taught that this is you're a blood letter and you need to extract this blood at any cost, and I need these four pieces of who besides yourself makes the decision, when you make a decision, as you had said. I'm only asking questions here to get the buyer into this cul-de-sac that they know they're trying to be shuffled into and they're playing the game, and who's to say that they're going to give you honest information. So we can talk a little bit about that too in addition to how do you reverse it? Why are people, why are managers trying to teach this way that this isn't a discovery meeting, that you only need these four pieces of information and the job of the discovery call isn't necessarily a sale it's market dominance to talk about? So in and of itself, the mindset has to shift for the sales reps, where that is a product that has value inherit in and of itself. Even if you don't get the sale, you've moved the needle to helping raise awareness, increase information, increase a market branding in the market itself even if you don't get the sale. That's a tough equation for a lot of sales reps to solve in the binary world of did you get the sale or did you not? But even if you didn't get it today, you may get it later. So I think those are three broad topics we could cover today if you're game. Chris Beall (06:49): Sure. We could probably get a book out of each one of us. That's a really, each one is pretty big. Corey Frank (06:55): Where would you like to start? How to reverse the effects of aging and as a terminal? Why or how do we better coach as leaders our team besides just extracting the form bloodletting questions and how do you square the circle that this is a product in and of itself that says value inherent in and of itself, even if I don't get the sale. Chris Beall (07:16): Yeah, let's start with the big one, which is how do you reverse the effects of aging? That's very near and dear to my heart right now. Actually has been for about the last 25 years. So I like, for instance, I actually ran all the way to the Seattle sailing club yesterday, just because if you go out and run for a few hours every day, you will reverse some of the effects of aging. It's actually a pretty good example. It's a simple process. You run it every day, you run it long enough and it has an effect, and I think it's very similar to the issues around your aging position in a market. So I think most companies find themselves in exactly the situation you were talking about, which is they don't dominate any market, but they can't be sure. I think step one in the question of market dominance is, you need to discover the truth about whether you might be currently dominating market. It's easy to forget what a market is and a market is a set, which means it can always be expressed as a list of those companies that for your offering are inter-referencing. That is if you sell to one, you will lower your cost and risk associated with selling to all others in that set, that's the nature of a market. I don't know, markets are naturally bounded because you get to the edge where you find a company that will not be influenced by the sale of your offering to anybody in the set. That's the natural boundary. So it's entirely possible that you actually do dominate a market and you just don't know it. So that's number one is you've got to go find out what your current status actually is. Given that the relationship between the markets as natural entities, that is if you do the research and the analysis and ask yourself that inter referencing question, you get a list and who you actually sold to in the past. It's often somewhat rather coincidental mostly because sales itself is the means by which markets are dominated, and sales is very rarely aligned with markets, natural markets, real markets. And so what you do is you find yourself in three or four or seven or 31 markets or whatever, and if you were to make that list, which is a good exercise, what are all the markets oriented? What's the rule? Well, market is a list of those companies that are into referencing and you do it in a rigorous way so that you're not fooling yourself like, "Oh yes, of course," because Harry the pencil manufacturer bought from us then George, the grocer certainly is more likely to. That's the sales person's fantasy. But a proper analysis will show you generally that there is one market that you dominate. It's a funny situation. There's a reason you're still in business. I mean, you can actually flip the reasoning around. If you're still in business after a while you probably dominate a market, but you may not know what it is. You may not have been explicit about what it is. So step one is go make those lists and find out if you dominate a market because if you do- Corey Frank (10:26): If there's something that you're still good news, step one, you're still alive. Chris Beall (10:30): And if you want to reverse aging, the first thing you have to determine is that you're alive and aging. If you're not alive and aging, you probably can't do very much about your aging. Corey Frank (10:40): So we will create an algorithm and then if statement for all of this. I love that. Chris Beall (10:45): So that's step one, because, and the reason that's such an important step is, in the likely case where you'd find a market that may be small, that you dominate, you should ask yourself the question does the gross profit flow from that market support the entire overhead of the company. This is one of the glories of actually having a P and L that's set up correctly. Is that you can really go to your P and L and you're not allowed to cheat here. You can go in and be realistic. That is if your P and L has below the line expense items that properly are allocated to the sales function, or maybe this marketing function, or maybe marketing and specific product within market for this list support function. You can do some work there and say, okay here's my true overhead, but whatever your true overhead is, you have to ask yourself, the question, does the gross profit flow from my current dominated market, allow me to be a company of the size that I am? So having done that, you get an answer to that question, which is almost always no, because you bloated your overhead over time. By the way, if you have ventured in finance, you actually deliberately blooded you overhead like crazy because that's what venture capitalists ask you to do is just spend their money. They call it putting it to work because they have no more evidence that the money is doing a good thing. Other than that, it's going somewhere else. It's not stay here, and we certainly didn't give it to this company to have it sit in the bank. [inaudible 00:12:19] banks checking account offering is not what venture capitalists are looking to fill. They're hoping that money goes to work. It's actually a little bit of a silly idea, but it has some soundness to it. But anyway, it's how they work, and therefore venture finance companies tend to take on a lot of overhead and the answer is always, no, even if we dominate a market, we can't cover our overhead, but that's okay, because our marketing includes future venture capital. So you're on a path and the path is a different path where you say, well, I'm going to get this D round or this E round or whatever. But at some point that ends up being a below threshold question that is here. You have to either sell the company, which is actually the plan, or you have to shrink your overhead to match the gross profit flow from the markets that you are confident in, which always includes every market that you dominate. You got to do that math. It's the fundamental math the business must be done before we can figure out the future role of sales. This step is I would say this step is never done. Chris Beall (14:12): I mean, it's an obvious step, but it doesn't seem connected in folks' heads that you have to do this first because they see all the revenue as being reliable. But in fact, their revenues divided in two and therefore the gross profit flow is divided into two basic sets. One is the set of all profits from markets I dominated and therefore I can comfortably predict the future. I can forecast. So there's a relationship between market dominance and forecasting that's interesting. The entire sales forecasting process when carried out or the revenue forecasting process, not sales, but revenue forecasting process when carried out a year or more actually has a hidden assumption and that is that that revenue is forecastable. But non-market dominant revenue is not forecastable fundamentally because after all, you could have the dominant player decide to play a game in that market and throw you out. One of the reasons that you want to be the dominant player is it opens up a whole bunch of games such as, "Hey, we'll reduce our gross profit flow in here a little bit and price crush everybody else in this market, and then when they're gone, we'll enjoy it a little bit more." To the victor, will go the spoils. The fundamental nature of fighting when you spend in order to fight and you take risks. But when you do it from a dominant position, when I've got the aircraft carrier and you have the whatever it is, a little destroyer over there or whatever, I often will choose to fight just to get rid of you. I prefer to have an ocean that doesn't include you and your stupid destroyer. You can't do anything about it. This is the point. The point is when you're not the dominant player, if dominant player decides that you are a threat and they decide to spend the energy time, money, whatever, to attack you, they have a play they can run that you can't play unless your pockets are infinitely deep. So let's ignore infinitely deep pockets which I call non businesses. Those aren't businesses at all. Those are companies perhaps like venture finance companies, but they're not businesses. A business actually lives and grows off its net profit flow, and therefore must have a gross profit flow, and therefore it has to have, in order to plan, has to forecast ability across profit flow and therefore must dominate at least one market because that's when they can play this [game 00:16:36]. They can choose to attenuate their gross profit flow in order to increase their hold on a market. Generally, for the purpose of being able to go launch themselves into another one. That's why you do it. I don't know, this is tough for this book because most people I think of an age to read this might not have ever played the game Risk. Risk is the game that those of us of a certain age grew up on that taught us about market dominance. The way you play risk is you decide at the margin, what am I going to risk in order to boot somebody out of a territory so that I can dominate it from which I can launch another campaign when I'm strong enough to dominate and adjacent territory. I mean, if you just played Risk all day long, I just applied it to your business. You do really well because it the ultimate simple game and it had chance in it and everything, which is true. There's a lot of chance out there. Your product might not be as great as you think, or technology might change out from under you. Secular changes could occur in the economy. You can end up, if you're in the real estate business and the economy turns upside down with regard to real estate. Well, the market you dominated is no longer such a wonderful thing to dominate. Now, that sucks to be in there. Corey Frank (17:56): That's a great analogy Chris, because you think about the risk board if when you get the random assignments of your countries with the cards at the beginning of the game, and you may look down and say, Holy cow, I got three of the five territories in South America. I think I'm going to start dominating there first to get your beachhead. Then if the other folks, there's always one guy in the group that puts all their armies in Russia and thinking I'm going to start there and I'm not going to have all these little satellite, little armies. I'm going to start there and then invariably what happens, the little ankle biters start nipping at the peripheral of this big guy and he doesn't have a big army anymore because he has no beachhead to expand off of that and that's very, very compelling. Chris Beall (18:43): Yeah, this is funny. I've thought about this before. That'd be interesting to hold a one week seminar in which all people do is play Risk for about two or three hours, and then you talk about what you learned and you actually have the game recorded and analyzed. It's like what are you trying to do here? Because it is the game that matches the challenges that we find around market dominance. The funny thing is, and this is, I think what folks don't get, I'm going to jump to the other topic for a moment, is the duty cycle, the core act of market dominance is acquisition of one net new customer gain market. And the impact is all of the gross profit flow that will happen not from that customer alone, but from that customer and the increased opportunity to take other customers and put them in your portfolio because of the reference ability impact from that first customer. So this is why there's a bunch of other elements to this equation that are really interesting, and we don't have to get into all of them. But for instance, time to value is a big element, because time to value can affect time to reference-ability and the act of reference of being reference able or the state of being reference able is the state you're trying to put a majority of that market into. So you're trying to get a book. I call it rolling a boulder downhill. You're pushing the boulder up hill, up hill, up hill but you're spending energy trying to get enough of this market that the boulder starts to roll down hill and all boulders that roll downhill get to the bottom of the hill. They just do. It's the nature of boulders and the nature of hills. It's a really simple idea, but you have to, if you think about it, if I'm rolling a boulder up this hill and every once in a while, I run away from it and I go over and I roll a boulder near the bottom of another hill and I forget to get this one all the way up over the hill to where I dominate, I get a bunch of boulders when I'm pushing up hill. That's all I get. It never gets easy. The great rule of business is, there's a point where it gets easy and the point where it gets easy, if you make a list of all those companies for whom you could make a next sale pretty easily, that's the rest of the market that you're dominating. So, once you identify a market that you dominate, you actually don't have to go gather the rest of it. You can use the rest of that market as a financing vehicle so that it turns into it a different thing. You'd have to be careful of threats, your Russia situation. You have to be careful of threats, but then aware of them, but not obsessed with them because you're done. You got extra plays. You can run, but be aware of them. You have to be aware of secular forces, which you can only deal with with financial buffers. So that's why we keep cash in the bank because there may well be something that happens we don't predict, and we have to weather a storm. Those things could happen in a business, but we should not at this point simply say, "Oh, I got to get the rest of this market." The purpose of the rest of that market for your business is to provide you with the flow of gross profit that doesn't cost you much to acquire, including future sales in that market. So you can take that money in excess of the buffer that you need and choose another market of the right size that you can afford to go after and now go roll another boulder up the hill because this one's rolling down the hill. Time to go put some effort into your business, and this is not done. It should always be done once you identify one. So this is the opposite of what everybody thinks. So what everybody thinks is, "Oh my God, I got to go find one to dominate." It's almost always the case that if you're in business, you dominate one market. You just don't know it. It's pretty small. Well, it's just what you think and you just have to be realistic and go. This is the one I'm sure of, how much excess gross profit flow can I extract out of it without hurting my reputation. You've got to provide good service and because otherwise your reference ability goes down. With bad service, you can turn around and push the boulder back up over the hill. That's a really bad idea. You have to monitor whether folks are still reference able, whether they're still getting value, that kind of stuff. But the conservative play is to say, I just want this one, and they will ensure your survival right up until the point where the secular forces of the world, either competition or change in the economy cause you to suddenly not be able to forecast properly up to two years. And when you can't forecast properly, then you have a problem because you can't rely on that gross profit loss. What have we dominated market looks like as a venture capitalist? Who is providing or a bank, who's providing you with money at a very, very favorable rate? Corey Frank (23:48): So these equations that we've been taught in business school and marketing for a while, or these types of graphs here cost five to 10 X more to acquire a new customer. We've all seen the box where you have the four quadrants in the lower right quadrant is it's five X easier to get those. You know what I'm talking about. It sounds like it's missing a piece. It's not just go getting any customer. It's getting a customer in that existing market that you're trying to dominate. That's what makes it easier. Not just any random customer, an existing customer at all. They have to be in that marketplace. That's how you're going to move this boulder much easier. Chris Beall (24:28): The big issue I'll call it the impedance mismatch that makes companies operate chaotically when it comes to engaging the outside world, not just the world of potential customers is how sales is organized and how sales is operated. So sales is organized according to territories or whatever, but tends not to be tightly organized around markets, real markets, which have these inter referencing capability. That is a sale is a sale, is a sale is a sale. Although we all know it's not, we all know there are customers we love and when we go, wow we got that one, isn't that great? And customers that when we bring one in, we can feel it. It's like the sales person asked for extra whatever. The first thing they ask for is discounts that don't make sense. Everybody goes, why are we doing this? And the answer is because the sales person wants the commission and they don't want to lose their job. Why does the manager let them do it? Because the manager doesn't want to lose their job. I mean, it's really simple. It's a cascade of conservative fear-driven behavior that drives out this rationality of saying no, no, these are the good customers, and these are the non-customers and says, but wait, wait, wait it's revenue. But wait, what's being ignored is, that revenue could actually have negative value. Even after you look at it on a P and L and you go there's the gross profit flow. It could have huge positive value. Does it represent a legitimate beachhead in a new market? But using luck or the desire of a salesperson for a commission or the fact that Joe knows Mary, using those as the ways of identifying your next market is truly insane. You're putting the whole business at risk in order to make a salesperson happy as you can't figure out another way to motivate them. I mean, it's really rather strange. And I'll go all the way back to, this is what I'll call the conundrum of capitalism. Capitalism taught us something about sales that has not been widely recognized. Capitalism taught us that sales has a purpose. Dispose of the inventory to generate gross profit flow. It was the push out of the factory that organized all of sales because the factory is going to keep making stuff, and we got to get rid of it. And since we can't keep making it at the margin, we may as well just keep making it unless the market gets saturated in such a way that it starts spitting it back, vomiting it back on us. That tends not to happen in most markets. So we learned how to organize sales and operate sales. According to the principle of get rid of the inventory, which is why we discount. In the modern world of digital products, there is no inventory. You discount because you're afraid that if you don't make the sale, you're not going to cover your overhead. The discounting and sales competes with your pool of capital. Your pool of capital if you've had a pool of capital would also allow you to say, you know what, I don't have to worry about this little issue of whether we have enough money flowing in. I've got my pool of capital and I'm going to focus tightly on making sure I dominate a market because that's- Corey Frank (27:44): But I don't have inventory, but I have overhead in costs. I spent X amount of dollars on ad-words. I spent Y amount on SDRs Z amount on my marketing stack. So it's ironic that it's inverted. Before I had this big factory with a warehouse full of hale bales that I needed to get out of there. Now I don't have that, but I have all this other costs that gets the Hale bales off the door. That's where that panic sets in to discount or to get. I got to cover my net for the month. I got to be profitable for the month. Chris Beall (28:14): And many times, those that you just described are all above the line. There they are. They're all actually accounted for as cost to goods. Corey Frank (28:23): Yes. Chris Beall (28:24): But you just pointed out that they're not. They're the equivalent of a factory that's sitting there producing nothing, but when it produces, it produces a weird thing, which is revenue. But from running a business perspective, it's really producing gross profit. But what it does within a dominated market and outside of one are radically different with regard to the future gross profit, which is what you really care about unless you're going out of business tomorrow. This is actually the fundamental reason we need capital in modern companies is not to have a factory, is to have a buffer against uncertainty when we decide to either fight within market, you got to have the ammo to fight. I want to throw somebody out. I want to expand into an adjacent market. So I know that's going to cost me money because those initial sales aren't pushing a boulder up the hill. I don't have the reference ability and I got to break force my way in there. And all of this is confounded by another factor, which is the one that's I think the hardest for people to think of. The replacement cycle for most products in B2B is three years, therefore only eight point five-  

Rocky. The Karate Kid. The Average Joes. Rudy. Underdogs. We love them. They are the people who use their grit combined with their well-coached and newly acquired skills to make waves, cause the odds-makers fits, and run up the score.  When you get funded by a VC and finally have the green light to release the Kraken and launch your vaunted sales machine, there is a temptation to run up the bill on the countless tools available in the sales and marketing stack and forget the meager stack from whence you came.  “Stand back…I have capital and I’m not afraid to use it!”...you’ll think.  Magic beans to make my phone ring?...I’ll take it! A love potion to make my prospects swoon into a demo?...Yes, please! A virtual dancing Elvis to get folks to download my white paper?...sure, why not? You can spend the GDP of a small Caribbean country playing this game and feeling like you also have the perfect Millennial-friendly office, the best cold brew, and the ideal dress code and PTO policy.  But the most sophisticated and successful stack and culture in the world can be had right now if you simply have a tight message that works combined with a mechanism to talk to hundreds of thousands of people a year…AND doing it with a small team of sincere and empathetic salespeople. But is it realistic?  In this episode I ask Chris if something like this only exists in the lab…or can it be really be seen in the wild.   Welcome to the Market Dominance Guys and this week’s episode: “Mr. Miyagi and the Theory of Market Dominance.” ----more---- ------------------ 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:48): This what's so weird. This is huge leap. This is why I think it's so interesting. Okay. I have a strategy. My strategy consists of making a list. That's my strategy, right? I make a list. I claim that hypothetically, that that list is self-referencing. If one of them buys, the others are more likely to buy. I don't have evidence of that yet. It's a claim I'm making to myself. It's like any other scientific experiment, I make a claim. I got to set up the experiment. So I set up the experiment by making the list of companies. And I set up my sub experiment by saying, oh yes, and I'm going to try to talk to these people in these companies. I hypothesized that they're important to this process. And then I can start with them. Now, what? Right, it's really interesting. Now what? I can advertise to them, but that doesn't give me any feedback other than that some of them can advertise another way. What if they're searching? I can buy some ad words and I can do that. And some of them will come to me. I can email them and some of them will come to me. But what I'm trying to do is to drive discovery conversation with which I find out from that individual whether they will take the risk of advancing the discussion to the next step. So now I get to call the sheep from the goats, the sheep of the socializers who will always take a discussion to the next step because that's what they do. And the goats are the ones who are going to go, "I ain't going there unless I see personal advantage." And the personal advantage must first include the risk. So the risk comes from you lying to me because you know, more than me. So therefore the thing that must happen is a discovery conversation in which by and large, as the potential buyer exits that conversation, they've now placed significant trust in that particular seller, whether or not they're going to buy now. So you're conditioning the market through sincerity applied at discovering. Your mathematical problem however, isn't discovery because you can't get them into discovery. We're busy and they don't spend their time doing this. So now you have to go, oh, here's my bottleneck. My bottleneck is right above discovery, which is right above the top of my funnel. So now I have a new trust problem, which is how do I get somebody to take me to a discovery meeting? Oh, well the answer to that turns out to be in the oddest place that nobody ever thought to look, which is the first seven seconds of a cold call. So that's what's so interesting about all of this is you take what is going on in the big world, right? So what happened to capitalism? It's really interesting. What happened to capitalism is all the machines became free and you can rent them. So the role of capital in society is completely changed. Capital is no longer an interesting question with regard to expansion of your business. It used to be core to buy the second cotton gin, I had to spend the same as I did on the first cotton gin. I've got to know that there's enough demand out there. So that's probably pretty easy, but mainly I have to have the capital. Without the capital, I can't do it. My gross profit flow from my sales is what's going to create the capital because at some point accumulated capital drains off. So to make a sustainable business, the capitalist formula was get a machine, make a thing, whatever the thing is that the people need or companies need or whatever, have a sales force out there, channel and we call it and have the gross profit flow come back and make sure the inventory is disposed of or else my prices will collapse, right? That's the old formula. That's the formula I was taught in school, in high school. I remember taking a class on whatever they call it, economics. Right? And they showed me the supply demand curves and how capital works. And in 1972, when I took that class, I remember raising my hand saying, "Mr. Kittredge, that model is obsolete. "And he said, "How could this model be obsolete? This is how our society works." And I said, "That model is obsolete." And I told them this in '72. I said because the math says that the cost of making new products is going to go down. The cost of making the machines that make products is going to go down. And the driver for that is the thing I just learned how to do over the last four years, which is to build software. When the experts say software is eating the world, everybody gets this wrong and they go, "Oh, software's eating the world. That means we're going to use more software products." It's not true at all. Software is essential to the making of all things that we use, including software. It's irrelevant that we use software, that we sell software to consumers use it is irrelevant. That doesn't make any difference. It makes making things cheaper and cheaper because it's software that ultimately robotized as the economy. It robotizes first certain jobs like writing something down on a piece of paper, sending it to somebody, sending the memo. Remember we used to have typing pools? The typing pools all went away. These are huge, huge, huge numbers of employees who did things that are now done by software. Software drives costs, incremental costs of making new products, new products. The copy of a product is so cheap. Now we don't even think about it, right? Back in the day, the copy of the product counted. The classic P and L meant something. Cost of goods was the cost of my inputs, and the cost of the labor to make the thing. Cost of the labor has gone down because of software. The cost of the goods has gone down because of somebody else's software. It ripples through the economy. So now we're left with the only thing that counts as markets. The only thing that counts as markets and the biggest changes you can't buy them anymore. You used to be able to buy markets and now you can't buy them because you're competing with money, and money is more liquid than your damn corporation. This is why the first seven seconds of a cold call are the essence of executing corporate strategy. And the message that goes in the next 27 seconds is the most likely point where you're going to fail and they process or the machine that's in scarce supply is the sincere sales person. And that's the new economy. That's why I want to write this book. That's what this book is about. It's not about salespeople getting better. The reason that we're doing this company is we've stumbled upon the mechanism for tearing the lid off the top of the funnel. We actually don't think that solves the problem. We think that's today's problem. Today's problem is getting a flow of discovery meetings. Tomorrow's problem is holding great discovery meetings. That condition the market in your favor for dominance Corey Frank (09:51): Is the natural progression of ConnectAndSell, right? From a one dimensional product company that performs a service that's advantageous to the market. You've repositioned the messaging, the big idea to what ConnectAndSel really is. That it seems like this natural offshoot is that there is going to be a shortage of sincere sales people than that is going to beget another industry of all types of sales training, or maybe even instead of a typing pool, I have a sincere salesperson pools. Right? And it's kind of the natural trend line for great, okay, I love it. I agree with you. I want to dominate my market. I don't have the right recruiters. I don't have the right people to hire these people. You're given me the screenplays to say, but I don't have the Stella Adler's to coach and put me on stage and slap me around to get me there. How do you get me there? Chris Beall (11:01): Exactly. Exactly. How do you hire the right people who have the right characteristics inside of ... So how people are raised becomes really important. What kinds of places can you go that have filtered for sincerity? So we have a company in Northern California we work with called Five 11 Enterprises. And what they do is they hire graduates out of Simpson College and Bethel University or College, whatever it's called. So their strategy, their purpose was to provide jobs for people that were like themselves. That is people whose spiritual inclinations were such that they went to a school whose purpose was to allow them to conduct a spiritual life professionally, somehow, right? So that's a sincerity filter because those schools don't attract insincere people by and large, and they filtered them out along the way through their program. That's not their primary intention. It's a side effect of how they're run, right? It's a core to their mission, but not core to their practice, the filter. So you get these folks who are coming out of these schools who love the area it turns out. So you have a reason to aggregate them. They like the Mount Shasta area. They like Redding. There is not a lot of jobs there for these kinds of people anyway. What are the jobs going to be? Right? It's kind of interesting. So they could go to work in the medical field perhaps, or something like that. There are always jobs there. But what if they could learn sales? And then what if we could amp them up by a factor of 10? So this phrase is a little bit funny and it sounds flip, but it's not. It's actually very sincere, which is we work with Five 11 Enterprise to provide packaged sincerity on steroids. So they package the sincerity in the form of a salesperson training, and a place to sit, great support that is support that's appropriate to a sincere person. And then we amp them up by a factor of 10. We turn each one into 10 people, and then we manage them against the standard since. Drift, right? And drift is all about seeking comfort in place of performance. So the coaching is very simple, but it's still rigorous coaching. We have to listen carefully and they have to be held to a high standard. But interestingly, the high standard is the standard of sincerity and precision, not what you normally do with salespeople. Normally with a salesperson you say, "Give me somebody with some good sales DNA, a good track record, the Rolodex, and here's your territory," right? But that's the capitalist approach, which is no longer relevant. Not because there's anything wrong with capitalism. It's just burned out because you don't need the capital anymore. Chris Beall (14:40): So what you need is you need a pace of taking a market and you need the insurance policy of knowing you're going to dominate it. As soon as you know you're going to dominate one market, you have capital. Oddly enough, it frees up resources to now go after another market. And all this stuff comes together in this interesting way. That's what's going to be kind of hard about this book, but I think is exciting. So when I deliver this to people now in a simple form, right? But it's still a whole thing. Starting from here's the change that you were seeing out there. The change is it's hard to buy companies now to execute strategy. You can put a strategy down on a piece of paper, but there's a new sheriff in town called private equity. And he doesn't want you to have his company that he wants to buy and he's going to bid it up. And by the way his job is simpler than yours. You've got to integrate, he doesn't have to integrate. So he's going to, oh, you're going to get an overpriced product and it's going to have higher risk. So, okay. How do I stay in business? Because dominating markets is not a matter of desire. It's a matter of necessity. If you don't dominate one, you will always go out of business. Mathematically you will always go out of business. Why? Because someone else will come along and dominate all of the markets that you're playing. One will dominate one, one will dominate another. You're playing in five markets. You think and I get 16% share, 22% share, 5% share, 9% share and 18. I'm doing so good, right? And you're counting dollars with dollars are coming in. And you're looking at the gross profits. Gross profits are good. Right? You're looking at your growth rate. Oh, I'm doing okay in this one. I'm growing 20% in this one. I'm growing 6%. But mathematically what's going to happen is if you're in five markets, one, two, three, four, up to five companies are going to come in eventually and dominate that market through a simple program of talking to everybody. Corey Frank (16:34): Yeah. Right. And today they talk with everybody in lieu of ConnectAndSell or a tool like that, they're going to do it by using social media to dominate the conversation. Whoever has the greatest noise, which has to be done. Chris Beall (16:50): It can't be done because it's noise. It can't be done. Corey Frank (16:52): But this is a lot like Ockham's razor theory of markets, because you're going to the simplest half that not the most obvious path for so many folks is where does truly the consumer have this catalyst, this initial big bang or spark of being introduced to your company of potentially step one, verse one chapter, one of your company is in that first seven seconds. It's not way back in the origin story of the product. It's not in the R and D meetings. It's not in the marketing or the logo or anything like that. Right? It really is this Ockham about what's standing right in front of you. And that's very disconcerting I would imagine for the traditional market understanding. It's very disconcerting for a marketing person, a product marketing person, an R and D person, hell it may even be disconcerting for the sales person here. Right, because wait, I thought my job was just to make my nuts and then maybe get a firm handshake. And now you're telling me that the company's survival, it's very survival, it's binary. It's either you dominate or you're dead. I don't like this binary world. I like this gray world instead. And that's what we're talking about here. Chris Beall (18:17): Yeah. That's what's so interesting. The shift happened really fast and so we have a front row seat at ConnectAndSell that no one else has. We get to watch companies actually doing it, and they won't talk about it, but we get to watch it. That was my dream with you guys at Stormwind. If we had done that step-by-step and stuck together and hadn't had that moment of doubt that Tom had then ended up in kind of going away and coming back. And if we had just said, let's reduce that top of funnel force by 70% and let's change their comp so that sincerity is going to be in play a hundred percent of the time. Let's do the whole thing, right? Would have simply eaten that market whole. Nobody would have a little to stand up. And it would have been simple step-by-step. It would have taken approximately three years to full domination. And it would've taken approximately 18 months to certainty. And its certainty could have said, you know what? We could be worth four times as much if we demonstrate we can dominate a second bar. So let's do that because we know how to make products like that. Right? I mean, how hard was it to make a new product? Corey Frank (19:28): Nothing. Nothing. Chris Beall (19:30): But dominating market? Very hard. Having shown you can dominate one, if we dominated one together, we would have been able to easily identify another. You already had like nine of them in your head. Just pick one, make a list, take the best, the best four people. And in four weeks we wouldn't just have knowledge, we would have had the beginning of dominance, and we'd take that dominant cycle down from three years and then maybe two years. But the time to certainty would have gone down to six months. And with a time to certainty on six months, that's the turns on your capital. That's what's changed. The financial equation has changed the turns on your capital. When do I get all my capital back? Right? Corey Frank (20:11): Yeah. Chris Beall (20:12): It depends on only your capital is now market domination is its markets. That's what my capital is, not money anymore. So what's the turn? Well, the turn starts at three years because that's the replacement cycle for products. For all products it starts at three years. Your time to certainty, when you look at the math, is you're at about 85, 90% certainty if you're following your dominance plan and the numbers are working. If that's all happening, then at 18 months, halfway through that cycle, you're sure that you're going to dominate that market. You're only at about 18 to 20% of market share, but doesn't make any difference because you've talked to everybody. You condition the market in your favor right? It's a mopping up action. So you're foolish to spend management attention on a mopping up action. Management attention should go where net new value is being created and net new value is created in the next market. So I've got customers doing this and we can't put them in the book by name because they won't agree, but doing this right now [inaudible 00:21:18] market. And no one will ever be able to compete with them and no one knows what's happening. And they're very secretive. They hired a new guy. He comes in and he's at least got a great background and used to be at inside sales, all this stuff. And he says to his boss, "We got to go talk about this." He says, "If you ever breathe one word of what we're doing with Connect and Sell, you will be fired." He goes, "Oh, oh." And then he comes to me and he says, "What should our stack be?" I said, "You have the most sophisticated stack in the world right now. You have a message that works. You have people who talk to 300,000 people a year, 11 of them. You've won. What you need to do is pick another market. Don't worry about your damn stack." And so we fought over this for quite a while, for quite a while and you know, like three months, right? And he's going, "But I need this, I need this, I need this. I need this." Dude. And he says, "Yes, I get that it's working, but it could be working better." So it doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference. If I'm going to win every fight. Does it make any difference if I win in the first round, the second round or the third round, if I win every single one? Who cares, right? I'm going to be undefeated. Corey Frank (22:27): So the competition's going to wake up one morning and realized that they can't catch. Corey Frank (22:32): Hopping over, game over. They've talked to everybody and they don't even sell to them. Their strategy is this, it's literally their strategy. Talk to everybody. That's their strategy. And they simply talk to everybody so they don't push it. They just talk to everybody. They kill their numbers. Everybody's talks about somebody's new business plans. How are they doing? These guys literally blow their plan out of the water every quarter. And yet they don't try to sell the product. They just talk to everybody.

Today, when you examine the toolbox of the modern sales professional, many of us immediately see the abundance of options in the marketing and sales stacks that decorate most of our desktops…I have tools that can disguise my phone number, I know when someone opens an email, I can do a virtual face to face meeting…AI and machine learning tools even tell me what to say and who I should say it to…a scale of portable technology and advancement and capital on any ordinary rep desktop that would leave an Apollo-era NASA slide-ruled engineer in your dust. But what about the techniques, behaviors, and go to market strategies of that same modern sales professional? Sadly, for most of us, we’re still stranded in mid-century America. But not the mid 20th Century,  rather, I’m speaking of the mid 19th Century America of 33 states. The mid-century of America where the new hot book on the scene was not Good To Great or The Lean Startup, but instead a fresh little nautical fiction text entitled Moby Dick. In this episode, Chris takes us through a virtual time warp of strategy, territories, and compensation as a salesperson. Some things have indeed changed, But some remain firmly entrenched in a midcentury President Franklin Pierce’s America. This is the Market Dominance Guys and today’s episode “Get the DeLorean; My Profession is Stuck in 1855!” ----more---- ---------------------------------------- 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Corey Frank (02:42): When we were doing the test drive with you, at Stormwind we had ConnectAndSell, and we were doing pretty well and we're spending lots of money. Tom says we should probably try another competitor just in case. Well, there are no other competitors. Came back with this company called ConnectLeader. Chris Beall (02:57): Oh yeah. Corey Frank (02:57): Oh, okay. Well, sure I kind of felt that yeah, that's the right thing to do for the business. Chris Beall (03:03): Right. Corey Frank (03:03): You know, brought those guys in and you know how the movie ends, right? We probably lasted maybe, gosh, maybe a month with those guys after like three months with you. And then I come crawling back to you and the services, give or take let's just say from Tom's perspective, the services were roughly the same. The biggest difference was the trust factor that I had, because we've probably known each other maybe 10 years before Stormwind and had various interactions. So I did trust you more than I trusted myself. Right? And people like Chad or Steve in the marketplace as well, there are certain folks that I do trust, which is why you seek out their counsel, you seek out their advice. You probably don't set one foot in the AASP Conference in Chicago, you don't even get into the breakout rooms before somebody sees you at the hotel check-in and says, "Oh wait, Chris, I got a quick question about ABC vendor. You're familiar with them." Chris Beall (04:04): I can't physically get into the building, which is great. Corey Frank (04:11): Yeah, because this trust oozes from you, people do trust you. Is that a little bit of that I may have a superior product? I may have even an exceptional list, but if my salespeople are not trained with true empathy and I don't hire to that, that they'll never get to that threshold. Or I may succeed in spite of my sales team, but how conscious should I be as we're going down this path of market dominance in the selection of the people who give that message? Chris Beall (04:46): Hugely careful, this is where hiring somebody who even exaggerates a little bit is highly problematic. I know some who do and get away with it, but they exaggerate transparently. That is, it's a joke. You know, Steve's the opposite. Steve Richard is hyper precise. Steve will never tell you a number that he doesn't know is true. He just won't do it. So there are two personalities out there in the public that take different approaches to it. But when you're hiring a salesperson and you get that person who shades what they say a little bit in order to influence somebody, the problem is that it is the web of lies problem. You can't play it. At some point it just gets problematic. But the other problem is, human beings are to sincerity as wolves are to fear. They smell it, our insincerity, right? Human beings smell insincerity, and the only people that can get away with being insincere in a sales situation are psychopaths. And there are psychopaths out there, sociopath's whatever you want to call them, who actually have perfected the art of causing people to trust them, even though their intentions are very, very bad. Those people exist. They make up a special subset of society they've existed for all time. They have some function out there. I'm sure you can send them in among your enemies. You might get something good to happen. Some of them are in certain industries that are interesting. I would imagine if I were going to be, say a true undercover spy, living in somebody else's society for 40 years, with intent to subvert them, it would probably be pretty handy to be a sociopath or psychopath because then I could get people to trust me because I manufacture it. But for most of us, for the vast, vast majority of people, we're stuck with actually having good intentions, sincerely having good intentions in order to be trusted. And that's a funny place for a sales person to be. In fact, when we compensate salespeople, we're basically saying to them, "you know what, I don't trust you to actually put the effort in and do this correctly so I'm only going to pay you for what you bring in." Everybody else in the company we pay because they do what we asked them to do and we've designed that process. If they do a diligently and they interact with other people in the company, in a way that's helpful, or at least not too hurtful, we keep paying their salaries and unless their job description goes away, they get to stay with us, right? Salespeople, we give them the opposite message. We say, you're an outsider. We're going to pay you as little as possible for doing the job and as much as possible for the results, we don't care how you get the results. We just don't care. Just bring in the number, right? And then we kind of hope that we get sincere people. It used to be, you didn't have to be that sincere to play the scan. So now we have a new situation. It's going to be very interesting to me to see what happens in the world of sales compensation. Sales compensation is based on the notion that sales itself is an external function of the company. Sales is not inside the company, it's outside. It's an appendage, notice where it is on the P and L S G and A sales general and administrative. What, what in the world? We've lumped it in with the electricity that we buy, the rent that we pay. You have to have a sales function, whatever that is right? The sales job was always to convert inventory that was being generated by a factory. So it's the essence of how sales is thought of as an outgrowth of the core structure of capitalism. So capitalism says this, Hey, I got to have capital to make stuff, because you make stuff with machines, right? That's why capitalism was interesting because machines represent the ability to make more than an individual human working with their hands, with the tools they might've accumulated, say were handed from their mom, their dad, right? So if I'm a carpenter in 1600, well, I apprentice to a carpenter, probably my dad. I borrow his tools for a while and then when my dad retires or passes on or cuts his hand off or whatever the hell he does, those tools become mine. And my skills are mine and I take my trade out and I do my trade. Chris Beall (10:04): That's not capitalism. What's the upside of having capital? That would do you no good. In fact, it'd be bad. It would take away the spirit to go out and work. Corey Frank (10:14): Right. Chris Beall (10:14): Idleness, right? I've seen books, very sacred books that talk about how dangerous it is to have [crosstalk 00:10:22]. They're not the right ones, the [inaudible 00:10:25] issues. So there's only so many forms of entertainment. Corey Frank (10:30): Getting pregnant. Chris Beall (10:31): So then we come along and it's like, okay, wait a second, we figured out how to take the stuff of the earth; coal, rain falls uphill and runs downhill. Just a couple of things and turn that stuff into motion. And we figured out how to harness that motion and turn that motion into inputs turning into valuable outputs without a person doing it. And now we say, "Oh, well look at this. I can make cotton gin." Well, what does a cotton gin do? It solves one problem and it creates another problem. The problem is I can run the thing all day long. I can run it all night long. I can do it with two people, one in the day, one in the night, because people need to sleep. That's it, two people doing the job of a hundred people. So now I have this output. I got to dispose of the output. Now I need sales to dispose of the output and turn it into cash. Why do I want the cash? Because the cash is capital to get a new machine and double my productivity, double my production, not my productivity, but my production. So, capitalism produced this beautiful thing, which is a positive feedback loop between the gross profit produced by sales and the future size of my company. Because as long as I have access to the inputs, which is why big companies became vertically integrated, I need my own coal. I need my own iron ore, right? They have integrated supply chains and they did that because interruption of supply would cause your capital to go idle. Your machines would go idle. Sales' job was to keep up with the output and the primary way sales did that was by dynamically adjusting price within individual markets called territories; it was always geographical, in order to make sure that all the output was disposed of. So the reason for the great discounting culture in sales is that the job of sales was to dispose of the output. You can't have inventory buildup forever. You got to sell the stuff off in order to be able to buy the raw materials that you needed to make the stuff in the first place and then in order to be able to potentially expand the business. So sales is still stuck in 1855. Still looks exactly like it did in 1855, which is, I hire you, I give you a territory and you have discounting authority. And you'll only exercise it to a particular degree because your commission depends on how much you sell. So the discipline is provided by the commission. Corey Frank (12:59): And I have extra inventory and I need to get it down to a certain level to keep these machines going and I need a machine [inaudible 00:13:06]. Chris Beall (13:06): It's very simple, right? Why sales exists and why it sits there on SGNA. Why sales doesn't sit, where it should set today, which is right in R and D. Sales is actually a form of development at this point. It's development of the thing you need more than a product, which is a market. The scarcity in the world has gone away from products. You can build products anytime you want. See this product here, this little coffee cup with all of this stuff on it, it's my wife's name and all this cool stuff. I can go on Zazzle and have one of these things made for me. I can have a hundred mate, I can have 10,000 made. And all I do is go click, click, "no I don't want it to say this, I want it to say this. No, I don't want the color to be white I want the color to be beige. No, I don't want that size, I want the handle to look different." Right? Think what that used to take 150 years ago, a hundred years ago, 50 years, 30 years ago. That's huge to make that design decision. We made molds, we have jigs, we have this, we have that. My capital had to be affected. Products are nothing nowadays. Markets are [inaudible 00:14:11]. I was talking to a guy last night about a radical product, a product that will change the world. I can describe it at the very highest levels. It's a product that would allow any owner of any company to know what their company is worth at no cost. Just like you can know what your house is worth through Zillow, you can know what your company is [crosstalk 00:14:34] super valuable product. Anybody can see how valuable it is, right? If you could do that and make the product, you do it. Well, you can do that and make the product. It turns out to build that product, if you have the deep knowledge of that domain, which this individual happens to have, is a matter of calling up [inaudible 00:14:50] and saying, Hey, Tesh would you take a $100,000 to build this for me in six weeks? And he goes, sure, yeah, maybe whatever. I don't know, I'm busy, whatever. Right? So say decides to do it. You're going to get a usable product within six weeks that will change the world. [crosstalk 00:15:06] a marketing problem. Corey Frank (15:08): Right. Chris Beall (15:09): Your product problem has gone down, which is why VCs will no longer fund ideas because the products are so easy to build. They're going, if you bring me an idea, what's wrong with you, why didn't you build the product? So they won't play that game anymore. But the [inaudible 00:15:26], is to go to market game as a demo for a future acquire. But if you're a serious corporate, that is, you're stuck with survival. As a corporation when you get to a certain point, the option of just throwing yourself away, is not so great. If you're a startup, fine, you throw yourself away. You get bought by somebody for whatever the going price is. Everybody's got a formula such and such X revenue, but this category of company, blah, blah, blah, right? But if you're running a hundred million dollar company that you've built up over time, you don't have one market you dominate? Somehow say two of your markets that you used to dominate dissolved through secular forces, they're not there anymore. So you're going to go out of business. It's not an "if" it is a "when". You will go out of business essentially for a simple mathematical reason, someone else will come in and dominate one of your markets that you're playing in. And as you lose share, you'll have to discount like an old fashioned sales guy in order to maintain what feels like share in the market but it actually is going down because the gross profit contribution of each unit that you're selling in that market on a repeated basis is going down and you're hollowing out your company. Corey Frank (16:33): Okay, so if I take this in continuous equation here, superior products, better than average products may not necessarily win in the end if their go to market strategy, their sales staff is not at a superior level. In other words, all of the things being equal in a vacuum, a superior sales force with a substandard product will beat a standard product with a substandard sales force over time, over an extended period of time. Chris Beall (17:05): Overtime, every time. There will be no exceptions to that. There's a certain class of product that is not a superior product that is sort of the mindblowing product where somebody gets it just right. And it resonates in the market. Slack is an example of a mindful product. There were a hundred Slacks, right? There were a thousand Slacks at one point and they happen to get it together just right and "bing" the thing resonated and it spread. And everybody uses those as examples, but when you look at those examples, they apply to a tiny, tiny fraction of the kinds of products that you can feel out there. Almost all products you can feel for the enterprise can't work like Slack in terms of the spread, because the unit of adoption isn't the human. Dropbox was like this, the unit of adoption was the individual and then they did this thing. Most products, the math doesn't work like that in [inaudible 00:17:58]. The unit of adoption normally is the work group or the department or the division of the company. [crosstalk 00:18:07] And the unit of adoption or unit of change is above the level of the individual, product is essentially, not meaningless, but secondary to go to market strategy. Did I make a list? So, it doesn't get easier and easier or harder and harder?    

States, lots of ‘em, 50 states. Plus Red States, Blue States. States of consciousness. Physical states. Liquid/Gas… How about the state of Markets, being Market Dominant, or simply being an “also-ran?” The fact is there are only two states you can reside in as a company: you're either dominating one market or more, or you're dominating zero. And if you're dominating zero markets, you WILL go out of business in time unless you turn into a company that IS dominating at least one market. Market Dominance is security, it’s collateral, safety, shelter, asylum, parlay; but most importantly, it’s freedom. Because the only two reasons a company dominating a market can ever go out of business is either financial mismanagement or if the market is just too small. So how do you map your journey to market dominance? What’s changed over the past few years that makes it easier for some and more difficult for others to even get out of the gates? In this chat, I ask Chris for his insights into the real stakes of entering this Octagon of business without true dominating intent. This is the Market Dominance Guys and today’s episode entitled, “The Two-State Solution in Market Dominance: Dollars or Donuts?” ----more---- ---------------------------------------- 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.   The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:39): It's the talk that I gave, starts with corporate strategy and the challenges of corporate strategy, and it goes all the way down to the psychological nuances of the script. In one case in the dinner case, I'll call it, I leave the details a little fuzzy. So I get to sort of the fact that there are these psychological imperatives and the language is important, but it's not a workshop. The idea is to get people discussing this controversial question which is, is it possible that an old path to dominance has gotten more difficult because of some secular changes in the world? Which is primarily the concentration of wealth in the hands of a smaller number of people which has driven the growth of private equity, and private equity has driven the competition of money with corporates where corporates have to compete against money that has an easier job. What does the money have to do? All the money has to do is make an investment. They have to find an asset they want to invest in, and they see them as assets, not as companies. And then they put the money into that company through this complex looking process. But it's the same for all parties who might ever want to buy that company, no different. They have more flexibility. They can take positions from whole ownership down to some fraction, which a corporate can't do, corporate needs control. So they have a wider variety of targets they can go after. They have no requirement to integrate, none whatsoever. You can buy the company and just let it run, or they can buy it and put in new management, or they can buy it and have a thesis about operations, or they can buy it and combine it with another company. They can do anything that they want, right? I'm a corporate when I buy a company, what can I do? I can either let it run independently and decide whether the law says I have to consolidate the books or not. And then I can say, "Well, I've added it to my portfolio, and I'm going to seek synergies later at the SSL approach, or I'm going to integrate that company into mine, into the acquiring company, which is known to fail 90% of the time. So as a corporation, I have to pay up. Now I have to pay premium prices for an asset that may or may not be the right asset because I can only learn so much about it before acquiring it. And after acquiring, and I have to do more work with a higher failure rate. The guy I'm competing with just does his due diligence strokes a check and says, "Yeah, we'll flip it later." Right? So that path to strategy, that mountain that sits in front of me has gotten steeper and steeper and bigger and bigger and corporate strategy, which is, essentially, which markets am I going to go at? Right. I have product strategy too, but even there, I tend to execute as a big corporate, I execute through acquisition. And product strategy, I still can kind of do it that way. The venture capitalists take care of that problem for me. They build the research and development labs off there in Silicon Valley and Silicon slopes and Austin and Boston and all those places. And all of these people come to work for them thinking that they're starting these businesses, but all they're really doing is just working for these laboratories that are working on categories of problems. [inaudible 00:05:42] isn't quite happy because they get a free labor and they have a salvage operation running, just strip the IP out of these things if the business didn't work, which they don't really care about, the business that is. That business's a demo of value for a future acquire and every once in a while, you'd do kind of demonstration make one of them. So as that game is played, no problem. Product strategy is a big corporate. I could choose to make my own products and take them to market, but that fails almost every time. Now, some people know how to do that. Half of those people are talking to you right now. So it's so uncommon that it's just not even worth considering a product strategy. But your big strategy is market strategy. I need to go and take a new market because market domination is by strong evidence, the only insurance against business failure. So that's actually where I start this talk, which is quite surprising to people. I say to them, the fact is there are only two states you can be in as a company. You're either dominating one market or more, or you're dominating zero. If you're dominating zero, you will go out of business, unless you turn into a company that's dominating at least one market. The only reason a company dominating a market can ever go out of business, or two. One is financial mismanagement to the point where you can't even recover in a market dominance position. Usually you take on too much overhead. So if your overhead is so big and you can't figure out how to get rid of it, or you're too dumb to get rid of it. And if your market is too small, then dominating a market, doesn't ensure your survival. Corey Frank (07:24): So, what is defined as a market, Chris. Chris Beall (07:25): I use Jeffrey Morris' definition. So a market is a list or set actually, but a set is usually expressed as a list, of mutually referenceable companies. That is, they have the mathematical property that when one of them buys a product from vendor A, a specific product X from vendor A, then every other participant in that market, everybody else in that set becomes more likely to buy that product at the same price or under the same conditions of knowledge. So you keep lowering the cost, the internal cost, your cost as a seller of taking the next unit within the market of advancing in the market as you take units. So markets essentially are mathematically downhill operations. Once you get a Boulder rolling downhill, it rolls faster and faster and picks up more boulders, right? So in a market, once you get that first customer, which is very hard to get, by definition, anybody else who's positively influenced to buy from you, that particular product by definition, they're in that market. If I will buy, because you bought a little bit mean. I'm a little more likely to buy because you bought, you and I are in the same market for that particular product. And that's it. It's just a mathematical concept. It's a set of all of those who are mutually, mutually reinforcing with regard to their desire to buy. And the reason for markets being defined like this, and this is markets for, usually not entirely estate, which categories, but if I'm a company coming into a space I'm not established. So I've got the same problem as though I have a new product or innovation. I'm new. New is bad. Nobody wants to buy new in business, right? Everybody wants to buy new as a consumer because as a consumer, I'm putting my money at risk. And if I'm identity as a consumer is wrapped up around, like my social status is wrapped up around the perception of other people that I do, new things, then I'm easy to sell to. This is what consumer products tend to come into the market quickly. If they hit a little subset that are like, wow, that's the cool thing. And then cool tends to take them either up a big or they just eat the cool factor. And that's all they get is the cool ones, right? There was no equivalent of that in business, except a tiny fraction of people called technology enthusiasts that you can sell to and you can sell new stuff to them. And they were very, very small and they flame out quickly. In the business world, people are afraid for their jobs when I buy, I fear for my job. So I'm not sure surely much more conservative than when I'm risking my money because I'm not risking my money anymore. I'm not risking the price, right? If even if I buy a Tesla, the worst cases, I melt the price of a Tesla minus the resale value of a Tesla, right? So I take it off the lot and then I sell it the next day because I hate it, because it turns out those two big screens make me have seizures while I'm driving or something. And it's like, "Well, I got to get rid of this Tesla." What if I might lose, I don't know, 5,000 bucks. It's not so bad. If I buy my company a Tesla, so to speak, and we could commit to a business process in which the Tesla is essential to the business process. This is how we're going to get to our conferences from now on. We're not going to fly. We're going to drive this Tesla really fast. And then we discover, Oh, darn their speed limits. We hadn't taken into account that there are speed limits. It will go really fast, but we can't go that fast. And now it's too expensive to get to all the conferences we need to go to, and we're going to go out of business. "Hey Chris, why'd you buy the Tesla? Why didn't you stick with the airplanes?" "While they're kind of expensive and all that and the Tesla promise to be cheaper and blah, blah, blah." It's like, Oh, okay. So you failed to notice something in your analysis and we're not letting you ever buy anything again. So we're going to take your power away. Maybe take your job away. So what am I risking? Oh let's see my reputation by kids' college education, my retirement, my respect in the community, whether my wife stays with me, husband, dog, whatever. I risk everything [inaudible 00:11:39] it could be to be first bigger or the newer, the scarier. So what's so unique about B2B and what frankly drives me crazy when I see these predictions that B2B will go to the way it BBC, and it'll all just be easy buying online. It has to do with how much information the buyer has. It has nothing to do with how much information the buyer has. In fact, the 180 degree opposite. The more information the buyer has accessible to them in B2B, the less inclined they are to buy. Because the information is all vendor information or vendor influenced information. You can't tell. It's the fake news problem. It's all fake To some degree, every single thing anybody says about any commercially available B2B product is shaded in the direction of trying to influence the buyer to make a decision. The buyer knows that, and the buyer knows that decision could cost them their career Corey Frank (12:34): The B2B buyer knows that. [crosstalk 00:12:36]. Chris Beall (12:38): That's right but the B2B buyer has this, their consumer, when they get up in the morning. They drive to work in their car and they close their car door. They walk with their briefcase up to security, and as soon as they scan their badge and they go into their cubicle, it's almost as if the air is piped in differently or the ceiling tiles or the magnetic forces change them to these risk averse pieces of mankind, versus they'd be so risky to buy something on their own money, but they come into this environment and they have much more of a sensitivity to marketing information, product information, the phone ringing in a sales or a stranger on the other end of the line. So it's the same person on the weekend between Monday to Friday, but the stakes are higher. Is that what I hear you saying? Corey Frank (13:34): Exactly. The stakes are so high. They're so high that only somebody who is so reckless that nobody would ever let them buy anything for a company just goes out and goes, Oh, I'll just get one of these. They'll just get whatever it is. Even something as simple as a conference. Look at the decision to buy something as simple as, "I think we'll go to this conference," not even as a sponsor. Very simple. Risk isn't that high? You don't like the conference. You don't go again. And yet a committee will form around it. People's opinions will be asked, right? It's not this idea that... In fact here's the contradiction. Okay. The big contradiction. So we're told us sellers, two things are going on. One is our B2B buyers are becoming consumer-like, and the other is the buying committee is getting bigger. Now think about that physically. A consumer privately sits there in front of their computer or on their smartphone, and it looks at some information and gets influenced by influencers, whoever it is, Kim Kardashian or whatever. And they go as a consumer, "Oh, I think I want this, click, click, click. And they have like buy with one click on Amazon and all that kind of stuff, right? The B2B buyer, we're told, does the same thing more and more each day. And yet somehow they're doing it by committee. The committee is getting bigger. So what is the committee all sit around at that person's desktop and stare at the stuff and go, "No click here. No click there." It's physically impossible to reconcile the notion of the B2B buyer becoming more like the B2C buyer and the committee growing, ever larger and more influential. They're opposite ideas and yet we're fed both of them by the pundits. The experts in B2B sales, with the exception of what I'll call the four horsemen of Outbound, right? Jeb Blount, Anthony Iannarino, Mike Weinberg, Mark Hunter, people around that set go, "No, no, no, you don't get it. None of that stuff's happened." What's happening is the scared buyer is still the scared buyer I must talk to a seller that they learned to trust. And that seller is when it tell them what to buy. And they're going to earn that trust by being trust able at the beginning, and then trust worthy over time. They actually have information asymmetry. They know better than the buyer, and so they will be the trusted advisor. Think of the contradiction between the B2B buyer being B2C and the need for the trusted advisor and the growth of the committee. All of these are contradictory ideas. And nobody exposes the contradiction. "Oh no, no. They're all happening." Why? Because as an expert, I can make more money selling sales techniques to you. If you believe all this crap, right? But what's really happening is nothing has changed, except this internet thing has provided so much additional information in the form of scary noise. The buyer has become more conservative rather than less. And that more conservative buyer expresses themselves in the larger committee. The committee is an insurance policy against the individual buyer, making the decision and being held accountable. So the committee is not a corporate idea like, "Wow, we need to have 10 people involved in every sale." It is, "Wow! It's so confusing out there. Things are moving so fast. So if velocity increasing and information flow and availability increasing. And so here I am as the buyer, what do I do for safety? There's safety in numbers. I'm not going to make this decision by myself. I'm going to make it with others. However, only one person in that committee, whoever it is who kind of is guiding it, or is the person that everybody else is looking to the person who would have been alone. If there hadn't been the committee, that person is going to rely completely on trusting one of the sellers more than they trust themselves. The threshold for a B2B purchase decision is not to trust one of the sellers more than you trust the other sellers. It's to trust one of the sellers more than you trust yourself. This is the essence of the B2B equations from a market dominance standpoint. Now we go all the way back to, Oh, look what happened. Private equity came in and wrecked the landscape for buying companies in order to enter markets. So now I have to enter markets by myself, which means I have to sell my way into markets. So now I'm on the outside, my buyers are these cautious creatures who aggregated into these committees when they're doing serious buying. So I have to somehow gain an advantage there over all my competitors in order to dominate this market. Before I could take my balance sheet and get an advantage by cleverly identifying a company that was ready to sell itself. To me, that's hard. Now I have to do something though 100 times harder, which is I've got to get this cautious animal called the B2B buyer first identified, as to find them. Then I got to get their trust. And then I got to grow their trust through a process in which new players are going to come in and that trust has got to go out into the committee, somehow. I have to exceed a threshold I'm not aware of, which is they have to trust me more than they trust themselves. Otherwise, they're going to go to the standard outcome of a B2B buyer, which is no decision. 90% of all B2B purchasing processes end in no decision. The reason is none of the sellers climb the mountain high enough, the trust mountain high enough to be trusted more than the buyer trust themselves. This is the essence of the entire market domination and therefore survival question for every B2B company.    

What do you need to believe when you ask someone for 15 minutes of their time? What’s the underlying emotional and rational DNA of true belief that is pulsing through your brain? And even beyond this, it would be helpful to remind our listeners about our mission here at the Market Dominance Guys…what’s the real reason these nuances and steps and tactics of market dominance even matter? Because, after all, if we don't get past the discovery step consistently we can never dominate our market. So all of these steps are not necessarily put in place for the salesperson themselves to be successful, although that is great byproduct; The real underlying purpose of all of this is to provide an alternative or an adjunct to the traditional funding, mergers, and acquisitions as a way of executing corporate strategy …That’s actually the purpose of all this…as my esteemed and candid co-host is very fond of saying, “You can go sell any damn way you want…if you DON’T want to dominate markets. Why? No one will care.”   In this episode, I poke Chris into a controlled burn on the mathematics, the reasoning, and the basic economics of how to dominate your market…and why it matters even more in today’s booming economy.  This is “No Tourists Allowed: Are You Serious about Reaching the top of your Market.”  ----more---- ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it! 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. So come on… give your fingers a rest with ConnectAndSell! 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

  Ask 50 bartenders how to make the best Tom Collins and 48 out 50 will tell you: Pour 1 oz Freshly squeezed lemon juice, 1 1/2 oz Gin, 2 oz Carbonated water and 1/2 oz Sugar syrup and shake. Now ask 50 sales professionals how to “make” the best Discovery call and you’ll get 50 different answers. Have an agenda. Build rapport. Establish time frames. Set a power frame. Identify a budget upfront or don’t do the call at all. Do a question stack. Talk a lot. Talk a little. It seems that everyone has their own recipe, and yet they are still calling it by the same name. Now sales discovery calls have been around at least as long as the vaunted and debonair Tom Collins. So why do they differ so broadly, and what ARE the necessary ingredients for creating a great Discovery session? In this session of the Market Dominance Guys, I ask Chris – a master mixologist in his own right – for the best additives – including trust, tone, and pace to earn a true confession in a Discovery. This is “The Confessional is Now Open – How to Harvest Authentic Trust in your Discovery Calls” ----more---- 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.   The complete transcript of this episode is below:   Product is, how do I go about navigating putting the right steps, the mood lighting if you will, for a good discovery call to get them to feel ... confession isn't out in the open in church, right? The music's in the background and the curtain and there's the screen and I feel safe to talk about some of these issues because you are a white-jacketed professional who's already demonstrated to me that you've solved problems like this in the past. And, "I've never told anybody this, but here's the problem that I have. Maybe you can help." It rarely gets to that point of trust in most discovery calls I find. How do you get that spark going? Chris Beall (03:22): Yeah. So first is the very thing that you talked about. At the very top of the funnel we have to believe, truly believe, in the potential value of the meeting for this human being. And that's what we're selling. Now we're having the discovery meeting. So the very first thing we have to do, remember we don't have rapport yet with this individual. They've simply decided to take the meeting, so step one is to take that as sufficient trust for you to approach me and turn that into an opportunity for rapport.  There are tons of ways of doing this. There are a lot of people who are expert at it. I have my own way of doing it. I simply ask the person I say, "It really helps me to know where somebody is when I'm talking to them in this world where we're all removed from each other, where are you on the face of our blue, whirling planet right now?" And the reason I ask it like that is twofold. One is I want them to have a picture, that classic picture of the earth from space, the one in which we're all together, because I want to bring us closer together. So the farther away the view, the closer together folks in the picture. So we're both in the same boat. Here we are. We're on this blue whirling planet. I want to see that Earthrise over the moon planet, that picture, right? That famous picture. I'm trying to get at that in their head because it takes this where you're over here and I'm over here and it pulls us together. And we're both in here. And that's why I say blue, because when you look at the earth from far away, it just looks blue, right? Because it's mostly ocean. And the fact that it's whirling, time is going by, we're spending our precious time together. So, where are you on the face of our blue, whirling planet? And then they'll talk about where they are usually with pride. Almost everyone is proud of where they live. So they have an opportunity to express something that's a value to them, which is pride. That's why don't ask about the weather, because people aren't proud of their weather, they're proud of where they live, they chose it. They're making the best of it. They might be moving from there to somewhere else. They may have a story about it. So immediately some openness starts. And it's very rare that somebody won't speak for two or three minutes. Then they remember it, that they're dominating the conversation and then they politely ask, "So where are you?" And I always tell him something that's very personal. "Well, I'm here in Reno, Nevada. And what I'm actually doing right now is I'm trotting on this trail, because I love to get out and run while I'm talking." "Wow, really?" And that's just ... it's different, right? So it causes them to remember this part of the conversation, it's just about people. So I want to go from the setting of it's about problems. I want to avoid that issue to start with and just have it be about two people having a conversation in some setting, the setting is we're far apart, but we're close together. You're in a place that you're proud of. I'm an interesting person because I'm doing something interesting or I'm in an interesting place and I'm proud of where I am too. Okay. So now we're done with that. The second question I tend to ask in discovery is this. I say, "I took a look at your website and I kind of think I get what you guys do, but I've learned the hard way that I'm always wrong when it comes to guessing about somebody else's business. So if you could help me out here, here's something that I'd find useful. If you have a perfect customer, everything's great, perfect client, perfect customer, perfect fit, your product is exactly what they need. They have the means to buy it. They're not pushing back on price. Your customer success people or support people are going to have a very easy time with them. They have the right attitude. When everything goes perfectly in your business, how does that change your customer's life?" And I always ask it exactly like that, because now I'm [inaudible 00:07:11] mission, and everyone is proud of the mission that they're on, but they don't get to think about it very often. They're lost in the minutia of day to day, the challenges of not having enough time, enough resource or enough support to do their job as well as they think it should be done. After all, that's why they took the meeting. They took the meeting because they resonated with one of the three. They had an emotional or an economic or a strategic reason to take the meeting based on their personal experience, not on their problem. Corey Frank (07:40): But, Chris, you're talking about is you now have two questions that ... let me back up for a moment. We started with Sebastian Maniscalco and the company bit, and he was on Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee with Jerry Seinfeld a couple episodes ago. And Seinfeld has a really insightful piece on the New York Times video magazine about how to write a joke. He calls it the pop tart joke. Seinfeld shows the actual, a browned yellow legal pad, free hand in a Bic number two blue ballpoint pen that he's written and crossed out and moved the words around. And he says, "I worked three years on this one joke to the point where every word is in the place where it needs to be." And he talks about chimps in the dirt, playing with sticks and how the tone and the syllabic transition has to be just right for the timing. And what I hear you saying is, the blue, whirling world right now, right? That has been tested and retested and refined. You say it with an exuberance of an intensity of real curiosity, of intimacy, of empathy. And then the second question that you talk about where you struggle a little bit with the broken wing, as an amateur salesperson, I could say, "Oh, Chris is asking. So where you calling from?" [crosstalk 00:09:15] Chris, I did the same thing you did. And I could say, "So what exactly do you guys do over there? And I get different reactions." Wait a minute, Chris, I said the same thing you did. No, no, you don't understand. Yours reeks of empathy and true interest. And it seems like I could, as a sales person, feel like I'm doing the same thing you are.  "What do you mean? I'm building rapport. I asked them where they were, and I asked them what they did. Then I went and I said, 'Okay.' And maybe I didn't respond with an empathetic tone. I would say, 'Anyway, so let's just jump right into this.'" And the prospect feels like, "Did you care about my answer at all? Or are you following some sort of script?" And it's like, at that point, the call is dead. And now the product would have to really be fantastic for them to supersede a terrible opening that I just gave.  But nevertheless, we see that all the time. So this element of tone that you have, dropping your voice. I just think that, that is ... can that be taught? Does that take practice? Does that need real coaching behind that to make sure. Because even if ... my product demo could be off a little bit, but if my tonality in my empathy is at the level that you just demonstrated, it seems like that's going to buy me a little bit more time, because I'm now likable. I've connected. I've had a little bit of trust in that initial call. So, but I see that all the time. Chris Beall (10:43): Yeah. Can it be taught? Absolutely. Must it be coached? Yeah, because we drift, and we drift because our personal lives and our professional pressures cause us to get in a hurry and skip micro steps. That little step where you check yourself before you even start the conversation to make sure that you're sincerely interested and not just saying the words, that your curiosity is real.  Just like before you go on stage, if you were a Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld I'm sure has a checklist before he walks out on stage. And that checklist is run 95% inside of himself, because if he is not on, and that's what it's referred to in that business, as being on, if he's not on, he's dead and he'll find out how dead he is. In front of a comedy audience, you're dead within three or four seconds. Walk out there and then start talking, you run the checklist internally.  I run an internal checklist before every discovery call. I ask myself, how do I feel physically? How sharp am I mentally? How much do I care right now about our own business and about somebody else's potential to take advantage it? And how open am I to learning something new? Those are the four things on my checklist. It takes me five or six seconds to go through the whole thing. But I go through that checklist and I never initiate a call. As experienced as I am at this, I'm too experienced to initiate a conversation with somebody without going through my checklist internally. It's a 100% internal. I don't care about, do I have some materials? Have I prepped this or that? Am I ready to show them a demo? That stuff's all garbage. All that really counts and the strategy within the discovery conversation is that we go from sufficient trust that the person is willing to approach me and come to the meeting to actual rapport. Rapport means we're doing things together. We're not moving and having to check each other. We begin to move in the same way. True rapport. We're walking side by side. Our steps are matching. When I speak, they listen. When they speak, I listen. That's rapport. Rapport is in an emotional state. Rapport is an operating condition that can be achieved between two people. When we're in harmony, in sync with each other, it's very intimate. In a sense, it's very mechanical. But to get to the point of being in rapport, you have to practice it with each other. So you need a safe place to practice rapport. So where are you on the face of our blue, whirling planet? And every word counts. Where are you on the face of our blue, whirling planet?  We share it. It's blue. It's vast. We're tiny. We're here together. It's whirling. Time is going by. It's a planet. It's not just some dirt. If I give somebody that to say, 100% of the time, they'll make up some other words and tell me it's the same thing. That's right. We just had one just for the 27 seconds that was funny, a call yesterday with somebody who will remain unknown, and he's the owner of the company he's personally calling. So they changed the 27 seconds to 17 seconds. And then say, "Well, nobody stayed on. People were hanging up on us. We said the same thing." No, you didn't. You change 27 seconds to 17 seconds. So you actually sounded like you weren't serious. Like you were lying. Because nobody could get something done in 17 seconds, so you weren't credible. Simple mechanical issue. You only put 23 pounds of pressure in a tire that needs 38. And you're wondering why the car doesn't handle it correctly. Well, there was some PSI in there. Isn't that good enough? No, it's got to be a right amount.  Corey Frank (14:25): The new Top Gun trailer just came out and it reminded me, I used to do a bit where I'd teach some of the sales reps that, remember the movie, Top Gun. They're in the bar and they first see the villain in the movie, Val Kilmer, Iceman. And Goose is re-introducing Maverick to Iceman, "Hey, why did they call him Iceman?" Said, "Because he flies ice cold. He waits for the other person to make a mistake. He is an automaton. He is a robot of efficiency." The skill then is, how do you do these things? I have no doubt, Chris, that when you say, "Hey, where are you in the face of our blue, whirling planet, Corey?" Right? The pauses, the staccato, the musicality is exactly the same. If I track that on an oscilloscope for your last 100 calls, there would be almost zero deviance in there. And that's locked in, and you are now the Iceman when it comes to that bit. And if I can put the little mini steps where I just aced that, and then I ace the opening and then I ace the next rock and the next rock and the next rock. Before you know it, I've created so much positive momentum that it does become very predictable. Chris Beall (15:45): Yeah. What's funny is, all you're trying to get to is a state where the person is comfortable confessing. Corey Frank (15:52): The state where the person is comfortable, yeah.  Chris Beall (15:54): That's all you're trying to get to. And you do that with what you say and how you say it, and with what's inside of you that supports what you say and how you say it, which is actually the key. And the openness is the real internal key, because if you're not open and curious, then it comes out in your voice and nobody's going to want to confess to you. People want to confess where they will be heard. They don't want to confess to somebody who has an agenda. So if your agenda, in fact, this is why I do not open discovery calls with an agenda. Because as soon as I've been an agenda in place, I'm saying my purpose is to get you to a condition where you're more likely to buy from me, no matter what the agenda is. And if you need to talk more, I'm not going to listen because I have my agenda. But a confession is a confession. We don't know how long it should take. Here's how that actually goes in time. Those first two parts, the first one will take about a minute and a half to two minutes, and somebody will talk about where they are. And then they'll ask you, because after two minutes, they get uncomfortable with dominating the conversation, because now they're flowing and they think, "Oh, I shouldn't do that. That's impolite," and they'll ask you where you are, which is the immediate rapport. You're back and forth. You're actually, this is like a warmup to play a game of tennis with somebody. You don't start right out in the court with a big booming serve. You politely hit some balls back and forth to warm each other up, because that's what's fair, right? That's what's fair. It's how we start a game of tennis.  People tend to ignore this part of the game. This is a critical part. By the way, when you're playing friendly tennis, right? I used to play a lot of it, the warmup is where you actually establish the feel for what it is that you're going to do with each other, because you're not really just trying to beat each other's brains in. It's competitive, but it's still friendly. So that first question, minute and a half or so, then you take 15 to 30 seconds to say something about where you are and how much you like it. Just saying how much you like where you are is a positive thing. They're proud of where they are, what they're doing. They may have something interesting to say about it. You say something interesting and you say you like where you are. Then when you ask them the second question, which is about their mission, you just shut up afterwards and they could go on. So the time that that takes is somewhere between 15 seconds, they don't think about their mission much. And it's really hard to help people like that, or they love what they're doing and how it changes somebody's life. And they just go on and on and you just let them go. There's actually no time where you ever stopped that, because that will contain the entire confession. You have to never ask another question. If they give you everything about the mission, then when the mission is getting stuck in some way, when they can't get the job done as well as they want, they're going to talk about that stuff. And all you have to do is just listen. You're done. I mean, discovery will take place entirely within the answer to that question.  When everything goes perfectly, when it's the perfect customer, when is the perfect situation, when the delivery is perfect, where your people just nail it, where the timing is great, where the customer has the means to buy the product and doesn't push back on price. When everything goes perfectly, how does your offering change that person's life? And then that's the key question, how does it change their life? You've recontextualized the whole thing in terms of true, ultimate value for a human being. Not the value you're going to provide them, but the value that they are providing others. Folks love to talk about the value they're providing others. Let them do it. Corey Frank (19:38): Even if they're in database management at American Express, by asking that question, I mean, you could get whether they are strategically minded. [crosstalk 00:19:51] just want to make sure that if somebody is on vacation, that when they swipe their card at the scuba shop in Jamaica, that it goes through. Or they could maybe lend it to their world, is that something more tactical. "My guys don't have to work on the weekend because we're running a very smooth, tight, under budget shop and we get our requirements done right the first time," so. Chris Beall (20:17): Exactly. So now they finished their confession, right? So you're actually kind of done, except you haven't told them what you do. So at that point, it's very awkward for them because they've really dominated the conversation, which you want them to do. And they're just [inaudible 00:20:34]. And then at some point they kind of go, "Oh, there's not a lot of time left." I'll often let it run up to within three minutes of the end of the meeting. I mean, this would shock most people in sales. I now have three minutes to tell them what we do. But remember, all we're trying to do is determine whether it makes sense to move to the next step. So how much did they need to know about what I do?  Well, they need to know one thing that I believe we do that addresses an economic issue. One thing that I believe that we do that addresses an emotional issue, almost always frustration. And one thing that I believe that we do that allows for a strategic result to be achieved, that would otherwise be difficult. So there was only three reasons that anybody ever avails themselves of something new, it either makes them money or reduces risk or save them money. That's all economic. The risk being just the probability of getting those savings or those new winning, or their life is dominated by something that's frustrating them, very rarely a positive emotion. There's normally frustration. That's the nature of work. We're frustrated when we don't have the time, we don't have the resources or we don't have the support to do our job as well as we believe it should be done. This is what Deming taught us back in the 50s. People work for pride of workmanship. They don't work for money. They work for pride of workmanship, and they're frustrated when they don't get pride of workmanship because they don't have the time, the resources, the support to do their job as well as they think they should do it. And then strategy is pretty simple. Everybody's trying to go somewhere. My product can help them take a step. If that step is a step within their strategy, we can help with their strategy. And whatever they respond to, this is the hardest thing in the world I think for salespeople to do, the very, very hardest. If somebody says, "It's really, really frustrating for me because my reps just won't use the phone." And I say, "Yeah, and you know what's great about ConnectAndSell? It's going to save you a bunch of money."  When I refuse to abandoned the other two, when they [crosstalk 00:22:48] one of the three, I basically am saying truly, truly, I'm not listening to you and I don't care about you at all. But reps hate to give up anything it's like, "But what if the cost savings were important to them? What of making more revenue were important to them? What if dominating the market's important to them?" And their sales manager will say, "You didn't mention this, this and this," when they listen to the [crosstalk 00:23:12]. But the key to everything is to reduce the problem set to be discussed by a factor of 66%. That's what you're looking to do right then.  Then if there's something left, there's a fourth answer by the way, there's a fourth thing, which is none of the above, in which case you don't move forward. So if they resonate with the economics, if they resonate with the emotional, or they resonate with the strategic, you immediately abandon the two they don't resonate with and they're qualified to move forward. If they don't resonate with any of those three, they're not qualified to move forward. It's very objective. It's not their answer to their budget question, their timing question, their this question, their that question. In discovery, we're trying to find out, is there a fundamental reason for us to take one more step? And if you hate your life because of something that I can help you with, and it's emotional, there's a reason to go forward. We might find the money at that point. Corey Frank (24:06): But I've already established trust with you in rapport. I've already confessed things. So the likelihood that even in this last three minutes, I may not have the comprehension to fully understand your value proposition and those things that you're talking about. But because you're just such a likable, empathetic guy, I'm going to give you that next meeting, which would be more of the formal demo at that point. But if I've ruined or rushed the confession, the priest isn't there looking at his watch saying, "Okay, come on, come on, come on, come, come on." Chris Beall (24:42): Yeah, and I'm sure there are priests like that. I mean, being a confessor is a nuanced art form. It is performance art at the highest level. And what's so interesting about this approach- Corey Frank (24:56): Performance art at the highest level. Chris Beall (24:59): It is, it's truly. It's performance art at the highest level. Sales is essentially, you're asking somebody to adopt you as their confessor. So it's even harder because you don't have the magnificence and the tradition of the church. All you've got is yourself. The horror, the sliminess of the tradition of the salesperson at the crossroads, trying to get you to pay as much as possible, and then go on your merry way, you actually have a harder job as the salesperson. But without doing that job, you're doomed because all you get then is the lucky hits. You're not looking to get the lucky hits. That's why we call it discovery. We're trying to discover.  Now to go back to, what was the value of the meeting? It turns out in a great discovery meeting, the value of the meeting is the person in their confession, discovers truths about their own situation that they were unaware of. And that's valuable. So oddly enough, the value of the meeting isn't learning about your product, it's learning about yourself and your situation and clarifying it. Then hearing that there is something that could help with one of these, maybe all three of these aspects, something about, "Hey, this is wasteful and it's driving me nuts." Something about, "I never seem to have enough time to get everything done." Something about, "Every time we try to go down the road and try to get to where we're going, we're blocked and we can't do it, that strategy." They get to hear that, "Hey, for my truth, there's a possible light at the end of the tunnel. There's a door that might open." That's what they could learn. That's [crosstalk 00:26:37]- Corey Frank (26:36): Discovery, but it's really self-discovery. Chris Beall (26:39): Self discovery. And then one little piece of self-discovery plus rational hope.  

Alex Honnold, one of the most talented mountain climbers in the world – who is the only man to ever successfully summit El Capitan free solo – and that means no ropes - by the way – had a strategy. And his strategy did not reach the top of the mountain. That was his ultimate destination. His strategy was to map the 30 sections – or “pitches” as they are called in climbing parlance - and practice the necessary and wide variety of different skills needed to manage each of these 30 precarious steps. Now as a sales professional, I find it fascinating that climbers call each section of a mountain a pitch…especially because, in this episode of the market dominance guys, Chris talks about strategy in much the same way Alex attacks a mountain…as simply a list of necessary and intermediate destinations leading to the summit or close. And each of these strategies needs to employ the proper tactic – or in this case – the proper pitch. This episode of Market Dominance Guys is “How to Free Solo your Pitch”. ----more---- 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: You were saying that we are experts at strangers. We see, sense, can feel the seismic disruption in the force of strangers when they come into our life, albeit via phone or for a conference call or what have you. And so we're pre-wired to know that strangers, these invisible strangers, are inherently never a good thing. And so by understanding that, it's like I've seen the problem in the world and it's me. By starting from that very self aware versus being self-absorbed perspective, I think that's going to step one, chapter one of how a sales rep can have a successful discovery call. And so I think that's what we wanted to chat about today a little bit, is that this breakthrough that I really liked you talking about last time, is that the discovery call is the product, should be a product in and of itself, separate from the product. And that if your discovery call is all about an inquisition, all about questions that the prospect can see a mile away is only going to be used to box me into a corner with some fancy alternate choice questioning technique, then that's not a successful discovery call because it doesn't lead with value. It doesn't have any value separate from the product itself. And if you do that and you do the example you used with the black widows in the garage with the Raid, it only makes them angry. So you have to have the right repellent or attractant, otherwise you're only going to piss off the person that you were intent on. You can't be like Evel Knievel and jump over discovery into the close, into the product demo. It has to be something that has much more of a nutritional value, much meatier in this case. So I think that's probably a good place to start for today, is the discovery call. And how it has value, how it doesn't become successful, how you screw it up. Maybe a little bit of the biophysiology of why we need a good discovery call anyway and why it's the surest path, even though it takes a little bit more time and reps want to jump it, they want that Candyland shortcut, but it truly is the best way to get to a sale and then ultimately market dominance. Chris Beall (04:52): And number one is that the discovery call is a destination. You're not trying to get to a deal. The destination, and this is true of any strategy, by the way. It's kind of funny, when people talk strategy, so I'll back up into strategy just a little bit. They often are talking about the equivalent of standing at the bottom of the mountain and looking at the summit and saying my strategy is to get to the summit. But that's not a strategy. The strategy would be, looks to me like this crack right here on the northwest ridge is a good place to start. And there's a ledge up there that I see. And from there, it looks like we can traverse 50, 60 feet to the left, and now we can get into this big chimney over there and we can go up. It's a series of steps. A strategy is in fact, a series of destination and each destination has the quality that it gets us closer to or reduces the cost and risk associated with getting to the next destination. And if we string them all together, we get to our ultimate destination. So people are very confused about strategy in the first place. They think strategic means important or final. And strategic has nothing to do with what's important and nothing to do with what's final. It simply is a list. Strategy is a list of intermediate destinations, each one of which reduces the cost and risk of getting to the next destination on the list. That's it. If you want to cross a river, you don't want to get in and swim perhaps because you have some issue with that and there's rocks in the river. The strategy is I stand on this rock and then I go to this rock and then I go to this rock. I go to this rock and some of them might appear to be coming back toward the shore I came from, but I can string them all together and arrive at my final destination. But each rock- Corey Frank (06:33): But folks would say that those are tactics, but you're saying that there's a whole bunch of little tactics to make the strategy, but the strategy in and of itself is made up of these little stepping stones. And some folks like to skip over all that and just get to the top of the mountain. Chris Beall (06:51): Yeah, the tactic is how you execute a strategic step. How I get to that next destination. That's a tactic. So for instance, if my destination is a discovery call, that's my first destination. My tactic could be I call somebody on the phone and I use that breakthrough script. My tactic could be that I send them an email. My tactic could be that I make a presentation to a group of such people and see which ones respond to my presentation and talk to them in person. My tactic could be to put a billboard up outside their office that says, "Hey, we got something cool going on, come learn about it and here's a website or a phone number." All those are tactics. Tactics are all hows. Strategies are lists of wheres, of destinations. And the first destination is the only one that counts at any given point or the next one is the only one that counts. And so when you begin the process, the safe thing to do is ignore the second rock, the third rock, the fourth rock, the fifth rock, because you've got to jump and land on the first rock. And if you're trying to jump to the second rock while you're trying to land on the first rock, you will land in the river. And that's what happens to most salespeople. They don't see the value, they don't understand the value for the person they're going with. Because they're saying, "Hold hands with me, oh prospect, and we'll jump to this rock here that we call discovery." And then the salesperson, as they're about to take off says, "Well, really, really, really though, there's this other one. I think I can almost get to it. Let's just jump over there." And then splash, you both go in the river and it's not so great. You can only accomplish one strategic step at a time. You need to focus on it. You need to treat it as a destination. You have to maximize the odds of getting there with the person you want to get there with. And then you need to consider, do I take the next step or not? Because one thing that's true in sales strategies, all sales strategies have intermediate qualification. That is at some point, you find out that it doesn't make sense right now to move to the next step. So each one has that special quality that not only are you going there for an independent purpose, independent value, that's going to be delivered to the person who's going there with you. But one of the outcomes that's okay, is you say, "Let's not move forward together." And that's the other thing that salespeople have such a hard time with in their heads, is they don't think it's okay to go to the first step with somebody that they're not sure is going to go to the second step. But it's in the first step, discovery, where you discover if you should go to the second step. So presuming anything about whether they should go to the second step, that is beyond discovery to a demo, to a test drive, to a POC, wherever it is your next step might be, having any assumption about that whatsoever, again, pulls you off course and makes it harder to sell the first step on its own as independent value. The core belief that's needed for a salesperson in the top of the funnel conversation, whether it's a cold call or whether it's a follow-up call, a second conversation, third conversation or whatever. The core belief that they need to have really deep inside is they need to believe in the value of the meeting that they're offering, the discovery meeting. For the person they're talking to, not their company, but that human being. In the case, which they would consider the downside case, where there will never be any business done between your company and their company. That's the core belief. If a person believes that, they can use almost any tactics at the top of the funnel. Then it's just a question of efficiency. How much time do they have in order to get the job done? And recalling always, the job is market dominance. The job isn't to make the sale, the job is to exhaust the market of possibilities so that when your competitor comes along, basically it is scorched earth. You've talked with everybody in a sensible way, everybody who's relevant before they talk to anybody. That's the ultimate winning approach. It's above a strategy. It's an approach. It's a paradigm for going to market. And it says basically if I work my way all the way back through, the only safe position is dominance. All nondominant companies go out of business. It's just a matter of time. So I've got to seek safety. I need to find the high ground of dominance. To find the high ground of dominance, I need to have something to dominate. We call that a market. In order to be able to dominate that market, I need to condition the market in my favor and against all competitors, current and future. The most reliable way to do that is to establish trust with every relevant person in that market. The only way to do that is to have conversations with every relevant person in that market, because it takes about 600,000 bits of information going back and forth to establish trust. And I can't do that with digital means. I can't do that with emails that have 5,000 bits of information each. How can I get somebody to read 120 emails before we ever speak? That doesn't happen. I can't do it with social, which is even worse. Social communication is shorter than email. I might have to have 7 or 800 social communications before somebody begins to trust me. And then I'm in a noisy environment where others are being mistrustful and not trustworthy. And so that environment is a tough environment for me to operate in. Have conversations in a private environment, where somebody can choose to begin to trust me based on just the information I'm providing, not all the noise that everybody else is providing that's trying to counter, confuse, mess with what I'm trying to do here, which is to be a person to another person. Corey Frank (12:12): Sure. Chris Beall (12:12): So I'm kind of stuck, right? If I want to have a business that stays in business, I must dominate a market. To dominate a market, I need to talk to everybody in the market who's relevant. I need to talk to them in a way that is meaningful to all of them. The only product that I can sell to every single person in that market is a discovery conversation that educates them with regard to something I know that's of potential value to them that they probably don't know and it's okay that they don't know it. That's the other key. It has to be okay for them not to know it. It has to be safe. It has to be- Corey Frank (12:46): For them to admit that I don't know this. Chris Beall (12:48): Exactly. And the beauty is, as the vendor, I always know what the customer doesn't because I'm a specialist. They're a specialist in their business, I'm a specialist in my business. A specialist can always teach a generalist. So the information that I have as a specialist is okay for you as a generalist to say, I want to learn this. You don't have to do anything to your self image, except I'm a learner. Whereas other, if I'd say to you, "Gosh, Corey, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough system that allows you to make coffee in the morning." And you'd say, "Well, I'm set." And you're thinking, what kind of idiot does this guy think I am? He thinks that I don't even know how to make coffee and that's an important thing to do? That's the standard opening pitch. "Hey, Corey, let me tell you about a category of product that every competent person in your position has already considered in order to solve a problem they have." Otherwise, I wouldn't be calling you and telling you. Corey Frank (13:47): But is that laziness, Chris? Or do some companies just don't have that thought, what problem in the world does your product solve? But if I'm a sales rep working for an established company, it seems like that is a violation of the rules of nature, if I throw out some broad based ubiquitous benefit that insults the prospect in the first 30 seconds of the call, either due to laziness, it's not thinking about their product in the right way. It seems like that's so prevalent in the world, is that sales reps won't spring off their first step and have something that is more of a specialist benefit. And instead, "Hey, we have a better, faster way to do X and Y and Z. Like to take a few minutes of your time and maybe schedule a demo and talk to you about that." Chris Beall (14:44): Yeah, so I don't think it's laziness. I think it's actually a misunderstanding of the situation. The problem is this, if I'm going to speak to you narrowly about something that's special and I'm going to do it before we're in a discovery conversation. So I'm trying to get you into the discovery conversation first, and I'm going to speak narrowly, the chance of me hitting your current problem, which by the way I can't do anyway, because your problem is me in the first conversation. But say as a lucky guess I could hit problem number two, one that's in the back of your mind. You just turned away from that problem to answer the phone. So the narrower my targeting of what I'd have on offer, the lower probability of me hitting your problem, because the narrow problem is something that's had by a smaller number of people right now. So I have a problem at the very, very top of the funnel. And again, this goes all the way back to the peculiarity of the times we live in. This problem was not worth solving 20 years ago. It simply wasn't. There were very few companies that were bottle necked above the top of their funnel 20 years ago. They were bottle necked on delivery and on innovation. So delivery and innovation, I can't deliver more of the stuff that I'm selling. I've got channel issues, I have delivery channel issues. I've got all this stuff. And oh, by the way, I got to keep up with whatever's going on in the market. I got innovation issues. Now it's flipped around. Everybody can innovate. Everybody can deliver. And nobody has enough people to talk to. So we have a new problem that's worth solving, which is, how do we just breakthrough above the top of the funnel? Which is a universal problem for all B2B businesses now. And in so doing, what universal factor or situation or fact can we use in order to make every single conversation at just above the top of the funnel? That's a prospecting or lead generation kind of conversation. Make everyone stand on reliable ground. A guess as to somebody's business problem is not reliable ground, because the narrower my guess, that is the more value I bring, the lower the probability of actually hitting the target. And I've got to dominate the market by talking to everybody in discovery. My problem is I need for a market of 10,000, I need 2,000 discovery calls in the first year. So that by the time I'm through with the third year, I have 6,000 discovery calls and I've hit more than half the market. And anybody comes in now, three out of five times at random, they run into somebody I've already spoken with. So I'm conditioning the market for all time against all competitors by having discovery conversations rapidly enough. Therefore, my discovery conversation needs to be an independently sellable product. I'm going to sell it for time. You give me 15 minutes, I'll teach you something. And I need to know what I'm likely to teach them. Corey Frank (17:24): Because information is so readily available today versus 20 years ago, you as a salesperson, you were the necessary evil because I needed you for more than the price. You were going to give me information that wasn't available because you had access to catalogs and trade shows and manifests and scenarios and case studies. I couldn't pull up a white paper as easily as I can today and know more about your three or four competitors in the first 30, 90, 60 seconds of that phone call. Do you have any competition? Well, no, we don't have any competition. Well, according to the research I did in the last 60 seconds, this and this and this and this. So it seems like the salesperson hasn't evolved past the point where all they're good for today is just figuring out if I can get a lower price than what I can available, what it says on your website. And if I don't evolve to be more of someone who provides value, insight that I can't readily find anywhere else, then I'm going to go the way of the dinosaur. Chris Beall (18:36): Yeah, exactly. And the insight is not insight that I can just bring to the meeting because I haven't heard from the prospect, then the true nature of their situation. Their situation is always embedded in something. It's always peculiar, as my mother would say. So it's idiosyncratic. They have their boss, not somebody else's boss. They have their budgetary process, not somebody else's. They have their history of other tools, techniques, and approaches they're using to address this problem. Not someone else's. None of that stuff is publicly available. It's so precise and it's so unique to this individual that offering anything generic as an insight, doesn't make sense. The insight needs to evolve out of the conversation. That's why it's a discovery meeting, not a discovery presentation. And it has to involve true discovery and what are you trying to discover? You're trying to discover the nature of their situation, such that you can use your expertise and evaluate whether it makes sense to take one more step down this road. That's really all you're doing in discovery. You're not designing a solution. You're not looking to figure out what the ROI would be. You're not doing any of those things. You're not digging into the product details or features. You're simply asking a bunch of questions and they're asking a bunch of questions. You're having an actual conversation to figure out if by and large, in a risk adjusted sense, given the cost of the next step and the risks associated with failure for the next step, does it make sense to take the next step? That next step could be simple. It could be a demo. It could be more complex, proof of concept. It could be a visit to the site. It could be a decision to bring more people into the process, which is expensive. Whatever it happens to be, we don't know that we should take that step together until we've had a conversation in which the prospect confesses the truth of their situation. So it's really of the form of a confession, not an interrogation. Corey Frank (20:41): It seems now that a sales mind person like myself, the answer to, does it make sense to take the next step? Does it make sense to move forward? 100 times out of 100 when I ask that question, my intent is that of course it makes sense from my perspective. Chris Beall (21:01): Right. Corey Frank (21:02): But I didn't do a thorough job of getting them to confess their problem to establish trust and so every problem is a nail and I'm the hammer. And every prospect is the same. And if they would only take my product for a test run, if they'd only just see the demo in their mind, they don't even have to elaborate it. I know they're going to process silently that, ah, this is a fit. And that's what I'm hoping for as a salesperson, versus getting them to elocute and talk about what the specific issue is. And so if I don't have that trust, I'm not going to give that to you in a good discovery call, no matter how good your call.  

There is a universal product that every company has that it needs to better understand and sell more effectively and correctly. And it's a product that can be crafted and messaged just like any other product your team sells. Because it’s a real product, it requires belief in its potential value and worth from the folks that sell it. It’s a product that shouldn’t be short-cut or mis-messaged…or even try to do too much. It needs to be measured for effectiveness. And the ability to get this product in front of your list is also one of the keys to market dominance. That product is the Discovery Meeting or Discovery Call. In the episode, I ask Chris to separate fact from fiction and put some sound data and reasoning behind this misunderstood and much-maligned tool. This episode of Market Dominance Guys is The Right Tool for the Right Job, or as I like to call it, Don’t Make the Spiders Angry. ----more---- 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. The complete transcript of this episode is below: Chris Beall (02:11): It's subtle as can be, and when people want to change it, it's really fun to listen to them because they want to change it to eliminate the taboos. They want to run from the taboos into the conventional, where they can ask some normal questions. Did I catch you at a bad time? All those kinds of questions feel... Corey Frank (02:32): Why is that, Chris? They don't want to express vulnerability, they have an inner governor that says, I don't feel confident enough, vulnerable enough, to go there. And so, it's really on them, not necessarily, they're not ready emotionally to commit themselves to that level of vulnerability in our profession. Chris Beall (02:58): Yes. And [inaudible 00:03:01] puts it perfectly, which is, every objection I ever heard was felt as a rejection and went into the banks, the memory banks of, oh my God, I'm going to be rejected again so I'm going to take actions to avoid rejection. And the objection would be, no, I don't have time. To hear that in somebody's voice is actually not to hear, I don't have time but I don't like you, I won't even give you 27 seconds. And that'll happen. There are people who can say no, there are people who'd slam the phone down, there's people who will bark at you. All these things will happen and they accumulate so the emotional courage that it takes to be a cold caller is substantial, even with only two sentences. Even two sentences you can learn, and if you get the emotions right in your voice, you're good. Now that the cure for it actually is not to go get [inaudible 00:03:55]. The cure is to have a belief. And the belief is in the potential goodness of what you have on offer for the other person, which is never your product. So this is the other huge problem with this approach is there's a desire to skip the step of selling the meeting, which as an object of independent value for this individual, regardless of what is ever going to happen and to jump to selling the product to the company. And that error is the standard error. Once you get past the courage question, then the question is, what do you really sound like? Are you sincere, or you're not sincere? So you need to sincerely believe something to make all of this even- Corey Frank  (04:42): So a one call close, even if it can be done, shouldn't be done because you rob the prospect of an opportunity to have this trust journey with you. You're really manipulating at that point. So even as a fuller brush sales person, even though they probably hit you over the head, there should be a one call, one door close, you would set the meeting. And that aspect of the meeting is the prize for that instance. That is the objective, that should be the only objective on a cold call at this point. Chris Beall (05:25): Yes. And therefore you must believe in your product, your product is the meeting. So you must know what they're likely to get from the meeting independent of ever moving forward to business. So the core belief for successful cold calling is to believe in the potential value of the meeting for the human being that you're talking within the downside case where there's never going to be any business done between your company and theirs. It's precisely that formulation. That's what you must believe in. And you must rationally believe in it, that is you must be able to internally defend that belief to yourself. You must know what they're going to get. And the only thing you could get from a meeting, when people have often said to me, "Oh, what does that mean, you should give them a prize like, they get a $5 gift card?" No, you must know what they're likely to learn that will make a difference in their life no matter what. They're not sure to learn it because learning is always an iffy proposition, but there's a likelihood, a probability that they're going to walk away from that meeting knowing something they didn't know before, that's a value to them, not to their company. It may be a value to their company, but that's irrelevant. It's a value to that human being. So I'll repeat the formulation. This is the key to the whole thing. If you can accomplish this, the techniques mean almost nothing, but this is hard to accomplish. If you flip it around and you get good at the techniques, you'll get some success, but your success will be limited by the fact that you don't have the correct core belief because people are being [inaudible 00:06:57] listening to voices and they'll hear the lack of sincerity in your voice. So what can you be sincere about? You can be sincere about this one thing and then it's so important to get there. If there were one thing I would change about every sales organization in the world would be this, that everybody who has first conversations, the leads and the potential value of the meeting that they have on offer for the human being that they're talking with, in the case where there's never going to be business done between the two companies. And those are all important, the word never is important there. Corey Frank (07:32): So belief. Chris Beall (07:33): Belief in this very specific. Belief in your product gets in the way of belief in the potential value of the meeting. If you try to combine the two beliefs [inaudible 00:07:49] . Corey Frank (07:49): But that is the fundamental dispute, they're one and the same. And they are two distinct destinations in your perspective. Chris Beall (07:58): Yes. If all you learned from me as a fuller brush man, is that there's such a thing as a spider spray that kills black widow spiders, and you don't buy any from me, you know something new, which is when you're looking for something to kill spiders with, don't use Raid, it just makes them angry, that's a value. Corey Frank (08:21): That's awesome. You're already preempting my objection. How will that benefit there? [inaudible 00:08:33] Chris Beall (08:35): That's the key. And what's so interesting is we've done the experiments. So for one of our customers who will remain on named here, we took on the project of doing a massive amount of calling for them, using our outbound on-demand service. And we got the script right, we got the messaging right. We knew that this stuff should work. And it only worked at about a 4% conversation to meeting conversion rate. And after three days, I just said, no, no, no. You know, because one of the beauties of ConnectAndSell is in three days you're done, In fact one day, you're done. You're always done in one day. Your signal has come back. If it's working, it's working. If it's not working, you should stop and fix something. That's the whole idea. So in three days, because I was paying attention to other things, I'm looking at the numbers and I go, this is insane. We can't do what we said we would do with these conversion rates. We're below threshold and we're not moving. And oh, don't worry, they'll learn to do it better. That's never the case. They don't learn to do a better, you teach them to do it and they do it and that's it. So I listened to a bunch of recordings and I thought, what is missing here? What is missing in this paint by numbers thing that I'm hearing and what was missing was the sincerity in the tone of voice. And by the way, these callers were selected specifically for their sincerity, they're graduates of some of the finest religious colleges in the world. They're pre-filtered for sincerity. This is like packaged sincerity on steroids, and yet they were failing. And so the question is well, what's missing. And I thought, oh, well, what's missing is they don't believe in what they're selling. And in fact, their sincerity about their religious calling is that, that's real, their sincerity about this product is zero. So what could they be sincere about? Well, they think they're selling the product, they're selling the meeting. So we got a customer to actually just tell them in a video testimonial, what the meeting did for them, not what the product did for them, and then what the product did for them. And what they learned in the meeting was that by changing how they dealt with this particular problem in their organization, which happens to be expense management, they would free up time to pursue their own strategic objectives, which is the reason they joined their company in the first place. They learned about the opportunity to be free to do their job well, like learning that Raid makes black widow spiders angry, and that there's a spider spray that kills them. And then frees you up from having to worry about angry black widow spiders in your garage. They learned that there was a path to freedom in which, if they were to go down that path, they would find themselves with time, with the energy, with the bandwidth to do the job as they really wanted to do it. Instead of being consumed with this meaningless to them sort of ticky tack paperwork back and forth rework job that they were doing. Corey Frank (11:36): Sure. But isn't that the different evolutions of sales professionals? Like I remember an article, I think it was about 20, 25 years ago when I first got into sales by the Beverage Institute that talked about the four evolutions of sales professionals and evolution number one, well, what was called the commercial visitor. And the commercial visitor was someone who had a certain level of criteria that classified themselves as such number one, was they fell into sales by accident. Number two, they felt that sales as a profession is living on the fringe of society. This was well even before Sandler's kind of role versus identity where or supplication, they had really an essence, a high need for approval. And they felt that anytime I have to ask for something and taking something from someone and I couldn't square that circle. And so what you're talking about these folks who had a tough time believing in the product they had to sell, and is that a fundamental mistake for a lot of sales leaders or a lot of visionary CEOs is not necessarily talking about the personal benefits of the product or the learnings that their product has, even if someone never buys, as you had said, and that instead they're dwelling on the better, faster, cheaper, rainbows unicorns world after that the prospect has purchased the product and is paying you their monthly SAS business. And it seems like there's a disconnect and identity perspective or from a messaging perspective of training these new salespeople Chris Beall (13:20): There is. And my claim is this, there is a universal product that every company has that it needs to understand and sell correctly. And that product is the discovery meeting. And it's a product that can be crafted, it can be understood like any other product, it can be described sincerely, it has to be delivered correctly. It's a real product so it has delivery. And its purpose is to help somebody understand something of value to them or potential value to them that they didn't understand before. Because the asymmetry in businesses is, if I'm the purveyor, if I'm the vendor, I know I always know more than the person I'm selling to. So the first product I can put on the shelf is the product where I share that knowledge in a way that is useful for this person, even if they don't [inaudible 00:14:11]. That's the universal product, and once you understand that that's the universal product, then you can manufacture and sell discovery meetings in a completely reliable way. And we know from the math of business, that the flow rate of discovery meetings constraints the growth of the business. It's as simple as that actually. This entire thesis is around one thing mathematically, and we were dealing with the human side like how do you get there? Right? Just the manufacturing process for these discovery meetings. But the discovery meeting itself is the product. And this is the hardest thing for sales leaders and marketing leaders together. And this is where the sales and marketing alignment question if we can explore in depth in another one of these discussions. Sales and marketing alignment happens when sales and marketing agree as to what the discovery meeting itself is as a product. As soon as that happens, the entire sales and marketing misalignment problem goes away. Failing to do that you're left with this evil Knievel approach where I'm going to leap across this huge trust barrier and land on the buy something from a side of the Snake River Canyon. And I end up down in the bottom of the Canyon, almost every single time, which is this whole quota attainment problem and all that kind of stuff. And it's the business failure rate from businesses fail primarily because they don't establish product market fit between the product that they need to sell first and the market and the product they need to sell first is not the product they set out to build, but it's the discovery meeting. Corey Frank (15:50): And the discovery meeting, if you had to is it's an educational journey that establishes value if the person never moved forward with the product itself. Chris Beall (16:06): That's the absolute. Everything you offer along the journey to possible sale has to have independent value that is value independent of the sale itself. If I apply on that simple construct, you can generate a strategy, a series of steps that you can consistently execute between the starting point, which is being the scary invisible stranger, who is also inconvenient and a possible ending point that is not predetermined, which is somebody deciding that they want to enter into partnership with you and take advantage of your knowledge and what you have to offer as a product and the steps in between are steps of increasing trust and knowledge moving together. And so what you have to share is knowledge. So your product is knowledge and knowledge is shared in a discovery meeting and the opportunity for the person to confess, which is the breaking of a taboo to go back to the original topic, to confess their problem to you. They're paying their situation. That opportunity is actually what's on offer in the discovery meeting. The opportunity for them to confess their problem to somebody that they trust. That's actually what the product is. Corey Frank (17:22): I love it.  

Growing up, your mom probably told you to never talk to strangers. She also said never ask anyone for money. So…fast forward 20 years and find yourself at your desk, a newly minted college grad and a fresh-faced and newly hired sales professional at a great company. And what does your boss tell you to do on your first day? “Um…Josh, I need you to take this list of leads and I need you to call them (i.e. talk to strangers)…oh and then, if they’re really friendly, I need you to ask them to buy something (i.e. ask them for money…or even tougher, ask them for time).  Um...ok?” So how do you step up and actually tackle these taboos and address the social baggage that we all have been taught? How do you reduce fear and build trust…especially since you are even worse than a typical stranger…you are an invisible stranger! In this episode, Chris and I have a little fun in this episode of Market Dominance Guys and discuss “Stranger” Things.  ----more---- ConnectAndSell – Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it! ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology loads your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x 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 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 (02:06): In cold calling is "how do you step up"? And it turns out there was a very powerful way to do it, which is to break the taboo against being the problem and be straight up, just admit, in fact, proactively declaim, you are the problem. I know I'm an interruption. And that's why the phrase is said like that. I know I'm an interruption. I agree with you. You know, I'm an interruption. I don't have to tell you that, but I'm telling you, I know I'm an interruption. So not only have I broken the taboo, which gets everybody's attention, right? It's like blood, it gets everybody's attention. You can't open a cold call with blood and that one doesn't work. And you could, somebody answers the phone. You say: "Hey, Corey, you know, I've got a lot of blood right here. That's kind of pouring out of this side of my arm." Chris Beall (02:54): You'd probably go: "Oh my God, I might get your attention. But I think it might be a little difficult to the conversation." But if I say: "I know I'm an interruption and I break that taboo against being the problem." Then suddenly you've got to deal with the fact that I've done that. And this is by the way, how I was successful as a brush man in Phoenix. I would knock on the door and imagine your kid has never sold in his life. You're selling under pressure, real pressure. I've got to make money in order to deal with the financial consequences of a miscarriage said, miscarriage, by the way happened, just on the other side of this counter, in the middle of that kitchen, that's 10 feet away from me. It happened. And guess what it was: it was pool of blood on the floor. Chris Beall (03:41): So, I mean, imagine a pool of blood spreading across the floor, underneath my wife. So that's how, that's what I came to as this miscarriage is watching somebody in her, in her house, coat standing in a pool of blood. Right? So now I've got to deal with this and we're about to move the next day. We're going to move to Colorado. Well, now I can't move to Colorado. There was a hospital visit. There's... Corey Frank  (04:07): And you're selling Fuller brushes? Chris Beall (04:08): And not, yet, I'm moving and now I need a job and I need a job in one day. And the only job I could find in one day was to be a Fuller-brush-man. And I met the Fuller-brush people at Denny's, the boss, you know, the district manager or whatever he was. And the training was almost non-existent. It's like: "here's the bag? Chris Beall (04:31): Here's the stuff. Here's what you do. Here's how you fill out the order, your territory dude go." Right? So I thought about it and I said: "Hey, this is what they said to do is knock on the door and then try to sell them something." And I thought that's impossible. Chris Beall (04:44): Why would somebody buy something from a stranger knocking on their door when it's 114 degrees out? That's just nutty. They have a perfect excuse to close the door, you're costing me a dollar, a minute of air conditioning. "Thank you very much goodbye." Chris Beall (04:58): So I thought, you know, typical of my approach to things as a physicist mathematician: is to break it down into the pieces and then ask which piece can I do? So the piece I realized I could do was this: I would knock on the door and I thought, what I need is information and permission to come back. Chris Beall (05:15): Those are the two things I need. I need to know who I'm dealing with. I need to have them tell me I can come back. So I can't sell them. So when I'm selling them, I'm selling them the opportunity to learn something about them, which I can do just by looking at them. Okay? Chris Beall (05:29): So I got to get a look at them and then I need to get permission to come back; so that's my sale. Can I come back? So the way I did it was this: I broke a taboo and knocked on the door. They would answer, I said: "Hi, I'm Chris Beall I'm your new Fuller-brush-man. You probably don't know what Fuller-brush is, I sure don’t." Huge taboo, Right? I'm ignorant of my own company. That's like a crazy thing to say. A hundred percent of the time people kept the door open. There wasn't one person who closed the door in my face. I don't even think my mother would've done. And she was an expert, she was like, God of closing the door. Chris Beall (06:11): So, then they would say, how can I help you? That's what everybody said: "How can I help you?". Because I had said that I was vulnerable because I didn't even know what my company was. And so they asked for the opportunity to help me. And I said: "Well, here's what would be really helpful for me. I've heard, and I don't know if this is true, that our company has some products that can't be bought in stores and that are unusually good around the house". Chris Beall (06:41): And what I would like to do is to go look at those products, which I haven't had a chance to look at, at all yet. And if I find one or two of these that I think would really make a difference in your life, do I have your permission to come back in and waste five minutes of your time showing them to every single person I talked to said, yes, there were no exceptions. So I had a door to close rate in my first week here, my territory of 100%. And now I had information. So it was a woman 30 to 40. Obviously had some kids. There's an oil stain on the driveway. Hey, they have a garage, it's Arizona and know that they have black widow spiders in there, and I know how to find them because I grew up here. Then I went off, you know, I took my notes on each one and went to the next door and, and did this and did this and did this. Chris Beall (07:31): And it took five days to do my whole territory. I was very efficient because I didn't have to waste any time selling them anything. It was just this one thing. It took less than two minutes. It was done. I'd watch, take my notes fast blocks with they do the next door, compose myself a little bit, and then knock on that door and just repeat the same thing. Now I got all this information and I went and found, I figured out there were seven demographics that were significant. And I found a person that I knew in each demographic. And I went through the catalog very quickly category by category and found two products for that demographic that that person told me that they would buy. One was very inexpensive and it was something you would only ever need one of in your life. Chris Beall (08:12): So you would buy it from me unless you hated me. And then the other one was something that was relatively expensive consumable, and that if you wanted it and you thought it was never coming back, you'd buy a lock. That was that two products. So 14 products. I sold that of the thousands in catalog. And then I just went back in the evening when people were a little more relaxed, it's not quite so hot, sun's just gone down. So it took me twice as long to go through the territory. And I shared those two products and I always made sure it was only five minutes and everybody except for 6%. So 94% bought something from me and other 72%, bought at least $30 of the thing that you wouldn't be able to get again. And some would buy a hundred dollars plus, and one in 10 would buy my electrostatic-force-sweeper. Cause my mom liked it. Chris Beall (09:06): And I became the number one Fuller-brush-man in Arizona history, I believe in two weeks. By doing something very simple, by breaking the taboo of ignorance of what you're selling by not posing as the product expert, but by being vulnerable. And then them offering me help and me doing a service for them, which is researching the products and then keeping my promise, which was five minutes. Corey Frank  (09:32): So, but everything else that you read, it seems as about establishing star power, credibility, respect; that you know, your product. And I almost hear you saying Chris, that vulnerability supersedes that, it it's a, it's a super highway to trust because the reaction that your prospects had said to you after you showed vulnerability, you probably physically threw up your arm. Corey Frank  (10:05): So I don't know anything about right. And so just the mythological statement of having [inaudible 00:10:12] being vulnerable led to them saying, well, how can I help you? You've given, you've opened up. You know, let me, let me see. I can, how I can help you. And is, or, or is it, is it a temporary condition? Is it a parallel condition? Does it, is it like the word blood where vulnerability shocks people into wanting to render assistance and, now you're in the trust circle. If you will? Where they're going to be listening a little bit more intently because they're not going to have their hand on their wallet or their hand on their holster because you've already kind of bypassed that, that emotion. That's what I hear you saying. But,... Chris Beall (10:59): And it's very powerful because it's universal. We're not pulling a trick on them. You're actually telling them the truth, that's what's especially interesting. Chris Beall (11:07): In the cold call, when you say, I know I'm an interruption, you're not saying, I know I'm interrupting you. I know I'm interrupting your day is not interesting. It's not about me. I want to tell you that I'm the problem. And then, cause you think I'm the problem. The circumstance is not the problem. We can't throw the circumstance under the bus, but we can throw me under the bus and that's it. There's subtlety in here. This is why this is so hard to teach and so hard to learn because taboos are very, very hard to break. And we drift away from breaking the taboo to the non-taboo version, which doesn't work at all. By the way, it has no effect. When I say, if I were to say know, I'm interrupting your day, I get nothing. If I say, I know I'm an interruption and I emphasize the word, no, then I get something. And what I get is you're listening to the person who just said he was an interruption. Why did he say what was an interruption? Chris Beall (12:11): I mean, I know I agree with you, right? But nobody ever, nobody ever admits that and it doesn't go. It doesn't go stale at some point you only have to use it once or only that person once. Corey Frank  (12:24): Versus, "Hey, did I catch you at a good time to catch you at a bad time? Do you have five minutes to talk? Can you have 15 minutes? Maybe I can get in your calendar?" Too soon and no trust and no empathy. Chris Beall (12:35): Yes. And it's only four words: I know I'm an interruption. It's Five words after which you get to offer a solution to the problem after all, why would I tell you about a problem that I believe you have? Chris Beall (12:50): Which, happens to be me unless I'm going to offer a solution to the problem. So if I just called you up and said, I know I'm an interruption and just stopped after a while, you'd be thinking, yeah. "Okay. Like, what's next?" What if I say: "I know I'm an interruption." And then I changed my voice to playful and curious, and I offer a solution. So I'm going to change the mood here from an acknowledgment of flat, very flat acknowledgment of a fact, which is, I am the problem to a question which is basically: "might we play together for a little bit of time?" Chris Beall (13:38): Can you, will you come out and play? So now we're back to knocking on the door; "Hey, can Corey come out and play? Mrs. Frank, can Corey come out and play?" That's that voice, right? You wouldn't say: "Hey, Mrs. Frank, can Corey come out and play?", that would be ridiculous. Right? Corey Frank  (13:56): Yeah. Chris Beall (13:56): You have to say it in playful curious. And it has to be that knows Okay. "No, sorry. Corey is doing his homework right now and he's a little bit behind in school. He's not the quickest kid in the entire place. And he has to do the extra work. Sorry. He can't come out and play" Chris Beall (14:11): Right? You have to let Mrs. Frank say whatever she's going to say. And that's who you're asking. Actually you're asking their parents if they can come out and play. So that is, it's interesting to them that the solution to the problem might be as simple as coming up and playing for 27 seconds and they don't have to do anything. They just have to listen. Chris Beall (14:32): So, when you asked the question, you're actually asking a funny question. You're not asking permission. People often say to me: "Oh, so then you ask for permission to talk." Chris Beall (14:42): That's not what you're asking at all. You're asking about a circumstance, which only they can know about. And you're doing it in a way that you're presenting a plan to solve, to solve the problem. So you're showing that you're competent to solve a problem they have right now, The problem is: you. Chris Beall (15:02): So you offer a solution to the problem in a classic way. That's been heard thousands of times, which is:" can you come out and play?" That is:"are you free for a moment? Can I have 27 seconds?" So at that point I've shown vulnerability. I know you want to help me at that point, by the way your inclination is to help me. So I'm going to give you a program where you can help me. Can I have? "You're going to give me something: 27 seconds." Chris Beall (15:30): That's funny, that's playful. For purpose to tell you why I called; can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called? Chris Beall (15:37): And that voice, which has got a little up rollercoaster is not a standard question. It's not a question of the sort like where you would answer:"Yes I have a bag of coffee; no, the dog is sick." Chris Beall (15:52): It's none of that, it's a question of, are you willing to come out and play with me for 27 seconds in order to solve a problem that I know that you have, which is that I'm an interruption  

Explaining the decision to employ the newly developed and yet far-from-perfect radar system used to protect England from the stifling Nazi blitz in World War II, the esteemed scientist Robert Alexander Watson-Watt said, “Always strive to  give the military the third-best because the best is impossible and second best is always too late.” This attitude of being good enough, and not perfect, has been dubbed ‘the cult of the imperfect.’ The French philosopher Voltaire summed this attitude nearly two hundred years earlier when he wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Certainly, when creating a call campaign or lead list, trying for perfection in our initial query is also very much our enemy. In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris explains why what you are doing when you create a list is already wrong! This is Market List Creation…Know your enemy! ----more---- ConnectAndSell – welcome to the end of dialing as you know it! Give your fingers a rest. With ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology, you’ll load your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x More Live qualified Conversations every day… and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified… like knowing how many tears they shed while watching the end of Toy Story - kind of qualified. 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: Your advice then if I may, we have a hypothetical software company that it's an HR persona software that helps me identify unhappy employees and it calls their social media and their credit score and their kid's college tuition and puts this all into an algorithm that spits out a score that says, "Even though Chris Beall is a good employee today, he has all these external pressures, positive or negative, that would make him an unhappy employee." Let's just say we have a product like that. And I want to focus on certain people in a company. The traditional way is to say, "Hey, listen, this fits HR people in an organization." What I hear you saying is, "It's more or less of who has the most, where is a potential area of pain from an organization that is suffering from turnover that needs to stem that turnover or that the cost of acquisition is so high in getting an employee that you want to make sure that when they find an employee, they keep that employee." And so as I'm going through this thought process of creating this list for this fictitious HR software company, what are some of the steps I should think about when I create my list from how most people do it, to how it should be done? Because I have a product that fits every HR person in America and every organization that has employees should care about this product, because you don't want those employees to leave. Chris Beall (03:43): So the trick to all of this is actually pretty simple. It is first to recognize that it's a hypothesis. Your list is a hypothesis about the market. It's not the definition of a market. And as a hypothesis, it's worth about as much effort and time that it would take to come up with a hypothesis for, gosh, I wonder if this pork chop would taste better with more salt on it? Really, you don't want to sit around for four or five days thinking about this, arguing about it. So thing number one is, cut it with the internal meetings that are full of everybody's opinions. All you're going to do is reduce the darn thing to a list anyway. Until you're actually talking to folks you don't know very much, get a cycle time for building a list down to as fast as possible because the cycle time to discovering if the list is any good is about a week. Done right, it's about a week. So don't spend five weeks talking about something that's going to take one week to determine if it made any sense, because I guarantee you you're wrong. So you missed, number one, admit you're wrong in advance, and then be bold in your hypothesis. Second, be very, very specific. So whatever your hypothesis is, don't hedge within the hypothesis. The goal isn't to see whether you can settle at a meeting. The goal is to see whether you'll learn something from having set those meetings. So be specific. Target a role, target an industry. If you're really in a frisky mood, target a geography for a funny reason, which is there are always differences in geographies that are not manifested in the data. Corey Frank (05:19): Really? Chris Beall (05:20): All of it, everything in the world has got local influences. It's like in every business there's seasonality, but until you've run it for two years, you don't know what the seasonality is. Corey Frank (05:31): So for instance, if we had this hypothetical HR software, obviously where there's a high amount of employees moving back and forth for attrition. I tested in the SFO Palo Alto area, and I may get a different result of the same product in Mission, Kansas, where there's only four big employers and people work at these organizations for 10, 15, 20 years. And so if I would validate it in Mission, Kansas versus SFO, I would potentially get some false positives if I never tested it outside of a particular geo. Chris Beall (06:10): Exactly, exactly. It's always good to be more specific, if there's enough volume to support the experiment. Unfortunately, these experiments don't take that much volume, the smaller this debt that you're going, if you think, okay, it's possible that the San Francisco Bay area is a market for us. That means it's self-referencing. And that's a great example you gave because that's a great example of companies that share a bond, a background that you wouldn't have elsewhere. They share the same venture capitalists, the same board members, and they're under very similar pressure. So I would go as specific as you're going to go to the SaaS companies in the Bay area that are funded, they have to be funded, maybe even going to the ones that are series B and beyond because they have this particular talent management problem, in my head. And I just go over to some combination of ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And maybe if I'm really looking for funding information, CB insights, I make my list. How long does it take to make that list? 15 minutes, 20 minutes, not very hard. I put in some criteria, then I inspect the list. How do I inspect the list? Well, list-making always brings false positives in terms of titles, mapping personas to titles is very, very hard. Don't worry about it. Make the list with a broader set of keywords, because that's all you really have to work with or concepts and attributes. As you know, this used to be my business at one point in my life was the world of catalogs, all that kind of detail in them. Don't worry about it too much. Just make sure your list has false positives in it. Then pull the list into Excel, pivot the list on title, sort descending, that's from the biggest, the highest count to the lowest count, on the counts of the titles. And there are two things you're looking for. One is you want the title with the biggest count to be a drop dead obvious, this is who I want in the list. And you want titles that have high counts that are obviously not possibilities. The classic case, I'm looking for CEOs and I got assistants to CEOs. Corey Frank (08:15): Yes. Chris Beall (08:16): Well, I pivot the list and now I've aggregated the assistant to CEO titles with a number next to them, there's 22 of these, 11 of these and sort. I just strike those as a chunk. And then I got my list. It's a very simple two-step process. And even with the big list, a list of say 5,000, it takes about another 15 to 20 minutes to go and pivot the list and say, "Oh, there's a title that I never want. And there's too many of them." If there's a title you never want, and there's not very many of them, below some level of count, just ignore it, go ahead and call them and talk to them. You might learn something. Now you've got a list. That's it. Corey Frank (08:50): That should take about a week to run through with the proper support mechanism, the proper technology. I should be able to use that week cycle to validate to vet out the success of that list. And we can talk about next time since we're up against the clock here, talk about what is the definition of success, whether this list should continue or whether we should pivot, change the selects and go with a different list. And then AB tested week to week before we quote unquote scale or get a larger list. Chris Beall (09:23): Exactly. Actually what we're going to pivot on is the message first. The message is more nimble than the list. And we always modify the design based on the cycle time of getting to a new design. So the new design is a new message, which is a new product remembering that our original problem was not to find the people, they're always out there. The companies are always out there, but to find a product. It's a search process looking for a product, and we're going to look for the product that resonates in a list. Once we do that, we lock down on the list and we lock down the message, we expand it, and we immediately go to scale. I'm hearing you say, Chris, they're just so overly rigid in their messaging and what they perceive as their market, after maybe a cycle or two, either in seed round or early A round where they never come off of that and then they just throw boatloads of money at trying to fit the square peg in this round hole. And I think that's what we can talk a little bit about next time here, since we're up against the clock.  

Startups that begin their journey without a primary mission and focus on getting to true market dominance causes many teams to instead lead their new company into conditions that are ripe with extreme uncertainty and essentially abandoning all process. They often jump head-on into the product development cycle in order to execute on their “idea” and get to “market” as quickly as possible…so they can start selling and bringing in revenue. Understandable for sure. But this is not the only option…nor is it even close to the ideal one. Eric Ries’ fantastic work, The Lean Startup, demonstrates that companies CAN create order and reduce chaos by providing tools and processes to test their vision not once, but continuously. That’s the key here…continuously. In this Market Dominance Guys episode, entitled “Messaging Eats Product for Breakfast” Chris and I also discuss when is sales really sales, and when a product pivot should really simply be a messaging pivot.   ----more---- ConnectAndSell –With ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology, you’ll load your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x 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.  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: We had left off last time with this concept of do something that looks like sales or do you actually do sales. Whereas the goal was to actually do something that looks like sales from our friend VenCat and his concept of trying to get to these pivot points as quickly as possible. Chris Beall (02:25): That's a very interesting point. I think it's funny that when you think about it, the looks like sales part actually is sales, but it has this subtlety, this subtle difference, which is that rather than it being an activity that is, I'll say, thrown to the sales department and we measure, "Did you sell something?" We do something that looks exactly like what we would do if the sales department were very mature and well run, which is they handle the top of their funnel with great discipline. That's what great sales departments do is that when you look at the top of their funnel, it looks very smooth. The flow is smooth. And instead of desperately lunging for the deal at the end of the month, the quarter, the whatever in order to quote unquote, make their number, their goaled the same way but the flow is so smooth that they actually make things happen all along the way. And I mean, that's I think the greatest distinction between a well-run sales organization and sort an average sales organization is a well-run sales organization, even if the deals will tend to close toward the end of the period because that's how their buyers are trained to behave and it's just easier to do that way, their top of the funnel on there and as a result, their pipeline, they call it strong, but it's really smooth. It's just, it flows. There are opportunities that flow in, they have consistent false positive rates. If you were to investigate them carefully, they'd have very low false negative rates, that is they'd be catching most of the opportunities out there before their competitors do. That's the essence. And what we're really talking about here is market dominance and therefore we're talking about competition. So, the key isn't just to survive and thrive in the venture capitalist eyes, it's to actually win the market. So, even if you weren't funded at all by external funding, core dynamic is you want to be there before your competition is there. I think what really happens done right is you build the top of the sales organization, that is the top of the funnel, exactly like you would have it at maturity and you simply do it faster and you run it faster. Down funnel, your activities are very similar but they're subtly different. So, discovery actually a great discovery is real discovery. That is it's not a drive to a deal. Because once the top of your funnel is in good shape and is flowing well, you can afford to do true discovery. That you can afford to have a conversation with somebody in which you discover whether your idea of your offering and their current concept of their problem as it evolves in the conversation that you have together, turns out to be a fit sufficiently to take the next step. That's all discovery is, is that we're trying to find out, do we have enough reason here from this conversation which might take 15 minutes or 30 minutes or something like that to say, "Let's explore further. Let's go from discovery to intention to solve. To explore a solution to one of the pain point or opportunities that's been discovered." So, discovery is really the key to this whole thing because what you discover is product market fit. Market because you're talking to enough people. So, it's not product customer fit. The problem with the standard model of, "Let's just go sell." Is you never find a product market fit because you're so busy working on product customer fit. It feels so good, "Can I get this person to buy something?" And when you go down that path, you morph your message in real time by adapting the message to the customer in order to try to make the sale. And this is the standard problem that shows up in all sales organizations. It's fatal actually, or at least it'll wound you badly when done early in the go-to-market process, is instead of saying, "Hey, here's my offering," in the form of a message, "now I'm going to go through discovery to discover whether anything in my offering resonates with your problem. And then we're also going to explore timing." Instead of doing that, we say to the sales person, "Hey, go get a deal." So, the offering morphs in the process of the deal to whatever the salesperson and the customer decided should be to take the next step. So, now every conversation takes the offering in a new direction. Corey Frank (06:44): Yeah. And the product team is frustrated, "Why don't you just sell what's on the menu for God sakes." Chris Beall (06:49): Yeah, exactly. And so now you go all the way back to, and they've invested in the product, the product team has and therefore their confidence in the product. And so you have this drift occurring over here on the sales side, you have this rigidity because you already over-invested in the real product which you can't move very easily because it's built, and those two create this fault line and the Grand Canyon actually that you mentioned shows up in that fault line. Corey Frank (07:15): So, the Henry Ford axiom that if I listen, actually listen to what my customers wanted, they'd still be riding on horses. Chris Beall (07:23): They'd want a faster horse. Corey Frank (07:24): This concept where you can over-invest in the product at a greater pace than you're getting, gaining, culling, harvesting, this market data is the key. So you want to have the product ahead of the market or you want to have the data coming in just where there's a low enough, where the product can continue to be nimble and adjust accordingly. Chris Beall (07:49): Yes. Yeah. So, the less built the product is the more valuable feedback from discovery is in terms of informing product evolution. Product is free to evolve when it has less to it. Corey Frank (08:00): Product is free to evolve when it has less to it. So, less is more. Chris Beall (08:05): Yeah, and it's vastly cheaper to build a message than a product. I personally do messaging work for lots of our customers. The good messaging exercise at the top of the funnel takes about 15 minutes. That's a solid messaging exercise that will turn into results in the form of appointment setting rates within 24 hours. So, you've got a 24 hour cycle from building a virtual product in the form of a message and getting starting to get the feedback back in the form of appointments that are set. And you have, even in the most agile of development communities, even when the product is pure software, Cloud based, agile is can be, scrumming like crazy, all that good stuff, you're very, very lucky to do meaningful four week sprints with releases. The difference between four weeks and a day, it's a factor of 20, approximately 18, right? You're 16 times as nimble as the most agile development team if you simply avoid developing things that you don't know you should develop. Corey Frank (09:07): Let's talk about that as an example. So, without maybe just broad, broad messaging, obviously not necessarily company names here, but what is an example of where you would go in and you would talk about messaging that they think is static. They think is valid. They think is mature enough and, "Thank you very much, Chris, I just want this tool. Thank you." And then after a while, they'll come back and say, "Hey, the tool, wasm#t what we thought, Chris, thank you very much," and you're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a minute. Let's talk about your messaging before you just get this faster horse here." Right? And what are some of those examples where folks may think that they are selling the drill versus selling the hole? Chris Beall (09:55): Yeah, I wish they were mere examples. I mean, it's the standard. And for a couple of reasons. One is that messaging at the top of the funnel generally is inherited from marketing. Somebody uses some marketing language and says, "Let's say that we are the number one provider of something. Let's say that we have a platform that does X, Y, and Z. Let's say that, our service provides you with and category one, two, and three of wonderful things that it does." So, all those are marketing oriented messages. In fact, they're the very kinds of messages that inform a [depth 00:10:34] that you've built to influence venture capitalist to perhaps invest in you. So, in the world of marketing and the world of investment we talk about categories. Always. Because if we're not in a category, we don't know what we're doing. We can't message a market without a category. It doesn't mean anything. It's like to the market we say, "We do this wonderful thing, using words you've never heard before." That doesn't work, right? So, you can't do that in a market because markets are one to many. Interestingly investors are one to many also because investors look like consumers or companies in the marketplace and that they have to all be investing what each other are investigating, category-wise. Nobody wants to be fool enough to invest in something that no one else is investing in. And that means investing in a category whose name is understood, the idea is understood. It's really funny, people use disruption all the time as something that, "You're going to invest in my disruptive product." What they really mean is, "I have a variant of something that's hot and that you guys are investing it." Right? And you can tell, because they'll say, "Well, we're the Uber of something," and then when Uber became unpopular because of their shenanigans, "We're the, whatever," you know, "We're the Snapchat of account-based marketing." And so what does that mean? Well, it's rational to say that to investors. And it's rational to say something a little bit like that to customers in the marketplace when you're using advertising and you're using social media. The problem is when you're trying to assess whether a specific thing that you're thinking of building might solve a specific problem, you have to stay away from the category for two reasons. One is the category is not the solution to their specific problem. The category is a bag in which a whole bunch of different things that might solve that problem or problems like that are placed. So, you're not really helping them think about it. Secondly, psychologically, when you say to somebody in a cold call, especially you say something that indicates your product category at all, "I'm calling you because we know we help companies like yours solve the problem of keeping track of their IOT investment." Whatever that is or something like that. It's like well if they're competent, they're already doing it. You're actually asking them, you're saying this, "We provide something that you should have already bought, unless you're an idiot. Unless you're an incompetent fool who's paying no attention to the market. We provide ... Oh, wait, it's already out there. We provide another one." Corey Frank (13:16): That messaging that you just say, right, as fictitious as it is, I mean, that is so common to all the different varied sales pitches that you and I receive every day, either in a LinkedIn reach out or in a cold call or in a mass email, it is structured exactly like that. Chris Beall (13:34): Right. And so you get one of two answers. Neither one is good. One is, I don't care. That is, that's not a concern of mine right now. Thank you for letting me dismiss you in a relevant sense in a couple of seconds, which is what I was trying to do anyway. But if you're pitching me, my job is to make you go away. Corey Frank (13:52): Yes. Chris Beall (13:52): I'm not inviting you into my house to sit down. You know, here got another mug, got a pot of coffee, sit down. And Mr. And Mrs. Salesperson and regale me with your wondrous insights, right? That's not what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to make you go away. So, you've given me the perfect way to make you go away as soon as you tell me the category, because I get to say the following either, "Don't need that kind of thing right now," and I get to preserve myself image, "Thank you very much. You have to go away." And then the other one is, "Oh, you've hit a little too close to home. You've actually talked about a category that's important to me, but you've insulted me by implying that I haven't even bothered to look into this area. So, you're telling me it's really important and I've been incompetent and inattentive and haven't paid any attention to it at all." Now that doesn't work. So, I just say, "Oh, thanks. That's really nice. I'm glad you're in that business. You know, we're set, we're set." And then neither one of those, consider them as objections, is handle-able. They're fundamentally on handle-able objections. One of them you say, "Hey, this isn't something that's important to us right now." And how do you [crosstalk 00:15:02] argument with somebody, "You know, you're just wrong. You don't know what's important to you. Let me tell you what's important to you. I have insights about you and your problem you have no idea about because I'm a sales person. In fact, I'm a top of funnel, 24 year old sales person. And [crosstalk 00:15:20] you the person with enough money to buy, authority to buy what I sell. And I'm going to give you insights about your business that you just didn't know. I mean, you're just so clueless, dude." And then on the other one, they say, "I'm set." It's like, what can you do with that? "No, you're not, no, you're not. We're so much better," "No, really. I just bought one of those last week." Corey Frank (15:43): Isn't saving money important to you? Isn't saving time important to you, right? And then I already lost the pride argument here. Now I'm just wrestling with the slippery pig, but that's the point that most people don't. Chris Beall (15:53): You need a message that's in a package that allows you to get all the way through a conversation and intrigue somebody enough to have a meeting or to maybe take a meeting, maybe take an appointment. So, to do that, you have, you've got to put some pieces in the message. So, recalling that, as you pointed out in your intro summary here today, the product is the message at this point, you're selling the message. The close is the beating. They take the meeting. The actual delivery is they come to the meeting. That's delivery. They come to the meeting and you hold the meeting and then you have a full product cycle that you've got an idea of what you want to want to do, you've sold it, you actually have transacted. They came to the meeting and now something will happen next. Whatever's going to happen next will happen next, right? Corey Frank (16:45): [crosstalk 00:16:45]. Chris Beall (16:45): So, we're trying to find out very, very early on, as early as we can, does our product, which is the message actually have validity or legs in the marketplace? Which is my list. So, it's so important to start with a list that the company creates and the company manages because that's the market. Allowing the sales person to make up the list is basically saying, "We have no idea what our market is and what we're really looking for is some faux examples of success so we can take them back and fool ourselves. We want to feel like we're making progress." You're not making progress if you're going in every direction, you have to be going in one direction. You can't go in every direction at once. That's a bad idea, right? I can't say, "Hey, Corey," say to me, "Well, what'd you do on the 4th of July?" Say, "Well, you know what I decided to do was to go on a little vacation. So, I sent part of me to Seattle and part of me to Phoenix and I went a little, a little chunk I sent over to Columbus, Ohio, because I have some friends there and you know I've always wanted to see Alaska. So, I sent some parts and all those different directions." "Oh, really? How'd you decide that?" "Well, I let foot decided where it wanted to go and you know my left hand [crosstalk 00:17:52] had interest in Phoenix ... " And it's just ridiculous to do that and yet it is common practice. Let the sales person make the list, use a category oriented message and then let the salesperson make up any words that they want to package that [crosstalk 00:18:06]. Corey Frank (18:06): I had a conversation over the 4th of July with a girlfriend of my brother who just started at a SAS software company selling HR solutions. And she's been there for about six weeks and so of course I say, "Hey, how's it going so far?" "Well, it's going all right." "Well, tell me about a typical day, how you start your day and what's your list like, what's your market?" So long story short, what they believe in is for the first 90 to 120 days is that the sales rep self generates their own leads via LinkedIn, via business journals etc. Find out who's in the news. And so they have a software product that's been around for a few years and their goal is to not support the sales rep by feeding them the list but instead to say, "This is what our product is, this is what it does. Now you go out and you find folks that you think will fit into this type of model." So, of course there's an incredible amount of frustration. And I would imagine downstream, especially if there's no sales happening, there's an incredible amount of desperation that shows up in the tone. And there is this confrontational nature then because, "I really, as a 24 year old sales person, don't know what I'm doing. I have all this marketing collateral. I have a website that I really don't necessarily quite understand and I'm trying to get to the sale. So, it's going to come through in my tone that, 'What do you mean you don't want X and Y and Z? Because I'm seeing for my website in my collateral that people like you should want X and Y and Z'." And so the tonality is wrong even if the messaging is kind of right because it's starting from again, I think the back end of the cow here. That kind of yields this, that goes back to the front of the cow where this frustration comes in. Then I realized that the sales manager of this HR software company is probably going to say, "Well, I just need better sales reps at this point. And that's the problem. It was not necessarily my message because I have a mature website and I have a mature messaging and I have sold a couple of widgets before. So, I think I know what I'm doing. I just need to grow at scale. And so it seems to become a challenge. Chris Beall (20:19): It's very interesting that the most common response to executing a process that is guaranteed not to find product market fit is to scale the sales organization. Corey Frank (20:33): That's correct. Chris Beall (20:33): I mean, it's really interesting when you think about it. It's like saying, "Well, so I have this hose. I'm trying to put out a fire with this hose but the hose sprays the water in every direction so it doesn't seem to do anything to the fire. So, I think I need more hoses just like this one. And I'll point them in every direction and maybe the fire would go out." Well, for little wimpy fires that could work but dominating a market is not a little wimpy fire to put out. If you just change the hose so the hose directs a high pressure stream at one place, you can choose the part of the fire that you can put out. And from there, cools down a little bit, people would think of this as the opposite analogy, right? It's like, how can going to dominate a market look like putting out a fire. Well, remember, you have competition. The market is always on fire. You're trying to cool some of it down enough to let you go in. You're new and you need to direct it at one spot. And one spot means it's something about the market that if you get some you're more likely to get more. This is where going all the way back to Geoffrey Moore and Crossing the Chasm is so key. Markets are self-referencing. The most important thing about a market is that it's self referencing. A correctly defined market is always a list. It's never an idea. It's never a description. It's always a list. So, here you have this problem, "I've got a list and I've got to make that list self referencing with regard to something that I sell, my product. So, if I don't at least make the list, to direct all the effort at the list, I have no chance whatsoever of ever getting self-referencing going on." And there are exceptions and the exceptions are in the ... This is not about consumers. This is all about B2B. In the B2C world you can actually have products take off almost accidentally. It happens on occasion because the product is so popular for whatever reason something's going on in the world, right? Every once in a while in B2B, like in once in 20 years, something will take off just like that. Often a B2C crossover, like the iPhone. The iPhone became a dominant player in B2B even though the iPhone deliberately tells you in every way, don't use me for business. When you go and put a contact on the iPhone, it says their default phone number is their home phone. Home phone. You don't even have home phones anymore. Even Apple should have known about mobile phones. They were selling you one. But it [crosstalk 00:22:59] difference because utility was so high in the B2C space that the product jumped into the B2B space, like a fire jumping from your neighbor's house. And that's what happened. But when you're inventing a product or coming out with an innovation in B2B and say, it's not even a product site, it's a service, you've got to get the thought rough reference-ability within a market. That means go small, because it's easier to put out a little fire, a little part of a big fire than a big part of a big fire. Start with the premise, the market is always on fire because your competitors are out there. You've got a problem. There's no safe way to go. You need to cool down part of that market enough for you to safely go into it. And then once you get in there, you're closer, so you can aim your high pressure, very directed, super, your hose with a little bit more water. So, you're not trying to see how much you can get on the flames. You're actually trying to see how concentrated you can get. And you've got to make sure it's all water. The message is water. If you pour the, if you point that hose at the fire and the fire gets bigger, you got the wrong message. Your product is not acceptable in the marketplace. It doesn't cool the market down enough for you to enter. So, the context that I think folks tend to be missing in this entire discussion is competition. There's a strange assumption that is it works like this, if I'm coming up with something new, I have no competition. That's ridiculous when you think about it, if you're coming up with something new, you have infinite competition. Your competition set is everything out there that anybody could conceivably use today to solve the problem that you would like to solve. And by the way, the problem is always being solved today because those companies you want to sell to are not all out of business. Your problem's important and it's not currently being solved in some way, then everybody would be out of business. So, your problem is always currently being solved. Always have a competition problem. Now, the question is, can you cut your way in, or in this analogy cool your way down? I get it that this analogy is weird. It's not going to fit people's mental framework, but it's the true analogy as far as I'm concerned for what go to market is like. Go to market is not an attempt to start a fire, it's an attempt to put one out in a small enough area that you can go there. That it's safe for you to go. Because it's unsafe to go into highly competitive markets with a brand new anything. Giving it to your salespeople, you're doomed because they're going to make up their own message. They're going to make up their own list. And now I've got, I'm pouring gasoline, I'm spraying gasoline on the fire instead of directing a high pressure stream of water at a part of the fire that's most likely to be put out. That's it.  

I know many veteran entrepreneurs would agree that “Raising venture capital is the easiest thing that a startup founder is probably ever going to do.” Marc Andreessen said that the venture capital business is a 100% game of outliers- it’s all about extreme exceptions.” “…think about it…there are on the order of 4-5000 ‘fundable’ companies a year, that want to raise venture capital.” “…and about 300 of those will get funded by what’s considered a ’top tier VC’; about 25 of those will someday get to a 100M in revenue…” “…and those 25 from that year, will generate something on the order of 97% of all the returns for the entire category of VC in that year.” In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Corey asked Chris to tackle the mindset around this Venture Capital seduction process and break it down with eyes fully open to its true purpose and function. Who should you have on your team to really give you the brutally honest feedback you need…before the VC enters the picture? And most importantly, how can you ensure that your VCs goals and YOUR goals are properly in alignment? This is the Market Dominance Guys: “The Hard Truths about Taking VC Funding”         ----more---- ConnectAndSell – With ConnectAndSell’s Patented Technology, you’ll load your Best Sales folks up with 8-10x More Live qualified Conversations every day….and when we say qualified, we’re talking about really Qualified…like knowing how many tears they shed while watching the end of Toy Story - kind of qualified. 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 (02:34): I just find that [inaudible 00:02:35] entrepreneurs, especially if they go into a traditional VC, they're not getting that to be true to the process. Maybe a list of ventures with their book seems to have that template on the process. And I think a lot of VCs and financial institutions are following that model from that PE firm. But the vast majority, they're not clinging or adhering to maybe financial process controls. But nothing outside the realm of doing what you're talking about, which is validating, vetting the customer persona profile, finding the three pieces of information, trying to get it done in quick cycles, not 500 days, not 50 days, but trying to get it done in a couple of weeks, to then rinse, lather, repeat. So where is that disconnect where they're unaware that that is helpful? It seems contrarian to how a traditional VC operates giving guidance to an entrepreneur today. Chris Beall (03:37): It's actually competitive without a traditional VC operates, which is why you don't see VC encouraging them. Because the VC is actually interested in putting money to work, and then maybe having a win and having high salvage value on the losses. So the three things you've got to do as a VC is you've got to fund with too much money. You have to put the money to work. So that means you want to invest in companies that need more money later. You certainly don't want to invest in the ones that don't need more money, right? Because you have this other problem. If you were running a venture firm that had a very small fund or sort of an on demand fund with limiteds that were quite happy to have their money not invested, unless it's going to be a win, then you might run a process that emphasizes early on making sure that we have a product before we build the product. Chris Beall (04:28): I mean, a VC that focused on that would actually just have to restructure their portfolio to say, we're always going to win, but we're never going to own as much because we don't get to put as much money to work, but we'll be happy doing that. We'll end up owning 8.7% instead of 87%, but we're going to win a hundred percent of the time. And we're still going to have the same unicorn ratios, so to speak. We'll still have the same big home run ratios, but instead of salvage value, we're going to eliminate salvage entirely and always build companies that work. It's actually impossible to build a company that doesn't work. If you go through the initial process of making sure that somebody wants your product and will buy enough to cover the cost of developing the darn thing and taking it to market, that's a working company a hundred percent of the time. Chris Beall (05:19): It may not be huge already, but you can actually repeat the process over and over. You can say, Hey, wait. Now we're in this market with this product. Let's find out if this product described a little bit differently with this message, can go into this adjacent market. Now, instead of one big monster market, I can go take market after market, after market. That's why the series that I've been doing on LinkedIn is called Market Dominance. It's not dominance of imaginary [inaudible 00:05:46], it's dominance of actual markets reduced to lists. When you reduce the market to a list, you have a shot at understanding what it would take to solve a problem for enough folks in that list, for enough money, that it covers your cost of building the product in the market, the cost of going to market, and the cost of supporting the product. Chris Beall (06:07): And you can do that a hundred percent of the time because here's what's funny about this whole situation. What comes out of discovery is completely reliable. In a discovery meeting, if you run a discovery meeting with the correct fidelity, it's like a super MRI machine. It's like a CAT scan from heaven. It tells you who needs what. And if you choose to be so bold as to ask what they will pay for them. And you can even discover through implementations. Now you can't discover this and discover it. Through your first five implementations, you can even figure out what does it take to make it work in the real world. Can you do five implementations before you take them on it? Probably. After all, VCs don't fund the Build a Products anymore. They expect you to build the product in the garage because they're so easy. So now really what is the VC funding? They're funding to go to market of a product that they don't know if it has a fit in the market. And that's the VC's risk profile, which is where all the problems come from. Chris Beall (07:10): The root cause of all of this is building products that don't have a place, a known place in the market to solve a known problem for a known person is within a company, so it solves the further problem, who knows how to buy it. You know, it's the unknown. You started this out, you asked the great question, which is what are the unknown unknowns? [inaudible 00:07:32] unknowns are. Does anybody need what it is that we're thinking about building? What would they pay for it? What would it take to implement it in the field? What other element of the ecosystem must be brought to healed? That is, do you have service providers? Do you have integrations that have to be done? Is there training that's needed? Our product is a great example. We need to train people on how to hold great coal costs because what's the point of having 10 times as many conversations, if you suck? Chris Beall (08:02): So our product naturally in its natural way, if you just unleash it like a coyote into the wild, it doesn't behave like a domestic dog. It behaves like a damn coyote. You have to train the thing to sit, lie down, and roll over. Don't pee on the carpet, quit killing the cat. Would ya? Our product is very dangerous in that sense, because it's so fast. It has to be tamed. So we had to learn through the implementation process, because you can't learn this through discovery. You learn it through implementation. Chris Beall (08:35): What needs to be done to have the problem actually get solved without blaming the customer for their failure to do their part? That is the step after discovery and that's the hard work. And that's the one thing you might need funding for. Because implementations, unless you can figure out how to charge enough for these things, for the whole thing, you could end up underwater. Now, I believe that there are ways to avoid that if your product is tight enough and small enough, and then you can wrap it up in some services. There's a safe way to use services as an adjunct to a product without becoming a services company. And there's rules that are easy to follow, like don't charge for the services, or if you do charge for the services, make sure that there's no goal associated with the services number. So don't give somebody that number, that tail will wag the dog every time. Corey Frank (09:30): And that's a common pratfall as it is, because you see companies and the software, especially in our space, they have a great software and the tech or market stack. They love it. People enjoy it. It's a klugey install. And then some CFO or VP of sales has the bright idea to say, wait a minute, if it's complicated, that means we can charge for it. And if we can charge for it, I can have a whole team of professional sales, engineers, poster, pre-sales engineers, et cetera. Corey Frank (10:03): And I could create a high margin product line, and in essence, you keep following that process, that flywheel and it leads to more frustration from the customer, more fear from the customer side that we fall this false flag of the Accenture model where the implementation is never done. In the new world, you're saying that just the opposite should be true, because we want intuitive, simple products that fit three needs, one of them emotional, ideally, and we want them up and going. And that's how you get to market dominance, is more people using a product, not fewer people using the product. But you're charging more for it with not just the software, but the professional services element as well. Chris Beall (10:48): Exactly. If it turns out that something needs to happen to make the product succeed and actually solve a problem, that work needs to be done it's fine to coordinate that work. It's fine to do that work. It's even okay to charge for that work. But if you ever give somebody that number, they'll sell that work and they'll sell every other kind of work that's close to it. The problem with services is service offerings have no natural boundary. Product offerings have a natural boundary. The product only does so much. I can only use this coffee cup for so many things. I can't actually ask it to drive me to the airport. It doesn't work. I could ask a person holding this coffee cup to drive me to the airport as a service. Okay? Chris Beall (11:34): So say that person's original job was to fill the coffee cup and bring it to me and make sure that it had the right coffee in it, but they're charging me for bringing me the coffee. And I could say, by the way, I'd like a ride to the airport. What's that going to cost? And they're going well, I get my commission based on how much services I charge. There's a services revenue I bring in. Yeah, I'll give you a ride to the airport. And then they say, wow, that's great customer service. But where's the boundary? I went from serving coffee to driving people to the airport. And that's what happened. That is the tail that wags the dog. And the problem is those services are an essential part of filling out the rest of the product. You can't build every feature. You can't make every integration happen. Chris Beall (12:17): So take integration services, a very, very common problem. In the software world, my software must always work with other software. I can build out every possible integration in advance. My problem is I don't know whether my first customer is going to have exactly that version of that thing, whatever that is, their CRM or their accounting system or whatever. I don't know what that's going to be like. And even worse, I don't know how it's configured. So I may think I've done an integration with Salesforce, but have I really done an integration with Salesforce that takes into account the fact that they use contacts for leads and that they customize the contact object? So some of its lead characteristics have to do with these additional fields, some of which were interpreted three years ago, one way, and then we changed the interpretation and they mean something else now. That by the way is the standard. That is the standard for all CRM. It's the standard for all enterprise systems. They're full of these overloads of fields that have values that used to be one way, but now are another way, where you have to interpret it. Chris Beall (13:18): Well actually, if it starts with an A, what that means is all of this stuff is in there. You can't integrate to a piece of technology in advance, and know that the implementation of that integration out of the box is going to help solve the problem that you are trying to solve. Services will be required. The question is, do you charge for them? If you charge for integration services, which by the way, have no independent value. So one of the rules for services is if you charge for stuff that has no independent value independent of your product, you have a real, real problem. Your problem is that, that piece of the business will run away with the business. And yet it has little appeal, so you'll undercharge. And now you'll end up with negative margins on your services. Chris Beall (14:05): So this happens all the time, right? So you've got to be very, very careful. Services are required. Think of it as ongoing product development costs that is not capitalized, it's expensed. Keep track of it very, very carefully and make sure it's enough to make the product work, that the feedback that comes back from the services is what tells you what to build next. So the first iteration of that product is three features that are going to solve real world problems that somebody has a field for. The second set of features are the ones that come back from the gaps that show up in services. We keep doing the same thing over and over. Let's product test that. Some of them are full, some of them are platforming. They're like, we have one in our product. We call it integration architecture. Chris Beall (14:51): We do our integrations out of a pre-wired integration to Salesforce, to Microsoft Dynamics, to whatever. And then we just have to do non-coding work. So taking coding, where it can turn into non-coding work by building a platform with configuration switches in it, is a way to make your product more robust without solving a new problem. You're not solving a new problem, you're solving the problem of fitting into the world that your customer lives in, and doing it without ever increasing services revenue that somebody owns. And they go, Hey, I'm going to go sell more of them integrations. You also avoid the conflict because services revenue often is charged by time, by the hour. So you have an inherent problem, which is the person who owns the services revenue number wants things to take a long time, and you need short cycles to actual usage of the product and delivery of results. Chris Beall (15:48): So the longer the services, the longer the cycle time between the sale and actual realization of value. And that's where the fundamental risk of the businesses is that cycle time. So you increase the fundamental risk of the business in order to make some revenue that has no value for you in the long run. It's a huge mistake. I think if we were to reduce it to a recipe, the recipe is this. We need to take our [inaudible 00:16:15] close deals because you need implementations because that's the next part of the feedback. Chris Beall (16:18): Corey, I tell you, I believe we're onto something here. And you know what the next natural thing for someone to do is, and this'll be on the recording so it's okay. Someone who wants to run a different kind of investment operation, who simply says, look, if you have an idea, bring your idea. And instead of having the Vista style book, which is very, very late, have the early book that says, the name of the fund is it's the Hundred Percent Fund. A hundred percent of all the companies that we launch. It's not one of those incubator blah-blah-blahs. Actually, it's a process machine in which the entrepreneur and their passion is inserted. And five weeks, six weeks later, a product pops out, and that product goes and dominates its first market. Within three years, it'll be complete dominance, but its assurance of dominance happens within six to nine months. But it's a runaway math problem at that point or best solution. Corey Frank (17:22): That's right. I think you're onto something on that as well. It's certainly needed today, as you said, that there's ubiquity of products, but there is a scarcity of solid go to market advice. I have a plethora of MarTech, ad tech, sales tech tools in my stack that I can amplify the suck. Chris Beall (17:45): Yes. Corey Frank (17:45): Right, as you say. But if I don't have the clean closed-loop strategy feedback loop to expedite my five pivots, that invariably I'm going to hit. Pay me now or pay me later. I'd rather do that, and front load those versus backload those which is going to cost me time. It's going to cost me people. It's going to cost me ownership, and it's going to cost me potential market dominance issues, et cetera. Chris Beall (18:11): And marriages. Corey Frank (18:12): And marriages. That's right. Chris Beall (18:16): [inaudible 00:18:16] friendships settled. I mean, really when you come right down to it, time doesn't kill all deals, time kills all companies. And it kills the relationships. It kills the human side. Frankly, it's just too hard to go climb these mountains if it takes too long, and people's relationships fray when they're asked to be in the lifeboat with somebody for two or three years before they figure out if there's a destination. So I think really you come right down to it, the big issue is the human cost. We're sending people to war, and we're sending them to war unarmed and unprovisioned. and the brave ones get through, and then we say, well, look at that. Well, it was one in 10. But you know the one in 10 that make it as unicorns go in and examine the human relationships, examine the history of the human relationships in those companies. Chris Beall (19:10): And then ask yourself a simple question. If this had happened in one fifth of the time, would these people still be friends? Would they still have intact marriages? Would their kids still know who they are. And that's really what's going on here, is the innovation economy is a beast and it chews up human beings in a way that is not good. It's not good. It's absolutely necessary. It's the current war. If we don't fight the war for innovation, we have issues, really big issues. So, somebody's got to go out there and do that, that hard work, but we don't have to do it in a way that destroys people's lives. This is my entrepreneurial passion. This is why I'm doing connect themselves. Helping investors make money, that's not that interesting to me. Chris Beall (20:03): I've been in the startup world since 1984. That's a long time. I've done sincere startups, one after another. They take too long. They hurt too many people. Yeah, they sound glorious and all, but if you really go in and you really dig in and say, realistically, what happens? What happens is human beings get chewed up in a machine made out of ignorance. They attempt to solve the ignorance through the application of money, and the money poisons the relationships, and it actually poisons the companies themselves. So this is a way of getting the innovation economy to work in a fundamentally different way, by dispelling the ignorance and reducing the amount of time you need to spend in the lifeboat together, and making it much more like something that we know how to do. We should know how to do innovation. And the bottleneck of innovation is go to market, not invention. This was beyond delightful and exceeded expectations. And my expectations were pretty darn high. Corey Frank (21:04): Oh no. It's you have so much rattling in that brain of yours. Right. If I could do a matrix and just plug it in, and fly a helicopter out of what's in your head, learn Kung Fu or whatever it is that's in Beall's brain. That's great. Forget inside John Malcovich. Chris Beall (21:21): I love it. I'm now fascinated by an idea that I hadn't really thought of before that you and I might be able to work on, which is you might know some people who are open-minded enough to make a new kind of investment thought. Corey Frank (21:36): Oh, my buddy Ori Isen. We did 41st parameter. He's on [inaudible 00:21:42] right now. So he's good buddies with Morton Meyerson who is a very keen, savvy investor with this type of humanistic approach. Absolutely. I think that's something that we should talk about it. Beyond incubator and it's beyond VC, it's something from the heart.