Is the goal of each member of your sales team to dominate your company’s market? Or is their goal to make their sales quotas? According to our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, it should be “Dominate or die!” This week, Chris shares with our podcast audience a Selling Power webinar he calls “How to Achieve Market Dominance,” in which he details the steps necessary to do just that: dominate your market! In this first part of a three-part series, Chris defines the terms “market” and “addressable market,” and then goes on to explain precisely what information you need to obtain from your addressable market prospects when you have a conversation with them. Using a clear and organized approach, Chris will lead you to an understanding of this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ topic, “What Do You Do With an Addressable Market?” As usual, you’ll walk away from this how-to guide with insights and strategies to help your company on its way to dominating its market.

—-more—-

Here is the transcript to the full episode:

 

 

 

Gerhard Gschwandtner (01:27):

Hi. My name is Gerhard Gschwandtner, I’m the founder and publisher of Selling Power magazine. I want to welcome you to our webinar. With me is Chris Beall, he’s the CEO of ConnectAndSell. Hi, Chris.

Chris Beall (01:39):

Hey. Hi, Gerhard, it’s great to be with you back from Italy.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (01:43):

Well, I’m glad you took some time off and recharged and feel like a Renaissance man, right?

Chris Beall (01:49):

I’m fired up to broaden my scope of understanding and appreciation.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (01:55):

And you have a fresh perspective on how to achieve market dominance. And before we dive in, Chris, can we do a quick poll with the audience? I want to welcome everybody to think about when you want to ask question, type him in, then we’re going to pick him up on the fly. We also have about 10 minutes at the end for a Q and A, so let’s show the audience poll in the beginning.

Who on your team is responsible for creating and maintaining prospecting target lists? Is it marketing? Is it sales development reps, sales leadership, or a research team? Think about those four questions and check the box. Chris and I will look at the results and share them with you. Right now, I’m seeing this in the real-time. Marketing and sales development reps are in the lead, sales leadership is third, and the research team does not exist at this point, doesn’t have a showing.

Chris Beall (03:01):

I don’t know if that horse didn’t even show up for the race.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:04):

Didn’t that horse didn’t come? It didn’t come in.

Chris Beall (03:09):

If this were the race in Sienna, the horse is still in the church being blessed.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:15):

So, is it true that they ride horses in the middle of those small towns?

Chris Beall (03:19):

In that one in Sienna, they have a horse race with 10 horses each year. Right in the square in town, they bring in dirt and put mattresses up to keep people from dying and they ride bareback.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:31):

Amazing.

Chris Beall (03:32):

Yeah.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (03:33):

So, the leading horse is marketing. The second horse is sales development reps and sales leadership. And there’s no research team among our audience today. What do you make of that?

Chris Beall (03:44):

Well, it’s interesting. It actually speaks to the heart of what I want to talk about today, but it depends on how you think of the purpose of sales in the business. And there’s a major change came about because of software as-a-Service. Primarily, software eating the world, as they say, in which the role of sales, the old role of sales was really to dispose of inventory at a gross profit in order to keep the lights on at the factory and maybe generate some net profit, which you could use to expand the business. So, this is what we called… I believe the term for is capitalism, and the idea is that you put capital to work. Most people think of that as money, but capital is actually plant and equipment and stuff like that. And you produce stuff, you make things and when you make things, of course, you’ve got to get rid of them.

And so, sales job was to get rid of the things you made and turn them back into dollars, so that you could pay to do stuff. The role of sales actually has fundamentally changed in the economy, and most people don’t recognize it. And that’s really the why behind this entire webinar, it’s the why behind my podcast, it’s called Market Dominance Guys. We’re on episode 104, 105 or something like that. Apparently, either we’re crazy or people are interested in this new role of sales, which is to dominate markets.

It doesn’t seem like that’s connected to making prospecting lists, right? Why would they even be connected? Who really cares? Isn’t a market just like, “Oh, we’re going to go and do something. I know we’re going to be the leader of…” And then, a bunch of pretty words. And if we take it down one level, we say, “Well, that’s for companies going to sell the companies in this vertical and we’re going to sell a solution to this problem.” And that’s our market as those companies that want that solution.

And I want to talk about market dominance with regard to the role of sales in actually doing the most important thing we do in business, so this is really for salespeople and sales leaders. This is a bit of an attempt at a wake-up call, which is you’re being called to a new mission, which is to dominate markets not just make quota. Sales tends to think of itself as, “Hey, I got my territory, whatever it is. And my job is to make this quota number happen within the territory by hook or by crook. However I do it, that’s good. If I make the number, it’s good. If I beat the number, it’s great. If I beat it by too much, that’s bad.” Because then, they’re going to know that by a sandbagging and they’re going to raise the number by a lot, right?

So, there’s a whole game that’s played around making the number. And from a CEO’s perspective, from my perspective, I can act like I care that my reps make the number, but what I really care about is for our defined target market. Are we on our way to becoming the dominant player? Because the dominant player gets disproportionate rewards. How disproportionate? Roughly 10 to 20x, so if you want 10 to 20 times the valuation be Salesforce, don’t be Zoho. Because as Salesforce, you get this huge multiple part of what for a valuation that is the value as a multiple of your revenue or multiple profits, however you want to look at it. You get this big, big multiple because the world, the stock market, everybody looks at you and goes, “Ooh, dominant players have lots of options in the future, including dominating other markets.”

And the flip is, if you’re not dominating at least one market, you are on your way to being put out a business at the leisure of the dominant player in that market, because they can play games you can’t play. They can reduce their price if they want to. They can be more aggressive with regard the extra services they offer. They can do all sorts of things that you can’t do as the number 2, 3, 4, 5 player.

So, this guy named Geoffrey Moore, and I don’t know whether everybody watching this webinar today has read Crossing the Chasm. If you have not read Crossing the Chasm, it published in 1991. So, you are a hundred percent confident that guys like Gerhard and me who were actually also in business in 1991 and in 1981… In fact, I would suspect you would think that’s obsolete just like Gerhard and Chris. Those guys are obsolete. Surely a book published in 1991 is obsolete. Trust me, it’s still the bible.

When it comes to taking new things to market innovations, to market, he calls them technology, but anything new to market that bothers people. You got to go read that book and understand it, because what it basically says is, you are either going to cross the chasm to being sold primarily by reference from company to company to company, to solve a broken mission, critical business process that they have. And they hold their nose against the stench of buying something that’s in a new category or whatever, in order to solve this problem. But then, once it starts to prove itself in a market, then it moves. It’s actually kind of about virality at the company level where things you move virally.

And so, then, the question is, what is a market? And Geoffrey Moore, the guy who wrote Crossing the Chasm, he was one of my venture capitalists at one time many, many years ago. And I had the luxury of getting to occasionally sit with him. And once we were on a plane going somewhere and I said, “Geoff, what do all of us get wrong that drives you crazy, where you just roll your eyes and go, you idiots, can you never learn?” And he said, “Oh, that’s simple, Chris. You guys always think that a market is a pretty description of something. Whereas, a market is always a list and it’s a list of companies such that every company on that list has this quality. If they buy, it reduces your cost and risk of selling to every other company on that list without exception.” A market is naturally bounded by when that list doesn’t work anymore for referencing other customers. And he says, “It tends to be an industry, but it’s a sub…” Maybe a geography and industry or whatever it is.

As a result, markets tend to be smaller than we think. And venture capitalists encourage us to describe total addressable markets as fantasies. Everybody, like I could do this with ConnectAndSell. Well, everybody needs to talk to 10 times more people, so all the salespeople in the world are addressable market. But in fact, at ConnectAndSell, this is our own company. We have exactly two markets and they’re two lists. One is a list of large companies with strategic challenges that they need to address by talking to a lot more people. So, they have a go-to-market problem and they’re hard to find, but that’s it. We make a list of them. And the other is, funded startups because they all have the same problem in B2B funded startups. Those are our two markets and we just make a list, one and the other. And that’s it.

Chris Beall (11:45):

And so, we’re a little ambitious. We’re going to go try to dominate two markets. I know that’s a little crazy, but they’re lists. And so, the biggest problem with market dominance fundamentally is that, well, one, most people don’t know they need to do it. They don’t know what’s important. They don’t know what’s achievable. They’re just out to make a number and hope they don’t get fired. And what is the average tenure of a VP of sales at the point where they’re dismissed nowadays? 17 Months?

I think you told me something like that. So, that’s one goal. But the company’s goal nowadays is not to ship widgets. They have infinite inventory. Everybody is selling software-like products has infinite inventory. Manufacture software by doing nothing. You make them at… There are no copies, right? It’s in the cloud. How do you use that ability to service without having to make another widget? How do you do that and dominate markets, so you don’t have the dominant player basically decide whether your business is going to succeed or not? [crosstalk 00:12:53]

Gerhard Gschwandtner (12:55):

Sorry for interrupting. Are you saying in the fact that, if you are not achieving marketing dominance, there are actually two reasons why. One is that, your list is not long enough? And two, that your calls are not frequent enough?

Chris Beall (13:15):

I would put it another way. One is, your list is not short enough.

Gerhard Gschwandtner (13:18):

Okay.

Chris Beall (13:19):

And the reason is that, it’s really easy to dominate a market of one. You make a list of one, you go sell to them. And why is that a market? Because everybody in that market is more likely to buy from you because they bought from you. And so, one company’s more likely to buy from you in the future, because they bought from you in the present. A small list is easy, but maybe not important enough. So, your list should be sized thus such that when you successfully dominate that market, you’ll be operating profitably as a business. That’s actually how you back into the size of the list. If the list needs to be a little bigger, because your unit price is small, then you have to make it a little bigger, but it’s hard to make coherent lists that are bigger. Because the bigger they are, the less likely it is to be a market, and more likely it is to be a fantasy.

This is the tricky part about lists, and this is precisely why I opened with this poll. People who say marketing makes the list, it’s not bad. Marketing’s job could well be to define the market, that could well be. It could also be that the senior executives of the company have thought this through. They have a strategy and they have a research team that makes the list, because maybe it takes a little bit more than just going out and asking people to come and register on the website or do whatever it is they do, maybe you have a real market. The research team could have to dig in order to find the right companies and the right people to talk to.

The folks who should never make the list, if you want to dominate markets are sales reps. Because sales reps are going to make the list for the purpose of making a number, and making a number is not a step along the way to market dominance. It’s coincidental. It could help. It’s better than nothing, but you’re basically turning over your strategy, your corporate strategy, the reason that you have investment in the company. However, you got that investment. That reason has been turned over to sales reps and even worse to sales development reps who are often relatively young, relatively inexperienced in business, and have no background nor motivation that would cause them to make a true market list. They’re more likely to make a list of people they think they can get a hold of, or that might buy. So, market dominance, it’s dominate or die. That’s the nature of the business.

Nowadays, we see disruption happen right, left, and center. Everybody can be disrupted. It costs nothing to make new software products. If I just started thinking, I could probably name 200 companies that were relevant five years ago and are dead now because they didn’t dominate a market. It’s about making something a list of companies that if one buys, the other will buy, and then finding out what they really, really need. That’s product-market fit, not product fantasy fit.

So, I’ve answered this question, what is an addressable market? And it comes down to this. An addressable market is a market. It’s a list of companies. Within that list of companies, you have to say, I want them, they’re coherent. I believe each one I sell to is going to make it cheaper and lower risk to sell to all the others. Now, how do I know it’s addressable? Well, I got to go talk to them. Let’s face it. If I don’t talk to them, I actually don’t know if I could even do business with them. It’s kind of an old-fashioned notion, but in order to determine whether my market is an addressable market, that is I can actually successfully sell to them, I have to have a product they want or an offering that they want.

I need to talk to them to find out if the offering’s interesting. Fortunately, that is easy. Everybody thinks this is hard, but it’s easy. All you have to do is talk to a reasonable subset at the market. How many? Roughly speaking, and I apologize for the math, but roughly speaking, you need to have conversations with the right kind of people at about the square root of the number of folks in the market. Say your market is a hundred companies, that’s your first market you want to dominate. You need to go have 10 conversations at random with folks, and the conversations need to explore this question. First, will you take a meeting with me to learn more about this? It’s very objective. If somebody will take a meeting with you to learn more about the problem that you claim you solve and how you might solve it, that’s a positive indication that you might have an addressable market. It’s very objective.

This isn’t like, they sound like they liked me. It’s not that at all. It’s like, I got to have meetings. At those meetings, I need to explore with them, whether there’s resonance around one of three things. That is the problem that they have, and my proposed solution to that problem does that resonate with them, either economically. Does it address a time risk or money issue that they care enough about to change their ways and actually adopt this thing?

Emotionally and generally, this is the big driver. Does it address usually a question of frustration? Almost everybody is frustrated. Business leaders are always like this, even Satya Nadella who runs Microsoft. I would bet, if at the end of each day you said, “Satya, is anything bothering you about the business?” And he go, “Oh man, I’m frustrated.” That then he would behave something. What is it? It’s always the same, that they don’t have the time, the resources, or the support. And I can assure you as a CEO, you need the support of your people more than anything to do their job as well as they hold themselves accountable for.

Everybody’s frustrated, so addressing frustration is the most common emotion that you can address. And that’s important because folks won’t buy without an emotional trigger, emotional spur. And then, the other thing is what we call strategy. And what do I mean by strategy? I mean, everybody’s trying to go somewhere. They’re trying to take their business somewhere. They’re trying to get from where they are to where they want to go. That’s a strategy. A strategy is a list of steps that you believe will get you closer to your goal, and each step has the fun quality that if you achieve it, it makes the next step cheaper and lower risk. That’s the definition of a strategy, and I don’t know if everybody knows that, but that’s what a strategy is. It’s a list. Isn’t it amazing that a market is a list and a strategy is a list. Holy moly, we got lists everywhere. A strategy is a list of steps, and the definition of a step and a strategy is… This is why it’s different from a tactic.

The strategy is, if I get here, I increase the probability and lower the cost of getting here, which increases the probability and lowers the cost of getting here and so forth and so on. And my goals of it there. Well, everybody is blocked at some point in their strategy. So, if your offering can help to unblock them, you’re solving a strategy problem for them. Does your description of what you do resonate with them sufficiently that they will take a concrete next step?

Now, you’re determining if your market’s addressable, because you are interacting with the folks in the market enough to get that feedback. Two things could happen. One, fantastic we guessed right. Right? We guessed right. We built the product right. It’s for the right purpose. It’s resonating like crazy on this emotional thing or whatever it is. And the people we talk to when we have meetings with them, 30% want to go to our next concrete step of doing something. By the way, meeting again is not a next concrete step, just for all your salespeople out there, I think having another meeting and another meeting and another meeting and another meeting is making progress towards something, it’s not the case. You actually have to take a step where the other party makes an investment of something more than I showed up at a meeting, so make them do something.

In our company, what we do is we make them do something. We call in an intensive test drive. They bring people to an experience that’s expensive. They don’t have to pay us money, but they got to pay us by bringing the people, and bringing the list, and having the executive attention, and spending two hours actually using our product, and going out, and setting meetings, and talking to a bunch of people. Well-

Gerhard Gschwandtner (21:49):

And that’s a Flight School.

Chris Beall (21:51):

Well, that’s a Test Drive, and then Flight School is something we would sell them afterward. Say, “Oh, you suck.” Isn’t it great? We did the test drive. Now, we determined that there’s room for improvement. We don’t say you suck, there’s room for improvement, so now you could choose to avail yourself of a next concrete step, which is this flight school. And then after that, you might want to go to this next step, which is a production deployment of some kind that has an integration to your CRM or whatever. Now, it’s concrete, concrete, concrete.

But the real issue that we have in markets is, even knowing this market is addressable, is this list any good? So, thing number one is the dogs love the dog food. Thing number two is, our product doesn’t quite resonate, and we start to have confirmation by us and take the lack of concrete next steps as symptom of something else. It’s almost always a symptom of, they’re not going crazy for your stuff. And you can tune the message, and once the message resonates, then you can go back and tune the product.

By the way, that’s the right order in which to do it. Don’t run back and fix the product and keep showing people products. That’s expensive. Just tune the message. And when the message finally resonates and they want to take a next step, then go fix the product.

 

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Driving revenue is what keeps a startup company in the hands of its founders, instead of in the grasp of a venture capital firm. That’s what Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is all about: teaching founders how to sell their own product or service to get that revenue rolling in. Robert Vera, founding director of this Grand Canyon University center, is proud of the success of the founders he has been mentoring. During this second part of their two-part conversation, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank talk with Robert about the importance of his program. “It’s only by selling that we learn how our business is really working,” explains Chris. Those selling conversations with prospects give startup founders the information necessary to fine-tune their products and services so they can dominate their market. Here on Market Dominance Guys, we try to do much the same thing: For 100 episodes now, Chris, Corey, and their guests have helped our listeners finetune their businesses so they can dominate their markets. At the end of today’s episode, Chris and Corey applaud a couple of stand-out guests who have generously shared their insights on this podcast. Like Robert Vera’s program, Market Dominance Guys is also — just as the title of this episode states — “A Finishing School for Future CEOs.”

Episodes mentioned by Chris and Corey as two of their favorites:

EP7: Don‘t Make the Spiders Angry
EP75: The Secret of Her Success
EP76: I Heart No Shows!

About Our Guest

Robert Vera is a bestselling author and the founding director of Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona.

—-more—-

The full transcript for this episode is here:

 

 

 

Chris Beall (01:47):

Just to have an organization that can, itself, scale and is based on sound principles, and not just sound principles but sound values, that can attract companies of all sizes who want to succeed and want to take care of the part where they’re most likely to fail. That’s amazingly heartening, right? Corey and I have each done one company at a time. I’ve got to help a lot of companies here at Connect and Sell, but it takes more than just pushing a button and talking to somebody. It takes a lot more. It takes having the data, it takes having the messaging, takes having the management, it takes a lot. So having all that come together is super gratifying. The other part is, as you and I have talked, and Corey always laughs at all the different jobs I’ve had, I was trained in education at Arizona State University. I was going to be a high school physics teacher at [Sorale 00:02:37] High School in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Chris Beall (02:39):

And until I was talked out of it by my high school physics teacher who said, “You should go start companies.” And she gave me a bunch of good reasons, including a stack rank of all the students she’d ever had. A stack rank to buy entrepreneurial potential. And she showed me where I was on that list and then sent me off into the world to do what I’ve since been doing. My heart is still there though. At the age when folks are deciding what to do, deciding what they can do, what they love to do, and even getting a vision of the possible by doing, not just by listening, I think it makes all the difference in the world. And so, to me, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime for me to get to provide something. Those $200 in an hour or whatever, that’s $200 somebody didn’t have to make. Thank God.

Chris Beall (03:28):

My 600 people are navigating those dollars and working for a good cause. And so it’s only going to grow. This is just the start. You guys have been doing this in COVID for how long? A year and three months or something like that. [inaudible 00:03:43] story is very familiar to me, I will never forget that day. I was up at that time in the morning, too, with all of the instrumentation that I have bristling in order to watch and listen to make sure it was all going. And it was clear who was going to kick whose butt and I could go off and have a little brekkie and enjoy the day. So I think we’re going to have those kinds of stories.

Chris Beall (04:05):

And by the way, Ramsey’s a customer of ours also. So, it all kind of comes full circle. That’s a great, great firm. I love working with those guys. They’re one of my personal accounts, so I like hearing that also. Education is where it’s at, but education isn’t sitting there listening to people. It comes about from doing and doing in a framework that has a shot. And when I said this was a finishing school for future CEOs, that was not a turn of phrase. That was a seriously considered concept. And I just am totally excited and gratified.

Corey Frank (04:39):

What comes out of the mouth of Robert, that I furiously write down every little nugget, certainly could have easily come from you, Chris. And I think that when you guys sit down and talk about who you know and what you can do and the philosophy, there may just yet be some collaboration between what you do, certainly at Connect and Sell and the flight school, and what we can do here, certainly, at GCU and Robert’s vision. Robert has been talking about a cheerleader and an unpaid board member and a coach and an advocate. And so we couldn’t have asked for a better landlord, even though I don’t pay him any rent.

Bob Vera (05:15):

I get complaints all the time. What happens is, every time they set up a meeting for one of their customers, it’s a huge deal. So it means revenue for them and for, potentially, for their customers. So they ring a bell and they all applaud. It’s been going on for awhile and there’s, literally, I get calls all the time. Can you go back there and tell them to keep it quiet? I go back there and ring the bell and applaud with them. I want everybody to know what’s going on over there. That’s what you need to do to be successful. Let me tell you one other thing that makes this organization, Branch 49, different from most organizations I’ve been affiliated with or know of. Most chief revenue officers will put a safe number up there, especially if it’s a publicly-traded company, because you’ve got to hit your number.

Bob Vera (05:59):

There’s only two ways to hit your number as a publicly-traded company. Remember, every quarter … I worked for a publicly-traded company. I’ve been a senior executive there. So every quarter, what you have to do to satisfy your investors, is hit your target. It’s what you have to do. The only way you can do that is to drive revenues or cut expenses. So what that means is that you’re not going to get a chief revenue officer who’s really going to go out on a limb to say, “We’re really going to dominate our market in the next 12 months.” They’re not going to say that. They won’t, it’s too much risk for them. No company that I’ve ever been affiliated with will ever say … they’ll say we want to dominate our market. Great, so tell me what your total addressable market is, your TAM, and tell me how you’re going to get to that in 12 months or less.

Bob Vera (06:47):

Because that’s what I would consider a good definition of dominating the market. If you don’t have a plan to get to your total addressable market in 12 months or less, you’re not going to dominate the market, someone else will. What Corey’s group does is, when they meet with a customer, they say, “This is your TAM, 10,000 people in your TAM. We can get to that in 12 months or less,” that’s market domination. That is. Everything else is a lie. It’s a lie. You’re not going to dominate your market. You’re not. You’re not. You think you are, and you’ve told everybody that you are, but you’re not going to. How are you going to dominate your market if you can’t get to everybody? Someone else will get to them.

Bob Vera (07:29):

But these are the things that I think are different. So I love hearing that bell ring every day. I mean, I love hearing that bell ring because that’s what people need to understand. This is success, Chris, what you said is, I really appreciate this, we have a lot of founders and they’ll ask me, “We’re in our seed round,” which means your very early round. How much should I give up? And I can do the math for you, but I’ll say, “Look, if you give up more than 20% of your seed round, you’re going to have troubles going forward.” And right behind that sentence, I say, “In addition to that, if you’re going in after your seed round for an A route and you have not driven revenues, guess what. You’re going to be working for somebody else soon,” because that’s how these things work, right?

Bob Vera (08:17):

So in order to justify your valuation, you need to drive revenues. And in order to give up less of your company, you need to drive revenues. If you don’t have a plan for that, guess what, the VC does. They do have a plan for that, right? They’re going to give you enough, they’re going to dilute you to the point where you were working for them. And at some point, when you’re doing 18 hour days, you haven’t been your wife and kids, they’re missing you, and then someone else owns your company. Tell you what, there’s a way around that. That’s to drive revenues. Find that target market fit and the product-market fit and drive revenues. And then you are in control. You are in control.

Bob Vera (09:30):

Most people, most entrepreneurs, they’re afraid of that. Our entrepreneurs are not afraid of that. They love that. They want to get after it, they want to drive revenues, and they use Corey’s group to do that and it’s working.

Susan Finch (09:42):

I’m going to ask you real quick, I know you have to scoot so I’m going to fit this in because I know you have another meeting behind this, what challenge would you want to give to companies? Because my feeling is the most successful CEOs out there, the most successful leaders, have that level of mentorship, that route of teaching … And I’m not saying just successful because of all the money they’ve raised and their lifestyle things, but successful through and through. I see that in both of you guys. I see it in all three of you, now that I’ve met you, Robert. And my three favorite bosses I’ve ever had had that too, where everybody wanted to work with them. Wanted to just stay and do well for them. What would you advise companies that need to challenge themselves or up their game?

Chris Beall (10:31):

Well, from my standpoint it’s simple. It’s lead from the front in sales. If you’re a CEO and you’re not out there selling, there’s something seriously wrong with you. And I don’t care if you have a sales background or don’t, you probably will do better if you don’t, because frankly, very early market sales work better without a sales background. But you need mentorship, you need help, and you need to talk to a ton of people. And get good at that and stay there. So I mentioned Scott Webb earlier … There was a guy, a huge company. Leads from the front, highest conversion, highest number of meetings, highest everything, and advances the state of the art every single day. And holds the title of Chief Growth Officer of a multi-billion dollar company. You got to lead from the front and sitting back there and looking at spreadsheets and barking about stuff just doesn’t get it done.

Chris Beall (11:19):

There’s two reasons, one is to inspire folks to come with you. The other is, frankly, it’s only by selling that we learn how our businesses really work and what’s really going on. Whether what we’re doing is worth doing or not. And when we’re selling, we actually get that feedback in a way that has got enough data and enough fidelity that we have a shot at understanding the company that we’re trying to create. Pretending you’ve created a company before the Velveteen Rabbit theory pops in and owns it … I have the Velveteen Rabbit theory of business, I don’t know who has kids whose read that book, but you know the stuffed rabbit? It becomes real when somebody loves it. Well, you’re not a real company until your customers love you so much that they insist that you stay in business. And that is how you’re real. Everything else is just prelude to that. So you’ve got to get to that point and you’ve got to lead from the front to get there.

Susan Finch (12:13):

Oh, that was beautifully said. Talk about bringing tears to your eyes, that brings it to mind because that’s how I feel with you guys towards us.

Chris Beall (12:22):

Oh yeah, we’re not going to let you go out of business. I apologize, I’ve got to jump. I got something to sell.

Susan Finch (12:28):

No, you go do it. Talk to you soon.

Chris Beall (12:29):

All right. Robert, so good to meet you.

Bob Vera (12:29):

Good to meet you, Chris. Look forward to meeting you here.

Susan Finch (12:30):

All right.

Corey Frank (12:36):

Thank you, Susan. This is great. I’m glad we got … Robert, thank you so much for joining us today. Long overdue. You can see, you and Chris are brothers from another mother. I mean, you speak to some language, you have the same level of passion, the same level of intolerance for fools. And that’s born out of a love that you have, because you’ve seen too many entrepreneurs give up the keys to their brainchild for pennies on the dollar, without the proper guidance. And I think that stem from, certainly all of us, having our first startup companies breaking our heart because we signed on the dotted line before we had some wise old sages who slapped our hand away at the right moment. So thank you.

Susan Finch (13:22):

This has been wonderful. Audience, if you want to learn more about what they are doing at GCU, more about Youngblood Works, Branch 49, Grand Canyon University, everything happening. Corey, tell us how to find everybody.

Corey Frank (13:37):

We’re at branch49.com and Robert, if I’m an up and coming company, technology company, entrepreneurial organization, how do I potentially apply to be part of the Grand Canyon University Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship?

Bob Vera (13:54):

Yeah. Great question. So go to GCUworks, all one word, GCUworks.com. That’s G-C-U works dot com. You can learn more about the companies here, there’s an application for consideration, but GCUworks.com. That’s where you can find more information about us.

Susan Finch (14:15):

Terrific. Now I know GCU also has … You can attend from afar? Do you need to be on campus to do this?

Bob Vera (14:24):

No, so we have companies that are housed with us, but they’re in Budapest, Hungary. We have companies in London or England. So we have companies that just want access to our GCU students. They pay them via Venmo, so we have companies from across the globe. We had a company move in, in fact, they work with Corey. The company is [inaudible 00:14:47], they’re from Dubai. So companies from across the globe have sought us out. I have a meeting here in a few minutes with one from UK, another one from UK, so across the globe. Students can work remotely.

Bob Vera (15:01):

So we’re flexible on how we do this. We just look for great companies. They want access to our GCU students and want the mentorship and have the desire to grow. And I think grow, not just by … And I see a lot of this, in deference to all those folks, but I see a lot of press releases on money raised. I’d rather see press releases on sales. And if you’re in need of that, I think if you believe in that philosophy, I think this is a perfect fit for you. If you want to take your destiny in your own hands, you come here with us.

Susan Finch (15:34):

I love how you just changed that. You are so right. Way too much about money you are able to acquire, borrow, be beholding to somebody else for. Sales are all yours, sales belong to the company, that is something you own.

Corey Frank (15:50):

Well, thank you, Susan, for the opportunity to turn tables here. This is great and we’ve got to do it again. And we’ve got to have Funnel Media Group. Maybe we can switch it and we can actually interview you one of these days and learn all about the vision that you have, especially going into the next coming year. The days of Chris eating his oatmeal, bumping into the piano, my dog barking in the background.

Chris Beall (16:20):

I got a glass of wine, does that count?

Corey Frank (16:22):

We’re just having conversations and you’re like, wait a minute. Okay, guys. It took us a while, took us a couple of episodes.

Susan Finch (16:29): Corey and Chris, we have just celebrated 100 episodes of Market Dominance Guys and people all have their favorite episodes, I know our team does, and you guys do, and then listeners do. But I don’t think we’ve ever shared that. So I want to know, first from Corey, what has been one of your favorite episodes that we have done?

Corey Frank (16:50):

It’s got to be the themes that we dive into when I can learn about Chris’s prior professions. Which is selling bug spray door to door. Kill spiders … Actually, sorry, what was the exact phrase, Chris? You don’t kill spiders, you just piss them off.

Susan Finch (17:10):

Don’t make the spiders angry.

Corey Frank (17:12):

Don’t make the spiders angry. Those were some of the golden … As I’ve mentioned many times to Chris, Susan, I have just as many pieces of material and hijacked risks from Chris as probably any of our listeners. So this is a nefarious way for me to get a front-row seat. But yeah, probably have to be the episode with all of Chris’s professions, we seem to learn a new one every other episode, but it’d have to be when he sold the bug spray and the [inaudible 00:17:43] brushes door to door.

Susan Finch (17:45):

I like it. All right, Chris, so tell us what your favorite episode or episodes have been.

Chris Beall (17:50):

Well, it’s interesting. For me, there’s two flavors. One is when we were just kids, Corey and I, and we were just doing this together. And it’s actually an episode before we were doing a podcast. We didn’t know we were doing a podcast, so this all started with Corey saying, “Hey, we need to suck a book out of you somehow.” And so there I was in this house in Reno, this rental house, it’s a big house, a big room with wooden floors and no furniture, echoing like crazy. And we’re just gathering material. And I don’t know which one it is, but it was very early, when Corey just got me going on something. It was one of my favorite episodes because it convinced me that my mother was right, I really can go on and on and on.

Corey Frank (18:38):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (18:40):

I don’t remember which one it is though, I’m not very good at that. Another one that really delighted me was ambushing Cheryl Turner and getting her to come on an episode because she didn’t want to do it. And it was one of those things that, I was just talking with her and I said, “So Cheryl, I want to just have you jump on and be a guest on Market Dominance Guys.” And she says, “Oh, I don’t want to do that. I don’t do stuff like that,” blah, blah, blah. And I said, “Well, that’s okay because it’s only 10 minutes from now. So there’s no time for you to freak out.”

Chris Beall (19:11):

And it was literally 10 minutes away and there she was, ready to go, and she was dynamite. She was just absolutely dynamite. So for a person who didn’t want to be on, wanted nothing to do with it, I’m a very private person, I’m shy. To being one of our best guests ever. And I think that, Secrets of Her Success, is actually the most practical episode we ever did that contains, I think the fourth breakthrough, which is the insistence play as a setup to iHeart no-shows. And I’m still trying to teach it to people in our own company. Apparently, it’s hard to learn.

Corey Frank (19:50):

That insisted mindset.

Chris Beall (19:53):

Which we learned from Scott Webb, over at Hub International, but Cheryl picked it up just like that. And so, anyway, it was fun to have her on, all freaked out and ready to go.

Susan Finch (20:05):

Thank you so much, I would love to. Everybody …

Chris Beall (20:07):

Thanks guys.

Corey Frank (20:09):

Awesome.

 

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

One of the major challenges of getting a startup up and running is doing a lot of things you don’t know how to do. How are you going to learn to do them? Enter Robert Vera, founding director of Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University, and today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys. Mentoring a portfolio of 32 startup companies that are beyond the ideation stage, the Center’s goal is to accelerate the growth of each company by coaching them, at no cost, in selling their product and generating cash flow. The program’s one caveat? Each company must hire Grand Canyon University students and give them professional sales experience prior to graduation. Our own Market Dominance Guy, Corey Frank, helps to provide that successful selling experience with his company, Branch 49, a sales acceleration software and service that uses AI to score leads, dramatically increasing conversations-to-meeting rates. Intrigued? Find out more about how to grow your startup on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Taking a Leaf Out of Branch 49′ book.”

—-more—-

About Our Guest
Robert Vera is a bestselling author and the founding director of Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona.

The full transcript for this episode is here:

 

 

 

Susan Finch (01:31):

Well, that brings us to our topic today, and I know we’re waiting for a very special guest to join us. But, flipping the format of the Market Dominance Guys, Corey, usually you’re the one who’s prodding, and commenting, drawing it out of our guests. Usually it’s Chris bantering with the guests, and you’re bringing it out of them. To make sure that we get to all their goodness. Well, it’s your turn today. And you have struck me, since you started talking about Youngblood Works at Grand Canyon University, I have been intrigued, impressed, and touched by the work that’s happening there. And when Chris and I were having lunch the other day, we said, we have to do this. Corey has to be in the seat. It’s Corey’s turn. And we want to hear all about what got you started, how difficult it was. And at the end of this episode, I would like a call to action, to challenge other businesses, to step up in the mentoring, step up in, take a little bit of a risk. To have an effect, such a positive effect on so many, as you guys have.

Corey Frank (02:45):

Yeah, I think that has its roots. Certainly, Chris, I think you can add color to this. And I think we did an episode early on, where we talked about if digital is your only strategy, that’s not necessarily a sound strategy. And, Chris, if you recall right, we went into the science of just simply delivering information, right? So that was really the brainchild of this, right Chris? As much as I’ve been poking my stubby figure in Chris’s chest for years, trying to get as many nuggets of information to steal from his brain as possible, he’s certainly been challenging me, and all the businesses that I’ve done and the successful exits that I’ve had, to go back to [inaudible 00:03:29] at its core. It’s that we, both of us, I think all three of us, so you included Susan, right? We like to mentor. And we like to guide our profession, and leave a mark on our profession, that maybe folks don’t understand the craft as well as they should.

Corey Frank (03:44):

The craft of selling, the craft of cold calling. And especially as a startup, we’re here on campus at GCU and the incubator and the innovation center. And we have 29 different organizations, that are at various stages of funding here. And all of them have one thing in common. They all want to talk with more prospects at the top of their funnel. And all of them struggle with, how do I do that? I just received seed funding. I just received A-round funding. I just received friends and family funding, and now I’ve got to put it to work. I think that was episode one, chapter one, verse one, I think Chris, we talked about, right? Getting that funding.

Corey Frank (04:25):

And so all the things that we’ve talked about, on Market Dominance, it’s funny, because it’s paralleled a lot of the experiences that we see. So this isn’t in a vacuum, this advice and this guidance that Chris provides. We actually see it every day in the companies that we guide, as the entrepreneur in residence here, to help take these companies at least on the right path to think about market dominance. Which unfortunately not a lot of them really think about their foray into a business world as a Zero-sum game, which it should be. So Chris, you certainly see a lot of these startups and they ask you for unsolicited advice. Many of our folks that end up being guests on our show, seek you out still as an in-demand sage, Muhammad at the top of the mountain, for all business advice of all kinds. So I know of what I speak. You see that traditionally, even outside of here in Phoenix, in the companies we deal with, correct?

Chris Beall (05:20):

Yeah. I mean, a lot of people want to know what to do when they get started, because getting started is the hardest part of doing anything. And it’s pretty easy to fool yourself into thinking that you’re doing good stuff. When what you’re really doing is familiar stuff. And the unfamiliar stuff is what is tough. And then I was just talking with Helen about this yesterday, or the day before when we were driving back from Oregon, and pointing out in that conversation to her that there’s only one good state to be stuck in from which you can make great progress, and it’s not flow. It’s stuck. People seek flow, but flow means you’re repeating what you already know how to do. So when you’re in flow, oddly enough, you’re never making progress. You may be advancing. You may be doing more, but you’re doing what you already know how to do.

Chris Beall (06:09):

And the nature of startups is you have to do a lot of things you don’t know how to do. And so how are you going to learn to do them, or even what they are? It’s through conversations with folks. And in particular, the big one is, but what should we be doing? What problems should we be solving? I had a conversation today with a young entrepreneur, who has actually been on the show. I won’t mention who it is, because it’s a kind of a quiet relationship right now with regard to his entrepreneurship. But we were talking about the industry that he’s interested in working together with, with some folks on. And it was clear that one of the deep psychological dynamics that’s likely to be in play in that industry, which is a B2C industry, is actually a B2B dynamic. And there’s a reason that it’s a B2B dynamic.

Chris Beall (06:58):

And so we talked about that. And that conversation is going to perhaps lead him to have conversations with folks in that market, in this case, consumers, to investigate this B2B psychology that may be in play there. But without those conversations, what is he going to do? Take a guess? Build a product? Hope for the best? That’s a pretty bad way to go, to build things, and then get money, and run around and try to sell them, and deploy them, in order to find out whether you’re basically on a track that could lead somewhere.

Chris Beall (07:33):

And something we’ve talked about a little bit, but haven’t really, I think extolled the virtues of enough, which is the wonders of being stuck. Corey says that he’s playing an entrepreneur in residence role, and advising companies. Well, when somebody seeks your advice, if they do it correctly, it’s because they’re stuck. Not because they’re in flow, and not because they’re waiting. And so the job of the unsticker is often to say, here’s a way to get unstuck. We’ve just had this conversation. We framed up kind of the question around which you’re stuck. Now you need information, guess where you’re going to get it? Well, you can get it at 20,000 bits a second talking to somebody, or you can get it at 5,000 bits an email, and wonder whether you’re getting the truth.

Corey Frank (08:19):

Right, right.

Susan Finch (08:20):

No. I’m wondering Corey with the businesses that you are witnessing at GCU, are they primarily B2B? Or is it a mix? And how are you seeing their paths? Are they similar paths that they’re taking to achieve what you guys are talking about?

Corey Frank (08:37):

Yeah, they’re all B2B. And Robert Vera, who runs the Center of Innovation Excellence here at Grand Canyon University, he’s responsible for curating, recruiting, and helping these organizations on their glide path to success. And so they’re all predominantly cybersecurity, SAS. There’s some med-tech, ed-tech, but all high growth potential, all deep, juicy markets that we have on here. And all of them collectively, we know that most businesses that are with the stats are at 80 plus percent of businesses fail because of low revenue, and their inability to build a sustainable sales team, or sustainable systems. And these type of businesses, certainly Chris you’ve seen it all the time. We’ve talked about it on the show. Is that two thirds of these businesses waste their marketing and sales budget targeting the wrong folks, in the wrong channels, in hiring the wrong people.

Corey Frank (09:39):

And what’s oftentimes the remedy for that, is to raise more money. And good is the enemy of great, as we saw this. Is that these organizations, they kind of venture out so quickly, without real product-market fit. And they want to hire at scale, salespeople at scale. They want to hire their software engineers at scale. They want to max out their SEO and SEM budget. And oftentimes that just leads to the inevitable, and enviable position as well, of pivot, correct Chris? And we have our future title for our next book that is correlated with that, but the dreaded pivot.

Chris Beall (10:26):

Yes, yes, yes. I still actually, perhaps my favorite phrase that’s come out of Market Dominance Guys is when we considered, what if Jesus had been venture financed? And then we’d be going pivot, Jesus, pivot. Your message is not being taken up by the market fast enough.

Corey Frank (10:46):

That’s right. So unless you’re the son of man himself, so God himself, pivoting is not necessarily something that you can play with.

Susan Finch (11:37):

Welcome Robert.

Corey Frank (11:40):

Fantastic. Fantastic.

Susan Finch (11:41):

Thank you for joining us on such short notice.

Robert Vera (11:44):

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Susan Finch (11:45):

Terrific. Corey, I’m going to let you go ahead and introduce our special guest today on Market Dominance Guys.

Corey Frank (11:51):

Absolutely. My pleasure. So Robert Vera, please meet the indomitable Chris Beal and Susan Finch. Chris, of course, is my sensei, and sage, and mentor, and all-around good buddy, CEO of ConnectAndSell. And Susan Finch, I can say the same, but instead of ConnectAndSell replace Funnel Media Group as well. She’s CEO of Funnel Media Group, which is one of the fastest-growing podcast production organizations in the U.S. And Susan has the unenviable job of making folks like Chris and me sound intelligible. And it’s an editing malaise and [inaudible 00:12:31], for sure. So Robert is the Director of the Grand Canyon University Center for Excellence in business excellence here, in entrepreneurship. And he’s responsible for curating, we were just talking about you, Robert behind your back, about the 29, is that how many companies you have here on campus right now that you help curate, and foster, and growth, and elbow at certain points?

Robert Vera (12:54):

We’ve got 32 right now.

Corey Frank (12:56):

32 right now. And before that, Robert worked in Senator Ted Kennedy’s office. Back in the day, he’s been a senior executive at Merrill Lynch. He’s been an entrepreneur, a New York Times bestselling author, multiple times. He does the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim, you’ll appreciate this, Chris, in the Grand Canyon. I don’t know how many times, 3, 4, 5 dozen times namely with Navy seals, and a lot of veterans, and he does that. So though servant leadership is near and dear to his heart, and this University certainly is one of the fastest-growing in the United States. Now Robert is at the lone star here for helping curate the right type of conscious capitalism, competent capitalism, that graduating folks to what Chris, Robert, I stole the phrase from him, and we talked to him about a finishing school for future CEOs. And Robert has really appreciated that term ever since. So Robert, please meet the good friends, Chris and Susan, and welcome to the Market Dominance Guys.

Robert Vera (13:53):

Great to be here, guys. Nice to meet you both.

Corey Frank (13:56):

Super excited.

Chris Beall (13:58):

Well, we’re getting to turn the tables today.

Susan Finch (14:00):

Yes. We’re here to hear some stories and hear some success stories. What it used to be like, what happened, and what it’s like today stories, for what you have started at Grand Canyon University, what you are all a part of. And I know that stories are, certain companies will stick, out certain individuals. I would love to hear how this has impacted you. And if you had anybody that comes to mind that you would like to tell us about.

Robert Vera (14:29):

Yeah. So I’d like to talk a little bit about why we’re different. And I think Corey Frank and his group, their Branch 49 makes us different. So here’s why. Entrepreneurs, and we have 32 of them now, and we are Canyon Ventures Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We bring companies in here, they’re beyond the ideation stage. So they’re going to grow. And we’re an accelerator. I think there’s a distinction between facilities like ours that are incubators, and they get their help from Techstars and Y Combinator and the like, and then these are accelerators. You’re beyond the ideation stage. You’ve defined what your product-market fit is about. And you’re looking to grow your organization. We are that organization. We call it an accelerator. The main requirement that we have here is we give you no cost rent, utilities. Everything is, you’re on a scholarship here. With the proviso that you hire our GCU students and give them professional experience and professional network, prior to graduation.

Robert Vera (15:26):

So we’d like to say that we don’t want our GCU students to fight fair. We want to give them an unfair advantage in the marketplace. So they go out there. They have years of professional experience, right? From some of these companies. And they’re either get a job with one of the companies that hired them here, or they use that to leverage, to get a more than entry-level job in the real world. So one of the things that makes us different, and I appreciate I was an entrepreneur, so I appreciate entrepreneurs. But one of the things that makes us different is entrepreneurs, they want to build things. And I love that. You’re building something, but you can’t build it in the vacuum. At some point no one’s getting out of here until you sell something. So we need entrepreneurs to sell something. So the first day I came in here and we set up. And I had a notion that, hey, we need to figure out.

Robert Vera (16:15):

People are like, well, is there going to be legal, help, accounting help, marketing help? No, no. You’re going to sell something. You’re going to figure out what your product-market fit is. And you’re going to sell something. All that other stuff is not top-line stuff. What every startup needs to understand, every startup, is that we’re going to focus on cash flow. We can focus on net profit and return on investment later. Those two will come when you focus on cash flow. In order to do that, we’re going to have to sell something, right? Because you can’t hire our students unless you have one of two things. Equity, which is going to run out pretty quick, and/or revenues, which we’re going to figure that out. So Branch 49 is what makes us unique and different. Here’s what they do. They’re a revenue generation consulting firm. And what that means, and I’ll tell you a quick story. Branch 49 started here May of 2020. And I knew we needed it.

Corey Frank (17:17):

Youngblood Works is the parent organization of Branch 49, is the DBA, what we go to market as. So just to kind of clarify, we’ve spoken about Youngblood Works. That’s really Branch 49.

Robert Vera (17:29):

Thanks for clearing up. So, I knew we needed it. And I didn’t know how it was going to work out. But they morphed into a revenue generation consulting firm. It was July of 2020. COVID is still in full swing. We brought people back. We brought a few companies back here. One of them was the Branch 49 team. Now at that point, there’s only three of them, correct me if I’m wrong. But I think there may be 20 of them now. And they had an opportunity. They said we have an opportunity to get a $100,000 a month contract with a company called the Zucker. And one of the guys that works there, young kid just graduated. Literally all three of the kids that work there just graduated from GCU. His name is Micah [inaudible 00:18:07]. And Micah, great kid, his mom is Air Force. She flew as flight surgeon on Air Force One.

Robert Vera (18:12):

Micah comes to me, it’s July 15th, 2020. We’re in Arizona. He says, can I park? He lives in his RV, by the way. Can I park my RV out in front of the building? We got an early morning start. We’re going to East Coast time. So we got to be up and rolling. So I asked Micah, he says he has to park out at 05:00 in front of the building. I don’t ask him why, until later. Finally, he tells me we have an opportunity to compete against an inside sales organization, Zucker’s own sales organization, an outside sales organization from Pakistan, and our GCU recent college graduates, and a newly started up company to drive revenues, to help companies drive revenues. So he says, if we win, we get a $100,000 a month contract to continue the effort. So I thought, that’s probably a good reason to park out front.

Robert Vera (19:02):

So they came in the next day. I drive up, it’s 04:30 in the morning. And now it’s July in Arizona. We compete with hell for the hottest temperatures on the globe, right? So it’s probably 115 degrees out. It’s in a black parking lot. It’s well over 110, I’m sure. And they’re all outside the RV. And I pull up, I mean, everything’s outside the RV. I pull up and ask what’s going on. The AC broke. So they didn’t sleep all night. Now it’s five o’clock well, hey, we might as well just get after it. I let them in. They come in the building, they coffee up and start calling. I go to work, which is across the hall from them. And I poked my head out about 11:30 ish, closer to 12 o’clock on that day. Which is now, you’re looking at end of day, East Coast time.

Robert Vera (19:49):

And I said, how’s it going? Mike says, well, the other two teams combined have already set up seven meetings. I say, okay. And how are you guys doing? “33”. That’s when I knew we had something special, that’s when I knew there was something different about what we were doing, and how we were doing it. And that’s when I knew that every company in this place needs to consider setting up just like Branch 49 is set up, or hiring Branch 49.

Robert Vera (20:23):

Here’s why. Every startup, in order to justify your revenues, you’re going to need to have proof that you can sell. In fact, it’s easier to justify your valuation when you’re in revenues. So you’ll need to do that. In order to define, if you have a product-market fit, you have to get to customers. You have to do that. As far as I know, and there’s these innovation centers and universities across the world now. As far as I know, we are the only organization of its kind, either an incubator and accelerator innovation center, that has an in-house revenue generation consulting firm that can do this for you.

Robert Vera (21:03):

When I ask companies great, we’d love to help. Can I see your three selling documents? They look at me like, what do you mean? Do you have a copywritten screenplay to connect with your target market fit? Do you know the persona you’re calling, so they can call them? Do you have a consistent pitch deck? There’s less than 10 minutes. Let me tell you what. If it’s more than 10 minutes, you don’t know what your company does. If you can’t communicate that value to your target audience in 10 minutes or less, you don’t know what your company does.

Robert Vera (21:34):

And then do you have a consistent follow-up? Email, call? Do you have a consistent, follow-up? Do you have a message? How do you measure if somebody is successful? If you don’t have three consistent documents to do that, you can’t. You don’t know if it’s performance, you don’t. And then do you know how to perform that? Do you know how to deliver that? You don’t know how to do that. You need to talk to Branch 49. You need to talk to the team over there. You need to create your three selling documents. You need to have the tools to do it. I brought someone by the other day. Kavin, one of the team members over there, a young kid, GCU graduate. I said to Kavin, he’s been working for about three hours. Kavin, how many phone calls have you done already? He had done over 200, in three hours. Most people don’t get that done in a week. It’s the system that Branch 49 uses to actually deliver those.

Robert Vera (22:23):

Now, here’s the difference. The data makes the difference. A lot of people use Zoom to get their data. What Branch 49 has been able to create, is relevant and actionable data. What that means is conversion rates are so much higher from their calls than anybody else. It’s not because of experience. We have a person, Ashley, she has no experience whatsoever. She was a nursing major, comes from GCU. Comes here, looking for work. She gets on the phone, her conversion rate, because of the screenplay we give her, because of the data she’s using to call, is 10%. She has a conversion rate, almost 11%. Anthony, he’s one of the seasoned reps over there. His conversion rate is 20% or close to it, 19.9%. The reason why their conversion rates are higher is because of the data. It’s not just Zoom data, it’s filtered. And then it’s called before to see, is this person going to pick up? The persona is right.

Robert Vera (23:31):

So I like to think that we have got something, one of a kind here. We’re able to consult with startup companies, and other growing companies. Most of Corey’s companies that he has, are not startup companies, they’re billion-dollar companies or billion-dollar-plus companies in the SAS industry and cybersecurity. So, we’re able to consult with them, to deliver to them their three selling documents. Give them the tools, the resources, and most importantly, the data that they need to be relevant and actual data. Let me speak to that just a little bit more. Relevant means that the persona who’s picking up that phone, we know that person will pick up. How do we know that? The Branch 49 team has a methodology they use to screen the data. They know this person is one that will pick up the phone call.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Are you providing your reps with excellent sales training only to find that most of them drift slowly back to their old behavior? In today’s podcast, Gerry Hill, Regional VP/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, and Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, join our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, to discuss the solution to sales rep drift. Using the analogy of machinery that drifts out of tolerance and requires maintenance for necessary adjustments, the guys discuss the necessity and effectiveness of sales coaching in real-time. The solution’s success hinges on catching and correcting those little (or big) errors in message, tone, and pacing before your reps run through your lists and have nothing to show for it. Vigilance and just-in-time coaching: All that and more on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Do You Catch Their Drift?”

—-more—-

 

About Our Guests

Shane Mahi is Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, a service provided by some of the sharpest minds in sales, generating quality meetings for its customers.

Gerry Hill holds the position of Regional Vice President/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, a Silicon Valley–based sales acceleration company, which provides technology that gets salespeople 10x more live conversations with decision-makers.

Related to this episode: 

All Churn is Not Created Equal

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey (on Amazon)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What’s the most efficient, most secure method of growing your company? Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, and Gerry Hill, EMEA Regional Vice President of ConnectAndSell, explore this question with Chris Beall in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast. “Overhead is like a racehorse,” Chris says. “It eats while we sleep.” He offers the following advice to Shane and to our loyal listeners: Forget taking money from VCs. Instead, work on shortening your pitch-to-value cycle time and build your business that way. “The faster your company can cycle and produce value,” he explains, “the lower your risk of losing your business.” Gerry chimes in with his own great advice: “Be sure to take a scientific approach to the experiment, not an emotional approach.” And, as always, Chris reminds those pursuing success in business that “Market dominance is a risk-reduction program: in order to reduce the risk of losing your company, you need to dominate one market. Then go dominate another.” That’s the way we roll on Market Dominance Guys every day: lots of valuable advice and helpful reminders. Listen in for more of it on today’s episode, “Overhead Is Like a Racehorse.”

—-more—-

About Our Guests

Shane Mahi is Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, a service provided by some of the sharpest minds in sales, generating quality meetings for its customers.

Gerry Hill holds the position of Regional Vice President/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, a Silicon Valley–based sales acceleration company, which provides technology that gets salespeople 10x more live conversations with decision-makers.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Shane Mahi (01:36):

So how does a new business owner protect themselves when they are seeking funding? Because with all the advice in the world, some people will just still go for it. What can a business owner do to protect themselves from getting into bed with the wrong person?

Chris Beall (02:01):

Wow, that’s a tough question. I’ll take a shot at it. Well, I’m going to go with an analogy. Some people who’ve watched this program know that there was a time when I was working with somebody as an advisor to his company as a friend, and he came into some money and decided to hire some salespeople, a salesperson to take his product to market. And I told him, “I’ll fire you. I won’t advise you anymore if you do that.” And he asked me, “Why?” And I said, “Because we’re doing an experiment now with a great deal of money to determine the answer to this question, ‘Are you great at hiring salespeople?’ And the answer is no, we know you’re not, you’ve never done it before.”

Chris Beall (02:40):

So what are the odds, your first go, one of the hardest things in business, which is to hire a salesperson, but an unattractive company that you do no business with anybody, you’re just getting started, what are the odds that you’re going to hire the great salesperson that you need to take a product nobody knows about to market with the chief operating officers and similar of some of the biggest companies in the world? It’s like zero, right? So I told him, “I’m not going to waste my time.” And he said, “Well, what’s your alternative advice?” I said, “You mean, after you fire the salesperson?”

Chris Beall (03:13):

And he said, “Well…” And I said, “Okay, let’s assume that you do the right thing and that you let this person go so that they can go do something useful with their life. You need to cold-call these chief operating officers and talk to them, somehow, get a meeting with them and talk to them about what their needs are, what they see in their own organization that you can help with, with your idea of a product, and that’s it. And if you can get the flow rate of those conversations up high enough, then you’ll be fine. Your money won’t run out, or you’ll find out your idea is bad and you’ll find out fairly quickly it’s bad. And then you’ll save yourself a bunch of grief and you can do something else.”

Chris Beall (03:54):

And he said, “Huh.” And I said, “So it’s very similar when you think your problem is I got to, I got to raise some money. You’re just like this guy thinking his problem was, I got to hire a salesperson. The odds of you choosing a financial partner as a naive and getting the right financial partner, who’s going to be there with you with your interest in mind rather than theirs, bringing something beyond money to the party because money is, Gerry just said, “Cash is trash.” The world’s awash in money. It’s of no value to you. You can get it from anywhere. So what are the odds of you doing a great job of… I think of this way, you’re not seeking investment, you’re hiring a financial partner. You’ve never done it before. I guarantee you will fail. However, the price of your failure will be your company. And so given that you’re crazy, just crazy to take investment, unless you’re an expert investment taker, that is your great at buying from out there somewhere, a great financial partner and selling them for good reasons, not bad on why they should partner with you.

Chris Beall (05:04):

It can be done. I am at the edge of sometimes being able to do it, but I regret quite frankly, every dollar I’ve ever raised. And I can go back and look at that and the numbers are big. It’s like $180 million. It would have been better in every one of those situations to bootstrap and it would have been better because it would have slowed us down enough that we would have had to learn what the real problem was we were solving all the way to the bottom. And that’s the hard part of business. It’s easy to come up with a solution. It’s hard to come up with a solution, right? I mean, anybody can come up with a solution and a slide deck. There’s nothing to it. Anybody can name a big tan, by the way, if you name a big tan, you’re dead already.

Chris Beall (05:48):

No small company can ever address a big tan. That’s just a stupid idea. That’s just a crazy idea. Yeah. We’re going to take over the world. Well, who cares, right? I mean, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s like I have a mountaineering analogy. You can stand there and look at the summit all day long. It doesn’t get you any closer, right? I’m looking at ever… Oh, what a tall mountain. It’s 29,028 feet and it’s all covered with ice and the ice fall looks really dangerous. Well, it is, but it’s great. That didn’t help you, sorry. Yeah.

Shane Mahi (06:22):

It made you tired looking. Made your neck tired.

Chris Beall (06:27):

So I’m with you Gerry and that’s kind of the whole purpose of this podcast is to let people know. And it’s the purpose of connecting. So why we do the company is to let people know there’s a… You actually have the key resource, which is your voice attached to your willingness to learn associated with a hypothesis of how you can help. And that’s it. That’s your core. That’s what you’re bringing together. If you take your voice out and you just left with the hypothesis, that’s not so great. So the hypothesis ain’t going to dominate any markets. But the VCs will pay you for it because they’re looking to get rid of you anyway, right? They’re looking at-

Shane Mahi (07:16):

I never call. I never understood that line. Why? All right. So what if you have a good CEO and the VC still wants them out, then what does a company do?

Chris Beall (07:28):

You end up with a fight and it’s not good. I’ve been through them. I know what it looks like. Anybody ever wants to give me a call. I might tell them about one of them, all depending on how the court records are sealed. But let’s face it, once you take money, if you end up in conflict with the money that conflict’s going to be resolved relatively violently, I’ll say through corporate violence or you’re going to lose. You will probably lose most of the time. And the reason is they’re experts. They’re professionals. They’re not professionals on running a business, they’re professionals at winning that fight. So you don’t want to be in that fight. You don’t want that. That’s what that big document’s all about. That’s the rigging of the fight. [crosstalk 00:08:13].

Shane Mahi (08:13):

Well, I just don’t… I do not understand. So maybe, I’m too simple-minded or I don’t know how this comes across, but I just think I would never give up that much control then. Does that not protect you? If you just say, “I’m not going to give up that much control, I’ve heard of ultimate vetos in contracts where they can’t override the CEO’s decision.” Does none of that play into factor in 2000s?

Gerry Hill (08:41):

No, not really. Because there aren’t enough CEOs are dynamic enough to actually be the intellectual property of the company. I can think of about four at the top of my hands with that shit or maybe two kind of works right now in popular culture. No one’s getting rid of Elon Musk. Nobody’s getting rid of Jeff Bezos. Nobody’s getting rid of guys over at Palantir. They are the intellectual property of the business. They’re the reason that the investment is made. That’s why they get to hold onto category a shares and do all that other cool corporate stuff that they get to do.

Shane Mahi (09:10):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gerry Hill (09:12):

That’s to know that if they just hold on really tight… Sorry, they just hold on tight in Elon Musk’s coattails, they’ll be fine, but there’s nobody corporate rating Tesla because nobody can do Tesla other than Elon Musk. So if I’m an investor there, that’s fine. But to be honest, Shane, you, me, Chris, every one of us from this call whilst we own sparkling in our own brilliance every now and then we are not the intellectual property that can carry a company forward for long enough, right? Anybody could lose that fight because we’re not professionally equipped, like Chris says, to deal with the ability to win that fight. I mean the classic in social culture story is I bought a server on Facebook. He was the major shareholder. His share got related to X and he ended up in a lawsuit that he lost and basically got a settlement at the end of it, on a billion-dollar idea.

Gerry Hill (10:04):

So it happens all the time.

Chris Beall (10:06):

That happens.

Gerry Hill (10:08):

Yeah. I started an inside team on a practical basis for a pretty hot start in the UK. I can’t disclose what it is. And the CEO was adamant. She was never going to dilute, never going to dilute, never going to dilute. Now, there’s kind of a horrible culture over there at the time. And so there’s a bit of bitterness. One of the previous colleagues who got let go horribly and didn’t deserve to sent me through the company’s house filings after their latest rate. She ended up diluting everything. She owns zero in the company anymore, but she’s still the CEO, even after all of that stuff and that’s visible. You can see it in the company’s house. Now her major next problem is she’s now got growth number on her target and the way that a chief revenue offer does. She fail to attain that. She’s really easy to get rid of because not only does she not have any real stake anymore and her go-to-market execution’s absolutely messed up. Because she’s reliant on four customers.

Shane Mahi (11:10):

I’m putting my boxing gloves on and I’m going to town with them. That such a bad idea.

Chris Beall (11:16):

All right, Shane. So I’m going to tell the audience you’ve done something really, really smart recently.

Shane Mahi (11:22):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (11:23):

You gave me a call and said you were looking for an initial set of partners in order to engage with provide value to know what you were learning, know how you were learning, and form a foundation on which you could build the business in the next stage.

Shane Mahi (11:41):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (11:42):

I was very intrigued with that. I got Gerry involved. We did a test drive yesterday. We’re now partners, right? How long did that take end to end from you giving me that call to us being partners and moving forward?

Shane Mahi (11:54):

Couple of days.

Chris Beall (11:56):

Couple of days.

Gerry Hill (11:56):

Not even.

Chris Beall (11:57):

Right. Nobody raises money in a couple days and this relationship is worth a lot more than a VC too. I can guarantee you over time. You’ll learn things. We’ll learn a bunch from you also. And then you’ll also do something really valuable for us, which is drive meeting for Gerry. And Gerry’s a big producer. So I love to have the draft horses eating well, because that way they pull hard on the plow. It is just… What can I say?

Shane Mahi (12:23):

Well, I’ll tell you even just now. I’m not even being anything cheesy. I honestly just had chills down and it’s not because the windows is open, but I had chills run and down my body because of that. And I have been through my run of the trenches through my life. And even some of the contracts for business that we’ve had with some of our clients have been a nightmare in some cases and meeting Gerry for the first time when we trialed, connect then so to become a customer and then getting into conversations with you and learning from you and then just the ease and the comfortability of that conversation and how it’s transitioned. I’ve heard many, many times, that’s how business should be done. If somebody makes business complicated, you probably don’t want to work with them.

Shane Mahi (13:53):

When somebody makes businesses smooth and energetic and fun as it is with you guys, even yesterday, we smashed out the park, I think Gerry had a great meeting, even today with one of the people we put forward, that’s what a company wants to aspire to be. They want to dream of having partners that they can connect with, they can click with, and they can create that magic. And that is what I believe we’re creating with you guys at ConnectAndSell. So in everything that we say, we are in debt to you guys. We’re thankful to be even in conversations, even on just appearance with you guys. It means a lot.

Chris Beall (14:27):

It means a lot to us too. So I’m going to bring out some technical issues here that I think Gerry’s quite the technical guy when it comes to building businesses. So Gerry, you and I both know that in the world of manufacturing stuff, all of us who have ever been successful know that there’s this thing called the theory of constraints and there’s only one bottleneck, right? We know that. We also know that you have to characterize the bottleneck in terms of throughput, cycle time and quality. And that those are objective measures, not subjective measures. Throughput is units per unit time, right? That one we got to know. Cycle time is I got to make one. How long does it take till I get one out, and I can go make another one? And then quality is what percentage of what comes out actually gets used downstream and what per percentage gets scrapped. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. And there’s only one bottleneck in any organization.

Chris Beall (15:17):

And I firmly believe the bottleneck in almost every B2B organization is the flow rate of meetings with folks that they should be talking with, not just to sell, but to learn. There’s feedback loops that we have to have. We can’t know everything. And the only reliable way to learn anything is through direct experience, working with people trying to solve their problems or failing to be allowed to solve their problems or anything in between. All those things are great, right? So Shane, you just described the cycle time from desiring an investment of a kind, right? Investment and partnership, to having the opportunity to pitch, which was the test drive that you did yesterday, your team did yesterday to closing that deal that is getting funded, so to speak, to delivering first value.

Chris Beall (16:06):

Now think about that from a venture capitalist. When do you ever deliver first value back to the VC? You have already delivered first value in a cycle time of one day because Gerry’s had one of the meetings. And so that meeting is probably worth, I’m going to guess, given Gerry’s close rate, that’s about a seven to $10,000 value meeting on average, some number like that. Here’s a point I’m going to make. And Gerry, you can elaborate this. When we talk about risk in business, a risk in anything, we tend to talk portfolio, right? The way you solve risk is through portfolio. Have a lot of stuff on the table, have a lot going on, have it at different points in its evolution, and something will be coming across the finish line at every point. And you can do this with deals. You can do it with learning. You can do it with people. Everything’s got a portfolio associated with it.

Chris Beall (16:52):

What I think we tend not to think about is that the risk within the portfolio can be sharply changed, sharply reduced by reducing the cycle time to value of every step within the execution of that portfolio from engagement to value delivered. The shorter that cycle time is, the lower our risk is, because we learn faster and I’ve made this point on multiple episodes of Market Dominance Guys, overhead is like a racehorse. It eats while we sleep. Like Shane, when you went out in the business on your own with that commission check, there’s the racehorse called your life and it’s eating at that having nothing to do with the business. That’s your overhead, right? So the faster we cycle and produce value and produce knowledge, the lower our risk. And oddly enough, it takes patience to run fast cycle time businesses. It takes patience because we have to say, “Well, we don’t rely on any one of these. We’re going to be patient and let them hit, but we’re going to make, them run as fast as they can within the bounds of nature,” right?

Chris Beall (18:04):

Gerry, I want you to riff on this little bit. I’m going to play Corey Frank here and ask you to look at the world you’ve lived in, which there’s a lot more as I call it, analytical machinery around business than most of us that you understand. And look at this issue of how fast do you go from I’ll call it, from pitch or idea, proposal, whatever it is to value delivered across the portfolio. How much does that play in your mind as you’re thinking about business, and you’re thinking about risk reduction? Because the essence of market dominance is risk reduction. Oddly enough, market dominance is a risk reduction program. It is not anything else. Reduce the risk of losing your company by dominating one market, then go dominate another. What’s that cycle time X? Whatever it is. What’s the cycle time of the little stuff in there? Better pay attention. What are your thoughts on this Gerry?

Gerry Hill (18:56):

I think you can run those cycles in parallel as well. If you’ve got the right process and systems and people in place.

Chris Beall (19:03):

Ah.

Gerry Hill (19:05):

With some standardization and just some deviation, the standardization is going to be who. The standardization is going to be what. What am I going to say? How am I going to engage? The difference might be, who am I speaking to? The difference might be, which market am I speaking to them in? And then I’m going to intelligently look at that data, review it and determine [inaudible 00:19:29] and effort and motion require the objective, the goal, the thing that I need to prove that this was a valuable and worthwhile experiment. What I’m not going to do though, is set the boundaries out for six months because six months is far too long for me to tolerate failure points. But if I can get the same amount of data, same amount of information, the same flow insight in a week or two weeks that I can get in six months, then every single hypothesis that I want to test that I believe in is worth running into the side of a mountain. And that’s kind of how I think about it.

Gerry Hill (20:03):

Every single experiment is taking an idea and literally throwing the tennis ball or whatever into the type of a building and seeing if it comes back at you with the right signal or if it deviates. And can I do something about the deviation? Is it the deviation of 1% or is it a deviation of 15% from my normal performance levels that I’m anticipating? If it’s 15% plus I’m probably going to park it for a while until I can resource it appropriately with the right message, the right staff, the right level of maturity. If it’s 1%, I might go again and double down on one of the variables to see if I can bring it back to zero on the degree spectrum. But the key point is, so as long as I’m investing that data, give myself a mindset which is, I’m going to stay neutral and just simply observing and analyze rather than being materially invested emotionally to the concept, I can get very far very fast.

Gerry Hill (20:53):

One of the things I liked about the test drive that we ran yesterday is inside our operation for better worse, our data connects been dropping off. I’ve been experiencing it a lot. My lists have fatigued. We brought in Shane’s fresh lens on targeting and his fresh lens on list building. Their lists proved better than our lists, right? It’s not an experiment that we were necessarily going to run inside our company without going through the cycle of getting other people involved in the process. But this was another way that we could dynamically take control of something. Virtually everything stayed the same, same system, same weapon, same message, fundamentally the same regional skill level across the board minus chain and [inaudible 00:21:39]. What was the variable? The specificity of the list and the list vendor that we used. That’s a really good example of that playing out in the real world.

Shane Mahi (21:48):

That’s a great example.

Chris Beall (21:53):

Yeah. Fascinating you bring that up by the way. Our own list, as you know, had been kind of degrading over the summer. And part of it was I think a strategic miscommunication or misalignment that had us focusing on a smaller subset of lists and we could have gone into some others in our land and expand world. Just to quote you some numbers, our dial to connect a week ago was 36 point something today, it was 19.97, exactly one week later. Because we paid attention to Shane, what you taught us yesterday. And we actually did something with it in our own shop. And voila, we got an improvement with regard to dial to connect. By the way, we didn’t get an improvement with regard to the number of meetings. And I’ll make this point, you’re going to have to put up with a lot of this yourself.

Chris Beall (22:41):

When you measure the outcome only, and you don’t know what the intermediate steps that lead to it are, and you’re not measuring those separately, you can get dicked like nobody’s business into thinking either nothing is happening when something’s happening. So here I’m looking at this. Our dial to connect improved by a factor of two. Our number of meetings stays the same. Our conversion rate went down by a factor of two. Now, is that because we were calling on list that we didn’t have a good message for, that is we got the numerical more folks to talk to, but we went up in company size and maybe we need to change our message a little bit. That’s a possibility that comes out. Cycle time for that whole thing, one day, right? One day. We don’t know it’s time to dig into those particular conversations and ask that question. And you’re going to be challenged with this, because you want to do this for other companies and they’re going to want to resist science, right?

Chris Beall (23:37):

Gerry’s describing a scientific way of going to market. He used the word experiment. He meant it. He didn’t use it like an experiment. He used it as an experiment, change one variable, run it, stay objective. I love it. Gerry talked about staying emotionally separated, like you can’t go in and do science and go, “I sure hope this works. Squeeze harder, and I’ll make that buns and burner hotter and I.. Okay man, I’ll fro it against a wall, maybe that will make something happen.” It doesn’t work like that. And I’m an old scientist. I get this. You have to be a little cool to be a scientist, right? Bring a little fancy to it. But what are you experiencing already working with customers, where you are trying to bring a more scientific approach to their go-to market and their market dominance and they might not be resonating with you on it. What is your experience and what do you think you’re going to have to do in order to deal with that other than get great customers like ours? [crosstalk 00:24:35].

Shane Mahi (24:36):

Hope either slow or a complete halt to their learning experience or their learning and development. Now with us, as soon as we… So I came from a Mitel phone, then I went to an 8X8 software. I told you about that, Gerry. Yeah, we are using 8X8. We are running and gunning right now. And then we stepped into ConnectAndSell and literally stepped into an Aventador SVJ with polar exhaust, everything mapped out and we just went for it. And the thing is, because it was not only the data, it was adapting to that software and that speed of work and that speed of performance that completely accelerated our growth. And it’s because we were able to understand much clearer, much better. We were able to pivot quicker. We were able to understand data sets a lot clearer.

Shane Mahi (25:34):

And simple, simple example of just mobiles versus office and headquarter lines. There’s a, it was a 4.49 versus a 9.59, almost a double increase in performance based on the quality of what you choose in your list. So when I’m speaking with companies and we are not using in some instances… No, we are not using ConnectAndSell, and in those instances, the performance is poor. The performance, the activity, the level of engagement is poor because it takes so much longer to understand who we’re trying to speak to. However, when we flip the script and we jump into the weapon, for example, we analyze data, we analyze trends, we analyze outcomes, we analyze the performance of the list, I’m able to dig into how do I turn up the notch with each and every one of my reps?

Shane Mahi (26:26):

I can see they’re dials. I can see their conversations. I can see everything from front to back and literally have a full dashboard of what I need to learn, analyze, change, tweak, review, and then execute. So to the direct answer to your question is what do I experience if I’m working with customers that don’t adopt that behavior is they learn slower, their results are achieved a lot slower, and they halt what the potential is for greatness. And that’s where applying the right technology comes into play.

Chris Beall (27:03):

I mean, it is quite interesting because they end up in this. I’m going to coin a Gartner or a Forester type of term. They end up in this trough of disillusionment, where they think they’re buying something. The execution is constrained. The learning’s constrained. Their mindset goes from enthusiasm to, “Okay, where is it? Where’s this amazing thing.” And then it goes to concern, and then it goes to, “Just get me the bloody meetings,” rather than, “Help us diagnose why the meetings don’t exist.” Now, the methodology that is superior, it’s just coined by McKinsey, right? If I think about what they do to structure an analytical framework over anything that you want to explore is superior. The way we think about it at ConnectAndSell is that there are three inputs, rep-less message. I’m adding another one coaching. How can I coach a velocity? Can I coach well enough? Four components, the four-legged stool, right?

Chris Beall (28:01):

Now, if I’m McKinsey, what am I doing? I’m analyzing information. But there’s four things to analyze. There’s not one thing to analyze, there’s four. So their framework is mutually exclusive, comprehensively exhaustive. Mutually exclusive, I’m going to analyze list without thinking about any of the other stuff. And I’m going to come to a conclusion about list. I’m going to analyze rep without thinking about the odd stuff and come to a conclusion about rep. I’m going to analyze messaging and come to a conclusion about messaging. And then I’m going to analyze coaching and come to a conclusion about coaching. And at the end, I’m going to apply my superior brainpower to analyzing those four conclusions together, to come up with a meaningful, almost perfect analysis of the total, the whole.

Chris Beall (28:54):

Now, one of the things that a lot of people who are inexperienced with processing data at volume, turning data into insight and looking at dashboards is that they’re jumping between the themes and mixing their conclusion so that they don’t actually come up with the total conclusion.

Shane Mahi (29:12):

That’s a good point.

Chris Beall (29:13):

And we get bogged down on this insight culture, with data culture. We love TotalGen. We love the power of big data, but unless you know how to mutually exclusively and comprehensively exhaustive to analyze each of the four components of success, then you’re never going to win. And I think, one of the areas in business, which suffers the most still is this massive lack of maturity on the value of analysis and data isn’t going to market execution, especially on the sales side. Marketers are starting to get their shit together here, but we still suffer. Now, what I think is unique about your business proposition, Shane, other than the execution of staying meetings is you’ve got a radical opportunity to rip up the playbook for outsource selling and actually lead with the insight, lead with the data, lead with the value that’s created by being able to forensically pick apart the four things, which matter, rep-less message and coaching.

Shane Mahi (30:10):

I like the forensic word that you threw in there. Forensic outsource specialists.

Gerry Hill (30:18):

Hey, you could use that. Go ahead.

Chris Beall (30:20):

It’s the words that matter. But there’s a royalty attached and it’s about 20% [crosstalk 00:30:26].

Shane Mahi (30:27):

I’ll pay it.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How did you get started in sales? And what led you to the position you now hold and the company you are currently involved with? Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, and Gerry Hill, EMEA Regional Vice President of ConnectAndSell, are asked these very questions by our Market Dominance Guy Chris Beall in today’s podcast. Surprisingly, a common answer emerges to the first question: both guests, as well as our host, took their first step into the sales world by selling products door to door — and doing so successfully. Our guests describe the steps that subsequently led them to where they are today, and this leads to a discussion with Chris about funding new companies and the temptation and possible pitfalls of taking venture money to facilitate growth. Follow their conversation in this first of three meetings of the minds on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Is Venture Capital for You?”

—-more—-

About Our Guests
Shane Mahi is Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, a service provided by some of the sharpest minds in sales, generating quality meetings for its customers.

Gerry Hill holds the position of Regional Vice President/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, a Silicon Valley-based sales acceleration company, which provides technology that gets salespeople 10x more live conversations with decision makers.

The full transcript from this episode is here:

Chris Beall (01:29):

Okay, everybody. This is another episode of Market Dominance Guys, and this one is special. So we’ve had no guests. We did that for, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 episodes, because remember those of you who don’t know, we’re just trying to get material for a book on market dominance. By the way, the book still hasn’t come out. But I am here with Shane Mahi and Gerry Hill all the way from the UK. So we recorded a bunch with no guests. Then we had a bunch of guests and finally, we had woken up to the possibility that there really is business, including sales, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I think it’s amazing that we discovered this. So I feel like, my name is Chris. So I feel like Christopher Columbus going the other way and finding out that, in fact, not only is there sales, there’s a level of sales innovation going on in the UK right now that I’ve thought we should tap into.

Chris Beall (02:24):

So Gerry and Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Mahi (02:30):

Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Beall (02:32):

And by the way, this is the first time we’ve ever had two guests at once. So I anticipate this is going to be a total cluster with regard to who talks when. So I’m going to try to be a good host and ask questions when at a time or whatever. But first I’d like to start with beauty and youth. So we’ll go with Shane. And Shane, could you tell us how you got to here? You’re running this company called Sales Driivn. We just observed you guys, your team knocking it out of several parks. I think in some games it would’ve been a six and others it would’ve been a walk-off home run. I don’t know what it would’ve been in fencing, but somebody would’ve died. ConnectAndSell yesterday. But how did you get here to where we’re hanging out on this podcast together?

Shane Mahi (03:12):

I think, I think you’re being quite modest, Chris, but I got here from… There’s plenty of good conversations with you around growing our business, and yesterday was a definitely an eye-opener, even for our team. We got a chance to trial the weapon. But trialing the weapon, selling the weapon, which is definitely something new for us. And we’re able to achieve some incredible results based on our activity yesterday. And lo and behold, had a good conversation after. We are now partnering with you guys, and I am now featuring as a guest on the podcast. So, just really excited to be here and share our story.

Chris Beall (03:51):

Fantastic. Fantastic. And did you grow up in sales or did you intend to be something more productive?

Shane Mahi (03:57):

My dad told me one time, if you go to law school, if you go to Harvard Law School, I will get you any Porsche 911 that you want. That wasn’t enough to get there. Clearly, because I did not get to that law school. But I was horrible, absolutely terrible at school. I was always a disciplinary issue in high school, middle school, college, didn’t really take a liking to books. And when I got out of college and realized that I had not achieved anything in my life, I decided to sell Cutco Knives. So I don’t know… In America that’s a whole thing. Cutco knives, going door to door, family relatives, trying to sell knife sets for $1,500. Came to find out that I was pretty good at selling knives to parents and my friend’s parents. So that obviously went into a whole rabbit hole of more selling.

Shane Mahi (04:54):

I ended up taking my Series 7 license, my Series 66 license to become a financial advisor, ended up getting into a different environment or walk of life and that cut that path right in half. And then long story short, I fell into sales, into event sales, then demand generation sales, corporate sales, and then oil and gas demand generation sales. And after a while of just thinking I I’m not working for a ship company, I decided to figure out a way to do things faster, better make people’s lives easier. And that’s when we created Sales Driivn.

Chris Beall (05:31):

Fantastic. Love the story. I didn’t get into Harvard Law School either and I didn’t try either. So, we have that in common. It’s fantastic. Gerry, how about you? Here you are Gerry, by the way, runs AMEA for ConnectAndSell. He also secretly runs our most significant partnerships. He has many skills in these areas and advises me on all manner of things and corrects me on some. Here he is on Market Dominance Guys, probably the pinnacle of your career now, Gerry, I’m sure, as being on the show. But how did you get into this? You’re you’re a guy who’s been known to do some other things. You’re not the smallest person in the world or the least athletic. You’ve been known to play a little sport here and there. But how did you end up here overall? And specifically.

Gerry  Hill (06:15):

I was looking to solve a problem and I Googled some stuff and ConnectAndSell came up as a thing that could potentially solve a problem for me. And I’m not sure if you’ll ever remember this, Chris, but you took the lead exchange. You personally called me up from your cell phone on a Saturday afternoon and it about 1:00 PM in the UK. I think you were probably still in either Nevada or Colorado at the time. And we probably sat down and spoke for about 45 minutes.

Gerry  Hill (06:44):

I was on my way out the door to play golf. I didn’t play golf that day. Instead you and me had a pretty dynamic conversation about what was wrong with funding and startups, the VC code system being fundamentally broken. We talked about go to market being this flawed fabled complex exercise when it could be something really simple. And at the end of the call, you said to me, “Hey Gerry, you should do a test drive.” And I’m like, “What’s a test drive?” And he’s like, “Oh, don’t worry about what the test drive is. I’ll get you over in front of my man, James Townsend, and you’ll do a test drive.” Like that’s how I ended up here specifically.

Gerry  Hill (07:17):

How did I end up in perfectional selling. Same story as everyone else. Probably the smartest kid in the room meant I was absolutely terrible in a formal academic environment, messed around at college, played a lot of rugby for dollars, had a massive ego and then suddenly wasn’t playing rugby anymore and needed to make a living. And the only way I could make a living was at an 18,000 pound a year recruitment shop called Robert Half where I absolutely rocked it for 18 months, but realized the recruitment model was broken and transitioned into management, consultancy advisory research, and then into software.

Chris Beall (07:56):

Wow. Okay. So you didn’t sell door to door. No knives for you.

Gerry  Hill (08:00):

My first ever sales job was whilst I was still in high school. I was in my last year of secondary school, high school for the American audience for translation, and I was selling kitchens and I would work there two nights to the week after school being a demo guy for the kitchens. And then I’d be doing surveys and sizing and pricing kitchens and closing 30,000-pound deals with moms on Saturday afternoons when I was 17 years old.

Chris Beall (08:32):

So you did door to door also. It’s kind of a funny theme on Market Dominance Guys, almost everybody that is on the show sold door to door at some point relatively early in their career, some more intentionally than others. I was probably the least intentional. I was trying to fund paying for a little gap in American healthcare called American Healthcare. And my first wife had had a miscarriage and I needed to make some money in a hurry. And the next day I found myself selling Fuller Brush door to door and that turned into… It didn’t turn into a sales career, but it turned into a revelation, which was “Wow, you could do this in a really simple way that works.” And that’s not how most people are doing it. And then I kind of put that away. But it’s interesting.

Chris Beall (09:23):

So I want to go to revelations here, not in a biblical sense, but in an eye-opening sense. Shane, I’m going to ask you this. There has to be a point in the process of learning all this stuff where you said to yourself, and maybe not, you can tell me if this didn’t happen, where you said, “Wait a second, nobody knows what they’re doing in sales. It’s not like they think. It’s simpler than that.” Did that happen to you?

Shane Mahi (09:51):

Absolutely. And it was as simple as a Salesforce automation. So I was working at a very outdated intelligence agency, but mostly run on corporate hospitality and events. And it was literally a Mitel Phone, manual Salesforce. They didn’t even want to fund LinkedIn, no technology whatsoever. And I came across few books and Google searches on how to make sales faster. And one of those things was just sequencing, just sequencing. And I found out through the Salesforce admin, yeah, you guys have the enterprise license, you can do that. So I started to that with my Salesforce admin. We started… And I started getting out tons of emails to people, started getting actual responses and I didn’t have to do the work because this was at the time of the pandemic. And after I asked to roll it out across the team, the sales director said no.

Shane Mahi (10:56):

And that for me, it was just like, what can you do? You cannot be this stupid. And then more and more things. I started to learn and understand like, okay, this happened. You can do this multi-threading stuff. You can do this. You could do this. You got, you got systems that call for you. And he was just like, “We’re not going to get the investment.” So I closed this huge deal with Leica Microsystems, took that commission, and started my own company and said, I’m going to do it myself.

Chris Beall (11:23):

Alright. I love it. So you didn’t just have the revelation, you had the revelation leading to you opening the door to action.

Shane Mahi (11:31):

Exactly. Had to. I’m an executor.

Chris Beall (11:34):

Well, didn’t it scare the living daylights out of you to go out on your own? You got to little pocket full of commission check, but as you do the math, and I’m sure you can do the math, you realize them things dwindle like crazy over time when you’re out executing. It’s like watching a bathtub draining, except somebody punched a big hole in the bottom of it. Was it scary or was it just fun?

Shane Mahi (11:55):

I did a lot of personal development in the year of 2019 and 2020. And my life coach, she spoke to me and said, “What is the reason you’re holding onto this job?” And I said, “Security.” And the whole security came around a monthly paycheck that came with commissions. And she said, “Well, look at it. You are going paycheck to paycheck, anyway. You are waiting for your commissions, what they’re holding from you anyway. So what security do you really have?” And that was an eye-opener for me. And I just thought, you know what, you’re actually right. And do I hold onto these commission checks that are coming in or do I take a leap of faith and own my space, own my belief systems that I can do it. I know I can go make money and just go for it.

Shane Mahi (12:41):

What is the worst that could happen? My wife had just literally moved from Morocco. We were about to move into a new place, new things happening in my life. I asked my wife, I said, “Hey look, do you think I should do this?” She said, “Follow your dreams.” And that was enough for me, my partner and myself, just going headfirst into it and saying, what’s the worst that could happen? You fail. And you try again. So for me, there was no fear. I’ve been through too many things in my life to hold back growth for a little bit of something that could present a bit fear in my life. No, that wasn’t an issue for me.

Chris Beall (13:54):

How about you, Gerry? You, you must have had a revelation at some point. You have a pretty iconoclastic view of sales and business, right? I do remember that first conversation actually.

Gerry Hill (14:09):

It’s just an imbalance in the world. And I dislike the imbalance. It doesn’t feel right for me. Like everyone else took the blue pill and I’ve taken the red pill. And I feel like I see the world in a very different context. And the context is that the model is broken. Now, I’m all for job creation, I’m all for the economy, I’m all for B2B. I’m an ardent capitalist. But the reality is we’re now living in an automation first world, and those automations are becoming more sophisticated.

Gerry Hill (14:34):

All I really want from my talker-listers in the world, I want them to be doing their job. I don’t want them to be admin junkies, I want them to be admin monkeys. The reason we allow that behavior to happen is because the way that companies are funded today, they no longer produce goods, products, inventory. You can’t get rid of that inventory through a selling motion anymore. It’s all esoteric. It’s software. It’s code. There’s no real value attached to the manufacturing of those products anymore.

Gerry Hill (15:05):

But you take investment money, you need to be seen to put that money to work, and that money needs to go to work in two ways: The perception that we’re a big company and the perception that we’re a big company in two forms, real estate and headcount. And what do you get every time you hire somebody new? You get less profit per employee, because the value of that employee’s contribution to the top line of your company diminishes because there’s less of the pie to go around.

Gerry Hill (15:32):

So what the founders, what the company owners, what the people that create innovation and try to take it to market end up doing, they end up going into debt and don’t realize the potential value of their own businesses because they take money from charlatans who wear [inaudible 00:15:47] and spend their life in spreadsheets who aren’t executioners, who don’t understand what it’s like to build, run, bootstrap from scratch. So that is the imbalance in the world is this reappropriation of venture capital as another asset class staffed by investment bankers, treat companies like bets, not the vehicles for value creation, for founders, owners, original shareholders that they got the potential to be. And what do we see in the world of professional selling today? We don’t see any professional selling anymore as a result.

Chris Beall (16:25):

That’s fascinating. I’m listening to you and thinking back to the latest edition of Nathan Latka’s magazine, and he has a physical magazine. It’s a great way to consume the lists that he creates. Actually, I think you can’t beat paper for consuming a list quickly with your eyes. I don’t know why, by the way this is so, but it’s sitting over here on a coffee table nearby. But this is the headcount issue. And it’s kind of funny because Latka is very big into bootstrapping.

Chris Beall (16:55):

And even though there’s a legitimate element to growth. We grew. We’re bootstrapping and we grow when you add some people, but it was who grew the most in terms of headcount. And I was reading it and going, man, I always resonate with this Latka stuff, but I’m not resonating with this growth of headcount as a measure of, I kept up with the VC-funded businesses. To me, if I wanted to see how many people I could hire, if that was my goal, I don’t know what I’d do. I guess I’d just make it really fun and attractive to somebody with a bunch of money so that we could hire a bunch of people and lose their money. But that sounds like the standard VC model to me.

Chris Beall (17:36):

So did you ever… Were you ever like on board, Gerry, with the VC model? And then I’m going to ask you Shane. Shane, did you ever get tempted by the VC model? Cause I know you could raise money, unlike me. Nobody would fund me. I mean, guys from Google actually told me you’re so old, you could never be funded.

Gerry  Hill (17:55):

I think part of my disillusionment was when I worked at Frost and Sullivan in the advisory space, a huge number of our clients were private equity and [inaudible 00:18:03] a bit jaded by the fact that they were just fueling these big beasts, these big corporate beasts with more and more debt. And then when you go down another level, VC is essentially the same. It’s the same thing. You’re taking other people’s money, fueling companies with debt and not necessarily realizing the benefit of that debt or, turning that be debt to value in any way, shape or form. And then I started advising companies on go-to-market strategies and helping them prepare the go-to-market components of pitch steps.

Gerry  Hill (18:30):

And I was going into about four or five VC pitch meetings a month. And I was just universally underwhelmed by virtually every single professional investor I met because they actually didn’t care about the go-to-market stuff. Spent cycles prepping it. Spent cycles going through it. But unless you could talk about one number, your TAM and massive TAMs at that. They were the only things that they’re ever interested in, even when they claim to be niche and differentiated. And then you actually get to the underpinnings of a term sheet and you realize what a racket it is.

Gerry  Hill (19:05):

Gangsterism. They’re still going to take their two and twenty out of the fund which means that the capital that you get left with is 80, 78% of the total realized value of the investment that gets made. After that 78% has been tranched based on performance milestones, which you may or may not realize, how much capital do you actually end up with over a four-year investment from that fund or that cohort of funds. One-fourth of the total number.

Gerry  Hill (19:34):

And how can you put that capital to work, especially if you’ve got a technical deficit or you’ve got some fiscal issues inside the business that exists today. So by the time you’ve paid down that debt with the debt that you just took, your business is failing anyway. The only way you can get through that is to sell yourself out of it. And I think the biggest sort of tension that I found was speaking to CEOs going what’s better, slower growth, bootstrap to profitability on a really robust sales process that’s designed on [inaudible 00:20:02] rate improved with market dominance at the core, or take this money. And nine times out of ten, none of them could think more than the vanity metric of taking the investment round so that they could be featured at tech crunch. And I just got massively jaded that something’s gone wrong in business.

Gerry  Hill (20:17):

The business that my dad used to talk to me about as an ex IBM executive from the seventies and the eighties from Xerox that used to sell things and make profit and grow shareholder value the right way versus anything .io. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And one of the reasons why I’m so emboldened by the mission at ConnectAndSell is to help companies realize the potential value of their businesses, whether they’re funded or non-funded by giving them the tools to cookbooks and the playbooks to become market dominant. That’s the mission.

Chris Beall (20:52):

It’s funny that you refer to it as debt, because most people think when they take equity financing, it’s not a form of debt and you have nailed it. It is-

Gerry  Hill (21:01):

What else is it?

Chris Beall (21:02):

What else is it? Exactly. We give you money. You owe us. It just turns out that what you us is hard to figure out. Back when we were venture-funded, our corporate documents were that thick. And I was at one point tasked with understanding every word in those documents in order to be able to execute on some plays that were needed to essentially save the company from the VCs. And they needed to be executed very, very quickly. And unlike you, Shane, I did take to books and I can read documents like that and keep all that shit in my head and do okay with it.

Chris Beall (21:39):

But it struck me as I got deeper and deeper into it. I asked myself this question. In those documents, how many of the words were there to protect the VCs and how many of the words were there to protect the company? And how many of the words were there that had anything to do with growing the company? So the latter category was easy. Zero. None of the words were there to help grow the company. And I counted them up on a number of pages and you know how I am Gerry, I’ll do this kind of stupid stuff. And I literally counted word by word, by word for a few pages at random in different spots and asked what were the words for? And 97% of all the words were to protect the venture capitalists against downside risk.

Chris Beall (22:26):

That was it. And I realized, these are salvage shops. That’s what they are. They’re salvage shops. And so to build something that looks like that boat behind me, but the chances of it floating are only about 3 or 4%. And so we got to make sure that we can kind of quickly get the steel and the plastic and the glass and the bones of the dead bodies that we can grind up for fertilizer and anything else we can find and sell it on and do it as quickly as possible. Because we only have so much time to focus on building another picture of a pretty boat. It’s quite a while. No, Shane, I don’t know if you obviously have… You haven’t been subjected to as much of this as Gerry.

Shane Mahi (23:08):

No, I haven’t. I’m thinking what the fu… I [crosstalk 00:23:08] wanted to get this. I don’t want to touch it now.

Gerry  Hill (23:15):

Pirates in chalets mate. That’s all they are pirates-

Chris Beall (23:18):

Well, maybe the whole purpose of today’s episode was to save you from a big mistake.

Shane Mahi (23:22):

Well, I think it already it is because I’m sure, I’m sure I’m certain that there are so many people out there that in the midst of what’s happened since 2020, I know it’s just a repeated topic that goes over and over again, but I truly believe that the world was going to change after March 2020. And I’m sure there’s so many people that want to go get invested because when we were starting the company or in the midst of growth with our company, I was just thinking, I want more money. I want more money to grow. I want to grow faster. I want to grow faster. I want to grow faster than somebody told me. Look, calm down. You need to organically grow your business the right way. And it’s… I’m guilty of it. All I saw was green. There could be dollars that more, that account balance more zeros on the account.

Shane Mahi (24:11):

I can hire more people. I can buy more cool technology. I can invest in more things and even having my colleagues or people in my network say, “No, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t understand. Investment is there to help. If you grow, they’re not there to screw you.” And then you hear the flip side of things. So being educated from people who actually have been in that environment like yourself, Gerry, or even you, Chris, who’s actually read through documents, it’s a massive eye-opener. And I think there’s a company stage two capital macro version, a whole bunch of leaders that are running that. And their whole thing too, is don’t fall into the trap, do it the right way, right? Learn from other people’s mistakes. And without even a section like this, I genuinely could have fallen into a huge mistake. I’ve taken a whole boatload of money and losing entire control of my company, losing control of the direction and the vision that we have, and potentially sinking the business. And that’s just being naive.

Gerry  Hill (25:13):

[crosstalk 00:25:13] I’m not being negative around why investment can be useful. Taking investment can be a good thing. But it has to be the right investor. I think the other difference, generally speaking, is most people don’t understand how their valuations are calculated inside their own businesses. So if you are not in control of the valuion and what you believe your valuation to be, then how do you actually execute? Well, you’ve got to take third-party advice. Third-party advice isn’t free. So the process of even giving yourself a gearing for valuation is tough. What’s the easy thing to do though by comparison is do what you’re really good at as a business. Pick up the phone, have conversations with as many people in your market as possible, down to the finest sweet spot, where you can leverage and market dominate that sweet spot as much as possible, refine your messaging, acquire enough customers in a short enough amount of time that you can then cross the chasm and go into that next market.

Gerry  Hill (26:08):

Now you investment rate, because you’ve actually got tangible things on your balance sheet that you can talk to people about. And what do we see in the world? We see seed funds that are raising series A amount of money. We see series A that are raising series B. We’re seeing pretty poor products raised to $115 million in capital on billion-dollar valuation. And the big trick that the world is being played at the moment is that there’s so much access to free capital at the moment. This concept that I heard the other day from my mortgage broker, I just got approved on a mortgage, which is absolutely ridiculous. .99% fixed for five years. Why? Cash is trashed. So the amount of liquidity available to venture capitalists right now to go out and fund other people’s businesses and prop, them up for another five years of not getting any further forward in their actual purpose, which is to acquire customers and serve customers. It’s something that we are all going to be paying for in 20 years’ time.

or in 20 years’ time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Could you name that one all-important thing that makes your relationship with your customers successful? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing, can: As he tells our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, that all-important thing is “doing the day-to-day right.” Why? Because it daily reinforces the trust your customers feel for you and your company, which incrementally builds the credibility of your services and products. And with that credibility in place, you have a decent shot at an agreement with your customer when you propose bigger, more important initiatives. Take a listen to more insights shared by Rahul, who has been a Microsoft employee for eight years, as he explains the culture of collaboration at his company, whether he stands with human intelligence predictions or artificial intelligence predictions, and what job he wanted to do when he was a 10-year-old, on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Doing the Day-to-Day Right.”

Listen to the first half of this two-part interview:

Empathy, Goals, and Alignment of Purpose

—-more—-

About Our Guest

Rahul Maniktala is a technology executive, a sales engineer, and currently Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Christopher Beall (01:31):

So there’s a big difference in the world of just regular old sales market dominance kind of stuff. People care a lot about forecasts. I don’t care that much about forecasts because I think you handle those with a portfolio and you just don’t worry about it. Have a bigger portfolio, the individual deal is not that big of a deal. It happens or it doesn’t. Who knows? The world’s full of all sorts of crazy stuff, right?

But it sounds like forecasting of a kind – prediction is a real key for you. And so when people talk about like, you’ve got to know what’s going to happen next. You have to have that conviction, right? That I know what’s going to happen next. I don’t have to keep second-guessing myself and acting crazy about it. Maybe every once in a while, there’s this surprise, but pretty much if I’ve done my job right, it kind of plays out.

So here we live in a world where everything that has the word “prediction” associated with it is now associated with AI, right? So if there’s a prediction, somebody is going to tell you there’s some ML that can do the prediction better than us human beings. So here you are, somebody who handles relationships, there’s a political element to it, there are the rules of engagement, and then there are these predictions. Do you think an AI is ever going to come in and help with those predictions, replace your right arm or a lobe of your brain or something like that? You guys at Microsoft got no shortage of AI, right? You got AI everywhere. Do you actually use AI kind of predictive capabilities in the job itself, or is that more in the bucket of things that you offer to your customer that they can use in their business, and Microsoft can use it elsewhere in the business, but they’re not using it as a prosthesis or anything else for Rahul?

Rahul Maniktala (03:20):

We do both.

Christopher Beall (03:21):

Oh, now he’s talking.

Rahul Maniktala (03:24):

The technology,  and we rely on every human being for their own AI. So the technology AI gives a certain thing with some amount of predictability, but then our own AI, which is bent on those connections and rules of engagement helps us with how we engage. And some people do it more. Some people do less. I have a little line there.

Sometimes folks on the team would say that you come up with all these conspiracy theories and generally I would say, generally, those conspiracy theories are true. They come true with that element of AI. What we do, we do internally. There is a lot of in the last three, four years, we have seen those items helping us with the business as such.

Christopher Beall (04:10):

I can tell Corey has a thought, Corey is thinking. This Rahul, is he a bot? Maybe he’s actually a bot.

Corey Frank (04:18):

He is right because I’m going to say that I’m a part AI. Then I’ve never considered myself. Certain my wife doesn’t think I’m part AI. Something else starts with an eight 50. If we take Rahul out of Microsoft you become the fourth market dominance guy, right? It’s like the Musketeers we have Henry, he’s obligated for the third spot.

And then Rahul, let’s say you become an investor, private equity investor, or venture investor. And you were to give advice to organizations that are in that 10 to $50 million range about market dominance, knowing what you’ve learned and gleaned certainly from the Cisco days and the latter Microsoft years of working with, as you said, the 65 clients now to just one, I imagined the speed that you see in a large organization like that, managing one client, everything slows down like the matrix to you, probably to a smaller organization that you see things that maybe I wouldn’t see for quite a few cycles.

When you do that, when you have other buddies or colleagues say, “Hey, Rahul, would you take a look at my business and see where maybe it’s wrong or a little off”, what are some of the common speed bumps that you see to dominate a market that you know so well right now? It is like plain vanilla, straight down the middle; it’s like stomping beer cans. It is so written to you in so many ways, but yet I miss.

Rahul Maniktala (05:46):

I think what I have come to realize going from a large customer base to a single customer, it’s how well you can define the processes. How well you can measure the OKRs for example, right? And that’s where the operational efficiencies are derived from. Now, there will be challenges obviously, large companies have their own challenges where the spark that you mentioned, 10 to 15 million, how much ever you can processize and get the execution out of those processes is the key to success. I’ve seen here in the Silicon Valley. I’ve seen a lot of companies do that, right? That they will, when they get on their growth trajectory, they’re optimizing that piece of the business, highly optimizing that.

Christopher Beall (06:36):

And why is that? Is it that the processization frees up cycles to do things that are surprising value at the margin, or allow you to exercise insights you wouldn’t have the time even to have? What is it that the processization does other than the obvious, which is keeps your overhead under control and allows you to go faster or more reliably with the same resource space?

Rahul Maniktala (06:56):

You’re reducing the room for errors. That’s it.

Corey Frank (06:59):

There was a video I shared with the team last week to this point, Rahul and Chris. It was with Elon Musk, and maybe you saw it. He was on the ground at the launch site with Space X. And he’s asked a question about design versus manufacturing, or process versus the creative. And he had said the “simplified and multiply” is one of his axioms that he’s always done. But he had said that most people think the creative, right? The frenetic flailing of arms. And let’s just put a bunch of stuff on the wall and let’s just see what works. That testing, that’s the tough part. And the manufacturing is the easier part.

And he said it’s actually just the opposite. And he said, it’s so low. The creative side is so low on a mathematical stale, that really it’s zero. In that it doesn’t matter if you can come up with this incredible Saturn 5+ type engine, if you can’t manufacture it at scale and build the machines, et cetera, to do it. And it sounds like that’s what you’re saying is that if I’m a 10 to $50 million organization, one of the things that I shouldn’t neglect is the iron clad processes in order to build those, more so than anything else at that stage, otherwise it’s not going to handle my scale.

Rahul Maniktala (08:22):

Introducing editing is one thing, but the operational efficiency is another. You want to get that and you want to get there quickly.

Corey Frank (08:29):

Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher Beall (08:30):

Well, I got to stop doing these podcasts and go back and work on my operational efficiencies dammit, but not right now. Right now I’m going to be creative. I’m going to have to set it on my calendar.

Rahul Maniktala (08:43):

You’ve created a process out of this Chris. Isn’t that true?

Christopher Beall (08:47):

It’s true. It’s true. Actually, we accidentally created a process out of this, and we’ve gotten to a hundred episodes without Corey and I doing anything but what you see. Everything else is processized to the max. And thank you so much for those of you who make that happen. I really appreciate it. That’s actually true. I’m kind of a process freak myself. It’s kind of funny though. Cause I found many times with startups that people from larger companies will come into startups and they have zero experience with creating traction. So I don’t really look at it as creative versus process. I look at it as traction leading to scale, and they want to jump to scale before they have any traction. So they’ve been over and over in their lives in situations where somebody else got the traction, somebody else made that product stick in the marketplace. Somebody else took that idea and determined by making it and selling it enough and changing it.

You know that they had Excel instead of Clippy, right? I mean, without that distinction being made, you can’t do it a great deal on the processizing the… My mother said it well, “if something’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.” Right? And so I always took that to heart. But telling if something is worth doing or not worth doing is in the eyes of a customer, and the customer is going to make demands on you early that are peculiar to the situation, not to their problem. That is, it’s one of those you are the observer in the middle of the experiment, messing around with it, by making the offer and trying to turn it into value for the customer. And you don’t really know how much is you and how much is the product, and you know, trying to figure this stuff out.

So I’ve found often that folks will go, “you know, we’ve got to design for scale,” and I’ve always said to them, “look, first, we’ve got to get enough traction that we can learn from our mistakes” because early on the errors are worth a lot. And later the persistence of the errors is a huge problem. And the trick to the whole thing is knowing when to go from one to the other, because you got to love the errors early and have your ears open for them in your mind open for them always. But then you got to see if you can design them out and design them away and make them go away by design not by effort. I don’t know if that – you know, that must apply though. Rahul when you came into this particular job with this big, big customer, you can’t have done everything right.

You must’ve screwed up in some ways. And there has to be that occasional evening where you just, you said to Pooja “my God, I just did something so dumb today that I don’t know if I’m going to recover from it. I at least feel pretty bad about it. And I’m going to have to do something tomorrow, figure out something in order to fix it up.” I’m not going to ask what that dumb thing was, or even if it was there, but what is the dumbest thing you could do? What is the category of idiocy that you could really fill nicely early on in a job like this, where you have a big portfolio and no intimacy yet? You’re building the intimacy. That’s like the attraction is the intimacy or vice versa.

Rahul Maniktala (12:09):

So there were many such evenings, Chris. Let me tell you that. But I think there were a few times where not having the intimacy and making certain moves and we hadn’t made a lot of progress, right? So there were some internal things and there were external things, but at times I had some things more detrimental. When we could, given the complexity and given the engagement from a functional standpoint and the relationship from a B2B standpoint were all at stake.

So yeah, I do some things like emailing one of the executives really, really high up in the organization, which I shouldn’t have done. And it cost me be quite a bit; but those first 18, 19 months were fun because you’ve got nothing to lose. We literally did not have anything to lose, but I would go back to the point you made earlier about production without traction and scale. I think the point about, when you get to that 10 million mark or 20 million mark, you have established enough traction in the marketplace. And that’s when you started thinking about, “Hey, how do I scale this out? How do I processize this so I can get the efficiencies that I want.” So you are absolutely right, that initial traction, trust, is very much needed before you can really talk about process or scaling.

Corey Frank (13:44):

Well I would imagine that’s where your personality with sincerity, as we started this conversation out with. If you lack a semblance of EQ, emotional intelligence here, when you hit that turbulence, you can depend on the math to kind of guide you in an engineering process and a project management process. But when you’re dealing with the people behind the processes, that’s quite challenging. Then Chris, you certainly have some experience with that, with the flight school and dealing with turbulence. And how do you take something like that? And I think certainly that last element of the flight school certainly applies in Rahul’s world, too.

Christopher Beall (14:59):

Yeah, that is interesting. I hadn’t really thought of that, but it’s funny. Cause we’ve processized something nobody had ever processized before, which is turning a regular person into a master cold caller and doing it while they make money instead of having to spend money doing it. And that the key, by the way, we made an adjustment, we moved the turbulence segment of flight school, which used to be the last two hours. We moved it into the third slot. So there’s four, two hour slots: live calling, live talking to people, getting coached on the first seven seconds of the conversation for two hours, very precise. It’s schematized, which I think is a key to design is you have to have a schema, and you have to have a private language of what goes in different places. All good designs talk about things that nothing else talks about in a way that nobody else could understand.

And that turbulence part was the most interesting part because we realized we had it too late. That is, the student was already experiencing the need to respond to objections. And by putting that off one more lesson, they didn’t do very well in what would have been the third lesson, because they’re so freaked out by the turbulence. So we had to actually process that took into account how human beings develop emotionally as they learn to do difficult things; that became part of it. This stuff is everywhere in my opinion. There’s always design. That one, by the way, what happened is Donnie Crawford called me up, our flight school instructor has been a guest on our show, and he said, “Chris, I’m thinking of changing something.” I said, “what’s that?” And he explained why he wanted to move lesson four into lesson three, session four into session three, and kind of hesitant because I had designed it.

And that’s actually, to me, the most interesting thing: when process and politics get close to each other, they tend to repel each other instead of accepting each other. Now I’ll give an example, or a kind of example, right? I think everybody on the show by now believes that the theory of constraints make some sense. There is only one bottleneck: go find it, characterize it, understand its investability, know its throughput, know its cycle time, and know its quality. And then do the investment in a limited way to see whether the throughput actually increases while keeping quality constant or making it better. That’s kind of like how you manage according to the theory of constraints. Nobody does it because the politics, and the politics is it says that only one part of the company is worth optimizing right now. So everybody else feels bad.

It’s like, “I’m not important. Why aren’t we optimizing my part?” Right? So there’s a political pressure to optimize what is counterproductive to optimize. And I’m sure you must run into this all the time. Or a hole where there’s folks who want attention. So you’re looking at it. You look at through your client’s eyes and go, “If there was just one thing, they could do it.” So that’s it, and we can help them do that and make all the difference. And over here is Mr. Squawky or Ms. Squawky going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about me? What about me?” And you’ve got to figure out how to handle that, so that the big thing happens, and “what about me?” doesn’t turn into a roadblock. I can tell you’re smiling. You must run into this on occasion.

Rahul Maniktala (18:15):

That’s the story of my life. It’s the reality, and it’s the perceived reality, right? That’s where I lived. The examples that I did not get into that much detail. There have been few successes on the big items when we have been able to align on those kinds of initiatives where you can really come in and make an impact, but then there is always this day-to-day. And we have to make it off the day-to-day. There’s no way we can back out of that. And I’ll also add this: that doing the day-to-day right, or going back to my rules of engagement, is what helps us build that incremental credibility and furthers the trust with the customer. So when it’s all done and we ask for bigger initiatives or engagement on bigger, important priorities, we have a decent shot in that.

Christopher Beall (19:16):

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I’m going to jump to a completely different timeframe. So you’re 10 years old. You’re looking at your life, you’re looking at the future. By the time you’re 10, you got a pretty good idea of your skills, right? I think we all do. We’re not mystified by who we are. At the age of 12 we certainly are starting to lose track of a little bit of that because we have other ambitions that might show up. At the age of 10, we’re pretty good on the skills, and we often have an ambition, like I want to be at whatever, right? What did you want to be when you were 10? And how does that map onto … cause you have fun doing what you’re doing today and you’re very successful.

My guess is that Rahul could buy that boat if he wanted to, but he doesn’t really need a boat that big, so he buys smaller boats, or non-boats that may as well be boats. You’re very successful and having fun, a rare combination, a wonderful thing. But how different or the same is this? Or what could you see in your ten-year-old mind and ambition that’s playing out today, and what is it that if you told your ten-year-old self, this is what I’m doing at the age of whatever you are now, 23 or whatever. I don’t know how old you are. How does that go together?

Rahul Maniktala (20:28):

What if I said to you that this is exactly what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old?

Christopher Beall (20:34):

Good God.

Rahul Maniktala (20:36):

I figured it out right when I was ten!

Christopher Beall (20:42):

All right. Well, I was told you were a freak of nature. First time we had a virtual drink together, I figured that that was probably true, but now it has been nailed down. So the lesson for everybody here is go back to your ten-year-old self, find out what that person wanted you to be. Just go be that. And you’ll be as happy and successful as Rahul, unless your skills are so limited that you’re going to be in a cave,  eating bugs with me.

Rahul Maniktala (21:11):

When you were 10, you probably figured out the skills. See, I’m still figuring out with skills. So, that is the problem. That’s what the problem is. That’s why I kind of knew this is what I would be doing four decades later. So we here we are, I’m still building the skills.

Christopher Beall (21:28):

I see. I see. So the journey is forever for you? So what you are is on the journey and at ten, you knew you’d be on the journey forever pretty much. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Corey, we don’t run into this kind of person very often. I’m not sure we should very often. Rarity is a wonderful thing.

Corey Frank (21:47):

It is. It’s like your 18-year-old Macallan there. Right? You just don’t, you don’t have that too often. And when you do, you just want to savor it. So with that point, let’s go back to maybe not you’re ten, but to Chris’s point, the influences, right? A little bit more on the personal side, Rahul. What do you do to stay sharp? Are you a Ram Charan guy? Execution guy? Are you a creative guy? You fill us up. What are some of those books or those podcasts that move you to continue to explore on the journey?

Rahul Maniktala (22:22):

I am not a podcast guy. I like to talk to people. I like to watch movies, and I’ve always been like that. I’ve always been big on movies, especially Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and then there are Indian film stars. It’s always that for some reason I’m not able to disconnect from things, and movies are one thing that will make me disconnect and kind of recalibrate, rethink the things that I’m doing. And then I start connecting the dots.

Corey Frank (22:54):

Are you, can I ask, are you a middle child? Are you right in the middle as far as the birth order?

Rahul Maniktala (22:58):

I am the oldest.

Corey Frank (23:00):

You’re an oldest. Okay. Very, very empathetic and creative for traditional oldest there.

Rahul Maniktala (23:08):

But to your question about Ram Charan, I’m a fan and also Jeffrey Bedford. But then I’m all about execution, do the best I can with the big picture, but I will be laser-focused on execution.

Corey Frank (23:24):

Yeah, I would imagine. Cause you probably have forecast calls like every three hours, right? So constantly calibrating, adjusting all the communications that come in cause certainly a position of big trust. When they talk about the stakes being large, the decisions you make, the emails you send or don’t send to those who you should send to or not send to can have a ripple effect on not just one company’s quarter, but multiple companies quarters. So when the folks get together for the class action, right, I’m sure you want to be as far away from that as possible. Shareholders are apt to try to find a villain somewhere. A lot of high stakes going on I would imagine.

Christopher Beall (24:02):

Microsoft shareholders are not looking to find any villains inside of Microsoft I can assure you. They’re finding a lot of heroes, right?

Corey Frank (24:10):

Absolutely. Yes. A little different landscape [crosstalk 00:24:12].

Christopher Beall (24:12):

That is a good thing to be is a Microsoft shareholder. I know one very well, and I think it looks like a grand thing to be. I’ll tell you what, I do have the luxury of walking by sometimes when Rahul and Helen are talking to each other about business. And if somebody asked me, “what are those two doing over there?” I don’t listen in, I don’t come and listen for the words, but you can get the tone from a distance as you’re going by. I’m doing my micro prancing or whatever. And I’d say, they’re seriously having fun.

They’re very relaxed. It’s really interesting in a game that’s being played for those kinds of dollars and those kinds of stakes, how surefooted they sound. How it’s serious about solving problems, but relaxed in the situation and going, “this is where we’re going to do what we can.” And it is very, very execution focused. And it’s fascinating to me to be able to just watch and learn from the tone. So I’m impressed by it. I’m impressed by, you talk about a culture of collaboration. I didn’t know very much about Microsoft from the inside, so to speak, at all. And I got to say that straight up, that culture of collaboration is real. And that’s what I think might be the thing that’s an absolute requirement to work successfully with these really, really big customers.

Rahul Maniktala (25:39):

I call her shared accountability with discrete ownership.

Christopher Beall (25:45):

You write that down, Corey, it goes in the book.

Corey Frank (25:48):

That’s the title of the new chapter. Yeah. Is it like in essence, you just have this epiphany or that it’s really like a consultancy, it’s like a burying point, or a McKinsey in a lot of ways of what you’re doing. You’re trying to find those efficiencies. You’re trying to romance the new features or ideas and a little bit of inception trying to make them the prospect’s idea, even though it’s maybe your idea. And that does sound very much like the machinations of the very employer McKinsey type of organization.

Rahul Maniktala (26:18):

There’s a lot of internal selling that goes in what you just described. Getting what I was saying earlier, getting that alignment, it’s more internal. So you can go have that kind of a conversation with the customer, not so much try, but then get that alignment on a regular basis. But it’s more internal than it is with the customer.

Christopher Beall (26:45):

Well, for all of us who are looking to grow to be Microsoft size and then mature to being able to have the biggest companies in the world as our customers. And that would be far out for many folks, but I think it’s great. It’s great to know that there is a way of doing it, that there are things to focus on. There is a way of looking at things and executing on them that don’t have to just do what I would have done, which is walk in and then walk out. You could actually proceed in that direction and know that it’s okay. There’s a step by step that you got a shot of getting there You’ve got a real shot of getting there if you can hire Rahul to be your guy at one of those.

Whoever you are on this podcast, you don’t have a shot. So don’t even bother to give him a call about that. Just ask him about a good whiskey and stuff like that. But I think it’s fascinating. I hope our listeners have gotten a flavor of what that world is like, because it’s pretty different. It’s not quite Elon Musk on Mars, so to speak, but it’s different enough that most of us, we could watch it. We wouldn’t even know what we were watching and those rules of engagement, we’d probably miss them.

So I thank you for sharing all that with our listeners and with us. Corey and I will go off and feel dominant and significant for a while, which we’re quite capable of doing. I think we have some skills there. And so just wanted to express my appreciation. Corey, what are your last thoughts?

Corey Frank (28:09):

Yeah, Rahul it’s just wonderful. You’re enjoying to talk to. I can imagine what you would be like with two and a half McCollins in you and maybe a bourbon and a half of the war stories. I think I’m just kind of a voyeur of these situations that happen in business and the different opportunities and the “choose your own adventure.” What if I chose right here? What if I chose left? What if I went to the door? What if I jumped on the schooner, and what happens? And to have someone like you, has the best of an engineering mind and instills so in touch with the emotional mindset of your prospect, it’s a very deft hand that clearly that you in a deft talent that you possess. So I really, really appreciate this. And especially for those folks who are that 10 to $50 million range.

It’s a whole new skillset that is probably underutilized, under-thought of on that processing side. Great valuable stuff. For the Market Dominance Guys, we certainly appreciate it and our audience here.

Like many of our guests, Rahul, you may be asked to come back at another time, because we get a lot of requests for these episodes for folks to come back and explore different scenarios. And maybe we have a little speed round one of these days, Chris, where we get our expert panel, people like Henry or Cheryl or Mark or Rahul. And we take some questions that we’ve had and amassed over these almost two years of doing this thing and getting the different perceptions from someone like Rahul and his business or Henry and his business, or Cheryl, or Mark, or any of the multiple guests that we’ve had and put them to play. But so thank you Rahul for carving out the time. I’m sure it was a very, very busy day for you guys at Microsoft. And this is the Market Dominance Guys as we inch towards episode 100. Good to have you back, Chris, and thank you again, Rahul for the insight. Until next time, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall.

Rahul Maniktala (29:58):

Thank you guys.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What if you only had one account to sell to? One with a $100-million budget and a quarter of a million employees? Rahul Maniktala, Microsoft’s Strategic Account Director of Semi/Hi-Tech Manufacturing has that very job. He’s today’s guest on Market Dominance Guys, and Chris Beall and Corey Frank are curious about how Rahul goes about dominating his market of one. “Behind me is the might of Microsoft,” he explains, and the culture there lends itself very well to support for their customers. In addition, Rahul’s background in technical expertise and an understanding of high-tech products, which is the basis of his customer’s business, helps him gain an understanding of what his customer wants to accomplish. After that, “[t]here are a lot of people you have to align,” Rahul explains to Chris and Corey. He always starts with the customer, employing empathy in order to understand their goals, and then works with the people at Microsoft to create an alignment of purpose between the goals of this company he works for and the goals of the customer he serves. It’s a balancing act, and one that Rahul is very adept at, as you’ll learn in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Empathy, Goals, and an Alignment of Purpose.”

—-more—-

Part 2 is here Doing the Day-to-Day Right

 

Market Dominance Guys is sponsored by:

ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling, since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com

Uncommon Pro – Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (01:48):

Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and Chris Beal, Chris it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I think we’ve had our vacations, right. All points north, east, west European and otherwise. And we finally get together. You’ve had a couple of solo episodes. I’ve had a solo episode. They’re not the same, just I love Susan, but there’s nothing like having Johnny Carson in his seat. You can’t have the Joan Rivers and those replayed to John Davidson and the replacement homes. So it’s good to have you back in the seat as always. And we have guests, which is always some of our favorite episodes as we approach the hundredth episode of The Market Dominance Guys, Chris, we’re leading up to that milestone and today, right? We’re raising the bar from an interesting perspective and the topic Chris, when you hit me up on this, right, is dominating a market of one.

Corey Frank (02:37):

And so we’re pleased to bring on and I’ll let you introduce some Chris, his background, a little bit Rahul Maniktala from Microsoft and Rahul. I apologize if I butchered your last name, but we’ll just go by Rahul for now. And Rahul’s a friendly, and we’re fascinated because as we talked about in the previous 95 episodes, or so the different machinations of how you dominate a market and the moving pieces and how many different variables in a closed system and an open system. And sometimes it can be probably equally challenging if you’re in Rahul’s situation here, can it not Chris, where you have a market of one, you have concentration risk as the private equity folks like to call it. And how do you turn that to an advantage and how do you not screw it up? So with that, Chris, I’m going to let you introduce Rahul and how you guys started chatting about market dominance.

Chris Beall (03:29):

Yeah. So, Rahul, it’s great to have you on thanks so much, Corey. Rahul And I met through my fiance, Helen Fernutchi at a bourbon tasting event online. So it was how many of us were there Rahul, like six or something like that. And we were being introduced to Kentucky bourbons by a real master. And then afterward we had a private conversation in which we didn’t say anything during the event, but here’s the McKellen 18. This is more along our lines.

Corey Frank (04:03):

When you switched from bourbon, to you went immediately up into the scotch realm.

Chris Beall (04:06):

Well, we went back to our native habitat, so to speak and had a nice chat about some other things. And we have talked to each other a few times since. And what fascinates me is, we’ve been talking about dominating markets or addressing market needs, getting into markets, not failing all sorts of stuff in the world where there are many, many, many potential folks to sell to. So the flip of that is of course, where you have a single account that’s yours, but it’s so big, so complex, so changing and so embedded in not just what they’re doing, but in society is large. So there’s a lot of things going on and being the person for that is a completely different game.

Chris Beall (04:49):

It’s like being the CEO of a company who has adopted a market that happens to consist of in a way hyper verticalized. It’s one company after all, it can’t get much more vertical than that, but incredibly complex on the inside. And I just thought it would be really fascinating to have Rahul take us on that magical mystery tour. And first thing is Rahul, thanks so much for being on. And secondly, how the hell did you get into the business of a market of one,? What’s been your life trajectory that would lead you to such a strange and wonderful place?

Rahul (05:21):

Well Chris and Corey, thank you for having me. I think you summed it up well, right? Going from bourbons to scotch right. So that’s what things are. So the way I ended up in this is having that deep technical expertise and having an understanding of high-tech, which is totally steadily getting very workable verticalized, as you said on hyper verticalized. Right? So when we look at companies, or accounts that we talk about, there’s a certain specific secret sauce, as we all know how they go about approaching the market, right? So that’s, that’s been a passion all along. Focusing on complexity and some kind of secret sauce that these companies have and understanding how they go to market. So that’s what kind of led me to looking at this single customer who in itself, as you said, dominates the market.

Chris Beall (06:15):

Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, you must have started out as a regular person, just like the rest of us doing regular human things. It be us going out and knocking on doors and doing all the crap we do in order cold calling people or whatever. I don’t know if you had to do any of that. Did you ever have to do any of that stuff? Do you ever have to, were you ever at that end of the world or did you go right from the technology side, the deep technical expertise right into, okay, so here, you’ve got your multi bazillion dollar account, Rahul, it’s all yours go for it and try not to screw it up.

Rahul (06:46):

I think it’s technology helps, but I still do cold calling. It always starts there. So technology helps ease the conversations based on what the customer wants to accomplish, but it’s a mixed bag. That’s how I would put it, that there are multiple variables, technology if you are operating in a high-tech type of an environment, eases the conversations, but it’s not very different from what you do.

Chris Beall (07:10):

Did you start out as a technologist? Like I started out, I’m a physics math guy who fell into programming because I followed the Willie Sutton theory of business and life, which is where the money is. Right? So you Rob banks because that’s where the money is. I couldn’t find a lot of dollars over in physics and it appeared by my predilections and nature has likely to have children, although nowhere near as many of them as Mr. Frank has had that, not everybody can be that prolifically prodigious and prodigiously prolific, but I figured they would probably need food in their mouths and living in Denver.

Chris Beall (07:46):

So it gets a little cold there, somebody, a roof over their heads. And I went into software and finally ended up in business somewhere along the way. Cause I got sick of people not selling my stuff, frankly, I just get sick. I’d sit there and listen to that sales guy and he’d do everything wrong. And I finally just turned around and close the deal myself and go, wait, why am I paying him for what’s that all about? So how about you, you, where did your path start? And then what was that moment where you went, huh? Actually selling stuff or helping customers buy stuff or whatever it is is part of the portfolio or should be part of the portfolio.

Rahul (08:19):

So very much started as a technologist. But then when I saw all this, I was doing contact centers back in the day, selling to application owners and largely selling, but more consulting. And then I was just like you, I was like, I’m making money for so many people. Why can’t I make it for myself, right. So that’s how I ended up letting myself take control of these things and just strung with it myself. There has been no looking back since then.

Chris Beall (08:45):

Hmm. Interesting, interesting. Corey, what are your thoughts about this strange path that some of these technologists go on you would think we would all stay in our swim lanes and be good little boys and girls writing code and stuff like that. But I mean, you’ve seen this once or twice.

Corey Frank (09:02):

Yeah. Especially as you look at Rahul your background, you like to stay with the small companies I noticed, right. Cisco and Microsoft. Right? So just to step above the traditional market dominance companies that Chris and I work in and consult within that journey, that career journey of yours going from product to a little bit of sales. Do you miss out on having a smaller startup kind of experience or looking at the rules that you’ve done knowing your background? Is it really an essence having a small company within a bigger company and that’s the way that you’ve approached it and why you’ve been so successful?

Rahul (09:40):

I think it’s a combination. There is no doubt about missing the agility in smaller companies. I’ve been in smaller companies and things get turned around very quickly. But I think that is the beauty of working in the big machine where you, when you have large customers that you’re operating with the demands are very silo so you can tap into, on your end, you can tap into those smaller operations and bring the best out for your customer. So there are elements that I do not like on days. Like today’s one of them, but for the most part there’s a lot of resources. If you know how to navigate on both sides, the customer side, and your side.

Corey Frank (11:06):

So let’s talk about that concentration risk, right? I mean, if you’re, if we’re an investor, right, Chris, you and I and private equity and the venture side, and we look at an organization and you say, wait a minute, you’re spending all of your time, all of your resources, a lot of your capital at the risk of having one client of yours say, Hey, I want to go a different direction or the leverage they have over, Hey, listen, you got to do better on your prices or the leverage they have on Rahul and you’re not as handsome as you once was. I prefer a more handsome person to take over our, whatever the whim of the prospect. How do you deal with that when there is one client and there are certain multiple constituencies yourself, but that’s what I’m curious about. Never having a situation like that from a market dominance perspective of just one client that you serve.

Rahul (11:58):

So that’s an interesting question and that in the past, I’ve had experience with managing a territory where you have multiple customers and then you come to a single customer, it’s a territory of its own. Right? So yeah, I mean, I can’t change the reasoning if they need a more handsome guy, but then if there are areas, so I would always start with the customer and work backward, right? That’s the logic. So when I gave you the example of, Hey, there are many operational silos that I’m dealing with on both sides. I’m trying to bring the best from everywhere to my customer. It could be one customer. It could be multiple customers. The beauty of one customer is that I know things inside out and I’m operating with that sense of urgency where I’m delivering to various needs.

Rahul (12:45):

There could be an invoicing issue in the modeling and executive meeting in the afternoon, and then doing a deal in the evening. So it’s like juggling multiple balls, but you know, compare that to multiple customers. I had when I came to Microsoft, I had about 65 customers that you, just from the whole off Bay Area, but that time you got to pick and choose, right? Where am I going to focus on this common knowledge? So it’s the same, it’s the same, there are so many things going on at every given time.

Corey Frank (13:15):

Sure. And the level of intimacy you must have in that operation to know how the stock price is going and how everybody’s feeling about their options to that with the latest super of the day is on Tuesday in the cafeteria, in Santa Clara versus Oregon, I would imagine. So there is a level of familiarity that you have to be beyond just a traditional vendor. When you have one client,

Rahul (13:41):

You have to have that sixth sense. That’s the key, right? Common sense is not common. So the intimacy piece is critical. You are absolutely right. You got to know. You got to know it inside out and to your earlier point or question when you are approaching those areas in a single customer, you have to keep in mind all that impacts on the broader relationship or the intimacy piece.

Chris Beall (14:08):

Well, there’s one thing that strikes me. I’ve been around big companies, little companies, I worked for a couple of big ones and I’ve sold to some big ones since not exactly like you do Rahul and that it was a single product being sold into a big company, maybe in an OEM setting or something like that. You don’t have a single product. You’ve got a wide range of offerings. They’re evolving over time. Each one has its own set of resources back inside of Microsoft that can help you or could choose not to help you, right. I get the sense you have to sell to them in order to get their attention on something. And you have to be careful not to cry Wolf too often, or you will be ignored. So the false positive problem is they’re on both sides of the business.

Chris Beall (14:56):

Whereas like I remember when I was telling to SAP and it was an OEM deal, I didn’t have any real complexity other than what’s going on inside of SAP. And what was their go-to market that was around the internet at the time. So it was really very simple. I found it simplifying. I didn’t have to pick and choose. All I had to do was be real intimate. The way I did it, by the way, was I sat at their headquarters for 37 consecutive days in the lunchroom until I found somebody who would talk to me about something interesting and kind of move from there. But you have this thing that’s really complex. And what’s interesting to me is I’ve thought about like, I always think what if I had that job, right? So if somebody threw me into Rahul’s job, I know what I would do.

Chris Beall (15:37):

I’d quit and I’d quit immediately because I know I don’t have a chance. Cause here I am, I’ve got this big customer with all this internal complexity and personalities and all that. Then I’ve got my own company with all of its products and they’re trying to get me to sell some things more than other things that I might be able to understand that then I have all these people, they got to help me by be six or 700 of them floating around somewhere and I get to know them. And then I got a number in front of me. So I got to go make the numbers somehow and still serve the customer. So my thing would have been, I just go, okay. That was really great. I’m so glad that I know how to eat bugs because I’m going to sit in a cave and eat bugs for the rest of my life.

Chris Beall (16:16):

Cause that’s all, that’s all I can afford to do. But you did this. So I imagine I can almost imagine doing your job. I can’t imagine learning to do your job because I don’t imagine you were given a lot of slack in the learning part that was specific to the customer and specific to all of the stuff that’s going on behind the scenes, on your side, all those people you have to sell to and Marshall and get to do things.

Chris Beall (16:45):

And then this is something I don’t know. If all of our listeners know about big companies, but here’s a fact, a big company, life, big markets, never reorganized. They never do. They do not undergo cataclysmic changes. If you have a big market, it behaves as a big statistical entity. And even when something like COVID comes along, it might change a bunch like, Hey, I sell into the airlines. Look what happened last year. Right? But they don’t reorganize. Big companies always reorganize. And those reorganizations can be fraught with peril for the sales guy. How did you get started? Like you walk in the door, why didn’t you quit? Like a rational person would have done. I mean, I would have left. I’m a brave guy. Why didn’t you?

Rahul (17:35):

I spend quite a bit of time at Microsoft. And I think the culture lends itself really well to support and align with working with such a large customer. Now the customer story is very much in line with what you were saying, but I think the time I came to Microsoft and how things got realigned and readjusted from a budget shift standpoint. It Was very helpful. And it’s a bunch of collaboration simply put, yes, there is always competing priorities. There are a lot of people you have to align and all that stuff. But like I said to Cody earlier, always start with the customer and have that goal. And then people start aligning.

Rahul (18:13):

Now you will, absolutely. Right. When I came in and did the sole customer side, however, was very different from where it is today. It’s definitely in a better shape. It can be better. It’s getting better. But at that point I was one one-man-band man. And I had to be like, how do I turn this out? But I knew that behind me is the might of Microsoft. So I just had to use my ADHD skills, how to best align people towards a common objective that the customer had, which kind of took me about 18, 19 months to get there. It’s a function of time.

Chris Beall (18:49):

Okay. So, during those 18 or 19 months, this is like a startup going out and trying to find product-market fit. Now you’re the product, right? And here’s your market. And you got to find out where you fit in there to be helpful to them? So what was the very first thing that you did, was it to study them and understand them? Was it to just start interacting and following the breadcrumbs? What did you actually do on day one, day two, day three that allowed you not to have to turn around and go, there’s got to be easier work than this with a higher probability of success.

Rahul (19:23):

It was hard to work for starters that’s what I would say. So I did my homework prior to signing up for the rules. A lot of research, lot of external research, lot of internal research on where things were. But then I started interacting with this from day one. Like not necessarily looking for the breadcrumbs, but looking for what is the expectation of the relationship between the two big corporations, right. At least my piece of business. So once I started to get an understanding of what the outcomes were. Started alining the team accordingly and started working on some key negotiations that were going to get us where we needed to get.

Chris Beall (20:06):

That is one thing you had, which is you have the momentum of the relationship itself. I mean, after all your customer, it’s kind of obliged in a way to buy some stuff from Microsoft as are we all, I’m looking at my Surface Pro right here while I have Microsoft software all over this thing. Probably some of it, I know some of it, I don’t know. So there’s momentum at least. And there’s-

Rahul (20:25):

I wouldn’t call it momentum. The relationship is one of the oldest in the industry. But it wasn’t necessarily at a pretty point. It wasn’t where things were automatically propelled and things would start falling in place. That wasn’t the case. It was the other way around. Right. So you had to literally build stuff from the ground up.

Chris Beall (20:46):

Oh wow, I surely would have left. Corey what do you think about this? [crosstalk 00:20:51]

Rahul (20:55):

It’s really something from the ground up is a lot more fun than inheriting something and running with it. I’ve been there, but this has always been fun. I mean, repair is one aspect, but the joy that you get when things come too close, it’s very different. 

Corey Frank (21:10):

I was just saying that Chris would have left. I would have hidden and then they find out and then they escort me out the building that’s generally when I go through it’s an ugly scene. But talk about that another episode. So when you look at the basic tenants, the building blocks, we have these episodes Rahul. We often talk about kind of the key tenants. If you’re a sales rep and you’re approaching the beginnings of a new market, right? You need a script and you need tenacity and empathy. You need timing. You need a list. You need these things. If you were to train a big, dumb farm animal like me to come in and apprentice under you to what are the two tablets coming down the mountain that according to Rahul, that I need to have in order to at least have a semblance of hope of success to do what you’re doing.

Rahul (22:01):

I think the two things would be empathy and goals. Empathy from a customer standpoint where the relationship has been, what they are experiencing, where they want to go and goals are yours, which goes back to my point, that I mentioned to Chris, that before I took the role, I identified my goal based on my research, internal and external. And when I came to the customer, I leaned in with empathy to understand what they want to accomplish. And then it was just an alignment exercise.

Chris Beall (22:30):

So simple, an alignment exercise. I’m in now.

Corey Frank (22:38):

But the identity that you have Rahul do you see yourself as a I’m sure there’s elements that every day you probably have pieces of this, but are you a project manager? Are you a politician? Are you a sales guy? Are you a product marketer all day? Probably depends on the day, but again, how do you qualify what you do and where you need to spend a little bit more time that maybe people don’t assume that you need that more. For instance, the empathy side of it. It’s not just about pushing a bunch of Gantt charts or project management plans down to the appropriate folks as a traffic cop, correct?

Rahul (23:14):

No, it’s not, it’s not, it’s what I call active listening or aggressive listening. That’s where things open up when you’re sitting down with the customer. But I think of all the four or five things that you described, you have to, you really have to be a politician, right? You have to be able to connect the dots, right? And then you have to do it on both sides. You have to, like I said, the understanding of customer goals is key, but in a bigger relationship, what it is, is what drives everything, right? On both sides, you have to budget time that you’re your own one-on-one time. But you’re thinking about the customer, thinking about what you’re saying and how you’re landing, that’s where most of the time is spent.

Corey Frank (23:55):

Do you see yourself as this politician or someone who maybe the mothership Microsoft says, you know, Rahul, we need to reign you in. We think that you’re a little too sympathetic to the client as opposed to being empathetic to their needs. And remember who signs the front of your check in certain situations, cause I’d fall in love. I would just be sucked in by my clients so much and right. Probably forget whose buttering my bread and a lot of degrees, but hey, do you want this feature, this feature, this feature let’s, we can do that and then realize that I got to be a politician in my own house here too.

Rahul (24:31):

I mean, it’s an interesting question, but it’s a balancing act. Sometimes I do get there, right? Instead of empathy, it gets very sympathetic, right? And then you have to pull yourself out because of the relationship and the overall responsibility and to your point, who writes my paycheck, right? So that’s all it’s there. But I think as long as you’re doing right by the customer things work out, things fall in place, that’s been my experience.

Corey Frank (24:57):

So Chris, from a market dominance perspective, probably two and a half bourbons and one Macallan as you and Rahul were speaking and knowing is what you do about market dominance. What was so intriguing that you think a lot of our other listeners on more of a traditional market dominance who have multiple clients, multiple prospects, large Tams can learn from Rahul that surprised you.

Chris Beall (25:20):

I think it’s always one of those, What’s the same and what’s different? kind of things. So in a traditional market tech market, especially. The key is to first of all, to know your market, which is at the very least a list, much more of a list than a description, but it’s a list of folks that have no moving parts between them there. That is their relationship is essentially independent except for one thing. And that is each company on that list is if you sell to them, going to reduce the cost and the risk of selling to every other company on that list, that’s the kind of the definition of a classic market. And so what I’m curious about that, what stays the same and what’s different. That is what is the importance in having a market of one where you can make a list, right?

Chris Beall (26:09):

You can make a list of all the different parts of the business and who services them because they have their own internal service capabilities. They have a CIO and that person’s taking care of all sorts of things and so forth. So you can certainly map it out and make a list of people, but they actually have functional relationships to each other, which I think is fascinating because there are no functional relationships between the entities you’re trying to sell to in a traditional market. Other than this weird one, which is they each have some confidence in the other guy, if other guy go first. It’s like, all the lemmings are standing at the edge of the cliff. If one of them is just brave enough to jump into the ocean. So you kind of keep flicking them, right. And you get one of them to go.

Chris Beall (26:52):

But then that second lemon kind of goes, Hey, this ain’t bad. I’ll go to, and that’s your job is to get all the lemmings into the water. So you can, I don’t know what you do with lemmings in the water. You follow them in and have lemming stew or something like that. Rahul’s world is both the same and different. I’m guessing. So here’s what I think might be the same. I’m going to throw a hypothesis out there, your big client. How big are they by the way, how many people and how many, how many people do you care about in there that you have to interact with them, then how many dollars are involved in their business?

Rahul (27:22):

I mean, it’s close to about a quarter of a million people and close to about a hundred million dollars.

Chris Beall (27:31):

So you need to identify, I think this part’s the same. You’ve got to identify the people who count to you. And I bet you have a list. Right. You know, everybody at any given point that you’re sure counts.

Rahul (27:43):

I know most of them, but I have a big team, right. So I got to, like I said, to go to and prioritize and yes, for the most part.

Chris Beall (27:54):

Yeah, you got to, I mean, you can’t say, oh, I just come in every day and start randomly interacting with people at that doesn’t work. So you kind of know who’s who you, you know something else which is, I think interesting. I think there’s an analog. So when, when we make a sale into a market, like I was talking to a gentleman today, CEO, founder of a company that’s just made a big pivot and they need to get 20 customers by the end of the year in order to get funding. Right? So their market has actually got two elements to it. One is the market of customers and the other is the market of VCs. And in order to make the market of VCs comfortable enough to go to the next level with them, they need to get themselves some more customers. That’s what they think.

Chris Beall (28:39):

And they’ve just done this pivot. So they’ve got to go through this process of looking at the whole market and talking to maybe 500 people and getting it down to these 10 additional that are going to buy from them. So they know that functional relationship is pretty much if I sell to you, this one’s more likely to buy. And then the relationship with the VC is if I sell the 10, then this one’s more likely to write me a check, right? You, it seems to me, you face it additional dimension beyond internal reference ability. And that is, I bet that I’m going to take a guess. Sometimes you’ve got to decide, I want this to happen next. So that this person over here will be appropriately influenced by the fact that this happened over here into somewhat independently or connected to your customer’s business they’re trying to run and having something to do with knowledge that you have of the functional or trust connections or whatever, among the people inside. It’s almost like the people or the companies. That’s what it kind of feels like to me. It that kind of close.

Rahul (29:47):

That’s yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s what it is. People are the company. I mean, I’m not interacting with the entire 250,000 people. I got a few and there are to your point about the functional relationship there are many. And there are times where I need certain things to happen. And I just have to the point earlier about making those connections and to some extent influencing them or getting information that helps and then just ride.

Chris Beall (30:21):

So do you often know something that one person in that big company would like to know that they don’t know that you know, from somewhere else in there and you have to decide what to do with that information.

Rahul (30:30):

Once in a while. [crosstalk 00:30:37] The more time you put in the more frequent that gets.

Chris Beall (30:45):

It’s like getting lucky because you, the harder I work, the luckier I get, right.

Corey Frank (30:51):

By the way, for the audience, before we started recording, we asked Rahul. So there’s going to be some questions we’re going to ask. And based off of the nature of the sensitivity of the relationship, right? He can politely differ or politely obfuscate. So putting them on the spot and he’s very elegantly deflecting here and there, I would imagine. So to Chris’s point Rahul, if you had, take the antithesis that if you wanted to really boost production value delivery results, how do you go about doing that? If you said, listen, we need a 40-yard pass, right? This is, this is Corey. The small mid-sized guy speaking, right? The naivete of the larger organization, particularly two large organizations, but I’m sure there are certain times where you got to think where’s the 40-yard pass downfield here. That if all of the moons were in alignment, if you could really get everything in place could really make more than a couple of basis points. Difference. Talk a little about some of those processes maybe that you would go through or those project plans, ideas, collaborations that maybe you’ve done in the past.

Rahul (32:00):

I call it rules of engagement. You have to follow all of them. There is no exception. Once you’re following the rules of engagement and the relationships are in place. Not a lot of them are very specific to the question you asked, I think all the chips fall in place and that’s were we have seen success. I would say a few times now in the last, maybe three years, that’s how things have been. So I never, like I said, you know the political piece. So I never tried to mess things up there, but I stayed focused on the guardrails and align the team in that manner. So we’re not breaking any rules. And as long as you’re doing that, and then you’re connecting the dots from a relationship standpoint, big things happen.

Corey Frank (32:51):

Got it.

Rahul (32:52):

That’s generally not such a large relationship where you’re working with a pharma customer in the past, and it was like a pharmaceutical distribution. It was very similar. It was a distributed environment where they work in now is a very centralized environment where, but the rules of engagements, we’re still kind of defining how you go back.

Chris Beall (33:18):

Oh, that’s really interesting. I would make the distinction between physics and chemistry so we can all learn physics, right? Cause it’s simple. It’s only four forces in nature and you throw in a little geometry and you’re pretty much there, but in the world of chemistry, you have to know what goes with what, in what environments and under what conditions. And you have to respect that it’s going to do what it’s going to do.

Chris Beall (33:40):

And if you don’t know, you can have bad experiences. Right. I think the phrase blow up in your face, came out of the chem lab, not out of physics lab. I’m pretty sure. So that’s what it sounds like a big part of this kind of market work is knowing what those rules are, what goes with what, what you can rely on, I suppose, is that, I mean, there must be some things that would freak me out, but you’d just go, no, no, no, no, no. This is going to be kind of what happens next, because in a way it’s kind of like this bonds to that, and that happens next and you dumb physicist. You’ll just think they’re bouncing around, but actually they hook up and these things happen next is that kind of what it’s like?

Rahul (34:20):

It is. So what goes with what is the rules of engagement, right. And then you are connecting the dots, which is more of the relationship piece. And then you go in with conviction that I know this is what’s going to happen next. As long as we have done these things, right? Things would fall in place.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How do you improve your cold calling skills if your present company isn’t providing any sales training? Train yourself! Until you can get with the right company, borrow ideas from the best sales experts you can find (many have been guests on this podcast), take improv classes, join Toastmasters, and keep your mind open to absorb what works. Our Market Dominance Guy Corey Frank is talking in more depth about training yourself during this second part of his conversation with Susan Finch, president of Funnel Media and Funnel Radio. He advises listeners that salespeople should fall in love with their craft — not the product they’re selling. How do you do that? Care about the potential value of the meeting for your prospect and remember the “why” of what you’re doing. And what skills should you hone? Learn what moves prospects to make a decision, create a well-written script and adhere exactly to it, use the tone of voice that elicits the response you want, and most importantly, leave your own mood and ego behind when you make a cold call. Train yourself to remember that it’s not about you. When you place a call, it’s showtime!

Listen to the first half of this interview here:

Are You Laying Brick, or Making $12 an Hour?

—-more—-

Here’s the complete transcript for this episode:

Susan Finch (00:06):

Welcome to another episode with the Market Dominance Guys, a program about the innovators, idealists, and the entrepreneurs who thrive and die in the high-stakes world of building a startup company. We explore the cookbooks, guidebooks, and magic beans needed to grow your business.

Susan Finch (00:35):

How do you improve your cold calling skills if your present company isn’t providing any sales training? Train yourself. Until you can get with the right company, borrow ideas from the best sales experts you can find. Many have been guests on this podcast. Take improv classes, join Toastmasters, and keep your mind open to absorb what works.

Susan Finch (00:55):

Our Market Dominance Guy, Corey Frank, is talking in more depth about training yourself during the second part of his conversation with me, Susan Finch, from Funnel Radio. He advises listeners that salespeople should fall in love with their craft, not the product they’re selling. How do you do that? Care about the potential value of the meeting for your prospect and remember the why of what you’re doing. And what skills should you hone? Learn what moves prospects to make a decision. Create a well-written script and adhere exactly to it. Use the tone of voice that elicits the response you want. And most importantly, leave your own mood and ego behind when you make a cold call. Train yourself to remember that it’s not about you when you place that call. It’s showtime. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys. Not getting trained? Train yourself.

Susan Finch (02:00):

And in my own business, in the podcasting, I’ve watched the weasels and the people that hide, “Oh, it costs this much.” Why? Why is it nine times as much as I charge? “Oh, because we do this.” Is that nobody cares about that. Why is that so expensive? When, what’s the benefit for the people you’re promoting? If I don’t make you guys look good, and help you grow, and give you confidence, you can speak better everywhere you go, I am failing.

Corey Frank (02:26):

Sure. Well, you have though, sales folks. It doesn’t matter if they’re experienced or new, but certainly, it’s more common in newer folks. It’s common in more mediocre folks who just go from job to job, to job, and you see their LinkedIn kind of stack up, is that they have a tough time introducing that tension that we were talking about because again, the need to be liked, the need to be accepted. And I think that leads them down a path, if they value supplication too much in the denominator that it’s going to cause them to over-promise maybe a product delivery, a product feature, add in things that they know they can’t deliver on. It’s almost as if I would … I wouldn’t question anybody’s necessarily ethics, but it’s the root of, publicly people see it as dishonorable. Internally, I think that starts and it manifests into that dishonor because of a need for approval more than anything else. Would you agree with that? Or is it …

Susan Finch (03:23):

I would agree with that, but I’m wondering, not everybody is this familiar with Orin as they should be, or you and Chris. Can you give us an example of building that tension with those four elements in there?

Corey Frank (03:37):

Well, it’s an easy way. Now, this has to be delivered with the deft sense of humor and self-deprecation. But let’s say we have a meeting scheduled Susan, and it’s you, and it’s your VP of sales, and it’s your CEO, and you’re my product champion. But, two or three other people, executives are supposed to show up for the demo. And you show up, of course, you’re my champion, but the others do not. Or the CEO doesn’t. Whoever is that stakeholder that I really need, that I was implying was going to be at this meeting, doesn’t show up. It’s 11 o’clock. It’s 11:01, it’s 11:02, it’s 11:03. And Orin is famous for, let’s say they show up about 11:04, then make an entrance. Now, incredibly disrespectful for the other folks who are on the line. I know they’re busy. They’re executives as are, but no busier than other folks.

Corey Frank (04:25):

Orin’s way to introduce tension, as one of many example is, Susan comes on and, “Oh, Susan, you must be here for the 11:04 meeting.” Right? Now, that little bit of tension. Now I can’t say, “Susan, what, are you here for the 11:04?” I have to flirt with that. And I usually have to follow up with a little bit of self-deprecation to say that, “I don’t take myself seriously,” but sometimes that’s enough to say, okay. And then usually nine times out of 10, they’ll say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was tied up,” and that’s all you want. Just to say …

Corey Frank (04:58):

And people who start off meetings with say, “Susan, Chris, Henry, so glad you guys could carve out this time. I really appreciate, I know how busy you guys are. I really think that this is going to be something you’re going to be excited about. I really appreciate you,” and it’s like, whoa, your status is diminishing, diminishing, diminishing. And that’s going to be a little bit tougher if I start to introduce tension after I’m the nice guy, over the top, trying to build rapport, asking about your favorite sports team and your weekend. And then at the end of the call, I try to introduce some tension by, “The price goes up on Monday,” close, or, “We’re really busy.” And, trying to squeeze you into a decision. That’s the wrong place to use tension because it’s so transparent, right? And so the right place to use tension is generally out of the gate when you’re starting that initial banter back and forth.

Corey Frank (05:59):

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

Susan Finch (06:48):

But, I do appreciate that. The other thing that you did with that, the 11:04 meeting. You’ve said, “I was on time. I’m just the same level you are. You are no high and mighty, extra busy person. Because I’m equal with you, I can poke you a little bit. We can play a little bit. Because I don’t have to be afraid of you.”

Corey Frank (07:10):

That’s right.

Susan Finch (07:11):

“Because I’m no less than you.” And that’s what Cheryl Turner does.

Corey Frank (07:15):

She’s amazing. Yeah. I mean, I think Chris gives her the crown of the best cool caller in the world. And I would really put the onus on anybody to try to take that title away from her. Because, but it is just that, right, Susan? It is that, her status. In a pitch anything world, right? I have true status alignment. And that is something that is also worked on here. We’re better at it today than we were yesterday. And we’ll be better at it tomorrow than we are today at coaching on it because you have a lot of stuff that goes on in the life of a younger grad, certainly, besides what’s on the mindset of a CEO for hitting P&L, and numbers, and finances, and raising money, et cetera.

Corey Frank (07:57):

And so, tone changes daily based off of what happened in their life. Did they lose that Call of Duty? Did their dog crap on their carpet? Did they get their first student loan payment? Are they anxious about their roommates? Whatever it is, did their Bitcoin kind of plummet? And so, they may read the same screenplay, but they may not perform it at an Academy Award level every single day. And I think that’s one thing that Cheryl does is, she’s the modern-day equivalent of the Iceman. Remember from Top Gun, and Val Kilmer became, his name was the Iceman because he waited for the other person to make a mistake. He flew ice-cold. Cheryl certainly has a great personality, outsized personality, but she does not make mistakes in the pieces that normally costs other people conversions, right? It’s consistent. It’s amazing.

Susan Finch (08:52):

I truly believe salespeople, if you guys have some extra time, at the very least read a book on improv.

Corey Frank (09:00):

That’s a great one.

Susan Finch (09:01):

Join Toastmasters, because you will learn many things, including how to listen and shut up. And if you can read the book on improv, see if there’s a way, those of you in LA, even up here in Portland, we can take improv classes and it’s mainly to get us to look for those openings.

Susan Finch (09:33):

Connect and Sell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. Give your fingers a rest. With Connect and Sell’s patented technology, you’ll load your best sales folks up with eight to 10 times more live qualified conversations every single day. And when we say qualified, we’re talking about really qualified, like knowing how many tears were shed while watching Titanic kind of qualified.

Susan Finch (10:00):

And we’re back. Those are additional training skills. If you’re not going to get trained properly by whomever you’re working for, get trained for the next better position you’re going to get, working for somebody that will appreciate what you’re bringing, because sometimes that’s all we’re doing is biding time, until we can get to the right company.

Corey Frank (10:18):

Yeah. There’s a lot of folks that are in this coma of complacency and they’re just kind of live in this world, like a ship without a rudder, drifting from port to port. Hoping that trade winds will have them go into a port of prosperity or something, biding time. And so when we see that, because it happens, right? People get into a rut, and I think the French word for rut is routine. So, when people get into that comfort flow, we try to do is remind them again of their why. And, one of the bits we do here pretty often with newer folks is that imagine you’re in the cast of Cats or Hamilton, you’re on Broadway. In this, let’s take Cats. It’s been on Broadway for like what, 28 years or something like that. Right?

Corey Frank (11:03):

And there’s a little old lady. She’s in Mission, Kansas. Outside Mission, Kansas. And she’s a widow and she’s always wanted to see Cats on Broadway. She lives in mission Kansas, but she saves her egg money. People buy eggs on the side of the road, and vegetables, and a little firewood here and there. And she saves up all her pennies, and nickels, and dimes. And she gets enough to get a bus ticket, to take her from Mission, Kansas to New York City. And the only ticket she can afford is a Tuesday afternoon matinee, not a Friday night performance when all the stars are in the house. And she can’t afford a seat down, she’s got way up in the top of the mezzanine, right? I mean, it takes her a while to get up the stairs, but she’s up there. And here it is Tuesday at two o’clock. She’s clutching her purse and her ticket. And she’s just giddy.

Corey Frank (11:45):

She has been waiting for this for 28 years. Tuesday performance. Now those performers at Cats, they’re backstage, they’re probably out in the alley kind of smoking it. They’ve done this a thousand times. The bell rings like, “Okay, we got to go, okay? Let’s get into character.” If you’re a professional, when that bell rings and that curtain goes up, it is as if it’s opening night. Is as if it is an Oscar-worthy performance recorded by HBO, because you always have to think that there’s a little old lady up in the rafters who saved everything. If we can kind of get in that mindset, when we feel like we’re in a routine, to shake us and say, “Wait, it’s not about me.” That, as you had said at the outset, Susan, right? It’s there’s an honor. There’s a selflessness.

Corey Frank (12:31):

I just got back from a European trip with my son. And one of the places we went to, was going to Notre Dame Cathedral, and we saw, you could see it was burned. But, when you see that, that place started architecturally, right, 350 years in the making. That the architect’s sons, sons, sons, son would barely live to see it completed, you start to see that Europe is full of these. The Colosseum in Rome, the Vatican, these mammoth projects that it’s not necessarily about me. I got to be, build a cathedral. Can I make sure everything’s in the right place? If it’s the selfie generation, it’s only about me, and me, and my comp plan. Then chances are, is we’re not going to see too many cathedrals built in our lifetime.

Corey Frank (13:19):

So that’s why I think when you look at the shows that you do, and that Funnel Media does, right? If there’s one connective tissue that lives through all of them, it is professionals by professionals, true master craftsmen of their performing art, whether it be sales or whether it be the med-tech or any of the other shows that Funnel Media Group produces. And I don’t think that if you’re a new lead graduated, or even if you’re five, six, seven, 10 years in, you can get enough of that in your life.

Susan Finch (13:50):

That’s the community. Since we are all virtual, choose what you put in your head, choose what to surround yourself with. Do we want to surround ourselves with the negative, the bashing of this and then that, or would you rather surround ourselves with people that have done it way better than us for a very long time, and that everybody respects? Wouldn’t you want to bring that into your heart, into your head, into your ears, whatever it is, because something’s going to stick?

Corey Frank (14:21):

A mentor of mine called it, “I paid your stupid tax for you. All my mistakes, all the residue from my stupid decisions. I paid your stupid tax, so you don’t have to pay it again. So just open up your eyes and your ears once in a while, humble yourself, and know that somebody else paid the dollars that makes your life and your job a little bit easier today.”

Susan Finch (14:43):

Right? You talk about the common thread between all the shows that Funnel produces. It’s deeper than … Yeah, it’s professionals and you guys all have a ton of experience, and I’ve learned so much from all of you. My husband, he says, “You’re so myopic. All you do is listen to your guys,” and I don’t have any more time. So at least I have the good ones with me. But the deeper thing that all of you have in common, no matter your creed, your faith, your nationality, it doesn’t even matter. You all have a servant’s heart. Every one of you. There isn’t one host in this group out of the 15 shows we produce currently that does not have a servant’s heart and is not humble.

Corey Frank (15:27):

Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Finch (15:28):

It’s huge.

Corey Frank (15:29):

Yeah. Absolutely. So, a testament, I think, to how you sold art. You attract that. One of the quotes that Orin says quite often is, “By the work, you shall know the workman.”

Susan Finch (15:41):

Yes.

Corey Frank (15:41):

And by the Funnel Media Group, you know everything there is to know about your designers, and your audio techs, and your producers, and your hosts, and everything else. And, I think that’s a testament, but that’s really how Chris and I got together on Market Dominance Guys is I would call him. I’ve known Chris for 15 years, 20 years, almost 20 years. And I would call him periodically, always hat in hand, always a finger away from hitting record because I had a problem. And Chris would pick up in an airport, he’d pick up on his vacation, he’d pick up on a boat. He would always pick up. And that’s what a dear humble person he is, to always give back.

Corey Frank (16:20):

I never got an invoice unless I became a client of his, then I got big invoices. But I never got an invoice for that. And I think that sets the tone of why a company like Connect and Sell, right? The fish stinks from the head down, and the opposite is also true. We got people like Cheryl and we’ve had a lot of his top dogs on this show, haven’t we?

Susan Finch (16:36):

Yep.

Corey Frank (16:37):

Mark, and, it’s a testament, I think, to not only what Chris does, but what Funnel Media does and the type of talent that they attract.

Susan Finch (16:43):

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Corey Frank (16:45):

Of course. Of course.

Susan Finch (16:46):

I mean, it’s a joy. So, as a company that has helped to build and be part of this Branch 49 and this whole program at GCU, what would you put out there as a challenge to other companies, especially those that want quality salespeople in their future? What’s their part then to ensure that without just vetting people to hire them, how do we get them down that path in the first place so that they are somebody we want to hire?

Corey Frank (17:14):

I think if we go back to your example of when you worked in the art gallery, you learn to appreciate art because you knew what the story was. And you knew that the artist laid bare his soul emotionally and manifested in the form of all these colors in this piece of canvas? You understood that creative process enough to convey that sense of emotion to the buyer and that connection was made, and then that sale was made. But you understood bio-physiology probably subconsciously before you knew it and studied why people do what they do. And I think for most employers or organizations today, is if you have a complacent sales organization or sales organizations that stop growing, or it’s only growing because of market factors, not because of development factors, is how can you get your team to fall in love with their craft? Not necessarily what their product. That’s going to come, but they fall in love with their craft? The nuances of voice, and tone, and pacing. The creative aspects of writing a screenplay with the right sequencing moves people.

Corey Frank (18:24):

Marvel is Marvel today because of Kevin Feige and because of the writers, but the consistent story journey, a reluctant hero who has a trait that he sees, or she sees as an asset, but it’s really a liability. Pride cometh before the fall. Takes out their legs. They’re rock bottom. A guide comes, appears. Helps them realize that no, what they saw as their liability is really their asset. And then they save the world, right? But that’s, as you know, from being too, that’s the cosmic addict cycle, that Joseph Campbell stuff that, we are-

Susan Finch (19:03):

A hero’s journey.

Corey Frank (19:04):

We’re tuned into that frequency, right? That’s kind of the vicar inside of us, for thousands of Aboriginal cultures have the same narrative arc. And I think once you understand that as a sales rep and realize, “Wow, I don’t have to wing it. I can actually have a system that doesn’t sound like a system.” And there are too many folks who put you into a system, but they don’t tell you the why the system, the anatomy of what happens when I say this with this tone, versus this with this tone. And you see the reaction in your prospects, and then it gets addicting.

Corey Frank (19:38):

But it all comes down to breaking down the story craft, as you had mentioned, the bio-physiology of why people buy, not buy. How they’re moved emotionally. The story of the little old lady. Knowing that, okay, if they can do that versus pitching a product, any organization will reap the benefits. And everyone’s going to have a hell of a lot more fun, right? They’re going to be smiling and building more cathedrals and saving men’s souls, more than just laying brick.

Susan Finch (20:03):

I think that’s a great way to end this episode.

Corey Frank (20:06):

Beautiful. Well, listen, I appreciate what you do, Susan. You’re so awesome. And as we said, at the beginning of this here, we’ve got to put it into our contract for Market Dominance Guys that we get at least one dedicated episode where we can do all the talking. And certainly, I can do my share of talking and as opposed to just Chris and all of our wonderful guests, so.

Susan Finch (20:25):

Be sure to subscribe, everybody. Find Market Dominance Guys on all your favorite podcast venues. You will find them also where you start, you’ll see some of the extracts and our highlights over on YouTube, on the Connect and Sell channel, and you can find them on the Funnel Media Group. So, we are everywhere. Just look for Market Dominance Guys. Get in there, subscribe, start from the beginning if you want to go on this journey, or pick and choose based on the title.

Susan Finch (20:47):

Thanks so much, Corey, it was a pleasure, and welcome home. You’ve been missed.

Susan Finch (20:56):

Today’s show is also brought to you by uncommonpro.com. Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer or investor is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it’s really time to go big, you need an uncommon methodology to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through a modern and innovative sales and scripting toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious leaders in their quest to reach market dominance. It’s time to get uncommon with uncommonpro.com.

Susan Finch (21:26):

Never miss an episode. Go to any of your favorite podcast venues and search for Market Dominance Guys, or go to marketdominanceguys.com and subscribe.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What good is a salesperson with five years’ experience if they’ve never been trained and have a hopscotch career of many short stops at companies that never invested in training their sales teams? Corey tells the old story, “A guy walks past a construction site and sees five people laying brick. And he goes to the first guy and says, “Hey, what are you doing?” He’s like, “Building a wall.” Goes to the second guy, “What are you doing?” And he’s like, “Making 12 bucks an hour.” Listen to the rest as Corey Frank and Susan Finch, president of Funnel Media Group and Funnel Radio, go on without Chris Beall this week and talk about the concept behind Branch49, a sales acceleration software and service that uses AI to score leads based on their preferred contact channels, while also dedicating a sales team to perform top-of-funnel and full-stack revenue generation. They discuss the obligation that companies have to ensure sales professionals are trained correctly and with the good of the prospect and customer at the forefront, how to undo bad sales habits, and how to help sales professionals who were never trained prepare to work for honorable companies who value sales skills. This is part one of a two-part interview.

—-more—-

Part two of this interview is here:

Not Getting Trained? Train Yourself!

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Susan Finch (01:17):

This week on Market Dominance Guys, I’m joined by Corey Frank. Chris is off busy doing something and I’m sure we will catch up with him later, but Corey and I wanted to dive into the topic of our responsibility to help bring up honorable, terrific, trained, competent, confident, and enjoyable salespeople. How do we do that? You’re going to have to listen to this episode for some great suggestions, what you needed to be aware of and how you can start to have a better sales team, not only for now, but for the future. Join us for this episode, Keeping the Weasels out of the Cathedral.

Corey Frank (02:01):

Then the focus of Youngblood Works and Uncommon Pro is we find companies and then we invest or we’ll lead the round or we’ll do a pile on round on a funding place, or we’ll do like sales advisory consulting and what’s your product-market fit and stuff. But then it led to the creation of the accelerator. And the accelerator is where we have organizations all across the world, like a hundred plus different mainly in cybersecurity and med-tech, where we do top of the funnel and we’ll help them create their top of funnel activities, prove product-market fit. And then we’ll also do full-stack. So if they want us to sell their product in their name, because they don’t have a sales team, we’ll do that. And that’s branch 49.

Corey Frank (02:43):

And so branch99.com is really like if we were going out, like with maybe something like this and say, Hey, it’s really youngblood Works, but it’s Branch 49 is kind of the go-to-market, the B2B kind of element with regards to what we do. It’s like a VSA. Remember we had Val on about six months ago. So we do similar, but we focus predominantly on cyber. And then we do all the messaging. So through Oren Klaff, who we’ve had on before too, my buddy Oren, that’s what we do on Uncommon Pro is we craft kind of the face melter messaging screenplays for folks. We have a technical sales division where we take cybersecurity content, educational content, and that’s called Tresorit. And so Youngblood Works is the parent. And then we invest and fund all these other different companies. Branch 49 is the one that’s forced your main to what we talk about at market dominance, which is trust-based conversations at scale when we do that for companies.

Susan Finch (03:41):

I want to talk, I mean, you gave me the overview of Branch 49, of Youngbloods and things, but I want to talk about the impact that you guys are having starting people from a good starting point with good training, rather than having to correct bad habits that people learned from first jobs where people have no clue how to train somebody, and the strength and the advantage that all those people are going to have, having gone through your programs and how many of them are already on their way to successful careers as they graduate debt-free. There’s a point to me, almost a social responsibility and as successful business people, if we want to keep everybody being successful and growing and dealing with successful people, we have to put our time in and our effort in to getting people to that level before they even start down some career path, starting their own businesses, whatever it is.

Susan Finch (04:37):

And so you guys have taken that responsibility and taken that lead. Yeah, you’re making money from it and you guys are benefiting and other people are too. That’s not the point. It’s that long-term investment in these humans that are choosing to be a part of this program. I watched too many people that I run across in B2B, B2C that have had horrible training, no training, partial training, no support. And they have no confidence, they’re shwarmy, they’re nobody you want you to deal with, let alone share lunch with, dinner, or a long-term relationship, or refer anybody to.

Corey Frank (05:11):

Where do they learn? Is it like they’re just a victim of the social more, the Kardashians and the Instagram and the selfie generation? Where do they learn that bad or not optimal sales behavior? Because they don’t have enough experience to buy cars or houses or buy software yet. So they learn it from somewhere.

Susan Finch (05:33):

Think about the movie Tin Men.

Corey Frank (05:35):

Yeah. Right.

Susan Finch (05:36):

Okay? That’s way before the Kardashians.

Corey Frank (05:38):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Susan Finch (05:40):

Weasels have been there all along. Snake oil salesmen, it has always been that time. It’s a shortcut, it’s lazy. It’s survivor mode that people get in to. And those are cycles that get repeated in households and by example. That’s where they see it first, no matter what the home life is like, whether it’s fractured, whether it’s all put together, but they watch these examples happening and they continue it. And then yes, it is further emphasized, further supported through these fantasy things that we see on television, on Instagram, on everywhere as if it’s reality and the lines are kind of blurred. I hear it from people in my daughter’s groups. You would almost think that they thought the reboot of Dynasty was really how it is. People are really like this. No, they are not. I’m telling you, you don’t understand this is camp. I said it is not camp. Yeah, it’s camp. It’s campy.

Corey Frank (06:39):

Reality TV. Right?

Susan Finch (06:41):

But they don’t get what campy is. They actually think it’s attainable and correct.

Corey Frank (06:47):

And lack of moral compass. I don’t know. Maybe we wouldn’t have to get rid of that.

Susan Finch (06:51):

Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, you and I have talked about that before that all these people, I’m spiritual. I just want to have to go to church. I don’t have to do this. They have no communities that they are answering to hold them accountable because that’d be inconvenient and embarrassing and make them change. And mainly that’s why people don’t do that. And so they use it as their excuse. I hate religion. I hate structured this. I hate structured that. Well, the more we’ve all fallen away from all that, whatever your faith is, but something that is not you, not the almighty dollar to guide us and for people to call us out as we don’t live with all of our extended families like we used to. I’m away from all my cousins. My kids are away from their cousins. They’re away from their nieces and nephews and their uncles that would call them on their crud when I’m exhausted.

Susan Finch (07:38):

And remember, I mean, when you grew up, when I grew up, there were people on us. We had so many sets of parents. So many people that could give their opinion could smack us on the back of the head like, what are you doing?

Corey Frank (07:50):

Well, maybe that’s interesting than that with the whole Chris likes to really focus on the new virtual landscape of business, right? We’re not going back to the office.

Susan Finch (08:01):

No, we’re not.

Corey Frank (08:02):

One of the downside pieces of residue is just that in a familial if you’re in a small town and you got cousins and uncles, et cetera, you steal a candy bar from a drug store, somebody’s going to tell your uncle, he’s going to tell your dad. If I’m working from home for you, I’m a sales rep working for my manager. Yeah, we have Zoom calls a couple of times a day, account reviews here and there. But my daily behavior is a spreadsheet. It’s not what I’m doing. Maybe how I’m dressing, what time I’m getting up. What I can’t observe. Our folks are 20 feet here. Here’s [crosstalk 00:08:35] right? And I can see their body language, I can see when they’re hunched over. I can see when they’re… All those little nonverbal cues that say, I think the lead list sucks. Or I think it’s time for jumping jacks or I think it’s time for bringing in pizza. So maybe that’s one of the downsides of having this kind of truly virtual culture is that level of accountability you’re talking about.

Susan Finch (08:57):

So with the extra time that we’re all saving from not going into the office from not having nonsense meetings all day long, just to hear somebody else yammer on what percentage of time should we invest? If we can spend three hours watching television that night, take 10% of that time, 18 minutes devoted to community. Whenever your downtime is 10%, I dare you to invest in an accountability group. Whether it’s your neighbors, your friends, your peers. I have three people that all own their own businesses within walking distance from my house. We are accountable to each other. We check in, we take walks. We brainstorm in person as we’re walking the dogs, as we’re blowing off steam, whatever it is. But we do that three times a week.

Corey Frank (09:45):

Sure, sure.

Susan Finch (09:46):

So right there, and they’ll remember and say, well, what happened to that thing you were doing? Well, how come that’s not working? Oh my gosh, that’s what she said? You might want to consider.

Corey Frank (09:57):

That’s powerful. Wow. That’s great. You’re lucky to have that. You can’t hide, right?

Susan Finch (10:02):

I don’t want to.

Corey Frank (10:03):

You don’t want to.

Susan Finch (10:04):

But there’s the difference too, because I can’t keep improving or succeeding or whatever it is if I am not willing to change and to look at the ugly parts.

Corey Frank (10:18):

That’s so good. So out of principles, right?

Susan Finch (10:59):

Tell me some of the successes. I mean, I know there have to be so many highlights from right there at Branch 49, with everything that you’re doing. Can you tell us a couple of what it used to be like, what happened and what it’s like today for a few people?

Corey Frank (11:13):

Yeah. To take a step back for a second, the concept came from Chris’s inspiration and our riffs over the years, that there needs to be a different training mechanism, boot camp, minor league system for bringing up the next generation of sales folks. And we had talked about that just a few minutes ago, is what are these cultural shackles that limit the folks from wanting to move into sales or doing it the “right way”? And so this concept of this being a finishing school for future CEOs.

Susan Finch (11:52):

Yes.

Corey Frank (11:53):

As we’ve heard many times on this show, with Chris and all of our guests is that if you’re a CEO and you’re not actively selling, there’s a challenge there. I think it was Henry Ford who said the definition of a sales manager is the best damn salesperson in the place. And today, as a CEO, you can’t just be product-oriented or finance-oriented. You need to be up, front and center, whether it’s selling stock in your company or it’s helping your folks sell products. And as we’ve talked many times, it’s not just cherry-picking, oh, give me the good leads. It’s having, as the CEO, do the cold calling so they see what the quality of the lead lists are, the quality of the tech stack, and everything in the float.

Corey Frank (12:35):

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

Corey Frank (13:36):

And you found that the killers, the ones who had experience, they really globbed onto this at a rate that was equivalent to what the new folks did because, and as you interviewed these folks after months and our performance went up, they realized that no one really taught them that before. When they started at a new organization, it was all about product training and sales training was just a small piece of it and they said, well, you guys figure it out. And-

Susan Finch (14:05):

Here’s a list.

Corey Frank (14:06):

Here’s a list. And so they had to really unlearn a lot of the basic cliche type of techniques. Well, I just like to wing it. I just like to have my personality shine through in the interview. Right? Susan, well, what’s the strongest part of your sales process before they come on? And I’d write it down. Rapport building, relationship building. And of course, they would say, “well, probably my ability to build rapport and relationships”. I showed it to him, and was like, how did I know that? It’s because most folks have this mindset to have supplicative behavior that is needy, that I want to be liked. I want to be included. I want to be part of the tribe.

Corey Frank (14:46):

And I think we had Oren on, what about six months ago I think it was, the Oren Klaff Pitch Anything. And he talks about, you need four key elements in every sales. Humor, you need intrigue, you need curiosity, but most importantly, you need tension. And it doesn’t mean you’re over the top and you’re aggressive or you’re a jerk. It just means your ability where I’m going to come off as equal status and not supplicative, or hat an hand. And if I come off as equal status or at least professional, knowing my world, you know your world, the success is going to increase. And so that’s been one of the things that a lot of folks tend to unlearn. So from a success story perspective, that’s really neat to see is that people crave a process, a regimen, a structure, more than anything else.

Susan Finch (15:28):

Well, and they’re seeing too that it works. In short order, they’re seeing that it works.

Corey Frank (15:34):

Yeah.

Susan Finch (15:34):

And like you said, you’re taking people that were tossed into the ring with no training. And most salespeople are not, I mean, even in retail, business to business retail. Doesn’t matter. They barely get anything. It is all about the product, the widget that you’re selling, the service that you’re selling, know it inside and out so you can answer any questions. That’s good. That’s really good because you don’t want to sound like an idiot. Because why are you going to sell something to somebody you don’t know anything about?

Corey Frank (16:00):

Right. We looked at birth order a lot too. Certainly, the firstborns are very interesting to train. So I’m sure you’ve had experience with it. First and onlies. I mean, they’re just-

Susan Finch (16:10):

The singletons.

Corey Frank (16:11):

Yeah. Yeah. If it’s not in the book if it’s not in the training book, then why isn’t it in a training book? And it’s tougher to call audibles in general, very justice-oriented. So if you have a comp policy, you have a crossover policy with leads. If you have somebody grant a couple of hours of PTO, you better have it equal across the board. Those are firstborns, especially first [crosstalk 00:16:34].

Susan Finch (16:33):

Interesting.

Corey Frank (16:34):

And then the last borns you’re going to have the rule-breakers, the comedians, the Reverend folks. And you need a nice amalgam of both firsts and lasts. And the second borns even, they’re more of the melancholy, the people Watchers. They get along to get along. The consensus builders between the two. And so obviously it just comes out in the wash that we know who’s a first and who’s a last and a middle.

Susan Finch (16:58):

It’s fascinating.

Corey Frank (16:59):

But once we do the OMG or the Myers-Briggs and we’ve used them all here at the university, we can get access to all these tools, people always want the little mental pinprick, blood tests, roar shack of where do I rank?

Susan Finch (17:14):

Where do I fit in? Like you were saying.

Corey Frank (17:16):

Yeah.

Susan Finch (17:17):

What’s my place here because I want to make sure I do my place right so I can be successful. And I think that’s part of it is they’re looking for that answer of, okay, what’s my starting point where the expectations of me, what do you know about me? And how can I blow that out of the water?

Corey Frank (17:37):

Yeah, because they’re all looking for their why. Even though they think they’re looking for a what, because they post on Instagram, this house or this boat, or this stack of money or this trip, they think they’re surfing for the what and you and I, of a certain age, of having families, and we see children and we’ve had a number of team members work with us over the years, you realize that, okay, there’s no or little nutritional value in shooting for a what without the why. And so one of the things that Chris has helped us a lot with is helping identify where the why, man searched for me and is on the book lists that these folks have. Any person could do a what if they understand a why.

Corey Frank (18:18):

We tell a story oldie but a goodie I’d give credit if I knew where this came from, but a guy walks past a construction site, and sees five people laying brick, Susan. And he goes to the first guide and says, “Hey, what are you doing?” He’s like, “Building a wall.” Goes to the second guy, “What are you doing?” And he’s like, “Making 12 bucks an hour.” Goes to the third guy and says, “What are you doing?” And he’s like, “Laying brick” and goes to the fourth guy and says, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m building a cathedral.” Then finally goes to the fifth and says, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m saving men’s souls.” Now they’re all doing the same thing. They’re all laying brick, making 12 bucks an hour, building a wall. But it’s the latter two who see building the cathedral and saving men’s souls as the ones that probably are paying a little bit more close attention to detail spelling in their notes, pick it up a piece of paper in the corner of the office, refilling the soda machine, if it needs it. Not taking the last bagel in the morning. Those are the folks that really kind of make the culture sing.

Corey Frank (19:24):

And then you find a lot of the folks who weren’t taught that way. They have five years’ experience, they say, but they really have like one year five times or six months 20 times. So you’d assume that the veterans would be the leaders, but it’s actually the newer folks, the grads, and the current students who this is brand new, who is so enamored with the shiny object of a why finally. After four years of school, and I finally figured out what I want to do versus probably people like you and me, right, who drifted, fell into sales because we’re liberal arts folks. And that’s just I guess what we do. We have a good personality and it’s either drive a cab 10 borrower or jump into sales.

Susan Finch (20:05):

One of my first jobs, my first two jobs, I didn’t get myself.

Corey Frank (20:09):

You didn’t get yourself?

Susan Finch (20:10):

No, my girlfriend got hired. And then she said, “I need you to come work with me because we need another person. You’re the only person I could work with.”

Corey Frank (20:18):

So you’re drafted.

Susan Finch (20:19):

So I was drafted by two different companies. The first one was a men’s clothing store in the mall to sell David James closures, and trying to sell men’s casual wear, chinos, suits, you name it. And we killed it. We both quit though because some people like too many inseams measured. Then we moved on and she got a job at a health club and in the call center, oh my gosh, your name was drawn. You just won a two-week free membership. Are you kidding me? This is so great. That was my first telemarketing job, grabbing the names from the fishbowl and calling them up, and getting them excited to come in. She would close them on the tour. So we double-teamed. So those were my first two jobs. And then I went into restaurants and stuff for a while.

Corey Frank (21:05):

So it wasn’t necessarily an intentional pathway or traverse up the mountain to say, Hey, this is what I want to accomplish. But isn’t that funny though, Susan, that we talk with, and most of the folks in our profession, because there’s no formal sale. Ohio University has great sales school and Texas and Baylor University, but Arizona State is getting one but Grand Canyon University where I am. But a lot of universities, don’t have a sales school yet. Right?

Susan Finch (21:29):

No.

Corey Frank (21:30):

Part of communication and marketing. So you have folks who kind of fall into it and there’s no LSAT or GMAT, or again, roar shack that you need to get into sales or not. It’s steam this mirror, you got a good personality. It’s like the old animal house. Hey, we need the dos, let’s hire this person. And I think that kind of weighs… One of the other things that Oren says is people want what they can’t have, people chase what moves away from them. And people only place value on that which is difficult to obtain.

Corey Frank (22:00):

I’m sure you have. I know Chris has, I certainly haven’t… early in my career, you were interviewing for a sales position and they’re hiring you 15 minutes in to the interview and first you’re exuberant and enthused, and this is fantastic. And then you say, wait a minute here.

Susan Finch (22:16):

Too easy.

Corey Frank (22:17):

Too easy. And I think that’s part of the downside of a lot of sales organizations. They don’t make their process, their neediness shows. And it shows if I’m a recent grad and I graduate and I have a marketing major business, major economics, et cetera. And I get offered three jobs. One is a life insurance company. The other one is enterprise Rent-A-Car or the third one, I don’t feel like it really worked for it like I needed to get into a top law school for instance. And I think that when I start day one, that’s probably festering a little bit how valuable is this place if they’ll hire anybody.

Susan Finch (22:51):

Right. I was telling you earlier that I went to Santa Fe. And I don’t know if you know, I owned an art gallery years ago in Laguna Beach. It was contemporary Southwestern. So we visited one of the artists that I used to represent. And I was his top gallery. I was for all of our artists because I can tell a story and I was selling their stories and I only had artists in that I would want to invite into my home. It was all good people.

Susan Finch (23:17):

Yep, good people. And so we decided to splurge and we were going to buy a piece of art from this gentleman, Tom Wheeler, before we came back and my husband Tom was looking at a piece and it wasn’t very big and it was kind of cool. And then there was one of those twice the size of itself in the suitcase. And I found myself selling that piece of art to my husband, who used to be my client in the gallery, and an easy mark. And I went right into that mode, telling him a story behind this piece that I’ve just seen for the first time. And see, this represents our family. And they’re four stones in here and the hair up there shows humor and that’s us. And they were both dying. They said, you just sold your husband a more expensive piece of art. And it made me laugh because once it’s in you the right way.

Corey Frank (24:10):

Sure. Were you taught how to sell? Was there a methodology or who taught you how to kind of sell that proper narrative, that emotional arc that people want to be on a journey versus just winging it?

Susan Finch (24:24):

Well, I can say I’ve sold boating curves, inflatable boats, windlasses, you name it. Those did not have stories. But when we ended up with this gallery years ago, with my ex, they told stories. And that’s what sucked us into wanting to buy that gallery because of the stories of every single piece of art, because they knew every artist. I realize people do not need art, but they need to justify the purchase to their friends because it’s extravagant and they want a story to tell, they want to know the artist because the artist is a celebrity and I’ve watched this happen. And I thought, well, the more stories I can amass and listen and pull out of these artists, I can share them. And those pieces will go home, which they did. So I still do that though. I still tell stories, but that’s where I really mastered it.

Corey Frank (25:17):

Well, look at Funnel Media Group, right? I mean, between Chris and all your other guests and all the other podcasts that you have, it’s just a collection of storytellers in different industries.

Susan Finch (25:27):

Yes, exactly.

Corey Frank (25:29):

In fact, I don’t think of any of the Funnel Media Group’s podcast, the dozens and hundreds I’ve listened, I don’t think he ever talks about product. There’s no product. It’s all about people’s stories and experiences and learnings and lessons [inaudible 00:25:43].

Susan Finch (25:43):

Right. And there isn’t one person… I’ve had a few people approach us. I’ve actually turned down a couple of shows because I did not find them honorable. And I can’t get behind and promote somebody that is not honorable or a message that isn’t honorable. And that I wouldn’t be proud to say, Hey, neighbor, you need them. if I’m having to protect my neighbors from my shows and the hosts and their products, there’s a problem.

Corey Frank (26:11):

Yeah. There’s certainly and even in hiring too, you see that, as you had said, from which artists you bring out or not, is that’s a decency quotient. What’s somebody’s decency quotient? And is it something that can be taught? Is it something that you experience over time? And then you get burned enough and your spider-sense tingles and says, can sales reps be taught that with prospects?

Susan Finch (26:35):

Yes. They can. And I think part of it is letting go of that desperation feel. Have to get the numbers, have to get the numbers, have to get the numbers. And once you learn that it’s going to be okay if that one doesn’t work out, because there were four more that are better, let it go. And it gets reinforced to us when we have unscrupulous people that have taught us or that we have worked for, they didn’t teach us anything, but they’re forcing us, scaring us, manipulating us, badgering us to do whatever it takes to get them their goal. And it crushes our souls. It does. It just chips away, little by little.

Corey Frank (27:17):

It does.

Susan Finch (27:18):

And it takes a while for people to recover from that.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

  • Products

      Products

      Express Connect

      Instantly connects your team to the first live voice encountered or the decision-makers

      Precision Connect

      Connects your team directly to the right decision-makers on your target list.

      Flight School

      An immersive, hands-on training program that equips your team with the skills and confidence to master first conversations.

      CASSi

      CASSi Better Phone Numbers

      Uses AI and our knowledge of phone numbers to enrich your contact data with the best, most accurate phone numbers

      CASSi Fast Numbers

      Quickly identifies and prioritizes the most promising phone numbers.

      CASSi AI Coach

      Automated scoring of conversations with coaching insights and examples surfaced.

      CASSi | Transcription & Notes

      Leveraging the power of AI to summarize conversation notes and suggest follow up text.

      Focus Features

      Live Coaching

      Listen live to rep and coach in realtime.

      Targeting & Analytics

      Supports visibility into your account based motion.

      Pipeline Attribution

      Instant access to measure demonstrable ROI from you ConnectAndSell investment.

      Conversation Acceleration

      Only reliable way to ensure your team is having enough conversations in order to meet and exceed their number.

  • Test Drive Experience
  • Customer Success
  • Pipeline Heroes
  • Pricing
  • Login
Request Demo