This week, our Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, interview Matthew Forbes, Head of Strategic Accounts at ConnectAndSell, about an epiphany Matt had that increased the meetings he set by almost 400%. Wow! What could possibly change that would explain that kind of increase? Well, it’s actually a simple change, but it’s a very necessary one: Matt came to truly believe — deep in his soul — in the potential value of the discovery meeting for his prospects, even if they were never going to do business with ConnectAndSell. His messaging script didn’t change at all. It was his belief that did. Listen to today’s Market Dominance Guys episode, “You’d Better Believe It!” to learn how Matt came to make this meeting-setting leap.

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Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by

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

  

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

 

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Matthew Forbes (01:20):

I have a friend who I used to work with. We discovered 16 years ago who was like, “enough of me looking at your crap online. You’ve got to tell me how you’re doing this. I need to go talk to more people.” So, we went through it very, very quickly, but it would not be Insperity. It would be just him and plausibly could grow from there, but I think they were once a customer.

Corey Frank (01:43):

Flight school has not been grounded. Flight school is taken off. I love it. We’re going to talk today. We’re going to interview big Matt Forbes about belief.

Chris Beall (01:53):

So here’s the little story Mr. Forbes and I had a conversation three or four weeks ago, right before I bought this house. And it went on for a couple hours. He refers to it in one way. I refer to it in another. I’ll let him describe it, and something happened inside Mr. Forbes that changed his conversion numbers to the point where he is now the gold medalist on two consecutive flight school experiences across one of the most experienced ConnectAndSell calling teams on earth, our account executives. And he didn’t win by a little-

Corey Frank (02:33):

He cheated.

Chris Beall (02:34):

He won by a lot. [crosstalk 00:02:36]. He cheated. He did cheat. He cheated by believing in the potential value of the meeting for the human being that he was talking with. Even if there’s never going to be any business. I know, he’s been deeply corrupted. I thought it’d be great to have Matt share his story while we listen.

Corey Frank (02:52):

Okay, Matt, are you a Sales Director at ConnectandSell? What’s your specific title?

Matthew Forbes (02:58):

Oh, I’m the Head of Strategic Accounts, Mr. Frank.

Chris Beall (03:01):

I was going to say you remember the guy at the end of the Rocky and Bullwinkle and everything goes down and the guy with the broom, comes out, and sweeps everything off?

Corey Frank (03:08):

Yes, he’s the one

Chris Beall (03:10):

That guy.

Corey Frank (03:10):

He’s the one. I love it. Okay. All right.

Welcome to another episode of the market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank, and as always the prophet of profits, the head of the market domination department for many companies, even though they won’t admit it, Chris Beall, the CEO of ConnectandSell. Chris, good afternoon.

Chris Beall (03:32):

As always Corey, it is a good afternoon when I’m here with you.

Corey Frank (03:35):

And we have a guest, Chris. You know how we feel about guests. We don’t have to repeat it, but I think this is a very appropriate guest for what we’ve been talking about the last few weeks, which is the system of the cheat codes. I think it sounds like what you and Matt had been cooking up here is probably the Occam’s razor of cheat codes. I think you could say, because it’s right in front of you, but you have folks trying to make things a lot more complex than they are.

And we have Mr. Matt Forbes, who is the Head of Strategic Initiatives over at ConnectandSell. And we’re going to talk to Matt about an initiative that sounds like he not only spiked the ball, but spiked the ball, picked it up, threw it in the stands, then went and grabbed it and then spiked it again, based off some of the results that you’ve had. And so I know I’m on bated breath to find out what some of this data is, and cause Chris knows, Matt, that my MO for the last couple of years, as we’ve been doing this 75 plus episodes is to take anything I get from anybody smarter than I, and claim those ideas as my own. That’s what I do. I’m a shameless, shameless thief. So with that, Chris, talk a little bit about the background of Matt, the project he was working on, and exactly what he uncovered here.

Chris Beall (04:51):

The project has been going on for a few years. I would say it was punctuated by various things. A lobster dinner in Boston once I remember was kind of a little slice of it. Matt and I have been talking for a long time about the relationship between what goes on inside of us and what happens on the scoreboard. As you know, and I think the … I don’t know how much of our audience has bothered to plow through my endless diatribes on the subject. But it’s my deep belief that we are seen as what we believe as, as who we are, by what we believe in, how we say what we say, and we’re unaware of that connection. And I go back to a time when one of our big customers asked us to do an outsource project and Corey your YoungBloods.works doing outsource projects, right and left and helping people get lots of appointments and move forward with their businesses.

And we took on this project with a company that we’re very, very familiar with. We knew exactly we thought how to be successful setting appointments for them. Mind you not ConnectandSell’s normal business, but we were asked to do it, and we gave it a whirl. So we took our own SDRs and applied them to this. And they were terrible. Even though we got the script right, we got all that stuff right, they were terrible. So about three weeks in, I asked this question, which is, do our SDRs believe in the potential value of the meeting that they’re offering to these human beings they’re speaking with, even if there’s never going to be any business. And the answer was well, how could they? They’ve never spoken to anybody who attended a discovery meeting for this particular customer and could come away and say, “You know what, here’s what I learned. And it changed my life.”

So I went out and I found a couple of those customers and had them speak to the SDR team directly and say, “this is how that discovery call changed my life, independent of buying that product.” And voila, immediate four times improvement in output measured as meetings per hour and yet no change at all in the script. There was a force hiding inside these people, and I just needed to go in and find it. And the way we found it was by having them talk to somebody who had experienced the value, then they could believe in the value of the meeting and they could sound like they believed in it. And so I’ve been on a little bit of a kick ever since then, but it’s the hardest thing because sales reps are naturally inclined to want to do things that produce results that go in the direction of producing results that eventually produce commissions.

That is they have quota to make, and we incentivize them that way. And then we kind of hope they will put that aside and instead do something that might be more effective. And we did a whole episode on this, the dog, the piece of meat, and the chain link fence, a whole episode on it. And we know what a dog does in those circumstances. All of us are dogs when it comes to sales. We look at a piece of meat or smell it on the other side of the fence, and we try to go through the fence instead of backing away from the fence and finding the gate, which is generally about 10 feet to the right. So what do we get? A bloody nose, lots of frustration. So Matt and I have been talking about this for years on various, in various levels. And I don’t know what kind of conversation I would characterize it as, but it was a long one. Cause I was out on a barefoot trot that went long, long, long-

Corey Frank (08:18):

Hang on a minute. Did Chris just say that he had a long conversation? I mean stop the presses.

Matthew Forbes (08:24):

It’s shocking. It’s absolutely shocking that 10 minute call went about 2:20. Yeah. Who knew.

Chris Beall (08:30):

2:20. And the next thing you know, Matt’s going to tell you what the rest of the story is because it’s, it was quite remarkable. And he told it to me a few days ago and I, it brought tears to my eyes and not just cause a cold wind was blowing out of the Southeast here in Green Valley, Arizona.

Corey Frank (08:49):

And you were wearing a kilt, right? Exactly.

Matthew Forbes (08:50):

Exactly. I’ve worked with Chris for nine years and you know Chris, right? Lot of abstract concepts and they don’t, some of them are perfect and some of them are over my head as just a dumb old sales guy. And we had this two hour and 20 minute conversation about what do you believe and not, what do you believe? What do you believe in your soul about what you’re selling? Do you really believe that someone should take a meeting with you that everyone should take a meeting with you? And of course, as Chris is being Chris, I’m like, “Well of course I believe, Chris, I truly do love ConnectandSell. I think people should use it.” And after the call, I kind of got to thinking, do I actually believe that? And I do, but do I believe it in my soul? Like deep, like truly. And I don’t think I’d ever realized the fact that I really do believe that deep and that in turn, I think lets a lot of people off the hook when I’m talking to them on the phone.

Corey Frank (09:52):

Is it a change in tone? How would you dumb it down to a guy like me, Matt, of same phrase used without belief and maybe a same phrase used with belief. You have, you’re Never Split the Difference book there and our friend Chris Voss, right? The inner partner, right, Chris? From many years ago, talked about that’s right versus you’re right. Talks about that in his book and how a lot of folks, when they talk, they’re waiting to hear for “You’re right. You’re right. You’re right.” Which in essence means “just go away.” I don’t believe [inaudible 00:10:26], but when you say “That’s right,” now I have some trust built up. So what, what is it that you’ve discovered in this that could help a guy like me develop a belief mentality, an intention mentality?

Matthew Forbes (10:38):

First, you really got to decide what you believe as a sales rep. I mean truly you have to actually ask the question cause you inherently should believe. You sell it. You work there. But even me at nine years, I really had to ask myself the question. So the script didn’t change because unlike a lot of sales directors and certainly some at ConnectandSell, I read the script. It’s right there. I mean I physically, my wife makes fun of me. Right? I get on a call and the call starts here and I turn and I read because I do know that an opening script works word for word and you shouldn’t stray. So it’s not the words. We know that for sure. It’s really the belief. There’s some tonality difference, but there’s a piece where when you try to get off the phone with me, I’m not going to have it because I want to truly help you.

You’re lucky if you take a 15 minute call with me, I’m going to teach you something you don’t know. And it may just change everything for you. It may not, don’t know, but you’re going to learn something. And that’s when things started to change and I ran my numbers. So here are the stats, Corey: Matt Forbes, last year, 42,000 phone calls on ConnectandSell. My meeting booked rate was 9.2%. And that’s a blended rate between first calls and the second calls, right? It’s about 60% first and 40% follow-up. Matt Forbes last week was meeting booked of 26%. Something changed. Matt Forbes on that Friday call blitz was meeting booked at 35.7%. I went five for 14 on net new calls, same list, same script, same everything. Now there was … we’re in a flight school. So there was competition. And I admit that the competition is just so valuable.

It’s ridiculous. But those numbers, when I look at where the other reps were, they didn’t go up as high as I did as a percentage, not even close. And I really think it’s that last notion of it’s not that I don’t want to let you off the call because I want to book a meeting. It’s I don’t want to let you off the call because you deserve to hear what I’m going to say. It literally could change how you go to market. I mean, I believe that in my soul, I think I always believed it, Chris. I don’t think I recognized it. I don’t think I was willing to come out and say, “Look, here’s the deal.” And that’s what changed. And honestly, it’s different now.

Corey Frank (13:14):

How long of a time frame was that, Matt, again that you were on the phone for those five meetings?

Matthew Forbes (13:19):

Session dial time: two hours and 29 minutes. Talked to 26 people-

Corey Frank (13:19):

That’s incredible.

Matthew Forbes (13:23):

Went seven for 26. Yeah. That’s insane. That’s a Friday afternoon, but that’s a Friday afternoon.

Corey Frank (13:30):

Friday afternoon. You know Chris, I think probably one of our first episodes, we talked about this concept of the promise is that the market is always on fire. And that… Think you had said, Chris, that the message is water, right? And that that’s the mentality you need to have is that the proverbial go to the person at the end of the bar on his left side at the end of the day, “How was your week?” Right? You have no idea, right? They’re on fire, and the message is water, but it sounds like we need to make a little caveat to that. Now, certainly after talking with Matt here, right? It’s not just the message is water, right? But the delivery or this belief, this intention messaging is the fire extinguisher. Right. Water’s good. But as you know, Chris, from working in a restaurant, we’ve heard this many times, you don’t put water on a grease fire.

Chris Beall (14:22):

That is so true. I know somebody just the other day who burned themselves by making that mistake. I shouldn’t laugh, but they survived.

Corey Frank (14:30):

What do you think of the tonality difference versus the … I mean, Matt, you’re calling it something internally that there was a, sounds like it’s more of a, a switch than a dial of belief. Like, listen, I’m trying to help. Right? I have a belief that my discovery call will open up. Whether you buy my product or not, the discovery call has a cape on it. And you just need to show up for the discovery call, whether you buy my product or not, you’re going to find something new about the industry, you’re going to learn something new about your business, et cetera. Is that bottled? Can that be taught? How would you teach it to a new sales guy like me where I’m reading, what you’re reading, Matt, I’m reading your script that’s on my wall. I’m holding it on every call, but I’m not getting the converts that you are.

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Over the years, how salespeople make an initial contact for a sale has changed. In these modern times, it has come down to a choice between making a cold phone call or sending a cold email. It seems to be a matter of choice. However, if you’re trying to break through a prospect’s initial fear of being sold to so that you can engender that level of trust necessary to set a meeting or make a sale, which approach should you put YOUR trust in? The human voice? Or a digital communication?

Today, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, talks with podcast producer Susan Finch about this very question. As CEO of ConnectAndSell, Chris is an impassioned believer in phone conversations first as the most successful tool for setting appointments. Why? Because with your voice, you can employ timbre, tone, pacing, and emotion. In a one-on-one conversation, you can pause for a response, share humor when appropriate, or convey that you understand the other person’s situation. However carefully crafted, an email message can never do as a good a job at interacting with another human being. In pursuing the all-important goal of engendering trust with a prospect, initial phone conversations win, hands down! Listen in to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode as Chris shares his well-honed opinions on “How to Warm Up a Cold Communication.”

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Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by

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

  

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

 

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

Susan Finch (00:06):

Hey everybody, Susan Finch here. I am the Producer for Market Dominance Guys, and I was invited by Chris Beall to join him on today’s episode. Chris, what are we going to talk about?

Chris Beall (01:00):

Well, let’s talk about something we’ve never talked about, which in 70 episodes or whatever is a little bit hard to find but this turned out to be easy to find. So I’ve been doing some radio advertising recently and we’ve been doing a lot more work with what we call talk to send, which is sending an email after each conversation and talk to sequence and talk to cadence or whatever people call these things in case it’s not just an email that might be triggering a sequence. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about how does a conversation first approach work with all of the other media, all the other ways of having information flow between you and your prospects. I thought that might be kind of fun.

Susan Finch (01:46):

It is. It’s dizzy you know. And new players and new shiny things, as you brought up clubhouse earlier today, are coming into our spectrum of time sucks and we don’t know whether they’re effective or not. And we don’t know where they’re playing or where they’re hanging there or invest in time over there is really worth the time. And how do we measure it all?

Chris Beall (02:11):

Yeah, there you go. So I think measuring it is really, really, really hard. But I think there’s a principle we can apply that’s really simple. There’s only two kinds of communication we can have with somebody; one is communication with somebody we have no relationship with and the other is communication with somebody we have a relationship with as I often say. And sometimes derided for, that’s just math, right? In fact, it’s a branch of math called Logic which is not that popular here in our country, but every once in a while somebody takes it up for a few minutes and they get some good out of it. So it’s just two possibilities. And what’s so interesting to me is that when you divide the world of communication with prospects and customers into those two categories instead of into other categories, you find something out really quickly.

You may not get it at first, most of us don’t, but it works like this, all communication of a digital form with somebody we don’t have a relationship with is open loop and doesn’t produce trust. And that’s really interesting because in the world of business to business, we only get information back when it’s closed loop. So say I send you an email and say you retired from your company five months ago but your company keeps your email alive so that they can make sure that should somebody send an email to you, a very important senior or vice president of whatever, that email gets proper attention will come back to me as you opened that email. That’s the it because email is fundamentally open loop. And even if I put little tricksy things in it little pixels or pixies or whatever they happen to be, they’re going to notice and they’re going to send something back and say, “Oh, they opened it.”

Or even if I’m looking at bounce rates. In both cases, it’s not going to bounce and the pixies and the pixels and all that are going to say it was opened. And then what will happen? Well, say you’re a data seller like, I don’t know, Zoom info, you’re going to report to the world that this person works at this company still even though they left five months ago. And in fact there’s a great mystery among the data sellers and people who buy data and actually use it like we do and our customers do to call people, talk to people. It’s like, “Huh, why are there so many retired people in this dataset?” And it’s because email is open loop. It sometimes tries to be closed loop and people put fancy things in it to try to make it closed loop but it’s open loop. And so we can’t really trust the information that comes back. And then the other part is, it doesn’t matter if it’s email, if it’s social, if it’s whatever, billboards which are actually analog, digital media open loop, we can’t build trust through digital communications alone.

There’s not enough data. And everybody thinks there’s enough data cycle. It’s digital. It must have more data, but there’s almost no data in a digital communication that gets through. Maybe a picture quickly forgotten.

Susan Finch (05:26):

You remind me of somebody that I respect a lot, Linda Zimmer. And she is into data security and speaks on it throughout the world. But she always reminds me that data is not truth, but it is sold as truth.

Chris Beall (05:41):

Oh yes. Yes. And oddly enough to get to truth takes a lot more data than the amount of data that tends to be sold as truth. That is, the data that’s important for building trust is data that speaks to parts of ourselves we’re not aware of. That’s why they’re called unconscious and subconscious parts of the mind. Those are just fancy names for, oh, Sigmund Freud wanted to say something. Although Sigmund Freud was kind of a weird guy, wanted to say some things, right? Not all of which were that savory, but it’s just simple which is, there are things that go on inside of our noggins and our bodies that we’re not aware of that are really important when it comes to us making decisions. And in fact, when we make the big decision, the biggest decision we ever make, do I trust this person?

That’s the biggest decision because when we screw it up and we get it wrong, it can be fatal. So here we have this really big decision, a blood decision, and we make it based on lots of data, lots of information actually, going into our unconscious and subconscious parts of our brains and our bodies. And that data, that information just isn’t available in digital media. We just can’t get there from here. Email, 5,000 bits roughly in an email, conversation, 20,000 bits in one second of that conversation, in one second, it’s for emails. So now we’re into a world where well, how many seconds does it take to get trust? Chris Voss, FBI’s hostage negotiator for many years, I think the world’s foremost expert on getting trust in a sales conversation. I asked him once, “How long do we have to get trust in a cold call?”

And a cold call is just a name for an initial voice interaction. We haven’t spoken before and I’m the ambusher. So I’m the ambusher, how long do I have to get trust from you? And he just looked me in the eye and said seven seconds. And when I playfully said, “Really? Our research says eight seconds.” He said, “Your research is wrong. It’s seven seconds.” At which point, I was pretty sure that his research was research and mine wasn’t. And I asked him, “What do we have to do in those seven seconds?” He says, “Oh, that’s easy. All we have to do is demonstrate to this person that we see the world through their eyes and show them that we’re competent to solve a problem they have right now.” I said, “Well, that’s a lot to do in seven seconds.”

Susan Finch (08:25):

You guys have talked about this a lot, the seven second rule and how long and what has to be packed into that time. And I played through in my head, so many people that are not customers of connect and sell and some of your reputable competitors. But what I see is, four of those seconds gets wasted as that transfer happens, that hello, hello, hello. And the seconds tick away and you’re almost done before you even heard a voice and what a waste.

Chris Beall (09:01):

Exactly. And then when you, yes, the time goes by. And then by the way, most reps just waste the time that they have. So they say, “So Susan, how are you today?” And I was like, “Okay.” So now you talk for six or seven seconds and we’re done. And that’s not enough to get the job done because we didn’t show the person that we see their world through their eyes. “Hi, how are you today?” Is not seeing the world through their eyes. “Did I catch you at a bad time?” It’s a little bit closer because you referred to a bad time and it is a bad time because it’s always a bad time but they did answer the phone. So it was probably a good time actually for a conversation, just not with you.

Susan Finch (09:44):

My time is so precious that how much time do I want to allot to something unexpected, a stranger or an annoyance in general. Because me might even know the annoyance and they may have called us before and how much time are we willing to devote to that to actually pick up the phone? My time super precious. I won’t do that many times.

Chris Beall (10:05):

Yeah. And what you will do in general is you’ll trade a little certainty. I’m off this call in 27 seconds, thank God, in exchange for a little courtesy. Yeah, I’ll listen to why you called. That exchange is very, very easy to sell. That’s one of the easiest sells in the world. I know I’m an interruption. “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I’ve called?” And if I say that, you might decide that your self image is so robust that you’re just going to say no. Or you might decide you’re so afraid of me or afraid of your own tendency to go along with what people say to you that you will say, “No, not right now. I’m busy.” Which is kind of silly because you did answer the phone. You aren’t that busy. You were expecting something that was going to take, oh, maybe 27 seconds.

But for the most part, people would chuckle and go, “Sure, go ahead.” And the reason they chuckle is that people chuckle and they laugh when their fear is relieved. That’s how jokes work. Jokes make us nervous about a particular way it could go and then when it goes another way, that thing called the punchline, we’re relieved and we laugh. Laughter is a way of expressing relief and the departure of fear. So when we get called, we’re afraid. Why are we afraid? An invisible stranger just ambushed us. That’s pretty scary. And how do we express our fear? Annoyance and desire to get out of the room, so to speak. But what is our constraint? Oh, darn. It’s an interaction with another human being and if I treat them too badly, my own self-image will be harmed. I’ll hurt myself. So I don’t want to do that so I’m a little bit stuck.

Oh, you’re so kind. You offer me a way out. I know I’m an interruption. “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I call?” Said playfully. And sounds like a deal. Now what’s funny about this is, right there you’ve accomplished the purpose of a cold call. You’re done. You have trust. Oddly enough, fear is a great foundation for building trust because by relieving fear, you’ll always build trust. Not sometimes but always. And if you just left it at that and you didn’t actually fulfill the 27 second promise, then you’d have trust that got eroded because you didn’t fulfill your promise. But if you fulfill your promise and tell him why you called and then let them go if they want to go, they’ll trust you and you can talk to them again. However, and this is the big point, then you can also send them an email. Then you can send them an email which they will open and read because you can say in the subject line of that email, thanks for our conversation just now.

And that’s a completely different email because it’s within a trust relationship that actually exists and is very fresh. And so when you look at digital media, and podcasts are like this too by the way. Somebody might be amused by us in our podcast, right? And they might learn something. Sometimes they’ll reach out to me and say, “This changed my life.” I’m getting a fair amount of that, but they actually won’t quite trust us yet. Not Corey, not me, but if we have a conversation with them. So say I have a conversation with somebody. I had a conversation with a very senior sales enablement head from 3M today. And by the end of that conversation, which was longer than 27 seconds, it was actually 17 minutes and 38 seconds, I could send this person an email and this person is going to open that email and actually read it and probably reply to it and say thank you for the information you provided, blah, blah, blah and here’s how I’d like to proceed or something like that, right?

That same person, a cold email would have gone right over into the cold email trash file where cold emails go and I’d have to then resort to a clever subject line. Oh, did alligators eat your toenails? Or some nonsense like that which people do in hopes of raising themselves up above the sea of noise called email. It’s not really a sea of noise. It’s trusted email from people. I know you sent me a house warming gifts to Helen and I via email. 

I didn’t see it because it was in a sea of untrusted email and somehow it just slipped by me but when you reminded me of it, I went right over there and opened it, forwarded it to my fiance and voila, we’re grateful, we’re happy to have a house warming gift. Thank you so very much. We really do love our new house and all that is good. Had you just been some stranger sending me a house warming gift, first of all, it would have been weird. Secondly, I would have been suspicious of it as like, what are you trying to sell me? And thirdly, I missed this one. I would have missed that one forever one.

Susan Finch (15:01):

You definitely wouldn’t trust the click.

Chris Beall (15:04):

I wouldn’t trust the click and you wouldn’t be able to know.

Susan Finch (15:08):

No, but you-

Chris Beall (15:09):

You wouldn’t know what had happened to it.

Susan Finch (15:12):

But you’re coming back to something. With that subject that you said about the alligators. With the piece that you brought up earlier about a joke and a punchline, there is a piece to building these relationships. And maybe it’s just me because I appreciate a good sense of humor, but I find when people have a good sense of humor and know how to fine tune, it’s, this is normally done, this is why I talking to GoDaddy for a hosting company as opposed to some of the other competitors of theirs because it’s so sexist. The guys answer, the guys have a sense of humor.

The guys get any humor I have. And there’s a report immediately because you get me. You find me funny. And if you find me funny, I’m probably going to hang out with you a little bit more and trust you more especially when I have a stupid joke to say. And I want to talk a little bit, I know this 27 seconds are so valuable, but even from that moment and in that little space, there are ways to drop those disarming pieces of humor, of relatability, of vulnerability. How important is that?

Chris Beall (16:19):

I think it’s crucially important in discovery, crucially important. I think it’s also crucially important in your voice when somebody accepts your 27 seconds, because you can say you can actually just chuckle along with them. You don’t have to say anything about it. It’s just funny. Can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? It’s kind of funny. Listen to James Thornburg say it some time out there on his many, many, many LinkedIn videos that he makes of himself cold calling using that opener. And you look at his face and he’s ready for humor, for action, right? But for humor action, for humorous interaction. I think humor when shared is, that’s the first dish we share with somebody that shows that we trust them. We’ll find what they said that is intended to be funny funny. That’s trust. That’s why comedians make a lot of money because they can stand up on stage with an audience that doesn’t trust them to start with, that’s why they’re heckled also, is to test their ability to punch all the way through to the other side and get to the trust regime.

And it’s why when they bomb, they call it dying, died up there on stage. And I don’t know if you’ve ever done standup. All of us who’ve done classroom teaching have done lots and lots of standup. I’ve spent thousands of hours stand up. And the number one rule is, until the class laughs with you and at you a little bit, you’re just not there. You’re just not there. But once they do, you’re probably pretty good. So it’s also true that follow up email. So self-deprecating humor in a cold email is incredibly dangerous. You actually don’t even know who you’re making fun of, them, you, somebody else. It’s very dangerous. But on a followup email, it’s really easy. It’s really easy.

You can say, “Oh, about that conversation we had today.” Ambushed again, and I know it was awkward, ambushed again, it’s kind of funny so people don’t think of ambush. Unexpected word makes you nervous. The punchline is it was really something that they understand. There’s a million ways to tell a joke, right? One word, two words, any words, no words. But in a trust relationship, the joke is understood or attempted to be understood. People will laugh at your jokes when they trust you even if they don’t get the joke.

Susan Finch (18:56):

I agree. We were just having this conversation in our house last night, my daughter’s pledging a sorority and they want her in the sorority because they think she’s hilarious while the other three of us in the house that are funnier than she is disagreed, which she didn’t appreciate it. We all agreed who is the funniest and it’s my son but she said, “You don’t understand. I’m really funny.” She said, “You don’t understand. My friends think I’m the funniest person they know and I tell them they need to up their game with their friends then. If I’m as good as they have, they need somebody better.”

Chris Beall (19:33):

I’ll make some interest. Well, at least she’s funny enough.

Susan Finch (19:36):

She is.

Chris Beall (19:38):

And actually this brings up another point. It’s a point I call above threshold. We haven’t really talked about it on Market Dominance Guys. Once you’re above threshold, within some element of a relationship that’s sufficient to allow you to advance the relationship then it doesn’t make sense to keep pushing that particular dimension of the relationship. And this is the classic failure mode of all salespeople. It’s called selling after the close. But most people think the close is when the deal is signed. That’s actually not the close. The first close is, did they chuckle at your 27 seconds? The second close is, did they actually listen to you when you set the next part? Really listen. The third is, do they come back and say something to you? Now you’ve had three closes.

The fourth is, did they agree to take the meeting or did they tell you the truth about their situation? Now in an ambush, nobody will really tell you quite the truth. There are very few people with the plum to do that. It just is tough, right? So in sales, we’re always doing these little tiny closes and what a close means is that’s done, it’s okay to move on. That’s actually what it means. That’s done. And people who can’t close have an emotional issue concerning their confidence in the relationships they build. So a closer such as say, myself, and I’m a pretty well-known closer, right? Not a deal closer. I do close deals, but that’s not… What’s interesting it’s like, once we get to point X, if I think we’re there and you act like we’re there, we’re there and we’re moving on.

This is why I can propose to somebody two days after meeting them, which had happened in the case of this particular fiance and me and why I can be confident doing it because we were there and it was okay for me to say it and then I didn’t have to keep going back and saying it. There are three things that I said. I’m not going to repeat them here but they were really important and then we could move on to the next part, which was me going back to my hotel. So it’s really fascinating, when you watch great salespeople, they will close 30, 40 times in a discovery conversation in little tiny ways.

Susan Finch (22:07):

Yes.

Chris Beall (22:08):

And it’s because, having built trust, it’s okay to risk the relationship by moving forward as long as you have reasonable confidence, that you’ll be told that you’re being inappropriate, which happened by moving forward. And so he says, “Hang on a second.” And that’s great, you go, “Okay, wait a minute. We weren’t really close.” But that’s called a false positive on the close, that you got the false positive. It wasn’t actually an okay situation to close in but you have enough trust that the other person is going to catch the false positive and they’re going to give it back to you as information and this is what you can’t do in digital media. You can’t catch the failure to close. In fact, you can’t detect the micro close. It’s not there. Where am I going to detect it? Between the first sentence, second sentence, third sentence of the email.

I don’t know what’s going on in you. But if I see you and hear you and then you trust me enough to tell me when I’ve screwed up, then we can collaborate and move forward. And this is the essence of all sales, people who learn it, have fun and make a lot of money. And people who don’t learn it drive the rest of us because it’s like-

Susan Finch (23:17):

They make their family crazy and their friends crazy. They make everybody crazy because it carries through. If you don’t see where you have been given permission and encouragement to go to the next thing and you can’t recognize that and you do stay stuck in those same; you’ve met the people at parties. They say the same stories every time. When you see them at the same party, they’re telling the same stories every time and they never are able to move on or out of the past or out of the college days or out of, the one time they met a celebrity 55 years ago. They’re still talking about that because nothing’s come up since or they haven’t learned how to move it forward. It’s embarrassing.

Chris Beall (23:56):

Yes. Or they don’t have the confidence. Because there’s a funny thing, what we do when we’re closing and it’s a really, really awkward thing. It’s the hardest thing in the world. We’re potentially sacrificing the relationship for the collaboration. As a pure socializer, and some people are pure socializers, were I up here socializer and all I value that was the relationship, I could never get a deal. Because I have to come to a point of saying, “But the purpose of these conversations was to collaborate on doing something together that we can’t do alone and we can’t do separately so I have to take the risk of sacrificing the relationship and trust you that you are going to catch me when I fall and I moved too fast.” And that’s where the trust ends up being a two way street. You have to trust me to have your best interests at heart.

And you have to believe that I know more than you do about what it is that we’re trying to do otherwise I wouldn’t have ambushed you, you would have ambushed me. I have to trust you to correct me when I’m moving too soon in a deal, too soon to the next step of collaboration, whatever it turns out to be. And that’s the trust that the non close of the socializer never has. They don’t trust the other person to keep them from blowing the relationship up so they stick on this point and just keep hammering it.

Susan Finch (25:25):

It’s like my husband on his computer when it’s not doing what he wants, he just keeps clicking. He’s like, “Stop. Stop it.” It can’t even catch up with what you’re doing to move on and do the next thing because you keep clicking. Stop clicking.

Chris Beall (25:37):

Oh, that’s a good one. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing. And of course it is really hard to trust technology. But the point of all, this is, look, there’s an easy way and a hard way. The easy way is also the most awkward way which is you have to ambush somebody because it puts them in a state where you can build trust quickly in seven seconds and therefore you have a foundation for all future interactions; verbal, digital, billboard put outside their office, sending them a note in the mail, offering them a gift. All that stuff within a trust relationship is actually trivially easy to do well and hard to blow. And so if you do the awkward thing, that’s awkward, it’s really awkward to throw yourself under the bus. It’s really awkward to say I’m a bad thing, but you must because you are. You’ve ambushed them. You’re bad. So just own up to it. It’s really awkward to do it fast enough. I know I’m an interruption. So I’m so glad that I caught you. Now I’ll be brief. I know I’m an interruption. It’s like, boom, done, dead. Boom, dead.

Susan Finch (26:49):

What’s that phrase? I’m so glad I caught you. I feel like a prisoner already.

Chris Beall (26:54):

I caught you-

Susan Finch (26:55):

Like a tiger [crosstalk 00:26:56].

Chris Beall (26:55):

You didn’t catch me at all.

Susan Finch (27:00):

Right.

Chris Beall (27:00):

You haven’t caught me. What are you talking about? But if you told me you know you’re an interruption, I hear the bus go over you like this, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. And I’m good. I don’t have to back the bus up. I don’t need six more thumps, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. I’m good. Thank goodness you ran yourself over. Now if you fake it, if you say, “I know I’m a bit of an interruption.” That means I didn’t really mean it. I got near the bus and when you couldn’t see, I pretended I was run over by the bus but actually I just squealed and jumped back and now I’m just another faker in the world and you’re not going to trust me. And so it’s a subtle business. This is very subtle, but if you’re willing to do it, digital media open up, including advertising.

Interestingly enough, it’s a delight to see an ad for a company where you just talk to somebody that you now trust about what they do. That’s fun. Oh, look, I just saw their ad. I just talked to that guy this morning, that gal this morning. That’s really interesting. What a coincidence. So suddenly retargeting is different. I talked to you. I can retarget everybody around you, including you. And most of them, it just goes, eh, whatever. But somebody might say, “Have you seen that ad?” And it’s like, “Yeah. I talked to those people yesterday. You know, it was really actually an interesting conversation.” Boom, everything’s different. Same with social outreach. I reach out to you on LinkedIn after talking with you. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. I know we didn’t have a lot of time and I guarantee you I will never pitch you on anything on LinkedIn. That would be an exception to the current rule which is, everybody pitches everybody all the time, because-

Chris Beall (29:28):

Clubhouse is fascinating. I think clubhouse is the most interesting thing going on in the world today because it’s basically this, social media where you can’t be rude.

Susan Finch (29:37):

And you can’t be recorded and you can be reshared. People figure it out how to but for the most part, yeah.

Chris Beall (29:43):

Yeah.

Susan Finch (29:44):

And the bios, have you seen the bios and what people do in there? Their bios are about nine inches high and it’s filled with every keyword phrase, offer, pitch, discount, every possible link, where to find them with emojis and little this and little that. It’s the most decorated. It would make somebody who builds professional resumes just cringe because it looks like a four year old had a party with emojis and just blasted them all over anything incredible about you.

Chris Beall (30:17):

It’s like a four-year-old had a party with emojis that were served as sushi and they got sick, threw up all over that thing. It’s like emoji vomit.

Susan Finch (30:28):

It really is. So it’s an interesting thing, and I find myself attracted to the smaller rooms because I like deeper conversations. I like collaborative conversations rather than the grand standing from the larger rooms and the bigger names where they’re pontificating on stuff that I’ve already heard them say everywhere else. So it is an interesting venue, but I do agree with you, my experience so far has been, it’s been a very gracious kind venue at this point.

Chris Beall (30:57):

And it will stay that way because we actually don’t have mechanisms in us that allow us to be rude with our voice when we have been identified, especially to a group. That’s why panel discussions are such frankly pablum. When I’m invited to be on a panel I always say, “You realize I’m actually going to speak my mind.”

Susan Finch (31:22):

Yeah. That happens to me too.

Chris Beall (31:26):

But I’m not going to be mean to anybody. I’m just going to act they’re not there, but I will recognize them and say like they said, I’m actually going to be much more polite to the panelists if they’re were up on the panel with me than, I don’t know, if we were just having a private conversation at a bar. Why? Because I don’t want to embarrass them and I don’t want to embarrass myself and so we’re built to be polite in voice conversations, especially in groups.

Susan Finch (31:52):

You’re not because you’re just not capable of it. You get kicked out or muted. So it’s okay.

Chris Beall (31:57):

Exactly. It’s got the appropriate controls and the appropriate hands. I think clubhouse is fascinating and it tells us two things; I think one, text-based communication or pictures, unsolicited, whatever tends to be noisy because it’s cheap to do, cheap to reproduce, cheap to copy. And therefore everybody does it for nothing and it’s not working so well. And it’s actually even worse with work from home where you’re already agitated about your kids, your dog, I love your dog, but your dog, whatever. And then on the other side, this video thing is oddly wearing and people are trying to figure out, it’s wearing enough that it has a name, Zoom fatigue.

And here’s this little slice that’s actually the biggest field of all, which is the human voice. The thing that speaks to our insides, that it borders on song that lets us sing to the other person. But somebody once said to me after I came out of a board meeting and it was funny, it was one of my direct reports. He was invited to the board meeting. He said, “What did you do in there?” I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “You saying to that board of directors, it was done with the voice, it was done with the tone, it was done with the cadence and the note and they gave you three million dollars.” And I said, “Well, singers make a lot of money.”

Susan Finch (33:21):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (33:21):

They do, if you heard. Rockstar means something man, it means something. And the human voice has got this amazing deep ancient range. We just discovered by analysis of the skulls of Neanderthals that they heard the same way that our ancestors and we here, including being able to distinguish certain sounds the sound t from shh from ss from k is really, really hard for most animals to distinguish because of the way their ears and their skulls are constructed.

Susan Finch (34:00):

Right.

Chris Beall (34:01):

But here we have these two branches and we have the [inaudible 00:34:06], we have all these other branches of our family tree that we’re finding and language goes back at least that far because that’s what that difficult to attain bunch of shaped bones allow us to do is to make these distinctions that are peculiar to language and not very relevant in the worlds of natural sounds. You don’t really need this tell a t from a k from a shh from a ss out there in the woods, but you better be able to tell the difference between sit. You know what I mean?

Susan Finch (34:46):

Oh man. You did a post a couple of weeks ago where we were participating in one about spontaneous phone calls and people picking up the phone and being irritated by people that actually call and don’t set an appointment to make a phone call first and what has been lost so much in communication. And I think, yeah, we just talked about it with clubhouse and the value of conversation and the gifts that you get from that, that you can’t get from data, that you can’t get from email from other things because there is no replacement for a conversation and the time that it saves to have a 30 second conversation as opposed to 15 emails to say the same thing.

Chris Beall (35:29):

Or to fail to say the same thing.

Susan Finch (35:30):

Yes.

Chris Beall (35:32):

That’s really what the issue comes down to as I read these email threads cut back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and I ask, “Okay. So what is this the equivalent of in a conversation?” And normally it’s 30 seconds in which there are five interactions, two of which are corrective, one of which is expansive, and one of which makes a fine distinction that needed to be made in order to get to where you got to go.

That’s what we do with each other. We correct each other. No, no, that’s not what I meant. Imagine that in an email. No, that’s not what I meant. Oh, now you’re insulting me. Whereas in the live conversation, that’s polite. It’s like, “No, no, no. That’s not what I meant.” And there’s a big difference between no in an email and no, no, no, that’s not what I meant. No, no, no means I’m trying to help you now.

Susan Finch (36:28):

Right.

Chris Beall (36:28):

I’m working with you, right? They’re totally different concepts. Even though one of them has three nos it has a lot less no in it than one no in an email. So this stuff’s magic and to abandon the magic in favor of cheap reproduction and absentee landlordism, I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to have to actually do the dishes. I just want somebody else to take care of everything. So you take care of delivering it and they’ll take care of reading and I don’t have to do anything and I’m going to go write another one. No, I’m not even going to do that. I’m going to use a template. I’m not even going to do that. I’m going to have a sequence. My sequence know more than I do.

In fact somebody is AB tested every sequence in the world. “Really? How many would that be?” “Well, do the math. There’s more interesting sequences of emails you could send them. There are oh, Adams in the universe. It turns out.” So I don’t think they’ve all been tested. Pretty sure, but everything in conversation has been tested. It’s been tested over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. It’s all been tested. When I say it’s all been tested, I’m saying something very different from, it’s all been tested. Those are very different things because that’s been tested.

Susan Finch (37:50):

Correct. And when I think back, you were just covering that. How many emails are always restating something, finding something, telling somebody where to find it, where you already told them where to find it, where to look for it. I can’t think of three conversations in the past month that I’ve had to have it corrective, and definitely not on video. I haven’t had to backtrack on anything. And if I do, it was so not memorable because it was so minor and quickly resolved, it doesn’t stick in my head.

Chris Beall (38:23):

Exactly. Because we’re urged on the insight to do the correction in real time.

Susan Finch (38:28):

Yes.

Chris Beall (38:30):

It’s a closing. Every correction is a little mini closing and we do them all the time. We do. We have catchphrases for them. We all know how to do it. Well actually what I was trying to say, right? We say that. That’s a known phrase. I can go look it up on Google, actually what I was trying to say. But if I looked it up on Google, I find a little bit. But if I looked it up in the transcripts of every conversation, if I had them all that had been had in the last day, I’d find 100 million. Actually what I was trying to say.

Susan Finch (39:06):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (39:06):

You know, now that I think of it, it seems to me, huh?

Susan Finch (39:12):

That just reminded me.

Chris Beall (39:12):

That’s another one. Just reminded me. Well, at the end of the day, we have these phrases-

Susan Finch (39:20):

[crosstalk 00:39:20] not that. Anything but that.

Chris Beall (39:22):

And it’s a bad one, right? But these phrases, even the overused ones, they’re ways of saying, this isn’t going exactly as I expect it to where I understand it at this point. We need to back up a little bit. Let’s back up. Let’s slow down. Let’s get this right before we go to the next thing and let’s do it without any rancor because we need the relationship. So we’re just about to break the relationship through a misunderstanding. Let’s not do that. Let’s let it be a little rubber band, snap it back gently and then we’ll fix it up. Get on the same page. How funny that the one thing we can’t do with text is get on the same page.

Susan Finch (40:04):

No.

Chris Beall (40:05):

In a conversation we get on the same page easily. We got to make sure we got on the same page so we got off the email where the pages were and we went to the conversation where there’s no pages. I think that’s a church reference by the way. That’s referring to singing the same hymn as everybody else, I think get on the same page because everybody did that. It was a community activity where you needed to be on this or people start doing it, I suppose. Yes, exactly. So let’s get on the same page. This stuff to me is fascinating and what’s really fascinating is the entire innovation economy depends utterly on it being mastered by salespeople.

Susan Finch (40:45):

Yes.

Chris Beall (40:46):

We have nothing. We have nothing in terms of our ability to move forward, unless salespeople master all of this stuff, which thank goodness they mastered 98% of it just by being humans and learning to speak.

Susan Finch (41:01):

So I think this is a great place to wrap up this episode.

Chris Beall (41:03):

I love it. Let’s do it.

Susan Finch (41:04):

All right.

Chris Beall (41:06):

Oh. We’re closing everybody. We’re closing. We’re moving on.

Susan Finch (41:11):

We’re going to wrap up this episode of Market Dominance Guys and I’m acting like I’m the host. We don’t know who the host was today. We just know we were on it together. We had a great conversation and you can find out more at marketdominanceguys.com. You can also find this show in any podcast venue that you favor, and you can check Chris Beall out, he’s over on clubhouse. Look for it when he’s there. Set up those alerts. Follow him so you know when he’s participating in something. You may want to hear some bonus materials or give him one of your burning questions and let him answer it. Maybe he’ll have one for you. We will talk to you all soon. Thank you so much. I’m Susan Finch. I’m the producer of Market Dominance Guys with the esteemed Chris Beall. Chris, thank you for having me on.

Chris Beall (41:54):

Delighted as always Susan.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On this week’s episode of the Marketing Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their conversation about the middle phase in the creation of every startup or new product — being stuck. That’s the stage when things aren’t working out the way you’d envisioned them. That’s when prospects aren’t embracing your concept as you’d hoped they would. That’s when you have that sinking feeling that this whole project might be a terrible, terrible mistake. Something’s wrong! Panicking isn’t going to help the situation, but neither is denial. That can lead to faking that everything is just fine — when you know darn well it isn’t. Listen to Chris’ warning: “It’s hard to be honest once you start faking it.” Corey and Chris encourage you to face the truth, because as they say, “The truth is the boss!”

Come listen to how to use your resources to get an honest assessment about why you’re stuck so that you can start moving toward getting your project back in flow. You’ll learn these details and other great advice in this week’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Stuck in the Middle with Denial.”

 

—-more—-

 

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (01:40):

Oh, yeah. But what do we do when we’re stuck for too long? We go back and we fake flow?

Corey Frank (01:56):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (01:56):

That’s what we do. We fake flow and faking flow is the death knell of a start-up. You’re dead if you fake flow because where you’re going to go is somewhere and where the gold is somewhere else.

Corey Frank (02:08):

And also you have these quarterly or every eight weeks or so meetings with your board as a start-up, right. And we both been there where you got to give him something, you got to shoot a hostage, you got to give him some red meat, you got to make a virgin offering or something or you have to fake it. And that’s the worst because you’re an ear inauthentic in all of those and it sounds like… Which is probably going to butcher it. I think it was Lao-Tzu who had this Zen syllogism he says, “I know nothing, I know everything, I know nothing.”

Chris Beall (02:46):

Yes, yeah.

Corey Frank (02:46):

And the stages that folks go through, right. And some folks will never get past the first or the second stage. So when you look at that from the makeup of a start-up so we drill a little deeper here. That has to be a safe place for Cherryl to be able to go to the CEO of the company in this new position she’s in and say, “Hey boss, I’m just not feeling it. I think we need,” “What do you mean it’s not feeling it?” Right. And then there’s got to be a level of humility there to incorporate other folks. So how do you, you mentioned earlier that a start-up of one it’s a tough and lonely proposition to do and arguably you could say that the success curve is a little more elongated than one with multiple folks but what are you doing to kind of surround yourself with those kinds of folks? We talked early on and at some of the earlier episodes last year about politics and bcc’ing emails and all that kind of stuff.

We don’t have to go into it now but right now if I’m going to start-up and I don’t necessarily have those types of folks, what can I do to get it? How can I navigate those waters to showcase folks that, “Hey, maybe I’m stuck and we need to break out of this otherwise we are faking it”.

Chris Beall (04:04):

Yeah. I think that the trick to start-ups is like the trick to everything. One is tough, one person it’s a tough business, right. I used to be as you know pretty serious rock climber mountaineer. That’s a very, very, very dangerous game to do alone. Not only because there’s no rope to catch you but primarily because you can’t trust your mind and you think you can but where are you going to check it, right. Where are you going to check it? Where are you going to figure out whether you’re doing something based on fear, on self-induced bravado, on you’re tired you just don’t want to think about it anymore so you’re going to try it. It’s a dangerous, dangerous world. Start–ups are a lot like that, we did an episode in which you brought up the Free Solo your pitch, right. Alex, up there climbing a El Capitan’s-

Corey Frank (04:56):

El Capitan’s, yeah.

Chris Beall (04:57):

Free Soloing it. Well, if you watch the movie you see that he’s not really alone, alone in that endeavor, right. He’s got people that he talks to, he’s a kind of guy who can trust his own mind by the way almost but he’s too smart to trust only his own mind. So he has other people to talk with and I think that even that kind of thing it’s not the rope, it’s the relationship that allows you to go. And what do you have to have? You got to have somebody who sees the world a little differently from you is on your side. And is sincerely going to come forward with their own enlightenment and their own ignorance and you can put the two together and you got a shot, you really do have a shot.

It’s like trying to walk on one leg, it’s just a problem. You’re not really built for it, we’re really built to go in pairs and go do things. You and I doing this show is a good example. I can do one of these by myself, you can do one by yourself, that’d probably okay but I don’t think we’d be on episode God knows whatever we’re on here, 70 or whatever it is by now. There is the covering of each other’s weaknesses but there’s also the knowing that there’s somebody you can go to in order to get unstuck. Because if you really look at these flow states, at these three states, right. The flow, the stuck and the waiting, we don’t need much help waiting, we can always find something to do, we just need to know that when we’re waiting you need to find something to do, right. We don’t need a huge amount of help in knowing that we’re stuck as long as we’re honest but it’s hard to be honest once you start faking it.

And so when you have an external audience like a board of directors like you said or whatever… I remember when I joined this company something happened here which is I joined as a head of products and a few days later sort of the whole engineering team, which is fairly small up and quit. And a few days after that there was a board meeting. Well, between those two we didn’t fake it, we actually did some things. We hired a couple of people, we read all the code. I spent a weekend, we read 300,000 lines of code. We built the system repeatedly, made sure we can build and start it, build and start it, build and start it, knock it down, kill it, start it again. That’s the kind of stuff you want to be able to do in a live system that’s servicing lots of people and went to the board meeting.

That’s pretty tempting in a board meeting like that to fake it. “Hey Chris, you lost your whole engineering team, what’s up?” I was like, “Well, what’s up is, here’s what we’re doing, here’s why I’m pretty sure that we can do things, start it, stop, keep the thing a live, here’s what we don’t know but here’s the recommended course of action.” But it is so tempting under that kind of pressure to either cave into somebody or-

Corey Frank (07:39):

Oh, for sure.

Chris Beall (07:41):

Else or whatever and so part of what you’re hiring for or partnering with is somebody who has the drive, they got to have the drive without the engine this whole start-up thing is stupid you can’t do it, it’s just too hard.

Corey Frank (07:55):

Right.

Chris Beall (07:56):

Not to think a lot of people are going to help you. You got to have that big motor and the motors got to kind of be willing to turn by itself. You get up in the morning if you don’t feel that every day and you haven’t felt that every day since you were pretty young, don’t do start-ups it just doesn’t work out, it just doesn’t trust me. But say you do, you’ve got to get another person with that kind of drive and then the next part about the relationship that’s got to work is, you’ve got to have a framework for talking about being inflow, getting stuck. You have to have the words for it. You have to have words about things like, “When are we guessing?” You have to use words like ignorant.

The word I use today with Cherryl was I said and was talking to her and got Jon Campbell and I said, “We’re just doing this like total idiot. We’re just like dummies here. Obviously the thing to do is to talk to somebody else and here we are talking to each other. Let’s not do this the hard way, let’s go the person that we would be selling to, except we already sold to that person and talk to that person,” right. Well, but you have to use the words if you don’t use a word like, “We’re being idiots here.”

Corey Frank (09:06):

Sure.

Chris Beall (09:07):

Then nobody feels safe coming forward and saying, “I feel like I’m a little stuck or I’m being an idiot or whatever,” Right. You have to use the vocabulary of truth.

Corey Frank (09:17):

Well, and you as the leader, right. To be the first one to level a degree of humility that it’s safe to be humble, it’s safe not to know allows you to probably have that outcome’s raiser level of clarity to say, “Wait a minute it’s probably right in front of us, let’s look elsewhere.”

Chris Beall (09:38):

Yeah. And when I hire people this is throughout the whole process I always tell them this I say, “Look, you’re going to love it here or you’re going to hate it here. If you’re going to hate it here let’s figure out how to have you not join.” So you wouldn’t be talking to me unless you’re qualified because people don’t get to talk to me unless they’re qualified. That’s another process I don’t go through that, that would be crazy. That’s like qualifying on a cold call, right. The list got to be good or not good we’re not going to find out if we qualify on the cold call, that’s crazy. We got to set the meeting and let qualification happen in discovery. This is the same problem. So here we are now, we’re in discovery and we’re going to discover something, you’re going to discover whether you want to work for somebody like me in an organization like this because we can’t avoid that you’re working for me.

There’s nothing, no words are going to make it go away. I’m the CEO, you’re stuck or we’re stuck with me. We can’t make me not be that guy, right. But I can tell you how it works and how it works you might love and you might hate, it’s about a 50, 50. And you might love it because you’ll think, “This is just what I’ve always wanted,” you might hate it and think, “Wow, this feels really kind of exposed and maybe a little harsh.” And one of the things I tell folks is, “Look, we don’t really report to each other. This is not the strict hierarchy that’s about you tell so-and-so what you did, they tell you what to do that’s isn’t here.” We report essentially to our real boss which is the truth as we can ascertain it.

The truth is a pretty good boss and the truth will evolve along with us. So it’s a boss that keeps up, it doesn’t fall behind. The truth by its very nature will keep up with changing circumstances, changing markets, COVID can come along, you still can have the truth as your boss the day after the pandemic hits just like you did the day before. You might not be able to ascertain it so easily, you may have to go through more effort to find it but it’s still the thing that we could report to. However I tell them, “When we’re out of time and we got to make a decision and we’re just out of time, we don’t have enough knowledge to make the decision that’s the definition of being stuck, we guess and here’s how we guess, I guess.”

I guess that’s it. And here’s the corrupt part, am the person who says that we’re stuck and we’re out of time, we don’t have a… I declare the guess that it’s totally corrupt I get it.

Corey Frank (12:02):

Right.

Chris Beall (12:04):

But it’s a singularity and you have to accept that coming in and if I ask-

Corey Frank (12:07):

Risk it i guess.

Chris Beall (12:10):

And I’m guessing. Well, but first of all I’m going to call it a guess. We’re not going to wrap it up and say, “Our analysis shows this, this consultant said this.” Maybe we did an analysis, maybe we have a consultant but if we’re guessing I promise you I will tell you that we’re guessing and we delegate the guessing to me. And then I’m going to guess and we’re going to treat my guess as a fact of the world as the truth regardless of whether it is or not. And that’s your commitment when you come on board because the alternative is we can’t get unstuck when staying stuck is fatal.

Corey Frank (12:49):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (12:49):

Staying stuck can be fatal. I don’t know what to do and the right thing to do is to stop the car before you go off the cliff, you drive off the cliff.

Corey Frank (12:57):

Sure.

Chris Beall (12:59):

So, fatal mistakes are the ones that we should try hardest to avoid through design, right?

Corey Frank (13:03):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (13:04):

Don’t avoid fatal mistakes through diligence, always avoid them through design.

Corey Frank (13:08):

Always through design, yes and I think that’s again the impetus of the show is the failure to dominate markets.

Chris Beall (13:16):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (13:17):

Always will lead, let’s add this new axiom to the pile as well so.

Chris Beall (13:21):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (13:21):

Okay.

Chris Beall (13:22):

It’s an interesting thing. So the cycle time thing around going from… And using the words, use your words as they say to little kids. The word flow is a good word, we’re inflow that’s a great word. The word stuck is a great word it means something, it’s a term of art it actually means we don’t know enough to continue moving forward confidently.

Corey Frank (13:42):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (13:42):

Just a term of art, right. Waiting is waiting, we’re just waiting, we’re waiting for something. We need something because until we have that something we can’t move forward. Now some people are always waiting because they think they need everything before they can do anything, don’t hire those people. Such people are problematic, right.

Corey Frank (14:01):

And by the way I know the truth from what I hear you saying the truth is your boss.

Chris Beall (14:06):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (14:06):

But I know that come five o’clock, right. You have a different boss and that is your bride and it’s her birthday today so we will be wrapping this up in a minute because I think Helen’s birthday trumps the truth, Helen’s birthday is the truth. We always talked about the next book after Market Dominance Guys, or the subtitle for the Market Dominance Guys’ book was going to be called Pivot Jesus Pivot. But I think maybe the subheading the Pivot Jesus Pivot would be stuck inflow waiting and faking it in start-ups today. I’ll tell you what that would be, that’d be a title then-

Chris Beall (14:43):

That’d be pretty good.

Corey Frank (14:43):

Tell me.

Chris Beall (14:43):

Ideal on the title, Pivot Jesus Pivot. I don’t know if anybody gets that but if we were to tell everybody what the joke behind the punchline or whatever it is, is it’s like If God were a VC he’d be saying, “Pivot Jesus Pivot.”

Corey Frank (15:01):

That’s right, “Not enough people are buying into your products.”

Chris Beall (15:04):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (15:05):

“You probably need to take a look at it.” So I love it. Want to tell you what Chris, this was supposed to be a two-parter and we’ll continue the next part because what we want to springboard into what we talked about today about these different states in making progress also is tied into what we want to talk about next time, which is discovery calls. And discovery calls for a start-up because many of the aspects that you’re talking about, about being stuck or inflow or waiting or humility or authenticity or status alignment is just as critical when we get to the discovery process. So I think that’s what I’m going to look forward to next time on the Market Dominance Guys talking to you, again the surge of sales, the profit of profit and again my personal favorite, the resputing of revenue so till next time.

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This week, the Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, walk you through the three states of cycle time for start-up businesses or for any company that’s trying to launch a new product or service. There’s in flow. There’s stuck. And there’s waiting. Using an example from his own company’s experience launching Flight School, their brand-new sales-rep training program, Chris tells what happened when they thought they were in flow and ready to set meetings for discovery calls, but soon found that prospects didn’t respond as enthusiastically as expected to what his company was offering. In other words, they were stuck.

But what was the problem? It’s a great program! Why weren’t their prospects seeing the value of what was being offered? Chris explains that it’s often necessary to put your own narcissism aside in order to clearly look at all the possible reasons why you’re not moving toward success as quickly as you think you should be. Only then can you be open to exploring and utilizing all the resources that might help you get unstuck. As he says, “You need to plumb the depths of your ignorance! You need knowledge!” As practical and helpful as usual, our Market Dominance Guys offer advice on this common problem encountered by almost every startup company. Join them for today’s episode, “How to Get from Stuck to Unstuck.”

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (02:00):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the … I used to say the sage of sales and the profit of profit and the duke of discovery, but I think what we’re going to talk about today, Chris, it’s more like the Coronado of closing, the Pizzaro of profit, and let’s say the Diaz of discovery. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about exploring and discovering things, and the process of maybe persistence and cycling.

Corey Frank (02:34):

And before we even get to that, it’s funny because, Chris, you and I were talking before we hit the record button, that you needed to turn off your phone because it was discovered by you that even if your phone’s in airplane mode that you can still get calls. I believe the phrase was, “Let me turn off my phone, because it’s in airplane mode, and I can still get calls when it’s in airplane mode.”

Corey Frank (02:59):

And we were joking that if that was a phrase mentioned at a cocktail party 15 years ago, I think there’d probably be a different phrase that people would be saying to you. What would they say to you if you mentioned something like that?

Chris Beall (03:13):

I think somewhere between the loony bin and burn the witch.

Corey Frank (03:18):

Burn the witch. Indeed, indeed. So I think this concept to discovery, Chris, and we’ve talked about this off air many, many times, you’ve helped me with this in my various startups that I’ve created here, is that the discovery process and even the top of funnel cold calling breakthrough process, it’s different for startups than it is for more mature companies, is it not?

Chris Beall (03:44):

It is, it is. Everything’s different for startups, because of the depth of your ignorance about your own offering and what it’s worth to anybody, even whether you can truly deliver, because if you don’t really know what it is, and who might want to take advantage of it, you actually don’t quite know if you can deliver it. You’re starting with kind of a conjecture, I’ll call it a narcissistic conjecture, right?

Chris Beall (04:06):

So what’s narcissistic about it? Well, you believe it, nobody else in the world does and the only thing you really know about it is I came up with it so it must be great, and that’s pretty narcissistic, right? And then the conjecture is a conjecture, you don’t really know. It’s somewhere between a conjecture and a hypothesis, but you come up with something and you either are foolish enough to actually build it, or you’re smart enough to go talk to people about it and see if they’ll buy it before you build it, which is a really good idea. You’re throwing darts in a dark room, and you’re hoping to hear a squeal every once in a while.

Corey Frank (04:39):

Right, right. Well, this concept, this process that I go through, right? It is a little bit of the states of the unknown, unknown. I don’t know what I don’t know, certainly. But once I realize that there is something that I don’t know, how do I go about maybe these cycle times? How do I know what state I’m at in order to potentially make progress? Because I may not even be aware that I need help, or how many cycles do I use in the same screenplay or the same discovery process before I realize, “Wait a minute, I may be a little stuck here.”

Chris Beall (05:13):

It’s interesting because there’s a numbers outcome, right? I mean, if you’re trying to set meetings, and you go 35, 40 conversations and you can’t set a meeting, there’s a mismatch between your message or how you’re delivering it and your list. If you’re pretty good at the message, and by the way, using a non-calibrated person to do early market exploration is just dumb, right?

Chris Beall (05:33):

It’s like hiring a sales person is the first thing you do when you think you have a product. You’re not testing your products fit in the market, you’re testing whether you’re any good at hiring salespeople. And that’s not a very interesting question, that’s not the first order question of a startup, am I good at it at a hiring salespeople? The first order question is, anybody out there seeing a value in this to try it and pay me for it?

Chris Beall (05:57):

I mean, that’s kind of it, right? The first step there is, will they take a meeting? And if they’re not taking meetings, you know you’re stuck. That’s really, really simple. And by the way, the three stages that I see all progress being in, the phases that they get into, are three. I wish there were four, but this is the case where three is the right number. Number one is you’re in flow.

Chris Beall (06:18):

Usually you can tell you’re in flow because the emotional state that goes along with being in flow is that you don’t notice you’re in flow. So if you don’t notice you’re in flow and things are just kind of moving along, you’re probably in flow. That is, you’re doing the next thing that makes sense, you’re doing the next thing that makes sense. I’m not saying you’re optimized, by the way. Optimized is completely different. It isn’t a state of making progress, it’s a state of the machine itself, in which you’re trying to make progress.

Chris Beall (06:46):

My machine is optimized, my process is optimized, but I, myself, I’m in flow, it’s going. Like right now, I’m talking, I’m in flow. You know me, when I’m talking, I’m in flow 99.97% of the time, and other people wish that I would get out of flow so they can get in flow.

Corey Frank (07:03):

Well, as I always say, you put the quarter in Chris’s machine, you got to listen for the whole song, so that’s how it works.

Chris Beall (07:08):

That’s right. So the next state that we tend to get in is stuck, and stuck is a funny state and we did a whole episode on this once. Stuck is the state where I actually can’t move forward, I’m not moving forward because I am missing knowledge. I don’t know something that I need to know to move forward. And one of the things that’ll take you out of flow is getting stuck, realizing that it’s not quite working well enough, you’re not really flowing, or even more commonly among startup people you’re fooling yourself.

Chris Beall (07:40):

The narcissistic part tells you you’re doing better than you are. They call it happy ears in sales. Happy ears is when you’re hearing good things, and an objective listener is going, “Really?” That just sounded like politeness to me, I don’t think they really are resonating with your message. I think they’re just being polite, right? Or you’re talking to somebody who doesn’t know how to say, “Uh-huh (negative). That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Chris Beall (08:05):

So you feel it though, and then you get to a point where it’s like, “Okay, I’m actually stuck. I don’t know what to do next, I need knowledge.” And when we get stuck, we’ve got to do something special. And then there’s waiting, and when we’re waiting we should find something else to do. That one’s really easy, but most people don’t have the emotional stamina to accept a waiting state, and so they keep gnawing on the bone that doesn’t have any meat on it. It’s just time to stop and go somewhere else.

Chris Beall (08:33):

By the way, this is a total aside, one of the cool things about our product ConnectAndSell, is the waiting state is a literal state. You push a button and you wait to get to talk to somebody. So you actually get to practice waiting, and if you’re really, really clever or optimized, then what you do is you do something while you’re waiting, something else, preferably something that can be interrupted because you’re going to be interrupted.

Chris Beall (08:59):

So the other day, for instance, one of our premier users, probably the premier user of ConnectAndSell, is the chief sales officer of one of the largest insurance brokerages in the world, was using the ConnectAndSell mobile app as the first user in the wild to use it in anger. And he was talking to, having conversations with the CEOs and CFOs of all these SPACs. So, SPACs, Special Purpose Acquisition Company, these things are bags of money that are seeking a company to acquire or to combine with. They call it an initial business combination. And then I guess they have special insurance needs, the risk needs, I would call them.

Chris Beall (09:41):

And so he’s using our mobile app and he called me up and he said, “Hey, just had a really interesting experience. I found out that by using my waiting time on the mobile app, I could get something really, really valuable done.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “I could talk with my daughter while she’s cooking.” She said, “Whenever I was trying to get ahold of people before I’d be heads down, dialing, navigating, whatever I’m doing, and I couldn’t talk to her, now I’m waiting to be interrupted, all I had to do is hold this thing up and say, “I’m in this application, I’m waiting to be interrupted, is it okay if we talk until that happens?”

Chris Beall (10:16):

He says, “We had a great conversation for an hour and a half, reconnecting with my daughter in a way I wouldn’t have.” So waiting time is super valuable, as long as you don’t keep gnawing on the bone, as long as you back up and go and look for some beans to eat or something. There’s something else to do. The troublesome one is stuck. And the reason stuck is hard is you’ve got to decide you’re going to learn. You’ve got to decide to stop doing and not switch to something else, because when you switch to something else and you’re stuck, you’re just avoiding the real situation, which is you’re stuck. And you’re not going to get any less stuck by just going to do something else, maybe it’ll come to you, but usually you don’t.

Chris Beall (10:57):

So the question in a startup is, “When I’m stuck …” Because I’m often stuck as a startup company or a startup effort, as a state of manifest ignorance, right? You start the big pile of ignorance, and you get a spoon out and you start moving ignorance around in the plate to see if you can find what’s inside the ignorance. And eventually, sometimes you run into something go, “Clunk, what’s that?” And that’s like product market fit, or don’t do that again or something cool like that.

Chris Beall (11:22):

So here you are all ignorant and trying to make progress, and you recognize I’m stuck, what do you do? So we had a great, great example today of the number one thing to do when you’re stuck, which is with a very short cycle time, try to learn something. So how can we learn things? We can learn things from books, we can learn them from podcasts. I’ve heard there’s a podcast out there about market dominance. Somebody said they learned one thing in 15 hours of listening to it, that’s fabulous, right? So we can learn from various sources.

Chris Beall (11:58):

But the number one source we can learn from is another person who might be an expert or have been there done that, or whatever, and we have a conversation with them. Now, the typical way of doing this is long cycle time. You come up with a list of people you can learn from maybe. This is if you’re real smart, right? You actually say, “I’m going to go and I’m going to learn from them.” And you send them an email and then now you’re in a waiting state, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, while they get back to you.

Chris Beall (12:26):

The problem with learning is it’s something that works best, not like revenge. Like revenge is a dish best served cold, right? That’s what they say. But learning is a dish best eaten hot. The hot conversation is going to catch you in the frame of mind where you’re going to ask the best questions, because they’re the questions that come from your deepest ignorance.

Chris Beall (12:50):

When your ignorance is right in front of you, when you’re stuck, and you ask somebody to enlighten you, it does something to them. It causes them to want to help you, because you’re so manifestly in trouble. You’re just such a weak little puppy dog. “Help me, help me.” You don’t have to even put it like that, you just be straight up, and people like to help people.

Chris Beall (13:13):

And so that cycle can be really quick. And today we had a super example. So today we’re launching a brand new product, actually we launched it on Tuesday, brand new product. It’s called Flight School. And what Flight School is, is something we’ve been doing for a while, and we’ve decided to put a wrapper around and say, “Let’s kind of take the ConnectAndSell thing and put it inside of a class instead of take the ConnectAndSell thing and have people use it, and then maybe bring them some instruction.”

Chris Beall (13:44):

They’re very different ideas, they’re similar, but they’re very different ideas. And I’ve resisted it for years. Manny Medina, the CEO at Outreach, gosh, four years ago, three years ago, something like that in Seattle, he asked me to come up and have a drink with him. The drink was bourbon, and this was back before my fiance had taught me how to drink bourbon. So I only knew how to drink single malt scotch whiskey. But he said, “No, you drink it. They put these bitters in it and this and that.” And I’m going, man, my idea of mixing a drink is you pour it a little bit, have a little bit.

Chris Beall (14:18):

But I tried and I listened to him and he said, “You’ve got to start a training company, man.” I said, “Why is that?” And he said, “Well, because all of our customers are stuck.” He actually said they’re stuck, because their reps need to learn to talk on the phone. And you guys clearly are experts at talking on the phone, so start a training division or something, please?” And I said, “Nah, I’m not going to do that, plenty of trainers out there, tons of trainers. Everybody trains cold calling, this doesn’t make any sense.” Right?

Chris Beall (14:47):

And so I left him, he was all disappointed. I don’t think he’s ever bought me at bourbon since, but he might have. Still a good friend. And so it kind of gnawed on me though, because he’s a really, really smart guy. Obviously very successful, he has raised a ton of money at Outreach, they’re doing really well. We partner with them, we love them. So I was like, “Wow.” It’s still bothering me, right?

Chris Beall (15:09):

So then we start delivering training a little bit at a time, and then we have this epiphany with a bankrupt company in Texas that needed help, and I offered a Monday and Friday unlimited for a small amount of money for a month, because I wanted to see if we could help him keep the company open and keep their employees employed. And suddenly it’s like, “Oh, well wait a minute, if we’re going to do that on Monday, we better train the living daylights out of them on Fridays.”

Chris Beall (15:34):

And suddenly we had this four sessions of blitzing coach, with a lot of preparation in between, voila! Four sessions, first one’s the first part of the conversation that we’re working on. The second one, that’s the seven seconds everybody talks about to get trust. The second part is what we call the 27 seconds, the value piece, we called it free flight take off, free flight. You see the picture is starting to emerge, why do we call it flight school?

Chris Beall (16:01):

Third one is, how do you ask for the meeting, practicing that, landing the airplane. And the fourth one is handling turbulence, right? There’s always lots and lots of objections. And so we said, let’s offer this thing, but we didn’t package it. It was just something we did. And we did about 30 of them, and the effect was profound. There was a company in the industrial air compressor space that took the entire group of professional sellers, I think about 100 of them, through this Flight School program, and they’d never really sold on the phone before, and they were effective and they had fun and they made money during the training. Well, money in the form of fresh new business, new meetings. What kind of training delivers money?

Chris Beall (16:46):

So we’re really excited, we got to package this thing up, I need somebody to sell it. Now I am established as this guy who can actually hire a salesperson. So it’s safe. Do not try this at home. If you’re not sure about the step, you got to do it yourself. But I was pretty sure I’d been through 30 of them. I’d sold a bunch of them myself, so I hired a professional seller. Her name is Cheryl Turner, she’s as good as anybody in the world, maybe better than anybody. By the way, her secret power is she feels quite correctly like she’s anyone’s peer. So when Oren Klaff talks about a status alignment-

Corey Frank (17:22):

Status alignment, yup.

Chris Beall (17:22):

She can status align up or down anywhere, because she naturally, correctly, morally, ethically, deeply, personally, professionally feels like she is the peer of any human being on earth. And therefore it comes across in her conversations. So given that I’m going out and I don’t know, we’re going to call on managers, I want to go after big companies. Why? Because it’s kind of hard to get something like ConnectAndSell, which goes so fast, it causes process change, to get embedded in a big company.

Chris Beall (17:52):

Some have done it and they’ve done it well, but it’s a little hard, so why not offer something a little easier that they still get the good effect, which is this blitz and coach kind of training. So I need somebody who can go all the way up, sell to CEOs, come down, sell to managers, Managers at big companies are like CEOs of little companies. In fact, I’m a good example, I’m a CEO of a pretty small company, some double digits, millions of dollars with some number other than a one at the beginning.

Chris Beall (18:19):

And my fiance is sales manager, is what she calls herself, at a big company, one of the biggest in the world. Well, my quota is whatever it is that I, as the person running the business, trying to do next year. So I think, I don’t know, more kind of, I guess eight figures in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight figures kind of stuff, but not nine. Hers is 10, okay? She’s got like three commas, that’s just her patch itself. So she gets the office and I get the spare bedroom, as you can see, because we go by natural hierarchy, the producers get the good stuff anyway.

Chris Beall (18:59):

So anyway, it’s interesting you don’t know where you’re going to call, so you need a really robust caller who sees themselves as a peer of anybody’s not going to be put off their feed. But you know what else do you need is somebody who doesn’t have happy ears, but goes after it. So that’s really, really tricky. So I got that, Cheryl does that. Boom, she goes after, she set three meetings in her first morning and then calls me up and says, “I don’t know if this is working.”

Chris Beall (19:30):

Now, imagine that. So Tuesday, she gets in the company, I’m really bad as an onboarder, so it takes her like an extra day. Get her some lists, she starts calling yesterday, that’s Thursday. Three meetings in the morning, but she feels it’s not quite in flow. Now, that’s how you know you have a real profession. It’s not because they’re hesitant or have any reluctance or any of that stuff, it’s like this could be clicking better and it’s early.

Corey Frank (20:40):

It’s not necessarily dial the contact, dial the meeting type of rates, it’s how would you describe that, Chris? What is it, you get a feeling that Cheryl has or that folks like that have to know that they may be stuck, and they don’t necessarily know that they’re in stuck. Or worse, or excuse me, better is they’re stuck, but the other folks in their party on the team don’t agree? “What you mean you’re stuck, you’ve got three meetings?”

Chris Beall (21:12):

And I was that other person. I’m going great, three meetings, and she says, “Uh-huh (negative). Nope, boss, not quite there. I’ll keep doing it, but I want to give you some feedback.” So that’s what she said. And it’s kind of interesting, there’s a way of doing startups that’s really paradoxically odd, shall I say? And that is, you got to have drive energy going somewhere, but you have to be ready on a dime, not to start on a dime, turn on a dime, but often to stop on a dime just for a moment to assess.

Chris Beall (21:49):

I recall going sailing with Helen the very first time I went sailing with her, and that she’s a real sailor, and I’m a sack of potatoes, right? But hopefully I’m a sack of potatoes that if you put a personal flotation device on me, I’ll be a floating sack of potatoes, which is better than the sinking kind. And so there was a little problem with something up on the mast and the main sail and all this, of which I’ve learned since, but I didn’t know anything at the time.

Chris Beall (22:17):

And she went toward it fast and then stopped. And I thought what’s that about, right? Most people when they run towards something, they’re going toward it like it’s an emergency. All she was doing was getting close enough to see the details and assess the situation. She was going to close the distance in order to get the maximum information and then stop on a dime, assess, and then take a hypothesis and act on it. And it was remarkable to me as an example of a very effective startup style of problem solving.

Chris Beall (22:48):

So you have this drive, but you’re not just dumb, just beating your head against a wall, but you don’t give up either. It’s really tricky. This is why startups tend to fail actually, is that having this combo, right? Drive, but without bullheadedness, how do you get that? And the way you really get it is you got to have somebody else. This is why very rarely do one person startups succeed. They’re like marriages in a sense that you got to have somebody cover your weakness and your blind spots.

Chris Beall (23:19):

And we all have blind spots. When you’re busy doing this, it’s kind of hard to do this and vice versa. So anyway, Cheryl came to me, and said, “I’m kind of stuck.” And we went through this process. And the thing I wanted to get to is the cycle time. So the normal thing in corporations that I see is, I need to know something. I go out and I find some people that might be able to help me. I might write an email to them, because I already know them, they’re going to answer me.

Chris Beall (23:43):

And the cycle time for getting to the first conversation where somebody might help me might be a day or two days, or if it’s a weekend, calendar time, it might be three or four or five days because people are busy. They don’t hear that in your voice, and you’re trying to be polite, “Hey, I could use some help. I’m facing this situation.” We’ve all seen those emails. I get more of them than the average person probably, but we all see them. We see them both ways. We do them and we see them.

Chris Beall (24:10):

But I think in a startup, and actually in any situation, because every situation is a startup, all we really do is startups, everything worth doing is something relatively new, because otherwise it’d be old hat and somebody else would be doing it. So here we are, we’re doing something new, we’re not quite sure that it’s right, that we know enough to do it well. We think we’re in flow, but are we sure we’re in flow?

Chris Beall (24:31):

And what we did was I said, “Let’s bring somebody else into the conversation, right now, while we’re talking in the Zoom.” We’re in a Zoom, boom, “John Campbell, come on in.” Why John? He’s our head of product, but he’s a former head of training. So maybe he’d have a perspective, because we’re selling a training product, right? We don’t really know how to sell training products. “John, if we were selling to you, what would this be like?” Get him involved, we’re still not there. Cheryl’s a lot like, “That’s interesting, but it’s not enough. We’ve changed some words, we’ve done this, we’ve done that, but not quite enough to make me feel like, yeah, I should just go do it again.”

Chris Beall (25:09):

Still have everybody on, add one more person. I finally go, “Huh, wait a minute, there’s this person who works for Sharp electronics.” And I won’t use her name right now, because she might not want me to, but she might later. And she’s the head of all the sales training there, she’s absolutely brilliant, hard driving, and I’ve been on multiple test drives and flight schools with her, and Flight School is a thing that is kind of a thing over there at Sharp Business Solutions, and they’re sort of rolling it out.

Chris Beall (25:39):

So I thought, well, that’s who we successfully sold it to before, and we didn’t even know we were selling it. Let’s find out what she would think as the buyer in a cold call. So we’ll go back in time and say, “Imagine somebody’s cold calling you, how should they get you intrigued in a meeting? What should go into the breakthrough line?” And we did that. Did we come up with something? Almost.

Chris Beall (26:04):

But Cheryl’s still like, “Almost, but I feel like that’s the stuff that would go in discovery, not the stuff that would go in a cold call.” And then we have the breakthrough and the breakthrough is, “Cheryl, your own story is a story, you used to be the number one appointment setter at insidesales.com, but now Zand. The CEO, Jim Steele, came to you to find out how you do what you do, why are you killing it, and other people are killing it less? So you are that person, you are that go-to person. When you experienced ConnectAndSell in a blitz and coach session, it was a test drive, not a flight school, what was your experience like, how did it change your life? Because that’s your story, and you can tell it undeniably and answer to an objection. And you can say at the very least, this is what it feels like to go through it. This is what it did for me, so much that I joined the company and now I’m making my career selling this.”

Corey Frank (27:00):

Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome.

Chris Beall (27:02):

So that’s where we got, I think it’s a good answer. We’ll find out, right? But at least for Cheryl-

Corey Frank (27:07):

It’s authentic. It’s authentic and it’s empathetic, it’s novel, it’s all the things you look for. And frankly, there’s just enough tension in there too where, “Listen, I’m already on this journey and on this path, and look at me now, your team could be me.” In essence, right? So as we know from Orin as well, right? You need humor, intrigue, curiosity, but a fair amount of tension. And I think what you guys have discovered there, certainly has all four. But that cycle time in a traditional organization would have been weeks or maybe even months.

Chris Beall (27:47):

And maybe never.

Corey Frank (27:49):

And maybe never.

Chris Beall (27:50):

Maybe never, because when you’re stuck for too long, there’s pressure to do something, and to do something is actually the fourth state that I don’t even put in my list, because I don’t accept it. It’s called faking it. I hate to say it, but I think that phrase fake it till you make it drives me nuts. Because faking it is not a way of getting to making it. Doing it as well as you understand honestly, and then understanding whether it’s working or not as best you can, and getting other people’s viewpoint on that, that is not faking it. Faking it as when you’re doing it as best you can, and you claim to yourself and others that you’re really doing it, because it’s about how they think about you. And I’m not a fan, but what do we do when we’re stuck for too long? We go back and we fake flow. That’s what we do, we fake flow. And faking flow is the death knell of a startup.

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Chris Beall and Corey Frank, our Market Dominance Guys, explore the subject of artificial intelligence taking over jobs held by humans. It’s an emotional issue, to be sure. But instead of looking at this as an either/or concern, the Market Dominance Guys take a different tack by asking,” What do humans do well? What do machines do well? And what can they do together?” You may be thinking, “Wait a minute! Using AI will help us run our business much more cheaply than keeping all those humans on our payroll.” If so, Chris asks you to take a few steps back and look at the big picture by asking yourself, “What’s my main goal here?” In other words, should you be concentrating on how to operate your company more cheaply, or should you be thinking about what will help you dominate your market? And what skill sets are required for your company to do that?

 

Using a sales department as an example, Chris and Corey discuss the different cluster of skills needed for each type of job in that division and which ones can be handled by either humans or artificial intelligence — or by a combination of both. As usual, you can trust the Market Dominance Guys to steer you in the right direction when it comes to dominating YOUR market, just as they do on today’s podcast, “The Right Skills for the Job.”

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Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by:

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

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

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (01:57):

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the indomitable, [inaudible 00:02:05] of sales, the profit of profit, the rasputin of revenue. How about that? That’s a new one, the rasputin of revenue, mad monk rasputin and the controversial Chris Beall. And today, one of our topics we’re going to tackle is this little thing called scale, Chris, you and I were talking the last several weeks about this going back and forth about AI and the advent of machine learning and can human scale? A human with all its faults can it compete with a fully automated, fully mandated machine learning algorithm that learns on the fly? And when you consider human scaling at the same rate as maybe software, how does that play into what folks want to do from a market dominance perspective? So I figured we could start there.

Corey Frank (02:54):

This will be a fun one. We have a lot of folks of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle businesses that depend predominantly on humans. And we certainly have our share of folks who are on the tip of the spear so to speak on folks who are really focusing on the AI side particularly when it comes to sales, will we ever be out of a job, so to speak? So let’s start there, Chris, what’s your opinion on scale using humans versus machines and a profession from top of funnel all the way through discovery, to closing?

Chris Beall (03:27):

Sure. It’s a very interesting topic. I’ve been obsessed with it for I don’t know, 40 something years. This question of what do humans do well? What do machines do well? And what can they do together that they can’t do separately that’s of high value? I think that’s actually the interesting question. I think in the engineering world, there’s an either or mindset that tends to show up. It’s like, I want to make the humans go away. It’s almost like a science project. I want to make them go away to show I can make them go away. And as though that last human, that last drop of blood running through the system somewhere is going to carry a fatal disease. And yet when you come right down to it, any system that can do something marvelous without any human involvement can do something better with human involvement.

Chris Beall (04:15):

Even if the only thing it does better is throws out the silly stuff that the machine has come up with because of some limitation and its training set and the algorithms that it’s developed so far. A car that has a human in it, who somehow stays alert very hard in it self-driving cars or semi-autonomous cars. But somebody who pays attention all the time, never runs over somebody who kind of looks like a pedestrian, but not quite enough in order to have the self-driving car, having seen one of those before and so boom. And that happened in Tempe a few years ago, as you well know. And it’s one that when you look at it and you say, “Would a human have hit that person driving a car?” The answer is, “Not, if they were sober.” The machine was perfectly sober, but it just hadn’t seen those lighting conditions and that kind of combination of somebody walking in front of it and somebody died.

Chris Beall (05:04):

And I think that problem at the margin is always there, but I don’t think it’s always at the margin. I think the problem is actually more in the center. So I run a company that has humans in the loop doing something that almost everybody imagines a machine could do. They say, “Well, you have a dialer.” Sure. Okay. For legal reasons, my quote unquote dialer, which it’s not, when it makes dials in parallel, which is what makes it fast. One of the things that makes it fast. If you’re doing five things at a time you’re five times faster than somebody who’s doing one thing at a time and the same thing, it’s all there is to it. It’s just pretty simple, right? Somebody once asked me by the way is [inaudible 00:05:40] always faster? I said, “No, it’s not always faster. It’s only faster on days when five times three equals 15, all the other days, it’s not really faster at all.”

Chris Beall (05:49):

Because if five things at a time or six at a time times a unit rate of three times faster, because we specialize specialists are always faster. You ever watch a specialist do anything they do it in a way after they’re experienced in a way that kind of freaks you out. You ever sat down at a blackjack table? Remember the first time you ever did that in Las Vegas, it’s like these dealers are really, really fast. The game is going much, much faster than you’re comfortable with. And eventually I used to play blackjack for a living. So I went through that process and eventually it slowed down. So this whole question of a person in a loop is very close to my heart so to speak in my professional life, because we do it. We employ roughly speaking, 500 people. And those people navigate phone calls on behalf of salespeople.

Chris Beall (06:39):

Now, why would you divide the labor between navigating phone calls and dialing or whatever that is that we expect reps to do? I mean, people often say reps should pick up the phone. It’s kind of a moral thing. Like pick up the phone you wimp and when you come right down to it, when a rep picks up the phone, 95% of the time, they end up navigating a fun system to nowhere voicemail. There’s no point in navigating to voicemail, unless you think leaving voicemails is a great idea. And even if you’re going to do that, you may as well then have somebody else navigate to voicemail and leave the voicemail for you unless you think your brilliant personalization of the voicemail is going to make the difference in which case you’re living 20 years ago and kind of catch up with the times.

Chris Beall (07:18):

So navigating to voicemail is essentially a wasteful activity for a sales rep, but it’s a necessary activity if you want to talk to anybody, because there are people out there to talk to. And if you navigate 25 dials to voicemail, somewhere in there on average, you’ll probably talk to one person. It’d be three. It could be 57. It could be 11, whatever it happens to be there’s some ratio out there for that moment in the day for that particular or target market that you’re going to hit. And the alternative is to leave those conversations to your competitor. This is where all of this really comes down. It’s not a theoretical exercise. Like, “Hey, what’s cheaper?” That’s not the question. The question is what dominates markets. If you want to be cheap, don’t start a business. That’s the cheapest thing to do, you spend no money whatsoever.

Chris Beall (08:08):

And you’ve succeeded in the world of cheekiness, right? I didn’t spend any money. I sat back and I watched the market go by. Maybe I’d make some passive investments. And that’s it. If you have an idea and the idea that you think is helpful to businesses and there’s enough of them to sell to, and you think they’re going to get enough value and you can provision that solution at a reasonable price that gives you gross margin. That’s high enough that it’s worth doing then you kind of have only one question, which is, who’s going to dominate that market? You or somebody else? That’s really the question. That’s why we’re doing this podcast. That’s why we’re writing this book. It’s all about one thing. Hey, everybody, let’s focus on this. Failure to dominate markets equals going out of business. You just don’t know when.

Chris Beall (08:54):

So it’s basically a question of what can you do that’s high enough value that somebody will take you up on it, choose you first before they choose the other guy, and will find value and stick with you? So the cheapest thing is rarely the thing that provides the most value. If you put a human in the loop, even just to handle stupid exceptions. There’s just stupid exceptions. So ask a computer to tell the difference between a dog and a cat. It’ll tell you some things are cats that clearly aren’t cats. If this weren’t true, those little captcha things, and you’re logging in and says, which pictures have a truck in them? If that was an easy problem for computers to solve that wouldn’t be how a captcha works because they’re trying to figure out if you’re a human and it’s trivially easy for most people.

Chris Beall (09:43):

It’s not for me because I have to go get my glasses. And I can’t see the little tiny things that 22 year olds who programmed this stuff think that you can see really, really small pictures, but that’s okay, eventually I get through it. I don’t have difficulty recognizing a truck compared to a picture of a truck on a billboard, for instance, or on a car that’s clearly not a truck, but it has some boxy characteristics on it. And it has something behind it that looks like a trailer. And maybe the Subaru Forester with the trailer on it might look like a truck, but it ain’t a truck, right? AI might get that wrong. And that’s what they’re trying to weed out. Weeding out silly stuff is just one thing that humans can do exceptionally well.

Chris Beall (10:29):

And in concert with machines, whether the machines a AI, or it’s just a sorter or a search mechanism or whatever. We used to do a product back in the late 1990s did it from 1992 to 2001 or something like that two different products and what their job was among other things was taking all the world’s product and service information and putting it in a catalog that could be searched by any company, according to its subset of the catalog, the products that they wanted to buy, not everything across all vendors and do it in a way that would globally. So we published it in 14 languages every night.

Chris Beall (11:09):

Now that sounds like you could have a lot of automation in there and you sure can, but getting something wrong is the same as hiding it. So putting the bolt in with the cars, because there’s a Chevy bolt is a mistake. The quarter inch hex head of stainless steel bolt is not a Chevy bolt and vice versa. So we put humans in the loop and have the machines do the first level kind of, I’m absolutely sure of this with some human QA sampling downstream, but whatever we had ambiguity, we had an efficient means of putting a human up and say, “Better one, better two, or not any of us.” And the human and that about a ton could do that.

Corey Frank (11:52):

I think you gave the example when we were talking earlier about voicemail, how quickly can we recognize a voicemail for human versus some of the statistics that you gave versus having a machine do it so I can either transfer that call or I can move on to the next call, et cetera?

Chris Beall (12:11):

Yeah. Nobody knows what the theoretical limit is, but we have a pretty big training set. I mean, we called 380 million people or something like that. So pretty good big training set to figure out what sounds like a voicemail, what sounds like a person and it includes by the way, a disposition on every single call saying whether it’s a voicemail or a person. So our training set is perfect. It’s pristine for making this distinction because it’s what we do for a living. We navigate dials. And if it’s a person we transfer and if it’s a voicemail, we don’t, and we navigate them. We don’t just call direct numbers and hope for the best. It takes care of all this other stuff, dial by name directories, and this, that, and the other thing, human gatekeepers and everything else.

Chris Beall (12:51):

How do you tell the difference? Well, we don’t know how our machine tells the difference, but we have a machine that tells the difference and it’s great. And we can just about use it, but we want to have a human in the loop because it takes almost a second and the human takes 192 milliseconds. And it’s a race. The difference between a second and two tenths of a second is big, eight-tenths of a second it’s five times. So going five times slower, I got to have a lot cheaper people. And there are folks who are just attracted to cheap. It’s like, Oh, if I can get the cost down low enough, that’s the right answer, but that’s not.

Corey Frank (13:31):

So you would believe this technological singularity of AI, other folks will say that it’s imminent this singularity, the singular moment where machines will be preeminent in sales or discovery, but from your perspective, that will never happen. There will always be a control joining of these two forces. And certainly that’s farther down the loop simply because of these nuances that machines can do only a certain part and humans can do others?

Chris Beall (14:04):

Yeah. I am not looking in a practical sense to a day where machines do everything that’s required in selling, identify who to sell to maybe they’ll do pretty well with that, actually, because that can be based on a lot of data, having a conversation with somebody and causing that person to trust you. Well, we did have ELIZA up back in the fifties, a program that everybody trusted because ELIZA would use what’s called Rogerian non-directive therapy approach, and answer your questions with questions that kind of sounded pretty good. And you’d kind of go for it. Most people actually bought ELIZA. Maybe ELIZA would still make a great salesperson for all I know, but ELIZA ain’t much of a closer. So knowing when to close, when is that moment and doing it correctly, that might be a little bit tricky for machines to do.

Chris Beall (14:57):

Getting to the edge cases, which is where business is interesting noticing opportunities that were not in the playbook. That’s extremely hard. I mean, not in the playbook means machine learning has a tough time dealing with it. The thing is business is vast and multi-dimensional, and it’s ill characterized. It’s very, very hard to make a training set in which you’ve captured everything that’s relevant. And then you truly know the outcome of it on some crude closed one versus something else kind of outcome. And very little of sales is understandable from what ended up being closed one, the interesting action was before the end. So for instance, we’ve just learned of a way to extract the gut feel from a rep about the seven key relationships in any deal, along three dimensions, to get that out of a rep by a machine asking the rep the questions is really hard and a human interviewer can do it really easily, super valuable.

Chris Beall (15:58):

The machine can calculate whether this collection of answers equates to 78% chance of close or 23% chance of close. Machines are really, really good at that. It’s not great at interacting with the rep in a way that is curious when the rep says something in a funny tone of voice that the machine goes, “Huh? That didn’t sound quite right.” That causes me to go down this Y path and ask, “Well, why do you think that’s true?” And it’s the key part of the entire process is knowing when to ask why. So these things are bound throughout all of sales and anyway, being cheap in sales might not be the main thing. So as long as you’re defeated by somebody who wins the deal, you don’t win in a zero sum game or a winner take all game. We talked about this once in a episode. Sales is a winner-take-all game, but it’s not a winner take all game in the classic sense. It’s a winner take all game in which the habit of the winner taking all becomes dominance.

Chris Beall (17:01):

It’s a runaway, it’s like a nuclear explosion and it’s not good to be on the wrong side of it. So losing being in a hundred races and losing a hundred races by one second is really bad. Being in a hundred races and losing one by a hundred seconds and winning 99 by one second. It’s really good. And so we tend to forget in business and sales as the spear point of business, it’s truly about winning or losing. It’s not about imagine this I’m going to lose every single deal by 2%, but I’m going to do it at one-tenth the cost.

Announcer (17:45):

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

Chris Beall (18:24):

Well, I lose the market. I might as well stay home.

Corey Frank (18:28):

Right? Right. So I think in the classic sense, Chris, where folks will push back and say, that is it on scale on humans versus machine is in my tech stack, right? I have this plethora of tools that I can add to make my folks each have an iron man suit, but at the end of that equation, I still need somebody to pull the trigger. But the advent of intense tools of what time people are picking up their phone, what time they’re answering an email, what’s the best day of the week, what cadence works, that type of nuanced behavior to help in collection of all these basis points into real close rates. We’re seeing that a lot in the face today. It’s not necessarily just adding more bodies, it’s adding more pieces of technology to each of those bodies.

Chris Beall (19:25):

Yeah. Which makes it harder to be the rep. Because now in addition to learning how to sell, which most reps actually don’t know how to do and could stand to be taught. And I’m not saying that cruelly. I’m just saying, the most contained part of selling was the cold call and we teach cold calling now, why do we do that? Because we noticed after 14 years that most reps didn’t know how to cold call. And if you give them technology to let them have 30, 40, 50 conversations a day, finally, you may as well teach them how to cold call, right? There’s a very simple thing. It can be done in five sentences. There’s a certain framework. There’s a tonality that means something. There’s an emotional journey that’s well understood. There’s a way to handle it when it goes this way, that way or the other way, none of this is actually theoretically, particularly hard and it be hard for me to even say it’s interesting, except it’s pretty interesting when you dig into it, right?

Chris Beall (20:15):

So here you have a human, who has a hard time with something that doesn’t require any technology, other than a way to talk to he a remote person for a remote cold call and that’s hard for them to use. So when the telephone itself, after the connection is made is hard to use because sales is hard and sales is hard because it’s essentially a psychological game played against this very troubling backdrop of time. That is even when played perfectly you’re only at an 8.3% or 8.6% or whatever win rate, it gets really, really hard to interpret the data, putting more tech out there, just as more variables, the more variables you have, the harder it is for you to understand what’s making a contribution and what’s getting in the way.

Chris Beall (21:02):

But you know, one thing for sure, each piece of tech has to be learned. Each one has to be wired up to all of the others or some of the others in some way, all of the data has to be consistent. They haven’t made any tech in the tech stack yet that can deal with the fact that Mary says busy call back. And Joe says not interested reason given on exactly the same conversation. There is no tech that can make sense of that. I don’t care what somebody says on that one. So we have this problem that data is not consistent and can’t be. It’s naturally variant. It’s variant both in form and in meaning, but the syntax and the semantics will vary. Then it varies over time. Folks have different meanings for the same field. Oh, we stopped using this field, but we didn’t want to make a new one. So what do we do? Now you actually take this value and you put it in this field.

Chris Beall (21:55):

You don’t use these other two anymore. And when you say this it actually means this, and then you look over here to see what the real value is, because we also didn’t want to add an object to the Salesforce at that point, because we have a rule against custom objects. You ever heard that before? I mean, I think everybody’s for that one. So tech stacks are fundamentally attractive because it seems like there’s all these jobs you can make easier, but they don’t make the job easier, the job of being a rep. In fact, I would contend and I get feedback on this every day that even a CRM makes your job harder. And if you have to put data in and keep a CRM up to date, it means you have to know all the rules for putting the data in. The rules have to not change out from under you in interesting ways. I mean, I have a hard time in our CRM putting in an opportunity. Why? There are about three required fields that I actually don’t understand.

Corey Frank (22:53):

Right.

Chris Beall (22:53):

I don’t understand what they’re for. I run the company, right? And I sell a lot. I sell [inaudible 00:22:57] six million a year, so it’s not like I don’t have any reason. So I do something simpler. I delegate that to somebody who’s a specialist. That’s the answer to the tech stack is it turns out there are distinct jobs that have sort of clusters of skills around them. So the sales rep job has a cluster of skills around talking, listening, empathy, and problem solving in the moment and a knowledge base around the resources, internal and external that could be brought to bear to help a customer. Those are the five skill areas that cluster around somebody being a sales rep. And when we think of making a sales rep better, we think of helping them say the right things in the right way. Listen for things where they kind of adjust what they’re doing next in a way that’s useful, recognize the difference between no and not now, and not me, those kinds of things.

Chris Beall (23:54):

So we need for them to do those things. When they get down to problem solving, we need them to have a problem solving mindset. So that they’re thinking what is the customer’s problem? And they have a mental model of the customer’s problem, and they know how to do the talking and listening to validate. We look at those skills, right? Well, do any of those skills, including… And I’ll just go with ConnectAndSell parochially. Do any of those skills include navigating a phone system, being an expert at using a dial by name directory. Is that part of any of those skills? No, it’s not. That’s part of a different skillset. That’s around getting a conversation with somebody. There’s another skill set around updating your CRM. We try to keep reps out of the CRM, make the data go in, but the data goes in with the robot doing it.

Chris Beall (24:40):

So our robots take the data in you finish a ConnectAndSell call. You take your notes, you hit your disposition, busy, call back, interested, send information or whatever you put in your followup date if you want to talk to them in the future. And you’re little teleprompter so you know what to say, when that pops up on the screen three months from now or whatever, when you decide that’s when you want to talk to him and you get ahold of them again. So all of that, should you go over and type that into the CRM after navigating down to the task record, knowing that you set it up like this in order to show a complete telephone test, no robots are really good at that.

Chris Beall (25:14):

So we delegate that to a robot great, but then when it comes time to understanding these conversations took place I wonder if I don’t see quite the right close rate of conversations to meetings. I wonder what that means. Well, then I put a human back in the loop to listen to the conversations, but I use the data and the machine to say, but these are the good ones to look at. So machines are really good at looking at data and saying, “This is probably more interesting than that.” Humans are really good at actually looking going, no, it’s not, but as long as you don’t make the human, do that hard work of calculating what might be interesting and let them just take a look. And humans are especially strong when it comes to visual stuff. So we’re doing something right now at ConnectAndSell internally that’s really fun.

Chris Beall (26:05):

We’re taking all of the data about all of our customers and putting it up in a single chart that a human can look at and say that customer is having a problem with this particular thing say their dial to connect is increasing suddenly compared to the last say, 30 days. And they’re really important because their bubble is big and they’re not getting very much economic value because it’s red. I want to go hover over that and see, what’s true about them yesterday, last week and last month, and I don’t want to click, if it looks interesting, then click. All of their humans, then turn into bubbles and it’s the same evaluation. There’s the person that is most responsible for most impacted by this. And they’re important because in our case, they’re using a lot of our product.

Chris Beall (26:58):

And so expectations are high because somebody’s spending a bunch on it. I think everybody can do stuff like that and the human visual system, how hard is it to say that’s up there, that’s over there, that’s green, that’s red, that’s big, that’s little? Nothing to it. You see it all at once. That’s a hard one for the machine to pick out because at the margin, it doesn’t quite know what you know, like yeah, but that’s these guys and they are always like that I don’t worry about them. So it’s those kinds of things.

Corey Frank (27:30):

Well, you think about it. What I hear you saying is that you look at the skills that go into a professional, simple sales person. Forget about complex sales, but just keep it in simple sales for a moment. And that a specialist will always trump a generalist. And when you look at what is asked for, what is expected of, most sales reps today is to do cold calling. Well, that cold calling seems to have two distinct skill sets. One is the process before I actually talk to somebody, navigating phone trees, [inaudible 00:28:11] screeners, et cetera, cadences.

Corey Frank (28:14):

And then the second one is actually once somebody who is on my list, who picks up the phone, that’s a completely different skill set. Then after that, I have the discovery skill set, which we’ll talk about next time and next call, I know we’re anxious to talk about what goes into an ideal discovery call. And then you have kind of the closing and the pursuit pattern. And yet it does seem a bit challenging today to have, or to expect a sales professional, to be a specialist in all of those areas when clearly there can be machines that can help them with certain pieces of that to optimize their success.

Chris Beall (28:58):

Yeah. And it’s really easy for a specialist to learn, to use a machine that they use every day or a tool they use every day. It’s trivially easy, right? Even difficult to use tools are easy to use one. It’s what you do all the time. And anybody’s ever worked in a kitchen knows this. I used to work in a kitchen. There are some tools in there that are actually very difficult to use really, really well. But if you use them every day, they get pretty easy. The most challenging of them all is a chef’s knife. Most people never master it. And as a result, they’re slow, they’re clumsy, they’re cuts aren’t even blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? So here’s a machine that as a specialist that I use it every day and it just starts to make sense. You have that feel as it slides down the fingernail of the middle finger of your left hand, that slight touch that tells you it’s where I want it to be.

Chris Beall (29:48):

You’ve got that pullback feel where you’re making that next slice with the left hand, pulling back, you know what you’re controlling. So even hard to use machines are complex machines. Jet fighters are probably pretty complex and yet smart kids out of school are taught to fly these things in combat situations relatively quickly. And they get used to all the complexity because they train and they train and they train and their specialist and they use it all the time. If you threw them in a helicopter and they hadn’t flown one, well, it’s hard. It’s hard to train for both at the same time, right? So that’s why we specialize. There’s fighter pilots and there’s helicopter pilots. And maybe they start out with similar skills, but some are better at one than the other, in some ways. And in sales, we have a funny situation where a lot of the things that need to be done can be done by very low cost labor that loves doing them.

Chris Beall (30:41):

It fits not only their skills, but their temperament, which is important and navigating phone systems as an example. There are people who love to navigate phone systems, but would never want to have one sales conversation from now until just after the day they die. They really don’t want to have sales conversations because it’s uncomfortable for them. There are people who can have sales conversations at the top of the funnel very comfortably, but they have an issue talking about money. And so for them to set appointments is easy. They can believe in them. They can get those appointments set, no problem. But if they have to close for money, then their family issues, the way that they were raised, the way money was seen in their family can block them.

Chris Beall (31:22):

So if you want to hire SDRs, one of the things you want to do, if you want them to be with you for a long time as SDRs, top of the funnel, BDRs, whatever you want to call them, hire people who have the skills that are needed there and have an anti skill, which is the ability to talk about money because you’re actually hiring from a more specialized cohort. You’ll get a better price, so to speak and you’ll get better performance and you’ll stay in the seat longer, which is a big deal too.

Corey Frank (31:49):

That makes perfect sense. That’s great. Yeah. The chef’s knife example is also a great analogy, too. It’s a simple tool, but in the hands of a Emeril or Gordon Ramsey they are just a maestro with their ability to slice an onion without losing a couple of inches of their left index finger. Sure. I could see that. So in conclusion here, Chris, we’re going to wrap this up here. When you look at, and I know you hate this question every episode when we talk about it is first feel the prognosticator, right?

Corey Frank (32:19):

Is where do we see it today? Will machine learning with all the equations, its ability to defeat Kasparov in chess, its ability to navigate the NSA security codes in a matter of minutes, and to map the human genome, but yet where are also the opportunities that you see that didn’t quite wide-scale enough yet where machine learning and AI can really help what we’re doing in getting maybe top of funnel folks on the hook faster? Or have we reached again that singularity with regards to machines or sorry, humans and machines will really be focused more on other things such as data or dialing technology and things of that nature. Where do you see it?

Chris Beall (33:09):

Well, I don’t see the machines anytime soon, taking over the conversation. Trusting the machine with your career, which is what must happen in B2B sales the buyer must trust the machine with the seller, with their career, who would ever trust the sellers machine? Oddly enough, we will trust a human being because it’s our nature to do so. But if we knew that somebody had made it a machine whose purpose is to sell it to us at all costs, no matter what, we’re not going to trust it, it’s just the way it is. It’s like here’s a machine that is better at manipulating you than any human. It can manipulate your emotions, but I can’t hide the fact that it’s a machine. So it’s very machiness is going to mitigate against it being successful in creating trust and trust is the essence of the B2B equation.

Corey Frank (33:56):

Sure.

Chris Beall (33:57):

It’s hard. That one’s a hard one. Data? Man machines are great at data and they can find candidates to talk with like nobody’s business. They’re really good at keeping up with changes in the data world, which is so hard for a human to do. A machine, could look at everything that happened on LinkedIn yesterday and do it with no issue whatsoever and do it quite quickly and find you out of all the people who’ve changed jobs in all 27 of them that you should probably talk with, but the machine won’t be able to talk with them as well as you can. And I think that’s a distinction that’s going to be made for quite a while. And machines are better at data than we are. They still do silly things. I actually think that’s a psychological issue for sales reps.

Chris Beall (34:45):

Some sales reps hate to have one conversation that day that’s with somebody they obviously shouldn’t talk with. I can tell you right now, I’m about to close a quarter million dollar a year business with somebody who was introduced to me by somebody who I never should have talked with. [inaudible 00:35:00] somebody turned into a brilliant customer of a very niche kind and fell so in love with our product, that’s sitting in first class on a flight at random, told somebody else about connected cell and there’s the quarter million dollar deal. I don’t think any machine would anticipate that. And I was going a little bit on, I really liked this guy. I want to help him.

Corey Frank (35:21):

It would have been classified as a false positive, sorry for slipping through the cracks. It would have been the data elements somewhere, but another man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Chris Beall (35:30):

Exactly. And you have to actually dig through the trash which we do with conversations.

Corey Frank (35:34):

Absolutely. Well, excellent. Well, great, Chris, I’m glad we finally got a chance to talk a little bit more in detail about this. I know how strongly you feel and especially where a lot of the noise in the industry is moving towards this direction of putting folks like me out of work and putting us on the street. I can’t handle a chef’s knife. So the only thing I do know how to do is pick up the phone and talk to strangers and ask them for time or money. So it’s good to know that at least I have a runway of another few years or so, this has been another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall. Until then.

 

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Our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, continue their discussion about churn and its various causes. Today’s topic is about how a company’s growth is managed. Are the guiding forces going after traction first? Or are they jumping right into how to scale before they have worked out their product’s kinks? Chris and Corey talk about the tragedy of designing for scale before you have traction. As Chris will tell you, it’s a fool’s errand. If you have no traction, no conversations with your buyers, then you’re not going to learn anything about what your customers need or about why they may not be coming back. Once again, market dominance is achieved when you investigate your churn! And that’s done with conversations.

Today’s podcast winds up with a question of “Who’s in charge here?” when it comes to how to steer a company toward success. Is it the investors you’ve taken money from, who may be pressuring you to scale quickly? Or is it your customers, who, if asked, will tell you what they do or don’t like about your product or service, guiding you toward what you should do to keep them renewing? Listen in to what Chris and Corey think about this important matter on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Which Comes First? Traction or Scale?”

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Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by:

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

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (01:54):

How I think a lot of folks start in this profession of sales, right? We’re talking about churn and SaaS, and there’s certainly churn in your team. And what do you see when the landscape today, particularly all the implementations ConnectAndSell as part of? I would imagine it saves a lot of careers though too. When you have the right tech stack with the sales rep, who maybe again is in this existential crisis, that tech stack can revitalize or reclarify, re-energize that what they thought sales was doesn’t necessarily have to be what sales will be. And they have a sense of promise of future potential, of hope again, I would imagine in quite a few instances, true?

Chris Beall (02:41):

ConnectAndSell in particular, I think has a place in that hope equation, in that if you didn’t really recognize that your issues had to do with the fact that you just weren’t talking to enough people to even have a shot. It’s like if somebody put you to the task of driving a car up a hill, because you’ve got to deliver something, or trucks, say you’re an Amazon Prime delivery person, which I believe is now one out of three Americans. So, your job is to get this truck up the hill. Well, if the truck has the horsepower and it has the gearing and it has tires on it and it has a steering wheel, it’s connected through some coupling mechanism to the front wheel so that they’ll still both point the same direction at the same time, this seems really straightforward.

Chris Beall (03:28):

It may be that the hill is steep or windy. It could be like the hill that led up to the geodesic dome I used to live in up in the Santa Cruz mountains where people would visit us once and never come back. That was pretty common. We had very few dinner parties after a certain point. It’s like, “We’re never visiting your house again.”

Chris Beall (03:46):

“Why?” “Because you can’t see where you’re going on that hill and there’s a cliff.” “Okay, got it.” I don’t see the cliff anymore. But if that’s your job, and your boss says, “Go do it.” And then the problem is that there’s something on the hill, say a little skiff of snow or a little wetness or a little oil or whatever, that friction issue in this case, that lack of friction issue is going to manifest itself as 1,000 things you’re going to try, none of which are going to work, because unless you have enough fundamental friction between the tires and the hill, it doesn’t matter what else you do. And I think in sales, the role technology can play is to reduce the friction, or to provide enough traction, enough grip between the rep and the market, that the rep can start to do their job, they can drive up that hill for the first time.

Chris Beall (04:41):

And before then they don’t realize they were doing 100 things, but they didn’t really have a shot at doing their job, which begins in the conversation. It doesn’t begin in the research. It doesn’t begin in the strategy, reps shouldn’t be handling company strategy anyway. Why we give company strategy to reps is one of the great mysteries of my life, but people still do it. But by the way, the reason we give company strategy to reps is there’s no consequence since they’re not going to talk to anybody anyway. So it’s a fine thing to delegate since there’s so little traction between those tires in the road, that doesn’t really matter.

Corey Frank (05:20):

Yeah it’s true. Well, let’s also clarify that most organizations don’t understand, or maybe haven’t had the pain enough that the list is your ultimate strategy. I can strategize product market fit, I can have great product research, I can have the best engineers, I can have the full feature set, great UI, award-winning UX, everything, but if I leave that to chance to my reps to, “Just go in the market, you’ll find some buyers out there.” That’s probably where most are, correct? From that approach when you talk about strategy and leaving it to chance.

Chris Beall (05:59):

It is. And when it’s left to chance, when you don’t have engagement, real engagement, where you have traction, and it’s like you’re building a business. In all businesses, you should seek traction before you seek scale, always.

Corey Frank (06:14):

Seek traction [crosstalk 00:06:15].

Chris Beall (06:15):

Dreaming about scale before you have traction is a fundamental mistake in designing a business, because the big question is likely to be, what does it take to get traction? Not, what would it take if I had traction to get scale? And I’ve been through this argument with people for 40 years, and say, “Well, what you’re doing doesn’t scale. Well, what I’m doing is getting traction now because of without traction, thoughts of scale are pointless. If you think that I’m too dumb to realize that there’s a point where we now have traction, and by the way, flowing cash coming into the company in excess of our overhead, and we could redesign around scale, if you don’t think we’re going to do that, you’re wrong.”

Chris Beall (07:01):

But designing for scale before you have traction is a fool’s errand. And we see this in SaaS companies every day, most are designed for scale and they fail before they get traction.

Corey Frank (07:13):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (07:15):

It’s the most fundamental quality of business. If you have no traction, for one thing, you’re going to die, for another thing, you’re not going to learn anything about what your customers really need, you’re going to live in a fantasy land of your own making. You’re going to find yourself having internal meetings about why your customers are not coming back, right? Internal meetings on churn are a joke. Just talk to your customers, the ones that left and find out why they left. And then after the fact categorize those, and whichever category has got the most in it, that’s probably the one you should address, right? The data, the conversations will tell you the answer, and your internal discussions are probably not going to help very much. Don’t do the schema in advance, have the conversations first, do the schema later, this by the way, is the same rule, conversations are attraction, schema is scale.

Corey Frank (08:03):

But is that a new phenomenon over the last unicorn era or is it a better remnant for quite a while? Is it exponentially connected? Is there correlation or causation because of the venture money that’s poured into the marketplace about designing, especially these SaaS companies for a scale versus traction, would you say?

Chris Beall (08:27):

I think it’s an investor-driven phenomenon, has been for quite a while. That is not a very informed opinion because I started doing companies myself in 1983 with Silicon Valley venture money, even though I was living in Boulder, Colorado. And this argument came up very quickly. So first product that I built with another guy, we built a bunch of different things. We had a relational database built from scratch, and I do mean a relational database, DVMS, where it was the pre-Oracle version of this stuff, quite fast. And we had to decide was that going to be our product, while we had this MRP thing, now you call it ERP. We decided to go that route, but was it okay to specialize into flow manufacturing instead of all manufacturing? Well, we decided for traction reasons it was because flow manufacturers, folks who put stuff in one end of a… Instead of a production line, they’ve got a trough, those folks who worked with tanker cars full of stuff, they were underserved.

Chris Beall (09:27):

And so we went down that road. And our venture capitalists, at one point in about 1986 said, “We don’t see how this scales. So what we want you to do is shrink wrap it, put it on these new things called PCs, and we’ll pump a bunch of money and you can sell it to little companies.” Little companies didn’t need what we had. It was just a top-down view where scale was given priority over traction. And we took what I think would have been the next SAP perhaps, you never know, we might’ve failed at it, right? But it certainly had a shot. We had big customers. We had lots of very happy customers who were getting something they couldn’t get any other way. They were paying us a lot of money, but that desire for not just scale, but scale now, overwhelmed. Now look at SAP, SAP is a company that fundamentally you would say couldn’t scale, because every implementation was effectively custom. The software standard, but the implementation was custom.

Chris Beall (10:27):

But they found a way to scale in the US. They stumbled on it a little bit, but they embraced it in the ’90s, which was to let Anderson Consulting take them into the market. They gave up a certain amount of revenue, but they got scale another way and still preserved the very fundamental qualities of an SAP offering, which is, it’s going to work in your company because somebody is going to fit it to your company. You may pay the consultant more than you pay the software guy, but the software companies can end up being capable of creating the richest man in Europe. So, I think that people get confused and it brings up this question of patience. It’s extremely rare to make a great business, in fact it’s almost unheard of to make a great actual business in less than 10 years. This is rare. And yet the, the lifetime of most venture funds is 10 years.

Corey Frank (11:23):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (11:25):

So, if you take money from a venture capitalist five years into their fund, yeah they’re going to stick with you after those five years, but the level of patience is going to be… Shall we say their level of patience or their kind of patience is going to be distinct from the patients the market might have with you. It may well be that you need to hang around longer and solve more problems with more customers in order to really figure it out. And that’s the market’s patience, the market continue to keep you in business, but unfortunately you gave up control to somebody whose timeline is different from yours. And they’re looking for 10X to 100X and you aren’t it yet. And so, you made a deal you didn’t think that you had made. And that one I think ends up being, often I think tragic, not in that people aren’t going in eyes open, but there are some really good solutions to some serious problems that have been thrown into the ash heap of history and they’re left to be rediscovered.

Chris Beall (12:25):

I talked to a CEO today of a company who’s basically doing a superb job. This company is building something that I happen to be involved in, building something similar in 2008. I think it’s wonderful that they’re doing this now, but the thing probably could have been kept going in 2008, it’s just the venture guys get impatient and they wanted a consumer product.

Corey Frank (12:48):

Sure.

Chris Beall (12:49):

Well asking me to do a consumer product is totally idiotic, not because a consumer product is not a great idea, they’re great ideas when done well, but because I’m an idiot when it comes to consumerism. I mean, I suck as a consumer.

Corey Frank (13:03):

You could even run a restaurant.

Chris Beall (13:05):

Yeah. Restaurant, thank God, I understand food. That I get. I get food and I get service. Those things I could have done all right, it just wasn’t my adventure. But I do think these things all go together, the traction and patience and solving real problems, and then somehow making the money equation work, and then the question of churn and whether it’s good or bad churn, and the whole product, this stuff all goes together. And when somebody complains about a company, that it has too many moving parts… I remember when I left Requisite Technology, I was asked to leave, I believe because and given that it followed the next day at 5:30 in the morning, because I had made the strong suggestion that I should be the CEO and that I had a plan.

Chris Beall (14:27):

And I thought my plan was pretty good. And they thought a better plan was that I would clean out my desk that day. So, I-

Corey Frank (14:43):

Just a difference of opinion. Yes, right.

Chris Beall (14:45):

Yeah, it was a difference of opinion. And their opinion obviously counted more than mine since this is just how this stuff works. They were on the board, and the CEO by the way, who put the note on my coffee cup that said, “Chris, see me,” Lou is still a very close personal friend. So, it does show that you don’t have to take these things personally. In fact, I still really appreciate what he did for me and how he did it. But when I look back on that situation and think, “Okay, what happened next?” Well, they got a new CEO in there eventually. It took a while, but they got somebody in there. And he called me up the second day on the job and said, “Chris, this thing’s incomprehensible, that you built here. It’s got so many moving parts. I can’t understand how they go together.” And I went and had lunch with them and drew some pictures on napkins and stuff like that, and offered my help.

Chris Beall (15:42):

And it turned out, I think to be too hard to figure out. But my point is, the moving parts are already there, they’re built into the world as we find it. There isn’t a situation in business that’s simple, that everyone that’s of any value has all these dimensions, that they all have a money dimension. Your overhead is that racehorse that eats while you sleep. It will break you eventually unless you can figure out how to make the cash equation work. And the cash equation runs off the gross profit flow in some way, or off a funding flow in some way, and you’ve got to figure that out. And there is the whole product problem, it’s all there.

Corey Frank (16:26):

Over capitalization, we can talk about this here because it’s a natural trajectory here. Over capitalization in business, how much harm does that do to CEOs and managers versus what you’re saying, which is, “I got to learn to live within my means. I got to learn to live lean. If I have a company that’s seven, eight, nine, 10 years, that may had been through a few cycles versus if I continually go from series A to series B to series C, I never really have that tight cash crunch crisis, three in the morning, can’t sleep because how do I feed this race horse?” And maybe talk a little bit about your opinions on that, because I think that… I have a good friend, I think we said that many times, that Tim Crown, chairman of Insight, him and his brother started it. And he always said, “The best ideas for me come when I’m around porcelain.” As a CEO, talk about existential crisis, he always said, “The best ideas and the best solutions to my problems come when I’m hanging around porcelain in the shower, brushing my teeth, shaving in the toilet, wherever it is.”

Corey Frank (17:38):

And is capital sometimes too easy to get? Just because you can get it, should you? Because you miss out on really trying to figure out how these problems can be solved in more creative ways versus just adding more capital.

Chris Beall (17:53):

I think too much capital is the biggest problem, at least in tech. There’s, always more money that wants deals, and there are smart things to do with it at that instant. And it’s also provided in these chunks, these big chunks. And it’s because as Matt Melymuka over at PeakSpan says, “These funds have got too much money and too few partners. And so, they got to seek unicorns. They’ve got to seek that huge exit. And they’re going to sacrifice lots of good companies in order to do it.” It’s not intentional. There’s no bad will involved in any of this stuff, it’s just math. Like so many of the bad things in life, it’s like viruses are just math. They just are. And I don’t know, if somebody thinks the virus isn’t math, I can have a private conversation with them about the nature of viruses and math, but I guarantee you a virus is an inevitable piece of math based on how cells reproduce and that’s just the way it is.

Chris Beall (18:53):

So, the fact is there’s money over concentrated or over piled up in the hands of a smaller number of money managers who call themselves venture capitalists and growth equity guys. And it’s because if you have money in, say you’re a pension fund or whatever, who are you going to put it with? The one who had the big exits and big successes in their previous funds or not? It may be pure superstition. After all, if you just roll dice or flip coins, half of them are going to be better than the other half. And investing in the half that are better by luck is a bad idea, but no worse than idea than investing at random, except they’ll come in at a higher price, which they take out of your head. I think the problem with money is actually not the quantity of it, the problem is that it shifts the customer from being the customer who gets economic value from actually using your product.

Chris Beall (19:48):

And this is B2B, again, I’ve told you, I know nothing about consumers. Literally I know nothing. I don’t know that that glass I’m drinking that Macallan 12 out of it is the wrong glass. It is not. That’s not me. I know that I have a fondness for the Macallan 12 and I can afford it and that’s about it. So that’s the level of sophistication that this consumer goes for. But in B2B, I’ve been around a little bit, and I know a little bit about how it works. And what happens in B2B is your customer has fundamentally got two qualities that you have to take into account. One is that the buying person or committee, but the buying person in particular, is afraid. And we’ve talked about this at length on Market Dominance Guys. They’re afraid, they’re cautious, they’re nervous. Say it however you want, there are consequences to a bad buy for a business that are not there in the case of a bad buy for yourself as a consumer.

Corey Frank (20:49):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (20:50):

And that’s part of it. The second is, businesses vary in more interesting and important ways regarding a product helping them, than individuals do. Individuals are bound tightly by biology, and relatively tightly by culture by the society that they live in. And then somewhat tightly by demographics, how do they fit within that society. And so, in consumer-oriented businesses, we can segment, and when we find a hit, we double down on the hit. That’s the rule for consumer-oriented businesses. You segment, you micro segment, you find a hit, you’d strike a cord, boom, go, be prepared to make more of that and market the living daylights out of it. It’s not how it works in B2B, because our names for the different kinds of companies and different kinds of roles and different kinds of problems they have, don’t map very cleanly onto the actual companies and their variety and the actual kinds of businesses they’re in, and the actual roles. Companies are not constrained by biology. It’s always the wild West.

Chris Beall (21:57):

And so, when you go to solve a problem for a company, you have to be prepared to do more different things other than simply say, “Here’s the product.” And those different things are opportunities to learn what might be the future product, what might be the ancillary services, what might be the partnerships that would help, and where to say no. All of these things are the things that you must practice every day when you’re evolving and nurturing a B2B company. You’re always paying attention to the stuff. The intelligence that comes back from your interaction with customers tells you what not to do, guides you toward what to do, and basically also freaks you out about what you might be able to do, both positively and negatively.

Chris Beall (22:46):

And guess what? None of that stuff makes any difference to your investors because they weren’t in the thesis when they invested. So when you take too much money, your investor becomes your customer. And here’s how you can tell you have a serious problem in a company, serious problem, when you spend a whole day, once a month, six weeks or a quarter or whatever, preparing for a board meeting, and it’s an investor board. Your investor board is not going to benefit sufficiently from that extra bunch of preparation compared to just sitting down with them and telling them what’s going on.

Corey Frank (23:25):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (23:26):

It just are. So you’re putting on a show for somebody. Well, why are you putting on the show? Because you want that next round of financing? That’s why. And that next round of financing becomes your next deal. So you go from a company that might have 100 deals or 1,000 deals or 10,000 deals, and deal with all that variety, get all that intel back and use that intel to make your product better, your services better, decide what to invest in and what not to invest in, and what kind of people to hire and what your attitude is going to be towards offering help to your customers, all that stuff, which is where real business is run, and you’re going to forget that. And what you’re going to do is prepare for the next board meeting because you’re putting on a show for somebody.

Corey Frank (24:07):

So true. Yeah, you’re dancing with the wrong person at that party, right?

Chris Beall (24:09):

You’re tight, you’re dancing with their mom, and she’s not going to marry you. That’s all there is to it. I’m sorry, you’re both 17 and you’re going to be a little bit clumsy, and next year you’ll be 18, and eventually, maybe you’ll be able to get married, but dancing with her mom is not going to help you, I hope.

Corey Frank (24:36):

It’s illegal in 16 states too, so it’s fine.

Chris Beall (24:38):

Yeah. But it’s fascinating that the best of the best, and there’s nothing wrong with taking money fundamentally. I mean, I actually believe that putting capital to work in companies is the smartest thing you can do with capital. It’s why private equity is such a big business, but private equity is careful, they tend to be a little later stage. Private equity invests in businesses, venture capital invests in a company, but it really is a combination of an entrepreneur and idea, and their own sense of how that might play out, which is a category that everybody else is investing in. They’re very different games. And folks like Matt Melymuka can come, and PeakSpan can come into a world that’s like venture capital, but they’re bringing a growth equity mindset.

Chris Beall (25:26):

They’re saying, “Everybody succeeds. 100% of our investments are going to yield. They’re going to yield positive outcomes.” That’s very different from 5% or 10%. So I really admire folks like that, that are looking at a way to bring capital to bear on good companies and even potentially great companies with a sharp eye to how not to ruin those companies inadvertently through excess capital or by becoming the customer.

Corey Frank (25:58):

Well yet again, Chris, in our hour-or-so conversation, somehow we’ve made it a point to talk about what it seems that so many of our 60-plus episodes are about. We always get a little bit of rock climbing in there I think somehow. We always talk about capital, we always talk about churn, SaaS, and then we even dosed a little bit of existentialism in there. And maybe what we should do in next episode is we can have a throwback machine where you can grow your hair out, you can have your Jean shorts and we can reminisce, tell the listeners here that, “I have a running tally of how many different positions Chris has maintained and has communicated throughout these episodes.” I think we’re up to 18 or so. So I’m sure there’s a few more, that there’s always some good lessons that come from you, either rock climbing or hanging out at the wrong place at the right time. And so, more to come, hopefully with many episodes.

Corey Frank (26:52):

So with that, Chris, it’s always been a pleasure chatting with you. And until next time on the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall, the sage of sales.

 

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Our Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, are back this week with an episode about “churn.” No, they’re not talking about butter-making here. They’re addressing business churn — a measurement of cancellations or non-renewals of your company’s product or service. Are you thinking, “Churn: What can I do about it?” If you’re like many people, you may look at your company’s churn rate, give a philosophical shrug, and go back to hunting for more prospects to replace those MIA customers. But is it really easier to find new customers than it is to figure out what went wrong? As the folk-rock band, The Byrds, might have sung in the 60s, “To every cancellation (churn, churn, churn), there is a reason (churn, churn, churn).”

Corey points out that some churn is inevitable, but not all churn. Examination of cause and effect is needed! In a spirit of solidarity, Chris comes clean about what unexamined churn cost ConnectAndSell, the company he works for. He explains that he had to put arrogance aside and face the fact that their customers weren’t getting the full benefit from ConnectAndSell’s sales- acceleration platform simply because reps didn’t know how to successfully conduct a cold call. And, thus, a training program was born. Yes, it’s shine-a-bright-light-on-the-problem time on the Market Dominance Guys in today’s episode, “All Churn Is Not Created Equal.”

—-more—-

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (01:58):

So here we have my friend, Chris, and we have nobody on Johnny Carson’s couch today, buddy. It is just you, the Carnac, and then me. I don’t even think [inaudible 00:02:08] Ed McMahon, I’m probably even like Doc Severinsen. I don’t even know what I am to your Johnny Carson, so. The production assistant to feed you the little three by five cards that you do your Carnac the Magnificent, so.

Corey Frank (02:19):

So here we are today, and we were talking before we jumped on, we got yet another story of a lesson learned from your life about one of your first jobs. How you hung out at the right place at the right time, and almost owned a restaurant. And that led us talking about, sometimes when we are thinking about our profession, how many times are we really tourists in our own profession? Where I think this is what I’m supposed to do, be promoted to a sales manager, or assume this more… This bigger territory, the VP or the CEO sits down and seductively presents it to us. Right, Chris? And I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do, and then I very quickly realize that I don’t know if I like this. And so, you shared kind of a couple of stories about that, but what do you think about that epidemic in our profession? That just because you can, should you?

Chris Beall (03:19):

Yeah. I think the answer is generally… Well, I don’t know if it’s generally anything, actually, now that I think about it. I mean, my whole career is built to these things, and there’s two flavors of it. One is like the one story I told you, of coming up out of the desert on a warm day. And I was out rock climbing by myself, bouldering, not dressed particularly for company. A pair of cutoffs, a pair of climbing shoes, and some geeky glasses that I wore. And long hair, and a headband pulled down behind my back, and that was it. And-

Corey Frank (03:49):

So, you were the Matthew McConaughey before there was Matthew McConaughey? Sounds [inaudible 00:03:53]. The outfit you’re describing, that sounds very much like something he would… And bongos in your backpack or something, probably.

Chris Beall (03:59):

I didn’t have even a backpack, and I still have this bad habit, I didn’t even take water with me. So I used to go climbing out in the desert for three, four hours at a time with no water. I heard a sound and I didn’t know what it was. I walked over a ridge to check it out, and there’s a guy in a suit. Nobody wears a suit out in the desert. I mean, it was a hot day, not hot for the desert, it was probably 97 degrees or something, but cool enough to boulder. Bouldering being climbing stuff that you think you can jump off of. Right? And every once in a while you find out you shouldn’t have, but I was pretty practiced at taking some pretty long jumps. I’d practiced up to 22 feet, and then being able to land reliably on something.

Chris Beall (04:35):

So I felt… Feeling pretty, kind of worn out. I was bleeding here and there, because the rock there was pretty sharp. I walk up to this guy, who’s standing there looking at a building, and I think it was the first time I ever really wanted a job. I had a job already, but I never had to get that job. But I wanted a job at that point, because I wanted to buy some climbing gear, and I was kind of starting to formulate this idea of taking a year and climbing all over the West. And so, that was going to take some capital. And in my world there was only one way to get money, and that was to work. I suppose there are other ways in other worlds, but that’s kind of how we did it. So I walked up next to this gentlemen and stood there, quietly. And we watched what was down there, which is this nice, new building.

Chris Beall (05:21):

And it looked like a restaurant, and as I mentioned to you, my family really didn’t go out to restaurants. We went out to Bill Johnson’s Big Apple out there in Phoenix, which by the way, is the last place that I took my dad the night before he died. And so that was kind of coming full circle. And I suspected this was a restaurant, in Carefree, Arizona. Right? What else can it be? And the gentlemen, his name was Joe, he’s just standing there. And finally, I asked the right question. I asked, “Is this yours?” And he beamed with pride. And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “What’s it called?” And he said, “The Elbow Bent.” And I thought for a moment, and I said, “Need any help?”

Chris Beall (05:57):

That was my value prop, for I… “Need any help?” And that was the entire interview. And he said, “Yeah. Truck’s going to be showing up in about 20 minutes, and would you like to help me unload it?” And we just had a great time that afternoon, setting up the kitchen, and setting up the freezer, and learning where everything went in the bar. And he offered me a job in the front of the house, as they call it. I could have been a bus boy. Now this turned out to be a very high-end restaurant, and a busboy would’ve made a bunch of money, but I told him… I asked him what I had to do. And he said, “You have to cut your hair.” I said, “No. I’m not going to cut my hair.”

Chris Beall (06:30):

So that was a little crossroads, that little piece of arrogance on my part ended up back in the kitchen. But the kitchen fascinated me, because the kitchen was where the mysteries were. The kitchen was technically complex. It had to do a job that, done imperfectly, resulted in really nothing. In a place like that, I could tell, you couldn’t make a 90% good meal. You had to make a good meal, and you had to get kind of everything right. So I spent a long time back there, for me as a kid, 10, 11 months, working every night in that restaurant, six days a week and going to school, going to high school. And at the end of my tenure there, he took me aside, took me to the bar, poured me a single malt whiskey, very much like this. In fact, it was the Macallan 12, it’s exactly what’s in this glass. I didn’t really realize he’s the guy I learned it from. And told me a story about his restaurant career, and what his aspirations were.

Chris Beall (07:25):

And then hit me with a blockbuster, which is, “I’d like to give you this restaurant.” And I said, “That’s a very strange thing to say. Why are you saying that?” And he said, “Well, I don’t have any heirs, and you seem like an unusually… A different kind of business person. And you’ve done a good job in the back, you’ve helped in the front some, and you can talk to people, obviously. And I get the sense that you know numbers.” Well, I knew numbers, that was pretty clear, right? As a participant, put it modestly, in the National Math Contest several years in a row, and did all right. So I thought it over. I told him, “I’ll tell you tomorrow.” And I thought it over, but I just thought, “That’s not my adventure.” That’s really what it was for me, is this, this isn’t my adventure. This isn’t what I’m made for. I could do it, I’d probably be pretty good at it. It’s fun, but I really was a tourist.

Chris Beall (08:14):

And what did I take out of that job? I cook now. I cook a lot, and I love to cook. And I learned how to handle a knife, and assess a recipe in progress, and taste things, and go fast when you need to go fast, and pay attention when you need to pay attention, all the things you do in the kitchen. And so I love to be in the kitchen. I love to cook, and that was the part of the adventure that was my adventure. But running a restaurant wasn’t going to be my adventure. And so, I reluctantly told him no. I was flattered, I was blown away. I was only just 17 years old, and [inaudible 00:08:49] to have to work there for five years, etc., in order to get the place. But I still think about it every once in a while. I would have been your neighbor out there in Carefree, maybe we’d still have the restaurant.

Corey Frank (08:58):

Yeah. Chez Beall, whatever you’d call its, or something.

Chris Beall (09:01):

It would have had some crazy name, I would have renamed it.

Corey Frank (09:06):

But it’s interesting with that, it wasn’t what you were called to do. It wasn’t your adventure, you knew you were a tourist. He didn’t, until you told him. So the question then is, as a sales leader, and as a CEO of many companies, as an investor, can you build a sales organization with a bunch of folks who are in an existential crisis? Who am I, what should I do? Do you want… Does it matter? How much of the companies that you’ve built, or the companies you know that are successful… First of all, do people care? Right? Because hey, I’m filling a role, a busboy, a dishwasher, or front of house, back of house, a sales rep, a field rep, a BDR, BDR manager.

Corey Frank (09:42):

But everybody is kind of going through these, maybe little, mini-existential crises, especially as the company grows to different stages. Do I want to stick around for series A? Do I want to stick around for acquisition? Do I want to stick around after the layoff, do I want to take this territory? Do I want… How do you deal with all of that, and should you really care as a CEO? And especially, maybe how it’s evolved today, where some of the younger folks entering into the market, who seem to be laden with these existential crises all the time.

Chris Beall (10:14):

Yeah. Yeah. I treat it for myself the same way I treat all, what I call, fundamental churn. Everything in life involves things changing, people going through changes, people making decisions, people staying or moving on. I never really give that a great deal of thought. I think persuading somebody to stay when they want to move on doesn’t make a lot of sense. Great to explore it, great to figure out if it’s just something stupid that you’re doing, or some misunderstanding of the situation and how it’s evolving, that’s causing somebody to want to leave. But when somebody wants to go because they do want to go seek their adventure, I think that’s great. And I feel that way about customers, too. I think there’s this obsession we have, especially in SAS, with holding on to every customer, and almost forcing them to be a customer forever. Even if it requires extraordinary acts.

Chris Beall (11:01):

Discounting, I think, is a bizarre and extraordinary act. I see discounting as making a lot of sense when you’re trading cash today against cash need tomorrow. I think it’s a form of financing, and that’s fine. Money always costs money. And if discounting is how you’re going to get that transaction to happen, so to speak, and it’s at a time in your company’s life when you’d rather do that than raise money from a VC, or some other dilutive, or control losing kind of proposition, then discount. Right? But discounting to keep a customer just to keep a customer, maybe you should ask yourself whether that’s a really great relationship. And it’s okay if they move on, and I-

Chris Beall (12:16):

And I think in SAS, we do SAS upside down and inside out. The upside down part is, that we tend to do it from the top down. We tend to make a model, and I just did this the other day, by the way, so I know what the lure is like, and I’ll tell you what the model is here in a second. But we’ll make a model, and the model has certain assumptions in it. And one of the big assumptions that drives the big numbers three years out, four years out, is this churn assumption. So we have a customer churn, and then we have kind of a net dollar churn that people care about. And then you also have got these other numbers, a little easier to lay your hands on. Cost of acquiring a customer, you’re probably going to be closer on that than a few things. And then, what? Your…

Corey Frank (12:56):

[LTD 00:12:56].

Chris Beall (12:56):

Your ARR per net new customer is, and stuff like that. You’re probably going to be within bounds, but churn is a funny one because it operates like compound interest, but the other way around. It’s inverse log that you’re going to run, and it’s going to be really ugly when the churn is high. So we’re afraid of this thing, and we manage our companies at the margin often, to artificially reduce churn temporarily, so that no one draws the “wrong conclusion,” which is the right conclusion. Sometimes they come, sometimes they go, and that’s the way the world works. So in our business at ConnectAndSell, for instance, it’s a naturally churn-y business, in that we sell to vice-presidents of sales often, and vice presidents of sales have pretty short half-lives. About seven months after you meet them, they’ll be gone. And it has nothing to do with you, right? It doesn’t involve us at all.

Chris Beall (13:48):

We sell to somebody, and it’s just the nature of the beast, because sales management by and large, consists of hiring somebody, giving them a territory, or if it’s a sales manager, giving them a team, and a number. And then if it works out and they make the number, which is pretty much a roll of the dice most of the time, it has very little to do with what anybody does in their first year. But if they do okay, we keep them for another year, and if they don’t, we replace them. Same thing with territories. So there’s a lot of survivor bias, survivorship bias, built into our analysis of sales situations and sales outcomes. You wrote a very good piece once, I really liked it, in which you were asking yourself the question, “Why do I sometimes celebrate lucky deals?” That’s like the dumbest thing to do in the world, is to celebrate luck.

Chris Beall (14:33):

You take your natural superstitious-ness, which will already celebrate luck on the inside, and then you amplify it publicly, forcing yourself to believe that what you did was material, when in fact it might’ve just been luck. So you have the same thing on the churn side. I think that another way of looking at churn is like this. When folks leave, whether it’s employees, or whether it’s customers, for a good reason, then you just improve the quality of the remaining stock. And quality is a harder problem to solve, quality of your employees, quality of your customers, is a harder problem to solve than quantity. So if you have a mechanism that naturally solves the quality problem, probably shouldn’t fight it really hard. You can go ahead and let it run, which means you need to run a very robust top of the funnel, both with regard to getting new customers, and getting new employees.

Corey Frank (15:22):

Sure.

Chris Beall (15:22):

It’s like a pot of water that’s boiling away. It’s a really good idea to have some more water around to put in there, but just putting a lid on it, and saying, “Sorry. No boiling today,” is not really the right answer. So, that’s kind of how I feel about it.

Corey Frank (15:36):

[crosstalk 00:15:36] All churn is not created equal, and there’s certainly healthy churn. And the focusing on the churn that you have by discounting, and giving away dollars, etc., it’s better off firing up the new customer engine, and keeping that going to find the folks that fit your profile a little bit more jointly, than trying to save, or salvage, or create a hostage situation with an existing client.

Chris Beall (16:01):

Yeah. There is, however, another side to it. That another reason that churn occurs in both employee situations and customer situations, and who knows? Maybe in personal situations, the churn we call divorce, for instance, those sorts of churns.

Corey Frank (16:15):

Right. Sure.

Chris Beall (16:15):

It has to do with something else, which is what Geoffrey Moore calls, “the whole product.” So when we think about the whole product, say, what does somebody really need in order to get the full benefit of what I have on offer? What is all of that? It’s tempting to say, like we said at ConnectAndSell for many years, well, when it comes to training reps to speak on the phone, you know what we do, we let people talk to 10 times as many folks, right? So I can look at my team today and ask this question, which is, “Well, how’d they do?? Right? Well, how they did was, in a big number sense, they said 28 meetings, and they converted 9.37% of their conversations to meetings.

Chris Beall (16:51):

Is that good, or is bad? It’s above threshold, it’s good enough to keep us in business, but when you come right down to it, and you look at it and go, “Okay. So what is the important factor here for us, or our customers being successful with ConnectAndSell?” It’s not really delivering all those conversations. That’s a brute force, mathematical thing, it’s always going to happen. Somebody once asked me, “Well, when does this product not work?” And I said, “Oh, it’s simple. It doesn’t work on all days where three times five doesn’t equal 15. Those are the days it doesn’t work. But on days where three times five does equal 15, it really works quite well, because it works simply by multiplication of three times five.” Actually it’s five times three, I suppose, at five times as many people making the dials as you do.

Chris Beall (17:38):

And since I have a level of automation, you can’t afford for your individual sales reps and specialization, they’re three times as fast. And when five times three is calculated, it tends toward 15, whether it’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. So that’s not the interesting question. The interesting question is, what do your reps say, and to what effect, when they get somebody in a conversation? Now we used to just say at ConnectAndSell, “Well, the ecosystem will take it.” Right? The training ecosystem. They know all about the cold call. Why should we have to be the guys to teach it? And then we stumbled onto, once, a situation where we were obliged to teach it. It was an emergency to help save a company, to help save a customer of ours, who will remain unnamed. But they were in bankruptcy, in Chapter 11, being managed by the bank, the receiver, and somebody had taken many, many millions of dollars out of the company without permission.

Chris Beall (18:33):

And it had come to light late, and they had a problem. And I felt for him, and I made an offer. It was a really weird offer. I said, “Well, I’ve got extra capacity on Mondays and Fridays. So, how about if we just use a fixed price deal for a month? You pay me a certain amount of money, and you guys can use it all you want Monday and Friday.” It was like, “Yeah. We’ll do that. But now it’s really focused on two days, we need to be really good.” And next thing you know, this thing called Flight School was born, where the first Friday they prepped like crazy, and trained, and did all sorts of [inaudible 00:19:07]. And then Monday, they ran in production, but being coached. It was a blitz and coach thing, and just being coached on the first seven seconds of the conversation.

Chris Beall (19:15):

One of my colleagues and I just, literally, made this up on the airplane, like, “Well, let’s do the first seven seconds in the first session, and call it takeoff. And let’s do the value portion in the second two hour session, we’ll call it free flight. And then we’ll do the asking for the meeting part in the third session, and call it landing.” And then, this was the clever one, and then handling objections. What do you do when somebody asks the famous question, “Well, tell me more,” or they have some other objection. We call that turbulence, handling turbulence. So Flight School was born. Well, we didn’t think it was a big deal. It was just like, this is going to help this one customer out, but we started to feel it. And we must’ve felt it more than we thought, because we made a logo for it. James [Townsend 00:19:56] Actually built a logo on a flight, so now we have this logo. That was years ago. Well, this last week we launched Flight School as a product, right?

Chris Beall (20:04):

Two, three years, maybe three and a half years, to get to the point of finally saying, “You know what? The ecosystem’s not going to do it.” So we were having excess churn because of our failure to see that part of our responsibility was to take the learnings from millions, and millions, and millions of conversations on our own use of our product, and put those learnings to use in a way that would help our specific customers with their specific problem. And the specific problem is, by the way, they are ambushing people 30 to 40 times a day. That’s a very specific problem. Not they’re ambushing somebody at all, you’re ambushing… Each rep is now ambushing somebody 30 or 40 times a day, that’s a new problem. Sometimes quantity makes a difference, speed makes a difference. You get something new.

Chris Beall (20:48):

It’s like, we were talking about those big ships out there that have all the containers on them. And I got to experience the wake of one of those that goes a lot faster than the other ones. Well, it made a difference. A one foot high wake is very different from a four-foot high wake coming at you in the back of your little sailboat, when you’re not paying attention. So I think there’s good churn that just happens, and improves things, and then I think there’s chronic bad churn, probably for a reason that you don’t understand. And the resistance you will have as entrepreneurs, especially if you’re funded, to doing the best thing for that other churn, for the one that you should have been providing more and you weren’t, is you’ll say, like I said…

Chris Beall (21:29):

And I said it on Tony Safoian’s Cloud N Clear podcast, we don’t want to be a training company. And that was a small minded thing to say, rather than just saying, “Our customers really need the opportunity to learn from us, and take that group of reps, and get them in the top 5% of all reps, in terms of cold calling.”

Corey Frank (21:48):

Sure.

Chris Beall (21:48):

But we wouldn’t… We didn’t do it. I was stubborn, and I had this view of revenue multiples for evaluation, and a bunch of other stuff that got in the way of clearly seeing just first order. What does the customer need to actually succeed by their standards? Not some BS I made up because my spreadsheet said it would look good.

Corey Frank (22:09):

Right. Exactly. Vanity.

Chris Beall (22:10):

It is a kind of vanity. And so I have a spreadsheet I did just yesterday, and the day before, on this whole Flight School thing. And the spreadsheet says, that if certain occupancies of capacity is filled, and an instructor does this, and we charge this much, and we use this many dials, and we have this blah, blah, blah. Voila, with two instructors, I got $500 million evaluation. And I had to look at that really carefully, and say, “Well, that’s good to have done the calculation. Now, put it aside and forget about it, and ask this question. Which is, on the Flight Schools that we’re going to be offering, are they going to provide what the customers need in order to be successful?

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On today’s episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Jason Beck, Vice President of Sales at Enerex, by addressing how sales got a dirty name. Chris explains that in ancient times, the salesman met the buyer face to face, but the encounter was usually a one-time transaction. Then, the camel caravan moved on, and if the buyer wasn’t happy with his purchase, there was no one to appeal to for a replacement and no one to lodge a customer complaint with. Ancient sales was a hit-and-run relationship that frequently left a bad taste in the buyer’s mouth about salesmen. But in modern times, the sale is never over, because the telephone and the internet have created an ongoing relationship between sellers and buyers. The modern salesperson needs to understand that you can run, but you can’t hide, which makes it imperative that reps provide value to their customers.

Jason and the Market Dominance Guys segue into a discussion of what type of personalities are best suited to be salespeople and what types should definitely NOT hold this job. The attributes of being pro-active and persistent are touted, as well as the importance of being in sales for the right reasons. As Jason puts it, “If closing the deal at the end of the day isn’t what you live for, then don’t be in sales.”

This team of sales-savvy guys wraps things up with a discussion of the cycle of the sales process for a new product and why it works — as this podcast’s title says — to Strategize, Execute, Evaluate, and Repeat.

—-more—-

About Our Guest

Jason Beck is Vice President of Sales at Enerex, retail energy’s trusted data platform, providing secure connectivity to the entire value chain — brokers, suppliers, agents, customers, and utilities — to drive efficient transactions. Their flagship service, Sparkplug, is the #1 retail energy sales platform in the world, powering over 10% of US commercial and industrial (C&I) transactions.

——————————–

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (02:16):

Sales is so delicate because we have to ask first what do they get out of it? And as an expert, can we be an honest broker and be on their side? Because it’s actually imbalanced. I know more than you do when I’m selling to you. Therefore, I have to take your side in the transaction. Otherwise it’s imbalanced. That’s just simple. That’s just a fact, right? And an imbalanced transaction will always come back to bite you because at some point there’s a further relationship, except 2,500 years ago, sales done at a crossroads and the silk road or 1500 years ago or whatever, never see me again. That’s where sales got the dirty name.

Chris Beall (02:51):

You’ll never see me again. That’s not the modern world. So I think of sales now, I’ll call modern sales as different from ancient sales. Ancient sales was a transaction between strangers haggled under the time pressure that somebody’s got to move on. The guy in the caravan has got to move on the guy at the crossroads, the trader, gets to stay, but has got to dump the inventory. At some point, a deal is struck and it’s over. In modern sales, it’s never over.

Corey Frank (03:19):

No, especially-

Chris Beall (03:20):

And that’s the difference. Especially in tech. Right.

Corey Frank (03:24):

It’s an ongoing relationship. And it’s really… Maybe we shouldn’t be coming up with… You’re not a VP of sales, you’re the VP of relationship management, right? At the end of the day. But that’s really what it is. It’s that relationship. I agree. And then I always thought that was very interesting, asking for the close comes so easy for me because if you talk upfront about somebody’s problems, you discuss what different alternatives and how… What they’re valuing besides you and or evaluating, right? Besides you. And then you pitch your solution. The last thing is, “Okay, now, now that I’ve showed you value and I’ve answered all your questions, can I have your commitment?” And that’s never been the hard part of sales. I think, where it gets to the dirty connotation is simply it’s on that upfront. It’s on what you guys do. The best, Corey, right?

Corey Frank (04:09):

In terms of opening those doors. And I think that’s the hardest part of is people don’t want to be quote unquote, “sold to.” It’s great. Well, there needs to be a reason that we’re here today. You have a problem, right? And understanding that problem first. So that was really eye opening to me Chris is how you talked about too that how important we are as salespeople. I think most sales people either feel they’re super egotistical, right? And I’m the coolest thing since sliced bread or they kind of feel if they’re not getting those transactions and they’re not having success, that they feel a little minimized, right? But the level of importance that you just shared on that is is we’re the crossroad, sales is the crossroads between how the economy continues to grow. That’s a great way to phrase it, man. I’m going to steal that one. [crosstalk 00:04:56].

Chris Beall (04:53):

Well, everybody depends on sales, right? Yeah. See, I keep it. I hold a few patents as Corey knows. One or two or 16 or what, I don’t even know what the number is, right? Some of them are, I would say important. Some of them are ancillary. The ones that were important were of no value without sales. The ones that were ancillary, ancillary. But even the ones that were important, in fact, the more important they are, the more dependent the actual value is on sales. And also think about this. When you patent something, it has to have three characteristics. It has to be novel. It has to be useful. And it has to be non-obvious to one skilled in the art. Well, novel means you can get people interested in it, but they’re repelled by it because it’s novel and therefore has not been tried, right? Useful is great, but things that are useful are solving problems that are already being solved. You don’t get to solve new problems. You only get to solve old problems. Non-obvious means scary, right? And somewhat insulting. Like I didn’t think it up.

Chris Beall (06:00):

So now you have this problem, the more valuable the innovation, the harder it is to sell. And therefore sales becomes ever more important.

Corey Frank (06:12):

Well, it seems Jason, then with that perspective on sales, how do you think if we really put you on the couch here, how do you do so well with this profession of sales, where the connotation and the denotation of what it means maybe is a little bit sullied to you or it’s a little bit not as clean as, “Hey, I’m an engineer,” “I’m a product marketer,” et cetera, but yet you do it so well and you were obviously attracted to do it. What’s that end result that kind of polarizes you to do a profession as well as you’re doing it clearly.

Jason (06:51):

Well, cheers, thanks again for those kudos. I’m pretty big on personality profile tests. I really do believe that there are traits that we have as individuals that make us kind of who we are, right? As a person. By the way, anything that’s about your personality in certain situations, it’s a positive and in certain situations it’s a negative. So for anybody who’s watching this, like don’t think just because it’s part of your personality, it’s always a bad thing or it’s always a good thing. That’s how you judge yourself. And yes, there are certain times where you have to take something in your personality, like my example is that I really care what others think about me. Now, I’m not fearful. Fear is… It’s the end of that. Like it’s the far end of that spectrum. I won’t even talk to somebody because I’m fearful that they won’t like me.

Jason (07:38):

No, but I really aim for everyone on the other side of a conversation with me to walk away that they got some sort of value, even if it wasn’t a transaction, that they learned something. And I know you guys feel that same way, right? You’re… I’m in it. And I’m in this game of sales because I want to provide value to others. And when they gain that value, I want them to remember, “Hey Jason, he was right. He came through on what he said, right?” And the Anarex team supported all that vision and this pied piper mentality that I have in our industry is to try to move people along. So listen, at the end of the day, if closing a deal is not the most exciting thing to you in the world, don’t be in sales, because that is really what we live for at the end of the day.

Jason (08:23):

That is why we get to celebrate. I am in it for providing value to people, but I also really enjoy when there’s a sale made and then that customer is happy. When we have our NPS score, which we just rolled out for the first time and it’s 44, and it’s like, “Wow, we’re actually getting customers that are happy and they are willing to promote us,” if, you know, for all those who know what NPS is. Right? That’s fantastic. Right? And that’s kind of why I’m in personally in sales, but that personality side of things, I do believe there are certain personality types that should never try the profession. And then there’s other types that would never even know that they should try the profession and really should, right? And there’s more of those I think. I think sales is something that can be taught. It can be learned. It is a skill set. It’s not tips and tricks though. It’s relationship and you got to be in it for the right reasons.

Corey Frank (09:16):

What are you working on as a sales professional now in your career. And then also, what do you see that as you were coming up through the ranks that you wish you would’ve learned now from a sales trait or from a perspective or from a talent or from a habit?

Jason (09:33):

Yeah, it’s a really great… So one of my best skillsets personally, I think is, everyone will tell you this, so I have a funny story about this, is persistence. Persistence, I think is the one thing that a lot of people don’t have that drive, that high D personality in the disc profile. That’s only 10% of the personalities tested out there is the high driver mentality. And that’s definitely my biggest skill set. I am more persistent. If you tell me that you want, you know, that, “Hey, call me in two weeks,” you’re going to get called in two weeks.

Jason (10:04):

Like to the day, to the hour, to the minute. I joke around with people and say, you know, “My bathroom breaks are scheduled on my calendar.” Back to persistence for a second, my story with persistence is that my wife, I asked her out freshman year of high school and that was when we were, what, 15 or so. And she said, “No.” And nine years later after college, somebody mentioned her name and I reached out to her on Facebook and then we had a couple of dinners and then we got married. So don’t give up ever. Always be [inaudible 00:10:35] in everything you do.

Jason (10:35):

And so first off, I would say my number one skill set, and what has carried me through so far is the fact that I produce more than most because I am so proactive and I’m so driven. And I’m really trying to move things along constantly. You asked an interesting question though, which is, what did you want to learn earlier? Or what do you think you didn’t know? So my first real job out of college, I ran my own company for a year with a friend of mine, but the first real job was Constellation New Energy. Constellation is a Fortune 500 company. It is the largest retailer, still as of today, I believe, direct energy and energy just merged together so they’re going to be one A and one B now, like two of the top five just merged. Anyway, getting into a company like that as a 22 year old and learning the sales training. There’s a gentleman named Tom Freese who write Question-Based Selling and a whole slew of other books.

Jason (11:35):

He came in and he, I mean, he’s a high dollar trainer. Like if I was going to say, if I had a Chris or a Corey to come in and train my sales team, right? These are high dollar, high paid top tier consultants. And so having that training early on, that was invaluable. And I thank Constellation so much for that portion of my early career. And I think that did help set the stage for my… I started off in marketing. I was doing flyers and actually running them through the mail machine to make sure that they got out to tell the market and then my transition to sales was we were having so much success with the lead generation, the sales people were like, “Oh no, that one’s too small.” It was still a $10,000 transaction. What do you mean small? That’s still a big transaction in my mind. Millions of dollars in business that we could be gaining. And so the thought was is start up a small SMB team. And that’s what we did. And how I made my transition into sales and honestly it was right in the sales management.

Jason (12:34):

It wasn’t even in the carrying a bag. And I said to myself, “You know what, I got to carry a bag,” right? I got to do this cause I don’t… How can you train somebody on what you don’t know how to already do? So for two weeks, I called and just made sure that I could actually do this, but lots of confidence in myself and yeah, it was successful. And then honestly, throughout my entire career, I really didn’t get back into sales, specifically carrying a bag and having a quota, et cetera, until this last role. Everything else was really sales management and leadership. Now it is this whole pied piper and I’m the one that’s responsible for the revenue at Anarex and carry that weight on my shoulders and my team’s shoulders. So-

Corey Frank (13:49):

Just to clarify, you are a sales leader or leader of your company who actually does sell. Chris, that’s an alignment, I think, with some of your philosophies [inaudible 00:13:59].

Chris Beall (14:00):

Well, who’s your rep, Jason, at ConnectAndSell?

Jason (14:02):

Oh, that’s a good question. [inaudible 00:14:07] Don’t even know. I don’t even know.

Chris Beall (14:10):

Yeah. So I’m your rep and yeah.

Jason (14:14):

[crosstalk 00:14:14].

Chris Beall (14:14):

I mean, yeah, that’s the answer, I’m your rep. And I believe that the intelligence flame front of a business takes place in the sales conversations and the sales outcomes that are happening every day. And as a business is evolving in the marketplace, if you’re not out there selling in the front lines yourself, you will lose touch in my opinion, with how the business has evolved and you’ll leave gaps for competitors to walk into. They get ever bigger with every day because the business is changing. The only way you can learn what’s really going on is to clean off the windshield, drive the damn car.

Jason (14:51):

You have to. Yep. You got to be on that frontline, again, carrying a bag and I knew it was important early on. That was a great learning… But now with what we’re doing at Anarex, I feel my role on the sales team is always to sell the new product, right? Because that, there is no playbook for it. Nobody’s sold it. How do you even know how to sell it? Well, again, I come back to what I really truthfully believe in, which is, by the way, strategy is nothing without execution. Execution is the most important part of my cycle. It’s strategy, it’s execution, it’s valuation repeat, and that execution part… I think there’s a lot of people out there that come up with really great ideas. How do you execute on them? And can you have that iterative cycle? And can you fail fast?

Jason (15:37):

Can you make that process quicker so that you can get onto that next thing? And then once you have a pretty good way of doing it, it’s time to hand it off to somebody who can make it even better. When I hired Doug and even when I look back in my career, I always say, I’m really good at getting that car from zero to 60, but then once it’s at 60, somebody to take it from 60 to a hundred miles an hour, that’s a totally different skillset, right? To improve upon an already existing process, I always think that that actually takes somebody that’s slightly different. Again, this could just be me as a personality. I’d love to hear you guys’ take on this, but I’m really good at figuring out what’s not been figured out before. Once it’s figured out, I think it’s working. So it could be better, by the way.

Jason (16:22):

I’m not so cocky that I think my way is the right way. No, my way is a way. And somebody can improve upon that. So I like stepping out of the way at that point and then giving my baby, right? Or car over to that next person who can take it from 60 to 100. That’s proven out three times in my career so far where that person has been successful at driving even faster than I have. But I’m curious, do you guys feel that that’s different somebody to do something that’s never been done before versus somebody that can improve upon a given sales process or selling of a product?

Chris Beall (16:57):

I think that the ability to take something from scratch, an innovation from scratch to market is a completely unique, I mean, very different kind of skillset because your cycle times for that cycle you described, which is the strategy execution evaluation cycle and then back to strategy again, has got to be really, really fast. And you have to be passionately cold and it’s very hard to be passionately cold. And so it’s not your baby. You kill that damn thing three times a week, but you come across to other people as highly committed and highly passionate and really, really interested in the outcome. So you commit a hundred percent to the execution that’s associated with that particular strategy and implied by it. But your evaluation is a cold, cold, sharp knife. And when you cut, it’s gone, and you go back, you tweak the strategy and you execute again.

Chris Beall (17:55):

I think that mix is rare and belongs in that zero to 60 part. There’s another cycle time that’s just longer. That’s required to take something bigger if that’s up and running and do the same thing, but to do it and have the patience to watch it play out. I don’t have that patience. I just don’t have it.

Jason (18:18):

No, by itself.

Chris Beall (18:19):

But if… I’m pretty good at what you do. Give me something new. I’ll take it up to the point where now it’s running, it’s functioning and somebody else will do a better job than I do at taking that to the next level of big. Now, when you look at enterprise health, the issue with the enterprise is always that you have two things to conquer. You have markets to conquer with your current innovation, and you have the natural next innovations, which are never obvious to turn into something worth conquering markets with.

Chris Beall (18:53):

And if you don’t do both of those, you just go out of business. We have a whole podcast episode called All Dead Companies are Equally Uninteresting, and it describes the process by which companies become dead companies by failing on one of these two fronts, right? So I think these are two different kinds of horses. I think the main difference is what is the cycle time you’re comfortable with going from strategy to execution? So for me, strategy to execution cycle time is about a day, because I can’t imagine working on strategy for more than part of the day. You exhaust the possibilities. It gets uninteresting. It’s like, “I’m going to cross the river. I’m going to go with this stone, this stone, this stone, this stone, or maybe this one, this one, this… They look about the same. I’ll pick this one. Okay. Now let’s go give it a go, Oh, wait a second. That one rocks. My foot got wet. I almost fell in. Let’s come back now. What? Okay, let’s try this one,” right? That to me is natural, but for some people it’s not. So I think it’s a big part of it has to do with your natural cycle time for running through that.

Chris Beall (19:57):

I also agree with you that execution is the key for a funny reason. And it is that the strategy itself will end up ossifying, it’ll end up becoming a thing that is like set in bone or stone and becomes the subject of discourse, whereas the subject of discourse needs to be what happened when we did it? Not did we do it and did it work? Which is a completely different question, but what happened when we did it? And you got to execute cleanly, the very, very clean execution and not cheat in the middle of the execution.

Jason (20:37):

Example is this. I’ve told you about this. When you’re executing cold calls, you must not qualify. The reason you must not qualify is that you dirty the execution on the strategy which is your list. The list is the strategy. And if you qualify during the execution, which is the cold call, then you’re not actually executing. You’re fixing the list at the same time. So you’re modifying the strategy on every single conversation and therefore you get no iteration and you have a broken process and you can’t evaluate and you can’t go back and tweak the strategy. So done correctly, cold calling is the execution mechanism to take market hypothesis, which is the list and immediately turn it into something you can evaluate but I think that is horses for courses kind of thing.

Corey Frank (21:21):

That’s right. That’s right. In the last few minutes together, I think there’s a good springboard into this concept, Chris, about being a specialist versus a generalist. Because I think with what we’re hearing from Jason is that in order to kind of build this trust that he has in the marketplace, right? It’s okay even though they’re in competing industries or quasi-competing industries, et cetera. But Jason seems to come off as a specialist, which means it’s… Chris, correct me if I’m wrong, right? It’s okay. A specialist can always teach a generalist and then it’s always all right for you to approach a generalist because you know you’re secure enough in yourself image to take advice from a specialist versus another generalist. So what do you think of that, Chris, from what you’ve heard, Jason as far as how he’s approaching the market from his vision, as, again, as this pied piper, it’s regards to specialist versus generalist.

Chris Beall (22:22):

Okay. In all cases in B2B, the idea of sales is to allow the buyer who is a generalist to be safe. It’s a risk reduction exercise. So the buyer needs to become convinced that it’s safe to buy from somebody and that means they have to trust the specialist. If the buyer were the specialist, they’d just go ahead and buy for themselves. They wouldn’t need anybody, right? So the salesperson by definition is the representative of the specialist and must be a specialist themselves. Now there’s one exception and the exception is at the very top of the funnel, the seller is selling the meeting and the meeting is a universal product. So the seller is selling the temptation or the curiosity about meeting with the specialist, meeting with the expert, but they don’t have to be the expert themselves. And that’s why the only bifurcation, we get a function in sales, that makes any sense at all is if we decide to have a specialist in setting appointments and a generalist at taking somebody into discovery. That one can work, but you have to be very, very careful with it so that you’re not qualifying because as soon as you qualify, you’re saying you’re a specialist.

Jason (23:37):

So true. You know and it’s funny because I was going to ask before… Thanks for answering that query, Chris, because I was kind of interested how did you mean that, right? Because as a entrepreneur, when you start up a company by definition, you’re a generalist. I wore part of a marketing hat. I wore part of a customer success. I wasn’t just doing sales, right? So many more things that have to be done to really stand up a business. And then as you get to hire new people and bring new A-players into your organization, right? You naturally become more of a specialist when it becomes to what the role you do with inside your organization is. Having said that, when you look at it from the transaction or the discussion with the customer, if you don’t have expertise and you’re trying to actually sell the product, I don’t think you can sell that product.

Jason (24:22):

You have to understand it better than the consumer like Chris just said, and I do find it really interesting, you guys take on this top of funnel, it’s why I’m here. It’s why we had this discussion. It’s why what Corey and Chris were doing actually worked on me when I got that phone call and I said, “Oh wow. Yeah, I got 27 seconds. Let’s go, let’s talk.” And then it ended up being 15 minutes, but it opened the door. And I really believe that that top of funnel activity, what you’re talking about, that doesn’t need a specialist. It needs the person who can actually execute on getting the meeting, right. And taking that next step. You want to talk to the specialist and I love that what you guys do with that top of funnel activity. It’s fantastic.

Chris Beall (25:02):

It’s also very delicate and it fails for the same reason time and time again, which is that instead of just selling the meeting, the rep sells the product or the promise of the product and the meeting is just about the curiosity of what might this be. And then a certainty, and the certainty is they’ll learn. When the prospect comes to the meeting, they’re going to learn and what they’re going to learn is known in advance and therefore that’s what you’re selling. That’s why we recommend that the breakthrough script has got these three pieces. One of them is economic. One of them is emotional. And one of them is strategic because in the breakthrough discussion, which is called discovery, you’re going to learn something economic, something about handling some of the emotions that come about in your business and something about where you’re trying to go, which is strategy, which you can use, whether or not you ever transact with us. And that’s the key, it’s the whether or not you ever transact with us that makes the meeting and the independent product with its own features and its own value. Until that happens, you have a problem, a psychological problem, which is an approach avoidance problem. That is you’re approaching somebody and scaring them and asking them to trust you at the same time. And they avoid you. And what do they do? Well, they enter a state of confusion and a state of confusion they exit. And that’s the false negative problem that plagues all of sales.

Corey Frank (26:29):

Very well said. Very well said. I love these conversations. I really do. Chris and I have had now four or five conversations. I’ve loved it and Corey, just… Everything you guys are doing. This breakthrough script that you guys use at [inaudible 00:26:41], I love it. And for all those, not that this was ever asked for, and the check’s not going to be in the mail, but if anybody’s trying to save time from their sales force, I’m a firm believer in what ConnectAndSell is doing. It is going to… I’m very excited to see what it does for my sales team, but it’s going to alleviate this time that they really spend, the time that they hate, which is actually getting somebody on the phone. And that’s a lot of time. And I’m very excited to see what it’s going to do for our organization.

Corey Frank (27:08):

We need, we need to give Susan that little clip, don’t you think Chris? From Jason and [inaudible 00:27:13] podcast.

Jason (27:16):

[crosstalk 00:27:16].

Corey Frank (27:16):

[inaudible 00:27:16] Dollars will come rolling in. Thanks for that, Jason. This is always the fastest hour in the podcast world for me. And I listen to a lot of podcasts and Chris and I know. We, besides my mother, we also listen to our podcasts a lot. Often times you plug Chris in and you feed him a cookie and you listen to the whole song here and all these nuggets come through. So well with that, Jason, thanks for joining us here in the hot seat on the market dominant guys. And every time we flip on our lights or pay our gas bill, we’ll be thinking of you and all the help on crossing the chasm from all your other brokers and clients out there. So with that, this is Corey Frank and Chris Beall for the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, welcome a new guest this week: Jason Beck, Vice President of Sales at Enerex. Or as Corey dubbed him — the Pied Piper of Retail Energy.

The topic today? What leads to the adoption of a new product or service.

Jason is a big believer in the role of trust in establishing business relationships that will lead to adoption. “Trust is so hard to gain,” he says, “and so easy to lose.” In gaining trust, it’s a two-step program, Jason explains. First, be honest in the claims you make about your product’s value — not as you hope it will one day perform, but as it performs today. And second, find out what your prospects fear most and make sure you and your company are none of those things. If you’re trying to dominate any market, Jason continues, you need to be working toward that tipping point where your initial adopters, whose trust you have successfully gained, will begin vouching for you to your new prospects.

Chris, Corey, and Jason end the podcast with a frank discussion about that dirty word “sales.” They talk about the negative reputation sales acquired and why people fear being sold to. You’ll want to listen in for Chris’ insights about how to turn that frown upside down by shining a brighter light on the necessary role of salespeople in the B2B world. Join us for this episode of The Market Dominance Guys: I’m Not the Salesman Your Mother Warned You About.

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About Our Guest

Jason Beck is Vice President of Sales at Enerex, retail energy’s trusted data platform, providing secure connectivity to the entire value chain — brokers, suppliers, agents, customers, and utilities — to drive efficient transactions. Their flagship service, Sparkplug, is the #1 retail energy sales platform in the world, powering over 10% of US commercial and industrial (C&I) transactions.

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (02:06):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and my very handsome co-host, with the Howard Cosell headphones on this evening, Chris Beall, the Sage of sales, the prophet of profit and the Prince of the P&L. And today, Chris, we have yet another guest. Do we not, the incomparable, Mr. Jason Beck, VP of sales for Enerex. And we’ll have Jason certainly tell a little bit about his background, but most you could say at the very least he’s a VP of sales of Enerex, but he’s also bigger than that. He’s an entrepreneur and he’s an innovator and he’s probably a gadfly of the status quo. How about that? I think we can probably describe, Jason better [inaudible 00:02:52].

Jason Beck (02:51):

What is [crosstalk 00:02:55].

Corey Frank (02:55):

Yeah. It’s not just a bad thing to give and it’s a good thing to give. You see you’re proverbial fly in the ointment of many a mouse trap that you have come across. Mr. Beck. Great to have you on the Market Dominance Guys here, Jason. So Chris, why is Jason sitting in the hot seat with the Market Dominance Guys today? Not only is he one of your newest, best clients I have connected [inaudible 00:03:17] of course, but over the course of the communication and the relationship with Jason, there’s something about Market Dominance, is it not that we said, we got to have Jason here on the show?

Chris Beall (03:27):

Well, Jason represents the world that I lived in forever, which is the world of what I’ll call pure innovation, where you come up with something that’s really new that people said, “Yeah, I don’t know.” And then you go out and you make it so. And so I’ve been doing that stuff as you know for way too long. And what’s interesting about innovation, pure innovation and market dominance is they very rarely go together. So it’s a wonderful thing to innovate and the stronger the innovation, the more dimensions that it has that are different from the status quo, the harder it is and the less likely it is that you’re going to succeed and take those to market.

Chris Beall (04:07):

Well, Jason and his team have already succeeded in taking theirs to market. And he’s done other ones before that. So I figured we could talk about this big, big question, which is you got something new and it really does change everything, maybe not everybody in the world, but for a defined audience, how in the world do you cause them to see the world in a new way and adopt your new thing? So that’s what I’m interested in with Jason. I don’t know what Jason, does that make a lick of sense to you?

Jason Beck (04:37):

Oh, it makes a ton of sense to me. In fact, I love talking about this kind of stuff. I think when you’re ever trying to change the world or change just a portion of the small world that we live in and ours is retail energy, it really starts, a, with having a strategy but b, I don’t think there’s ever a right way to do it, that you strategize, you execute, then you evaluate. And if you did something wrong, that’s the evaluation process so you can restrategize and do it again the next time. It’s an iterative cycle and our story here at Enerex, I think absolutely prove that out in what we’re trying to do in retail energy.

Corey Frank (05:11):

And what’s broken about retail energy, Jason, that… You have this pied piper approach where you see a challenge, you try to fix it. And as Chris said, you get a bunch of fish to try to follow you around to see the world as you do. So maybe we can start with what was broken about retail energy that had you wake up in a cold sweat and say, “I got to fix this.”

Jason Beck (05:31):

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And interesting to hear your guys’ take on this as senior salespeople, right? People who have sold many more things than I’ve ever sold in my life. My background is I was in retail energy from the get-go first job out of college, worked for Constellation, the largest energy supplier in the country. And I was working on the supplier side of the business. Retail energy is a two-sided market. You have your suppliers, right? Those that are producing power or some them are just buying wholesale and selling retail, but you have your suppliers who are taking responsibility for that power. And then you have what has emerged as a very, very robust broker market. 82% of all CNI deals or commercial industrial deals are sold through a retail energy broker. Why? And that by the way that’s changed over the years, over the last 10 years, it’s gone from 40% to 80 plus percent.

Jason Beck (06:20):

And the reason is, is because it’s a complex sale. It’s the same reason why you would have an insurance broker or a financial broker. Energy’s not incredibly easy to understand. All the different components that go into it. So just to give you that background is two-sided market theory. Okay, great. I mean, we have a lot of other two-sided markets in this country. I just named a few of them. And you also look at things like travel, which used to be a two-sided market, right? And now is more dominated by online shopping and online websites. I don’t think technical sales ever gets there, but for our technical sales, what was the problem? And to get to your answer to what’s broken the communication between brokers and suppliers is emails and spreadsheets and PDF documents, and just really old school stuff that, how do you automate and how do you get quicker and faster?

Jason Beck (07:08):

And how do you look better in the eyes of the end use customer, who you’re trying to serve as an industry? Definitely not through old processes, archaic processes that don’t lend itself to new technology and with APIs and cross system communication. And that’s what we set out here to do at Enerex and realize that in retail energy, the only thing and what Chris talks about of this innovation, the only thing that existed is shopping websites. So a broker who would say, “Hey, I’m a broker. Hey, all you other brokers come work underneath me.” Everyone wants their own piece of the pie if you will.

Jason Beck (07:46):

We’re a bunch of entrepreneurs in retail energy, and that’s not the way I think the industry comes together. It comes together by having a trusted third party that is friends with brokers, is friends with suppliers not competing against either one of those. We have a phrase here that says to be the market, you can’t be participating in the market, right? Yeah. So and I really do think that’s kind of part of the secret sauce but for again, when we talk about this introducing a new concept, that was the hardest part. We looked at it and said, “There’s a better way to do what we’re doing. How do we get from where we’re at today to there?” And it’s a seven-year big, hairy, audacious goal of ours to become the source of trust for retail energy.

Corey Frank (08:30):

Chris and I talk about this quite a bit. One of our earlier episodes, Chris, we talked about innovation, did we not? Where we talk about the bottleneck of innovation is go to market, not necessarily invention in its pure form. So it’s been a seven year startup journey, but obviously it looks exponential where you may have this new mouse trap, but to actually get it to market and show this innovation economy, right? The friction is so great. But once you get out to the market in great scale, you said the key term, trusted relationships, trusted conversations, right. It gets easier. So from that perspective, a little bit on the journey of being this pied piper share with us a little bit about kind of what it took to have people see your way. You talked about the challenges, talk about some of the grease skids here that you’ve been able to achieve.

Jason Beck (09:23):

Yeah, that’s interesting too. This journey, we set off three and a half years ago as PowerMatrix. And PowerMatrix, my business partner and our CEO Deepinder Singh, and I really grew PowerMatrix and the market dominance was Nate Richards and Nate Richards ran a company called Energy Frameworks. And our goal in the beginning was to serve the broker side of the community with great software. Now I’ll stop there for a second and say, that was always our dream. Always our vision was we will serve the broker side of the market and then bring together brokers and suppliers. But when we talk to suppliers early on about this idea of API communication, a secure data platform for retail energy, they all said, “Well, when you get enough brokers to adopt that vision, call us,” but that’s who we’re after, right. Just saying that you have a solution or showing a solution and no one’s using it out on other side.

Jason Beck (10:16):

And this is why I think a two-sided market is so interesting because you really have to kind of get one side to buy in before you get the other side to buy-in right. But taking you back on that journey, that was always the vision. But we knew we had to serve the broker side first and Core was the Energy Frameworks product that Nate Richards was running at the time. And we caught his eye by growing really fast. And then basically two years after the start of our journey. And I remember it like it was yesterday because it was actually two years ago, three days ago. And Nate said, “Hey, Jason, let’s get together for lunch.” We’re both down here in Houston and it was very quickly, why are we fighting each other? We both have the same vision and you’re growing fast. And I have all this 10 years of experience.

Jason Beck (11:00):

Why don’t we work together and dominate the market. And overnight, then we did become that. We now serve 100 customers, today we serve 120 on the broker side. And that was when that tipping point. And I think that’s what you look for always when you’re trying to dominate a market is the tipping point for the suppliers, it was always let’s see you serve 100 plus brokers. And if you do that, I don’t think there’s any reason why we wouldn’t talk to you. Now, we sit here today, again, halfway through our journey. We do have supplier clients. We’re proving out this out data can make the process so much easier of a retail energy transaction. And that’s really in 2021, what we’re doing is proving out those efficiencies, but we have now participants on both sides. And where does that start? It starts with providing value to the consumers that you’re providing software to. And that’s what we focused on with the broker side to start off that journey.

Corey Frank (11:55):

Got you.

Chris Beall (11:55):

It’s an interesting problem, right. I was intimately deeply involved in the world of marketplace, B2B marketplaces in ’98 to 2001. I supplied the electronic catalog and technology as the CTO and then the chief strategy corporate development officer of a company called Requisite Technology. That was kind of we dominated the world of electronic cataloging for B2B. And what we found was that the chasm crossing exercise for marketplaces was fundamentally more challenging than it was for two set of marketplaces than it was for regular companies, because you had to make a choice buy side or sell side, so to speak, and then you had to make it stick. And until you made the choice, made it stick and provided the independent value. You as an intermediary were of no interest to anybody who in particular was on the sell side. So they wouldn’t see you as being big enough, liquid enough or whatever to play with you.

Chris Beall (12:56):

It sounds like you you’ve done that move a little bit differently from most. You’ve taken us in a situation where somebody was across the chasm with the 10 years and you guys are approaching it at warp speed and you built a bridge of trust in order to call it a gossamer bridge and skipped across what normally would have cost a huge amount of money. How did you get to the trust point where that’s even possible in that relationship? Normally that’s like preying mantis city. Somebody’s going to eat somebody’s head before somebody else is going to have sex with them and it’s just… Corey is used to this. So how did you do that? I mean, it’s like you described it, but something tells me if you remember it like it was yesterday, then it’s a little bit more than, hey, let’s get together and have a little chat, right?

Jason Beck (13:52):

Trust is so hard to gain and so easy to lose, right? It is one of the hardest things to gain and the easiest things to lose. And when I think about trust and I think about how great relationships get formed, it is first do what you say you’re going to do, right? You got to be accountable. So if I promise that let’s say a broker of ours and it’s like, “Hey, here’s our value proposition. This is what the software is going to do for you.” If I was talking about all these pie in the sky features that the software actually didn’t have today, but it was, “Oh, it’s coming, it’s coming. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” And I wasn’t as a sales person, very articulate about, “Hey, this is our roadmap.” And a roadmap can change, but here’s what I can do for you today, right?

Jason Beck (14:32):

That’s the first part about the whole gaining the trust factor of this and why we’ve moved at warp speed. I also think that merging the two companies is another really… That’s a how do you sign up 50 customers overnight, merged two companies that have 50 customers, right? So that was a big part of why we’re here where we’re at. And we’ve had very supportive customers in that. But I think the other part of trust, and I get back to this whole forming a relationship. Once you know your customer pool or your target market intimately, you have to figure out what are their fears? What do they fear about a relationship with you? And you need to make sure that you’re none of those things. And when I say none of those things, I mean, not even the semblance of it and specifically in our industry, what does it mean, a brokerage book of business. I’m not selling widgets.

Jason Beck (15:17):

I am a consultant of sorts. I’m a value added resource. I’m a knowledgeable expert in retail energy as a broker, right? And I’m serving my end use customers. So what’s your true asset? It’s your brain, right? What the knowledge you have in your head as a retail broker, but it’s also your data. It’s your customer book. It’s the accounts, the meters, right. It’s all those type of things. And so why would any broker trust another broker with that data? So for Enerex, it was incredibly important that we have no broker licenses. We’re not competing against you, Mr. Customer. In fact, we are trying to do everything we can to be your guide on this journey and let you be the hero.

Jason Beck (16:39):

As some of these [inaudible 00:16:40]. They’re marketing new stuff that talks about that, right? Being the guide as the software provider, not being the hero, I don’t need to be the hero. Yes. We might make this marketing incredibly more efficient. And if that makes a lasting impression on retail energy, I hope it does. But my main focus is how do I have happy customers, right, of our software programs. And that’s just doing things that maybe they didn’t even think they knew could exist and bring those things to market across the two sides of our marketplace.

Chris Beall (17:09):

So you had to defang yourself? Right in front of God and everybody.

Jason Beck (17:12):

That’s right. Yeah. Hey, we’re not that wolf, right.

Chris Beall (17:15):

Yeah, lets stay calm.

Jason Beck (17:15):

[crosstalk 00:17:15]. And it’s funny because it’s not like… We have one company that I would consider them as close to a direct competitor as I can consider them. And then there’s a lot of indirect competitors that are trying to approach this, that whole broker of broker route. And there is such a need by the way, for brokers, we serve some of them. Broker of brokers are needed in the marketplace because how do you attract new talents, right. That person that’s an accountant, but “Hey, if I have accounting clients, can I sell them electricity?” It’s not a far stretch. I’m looking at your bills. I see your bills are high on utilities. Let me help you out with that.

Jason Beck (17:54):

I know somebody write the referral partners. So I think there’s a huge need for those folks in the marketplace. I just don’t know that they’re going to bring together this solution, this trusted architecture of broker, supplier communication. And so that’s kind of where we saw the need to be filled. By the way, realize you’re giving up on short term earnings. A lot of short-term earnings by doing it this route. And your play is to continue to just build value with your clients versus trying to take a piece of each transaction today.

Chris Beall (18:30):

Yeah. I remember back when we did requisite, we had to do our own schema for all the world’s product and service information, because we needed to catalog it in a way that allowed a buyer to have their catalog from multiple suppliers, but be easy to use and consistent to use for every one of their users.

Jason Beck (18:48):

You have a product that [crosstalk 00:18:49] SIC codes out there, right? Probably different [crosstalk 00:18:51] products.

Chris Beall (18:50):

Oh, yeah.

Jason Beck (18:51):

What a challenge.

Chris Beall (18:53):

Yeah. And we came right down to the product category in a way that was understandable and searchable and all of its attributes that were relevant for purchase. And we codified all of that. So it wasn’t just SIC codes. It was right down to, this is a one half horsepower compressor motor with a capacitor start. It was that kind of stuff. And when we took that step, we thought we were entering into a world where we would be more trusted as a result. But then the community decided that because we controlled the schema, we were less trusted. And we made the mistake of naming the schema after ourselves, even though we just called it, Russ, everybody knew it was the requisite unified schema. We should’ve called it UNSPSC2, after the United Nations Services and Products [inaudible 00:19:41] and taking advantage of the fact that their trademarks were weak. Do you have something like that where you’re doing the right thing and you know it’s the right thing. But the impression that some people have might be [inaudible 00:19:57] they say it’s the right thing, but it feels a little bit like a power grab to me.

Jason Beck (20:00):

But then I hope my client who I talked about this yesterday gets to see this podcast and I’m not going to do a direct channel, but I speaking to somebody the other day, great client of ours and he said to me, “Jason, I’m telling you this because we’re friends. How many other clients do you think you have that aren’t telling you this?” And I said, “Great point. That’s a great point.” Which is that fear of wait a minute, if you become the marketplace, do you just get rid of me, right? Do you even need brokers? If you guys have all the data, you have all the transfers, can you just go to the end-use customer? And by the way, the answer is, yeah, absolutely. We could. Now again, where I keep coming back to is the fact that you need that expertise in certain, specifically in commodities, things that you can’t touch and feel, and the consumer product goods much easier, right?

Jason Beck (20:48):

I always say it’s like a travel industry. He brought up the concept of the floral industry, which until this week, I didn’t even think about that, right. But you had the same thing that happened in travel to all the florist in the country, right? You had Teleflora and FTD and they basically just started taking a piece of every single transaction. Oh, well, I can give you this and I can give you this. And then all of a sudden, well, I’m just going to go direct to the consumer. What I continue to tell people in retail energy and Cory, I love that. I’m going to steal that [inaudible 00:21:16]. Jason Beck is the pied piper of retail energy, trying to move it forward. And I have so many folks that have been backing me up on this journey because I know we can be stronger together, but it’s this aspect of retail energy is incredibly detailed and it’s different in every single state.

Jason Beck (21:34):

And it’s also different in every single utility. Pennsylvania has six utilities in and out by itself, just that one state and it’s different. The components of the energy transaction is different. And so if you’re comparing, what your supply contract is going to be on the electricity side or you have to do nominations on the gas side, either you’re an expert or you need an expert. And that’s kind of where I say to myself, yeah, I understand the fear and I can’t do any… I’m not going to like sit on a piece of paper and say, we will never replace… No company is going to literally handcuffed themselves for what the future could hold. But I continue to keep saying, and I really truly believe this, that in certain complex sales, you need an expert. And if you don’t have an expert, it’s very hard to navigate those sharky waters. Usually those are the people that gets their lunch eaten.

Chris Beall (22:27):

You’re an expert, but you need an expert you can trust. So how do you get to the point of trusting that expert. Because expertise, confers power, right? So I’m an expert, I’m very powerful. And I’m very powerful if I’m on your side, that’s great. If I’m on my side, you don’t know if my side is your side. So it’s uncertain and if I’m not on your side at all, I’m against you, then everything’s very clear and we fight. So the position that is most dangerous is the one in the middle where it’s like, “Well, are you on my side or not?” So how do you get them to believe, to know, not believe incorrectly but to know for certain. You said something really fascinating earlier, you have to remove everything that they would be concerned about, including the appearance, the image, the thought, the nascent sense, incipients. I love that word of becoming that thing that they would be concerned about, right. And how do you do that? What’s step zero. What is steps there? Yeah, go look up incipients, it’s a heck of a word.

Jason Beck (23:27):

Yeah, I will. I got my vocabulary [inaudible 00:23:30] really good. No, that’s awesome. I think that when you are trying to… Is that everything you’re 100% right. And I don’t think you’re ever going to dispel people’s beliefs, right? They know if it’s still a possibility, it’s still a possibility but the way you really do that is you focus on the value that you’re providing. And for the service that I am providing you, right? The cost I’m providing you at, and it’s today, right? Don’t worry about the future. The future is going to hold what it is, but today is that value 5X, 10X, 20X of what I’m costing you. And if you look even at the risk of the future, right, that you’re talking about again, although we have nothing that could let us sell to end use customers today.

Jason Beck (24:19):

Again, no broker licenses, no supplier licenses. We just focus on software and technology. Is that a viable risk for you, Mr. Customer? And then they have to make that decision. And that’s the tough part. I would say, you got to focus on the value you’re providing for that customer. And if today it’s just exponentially more than what the cost is or the future risks are. It’s an easy decision to make for most customers. I also live in an industry that has not adopted technology incredibly quick and fast. So even still, even though when we say market dominance, right, Chris and I talked about this, we have 120 retail energy brokers on our software here on Enerex, our nearest competitor has between 25 and 30.

Corey Frank (25:02):

Yet already condition the market in your favor and against all these other competitors, current and future. And Chris and I talk about this a lot. I interview him and Chris, right. You know that the most reliable way to establish trust is to get to every relevant person in that market. And you as this pied piper, right, conditioning the market with forwarding, with trust, not with an email, not with a voicemail, not with a mere website, right. We see your website there, but in Jason and what you offer. I think that transference of the bits of what Jason has to say is truly why you’re… He’s following the playbook, Chris, what you say as far as how to get to a market dominance in this… The riches are in the niches. Well, you definitely are on the way there, Jason.

Jason Beck (25:58):

Well, thanks so much. I really do appreciate that. And when I was talking to Chris about this and I saw both, young blood in what you guys are doing in training up fresh people, right. Fresh out of college and giving them a really strong career in sales. I was one of those… I still don’t even like the word sales. I don’t know how many sales… That’s another quick topic I’d love to transition to is this world of sales, right? Tell me how you guys feel about that in terms of I’m trying… Nobody wants to be sold something, right? So when we talk about this, I’ve developed trust because I’ve been in the industry for 15 years and I can prove trust out to you. And then those first few clients, you get them to be referrals for you.

Jason Beck (26:40):

And then you have the eighth person called the first in the 40th person called the 10th person. Right? And that’s how you continue to grow is as you have really good relationships, but that’s just happened naturally for me, calling, discussing, having those conversations, grabbing that trust, moving them to a transaction. And I get to represent a fantastic team of 70 behind me in this marketplace. But I will candidly still say that I don’t like being called a salesperson. It has too many negative connotations. Now by the way, I actually love being called a salesperson when people are like, “Man, you’re a great sales person.” Thanks. What should work? Was that serious or was it? Right. So I’d love to hear kind of your just thoughts on that, of this dirty word of sales. What’s Cory and Chris’s take on that dirty word of sales?

Corey Frank (27:29):

Well, if you’d listen to any of the prior 63 64 episodes we’ve done. Chris certainly has sold his share products from fuller brush, et cetera. So I’ll let him, I’ll defer to age before beauty here, because he’s got such an exceptional background that sales as a term may have a denotation as such, but the connotation of sales over the years, especially how Chris weaves it in and out of how the fuller brush experience has led to him being the innovator that he is at ConnectAndSell. I think really stems from whether you sell him fuller brush or spider repellent in the garage to talking with CEOs of… And private equity firms has to do with the trust factor that you’re talking about here so adroitly here, Jason. So Chris, what would you say that Jason’s concept of sales as a profession and the denotation that exists out there in the world today?

Chris Beall (28:27):

Well, I don’t like sales either. So to me, sales has a bag of tricks, tips and tricks. I gave a talk once at American Association of Inside Sales Professionals event in San Francisco. And it was an unusual talk, my normal talk is about market dominance or about using the voice or about stuff like that. But I decided to tell these inside sales folks that they were the most important people in the economy and here’s why. And so I broke it down for them, how the entire economy is built around B2B. And because businesses have to make stuff before consumers can buy them and all government can do is tax. So if you follow the money, you start with the innovations in business that turn into ultimately things that consumers can do. And so here B2B has been transformed from I’ll call it, run around knocking on doors to accessing larger markets, which means more of them as remote.

Chris Beall (29:25):

If your solution doesn’t have a geographical boundary around it naturally then inside sales, which is really just remote sales done professionally becomes the thing. And therefore, you’re now at the beating heart of the entire economy. And perhaps you at the bottleneck of the whole economy, which means, hey, inside salespeople, your skills and your professionalism are the limiting factor in the growth of our economy for everybody who’s alive.

Corey Frank (29:53):

Wow.

Chris Beall (29:54):

So take it seriously. So take it seriously, right. So I gave that talk, right? And I came off the stage and I won’t say which of the people who was at the AISB because they are dear friends of mine took me aside and said, “Don’t ever give a talk like that again, they want tips and tricks.” They want tips and tricks. And I actually shuttered a little bit because the last thing in the world I would ever want to do is to use a tip or a trick. Now I know some tricks, here’s a trick. If you’re ever doing any public speaking, use the word blood and you’ll get the audience’s entire attention, 100% of the audience for about eight seconds. They will never forget the next things you say, that is a trick. But if you use that trick against your audience, instead of for your audience, you’re a charlatan, you’re a thief, so-

Corey Frank (30:45):

You [inaudible 00:30:45] every single bit of trust that you thought you were getting, right?

Chris Beall (30:47):

Exactly. So the trick of sales without sales being dirty is to literally think of it as a service business, where you have the luxury of becoming an expert in an area where the buyer doesn’t have the luxury of becoming an expert and therefore you have the opportunity to advise them. And that advice given rationally with any kind of reasonable timeframe around their need will lead to a transaction. And then you just have to be willing to transact. The hard part about sales emotionally is that there’s this thing called closing and closers are people like me who are willing and I’m telling you this straight up in business, I am willing to sacrifice the relationship as it’s developing for the transaction that leads to you getting value or deciding you don’t want to move forward.

Chris Beall (31:42):

I’m willing to do that because time is too precious. And that’s a hard thing to do with somebody you like. And I think that makes sales very, very difficult because we have to do two emotionally impossible things. One is we have to ambush strangers with an expectation of helping them. And the other is we have to sacrifice relationships with the expectation of getting clarity as to whether it makes sense to transact or not. We don’t like either one of those, they’re both bad things in our personal life. In our personal life, we approached people that we wanted to have relationships with on an ambush for your own good basis. And then we sacrifice those relationships based on the fact that time is running out and we got to transact or not, then-

Jason Beck (32:24):

What do I [inaudible 00:32:26] right? Yeah.

Chris Beall (32:26):

Exactly. So it’s very… Sales is so delicate because we have to only ask first. Well, not only, but we have to ask first, what do they get out of it? And as an expert, can we be an honest broker and be their side? Because it’s actually imbalanced. I know more than you do when I’m selling to you. Therefore, I have to take your side in the transaction otherwise, it’s imbalanced. That’s just simple, that’s just a fact, right? And an imbalance transaction [crosstalk 00:32:52].

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Join us on the Market Dominance Guys as Chris and Corey continue their conversation about sales enablement with CEO Roderick Jefferson of Roderick Jefferson & Associates. This week, the guys address the challenge of hiring the right people for this function — people who have a certain level of sales credibility within the company. Roderick explains that in order to be a respected voice and get a vote when it comes to providing sales enablement tools and processes to support the sales team, you need to bring people on board who have extensive sales experience.

Now, don’t get him wrong: Roderick is not advocating a perpetual continuation of “Do sales the way we’ve always done sales.” Instead, he suggests hiring those who understand that what really works in sales is helping clients maintain their customer roster, and aiding clients with increasing THEIR profits, reducing THEIR costs, and mitigating THEIR risks. In other words, your need to hire a sales enablement team dedicated to having conversations with prospects about business outcome. Roderick states that to do this, sales people have to stop giving presentations and start having conversations — true discovery conversations.

—-more—-

Chris, Corey, and Roderick then discuss how diagnosing a prospect’s pain is only a first step in what we should teach sales reps. “Isn’t it a miracle,” Chris says, “that most salespeople act as though whatever a prospect’s pain is, their product will fix it?” The guys wind up this Market  Dominance Guys’ session in agreement that sales reps should be taught how to get out of the way when their solution is NOT a solution. You won’t believe your ears at some of the eye-opening, jaw-dropping ideas in this week’s podcast!

About Our Guest

Roderick Jefferson is CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, a global sales enablement consultancy that uses cutting-edge technology to enable its clients to decrease time-to-revenue and increase productivity. 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (02:06):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and my very handsome co-host, with the Howard Cosell headphones on this evening, Chris Beall, the Sage of sales, the prophet of profit and the Prince of the P&L. And today, Chris, we have yet another guest. Do we not, the incomparable, Mr. Jason Beck, VP of sales for Enerex. And we’ll have Jason certainly tell a little bit about his background, but most you could say at the very least he’s a VP of sales of Enerex, but he’s also bigger than that. He’s an entrepreneur and he’s an innovator and he’s probably a gadfly of the status quo. How about that? I think we can probably describe, Jason better [inaudible 00:02:52].

Jason Beck (02:51):

What is [crosstalk 00:02:55].

Corey Frank (02:55):

Yeah. It’s not just a bad thing to give and it’s a good thing to give. You see you’re proverbial fly in the ointment of many a mouse trap that you have come across. Mr. Beck. Great to have you on the Market Dominance Guys here, Jason. So Chris, why is Jason sitting in the hot seat with the Market Dominance Guys today? Not only is he one of your newest, best clients I have connected [inaudible 00:03:17] of course, but over the course of the communication and the relationship with Jason, there’s something about Market Dominance, is it not that we said, we got to have Jason here on the show?

Chris Beall (03:27):

Well, Jason represents the world that I lived in forever, which is the world of what I’ll call pure innovation, where you come up with something that’s really new that people said, “Yeah, I don’t know.” And then you go out and you make it so. And so I’ve been doing that stuff as you know for way too long. And what’s interesting about innovation, pure innovation and market dominance is they very rarely go together. So it’s a wonderful thing to innovate and the stronger the innovation, the more dimensions that it has that are different from the status quo, the harder it is and the less likely it is that you’re going to succeed and take those to market.

Chris Beall (04:07):

Well, Jason and his team have already succeeded in taking theirs to market. And he’s done other ones before that. So I figured we could talk about this big, big question, which is you got something new and it really does change everything, maybe not everybody in the world, but for a defined audience, how in the world do you cause them to see the world in a new way and adopt your new thing? So that’s what I’m interested in with Jason. I don’t know what Jason, does that make a lick of sense to you?

Jason Beck (04:37):

Oh, it makes a ton of sense to me. In fact, I love talking about this kind of stuff. I think when you’re ever trying to change the world or change just a portion of the small world that we live in and ours is retail energy, it really starts, a, with having a strategy but b, I don’t think there’s ever a right way to do it, that you strategize, you execute, then you evaluate. And if you did something wrong, that’s the evaluation process so you can restrategize and do it again the next time. It’s an iterative cycle and our story here at Enerex, I think absolutely prove that out in what we’re trying to do in retail energy.

Corey Frank (05:11):

And what’s broken about retail energy, Jason, that… You have this pied piper approach where you see a challenge, you try to fix it. And as Chris said, you get a bunch of fish to try to follow you around to see the world as you do. So maybe we can start with what was broken about retail energy that had you wake up in a cold sweat and say, “I got to fix this.”

Jason Beck (05:31):

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. And interesting to hear your guys’ take on this as senior salespeople, right? People who have sold many more things than I’ve ever sold in my life. My background is I was in retail energy from the get-go first job out of college, worked for Constellation, the largest energy supplier in the country. And I was working on the supplier side of the business. Retail energy is a two-sided market. You have your suppliers, right? Those that are producing power or some them are just buying wholesale and selling retail, but you have your suppliers who are taking responsibility for that power. And then you have what has emerged as a very, very robust broker market. 82% of all CNI deals or commercial industrial deals are sold through a retail energy broker. Why? And that by the way that’s changed over the years, over the last 10 years, it’s gone from 40% to 80 plus percent.

Jason Beck (06:20):

And the reason is, is because it’s a complex sale. It’s the same reason why you would have an insurance broker or a financial broker. Energy’s not incredibly easy to understand. All the different components that go into it. So just to give you that background is two-sided market theory. Okay, great. I mean, we have a lot of other two-sided markets in this country. I just named a few of them. And you also look at things like travel, which used to be a two-sided market, right? And now is more dominated by online shopping and online websites. I don’t think technical sales ever gets there, but for our technical sales, what was the problem? And to get to your answer to what’s broken the communication between brokers and suppliers is emails and spreadsheets and PDF documents, and just really old school stuff that, how do you automate and how do you get quicker and faster?

Jason Beck (07:08):

And how do you look better in the eyes of the end use customer, who you’re trying to serve as an industry? Definitely not through old processes, archaic processes that don’t lend itself to new technology and with APIs and cross system communication. And that’s what we set out here to do at Enerex and realize that in retail energy, the only thing and what Chris talks about of this innovation, the only thing that existed is shopping websites. So a broker who would say, “Hey, I’m a broker. Hey, all you other brokers come work underneath me.” Everyone wants their own piece of the pie if you will.

Jason Beck (07:46):

We’re a bunch of entrepreneurs in retail energy, and that’s not the way I think the industry comes together. It comes together by having a trusted third party that is friends with brokers, is friends with suppliers not competing against either one of those. We have a phrase here that says to be the market, you can’t be participating in the market, right? Yeah. So and I really do think that’s kind of part of the secret sauce but for again, when we talk about this introducing a new concept, that was the hardest part. We looked at it and said, “There’s a better way to do what we’re doing. How do we get from where we’re at today to there?” And it’s a seven-year big, hairy, audacious goal of ours to become the source of trust for retail energy.

Corey Frank (08:30):

Chris and I talk about this quite a bit. One of our earlier episodes, Chris, we talked about innovation, did we not? Where we talk about the bottleneck of innovation is go to market, not necessarily invention in its pure form. So it’s been a seven year startup journey, but obviously it looks exponential where you may have this new mouse trap, but to actually get it to market and show this innovation economy, right? The friction is so great. But once you get out to the market in great scale, you said the key term, trusted relationships, trusted conversations, right. It gets easier. So from that perspective, a little bit on the journey of being this pied piper share with us a little bit about kind of what it took to have people see your way. You talked about the challenges, talk about some of the grease skids here that you’ve been able to achieve.

Jason Beck (09:23):

Yeah, that’s interesting too. This journey, we set off three and a half years ago as PowerMatrix. And PowerMatrix, my business partner and our CEO Deepinder Singh, and I really grew PowerMatrix and the market dominance was Nate Richards and Nate Richards ran a company called Energy Frameworks. And our goal in the beginning was to serve the broker side of the community with great software. Now I’ll stop there for a second and say, that was always our dream. Always our vision was we will serve the broker side of the market and then bring together brokers and suppliers. But when we talk to suppliers early on about this idea of API communication, a secure data platform for retail energy, they all said, “Well, when you get enough brokers to adopt that vision, call us,” but that’s who we’re after, right. Just saying that you have a solution or showing a solution and no one’s using it out on other side.

Jason Beck (10:16):

And this is why I think a two-sided market is so interesting because you really have to kind of get one side to buy in before you get the other side to buy-in right. But taking you back on that journey, that was always the vision. But we knew we had to serve the broker side first and Core was the Energy Frameworks product that Nate Richards was running at the time. And we caught his eye by growing really fast. And then basically two years after the start of our journey. And I remember it like it was yesterday because it was actually two years ago, three days ago. And Nate said, “Hey, Jason, let’s get together for lunch.” We’re both down here in Houston and it was very quickly, why are we fighting each other? We both have the same vision and you’re growing fast. And I have all this 10 years of experience.

Jason Beck (11:00):

Why don’t we work together and dominate the market. And overnight, then we did become that. We now serve 100 customers, today we serve 120 on the broker side. And that was when that tipping point. And I think that’s what you look for always when you’re trying to dominate a market is the tipping point for the suppliers, it was always let’s see you serve 100 plus brokers. And if you do that, I don’t think there’s any reason why we wouldn’t talk to you. Now, we sit here today, again, halfway through our journey. We do have supplier clients. We’re proving out this out data can make the process so much easier of a retail energy transaction. And that’s really in 2021, what we’re doing is proving out those efficiencies, but we have now participants on both sides. And where does that start? It starts with providing value to the consumers that you’re providing software to. And that’s what we focused on with the broker side to start off that journey.

Corey Frank (11:55):

Got you.

Chris Beall (11:55):

It’s an interesting problem, right. I was intimately deeply involved in the world of marketplace, B2B marketplaces in ’98 to 2001. I supplied the electronic catalog and technology as the CTO and then the chief strategy corporate development officer of a company called Requisite Technology. That was kind of we dominated the world of electronic cataloging for B2B. And what we found was that the chasm crossing exercise for marketplaces was fundamentally more challenging than it was for two set of marketplaces than it was for regular companies, because you had to make a choice buy side or sell side, so to speak, and then you had to make it stick. And until you made the choice, made it stick and provided the independent value. You as an intermediary were of no interest to anybody who in particular was on the sell side. So they wouldn’t see you as being big enough, liquid enough or whatever to play with you.

Chris Beall (12:56):

It sounds like you you’ve done that move a little bit differently from most. You’ve taken us in a situation where somebody was across the chasm with the 10 years and you guys are approaching it at warp speed and you built a bridge of trust in order to call it a gossamer bridge and skipped across what normally would have cost a huge amount of money. How did you get to the trust point where that’s even possible in that relationship? Normally that’s like preying mantis city. Somebody’s going to eat somebody’s head before somebody else is going to have sex with them and it’s just… Corey is used to this. So how did you do that? I mean, it’s like you described it, but something tells me if you remember it like it was yesterday, then it’s a little bit more than, hey, let’s get together and have a little chat, right?

Jason Beck (13:52):

Trust is so hard to gain and so easy to lose, right? It is one of the hardest things to gain and the easiest things to lose. And when I think about trust and I think about how great relationships get formed, it is first do what you say you’re going to do, right? You got to be accountable. So if I promise that let’s say a broker of ours and it’s like, “Hey, here’s our value proposition. This is what the software is going to do for you.” If I was talking about all these pie in the sky features that the software actually didn’t have today, but it was, “Oh, it’s coming, it’s coming. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” And I wasn’t as a sales person, very articulate about, “Hey, this is our roadmap.” And a roadmap can change, but here’s what I can do for you today, right?

Jason Beck (14:32):

That’s the first part about the whole gaining the trust factor of this and why we’ve moved at warp speed. I also think that merging the two companies is another really… That’s a how do you sign up 50 customers overnight, merged two companies that have 50 customers, right? So that was a big part of why we’re here where we’re at. And we’ve had very supportive customers in that. But I think the other part of trust, and I get back to this whole forming a relationship. Once you know your customer pool or your target market intimately, you have to figure out what are their fears? What do they fear about a relationship with you? And you need to make sure that you’re none of those things. And when I say none of those things, I mean, not even the semblance of it and specifically in our industry, what does it mean, a brokerage book of business. I’m not selling widgets.

Jason Beck (15:17):

I am a consultant of sorts. I’m a value added resource. I’m a knowledgeable expert in retail energy as a broker, right? And I’m serving my end use customers. So what’s your true asset? It’s your brain, right? What the knowledge you have in your head as a retail broker, but it’s also your data. It’s your customer book. It’s the accounts, the meters, right. It’s all those type of things. And so why would any broker trust another broker with that data? So for Enerex, it was incredibly important that we have no broker licenses. We’re not competing against you, Mr. Customer. In fact, we are trying to do everything we can to be your guide on this journey and let you be the hero.

Jason Beck (16:39):

As some of these [inaudible 00:16:40]. They’re marketing new stuff that talks about that, right? Being the guide as the software provider, not being the hero, I don’t need to be the hero. Yes. We might make this marketing incredibly more efficient. And if that makes a lasting impression on retail energy, I hope it does. But my main focus is how do I have happy customers, right, of our software programs. And that’s just doing things that maybe they didn’t even think they knew could exist and bring those things to market across the two sides of our marketplace.

Chris Beall (17:09):

So you had to defang yourself? Right in front of God and everybody.

Jason Beck (17:12):

That’s right. Yeah. Hey, we’re not that wolf, right.

Chris Beall (17:15):

Yeah, lets stay calm.

Jason Beck (17:15):

[crosstalk 00:17:15]. And it’s funny because it’s not like… We have one company that I would consider them as close to a direct competitor as I can consider them. And then there’s a lot of indirect competitors that are trying to approach this, that whole broker of broker route. And there is such a need by the way, for brokers, we serve some of them. Broker of brokers are needed in the marketplace because how do you attract new talents, right. That person that’s an accountant, but “Hey, if I have accounting clients, can I sell them electricity?” It’s not a far stretch. I’m looking at your bills. I see your bills are high on utilities. Let me help you out with that.

Jason Beck (17:54):

I know somebody write the referral partners. So I think there’s a huge need for those folks in the marketplace. I just don’t know that they’re going to bring together this solution, this trusted architecture of broker, supplier communication. And so that’s kind of where we saw the need to be filled. By the way, realize you’re giving up on short term earnings. A lot of short-term earnings by doing it this route. And your play is to continue to just build value with your clients versus trying to take a piece of each transaction today.

Chris Beall (18:30):

Yeah. I remember back when we did requisite, we had to do our own schema for all the world’s product and service information, because we needed to catalog it in a way that allowed a buyer to have their catalog from multiple suppliers, but be easy to use and consistent to use for every one of their users.

Jason Beck (18:48):

You have a product that [crosstalk 00:18:49] SIC codes out there, right? Probably different [crosstalk 00:18:51] products.

Chris Beall (18:50):

Oh, yeah.

Jason Beck (18:51):

What a challenge.

Chris Beall (18:53):

Yeah. And we came right down to the product category in a way that was understandable and searchable and all of its attributes that were relevant for purchase. And we codified all of that. So it wasn’t just SIC codes. It was right down to, this is a one half horsepower compressor motor with a capacitor start. It was that kind of stuff. And when we took that step, we thought we were entering into a world where we would be more trusted as a result. But then the community decided that because we controlled the schema, we were less trusted. And we made the mistake of naming the schema after ourselves, even though we just called it, Russ, everybody knew it was the requisite unified schema. We should’ve called it UNSPSC2, after the United Nations Services and Products [inaudible 00:19:41] and taking advantage of the fact that their trademarks were weak. Do you have something like that where you’re doing the right thing and you know it’s the right thing. But the impression that some people have might be [inaudible 00:19:57] they say it’s the right thing, but it feels a little bit like a power grab to me.

Jason Beck (20:00):

But then I hope my client who I talked about this yesterday gets to see this podcast and I’m not going to do a direct channel, but I speaking to somebody the other day, great client of ours and he said to me, “Jason, I’m telling you this because we’re friends. How many other clients do you think you have that aren’t telling you this?” And I said, “Great point. That’s a great point.” Which is that fear of wait a minute, if you become the marketplace, do you just get rid of me, right? Do you even need brokers? If you guys have all the data, you have all the transfers, can you just go to the end-use customer? And by the way, the answer is, yeah, absolutely. We could. Now again, where I keep coming back to is the fact that you need that expertise in certain, specifically in commodities, things that you can’t touch and feel, and the consumer product goods much easier, right?

Jason Beck (20:48):

I always say it’s like a travel industry. He brought up the concept of the floral industry, which until this week, I didn’t even think about that, right. But you had the same thing that happened in travel to all the florist in the country, right? You had Teleflora and FTD and they basically just started taking a piece of every single transaction. Oh, well, I can give you this and I can give you this. And then all of a sudden, well, I’m just going to go direct to the consumer. What I continue to tell people in retail energy and Cory, I love that. I’m going to steal that [inaudible 00:21:16]. Jason Beck is the pied piper of retail energy, trying to move it forward. And I have so many folks that have been backing me up on this journey because I know we can be stronger together, but it’s this aspect of retail energy is incredibly detailed and it’s different in every single state.

Jason Beck (21:34):

And it’s also different in every single utility. Pennsylvania has six utilities in and out by itself, just that one state and it’s different. The components of the energy transaction is different. And so if you’re comparing, what your supply contract is going to be on the electricity side or you have to do nominations on the gas side, either you’re an expert or you need an expert. And that’s kind of where I say to myself, yeah, I understand the fear and I can’t do any… I’m not going to like sit on a piece of paper and say, we will never replace… No company is going to literally handcuffed themselves for what the future could hold. But I continue to keep saying, and I really truly believe this, that in certain complex sales, you need an expert. And if you don’t have an expert, it’s very hard to navigate those sharky waters. Usually those are the people that gets their lunch eaten.

Chris Beall (22:27):

You’re an expert, but you need an expert you can trust. So how do you get to the point of trusting that expert. Because expertise, confers power, right? So I’m an expert, I’m very powerful. And I’m very powerful if I’m on your side, that’s great. If I’m on my side, you don’t know if my side is your side. So it’s uncertain and if I’m not on your side at all, I’m against you, then everything’s very clear and we fight. So the position that is most dangerous is the one in the middle where it’s like, “Well, are you on my side or not?” So how do you get them to believe, to know, not believe incorrectly but to know for certain. You said something really fascinating earlier, you have to remove everything that they would be concerned about, including the appearance, the image, the thought, the nascent sense, incipients. I love that word of becoming that thing that they would be concerned about, right. And how do you do that? What’s step zero. What is steps there? Yeah, go look up incipients, it’s a heck of a word.

Jason Beck (23:27):

Yeah, I will. I got my vocabulary [inaudible 00:23:30] really good. No, that’s awesome. I think that when you are trying to… Is that everything you’re 100% right. And I don’t think you’re ever going to dispel people’s beliefs, right? They know if it’s still a possibility, it’s still a possibility but the way you really do that is you focus on the value that you’re providing. And for the service that I am providing you, right? The cost I’m providing you at, and it’s today, right? Don’t worry about the future. The future is going to hold what it is, but today is that value 5X, 10X, 20X of what I’m costing you. And if you look even at the risk of the future, right, that you’re talking about again, although we have nothing that could let us sell to end use customers today.

Jason Beck (24:19):

Again, no broker licenses, no supplier licenses. We just focus on software and technology. Is that a viable risk for you, Mr. Customer? And then they have to make that decision. And that’s the tough part. I would say, you got to focus on the value you’re providing for that customer. And if today it’s just exponentially more than what the cost is or the future risks are. It’s an easy decision to make for most customers. I also live in an industry that has not adopted technology incredibly quick and fast. So even still, even though when we say market dominance, right, Chris and I talked about this, we have 120 retail energy brokers on our software here on Enerex, our nearest competitor has between 25 and 30.

Corey Frank (25:02):

Yet already condition the market in your favor and against all these other competitors, current and future. And Chris and I talk about this a lot. I interview him and Chris, right. You know that the most reliable way to establish trust is to get to every relevant person in that market. And you as this pied piper, right, conditioning the market with forwarding, with trust, not with an email, not with a voicemail, not with a mere website, right. We see your website there, but in Jason and what you offer. I think that transference of the bits of what Jason has to say is truly why you’re… He’s following the playbook, Chris, what you say as far as how to get to a market dominance in this… The riches are in the niches. Well, you definitely are on the way there, Jason.

Jason Beck (25:58):

Well, thanks so much. I really do appreciate that. And when I was talking to Chris about this and I saw both, young blood in what you guys are doing in training up fresh people, right. Fresh out of college and giving them a really strong career in sales. I was one of those… I still don’t even like the word sales. I don’t know how many sales… That’s another quick topic I’d love to transition to is this world of sales, right? Tell me how you guys feel about that in terms of I’m trying… Nobody wants to be sold something, right? So when we talk about this, I’ve developed trust because I’ve been in the industry for 15 years and I can prove trust out to you. And then those first few clients, you get them to be referrals for you.

Jason Beck (26:40):

And then you have the eighth person called the first in the 40th person called the 10th person. Right? And that’s how you continue to grow is as you have really good relationships, but that’s just happened naturally for me, calling, discussing, having those conversations, grabbing that trust, moving them to a transaction. And I get to represent a fantastic team of 70 behind me in this marketplace. But I will candidly still say that I don’t like being called a salesperson. It has too many negative connotations. Now by the way, I actually love being called a salesperson when people are like, “Man, you’re a great sales person.” Thanks. What should work? Was that serious or was it? Right. So I’d love to hear kind of your just thoughts on that, of this dirty word of sales. What’s Cory and Chris’s take on that dirty word of sales?

Corey Frank (27:29):

Well, if you’d listen to any of the prior 63 64 episodes we’ve done. Chris certainly has sold his share products from fuller brush, et cetera. So I’ll let him, I’ll defer to age before beauty here, because he’s got such an exceptional background that sales as a term may have a denotation as such, but the connotation of sales over the years, especially how Chris weaves it in and out of how the fuller brush experience has led to him being the innovator that he is at ConnectAndSell. I think really stems from whether you sell him fuller brush or spider repellent in the garage to talking with CEOs of… And private equity firms has to do with the trust factor that you’re talking about here so adroitly here, Jason. So Chris, what would you say that Jason’s concept of sales as a profession and the denotation that exists out there in the world today?

Chris Beall (28:27):

Well, I don’t like sales either. So to me, sales has a bag of tricks, tips and tricks. I gave a talk once at American Association of Inside Sales Professionals event in San Francisco. And it was an unusual talk, my normal talk is about market dominance or about using the voice or about stuff like that. But I decided to tell these inside sales folks that they were the most important people in the economy and here’s why. And so I broke it down for them, how the entire economy is built around B2B. And because businesses have to make stuff before consumers can buy them and all government can do is tax. So if you follow the money, you start with the innovations in business that turn into ultimately things that consumers can do. And so here B2B has been transformed from I’ll call it, run around knocking on doors to accessing larger markets, which means more of them as remote.

Chris Beall (29:25):

If your solution doesn’t have a geographical boundary around it naturally then inside sales, which is really just remote sales done professionally becomes the thing. And therefore, you’re now at the beating heart of the entire economy. And perhaps you at the bottleneck of the whole economy, which means, hey, inside salespeople, your skills and your professionalism are the limiting factor in the growth of our economy for everybody who’s alive.

Corey Frank (29:53):

Wow.

Chris Beall (29:54):

So take it seriously. So take it seriously, right. So I gave that talk, right? And I came off the stage and I won’t say which of the people who was at the AISB because they are dear friends of mine took me aside and said, “Don’t ever give a talk like that again, they want tips and tricks.” They want tips and tricks. And I actually shuttered a little bit because the last thing in the world I would ever want to do is to use a tip or a trick. Now I know some tricks, here’s a trick. If you’re ever doing any public speaking, use the word blood and you’ll get the audience’s entire attention, 100% of the audience for about eight seconds. They will never forget the next things you say, that is a trick. But if you use that trick against your audience, instead of for your audience, you’re a charlatan, you’re a thief, so-

Corey Frank (30:45):

You [inaudible 00:30:45] every single bit of trust that you thought you were getting, right?

Chris Beall (30:47):

Exactly. So the trick of sales without sales being dirty is to literally think of it as a service business, where you have the luxury of becoming an expert in an area where the buyer doesn’t have the luxury of becoming an expert and therefore you have the opportunity to advise them. And that advice given rationally with any kind of reasonable timeframe around their need will lead to a transaction. And then you just have to be willing to transact. The hard part about sales emotionally is that there’s this thing called closing and closers are people like me who are willing and I’m telling you this straight up in business, I am willing to sacrifice the relationship as it’s developing for the transaction that leads to you getting value or deciding you don’t want to move forward.

Chris Beall (31:42):

I’m willing to do that because time is too precious. And that’s a hard thing to do with somebody you like. And I think that makes sales very, very difficult because we have to do two emotionally impossible things. One is we have to ambush strangers with an expectation of helping them. And the other is we have to sacrifice relationships with the expectation of getting clarity as to whether it makes sense to transact or not. We don’t like either one of those, they’re both bad things in our personal life. In our personal life, we approached people that we wanted to have relationships with on an ambush for your own good basis. And then we sacrifice those relationships based on the fact that time is running out and we got to transact or not, then-

Jason Beck (32:24):

What do I [inaudible 00:32:26] right? Yeah.

Chris Beall (32:26):

Exactly. So it’s very… Sales is so delicate because we have to only ask first. Well, not only, but we have to ask first, what do they get out of it? And as an expert, can we be an honest broker and be their side? Because it’s actually imbalanced. I know more than you do when I’m selling to you. Therefore, I have to take your side in the transaction otherwise, it’s imbalanced. That’s just simple, that’s just a fact, right? And an imbalance transaction [crosstalk 00:32:52].

 

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