All Dead Companies are Equally Uninteresting.

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.”

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, etcetera, 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):

In 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 the 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 the 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 market that is not in the market right now. There are 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 salesperson 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 salesperson, look at the classic field salesperson 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 the 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 a 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 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 its about three years.

Chris Beall (11:14):

And when you think about what needs to happen in those three years, your goal within the 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, 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 compete, 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 the 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 the 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 labs. 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 its 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 reference ability crosses the chasm, it’s like the blood, brain barrier. No reference ability 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 for a completely different reason? And are not referenceable at all across the chasm? Yikes. So this is your problem. In 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 it. 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 real, it’s a business. It’s a business whose purpose is to help somebody else dominate its market. That’s its purpose. That is it sells a 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 complete 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 is 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 true, 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 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 come 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, a 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the market. So by the way, Jeff Moore taught all of this, years ago, it’s been 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 salesperson 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. The 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?