Would you hang up on your grandmother? Of course not! Jennifer Standish, Founder of Prospecting Works, joins our Market Dominance Guys, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, in this second of a three-part conversation to talk about the perfect voice for cold-calling success.  Certain voices cause people to react in a positive way, and it turns out that a female over the age of 60 has the perfect voice to get that positive reaction needed to be a successful cold-caller. Who knew?! Well, researchers like Jennifer did. She has discovered that with a little training, middle-aged women without an identifiable accent are phenomenal appointment-setters. Corey and Chris enthusiastically agree with her that “grandmas are the untapped labor market we need in sales.” If this sounds bizarre to you, tune in to hear how the nuances of voice affect the trust you need to establish in the first critical moments of a cold call. It’s all on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Hire Yourself a Grandma.”

Listen to the first part of this conversation:

EP122: Learning to Manage Your Voice Under Pressure

and the next segment after this one:

EP124: The Magical Type of Cold Call

 

About Our Guest

Jennifer Standish is Founder of Prospecting Works, an organization that assists salespeople in overcoming cold-call reluctance. She combines her 25-year cold-calling career with her skills as an intuitive healer, offering a “warm and fuzzy” approach that attracts introverts as well as people who don’t want to be considered salespeople.

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Full episode transcript below:

Chris Beall (01:24):

Scott, by the way, his thing is commercial insurance. And I know he believes he’s potentially saving these companies lives. I mean…

Jennifer Standish (01:38):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (01:38):

Saving those jobs.

Jennifer Standish (01:40):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (01:40):

I look at ConnectAndSell. Somebody asked me, “What do you guys do?”, we are determined to pull the cork out of the bottle that keeps the value of the innovation economy on the inside. When it could be poured freely on the outside, where people could make use of it. We all rely on innovations. They’re stuck inside of companies and they need to get out for all of us, and that’s what we do.

Corey Frank (02:04):

That’s a beautiful thing. We go back, because again, I keep seeing it on a t-shirt here. Jennifer’s [inaudible 00:02:11] the Chick-fil-A, “Eat more chicken.”, right? But you say, “Take more cold-calls, take the meat.”.

Jennifer Standish (02:16):

Take the call, take the call!

Corey Frank (02:21):

Take the call. But, a lot of the trust is that I don’t have a relevant list. If I’m talking to someone who I feel there’s some relevancy, there’s some linkage there. Some familiarity, some status tip off as our friend Oren Klaff talks about on the call. Then I have some credibility. But if I have, for instance, I get these alerts from Glassdoor. Glassdoor is a reputable organization, been around for a long time and rates socially how organizations are doing, how happy team members are. But, they also have these alerts that somehow I got on that says, “Hey, you’re a good fit for X and Y and Z position.”, right? Maybe we’ve all received some of those. Well, I got one the other day and I shared it with the team that evidently I’m a pretty good fit for short order cook at the Village Inn, down the street.

Chris Beall (03:14):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (03:14):

So there’s no relevance there. Now, I don’t think I have anything in my LinkedIn file that says that I’ve gone, now to me that’s my ideal position is someday to retire and be a short order cook. But between now and then, so if I got a call from someone at Glassdoor immediately I would say, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Your list is garbage. You haven’t put that human element attached to say, wait a minute, somehow I got a little disconnect here. So how important is that? When you create a list, we’ve talked about it on the Market Dominance Guy’s level. When you create a list for a client, if there’s no relevancy there, it seems like what you’re saying is right. The whole house of cards kind of falls apart a little bit.

Jennifer Standish (03:56):

Yes. But, I would never talk to somebody that way. If I got a phone call, a cold-call, about a job as a cook, I don’t think I would respond that way. I would say, oh my goodness. Wow. I think you’ve…

Corey Frank (04:09):

Of course.

Jennifer Standish (04:12):

Yeah, I wouldn’t say it that way. I would say…

Corey Frank (04:15):

I think internally, how’d you…

Jennifer Standish (04:17):

You need to talk a little bit because seems the algorithm that you’re using somehow is misplaced or because I am not at all your target.

Corey Frank (04:28):

Yeah.

Jennifer Standish (04:28):

And I’m afraid that maybe your list is filled with people who are not yours as well.

Corey Frank (04:33):

Sure, sure.

Jennifer Standish (04:33):

But algorithms, they make mistakes. I mean, they’re…

Corey Frank (04:37):

If you’re a rep, and over and over and over again I’ve been instilled with this belief system from Jennifer and Chris and the battle cry. You’re going back and forth like Braveheart, before we hit the phones in the morning at 7:59. Okay. Release. Okay. You guys are released to the world and third phone call, fifth phone call, 20th phone call, “No, that’s not me. No, that’s not my role.”. Are we committing a little mal practice as sales leaders sometimes by not spending the time we need on the relevancy of the list?

Jennifer Standish (05:08):

Yes. Yes. Because I will tell you that, if you give me a bad list, I’m going to have bad results. I will have horrible results. So the list is actually critical to cold-calling, so you better spend your time. And what I tell people is, you need to have multiple, highly targeted lists, and don’t be lazy, come up with multiple scripts. And, I don’t like writing scripts all the time. I don’t want to write 10 scripts in a row, but I do it because I want highly targeted lists. And I want the scripts to speak to each segment. Otherwise, I’m going to be calling a whole bunch of people and it’s going to be irrelevant to them and nothing is going to resonate with them. And then they’re going to get angry. So yes, it’s got to be highly targeted. Really spend the time, don’t call thousands of people and say something generic, because then you’re just going to piss people off. I don’t want to be that person. So on our side, yes, we need to behave better. We need to behave a lot better.

Chris Beall (06:15):

I agree. Lists are so fascinating to me because we make lists primarily, at first, cold list. Right? We make them based on publicly available information, which we know is limited and flawed. And we know it’s limited in flawed in a bunch of different ways. Some of it is out of date. I was with my data concierge, Tom. We were looking at some calling data the other day and we were identifying individual human beings using some techniques that we have. And we found that there had been 476 calls to a guy named John T. I won’t say his last name because it wouldn’t be polite. And he died in 2013 and the reason that all these calls were going there was that his son, James T was still running the company, had the same email address. Why not J.T. at company name.

Chris Beall (07:17):

And it had fooled the various algorithms out there in zoom info and so forth into putting his late father into these lists. And so it was easy to tell from the data, by the way, there wasn’t much to it really. One of the funny things is you get a lot of good information back from calling, but you have to do a lot of calling. So in our case, we do 60 million dials a year. So we have a lot of information and we use some of that information to help folks avoid these faux pas that one could make and at least avoid them a little bit, right. Avoid them. But you can’t avoid them perfectly in much the same way you can’t really be sure in any sales situation that you’re not going to be obliged to say what you found out is that there’s not a good reason to move forward.

Chris Beall (08:09):

I mean, if that were not the case, wouldn’t the funnel just be a pipe. I mean, it would be odd, right? It’s like everybody that we talked to, with whom we will do business with. That doesn’t really make any sense. It’s an exploration of the world in much the same way that if you go Google something, you can’t just blindly take a research result that comes back and goes, oh, I’m going to get that one. Right?

Corey Frank (08:34):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (08:34):

Whatever it is. I mean, go look up Chris and Helen’s wedding. Well, you’ll find one in Italy that’s going on on the same date as our wedding will happen in Washington. But don’t buy plane tickets for Italy. If you want to come and hang with us and have been invited to our wedding. Check it out a little bit more and be ready to go back and forth. And I think this comes down to the essence of sales.

Chris Beall (09:02):

Sales has a lot to do with information exchange. We exchange information first to decide if we trust each other enough to exchange more information. That’s actually what a cold-call is, cold-call is an exchange of information with the purpose of deciding if we trust each other sufficiently that it’s worth exchanging more information. I mean, that’s a cold conversation. A cold call by the way, is an attempt to get a cold conversation. Cold calls are kind of irrelevant, because most of them don’t go anywhere, but you got to do them anyway. I mean, what can you do? You’re going to try to talk to people who are busy right now. Great. Okay. So you found out they were busy, but a cold conversation has a very, very specific purpose, which is to exchange enough information to determine mutually that we trust each other enough to move forward, to exchange more information, right?

Chris Beall (09:55):

So some of has to be in charge of how much information that is and what the cost is. If the cost is about 30 seconds and the amount of information is something roughly on the order of say six or 700,000 bits, we’re good. 20,000 bits, a second with the human voice, 30 seconds, 600,000 bits, it’s about what it takes to get sufficient trust to decide to move forward. That’s why cold conversations are so valuable because as human conversations with the human voice, because the human voice carries those 20,000 bits a second right into their midbrain. And theirs goes into yours too. And so you got a shot.

Chris Beall (10:36):

How many emails? I don’t know. Somebody in the audience can do this math divide 600,000 by 5,000. What do you get? 600 divided by five. That’s a hundred and something 120 emails. Can you get somebody, without losing their attention, to read 120 emails and respond to you intelligently to each one so you can adjust your next email. That’s the equivalent of a 30 second phone call. You can’t do it. It’s the only practical medium to get sufficient trust between two people, if they’re not sitting in the same room.

Corey Frank (11:15):

And the building trust, curious Jennifer, this is a staple of Market Dominance Guys, that Chris is just mentioning here. But from your perspective on modulation or inflection, I want to say tonality, because we always talk about tonality here. I’m thinking for maybe a little bit, even more nuanced, maybe rate of speech. What goes into your mindset? Forget about your team, talking to you as the expert, as the black belt, right? Making the call one shot one kill. I give you four leads. That’s it. And we need two meetings of these four leads.

Chris Beall (11:50):

Oh, that’s yesterday. She did that.

Corey Frank (11:51):

That’s yesterday. That’s good. Great.

Jennifer Standish (11:53):

Yeah. I didn’t do it today though. Boy, I had one call and really screwed that up. Well, first of all, I say professional, confident, friendly, and a little bit enthusiastic, and that’s where women excel. We can do the enthusiastic part very easily and still remain professional. It’s where men really struggle because men come to business from a very different place. They come to business in a, I want to be the smartest person in the room, the most successful person in the room and it can be almost aggressive. And so they have a hard time with being enthusiastic. You want me to be in enthusiastic? I don’t want to be enthusiastic. But over a telephone line, that enthusiasm really helps otherwise they sound disinterested. So, and it’s like, if you want somebody to be excited about meeting with you kind of have to be excited about you and what you’re calling about.

Jennifer Standish (12:52):

And that’s my formula. And everybody executes that a little differently, but I look at professionalism, you have to sound professional, confident, friendly, and a little bit enthusiastic. And so when I’m working with people, I’ll say, “Okay, well try this out.”, and then it’s very flat and they’ll try it out again. And it’s very flat. And then I’ll say, well, let’s pretend you’re the leader of a three-ring circus and you’re going to go so over the top, it’s going to be absolutely ridiculous. And I’m like really go over the top and they’ll try and it will be perfect. And I’ll say, “There it is.”.

Chris Beall (14:10):

That’s so interesting.

Jennifer Standish (14:11):

And it was really uncomfortable for you, right?

Chris Beall (14:15):

Yes.

Jennifer Standish (14:15):

And they’re like, “Oh my God.”, and I’ll be like, “it was perfect.”.

Chris Beall (14:19):

That’s so fascinating. Wow. I went through this with radio ads. Working with Rich Kagan.

Corey Frank (14:26):

Oh yeah, sure. Right.

Chris Beall (14:27):

So we’re up there in Tucson and we met at this very, very fancy studio. Well, okay. So I triple-locked the car and I, standing there in the sound booth in the studio, and he is telling me he says, “You are a naturally big voice, big range, you project. You will sound dead on radio. You must take it over the top. You’ve got to go to the point where it feels ridiculous to you.”. And sure enough, when it played back the ads I’m like, “Geez, Chris, can’t you bring a little something.”.

Corey Frank (15:04):

Yeah. Well the impact of the camera is supposed to add 10 pounds right?

Chris Beall (15:08):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (15:08):

So some of the earlier videos, when my wife watches these, I say, remember the camera adds 10 pounds. She says, well, how many cameras did you use? But look at the Nixon and the Kennedy debates, right? Early on with makeup, if you have makeup on, right, and to the naked eye, if you were in front of me of like, “wow, you’re very orange today.”.

Chris Beall (15:30):

Right.

Corey Frank (15:30):

But on camera, you don’t see it. So that’s interesting though, Jennifer, I like the nuances between men and women and the enthusiasm.

Jennifer Standish (15:38):

Yes.

Corey Frank (15:38):

Projection, because we predominantly call IT and we find that the gals on our squad, they do better on average than the gents do.

Jennifer Standish (15:50):

Yes. And I will tell you that if you’re going to hire are an appointment setter, middle-aged women, without an identifiable accent are phenomenal appointment setters. Because we just are confident, if you sound like a little girl, you’re going to have problems.

Corey Frank (16:07):

Yeah.

Jennifer Standish (16:07):

But I worked for an agency once and we were scheduling appointments for VP of sales and banks. And we had no message. It was basically senior vice president, so and so, so and so, would like to meet with you. And the very first meeting where all of the callers were on the top 10 cold-callers, they were all women and they all sounded like grandmothers. And I thought to myself, this is absolutely brilliant because nobody is going to say no to a grandmother. And they were consistent. And I was in the top 10 and I was younger, but they sounded like grandmothers. And I thought, does this company know what its just done? Or is this just happened to be that these women who were in their sixties needed a second job and they, day in and day out, we’re the best of everybody. So I’m not saying go out and hire grandmothers, but middle-aged women without an identifiable accent are the people I try to hire all the time.

Chris Beall (17:05):

I am saying, go hire grandmothers. I read an article about this 10 years ago, and I still stand behind it. The biggest untapped resource in the economy is post-retirement women, in particular. Although the men start to become, I’ll call it usable at that point also, maybe because their testosterone levels go down. Maybe because they’re no longer bossing people around or maybe because now they’re living with somebody’s bossing them around and it helps them understand their place in society a little bit better. But it is very, very interesting that we make, I think, a huge mistake. And I think it’s one of the biggest economic mistakes that’s been made in the last 20 years of believing that the cold-calling job, which is a highly specialized job, it’s like being an anesthesiologist. No, you don’t cut the patient open and do all that stuff.

Chris Beall (18:01):

But if you don’t do your job, right, somebody dies, right. It’s really, really important to get this right. And it looks really routine like, oh yeah, you give them this amount of gas. You do this, you do this. But really it’s very subtle. And that job has been now relegated, I’ll say, to the world of the 24 to 26-year-old, who wants to become a salesperson. And yet if you take it seriously as a hiring manager or as a strategist putting together a company, you would say, well, wait a minute. Why am I overpaying for 24 to 26-year-olds…

Jennifer Standish (18:36):

Right.

Chris Beall (18:36):

Who don’t want this job and want to go get another job when I could go to the other end of the economy and hire people in their fifties and sixties and seventies. And I have a great example, Israeli cybersecurity company selling to hospitals.

Chris Beall (18:50):

And they were using as their cold-callers, three people out of the Northeast who were living in a rural place, didn’t have much accent. Youngest was 58, the eldest was, I think, 77, the leader was in 77. So yeah, something like that. And they created 32.788 million dollars of pipeline in seven months. And this company got sold for 400 million dollars with significantly less than that have been invested. Now they cheated, they used ConnectAndSell, and they were really good at it. And so they talk to lots of people, because it’s considered an inaccessible market. Hospital IT, you can’t get there, not with the telephone. Right?

Corey Frank (19:39):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (19:40):

And I have those numbers. And every once in a while, I’ll publish the chart that shows the pipeline that was built, not a hundred percent from meetings, by the way, this is another really important factor.

Chris Beall (19:51):

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 (20:51):

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 sending. It blew everybody away except for me. And I was like, “This woman going to be phenomenal.”. So maybe we really, really, need to change how we’re hiring. And these women love it, they feel useful, they’re proud of what they’re doing. They have a really thick skin, because they’ve lived a long life and they’ve seen things. 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 (21:40):

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’m not retired, of course, and Helen’s not retired, so we call ourselves the working stiffs and there are a handful of us around here. But 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 pace and 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, right?

Chris Beall (22:36):

That thrash at the edge, I call it, the thrash at the margin that occurs where the in and the outer happening at about the same rate.

Corey Frank (22:44):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (22:45):

It’s 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, right? And you’re taking on customers that are less sincere and less interesting and less worthwhile and blah, blah, blah.

Corey Frank (23:02):

Sure, sure.

Chris Beall (23:02):

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

Corey Frank (23:18):

See that should have been your patent. Not the other thing.

Chris Beall (23:22):

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

Corey Frank (23:24):

Oh, okay. All right.

Chris Beall (23:25):

Well, it’s not all about grandma’s.

Corey Frank (23:26):

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

Chris Beall (23:36):

Yeah. The innovation economy…

Corey Frank (23:37):

Innovation economy.

Chris Beall (23:39):

Will not fulfill its potential for humanity, unless grandma step up.

Corey Frank (23:44):

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

Jennifer Standish (23:48):

They’re hard workers, they’re really hard workers.

Corey Frank (23:52):

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Beall (23:53):

And they’re self-managing.

Jennifer Standish (23:55):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (23:56):

They’ve been managing themselves for quite a while and managing someone else too most sure, sure.

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Jennifer Standish, Founder of Prospecting Works, is preaching to the Cold Calling Choir when she says that cold calling trainers don’t spend enough time working with their people on their delivery. Jennifer and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, all believe that a great script that hits all the points but has a terrible delivery won’t get you any appointments. However, a great delivery — even if you’re working with a mediocre script — will absolutely bring in the appointments. In this podcast, they also emphasize the importance of a salesperson’s mindset when it comes to being a successful cold caller. If you think everybody’s going to hang up on you, that everybody’s going to be nasty to you, well, then, that is generally what you’re going to get. But if you believe in your core that your product or service can truly help people, if you are certain of the integrity of your offering, then you can sell people on your belief. Why? Because your authenticity will come through to your prospects, loud and clear. Listen to this first of a three-part Market Dominance Guys’ series by these three cold-calling gurus on today’s episode, “Learning to Manage Your Voice Under Pressure.”

Then, listen to the next two parts of this conversation here:

EP123: Hire Yourself a Grandma
EP124: The Magical Type of Cold Call

About Our Guest

Jennifer Standish is Founder of Prospecting Works, an organization that assists salespeople in overcoming cold-call reluctance. She combines her 25-year cold-calling career with her skills as an intuitive healer, offering a “warm and fuzzy” approach that attracts introverts as well as people who don’t want to be considered salespeople.

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Full episode transcript below:

Corey Frank (01:29):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with the sage of sales, the profit of profits. With Chris Beall and Corey Frank and today we have a guest that is near and dear to both of our hearts Chris, we’re going to speak in reverent tones, hush tones of cold calling. Jennifer Standish is here from Prospecting Work so, Jennifer, welcome to The Market Dominance Guys. Please say hi to our seven listeners, including my mother on this well esteemed almost 200 episodes of this podcast. Jennifer, welcome.

Jennifer Standish (02:03):

Hello. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great pleasure to be here.

Corey Frank (02:07):

Great. So I understand that you are well skilled in the black art of cold calling but then I also heard, right? When we were talking about it in pregame a little bit that as skilled as you are, you also want to make cold calling obsolete. Do you swear that’s true?

Jennifer Standish (02:26):

Well, where did you hear that? That I want to make it obsolete?

Corey Frank (02:29):

Oh, the sage of sales had shared that thing with me beforehand so.

Jennifer Standish (02:32):

Yeah, because I work with a lot of people that have call reluctance and it’s such a struggle for them and I just wish that we could somehow rename it, do something, something to help these people be able to make cold calls and I would also like for it to be acceptable to be able to call a business during business hours to discuss business and be able to call somebody and get an appointment and it’s such a struggle and cold calling is such a bad name. That if there was a way to just be able to call somebody and schedule appointment and have it be done. I would love for that for it to happen.

Corey Frank (03:12):

Well, I can already tell, Chris and you probably picked up on this. You’ve known Jennifer a little longer than I have, right? The cadence and the tonality you use just to explain yourself is probably indubitably what hooked Chris, so is that how you guys met? Chris, were you a cold call from Ms. Standish here? How did you guys meet?

Chris Beall (03:32):

I can’t remember.

Jennifer Standish (03:32):

No, you-

Chris Beall (03:35):

But I know she told me that she had an idea and it’s such a tremendous idea that I asked her not to tell me more about the idea until she got a provisional patent on it because I think I said, “Jennifer, at this moment I’m the most dangerous person on the face of the earth and you should protect yourself before you speak with me.”

Jennifer Standish (03:56):

Yeah, so we were introduced by David Masover because we were both on his podcasts and so Chris and I just had a nice lovely conversation and I said, “I have this idea about how to end cold calling.” And so I told him and then we spent two and a half hours on the phone.

Corey Frank (04:10):

Oh that’s nice.

Jennifer Standish (04:11):

And he said, “you need to get a provisional patent for this. You have to protect yourself and then we can build it because it’s a brilliant idea.” And I got off the phone thinking that I was going to be the next Elon Musk and I felt as if my life trajectory had just changed and it didn’t turn out quite as I had expected but the idea is still there.

Corey Frank (04:34):

Sure.

Jennifer Standish (04:34):

And who knows but I really think that what’s missing is we spend so much time on the sales side, becoming more efficient, trying to be more effective, working on bettering ourselves, coming up with a great cadence and all that stuff.

Jennifer Standish (04:48):

But nobody’s dealing with the prospect side and how they’re part of the problem. When we call these prospects, there are so many things that get in our way from reaching the prospects. Nobody’s dealing with them and their bad behavior and how they are costing their company’s money and how their gatekeepers are costing their businesses money and how somebody needs to tell these people or maybe it’s the CEO or the president, guys you need to start taking these calls. There’s a lot of reasons beyond why these sales people are calling you. It’s a great networking event. You have no idea why they’re calling.

Jennifer Standish (05:26):

It could revolutionize our company. How about karma? Are people cold called? Why don’t you need to pick up these cold calls? Because our people are cold calling. What goes around, comes around. You just never know. All of this types of reasons. Take these calls. What I would hope to happen is the number of calls that you were required to get through would go down. We wouldn’t need to be making all of these numbers. We wouldn’t need as many sales people out there hounding away. It would just facilitate business. We could-

Corey Frank (05:58):

And if I have it straight Jennifer, that… Chris, help correct me. I’m hearing you say if your message to the world, if your message to humanity is to accept and take more cold calls.

Jennifer Standish (06:13):

Yes. Take the call-

Corey Frank (06:14):

Take the calls.

Jennifer Standish (06:16):

Take the call.

Corey Frank (06:17):

That’s a great t-shirt.

Jennifer Standish (06:18):

And what I tell them whenever I present, I will have people come back a week or two later and say, “Jen, I didn’t think I would ever want to say this to somebody but I took a cold call and it turned out to be a great decision for my business.”

Corey Frank (06:35):

I love that.

Jennifer Standish (06:36):

Time and time and time again.

Corey Frank (06:38):

We had a guest on who’s a great friend of ours, his name is Robert Vera. He runs the Center For Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University and one of the things that he mentions a lot is that to take a phone call, to take a cold call especially, there’s a special intrapreneurship mindset that these folks have to have. Not an entrepreneurship but an intrapreneurship. So, Jennifer calls me and she’s going to give a face melter of a screenplay of a pitch and it moves me but still I got to think of my boss, Chris Beall here whether he tolerates this culture of intrapreneurship of change, of improvement of kaizen, et cetera. What do you think about that, Chris? Is it our job as cold callers to arm them, to preempt the message that a boss will say to stifle the great message and emotion that you just stimulated and was a catalyst for me to say, “Hey boss, I got an idea,” versus. “I get a lot of crappy phone cold calls”

Chris Beall (07:45):

Right.

Corey Frank (07:46):

And I may not be that motivated to make change.

Chris Beall (07:51):

Well, I think that there’s two kinds of change that you’re dealing with. So one is very private which is the choice to attend a meeting and when we think about the psychology of a cold call, a cold call is always a mistake not by the person making a call but by the person answering the call. It’s very rare that they answer the call thinking this could be a really cool cold call, I’m so ready for this, right? And so what they’re really doing is going, huh, I don’t know what this is and for some reason I feel like I got to pick it up and then they realize it’s a sales rep and then the defenses go up and then we have an issue, right? So I think then this is a fascinating area to me. In fact, I just had a post golf meeting two days ago with a marketing expert.

Chris Beall (08:42):

And she said, “Hey, I’m helping a company out that’s doing account based marketing, ABM.” So ABM basically is like Market Dominance Guys, basically we say make a list. It’s like okay so make a list, right? And she asked me this question. She said, “how can cold calling work together with ABM? It doesn’t seem like it can because in ABM we have to know lots about each individual target on the list before we have a conversation.” And so I think the first order of business for the cold caller is actually a psychological order of business which is can you get somebody curious enough to take a meeting and nothing else. And all that requires is that they be a human being. It doesn’t matter what business they’re in. As long as you can say something that A doesn’t cause them to reject you. I don’t mean reject you as a person.

Chris Beall (09:34):

Just reject the idea of taking a meeting with anybody you’re associated with but B has to resonate with them while not answering the question. So, that’s thing number one. Thing number two, the intrapreneurship thing I think comes into play once you’re in the discovery meeting or the breakthrough sharing meeting or whatever you want to call it because that’s when you’re on stable ground. That’s when you’re in the confessional. If it’s run correctly and in the confessional, you can discover the answer to the question.

Chris Beall (10:02):

Does it make sense to do the next thing, right? Whatever the next thing is. Does it make sense for Corey to come talk to Chris or does it make more sense for Corey to go do the test drive? And de-risk it a little bit through direct experience? Corey can make the decision but it’s funny how this relates to cold calling. Cold calling is essentially a mechanism to allow enough human trust, human interaction and curiosity to be generated such that two people will get together for a little bit of time and explore a possibility and that’s it and I think the key to cold calling is to know that’s it and not much else.

Corey Frank (10:46):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jennifer Standish (10:48):

Can I add something?

Corey Frank (10:49):

Of course.

Jennifer Standish (10:50):

I also think that we have to accept that a certain percentage of the population doesn’t like to be sold to and they will shut down meetings to their own detriment but there’s nothing you can say to them. They just will not be sold to and we just have to accept that but everybody else is somewhat willing. Some people are more willing than others. I’ve had situations where I get no objection. I get, “sure I’d love to, absolutely. I’m available in this particular date and time” and it’s super easy. Other times there’s a little bit of pushback but then people are amenable to scheduling appointments. So we just have to accept that some people are more willing to meet with people and are interested in what people have to-

Corey Frank (12:37):

Jen, how much of that do you think and you’ve seen, you’ve probably experienced bad cold calls, you’ve probably from your background, taught many folks to learn this skill. You have, right? A voice. We have a handful of folks on this podcast, all brilliant folks of course present company included with me and Chris but a lot of the folks that are on these podcasts of ours, right? They have a voice that can just melt butter and they have a command of their tonality, their stammer, their pregnant pauses, is that something that you see as correlating to your success?

Jennifer Standish (13:15):

Yes.

Corey Frank (13:15):

When you’re on-

Jennifer Standish (13:18):

And I’ll tell you cold calling trainers do not spend enough time working with people on their delivery because it’s 80% of your success as a cold caller. A great script, hits all the points with a terrible delivery will get no appointments but a great delivery with a mediocre script will still get you appointments. Absolutely.

Chris Beall (13:41):

But write that one down. So this is actually why we do Flight School. Flight School is about learning to manage your voice under pressure because it’s one thing to learn in some role play but then under pressure, away it goes and you tighten up and I have an analogy I’ve used it before here. I’ll use it again. So in the next room over there I have this wonderful Kurzweil electronic piano and it’s got all these beautiful voices and stuff and there’s a song that I play most evenings for Helen and I play other stuff too but I play for my fiance, right? She’s been a guest on the show so go check her out anybody who wants to do that and I know full well that she thinks that I am a very good piano player and a pretty passable singer but I’m also pretty sure if somebody walked in the room while I was playing that I was sure was a real piano player or worse, a real piano player and a real singer.

Chris Beall (14:46):

I would suddenly suck to the degree that even Helen would know it even though she’d be too nice to say anything about it and that command of your voice under pressure is the essence of being able to cold call. Helen and I listened to Cheryl Turner once for about 20 conversations and I asked her, “what’d you think?” As Helen’s not a cold caller of any stripe and she said, “what’s amazing is the emotional pivots and they happen in split seconds and so she knows what she’s going to do, but then she does what she has to do with her voice.” And I thought that was a really good phrase. She knows what she’s going to do but then she does what she has to do.

Jennifer Standish (15:30):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (15:30):

And that’s it.

Jennifer Standish (15:31):

It’s the mental agility.

Chris Beall (15:32):

Yeah.

Jennifer Standish (15:33):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (15:34):

How do you teach that to… I’m a new grad, Jennifer and I was a history major, liberal arts major, communications major. I’m going to land on your floor. Maybe I’m a middle child so maybe a little bit more introverted, right? Chris has some theories on that in a minute but how do you draw it out to somebody because these are big bad strangers, people who hang up on me and they have teeth and they can ruin my career and they can pull up my LinkedIn and they’re going to track me down on social media. What do I do with all this stuff here before I make a phone call?

Jennifer Standish (16:07):

Well, I’m an extreme introvert and I can do this and I think right there I would say well, we got to talk about your mindset because if that’s the way you’re going into this, yes, you’re going to have problems. If you think everybody’s going to hang up on you, everybody’s going to be nasty to you, that is exactly what you’re going to get. But if you believe to your core that your product or service can help people. If you have integrity, if you’re calling because you believe that you can help people and you do your homework but if you do your homework and make sure that you’re calling the right people, you’re not calling everyone under the sun. Nobody likes to receive irrelevant calls, right?

Jennifer Standish (16:48):

You come up with a targeted list and you’re calling with the motivation of wanting to help. You’re not here to sell. You’re wanting to introduce yourself and have a conversation that you’re going to sound very different and sometimes I can’t make somebody sound different and I will send them to a vocal coach. Sometimes it doesn’t help and there’s very little I can do but I can always start with a mindset and I can sit down and go through all the things that they’re bringing to the table that are going to get in the way and I can help them. I can’t do the work for them.

Corey Frank (17:25):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jennifer Standish (17:27):

And then we’ll see. But a lot of times when I’ll say you’re allowed to call a business during business hours to discuss business, I give you permission. Right then and there they’re off to the races. They’re like, that’s all I needed. Just give me permission. That’s all I needed. Other times it’s when you told me that I really help people, that’s all I needed. I do help people and I sell cleaning supplies but I keep people safe and healthy and my customers would be lost without me because when you really look at it, all of the businesses all over the world, we are all ultimately trying to help people.

Corey Frank (18:05):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jennifer Standish (18:06):

Even paper, look at paper. What is paper? Well paper communicates ideas to people. It’s all about people. So if you can trace your company and what it does back to how it helps humanity, then you’re selling with a purpose, a noble purpose-

Corey Frank (18:21):

That’s beautiful.

Jennifer Standish (18:22):

And then people can get behind it. So I tell sales managers all the time, where are your case studies? You need to be telling these people every single day look at what we did, look at how we helped these people. Look at all the wonderful things we’re doing. That’s what we are as an organization. We need to be proud of ourselves.

Chris Beall (18:39):

Well, so Donnie Crawford and I are going to be doing a webinar two days from now about how to conduct a breakthrough sharing session. What people should call a discovery call. I’m not really fond of the word discovery call even though I love discovery as you all know Corey, I’m into it but it means I’m going to discover something about you that lets me make you buy my product.

Corey Frank (18:59):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (19:00):

And that’s a disingenuous approach to that next step. If you think of it as a breakthrough sharing call, I called you because I truly believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough and I want to share it with you because I think it has potential. At least this meeting has potential for you to learn something that’ll change your life. We may never do business together and this to me is the critical break point that Donnie and I are going to go over.

Chris Beall (19:26):

The mindset break point is to get to the essence of the mindset, to say the following. In the event we never do business together, as I have to sincerely believe in the potential value of the meeting that I’m offering not the product but the meeting, to this human being not their company but to them, in the case where we will never do your business together and if I believe that sincerely then I can take what I’ll call the Scott Webb mindset which his mindset is, I envision this person is about to step in front of a speeding bus and I may have to hit them hard in the middle of the chest to keep them from stepping in front of that bus but I know of the bus is coming and they don’t. So it’s my responsibility to get them to the meeting because that’s where something magical can happen.

Chris Beall (20:20):

And when he adopted that mindset he went from a world class but to him mediocre 30% conversion rate and Jennifer was calling for me yesterday, kindly to set meetings for me and she set at a 50% rate on a list she’d never heard of before and God knows it wasn’t. I don’t need its best list in the world actually, a little hard to get ahold of him too. It’ll dial the connective, I don’t know 131 to one today or maybe worse and yet she said 50%. Well, when Scott adopted this mindset working at HUB International as the head of sales, he’s the big guy there. He went from 30% to a hundred percent overnight.

Jennifer Standish (21:01):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (21:01):

Not overnight but in the next hour and he stayed there ever since. He converts a hundred percent of his cold conversations to meetings and he says the essence is to truly remind himself.

Jennifer Standish (21:15):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (21:15):

He’s saving their life.

Jennifer Standish (21:16):

Oh yeah. I tell people all the time, imagine you had the antidote to COVID. You would be relentless. You would find the person who you needed to talk to, who could distribute that to as many people as possible, you would do your homework and you would not stop calling. You would not stop calling because this thing could save lives. It’s that sort of purpose and you would be annoying but you would be okay.

Chris Beall (21:45):

When you hit somebody in the middle of the chest. I’ve actually done that by the way, when Scott said that thing about the bus, it turned out once in Des Moines, Iowa, there was a bus coming and it was coming in the fog and I did reflex without thinking and I hit somebody very hard in the middle of the chest and kept him from stepping off the curb. So when he said that to me, it actually made me shutter.

Jennifer Standish (22:06):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (22:08):

It’s a little emotional just to remember that moment.

Corey Frank (22:10):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (22:11):

So this is a big deal. When we have a breakthrough, it doesn’t have to actually be something that they end up taking advantage of, the knowledge of it is of value.

Jennifer Standish (22:21):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (22:21):

And that’s all we’re offering. It’s that knowledge.

Corey Frank (22:24):

I love that it really comes about. We’ve talked about this several times Chris, right? The belief, the insistence mindset. You can only have an insistent mindset when you have firm belief in the value certainly of what you’re selling, right? To your earlier point Jen, right? If I’m a new grad and I have all these boogeyman fears or worse, let’s say I’m apathetic to what it is. I think I’ve shared this a few times on the podcast here is one of the stories, one of my great mentors years ago taught me when we were first starting one of our first companies is about a guy who’s just minding his own business and walking past a construction site and there’s five guys laying bricks and he goes to the first guy and says, “Hey, what are you doing?” He’s like, “laying brick.” Goes to the second.

Corey Frank (23:10):

“What are you doing?” He’s like, “I’m building a wall”, goes to the third guy, “what are you doing?” He’s like, “making eight bucks an hour”, goes to the fourth guy, “what are you doing?” He’s like, “I’m building a cathedral.” And the fifth guy, “what are you doing?” “I’m saving men’s souls.” All right. So arguably the latter two construction workers are the ones that you want as team members, you know that they’re going to pay a little bit particular more attention to the runoff and maybe the cleanup and maybe the hard right corners of the walls. The first three pedestrians, tourists in the space apathetic. Yeah, I work for Saunders Prospecting here and well, what do you do? Well, I make 18 bucks an hour. I get paid X amount per appointment. Working my way through law school but generally not the folks that you want to put on any campaign and certainly they’re conversion and rates will go less than pedestrian, I would imagine.

Jennifer Standish (24:07):

Right. So I would tell hiring managers to be very careful and I would also tell candidates be very careful. You could be a great salesperson, a great cold caller if you align yourself with organizations in which you believe, right? And I work with a lot of commercial insurance producers and I tell them, do you know that business could not continue without you? And you start them the story about the history of commercial insurance and you keep roofs over people’s heads. You keep people employed. We wouldn’t be able to do business without you, right? And then they start thinking oh my God, absolutely. So be very careful who you work for and if you don’t work out one place, don’t give up, try someplace else. Think of really about what is in your-

Chris Beall (24:58):

Wow. I love it and Scott, by the way, his thing is commercial insurance and I know he believes he’s potentially saving these companies lives.

Jennifer Standish (25:09):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (25:09):

Saving those jobs.

Jennifer Standish (25:11):

Yep.

Chris Beall (25:11):

I look at ConnectAndSell somebody ask me what do you guys do?We are determined to pull the cork out of the bottle that keeps the value of the innovation economy on the inside when it could be port freely on the outside where people could make use of it. We all rely on innovations. They’re stuck inside of companies and they need to get out for all of us and that’s what we do.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How do you de-risk your company? Marketing and business consultant John Orban and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, wind up their four-part conversation by offering our listeners a great deal of advice about how to balance potential risk. These three sales scholars delve into the potential problems of forecasting your company’s success, the possible perils of determining the market value of your sales pipeline, and the pitfalls of the practice of inflating your sales and revenue prior to a reporting period, which is known as “stuffing the channel.” “I give myself good advice, but I seldom follow it,” admits Lewis Carroll’s famous character, Alice. In this vein, Chris warns that being in love with your brilliant idea for a business can make you into your great idea’s zombie — ignoring all you’ve learned about de-risking. Save yourself from that fate by listening to this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”

The complete poem by Lewis Carroll is here. 

About Our Guest

John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals.

—-more—-

Full episode transcript below:

John Orban (01:21):

All the games that were played to make sales, you would not believe the stuff that went on. And quite frankly, I think it’s one of the reasons why a number of insurance companies went out of business, because of all the games that their sales reps were doing.

Chris Beall (01:36):

Well, I think that-

John Orban (01:36):

Think that question compensation system is a problem.

Chris Beall (01:39):

It’s a very interesting problem, right? We don’t compensate our, our software engineers on how many lines of code they wrote this week and then have them go out and fake up some lines of code that … you know? Okay, I’m going to do this. Then I had the smartness to delete it and add it, delete it … Oh, I got enough code, right? I found that person who was alive and could sign that insurance policy. We don’t do the at anywhere else in business. And it’s a hangover. And it’s a hangover, I believe, from the fundamental nature of manufacturing-driven capitalism, manufacturing core capitalism, where we came up with a trick. It sounds like the ultimate trick, which is, take raw materials, use machines and turn them into something, therefore allowing money to turn into more money in a very predictable way, but comes with a problem.

Chris Beall (02:30):

You got to dump the finished goods inventory somewhere. Otherwise it piles up. So, how often do we have to dump it or what’s our flow rate to dump it? Well, our flow rate to dump it is determined by the flow rate of our factory and our buffer for finished its inventory. So, we do a bunch of things. Here’s a gaming thing that people do at sales called stuffing the channel. So, we expand the buffer by getting channel partners to take on inventory that they may or may not be able to sell. Why do we do that? To make the number today. Why do we do that? Because the number today allows us to invest in the factory at very low interest rates, maybe even negative interest rates to borrow that money, because we don’t have to borrow it, we got it from customers in advance and therefore we can make our factory bigger and it can dump our widgets up into finished goods inventory.

Chris Beall (03:21):

And at some point the channel, as they say, barfs it back up on us. That’s a thing that the channel does. This is no longer what’s interesting in the world. What’s interesting in the world now is in  B2B, is helping companies acquire capabilities that let them run better or grow more cost-efficient, or capital efficient way or more smoothly or less brain damage or less unethically or whatever it is they’re trying to do. That’s what we’re selling. And there is no finished goods inventory. There’s nothing to dump. And so, we compensate salespeople as though they’re dumping or as though there’s stuff the channel, let’s face it, as though they’re stuffing the channel, and we admire them and call it President’s Club if they stuff the channel enough this year, because they got a club and nobody next year it’s like, oh he had a bad year.

Chris Beall (04:11):

No. The channel barfed up his stuffing back onto it. Right? That’s what we’re looking at.

Corey Frank (04:18):

That’s right, that’s right.

Chris Beall (04:19):

And then it’s a funny thing. I don’t see it changing soon because, frankly, the very best sales people get to ride on that surfboard. And it’s okay for them that they get paid immense amounts of money for being really good. Even though you could pay them the same immense amount of money and they would sell just as much or more, and you could trust them. You could just go, “Hey, I’m just going to pay you this.” Like we do with CEOs, right? CEOs are considered often to be the top salesperson in the company. We don’t ever pay commissions to … At least I don’t get one. Maybe I should go talk to my board about a little commission work on the side. So, it’s a very interest situation in which we’re still, I would say, early in the evolutionary process of coming to terms with postindustrial [crosstalk 00:05:12] … it’s not even capitalism anymore. It’s just postindustrial innovation economy. We’re coming [crosstalk 00:05:19].

Corey Frank (05:18):

We’re having Matt from [inaudible 00:05:20], was it next week, I believe? He’s going to be on the show, and one of his associates. And I was talking with Robert Vera, who’s been on this show as well, Chris, as you know. It’s a later episode, John, so as you catch up through the last couple of years, you’ll eventually get to Robert Vera. And, Chris, you’ve said this quote too, and it’s interesting to see how kindred minds here think alike. It’s that, you know, to create this de-risk revenue generation machine, should be the goal of every board and every CEO and every CRO, a de-risk revenue generation machine. And as we talk about the math of sales. Again, your colleague Jerry Hill posted a great article today on the math of sales.

Corey Frank (05:58):

I’m a big fan of math of sales, [inaudible 00:06:00], we have a community. James Thornburg, ConnectAndSell as a weapon has enabled you to take the emotion, don’t get emotional about math, and realize where you are as identifying the constraint in the system, and then focusing on that constraint in the system. But you have zero risk, right, Chris? In pursuing this math of sales, this methodology, as you speak, because if it doesn’t pan out, what are you out?

Chris Beall (06:29):

[crosstalk 00:06:29] Right. Exactly. It actually, it’s really funny. In the innovation economy, fundamentally, the only that we’re risking is the time it takes to find out if anybody wants a solution to the problem that they’re having, that is along the lines that we think we’re capable of producing. It’s so low risk and it’s so fast, it can be done with one or two people in almost any size market. It can be done in less than two weeks, normally one week you in any size market and it’s the step everybody skips. [crosstalk 00:07:02] And the reason they skip it is, think of the process, right? You have this idea. The idea is a brilliant idea. At least it seems that way to you. It takes over your mind. You think about it day and night, whatever that brilliant idea is, you think about it. All of us who do this kind of work, have this problem.

Chris Beall (07:21):

We come up with something. I got a great idea. Let’s go use ConnectAndSell to call folks and help them see the wisdom of donating money to X, Y, or Z. It could be a great idea and I could think it all the way through, and I could get these kind of people to do it. The idea takes me over, it parisitizes me, it zombifies me. I am now that idea’s zombie, and it controls my life for a little while. So, now, is the next natural step to go and say, huh, I wonder if anybody will buy this? I really want to be out of it within a week if they, if they won’t buy it. Rationally, great idea. Emotionally, there’s a kind of an ant for instance, and it gets parisitized by a microorganism. I think it’s actually a fungus, perhaps.

Chris Beall (08:13):

And that microorganism, it’s one of these real little tiny things, lives inside the ant. But it needs to be eaten by a bird in order to go through the rest of its life cycle to reproduce. So, what does it do? Well, it takes over the mind of the ant, the brain of the ant. And it says, you know what? I think, what would really feel really good right now, it’d be to climb this blade of grass. I want to go up I am an upwardly mobile ant. I just feel the urge suddenly, right? It’s like, I feel the urge to take this great idea out. And then the ant gets to the top of the blade to grass. It goes, you know, being head up just doesn’t work for me anymore, I want to be head down, feel the ant blood rush to my little [crosstalk 00:08:59] hanging here by my hind legs and my [crosstalk 00:09:01] legs.

Chris Beall (09:02):

I wonder why my abdomen turned so red and looking like … oh, I’ll ignore, that big red berry of an [crosstalk 00:09:09], that won’t cause a problem. And then a bird comes down and eats the ant and the parasite gets what it wants, right? So, we have to avoid being that ant when we have been zombified by the idea that takes us as entrepreneurs. And how do we do that? Well, it’s hard. This is why we should always do business with somebody else, but we need partner in business that says, “Let’s take a look.” Take a look, and the way we take a look is to go out into our hypothetical market, turn it into an actual list, talk to people on that list with our breakthrough script, that attempts to set meetings for our brilliant idea. Look at a simple number, which is what is our appointment setting rate for those meetings, and if it’s above threshold, then we’re okay. But otherwise, thank God we didn’t get to the top of that blade of grass and turn our shiny berry red butt up into the sky and let a bird eat us.

John Orban (10:09):

That’s right. That’s right.

Chris Beall (10:10):

Because that’s what happens.

Corey Frank (10:11):

That’s exactly right.

John Orban (10:12):

Yeah, that’s amazing stuff.

Corey Frank (10:14):

Yeah. So, John, you’ve been in sales for a while and you’ve sold all kinds of products and now you’re in the art world. So, you’re using another side of the brain a little bit more on a full-time basis, a consultant advisor to many upcoming artists and galleries, et cetera. So, if I’m selling art versus Chris and I are in the software business, the services business. But I’m selling art. A lot of these same rules apply?

John Orban (10:40):

It’s interesting because I’m still trying to learn what’s involved with that. And I happened to hear on one of your podcasts that Susan was a former gallery owner. I don’t know whether she still isn’t in gallery or not, I’d love to talk with her about some of the things that she’s experienced but I think most people would agree that art is pretty much of an emotional purchase. You see a picture and it reminds you of vacation you took, or it reminds you of your grandfather or something, and you make that emotional connection and you get it. Over the last, I don’t know, 10 or so years I’ve tried to analyze, why is the Mona Lisa such a amazing picture and how come we’ve only painted one of those in, what, 550 years or something like that? It doesn’t seem to make sense. But they had something going on back in the Renaissance.

John Orban (11:29):

And it’s not just the Renaissance. You take the 1800’s, up until about 1920 when art just went south, except for people that we’re still doing, well, what I consider to be real art, it’s always been that emotional connection. It’s the interplay of color. And sometimes it’s a subject matter, but I’m still trying to figure all that out. And in the meantime, I’m trying to learn to paint myself and get better at it and see if I can crack that code, then I’ll do the next Mona Lisa, that’s my project for right now, but we’ll see how that all works out.

Corey Frank (12:05):

Well, I think why this is so … here you are, you’re a master of your craft. You’ve been in sales for years and years. You’ve sold millions and millions of dollars worth of products to thousands of prospects. Chris, you have the same, taking companies public and raise money and [inaudible 00:12:21] residents and all this stuff. And I’ve made my share phone calls too. And I think as a science guy, Chris, you say, “Hey, what makes a law, a law is that it’s a constant.” Entropy or thermodynamics or math of sales. But where this is still so elusive is that, when you talk about trust, when you talk about engendering trust, you’re talking about building curiosity. We know it when we see it like good art. I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it.

Corey Frank (12:52):

Of course, with the math of sales, I can actually know it when I see it too, you look at stats constantly of dial to connects for companies and look at their chart. But what we’re talking about isn’t quite a law, but it’s also not a theory, correct? What would you call this kind of tweener period we are, what we’re trying to build here in market dominance?

Chris Beall (13:12):

There is an underlying theory, but it’s not and hard and fast. You can’t go in and say in every single situation, this is what is happening. But in business, we don’t get to do that anyway. We’re not trying to make something happen every time. We always are dealing with ignorance of the future. That’s the nature of complex systems, our ignorance is vast, very, very vast. The only way we know how to manage ignorance in large is through portfolio theory. That is we have more little bets. More little bets are safer than one big bet, if we can decouple the little bets. Now, it’s very tricky to know that you’ve decoupled your bets, by the way. I thought that, for instance, my floor finishing company, that I decoupled my bets. And then I out that at midnight, on November 1st, every year, they turn on the big old furnace in every hospital in the Midwest and the humidity goes down and the airflow goes up and wow, that’s interesting.

Chris Beall (14:07):

Those things all happen at the same time. And so, if you think your bets are decoupled and I thought mine were, you can find yourself failing everywhere at the same time. So, even that’s hard. Portfolio theory is hard to apply because it’s very difficult to get under the covers and say, these are truly decoupled, they’re decoupled from big moves in the economy, whatever it happens to be. The way we manage risk, therefore, this is part of the theory is, we go fast. So, before bad things can happen, good things are done. So, the market dominance theory says I’m going to decouple my bets by spreading them across many individual conversations within my hypothesized market. And then I’m going to move fast enough that even if they turn out to be coupled in a disastrous way, I don’t go broke because I know that’s my state I’m trying to avoid is the broke state. The going bust. I used to be a professional gambler, as you know. And the number one rule as a professional gambler is you don’t go bust.

Chris Beall (16:09):

Because then you’re out of you’re out of the big game. So, everything you’re doing has to do with matching your bet size against your bankroll size, and running a portfolio of bets over time. And you got to do it fast before bad things happen externally. So, it’s more of a system built around those two big ideas that, look, everything is risky. Big stuff that can go big is really risky. Therefore, start small, go fast and use really tight feedback loops, like Boyd, the fighter pilot John Boyd. He’s the guy who revolutionized modern warfare by coming up with this notion of the OODA loop. So, the OODA loop says, you’re going to orient yourself, then you’re going to observe, then you’re going to decide, then you’re going to act. The shorter of the time cycle of your OOTA loop, the lower your risk is in making one bad decision that’s going to cost your life.

Chris Beall (17:06):

Because you have time to do it again, to orient yourself again, observe again, deciding in and act again. So, what the market dominance theory basically says is it’s not really about sales. It says in a world of uncertainty, speed to understanding of something no one else knows, that’s a value. And that is this list of people will actually buy this thing. And therefore, it’ll get cheaper and faster and easier to get more and more of them to buy it. The faster you can do that and get to market dominance in any size market, the safer you are, because market dominance is more predictable than individual sales, which are more predictable than market acceptance. And so you come up with proxies for the future, like, hey, let me talk to you about a meeting. Oh, if you take the meeting, that’s a proxy for you buying the product because it’s linearly related, mathematically in a portfolio basis, to folks buying the product. That’s actually the underlying … John, you said, this is almost like a physicist would say unified field theory.

Chris Beall (18:10):

It’s actually the application of gambling theory, which is universal in the world of ignorance, ignorance theory, I’d call it, to the realities that we face in the world where we’re trying to provide value. [crosstalk 00:18:24]

John Orban (18:23):

Yeah. I used to handicap horse races. So, And I only used to bet on long shots, anything that was eight to one or higher. So … yeah.

Chris Beall (18:33):

Yeah, yeah. That’s really funny. The guy who built the Museum Of New And Old in Hobart, Tasmania, built that fortune on two things. One is, he started out as a blackjack player. And then he did the horse racing handicapping thing all on long shots because there’s an emotional reason long shots are mathematically superior. You have to endure the fact that you’re generally not, it’s not going to pay off, but when it does, it pays big.

John Orban (19:01):

And you only have to wait three minutes, about, [crosstalk 00:19:04] to find out whether it’s going to pay off or not.

Chris Beall (19:06):

The cycle times are quick. You’ll notice, by the way, that without them admitting it, a lot of people who are doing innovative work in business often have a gambling background. Sean McLaren himself has got a background in new Orleans that he can talk about, and I won’t, way, way back. I’m not going to say that Sean could have done something longer ago than my life, but it’s entirely possible. But I’m such a young guy that I think it’s entirely possible. So, yeah, what’s funny is the rest of this is, okay, what are the universals? Well, the universals are in B to B, people are afraid of buying stuff because they could lose their career. That’s pretty much universal. Do I find people who will buy stuff because it’s intriguing to them. Sure. And they’re called tech enthusiasts.

Chris Beall (19:54):

Do I need to identify them and avoid thinking that they’re part of the market? Yes. Is that easy or hard? It’s hard because I love my product. And therefore, when they buy its idea, I feel loved and therefore I’m attracted to it. So, what do I have to do? Put up barriers to going in that direction. What kind of barriers? Well, preferably having a business partner, says, remember when we talked about tech enthusiasts? Yeah. Mary over there is one of those, let’s not sell to Mary. Or we’re so early, we don’t know if our stuff will work. So, let’s go sell to Mary, but let’s not mistake Mary for the market. When do we know we’re dealing with an electron and when do we know we’re with a big old, heavy proton? And when do we know it’s a neutron and when do we know the quirks are, you got to categorize in order to make good decisions, but that’s about it.

Chris Beall (20:43):

That is really about it. And the reason we talk so much about trust, is trust is the hard part, because you’ve got to trust that you’ve got the goods and the staying power to not have to make this deal. So, [crosstalk 00:21:01] that somebody can trust you as a partner collaborator very early in the relationship, from the first seven seconds. And that is hard for people to come to for a lot of reasons. We talked about [Eric Honhower 00:21:17] climbing the LCAP thing. [crosstalk 00:21:21],

Corey Frank (21:21):

So, nine or 10, I think it was? [crosstalk 00:21:23].

John Orban (21:22):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (21:23):

Imagine the level of trust he has to have in him self to even try that stuff, much less to make that one move. And it wasn’t the slab, which is the one that freaks me out, because I have bad experiences trying to down climb slabs in Yosemite, but it was that karate kick move. Anybody wants to go back and watch Free Solo if you want to get what got me, and I know of what I speak to some degree, as a former big wall climber [crosstalk 00:21:54]-

Corey Frank (21:54):

Alex Honnold. [crosstalk 00:21:54]

Chris Beall (21:54):

[inaudible 00:21:54] Alex Honnold. So, Alex has got to make a move that’s the one thing you never want to do as a climber, it’s called a committed move. He has to trust an outcome that he actually knows he’s not in control of. And it’s the one where he decides of all the moves to be made there, that karate kick move, that just looks so bizarre when he does it is actually the one with the lowest risk of failure in the circumstances in which he anticipated finding himself with regard to how he would feel, how his body would feel, how his mind would feel at that point in the climb. And he chose that from his portfolio, just like we have to do in sales. We have to choose stuff that isn’t always going to work. Now, he was going without a rope. In sales, we pretty much have a rope. It’s very rare that we’re betting our entire career on a deal.

Chris Beall (22:46):

I’ve I’ve done it a couple times myself, staying detached and just being on the the other company’s side, the other person’s side throughout a long deal that’s fraught, and you’re going to go out of business if you don’t get it done.

Corey Frank (23:00):

But zero. [crosstalk 00:23:02]

Chris Beall (23:02):

That’s hard. That’s harder to do, that’s true mastery when you can do that stuff. But most of us in sales don’t have to do that.

Corey Frank (23:08):

No, but you mentioned … what’s your law in gambling, right? Never go to never go to zero. And you certainly it’s a little tougher today because if I raise money in an A round, a B round and I’m not going in that trajectory, I don’t necessarily have that concern of going to zero, do I? Because I can always get more money. I can always do it down [crosstalk 00:23:29].

Chris Beall (23:29):

Yeah, yeah. Let me talk about this for, just for a moment, because this is something people … [crosstalk 00:23:35] people think they’re de-risking their company by taking venture capital. I’ve mentioned this before in the show. Read the docs, read the corporate text, read them in detail and ask yourself one simple question about every sentence. Is this sentence to protect them or me?

Chris Beall (23:54):

Just add them up. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, add them up. Put them on the scale. Do it page by page, anyway you want to do it, you’ll see they’re professionals at something. And if you read it in detail, you’ll find out their professionals at salvaging value from businesses that are being thrown away. That’s what their professionals at. So, you have decided in order to de-risk your company, to go and go into business with somebody whose primary outcome is salvaging your business. If you think about it that way you might have a different point of view about risk. Another way you can get your venture capital is, find the smallest possible market you can imagine that’s a true market and go take it, and let that be your venture capital. That will de-risk your company.

Corey Frank (24:41):

That’s right. I think we talk about the gambling, right? One of the books … it’s on my list I think I sent you a few weeks ago, John, is against the odds or it’s against all odds. I think it’s Against The Gods.

Chris Beall (24:53):

Against The Gods, I love that. [crosstalk 00:24:56]

Corey Frank (24:55):

Against the Gods, by Peter Bernstein. Yes. And he talks about that in the 12th, 13th century, right around there, the concept … you’re mathematician Chris, you probably know this better is, the Hindu Arabic numbering system finally came and replaced letters as a symbol of value, right? And then this consequential concept of zero was finally established. And then this concept of zero was established, so the tools and mindset were finally in place for algebra and accounting and math of market domination, et cetera. But that concept of zero seems to be lost a little bit in folks that raise a little bit too much VC. Sometimes I think-

Chris Beall (25:40):

They think they’re climbing with a rope.

Corey Frank (25:42):

They think they’re climbing with a rope. And the other one that I was reminded the other day, I was just talking about with Robert Vera about this was, there’s a weather forecaster in charge of weather forecasting for the United States Air Force in World War II, right? A lot of weather patterns, hey, they just came across Normandy and they’ve got to figure out how we can get to Berlin as quickly as possible and we need air cover. And so, this particular gentleman was in charge of making predictions for the weather over the following few months. And this weather forecaster quickly realized that these long-range forecasts that he was putting together were effectively useless. No better than pulling numbers out of a hat.

Corey Frank (26:22):

And when he argued, like the dutiful, loyal soldier he was, up the chain of command, when he argued that they should be discontinued, the reply came back, “The commanding general is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.” And I think when we have folks again, like our colleague Gerry Hill put out his LinkedIn post today that, hey, we’re in the season of kickoffs this year, right? There’s all kinds of company corporate kickoffs and raise the bar race for revenue, swing for the fences, whatever cliche vapid kickoff they’re going to have as a theme, there’s going to be forecasts. And if there’s no forecast without math, the math of sales, the concept of zero, you’re living off a little bit of hopium there, it seems.

Chris Beall (27:14):

It’s a funny world. It’s a funny world in the sense that when you take somebody else’s money, you’re taking it in exchange for a story. So, when you’re raising money … and by the way, anybody who listens to this and thinks, oh Chris, doesn’t like VCs or whatever. That’s not true. I actually think investors provide all sorts of wonderful services [crosstalk 00:27:35]-

Corey Frank (27:34):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (27:35):

… I’m just saying, keep your, keep your damned eyes open for certain things that are universal out there. When you’re raising money, investors want to see story of how it could be if everything works. If they need an answer to this question, which is, is this worth investing in? Because if it’s not worth investing in, if it works, it’s certainly not worth investing in if it doesn’t work. So, they would just want to know not whether it’s going to work or not, but if it works, will it have turned out to be a good investment?

Chris Beall (28:07):

That’s actually the first order question. Most things, the answer is no, even if they worked, they wouldn’t have been worth investing in. My mother used to have this phrase, if something’s not worth doing, it’s certainly not worth doing well. So, most mothers didn’t tell the kids this, but my mother had a special way with words, shall we say, some of which involved the desert where you could bury a child. So, now that’s something that gets confusing to folks because then when they raise the money and now here, what was put on paper was, is it going to be worth doing if it works? Now the question isn’t that anymore, now the question is, really, how do we want to balance financial risk and potential return? That’s a completely different question. And you need forecasts that are a little shorter term, because now you have questions like, are we going to run out of money? Do we want to run out of money?

Chris Beall (29:04):

All sorts of questions like that come into play. And so, you switch. It’s like switching from that hard flat voice where you throw yourself under the bus, I know I’m an interruption. Now you have a new purpose. Come along with me, right?

Corey Frank (29:18):

Yes, yeah.

Chris Beall (29:18):

It’s, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? Those are different conversations for different purposes. And I think folks get confused by it. The weather forecast has a similar role. The weather forecast needs to … not, like, are we going to decide to fly or not based on this, whatever it happens to be, it’s in general, how are we going to allocate and stage our resources in case things turn out a certain way so we can react at lower cost and shorter cycle time? I think people really, really overplay proactivity in business.

Chris Beall (29:54):

They just wildly overplay it. The primary thing you have in business is your ability to react. Could you proact your way through COVID in December of 2019?

Corey Frank (30:06):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (30:09):

Right? You can’t. Who made it well through COVID? Those who had buffers that were against some bad things, they didn’t put all their chips on the same table, so to speak. And then those who reacted really, really fast and reacted fast in ways that were not overreactions, Cause overreacting is a bad idea too. Reaction is undervalued, I believe, in the world of business. It is the number one thing you’ve got to be able to do is take your forecast, take your plans, take your whatever, and go, okay, that was nice. Now what? How quickly can we think through the current situation and what is the one thing that we should do today in order to stay alive? Or in order to take advantage of an opportunity, or in order to snap the mouse trap. One or the other.

John Orban (31:03):

Yeah. I love [crosstalk 00:31:04]-

Corey Frank (31:04):

Religion, right? As a Catholic, we have it in The Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” not give us our Q4’s bread.

John Orban (31:12):

That’s right.

Corey Frank (31:13):

401(k) or … even God, the son of m said, “Listen, today is what I want you to focus on.” Right?

John Orban (31:20):

Right,

Chris Beall (31:21):

Right. Right.

John Orban (31:22):

Well, I also love that concept you talk about how the SDRs and BDRs should be on the balance sheet. Because that gives you that extra hedge to be able to react as well. Because that’s a powerful concept, it seems to me. And how you want to value that, I don’t know. But that is definitely an asset that’s underappreciated, I think.

Chris Beall (31:44):

Yeah. And I think your pipeline should be on your balance sheet too and it’s not. It is, but it’s in a subtle way. If you actually ask a financial expert, where’s the pipeline? It’s like, what pipeline? Well, where is it? Is it an asset? Oh, I don’t know. Well, let me do this thought experiment. I’ll take your pipeline away and make it mine, it’ll now be my pipeline. I get all those relationships, I get to sell to them, I get your products to sell to them, won’t this be great? What are you going to charge me for that? Are you going to give it to me for free, your whole pipeline? Oh no. Okay, so what’s the price. Well, whatever that price is, that should be on the balance sheet? Because that is the market value of your pipeline. You only have maybe one buyer yourself and maybe you don’t have any sellers, you don’t feel like selling your pipeline, but when you sell your company, it’s right in there. We call it good will.

Chris Beall (32:40):

[crosstalk 00:32:43 ] But actually, good will is a hodgepodge. Good will can include brand equity. It can include IP that’s that’s hiding at the edges, knowhow, all that stuff that’s in there. But your pipeline, you can measure that sucker. We have an attribution report in ConnectAndSell. We can actually measure the growth of your pipeline due to conversations that you’re having at the very top of your funnel every single day. You do a test drive with us, if you’ll let us have access to your opportunity set, just throw them all at us. What’s the name of the company and what’s the anticipated close date? What’s the amount? And if you want us to get really fancy, what’s your imputed probability of close, which is bullshit.

Chris Beall (33:28):

But if you’ll give it to us, we’ll tell you how much money you are making that you can now discount, how much money’s going into the pipeline every single day. You can watch it every day, one day at a time. To me, if you don’t have control over and visibility into that asset, what are you doing? You’re just dreaming, right? You’re just like, oh, what are we doing? Well, we’re doing some stuff today and according to this plan, it will yield fruit next year. Really? If you were to fertilize a field, would you then just leave it for a year and come back and see how it went? Doesn’t make sense. We don’t do it in other areas, but we do it in business because we’re accustomed to not seeing what’s going on. We’re accustomed to having what are called reports. A report means somebody tells me something. It’s hilarious to me that we call them reports when they come right out of the data. Nobody told you anything.

Corey Frank (34:23):

That’s right. Well, we certainly told a lot of stuff to a lot of people in the last two hours here. So, we’re going to leave it there. So, John, thank you for being, sincerely, one of our seven listeners, seven subscribers. We got the fetching Ms. [Fenucci 00:34:41] here once in a while, we got his sister, Chris’s sister, Shelly, we got my mom, we got you. And I think we got a couple other folks out there, Chris, but-

Chris Beall (34:49):

Two of my four kids occasionally listen.

Corey Frank (34:51):

Well, there you go. There you go. [crosstalk 00:34:53]

John Orban (34:53):

This is a groundbreaking show, what you’re doing is just fantastic. It’s an honor to have been on the program. [crosstalk 00:34:59]

Corey Frank (34:58):

Absolutely. I don’t think it’s going to be the last time too, john. We really like to dive into, again, the craft of face to face sales really is something, Chris, that’s a nuance, a field that we really haven’t explored as much. And it’d be interesting, certainly talking with John further about an expert who does that, and I really love, again, the left brain and the right brain that clearly has made you a success in sales, John. So, any final thoughts, Chris?

Chris Beall (35:24):

Well, I tell you what, we brought in art for the first time. That’s heck of a thing we brought in books, but we didn’t go deep on the books. I think I’ve been very lazy about my recommended reading list, but I think we should put them up and make a little bookstore. The Market Dominance bookstore would be a fun thing to have. I have listed over here. What about GoldRat? Right? What about Deming? What about Taleb’s? [crosstalk 00:35:49] Jesus, anti fragile. [crosstalk 00:35:51] I love rants, by the way. I love rants like out of the crisis, Demings rant. Grouchy old man saying, yeah, but when you read it, you go … by the way, it’s assigned reading for all my kids. My mom had her cruelty and I have mine.

Chris Beall (36:09):

And when you realize, wait a minute, what makes people do things at work? Pride of workmanship. Just knowing that will change everything about how you approach business. That one sentence. What is the first sentence in that book? Drive out fear. Drive out fear, why would you want to drive out fear if you want to control people? Why would you want to do that? It’s a big, thick boo written by a grouchy guy who gave you a little Japanese memorabilia behind you? Who, frankly, gifted Japan the postwar economy because the US wasn’t interested, because we had too much pride. We just, we know what we’re doing. Look, our industrial machine just conquered the world. We must know what we’re doing. Well, it turns out one thing that’s really not obvious, drive out fear. And people work for pride of workmanship, not money. That’s weird.

Chris Beall (36:59):

But those are the essences, that’s the stuff where all this is hiding. And I want to get to the [crosstalk 00:37:06]. That’s where it’s at, [inaudible 00:37:09] book. I go back to flip the script, I don’t even have to open it. My whole team does something in every discovery call that we call a flash roll, and we have to keep reminding ourselves what it’s for, is to establish ourselves as experts, not to teach them anything about our product.

Corey Frank (37:27):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (37:27):

And it’s practiced. I’m very proud of my flash roll. I think mine is the best because [crosstalk 00:37:34] proud of, right? But it’s interesting what’s in these books. It’s interesting when you go into books like Temple Grandins, an anthropologist on Mars, and you realize there’s a whole different way of seeing the world and you probably don’t see it that way. But people you’re interacting with might have some of that in them. And if you’re going to deal with technologists, probably really good to read an anthropologist on Mars.

Corey Frank (38:02):

Oh, yeah.

Chris Beall (38:03):

If you’re going to understand what it’s like when we forget stuff or misapprehend something, read [inaudible 00:38:12] No Shadows in the Brain or Mind, whichever it is. I can never remember the title, because I’ve got one of those same problems that he’s talking about in the book. It’s about deficits, neurological deficits and how they manifest themselves in experience and behavior, that stuff will teach you tons. Read Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. You’re going to learn some stuff about yourself [crosstalk 00:38:35]. So, I will do the book thing one of these days, you guys have great reading lists. I have this little, trashy one that I had come up with. But this is the stuff that … and then one more thing that you said, John, I’m going to leave everybody with, if you’re in business and especially in sales and you don’t read in the sciences, real science, not stuff that’s politicized, but real science, find something that you can do to read in the sciences.

Chris Beall (39:03):

And my recommendation is just get a subscription in New Scientist’s and read two or three articles out of it each week. It’s a weekly, so it’ll keep you on your toes. They’re always coming up with so something like why blue whales don’t actually choke to death on all that sea water. I just read that yesterday in New Scientist’s, but reading in the sciences grounds you not to the reality, that’s not like learn those facts, but to our ignorance, our mutual-

John Orban (39:32):

Yeah. Right, right, right.

Chris Beall (39:34):

It makes it help us embrace our ignorance, which is the key to being in a position to help our prospects move forward with us.

John Orban (39:43):

Yeah, yeah. I agree. I agree.

Corey Frank (39:45):

Well, that’s just great. Helps us embrace our ignorance.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Do you believe that the cold calls you make are an interruption in your prospect’s day? Well, they definitely are! But to what purpose? Marketing and business consultant John Orban and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, use part three of a four-part conversation to take this inherent problem in sales and look at it from a different angle. Chris cites the podcast he did with ConnectAndSell’s Matt Forbes, whose epiphany about how belief in the opportunity he offers his prospects changed everything about the way he conducts cold calls. John cites the epiphany he experienced reading Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, when he discovered how a book can change your awareness of ordinary things and lead you to look at your world differently. Chris touts Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm, for opening his eyes and engendering a new belief in empathy and how employing that essential quality can help you build trust with a prospect. And, with another of his insightful summations, Corey ties all these ideas together with the advice to “major in minor things.” Be prepared to garner insights of your own as our three dedicated students of sales and of life share with you their practice — just like Alice’s — of believing “Six impossible things before breakfast” on this episode of the Market Dominance Guys.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – Betty Edwards

Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey A. Moore

 

About Our Guest

John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals.

—-more—-

Full episode transcript below:

Corey Frank (01:38):

Was that something that you were taught? Was that your natural state as an introvert? Could you teach that to your other reps that were on your team over the years? You’re selling a different dynamic than Chris and I sometimes are used to in that mostly it was face-to-face sets. Correct?

John Orban (02:00):

Yeah. Yeah.

Corey Frank (02:00):

So what are those dynamics that broke down to elicit that level of trust that people would go to the confessional with you?

John Orban (02:10):

This is how I feel about it. That technology is so powerful when I realize what was happening I tore all that stuff up. It scared me. It was way too much power for any one person to have. I’m serious about that. I’ll never forget it. I was sitting in the guy’s office and I was leading him down this track. “Well, why is that important to you? Why is that important?” And going deeper, and deeper, and deeper. And I got down to a level that if I had gone one more, I don’t know what would’ve happened. And I said, “I can’t handle this. I’m certainly not going to be teaching this to somebody else.” Now, there are people out there who have learned it and you see them a lot in the personal development field. And they are very close to pure manipulation. That’s how powerful that technology is. And it’s like I told you on the phone. I don’t know why we’re torturing people because if you understand how to use this technology, they’ll spill their guts. And I know that in some cases-

Corey Frank (03:11):

You talked about Neuro-linguistic programming, NLP.

John Orban (03:12):

Yeah. Yeah. And that in itself sort of raises a lot of red flags to people because NLP, the way it was originally developed and the way it’s being used now, has basically been bastardized over the last 50 years since it’s been out. So as part of the process of learning about that, I got involved with propaganda because I felt that basically that’s all sales and marketing is, is propaganda. And who got at that started? Well, it was this guy by the name of Edward Bernays, who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who was exploring all this stuff about the human mind and that kind of thing. And he wrote a very small book called Propaganda. And I also read Goebbels’ book on propaganda, which is, it’s a short book. It’s like 60 pages. So everything you need to know about propaganda, you can learn in a pretty short period of time.

John Orban (04:04):

Bernays, his book… I hate listening to C-SPAN’s Booknotes because every time I listen to that stupid program I end up buying a book. So I’m listening to this guy. This goes back to 1998; I found it on YouTube. And he’s talking about this book he wrote about, Edward Bernays, and it’s in my Kindle library now because I want to start reading it tonight, but it’s just fascinating. But all that stuff is related. And so, one of the notes I had written down was the idea of the power of words and Bernays understood that very early on. It’s one thing if you call something a gene therapy treatment. It’s another thing if you call it a vaccine. And the power of words is just something that people who know how to use it, use it very effectively, and it’s just too much power to be in one person’s hand. You know? That’s just how I feel about it. And…

Corey Frank (04:58):

So Chris, let’s springboard off of that to John. And since we originally talked to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, I think you and John met each other through a love of collaboration of different books that you were influenced.

John Orban (05:10):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (05:10):

When I say a book, that I’m a 21-year-old recently minted communications, finance business, econ, Elizabethan poetry grad. And Chris, I want to find the elixer, the matrix plug that can engender me as much trust, as much success as possible, as many conversations. Is there a particular book that you and the fetching Mrs. Fanucci perhaps talk about with all your younger, new-minted sales folks that come on board your respective companies that, “Hey, you’ve got to read this.”? What should be in their arsenal as they set forth?

Chris Beall (05:51):

It’s kind of funny. I don’t have such a book that I tell sales folks to read. My view is actually consonant with John’s view, which is if you learn how to use words and how to do your job sincerely, if you go through the first step, which is to make sure you’re on their side for real, make sure you really believe. We had a whole podcast episode on this, which is the one that I’ve actually they’ve been sending around recently with big Matt Forbes. And that conversation that I had with him that helped him to go inside and ask himself-

John Orban (06:27):

About belief. Right?

Chris Beall (06:29):

[crosstalk 00:06:29] Do I believe? It’s the one titled-

John Orban (06:30):

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I heard that. It’s a great one.

Chris Beall (06:34):

It would’ve been comical for anybody to listen to that conversation. It was a two-hour conversation. I was out for a barefoot run down in Green Valley, Arizona and I thought I’d be out for half an hour. And an hour and a half later, I’m still talking to Forbes about this question because he’s good. And when you’re good, you’re dangerous. And when you’re dangerous, it’s just like being big. Right? He’s a big guy. So he’s learned how to handle when you’re 6’8″ and you’ve been big your whole life; you learn that you have responsibility for what your body might do to other people who are smaller than you. And when you have the ability to use your voice, and it’s really the voice more than the language, then you’re like a big person. It’s not right to go bump into, smash, knock over smaller people. It’s just not right.

Chris Beall (07:24):

And this isn’t about like who’s better than somebody else. It’s sort of a fact of the world. If you know how to use your voice already, then your number one thing to do in sales is make sure that you really believe in the potential value with the thing that you have on offer. It doesn’t have to be certain value, but the worthiness of exploration of that value for this other human being, not for their company or anything else because you’re talking to a person, and that value is potentially there even if they never are going to avail themselves of it or work with you in the future. That belief beats all books when it comes to salespeople who have any ability whatsoever to [crosstalk 00:08:04]-

Corey Frank (08:04):

How about… Let’s talk about that raw skills. John, you can chime in this too. I have the belief I bought into this company. I want to work for MetLife. I want to work for SAP. I want to work for Microsoft. I believe in it, but my voice is… Maybe you have a slight accent. Maybe you have a slight lisp. Maybe I don’t know… I’m not conscious enough of my voice as a tool, as much as Matt is conscious enough of his size when he is walking through an airport. How do you teach that? How do you make somebody self-aware? You’re a singer Chris, right? And you’re an artist, John. So how do you develop that awareness, that, “Wow, this instrument here can be used, manipulated in ways that transcends what my script says and that I have to be responsible for that.”?

John Orban (08:50):

It’s interesting because one of the other books that I read that really had a profound impact on me was a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. And in the introduction, she made this comment that artists see the world different than other people. I could not wrap my head around that for the next 40 years. And it wasn’t until I took up oil painting. And I’ll never forget. I walked out of my studio one day and it was like in the movie Wizard of Oz when Dorothy walks out of that house and opens up the door and she goes from black and white to color. I saw stuff that I had never seen in my life before. I saw sun shining on leaves and going down the side of a tree and sparkling grass and things like that.

John Orban (09:37):

And when I mentioned that at a, I don’t know, I’ll call it a mastermind group that I was in for a while, one of the people that was there, who became a friend, was a copywriter for a company. And he had this group that he worked with, which he called his Copy Cubs and he was teaching him how to do copywriting. And he said, after that, he made every one of them take some kind of art course before they started his program so that they could reach this higher level of understanding. And I think that’s part of the process. You can teach somebody some of this stuff, but until they experience it… I was a teacher for a while. I taught kids in a computer class. And one of the things that was most rewarding to me was when you see that understanding come across the student’s face and they get what you’re talking about and they didn’t get it before. It’s amazing. I mean, you basically have transformed their lives and that’s what we’re trying to do in sales.

John Orban (10:38):

See? That’s the other thing that really got me about you guys, is that you seem to have a level of ethics in your businesses that remind me a lot of Zig Ziglar because when I think of Zig, I think of ethical business practices and he was very much into that. And it’s like I see you as trying to take that to the next step. It’s not just for the prospects that you’re dealing with, but also the sales rep and your employees. I mean, you don’t treat them like dirt. I mean you treat them like human beings and you’re trying to empower them as much as they’re trying to empower the people that you’re working with. And if you can’t empower them, how in the world are they going to empower the prospect or the potential client?

Chris Beall (11:21):

Holy moly. So two things. One is Drawing on the Right Side of your Brain transformed me in an instant also. I was actually afraid of drawing. I would draw by myself and drawing anything that was supposed to be realistic was an embarrassment to me. And in my 30s, early 30s, that book fell into my hands. And I decided not to read it but just to do the exercises. So the only thing I read was the introduction. And then I simply did the first exercise. Terrible. Did the second exercise. Terrible. Did the third one. Terrible. I think it was the fourth or the fifth exercise, you look at your off hand. In my case, my left hand; I’m right-handed. And without looking at the [crosstalk 00:12:11] you take the paper down, you look at your left hand, you block your view with like a little divider. I remember standing a three-ring binder up so that it was really blocking the view, so I couldn’t cheat and glance over there. And then you draw what you see.

Chris Beall (12:27):

And it turns out when you can’t see what you’re drawing, you can only draw what you see, which is… I didn’t know that because I was this ignorant person. So, finished it. It took forever. Took probably an hour and a half. Oh, you’re not allowed to lift the pencil. Pencil stays on the paper the whole time. So an hour and a half later, here I come out of this interesting meditative, weird ass state that I’m in, and I take the notebook and put it down. And I look over at the page and it is truly bizarre looking. Like, lines that would represent the edges of my fingers are crossed and stuff like that in ways that are impossible. And it’s the best thing I’d ever drawn in my life. It was completely realistic without having any realism in it, if that makes any sense at all. To artists, I think that means something, right?

Chris Beall (13:18):

And suddenly, instantaneously, with no further training, I could realistically draw anything.

Corey Frank (13:26):

Really?

Chris Beall (13:26):

And I spent the next year and a half or two years, in my spare time, always with a pad, always with pencils ready to go. And wherever I was stuck, much the same way that you might; you were a Sudoku freak, you might pull out the Sudoku thing and do that; I would pull out the pad and I would draw what’s in front of me. And yet, it came down to that one thing. No, no, no breakthrough. And what’s funny about-

Chris Beall (14:35):

If I apply this to sales, this is why we take people through flight school. The reason we do it is that there’s a moment in there suddenly where being trustworthy and letting your voice express your true belief, that this is good for the other person. That it is truly ethical. It’s not a moral question. It’s an ethical question. You’ve gotten to the bottom of the time. It’s an ethical question. What is right here? And if you don’t believe it’s right for them to take the meeting, why are you selling the meeting? You’re a thief. You know? Being a thief kind of comes out in your voice. I mean, unless you’re a psychopath by the way. If you’re a psychopath, pay no attention to all this. Just ignore it and go be a psychopath and do bad things or do good things.

Chris Beall (15:21):

If you’re a psychopath, by the way, you have a real burden to be ethical. Ethical psychopaths are some of the most useful people in the world, right? Because they’re psychopaths, they can manipulate people right and left, but they’re ethical, so they do it for other people. Right? If you are a psychopath, which is a nature of things, kind of thing. There’s introverts, extroverts, and psychopaths. Those are the three categories of people, right? So if you’re going to be a psychopath, because you’re one today, therefore you’ll probably be one tomorrow, don’t fight it. Just go adopt some really deep ethics because that’s the only safe place to be because you’re a very, very, very, very dangerous person. And it’s good to recognize that. And it’s like going around, not like Matt Forbes, but like Matt Forbes covered with dynamite, with little fuses all over the place. Like, don’t do that. Don’t blow people up. But if you’re a regular person and you want to succeed in business, not in sales, but in business, there’s a hump you have to get over. The sincerity hump.

John Orban (16:18):

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:18):

You’ve got to decide that you’re only going to do for others what you truly believe has potential. You don’t have to know. You can be ignorant. Ignorance is fine. You can be uncertain. Express your uncertainty. All of that is just ducky, but you got to get there. And as soon as you’re there, it’s great. But how do you get there? What’s the equivalent of looking at your left hand and drawing with your right? Do the breakthrough script. And all you have to do is be coached over and over on getting your voice to be the same voice you use to tell a genesis story, a story about yourself from when you were younger because that’s the voice, the voice that you use to tell a story about how you came to be like you are; a story, not exposition. The story of how you came to be like you are. That event in your life. That voice is the full voice you need to go find.

Chris Beall (17:15):

And you can have somebody help you find that voice by just telling them your genesis story. We actually did this exercise last night, interestingly enough, right here. Helen Fanucci, who’s been a guest on our show here, who I’m marrying, she’s right over there in the other room, she has some podcast work that she’s doing, shall we say, working with our favorite podcast publisher, Susan. And we were listening to a podcast episode. And her question was, “How’s the voice?” And well, it’s a little bit, maybe a little more factual. And then she told me her genesis story of how she came to expressing action what she believes in the book, that she did it herself at the age of 23, did it to herself. And I’ll let her tell the story. And that voice is the voice, the voice that she tells that story in is the voice.

Chris Beall (18:07):

So if you want to find your authentic voice that you can use to share with folks, if you want to do that exercise, but that the one that works for you, my recommendation is the voice comes out of the genesis story, the practice comes out of the first two sentences, the breakthrough script. And the reason is it’s really, really a deep thing to throw yourself under the bus within tenth of a second of meeting. So that’s a deep thing to do. Most people can’t do it. When you say… And the two sentences are, “I know I’m an interruption.” When you say that and you mean it, that you mean you’re a bad thing, you get it, you have agreed with yourself to be the invisible stranger, the scary invisible stranger. You know that’s going to engender fear in that other person.

Chris Beall (18:53):

And yet you did it anyway. Why’d you do it? You have to be doing it for them and for you mutually, but for them first in that order. For them and for you. And then, you have to do something really hard, really hard with your voice, which is let go and say, “We’re going to go on adventure together if you’re willing to.” And you switch to that playful, curious voice. That’s what Chris Voss told me when I said, “What do you think of this?” He says, “It’s perfect.” He says, “When you switch from that hard flat self-indictment to playful curious in a fraction of a second, that is the thing that makes those two sentences work.” And you’re not faking it. You’re finding it. That’s the key. You got to find it in yourself.

Chris Beall (19:35):

As to books to read about sales, I’m not a big sales book guy. I think that Market Dominance Guys is actually built around different books. It’s not a sales show. It’s a market dominance show. And it’s built around Geoffrey Moore, which is, again, it’s about people’s emotions. When people are buying new stuff, they’re afraid of it. Not just you. Now they’re afraid of it. At least life insurance, they might have thought, “Well, some people buy that stuff and maybe it’s not bad. I don’t know. I’ve heard people been bamboozled, wasted their money.” But when you’re buying innovations… In the innovation economy, you’re buying innovations. And when you’re buying innovations, they make you sick to your stomach. They’re scary because you fundamentally don’t know what’s in that thing. You don’t know what’s in it. And you don’t like the feeling. And you’re the first buyer in a category and you don’t like that feeling because you can’t look around on anybody else and say, “Well, Joe, Mary, they already bought it.” It’s like you’re going first because you need it really, really bad.

Chris Beall (20:33):

That book by Geoffrey Moore stands, in my opinion, alone in the innovation economy. Crossing the Chasm. And it stands alone for a simple reason. It tells us what we need to be empathetic about when we’re bringing something new to someone else. And otherwise, we don’t know what to be empathetic about. In fact, otherwise we’re pissed off that they’re scared of this thing. And we think, “Why don’t they treat me better?” Well, I don’t know. You walked into their house with a rattlesnake and it’s in a jar and you’re threatening to take the top off the jar and turn it loose. And their dog’s on the floor. Why should they be scared of you? You know it’s just a snake. Everybody knows that this one is more or less defanged. Right?

John Orban (21:17):

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Beall (21:17):

So that book speaks to me about the world we live in now. He was 25 years ahead of his time. He was right on, but he’s 25 years ahead of his time with regard to the universality of the problems we facing. I’ll call them interesting businesses. And interesting businesses, by the way, come up with innovations. HUB International, Scott Webb and that team over there, they invented a new product so that they can engage with these CFOs using the telephone. It turns out that commercial insurance is fine, but it’s kind of a difficult product to sell in a displacement mode because everybody’s already got it. So what do you sell them? The opportunity to learn something. Actually, the same thing I used to sell in [inaudible 00:22:05]. Their’s a little more complex. They do a big multi-point analysis of your business and share it with you and it’s worth a ton of money. I had it done for us and it was fabulous, but it’s the same thing, which is, what can I always offer in service? I can always offer my expertise. Always.

John Orban (22:19):

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. Right. Right.

Chris Beall (22:21):

Always. Always. I can go to work for you, right? That’s my first thing I can do; in service. But to get there in your own emotions, you need to know what’s going on in the other person. And the other person is repulsed, scared of, sickened by your innovation, not because of its characteristics, but because it’s new. And read Crossing the Chasm five times if you have to. And if you’re a tech entrepreneur and you like your own stuff, you’re in deep, deep trouble because you’re in love with your baby. And it’s not that your baby’s ugly. It’s that your baby has fangs, bites, and has poison packed in its jaws. And they know it. And there you are coming and going, “Want to hold the baby?” Get the baby away from me. That sucker bites. You know? My neighbor over there got bit by your baby. He’s been dead for three days. Come on.

John Orban (23:20):

That’s good. That’s good.

Corey Frank (23:22):

Love that. I love that.

John Orban (23:22):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (23:23):

I never pictured… I suppose it all come full circle now seeing the deconstruction mindset that you have, Chris, as a scientist. Right? Breaking it down to the core, to the atomic level, and how you can apply that to drawing, which is why I think why you were probably attracted to Ms. Edwards’ book and how to replicate it. Right? How to break down helping my son with fractions the other day; take these large fractions, break it down to the simplest form. Right? Two-thirds versus four-sixths versus eight-sixteenths. That’s in essence what I hear you both doing from an artist perspective as well as a science perspective and certainly a sales perspective, but simplicity doesn’t mean ineffective. It doesn’t mean a watered down, non-creative.

Corey Frank (24:12):

I think it is so creative because it is so simple. And we’re trying to complicate things too much, as you had said, John, certainly with NLP. And did the eyes move up into the right? How’s the mirroring? Am I being defensive? Now, its like I’m really majoring in minor things in a sales presentation where I just try to engender that trust, Chris, as you say. And man, and then just be curious. And holy cow, the floodgates will open.

Chris Beall (24:37):

Yeah.

John Orban (24:38):

And like you kind of intimate, it’s a switch that gets flipped. I mean, it’s like you go from one state to the other almost immediately once you have that realization.

Corey Frank (24:48):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:49):

Yeah. It’s funny. I think there are two things that we’re talking about here that are quite complementary, but I think it is tough for people to see how they go together. One is there’s stuff you need to learn about the world to be an expert who’s worthy of talking to of helping somebody else. It is true. You all only need to be one chapter ahead in the book to teach it. Right? John, you taught-

Corey Frank (25:09):

Right. Right.

Chris Beall (25:10):

I used to teach physics. I was often three-quarters of a chapter ahead or one equation ahead. Right? I go back to the Maxwell’s equations. Maxwell’s equations. Oh my God. Right? What is that thing with the curl again? And then, I’d be all distracted. But I was just a little ahead. So one is the what stuff. You got to be an expert. You got to be worthy. You have to have access to resources. You have to have something to offer. That’s fine. But the second is you got to find that thing inside of you that allows you to be yourself when you’re in the uncertain situation where you don’t know what the outcome is.

Chris Beall (25:43):

And sales management, we talked about that, and that’s why I said, “Holy moly.” You know? Helen’s over there writing a book right now and it’s going to be a major, major book in my opinion. And the book is called, Love Your Team. And it’s exactly about what you said, John, which is, if you don’t empower your salespeople, how are they going to transfer any power to the prospect? Right? And so I think sales compensation is actually one of these. The way we do it, it’s locked. It’s locked. Work in the office used to be locked, and then it got blown up by the pandemic. And now we’ve gotten over it, right? It’s the same way that John was locked on one side of the phone until he actually started calling, and then curiosity would call into the next call. Everything is locked somewhere.

Chris Beall (26:30):

I think we’re actually locked as an economy in a what I can only call a funny way of compensating sales people. We compensate them for the short term. We’re asking them to build our business for the long term.

John Orban (26:44):

And that hasn’t changed in 50 years. I mean, at least the 50 years I was involved in it. And the thing about that, one of the other podcasts I was listening to, the guy was talking about how you game the system. Yeah. He was sand bagging his calls for the blitz that they had on Thursday or something like that. But I saw that when I was in business. I mean…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Would you expect introverts to be good at cold calling? Oddly enough, they aren’t just good —they’re great! Today, we delve into why introverts make great salespeople in this second part of a four-part conversation between marketing and business consultant John Orban and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank. It turns out that introverts’ reluctance to push themselves forward makes them less likely to take over a cold-call conversation, and this allows prospects to talk. And when prospects talk — shazam! — we learn things about them that help us become partners on their sales journey. This insight sparked John to ask Chris the question, “What role do you think curiosity plays in the process of making a cold call?” Listen in to learn the whys and wherefores of this valuable cold-calling asset on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “ ‘Curiouser and Curiouser.’ ”  

About Our Guest

John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals.

—-more—-

Full episode transcript below:

Corey Frank (01:18):

Formula we use for screenplay scripting, Chris uses the same one of iteration that creates millions of phone calls and tens of thousands of successful conversations a year has to do with that simplicity. When you have two competing theories, right? Chris. That makes exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is always the better one and until more evidence comes along.

John Orban (01:43):

But you’ve taken A/B tests to it to a completely different level. Your whole idea of taking an idea, get on the phone for a week and whether it’s going to work or not. That’s game-changing. I don’t know why you’re beating people away from the door, maybe you are. But seriously it, I could go on all day about that, but anyhow.

Chris Beall (02:02):

We’ve politely ask them to stand six feet away. Cause here, we live in splendid isolation in the pandemic and we [inaudible 00:02:16] Six feet away.

John Orban (02:16):

So I want to go one more step on this thing about the communication and what’s inside the sales rep. It’s not just the sales rep because he’s got a sales manager, he’s got a sales VP, a marketing VP. God knows how many steps to get to the CEO and every one of those have got problems. When I say problems, I don’t mean like they’re psychotic or anything of that sort. Although there may be one or two that are in there, but they’re all dealing with this stuff. And you’re trying to create this smooth path through all this thing. And there’s got to be a simpler way to do it. And I think you’re on the right track, you really are. You’re thinking the right way to go on this. And it amazes me because I was in sales 50 years ago and they basically pointed at a telephone.

John Orban (03:02):

In fact, when I started, I started in the insurance business. I was one of the first group of sales reps that came through that was going to use this new marketing thing called the telephone. Up to that point, everything was door to door. Now I’ve done my share of door-to-door stuff too. And I know Chris has because you talk about it. I love listening to your stories by the way. And they basically pointed the phone. They gave me a piece of paper, which was a script and said, “Go get them tiger.” And I learned everything on my own. And talk about fear, you talk about fear on the phone. I was so petrified. I would stare at that thing and just shake. But I made a couple of changes in my head. Finally, as I went through this process, it pulled me out of my introversion.

John Orban (03:48):

I was forced to get out of it. I ended up going to Dale Carnegie courses, both in New York and also when I came back home after I left the city. I actually worked for, well, I worked for a bunch of different insurance companies, but the first one I did, I was a group and pension specialist in New York City. And so I went to the Dale Carnegie sales course first. And that’s where they taught you about the “Sales Burger”. If you know anything about that, the hamburger is the benefit and the role is the features. And then you stick this toothpick through it and that’s something else, I can’t remember what that was supposed to be.

John Orban (04:22):

But anyhow, I did that and then I came back and I went through the Dale Carnegie sales course when I got into the insurance business again. I had a skin as a professional photographer in the interim, but I was terribly introverted. I had a lot of difficulty with it, but making those calls just forced me out of it. I had no choice it was either that, or I don’t know. Go [crosstalk 00:04:41].

Corey Frank (04:40):

So you were an introvert by nature, John?

John Orban (04:42):

Oh yeah. (affirmative) And my brother’s the same way. In fact, my brother still is, but I was that way. I’m not anymore.

Corey Frank (04:49):

Not anymore. No, you’re not. But that’s interesting. Chris, what do you make of that? You’ve hired thousands of sales folks, thousands of team members over the years in your companies. As John’s experience a typical one that introverts turn into some of the best sales and what happens. Where’s that Rubicon that they cross? What is it internally that sparks, “Hey, listen, I can actually do this. I’m actually safe here.”

John Orban (05:12):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (05:14):

I think introversion has to do mostly, according to researchers, I don’t know if I believe them or not. With kind of where do you get your energy. Do you get when you’re hanging out by yourself? Do you feel better later? Do you get out when you’re hanging out with a bunch of people? My definition of an introvert is somebody who goes to a party and has one deep conversation with one person they meet there and then they go home, right? That’s me, by the way. People are shocked when they find out that I’m fundamentally introverted because I can also be an entertainer. I can entertain at a party with no problem whatsoever, but then it’s a completely different game because those people aren’t people, they’re an audience. So they turn into something else for me and basically it’s a toy that I play with.

Chris Beall (05:57):

And it’s not a nice thing to say, but it is what happens, right? Introverts have a huge advantage in sales. And it’s really simple advantage, which is they’ve spent a lot of time with themselves, not recovering from whatever it is that was going on. But actually going inside themselves naturally and thinking through stuff about themselves and about situations, about what they’ve just encountered. They have that alone time and knowing yourself is the key to being able to be empathetic. It’s impossible to be empathetic unless you know what it is to be yourself. You have to have some sense of what the pieces and parts are in there and which ones are in play. What bothers you and what doesn’t? I think you come out of that into sales, by doing what John just said, which is you get in a catapult and you get flung or you fling yourself.

Chris Beall (06:49):

It’s like bungee jumping. You go to where you were so uncomfortable going and then you realize you didn’t die. I have a personal example of this just from my life. I used to be a very afraid of heights and not unnaturally so, but like a normal person. Normal people are afraid of heights. It makes sense by the way. And then I took a fall and it was a big fall, not a little fall. It was about 800 feet. And 800 foot fall that takes a long time. There’s plenty that goes on during an 800 foot fall inside yourself. It’s not like you think it would be actually. It’s one of those, “Really? I didn’t know that would be like that.” And of course, if you survive, then you get to think those thoughts, otherwise you kind of forgot. [crosstalk 00:07:29]

John Orban (07:29):

Was it in slow motion? Did you experience that?

Chris Beall (07:31):

You bet. I got to do things like watch a piece of ice rip a chunk out of my arm and I got to watch in [crosstalk 00:07:39] slow motion. The little drops of blood going out and sparkling in the sun.

John Orban (07:45):

I was riding my bike one day and a dog ran out in front of me. And I went over the top of the handle bars and I had my helmet on, thank goodness, and everything was in slow motion. I came down, I felt my head hit the ground and bounced back up and it was amazing.

Chris Beall (08:06):

It’s a remarkable experience. But for me, what it did was it offered me a bridge to a world where I embraced doing things that involved heights. And I became a very serious mountaineer rock climber. In fact, I climbed that very mountain that I fell down later that day because the guys I was with foolishly left me unattended and went fishing. Thinking that any sane person would just hang out and camp with his concussion and his hand that was opened up with the bone exposed and his leg that was rather blue and yellow. But I looked at it a different way. And this is, I think an introvert, its way of looking at things, which is I know myself well enough. I was only 14, but I knew myself well enough by then to know that if I didn’t actually attempt to climb that mountain again right now that I would end up as the person who was stuck on the other side of that fear. I had the same fear of the telephone by the way.

Chris Beall (08:59):

So when I got my first job in industry at NCR, I’d done a fair amount of stuff by then. I was pretty old, like 26 years old. And there was this phone and I’m supporting this 10 state area. And I’ve got to talk to all these different people about the problems they’re having with their computers, which by the way, all I had was a manual. I didn’t even have a copy of the computer. So I had to walk people through stuff by reading it and then asking them what they saw on the screen because back then you couldn’t screen share. Try that by the way, with somebody in the Navajo Nation. Where the cultural issues around just speaking up spontaneously when you’re being supported on a computer are really, really interesting. I learned a lot about that. But I had to learn to pick up that phone to do my job.

Chris Beall (09:43):

And it felt like that fall. That is, “Hey, I survived.” And I think when you get to the other side of it and you realize, “Oh, there was really, there’s something there to be afraid of, but it’s not bad. It’s something completely different.” And you know yourself well enough than to actually be able to use all those, that self-knowledge in slowing down the conversations. And I think introverts naturally when they get going in a conversation, their inner monologue, so to speak, their inner responses tend to be a little slower. They’re not looking for the next thing to say quite so fast. And in sales that desire to say the next thing in order to push your agenda is ironically what destroys sales conversations. Sales conversations among people who are going to do business together over time, they’re most effective.

Chris Beall (10:35):

If you’re actually going to be together down the road, because you’re going to stay together. The idea is to form a relationship. And I don’t mean a relationship like buddies. I mean like in the modern world, there’s nothing interesting that we sell that we don’t end up partnering with our customer. Those things don’t exist anymore. Everything’s got so much software in it. Everything has so much interoperability that’s required. Everything has so much adaptation and learning that needs to be done. That you’re really partnering. Whereas, sales itself was invented at the crossroads. Sales is a byproduct of one set of strangers going one way, “Hi, we’re on the silk road and we’re headed off on an adventure. We’re going to get some silk, some salt.” Whatever it is, right? And then somebody else who’s got some stuff that came from some other direction, right? Some supply chain as they call it nowadays.

Chris Beall (11:25):

So they’ve got that and they’ve assembled it in the inventory and they know it’s in their inventory and you don’t. They know the quality and you don’t. They know that there’s some that’s showing up tomorrow and you don’t. Or that there’s none that’s showing up tomorrow and you don’t, because you got to get going. So one party’s under time pressure, that’s the buyer and the other is it’s got superior knowledge. And so sales was always about the extrovert pushing their agenda, which is, “Buy the crappiest stuff I have at the highest possible prices. Sayonara, Sonny Lee, get out of here. I will never see you again because they’re going to kill you out there.” And if you come back anyway, who else you going to buy from? A dude over here is no better than me.

Corey Frank (12:10):

Well, Chris, you talked about that. I think in one of our earlier episodes about, even with the advent of the internet, is that as a salesperson, I used to have this idea that I am the single sole purveyor of information of market intelligence of product features. And so you have to deal with me. Now, the internet, and so more often from an Oren Klaff cold cognition world. I, as a salesperson, would spew these set facts in these set features in the hope that would engender some sort of trust. John, you come from the insurance business for what, 25, 35 years. Financial sector. So man, you are as sage and I’m looking to you to take my little 401k and go from here to here or make sure that my family is taken care here to here.

Corey Frank (13:01):

How do you kind of square that circle then, John and Chris, where I’m an introvert and I’m in sales today, but now right. “Hey, do you really kind of need me because I have all this inform available.” So what’s a guy to do? I can buy insurance online now. I can buy a Salesforce license online now. If I have 300 reps inside, I can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with the Salesforce, a CRM, never talk with the Salesforce cause I don’t have to. Where is our role then? Does that mean that a lot of the extroverts are here to stay? The introverts are here to stay? How does it kind of change the landscape a little bit of sales and how will it continue? Do you guys think?

John Orban (13:43):

I had a thought about that actually this morning when I was walking the dog and it came from out of our conversation. When I realized you could do a hell of a lot better job than me. But my friend doesn’t know about you, but I do. All I got to do is hook the two of you together, I’ve done my job. I don’t even have to know anything. All I got to know is the right people to hook them up with. And to me that would address that.

John Orban (14:50):

Address that. But I wanted to go back to something that Chris was talking about with sales reps and introversion, that kind of stuff. What role do you think curiosity plays in that whole process, about the person being curious?

Chris Beall (15:02):

That’s funny. That’s what I was thinking about this morning is that a curiosity is the ultimate vulnerability. When you’re curious, you are being vulnerable in a dimension that people are really reluctant to be vulnerable in, especially in sales. You’re saying, “I don’t know.” Or as Tom [inaudible 00:15:23] says to me many, many times a day, he’s my data concierge. He was on Market Dominance Guys. Guy’s incredible. He says, “Let’s take a look.” It’s let’s take a look. I love the way he says it, by the way he always says it the same. I say, “Tom, what about this?” And it’s some crazy question to ask us. “Let’s take a look.” And what he’s saying is, I don’t know and you don’t know. “Let’s go find out together.” And it’s that the thing curiosity gives us in sales is.

Chris Beall (15:49):

First, it allows us to be vulnerable without weak. We’re universally vulnerable because we’re universally ignorant and that’s a wonderful thing. Second, it allows us to legitimately go on an adventure of exploration with the other person. Where now what we know and what they know in the circumstances we’re facing and what we’re trying to learn are shared, we’re peers. We get to go to each other, we’re two outriggers on the same boat and the reality is the boat. And so we’re going to keep the boat from tipping over. Boats without riggers are easy compared to those cruise ships. We don’t know if they’re tipping over or not. But are pretty confident that each one of us has got something that we know. And now we can go forward together confidently because we have shared ignorance and shared ignorance is expressed as curiosity. Salespeople, like all people, are curious, but you have to agree when you’re being curious that you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Chris Beall (16:45):

You don’t know the outcome. This is the great irony of sales to me. And that’s actually the great irony of entrepreneurship, but of sales in particular, as a class of entrepreneurial activity. The key to success is admitting you don’t know what you’re doing. And that allows you to partner early with somebody. And given that other person is concerned about who’s going to bamboozle them. They’re concerned about who is competent, but not on their side. So as a buyer, my worst case is the competent expert who is not on my side. The second worst case is the incompetent idiot who is on my side. An okay case is the incompetent idiot, who’s not on anybody’s side except their own because I get to dismiss them and walk away. And the only good case is the competent person who is on my side. So the common case is the salesperson presents themselves as competent.

Chris Beall (17:39):

Whether they borrowed the competence or they actually have it. Collateral is borrowed competence. I’m going to act like I know what these pieces of paper say, because I can reach over and hand them to you and act like that’s a form of knowledge exchange. So I can fake the competence or I can be competent. Who knows? But your nightmare case is the buyer, is that I’m not on your side. And that’s what you need to get beyond as a buyer at some point. So by being curious, by being genuinely curious and admitting we don’t know how this is going to turn out. We don’t know, we’re going to explore together. You form immediate partnership. And that’s why the breakthrough script that we teach people, which we stumbled across through curiosity, is a script that people emphasize trust. They go, “Well trust the cool thing, right?” Trust is actually just a little platform in that script.

Chris Beall (18:33):

It happens to be durable. It’s the one durable asset in a relationship. Once you get somebody’s trust that Chris once told me, you get to keep it until you blow it. Now you’re your number one job in sales is don’t blow it. Don’t blow the trust. You just got it in seven seconds. Don’t blow it. “So now I know what not to do, but what do I do?” Well, let’s see if we can get curious together. Let’s see. And so there’s the elements of the breakthrough script that are about curiosity are this: I believe that’s the only part that’s not about curiosity. That’s an assertion, but it’s an assertion about something I can be sure, my belief. I can confidently assert that I believe something. And you can confidently feel like this guy sounds like he actually believes it. Therefore the tone of voice is really important.

Chris Beall (19:22):

I believe not like I believe it’s going to rain today, that’s an expression of uncertainty. I believe and then we go all curious all the time. “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough.” The “we’ve discovered” is very light. The voice is very, very gentle. It’s basically saying we’re done with the assertions. Now let’s be curious. So what can we be curious about? We, because people are curious about people. I say this all the time. I’ll say it again. There are Americans. You may not believe this. Anybody in the audience may not believe this, but there are Americans who have a deep and abiding interest in the British Royal family. Now, last time I checked the British Royal family became an relevancy to Americans in significant ways, either in 1776 or just after the war of 1812, kind of depending on how you look at it.

Chris Beall (20:21):

So there they are completely irrelevant yet fascination. Fascination abounds, even in the heartland, I knew people in Des Moines, Iowa, who were fascinated by the British Royal family. Now they were also fascinated by corn and pigs and all sorts of other cool stuff. But they were fascinated by the British Royal family. I was like, “Why?” Well, because it’s built into people. We’re curious about people. There’s a magazine that you can hardly believe exists called People magazine. It has no content whatsoever, other than stuff that’s about people who are doing things that you’re supposed to be curious about and you get interested, right? There’s a whole industry about celebrities. There are these people called paparazzi. We ask them to stand six feet away. So we’ve discovered, discover, that’s curiosity. We didn’t make it. We didn’t grow it. We’re not inventors of it. We’re not big and strong.

Chris Beall (21:13):

We’re innocent. We discovered it. That means we can partner a breakthrough. Who wouldn’t be curious about a breakthrough. But all that saying is a breakthrough might be on your side. So now I’m emphasizing, this could be on your side. It could be of utility to you. So we’re curious about things that we could use. If somebody brings you a pointy stick and you’re an eight-year-old boy, you’re curious as to whether the pointy stick will make the dog jump. So you poke the dog with the pointy stick and there you go, right? So curiosity is the number one thing that we can bring to bear. And it’s the number one thing that salespeople can’t bring themselves to use because they feel like they’re out of control. They want to be [crosstalk 00:22:01]

Corey Frank (22:00):

Is that an ego thing, Chris? Is that a humility and ego thing where it’s difficult for me to say those words probably more so if I’m an extrovert, because I had this illusion that I’m uncomfortable in large places, I’m on stage and I always have the answers.

Chris Beall (22:14):

And I think it’s, I don’t know about ego per se. I think it’s a protection thing. I think people protect themselves quite rationally by exuding certainty. Extroverts tend to exude certainty about lots of things. Most of which, if you get them in a private conversation, get a couple drinks at them they’ll admit, “You know, actually I’m not a hundred percent sure of that.” Some of them take a lot of drinks. Some of them, they get a little rowdy at that point. They tell you they’re really sure and they hit you with a bottle, but there is a protection to be had for yourself by simply asserting that you know stuff that you’re great. And this is what we teach people in sales to do. We teach them to say, “We’ve helped companies alike.” Then you start naming these companies. “We’re great.”

Chris Beall (23:02):

“I’m great.” “I’m great,” might work if you’re selling to somebody heading out in the silk road and they’re trying to get one great thing that they got to take with them and they’re really afraid of their future circumstance. But if you’re going to go with them, that assertion of greatness, they’re going to kind of want to check it out. What does this mean exactly? What’s this guy going to do to me? That is I’ll call it the extrovert’s dilemma in sales. The extrovert finds it easy to pick up the phone, relatively speaking. The extrovert finds it easy to walk up to somebody and shake their hand. They find it easy to turn to that person they’re sitting next to on the airplane. They find that easy. What they find hard is being curious, because being curious means you got to let go of what feels like control. It turns out you, here’s how you do it.

Chris Beall (23:48):

If you’re an expert, any extrovert’s watching this, this is how you do it. It’s an act of faith. The act of faith is, “If this is good, it’s good. It’s not, it’s not. So let’s find out, right. Let’s find out because I want my time back.” So when sales experts tell you, your time is super precious, what they’re telling extroverts is go ahead and get it over with. Get it over with, let it run its natural course and you’ll get your time back. And the best way to do that is just to be curious. But you know, it’s hard.

Corey Frank (24:19):

You know, Chris and John, I wrote an article recently about disfluencies, in a screenplay, a sales screenplay that we’re producing for prospect. Chris has performed his thousands of times in their ConnectAndSell Flight School. They teach it and to the right frequency and tonality and pregnant pause, it is ran into them and works. And it works because the math says that it works on the dial to connect, connect, conversation rate, et cetera. But I was curious, we had a guest on a while ago, Jason Bay. And I remember one of the things that he talked about was he had such a great tone. He does have a great tone. Like butter, just certain folks are just bestowed by the gods themselves to just have the right vocal chord toneage and it’s just. I could listen to Jason read the phone book as I told him.

Corey Frank (25:16):

It’s a beautiful thing. Naturally, tonality and pacing and cadences are attractive or sway folks from listening to certain people. Think of the attorney in My Cousin Vinny. Who gets up and he stamers through the first cross examination. Think of somebody on a talk show who can’t quite get the words out and stammer. Think of the Bob Newharts of the world. For those going back, who had the natural stammer that was part of the comedic timing. So I wrote this article about disfluencies and that certain ahs and ums and ers helped build trust. And I got a couple of academics that responded to this, talking about articles in academia. That when you use these disfluencies, that it actually projects engenders more trust. In the example I gave is one of my mentors always told me, “Never trust a man who doesn’t walk around with a little bit of a limp.” No one is that fluid. No one is that much of a silver tongue devil. And that ties in a little bit, Chris, with those words that you used, right? Let’s take a look.

Chris Beall (26:36):

Just like this, “Let’s take a look.”

Corey Frank (26:38):

That’s so beautiful.

Chris Beall (26:40):

Playful curious.

Corey Frank (26:41):

So John, insurance, life insurance, you’ve had a lot of reps who work for you over the years and life insurance. Man, that must be a tough thing to engender trust in. “I’m a 21 year old, newly minted life insurance agent. And you’re going to sit down with an old guy like me and my wife and tell me about my future?” How do you build that trust? I’m in your living room, right? I’m over the kitchen table. How does that dynamic work? How did you teach and what did you learn over the years of the nuances that some of your reps use to leverage, expedite that trust?

John Orban (27:20):

Well, there’s a lot going through my head thinking about what you just said, because one of the things about curiosity that pops into my head is when you’re doing that, you’re really in a collaborative relationship with that person. You’re not trying to sell them, they’re not trying to resist a sales close or something like that. I remember one case that I walked into with my sales manager, right at the very beginning when I got started. And I wasn’t sure we were going to get out of that house alive. Because he was so mad at us because of something the company had done to him or a former rep had done. I mean, he greeted us at the door and was yelling at us. As soon as we walked in. When we walked out, we had sold him something. And basically what we did was we just allowed him to talk and we just sat there and listened to what he had to say.

John Orban (28:08):

We agreed with him when he was right. We corrected him when he wasn’t exactly right. And that really made an impression on me in the way that I was going to deal with people going forward. Now, as you found out, Chris, because you keep talking about it on the podcast, for some reason, people don’t want to accept that. They still keep going back to the magic bullet. It was like, again, on, on another one of your podcasts you were talking about, or you were talking about the speech that you gave. And it said, “Never give that speech again, because what they want are tips and tricks.” So I thought when I go out with my granddaughters on next Halloween, I’m going to go to the door and say, “Tip or tricks.”

John Orban (28:50):

But that’s what they want. Everybody wants silver bullet. There are very few people that can pull that off. You really have to develop a relationship with that. You have to listen to what they say. If you just let people talk, you will find out everything you want to know. You may have to prompt them with a couple of questions along the way. But Chris, when you started talking about the sales process is not by the quarter or whatever, you’re looking to develop a long term relationship. There was a lot of lip service to that when I first got started, but it was Thursday night. What are you going to report tomorrow? Friday? I mean, every week we didn’t have a quota after quarter, we had a quota every week. And so Thursday night was when you wrote the Thursday night special, you went out and found somebody if they were breathing and they could write you put their name. Now I never did that.

John Orban (29:36):

But a lot of people in the office did because that’s just the way it was. So I think listening is such a key thing that has to be done. And going back to the curiosity thing, I developed after a while on the phone, I got really curious about what the next call was going to be like, because I had had so many interesting phone calls up to that point. Some were sales, some were appointments, some weren’t anything. But it was always fascinating to talk to people and I could talk to them because by then I’d read a hell of a lot of books. And I really felt comfortable with knowing what I was going to be talking to these people about. And I could talk on a wide variety of subjects, which I think is something that a lot of sales reps, if all you’re going to read is sales closes.

John Orban (30:22):

You’re not going to get the kind of depth that you need when you’re sitting down in front of that executive and trying to get them to move along or to learn more about what they’ve got to say. I remember when they’d talk about rapport. And I remember when I first heard the term rapport, I’d walk into an office and I’d look around, is there a photo of them playing golf? Or is there a trophy on the wall or that kind of just anything that I could grab a hold of. And then it dawned on me that the whole point of rapport is so that you can ask questions and they’ll respond. And if you’ve got good rapport, you can ask much deeper questions. And like I told you, Corey, I got people to the point where they were telling me things I didn’t want to know. It wasn’t like it didn’t have anything to do with the sale process. It was like, I was a priest in a confessional and they were confessing to me and that really freaked me out.

 

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“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things.” Our podcast guest, John Orban, is currently a marketing and business consultant who spent 24 years honing his sales skills as a rep for MetLife. Today, John joins our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, to talk of many sales- and life-related things. In this first episode of a four-part conversation, John, Chris, and Corey touch on the trickiness of successfully communicating an idea, on the importance of thinking but not over-thinking, on resisting the temptation to make things complex, and finally, on the math employed in sales and, thus, market domination. There’s even a bit about the stability of cruise ships. Seriously. Many things! And these three sales guys are just getting started, so don’t miss the fun in this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Of Cabbages and Kings — and Blue Whales.”

About Our Guest

John Orban brings his background as a MetLife sales rep and as an administrator of computer networks to his current career as a marketing and business consultant for creative professionals.

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Full episode transcript below:

Corey Frank (01:18):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. Here we are in late January, or whenever this is going to air, Chris, 2022. I’m here with Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the prophet of profit. And here we are talking all things market dominance, math. And today, we have a very special guest. We may delve into other topics, such as art, maybe blue whales, Chris, as you said before the show, and of course, all of our fun things to talk about with regards to how to dominate your market in today’s business world. So Chris, how about just a few minutes on our special guest, John, and how you guys met, and then we’ll dive right into the topics?

Chris Beall (01:57):

Well, John reached out to me on LinkedIn, and said something that made me cry. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was basically, hey, your podcast doesn’t suck too bad. I got kind of hooked on it. And it just touched my heart, quite frankly. And then, as we went back and forth a little bit, I realized that John brings a kind of depth and precision of thought honed over very many years. I’m not saying, John, that you’re older than me, although it’s possible, I’m-

John Orban (02:30):

Yeah, I am.

Chris Beall (02:31):

… [inaudible 00:02:31] old, but it was one of these situations where we just went back and forth a little bit, and I thought, good god, we have not had this guy on Market Dominance Guys, and we should. It was just like that. He reads books, we were doing a little book thing. He respects thought and reality. He’s multidimensional. And he’s out there in eastern Maryland, one of my favorite places in the world, so why not get a little geographic diversity here? Love it. Love it.

John Orban (03:01):

There you go, there you go.

Corey Frank (03:02):

But we all need a little serendipity in our life, and John, if you came across the podcast when you were looking for Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, or any of the greats, sorry to disappoint you upon first listening, but we’re still glad that you’re one of our seven listeners. So let’s jump right into it.

Chris Beall (03:17):

Anyway, how are you doing?

John Orban (03:19):

I’m doing pretty good.

Chris Beall (03:20):

Fantastic. This is going to be a fun episode, books, books, books, so-

John Orban (03:23):

I don’t have a fancy background like you guys.

Chris Beall (03:25):

I have a story with my background. It’s a funny story.

John Orban (03:28):

Oh, yeah?

Chris Beall (03:29):

The story of the boat there is that Helen and I spent a month in Australia, first month of 2020. And the last day of the trip. I went out for a nice long barefoot run, because she was hanging in the hotel having some business meeting or other. I mean, the girl carries a $1.2 billion quota. And even though she was between jobs at that point, I think quota chases you somehow, even if you’re not working. So she’s doing business stuff, so I go out for this long barefoot run. Come around this corner in Sydney Harbor, and here’s this giant boat with this blue bottom, and it’s got a Panda, like a four-story high Panda coming down off the top of it, like King Kong coming down it.

Chris Beall (04:12):

Yes. And I thought, wow, that’s really weird, but interesting. And it’s just huge, like, it’s a city block or more long. So I looked at it, and I noted its name, and I don’t really care about cruise ships, and that was it. And then, boom, cruise industry is gone about a week or two later. It was its last voyage before COVID. And we’re not thinking about any of this kind of stuff, and then, here we are a year and a half later, having dinner, looking out over at Seattle, and suddenly, the ship shows up. The [inaudible 00:04:45] followed me from Sydney like a faithful dog …

John Orban (04:47):

Wow.

Chris Beall (04:48):

… to show itself off. So I took a picture of it. And so, when people ask me, where are you on the surface of this blue rolling planet, I can say, well, I’m about half a mile from where this picture was taken, looking over at Seattle. And they go, oh, okay. There you go.

Corey Frank (05:01):

Our dear friend, Oren Klaff, has a response for why are things the way they are, and why don’t cruise ships tip over? Why are tides the way they are? Why do people buy the way they do? And I’m going to butcher it, but he uses what’s called, the blue whale close. When a prospect asks you something that is, well, why is it the way that it is? How come your product does X and Y and Z? Something obscure. And as a sales rep, right, sometimes you want to delve into the detail, and go to the cool cognitions, and sometimes you want to dance. And sometimes you want to just forget that the question existed altogether and change the topic.

Corey Frank (05:33):

But he has this blue whale close that he uses. And the blue whale is the most magnificent creature on earth. It is the largest mammal in the world. Cruise ships and tankers of the aircraft carriers, when they see a flock, a fleet, of blue whales swimming towards them, they move, not the blue whales. And this blue whale, right, can eat thousands of tons of plankton every single day to sustain itself. Plankton, the most minuscule, microscopic piece of … as you know, John, in the universe. This blue whale, the most majestic creature that there is, can choke on a common grilled cheese sandwich. Why is that? Because it just is, that’s why. Because it is.

John Orban (06:16):

Good.

Chris Beall (06:21):

That’s so funny.

John Orban (06:22):

That’s good.

Chris Beall (06:23):

By the way, Corey, that’s not only funny, but I just read an article in New Scientist yesterday, in which they were reporting the discovery of why blue whales and other baleen whale don’t choke when they ingest as much sea water as would fill their whole body. It’d be like us drinking one human body’s worth full of water, right? If you hollowed a person out and you made them into a bottle, and you filled them up with water and you drank the whole thing at once, in about two seconds, that’s how they eat. And they finally discovered just a few months ago, why they don’t choke. And you know why they don’t choke? Because there’s no cheeseburgers out there at sea.

Corey Frank (07:07):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (07:08):

No, they actually found a big plug in the back of their throat that works in a funny way, and they don’t choke. Which is hardly surprising, because if they all choked to death on the water that they’re using to eat all the plankton, well, the number of blue whales would be very small. It’d be slow, and sitting on the bottom of the ocean.

Chris Beall (08:10):

Exactly, so, John.

John Orban (08:11):

I talked to Corey some last week, and I mentioned to him that I could never have imagined me listening to a podcast about market dominance. I mean, I’m not a CEO, I’m not an entrepreneur. At best, I’m a reluctant employee. In fact, what got me was a podcast you did, Chris, where you were talking about the seven seconds to get trust built up, that kind of thing. And I was hooked. And then when you started talking about your spreadsheet porn, and stuff like that, I was just all over that. I mean I love spreadsheets, and I got three different spreadsheet programs on my computer, trying to figure out which one I like. Since I started hearing your podcast, I’m done listening to any other podcast for the time being, because as I’m walking the dog, these ideas are popping into my head that go back to books that I’ve read in the past.

John Orban (09:06):

And I’m just literally freaking out. I mean, sometimes I’ll walk around the circle and pick up pieces of my brain that had just blown out my ears while I’m listening to you guys. And it’s like, you are redefining the way business is done. I mean, you’re basically redefining sales. And I told you, or wrote in prior correspondence, Corey, I think you’ve basically obsoleted every sales book that’s out there. Well, except for one, and that’s the [inaudible 00:09:35] Book, In-

Corey Frank (09:36):

Oh, [inaudible 00:09:37].

John Orban (09:39):

… [inaudible 00:09:39]. But that’s different, he’s got a different approach to it. But I mean, I’ve read an awful lot of sales books in my life. And it was funny, I was listening to a podcast today, and you were interviewing the Jefferson guy.

Corey Frank (09:54):

Oh, Roger.

Chris Beall (09:55):

Roger.

John Orban (09:55):

Roger. Roger.

Chris Beall (09:56):

Yeah, sales enablement.

John Orban (09:57):

And as I’m thinking about these ideas that are popping in here, I’m thinking, I’ve never heard anything like this before. But what I have heard is little pieces in books I’ve read over the last 50 years. And I had this flash the other day when you were talking with Valerie [inaudible 00:10:18]. And I said, it sounds to me like you guys are close to discovering the theory of everything. And since you’ve got a physicist on board, I’m thinking, well, maybe that’s where it’s coming from. So I mean, I could go on all day about this, but it’s just like, I don’t see any reason to listen to any other podcast about business or sales than what you guys are doing. So I don’t know, that’s the end of my ranting and raving about that.

John Orban (10:44):

And like we were talking about before, Corey, where you were saying the client that I’m working with, would this idea work with him? Man, I think it could work with virtually anything. I mean, you’re already selling air compressors, German air compressors, right? With the thing? I mean, I think it’s a universal application, and that’s what I’m thinking about the theory of everything thing. Because what you’re doing is, you’re simplifying stuff, and that’s what needs to be done. I mean, we have overcomplicated so much in the world. That’s the reason why we’re having all these problems.

John Orban (11:18):

But the thing that really hit me was when, Chris, you started talking about these bits of information things. And I watched this, I don’t know whether you’d call it a movie or a documentary, or whatever, but it was called, What the Bleep Do We Know!?. And its basically gets into quantum physics and that kind of thing, and they said that we are bombarded with four billion bits of information every single second. I mean, I can’t even wrap my head around that and I tried to verify that independently. And as I told Corey, I couldn’t come up with a four billion number, but basically, the only thing I could come up with was scientists that were saying, it’s a heck of a lot of information we’re getting hit with.

John Orban (12:00):

Well, that took me back to one of the very first books that I read that literally changed my life. I mean … well, let me put it this way, it started me on a 30-year path, if you will, of reading everything I could get my hands on, on why people do what they do. What is human behavior, and that kind of thing. And the book was called, and I told Corey, and it’s called, Structure of Magic. And it was written back in 1975. And the idea is, we are by bombarded with so much information that we have developed this strategy to deal with all that.

John Orban (12:40):

So we basically do one of three things. We either delete the information. Have you ever had this situation where you’re trying to find your car keys? Because I’m all the time losing my car keys. And you’re looking around the kitchen counter, and of course there’s all kinds of crap on there, but the keys aren’t there. That’s where they should be, but they’re not there. Well, I do, let me not project this on you, but I go ranting and raving around the house. My wife goes crazy, the dog runs and hides somewhere. And then, I come back to the counter, and there they are. The keys are right on the counter, right where I left them. Now, why didn’t I see them? They were there, I looked at it, I didn’t see them. So that’s kind of like what the deletion thing is.

John Orban (13:17):

The second thing we do is, we tend to distort information. And this is for, I think … well, considering that sort of applied to me a lot, it was very difficult for me to say thank you when people would compliment me. I would always think in my mind, well, you don’t really mean that, I really didn’t do that great a job, that sort of thing. So you get into that. And I remember reading a book where the author said, all you have to do is say, thank you. And that was pretty significant, right? One of the things that you said, and I say recently. Recently, for me listening to, for you guys, it was probably like a year ago. But you started talking about this idea of, you were going to hire psychologists, and put them on as a sales rep.

John Orban (14:03):

And I said, that’s incredible. I mean, that is an incredible idea. Because, when you start to think about this communication thing that we go through, you have an idea in your head. Now, your idea just doesn’t pop into the other person’s head. You’ve got to verbalize that somehow inside your head, you then have to say it, the other person hears it, it goes into their head. They have to think about what it is, and then it gets to the thought that they come up with. Now, what do you think are the chances of the thought that’s inside your head and the thought that’s inside their head at the end of this process is exactly the same?

John Orban (14:43):

It’s pretty rare, especially as you think about the fact that while this is all going on, as a human being, you’re dealing with your experiences that you’ve lived in your life, the perceptions that you’ve formed from those experiences, and then the language that you’ve learned to try to communicate or express your feelings. And a lot of people are … a lot of difficulties about that. So in that whole chain of process, from idea to thought to verbalization, listening and all that kind of stuff, you’ve got all those things that you’re dealing with. Now, that’s in your sales rep. One of your podcasts, you were talking about how to hire sales reps, and things like that. But to have a sales rep that could understand themselves, for example-

Corey Frank (15:29):

Well, let me take something, John, when we look at … and Chris knows this, he’s heard the story, right? He’s been a mentor and a sensei and a Sherpa of mine for 20 years … gosh, 15 years, maybe. It feels like longer.

Chris Beall (15:43):

[inaudible 00:15:43].

Corey Frank (15:43):

But a lot of things that you’re saying, John, right, you’re talking about hiring psychologists. Chris talks a lot about, and kind of won me over years ago, two companies over, to look for introverts, as they make the best sales folks. And you take that psychological strategy, right, and he’ll talk about that in a second. And then you talk about using the proper tools. Jerry Hill today … Chris, you saw your boy, Jerry, right, who’s one of your top folks over at ConnectAndSell, posted an incredible iteration, deconstruction of the math of sales. Loved it, right? And Chris and I, and other folks live in the math of sales, John, how we deconstruct complex entities to the simple.

Corey Frank (16:28):

And you talked about your car keys. The reason you need to find your car keys, right, is something that we talk about on the show a lot, which is Occam’s razor, right? Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. Chris’s company, ConnectAndSell, is in the business of not multiplying unnecessary things unnecessarily. Don’t overthink things. Sometimes the simplest solution is the easiest solution. So when you take what Chris advocates from a personality perspective, the introverts and the introverted mind, and you take that and put the math around how to dominate your market, you have what should be something that is common sense. But sometimes, we in sales, especially CROs, investors, like to make things more complex, wouldn’t you say, Chris?

Chris Beall (17:16):

Yeah, I think the temptation to make things complex comes from two places. One is, it’s hard to make things simple, right? It requires a lot of thinking, actually. Henry Ford said something that I repeat to myself every day. Thinking is the hardest work of all, that’s why hardly anybody ever does it. He was being funny, but he was also being very, very serious, which is, when we think it’s psychologically and physically very challenging, and it’s a lot of work. And the easy thing to do is to think additively, just to come up with one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. And the hardest thing to do is to think synthetically, which is to say, this thing and this thing, actually, in some important way in this circumstance, or actually, this other thing when they’re together, and I’m going to take that thing and rely on it, even though I can’t see it.

Corey Frank (18:12):

You’re talking about simple. Again, you’re the physicist here, so just to be sure, John, right? I’m [inaudible 00:18:18] to be the poetry guy. I should be driving a cab or tending bar. Chris is the guy that should be running Los Alamos laps, okay? So we got to [inaudible 00:18:25].

John Orban (18:25):

Listen, listen, don’t cut yourself short on this. Because when we were talking on the phone and I was telling you stuff about my friend, and you were coming back with a sales script on me, I was freaking out. I could not believe that anybody could take that information and flip it around that quick, and come back with what I thought was powerful stuff.

Corey Frank (18:44):

Well, thank you.

John Orban (18:44):

And I’ll tell you what I told him right after I got off the phone with you. I said, listen, these guys can do in 30 days what it would take me over a year to do for you. And I said, if it doesn’t work, you’ll find out in less than a week. But I said, let me tell you something. If you go through with this, your life is going to change. And he’s not the first one I’ve told that to, because marketing, done right, will change a person’s life. I mean, he’s going to be on the road, he’s going to be touring, he’s going to be doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

Corey Frank (19:16):

Well, simple is better. And the formula we use for screenplays, scripting, Chris uses the same one, the [inaudible 00:19:25], that creates millions of phone calls, and tens of thousands of successful conversations a year has to do with that simplicity. When you have two competing theories, right, Chris, that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is always the better one.

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In striving for market dominance, which among the top companies in any field do you think puts forth the most effort to gain — or hold onto — that dominant position? Our guest, Matt McCorkle, Manager of Branch Operations for Kaeser Compressors, and our two Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, debate this question during this final conversation of their four-part discussion on all things sales-related. Even loyal followers of our Market Dominance Guys’ podcast will be surprised at the shared opinion these three sales gurus hold about which highly ranked company within each industry or service can claim bragging rights to the title of this episode, “We Try Hardest!”

About Our Guest

Matt McCorkle is Manager of Branch Operations for Kaeser Compressors. He has earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and has now been with Kaeser Compressors for 13 years.

Catch the three previous episodes in this session with Matt McCorkle:

EP107: On the Phone, They’ll Tell You the Truth

EP108: Sales and the State of Apprehension

EP109: Being There for Your Customers

—-more—-

Full episode transcript below:

Chris Beall (00:00):

Well, that’s funny. Many people have asked me, “Who do you want to do business with in any industry?” And I always say, “I want to do business with the number three player. Always.”

Corey Frank (01:22):

Okay. So, Matt, we always leave it on recording because we have just a brief… But thanks. Great stuff, brother. That’s really kind of you to spend so much time and to… We’re very careful about asking questions. We want to disclose the family jewels there. So I appreciate you indulging in some but not all of your techniques.

Matt McCorkle (01:43):

Absolutely. By the way, there is one that I was realizing, I probably shouldn’t have said third, I’m thinking. I mean, I feel like it’s common knowledge, probably. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but the guys who are fourth and fifth might be like, “I thought I was third.” I don’t know.

Chris Beall (02:00):

Well, that’s funny. Many people have asked me, “Who do you want to do business with in any industry?” And I always say, “I want to do business with the number three player. Always. Always.” Because number one is focused on the past.

Matt McCorkle (02:15):

Right.

Chris Beall (02:16):

Number two is focused on number one.

Matt McCorkle (02:19):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (02:19):

Three is focused on taking the entire industry. It’s always the same.

Matt McCorkle (02:24):

And the guys behind are just hanging around.

Chris Beall (02:26):

That’s right.

Matt McCorkle (02:27):

[crosstalk 00:02:27]-

Chris Beall (02:27):

So I mean, you look at it back in the day, right? Number one was Hertz. Number two was Avis. Number three was Enterprise. If you knew how Enterprise ran, you knew they were going to own the world.

Matt McCorkle (02:37):

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Beall (02:39):

It was abundantly clear, because they weren’t going after Hertz and Avis. They were going after the true loyalty of the person who rented a car, and they were going in places the other guys didn’t go. I was talking to somebody today who worked at Enterprise. Day one at Enterprise, here’s what they tell you. They ask a question, “So what’s the most important thing that we have around here as an asset, piece of equipment or whatever?” “Oh, the cars.” “Oh, the system.” Everybody has answers and nobody ever comes up with the right answer.

Chris Beall (03:10):

The trainer’s right answer is, “No, the telephone. And here’s what you’re going to learn to do. When that phone rings you answer within two rings and you sound like the person that that person needs right now.” And that’s how they built that business. Right? Avis and Hertz, they didn’t focus on that. So the number three player I’ve been obsessed with in every industry I’ve ever done business in. Because you can’t become number three unless you’re great, right?

Matt McCorkle (03:45):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (03:46):

You’ve built in real industries. But the question is who wants to own it all? Who wants to go after it? It’s never number one or number two.

Matt McCorkle (03:54):

Well, Chris, this is what’s great about our partnership with you because I don’t know that we can. It’s still, to me, a little bit of an open question of whether we can take those spots, because we are the top of the top. I mean, it is a different product, a different solution we offer than the other guys. And it is a dramatic different price. And so part of this experiment is to say, “What is that market share? What is the amount of the market that is willing to pay for the fully engineered German product that we sell? And that it is a good business decision for them to do that. How big of a market is it that needs that reliable of air at the cost we’re able to give it to them?”

Chris Beall (04:43):

Well, something to remember, and we’ve discussed this on Market Dominance Guys, is the market is always a list.

Matt McCorkle (04:50):

Right.

Chris Beall (04:51):

It’s always a list. And you dominate that list.

Matt McCorkle (04:54):

Yes.

Chris Beall (04:55):

So what somebody else might define as the market and market share is irrelevant. The question is four of those that you put on the list because you think they belong on the list because they meet the characteristics of those in the list, do you dominate there?

Matt McCorkle (05:10):

Right.

Chris Beall (05:10):

That-

Matt McCorkle (05:11):

That’s true. And leave out that segment that doesn’t need reliable air because [crosstalk 00:05:18]-

Chris Beall (05:17):

Yeah. That’s it. I mean, it’s so simple. And the beauty of dominance is dominance always excludes competition unless you want them to have part of it so you can throw them the bad deals. Because even within your list there are the-

Matt McCorkle (05:35):

[crosstalk 00:05:35]-

Chris Beall (05:35):

… so you can throw them the bad deals. Because even within your list there are the-

Corey Frank (05:37):

True.

Matt McCorkle (05:37):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (05:37):

And you definitely need somebody to throw the bad deals to, or else you get stuck with the damn things.

Matt McCorkle (05:44):

Very true. Very true. I was coaching one of my managers on that just today. I don’t think this is done, not meeting the criteria that we talk about as somebody we’re going to do business with.

Chris Beall (05:55):

Exactly. My dad told me something. He said once to me, “I’m only ever going to give you one piece of business advice. And here it is. You are never better than your worst customer.”

Matt McCorkle (06:06):

Oh, man. Huh, that’s interesting.

Corey Frank (06:09):

Yeah.

Matt McCorkle (06:11):

Yeah. There you go.

Corey Frank (06:13):

Yeah.

Matt McCorkle (06:14):

And you don’t want to be that.

Corey Frank (06:15):

Actually, we got a couple of and nuggets just right there, just keep the record button on for another five minutes. We got both of you guys in the can with a couple of other… So, Matt-

Matt McCorkle (06:26):

[crosstalk 00:06:26]-

Corey Frank (06:26):

… you’re not in Milwaukee, you’re in Virginia, then?

Matt McCorkle (06:28):

I’m in Virginia. Yes.

Corey Frank (06:29):

Okay. Gotcha. All right.

Matt McCorkle (06:30):

Where are you out of? You’re in Phoenix, you said.

Corey Frank (06:32):

We’re in Phoenix. Chris is just south of me right now. He’s seasonally adjusted, should be by now. My dad was a cop in Milwaukee for 30 plus years or so. So we grew up-

Matt McCorkle (06:44):

Wow.

Corey Frank (06:45):

… not five minutes from where you’re talking about. My grandpa, we got pictures, right, my grandpa selling fruit right around the corner from there. That was all swampland where now they have… It’s Summerfest grounds and all that stuff.

Matt McCorkle (07:00):

Right, right.

Corey Frank (07:01):

And so it’s a beautiful place, but gotcha.

Matt McCorkle (07:04):

Great city.

Corey Frank (07:04):

Yeah, absolutely. So, Chris, plans for the birthday? What are you doing this weekend, then?

Chris Beall (07:09):

We were going to go play golf somewhere and I decided to change that up. So we’re going to go for a hike up Madera Canyon for three or four hours.

Corey Frank (07:17):

Oh, beautiful.

Chris Beall (07:18):

Who knows? Maybe we’ll see the trogon, maybe we won’t. Helen doesn’t give a damn about birds, but for the sake of my mom and my late wife, I’ll take a look for the trogon. Oh, my friend, Robert Garner, just yesterday I had a snack with him and a coffee or whatever in Los Gatos. And he pulls out a picture of the trogon and he says, “You got to go see this bird at Madera Canyon.” So we’ll see whether on my 67th birthday I can see a bird that most people don’t ever see.

Matt McCorkle (07:46):

That’s really awesome.

Corey Frank (07:48):

Oh, that’s going to be great. Well, I’ve been privileged to know you for many of those. So we’ll look for many, many, many more. So thanks for what you do, Chris. And, Matt, thank you again for the time. And we’ll keep in touch and we’ll get you on the program here again and again. You’re a natural.

Matt McCorkle (08:05):

Oh, thank you. You’re too kind. Again, really appreciate it. Hope it’s valuable.

Corey Frank (08:08):

Awesome.

Matt McCorkle (08:08):

And happy birthday, Chris.

Corey Frank (08:09):

All right, everybody.

Matt McCorkle (08:09):

Have a great weekend.

Corey Frank (08:09):

All right.

Chris Beall (08:10):

Thanks so much, Matt, [crosstalk 00:08:11]-

Corey Frank (08:11):

Thank care, guys. See you. Bye-bye.

Chris Beall (08:12):

Have fun dominating. Bye-bye.

Matt McCorkle (08:14):

Thank you.

 

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When your prospect’s response to your cold call is “Not now,” do you assume they mean they’re too busy to talk at that moment? Or perhaps this is just their way of getting rid of you altogether. Our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, talks with Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO and founder of Selling Power, in this podcast about a more probable reason you’re hearing “Not now.” It has to do with the replacement cycle and consideration cycle of businesses. In other words, where they are in the three-year buying cycle most businesses utilize for timing when they begin considering a new product or service — or replacing an existing one. Once you determine if “Not now” really means “We’re not ready to purchase at this time,” what you do next is critical! Listen in as Chris and Gerhard divulge the intelligent way to deal with the 11/12ths of the market who aren’t ready to buy at this time. Take my word for it: You won’t want to miss the market-dominating advice you’ll hear on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Who’s Ready to Buy Right Now?”

About Our Guest Host
Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and CEO of Selling Power magazine, as well as CEO of the Sales 3.0 Conference series. Gerhard’s career has always been centered around helping sales leaders create peak performance in business and in life through video interviews, online events, and live workshops and retreats.

—-more—-

Full episode transcript below:

Chris Beall (01:22):

The big question in sales is who’s ready now and 11/12ths of your market … In the perfect case, 11/12ths of your market is not ready to consider your solution now. Consideration cycles are about one quarter, three months. Replacement cycles for solutions are about three years, 12 quarters. So one-twelfth of your perfect market, if your list is perfect, is in a consideration cycle this quarter. 11/12ths, you’re going to have to address later. Well, on what foundation? You can address them without trust or with trust. Which do you think works better? It’s actually as simple as that.

Chris Beall (02:04):

So, think of it this way. You dominate markets by building a pipeline that consists of paving the market with trust, and then harvesting the trust over the 12 quarters it’s going to take to get to dominance. Market dominance is generally a three-year process. That’s how to do it. Step by step, I have 104 episodes of a podcast. For the people who don’t like this compressed format, you can go listen to it for hours, and hours, and hours and go, “I think I heard of all that [crosstalk 00:02:33].”

Gerhard Gschwandtner (02:33):

Let me jump right in, because it makes me think about the tone of voice, the emotions, the emotion of trust. And that is the emotion that you want to create in the buyer. But at the same time, you talk about the fear of strangers, that not only the buyer has but also the seller. So fear decreases confidence, and a decrease in confidence is also perceived by the buyer as a decrease in trust.

Chris Beall (03:02):

Yes. Immediately. You’ve hit it. One of the biggest problem in market dominance, it’s getting started in those conversations such that your lack of confidence or lack of competence doesn’t sabotage the trust you’re trying to create. And, it’s not easy to overcome. exhorting people to be unafraid is of not value whatsoever.

Chris Beall (03:26):

I went to a fantastic weekend experience with you once, in which the culmination, the last thing that we did, was jumped out of an airplane. Not all of us did it, but some of us did it. And, I did it. I’m like anybody else. I looked out of an airplane, I looked down at the ground 10,000 feet below, or whatever the heck it was. You’re two miles about the ground. You’re going to jump. Are you kidding me? I spent a career as a rock climber, mountaineer. Falling is a bad idea, trust me. I’ve tried it once or twice. This looked like a big fall. So my fear was an issue. The confidence I got was from the guy I was strapped to and from the preparation. Rationally, I knew we probably weren’t going to die. And, the person I was with expressed confidence. Why? Because he’d jumped a bunch before.

Chris Beall (04:19):

So you need to be introduced to the problem of overcoming your own fears so your confidence isn’t an issue. So that now, the buyer’s fear can work for you. Their fear works for you because when you relieve their fear, they’ll trust you. “I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” When you take responsibility for being a bad thing, and then you show them a solution to a problem, you are the problem, they’ll trust you. It’ll really simple, but I’ve got to say it right, which means I need that confidence. Confidence comes from preparation and from practice.

Chris Beall (04:54):

That’s actually why we finally gave up over here at ConnectAndSell, you see this thing called Flight School. We finally gave up and decided to start teaching people how to have those great first conversations. And, it takes not just the confidence that comes from being taught, but it takes practice. If I’m going to stand in there against a major league curveball, have you ever seen one of them things? They’re not fun.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (05:19):

Right.

Chris Beall (05:19):

It’s not fun. That thing’s coming at your body and it’s going to break over the plate. And if you bail out, well that’s an easy strike for him. And now that he knows you’re afraid, he’s going to keep throwing it over and over again. You have to practice that.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (05:31):

Yeah. I think a good way to take your analogy with tandem jumping is that you, as the salesperson, put yourself in the position of the experienced parachute jumper and your buyer flies in tandem with you. Because your buyer needs the confidence, your buyer buys the confidence first before he or she is going to buy your solution.

Chris Beall (05:58):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And the mindset shift you need to make as the seller is, “This is good for this person.”

Chris Beall (06:06):

We’re working with a company called HUB International and their chief sales officer, Scott Webb, called me up one day. And he leads their blitzes, personally. He converts conversations to meetings at an incredible rate today. But back then, he thought he was bad, it was 30%. He called me up one day and said, “Chris, my mindset’s not right. I’ve got to more deeply believe in the value of this meeting, to the point where I insist on it.” He now converts at 72.9% and considers that to be a poor form.

Chris Beall (06:37):

How did he get from one to the other? First, he made that belief change. He decided he didn’t believe deeply enough in the potential value of this meeting for this human being he was talking with, even if they never do business together. No ulterior motives and boom, three X. By the way, the average conversion rate, conversation to meetings, is 4%. His is 72.9%. He is the rough equivalent of 17 people when he’s cold calling. He’s like a team of 17 people.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (07:08):

Wow.

Chris Beall (07:09):

And that’s from a mindset shift. His technique, obviously good. He’s been around, he knows what he’s doing. But even for him, it was a factor of three.

Chris Beall (07:20):

Oh, I have another analogy here. I think many people know that when surgeons work on human beings, they use a knife. They call it a scalpel so it doesn’t sound so bad. But, it may as well just be a sharp kitchen knife or something like that. They cut into that human being and there’s blood. And often, a lot of blood because people seem to be full of blood. Now, does it do any good for the patient if the surgeon never went through the process of getting used to the sight of blood? Because the sight of blood is not a good thing for human beings, we don’t like it. If we do like, by the way, I don’t want you to ever reach out to me. If you like the sight of blood, that’s a bad thing. Here, we have an important part of becoming a surgeon. It’s not the anatomy, it’s not the understanding of disease, it’s not the steady hands. The first thing we have to do is overcome our fundamental aversion to the sight of blood.

Chris Beall (08:13):

The first thing we have to do, in order to dominate markets, is to overcome our aversion to ambushing somebody so that we can serve that. If we can do that and we can manage that, this whole thing becomes extremely easy. Then, it’s repeatable because we’re not fighting ourselves along the way. And then, that tandem jump occurs where it’s a gift to the other person. You’re giving them a gift. “Ride along with me and you’re going to learn something.” And you get to legitimately say, when they’re being a little resistant, “I’ve been setting up meetings like this for a while.” It could be zero days. “And not once has somebody come to back and told me it was a waste of their time.” If you can say that honestly, it’s really easy to get people to take meetings. But without that belief, you think, “I’m trying to get the meeting so I can make my number, so that I get the quota.” It’s like me, me, me, me, me. You’re not going to get anywhere.

Chris Beall (09:14):

So the biggest problem in market dominance is that your intention to dominate the market, which is ego-driven, will keep you from dominating the market because it’s ego-driven. As simple as that. And it’s not a big transformation. That’s what we teach in Flight School, we actually teach people how to experience getting their ego out of the way and serving the other person, with a precise script and certain intonation, that sincerely allows that person to go on a journey with us. From their fear, to trust, then to curiosity, then to commitment, then to action. And if we can make that cycle flow, we can dominate markets. And if we can’t, it’s a matter of luck.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (09:53):

Yeah. And we need to keep in mind of the role of the salesperson is to identify the opportunity, and also then focus on delivering massive value that’s so superior, that nobody can say no.

Chris Beall (10:04):

Exactly.

Chris Beall (10:49):

I’ll ask anybody listening to this. If you set meetings or you have people setting meetings for you, can you answer this question? What are the three things that a prospect will learn in that meeting that they will remember as being of value to them, even if they never do business with you? If you can’t answer that question, you’re not sincerely selling them anything of value. The meeting is the product and the product needs to deliver value, and the value will always be in the form of learning. You’re not going to send them a gift card.

Chris Beall (11:18):

People who say, “Oh, come to my meeting and I’ll send you gift card,” you’re just saying, “We have no value, so here’s your stupid Starbucks card.” What’s that about? Can you imagine? I don’t even want to go there in human relationships. If I have no value that I know about, I shouldn’t be selling.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (11:37):

I want to remind ourselves of the value of time, we have four minutes left.

Chris Beall (11:42):

Any questions? They come along the way.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (11:47):

You have two more slides to go and I wanted to make sure that …

Chris Beall (11:51):

I didn’t know. Let’s do another slide. We’ll do them in a minute each.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (11:53):

Right.

Chris Beall (11:54):

What can you do about it? We already said what you can do about it. Make a list, hold conversations in which you’re trying to get resonance. Make sure that you’re setting meetings above a 5% rate. If you’re my friend Scott Webb, that would be 72%. His team does about 20. But, set a threshold, know that you’re in market. And then, focus and repeat. Get very, very, very comfortable getting that human touch early, to be the thing that creates the trust, that lets this get easier.

Chris Beall (12:24):

And then, the other thing you can do about it is be patient. It turns out, 11/12ths of your market is not in market this quarter, that’s a fact of the world. You can’t do anything about it except talk to them next quarter. So be patient and keep talking to them.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (12:37):

Yeah. Somebody just said, “Become comfortable with what makes you uncomfortable.”

Chris Beall (12:43):

Absolutely. And that’s true. This is the whole market of the professional, in every field, including what we’re doing. I’m comfortable doing this, you’re comfortable doing this. We could have a lot of people, if we said, “Hey, you’re going to do a webinar, go,” they’re not going to be comfortable. You’ve got to get comfortable because it’s uncomfortable. We’re talking to people we can’t even see, God knows what they think about us. They could be saying, “That Gerhard guy’s so good looking. What’s this Beall guy even doing on the screen and why is he yapping so much?”

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:10):

Wow.

Chris Beall (13:10):

I’ve got to get comfortable.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:13):

So how do people reach out to you?

Chris Beall (13:16):

Well, let’s see if there’s another slide that has that on it.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:18):

Here we go.

Chris Beall (13:19):

Look at that, it’s a miracle. Yeah. I’m Chris Beall, I’m CEO of ConnectAndSell. We do believe conversations matter. I think best is LinkedIn if you want to LinkedIn to me. It’s easy to find. There was that big long thing, who cares about that. Just go look me up on LinkedIn, I’m easy. Shoot me an invite. There’s my email address.

Chris Beall (13:40):

I think if you want to really learn about what I believe and what I’ve been talking about here that you can put into action, there are some episodes of Market Dominance Guys. Go to the one called The Secret of Her Success, in which my colleague, Cherryl Turner, teaches you to love no-shows. You will be amazed. She’s also a super high converter, 35% conversion talking to CEOs setting meetings.

Chris Beall (14:06):

And then, for those who are curious about taking their team to the top 5% of confident and competent cold callers, we have Flight School. And you do a test drive, and you take Flight School and magic happens.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (14:20):

Quick question. How was the 5% and above meeting rate determined? Somebody’s asking.

Chris Beall (14:27):

It’s actually, for most markets, it’s just math. You figure that the market consists of these 12 segments, so you have one-twelfth that are in play. If you exceed half of that twelfth, that twelfth is about eight-point-something percent, so about half of that is 4%. So if you exceed that, then you’re getting more than 50% of what’s in market right now, and 5% is just above half of a twelfth.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (14:56):

Right. Well, a number of people ask if they can get slides and share, and the answer is yes. And, “Did we record this? Because some people could not sit through the entire session, somebody missed the beginning.” We recorded this today and we will send everybody an email with the recording. It will be on sellingpower.com so we’ll notify you. And this webinar will stay on our website for at least the next 12 months.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (15:26):

Chris, thank you so much. I’m so happy to hear that you had a wonderful vacation. And I took a lot of notes today. I think that I would encourage you to write a book because people need it.

Chris Beall (15:40):

Well, thank you, Gerhard. I am writing a book. That’s what the podcast was actually to do, was to get the material for the book. The book is in progress.

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The only reliable way to see if your company’s value statement resonates with your prospects is to have lots of conversations with them, and for that, of course, you need salespeople. But as our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, tells our guest host, Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power magazine, that’s not all you need. You first require an expert to craft the scripted message salespeople will use in their cold calls. And you need a coach to train your callers to deliver that message in the most effective way. Once cold-calling begins, you then need a coach to make sure your salespeople don’t drift from your carefully crafted script and specified way of delivering it. “Under pressure,” Chris says, “we all begin to drift, to try something a little different, something unproven. So, somebody’s got to keep the salespeople together, and that’s the coach.” Join Gerhard and Chris as they provide coaching on the importance of sales-call coaching in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “The Enemy of Your Message Is Drift.”

About Our Guest Host

Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and CEO of Selling Power magazine, as well as CEO of the Sales 3.0 Conference series. Gerhard’s career has always been centered around helping sales leaders create peak performance in business and in life through video interviews, online events, and live workshops and retreats.

Full episode transcript below:

Chris Beall (01:20):

You’re going to start with one. Right. This is really simple. So you make a list of some possibilities and then you start putting companies in those lists and then you choose the one that’s kind of right-sized. Hey, we think we’re going to sell for average sales price of $37,000. That’s our guess. And we’re going to have a gross margin of 73%. That’s our guests because we’ve looked at our cost of goods and all that. And so if we get about this many looking at our overhead, we will be profitable. That’s cool. Or maybe we’ll be financable, which is a speculation about future profits.

Chris Beall (01:57):

So we need a market about this big. So let’s not make one any smaller than that. And then we’re going to make some lists. This is why having the reps make the list doesn’t make sense. This process would not work with a bunch of sales reps. This is executive management with the marketing function and the product function, getting together and you make the list. And you go, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one. You could close your eyes and pick one at random, but don’t pick two or three and don’t address two or three at a time. We address two now, ourselves at ConnectAndSell. We’ve been in business 15 years.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (02:29):

Wow.

Chris Beall (02:29):

We’ve been selling successfully in the marketplace for 15 years. We’re up to two. I’m thinking of adding a third. I’m almost there, but guess what? My salespeople are not adding the third. We’re going to add the third over here in executive mysteries. This is board of directors level stuff. And like, are we going to do this? Because it represents risk and it represents an investment. So how do you choose the ones you’re not going to pay attention to? It’s all the ones that aren’t the one you are paying attention to. One is an easy number. It’s a lonely number. It’s according to a song,

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:04):

Right.

Chris Beall (03:04):

Lonely. But you have to be as old as us to even have heard that song Gerhard. So that’s what an addressable market is. So I’ve already addressed this, but I’m going to address it again. Business leaders and sales leaders need to be business leaders. You must dominate at least one market because somebody will. That is whatever you’re doing fits in one market, two markets, three markets, whatever, somebody is going to be the dominant player. That’s called just math. Right. If you run a race, somebody’s going to win the race. I don’t need to know who it is to know that it’s somebody. There’s a little piece of calculus if you remember Gerhard, that they taught us that, right?

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:42):

Right.

Chris Beall (03:42):

So it’s a little fact about curves and this has to do with this maximum and minimum thing. So if you don’t dominate at least one market, you have two problems. One is a survival problem because whoever dominates that market is going to choose whether you survive or not. They’re going to keep you around kind of as their servant. Oh yeah. You take those, we’ll take these, the good ones. You can have the leftovers. Right. So you’re the dog under the table, hoping for scraps. That’s not the greatest position to be in, especially if somebody can put the dog out or put the dog down, which is not so great. Right.

Chris Beall (04:19):

So the other reason is that it drives valuation. And whether you’re a private company or public company or whatever, valuation is an expression of the willingness of others to invest in your future. That’s exactly what it is. So you’ll get 10 times the valuation for being a dominant player than for being the number two player. So you only have to dominate one 10th as many markets, like one and you get evaluation. That’s according to the dominant player, and according to the other factors of your business. Like what are your gross margins, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I realize in the venture capital-dominated world, this is a funny thing. They don’t like this so much. What they want you to do is to spend their money relatively quickly and show that you might have some currency across a whole bunch of potential markets.

Chris Beall (05:16):

And they rely on roughly speaking, only two or 3% of you surviving and the rest turn into salvage operations. So if you want to play that game, you can go play that game. It’s still really smart early in that game before you take the venture capitalist money to know that you can dominate one market. So what you do is you just make the list and you go talk to them and you don’t even build the product. You just talk to them and you get the resonance and you know the meetings are moving forward. Then go get the money from the VCs and then you won’t be conflicted because now you can sell and make them happy, sell and grow.

Chris Beall (05:51):

And meanwhile, you can also be dominating, which is your, that’s your safety factor, because guess who you have to deal with at that point? You have to deal with the VCs. And if you dominate one market, if they don’t want to fund you in the future, you just tune your overhead down and you’re profitable and enjoy life. And then go find another market to dominate. So instead of being in that two or 3% that succeed, you will be in the 100% that succeed. Dominating at least one market assures success. It’s very hard to go out of business as the dominant player in one market. It just is.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (06:26):

It’s a very, very powerful lesson  . And there’s something I think a psychological inhibitor that especially in S&B where business owners don’t think that way. They think more in terms of survival or meeting immediate needs. But I think that the domination strategy that you’re espousing makes a lot more sense.

Chris Beall (06:55):

Well it does. And by the way, it goes along well with survival and meeting immediate needs in a funny way. But it does mean you have to have the discipline to not do deals with folks that are not in your market. Or to reevaluate a very specific question, which is, did we just miss them? We should have put them in the list and we didn’t. But I tell you confirmation bias will make you invite unwanted guests into your market and they will distract you. The disease that kills companies is distraction. That’s why little companies shouldn’t do quote-unquote strategic partnerships with other little companies. They give each other the disease called distraction and it’s highly communicable. So be careful of it. You need focus. And the focus is, starts with the list. It’s really easy to stay focused when you have that list.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (07:45):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (07:45):

You can go through the list and say, have we talked to everybody on this list? We haven’t. Let’s take the ones we haven’t talked with and try to talk to them. Okay. If somebody wants help doing that, come to me. I can help you talk to a whole bunch of people. That’s what we do, is like to folks. Right. And we help you talk to people. Have we got a meeting with everybody on the list? Not yet. Well, we have a job to get a meeting with the rest. Have we learned from the meetings that we’ve had? What resonates? So what percentage are resonating on the economics, what on the emotional, and what on the strategic, and what didn’t resonate at all? That’s a little trickier, but it’s very objective step, by step, by step.

Chris Beall (08:26):

And by going step by step, we do take care of immediate needs. Because guess what? We’ll actually be closing business sooner than not. And the best part is it keeps getting easier instead of getting harder. That’s the reason you do this. Now here’s a funny thing about markets and it’s really awkward. One is you need different people to go on a market dominance program than are normally hired. And we already saw the answer in the poll. You need either externally or internally, somebody to do dispassionate research and make that list. And they cannot be distracted by oh, their comp plan for instance, right? I mean, it’s like, can you imagine CEO of the company goes well, I made the list like this. It turns out it took us right off a cliff, but it helped me make an extra $50,000 last year. Like no, you get fired for that as a CEO. Well, this as a person has to have the CEO hat on, so to speak and they’ve got to be tied to future market dominance. So you need to hire either internally or externally somebody to do research.

Chris Beall (10:19):

Research. You also need to either hire or put in place processes that cause you to have a structured identical message that asks the question, do you care about the economics? Do you care about the motions or do you care about the strategy piece of what we offer or nothing? And you need to have people who are expert at delivering that. That means you got to hire somebody to help you put together a message that reliably, I call it taps the bells. So think of it like this. You have an assembly line going by you and your job is to determine which of these things that look like bells are actually bells. I was just in Italy and they have beautiful bells there and they’re made out of whatever they’re made out of metal, right, brass, bronze. I don’t know how they make bells.

Chris Beall (11:06):

So they have these beautiful bells. But what if the bells could be made of clay? And they just go thud and they look identical. They weigh the same and they’re going by you. And your job is to figure out which ones are bells that we can ship to our customers and which ones are duds that we have to just send back to be crushed up into clay again. Well, you tap them. Boom or thud. Right. That’s what we do with conversations.

Chris Beall (11:35):

The only reliable way to determine that somebody is resonating like a bell with our message is one, to have a message. So we need to hire somebody who is really good at putting together a message that works psychologically for people so that they will resonate or not with one of these three elements. It’s simple. It doesn’t take very long to do. But now we need to hire another person and could be the same person, a coach to make sure that everybody’s staying precisely on that message because the big problem with focus is the enemy of focus is drift. So distraction leads us to be scattered, but drift and Gerhard you and I know this well, right? We’re both golfers. And we both know what happens to our golf swings.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (12:22):

Right.

Chris Beall (12:23):

When we quote-unquote, find something, right, on the range or whatever, or we have a lesson or whatever it is and we kind of got it, what happens? Under pressure of playing on the actual golf course, whether competitively or not, we begin to drift. We’re tempted to try something a little different, right? We’re tempted. And it’s why golf is this funny game, right? It tempts you inside your mind to try something unproven because that last one didn’t work so well, I’ll try this. So drift is the enemy of the precision you need to have your message delivered the same every time, which it takes to know if you’re resonating.

Chris Beall (13:06):

That is if sometimes I’m tapping the bell and sometimes I’m just waving a stick around, and sometimes I pick up a little hammer into it, and sometimes I do it with my finger, I’m not learning about bells. I’m learning about hammers and fingers. I’m learning about my reps. So somebody’s got to keep the reps together and exploring the market systematically with a message. And that’s a coach. Coaching needs to be done in real-time. Just like a golf swing. You can’t bring me your golf swing from last week. Describe it to me and I’ll coach you. I got to watch you while you’re doing it and go, Gerhard, remember when it was really, really great because you actually had your right hand a little bit more on top of the club so your wrist could hinge rather than the thing you’re doing right now with the thumb behind it that ain’t going to work. Right.

Chris Beall (13:53):

In real-time, we could do that. At the end of the week, you’re describing it to me. That’s how we tend to coach sales reps. We get them together on a one-on-one at the end of the week and then we tell them war stories or we ask them how it’s going or whatever. Right. This is performance. This is performance. And we’ve got to have a coach who coaches to performance in real-time. And then of course, we need to hire people who can have the conversations. By the way, they can be junior people, they can be senior people as long as they sincerely believe in the potential value of the meeting that they’re selling, but they got to sell the meeting. The meeting is the first concrete step into the market that tells you whether that resonance is happening.

Chris Beall (14:33):

How do you know the bell rings? They take the meeting. Not they said a nice thing. Oh, I’m interested. Send me some information, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. They take a meeting. So you’ve got to be trying to sell the meeting, but what’s valuable in the meeting, learn it. So your reps have got to know what’s valuable in the meeting, right? So you have to hire the right kind of people. You have to train them up to sell the meeting. You got to coach them in real-time and they need to avoid drift. Otherwise, you don’t know what’s going on in your market. That’s a bunch of very practical things to do. And then your list is made by a research team or by marketing, if they’re doing it honestly. And the driver for that is the company strategy.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (15:12):

I think you did a lot of thinking on your vacation about this because we have done a number of webinars together. And this is an experience today where you come up with a lot of clarity and a lot of good insights that are fundamental to running a business that’s focused on market dominance. The enemy of focus is drift. We got to share it on Twitter. We got to share it on LinkedIn because so many salespeople drift away from their process, from their script, from their story, and they improvise like you and I do on a golf course.

Chris Beall (15:53):

Exactly, exactly. And they do it because it’s uncomfortable doing the other thing. And by the way, you need to build what is conventionally considered sales pipeline in order to know that you’re dominating the market. You got to actually be engaging with folks. That first engagement is probably going to be an ambush conversation. And the reason is simple. You can’t figure out that resonance with the economics, or the emotions, or the strategy by sending somebody an email. The clever email that gets somebody to take a meeting, for instance probably is not a gate other than this is a person who takes meetings. That’s not what you’re looking for. You’re actually, you have to do it the other way around. Define the role and the company and then talk to them. But the first time you talk to them, they’re probably not going to be as ready for you to talk to them. You got to ambush them. It’s kind of sad actually, but you got to do it.

Chris Beall (16:52):

And so to build that pipeline, we have to have first conversations. And first conversations with strangers are extremely uncomfortable. In fact, they’re right at the edge of choosing to be exiled from the village. If you want to kind of go in the hierarchy of bad things that humans really don’t like, here’s what they don’t like. One, they don’t like invisible strangers. They don’t like them. Because in the environment of evolution, I’m reading The Decameron right now, by the way, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Right. So even just back there in Florence, in the 1300s, just then not that long ago, it was dark at night. There were no electric lights. Probably a quarter of the stories that those 100 stories involve an invisible stranger. Invisible strangers are scary, scary things. They’re not here to bring us a Bud Light.

Chris Beall (17:46):

They’re the bad people from across the river. We’re really civilized in the village that we live in. We paint our faces vertically. Those horrible people, they paint them horizontally. That’s terrible. Everybody knows that’s bad, except them apparently. And they speak a little differently and they eat food that smells not quite like ours. And when they show up at night, that’s why they’re invisible. And they’re not here to bring us a Bud Light. They’re here to change the demographics of our village to look more like their village because we won’t be here anymore. So we don’t like invisible strangers. And we don’t like exile. We don’t like being kicked out of the village. So here we are getting those emotions about being an invisible stranger and maybe being rejected by somebody, exiled. And we package it all together and call it a cold call.

Chris Beall (18:38):

And it’s awkward and it’s tough. It’s not as tough as people think. You can learn how to do it. And you have to have the right mindset and you teach mindset, been teaching mindset for years, how important it is. And you have to have the right technique. And I’ll compare this to surfing. It’s like being a surfer. It’s very artistic. It’s very beautiful. And you’re probably not going to shape your own surfboard because you don’t know-how. When you’re learning to surf, you surf on somebody else’s, on a board that was made for surfing, not on your eye idea of a surfboard. The script you’re going to use is just like the surfboard. It’s shaped by an expert so that you can bring your emotions out and be human. You don’t have to invent the words and wonder whether the words are right, wrong, or indifferent.

Chris Beall (19:24):

You don’t have to worry whether you’re using colloquialisms or too many syllables or whatever and got the pace wrong or whatever. You can actually work with a script just like working with a surfboard that was designed by an expert based on years and years and years of experience and experimentation. And then you can get comfortable there and express yourself like the surfer using their body, using their balance, using their cerebellum, all that stuff they use in order to make that beautiful move on the wave. They didn’t invent the board. Right. So your speaking voice is the surfer. That’s where your artistry is. That’s where your humanity comes out. I’ll just give you a little piece of computer science here. It’s actually information science. As you know, that’s one of my backgrounds, right? I’m a,

Gerhard Gschwandtner (20:10):

Right.

Chris Beall (20:11):

Written millions of lines of code and all that kind of horrible stuff. And I’m a physicist and mathematician by background. I look at this like this. How much information is going back and forth as we’re building our pipeline? Because it takes a lot of information to get somebody to trust you enough to listen to you, enough to get to the point where they might resonate with your message. Well, if I send you an email, I’ve got about 5,000 bits of information in there, if you read it. That’s just information theory. A character of information is about 10 bits and I can add them up. I might get to 5,000 bits. When I’m speaking with you, that’s 20,000 bits a second. So an email corresponds to one-quarter of one second of human speech. And yet there’s not all the words of the email in that one-quarter of a second.

Chris Beall (20:59):

So what’s in there? Is it just waste? Probably not. Right. Evolution kind of carries that stuff away. It’s the emotional content coming from the tone of voice. It’s who am I and can you trust me? That’s what’s coming in my voice and that’s actually all of the 20,000 bits except the words. So the job of the words is to carry the voice. It’s the job of the voice to create trust. It’s the purpose of trust to allow us to get curiosity. It’s the job of curiosity to get somebody to commit to doing something they don’t want to do, which is to spend more of their time with us or with our expert. And then it’s the job of that expert of the expertise to actually explore the possibility of working together to solve a problem.

Chris Beall (21:47):

So we’ve got a handle in our sales pipeline that first little bit. How long do we have to do it? According to Chris Boss of the FBI, used to be with the FBI, he told me the answer to this question one night, seven seconds. We have seven seconds to get somebody to trust us. So our sales pipeline really is this. Of that list we made, how many of those folks in that list now have some trust with somebody on our team because that person had a conversation with them and executed the first seven seconds correctly. That’s the beginning of your pipeline. The rest of the pipeline flows naturally from the mathematics of the situation. Put more in, you will get more out. When somebody tells me there’s a quality, quantity disparity, well, yeah, I have very high-quality conversations. I just don’t have very many of them. It’s like that’s nonsense, because that’s saying your psychic. You know in advance everybody who’s going to buy.

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You may have heard the term “post-pandemic” bandied about in recent months, but there’s nothing “post” about the COVID pandemic yet: We’re still in the thick of it. It’s not all downside, though, as James Thornburg, Enterprise IT Strategist at Bridgepointe Technologies, and our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank will tell you. In their third conversation together, they talk about the upside of the pandemic as it concerns sales. Because what is “post” for most salespeople is that bone-wearying business air travel, and the time-waste of business lunches, and the tedium and expense of that daily commute to and from the company office or to and from the offices of business prospects. The combination of cold calling by phone and discovery meetings by Zoom has made a new and successful world for salespeople, one that doesn’t require leaving home. Yes, you’ve heard of attempts to return sales to the pre-pandemic days, but as Chris predicts in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “There Is No Going Back.”

About Our Guest
James Thornburg is the Enterprise IT Strategist at Bridgepointe Technologies, which offers a service that helps design IT and telecom projects for their clients and includes selecting the right supplier at the right price with no extra cost to their customers.

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Full episode transcript below:

Corey Frank (00:47):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall with all things market dominance. I’d be curious to see from a CEO perspective, because a lot of us we’ve talked certainly several times now about the change in organizations when they’re moving remotely and the role in sales, where I have to be around you … As you say, my three pound brain has to be around in a vicinity of somebody else with a three pound brain and particularly in sales with the collaboration, and the energy, and the activity tracking.

But I’m curious, it would be interesting to explore what that does to the CEO as well, when his whole entire organization is virtual now. Right? You’re used to it certainly at ConnectAndSell, you guys have had a head start, but for a lot of CEOs, they’re used to having this security blanket of a staff around them to kind of go from meeting to meeting, to meeting, to have this echo chamber, as we called it, of feedback flowing up. And now I wonder if CEOs actually have more time on their hands. And so there’s even less of an excuse not to make these type of discovery calls or customer calls to fill those gaps.

Chris Beall (02:08):

Well, they certainly have more time that they’re not traveling. I can speak as, maybe I traveled an unusual amount, but I don’t think so. I was on the road in business 108 days last year. So, that’s a lot of time. Now you could say it’s productive of time to read, time to talk to people. I met random people here and there and not a small number of deals get made. I have a certain propensity for picking up deals in bars, so to speak, but still that’s a lot of time. Think of each trip, there’s the half an hour to an hour to get to the airport. There’s an hour and a half to go through all the junk at the airport. There’s the occasional missed flight. There’s the four hours plus to get to the other end. There’s the Uber, there’s this, there’s that.

That’s all waste. That’s all pure waste. So, that time has been freed up. By the way, that money’s freed up too. So in our company, $40,000 a month of travel is freed up. 

Corey Frank (02:08):

That’s right. 

Chris Beall (03:05):

$40,000 a month’s a lot of money to find … Talk about change found in the couch cushions, “Oh look, there’s 40 grand. I wonder if we could get something with it.”

Corey Frank (03:13):

That’s right. 

Chris Beall (03:16):

“Let’s put it away for a few minutes and then think about that in 10.” Right?

Corey Frank (03:19):

Right.

Chris Beall (03:20):

So, the time is certainly there and yes, I think one of the things is, there’s an egalitarianism of a good kind that shows up in these Zoom meetings. Zoom flattens the meeting. The meeting’s no longer in my office, but one thing I always hated when I moved, so to speak up, I never could figure out why they call it up, in organizations, is get the big office.

And I hated the big office. I’ve always hated the big office. I remember I had a big office at a big-ish company I worked at. Not big by anybody’s standards to think, a company had been a billion dollar a year, a company that had kind of moved into being under secular pressure from the internet of $350,000,000 year company. I was hired as the head of innovation.

They gave me this big, big office, big corner office on the eighth floor, overlooking, like a cornfield or something. I’m pretty sure I went in there six times during the year I worked there. And one of them was on the very last day when we sat around drinking some Chinese whiskey, because I had all-Chinese team. The most wonderful team I’ve ever had in my life. And they were very kind.

So that was one time. So five times to do anything else, but I refused to hold a meeting in there because why do I want to encourage people to lie to me? And that’s a terrible thing, the hardest thing to get is the truth. And you might get it at lunch. You might get it at somebody else’s desk, but you’re not going to get it on your own turf in that big office.

So now nobody has the big office anymore. So maybe there’s a little more truth flowing around. There is also who talks. You want your introverts to dominate the conversation over time. They’re the most thoughtful people in your company.

Corey Frank (05:09):

Okay. Right.

Chris Beall (05:10):

They’re also your best sales people. So your introverts actually didn’t like it in the rah, rah, sales floor that you were running. So your best sales people tend to be introverts, your best sales people are really [inaudible 00:05:21] all that banging of the gong, and high fiving and all that stuff, they’ll go along with it. But, they have to go relax and get rest afterwards, because that stuff hurts when you’re an introvert. It really does. It’s like, “Oh man, I have to do that.” And yet introverts tend to make the very best sales people. And on your staff, they tend to have the most thoughtful observations. After all they have thinking time, they’re introverts. Right?

Corey Frank (05:49):

Yes.

Chris Beall (05:49):

They get their energy from what’s going on inside. So, I think that flattening, I’ll call it the Zoom flattening that’s occurred, is a good thing in that everybody tends to get to speak. They’re all in the same office. It’s also in each person’s home, which has got an interesting intimacy. Some folks complained, “Oh, the kids walked behind. I had to take a moment.” But, that’s the good stuff. That’s the human stuff. That’s where we soften up with regard to each other sufficiently to maybe tell our own little truth or to listen to somebody a little bit differently, because until we’re empathetic, we’re not much.

And it’s hard not to be empathetic with somebody, who’s got the same problems that you have, the problems of home. In the big office, I don’t have any problems. You come into my office, we hold the staff meeting, you sit there, and you sit there and you sit there. The pecking order is established by all of that. We go in a certain order. The important stuff is first, the dog meets stuff is at the end, and if we run out of time, you don’t get to talk. Whoever you happen to be [inaudible 00:06:58] probably the introvert, who had the most valuable thing to say.

Corey Frank (07:01):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (07:01):

So, I think we’ve gotten a lot of good, not just in the raw productivity, the produce score is measuring, and that Microsoft is measuring in the Microsoft workplace analytics. They measure definite productivity increase in meaningful activity from work from home. That’s at the individual level, nobody has come up yet and measured what’s happening at the sociocultural level with regard to what I’ll call the Zoom egalitarianism or the Zoom flattening. I am going to make a prediction that when somebody does this work, they’re going to find out that introverts are making a bigger contribution than they used to, and a bigger contribution than the extroverts.

Chris Beall (09:20):

My big question is when are these chickens going to start to lay again? It’s bothering me. Every night, I go to bed thinking, “What’s with Thornburg’s hens?”

James Thornberg (09:27):

No, it’s tough. It really is.

Chris Beall (09:29):

It is. This is the hard part about agriculture.

James Thornberg (09:34):

I still have a bunch of meat in the freezer, so that’s holding us up. I saw a bacon and whatnot.

Chris Beall (09:39):

That’s good. Well, Helen and I were talking about pigs last night, because I once had a piece of software that the Hormel guys used to do a reverse bill of materials on a pig. Bills of materials normally used to bring things together and manufacture them. But we had this software that was so flexible you could run the bill of materials upside down, and you could take pig and you could manufacture parts out of the pig. And I’ll never forget going to the Hormel plant and saying, “So how does this really work?” And they said, “Well, comprehensively”, I said, “What does that mean?” And they said, “Well, everything but the squeal.” I said, “Okay, everything, but the squeal, that’s good.” So I told that to Helen last night, and she moved to the other side of the bed.

James Thornberg (10:24):

She’s now a vegan. Yes. 

Chris Beall (10:27):

She just got further away. It’s like, you want to say stuff like everything but the squeal? It’s okay, but I’m going to have a moment here.

Corey Frank (10:35):

So James, what kind of spread do you have over there?

James Thornberg (10:37):

I have 23 acres.

Corey Frank (10:39):

23 acres. And then what kind of animals?

James Thornberg (10:43):

Acres. I mean a lot of it is pasture, so it was an old horse farm. It was a pretty big deal back in the day, that the estate was, they had a lot of Arabians and then they would have shows. And if you come to the property we have, it used to be the announcer’s booth. It looks almost like a lookout, basically a little kid’s fort, or something. The kids use it as a fort now, but the announcer used to be up in there, and then when they would bring out the horses, there was a big kraal and everything.

Corey Frank (11:06):

Oh nice.

James Thornberg (11:07):

So, it was a pretty big deal back in the day with the Arabians. And so I have a lot of horse pasture with horse fencing that 50 years ago was probably beautiful. I mean, it would be 150 grand probably to fence this place. It’s a little run down, so I’ve been repairing it.

Corey Frank (11:24):

Is there a name of this estate? Do you call it-

James Thornberg (11:25):

Thornborough Farm.

Corey Frank (11:26):

Thornborough Farm?

James Thornberg (11:27):

Yeah. Thorn borough farm. I went kind of back to my history. If you have English heritage, you can track your family back pretty easily. And so, I was able to track my family all the way back into the 1300, and I grew up with not a lot of money and it was always kind of a funny thing in the family, on my dad’s side, where some of the people in the family … A lot of people are estranged from one another, but they said that we were royalty, that Thornburg came from royalty.

And there’s some truth to that. They were Knights of the Shire. So when the reformation happened and everything, they were Catholics and they basically, they all ended up converting and becoming Quakers. Basically they took all their land. So, traditionally my family is Thorn borough. And then when they came to the US, they changed it to Thornburg with an H at the end and then some took it with just the G.

Corey Frank (12:20):

Interesting.

James Thornberg (12:21):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (12:21):

So truly you are derived from Rontos. You are in essence the king once removed.

James Thornberg (12:27):

Exactly.

Corey Frank (12:29):

Of cool calling. I love that name-

Chris Beall (12:30):

And raising chickens can be a royal pain. I’ve done it. It’s royalty all the way around.

James Thornberg (12:35):

Yes. I enjoy it. I’m getting more into the kind of the butchering side and getting into that and we’ll see kind of where that leads me.

Corey Frank (12:44):

And what’s the biggest city closest to you?

James Thornberg (12:47):

What’s that?

Corey Frank (12:47):

What’s the biggest city closest to you?

James Thornberg (12:49):

Biggest city would be Kalamazoo, I’m in between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.

Corey Frank (12:54):

Okay.

James Thornberg (12:56):

Kalamazoo is probably only, it might be 70,000 I think. And then Grand rapids is probably maybe half a million somewhere around there. So, I was working for single path. I wanted to get out of Chicago. They said, “Go ahead.” And I was a little bit concerned because there’s not a lot of businesses around here, and up until the pandemic, some people were adverse to doing business with somebody that wasn’t local, that completely changed with the pandemic.

So it fell into exactly what I was doing, which is just on the phones. And so it’s amazing to me how much I can get done with making the dials in the morning, and then running all these meetings in the afternoon. The thought of even going to a meeting, now is so unproductive to me, the thought of it.

Chris Beall (13:42):

It is, isn’t I?. It’s like folks ask me to lunch all the time. Chris, you can attest this. People have no idea how expensive it is to go to lunch. Virtually, if I were to ask somebody to go to lunch, it’s not like it was in the days. It’s just, you don’t have time for that. 

It’s the meet of the day. You think about the flow state that’s interrupted. You think about the non-productive time, their back, the small talk for first 15, 20 minutes. All that stuff that just gets in the way that distractions. And I wonder if that’s changing even more so since the pandemic. What do you think?

Corey Frank (14:17):

I think it’s massive. That’s a great story, James. We got to edit that one into a little thing. Because we did a whole episode, back in April of 2020, on the death of the commute, and the injection of what I still think is about a trillion dollars a year into the economy, terms of the time and flexibility.

Like you’re doing your business James in a way that would’ve been possible, but somewhat challenging before the pandemic. And then now it’s in the absolute mainstream that this is how we do business. And people who think we’re going back, they all flunked math.

James Thornberg (14:55):

Yeah. It’s huge. I don’t have it in front of me, but I think I’ve closed deals in like 20 different states since I started. Never would’ve happened before.

Corey Frank (15:02):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (15:03):

I haven’t traveled on business since March. Well, we went to one conference. So, Helen and I went to a conference in Texas and spoke, and got one big opportunity out of it. Really big, huge and a great friendship. So, that was interesting. That’s the only business travel I’ve done since March 12th of 2020.

Corey Frank (15:26):

Wow.

Chris Beall (15:26):

And we do business all over the world, personally, I close deals everywhere.

James Thornberg (15:31):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (15:33):

When people bitch about Zoom fatigue and all that. I think, “How much did you used to travel? You want to see some fatigue? Go through an airport.” 

Corey Frank (16:27):

Oh, look at Mark Hunter. All Mark Hunter’s videos were done in the airport. Remember that?

James Thornberg (16:31):

Yeah, they are.

Chris Beall (16:31):

Yeah. 

James Thornberg (16:32):

I never traveled. I mean, I only traveled to a commute to drive to somebody’s business in Chicago in the suburbs. That’s it.

Chris Beall (16:40):

Yeah. But now you reach out to the world. Right? So I was on the road because the nature of every business I’ve ever done an average of 107 days a year for most of the past 42 years. And sometimes more than that, for four years, it was commuting from Denver area, from Boulder out to the Bay Area. Every Monday, back Friday. I did that every week for 52 weeks in a row for four years. This is pretty nice to be able to just talk to people.

Corey Frank (17:14):

Yeah. Went to the next room. James, do you do zoom presentations or do you do phone calls on your illumination discovery?

James Thornberg (17:21):

I do all zoom.

Corey Frank (17:23):

You do all zoom?

James Thornberg (17:23):

Yeah. 

Corey Frank (17:23):

So, you cold call them and then they have a chance to actually see you, talk with you, see the nuances of your nonverbal communication, et cetera?

James Thornberg (17:33):

Yeah. 

Corey Frank (17:33):

Interesting.

James Thornberg (17:33):

I run the 30 minute meetings, typically it’s on zoom. I always have my video on, they may or may not. It just depends on the individual.

Corey Frank (17:40):

Yeah. 

Chris Beall (17:42):

It’s an amazing world that we’ve been pushed into. I think what we learned is we had the tech to do it for a long time, but we didn’t have … Like the old fax machine problem, it takes two to tango. And suddenly everybody was two. So it’s interesting. And there’s all this talk about going back. There is no going back. I mean it’s crazy. It’s like saying, “Well, let’s go back and ride horses instead of cars.” So like, “It sounds good, I like horses just ain’t going to happen.”

James Thornberg (18:13):

Yeah. A lot of people are trying to introduce the hybrid.

Chris Beall (18:17):

Yeah. 

James Thornberg (18:17):

Where people are in and out, or who needs to be at the office will be at the office. We’ll see

Chris Beall (18:22):

The math on that is impossible. It’s just crazy. In fact, a number of people … There was a company that the company that I’d know pretty well, they gave up going back to the office. They were kind of doing it in a hybrid fashion, but it’s like, “I don’t know who is going to be there.” So if I don’t know, who’s going to be there, then this is like, “Well, you got to be there when I’m going to be there.” And then somebody will change their plans, because they’re used to the flexibility. It’s like, “Oh, you stood me up?” “I stood you guys up today for 30 minutes, and all I had to do was commute from that room over there, into this room. And I didn’t even stop for the traditional bottle of McAllen. So I could actually be calm enough to have this event here.”

James Thornberg (19:03):

Let me ask you guys this question. Are we good on the podcast? Did it turn out all right? It’s all bad, because I kind of got distracted when Corey was asking me for my words of wisdom.

Corey Frank (19:12):

It was better. That’s classic Market Dominance Guys.

Chris Beall (19:18):

Yeah. Because it just started out … Like you James, I would just call Chris, on the road or when I’m stuck. Chris is famous for saying that the best business breakthroughs that are worth a damn are when you are stuck, not when you are in flow. And too often you get too cocky in flow to work in the business versus on the business.

And so we said, let’s just put it on the zoom and take some notes, and just one thing led to another and then the pandemic happened and we shifted … Because it’s interesting. Think about if the pandemic happened five years previous, how do people communicate? Okay. You have a really crappy version of WebEx. 

James Thornberg (20:02):

You’re right. 

Chris Beall (20:04):

Maybe a couple of download iLink players where you have an agent in the … Let’s say it was 10 years previous-

Corey Frank (20:11):

That’s really the key. [crosstalk 00:20:14] before this zoom product existed, I know because I blew it. Five years ago. I was sitting there, in a room, with Dave Berman and he is showing me this thing by walking into the next room and saying, “This works on mobile from in there to here.” And by the way, we both turned off our wifi. And here we are having this meeting. And he says, “I want you to integrate this into ConnectAndSell.”

And they were customers and he was a customer. And I’m like five years ago, we’re running in the hard version of second gear, 8,000 RPMs. It’s not going very fast, but the motor’s screaming, no cash, no gas in the tank, I’m trying to do deals to make the company go forward.

So, I’m trying to get a deal with them and my imagination shrunk to the size of a pea pod, and I couldn’t figure out really … I walked out of that meeting going, “There has to be some way to do this. I love this product. There’s got to be some way to do it. Oh, now I got to get a deal with the guy.”

How hard would it have been for me to open my mind and go, “You know when you set a meeting in ConnectAndSell, it’d be really cool.” If it actually defaulted to being in this zoom thing and sent an invitation out of zoom to everybody. Well, I would’ve made us an extra a hundred million bucks, but totally missed it. So we had the tech, but we didn’t have … And we even had the zeitgeist, it would’ve worked. Right? 

Chris Beall (21:44):

Yeah. 

Corey Frank (21:44):

It would’ve worked. We wouldn’t have had these vaccines, the mRNA technology was not even remotely close. It was nowhere close.

Chris Beall (21:55):

I mean you had clip media 10 years ago, I mean, that’s the default tool to communicate via email.

Corey Frank (22:04):

Yeah. 

Chris Beall (22:04):

But it’s really sobering to think that if this thing would’ve happened 10, 15 years ago, what would it would’ve done to our country? What would it have done to the economy? What would’ve it done to business, homes, et cetera, without technology like this?

Corey Frank (22:21):

This was hard enough. I mean, the fact is we have a cell service, mobile that has been the other big deal. Because it’s not just what we do at our homes, it’s the fact that we can get texted with that SOS, or the fact that I can run the rest of my business life around my personal life, not just on a computer, but also on a mobile device that really works. It’s that combination that’s making this work. I think if my math was right. I think it’s a trillion dollars a year into the economy.

Chris Beall (22:55):

You have to look at that. I think we missed a zero or an item there, but it was close, or something like that.

Corey Frank (23:00):

But I think we missed some categories too. We were doing a simple cost savings on the commute and time freed up for the individuals. I think we missed the big synergy plays that are going on. And if you want to see where the money went, look at the stock market. Everybody predicted we were going to get a crash. We didn’t get a crash. We got the opposite. And that’s where the money … The value always goes somewhere. It went into stock market and you’re watching it and it’s like, “Look at that thing.” 

Chris Beall (23:26):

Yeah, and Bitcoin and NFTs.

Corey Frank (23:26):

Or Bitcoin. 

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