On Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall continues his two-part conversation with his fiancée, Helen Fanucci, Microsoft’s Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader. Today, they’re talking about how work-from-home experiences have resulted in a shift in employees’ attitudes about where and when they are willing to work. This is Helen’s area of expertise: She’s been managing employees remotely for 15 years, helping them grapple with their work-from-home issues. Additionally, she understands the challenges of attracting and retaining the best people, especially in today’s job market. Microsoft’s customers demand great service and support, and, Helen says, “That’s why we have to win the war to get talent. We have to keep serving our customers with amazing talent, or they’ll find somebody else who will.” And once you’ve hired talented people, how do you keep them? “Through servant leadership,” Helen explains. Describing her role as a manager at Microsoft, she says, “I am expected to model and coach, be inclusive, take accountability. I remove the blocks and barriers so that my team can achieve.”

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Chris plays devil’s advocate with his question, “If you’re all touchy-feely with your employees, where does their drive to achieve come from?” Helen is ready with the answer: “When we hire the best people,” she explains, “they come with an inborn drive to achieve. Part of a manager’s job is to make sure those people feel respected. [At Microsoft], we really bend over backward to be accommodating and help employees be successful. But make no mistake about it,” she assures Chris, “We’re about being competitive and winning in the marketplace, and our results show that.” Learn all about hiring and retaining the best people on this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “A Talent for Managing Talent.”

 

About Our Guest

Helen Fanucci has been a valued employee at Microsoft for 13 years and is currently their Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader, heading up an incredible global team of seasoned sales professionals who are working with some of Microsoft’s most strategic accounts.

 

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Chris Beall (02:35):

Well, one of the things I hear you saying is that we need companies to kind of give us places to go. But there aren’t places anymore that give us some boundary within which we can organize and work together and be a team. This does actually remind me of the first 88 episodes or whatever, of Market Dominance Guys, which are about, Hey, your company’s job is to dominate markets, which provides a stable foundation for doing more, for servicing those customers.

Chris Beall (03:07):

And maybe that’s one of the things that we do, as companies. Your company has done an extraordinary job, although I’m sure that there is nobody there who likes to talk about dominating markets, because when you’re big and you don’t need to talk about it, why talk about it? Right? But the fact of the matter is, there are markets where Microsoft does extraordinarily well. And in a way, that’s what makes the home, that’s the house in which employees can come. But then we better make sure that they have a good time while they’re there, but it’s not enough to have a good time. It’s a bigger deal.

Chris Beall (03:41):

This is the hardest part for me. Sales management, traditionally, I’ll be crude, used to consist of throwing somebody into a territory and seeing if they worked out. So, that was kind of it. And if they didn’t work out, then you put somebody else in the territory. I mean, I know there’s a lot more to sales management, but traditionally, I think that a lot of what folks call, sales management, has really been, checking to see if people are working out. And then, yes, there’re improvement programs and all sorts of stuff and there’s training and this and that, all sorts of wonderful things. But that’s been kind of the theory, over time.

Chris Beall (04:14):

I’ve observed how you manage, and you actually get ultra high performance from individuals and from the team, as a result. And yet doing it with these principles, these cultural principles, things that people would say, “Oh, that’s a bunch of touchy, feely. Aren’t your employees just going to hang out? Aren’t they just going to go for long, barefoot runs down to the beach? Why is it they bothered to work at all and do anything useful, if you’re just going to make it so delightful and easy for them, and you’re just trying to attract them?”

Chris Beall (04:46):

So, how do you achieve that balance? Because that seems to be the key to this whole thing. And I bet a lot of our listeners are going, “Yeah. Okay, great. Attract, attract, attract. Retain, retain, retain. But what about achieve, achieve, achieve?” How do we get all that to go together?

Helen Fanucci (05:02):

Have high expectations of achievement, but do it in a kind way, and do it in a way that helps the employees learn and grow. So first and foremost, I check in with my team and I have one-on-ones with them or team meetings. How are folks doing? But I have very high expectations and there are specific goals and objectives, including revenue performance. I do monthly forecast calls, I deliver revenue, I have quarterly revenue goals. I’m no different than any other sales leader, sales manager.

Helen Fanucci (05:36):

However, at the same time, I am expected, through our cultural expectations, to model, coach, and care my team. That’s part of the expectation of manager. So in some cases, I’m modeling for my team, what it means to be inclusive, take accountability. I view my job as, removing the blockers and barriers for my team to achieve. And so, for example, when my team is presenting in an important customer meeting, or it might be an internal meeting where we’re actually going to the board of directors, if you will. Not literally the board of Microsoft, but the discount review board, shall we say, to get a request for special pricing for our customer, my seller has been prepping for that, reviewing it with me ahead of time, getting feedback, also with a broader team. And so, is on the hot seat, delivering and presenting and answering questions.

Helen Fanucci (06:40):

What I do is, I listen, and sometimes I’ll chime in, if there’s something that I can add value on. But I’m in the background taking notes for them, so that they don’t have to think about what the actions are or what the conversation was. I’m basically being their admin, if you will, or their note taker while they’re on the hot seat. And then I send them the notes and we’ll do a debrief of the call.

Helen Fanucci (07:07):

So I do have, at times, performance related challenges with folks on my team. And I think it’s really important to be super specific, because it’s not an all or nothing thing. I have team members that are seasoned and excellent at what they do, but they’re not excellent at everything all the time. So there can be slices of things that require coaching, or as we change role expectations, because we evolve to meet up with the demands of our business so that we can maintain our competitiveness. Or as you say, “dominate a market.” Although, I am sensitive to the term, dominant, because I have been at Microsoft during the consent decree period. And while we’re past that, it’s not a term that we use.

Helen Fanucci (08:04):

But I coach my team and I will do it in specific ways. So for example, “Please, next time we meet, can you review with me your strategy related to data for your customer, so that we can talk about, how are we going to really help the customer with their data backbone. Review for me, your strategy related to executive engagement so that we can get higher in the organization or more with the business leaders.” Or it might be a conversation of, “Hey, I’m getting feedback that you are not listening very well in your team calls. And we need to really work on kind of, cultural expectations.”

Helen Fanucci (08:50):

So there’re things like that, but it’s not a, people are either making it or not making it. It’s usually more nuanced. And at some point, either the employee or myself will go, “Hey, I don’t think this is working out. Let’s find another role for you that would be a better fit.” And that may be another role within Microsoft. It might be helping the employee to leave Microsoft.

Helen Fanucci (09:18):

And so, I absolutely am all about performing. And in fact, we just must. It just comes…. It’s the anti-table stakes, it’s the table stakes to make quota, to keep pipelines up to date, to do forecast. And it’s complex. And if an employee misses their sales target for a year or two years, we’ve got to look at, what are they contributing? Are they doing the right things? Do they have the right impact? And at a company as large as Microsoft, sometimes we get quotas wrong. Sometimes people’s quotas have a baseline in it that doesn’t make sense because the customer divested a big part of our business.

Helen Fanucci (10:06):

So we’ve got a look at the bigger picture. It’s not just a binary, yes or no. It’s just, we’re going to look at a bigger picture and it’s more nuanced. And so when I interact with my team as a manager, I try to be nuanced and helpful to them so that they can excel and succeed, not only in the job today, but in their career at Microsoft. And help them build skills and abilities so that they can achieve what success looks like on their terms.

Chris Beall (10:40):

I think that’s what’s fascinating. You told me a story about somebody a little while ago, at a company that I think we should not name. And this person ultimately, as the source of their dissatisfaction, that caused them to go and become, today, an entrepreneur. Went through a couple of changes along the way, but they left that company a super talent, not just kind of good talent, but I always talk about the top 20%. This is somebody way, way above the top 20%.

Chris Beall (11:11):

And the way the company failed to be attractive was, they basically said, Look, you’re kind of here in this job because we need a person like you in this job, because we’re getting some credit for that.” And this individual, she said, “I want to go do something valuable.” And then they said, “Well, but if you go do something valuable for some other part of the organization, we don’t get credits. So, you have to stay here and do nothing.”

Chris Beall (11:38):

And I think a lot of people think, “Oh, that’d be fine. I’m going to hang out. I’m going to be on a weird-ass vacation, right? Where I’m just hanging.” And yet, maybe part of the secret of your opening up here is, “Hey, when we hire the best people, they come with an inborn drive to achieve.” And as you said, “If we can get the blockers out of the way, reduce the friction, and also make sure that they feel respected along the way…” That’s another thing that I’ve seen. It’s like that switch that, when you flip the disrespect, the switch once with an employee, you’re pretty much toast. Coming back from that, where they feel like they aren’t respected, or it might’ve been actual disrespect. It may have just been neglect or whatever. That’s a tough one to recover from. And I think again, it’s like, it’s actually almost a format disrespect to say, “I don’t expect you to perform.”, because people expect themselves to perform and they want to be challenged.

Chris Beall (12:34):

You don’t have to elaborate on that story, but I was really impressed with it. I was like, “Wow.” Because I know a lot of people say, “Hey, if you go all touchy, feely, and it’s all about being nice to people and empathetic, and all this stuff, where is that drive to perform? Where is the drive to achieve?” And I think that comes out of the selection of people who have a drive to achieve, and kind of nothing else, except giving them the opportunity.

Helen Fanucci (12:58):

Yeah. Well, delivering results is one of our values. We have three leadership principles. Deliver results, is one of them, and so that’s absolutely key, and you’ve got to hire for that. Create clarity and generate energy are the three leadership principles.

Helen Fanucci (13:13):

But for sure, we hire people that have a big motor and want to get things done. And some times the latitude that we have to make changes, isn’t fast enough for that employee. So in that example, yes, the person was unhappy because they were basically being used by upper management to help achieve some goals or metrics upper management had. But without having a job that was satisfying to them because things got changed in the organization, so they left.

Helen Fanucci (13:50):

I’ve recently had a situation where I had to have an employee with a big motor, big drive to succeed. And through some circumstances, she ended up moving into another team because we couldn’t adapt quickly enough to keep her on my team and open up another role that would be a stronger fit for her. And so, this is where kind of the larger company situation and the lack of agility that comes into play sometimes, can hurt, I think. So then, people leave. And so, that happens.

Helen Fanucci (14:27):

But in the balance, I think we really, really try to bend over backwards to be accommodating and help employees be successful. But make no mistake about it, we’re about being competitive and winning in the marketplace. And our results show that, if you look at the growth of our business.

Helen Fanucci (14:47):

And the Microsoft U.S. president just announced that she was leaving Microsoft. And in her four years at Microsoft, she almost doubled our revenue in business in Microsoft U.S. And that was on a huge base of business. And so, yeah, we’re about winning and being competitive and valuable to our customers. And I think our leadership has done a great job. We’re not perfect, but it’s a way better place to work now, than it was 10 years ago.

Chris Beall (16:01):

But it’s fascinating. And that is going to be the foundation for Microsoft’s competitiveness, going forward. Right? It’s a much better place to work, so you get great talent. And great talent is what your customers demand. But if you just kind of think of it that way, the company can create the marketplace, at some point. Right? There it is. We’re dominating this market. We’re important in this market. We have these customers. But the customers demand in a way that they can’t really say. They can’t come out and say, “We demand you give us the best talent.” But directly and indirectly, they’re demanding that, and they’ll walk. Customers will walk, if you don’t provide them with the people to interact with, that they feel like are people that are worthy of their importance as a customer, so to speak.

Chris Beall (16:47):

And I think to us, that’s a really big deal. As you know, we’ve won this award from the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, that I connect and sell seven years in a row. And what are those customers saying? They’re saying, “Your people are people we really get a lot of value out of interacting with.” That’s actually what they’re saying. It’s called, Service Provider of the Year award.

Chris Beall (17:07):

I think our customers vote every day about our people, maybe more than our products. And I think that’s really interesting, as a grounds for these two competitive forces come together. If we don’t compete with everybody for the people, and then give them that latitude to be great within a structure that allows it to work for the customers, then the customers are going to go, “Well. I’ll go to somebody who does compete and gets better people.”

Helen Fanucci (17:33):

Yeah, you’ve got to have… It starts with great people, no doubt about it. It starts with great people. And that’s why you’ve got to win the war on talent and be the destination organization, or the destination manager, that the talent wants to work for.

Helen Fanucci (17:51):

You’re exactly right. Every customer is grappling with technology and every customer must be a digital company and transform and monetize their data. And they’re looking for Microsoft and our partners because we have a big partner ecosystem we work with. But they’re looking for us to really guide them and help them along the way.

Helen Fanucci (18:13):

And actually, we do have customers that call up Satya or send him an email and say, “I need your A-team on this.” So, that just happened. A few months ago, one of my customers did that, and they were kind of in a tight spot. And we were stepping up to help them. And they sent Satya an email and said, “I need your A-team. I need your best people on this.” And he assured him that we were doing that, and we rose to the occasion. And so, that is an expectation of our customers. And we’ve got to keep serving our customers and serving them with amazing talent, or they’ll find somebody else who will.

Chris Beall (18:52):

Yeah. It seems like there’s a virtuous cycle that has always been there. But one element has flipped, which is, the locust of competition has moved. We can’t assume that the employees that we have, or the employees in our local area or candidates, are just going to come on board because we’re the only game in town. And that’s an easy thing to do. Maybe that’s what Apple is doing by saying, “The employees have all got to come to the campus.” Is they’re saying, “We’re the only game in town.” But I suspect, one in town, doesn’t really mean very much anymore. There’s talent all over the place. And two, only game? Not quite so sure anybody’s ever the only game. Right? These things come and go.

Chris Beall (19:34):

I’d make this contention. I don’t know if you agree with me or not. But if you’re looking to invest in companies, and everybody’s looking to get a return on their money that exceeds certainly the pathetically low interest rates out there, but exceeds the market as a whole… Is this a dimension along which the analysts, who are going to look at companies and advise us to invest or not invest in this company versus that, that they should be looking at?

Chris Beall (20:03):

Because I’ve never heard an analyst, a stock market analyst say, “You know what? That Microsoft over there, they have got the handle on this cultural issue and this way of looking at things where their flexibility and their commitment to culture, and their willingness and ability to train on empathy. And do all of these things you’re talking about, that is going to take them from whatever it is, their stock price of whatever number it is today, to two X, three X, four X that in the future. So don’t you worry because they’re competing with folks who, frankly, don’t get this war on talent.”

Chris Beall (20:42):

And so ding, ding, dang, we have a winner over here. Put your money here. Do you think that’s going to become something that the analysts from whatever they are, the Morgan Stanley’s of the world and so forth, are going to start talking about?

Helen Fanucci (20:55):

That’s a really good question. In some ways, I think Microsoft’s stock is reflective of our culture. And the reason I say that is because, Satya made it a top priority when he took over, to address culture. You can’t transform, you can’t have digital transformation without cultural transformation. The data is really clear on that. I used to do a keynote on that topic and it just doesn’t work.

Helen Fanucci (21:24):

And so our ability to change as a company, which has been credited to Satya and the great work he’s done, the underpinnings of that are our cultural transformation. So while it may not be deliberately noted by analysts, I think it is baked into our stock price because we’ve been able to achieve those results. Those results are only possible by our cultural transformation.

Helen Fanucci (21:54):

And Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. And Satya consistently says, “We can’t achieve our mission without addressing our culture and having a great culture.” It is our culture that achieves our mission and achieves the return on investment. And it achieves the stock price.

Chris Beall (22:21):

Yeah. It’s fascinating stuff. I know that there’s an apocryphal or maybe true Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” And that’s supposed to mean, you don’t want interesting times. You just want everything to kind of go along so you can go along with everything that’s going along. Right?

Chris Beall (22:36):

I have a feeling you really like interesting times. That this is energizing for you, that this big change is going to be what carries you forward in your career and gives you things to focus on that are going to be fun and productive for you and for other people. Are you feeling that? Are you feeling… You talk about energy, and how energy is… bringing energy as part of the game. Is this craziness? Where some people feel like it’s depressing and some people feel like it is scary, too complex, makes them want to retire tomorrow, and get out of the world of helping companies and helping people do things, you don’t seem to have that response to it. It seems to me like you like going toward this sort of thing and grappling with it.

Helen Fanucci (23:18):

Oh, yeah. I love it. I am like, “Game on. Let’s figure this out.” I’m really excited about the opportunities and what the future brings. So I’ve been managing employees remotely for over 15 years. And I’m really comfortable with it, I’m good at it, and I think I have a lot to offer. And I also help colleagues grapple with issues, particularly as it pertains to remote work or managing remote employees. And I think it’s super interesting. And I love it, and I love what I do. And I think we’re just at the start of this. And I’m really excited about what the future holds.

Chris Beall (23:59):

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, Helen, thank you so much. Finally, an issue of Market Dominance Guys that doesn’t go on and on and on about winning sales. I know you know how to win sales. You win deals all the time. You beat your numbers, you do all that kind of stuff. But I feel that this is a pretty special episode or two. I don’t know what this will become.

Chris Beall (24:19):

I’m sorry Corey wasn’t here. Corey, dude, whatever it is that you’re doing, wherever it is you’re doing it, I know you’re going to pronounce people’s names correctly. So, that’s fantastic. But Helen’s here with us today. Helen Fanucci, thank you so much for being on Market Dominance Guys. We could not be more blessed.

Helen Fanucci (24:36):

Thank you, Chris. I am so delighted to be invited and I’m just glad that you got around to inviting me. I thought, “Yeah…” I don’t know. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do to earn an invitation. So, thank you for being so astute and inviting me.

Chris Beall (24:52):

All right. Lucky me.

 

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This week on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall is once again flying solo while Corey Frank is out traveling the world. Chris’ guest today is Helen Fanucci, Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader at Microsoft — and Chris’ fiancée! The topic today veers away from competing with other companies for market domination, to competing with other companies for market talent. It’s just another result of our almost year and a half of working from home due to the pandemic: People now want flexibility in where they work and when they work.

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Helen explains that, because of this, managers have to manage and hire differently today, and provide the flexibility that workers might prefer. “We have to manage for outcome and results,” she says, “not just how long people are spending in the office.” Companies need to understand how to get the best out of their teams, building in that flexibility so that people want to continue to work. Another change is the necessity of asking how your team is doing on a personal level. Helen tells Chris, “If members of your team aren’t doing well, how can your company meet customers’ needs?” Employees exercise more power now with their decisions to stay at their current job or look elsewhere for a company that is willing to meet their needs, so it becomes imperative for managers and companies to be the kind of people that employees want to work for. Want to know more? Then listen to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Will They Stay or Will They Go?”

 

About Our Guest

Helen Fanucci has been a valued employee at Microsoft for 13 years and is currently their Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader, heading up an incredible global team of seasoned sales professionals who are working with some of Microsoft’s most strategic accounts.

 

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Chris Beall (01:50):

Hey, everybody, welcome to an unusual episode of Market Dominance Guys. For one thing, we are missing my co-host, the estimable, maybe inestimable, I don’t know how to estimate him, Corey Frank, who is off somewhere. I don’t know if he went off on this cruise ship behind me or if he’s doing something else, but he’s not available today. And so we’re going to have me play the host. And with me today is Helen Fanucci. And full disclosure, Helen Fanucci and I are engaged to marry each other. That’s how it works is you marry each other. It’s not a passive voice, like to be married, it’s active voice because we’re active people.

Chris Beall (02:30):

And Helen is working for Microsoft. She calls herself a sales manager. I think that’s accurate. She is a sales manager, but she manages some really, really big strategic accounts at Microsoft. But Helen has a substantial career in sales and sales management, also in marketing and actually an MIT-trained engineer, mechanical engineer, which is pretty unusual in the world of sales. So Helen, welcome to Market Dominance Guys.

Helen Fanucci (03:01):

Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be here and delighted to be here with you.

Chris Beall (03:05):

It’s pretty cool. So Helen, we’ve been talking on Market Dominance Guys for 80-something episodes about one thing, which is dominating markets in terms of competing for customers and particularly competing for markets. So markets are all those collection of customers that are inter-referencing, so if you sell to one, your risk and the cost of selling to every other single one within the market.

Chris Beall (03:30):

You have been looking at the world of successful companies, being successful and being successful as a sales manager and being successful in all these ways, in a completely different way. Basically, turning the lens around almost exactly 180 degrees and talking about something that we have literally never mentioned on Market Dominance Guys, which is how the world is structured now, with regard to companies competing with each other.

Chris Beall (04:01):

And your thesis appears to be that companies are now competing for something completely different from customers and it’s much more important. So first, tell us a little about what that view is and then kind of how did you get to that view, and what led you there throughout your career? Why would you think such unusual thoughts?

Helen Fanucci (04:22):

Well, thanks Chris. So you’re right, we used to compete for customers, and now we’re competing for talent. And the big sea change that’s happened is really accelerated by the pandemic. So during the pandemic, it became painfully at times clear that what really mattered as a sales manager, sales leader is how my team was doing. If we individually aren’t doing well, we can’t possibly serve our customers and do our best for our customers.

Helen Fanucci (05:00):

And so the expectations of employees has really changed, and we probably would have gotten there eventually. But as Satya said, a few months after the pandemic started, that we did two years worth of digital transformation in two months. And I think it’s largely the same with the relationship between employee and company, employee and manager.

Helen Fanucci (05:30):

So when I say employees expectations have changed, there’s a lot of data on that now. They expect to be known personally, first and foremost, and their whole life included, not just a work life. We used to think of going to work as to be professional at work is to not talk about personal things and just talk about work things. That doesn’t cut it, and that’s an outdated notion. And so employees like flexibility. So we compete for talent and the expectations have changed.

Helen Fanucci (06:09):

So 73% of respondents in a survey want flexibility of where they work. 92% want flexibility on when they work. And so we’re a great example, by the way, Chris. The day after Amy Hood, Microsoft’s CFO said, “Hey, returning back to the office,” and this was May 2020, “returning back to the office after the pandemic will also have a component of choice.” And so we looked at each other and we said, “Well, let’s buy a house in Port Townsend because I’ll have a choice of whether I go back to the office. So it gives us the flexibility of not just living in Seattle, but we can live on the Olympic Peninsula overlooking Discovery Bay and looking out towards Victoria, Canada.

Helen Fanucci (07:03):

So that trend is happening all over the place. And then I have employees that actually want to work from different countries from time to time. I have an employee that asked about working in India for a month. Family, he lives in California, but his country of origin is India. And so I said, “Sure,” because if I don’t start providing that flexibility, they’re going to go work for somebody who does. And so this idea of coming back to the office is really, it’s not going to happen. The genie’s out of the bottle and it’s not going back and employees aren’t going back.

Chris Beall (07:42):

And the genie is granting the employees, in a lot of way, all knowledge-worker employees their ultimate wish, which is, you’re in charge. I mean, you can choose for whom you want. We always used to say it’s a free country, but maybe suddenly it’s a free world with regard to employer-employee relationships. And that seems very new.

Chris Beall (08:02):

And if I was recruiting at one point in the Bay Area, I’d be either recruiting from people who already live in the Bay Area or people who are willing to move. And if they’re willing to move, don’t they have to move their whole family? So maybe I’m getting them before they are married and have kids or whatever it is that might be binding them together, but maybe not. And do they have to uproot their spouse, their kids, the school, all that stuff? I think that’s the way it used to go, and now it’s like, now the employee gets to make that call.

Chris Beall (08:33):

They might love me so much and “Oh, I really want to come to work for ConnectAndSell in Los Gatos, California,” which by the way we don’t do. ConnectAndSell, we just let you work wherever you want. But they might love me that much. But that love is a tax, right? I’ve got to actually raise the bar to get them to love me so much that they’ll move close by to work physically together. And somebody else might say, no, you can work wherever you want, work for Helen Fanucci. She’ll let you work where you want. You would out compete me in that case, all else being equal.

Chris Beall (09:05):

Of course, your company is much more, got a lot of good qualities. ConnectAndSell is a bit of a pain in the ass to work for. But you get my meaning, right? Are you seeing this play out in practical ways already with regard to, is it more with regard to retention or is it with regard to attracting new talent or is it both equally? What are you seeing play out already, that’s really impacting folks ability to compete in the marketplace because they have the talent that they need.

Helen Fanucci (09:33):

Well, the first order of business is retaining talent because why hire new talent if you can’t retain the ones who have? And so I think the data is four million workers quit their jobs in the month of April, and so that’s huge. And every employee is probably thinking about quitting, at least checking out what’s out there, because there’s so many jobs available. I think it’s like 9.3 million jobs or something like that available.

Helen Fanucci (10:07):

And so retaining is first and foremost, and retaining requires flexibility. And so a company I know that I’d rather remain nameless, is requiring their workers to come back to the office. And in fact, it’s been told to me that their CEO counts cars in the parking lot. And what they’re experiencing are workers, employees are quitting left and right. They’re not going to put up with being required to go into the office. So counting cars in the parking lot is actually emptying the parking lot.

Chris Beall (10:51):

Wow.

Helen Fanucci (10:52):

I know. And they’re having a tough time retaining talent. So that’s a real example that’s happening now. You may have heard about Apple and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase wanting to require workers to go back to the office. That ship has sailed, so to speak. No pun intended with your beautiful ship in the background. Hybrid work is here to stay.

Helen Fanucci (11:16):

We actually compete with everyone around the world for talent because we can hire from anywhere and they can work from anywhere. It opens up a competitive landscape. So while you might say Microsoft is competing with Google and AWS and Salesforce and all these tech companies, in reality, all of a sudden overnight our competitors for talent are really all companies, including ConnectAndSell.

Helen Fanucci (11:45):

You may offer such great flexibility and training and skill development in what you do, that I can’t hire SDRs at Microsoft because you develop people in a way that we can only dream about, as an example. So then you become our competition, even though from a product point of view, we don’t directly compete. So yeah, it’s happening all over the place. Retaining talent is the first order of business.

Helen Fanucci (12:13):

Also, we’re seeing municipalities, states and cities now flipping from trying to attract companies to come work for them to attracting workers to come work in their location. Just yesterday, I was on the phone with a colleague who lives in Greater Minneapolis and has a house in Northern Minneapolis. Whereas he said, there’s more deer than people up there. He’s now seeing job listings that list jobs in Northern Minnesota where there’s not really any companies. And he says, “Oh, it’s all work from home.” You can work here. The job is up here where you want to live. And then the job, actually corporate headquarters or what have you, is someplace else.

Helen Fanucci (13:04):

The other thing that I think that we miss a lot is if we are requiring people to come back to the office or not requiring them to come back to the office, as it actually is going, as a sales manager I might say, “Oh, well, I need somebody in California next to the customer so that they can go meet with the customer.” But where are the customers? The customers aren’t going back to the office either.

Helen Fanucci (13:30):

So one of the phenomena I think we will see is that we’ll probably organize travel differently. And so we’ll probably have fewer in-person meetings with our customers. And when we do travel, we’ll travel to bigger meetings. Maybe it’s an executive briefing that’s held at Microsoft corporate headquarters, or maybe it’s a hotel near the customer’s location or at the customer’s location, but people are flying in, both the customers are flying in and the sales team.

Helen Fanucci (14:06):

We have an annual sales kickoff meeting that traditionally has happened in Las Vegas every year. Now, we haven’t had it in person last year and we’re not having it in person this year either, but those could be catalysts for meeting in person. And maybe those kinds of get-togethers end up being extended. But I think we’ll see less travel overall because that’s part of, also the changing expectation. People want to travel less. They want to work from home. They don’t want to commute. We used to commute by planes, trains, and automobiles, and now we commute by logging in.

Helen Fanucci (14:48):

But there is a cost to all of that, to the logging in and working from home that has become researched and evident, that these back-to-back meetings, the data shows that 70% of workers are working three hours more a day. It’s just been relentless. I notice that my calendar, when I block it, it doesn’t get observed and people want to meet with me nonstop. And so, one of the things I’ve ended up doing is setting a default in my Outlook settings, so that when I schedule quote-unquote what was a half hour meeting, it’s only 25 minutes, or an hour meeting is only 50 minutes because it is really essential for brain health and wellbeing that we take breaks.

Helen Fanucci (15:40):

And Microsoft research did data on that and showed the degradation of cognitive function and that increase in stress just by doing three back-to-back meetings without any break and what it does to your brain. And so we’ve got to work differently and workers and the talent is demanding that different expectations and different ways of working be in place in order for them to go work for the company that has the jobs.

Helen Fanucci (16:17):

So I think we’ve got to get a lot more creative. And what this also means for managers is we’ve got to manage differently and hire differently. We’ve got to think through the menu of flexibility and choices that a given group of workers might prefer. And when we’re managing them, we’ve got to manage for outcomes, impact and results, not just showing up in the office. Activity doesn’t equal results. And so I’m going to pause there because I’ve said a lot of things, but those are some of my thoughts about how things have changed and really what are some of the core components on the war for talent.

Chris Beall (17:46):

That’s fascinating stuff. As I think about it, I always think about, you know me, I was thinking about what’s the one thing somebody can do to screw something up or to do it well. And often when we keep doing the same things we were doing before, inadvertently when there’s big changes, because big changes don’t happen very often. But when there’s big changes, we have a hard time shedding old habits. And so as you look at this world that you’re basically saying the world is turned upside down.

Chris Beall (18:14):

It’s almost like, I think there was an episode of Market Dominance Guys where I talked about the fact that sales has done traditionally is an outgrowth of factory capitalism. So the idea was that factories get capitalized with a bunch of equipment and enough cash to be able to have working capital in order to buy raw materials. And they had access to a supply chain, and then they made widgets. And the widgets must go. They got to go into the market, right? So what did we do? We dumped the widgets, so to speak, into the territories and the salespeople take care of turning the widgets into gross profits that then come back to the company.

Chris Beall (18:55):

And we did all sorts of things called discounting and having specials and bundles and this, that, and the other thing to try to move the damn widgets because the widgets otherwise pile up. And we spent money to make something that we don’t get any money back for, right? And now the world has changed to where companies like yours, like Microsoft, I’d say Microsoft’s leading the way. And Microsoft and Apple are probably the two leaders in this, turning the world into software.

Chris Beall (19:21):

Basically, software eats the world and now everything is software, including physical products become very software-like, so we don’t have a lot of inventory. And so my point was, hey, here we have this change, which means which we should change how we sell. And we shouldn’t just assign territories and dump inventory into it. But you’re saying there’s a different change entirely, which is, it’s not how we sell, it’s who’s on our team to help us sell, whether they’re sellers or somebody else.

Chris Beall (19:56):

And I hate to say it, people are going to think I’m some kind of a lunatic, but in a weird way, it’s almost like Karl Marx is finally right. That is the means of production in the world of sales and other things, has actually fallen into the hands of the workers. It’s the products that you guys make at Microsoft that let workers like me, for instance, working today with my data concierge, who’s been on the show, Tom Jung, where we’re working together for ConnectAndSell. Right.

Chris Beall (20:25):

But we actually had the power to do that for anybody without having to pick up and move. So, that power shift seems like such a big deal. So what do you see all of us failing to do, failing to shift in our own mindset or our own actions or how we organize, to keep up with this massive change? Because it’s such a massive change, there’s no way we’re keeping up. We have to be blowing it. So how are we blowing it?

Helen Fanucci (20:54):

Okay. So a couple things there. So the Karl Marx analogy might be a step too far. The power has shifted to the workers, yes. However, we still need an organizing collective that is called a company to help structure and organize the output productivity of the workers. I’ll just say it that way. Then it probably sounds all factory work and I don’t really mean it that way.

Helen Fanucci (21:28):

So for example, me as a manager, I need to make sure I’m understanding how to get the best and the most out of my team, and my team as an extended team. I have about 600 people that touch my customers. I have a big territory, global strategic accounts, et cetera. And so we have a more defined set of accounts we focus on, but how we go about our job and how we organize that is really critical.

Helen Fanucci (22:02):

And so building in that flexibility so that people want to continue to work. And by the way, as I said, a few minutes ago, about 4 million people quit their jobs in April. And so if you have nobody to do a job, it doesn’t matter how you organize the work. And so from that point of view, the workers have power. And in fact, just a quick digression or story, my daughter left her job in January of this year and she’s not going to go back to a company. She left her job to pursue her dream, which is starting her own business with her husband.

Helen Fanucci (22:46):

And there’s a very low barrier to entry. They are creating an app and an approach to help parents of young children be able to employ behavioral modification techniques to basically help the parents be better parents. And they’re doing it through technology and asynchronously and enabling a parental therapy if you will, for behavioral modification at scale and at a lower price point. So she’s never going back to an office.

Helen Fanucci (23:25):

So we’ve got to be sensitive that employees have a lot of choice. And so yes, they have power that way, but we have people in roles and we have coordination that needs to happen in order to serve our customers. But none of that actually is possible unless you have a foundation of a corporate culture. And one of the things that Satya did when he first became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, is he started addressing the Microsoft culture because he knew that we couldn’t be competitive and change if we didn’t have a strong culture.

Helen Fanucci (24:07):

So there’s a lot of work that’s done in terms of expectations, of being inclusive, hiring diverse talent. And being inclusive means that people feel included, not just they’re on the team. You can hire diverse talent, but if they don’t feel included, they’ll leave. And so while we used to expect tellers to meet their quota, and that was sufficient, it’s no longer sufficient.

Helen Fanucci (24:42):

So for example, you also have to behave consistent to our cultural expectations. And if you’re leading a team or interacting with others, and it’s not consistent with a culture of inclusion and trust and valuing others points of view, then that’s a problem. And you end up, me as a manager, I end up needing to address that. So I would say that the employees have the power, but then it becomes imperative for managers and companies to be the kind of people and the kind of organization that the employees want to work for. And that includes more and more employees want to work for companies that are taking a stand on social justice issues or DACA, have principles that are consistent with their values.

Helen Fanucci (25:43):

It’s more complex, I would say that it used to be, to attract talent and it’s across many more dimensions. One of the things that we did in Microsoft US, it’s an organization of about 10,000 sellers and managers is our president, Kate Johnson brought in Brene Brown and everybody from corporate vice presidents, to directors, to individual contributors, all got trained on dare to lead because we want to have more courageous sellers and leaders. And one of the things we learned is that there is no courage without vulnerability. And so what does it mean to be vulnerable? That’s a scary thing for folks.

Helen Fanucci (26:34):

And then as a manager, how do you have empathy for your team? And empathy as distinct from sympathy is about really putting on the other person’s shoes and understanding their situation. And so all of that becomes super important in order to build a culture where people feel valued, can communicate. We had a whole module on clear is kind, and being clear on expectations. And being able to, as Brene would say, rumble with vulnerability, like have tough conversations. Because tough conversations actually in a respectful way, unlock innovation and new possibilities.

Helen Fanucci (27:23):

So things have dramatically changed, but we can also carry that to our customers because our customers are struggling with these things too. And so I actually spend quite a bit of time talking to customers about our culture, the changes that we’ve made, why it matters, how to build teams, how to retain teams, how to manage teams remotely. So there’s a lot to unpack here, but those are some of my, I guess, not-so-short thoughts on the subject.

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This week’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast wraps up a terrific three-part conversation between our guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, and their guest, Henry Wojdyla, Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. Today, Corey asks Henry how he’s finetuned his business perspective and cold-calling technique since his recent immersion in Market Dominance Guys. “I copy and steal religiously,” Henry freely confesses. “I’ve wholesale stolen Chris’ approach.”

—-more—-

 

Henry has gone so far as to distill all he learned into a playbook, with links to related parts of Market Dominance Guys’ podcasts. He references the episode, “You’d Better Believe It,” with Matt Forbes, Head of Strategic Accounts at ConnectAndSell. “Listen to Matt Forbes,” Henry advises passionately, “to the tone he uses when he talks about belief.” Henry extolls the cold-calling virtues of Cherryl Turner, Chief Development Officer of ConnectAndSell’s new Flight School Division, in “The Secret of Her Success” episode, and the value he gained from her belief that she’s the equal of anyone she speaks to on the phone. Believe me — you’ll want to hear the complete conversation between Chris, Corey, and Henry to get the full value from this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Borrowing from the Best.”

When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear
Lead That Cold Call With Trust, Not Value

About Our Guest

Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (01:48):

So the initial cold calls you made, BC and AD, before Chris and after-

Henry Wojdyla (01:53):

Yes. Yes.

Corey Frank (01:54):

So with the croc brain and now that knowledge afterwards, you were leading with in essence, again, talk about orange world, the cold cognitions, data-driven, assuming folks would subscribe to the intellectual attraction of a deal from the numbers, from the status of the firm. And then post, you led with what? How did you establish that trust out of the gate to have better results than before?

Henry Wojdyla (02:27):

Well, again, it wasn’t really so much… Before Chris, BC, was not so much about, again, the firm, it wasn’t about patting your chest about who we were, but it was just almost probably cramming facts down people’s throats before they had the chance to finish the word hello. Now I have no shame in being honest about this. I’ve pretty much wholesale stolen Chris’s approach, the 27 seconds, even the approach to frankly discovery meetings.

Henry Wojdyla (02:53):

It’s really about, I think, getting the counterparty on the phone in a psychological condition. You can actually deliver something of value to them, but you can’t get there without trust. So I’ve really become a disciple. And that’s part of what drove frankly, a pretty big redraft. We have a playbook that I use heavily, but there was a lot of editing that went on to that when I really stumbled across this whole concept of leading with trust as opposed to value.

Chris Beall (03:20):

When you pulled up the Market Dominance Guys’ part of that book and the other book when we were in Seattle, I will admit it, I shed a tear or two. Really, I was so touched. I didn’t know that anybody was ever going to use this stuff. So you didn’t just use it. You used it with precision and thoughtfulness and commitment. It was one of those moments that I thought, “Okay, what Corey and I have been up to all this time might actually be worthwhile,” because you always looked for, “Is anybody going to get it?” Well, you went way beyond getting it.

Henry Wojdyla (04:00):

Well, it wasn’t until I really came. Again, I really can’t take any credit. I don’t know if it’s Oscar Wilde or Pablo Picasso or whoever I’ve heard various attributions to. But the idea of the best thing to do is frankly steal the best ideas. And I’m nakedly admitting that I’ve stolen the best ideas because they weren’t my own, but it was immediately apparent upon doing that binge-listening. That was the disconnect.

Henry Wojdyla (04:26):

Don’t get me wrong, the prior approach worked. It certainly worked, but it really wasn’t a best practice. And again, I can hearken back to a few key operating principles for me. One is the constant accumulation of best practices and I’m totally agnostic to either where they came from or that they have any particular shelf life. If there’s something better comes along, the prior one’s gone. I don’t care.

Corey Frank (04:50):

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

Corey Frank (05:21):

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

Henry Wojdyla (06:25):

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

Chris Beall (07:07):

I’ll let you jump later. We’ve done the experiment. So we’ve done the experiment of having a group that we were in Corey’s business at that time, a little bit side business of ours. And we were helping out a customer who really wanted to have somebody else call and set appointments for their people. So we had a very talented group. We got the message right. This all took about 24 hours to set up. And they went like this, fail, fail, fail for three consecutive days. So I did the statistical math and I said, “Well, okay, so now we have failed forever. I get it. We’ve succeeded in putting together a fail forever group.”

Chris Beall (07:47):

And this was a pure skin in the game deal by the way. So we were going to get nothing unless we started succeeding. So I thought it was interesting. So I asked a question of the person running the group. I said, “Do these reps who are doing this calling truly believe in the potential value of the meeting that they’re offering, even in a downside case for them as far as they’re concerned or our customer, that no business ever comes out of it?” And I got the following back. So I thought, “Well, okay, your silence tells me the answer is no, they don’t, because you would have said yes if they do.

Chris Beall (08:24):

Let’s go find a person who attended one of those meetings who did not move forward and got value. Let them talk directly to the group about the value that they got, about what they learned.” And they did that. Nothing else changed, no coaching on tonality, no change of script, no change of personnel. And we went from zero to 27 meetings the next day. So we’ve actually done the positive experiment which is introduce belief. In the absence of belief, we found out that technique was ineffective, and it was ineffective at a zero level. And I believe it’s because of the value chain theory which is a missing link in a value chain gives you a non-value chain. It’s not a chain. It’s just not a chain.

Chris Beall (09:11):

And the anchor, I came to believe very quickly in the value chain around initiating relationships that can lead to exploring the possibility of solving problems. The anchor link on that chain is the rep’s belief in the potential value of that meeting for the human being they’re speaking with should no business ever happen. And I’ve told people this many, many times, if you were to change one thing about your team, change that. Not easy, but change that because as you just said Henry, if you take care of that, actually technique becomes almost a nice to have. It’s better to have good technique than bad technique, but it’s like if…

Chris Beall (09:58):

Here’s a golf analogy. If you believe to make the ball go up in the air, you have to hit from below the ball and make it go up in the air, you’re screwed for all time as a golfer. As in all cases, you can’t make that happen consistently because there’s this thing called the earth between you and the ball on that trajectory. And you’re going to encounter it and find out that you can’t actually make the earth counter rotate fast enough to not take energy away from your shot. That is when you dig in. You’re not that guy. Who stopped the earth from spinning? Who was that? Corey, your Bible is better than mine.

Corey Frank (10:30):

Superman.

Chris Beall (10:30):

Doesn’t some guy… No, no, no. Someone biblical. Anyway, I thought I had you. I thought you were my man. That’s one of those beliefs that when you change that belief in somebody as a golfer and they start hitting down on the ball believing that that makes the ball go up, magic starts to happen because they have a shot. Now, do you work on their technique? You bet. I’d rather have more club head speed than less. How do I get it? Doing something counterintuitive.

Chris Beall (11:03):

I have to hinge my wrist and not control and bunch of stuff that drives you crazy as a golfer. But when you learn it, it’s fun. But I think that you just hit it, Henry. Belief, correct belief takes care of almost everything and will actually take care of enough to make you be in a market-dominant position. I actually believe you can get all the way to a market-dominant position by changing one thing.

Henry Wojdyla (11:30):

I couldn’t agree more. And it’s absolute Pareto principle all the way down. It’s turtles all the way down. I would encourage your listeners, hopefully the folks that are listening to this, if they haven’t been familiarized with the earlier episodes, go back and listen to Matt Forbes, or as Chris calls him, big Matt Forbes, because it’s amazing to listen to those episodes. And those are some of the ones that I didn’t put in my transcriptions that really took it home to me.

Henry Wojdyla (11:58):

And I would say even on the [finite 00:12:00], there’s a feedback loop there. Listen to the tone in which Matt Forbes talks about the belief in the episode. My God, speaking of biblical references, it was like Saul to Paul, listening to him. Just going through the transformation. You would hear the sincerity in his voice in your episode. By the way, the versions that I keep, the actual live documents of the transcripts, I keep hyperlinked back to the actual recordings.

Henry Wojdyla (12:30):

And the reason I do that is I would actually want to go back and listen to the tonality of Matt Forbes describing that or whatever episode you might choose. But to your golf analogy, it was crazy, Chris, that you just referenced that because I was thinking the same exact thought of if you could hit down on the ball, it’s at least a Pareto. You’re at least 80% of the way there. Sure. Are you going to be on the PGA tour? Of course not. But have you taken away 80% of the burden? Probably. And I think belief is the rough equivalent of hitting down on the ball on the cold call.

Chris Beall (13:40):

Wow. That’s a good one. I had no idea. We’ve never spoken about this golf thing. This is quite interesting to me. So I’ve taught a lot of people how to hit golf balls. And my point is I can teach you to hit a ball that’s up in the air and get all the physics of the swing right. But until you believe that hitting down in the ball is not just a good idea but is the only idea, you’re screwed because the earth is really big. It’s 25,000 miles in diameter and weighs a lot and it’s spinning. So it takes a whole 24 hours to go around. The surface of the earth is moving pretty quick and you’re not going to be able to make it move as fast as a golf ball in the opposite direction. That’s if you’re, by the way, hitting toward the sun rather than away from the sun, but you know that Corey.

Henry Wojdyla (14:28):

And if you’re at the equator, it’s a little bit more burdensome than elsewhere. But in all seriousness, Chris, it is really amazing that you can take the most simple or what sounds like simple principles, be it on the golf course or in the context of a cold call and the weight that it carries, the disproportional weight that it carries is profound. And the belief, I think everything stems from it. Getting back, Corey, to your question more directly, the tonality and all those things, they do absolutely matter. But I think where you can let technique move from technique to frankly more just genuine communication, when the foundation is built upon trust and belief. Trust in the part of what you’re trying to establish with the counterparty and belief in what you have on offer for them.

Corey Frank (15:17):

Absolutely. And I think you’re a testament, Henry, that it’s not just germane to a manager or director level, it’s that you can communicate and connect that trust vector at the highest levels, the C-levels of the world here just from those same principles and they apply.

Henry Wojdyla (15:38):

Absolutely. And on this second year anniversary of Market Dominance Guys, I will also make another referral. Please go back and listen to the Cherryl Turner episodes. Cherryl talks about, and Chris will attest to that fact, you frequently mention that Cherryl is the world leader in feeling she’s the equal of anyone that she speaks to on the phone. That’s absolutely right. So getting back to your question, Corey, it’s a belief in many ways. It’s a belief about what you have on offer. It’s about a belief in yourself.

Henry Wojdyla (16:08):

And again, easier said than done, but it’s applicable all the entire range, up and down the corporate stack depending on the organization that the individual works for. This does not have to be purely the domain of the senior execs or the C-suite that can execute against this type of approach. And it’s more than approach. Again, it’s a belief system, and I think that’s the most profound thing. So anyone from frankly the most junior person with at least some modicum of training all the way up, there’s really no reason why this can’t be applied throughout.

Corey Frank (16:43):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (16:44):

It’s funny. Simon Sinek talks about start with why and the why of why is without the proper why, without the real why, without digging into the why, why, then your belief is fake. And fake belief is the worst kind of thing in the world. The one thing you don’t want to fake is belief. And I hear a lot of stuff in business. I’ve heard this many, many times through my career that there’s a fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. And it’s always made me bristle. In fact, it’s not personal, very few things other than raw broccoli make me want to throw up. I love cooked broccoli by the way, but I’m sensitive to the chemicals in raw broccoli.

Chris Beall (17:23):

It’s a protein that’s folded wrong for my system. That does. When somebody says fake it till you make it, I just think, “I just spent a little time understanding what’s underneath this you don’t have to fake it,” because if you’re in a business of having to fake it, you’re a charlatan. That’s the definition of a charlatan. Somebody who convinces others of value that is not there. That’s it. So I hate fake it till you make it. If anybody watching this is a big fake-it-till-you-make-it fan, why don’t you fake some sincerity and see if you can get me to buy your thesis? But it suggests some pre-work in the real world.

Chris Beall (18:03):

And I’ll go back to being a fuller brush man. I used to knock on the door, and I think some people listening to this know this, I would say, “Hi, I’m Chris Beall. I’m your new fuller brush man. You probably don’t know what a fuller brush is. I sure don’t.” And I’d stand there. Well, that was the absolute, God’s honest truth. I didn’t know. And then, inevitably, they would ask me, “What can I help you?” Well, that’s a pretty good question to get as the very first utterance from a prospect. Can I help you? It’s not bad. There’s certainly stuff that’s lower on the totem pole net.

Chris Beall (18:33):

But my point is when I got to the end of that week, because I had offered to go do some research and only come back if I found something that I thought would change their life, I did the research and I found one or two items that I thought would really change their life. That belief was what allowed me to come back, not, “Here’s what I’m going to say about it. I’ve got this trick.” So sometimes I think people look at the breakthrough script stuff that we do with ConnectAndSell and they go, “It’s a trick.” Well, it’s a trick but when used as a trick, it doesn’t work. It’s like a trick that evaporates when you try to use it as a trick.

Chris Beall (19:13):

And I think that’s the key to all of this. And I’ve always thought the beauty of sales is sales disciplines companies to offer value in the modern world, not the tragedy of the crossroads, in the modern world because it doesn’t work as well when you don’t sincerely believe in the value. So either the salesperson has to be a charlatan or a fool, or they have to be a sincere exponent of the potential value. Those are the only three positions you can take. And if you’re watching this and you want to take one of those positions, some of you will want to be charlatans right there. There are a thousand books on sales that say, “Be a charlatan.”

Chris Beall (19:52):

Many of them use the word persuade. Cause somebody to believe something that they don’t believe for your convenience. That’s the core idea around a lot of sales training. Some are fools. They’re just happy fools and go through it. They get away with it. But actually, you as a salesperson are the selection and filtering mechanism for society to find out what’s of value because you choose first what you’re going to sell. And part of your job is choosing the good stuff. Henry’s got good stuff. Corey? On occasion. Me? I don’t know. Many people think I’m a charlatan. Cherryl certainly did when we first met. And then she thought I was a fool and then she moved on from there.

Corey Frank (20:39):

Was it funny that again, just to tie it back just briefly, Chris, to your point about the apple and going back to the office and this concept of going back to the office is that the belief system used to say, as we’ve talked about many times, is we need to be here physically to touch, to collaborate, to whiteboard, to eat lunch, to commute, to share the shared sacrifice of the accident on the one-on-one.

Corey Frank (21:07):

And we had to detour and that’s why we’re late. We had to have those shared experiences. And now for the last year or so, you’re saying, “Wait a minute. That belief was wrong because my production actually went up, not down. And now you’re telling me I’ve got to disavow that belief system that we’ve lived in this world for the last 18 months or so and go back to that old belief system.” That’s a little tough to put that genie back.

Chris Beall (21:36):

It is, it is. Well, it’s going to be tough to put a lot of them back and they’re not going back. The beauty of physics is it tells us what’s going to happen. Physics is all about saying if you can give me a pretty rough setup of what the current situation is, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. And we have a situation here where the physics of people and artifacts, mechanisms, systems, ideas, this thing called the internet which is still an underbet by the way, still an underbet. And here’s the case where the internet was underbet because it wasn’t properly bet on for its ability to deliver people to each other in business.

Chris Beall (22:22):

That was a huge underbet. That’s probably the biggest value that we will get. It’s not the ability to go on and buy something and have it show up at your house. That’s really cool. But actually it’s displacing something you could have done by going to Walmart. It’s like a small displacement, not a big displacement. This is a big displacement. And also our circle of I’ll call it trusted friends that we can do business with grows massively. And it doesn’t mean we don’t want to get together. Henry, what did we do after a few conversations? Let’s get together.

Chris Beall (22:56):

But did we get together at your office? No. Did we get together at my office? Well, I don’t have one so that would be difficult. We got together at a hotel that was nice enough. And we did that thing. But we don’t do it every day. We also got together for brunch the other day in Denver, which was super delightful, brought a third party. And here’s my first party right over there. And by the way, her assessment of you, Henry, is that I tell you, she would throw me over for you if you weren’t married. I don’t know how that would work out, but I’m just saying. She says otherwise but I could read it right there at the table. There’re no difficulties picking that one out.

Henry Wojdyla (23:33):

It was an absolute pleasure getting to meet your fiancée. And Helen was just tremendous. But yes, I am a taken man. In fact, I have to credit my wife for introducing me to [inaudible 00:23:46]. If it wasn’t for her, I would not know the PD goodness and the campfire in your mouth, deliciousness that is [inaudible 00:23:53]. But I do think Corey, again, just to bring some of these things back together, maybe the bigger picture in terms of the office work environment is that we’ve been historically getting around the wrong water coolers. It’s about schlepping the work. All the agita that is getting to and from as opposed to…

Henry Wojdyla (24:14):

I think one of the most powerful things, honestly, is the ability to share my screen because I can share my screen with colleagues and we can collaborate in real time. And weirdly enough, some of the key team members of my group, Chris Howard, Chris you’ve had the chance to meet, we are most productive when we actually just get on zoom and screen share. We don’t typically actually do video like what we’re doing now with each other, but we screen-share. And it’s imminently powerful because we can collaborate in real time. And I think that’s the water cooler to get around. It’s one. There’re others as well. But I get it.

Henry Wojdyla (24:52):

On the one hand, part of me understands where Tim Cook’s coming from and not because of the sunk cost bias or the hugely enormous Norman Foster-designed expensive campus. But what does become apparent is that there is something about culture for larger companies in particular, but it’s not necessarily about the headaches of getting to and from work. That’s not really what the culture should be built around. Like I’ve said earlier, I think the next year and a half to two years for a whole host of reasons, negotiating power, real estate leases coming up and due, it’s going to be extremely interesting to watch how these market dynamics play out in terms of the top 20% and what their relationship is with their employers.

Chris Beall (25:39):

So you know that we had a whole episode with Tom Zheng. Where does Tom live? I’m not sure. I think it’s Toronto moving to Ottawa. Where are Tom and I every single day for an hour of my time? The most precious hour of my workday every day is spent in the tender arms of my data concierge, letting my curiosity explore what might be true that I don’t know about. And we’ve never met, but we have a very close relationship, as close as I think it’s possible in a working relationship frankly, and it’s all through screen-sharing. We keep the video on because we think it’s a little earthy and it’s fun.

Chris Beall (26:22):

And I’m often, I’ll admit it, I’m sometimes still in my robe at that point. It’s only 11:00 AM. If Hugh Hefner can do it, why not Chris Beall? But the idea of being able to do something as deep as that. Think about how deep that is. We’re getting down into… We’re taking 60, 70 million rows of data and finding truths in there that we didn’t know were there. And we’ve never met but we do screen share about an hour a day.

Henry Wojdyla (26:53):

I would make a case that the screen share may be the most intimate business relationship I’m going to have in today’s world, more so than the video.

Chris Beall (27:00):

I agree.

Henry Wojdyla (27:01):

Because you’re putting your work product up and forward.

Chris Beall (27:06):

Well, you know how I sell ConnectAndSell. It’s pretty simple. I get on with somebody and I say, “Would you like to see how we manage our own company using ConnectAndSell?” And everybody says, “Yes.” And I just do a screen share and I bring up live how we’re doing. I’ve never looked at it by the way. I make a point of never knowing what’s going to pop up on the screen because it’s more fun. We can all be surprised together. They’re surprised that anybody at all could be having a hundred, whatever conversations. In a day, it might be 40 or 50. My surprise is, “Gosh, I didn’t know Rob was killing it today like this. He stuffed five meetings already and it’s only nine o’clock,” or whatever it is. So it is that, that screen share is so much more intimate than the video.

Chris Beall (27:51):

The video is nice and all, but it’s a little unnerving for some people, but the screen share is true sharing. There it is. It’s the screen. It’s the work. It’s the meaning of this thing. Now let’s dig in. It invites faster, deeper, more honest digging in, I think, than any whiteboard. And I made this point on another comment on LinkedIn. I have a hard time keeping them straight because I do it very early in the morning when I’m not fully awake. It probably shows in the writing. But one of the points that Helen reminded me of the other day is when you’re in the physical office, certain people physically dominate. That shouldn’t surprise anybody that that’s true, but it should shock anybody who thinks it’s good. It’s not good. It’s not good.

Chris Beall (28:38):

If you’re the person who can physically dominate a meeting and you learned those tricks on the playground as a kid because that’s where you learn them. You learn physical dominance on the playground. And then you’re applying that at work, you’re robbing the group of value from the participation of those who are physically dominated. And Henry, you’re not a small guy. I can practice physical dominance pretty well. Corey tends to keep a baseball bat behind him in his office just in case anybody doesn’t know what he’s all about. And we feel okay about the step up. Actually, it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all.

Chris Beall (29:20):

Somebody recounted today that somebody who is blind was using ConnectAndSell today using some screen technology, not using our mobile app by the way which actually is designed to be used in a car and by people who can’t see or can’t see as well, but had a great experience. What I thought about is, “Wow, this isn’t happening in the office. If was in the office, I don’t care what you say your values are. That person who can’t see with their eyes to find their way around is at a fundamental cultural disadvantage that they have to overcome.” And that is not true when we’re even just talking to each other. And the screen share is a little tricky because something’s got to… Maybe the screen-share doesn’t work so well for a person who’s blind, but I can tell you the physical office is nasty. It’s just bad.

Henry Wojdyla (30:10):

Look, zoom fatigue is real, but I personally believe that zoom fatigue is largely when people have to put on these so-called zoom mullet of nice top, maybe if anything below, but that’s of really no value. It’s really what’s on the screen. It’s the work product. It’s the honesty to show what you’ve been working on. And I think there’s a real actually very beautiful distillation that goes on in the ability to actually collaborate, truly collaborate with people by sharing screens, sharing work product, sharing thinking because that’s what really work product is.

Henry Wojdyla (30:41):

It’s really your thinking around whatever is the problem you’re trying to solve. Zoom, it doesn’t really matter which platform. It’s the idea that you could actually collaborate in real time. It doesn’t matter that they’re either on the other side of the cubicle, which actually in that case, they’re going to probably bias to walking around and looking at your screen, which isn’t really actually as productive. So I think there’s a lot of really powerful dynamics are going to begin to unfold here over time. They’re starting to happen now because we’ve been talking about them, but give it, again, 18 to 24 months, maybe less. And I think we’re going to be in an entirely different environment in terms of how the top tier, that Pareto principle, 20% Chris that you talk about is really going to be defining the terms of engagement with employers.

Corey Frank (31:25):

Absolutely. Well, great. Well gentlemen, I think collectively we are out of scotch and tequila, and that means-

Henry Wojdyla (31:33):

I still have some more.

Corey Frank (31:34):

We have a little bit more.

Henry Wojdyla (31:34):

It’s a fresh bottle.

Corey Frank (31:37):

You got a whole bottle. Fresh peat goodness there. Absolutely. So I’ll tell you what, I don’t think we’ve had any guests and I don’t anticipate any guests that we’re ever going to have on Market Dominance Guys where we have this hierarchy of IQs where I don’t bring up the rear. And I think this is also no exception to this one, Henry. So I always tell Chris that I prodded him to nefariously start this program on the books so I can suck all these ideas and use them in my businesses. And today is no exception with another three or four pages of notes. So I get the front row seat.

Henry Wojdyla (32:13):

I’m doing the same thing. I’m doing the same thing, Corey. I copy and steal religiously.

Corey Frank (32:19):

It’s wonderful. And it’s great to have you part of the Market Dominance team for the markets. We sound like we’re an English company now, markets dominant team. Maybe it’s a little bit more European.

Chris Beall (32:27):

Markets, maths. Are we going to talk about maths?

Corey Frank (32:31):

Maybe your friend Jerry Hill, maybe he will have another one on the other side and we’ll change the spelling of one of those words to make it more UK, Queen’s English if you will. So Henry, thank you very much for the time. I am sure this is not the last time that you’re going to be on the Market Dominance Guys. You have way too many great ideas rolling around there. And I just love the interchange between you and Chris and that’s something for all of our market dominance listeners to look forward to. So until next time, this is Corey Frank with Chris Beall and Henry Wojdyla at the Market Dominance Guys.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This week, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank are into part two of their three-part conversation with Henry Wojdyla, Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. And what a conversation it is! Chris was surprised to discover Henry had binge-listened to every Market Dominance Guys’ podcast in one weekend. You might wonder why the rush until you hear the questions Henry was wrestling with while attempting to finetune his business: “How can I systematize what I’m doing?” “How can I maximize the efficacy of the sales practitioner?” “How can we create systems that are somehow universal?” Right here on Market Dominance Guys, Henry found what he was looking for!

—-more—-

One answer came from Chris’ advice about what you lead with when you are that invisible stranger calling a prospect: Do you immediately trot out your company’s value? Or do you attempt to establish trust first? Henry confesses, “I was obsessed with the idea of leading with value.” He says his approach was data-driven, data-forward. But as Chris has repeated in his discussions with other guests, “Trust always has to precede presenting your value.” Henry is a true believer now in establishing trust first and restates it this way: “You create trust by essentially alleviating the pain of who you are as the attacking entity.” Join Henry, Corey, and Chris as they explore more about calming a prospect’s fear of cold callers on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Lead That Cold Call With Trust, Not Value.”

 

About Our Guest

Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (02:07):

Well, we talk a lot about, there’s only really three things you can do in business from a strategy perspective. You can do something with your current situation and move it from a position to a better position. You can see who you have together as team members or board members or capital and do something different with those people. Or it sounds like what you’ve done clearly is take what you have and make it run better, faster, cheaper, which is expanded the bottleneck in some way with your ability to kind of replicate in this iron man concept that [inaudible 00:02:40] talks about.

Henry Wojdyla (02:40):

Mm-hmm (affirmative) I think that’s an interesting way to parse that earlier question. And to your point, a hundred percent. I think I’ve been an absolutely obsessed with figuring out what are best practices and putting best practices on top of each other, in a way that’s cohesive. You can’t just apply maybe one system that doesn’t necessarily align with another, but we’ve been very judicious in the way we look at things. I’d say from a business perspective, if I was going to really simplify it, one of my theories I’m trying to play out over a period of years is how can I shift from opex to capex or operating expenses to capital expenses. And the way I’m doing that is by really heavily investing in systems, which can both be literal systems in terms of technological systems, but also systems of practice and systematizing the way in which I operate.

Henry Wojdyla (03:26):

And I think one of the things I’m really keenly desirous to prove out here in the coming years, I think with Chris, it’s going to be very interesting ride here over the next 12 to 18 months with ConnectAndSell is how can we really maximize the efficacy of the sales practitioner. And to your point earlier, Corey, about the way to apply and readapt business models into other either industries, another way that’s something too that I’ve kind of been always cognizant of in the back of my mind that we could templatize this approach. On the one hand, you’re hearing me talk very, very specifically about the dynamics and the realities of the TAM that I focus on, but the systems in which we get there are largely replicable to entirely different industries or sectors.

Corey Frank (04:12):

Sure. Certainly the industries. When you dominate and as you continue to dominate the medical space for the asset class for real estate to medical buildings, again, this is part of what you do in your business, but are there designs the same template can be applied to other kinds of broader types of commercial real estate as well, correct?

Henry Wojdyla (04:32):

Absolutely. In many ways, there’s a broader, theoretical discussion that I think Chris has had been [inaudible 00:04:38] on that just recently on LinkedIn, but we’ve had some conversations about other property types that we’ve been picking particularly on commercial office. That’s a different topic for probably a different podcast. Suffice to say, yes, it absolutely can be applied to different industries. And that’s been something that I’ve been, like I said earlier, I’m cognizant about, how can we create systems that are really somewhat universal in their nature.

Henry Wojdyla (05:02):

And one of the things that’s been floating around the back of my mind is wouldn’t it be interesting to not just harvest the physical assets, the physical real estate, the bricks and mortar, but actually go out and acquire these local and regional ownership groups at the corporate level, because then you can actually get some of the other services that you need to really operate a portfolio of assets, things like asset management, property management, leasing. These are terms obviously in our world, but you can go out and harvest companies in the exact same strategy that we’re doing it. So there’s broader principles at play. And like I said earlier, I think really one of the theories I have is that I think you can go a long ways with capital investment as opposed to operating expense investment in terms of necessarily growing headcount. I’ve always said from day one, when I start this business, I will never consider the success of this business based on a head count. Ever

Corey Frank (05:54):

Absolutely. And I think with ConnectAndSell and certainly the marketing that they have that’s part of what I want to focus on is that leverage and ConnectAndSell what’s been able to do for you. But you bring up an interesting point. And maybe this is a good segue too, because Chris, we have seen now with the economy on the uptick a little bit, and certainly the announcement from Apple, that they’re requiring their folks in the office, what, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, I think it was. Kind of an odd amount of days. It’s like why not just make it three concurrent days, if you’re going to do something, maybe there’s a method to that madness.

Chris Beall (06:29):

They’re trying to get some gesture out, I don’t know what it is.

Corey Frank (06:31):

It’s got to be something like that. But certainly that’s where I was leaning into the commercial real estate is that as broadly lucrative, Chris and I have done a number of episodes certainly on, especially when COVID first hit about the need for my three-pound brain to be next to somebody’s five-pound brain. And what, within that six-foot proximity, I think it is, and how critical that some employers still feel that that is correct, Chris.

Chris Beall (06:59):

Yeah. I actually commented on the Apple thing. It’s kind of funny. I just put a LinkedIn comment out there yesterday on what I think is… Well, as I said, Apple will find themselves on the wrong side of history and employers like ourselves are essentially, I will say with vis-a-vis, our employees are now ultimately no more powerful than we are. Vis-a-vis our customers. It’s the same game. As employees have become full-on customers of the corporations they work for. And that sea change will not ever change. That is a done deal. It’s been coming for a long time, but I needed a tsunami to wash the beach away and expose the bluff. And now it’s a big step function and the employees are up there on the top of the bluff. The main players are down on the beach, wondering when the next tsunami is going to show up.

Chris Beall (07:51):

So these statements of you got to be in the office, beg the question of who you is and willing to include their top 20%. And the answer is pretty simple. Only if they want to. So top 20% used to do all sorts of things, make all sorts of compromises, oh, we’ll go live on Mercer Island because it has a great school system, blah, blah, blah. And it’s close enough to Microsoft. Well, and it’s close enough to Microsoft is no longer a relevant consideration. So now the question is [inaudible 00:08:23] like Mercer island live there? And if you like Quail Creek, Arizona go live there. It’s like, you can live wherever you want, work wherever you want if you’re a top 20% knowledge worker today and it makes the union movements of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s look like nothing in terms of power, because the unions were always bustable mathematically.

Chris Beall (08:47):

They had a serious problem, which is the workers needed the money. They needed to make that paycheck. And you can provide some insurance, strength in numbers kind of insurance, but you can’t provide enough insurance to have them make another hand gesture to the employers and continue that with a lot of stare-down power. There’s issues. The stare-down power of the modern top 20% employee and knowledge work is right now infinite, and it’s infinite and growing, which is even more interesting. And all employers should take note. Now, one of the things we really like about, accidentally by the way, about our own product is it makes it fun to work from home with family. So Cheryl Turner who’s been on this show, goes to the park with her three year old and they play on the swings while she talks to CEOs, that would be work-life balance in reality, that is work and life truly coming together synergistically to support each other without sacrifice of either. She is the best cold caller in the world, talking to CEOs.

Chris Beall (09:54):

And I bet she’s a heck of a mom, too, playing with her three-year-old. She can drive her 11-year-old to school, but it’s her work. She’s doing it while she’s driving and talking to CEOs. So technology’s capabilities that make that easier are going to be a big deal. But the first thing is, man, these executives running these companies got to get over themselves. They do not have the strength, the capacity, the staying power to tell their top 20% of their employees screw you, I’m going to tell you where you’re going to live, I’m going to tell you where you’re going to spend your time, on the road going back and forth to work, I’m going to tell you which days you have to be there because otherwise the whole thing doesn’t happen.

Chris Beall (10:35):

At least Apple’s right on that. That has to be Monday something, something, it can’t become whenever you want because those other three-pound brains won’t be there. So that’s idiotic. So they’re at least trying, but what they’re trying can’t be accomplished. Now, the other thing is for those who care, this is the real estate thing here, the conference business and the real estate around conferences and around meeting each other somewhere nice, that business is going to go crazy. That business is going to see a renaissance that is unheard of in the history of hospitality. And it’s because there’s never been anything other than jet air travel in the history of hospitality that caused every place to be in place online. And this makes every place in play because guess what? We already have jet air travel. So every nice place to get together is suddenly in play competing with those office campuses.

Chris Beall (11:33):

And I can tell you who’s going to win. The nice places you go just to be with people are going to be the kind of funny place that had, as my mother would always say, that high school, is that a prison or a national guard armory. That’s what she’d always say. They make those buildings like they’re one or the other. Look at the average corporate campus has those kinds of qualities. Whereas the four seasons doesn’t. The Rosewood, the Edgewater, these places are really, really nice. You want to go meet, go meet there. So there’s a dynamic that I’ve said before on the show, people are under betting like crazy on the work from home, work from anywhere top 20% do whatever they want dynamic. That under bet right now I would say will turn out historically to have been at least off by a factor of five.

Chris Beall (13:03):

If you want to make money now just pay attention to this. Ignore Henry. He does hard work. He has his brain and everything, he has to think. This is the thing you can do with no brain whatsoever.

Henry Wojdyla (13:15):

Well, Chris, it’s interesting that you’re mentioning, and this has actually nothing to do with the fact that I’m in the commercial real estate space generally, or I should really say specifically. I think real estate is going to have a huge piece of this. And we all heard a million times that COVID accelerated trends that are already in place. This is clearly true here. I think in the case of commercial office space, to be clear, totally different from medical office space. If it’s not mission-critical, it’s fungible. And what’s really interesting is I think the timeframe in which employee dynamic is going to play out in part, not in total, but a key variable is going to be the loss cost bias or sunk cost bias.

Henry Wojdyla (13:54):

And what you’re going to see, I think, over time is as these very expensive office leases begin to expire and office leases in commercial space tend to run in larger markets, 5 to 10 years, maybe average it out to 3 to 7 as a range, but the Jamie Diamonds of the world, these large CEOs, Tim Cook’s Apple, of course they own their facilities, they’re a little bit different, but at the end of the day, it’s as these leases begin to expire, I think there’ll be a little bit less pressure on the C-suite to force people to come into an office just because they’re paying rent on it. And I won’t [inaudible 00:14:33] to all the phenomenal points Chris that you’ve made, but I think really the, as you said, the top 20% is going to really have… Really the world is their oyster. I think there’ll largely be able to dictate over time increasingly over time, partly because of the real estate dynamics, where they can work with increasing conviction.

Henry Wojdyla (14:52):

And as you’ve said here and elsewhere, and if you think about just the tremendous amount of loss of time, and if there’s one asset we know that we can never get back is time. We can get money back theoretically and frequently you can, you can get other investments back, but you can never get time back. And I just have always been amazed that people are willing to sacrifice so much of their lives, maybe they don’t have a choice in many cases, about the commutation that they take on every day.

Henry Wojdyla (15:17):

And that’s something that’s a really big expense, not just for the individual, but actually for their employer. And while it seems amazingly obvious, somehow it seems to be lost in a lot of the C-suite at least in the larger corporations. It’s kind of an institutional imperative in a different way and I’ve alluded to that earlier in terms of the decision or not decision to essentially sell assets. It’s really the large-scale kind of institutional imperative, the inertia is something that’s going to have to kind of take place over a period of time now. So it’s going to be a very interesting gear shift over the next 18, 24 months in terms of how this plays out.

Corey Frank (15:51):

Well, isn’t it fascinating that the tech stack, particularly what we’ve talked about a lot ConnectAndSell, reading signals from noise parallels, that same type of restriction or coming together of efficiencies that you have the top 20% team member now who can thumb his nose at his employer and now can do what Cheryl’s doing at 20%, 50%, 100% higher than she was doing working for their employer by doing it now. And I have the balance to do it with my child 15 feet away on the jungle gym.

Henry Wojdyla (16:33):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (16:34):

Yeah. And it brings up another point, which is if employers have got to learn that their employees are our customers, that means they have to play a different trust game than they’re playing now. And one thing we haven’t spoken of here that Henry you said was a pivotal moment of flip the pancake moment for you was you went through the process of kind of finding this and that and eventually wandering into it or being lured in or whatever to this Market Dominance Guys thing. And you need to tell the story of the binge-listening because you’re the second person ever to do it that I know of. And I sure hope anybody else who so interesting that you binge listen to a Market Dominance Guys, please call Corey Frank at about 11:00 PM Pacific or later because he’s free then to talk to you.

Chris Beall (17:23):

So you had a bit of a moment regarding this question that we’ve explored a lot, which is what do you lead with? Once you get past fear, what do you lead with? Value or trust? And the tradition in sales is to lead with value, which is in the first part of a relationship, a failing proposition because the other party is not ready for a value. That is trust proceeds value. You can’t listen to value cleanly because in order to listen to value, I have to be prepared to confess my problems. And I do not confess to somebody I don’t trust. So that’s the little broken triangle that sales was built on for years and years and years. The idea of being well, you’re not ever going to see me again anyway, so [inaudible 00:18:09] some value, right? That’s it. That’s what I call the tragedy of the crossroads.

Chris Beall (18:13):

The sales were made at the crossroads. The caravaners going one way, the trader is at the crossroads. You’re never going to see him again. The trader has superior knowledge of the goods. They sell you crap at the maximum price. And the poor caravaner has got to get going before the snow starts flying in the mountains. So there’s this old… I’ll call that the old sales dynamic. The modern sales dynamic is nobody gets away from anybody just like these employers. You can’t get away from your employees because you’re now made of employees. Used to be made of a bunch of bricks and steel and access to raw materials and all this stuff. It’s like, I’m sorry, but now you’re kind of made out of your employees. That is the actual structural material of your company. And if you don’t trust them and they don’t trust you, you got bricks, you ain’t got no mortar.

Chris Beall (18:59):

And it’s a real serious, serious problem. And Henry so tell the audience about this trust thing because you told me about your eye-opening on that. And it was surprising and delightful to me.

Henry Wojdyla (19:12):

Well, I really have to credit the both of you really, for that kind of pivotal moment. But I was way over-indexing on… I was obsessed with the idea of leading with value. And again, you’ve kind of heard me outlining schematic format, how we’ve tried to really get super hyper granular with our very defined TAM and part of the reason for that was well, if we could really know who we’re addressing, we can really kind of customize the data and the information and the sharing of knowledge on a very bespoke level. There’s still real value in being able to do that. But the problem is you have a counterparty on the other end of the phone who’s not ready to listen to that.

Corey Frank (19:52):

So you were front-loading in your screenplay, all the benefits of your firm and all the cold cognitions of your stats and your yields. Is that what you’re saying?

Henry Wojdyla (20:06):

Not exactly. It was definitely vectorally in that direction. It was more so I would say more data-driven and not so much about us as a firm. In many ways, I would say probably one of my faults is I probably tried to templatize my impression of how people sell and usually do the inverse, which is kind of a simplistic way to look at it. But leading with trying to beat my chest about who I am or who Real Source Group is I don’t think is of frankly any value to someone that’s not familiar with us.

Corey Frank (20:37):

That’s why I want to understand from your perspective, because you ask five different folks in a firm, they lead with value. Some could lead with status as my value, some could lead with longevity of my firm as value. So that’s why I want to just try to deconstruct that.

Henry Wojdyla (20:53):

We were data forward. It was data forward. So it was a hyper-focus on data that was then very finitely aggregated and to different components and then partitioned out to people that we thought that those particular data points would be most relevant too. I still think that that’s of some aid, but as opposed to it being the tip of the spear, when it really can’t be received, the idea of leading with trust. I guess in some ways I would almost say, just talking about binge-listening, I’m actually kind of taken back to the Oren Klaff episodes that you had.

Henry Wojdyla (21:23):

You could say that the cold call is the micro condition of the larger psychological play Oren Klaff does in the pitch. When you’ve got the disparity of the crocodile brain with a higher functioning of the brain. And clearly, in the context of cold call, that is a completely a defensive posture of the part of the recipient. So as Chris has outlined many, many times the ability to create trust by essentially alleviating the pain of who you are as the attacking entity, it’s almost hard to kind of overstate the… Well, speaking of value there’s value there. There’s value in creating trust, but it’s an entirely different dynamic.

Corey Frank (22:02):

So the initial cold calls you’d make BC and 80 right before…

 

 

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This week, the Market Dominance Guys’ dynamic duo of Chris Beall and Corey Frank are back together again, talking with Henry Wojdyla, the dynamic Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. His company’s special business niche? The direct acquisition of healthcare facilities, particularly medical offices and surgical centers around the country. Recently, Henry was introduced to ConnectAndSell’s sales-acceleration system, and from there, he discovered Chris’ blogs and then this podcast. He is now taking the theories and techniques of marketing domination, which he learned from listening to every Market Dominance Guys’ episode and employing them to dominate his own market.

—-more—-

Listening in on their conversation, you’ll discover that Chris, Corey, and Henry are kindred spirits and speak a similar business language: the laws of sales thermodynamics; the self-referential dynamics of markets; feedback-loop dynamics; and tactical empathy. What these men also share is a true belief in the practice of having real conversations with prospects over what can often be a prolonged period time, so that when a prospect is ready to buy, the relationship that has been developed will lead to a sale. Borrow ideas from their insights in Chris and Corey’s three conversations with Henry Wojdyla, beginning with this Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear.”

About Our Guest

Henry Wojdyla is Founder and Principal of RealSource Group. RealSource Group is retained by institutional real estate investors, enhancing their speed and surety of execution through “off-market” acquisitions of medical office buildings and surgical centers.

 

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Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (02:08):

Okay. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and Chris Beall, the sage of sales. Today, Chris, it’s a special episode. It is the two-year anniversary of the Market Dominance Guys. This little exercise, where we stumbled upon a litany of my problems that I wanted to solve in the sales universe and I went to you, the sage of sales, and you systematically checked the box for me. It turned into an idea for a book, and then a podcast and then, oh, so much more. Then our new friend, our guest today, Henry Wojdyla from RealSource Group here up in Colorado, right Henry? I think that’s where.

Henry Wojdyla (02:51):

Denver.

Corey Frank (02:52):

In Denver. Henry is the principal of RealSource Group and is on the buy-side of real estate assets and helps focus really into the capital placements into a really tight niche. We always talk about the riches and the niches on this podcast. Henry’s got a great story about how he is employing the theory of market dominance into practical market dominance today, using some of the techniques that we’ve talked about for the last couple of years so welcome, Henry.

Henry Wojdyla (03:22):

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Corey Frank (03:23):

I think it’s helpful, Chris, how did Henry come into our little market dominance universe? Cause I think we have your family members, your son, and I got my mom. I think we got about seven subscribers, eight subscribers. Henry was the eighth that just stumbled into our world here. How did this happen and how did Henry come to be a guest here today?

Chris Beall (03:45):

Well, first of all, I have to correct you and thanks so much, Corey. Thanks for being here, Henry. There was a doe walking out here in my fiance’s forest, as we call it, the next door lot. I call it Helen’s forest because a queen should have a forest and she has two fawns so I signed up all three. We’re now up to 10 people listening to Market Dominance Guys. I don’t think they will ever be guests, though. They seem to be very, very quiet and they’ve got a lot of work to do out there. There’s a lot of stuff to eat.

Corey Frank (04:15):

[crosstalk 00:04:15] ethereal too. Wouldn’t you say? Through the thermodynamics of sales, they let that do the talking for them.

Chris Beall (04:23):

Exactly, exactly. So how Henry and I came together from my standpoint was pretty simple. Somebody said, “Hey, we got this Sandler deal. We have a deal with Sandler so we have a Sandler client. He seems a little different.” I said, “What does that mean?” “Well, he wants an integration. An integration? We don’t do those. “Should we charge him for it?” Yeah, better charge him for it. We don’t want to do integration for something like 5,000 dials for a dollar 398. Are you kidding me?

Chris Beall (04:52):

Well, I looked a little bit closer and then thankfully for me, Henry said he wanted us to talk and I had a conversation with him and he just blew my mind, just totally blew my mind. It was like wait a second. I’m wandering around and looking here, I’m doing, I’m looking at, oh, there’s the Tower of Pisa, there’s this, there’s that. Then I wander into this place and there’s Michelangelo painting the ceiling. It’s like holy Molly. I didn’t know anybody knew how to paint ceilings like that.

Chris Beall (05:20):

He’s painting the ceiling by basically taking over an industry that we at ConnectAndSell have done more than blunted our pitch on. It’s actually been maddening for me. I’ve done a test drive at a very large, commercial real estate firm and it went spectacularly well. I won’t name the firm because God knows, I might have to talk to them again someday, but it went really well. They’re calling in these places in Manhattan and basically saying, “You want to sell your building and pay me a commission to do it?” Which Henry is going to tell us why they say that. And it’s just, boom, boom, boom. Things are happening. They’re really professional.

Chris Beall (05:55):

They’re on message, everything’s great. We get to the end and they say, “Well, what’s next?” I said, “Well, this flight school thing is next. It’s going to cost you 9,500 bucks.” They just looked at each other and went, “How do we ever get 9,500 bucks?” I’m thinking you can sell two of these chairs. But that was my experience with commercial real estate. Suddenly, I meet a guy, Henry, who’s got not only just a plan, but he’s executing already on something that when I hear about it, I go, “Oh my God.” We spoke and then we’ve done some work together.

Chris Beall (06:29):

Then he was kind enough to fly up to Seattle and we spent the better part of a day together, not socially distanced properly in a hotel lot. Well, we were half and half. Discovered that he drinks Lagavulin so he’s a stronger man than I but I can drink it, but I’m a weak guy so I’m here with my little Macallan. Anyway, what I realized in talking to Henry was he’s taken something that could have been an idea but I never managed to articulate it about what we’ve been talking about with market dominance, which is time-shift your efforts into, I’ll call it the closing past.

Chris Beall (07:09):

That is take your anticipated closing date, whatever it is, time-shift your activity so that they’re well before that closing day. Build a relationship, build trust, and gather information. Do this systematically across the market because each potential prospect has got a different closing date and you get the famous portfolio. We talk about running overtime, I’ll call it the John Jackson portfolio, but you get it with an information flywheel attached to it that lets you dominate in another dimension.

Chris Beall (07:41):

You dominate in time and relationship with trust, and you dominate with information by using your sales activities to gather information. The combination, as you can tell, me being the old mathematician, I’m always looking for something that multiplies together because through multiplication we make an exponentiation and the really big stuff happens. I was blown away so we’ve been working on something. That’s how we came together. That’s my story. Henry’s story is from a different perspective.

Chris Beall (08:09):

Henry, would you mind telling us the story? Why are you on this crazy podcast with us? You got a Lagavulin and I’ve got a Macallan. We’re ready.

Corey Frank (08:19):

Well, I think essentially, it’s almost a bit of a mirror image of what you just described, Chris. It was again, a somewhat Securitas path of referrals that led me to you. The origin point of the initial referral was me looking for ways in which to speak into multiplication. Multiply myself in a way that I can cover this niche that we’ve built this business around, which is specifically the acquisition, direct acquisition of healthcare facilities, particularly medical office surgical centers around the country.

Corey Frank (08:53):

Although that is a very finite niche, there are still enough assets, prospects, and people and things to know that for one individual to cover on a national basis, it can be a bit challenging. I was determined to figure out a way to multiply myself. The initial thinking was, well, maybe we’ll get a contract. Someone that’s got some senior sales skills and has some experience working with large value increments of investment and use them to leverage myself. That steered us somewhat in the direction of Sandler.

Corey Frank (09:28):

Ultimately, what it did is it got me in your orbit because I was fortunate enough to have someone at that organization say, “Hey, what would the best thing be essentially for you just to make the call yourself?” I said, “Well, precisely that’s what I’m doing, but I’m at my throughput limit right now.” That’s when the introduction to ConnectAndSell was made. After quickly understanding the mathematical implications, what was a lot more exciting to me, although that was impressive, was really the foundational aspects that you and Corey have been talking about because I came across your blog.

Corey Frank (10:02):

I came across Market Dominance Guys, and really, quickly began to understand that there’s something far more profound here than simply a way to make more dials per hour.

Chris Beall (10:12):

Yeah. Tumbling to that is not easy. It’s that you managed to do it pretty darn quickly. The thing that amazed me is you’ve done all this work. When we first met we were talking actually at this fairly low technical level. I mean low in the stack about certain things about making outreach work with ConnectAndSell. We’ve made outreach work with ConnectAndSell in some very interesting ways for some pretty big companies and it’s done just right. We call it talk to sequence and it’s pretty magic, but you had turned outreach into an air traffic control center for you.

Chris Beall (10:46):

But when you think about it, this is what really got me, is your concept was, and nobody’s ever attempted this before, as far as I know, which is one man, one market, dominance. That is truly the Iron Man theme. I think back to the Iron Man comics, the movie, the whole bit, as it’s one person with the Iron Man suit can go do so many things so fast, and they’re so precise that person can dominate an entire movie, so to speak, or the villains or whatever. The idea of one person dominating all by themselves a significant chunk of the economy that’s identifiable, that you can put a name on, you can put a number on.

Chris Beall (11:31):

I don’t know how big that number is, Henry, but I’m suspecting it’s got to start with the B because the folks behind you with the capitol don’t do stuff that doesn’t start with at least a B and sometimes they have to put other words in front of the B, commas and all sorts of stuff like that, right?

Chris Beall (12:28):

So it’s not a tiny market. It’s not like a banana stand. Yeah, I could probably go, if I really put my mind to it and dominate the Port Townsend Farmer’s Market for hard goat cheese. Actually, I couldn’t because I know who does that at the Chimacum dairy place and she’s so good. No, I couldn’t displace her but I could come up with something that’s tiny, but you’re not talking tiny. You’re talking how many interesting assets are out there to be acquired?

Henry Wojdyla (13:01):

Well, in our universe and we control for a lot of things. So again, right off the bat, we’ve definitionally siphoned down the commercial real estate world into a property type or asset class, if you will that is healthcare-oriented again, as medical office and surgical centers. That definition area begins to cordon off quite a bit of the inventory that would be under the broader commercial real estate umbrella. From there, we then began to control for certain factors, in terms of size of assets, quality of assets, ownership or counterparty types.

Henry Wojdyla (13:33):

I can give you some specifics. In our world, we don’t particularly care about properties that are less than 20,000 square feet just because you’re probably never going to get to evaluation that is going to be large enough to make sense for our book of clients. You don’t get any economies of scale, in terms of the capital placement. As it relates to the quality we’re looking for, generally speaking, higher-quality assets, which is a fuzzy term, but we know what to look for. It’s a combination of just the physical infrastructure, the quality of the tenancy.

Henry Wojdyla (14:01):

Then we also specifically look for the type of counterparties we don’t want to interact with. In our world ironically, what we don’t want to do is actually be calling upon health systems or hospitals. The reason for that is that they, like many large institutional type owners, frequently have two factors that don’t work in our favor. We’ve identified that early on in this business. One is they are slow to move, generally speaking. They also, typically for many institutional reasons, don’t tend to make, what I’ll call, more entrepreneurial-driven decisions.

Henry Wojdyla (14:34):

And what that means in this world is they are not going to sell in an off-market basis. Somebody in accounting and somebody in finance needs to have some version of a CYA where they can say, ” Well, we went out, and we made a market, and we got X number of offers and we feel comfortable with the price.” It doesn’t mean they couldn’t have gotten the same price directly, or frankly, probably for the better price, when you began to think about all the frictional costs we take out of the equation.

Henry Wojdyla (14:57):

Setting that aside, we quickly learned that was a type of counterparty that didn’t work well for us. None of this is negative and says that this doesn’t speak ill of those institutions or groups. It’s just we had to quickly distill down where is our fertile ground? When we do all of those things, getting now back to your question, there’s really only about 5,000 properties across the country that we care about, maybe a little bit more. That’s about it.

Corey Frank (15:22):

Yeah. It’s interesting, Henry, I think you’re leading the witness there, Chris, about how tight and small this market is with Henry, right? We led off by saying the riches are in the niches. I think when one of our earlier episodes, and this has got to be in the first six, eight months or so and Henry has them all categorized so you probably know this. Remember this, Henry, is we talked about how entrepreneurs oftentimes make the mistake, repeatedly encouraged by VCs, by the way, to describe their TAM, their total addressable market, as really vast, as some sort of advantage.

Corey Frank (15:58):

But it’s really a huge disadvantage, right, Chris? Because the tighter your market, your first market, the better off that you are because you actually have a better chance of your product actually solving a problem that your market has. Correct?

Chris Beall (16:14):

Yeah. The problem with big markets is they’re generally not markets. A market is defined as a set. Essentially, you can reduce it to a list and order it in whatever way you want, but a set of entities, folks, whatever, that if you sell to one, it reduces the cost and risk of selling to every other one in that set. As soon as you come to one that doesn’t fit that model, that if you sell to one, that one is not advantaged. You don’t have an advantage selling it out. When you have to kick them out of the market, they don’t count.

Chris Beall (16:50):

This is a Jeffrey Moore definition of a market. It puts a skin around it. It’s almost surface tension. Actually, the math is identical to surface tension, but thank God most people listening to this podcast don’t know the math of surface tension so they’re not plagued with the dreams I have at night. How surface tension works it holds itself together because every molecule in there is attracted to every other one in a certain way. Water is funny like this. It’s this polar molecule, that one water molecule gets close to another one, it orients itself so they like each other.

Chris Beall (17:24):

Well, if you drop them from the sky, they make little balls. It’s called raindrops. It’s cool. They’re not actually shaped like this. They’re shaped like little balls because it holds together. Markets are like that. And by definition or by effect, it’s hard to make a raindrop above a certain size. You can’t make a raindrop the size of a 747, much less the shape of one. It just doesn’t work. It breaks apart into pieces and then the pieces hold together. That’s how markets behave. Almost by definition, true markets are always relatively smaller than people think.

Chris Beall (17:57):

So to your VC, what you should be saying is, “There’s a set of markets that we’ve identified, if you need a huge investment, and they’re related to each other by a common set of needs that aren’t perfectly overlapping, but are similar enough that one product with small modifications can jump from market to market.” And that market dominance is key because I can’t get to all of them unless I can take one because the only safe position in a market is dominance so I have to go take a market.

Chris Beall (18:26):

We had a whole episode on this. I was talking about it with somebody today. Take one and then go, “Okay, what’s next?” Then as soon as the boulder is rolling downhill. And by the way, the guy I was talking to, Matt Forbes, who you know well, said, “You’ve never used the boulder analogy on the Market Dominance Guys.” I said, “Well, Forbes, your memory tends to be pretty poor so maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I really don’t know but here’s the analogy I think I used. I think I know where I was walking in the San Francisco Airport when we were talking about it.”

Chris Beall (18:54):

But the idea is when you are trying to dominate a market, it’s like pushing a boulder up a hill. At the beginning, you’re at the bottom and the hill’s like this. It’s super steep, and super hard, and you got to work like a dog, and you keep thinking it’s going to roll back on you, and all these things are going on. Your feet are slipping. Your hands are sweaty, you’re afraid. As you start to get farther up the hill, the hill gets a little, the hills are like this like these volcanoes we have here like that. Then it gets a little less steep and a little less steep.

Chris Beall (19:23):

Then you start to feel like, “Hey, I can move this thing.” There’s a point where it starts rolling downhill by itself. Don’t run next to it. Go get another boulder at the bottom of another hill because you were strong enough to do one. The key to markets’ dominance, maybe we should have called this Markets’ Dominance Guys, but I think people would have just… They already look at us funny, Corey, so it’s not going to help to do that stuff. But markets’ dominance is the key because unless you’re offering, can address at some level or provide leverage at some level across multiple markets, you were an idiot to build it. That’s the definition of a product.

Chris Beall (20:03):

A product is something that can have currency or meaning in multiple markets with some modifications. Now, maybe the modification is too big or that the resulting product is too low value. A Tesla as a doorstop is a weird cross-market move. They make great doorstops, by the way, but so do a lot of other things. A Tesla to tow an electric airplane in up to 60 miles an hour to reduce the amount of battery you need in the airplanes, the airplane could go 600 miles instead of 400 miles. That is a pretty cool use of a Tesla. Now, that’s a very defined market.

Chris Beall (20:41):

How many electric airplanes do we need to get going 60 miles an hour so that we know we don’t have to use that heavy battery to get them going? The battery can stay on the ground and the plane can go in the air. We don’t know yet. That’s a nascent market but it is an adjacent market to the electric automobile market. The product itself would work fine with a little hook on the back for the cable and stuff like that. People tend to think of markets, I would say funny or not very precisely. Henry thinks of markets super precisely.

Chris Beall (21:11):

What I just defined is I’m sure of this following fact. The more buildings he buys, the easier it’s going to be to convince somebody to sell a building through him. Right, Henry?

Henry Wojdyla (21:22):

Right. Absolutely.

Chris Beall (21:23):

Because they see themselves like each other. It’s actually the same principle when we say tactical empathy and a cold call. We want the other party to know that we see the world through their eyes. A market is a means by which each sale causes everybody else to see the world through the eyes of the person who bought and it makes it easier for them to buy. [crosstalk 00:21:43] It’s powerful stuff.

Corey Frank (21:48):

Well, we’ve talked about one of the laws of sales, thermodynamics and market dominance is that the more traction I get, the less there is for my competition, and the more friction my competition in essence has, especially when I do proper follow-up. I’d imagine, Henry, that as you started this process that the exhaust or the signals, not the noise, as Chris talks about oftentimes.

Corey Frank (22:14):

But the signals that you’re getting from these folks, who aren’t quite ready to engage in a conversation yet, but they may be ready next month or next quarter, is that’s part of your market dominance process, correct?

Henry Wojdyla (22:30):

Absolutely. That actually ties into the broader concept that Chris mentioned a little while ago of the air traffic control piece. Part of the reason I needed the air traffic control was actually to really helped me manage in two completely different capacities, two ends of the pipeline or the spectrum. On the one end, we’ve got the top of funnel, if we want to call it a such, which is the out there, in the trenches, engaging with market participants at a high volume of number and speed.

Henry Wojdyla (22:58):

On the other end, because of the caliber of the people I typically deal with, they’re usually fairly sophisticated. They typically are high-net-worth individuals. The value of the underlying assets and question, I can’t let any ball ever drop. I have to figure out a way to operate in both ends of the spectrum and the air traffic control piece was a big way to get there. You’re right. Getting signal out of noise is a huge piece of it. We are very cognizant to always try to harvest data, either be it directly, which is of course, the best, by way of having real conversations with people over time.

Henry Wojdyla (23:38):

But also be able to begin to infer data, which speaks to a little bit, although maybe a different point that Chris was making, about the self-refer self-referential dynamics of markets. And as you began to more tightly define them, you begin to identify not just trends, but you can begin to understand what the cohesion is across cohorts. That helps us begin to if we can’t get direct data, make some pretty intelligent, some cases guesses or assignments, if you will, of what I call metadata that we can then begin to overlay upon our TAM. That lets us really get precise in how we cross-cut that, which again, lets us then better message and better address concerns with folks.

Henry Wojdyla (24:21):

If we still haven’t necessarily spoken with them directly, we can begin to partition that messaging in a way that’s meaningful for them. There are all these feedback loops. Chris and I frequently are discussing feedback loop dynamics in many, many different ways and this would be one flavor of that.

Corey Frank (24:37):

Yeah, I like that. It’d be interesting, I think, for the sales nerds who are fans of this kind of show and these types of discussions that we get into a lot, without disclosing too much of the IP. What surprised you being a seasoned real estate asset acquirer in the marketplace for many years when you started looking at one man’s trash is another man’s treasure? And when you looked at this residue, what surprised you that maybe they never taught you about real estate in the past?

Corey Frank (25:05):

They never talked to you about acquisition strategies, or sales or pipeline management, et cetera, that now you can’t unsee it. I think that’s the thing about these laws of sales thermodynamics that we talk about is once you understand in our world, dial to connect, sales ratio, list size, who picks up the phone. Once you see it, you never unsee it, no matter what market you go into. What are some of those that maybe you now see you with these predator goggles that maybe you didn’t in the past?

Henry Wojdyla (25:35):

It’s an interesting question. It’s both specific and broad at the same time. I guess at a certain level, a lot of this has been organically figured out over time by ourselves, myself specifically. There wasn’t really a specific roadmap to get there, per se. As on a somewhat related but separate topic, Chris and I have also had many conversations, including with some other individuals, about really the lack of any sort of guidance or training in this particular industry. A lot of it has been bootstrapped over the course of my career to figure out the signals to look for and the indicators.

Henry Wojdyla (26:08):

It wasn’t really a formalized, in terms of training, no really real training. It was really the necessity being the mother of invention was really the driving force here. I’m not really precisely answering your question, Corey, but a lot of it I think is what’s driven me to get obsessive about capturing and harvesting data. Really beginning to understand our market in a way that is both specific in the aggregate, but also finite in the ways that we can cross-cut it, because it begins to give me the type of traction that I need.

Henry Wojdyla (26:39):

Not necessarily in terms of the engagement with people, but to really understand them even before we ever speak.

 

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This week, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, is again flying solo as he continues his conversation with business intelligence engineer Tom Zheng, an expert in the field of data analysis. Explaining the importance of a data-related topic to this podcast audience, Chris points out, “Everybody who is used to Market Dominance Guys knows we talk sales, sales, sales. But because sales generate a lot of numbers, you need a data concierge to take that information and help you generate potential insights.” As a CEO, Chris is currently using a data concierge to analyze all the numbers his company generates and to make sense of the results. What works best, he says, is to tackle this process one-on-one — the CEO and data concierge only — in order to eliminate company politics.

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This depth of analysis requires skills and tools beyond the use of an Excel spreadsheet. So, on our listeners’ behalf, Chris asks Tom what you should look for when hiring someone to guide you through your data analysis. And then, from his own successful experience working with Tom, Chris adds this advice: “Your data concierge needs to be someone with clear communication skills to explain things to you in terms you can understand.” Obviously, comprehensive data analysis is not a do-it-yourself project for a Chief Executive Officer: There are just not enough hours in a CEO’s day. Thus, the strong recommendation, as the title of this week’s Market Dominance Guys commands, “Get Thee to a Data Concierge!”

Listen to Part 1:

Giving Your Data the Sniff Test

About Our Guest

Tom Zheng, a business intelligence engineer, and independent contractor is a seasoned data guru who specializes in transforming your company’s data into actionable insights. With experience throughout the entire data value chain, from designing robust data ecosystems, implementing automated pipelines, and visualizing results in meaningful ways, Tom’s unique storytelling approach will help you discover those “Aha!” moments needed to challenge traditional thinking and assumptions. He can be reached at (416) 877-5412.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Tom Zheng:

Yeah, I mean, communication is definitely something that one has to develop over time, right. But one of the things that I’ve quickly learned is that people, generally speaking, don’t like to be told what to do or what they need to do. So instead, what I tend to do is I give them the opportunity for them to come to the same conclusion that I wanted them to do in the first place. Right? So for example, you know, like, let’s say if I wanted my girlfriend to clean the kitchen, right. Instead of saying “Hey, please clean the kitchen.” And by the way, I usually clean the kitchen so I can use this analogy. I’ll say, “Hey, doesn’t this kitchen look a little bit dirty to you?” You know? And then you try to get the other person to come to the same conclusion. And then they realize, oh, you know what, you’re right. I got to do this. Right. Or, oh, I got to change my assumption.

Tom Zheng:

So that works out to be a better play usually then directly saying to somebody no, this assumption is flat out wrong. Even if you genuinely believe that you can usually use better language to help the other person drive to this.

Chris Beall:

And that gives them a little bit of time to, you know we say this about cold calling that when you get cold-called your problem is that you’ve been cold called. And so you’re trying to solve that problem by getting off the call, but you have to keep your self-image intact. And the great cold caller takes advantage of that and says, okay, I know that you want to get off this call. They know going in. You want to get off this call with your self-image intact. I will offer you a way to do that. That if you take that way, I’ll get something also, which is the opportunity to say something to you. And so, we teach that, right? I know I’m an interruption in 27 seconds, tell you why I called.

Chris Beall:

And the purpose of that is, one, to get somebody to trust you, which is also very important if you’re going to be a data concierge, you have to be trusted. And two, to give them some time to change their mind about their goal. Their goal is to get off the call with their self-image intact, but maybe their goal could be to be sufficiently curious. It could be changed to be sufficiently curious, to accept a calendar invitation for a meeting.

Chris Beall:

So it seems like as a data concierge, you’re in a funny situation because you can see often what is needed, but just straight up prescribing it so to speak is not going to get the patient to take the medicine. You have to figure out some way without wasting time to let enough time go by with enough, the right kind of input that somebody can shift their mind. And I would imagine the hardest mind shift is away from assumptions that have been baked into the business for a long time. The way we’ve always done things, right. I come up with those all the time in my own business and I go, really for 13 years, we didn’t train anybody how to speak up because our assumption was we’re not that kind of company and as soon as we start doing it, great things happen, right?

Tom Zheng:

Right. I can definitely vouch for any sort of, for example, sales training program such as ConnectAndSell’s Flight School because I myself have received something similar to that in the past, which is training how to sell credit cards. Because when I was in university for one summer, I had to sell credit cards for my summer job. And believe me, Chris, that was the hardest job I’ve ever had. But through continuous training and through learning from your mistakes, you, just a simple change in your wording to make a huge difference, right? I mean, one of the key lessons in credit card selling is never mention the word credit. Don’t mention credit, unless they ask you for it, just say, “Hey, would you be interested in this card?” And if they ask you, “Oh, well, what kind of card is it?” Then you have to tell the truth, but often people won’t.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. So I’m recommending to anybody watching this or listening to Market Dominance Guys, Hey, somehow get yourself a data concierge. And I’m going to make a strong recommendation. Do your interacting with your data concierge one-on-one and don’t do it with any politics in the room. So be alone, be part of that lonely minds club of your own, but know that you’ve got somebody who can discern truths and let you explore truths in the data and who will be both rigorous about how the work is done, but will allow you to kind of come along, right? It’s not going to demand that you make an instantaneous flip of every moment. So that’s, my recommendation is get one of these. And there’s a hard recommendation. I mean, now that I’m doing this, I regret not having had this experience for the past 10 years.

Chris Beall:

Actually, when I started with ConnectAndSell, if all I had done, if all I had done was said “You know, Sean,” to Sean McLaren, “I actually don’t think in my role as the senior vice president of products or chief product officer or whatever the heck I was called, I don’t think I should launch right into the product. I think I need to have somebody work with me and go through the data that the company’s generating and the data that’s in the CRM and try to make sense out of it. Had I done that I probably would have lopped seven years off off of this journey. I think I would have. About seven out of the 10 and we’d be about seven years ahead. And given that time is nobody’s friend in business, time is never your friend. I highly recommend this as an accelerant to your business as a whole.

Chris Beall:

And frankly, as a CEO, you need some power too. Right, you need to have the power of known truths rather than guesses otherwise your own people are going to go “Yeah but that’s not the way we did it yesterday.” You get a lot of “Yeah , but” back to you when you’re a CEO. That’s kind of like everybody’s in the “Yeah, but” department. And all they’re really saying is “yeah, but that’s not the way we did it yesterday.” So folks, are going to take me up on this, brilliant idea that I have. Go get yourself a data concierge. Where should they look? I got lucky. Our VP of customer success and master of intensive test drives, James Townsend kindly introduced me to you. And we didn’t know exactly what we were going to do. And then we kind of I’ll call it, shaped it up as we went along, but it shaped up pretty quickly. Now I think I know the shape, but if somebody is looking for you, but not you, what should they be looking for? And also what should they be avoiding like the plague?

Tom Zheng:

You want to be able to trim the fat as much as you can and avoid middleman, right? The simplest way for anyone to go about this is obviously to be able to go to a consulting firm, contact their partners, say this is what I need. And then you end up with a multi, not a multimillion, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a consultant contract. And that’s not realistically what you want because you have too many people that are in the middle who are interfering with things, right? Ultimately you want flexibility and direct action. So what I would do if I was in the market, looking for someone who could fulfill that data concierge role is somebody who has experience in the entire spectrum of data, which is basically to say data analysis and data engineering, primarily. Data architecture is less needed in my opinion, but for sure you want somebody who has done both data analysis, which is somebody to analyze clean data and data engineering, which is someone to clean up dirty data and to clean data for the analysts to use, right.

Tom Zheng:

But the key thing though, is they should have enough business background to have strong business acumen because you’ll often find people who are very technical, very number savvy, but they don’t understand the bigger picture. So where I would start is looking at people who might’ve gone to business school, let’s say, but ended up focusing on something with a data niche. Right? And so that’s, I think the sweet spot in terms of intersection of the type of skillsets that an ideal candidate would want. Now, to be honest, where could you go for this? That I’m not entirely sure yet. I’m not sure there’s exactly a dedicated firm out there who provides data concierge service. Hey, unless maybe I start that firm who knows, right? But simply if you were to, for example, post a job on LinkedIn or on Indeed or something, the skill sets that you would want is generally speaking, the technical experience coming from either a data analyst or a data engineering role, plus, strong business acumen skills.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. I think I’d add one to it. And this is one of those rare cases where an interview can get you a lot more than you would expect, which is you need somebody who can explain something to you in terms you can understand without generalizing to stuff that doesn’t make any difference. And that’s, I don’t know how you find that, but I know how I know that would be a huge mistake is finding somebody who’s got all these other skills, but the skill that a data concierge would have is the ability to work interactively. And that means clear communication and keeping their wits about them. And knowing also, this is an interesting skill. You do this extraordinarily well, knowing when to say, okay, in order to go down that path of that exploration, it’s going to take me a little bit of time because, and you’re always very careful about this, because I need to do X, Y, and Z in order to prepare for that.

Chris Beall:

And therefore I can share those results with you tomorrow. That ability to clip the conversation and say, got it. I know, Mr CEO, Ms. CEO, you’re driving in this direction, but let’s face it, the road we’re on is getting more and more slick with black ice. And unless I have a chance to go out and put some salt and pea gravel down, we’re going to go off a cliff. So let’s not just keep doing this. Let’s just stop here and I’ll go prepare the road for you, for us. And then we get to drive down that road. That seems pretty important.

Tom Zheng:

It is important. Unfortunately, the only way to be able to obtain that skill is from experience right. Of working with data. Because typically what I do is before I start each meeting, right? Each service, let’s say. I would prepare and massage data like a funnel. You know, a funnel only goes so wide or it goes so deep. So once you exceed the width of the funnel or the depth or the length of the funnel, however you want to call it, that’s when the concierge would need more time because I can only predict to a certain degree of the types of things that will want to analyze because X, Y, and Z. And so every good data concierge should prepare some preliminary stats and preliminary data to begin with, but there will always be the time where you’re going to go out of your funnel, right. Which means more time is needed. And unfortunately, to develop that skillset of knowing what type of data you should have in your funnel, as well as when you’re about to exceed your funnel, that unfortunately can only come with experience.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. It’s well let’s say an exacting business. That’s so valuable. I actually think this would be game-changing for everybody who’s trying to run a company and succeed in the market. And I don’t think anybody knows that it’s out there as a way of doing things. It’s one of these situations that my recommendation to folks would be find somebody that’s better than you are with data. Now, most CEOs aren’t bad with it, right. But somebody who’s better than you are, has the ability to work with tools that go beyond Excel. I think the ability to visualize quickly to get a visualization right in front of your eyes, in order to validate or partially validate or invalidate a hypothesis is critical. The number of times you’ve just put something up on a scatter chart or some marching bar graph or whatever, we just look at it and go, huh, that’s it like, huh?

Chris Beall:

I didn’t expect that. Right. Getting that cycle time down, I think requires facility with tools like Power BI that we’re using that kind of allow you to iterate on visualization, to go from thinking, to looking, to talking, to thinking, to looking to talking in some cycle and kind of get going with it. Because here’s my guess, my guess is most CEOs bring to bear sufficient curiosity and ability to communicate with somebody that they’re kind of directing that they could work with to some degree, anybody who’s better than they are with data, better with the tools and that they’ve given access to all the data, which by the way, it’s not the thing we haven’t talked about. You have to have kind of all of it. You can’t have just some of it. And who is kind of capable of hanging in the room with just the two of you on a zoom and that you can form a bond with, as you go along doing this, because they’re going to be inside jokes so to speak about the data, right.

Chris Beall:

They just show up and it’s like, that’s one of those kinds of jokes, right. We run into them all the time. So it seems quite doable. And I would encourage folks to, in my position to jump a little sooner and see what you can do. Maybe just somebody on your staff who loves a good spreadsheet, perhaps send them off to Power BI class or something like that. And they know your business and then maybe switch their job over. By the way anybody is thinking of doing this, data concierge is truly a full-time engagement. It takes a day of work to get to an hour of interaction. Is that a reasonable cycle?

Tom Zheng:

I would say so. Yes. It’s. I mean, another analogy that I think is quite good is it takes 80% of cooking time to actually just prep the ingredients, right. To wash your vegetables, chop it up and stuff. The actual final bit of stir fry or assembly. That actually is pretty quick, right? I mean, let’s say you’re doing a stir fry or whatever, right. Once you have everything done and you put everything into your pan and you stir fry, that’s quick. And that’s why I hate watching those Gordon Ramsey videos, right. Where it’s like, oh, this delicious meal in 10 minutes. Well, it’s like, dude, you already have all the ingredients prepped. Right. So yes, I would say that’s used to be about right, where it takes for me, at least it takes about a full day of prep work in order to get one to two hours of analysis.

Chris Beall:

Yeah, that makes sense. And then you iterate again, you find something new to go after. Sometimes you just find a blocker. It’s like we had the last few days involve the fact that ConnectAndSell has got a little bit of data, right. Compared to some folks. I mean, you’ve been dealing with millions of rows and now we’re talking about a hundred million rows or thereabouts. And a hundred million rows of data is kind of challenging for some of the tools. And you have to figure out, I’ll call it data engineering of the other kind. It’s data infrastructure engineering, just making it work, which of these techniques will physically get this data together. But one thing you’ve emphasized is when you’re doing that kind of work, go get it done. It might cause a delay, but go get it done and resist the temptation to just summarize.

Chris Beall:

Because once you’ve summarized, you’ve lost the information that, you’re making an assumption, right? There’s the sum in summarize, may be the sum in assumption, but there’s something that you believe and that thing can turn out to be false. And then you don’t have access to the detail anymore. So it seems like that’s an important thing too, is before you CEOs that want to work with a data concierge, make sure that when you run into a problem that could be solved with either an insight about how some tool works or with money, by the way, suddenly the tools seem cheap, right? Because you, as a CEO, your time is very valuable and you get that. One thing you don’t have to sell any CEO on is that their own time is very valuable. That’s an easy one. So when you think about that though, it’s like, huh, okay.

Chris Beall:

So I’ve got to bring a certain patience to bear along with drive and curiosity. Because I’ve got my job to do as the CEO in the data concierge relationship. And I’ve got to keep my end up. And part of it is like drive, willingness to clip off areas of inquiry because I know they have no business value. I suddenly realized the insight is that doesn’t mean anything, right. Let’s not go there. But the other insight coming from the data concierge side is, I got to go figure this thing out with regard to putting a hundred pounds of mud in a 10-pound sack or whatever it is. And I’ll keep you posted. Right. I mean, all that stuff’s got to happen, it’s kind of a complex relationship, a bit of a marriage actually.

Tom Zheng:

Yeah. I would say so for sure. One thing I was going to say for any CEO’s or companies who want to get started, but might be limited in their resources, either staffing or budget. The great thing about tools like Power BI is that there are lots of training videos out there for free that teach you how to use the tool, right? And so, as long as you have an analytical mindset and you have strong business acumen and maybe an ability to communicate things clearly, if it’s really just the lack of knowledge of the tool that’s your constraint, then I highly recommend going on YouTube or LinkedIn Learning and watching some of those videos and doing some of those tutorials because nobody is born with these skills.

Tom Zheng:

Everybody at some point would have had to do those training as well, including myself. And even though it does take a little bit of time, I would say, if you are wanting to pursue this path, give for example, one of your staff members one whole week, and just basically say, let me reduce your workload and just focus on completing this training module. And I guarantee you will find your return on investment of not one week of possibly lost productivity on that employee.

Chris Beall:

I think that’s a great recommendation. And I would recommend this is something that came up in a conversation with some very senior people at Microsoft about, Hey, you know, Microsoft has Power BI, most powerful use of Power BI is directly with the CEO. Does anybody let that happen? And one of the people said, “Well, yeah, the tools are so easy a CEO could learn to use them.” I guarantee you as a CEO, you’re not going to do any better learning to use the tools yourself because your day won’t allow you the focus time to make use of them, you’ll think that you’re doing something but quite frankly, what you’re doing is what I call a science project. And your science project will not win the science fair. You need to do what Tom just said, which is, I would say, take somebody in your organization who has that weird facility with Excel, but they’re really a business person and say, Hey, let’s skill you up on the super version of Excel.

Chris Beall:

The one that can handle more than a million rows, the one that can do visualizations 20 ways from Sunday at a click. The one that you can preserve your work and reapply it to other situations or other chunks of data. And so Power BI is a great example. There are others that are out there for sure, but you know take that person and do what Tom suggests, which is make it their job to learn the tool that is really, I’ll call it Excel to the next level because companies tend to run on Excel. That means somebody out there knows it. Somebody might know the business and then, they could come from any department. And then try that person out as your data concierge. Schedule an hour, a week or an hour a day with them. And I do think it takes about an hour a day.

Chris Beall:

You could do it for half an hour, but at the beginning, I think it’s an hour a day. That’s your time commitment as a CEO. Make sure they get all the data that it somehow be brought together enough that it lets you explore something together and get in the canoe together. It’s kind of like a canoe, right? You’ve got the data concierge in the front of the canoe, providing all the power and you’re in the back and you’re providing a little power and some steering, but mostly what you’re doing is you’re stopping and saying, huh, you know your river running here. What do you think? Do we go down the right side or the left side or the middle? Or are we just cool and we just keep going. We don’t have to get out or do we have to portage? Or what do we have to do right?

Chris Beall:

And that’s, you’re very much together in a boat. I think it’s a two-person operation. It is like a canoe. A canoe is [inaudible 00:24:11] a little bit specialized, but it’s not one hundred percent specialized. Everybody paddles in that there are two of you who paddle. If things go well, you stay dry and you try not to get dumped. And you do have to stop every once in a while to figure out what your next move is. And then when it’s time to go, you got to get in and kind of pedal like that.

Tom Zheng:

Exactly. Exactly. Just going back to your point about Excel. I mean, the tool that we’ve been using, which is Power BI is built off of Excel, right? I always call it Excel on steroids. And so, I mean, most people already know Excel, but Power BI is honestly just much beefier, much faster and it produces much better results than Excel. So my recommendation is take somebody who you trust, who you can trust with the company’s data set. Right. And if you know, they’ve been doing excellent analysis and reporting in Excel already, then promote them to using Power BI. Give them one week, right. Get them to take a week and just let them learn Power BI and I guarantee you’ll get your return.

Chris Beall:

Yeah, that’s an awesome suggestion. If you look at this report, that’s the fake background behind me. That actually is a report it’s called the attribution report, exists in ConnectAndSell. And it shows you how much money is in your pipeline from conversations you’ve had that have turned into meetings or conversations that were positive, or this green one over here is conversations that just happened, they didn’t have any great outcome, but somehow you ended up with those folks in your pipeline. The person that I want is the person who looks at that and goes yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I like that export button up there, the one right above my head, because that gives it to me in Excel. And they would tell you what I’m curious about is, and they’ll use the word pivot. And somebody who does that and they use the word pivot, that’s the person that you want.

Chris Beall:

They think in terms of not just filtering, but also looking at the data from different angles, with different ways of summarizing because just to make a good pivot table and get it right, it takes that mental model of data that you want in your data concierge. So I’d be looking for that person. And I have somebody like that used to work at ConnectAndSell. I remember spending about two hours one day with, she was curious about Excel and really wanted to use it more for one of our customers that had a large amount of data, customers generating or consuming about 35,000 dials a day. And the question is, so what was going on with regard to problem connects in their use of ConnectAndSell? And the way to discover that was to take the raw data from the dials out for a period of time, look at the problem connects and then invert it and pivot it and find out well who had the most as a percentage of the whole and taking off some of the other connects because they sort of didn’t count in the denominator.

Chris Beall:

And I remember teaching her to do this on a long phone call, on a phone call that turned into a zoom session and it kind of changed her career. She now is the head of sales of a pretty good size company and is doing fabulous, fabulous things. I would say the pivot is the pivot. That is somebody who loves pivots in Excel and really gets it. And they’re hungry for those insights. That’s the person that you want. Find out who loves the export from say, you’re using Salesforce or using Dynamics. Somebody doesn’t just look at the report, but they export the report. That would be my first question would be, so what’s your preferred way of interacting with data that comes out in a report? And somebody says, look, I don’t even look at the report. I just export it into Excel. And now I’ve got control, check.

Chris Beall:

You’re coming closer. Well, what’s your favorite way of figuring out what’s going on in that report? You know, what’s real. Well, I tend to eyeball it with some filters on it, just to see if I understand it. And then once I have a hypothesis, I’ll select the data and I’ll go ahead and I’ll pivot. Really? Do you have an example of that? You know, and man, you’re pretty close. Take that person, turn them loose on Power BI with all that extra power that’s in it, I think you may have yourself your data concierge.

Tom Zheng:

Absolutely, absolutely. Spot on. That’s where all good data analysts start from, right? Just not accepting the out-of-the-box reports of pre-summarized data and always trying to get to the truth by pivoting it themselves. And if you have somebody with a bit of a data engineering background, they can even say “You know what? I don’t like always exporting to CSV or Excel. Why don’t I try to connect directly to the system.” Right? And then that makes things even faster when it comes to continuous analysis, because you don’t have to constantly be exporting CSVs, because if you think about it, all this data comes from a system usually. And so why not directly connect to that system and link it to your analytical tool?

Chris Beall:

Well, we know the why not actually. The why not in general is that to do that, you have to go through the engineering department and you’ll die before it gets done. But that’s for a different episode. So we’ll talk about that sometime.

Chris Beall:

Well, thanks so much, Tom. This has been spectacular. I know everybody who’s used to Market Dominance Guys, we talk sales, sales, sales. Well, you do it right, you generate a lot of numbers, generate a lot of facts. You generate a lot of potential insights. If data is the new oil, you better get yourself some tools and techniques to go drilling and know which direction you’re going and whether you’re coming up with dry holes or whether you’re coming up with black gold. And I can’t thank you enough Tom I’m looking forward to our session tomorrow. I’ll be in my car. So we’re going to try something new. I’m driving to the airport. He’s going to show me visualizations through my ears. While I drive on a road that has water on one side and big burly trees on the other that I don’t want to collide with. So we’re going to do this with great care, but Tom, thanks so much. This is spectacular.

Tom Zheng:

Thank you Chris, for the opportunity and it was great to share my insight.

 

 

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Our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, is flying solo again this week as he meets with data guru Tom Zheng. Tom is a business intelligence engineer and works as an independent contractor in the field of data analysis. In other words, he spends his days making sense out of those large quantities of data that tend to pile up in businesses. As CEO of ConnectAndSell, Chris uses Tom’s data analysis services to guide him through the often-confusing pathways that data can create. As Chris says, because data is kept in ways that are not always optimal for analysis, business leaders need people like Tom to help make sense of it, so they’ll know if they’re dominating their market or not, or if they’re making or losing money on different parts of their business.

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With education credentials in economics and finance, Tom employs his talents in data engineering, data architecture, and data analysis. Along with these skills, he brings a great bedside manner — coupled with brutal honesty — to his data-sharing sessions with CEOs. To get to an actionable truth about the numbers he’s analyzing for companies, Tom uses a series of questions that he asks himself and his clients: “Is this data meaningful? Is it true? And does it lead us somewhere or not?” Take a listen to how expert data analysis can help you dominate your market on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Giving Your Data the Sniff Test.”

Listen to Part 2:

Get Thee to a Data Concierge!

About Our Guest
Tom Zheng, a business intelligence engineer, and independent contractor, is a seasoned data guru who specializes in transforming your company’s data into actionable insights. With experience throughout the entire data value chain, from designing robust data ecosystems, implementing automated pipelines, and visualizing results in meaningful ways, Tom’s unique storytelling approach will help you discover those “Aha!” moments needed to challenge traditional thinking and assumptions. He can be reached at (416) 877-5412.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Chris Beall:

Hey everybody, Chris Beall here without [Corey Frank 00:02:03], I don’t know how I can get by a Market Dominance Guys episode or two without him, but I don’t know I’m going to be brave and I’m going to plunge right in. I’m here with Tom Zheng. Tom is a data guru. He’s a guy who makes sense out of data. He’s a master of the tools and the techniques and the mindset that it takes to take those big piles of data that tend to pile up in our businesses and help you make sense out of them. And he’s working with me at Connect and Sell to make sense out of our let’s say 50 million rows a year of data.

We call them rows in the data business. So think of it as we do 50 million dials a year. Each one generates some data. And if we wanted to figure out anything about that data, it’s a couple of different ways we could go. I could have somebody do a project and go try to figure some stuff out. But what I’ve been doing with Tom, and this is a very Market Dominance Guys relevant is we spend some time every day exploring the data together. I’ve come up with a name for it. I call it a data concierge. So the CEO or a CRO, or whoever really cares about trying to understand the business and figure out what to do about the business can actually exercise their curiosity directly on the data, but without becoming an expert on the tools and have somebody to help them think through what makes sense. What’s a good hypothesis. How might we go about addressing that hypothesis and get some facts. So welcome, Tom.

Tom Zheng:

Thanks Chris. Glad to be here.

Chris Beall:

It’s awesome to have you here. And this is one of these things that we’ve talked about a lot of stuff on Market Dominance Guys, but it tends to be about sales. And it tends to be about sales as though my thesis, which is you can pave a market with trust and with trust-based conversations or trust-yielding conversations, and then harvest that market over three or four years as folks come into the decision process. It says though, that thesis just operates by itself, right? And I think that’s BS actually, when you really look at a real business and then you think, “Well, how does it work?” I’ve got to be getting feedback from the outside world somehow that says, Hey, what you’re trying is either working or not, or accomplishing X or Y, or maybe doing something surprisingly wonderful that you didn’t even imagine.

And that tends to be, I’ll say hidden in the data in two ways. One is data is fundamentally complex. Maybe three ways. Tom might give us some more, but one is it’s fundamentally complex. It represents lots of different things that happen and you’re trying to figure out what does it all really, really mean and how does it go together? And the other is data is kept in ways that are not optimal for analysis. So we tend to build systems that are good for operating, getting something done, but we tend not to build them so that they’re great for figuring out what was going on.

So I’m just going to have a chat here with Tom, and he’s kind of enlightened us about something that I think every person who cares about market dominance should be thinking about, which is, who is helping you make sense of the data in your business, such that you can tell if you’re dominating or not. You can tell if you’re making or losing money on different parts of the business, and you can even uncover opportunities to go and build the business where you might not have seen those opportunities before. So I’m going to ask Tom just a little bit about his background first, and then we’ll go from there. So, Tom, how did you fall into this? I know you used to teach little kids how to play the piano. Has that background that led you into this direction or was it something else?

Tom Zheng:

Well, sort of, I mean, if you listen to studies, there’s been lots of studies that show people who play piano tend to be better at math, right? Because music inherently is numbers-based. And so growing up, I’ve always been better on the numbers side than on the language side. And so when I went to university, I pursued a degree in economics and finance. I went to business school, but my major was in economics and finance. And so more so in the economics part, that’s where you deal with a lot of data, right? So that was kind of the entryway into learning more about statistics and working with large data sets. And so when I started off in my career, I worked for a financial consulting company who specialized in helping banks revise processes and become more lean essentially. But I was involved on a lot of data-based projects and technology driven projects, which further honed in my technology skills.

And after a few years of working consulting, I then ended up working in a brand new industry, which was the cannabis industry here in Canada. And so a couple of years ago when they legalized cannabis, that’s when I jumped into that industry and I worked as a data engineer. And I’ve since left that industry and now I am an independent consultant and my specialties are really anything to do with data specifically in data engineering, architecture and analysis.

Chris Beall:

Fascinating, fascinating. What was it that as you went into the cannabis industry, what were the data areas that were interesting there? What was the subject of… What was the mystery that they were trying to resolve that was most intriguing to you?

Tom Zheng:

Well, considering it’s a brand new industry with no standardizations, one of the challenges and what people were like myself were trying to fix is to create a standardized schema of how we capture our data and to design, for example how do you create a database table? What columns do you need in a particular dimension table? These are all things that were unknown because cannabis has never really been legalized at least in North America on a large scale, right? And additionally, there were no mature technology players. So everybody was designing their technology from scratch. And when people design their technology, they often didn’t have a data lens to it because the idea is let’s capture the data first before worrying about analyzing it tomorrow. And so one of the challenges of working in that industry is that data was often unclean and you spent a lot of time having to cleanse that data before you could even use it.

Chris Beall:

Oh, appropriate for the cannabis industry. A lot of cleansing was necessary before it’s ready for use.

Tom Zheng:

Absolutely.

Chris Beall:

What can I say? What can I say? Something that struck me is when folks are doing sales-oriented kind of work, they tend to be using a CRM and CRMs have the endearing quality, but also frustrating that you can extend them by adding fields, adding objects and so forth. And that often is done by folks without any data backgrounds. So we have a couple of fields in our CRM that are laughable. One of them says, for instance, if I recall correctly, something like at the account level, there’s a field that says 2017 revenue. And nobody who designs data for analysis or even maintenance would ever create such a field, but to the person that was trying to keep track of revenue that year, they thought, “Well, how simple, I’ll just make a field that says 2017 revenue and drop it right here on the account object.” Not thinking ahead to does that mean I need a 2018 revenue field and what is going to update that whatever process updated the 2017 revenue field it has to be changed in 2018 and so forth and so on.

That’s an innocent example, but it’s not an egregious example. I would say we have, my guess is we have probably 150 data fields that have been added to our CRM over time, including some new objects. I would say 10 to 20% of those are somehow in meaningful use. So we don’t know what they are. And if you try to… And some of them changed their meaning over time. So you’ll say, “Oh yeah, back in 2019, the way we use this field was we put in it the number of hours that it took to sell the deal, but that became uninteresting, but we kind of liked the field. And so we decided to put in the actual cycle time of the deal itself the total number of days between first engagement and first close, and we just thought that’d be better.” And there you are the analyst trying to make sense out of this, how do you tackle stuff like that? And have you been faced with this, I’ll call it the extensible data model done by amateur modeling, modelers problem that’s full of lots of data? What do you do with that problem?

Tom Zheng:

Absolutely. So this is something I see all the time and the reason why it happens is down… I can boil it down to one word, which is convenience, right? Often people will make customizations for their own convenience. And so whenever somebody adds a custom column or field, often they are just manipulating or filtering or aggregating existing data that already exists in their system, but it makes it more convenient to access. And so before I answer the question of how I deal with these types of custom columns, the first thing I will say is that as a general best practice, if you are running your company or at least the IT side of your systems company, you should always try to avoid adding these columns of convenience. Because if you use an analytical tool for example, Power BI, Tableau, or Click, there are very easy ways for you to recreate those columns of convenience directly on your report. And so it negates the need for you to actually add it into your system.

Whenever I see those things, it’s always a big pain because they’re not often labeled correctly. And what I mean by that is as a best practice for data governance, you should have this thing called a data dictionary, which is basically a tool that allows you to add metadata to all of your data sources, right? So in your case, for example, 2017 revenue, if a data dictionary tool was used, then the original author of that custom column could say, “These were the filters applied. This is how I aggregated and transformed the data.” And so as a result, the data analyst or the end consumer does not need to make assumptions or reverse engineer how that column was calculated, right?

But in the absence of documentation, which is quite frequent, somebody like myself would have to reverse engineer and figure out how that column was calculated, if it’s not inherently obvious. And it does take up a lot of time, but I always tend to do that before I run any sort of analysis, because I’d rather give you no information than to give you wrong information, which we all thought was correct. And you end up making wrong business decisions out of that.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. It’s pretty easy I think to be led down the garden path, by thinking that a field means one thing, analyzing it, drawing a conclusion, and then chasing that conclusion, turning it into a hypothesis about the business. Maybe even getting other people excited about it. So now it has political implications because you’ve made some claim to, even as the CEO, or maybe especially as a CEO, you don’t want to say something and then have to walk it back. And while we’re also excited, the particular danger I see actually, as you say it, everybody believes it. You realize it isn’t true. And then you can’t get them to stop believing it.

Tom Zheng:

Right, exactly.

Chris Beall:

I think it happens a fair amount. So as you work through that, here you are, you’re somebody who’s like me who says, “Hey, Tom, give me a hand on this stuff.” And you’re looking into the data and you’re finding these labels that are ambiguous, or they don’t seem to match up with the data itself. Say you were to find two different times for an event and one time appeared to be the time at the beginning and the other is the time at the end. We just went through this today. That’s why I’m bringing this up folks. And you say, “Well, let me just take a look and see.” How do those spread out? So it seems like one of the first things you do is you say, “Look, let’s just count all the values and just eyeball it, sort it top to bottom.” And then in the case we were looking at today, you found a bunch of negative times, and we’re pretty sure that time is never negative. That is directly… Duration being negative is kind of things don’t take minus 10 seconds. That doesn’t happen in the actual world we live in.

So there you are. You now have this piece of evidence that there’s an issue with the actual data itself. You don’t really know is that an issue that’s going to make a difference or not? Or can I just… Is it just some error that was made in data input or whatever, in some small fraction. You got to make a call there, right? How do you make that call? And then do you do that alone? Or the people… I would think the people are generally not there who had to do with creating those fields or filling them they’re gone, right? Everybody’s always [crosstalk 00:15:54]. what do you do and how do you get past that to start to get to the good stuff?

Tom Zheng:

Well, being an analyst, you have to have a degree of reasonableness, right? So with all data sets, there are going to be erroneous records, erroneous data and it’s up to you often as the person on the front line to decide whether or not something is acceptable or not. So call it the sniff test. Right? So in the case of our analysis, even though we did discover negative time, the negative time did not represent a big chunk of all of the available data rows, let’s say. And so in this case even if we did include it in our analysis, it would not make a grand impact.

But every analyst should, whenever they discover something that seems odd, figure out the magnitude of that data, right? Figure out how much would it impact your final number if you were to include that data and if it’s not statistically significant, then don’t waste your time and just include it and then call it out when you actually record those numbers. That’s the way I recommend other analysts go about it. Because sometimes people can go down a rabbit hole where you spend an entire day trying to cleanse a piece of data which ultimately doesn’t have any material effect on your final numbers.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. My old chemistry professor, I remember from high school said to me once, and I think I was probably 15 years old, said something that still sticks with me, which is, “A difference, is a difference if it makes a difference.” And, but of course that’s tricky. You can get kind of circular on that. You can assume that it doesn’t make a difference than find out that it was the thing that made all the difference. There’s a lot of thinking that goes on to this. I think that going into this process.

One of the ways we’ve been working, one of the things I’d like the audience to think about is this. If you are engaged in a market dominance play, so what you’re doing is you’ve identified a market, you’ve made a list you’re having yourself or your folks talk to folks on that list. You’re building trust. You’re trying to stay out of the red ocean of everybody who’s currently in market and everybody’s fighting over those deals and go to the blue ocean where you’re early, so to speak. And you’re going to very inexpensively use technology and good techniques and good attitude in order to talk to people multiple times. So you’re doing all that stuff. I’m going to make a recommendation that you find yourself somebody who you can work with. And I mean, work with intensively to iterate on these particular matters and to allow your curiosity, to guide you into a couple of things. One is, is this data that we’re looking at meaningful or not? Second, is it true or not? Third, does it lead us somewhere or not? And I think you need to iterate quickly.

If you had looked to look at how you and I are working together, we’re having a touchpoint every day, unless I’m on an airplane or whatever. And during that touchpoint, you’re showing me what you’ve come up with from the previous day in the general rhythm is what’s happening. And then I’m going, huh? That’s interesting. That makes me think of this. Or you’re saying, “When I got to this point, this didn’t quite look right. This looks like this might be wrong in some way. Or I discovered something interesting.” And we iterate. So we have this daily iteration cycle, but how often do you think we iterate or pivot or maneuver within say a one-hour touchpoint session? And is that normally how you’ve worked with folks in the past? Or is that something that’s a little bit new and different?

Tom Zheng:

Well between you and I, we definitely pivot a lot and I actually see that as a good thing, right? It’s basically the whole concept of if you’re going to fail, then fail fast. So often we will analyze some data only to find out that, you know what, this isn’t actually the data that we want to analyze. So a great example is when we were trying to figure out making our own analysis as to whether or not a phone number is direct or not only to find out well, why it matters if we identify a number as being a direct number or not when we should just always dial the number that has a faster navigation counter. Right? So to the audience, that example might not have made much sense, but I hope it did. But nonetheless, my point is it’s important to be able to be agile, especially if you are looking into a data concierge service.

Because historically speaking, most companies would treat data analysis like for example, software development, where you capture all of the requirements up to the front and then you provide a time estimate and then you develop the work and then you present it. Right. But ultimately the problem with that is that 99% of the time, people don’t know what they want. Right. I always like to reference that meme or that segment of a movie from the notebook where the guy is trying to ask his lady friend, what do you want? And she’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Right. And it’s become a meme where people turn up for a dinner conversations like, what do you want for dinner? I don’t know. What do you want? I don’t know. And it’s the same thing for data as well, often business leaders don’t actually know what the most important KPIs are to successfully running their business.

Because you can’t know what you want if you don’t know that it exists. Right. Or you can’t know what you want until you figure out it’s statistically significant. So that’s why I think data concierge is something that you’ve identified Chris, I think it’s so important that lots of companies who do want to succeed, utilize this new approach, as opposed to the standard report building format of capturing all of the requirements upfront.

Because in my past experience, 95% of the reports that I built, it looks new and shiny for the first couple of days. And then eventually nobody ends up using it. And how do I know this? Well it’s because in the tool that I use, which is Power BI, every single interaction with the report is logged and I have access to those logs. And so what do I do? I run my own report using the logged data only to find out that a report gets used quite heavily initially. And then it just crickets.

Chris Beall:

Interesting. Interesting. So the half-life of a report with regard to its actual utility seems to be somehow inversely correlated to the detail level of the specification that went into it. So the more you specify and the more certain you are that you got it right up front, and everybody’s talking about it, thinking about it, crafting it, but they’re not looking at the actual data. Yeah. I’m just making this up. I have a feeling it’s probably true. Then the shorter the time the report will be considered actually valuable and will be used on a daily basis by the people running the company.

Tom Zheng:

That’s right. In other words, the simpler, the report, the more it’ll actually get used. Right? So the best example is give me a sales report. Just tell me how much money have I made this week. Those types of reports, straight and simple, it’s going to get used a lot. But once you start saying, give me a sales report, but only show the top five teams, right. Or the top five individuals and their sales. Then it starts being used less because other people might say, “Well damn, I need the top 10,” or, “Oh, I only need my team.” And so it doesn’t meet everybody’s requirements if you get it to be more detailed. And so as a result, it starts getting used less and less and less.

And eventually as well, when it comes to your standard report building process is that you often find new data points or you find irregularities or an assumption with data, which fails your assumptions, and then you’ve got to revise it. And then you got to create a new report in the future and so for everybody within an organization is constantly learning because of its data. And so that’s why if I had to put a number, I would say the half-life of a report is usually just about two weeks.

Chris Beall:

Wow. Wow. See, you spend a bunch of money. You spend even more time. You do all the specifications and you end up with something that less for two weeks, which means it wasn’t providing much value in the two weeks either, because otherwise it would have been hung onto. It’s fascinating. Well, I mean, I really like the way we’re doing this. I actually brought it to some folks at Microsoft and asked, you have companies, your customers like Intel or Boeing, or these are big companies where I’m sure the CEO would love to have a private process where they can ask questions of the business without depending on individuals in the business to give them answers. In fact, I call it being a CEO of being in the lonely minds club. We’re assumed to have no hearts. And so we can’t be the lonely hearts club, but the loneliness comes from the fact that no matter how you set up an organization if you’re at the top of it, your people are obliged to lie to you, whether they want to or not.

That is… The unvarnished truth doesn’t know how to move to the singularity at the top of a company. But the data itself contains somewhere in it, the unvarnished truth. So why not sit with somebody? And I like to do it every day. I think that’s kind of the sensible amount of time to spend in iteration, right? To ask direct questions of the data.

But as a CEO, I’m not going to learn the tools. And you know me, I’m not the least [toolsy 00:26:09] guy in the world. Right. I built a little bit of code in my life and that kind of thing. But when I watch you with Power BI, I can say, “Hey Tom, what do you think instead of just having the Y-axis be the number of dials on the excess as be the duration of the navigation a dial, what if we looked at the actual volume by multiplying those two together? And then plotting that against something else, whatever it is we want to plot it against. What do you think?” And you’ll just go, “Sure, absolutely. I can do that. Hang on a second.” And you’ll go click and some things will happen. And here we are. It’s very important that we’re screen sharing at the time and I’ll get a visual on that instantly. And I might see something in it and you might see something in it, or it could be nothing, but it didn’t cost a lot of time and nobody had to write a specification and it’ll spark curiosity.

So it’s almost like if data is the new oil, you don’t want to just go drill where some bunch of people walking around on the ground said, “Well we found oil in a place once where there was a Mesquite tree and there was a cow nearby and it was noon.” So here’s a Mesquite tree and here’s a cow and it’s noon, let’s drill here and spend the next six weeks drilling a hole in the ground and then find out there’s no oil down there. You want to drill a ways and sniff around. I think in the oil business, they use neutron activation analysis to do this correctly. And then you want to steer the drill toward the more promising oil. And if you’re running a really hard rock and you can’t get through it well, maybe you want to go another direction. Right. Is that a reasonable analogy for this kind of thing?

Tom Zheng:

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, the biggest issue, I think with your traditional method of upstream reporting is that people can easily fudge the numbers and tell a different viewpoint of that story. I wouldn’t say lying, but you can just conveniently forget a filter or hide in a filter somewhere, or present as a completely separate view of what’s actually going on in the world. Right. And I mean any good data analyst will know exactly how to fudge the numbers to make the numbers look good. And I’ve done that for other executives as well, right? For usually middle senior managers like directors or senior directors, often I would present to them the data and the results. And they say, “Oh, no, no, this doesn’t look good. Help me make it look better.” Right. That’s the issue with your standard method of reporting.

But ultimately if your data is recorded correctly, assuming there’s not any sort of catastrophic failures in your technology stock data doesn’t lie. Right. And so as the CEO, you have a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for the organization as a whole. So why accept anything less than the actual truth? I mean, the truth might not look good, but how can you make good business decisions if you’re not presented the absolute truth? Right. So that’s why I think the traditional way of reporting does need some sort of reform. But the one thing that I would be a little bit concerned about is just how many CEOs out there are really willing to commit let’s say an hour each day, going through the data with the data concierge.

Because I genuinely mean this, Chris, I think you are one of the hard-working CEOs who actually give a shit, because and pardon my language because lots of CEOs out there just want people to do the work and they’re not intellectually curious themselves. And so if you are going to utilize a data concierge service, you have to be intellectually curious and you have to understand your business very well.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. That’s interesting. I don’t know if I’m special in this regard. I actually think here’s my hypothesis. And my observation about CEOs, CEOs have a hard time getting the truth out of anywhere. And so sometimes they despair of getting it at all. And so… But I do believe, and I know very few exceptions of the CEOs that I know. And by the way, Market Dominance Guys, all about it’s a CEO audience, right? This is about folks who want to dominate markets and middle managers don’t get to dominate markets. Maybe they get to play. Maybe they get to sort of be the CEO of their own world. General managers are always CEOs.

Some people are CEOs who carry funny titles and you just kind of go, is that really a CEO? Like I would say, [Matt McCorkell 00:30:47] over at [Case or Compressors 00:30:49], he carries this title of a manager of branch operations. Does that sound like a CEO? No, but I guarantee it Matt McCorkell is a CEO, I’ve worked with him and he’s driving for improved results holistically for the company within the constraints as he sees them and believes them. And he is relentlessly curious. So what I find is the curiosity is there, but the pick has been blunted on the hard rock of trying to get to actionable truth that you can believe. Because you’re making big bets. You’re making big bets. Here’s a big bet you and I are talking about, which is I’ll call it the direct number bet, right. Do we have enough information in our system about navigation times, we thought it was direct numbers, but it’s really navigation times in order to automatically choose the best possibility of the ones on offer for trying to reach somebody?

And I find one when we’re doing that and I think this might be a little difference between me and some other folks is I find it super helpful to have analogies. Analogies are soft, but there is an old experiment that was done where folks are asked to figure out from the values on some playing cards and a rule, whether the rule is actually being followed or not. Like all face cards have an odd number on the other side or something like that. Right. And people have a heck of a time reasoning through stuff like that. But if you take the same problem and you express it in terms of, there are some people at a table in a restaurant and the waiter or waitress has got to figure out who’s of drinking age or not. Who they can serve the drink to and you put the same problem in those words, exactly the same mathematical problem, everybody can reason instantly.

It’s the phone number thing you were talking about, my example is, okay, so you’re trying to get enough eggs in order to make this recipe. And the recipe calls for lots of eggs, maybe 12 dozen eggs. And you know stores that carry the eggs and you know the navigation time, how long it takes on average and the midpoint, 50% longer, 50% shorter, two, that’s called the median for folks who don’t like these sorts of things to get to the store. Right. And I have two forks, two ways I can go. Well, if I don’t know if the store is open at all and I can’t call and find out. And then once I get there, if I don’t know if they have eggs today or not, what’s my best strategy?

Well, the best strategy is always take the fastest route so if not this store, you have some time left to go to another one because you only have so much time to get anything done. That analogy is easy to think through. Okay. As soon as I’m concrete and I have a road and I’m in my car and then get to choose the long way or the short way, and then it’s like, “Well, let’s go find the short ways.” And always choose them if we can. Have you found that you find yourself needing to explain to somebody that you’re working with in terms of an analogy, so they can think through something because they can’t do it with the playing cards, but they can do it when they’re the waiter or the waitress?

Tom Zheng:

Absolutely.

Chris Beall:

[crosstalk 00:34:20] problem.

Tom Zheng:

Absolutely. And that’s such an important thing. I mean, it’s not as much of a skill set as being a traditional data analyst because you’re often not the ones telling the story, but if you want to be a top-notch, in my opinion, a top-notch data analysts, you need to have a good enough business background to be able to convert these data concepts into analogies as well. Because the long story short is that 90% of the people in the room are not going to be as strong when it comes to data science, as you are, that’s why you work in data and your audience works not in data, right? They are business stakeholders. And so that’s why it’s very important to be able to translate from numbers into English.

And it’s funny that we bring this topic up because historically I’ve always worked with data scientists who are extremely smart in their fields, but they don’t know how to properly convey the end result. And so as a result, they lead meetings where they just end up speaking gibberish. But people assume that what they’re speaking is correct, because holy crap, this guy’s using a lot of big words and statistical concepts, he must be smart, right. But at the end of the day, what are you here to do? You’re here to drive business value and you want to make sure that your audience can understand the value. And so analogies are a great way to be able to deliver on some of those results.

Chris Beall:

Well, and I would think also there’s one more thing, which is, we’ll go back to that truth thing. So here I am a CEO trying to figure out what’s the next great move to make for this company? And also how can I avoid screwing up in some really bad way that I’m going to regret? So we’re looking at this stuff together and I come up with an analogy. And one of the things that I really enjoy about working with you is you don’t just accept the analogy. You’ll point out where it’s flawed.

Well, it could be like that… You’re very gentle about it by the way, which I think comes from that piano lessons for the four-year-olds and stuff like that. So I get to be the four-year-old and I go, “Well, is it like this teacher?” And you go, “Well, it’s almost like that. But if you want the cord to sound better and move this a finger over one of these keys that [inaudible 00:36:38], and then it will be a major chord and for this part of the song it sounds better because it’s happy. Where as this other one sounded kind of sad and anxious.” Or something. Can you hear the difference, right? You’re very… But bedside manner I’ll call it with still brutal truthfulness. Like “No, Mr. CEO, that analogy doesn’t cut it, it’s wrong.” That seems like an important skill.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This week on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their interview with Marc Hodgson, sales director at ConnectAndSell. What’s the topic? How to get the most out of a first conversation. As Marc says, “All the magic happens inside the conversation,” getting your prospect from fear to trust and then on to curiosity. But how do you take a green SDR — or even a fairly well-seasoned one — and develop the skills that get them to the level where the magic happens?

 

As Chris and Corey have discussed in previous episodes, first you need to have a clear idea of what the purpose of that initial conversation is: You’re not trying to sell anything but the discovery meeting. And to do that, you need to truly believe in the value of that meeting for the person you’re talking with. Once you have that belief firmly in place, it’s time to develop your skills, which start with learning a great script and how to deliver it in the right tone and with the correct pacing. After that, practice, practice, practice. As Marc explains, “It’s not enough to do it. Now you have to get really great at it. You’ve got to be frequent before you can get good.” As usual on the Market Dominance Guys, you’ll hear this and lots more sage advice on today’s episode, “Tried and True: Practice Makes Perfect!”

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About Our Guest

Marc Hodgson has had an illustrious and successful sales career at a variety of companies and currently holds the position of Sales Director (aka Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer) at ConnectAndSell. Marc resides happily in the Greater Boston area.

——————————-

Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by

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Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Marc Hodgson (02:04):

It’s about getting there and having them have the experience, the rest takes care of itself.

Corey Frank (02:11):

Yeah. We’ve had a couple of episodes where we spoken about from a connected self-perspective, Chris, how much you love those test drives too and the look of the change that you’ve seen and feel on those sales floors when we could travel, if we’re getting back to those test-drive days. When you think Marc about this approach, what kind of guidance would you have of a new salesperson kind of getting in.

Corey Frank (02:35):

And I really liked the way how you described this Chris, right, is that you have to have, get your senior folks in a red ocean, a top of funnel, and then you have your executives of one portion, and then you have this other trinity with a small T as a, as a long play salesperson. Are there certain skill sets, mindsets, prep that you would give to because you’re probably a five, two-player, you can do it all. But to do this probably requires different skill set that you probably would have talked to yourself 10 or 20 years ago, “Wow”. But clearly it works. The math works. What advice or guidance would you give to me as a newer salesperson, a sales gal, a sales guy to get into this, to believe in the math.

Marc Hodgson (03:13):

There’s the math, the sales, and then there’s the multiplication factor of what really works, right. You see what’s happening all over the place where you look at your inbox, things are noisy. Things are, are mucky, LinkedIn, and email and all that jazz. But I think what we’re really seeing now is the resurgence in not just B2B, but human to human, right. It’s that conversation. And I think the newer salespeople, the best thing you could do for yourself is learn how to have those first conversations. Right

Marc Hodgson (03:51):

We talk a lot about being able to move from fear to trust and curiosity and all that. That’s probably the core skillset that any new sales rep could, should develop, right. That’s the one that is going to pay dividends. And I think a lot of folks it’s a bit lost in our digital world, right. We’re looking for fast efficient, “Hey, what’s going to ping the most emails or touches or activities or whatnot”. All the magic happens inside the conversation, right. And I think getting good at that and working on that, if that’s a core skill, if you had to work on one skill and one skill only, I think it’s the value of a conversation on how to have it, how to get really great at it.

Corey Frank (04:34):

Absolutely. And I know you guys are launching or you have launched the flight school, where you teach big dumb farm animals like me, right, to, to have the right tone, and the right pacing, and deliver this trust that we’ve talked about for the last couple of years, Chris, right, in seven seconds or so. And that’s a school that I think that every new sales special, they really are dear to their craft, should probably learn how to do, so that’s a great, that’s a great one, Marc.

Corey Frank (05:01):

It’s almost as if you got this dirty joke level, right on this one matrix, right. And on the other matrix, right, you have your time. And too often, right, a figurative dirty joke level, but you have relationships with people over the course of many months, in many quarters where, you have sat on their left and you’ve asked them how their week is going. And they’ve told you, you have no idea. And They poured out their contents of their soul. And you do that month after month, quarter after quarter, you have earned the right to have that figurative dirty joke level, and that’s where that trust certainly is engendered, wouldn’t you say Chris?

Chris Beall (05:42):

Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you, Marc. I call what Corey is doing A young blood works finishing school for future CEOs. And it’s helping folks start their careers and sales by learning how to have first conversations. The most important thing you ever learn in business is how to have a first conversation with a stranger when you’re not prepared for that. The specifics of that conversation, oddly enough, the preparation has to be for the generality of speaking to a human being. And if you have an idea, a clear idea of what the purpose of that conversation is, the first order purpose that is, if I could only do one thing, what would I do is, you know, Corey, I, I used to be a bit of a systems designer, right? I used to build systems of a certain size, right. I just saw the princess bride the other day. So it was like rodents of an unusual size.

Chris Beall (06:33):

I used to, I used to build systems of an unusual size and, the key to building great systems of an unusual size that worked is to ask this question of the stakeholders, which is, I, you know, I would do it like this. I’d go up to a whiteboard and I draw a big circle. I’m not very good at it, but at least the two pieces would come together. If not perfectly straight, they would intersect in some way. And then, I would draw an arrow out of the right side of that circle. And I put a little stick figure there. I say, okay, so if our system can only do one thing, no compound sentences allowed, what would that one thing be? And, and by the way, who is this, right. In sales, we ask exactly that question.

Chris Beall (07:21):

If we can only do one thing in this conversation, what would it be, and who is it for? And the answer is simple. What it would be, is we would manufacture trust, and who it’s for is the person we’re talking with. That’s the system of sales. And I speak as a guy who’s, as you know, I’ve got a patent or two, we just had one awarded the other day. We had one for our mobile app, my 18th patent. And this one I’m very proud of, because Dhruv Shah who was 17 years old when he built our mobile app in high school is my co-inventor. And that mobile app does one thing. It lets you talk to people without touching the device that you’re using. That’s the key, that’s its job. It allows Cheryl Turner to go to the park and watch carefully as a good mother, her three-year-old playing on the swings and have conversations with people like the chief financial officer of Johns Hopkins, advanced physics laboratory.

Chris Beall (08:29):

And she actually did that. She had that conversation while at the park, making sure her kid was having fun and being safe. That’s the purpose of that thing. That was what was on that whiteboard. It didn’t have a name. It didn’t know its inputs, but it knew the one thing, it delivered a conversation to somebody and that little stick figure was a salesperson with no hands. That was the idea, right? So in a conversation, if you know what you’re trying to achieve, and you can describe it with that level of specificity, and then you learn how to actually do it. As Marc said, it’s not enough to describe it. Now you’ve got to get good at, it sounds trivial, right? How hard is it to get trust built with somebody in seven seconds? Ah, how do I break that problem down? Thank God Chris’ boss broke it down for us.

Chris Beall (09:19):

So it’s, this is the stuff, you know, if I were to ask salespeople to believe something, in order to have great careers as businesspeople believe in precision. Believe that human psychology is a precision science. It’s not about generalities, it’s not about aphorisms, it’s not about opinions, it’s not about what your mom told you, it’s a precision science. You are a brain surgeon. You’re operating with two issues that are really big for brain surgeons. One, you’ve got to know what’s what, in that massive gray, you got to be able to tell the amygdala from the pons or somebody is not going to be able to remember anything in the future. And somebody else might get really pissed off every time, a dog barks way down the street. So you got to be careful. The other is, you can’t faint at the sight of blood. And most sales reps faint at the sight of blood.

Chris Beall (10:16):

The discomfort of being the brain surgeon of having that conversation, where you’re in charge of somebody else’s mental state, that’s too hard for them. And they quail, and they drop to the floor and then they aren’t there. That’s not good. You see, you got to get over the sight of blood through practice. Corey, you let dozens, hundreds, I don’t know how many people come through your program, but I think it’s the greatest educational program for business on the face of the earth right now, because they get to experience what it is to actually be a brain surgeon. And you got to do it over, and over, and over. You got to know what you’re doing, but it’s secondary to being able to actually do it and keep your hand from shaking so much that you’ve cut somebody’s brain apart and make them a little worse than you intended.

Chris Beall (11:04):

[crosstalk 00:11:04]

Marc Hodgson (11:06):

It’s not just your dad’s marketing jargon. That’s real transformation.

Corey Frank (11:13):

Well, it’s what we had talked about. Our new best friend Henry right, had been coalesced in this right. Chris and me was talking about, I think it’s got to be episode two or three where we kind of talked about this concept of when everything goes perfectly in your business, how does that change your customer’s life?

Marc Hodgson (11:29):

Yes.

Corey Frank (11:31):

And when you can yield that, right, when you can do that, that Vulcan mind meld in that matrix extraction, it could be that brain surgeon you’re there. And so Marc, what you do clearly by playing long ball is because you’re invited back into their brain every two to three weeks or whatever your cadence is, quarter after quarter, month after month, until eventually it engenders that fear to trust, trust, to curiosity. And then they’d make that leap to finally commitment. And…

Corey Frank (12:02):

[crosstalk 00:12:02]

Marc Hodgson (12:03):

They know I’m not going to cut left. I’m going to cut right. They’ll be okay.

Corey Frank (12:07):

That’s right.

Marc Hodgson (12:08):

I hope.

Corey Frank (12:09):

You can sit on their right in that bar versus sitting on their left.

Chris Beall (12:16):

[crosstalk 00:12:16].

Chris Beall (12:16):

Great Corey, I love that. Get to the point where you can sit down on their, right. And they’re going to hit you with the shoulder and say, “Hey, my week, wasn’t that bad this week”.

Corey Frank (12:27):

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. So listen to earlier episodes of that, that analogy if it’s confusing for some of you guys, as a core tenet of the Market Dominance Guys, approach to the illustrators.

Corey Frank (13:18):

That’s great. So here’s where we’re at. We’ve been enlightened that there are three key roles in a sales organization between the red ocean senior folks that you need, pay light bill. You have blue ocean, long ball guys and gals, right? Who keep the valuation up, kind of de-risk the organization so you don’t have to get diluted, brings up capital that is very inexpensive. And then you also have the executive team CEO or in your case, you’ve got a triple threat between the VP of sales and the chairman, Chris, who are also bringing in dollars and not to mention what that does to keep fresh on the market understanding. We’ve talked about the fact that to have that arch in, which is really a science in, in the brain surgery of developing your skills to have that first conversation is a skill that everybody should have and continue to sharpen.

Corey Frank (14:17):

And certainly tools and repetition, I think as our friend Warren Cleft says, “You’ve got to get frequent before you get good”. And when you have a weapon like ConnectAndSell, or any type of weapon that can help you be frequent before you get good. Those are good things, as you start an organization. Not only from the reps increase in efficiency and proficiency, but also in understanding what you had said earlier, Marc, about getting those false positives out of the way and using that to pivot. So I think it’s a pretty juicy episode here, Chris, I think thanks to you Marc for, for jumping on word and making this easy. Sometimes when I just do these with me and Chris I’m, I’m the guy that has to…

Marc Hodgson (15:04):

You’ve been having a scotch? [crosstalk 00:15:07].

Corey Frank (15:10):

So this is, this is fantastic. Any final thoughts, Marc? Any other words of wisdom or things that the viewers should know there?

Marc Hodgson (15:18):

Well, no, I appreciate you guys having me. It’s always an education to listen to you guys, like keep up the good work. I can’t believe. I think you said earlier, it was, did you say 70 or 80 episodes in two years already?

Corey Frank (15:33):

I think it’s one episode 85 times, but it’s the same thing. [inaudible 00:15:36] I forget what it is. Yeah. It’s a lot. It’s coming up on two years since we’ve been on this journey here and I think we’re rounding the corner, Chris. I think we actually will have some residue that is market-ready to show to our half dozen listeners here in the next month or two. So that’s, that’s exciting.

Chris Beall (15:59):

Yeah. It’s pretty wild. I got a question for Marc before we go. So Marc, talk about sharpening, sharpening the tool, right. Abe Lincoln’s sharpening the ax, right. So you’re an expert at having first conversations, you do it all the time. You do it every single day. How often do you engage with the team in a structured blitz and coach environment and how often per year do you go through flight school, yourself?

Marc Hodgson (16:27):

Yeah, that’s a good question. So I get to tell you, it’s interesting. We didn’t use to do things like that. We didn’t used to participate like this. And then we go through flight school now a couple of times a year and it’s a game-changer. I blitz with my team twice a week, two hours. It’s on the calendar. It’s mandatory unless you got something else that is, you know, supersedes it, which is a pretty tough case to make. Right. But it’s been great. You know, we go through flight school, we’ve seen our own improvement each year because everybody drifts. Got the competitiveness you get out there, we’re on a slack channel.

Marc Hodgson (17:09):

So we do it twice a week. We have four hours a week that we blitzed together as a team of sales directors. We’re all closer to 50 than we are 40. So, you know, we’re not the SDR type, but you know, it turns out it keeps us sharp, you know, and it’s, it’s a lot of fun. It’s been a game-changer for us than just jumping in here and there. There’s no excuses, Corey, there’s no excuses, Chris, get out there. And…

Corey Frank (17:35):

Well, you know what we should do is [inaudible 00:17:37] calling you guys on the carpet, but Ryan Ricerd and, James Boughten has the SDR league, right. The vaunted SDR league sales, development rep league, where Chris, I know connect themselves and big sponsored proponent of this concept of bringing this e-sports concept to the world of outbound selling is you guys are, you guys are just minor leaguer kind of like us. I mean, you been on the wall and you, you’re well past your you’re a veteran contract here, but maybe we should have a little, a little ConnectAndAll SDR going at it and put them up against a take on all comers. Have another team out there that takes on the connected. So use your blitz time, but do it, do it online live. So maybe we should…

Chris Beall (18:17):

Well, my account executives have more dials and more conversations per week than the industry standard for SDRs by a factor of seven. That is every one of my million dollar plus quota carriers talks to seven times more people at the top of the funnel, than Trish Bertuzzi and the bridge groups say that the average SDR talks to.

Corey Frank (18:47):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (18:48):

And I love the fact that SDRs are out there talking to people. But the fact of the matter is your best SDR is an AE armed with ConnectAndSell

Corey Frank (19:00):

That’s right. And a special plug. Steve Richard from foresight and I just did that. We were in the, the octagon, the vaunted octagon. And we show that, Hey, as, as AE’s, we both sell, we’re both CEOs of our companies and we both sell. And we use a weapon like ConnectandSell. And I think in our little short period, we had four dials and we had three conversations. So not many places where you can do that with…

Chris Beall (19:26):

Wait, wait… You didn’t have four dials and three conversations, you had four conversations in three meetings. Right?

Corey Frank (19:31):

That’s true. That’s true. Well no, I didn’t have actually three meetings but you know…

Chris Beall (19:34):

I was going to say $4, anybody can do four dials. I’m going to look right now. Let’s just stay on for a second here, because I’m going to look right now at my AE team. This is account executives, carrying million dollar plus quotas. And I’m going to see for today.

Corey Frank (19:52):

And while you’re doing that Trish Bertuzzi says the average SDR does about 47 dials per day, of which half are Colt, correct?

Chris Beall (19:59):

Exactly. 47 a day. So I’m going to look at our time allocation report. I’m not going to share this screen. Cause Susan says I can’t share screens when I’m doing podcasts, but here’s the deal. So I’ve got myself one, two, three, oh, I got to go down to one team. So I got to hit the team cause I was accidentally including some SDRs sales team only. So sales team today, they’ve had 183 dials and 12 conversations over three people. Let’s go back to, let’s just do a month cause a month. You can divide kind of by four and figure it out and let’s take a look. So my account executive team has had 1005 conversations with decision-makers in the month of May. During that time they did, and by did, I mean they didn’t do cause ConnectAndSell did it, navigate 25,001 dials. The number of people on this team I will now count, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. That includes my executive chairman.

Chris Beall (21:09):

By the way, my executive chairman in the month of May outperformed most SDRs in terms of dials conversations and way by meetings. And our VP of sales himself at $137, 12 conversations set, six meetings. And last I checked, he, when he uses ConnectAndSell to reschedule meetings, he makes us about $242,000 a day, or an hour, I’m sorry. And our top converter Cheryl Turner, who’s been on our program, converted her conversations to meetings, her 52 conversations, mostly with CEOs at a 42.3% level. So I don’t want to brag too much, but the fact of the matter is your best SDR is your most senior person armed to the teeth to have conversations at pace and scale.

Corey Frank (22:06):

Yes, absolutely. That’s wonderful. Yeah. Those are stats that in our profession in your craft are just unheard of it. So as many of us who have it backward and I think become a believer in the theory of market dominance and certainly what we heard from Marc and Chris today, I think you’ll experience that yourself. So thank you for your time, Marc. It’s always a pleasure. We’ll have you back again. Chris is out of scotch, I’m out of vodka, and we’re out of time. So until next time this was the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and Chris Beall, until next time

 

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The Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, had a meeting of the minds this week with Marc Hodgson of ConnectAndSell, who proudly claims the titles of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer. Chris introduces Marc as a learner, a student of the craft of selling, and a delight to work with. As Chris says, “With Marc there’s no bravado, no sales-jock stuff.” Marc is what’s known as a “long-game player,” spending his work days building relationships with prospects, not pushing for an immediate sale.

 

He credits fellow ConnectAndSell salesperson John Jackson with being his long-player model. As Marc explains John’s sales approach, “[He] talks to a prospect three or four times a year … and when they’re ready to buy, they buy from John.” The phrase, “Conversations matter,” is the basic tenet of ConnectAndSell, and Marc explains his adoption of it this way: “It takes time to build relationships. I have that core belief that there’s going to be value in the conversation. We’re going to learn together.” You can learn more about being a long-game player in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “When the Time Is Right, the Magic Happens.”

—-more—-

 

About Our Guest

Marc Hodgson has had an illustrious and successful sales career at a variety of companies and currently holds the position of Sales Headcount Multiplier and Cost Per Meeting Reducer at ConnectAndSell. He resides happily in the Greater Boston area.

 

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Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by

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Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Corey Frank (01:39):

Fantastic. We have a quorum… an official quorum. Of course, last week, Chris, in the last weeks episode of Market Dominance Guys, a quorum was one because I was indisposed. So… but today we have a real quorum. We actually have a guest and that is Marc Hodgson from Connect and Sell. And me Corey Frank, of course, and the prognosticator of profit in the sake of sales Chris Beall.

Corey Frank (02:05):

Chris, I’m a little ahead of myself in my skis today because Marc’s joining us. And it’s not often that we can chat with somebody who is… you take Chet Holmes’ pyramid, the market dominance pyramid that we’ve talked about so much. And Marc is a living, breathing, W2-ing his off, example of somebody who lives on the bottom part of that proverbial pyramid. And so it’s good to welcome you to the Market Dominance Guys, Marc.

Marc Hodgson (02:35):

I’m honored to be here. Honored to be here.

Corey Frank (02:38):

You know, Marc, I got to ask you, looking over your LinkedIn, your previous experience, you were VP of here and you were a sales director of this, but then when you get to Connect and Sell, you don’t use kind of antiquated terms like that. Vice President of Sales, CRO Director. Right? You call yourself a Sales Headcount Multiplier or a Cost per Meeting Reducer. So I think that alone endears yourself, certainly to me and Chris, but of course we’re biased because you’re part of Connect and Sell, but love the titles. And I think that ties into what we’re going to, what we’re going to talk about today. Right, Chris?

Corey Frank (03:14):

How do you kind of get a tap into that 11 twelfths of the market dominance pyramid, or show where the dollars live, where lazy salespeople don’t go. In fact, when lazy salespeople see that pyramid, it’s like the proverbial Darby dragons, right? Because they don’t go that far down the pyramid to actually tap in to this blue ocean. So Chris. How’d you end up tripping over a guy like Marc to join a company like Connect and Sell. And what makes a guy like Marc so perfectly aligned with some of the goals of Connect and Sell on how he approaches market dominance?

Chris Beall (03:51):

Well, the alignment comes from some straightforward features of our… for one he’s tough, but he’s pleasant and dealing with me, you better be pleasant, because otherwise, I’ll be unpleasant and that’s no fun at all. So that part works out. But the main thing is he’s a learner. So he’s a student of the craft of… not just of sales, but beyond sales and has been since the first time we ever spoke. I recognize that like, okay, we have a hard time at Connect and Sell finding people who fit in, in a sales sense, because there’s a lot of folks who are transactional and that’s not very interesting. There’s a lot of folks who are complicated and my view, which is no solution should be more complex than the problem. And complicators like to aggrandized power actually by complicating beyond the complexity of the problem, and then they harvest the power differential between those two.

Chris Beall (04:47):

And those people are also generally politicians and Marc is not a politician. You know my intolerance for parasites. And so some of it’s negative, he’s not a parasite, which is what I find very handy. But this is a funny business because what you’re doing is not obvious to anybody, even the people who are doing it, which is you’re dealing with a future instead of just the present. Think about all the intent guys, right? Zoom info’s out there right now, selling contacts, they sell tons and tons of contacts. They’re worth $16 billion, a public company. So how do they try to keep relevant? They add intent data, but intent data only tells you where the feeding frenzy is already going on. So it’s like, I want to be there minutes before the feeding frenzy shows up, because I sure hate to waste my time building relationships with people who are going to buy next year. That’d be crazy. Why I want to wait until the last second, see if I can snipe this deal.

Corey Frank (05:49):

Yes. [crosstalk 00:05:50] Well with everybody else who subscribes, right Marc, to that same piece of intent data.

Chris Beall (05:56):

Yeah. I mean, that’s… he’s somebody that I call when I want to think things over and talk things through. There’s not a lot of people that can tolerate that. So maybe that’s the last feature is he’s just playing tolerant of listening to me, which I’ve listened to a lot of Market Dominance Guys and I wouldn’t be. So anyway, it’s a delight to work with Marc, and he’s also a guy who… he moves consistently up the leaderboard. It’s nothing… there’s no flash. There’s no bravado. There’s none of the sales hur-rah-rah-rah-rah, jock kind of stuff. I’m sure he’s plenty manly, but he doesn’t act some sort of jock. And I like that. I’m a cerebral type myself, a little bit of a wimp and a sissy runs barefoot and stuff like that. And so we do well together. Right, Marc?

Marc Hodgson (06:42):

I agree. And it’s funny, I liked how you talk about the pyramid and whatnot and moving up the leaderboard. And I think that’s the thing that people miss the most. Right? You guys talk a lot about this, right? Chris, you talk about opportunities out there in the marketplace, people in the marketplace, three-year placement cycles. There’s 12 quarters. There’s people out there in that feeding frenzy, what 8.33% of the time that are out there doing business now and the scavengers fighting over pieces and crumbs and reducing their likelihood of success mathematically. And I think where success is really driven… if for our customers too, not just us, the sales folks, is below the water level. It’s below the waterline. So the pyramid that’s just poking out, that iceberg, Right? And I think that’s the most important thing that I’ve taken from you guys, your episodes here, is the idea that you’ve got to consistently build trust and it takes time. Right?

Marc Hodgson (07:45):

You mentioned the time factor. And I think that’s the key that people miss and it ties really well into market domination is that yeah, you can do it at scale, but yeah, you need time. And really the blue ocean is that that which is underneath, right? That you develop and you cultivate with trust over time over your competitors. Because I think for me personally, my successes have come from the fact that it’s taken a long time to nurture relationships until the time is right. And it may even be earlier than when the time might’ve been right, but I’ve been there to help them along and we’ve discovered along the way. So I think that’s been the most sort of fascinating journey for me is to be curious about where they are and continue to build relationships with them until the time is right. And then the magic happens. Right? It just happens.

Corey Frank (08:36):

Let’s talk a bit about that magic. And as a refresher to those who maybe aren’t familiar with the great Chet Holmes and the theory of market dominance, listen to our earlier episodes. But in essence, Marcus, you had alluded to, we have this pyramid and on the top of the pyramid, you have this three-ish percent of folks who are ready to buy now. They’re in market. It’s that time of their three-year bind cycle that they’re raising our hand and then you have another what, six, seven, 8% or so, that they’re open to it. And then you get the deep waters where you need the good tense and strength line. And there’s 30% who are the market that’s not thinking about it, 30% don’t think that they’re interested in it. And then there’s 30% who know they’re not interested. And you’ve made a living. You’ve made a career fishing in those waters and nurturing those little fish that turn into lunkers over time. What’s your secret in doing that?

Marc Hodgson (09:38):

I’ll give some credit to a colleague of mine. That’s been here with Connect and Sell since the beginning, John Jackson. And I heard very early on when I started here at Connect and Sell, John Jackson has thousands of people in his addressable market, right? His own little market he’s looking to dominate. He just talks to them two, three, four times a year. And when they’re ready to buy, they buy from John Jackson. And I thought about that and I thought, “Wow.” It takes four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 conversations sometimes before the time is right. And you guys talk a lot about trust and that person, that buyer, that group, that company trusts you more than they trust themselves.

Marc Hodgson (10:22):

And I realized John’s been doing it for years. He’s mastered that part of the ocean that no one dares dive down to. He owns it. That’s his realm. And you know, that… I took that to heart very early on. So for me, it’s about building a massive queue of relevant conversations and second conversations. And quite frankly, no one can get to them faster than I can. And no one can build more relationships because people only play that which they stay above the surface. So it’s the low-hanging fruit. They pick up the apples that have fallen out of the tree. They dare not climb up and fill their bushel.

Chris Beall (11:02):

That’s interesting. You know what fights over the apples on the ground? At any farm, what fights over the apples on the ground is the pigs. And it’s not a pretty sight.

Corey Frank (11:12):

When you look at Marc’s approach, Chris, and you see that these little acorns are turning into big trees over time. If you… because you’re living it at Connect and Sell, certainly with how dominant you guys are and how dominant you are, particularly this year, the year that you’re killing it here. What if you had… if I was a manufacturing or if I was in real estate or if I was in software and I had an entire team that approached in this way, I’d love your thoughts on that reciprocal effect. Because I think that as sales managers and sales leaders, we’re not wired to coach our reps to process that way, to work that way. That market’s working, correct? Because I have the pressures of a month, a quarter quota, here’s your dial tributes or what have you. So from a leader perspective, what are the long-term gains I can expect if I play long ball, if I play true blue ocean strategy versus red ocean?

Chris Beall (12:09):

Yeah. What’s so interesting to me. It has been for quite a while, and it was John Jackson and Shawn McLaren who taught me this as that the blue ocean is separated from the red ocean in time, not in space. That is… all you have to do is either go back in time. That is go back in their time to where the prospect is early in the process of even considering, or even not considering… to just go back there and talk to them in their time earlier, and the ocean’s always blue. That is, there is no competitors. The definition of a blue ocean is there are no competitors. And it’s thought that blue ocean strategy is generally around product differentiation, but product differentiation in the modern world is almost impossible. We actually have at Connect and Sell, which is kind of funny that I say that it’s almost impossible, but we’re an example of where it’s… I tell you what, it ain’t easy to achieve product differentiation and the way we’ve done it, we’ve kind of stumbled into it.

Chris Beall (13:05):

And then I happened to be kind of a fanatic about patents and know-how and learning how to do things that other’s aren’t willing to do quite frankly. And it is a dirty job. It’s like, you don’t want product differentiation? Clean sewers, right? You’ll have product differentiation in a hurry compared to people who they’re the street sweepers. They have less. And the folks who are waiting tables have less yet. And you know, the host or hostess in the restaurant has the least. There’s not much product differentiation up there, but there sure is once you go down the sewers, because nobody wants to do it. And guess what? There’s a lot of tricks to cleaning sewers. Once you learn how to do it, then the guy that doesn’t want to do it isn’t willing to learn how to do it, right? So that’s the standard blue ocean theory is as a product-led theory.

Chris Beall (13:50):

But it turns out there’s a universal theory of blue oceans that says, I don’t need a whole blue ocean, just give me 11 twelfths. 11 twelfths of the whole lotion being my blue… good enough for me. So all I have to do is travel in time to an earlier point in the consideration cycle for everybody who intrinsically needs my solution and go make those relationships happen from a CEO perspective, it has profound financing implications. It means, especially if you don’t want to give up control of your company, you’ve got to figure out how to finance from current sales, while setting up for future sales, which you can only be assured of on a portfolio basis. But as you… you don’t know any specific thing’s going to happen.

Chris Beall (15:14):

Portfolio math is the only math in business. Anybody who tells you that they got some other kind of cool math is a charlatan or an idiot. They’re a charlatan saying I can control things that they can’t control, or they’re an idiot saying I can control things that I can’t control, but I don’t know I can’t control them. Those are your two ends of the spectrum. When I first met Cheryl Turner, who was on one of our episodes, she came to the conclusion that I was either a charlatan or an idiot within the first probably minute and a half of me talking to her team at a primary intelligence… at a test drive. 10 minutes later, she came back in the room, made sure it was empty and said, I thought you were a charlatan or idiot, but now I actually think that you guys are… that you have the truth. They were right, because she started talking to lots of people.

Corey Frank (16:00):

So it was mutually exclusive, those terms that she tried?

Chris Beall (16:04):

Exactly charlatans and idiots… the Venn diagram has no intersection. They’re like over here, right? They’re just way apart from each other.

Corey Frank (16:11):

Okay. And for those with only a seven years of community college education here, what do you mean by portfolio math first?

Chris Beall (16:17):

Well portfolio math basically says this, “In the face of ignorance, we need more bets.” And so more smaller bets will yield more consistently on a risk adjusted basis than a smaller number of sure things. The sure things are never as sure as you think, and a larger number of less sure things are more sure. And the math itself of portfolios is a big deal in that it’s what I call the multiplicative math. That is your risk actually goes down as you multiply the risks of the individual elements of your portfolio. So your risk of one thing that’s got… they call it “all your eggs in one basket,” except it’s actually the worst case is one egg in one basket. And then the very worst is one egg with no basket and you’re holding it in your hand. And then the very worst is one egg in one basket.

Chris Beall (17:07):

What could go wrong? Right? And that’s the… that is the… I’ll say the charlatans view of the world. What could go wrong? The idiots view of the world, I’m just going to do a bunch of stuff, see what happens. So the portfolio, whether you’re an investor investing in a whole bunch of businesses or in a whole bunch of stocks or issues or whatever, or you’re an investor, like a salesperson, like Marc. Marc’s an investor. Right? What is he doing? He’s investing his time, because that’s all he’s got. Right? I’m not accepting his money. Sorry, Marc. Your money is no good here. Right? But his time is good here. So he invests his time. So now the question is in how many potential future deals at how many different stages, if they’re all at the same stage, the risk is higher. If they’re all at different stages, the risk is lower for a bunch of interesting reasons.

Chris Beall (18:02):

One of which is fundamentally the risk is lower because there are different stages and you have variety. The other, which is the slower ones, represent an opportunity for Marc to learn more. So one thing we tend to ignore in sales is we learn more in long relationships than in short relationships.

Corey Frank (18:20):

Yep.

Chris Beall (18:20):

And so not only do we build trust, we build knowledge. Marc knows an awful lot about his largest potential customer right now. His… he’s very patient. His largest potential customer happens to be a big company whose headquarters has something to do with that flag behind you there. And that company moves at a certain pace and its U.S. operation moves at a different pace than that. And it’s various pieces that they’ve got to make individual decisions because of the way that their budgeting and allocation process works. And, and, and, and so Marc needs to patiently wait. While he’s waiting, he’s learning because he keeps interacting, providing value, help, and keeps learning things as he goes along.

Chris Beall (19:07):

So when you play the long game in your portfolio, you’re not only broad, but you’re deep in time. You dominate the market earlier and more certainly. You actually know you’ll dominate. We all show on this. What do you do when you know you’re going to nominate, well, stop putting your top people on it, go have them go penetrate a new market because your portfolio of markets is what… that you dominate, is what reduces your risk of going out of business.

Chris Beall (19:32):

This stuff is, is evident and talked about among passive investors. And interestingly enough, when it comes to our time as salespeople, we are actually mostly passive investors. We’re stuck in that position because we can’t make anything happen. So what we have to do is engage in many places and let some things happen. The portfolio, when it’s big enough, let something happen. I happen to be marrying somebody who is in her last… now how many days, what is this? A third, the last 27 days of her fiscal year. She carries a big quota. In the something that starts at the B and has numbers after it, right? She doesn’t have very many customers, a few handful. She’s pretty relaxed. She’s going to go for a walk with me after this. We’re going to go kayaking.

Corey Frank (20:26):

Yet another woman, [crosstalk 00:20:28] another woman who was in your life, who has decided that you are neither a charlatan or a liar, so.

Chris Beall (20:34):

Well, if she has decided if I’m a charlatan or an idiot, she’s holding out…

Corey Frank (20:38):

Oh, that’s right. Idiot.

Chris Beall (20:39):

Because my piano playing is so appealing. You never know. It could be the barefoot running, but I don’t think so. So Marc, jump in here because this goes to the depths I think of what you’re about.

Marc Hodgson (20:51):

Yeah. You said something really interesting. When you talk about portfolio math, I think people are going to jump right to my existing customers, my existing investments. Right? And yeah, I’ve got some risks and some long shots and big and small and whatnot. And what you’re saying there, I think is, I deeply believe in you absolutely need to be running the top of the funnel as a portfolio as well. That’s the game-changer. One of the things that I think is really important is the idea about the false negatives and the false positives. Right? We’re so scared sometimes that it’s important to explore with curiosity, to not miss false negatives, because we don’t know what we don’t know until we know it. Right? And it takes time, to your point, to really discover more deeply where they are and where they can fit in your portfolio. We don’t manage, build a portfolio and service it, but not just in your customer base, but in your prospect and your relationship base. I think that’s a gap that some people don’t connect those two dots.

Corey Frank (22:05):

When you look at this, Marc, from a producer, from a production perspective, and Chris put your sales leader hat on. If I had to replicate this, oftentimes my investors aren’t going to let me play the long ball. Right? They’re not going to let me play this long game. Doesn’t matter if I show them the portfolio math or not. Right? Hey, they got… we got bills. They want valuation. They see this company and they’re in the space getting X valuation. And this one’s aging that why multiple, how do you manage those expectations or so, and keep the eye on the long-term prize, which is again, the market domination and many of these portfolios that you can get?

Chris Beall (22:49):

Well, that had to be a question for me because thank God Marc doesn’t have to deal with investors and that kind of crap. Right? So I’ll take it first hand. If you’re going to run something, make a deal that allows you to succeed. I mean, you got to make a deal with the money. And the money comes from two places. It comes from somebody writing a check and it comes from going out and selling stuff. And you’ve got to understand what their balance… what that balance is. And you’ve got to figure out how to run a market dominance play within the bounds of what the money will be allowing, not comfortable with. The money is never comfortable with anything other than an instantaneous return that exceeds expectations. That’s whether it’s your own money or not, but if you’re going to play, make sure you’re playing on a field where you have a chance.

Chris Beall (23:39):

I remember once I took a soccer team out on a field and we’d never lost. This was the bug squad team that kicked the ball out of bounds every single time they laid a foot on it. Drove other teams crazy. They went from never being in a game to never losing a game. And finally, they’re in a game they’re threatened to lose. You know why? Because the Colorado Rapids practice field is tilted toward the South by about one degree. And when you’re playing uphill, it’s hard. It’s really hard. So don’t get in a situation where you’re playing uphill in advance, unless you like that kind of stuff and you’re willing to eat the consequence. And the consequence might be that you have to sacrifice your time portfolio in favor of something else and you don’t get to dominate. The other thing is you divide your business immediately at the very beginning into two parts.

Chris Beall (24:30):

And part one is the long play. That’s what Marc is, he’s our long play. Part two, which looks like part one, if you look at it by numbers, but it’s not is the financing play. And the way you run that is you have your most senior executives sell in the red ocean, because your most senior executives can always sell. They can sell on any color, ocean red, blue, green, blood drenched, doesn’t make any difference. These are the people who can go into battle that what I call, and I think I’ve mentioned this on a show, the sword fight in the darkroom. If you are at that point in your career, where you win every single sword fight in a dark room, then go win some for the company and bring in some cash so that everybody else can play a long game and you can do it without interference from the outside money.

Chris Beall (25:26):

And so that’s how you actually allow yourself to play the long game is don’t ask your long game players to play the short game. You play the short game. This is one of the reasons CEO’s should sell. I was talking to a CEO today, Dashur, and he said, “I like Larry Ellison’s phrase. If you’re not creating a product or selling a product, what are you doing here?” And that’s one of those things that people sometimes take as Larry being macho. But what it really is, is Larry being smart. He’s saying in terms of our independence of action, our ability to execute strategy, we’ve got to make money today also.

Corey Frank (26:08):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (26:09):

But my view is don’t waste your reps time, your reps are your future. They’re playing long games. Their portfolio can be much bigger yours, but if you’re a leader… you’re a company leader and you’re not out there selling for gross profit contribution, that’s what you sell for. Then you’re letting the team down because you’re causing the situation or allowing a situation where outside money is going to control whether your market dominance team gets to run the long play that needs to be run. The sword fight in the darkroom is not comfortable for everybody, but I guarantee you, every senior person who runs a company knows how to do it. Sometimes they have to be thrown into the darkroom a few times and come out dripping and ask whose blood that is. Right? Sometimes that’s the way it is, but that’s what we’re good at. And so that’s how you divide it up. It’s super simple. It’s super simple, but it’s not often done.

Corey Frank (27:06):

So in essence then, and Marc you could chime in on this, right? Chris, you’re saying that you need folks like Marc on that wall as a hedge, against getting diluted by having to go to the capital markets or going to the other investor markets to get more capital, with Marc’s hedge against that. And Marc, you have a CEO on the wall, right, who’s a hedge to support you to continue to do what you’re doing on the 11 twelfths to the market, because his contribution helps bring in those margins that allow you to keep the lights on, pay the medical insurance, advise you times you guys can live to fight another day. So I hear that as an organization, you need both those elements.

Corey Frank (27:52):

If you just had a CEO who sold for margin and everybody in the short game and a red ocean, that’s not very effective.

Chris Beall (27:59):

Right.

Corey Frank (27:59):

If you have all three components, you have a short-term team, you have a long-term deep pyramid, a blue ocean too. And you have a mindset of a CEO, or like you have with Jonti as well, right? A VP of sales who also contributes. And I guess in your case, you would even have a chairman who contributes.

Chris Beall (28:16):

We do. We were very fortunate. We have three senior executives who sell a lot, but we’re not… it goes on the books as cash and revenue, but in my mind, it doesn’t go there. Our contribution is financing.

Corey Frank (28:32):

Yes.

Chris Beall (28:32):

And what we’re doing is maintaining independence of action.

Corey Frank (28:35):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (28:35):

That’s our job is to maintain independence of action. The action is actually not our action. The action is Marc’s action and his colleagues who are building that deep, deep portfolio over time and over accounts, and sometimes even over the edge of markets where we’ll… it’s like water splashing out of a glass, right? You carry the glass around. If it’s pretty full, it’s going to splash here and there. Every once in a while, you’re going to splash over into another market and you learn something. So that learning is taking place with Marc and Matt, and Seth, and all these folks. We don’t have a big team, but it’s a learning team. And as they execute, they’re actually executing in another dimension. They’re executing in deep time. Whereas my fellow executives and myself, so it’s myself, it’s Jonti and Shawn, the three guys who keep the lights on. We’re simply avoiding. It’s not dilution of money. That’s not interesting. It’s dilution of purpose. We’re avoiding dilution of purpose…

Corey Frank (29:42):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (29:42):

By going out and winning some sword fights.

Marc Hodgson (29:46):

That’s it, right? I mean, that provides us the sales directors the ability to go out there and stay curious and be open-minded to discovering things in new markets and new customers that we normally wouldn’t if we run a very flat playbook. Right? We explore and talk to customers that you’d never think would be a good fit. And we learn this and we share this. So you’re right, Chris, it frees us up to get out there and exponentially harvest learnings and markets and build portfolios that we otherwise wouldn’t. We never would if we were governed to a playbook that was narrow. We get to go wide and that’s fun.

Corey Frank (30:31):

So, Marc, how do you taste blood in this world? Right? Because as sales… sales guys and gals, right? Sometimes we’ll buy your where… we want to ring the gong. Right? Every day, every week or so. And the month of the quarter and playing long ball and having a currency… an alternative currency, if you will, by building long-term relationships, now you’ve seen a reciprocal effect. You’ve seen them go though the entire life cycle, so you know how the movie ends, but how do you maintain that level of motivation and blood lust along the way with the activities that you’re doing?

Marc Hodgson (31:06):

I’m a competitive person. I think there.. our whole team has that aspect. So I pride myself to be on the top of the leaderboard metrically, but intrinsically, I drive a lot of value from that know personally. Right? So that’s part of it. That’s it… and everybody here is kind of built that way, I believe, so that’s a lot of fun. But I think it’s more of the curiosity factor. I really, truly do. Chris has talked about this. I do have that core belief that when I get on the phone, that there’s going to be value in a conversation that I can have with people. We’re going to learn together, whether we ever do business together. And that’s sort of my core belief throughout the sales cycle, whether it’s the top of the funnel conversation, a discovery conversation, them getting the opportunity to experience one of our intensive test drive days, which is the best day that you can have because you learn so much about them as people and their culture and their process. And those are the best days that we have here, our test drive day. So for me, it’s about getting there and having them have the experience. The rest takes care of itself.

Corey Frank (32:24):

Yeah.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On our podcast this week, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, is flying solo with an episode about selecting the best SDR to have discovery conversations with senior-level prospects. You might subscribe to the “cheaper cold callers are better” mindset, but Chris presents some well- thought-out reasons to put your money where your telephone’s mouthpiece is. That’s right — once again, Market Dominance Guys is asking you to look at the scary spot — cold calls — and rethink what would work best. Chris’ contention is that people holding senior-level positions are much more likely to respond to and connect with someone who has the same level of experience or background they have.

—-more—-

Here’s what he says: “If somebody is worth having a meeting with, then have a senior person be the contact.” He means, have that person conduct each call in the sales process, from first conversation, through follow-up calls or rescheduling a missed meeting, to the discovery call. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to set a meeting or to get accurate discovery information when talking with a senior person if the caller is also a senior person. Generally, there will be a shared background or job experience that will create a connection between these two senior-level people. As good old Mom used to tell us, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” So, put your best, most experienced, highest level cold caller’s foot forward. There are plenty of other sales-related tasks better suited for your young SDRs. Yep. Doing what works: That’s what it’s all about on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “The Best Frog- Kisser for the Job.”

——————————-

Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by

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Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Chris Beall (02:22):

Hey, everybody. Welcome to a solo episode of Market Dominance Guys. This is Chris Beall, one of your two co-hosts. Corey Frank and I, have not quite been able to get it together, to get it together and put an episode down. And it is Memorial Day weekend, so I figured I’d leave Corey alone to enjoy time with his family, and I’d come down here to the beach and tell you what I think about the world of SDRs.

Chris Beall (02:51):

So here’s what I think. SDRs became very popular mostly because Aaron Ross wrote a really cool book called Predictable Revenue. And in Predictable Revenue he said, we should specialize, we should have folks who work really at the top of the funnel who are going out and identifying new business opportunities and engaging with them, bringing them to meetings and getting them into the funnel really proactively.

Chris Beall (03:18):

And back in the day, that could be done with email, and so there was a lot of email involved. It can still be done a little bit with email. It’s a lot easier to do just by calling people and talking to them. Although that’s not easy, because you’re going to go to voicemail probably 23 out of 24 times. So then you could cheat and use something like our product ConnectAndSell. And then you push a button and talk to somebody and suddenly conversations can be how you move forward.

Chris Beall (03:44):

Now here’s my point, is once you elect to go conversation first, use a conversation as the very first way that you interact with somebody, a whole bunch of stuff happens, and some of it has something to do with SDRs. Why is that? Well, first let’s look at what happens.

Chris Beall (04:02):

When we talk to somebody, especially a senior person, a decision maker, and we talk to them directly, we have a problem at the very beginning and the problem is they don’t want to talk to us. Why? Well, they don’t know who we are. Frankly we scare them. We’re the invisible stranger on the other end of the phone, a whole bunch of reasons that they don’t want to talk to us. They want to get off that phone call with their self-image intact.

Chris Beall (04:26):

And fortunately, we can use that fact in order to get them to talk to us, or at least listen to us a little bit. And then we can, as Cheryl Turner has said so artfully, we can turn if into when, and how do we do that? Well, we do this. We say something like, “I know I’m an interruption, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And then when they say, “Hmm, yeah. Go ahead” or whatever they say, we say what we’re going to say, which is I kind of like this breakthrough script.

Chris Beall (04:57):

“I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates,” and then you completely eliminate some three bad things. One of them being a bad economic thing, that’s time, risk or money. One of them being a bad emotional thing, often frustration, occasionally something more like fear, but fear is kind of a third rail. Be careful of touching that one, because people don’t really like to be told that they’re afraid of anything.

Chris Beall (05:21):

And then the last one is what we call strategic, which is something that’s standing in their way from getting to where they want to go. Strategy is a list of steps where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. So it’s not how you’re going to execute the steps, it’s the list of steps. And if a step is becoming accessible, blocked, too expensive or whatever, and that’s something where we’re a difference maker, where our product or service can make a difference, then we can mention that.

Chris Beall (05:46):

We have to not mention of course, that we offer a known service or a known product in a known category, or they will say, “We’re set”. Why will they say we’re set? Very, very simple reason. They’re looking to get off this call with their self-image intact. And an easy way to do it is for you to blow it, tell them what your category is of product or service, and then they can say quite rightly, already got that covered. And you can’t say much about that.

Chris Beall (06:15):

So you avoid all that. And then you point out that it’d be a great idea to finish this off by doing what you promised. “So the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar to share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available?” Say it in a playful, curious voice.

Chris Beall (06:32):

Now, if you go through all of that and then when they say, “Well, I don’t know,” or whatever, you do the Cheryl Turner play, you manufacture a no-show. No shows are the most powerful thing in business, because once you get them on the phone again, which you will be able to do again if you’re using this, as Jerry Hill calls it, cheat code, called ConnectAndSell, then it’s really straightforward.

Chris Beall (06:56):

You’re going to talk to them after they don’t show up for the meeting and say, “Hey, we had something on our calendar for 9:00 AM yesterday, and something must have come up for you. Is now a better time to talk about when we could get something back on the calendar?” And you have that conversation. It might take one, two, three times, but here’s a funny thing, by the way, the very, very senior people will show up. CEOs show up almost every time to something that’s on their calendar. It’s kind of how they live their lives.

Chris Beall (07:23):

More junior people, they’re often pulled this way in that. And so they’ve got a lot of reasons to talk to somebody else that day, rather than talk to you. And that moment something might’ve come up, they fight more fires is actually what their lives are like. And that’s all right. Just go ahead and have that conversation and reschedule.

Chris Beall (07:41):

And remember this, you’ve just made a list automatically and managed a list of people who actually answer the phone. So that’s pretty good, because you know they answer to the phone, they answered the phone before, and now they’ve answered it twice because you’re talking to them about rescheduling. So all is well, they’ll answer it over and over, it’s their habit. And you can talk to them repeatedly until they actually show up at the meeting. At which point you can have a further conversation with them in which you actually share your breakthrough.

Chris Beall (08:11):

So how do you blow this? Well, one way to blow it is to put a junior person on the phone talking to a senior person. Oren Klaff talks about what we call status alignment or what he calls status alignment, and I sure call it that now. Status alignment is about making sure the other person is aligned with you and you’re aligned with them regarding your status in the conversation, that you’re equals. And that’s a little harder to do when you’re just fresh out of school. And you’ve been put on quote, unquote, the phones in order to talk to people.

Chris Beall (08:43):

You can learn it, but it’s harder. It’s a lot easier to do when, guess what? You already have that person’s status because you have 10, 15, 20 years into the business, you know a thing or two.

Chris Beall (08:56):

And when you talk to them, that will come out two ways. One is in your voice, you will sound different. You’ll sound confident. You’ll sound like you know what you’re talking about, because guess what? You know what you’re talking about. The other is when they check you out before coming to the meeting or check out whoever it is that you’ve set the meeting with, they’re going to remember very little. When they check you up, they’re going to note, is this somebody I want to meet with or not?

Chris Beall (09:21):

So the easiest meeting to get somebody to come to, and pay attention to, is a meeting that is set by a senior person for themselves, that’s an account executive, making their own calls, or for somebody even more senior, say their CEO and there’s a reason for that. And this one is not obvious to most folks, but think about it this way.

Chris Beall (09:44):

If somebody is worth having a meeting with, because the data says they’re worth having a meeting with, why don’t you get off on your best foot and have a meeting with the most senior person available, maybe it’s your CEO, who could spend 15 minutes and let this person know why you’re really in business, how you’re really trying to help people. What it’s all really about.

Chris Beall (10:06):

Your CEO or somebody like that, will have a story or two or three about how they got there. They’ll be credible. They’ll be interesting. They’ll share backgrounds with folks.

Chris Beall (10:18):

I had a meeting just this week with somebody and it turns out we both worked at Sun Microsystems and there was a lot to talk about there. But it was a long time ago, 20-something, on my case, 30-something years ago. But we had a lot to talk about there. And we had other things to talk about as a result.

Chris Beall (10:35):

It’s not like we’re going to have a social conversation. It’s just that people’s status align around a whole bunch of things, and familiarity, a shared past, that sort of thing can be helpful. If you don’t have a past, if you’re a 23-year-old SDR, you don’t have much of a past, it’s hard to have a shared past with a senior person. So it’s more difficult to status align.

Chris Beall (11:30):

So you’ve got to get status alignment before you can get to the point of executing what Corey Frank calls or Oren Klaff calls, Corey calls it that too, a flash role. That’s where you casually speak fairly quickly about something that only an expert would know, treating it as something routine. And in our case, it’s really simple.

Chris Beall (11:52):

I’ll go to a ConnectAndSell leaderboard, and we’ll take a look at it. And I’ll just say this, I’ll say, “Well, take a look there. There’s Rob. And Rob is one of our inside salespeople. And Rob has used ConnectAndSell today for three hours, 27 minutes and 35 seconds. And during that time he’s had 46 conversations. And out of those 46 conversations, he’s set three meetings.”

Chris Beall (12:16):

So Rob’s probably feeling pretty good today, because 2.3 meetings is his goal. And how did he do that? Well, he pressed that go button that’s up at the top. And he waited a little bit. Whenever he wanted a conversation and only when he wanted a conversation. And then he waited. How long did he wait? Three minutes and 54 seconds on average.

Chris Beall (12:34):

Now all that is not very instructive, but it is something interesting, especially when I add, “And Rob did not have to dial the phone once. All he did was pushed a button 46 times, and in the background, what happened was however many dials, you know, 857 dials.” So that’s a bit of a flash role. You’ll have your own.

Chris Beall (12:58):

But if you’re a senior, your flash role is better because the fact that you are an expert, makes you sound like an expert and the idea of the flash role is to allow somebody else to be confident in you as an expert, because what is surprising and special to them, what is unusual, what would require expert knowledge is casual and routine to you, and they can tell in the way that you deliver it.

Chris Beall (13:21):

So it’s a lot easier to run a sales play, where a senior person sets a meeting for themselves and holds that meeting, or a senior person sets a meeting for an even more senior person, and they hold the meeting together. In which case there’s also something to talk about, which is the person who set the meeting, in case that’s a reasonable way to use their time. And then you can pass it off to a sales person, should there be a reason to move forward.

Chris Beall (13:50):

So the inversion of this play in which the standard play is start with a junior person because, hey, you’re going to have to go through a lot, kiss a lot of frogs, they say, so why don’t you assign somebody to kiss the frogs?

Chris Beall (14:01):

Well, the fact is if you assign somebody to kiss the frogs, not very many of them are going to turn into princess or princesses, whichever you prefer. Those frogs are pretty much going to stay frogs, and that’s not what you’re looking for.

Chris Beall (14:15):

So find yourself a good frog kisser to have the first conversation and especially to take the first meeting. After that, everything’s a lot easier. Because really when you come right down to it, you want to have the choices and you don’t have very many choices if you have a meeting with somebody who kind of doesn’t think that you’re that interesting.

Chris Beall (14:36):

So leave the junior people for other work. In fact, research work is great. Learning to cold call is great, but not sure they should be calling the most senior people to set meetings. So they could be calling to ask questions or do all manner of other things.

Chris Beall (14:51):

And don’t treat it as a training ground, because if you treat the SDR function as a training ground for being an AE, what you’re doing is wasting the top of your funnel. In fact, you’re wasting it in a really horrifying way. You are taking the opportunities that are most difficult to identify because you have the least information, and you’re providing really an experience that is most likely to cause them to not be interested or cause you to not be interested as a company in going further with them.

Chris Beall (15:21):

So you’re going to walk right by some of your very best opportunities, that if a more senior person had actually had the first conversation, and the follow-up conversation, and the appointment rescheduling conversation, and then an even more senior person had had the first discovery call, which would be mutual discovery, not interrogation, which is such a sad and common thing. Then what you’ll do is run a very clean top of funnel, that’ll give you very pure feedback about the most important thing, which is ultimately your list, because your list is the definition of your market.

Chris Beall (15:55):

So consider this possibility the next time that you’re looking at designing or executing one of these sales plays, that your best resource to have a first conversation is a senior resource. And your best, best resource to have a discovery conversation is somebody even more senior than that. And the past can then be down to more junior people who can handle the next steps. The mechanics.

Chris Beall (16:21):

Say there was a demo to be done, or there’s some exploration of how you would actually do business together, some due diligence. That kind of work can be done by lots and lots of people.

 

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