Today on the Market Dominance Guys, you’re invited to join Chris and Corey and their guest, Roderick Jefferson, the CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates, a global sales enablement consultancy firm. This trio of sales gurus outlines the whys and how’s of providing sales teams with the information, training, content, and tools that reps need to successfully engage buyers throughout the buying journey. This is known as “sales enablement.” Sounds like a pretty simple “follow the blueprints” process, doesn’t it? And, yet, as Roderick informs us, if you ask 10 people what sales enablement is, you’ll get a multitude of answers.

 

Chris and Roderick discuss this quandary and, more specifically, how the pandemic has impacted training and overseeing sales teams now that each rep works from home, physically away from their manager’s watchful eye. Roderick relates this problem to that of an orchestra whose conductor is missing. Like so many other things now, sales enablement must be fine-tuned to this new situation. In order to orchestrate and conduct a sales team so that each rep plays their part and uses the provided resources in a collaborative manner, a major change must take place in how they are managed.

If you’re a follower of the Market Dominance Guys, you know that this episode will have you nodding along with the opinions of Chris, Corey, and their guest, and jotting down notes from their insights. Stay tuned! They aim to help you dominate your market! 

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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 (02:19):

Well, welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank, and the sage of sales, Chris Beall. Today, Chris, we have yet another guest, I think. And our booking agents finally found time to get on the calendar with. In fact, I think he’s probably the only guest we’ve had that can say they have a lifetime achievement award from anybody. Right? Well, actually I got a lifetime achievement award from Luby’s Cafeteria, but Roderick has one from selling power that he got.

Corey Frank (02:49):

And so, Roderick Jefferson, the sales enablement OG of all OGs is with us. We’ll talk a little bit about it, but sales enablement at Oracle, and at Salesforce, and at Marquetto, and way back even to Siebel. In fact, I think you did sales enablement before it was even called sales enablement, right? [crosstalk 00:03:06].

Roderick Jefferson (03:06):

I did. As far as I know, I’m the guy that actually created the nomenclature sales enablement. Oddly enough, there’s one other guy that claims it. He could have it maybe, who knows.

Corey Frank (03:16):

Well, we have the right guest for the Market Dominance Guys then today, certainly, Chris. But I am curious, before we start though, Roderick, and we talked about this on the phone the other day, is when you get a lifetime achievement award, is it assumed that they put you out to pasture, and there’s no more content coming out of that grape of yours, and there’s no more good ideas? If you do happen to create anything that’s good, that’s fresh, that’s new, what do they call that award then?

Roderick Jefferson (03:41):

You know what they say about assuming? So we’re not even going to go down that route. Let’s not assume anything. I think if there’s anything else, maybe it’ll be really cool to have something named after me. Other than that, who knows?

Corey Frank (03:54):

Like a Lombardi trophy. There you go. Perfect.

Roderick Jefferson (03:56):

Like the Lombardi. Kind of like that, yeah. The Jefferson.

Corey Frank (03:59):

Chris, do you have an award named after you, by chance yet?

Chris Beall (04:02):

Even my children aren’t named after me.

Corey Frank (04:08):

Well, that’s good. I think I’ve known Roderick for almost as long as I’ve known you, Chris. So it was great. And Roderick was one of the first clients that I had, that actually took my call before the pre 27 seconds. He took a cold call from me and actually bought something from me. And he hasn’t been able to get rid of me in 15, 20 years, or however long it’s been.

Corey Frank (04:27):

So it’s great to have both of you guys on the Market Dominance Guys here, Roderick. So I appreciate you taking the time with me and Chris. Since we do have a short amount of time, I just want to jump into this concept of Sales Enablement 3.0. I hear some guy wrote a book on it, right? So you just released your worldwide bestseller. They’re making it into a movie, I hear.

Corey Frank (04:46):

But Sales Enablement 3.0, when you told me that, I’m a little panicked. Because I barely mastered sales enablement 1.0, let alone 2. I completely missed 2.0 and right into 3.0. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what is sales enablement 3.0? And what did I miss?

Roderick Jefferson (05:04):

Yeah. I don’t think anything’s been missed. And that’s exactly why I wrote Sales Enablement 3.0, is the fact that we have been doing the same things the same way, for 20 plus years that I’ve been in sales enablement. And I was looking at things from a new set of lenses, like all of us now with COVID.

Roderick Jefferson (05:20):

And I’ll say the best thing that’s happened, personally, to come out of COVID, is the fact that … It’s done two things. One, it’s separated the practitioners from the theorists in sales enablement. And, secondly, it has made all of us get comfortable with being uncomfortable. We now have new technology. We’ve got all this great innovation around us. But we’re still running programs the same way.

Roderick Jefferson (05:42):

Then comes COVID. Guess what? You can’t do that. You don’t get to go stand in front of folks anymore. You don’t get to build that rapport out at dinner, or having cocktails, or out playing golf. Some do, but most don’t get to do that.

Roderick Jefferson (05:55):

So I was really looking at what are we going to do different, and how are we going to do it different? But more important … And both of you guys know me, I’m about the why. Why do we have to change? Well, the first thing that came to mind was we’ve got to stop being seen as a cost center. We’ve got to stop being seen as the fixers of broken things, and broken people.

Roderick Jefferson (06:11):

And so the thing that came to me was you train animals and you enable people. We literally have to get to the point to where it’s not just about training, it’s really about enablement. It’s those five Ps: the programs, the platforms, the processes, and the people, that all just jump out at me.

Roderick Jefferson (06:27):

Here’s the problem with sales enablement, big problem I have. And I love my vertical. I love my space. But we’ve gotten away from realizing that we actually are about people. We’re about getting people bigger, faster, and stronger. So, at its core, Sales Enablement 3.0 really comes down to taking an innovative approach, focused on increasing sales productivity, through what I call a systematic approach to support the content, the tools, and the people, to drive increased revenue.

Roderick Jefferson (06:55):

So when I wrote the book, I wrote it as a blueprint. Because I wished I would have had this as I was coming up the ranks. I’ve been fortunate to do every role inside of sales enablement, from coordinator, to program manager, to owner, all the way up to executive level. So the book will actually provide folks with a blueprint, that’ll help them to navigate the twists and turns that ultimately lead to designing, deploying, measuring, and iterating a world-class sales enablement organization, not just program.

Corey Frank (08:03):

Chris, to you, over the years, running and leading entire organizations, let alone sales organizations, what have you kind of seen … We’ve talked about this a couple of times on the Market Dominance Guys, particularly alignment or misalignment between sales and marketing, and training and hiring, etc.

Corey Frank (08:21):

But what are some of the more advances that you’ve seen in the sales enablement 2.0, 3.0 world that we’re living in, that adds to what Roderick is saying, that would’ve made the life certainly easier 10 years ago, 20 years ago, versus today, where you have these types of blueprints available?

Chris Beall (08:38):

Well, necessity is the mother of pretty much everything, and certainly mother of invention and getting it real when it comes to things like sales enablement. And sales enablement is broad enough that anything can drift in there, right? So you can have a big old, bright sun in there, and then you can have a little planet out there circling way, way far away. And you go, “Oh, it’s all sales enablement. It’s a big house.”

Chris Beall (09:00):

But, to me, it’s always been like this, if it doesn’t address the bottleneck in the business, you shouldn’t be investing in it. And one of the challenges I’ve seen, it’s not just sales enablement, but everything it’s about getting better, is everybody wants to be important. And if everybody wants to be important, that means everybody wants to have their thing be something that needs to be improved. But most things don’t need to be improved. There’s one thing that needs to be improved, it’s the bottleneck.

Chris Beall (09:25):

And if you don’t take step one, and go find the bottleneck, you’re just messing around. You’re just putting people to work. It’s like, “What are you doing?” “Well, I’m grading the side of this road.” Well, does the road ever need to be built? That’s somebody else’s problem. I’m busy grading the side of the road, because somebody gave me a … Back when I used to work at McCormack Ranch building that thing, some Hungarian dude was yelling at me, and I had a rake and I had a shovel. And he said, “Chris, shovel you the concrete.” Well, I shoveled the concrete, my friend.

Chris Beall (09:52):

That’s what I did, right? Did it make any difference? Was there any why in it? Who knows? Because when you operationalize why … You operationalize why by finding the process bottleneck that responds in this way. We make it bigger. We make stuff go through it faster at the same quality, we get more out the end, revenue. If that’s what we want, it’s revenue.

Chris Beall (10:15):

And sales enablement, because of COVID, has finally had to face the necessity of being more relevant and addressing the bottleneck. Because the bottleneck conveniently moved, in a moment, to a new place, which was communicating with your sales people how they’re supposed to do their job. Because it used to just eat it up by osmosis out on the floor. And now suddenly there ain’t no floor. So now it’s like, “Oh, we actually have to do this thing.” Now, it’s still hard to figure out what you’re measuring when you do that thing. But at least you had to do it. And that’s necessity. So I think that we’ve had a really interesting transition.

Chris Beall (10:55):

You’ve always been a systematic guy, Corey. I could go out on your floor and I could see systems. I could walk out there. And I could say to the person with me from ConnectAndSell, “Look at that. See what those five guys are doing over there? I guarantee you, they do that every single day, that five right over there. Because this is a Cory Frank shop.” So that’s what happens, right? You’ve always done systems. But, for most people, they don’t do systems. They just let osmosis do its job, and then they want to take credit.

Corey Frank (11:25):

Tim Ferriss handles the Titans. It’s funny, Chris, we were just talking about that with the team over at Youngblood Works today, said very … He interviewed Seth Godin, and talked about that very thing that you and Roderick are talking about, that departmental goals or vanity metrics, Roderick, which I’ve heard you talk about many times, right? Chris and I talk about that.

Roderick Jefferson (11:44):

Butts in seats and smiley sheets.

Corey Frank (11:45):

That’s right. But, those departmental goals, those are for average organizations. But top tier organizations have systems in place that are replicable over time. And how many different ways can you attack a territory? How many different ways can you hire a sales rep? How many different ways can you go to market? There’s a handful. There’s not an end amount.

Corey Frank (12:09):

And so after years and years of sales in the digital world today, I think that, if you don’t have a system, even if it doesn’t work, it sounds like you’re missing out, if you are stovepiping or tiering your organization into these different fiefdoms, marketing, versus sales, versus recruiting, versus training, retention team, account management team, etc, without a system to get them a snug … And I think you used the analogy of an orchestra, which I’d like Roderick to kind of describe all this, correct?

Roderick Jefferson (12:40):

Yeah. It’s collaboration. It’s communication. It’s orchestration, which, standalone, sounds like a lot of fluffy marketing terms, but it’s not. And I’m going to dig deep … But I want to double tap on something that Chris said earlier, is we don’t do enough of finding the why at sales enablement folks. And we’ve got to go deeper on that.

Roderick Jefferson (12:58):

And to the point around the vanity stats, yeah, I believe there are two different types of metrics when it comes to sales enablement, one that enablement influences and impacts, and then another set that we own. On the sales side, the pieces that we influence are the typicals of average deal size, collateral frequency, deal velocity, pipeline creation, and velocity quota attainment, time to revenue, all those.

Roderick Jefferson (13:21):

And I’m going to say this directly to my sales enablement folks that may be listening, stop saying that you drive revenue unless you carry a bag. You do not. You influence and you impact revenue. The things that we own are the things like the accreditations and certifications, the needs analysis, the programmatical bills, the tools, the processes, the programs, those things, and sales.

Roderick Jefferson (13:42):

And then, on the success side, a whole other set of metrics that some claim we own, and I don’t believe we do, I think we impact and influence, adoption rates, annual recurring rates, customer churn rates, red account reduction, those kind of things. And so how do you come about understanding how to get those metrics right, and who you need to work with? That’s where the orchestration piece comes in, that you were just talking about, Corey.

Roderick Jefferson (14:06):

And it’s literally the analogy of we’ve got all of these different pieces to an orchestra. You’ve got strings, woodwinds, percussion, brass, etc, that come into play in trying to do the right thing, and make this incredible orchestrated sound. Now, let’s now akin that to the lines of business. You’ve got sales, sales enablement. You’ve got marketing, product marketing, engineering, product management, etc. And they’re all trying to do the right thing for the customer or the prospect.

Roderick Jefferson (14:33):

The problem is they’re stepping over each other. Sometimes they’re playing sour notes. They’re just a bit off. Until one person or one organization, the orchestrator, which I believe is sales enablement, steps up, taps the stand, and now all of that chaos becomes a beautiful sheet of music. That’s what enablement does.

Roderick Jefferson (14:50):

And something else you said earlier, Chris, that really resonates with me, and that is there are so many different definitions of what sales enablement is. And I think if you ask 10 people you’ll get 12 answers. And I don’t know that any of them would be wrong. The problem is enablement does not have standard nomenclature, similar to what PMI has for project management.

Roderick Jefferson (15:11):

And that’s kind of the goal of sales enablement society is to put that all together. I don’t think we’ve hit that target yet. I think we’ve hit all the spots around it, but I don’t think that target has been hit. So what we’ve got to do is understand what sales enablement means in your given company, based upon the maturation cycle of where your company is today, and also what the goals are of where you’re going.

Corey Frank (15:32):

Chris, with a weapon like ConnectAndSell, you have a front row seat, oftentimes, of people who … Their mindset, their goals, their heart may be in the right place, but implementing a weapon like ConnectAndSell flushes out all these misaligned enablement pieces in an organization, does it not?

Chris Beall (15:55):

Well, yeah, down to a certain point. Not all of them. Really, all ConnectAndSell is generally used for is to create discovery opportunities. It has other uses. But you have to be so sophisticated to make use of those other uses, that they all look like one-offs to me. They’re fun to look at. I go, “Oh, how pretty?” But I don’t go off and tell somebody to try it. It’s like, “No, really? I don’t think so.” Oh, chasing down people who went dark before the end of the quarter. Okay, some guys use it for that. Great.

Chris Beall (16:24):

But I like the ones who go, “You know what? We got 250,000 folks in this market. We want to talk to 137,300 of them in the next three years. We want to set appointments with and hold those appointments with 62,150 of them. And we want to do that over this fixed period of time. We want to convert 18.7% of those to first deals. And we want 9% of them to turn into deals after a year or so, when the timing’s finally right. Therefore, let’s talk to a whole bunch of them. Therefore, let’s not qualify on first calls.” There’s all a bunch of therefores that fall out of it.

Chris Beall (17:04):

What’s funny about ConnectAndSell is the 10X. Because the 10X is weird. I mean, 10X’s are really, really not comfortable to wield, right? They’re not. It’s like, “Hey, I’ll give you a sword. It’s 10 times more powerful. Let me show you how to use it in the house.” Well, I don’t have a house anymore. And now I’ve got to go live somewhere else. That’s not much fun. So you got to be careful with something this fast, and you got to make sure you’re applying it to where it can make a difference.

Chris Beall (17:29):

And the big thing I’ve seen is that most people don’t know what would make a difference. They really don’t. What they do in their budgetary process is everybody raises their hand, says, “I want some.” And then the assumption is everything makes a difference. And everything doesn’t make a difference. It just doesn’t. Right now, only one thing can make a difference. And the hardest thing to do is to go find it.

Chris Beall (17:52):

And when you got something as fast as ConnectAndSell, you either find it, or you wrap that Ferrari around a tree. Those are the only two possibilities. And it’s really quite dramatic. So we get to see that quick, violent bifurcation between aligned situations, or aligned enough, that you’re actually doing something for a reason, that is you’re going to move a real needle. Or whether you’re just doing it because somebody said, “I want more. I want more. I’m like The Little Mermaid. I want more.”

Corey Frank (18:20):

Is there one department more than another, when Robert talks about the different pieces of the orchestra in an organization, that you’ve seen Chris, over the years, that needs to embrace, albeit reluctantly so, this concert strategy more than another? In other words, I’m used to working in an independent arena, and everybody else supports me.

Chris Beall (18:43):

Well, it’s sales. I mean, sales is the land of the lone wolf. And we take people into sales development roles, and say, “The only reason you have to do this job is so you can be a lone wolf someday.” I mean, we do that. We literally do that. We say, “This job sucks, but if you do it for a while, we’ll let you go lone wolf it up, and you’ll have a lot of fun. And then you can just do things your way. You can reinvent sales. I mean, after all, it’s a discipline that’s only a few thousand years old. Maybe you’ll come up with a new flavor of it that’ll knock everybody’s socks off. You be the person.” So I just think it’s really interesting that there’s this whole sales and marketing alignment problem, that I think I mentioned once maybe on the show.

Chris Beall (19:25):

I talked to John Neeson way back when, founder of SiriusDecisions, co-founder. And I asked him, “John, what’s the maximum conversation coverage you’ve ever seen on inbounds? Somebody’s generating the inbounds, marketing’s got them coming in. What’s the maximum percentage you’ve ever seen spoken with at one of your clients?” And he just said, “9%.” Long pause on my side. I said, “So, John, does that mean 91% of all marketing budgets are wasted, because sales doesn’t bother to talk to the leads?” Long pause. He says, “Never say that to anybody.”

Chris Beall (19:58):

You didn’t hear it here, but marketing generally will do their job within parameters. And their job is harder than is right, because they’re trying to take a stew of information out there, publicly available information, and turn it into some kind of a list of folks worth talking to. I mean, really that’s what it is, right? Sales tends to approach the job like this. Eh, I don’t like that one. Why? Well, I assume it’s no good, because it looks kind of like this other one I didn’t like. That’s where the variety shows up first. And we encourage it, and fan the flames all the way through the sales process.

Roderick Jefferson (20:31):

Chris, you’re absolutely right. And, for so long, it’s been the nomenclature of sales is the sun. And the further you get away from the sun, the colder it gets, which there is some truth to that. But, at the same time, I love what you were just saying. Too many times in my career, I’ve seen where marketing says, “We give so many leads to sales, and they never do anything with them.” Sales in turn says, “Yeah, you give us leads, but they all suck.”

Roderick Jefferson (20:56):

And I’ve asked one question, and that question is, have you guys ever actually sat down at the same table and defined and agreed upon what a sales or a marketing qualified lead actually looks like? Long pause, to use your words. And the answer is, generally, why would we do that? We know what they need. And sales says, “We know what we need.” Yeah. But have you actually ever told each other what those are? Generally the answer is not yes.

Chris Beall (21:23):

Generally, the answer is not yes. And what’s really interesting … And, Roderick, I come from a weird background, right? I’m a physicist who used to build big software systems. That’s what I did for a living, right? So here’s how I build big software system. I draw a big circle on a whiteboard. I draw a line. I’m going to do this from your perspective. It comes out from the right-hand side. It’s got an arrow on it. I put a little stick figure at the end of it. I say, “Here’s what we’re going to build. Here’s its only output it’s allowed to have.”

Chris Beall (21:47):

Right now, in our minds, we’re only allowed one output. No compound sentences need apply. There’s somebody that’s an actual human being somewhere on earth, nowhere else. They got a title, they got a job, they got responsibilities. And then I put a little dollar sign over it, goes, “When one unit of this output goes to this person, how many dollars are saved, or how many are made by them, or the organization they’re responsible for?” That’s a why on a system. Real simple.

Chris Beall (22:14):

Then you ask the key question, which is what is the minimum input … What are the minimum inputs required to make one unit of output? How good do they have to be? Now, if you can answer that question in sales, you’re golden, right? You’re golden. Sales is a system that produces an output, called a deal. Somebody makes money off the deal. What are the minimum inputs, and are they available. That’s what nobody asks, are they available?

Chris Beall (22:40):

So sales goes, “Well, I want inputs that I want it to be good.” Well, what if good’s not available out there? That is, what if the information required to get past what you’re getting right now isn’t available? Well, you got to finish it. And that means, among human beings, you’ve got to talk to somebody. So my suggestion would be this. They should get together, just like you said. But how about if they got together with 20 perfect prospects, one at a time?

Roderick Jefferson (23:08):

Absolutely. That’s step two. They’ve got to get past each other first. Right? Then sit down with that perfect prospect together. Yeah.

Chris Beall (23:17):

But do they do it? No. And I think the reason is politics. When you come right down to it, budgetary politics, rules, organizations. Somebody gets the money, right? So if I say that I need you, then I’m implicitly saying, “I need you to get some of the money that’s coming to me.”

Chris Beall (23:36):

And that I think is the big problem that keeps … I think that keeps sales enablement from being appropriately at the table, more than anything else. Because it’s like, “Well, we already how much money there is. So now we’re kind of done.”

Roderick Jefferson (23:49):

Yeah. That’s like trying to go to a client after the hour, and P is already written. A little late now.

Chris Beall (23:55):

That’s a great example. A little late now.

Roderick Jefferson (23:58):

Yeah. A little late now. Thanks for the input. But it’s already in ink.

Chris Beall (24:02):

Where’s the CEO, is my question. You want results as a CEO, why aren’t you at that meeting?

Roderick Jefferson (24:09):

Oh, great question. And, as a sales enablement practitioner, that’s one of the things that I always push for. And that is we cannot have sales enablement initiatives. We have to have sales enablement woven into the fabric of the company. And that only happens from the top down.

Roderick Jefferson (24:23):

If this is one of their top three or top five initiatives for the year, then you get movement, because you’ve got some wood behind the arrow. But if it’s sales enablement saying, “I need you to do this,” or in some cases, “It would be really nice if you kind of sort of maybe might think about doing this,” then you’re not going to get anywhere. Because now you’re a nuisance, and you’re bringing no value.

Roderick Jefferson (24:44):

The value comes when it comes from C-level down, and they say, “This is the direction we’re going. And in order for us to hit these success metrics, it requires that each of you communicate, collaborate, and orchestrate together. Now, go play together and figure out how it’s done. And if you can’t figure it out, then I’m going to have to jump in and help you figure it out. And that’s not going to be nearly as pleasant of a conversation.”

Chris Beall (25:06):

Yeah. Well, there’s a fun one there, which is … And this nobody will do, but I like to throw it out there, because I do it out of probably personality disorder, or some other illness that has not yet [crosstalk 00:25:17].

Roderick Jefferson (25:16):

Your crazy idea of fun, Chris?

Chris Beall (25:18):

Yeah. I got a funny idea of fun, which is, when the CEO goes and sells, and sells real deals, just like everybody else, little ones, big ones, not swoops in on the big ones, but actually sells, sources new deals and sells new deals, you find out what sales enablement needs to provide in a hurry. Because that poor sucker needs what he needs, or she needs, and that stuff’s going to happen.

Chris Beall (25:41):

And then the question is how do you keep it from being idiosyncratic? How do you keep it from being a one-off for the boss? But if you can take that information back, which is like, “Wait a minute. I got one, right?” That happens to me all the time. I finish a process, part of a process. So I sell a little bit. And I finished part of the process.

Chris Beall (26:02):

And I go to put that information in the CRM, and there’s a required field I don’t know the answer to. In fact, I don’t even know what it means. I literally do not know what it means. And when I asked somebody, they say, “Oh, we always put X in there,” whatever X is. I said, “Well, why do we do that?” Well, because that way the required field’s filled in, right?

Roderick Jefferson (26:21):

Then required becomes relative.

Chris Beall (26:23):

Right. And I think we have a lot of stuff like that, that if the CEO is selling, you find out in a hurry that there’s a lot of things we ask salespeople to do that are utter nonsense. And then we don’t provide them with stuff that is utter-esence, that’s the essence of getting the job done. So have the CEO sell, that’s my recommendation, Corey.

Corey Frank (26:49):

Have a company of all former CEOs, and they become the sales organization. That’s it, right?

Chris Beall (26:55):

Poor guy doesn’t have to sell forever, but I don’t like CEOs just selling big deals, the swoop swoop. I just hate that [inaudible 00:27:01]. If I’m going to do it, my thing is give me little ones, give me the trash, throw me the stuff nobody else wants.

Roderick Jefferson (27:08):

Because can’t set an example by being a super closer, right? If you only come in and swoop in on the big ones, then you really have no idea what it takes to close those. And, to your point, if the internal pieces actually talk to each other, beyond just the CEO, right?

Roderick Jefferson (27:22):

And I think that’s another one of the key values of true sales enablement, is that we’re what I call the translators of dialects and languages. So we’ve got to be able to speak marketing, product marketing, engineering, HR, etc. As an old sales guy myself, and I’m back here, I loved going out. And miss those pieces of being able to go out with sales folks.

Roderick Jefferson (27:44):

Because I could go and listen to 10, 12 prospects, customers, and come back and say, “Hey, product marketing, marketing, loved the company pitch. But we get the slide seven, one of two things happens, either no one uses it, or I’ve heard it described 10 different ways. Can you either smooth that thing out or get rid of it?” Then I can go to product management and say, “Hey, I’ve had eight different prospects asked for the same feature. How do we get it moved up on the release cycle?”

Roderick Jefferson (28:09):

Then I go back to sales and to HR and say, “Folks, what I’m realizing is we’ve got our ICP, our ideal client or customer profile nailed. What we really lack in is we don’t know what our IEP is, our ideal employee profile. Because we’re not in a different maturation cycle, and we’re still hiring like it was yesterday. So what we need really is to look at and identify and address where we’re going. Maybe we need a more senior person. Maybe we need to go and hire folks from different verticals or different companies, or even the BDRs, SDRs. Let’s look outside of those top 10 schools that we always go and look at, and we’re not getting what we need. If we keep hiring the way that we did, we’ll get to the edge of the chasm, but we’ll never get across.”

Roderick Jefferson (28:52):

Now, bear in mind, you’ve got to have a little level of credibility to be able to say these things. But if you don’t say it, then you’re a theorist. You’re not a true self enablement practitioner.

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In this follow-up to last week’s Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, “Your Sales People Are Brain Surgeons,” Chris and Corey have another conversation with ConnectAndSell’s customer success manager, Donny Crawford, about using the telephone plus your beliefs to gain market dominance.

First things first, they discuss how to get prospects on the phone who are the most likely to set a meeting with you. It sounds like a numbers game — more dialing equals more people picking up the phone, which equals more meetings set, right? But as every sales rep knows, you can lead a prospect to a conversation, but you can’t make them link you to their calendar. That rate of success is fairly low. In his experience calling on prospects, though, Donny discovered an amazing way to increase the dial-to-meeting conversion rate: make more calls to people on your follow-up list. He found out that if at first you don’t succeed, call, call, call again. Wait till you hear what his success rate is — and then listen to the story Chris tells about follow-up calls, which corroborates Donny’s experience.

—-more—-

Donny also shares the most important key for success in a cold call, and then he lists for you all the other ingredients in his proven recipe for successful conversations with prospects, one of which is his practice of listening to his own recorded cold calls to hone his ability to sound human.

As Corey says in the wind-up to this interview, what we’ve got here is “another great, fantastic episode of the Market Dominance Guys!” We sure do!

About Our Guest
Donny Crawford is a Customer Success Manager for ConnectAndSell. He is responsible for providing Flight School training to sales representatives of ConnectAndSell customers in order to help them become more effective and successful when cold calling.

 

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (02:15):

There are some weird sub lists that are out there, but you’re right, Donny. The big question is, do they trust you? If you handle the first seven seconds of the first conversation right, they trust you for the rest of their life, and it’s not a voluntary thing, unless you blow it.

Corey Frank (02:31):

Well, that’s true. We talked about that many times, about the trust. I’m curious about… Let’s talk some turkey here on some actual conversion rates. Just ballpark conversion rates here, Donny, of what you’ve seen from maybe dial to meeting. Implementing this practice, if I didn’t, if I’m an average inside sales leader on the street, and maybe I use a dialer. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I use ConnectandSell. Maybe I don’t. I’m probably in the what dial to meeting range, would you say? Just an at rest, average inside sales team?

Donny Crawford (03:12):

I don’t know. Chris, would you say probably somewhere in the 500 to 700 dials to get a meeting range?

Chris Beall (03:17):

Yeah, it’s pretty normal to see… 500 is a reasonable cold number.

Corey Frank (03:22):

Yeah. That’s what I would say. Maybe a little bit higher for tougher gets, if the persona or ICP is higher, and then my contact conversion rate. For every hundred people I talk to, for instance, on a given day, what should I expect? Four? Five? I don’t know. Maybe a little bit more, a little bit less? What do you generally see?

Donny Crawford (03:44):

I would say the less trained sales rep who’s on their own doing what feels comfortable is, on average, going to set meetings around maybe 3% of the time on a first conversation, maybe 4%. The well trained, the well honed in skilled cold caller, the person who is having those initial conversations, I think that can rise up to 5% to 7%, 7% to 9% for a first conversation. For a first conversation, most of the time, the majority of the time, probably 90 out of 100 conversations, they’re not going to turn into a meeting that first conversation. It’s okay. Everyone needs to be okay with that.

Corey Frank (04:29):

Okay. What have you seen after you go to the flight school to implement this process that… I love the fact that a lot of it was implemented under duress. You had this Damocles plan hanging over to you, all the best ideas. I had a friend… All the best ideas come from being in the vicinity of porcelain in the bathroom, in the shower, or wherever. The second best ideas come under duress under stress. It sounds like this concept of the follow-ups here. What have you seen from some of the ratios, some of the ranges of a conversation percentage? When you have a proud graduate student of the Donny Crawford Academy, what can I expect to see?

Donny Crawford (05:15):

What’s nice is that you can almost break it down to the actual follow-up number. On a first conversation, if you’re scheduling at about a 5% rate, then you can almost expect that the second conversation itself will be around a 10% to 11% rate to schedule meetings on just the second conversation with the prospects that you’re reaching. On the third conversation, if you actually happen to be able to get a second follow-up in there, you’re going to convert at around a 16% rate on a third conversation with the prospect.

Corey Frank (05:51):

With those numbers, I don’t want to lead the witness here, but for Chris had Dottie, is that a great equalizer? Even if I’m a rep that maybe struggles with my empathy, my pitch, my messaging, the fact that I am still following this process, you don’t have to sell it. You don’t have to be a Tony Award winning actor on stage to sell it. Just following this methodology, I’m going to see a 3x from what I would if I was just purely calling cold.

Donny Crawford (06:25):

Conversation to meeting conversion, you’ll see a 9x dial to meeting conversion. The reason is, you’ll be calling on a bucket that’s three times more likely to answer the phone.

Corey Frank (06:37):

Exponentially.

Donny Crawford (06:38):

I actually had a customer who called me once. They’re a very important customer, a customer I just signed a deal with yesterday for something that had a fair number of commas, and some zeros, and stuff like that. I felt good about it at the end of the day. It made me think back to very early in our relationship where we’d done a little tiny deal with them. We were just a few weeks into it. I got a call from a guy who reported directly to the boss who’s the son of the person whose name is on the company. He said, “You got to get up here.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, we’ll tell you when you get up here.”

I jumped on a plane in San Jose and I got off in the appropriate city, and went over to the place, and was ushered into a boardroom where I got to sit for a little while and cool off. Then, a bunch of people came in, none of whom were on my team, all of whom were acting pretty serious. Finally, the big guy came in. He sat down and he said, “You lied to us.” I said, “Well, so I’m curious. Which one of my many lies I chose to tell you?”

He said, “It was a big one. You told us we would get three times lift on follow-up calls.” I said, “Well, from what I’m seeing, you’re getting about 3.4 times.” He said, “No, we’re not. We pay for dials. We’re getting nine times lift. Why didn’t you tell us? We would’ve focused harder on it. The reason we called you up here is to get a detailed step-by-step instruction manual on how to make maximum use of follow-ups, creating them, and using them, and maybe retiring them.” I said, “I don’t have to talk to you about the third one. You never retire. You never do.”

Corey Frank (08:26):

All I had to do was have you come to Scottsdale and show me that manual? That’s all I had to do?

Donny Crawford (08:32):

All you had to do was allow me to fulfill the request I made to come to Scottsdale [crosstalk 00:08:40].

Corey Frank (09:20):

[crosstalk 00:09:20] I bought the technology and I knew what I was doing, Chris. I didn’t need no stinking training school, come on [inaudible 00:09:29]. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I was waiting for me to get up here, but what are you going to do?

Chris Beall (09:36):

Donny couldn’t shut up. You would’ve listened to him.

Corey Frank (09:42):

That’s right. That’s amazing. Three in nine x time. Obviously, if I do all the other things that we’ve talked about, Market Dominance Guys, such as empathy and tonality and screenplay writing, and I implement the logistical processes of Donny Crawford here, that I can obviously expect to get some pretty impressive numbers. Getting out of the Gates in Q1, it seems to me that this isn’t a really complex… There’s not many barriers to entry to actually start doing this. It’s not like I need to do a lot of plumbing, correct?

Chris Beall (10:20):

To do Blitz and Coach, there’s no plumbing, right Donny? [crosstalk 00:10:24] Do you have an Excel file where you wind up in an hour to be annoyed by Chris Beall for an hour in order to get to the point where you finally believe in his breakthrough script approach? Is that it?

Donny Crawford (10:36):

Yeah, exactly. I think you have to narrow down on what truly valuable theme are you offering this person you’re reaching out to for the first time. If you break it down, and we’ve heard Chris talk about it a lot. There’s three values. If we can touch it, if we can find those three values, economic, emotional, and strategic value that we’re bringing to the marketplace, and we can just clearly identify that in simple to use words, and just a very simple phrase, and say it with belief, and believe in the value of the meeting that we’re going to set up with this organization, there’s no problem.

If you can figure out that thing that you’re offering the marketplace that’s a breakthrough, and then you have a list of people that you need to tell all about this, and you’re excited to do it, and you have the belief and the sincerity in your voice, and a little bit of skill. The little bit of skill is actually not what you have to begin with. The skill comes when listening back to your own recordings of these calls because when I listen to myself, I’m like, “Oh, why did I say it that way?” The next time I deliver it, I’m not going to say it that way anymore. I’m going to practice it and listen to myself, and I’m going to hear how I’m coming across. Do I sound human?

That’s what I need to actually get across. You can learn that in one blitz, absolutely. You listen to yourself and you’re like, “Oh, freak. That was horrible.” The next time you come to the next blitz and you’re calling those same people, delivering the same value prop to them, you’re going to be able to say it in so much more. We actually have organizations who are doing blitzes and by their third blitz, they’ve increased from about the 5% conversion rate. Some of our customers that I’ve worked with, they’re setting meetings on first conversations around 15%. 17% we’ve seen sometimes, just because they truly believe in it. They have that natural way of interacting with someone that they’ve learned after a few blitzes. It’s really pretty [inaudible 00:12:50].

Chris Beall (12:51):

By the way, I’m going to make an analogy here that both of you guys will understand, and I won’t. I’m going to do it anyway. You guys have both been to church once or twice, right?

Donny Crawford (13:00):

I have, yeah.

Chris Beall (13:02):

Just checking. Think about it. When you think about believing and the key to success in sales is believing in the value of what you’re offering, and what you’re selling here is a meeting. You have to believe in the potential value of this meeting. Not certain value, right? There’s a little faith here. Potential value of the meeting for this human being you’re speaking with, whether or not you ever move forward and do business with them. When you really believe that, this whole thing becomes very, very easy. Think about the setting of church. It’s a lot easier to believe when you go to church and it’s full of other people, than it is when you go to church all by yourself. You go all by yourself, it’s a little tricky to have it not be a building. When you go with a whole bunch of other people, it’s actually a little tricky just to have it be a building.

Corey Frank (13:57):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (13:59):

That’s what these blitzes do, I believe. They allow us to believe together. That belief shows up in our voice. This is the ultimate surfer’s question. I’ll switch from surfing to rock climbing, and show an example of a power of belief. There was a rock climbing problem that I used to work on at the end of Campbell Avenue in Tucson, Arizona off the north end. There’s a little thing called Campbell Crag. There was a very obscure part of it that had a very obscure problem that very few people would attempt, because it was so ridiculous. I would go over there every single time when I showed up. As soon as that was warmed up, I’d walk over there and try this thing. I would fall off at exactly the same point. This went on for two and a half years. I went out there probably five times a week. I never got past this point.

One day, I was on my way over there, and I realized there was a line. That is, there was one guy at the bottom already. I didn’t know him. Never seen him before, and he blazed up this thing. I did not learn one thing technically from him, but I did learn one thing from him. It could be climbed, and I raced up it like nothing. He watched and said, “Oh, you’ve done this before.” I said, “Well, kind of. Just never past this point.” Belief inside of yourself drives the opportunity for belief, which is the foundation for change inside of another. When we sell what we’re asking for or hoping for, what sincerely want is for another person to change the way that’s useful for them. Until we believe they won’t believe it. It’s hard to believe when you’re alone.

There’s a show on TV called Naked and Afraid. After the third day on Naked and Afraid, nobody believes anything, except bugs are really bad and they’re getting hungry. If you remove one of the two people on that, they tap out, as they say. The other person generally just folds up after a day or so, because they don’t have anybody to sustain their belief that they’re going to make for those 21 days.

Corey Frank (16:14):

How did you do it then, Donny? Again, if you have this plan, this great sales leader that you had, who poked his stubby finger in your chest to say, “Listen, I’m going to get it out of you.”

Donny Crawford (16:25):

Very skinny finger, by the way.

Corey Frank (16:27):

Skinny finger. Okay. Gotcha. Like a Mr. [crosstalk 00:16:30].

Donny Crawford (16:30):

Oh my goodness, he was [inaudible 00:16:32]. I mean, it was just ridiculous.

Corey Frank (16:35):

Gotcha. He believed in you when you didn’t believe in you, and this process that you used, did the process give you belief, and then that compounded to the point where now it was a switch versus a dial? Let’s talk a little bit about how this epiphany happened for you.

Donny Crawford (16:56):

I think that the act of sandbagging follow-ups to Thursdays, if we’re returning back to that experience, sandbag… I’m saying I could have called these people on Mondays and Tuesdays and probably set meetings, but it wasn’t going to be financially beneficial to me during the blitz if I set meetings on Wednesday instead of Thursday. Literally, in the truest sense, sandbag these are follow calls to Thursdays where I would get a better advantage. A better outcome. I know that putting a large bucket together of people that I was going to be incredibly comfortable talking to because I had talked to them before, the cold call feels uncomfortable. I like it. I don’t mind it, just because I know exactly how to manipulate people’s minds. When I get into a first conversation, I’m so good at it.

I enjoy meeting new people, and I know what I need to say and accomplish that I’m okay with it. It’s way more comfortable to call someone who I’ve already spoken to before. My belief in the power of the follow-up when I was sandbagging [inaudible 00:18:09] into my blitzes became solidified in that moment. Not only was I able to win the little competition and get some Amazon cards or whatever, but I was also able to see the concentrated effort into a follow-up list would produce a lot of meetings. I was able to be taken off a plan after a month because I knew that I was going to produce and start overproducing even what the expectation of me was. The belief came pretty soon. It was a revelation right type of thing that if I attack and even structure my regular calls…

What the beauty of blitz is, and I think I can even relate this to flight school, is that if flight school takes place on one day a week, every single week, repeating for four weeks in a row, on the first week that I’m making calls, and I find a couple of people who are just busy on a call. They can’t talk right now. They’re not giving me the time of day, but I put a follow-up to next week, I can come back to my second week of calling, get a couple of those people online, and actually make something happen with a second conversation. You can actually build belief in this. Even within four weeks, you can already start seeing the production value of following up with someone. It’s pretty cool.

Corey Frank (19:31):

If it goes through the snake as you load it up, then that’s where the exponent occurs.

Donny Crawford (19:37):

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Corey Frank (19:40):

That’s beautiful. What a great story. I’d love to have you back again and again here, Donny, sharing some other war stories of… These percentages that you’re seeing, the 3x and the 9x or so in the conversation conversion rate, and the dial, that’s pretty sexy stuff. I think for anybody listening who wants to boost their Q1 without an investment in the tech stack, I don’t want to have to do any more email, no more SEO, SCM. I don’t have to invest in any virtual trade shows. I can just give Donny a call here and he can walk through the process. Certainly, if you want to use ConnectandSell, you amplify those types of results. I just think that’s a simple process that every sales leader should be adept at, especially moving into these tougher times to get prospects. With that, this has been another great, fantastic episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank. Until next time.

Chris Beall (20:43):

Thanks, Corey. Hey, Donny. Thanks for being on. I know one customer today I talked to, they wanted me to send some thanks your way, too. That was a great blitz today.

Donny Crawford (20:51):

I appreciate it.

 

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What do you do if you have a group of 25 or so folks on your sales team, and you want to really make a splash in the first quarter of the new year? Due to the on-going pandemic, we all  know that connecting with customers face to face at trade shows is no longer an option. No doubt, your reps are still working from home, most of them researching their prospects and trying a little social media marketing, but all of them eventually doing the traditional dialing, dialing, dialing, and praying, praying, praying that someone will pick up the phone. How, in the name of all that’s financially holy, are your reps going to help your company dominate its market if they simply continue to use the same old methods during this brave new year we are entering?

Our two Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey, along with this week’s guest, ConnectAndSell Customer Success Manager Donny Crawford, diagnose the problem of what’s keeping companies from the market domination they desire. These three cold-calling practitioners offer their insights into what works best to get the greatest number of conversations with decision makers — despite cold call outcomes like “Not me,” “Not now,” “Not interested,” “Call back later,” or even the dreaded hang-up. Wait till you hear Donny’s proven method for how to turn repeated hang-ups from a prospect into the appointment you’re after.

Chris compares the work of a salesperson to that of a brain surgeon, first cracking open a company’s “skull” by getting that first appointment, and then exploring what’s wrong inside the “brains” of a company by having a discovery conversation. Join Chris, Corey, and Donny as they guide you through that operation during this episode of Market Dominance guys, “Your Sales People are Brain Surgeons.”

—-more—-

Listen to Donny’s previous episodes:
The Power of the Anti-curse to Overcome Rejection
Three Reasons Sales Reps Don’t Follow Up

 

About Our Guest
 
Donny Crawford is a Customer Success Manager for ConnectAndSell. He is responsible for providing Flight School training to sales representatives of ConnectAndSell customers in order to help them become more effective and successful when cold calling.
 

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

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (00:43):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and your co-host, the Sage of sales, the prophet of profits, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. And today we have another guest. I think we’re on a roll Chris. We’ve had, normally we say, I think we had a rule, no guests, but in the last couple of months or so we had Oren Klaff, had certainly Ryan Reisert. And so we’re going to dig deep into the connoisseurs of our craft in your own backyard. We have Donny Crawford, the customer success manager over at ConnectAndSell. And Donny’s been with ConnectAndSell for several years, I think over five years, I think you had mentioned Donny, and you’re originally from the main streets of San Jose, but now you live in the rarefied air somewhere in a nondescript location in Utah, having spent we’ll get out of them.

Corey Frank (01:37):

But one of the talk with Donny today, Chris, I think too, we were talking about market dominance, certainly for the last 60 plus episodes. Can’t believe it’s over 60 episodes now. And one of the questions we get oftentimes is, well, how do you put this actually into practice? Can we interview and talk with somebody who puts ConnectAndSell into practice? The theory of market dominance into practice and who lives it at scale? Now, Chris and I, Chris was my guide and my Sherpa here in the days of my previous company, where I was a degenerate gambler. And when I got ConnectAndSell, I just kept spending and spending and spending those dials and eight, nine hours a day. And now I understand from Donny that there’s a right way to do it. And I was doing absolutely the 179 degrees away from the right way to actually properly use ConnectAndSell, if I’m going to have an internal team, that’s going to be coached up here. So Donny, welcome to the Market Dominance Guys.

Donny Crawford (02:41):

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Corey Frank (02:42):

Great. So Chris, I think we can probably throw it over to you. And when you look at a lot of the folks who are trying to be practitioners of our craft of market dominance, especially if they have their own internal and they want to hit some of these numbers, they’re looking at a new year coming up and say, do I need to hire five, 10 more folks? Do I need to take my trade show dollars that are going to be used in 2021? And maybe put them into SEO. Maybe I should put them into what obviously there’s a lot of red meats there. And I think that he can set Donny up here by talking a little bit about, what would I do if I have a team of 25 or so folks on the inside? Maybe 30 or 40 folks.

Corey Frank (03:31):

And I want to really make a splash in Q1 and I don’t want to do the traditional digital. I don’t want to just throw something at my tech stack. I can’t do trade shows any longer. My field reps are really working from home and now they got to use the phone, but I still need this thing called market dominance. What are some of the things that maybe we can tee Donny up since he sees it every day to kind of guide the average person like me on how to get to the next level?

Chris Beall (04:02):

Thanks Corey. Yeah. That’s, it’s fascinating putting this stuff into practice ain’t easy, right? Otherwise, there’d only be one episode of Market Dominance Guys, which we’d say is pretty much let me review the bidding here. Talk to everybody in your market, generate trust in seven seconds, harvest that trust over a three-year period. Turn it into meetings when you can and turn it into follow-ups when you can’t, that’s it. Now that you get into subtle stuff off, if it doesn’t work, tweak the message.

Corey Frank (04:32):

Right.

Chris Beall (04:32):

If that doesn’t work, tweak your list. I think we’re done. But obviously, we’re not done.

Corey Frank (04:36):

If that doesn’t work call Youngblood Works and we’ll do all that for you.

Chris Beall (04:39):

Yeah. That’s exactly right. So the next possibility is, well, maybe it’s not that you’re doing it wrong, maybe you’re just the wrong folks to be doing it. And what you really need is somebody to open the market for you. I compare this to brain surgery. So your salespeople are the brain surgeons, but opening somebody’s skull isn’t brain surgery, it’s just different. And Corey’s folks over at Youngblood Works are specialists at getting in there with the drill and the saw and everything and opening the patient’s skull without killing them so that you, the brain surgeon can then go in and do the cutting that is going to cause them to have a new personality or a little less cancer or whatever it is that they’re looking for that day. So that’s great. You can do it that way. I highly recommend it.

Chris Beall (05:23):

If you don’t test drive with Corey’s group anyway, you’re probably kind of not seeing the whole picture, but so you want that level of intimacy, I suppose, that comes from having your own people, have those conversations or say you want to hybridize and you want to use Youngblood Works folks that we would call, by the way Youngblood Works it’s called finishing school for future CEOs. In case you want to know, because you can’t become a CEO, unless you can have conversations with strangers and they polish up some of the best business graduates in the world at Grand Canyon University to become those CEOs by going through a program where they learn how to cold call by really doing it. Great. They get a lot of calls. They use ConnectAndSell. Life is good, but say you want to have your own folks doing it.

Chris Beall (06:08):

There’s sort of two ways to go. One is that you’re going to just say here, just go. And there you go, you get what you get, right? Here’s what you likely to find out. Some of them are what we call weasels. They don’t want to talk to people. Some are what we call faux weasels. They say they don’t want to talk to people, but they really do want to talk to people. They just don’t know what it would be like to talk to people because they haven’t tried it. So those are like fake fur, it’s like fake fur weasels, right? So those exist too. Then we have these people we call pigs, conversation pigs, and they’re hungry for the next conversation, no matter what the last one tasted like, but some pigs can sing and some pigs can’t sing, that is some pigs can use their voice to great effect.

Chris Beall (06:52):

As we’ve said, the script is the surfboard. Your voice is the surfer. Well, if the pig squeals an ugly squeal, you’re not going to get many meetings and you’re not going to get a lot of trust. So the question is what is really, it’s better than just turning them loose. And we learned this really fast. It only took us 13 years to learn that, after doing this for a while, really folks need the help. And so Donny is our lead at ConnectAndSell on providing that help in two ways. One is structured learning through a messaging workshop and a multi-session thing we call Flight School that I’ll let him describe. He’s the master of delivering that. And second through structured blitzes. And interestingly, I think Donny, you have a story going way back into your past when you were a young buck sales rep and you were on plan.

Chris Beall (07:46):

And I don’t know, I’ve never been put on plan before guys, by the way, never. Whenever anybody gets close to that with me, I get a note on my coffee cup like I got in 2001 that said, “Chris, see me, Lou.” And what it meant was you’re fired. Nobody ever puts my on plan. They just fire me, immediately. But Donny is such a great guy that he had a sales job once where he was put on plan. And you can tell us that story. So Donny, welcome to the show. Market dominance, you do it every day. You’re a true practitioner. You help other people do it. So what’s that story.

Donny Crawford (08:24):

Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. I appreciate that. You’re right. I was really new to tech sales in San Jose and I was in a team of probably seven to 10 inside sales reps. We were supporting a senior sales team and setting appointments for them. And I’m telling you, the pain you feel every day coming to work and having to make 100 manual tiles is just, it wears on you, right? I mean, at that point, I was super burnt out of it. Yep. You’re right, I was put on plan by a new inside sales manager, total stud, I really enjoyed working with them. And he, I think did it because he did like me, but he wanted me to succeed and needed to put a fire under my belt. So I needed to make sure I stepped it up and I’m glad he did it because there’s nothing worse in my life than knowing that I’m not performing like I should. And I was pissed. I need to step it up. We also, fortunately, just recently before that had started adopting ConnectAndSell.

Donny Crawford (09:30):

So our team and our fantastic, one of our first sales reps at ConnectAndSell John Jackson sold it to our company. And Sharmeen was our customer success manager and taught us how to perform really well on the ConnectAndSell platform. And our inside sales manager instituted a weekly blitz. And this is when I really became a really big believer in the power of ConnectAndSell in the weekly blitz, there was a cash prize or gift card at the end of each of these two to three-hour blitzes that we would do as a team, every Thursday. And I learned very quickly how to manipulate winning almost every single one of these blitzes.

Chris Beall (10:11):

Really?

Donny Crawford (10:12):

And that’s how I did it. And then it actually ended up making me become a massive believer in ConnectAndSell. I started sandbagging every single one of my follow-ups to be run on Thursdays during the blitz. The rest of the team would come to the table with a bunch of cold calls, the big list, the Excel sheet of numbers to call and try to get ahold of people. I put every single person that I had spoken to before and I intended to speak with again, and I called those during my blitzes.

Donny Crawford (11:20):

And lo and behold conversion happens with follow-up. And if you get ahold of someone you’ve spoken to before, and you just say, “Hey, what’s up, we talked a week ago, we talked a month ago. We’d love to get some time with you.” People are more readily open to actually set a meeting with you and-

Corey Frank (11:35):

These are the folks you talk to, maybe weren’t ready to fall in the bucket of a demo. Just needed to be romanced a little bit. You would set all those follow-ups for the same time on Thursday or for the same day on Thursday.

Donny Crawford (11:49):

Every Thursday.

Corey Frank (11:50):

And then just knock them down.

Donny Crawford (11:51):

That’s right. Every Thursday. And so I look at the world very simply. There’s two kinds of people in the world. It’s weird. You’re going to classify the human race. Yes. There’s two kinds of people. People I’ve never spoken to and people who I have spoken to, that’s it, that’s all that matters to me. If I’ve never spoken to you, I know exactly what I want to say to you, to introduce myself, give you some value and hopefully introduce you into my process of learning something valuable for your business. The second class of people are all the follow-ups, it’s all the people who I already spoke to before. So I don’t need to worry about the cold-calling angst. I’m just going to call you again. You know me now, all you have to do is just get to know me a little bit more and accept the fact that I want to help your business within this follow-up call and just trying to schedule that appointment.

Corey Frank (12:39):

See where it sounds like where I screwed up at scale because I do everything at scale. Even my screw-ups are at scale, is that I just used, if I get an email system, if I get outreach or if I do anything, a HubSpot or an act on, I’m going to just throw a ton of money at it and just do that one thing.

Chris Beall (12:57):

Right.

Corey Frank (12:57):

And it sounds like what I screwed up with ConnectAndSell is I just did the cold calls and I did bucketize if you will the follow-up process. So how effective is that? Ryan Reisert, I know, our colleague and he’s been a guest here. He’s a big advocate. Sean is a big advocate. So talk a little bit Donny from your perspective as the flight manager, you’re on the flight line directing, how many companies come to these flight schools? 10 at a time? How many can it handle? 20 at a time?

Donny Crawford (13:31):

Yeah. Yeah. We can handle a lot of reps in a Flight School. So, I mean, we are basically training reps in a series of four, very closely orchestrated coach and blitz sessions with anywhere up to 20, 25, 30 people in a flight school blitz in that program, we could probably even cross a few different companies to introduce them into a blitz.

Corey Frank (13:56):

Even though there’s all these different industries with all these different organizations in the Flight School, the fundamentals of cold calling and follow up and using it as a strategic blitz. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Maybe some of the results that you’ve seen from doing this.

Donny Crawford (14:13):

Yeah, absolutely. If you are really intent on increasing the productivity of your team, especially let allowing them to learn together, we believe true social selling is not going necessarily into your social network and sending LinkedIn invites and things like that. You can do that and you should, but true social selling is getting together with a bunch of sales reps and selling together, like being social with your team about this, get your management involved, your leadership involved, get them excited about actually now hearing the conversations that the team is having, not just one at a time one-on-one focused information, but now with ConnectAndSell, you essentially are able to get a team together, listen to 50, 100 conversations in an hour from your entire team, and really start to diagnose whether some are capturing the vision of the initial conversation with someone. Creating effective followups and hearing the differences in the styles, the tones, the tempos, the belief that your team is able to actually portray during a first conversation and then diagnose whether they’re being truly intentional on how they’re going to follow up with prospects.

Donny Crawford (15:37):

We as sales reps, we oftentimes feel like objections are rejections. So when we get someone to hang up on us during a cold call, we’re like, Oh, that guy doesn’t want to hear back from me. No, in a month they’re not even going to know who you are. So follow-up with them.

Corey Frank (15:49):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Donny Crawford (15:50):

Teaching sales reps, how to do that has actually, it’s a lot easier than I think leadership realizes. It’s just necessary to be repetitive and to be teaching very simple and executable principles. And I think that’s what [crosstalk 00:16:07].

Corey Frank (16:06):

Just so I understand. So when you said you see the world with two sets of eyes, right? One people who you haven’t talked to, you’ve spoken to, people that you have. Once I’ve spoken with somebody, whether they’re a hangup or reject or not now, or you caught me in the car driving my daughter to softball practice, or what have you, they go into the buckets, they go into the process that needs a little bit more conversational nurturing. Is that what I under understand you to say?

Donny Crawford (16:40):

Absolutely. When you have an initial conversation with someone, you get so many bits of information about the type of person that person is when you’ve had a conversation with them that you actually, all of us instinctually have this gut feeling on the right time and way to approach someone else. It’s instinctual. We all get it. Sometimes it’s just like, I would not set up an appointment with that person in three days, if my life depended on it, because they’re just going to recognize me and they’re going to yell at me if I call them back in three days. So that gut feeling tells me, Hey, let me make sure that I design a strategic way to go after that individual again. If I have a call with them, “Hey, I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And they’re like, “No, I’m not interested,” and they hang up on you.

Donny Crawford (17:30):

It’s like a lot of sales rep would be like, that guy I don’t need to talk to again. I don’t want to, but my gut tells me, Oh, that’s a perfect person to approach in a month. And what am I going to say to that person in a month? I’m going to say, “Hey, on December 11th,” or whenever it was that I spoke with the person, right? “Hey, when I talked to you on December 11th, I think I caught you at a bad time is now a better time.” And they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, I got a little time now, what was this about?” You can just go into that conversation in a nice soft way where you actually have informed them I’ve spoken with you before. We know each other.

Corey Frank (18:10):

That trust factor as Chris talks about that, that meter’s moved a little bit closer.

Donny Crawford (18:15):

Absolutely, it has.

Corey Frank (18:16):

You’re not an abject frigid stranger. You’re still a little bit of stranger, but you drop something social from the conversation we had. And I think more importantly from your kind of bucket analogy here, Donny, it sounds like I know they’re a picker-upper.

Donny Crawford (18:31):

Absolutely important.

Corey Frank (18:31):

I don’t know what the technical name is for that, but I want to separate the picker-uppers because not everybody who has a phone who’s on my Zoom or Lucia or SalesIntel list is a picker-upper.

Donny Crawford (18:42):

True.

Corey Frank (18:43):

So it’s nice to know who picks up. Even if they’re going to yell at me, they’re still a picker-upper and they have a higher score than maybe who doesn’t.

Donny Crawford (18:50):

Yeah, absolutely true. In fact, In my follow-up bucket of lists of contacts to go back after, I have notes for individuals who have hung up on me in January 15th and March 11th and May 21st. I have a list of the times they’ve hung up on me. And at one point during a follow-up, it’s like, “Hey, so-and-so. I’m so glad I got you on the phone again here. On January 15th, you hung up on me, on March 11th you did. You’re a really busy guy. Every time I get ahold of you, you just don’t have time to chat. I’m curious when a better time to talk to you would be.” I don’t even mind letting them go again, because when you bring their mind to the fact that you’re not going to give up on them, there’s a certain amount of respect people start to give you. When you come across as a trusted advisor, someone who truly is invested in helping them and won’t give up on them. Even if they’re being really, really difficult.

Corey Frank (19:52):

Well, I’ll tell you what, if we ever create a way back machine or uncle Rico perfect it, I’d bring it back to my high school days because calling the girls, trying to find a date for prom, that approach of keeping track of the hangups I could have cleaned up. So maybe you moonlight a little bit as a high school guidance counselor, right? To show guys that-

Donny Crawford (20:12):

Just like wear them down.

Corey Frank (20:13):

Of course-

Donny Crawford (20:14):

And eventually, you’ll get that date.

Corey Frank (20:15):

But do kids even call each other in high school anymore? I don’t know Chris. It sounds like they probably do Instagram or something. They don’t even pick up the phone and the gauntlet of getting past the father to ask the daughter. I don’t know if that angst exists anymore for these poor kids.

Chris Beall (20:32):

I actually think those who do use the voice, dominate their markets, just like in any other market.

Donny Crawford (20:38):

That’s true.

Corey Frank (20:39):

It doesn’t matter if you’re dominating the father of your target or the person you’re trying to get ahold to in IT.

Chris Beall (20:46):

Well, let’s face it, what Donny’s talking about here is predicated on something that in a way, if I were just listening to this, I’d go, well, still Donny, you’re kind of crazy, right? So you’re going to let somebody go and then you’re going to have this task that’s in Salesforce. And now you have to go look at the task when it shows up and then you’re going to dial them and then they’re not going to be there and you’re going to get their voicemail. And then you’re either going to leave a voicemail or not, and then give yourself another task. But clearly that’s not what you’re doing. So are you saying that ConnectAndSell has a mechanism in it that sort of does this for you? That as this the task exists, let’s talk to this person in the future, starting on this date would be one I’d like to try, here’s what I’m going to say to them, but you don’t have to execute the task. By some magic does ConnectAndSell thing does that for you?

Donny Crawford (21:37):

Yeah. If you recall, even from Ryan’s discussion, the buckets are so important. And even with his buckets, you can segment into two groups. One is a cold calling bucket or an initial conversation bucket. People who you’ve never spoken to before, but you’ve verified and it’s been a good bucket. The next bucket are people who you have spoken to. And that the priority of going after that list is so highly important. And yeah, luckily in ConnectAndSell it’s literally just running your open tasks until you get ahold of those people. And it’s just automatically running. It’s just, I’m going to be able to call on them and if they don’t pick up the first time and I try to attempt them, that’s fine. I’ll call them tomorrow. I’ll call them tomorrow two or three times until they pick up.

Donny Crawford (22:22):

But it’s important for me to always go after this list because it’s always going to convert higher. And luckily there’s a mechanism that even if I don’t get ahold of them two times, five times when trying to get them back on the phone, 10 times eventually they’re going to answer the phone and I will have a little mechanism called the teleprompts. I think Sean McLaren is the designer of the teleprompts. It’s like giving a speech to the person when you get them on the phone. And it’s exactly what you want to say to them. And if you design that the right way, the teleprompt is honed in exactly what you want to say and the purposes of the call, it’s magic. That is your magic list. That is the best bucket you could ever go after is your follow-ups.

Chris Beall (23:04):

Actually, it’s not, I disagree. The best bucket you cannot ever go after are the folks that you went through a discovery process with and did not move forward with you because now you have something really special. You know a lot about them. So with regard to getting them into a process, that is the best list. The very best list is your closed lost.

Donny Crawford (23:28):

I agree.

Chris Beall (23:29):

The very best of all.

Donny Crawford (23:32):

But if you were to simplify the two buckets of people I’ve never spoken to, and people who I have, even those closed lost are going to start to fall into our followups.

Chris Beall (23:42):

They’re all in that one, they’re just the cream of the crop.

Donny Crawford (23:44):

Exactly.

Chris Beall (23:44):

The other cream of the crop that people don’t call, which is in the first list is folks who are inbounds, that they haven’t spoken with.

Donny Crawford (23:53):

[inaudible 00:23:53].

Chris Beall (23:53):

Because they tried them once or twice and gave up. And remember, we did an experiment once, an experiment, we did a diving catch once with a company down in Chandler, Arizona. And they told us they were 750 meetings behind per month to be able to make their business plan, which called for this going public. When I visited them, they had a football field inside of a building set up as a football field for entertainment purposes, for people to exercise. That’s how much money they were spending, so sure they were going public, but at 750 meetings a month behind plan, it wasn’t so great. So I asked him a question. I said, “Do you have a list of folks that came inbound, that’s more than a year old that you never spoke with?” And he said, “Well, why would you want that? That’s just garbage.” “Well, we’ll find out if it’s garbage, I’ve got some guys over here are willing to do some calling on your behalf.” We had scheduled 735 meetings for them in 11 business days. And why? Because these are people who are fundamentally interested and all they needed was a conversation.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, we’ll dissect that sales process called the “discovery call” and diagnose the problem that is keeping sales reps from making a successful one. Chris, Corey, and Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, share their opinions on the subject, and lament the unfortunate fact that most sales reps have no set method for conducting a discovery call that includes true discovery.

As Oren describes it, “Selling is a bit icky, and [salespeople] want to retreat quickly back to the relative calm of their normal lives. Once a salesperson hears one thing [from the prospect] that’s an indicator of interest, they want to hit the buzzer” and immediately jump to the sales pitch so they can end their own discomfort. As Oren sees it, this cut-to-the-chase method is the primary reason many discovery calls fail. Instead of truly finding out what problems the prospect or his company might have, which the product being offered might solve, reps skip right over the creation of a relationship that might help them eventually make that sale. Chris is convinced that salespeople can actually be coached on where they went wrong during a discovery call and how to do it in a way that works. In this podcast, you can listen to the two questions that Chris begins his own discovery calls with — and then find out what the heck “the dog, the meat, and the chain-link fence” have to do with this subject. Who knew that a discussion about discovery calls could be so insightful and entertaining?

If you missed the first half of this conversation, you can get it here:

https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/getting-prospects-from-fear-to-commitment/

—-more—-

About Our Guest
Oren Klaff is managing director of Intersection Capital, which provides training, management, and advisory services in the areas of technology banking, healthcare investment banking, and asset-backed securities. Oren is also the author of Pitch Anything and Flip the Script.

 

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:

Join us for this conversation in progress from the previous episode.

Chris Beall (02:17):

Which by the way, is not we’ve got the inside track on watching this, right? We do more of it than everybody else in the world put together. We don’t create meetings. We just help other people do them. Corey’s team is one of the sets of other people. We just help them get first conversations and follow-up conversations and if you’re doing right, you can take the market in terms of meetings and meetings are good leading indicators of the potential of the business, as long as the message happens to correspond to the value in some way.

Chris Beall (02:43):

What we’re doing is we’re pushing the bottleneck down to discovery, and what we’re finding is nobody can do discovery. So I’m fascinated with what you’re doing because I’ve been looking for a long time for some blockbuster, some stick of dynamite I can stick into the discovery process that regular people can learn, like your North Dakotans, right? They can actually learn to do it and where you can analyze where they’re going bad, where it’s coachable, because that’s the other thing we’re not seeing is… We’re not seeing methods that are specific enough that you can say, “Right there, you slipped into the sorcerer. Dude you were dead at that point.”

Oren Klaff (03:23):

Yeah, so I think in discovery, what happens is people don’t like being in discovery and then with discovery tends to rhetorical questions. Chris, would you like to make a million dollars by just going to the mailbox and collecting the mail and cash and checks?

You just rolled your eyes.

Chris Beall (03:23):

Two million. Two million.

Oren Klaff (03:44):

You just rolled your eyes. You literally just rolled your eyes. Unconscious sub-communication. You rolled your eyes. And so that’s what discovery is. It is just one big rhetorical question, because you basically know the answers to the questions largely in discovery. Discovery tends not to be a real process.

Chris Beall (04:08):

Yep. I agree.

Oren Klaff (04:08):

Right? And so one idea to riff off of, and I know what we do is we give a sense that we’ve solved this problem a thousand times. This is boring. Instead of telling people, “We’re good at it. We’re the number one company. Microsoft uses us. We have 500 people. We’ve got the best customer service. Our CEO is friends with Elon Musk.”

Instead of telling people, we find a way to show them that we solve this problem, this area all the time. We fall asleep while doing it. And then when we say, “Tell me what’s going on with you,” and then prompt that with sort of three, five, seven questions that cover the territory. Right? So circle the territory, then they’ll fill in discovery. So we’re talking about abstractly, let’s just talk about copiers, right? People don’t even sell copiers anymore do they, Corey? Is that a thing?

Chris Beall (05:06):

I’ve got one of the biggest copier sales companies in the world.

Oren Klaff (05:09):

Okay, great. I don’t know anything about copier sales, but we’ll abstract on it. So the new copier’s cinema file, they automatically in cross-correlation, send it out, fax, email, send, produce, bind, put it on your desk, FedEx and anticipate exactly. Try to giving you an example. Microsoft had a file that had to go out for a company that they were doing something with. We sent over the file and started getting emails. Before anything else had happened, they had already been at the CEO, CFO, and delivered. And everyone’s saying, “Thanks,” before they even knew the file had been sent. Today, that’s not even a thing. Anyway, some technical description of a master solution that that company would be dreaming of. Right? Somebody wants something copied, right? They wink at it. It goes to the copier. The copier bills the right accounts out. It gets to the desk. It’s in FedEx and the account assigned and it’s in DocuSign and back on the desk.

Right? And then the question, the discovery is, so what are you guys looking for? Right? What’s going to make a difference over there? Cost reduction, rapid correlation, distribution, getting the DocuSign or placing copies of the facility. What’s going on there with you guys? What hurts? What doesn’t? Where are you? So the open-ended question is what hurts? What doesn’t? Where are you? You can’t just ask that without circling the territory. Right? So the territory is cost reduction. This is what I’m guessing for copiers, cost reduction, maintenance, uptime, volume, ease of use, right? So you circle that territory and you go, “What’s going on with you? Where are you guys? What do you want to make happen?” And then, because you’ve given them context and you’ve given them a channel to go down, the discovery will unfold. As opposed to you asking, “Are you looking for cost reduction?” It’s the same process. But when you ask that, they’re very resistant in discovery to give you the real information or to give you information at all.

Chris Beall (07:06):

I think it’s the biggest issue in discovery and it’s huge enough, we can figure out how to teach it to folks so they can do the whole thing and resist the horrible things that they do in discovery, which is the whole rhetorical question thing is the worst.

Oren Klaff (07:22):

Right.

Chris Beall (07:22):

There’s no doubt about it, right? You’re taking away autonomy. You’re saying, “I’m going to put you in a corner of my choosing, and then I’m going to wear you down until you finally decide that you’re going to say yes to my next step.” That’s what people [crosstalk 00:07:35]

Oren Klaff (07:36):

I think it’s giving the example of the best possible of all, or utopia and making utopia feel like a day-to-day thing that we just do here all the time.

Chris Beall (07:47):

Yeah. So there’s a question I ask in discovery. So I do about three discovery calls a day in ConnectAndSell because I think CEOs in themselves…

Oren Klaff (07:54):

Oh. Wow.

Chris Beall (07:55):

…have no idea what they’re doing, right? And I sell a little bit. I sell about 6 million a year. I’ll probably do a little better at this year. It’s kind of a spare time gig, but it’s one of those things that I figure if I’m not out there, what do I know? And I ask two questions and they’re kind of weird questions. I want to get your take on them. But they’re strange. The first question is a very simple question. It’s a little bit of a kind of a status tip up, but it’s a little bit… It’s subtle. I just ask “So where are you on the surface of our blue whirling planet today?” And I ask it exactly like that. And I get the most amazing responses. But all I’m really trying to do is two things, get the person to see that we’re together and get them to speak with pride.

Because when people speak with pride, they start to open up and everybody’s proud of where they live. So it’s really simple, but it’s amazing what happens. And then when they get done with that, I say, “So… And I went out to your website… I try to understand…” I always try to understand businesses. I think I’m pretty good at that actually. I’m one of that guy who reads the… I read the K-1s and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t read that junk but I’m always wrong. A hundred percent of the time when I really learned about the business, I’m wrong. So tell me about this. When everything goes great in your world and your business, when it’s the perfect customer, it’s the perfect situation, their budget’s in place, their need exactly matches your product, your customer’s success, people don’t mess it up, engineering doesn’t do any bad about it, the whole thing works perfectly, how does your product change that person’s life? And they will hold forth and they will hold forth sometimes for 15 minutes.

Oren Klaff (09:34):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (09:35):

At which point, a lot of discoveries happen and I haven’t had to ask any rhetorical questions because frankly, I don’t know the answer to either one of those questions. And frankly, I don’t kind of care about the answer, but I do care about the psychological process, which is speaking with pride as an equal and then speaking with pride about their mission without using the stupid word mission and getting into mission statements with our company says things like, “Why are you doing this? Why are you taking the precious moments of your life and spending them doing what you’re doing?” Because you must believe it’s good for somebody.

Oren Klaff (10:10):

Yeah. So I give you my take on it. I was called into a pretty high volume motorcycle parts, sort of a BikeBandit, RevZilla kind of company. And so the thing about motorcycle parts that’s so challenging is they’re low volume, relatively compared to cars, relatively low volume, but there’s so much variation in parts. So even a correct part number can be a half year so you can… BikeBandit can send out what they believe is the correct part based on the numbers and the catalog number, which is very complicated. The user gets it, goes to put it on his bike and it doesn’t fit. It can be on the guy doesn’t know what bike he has. Right? He believes he has a 2004 Kawasaki KR1000 and it’s a 2004 Kawasaki K1000R. I don’t know how the motorcycle industry works, but they make minor model derivations in the same year.

So they have three of the same model. It’s just motorcycles are very intelligent specifics. Anyway, the part comes, it doesn’t fit and BikeBandit hasn’t been a malicious or malevolent and they don’t want… But the guys call and their bike is down, right? And people are very passion [inaudible 00:11:35] and they’re screaming and yelling and frustrated and threatening and all kinds of stuff is going on. And so I came in there. I’m going to say I was doing sales stuff, but on the other end, I saw this going on and I go, “Just ask the guy what kind of bike he has.” Right? Just tell him, “Hey, can you tell me about your bike? It looks GSX-R600. How do you have it set up? Tell me about the bike.”

Well, the problem became the other way where the guy would just exactly like you’re saying, he’d want to talk about his bike for 45 minutes. And I thought about this just the other day because behind me, I have all my bikes and I was talking to a guy who was selling me, trying to get me on his membership program. And we were doing a video call and I walked by. He’s like, “Oh, hey, are those your motorcycles?” Right? And I go, “Yeah. Yeah.” He goes, “Tell me about them. I’m really into that.” Right? And then I went on for 40 minutes, right? And then I realized… And I know the guy, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care at all. But he used this and I am familiar with it. So I’m a million percent in agreement, if you can get someone to talk about their motorcycle, they’re completely off of the pain they’re feeling as they’re describing the thing that they love. So when you could get somebody describing the thing that they love, it’s for discovery or any other sales or customer service process, it just creates magic.

Corey Frank (13:01):

But that process alone, Chris, that you’re using, I think, or maybe an echo that there is novelty in that process because it precisely is antithetical to how most big, dumb farm animals like me would conduct a discovery call prototypically based off of my feel, felt, found solution selling type of script. And you certainly have status as a CEO to go in, but that pattern interrupt about that novelty approach, I think, is what works with that because you’re authentic, I think, in your tonality and in your pacing and your empathy that you’re emoting, I think, that gets people to open up and I think the question, right? Certainly, or is can you… To Chris’s earlier point, can you teach that at scale? We have this kind of top layer, which is stopping on beer cans, which is creating appointments. And then if the next bottleneck is in the discovery and you have a hundred people doing biz dev and SDR, and you got 10 people doing sales, is that also an acquired gift or traits and can that be screen played out?

Oren Klaff (15:03):

For me, the screen playing it, and to be fair, we work at a pretty high level, right? Is to just square away the seven variables. So he’s buying a house, right? And you’re doing discovery on what their needs are. You can paint in the variables, right? Square-foot, build quality, schools, road-noise, price range, parking.

Corey Frank (15:29):

Sexual [crosstalk 00:15:30] neighborhood.

Oren Klaff (15:30):

Amenities. And now I’m starting to run out of stuff, right? So maybe a couple of other things. And so then say within that, and these are variables. We do this all the time. Put a hundred people in a house of 3,000 to 5,000 square feet, amenities, pool, no pool, perfect for the school. What are you trying to make happen? And now you’ve laid out the variables. And in my experience, they’ll self-discover if you give them the variables. And I think that is pretty scalable because you’re creating a sandbox. And now if they’re outside of the sandbox, you can push them back in. Right? And I think it’s the same as Chris’s question, which is in your best day, dream of dreams, best outcomes, what needs to happen here? What are you trying to make happen?

Chris Beall (16:29):

[crosstalk 00:16:29].

Oren Klaff (16:28):

Zig Ziglar, if you could wave a magic wand today and say, “Oren, go make this happen,” what is it we should do?

Chris Beall (16:39):

I think I used to actually bring a magic wand by the way that I made into our big customer meetings, where we bring all the customers together and then have the elite group advise us. I would make a magic wand each year out of three plants in my yard and tie it together with the right color thread and hand it around. So you’ve got the magic wand. You could [crosstalk 00:17:00]

Oren Klaff (17:00):

You have it in your [crosstalk 00:17:01] as well to go with it?

Chris Beall (17:02):

I did not. That would have been special. Something that I found pretty consistently in discovery that’s I think a big challenge that I see with our reps having is instead of wanting to find out, they want to get the other person to do what they want them to do. And it’s a challenge. There’s an implicit assumption, which is, “I want you to buy my stuff, whether you’re right to buy it or not, whether it makes sense for you to buy it or not.

Right? I just went through this with one of my reps the other day. He said, “So I’m trying to apply your techniques for selling and it’s working really well, but it’s really, really hard because I find myself over and over wanting to jump ahead an extra step, because your process requires patience.” And in my process, I operationalized the relationship at the end of discovery and stop selling entirely. It’s like if you want to learn more, we do an intensive test drive. It’s free. It takes you some time and a day of your people doing it. You’ll either produce results or not. Sometimes people get amazing results. Usually, they just have a bunch of conversations and find out they suck, but even that can be worthwhile and it’s a learning experience and I highly recommend you do it. And if you want to do it, I’ll introduce you to my VP of customer success and boom, I’m gone.

I’m gone. There’s no selling that’s going to happen from then on ever until the very end where they’ve had all the experience and then the question is, “So now that you’ve got the experience, do you see anything here that’s worth doing?” I see one thing, which is I think your people aren’t very good. And I think maybe doing some small sort of engagement to get them better might be a worthwhile activity. What do you say? Give them a little… That’s my one variable, right? Because that’s always the variable that people always suck. Everybody sucks. So I got an easiest… It’s like all the houses we’re going to sell have the same problem. They all face north and everybody wants a west facing exposure. Unfortunately in this neighborhood, all the houses face north so you’re not going to be able to watch the sunset. Sorry.

Oren Klaff (19:19):

Well, I think… And as we’re around the corner, I have to watch the clock here, Chris and Corey. I have a seven-year-old’s birthday party here in eight minutes that I also have to get to. So I think a thing you said triggered interest in me, which is salespeople don’t naturally want to invest in that discovery period. And once they hear one thing that sounds good, that’s a leading, an indicator of interest, then they want to hit the buzzer like in American Idol or one of those things. Right? And then end the song early and go, “I love her. Send her through. I don’t have to hear the rest of this. That was amazing.” Right? You’re juggling nine balls and everything. They’re like, “Send him through. My vote is yes.” Right? Or this is the worst thing ever so they want to hit that button early.

And so one thing we try and do is give a sense both to the buyer or the prospect and ourselves is, “Hey, listen. I’m excited. We don’t really need a… right? But I’m excited with working with you. Everything looks… This is the kind of company that we work with. We’ve done this exact same thing 15 times in the last year, but at the same time, there’s some things here that make me nervous or that are confusing. Got to sort all that out in my head. Look, I’m going to invest some time with you. Bend over backwards. On one hand, we’re busy. Don’t care what happens, right? If it works out, it works out. If it doesn’t, we’re named in Rolodex, we’ll meet another day. But for the meantime, I’d love to be involved with this project, if everything makes sense and there’s some things to clarify, I’m going to invest some time here to figure this out.”

And so if it’s contextualized and it is an investment in time, then that’s a different process for I’m waiting until I hear an indication of interest to bounce out to the next, right? So let’s invest some time together and figure these questions out. Right? And that is more process-driven than I’m waiting to hear a hot button that I can pounce on.

Chris Beall (21:48):

Yeah. I call it the dog, the meat and the chain link fence problem. As soon as the dog smells the meat, it tries to go through the fence and it becomes unaware that the gate is 10 feet to the right and salespeople are dogs, to go back to our animals. [inaudible 00:22:06] I got to get through there.

Oren Klaff (22:08):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (22:08):

Through the damn fence, and you’re going to hurt your nose. And you’re not going to get the meat most of the time. But every once in a while, they get a taste and they go, “That’ll work.” And that reinforcement, I think, is pretty damaging. We tried to engineer a sales process at ConnectAndSell where the next step is an investment on our part and it’s a serious investment. It’s an investment that we actually go into business with them for a full day of production and real things happen.

Real things like Tony Safoian and over it, SADA, Google Cloud’s number one reseller. He laughed on his podcast. When I was a guest, I asked him, “Didn’t you make like a million dollars on our test drive?” And his VP, Billy Franz laughed and go, “We made tens of millions that day, Chris.” Tens of millions. Well, it might happen. It might not. But we did put in that investment. I got on a plane. I actually took my fiance. We all went down to Austin and we did the thing and it takes seven, eight hours plus back then flying. I’m not flying anymore. Right? COVID times. But I deeply believe the next thing that makes sense and I hate calling it the next step because that’s salesy talk about the next step is something I gained control over you with, bothers me a lot. But here’s an investment we can make. You bring the people. You bring the lists. We’ll work on a little message together or not, depending on if it makes sense.

Usually, I say no, and here’s why, but sometimes that can work out. Sometimes we do it. Spooks the reps and they confuse the message that they don’t know how to deliver with the product and then they say the product sucks because they suck. Now that could go wrong. So we probably won’t do that, but we’ll see what happens. A lot of things are likely to go wrong. People would be afraid. Some of them might go home sick. We’ve had a guy have what looked like a seizure once, throwing up in the garbage can, had a panic attack. I had to call an ambulance. It was all right. Medical help was available, but usually everybody survives and we learned something together.

Oren Klaff (24:06):

[crosstalk 00:24:06]

Chris Beall (24:06):

So we’re willing to make that investment if you are.

Corey Frank (24:09):

A podcast that you’re on with Tony and that test drive, millions of dollars. That is nothing on the podcast here that we just put in the can over the last hour. So we’re going to let Oren get to Asher’s birthday party here. I’ll tell you what. This is like… I remember watching the Black Belt Theater as a little kid here. We got the Northern Shaolin Temple against the Southern Shaolin Temple. Right? And we’re going to kind of explore this maybe in the next episode where we talk about discovery and tone and how to do that properly again a little bit more in detail.

Oren Klaff (24:43):

Hey Corey, how am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to do that?

Corey Frank (24:47):

What would you like me to do next?

Oren Klaff (24:49):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (24:51):

What do you want me to do?

Oren Klaff (24:51):

Right. Well…

Corey Frank (24:55):

It’s on your third book that’s coming out. Right? [crosstalk 00:24:57]

Oren Klaff (24:58):

Right. Okay. Well…

Chris Beall (25:00):

Your book is awesome. I heard a testimonial for it today from Jared Robyn who’s got this thing called the… They’re doing an outbound club thing where they’re doing e-sports as cold calling or cold calling as e-sports. He said, “I read Flip The Script, then I read Never Split The Difference. Then I went back and read, Flip The Script again.” And he says, “Now I feel like I know something.” So you’re inspiring folks out there. And I think actually making a difference when the hardest thing in the world, which is to get people to sell in a way that makes sense for human beings and can be done for all products. So I think it’s just simply awesome.

Oren Klaff (25:36):

Well, I think the last point… My goal is that people should not feel like selling is a thing that they have to do, but it is a bit icky and they want to retreat back to their normal life. And then they have to go all those chores or… but having to clean it, take dishes, to then wash the dishes, or it’s this thing that yes, you have to do it. You’ve signed up for it, but you have to get out of yourself and go do it and then come back to yourself when you’re done. And that is one thing I was hated feeling about selling and so it should be so integrated with who you are really, your values, what you believe, what you would do in the normal world, what makes you feel good and so that’s what I want to give people is a sense like I’m working in a space that I’m myself. I’m not trying to be someone else or do things that other people do. I’m just myself and I’m doing things that make sense for me and I’m selling and that is magic.

Chris Beall (26:47):

It truly is magic. Well, I’m on your team now. So let’s say if you can use me for something.

Oren Klaff (26:53):

Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Corey.

Corey Frank (26:55):

Thanks. Take care. I appreciate it. [crosstalk 00:26:57] Market Dominance Guys.

Oren Klaff (26:57):

Have a great weekend guys.

Corey Frank (27:00):

Right. Happy birthday, Asher.

Oren Klaff (27:01):

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

You’re about to make a cold call, hoping to get a commitment out of your prospect. What are you feeling? A little trepidation, perhaps? As all salespeople know, that’s the fear of rejection. But have you ever considered that your prospect is feeling some fear too? It’s true: most prospective customers feel the fear of having to talk to an invisible stranger. That’s a lousy way to start a conversation with someone you’re wanting a commitment from. So, how do you, an invisible stranger, get your prospect, an unknown person, to go quickly from fear to trust, then from trust to curiosity, and, finally, from curiosity to commitment — all in about a half of a minute? And how do you do it so the call doesn’t end with a disappointing outcome? Chris, Corey, and today’s Market Dominance Guys’ guest, Oren Klaff, managing director of Intersection Capital, tackle this challenge with a discussion about trust and how to manufacture it, especially at the speed and scale necessary for startup founders to glean success — before their new venture runs out of money.

Listen to the continuation of this passionate conversation:

https://marketdominanceguys.com/e/why-cutting-to-the-chase-in-discovery-calls-fails/

—-more—-
About Our Guest
Oren Klaff is managing director of Intersection Capital, which provides training, management, and advisory services in the areas of technology banking, healthcare investment banking, and asset-backed securities. Oren is also the author of Pitch Anything and Flip the Script.

 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (01:54):

So, we’re going to jump right in on the recording, because we got the great Oren Klaff. Oren, I am listening to Flip the Script. It is making me a little sick actually, when you come right down to… I’m getting a little ill because I keep going, “Oh, shit. I do that. And I didn’t have a name for it. I’m such a dope.”

Oren Klaff (02:14):

Yeah. It’s funny. I get calls from guys at Goldman Sachs, and they’ll go, “Hey, listen. Listen. That’s a great book. Just want to tell you it’s great. But we do that. You didn’t invent that.” But, it doesn’t say I want to tell you about the things that I invented.

Chris Beall (02:30):

Right. [crosstalk 00:02:30].

Oren Klaff (02:30):

All it says is you should do this, or well, you wrote it down good, we just didn’t have time to write it down. Yeah, okay. Well, that’s why you don’t have a book.

Chris Beall (02:39):

I was just talking to a guy named Jared Robin, who started the thing called RevGenius, and they have a thing called the Outbound Club. So we signed up to sponsor it, and we’re going to provide unlimited ConnectAndSell to the participants. And we’re making an e-sport out of cold call. And your e-sports story with the sniper was what I just finished listening to. And I said, “Look, dude, what we’re going to do is we’ll make an e-sport out of this. We’re going to give Mark Cuban a call. He’s an e-sports guy. I’m going to say finally, an e-sport for business.”

Oren Klaff (03:08):

That’s awesome. Yeah.

Chris Beall (03:09):

It’s time [crosstalk 00:03:10].

Oren Klaff (03:10):

That is awesome. Man, I wish I was smart.

Corey Frank (03:13):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m the Paul Shaffer, the perpetual Ed McMahon, Andy Richter. On this couch today, as I was preparing for this to finally get two of my good friends, two of my good mentors in one virtual room at the same time, I was telling Oren earlier, about 90% of the soundbites and riffs that I’ve used over the last couple of years I think has come from one or both of your sources, and the tank is running low. So this is a purely selfish endeavor to fill that tank and to shamelessly steal all this information, [crosstalk 00:03:48]-

Oren Klaff (03:48):

Oh really? You need a sound bite? You need a sound bite? Here’s a good one. Just tell your kids, “Hey, I brought you into this world. I can take you out.” That’s a good soundbite.

Chris Beall (03:55):

That is a good one.

Corey Frank (03:56):

I think that was in Pitch Anything. I’ve used that before. We had one of the titans of… Don’t step on my lines, here. One of the titans of sales thought leadership, author of a few best-selling books. Pitch Anything, which is one of the top five sales books of all time. He is a consummate craftsman, constant alchemist of our profession, and has done more to advance the boundaries I think of sales thought leadership than almost anyone in the field today. We have the one, the only Oren Klaff to go along with the Sage of Sales here on the market dominance podcast today. Chris Beall, please welcome Oren Klaff to the program.

Oren Klaff (04:38):

Thank you. That was nice. I just wish I had more people saying nice stuff about me.

Corey Frank (04:44):

Today, it’s great to have, because I think especially we were talking about Flip the Script and Pitch Anything, and Chris, you’re knee-deep and Flip the Script right now. One of the things we talk about on the Market Dominance podcast, Oren, is this concept of cold calling, and how do you get and manufacture trust at scale?

Corey Frank (05:03):

One of the things that Chris and I talk about is the state of a prospect. When we first call, their natural state as this invisible stranger who’s calling them, right Chris, is that fear. That’s their emotional state. And so how do you get from fear to trust and then trust to curiosity, and that curiosity and turn that into commitment?

Corey Frank (05:26):

So, I think as Chris and I were talking about last week, it’d be great to ask you your thoughts of how you manufacture trust. And do you agree that it can be manufactured at scale? And how do you attack that concept that somebody who is not expecting a phone call, yet we need to penetrate that veneer, that barrier that they have in order to get some trust.

Oren Klaff (05:55):

I mean, this is going to be a very fast entry into the world of Pitch Anything and Oren Klaff. I mean, it would be good for people to scale into it.

Oren Klaff (06:05):

But basically, I mean, this presumes that trust is a valuable state, all right? This presumes that them trusting you is a valuable state for them to have. And I think that is a good, common assumption that’s been in sales for over the last 50 years. The problem is that I think if you really look at trust, not academically, although you can look at it academically, not in conversation with guys like us who dabble in this, but in your own life, where have you ever manufactured trust rapidly? One function of true trust is time. Time is ball of wax choking on a splinter.

Oren Klaff (06:47):

So time. And so I think in my worldview, you’re really looking at a proxy for trust. Something that stands in for trust because you don’t have, in five seconds, 10 seconds, three minutes, five minutes, 11 minutes, 59 minutes. In my mind, that is not enough time to get real, defensible, robust, high quality, leverageable, you can trade on it, put it in your pipeline, this is going to happen trust.

Oren Klaff (07:17):

And give you an example. My partner Jack called me up today, and I go, “Jack, I don’t like the way you sound today, because we’re doing a deal, and you don’t sound happy.” Right? “And so you’re going to make a couple million dollars here. You should be coming out of your sneakers, or whatever it is you’re wearing over there where you are, and excited and we’re making money. And you’re making me nervous, because you’re not happy about making more money than we’ve made all year. What is going on?”

Oren Klaff (07:43):

He goes, “No, no, I love the deal. I just don’t know that the money is going to show up, the two million bucks is going to show up.” I go, “Listen to me. Write this on your arm. Oren Klaff is delivering two million dollars for this deal. And go on the weekend and get yourself happy, because I can’t take it, this unhappiness.” And he goes, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

Oren Klaff (08:03):

Trust. We’ve been working together for 10 years. Now, he makes his next phone call, and he goes, “Mumble, mumble, mumble,” right? And the guy goes, “Hey, what’s going on Jack?” “I don’t know if the money is going to show up.” And he goes, “Don’t worry. I’m going to make the money show up.” And he’s just going to go, “Mumble, mumble, mumble,” because he doesn’t trust the guy. Trust takes years to develop. You need a proxy for trust.

Oren Klaff (08:23):

And so, I’ll tell you a quick story. We go to rent a… Because at some point in my career I [inaudible 00:08:31] book, and a lot of people love me, and then the podcast and everything like that. And we go to rent a studio in Los Angeles. 10,000 square feet, because Oren Klaff’s big head needs a 10,000 square foot studio to be filmed in. And they have a crane that zooms down, and cameras, and audio gear. Because that’s when I thought that really mattered. Maybe it does.

Oren Klaff (08:50):

So anyway, so we walk in and we’re in the green room. No, we’re in the lobby, we’re not in the green room, and the guy, “Listen, we have another thing film…” Just when we were going to check it out to hire it, right? Because it’s whatever, $10,000 for the day. It used to be real money back in the day, Corey. And so the guy goes, “You can go back and check it out, the space. There’s another film crew back there. Just wanted to let you know, watch out for the line.” And we go, “Well, okay, so it’s Los Angeles. Fashion line, fishing line.” Watch out for the line. We go, “Yeah, we’ll watch out for the line, great.”

Oren Klaff (09:17):

We walk back there. Whoa! It’s a lion! L-I-O-N. It’s a lion. All right? But don’t worry. And so they’re filming the lion for a vodka or a watch commercial with a half-naked woman. But she’s not with the lion, right? That’s not how, when you see that in a magazine… Sorry, Chris, I’m taking over your podcast, but when you see a woman with a lion, the woman is not there with the lions. The lions are dangerous. And so there’s no safe lion. You guys know that, right?

Oren Klaff (09:49):

So anyway, we’re talking to guys and he goes, “Shit,” very softly. “You don’t want to upset Major.” I’m like, Well…” And so they go, “Don’t worry. Major, there’s an invisible fence. There’s an invisible fence that keeps Major from hopping out on the crew and everything like that. But you just don’t want to move fast and look like prey and everything like that. So just keep it down and don’t move fast.”

Oren Klaff (10:11):

And then I’m talking to one of the crew, he’s like, “Yeah, the invisible fence works a hundred percent, right? Unless Major gets mad, and then he doesn’t give a shit about the invisible fence,” right?

Oren Klaff (10:21):

And so I feel like these rules here that are in place are this invisible fence. And you want to find things today… Because everything’s changed. Let’s not get into the change, Zoom, and COVID, and not meeting in person, and number of contacts, and data and machine learning, and databases, and AI, and constant ringing of phones, and look-alike audiences and all that stuff, right? So all that change.

Oren Klaff (10:46):

So I think the stuff leftover from the 1950s of trust and value proposition and a trial close, you can get your inner Major, break out of your invisible fence and try some of that stuff outside of the line. And so, then I will take you somewhere that I got by getting mad and breaking through my invisible fence, and a proxy, I think, for trust. But by the way, we’re talking quite abstractly. Maybe we should just mock up a call so we can just mark what trust is. So Corey, I mean, you’re great at this. What would a trust script sound like?

Corey Frank (11:23):

Well, we happen to Chris, you want to talk about the breakthrough script, since this is what the folks at ConnectAndSell use on the phone millions of times a year. So let’s walk through the steps on this. And Chris, you had Chris Voss from Never Split the Difference certainly give his thoughts on this. So now we have another titan in the arena here, let’s get some of Oren’s impression on this.

Chris Beall (11:47):

Sure, absolutely, Oren. I love it.

Chris Beall (12:32):

By the way, Oren, I used to play with a lioness when I was a kid. My mom worked at a veterinarian’s office, and they boarded this lioness every year. And my mother actually encouraged me to stick my hand out, and this animal would take my entire hand up to mid-forearm in her mouth. And I quote, she would say, “Ahhhhhh.”

Oren Klaff (12:54):

Oh, that’s incredible. That’s incredible. Yeah.

Chris Beall (12:59):

So I made sure to use my left hand just in case my mom was wrong. Because then at least I could have a shot at life after that [crosstalk 00:13:08] my mom.

Oren Klaff (13:08):

Oh no, I mean, those animals… My parents are from South Africa. Those animals are gentle, beautiful, kind, loving, sweet. Until they’re not.

Chris Beall (13:21):

Until they’re not.

Oren Klaff (13:25):

It’s not like me at six o’clock, “Hey guys, I just want to let you know I’m getting irritable, okay? Everybody stay out of my way. Just let me eat dinner, read my email, get work done, and go to bed. But clear the hell out of my way.” You don’t get that from a lion. I mean, they’re like wolves.

Oren Klaff (13:41):

Anyway, I know this is not an animal show, but wolves, they take these baby wolves, right? And they’ve never seen anything but a human. So they raise them in contact with humans 24 hours a day, right? They don’t have contact with her, with the parent wolves. And they raise them to be socialized with humans. They’re never out of contact with a human. And even then, I saw a whole, not 60 Minutes, but whatever the… Discovery Channel thing on it. Even then, a young pup Wolf with a human that he’s been in contact with hundreds of times, for a hundred hours, his main contact in the living world, will just snap and attack.

Chris Beall (14:16):

Let’s just play. Yeah, that’s the world I grew up in.

Chris Beall (14:18):

Hey, so the context here for this particular trust thing that we’ve been exploring on Market Dominance is about two alternatives, two different ways of approaching large markets. So this isn’t deal at a time kind of stuff at the beginning. This is how do you go from, “Huh, I think I should be selling to somebody out there of these thousands,” to figuring out who you should actually be selling to, to actually doing it at pace and scale? And doing it with people you can hire. This is the Silicon Valley problem, I’ll call it.

Oren Klaff (14:50):

Sure.

Chris Beall (14:51):

But it’s a problem that others have. We work with a company, and I was just talking to him today, and he said, “Don’t say our name.” So think German air compressor company sells to factories in the U.S. and in Germany, obviously.

Chris Beall (15:06):

So the question on their mind was, well, we got these door knockers, right? Got about 72 people in 17 branches, and then knock on doors. And then this internet of things comes along and they can’t knock on doors anymore. Every factory starts to put up fences, put up a security guard. Now you got to get an appointment. So how can we teach our door knockers to get an appointment?

Chris Beall (15:27):

So the amount of trust that’s required is kind of like the amount of trust that’s required when my mom and the lioness’s owner, said, “Go ahead. Let her play with your hand,” right? It’s not the amount of trust that’s required for me to say, spend a night in a company of that lioness when she was hungry. It’s not that depth where I can put my life in her hands. Not like my buddy Jim Haggart sent me a birthday card two days ago, and [inaudible 00:15:52] said, “You’ve got a pretty deep relationship with this guy.” I said, “Guy saves your life more than 150 times, you’re going to have a deep relationship. That’s literally trusting you with my life.”

Oren Klaff (16:01):

Right.

Chris Beall (16:03):

But this is a little bit different. What this is, is when you look at the beginning state, which is, we don’t know who to talk to. And then you look at the information paucity. We don’t have enough information to tell us who to talk to, so we’re going to have to have a conversation in order to get a conversation about having a conversation. So now you’re in this problem, and then you’re trying to figure out how do I do this at pace and scale before I run out of money. Which is the big issue with all these Silicon Valley guys and even a German air compressor company. You don’t run out of money. You’re the boss. You run out of keeping your job, right?

Oren Klaff (16:34):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:34):

Because you didn’t get it done. So as we looked at this, and we get to look at it scientifically. We deliver a few conversations a year, about two and a half million. And so we have a fair amount of grist for our mill. I don’t know what two and a half million squared is, but it’s a big-ass number. So, we have statistical significance against a big number of two and a half billion squared, roughly.

Chris Beall (16:57):

And when we looked at what folks were doing, they were trying to do the old-fashioned thing of leading with value. And so they’re leading with value. First, they lead with rapport, like me, then value, business value, and then they’re hoping to get in a relationship that has something to do with the value.

Chris Beall (17:13):

And what we found was this guy in Denver that we had, name is Jordan [DuFour 00:17:20], was leading a different way, and it made everything better in the sales cycle. He worked for us. He was selling ConnectAndSell, using ConnectAndSell, works for us. And he was leading like this. “Oren, I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And that two-sentence thing he was doing, which we all thought was goofier than the goofiest thing we’d ever heard. He is a goofy guy. Jordan, if you’re watching this, you’re kind of a goofy, dude. He has a very great skill and asking people for things. He has no hesitation, right? But he would have better results all the way through the sales process, and that was the only thing he did different.

Chris Beall (18:00):

So we asked ourselves, well, what happens when other people do it? I just blindly tried. Good science, right? Just spread it around and see what happens. And so we did that and it had the same effect over and over and over. But only if they got the tone right. “I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called?” And we still didn’t understand the damn thing, but we spread it around.

Chris Beall (18:19):

And then this guy Noah Blumenthal comes along, and I help him get his company’s named sold, a big company in Redmond, Washington. They called up one day, didn’t say who they were. I figured out who they were. I was advising this company $1.1 million in one day. So now he’s got a little bit of money. He’s not going to go out of business. He’s got a product, and not much product, interesting concept. And he’s going out to sell it, and he hires a sales guy. Calls me up, says, “Oh, I hired a sales guy. I’m so proud.” I said, “Great. So now I’m going to fire you as an advisor. I’m not going to advise you anymore. Because what we’re going to learn is you don’t know how to hire sales guys. Which we already knew. So you’re spending money to find out something you already knew. That’s stupid. Let’s not do that. You got to sell this damn thing yourself.”

Chris Beall (19:05):

He said, “Well, how do I get the meetings?” I said, “You’re going to cold call the CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies.”

Oren Klaff (19:10):

Sure.

Chris Beall (19:11):

He said, “I’m going to do what? I’ve never cold-called anybody in my life.” We argue, we argue, we argue. Finally he says, “If I’m scripted, I can try it.” I said, “I don’t do scripting.” This is back when I was ignorant of scripting. I said, “Well, so what?” And he says, “Well, I do scripting. I do it. I do it for TEDx talks for other people. I’m an expert.” I said, “Okay, let’s script you.”

Chris Beall (19:34):

He scripts himself up five hours, three sentences later, and he comes up with these three more sentences. He tries it out. He gets three times the appointment rate we’ve ever seen. And he’s lame-ass on the phone. Lame-ass. Noah, my forgiveness, but you will agree with me if you’re watching this, that you sound like you’re reading the script because you’re reading the script. And he gets meetings with the chief operating officer of Dell Technologies and stuff like that.

Chris Beall (20:02):

So now we’re going, “Holy moly.” We got a technology that delivers 10 times more conversations. This guy has just proven you can be lame-ass and get meetings on a curiosity-based script whose main feature is this weird opening that he didn’t invent, someone else invented it.

Chris Beall (20:21):

And then I asked Chris Voss about it at a dinner one night. And he says, “Oh yeah, all we got to do is we got seven seconds to get somebody to trust us in a hostage negotiation phone call. Seven seconds is all we got. It’s too late otherwise. And we got to show them we see the world through their eyes and we got to prove we can solve a problem that they have right now.” And I thought, “Holy shit, I’m the problem they have right now, and I know I’m competent to solve that problem.”

Chris Beall (20:46):

And so that’s the smidge. It’s a sliver of trust. It is not bet your house, do a deal with me. It’s just enough to reverse the standard equation, which is I’m going to get value into your head first. After all, I ambushed you. I’m an invisible stranger. I’m like the worst thing in the world. I showed up from across the river. You paint your face vertically, I paint mine horizontally. You put a bone in your nose, I’m the idiot who puts them in my ears. I’m horrible. And when I show up, I’m invisible, it’s nighttime, and I’m here to change your demographics, right?

Chris Beall (21:20):

So that’s the little tiny sliver that we’re talking about. And you know what? What’s weird is it’s teachable in zero time to non-salespeople who can then actually get meetings that people show up at and are shocked.

Oren Klaff (21:38):

I have to hear what comes after it, but I would have to test the assumption that it’s creating trust.

Chris Beall (21:44):

Yeah, we could be lying to ourselves.

Oren Klaff (21:46):

Well, yeah. I mean-

Chris Beall (21:47):

[crosstalk 00:21:47].

Oren Klaff (21:47):

I think what it’s creating is novelty. And so it could be that you could get very similar results by saying, “Hey John, it’s Oren. The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.”

Chris Beall (22:00):

Could be.

Oren Klaff (22:00):

So think, so that would have to be checked, because the net result, and I think you agree, you said it yourself, is now you’ve left yourself in a very low-status position that you’ve got to claw out of.

Chris Beall (22:13):

I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Oren Klaff (22:14):

So if we’re chasing trust, right? And so I think there’s some other things that could stand in as a proxy for it. One thing I was going to go to is serendipity. So when you use serendipity, you’re going to get the same impact of, “Yes, I’m willing to stay on this line, hear what’s next.”

Oren Klaff (22:39):

So serendipity is normally we have here at [inaudible 00:22:43], “Hey Chris, it’s Oren from Intersection. Normally, my admin would be calling you on this, but I took a quick look at this, and see, I’m the managing director here, and I decided to jump on this account.” Okay? A lot of words. So serendipity is normally you would have talked to somebody low status, but I took a quick look at this, and I realized you guys need a managing director to talk to you.

Oren Klaff (23:11):

So, I’m not sure that’s perfect for all your situations, but that kind of serendipity is very attractive to people, and we’re not sacrificing status. Saying, “I know I’m in the interruption,” is now a hole that we then have to fight out of.

Chris Beall (23:27):

Actually, I haven’t seen that. It depends on how it’s said. If you say it right, the upfront, “I know I’m an interruption,” and then you go to playful curious, “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” You’re not asking permission. Somebody says may, they’re screwed. If they say please they’re screwed. If they ask a question of fact, then you can get to serendipity and you get to it really easily, which is the very next thing. They always say, “Go ahead,” by the way. This thing, this is proven to work, and they say it with a chuckle and it’s not a downward social chuckle. It’s pretty much straight across. You’ve got to listen to some of these.

Oren Klaff (24:03):

I hear that, but it’s an eye-roller, right?

Chris Beall (24:06):

Ahhh….

Oren Klaff (24:07):

It’s an eye roller.

Chris Beall (24:09):

You and your emotional responses to this. This is science, man.

Oren Klaff (24:13):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:13):

Eye rolling or not eye-rolling, this is science. Oh, by the way, John T. McLaren rolls his eyes when he hears you read your book.

Oren Klaff (24:18):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:19):

I just hear it and go, “That’s Oren. Sounds great.”

Oren Klaff (24:21):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:24):

Here’s the thing. We’re trying to get regular people, not MDs.

Oren Klaff (24:28):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:28):

To be able to cause a senior person, much more senior than that, to take a meeting. And serendipity is in fact the key to the whole thing. Because the next thing they say, and I was listening to Flip the Script and you use this word many times, you used the word discover. We’ve discovered.

Chris Beall (24:48):

“My team and I,” you say, always. You say, “My team of linguistic psychologists or cognitive psychologists or whatever they are, there’s hundreds of them and they’re ranked back there, have discovered blah, blah, blah,” right? Which makes you innocent. We don’t have to have any psychological reactance. Because you found it. You were lucky. It’s serendipity. We’re so happy for all of us. We want to rub shoulders with the lucky dude, right?

Oren Klaff (25:14):

Right.

Chris Beall (25:16):

And so we teach these people to raise their status immediately to being somebody to be curious about, somebody who has discovered something new, and somebody who’s a little ambiguous in terms of who they are. Which you do also, you say, “My team and I,” right? You never just say, “I have discovered,” right?

Oren Klaff (25:34):

Right, right.

Chris Beall (25:34):

You never say that.

Oren Klaff (25:34):

Of course not. No.

Chris Beall (25:35):

We teach people to say this. To get their attention they say, “I believe.” So that’s the established… When I say, “I believe,” you should listen, right? “Oren, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough.” That completely eliminates, and then we say some really bad-ass thing that it completely eliminates, right? And the bad-ass thing is normally something economic like cost or risk or something, something emotional like frustration.

Oren Klaff (26:02):

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Beall (26:03):

And something, we call it strategic, like you’re trying to go somewhere and there’s a blocker, and we’ve discovered a way of doing something about it, but we’re not going to tell you what it is, we’re not going to tell you what business we’re in, and no matter how often you ask, we’re not going to tell you that shit. We’re just not going to tell you. So for us, we say, “I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the waste and the frustration that keeps your best sales reps from being effective on the phone or even using the phone at all. And the reason I reached out to you today is to get 15 minutes on your calendar to share this breakthrough with you. Do you happen to have your calendar available?”

Chris Beall (26:36):

And what is interesting and surprising is this shit works, right? And it works a funny reason. Because the journey, you can call it trust or something else, the journey is from I ambushed you and you don’t like it, probably because you’re afraid of me. And then I relieve the fear, so maybe it’s relief, but you’re willing to go a little farther. And then I go immediately to serendipity, to curiosity. And then I let the curiosity sit there and see if you’re willing to make a commitment, which is not to do something but to tell me something. If you happen to have your calendar available. It’s just a simple question. Most people do. It’s a question of fact.

Chris Beall (27:19):

And we haven’t found anything better that’s teachable to regular people so you can hire them, like Corey does, and have them producing money that day, which is what our goal is. We want to hire regular people and have them producing money that day, regardless of the business.

Oren Klaff (27:40):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (27:40):

So far, eh… Now what I want to do is take my guys because they’re in discovery and take my customer’s guys and gals because they’re in discovery and teach them to flip the script. Because I think we push the bottleneck down there now, because we can manufacture meetings [inaudible 00:27:57].

Oren Klaff (27:58):

That’s where we live. We think today what has happened is leads are available. We don’t have anybody who really can’t produce leads, or can’t get leads, or can’t go with ConnectAndSell and Corey. And so conversion is… I think the larger issue today is you can get on a call, you can get on the calendar, there are efficiencies either on the pure technology funnel side, on the advertising, on the intent-based side, or the outreach, as you’re discovering and using is creating efficiencies in the lead creation, right?

Oren Klaff (28:37):

So then we get the 15 minutes. And then we get the value proposition out in terms of the… And then we get to an offer. And then conversion, then, is a higher-order skill set that we need these same efficiencies in. How can you take a regular person and get them to improve on conversion on the leads? So that’s the next I think goal in terms of scalability is scaling conversion once you’ve got lead generation or appointment generation scaled.

 

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Every single thing that happens in sales is about learning — on both parties’ parts — and this includes presenting and discussing value metrics with prospects and with customers who are up for renewal. What works best? Adopting an attitude of rampant optimism or one of friendly skepticism? Should the value metrics you present be the same, or should they vary when you’re talking with inbound prospects versus outbound prospects? Is it most effective to emphasize only one appealing value, or is it better to trot out several beneficial metrics?

 

In this third Market Dominance Guys’ conversation between Chris, Corey, and Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, this trio of experts discusses how to price your company’s offering, how to handle discount requests, and what to do about a prospect’s fixed-budget limitations. Most importantly, they delve into the reality of what happens when you have successfully convinced a prospect of the value of your offering — to the extent that he is now a champion of your product or service — but when he carries your banner back to his company, he is faced with a bunch of skeptics who haven’t had the benefit of hearing your pitch. Since 98.3% of all sales decisions are fought internally, you’ll want to hear the strategy Chris, Corey, and Mike suggest for arming your prospect with the value metrics that will help him win that battle.

—-more—-

About Our Guest

Mike Genstil is co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, an innovative company that enables B2B sales and marketing professionals to easily create and share visually compelling value propositions with prospects and clients.

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:

Chris Beall (02:19):

Every single thing that happens in sales, up to the point where somebody signs a contract, is learning on the part of both parties, every single thing. And so the only question up until the point where you sign a contract is, is it worth making the time investment to continue to learn together? And pessimism is a wonderful tool at that point because saying, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what this is worth,” it’s actually more than pessimism. It’s a kind of, I’ll call it, friendly skepticism. You’ve heard me so famous or world famous Intensive Test Drive a few times. Right, Corey?

Corey Frank (02:57):

Of course.

Chris Beall (02:58):

And what do I say? I say, “I have no idea whether having a bunch more conversations is going to make any sense in your business at all. I have no idea.” And I’m being honest. I too have no idea. It could be great. It could make you seasick. I don’t know. I don’t know, but it’s pretty low cost. It’s kind of like a zero-cost option for you, a little bit of time. It sometimes produces actual business value. Every once in a while it’s a lottery ticket that pays off as Tony Sephonian said on his podcast when I was a guest. We made tens of millions of dollars during our test drive. Okay?

So maybe, but you know what I’m selling? I’m selling, “I don’t know.” And you know what my reps have a hard time selling? I don’t know. They have a hard time saying, “I don’t know,” because they want to be the rep that says, “It’s going to be great. It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be huge. You’re going to have a…” It could be that, whatever, right? I tell you what, it’s a lot easier to sell I don’t know and stand behind it than to sell huge.

Now, at some point they sign a contract. The beauty then is it’s reduced to numbers. And now you’re at the point of saying, “Okay, we’re not just learning anymore. We’re exchanging dollars. Dollars are going to change hands here.” So somebody’s got to put their career on the line to go get those dollars. So think about that person. How much of their career? Very much of it. We had a situation recently involving a very, very large company. It’s a multinational, and they’re headquartered in Japan, and their US group told us quite clearly, “Hey, guess what? At $27,000, we don’t have to go to Japan for approval. At $27,001 we do.” Right? So what do you think the first deal was struck at? And that’s the stuff, that’s why sales is not marketing.

Marketing can’t take that into account in a generic way ever, because it might not even be a concept that plays, or it might play at a really high level, but it plays a high level in terms of design of a sales process. At this point, we ask ourselves a question. How much friction do we want in the deal from approvals? If the answer is zero, make sure the person we’re talking to has the authority to approve the deal without going and talking to anybody else. If it’s okay to have more friction, which by the way, shows up as both delay and risk, then it’s some other number.

So there’s a big difference also between deals and first deals, deals and next steps. We take educational learning next steps together for quite a little while. Then we transact. But that transaction itself should be sized not just to value, which is super important, but to what fits, right? And it’s never smooth. It’s always a step function. Right now at United Airlines, my understanding is anything over… I believe it’s $50,000 goes to the CEO. Well, is anybody here dumb enough to offer United Airlines a $50,000 plus $1 deal? Because I can assure you United’s CEO’s pretty busy right now.

Corey Frank (06:11):

Right. I think we’re all familiar with Aaron Ross and predictable revenue. I think that one of the things that Ross talks about is similar to what you were saying about PI, personal impact, earlier, Chris. Is that Aaron talks about ask yourself when you’re talking to a prospect or a soon to be client, what can you eliminate, automate, outsource or delegate? And I think from the perspective of helping that… If I say, what can I eliminate, automate, outsource or delegate? Mike, your advice certainly would be to have something that’s not just quantifiable, but also visual as well to really kind of contribute to all the senses and to do the job that a CFO or a VP of sales or whomever your buyer is to do anyway. Because if I got to sell to my boss after the sales person sells it to me, I got to justify it. If you can help me do my job by thinking in those languages, eliminate automate, outsource, or delegate, I’d imagine there’s just going to be a tighter affinity there, even if my price is more because you’re speaking my language.

Mike Gentsil (07:25):

Yeah, again, I think this gets back to the persona discussion where there will be personas that will absolutely be excited about that value proposition because they want to focus on the stuff that is the higher value added activities, and they know what those are. And I think where this gets tricky, back to Chris’s point on what marketing can conceive versus what sales does, is there’s a difference between an inbound prospect and an outbound prospect. And this is really important to kind of talk through here because if I receive a lead, an inbound lead, and they’re looking for something very specific, I could come to them with this value prop of eliminate, delegate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And they might say, “Okay, that sounds interesting, but I’m just looking for something that does this.” And that this thing could be walk like a giraffe. “And we think your website says you have a tool that walks like a giraffe. Can you show me that feature?” Well, that’s what that person is trying to buy today. And this aspirational, visionary stuff around eliminating, delegating, et cetera, et cetera, might be interesting to somebody in that organization, but this person today wants this specific feature set. And so when we’re coaching folks on dealing with inbound versus outbound workflows, on the inbound side, you’ve got to play this dance. And it’s a hard, hard job to figure out what the person really is interested in learning about. They called you. They’re taking their time to meet with you and address that need, but also educate them. And this gets into challenger sale a little bit where I’m teaching, tailoring, taking control of the conversation.

You have to address the things that they care about, but then educate that they also have these three other problems that cost X, Y, and Z, which may be solved by delegating and eliminating, et cetera. But we also do the thing that you want. That value prop then has elements of quantification that solve the current problem, but then solve these other problems. Whereas in an outbound workflow, somebody may not be looking for you car doors that open like this. The person is not looking for that, but you send them a video of car doors opening like that. And you give them an image and a vision so they can do things differently that they never imagined. And that delegating thing just happened to hit them at the right time. They weren’t looking for that service, but you hit them with the right image and the right word and the right quantification of that.

So where it gets fun, frankly, is enabling people to experiment. They’re using tools, outbound tools like Outreach and SalesLoft and Yesware, et cetera, that are giving me the ability to do this rapid experimentation. And what we’re trying to insert into that for these outbound workflows is images and quantification and value that really make it come to life for that buyer that may or may not have a project that’s got budget attached currently, but it can reach those aspirational, visionary things that may be latent. It’s addressing that latent need that you may find budget.

Chris Beall (10:25):

This is brilliant stuff, Mike. The latent need might not be with that individual. It may be elsewhere in their organization. And what you’re doing is you’re actually letting them know that when that becomes the relevant part of the conversation, when they’ve got to go to Mary and Joe and Marissa and have that conversation, you’re giving them something that they can be confident in, even if they don’t care about it at all. And there’s a technique for doing this in sales that salespeople, I think, would be wise to learn. And it goes something like this.

So, Mike, as far as I can tell, the only thing that you care about, the only thing at all that we do that could even move the needle in your business is we help you see how your sales reps are doing at home. That’s it, because you had to send them all home and it’s a nightmare, but we do these other three things that sometimes people get pretty excited by. And I just want to make sure, because I think they have no relevance to you whatsoever. And then I’ll tell you the other three things, and you feel good because I’ve recognized that you don’t care about those three things, which means… Because if you never tell somebody what you think they don’t care about, they’ll think that you’re just smorgasbording them.

Mike Gentsil (11:45):

Right.

Chris Beall (11:46):

Like, “Oh yeah. You like the salmon,” right? Therefore I’m going to assume that you also like whatever it is, right? The soft cheese. But it turns out that if I say, “Mike, I suspect the salmon is really your thing and the soft cheese just going to make you sick.”

Chris Beall (12:41):

“You really hate that stuff. But it turns out we have really great soft cheese here. And am I right, that you just can’t stomach that stuff, that it may as well be a pregnant person because soft cheese really doesn’t work for you?” And you go, “Wow. Chris actually understands me.” However, Mandy is into soft cheese, and now I have that in my pocket, which by the way, don’t ever do a soft cheese. But this is where I think a lot of times, Corey, this goes back to my analogy of the dog and the meat and the chain link fence.

Salespeople make, by and large, average salespeople make this mistake repeatedly. They make the mistake of going for the win before the game is even set up. They just go for the win right now. They go for it. Like, “I got Mike, I’m going to pander to Mike, I’m going to cater to Mike.” But even if Mike’s the CEO, which in this case he is, Mike’s got other people he’s got to deal with. And say Mike’s CFO happens to be a pushover when it comes to cost savings of a certain kind, not unit price, not value oriented, but just chunk size. He’s a chunk size guy. He’s looking at the amount of money in the bank and going, “I’m not very comfortable when we get above a $23,000 investment at a time.”

And so if I said to Mike, “Mike, one of the beauties of ConnectAndSell is you can actually get in the game for 9,500 bucks and find out if it makes any sense to you.” And Mike’s thinking, “I don’t give a damn about that, but my CFO just might care about that one. Thank you for arming me for future battles I’m going to have to fight.” Because in sales 98.3% of all of the battles are being fought internally. They’re not you. You’re not on the other side with your champion. You’re on the same side with them. They’re on the other side with a whole bunch of skeptics who haven’t heard what you have to say yet.

Mike Gentsil (14:42):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (14:42):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Gentsil (14:43):

I do a variant of that technique, Chris, where you said these three things probably don’t apply to you. I say a version of that, which is, “If you can spare five more minutes, I’d like to show you two other things. One to two times out of 10, this is the coolest thing that people have seen. I don’t know that that’s going to apply to you, but I’m only going to ask for five minutes.” And then you show it to them and they’re like… Then they go down the path. “Huh, that’s really cool. Bob would be interested.” And often it’s actually more than one or two times out of 10. It’s closer to three or four or five, but you’ve got to give them confidence that what they’re going to see isn’t going to take a lot more time and you’re not going to go too far afield from what they cared about.

Chris Beall (15:19):

Yeah. The number one reason that enterprise sales fail is that your champion loves you, but doesn’t have enough confidence to put their ass on the line in championing you all the way through.

Corey Frank (15:30):

And then keep that, following that statement, what generally happens as a salesperson. And we can finish up by talking about discounts, right Chris and Mike? So I would imagine my champion loves me not enough to put faith in my solution because I didn’t arm him with enough data. And instead I’m going to panic as the sales rep, try to panic and pop smoke here. And I’m going to try to drop my pants and drop the discounting lever to try to give him a little bit of ammo to grease the skids seemingly when that may not be important at all.

And so can we say to that, I mean, is there an atomic weight, like we say to these ROI elements of hard cost savings and risk mitigation, et cetera, that Trump’s discounting? Is there this natural force where the unseen force, the sales manager who’s managing that sales rep, they’re only hearing from the sales rep that, “Hey boss, if we get another 10% or 15%, I think I can get the deal from Mike.” When the reality is, is they haven’t been speaking the language that Mike needs to perpetuate this value prop throughout his organization.

Mike Gentsil (16:45):

Yeah. I see a couple variants of discount requests. One variant of a discount request is there simply is fixed budget. The CFO has told the head of marketing, “You’ve got a hundred thousand dollars to spend on marketing this quarter. You can spend that however you want.” And the CMO says, “Okay, well I’ve already spent $75,000. I’ve got $25,000 left to spend. I can give you 25 or I can’t do the deal.” Now, theoretically, you could say, well, let’s go back to the CFO together and try to get more money. That’s theoretically possible. But the CMO is probably not… They can do that maybe once a year with a CFO. And they’re just not going to want to play that card today for this product that they haven’t used before. So that’s variant number one, they’ve got fixed budget, and we address that a certain way.

The second is there’s a competitive offer, which actually is less expensive. And so you’ll say, “Hey, your offer is $40,000. I’ve got a competitor over here that’s charging me 25. I like you guys better. But my boss, my boss’s boss said ‘Well, listen, money is tight. Let’s spend 25K.’ And if you can’t match it, I’m going to go with an inferior but less expensive alternative.” And that’s a tough one to sell into. And that’s where ROI tools… I’m going to address this one first, can be very, very effective because you can, in that case, put a picture in front of both of those folks in the management chain that says, yes, the inferior offer is 25,000, but the incremental value that you’re getting for this incremental $15,000 is $2 million because we have these features that they don’t, and we cannot discount. We’re sorry, and it’s $2 million in incremental value and that might win the deal. And that’s high stakes poker. But that is a good way to preserve your price when you know that you have incremental value. If you’re selling a commodity, it’s a little bit trickier.

In the first case where there truly is fixed budget and you believe your buyer, and that’s what they say, then what you try to do and what we coach and we do this a lot ourselves as is construct a multi-year deal, a two or a three-year deal, which escalates. Say, listen, understand you’ve got fixed budget right now. We both agree on the value of the solution, if it works, is $4 million. Right? Right. Great. Well, let’s give you the price today, but we’re in this for the value that we’re delivering. So let’s construct a two or a three-year deal where we’re going to get to those bigger prices if those metrics are hit in the first year. We both got skin in the game. We’re going to go for those metrics. And if we get them, we’re going to go to the next level next year. Right?

You can get that deal done. Sometimes, in that case, you do have to meet with the CFO and walk through it, but that’s a good conversation. You want to establish that. Those are the two main ones. It’s less, somebody just shows up. It’s like, “Ah, you quoted me 20. How about 17,000?” I don’t see that as often. I’m not sure. It’s not the buyer’s money in the first place in a business, in an organization. It’s more, if they’re moving budgets around, then they’ve got realities there. But that’s what I see. Chris, do you see a third variant or how do you address those?

Chris Beall (19:58):

Well, one way to address them… I love both those. One way to address this whole discounting question is to make it abundantly clear that you are the lowest risk party to deal with because you have the expertise and the skin in the game approach. That’s going to provide a kind of guarantee that the individual that you’re dealing with is willing to buy off on and to allow that, and the chunk size question, of course. I mean, there are budgetary chunk-sized questions. They just exist out there. So try to preserve your unit price while adjusting the chunk size. When you’re doing this, think about this all the way back to when you think about your product. If your product doesn’t have any units in it, then there’s no unit price. And if there’s no unit price, well, you got a problem, right?

So if somebody says, “Oh, I only got 25,000,” well, it turns out that really we get the best results when we only work with a subset of the users and then I’ll come all the way back to adoption. Your VCs might hate you for only taking on 100 users instead of 1,000, but there are 100 best users by definition. This is just-

Mike Gentsil (21:11):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (21:13):

Anybody who doesn’t believe that, go to the calculus, right? Every function’s got a minimum. So there are the 100 best users out there. So let’s just say, look, we get the best results this way. And we actually prefer to start smaller because that way we can focus on getting the best business results, measuring them carefully and making sure, before we go to higher levels of adoption, that we have solid results, solid processes. You’re doing your part, we’re doing our part. What do you say we fit this deal inside that? Now your unit price stays right where it was. Your chunk size is the right chunk size. It’s very rare that somebody has a unit price budget. It’s very common that they have a chunk size budget. So work with it.

Mike Gentsil (21:55):

Yeah, that’s smart.

Corey Frank (21:57):

Wow, this is just a great step. Chris, I don’t know. I think you probably agree with me that in the Beatles world, right, as an analogy, I think Mike Gentsil is the Brian Epstein of the Market Dominance Guys here. So he’s the force behind the force. And, Mike, we’d love you on anytime that you’re free. This is great. You clearly speak our language. And, man, I think we have a whole couple of new chapters in the Market Dominance Bible here that Mike just wrote in the two sessions we had together. So we appreciate that very much, Mike.

Mike Gentsil (22:29):

Thank you, Corey. Really enjoyed it. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Beall (22:32):

Thanks, Mike. This was tremendous. And thanks, Corey, as always, you seem to have come back from the brink of death, and you’re back with us. You know what we say about all dead companies, they’re equally uninteresting, but you know-

Corey Frank (22:43):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (22:44):

… not all dead people are like that, but we still love you a lot.

Corey Frank (22:48):

Well, as I think the quote goes: I wasn’t dead. I was just in Texas.

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As a follow-up to the recent Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, “Vanity, Vanity, Thy Name Is Value Metrics,” Chris and Corey continue here with part two of their conversation with Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI. Mike and Chris share their insights into value metrics and how to construct and present statements about value propositions and returns on investment. These market dominance experts explain that it’s all dependent upon the job title of the customer rep being addressed, as well as where in the sales cycle you are with that company. Is risk mitigation the most appropriate metric? Is it perhaps better to talk about productivity gains? Or would a statement regarding cost savings be more enticing as a promised ROI? And, as Corey asks, whose job is it to craft the appropriate statement for the value prop or ROI?

—-more—-

Mike cautions listeners about the importance of being careful in the representation of value when talking to a prospect or customer, because it’s necessary that the stated ROI be credible.

He then gives examples of formulas for determining what you should charge a customer by relating it to the amount that company will gain by using your product or service. As with all Market Dominance Guys’ podcasts, you’ll find this sales-related topic both
enlightening and helpful in your quest to dominate YOUR market!

About Our Guest
Mike Genstil is co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, an innovative company that enables B2B sales and marketing professionals to easily create and share visually compelling value propositions with prospects and clients.

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (02:07):

Welcome to a part two edition of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall. I am not on camera today to save precious bandwidth because I would not want to have any iota of bytes or exabytes or terabytes wasted on looking at me when we have Mike and Chris, these two experts here where I’m going to try to get out of the way as much as possible. Last time, I think in part one of our exercise with Mike Genstil hear from VisualizeROI, we were talking a little about a lot of vanity metrics that big dumb sales farm animals like me use to try to justify or dazzle their board with how we’re doing in sales. Certainly was a important episode, you should go back to the listen to in part one, but part two I thought, when we kick it off today gentlemen, let’s talk a little bit about how that spark happens between sales reps and actually the prospect when we are in the language, we are right in the heat of battle so to speak of trying to communicate ROI during the sales process.

Oftentimes we’ll talk about features and benefits and things of that nature of course, but how do we in a VisualizeROI world, they talk about justifiably earning Mike, the available budget and this value-based messaging that you talked about so eloquently in part one, how do you communicate that? How do you go beyond just a traditional budget type of conversation to paint a picture of how or why the ROI occurs? I think that would be a good place to start as we enter into the next episode of the Markets Dominance Guys here. Good to have you again Mike.

Mike Genstil (03:50):

Thanks Corey. We tend to help organizations who are trying to engage buyers around value. Think about four buckets of value, hard cost savings, revenue acceleration, productivity gains and risk mitigation and every buyer that you engage with, if they’re truly interested in your service or solution, they will have to create a business case internally that will touch on at least one of those points and often it’s several. The favorite one for buyers and sellers is hard cost savings, meaning you’re spending X with this certain vendor today and you’re spending Y with another vendor. If you shift that spend to us, you’ll actually be able to save costs and that’s dollars back in your pocket and the CFO will appreciate that argument as well as the advocate that you’re selling to. You go down the line, most B2B organizations are selling something that gets productivity gains and productivity gains are a little bit tricky to quantify the value of, because you get a lot of hours back for people avoiding certain activities. What are those hours worth and it’s hard to quantify that sometimes depending on what those people do.

For salespeople, if you get hours back from routine tasks, well, theoretically that’s more time spent selling, which allows them to actually achieve their quotas more effectively. You could say those productivity gains equate to incremental revenue booked and that’s going to appeal to every VP of sales, as well as CFO and CEO in that buyer decision-making unit. The next one is risk mitigation and so you’ve got every organization is making certain amount of mistakes, both in their internal accounting, internal processes as well as the product and services they offer to their customers. Everybody’s making mistakes. Some of those mistakes are easily measured. A good example of it is an assembly line. People typically know the error rate on their assembly line. If I produce a thousand widgets, typically a half percent have something wrong with them, if I could reduce that, that would be a good thing.

To your point though Corey on visualization, there’s two sides of visualization here. The first is the images themselves that the marketers are already doing a good job creating. Most B2B organizations that we engage with have marketing teams that are very effective at creating sales materials in the form of PowerPoint presentations or Google slides or other imagery that has very powerful images that describe value proposition, reduce carbon emissions and a picture of a cloud, reduce this, improve that, and those images are very powerful. What we do is we equip sales reps to overlay numbers on top of those powerful images that the sales reps are already using in their discussions.

That’s part A, overlaying numbers and data on top of good images and making that data dynamic and then part B is charts and graphs. Depending on who you’re selling to, some people appreciate images with data and others appreciate bar charts or pie charts, lets say you were spending X, that’s coming down to Y. The best visuals that we equip our customers with are a combination of beautiful images with numbers as well as bar charts and pie charts and line charts, showing cost savings and revenue growth over time. That’s kind of in a nutshell, how we think about it.

Corey Frank (07:04):

When I look at our cost savings or risk mitigation or productivity gains or into the other, is there one that you found Chris, maybe even from your world too in the ConnectAndSell world, that when I’m speaking the language of ROI that is more alluring or sexy or powerful than another, for instance is hard cost savings may appeal that this person, this persona, productivity may… are they all really kind of different heads at the same point?

Chris Beall (07:31):

I can speak to this from long experience, not just in ConnectAndSell but other companies. I’ve done consistently selling productivity gains that free up people’s time. That sounds great until somebody thinks it through a little bit and then the question is, well, are they going to fire people in order to also save money? Probably not, and what do they thinks going to happen with that time? I remember the general counsel of General Electric once took me aside and said, when we were selling some productivity kind of oriented stuff and he said, Chris if it doesn’t save a dollar that the CFO can see as a dollar, don’t talk about it, we call that water cooler time and we value it at exactly zero.

That was fortune one at that point and very sophisticated viewpoint, somehow I managed to listen to them well enough to change the message around from the sole savior engineers two and a half hours per part that they find to this will save you $50,000 of vendor certification each time they find a part and 11 divisions of General Electric bought our product and we became important in the electronic catalog and space for engineering. Getting that right and getting over where that hard dollar cost savings was something that Mark [inaudible 00:08:49] needed. The chief counsel of all of General Electric could stand behind as he spoke with the CFO, that was really important. Now later in our relationship, he pounded his fist on the table and said, Chris, you are destroying the General Electric company, we had a different conversation but that was the conversation we had to get in and then there was the later one.

The other thing is people respond differently at different points in the sales cycle to different things. So very early in the sales cycle, there was an attraction to upside that is not followed through later and there is a distress, an emotional distress with risk that when risk is emphasized early, it’s a wonderful thing. That is, if you say we completely eliminate, I believe we’ve discovered a break trip through that completely eliminates. The fundamental risk of X, whatever X is and then you’d say something that’s emotional and the frustration with Y allowing you to do Z. That’s pretty good. If you’re trying to get a meeting, that combination works pretty well because completely eliminating fundamental risk, this is surprising after all it wouldn’t still be there and be fundamental if that were easy, so that’s a bold claim and wiping out an emotional stressor, which is always frustration by the way of business, always, always, always frustration.

Everybody’s frustrated all the time in business because they’re trying to do really well. You know what Deming taught us that’s right. People have pride of work from show and they feel like they never quite have the time, the resources or the support to do their job as well as they hold themselves accountable for. Then they’re trying to go somewhere and that’s the upside. But if it’s the upside of like and it makes you more dollars, that’s probably not as appealing as it will let you accomplish the thing that’s been sitting on your plate for three years, you’ve been unable to move toward because you’re so busy doing other crap.

Mike Genstil (10:44):

Yeah. I think Chris, you talked about the persona and the different stages in the sales cycle and I think the way you articulated it was correct, where the CFO, particularly in conservative companies like GE are going to need that hard dollar savings, but to get to that CFO, you needed to get through some middle management layer. That middle management layer may or may not care about the hard cost savings because it doesn’t affect their job and so as you’re appealing to that person, you need to say, what is the job you’re trying to do? You’re trying to get more widgets through the assembly line more quickly, more effectively with fewer errors, at reasonable prices. You might talk about higher throughput and a lower error rate, those metrics that person might get as bonus based on those two things, throughput and error rate, so yes, the whizzbang thing that you’re selling, today you’re here, going forward you’re here on your error rate reduction, et cetera. But then when you get to the CFO you flip the thing and you compute the actual hard cost savings per your metrics, it’s vendor certification.

To kind of tie it together, you kind of build a matrix of persona on one axis and then the actual KPI’s on the other and your business value story needs to be able to show the right metric to the right persona at the right time through the sales process. It’s pretty elegant and sophisticated and you kind of need software to do that which is where we come in, but that’s kind of the Holy grail because you have to consider the entire decision making unit and what each person cares about and putting the right numbers in front of right folks is tricky, but I would agree with Chris’s point on hard cost savings is the number one thing.

Chris Beall (12:22):

We’re certainly number one at the end, right?

Mike Genstil (12:25):

At the end?

Chris Beall (12:26):

But I love this. This is so important because often in sales, we get locked in to what we consider to be a value proposition. I remember walking into Sean McLaren’s office when I first joined ConnectAndSell. I’ve been with the company for maybe a day and he was officing out of some company where he had made an investment because Sean’s too smart to rent his own office so he was getting some sort of trade out office space. I walked into his office and I just wanted to sit with the guy. He’s a genius and why not? I could learn a thing or two plus actually I’d been under the impression for years that he was dead, so watching that dead guy work is so cool. So I go and sit down and he’s got a whiteboard and it’s got two letters on it.

This whole whiteboard in big letters, they’re like three feet high, PI, and then I said, what’s that? He says personal impact. If you don’t know what the personal impact of what you’re offering is to the person you’re speaking with right now, you will never make consistent progress through the sales process. So that’s what this is about, is ROI is kind of abstract, PI is like PI personal impact is right now, but they’re related to each other. They’re related in a somewhat subtle way. The software that Mike’s company provides lets you actually make a PI statement, personal impact statement that makes sense out of what would otherwise be an ROI generalization.

Corey Frank (13:57):

I love that. I love that. Contrary to rumors he’s not dead, right?

Chris Beall (14:04):

Not very, not very at all. Every time I talked to him, he’s very lively.

Corey Frank (14:08):

That’s good a little bit. So to the point, Chris and Mike, who creates this as it come from, we talked I think a few episodes ago, Chris, about sales and marketing alignment, right? I think we’ve had 50 or 60 episodes in sales and marketing alignment, always seems to creep in there once in a while, but from your perspective on these value statements, these ROI, these PI statements, do they come from the messaging from the sales side best practices, should they come from marketing and this is what they use to empower all of their messaging. How does something like that spark or create, cause this is a philosophy but now I can point my finger and say, great, who’s going to create it, marketing has all the content. Hey, sales guys, we don’t do that kind of thing or do we? Where does it originate from?

Mike Genstil (15:00):

Yeah. It ends up being a bit of a hybrid responsibility Corey, is what we’re seeing. If you think about the evolution of a new company, imagine a company being started or founded by a founder, that founder is going to go out and acquire his first customers and his first investors and he’s going to create a pitch or she’s going to create a pitch, which is visionary. It’s going to describe problem areas that customers tend to have and how those problems can be solved with this revolutionary new thing. It’ll have imagery that talk about these problems sizes and then benefits. It may have a couple of testimonials of people that have tried it and had success, et cetera.

On day one, you’ve got a visionary founder and then that person brings on some marketing folks that are really building out the story and the message. So you’ve got this nice compelling visionary message, which is largely qualitative, some nice images and problem statements and then a couple of testimonials. Over time then as you hire and scale a sales organization, you’re getting past those early visionary customers to the early majority kind of coming back to crossing the chasm and then the late majority and the crossing the chasm was right, we should still talk about it more these days, I believe. Those buyers aren’t as effective at getting budget for a very visionary concept, they need proof points. They need to see these ROI stories and then the CFO will need to be basically agree with those. What we’re seeing is the people that are building that quantified message inside of organizations to supplement the visionary value props that were designed during the founding days and then in those several quarters after that tend to come either from product management. These folks tend to be highly analytical and quantitative, so sometimes they’ll build the quantification.

Sometimes it’s product marketing, the product marketing folks tend to think about segments of customers and the value of segments per customers and then there’s also, some of our customers in emerging function which is called the value analyst or the business value analyst. We’re seeing more and more companies that have these folks on staff used to be companies like SAP and Oracle, had small armies of business value analysts and now alumni of those organizations are heads of value at hundreds and nearly thousands of companies.

These people have a day job of building and refining value quantification for typically they get started on the biggest deals that the company is selling into and then over time they’re scaling themselves by building self-service tools, sometimes through our platform, to make it accessible for the average rep and the average deal. But at scale, what we’re seeing is a hybrid approach where the marketers are still generating beautiful slides with beautiful images and as the company releases new products with different variants of the value proposition, the value prop, there’ll be different approaches of quantifying and describing the value prop, then overlaid with actual hard calculations from either again the product manager, the product marketer or the business value analyst.

Chris Beall (18:28):

That’s what we’re seeing. As we go through the sales process, it’s interesting how these capabilities and the artifacts that come out of them are best used. Some sales job is actually to do two things. One is an assessment. Should we, does it make sense for us to move to the next step or not, to do more together? Should the relationship evolve or should the relationship stop evolving? That’s the number one job of a salesperson. When they’re testing that with somebody, these kinds of tools are incredibly valuable because if you’re the salesperson and you reach into your bag of, I’ll call them ROI tools or valued tools, and you pull out one that you think makes a lot of sense, you populate it with the relevant data that applies to the situation for this particular person that you’re speaking with and their situation and they yearn well, you just learned something.

What you might’ve learned is, huh, we really don’t have anything here for them or you might’ve learned, huh? I didn’t get it. I need to go back into the tools and find the other one that they care about. I have a classic example, I mean it is true of almost every VP of sales. Corey, you’ve run sales organization, so you’ve heard me say this to you when you were my customer, Corey you got 102 people. I think 23 it’d be a better number. What do you think? You’ve heard that from me, right? What did you say? Chris ain’t no way, right?

Corey Frank (20:02):

All of the limited self-worth I have as a man, Chris is all coalesced into the number of salespeople that I have under my payroll. I think I said something along that lines maybe not that eloquent, but that’s basically what it meant.

Chris Beall (20:16):

Yeah. I think NFW came to mind, therefore this, Hey, here’s this efficiency that will let you save money through reduced head count, I could show it to you all day long and it wasn’t going to get anywhere. So I either had to find something else or we had to disengage one or the other, so that’s sort of thing number one. Thing number two is, but if we go to the next step, new people get involved, new things happen, expectations are set and maybe expectations need to be met. So one thing that’s different between marketing and sales involved in all this is, marketing paints a picture that can be arbitrarily large in value along the four dimensions that Mike mentioned.

Sales must constrain that picture to being just large enough to take the next step and do larger. It’s really important for a successful sales cycle that you don’t overstate value early, regardless of who you’re talking to. So one of the jobs of sales is kind of odd, it’s to not to attenuate an artificial way, but to be careful in their representation of value, whether it’s risk reduction, whether it’s cost savings, whatever. So that it’s just enough to move to the next step and not so much that they get and this is a really good phrase for those of you who’ve ever done it physically out over their skits.

Mike Genstil (21:36):

Yeah. The way we address that is we always coach sales reps to say the first thing you need to find out before you do anything else is roughly what is the revenue of your customer? Because if you’ve got a customer you’re selling into this doing $20 million in revenue, you can’t give them $10 million in value next year, unless you’re going to create a rocket ship, you’re going to put the whole team in a rocket ship and send them to the moon and back and that’s worth $10 million in value to them. You’d be lucky for a $20 million company, if you add $1 million in value, which is 5%. It would be phenomenal that there’re another one to $2 million on top of that. Now, if you sell something like ConnectAndSell, which dramatically improves their sales results, well maybe you’d be getting on top of the 20 million and extra one, two $3 million in value.

But you should not say 10 million because it’s not going to be credible. Now you might get those results, that’s fine. We find that sometimes these models don’t have these [inaudible 00:22:32] in them, as Chris said, you can’t overstate but you also can’t understate, so for that same $20 million company, to tell them they’re going to get $20,000 in value, the CFO’s probably not going to care at that point and your solution better be better cost no more than $5,000, if you’re going to get $20,000 in value, maybe hopefully a little less than that. But the point would be, Hey, try to get that $20 million revenue company, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in value to a million bucks and charge them 20,000 bucks for that. That’s a good exchange of value.

I’m going to give you a 20K, you’re going to get a 100 to 200 to 400K back. That’s worth a couple of percent on top of your $20 million in revenue. That’s a story that you should be trying to tell and that’s what we train against, starting with what’s your price, what’s the value and what does that relate to their overall top line and profit associated with that? There’s variants of that, but that’s kind of how to think about it.

Chris Beall (23:26):

Wow Mike, do you actually train this stuff? Cause I don’t see anybody being trained like this. I mean, it’s like talk about one size fits all. Every rep wants to say, you’re going to get the sun, the moon, the stars, three galaxies and the unicorn and that’s just the greatest thing in the world and what you’re saying is you actually train folks. That’s how we train reps too. We train them in a five sentence way of having an okay conversation, right? First conversation. We do it because our software quote unquote works, but it doesn’t deliver as much value unless the conversation is good. So you’re saying your software quote unquote works, but it doesn’t do as much good unless they have a conversation that makes sense for that kind of customer. Is that what you’re saying?

Mike Genstil (24:10):

Yeah. Every B2B rep is in the business of getting meetings and ultimately quoting prices and trying to get contracts on. When we do the training, we say, well, what’s your average deal size? I’ll say my average deal size is $50,000. Great. So then I’ll ask the question to the room. Okay, what do you think your customer needs to get in terms of value, for that $50,000 to make sense? They’ll say, I don’t know, a $100,000. Well maybe, what would be better? $500,000? Yeah. 500 to a million bucks. 10 X to 20 X is a good story to tell, it’s credible, it’s reasonable. It’s a good story to take to the CFO so it’s okay, let’s agree it’s a million dollars in value for your $50,000 investor. How are you going to convince the customer there’s a million dollars in value?

Do you believe it? How would you prove it? Let’s say you’ve got two minutes in an elevator going back in the old days, when you rode elevators with the CEO of the company, how would you tell that CEO you’re going to get them a million dollars in value. You better know to be able to talk to that pretty quickly as a function of the things that he does, what he’s selling, how much revenue he’s making and you go there and when we frame it that way, Chris as part of the training, it actually resonates because they’re quoting prices and they’ve never really stopped to think about, huh, what should the value be? And it’s simple math. Once you kind of get them thinking that way, it’s easier to get the adoption and change the culture around value selling.

Corey Frank (25:30):

Yeah. I think we are wired. I think our good friend Oren Klaff from Pitch Anything, Chris where he talks or runs a big advocate of leveraging pessimism in your sales process, because I think Chris says you were alluding to, I mean, what type of professionals in the world are the most optimistic you’ve got entrepreneurs, especially when they’re trying to present to an investor, their product and you’ve got salespeople. I mean, their job by definition is to seed optimism. They’re programmed to promote this vision of the future while your biggest problems are solved, as he had said and you can live in the moon and the sun, as you’re saying so. Given the nature, though what you’re saying, Mike and Chris, I mean it’s counter-intuitive because given the nature of our profession, salespeople like me, we’re not programmed to be pessimistic. We’re programmed to be optimistic and push you in that direction too.

I think this optimism that bubbles up from our emotional core, I think it sows those seeds of doubt, doesn’t it Mike. Where it actually creates stress for the buyer you could say, because it’s unbelievable. My goals and Chris, you talk a lot about this in the messaging about after the breakthrough, we do X that does Y and Z and some of those are emotional pieces of the messaging and some of them are logical, but so that pessimism does wreak. You need that pessimism. I think what you’re saying to get a little bit more credibility. They shouldn’t fight that as a salesperson. It sounds like giving them that autonomy to question. Yeah. That’s reasonable. The goal of the value, the ROI that you’re saying, I can buy into that and that gives me a little bit more autonomy and trust to move the conversation along.

 

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Change is the obvious hallmark of the current pandemic. And, as most of us know, change rewards innovation and punishes those who stand pat on tradition. This is especially true in the winner-takes-all world of sales. Most people believe that true innovation springs from the use of technology. But is innovation mostly about taking a technological product or service and then marketing and promoting it to the stage called “user adoption” — or even to the more desirable stage that we’ll call “user embrace”? Or should innovation be more cultural than technical?

Join Chris as he makes the case for pursuing innovation during the pandemic and talks about the difference between strategy and tactics during this pursuit. Chris is joined by his friend, Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and CEO of Selling Power, Inc., as they discuss the role of empathy in sales and its importance as a leadership tool.

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About Our Guest
Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and CEO of Selling Power, Inc., a multi-channel media company that produces Selling Power magazine, the leading periodical for sales managers and sales VPs since 1981, and conducts Sales 3.0 conferences, which provide sales leaders with strategic insight and best practices for improving sales performance and revenue growth.

 

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (01:43):

I’d like to talk about something that frankly I stole from my fiance, Helen Vannucci, she had spent a lot of time researching what turns out, I think to be the big question in the world of sales, which is sales culture. And she was looking at it from a digital transformation kind of viewpoint and discovered that culture was really the issue that needed to be addressed around digital transformation, much more than technology. I wanted to know is it possible for innovation, doing new things and valuable things in a pandemic to coexist? Just to remind us all, sales is a winner take all business. That’s kind of all there is to it. Sales is peculiar in that regard. So marketing’s not like that for instance, it’s not winner take all. In fact, it’s really hard to tell in marketing who the winner is.

Every once in a while, something happens that’s so spectacular in terms of an advertising campaign, as Gerhard referred to the 66 million ads that… Facebook ads that the Trump campaign used in 2016. I’d say that was a winner take all situation, but it didn’t show purely in the marketing. You have to go tear it apart there. Certainly in research and development, product development, it’s not winner take all at all. Products come and products go, there were a brilliant products that hit product market fit at least for a while and in a marvelous way. But in sales deal by deal by deal, there’s only one winner.

And I think that puts a huge amount of pressure on innovation because there’s only two situations you’re in. You’re in a situation where you just won the last deal, in which case your inclination will be to continue to do whatever you did before. Whatever you think got you there, might not be what got you there, but it’s what you think got you there. And that works against innovation. How can you innovate against success? And yet in the case of failure, we tend to either cast about, try one thing, try another thing, another thing, another thing which also gets in the way of innovation or we kind of hunker down.

And I think in the pandemic, there was a lot of hunkering down. There was a lot of Fox holing. Let’s go and get in the foxhole, we seem not to be winning. So let’s just kind of banker fires and do nothing. And the problem is that change when it happens, demands innovation. That is, if you don’t innovate, you’re actually going backwards in a changing world. And here’s what the pandemic looks like in a changing world. This is a 20 cows that didn’t get out of the way of a high-speed train. A high speed train is a pretty good metaphor for what just hit us all in March and April of this year. And I think people are finding out that the high speed train is continuing to be a high speed train. It hasn’t really slowed down. And being a cow who didn’t get out of the way of that train for any of you who know the weird Al Yankovic song Albuquerque, he refers to us.

I think his mother is looking at him like a cow looks at an oncoming train for a certain part of the song. Well, you don’t want to be the cow looking at the oncoming train. You’ve got to innovate, but in which direction to get off the tracks, to the left? To the right? Go into the bushes? Do you jump up in the air? What do you actually do? One thing, you know, you cannot do and you must not do is stand Pat. But what do you do? I mean, what’s a positive way of looking at innovation. There’s a tough picture to look up by the way I was a vegan for quite a while. And I used to raise cows too. So what can I say? This didn’t work out well for these cows. You don’t want to be one of these cows.

You want to move in some direction that makes sense. And you certainly don’t want to stand pat. If you stand Pat, and you just kind of stare out there into the world and kind of are just made of whatever it is that you get from yourself, so to speak, but you don’t want to stand Pat. You want to move. And the question is, how can you move in a direction that makes sense? Or that might make sense? I mean here’s one of the other problems with innovation. You can only move in the direction of your hypothesis. You can’t know what’s going to work in advance. That’s simply impossible. If somebody comes and says, I know this is going to work, they’re either diluted or lying in our business, actually Connect And Sell, we’ve enshrined this principle into a thing we call the Intensive Test Drive, which is, “Hey, we don’t know what’s going to happen.

We know you’re going to talk to a lot of people. We have no idea if that’s good, bad, or indifferent, for all we know you’re going to go fast and wrap our Ferrari around a tree and it’s not going to be wonderful. Why don’t we actually safely do the experiment, production for a full day?” So that’s an idea that we had around innovation, but I think every innovation has to think what’s a step I can take in the direction of learning more, a step of action not of contemplation, in the direction of learning more safely in the environment in which I find myself. When folks talk about innovation and sales, they generally talk tech stack. As an old software developer, you know, the idea of a stack actually is sort of a real idea. It’s… The fact is there’s stuff down in the stack, closer to the operating system or in the operating system.

There’s apps up at the top, and… By the way, human beings kind of live way at the top of the stack as users. And there’s, all sorts of real ideas of stack. We kind of use the term a little bit more, I would say, loosely, not in the world of sales. Could you pick the one that’s going to make the difference. That’s safe to go down the road with, and learn more. How would you do that? So you’ve attempted to do that. You attempted to say, we don’t want to be hit by the train. Let’s go and talk to the folks at Bigtincan about sales enablement and get our content managed in a way that makes sense for our sellers. Or let’s go talk to people at Vidyard or BombBomb and start to use video in our outbound selling or let’s go to see if we can get some automated lead engagement, have conversations because a bot actually write our emails for us and do the engagement or whatever it happens to be right?

We could look at all of this, but it’s a little hard to know two things. One is, is it the right thing to do? And the question is, will you quote unquote “adopt the technology?” I think adoption is actually kind of a silly metric. The real question is, do you embrace the technology, whatever it happens to be or the innovation? And do you feel like it changes your life? Like it changes how you feel when you’re doing your job? And does it change it in a way that you see this being sustainable, working for you over time? I think people have really embraced zoom here. We are on zoom video. So people have embraced it and that’s really what made it work. And even though we complain about zoom fatigue, it’s only because we use too much, but then I’m sure they’re busy doing something about zoom fatigue.

So there was a case where the embrace was easy and it was also however forced. It was forced by that high-speed train. If you didn’t come up with or use a way to talk to people that’s more intimate and exchanges more information than email. And even a phone call. Well, you were going to get hit by the train. So the real question here is, is innovation mostly about taking a technology and getting it beyond adoption, getting it to embrace? I’ll tell you, I don’t think it is. And this is what my fiance Helen taught me. And I’ve been paying a lot of attention to it. I think here is the real issue. Peter Drucker said it this way, a long time ago, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Well strategy eats technology as a snack. I mean, if, without strategy we’re simply doomed, there’s just no hope. Strategy is basically a list of steps that are positions that we could get to new places to go on a journey that is to where we really want to go.

So a strategy is not how we take the steps, that’s tactics. It’s not the shoes that we wear so to speak or the hiking poles that we have, or our backpack. Strategy is more like the rocks in a river that we’ve chosen, I’m going to step on this one and this one, then this one, and then I have to step on this one, even though it appears to come back toward the bank that I’m already on, because I want to get to this one. And from there, I think I can jump over to the other side.

That’s strategy. Strategy is as a bunch of wares put together in a list, and tactics are the how’s, and then technology is the what’s that we’re going to use either like shoes to defend our feet against the ground. So if culture eats strategy for breakfast, it certainly eats tech. And so the thing that we’ve got to pay attention to is how do we get a culture of… [inaudible 00:11:20] have a culture of innovation or use culture to innovate in a world where our sellers have gone home, so our sales teams, our home, our customers have gone home, where businesses have been wildly disrupted, but some of them have been wildly improved. What do we do with all this change? And the answer turns out to be empathy.

Chris Beall (12:25):

And I think we all get empathy. We tend to get it wrong. We think that empathy has something to do with how we feel and with caring. So I want to make a sharp distinction, how we feel about somebody else, whether we feel their pains, whether we feel bad for them or bad about them, that’s sympathy. Our feelings are sympathy. And they could be very powerful sympathetic feelings, or they could be weak, or they could be non-existent, but it’s not empathy. So, let’s put that aside. Empathy is also not caring. That is I could fail utterly to see the world through your eyes and still care for you. In fact, I had something, a little medical procedure done and just had some stitches taken out of my face yesterday. You know, I didn’t really concern myself with whether the nurse who was doing that work, whether she had empathy for me, that is whether she saw the world through my eyes.

My concern actually was, are we going to get this over quickly enough that I can make my four o’clock call? That was my concern. I didn’t care if she had that concern, knew about that concern or whatever. What I cared about was that she did a great job professionally, that the stitches came out, that whatever amount of damage that might’ve been done was going to be minimized. And then we’d get it over with, I mean, let’s get this over with and get me out the door. So I cared about her caring for me, caring is something that you do for somebody. You actually take care of them. You do something for them. Empathy is another thing entirely. Empathy is actually going through the effort, trying to understand what somebody else is thinking, how they’re seeing the world. And Christopher Voss talks about it really well.

And we use it extensively at Connect and Sell when it comes to thinking about cold calling. So I’ll just use cold calling as an example. I want to point out that the big issue here is not seeing your customer’s world through their eyes. That is huge, by the way, you’ve got, you’ve got to be able to do that all the time in sales, but that’s not new. That’s not the bullet train. The bullet train is you actually have to do this. If you’re a sales leader, you have to do it with your sales reps. And the old world of saying, here’s your number, make your number and we’re going to maybe provide you with some quote unquote “coaching” most of which is relatively, I think, disjointed to put it politely.

The thing that’s required now, if you’re going to work with sales teams that are remote, and if you want to have a cultural foundation for innovation, is to actually see your sellers, your sales people’s world, through their eyes, as they’re working from home, as they’re adapting to the different ways that their prospective customers and customers are responding to them, how are they seeing that?

So if you want to do that, you kind of have to do something similar to what you do in a cold call. That is you have to go from a state where the other person is afraid. That is the general state of other people. Is that in a cold call, the other party is afraid. They’re afraid of you the caller, because you’re an invisible stranger. In the world of have I been left at home to sell, fear tends to predominate. And if it doesn’t at one point in the day, it likely will at another point in the day, that is fear tends to show up on bitten and it really hampers performance. And so, getting the understanding that your reps may be starting from a place of fear and taking them on a journey where they actually trust you, where they think you’re on their side, one of the things you have to learn to do or do organizationally, which is how we do it, is coach without any intention of evaluating.

And this is incredibly important. If you’re evaluating while you’re coaching, you’re in big trouble because you’re creating fear. Deming told us way back when W.Edwards Deming said, first drive out fear. If we want the truth, we need to drive out fear. So how do we actually do that? So the idea here though, is to show empathy. You can teach empathy. That is if you’re not being empathetic, acting empathetically with empathetic intention, to understand your sales reps, I’m talking to sales leaders here. And understand what it is they’re experiencing and see the world through their eyes, they’re going to have a hard time doing it with their prospects. And given that tactical empathy in action with prospects is the key to being the winner rather than one of the very many losers in sales, this is super important. So I believe this should be your primary focus of innovation.

Number one, just like in a discovery call, ask the damn question. And don’t just ask it once. And don’t just ask it one way. Ask your reps, how are they actually dealing with all this change in a practical sense? That is what are they doing in terms of a place to work? What are they doing with interruptions? Do they have kids at home? Do they have a dog that needs taken care of every once in a while so that they can’t run back to back? Do they feel like they’re being run harder than they used to be or harder than as right before them, do they feel breathless? How are they dealing with this change? What are they doing practically? And how are they feeling about it? Two is, don’t take all those answers for an answer. I actually go do their job. And I know this is something people are advised not to do is like, “Oh no, you’re a sales manager now, you’re a leader, don’t sell”.

I actually think no matter who you are in the organization, the most important thing to know is, how does the world look through your seller’s eyes. Go do their job, a week is enough, but take a little mini quota. It could be meetings that you set might be hard to close deals, do some cold calling. I mean, if you’re not doing cold calling, you’re not getting to the source of a lot of their fear. And go do the job. And then be curious, not that judgemental with regard to the data. Look into data and ask yourself, what is it telling me before the pandemic, after the pandemic, for instance, what is it telling me, about how my reps are seeing the world what’s going on? And then go with your reps on calls that is get joined them on a zoom.

You don’t have to say anything. You can just be the intro and see what their buyer’s world is like. And then discuss it with the rep. Don’t discuss the deal. Ask what did we learn about what our buyers are seeing, how they’re seeing the world. And then fifth slowdown. Everyone is running really hard right now with all this stuff that’s going on, slow down. This stuff takes time. Your reps are alone. They’re alone with a bunch of people, could be their kids, it could be their dog, it could be their mother-in-law, whatever they’re alone in the sense that they’re working without physical human contact with their own tribe. And it is the loneliest way to make your number. So when you’re alone, the mindset that tends to predominate has a lot to do with fear. I think we all have to figure out what to do with fear.

And the main thing we want to do fear is first, just admit it, admit that it’s there. Reps are often encouraged to be brave, rough, tough, hard to bluff. But when you’re talking to your team, start with, what is it you’re afraid of? This is what I’m afraid of, be transparent about it. This is where my fear is. Explore their fear and let it be okay. And then figure out how to drive out fear. Because once you drive out fear, you can actually set up a cultural situation where you can innovate around culture. And if you innovate sufficiently around culture, you already have gotten off the track. You’re not going to be hit by the bullet train, but now you’re free to actually look at technology and think, is there something here that would be helpful that we could embrace and that we can embrace it in a way that really makes sense and is on a solid cultural foundation. So that’s kind of it.

Gerhard (20:48):

Chris, are you still there?

Chris Beall (20:50):

I’m here. It’s 9:08, am I done?

Gerhard (20:54):

No, you’re not. I think we have a few minutes, like two minutes, but I want to make a couple of comments. One is I love that you highlighting the fact that sales… In sales you’re measured by your wins, and winning in sales is so important, and it’s so challenging right now. Secondly, I love that strategy eats technology as a snack. Never heard that before, but I totally agree, strategy is so important. And I like that you talk about empathy and it reminded me of a saying that I heard a long time ago. If you want to know what John Doe buys, see the world through John Doe’s eyes, empathy is a leadership tool. It is a product innovation tool. It is really a tool that makes our society, our world a little bit better. And I thank you for that.

Chris Beall (21:53):

Well, I thank you, Gerhard. You are my empathy hero. Every conversation I’ve ever had with you, you have made a point of trying to understand further what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling, where I’m going. And I think that when we do that with the people who work with us on our team, we help them to do it with our customers. And I think that’s where the winds come from.

Gerhard (22:20):

This is exactly what is so hard to teach salespeople, which is taking a half a step back in a conversation with a client and see what is really happening emotionally with that person in the present moment, and really tuning into that mental state of the customer and sensing the emotions. And before you interpret, the more you are able to suspend the pre-occupation with the sales, the more you can tune in to the state of mind of the customer and open the conversation to a deeper level or to a higher level, or to explore a new perspective. And that’s what I think co-creation is all about, that as kids, we all want to play, and as adults, we want to transform that drive to play to co-create and explore possibilities.

Chris Beall (23:24):

If you could change one thing about yourself to be successful, to be really, really successful, here’s what I suggest it would be, totally lose interest in closing deals, totally lose interest because your interest, your desire, the deal is getting in the way of your ability to pursue the truth with somebody else. And when you pursue the with somebody else, you have a chance of co-creating. Otherwise, you have no chance. It’s so delicate that, one little finger on the scale saying, I want the deal, that’s the thing that kills the deal.

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In the modern SaaS economy, adoption metrics abound. Sure – they measure something that VC investors care about, and sometimes something that product recommenders and even decision-makers want to track. But does adoption speak to business impact?

One thing for sure: when it comes to business impact, adoption metrics are pure vanity. A business doesn’t measure return on investment by asking how much time its employees are spending as “users.” Horror stories abound of products that suck up time due to their own internal inefficiencies, sending employees on wild goose chases to figure out what to put in that so-called “required field,” or how to coax a shiny new SaaS product into spitting out a coherent report on what it did for you — or, more likely, what you did for it. At its worst, a focus on adoption invites corruption, as the SaaS vendor needs to make a claim that their goodness is spreading throughout your organization and the buying committee needs to justify, and feel good about, their purchase.

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Join Chris and Corey as they talk with Mike Genstil, co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, and analyze the practices and dilemmas of determining adoption, the difference between theoretical value and harvestable value, what a QPR has to do with renewal, and the role of a VP of Value.

About Our Guest

Mike Genstil is co-founder and CEO of VisualizeROI, an innovative company that enables B2B sales and marketing professionals to easily create and share visually compelling value propositions with prospects and clients.

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (02:07):

Well, here we are altogether for another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall, the Sage of Sales, and Corey Frank. Chris, as you know, we don’t have guests on too often, but we seem to be saying that more and more often that we don’t have guests on often. But we just keep running into so many interesting folks, smart folks, that we want to get on the air. Some of the information, some of our conversations that we’ve had are just too powerful to have just in our little own Zoom world.

Chris, we want to certainly welcome our newest, oldest friend here, Mike Gentsil, CEO of VisualizeROI. Is that the name of the company? Is that the tool? Is that a little bit of both, Mike?

Mike Gentsil (02:44):

VisualizeROI is the application that our company sells. Yes, that’s the name of how we market ourselves.

Corey Frank (02:49):

Well, fantastic. Well, welcome to the Market Dominance Guys. Chris, how about you tell our audience a little bit about how you came across Mike. Especially in our topic today, which I think is so captivating, which is customer success and customer adoption. And some of the flypaper, and stickiness that we all as sales leaders are trying to get at, and some of these vanity metrics, as we talked about that people chase. But yeah, let’s talk a little bit about how you tripped over Mike, and why he’s such a pertinent guest for us here at the Market Dominance Guys.

Chris Beall (03:21):

Sure. Absolutely, Corey and welcome, Mike. This is going to be fun. Mike and I ran into each other a few years ago, right? Three years ago, something like that?

Mike Gentsil (03:28):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (03:29):

And started working together with us as a client of VisualizeROI, to figure out how we can take our test drives and turn them into ROI-centric case studies. And we do hundreds and hundreds of test drives every year. I’ve been frustrated through the years with our lack of, shall we say, sophistication and compelling presentation of the value and the return on investment for our customers. Now, their investment in the test drive, of course, is just three or four hours of their people’s time. Nobody pays for our test drives, but still you want to be able to show business impact.

And our conversation has evolved over the years to be much more about this big question of the business impact of what you buy in business, and measuring it, and making it abundantly clear. Both from the vendor’s perspective, they’d love to be seen as having big impact, but primarily from the customers’ perspective. We were just having a discussion the other day about this. Mike and his team were taking what we call our attribution report, which is a lame name for what did you get out of all that ConnectAndSell you bought, right? How much pipeline value did you generate?

How much directly, how much indirectly, and how much kind of, maybe, sort of? We shipped off some data to them. His team put together something that was just awesome that allows for an interactive QBR. We started talking about what is the role of the QBR? What does it all mean with regard to renewal? Mike said something to me right as we were wrapping up, which was, he said it kind of hesitantly. He says, “I’m not a hundred percent fond of the adoption metrics that people use,” and I just jumped out of my skin and I said, “I hate them. I think they’re corrupting. I think they’re terrible. I think that they’re misleading.”

“I think they’re gameable. I think they’re for venture capitalists to care about something that they should be more careful about. It encourages people who build SAS companies to lie about their business.” I gave him an example. There is a company that will remain unnamed in our space that we’re in the same account with. The people at the account said, “These guys at this company, they measure adoption. If you send one email using their tool, that’s adoption.” We don’t see it that way. You guys talk to us about business impact. I said, “Yeah, but we fail to actually quantify it for you.” I said to Mike, “You hate it, I hate it. Let’s talk about it,” so here he is.

Corey Frank (05:56):

That is a setup. I think the first question then, Mike, with that is I remember working at a drugstore when I was in grade school and I had to stack the Sunday papers. Remember those coupon sections that came in the Sunday papers, and on the bottom of every coupon, they always said no cash value. Or they said cash value one 100th of a cent. And it seems to me, Chris, what you’re setting up Mike on is these vanity metrics where one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and certainly vice versa.

But a lot of these adoption metrics, if you really look closely from a venture perspective or a valuation perspective, I can’t pay my employees with coupons. I can’t pay them with adoption rates, and so who cares about that? So let’s talk a little bit about what are some of these other adoption metrics that you’ve seen, certainly in your years, that have that cash value of one 100th of a cent, or maybe nearly nothing to the rest of us business owners?

Mike Gentsil (06:56):

Yeah. I think the impetus for this discussion is when you think about as a vendor, getting a renewal from a customer. So often what you’ll hear from your contact is, “Well, we did an internal survey and we learned that the adoption was okay or it was great and other tools or other services have more adoption.” And you’re like okay, well, that’s interesting but the value of the adoption is what? Let’s say that you give your employees free crackers and they love the free crackers. And you do a survey, hey, what’s the value of the free crackers?

Well, everybody loves the free crackers. What’s it worth? Should I continue to spend money on the free crackers, or if I have to make a choice, should I spend money on something like an automatic dialer that actually gets connections with people where I grow my business? I think CFOs want to spend money on services and solutions that create value and ROI, that’s how they’re wired to think. But the metric that they’re given by the business owners of these solutions typically is just an adoption metric because there’s nothing else that they are trained or capable of providing to the CFO.

So I think that kicked off the discussion around how do we bridge the gap here? Because the seller wants to communicate the ROI. The buyer wants to understand it. But in the meantime, the only thing people are looking at is adoption. I think it spans all of the main services that people are spending money on from a procurement perspective in B2B.

Corey Frank (08:27):

So there’s a lot of noise out there of what really is determinant of true ROI. Very few of them, it seems actually have a dollar associated with it. Instead, it takes a little bit of extrapolation to get to the actual real value of what the impact is to that business.

Mike Gentsil (08:45):

Exactly. The good news is it’s relatively easy to measure adoption. Then the second piece of good news that Chris and I have been discussing is if you roll up sleeves a little bit, you can extract and extrapolate some kind of value calculation, whether you’re subscribing to an invoice processing service, or an automatic dialer, or a service that helps you reduce fuel costs. If you actually do the math and make some basic assumptions, you can get to a value estimate.

In that case, you’re going to make everyone happy. The CFO’s going to be happy, the business owner is going to be happy, and then the vendor is able to quantify the ROI and communicate that to you. The work can be done. We just need to roll up our sleeves as buyers and sellers and do it.

Corey Frank (09:31):

Chris, when Mike struck that nerve on adoption or so, what were some of the vapid metrics that you’ve seen over the years that prompted the visceral reaction that you gave?

Chris Beall (09:46):

Well, most of it’s been adoption. That’s the one. The fact is, it’s not considered that but it’s considered essential. With hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being invested based on these adoption numbers, which seem completely, well, not wholly uncorrelated. After all, if you get no adoption, nobody uses your product, you’re probably going to fail spectacularly, right? In much the same way in our business if you were to buy ConnectAndSell as a service, and then nobody pushes the button and talks to anybody.

It really doesn’t matter how great those conversations would have been and how much business they would have led to. This is the quantity, quality thing. At quantity zero, the quality is always the same. It’s zero by default. It’s not like it’s a totally dumb metric. It’s a highly gameable metric. Gameable metrics suffer from inflation on one side. Whoever is going to make the most money at the margin by gaming the metric is going to game it in an inflationary kind of way.

And then discounting on the other side. So then CFOs and other people who, with flinty eyes and green eyeshades will look at it and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” And so you get a runaway process of discounting versus gaming. And eventually, you just end up with is goo, which has no intellectual integrity to it and really no predictive power. What’s kind of funny though, is on the other side, if you look at any estimate of ROI that’s rational. Say you’re measuring something, you’re measuring a real something and at the end you get dollars.

Dollars are invested, and dollars have come out, whether in the form of savings, or in the form of gross profit contribution. The two ways that dollars move around. Could also be in the form of risk, which is the trickiest of the dollars to measure, this big industry around doing something about that one. Every once in a while, they get shocked and surprised by something like, I don’t know, say a global pandemic, or a hurricane that’s a little fiercer than normal. For the most part, it’s cost savings or it’s this other side of people call it revenue, but it’s really gross profit contribution.

If you get a measurement going, the beauty is, say you love it now. You love what you’re getting from Mike’s company. I’m using VisualizeROI, everybody’s happy, and we feel like we’re getting something good. When we measure, we get a five. And the next time we measure it, we get a seven. It’s the same measurement. We probably can rely on that being a 40% improvement over the five.

By the way, if the five were five percent, and seven were seven percent, most salespeople would report that as a twp percent improvement, which shows that they could use a little math education, as could many people. But it’s a 40% improvement over a baseline that was established as being above threshold for investment. We can rely on real measurements of dollars in and dollars out to some degree in the absolute, but really, really strongly relative to a baseline that we’ve established. We cannot do this with measurements like adoption.

Chris Beall (13:13):

Where the marginal increase tends to be, shall we say frothy?

Mike Gentsil (13:27):

Corey, let me give you maybe a different example because probably everybody on this call recruits candidates. Part of your candidate recruitment you probably have an HR platform. You might have Google Sheets. You might have some, there’s a number of other platforms. Now, if you are the VP of HR, and you’re subscribing to one of these recruitment platforms, some people call it applicant tracking software, for example, and we have customers that sell this kind of software.

The VP of HR might say, “Hey, our applicant tracking software system was great last year. We had 2000 candidates submit their resumes into our software and we hired a hundred people.” Great. She could say, or he could say, “We love the software, but guess what? What if it so turns out that those hundred candidates are on average, lower quality than another set of a hundred candidates they could have hired?” And what if it took them five months to hire those candidates, versus what could have been three months with a superior platform?

They might think this is a classic vanity metric. We used it a lot. We submitted a whole bunch of candidates. We actually hired people. But what you really care about, as the VP of HR, and the CEO, and the executive team is hiring high quality candidates that can add value on day one, and hire them quickly at the right price. That’s a valuable system. You’re not overpaying the market, you’re not overpaying recruiters, et cetera.

If you were the vendor of that applicant tracking software, you would want to communicate, “Yeah, you used it a lot, but the value you got was substantial,” and you would quantify all those pieces, and we’d back into how you could do that. I can give you a couple more examples where you want we could…

Corey Frank (14:58):

Yeah, no, that value communication, right, I think is key. And even what you were alluding to earlier, Chris, on discounting, I think Mike is appropriate, right? Because again, I’m a big, dumb farm animal. I’m a sales rep, and I’ve been a sales rep for a long time. Sometimes I have a tendency to discount when I don’t need to discount. Mike, you’re my boss, you’re my VP of Sales. You think, “Gosh, Corey does a pretty good job selling,” but am I really, because I’m giving away the farm when I don’t need to. How would I be able to kind of track that?

I maybe think I ran into some pain and I have to discount, but I think that’s also a metric that maybe is a little elusive for companies, that would be wonderful to be able to determine if I run into resistance is proportionate to discounting, true?

Mike Gentsil (15:45):

Absolutely. Corey, I think you’re referring to a pre-sales process. I think it would also apply in a post-sales case. Discounting is a problem, both in pre-sales and in post-sales. In pre-sales, it’s a problem because that rep, who is high velocity, likes to close sales, likes to hit the number at the end of the quarter, is very quick to give discounts. And truly the VP would be happy to take the deal at 80% of the price. It helps him get over his number versus if we had simply quantified value and quantified pain, we probably could have gotten 95% to 100% of the price.

On the renewal side, we have the same challenge. What you run into there is in an average or above average case, the customer will say, ” Yeah, the adoption was pretty good. Bobby and Susie love your product, and we want to keep it, but we’ve got some bad news. The bad news is we’re in a recession. The CFO’s looking at everything very carefully and we have been asked for across the board, 30% cuts on everything.” I’m like, “Okay, well, that is bad news. I understand. I’m glad you’re happy with the product.”

Now, what would I ideally be able to do in that case? I’d say, “Well, I appreciate that CFO’s perspective. What would be great, because I’m not sure I can get that discount across the board. We can’t tell our investors that we’ve lowered our average revenue per customer. Why don’t we take to your CFO, the value that you’ve realized from the solution and perhaps you guys should buy more of it next year. Maybe you could redirect some span from some of those other solutions that are getting less ROI. Why don’t you cut two of those a hundred percent and redirect that over here, because there’s real ROI.”

That’s the discussion you want to have. If you’ve set that up over the course of the year, through your quarterly business reviews where you’ve associated adoption with value, you’re in a strong position to do that. In the best case, you’re actually paying that CFO somehow quarter over quarter. “Hey, by the way you used our solution 222 times and it generated $5 million in value.” And he’s like, “Who are these folks?” And then you’ll raise the awareness. Then you’re in a much better position at that last minute, and you wouldn’t have to do the renewal.

Corey Frank (17:44):

To your point, Mike, where does this live? Chris, where would you and Mike see, ideally, is this a new role, a VP of Customer Success, a VP of Value? Because it seems like this discussion traverses so many different roles in an organization. Is it worthy of its own little responsibility? Is it an enablement? Let’s talk a little bit about that.

Mike Gentsil (18:07):

I’ll give you a quick perspective. What we see across our customers is there is a growing number of customers that do have a title VP of Value. That VP of Value can report into the chief revenue officer. They can report into the head of solution engineering, in some cases. They can also report into the CFO, in some cases. The more important point I think is not where they report, but the person that quantifies that value inserts those value estimates at every step in the customer life cycle.

There is a version of value calculations for marketing people, who are trying to entice people to become a lead. There’s a version for your inside sales team that’s trying to get you to take a meeting and you’re quantifying value as part of that. There’s a version for the sales person, and then there’s a version for the customer success person. I think the VP of Customer Success, and the VP of Sales, and the VP of Marketing, they should be able to quantify value for their motions.

They should extract that quantification from that function. That function again, could live in its own silo or they could report to any of those folks theoretically. But each customer facing functions should be able to extract those calculations and use them to their purposes properly.

Chris Beall (19:18):

Wow, VP of Value. I got to go and apply for that job. That sounds like fun.

Mike Gentsil (19:23):

Not an easy job. You better love Excel.

Chris Beall (19:26):

Well, I do have a certain fondness for the occasional spreadsheet, as Cory knows. So yeah, it’s interesting. In our company, we do something a little funny, which is our VP of Customer Success is actually evaluated based on the customers getting the maximum amount of business impact, which we tend to measure in terms of meetings that are set. Now, people will argue and say, ” Oh, the meeting set might not have happened, blah, blah, blah,” but I guarantee you over time, it’s linearly related to value.

And that’s the main thing is that you need a linear relationship between whatever you’re measuring and whatever you’re getting out, so that should it trend, the trending actually will represent a linear increase or decrease in the value that’s being achieved. James Thompson, our VP of Customer Success, is held directly accountable for the value that our customers get per dollar that they spend with us. His job is to minimize the dollars that they spend for the same unit of value.

You could look at it two ways, but the easiest thing to hit is always costs. He’s always looking for opportunities with his team to keep folks from using too much ConnectAndSell. You might’ve experienced this, Corey when you were our customer and I was acting in that role of VP of Customer Success. When you were a customer at StormWind and I was telling you to use less.

Corey Frank (20:44):

Here’s a guy that didn’t want me to spend. “Spend less, Corey. Spend less with me.”

Chris Beall (20:48):

Well, it’s not altruistic. I think it’s like, look, we put a keel on a sailboat, not in order to make it go faster, but so that it can go the direction that you want and it doesn’t ever tip over and leave you upside down turtle in the water, right? It actually slows the boat down, ticks down in the water, but try sailing in rough seas without a keel on your boat, and you get a little bit nervous. I believe that this attachment to maximizing the customer value per unit spend, that is their ROI with us and focusing on it because we have the inside track.

The thing that vendors, I think, need to realize is look asking your customer to do this is asking them to do something really hard. If they provide you with a little bit of data, you can provide them with a lot of insight, as long as you both agree what you’re trying to do, which is to get them to spend the least with you to get the maximum business impact. That’s what I hate about this whole business of adoption because it leads to exactly the opposite.

I want the marginal adopted user, think of it this way. If I have a SAS solution and for 10 core users, it provides for every $100 spent, it provides a $1,000 of value per year. Then for the next 50 users for every $100 spent, it provides $200 of value. Then for the next 1,000 users for every $100 spent, it provides no value whatsoever. I run out of the users that are really the high-impact users fairly early, but I’m under pressure to extend the usage beyond that group.

That’s what I’m referring to as the corrupting influence of the adoption metric on customer success. It runs counter to the mission to help the customer be successful for the least amount of money that they need to spend. Then you can find their budget. And by the way, they’re likely to reward you next year in a funny way. They’ll discount less. The discounting of price is irrelevant compared to the discounting of value, as skepticism will cost you more than transactional discounting over time, every time.

If you can dispel skepticism by being upfront about the value that’s being created and transparent about it, transparency is a big movement in business. Lay it out and say, “Here’s what we’re doing.” And by the way, there’s a big difference between theoretical value and harvestable value like at ConnectAndSell. I can tell you, I can save you money, right? After all, you can have a smaller team. Well, what if you don’t shrink the team, then you didn’t harvest that value. Are you likely to shrink the team within the timeframe that we’re talking about for harvesting the value?

If not, it’s illegitimate of me to talk to you about the cost savings. I need to talk to you about the opportunity, about getting more on the top line. A little bit more painful, but I got to go there. Maybe in the next budget cycle, you won’t grow the team as much.

Mike Gentsil (23:35):

Chris, that was a fantastic example of that distribution or histogram, if you will, of value by user. A good example, perhaps for folks listening, is you think about a service like LinkedIn, where if you’ve got a team of a hundred sales reps, sure. They’re all going to want access to LinkedIn. Now of those hundred sales reps, 10 of them, for example, are going to use that so effectively, they’re going to find the best contacts. They’re going to generate half a million dollars in pipeline per month because they’re able to use LinkedIn so well.

The bottom 10%, they’re going to use it, and they may or may not pay for their subscription at all, because they’re not as connected already. First degree connections, secondary connections, they’re not as skilled. So as a VP of Sales Operations, subscribing to LinkedIn across those hundred users, if push comes to shove, you have to become a little bit tough and very analytical around, well, maybe these guys got a premium subscription, maybe these guys get nothing at all, or that’s where it gets very tricky.

Then the customers, to Chris’s point, the customer success rep for LinkedIn managing that account, should be ensuring that the high value users really know all the great features, so they’re getting more, and more, and more value. Maybe even be able to charge them more for more features. Whereas, they get the people at the end of the histogram, at least to a point where they can prove to themselves and the CFO they’re getting value out of it. That’d be very sophisticated customer success. I have to believe that’s where we’re going as an industry.

Corey Frank (24:55):

Well, I think so too. And that’s a great way to kind of end this part one session with Mike from VisualizeROI. And I think maybe in our part two, Mike, we can expand on this that you and Chris were talking about this. As sales guys, like me, the goal is to create a compelling narrative that sparks creativity and inspires that prospect to make a buying decision, a purchase. But often, I’m going to focus on what my product can do for the prospect’s business, but I don’t spend enough time demonstrating how it will actually make an impact.

I think in our part two, we’d really like to hear you and Chris expand on this evolution from moving from traditional, how do I justifiably earn an ROI and how I process that to more value-based messaging, which I think what you and Chris are talking about. And how that value based messaging can take ROI and go beyond just merely budget conversations. I think that’s a good place to stop session one here, and to thank Mike for his time on this. Tune in next time to part two with Mike Gentsil from VisualizeROI with more on customer adoption.

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In the last two podcasts, When Operational Excellence Hits a 9-Foot Wall and Myths and Misconceptions of the Cold-Calling World, Chris, Corey, and Valerie Schlitt, CEO and founder of VSA, have been discussing various aspects of striving for operational excellence. In this third and final podcast on the subject, these three sales experts turn to the topic of coaching. Listen to what they have to say about how coaching works best — and the challenge of doing it in today’s work-from-home world.

Valerie explains that what she misses is the way coaching worked before COVID, when she and her team were in the same office, with many of them calling on the same program. And they would sit next to each other, and listen to each other, and hear what went well on each other’s calls, and then copy it. This passive coaching among co-workers isn’t available now. And though active coaching by management isn’t impossible right now, it has to be done in a different way.

—-more—-

In the past, using ConnectAndSell, Valerie’s team at VSA listened to call recordings together and then dissected calls as a team in order to teach and learn what works and what doesn’t when cold calling. Like so many aspects of working from home, coaching is so much more difficult when your team members are scattered across town.

As with most Market Dominance Guys’ podcasts, the conversation often wanders into related areas of sales. Hear what these three have to say about the often-misaligned purposes and practices of two related departments — Sales and Marketing. And then listen while Chris suggests a cure for the misalignment. Yep. You’re going to want to hear this!

About Our Guest
Valerie Schlitt is the founder, owner, and CEO of VSA, a B2B call center that helps clients generate leads and produce new business. Valerie also heads up the Philadelphia chapter of AA-ISP.

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (02:25):

Empathy as Chris and I talked about in many, many episodes of how it could be taught. Could it be beaten out of you? Can I take a pill? But how can you create that or engender that in a conversation with a stranger? And we don’t have many tools at our disposal, right? We have our tone, we have our pace, we have our reflection, we have our intonation, or we have our pauses. And the right combination of that, like a good musical selection of notes. You can’t just go to the waltz and say, “Give me a G, give me a B flat, give me an E and let me just throw it together.” You got to kind of play around with it. And I think as Chris has said with his new keyboard here, sometimes you just going to just play, and then flow and then pretty soon you have a nice harmony and a nice melody and before you know it, “what do you plan?”

“Well, I’m just playing my own thing.” But it sounds like it’s something. “Who wrote that?” “I did. I’m just meandering on the keyboard.” But it sounds like something. And sometimes the trained ear, right? Can hear that more than a newer rep and we need that power of that coaching to say, “Wait right there, that stammer that you incorporated, that’s the right level of empathy and aw shucks and toe in the sand and vulnerability. That’s what we want. Now do it another 25 times today. And make it sound like it’s the first time he ever did it.” And that’s what’s challenging, but that’s what’s fun if just like a good Broadway actor, knowing their farewell performance in cats has to be just… And hit the marks as they’re opening performance of cats on Broadway three years earlier.

Valerie Schlitt (04:02):

That’s true.

Chris Beall (04:03):

Yeah, Valerie how do you guys coach? I just heard somebody who has listened to a webinar this morning. I had to get over a bias that I have. I’m working on this bias, which is the modern way of speaking, especially the way that imitates California speech in which everything is a question and we can’t say anything definite.

Corey Frank (04:25):

Upspeak.

Chris Beall (04:25):

I’ll keep asking one question after another. And we use the word like a lot, because we don’t want to say something is, but we can kind of say it’s like, and so if we say like seven times in a sentence and then we sound really uncertain, then we’re not offending anybody and everything’s fine. Well, I’m sure I’m caricaturing a perfectly legitimate way of speaking that I’m just uncomfortable with and then it makes me think that somebody doesn’t want to stand behind what they’re saying. And so I was listening to this this morning and the substantive part was that only 20% of managers and sales do any coaching whatsoever.

Now I believe the number is above 3%. Actually. I’ll be completely Frank. I think almost nobody, coaches almost never so to speak and they think they’re coaching, but what they’re really doing is just holding a conversation at the end of the week, in order to say how they used to do it back in the day when they were rough and tough. And maybe they’ll listen to something or whatever, but how do you do it? Has it changed over time? Or how does your team do it? I mean, I guess drift is everywhere. I listened to Seth Weinstock, who’s one of our top reps. He’s not an SDR. This guy carries a big quota and makes it stick. And I listened to him today on a call and he opened it like this. “I know I’m a bit of an interruption” whose deaf. May as well put a gun to his head right?

Yet there was no way that that’s the same as “I know, I’m an interruption.” That was the retreat into comfort and comfort is the enemy of performance in everything that we do. And so here, what one of the best in the world had done that. And I guarantee you, he’s totally unaware of it. I guarantee you that this is like a hitch in his back swing. He is totally unaware that that elbow came out and that club crossed the line and there was no way it’s going to any way, except dead, dead left into the water after this, right? But he doesn’t know it. So how do you guys do it? How do you formalize the continuous tuning that’s needed?-

Valerie Schlitt (06:25):

I will say that we don’t do it enough. I look at our operation here as… Okay, we’ve now worked with ConnectAndSell, we have a great list source, we have great hires and now we’re a little tilted because I think we can be coaching more. We do coach this way. We have someone who’s responsible for listening to taped calls for giving, then setting one-on-ones with our reps and for coaching them. And they’re supposed to talk to everyone. So this is one person that does this and we have about 50 people. So they get to everyone once a month. That’s not enough. By the way, we are hiring someone right now whose only job is going to be to do that. Because as we look towards operational excellence, that is one of the things we need to bring us all up to the next level.

So the table’s not tilted anymore, but we also have team meetings for each client and we play calls for everybody in that team meeting. And we listened to good calls, bad calls and dissected the calls as a team. So there’s one group effort, that’s the one-on-ones with each individual agent and that is not frequent enough, and then the other one’s once a week where there’ll be some sample calls that will be either sent out earlier or actually played at the meeting itself. And we dissect those and talk about what went well, what didn’t go well.

What I miss is before COVID, we were in the office and since we have a team-based approach, we could sit next to each other and many people were calling on the exact same program and they could listen to each other and see what went well and “How did you do that?” And then copy that. And we don’t have that now. So that’s one of the deficits of this COVID environment that we need to make up for. And hopefully this new hire will… A lot is riding on him. So we’ll see how that goes. But that’s basically how we coach.

Chris Beall (08:23):

Yeah. It’s fascinating as a challenge, right? Coaching is so interesting because sales is so athletic and top of the funnel sales is the most athletic part of sales, where split-second timing, management of your internal states, of your emotions, I compare it to facing major league pitching that the main trick apparently to being a Major League hitter is to hang in there against that curve ball that looks like it’s going to hit you in an uncomfortable place. And it’s the management of your emotions and your expectations. And they call it “picking up the spin.” What you’re really doing is trying to figure out if you’ve got to bail out, or if this is a great opportunity. And that’s a tough one in sales, and we do it all the time. We have to do it really, really quickly, which means we have to have practiced.

So it suggests that coaching is more… A lot of coaching is about what’s in the moment. And how do we do that without getting close to the moment? It’s like doing it the next day saying to me, “Hey Chris, yesterday in this call, you sounded like this.” Like, “Yeah, but what did I feel like then? Why did I feel like that? Is not probably why I did that, it’s more about what I feel and maybe even about what I believe? My beliefs might’ve moved out from under me a little bit.” And so I just think it’s the most fascinating part.

And you guys are always working out of both of your companies. I see you essentially as this; you get talent, you put talent into the seat and make sure that they’re equipped, you get a problem for them to solve, which is “Here, talk to these people and get appointments,” and then you deal with the fact that they’re human beings. That’s kind of like the four-step process. The fourth is dealing with the fact that they’re human beings. You’re both experts at this, right? Do you feel that that’s kind of a fair characterization and the bulk of it is step four? Dealing with the fact that their human beings?

Valerie Schlitt (10:23):

So, yeah. There’s only so much you can control with automation and with getting the right lists. And then you have, as you just said, the people, but-

Valerie Schlitt (11:12):

… honestly, in some ways it’s beautiful because someone might come up with a wonderful idea and a wonderful way of opening the script that I hadn’t thought of, or the program manager hadn’t thought of, or even the client, or whoever’s putting together that message. And then everyone can incorporate that or even the timing, but you can’t control it. You’re exactly right. And even the best people have bad days and that’s the hard part, but it’s also could be the beautiful part.

Corey Frank (11:39):

I think it’s more the latter. I think it is the beautiful part because you think about the 10,000 years ago, right? There was a caveman who wrote out a wall somewhere and ink dye and berries, et cetera. And he wrote this picture of reindeer, right? Running in a meadow somewhere. So of all the things that they could write. So even 10,000 years ago, we are wired, right? For beauty, we are wired for reflection. He saw it, he experienced it, it was beautiful enough in his own home to say, “Listen, you know what could go over our fire here is I need a …. His own version of Van Gogh and 9,500 years before Van Gogh. And he, and he created it.

And I think if we can get the reps, our teams, ourselves as sales professionals to come above ourselves and see what we do and how we perform it as an art form, as did I… Chris’s example of the pitcher with the curve ball and watching film, “Why did that curve ball just hang a little bit too much over the plate and they took it 405 yards or 405 feet out of the park?” “Well, I think I came a little late on the delivery. I think maybe I didn’t hunch my back and get enough spin into it.” And so it’s about the technique.

“Why did I get the bad review in variety because of my play on Broadway?” “Well, the song that I just… I was a little flat, maybe the orchestra overpowered my vocals.” And I think as a sales rep, and you’d say it’s really about the performance. And once the rep feels comfortable that it’s not about Valerie Schlitt or Chris Beall or Corey Frank, it’s about the performance. “And don’t worry, I’m going to get another audience in tonight and you have another shot and don’t worry if you screw that up, because I got another audience coming in. I can keep bringing people in front of you. Don’t worry about that.” And by the sixth week, the 10th week, we’re going to be ready for the Tonys.”

So I think if folks can get beyond themselves, this bias that we have, get this mental toughness, this grit to realize that it really is… I’m not going to law school, I’m not going to medical school. What I do is I am a professional salesperson and these are nuances that I want to learn. And so help me, Valerie, help me, Chris, as my coaches helped me learn these, so I get better and better. And I think when you can kind of move beyond that, where it’s an art form, I think reps seem to perform to those standards.

Valerie Schlitt (14:09):

Yeah, I agree. I think also it goes to the part that we need to be with other people to make things work. And when success starts coming and that sense of accomplishment, and enthusiasm, and even the adrenaline, that’s contagious to other people, it infuses an entire organization to go up another level. I do want to give a little story about myself here. I come from a family of professionals. My father and three siblings are all pediatricians. So being in sales was really shunned. And I remember when I started my job and I realized I was going to have to sell. I think I went through a depression. So I thought, “Oh my God, you don’t just open up the door and then people come to you, you actually have to sell.” So I have really become a convert. It shells. If there was no one selling, we would not have this economy. We would not have any work for doctors to do. I think what we do is the most important thing ever.

Chris Beall (15:15):

I agree. This is actually, if somebody will ask me, given my background, what are you doing running ConnectAndAell? Like what’s that? And run innovation at companies and built products and a ton of all this kind of stuff? And my answer is that we live in a world that has an ROI in a funny place. It’s rely on innovation. We literally, as a society, we rely on a pace of innovation to deliver what it is that’s going to allow us to continue to live together and thrive in the challenging conditions that earth always provides for us, regardless of whether we think it’s easier or not. All you have to do to see all hard it is, go watch that show Naked and Afraid sometime and see what people are like without their technology, which includes their clothing by the way, and just see what it’s like because that’s only 21 days and it ain’t good most of the time. It’s really not good.

They were highly dependent and reliant on innovation and innovation generally doesn’t make it to market. And it is the point at which it founders is sales. I was talking to somebody today who has a company that they have a great innovation, but he said, it’s kind of a crowded space and they’re just getting going. They have the product, but they’re just getting going. They’re building their sales machine. And he recognizes as the founder that the sales machine is going to make or break the company. And so he’s out talking to people like me about how do I build that great sales machine? And of course my advice to him was, “Well, before you build the sales machine, it’s good to have one set of facts, which are what happens when you actually talk to people in your hypothetical target market?”

And I’m hoping that he’ll go ahead and do that because I think it’s a tragedy to take something as great as what they’re doing at this company and not be able to take it to market in a way that allows that to happen before they starve. It’s like Naked and Afraid, right? They got 21 days before they run out of money. It’s not 21 days in this case, it may be a little longer, but it’s not very long before as a company… I’ll go back to the COVID thing. We ask our CFO. “CFO, how long before we run out of money?” That’s a big question in business and it’s sales that saves us from becoming irrelevant. And I think you guys, you two and your organizations and the others that do similar kinds of work essentially are bringing lifeblood to innovations, which are of great value ultimately to the people who buy them.

And I think it is the most important job. What we call the SDR BDR job or whatever it does certainly defeats the CEO’s job I can tell you, in terms of importance. You could probably replace the CEO of the cardboard cutout for about six weeks and you’re not going to notice, right? But if you replace your top of funnel outreach people with cardboard cutouts, well, it’s not good. We had one of our customers sort of do that once. And so they fell 11% behind plan and [inaudible 00:18:31] 12 weeks, and they decided to go back and do it the other way.

Corey Frank (18:36):

Well, weasels in essence are made of cardboard. We could agree on that.

Chris Beall (18:42):

[crosstalk 00:18:42] When I get done with ConnectAndSell, I’m going to start a band and it’s going to be all keyboards and they’re not going to be hooked up to anything. And we’re going to call ourselves the Cardboard Weasels.

Corey Frank (18:58):

No.I like it. So last question, Valerie. And then the hostage is officially released from the Market Dominance Guys’ holding cell here. But you’ve been a leader in the AISP for so long. You got to lead the chapter there and Philadelphia, which is no easy task. A lot of folks will say to participate in a chapter is one thing, to actually lead it a chapter, be an officer chapter that is a job in and of itself. So I’m curious, just for kind of our folks who are listening today is what are you seeing across the chapter that maybe the rest of the country as a leading indicator, maybe either some nice technologies, some new techniques, some common issues, some common shared wisdom, kind of as the chapter head there. What are you seeing that the rest of us should be aware of from your purview as an inside sales professional?

Valerie Schlitt (19:50):

I will say, I’ll just contribute this. We are having our third annual conversation on the alignment of sales and marketing. And we’ve had this obviously for two prior years, and now this year. This year, we’re actually getting professionals from within corporations, not coaches, not consultants or trainers, but people who are actually within the organization who have a responsibility to marketing or to sales, talk about how there’s alignment, because there’s often that conflict, that tension. And I think especially even in the field that I’m in which overlaps, sometimes sales and sometimes marketing, having that alignment is really, really important. So that’s just been a theme that’s been really, really interested, gotten a lot of interest from the Philadelphia membership, so. And I think the whole automation of marketing and whether that helps or doesn’t help in providing leads is a great topic. And everyone has a different perspective. So anyway, that is what I will leave you with.

Corey Frank (20:56):

Yeah-

Chris Beall (20:56):

Wow. Can I jump in on this? Because this is my favorite topic of all.

Valerie Schlitt (21:01):

Yes.

Chris Beall (21:01):

Sales and marketing alignment. I think I’ve probably told the story on Market Dominance Guys. I’ll tell it again. I once asked John Neeson, SiriusDecisions founder, what percentage of leads that are generated by marketing ever get a conversation? What’s the highest number he’s ever seen? And he said 9%. My comeback was, “Well, I don’t think we have a sales and marketing alignment problem, I think we have a leakage problem.” And my analogy was this, if I’m at the Talisker Distillery and the Isle of Skye and I’m visiting and I’m taking a look and say I’m a whiskey distilling consultant, and they’re showing me their operation. And over here in one building, they’re making the mother liquor, which is essentially beer. And it goes up through a pipe that goes along the ceiling and goes over to another building, because distillers sometimes blow up.

And when they do, you want them far away, right? So it’s going over there. And I witnessed that there was like a flood of the mother liquor coming out of the pipe and 91% of it it’s on the floor, would I say we have an alignment problem, or would I say we have a leakage problem? And I’m pretty sure we have a leakage problem until we’re talking to a majority of the leads, probably 50, 60% of them, rather than talking to 9% that are cherry picked by somebody, according to their tastes. Really it’s what it amounts to. In fact, we tend to talk to the 9% that are the easy ones to get ahold of, whereas the best ones are the hard ones to get ahold of because they’re busy people. So I’m fascinated by that topic. And I have a cure for it that your companies can both provide that I’m going to suggest that you field as a potential product.

It’s called the VSA young blood work sales and marketing alignment workshop. Guaranteed to produce results. And here’s what you do. Take the marketing folks and train them to be cold callers and have them do it for a week. You’ll be done. It’ll be the most brilliant product on earth. And I guarantee you that all of the sales and marketing alignment issues will go away immediately. And it’s not because they’ll fail, it’s because you’ll make them succeed. They’ll realize that the language of sales is fundamentally psychological. And the language of marketing is fundamentally about where products fit within an evolving markets. And there are two completely different worlds. And once a marketing person experiences being a sales person at the top of the funnel, they’ll be able to make that distinction and alignment will be easy. So I’m going to beg you guys, please go come up with this product and save the world.

Corey Frank (23:46):

I don’t know if there’s enough… 91% of the market, I don’t know if there’s enough leakage yet. Let’s wait for there’s a little bit more pain, right?

Chris Beall (23:52):

Well, that was the best case.

Corey Frank (23:55):

That’s awesome. Well, Valerie, Hey, it’s been a pleasure. You’re at vsaprospecting.com. One of the pioneers in the space and one of the true experts in the field of top of funnel. So really appreciate your time. And again, I think next time we have Valerie on we’ll change it from Market Dominance Guys, to something more Market Dominance Legends. How about that with Valerie and Chris and [inaudible 00:24:19].

Valerie Schlitt (24:18):

Legends. Great.

Corey Frank (24:19):

Yes. We appreciate it.

Valerie Schlitt (24:20):

This has been delightful guys. Thank you.

Corey Frank (24:20):

Thank you, Valerie.

Chris Beall (24:23):

Thank you so much, Valerie. This is just, I know we were long in planning this. It was yesterday and then you came today, but hey, all of our planning has paid off.

Valerie Schlitt (24:36):

Thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve liked meeting you Corey, and this was delightful.

Chris Beall (24:42):

All right.

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