Chris and Corey continue their discussion with Valerie Schlitt, CEO and founder of VSA, which began with the Market Dominance Guys’ podcast, When Operational Excellence Meets a 9-Foot Wall. Making another observation about operational excellence, Chris begins this session with the statement, “A big part of operational excellence is recognizing that you don’t always have the resources that you need to get the job done perfectly — or even well.” Valerie thrives on solving problems just like this one and is adept at addressing problems in unique ways. Together these three sales experts tackle the issues of maintaining operational excellence while running a business — either before or during a pandemic.

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As their discussion progresses, they debunk several myths about the best way to plan a cold-calling campaign, they tear apart the misconception of how much time it takes to onboard a sales rep, and they share some of the unexpected employment backgrounds that have made for the most effective BDRs. Always intelligent, often irreverent, Chris, Corey, and Valerie delve into what works — and what doesn’t — in the world of sales. You won’t want to miss their insights!

 

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:

Chris Beall (01:48):

I think a big part of operational excellence is recognizing that you don’t always have the resources that you need to get the job done perfectly or even well and sometimes you just have to guess. And if you don’t have a formal process for entering guessing mode and then doing the guess and then treating the guess as a fact, I think it’s really hard to do. And I think it’s a distinguishing feature among operationally excellent leaders, is that they know that they’re the guesser and when it’s time to guess, they’re upfront about the fact that they’re guessing.

Corey Frank (02:26):

So would you say Chris that all most operational mandates, operational posits, facts today have its origin story in a guess yesterday?

Chris Beall (02:39):

Usually yes. And COVID’s a great example. When COVID hit, we were suddenly all out of time and didn’t have very much information. How did we know we were out of a time because we could ask our CFOs when we’re going to run out of money?

Corey Frank (02:52):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (02:55):

That was the March 22nd question this year. You got to the CFO and you say, okay, so in scenario number bad, right, where all of our customers can’t pay us, 22 million people die. When do we run out of money? And then you can reason your way to all sorts of stuff but you don’t have enough information to tell you what to do and so you take a guess. And you got to do it fast, the brick’s been thrown at your head. I mean, COVID was a pretty quick little brick. And so we guess.

And I think that’s where the great stuff tends to come from because when we’re doing what we know how to do, we’re doing what we already did. So it’s not comforting. It’s not comfy at all. I mean, the people often ask me, what’s the deal with leadership? Aren’t you the leader if people following you? And I would say, not if they’re just following you on a trip to the ice cream store. No. You got to be crossing the freeway with the busy traffic and in the dark with a dog chasing you. Then you find out if you’re a leader. If they follow you then, maybe.

Announcer (04:11):

Let’s talk about that operational excellence theme about guessing, right, in terms of Valerie at VSA, right. It’s a top of funnel firm and you talk about… Chris that should we do everything as a leader, as a CEO, as a VP of sales, as a sales manager? And certainly Valerie, a company like yours and Chris, certainly a weapon like ConnectAndSell, right, are two such vehicles where… I’ve got across this little chasm here, I’ve got to… I’m faced with this nine foot wall. Do I want to go down? Do I want to just stick with mountains or do I already have a predictable pathway? You chose to go the path not traveled, right, the way not mapped yet.

So Valerie, from an operational perspective, when somebody lands at your doorstep as a VP of sales, what do they… Say Valerie I need help. I cannot do X anymore. I’ve reached the limit of my potential with my team and why? I don’t want to hire any more folks. I want to try this new particular market. I want to test some new messaging. What state do you find a lot of the folks emotionally when they arrive at your doorstep whether to engage in VSA or not?

Valerie Schlitt (05:29):

As you probably know they arrive in all different states, but I would say the most common state is they know they have a problem, they don’t want to or have any idea how to fix it and they have hope. They are optimistic and we’ve developed trust. So from there… I mean, obviously what we do in helping people set appointments, a lion share of it, I don’t know, 75% of it is the same for every single client, but that other part makes a big difference on whether we’re going to be successful for each individual client and that is the messaging or the team that we put on a program or the cadence that we call with, the list that we choose, all of those things. And I think of it as this big multi-dimensional puzzle that you have here, where there is part of it that’s the same and all the rest can be switched around in different ways and always need to be switched around. It never stops.

You try something in the beginning and, okay we’re going to go with this message with… So we have a team-based operation, which means that we have three or four people on a certain client that comprise one full-time equivalent. And the reason for that is we recruit people in a very different way than other people do, other firms do. And that we are not actually looking only for sales people, we’re looking for people who have great communication skills, can engage, they’re inquisitive and they also often only want some kind of a part-time job because they have other commitments. So there’s this whole group of talent that cannot work in the traditional nine to five role and we get them. So we put them all together in this team and they share their feedback, they share what works, what doesn’t work and they get kudos from each other and bravos. There’s a whole team orientation that we talked about earlier. They’re not doing it alone.

And that way we can also see who is producing, who’s not producing and if someone’s not producing then we can take them off and we know it’s not just key person dependent. But who we put on that team is going to be dependent on who fits well with that particular client’s problem. It could be what the outcome of the call is, it could be the industry, it could be the type of product, whether it’s a service or an actual offering product. All of these little things have to be put together and you take your best guess based on 19 years of experience and start off a program that way.

Always telling our client being transparent that we are going to be making changes as we go forward, because there’s going to be things that are not perfect in the beginning and we’re going to have to make adjustments. And then comes the fun part, I think, which is making adjustments and seeing what actually leads to improvement. And then you want something that in the long run is pretty smooth sailing, always knowing that there is room for growth even after we’ve optimized as much as we can. Did that answer your question?

Corey Frank (08:48):

Yeah. So what is that common myth that you’ve seen over the last 19 years that can be most easily debunked or demystified, right? Chris talked about, hey listen, I can’t do it all. And you have to kind of cross this mental chasm to get to another layer, another level of maturity, of business maturity, I can’t do it by myself. But in relation to VSA and the business you’ve built over 19 years, what you find is that one or two big common areas that are debunked about an outsourcing firm, about a telesales front, about a top of funnel firm, that it doesn’t take you too long for them to run your Jedi mind tricks to say no. In their whole world inception just comes tumbling down. That they thought it was a tree hugger about this for years, you come in, debunk this theory that they had and it opens up an entirely new world.

Valerie Schlitt (09:47):

There’s so many, but I’ll go through some. We don’t need to know everything about your product or service in order to be successful and deliver qualified appointments.

Chris Beall (09:56):

My favorite.

Corey Frank (09:59):

Well you don’t understand Valerie. My product is different.

Valerie Schlitt (10:04):

Exactly. You’re so unique and so… We treat every client as though they are unique and every client is unique. But we need to know enough to connect with someone and give them a reason to want to talk more. And we have to be really good at that and not go any further because if we go further then we’re going to ruin it. And that’s… No one wants that.

Valerie Schlitt (11:05):

Another one would be that you have to have seasoned salespeople on the phone in order to be successful and we have proven that you don’t need that. You need a certain personality, a certain inquisitiveness, confidence. They can’t be afraid to talk to someone on the phone but we make them really excited to talk to people on the phone after they’ve been with us for a while, but at least they can’t start off afraid. So you don’t need a seasoned sales person. Cold calls really do work. People think that they might not work. Although by the time they come to us, they’re open to it.

Corey Frank (11:41):

Valerie, I think just those three alone Chris, we should probably have Valerie out irregularly and change it from Market Dominance Guys to Market Dominance People, Market Dominance Prefect. I mean, this is… you’re speaking the language that Chris has taught us over the last year. This is great stuff. So keep going. This is a great list of these debunked myths here.

Chris Beall (12:02):

You know there was this big ramp time thing and we had a funny thing the other day where [Sean Cece 00:12:07] who is working with us for a while and is now still working with us but he’s outside the company, he posted something on LinkedIn that had actual numbers of him ramping to set his first meeting for a brand new client on his own outsourcing business. And he had it broken down to detailed minute by minute kind of thing. And his conclusion was, yeah you can ramp a rep and a new message to be effective with a business they’ve never seen before setting appointments in two hours.

And I think it was the most controversial thing that I’ve seen anybody say in a while. A a lot of experts came in and said, but what about what, but what about, but what about, but what about, and it’s like folks, I published the actual numbers. Here’s the recordings. It’s right here in front of you. [crosstalk 00:12:56] Yes, but you’re really good. Well yeah, we weren’t talking about starting from when a person is conceived and then they’re finally born, we are starting with a human being who can talk on the phone.

Corey Frank (13:08):

I just finished an interview right before we jumped on here with a potential candidate to come on board here at young blood. And Chris and Valerie, you’re going to kick in this because Chris, one of the questions that John and I my buddy here, we were asking him is, “Tell me about your last position.” He was a BDR and SDR at a FinTech firm out of California. So I was like, well that’s fascinating. And I ask him, “So you didn’t do full stack?” He was like, “No. I was just a BDR.” And I say just, but he was a BDR there for… he did quite well.

And so tell me about your onboarding process. Well, we had two months of sales training before we hit the phone. And I said, “I’m sorry. I miss my trick here. Did you say two months of sales training?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I said, “You mean product training?” He’s like, “Well there’s a little bit of product, but a lot of it was sales.” And I said, “Were you hired as a sales rep and then a BDR?” He’s like, “No. This is for all the BDRs go through this.”

Valerie Schlitt (14:00):

It’s unbelievable.

Corey Frank (14:03):

We went over MEDDICC and BANT for two months and I was like, wow. I think that Chris or I should get Sean, get the name of that firm and have sent Sean Cece over there right away because, how would you’d like to take instead of 60 days down to two hours we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, four hours, and your folks could be on the phone to one of the myths to buttress what you were saying Valerie about. You don’t need to know the product to be effective out of the gate here. Just be intriguing, you listen, some curiosity, establish some trust and some curiosity and you’ll be pretty well on the way.

Valerie Schlitt (14:43):

Yes. Absolutely. That’s amazing. Two months. That’s a lot of investment that you could have used someplace else.

Chris Beall (14:51):

Yeah. There’s a lot of opportunity cost hiding in there too when you really think about it. Everybody looks at this like, well I spent two months and that’s pretty normal. I think two months is pretty normal onboarding for new BDRs out there in the tech world. And then the washout rate is about 60% over a four month, five month period. So now you have to take your two months and divide it by 40%, right. So you’re going to multiply it by two and a half. So now you’re five months equivalent on the mean and in five months I would expect a new BDR to set 2.3 meetings per day. So at 2.3 meetings a day times five months, that’s 46, 47 meetings a month. So that’s 150 meetings roughly speaking for three months and now we’re out to another 70 or so 75. So we’re in a 200, 250 meetings that didn’t happen. And the value… [crosstalk 00:15:46].

Corey Frank (15:46):

Chris, they did happen. They happened for your competitor who’s using ConnectAndSell.

Valerie Schlitt (15:49):

Not the case.

Chris Beall (15:54):

It’s interesting how people do this math. And when you challenge them on it and say, “Well why are you doing that?” They generally will say, “Well, I read it in this book that onboarding works like this and blah, blah, blah.” And what they’re really saying is this, the longer this process is and the more elaborate it is, the more important I am. Because the biggest impediment to operational excellence in my experience is in politics. It’s in the politics of importance. And it’s very hard to be operationally excellent when the focus is on people being seen as being important, because importance, that sense of needing to be important or seen as being important has its own inflation built in. It’s got its own version of, whoever’s law you want to take or it could be Parkinson’s law or some other law that says stuff expands to fill whatever it is out there to expand into. And the need to be seen as an important player expands and expands and expands.

I also think it’s the reason that we tend not to see very many organizations operate based on the theory of constraints. Now, theory of constraints tells us that we have one bottleneck in our current process and it would be a really good idea to go find it, inspect it, characterize it, come up with an investment hypothesis, test that hypothesis and if it makes sense, if it works out, then make the investment and then stand back and watch the system settle down and see where the constraint goes. Well the problem is, everybody feels like they’re unimportant because the constraint isn’t in their department. And so they fight it.

And at budget meetings you very rarely hear say, “You know what, the stuff we’re doing is going really well. I actually don’t need any money next year beyond just resources to make it.” But if you can get the politics out to the point where you can go after the constraints, and in this case the constraint is a false constraint around time. If you invested in this correctly and end up with the two hour ramp or the one day or whatever it happens to be, it’s really challenging to get folks to say, “I’m part of the team. It’s important that I do my job, but it’s not important that I’m important or seen as important right now. It’s okay that I’m just part of the team right now because my stuff’s working.” You guys ever see that or am I crazy?

Corey Frank (18:35):

I think it’s part and parcel of the profession though. I don’t want you to think about this Valerie, right. And you have a lot of part-timers, right. You say you have people who are… I’m secure enough in being a stay-at-home dad where I have a window or I’m secure enough to be a student who’s going to law school where I have a window. It’s my identity versus my role like Sandler talks about. And I think though that a lot of us who are full-time in sales, especially coming from the bigger organizations where you have the great equalizer is what’s on the board. Or if I’m a sales manager, the great equalizer is how big is my team, right. It’s the sense of importance, the sense of alternative currency is different than… And it has to do with people and time versus probably results in investment and growth.

And I think which ties back to our theme on operational excellence, right, is this element of developing a mindset where you don’t have to put eight hours a day and talk with three people and spend 47 dials and send out 1000 emails. It’s okay to feel your worth about how many people you talk to. Did you grow today? Did you learn something today? The word I think Chris had been stealing from you from a few months ago is ruthlessly curious. I think that’s the word that you use that you try to perpetuate in your organization, correct?

Chris Beall (20:07):

Yeah. I’m a big fan of ruthless curiosity. And by ruthless, I mean, almost like a three-year-old asking why and not taking because I said so as an answer. And I think that that’s a hard thing to have in an organization because it roots out politics all by itself, but it can also be used as a political weapon. And therefore it has to be managed. You can go around and ask why for the purpose of wielding power over people or you can ask why because you’re genuinely curious. There was another element to this because some people are like that by personality, they’re genuinely curious.

Valerie, I’m really curious about this. When you’re going out to hire folks, do you find… The CIA and the NSA in particular, they love to hire people who come out of either theology backgrounds or philosophy backgrounds of some kind or music, musical people who are musical performers in order to be computer programmers on this really hard stuff that they work on, because those two kinds of backgrounds happen to be consonant with the skills that it takes to do that puzzle kind of work that you do in those organizations with software. And often it’s surprising where the skills tend to aggregate in college, what people are interested in.

And I’ve seen an example of the best cold caller I’ve seen in years and years and years, was a therapist. I got to see her on her first day as a cold caller. Never done it before and never thought about doing it before and these very smart people in Philadelphia thought that maybe it’d be a good idea for her to give it a go on very specific ConnectAndSell test drive. And she approached us at the therapist. She listened like a therapist. She intervened like a therapist. And she set meetings at a pace that generated more than $120,000 an hour for their business of [inaudible 00:22:11]. so I got a glimpse into that and I thought, are we missing? We should… I mean, the psychology departments are full of these people who get trained in this stuff, but mainly they were attracted to it. They were attracted to it and therefore, maybe it’s a magnet for a certain type of person that we could go and say, “Hey, you’ve got a couple of hours a day?”

Valerie Schlitt (22:36):

Fascinating. In the beginning, we somehow got through this network of people who worked in a preschool and a lot of the teachers came and worked with us. And very quickly I realized that if you are a preschool teacher, you have a way of talking that gets people to listen to you right away and do what you want them to do and you can talk to a lot of people, a lot of different temperaments. I forget what all the commonalities were, but there was a lot of commonality between being a preschool teacher and being someone who can talk on the phone and capture attention and secure appointments. And that was really an eye-opener.

Chris Beall (23:22):

Do you still do that? Do you recruit… I mean, there must be preschool teachers that are like Venture Capital in Silicon Valley, the streets must be a wash in preschool teachers, right.

Valerie Schlitt (23:33):

Probably are. We don’t do it purposefully anymore. We kind of happened into this little network, but I’m sure that the same qualities of some of the people that we bring on are similar to that.

Chris Beall (23:43):

Who was the common nectar that you… [crosstalk 00:23:47].

Valerie Schlitt (23:46):

There was one person that came to the organization. She wanted to, and not everyone works part-time, she wanted to work full-time. So she worked full-time but she had these buddies that she said, “Come on, this is a great place to work. You got to come.” You have to convince someone though who’s talking to kids that this is really very similar and it’s a nice place to work because it seems kind of scary. You have to make all these telephone calls and talk to strangers. But then little by little they came over. And I think we have had probably about five.

Chris Beall (24:16):

Now how about the flip on the other stuff. So I have an example, last year where a friend who is running a company doing some sort of a… It wasn’t outsourced cold calling but it was for himself. And I looked at his business and I said, I think that you ought to give my first wife a try with regard to calling. And it just seemed to me, I mean, I knew her well, we were married for quite a while and I have a huge amount of respect for her capabilities. And it was just the most horrible experience in the world for her. It created this anxiety. And here, I’m saying, ConnectAndSell, lots of fun. You push the button and you talk to somebody.

And she said it was something really horrible like anticipating putting your finger in an electrical socket kind of horrible, not when she pushed the button but waiting for the conversation. And so here’s a case of somebody who seems like a good match, smart, articulate, hardworking, courageous, used to run around business at a bookstore and built it from nothing, and it’s the worst job in the world for her. And do you find that sometimes you think you’re increasing the operational excellence with a particular hire and their eyes are bigger than their stomach when it comes to stomach and cold calls.

Valerie Schlitt (25:36):

I can’t think of anyone in particular but I do want to translate to, as we’ve migrated over to ConnectAndSell and putting people on ConnectAndSell, people were really afraid at first that these calls were going to come, they weren’t going to be able to study all the notes. I mean, you can see the notes of course, but you don’t get to see, I don’t know, six months worth of notes. And they were going to come shooting at them, how are they going to address it? Everyone loves it but change is hard. And that part of our journey towards operational excellence, it really didn’t take that much adjustment, but it did take people being convinced that they would be fine if they get put on ConnectAndSell and now everyone loves it.

Chris Beall (26:19):

It’s the scariest product in the world. It still scares me. It does because what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself in a known vulnerable situation without the precise control over timing. You don’t know if the beeps going to be one second from now or 10 minutes from now. It has a little bit of a horror movie quality to it of being in a dark room with something bad in there and you don’t know if that bad thing’s going to get you or not. And then when the lights turn on, it’s a surprise party and they’re [inaudible 00:26:54].

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Operational excellence is achieved when every member of an organization can see the flow of value to the customer and fix that flow before it breaks down. But as a manager of people, you know that this isn’t an easy goal to achieve — especially if your team members are now working from home instead of working together in one building. As Chris explains in a story about his experience mountain climbing and running up against a 9-foot tall stretch of wall, “We make a great plan — and then we run into that blank wall. The COVID pandemic is an example of that wall.”

In this podcast, Chris and Corey have a conversation with Valerie Schlitt, founder and CEO of VSA, about what to do with the problems this wall has created for her team members and those of her clients. Valerie holds a Wharton MBA and has 19 years of experience directing a great team of her own who use their skills to help VSA’s customers develop their businesses. “Collaborating with people is one of the biggest sources of ways to solve problems,” Valerie explains. But with the work-from-home movement, how can you maintain that same group problem-solving?

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In talking with Valerie, Chris and Corey ask for her expertise and share their own experiences in managing these challenges:

  • How do you motivate your team to rally around a radical decision?
  • How do you get everyone on your team to recognize the value of the expertise and talent of the other team members?
  • How do you help your team members see where they themselves are deficient and then learn to bolster that with other people’s talents?
  • How do you encourage everyone on your team to respect other team members when people are so different?
  • How does self-importance get in the way of operational excellence?

As usual, Chris and Corey create an atmosphere of camaraderie with their podcast guests. You’ll enjoy the flow of conversation and the information these three experts share.

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 (00:34):

So today, we have Valerie Schlitt from VSA Prospecting. Valerie, it was great to lasso you or corral you into this. As Chris and I say, we don’t have guests often, but when we do, it’s truly a hostage situation. So, you will develop the Stockholm syndrome probably within 15, 20 minutes of talking with us. And so your hours to glean all this nectar of wisdom here, especially the topic today, which is operational excellence, which you’re the perfect person. We have a Wharton MBA, right, Valerie?

Valerie Schlitt (00:34):

Yep.

Corey Frank (01:05):

You went in Wharton. So, I’m the lowest IQ person on this phone call by a great factor and…

Valerie Schlitt (01:11):

Not really sure about that but…

Corey Frank (01:13):

…And then before that you were at KPMG.

Valerie Schlitt (01:15):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Corey Frank (01:15):

So, impressive. How do you manage these type of wicked smart kind of guests here where we’re talking about operational excellence. Valerie falls from the sky from VSA, one of the top of funnel firms in the country, been around for about 19 years right, Valerie?

Valerie Schlitt (01:30):

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yup.

Corey Frank (01:31):

And the perfect person to talk and to be Chris’s foil here as we talk about operational excellence and with that, welcome Valerie. Great to have you at the moment.

Valerie Schlitt (01:41):

Oh, it’s lovely to be here. It’s great. Thank you both. So I’ll tell you exactly how I got started.

Corey Frank (01:46):

No. That’s the origin story [inaudible 00:01:47]

Valerie Schlitt (01:48):

So I have this Wharton MBA, as you know, and I really thought I was going to be a corporate person my whole life. I was climbing the ladder. Here I was, several different companies, marketing management, and consulting. And then I found myself laid off in 2001 during that downturn. And I decided to venture off and do my own thing. But unlike everything I learned at Wharton or at consulting or in marketing, I had no business plan, no Rolodex, no funding, no nothing. I sat in my family room. I met some people. They asked me if I could do something and honestly, I discovered this is my modus operandi in everything I do, I’m responding to what I say the market needs. And that’s how I started to VSA, just responding to one request after another and building up our client base that way. And we’ve done a lot of twists and turns along the way and now we’re in a group.

Corey Frank (02:41):

That’s fantastic. Fantastic. So the thought of actually using the phone to create conversations at scale.

Valerie Schlitt (02:48):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (02:49):

What a crappy business idea. Right, Chris? [inaudible 00:02:51]

Valerie Schlitt (02:52):

Honestly, I often say, “Who ever thought of this business?” But I love it. It’s real. It’s great. It’s real. I gravitate toward something that it really is tough and you have to just do it over and over and over again and then you make a difference. You make a difference. We make a difference in our client’s lives and in our life.

Corey Frank (03:12):

Well, it’s funny because when Chris and I were talking about trying to cajole you to coming on the show here, right? The first thing that we talked about was how many influencers, and I don’t want to disparage anybody, but the influencers on LinkedIn and right, Chris? That “I’m an expert. I’m a thought leader.” And then you have someone like Valerie who has been around for 19 plus years, quietly going about her day with her great team, growing this incredible business, right? Who probably doesn’t… You have a day job.

You don’t exactly post on LinkedIn every hour of the day, certainly. So, if anything that Market Dominance Guys can do is hopefully kind of nudge you a little bit that you have so much to offer to the greater community. And I think that’s certainly why I like doing these things with Chris and some of the guests that we have and all the great thought leaders that are connecting sellers. There’s so many younger sales leaders, and even guys like me that you need help and it’s a small community of folks who are crazy enough to pick up the phone and talk to strangers and ask them for money or time. And sometimes, we need all the help we can get from authentically real and genuine and experienced folks like yourself, who’ve done this for more than a couple of cycles.

Valerie Schlitt (04:22):

Great. Well, I hope to give you some advice. I can offer-

Corey Frank (04:26):

Well, first, let’s talk about operational excellence today. So, how about you kick it off a little bit since that done, on your recent trip from Reno to Washington, you had a lot of windshield time and this thought of operational excellence. I get a text out of the middle of nowhere, say, “Oh, the topic operational excellence. I got it. This is a good one. I got to rip.” And then we just happen to have Valerie. So we have lightning in a bottle here, hopefully.

Chris Beall (04:47):

Well, I blame it on the smoke. There was a lot of smoke I was driving through. And when you’re driving through smoke in Oregon, apparently the smoke has got a lot of sources and not all of it is forest fire. So that may have just kind of crept in past my protective gear that I had on it, altered my thinking a little bit, but I’ve had this thing in my head for a long time, probably goes back to my long career in rock climbing and mountaineering, which is that if you can think of anything you want and you can stand at the bottom of any mountain or any big wall that you’re looking at. And you can, you can think, and you can plan, you can get the binoculars out and you can look at the route. I remember once up in the wind river range, my partner climbing partner, Jim Haggart, and I spent three days trying to get a glimpse of this thing called Golden Eagle pinnacle to see if we could plot a route up because nobody had ever climbed it.

And we were really, really diligent about taking a good, hard look. But when you came right down to it, about 1600 feet up, there was a nine foot dead blank wall that you couldn’t see with the binoculars from across the valley. And that stopped. And I think that’s pretty typical of what we often find in business is that we make a great plan, we look carefully, we talk to people, we think it over, we make spreadsheets. And then we run into that nine foot blank wall and I don’t know if you’ve never really tried to climb anything. Nine feet is kind of a magic distance, right? You can’t reach that high even I’m not the shortest guy in the world, but I can’t reach up and grab something nine feet above my head and blank means blank. Like there’s no holds on it.

And that’s when the operational excellence question really kind of rears itself up in business, I think, and in climbing and stuff like that. It’s always easy to do the easy stuff, but all the easy stuff has already been done by everybody that is competing in a commodity basis. And you have to deal with the nine foot blank wall with great operational excellence with precision operation in order to be able to get all the way to the kind of summits we try to get to whether in business or climbing.

And I’m curious in this talk and that’s actually why I was thinking it over. When I was driving up here, I was thinking everything I’ve ever done that I looked back on and said, “That was worth doing.” There was some point in the doing where there was something that had to be overcome and it had to be overcome operationally. So I think a lot of times we think operational excellence is just repeating something we know how to do, but often I think it’s not, I think we’re more often in problem solving mode than we think. And we sometimes know that, when we’re solving a problem, we’re fighting a fire or doing something that we wish we did less of, we wish we could just repeat and turn the crank, right? But it’s hard to make a machine where you just turn the crank, even a machine like connect and sell there’s problems every day.

Chris Beall (08:21):

To address the problems and I’m curious about that Valerie said. Okay, you started this business with no business plan, just responding to people’s problems. So it’s problems all the way down to start with. Do you recall any times as you were going along or even recently where you kind of came up against it and went, “Huh? How are we going to get this done?” And then you had to figure out how to not just solve it that one time, but operationalized that solution to make it part of the business. Do any of those come to mind?

Valerie Schlitt (08:52):

Well, I think that if you have a business for 19 years and you both have businesses, you are constantly facing that nine foot wall. It’s not every day, but probably six times in my 19 years, I’ve faced that wall. And I guess one could be just recently, COVID. All of a sudden here we are, we’re faced with COVID and things are changing and we’re saying, “Well, okay, what are we going to do?” And I personally think that coming together with people, collaborating and getting minds to come together and thinking and bouncing ideas is one of the biggest sources of ways that I’ve come to identify how to solve problems. I do not work well autonomously, and I think most people don’t. And when it came to COVID, it was really saying, “Okay, what do we do really well? And how can we leverage that in a different direction? What else can we do? Or what’s working for us that we can leverage because these other things are not working?

So it’s like going up that nine foot wall where you’re saying, “Okay, I can’t go up it, but maybe I can go around. Maybe I can have two people helping me.” And that happens all the time. I’m not being very specific, but all the time. And I think, really had leaning on the people in the organization, I had such great people who are always problem-solving also, and as you know, Chris, we work with your firm quite a bit and we are constantly saying, “Okay, these clients that we used to work with on a regular click and dial, and now we’re using with ConnectAndSell.” That has been a game changer for us and we’ve been able now to retain so many more clients and gain more clients that way as well. So-

Chris Beall (10:31):

That’s interesting. That was the solution to our nine foot blank wall by the way, we did something we had never done before and never did ask her on a climb, which is literally the boost. You know, you’re a kid and you can do this, right. You get down, you lock your hands together and somebody stands on the hand and it was my turn to lead. And it was pretty freaky quite frankly, not because I was depending on Jim’s hand strength, which is quite remarkable, but because he had to belay me and be my foothold at the same time, and I was kind of thinking, so if I blow this move and I’m off and away, we all go and it was some ways down. I did get a sense of this is the empire state building plus about 500 feet of vertical below our feet.

So it’s not like nothing’s going to happen if you could aim at that direction. But I remember we spoke at various points in this COVID process. You and I did Valerie. And one thing that really impressed me about speaking with you about the challenges that you had is you have a way of reaching out to somebody with the very specific requests, like there’s something that’s on your mind and it’s really specific, but you’re very open-minded about the nature of how somebody responds to that, including if somebody and I often do this, it’s Corey and I says, ” I don’t know if that’s the question.” And I think that’s pretty unusual. So, looking at COVID, what was it as you saw it all happening that kind of made you think, ” Oh my God,” did you ever think, “Oh my God, we could lose the business.”?

Valerie Schlitt (12:10):

I didn’t think we would lose the business because we have a lot of diversification. So there are other sources of revenue. However, I did think about the employees a lot. That was my driving force, is that I have a team of such talented people and they are counting on me to be on and creative and thinking about their future and the company’s future. That was incredibly motivating. So, that is probably what is the single biggest thing that propelled me. But I think also innately if you’re a business owner or anyone who’s a leader in business, who said that, Chris, I think you, that we are problem solving more than we’re not or more than we think we are. So, this drive to say, “Okay, how can we overcome this?” So what was happening in our business is we have a lot of clients who are in healthcare and in healthcare, we all of a sudden heard people say, why are you calling me?

We are dealing with the pandemic, don’t call. So that meant a lot of our clients would say, we’re going to pause. And therefore we had to think, “Okay, well, what else can we do? What other industries are open? What other services can we offer so that we can actually keep our people in business and thrive?” And actually, honestly, this nine foot wall is kind of also a thrill, it’s a little bit of adrenaline boost. So, you want sometimes this nine foot wall, because it propels us to do things that we might not have done otherwise. So for us, it was trying to go into contact tracing and use all the skills that we already had, but in a different area. So that’s another line of business that we have opened during the pandemic.

Chris Beall (13:55):

No, that’s fascinating because there is nothing scary in a business than going into a new market. I mean, this show’s called Market Dominance Guys because market penetration is so hard that you better dominate a market once you penetrate it or you got to get really good at penetrating. Choosing to go penetrate other markets is I think the scariest thing to do in business. It’s the biggest of the unknowns. It’s the Christopher Columbus equivalent of sailing off to the West and hoping it turns out okay because you really don’t get to see very well. As you looked around and said, “Okay, we have to go and go after some more markets.” And contact tracing is pretty far away in certain ways from helping folks get appointment, right. Really, it’s pretty far away. What led you to believe that you had the operational chops to, let’s say, yes, you had the dog chasing the car, right? If you catch the car, how do you think you can put your teeth around the bumper and grind it through a halt?

Valerie Schlitt (14:57):

Well, I first want to say, I knew I had a great team who was going to keep us on the track of getting appointments for our clients. So that was never going away. We were going to, and we have stayed in that business and healthcare is starting to come back. And that is where the lion’s share of our businesses.

But, I think it goes to this operational excellence. Really, the entire process of what we do every day is all about doing something really well, knowing how to engage and talk on the phone, so that someone wants to talk back to you. So you’re delivering the right message, but you’re saying it in the right tone, a lot of what we’ve learned from you, Chris. Also, having the right list, knowing when to call, how often to call, those are all skill sets that you need in contact tracing as well. So a lot of the operations of what we do is in fact directly transferable. Some of these skill skillsets, even empathy, it’s more alike than you think. So it was not that big of a leap. And I’m really committed to communities and helping communities. So it fit my own personality and what I like to do and in helping, not only employ people, but now help people so that they can stay alive.

Chris Beall (16:15):

Yes. That’s a good one, it’s pretty cool. Corey, did you ever think about adding contact tracing to what you guys are doing over there at a Youngblood Works?

Corey Frank (16:23):

Listen, eight years of community college, I’m no Wharton man, and I copy ideas, I don’t pioneer them, you know that. So there’s [crosstalk 00:16:32] one. I am curious though, Valerie, we like to ask this to a lot of folks, I’ve asked this to Chris over the years, how do you think as a leader? Because it’s a scary proposition, right? Even to Chris, Chris, you and Jim on that wall, you have a couple of choices. Number one is to do nothing, basically retreats, go back down and say, “Well, that didn’t work.” Number two, is to try an incremental approach. And number three is just to go for it. Who stopped? You got one shot, one shot, one kill pronged, the stakes could be higher. But did you guys talk about that to deliberate it?

You mapped it out. So Valerie you go in a contact tracing, because if you’re wrong, it’s not going to take down the company, but it’s certainly going to be an expansion. You expend capital and you expend hope because there’s a lot of folks during COVID that we’re trying to grasp for different things. You only have a finite amount of wishes from the genie, if you will, where they follow you. “Yes. Valerie, we’re with you. We’ll do this.” But if that didn’t work, then maybe a couple of people like, “Well, I don’t know Valerie.” So how do you and your team kind of rally around a decision? Is it collaborative? Did you analyze it to the ends degree? Do you trust your guts? Did you test it a little bit? Or do you just, like Chris and Jim, just go for it and say, ” Listen, I know it and we’re going to rally around this battle cry here.”

Valerie Schlitt (17:58):

Well, when I started the business, it was much more incremental. I just took baby steps. As I’ve become more seasoned as a leader, or looking at the future of the business. There’s something that propels me that almost there’s no going back, you can’t go back and you can only change or go right or left or something, but there’s no going back. And so honestly, there’s just a vision that I glom on to and I’m going to somehow address it now. You bring up a good point because we went into the finals in New Jersey for the contact tracing. And at first, no one believed that we could actually make it. But as we kept on going further and further and further, the whole team was like, “Wow, we’re really doing this.” And then they’re like, ” Valerie, we knew you could do this.”

And then we didn’t get it. So that does expand a little bit to me that said, “Wow, we got that far. That means the next time we can get further, it would be like going up to eight feet and say, next time it’s going to be nine.” But maybe there’s some people that will lose a little faith. I think that’s on them. I think taking risks is really important. And really I look at everything at what is the benefit if it works out and what is the downside if it doesn’t work out? How bad could it really be? It can’t be that bad. So we just stay the way we are. That’s okay. But if we have the opportunity to try something else that’s could be really cool and make a mark in this society. That would be great. And so let’s go for it.

Chris Beall (19:29):

Question about your past. We kind of went back to the Wharton thing and all that. I think that as you know, I’m engaged to the incomparable Helen Nucci and she’s she went to MIT on her own back, right. She figured out how to get in. She figured out how to get through, very similar to you in certain ways, by knowing how to reach out and ask for help from people and ask for advice. I think that’s one of the greatest skills in the world is to be able to do that.

I’m very poor at it myself, which is why I thrashed around like a fish that’s been brought up on a boat for a long time, but you’re really, really good at that. When did you realize when you were, I’m assuming it’s when you were a kid, that things that other people struggled with, that you could actually do? There has to be a point somewhere because now you do it and talk about it like, “Yeah, we go for it.” Right? But at some point when you were a child or somewhere, there has to be an experience or something where you went, ” Huh, that’s interesting. These other folks are kind of going, I don’t think we can do this and I think I can do this.” Did that happen to you? Can you remember that?

Valerie Schlitt (20:40):

I remember one time, but it was not when I was a kid. So I think I was a very, very humble person. I didn’t think anything I did was quite remarkable. I thought I was just doing what I was supposed to be doing. And then at some point, someone remarked on my problem solving skills. And I had just thought that was natural. I did not know that they were different than anyone else’s skills. And from then on, I think I realized that I looked at problems and address them, maybe not so differently than other people, but in a unique way or that I actually thrive on it, that it’s a passion of mine to solve problems. So that’s the only thing I can actually say. And I don’t think it has anything to do with being particularly smart or being particularly brave or being a technical capability. It’s just a mindset of solving problems.

Chris Beall (21:33):

You just like them?

Valerie Schlitt (21:34):

Yes,

Chris Beall (21:38):

I do too so I think pretty fascinating.

Valerie Schlitt (21:39):

I don’t like it when people make things out to be so simple because I’d like to find out, well, what is hard? Let’s try to solve the hard ones.

Chris Beall (21:47):

That’s really interesting. Well, when you were in school and you were taking the classes that have problems in them, like math is often one that, in our English classes, we’re asked to write stuff in our math classes, we’re asked to literally solve problems. That’s what they’re called. They’re called problems. Right?

Valerie Schlitt (22:04):

You’re a genius in math. I am horrible in math. So I have learned that I need, Oh, here’s a good example. I have learned through my experiences. I went through the Goldman Sachs program. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. It’s for small businesses, you take a course that Goldman Sachs put together. Even though I had my MBA from Wharton, I still went through this. And through there, I realized at the end, I really need to get someone to help me with the finances because I’m struggling way too much and I can use my capabilities someplace else. So now I have a great CFO, a fractional CFO who works with us and his honestly, if I didn’t have, his name is Steven, we would be struggling, trying to solve certain problems that he can solve in an instant. So I think that’s another one of reaching out. I guess we find out where am I deficient? And I am very deficient in very many ways and bolster that with other people’s talents.

Chris Beall (23:04):

Well, what a talent that is. I’ve often bristled at the notion that we should all be doing everything. And it’s often implied by these self-help types that are out there. It’s like, “Do this, do that, be strong about this.” And to incite, well, it’s almost always a team game and the main thing we do in a team is we cover each other’s weaknesses because we got them. So let’s be as upfront as we can be about our weaknesses and then cover them. As you know, I sucked so badly, simple logistics that you can’t hope to have me show up at something scheduled two weeks from now. And it’s a conference talk or whatever. If Shelley Morrison, doesn’t make sure that I know that I’ve got to do it and it’s on this day and somebody took care of PowerPoint or one slide that we do and all that I’m hopeless.

Right? And so I’m just thrilled to be able to have somebody help me with that stuff because I could work on it the rest of my life and I’d still suck, there’s no doubt about it. So, I think that ability when we’re talking operational excellence, I think we often think about the individual, but the cheapest way to get it is to get a team together of people. Each one of whom is very strong in one area and let all the others be as weak as they want to be, and then make sure that everybody respects each other and lets whoever’s great at whatever, take that thing and do it.

Valerie Schlitt (24:19):

I think that the idea of letting everyone respect each other is really important and hard. And I’d love to hear how you’ve been able to do that, to get other people, to respect differences because a lot of people look at other people and they want them to be just like themselves.

Chris Beall (24:35):

It’s a tough one. It’s easy to do for me and my areas of weakness, because then I can just model what I want by holding a problem-solving meeting with somebody who’s superior in that area and making it abundantly clear that I see that person as the leader. I think that leadership shifts around appropriately based on the moment and making it abundantly clear. I am following now, this person is leading and being very explicit about it makes a big difference and I’m big into explicitness. Anyway, here’s a story from my deep past. So I was hired at a company called CAD Information Systems that we changed the name to CADIS fairly shortly to build the world’s first engineering oriented electronic catalog system that would allow an engineer to find a park that they needed to reuse in a design from the panoply of parts that might’ve been already sourced in are hiding and the MRP database or ERP database or whatever you call the item master.

And the first thing I did when I got the team together, there were just three people, as I said, we’re going to sit in a room until we know what all the words mean. And we’re just kind of put words on the whiteboard that we think are relevant to this business. And until we have an ostensive definition where we can point to one formal definition, where we can describe it in other words, a comparative definition, we can say, it’s like this, a distinctive definition where you can say, it’s not this, it’s not this, it’s not that. And do it for every word that we’re going to encounter in the next 10 years of doing this. We’re not leaving this room.

And of course the software developers thought I was out of my mind. But to me it was the essence of operational excellence in design is to know what you’re talking about. And so get explicit. And it was painful. People yelled at each other and stuff. But when we were finished, our distinguishing feature is we had a common language of discourse forever and we could call each other out on using a word in precisely. That was a term of art in our business. I think that we do this in a way with each other, but allowing people to be precisely understood in terms of their capabilities and say, this is so-and-so’s thing because they’re really, really good at this. And therefore, when we’re doing that, they’re the leader.

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When we’re performing in the presence of someone we know to be more expert than we are, our performance usually suffers. In the world of sales, managers often put this pressure on salespeople, although often unwittingly. They may approach their sales rep with every intention of being a helpful coach, but too often they slip into the role of a critical evaluator instead. And as soon as a salesperson thinks they’re being evaluated, fear sets in — their stomach sinks, their voice tightens up, their intended flow of words gets backed up — and there goes their normal, relaxed performance.

In this podcast, Chris talks with Susan Finch, president of Funnel Radio, on this topic and then segues into the benefits of how a mutually beneficial relationship between members of the company’s team (sales, research, engineering/manufacturing, customer support) creates the best possible means of serving customers. Chris and Susan then discuss how showing appreciation and respect for the behind-the-scenes team members keeps those people from feeling invisible, motivates them to perform better, and to willingly offer support to the people on the front line.

Join Chris and Susan for another relaxed, entertaining, and informative Market Dominance Guys podcast as they explore what works and what doesn’t when managing salespeople and dominating your market.

 

—-more—-

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (01:54):

Sales is a game ultimately of dissonance and irony, ultimately of dissonance and irony. There’s very little of it where you get to play it straight up because you’re operating in the field of other people’s emotions and their factual vulnerability. They are vulnerable to you if they let you begin to pitch them, and so there’s resistance, “psychological reactance” is generally what it’s called, and they can’t help it. Then if you respond to that by being offended that they’re rejecting you by raising an objection, you’re toast.

Jeb Blount wrote a whole book on this called Objections. Here’s the book. I mean, it’s a brilliant book. Don’t take my synopsis and say, “I’ve read the book,” but here’s the book. Inside, we hear objections, which are reasonable things for people to say in their circumstance, as rejection, and rejection is the toughest thing that happens to us because it creates embarrassment for us. How we handle hearing an objection and dealing with our inevitable emotional response internally that it’s rejection is the key to handling the hard part of sales, which is what to do when they say no and they don’t mean it.

What do you do when they say no, but that’s not what they mean, because you can’t say, “You didn’t mean that”? What do you do? Jeb makes this point, which is you do a thing called “ledging.” I’m an old climber, as you know. My game growing up was rock-climbing and mountaineering and a ledge, when I just heard the word for this first time, “ledging,” a ledge is a safe place. Ledges are where you sit and belay, they’re where you sleep, and they’re where you don’t need handholds anymore. When you’re climbing, sometimes you can go through extended periods of time where one hand or the other must be very active on the rock holding on, or else bad things happen, right? For certain kinds of climbs that can get worse than others. It’s always a game where you can’t make an awful lot of mistakes. It’s kind of a tense game. A ledge is where you can relax and that’s his point.

How do you ledge? You just have to have a word or phrase that you say out loud at that point that tells you that you’ve had the reaction of rejection to an objection so that you can have a little bit of time to regain your equilibrium, assess the situation, categorize the objection, and know what kinds of things you might want to be addressing at that point. My ledge is the word “fantastic,” so when somebody calls me and says, “Our number nine production system just went down for the second time this week,” I say, “Fantastic,” because that feels like rejection by the system to me. It’s like, “Oh, man, did it go down? Our users need it. It’s down. That’s not a good thing.” I feel bad on the inside, so I go to my ledge and my ledge is the word “fantastic.” It sounds good to me, “fantastic.” I love the way it sounds. It’s poetic. It’s three syllables, it’s like a little haiku: “Fantastic!” It’s real easy to say with an exclamation point on the end and not be sarcastic.

Susan Finch (05:24):

But that is the key, too: It takes practice.

Chris Beall (05:32):

Yes. Everything takes practice. That takes a lot. You golfers know this, right? The hard thing in golf is not hitting the shot that you know is your weakness when trouble is on the side that you tend to go, so all of us have a tendency to either hit the ball left or hit the ball right. There’s nobody who has a tendency to hit it down the middle. That doesn’t exist, even the great golfers. “My miss,” it’s referred to as “my miss.” My miss is a hard hook and it goes left.

Lee Trevino said this very well. He said, “You can talk to a slice, but a hook just won’t listen.” He might’ve said, “You can talk to a fade,” to make it more polite, “and a hook just won’t listen.” I love that. You can yell at a ball that’s going to the right and it’ll listen to you because it’s not going that hard to the right. But when you hook it, it’s coming down. It’s not just going to left, it’s coming down, right? Well, when trouble’s on the left and it’s a game situation, so to speak, it’s important, it’s the club championship, or it’s just you’re going to break your own record or you care or whatever, that’s when the hook comes up for me. That’s when it comes out and it’s because in my head, I have failed to say, “Fantastic, it’s out of bounds to the left. OB to the left. Fantastic.” Right, and treat that as a clarifying moment.

Susan Finch (07:01):

On the last episode, Chris and I have been talking about scarcity and abundance and economics. Let’s go on with our conversation from last episode and continue it because I think this is the only way for us to break cycles as sales professionals before we really can get started. For those of you that have to sell, but you don’t think you’re a sales professional, you still need to know how to break these cycles.

Chris Beall (07:26):

Yeah. I mean, everybody has to sell. Everybody has to sell and most people get pretty locked up when they’re trying to do it when it counts. Most people are actually pretty good at it when they really believe that the outcome is a good outcome, even if it’s just for them. As little kids, we’re really good at it. We’re really good at whining at mom when we’re in the grocery store to ask for the candy bar that we know we’re not supposed to have. We’ve become quite effective little sales monsters at that point, right?

All of us, except for a certain class of person that none of us happen to be, thank God, we get tight when we have to perform in the presence of somebody we know to be more expert than we are, and so when the pressure is on, we might be able to perform, but when the pressure is on and the master is there, it’s hard to perform. That’s evidence that we have a hard time performing in general anything. If you’ve learned to juggle three balls and then you’re in the presence of somebody who can juggle five, your three-ball juggling goes to hell in a handbasket. That’s all there is to it.

I experience this on occasion. COVID has really saved me from it because we live in splendid isolation now, so I have this beautiful little Yamaha electronic piano that is sampled from their big concert grand, so it sounds just like the big concert grand, at least in my mind, and I can sit down and play quite comfortably in the evening and my fiance will listen to me and she’ll say she loves it. That’s easy. All you have to do to make me into a horrible, halting, unsure piano player would be to have my sister’s boyfriend, who is a brilliant pianist and a piano tuner, walk in the room, or just tell me that he’s coming to visit, and I will suddenly not know what the major third of an E flat chord is. I’ll know it, but I won’t be able to execute it. I’ll be unsure of myself, and that little feel I have, which is, “Where is that? Oh, that’s the one between those two black keys that I feel here with this finger,” that feel is going to go away like that.

I think that’s what happens when we get tight is we lose access to the feel feedback and it’s overwhelmed by this performance expectation feedback. Salespeople often put that on themselves, and worse, sales managers often put it on salespeople by showing up. When they should be in a coaching role, they’re in an evaluation role. If you want to ruin somebody’s performance, and especially in something athletic like sales, all you have to do is make it clear that you’re evaluating their performance while they’re trying to perform and you will guarantee the outcome that you already knew was going to happen. That’s why it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of scarcity.

Getting over that is hard, and one way to do it organizationally, and I’m a big believer when you can do something organizationally if you have the money for the extra person, or you can figure out how to allocate, go with a part-time person or whatever in a role, do it rather than doing it through personal transformation because personal transformation is long, it’s expensive, and your overhead is burning a hole in your pocket and your company.

For instance, an example is the difference between managing and coaching. In the NFL, we manage out of the front office, there’s a person called a “general manager.” They choose the players. The coach has input, but the general manager is responsible for making sure the right players are hired to be on the team and whether they’re fired or not is their choice. The coach decides whether to play them or not. That’s a different thing. The coach also trains them, teaches them, helps them, gets inside their head, understands when their problem is a psychological problem or physical problem, does all that. But the coach doesn’t hire and fire. They have some influence on that, but they don’t actually do that.

In sales, which is more athletically demanding than NFL football by far, we make a mistake when we coach out of the leader’s position, when we’re confusing the person we’re coaching with, whether we’re coaching them or evaluating them because as soon as we’re evaluating them, we’re ruining their performance, they tighten up, and in sales, when you tighten up, you’re toast. You’re just toast when you tighten up. The scarcity mindset, it’s something that we tend to say we must address it within the individual by fixing their mindset. We can help with that. We can encourage it. We can provide. Go to Gerhard Gschwandtner’s Peak Performance Mindset Retreat and jump out of an airplane, drive that Ferrari. Now, have somebody help you understand where your beliefs come from so someday you might be able to do something about them.

But we can also do it organizationally, and sales is a team game, even when it’s played alone. That’s something that I think we often forget because sales in history was done like this: “Here’s your territory. Go get them, tiger.” That’s it. That was sales management forever and ever and the salesperson was a business person who owned a territory and they kept that territory. They bought that territory by making their quota and then the territory itself had an increasing value by increasing the quota. It was actually pretty simple, right? Asset must increase in value to be worth the investment. The way it increases in value was we keep raising the quota. The salesperson who wants to keep buying that territory keeps buying it by hitting that quota. That’s the old model. That’s not the new model.

Software ate the world. There is no inventory anymore to be disposed of, of significance. There are engagements, there’s helping, there’s this whole new world where there’s no inventory, so sales immediately became a team game, and it’s hard for folks to recognize that. The most important team relationship is between the player and the coach, but the coach is best, I won’t say only, but is best a coach without hiring or firing authority and kind of keeping out of that, kind of keeping out of it. Let the facts speak for themselves, including the performance facts, the recordings, all that kind of stuff, but let the coach just be there to help performance, help you get better.

Susan Finch (14:14):

What about the other players, though? How do they factor in? To the individual performance of one salesperson, you’re saying the team is a big thing, it isn’t just the coach.

Chris Beall (14:24):

No, I mean, it’s a lot. There’s a lot of players on the team. There’s whoever is the expert on the product. How do they interact with the salesperson so the salesperson is knowledgeable about the things that are worth being knowledgeable about and confident in the product’s ability to carry those out for the right prospect?

Chris Beall (15:30):

How does that happen? Product knowledge is inferior to product confidence, so how does that happen? That needs to happen in the relationship between the product team and the salespeople, so if the product team is very engineering-focused/oriented, they’re engineers, they tend to see salespeople as these inferior beings who aren’t smart enough to build products, and therefore, they talk down to them. Well, when you talk down to a salesperson about a product, you actually reduce their confidence in their ability to represent the product correctly, so you’re actually hurting yourself when you do this. Those are key members of the team.

Support is key members of the team. Things go bad. Things are going to go bad. In the modern world, everything is support-oriented and having a relationship between support and sales that is supportive and where sales is not using support as an excuse for future failure. That’s a two-way street because sales really owes support their support and support needs to be thinking, “Hmm. Instead of just running the regular book here, is this a case where I could take the extra minute and inform the salesperson responsible for this account what I’m doing and get a little guidance about the business context?” Maybe there is no renewal immediately coming up, but there might be a renewal discussion that’s happening because of an upsell opportunity. You wouldn’t know that as the support person. You’ll find it out if you ask the salesperson, “Is there some nice to be thinking about before I do this?” Because I could support like this the regular way, or I could do the extra effort and get in a screen-share and actually help them. It’ll take a little bit more time. Is this person really important to you, o salesperson?

It’s a team game on the support dimension. It’s certainly a team game on the information dimension. You’re getting information about who to go and call on. But by the way, I highly recommend that the information team, the data team be separate. Why? That’s actually for a different reason. It feels bad to do work you can’t do very well and it reduces your confidence and most don’t do data work very well because their brains are not organized for data work, so they don’t see it. They don’t see the data at all, or it’s hard for them to see. The same thing with writing. Most salespeople were not the person who in the English class raised their hand and was the best writer in class, so support in these areas for different elements of the job let the salesperson be free to execute.

Susan Finch (18:17):

I agree. I can tell a difference within a minute when I call a support team that is in the position of being the punching bag and when you call the support team that you know they have this level of confidence that, “No, we’re the ones that keep everybody happy. We’re the ones that bring back more business. We’re the ones that hold this all together,” and whether it’s true or not, they feel it, and it comes through to where I know I can relax because they’re handling this for me, they’ll solve my problem, which builds my confidence in the company overall to trust the salesperson the next time they suggest something to me.

Chris Beall (18:52):

Yes, and as management, we need to be careful about what we celebrate. Corey wrote a brilliant piece recently about trying to train himself away from celebrating luck, because after all, if something happens by luck, you’re not really looking to repeat the run-up to that. That’s just depending on luck, right? If hope is not a strategy, luck really sucks as a strategy, right? Rely on luck, ROL. I don’t think so, so let’s keep it more in the ROI, a little bit earlier in the alphabet, right?

It’s an issue there, but there’s another issue, which is the issue of celebration, so when a deal gets done and everybody can see it, at our company, everybody can see it because it’s a DocuSign that goes around and it’s been signed and then it gets posted and everybody can see it. We’re virtual, so we don’t have a bell to ring, and it could be in the middle of the night somewhere, right? We could do a deal in the evening here and in the UK, it’s middle of the night. I’m not going to have Jerry Hill wake up to some idiot bell that wakes him up, right?

But we even have a tendency as a company, which I try to work against every day, to celebrate the salesperson: “Wow! Great deal, Jerry. Fabulous that you brought that one across the line.” Well, what about customer success who ran the test drive? What about my research team, Jaidev Anand, who put together the fabulous list that was used in that test drive, because that was one where they needed data? What about the support staff that took a situation where four people showed up late for the test drive that we didn’t even know about and within five minutes they were administered into the system, blowing the minds of whoever it is?

I can think of a case where actually the team from the big OEM showed up not intending to use ConnectAndSell at a test drive of their biggest reseller and they showed up and they watched what was going on, and this is a big OEM. We would all recognize this company. Very, very big. The leader of that group said, “What is this?” and the leader of the reseller said, “Well, this is ConnectAndSell. We’re testing it today. It’s called an ‘intensive test drive.'” There was some listening that went on for three or four minutes and then the question, “Can we join in?”

Well, gosh, it was seven people and we didn’t know who they were and the lists had already been divided up among everybody so there was no extra data. All the ice cream was gone. You’d scoop all you want, but there was none left in there. I asked our head of customer success to see if we could accommodate and he never says no to anything that’s doable, but even he hesitated just for a moment, and then jumped in and I put it on the clock. Within seven minutes, everybody on that team was administered into the system, they had data to call on, and they were trained. That was better than the test drive, even though it was a different team and they weren’t going to buy in the whole bit, that was better than it going well.

Who deserves that deal, which has turned into a fabulous relationship for both ConnectAndSell and for that customer? Well, it’s not the rep. I’m the rep, I think. No, I think Jonti McLaren is officially the rep, but I was the one on the ground there that day. The tendency to celebrate the hero who was in the front without extending that celebration by name, not in some general way, but this person, this person, this person, if possible, that’s a bad tendency, and it causes a feeling of less abundance among the people who are behind the scenes. Then it’s harder for them to execute because they have to overcome the emotional barrier of being behind the scenes, even though by personality, they probably prefer to be behind the scenes, right, they still want recognition. Everybody wants recognition.

Susan Finch (23:09):

It’s a little different than the embarrassment thing that we talked about in the previous episode. You don’t forget those feelings, but you also don’t forget the feeling of being invisible.

Chris Beall (23:20):

Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Finch (23:22):

Nobody wants to be invisible. Even if you want to be subtle behind the scenes, you still want to be seen a little bit.

Chris Beall (23:29):

Yeah. This is one of the main reasons that I suggest that CEOs sell, but also that they get involved in product at a detailed level. Not so much that they’re going to make a great contribution. Maybe they are a product person. I mean, that’s my background. I’m a product person, engineer, and all that kind of stuff, so it’s kind of legit when I do it, but that’s not the only reason I do it. The other reason is the people on the front lines on product have a scary job, the scariest job, which is they do work that nobody knows it can be done or not and they’re treated as though they’re doing work that’s simply a matter of doing the work.

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The pandemic has certainly shown the general public that scarcity or abundance of products can have an effect on people’s emotions. Scarcity increases desire — whether you desperately need the product or not. Abundance decreases desire, because there’s plenty of what you might need in the future. This is true for the sales process too. When you know that you’re going to have another conversation with a prospect, then you can relax during the initial conversation. The tension will disappear from your voice, because you’re not pushing for the sale: you know you have another chance at a future date, and you can relax while you gather information and begin establishing trust with your prospect. There’s no need to hang on and desperately keep the call going; you set up an appointment for the next conversation, and then you end the call. In other words, you “make yourself scarce.” And right there, you’ve introduced the element of scarcity to your prospect’s emotions and, in doing so, increased their desire for more information about what your company offers.

—-more—-

Join Chris and Susan Finch of Funnel Radio as they explore this yin-yang of scarcity and abundance, and then let you in on the biggest sin in sales. You won’t want to miss this!

 

This episode of 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.

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Susan Finch (00:22):

Hey everybody, you don’t usually see me here. I’m Susan Finch. I’m usually the host on a couple of other shows, but I also help produce the Market Dominance Guys. And Chris Beall And I had this wonderful conversation that we did not hit the recording button on, about scarcity and abundance. And he said, “Hey, let’s just make this into a podcast.” So we’re going to get going here. And we’re going to be talking about scarcity and abundance and how it affects demand for what we offer in products and services. Now we know that scarcity falls into three distinctive categories, demand-induced, supply-induced, and structural. And demand-induced scarcity happens when the demand of a resource increases and the supply stays the same. And I think it’s one of the most common versions of scarcity that we deal with in sales. And, Chris, I ain’t even going to even ask you to talk about when it’s totally manufactured, wholly unnecessary, because you told me that whiskey story yesterday, and we’re going to dive into that. So, Chris Beall, enlightened us. Let’s have this conversation.

Chris Beall (01:42):

Well, nothing is more enlightening than talking scarcity and whiskey at the same time. I bet there’s a lot of folks who can relate to that at this very minute. And they’re probably thinking, “I’m feeling a little scarcity on the whiskey front right now.” And that story by the way, it is an example of brilliantly manufactured scarcity. I think everybody in sales, at the margin manufactures a little bit of scarcity, either you’re busy and you can’t meet with somebody. All the really good sellers are always busy, and they’re busy, whether they’re busy or not busy, right? Because folks feel better, quite frankly, when they feel like they’re getting something that not everybody is getting. And so scarcity is correlated positively with desirability. And at the margin, of course, we all have got to use little clues in the environment to tell us what’s desirable.

We may have calculated or thought through our situation. And we said, “Well, we really need a product that does X, Y, and Z. It’s got to have this feature and this capabilities, performance characteristics and this cost.” But really what we do is we go, “Well, wait a minute. You mean I can’t have that one? I want that.” I mean, that’s actually what we do on the inside. And we do it all the time. We do it all the time in life. By the way, the whiskey story is about the Blanton’s and it’s for bourbon drinkers, for people who care about this. And what they’ve done is super smart. So every bottle of the Blanton’s… They’re these attractively-shaped bulbous bottles, they come in a bag, but it’s not like a fru-fru bag, it’s just a bag that looks nice.

And the cork is attached to a little figurine of a horse, and a jockey riding the horse. And when you first see it, it’s just a horse and jockey. And then you look more closely and you see two things. One is, if you get a second bottle, the horse might be in a different position, one horses at a trot or a walk, and one of them’s at a dead run, tail straight out behind it. And the jockey is in different positions, either sitting up a little bit or down the homestretch, head along the neck of the horse, whip hand up. So you can tell, I used to go to a lot of horse races when I was young. And so, they have these eight different horses because Blanton’s… Oh, each one has a letter, B, L, A, N, T, O, N, S, eight letters with the N repeated of course.

So you get a bottle and you go, “Oh, I got the T. Well, you mean I could get all of them?” Immediately they’re a scarcity because the other letters are more scarce. And when you’re finally down to just one letter left, it’s really scarce. And you scour the stores for this thing that, by the way, isn’t usually there because they’ve also made it rare by not shipping very much. As a result of this, not only do they get us addicted to shopping for Blanton’s, you don’t have to be addicted to the damn Blanton’s, you’re just addicted to shopping for the stuff because you want it because you can’t have it, even though there’s a bottle of it right there, “That’s fine. I have to buy it.” I can’t see the letter on it before I buy it. They put it intelligently in a box to make that information scarce and valuable.

And it’s always behind lock and key. So you can’t just go route it out of the box. They’ll never sell you another bottle at the store if you do that. So you keep buying, and when you finally, it’s like, “I’ve got them all, but one.” You’re going to have to buy eight on average to get one, whereas at the beginning you bought one to get one. So the scarcity naturally mathematically increases over time. And there you are, you become addicted to shopping. It’s an example. I guess people talk about an abundance mindset as a good thing. And they’re right. It is a good thing because it relaxes us in sales. When we know that we’re going to have another conversation, we relax on this conversation. And being relaxed allows us to be more approachable. And when we’re more approachable, we can build trust.

And we don’t have that tightness in our voice that makes people think, “Oh, he’s trying to do something to me.” So in a mindset, as Gerhard Schwertner always says, is what makes sales really work. And the number one thing that makes sales not work as wanting the deal. As a salesperson, if you want the deal, you will generally fail. So salespeople, unfortunately, we incentivize them to want the deal, we tell them, “We’ll pay you for the deal.” There’s a lot of luck and sales, especially toward the top of the funnel, there should be. That is, we can’t know everything until we talk to somebody to learn something. And one of the things we’re most likely going to learn is they don’t need what we’re offering. That’s the standard outcome of a conversation, otherwise your market would be everybody.

And that’s a dream that will never come true. Here we are incentivizing salespeople to put their fingers around the neck of the prospect and hold them tight because, “I really want this deal, whether the prospect needs my product or not.” We do well in sales when we create an abundance mindset within ourselves, but a scarcity fact about us and our product. And it’s that fine line that the great salespeople walk, where they’re not very available, but they sure are relaxed.

Susan Finch (07:13):

I had an interesting experience, you and I, when we visited the other day, I mentioned that I had had an art gallery in Laguna Beach. And so, we sold fine art and paintings and one-of-a-kind things, which there’s nothing more scarce than one-of-a-kind, other than one-of-a-kind not for sale. And we would also sell limited edition prints. And what’s more limited than a limited edition is the artist’s proof, which they’re usually two or three of and that’s it. And so, we would constantly go back to the same list and constantly say, “Oh, it’s your one chance.” And we would kill it. We would sell out of the entire edition before it was even on the press because people wanted, they didn’t want to miss out. They wanted to say they had it. Or they had a certain number, “I want number seven. I want number one. I want number 45 because that’s how old I am this year.”

Whatever the reason, we would make it as scarce as possible for them to create that must-have, that very specific one thing, even though I had 500 others I could sell, the one that they wanted, that we created that they would want, they had to have.

Chris Beall (08:19):

Yes. And I’m going to jump onto one thing, which is sales. When you have a first conversation with somebody, you must be looking to end that conversation, because that makes you scarce. You become that limited edition. And if you’re looking to extend the conversation forever, you’re making yourself not scarce. You’re saying, “I’m not very valuable. I have all the time in the world to talk to you.” So that’s an issue, especially for first conversations, because first impressions are very lasting. So when we teach people how to have a cold call that’s effective, we teach them to say something, allow the other person to say something. We teach them to say, “I know I’m an interruption. Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called?” And then when they’re told, “Yeah, go ahead,” they don’t say very much, and they end it.

It’s like we would 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?” That’s the last thing you say. And when they come back and say, “Tell me more,” you make yourself scarce. You say, “You know, we’ve learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this isn’t a fair setting to talk about something this important. Are you a morning person? How’s your Wednesday?” So that’s scarcity that’s being created right there, that’s the O that you can’t get in the Blanton’s unless you buy another bottle, that’s it right there.

Susan Finch (10:05):

You’re turning something upside down as usual. Old ways of thinking, as usual, people were taught and we were taught to be polite. And you keep talking and you keep the conversation going and you keep dragging blah, blah, blah, and that’s what it becomes, but you are just stabbing that and flipping it up and saying, “No.”

Chris Beall (10:23):

Oh yeah, the pancake sizzles better on the side that’s still wet. So you want to flip that sucker over so it starts cooking and making some noise. I always liked that image. I used to do a little short-order cooking when I was younger. There are few things more satisfying than the sound of that flipped pancake right when it hits the griddle. And really, we want to do that in sales. We want to flip the pancake over, stop just doing it on one side, take it over to the wet side, then let it do its thing over there. And when you’re around great salespeople, you realize they’re not just treating their time as precious because they’re going to do something with it, they’re treating themselves as precious as a resource, as a scarce and precious resource. And that mindset that I have an abundance of something that should be made scarce so that people will value it, that’s where almost everybody in sales gets trapped.

They want to believe that they have an abundance of value, but they don’t really believe it. And then they’re told not to just, what do they call it? Spill their candy in the lobby or whatever they’re told, but just this one time, it would feel so good just to spit it all out. Sales is hard because very little of what we do in sales as professionals is naturally intuitive. And for those for whom is, they’re mystified that other people can’t sell. It’s like, “What do you mean? This is the easiest thing in the world,” but that’s because those people have the ability to see directly into somebody else’s mind. So they’re not confused by all the signals on the outside, they’re seeing right in there. And they don’t want to move forward most of the time because they know it’s not good. Again, the scarcity runs the other way, right? The great prospect is fundamentally scarce as a fact of the world, let’s discover who’s a great prospect as fast as we can.

Susan Finch (12:26):

So many people want to have visits, the random ones, you’re always talking about all the sales deals that you got, the meetings that you got and things in a bar, sitting next to somebody, random conversations with people. I have them when I go camping, random conversations, and suddenly I’m learning about things that I never knew about. And suddenly I’m identifying a prospect, which is stunning to me in that setting. People have a hard time of knowing when to stop talking, even in those casual situations, not even such a formal thing as the call.

Chris Beall (12:58):

Yeah. And one of the ways to handle that by the way, is to change the topic. So you’re allowed to continue to talk, but you’re no longer within that topic. And that’s very safe. So, if you’re at a bar with somebody and you’ve met them, you don’t want to just walk away, but you also don’t want to go too far down the road, whatever it is that you might do for them if there’s something to do. Sometimes it’s easy. Like I was pulled over by some sheriff’s deputies when I was moving from the Santa Cruz Mountains to Reno. And as you probably know from talking to me, that move was strenuous to put it mildly. It required seven trips across the mountains because of the house that I was coming out of, which was a geodesic dome at the top of a road that was more than a quarter mile long and had two hairpins in and a cliff.

So trucks couldn’t go up and down, I traveled all the time. It had to be done piecemeal. You couldn’t even get a PODS up there. So, it was done with U-Boxes and a Ford Excursion, and that’s it. And I had a trailer, an open trailer. I finally got it through my thick head that perhaps renting a trailer in Reno for the day and taking it over, loading stuff up and bringing it back for $19 was better than going one way for 200. Sometimes I’m not that smart. So the very last trip I’ve got the trailer and I’ve got the Excursion loaded to the gills, and the excursion doesn’t exactly have what you would call a current license plate on it because it hadn’t been driven for a couple of years. So I thought eventually I might get pulled over. Well, I did. Now the cops surrounded the vehicle, there were two cars, they had guns, real guns, long ones that fire really fast.

And they wanted to make sure that I wasn’t what I looked like, which is some bad guy with tinted windows in a big car and a mysterious trailer going from A to B. So I had a nice conversation with them, I kept my hands on the wheel. Oh, by the way, the driver’s side door of this car doesn’t open. So it has that issue also. And I had a nice conversation with them. And here’s the in the bar point, at least I didn’t have to worry about finishing the conversation because they wanted to get on their way, but I did manage to interest one of the officers in his brother looking at ConnectAndSell for his business. So that’s an example. That’s abundance thinking, right? I thought, “This is fun. Here’s some guys doing their job. They’re not going to shoot me very much, I don’t think. And they’re not going to…”

Certainly I’m leaving California and it’s only 25 miles to the border. So the path of least resistance is, “Let that guy go.” But what can we do with the situation by backing up? And I think we should all do this often, but we’d get in a situation that’s different, unfamiliar, maybe a little tight in some way, and we tend to think, “I need to approach the situation and deal with it.”

Chris Beall (16:51):

But the most powerful thing to do is to step back from the situation and contextualize it. In context, was anything bad going to happen? No. It was going to cost me 15 minutes of my life. I show them some documents. I tell them the truth, but what else could have happened? Never know, everybody’s connected to somebody. So they wanted to know what I do for a living, I told them what I do for a living. Next thing you know, there’s the brother. We didn’t close the deal by the way, but it was at least somebody to talk with. Well, that’s the other thing, I think you need to really believe in the potential value of a further exploration of the meeting as we call it, with the human being that you’re talking with, even in the case where there actually will be no business, ever.

And I think the true key to sales is, our funnels are shaped like funnels for a reason, there’s more at the top, abundance, there’s less at the bottom, scarcity, that’s the high value prospect that we’re actually engaged with. There’s another funnel over here, which is the one that we’re not sending anything through. Think of it as the phantom funnel, through which we are rejecting folks that we should have been having further conversations with because we failed to engage them. That’s the funnel that we worked for our competitor. Our fiercest competitor accepts our gifts of all the people that we screwed up with that would have made great prospects, and they accept them gratefully. And again, don’t even talk to us about them, right?

Susan Finch (18:23):

Right.

Chris Beall (18:24):

They don’t come back and thank us, but they’re in business because of us, because we blow it at the top of the funnel and let one out that should have stayed in, but we also keep too many in that should’ve gone out. Funnel is too much like this and not enough like that, right? But at the top, there’s this abundance of people to talk to. And what we want to do is get to the right ones that are scarce, but we want to do it in a way that doesn’t screw it up. So we have to have value for them to go down the funnel. We tend to think of it as value for us like, “It’s closer to a deal.” Well, the way to get away from that in our heads and get an abundance mindset is to say, “There is no deal.” Let’s consider the case where there’s never going to be a deal, would it make sense for this person to have a meeting with me and learn something, or have a meeting with my experts and learn something?

If the answer is yes, we have to forget about the deal. And it’s so hard to forget about the deal. We did a whole episode on it with the dog, the chain-link fence, and the piece of meat. The dog wants to go through the fence to get the meat, and the gate’s sitting right over there, 10 feet to the right. This is in our heads, we get here, instead of backing up and seeing the whole picture and then asking the fundamental question which is, “What in this situation would be good for this other person that I can provide, that I have an abundance of?” And when we’re the seller, we have an abundance of information and expertise, so let’s offer that.

Susan Finch (20:00):

I think that’s something that is so underrated. I talk about this when I talk about how do you make your guests look good on a podcast. You and I have talked about this. When we help people look better to their peers, look better to their own prospects because they have information, knowledge and confidence on a topic, we’ve given them a gift. And they will remember that. And even if they don’t need us, they trust us now because we made them look good, and they are willing to say, “Hey friend, I know this guy that has this product, not for us, but it’d be a perfect match for you because they are great to deal with.”

Chris Beall (20:40):

Yes. And the flip is that the emotion we all remember from childhood the most is embarrassment.

Susan Finch (20:46):

Yes.

Chris Beall (20:47):

We never forget it, and we never forgive it. And it is the unforgivable sin in businesses to embarrass somebody in front of their peers. And it’s done all the time, but Jan Blunt always says that whoever maintains their emotional control the longest ends up winning in sales. And it’s a breakdown of emotional control I believe that causes us to embarrass somebody else, especially in front of somebody else. We signal that we’re not going to do this when we say something embarrassing about ourselves, that’s actually a strong signal that we will not embarrass somebody else. And that’s why it’s a great idea, early in any conversation, to go ahead and make a little fun of yourself, whether it was the fact that you’re a little late for the meeting or whatever it is, your coffee’s cold, your hair doesn’t look good, you’re on the outs with your mom because you did whatever, whatever it is.

If you throw yourself under the embarrassment bus a little bit early, you’re strongly signaling, “I will not embarrass you on purpose. I’m adopting this position of being the first to be embarrassed. And I’ve taken care of that. Now we’re done with that subject.” And then if the other person trusts you, they will say something that would have otherwise been embarrassing about themselves. And that’s the surest sign of trust from another person, is when they express vulnerability through the most tender of emotions. I mean tender like a blister, not tender like, “I feel so good in my heart.” The tenderest emotion is the one that hurts the most, and embarrassment is the one that hurts the most.

Susan Finch (22:30):

It does. I really hadn’t thought about that much, but my most painful memories with relationships, that’s what it always is about.

Chris Beall (22:38):

Yeah. We never forget them.

Susan Finch (22:40):

You don’t. And you’re right though, don’t forgive. I can say, “Yes, I forgive you for that.” Or most of the time though, I don’t even address it, because I don’t want to keep talking about that because I can’t believe he did that to me.

Chris Beall (22:53):

Yes. The elephant in the room that people talk about is always the elephant in the room because of its potential for embarrassment. That’s just why it is. Among strangers, it’s very tricky because what we’re doing is, in sales, we’re always starting as strangers. And now we’re making a decision, which is, “Am I going to trust this person with my feelings about myself? That’s really what I’m going to do at some point.” That’s the trust. When we talk about trust, we’re not really talking about, “I’m going to trust this person not to screw up my career.” We pretty much think that we can defend ourselves there reasonably well. Now that’s what we’re afraid of, that’s the death at the end of the long march is our career is ruined, but that’s not really what we’re concerned about. What we’re concerned about is more immediate, which is, “Am I going to be treated with respect?”

That’s the key. And since we as the buyer are not the expert, the seller is in a great position to not respect us. That asymmetry is where sales starts. So how does the seller manage to climb down from that pedestal without giving up their expertise? And that’s the delicacy of sales, is being able to do it. The best way to do it, I think, is leave yourself professionally up there on the pedestal and take yourself somewhere else personally, because we all have peccadilloes, we all have failings, we all know what they are, and we may as well have a little fun with them.

Susan Finch (24:26):

I find it almost freeing and powerful, because the more we share that… We all have a box of those that we can whip out when we want to. When we want to be vulnerable, we all have them and we just have to choose which one fits the situation best. But I also find though, there’s actually a healing thing that happens with that. The more I do it, the more I can laugh at it constantly, and enjoy watching somebody else laugh at that in me. And it actually brings me more joy than it did the pain, and it undoes a lot of that.

Chris Beall (25:00):

Yeah. And having that box is so critical. And you get that through experience and legitimate self-examination. Like legitimate self-examination, salespeople are encouraged, never to look inside themselves for something that’s imperfect unless they intend to fix it. And yet, it’s the ones you don’t fix that are going to do the most good. And when you can talk about them and laugh about them and be that person that someone is comfortable with quickly, and you can tell. I had a conversation today with somebody that I found to be the smartest, most sophisticated people that I’ve talked to in a long time. But what he said very early is, he told me something very early, two or three minutes in, which was reasonably sensitive and private. And then he stopped himself and he said, “You’re just really easy to talk to.” Well, the reason for that is I’m sure… I can’t even remember what it is, I can go back to the recording.

I hope that I said something both true and vulnerable, because if you start there, you are actually saying, “It’s okay for us to be ourselves. And until we’re ourselves, how are we going to explore the dangerous territory called the business-to-business transaction?” It’s so dangerous. It’s such a bomb that’s ready to go off. It’s like, “How do we get there? How do we approach it? What is the carpet that we can put down that keeps the landmine from going off under our feet?” And I think it’s vulnerability that leads to trust, [crosstalk 00:26:34] of sincere expressions of vulnerability. And it’s taught to some degree, but man, it’s hard to do if you have a feeling of abundance inside.

Susan Finch (26:45):

In the concert, Tina goes around the edges, and you’re just trying to protect yourself and protect everything that you have and hold dear and are afraid of losing, that you never had in the first place.

Chris Beall (26:55):

Right. In fact, you’re compromising it by trying to protect it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Can your prospects smell your “commission breath”? Is your eagerness to set the appointment or reach for the deal keeping you from gleaning the information you need from your conversations with prospects?

There is a danger that comes with expertise. When you are a true beginner, your mind is empty and open. You are willing to learn and consider all pieces of information. As you develop expertise, however, your mind naturally becomes more closed. As a salesperson, you might have a preconceived notion that you know where a cold call is heading. Rejectionville again! And this makes you less open to discovering new information, less likely to hear your prospect’s confession about his business or job or a problem you might solve. Your expectations are not immediately met, and you get that sense of doom that this call is a waste of your time. What can save you from that out-on-a-ledge, sales-related fear of impending doom? Shoshin, a Zen Buddhism concept that means “beginner’s mind.” Chris, Corey, and Jake Housdon discuss how employing the curiosity mindset of Shoshin (“I know nothing. Tell me about your experience.”) allows you to take ahold of your emotions, lead your prospect back into having a conversation, and put you back on the road to discovery.

—-more—-

About Our Guest
Jake Housdon is CEO and co-founder of SDR League, the world’s first esports league for salespeople.

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (02:09):

Yeah, Jeb Blount always… He always says that the biggest problem that we all have in sales, and he wrote a whole book about it, Sales EQ, is that we don’t understand our own emotions and therefore have ways of… I’ll call it managing, but I don’t mean it in a controlling kind of sense. The ability to remain detached while executing precisely and with energy. And it’s a tricky business in everything, though. I mean, I’m an old rock climber mountaineer. And how can you be detached, especially doing some of the games that I used to do, which did not involve a rope. I’m not saying I’m a smart person, right? I’m just telling you the truth. Corey, you know the Praying Monk, right?

Corey Frank (02:51):

Yes.

Chris Beall (02:51):

On Camel’s Head, on Camelback Mountain. And I remember having this experience once at about 6:30 in the morning where I was free soloing. A very easy climb. I had to go up to the top of the Praying Monk, but it’s got a lot of exposure. Exposure means how far you fall before you hit. And the exposure on that climb, it looks like you’re going to fall into somebody’s swimming pool, about 600 feet below you on the first move. So you come out of this little cave, tunnel, and you traverse right onto the face, and then you kind of get yourself situated, and it’s a really easy climb. It’s really easy. It’s just a long ways down. And to do it, unroped at dawn, when the sun is just taking up as a kind of lonely and kind of special feeling, right? So I was up there doing that one Saturday morning, and I get up about halfway up the climb, and there’s a little old mudstone flake there. That’s got a hole in it, and you can move it with your finger.

You can actually pull on it, and it’ll wiggle, and you’re going to have to actually use it, not use it at the same time. So it’s a very delicate sort of operation. And suddenly, I hear a noise. Totally unexpected noise, an industrial noise, and it’s getting louder and louder and louder. What did I need to do? It’s just like what happens when you are afraid that this person that you’re talking with in a discovery conversation isn’t the right customer. They’re almost right, but. Nah, they’re not going to go with us, right? What do you do? How do you not panic?

So that was the skill that, I was given the good fortune of learning, through a game that is too stupid to play it. Nobody should play it, which is this particular thing. And by the way, the way the story ends is fine. Obviously, I’m reasonably with us, or this is some real high-tech talk about ghosting. They talked about ghosting people now. We could be ghosting me right now. But I finally get enough courage, and I calmed down, and I get enough courage and turn my head, and there’s the Goodyear Blimp, Colombia, at eye level about a hundred feet away. It’s a bunch of people having a breakfast tour looking at “Look, human flies.” Right? So my hands are sweating right now, by the way, as I try to emotionally detach from that little piece of PTSD.

Corey Frank (04:52):

But you know, Chris, what I think you’ve outlined there is the perfect archetype example of what we have as the four legs of that barstool, where you had that fear. Should I do this free solo on the Praying Monk? And then you had to cross that bridge going from fear to trust. I trust that I’m competent enough to get there. And then I’m curious enough if this foothold can maybe take me up a different pathway or a different trench here. And then finally, once you have that curiosity, you had to commit, and some folks won’t get past that fear, but you’ve got all the way to all four of the little legs of that barstool there. In that one story certainly.

Chris Beall (05:32):

Yeah. Commit and take action because it’s real easy to stand there forever, but that doesn’t get the job done either way. But I think sales has that level of emotion associated with it. And Jeb’s book, Objections, in which he tells us that our emotional reaction to an objection is that it’s a rejection. And that our fear of rejection is worse than our fear of death. We react in sales situations in ways that are more compelling emotionally than a free solo. I’ll be kind to the rest of them. This was not true of me. A free solo artist is actually experiencing a less compelling emotion, which is merely the fear of falling to their death. Whereas the salesperson, in discovery and into cold calls, especially, faces the fear of rejection over and over and over. And each objection is mapped onto a rejection.

And Jeb teaches us a word that he uses, which is the ledge, right? It comes right out of climbing. He’s not even a climber. He’s a horseman. They don’t even have ledges. They have saddles, right? But he used the correct term, which is a ledge. You go to your ledge. Mine, when you hang out with me, you’ll know what my ledge and in short order.

So fires are in Oregon. I can’t drive from Reno, where I’ve got all this work going on with my house and moving and all that back to Washington because Oregon’s on fire. What did I say when I was talking to Helen about it? Fantastic. As soon as I found out, that’s what I said. Fantastic. Because that’s my ledge. You tell me that “I don’t know Chris, our business doesn’t work like that.” Fantastic. And it calms me down. It’s my ledge. Everybody needs one, no matter how experienced you are, no matter how many times you’ve been up that route. Something funny that could… Your Blimp Columbia could sneak up on you, and you need to look at it and say, “Fantastic.” And then go to your curiosity.

Jake Housdon (07:22):

A 100 Percent.

Chris Beall (07:23):

So where do you go from your ledge? Always go to your curiosity. It’s the safest place in the conversation for you.

Jake Housdon (07:28):

That makes a lot of sense. And it reminds me of some neuroscience work that was done by this guy Moe something? He used to be the head of Google X, and then his son passed away, and it was devastating. And he took a sabbatical to try to understand from an engineer’s perspective how he could create happiness and solving for happiness. He went on this mission, and Google let him do it and everything. And one of the things he figured out is that he said happiness is, as far as he can tell, the feeling of having your expectations met. But he said that that doesn’t mean that the solution is to set low expectations for yourself. It’s what do you do when your expectations are not met. Anyway, what he does practically, what he prescribes to people, is that what goes on is when your expectations aren’t met the middle of your brain, where there’s incessant thinking, that part starts to really light up and do all kinds of bad things.

And that’s where you get into the downward spiral of emotion. Imagine you missed a bus. And then you’re like, “Oh, I missed the bus.” And then you’re like, “No, now I’m going to be late for that thing. And then that meeting, it’s not going to go well, and this, and I’m not going to make my quota, and I’m not going to…” Suddenly the world is upside down, and the best way he said to practically overcome that. And maybe the ledge just reminded me of this, but it’s to shift your thinking towards, “Okay, well, what would I do next time to prevent that from happening?” And the reason for that is it moves the neural activity from the middle of your brain to a different part, so it literally stops that downward spiral. So that reminds me of how you are saying to go to curiosity right away, meant to kind of create it with a positive feeling and then go curious, because saying, how would I stop this from happening again? It’s kind of a curiosity type of function. So, that certainly resonates deeply with me there.

Corey Frank (09:09):

In essence, Jake, it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing with the SDR League. So it’d be a good segue way into this veneer that you’re putting on top of the midbrain, where there’s potential rejection, and dejection, and disappointment, and struggle in that midbrain. Where I’m going to perseverate over an issue or a challenge or my numbers. And now I go more into the neocortex or even the opposite end, even more to the primitive side of the brain, which is a little bit more competitive, a little bit more fun, a little bit more [Crosstalk 00:09:40]. And let’s talk a little bit about that. Was that part of the intent? Is how do you kind of put this velvet rope around what our profession really is and kind of come at it from a different angle.

Jake Housdon (09:50):

Exactly. And I think to touch on your point there. All those things, it’s all part of the game at the end of the day. And that’s what us seasoned folks, who have done this for a while, would say, right? We get punched in the nose. We get rejected, kicked in the teeth, as Ryan likes to say. It’s all part of the game. We learned to love that because it means that we’re one step closer to the great thing that we want happening. Right? So I think that isn’t necessarily the inspiration for creating the entire thing. But that’s something that’s definitely at play is that learn to love the game, learn to love the process itself, learn to love the L, not just the W. That’s how you can get yourself to be formidably defending against the downward spiral and negative emotion. That’s when you’re like, “Fantastic!” As Chris said. When he can’t drive to where he wants to go, right?

So from what I’ve seen in terms of hiring as well, let’s just say at the top of the funnel, on the sales development side, I love people who love the game. If you love the game, if you’re passionate about the game, that’s great. We’re going to be able to figure this thing out here. So, yeah, I think that’s a huge part of it. We also want to really elevate our profession, and sports is, think of children watching athletes and becoming inspired and all of those things. I think that none of this stuff is public-facing right now. It all takes place in the best orgs at Connect And Sell, among the team talking to each other at Youngblood Works, that culture exists, but it can’t be shown to people that aren’t a part of it necessarily either. So that’s something near and dear to my heart as well.

Chris Beall (11:20):

Yeah. I love what you’re doing with SDR League. It’s a crazy idea. Mark Cuban is the big exponent of eSports, and I’m going to talk to him about what you guys are doing because he’s going to love this. I mean, the idea of making an eSport, you got to get it up and running because Mark’s not a speculative guy, but it’s really something. What could be a better competitive activity than cold calling?

Jake Housdon (11:41):

That’s it. Yeah. A hundred percent Chris and not to interrupt you there, finish your thought, just to interject. I see eSports becomes bSports, right? That’s the new category that we’re ushering in here. It’s business as a sport, and absolutely to your point sales development, top of the funnel is the most high adrenaline, fun, fast-paced, action-packed stuff to watch, so.

Chris Beall (12:02):

People like to watch sports that involve violent collisions between talented human beings. In this case, there’s a bunch of them. I mean, it’s like, there’s the two competitors there’s what’s happens on the call, every cold call’s a train wreck. What a fabulous, fabulous idea. I love what Ryan is doing, Ryan right. Sort is out there on Twitch right now. Twitch is the video gamers’ eSports channel. He has a channel out there. The channel has grown crazy already. And I just can’t imagine a cooler thing than that. And it is true, Corey, by the way, you go to both the more primitive part of the brain, but also you go to a very cerebral, very cortex part of the brain and very neocortex part, right? I mean, the smartest people I’ve ever known in sport are left tackles, played football. Yeah. Those are by far the smartest people are so smart- [crosstalk 00:12:48].

Corey Frank (12:47):

Scores are off the charts. Exactly right.

Chris Beall (12:49):

Yeah. And they’re into technique. And at a level of nuance and detail into the biomechanics. And then into the psychology, there’s a guessing game going on. There’s all this stuff happening in the mind. This person’s brand is attached to a big body. You don’t get to play left tackle if you’re really small, I think. Because all the quarterbacks end up dead at that point, but it’s a fascinating thing. And I really think that one of the things we’re seeing is that thinking and executing in real-time, now, have become the keys to success. Business used to be built around planning. You’d have this annual plan. Now I’ve always rejected the annual plan. I always thought the annual plan was an idiot’s exercise. Why would the fact that the earth shows up relative to the distance of stars, and approximately the same alignment as some time it did before? Why would that be the natural unit of planning?

We’re not farming. We don’t have seasons that are meaningful in our business in that sense. Not very many of them anyway. We’d make them up. “Oh my God. Q4, Q4, Q4. Let’s close all the deals. What? That’s just nuttiness. When you think about it, businesses need stuff all the time. And we’re going to plan our investment, our innovation investment out through the whole year. Well, I’ve got about six weeks of visibility into innovation investments that connect itself. And I remember when I joined the company, I was VP of Products. And I joined five minutes after meeting a founder, Shawn McLaren. And I just told him I was working for him. And he said, “Well, you know, what if I’m not hiring?” And I still “Look, Sean, it’s a free country. I can work for whomever I want, and that’s entirely up to you if you decide to pay me. I highly recommend you do because it stabilizes the employer-employee relationship, but do what you want. It’s up to you. I’m committing, and you can have your way with me if you want.”

So first day on the job. I go talk to the engineers, then they asked me, “So you’re the product guy, how do you do roadmap?” I said, “Road map? I don’t do a roadmap.” Whoa. I grew three heads. I started vomiting blood, as far as they were concerned, flying around the room with wings. It’s like, “Who is this creature? A product guy who doesn’t do road map.” That’s like a racehorse with no legs. Doesn’t make any sense. And the fact is, a deep road map is an assertion of knowledge that you do not confidently have. And it’s an expression of your lack of curiosity. You’re saying, “I don’t care. I don’t care what we learn.”

Jake Housdon (15:10):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (15:10):

It’s the business equivalent of free-soloing then, is what you’re doing?

Chris Beall (15:14):

Yeah. And you got to be good or else you die.

Corey Frank (15:17):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (15:18):

You got to be good, anyway. So what?

Jake Housdon (15:20):

That also, Chris, then is something that stops everyone from being able to follow the constraints so closely because they lay out this annual plan, and then they get a bunch of important eyeballs at the board level on it and everything else. And then it just becomes, “Did you do the plan really?” Not about anything else, really, right?

Chris Beall (15:38):

Why was it annual? Why was this annual? Well, we only have four board meetings a year. Oh, okay. So the board meeting’s purpose is to serve for the company, or is there some other purpose that we should be trying to detect here? Why don’t we have a quarterly plan? Why don’t we have a one-month plan? It’s been a bother to me for a long time, and I don’t do it. It’s the same reason I don’t hold meetings, by the way. I think standing meetings, fixed meetings on the calendar are exactly the same thing. They’re an expression of your lack of interest in the future.

Jake Housdon (16:07):

Very interesting.

Corey Frank (16:08):

Well, I like the concept certainly, and Chrisy and I have spoken about compensation and how these antiquated compensation plans, unfortunately, continue to drive the behavioral of end of month, end of quarter, end of year, end bonuses and stifles that curiosity, I’m curious in the first week or two of a quarter, but, then when this impending doom of a quota creeps up on me, that I have this sort of Damocles staring at me at the end of a quarter, then I’d better stifle that curiosity and go more towards volume. And I don’t have time to ask the type of discovery I need to be to be curious. Because I just need to find out if you’re going to buy or not, Chris. And how compensation plans play a part in that and that perhaps even the type of people we’re hiring and indoctrinate and like a virus spread from one sales organization to another to another.

So it’s as almost as if we have to have a Lord of the Flies-type of Island situation, where people who are pristine, virgin, pure in the black art of quota creation, who have never succumbed to an ISPC or a board meeting or account review where they feel pressured to hit a quota at the month, corresponding to their commission and just let them discover, let them be curious and to see if there’s a different type of currency that can be created that is inconsistent with kind of the forms we’re having today.

Chris Beall (17:31):

I think we came up with a partial cure. And the partial cure it would be to have a new role, which is discoverer.

Jake Housdon (17:40):

I was just thinking that, discoverer.

Chris Beall (17:43):

And the discoverer role can be comped as the discoverer role should be comped, which is what did we learn? And if the main thing we were to try to learn is the business truth of the other person and their beliefs. And then we were to say, “Here’s the roadmap that we’re hoping for in this relationship. We think the timing is going to work like this, but we think their belief, we hope evolve, that’s the next step.” Next steps being actions are ridiculous sales. The next step that counts is if that person can believe something new, people buy because of what they believe. They don’t buy because you took an action. You can take actions all day long, do nothing. But when they believe it, whether you took an action or not, they believe the next thing. You’ve made progress.

So if we were to put together with our discoverer a belief map, it says, where are we trying to go belief wise. And a business map. Which is what’s the business truth that they’re living in internally and externally, and then comp that correctly. Then our AEs could be commissioned for being the order takers that they love have to be. I mean, consultants, sorry. I didn’t mean order takers. I meant trusted advisors. Actually, they could be trusted advisors that they would be fine with that. They’re just being trusted later in the process because getting to transaction itself is hard. Transacting is the problem with closing emotionally, is your emotional stance that you need to have is, “I am willing to sacrifice this relationship for the deal.” That’s actually what you have to do to be a closer. This is why sales is so hard is you build relationships, and you’re willing to sacrifice them for the deal because your time is essentially all you got, and you can’t be spending your time on stuff that isn’t going to turn into a deal.

Chris Beall (20:13):

But that’s not to say as organizations, we couldn’t have a role whose job is to learn the truth, and we could build our forecasts off the truth rather than building our forecast off of this somebody who’d need to say, “Well, I can backfill that with this other one.” How many times have you heard that Corey, “Oh yeah, well, that one’s going to slip, but I can backfill up by pulling this other one in.” And if you could pull either one in, why didn’t you pull it in?

Corey Frank (20:13):

That’s right, yeah.

Jake Housdon (20:36):

It takes me to a place of thinking about just the puzzle of motivation, though. And I do think that discoverer would be fantastic. But then, if we start to try to measure the truth, that’s where we get into all kinds of issues. It’s like, how do we truly measure that truth? And if we compensate based on finding the truth. Then we get into all the same wrong behaviors at the discoverer level.

It’s almost as if they need to be non-variable in terms of their comp. We’re all alert. There’s a lot of salespeople that are allergic to that thought. But I think there’s those studies out there. I can’t remember the exact name, but it’s the one where people were given financial incentives and asked to do a task where they had to get this candle to stick to the wall with thumbtacks and a little case, a match case. And as they escalated the amount of money they gave people, they got worse and worse at that task because it caused… And you guys seem to know a lot about how the brain works. So feel free to fill in which parts were going on, but it caused the wrong parts to sort of supersede the others. So I think the discoverer would have to be almost just paid for their job

Chris Beall (21:37):

And measured objectively by somebody else, not themselves. This is another bizarre notion that we have in sales that the measurer and the actor are the same person. You mentioned doing that in manufacturing, but let’s not actually measure what the machine is doing and check it just to see if it’s calibrated. Let’s just assume that it’s good and then use its output as the measurement. That’d be nutty. We’d never be able to build anything.

Corey Frank (22:00):

Yeah. Well, I think either. As Jake, I think, as you had said, at the outset of this conversation, because we’re dealing with variable, such as a human being who uses three parts of their brain, who is in a profession that has cascaded for living on the edge of society, bleeding people dry, right? You put all these conflating elements together, and certainly, you have too many variables in a system. As Chris had said many times in this podcast. So how is a new SDR or a new sales rep, or you let alone a new Sales Manager VP who, is thrust into an opportunity and environment where they have one quarter at the average tenure of a VP is what a 180 days, so to speak, right? It’s maybe a year before they start feeling that heat. And they’re thrust in that environment where there’s way too many variables in a system.

And there is no go-to to have each of these variables weighed from a different atomic weight perspective to say, “What should I focus on?” And so invariably, I go to the old standbys, the old reliables, which is how many conversations, not that I’m having, but how big is my pipeline and how many demos have I done? And I think that lends itself to part of this confusion, this mass chaos, why you see one sales organization selling relatively the same type of product to the same type of TAM, doing completely different results than another sales organization, competing sales organization with the same type of TAM and relatively the same type of products.

Jake Housdon (23:23):

And I had heard you guys talk about Mr. Monkey and that whole idea. And when you depict it like that, Corey, it sounds like it’s pretty easy for people to just default to being Mr. Monkey because there’s so much chaos to navigate through and everything, right? It’s this meta-thinking is required above everything, and it’s really missing. And it’s, I guess, the role of leadership to ensure that it’s part of the culture. And we talked culture very early on and how it’s a cultural thing and to get the human beings to feel reasonably good enough while you just hone in on one specific bottleneck at a time. And it comes down to then, I think, culture design. And that’s kind of a weird thing for people because everyone thinks that culture needs to be this organic sort of thing otherwise, “no that’s skin posts, that’s sterile. That’s not real culture.” And all that.

But if you don’t design something intentionally then, you can’t expect to be able to control any of the results that it produces. So I think that maybe what’s really important as a takeaway here is that you need to design the right culture in your organization that defends you against all of these problematic ways of thinking that people fall into based on all the things that we’ve been talking about, basically.

Corey Frank (24:31):

Well, Chris, in one of your earlier episodes, we talked about the culture at ConnectAndSell, and that the goal, and I’m going to butcher the exact phrase you use, right. Is to “Fail spectacularly at least once a day.” I think you had explained. So that’s number one. And I’m looking at my notes from a brief conversation, Chris, that I had with you a couple of days ago. And you said a phrase that I liked that ties in Jake. What you’re saying is, “To be ruthlessly curious.” And I really liked that Chris, you see all these nuggets just come out, and you’d just of kind of capture them where you can. But I think that that culture of what you are doing with the SDR League and what folks like James Thornberg, the grandfather of kind of the… I would consider him kind of the Uncle Rico.

If you remember your Napoleon dynamite. Uncle Rico always had those video cameras. He’s had the video cameras set up as he’s practicing his throws, trying to go back to circa 1988. And so James, if you’re listening, I think you really are the Uncle Rico of always adjusting, always trying to tweak your passing game, and certainly, what Ryan’s doing there too. But that curiosity of what that self-introspection, and if you can have a culture like that. Chris had said even a connected cell where you’re able to fail miserably at least once a day. I think that will engender itself into an organization where people will be more curious that their curiosity will trickle down internally in the business to externally to the type of people that you’re talking to and your prospects.

Chris Beall (25:58):

Yeah. We want to fail enthusiastically. And you know, I’ve told everybody I’ve ever hired that one of the things that we do here, wherever here happened to be, is we are wrong enthusiastically every day. And that is a real key because we’re wrong by nature. We’re almost always wrong. I mean, how often do you look back and say, “Oh, I was so brilliant 20 years ago. I had it all.” You look back, and you go, “I’ve learned a few things.” So relative to some future state, you’re always wrong. I’m going to jump on this culture thing for a minute. So, Corey, this is something that I actually think you can look at it at Youngblood Works in a totally new way, and you can change the whole world with this, and here’s how cultural transformation is the hardest thing we can ever do. So I have the luxury of doing startups.

I mean, ConnectAndSell wasn’t a startup for me, but it’s been really close. But before that, almost all startups, except a couple of stints at GXS, where I was a senior vice president of new product innovation. I predicted I would last 364 days there during the interview. I actually told the CEO he would fire me on day 364. And I was right to the day. I can tell you I was right to the day. So I don’t do very well in those organizations. Not because I don’t get anything done. I think I built five products for them, a great team. The late Suli Ding was leading this awesome team and built products. We bought a company forum, all these great things, but the fact is, I pushed continuously for cultural change, and in particular, for getting rid of parasites. And parasites are the big problem with companies are organisms full of value.

And there will be other organisms that want to feed on them while they’re still alive. Those are called parasites. And when you’re a company, they will try to feed on you. And they come in through your open mouth, just like many parasites do they come in through your food supply, which for companies is their new hires. And you’ll get one of these parasites in. And I’ve mentioned on this podcast, how do you know they’re a parasite. They say in the interview, “I’m a team player.” As soon as somebody says, I’m a team player in an interview. Now I’ve let the cat out of the bag. And that, by the way, as a reference to the cat o’ nine tails, not the kind of cat that people pet, but in any case, now let them know. So thank God the parasites will. They won’t change their stripes too fast.

But when somebody is joining a company and their actual intention is to suck value out of it while appearing to provide value, which is a perfectly rational thing to do. But if that’s their intention, they’re going to say during the interview process, I’m a team player, and they’re saying it because they’re not. They’re a parasite. And here’s the thing about Youngblood Works. You can build a parasite-free organization, and you have, and you can grow it parasite-free forever. And therefore, you can offer as your primary product a different culture from the identification of the market through the delivery of the customer who is ready to buy now. So if you were to go to the psychology department, not just the business department, and don’t just take future CEOs into finishing school, which you’re doing now as cold callers and folks who have the ability to hold a conversation with an invisible stranger, the scariest thing in the world that we do.

But you tap another department, the psychology department. And bring in these therapist types who are highly curious and have a feel for people, and then teach them enough business that they can hold a product-free discovery call using Chris Bennet’s techniques. I go talk to Chris Bennett, another good Canadian, just north of where I live in Port Townsend. He’s just across the water there, bring his techniques in and productize that you will actually solve the cultural problem where it’s causing the most pain. And that’s the problem that needs to be solved. And that can be your ultimate product.

Corey Frank (29:36):

And that’s the export. That is, in essence, the inherent product, not necessarily the demos. It’s delivering people that may be recruited or move to these organizations that already have their foundational elements based off curiosity and non-parasitic behavior.

Jake Housdon (29:53):

It’s like the- [crosstalk 00:29:54].

Chris Beall (29:54):

It’s like a cultural graph. It’s a graph, right?

Jake Housdon (29:55):

… yeah, it’s the immune system.

Chris Beall (29:56):

Think of it as you’re the branch that’s going to be added to their tree because they got a lemon tree. It’s producing these sour lemons. They need some apples. Youngblood Works could be the graph that produces the apples they need. So then they can figure out how to turn some of their lemon branches into, I don’t know, at least plums or something.

Jake Housdon (30:13):

It reminds me of the gut. And the flora and fauna in the human gut and how important that is. And when that’s out of whack, it affects everything else. And the ways that so far people seem to be able to improve it is by, like you said, grafting from a healthy gut, or it’s actually pretty disgusting. They actually take feces and put them in pills, and get people to swallow them. And then that stuff gets down there and kind of helps to correct things. But hopefully, these discoverers, I don’t know how to tie all that together, but.

Chris Beall (30:42):

That was a good one, Jake. So this is an adult program. So I can actually say you’ve now come up with the exact counter to, “Eat shit and die.”

Corey Frank (30:49):

Or eat shit in fives. Either one.

Jake Housdon (30:55):

Eat shit and live.

Chris Beall (30:55):

Yeah. So don’t go from curious to furious, eat shit and live.

Corey Frank (31:01):

I love it. I love it.

Jake Housdon (31:02):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (31:04):

Chris and Jake, right? I’ve we say this to all the guests, right? Is that I’m an active participant in these podcasts. I have this nefarious guy some sort of co-host or moderator, but my notes are full of all these. So I was just like from sure. A lot of our listeners take Chris’s ideas and claim them as my own as frequently as I can. So that’s just golden stuff, Chris. So, keeps me in the style I’ve become accustomed to, to be smarter than I am when I stand tall in front of my board, in front of my advisors, and say, “You know, I got an idea. I think we should probably focus on the psychology students that we have at the university here.”

And I will be brilliant, and I will get all the accolades and contrary if they shoot that idea down, I say, well, that came from my Podcast partner, so. Either way, that’s a benefit. So, and I will do the same with you, Jake shamelessly, with all the information that you’ve given us here today. So with that, we’d love to have you out again, Jake, as we continue to follow the SDR League and we’d go up the ranks. I don’t know if there’s a senior tour for guys like Chris and I. Like I said, something to think about versus the game is so fast for us old-timers here, but we just love what you’re doing. And can’t thank you enough for jumping on today with all the great information and any way we can support it here on the Market Dominance Guys, a score check. Chris and I would start every day with kind of looking at the box scores, certainly. And the highlights, we will certainly, keep that open for you.

Jake Housdon (32:31):

Love it. Well, someone’s got to come in and teach us, the young folks, how it’s done right. So I think we could definitely reach some sort of a cage match. Who’d be your choice opponent, Corey or Chris?

Chris Beall (32:44):

Oh.

Corey Frank (32:44):

That’s a good one.

Chris Beall (32:45):

You know who mine would be because he’s so good. He’s so cerebral. I always say if you can’t do anything else, bringing a lawyer, bring an Anthony Iannarino.

Corey Frank (32:54):

There you go. Yeah. I’d fight Shatner. William Shatner. That’s who I’d go head-to-head with, so.

Jake Housdon (33:00):

I love it.

Corey Frank (33:03):

Another could be- [crosstalk 00:33:04]

Chris Beall (33:04):

Shatner, he’d have a hundred percent close rate.

Corey Frank (33:06):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (33:08):

Nobody knows how that voice works, but whatever it is, I watched an ad for him. It’s so funny you bring that up. You don’t watch very much TV. But I’m stuck in a hotel here for a couple of days, months. I have nothing to learn in the hotel. Okay, I’m curious. So he’s on with an ad for the system that cleans your sleeping apparatus, which then they come up with some name for it, your sleeping equipment, some euphemism for a C-PAP, which apparently sounds like a really bad thing. And he talks about that, and I’m listening to his voice just thinking, “You know, this guy should be cold calling.”

Corey Frank (33:40):

Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s why you got to go big, so.

Jake Housdon (33:45):

Well, we’ll have to give him a shout and see if he wants to take you on, Corey.

Corey Frank (33:48):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (33:49):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (33:49):

When you do have the head-to-head Jake, when you go head-to-head with Ryan, do you play the Canadian anthem? And then you play the USA anthem. Is that how it goes? Just like it is with the baseball?

Jake Housdon (33:58):

Yeah. Well, I think it depends who’s the champion and who’s the challenge here in terms of which anthem goes first, but.

Corey Frank (34:03):

Okay. Thanks again, Jake, for what you do for our profession. It’s admirable. We love it. And we’ll support you anytime. So it’s been another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of sales, Chris Beall. Until next time, have a great day.

 

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The theory of constraints dominates the world of business, and yet it tends to be ignored by almost everybody in business for a pretty simple reason: it’s politically unpalatable. The theory of constraints says your business is a system, and every system has one and only one constraint.

And that’s the only thing you should be working on right now: understanding that constraint, characterizing it, coming up with an investment thesis, making the investment, or observing the results of the investment. The investment is something like better cycle time, increased throughput, more units that are doing the work, or better quality. Those who employ this practice will dominate markets.

—-more—-

What we tell you here at Market Dominance Guys is that there’s an environmental constraint on businesses, which is gaining the trust of your prospects. How do you do this? In other words, what’s your investment? Have conversations with them! Do you have to wait till they’re ready to buy? No, have the conversations now, and the relationships you create will begin paving the road to trust, which leads to eventual sales.

The main challenge as you narrow your focus down to this one constraint is keeping all the human beings in your own business happy and willing to allocate enough resources from the business to solve this one constraint issue, one bottleneck at a time. Join Chris, Corey, and Jake Housdon as they discuss this challenge, as well as how to successfully employ the conversation-first investment.

About Our Guest:

Jake Housdon is CEO and co-founder of SDR League, the world’s first esports league for salespeople. 

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank: (00:35)

So welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall, with us today. We are very pleased to have Jake Houston. And Jake, for full disclosure, is Canadian. So we will have subtitles as appropriate. Susan we’ll add those where needed; when he uses words like a boot or a lift or whatever else you guys do. So Jake is the co-founder of the SDR league; which we’d like to talk a little bit about today; certainly, which is the world’s first E-sports league for salespeople. Something that before I had a bad shoulder 20 years ago, I’m sure I would have participated, right Chris? Chris has kind of gimpy knees, but we were kind of the older guys. Maybe we can come in for an inning or two of relief, but we’ll see. We’ll leave it to you guys, like you and Ryan and the younger guys, to set the records. All of Chris and our records are in the books.

 

Corey Frank: (01:31)

You and Brian and the new guys will have a little asterisk next to yours. You have weapons like ConnectAndSell and Outreach and everything else to talk to more folks. We had rotary dials, so our fingers are all knuckled up. So before Jake did the SDR league, it was a CRO of an EdTech company and currently your director of SDR development at dialogue. So we’re pleased to have you today, Jake, and Chris and I do not have guests on very often. So when we do, certainly expectations are very great, but we know that your reputation precedes you very well, Jake, and I think we would just jump right into it.

 

Corey Frank: (02:07)

As we were talking before we hit the record button, Chris was talking with you, Jake, about the theory of constraints and the series of constraints that’s germane to us as salespeople today seems to be the sales reps, rattling the marketing cages and rattling the SDR cages and said, “Hey, where’s my leads? Where’s my demo’s.” And then God forbid, we actually fill the top of the funnel and then what happens after that, right? Chris, how would you frame that up for you and Jake here, since we were talking about it just a few minutes ago about this very same issue.

 

Chris Beall: (02:45)

The theory of constraints dominates the world of business and yet tends to be ignored by almost everybody in business. And it’s ignored, I think, for a pretty simple reason, which is it’s politically unpalatable. When you think about a theory of constraints of your business, a system, every system has one constraint, one and only one constraint. And that’s the only thing you should be working on right now. You should be investing in either understanding that constraint, characterizing it, coming up with an investment thesis, making the investment or observing the results of the investment. The investment has always been something like better cycle time, increased throughput, more units that are doing the work, better quality. And the reason we don’t like it; none of us like it, there’s not a human being on earth who likes it except for Eliyahu Goldratt; the guy who came with it; is that it says there’s only one thing right now to invest in.

 

Chris Beall: (03:34)

Therefore, here’s the parentheses; it’s probably not what you’re doing. It’s probably what somebody else is doing. And so that makes everybody feel that, right? Imagine a budget meeting if we said we’re going to address one constraint next year. Just one, right? That would be an improvement for most businesses, by the way, if they get up from zero to one, that’d be pretty good. So we’re just going to do one. So Jake, we suspect by all the measurements where we’re doing the inventory in the form of prospects builds up in front of the sales development function and the discovery function is starved. So we think you’ve got the constraint and we want to go in and characterize it and you go, “Yippee!”

 

Chris Beall: (04:18)

So great. You’re going to focus on my stuff. And that means, Oh, by the way, the salespeople who are doing discovery, you’re going to ignore you completely. The folks who are providing the data, we’re going to ignore you completely. All we’re going to do is focus on Jake. So now Jake’s important and he gets all the budget money, and everybody else gets to sit around and wait until 2021 or two or whatever it happens to be. Right? So nobody likes it. But those who practice it dominate markets. And in fact, when you look at market dominance, guys, the whole of what we’re saying is there’s an environmental constraint on businesses, which is the people who need to trust you, trust you yet. The answer is not enough of them. So go get them to trust you. How? Have conversations with them. Do you have to wait until they’re ready to buy?

 

Chris Beall: (05:05)

No. Have the conversations now. Cheat, right? Condition the market, pave the road, cheat. That’s how it works. And you said, right, as we were coming on aren’t that analytical? I’ll tell you. That’s not the problem, even though it’s true. The problem is doing it right is politically unpalatable because it feels de-powering to everybody else. And then as soon as you do it right, you get this problem. You create a flood of output from your constraint, usually, assuming there’s enough input, and whatever the next function is downstream becomes the constraint and they don’t like it. They wanted it to be easier. They didn’t want to be under the spotlight. That happens a lot. Have you ever seen it?

 

Jake Housdon: (05:53)

Yeah. When you depict it that way, Chris, it seems like the main challenge then is sort of keeping all of the human beings happy as you go about narrowly focusing on the single constraint, right? Because Ryan and seemed to debate this one a lot; whether it’s process before people or people before process. But at the end of the day, these organizations are just groups of human beings. And it’d be nice if we could just sort of sweep aside all of their sort of feelings and everything else and just kind of drill down on that.

 

Jake Housdon: (06:20)

But I think what you’re saying is that the challenge is that the political factors at play with everyone’s sort of different wants and desires within the business is what makes it difficult for leaders to take that focused approach, to identifying and characterizing that bottleneck and then addressing it and then following it and allocating enough resources from the business behind solving that one bottleneck at a time. It seems like it’s probably a kind of human problem more so than anything based on what you’re saying, which makes a lot of sense to me.

 

Chris Beall: (06:55)

You’ve nailed it! Isn’t that something? Corey, you nailed it. I’m setting you up to be CEO of my next company cause I’m always the constraint and, yeah, you’ve nailed it. My fiance goes on stage and talks about the years of research that she’s done on digital transformation. And she works for Microsoft. She was a global digital transformation leader; their sales leader; and her conclusion was it’s culture. Ultimately, the technology can’t get the job done without the culture. And I think you’ve just put your finger on what the cultural issue is, which is that it’s like an Uber constraint and everybody’s got to feel good enough.

 

Chris Beall: (07:34)

That’s fascinating. So how do you do that? Corey is the master. How have you been Corey? How have you kept everybody happy?

 

Corey Frank: (07:41)

Everybody knows within the sound of my voice, that how I fix it is hang on, let me get Chris Beall on the line and let me tell if I can get the answer. But then if you’re busy, I’ll call Ryan or I’ll call Steve Richard. So that’s how I’ve been able to do it. I think, Jake, what you were leading to when some of the correspondence we had prior to this to answer Chris’s question is that the revenue problems seem to start upstream in a business and with this conversation flow and this mystique that, “Pipeline cures all, right Chris?” How many books have we talked about that? It just gets more pipeline. But then what happens if the pipeline is a little sickly, right? What do you do in that regard?

 

Corey Frank: (08:23)

What cures sickly pipeline, would you say? This is what Chris and I were talking about, jake, before you jumped on, is talking with another gentleman whose colleague, a former board member of Chris’s and talking about some of the clients that he deals with and that as soon as the SDR, the BDR function fills that pipeline as Chris was iterating on the constraint. Now the sales reps go from, “Well, I just want any conversation” to “Well, I want a particular type of conversation.” They try to be in search of the perfect pitch as opposed to getting frequent before you get good as we talked about with Oren Klaff and a lot of the things that we do on flip the script.

 

Corey Frank: (09:04)

So have you seen that, Jake, is where you do such a great job and you get all the budget as Chris had iterated, and now you find downstream that the sales reps are saying, “Jake, the thing is I know you put 20 on my calendar this week, but I talk with 12 of them and six of them, if they could just be a little bit more X or a little bit more Y, then you nailed it, buddy. So keep those flowing, will you, but don’t send me the other ones.”

 

Jake Housdon: (09:32)

I think that’s a massive problem. And I think that it’s been succinctly stated by Chris. I think that it’s really people think that the cold calls are the Google search, but that’s kind of absurd. And it’s actually the discovery is the Google search. And ironically, the discovery is where all the best discoveries are made, right? I think what it comes back to is just the prominence that the eight-year-olds have given within the sales org. And I think that’s something that is just because they’re closer to stroking the cheque that people elevate the AAE role to an extent where they kind of put down the SDR role a little bit, frankly. And I think that you end up uncomfortable to have conversations that are less perfect, let’s say, right? And so I think that again, human beings just naturally shy away from that discomfort.

 

Jake Housdon: (10:20)

And when the authority level is sort of in the hands of the AAE, then that’s where you get a lot of that bad behavior and stuff like that. I think we’re seeing that change where people realize the whole pipeline cure it’s all we’ve heard that forever. Outbound, just getting harder, I think, maybe? Maybe it’s easier with amazing tools like ConnectAndSell now to your point about the asterisk earlier, but to Chris’s point about the emperor being naked with emails and sales engagement platforms and things like that. Now you’ve got a lot of SDR teams where they feel like they’re doing their job by just kind of clicking a bunch of buttons on a, on a platform or something. Right. So I just think that outbound is getting really hard. And as a result, the most effective thing now is the most uncomfortable thing, which is making the cold calls, having the conversations. And so it just leads to people, even not wanting to have discovery meetings that are less than perfect. I think we’re seeing shift though, where people are like, wow, I, I see how incredibly important my outbound machine is.

 

Corey Frank: (11:17)

Let’s take that for a second. So for Chris and Jake, let’s say I did listen to my sales managers and my sales reps, and I wanted to alter tweak, change, quote, unquote, improve my SDRs to get them much more perfect discovery calls. What’s the, in what’s wrong with having my SDRs engage in a little, maybe instead of one band, maybe my effort is to get eight bat questions, right? I’m going to get two B’s and two A’s and two ends and two tees. And I’m going to put this massive freeform notes section, and then I’m going to put the ball on the tee. So my sales may get fewer conversations, but man, are they going to be qualified? What’s what’s real harm in that. Well, I think you’re going to crank down the trust that you have in your Tam and the amount of relationships you have with people. Right? Because another thing that I absorbed is just that relationships, third binary, and I know that’s something you talk about Chris, like either have one or you don’t. Right. So I think that this notion of, I don’t know, spamming your Tam or things like that is flawed thinking and that instead it’s the whole nail-shaped pipeline instead of the wedge and all of that stuff that we should aspire to. Because at the end of the day, like we said, in the beginning, human beings are involved in business and speaking with them is how you go from that zero to that one. And if you try to sort of crank up the perfection and you, you end up cranking down the relationships and trust that you have, which are really the currency of business in the first place, right? So that’s how I think about it.

 

Chris Beall: (13:30)

Yeah. Corey, I think about it in the very similar way would, when you think about it in detail, and this is one of the hard things about not as in manufacturing, it doesn’t do much good to sit around at the coffee shop and talk about how your factories running, right. You’ve got to actually get in there and watch it run. And you’ve got to measure yourself and you’ve got to listen to it. And you, you got to be surprised. You got to be open to, Oh my God. I didn’t realize that at that point. And on that conveyor where it turned on that little corner that you can’t figure that out at Starbucks, she looked at the details and the deep conversation, cold conversation. There’s a flip on the side of the prospect. Hopefully not on the side of the rep. The rep has to have their emotions and their beliefs in line beforehand.

 

Chris Beall: (14:14)

They’re the machine. You can’t have the machine changing its characteristics while it’s processing the part. It’s the part that’s changing its characteristics and shapes because it’s being processed by the machine, right? So the reps, the machine processing the part and the part isn’t ready yet for the, so the next process say the next process is a kneel and you’re going to put another, make it really hot and hard, right? So it’s got to be shaped right? First. Otherwise you’re kind of screwed. You put it in the oven and now it’s too hard that to work in sales, we don’t have enough trust built in order to go to the confession part until somebody shows that they’re ready to confess by saying, they’ll come to us. So when we ambush somebody, they are not by definition, ready to confess. There are exceptions and folks will hold those up.

 

Chris Beall: (15:02)

Oh, I had a great conversation with so-and-so first conversation. They told me everything about the business, blah, blah, blah. That’s how you can tell you don’t have a decision maker, right? You have a socializer. It tells you everything about their business because they’re lonely and they want to talk. You know, but if you’re talking to somebody serious, the evidence, the number one qualifying evidence that you’re going to get it’s that they agree to come to the meeting. And the number two qualifying evidence is that they come to the meeting. And the best thing for you is for them not to show up at the meeting the first time. So you can talk to them, furthering the relationship within the context of them being obliged to you because they didn’t come to the meeting. So the best sequences, brief conversation, we talked about how to do it.

 

Chris Beall: (15:49)

Enough curiosity, to agree to the meeting, too busy, to go to the meeting. That means they’re important. Call them back, reschedule the meeting. Hey, I don’t know something must have come up for you. So when would be a better time to talk. And that is by the way, the biggest emotional problem that reps have is doing that. I’m offended. You didn’t show up at my meeting. Well, I’m trying to find busy people. Of course they don’t show up at meetings. That’s how busy they are. They’re doing things more important than that. Today. For instance, I’m supposed to pick up a trailer today over at U-Haul and I’m going to drive my Chevy bolts up onto the trailer, put a bunch of paintings and stuff like that and hook it up to my excursion and drive it through Oregon back to Washington. But Hey, Oregon’s on fire. I’m a busy guy. You think I’m going to pick up the trailer

 

Chris Beall: (16:33)

And I’m the customer.

 

Chris Beall: (16:34)

And you know, if they want to run a really good business that Uhaul and I love them. And they’re going to, they’re going to say Mr. Bill, but we’re so sorry that you were unable to execute your mission and we’re here to help you. Let’s move this. When would you like it? Oh, next Friday. No charge. Right? And they have the moral advantage on me because I’m thinking I didn’t pick up the trailer, right? So that’s the advantage you want. Your ultimate way to build a pipeline is to have conversations with, with people you really want to meet with objectively in an ambush conversation, in a cold call, the prospect is not ready to confess. We don’t have enough relationships. So we want that nail-shaped pipeline, that funnel and they’ll shape the funnel. So when we’re trying to generate a quality product at scale, the quality product is for folks to buy our product.

 

Chris Beall: (17:25)

We need to start with an input. And the input is the best list that we can put together in a short amount of time. And we shouldn’t ignore timing. That’s why going after going after timing, it’s like the dumbest thing in the world. You want to talk to your whole market before anybody talks to any of your market. Therefore you need to talk to everybody and timing must stop yet concern. Secondly, we need to avoid the fantasy of believing that folks will confess to us before we have a relationship that is strong enough for them to actually tell us their business truth. The evidence for that relationship is that they will come to a meeting. So the ideal sequences, we talked to everybody that we believe intrinsically as qualified to buy our product, regardless of timing, and to make use of it. By the way I make money off it, we talked to them.

 

Chris Beall: (18:14)

We said as many meetings as we can, and we hope they don’t show up. And the reason we hope they don’t show up, then we can talk to them again. And that’s evidence that they’re busy people by the way. So we can talk to them again and say, Hey, you must’ve been too busy to attend this meeting. Can we reschedule? Eventually you will end up having the discovery meeting with them. And that discovery meetings quality has to do with how clean is the confession not did it lead to a deal? So one of the problems we have is we comp our account executives on the deals, but part of their job is just to discover. What’s true. We look at the world in a quarterly timeframe, but in our customer base in our Tam 11, 12, set them are not possibly in a consideration cycle this quarter.

 

Chris Beall: (18:58)

So who’s going to do that discovery work. I suppose we could reorganize and have sales development do discovery. And that could be done by the way, Jake. I bet we could do this experiment. If your organization was willing to do it is to train sales development on how to do product-free discovery and then pass off great stuff. So you have two kinds of conversations, one to set the meeting and then you would be holding meetings and then you’d be passing off, essentially done deals. And everybody would love you. Of course, you’d be doing the whole job too, but that’s okay. Everybody would love you. And the account executives could just sit around and go, Oh, look, I got a check

 

Jake Housdon: (19:35)

Hundred percent. And that I think is what ends up happening with all of these forces at play? Is that that becomes the move, right? Because like you said, people want perfect timing. The compensation is based on closed deals, depending on how long the sales cycle is. And all of those things, the eight ease sort of appetite for how far out that timing might be in all of those things, then just impedes the trust-building in order for their confessions to happen and, and everything that you’re saying. So I think that naturally what ends up happening is that sort of quest for perfection for the perfect meeting takes so much power that it like forces what you just said to happen, where, okay, well the correct model then to make our business function properly, if that’s going to be your expectations is to bring something that’s already had great discovery done and, or there’s been a few truthful confession spilled already, and then sort of bringing that to the account executive and that model can work too, right? It’s, it’s a very different culture in terms of your organization and the trouble with it is what you said. It’s that we’re asking you a heck of a lot out of the SDR, right. And the pay that they make, usually doesn’t reflect that in most organizations either there’s the open, the close, right.

 

Corey Frank: (20:48)

So good. Are you at 50 50 in terms of the importance that, that each role has? Right. So that’s some of the issues I play for sure. Well, it’s difficult. I would imagine Jake too, in person, I’ve spoken about this in several episodes, that to develop that level of curiosity, which can carry the conversation to any real deep level of insight. Anyway, it’s one thing as we always talk about to get from fear to trust and then trust to curiosity, and that chasm is large to get from fear to trust. Right? Chris, Chris and I have certainly we’ve talked about it. Certainly if Chris Voss, et cetera, it’s about seven seconds, seven to 15 seconds or so, but that next chasm, that next hoop that I have to jump through to get from trust to curiosity, oftentimes that’s where the empathy and the tone come in.

 

Corey Frank: (21:34)

And certainly the screenplay, if it’s a great message, but a lot of it is really contingent on that, that BDR, that SDR to drive a sense of conversationality through their own curiosity. So it becomes a conversation and not an interview, not a hostage situation. So in that scenario, Chris, that you and Jake just outlined, that’s a tough trait to train on. That’s a tough trait to hire for, but yet is really contingent on if I wanted to change my whole organization to much more quality discovery at the top of the funnel versus just cold calls. Correct.

 

Chris Beall: (22:14)

So you got me thinking here and Corey, I, I think that we could do this in your business. Why don’t you hire a good therapist and teach them enough about business, that they can hold a product-free discovery call, just think about it. You could do it and I could do it right. I could, I I’m confident that I can hold with, Oh, say two hours of education in a particular field, but I don’t know anything about that. I could learn enough to hold a product-free discovery call. That was a lot of fun for the other person that was very educational for them because I’d have my three insights that are special that have to do with my company. I just joined two hours ago. Right. And I’m not motivated by anything other than learning the truth, because one of the problems you, you hit on it.

 

Chris Beall: (23:01)

One of the problems in discovery is the motivation is not to learn the truth. The motivation is to get to a deal. And as soon as, as an AEC smells that there might not be a deal. They either abandoned or begin to persuade. And to really bad things to do in sales are abandoned. You start to lose interest and then you sound like you’ve lost interest and nothing’s worse than talking to somebody who’s lost interest in you. So the other party is like, what’s going on or you start to persuade to start to sell and it’s discovery. It’s not selling. Right. So I actually think these people are out there and they’re out there in the boatloads of highly hireable need to learn business acumen. They need to learn to feel and think business while remaining open to possibilities. And that might be the missing role. Jake, we may have just had, we may have discovered a breakthrough

 

Jake Housdon: (23:56)

May have a breakthrough that completely eliminates the lack of trust in discoveries, right.

 

Corey Frank: (24:04)

Person in the think business. Yeah. I mean, what do you think about that? Curiosity trade, all the folks that you’ve had working with you over the years as CRO and VP of sales director of a biz dev, is there a proportionate connectivity here between curiosity and success or curiosity and their ability to maybe move into a sales role and the success they have there? Do you see any correlation?

 

Jake Housdon: (24:32)

Yeah, well, I certainly do. And I think that one of the things that’s extremely difficult for people is that as they sort of get further in their career and learn things and become more experienced, it takes them further away from a nice Zen Buddhist word called shoshin, which is the beginner’s mindset. Right? And I think that becomes one of the most difficult things is to really do good discovery. You truly need to be curious and sort of naive in some way as well, because as you get more experienced, you’re fighting with yourself on the fact that things that come up, you’re going to think you’ve heard this before and you know where this is going, and you’re going to steer it a certain direction, which causes you to miss out on a whole lot of clues that, that ought to be discovered and potentially not create the right environment for people to spill their beans in that confession in an ineffective way,

 

Corey Frank: (25:24)

Like water as Bruce Lee would say, I love that Shoshin

 

Jake Housdon: (25:28)

Shoshin. Yeah. Shoshin beginner’s mindset. And this is a whole other topic, but I think a problem in sales is beginners are, are often sort of looked down upon and, and stuff like that a little bit. And I think that sometimes they have some of the more valuable insights for your business. And so maybe in that way, it does make sense for SDRs to be doing discovery, right. Because they are usually more so beginners. Yeah. It’s pretty interesting.

 

Corey Frank: (25:52)

I think it was from a Lao-Tzu or Confucius or a fortune cookie that I had, but a mentor of mine would always say kind of the evolution of a great salesperson is a three-step process. It’s number one, it’s ironic that we’re talking about this that says I know nothing. And then number two is I know everything. And then number three is I know nothing. And I think some of us stop at maybe the second piece, maybe some of us stop on the first phase. But I think certainly the practitioners of the craft, the true searchers that we know, and we admire right. Continue with all three.

 

Jake Housdon: (26:33)

Yeah. A hundred percent that reminds me of something else it’s on a slightly different gear, but it’s these extreme dualities, right? That you have to grapple with. The other one is the whole notion of detaching from the outcome. You know, that, that we like to talk about it. And Josh Brown, he talks about commission breadth and, and how people can smell your commission breath and all these things. And it’s the same thing where you have to close the gap between yourself as a human being and yourself as a human being with a sales quota, strapped to your back, that you’re gunning for it. Right? And the best people in the world that I’ve seen, they close that gap, very elegantly. And, but what it is is this dance of thrashing between the two, as you learn, because at first you have to learn certain sales tactics and how to have a cold conversation and these things, cause they’re not natural necessarily ways to speak to people, right.

 

Jake Housdon: (27:16)

It’s kind of different than the way we might have a normal conversation. So you need to be strategic like that, but you also just need to remain yourself. Right. And that’s the real tricky part. And then I think that’s maybe why you land into third place again, of not knowing once again, because you had to, you didn’t know, then you had to learn stuff and then that stuff messed you up a bunch along the way, because it messed up your ability to do certain things. But then at a certain point, you’ve done that stuff so many times that it just becomes like part of your soul. And I think that’s the promised land to get to. But the thing I was talking about with detaching from the outcome is you simultaneously have to care everything about trying to help that person, but you also need to care nothing at all about whether you actually can’t. That’s a very weird thing for people because we’re emotional creatures.

 

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How long will it take to get the meeting? You have three steps first:

1. Make the list. And review that list and eliminate the dumb titles. Chris is a fan of Zoominfo.

2. Write the messaging. Remember, one turn of phrase can kill the meeting. Marketing language kills a sales call. Subtle nuances make or break the call.

3. Talk to people in that market, those that are intrigued enough to hear what we have to say. Who does the talking? Find and hire the ASKERS.

Tune in for this short episode of Market Dominance Guys: Change the Message or Change the List

—-more—-

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (00:41):

Hey there, Market Dominance folks. I’m here today without my brilliant and amusing cohost Corey Frank, and I’m just going to do a little practicum, I guess you’d call it. A little kind of look at the nuts and bolts of market dominance.

Chris Beall (00:57):

So in order to dominate a market, we’ve got to have the goods, obviously, we have to have something the market needs and wants. We have to have a notion of a market which we need to turn into a list. So key to market dominance starts with obviously a market, and a list is defined as a whole bunch of companies, if this is a B2B, a whole bunch of companies. Maybe two, maybe 50, maybe a thousand, who knows, maybe 10,000. That if any one of them on that list buys from us, then all of the other ones will be slightly more inclined to buy from us sooner rather than they would have otherwise, and at the price that we want to sell to them at.

Chris Beall (01:38):

So it’s kind of a self referencing or inter referencing list. So we need to make that list. So that’s step one, it’s a practical step. And I’ll talk a little bit about that. Step two is we have to have something to say to them, and we have to have a purpose in saying it. So we’ll go over that too. We’ll call that messaging. Step three is we’ve got to actually talk to people in that market. And we need to find the ones who are intrigued enough with what we have to say, that they decide to come and attend a discovery meeting, or what I call a confessional meeting. So how do we do all of that in the practical day-to-day way, and how long should it take?

Chris Beall (02:22):

So let’s start with step one. Let’s make the list. Thankfully, there are many, many list providers out there. I have a great fondness for the folks at ZoomInfo. And really you can make a list, which is nothing more than a hypothesis about your market. A list, not only of companies, but of people that you might want to talk with. So it’s titles at companies. Try to keep the companies more or less the same size that is within a band because small company titles are different from big company titles. At small companies, a title like mine, CEO, might be somebody you want to call a broad range of things. But when you get a Microsoft size company then you’re not going to call Satya Nadella and talk to Satya about, say for instance, oh, having the Microsoft employees have a lot more sales conversations. You need to find somebody who’s responsible for that.

Chris Beall (03:15):

And that might be a manager title at a large company. So get your titles lined up with the size of the company. And remember it’s a hypothesis. How long should this take? Well, it’s hypothesis. Doesn’t take that long. Actually, you can get a list that’s worth calling on about 30 to 45 minutes at work, let’s say an hour on ZoomInfo, and now we need to validate the list. So how do we validate the list? We’re going to have conversations with the folks on the list. Those conversations have got to be about something that’s relatively consistent, otherwise we won’t get a very good signal out of our validation. And so what we’re going to do is construct a message. The message will have essentially two parts. Part one is simply being in a position to have a conversation with the person.

Chris Beall (04:00):

We’ve ambushed somebody, these are going to be cold calls and or follow up calls. The beginning they’ve got to be cold calls because you can’t stop somebody a second time unless you’ve talked to them the first time. So we’re going to have, what we call, an ambush call or a cold call. That’s a conversation with somebody that is not expecting us to ring them up on the phone. And in that conversation, first, we need to get them to trust us a little bit. And the way we do that is through what’s called tactical empathy. We start from a position of knowing that they’re afraid of us as an invisible stranger. We offer a solution to that fear to the problem, the problem is us. And we offer that solution in a way that indicates that we’re competent. Competent to solve a problem they have right now and therefore we are worth trusting.

Chris Beall (04:46):

So here’s a situation where we can say a few words. I know I’m an interruption, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? And while you might want to cast around for a whole bunch of other different ways to start a conversation, that one is good enough. It’s above threshold. So my recommendation is don’t try to become the cleverest person on earth putting together the first two sentences. The first two sentences, or first seven seconds, are the most important part of the conversation. And there’s a bottleneck of all of market dominance. So it’s worth getting them right. It’s worth getting the tone right, and it’s worth having the underlying belief right. The underlying belief has to be a belief in the potential value of the meetings that we’re offering to this human being in the case where they’re never going to do business with us. And I know that sounds a little funny, sales folks and business leaders always want to go right for it. The fact is, it’s the hypothesis.

Chris Beall (05:40):

We don’t know what should happen, so we shouldn’t presume that what should happen is that they should take the meeting. We need to have an open mind, but we also need to have confidence that the meeting itself is a good product. It’s the universal product of business. Let’s understand the value from the meeting that they will achieve. And then let’s just say something that is interesting and intriguing to get some curiosity going. And let’s have it be positive. I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates, and name a bad thing that you’re going to take care of that has an economic value to them. A bad thing that has some sort of emotional value, and a bad thing that’s keeping them from getting where they want to go, call that strategic value. Do that without mentioning what category of product that you offer, without pigeonholing yourself in order to avoid getting the, we’re set, objection, the deadly objection, and move on from there and just ask for the meeting.

Chris Beall (06:39):

So you need to have your people learn to do this, or you need to do it yourself. Kind of depends on how big you are. I highly recommend you do it yourself first to get a feel for it. And asking for the meeting is just a question of asking something like, 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? And that’s it. And then you both, you take your belief, which is, this meeting really is going to be of value to them, they’re going to learn a lot. And you let that guide you for the next little dot.

Chris Beall (07:10):

Now day-to-day, say you’ve hired the right people. So what are the right people to have these conversations? They’re people who are sincere. People who believe in the mission that you’re on. They don’t have to understand it deeply, they just have to believe in it. People who have good voices. People who are comfortable asking rather than having people guess what it is that they want. That’s a good way to look at this is that there are askers and there are guessers. There are families that work like this, cultures that work like this. You want somebody from an ask culture or an ask family, where people ask for what they want and it’s okay if they get a no, that’s a real key. And that’s a fairly easy thing to ascertain. In an interview you can find out, did they ask you for things? When you’re interviewing them, did they ask you for things, not just ask you about things, but for things? If they do, and they’re comfortable getting a no for an answer, and they’re capable of being an asker, they can probably ask for the meeting because that’s what they’re doing.

Chris Beall (08:08):

First, they’re asking for the 27 seconds and then they’re going to ask for the meeting. So find askers, hire those askers. And how long does all that take? Well, if you’re doing it yourself and you’re an asker, it takes no time at all. And you’re actually talking to people on day two. Otherwise you’ve got to find somebody. And I would recommend finding two somebodies, but that’s because it’s hard to test anything with the two different ways of doing it. And then train them up. So let’s say it takes a week to find and hire two people, good voices who are askers. Train them up means they learn the message, that takes about one day, and they need to practice it. How often? About 30 times. So 30 times in a row, just getting the message out, and then they need to practice answering the natural objections. Especially what we call the Venus flytrap objection, which is, hey, tell me more.

Chris Beall (09:02):

And when somebody says, tell me more, you have to get really comfortable saying, you know, we’ve learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this isn’t a fair setting for talking about something this important. Are you a morning person? How’s your Wednesday? So getting to that point should take no more than a day. So now we have a day of putting our list together, a week of hiring, and now we have a day of training up our new hires, and then we want to have them talking. But from now on, they’re going to talk to people in a coached way. Now, how often should they talk to folks? My view is, lots. And I sell a product that lets them do that, so maybe I’m biased. But my people today, for instance, my 12 people have had 170 conversations. And my top conversationalist has already had 27, and it’s 12:49 in the afternoon here on a Wednesday on the west coast.

Chris Beall (09:53):

So I’m most concerned for my team, and you should be most concerned for your team about whether they’re having enough conversations. You probably gave them a good list. If the list has titles on it they shouldn’t talk to, if you can take care of just by inspecting the list, I recommend pivoting it on title and looking at the count. Sorting descending on the count of each title, and getting rid of the dumb ones, that’s all you have to do. So now they’re not calling dumb titles they’re calling ones that might be pretty good. And now we need to find out, are they having good conversations or not? Remember, that the first seven seconds is where it tends to go bad. So what we want to do is we want to find out, well, who’s having trouble in the first seven seconds? Thankfully, there’s a call outcome or disposition that tells us that. It’s the busy call back disposition, or busy call back outcome of the conversation.

Chris Beall (10:46):

So I could look at my sales reps right now, which I’m going to do. Our team has had 7,913 dials today. And I think there’s 13 people involved, 170 conversations. They’ve set 17 meetings and they’re converting at about a 10% conversation a meeting rate. It’s hard to get people on the phone today for whatever reason. 46.55 dials, thank goodness our people never have to make any of those dials. And they’re dialed to meeting, which has kind of an overall metric that says, how well are we doing economically? It’s a little high today, 465 to one. But not a lot we can do in one day about the fact that people are hard to reach. So I’m going to just say, let’s forge ahead. Converting at a 10% rate is pretty darn good. Getting 77 follow-up opportunities, which our team has done also, and eight referrals is also pretty good.

Chris Beall (11:39):

But I want to find out, how to keep the car on the road? And my analogy for this is, if you’re driving a car and you close your eyes, or just look down at your GPS, it doesn’t matter how good your GPS is, you’re going to run into things. You’re going to run into things, animate and inanimate. And that’s a serious problem. You’ve got to have your eyes on the road and you have to make the little steering motions, breaking motions, and use your brain in order to drive a car on any road. It’s the same thing about driving a company on a market dominance road. We need to look at the road, and the road consists of, interestingly enough, the outcome of conversations. So what we want to do is find out who’s having the most trouble keeping people on the phone? If we find somebody who’s had 22 conversations and 40.9% of the time they’re getting up busy call back later, and that’s the top of the heat for busy call back later, that means they aren’t keeping people on the phone quite as well as they might.

Chris Beall (12:36):

Maybe it’s their voice. Maybe it’s the list. Who really knows until we listen to the conversations. Because most likely it’s the voice, and most likely it’s in the first seven seconds. So we want to listen to the conversations of our reps who are having the most difficulty keeping people on the phone. And then we want to come back around to them, speak with those reps and say, hey, let’s listen to this conversation together. They might be off script. A common thing to do is to change some of the words around. Change, can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called, to, do you have 27 seconds so I can tell you why I called? Very different effect. So the subtleties are important.

Chris Beall (13:14):

This an athletic kind of thing and we have to coach in real time every day. Fortunately at 30 conversations a day or so, that’s pretty straightforward to do. Now if we do all of this and then we note our conversation and meeting rate, if it stays about 5% forge ahead, forge ahead, forge ahead. If it starts below 5% and doesn’t come up to 5% as we tune our message, then our message needs work, or our list needs work. And that’s the primary adjustment.

Chris Beall (13:43):

One is to change the message, which is the most likely thing that has an issue. You probably put some marketing language in it and marketing language kills sales conversations, for sure. So you might’ve succumb to that temptation. But whatever it is, you change the message or change the list. That’s a little bit of a bigger task to change the list because you have to decide to go after a different market. So that’s pretty much it. Iterate, iterate, iterate, talk to lots of people, keep tuning and coaching and market dominance actually will come to you fairly naturally. So that’s a very brief episode of Market Dominance Guys for this week. Thanks everybody, appreciate it.

Corey Frank (15:09):

CEO’s who sell or don’t sell because what you’re, even at Connect and Sell, it’s unusual that you, as CEO, your esteemed VP of sales, Jonty, and your chairman all still make regular sales calls and sell. And in fact are some of the top producing folks in the company. Why continue to do that? Don’t you have the market figured out by now? Isn’t your time, or Jonty’s or even Sean’s, at the chairman level? I mean, you guys are dominating your market, you’re growing at a great rate every year. It seems that there shouldn’t be that many changes to the marketplace, or are there?

Chris Beall (15:58):

You kind have a choice when you come in as a hired gun. You can choose to be what we call Mr. Monkey, in my circles. Mr. Monkey, you know those little monkeys that, the toy one that you get that you wind up and it’s got the cymbals that it bangs together? And that’s all it does, it bangs the cymbals together and it makes this noise, right?

Corey Frank (16:15):

I used to work for one. Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:17):

Yeah, yeah. Sort of a cheerleader monkey, right? And they’re just doing the same thing over and over. And then if the company grows under them, they take credit for it. Much like [crosstalk 00:16:26].

Corey Frank (16:25):

Oh absolutely. Know them well.

Chris Beall (16:28):

Stockbrokers, they’ll take credit for, you know, they’ll bring you a bunch of stuff and some of it’s great and they take credit for that, and stuff that’s not great suddenly they’re just bringing you new stuff. Just keep banging the cymbals together. So you can be Mr. Monkey and you know, you’ll probably do okay. I don’t object to it. Now Mr. Monkeys tend to negotiate hard for themselves, and as a result they tend to do okay. And there’s kind of a desperate shortage of people who are willing to be CEOs, regardless of what everybody says about the job. It’s not actually that popular for some pretty good reasons. It isn’t the very, very, most fun job in the world in a lot of places. That’s one way to do it.

Chris Beall (17:05):

But even if I were Mr. Monkey, I would do this. I would take one discovery call per day. One. Not curated, just one out of the mix and I’d have it assigned to me, one per day, half an hour. That’s what I would dedicate to my sales activity. And then I’d pass it off. Because frankly it’s in discovery that we make the greatest discoveries. So kind of learn a lot in discovery. I’m going to learn what our sales process is like at the tip of the spear. Finding out what customers need. I’m going to find out what my flow is like. Can you imagine if I came into a company, I said, give me discovery call a day. And they said, boss, we don’t have one, right? We don’t have one for you. We’re going to have to work at that. It’s like, really, that tells me something already.

Corey Frank (18:00):

Yeah, or five no shows in five days, or whatever, you know?

Chris Beall (18:05):

Exactly. You’ll gain more information through that half-hour than all the staff meetings you will ever hold in the entire year. You’ll gain credibility because you’ll be out there executing discovery calls. And if you’re really good at taking credit, you can take credit for the deals that come afterwards. Now, it’s kind of funny because all you are as a filter, but if you’re a pretty good filter, if you can discover need and the need turns into something that happens downstream turns into business, you know, those are your deals. So you’ll be an actual player. But what you’ll learn is stuff where you can move the needle with very little effort. It’s always hiding in there somewhere, no one’s going to tell you. No one’s going to tell you, did you know that we have three extra steps in our sales process, that we inherited from five years ago, that drive away the best customers? Right?

Chris Beall (18:57):

Why? Well, because somebody once said that if we make them sign the contract first, rather than whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And when you’re the rep you’re going, are you kidding me? That’s crazy. You know, I could feel it, right? So you’ll find the points where you can have the maximum impact with the minimum disruption. And the credibility factor is huge. One of the things you need as a CEO in all cases is either credibility or the illusion of credibility. And real credibility doesn’t hurt the illusion. So if you’re an illusion kind of Mr. Monkey, then this’ll help. If you’re not, and you’re a reality kind, then this will help. So the one thing I would advise any CEO to do, and by the way, if you’re a VP of sales, chief revenue officer, whatever you are, including if you are that director of business development, take one discovery call per day on your calendar. 250 discovery calls a year will transform you and will transform your business.

Corey Frank (19:58):

That’s exceptional advice. And today, if you had to guess, right, since I’ve done all those roles and I failed in all those roles, and that’s such an incredible piece of advice, Chris, like I said, we’ve known each other for a long time. You’ve seen some of the organizations that I’ve been a part of, and that I created. And I can tell you that I fall into those, a lot of those same traps. Hey, I only want to be on the big deals or, you know, just, you know, just kind of save me for just the ones that, you know, have a lot of meat on that chicken wing. And I’ve been doing it completely backward. So that’s so incredibly, you know, embarrassing, cringe-worthy for a sales guy like me to hear that something so simple, outcomes raiser in that regard, that’s just one a day. So today from, I mean, you talk with sales organizations, you and Jonty, and Sean talked with sales organizations, VPs all day long, how many are doing that today, would you think? What percentage?

Chris Beall (21:00):

I’d be shocked if it was 5% of CEOs, I’d be shocked if it was two. I’d be shocked if it’s 2%. The easiest, cheapest thing in the world to give yourself information and organizational power, including by the way, board power. Because when you’re in a board meeting and those numbers are up there and somebody’s poking at the numbers, do you want to be held hostage by your VP of sales is the only person with the story?

Corey Frank (21:25):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (21:26):

Right. That might be the person you need to fire tomorrow for all you know. And so you better have something around stories and they better be firsthand, not secondhand. And so, you know, 250 stories to choose out of, for a year or so, a lot better than maybe zero or one whale that you’re going after you were called in on the big deal or whatever.

Corey Frank (21:45):

As always, it never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our values. So thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of The Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank

 

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The sales lead discernment process is similar to search results. The ones that come up on the first page are the ones you interact with. It’s like a discovery call.  A discovery call’s purpose isn’t to say, “I’m going to buy.” One of the biggest mistakes sales trainers make is relying on role-playing as the method to gain confidence. Role-playing is not designed to get you calm and confident. It’s a “gotcha” setup. Rehearsal and practice are a better training method to allow the salespeople to get comfortable enough they don’t have to think about how they might fail. You need to have it be a reflex to get to the underlying emotion. The underlying emotion that needs to come through is curiosity.

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As for the introverted sales pros we talked about in an earlier episode, public Rah Rah adulation is of little value. Giving these professionals a private rah rah is more effective in keeping them motivated. Get these and more insights in this episode of Market Dominance Guys: Sales is a Collaborative Exercise in Search.

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (00:41):

When teaching the golf swing the way I do it anyway, and I’ve had a lot of success with this in 15 minutes, somebody goes from never having swung a golf club to hitting little 100 yards, right to left seven irons with one hand. And the reason that they can do that is that the impediment is their desire to make the club move fast and get the ball the way,their mind tells them it needs to happen. And by taking the ability to execute on that desire away, they have a chance of feeling what it’s really like just swinging golf club, or have a golf club swing now. And I think in sales, the way we do this is pretty simple. One is the script. The script is really important because it gives us a chance to practice our way into the emotional state that we need to begin and to do it without the scary part there, which is the other person.

So a huge mistake that I see sales leaders make is that they think that the sales conversation is a contest between the seller and the buyer. And this is actually fairly commonly taught that buyers are liars and all these kinds of things are out there as concepts that folks have been told as though what you’re in is a little war with the buyer. And when you win they buy. And in fact, modern sales is the opposite. It’s a collaborative exercise where you start with search, you’re searching for somebody who potentially has the ability to get value from what you do or what you provide. So that’s all that cold calling and prospecting stuff as a form of search and the search results. When you do a Google search, right? The search results that come up on the first page are the ones you might interact with. The interaction equivalent is the discovery call.

And the discovery calls purpose, just like when you click through a link on a Google query, isn’t to say, I’m going to buy. You don’t do a query. I did a query yesterday, trying to find a particular hotel up in Birch Bay that happens to be associated with the timeshare that I own, right? I wasn’t simply going to click through and buy it. I was going to click through and check to see if the dates they had available, matched up with what I’d like to do in the first week of September. The idea that I need to qualify beyond the fact that they showed up on the first page of the search is kind of ridiculous, right? I need to look into things a little bit further, and it’s good that I’ve practiced, searching and go. That I practiced clicking. I didn’t have to spend 15 minutes girding up my loins to be able to click on a link.

I know that it’s pretty safe, right? But I’ve got to practice the safe stuff in a way that gives me a chance of succeeding in the micro, in the moment. And then I need a teacher to say, “Hey, that was good.” Even when the result isn’t there. And that’s the real key. It’s the key to the golf swing is the key to anything. If you want to learn something complex, you need a teacher to be there to tell you when it’s working before it’s producing results. So there’s two huge errors that people make in managing sales teams. And if they just stopped them, life would be much better for everybody. One is role play. Role playing is not designed to get you calm and confident. It’s a gotcha situation. We’re going to role-play. And we’re going to show where we can trip you up, where you should have done this, where you should have done that, where don’t do this. Don’t do that.

All that does is it gets you all knotted up. So when you go into the real conversation, your mind is going, should I have done that? Should I have done that? I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t do that. And then there you go, waters on the left, you’ve hooked another shot out of balance, right? And then the other thing that needs to happen is in the practice, replace role-play with practice, just practice, just rehearsal. Rehearsal is needed in order to make the sounds come out of you automatically so that you’re free to express the underlying emotion. And the underlying emotion is actually curiosity. So you’re curious, can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called? So you are showing that you’re competent to solve a problem this person has right now, that is you, the invisible stranger, the scary beast in the dark, but you’re also saying it in a playful, curious tone. Notice how quickly curiosity enters in the relationship in the second sentence, it enters into the relationship.

So if you’re curious, you’re naturally relaxed. When you’re curious, you’re waiting for information to come through to you. You stimulate it. And then you’re waiting. It’s like waiting for the golf smile, waiting for the club to get down, to get to the top before it comes back around, you just have to be relaxed in order to do that. You get relaxed by practicing the thing that works, not the thing that doesn’t work. And you need the teacher to tell you, “Hey, that was good.” Not, “Oh, look at that. You whiffed it.” It’s like in the golf swing, it’s like half an inch lower. That thing would have been beautiful. You did everything right. Let’s do it again.

Corey Frank (05:29):

As an instructor, as a mentor, as a teacher, you need to be able to give guidance. And as a student, you need to have a teacher that can tell you that something is working, even when you may not feel that it’s working in the wild just yet.

Chris Beall (05:46):

Yes. And when you’re listening to the conversation. So the way we run our flight school is like this. So we run this thing at ConnectAndSell called flight school and flight school takes pretty much any human being and turns them into a top 5% in the world, cold call, and does it in four sessions of two hours each. So step zero is to develop the message. And we’ve been through all of that, walking into the bar, sit to the left of the person who’s your ideal customer and ask them, how’s your day. We listened to how their day went. We come up with three things out of that. One of them is we’ll call it economic. One of them is emotional and one of them is strategic. We put them in a very simple sentence. I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough that completely eliminates the bad thing, the bad thing and the other bad thing.

Or maybe it’s got some other variations in it. And then we move forward and we avoid a couple of things there. Okay. All that’s great. We’ve got to have that. Now, how do we become great at it? Well, first we’ve got to get great at the first seven seconds. It’s like a prizefight. If I go into the ring and I get knocked out in the first seven seconds, it really doesn’t matter how good I would have been. Right? It just doesn’t matter. Flat on my back on the canvas is the same and almost every cold call is lost in the first seven seconds. And the reason it’s lost in the first seven seconds, is the voice doesn’t support the concepts that are in the script. The idea, the flow of emotions in the script are not supported by the voice. So I play a little bit of piano, as you might know, and many people think I’m much, much better than I am.

I’m actually a very poor piano player. I would rank myself among people who play the piano regularly in the bottom 20% easily, but I’m quite capable of playing freely the emotions that I feel in any piece. And then what did I do to do that? I took my left hand out of the equation, so I don’t have any mechanics associated with it. And I simplified things. So I can express myself in the melody of my right hand. It’s actually the same as the golf swing. Take the part that doesn’t work so well out. Do the part that does work and then getting encouragement for the stuff that is working before it’s producing results. And so in flight school, what we do is you do a two-hour session with ConnectAndSell. That’s like 15 to 20 conversations, all hot, all live, all live fire.

In those conversations, there’s going to be a coach listening to you, and you’re going to get coached not after everyone, but after most of them. In session one, you get coached only on the first seven seconds, because that’s the important part. That is, it’s what you need to get before you can go on. And then afterwards, there’s a listening session. We go around the classroom and everybody gets to listen to their best. Why do we listen to their best? Because you want to know what you did right. And you want the encouragement from the teacher that says, “Yeah, that was great.” Don’t worry that they hung up. The guy hung up, so what? The lady sounded pissed. So what? You sounded perfect. Let’s listen to your voice again. Listen to that playful, curious, listen to your voice go up twice. That was great. Then in the second session we do what we call the breakthrough part.

So we call it Flight School because the first session, the first two hours is takeoff. And then there’s freight flight. We’re in the middle of it. We’re going somewhere, right? It’s the, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough at the completely eliminates whatever it is. And it’s their message. And they’ve had time to practice it and rehearse it. And again, can they get the tone right? I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough. Does the breakthrough sound like the hero and the hero’s journey? Do they believe the breakthrough is an actor? Is doing something? Does the breakthrough slay the three dragons in their little story? Does it sound like a story? Does it sound like a pitch? Coaching us on that. That’s session number two. Session, number three, we’ve got to land the airplane, right? It’s flight school. You got to learn how to get it back on the ground.

So we have to ask for the meeting. It’s very simple. The way to ask for the meeting, we just say, the reason I reached out to you today, was to get 15 minutes on your calendar, share this breakthrough. I haven’t rehearsed every single. So you got to get that part right. You got to land the plane and then you got to deal with turbulence. The objections, they’re inevitable. How do you handle, they tell me more objection? The Venus fly trap? What do you do? You’ve got to practice that the most awkward of handles in the world. And the most honest, which is we’ve learned the hard way that an ambush conversation like this, just isn’t a fair setting to talk about something that’s important. You a morning person? How’s your Wednesday? Getting that stuff right is a matter of practicing with the teacher, paying attention and getting encouraged when you do it right.

Getting feedback that says you did it right. Especially when it didn’t deliver results. And then occasionally you’ll hook one up with results and you’ll see that works too. But there is an element of faith in all of this. And the element of faith is you actually have got to go into learning, to be great at anything believing in your teacher. If you believe you’re the teacher, then the teacher’s not the teacher. Somebody got to be the teacher. It’s just the way it is. And so in the same way that we shouldn’t bring our ideas too deeply into discovery, we shouldn’t bring our ideas too deeply into learning something as delicate and chilling as cold calling. It’s like when I learned to drive a race car, I got in that car and I tried to forget everything I knew about driving and just let my eyes take me where I was going to go. And instead of responding to the screaming of the guy in the right seat, telling you what to do, is responding, don’t tell me what to do.

I really tried to just do what he said, brake hard, brake hard, brake hard. Meant stomp on the brake, as hard as I can. And then his feedback was great. It was a young guy and he gave me incredible feedback. So the first time I did it right, which was on the third lap, turn one, we’re going in. And finally I wait long enough and I brake hard enough. And guess what? We kind of spin out a little bit. We don’t quite lose the car, but almost lose the car.

Corey Frank (11:58):

[inaudible 00:11:58].

Chris Beall (11:58):

Completely. Oh, the way race cars work. It’s like, [crosstalk 00:12:01].

Corey Frank (12:02):

But there’s the fighter flight. You want to disavow everything he’s saying, because you, who are a residential driver driving 11.2 miles over the speed limit, right? Who’s been doing this since 15, 16 years old. You want to resist that feedback. So how do you trust that teacher? Right? Even though you’re in the same environment you thought you were in before at driving to the racetrack, but now everything is accelerated. You don’t have to have a conversation as a person. How is it different than having a conversation as a salesperson?

Chris Beall (13:23):

That’s really good. That’s exactly the equivalent. And it’s up to the student to come with an open mind. It’s up to the teacher to coach the actions or elements of performance that next can lead to success without getting ahead of themselves, without coaching the next part, don’t teach the part after this part, just teach this part and just paying attention to whether it was done correctly. Not the result. It’s really quite simple when you come right down to it. And in sales, we have this conceit. I see it all the time out there on LinkedIn. Whereas some, for instance, I’ll post some numbers, right? You know how I am. I like to post the numbers about number dials, which are done for the reps and the number of conversations and the number of meetings, which are the wins and all that good stuff. There will often be somebody that comes in and says, “Yeah.” But what about the revenue? What about the closed one?

Well, so what, right? Unless we get the meetings, there’s not going to be any closed one. I mean, these are all small percentages, mostly working against us. So I’m not going to win a lot of races in that Ferrari, probably take me 20 years and having nobody show up for me to win one, but I can learn that I really do go all the way up to that cone before I break. And I really do break as part as I physically compress on that pedal. And I really do just aim the car at the apex. And I know it feels really weird, but I do it. And my instructor was great. When I came out of almost losing the car on turn one on left three, there was a straightaway. And so we had a little bit of time and he ignored the fact that I forgot to shift it to sixth gear on the straightaway.

He just ignored that, which would have been a natural thing for him to pay attention to. That’s the next thing, what he said was, “Great job.” That’s what he said. Great job. And I thought, okay, I did that right. And then the next time I did it right, but with a little more awareness of this other little piece he told me, which was kind of be a little bit more gentle as I changed the direction of the car, going to the apex in the turn.

Corey Frank (15:29):

[inaudible 00:15:29].

Chris Beall (15:29):

So yeah, I mean, there’s a sort of a thing that does a little physics in there somewhere. So I think our sales managers really, really need to be great teachers. We talk about coaching all the time and I think coaching is correct. I think that’s what we’re really doing, but I’ll make this warning. A lot of people in sales came out of the world of athletics and there are two elements of coaching. There’s a teaching element, learning to execute, the thing you need to execute to perform. And then there is sort of an energy motivation level of coaching, getting folks up, keeping them up, keeping their spirits up and all that. And I think that’s the one people remember having been coached and they think their job as a coach is to go all rah-rah or to go all yell at you, to go all Vince Lombardi to say winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, whatever he said. Right?

And it’s just not the case. I mean, when you’re coaching NFL players, you can say that they’re all really, really good. Every one of them already knows how to execute all of the moves through all that stuff. But guess what? They still get taught and get taught. Tom Brady actually gets feedback on technique, not just whether he was in a good frame of mind, whether it was a hopped up on excitement on adrenaline or whatever. And I think that coaching often sounds like let’s do some rah-rah. Rah-rahs have such little value in sales. It’s just a such little value, including celebrating the wins. There are certain personality types that need to do that. Go ahead, let them do it, right? Introverts who make the best sellers tend not to be encouraged or they like a private rah-rah. If you’re the leader of a company and you have an introverted salesperson, especially at the top of the funnel, recognize their good day privately at the end of the day, do that.

Corey Frank (17:24):

That’s great. So I think we had talked, when I was in the Uber and we were chatting about something else the other day about reps and today’s generation on this career cycle to eventually become CEOs. And what is the ideal career track, right? To be CEO development program, workout regimen, if you will, over the years to be a next-generation CEO? And similar to what I’ve heard you say here in the last 30 minutes or so Chris, is that if you have a great teacher, as a rep, you are naturally going to learn how to teach from your teacher, which will contribute to your skills as a great CEO. You are going to learn how to evoke a curious nature in a conversation, which as a CEO is, you clearly need, you’re going to have empathy, which we had talked about in several episodes already, and you’re going to learn presentation skills, but we’re also going to learn metrics.

And you had said something to me the other day that the CEOs of today, can’t just sit at the top of the food chain. They have to get intimate with the inner workings of every silo of their business. And it seems to me that what we’re talking about here is that if you have a solid rep BDR development program, as an organization, you are setting your organization up for much success that will trickle into every department, or trickle up, if you will, if you want to use a hierarchical example, your SDR/BDR team will trickle up a level of success and it should not be an afterthought. It should not be a place where they get residual marketing or sales training dollars. It should be at the front lines and be treated as such because of, I think the reciprocal effect of doing that really, really well from not just a numbers perspective, of course, but from a leadership development perspective throughout that organization,

Chris Beall (19:23):

I think this is a really big deal. Well, first of all, there’s two ideas in here. One is what is a modern and future CEO like? And they’ve got to have two characteristics. Big time. One is they have to be systems thinkers. They have to be able to see a system as a whole and understand how that system interacts with its environment. When you run a company, a company is a system and it’s a system that at that moment is designed in order to help some folks in database and companies do things more cheaply or do things more effectively or conveniently than they can do for themselves. So that’s what a firm is. That’s why we make companies. We specialize in something that others might need, but they don’t need it to the degree of becoming it. So we get to be it and concentrate that specialization.

And we create this system called the company. And if you don’t know how a system is put together in the inside and how it works, it’s very, very hard to reason about where it could go next. And in particular, where it might be breaking down. The systems break down easily and small things inside of systems can become big things. We had a small thing recently in our system at ConnectAndSell, unfortunately, we test extensively on ourselves as Guinea pigs, before we let anything out in the wild and the very small thing that we’d changed, created a very small delay in not transferring to the user of ConnectAndSell, but transferring to the agent who is navigating. And that very small delay caused a misunderstanding, kind of at a statistical level by agents of what they were hearing in voicemail greeting, and whether it really belonged to that person.

Corey Frank (21:01):

Really?

Chris Beall (21:01):

And that caused a miss marking of some of the phone numbers that we were calling as being main numbers instead of direct numbers. And that caused a miss execution. So we polluted our own data, but we didn’t intend to, we did everything as designed and in a lot of companies, I would assure you that a quarter second delay causing what looks on the surface like, “Oh my God, where do our direct numbers go?” Would have created a witch hunt to go out and find who’s responsible for the bad data. And the bad data actually grew like scum on a pond. Nobody was responsible for it. We just let the temperature of the pond get half a degree too warm. And it grew scum. And we caught it in a day and fixed it and went back and fixed the data and did all that. But that’s the CPR. [crosstalk 00:21:53]

Corey Frank (21:53):

And I think it, you caught it because you just happen in the course of your day as a CEO. One of the things that you do is you just look, almost like a beautiful mind. You look at 100 different KPIs and metrics and maybe it just takes a couple of seconds. Yeah. It’s on track. Yeah. That’s on track. And you said that you noticed something a little bit peculiar, which led to a deeper dive, a deeper dive, a deeper dive. And that’s how you found it from the systems type thinking. So you work from backwards up because you knew what the metrics were going to be. And when they’re off slightly, that’s where it’s time to dive in.

Chris Beall (22:30):

Exactly. And I didn’t diagnose the, what’s going on under the covers, but I could smell something was going on under the covers. And it was in one set of numbers. And it was simply the order of the outcomes. The most popular outcome is voicemail reached for after navigation. The second, most popular is voicemail reach direct number, call a direct number, which was third is gatekeeper as target, but not available. The number two and number three were flipped. That was it. And they were flipped day after day after day, starting on a particular day. To me as a systems kind of person, I look at that and go the odds of that happening spontaneously statistically are zero, right? So as a CEO, you also have to understand the nature of probability and all that. Then there’s this other job which has got to talk to people.

I mainly listen to them and kind of move things ahead. But without presuming that you know all the answers and I believe the best place to learn that is as a cold caller. So I look at cold calling like what you guys are doing at Youngblood Works. As truly finishing school for business graduates, where they’ve learned a whole bunch of things. Maybe even learn some things about teaching from their best professor. Why do we go to college? Because one of our professors will be so good. We’ll learn about teaching. And maybe we’ll do some of that ourselves later in life. It’s not the content. It’s the actual experience of being taught effectively. And if you go to a college, there’s enough teachers. Eventually one of them is going to be good enough that you’ll go [inaudible 00:23:54] I work for me. Right? And then you might want to learn more about that.

But I think what you guys are doing at Youngblood Works where you’re taking these very, very talented people, high ambition folks who are coming out of a program or still in a program, interested in business, probably have CEO in their minds, somewhere in their future. And the natural finishing school. Back in Victorian times, you had to learn how to dance certain dances, or you were toast in society, right? In Victoria, in England, if you couldn’t dance these dances, I mean, you couldn’t go, you couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t hold conversations with people because you had to do it out on the dance floor. Right?

And so how do you learn the dances of the future, which happened in conversations? Well, you got to go to a dancing master and you got to do it on the real ballroom floor. And that means talking to real people with real coaching going on. Because if you take the emotions away, the fear emotions, you’ll never find out if you’re performing right. So I just see that there’s a way of looking at the SDR/BDR role that folks are not quite getting. They think they’re preparing future AEs and getting them to that as fast as possible.

Corey Frank (25:06):

Exactly. Exactly.

Chris Beall (25:06):

Makes no sense. They should be looking at this as the best way to bring anybody into their organization. Even engineers, is to have them come in and sit in the seat. Anybody can learn the script. Anybody can learn to believe in the potential value of the meeting for the human being they’re talking with, regardless of outcome, anybody can get their voice to go up and down in the right places. Anybody can be coached to silence. And these things are very straightforward, right? They just have to believe it’s worth their while. Well, do you want to be a CEO someday, including a CEO of your own life? Learn to have conversations with invisible strangers. [inaudible 00:25:46]

Corey Frank (25:46):

I know a lot of Marines in my life and I work with some and my son is becoming one. And the John Darby who works with me at Youngblood had said, “Listen, as a Marine veteran, you’re taught that whether you’re a cook or you’re a attorney, or whether you’re in logistics, you are a rifleman first, a Marine is a rifleman first.” And it sounds like if you’re an engineer in an organization, you’re a CEO, you’re a VP of technology. This new world order of starting out as a biz dev as an SDR, learning how to script from the ground up is everybody needs to learn these traits of curiosity, these traits of empathy, the systems backwards and forwards to be a true contributor to that organization. I know where we’re running up against the clock here for this episode, but I think that we still have a lot. I have a lot to milk from you. Certainly. I think we can cover this topic next time on the traits of a CEO. I know we’ve touched on it in a few episodes here.

Chris Beall (26:49):

Yeah. I’m glad that we’ve hit this one. I think that this is sort of the big deal that we have a lot going on in our society right now with the pandemic and all that we have, a lot of folks are looking around and asking, what am I going to do? Well, what you’re going to do is going to be limited by what you’re capable of doing and what you’re capable of doing will have a lot to do with what you’ve learned how to do, right? You’ve got to go explore. And I would recommend anybody who wants to check out their future CEO ness, go ahead and become a cold caller. But by the way, don’t become a cold caller who spends all day, not talking to people it’s much better to talk to 30 or 40.

Corey Frank (27:25):

Well, fantastic. Well, it has been another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and the Sage of sales, chris Beall. Thank you Chris. Until next time. Keep dialing.

Chris Beall (27:34):

Thanks, Corey.

 

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CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider odd possibilities. You need input from the market you don’t have yet. This is why a CEO needs to be selling to understand what is actually happening. Their job is to feel the ice rather than just sending your reps to drive the road.

Put yourself in there as CEO, don’t absorb the friction, find the root cause. The marketplace is always changing. CEOs love to harpoon a whale, but they need to experience every aspect of a sale. They need to be in the mix and feel what is behind the numbers. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, It’s the CEO’s Job to Feel the Ice Rather than Harpoon the Whale.

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

 

Corey Frank (00:35):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of Sales, Chris Beall, with all things markets dominant oriented.

Chris Beall (00:45):

This is something that drives me a little bit nuts when CEOs stop selling and they cut themselves off from the only information flow that counts, which is what’s happening inside of a discovery conversation that indicates to you that something needs to be different, something about your positions, something about your product, something about your company needs to change in order to stay current and stay ahead of what’s going on in your marketplace. As you go through the process of dominating market, things change. One of the things that changes is some things get easier, and so if you keep doing certain things the hard way, you’re wasting money and time. It could be that there’s an easier way to move ahead at that point. So who knows, but unless you’re out there on the front lines, and particularly, very specifically, CEOs need to engage in discovery conversations.

Chris Beall (01:38):

Discovery is discovery. Discovery is not discovering whether they need your product. That’s what sales people tend to think of discovery as “I’m going to discover that you, Corey, need to buy my thing. You know a miracle that every discovery conversation has the same outcome. You should buy my stuff”, it’s like, “Really?” I thought we were going to discover the nature of the problem that you think you have. And then we’re going to examine that problem in the light of different ways of looking at it, thinking about it, that might reveal a solution to the problem that you hadn’t considered before. It may well be that that solution is something we can help you with. It may well be otherwise. That’s why it’s called discovery. And it’s actually been flipped on its head. It’s like, “We’re not discovering what we’re doing is hoping. We’re hoping that you want to buy something because I going to make my number.” Right?

Chris Beall (02:27):

It’s kind of funny that we call it “making my number”, when I get lucky enough that the hope turns into an outcome. So as a CEO, I want to know what’s going on. I’m driving on a road that hasn’t been driven before. By definition at all times, my company is going into new territory. Even if all we’re doing is going into the easier part of this market, how do I know for instance, something we’ve talked about which is, when I’ve gotten far enough into one market where it’s time to seriously consider a foray into an adjacent market. Well, I’ve said before, it’s stunned by the numbers. But in fact, I’m lying when I say that. It’s actually done before the numbers. There’s a point in the process where a discovery conversation with the wrong person shows incredible opportunity.

Chris Beall (03:12):

And it’s only when it’s with the wrong person, which is why you must eat false positives in the discovery process. You have to put false positives and it says you don’t know there are false positives. You just need to be a little bit promiscuous. As you throw opportunities into the discovery process, you have to be a little bit tight. And I’ve said before, on a different episode, 15% false positives, that’s a pretty good number.

Corey Frank (03:36):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (03:37):

10% is light, 20% is okay, but a little bit wasteful and 50%, you probably don’t know what you’re doing. So if you had about 15% and you have like, “I’ll look at our team again for the day. Let me just see how we’re doing.” What would that mean for us? So today, so far we have just to take a little peak here. We’ve got 20 meetings and so 15% of 20 meetings would be… Three of those meetings would be with people we shouldn’t speak with.

Chris Beall (04:07):

So say three of those happen a day. So every week we’re going to speak with 15 people we shouldn’t speak with. So say one out of 15 of those people actually has a problem we can solve. That’s nice. That’s a problem we can solve, even though they’re not correct with regard to our idea of the market and say, that problem turns out to be a problem. It’s fundamentally interesting in the sense that it represents a market opportunity, not a one-off. Well, how are we going to know that? My salespeople aren’t going to report that back to me. And if they do, we’re going to say, “Hey, focus on the ones that want to buy what’s in the bag” right? We’re not going to say, “Hey, great. You brought us something weird.” So who is going to take an appropriate action called thinking in the face of something weird.

Chris Beall (04:57):

There’s only one safe place to do that. That’s a CEO position.

Corey Frank (05:00):

That’s correct. Right.

Chris Beall (05:01):

CEOs are allowed to have weird thoughts and consider strange possibilities and maybe bring them forward and have them argued, shut down, whatever. You kind of get used to it as a CEO and you get used to your team kind of saying, “Really, again? Nutty I… Didn’t we do that before and it didn’t work?” That’s a very common [crosstalk 00:05:20] CEO, right? We tried that in 2013 and it failed in a spectacular way. Well, sometimes you end up prophesizing something that is different from what happened before and kind of outcome, but you need the input from the market. And I don’t mean the market you’re selling to, I mean, the market that you’re not selling to. The one you don’t even have yet. So CEO needs to be out there doing that.

Chris Beall (05:45):

It’s kind of like, if you’re driving a car and you’re driving on a road you’ve never seen before. Say it’s the middle of winter and back in the day, you were going to come up and visit me at my house up Pine Needle Notch, for extra effort. You weren’t aware because you’ve never driven that road before. You’re a desert guy, right? You weren’t aware of that sometimes there’s a stretch of the road just above long canyon. Then when everything is great, sometimes has a little ice on it and it’s outward sloping. And it’s about a 950 foot drop down into that canyon. Don’t you want to actually feel that ice rather than just checking the outcome. “Did Corey make it?”, that’s how we do it in sales. We say, “How many deals did you close to how are we doing?” That would have been, “How often did you make it to my house?”

Chris Beall (06:32):

“Oh, well, why didn’t he make it?” The answer is there’s a 26 foot stretch of road that tends to have ice on it, that tilts to the outside. And somebody forgot to tell Corey, “Hugged the cliff a little bit, angle the car over there, slow down and by the way, you can’t have tires that can’t handle this. Where’s your form of threat?” So it’s the CEOs job to feel the ice, to feel the difference. And then to kind of be the early warning system or the early opportunity system to close the loop from back. CEOs who don’t sell also have another problem. They don’t know where the friction is in their sales system. All systems have friction. Every system in the world has friction. Some dumb thing, right? It’s just there, every single one. How do you know? Well, your reps will complain.

Chris Beall (07:17):

Really? You’re going to listen to all their complaints. No. You’re going to dismiss their complaints because reps complain because their reps and they’re looking for excuses, right? And they’re in a game where it’s like golf, you and I played a little bit of golf. What do you do when you start around a golf? You assemble the most important club in your bag. Your number one excuse for how you’re going to fly. That’s the most important club because you know it’s not going to be great and you got to have a good excuse. So right now mine would be, “Oh, I haven’t played since last September”, more rough. And it’s, “You know, I’ve had some issues with my back as I’ve gotten a little bit older” but you’ve got to have an excuse, right? Salespeople need an excuse because they’re in a game that has a lot of law and a lot of failure, so you stop listening to them.

Chris Beall (07:59):

But when they’re telling you about legit friction, be great to listen to them. I tell you what, you put yourself in their as CEO and you absorb that friction. You have to eat it. It’s wasting your time. Suddenly it’s like, ” Oh I’m worth extra zillion dollars an hour. Why am I spending my time doing this? Why is my show rate this low? I had two meetings scheduled today. They didn’t even show.” Well, okay. You just experienced it. Now, let’s go find the root cause maybe nothing can be done about it. Maybe something can be done about it, but you’re the one complaining now and when you’re done complaining, we’ll figure it out.

Corey Frankl (08:31):

Well, I find it interesting.

You’re listening to the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Chris Beall of ConnectAndSell and Cory Frank of UncommonPro.

Corey Frank  (09:29):

I’ve always been fascinated, right, as long as I’ve known you longer than the ConnectAndSell days, of course, but since even at ConnectAndSell, it’s unusual that you, as CEO, your esteemed VP of Sales, Jonti, and your chairman, all still make regular sales calls and sell and in fact, they’re some of the top producing folks in the company. Why continue to do that? Don’t you have the market figured out by now. Isn’t your time or Jonti’s or even Shawn’s at the chairman level. I mean, you guys are dominating your market. You’re growing at a great rate every year. It seems that there shouldn’t be that many changes to the marketplace or are there?

Chris Beall (10:14):

Are there? Yes. There are. Always are changing, unless you do regular sales. So CEOs love to do this kind of stuff, “I’ll go sell something big. I’ll go harpoon a whale. I’m a whale harpoon. Right? Well, I got a couple of little whales that I’ve harpooned and I kind of liked them. They didn’t start that way. However, they just started little. And since they’re my accounts, I have to pay a lot of attention to what happens every day. And so I’m in contact with all the way through the process, through renewals and particularly through customer success. And why, because my customers really feel free to call me, right? I’m the CEO. They don’t like something. They know that they’re going to get something out of a calls. Give me a call and say, “That guy you sent over for the messaging workshop the other day, it wasn’t as thrilling as you. What’s the deal?”

Chris Beall (11:03):

Well. Whatever, right? I get to hear it. So that’s the most important thing is you have to hear it all the way through, but it’s not about the whales. It’s not about bringing in the big deals. It’s not about any of that. It’s about being in the mix and feeling what’s behind the numbers so that we can have rational discussions with each other about it and goes, ” That real is that not realistic, it’s just my emotions”, by having all three of us sell and we do sell a fair amount. It’s pretty beefy numbers that we put up and we compete a little bit. Jonti caught me by 10 grand on December 31st, last year. I’m not saying he’s a sandbagger. I’m really not. I’m just saying that he’s a guy who knows how to get you by 10 grand on December 31st at 11:00 PM. Right? I’m not bitter about it.

Chris Beall (11:49):

I just think it’s a good thing, right? But what are we really seeing? We’re seeing the flow of the business every day, at every stage so that the numbers can be interpreted in the light of shared experience. We can get together and say, “Are you seeing X, Y, or Z? Are you noticing that more people that we talk to seem to be interested in an outsource solution of having somebody else, like Youngblood Works, actually have their conversations for them at the top of the funnel. And do you know why?” “Yeah. I am seeing that. Well, why do you think that’s going on?” “Well, I talked to this one and I got this particular enlightenment.” “Really? Can we go back and talk to that person again? Maybe we can take them into a different sales process. Maybe we can do an experiment.”

Chris Beall (12:36):

So when you’re running something… If you think you’re running against stasis, you’re out of your mind. You’re running against continuous change and everything you think about it that’s interesting is wrong. Everything you think about it that’s uninteresting may or may not be wrong, maybe you think a bunch of correct things, but the interesting things are the ones where you’re wrong. And when you’re out selling, you feel it and you go, “Wow, that bothers me. The way that conversation went, bothers me.” A salesperson kind of go, “I didn’t get them. You’re going to go that bottles.”

Corey Frank (13:06):

That’s right. So in other words, what I hear you saying Chris is never trust a CEO who wears flip-flops.

Chris Beall (13:12):

Absolutely. The ones wear flip-flops will not go very deep in the canyon. The barefoot ones, you can trust. Actually, there was a personal note, I was just told by my fiance the other day, she didn’t tell me. She told somebody else that she hasn’t seen me in any footwear other than barefoot and flip-flops since March 13th of this year. So yeah, don’t trust me. I will never go past the flip-flop line. That’s all there is to it.

Corey Frank (13:40):

Correct. How about so professional CEOs, right? You reach a certain stage as a venture-funded company, or even a private equity-backed company, if we go up the food chain a little bit more, and you’re a hired gun Chris, right? I’m from XYZ Venture firm.

Corey Frank (13:57):

And the CEO is now going to become the Chief Visionary Officer or Chief Strategist or whatever title that they deemed because the CEO got us to 25 million. And now we’re thinking of a new change, a hired gun to come in and take us from 25 to a hundred million or so, what should the CEO do and not do in those types of situations, because the ownership of the company is still very much alive. Those founders obviously, still care very much about that. If they’re humble enough to bring in or let their VC bring in a CEO or a hired gun, or was placed by a PE firm. And let’s talk a little bit about that as we kind of expand this concept of what should the CEOs be doing in the sales role, obviously under the guise of making sure that alignment is tight functionally between sales and marketing.

Chris Beall (14:50):

Well, for one thing, I mean, those people are real-life professional CEOs. They’re not like me, so I don’t really know, but I have observed a few of them and some of them are my friends, so I have a sense of what their challenges are. You kind of have a choice when you come in as a hired gun, you can choose to be what we call Mr. Monkey, in my circles. You know those little monkeys that the toy one that you get, that you wind up and it’s got the symbols that have bangs together and that’s all it does. It bangs the symbols together and makes this noise, right? [crosstalk 00:15:20] Sort of a cheerleader monkey, right? And they’re just doing the same thing over and over. And then if the company grows under them, they take credit for it, much like stockbrokers-

Chris Beall (15:33):

Stockbrokers bring you a bunch of stuff and some of it’s great and they take credit for that and stuff that’s not great. Suddenly, they’re just bringing in new stuff, just banging the symbols together. So you can be Mr. Monkey and you’ll probably do okay. I don’t object to it. Mr. Monkeys tend to negotiate hard for themselves. And as a result they tend to do okay. And there’s kind of a desperate shortage of people who are willing to be CEOs, regardless of what everybody says about the job. It’s not actually that popular for some pretty good reasons. It isn’t the very, very most fun job in the world and a lot of places at. It’s the Lonely Minds Club because they have no hearts. That’s one way to do it. But even if I were Mr. Monkey, I would do this. I would take one discovery call per day. One. Not curated, just one, out of the mix.

Chris Beall (16:18):

And I’d have it assigned to me, one per day, half an hour. That’s what I would dedicate to my sales activity. And then I’d pass it off, because frankly, it’s in discovery that we make the greatest discovers, kind of learn a lot in discovery. I’m going to learn what our sales processes like at the tip of the spear, finding out what customers need. I’m going to find out what my flow is like. Can you imagine if I came into a company and said, “Give me one discovery call a day” and they said, “Boss, we don’t have one”, right? “We don’t have one for you. We are going to have to work at that.” It’s like, “Really? That tells me something already.”

Corey Frank (16:52):

And five no shows in five days or whatever-

Chris Beall (16:54):

Exactly. You’ll gain more information through that half-hour. Then all the staff meetings you will ever hold in the entire year. You’ll gain credibility because you’ll be out there executing discovery calls. And if you’re really good at taking credit, you can take credit for the deals that come afterwards. Now, it’s kind of funny because all you are is a filter. You’re a pretty good filter if you can discover need, and the need turns into something that happens downstream, turns into business. Those are your deals, so you’ll be an actual player. But what you’ll learn is the stuff where you can move the needle with very little effort. It’s always hiding in there somewhere. No one’s going to tell you, “Did you know, that we have three extra steps in our sales process that we inherited from five years ago, that drive away the best customers?” “Why?” “Well, because somebody once said that if we make them sign the contract first, rather than whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Right? And when you’re the rep you’re going, “Are you kidding me? That’s crazy.”

Chris Beall (17:54):

I could feel it. Right? So you’ll find the points where you can have the maximum impact with the minimum disruption and credibility factor is huge. One of the things you need as a CEO in all cases is either credibility or the illusion of credibility and real credibility doesn’t hurt the illusion. So if you’re an illusion and kind of Mr. Monkey, then this will help. If you’re not, and you’re a reality kind, then this will help. So the one thing I would advise any CEO to do, by the way, if you’re a VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, whatever you are, including if you are that director of business development, take one discovery call per day on your calendar. 250 discovery calls a year will transform you and will transform your business.

Corey Frank (18:39):

That’s exceptional advice in today. If you had to guess, since I’ve done all those roles and I failed in all those roles, and that’s such an incredible piece of advice Chris. Like I said, we’ve known each other for a long time. You’ve seen some of the organizations that I’ve been a part of and that I created. And I can tell you that I fall into a lot of those same traps, “Hey, I only want to be on the big deals” or just kind of saved me for just the ones that have a lot of meat on that chicken wing. And I’ve been doing it completely backwards. That’s so incredibly embarrassing. Cringe-worthy for a sales guy like me to hear that something so simple, outcomes raiser, in that regard, that’s just one a day. I mean, you talk with sales organizations, you and Jonti and Shawn talk with sales organizations, VPS all day long. How many are doing that today, would you think? What percentage?

Chris Beall (19:30):

I’d be shocked if it was 5% of CEOs… I’d be shocked if it was two. I’d be shocked if it was 2%. The easiest cheapest thing in the world to give yourself information and the organizational power, including by the whiteboard power. Because when you’re in a board meeting and those numbers are up there and somebody poking at the numbers, do you want to be held hostage by your VP of Sales? That’s the only person with the story, right? That might be the person you need to fire tomorrow, for all you know. You better have some of your own stories and they better be firsthand, not secondhand. And so, 250 stories to choose for a year or so, a lot better than maybe zero or one whale or whatever you called in on the big deal or whatever.

Corey Frankl (20:10):

That’s malpractice insurance, as far as I’m concerned, what you’re just communicating here. I’ve certainly been guilty of it for many, many years.

Chris Beall (20:17):

It’s massive. And it’s simple. It’s easy. It’s executable. And guess what? It’s also fun because one of the problems at CEO job is your office, if you have one and you might notice I tend not to, for this reason. Somebody once asked me, “Why aren’t you ever in the office?” I said, “Every time I go there, there’s no customers.” I tell her I don’t see anybody that’s interesting there, because I know you guys and talk to you anytime, but no customers, right? When you think about it, it’s like your office as a CEO goes from being a place of discourse to an echo chamber, because people will want to tell you what they think you want to hear. And the one-party who won’t tell you what they think you want to hear is a prospect. They’ll tell you the truth, but at least they’ll tell you the truth.

Chris Beall (21:01):

If you’re humble enough to do what it takes, to get a confession out of them. So if you can do that, you’ll get the truth. And the truth will set you free. Shawn McLaren always repeats that. Anytime somebody goes down, one of these perceptions is reality paths, or they don’t want to know the truth. He says, “Just repeats that”, know the truth. Truth will set you free.

Corey Frank (21:22):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (21:23):

So here’s the simple way of getting the truth, with variety. What’s statistical variety? 250 is a pretty big number. I had 200 squared. If we just had 200 a year, 200 squared as what? 40,000. Your market is 40,000. You just did a clean sample in a year with statistical validity. You got to hear all the different things people are going to say. And every once in a while, you’re going to find something.

Chris Beall (21:45):

I found something three weeks ago. I let people just jump onto my calendar and ask the Sales Development team to really load me up, because I wanted to see what did it feel like friction-wise to have 10 discovery calls in a row back to that? I wanted to see how bad was it. Would I have time in between them? How much research does it really take? What’s the handoff like? How much logistical work do I have to do? I wanted to drive myself crazy. It’s not obvious, but I’m a really impatient person. I frustrate relatively easily. I know a lot of people, ” Oh, you’re so patient. You’re so mellow.” “Yeah, exactly.” Get close enough sometime. And you’ll find out that’s not always the case. And I know myself pretty well, so I wanted to see what’s it like. Beat me up. I want to be in the ring.

Chris Beall (22:28):

I want to have one fighter after another. Come in. Boom, boom, boom, boom. So the first one was at 7:00 AM, if we did 10 in a row, it’s only five hours.

Corey Frank (22:36):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (22:37):

Done by noon, really think about that. 10 discovery calls finished by noon, kind of nothing to it. And I was tired by the time we got to the eighth line and I was concerned that I was starting to not pay attention very well. And the eighth discovery call was an individual and I didn’t research this person very well, but she turned out to be somebody who had worked as a consultant to one of our most interesting customers, who was in a new vertical that we hadn’t played in very much. And so I did this discovery call and what happened? She says, ” Oh, I want to start a company using ConnectandSell as the core in a vertical that I believe I know an awful lot about. And I want to set appointments in there and I’m going to create this company on these foundations. What do you think?”

Chris Beall (23:19):

Now, that was just a lucky hit, but it gave me a thought and it actually comes back to what you’re doing at Youngblood Works. Maybe it’s time for us to consider how hard it is for folks to take conversations at pace and scale and turn it into results and have a smaller number of folks who do it professionally, included with all the customers who do it themselves. Let’s not just offer a do-it-yourself product. Let’s offer something more package, but not just by happenstance. Maybe we should go out and start looking at this as a go to market. Now, had I not had that conversation? I might’ve gotten there eventually, but I tell you it stimulated me because there was somebody passionate about starting a business.

Chris Beall (23:58):

And when I pushed back and said, “I don’t know. That business has got some dirty qualities to it. Be pretty rough. Customers come and customers go.” I call it the chocolate chip cookie business. You promise them two dozen chocolate chip cookies with 12 chips at each one. One of them has 11 chips. They say, “Take the entire batch back and give me another rep.” Right?

Corey Frank (24:20):

That’s right?

Chris Beall (24:21):

And then, she pushed back on me and said, “No, I believe and this is why I believe. This is what I’ve done to prepare for it. What do you think?” And I said, “You know what? I’m willing to do that experiment.” So now we get to do an experiment, looking at a new market as a possibility, a whole new go to market, which you’re already pioneering for us in a very pure [inaudible 00:24:39] with somebody I don’t know. I know you, so it’s a big variable difference and would I have discovered that otherwise? No, so now I’m getting lucky, but that’s important too.

Chris Beall (24:49):

It’s important too to get lucky. I don’t know what CEOs are thinking of. What are they going to do? Talk to their staff. I mean, they have work to do. We don’t want to be bothering those people all the time. Track? Yeah. Look at spreadsheets? Well, that’s a good one. And that’s why God made weekends, so that on a Saturday morning, we can take a glance at a spreadsheet. And if something jumps off of that, ask a question or two. But really staring at data, doing analysis, reading endlessly, all that. Sure. Take half an hour a day. All the discovery call that’s legit, just like any one of your other sales reps. Again, no cherry picking. And by the way, don’t complain about the false positives. That’s part.

Corey Frank (25:30):

As always. It never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our value. Thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Bealls and Corey Frank.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Marketing can step in and help sales overcome it.

1. Beginning: listen to discovery conversations.

2. Middle: look at support tickets to see the unvarnished truth.

3. End: work on getting the pipeline to be seen as an asset, it belongs on the balance sheet. Ask to be measured on the value we are contributing to help steer my efforts based on results that are being produced.

1. I want to know upfront what’s going on – attribution

2. in the middle – discovery

3. at the end – support tickets and we should want to know this first hand.

BONUS SEGMENT: Introverts tend to make the best salespeople.

Why? They have time to THINK before they act and put deep thought into their approach to securing the meeting. Listen to the second half of this episode to confirm why you want more of them on your sales team.

—-more—-

Market Dominance Guys is brought to you by ConnectAndSell and UncommonPro

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

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

Chris Beall (00:35):

Yes, it’s kind of funny. Sales and marketing alignment as an issue has an assumption. And the assumption is actually the inverse assumption that is if sales and marketing were aligned and by sales and marketing alignment people mean, do they share the same goals, do they have the same metrics, the metrics interlock? So if marketing does their thing and they do as much of their thing as they have committed to the company to do and if sales does their thing and they do enough with marketing’s leads that they generate, their marketing qualified leads, as they’ve committed to do, then all good things happen, but there’s one good thing that doesn’t happen and that is information flow coming back from sales attempts to turn marketing qualified leads into actual sales opportunities, and marketing’s attempts to go out and get more marketing qualified leads. That is, it’s an open loop process. And the reason it’s an open loop process is twofold. One is just raw, and that is only up about 9% at maximum of marketing qualified leads of MQL, so never spoken with, never have an actual human conversation.

Corey Frank (01:48):

In sales and marketing alignment, we’ll end where we started with the virtual world that we live in today with companies. I can’t just go down to the marketing team and the marketing team can’t just sit on the sales floor. What do you see here? Is it easier now that we live in the world that we do? Or is it a little bit more challenging? Certainly, I would think that you can get better than 9%. So there’s arguably only one way to go there. But what’s your final thoughts on that?

Chris Beall (02:21):

Yeah. I think that there’s always developments that are going to improve stuff. We have one of them for sales and marketing alignment. People don’t think of it as that. Some people think of it as a sales tool, which is I bristle at. I insist on calling it a weapon of [crosstalk 00:02:35].

Corey Frank (02:35):

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Chris Beall (02:36):

But say you did consider it as another tool that’s out there and say, “Well, what does it do?” Well, let’s talk to a lot more people, but it also lets marketing people listen to what salespeople are saying. That alone, to have marketing folks listen to what salespeople are saying so that they can take that information and do two things with that. One is the obvious which is improve the marketing message. Now, generally, people think it’s the other way around, marketing needs to improve the sales message. But we know that sales psychology forbids marketing language from entering sales conversations safely. Marketing language in a sales conversation has the quality that it tends to be insulting and telling that person that they are not doing their job particularly well, or they’re not diligent and they’re not competent because they don’t know about this thing everybody knows about.

After all, marketing language starts the category. Category is always broad. If I’m telling somebody they don’t know about the category, I’m really insulting them. And if I’m saying you don’t know about this important differentiated offering in the category, I’m telling them they’re not keeping up. They were waiting for me to come along. So you’ll tend to get the weird set objection. And the weird set objection is the worst objection in the world of customer interactions. Because now to fight that, you kind of have to say, “No, you’re not.” And you’re telling somebody that you know more about their world than they do. And that’s not a good place to go in a sales conversation. But marketing can make huge use of what they learn in sales conversations, huge use. They can find examples. They can find nuggets.

They can find stories, opportunities for amplification and by the way, people to go back and talk to in order to get deeper understanding. One thing marketing has a hard time getting is primary research. Primary research, when you go to the source and you talk to him and who better to talk to than folks your sales folks have already talked to? You got some information back. Now, go have those conversations. So I think that would help. It’ll also help marketing’s credibility. So these recording technologies like Chorus, Gong and ExecVision are really powerful because they are generally used in discovery from marketing, to listen, to discovering conversations and see what’s being discovered. You’re discovering truths from customers and what could marketing value more than truths from customers and prospective customers? It’s kind of similar to ticketing systems. Now as a CEO, one of my marketing jobs is to know what’s going on so that I can direct our future regardless of how we’re going to position.

So I read every support ticket and some people think that’s just crazy. We’re not a tiny company. As you know, we’re pretty active. Once you get up to 50 or 60 million of something you do a year that people pay for, you probably have a lot going on.

Corey Frank (02:36):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (05:26):

And then those kind of [crosstalk 00:05:27] some things that didn’t work that well on any given day. But I read those tickets. They take two or three seconds in order to just kind of look at it. And I’m looking for insights like where are we missing it? Where are we doing something that adds friction that might go away? And where is there something fantastic happening that everybody else might see as negative, but I might see it as different, I might see it as an opportunity? So that’s something that I can do. It’s very inexpensive. Marketing people can do it too.

If I were a marketing person only and I am a marketing person in addition to a bunch of other things, I would start with two things. I would listen to discovery conversations and pay a lot of attention to those. That’d be number one. And then I’d also be looking at support tickets because I’d want to find out what are the truths that are flowing in the interactions with our customers when it’s not varnished? And they’re telling the truth. And then another thing I would do is I would work on getting the pipeline to be seen as an asset. And this is something we could do a whole episode on and probably should. Your pipeline ought to be on your balance sheet as a number. And I don’t mean adding up all the opportunities. That doesn’t make any sense because the early stage opportunities have a lower probability of close.

But if you multiply each opportunity by its eventual probability of close, and by the way, the probabilities you have on today are BS. You have to go back historically and see what the actual probability of stage one closing, stage two closing, et cetera, et cetera. If you’d look at that and just add it up, you can actually tell whether your marketing is doing any good without waiting for closed one business to happen. That cycle time is too long to be usable. If your cycle time to learning whether your marketing program has an impact is the marketing program was run, the median of that run so that’s a six week program, so now three full weeks in, and then I’ve got to start looking at results, but I have to wait until they turn into closed one business, I’m screwed.

But if I don’t look at the magnitudes, I’m screwed also. So how do I do it? Well, all I have to do is look at the opportunities, look at the lead source for the opportunity, map it back to whatever the activity was and voila, I can actually say I invested X in this marketing activity and I got Y out. Now, some people will complain and they go, “Oh, but you’re going to double count.” Yes, you’re going to double count because guess what? If I say hello and I shake your hand, I don’t know which one of those made the difference, but I’m not going to be able to do the easy experiment of saying hello ad well, now I could do it without shaking your hand. We could elbow bump, or we could stay in Zoom. Right? Well, back in the day, I was going to do both.

So it’s okay for me to say my investment in this yielded X, my investment in this other thing yielded Y and not have my two investments add up to this total investment yield that X plus Y yields the union at the sets X and Y. That’s just how set theory works.

Corey Frank (08:31):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (08:32):

And I’ll get myself a really good idea of what’s working. So as a marketing person, I would go to the CFO and say, “Hey, I want to be measured based on the value that we’re contributing. And I want to be measured in real time, not at the end of the year, because I think that the company needs to be able to steer my efforts. And I need to be able to steer my efforts based on results that are being produced. And since my results are in the pipeline, in the creation of pipeline, ultimately, I want to know.” So what I’m saying is I want to know up front, what’s going on. That’s that particular thing, attribution is what it’s called. I want to know in the middle of what’s going on, which is discovery. And I want to know at the end what’s going on, which is support tickets. And I want to know firsthand and all of us in our roles should want those things.

If I’m selling, I’m the head of sales, I want to know upfront what’s going on, that’s the conversations that are happening, relevant conversation, the flow rate of conversations. I want to know in the middle of what’s going on, because I want to listen to discovery conversation and see if we’re holding them well. Are we being open-minded? Are we being curious? Are we allowing the prospect to talk to us about their world? Are we getting everything or only are we getting what we’re looking for?

That’s a question that I would be asking in discovery. And then I want to know at the end what’s going on, which is actually interestingly enough in the support tickets again. The closed one is easy. That’s part of the process. If I do a great job everywhere else, I’m going to close a bunch of business. I might want to pay attention to that, but that’s probably not it. So everybody has three things they could be looking for, something at the beginning, something in the middle and something at the end, probably take… Well, here’s my investment. I like to overcook the discovery meetings. So my average per day is three. So I prescribed one. I actually execute three. It’s like my prescription for barefoot running is I think anybody who has feet should get out there and run maybe a half a mile barefoot a day. But I prefer to do about eight miles a day because I think it’s really good for you.

I think discovery meetings are really good for you. So three a day is better than doing one and one [crosstalk 00:10:50].

Corey Frank (10:50):

That’s right. That’s right.

Chris Beall (10:51):

I read probably 70 support tickets a day. I want to see what happens to those. Some of that’s of interest. And with regard to the what’s going on at the beginning, what’s going on at the beginning is really one more exploratory, right? I want to have just for me, and this a CEO thing perhaps, I want to have one exploratory conversation per day that I’m pretty sure it’s going to lead nowhere. Just if I have a day without that, I’m disappointed. I want to have one that on the face of it, if I had to explain to somebody why I was doing it, I’d be embarrassed.

Corey Frank (11:27):

I do that a lot with many of the functions that I operate on throughout the day. So it sounds like if we had to condense the last couple of last 90 minutes or so, it’s your perfect day, one thing we know is eight miles barefoot, is a helping of support tickets, a healthy ladle full of discovery calls and three fingers of scotch. And if we had to look at all the different problems we’ve solved in the world here or addressed today, we went from sales and marketing alignment to the value of your pipeline, to CEOs making calls, to how to make scotch and of course, with flip-flops in this elusive and very important and scientific line of demarcation, which is now called the flip-flop line, I think we’ve covered quite a bit here in these episodes, Chris. So as always, it never disappoints. You put the quarter in and you listen to not just one song, but we get a whole bunch of songs here for our values. So thanks for the time today as always. This is another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Chris Beall and Corey Frank.

Corey Frank (13:23):

Welcome to another episode of the market dominance guys with Corey Frank and the sage of sales, Chris Beall with all things market dominant. I’d be curious to see from a CEO perspective, because a lot of us, right? We’ve talked certainly several times now about the change in organizations when they’re moving remotely and the role in sales where I have to be around your, as you say, my three pound brain has to be around in the vicinity of somebody else with a three pound brain and particularly in sales with the collaboration and the energy and the day activity tracking. But I’m curious, it would be interesting to explore what that does to the CEO as well when his whole entire organization is virtual now, right? You’re used to it certainly at ConnectAndSell. You guys have had a headstart.

But for a lot of CEOs, right? They’re used to having the security blanket of a staff around them to kind of go from meeting, to meeting, to meeting, to have this echo chamber as we called it, right? Of feedback flowing up. And now I wonder if CEOs actually have more time on their hands. And so there’s even less of an excuse not to make these types of discovery calls or customer calls to kind of fill those gaps.

Chris Beall (14:44):

Well, they certainly have more time that they’re not traveling and I can speak as… Maybe I traveled an unusual amount, but I don’t think so. I was on the road in business 108 days last year. So that’s a lot of time. Now you could say it’s productive. Time to read, time to talk to people. I met random people here and there and not a small number of deals get made. I have a certain propensity for picking up deals in bars, so to speak, but still that’s a lot of time. Think of each trip. There’s a half an hour to an hour to get to the airport. There’s an hour and a half to go through all the junk at the airport. There’s the occasional missed flight. There’s the four hours plus. To get to the other end, there’s the Uber, there’s this, there’s that. Yes, all waste. That’s all pure waste. So that time has been freed up. By the way, that money’s freed up too. So in our company, $40,000 a month of travel is freed up.

Corey Frank (14:44):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (15:40):

40,000 a month’s a lot of money to find. Talk about change found in the couch cushions. Oh, look, there’s 40 grand. I wonder if we could do something with it. Well, let’s put it away for a few minutes and then think about that attack, right?

Corey Frank (15:55):

Right. Right. Right.

Chris Beall (15:56):

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

I’ve always hated the big office. I remember I had a big office at a biggish company I worked at, not big by anybody’s standards you think you know, a company that had been a billion dollar a year company that had kind of moved into being sort of under secular pressure from the internet of $350 million a year company. I was hired as the head of innovation. It gave me this big, big office, big corner office on the eighth floor overlooking, I don’t know what, like a cornfield or something. And I’m pretty sure I went in there six times during the year I worked there. And one of them was on the very last day when we sat around drinking some Chinese whiskey, because I had all Chinese team, the most wonderful team I’ve ever had in my life and they were very kind. So that was one time.

So five times to do anything else, but I refused all the meeting in there because why do I want to encourage people to lie to me? And that’s a terrible thing. The hardest thing to get is the truth. And you might get it at lunch. You might get it at somebody else’s desk, but you’re not going to get it on your own turf in that big office. So now nobody has a big office anymore. So maybe there’s a little more truth flowing around. There is also who talks. You want your introverts to dominate the conversation over time. They’re the most thoughtful people in your company.

Corey Frank (17:44):

Oh. Okay.

Chris Beall (17:45):

They’re also your best salespeople. So your introverts actually didn’t like it in the raw, raw sales floor that you would run. So your best salespeople tend to be introverts. Your best salespeople really cringe at all that banging of the gong and high-fiving and all that stuff. They’ll go along with it but they have to go relax and then try to kind of rest afterwards because that stuff hurts when you’re an introvert. It really does. It’s like, “Oh my God, I have to do that.” And yet introverts tend to make the very best salespeople and on your staff, they tend to have the most thoughtful observations. After all, they have thinking time. They’re introverts, right?

Corey Frank (18:24):

Yes. Yes.

Chris Beall (18:25):

They get their energy from kind of inside, from what’s going on inside. So I think that’s flattening. I’ll call it the Zoom flattening that’s occurred is a good thing. And that everybody tends to get to speak, they’re all in the same office, right? It’s also in each person’s phone, which has got an interesting intimacy. Some folks complain, “Oh, the kids walk behind. I had to take a moment.” But that’s the good stuff. That’s the human stuff.

That’s where we soften up with regard to each other sufficiently to maybe tell our own truth or to listen to somebody a little bit differently because until we’re empathetic, we’re not much. And it’s hard not to be empathetic with somebody who’s got the same problems that you have, the problems of home.

In the big office, I don’t have any problems. You come into my office with all the staff, meaning you sit there and you sit there, you sit there. The pecking order is established by all of that. We go in a certain order. The important stuff is first. The dog meat stuff is at the end. And if we run out of time, you don’t get to talk. Whoever you happen to be, you weren’t important because you’re probably the introvert who had the most valuable thing to say.

Corey Frank (19:37):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (19:37):

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

 

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