What changes should you make when you’re selling in an economic-downturn period? Today’s podcast guest, Jeb Blount, is CEO of Sales Gravy and a successful author and podcaster. With 15 books to his name, including his latest, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times, it’s obvious that Jeb knows what he’s talking about when discussing sales techniques during these troubled times. His suggestion? You’ve got to pay close attention to patterns, as well as the signals you’re getting from prospects and customers. In this first of two interviews with our Market Dominance Guys’ hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, Jeb shares his advice about selling a price increase to customers, and about honing and re-honing your message as fears about the current economy’s impact are revealed in your prospects’ objections. Jeb’s also a firm believer in selling alongside his sales team and listening to his reps’ calls to provide just-in-time coaching. Get ready to take notes as this master of selling practices lets you in on what works and what doesn’t in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “How to Dominate Your Market in a Crisis.”

 

About Our Guest

Jeb Blount is CEO at Sales Gravy, Inc., which is a global leader in sales acceleration and customer experience enablement solutions. He is the author of 15 sales-related books, including his most recent release, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. Jeb is also the host of the Sales Gravy Podcast, the world’s most downloaded sales podcast.

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Full episode transcript below:

 

Corey Frank (01:38):

Great. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening everybody. This is Corey Frank on behalf of Chris Beall and the Market Dominance Guys. We are once again with you for another exciting episode of what it takes to succeed in your market. And not just succeed, but to dominate your market.

(01:55):

And as always with me in the virtual studio is the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the Stephen Hawking of hawking, Chris Beall. So Chris, good to see you once again. So I don’t know if he owed you money in a poker game or what, but we were able to wrangle Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy, founder, author of 72 sales books… No, 13 sales books. Best selling-

Jeb Blount (02:22):

13? 15. 15.

Corey Frank (02:22):

  1. 15.

Jeb Blount (02:24):

I worked hard to get that number.

Corey Frank (02:26):

I’m misinformed.

Chris Beall (02:26):

[inaudible 00:02:29]

Corey Frank (02:28):

I’m misinformed. Yes, I will tell our producer that the data that I have is old, including the new one. So welcome, Jeb. Chris, how did we were able to lasso the esteemed Jeb Blount and his Sales Gravy team to our little podcast?

Chris Beall (02:45):

Well, so Jeb, it’s so exciting to have you here. I haven’t seen you for a couple of weeks. And it’s like, I miss you, man.

(02:56):

So I was sitting down by the fire with Helen over here, we’re down here in the desert, and I had been fortunate enough to go online at Amazon and buy a copy… Oops, a copy of Selling in a Crisis. And I love the title.

(03:09):

I was reading it, and it’s a very easy read. It’s 55 chunks that you can do something with each individual one, which I really like. My only complaint about it is, I prefer the number 108, as you know Corey. But Jeb got a little tired after 55, and figured that’s enough and cut it off.

(03:27):

So I went out to review Selling in a Crisis, and just say how fabulous I thought it was, and Amazon wouldn’t let me review it. So I sent Jeb a text. And it was fairly late at night, Jeb, right? It was like, I don’t know, 11:00 something your time or whatever.

Jeb Blount (03:42):

Yeah, I was in bed.

Chris Beall (03:43):

You were in bed. [inaudible 00:03:45]

Corey Frank (03:44):

He’s working on the 16th book, that’s what he’s doing. Number 16.

Chris Beall (03:48):

And he gives me this answer immediately, and basically says, “Well, there’s kind of an issue with Amazon.” And he explained it, and I didn’t understand it. But I realized I just have to settle down and try again every day until I can finally review it.

(04:00):

But he said something interesting to me too, which is that, “I’m glad you liked the book. I wasn’t 100% sure if people were going to like it.” I think that’s what you said, Jeb. Something like that, right?

Jeb Blount (04:09):

Yeah. Yes.

Corey Frank (04:12):

Well, I know it’s tough enough, Jeb, and we can probably start with this as we turn the attention over to you, and as we have pen in hand as you spew all this wonderful wisdom for these 15 books, and all the wonderful seminars. Including the number one sales podcast in the world, I believe right now, right?

Jeb Blount (04:28):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (04:28):

With the Sales Gravy? But selling is tough enough. Now you’re going to tell us, I got to learn a whole bunch of new things to sell in a crisis? So maybe we can talk about what was kind of the impetus and the rationale.

(04:40):

Because you have the pulse, you and your team have a pulse on what’s happening in the sales world, the outreach world, et cetera. What were some of the little reverberation, seismic things that are happening beneath the surface saying, “Okay, we’ve got to gird our loins, and we’ve got to adjust for this Winter is Coming type of moment.”

Jeb Blount (05:01):

Well, all you got to do is be a good observer of the world. I read the Wall Street Journal every single day, and you start seeing patterns. So if you read every day, and you look at legitimate business news sources every day, you begin to see the patterns stack up.

(05:14):

It’s no different than when, it was right before Christmas, and I was seeing all of these clients coming in asking us to teach them how to go out and get price increases, that I was like, “This is tipping. We know that the inflation is there, but to get this many people coming in…” And I wrote Selling the Price Increase.

(05:32):

And then, as soon as that book was coming out, you began to see that you’ve got some recessionary issues that are coming into play. Maybe not in every single economy. And by the way, not even in every single state in the United States. It’s just a pattern that you see emerging.

(05:46):

And when you start seeing a pattern emerging, the question is, are you going to be behind the curve or ahead of the curve? So by paying attention to what’s happening, you start thinking, “Well, there’s something there.”

(05:57):

This wasn’t a aha moment, I need to do this book. It was much more of a, I’m seeing things happening. I had just finished Selling the Price Increase, which was an intense book. It’s a detailed textbook on how to go get price increases. Really, really, really detailed. Probably one of the most detailed, wonky books I’ve ever written.

(06:20):

I’m not thinking I want to write another book. I’m thinking I want to go sleep for about a year. Because I pulled that book off in about 60 days, and it’s the longest book I’ve written in terms of pages.

(06:31):

So I’m sitting down, this third week in June in New York City. I was up there doing a gig, and met with my publisher, Wiley. And we’re just having a conversation batting around ideas, and they’re like, “What have you been thinking about?”

(06:43):

I said, “Well, I’ve got this content I’ve been working on for a while, and I don’t know if this is the right time, but it’s called Selling in a Crisis. And as soon as I said it, the antennas went up, and they’re like, “Oh, that. How soon?”

(07:00):

I had the summer blocked to write the follow-up to Fanatical Prospecting, called the Fanatical Prospecting Playbook, which is out on Amazon, but there isn’t a book yet. And they said, “Send me this stuff.” So I left there, send them my ideas, and had a contract the next day, and said, “This is what we’re going to do.”

(07:18):

So that was really the impetus. And I had the time set aside, so I was able to get the book done. The way the book turned out though was kind of weird. I didn’t start at this point with the book being the way it is. I’m really happy the way it is, but it wasn’t my point.

(07:33):

But that’s how it came about. But Corey, I think that the way that I’ve written books over the last few years, when you look at Virtual Selling, Virtual Training, Selling the Price Increase, and now Selling in a Crisis. It’s really the way that good sales professionals should be looking at their marketplace and looking at their world, is you got to be paying attention to patterns.

(07:54):

Because if you can get ahead of the curve on the activity, on the messaging, on how you’re changing. Even changing markets. Part of this book is, you’ve got to go where the money is. So if you’re shifting into a different market because you know that that market’s going to go there, there’s Chris with the book.

(08:10):

So most people in the world are reacting. You don’t have to be. You can be proactive. You have to pay attention to what’s happening around you.

Corey Frank (08:18):

So with that, Chris and I talk in our Market Dominance podcast certainly, a lot about the signals we get from prospects. The pauses, the not-pauses. The signals they give you by not responding to emails, ghosting, et cetera.

(08:33):

When you look at particularly selling in a crisis, what are some of these… We talk about 55 ways, but what are some of these ways? You said to pay attention to the patterns. What are some of those patterns that you’re talking about?

Jeb Blount (08:45):

Well, when you think about prospects teaching you. That’s the way I look at it. A prospect teaches you what’s happening in their world. Those lessons come in a couple of ways.

(08:53):

If you’re brand new… So for example, if you’re running ConnectAndSell, and you’re having lots of conversations, probably the easiest way to learn how to have a conversation with a prospect is to have lots of conversations with prospects. Pretty soon you kind of figure out, this is the things they’re interested in. These are the things they’re not interested in. Especially if you’re going down a market vertical.

(09:11):

That’s everyday work. If you’re in a crisis, or in a disruptive period, economic downturn. It could be energy crisis. It could be any of the things that are impacting companies today. You’ve got to pay attention to what questions your prospects are asking you. You’ve got to pay attention to how slow they’re moving, or how fast they’re moving.

(09:32):

So for example, in selling in a crisis, one of the things that we know to be true is that, when you’re in a situation where people feel stressed or overwhelmed, or they feel like making a decision to do business with you is super risky, time is not on your side. You don’t have six months to work a deal. You’ve got to advance that deal micro-step by micro-step by micro-step.

(09:56):

And if they’re not willing to match your effort and move along with you, it’s a pretty clear signal that you may not have a deal there. The most expensive thing that you can do during a crisis period, during a recession, is to invest a lot of time in the wrong prospect.

(10:11):

So the signals that you get from prospects along the way are, “Hey, am I really in this with you? Am I really interested in working with you?” Along the way, you’ve got to pay attention to the people that you are dealing with. Because, as we start moving into an economic downturn, as winter starts coming on, decision-making authority begins to shift and move inside organizations.

(10:33):

Right now, it’s typically at a middle level to a low level. As the crisis heats up, as the recession comes on, it’ll begin moving up higher in the organization, and you’re not going to know when that’s going to happen. So you have to start paying attention to when you ask those prospects to do something, what do they do? How do they do it? How do they respond to you?

(10:55):

You have to pay attention to cognitive dissonance. You have to pay attention to their body language. All of those things matter. And a good salesperson, a good sales professional, lives in the land of awareness. Because they understand that you cannot be delusional and successful at the same time. And if we ignore those patterns, we begin to live inside of delusion.

Corey Frank (11:16):

So Chris, you, as the CEO of ConnectAndSell, you see several million phone calls a year. If you look at, we’re talking about flight school, IFR and VFR type of ratings, right?You not only have the visual flight, by being on the ground with your clients, Chris, and seeing kind of the residue and the body language over the last few months. But you have the IFR, the instrument ratings as well, to see what’s that residue that shows up in all the ConnectAndSell reports from the data. So with what Jeb is talking about, are you seeing many of the same things?

Chris Beall (11:51):

Well, one of the ones we have seen… Yeah, we do see some things. One of the ones we’ve seen is, we get a signal back that says people have left their job, and it’s called person left remove in our world. And that signal has gone from a 2018 level of about 3.3% per month, and it went up during this whole great reshuffle, et cetera, et cetera, up to about 5.2% per month.

(12:15):

And we can look at it by how senior the people are. As Jeb said, the decision-making authority is likely to move up in organizations, and it moves up very, very fast. The reason it moves up is somebody has a meeting and says, “Okay, CFO’s got a lot of power.”

(12:31):

During a crisis, CFOs have a huge amount of power in organizations. In fact, you can generally say that the power shifts from the CEO to the CFO in a crisis. That’s what really happens. And the CEO’s left trying to figure out what to do with the resources they’re allowed to have.

(12:47):

I know a lot of people think CEOs are like big powerful beasts that do everything. Actually, kind of they’re both reporting to the board, the CFO and the CEO effectively. Unless the organization’s put together kind of funny. And you get these power shifts that are going on.

(13:02):

And they tend to be represented in reality by, suddenly somebody who could spend $50,000 has got to go get approval for $10,000. Or for anything. That’s a fairly common one.

(13:15):

What we don’t normally see in sales, and we have to learn to adapt to in a crisis, is not just continuous change and staying on top of stuff, it’s discontinuous change. So there’s continuous change going on like, “Hey, now if my deal takes three months, I have a 15% chance the person I’m working with is gone before the end of the deal.”

(13:36):

Think about that. So you’re better off doing a deal that can be done earlier, and then cementing it as best you can to somebody who’s likely to still be there and start delivering value, than to see if you can do a better deal in three months, which you might have been [inaudible 00:13:51]

Corey Frank (13:52):

So are you saying [inaudible 00:13:53] take a smaller price deal? Is that what I hear you saying? Potentially [inaudible 00:13:56]

Chris Beall (13:56):

I always make the distinction between price and chunk size. So price is price. Your unit price is your unit price. Whatever it is, you’re probably not going to move off of that. Chunk size has a lot to do with what you can get done in a amount of time you have with the people that you’re working with.

(14:12):

And chunk size, in a crisis, it’s often wise… It feels funny, but it’s often wise to actually come down in chunk size, spread your portfolio, and take market share. The best thing you can do in a crisis is while everybody else is trying to keep the lights on, you take the market.

(14:29):

And they wake up when it’s all [inaudible 00:14:33] “What happened?” And it’s like, “Well, I took the market.” Then that’s what our show’s all about, is market dominance. “I took the market while you were worried about the deal.”

Jeb Blount (15:33):

Yup. By the way, that’s exactly what we did at Sales Gravy during the last downturn. It wasn’t a very long downturn, but we put pedal to the metal, and we sucked up market share and quadrupled the size of our company by not being afraid to lean into it.

(15:48):

And a lot of it was exactly what Chris is saying. Really wise words. We just broke the chunks up into smaller pieces. And it turned out that when we were delivering value, they said we want more of those chunks.

(15:59):

So one way of looking at this, and Chris, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, is, when things start hitting the fan, you’ve got to make it really easy for people to do business with you with a lower risk to them, so that they don’t feel like they need to hold off on something. Because time is not on your side.

(16:19):

If you think time’s on your side, you are dead wrong. It is not. It will slay you. I love the stat, 15% of the people are leaving within three months. And that’s real.

Chris Beall (16:30):

Yeah, and a buying committee, it’s even worse. Because say you’ve got a buying committee of four folks, right? You’re almost at a 100% chance that one of the four will leave. And as soon as they leave, that committee goes into paralysis.

(16:42):

It’s instantaneous paralysis, because their buying mechanism was the vote among those people. And there is power games being played inside of there. You can never see them perfectly. You’re an outsider, they’re insiders. All that power is flowing around inside. But something broke down power-wise, because that person left.

(17:00):

And it’s not always that they’re fired. Sometimes they’re the smart ones. The powerful person who says, “I’m getting out of here, I’m going to where the grass is going to be greener, or at least the sprinklers are still going to be turned on tomorrow.”

(17:11):

So I think speed becomes a huge, huge issue. Getting cycle times down, and friction out. Those are hard things to do, because we cling to the big deals, the one that’s going to make everything happen. And we cling to our friction elements, because we think they provide us with proof of progress. And yet, we have to let go of that stuff if we really want to dominate in a crisis

Corey Frank (17:34):

Yeah, for sure. You know, one of the things, Jeb, you talk about certainly in a lot of your books, is activity is everything. Especially in a crisis, Chris, certainly you have a powerful weapon like ConnectAndSell that helps you amplify, and certainly modulate, upscale your activities is everything.

(17:52):

But Jeb, with that in mind, in these 55 ways, is there such a thing as, do I have to prospect smarter? Or is it, do I have to prospect more? Or do I have to prospect differently? When you talk about, again that broad axiom of activity is everything, how can we frame that in towards the crisis mentality here?

Jeb Blount (18:13):

All of the above. You have to get more prospecting done, in less time, with greater outcomes. And so you have to prospect faster, and you have to get more done. Which is why ConnectAndSell’s such a great product.

(18:27):

You have to have more conversations with people. And you have to do it, and you have to compress the time. Because you’ve got to get much more prospecting done during a crisis period, because there are going to be fewer buyers. It’s just necessary to sift through all of the soil to find the gold.

(18:46):

But you also have to do some things different. I mean, you have to maybe change your message a little bit. That’s going to be important. You’re going to face a little bit different prospecting objections. Most of it’s going to be deferment objections. “We’re not buying right now, we’re not doing anything right now.”

(19:02):

You’re going to have to get through those. And you’re going to have to pay attention to Willie Sutton. Willie Sutton is the namesake of Sutton’s Law. Sutton’s Law simply describes, you have to go where the money is.

(19:13):

So you’re going to have to begin shifting what you consider your ideal qualified prospect as we move into a down market. And that just simply means the money’s going to be moving someplace. It may not be moving in the market you’ve been calling in, so go find another market.

(19:28):

And then you’ve got to be prepared multiple times to shift. Because sometimes that money will move into one segment, and then move to another segment. It might move into a certain size company, away from other size companies.

(19:40):

This goes back to knowing your market, knowing your business, knowing your customer base. Knowing what’s happening at the macro level and at the micro level. It means studying, being an expert.

(19:52):

But you have to do all of those things. You have to prospect more, you have to be more efficient. And sometimes you have to be different. Different messaging, different ways of dealing with objections, and into different markets.

Corey Frank (20:06):

And Chris, in your world, when you look at, again, the weapon of ConnectAndSell. Dial-to-connect rates, conversation / conversion rates. Dial-to-meeting rates. What kind of residue and signals are you seeing?

(20:19):

Much like what you talked about earlier with the folks who are no longer employed. You saw a little bit of blip a few months ago, that was a leading indicator. What are you seeing from dial-to-connect, dial-to-meeting rates that kind of buttresses what Jeb’s talking about?

Chris Beall (20:34):

Well, I always look at the most calibrated reps, right? So you look at, over time, who produces certain number of meetings per prospecting hour. Because that’s really what the number is. Time is not your friend. Time goes tick, tick, tick. You’ve got a prospecting hour, what do you produce?

(20:48):

A fabulous number is, well, we know some folks who can go two and a half, three meetings per hour that they can produce like clockwork. Most really good, top-of-funnel folks who other people would say are good, they’re going to be at about 0.6.

(21:05):

But if you take that top person, and you see that meetings per rep hour go down, all things being equal, you have got to move. And if you don’t have a calibrated person, you’re kind of screwed. Because now the question is, “Well what’s really going on?” And what’s probably going on is actually what Jeb talks about in chapter 44.

(21:23):

Chapter 44 is Control Your Emotions. “Selling in a crisis can push you to the edges of emotional extremes. These emotional extremes become your Achilles heel. Unmanaged, they betray you, make you weak, cause you to lose self-control, and make it impossible for you to effectively influence buyers who are likely being impacted by similar emotions.”

(21:44):

The death spiral in sales is when your emotions start to be affected by their responses. When they’re affected negatively, you become less effective. And the place you become less effective is at the opener of your cold call.

(21:59):

That’s where you go to crap. That’s where you go to hell in a hand basket. Your voice tightens up, you’re a little bit off, and everybody wants to hang up on you. So that’s what I always look for, is that first hint.

(22:12):

It’s a very athletic business. Think of how you do it with athletes, right? If it’s a wide receiver, you’re looking for the guy who’s breaking a little bit late and gets hit in the side of the helmet by the ball. It’s like, “Why weren’t you looking back for that?” Because he’s tight. That’s why. Because he’s tight. And as soon as you’re tight you can’t execute.

(22:33):

So I look for that tightness in that number. Which is a discontinuous, or rather quick change in meetings per rep hour from a highly calibrated top performer. And then you kind of go, “That’s the market.” Go down in the organization, you’re going to see it from their own emotions. Now you’ve got a coaching thing that you’ve got to work on.

Corey Frank (22:54):

You bring up a great point. We have to do a plug to our friend Brad Ferguson and then Dave Kurlan from OMG. Because the OMG sales assessment tool, they have a metric in there, a measurable aspect, that says your ability to stay in the moment. And can you take a punch or not, right, Jeb?

(23:12):

I’m sure that you see this in… It’s tough enough in cold calling, when you’re doing prospecting. You talk a lot about it, I know, in the discovery, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later here. But how do you coach that, from your perspective?

(23:26):

From your team at Sales Gravy, they go out, and I’m somebody that, I’m going to get turned off my focus here. Because the prospect is maybe a little bit more antsy, a little bit more animated, a little bit more agitated. How can you coach me to stay in the moment, om, Spock-like, keep the game going?

Jeb Blount (23:45):

It’s more of a pattern of things. It’s not going to be one call. So it’s going to be multiple calls that are going to start pushing salespeople to change their pattern, and the way that they approach prospects on a cold call, because they become emotional.

(23:59):

In other words, they begin anticipating that they’re going to get hit in the head, essentially is what happens. They get tight. They’re like, “I’m going to get punched in the face.” So they come off more insecure, they lose their confidence.

(24:10):

And in a cold-call situation, because you’re moving so fast. I mean, essentially it’s verbal judo at 100 miles an hour. If you’re tight, you’re going to get nailed. So the downward spiral becomes, they get hit in the head, it hurts, then they flinch again, and then they get hit in the head again. Then it hurts. And then it just gets worse and worse and worse in the way that they’re approaching them.

(24:31):

So if you’re a sales leader, first of all, what Chris said is exactly right. Go watch your salespeople. Calibrate. Look at your top salespeople, look at the people in the middle. Pay attention to what’s happening to them. Listen to their calls. Be present. Pay attention to them.

(24:46):

You can’t lead this from sitting behind a desk looking at your email. You need to be there and listen to calls. In my case, I’ll go get on calls with them. So I’ll go make calls with the salesperson, have the same conversations, see what they’re experiencing, and then sit back and say, “Okay, we’re getting this objection from a customer or from our prospects. How are we going to handle that?”

(25:10):

And then we’re going to coach the messaging, build the messaging, replay the messaging, role-play the messaging, and then we’re going to go get back on the telephones again. Because all they really need is just to know how they’re going to handle that moment. And how are they going to handle their emotions when they get punched in the face.

(25:26):

But sometimes you forget. If you get hit enough times, you just forget. A really good way of looking at this. And Chris, this is kind of a connection to what you’re saying.

(25:36):

Most people know I’m just big into horses. It’s my thing. And I had a horse last spring that refused a jump on me really dirty, real bad, and it broke my foot. Then I get on another horse, and I get on another horse, and suddenly I feel fear because I think those horses are going to do the same thing.

(25:57):

Now this is all happening at the subconscious level, and I’m tight. Well, if I’m tight, what I do is I change the horse’s behavior because of my behavior.

(26:07):

What my coach did for me was say, “Hey Jeb, guess what? Let me show you a picture of what’s happening. Here’s a video. This is you on that horse going over the jump. See how far forward you are? See what you’re doing?”

(26:20):

So if you’re a coach, you have to sit with your salespeople, and then you have to help them become aware of the way they’ve changed their behavior. Because usually when they start changing those behaviors, they don’t know it. It’s just one little thing at a time.

(26:33):

And then you have to sometimes get on the calls with them and show them it’s going to be okay. But more than anything, you want to help them with their messaging. You want to listen to what they’re doing, and you want to get them back in track.

(26:45):

It’s no different than the coach with the wide receiver that’s cutting just a little bit early. You’re going to show them some game film. You’re going to say, “Here’s what you’re doing, now let’s go out and practice it.”And that’s how you get them better. It’s not like the person’s talent took a hit, it’s their emotions that took a hit. As the coach, that’s what your job is, is to fill and close that gap.

Corey Frank (27:03):

I think an example that you talked about, I believe it was on your blog recently or one of your podcasts, you talked about your son conducting one of the seminars. And a gentleman in the audience raised his hand and says, “Hey, this whole fanatical prospecting thing, is it even relevant today? Does that stuff even work?”

(27:21):

Now talk about getting a signal that there’s some fear there, right Chris? And I’ll let you tell the rest of the story if you recall. How did your speaker, how did your son, handle that particular question?

Jeb Blount (27:30):

He just pulls out his list and picks up the phone. He just rips off 20 outbound prospecting calls, he sets a few appointments. And he just looks at him and says, “Is it relevant?” That was it. That’s the truth.

(27:43):

So he covered that gap by showing them that what they were fearing was all the wrong thing. I mean, all they really wanted him to do was to let them off the hook. And Chris, you’ll love this, that the phone didn’t work anymore.

(27:56):

I mean, it wasn’t about whether fanatical prospecting was good or not. It was whether or not they should be talking with people in real time, in synchronous conversations, on the telephone. Or should they just sit around in their sales enablement platform and spam people with a bunch of crappy emails. And he just shut the whole thing down, just in that moment.

(28:16):

And my kid, by the way, looking at patterns. When he was in high school, I used to make him come in, and I would give him a list of people to call and we would practice messaging. I’d have it on speaker phone and all I wanted him to do was get objections.

(28:31):

So I wanted to hear all the objections that he got. Then we would change the messaging, and he would come in and we would do it again the next day. And we would change the messaging until we would hone it, and we would start getting fewer objections than we were getting conversations.

(28:47):

You’re always going to get objections. But if I can improve the probability that I get a conversation and reduce the probability I get an objection, I’m going to get more meetings. If I get more meetings, I’m going to sell more.

(28:55):

So it’s the same thing that Chris was talking about. As a leader, you’ve got to listen. Pay attention to what’s happening around you, what your patterns are. You cannot hide in the sand.

(29:05):

And Chris, I’d love to get your opinion on this, but I’ve got to tell you, I think a lot of leaders are frightened to death of coaching prospecting activity. I think it scares them. I don’t think that they like it. I think that they will do anything to stay away from it. I think it makes them feel uncomfortable.

(29:22):

And I can tell you that, if you’re a leader and you will go sit down next to your rep, and you’ll make dials with them, you’ll be the greatest hero in the world. They’ll tell everybody what you did. Because most leaders are afraid to do that, because they’re afraid that they’ll get rejected. They’re afraid that they’ll fail. They’re afraid that their reps will see them fail.

(29:41):

I do it all the time, Corey. I make egregious mistakes. Every once in a while I’ll sell something. I mean crazy as it sounds, I’ll get a deal. I’ll get somebody on the hook. But usually I’m crashing and burning right next to it.

(29:52):

They don’t even notice. I’m the guy that wrote Fanatical Prospecting, and I’m messing everything up. All they see is that I’m sitting there on the phone on a list.

Corey Frank (30:01):

Yup, yup.

Chris Beall (30:02):

Yeah, I’ve got an example of this that’s quite illuminating. So Scott Webb over at HUB International, chief sales officer of the Central Region there. He’s figured out two things I think that everybody should think about a little bit when it comes to this question of the emotions and prospecting.

(30:18):

One is, he doesn’t let anybody prospect using our weapon unless it’s in a group setting. And the group setting is all Zoom, but it’s a group setting. And it’s like, you come to this, you come, we start on the second. It’s at 9:00:00 it starts. And it ends at 9:59:59, and whatever’s left, and it’s over.

(30:44):

And you’ve got to earn your way in. You’ve got to earn your way in by converting it greater than 10% conversation to meetings. And you have four sessions in which to do it, after which, “Sorry, you’re out.”

(30:55):

But he does another thing, which is he leads from the front. And he leads from the front, he’s on every one of those. He’s calling with them. He has somebody else who’s paying attention and coaching. We provide that person.

(31:06):

And as a result, it’s sort of like a no excuses world. You really don’t expect the head coach to go out there and run that pattern better than the wide receiver, better than that first round draft pick. But he does it.

(31:18):

He converts, by the way, at 100%. And he does it using techniques I’ve never seen before [inaudible 00:31:24]

Corey Frank (31:24):

100%. Come on.

Chris Beall (31:27):

It’s what Cherryl Turner has adopted called the insistence close. It’s quite fascinating, and it takes care of a lot of emotions. But the big emotional thing is, look, we don’t like to talk about it, but we’re kind of herd animals.

(31:40):

A lot of salespeople think they’re not. They think, “Oh, I’m [inaudible 00:31:44] I’m this independent, I’m lone wolf, blah, blah blah.” Fact of matter is, people are braver in groups than they are individually. And once you get that sort of herd thing going, now you can coach to first failure very easily.

(31:57):

And we’re big advocates of coach to first failure. Never coach the second thing, because it’s the first thing that screwed up the second thing. Just coach the first thing. Push the damn button, have another conversation. See how you do.

(32:09):

But I mean, I’ve coached a lot of stuff. You know, Corey, I used to teach people rock climbing. The second failure tends to be really bad when you’re climbing. It’s the one that starts with the word falling ends with the fall. It’s the failure before that, that causes the fall. It’s not the one on the move, it’s the one that was going to set up the move.

(32:28):

And that’s true in sales too. It’s the previous thing that you didn’t quite get that left you in an awkward position, left you out of balance, left you too far forward on the horse. Whatever it happens to be. It’s that first failure you’ve got to coach to. But you’ve got to do it under pressure. Because when they’re not under pressure, they all perform.

Corey Frank (32:46):

Mm-hmm.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Most people look at a potential job from the standpoint of “What am I going to earn?” Austin Finch, Funnel Media Group’s podcast editor and today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys, talks with our host, Chris Beall, about an additional and very important way of looking at any new employment you’re considering. They suggest asking yourself the question, “What am I going to learn?” Austin cautions job hunters that even a high-paying job can be a dead-end job. When you’re looking at a new job — whether it’s in sales or another field —  Austin suggests that “If you can gain experience, and move on to gain more, then there’s no reason to hold yourself back.” Listen to the whole podcast for more words of career wisdom from Chris and Austin in today’s insightful and helpful Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “What Am I Going to Learn?”

—-more—-

About Our Guest

Austin Finch is an in-demand podcast editor for Funnel Media Group. He is currently a senior at Beaverton High School in Beaverton, Oregon.

Chris Beall (01:16):

It’s really interesting. Helen is always really thoughtful about whether the job she has or a job if she thinks about taking one, like moving from one position to another in Microsoft, her number one thing is always, what am I going to learn? It’s really interesting. And Helen is younger than I am, but not by five decades. And that attitude, that the main thing about a job is what are you gonna learn while you’re doing it? I think that is refreshing. It’s something to be intentional about for people who can. I know a lot of people it’s like, “What am I gonna earn? But even a really high-paying job can be a dead-end job. And so, I love your view on that.

(01:59):

There’s another thing you are getting out of this that you may or may not be aware of, you probably are ’cause here we are sitting here doing this. People go off to really expensive colleges, not hoping to get a great education ’cause they’re pretty sure when they’re 18, 19, 20, 21 years old the limiting factor in their actual education, their academic education is the fact that they’re at a really bad age to get an academic education. I mean, it’s just like you couldn’t pick a worse age range to imbue yourself in the deep knowledge that’s been gathered over the centuries, or whatever the leading stuff is that’s coming out of laboratories, or whatever it happens to be than between 18 and 22 when, for not everybody but for a lot of people, there’s a lot of, we’ll call it, biologically amplified social interest. I think that’s what I should call it, BASI, I could put a C on the end, that’d be pretty cool. Biologically amplified social interest .

(02:59):

But they do know they’re getting one thing. Why do they spend a bazillion dollars to go to, you name it Ivy League School? And the answer is the network. It’s why I didn’t do it by the way. Now, I’m not saying I could have gotten into one of those places, but some people thought I could because they were recruiting me. But I didn’t want that network interestingly enough. I don’t know why, it’s a freaking nature of my personality and I was wrong. Not that I should have gone to one of the schools, but if you know 10 people who are well placed in the world of whatever it is, and in the case of like Corey, and myself, and Helen, and all of our guests, you think about it, every single one of our guests would take your call. Every single one of our guests would take your call.

(03:47):

Now, think about who those guests are. That network, that’s a bazillion dollar network. That’s worth a Harvard education right there in terms of network. I mean you even know somebody who runs a really cool set of hotels up in Canada, the CEO of that company. You could call her up and go, “Hey, this is Austin Finch, I’m the editor of the podcast Market Dominance podcast you were on blah blah blah and I just wanted to tell you how much I really, I went back and listened to it and tell you how much I really enjoyed what you had to say there, especially X, Y or Z.” You have an entry point throughout. Do you think young people think about that network-building effect while they’re working in their first job, second job, third job?

Austin Finch (04:29):

I think in the first job it usually gets overlooked, unfortunately. But I think by the second it starts to really hit you. Because I have a lot of friends that quit their first job because the hours were bad or the pay was bad, whatever it is, the usual surface-level reasons. And then, when they were looking for their second job, they had a lot more in mind in terms of who that manager is and what companies that’s connected to. Because, like you said, I mean if you can build a gazillion dollar network, why wouldn’t you try to? Just the guests I’ve heard speak on this show alone are in so many different business sectors that any field I could have someone to talk to about it.

Chris Beall (05:15):

Yeah, you can talk to Oren Klaff, one of the most brilliant minds and practitioners in the world of how we should sell, who’s now in the business of helping companies raise capital.

(05:25):

In fact, I’m working with him right now, literally today, on raising capital for our company. And the world of investment banking, and how all of that works is so cipher to most of us. And he’s a phone call away for you. Also he is the only guy in the show who’s ever had the good graces to argue with me, which I thought was just fantastic.

Austin Finch (05:46):

It was memorable.

Chris Beall (05:48):

It wasn’t good. It’s the kind of thing that people who don’t like that sort of stuff would go, “Ooh.” We had a lot of fun on that show. That was really fun. So that’s fascinating.

(05:58):

So where do you go from here? What are you gonna do? You don’t have to divulge it all to the audience, but do you have kind of an idea, direction? You gonna run companies? You seem rather entrepreneurial to me or is that like, “No, that’s crazy stuff. People go broke doing that.” Or what are your inclinations?

Austin Finch (06:17):

I look a lot at my mom’s career and how it’s evolved several times and I think my priority one is to choose a good entry point. And the second priority would be to not be afraid to change ’cause she’s changed complete directions of her business several times just since I’ve been old enough to notice and talk to her about it. And every time she gets something new out of it, whether it’s knowledge, or a new career opportunity, every time it’s new contacts and that’s building that network as well. So I don’t want to be blind to the possibility of changing, or get locked in one career forever.

Chris Beall (07:37):

I love it. I love it. I think a lot of people think that they should get on some sort of a treadmill ’cause my mom always thought I should do that. I remember, I went through a big change in 1988 where on a Friday I went to the guy who was running the project that I was working on, title was director of engineering, or product, or something like that at the software company. But, in fact, I built the product and I’d sold the source code. It was Sun Microsystems, they were gonna use it as a foundation for building these automated distribution centers. And I went through a big change between a Friday and a Sunday. I went to the top guy and I said, “I’m gonna quit my job on Sunday at midnight. Do you want me here, Monday morning?” I was living in Boulder and working in California.

(08:24):

And I’ll never forget my mom’s response to that. I went from making $62,000 a year to making $260,000 a year over a weekend. So it was a big deal. And I was out on my own. I was suddenly an entrepreneur in the tech space, tech services effectively. And I’ll never forget, my mom’s reaction was, “You left that good job?” ‘Cause her view and many people of her generation, their view is, “My job is a lifeline and you get one and keep it forever.” Your view appears to be do stuff that’s useful, be good at it if you can and learn a bunch and be open to change. And I think that’s a much more robust way of looking at not just career but life ’cause they’re pretty intertwined, I believe.

(09:11):

And your mom is a great example. And I’ll never forget the lunch we had when she had just acquired Funnel Media and that was a scary move. That is not a trivial thing to do. You have to have a certain amount of activity to keep the lights on, and make things happen and how do you grow the business? She was so brave in the way she did it. And I thought really, really creative. So that’s a great example for you. But I think your attitude is just dead on. It’s just absolutely dead on. And I suspect it’s more widespread than most people my age think among folks like your friends. I mean, would you say that it’s more the norm among your circle of friends that they have this attitude, rather than, “I got to latch myself onto some job that’s gonna take me to retirement and then I can sit around on my butt the rest of my life?”

Austin Finch (10:02):

I think it’s kind of hard to tell because especially since all of us still live with our parents, you have so much influence from sometimes much older generations that are attached to that idea of if you find a good job, there’s no reason to ever switch. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, that whole kind of thing.

(10:19):

And there’s also that whole sense of loyalty to a company and to an organization where it’s not that I don’t feel any sense of loyalty, but it’s if you can gain experience and move on to gain more, there’s no reason to hold yourself back. And like you were saying, even a high-paying job can be a dead-end job. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that.

Chris Beall (10:39):

That’s interesting. Yeah, it’s a big part of what Helen does in the Love Your Team system is to help people move on, not move out of a group, or something like that. After all, the idea of it is to form high performing teams and have the best performers want to stay and work with you and really produce wonderful things. But she does it by paying attention to people’s aspirations to their lives, to where they really want to go. And help them along on their own journey rather than demanding some sort of loyalty to this abstract company. And I think that’s a big deal.

(11:14):

I think that the notion of loyalty to a company is a little bit odd when you think about it. The company is a bit of an abstraction. Loyalty to a bunch of people you work with while you’re working with them, and friendship with them afterward, and maybe good feelings about what you did and all that, yeah, those all make sense. But I don’t know, I think it goes back to when the idea was, hey, you had the local whatever they were, the duke, the king, the Lord of the castle. They’re keeping you from the other bad guys coming in and doing bad things to you, and therefore, you need to be loyal to them and just shut your eyes and do that. I think that’s a bad idea in modern business.

(11:51):

You need to be loyal to the truth. That’s sort of a different matter. But maybe not so much to a given company. And I don’t think anybody’s gonna refuse to bring you on board because you’re not pretending like you’re a slave to their organization for the rest of your life. So I love the attitude.

(12:08):

Do you find, as you’re interacting with the school you go to the teachers and all that, what do you think about their awareness of this particular dynamic of here you are at your age, you’re working at something, you’re going off ultimately away from the school to do other things. Does the school get it? Do the teachers get it? Do you feel like they’re looking out for you in that sense? And I don’t mean all of them, but even some of them. What’s your experience around that part of society? The [inaudible 00:12:38], the education part.

Austin Finch (12:39):

Well, I heard a lot about high school before I got there from my older sister, so that was kind of the background knowledge. But I feel like the focus has shifted a lot in recent years towards really gearing us up for a career and for college. I mean, for a while it seemed like the focus was mainly just work as hard as you can in high school, graduate with the highest GPA you can, and then we’ll see you never. And good luck with your career. And now, I definitely have a fair amount of teachers and staff members that when I talk to them about the classes I’m taking, or the plans I have, they genuinely want to help any way they can to help you succeed on whatever journey you want to pursue.

Chris Beall (13:25):

That’s hopeful and fantastic.

(13:26):

And, on that note, I think we should wrap this up. That’s like the most hopeful, coolest thing I’ve heard in quite a while, Austin. I’m gonna feel good about the world for a little bit here because of what you just said.

(13:37):

And I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. And I know you’re gonna do a fantastic job editing it. God knows what sort of things I threw in there that you can go pluck something else out. And I think you’re gonna have some fun listening to your own voice. You have a fantastic voice, by the way. And the thoughtful nature of your speech, of how you talk, and it’s clear how you’re thinking from how you speak, I think is a wonderful thing. It’s an inspiration to me. I’ll try to be more thoughtful in the future.

(14:05):

Thanks so much for being on and have fun editing this show.

Austin Finch (14:08):

Thanks for having me on it.

Chris Beall (14:10):

All right, fantastic.

(14:11):

And for Market Dominance Guys. Corey Frank, not here. Chris Beall with Austin Finch. Hey, ’til next time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Who’s behind the curtain making the Market Dominance Guys the great podcast that it is? It’s Austin Finch, an editor at Funnel Media Group, which produces Market Dominance Guys. In listening to this conversation between Austin and our host, Chris Beall, you would never know that Austin is the youngest guest ever interviewed for this podcast. Currently 17 years old, he has edited Market Dominance Guys for several years and has recently added Helen Fanucci’s “Love Your Team” podcast to his editing responsibilities. In talking with this intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful young man, Chris asks about the challenges of podcast editing, including the pruning and grafting necessary to increase a podcast audience’s understanding and to decrease the distractibility caused by any audio glitches or guests’ faux pas. Austin loves his job and sees his editing work as that of a translator for the hosts’ and guests’ messages, and his goal as “Helping to Get the Message Across,” which just happens to be the title of today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode.

—-more—-

About Our Guest

Austin Finch is an in-demand podcast editor for Funnel Media Group. He is currently a senior at Beaverton High School in Beaverton, Oregon.

 

Full episode transcript below:

 

Chris Beall (01:22):

All right, so here we are with another episode of Market Dominance Guys and this is Chris Beall flying solo on my side today without my wingman that I normally am with, although we’ve flown solo a couple times each direction. Corey Frank is off gallivanting around in Greek Islands, or God knows what. I get a video from him every once in a while and wonder why he’s there and I’m not there, but that’s just the way it is.

(01:48):

And I’m here today with a very, very special guest, Austin Finch. And none of you know Austin probably, unless he’s secretly more famous than he lets on. But Austin has actually been I think the most important member of the Market Dominance Guys team, because he’s worked, not behind the camera, but in this business on the other side of the screen turning whatever junk Corey and I spew out of our mouths into those episodes that people have been saying nice things about. So Austin, welcome to Market Dominance Guys, funny thing to say to the guy who actually causes it to go from a bunch of raw stuff to finished production material.

Austin Finch (02:30):

Thank you for having me on the show.

Chris Beall (02:31):

Spectacular, what fun. We in the form of I, came up with this idea at lunch the other day in Portland. I got to ask a preliminary question though because the audience is going to be all over this question which is, Austin, so we have a bunch of grizzled business people on, and then we have some lovely business people on, and then we have even some fairly young business people like Tom Yang has been on so that’s been interesting. But I have a feeling that you might be the youngest guest we’ve had in terms of chronological age, although I think in terms of perhaps wisdom and maturity, you got Corey and me both beat. I don’t want to ask you your name unless you’re comfortable spitting it out, but are you roughly speaking 50 years younger than me?

Austin Finch (03:15):

I don’t know quite how old you are, but I’m sitting at 17 right now.

Chris Beall (03:20):

50 years it is. I got five decades on you. The audience can be stunned that I’ve learned so little in five decades, or you’ve learned so much in 1.7. But just an opening question, I’ve told people for a long time that you’re the guy who makes our show real. Susan, your mom, says, “Cut it here, cut it there,” and then you go and go way beyond cut it here, cut it there and turn it into something. When did you get started, because we’re going to talk podcasting here for a while, a subject about which more than I. When did you get started editing podcasts?

Austin Finch (03:57):

In the summer of 2019, I had just bought a computer for the first time, a desktop computer and I was looking for jobs I could do at that age, which are pretty limited around here, almost everything wants you to be at least 16. And for years, since I was old enough to understand what she did, I’d always talked to my mom about what she did for work, or she’d asked me questions about, “Should I make this choice, or this choice?” And she goes up to me one day and she goes, “Well, do you have any interest in editing podcasts, that’s the way a lot of people are getting interested in the business right now?” “Sure, I’ll give it a shot.” And she asked me what I’d want to do in terms of content and this one sounded interesting, because she said you guys were very knowledgeable and that your topic was cool and I’d have to agree. So it’s been a little over three years.

Chris Beall (04:46):

Well, lucky three years for Corey of me, and for everybody in the audience who’s been enjoying these podcasts. What was it like? That sounds like, “Hey Austin, here’s a diving board and down there, somewhere, we’re calling that a swimming pool. There’s no water in it yet, but if you dive off we’ll get some in before you hit.” What was it like? Was it like, “Oh my God,” or was it like, “Oh yeah I could do this while doing three other things?”

Austin Finch (05:10):

Well there’s always that safety net of my boss being my mom, so she’s not going to just fire me for no reason. So that’s one plus. And then the other nice thing was that she would teach me all the tips and tricks as I was going along. So I was learning more about it. It wasn’t just hopping into a software I’d never used, because the Adobe Suite is not exactly self-explanatory.

Chris Beall (05:34):

I will tell the folks at Adobe that. I have tried to learn a couple of Adobe products in my life and I have concluded that I’m a no-hoper when it comes to that stuff. I mean even the simple ones, they’re just entirely beyond me. They seem to have a mental model that conflicts with my view of the world. Was that part challenging for you, or did you pick up the mental model of the… And what are you using? You’re using the Adobe Creative Suite, is that what it’s called?

Austin Finch (05:58):

Yeah, the Creative Cloud. I’m using Adobe Audition for all these.

Chris Beall (06:02):

I showed my age there.

Austin Finch (06:05):

I’m still learning something new every once in a while, but I feel like I’ve got most of the things I need for podcasts down.

Chris Beall (06:12):

So what’s the routine part? So we get done with the podcast, like we’re recording right now. I record it in Zoom into the cloud. Susan, your mom, read me the Riot Act 2, 3, 4 times about how I should set up the recording correctly so that the fidelity is good, and the sound is decent. I don’t have a fancy setup here. I don’t even have headphones. I probably do, but I think they’re sitting on the window sill behind the piano in the Seattle house and we’re down here in the Arizona house so you can only have so many of everything.

(06:42):

And I just talked to this here, Microsoft Surface Pro and I don’t know, it seems to do an okay job with those array microphones it has on them. Maybe it’s because it’s got a couple of them and they got some distance between them. I don’t know why it works so well, but I just record and then when I’m done there is a link that shows up and I send it off to Susan and copy a couple of people including Corey and my sister Shelly so that they can have it for some reason.

(07:08):

Then what happens in your shop?

Austin Finch (07:11):

Between Shelly and my mom, Susan, they read the transcript and Shelly makes an intro and then one of them gives me somewhere to break it, into two episodes or three, depending on how long it is. Sometimes only one. And beyond that it’s pretty much just make their message clear and don’t let them cough into the mic.

Chris Beall (07:34):

So what do you do about that? It sounds like there’s an easy part with just, “Okay it goes from here to there.” But then there’s another part which is, “Okay, but it’s got to be right,” because Corey and I, God knows what we do. Whether they’re drinking whiskey and doing all manner of things. So is there a part of it that’s that’s really challenging where it’s like, “Oh my God guys did you have to do that?” And then you’ve got to figure out what to do.

Austin Finch (08:00):

The hardest part is to probably audio glitches and when two people are talking over each other and one says something that you really don’t want to in the other one says something that if you take it out the sentence makes no sense. And what usually happens there is I have to take words from other parts of the file and piece them together by copy and pasting them, which you have to choose from the right area. So you end up with a completely different pitch or volume and it just sounds like you slammed a bunch of pieces together instead of repurpose them well.

Chris Beall (08:29):

I had no idea you did that. That’s fascinating. So we should just spit out a bunch of words said in a sort reasonable way just in case. We should make a word library for you. Have you ever gone so far as to choose a word from a different podcast like something Corey or I said and go steal it from another episode entirely?

Austin Finch (08:49):

I’ve never had to do that, but maybe I should have a file of you guys reading the entire dictionary and I can just go grab him catalog perfectly when I need to.

Chris Beall (08:58):

The Oxford English dictionary. We might get Corey to do that. Corey has beautiful elocution. I think he speaks much better than I do. So I love listening to him and it’s one of the reasons that I do this. Fascinating. So I didn’t know you did that. That’s really interesting. Do you do audio wave form trickery to go, “Oh well this was a little quieter and I don’t like the way it sounds. I’m going to take it from here to there,” and I’m here everybody who’s not watching this on video and I’m going to turn a knob, it’s a figurative knob, maybe it’s an actual knob, I doubt it, and make it match up. Are you using your ear in order to blend stuff together?

Austin Finch (09:39):

Yeah, sometimes I’ll pull up the graph of the frequency. So the normal one it just shows volume and then I’ll also pull up the pitch under that. So I’ll take out the low notes or something, to make it sound more like it was part of this sentence. Or maybe take out the high notes because someone got a notification on their computer. So it’s a lot of that. And then sometimes I have to close my eyes, or turn my head away from the computer so I can’t see the audio in front of me so I can only hear how it would hear to the audience.

Chris Beall (10:08):

Wow. Okay so hello does it take to do one of those, because they tend to drop the next day. We’re always stunned. It’s like your mom is going, “Come on Chris, get the recording to me, get the recording,” because for those who don’t know me, I tend to do things, Oh shall we say, when the opportunity arises. And so that’s the polite way of saying it at the last minute. And so she would rather have a schedule that, or they’re dropping on a regular basis, because audiences are used to that and so forth. You seem to turn these things quite quickly. How much time goes into making a 20, 25-minute episode from us yapping to something ready to go out the door with the bumper music on it, mom’s intro and the commercials in it and all that good stuff.

Austin Finch (10:52):

Well I tend to edit when the opportunity arises as well. So I get where you’re coming from. And it really depends a lot on what the subject matter is and who the guest is, because oftentimes a guest who have never been on a podcast before, or they have very little experience. So every once in a while you’ll get a guest that’s been on radio for 20 years and they speak perfectly and eloquently and sometimes you’ll have a guest that’s never had their voice recorded with you can’t expect them to be doing perfectly. And the other thing is if it’s a three-part episode, the first part will be worse than the second, which will be worse than the third, because you guys warm up to each other and you get more in the groove of that back and forth, especially getting past technological issues.

Chris Beall (11:34):

Oh that’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about that, so that’s really interesting. So as we get going we become more regular conversationalists and less the stilted scared bunnies that we are as we began episode 142 or whatever. But it is interesting, because the guests do need to get in the groove. I think Corey and I might start in a groove, but I’m not sure, maybe we don’t, you would know, because how can we be objective about this? That is really, really interesting. So do you know anybody else’s podcast? Your mom runs a podcasting company, so are you like the guy?

Austin Finch (12:12):

I’m not quite the guy but I have my two shows that I manage yours and the lovely Helen Fanucci.

Chris Beall (12:19):

Ooh yeah, lucky me. Lucky you too. We’ll see what goes on with Helen’s. Helen is not quite as enthusiastic a podcaster as I am. For me this comes completely naturally and while it shows that I never prepare, it turns out to be okay, I guess. She I think is more of a craftsman. She works at what she does, which is why she’s so much more successful than I am, I think. Plus she’s smarter and better looking and a whole bunch of other things. But I didn’t know you did her show also, so that’s pretty cool. Without saying anything too bad about Corey and me, just be gentle with us. But what do you see as of the differences between the two shows that you work on?

Austin Finch (12:59):

Well I thought it was really interesting to see when you had her as a guest here on Market Dominance Guys. It highlighted where hers is mainly an internal conversation and yours is a whole lot of external output things, in regard to business and sales. And hers is a lot more… It’s called Love Your Team. It’s a lot more about internal teams and how you manage those and it comes through in how you guys talk about other topics too, that hers is more focused on that aspect of it.

Chris Beall (13:28):

Yeah, it’s really interesting. The distinction with regard to direction was one that I hadn’t actually thought of until I ambushed her the other day and asked her to be a guest, because quite frankly your mom was putting a lot of pressure on me to get the show out and I said, “Hey Helen, want to be my guest?” She goes, “Yeah, sure.” And so we just set up and did it and we do it from opposite ends of the house so we can’t hear each other, which I think is pretty important, because as she says, I am really, really loud no matter how non-loud I try to be. And I just thought of that first question, second questions. We got past the bit where I asked whether it was true that she had something big happen in the summer. And for those of you who don’t know, Helen Fanucci and I got married on July 2nd and then promptly went off on a long trip, a working trip, mostly working only nine weeks.

(14:15):

So I suddenly realize, my goodness, we’ve been talking about talking to customers and prospects for 140 whatever episodes and here’s somebody who’s coming and trumping all of that and saying, “Yeah, that’s all nice. But a really important conversations are the ones you have with your team.” And so here you are, somebody who’s listened to in detail 60 hours, or something, taking you, you didn’t answer the question of how long it takes, but I’m going to guess it takes an hour to put out 20 minutes, but maybe it takes two hours. I don’t know.

 

Chris Beall (15:40):

You have like 150 to 200 hours of interacting with our material, which is all about out talking to customers, talking to customers, and suddenly here’s this person who comes along saying she’s not saying that’s not where it’s at. She’s saying your team takes care of that. You need to take care of your team. Was that a surprise to you? I bet to a lot of people it would be. That would be a big difference. How’d you feel about that?

Austin Finch (16:04):

Well a lot of what I’ve learned about business, because I haven’t really been in that scene at all, has been from you and Corey and all your esteemed guests. So then when I started editing Love Your Team, because that was so much newer, I hadn’t even thought of it that way. It was a completely new perspective and I thought it was really interesting at how well you guys obviously get along with extremely different approaches to a similar topic.

Chris Beall (16:32):

It’s interesting isn’t it? That’s good. Well I think that happens a lot in relationships. Our economic strategy is similar, we call it a dumbbell strategy. It’s got a lot of weight [inaudible 00:16:42] not a lot in between. So she’s a very successful executive who her earnings are commensurate with her responsibilities and I’m an entrepreneur who’s basically hanging out on the edge looking for the big wins. And so I guess that can happen a lot. It’s interesting to see that in the context of as you pointed out in business and in relationships.

(17:03):

So as you think about either one of those podcasts and you think about, okay, so you’re, roughly speaking, 17. You’ve done well in your career already. You’ve got real work, you do real stuff, people esteem your work, in fact worship it. You’ve accumulated enough capital, I’ve heard, to get a two wheeled form of transportation that would scare the living daylights out of me, which I love the way you described it.

(17:28):

You can drive a car with one finger, but once you’re on a motorcycle, you’re on an animal, on a wild animal and you got at tame it. As I look at it, I think about our audience. I think our audience tends to be people who are probably kind of well along in their careers, not everybody, but kind of. But you seem to have benefited from listening to this stuff. But maybe you haven’t, maybe it was like I’m stuck listening to junk, but would you think that, should we try to expand our audience to people in your demographic, or would they just go, “Yeah, I’m not. Austin, screw you guys, this stuff’s not interesting.” TikTok me up maybe.

Austin Finch (18:03):

I think as much as people want to easily lump a certain age group into that category, I think the vast majority of people I’m friends with and talk to would want something like this marketed towards them where they can actually learn about entering the workforce the right way. Not just going into a job that you don’t care how it progresses your career. Because like you said, a lot of the people that listen to the podcasts and come on and share their thoughts are far into their careers and have done a lot of development. But it’s also interesting to see the side of it of how did they get there? And not just in like, “I worked hard,” in all that sense, but also what were the stumbles and the missteps on the way.

Chris Beall (18:48):

Well that’s really interesting. I think you make me think about what Corey is doing down at Branch 49 from where I am up at Branch 49, I’m now down south of Tucson. So that’s going on in Phoenix, where they actually do listen to Market Dominance Guys, it’s part of the curriculum. I think it is at this part of Grand Canyon University, Branch 49, where they’re learning by doing. But also there’s classroom learning and there’re books that they’re reading and all that kind of stuff. I’ve given an impromptu guest lecture up there, which just means somebody got me in a room with people and didn’t tell me to stop talking and seemed to me, and these people are just a little bit older than you. There may be two years, three years, four years older. It seems to me that among those people there’s a great hunger and appetite to get real but also get underneath what’s real, really know what’s going on.

(19:38):

Not just do a job, because you’re told to do it, but to understand it and not just progress like, “Oh I’m being promoted,” but progress like, “Yeah, I get what’s going on and I could go do this in another setting. I could go start my own business,” that kind of thing. Is it just that old people, like people my age just don’t remember, do you think? Or is it that they always are trying to figure out how to put younger people in a box so they can feel better about themselves? What do you think is going on there?

Austin Finch (20:05):

I think a lot of younger people, as soon as they’re coming out of high school, like you said, they’re looking for something more real. They’ve done years and years of, here’s a textbook way to do this. And I’m not saying textbooks aren’t valuable, but you need the hands on with it, because with that pair then you have real experience. And after you do years of textbook learning and reading about what other people have done, you want to get your hands dirty and really see what your capabilities are and what you’re interested in, because it’s hard to tell if you’re just reading about other people doing it.

Chris Beall (20:39):

Yeah, man do I believe that. And somebody wants to ask me one evening in Des Moines, he was a guy that we were considering to be CEO of one of our branches at this company. It’s called Finish Line Floors that I started with a couple of ladies in Des Moines, Iowa. And this wonderful guy, Rich Emery funded it out of his business. And here we are coming along and I’m in an interview with this guy that we think of hiring and he says, “Would you take me through your entire resume?” I looked at my watch, it’s like, “Dude, it’s 9:00, this bar shuts in two hours. I don’t think we’re going to pull this off.” And when we got finished and it did take the full two hours, he said, “Why did you do all that stuff?” And I answered the exactly what you just said, which is, “How do you know what you’re really going to love until you just try a whole bunch of things?” Because there’s always positive surprises and negative surprises.

(21:34):

Like in this whole podcast editing thing, what’s the biggest negative surprise? Do you sometimes just go, “Oh geez, do I have to do this? I’d rather do X, Y or Z.” Or is there a piece of it that you’ve grown to hate over time, or do you just like it. You seem very adaptable to me. You make a point out of liking what you’re doing, if I’m guessing correctly. How does that go in your world?

Austin Finch (21:55):

I don’t know if I agree about always make it a point of liking what I’m doing. I’d say I’m pretty close-minded at things I don’t enjoy. But I do genuinely like doing the podcast, because I feel like it’s a type of media I rarely consume and I feel like I’m skilled at interpreting what people are saying even if they’re not wording it in the form of a speech, or something super formal and presentable. So I really like being able to get their message across to anyone who would listen, whether they have that skill or not. So I think that’s the cool part to me, is almost being a translator for a message.

Chris Beall (22:31):

I love it. I love it. And a message with ideas in it. I never would’ve described your job like that. So anybody’s listening to this, I think it’s often the case by the way, when somebody really is doing something that they’ve learned to do, that they know how to do, and that they love doing, it’s often surprising what the actual job is if they were to describe it. I love that as a description of the podcast editing job as you’re helping people who are just having a conversation, maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re not used to this kind of speaking, they’re a guest for the first time or whatever, but helping them get their message across.

(23:08):

I told people when they’re a guest on Market Dominance Guys, before we hit record, I say, “Look, just relax. Austin’s going to make us sound great.” And I mean it, because it’s hard to relax when you’re being recorded. You want to make somebody sound horrible, just tell them they’re being recorded and immediately they’ll go into robot mode and sing-songy or God knows what. And so that’s really interesting. So your job really isn’t just cut it up and make it work, technically, so to speak. It’s actually to listen and to have the finished product get the message across that you are hearing. So it’s funny, the podcast is going in through your ears and coming out through your hands in a way.

Austin Finch (23:51):

Essentially, yeah. So I guess if I’m interpreting what you guys are saying wrong, it could go a completely different direction than what you had in mind.

Chris Beall (24:01):

I’m you blaming from now. “Oh, I’m not a total idiot. That’s Austin’s fault. He didn’t get it. What I meant was…” No, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Well that’s pretty interesting. Would you recommend this, or have you recommended this kind of thing, editing recorded media to anybody that is in your circle of friends? Does anybody else do it?

Austin Finch (24:23):

I don’t know anyone else who does it. I don’t know if it’s for everyone, honestly. I think if I was editing podcasts of a subject I didn’t find interesting, or people I didn’t find interesting, I wouldn’t really enjoy it. But I like you and Corey, and I like Helen, and I like all the guests you guys pick out. So it makes it a whole different story, because you’re there in the conversation when you’re able to hear the tone and all the different pauses and everything. It’s totally different from reading the transcript, or a book of someone trying to summarize all their thoughts, because you hear all the little nuances of how you speak to other people that convey way more than just the words you’re saying.

Chris Beall (25:03):

But that’s interesting too. I really appreciate that, because all of Market Dominance Guys is actually about how to use the human voice, not the words so much. The words are part of the game, but the human voice in order to pave markets with trust and then harvest that trust at your leisure and completely dominate markets as a result. Only we hesitated to use that dominate word.

(25:24):

But the fact is it’s a zero-sum game out there in business, especially when you have innovation that you’re bringing to market. It’s going to be you or somebody else. And now it’s a race, who’s going to be first to the finish line And the question is, “Well what’s the magic?” And the magic is that point where somebody trusts you. And then what’s the magic behind that? People ask me what’s Market Dominance Guys about? I was just asked this the other day, I said, “It’s about how we can dominate markets with the magic of the human voice.” And what you’ve just said is, it is about the voices. It’s about not just the words, it’s not the beef jerky, it’s the dripping stake with the blood still coming out of it.

Austin Finch (26:07):

I think that’s another thing that I’ve learned throughout the few years I’ve been editing the podcast, is not only the importance of the way you speak. When I first started I didn’t quite understand that some pauses needed to be long and some need to be short. I would just try and make it concise. And I’ve learned since then, because through listening to it and the experience of editing it, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about that language that’s separate, completely from what you’re actually saying.

Chris Beall (26:37):

They talk about that in music. That’s really interesting. And when I was growing up, I had an opportunity to learn to play the piano. It was called, I took piano lessons because I had to, but I was very, very young. I was four and change when I started playing the piano. And what my second piano teacher really emphasized was the white space, was the pauses. And I’ve never gotten good at it, by the way. I think there’s something very juvenile in my playing. But hey, and you heard me play for the wedding as far as I go. When I think about it though, with regard to holding conversations with people, the pauses, the hesitations, that moment when somebody’s thinking before they speak, that thing that we do when we’re not speaking ballistically, we’re speaking thoughtfully. I think that conveys a lot. And I think a lot of people sort of don’t get that.

(27:29):

They think you can squish it all down. And I object to, myself personally, I know some people love to do it. To listening to podcasts at one and a half or two times speed. To me it loses the feel of the thing better to me to spend the time and let your own mind and your own feelings flow along with the conversation, because if it took that long to say it, maybe it’s okay if it takes that long to listen to it. In your case it probably takes twice as long, or more, because you have to do a bunch of stuff with it. But that’s a really, really good point. So I got to ask, obviously you’re not on camera doing this. Have you had any friends hang out with you while you were editing?

Austin Finch (28:09):

No, the extent of my audience has been, when I first started, my mom emails me the file for a episode and comes in and sits and watches me edit it. She goes, “I think you’ll do all right.” And that was a pretty quick trial. So for the last two and a half years, there hasn’t been anybody keeping me in check, I guess.

Chris Beall (28:32):

Well you’ve been doing great. Where does this sort of thing lead? I’m not saying you should predict the future of your life, but I’m a huge believer in working real jobs when you’re in your teens. And for me, a big part of my life was having a real job with real responsibility when I was 14. And the responsibility was taking care of a bunch of animals. It was a small, medium and large animals, if count horses as being large, and I thought they were. It was a display of all things. It was a marketing piece at Hall Craft Home in North Scottsdale. They set up these two model homes and said to my sister Cresta now, Cindy at the time, and I, “Would you like to take care of these animals?” And we’re looking out and going, “Well what animals?” And they said, “Oh well you’ll go and buy them and you’ll get all the pens built,” and you guys are experts this stuff, because you have so many animals, because we had horses and goats and this, that, and the other thing in a million dogs.

(29:29):

And I look back on that as the most important part of my career. That responsibility, and we were thrown into it just like you were. We were thrown into it. We weren’t allowed to go and drive to all the way to wherever it was. It was actually south of Mesa in order to pick up a goat, because she was 15 and I was 16. You couldn’t drive by yourself until you were 16. But the rest of it was just ours. And I still think of a long entrepreneurial career. Sometimes an executive at a real company, every once in a while I try to avoid, that it came back to that first job. And it’s something that happens I think in your teens when you’re working and it’s real. Do you experience it that, because you’re really responsible for this Market Dominance Guy’s show. All we do is yap. You turn it into an actual finished media product that is out there now. If you Google it up, it’s like everywhere, these things spread like crazy. What has it done for you, or to you, if anything, to take on this responsibility?

Austin Finch (30:36):

It definitely makes me consider more where a job will lead me than just what it is in the moment, because this one, I feel like I’m gaining a lot of experience both in the actual technical part of it and the computer software and all that. And of course the conversational knowledge and the business knowledge. But it makes me want to avoid any job that isn’t going to give me a skill. And I understand that skills can be really different from what it seems like they’re applicable for. But I don’t want to do something that I worked the job for a year, go off to college and forget about it. It never impacts my career again.

Chris Beall (31:16):

Yeah, that makes sense. That really makes sense.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Retaining your top talent and delivering results is a challenge for all sales leaders when your top talent can walk out the door without taking a single step.

The hybrid work revolution has made sales management the most pivotal role in the innovation economy—and simultaneously the most challenging. Our guest today is Helen Fanucci, Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft, with 25 years managing hybrid teams and has an in-depth understanding of the problems facing sales managers today. Our Market Dominance Guys’ host, Chris Beall, conducts this second interview in his two-part conversation with Helen about her new book, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. In this podcast and in Helen’s book are details on not only what sales managers must be doing to thrive, but how to do them. It’s definitely a quintessential guide — with all the steps you need to know. But it’s even more than that as the title of today’s Market Dominance Guys episode states, it’s “A Blueprint for Success.”  

 

About Our Guest

Helen Fanucci, Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft is the author of Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World, available November 1, 2022.

 

Full episode transcript below:

(00:21):

Retaining your top talent and delivering results is a challenge for all sales leaders, when your top talent can walk out the door without taking a single step. The hybrid work revolution has made sales management the most pivotal role in today’s innovation economy, and simultaneously the most challenging. Our guest today is Helen Fanucci, transformational sales leader at Microsoft, and has 25 years managing hybrid teams and an in-depth understanding of the problems facing sales managers today. Our Market Dominance Guys host, Chris Beall, conducts this second interview in his two-part conversation with Helen about her new book, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. In this podcast and in Helen’s book are details on not only what sales managers must be doing to thrive, but how to do them. It’s definitely a quintessential guide with all the steps you need to know, but it’s even more than that. As the title of today’s Market Dominance Guys episode states, it’s a blueprint for success.

Chris Beall (01:25):

You have a team this big, you’re going to have this much time spent on these one-on-ones, this much on these. These are the ones that have a fixed agenda. These are the ones that are event-driven, but they’re probably going to flow at about this rate. Here’s the blah, blah, blah. It’s on and on. I mean, it’s like an engineering breakdown. And folks, by the way, when you read this book, what you’re going to get is love as both an emotional concept but also as an engineering concept. Love your team is something you do, not something you just feel. It’s mostly something you do through these one-on-one conversations. There must have been a time in your career where you were going through the evolution of all this and you have all the pressures of regular sales managers, report this, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, right?

Helen Fanucci (02:13):

Sure. Yeah.

Chris Beall (02:14):

Did you have to go through a transition or were you just like, “No, I’m always going to do it like this. Screw all you people”? Because I think for most people in the audience who want to do this, what they’re going to do is they’re going to read the book, then they’re going to try to apply, say, some of the conversations of connection. I believe they’ll probably start there because they’re early and they’ll notice that they didn’t do one to introduce themselves to the team. And you have a great story about somebody quitting because she went to a group and never got engaged with by the audience. But you do have to go through a process of, “Gosh, I got to figure out this time management thing because that’s the real constraint.” Or is it just like, “I’m Helen Fanucci. I made my way through MIT. I must be able to manage my time”?

Helen Fanucci (02:58):

I had to think about time constraint, for sure. So, I used to do hour-long one-on-ones with my team. This was years ago. And somehow I thought that that’s what was needed and maybe at the time that’s what was needed. But I do a half-hour, actually 25 minutes now, and this is a new thing since COVID in the last 18 months is going from a half-hour conversation to 25 minutes. Because everybody’s back to back and everybody needs at least a five minute break between a 30 minute or 25 minute conversation. So, I do that. Now, the other thing is I’m available on IM. So, one of the things that I talk about actually in the book in the first getting to know your team is how to communicate with me. People IM me or they’ll text me, and so I’m also available for drive-by connection points in between our biweekly one-on-one.

(04:01):

So, I do biweekly one-on-ones with direct reports. And so my last team was 12 direct reports. I now have two managers that work for me and then about 30 people in my organization currently. And so I will do quarterly connections or things like that and sometimes more frequently with some of my skip level reports, people who report to the managers that report to me. And then of course, and separate from the one-on-ones, are the formal pipeline reviews. It depends on what is going on. So, it will happen twice a month if there’s a hot deal happening and there’s a lot of different moving parts or actions needed. It will for sure happen at least once a month. So, there are different requirements for forecasting in different organizations. So, I definitely pay attention to that and do the forecast reviews with my team so that I can be prepared when I need to report out and up to my management.

(05:10):

And one of the things I really emphasize, speaking of forecasting, is delivering three to 5% of the forecast. I don’t value diving catches and last-minute deals in a way that maybe traditional sales managers might. Like, “Rah-rah, that is fantastic.” Well, what that meant is it’s a missed opportunity for us to get additional investments in our business if we didn’t forecast that revenue. Because our investments in our business are directly tied to the anticipated and forecasted revenue. So, if we’re under-forecasting all the time, we are missing out on a whole bunch of opportunity to actually increase our value to our customers and get more headcount and investments for our team.

Chris Beall (05:58):

I remember reading that in the book and going, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” As the guy who’s on the other side making those investments, if the forecast is sandbagged, it’s off, it’s short, it’s light just to look good, then it’s like, “Well, how much are we going to put as a company into achieving that number?” If you take the thought experiment, you tell me you’re going to make nothing, what am I going to invest in you? Well, nothing. I got to find somebody else to do the job. I want to switch up a little bit to you experiencing… You didn’t just write a book, you actually do it. I’ve watched you do it now for, I guess, three years. And I’ve always been kind of surprised.

(06:38):

It’s like sales management to me, when I’ve seen a lot of it, is, “Yeah, I put somebody in a territory, try to get a good rep, put them in a territory, hope they work out, tell them war stories about how great you were back in the day. Fire them if it doesn’t work out and they go to club if it does.” It’s kind of like that’s sales management. You have this very systematic step-by-step process or repeatable cycles within the process with these 17 conversations. My guess is that of the 17 conversations, one kind of conversation is the favorite, the one you look forward to it. If it’s the first on the calendar in the morning, you get up a little bit earlier and are hyped up for it and ready to go, and you don’t want any distractions and away you go.

(07:25):

And then there’s always one kind of thing that you know you got to do, but it’s not your fave. It’s just it’s there and you got to make sure you do it and do it well. But it’s not the one that you… And I know you. You’re going to do both of them. But what is your favorite? The one that really gets you jazzed. You’ve looked back on it, maybe you want to talk about it over dinner and wine in the evening. And then what’s the, you got to do it, it’s really important, but I don’t love it that much?

Helen Fanucci (07:54):

Okay. So, I’ll start with the second first. I don’t love performance improvement, performance management conversations. What’s so critical to any role, but particularly when your employees are remote, is you set clear performance-based expectations, outcome-based expectations, not activity expectations. And so what that means is obviously there’s quota achievement required, but also for my team it is building stronger, deeper relationships with customers. So, I do a whole list of, if you will, hard expectations, hard numbers that are quantifiable, 3x pipelines, things like that, and then soft, like building a stronger relationship with your customer and increasing the executive engagement with a customer and things like that. So, when my team members, if they’re falling short of performance expectations, I address that head on, I talk to them, and then they’re on a performance improvement plan of some sort. I don’t love that at all. So, that’s my least favorite.

(09:15):

So, now that we have that out of the way, let me go to my most favorite, and that is account strategy and ideation and sales strategy. And I love talking with my team about that, brainstorming the next action. So, they’ll bring to me a situation, it could be a customer situation, maybe a customer executive left and they’re trying to figure out how to get in to see somebody else or the replacement, and so we talk about, “Okay, who knows who and how do we navigate and do we need to bring in one of our executives as bait in the bucket to get this executive to come and meet with us?” So, I love account strategy ideation. That’s my favorite part. And a lot of it is asking questions to really understand what’s going on and what is needed so that I can be helpful.

(10:16):

Because sometimes what’s presented to me, it sounds like we need to have a discount or an investment, but as you get into it it could be that there could be a miscommunication with the customer. It could be that there are things that we need to do to make sure we really understand their business sufficiently that we can present the best solution for them. And maybe it gets redirected to a different offering or a different tactic, if you will, to keep the business moving forward, deal at hand moving forward. So, I love the strategy part of it the most.

Chris Beall (11:01):

Sounds like fun for me too. I really think that that part of business is always fun. When you’re ideating, you’re brainstorming, you’re trying to figure it out. And also it’s got to be fun when those action plans are put together and they’re progressing to have those one-on-ones that determine, “So, how’s it going? And are we achieving what we… We took a guess. We did a thing. Now what?” That’s got to be fun too.

Helen Fanucci (12:06):

Yeah, it is, for sure. Yep. You bet.

Chris Beall (12:12):

Yeah. So, Love Your Team is directed at an audience of sales managers. It says so right in the subtitle. A Survival Guide for Sales Managers. Now, I suspect that your way of looking at the world and the techniques and that structure of having these important conversations probably is applicable to all management. But you’re not going to go crazy and just say that’s it. So, let’s think of your audience as sales managers for a moment. As you think about that audience and you think back on writing the book, were there any of those conversations you thought, “This ain’t the 100 level course, this ain’t the 200 level course. This is where your skills are really going to be challenged”? There’s a lot on the line. You have a whole section on skills, on conversational skills, which I’ve never seen before in a book like this, that says, “These are the skills you need to hold these conversations.”

(13:03):

So, there’s the skills. We’re all lacking in different skills and we all have strong in different skills. And then there’s the conversations. And we’ve never talked about this before. I’m just curious. Did you ever get to the point of thinking, “Oh man, this is like 400-level course stuff that somebody is going to try it, but it’s going to be hard for them to do it because the skills required are going to be in short supply”? Or did that not ever come up? Maybe it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, everybody can do this.”

Helen Fanucci (13:35):

Well, it never came up because what I intended to do with this book is reflect on what I think is needed for sales managers to be successful. And I will say, this is B2B enterprise sales. And so that’s my world, and so it won’t be applicable to everybody. And I’m not trying to convert people who don’t want to be converted, but if folks think that they have a challenge retaining talent or they want some new ideas, I’m hopeful that the book is helpful for them. To be honest with you, I probably am not the best observer of myself. So, while these conversations may seem obvious to me and straightforward and I broke them down and intended to make them accessible and straightforward, I really don’t know what the audience of sales managers reading the book, I really don’t know where the struggle might be. And I’d be super curious to know that and how I could be more helpful. But I’m kind of blind there, to be honest with you. I don’t know.

Chris Beall (14:49):

Yeah. It was probably smart to be blind there because it would be easy to overcook some of these sections if you think that they’re too difficult or whatever. I found in my reading of the book, and for the audience, just so you know, in its various forms I’ve probably now read it nine times, maybe 10 times, not always deeply, but this is a confession. Normally I don’t read any book twice. I’m a very fast reader. I love to read. I don’t read twice. I get something out of Love Your Team every time I read it. And that’s on top of a very, very long career. So, I think that there’s a lot of depth and subtlety in your description of these conversations.

(15:32):

As I think them through, I think this way of looking at the world and then putting it into action of having these conversations as a means of getting action, a means of getting results, some of which are, I’ll call it action results like deals, revenue, et cetera, but some of which are really, we’ll call them valuation results, that as companies are worth more now when they have great talent on board. You lose talent and you lose value. You lose your future as a company. You lose the option value of being able to do things with great people that you can’t really do with either not great people or while you’re trying to find people.

(16:12):

So, I’ve read it a bunch of times, but I kept coming back to, “Gosh, I wonder whether people are going to be able to do this or not.” And I’ve come to the conclusion they will be able to do it. I think you’ve broken it down to the point… Give an example out of, say, the first of the conversations of connection. What is an example of a level of detail that you’ve provided that somebody might think, “Why is she telling me to do this? Of course, I’m going to do that,” but in fact you probably suspect without the detail they aren’t going to do that or we aren’t going to do that?

Helen Fanucci (16:46):

Introducing yourself to your team. I have three PowerPoint slides that I show. I talk about, the first slide is about me, what’s my career background, my family situation. And in fact, I did this introduction to new team members this summer, and I put our wedding picture on it because that was current and timely and that was on that slide. And then a little bit about me. And also, what are my favorite things? Like what’s my favorite thing to eat or drink? And so my favorite thing to eat is anything somebody else cooks. So, I’m lucky that Chris likes to cook, and every meal that he cooks is my favorite meal. And then what I like to drink and things like that. So, just fun facts or things I like to do, hobbies or skiing or things like that. So, that’s the first slide.

(17:44):

The second slide is my leadership approach and philosophy. I list out the things that are on that slide, like culture first and people first, results-oriented, clarity of results and expectations, no surprises, if there’s bad news, communicate it early, things like that. And then the last slide is what’s next? So, I make it clear that I’m going to set up one-on-ones with each of them and they don’t need to come prepared. It’s really just to get to know them. And I also talk about how to communicate with me. So, as I mentioned, IM and texting works great. And so that’s what I put on the three slides. So, it’s really short and sweet. And for my last team of 12 people, I had each of them introduce theirselves briefly and tell me a fun fact of themselves, like where they like to travel or something like that.

(18:49):

My current team of 30, I did not have everyone introduce themselves but I followed up in over a two or three week period. I met with each of them, all 30 of them, even those that report to my managers. I met each of them for 30 minutes, had a one-on-one with each of them. So, that’s the level of specificity and detail in why I do it. And it may or may not work for the reader to be that specific, or maybe they haven’t reflected on what their leadership approach or style is and what they care about. So, it’s an opportunity for them to reflect on that. So, getting back to your last question as you were then talking, I thought about what might be tough for the reader. And I think what might be tough is the orientation to think about their team first, if that’s not how they’ve been doing their role to date.

(19:50):

So, for example, I think about servant leadership. How can I amplify my team’s success? And so when my team members are presenting to the deal review board to try to get a discount or investment or resources for their customer, I ask them, “Would it be useful if I take notes in the background so you can stay present in the conversation and your presentation?” And they all take me up on it. So, I will be off camera. I will take notes and including actions, and then I send it to them after the meeting and the call. And I think it might be tempting for sales leaders to be the ones that are doing the presentation in front of the top ranking executive in the company and the finance team and having that visibility.

(20:49):

Many sales leaders want that for themselves. I want to amplify my team and I want to help my team learn and grow. So, I’m in the background. And that might seem weird to some of the folks who are listening to this podcast or reading the book. And so it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m authentically telling them how I do it for their consideration.

Chris Beall (21:17):

I love that thing where you take notes, and it’s not so you can keep tabs on them or whatever. It’s so the person who’s reporting to you or reporting to the person reporting to you can focus on what they’re doing and their internal presentation, say as the example you gave, and do a great job and be exposed. I really like the fact that… This one, I think everybody should think about. If you really love your team, you’re going to help them get positive exposure for what they’re doing, not just in the number, but in every day or as life is going on to the senior executives. And it might result in somebody wanting to pluck them out of your team and put them somewhere else. And that’s okay. If that’s what they want to do, if that’s good for them, that’s your job to help them and support them in that. I think that is the hardest reorientation for folks probably is, even if it means that that exposure or that help, that support, whatever you’re giving them is going to let them go get another job, so to speak, that’s still your job.

Helen Fanucci (22:23):

Yeah, for sure. I do have explicit career conversations with team members and my recommendations. That happens at least twice a year. Sometimes if there’s a lot going on we’ll talk more frequently. But my team that I just referenced, a team of 12 sellers, three of them now have management roles within Microsoft. So, the three of them I was involved in coaching. They shadowed me in some cases. And so I absolutely think it’s a win and it’s a success. If your team’s not learning and growing, they’re going to leave. And actually the data supports that as well. It’s fundamental to what folks care about is that they learn and grow. And so I support that. And yes, it means I have to backfill them and hopefully they stay at my current company, which is Microsoft. And if for whatever reason they decide that Microsoft isn’t serving their career anymore, well okay, that’s okay too. But it’s really success on their terms, not my terms that I aim to support.

Chris Beall (23:43):

I think that’s such a big, big message and a big change between the Love Your Team approach and the standard approach. If we were just to boil it down to the one thing, it’s their north star becomes your north star. And it’s individual. It’s one-on-one. And I think that’s a radical big idea that to some people might sound soft or it might sound dangerous, like, “Oh my God.” But your view is it’s actually the safe route in a sense, right? It may sound different, but you’re reliant on them anyway. You’re already in the boat with them.

Helen Fanucci (24:17):

Here’s the thing is, I need to model the behavior I want to see in them. So, I expect my team to work well across the organization with their peers and building trust and building relationships is foundational for me with my team, but it’s also foundational for them with their customers. And so understanding what constitutes success for customers on their terms is critical for us to be able to deliver value and make sure that whatever we’re selling actually meets their needs so they get to say so. So, it kind of goes downhill, so to speak, or it’s a virtuous cycle where we all win if the customers are successful in getting what they want in return. And so it’s, I’m modeling the behavior I expect to see in my sellers as well.

Chris Beall (25:16):

Well, on that note, I guess we’ve finally come full circle all the way around to what the other 140-something episodes are about, which is having trust-based conversations with customers, which in the Love Your Team system actually happens more easily and more naturally because what’s happening on the inside is then happening on the outside. Helen, you and I have run out of time for this podcast. Thank God we haven’t run out of time for each other. And on that, I’m going to say, Corey, we miss you. We love you. But Helen and I had a really good time making this one today.

(25:52):

I am so pleased that you could be on today, Helen. Your book again, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. It’s out November 1st. This podcast will drop a little sooner than that. Everybody who’s watching this, listening to it, doing whatever you’re doing with it, mark it in your calendar November 1st, and if you’re really smart, reach out to Helen and see God knows what, LinkedIn or whatever. She might actually do something special for you in the book department. I really don’t know, but it’s going to be an incredible experience for you. Thank you so much, Helen.

Helen Fanucci (26:28):

Thank you, Chris.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this scary new world of employment, where top sales talent has the power to stay with your team or leave you in the lurch, how do you hold onto that top talent? Helen Fanucci, Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft and our guest on Market Dominance Guys, knows the answer to this question — and that answer has 17 parts. Helen has taken her 25 years of experience managing remote teams and turned that knowledge into a ground-breaking book titled, Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World (available on Amazon Nov. 1, 2022). In it, Helen details the 17 conversations that sales leaders must master with their team to successfully attract and retain top talent. Our podcast host, Chris Beall, questions Helen about her tried-and-true theories on why putting your sales team members first will get you the results you’re expecting. Get ready to take notes about this brave new approach to managing sales teams in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “17 Conversations That Matter.”

—-more—-

About Our Guest

Helen Fanucci is a Transformational Sales Leader at Microsoft and the author of Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World, available November 1, 2022.

 

Full episode transcript below:

(00:17):

In this scary new world of employment where top sales talent has the power to stay with your team, or leave you in the lurch, how do you hold onto that top talent? Helen Fanucci, transformational sales leader at Microsoft and our guest on Market Dominance Guys knows the answer to this question and that answer is 17 parts. Helen has taken her 25 years of experience managing remote teams and turned that knowledge into a groundbreaking book titled Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. In it, Helen details is 17 conversations that sales leaders must master with their team in order for the company to successfully attract and retain top talent. Our podcast host, Chris Beall, questions Helen about her tried and true theories on way putting your sales team members first will get you the results you’re expecting. Get ready to take notes about this brave new approach to managing sales teams in today’s Market Dominance Guys episode, 17 Conversations That Matter.

Chris Beall (01:24):

Hey, everybody, Chris Beall. I am sitting in right now for Corey Frank, who I know on Market Dominance Guys, we’re all used to hearing. His intros are fantastic. I have a little advantage in this intro because today I would like to introduce the audience again to Helen Fanucci. Helen has been a guest on the podcast before, but since the last time she was on Market Dominance Guys, Helen has been through a couple of, I would say, transitions. You never say transformation, she still looks a lot the same to me, although she has a certain glow. She got married and maybe she’ll tell us a little bit about that and then also Helen has written a book and her book is I’ll give you the title and then she can tell you about it. The book is called Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. It’s coming out on November 1st everywhere that you buy books. It’ll be out in Kindle and you can buy hardbacks and paperbacks.

(02:24):

What we’d like to do today is first welcome Helen to the show, and then secondly, we’re going to talk a little bit about this book and how it relates to market dominance, so Helen, welcome to Market Dominance Guys.

Helen Fanucci (02:37):

Thank you. Thanks, Chris. It is great to be back.

Chris Beall (02:41):

Well, it’s great to have you back. Just briefly, you do have that certain glow, rumor has it that you actually got married in July of this year of 2022. Anything you want to share with the audience that does not have much to do with market dominance?

Helen Fanucci (02:56):

Oh, you are so funny, so yes indeed, I did get married, and you know what? It was so great to have you at my wedding. That was amazing, too, and to have you play the piano as I walked down the aisle was truly, truly amazing. Okay, and for the listeners who don’t know, Chris and I got married in July. Well, does it have anything to do with market dominance? I don’t know. I realized when we started dating or seeing each other that I was in trouble because you’re probably the best sales guy on the planet, but the product is really great, so I have no regrets.

Chris Beall (03:39):

Fantastic. Well, I love being the product, and for those who wonder about the piano playing, I’m here all week, and tell jokes, too, so we’ll do fun. Yes, I’m the lucky guy and Helen and I went off on a nine-week honeymoon and during the honeymoon one of the things that we paid some attention to, I would say a lot of attention to was the, I’ll say, putting the final touches on Helen’s new book. Her book, as I said is called Love Your Team. I’ll tell you, audience, when Helen says a survival guide for sales managers in a hybrid world, this is not like some soft side or hype or whatever, this is literal, she means it, a survival guide.

(04:28):

Helen, first of all, why did you write a book? I mean, this podcast is supposed to be a book, and it turned into a podcast, which was definitely the path of least resistance, just doing 140-something episodes of a podcast. You went down the book route and the book is how to lift. There is no doubt about it. I mean you got to get yourself some leverage and some balloons and strong shoulders in all manner of things. Why did you take on the awesome task? It’s not like you have nothing else to do. You do carry a couple billion of quota for Microsoft, so why’d you add a book to the list?

Helen Fanucci (05:04):

Well, it’s an interesting question, for sure, so about a year and a half ago, July of 2021, I was at a conference doing a keynote talking about sales leadership in a hybrid world and what it means for sales leaders, and with the talent shortage and the great reshuffle or the great resignation, it was top of mind, how do we retain talent? When I was putting together the presentation and I got to the slide about retaining talent, I kind of struggled with what to put: care for your team, support your team, appreciate your team?

(05:50):

As I reflected, what was really true to me was love your team. That was a sentiment that sales leaders must have in order to retain their talent, and so I put it on the slide and then when I got to the conference, I was nervous using the L word, “love,” in a business setting, and so I explained to the audience what that meant, and why loving their team was so important to retaining talent.

(06:23):

I got to tell you, it was such an amazing response I got from the audience, and I got a lot of people coming up to me afterwards and asking me, Well what do you really do to retain your talent and how does that work? And as I reflected on it, thought I’ve got to put this into a book. And I don’t know, maybe naively, but I decided to put it into a book and write it down because I thought I had something unique to say, and also the time was right for this kind of a book because the tables have shifted, and now, top talent has the power, and so every company and every manager is struggling with retaining talent, attracting talent, and so I felt like it was timely, and so that’s how I came about writing the book.

Chris Beall (07:20):

Fascinating. Essentially, there was an audience reaction to something that you said in a talk that you were a little bit scared of saying, you weren’t sure about, and that audience reaction and a nudged you in the direction of taking on this awesome responsibility, so a little bit of an aside, because obviously I have not written a book as we all know, right? This whole podcast Market Dominance Guys started as Corey Frank trying to basically see if he could drag a book out of me by interviewing me every morning and every Thursday morning for an hour and a half, and so far, Corey has failed.

(08:00):

As you know, Helen, I’m a pretty frisky writer. I like to write words, come out of my fingers, but still no book, so here, you took it on. But my experience of it as an observer is you didn’t just go, “Oh, I’m going to write a book,” and then you started typing every morning at whatever, or well into the night when you were finally working on the book and we were in Edinboro, it was 1:30 in the morning and we were going to leave at 4:00 in the morning, and you’re still working the book. You weren’t doing that. You broke it down into some pieces and said to yourself, “Hey, I’m going to need some help with some stuff.” How did you do it? Just in case anybody in the audience going, “I want to write a book.” Well, here’s Helen, she’s written a book. How did you do this thing?

Helen Fanucci (08:45):

Yeah, it’s a really good question. I hired a book coach. I hired a company that specializes in helping authors write books and the company is called Scribe Media and that was super helpful. They have different kinds of support system, so if you want to write a book and you want to get trained, or learn coached how to write the book, you can do that, take classes, and then go off and write the book. But I wanted more of an interactive experience, and so I worked with a book coach who asked me great questions, we talked through my ideas and concepts and she really helped me crystallize and formulate the content of the book, and in fact, when I first started writing the book, she helped me get clear on, “Okay, who’s the audience for this book?”

(09:43):

But when I first started writing the book, I thought it was the book with a bunch of chapters that people would read, but actually, what the book is, it’s about the conversations, in fact, the 17 conversations that sales leaders must master with their team in order to be successful, and so that’s the bulk of the book. The book is 21 chapters, so there’s some context-setting in the first part of the book, and then there’s the conversation chapters, and then there’s a summary and conclusion and some of the skills that are relevant to having those conversations.

(10:27):

But I started to also reflect on what do I actually do as a sales manager and what are the conversations I’m having with my team? I think I came up with 25 conversations initially and I realized that there was redundancy and I was looking to consolidate and really pursue or talk about the vital few, which are 17 conversations, so the book coach helped keep me on track and then the publishing manager that was assigned to me also helped keep me on track. They both gave me the confidence that I could complete the project. They walked me through every step along the way.

(11:15):

One of the reasons I was up to 1:30 in the morning in Edinboro was I wanted to make sure that I got the edits back to the publisher so that they could do their next revision of edits to keep the train moving forward, so to speak, because I’m committed, and they’re committed with me to a November 1st launch date, and so there were definite milestones along the way that had to be met.

Chris Beall (11:43):

It’s fascinating. You were doing all this while doing your job at Microsoft, while changing the job from one to another different group, you were planning a wedding. I’d love to say that I planned a lot of the wedding, but I was the piano player, so we sat me over to the side, and a honeymoon that went on, so clearly, there was a lot to be done. There was a lot to be learned along the way, too, I assume on the books.

(12:12):

This is a hard question, and if you don’t have a great answer to it, just blow it off, but what did you learn from the process of writing the book that surprised you, but it’s kind of like, “Oh, I didn’t know that, I didn’t realize that,” and now, maybe as a result you’ll either write another book or you’ll never write another book or you’ll make sure that your grandchildren never write books because that would be, or whatever it is. What did you learn that was kind of like, “Huh, that’s really interesting. I didn’t expect that to be part of this whole book-writing thing”?

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Helen Fanucci (13:36):

Well, I would say that what I learned is it’s possible, and I can do it, and it really helped crystallize conversations or ideas I had into a whole what I think is a coherent work product, if you will. Sometimes I think, “Oh, well, I just do this. Isn’t this obvious? Everyone does it.” What I realized in working with a book coach and reflecting and also frankly talking with you is that not everybody sees the world the same way I do and that it does…

(14:18):

My trajectory of my career over the past 25 years had certain themes and consistencies in them and I actually developed some of the ideas that are in the book through my 25-year career managing people, so I started years ago managing remote teams, and I know for some managers, that’s kind of a big deal, like, “Oh, my gosh. If I can’t see my team. How do I know that they’re working?”, and so I started reflecting on what I do to manage remote teams and deliver results, and so I would say the coherency of the book from how the world is changing and why talent matters to how I actually manage teams remotely and deliver results and have teams that stay with me and people who used to work for me that want to come back and work for me.

(15:23):

I thought, “The time is right,” so in a certain sense, too, I feel validated that the approach that I’ve been using is successful and it’s now absolutely necessary in the world. I am absolutely convicted that if you don’t put your people first, your team first, you can’t deliver the results expected, and so I guess I hadn’t really thought about it so clearly until I wrote the book, and went through the process, but I think I have something unique to say and I think it could really help people who might be struggling on how to retain talent, and attract talent, and think differently about how they manage their team.

Chris Beall (16:13):

Well, I tell you, it’s already made a difference for me. I don’t manage the sales team, literally, I have a CEO and I have a VP who manages a sales team, but I do interact with sellers a lot, and you going through the book-writing process, and then me participating as a reader, and I read and provided some feedback, and some editing, what struck me as I thought about it in a market dominance context is you and I come after market dominance, in a sense, in exactly opposite directions. We both believe that conversations matter and we apply that in what we do. I’ve got this podcast with Corey and everything that I’ve been doing for the last 11 years or so has been focused around the human voice and the impact the human voice can have in opening up people’s minds, so to speak, involuntarily, by going from stranger to trusted partner using the voice, but then going on from there. I’ll call that the “outbound voice,” the voice that’s going out.

(17:20):

What you’ve done is taking the conversations matter part to scale and saying, “But the voice needs to be used also, and the heart, and the mind, and discipline, and process, and structure in another set of conversations.” It’s impressive to me that here on Market Dominance Guys, we have probably laid down in voice, I don’t know, a million words, right, some big number of words, and not one of those sentences before this episode has been about the conversations that you as a sales manager, and I have a feeling we have a lot of sales managers in the audience, those conversations that you need to master mostly one-on-one, so we focus on the conversations that somebody might have with a prospect, or with a customer, or all of this kind of stuff.

(18:11):

Your point is, “Look, that’s nice and all.” I mean, I’m going to caricature it a little bit, but that’s nice and all, but the real leverage is in your top talent who if you do the thought experiment, and say, “Well, one, if they perform, you’re going to do well as a manager because they’re top talent, and they’re proven, two, if they leave, you’re kind of toast.” If your top performer, your top seller walks out on the first day of the fiscal year, you have this in the book, it’s like the least of the bad things that happen is how much money you’re going to have to make up, and most of the bad things that happen are way worse than that.

(18:49):

It’s interesting to me that Corey and I totally missed along with all of our guests for all of this time, this other set of key conversations, which are so understandable, and you can break them down. You’re an engineer by training that you can break them down into 17 detailed categories with a handbook, so to speak, for recipe book for each category. You don’t have to say, “Yeah, you’re a bunch of idiots,” but do you find that? I mean, I find it kind of odd that here we both believe conversations matter. We both have long careers. I’ve focused almost entirely on external conversations, and your claim, which I now believe more than my own claim, is that internal conversations one-on-one with your team members, your sellers, is actually where both the leverage is and the action is. I think it’s quite fascinating. When we first met and you saw what I was doing, did you just think, “Nice guy, but misdirected,” or what?

Helen Fanucci (19:53):

No, I didn’t think that. You’re too compelling and convincing and convicted about what you do that I thought it was interesting for sure, and I wish you all the success in the world, but I wouldn’t want your job, frankly.

(20:09):

Anyway, getting back to me and what your point is, it’s not baffling to me how it gets missed. A lot of the sales managers focus on the business and quota and pipeline and the customer and external things, and where I believe the action is, as you put it, is with the sales team because they amplify impact and success. I’m one person, they’re 10 people, 30 people, a hundred people, whatever they are, they amplify success, and so I focus my time on helping them be successful on terms that matter to them, and this, I think, is maybe a new idea for many people who have been in sales a long time.

(21:01):

What I do in each of the conversation chapters is I talk about, I start each chapter with, “This is how traditional sales managers will do it, this is how love your team sales managers will do what the chapter topic is, and then each chapter has six different sections. It has its purpose, the purpose of the conversation that I’m talking about, the intended outcome. How do you know if this conversation is needed? How to do the conversation and how do you know if it’s effective? Then things to consider, so considerations.

(21:43):

The 17 chapters are broken into five sections. The first section is called Conversations of Connection because if you don’t make a strong connection and build trust in a relationship with your team members, you’re also toast, and so typically when I take on a new team, I don’t know any of them, I didn’t hire any of them, so the first chapter of the Conversations of Connection section is introducing yourself to your team, “Why do you do that? How do you do that? Here’s what I do,” and that might not even be something that some sales managers might think about it. That’s important.

(22:28):

Being on the receiving end of having new sales leaders, I can tell you it’s foundationally important because you make an assessment right away about that leader, and if they’re all about themselves, if they care about the team, where their orientation is, and you make an assessment, and I would submit that my team makes an ASEs an assessment of me, can they thrive under my leadership? Do I care about them? Will I support them? Will I help remove roadblocks? Those kinds of things matter to them. In a large enterprise company like Microsoft, there also are a lot of time in spent and conversations getting internal alignment across the organization, so my focus is with my team to help amplify their success, and support them.

(23:25):

The book is not about sales techniques, it’s not about how to close deals, or communication skills, or what have you. It’s literally about the conversations you have with your team, and most of those conversations are one-on-one. I’ve also heard managers say, “Gosh, I don’t have enough time to have conversations one-on-one,” so I’ve broken down the math. If you have a team of 10 people, how much of your time in a month is spent talking to your team, reviewing pipeline, all that? I’ve broken down the math, so it’s very doable, but I would wonder, what are other sales managers spending their time on, if not the team?

Chris Beall (24:15):

That’s so interesting that you bring up that the constraint, which is your time, right? You’re one person, you only have so many hours of the day, and so many days in the week, and so forth. When I was at the OutBound Conference last week, this question, first of all, this topic was probably 60% of the mastermind session, and I’d never heard the topic spoken of before at OutBound, so it was quite surprising that this question of, how do we work with teams? In particular, how do we get the top talent to stay? How do we get new talent that we train not to immediately take the training and leverage that up to get a job somewhere else, stuff like that?

(24:58):

When the question was asked about time, literally none of the experts had an answer other than, “Yeah, it’s tough. Figure it out,” and you break it down, “You have a team this big, you’re going to have this much time spent in these one-on-ones, this much in these are the ones that have a fixed agenda. These are the ones that are event-driven, but they’re probably going to flow at about this rate. Here’s blah, blah.” It’s on and on. I mean, it’s like an engineering breakdown.

(25:26):

Folks, by the way, when you read this book, what you’re going to get is love as both an emotional concept but also as an engineering concept. This is like love your team is something you do, not something you just feel. It’s mostly something you do through these one-on-one conversations.

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What’s your Big Idea? And does your Big Idea solve your prospect’s Big Problem? Exploring this important aspect of a discovery call today are Chris Beall and Corey Frank. As Chris explains it, at the beginning of a discovery call, you don’t really know what problem your prospect is facing. And because prospects are generally reluctant to confess their companies’ issues and concerns to strangers, it’s often tough for you to determine whether this is a call that will lead to the next step in the sales process — or will lead nowhere. You can nudge a prospect toward the confessional with a few probing questions, but you can’t necessarily get them to sit down in the booth and open up. So, how do you find out if your product or service is a good match for their needs or wants? Listen in as Corey and Chris teach you how to subtly and expertly steer your prospect away from their initial apprehension of talking to a stranger all the way to the moment when they finally feel safe enough to divulge the information you’re seeking. Then, and only then, will you know if your product will truly solve their problem.  As always, our two sales experts offer lots of helpful advice on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Is Your Product the Answer?”

 

Full episode transcript below:

(00:22):

What’s your big idea and does your big idea solve your prospect’s big problem? Exploring this important aspect of a Discovery call today are Chris Beal and Corey Frank. As Chris explains it at the beginning of a Discovery call, you don’t really know what problem your prospect is facing. And because prospects are generally reluctant to confess their company’s issues and concerns to strangers, it’s often tough for you to determine whether this is a call that will lead to the next step in the sales process, or will it lead nowhere. You can nudge your prospect toward the confessional with a few probing questions, but you can’t necessarily get them to sit down in the booth and open up. So, how do you find out if your product or service is a good match for their needs or wants? Listen in as Corey and Chris teach you how to subtly and expertly steer your prospect away from their initial apprehension of talking to a stranger all the way to the moment when they finally feel safe enough to divulge the information you are seeking.

(01:20):

Then, and only then, will you know if your product will truly solve their problem. As always, our two sales experts offer lots of helpful advice on today’s Market Dominance Guys episode, is your product the answer?

Corey (01:37):

How do we unplug? I think we started this conversation, is it possible to rewire the brain from the way that we do Discovery and our good friend, Oren Klaff, talks about the way that we learn things chronologically from our bad bosses, from bad behaviors, from trying to wing it, is the way that we run them or that we talk about. And so I think you and I earlier were talking about the alphabet, ABCDEFG. If I asked you to go to K and then tell me the alphabet backwards, well, maybe you could, but most people couldn’t do it because you didn’t learn the information that way. And so usually folks, again, are learning about Discovery from who’s sitting next to them, maybe their own persona, maybe how they were pitched themself on a product. And so they need to gravitate to the right way of understanding the emotional state, from what I hear you’re saying, to help us rewire.

(02:42):

And we rewire this natural, what we think is a natural order of doing things, otherwise, we’re going to constantly keep fighting this inclination to do it the wrong way all the time. And in the process, I think that what I hear you saying, Chris, is that what we’re trying to reconstruct is how the buyer really cares about things, how the buyer really sees things. They don’t care about how we learn about it. They don’t care how we think about it. They don’t care what our quota is. They don’t care how we do our business. They don’t care how we get our business. They only care about the information that they need to know in the order that they need to know it.

Chris (03:23):

And they need to be motivated to learn, which is hard, right? Folks are motivated to learn about stuff that might solve a problem that they have right now. And this actually is similar to the cold calling, how do you get trust? Well, you show the other person that you see the world through their eyes, tactical empathy, and then you demonstrate to them that you’re competent to solve a problem they have right now. The problem in discovery is we don’t know what their problem is that they have right now. So how are we going to allow them or get them to be comfortable exposing it? Nobody likes to talk about the big problem that they have right now. That’s vulnerability just like, here doctor, before we get started, I’d like to cut my chest open and show you this. It’s like, no, I’m not there. So this rewiring is really hard and it’s hard for emotional reasons on both sides. You have urgency on the part of the sales rep, you have apprehension on the part of the potential buyer or the prospect.

(04:25):

How do you get from there to a place where you’re actually discussing the nature of their problem? The beauty is once you get there, you are an expert as the seller and the other party will get more and more comfortable telling you the details, the constraints, the importance of their problem as they realize that you are asking questions that are the questions they’ve been asking themselves about it. And as soon as that happens, then you’re in this magic land. You’re in the confessional. And you’re both just mutually exploring the possibility that this is worth exploring further, because by the way, the POC ain’t going to come out of that Discovery call, come on. There has to be some subsequent thinking and consideration that goes on. Even at ConnectAndSell, all we’re seeking is a next step of let’s just do something together. This test drive thing, let’s have an experience together, but we’re not having it in hopes of buying connect.

(05:25):

And so we’re just having it because, frankly, our product’s incomprehensible without having the experience, you may as well have the experience. We got there eight years ago and decided that that was an okay thing to be shooting for. It’s a further discussion with action. It’s like, oh, so you think that my approach to the golf swing might hold some promise. Well, would you like to go out and spend an hour and see what it’s like? I’ll take your left hand off the club, if you’re right handed, and you’re going to swing with so much weakness that you’ll start producing good golf shots to your own surprise. It’s that kind of thing. Is it worth that? You’re not going to, mind you, I’m not a golf teacher. That’s like being a lawyer without a license or something, but I have a theory. Well, if you like my theory, maybe you’d come out and experience it.

(06:11):

So it’s such an interesting process because in the cold call we never really have a breakthrough. We have an agreement. We have a breakthrough we’re bringing, but we have an agreement, a commitment that comes out in the end, but there’s no breakthrough. In a Discovery call, we must have a breakthrough. And the breakthrough is into the confessional. And once we’re in the confessional, as long as we are not trying to manipulate the situation, and this is the hardest part of sales. You really believe that you have a solution in certain circumstances that would really help somebody and would be worth their while to go down the road and spend somebody else’s money. Remember, it’s always somebody else’s money. It’s B2B. So they’re spending their company’s money or whatever it happens to be. So we really believe in this, but if we push for it and therefore our product is always the answer, we can’t possibly be honestly exploring whether our product’s the answer. It just doesn’t make any sense. You have to be open to not being the answer in order to honestly explore whether you are the answer.

Corey (07:23):

Yeah, sure. I like that. I think that after that emotional state is accepted, validated and transitioned from that apprehension to pride. And, again, back to our friend, Orin, here on the concept of the big idea, or even with our friend, Brad at Sandler, the big idea from the Sandler Sales Training is they both say. Orin talks about this big idea is we have to then get the prospect to see that there’s a raising of the stakes, there’s consequences and outcomes. There’s a fear of missing out. There’s an opportunity, something is being taken away.

(08:05):

But that first step of raising the stakes to get them to open up a little bit in the confessional, because if there’s no raising of the stakes, there’s nothing to talk about. And if they see the stakes are perhaps being raised, then they may feel a little bit more open to say, okay, well, it sounds like you’re an expert and maybe we can talk about this problem that I have to create this little intrigue. What do you think about that kind of concept of the next step after moving them to a point of pride and less off of the apprehension?

Chris (08:38):

I think it’s huge. Oren talks about winter is coming as a way of framing something in the world as it is right now, this bad thing could be happening and cybersecurity where you guys do a lot of work, it’s not very hard to imagine winter is coming. Winter is everywhere, but-

Corey (08:56):

It’s nerdy and it’s always here. Winter is always here.

Chris (08:58):

Exactly. So we’ve got to get to the point. In fact, you can look at it this way, you need to get to the point where you’re comfortable enough with each other, that you can raise the stakes. Because if you raise the stakes too early, what you’re going to get is just run away. They’re just going to run away. It’s like, so are you an expert? Are you on my side? Are you an expert and are you on my side? Well, it’s easy to be an expert, and Orin teaches some great stuff about that. There were some things that happened on our honeymoon, by the way, doing our whiskey tastings in Ila where the flash roll that the [inaudible 00:09:35] talks about was so expertly done by this one young man, he was 19 years old and yet he’s walking us to-

Corey (09:43):

And he just nailed it?

Chris (09:45):

And it was the pace, the comfort, the this is so routine for me and I’m thinking, wow, this is wild that they do this crazy stuff to make this crazy stuff. But if you drink it at 11 o’clock in the morning, you better be ready to, so the flash roll, great, establish you as an expert. It’s a great thing to learn how to do. I think everybody should have a flash roll. And at ConnectAndSell we teach our reps that a very specific flash roll, they bring up our team today right now live, so you’re seeing them live so there’s some risk. There’s no heightened tension because you’re watching on the screen. You’re seeing calls and the meetings being set and nobody knows what’s going to happen. So a little uncertainty goes a long way right then. And then there’s a description of how one of the reps on our team is doing today. Well, here’s Steve and so far today he’s used ConnectAndSell for two hours, 51 minutes and 17 seconds. And during that time, he’s had 631 dials done for him.

(10:52):

And he’s had 37 conversations. And he set four meetings and his goal today is 2.7 meetings. So he’s probably feeling pretty good right about now. And it’s like bah bah bah, only an expert would talk like that. It’s not about teaching, it’s about establishing yourself as an expert. And that’s one of the main things I’ve taken away from Warren’s work and put into my own repertoire is, remember you owe the other person a flash roll because they need to accept you as an expert. And the flash roll is not an attempt to teach them something, it’s just to describe something in your world that you would not describe so casually, unless you were an expert.

Speaker 1 (11:34):

We’ll be back in a moment, after a quick break. ConnectAndSell, welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell’s patented technology loads your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live, qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we’re talking about really qualified like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com. And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Chris (12:15):

It’s almost like a quick mathematical proof of your expertise in a way. This couldn’t have happened. I can’t have juggled four balls casually while talking to and taking my hand out and I don’t know, petting a cat or something like that, unless I knew something about juggling. So that part is, I think you establish yourself as an expert and experts know things about the world. You go to the dermatologist when they’re looking at your body top to bottom, as they will do with us, the older we get and the more we grow up in Arizona, and they’re going barnacle, barnacle, barnacle hmm. That hmm you accept. Then the dermatologist says, Hmm, that’s like, whoa, my ear’s perfect, what do you mean hmm doctor? And I think we might need to biopsy this or two whatever, and we accept it because it’s an expert who’s on our side.

Corey (13:16):

We certainly are wired to accept experts perspective. And tonality has a lot to do with that. Listening has a lot to do with that. Certainly empathy, as you’ve talked a lot about, has a lot to do with that. The big idea is attractive enough and it’s compelling enough, it’s intriguing enough. If it’s building enough tension, it elicits the emotion and the prospect that, oh, I’m in the hands of an expert. I should probably sit back and listen to them, examine all the different moles that I have on my body.

Chris (13:54):

Is that a barnacle or is it something more interesting?

Corey (13:59):

And we could finish it. We could talk all day about Discovery. I love picking your brain on this is that runner think it was, is two modes of narrative. You have narrative, straight narrative and then you have paradigmatic. Orin calls them hot cognition and cold cognition. And the paradigmatic mode is the mode of science and it’s concerned with logically categorizing the world analysis, cold stuff. The narrative is about building meaning and describing human experiences through those stories. And these stories are human-like or intention with action, like the flash roll at the 19 year old in Edinborough, or the story with the ferry that you told me in Iceland before this, they capture people’s explanations about what they want to do and how they’ll go about achieving it, painting the picture of the future.

(14:47):

And so I think we have to be on guard of if we put people too much, because we’re so happy about our product, in the paradigmatic mode, in logical, mathematical, analytical modes, they eventually grind on us. Bruner’s argument was that if we stay too long in paradigmatic cold cognition world, they’re going to constantly be testing the things we’re saying for truth and falsehood and mathematical correctness. And they won’t become interested in us as real characters and believe that we’re honest and truthful and aspiring, and we’re on the other side of this big swirling blue orb and they’ll constantly be questioning and trying to trip us up. So what are your thoughts about that? Because we both sell very technical products and we work with clients that sell very technical products. And sometimes in the Discovery process, we can go a little bit too one way on the cold speeds feeds paradigmatic mode and that pushes us away from their trust in a lot of ways.

Chris (15:54):

I think that’s a big deal. It’s very tempting to go for the paradigmatic stuff because it’s ballistic. I say this, I say this, I say this, I say this. I say this. It is like reciting the alphabet. And I might think that I’m still flash rolling but at that point, I’m not. I’m not establishing myself as an expert. I’m establishing myself as a boring pedant who has got to be ignored sometime soon. And I’m also establishing myself as somebody who is tiresome to listen to. It’s very difficult for most of us to do analytic work, analytic work is physically exhausting and some people can do more of it than others. And so take an example, I don’t know if a puzzle, like a Sudoku puzzle, when you first approach it, it seems easy. And then you get this stuck feeling, and what that is is you’ve actually run out of analytic juice and if you put it away and come back, after two hours or whatever, you’ll immediately be able to make the next-

Corey (17:00):

You’ve run out of analytical juice. That’s one for the ages, Chris, I love that.

Chris (17:07):

And I’m an analyst by nature. I have people who have worked with me in these other ways know that I am annoyingly analytical. I spent two hours this morning buried in some spreadsheet in which I was trying to predict how much ARR would come out of a new product, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m pretty comfortable with that but I recognize there’s a point where I’m no longer too tired of that kind of thinking. When it’s coming out of me, I have a lot more juice. When it’s coming into me, somebody’s asking me to go along with their analysis, then I have this other problem. And the other problem is I have to keep up with the analysis and defend myself against conclusions that might not be in my interest and that’s exhausting. So the questioning that goes on in that the description that goes on paradigmatic description that goes on in a lot of Discovery calls is physically exhausting for the listener often. And if that happens, they don’t tell you that they’ve turned off, but they’re no longer hearing you.

(18:18):

It’s that cartoon where the dog is just hearing their name, blah, blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very famous cartoon. We’re like that. And it doesn’t matter how good we are at analysis, we’re like that. We have more juice when we’re analyzing something where there’s nothing at stake other than say getting to an outcome. I used to teach something, the audience probably isn’t aware of this, but I developed the Unix and the C curriculum for bell laboratories back in the early 1980s. And I taught it to establish that the curriculum was usable. I taught it to admins, to secretaries. I taught them how to program in the C programming language for those of you who, but it is still being used today, actually oddly enough, and how to use the Unix operating system, because that’s what they had. That was the desktop at the time for very advanced companies.

(19:21):

And what I learned very quickly was in the best case in a one hour session, they could learn three things. And those three things had to be taught in three 15 minute pieces with a break in between them to recover, doing something else that had nothing to do with the physical exhaustion of trying to learn how a pointer works or whatever it happens to be. We had huge success, but I had no success when I went to four. So I couldn’t teach four things in an hour, but I could easily teach three in an hour, but that doesn’t mean three close to each other. And the key was always to get the affect of the class, the emotions of the class together at the same moment. So the hard bit, there’s always a sticking point in understanding anything, there’s an aha hiding in there somewhere, could be something that most of the class had experience and then it would give them something to talk about and we’d do a little exercise later.

Corey (20:19):

So that’s the analytical juice running out as well as the example you gave of the Sudoku puzzle as well. Very interesting.

Chris (20:27):

We don’t sell a great deal of analytical juice, trust me. It’s really funny. Our brains were evolved to move our bodies and they were not evolved to think about stuff.

Corey (20:43):

So that’s why an ideal Discovery is probably in that 20 to 25 minutes max range or so before you’ve got to do use both a favor and pull up stakes and continue the conversation another time.

Chris (20:59):

Exactly. And that’s why I like starting them slow. No urgency. If this turns out to be important, it will turn out to have been worthwhile, to have started in a way that took a little bit more time. If it turns out to be unimportant, then nothing was at stake. So why are we worried? You could have had no meeting at all.

Corey (21:21):

Well, Chris, this is great here. See all that pent up wisdom from all that scotch that you consumed in the Shortlands, and Ed and Earl, et cetera, does have a purpose. We transferred all that to energy that will help all of us on the Discovery call. I’d like to do this again. As we had talked earlier, we need to bring in a guest expert for Discovery so we can run us a couple of things and folks who are doing it in the wild and we can chat about them. But until next time, Chris, any final thoughts on Discovery here?

Chris (21:53):

Well, it’s one of those rare things where the name of that holds the key. We go out seeking to discover, we’re curious and open minded. And if we can maintain that mindset and then learn how to help somebody else along so that they can afford to be curious. We come in curious, we have to help somebody else afford to be curious. Make it safe for them to be curious then we can discover amazing things. And that’s, in my experience, where the big deals come from. I’ve got in my deep past, a little bit of big deal history, the hundred million deal. And those deals when I go back and deconstruct them and reconstruct them, they had these characteristics. So the slow at the beginning, the patience. I was telling somebody a story about a particular company where I went and sat in their lunchroom for two hours each day for two months and just listened and talked to people. And that led to a deal that had a lot of zeros and commas and stuff like that.

(23:01):

And yet when it finally happened and I went back and thought, did I waste my time sitting there talking to people? The answer was, no. It took that slowness in order to get to that certainty where we could actually explore together.

Corey (23:14):

Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. We have to hear about the hundred million sale, a dollar sale one of these days too. So it’s great to have you back, Chris, the post honeymoon edition of the Market Dominance Guys for Chris Beal, this is Corey Frank.

—-more—-

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What are the best practices for conducting a successful discovery conversation? And how do those practices differ from having a successful cold call? On today’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, our hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, share their insights into these two distinctly different types of sales conversations. They talk about tone, about call length, and about the practiced performance of a cold call, which has the goal of setting an appointment, versus the slower-paced, getting-to-know-you interchange of information, which has the goal of answering the question, “Does it make sense — to both parties — to proceed further?” Stay tuned to hear the advice and cautions of these two sales experts on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Doing Discovery the Right Way.”

—-more—-

Full episode transcript below:

Announcer (00:05):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market. With our host, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49.

(00:21):

What are the best practices for conducting a successful discovery conversation? And how do those practices differ from having a successful cold call? On today’s Market Dominance Guys Podcast, our host Corey Frank and Chris Beall share their insights into these two distinctly different types of sales conversations.

(00:39):

They talk about tone, about call length and about the practice performance of a cold call, which has the goal of setting an appointment versus the slower paced. Getting to know you interchange of information, which has the goal of answering the question, “Does it make sense to both parties, to proceed further?”

(00:58):

Stay tuned to hear the advice and cautions of these two sales experts on today’s Market Dominance Guys episode, Doing Discovery the Right Way.

Chris Beall (01:11):

We do something cool here.

Corey Frank (01:13):

Well, you’ve always had a great tone and we’ve had many episodes talking about this, how does the tone in a cold call? Because we’ve talked about that with the surfboard, the surfer and the wave, with the screenplay and the performance. How does the tone differ? What are some of the best practices for that tone in a discovery, that you see different than a traditional cold call?

Chris Beall (01:37):

Well, for one it’s softer. So the cold call is a relatively fast precision operation. In 30 seconds, you’re going to go from fear to trust. You’re going to go from trust to curiosity, curiosity to commitment. And hopefully when they attend the meeting, that’s the next step, which is action, right? Well, that happens in 30 seconds.

(02:04):

A discovery call might be 15 minutes to 30 minutes, 15 minutes is what we always say on the calendar, you know a discovery call has gone well when it goes for 30 minutes. It’s one of the reasons to set it short, because if it’s going nowhere, well, time is valuable to everybody. If it’s gone somewhere, who really puts 15 minutes on their calendar and then puts a meeting right after 15 minutes? So you have a little free buffer to express that this is going somewhere, let’s explore further, right?

(02:31):

So in fact, that’s a big threshold across it’s like, “I see we’ve gone past 15 minutes, that’s worth talking about it.” They say, “Yes. You’ve gone a long way into the confessional. You’re really talking about stuff then.” So it’s a slower kind of thing, I mean, I ask those first two questions, I have all the time in the world. That’s my view of a discovery type call, I have all the time in the world. Whereas in a cold call, I don’t have all the time in the world, it’s a pretty clipped operation. On the cold call, you’re managing the tone, kind of millisecond, mega millisecond, it’s a practiced ballistic act. It has to be. It’s a sincere performance but a performance done the less.

(03:18):

Discovery call is more kind of a dance, a slower dance, you might spend five or 10 minutes just getting into it. Now, some people don’t have that personality and they’re going to cut you off and say, “Okay, so what’s this all about?” That’s fine. They want to break into the confessional, like the shining knight and can come in with the ax, here’s Johnny.

Corey Frank (03:41):

Right.

Chris Beall (03:42):

Whatever, that’s okay, clearly you’re not too apprehensive or maybe they’re just being aggressive in order to cover their apprehension. But to me, the real key to discovery calls is, curiosity takes time to be allowed to do its job, to be allowed to unfold. And it requires being in an emotional state where you can afford to be curious, because being curious is incredibly vulnerable.

(04:06):

When you were being curious, so what did I say about some cat, right? You’re offering yourself up to see if you have another life, right? Because bad things could happen to curious people, so it’s slower. And I like asking for help because it takes a while for somebody to decide to give you some help. And the help is, where are you in the face of our blue whirling planet? And then when everything goes great, how does your thing help that person? How does it change?

Corey Frank (04:36):

We have so many wraps in a lot of our clients, right? I’m sure in the clients that you work with as well. They like to just wing it, they like to just jump right into the questions, try to validate the banter as quickly as possible to get to that heralded POC and next steps. And they lose the romance and they lose all the authenticity that can come from that lack of resistance, that trust that you’ve built up, that it’s a continuity from the cold call to the discovery.

(05:10):

And it sounds like, right, there’s a lot of folks reps that don’t understand if you have a BDR setting calls for you, when they show up, it’s your responsibility to take that baton of trust and have it grow, have it foster. And what I hear you saying, Chris, or even acknowledge it, that there is some trust built up.

Chris Beall (05:33):

Right.

Corey Frank (05:33):

Don’t water it down or piss it away in the first couple of minutes by, like you said, doing something stupid, like actually trying to sell them so overtly.

Announcer (05:42):

We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break.

(05:45):

Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it’s time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employee successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world.

(06:04):

From crafting just the right cold call screenplay, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire team, Branch 49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branchfortynine.com

(06:24):

And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Chris Beall (06:33):

Urgency is the enemy of a good discovery call. If you have urgency, I would compare it to two things, I don’t know whether port’s analogies or athletic analogies are all always kind of, don’t they’re not dangerous. But not everybody appreciates them but I’m going to use two of them.

(06:50):

They’re two things that, one of which I do reasonably well, the other which I do reasonably poorly, is that they have very similar qualities to them and one is a golf swing and the other is skiing bumps. So in both cases, in a golf swing, you have to have good posture. You’ve got to have a lot of things that are in the right place. But you have to be very soft in two things at your grip and how your risks work. Otherwise, you can’t release the club and the club wants to be released and it’ll fight you pretty hard, if you grip it too tight and have tight wrists, right?

(07:21):

You have to be easy and patient on the golf swing, being quick is the number one reason that golf swings go awry and that’s why golf is a hard sport. Competitively, because when you’re under competitive pressure, you get tight and tightness results into rigidity. And rigidity and quickness in turning the swing around too fast, not letting it go through its entire motion is not effective in golf, as I am reminded on a regular basis but actually, I hate to say it, have a pretty effective golf swing.

(07:57):

Skiing bumps is very similar but what has to be soft is your knees. As you get rigid, which it feels like you should, because when you go off that bump and you’re going down to the next one, it’s like, “I got to get ready for this.” And you tighten up but you have to do is soften up. And you’ve got to accept that it’s going to happen. And it may feel fast but the slower it feels like tapening as you’re going down the slope. And kind of maintaining your posture but being soft in the knees, the better.

(08:25):

It’s very similar and it’s a different kind of athletic activity. The cold call is one kind of athletic activity, this is more like, Hey, if you’re going to ski an entire bump around, it’s not going to happen in, well, maybe it’ll happen in 27 seconds. But it’s going to feel a lot longer than that, right?

Corey Frank (08:41):

Sure.

Chris Beall (08:42):

And staying there, staying present, knowing where you’re looking, what you’re trying to do, being in charge, so to speak but being soft, is really important in a discovery call. And when you’re urgent, you’re not soft and the other person’s going to respond to the urgency. But backing up, you’re coming forward with your urgent questions, they’re backing up into a safe place called, “I’m going to answer your questions but I’m not getting answer the big question, which is what’s my big problem?”

Corey Frank (09:12):

So let’s get into this, because we’re going to prognosticate a little bit. But again, with the hundreds of thousands of phone calls, I think between us and certainly the millions from ConnectAndSell archives. When you have a rep who says the lead that I got from my BDR is no good. At what percentage do you think that the lead is no good? Because they only validate or they only come to that decision, usually after they’ve tried to run a process, tried to run a discovery on that prospect.

(09:48):

So what I’m getting at is, the salvageable quotient if you will, by Doing Discovery the Right Way, by looking at from your experience, how many leads that come over from a BDR, a frontier or an SDR team. That go to a typical rep who runs discovery, are really maybe the fault of the discoverer and not necessarily the fault of the BDR and the qualification of that lead.

Chris Beall (10:19):

Well, I’ll answer that in two ways. One is in my view, BDR should never qualify. Ambush conversations are really bad places to get the truth out of somebody, qualification requires the truth. The discovery meeting is where qualification and take place.

(10:33):

So, I’ll call it the technical qualification, the proforma qualification needs to happen in the creation of the list. The list is, as far as we know, qualified in advance. What are they qualified for? They’re qualified to be worth 15 minutes to explore the question of whether it makes sense to do anything further. That’s all we do in sales, is we only make one decision, does it make any sense mutually to do anything next, right? That’s called next steps all over the place for the most part and that part of sales is probably pretty solid.

(11:06):

So to me, anybody who comes to a discovery meeting is qualified to participate in that discovery meeting, which is the only question that’s on the table at that point. It’s not like you’re sacrificing your firstborn, it’s 15 minutes, maybe you were going to do something awesome during those 15 minutes. But I’ve watched a lot of people work in my life and it’s pretty much not going to be something awesome you’re going to do in the next 15 minutes.

Corey Frank (11:31):

They’re in your TAM, they’re in your ICP and they accepted the meeting. In a market dominant theme, if anything we’ve done in these three years and couple hundred episodes, it’s hopefully to get people to understand the basic tenants of market dominance.

Chris Beall (11:47):

Exactly. And then a whole bunch of good things could happen from a conversation. One is, they might understand what it is that you and your company offer. And know somebody else who has the problem that they don’t have. Or has the timing that they don’t have or whatever it happens to be.

(12:02):

You may discover that there’s a timing opportunity, I had somebody reach out to me today and welcome me back from the honeymoon. Because they kept track of the timing issue because last time, they wanted to talk to me, I was headed on a honeymoon. Brilliant. Are they going to sell something to me or not? I don’t know. But it was pretty smart to talk to me the first time, so that they knew enough about my situation that they could say, “Hey, welcome back from your honeymoon. I hope it was great.”

(12:28):

And then they actually said something specific from the previous conversation and this was in a digital medium but it made the digital medium effective enough, they’ll probably actually get a medium with me, so. I don’t think I’ll buy anything by the way but that’s because I know what’s wrong with their product. But what if I’m wrong?

(12:47):

There’s a lot of good things that can come out of conversations, there’s no bad things that can come out of them, other than the worst cases, you spend 15 minutes of your life talking to somebody and not making a deal. Well, you’re going to spend a lot of your life doing a lot of things and not making deals, there’s nothing magical about this thing, it’s kind of like part of the job, right? Does it take you 15 minutes to even get to your home office and get set up? That’s part of the job, there’s a lot of things that are part of the job.

(13:14):

Sales reps often get that coming home feeling like, “I’m almost there, compared to somebody who looks at the lottery numbers and says, “That, it ended in a one and I have the one that in a two, see, I was almost there.”

(13:28):

Like two is closer to one and a lottery ticket, it’s not, trust me. Those of you who know a little bit about me know that I have a background in mathematics. And I will assure you, the ink that’s on that lottery ticket doesn’t know whether it’s a one or a two. And then they’re not close to each other in some weird way, it’s just in your head. But reps, get that like, “I’m almost there.” And it’s a tragedy if this doesn’t lead to a commission check for me.

(13:55):

Well, it’s actually just part of the job, part of the job is to hold really great discovery conversations that lead to new insights on both parties.

Announcer (14:10):

ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. Give your fingers rest with ConnectAndSell patented technology. You’ll load your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day.

(14:22):

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. Learn more at connectandsell.com

 

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“Every discovery call begins with apprehension,” says Chris Beall, our Market Dominance Guys’ co-host, who is back behind the microphone after a two-month absence. Chris goes on to say that you need to be aware that starting a discovery call by interrogating your prospect only increases their apprehension. If you’re going to have a meaningful, successful conversation, you need to use a kinder, gentler approach. Chris talks with his co-host, Corey Frank, about a couple of ways he knows to take a prospect from that feeling of apprehension and fear to a feeling of pride and openness. Then, and only then, will the atmosphere of the call be right for you to ease the conversation into one of mutual discovery, where you and your prospect can learn whether their company is a fit for your product. As the title of today’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast states, this can only happen once you’ve succeeded in “Calming Your Prospect’s Apprehension.”

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Full episode transcript below:

Announcer (00:06):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guy, a program exploring all the high-stakes speed bumps and offramps of driving to the top of your market. With our hosts, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49.

(00:18):

“Every discovery call begins with apprehension,” says Chris Beall, our Market Dominance Guys co-host who’s back behind the microphone after a two-month absence. Chris says that you need to be aware that starting a discovery call by interrogating your prospect only increases their apprehension. If you’re going to have a meaningful, successful conversation, you need to use a kinder, gentler approach. Chris talks with his co-host Corey Frank about a couple of ways he knows to take a prospect from that feeling of apprehension and fear to a feeling of pride and openness. Then and only then will the atmosphere of the call be right for you to ease the conversation into one of mutual discovery, where you and your prospect can learn whether their company is a fit for your product. As the title of today’s Market Dominance Guys podcast states, this can only happen once you’ve succeeded in calming your prospect’s apprehension.

Corey Frank (01:27):

Here we are. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and with me post-wedding honeymoon holiday bliss, the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, the Hawking of hawking, Chris Beall.

Chris Beall (01:43):

The Hawking of hawking.

Corey Frank (01:44):

So, welcome back from all points across the pond, Chris. Good to have this marital glow about yourself here and good to have you back in the co-host seat where you belong.

Chris Beall (01:56):

Thanks, Corey. I’ve really missed this part of the professional world. And we were having such a good time, Helen and I were, in, well, Iceland and Copenhagen and Norway and by the Russian border and eating crabs that would’ve preferred to eat something else themselves.

Corey Frank (02:12):

You missed this part when you talked about that part.

Chris Beall (02:15):

Yeah. I missed this part. We fell into this thing unintentionally some years ago now actually, in 2019. I’ve been watching them. You did a few while I was gone. Anyway, it’s great to be back and hopefully I’ll bring something because God knows if I got anything left.

Corey Frank (02:34):

Oh, well. Listen, I think you got a 911 call from Susan, our producer, saying, “You must come back quickly. Corey cannot do these by himself at all, and he needs you in the seat.” So, I thought we’d jumped right into it, Chris. This had no easy topics that we’re going to venture into on your first episode back. We want to get into the meaty stuff. And one of the things that’s been on our mind, certainly here at the Branch 49 team working with some clients, is the discovery call, right? Seen a lot of stuff. The esteemed and prolific writer, commenter Gerry Hill of ConnectAndSell fame, right? I’ve seen so many postings for him on this topic. You talk about the cold call and we’ve done a number of episodes, right, Chris?

(03:16):

And if we’ve learned anything from you and your rantings and writings, it’s that the natural state, the primordial state of a prospect when they receive a cold call is that of fear. I think we all know and all the listeners understand that. But when you set up a discovery… I set up a call for you as a prospect to meet with Gerry Hill next Tuesday at 10:00 AM. And here it is Tuesday at 9:58 and you are thinking about this. Should I make it, not make it? And you show up. If the state of a cold call is fear, what is the state, the insight into the prospect’s mind on the discovery call, would you say?

Chris Beall (03:55):

Apprehension.

Corey Frank (03:57):

Apprehension.

Chris Beall (03:58):

Apprehension. It’s not anxiety.

Corey Frank (03:59):

Not, “What did I just do?”

Chris Beall (04:00):

Anxiety is a little bit too strong, but apprehension. After all, when you show up for a discovery call, you’re pretty sure that you’re really showing up to be sold to. And if we go back to the cold call, the number one purpose, the purpose of the cold call, is to build trust. And as we’ve been instructed by people who are our betters, that trust will last forever as long as we don’t blow it. And the best way to blow it is to sell to somebody. So, now they’re going to show up at this discovery call expecting not to participate in discovery, but to be discovered, right? To be discovered at. They’re going to have something done to them. And we don’t like going into situations where somebody’s going to do something to us. And it actually creates an opportunity to screw up whatever trust you managed to build in the cold call just by how you handle the beginning of a discovery call. So, just like the cold call, you’ve got to know the purpose and you have to have an underlying belief that supports that purpose.

(05:04):

And that underlying belief is in the potential value of this meeting you’re offering, for this human being you’re speaking with, in the case where you’re never going to do business together. And it’s those three conditions have to obtain inside of you in order to be able to sincerely execute on a trust-based cold call that starts an ambush that starts with the other party in a state of fear. So, now here you are. You’ve gotten past that very difficult situation and you’re in a new situation and the strong temptation is to interrogate. And so the party, the other person, shows up. We’ll call them the prospect, but that’s not really the right way to think about them, in a state of apprehension that you’re going to interrogate them in order to trick them into making a bad decision, a decision that’s bad for them. Because you’re the expert and they’re not, and therefore you can lead them by the nose down to some bad decision and they have to resist.

(06:03):

You got a bridle on the horse and now you’re going to tug them or you’re going to offer them a little carrot, or you’re going to say, “If I could show you how this hay over here is three times as nutritious as this hay, would it make you want to buy hay from me for the rest of your life?” Whatever is going to happen to you. And it’s happened to all of us. And so apprehension is that base state. And we’ve talked a little bit about this, that as professionals we have an obligation first to not faint at the sight of blood, right? If we’re going to be surgeons, we can’t faint the sight of blood. But we have a bigger obligation now that we’ve controlled our own emotions sufficient to execute, which is we’ve got to get in there before we start making any changes. Heart surgery doesn’t start with the heart. You got to get in there.

(06:51):

Now, maybe it’s some modern technique where you thread something up their toe or something like that and jam it up an artery and go, but it could be that we’re going to cut down there and we’re going to crack the chest open and there’s going to be noise. And that’s part of the job too. And it’s a big part of the job. And in discovery, we have that job ahead of us. And just like when we go to the doctor, we’re apprehensive. When that prospect comes to us in a discovery call, they’re apprehensive that we’re going to do them.

Corey Frank (07:19):

So, how do we screw that up? Between you and I, certainly you more on the ledger side than I, we’ve listened to hundreds of thousands of phone calls and recordings in our career. So, what are some of those patterns that me as a rep, that I’m going to screw it up right from the beginning?

Chris Beall (07:35):

Yeah. Well, you start off making the assumption that the other person is ready to confess and you start asking questions in which, if they’re going to answer them honestly, that they’ve got to trust you a lot more than they trust you already. And even worse, even more so, you don’t treat their emotional state as the most important element of the conversation. In any conversation, the other person’s emotional state, if you are a professional, their emotional state is your responsibility, not theirs. You’re the one who put them in a position where, in this case, they’re apprehensive.

(08:11):

You need to take them as best you can or help them go someplace that’s more useful to both of you emotionally. And I think that ignoring the emotions and starting right in on, “So, Corey, how big’s your sales team? How many reps do you got?” Right? “How much calling do you do? What’s your budget?” Oh my God. You go in for that stuff. And then of course somebody’s going, “Ask open-ended questions.” Those are open-ended. How big’s your calling team? I mean, it’s open-ended. The answer could be zero, 300 or, “I don’t really feel like telling you that quite yet.” And it’s in fact, no matter what they say, it’s, “I don’t feel like telling you that. Not yet anyway.”

Corey Frank (08:48):

But they showed up for the call. They showed up for this. The premises are incongruent. “I thought I was going to get X. And you, as the salesperson, are trying to feed me Y,” right?

Chris Beall (09:02):

Yeah. Right. I came out of curiosity. If it was a good cold call, it was only curiosity that got me here. So, I’m curious. What am I curious about? Well, I’m not quite sure. I mean, that’s what curiosity is about. If we knew the answer, we wouldn’t be curious, right? So, I’m curious enough to show up and I’m hopeful that I might learn something that’s of value to me. But I’m apprehensive. And it’s very hard for two emotions to be inside of a person working at the same time. In fact, that’s the nature of emotions. Emotions, they dominate one after another after another. They don’t coexist. We can’t be apprehensive and excited or joyous at the same time. We can’t do that.

Chris Beall (10:33):

Emotions are funny like that, right? We can see two colors more or less at the same time, but we can’t experience two emotions at the same time. So, it’s fascinating to me. So, And I think there’s some simple ideas and actual techniques, very similar to… You know how people got fixated on the 27 seconds thing? It’s like, “Oh, it’s about the opener in 27 seconds.” It never been about the opener in 27 seconds. It’s just anything that one could say in order to handle the second part of somebody being afraid of us and getting to that next stage.

(11:34):

And the next stage is emotional. In the cold call, we try to take somebody from fear, they’re afraid of us, to trust immediately. That’s the shock. The shocking thing is we can go from fear to trust like that. More fear sets us up for more trust, so to speak, because there’s more fear to relieve. And there are ways to do that. In the discovery call, there are ways to do it also and they work on the same principle. The principle is emotional substitution. You as a professional are going to help this other person, help them substitute a more useful emotion. So, it can’t be idiosyncratic. It’s got to be a fairly universal emotion. Well, here’s the universal emotion. Pride. It’s totally antithetical to apprehension. It’s almost the opposite of apprehension. When we’re apprehensive, we pull back. And when we’re proud, we come forward. And so the prospect is in a pulling back emotion when we start the conversation with them.

(12:38):

So, what can we do to get them to express pride? Well, there’s a funny thing that people have as almost a universal source of pride, oddly enough, and it’s where they live. And it’s because they chose to live there. So, one thing you can do, and I know people will fixate on this and go, “Oh no, it’s those words exactly.” It’s not those words exactly. But here’s what I do. I just ask a simple question. First, I want to make it clear that I’m looking for help. I’m not in charge here. I’m not running the show. I’m not making things happen to somebody else. Because they’re apprehensive that I’m doing that. So, I say, “Corey, it just helps me a lot to know where somebody is when I’m talking to them. I don’t know. It’s just a peculiarity of mine. Where are you right now on the face of our blue whirling planet?”

(13:35):

And the reason I say blue whirling planet is actually to give us a sense of togetherness. There’s a classic picture that was taken from the moon of Earth, that the Earth is this blue marble hanging in space. And we all know it’s spinning except for certain people who think that it’s flat or something like that. But they still use GPS. They still use GPS. Why not? Believe the Earth is flat and use GPS. It’s a miracle. But anyway. So, that gives us a sense of togetherness. But what I really want to do is then, I’ve asked for help. It wasn’t an interrogation question. It was a please help me question, because this is something I need in order to be able to have a good conversation with somebody. And I want this to be a good conversation. So, I just ask that question. And then it’s like, “Where are you?” And it’s very different from, “So, where do you live?”

Corey Frank (14:29):

For sure.

Chris Beall (14:30):

It’s very different. So, where are you right now? Now, most of the time they’re in their home. Some of the time they’re on the road. That could be. But in any case, they’re probably where they want to be unless you’re having discovery calls with people in prison or something like that. And I think that’s unusual. There’s not a lot of buy-side activity in the B2B world going on. [inaudible 00:14:53]-

Corey Frank (14:53):

Not a lot of TAM. Not a big TAM there.

Chris Beall (14:56):

No. So, sadly there is a big Tam. But anyway, let’s leave that Tam alone. But what you get is an opportunity, a very low-cost opportunity, for the other person to replace their apprehension with pride of place. And pride of place has a wonderful quality. And that is, it’s not personal, but it is about the person. It’s associated with the person. But none of us actually created the city that we’re living in or the place we’re living in or created our neighborhood unless we have big real estate development chops or something like that. So, most of us, we have various feelings about where we live, but when we’re talking to a stranger, the feeling that comes out as pride. And I’ll let somebody talk out of a 30-minute meeting for 27 minutes about where they live.

Corey Frank (15:54):

Right, right. So, that’s the key, is to acknowledge, understand that their state is apprehension, and making them feel at ease as much as possible. Because if I want the deep confessions, the ones that will drive my traditional discovery, my BANT, if you will, to determine if they’re part of a POC or is there any there there, I need to address that. And if I don’t, what happens typically?

Chris Beall (16:24):

If I don’t, I get a very confusing conversation, which is oppositional. I ask questions and they try to avoid answering them. And they might answer them in a halfway kind of fashion. The answers to my questions are irrelevant. That is, I’m an expert at what I offer. They’re the expert of their problem. Whatever their problem is, is deeply theirs. It’s peculiar, to use my mother’s favorite word. It’s peculiar to their situation. It’s about things they know about that I don’t know about. And until they’re ready to share those other things that they know about that I don’t know about, we actually can’t explore. I mean, I’ll call this real B2B. So, say you’re selling coffee beans or whatever. Maybe it’s easier. I don’t know. I’ve never sold stuff like that. I’ve sold complicated products like Fuller Brush, spider spray, you know how it goes, right? So, we have to accept their world is deep and rich and not about us, right?

(17:25):

It’s deep. It has all sorts of things going on. There’s all sorts of constraints, situations. There’s timing. There’s how are they already solving the problem that you would like to help them solve in a different way. All that stuff’s at play. And if we just skip this emotional transition to something else, and I like pride of place, and then I go from pride to place, by the way, my next question is to pride of mission. Because then we’re at the heart of it. Because everything they’re doing in their job has to do with the mission of their company. They don’t think about it like that, but why do they keep that job instead of going to some other job? You don’t talk to a lot of people who are basically iron shackles got to work at company X, Y, Z. They’re making a daily choice, especially now.

(18:14):

I mean, now as Helen Fanucci’s new book coming out, Love Your Team, says, “Your top talent can walk out the door without taking a single step.” So, it’s a different world now. You’re dealing with somebody who’s there because they want to be there. So, what’s that attachment to mission? And there’s a personal element. You don’t make it personal. It’s like, “What do you do that’s so great?” But what I like to ask is the simple question. And again, it’s a help me out question. So, I always try to understand somebody’s business as best I can before talking with them, because it seems like a good thing to do. I go to the website and I read and I think, and then I always get it wrong. Always. 100% of the time. I like to ask this question, which is, “When everything goes right, when everything’s fantastic…” Remember, we’re trying to get to problems, right? So, I don’t want to go anywhere near the problems quite yet because the problems are live wires. You could get hurt down there, right?

Corey Frank (19:18):

Sure.

Chris Beall (19:18):

So, I want to stay in a safe zone for the moment, which is to remind somebody, why do we all do what we do? Deming said, “We work for pride of workmanship.” Who do we work with and where do we work? We work to do good. I mean, that’s kind of it. If we thought it was bad, we probably wouldn’t do it. If it was evil, maybe some people are like that and we sometimes run into them. But in general, most people are in tune with what their company does. They think it’s a good thing.

(19:45):

So, I just ask, “When everything goes right, when everything goes right, when the customer’s the right customer and the solution’s the right solution, the budget is there, the timing is right, all of the support people and people on both sides do the right things, everything clicks, how does your company or your product change your customer’s life?” And I’m really specific. It’s changed your customer’s life. That other person’s life. It’s not, “Did it make a buck? Did it add shareholder value? Did it blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?” It’s about somebody’s life. And there’s a little reminder there that I’ve never had somebody fail to answer that question. Ever. They always answer. It’s almost like, “Huh. Wow. Yeah, we do something cool here.”

 

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Corey and Chris agree on the importance of building trust before anything else can happen. They are joined by Transformational Coach Jennifer Standish, Henry Wojdyla, Founder and Principal at RealSource Group, Matt McCorkle, Manager of Branch Operations at Kaiser Compressors, and hosts Ty Crandall on the Business Credit and Finance Show, Jeff Lerner from Ep 150 of Millionaire Secrets, and David Dulaney on the Sales Development Podcast. The full episodes to the ones included here are listed below:

EP91: Borrowing from the Best

EP109: Being There for Your Customers

EP123: Hire Yourself a Grandma

The Business Credit and Financing Show

Sales Development Podcast https://www.spreaker.com/user/9196584/episode-164-done

MILLIONAIRE SECRET #150 Unlock Your Potential with Jeff Lerner

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Full episode transcript below:

 

Announcer (00:05):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market. With our host, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch 49. In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Corey and Chris gather consensus on the importance of building trust before anything else can happen. They’re joined by transformational coach, Jennifer Standish, Henry Wodjdyla, founder and principal at Real Source Group, Matt McCorkle manager of branch operations at Kaeser Compressors, and host Ty Crandall on the Business Credit and Finance show, Jeff Lerner from Millionaire Secrets and David Delaney on the Sales Development podcast. We hope you enjoy this episode of Market Dominance Guys. Building trust needs to be step one.

David Dulaney (01:00):

It seems the trends, in just society in general, is more digital typing, texting, sending snaps or whatever. It’s much more digital, but that human connection, especially now during, this time period is so important. So where do you see the gap in the sales development world right now, between folks focusing on just that typing and texting and stuff like that versus actually having conversations with people?

Chris Beall (01:30):

Well, it’s a chasm. It’s huge. The challenge is this, the human voice carries about 20,000 bits of information per second. And an email, a whole email has about 5,000 bits. So it takes four emails to be the equivalent of one second of a conversation with regard to information. And it takes information, lots of it, before we trust somebody, because we’re smart.

David Dulaney (01:55):

Right.

Chris Beall (01:55):

We’re not going to just trust somebody on what’s in an email, we got to get more. And it turns out it takes about seven seconds of a conversation, which is the equivalent of seven times four, 28 emails to get somebody to begin to trust you. So who’s going to read 28 emails? I mean, really? I don’t think anybody does that. So when you look at the problem of sales development, not as, I made you answer my email, but you look at it instead as, among all the competitive offerings, especially do nothing, which is the big winner in business as the status quo. How do I become the most trusted and how do I do it before my competitor does?

If you see that as the problem, if that is what sales development needs to do, then the gap’s pretty simple, sales development reps aren’t talking to enough people. And when they do talk to them, they’re talking to them incorrectly. They’re not talking to them with an intention of building trust. They’re talking to them with an intention to get them to take a meeting. Or worse, they’re talking to them about a product, which is if you want to do the worst thing you can do in sales development, call somebody up and tell them that you have a solution to a problem that they have. You have a product that solves the problem they have. Because you’ve just insulted them. You just called somebody up, who’s supposedly competent and diligent, and said, did you realize you were waiting for a salesperson to tell you how to do your job?

David Dulaney (03:27):

Okay. So that’s one of the big misses. Yeah.

Chris Beall (03:31):

It’s a big one, right?

David Dulaney (03:32):

Not having enough conversations. And then finally, when you do get a conversation, not leading with the trust, just going to your script, basically.

Announcer (03:46):

Jennifer Standish joins our Market Dominance Guys in this episode 123 where they’re talking about hiring grandmas. I know, I know what you’re thinking. What are you talking about? Hiring grandmas. Listen to this and you will understand the importance of building trust, tonality, and how women of a certain age have this skill as well as thick skin. Join us for this segment.

Chris Beall (04:09):

Certain voices cause people to act in a positive way, even if they don’t take the meeting. So you’re actually conditioning the market for all your future communications, that thank you that comes after every conversation. Thank you for our conversation today. The only email in the world of B2B that always gets opened. The only subject line that works, everybody talks subject lines all day long. There is only one subject line that works in B2B. Thank you for our conversation today. Now the only way that it’s honest is if you just had a conversation. Now you’re down to how do they feel about it? And that feeling determines what happens to four out of every five of the pipeline dollars that will come out of calling. Because four out of five of the pipeline dollars that come out of calling do not come from the meeting that was set in the cold call. They come in the communication that happened afterwards that’s been conditioned by the trust that was built in the cold call.

Jennifer Standish (05:08):

I trained a grandmother last year and she was phenomenal to the point where the owner had to give her a week vacation because he couldn’t keep up with all the appointments she was setting.

Chris Beall (05:21):

I love that.

Jennifer Standish (05:21):

It blew everybody away except for me. And I was like, this woman is going to be phenomenal. So yeah, so maybe we really, really, really need to change how we’re hiring. And these women love it. They feel useful. They are proud of what they’re doing. They have a really thick skin because they’ve lived a long life and they’ve seen things. And there’s just something about their energy and you just trust them immediately. So I don’t know, Chris, we should come up with something on to use this talent.

Chris Beall (05:56):

Well, we should, I’m down here right now in Quail Creek, Arizona. And this community, I think we have 3000 houses or so. And I would say of those 3000 houses, 2,937 of them have somebody of grandmotherly age of the female persuasion who’s living there. And they arrange everything here. They make everything happen. I actually think every once in a while that it’s just the company that needs to be started. No one has ever made an appointment setting company that operates reliably at pay sent scale. And the reason is that the inverted S curve around hiring eventually kills them.

So it’s hard to find the marginal talent to add to that group. And then Corey, you’ve done it within the companies and you know how hard it is. That thrash at the edge, I call it, the thrash at the margin that occurs where the hiring, where the in and the outer happening at about the same rate.

Corey Frank (06:53):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (06:54):

Its like your drop of water can only get so big before it’s boiling as fast as you’re adding to it. And then all of your time is going there. And then the quality deteriorates at the center. It’s just the way these things happen. And you’re taking on customers that are less sincere and less interesting and less worthwhile and blah, blah, blah.

Corey Frank (07:11):

Very true.

Chris Beall (07:12):

But I do believe that it could be that grandmas hold the key to making the world’s first scalable appointment setting company that can grow without bound, without losing quality.

Corey Frank (07:26):

See that should have been your patent, not the other thing.

Chris Beall (07:29):

Well, she didn’t say what it is and we’re not convinced yet.

Corey Frank (07:32):

Oh, okay. All right.

Chris Beall (07:33):

That’s not all about grandmas.

Corey Frank (07:34):

Just checking it in. Grandmas are the untapped labor pool market that this country needs right now today.

Chris Beall (07:44):

Yeah. The innovation economy…

Corey Frank (07:46):

Innovation economy.

Chris Beall (07:47):

… Will not fulfill its potential for humanity unless grandmas step up.

Corey Frank (07:51):

You cannot move forward without looking back. That’s what I hear you saying.

Jennifer Standish (07:56):

They’re hard workers. They’re really hard workers.

Corey Frank (08:00):

Yeah. Absolutely.

Chris Beall (08:00):

Yeah. And they’re self managing.

Jennifer Standish (08:03):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (08:04):

They’ve been managing themselves for quite a while. And managing someone else too most of the time.

Corey Frank (08:08):

Sure.

Announcer (08:16):

Henry Wodjdyla joins our Market Dominance Guys with so much grace and respect for some of them that have come before him that he’s learning from regularly, including Matt Forbes and Cheryl Turner from the episode, Borrowing From the Best

Speaker 6 (08:16):

 

Henry Wojdyla (08:30):

That concept of building trust. We’ve had a lot of episodes, probably more than half of our episodes. I’d say, Chris, it comes up one form or another. And you referenced Warren and we had him on a few times and talking about that, certainly. And Chris has had many great episodes and riffs where we talked about tonality and in the Sandler world, nurturing. And Matt Forbes is exceptional at that. Mark, you’re from ConnectAndSell is exceptional at that. Cheryl is, as you write the one of the masters of our craft at that.

Do you find that talking now being aware, because you can’t unsee it, you can’t unknow it now, is that when you talking to other asset managers or property owners or investors, that the tonality, the pacing, has changed as well as your approach? And has that made an impact? And I’m asking this under the guise, Henry, of there’s a lot of folks in our sales profession who say you can’t cold call. It doesn’t work. Right. Chris and I, we love engaging in discussions with people like that. And for our competitors, you’re right, it doesn’t work. So don’t use it. It’s a waste of your time. But for those that are open, how much of what you do is this nurturing tonality, pacing, and what kind of difference have you seen by employing that more trust based approach with your voice as well?

Henry Wojdyla (10:04):

It’s an all the above answer it. And speaking of feedback loops, here’s another one maybe in the micro on the framework of a 27 second cold call, hopefully, maybe even less. It’s the idea that… Another thing you guys have talked about by the way is belief, the power of belief. And I would say if the power of belief is there, it frankly takes care of the rest. And if you believe, not just in the power of the discovery meeting, but the fact that you can offer something ultimately of value, but the pathway is trust, it almost really, it takes care of the rest. And I don’t mean that to be either a glib or partial answer to your question, but it all comes together, I think, in that essence.

Announcer (10:48):

We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break.

Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it’s time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employee successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplay, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire tam, Branch 49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance, learn more at branchfortynine.com. And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

In episode 150 of Millionaire Secrets, Jeff Lerner and Chris Beall visit about the innovation economy. Chris says, so the innovation economy is bottleneck somewhere. I happen to believe I know where it’s bottleneck, which is in the failure to create a trust relationship with somebody who might avail themselves of that innovation. Three years from now, three years in advance waiting. It’s not really the way to allow the innovation economy to achieve its potential. It’s creating trust relationships. Chris goes on to say, it’s creating trust relationships, where somebody gets to the point where they trust somebody with an innovation more than they trust themselves because they’re the expert. They’ve got to trust them more than they trust themselves.

So that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing at ConnectAndSell because we have this bottleneck of the entire innovation economy, which we all depend on for our future. We all depend on these innovations going to market, and yet business leaders, business executives, people who’ve managed them who run them, invest in them, don’t see what we see, which is the bottleneck, which is the flow rate of discovery meetings with potentially relevant people as early as you can get. And the foundation for making that flow rate consistent is building trust capital across the whole potential market well in advance of them, even wanting to hold a meeting. If you can do those two things, your innovation will go to market. Now you only need the goods and the will.

That blew Jeff away. He was saying because he struggles. One of his infinite game struggles is finding ways to explain to people what sales really is and why it’s not only so essential, but it’s actually one of the most beautiful human activities. And just as Chris explained it better than he ever could, even the name of his company ConnectAndSell.

Let’s go on to the next segment.

 

 On the Business Credit and Finance show hosted by Ty Crandall, Chris was telling us everybody’s got a value proposition. Those things flow around the internet like water at this point. They’re on LinkedIn, they’re here, they’re there, everywhere you go somebody is saying, “I’ve got this great value proposition. I’ve got this reason you should do business with me.” But why aren’t you doing business with them? The answer is you don’t trust them.

Chris says that the B2B buyer is super cautious by their very nature. They’ve got to trust you, the seller, more than they trust themselves with regard to this purchase. Because you are the expert. You’ve got to trust the expert. It’d be stupid to trust a non-expert, oneself, more than the expert. So they’re in a quandary. The only way that quandary ever gets resolved is through personal trust. If you can establish trust reliably very early in the relationship, then you can build on that to get the value.

From episode 109, Matt McCorkle manager of branch operations at Kaeser Compressors talks about legacy. He and Corey talk about the importance of preserving that legacy. And the only way to do that is through trust. Listen to this segment from that episode.

Corey Frank (14:52):

And Matt, I think that you can’t have a company Kaeser that’s been around for over a hundred years, and certainly you have technical competence, the company does. You have industry competence. But I think probably the leadership that continues to come generation after generation continues to engender that trust. Kaeser is a name that I can pick up the phone at three in the morning if I have a problem with, if I have a problem, I know that Kaeser’s going to try to figure out or manufacturer solution to help me. Sometimes it’s a little tougher to get when it’s pure software and there’s no touch. When it’s, e-commerce alone you miss out on certainly some conversations like this at an enterprise level or at a more intimate level. And you have just the brand promise the website, the commercials to somehow sometimes drive that. And it’ll be interesting to see if those companies end up being as durable as certainly ConnectAndSell or Kaeser.

Matt McCorkle (15:49):

Chris and I were actually talking about that as it relates to ConnectAndSell building trust, getting meetings with folks, because as I was calling with Cheryl, we’re trying to set up some virtual meetings, phone meetings. It’s not common in our industry. And it’s because of exactly what you put your finger on there, Cor, this is a hard product. It’s a piece of machinery in somebody’s plant, and they want to know that they can believe that you have the absolute best machinery ever. It’s just amazing. It’s reliable, it’s efficient, it’s just incredible piece of machinery. But if you can’t support it, they don’t want it anywhere near their plant. And so that support piece, that you’re going to have somebody here at three in the morning, they’re going to know how to put it back together if something catastrophic happens, that’s really critical in our industry.

So then when it comes to ConnectAndSell, a lot of times, you’re pushing for that face to face meeting. And then the way, certainly, we use the sales process after that is to demonstrate that not only do we have business outcomes, but we also have the infrastructure to support these business outcomes in terms of technicians and parts, support and things like that. That is definitely a piece that comes into play. I feel that it is more difficult to sell, remotely that you need a little bit of that face to face touch. Now, certainly we’re not giving up on doing things from a virtual perspective because it’s such a powerful time savings, but at some point in that process, you’ve got to make that connection.

Corey Frank (17:17):

Well, when I commend you, Matt, you think about the stewardship that you are responsible for this 120 year, 119 year old company. Is that what it is?

Matt McCorkle (17:26):

Yes.

Corey Frank (17:27):

So the stewardship that you’re responsible for that company, the leap of faith of trust that you had to have to say, I want to take this approach, not only from selling, but also from certainly the technology benefit of a ConnectAndSell. We can’t underestimate that. And I think that there’s going to be a reciprocal effect as you continue to see the market dominance effects occur. You’re number three in the US, hey, I’m sure when you’re on the episode, when the show maybe next year, maybe be number two, and maybe that’ll be a take away. But the math says three years. Right Chris? So we got another year to cram it in. So we’ll see how it works.

But I imagine that it’ll be fun as you look at the legacy is the reciprocal effect of Matt McCorkle inside company like Kaeser, going to be affecting the results five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. And if you probably have clients that have been with that organization for five years, for 10 years, for 15 years, and they continue to be fans of Kaeser. So those are some of the larger ramifications of focusing on market dominance and the strategy, and really is the residue of that or the DNA level of that is that you build trust and you’re building trust, certainly with your team, with your board, with your leadership team by this is the way we are taking these mantles in planting them here by this is how we’re going to sell.

 

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These sales experts agree, that there is more than one approach to a successful sales campaign. We’re sure Chris Beall has some dark childhood story about alternate ways of skinning a cat, although he’s never done it, of course. These discussions include modifications and redirections in the buying cycle, even though the basics are still there: awareness, consideration and decision. Join Corey and Chris in this episode of snippets from episodes about the buying cycle. This features Oren Klaff, Jason Beck, Gerhard Gschwandtner, Susan Finch, Dan McClain, Brad Ferguson, and our own Chris Beall and Corey Frank. To hear the entire episodes features, visit this collection:

https://marketdominanceguys.com/category/buying-cycle/

—-more—-

Full episode transcript below:

Our Market Dominance Guys Chris Beall and Corey Frank have proven there is more ways than one to skin a cat. And I bet Chris Beall probably has some dark childhood story to support that information, but we all can agree on that. There’s more than one solution to just about everything including the buying cycle. Now, the basics we know are awareness, consideration, decision. Those are the three basic steps, but let’s hear what some of the best experts that we know that we’ve had on our show say about this. Including of course our own Chris and Corey. So among our guests that we’re going to feature in these quick snippets, and you can listen to the whole playlist if you click on the post, we have Oren Klaff, Jason Beck, Garheart Gastraughtner, Dan McClain, Brad Ferguson, and your own yours truly Susan Finch. We hope you enjoy this playlist and learn a little bit more about the many approaches to the buying cycle.

Speaker 2 (01:19):

Yeah, so the nature of business products, the nature of all products to some degree is recency of purchase 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 might 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.

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 that 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’re 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? 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.

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, 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 decay and the [inaudible 00:03:47] very subtly. Well, these are strangers for crying out loud.

Speaker 3 (03:51):

Yeah. So the trust has a half life dependent on each person then?

Speaker 2 (03:57):

Exactly and its cycle. And then you have another problem. The person you’re dealing with, they themselves have a half life.

Speaker 4 (04:11):

If you could wave a magic wand today and say, “Oren, go make this happen.” What is it we should do?

Speaker 2 (04:20):

I think I used to actually bring a magic wand by the way that I made into our big customer meetings, where we bring all the customers together and then have the elite group advise us. And I would make a magic wand each year out of three plants in my yard and tie it together with the right color thread and hand it around and say, “You got the magic wand. You could-“

Speaker 5 (04:45):

Did you have a [inaudible 00:04:46] as well, to go with it?

Speaker 2 (04:45):

I did not. That would’ve been special. Something that I found pretty consistently in discovery that’s I think a big challenge that I see with our reps having is instead of wanting to find out, they want to get the other person to do what they want them to do. And it’s a challenge. There’s an implicit assumption, which is I want you to buy my stuff whether you are right to buy it or not. Whether it makes sense for you to buy it or not. I just went through this with one of my reps the other day he said, “So I’m trying to apply your techniques for selling and it’s working really well, but it’s really, really hard because I find myself over and over wanting to jump ahead an extra step because your process it requires patience.” And my process, I operationalize the relationship at the end of discovery and stop selling entirely.

If you want to learn more, we do an intensive test drive. It’s free. It takes you some time and a day of your people doing it. You will either produce results or not. Sometimes people get amazing results. Usually they just have a bunch of conversations and find out they suck. But even that can be worthwhile and it’s a learning experience and I highly recommend you do it. And if you want to do it, I’ll introduce you to my VP of customer success and boom, I’m gone. I’m gone. There’s no selling that’s going to happen from then on, ever, until the very end where they’ve had all the experience. And then the question is, so now that you’ve got the experience, do you see anything here that’s worth doing?

I see one thing, which is I think your people aren’t very good. And I think maybe doing some small sort of engagement to get them better might be a worthwhile activity. What do you say? Give them a little, that’s my one variable because that’s always the variable, the people always suck. Everybody sucks. So I got it easy. All the houses we’re going to sell have the same problem. They all face north and everybody wants a west facing exposure. But unfortunately in this neighborhood, all the houses face north. So you’re not going to be able to watch the sunset.

I’m pretty good at what you do. Give me something new. I’ll take it up to the point where now it’s running, it’s functioning and somebody else will do a better job than I do at taking that to the next level of big. Now, when you look at enterprise health, the issue with the enterprise is always that you have two things to conquer. You have markets to conquer with your current innovation and you have the natural next innovations, which are never obvious, to turn into something worth conquering markets with. And if you don’t do both of those, you just go out of business. We have a whole podcast episode called All Dead Companies Are Equally Uninteresting and it describes the process by which companies become dead companies by failing on one of these two fronts. So I think these are two different kind of horses, but I think the main difference is what is the cycle time that you’re comfortable with going from strategy to execution.

So for me, strategy to execution cycle time is about a day because I can’t imagine working on strategy for more than part of the day. You exhaust the possibilities. It gets uninteresting. I’m going to cross the river. I’m going to go this stone, this stone, this stone, this stone or maybe this one, this one, this one. Oh, they look about the same. I’ll pick this one. Okay. Now let’s go give it a go. Oh, wait a second. That one rocks, my foot got wet, I almost fell in. Let’s come back now. What? Okay, let’s try this one. That to me is natural. But for some people it’s not. So I think it’s a big part of it has to with your natural cycle time for running through that.

Speaker 6 (08:49):

We set out here at Grand Canyon to create that. And we’ve had an interesting AB experiment. We’ve had students and grads from the university. So fresh, they didn’t know anything. And then we had, let’s call them killers, who had the thousand yard stare who worked with other technology companies, cyber security companies sold in the past and they came together. You would think then that this island of Dr. Morrow would happen where you have these two or these Lord of the Flies where you have these two cultures where the vets would teach the younger folks. But what’s interesting is what happened is we taught everybody the same way, this is the books you read. We use the Sandler and Oren Klaff Pitch Anything methodology. You’re going to journal every day. You’re going to dress the part. We’re going to teach you public speaking.

We’re going to teach you how to read a financial statement. We’re going to teach breathing exercises so when you speak, you speak properly. Zoom backgrounds, all that stuff. And you found that the killers, the ones who had experience, they really globbed onto this at a rate that was equivalent to what the new folks did. Because, and as you interviewed these folks after months and their performance went up, they realized that no one really taught them that before. When they started a new organization, it was all about product training and sales training was just a small piece of it. And they said, “Oh, you guys figure it out.” And…

Speaker 7 (10:19):

Here’s a list.

Speaker 6 (10:20):

Here’s a list. And so they had to really unlearn a lot of the basic cliche type of techniques. Well, I just like to wing it. I just like to have my personality shine through in the interview. Right Susan?

Well, what’s the strongest part of your sales process before they come on? And I’d write it down, rapport building, relationship building. And of course they would say, “Well, probably my ability to build rapport and relationships.” I showed it to them. I was like, “How did I know that?” It’s because most folks have this mindset to have supplicative behavior that is needy, that I want to be liked, that I want to be included. I want to be part of the tribe. And I think we had Oren on, what about six months ago? I think it was? Oren Klaff? Pitch Anything. And he talks about, you need four key elements in every sales. Humor, you need intrigue, you need curiosity, but most importantly you need tension. And doesn’t mean you’re over the top and you’re aggressive or you’re jerk. It just means that ability where I’m going to come off as equal status and not supplicative or hat in hand.

And if I come off as equal status or at least professional, knowing my world, you know your world, the success is going to increase. And so that’s been one of the things that a lot of folks had to unlearn. So from a success story perspective, that’s really neat to see is that people crave a process or regimen, a structure, more than anything else. We tell a story, oldie but a goodie. I’d give credit if I knew where this came from. But there’s a guy walks past a construction site and he sees five people laying brick, Susan. And he goes to the first guy and says, “Hey, what are you doing?” He’s like, “Building a wall.” Goes to the second guy, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “Making 12 bucks an hour.” Goes to the third guy and say, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “Laying brick.” And goes to the fourth guy and says, “What are you doing?”

He says, “”I’m building a cathedral. Then finally goes to the fifth and says, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m saving men’s souls.” Now they’re all doing the same thing. They’re all laying brick, making 12 bucks an hour, building a wall. But it’s the latter two who see building the cathedral and saving men’s souls as the ones that probably are paying a little bit more close attention to detail, spelling in their notes, picking up a piece of paper in the corner of the office, refilling the soda machine if it needs it.

Not taking the last bagel in the morning. Those are the folks that really make the culture sing. And then you find a lot of the folks who weren’t taught that way. They have five years experience, they say. But they really have one year, five times or six months, 20 times. So you’d assume that the veterans would be the leaders, but it’s actually the newer folks, the grads and the current students who this is brand new, who are so enamored with the shiny object of why, finally. Four years of school and I finally figured out what I want to do. Versus probably people like you and I who drifted, fell into sales because we’re liberal arts folks. And that’s just, I guess what we do. We have a good personality and it’s either drive a cab, tend bar, or jump into sales.

Example two, similar to that is, Susan, we all show up, we’re waiting for Chris. It’s 11:03, 11:04 and I say, “Listen, I’ll tell you what, it’s 11:04 let’s go ahead and get started.” And you may say, “Well, can we give Chris another minute or two? He’s coming.” And I would say, as opposed to, “Oh sure, no problem.” And then you talk small talk waiting. Instead say, “I’ll tell you what, Chris seems like a smart guy. He can play catch up. Let’s get started.” Now I say it with a smile, but immediately my status goes up like hey, listen, this isn’t a vendor. This is somebody who has something critical to say. So those are two ways to introduce subtle tension into the sales presentation.

Speaker 1 (14:25):

But I do appreciate that the other thing that you did with that, the 11:04 meeting, you’ve said, “I was on time. I’m just the same level you are. You are no high and mighty extra busy person.

Speaker 6 (14:38):

That’s right.

Speaker 1 (14:40):

Because I’m equal with you, I can poke you a little bit. And we can play a little bit, because then I don’t have to be afraid of you.

Speaker 6 (14:46):

That’s right.

Speaker 1 (14:47):

Because I am no less than you. And that’s like what Cheryl Turner does.

Speaker 6 (14:51):

Oh, she’s amazing. Yeah. I mean, I think Chris gives her the crown of the best cool caller in the world. And I would really put the onus on anybody to try to take that title away from her because it is just that. Right Susan? It is that her status in the Pitch Anything world, I have true status alignment. And that is something that is also worked on here. We’re better at it today than we were yesterday. And we’ll be better at it tomorrow than we are today at coaching on it because you have a lot of stuff that goes on in the life of a younger grad, certainly. Besides what’s on the mindset of a CEO for hitting P and L and numbers and finances and raising money, et cetera. And so tone changes daily based off of what happened in their life.

Did they lose that Call of Duty? Did their dog crap on their carpet? Did they get their first student loan payment? Are they anxious about their roommate? Whatever it is, did their Bitcoin kind of plummet? And so they may read the same screenplay, but they may not perform it at an academy award level every single day. And I think that’s one thing that Cheryl does is she’s the modern day equivalent of the Iceman. Remember from Top Gun?

Speaker 1 (16:07):

Yes.

Speaker 6 (16:08):

And Val Kilmer, his name was the Iceman because he waited for the other person to make a mistake. He flew ice cold. Cheryl certainly has a great personality, out sized personality, but she does not make mistakes in the pieces that normally cost other people conversions. It’s consistent. It’s amazing.

Speaker 8 (16:36):

Towards the tail end of college, a friend of mine had a sister who married an entrepreneur that ran a company called Skyline Displays, they make trade show exhibits. And he saw how I was doing and he thought, I’d like to hire this guy and send him off to California to do what they called R and D sales. Because what they used to do is they’d come up with something new, they’d release it to the field before it was ready and then it was very expensive to make a change because it was on such a grand scale. So they thought, why don’t we just have one person go try to sell some new stuff. And I just fell into it. I moved out to California pretty much the day after I graduated from college. And that was a very interesting move. December 5th, 1995, very cold Minnesota day. I drove out to Newport beach and it was one of the happiest days of my life.

Speaker 7 (17:23):

That’s what they call a selling point.

Speaker 8 (17:29):

Absolutely. And when I went out there on the recruiting trip, they were very smart. They flew me into the Orange County airport. And when you walk out of the Orange County airport, you see green grass and palm trees. So I told myself, I hope it’s a good job because I’m taking it. And I think like most people in sales, I was young, started off, struggled and it took me a while to hit my stride to figure out what I wanted to do. And then I had a roommate who was a recruiter. He goes, “Hey you’re in sales, but you’re kind of struggling. I got this customer that’s looking for sales and they’re a software company. Do you know anything about software?” I said, “No.” But it paid more money, so I took that job. And then I was in software for 10, 15 years and then my company did a ConnectAndSell test drive.

I was one of the test subjects using the weapon and it was interesting. I didn’t know what I was getting into. And when you use ConnectAndSell, turn it on, you hit that green go button. Well, when it was time to hit that green go button, president of the company standing here, the VP of sales is standing here. These are big verbose gentlemen. They’re like, “Turn it on.” All of a sudden, my hands started shaking. My brain went blank and I hit the go button. And the first conversation came fast, 30, 40 seconds. I don’t know what I said. It wasn’t intelligent or legible. The person hung up. They yelled, “Do it again.” Did it again. Then the second conversation came fast and it was, Hey. Yeah, call me next week. I think I want to talk to you. And the third one, guy picks up the phone. I schedule a demo, a meeting, boss and the president leave me alone the rest of the day. I think I scheduled two more meetings on my very first day and it was awesome.

Speaker 3 (19:21):

True or false? The bottom line of professional selling is helping people get what they want and need. True or false?

Speaker 6 (19:29):

True.

Speaker 3 (19:30):

False. The bottom line of professional selling is to go to the bank. This is a neat profession to make some money. Yes, we want to take care of our clients and yes, we want to serve them properly. But if we’re trying to get our emotional needs met in this profession, it’s going to take us off because we will not ask tough, timely, effective questions that differentiate us from the competition because we’re busy being nice. And if I say something that might get them a little concerned or upset, they might not like me. If they don’t like me, they don’t buy it from me. So I’m going to be Mr. Nice.

Speaker 6 (20:04):

Give us, the audience, maybe an example of a few questions that… Because I want to be a nice guy. I want to be respected. I don’t want to be a jerk because I have a high need for approval. My mother told me be nice to this stranger, maybe people will like me. So I got issues, probably like a lot of sales people. I got a lot of baggage coming in to that entry level sales job, but maybe old school to new school. If for instance, when I came up, I learned Dale Carnegie. As is, should be barrier payout questions. What’s the one we always talk about? How’s it go? If I can show you a way-

Speaker 3 (20:40):

Buy today, if I, will you?

Speaker 6 (20:42):

What’s wrong with those questions? That sounds fairly logical for a lot of our audience. They’re going to say, if I can show you a way, would you? What’s wrong with that? And how does Sandler improve upon that?

Speaker 3 (20:52):

If I can show you a way, would you do business with me today? It’s like you got a snare and you want somebody to step in it so you can catch them. And you’re giving them, there’s no alternative. And the Sandler methodology it’s based on the prospect’s right to choose. If I, will you? Is we’re all moving and trying to get to the yes and that’s not how it works. But if you go back to old sales training, they told you, nod your head a lot and smile and get the people to say yes. And this is teaching you how to be a clown. I mean, who wants to be a clown? Prospects write to choose.

Corey, I have an offer for you I think will probably work. It matches up with what you told me you need, with what you’re willing to spend and how you go about choosing somebody. If this fits for you, we can get started. If it’s not acceptable, say “No thanks, not going to do it.” Either one’s fine. The prospects right to choose. When was the last time a salesperson told you it is perfectly okay and acceptable to tell me no thanks, we’re going to pass.

Speaker 2 (21:58):

Not since I bought sales training from you. That’s the last time. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:04):

It completely takes the pressure away.

Speaker 2 (22:08):

It does.

Speaker 3 (22:08):

They have a ton of power and the ability to say no, let your prospect feel like they’re in control. But if I deliver exactly what we’ve outlined together and we’ve co built that solution for them, I didn’t know what’s going. In the Sandler methodology, when you deliver a solution to a prospect and you’ve uncovered compelling reasons, found out what it’s costing them, found out what they’re willing to spend and how they hire people. If you have all that stuff available, only you can screw this up. They just told you their criteria. Now you just complete what they told you they require to purchase. They’re not being sold and the salesperson is not convincing. The salesperson is discovering, which is different than convincing.

 

 

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