Businesses are not evolutionary endpoints. Businesses can be endlessly inventive. Why is it that putting a bookstore on the internet would lead to the world’s richest man? If price isn’t your differentiator, you’ll work really hard to find one and fail. A business plan tells you if it’s worth doing. Will this have been worth doing?

What’s the smallest thing I can do in the shortest amount of time that will give me evidence to confirm or disconfirm my core thesis? Root in your own experience, not in somebody else’s business book. Your experiences are your core differentiator. That’s what you’re bringing to the party.

The person screwed on price wins on convenience or timing.
I want a startup because all the cool kids have a startup. Really? Every new business is a start-up.

—-more—-

Chris’s advice on starting a new business?

  1. LOW OVERHEAD. If you can ever get your overhead covered 100%, you should immediately go start a business.
  2. OVERREACH. Don’t be too creative when you don’t need to be.
  3. PROTECT. Keep the parasites out.
  4. TIMING. Look at the timing of when you want to expand your market.

Is it worth doing? Well, the business plan says it’s a good idea. But looking back, it was a bad idea. Here’s the story of Chris and Corey’s friend, Sushee Perumal. 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

Corey Frank (00:33):

Before this call, we were talking about one of the aspirations that you have, the super power you have is the ability to see a business and to deconstruct it in front of the founder’s very eyes and build it up again about how to kind of eliminate some of the pratfalls or painful financing lessons that most founders and startup businesses have. So, yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that.

Chris beall (00:54):

Sure. It sounds like fun.

Corey Frank (00:56):

So when you look at a traditional business, right? How many businesses have you helped over the years and just, “Hey Chris, can I buy you a beer? Can I grab 20 minutes? I’d like to run this idea by you.” So imagine the nightmare scenarios you’ve saved people from. I know I count myself on that list from preventing me, saving myself from me, I guess, is what you do best. So what are some of these common challenges that guys like me when I want to start a SAS business, and I have dreams of getting the series A and raising my three, four, $5 million and setting forth on this path to prosperity. What am I not thinking of?

Chris beall (01:32):

Oh, yeah.

Corey Frank (01:33):

What do guys like you have being on the trenches and having that 1,000 yard stare. What do you do to prevent me from hurting myself?

Chris beall (01:40):

It’s a great question. I don’t know if I know the answer. I feel like I respond on the spot to different people’s challenges, different business challenges. I don’t know the answer to the first question, by the way, I suppose it’s in the 100s because I like other people’s businesses. I just do. I’m fascinated by them and I’m attracted to the courage and I want to talk to people have a slightly naive courage to plunge off into the unknown. Pretty sure that they’ve got something, but also pretty sure that they should probably talk to a few people before they just put it all together in detail and then wonder why it didn’t work. And I do think one of the biggest errors that folks make is they business plan for the wrong purpose.

So they business plan for purpose in general of mapping out half that they’re going to take and saying, “It’ll be glorious. Here’s how it will be glorious.” And the amount of confirmation bias that goes into business planning, like stunning. And the other thing that they tend to do is take the intermediate products of the business plan, which are something like, “Oh, if we do A, B and C based on the size of the market, then we’ll have growth that’s of such and such a percent per year.” And then they use that growth of such and such a percent a year as though that’s the fact not the actions that are required to get it. And then tend to back into using canonical means and therefore we’ll spend a certain percentage of it on marketing and a certain percentage of it on sales.

And we’ll hit this mark here in two years because other people do and all that kind of stuff, right? It’s all canonical. And one thing I think I mentioned on a previous episode is that businesses are more different from each other than people are from each other. Because businesses are not evolutionary endpoints. They didn’t come from anywhere except out of the mind of somebody within the constraints of the society, in which they live. The laws, the mores, the available resources. So businesses can be endlessly inventive. I mean, look at Amazon, there’s a business that’s so bizarrely invented in its concept that to this day, I think if you took any sane business person back through the premise, except for Jeff Bezos, who is clearly insane in a very good way, you wouldn’t be able to get from where it started to where it is today on any path you could have predicted or even wanted to go now.

Why is it that putting a bookstore on the internet would lead to the world’s richest, man? Why? Well, whatever it is it had to do with the core belief that he had, which is something along the lines of. I have a business idea that has to do with a couple of things. And I’m guessing I’d never met him, but I’m guessing one of them is, we could exchange profits for market dominance and we could demonstrate market dominance in a market by sacrificing profits, but it has to be a market which price is important. And in order to make that, so it’s got to be a commodity, well, books are a perfectly fine commodity. And new ones are born every day and they need to be promoted and they need to be sold. But at the margin, buying a book from one guy and buying it from the other or the same thing, you get the book in either case.

So now we’re kind of down to price. As a bookseller online, especially, if price isn’t your differentiator you’re going to work really, really hard to find one and you’re going to fail. So I said, “Well, how do you do that?” Let’s see, I got to buy him for something. So I run a really cheap operation with wooden doors for desks and all this cheap stuff, right? Intelligently cheap, keep your overhead way low, keep the operating costs of delivery way low, looked for economizing and savings everywhere. And then, oh, last trick take no profit. And the stock market will reward me with more money than the profit I could have taken over any given period of time. That is the increase of value of the stock will recognize that I can do this over and over and over and grow. Right? It’s that kind of inventiveness that I think is so interesting in business.

And I think sadly, a lot of people who have those kinds of ideas, don’t pursue them in a clean way, because instead of asking themselves the right kind of question, which is, what must I never do in this business? If I believe what I believe, what must I never do? Right? If I truly believe what I believe is the why behind this business, what must I not do? Instead they back their way into something that they know damn well, they shouldn’t do. And they do it because somebody says, you have to do it. Somebody says you have to raise money. Somebody says, you have to have an office. Somebody says, you have to have a VP of sales. Somebody says, you need a technical co-founder, whatever one of those things happens to be, right? Somebody says something. And instead of thinking it through from first principles, how do I know that? In fact, why even pay attention to that?

The question is, what do I need at the minimum to confirm my thesis, the reason, my why. To confirm it or disconfirm it with the smallest negative impact and the fewest people, especially people that I care about. And it comes down to, well, now you’re in the business of doing an experiment. So now you’re doing science and the opening of every business is passion. I want to do it, follow it immediately if you do it really well, with a tiny bit of math, is it worth doing if it works? That’s the purpose of business planning, by the way. The purpose of a business plan is to answer this question. If it works, would it have been worth doing? It’s actually a retrospective done in advance. It allows you to look at the future and say, “In the case where it all works great, would it have been worth doing for me, for the other stakeholders and for the world? Would it have been worth doing?”

And that’s what a business plan tells you. The first sort of business plan, especially one that you’re ever going to present to somebody to raise money. But since you’re the first investor and your time is worth more than anybody’s money, for sure your time is worth more than anybody else’s money. Right? You got to ask yourself the question, am I going to invest the time? Well, you got to see the future. That not accurately. You must not see the future accurately. That’s a really bad idea. You have to make a business plan that answers this one question. So if it all works out, will this have been worth doing? Then having done that, you throw that business plan away. Now that you’ve convinced yourself to make the investment or somebody else in case you really, really, truly believe you need somebody else’s money, which in general, you don’t, but maybe you do.

And then you ask yourself the question. What’s the smallest thing that I can do in the shortest amount of time that’s going to give me evidence to confirm or disconfirm my core thesis? And in general, your core thesis is somebody needs something that they don’t have today, and I think I can provide it based on an insight or some other advantage that I have due to my background or my circumstance. If my circumstance or my background, doesn’t give me advantage to provide something for somebody who has a problem that I can solve, I don’t even know why I’m in business. So that’s rule number two is, root in your own experience, not in somebody else’s business book. Your experience is the core of your differentiator. That’s what you’re bringing to the party. You could be bringing your circumstance. Maybe you were born rich or something like that.

Some people say you’re 6’8, and you weigh a lean 265 pounds. And you can put your elbows over the rim. Well, maybe you should invest in learning how to play basketball. You never know what that might pay off, right? Like can be a good one. Your circumstances may have not have been over your own creation. That’d be a version of being born rich, no matter how poor you are is if you happen to have a super skill, you’re a mathematical prodigy, right? You’re a sales genius. You’re a psychopath who can talk people out of their money for reasons that they will never understand. That’s a bad one, but it would be a gift that you could use to start a business. And many people have used that last one as a gift to start business.

Corey Frank (09:54):

True.

Chris beall (09:55):

Bernie Madoff may well been a guy who did that and the best of the ones that talked themselves into it. They believe they’re doing good stuff, man. That’s a really good disguise. So, [crosstalk 00:10:06] those are the two things though. And they’re generally not done.

Corey Frank (10:09):

And instead what’s done is take a heaping load of confirmation bias and discount. Both of those two rules, big time.

Chris beall (10:16):

Yeah. Big time. And then following a formula. And there was a modern version of this and Silicon Valley was super popular. I used to talk to lots of young people. Who’d come to me and say, “I want to do a startup.” It’s like, what does that even mean?

Corey Frank (10:30):

Yeah.

Chris beall (10:31):

Well, I want to do a startup. But why? Because startups are where it’s at. Well, there’s no such thing as a startup. That’s a nonsense concept, right? It doesn’t even mean anything. All businesses at some point start, that’s not a unique characteristic of a business that it starts. They all start. That’s like saying, instead of saying, I want to be president of the United States. You say, I want to have been born. Well great. Wonderful. We’ve really accomplished something here in terms of our understanding of what to do next. Right? So I want to do a startup. Well, okay. So in what? Well then they’ll get usually to something that’s in their core. I know the young man come to me of somebody close to me. And he had a passion about how the relatives of old people who were sick, got screwed in medical pricing, medical services pricing.

Corey Frank (11:24):

Okay.

Chris beall (11:25):

And that the family members couldn’t figure out how things should be priced. And when you can’t do price discovery, and you’re a buyer on a short timeframe, you tend to get screwed. That’s one of the great principles of life, right? If I got to buy now, it’s like the seller who’s moving. And I know somebody right now is moving from her house to Tucson. So she’s got to get rid of her stuff by the closing date. It’s got all the ducks in a contract, right?

Corey Frank (11:50):

That’s right. Yep. Yep.

Chris Beall (11:51):

So she going to get the best for that white couch? No, somebody’s going to get that white couch for 100 bucks. And I guarantee you that white couch is worth a lot more to someone, just not to anybody she’s going to find in that amount of time, right? So being a buyers, is the same thing when you’re under time pressure and you can’t ice discovery efficiently, you get screwed.

Chris Beall (13:11):

That’s the definition of, I was like the number one mechanism. That’s why the economy also is some people are under pressure time pressure devise. Some are under time pressure to sell. In neither case, do they find the price, the correct price, the market, whatever the correct market price is. And there’s a transaction and somebody wins and somebody loses, but that’s okay because the person is screwed on price, wins on convenience or timing or whatever it is. Right? So it’s kind of funny though, when you say, okay, so you want to do this startup. So this guy wants to do a startup. And I said, “Well, what do you think your first step is?” He says, “Well, I’ve got to find a technical co-founder.” “Well, why is that?” “Well, because I don’t know how to write code.” “Okay. And how do you know this has something to do with writing code? Do you know enough about this to know that it’s worth writing the code?”

“Well, I know that people in the circumstance gets screwed.” Got it. We started with the passion, go write the business plan, that shows why this is a great idea in the future looking back if, it works. And then you’ll have some sense of what it is, but no, your problem isn’t finding a technical co-founder, that’s not your problem. And your desire can’t be this type of startup because all the cool kids have a startup. But you see a lot of that in business. And then you’ll get folks who are at the opposite end of the spectrum. We were talking about our mutual friend, Sushee Perumal, right? And Sushee runs a company called MaxSold. And I don’t think he’ll mind us talking about him because the guy’s just absolutely a dear.

Corey Frank (14:42):

He’s the only one that listens to our podcast anyway.

Chris Beall (14:44):

That’s right. He said he listened to every episode, at least once. He said he binged on us, Corey, he binged on us. Sushee, thank you so much. That’s why the numbers went through the roof last week.

Corey Frank (14:54):

That’s right. That’s right.

Chris Beall (14:55):

Listening over and over. But he has a brilliant business, brilliant, brilliant business. And he went about it the right way. Step-by-step starting with, is it worth doing? And this is a guy who has tried various things, starting an airline. You can go to susheeperumal.com or wherever he out there and check it out. His story is unbelievable. It’s told beautifully. He must have talked to somebody who told them how to tell him a good story, because a good idea. Sure it wasn’t me. But he’s kind about the step-by-step. Now he’s taking a little bit of money right now. That is a very, very considered thing to do because he’s figured out who needs it. They buy it all the time and they just got to figure out, okay, so how do I spread this out? How to escape it.

Corey Frank (15:39):

Wait, hang on. Did you say that a founder of a business actually has a business that’s running and throwing off cash, and then he’s looking for money? I thought Chris had happens the other way around. You actually have the money first.

Chris Beall (15:50):

Yeah. Different approach, different approach. It’s a very, very much a bootstrapped approach. And the beauty was he had an insight and then he went out and validated, or I would have been not happy, but content, I suppose, or accepting of a hard disk confirmation. It says, this is a bad idea. Business plan says, it’s a good idea in retrospect that from the future, looking back on it, if you were to make it great, but the facts of going out and exploring the needs, it’s a bad idea. But the fact said it was a good idea. In fact, right here in little port towns in Washington, where I live, we were walking along one day, about seven months ago and saw somebody with an apron with his company’s name on it. And that apron said, MaxSold and she was standing in a driveway. And I went over and asked her, “What is this?”

We’re out in one of the outposts of the world. This is the Quinn for peninsula. If you go that way, 300 yards, you are swimming to Canada. The picture behind me is Seattle. I’m a little ways away from that. And I asked her, “What do you think about this thing that you’re doing? Whatever it is.” And she said, “I do estate sales for a living. I’ll never do another one. This is the only thing that I will ever bring to my customers.” She didn’t know that I knew Sushee. I just asked her a question. Clearly he’s found, he struck a nerve out there. And we’ll need to get rid of their stuff. And I don’t know if he came up with it and, he acted surprised when I said it today. I say to people, “Okay, Sushee’s business, MaxSold. What does it do?”

It sells everything from the sponge under the sink to the Ferrari in the driveway and gives you the money. I mean, that’s pretty good, right? From the sponge under the sink to the Ferrari in the driveway, we sell it and we give you the money.

Corey Frank (17:33):

We’ll get him on as a guest.

Chris Beall (17:34):

Yeah. We’ll get him on. He really is great. He’s great. He can’t even fly to the US right now, even though he has an airplane and all that good stuff from the airline he started, which didn’t work out, but learned a lesson or two, and it’s on his site. But my point is going through the motions of starting a business is not starting a business. And going through the motions of starting a company, a VC funded company is almost surely not starting a business. It may be starting a company, which as we’ve talked about before is an R&D.Lab for a future acquirer. But dominance plays don’t come out of their, dominance plays they come out of figuring out a real need, figuring out something to do about that, that can fit within everybody’s cost parameters now, and for a long time to come. So there’s profit.

And then figuring out how to scale it. Now today Sushi and I were talking about scaling and that’s the flip side is you can create demand, but what if you have to service it locally, can you create enough local service centers, capability, or whatever you want to call it in order to scale? Well, that becomes a fundamental business problem. And you need to then understand finance at another level because each one of those is a unit of being finance. How are you going to finance it? You have to think that stuff through. This is where talking to people who built similar shaped businesses is worthwhile.

If you’re going to be a four-legged animal, talk to the other four-legged animals, don’t talk to the kangaroos. Don’t talk to the monkeys that hang from the trees, talk to the other four-legged animals and say, “How did you solve this particular problem? And there’s no business books that’ll tell you that stuff because there’s too much variety. In this case, I happen to have some experience from the past around 2003 and making that kind of financing and operational equation work in the real world. And so I could share that with them, not as some mentor or whatever, but as a guy who put one of his, another four-legged animal, right? Running ConnectAndSell is not like that. It doesn’t resemble it at all. It’s just completely different animal.

Corey Frank (19:36):

So when you look at, with that Chris, when you look at all the businesses that you’ve been a part of, either as an investor, a board member, an executive or CEO, and you see that when any of those businesses that maybe didn’t do as well as you’d like, was it personnel? Was it operational? Was it financial? Was it plumbing? What do you see when you get above the trees and you look at maybe the businesses that you’ve been a part of, or again, affiliated with or invested in, what’s the residue that maybe you’ve learned, certainly going to be different for everybody, but from what makes Chris Beall Chris Beall today, right? The Market Dominance guru here is the collective residue of experiences that enables you to now take a left turn when it previously took a right turn and to learn why it’s important to take the right turn. What would you say is the collective aggregate of those experiences? What would you say to us?

Chris Beall (20:36):

Number one, I’ll go chronologically because it’s easy to do for me. Because I can go back to when I was pretty young, because I started, starting businesses and one sort of another one, I was probably 11. First one was super successful. People needed it. They needed to have work done around their house and in their corral and stuff like that. And a couple of hardworking kids with some tools and razorblades and whatever could do anything and priced it right, sold it right, knocked door to door. As my first door to door sales job was selling our own stuff and it was super successful actually. It was a very successful business.

Key to success actually in that one, low overhead. I lived at my parents house and [inaudible 00:21:12]. So I had the energy from the food and time on my hands and I could go make a business. By the way, if you can ever arrange to have your overhead covered at 100%, you should always immediately go start a business. It’s always better than having a job. Always. I would recommend this to any kid who’s thinking about college. Who’s not a big fan of college. There’s a bunch of them.

Corey Frank (21:34):

Sure.

Chris Beall (21:35):

So tell your parents, instead of me costing you 100 grand a year, how about you put me up at home and I’ll go start a business and it’s going to be a grinded out business of some kind, because that’s how you do things. Go, [Walmart 00:21:47] , Cuban. Yeah.

Corey Frank (21:49):

If you get your GNA covered, that’s a big piece of that.

Chris Beall (21:52):

You’re good. You’re good. And that’s the number one thing to do actually in any business. Number one, not is so what do you believe when you’re not believing? Right? I mean a business or life is like a racehorse. It eats while you sleep. How much does it eat while you’re sleeping? So that was one that worked really well. It eventually ended because my business partner took up other interests. We aged out of it, I would call it. And went and did other things. And then on another business that went, a software business, I was in I’ll come forward, quite a ways that went bad. It was very sad. It was the first Unix-based ERP company. So think in 1983, ’84, imagine on Unix, which nobody built commercial software on at the time, the vision was Unix and it’s whatever comes after it turned out to be Linux, same damn thing really. Will dominate commercial software because it lowers the effective cost of software development by letting a developer spread their output over many kinds of computers.

And at the time there were many kinds of computers. So one developer suddenly becomes 40 and that arbitrage was too irresistible. So instead of thinking up some brand new ERP system, we took one that was fairly popular at the time and just went ahead and looked at it and said, “Well, at least this thing’s useful. Let’s just build this, but in Unix land.” And we did it and it was superb. I mean, it was built in a beautiful way, made every release on, every Monday morning, we would release software. Always worked pretty much bug free, got customers like Honeywell and all sorts of wonderful brands, right? Motorola, folks like that. [Shewish 00:23:32] Chemical out of salt Lake city was a big customer of ours, found a niche in continuous flow manufacturing because some of the things we did in our underlying mathematical model could handle units other than one, two, three. It could actually count to 0.5 or 0.3726, right?

Corey Frank (23:49):

Which lesson was target the niche?

Chris Beall (23:52):

No, that was. The good lesson was, don’t be too creative when you don’t need to be. You don’t need you stand at your genius on this damn thing. Right? So the genius was in seeing that this could be a differentiator that’s really fundamental with regard to being able to develop what the market needed. And then the chase, which was smart was down this continuous flow manufacturing route, but the company blew it and we blew it because the venture money that was in, which was some of the smartest venture money in the world, firm is still around. I won’t name them because I’m a nice guy, but they’re big and they’re still around. And I had friends have gone to work there as VCs, since they got impatient and wanted to make it go faster and be liquid. And that was only three years into it.

So what was wrong with that? Well, it wasn’t that kind of product. So while we had product market fit, we didn’t have investor and company product type fit, an ERP product. You want to treat it like SAP did. As an infinitely long road, you’re going to go down and you’re just going to become more and more dominant as you solve more and more problems in the world because nobody else can get to your stage of understanding of those problems and having the code, the integration of services on the customers that allow you to be able to go solve the next problem that is go vertical to vertical. And so they got impatient and they decided to shrink wrap the software and sell it as a standard package, fast, fast, fast, and nobody wanted it. So they actually created it. And the investor impatience created per product market non fit, where there was already product market fit.

Corey Frank (25:32):

So that disconnect between the investor and the founder in that disconnect on the thesis and the breakup strategy is what should have been ameliorated or talked about at the beginning? So arguably that wasn’t the type of investment that was a snug fit in their portfolio, but they did it anyway.

Chris Beall (25:52):

They did it anyway. And they expressed their dissatisfaction by bringing in professional management. And that’s a standard failure mode for all these businesses because professional management is the rough equivalent in many VC situations, ventured back situations of a salvage job. So a kind of a hatchet job, right? You come in and you trim costs and you arrange for the thing to be sold. It never got sold except the software got sold to a big company and became the core of a series of very exotic, automated distribution systems that were kind of second to none, a 20 year ahead of their time kind of things. But the business as a result went away. And there you go. I mean, it was ahead of SAP, who knows? You never know how these are going to play out. I mean, but it’s a game that, the game needs to be played out over 90 minutes, turning it into 90-second game is a bad idea.

Corey Frank (26:45):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (26:45):

That’s just all there is to it. And then I’ve seen that another standard failure mode is overreach. So when times are good, these things can fail because somebody thinks that, one of the businesses I was involved with, we had an opportunity to sell the business for a lot of money, billions and billions, really a lot of money on a very lucky set of circumstances where a company that didn’t have that much money into it. It was perfectly positioned at a particular time in the market to sell to a public company in an all stock deal with no lockup. And it was a one-week-long plan to a close and the whole bit, but that ran counter to the notion of the company’s liquidity path, which was to an IPO. So when 2000 came along and the beginning of the tech crash happened, the IPO was no longer viable and the company could neither be sold appropriately nor could it go IPO.

And so it got trapped. It’s just, what are those two, the two not quite mythical water feature Scylla and Charybdis, right? You get caught between those two. And it’s if you turn this way, it’s bad. If you turned this way, it’s bad. And so some billions of dollars of potential upside were lost and the company ended up selling for, I believe in 2005 for 19 million, with 11 million in cash, still in the back. So that’s a mistake of just an overreach. It was just a moment where there was so much boldness and certainty that liquidity was ours that instead of taking the money, and this is really common with us, right?

[Rich Plumage 00:28:16] told me years ago, am I a corporate lawyer, one of those companies many, many years ago, he told me on a round of golf once and I’m afraid. I said, “Rich, it’s clear. You’re a wonderful human being. And you’re a great professional, but it’s clear you haven’t spent all your time on the golf course.” And he said, “Well, maybe not.” I said, “Well, what have you learned all these years? 40 something years of doing this stuff, helping companies with finances?” And he thought for about four holes and then stopped me and said, “One thing, take the money.”

 

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Most sales professionals are familiar with the journey of a cold call.
It starts with fear. From fear we move to trust. From trust we move to curiosity. From curiosity we move to commitment, and from commitment to action.
In this episode, Corey and Chris remind us that there is only one discovery call or meeting. And a true discovery call or meeting doesn’t have a destination in mind. Welcome to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “Sales Professionals – stop worrying about the deal.”

—-more—-

Market Dominance Guys is sponsored by:

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

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

The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (01:04):

I did a debate the other day.

Corey Frank (01:06):

Yes, at University of Texas, correct? 

Chris Beall (01:09):

Yeah, and the subject was fascinating. We spoke about two different views of sales development. As you and I have been speaking, we’ve been speaking about the sales development function, that first conversation, the follow-up conversation, and ultimately the discovery meeting as being the essence of dominating markets. Because if you do that right, you can do the math, so to speak, and you can dominate a market. 

Scott [Gillum 00:01:39] was taking the other side of the debate because in his view, it’s simply too expensive to talk to people. So it’s better to use low-cost mechanisms, such as digital, media, search, advertising, that kind of stuff, and digital content, social media perhaps, in order to get people to come to you and then be the last company to have the first conversation. And my view is you want to be the first company to have the first conversation. So a very divergent view, but the difference in view is actually based on a different understanding of the cost of a conversation. 

It’s fascinating to reflect, for me anyway, on this debate, two rational people taking 180-degree opposite views of what you should do. One based on optimizing cost, the other based on optimizing market dominance, but each one coming from a different perspective with regard to the cost of having a conversation.

So Scott’s view was, well, a conversation is… He opened with quoting Chad Burmeister, who by the way I had just been with the day before talking about the same subject, and saying it takes 30 or 40 dials to get a conversation. That’s too much to waste early because you’ll be trying and you won’t get ahold of the person, and then they won’t be ready to buy or they’re the wrong person, the wrong company, whatever. So wait until they show up and you know they’re ready to buy, then have your first conversation because it’s so expensive. 

So it’s fascinating to me that the cost of having a conversation, both actual and perceived, can cause a 180-degree shift in the idea of how you should go to market or what’s practical with regard to go to market. Yet the difference at the end is, if you wait to have the conversation, your only way to dominate a market is by having superior advertising, which is a hard position to maintain.

Corey Frank (03:35):

Sure. If I have superior digital means, superior digital fire power, superior digital messaging, efficiency, at least that’s the top of the funnel in order to dominate a market. That view is interesting. It’s very pragmatic, right? It makes sense.

Chris Beall (03:54):

Well, it sounds pragmatic. It has an issue in that the entire fight is out on the table. When you’re choosing to get into a fight for a market with competitors known and unknown, it’s very hard to do it in a way that’s anything but transparent. Your search terms are all transparent. And by the way, at any given moment, Google is busy selling your perfect competitor the exact search terms that will put you out of business. Their model is to go and find your perfect competitor and once a year, each one of you gets a shot at the good words, so to speak. That’s going on and your advertising is out in the open, and your website, and your LinkedIn work, and your Facebook. Whatever it is, is out in the open. 

Whereas when you’re having a conversation one-on-one with somebody, not only can it engender trust in a way that digital can’t, but it’s private. Any information that you receive from that conversation is proprietary. And it’s hard to imagine sustainably winning a fight by having no information advantage whatsoever.

Corey Frank (05:01):

Let’s talk about that for a moment. I had a conversation with Andy Paul yesterday. Andy, if you’re listening, I’m about to break apart your messaging and about to butcher it. But from Andy’s conversation that I had with him, we were talking about the biz dev and then the sales role, and I believe one of his paramounts is that the biz dev, if I get a person, if I get a lead on the biz dev call and I’ve created some trust, that trust does not transfer to the sales person. So if I set a discovery call as a biz dev for you as my sales rep, Chris, and I’ve established some trust, I’ve been able to create a couple hundred thousand bits of information to create to turn that fear into trust and to be able to expand that trust into a discovery call with you, you as the sales person has to start all over again. You don’t start from step two. You really start less than that.

So we’re not talking about optimizing cost. We’re trying to optimize some trust when we have another cook in the kitchen as well, are we not? 

Chris Beall (06:01):

Yeah, I think Andy’s exactly right. If you do a hand-off from one person to another and do it with the simple assumption that the amount of trust that was needed in order to get to curiosity, remember the journey. And we’ll just go back over the journey for the cold call and ultimately for the follow-up call, too, the unscheduled follow-up call. The original journey in the cold call is from fear to trust, trust to curiosity, curiosity to commitment, and commitment to action. 

The action is actually showing up at the discovery meeting, and the person you show up to the discovery meeting with could either be the person who you set the meeting with; that is, the sales person is doing their own biz dev function and they are setting their own meetings. And in that case, you already have built that little bit of trust. You probably would be wise not to rely on it being there. Why squander it? But to go through a process of re-meeting the person a little bit, and that’s why, as I think we discussed in one of these episodes, I love to start with the question, “Where are you on the surface of our blue whirling planet?” just to have that sense of us being together. 

There is a need in every conversation to re-initiate the relationship a little bit and re-establish the trust. But you have an advantage in a 15-minute meeting that you don’t have in a cold call, and the advantage is the person has decided to come to you and confirmation bias tends to kick in. If I decide to come and meet with you, I’m doing it of my own volition. So my interpretation of the meeting, especially the early part of the meeting, is going to be conditioned on my decision to come and meet with you. That is, I will be looking for confirmation that this is a good thing for me to do with my time because I’m doing it with my time. I value my time. I believe that I am a good custodian of my time. I have voluntarily chosen to come and meet with you, and therefore, I’m going to be more likely than not to interpret that investment as a good investment and therefore you as a person worth meeting with, which is very, very different from a cold call. 

So yes, you can blow it by acting like a sales person. You can get into interrogation mode. I was told to ask questions. Let’s just start right in with the questions. Time’s a-wasting. 

And I know that Andy Paul, it’s funny that he’s a master of time and Zero-Time Selling was his first book and one of the most brilliant sales books ever done, and Andy and I have talked at great length about it. He’s not advocating hurrying up in the conversation though. He’s advocating getting to where you need to go or deciding not to go there in the minimum amount of calendar time and in the minimum amount of elapsed time or rep time actually. So his unit that he cares about most is the sales rep hour. And the question is, what are you getting done per hour of your time? I think that’s quite brilliant.

What happens in a discovery conversation needs to be as efficient as can be while taking into account that you’re establishing or re-establishing a relationship with somebody, and that needs to happen because otherwise you may run the risk… and you will run some risk, but you may run the actual risk that this person’s going to say, “Hey, I came to this meeting in good faith and you’re abusing my trust.” 

So the sales person who abuses that trust can lose it, but they still start with some. And they start with some for a funny reason. It’s not a transfer of the trust from, say, the business development person who called them to the sales rep who’s holding the discovery meeting. It’s a transfer of trust back to the prospect who trusts themselves enough to invest their time wisely and come to the meeting and, therefore, the meeting is going to be interpreted at first flush, at the beginning, in a positive light. 

Chris Beall (11:00):

You can blow it for sure. Sales people blow it every day. I have neighbors who listen to me listening to some of our sales reps’ calls. I use [Chorus 00:11:09] in order to listen to those calls, and I do it often while trotting on the trails here in Reno because I can get two things done. I know it’s supposed to be impossible to multitask, but you actually can walk and listen at the same time or trot and listen at the same time. And I am living proof of it. I do it pretty much every day.

Corey Frank (11:28):

Just as long as you have no gum in your mouth.

Chris Beall (11:31):

Yes, as long as you have no gum. And breathing turns out to be relatively automatic, especially when you’re going up these big hills here. My neighbors believe I own a dog, and the dog’s name is… Well, the polite version of the dog’s name is shut the heck up. That’s actually not the dog they think I have. That would be [crosstalk 00:11:51] brother or sister.

Corey Frank (11:51):

Sure.

Chris Beall (11:51):

What I’m saying is if you keep talking at this point… I’m just shouting at the air because I have no more sense than to do that, and then I’ll try to take a note by sending myself a text message by talking to my phone. But the point is, you can abuse somebody’s trust by going on and on about something that you care about instead of letting them talk and listening. It’s still very different from interrogating them. If you’re curious about what their situation is and you’re willing to learn what their situation is, before you map their situation onto the amazing coincidence that your product is the perfect fit for them, if you can just listen, get them talking about something that they care about and listen, then you are doing the right thing with their trust. 

And that trust can lead, again, to curiosity, but in this case it’s your curiosity. You’re being curious about their situation as a sales person. And from there, you can have mutual curiosity. They could become curious about how you might be able to help them, and from there you could have exploration, and exploration tends to be the next step that you’re looking for… exploration or stopping the exploration, deciding there isn’t any reason to. We call that disqualification, which is I think an unfortunate term. It’s nothing more than just deciding not to go on another date.

Corey Frank (13:14):

The shut the heck up reaction is from the sales rep abusing that trust that was first created by that biz dev in that conversation, the overwhelming confirmation bias that that sales rep has that you are a fit. You seem a mere QED, you must be a fit for my product, and I am going to continue to try to talk about the things that I’m interested in without curiosity at all, with potentially the exception of my only curiosity will be how you’re going to answer the questions that I need to have you answer… time, need, budget, fit, bant, what have you… in order to fit into my funnel. 

Is it a lack of empathy? Is it a lack of genuine curiosity? Is it a lack of awareness that the sales rep shouldn’t be selling the product in that discovery meeting? And as you’ve always said, there’s a product, irrespective of the product that you’re selling, that is innately built into that discovery meeting, and that is what should be sold. That’s the value that should be distributed to the prospect on that phone. 

Chris Beall (14:25):

Exactly. I mean, it’s a whole bunch of things that work together to get this standard behavior. For one thing, we make our reps believe that making quota is everything, and then we reason backwards and say therefore selling to this particular prospect is a perfect outcome. And in a market dominance sense, that tends not to be true. But even in a sales sense, it tends not to be true. 

We wouldn’t call it discovery if it only had one outcome. We wouldn’t go on a voyage of discovery and say, “And oh, by the way, here’s what we’re going to find, just to let you all know.” Right? We’re going into these little wooden boats and we’re going to sail across this big ocean and, oh, by the way, what we’re going to find is a mall with a Starbucks and so forth and so on. And it’s going to be shaped like this and it’s going to look like this. We’re going to be able to buy this. That’s not a voyage of discovery.

Discovery has to do with the unknown. And yet we tell reps, “No, no. You’ve got to know because if you don’t know what the answer is, you won’t get to the answer. And if you don’t get to the answer, you won’t get the sale. You don’t get the sale, you don’t get the quota. You don’t get the quota, you don’t get the commission. So let’s just focus on that.”

And I think that arises from two sources. One is it’s the tradition of what I call sales at the crossroads, one and done. Once we sell to you, we’re strangers and we will go our separate ways. It’s transactional, I believe is what that kind of selling is rightly called. But the other is when we only have a few opportunities, when our flow rate of conversations and our flow rate of meetings is low, then we’re desperate to make the most out of each one.

So if we have enough conversations, it’s very easy to take the attitude, at least it’s practical to take the attitude, that says let’s just have a good conversation. Let’s explore this one question, which is does it make sense to move forward together? In order to explore that, as a sales person, I need to tell you what it is that I think might make a difference, and you need to tell me what resonates with you, if anything. And it’s back to something that’s economic, something that’s emotional, something that’s strategic. If nothing resonates, well, there’s no reason to explore it. If something resonates, let’s take that element and explore it further in the conversation. 

So if the desire is to have a good conversation that has the right result… the right result being either moving forward or not depending on the degree of fit, timing, and maybe other factors that are out there… then it’s a simple job to hold a discovery meeting. But it’s hard. It’s a hard thing to execute on an intermediate step.

It’s like if you’re a football player… it’s NFL season now here in the US, the American football guys are out… and I’m trying to become a better wide receiver, and I’ve got to learn to run a particular pattern, whatever this pattern is. I’m learning to run this [inaudible 00:17:25], and there’s a cut in it. I actually need to focus on making the cut before I focus on catching the ball. 

If I just think about catching the ball the whole time, well, for one thing, my back is to the quarterback for part of the time and catching the ball isn’t going to work during that period. And I’ve got to make the cut correctly at the right time in order to get to the right place to catch the ball. So focus on making the cut. Focus on having a good run with the right speed, planting the correct foot, and doing the right stuff with my upper body in order to support the cut and also to see if the cornerback is covering me or whoever’s on me. And if I focus on that, my chances of being open to catch the ball go way up. If I’m just focusing on catching the ball, I’m probably not going to make a very good cut. 

What I’m doing in the discovery call is more like getting to the point where we can be open to consider a transaction. So how do I do that? Well, I need to focus on the conversation itself, and that’s what’s hard to do because it’s not the end goal. I’ve often heard managers say, “I don’t care how you do it, just get the deal.” And “I don’t care how you do it” is like saying our approach here is to hire people and fire people until we find one that can do it. 

Corey Frank (18:42):

Well, that’s right. Andy and I had a conversation about that yesterday, Chris, it’s funny, about quotas, and his premise, which I really like, is that quotas are not good. When the measure becomes the target, Andy says, the measure is no longer valid. You miss out on the humanistic element of the problems you’re trying to solve for your prospects it seems. 

And I really like this idea, I think we should tackle it next call, about discovery. Discovery is not a destination. Discovery is a state of mind with the unknown. It’s not an iterative process where I already know the destination with my heavy confirmation bias as a sales person. Certainly, I’ve been guilty of that, is that, listen, because you fit my persona of X… You’re persona number three, Chris. You’re a CEO of a SaaS tech company over X million dollars with Y amount of margin. Therefore, you must fit the product that I am trying to sell and not having any budget, you have to be a fit. So my discovery is already tarnished or biased in its performance. It’s kabuki at that point because I already know where I’m going to try to take you, and as the prospect, you probably already are feeling a little bit like this is a hostage situation as we’re going down our questioning funnel. 

But it’s not genuine from the sales perspective, correct? Because it’s not a true discovery of let’s find out if it makes any sense to explore this together because I already have my finger on the scale.

Chris Beall (20:23):

I think that’s exactly right. The hardest part about sales… And I’m speaking with these students at University of Texas, Dallas… Dr. Dover’s brilliant program down there. Dr. Howard Dover runs this amazing advanced sales program down at UTD. I had a group of students that were around me and one of them asked me, “Well, what should I do or what can we do that would make a difference in our sales careers?” 

And I said stop caring about the deal. Just stop caring about the deal. Just be willing to execute the process of exploring with another human being what might be possible, knowing that you only have one set of things you can provide. You’re not a consultant there to have a conversation with them about everything, which is why you allocate a specific amount of time for the discovery meeting. You allocate that time in order to clip the investment. And within that investment period, that 15 minutes or 30 minutes, whatever it is that you set on the calendar, you want to have it go as well as it can with regard to discovering the truth about the potential fit between that person’s situation and their challenges and what it is that you offer, especially your most plain vanilla, this is down the middle offer, the thing that’s really in the bag, so to speak. 

If there’s a great fit, or even might be a great fit, to the degree that it’s worth exploring further, then you have the next step. That’s what sales really is, is navigating a series of next steps that are very concrete and doing it with an investment known in advance, time investment. This is where Andy Paul’s entire approach is so spot on. You’re going to have one discovery meeting, and in that discovery meeting, you’re going to determine does it make sense to move forward to the next step? And the next step is not another discovery meeting. It’s something different.

In our world at ConnectAndSell, the next step is what we call an intensive test drive. It’s an actual experience of our product in production with a sales team. And that is the only next step that is prescribed in our sales process coming out of a discovery meeting. There is not a next step that says let’s meet again. The error that many sales people make is believing that-

Corey Frank (22:42):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (22:42):

… continued time investment is progress.

Corey Frank (22:45):

That’s right.

Chris Beall (22:45):

It’s generally waste.

Corey Frank (22:46):

Well, that’s great. Well, we’re going to end it there for today’s session, Chris. I think we have four more topics just from the last five minutes of your little riff there, one of which is I need to lasso Andy Paul and be the bystander, the fly on the wall, and let you two guys duke it out on the definition of trust, I think. 

So I think the discovery call as a destination is a misleading term from the prospect’s perspective it sounds like. So if we’re going to call it a discovery call, then we have to be authentic and genuine and really mean what we say about a discovery call versus having the destination in our mind and we’re going to do everything we can to get them there when it’s inauthentic to say let’s just see how it’s going when I already know where I’m taking them. So that’s incredibly valuable.

With that, Chris, until next time?

Chris Beall (23:42):

All right, Corey. This was a good session for the first one in my 66th year. Hopefully, I can stand up to the pressure going forward. 

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This is the continuation of the conversation with Donny Crawford about sales follow up, overcoming rejection, and likening sales to Google search results. Thank people for the conversation no matter how it went. This helps keep your emotions in check and allows you to move forward to the next call, even if you were rejected in the previous one. Get some very applicable and practical techniques in this episode of Market Dominance Guys – The Power of the Anti Curse to Overcome Rejection.

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If you missed the first half, you can catch it here > 

Three Reasons Sales Reps Don’t Follow Up

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This is the full transcript to this episode:

 

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Donnie Crawford talking about sales team follow up and why they don’t do it and what you can do to change that bad habit. The first thing they talked about were the three reasons reps don’t follow up. We pick up in part of that conversation so it makes sense for the rest of it. And we talk about search and how search and sales are so closely related. Sales and your ability to solve a prospect’s problems are no different than Google giving you the right results for what you’re looking for. You just have to be able to sift through the junk and know that there’s more than the story that’s being presented to you.

Chris Beall (01:13):

If you were advising somebody else and you were just looking at the business impact, how would you advise them? Oh, I’d have them call them. Why? Well, because something good might happen. That’s part of the why. But the rest of the why is, guess what? This is somebody that we know something about that’s incredibly valuable. This is somebody who answers their phone. And the cohort of folks who answer their phone, if we had known in advance, they answer the phone without having to call them, we would have just called that list.

Donnie Crawford (01:44):

Yeah, just that list. Exactly.

Chris Beall (01:48):

But now we know that list. They coughed up that information to us, answering the phone. And we don’t know how often they answer the phone, but we know they answered it once, which is a lot more than zero times. So we have… Psychology tells us, I’ve been rejected. I don’t want to talk to somebody who rejected me. The fact is they made an objection. They didn’t care to talk with you. They didn’t have time or for whatever reason. And they objected strongly enough that they hung up on you.

Donnie Crawford (02:20):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (02:21):

And so if you can take that objection and say, “You know, that’s fantastic.” And this is the key to the psychology. When somebody hangs up on you, non-sarcastically, you need to say to yourself, fantastic. This is somebody that I know answers the call.

I’m going to talk to them again. And I’m going to talk to them about a week from now and see how it goes. That’s open-minded. And then you put in the teleprompter, that thing I just said, which is, “When we spoke on this date, you didn’t have time for a conversation.” All the other ones compared to that one psychologically are super easy.

Donnie Crawford (02:58):

Totally.

Chris Beall (02:59):

Because you had a further conversation. However, there’s another psychology element. And this comes back to don’t know how and don’t know why. Which is when somebody says something to you that is any other objection, that is not indicating to you definitely that they’re intrinsically disqualified, you should talk to them next quarter.

Donnie Crawford (03:21):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (03:23):

Because there’s only four possibilities in a sales conversation. Yes, no, not me, not now. And we lump everything about not knowing that some prospect is disqualified into not now.

Why? Because until we talk to them, we don’t really know anything about them. So we can’t talk to them in the past. We must therefore talk to them in the future. And then that’s the definition of not now. How far in the future? One quarter. Why? Because the basic unit of time for considering any new category of offering, not your offering, but any new category of offering, is about one quarter.

Donnie Crawford (04:03):

It’s happening quarterly. Right?

Chris Beall (04:05):

Yeah. If you’re going to buy something, you’re going to consider it within a quarter. So put it out one quarter. Don’t think, put it out there. And that’s another thing is don’t think. And then write a teleprompter that says, “When we spoke on this date, you said whatever and I’m curious about whatever.”

Donnie Crawford (04:26):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Beall (04:27):

And that’s it.

Donnie Crawford (04:28):

That’s it.

Chris Beall (04:30):

And then you let the conversation flow. So a big part of the psychology is you don’t want to do what you don’t know how to do. And if you don’t really know how to do it, you really don’t want to do it. Especially if your emotions are involved in a negative way. And so you need a ledge, as Jet Blunt calls it, an emotional ledge to clean to when the objection comes, that feels like rejection. The worst one is the hang up.

So your ledge is a word or two that you say to yourself or say out loud. Don’t say to them, they’re gone. But you say it out loud, listen to yourself say it and set the follow-up. So what I say is “fantastic.” Just exactly like that.

Donnie Crawford (05:17):

That person answers the phone.

Chris Beall (05:18):

That person answered the phone, I’m going to talk to them again next week.

Donnie Crawford (05:24):

Yep.

Chris Beall (05:24):

That’s your ledge. And you need that ledge the same way that you need something to say to yourself. Say you’re weightlifting and you know you’re to the last rep that you can do before failure. You need to encourage yourself in that.

Donnie Crawford (05:39):

Absolutely.

Chris Beall (05:40):

It doesn’t happen by itself. That weight doesn’t jump up off your chest or wherever you’re trying to get it all by itself. This is the one that you’re going to have to push until then. It’s like “Eh, no biggie.” Right? And then when you’re… This is why we have spotters. So when we lift, because you might dropped.

Donnie Crawford (06:00):

That’s our managers, making sure we keep doing it.

Chris Beall (06:02):

Exactly. Managers spot us when we drop the weight on their chest and somebody needs to help come get it off.

Donnie Crawford (06:09):

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Beall (06:10):

But in general, we should be able to talk for ourselves and get that weight up one more time. And we need self-talk and the self-talk needs to be completely routine, setting the right tone of voice, very positive. And by the way, it has to specify why it’s positive. Because when we’re talking to ourselves, it’s just like we’re talking to a prospect. If we don’t say why, they don’t believe us. So if we don’t say why to ourselves, we don’t believe ourselves. Fantastic. Here’s somebody that answers their phone. I’m going to talk them again next week.

Donnie Crawford (06:10):

I love it.

Chris Beall (06:49):

You’re done. So that’s kind of it.

Now why do people believe that their follow-ups can be done manually more effectively than ConnectAndSell? They believe it for two reasons. One is they feel like they need to prep for the follow-up. What was the last conversation about? What do I need to think about before I talk to this person? They have to ready themselves. And there’s some truth to that, but you’re going to make a trade-off. And that is, say it took 22 dials on average to get somebody on your list on the phone. Now you’ve got somebody who answers the phone.

So your “answers the phone” list is now down to busier. Right? So they don’t always answer the phone. You don’t know. So say your new dial to connect for that list, it takes 12 dials. So now here’s the trade-off. If it takes 12 dials, still can navigate to failure, 11 times. Your mood is going to be pretty poor by the time you finally get somebody, it’s still going to be a surprise because you don’t expect to talk to them. So now you’re going to have a different problem, which is your preparation didn’t prepare you for anything, but leaving a voicemail. And leaving a voicemail, it’s a one-shot thing. You can’t leave voicemails over and over and over for somebody just because you had one conversation with them a quarter ago.

Donnie Crawford (08:07):

Right.

Chris Beall (08:08):

We didn’t earn that many voicemails. So you have another psychology problem on a performance problem ahead of you if you decide to manually call. You won’t be ready for the live conversation when it happens. And that’s a serious problem.

So what to do about that? Well, to get the other side of the bat, which is if I could talk to somebody on my follow-up list, and now it’s going to take me two minutes instead of four minutes. So that’s kind of nice. I get a little reward, it’s faster. And I know what to say, it’s right there in my teleprompter. All I have to manage is my attitude, my mood. But I always have to manage my attitude, in both cases.

So instead of peaking for the big conversation, that doesn’t happen, the big conversation that doesn’t happen, the big conversation that doesn’t happen. I don’t have peak at all. I can just relax and know that my teleprompters can tell me what to say. I’m going to say it.

Donnie Crawford (09:02):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (09:03):

And that’s… Yeah. So it’s a trade off. And that trade off, it’s got to be explicitly made by the rep. So then now I know why I shouldn’t do it manually because I still haven’t on in 12 chance, or one in eight chance or whatever, and I’m not going to be as good. And by the way, it’s going to cost me half an hour. Half an hour is a lot more than two minutes. So what could I have done with those 28 minutes? Well, I could have talked to four more people-

Donnie Crawford (09:28):

Talk to more people. Exactly.

Chris Beall (09:29):

I could have talked to four more people. Given that sales is search, have to talk to people. So if I talked to more people per day, that’s good. My follow-up list let’s me talk to more people per day, which lets me search more of the space for someone who has or might have the problem that my company offers a solution for.

 

Chris Beall (10:47):

So it kind of all comes down to the psychology of the here versus the future. I’ll call it the ant and the grasshopper. Salespeople tend to be grasshoppers. They don’t do anything for the winter. They just eat right now and hope for the best. They kind of hope winter is not coming. So that’s a problem for management. How does your compensation help them? How does you’re talking to them help them? How do you show them data and evidence that helps them? And how you help them hold themselves accountable for doing what they know needs to be done? You’d be on that rowing machine right now, Donnie. If you and I had a relationship where you said, “Chris, I want to make sure that I hit this rowing machine every day. Can you help me?” And I’d ask you every day, “Hey, Donnie got on the rowing machine yet?” One or two answers. “I haven’t, but I’m jumping on-“

Donnie Crawford (11:37):

Yes or no. If no, get on it.

Chris Beall (11:41):

Yeah, Donnie. We can still hold this conference call when you’re on the rowing.

Donnie Crawford (11:47):

Just get on there.

Chris Beall (11:48):

Get on it. I don’t think you’re going to transmit any viruses or anything.

Donnie Crawford (11:50):

Oh, shoot.

Chris Beall (11:52):

So accountability is always assisted by other accountability. And we need to manage to that because we know this stuff is hard for these three reasons.

Donnie Crawford (12:02):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (12:02):

I don’t know the how, they don’t get the impact, and the psychology works against them. And then there’s one more thing, which is, everybody loves a cherry on top. Everybody loves the extra, the freebie, but wait, there’s more. And here’s the more for follow-ups, when you talk to somebody, you can actually send them an email with the logo. You can actually reach out to them on social and they might accept your invitation. As long as you do it correctly, which is you thank them for the conversation. No matter how the conversation went, they gave you a gift and you must acknowledge that gift and do nothing else.

Donnie Crawford (12:42):

Right?

Chris Beall (12:42):

So if you acknowledge the gift and sell to them, you’re actually violating a social contract and you must not do it. But if you acknowledge the gift and simply thank them and then offer them a gift, maybe a piece of fairly neutral information that’s of value that you know about, then you’re approximately balanced.

So with regard to social transactions, social exchange theory. So you follow up with an email instead of it being ignored as cold spam, it’s an email from someone that just spoke with. And all that email has to say is thanks.

Donnie Crawford (13:21):

Yep.

Chris Beall (13:22):

So that’s it.

Donnie Crawford (13:22):

That’s it.

Chris Beall (13:25):

Now, what do the numbers say? The numbers say that follow-ups outperform cold calls by a factor of something on the order of three. They’re easier to reach and they convert to meetings more readily because you have better conversations. And because your timing is likely to be better because you can’t move into the past, only the future and all of their purchasing is going to happen in the future. So you’re getting closer to the date where they’re going to buy

Donnie Crawford (13:52):

When you started to really think through the Market Dominance stuff and the making sure you’re falling within that cycle, I think that big idea was that is the ultimate reason for following up. I mean, it’s completely the, that’s the big idea, the important idea to keep in mind. So hopefully I can relate that to them. By the way, on the fantastic piece.

Chris Beall (14:19):

Yeah.

Donnie Crawford (14:19):

I remember actually doing flight school with them and on the fourth call, the fourth blitz with Olive Caser, there was one group where we were talking about fantastic. We were talking about that word. Like any objection that comes your way, it’s almost like you can just answer “fantastic.” That’s fine. Great. I do like the answer of even people hanging up with you, fantastic. That person answers their phone. Move on. That’s great. I’m going to follow-up with that person later.

Chris Beall (14:47):

Yeah.

Donnie Crawford (14:48):

There was a rep who used the word “fantastic” five to seven times in one call with every single objection he got. It was hilarious. And we even got on, Matt and I, heard this guy saying fantastic over and over and over again. And his whole attitude about these calls was just magical. It was just amazing. And it was just because he was treating these calls as, not as a scary cold call, but as something that he can learn from and learn how to handle objections and have the right attitude when handling them. It was actually really a beautiful thing.

Chris Beall (15:28):

That is fabulous. I mean, that is… Self-talk is funny, right? Because self-talk like, I’m going to come up with something I say to myself is not effective.

Donnie Crawford (15:38):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (15:39):

It has to be almost like cursing, right? It’s anti-curse.

Donnie Crawford (15:46):

It is the anti-curse.

Chris Beall (15:49):

We need to have something come out of us that’s kind of like… Cursing comes from a different part of the brain than speaking. It actually is a completely different part of the brain.

Donnie Crawford (16:00):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:00):

It’s not related. It was barely related to speech. Cursing is more closely related to physical action.

Donnie Crawford (16:07):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:07):

Like punching the door or something like that.

Donnie Crawford (16:08):

Totally. There’s actually a physical energy that comes out of it when you curse. There’s actually a psychological effect, physical effect to it.

Chris Beall (16:17):

Yeah, cursing, self-talk that allows us to reposition ourselves for action after something like that.

Donnie Crawford (16:24):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:24):

And it’s important that people do it. It actually is really important. And it lets us know something about how somebody else feels, that they’re serious, that this means something to them.

This is the anti-curse. This is saying “That thing went bad, but cursing is a bad idea right now because I need to be in a different psychological space.” So you need a knee jerk reaction, but it’s just an expostulation that allows… And it’s said in a positive way and you need to practice it. One of the beauties of ConnectAndSell is you’ll get to practice that many times a day and you’ll get really good at it. [crosstalk 00:17:05]

Donnie Crawford (17:04):

That’s a big idea too, Chris, that’s a really good idea. That’s a podcast.

Chris Beall (17:04):

Remind me-

Donnie Crawford (17:09):

That’s a podcast.

Chris Beall (17:13):

That is a podcast.

Donnie Crawford (17:13):

The anti-curse and you have to practice them

Chris Beall (17:17):

First thing in anti-cursing, right? We learned how to curse when we’re young and we become very good at it. As teenagers, we practice it. And then as adults, we really, really have got it down. But we don’t really learn to anti-curse because why? Right? We lose… After all, if we do that in public with people that we’re trying to get to help us, here’s the deep dynamic. When we’re young, we’re in a power struggle with our parents. We need their help, but we want independence. We have to have independence because we have to become adults someday. So we’re doing this really awkward dance with our parents and that dance involves power. And we have to be careful about not giving up too much power to our parents, too early. And parents, this is why it’s tiring to be a parent because you’re in a power struggle with your children all the time.

No matter whether you think you are or not, because they have to be on an evolutionary journey where they take independence and you lose power. Because at some point you’re dead and they’re not, and they need to continue to function. Right? So if you have all the power and they never managed to get the independence, it doesn’t work out so well. Right?

So there’s this journey that we’re all on. And you would think that we would get to the point where we’re no longer fighting everybody around us in order to keep them from having too much power. But in fact, we all do something in order to gain power with others around us, the way we used to with our parents. I call it the baby bird syndrome. We open our mouth and show the pink interior and say, “feed me.”

So we complain. We complain in order to restore a power relationship that we like, which is our power over our parents by us squawking. And we don’t have to do it with our parents. We can do it with strangers.

The way this dynamic really, really goes down all the way is in sales we have a problem. And the problem is we have to be the adult. And most people can’t give up the power that comes from not being the adult and having people do things for you because you complain. Those who do by the way, are a master salespeople. The definition or the hallmark of the master salesperson is somebody who is so grown up that they have no, inclination to complain about bad things that happen. In a sales situation, they have mechanisms that they’ve adopted. Anti-cursing is one of them in order to maintain their status as the adult in the two person relationship between seller and buyer, the buyer must never be the adult. The buyer has to complain.

Donnie Crawford (20:03):

And then you’re there to provide the solution and the guidance and to be the trusted adult and parent to lead them down the right path. Yeah. That’s interesting. That’s interesting.

Chris Beall (20:15):

Exactly. So it’s totally different from what folks think, which is, “If I’m strong, one of the things I get to is I get to say, ‘Hey, that wasn’t good enough. You should have done more, whatever it happens to be.'” Right? But as the adult, with a bunch of kids, that’s a ridiculous thing to do unless you’re trying to get them to understand and grow. In a sales situation, we’re not trying to get the other person to grow.

Donnie Crawford (20:38):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (20:38):

We’re trying to get them to explore with us, whether it’s wise for us to work together from their special knowledge, which don’t have. We have to have access to their special knowledge about their situation. We have knowledge about our solution that somehow those could come together in a conversation we could figure out, “Oh yeah, this is something we ought to do.” But it doesn’t work so well if we can’t access their knowledge and we can’t access their knowledge, if we’re complaining and making them do stuff for us. We’re accessing their resources.

Donnie Crawford (21:10):

Well, parents and child relationships are the same way. A lot of times the child’s not going to open up and not going to provide the information until they realize the parent is really there for their safety and their guidance and they can trust them and they’re not just going to spew out feature function to their kids. They’re going to listen and understand and be honest with whether their advice or their product or their solution is going to even be valid in a situation or not. You have to be willing to say, “Yeah, we don’t apply to you at right now at this time. I can’t give you advice right now at this time, because it doesn’t make sense for you, but in four months in may.” In four months-

Chris Beall (21:57):

Exactly. Because I can see your evolution from my experience. Yeah. So I think what we tend to do is simply play these… We play these old scenarios out, depending on our level of maturity. And in sales learning how to act more mature than you are, is a key to making progress.

Donnie Crawford (22:20):

It’s interesting.

Chris Beall (22:21):

And therefore having words that you can say to yourself that cause you, or help you act more mature than you are, is very useful.

Donnie Crawford (22:29):

Yeah. When I was 19 or 20, I was on my mission. Me and my companions were all trying to be really good, like really good people. Like, I mean, just… I’ve never tried harder to be as good of a person as I could possibly be than I was in those two years when I was on my mission. And there was a companion of mine who lived a very colorful life before joining… To be going on a mission. And he was a bodybuilder. He lifted weights even on his mission. And it was hilarious, him trying to be good. The time I knew he was really, really trying was when he dropped free weights onto his foot and he yelled, “Yes. Yes.” And he just was screaming at this, his cuss word was a positive. Right? It was exactly the anti-curse that was like… And it filled him with endorphins and it took the pain away actually. But it’s a perfect example of the “fantastic” that guys will answer the phone. It was-

Speaker 1 (23:33):

I love it. I love it. Well, this is the essence of the whole thing. And I think we got to it here in this stuff about follow-ups. As the essence is the hardest stuff, which is deciding to overcome our need for emotional distance and retreat when we feel rejected, that’s the hardest part of sales. That’s why Jet Black wrote a whole book about it. So the hardest part is where we need the most help. And we need the help from others and each other and ourselves… I mean others in ourselves. And we got to have something that we do when it gets hard.

Donnie Crawford (24:10):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:10):

And that’s going to be talking to ourselves and we better say the same thing every time with the same tone of voice.

Donnie Crawford (24:17):

I like it. I’m absolutely going to use fantastic. This person answers the phone for this. I will incorporate that. So.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

 

This is a continuation of the conversation we started the last episode with Mandy Farmer, CEO, Accent Inns. Chris asks Mandy the question of what’s next after you have firmly decided that fun is the core of building a great business, and nothing will push me off this. How do you attract and retain the right people who hold these same values? Corey likened the tone of the company to something like the people who make Cards Against Humanity. Even their company contact info on the game sets the tone for their irreverence. They are the same all the way through from the product they make to the people who support it and lead the company. There is a box of awesomeness that is given to each new hire at Accent Inns. They know in a short period of time who is embracing their values and who is faking it. She does the fakers a favor and cuts them loose quickly, out of kindness to them and to her team. She says, “Fire fast, hire slow.” Learn more about her success ideas in this episode of Market Dominance Guys, “How to retain the people who want to save men’s souls.”

If you missed the first part of this interview, please listen here >

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Presented by:

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The full transcript for this episode is here:

 

In this episode of the Market Dominance Guys, we’re continuing our conversation with Mandy Farmer, CEO of Accent Inns. Be sure to listen to the first episode to hear all about fun being key to your success. This continues the conversation where we’re talking about how to attract and hold the right people. It goes back to an old sales anecdote where a guy was walking down the street and he saw some brick layers. And he asked the first bricklayer, “What are you doing?” he said, “Laying bricks.” The next one he asked, “What are you doing?” he said, “Making six bucks an hour.” He asked the next one, “What are you doing?” “Building a cathedral.” And he asked the fourth one, “What are you doing?” and he said, “Saving men’s souls.” This is how you find and retain the salespeople and the team members that want to be saving men’s souls, not just the bricklayers. Tune in for this episode of Market Dominance Guys.

Chris Beall (01:18):

So you went through all of that. When were you, “Okay, now Natalie, is this what I have to do, but this is what I have business faith in?” So to speak. There has to be a point in there somewhere it’s like, “I’m compelled, I must do this, I’m doing it, trying, it’s sort of working, sort of not working.” and then, “Now I’m so convinced that fun is at the core of building a great business, that nothing will ever be able to push me off that, even if a global pandemic, which probably is never going to happen, were to come along and blast my industry to smithereens, I’m not moving off the fun position. The fun spot is going to be mine.” When did that happen?

Mandy Farmer (02:00):

I think it first started happening maybe about five years ago. Before that, I always knew that fun was a part of where I wanted to go. So I always knew, “Okay, here’s where I want to go and it involves a lot of fun along the way.” But we weren’t there, we were way down here. So the first thing for me was, I was getting the right team and so slowly but surely, I made sure we crafted the most amazing executive team. We couldn’t call ourselves an executive team because that is a no fun name. So we’re the Care Bears. So our Care Bears are… They’re phenomenal. And I truly believe that crafting that team has been without a doubt the thing that I’m most proud of stuff, because they’re phenomenal. So with them, we can do whatever we want. So once we had the Care Bears in place, the next step was making sure that we’ve got the right GMs in place like, Natalie.

And that was hard, right? Because it’s going to mean getting rid of some people, but also making sure that you can attract the right people. We’ve got this amazing general manager in place and then of course it just trickles down. But once we have the Care Bears in place, the thing that we did after that was we sat down and the team, including all of our general managers and our frontline employees, we sat down and we crafted our values. So as much as I really wanted to say to them, “Guys, it’s fun, it’s fun, right?” I can’t do that, I can’t say that. It’s got to be organic and we all need to come up with what our values are. So of course they’re your real values, they’re what makes our company great. So I didn’t even need to suggest fun. Fun is going to be right up there, because it’s already how we’re living our values.

But the thing is, once we’ve got it in place, that alongside our other three values or our four values in total, then what happens is that when someone comes into our organization that’s new, and the very first day that they’re with us, they get a box of awesomeness. And it’s a beautiful, awesome box. And that box of awesomeness has four things in it. And all four things relate to one of our values. So immediately on a first day, people understand, “Oh okay, I’ve got a Kazoo, why do I have a Kazoo?” And it’s because we have fun, right? And we celebrate success. So it’s just a touch point, but it’s one of those things that is brought in on day one with people. Then they start training and they see that our training is also fun, because our values have touched every single thing that we do. So if, even if it’s our policies and procedures, look at it through the lens of fun, they still need to be tight. They still need to be very specific, but they can still have… You can put your goggles on and look at your policies and procedures.

So that’s just what we’ve done, is we’ve really made sure to look at everything through the lens of our values.

Chris Beall (05:04):

Corey, your buying heads should just be spinning at this point. So Corey, what, in your experience in your career, who’s come closest or what situations come closest to Mandy’s approach? Or have you ever seen it tried other than any certain crazy friends you have?

Corey Frank (05:24):

I think… And you and I have spoken about this offline a few times, Chris, is when it… And Mandy, you’re touching on it… Is when fun is mandated, when it seems forced, when customer service, the customer comes, number one. When it becomes more just a slogan that is in the employee break room, versus lived from the top down, that’s where I think the customers and the certainly, the prospects can feel it. I think of cards against humanity, right, that game. And when that came out a few years ago, there’s no other word I could think that, but it’s a reverent enough, where even on their customer service line, if you had a problem with one of the card decks that you ordered, or you wanted more, it was this concept that they could still get business done, but they’re not going to have this lead with ego. And having pride in your brand does not mean that it’s an elitist concept, necessarily. I’m thinking of some of the other hotel brands that, they’re very nice.

You feel very different when you walk in, but “comfortable” isn’t the word that I would use, because they’re almost so over the top elegant, the folks are more like butlers or maids than they are like people that you want to hang out with after shift and have a beer. Or, I don’t necessarily trust them to say, “Where’s the best place to go for a pizza and a hot dog around here?” Right? So I think Chris, right, what we’ve seen certainly in our inside sales teams over the years and all the teams that we’ve looked at and consulted with and been a part of, is sometimes the drudgery of making the dials is a challenge. One of the stories that comes to mind a mentor told me, was pretty famous story, right?

A man walks past a construction site and sees a number of workers laying brick. And he goes through the first worker who’s laying brick and says, “Hey, what are you doing?” he’s like, “I’m building a wall.” And goes to the second worker, “Hey, what are you doing?” and he says, “I’m making six bucks an hour.” Goes to the third person, “What are you doing?” he’s like, “I’m building a cathedral.” And then he goes to the fourth person says, “What are you doing?” he’s like, I’m saving men’s souls.” Now we all have worked with each of those four different types of folks, but it’s probably the latter two people and particularly, the latter person that are saving men’s souls that has this attraction, this endearment to, like you had said, Mandy, “To jump out of bed before the alarm clock goes off every day and get to work.”

So how do you go about… Right, Chris? I’m curious. How do you go about recruiting these type of people? Did they come from referrals? I think I noticed something on your website that you have folks that have been there over 10 years and you probably don’t lose people, I would imagine, even though you’re probably not the highest paid hotel or hospitality chain in the area, specifically in a nice area like DC. So how do you recruit, how do you retain and how do they weed themselves out? So they’re not parasites, because they probably look around and say, “Dude, I don’t believe in saving men’s souls.” and, “I don’t believe in building cathedrals, I’m just here for the six bucks or I’m just here to make a wall and then go home and slide down my dinosaur at the end of the day and go back to my family.” So you got to have this business’s personal mentality. I think this big picture, it’s… How do you guys do it so well at Accent?

Mandy Farmer (08:40):

Well, I can tell we’re on the same page and I think it’s really important to get rid of the bad apples. So I’ve always said that, I’ve always supported my team to let them know, “You what, it might cost us money, it might cost us money to get rid of these people.” So if that’s the case, I support you because it is no fun working alongside one of those people, they will ruin your day. So it’s worth paying that money. It really, really is. So I’ve always said that, “Fire fast, hire slow.” So they know that I’ve got that support. But the other thing is, is that we’ve got a really amazing people culture, whereby yeah, we have fun, but we also do things right. For me, fun is also doing a really good job. So doing a really good job means that you are coaching your team.

So you’re sitting down with them on a regular basis. You’re giving them feedback, you’re coaching them along. And if they don’t meet the milestones, then we say goodbye. So that happens pretty quickly. We give them lots of opportunities and lots of training along the way, but if they’re not going to cut it, then it’s really not fair to the rest of the team that they stay on with us. And they’re probably going to be better suited. I have fired people who I know are leading better lives because I fired them, because they just weren’t going to be happy working in my weird world. So now they’re in a great other place. So that’s such a good new story when something like that happens. So with our recruitment, we do ask for referrals.

We pay for referrals because you know what, if we hire someone good chances are they’re going to have good friends, right? And if they bring their friends into work then, again, that family fun atmosphere just gels more, right? You want to work with your friends, you want to work with people you like. So that’s one trick we use. And then we will put on job fairs. That sounds so boring, doesn’t it? But not how we do it. We actually do fairs, right? So there’s cotton candy, there’s a dunk tank, and again, it just shows like, “Hey, here’s what you’re going to get.” Right? “Right off the bat, come join us, we’re fun? And then, before you know it, you don’t have to advertise for people because the word of mouth starts going and you become known as an employer of choice and you don’t have to hire as much because so many people stay with you. I’ve got a lot of people on our team that have been with us for a really, really long time. And that feels so good.

Chris Beall (11:25):

It does. We just [inaudible 00:11:27] private celebration with our head of research this morning and sent him a note. This is his 10th anniversary with the company. And the main thing that I’d told him was, “It’s such a pleasure and it’s so much fun working with you.” And we’ve never met, he’s 11,000 miles away. And we work together every day on different kinds of stuff. It’s a blast and that’s the main thing.

It’s just, I don’t think any of us stay doing anything for very long if it’s not fun. Even the parasites have a hard time and they just have parasite fun, which is a different kind of fun. It’s that taker kind of fun, but it’s like, “Yeah, but the rest of us, it doesn’t work for.” But it’s a sure sign, I think, that you’re succeeding in using fun as a competitive weapon of business quite frankly. When what you’re really competing for, which is talent, ultimately it’s the people in business and into my business. It’s always the people and you’re competing for them every day. And if you have a competitive edge for the ones you really want, so they qualify in because they’re referred and they qualify in, because it’s no fun to work for a company that really values fun if you don’t. It’s the worst thing in the world.

Chris Beall (13:34):

So you were pelting invaders fairly naturally. Every once in a while, there’s a psychopath who really work hard to worm their way in if they see enough value. And you can normally tell. I can tell anyway when they ask for a big title, because it’s not fun to have a big title, it’s ridiculous to have a big title. So that’s like, “okay, you need a big title, you’re not going to be hired, right, that’s all there is to it.” “Oh, I needed to do my job.” “Really? Well, that doesn’t sound like fun.” But it’s fascinating to me. So all these folks come to your property… I come to your hotel and I have this experience, do you have business people who show up that then go…

They go off into their lives and they come back to you and say, “Hey, Mandy, you’re doing something different over there, can you help me bring that into my business? What is this magic? I came into the room, I saw a bunch of cool stuff, it was all fun, I had great experiences of the people. Even the people who were cleaning the room, they were fun. How’d you do that? Can you help me understand that?” Does anybody ever come and ask you that?

Mandy Farmer (14:48):

Well, strangely enough, I’m actually doing a webinar tomorrow. And it was a company, they’ve asked me to come and talk to their group. And I think it’s because right now, so many people are, or they’re in that fear mode and they can see that I’m not. So they want to help their team get into that positive brainstorming like, “Okay, where are the opportunities here?” So I’m happy to help any company do that. So yet just this week, last week I did one and it really fuels me as well to the point where just yesterday we started talking about, “Should we actually put together something? Should we put together a leadership retreat for when this is all over, we can actually welcome some people to some of our properties and put on like a really good in-depth how to do this, how to thrive no matter what life throws your way.” So it was just yesterday we started talking about that. So I’m really glad you’re asking me that question.

Chris Beall (15:56):

That’s so funny. I was talking to Natalie just yesterday and I said, “So are you guys thinking of using your property as a magnet for learning about fun and applying fun to business? Because it just seems like such a natural go somewhere, you have fun, you learn about fun?” And people who actually do it, not a bunch of consultants who come in and have no fun and claiming to make you fun, right. And come away with both easy stuff from the hard stuff, because the easy stuff is like, “Let’s have fun.” The hard stuff is, “Oh, and guess what? You’re going to have to fire a bunch of people.”

But that doesn’t sound like fun, right? It’s like, we’re all CEOs on this little podcast here and it’s kind of funny that I belong to a CEO group that’s called the Alliance of CEOs. And I love these people, I just love when we get together. Now, every Friday we used to just do it once a month and it’s virtual. So it’s easy to travel. It’s a gray area thing, I’m up here. I’m now in Port Townsend. I’m probably not that far from you. If I were a really good swimmer, I bet I could get-

Mandy Farmer (17:03):

I could see you [crosstalk 00:17:03].

Chris Beall (17:04):

If I go over to the top of the bluff over here, I can wave a little, “Hi.”

Mandy Farmer (17:07):

Such a cute show, love that [inaudible 00:17:10].

Chris Beall (17:11):

We’ll be right over as soon as the border opens back up, although I don’t think they’re going to detect a swimmer. I think that that gets [crosstalk 00:17:17]. I’m not good enough on a standup paddle board and it’s too comical, actually. You could make major league YouTube videos. I can defeat any cat video by watching me try to get up on a paddle board. That’s my-

Mandy Farmer (17:29):

I think you should do a podcast from a paddle board.

Chris Beall (17:32):

It would be very short and shaky.

Corey Frank (17:35):

I think we should do a podcast from one of the Accent hotels when this clears up Chris, right? I think we go out of location.

Chris Beall (17:43):

So anyway, the Alliance, we get together and we talk and it’s kind of funny. But this always sounds [cringe 00:17:48] but I think it’s actually funny, I call it “The lonely binds club”. Because, it’s not lonely hearts, but CEOs have lonely minds. You were the person who was working on the business all the time, even when you’re sleeping. If you don’t think you are, if you jam on your dreams carefully, you’ll probably find out that that’s what they were actually about, right? It’s trying to figure out the business because business is dynamic, because as I’ve always said, “People are only different in a small number of ways. Businesses are different from each other in a nearly infinite number of ways.”

And while we have balance sheets and P&Ls and all that, they don’t really capture how we’re different from each other, how dynamic businesses are. So we’re always working on them. So here we have these lonely minds and we get to meet and talk like this and we’d be with our Alliance of CEOs, but it’s CEOs talk to CEOs and they can connect at the mind level, because we have to work on the same crazy stuff, right? And what folks don’t often realize is that even if fun is core to your business, getting to fun involves doing things that don’t sound like fun, but you got to make them fun. To that’s the hard part, right? I don’t have the luxury of waking up someday and saying, “You know what, I’m not going to have any fun today. I’m going to take a non-fun attitude towards the parts of the job that other people might think aren’t fun.”

They have to be fun too, even though they have these other qualities, like letting somebody go or doing a tough deal with a customer in a difficult negotiation. Whatever it happens to be, I got to be having fun doing that. Whereas somebody else might have to have fun having cold calls, which is a lot of what our company does, right? So I just think that’s such a big part of this, is if you want to have fun, be part of your business, you got to take it really seriously without being grim. Seriousness is seriousness of purpose and grimness is a bad attitude and [inaudible 00:19:59] tease that apart. Do you ever run into that where it’s so important to have fun that sometimes it’s like, “But I got to do this part thing?”

Mandy Farmer (20:07):

Oh yeah. So another thing we do is we use strength finders. So we know our team intimately. And so what might be fun for you might not be fun for me, but maybe what the things that I don’t find fun, Corey is going to find really fun. And so that’s how we do it. We know where each one of us thrive. So that for me, I’m the big thinker brainstormer or cheerleader. But when we get down to the nitty gritty details, I’m not that very good at it. Whereas I’ve got people on my team who just cannot think big and they just, it scares them when someone says, “Oh, we’re going to do that.” So they’re the ones that are actually going to implement that. And they really thrive in it and have so much fun doing the implementation part.

So while it is hard to let people go and as a CEO, I need to be there. If let’s say I’m going to let one of my team go, I would be there. But I’m also going to have someone there with me who, they’re good at this and they also know that they’re actually liberating someone. So even though it’s hard, I know deep down, if it isn’t the right fit, I am actually really helping that person. So there’s a way for me to feel good about it. But I really believe that it’s about talking about what your strengths and what your weaknesses are so that you can team up, because I know all my weaknesses, I’ll procrastinate on them. And if I am held accountable with my team and they know what my weaknesses are, someone will help me and they’ll take the lead on it. And I’ll just follow along with them.

Chris Beall (21:51):

I think that’s such a huge principle. I’m a big believer that the main thing we do in teams is we cover each other’s backs, because our backs are weak and we’re all weak in different ways. A team can be strong and have fun where the individuals will sometimes but won’t often because doing stuff that you suck at isn’t fun.

Corey Frank (22:11):

Well, it’s liberating, I think. Two, you had mentioned this earlier, Mandy, coming to work for the first year or so as a CEO taking over the company, trying to put your own stamp on it. I think the word you used is “authenticity”, which I like, is that one of the reasons I love my podcast partner here so much over the years is he is the same over a beer as he is on stage, as he is on a $5 million deal. And that is true authenticity. There’s no trying to think, “What role am I supposed to play? Am I supposed to play this role for this title or this role for this title?” And I imagine if you have a culture of that, like you do at Accent, that it’s liberating for your team members to feel that way, is that somebody wants to work with me and collaborate with me throughout this 9.00 to 5.00, or whatever this period of time I’m at work, because of me, of who I am, not for my education and not for what, but because of who I am first and foremost.

Somebody could have the same degree that I do, the same GPA, the same experience, but that’s not as personal as what makes me laugh or what makes me burn the midnight oil on a project or makes me go the extra mile. I think trying to harness that and trying to… As in a aerosol spray that you spray when you walk into the hotel, is it an injection or an IV treatment when they go through the hiring process? But I imagine whatever it is at Accent, it’s clearly working.

Mandy Farmer (23:43):

Yeah. We joke about it because we can tell like with the new hire, it takes a good couple of months to where they really go, “That’s for real?” And then finally it hits them and they’re like, “Oh my God, this place is for real.” And then they realize-

Corey Frank (23:59):

And then they come out, then they’re really, really excited.

Mandy Farmer (24:02):

Yeah. And then it’s just they drop all their pretenses and they’re just like, they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and it’s exciting when we’ve reached that moment. And what I’ve noticed over the years is, it probably… I remember maybe three years ago it took six months, a solid six months before I saw that, “Yeah okay, they drank the Kool-Aid.” And now we’re down to, I think one or two months where it’s just, they’re starting to realize. And I think it’s because all those previous hires they’ll actually say to them, “Yeah, it’s for real, like seriously, let your guard down. It’s cool. We’re all cool here. You’re safe here.”

Corey Frank (24:36):

You’re safe.

Mandy Farmer (24:37):

Yeah.

Corey Frank (24:38):

So I’ve got a question for both Chris and you Mandy. One thing I want to ask Chris for so long, so is there a book or a movie? Just one book or one movie that if I was going to work for you, Chris, at ConnectAndSell, or if I was going to work with you, Mandy at Accent, is there a book or movie say, “Listen, don’t look at the website, don’t look at our collateral, don’t look at our P&Ls, don’t look at our investor docs. Read this, or watch this and you’ll get me after doing that.” Is there one that comes to mind for both of you guys?

Chris Beall (25:08):

There’s one for me. I would have you read, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, which is the autobiography of Richard Feynman. If you want to get me, read that.

Corey Frank (25:20):

Surely… And what’s it about?

Chris Beall (25:21):

It’s about one of the physicists who made the 20th century what it was and made some of the greatest discoveries ever. And he had more fun. I mean, the title of his autobiography is Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! This is somebody who took the hardest intellectual work of all in the most fraught situation that mankind has ever faced, which is the creation of the atomic bomb and made it fun. And not just made it fun like a joke, but made it fun like the fun was the key to getting the work done. And he’s also the guy that figured out why the Challenger crashed, the guy who pulled that little O-ring material out of the ice water, the congressional hearing, and got the congressmen to understand what had happened.

And this was a guy who put fun front and center. And if you want to listen to something you might not understand, but it’s worth listening to. Listen to the finding lectures on physics. I realize that sounds pretty bad and it doesn’t sound fun. And I sound like a physicist, which I am, but I tell you what, just listen to Richard Feynman and you’ll get how the most serious stuff in the world can be built on a foundation of fun.

Corey Frank (26:35):

That’s perfect. That’s perfect for you. Mandy, what do you think? How about in your corner?

Mandy Farmer (26:40):

I’m going to go with three books. So one book that really, really influenced me in creating a product that was so different, that really gave all of us permission to have more fun. It was a book it’s Purple Cow by… I think it’s by Seth Godin?

Corey Frank (26:59):

Seth Godin, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mandy Farmer (27:00):

And that really made me realize like, “Okay, I need to do something different here.” So that’s when we created hotel Zed. Then hotel Zed was still wacky and weird that it allowed Accent to really blossom as well. So that’s the first book that I think, to really understand my brain, that one gave me permission to really seek out differences. On leadership, I’m going to say Brene Brown, Dare to Lead. I love that book. I love all her wisdom on being an authentic leader. It’s on my bookshelf, in fact, I got it one foot away from me right now. And it’s one that I can pick up, I skim to any page and go, “There it is, this is it.” Then the third one is also a foot away from me and it’s called, The Culture Code and it’s by Daniel Coyle. And I love a thriving alive culture. To me, that is what so excites me. If we can create that workplace that just, as soon as you walk in the door, you feel it as a customer, that’s what really motivates me and really gets me going.

Corey Frank (28:09):

That’s awesome. That’s great. Well, I tell you what I think we’re out of time for today that has been incredible discussion. Thank you, Mandy, for coming. So from what I understand, right, it synthesized a lot of the tips that you have for fun is, “Go fun or go home, bring your true, authentic self to work, no parasites,” certainly you and Chris are aligned on that. “Find your Wolf pack in your organization,” which I really like that concept of the rebranding. “Always look to help.” Then of course the one, if I could put an explanation point on what all the things that you’ve said today, it’s ,”No fear.” So, really appreciate the time and I think Chris, we have a regular guest here in the making. I don’t think we have standing guests almost like they had on the Johnny Carson show, but I think Mandy should definitely be one of those. And especially if we can shmooze her to maybe do an onsite in a few weeks here, a few months up North at one of her properties too, what do you think?

Mandy Farmer (28:09):

I absolutely love it.

Chris Beall (29:07):

Mandy, I’m going to be right up, it’s not very far from Port Townsend and I’ll be seeing you soon.

Mandy Farmer (29:13):

I looked forward to it, Chris. It was great to meet both of you.

Chris Beall (29:17):

Thanks so much for being on, I really appreciate it.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Corey Frank and Chris Beall just had the fun privilege of recording a Market Dominance Guys podcast with Mandy Farmer, CEO of Accent Inns on the most important value in her business (and ours also, it turns out) – fun. This is part one of this interview with Mandy. Take a break and enjoy some lightness, as well as considering a new approach to help secure employee retention while growing your bottom line and see why she and her team are thriving in the hospitality industry while her competition is going through massive layoffs.

As soon as the border opens up and we can cross the border, our team will take the ferry north to have fun learning more about the crucial role of fun in business – the best way, by direct experience! Thanks, Mandy, for being our second guest ever, and for sharing the business power of fun with us today. And thanks, Ryan Reisert for introducing me to Natalie Corbett yesterday.

I’m so glad we took the opportunity to have these conversations. Conversations Matter. Fun conversations matter even more! Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys.

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

Corey Frank (00:28):

Great. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and the esteemed patron of honor here, Chris Beall as always to my virtual left. Today, we have a very special treat for everybody because we don’t have guests usually, Ryan [Riset 00:00:52] made it just under the wire from a few weeks ago, but we’re honored to have Mandy Farmer who runs the Accent Inns. It’s a family owned and operated group of hotels in the British Columbia area. And I think you’ll agree after our chat with me and Chris today that their approach, the Accent Inn approach, of taking fun seriously is a core value for any company, especially in today’s environment. So welcome Mandy to the podcast.

Mandy Farmer (01:24):

Glad to be here.

Corey Frank (01:26):

Chris, so how did we get to know Mandy here? Normally it’s just Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, Ed McMahon, of course. And we decided to have some guests and an esteemed one at that, so how did we get to know Mandy? And how does this have to do with Market Dominance? Is fun a dominant trait for businesses today?

Chris Beall (01:43):

Well, yeah. So what happened was Ryan Riset, somehow, and you know how many people we talk to at ConnectAndSell. If you haven’t had a conversation with us, you probably are hiding somewhere pretty well. Somehow he had a conversation with Mandy’s colleague, Natalie Corbett, and I don’t know how that came about, but he told me about it, he said, “These guys are doing something in the hotel industry that seems impossible and yet they’re just doing it.”

And they’re doing a bunch of something. So one of them was they’re providing accommodations for essential workers. And that really resonated with me because my son, Galen, is an essential worker in Reno. And I know the effort that he goes through just to get into the house, because there’s other people in there and he has to come home and strip down in the garage and put his clothes in a bag and sneak in through a known path that he takes quickly into the shower, and the whole bit. This essential worker business is a non-trivial undertaking and actually, he had an experience the other day that it would have been very nice if he could have gone somewhere else because he had a seizure at the office.

He’s the assistant manager of the FedEx office in Reno, and just some combination of some medication that needed to be adjusted and as a result, lack of sleep and the stress of dealing with the public, on the front lines of public, that by the way, is not always a very kind to these essential workers, basically saying, “Hey, you’re not at any risk, this is some kind of a hoax or whatever.” So it’s not a nice thing to hear during the day. So anyway, it would have been great if he could have gone somewhere other than having to come from the hospital all the way home and do all that. And so I heard about that and I got into a conversation yesterday with Natalie and what jumped off the page and maybe what was wildest, you know my way of doing business, right? I say, if you’re not having fun, you’re not taking this seriously enough. That’s our number one thing. And every company I’ve ever built, every company I’ve run, every team I’ve ever run, number one, we’re going to have fun. Number two is we’re still going to be enthusiastically wrong every day.

We’re just going to be so wrong so often and we’re just going to maintain our enthusiasm, not in the face of being wrong, but our enthusiasm for being wrong. And if we can do those things, then a whole bunch of good stuff’s going to happen. We don’t know what it’s going to be, but a whole bunch of good stuff is going to happen. And those are not easy things. And then we’re going to keep the parasites out. I don’t know if Mandy cares about that, but I care about it a lot. No parasites allowed in the company. If you’re not willing to get in the row boat, row with us and [inaudible 00:04:24] like. If you’ve got a yacht over there a little ways away, and you’re willing to sink the rowboat to go over to your yacht, that one doesn’t work, right? And I’ve got my ways to doing that. So I heard this flown in first as a core value thing, and I thought, this is the missing thing you and I have talked about, but we have a whole episode about it.

We have an episode that says the best surfer is the one having the most fun, right? So we actually hit on it, but we’ve come at it peripherally through the fact that we think the conversations are the key, but in Mandy’s world, something else is going on. It’s like a major business invention, putting fun at the top of the value chart, the value of the company values and then letting that provably drive business results that are effectively impossible for others with the proof being that when her whole industry went like this, her company came out of it in a couple of days with new offerings that made sense, that were being fielded, that were on the street, the people who are using with new stuff every day, coming back. And then it turns out if you go to the past, they were already doing stuff like that. It was a continuation. So fun as an instrument, an essential foundational capability of market dominance we’ve never explored and here we are with Mandy. Sorry. That was kind of long Mandy, but did I catch it?

Mandy Farmer (05:51):

You did. Yeah. And I think obviously we speak the same language, we are cut from the same cloth.

Chris Beall (05:57):

What’s wrong with us?

Mandy Farmer (05:58):

I love it. The fun is so important and I think that it’s a really crazy thing to actually be talking about right now because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. It’s almost like we’re not allowed to have fun right now, but for us, my company, we are thriving right now. Yes, revenues are down. Yes, I’m worried about our bottom line, but my company is thriving and we’re thriving because of our values of having fun and taking care of each other, making sure we’ve got the community’s back. And so even in great times, we thrive, but I can tell right now, we’re on fire right now.

Corey Frank (06:41):

You know Mandy, one of the things I noticed from your website, first of all, two things, I love it says that pillow fights are optional. So you’re putting that kind of irreverence fun tone at the forefront. But the other thing is, and I’m sure you notice this too, Chris, is that the images that you have on your website are of active people utilizing the property, not just of the property. A lot of hotels, you’re just going to see the beautiful room with nobody in it. You’re going to see the pool with nobody in it. You’re going to see the expensive restaurant with nobody in it and in your imagery, it feels very family-friendly, it feels that fun is a preeminent value. Where does that come from? From a thesis or a theme as a core value, as Chris had said, of your company?

Mandy Farmer (07:30):

Well, really, one of our other core values is authenticity. And so we call it, being real and for us, fun has always been such an important part of my personal values in that I really want absolutely every single one of my team to come to work and to have fun and to enjoy their jobs. And so it’s really important that we embrace that in absolutely everything that we do. So when you’re talking about the language on our website, when you walk into one of our rooms, we have actually sat down and thought about how do I make this pen fun? Okay. You walk into the bathroom, how is it going to be fun? It’s just going to be a boring hotel bathroom, but we’ve actually brainstormed. No, no, let’s just think outside of the box, let’s throw really bad ideas at everything. Let’s have a laugh because these ideas are so bad that we’re just going to laugh and have fun, but then you know what, one of us will go, “Oh, actually it’s not bad” Yeah. And then before you know it, we’re implementing it and we’re doing it.

I know that if I’m having fun, when we welcome people into our hotels, they’re going to have fun. And what I love is that, especially this really dark time, it’s really important that people have that brightness in their day. So one of our themes is we’re big onto ducks. We’ve got ridiculous rubber ducks and they’re the craziest rubber ducks you’ve ever seen. My favorite is the lumber duck, and he’s got this really big beard and he’s holding a chainsaw. Why? I don’t know why. And so people see that and it just brings a smile to their face. They’ll look on the phone, and there’s a joke on the phone, when you look at like dial zero for the front desk, there’s jokes in there that are hilarious. And what happens is if people might be attending for a funeral or they might be in a subtle worker and they’ve had a really hard day and suddenly we’ve just given them a reason to smile and to just not take themselves so seriously and not take this whole, like everything so seriously. And just to have a bit of a smile brightens people’s day.

Chris Beall (09:40):

Wow. So how’d you get here? How’d you get to… where you raised fun? [inaudible 00:09:48] I was kind of okay, so here’s my fun story, I’ll just throw it out there. My mom was a great practical joker. Now her practical jokes tended to be extreme. So here’s an example of one where I went to the school bus stop in the morning, I grew up near where Corey lives now in Scottsdale Arizona, but it was way out in the desert. And I went to the school bus stop in the morning and the kids were obviously teasing something that was on the ground and that something turned out to be a big rattlesnake, big, big thing. Big around as my current arm, not my skinny little arms back then, and I was probably 14. So I thought this is bad news.

I got to do something. So I ran home, got my rifle came back. Can you imagine doing this now? Came back. I was thinking of getting a shovel or something, but I thought, I think I can kill the snake. And we didn’t kill snakes, by the way, our family had a… One of our family values was not killing snakes, but this snake definitely was a problem. So I come back, now with the rifle, you can be at a distance, right? Hold it at arms length and that was my mom’s gun, actually that she’d given me. Shot the snake, took it home, put it in the refrigerator because I thought we might need it because it’s a snake. It was a lot of meat, right? We lived in a tough area and what did my mom do with it?

She curled it up on the top of the garbage and put it out for the garbage man, but she went to the effort of propping its mouth open and propping its fangs out individually with little toothpicks so the things are sticking out like this. And I found her waiting for the garbage man to show up and I said, “Mom, they’ll never come and pick up our garbage again.” She said, “It’ll be worth it.” So, that was the kind of fun that went on in my family. It was a little [inaudible 00:11:42] came right down to it, but I was otherwise raised by a Western Massachusetts person who had lived through the depression, and basically thought that we were all going to go broke and die tomorrow.

Corey Frank (13:02):

So I wasn’t raised with fun, but something in there, something lit up in me and I’ve been into the concept of, through my whole career, whether it was the rock climbing and mountaineering part of the career at doing big walls or whatever, the whole idea is don’t ever let it be grim. If we’re going to succeed, we’re going to have to have fun because this is… I guess my view is, life is hard, we better have fun or it’s too hard. That’s kind of it. So I was raised in a tough kind of situation like that, [inaudible 00:13:32]. How about you? How did you get to this weird position?

Mandy Farmer (13:35):

Well, I’m in a family business, so I’m third generation. We started off as a construction company. So it was my grandfather that started farmer construction and my dad worked in that field and he didn’t like it. He was not happy. And so as a kid, I saw him not really enjoying his job. And then one day he pitched to his partners, “Hey, why don’t we take this field where we keep a lot of the construction equipment? Why don’t we build a hotel there?” And they thought he was crazy and he kept pursuing it and eventually it happened. And I literally watched my dad change overnight where he became this really excited, happy, passionate, enthusiastic man. And it was because he found the right job. He found the right career. So I ended up in the hotel industry too, never thought I’d join the family business.

And to be honest, I needed a job when I came out of university and started in sales at the family business and eventually worked my way up because it was fun working with my dad. And so he really allowed me to take over the company, but in a family business, it can be challenging to take over because you often approach it feeling like, “Oh, I only got this job because I’m a daughter.” Like, I was given this job. And so I really felt like, “Oh, I’ve got to prove myself. And I’ve got to be just like him.” Or I’ve got to be the stereotype of a CEO. And so for the first few years of my leadership, I really thought, “Okay, this is how it’s supposed to be and I’m going to be this way.” And I realized I was not bringing my true self to work.

And this really upset me. And we had some parasites and I knew that if I was really going to bring my true self to work, which is really a bit of a weird and wacky and fun loving, big hearted person, there was going to be some big changes at work. And so it took me a number of years to really figure it out. But it meant cultivating the right team. They have been the secret sauce to my success without a doubt, making sure that I’m surrounded by people who inspire me, who I want to be around, who are fun. I want to enjoy coming to work. I want to wake up on a Monday morning and go, “Yeah, I’m going to work today.” And so, it was them that really motivated me. And I knew, I really sat down and spent time thinking about what is my ideal workplace? How am I going to get there? What am I going to do? And for me, that’s bringing my weird and wonderful self to work with no qualms about it.

Corey Frank (16:19):

So what’s the hardest part of being, not just fun centric, but fun foundational. What’s the hardest part about keeping the fun going or keeping the company going?

Mandy Farmer (16:31):

Whew. Well, first off, when we first started implementing fun, people didn’t get it. They were like, “Well, how are we supposed to do fun?” And they wanted to know, tell me how fun is. And I realized this isn’t something you’ve mandated. It’s got to be really authentic and real and grassroots. And so it took a long time to cultivate our sense of fun. We tried training on it and I was like, this isn’t working, this isn’t real. And so eventually it grew, but it’s about leading, leading with fun and making sure you hire people that are fun and with big hearts. So that was probably one of the hardest things we’ve ever had to do. When people ask me, how do you do it? I often think I just can’t really give you a recipe because it’s got to come from within.

But basically everyone knows, when I talk about a company’s success and why we’re thriving, it’s because I’m actually looking at it in terms of fun. And so I’m often not talking about it in terms of the bottom line and for many businesses out there, they’re like, “That is nuts, that makes no sense, you’re going to fail if you aren’t looking at your bottom line” Of course, I am looking at it, but what it is is fun comes first. And then what always happens is your bottom line is actually going to be even better because you’ve got all these engaged people coming to work. And not only do you have an engaged workforce, but then you’ve got engaged customers because they see you having fun and they’re engaging on your social media and they’re sending you sales leads because they want to see you succeed. So suddenly your bottom line is beyond what you ever imagined, because you’ve actually focused on the one metric of fun.

Chris Beall (18:11):

So is that what you would say is what the big guys are missing, is they’re using probably hospitality as it’s a destination, a clean room, a great restaurant, friendly staff. And you have this little secret that maybe is a little slightly irreverent because I can’t measure it, but yet you’re thriving. And yet you get referrals from your existing customers who seem to be a pretty fervent in their desire to continue to stay at Accent every time they come to the BC area.

Mandy Farmer (18:41):

Yeah. When I think about my competitors and some of them, they’re big boys, right? Like Holiday Inn, Marriott, all of these guys just so big that they almost are a little bit heartless and we’re all about heart. We were just one big gushy heart, right? And so for them, they have a share price that they need to maintain. I don’t have a share price. So I don’t have to focus on those metrics, I can focus on different metrics, but strangely enough, if they actually focused on my metrics, I think that the share price would go up, but it doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. And so for us, compared to our competitors, they were all about, “Oh, whoa, we have to cut. Right now, they went into fear mode. We have to cut, we have to reduce everything.

We have to cut our sales team. We have to do all this. And for us, we took a different approach. We were first off, safety. Safety of our team. We can’t have fun if people don’t feel safe so let’s make sure that they all feel safe. And so that’s when we went over our safety protocols and all of that, the second thing I didn’t cut my sales team and all of our competitors did and their business fell off. It just completely fell off. And instead what happened with my sales team was they decided to rebrand. So we no longer have a sales team. We have a Wolf pack and they are hunting, and they are fierce and they are… I have never seen them more, just connected in bumbling and bursting up. They’re a real inspiration to all of us, our whole team. So yeah, just this whole different approach. Fear-based versus love-based. And then once we had got in place, we decided, okay, well, how can we help in this time of craziness?

How can Accent Inns help? And so that’s when we realized, okay, we can actually house the essential workers, any of the frontline workers to keep them safe, to keep their family safe. But then we realized that there’s evenmore that we can do there. And so we partnered with a charity. We raised money so that all of those expenses were covered, these stays are free. So that if you are working, let’s say in a grocery store, we need grocery store clerks, right? We need to keep them safe and healthy. We need their families safe and healthy. They can’t afford to pay rent twice and stay in a hotel. So by doing what we’re doing, we can actually wrap our arms around them, keep them safe. And then what happened in the communities was people started donating food to them. We started dropping off Easter chocolate for them. We have schools writing them letters. And so we stick these little love letters from elementary school students on their doors. And suddenly now, we’re all the whole community is doing something good and positive and we feel great.

Corey Frank (21:35):

It’s just tremendous. It’s just tremendous. I got to ask a very specific question, I heard about this Valentine’s day thing you guys were doing. I don’t know when it was two years ago, whatever it was. Can you tell us that fun story? I think we all need a fun story right about now.

Mandy Farmer (21:53):

You bet. So we have two brands and they’re both our brands. I don’t franchise. I don’t buy it from holiday and they are brands and it allows us to do weird and wonderful things. So one is act [sentience 00:22:05], but then the other one is Hotel Zed. So in Canada, the last letter of the alphabet is Zed. And so Zed is a wonderful cousin to Accent, we still have humor and fun, but it is really out there and it can push boundaries and limits. And so it’s a retro chic boutique motel. So it’s got all the throwbacks to the 1960s. It’s a really, really fun place to say.

So on Valentine’s day, it was years ago, we started off by running a Nooner promotion. And so we decided that Valentine’s day, a lot of times what people do is they [inaudible 00:22:46] bouquet of roses, they pay way too much for roses. They try to get a reservation at the restaurant, but they can’t get in. And it’s just, you often Valentine’s day can fall flat. So we decided, well, why don’t you surprise your Valentine’s day with your gift of your sexy self? And it’s a Nooner, so you check in at 11 o’clock and you check out at two.

Corey Frank (23:07):

That’s fabulous.

Chris Beall (23:07):

That’s awesome.

Mandy Farmer (23:12):

So we started doing this and we run it every single year. And so this year, we always put a little slant on it. So this year, this slant was a baby maker and we thought, okay, so here’s our Valentine’s day nearest promotion. But if you actually make a baby at Hotel Zed, we’re going to give you Valentine’s day stays at any one of our locations for the next 18 years.

Corey Frank (23:39):

Wow.

Mandy Farmer (23:43):

[inaudible 00:23:43] CNN picked it up and then when CNN picks up something, it goes around the world and it’s translated into Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian. It was crazy. Went around the world, TMZ picked it up. And then before you know it, they’re doing a spoof on Saturday night, live on the weekend update.

Corey Frank (24:02):

Wow. TMZed.

Mandy Farmer (24:04):

Right.

Chris Beall (24:04):

TMZed that’s right. And so, how many folks have… So it’s been two years now, right? Or a year or so? I bet that everybody just flacks to the Valentine’s day promotions this year, than at every hotel, that’s incredible. And how many babies, any baby updates as for us yet?

Mandy Farmer (24:26):

We’re still waiting for confirmation, but so far, no, it looks like we went and struck out this year.

Chris Beall (24:33):

Wow. Well. Hmm. So we’ll be right up, but no, no babies. Not in the forecast on this particular Valentine’s day or the next one or whatever, but that’s just fabulous. So when you’re in the process, when you made the decision to go fun, go fun or go home, right, so to speak?

Mandy Farmer (24:59):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (25:00):

And you’re in that process and you’re trying to figure out how to do it. And you’re trying all the things that people might be recommending and let’s bring in the consultants, let’s do the training, let’s do all that stuff. You got your parasites gnawing away at you because there’s always parasites unless… In fact, I’ll make a contention. In my companies, fun is how we keep parasites out. It’s the number one part of our immune system, because the parasites have to fake that they want to come and have fun. And it’s easy to find out they’re faking before it [inaudible 00:25:34], usually easy before you hire them because they are parasites and parasites don’t want to have fun, they want to have whatever they want to have. They want to feed off the organism that you’ve created and it’s power and put some of it in their pockets, so to speak.

So you went through all of that, when were you like, “Okay, now Natalie, is this what I have to do because this is what I have business faith in, so to speak. There has to be a point in there somewhere, it’s like, I’m compelled, I must do this. I’m doing it. Trying, it’s sort of working, sort of not working and then pop. Now, I’m so convinced that fun is at the core of building a great business, that nothing will ever be able to push me off that even if a global pandemic, which probably is never going to happen. Where we were to come along, and the last of my industry is smithereens. I’m not moving off the fun position. The fun spot is going to be mine. When did that happen?

 

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Corey and Chris talk about when to hire the right people, how to hire the right people, and horror stories. It starts with the tension between talent and alignment. There are three scenarios you don’t want to end up with a new hire. You always want people that are talented and aligned, or else you either don’t hire them in the first place, or accept this and fire them now. You may have a candidate that is talented and capable. You think talent will take over and they will become alignment. Never happens. Lack of alignment may be due to a fundamental insincerity and sucking out of the company what they can. Yes, I can do that, hey can I have that corner office?

Next, you may run into the candidate that has no talent and no alignment. First, why would you EVER hire that person? If you did – time to fire them. The final is the tougher one. They have alignment, but why only have some of the talents you need, but not enough so they lack performance. They just aren’t catching on. Join Chris and Corey for this episode of the Market Dominance Guys: Construct Your Company So It Is Unappealing To Parasites.

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

 

Corey (00:34):

Hey Chris, great to chat again. One of the things that I think we were talking about last time in abbreviated detail was when to hire the right people, how do you hire the right people, and maybe some horror stories of when the people that we hire are not in alignment with what our values are as a business, particularly in this market dominance role.

So I think it’d be interesting to hear from the master here, hear from you about, when you’re knee deep in market dominance growth mode, and you have your systems, firing on all cylinders and everybody’s in their respective swim lanes. How do you go about hiring and adding to the team where we both know that sometimes adding one person that is not culturally aligned can bring down the entire kingdom, so to speak, or at least set us back many, many, many months? So what have you learned from the market dominance growth patterns that we’ve seen and you’ve seen in certainly so many of your client companies and how it relates to hiring the right people and what are some of the processes folks used to make sure that they’re hiring the right folks?

Chris (01:45):

Well, it’s a fascinating question, Corey. I mean, we know that there’s always a tension in every company, between talent and alignment. At General Electric, they used to talk about this, that you had the folks who were essentially talented and aligned, and of course those people are golden, and then you have the people who are talented and capable, but misaligned, and you tend to keep them because you keep thinking that their talent or their skill or whatever, is going to take over and somehow maybe they’ll get aligned and then that doesn’t ever happen and you finally end up firing them.

I mean, they used to talk about fixing that, but I don’t know very many cases where somebody whose lack of alignment is due to fundamental insincerity as a human being and they’re just kind of in it for themselves and seeing what they can suck out of the company. Ask not what you can give to the mission, they ask what’s your pot of gold is going to look like at the end of the rainbow, and by the way, can I have that corner office please with this nice view?

And then there was the easy one, which is the no talent, no alignment. And how in the world did you hire that person? So there’s your hiring processes, your recruiting and hiring processes be able to avoid, but anyway, that’s easy.

And then there was the tough one, which is the person who has very well aligned, but they seem to have some of the skills, some of the talent they need, but it just doesn’t come together, and so you’re getting a performance, really it’s not alignment and talent, it’s alignment and performance, you’re not getting performance. And what do you do about that?

Well, what do you do about it? Well first I think is you construct your company so that it is unappealing to parasite. The funny thing is, to where you can do…

Corey (03:21):

Parasites?

Chris (03:26):

Parasites, yeah. You’re probably wondering what is a parasite?

Corey (03:30):

I saw the movie, it was fantastic. So I’m on bated breath here. Yeah. I’d love to hear about that.

Chris (03:35):

It’s so funny that movie came out. I haven’t seen it, and then it won all these awards, and people are talking to me about it, and I’ve been yapping about parasites for 35 years and it’s, wow, finally, somebody else thinks they should make a movie about these creatures.

But parasites are funny, and businesses, in all systems, if you have something that is valuable and robust, that means it’ll survive a fair range of experiences, including injuries and insults, then that something, whatever it is, is likely to be parasitized because one business model, so to speak, is to attach yourself to it and just suck good out of it, right.

So our bodies are like this, by some count, most of the cells that are in me right now, in my physical body, from the tips of my toes, to the top of my head somewhere, and a lot of them in my gut and on my skin are actually different organisms, they’re not my DNA. If there is such a thing as my DNA, and I’m not sure I bought it anywhere or whatever, but it is certainly whatever I got from my mom and dad, that DNA is not their DNA, these are other organisms and they’re living on me like I’m some sort of a planet or a country, a state or whatever it happens to be.

And they have their own lives and they have their own concerns and their own wars going on. You know, when the war and your gut gets bad between some creatures and some other creatures, you might feel ill. People are finally figuring that stuff out.

And well why is that true? It’s because my physical body and its relationship to the world is such that I will survive a wide range of things, including this load of parasites. Some of which are good for me, some of which are bad for me, but they’re all living off me. I’ve got to do the eating, I’ve got to go out and find something to eat, and they ultimately are eating what I ate in some form. Like maybe out of my gut, maybe out of my blood who knows what they’re doing but they’re living. They don’t have to find a meal out in that world, they get to find a meal in this world, which is me.

And companies are like that because companies are pretty robust. If you have a company that’s achieved market dominance, for instance. So let’s posit that you’ve been following this program and you now are dominating, are in the process of dominating one market. You look pretty delicious to somebody outside who would love to come and join your band and enjoy the fruits of the hunting that the company does as the company finds new customers and goes through those first conversations we talked about and those followup conversations and builds trust. Think of the company’s trust goodwill in the market as an estate that the company owns, it has farmland, so to speak, that it’s created, it’s taken the stumps out of the soil and can grow crops, right? So why not join up with that company instead of having to go and do your own hunting. As an individual, join up with the company, and that’s why people join companies.

And one of the reasons is, hey, they’re bigger than me. It’s why my mom always told me to join a company, she said, “You know, why would you ever leave ‘that good company’?” Of course, my mom lived through The Great Depression back in the ’30s and a company looks like an island of safety to somebody who’s been through that, compared to being an individual on your own.

When I went out as a consultant in 1988, my mom was horrified because I was leaving the safety of something that was bigger than me and more robust, and I was going out in my own little rowboat to do well. Now I went from making 60 grand a year to a quarter million a year between a Friday and a Monday, I thought that was pretty cool. My mom thought it was terrifying, the fact that I had a one-year contract for a quarter million dollars, it’s like, are you kidding me? That’s not a long enough contract. What happens after that? I go, “Mom, it’s four years of what I was making.” She says, “Yes, but what if you can’t find a job in those four years?” Really, I’m telling you.

So it’s very interesting. So the attraction is toward the robust entity that you can feed off of, and yet what you want in your company aren’t people feed off it, you want people to contribute to it. That is everybody at a company has to be, from the bottom to the top, has to be fundamentally underpaid. That is, we all need to contribute more to the mission than we take out of the company economically. And at the top, so to speak, if you call it the top, I don’t really think it is, but if you look at the traditional hierarchy, then you say all a CEOs sitting there at the top of the company. Well, that should be the most underpaid person, that should be the person whose contribution exceeds the value of their taking out by the most and whatever that equation has got to be set.

And that’s pretty easy to do with founder-led companies. Actually, it’s one of the reasons that founder-led companies do so well, it’s because the anchor for the entire anti-parasite mechanism that you want to put in, is to make sure that the top person is not the top parasite and the worst hire in the world that you can make, and I’ve made, it is to bring in a very talented person with the pedigree, who’s joining your company as CEO in order to milk the company.

And you can tell you have one of those when they talk a lot about their sincerity and what a team player they are. As soon as somebody in an interview process, as soon as somebody tells you they’re a team player, you know they’re a parasite. It’s a certainty, because the team players don’t talk about being team players, it’s like saying to somebody that you meet over coffee, “Oh, by the way, I breathe oxygen.”

Corey (09:18):

What do they talk about? What should they talk about?

Chris (09:21):

What should they talk about is they should be very curious about the company’s mission, about the good that it does for customers, that the company does for customers. How it achieves that and how it operates on the inside in order to be able to continue to create that value for customers and how it is financed. They should be interested in that because that might affect what happens next, like are we financing by selling or as a gross processor? Are we financing by stock appreciation? Those are the curiosity that a person would show, sincere curiosity in the company, is an indicator of potential alignment.

Now, of course, there could be a curiosity that’s like Little Red Riding Hood’s Wolf. Very curious about how good Red might tastes but it’s a fine line, that’s why hiring is tricky.

Now there are a bunch of things in the world of biology that are very tricky. That it’s kind of amazing when you think about that they’ve ever been figured out, that eating is one of them. Think about how dangerous it is to eat, that you’re putting something inside your body. You better make it pretty good choice of what’s going in there because it might be bad. It has an advantage, whatever it is from being on the inside, and you’ve decided voluntarily to stick it in there, put in your mouth, chew it up.

Corey (10:44):

Well Chris, we spent a lot of time in person and if it truly was dangerous to eat, then I’m living on the edge. I have for many, many years so.

Chris (10:56):

Exactly. I think that we… Obviously, biology has solved that problem, and organisms have figured it out, all sorts of things, how to eat each other too often, how to procreate without one killing the other, although in the world of spiders, that’s a little tricky and we all know the praying mantis’ fate.

And so there’s a lot of trickiness to this whole business of interacting with other creatures. And when you’re a company, you’re a creature and you’re going to hire somebody, they’re a creature. If you’re going to eat a really big, dangerous meal, like a CEO, you better make sure it’s not going to eat you from the inside.

Corey (11:29):

If I’m hiring a senior person like a CEO or a senior leader, don’t I want to know about their previous team and how they interacted with their previous team? Isn’t that a leading indicator or a positive indicator? Or is there danger in asking a question like that?

Chris (12:46):

I used to think that you learned a lot from that sort of thing. I’m learning by getting to observe Amazon’s senior hiring process. It’s something that’s very interesting. Over there at Amazon, as far as I can tell, they don’t really want to know about what your team did, they want to know about you, they want to know what you did, because that’s who they’re hiring, they’re not hiring your previous team, and they don’t want anybody who got lucky and a lot of people get lucky in business because you can join something that succeeds and you had nothing to do with it. Maybe you were even harmful, who knows? And then you put that on your resume.

And do you ever see anybody in LinkedIn put in their profile, “I joined this company in 2016. It took me two and a half years to figure out what I was doing. By the time I figured it out I don’t think I’d made much of a contribution but the company got sold for a lot of money.” Nobody says that. It’s a common true story, but nobody says it. Nobody comes right out.

So what they do at Amazon is they ask these probing questions. They go down, down, down into their leadership principles. They asked the many why’s, what did you do? What did you do? What did you do? And they encourage you to talk about you, I, they want you to use I, and they want to find out a couple of things. One is, do you believe or have simpatico with their 14 or whatever this leadership principles, especially the big ones of customer obsession, of big thinking, of going deep?

You know, they’ve got these principles and they coach you, by the way. It’s really interesting. The Amazon process, they coach you, it’s not like a trick thing of figuring out, oh, did you get lucky and figure this out? And they say, look, this is how we hire, and this is what we’re looking for. And then they probe like crazy in the interview process. And then, and did they make a quick decision?

So my point is, knowing about the person and how aligned they are with your principles is much more valuable than did they get lucky once or twice. And by the way, if you get lucky, once you might be hired into other situations where you get lucky. I know a kind of person who has come in to companies I’ve been at, whereas no longer there, and their job is essentially to auction the company off. They get a big carve out and the company sells no matter what because it has value, and they’re just like, oh, they get another one of those. Well, what were you as CEO of three successful exits, really? Or were you the butcher? So it’s really interesting if you look at that.

But let’s take the more mundane hires. Not mundane, but the less scary ones. They’re all scary. How do you get somebody on board who aligns with your mission? Well, they better be curious about your mission and they better dig it. They got to think your mission is worthwhile because they’re going to work really hard at aligning with other people. Like at ConnectAndSell, our mission is to enable companies, to dominate markets by a conversation-first approach to business. So if you were to come to me, joining ConnectAndSell, and you really said, “You know, I don’t believe in that conversation’s first crap. What’s that? I believe that what you should do is advertise like crazy on social media. And if you have to talk to somebody, I guess that’s okay. But you know, so what, right?”

You might still love the idea of the connected self thing. Like I like this company it’s growing, it’s profitable, blah, blah, blah. I want to be part of it, and so I’ll answer the questions in the interview and have it in a benign way and then we’ll point to my previous successes and you’ll hire me. And then I come on board and I don’t even like the mission and I’ll start kind of edging away from the mission, right? So hiring somebody who doesn’t dig the mission, doesn’t get the mission, isn’t curious about the mission, there’s a real problem. And the younger the company is, the scarier it is to hire somebody who believes in another approach. And I’ve been at many companies that have done this, I’ve made this mistake repeatedly, or I’ve participated in making this mistake, or you hired the person, and the more senior, the role, the worse whose actual beliefs don’t align with the very purpose of your company’s existence. You’re hiring somebody who wishes you were dead. But what they really wish is you or someone else, right? That’s a problem.

And then the other one that is, okay, the hiring process. So you get it all really, really good, and you have these probing interview questions and everybody’s trained interview, and you do it like Amazon. It’s the most awesome process I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m still in awe that I got to see a little chunk of it yesterday and it’s like, wow, what an amazing thing they do over there. And say, you get that right.

Well, what if your company isn’t designed for action, for achieving the mission? What if it’s designed for parasites to grow and multiply in their power? Well that would be a problem because then if you get somebody who’s got a little bit of parasite in them, they’re going to rule the roost over time.

So here’s something I’ve done. Two things I’ve done over time that most people would disagree with but I think it’s worth folks thinking about it a little bit. One is I don’t allow standing meetings except for a meeting that’s called the forecast call. That’s actually, it’s a sales best practices call, but a regular meeting or once a week meeting that kind of thing, that people have to be at, those are outlawed in my world. And the thing I’m trying to avoid is the failure to sunset the regular meeting, to say the status meeting on a project.

So a new project starts up, we’re going to, let’s say, we’re going to figure out whether we can enter a new market. So we spin up a little team to go look at that market. At ConnectAndSell, the way we would do that as we’d say, well, the market hypothesis is a list. We can make the list, we take a couple of people who are our best top of funnel colors, we come up with a candidate message in the form of a breakthrough script, we train those people up on the breakthrough script, our top of funnel people, we turn them loose with connect. So, in the script, they have 30 conversations a day, we listened carefully for what those conversations sound like, we look at the appointment setting rate, and if over the next two weeks or, however long it takes us to achieve conversations equal to the square root of the number of estimated participants in that market. If that number is above 5%, we look at that market and go, that’s pretty good, otherwise not right.

Little project. Now, one thing to do is to keep the project short and by keeping it short, great things happen. Let’s say you have a check-in meeting, once a week on that project. So now the project gets delayed for some reason or said, it takes a couple of months or whatever any project could go on for a while, the check-in meeting, the status meeting and the status reporting, say we have status reporting also. So somebody has to write up a little status report. How are we doing on our project? And they write that up and they publish it every week to the people on the project. Oh, but they also have to publish it to senior management, including people who are just kind of interested or who don’t want to feel left out or whatever it happens to be. And so now a bunch of stuff starts to happen and encourages parasitism. One is the meeting itself becomes more important than the job, so whether we’re making progress, it’s also becomes easier, it’s easier to attend a meeting than it is to accomplish the goal.

Why? Because attending a meeting just requires showing up at a meeting, whereas accomplishing the goal, it requires doing the unknown. After all, if it’s known, we wouldn’t have a project around it. Projects are only built to address the unknown, so the unknown is scary and uncertain, so why do scary and uncertain one when you can do the certain.

Thirdly, you offer an opportunity for somebody to play holier than thou. You were one minute late for the meeting, Corey, isn’t punctuality important to you? So now things like punctuality, which of course are important, become more important than actually achieving the mission. So you get this thing that happens with standing meetings where officious parasitically inclined individuals. So maybe they might’ve just had that in their upbringing, that they’re kind of more comfortable or when everything is super structured and mom and dad are in charge and that kind of stuff.

That meeting becomes a new entity, it’s like having a new employee in your company, that meeting, is it like a demon employee that you didn’t hire carefully, that you can’t figure out how to fire. Like, how do you stop having this stupid bidding? So my approach is just to say, no, no, you can’t put meetings on the calendar on a regular basis, you can hold a beating. The only people allowed to add a beating or people who are going to contribute, actually make something happen, but you can’t have next week, same time, right? You and I have this particular meeting that we try to do on Tuesday mornings, but that meetings outside the company, not inside and we abandon it on a regular basis when we have other things to do. It just turns out.

So that’s part of it is no standing meetings and this is considered anathema, right? I don’t have an executive staff meeting that we have every week. We do try to get together and talk strategy, maybe on a more regular basis that I’m comfortable with, but that’s about it. And so the second thing is, and this is really big. Email is the vector. Maybe even email is the medium in which parasites thrive. And it’s for a very simple reason, actually for two reasons. One is, it’s very easy to use email for politics, everybody knows this, I’m not saying anything new to anybody, right? Email is a wonderfully political instrument because you can copy people on an email or worse blind copy them if you’re a well parasite, and you can do it for the purpose of pointing fingers, laying blame somewhere, setting somebody up for a fall, making it perfectly clear that you’re doing your job, but maybe they’re not doing theirs, whatever, right?

So all you have to do is copy a few of the right people, and then you have the right tone in an email, in a way you go and you look better and the other people look worse. So that’s a common parasitic track and you see it all the time. Well, what can you do about that? Since email is necessary for internal communication, although some companies have banned it, so maybe they just are doing something so brilliant that all it can do is worship them and that, but they might replace it with something else. The other thing is text-based communication. It comes with a default emotional interpretation, that’s negative. So when you read an email and its tone is neutral, your emotional reaction will be slightly negative. You will see, even a completely benign email that’s just neutral as critical of you or potentially critical of you.

The reason for that is simple, because email can be used politically, it can be copied to people, secretly or openly. You’re having a conversation with folks you haven’t agreed to a conversation with as a recipient, that is they know that you’re reading what it is that you’re reading, and you’re interpreting that simply. What do I think about this? But what do others think of me because of what’s in this email.

And so… BDM that’s right for political exploitation, and parasites operate primarily through intra inside the company politics. So my rule is simple. You’re not allowed to copy somebody in an email unless you can prove, and the burden of proof is on you, that they needed that information to do their job. And if you were wondering about whether that’s true or not, call them and ask whether they want to be copied on the email, tell them what it’s about and see whether they want to be copied because they could say yes because they need that information to do their job, but it’s your call as the email creator, and you’re answerable to the company, that would be me. And I fire people on the first offense, I tell them this in the interview process…

Corey (24:44):

[crosstalk 00:24:44] ego-driven activities of parasites. So this is your first parasite theory of market dominance driven companies, is that you got to get the politics out of business, is what I hear you saying. And that is core with understanding that the alignment more so than even talent or capability, but alignment is key, right? Summarize that.

Chris (25:08):

Yeah. Alignment is key in terms of your hiring. Talent is key in terms of the contribution they’re going to make, you can hire untalented people all day long, you get nothing. I see you really are trying to hire folks who are obviously talented, that’s not actually very hard to figure out. Obvious, talent is obvious, but to completely avoid the parasites, you’ve got to check the alignment process carefully through your hiring process, and that means your interviews need to probe and go deep and they need to go deep into what was this person really like? And specifically, what have they done in the past? They have done that. What their teams have done? And does it hold up to scrutiny and how did they go about their business that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny?

But on the design side, you can actually design a business to be robust against parasites by, from my standpoint, avoiding two things. One is where the parasites thrive in terms of I’ll call it time, and the time that’s dedicated to meetings, to standing meetings, which grows essentially to fill the calendar and grows to fill these status emails forever. You just design that out. So we don’t have those standing meetings and we’ll just live with that and miss a meeting needs to be called. Somebody can call they are meeting and that’s one meeting, and then it’s over. All meetings are sunsetted after their first occurrence, so that’s kind of, yeah… And they live for one, whatever, one hour, half hour, one day, whatever.

And then the other is that the medium, we call it the medium in space and communication space that breeds parasites is email. And you simply forbid copying folks on emails, unless you can prove they needed the information to do their job. And no [inaudible 00:26:52] seeing if anybody was at a company, there’s no reason ever to blind copy anybody within a company except, to advance your political agenda, secretly. So if you do that, you’re dead meat. And that’s kind of it though, those are two simple design principles.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank continue their conversation with the co-author of Outbound Sales, No Fluff, Ryan Reisert. Chris shares a view that is a bit unpopular but rings true. He states that “This pandemic will civilize our society. This is part of the civilization of our society by which matching the need to the capability of a solution it will be done without lying, tricking, and pushing. It’s a big honesty bath that will cleanse a lot of us off.” Corey dives into the concept of a repeatable process and leadership vs. luck and leadership. The latter option scales well. For a guide on how to come out of this restructured sales environment with everyone working from home, join Chris, Corey, and Ryan for your tips of the week. This Market Dominance Guys episode is called The Culling of the Non-Professionals.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, Chris Beall and Corey Frank welcome co-author of Outbound Sales, No Fluff, and Sales Director, Ryan Reisert. In these uncertain times, sales pros are faced with waiting for the dust to settle, then try to regain their market or take this time to learn new skills and technologies.

There is a third option and that is to reframe conversations compassionately, patiently and gain control of your market. For a guide on how to come out of this restructured sales environment with everyone working from home, join Chris, Corey, and Ryan for your tips of the week. This episode is called #WFH Sales Pros – Wait, Learn, or Dominate Your Market.

 —-more—-

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

Visit, ConnectAndSell.com

 

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