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In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall explores the potential of AI-powered data analysis using ChatGPT. Chris demonstrates how this cutting-edge technology can uncover valuable insights from complex sales data in a matter of minutes, a process that would typically take a human analyst days or even weeks. By utilizing ChatGPT’s Data Analyst feature and uploading data from ConnectAndSell, he’s able to quickly examine the correlations between sales reps’ skills and key business outcomes, Chris showcases how AI can help identify the most critical factors influencing pipeline generation and financial success. This eye-opening episode is a must-listen for CEOs, CROs, and CSOs looking to leverage the power of AI to make data-driven decisions and optimize their sales strategies. Join Chris as he delves into the future of sales analytics, revealing surprising findings that could revolutionize your approach to sales training and coaching. Join us for this episode, “Your New Data Analyst BFF Uncovers Surprising Sales Insights.

Key points and timestamps from the episode:

(00:01:37) Chris Beall introduces the topic of using ChatGPT to analyze sales data and uncover insights.
(00:02:39) Chris shares his experience working with ChatGPT to write a book summarizing Market Dominance Guys podcasts in just two days.
(00:04:20) Chris discusses using ChatGPT for a pricing exercise at ConnectAndSell, balancing customer ROI and company profit.
(00:04:55) Chris explains his plan to use ChatGPT to analyze the correlation between reps’ skills and business outcomes.
(00:07:37) Chris walks through the process of uploading data to ChatGPT and having the AI analyze the columns and data structure.
(00:08:34) ChatGPT identifies key columns relevant to the analysis, including activity metrics, conversion rates, and skill scores.
(00:19:49) The correlation matrix reveals that asking for the meeting has the strongest correlation with positive outcomes, while professionalism has a surprisingly low correlation.

Keep listening for the analysis results:

The regression analysis shows that 24.1% of the variability in direct amounts is explained by the combined skill metrics.

The breakthrough score has a significant negative coefficient, suggesting that higher breakthrough scores might be associated with lower direct amounts.

Conclusion:

Chris emphasizes the value of using AI for rapid, unbiased data analysis to gain insights and make data-driven decisions in sales.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

[00:00:00] Susan Finch: Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch49.[00:00:20]

[00:00:23] Susan Finch: In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall explores the potential of AI powered data analysis using ChatGPT. Chris demonstrates how this cutting edge technology can uncover valuable insights from complex sales data in a matter of minutes, a process that [00:00:40] would normally take a human analyst days or even weeks.

[00:00:43] Susan Finch: By utilizing ChatGPT’s Data Analyst feature and uploading data from ConnectAndSell, he’s able to quickly examine the correlations between sales rep skills and key business outcomes. Chris showcases how AI can help identify the most critical factors influencing [00:01:00] pipeline generation. and Financial Success.

[00:01:02] Susan Finch: This eye opening episode is a must listen for CEOs, CROs, and CSOs looking to leverage the power of AI to make data driven decisions and optimize their sales strategies. Join Chris as he delves into the future of sales analytics by uploading his own data and [00:01:20] feeding in complex prompts. This reveals the surprising findings that could revolutionize your approach to sales training and coaching.

[00:01:27] Susan Finch: Join us for this episode, your new data analyst BFF uncovers surprising sales insights.

[00:01:38] Chris Beall: Hey everybody, Chris Beall [00:01:40] here with another episode of Market Dominant Skies. My co host Corey Frank is actually in Armenia right now. And while technically I’m sure it’s possible for us to co-host Market Dominant Skies Armenia and Southern Arizona at the same time. Well, let’s let [00:02:00] him be. It’s getting pretty late there.

[00:02:01] Chris Beall: It’s about 2. 35 in the afternoon here in Arizona. Intuitively, I know that’s got to be very, very late in Armenia. So I want to try something today and let’s see if it works. It could be a little bit tricky, because it could require following a fair amount of verbal input from [00:02:20] me, I guess output, input to you, for something that’s a little bit complicated.

[00:02:24] Chris Beall: But here’s what I want to look at. I want to look at an example, maybe inspirational, maybe more step by step, you can use it in some way or another. to an example of how to use ChatGPT in [00:02:40] particularly to analyze some information that you might have and point the way forward, maybe give you some surprises.

[00:02:48] Chris Beall: So I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with ChatGPT since it came out, at least since I was introduced to it. By a couple of smart young people in the backseat of a car coming back from Whistler, [00:03:00] and they were using it to do something that was kind of surprising to me, but made a lot of sense. Once I understood it better, that was to write a yearly family letter and the results were great, but it was the process that really intrigued me.

[00:03:14] Chris Beall: So I decided to learn a little more about it, ended up working with ChatGPT, so to [00:03:20] speak, to write a book that summarized a bunch of market dominance guys podcasts, and I wanted to see, could you do that in a couple of days? The book wasn’t great. It never got any human editing, but it was usable. You could read it and you could get something out of it.

[00:03:38] Chris Beall: And two days is pretty [00:03:40] short for a book. Half a year, a year, a year and a half, two years is pretty common. So I thought that’s really interesting. And it was very straightforward. As I proceeded through 2023, more and more taking time with ChatGPT to see what I could understand, [00:04:00] uh, building some scoring capabilities for reps skills on cold calling as part of that process.

[00:04:07] Chris Beall: I thought, well, let’s, let’s just see how far we can go with this. And at one point I did a pretty. Substantial pricing exercise for the products here at ConnectAndSell, trying to balance the customer’s [00:04:20] return on investment with ConnectAndSell’s own profit on any given deal, at any given price point, given structure.

[00:04:28] Chris Beall: And what surprised me was that it was a better analyst than any human analyst I’d ever worked with, part of which was, it was just comfortable. There’s something about asking a bot to do [00:04:40] something for you that has both an impersonal quality, but kind of gives you a feeling of, I’m in control of this.

[00:04:46] Chris Beall: There aren’t going to be a lot of, yeah, but I’m not going to deal with a whole bunch of bias. It’s going to make mistakes. I’m going to have to pay attention, but not a bad experience at all. In fact, a very, very good experience. So I thought, [00:05:00] Hey, there’s a lot of things we all believe that might be subject to analysis.

[00:05:05] Chris Beall: And one of them is that RepSkill in conversations is correlated with outcomes, business outcomes. So I thought I’d take a skills analysis done by a GPT 4 model using a skills [00:05:20] rubric itself written by a. GPT 4 model that was provided originally with an input of about one hour of a detailed description by an expert of exactly what needs to happen in a cold call, second by second by second, and what skills need to be demonstrated.

[00:05:39] Chris Beall: So the [00:05:40] rubric was good. It’s kind of long. It describes for each one of the skills that it invented, by the way. It describes what happened at sort of a zero to one point level, you know, two to three and so forth. And it was a 10 point scale. And so just ran that against a whole bunch of data that we [00:06:00] happen to have about our own reps.

[00:06:02] Chris Beall: And pretty much just took the transcripts of all their conversations they had for a few weeks, put them together in, uh, in a form that the GPT. system or the GPT model could digest, apply these skills rubrics to it [00:06:20] and basically score all the reps one week at a time on these different skills. So that was something that was fairly straightforward to do, but it required a lot of, I’ll call it kind of mechanics, you know, grabbing a hold of the recordings and turning them into transcripts and making pipelines of [00:06:40] data that went to processes that did X, Y, and Z.

[00:06:43] Chris Beall: But once I had it, I thought, you know, I wonder, we kind of assume that these skills mean something with regard to outcomes. Why don’t I take a look? So here’s an analysis that was done by the ChatGPT [00:07:00] data analyst, which is one of the kinds of flavors of ChatGPT that you can get nowadays. And I’ll actually read through it and tell you how long it took.

[00:07:11] Chris Beall: So this entire process. It took about 12 minutes end to end once I had all the skills in an [00:07:20] Excel file. And here is my initial prompt. I said, let’s analyze a collection of weekly results of the ConnectAndSell sales team’s cold calls. I will upload an Excel file and walk you through what the columns mean.

[00:07:33] Chris Beall: And we can then conduct a regression analysis to understand the impact of each rep’s skills on [00:07:40] three business outcomes. Meeting set per prospecting hour, meeting set per week, and amount of new sales pipeline influenced directly or indirectly by those reps. Now one thing I like about ChatGPT, I don’t know, I feel a little foolish liking this, but, ChatGPT.

[00:07:55] Chris Beall: com Our emotions count is it comes back [00:08:00] usually with some encouragement. So it says, that’s, that sounds like a great plan. Please go ahead and upload the Excel file. And we can start by reviewing the columns and the data. Once I understand the data set, we can proceed with the regression analysis to examine the effects of the rep skills on the specified business outcomes.

[00:08:18] Chris Beall: So I upload away. [00:08:20] And the data analyst comes back and says, thank you for uploading the file. By the way, no analyst has ever thanked me for anything before. So this is great. Let’s start by loading the data so I can understand its structure and contents. I’ll check the first few rows and provide a summary of the columns.

[00:08:35] Chris Beall: The dataset contains a detailed breakdown of weekly results from sales [00:08:40] representatives activities. Here are some of the key columns that might be relevant for our analysis. And then it lists the columns. The rep name. The week start date and week end date, the dials, connects and conversations, the number of meetings, the total session time, total talk time, total wait time, total wrap time.[00:09:00]

[00:09:00] Chris Beall: Those are relevant in ConnectAndSell LAN. Session time is how long we’re using the system to call people. Talk time is obviously talk time. Wait time is the time between when you push a button and get a conversation. And wrap time is the time you spend wrapping up, taking notes, And setting next steps and [00:09:20] formulating your teleprompter for your next conversation.

[00:09:23] Chris Beall: So then it says conversion percentage, conversion rates from dials to meetings and from conversations to meetings. Scores. There was a greeting score, an opener, breakthrough, a meeting score, an objections score, [00:09:40] and a score for assertiveness, professionalism. And there was also an overall score, which was.

[00:09:45] Chris Beall: Actually weighted based on the number of conversations that got the subscores. So then it says there are also more complex fields like direct amount by stage and positive amount by stage, which seem to indicate financial [00:10:00] metrics related to sales pipeline stages. I’ll stop reading here and just say that was pretty good.

[00:10:07] Chris Beall: It got everything right, including the financial metrics. And I’ll explain these financial metrics here in just a moment. Since we’re interested in regression analysis, it goes on to understand the impact of rep [00:10:20] skills on business outcomes. We should identify which specific metrics and scores will be most relevant to use as independent variables, predictors, and dependent variables, outcomes.

[00:10:31] Chris Beall: Please guide me on how you would like to proceed. Specifically, which outcomes and variables we should focus on for the analysis. Now, that was a [00:10:40] fair amount of output for a fairly small amount of input, and it sort of nailed everything. These financial metrics, by the way, are from an attribution report that we have in ConnectAndSell that looks at opportunities by stage, and opportunities [00:11:00] by how they were influenced.

[00:11:01] Chris Beall: So some opportunities came about after a meeting was scheduled. Some after a positive conversation, that was the positive amount by stage, and some after any old conversation, and that’s called possible amount by stage. So all of this data is in the spreadsheet. It’s a very, very wide [00:11:20] spreadsheet, and it has a lot more columns in it that talk about things like.

[00:11:24] Chris Beall: Which objections were the most common? How were those objections handled? And also, what was the rationale for each score? But I wanted to stick to the numbers here. So now I’m about, what, maybe 2 3 minutes into this entire process. I get this [00:11:40] set of analyses and guesses as to what the columns are. And they look pretty good.

[00:11:45] Chris Beall: So I said, well, let’s take a look at the columns with Amount in their name. And it said the columns in the dataset related to Amount are DirectAmount, Direct financial outcome associated with activities. This means meetings, by the way. Positive [00:12:00] amount. These are associated with positive activities. Now, GPT, the ChatGPT got that wrong.

[00:12:08] Chris Beall: It said positive financial outcome. It actually was intended to mean is financial outcome from positive conversations or preceded by positive conversations. But [00:12:20] is good enough for this purpose. I didn’t need to correct it. And then there’s a possible amount, which is the same thing, but it’s possible attribution, possible influence.

[00:12:29] Chris Beall: And then it went on to say these amounts are also broken down by sales pipeline stage. So we could look at every stage and look at, say, the closed one only, or look at [00:12:40] contract through the closed one, or whatever it happens to be. Then it goes on to say these stage specific columns likely provide a more detailed breakdown of financial outcomes according to different stages in the sales process.

[00:12:51] Chris Beall: Given this information. It says, by the way, this is the ChatGPT analyst. Given this information, we could analyze how [00:13:00] these financial metrics are influenced by various factors, such as the number of dials, connects, conversations, and different score metrics of the sales reps. Would you like to explore any specific relationships between these financial outcomes and other metrics in the data set?

[00:13:16] Chris Beall: And I said, we will focus on [00:13:20] direct amount. As the financial outcome of interest. So that means a meeting has to be set. Well, it’s really not shocking that we’re gonna find a high correlation of direct amount to guess what meetings that are set. It won’t be a hundred percent. ’cause not every meeting set is actually a meeting attended, and nor is [00:13:40] an opportunity created for every meeting set, although in our way of doing business at ConnectAndSell.

[00:13:45] Chris Beall: We tend to create an opportunity as soon as a meeting is set, because that way we can track it more clearly. So the data analyst says, great. I love that, by the way. We’ll focus on analyzing the [00:14:00] direct amount as the primary financial outcome to see how it’s influenced by various factors. We can investigate its relationships with 1.

[00:14:07] Chris Beall: Reps performance scores, 2. Activity metrics, such as dials, connects, conversations, and meetings. Thanks. Given the potential complexity and size of your data set, let’s start by [00:14:20] exploring the correlations between direct amount and these various metrics. This will help us determine which factors might have a more significant impact on financial outcomes and are worth including in a more detailed regression analysis.

[00:14:34] Chris Beall: Shall we proceed with this correlation analysis? I love that it asks. If there is [00:14:40] any specific subset of variables or additional factors you’re particularly interested in, let me know. And I said, this is the easiest of the prompts. Yes. That means I’d like to proceed. It immediately outputs a correlation matrix between direct amounts and all the predictors.

[00:14:59] Chris Beall: Of [00:15:00] course, every predictor maps to itself perfectly, so that correlation is one. And then there are correlations of Meetings, as an example, with outcomes and that correlation is very strong with the outcome of direct amount. Meetings correlated at a [00:15:20] 77 level. That’s a high correlation and with conversations at a 59 level.

[00:15:28] Chris Beall: That’s not too surprising. It’s really hard to set a meeting in ConnectAndSell. Unless you have a conversation first. So it doesn’t say that all you really have to do is just [00:15:40] have tons of conversations, but it does say that conversations are highly correlated with meetings and meetings are highly correlated with direct amounts.

[00:15:48] Chris Beall: Therefore, conversations are correlated with. DirectAmount. That’s just kind of the way it goes. That correlation of conversations to direct amounts is 56. It’s almost the same as [00:16:00] the correlation to meetings. So, it gave me this beautiful matrix. So, down one side it says DirectAmount. That’s the answer, so to speak, what we’re correlating to, that’s the financial outcome.

[00:16:11] Chris Beall: And then Dials, Connects, Conversations, Meetings, and then the Scores. The Greeting Score, Opener, Breakthrough. That means how well did they [00:16:20] execute the breakthrough portion of the conversation. The part that goes something like, I believe we’ve discovered a breakthrough. That completely eliminates the need to To do a bunch of manual analysis in order to have a detailed and comprehensive set of insights based on complex data.

[00:16:38] Chris Beall: I just made that up right now, [00:16:40] but that’s an example. And then meeting, which is asking for the meeting and re asking for the meeting and re asking for the meeting. Objections, objection handling, assertiveness, and professionalism, and then the overall score. So this map is red. I’m not showing it to you because we don’t do that here on Market Dominance, guys, [00:17:00] but could.

[00:17:01] Chris Beall: Red is the 1. 0s. That’s a 100 percent correlation. Most everything’s correlated to itself. And then there’s sort of an orange, that’s some lower level of correlation, kind of a white, which is medium level, and then it goes into the cold blues. All the way to, to a dark blue. So [00:17:20] it shows me the correlation matrix.

[00:17:22] Chris Beall: I can look at it right, there is huge value in making a correlation matrix like this in Excel or some other way. I don’t know if I would’ve done it. It’s just too painful. It’s too much work. This is a huge time saver, and I can look with my eyes at it and let my visual system [00:17:40] call things out that are surprising and I say, huh,

[00:17:44] Susan Finch: we’ll be back in a moment after a quick break.

[00:17:52] Susan Finch: ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell’s patented technology loads your best sales folks up with 8 to [00:18:00] 10 times more live, qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we’re talking about really qualified. Like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified.

[00:18:12] Susan Finch: Learn more at ConnectAndSell. com[00:18:20]

[00:18:20] Chris Beall: Here’s something that’s surprising. There is a very low correlation 0.05, which is almost the same as zero between how professional the reps are, professionalism and meetings, and there’s also a very low correlation. Which is 03, [00:18:40] even lower, between professionalism and the direct amount of pipeline that’s built through meetings.

[00:18:48] Chris Beall: So I wouldn’t have expected that. I don’t think you would either. One would think that. A rep that is more professional, that comports themselves in a way that we would say is professional, they don’t get rattled, they don’t [00:19:00] have emotional responses that don’t make sense, that that would be correlated with positive outcomes, and it’s not.

[00:19:07] Chris Beall: It’s funny, though, because it’s a negatively correlated with the number of connects and negatively correlated with dials, which kind of makes you think that if you have too many conversations, you might lose a little bit of your [00:19:20] professionalism, something to keep track of out there. Assertiveness was a little bit better.

[00:19:26] Chris Beall: It was a 0. 28 correlation out of 1, so 28 out of 100 with the direct amount. So it’s not nothing, but it’s not strong. Objection handling is [00:19:40] 0. 32, a little bit better than assertiveness. But nothing to write home about. And then BreakthroughScript itself. We prize our BreakthroughScript. We think it’s really fabulous.

[00:19:52] Chris Beall: That adhering to it makes a difference. Well, the correlation with direct amount is 0. 17, 17 out of 100. The [00:20:00] opener also we think is super important, and yet it’s correlated only 0. 12, 12 out of 100. Hmm, that’s pretty low, right? Same thing with the greeting, 0. 15. So the greeting The opener and the breakthrough, which is the first kind of chunk, most of the [00:20:20] bulk of the breakthrough script and all of these reps are using our breakthrough script.

[00:20:23] Chris Beall: And these are all cold calls. They don’t amount to much with regard to booking meetings and therefore getting opportunities on the books that required booking meetings. The strongest correlation of all was the [00:20:40] correlation with, guess what, asking for the meeting. And then kind of insisting that the meeting is a good idea.

[00:20:47] Chris Beall: That correlation is 40 out of 100. So it is approximately 2 point something times how well you do in the opener, or the greeting, or the breakthrough, and [00:21:00] it’s about maybe, you know, something like 33 percent more important than objection handling. And assertiveness is vastly more important, uh, you know, more than 10 times, probably 12, 13 times more important than professionalism.

[00:21:18] Chris Beall: Not that we want people to [00:21:20] be unprofessional. I’m just saying it doesn’t lead to measurable results. You probably shouldn’t be coaching it too hard unless you’re just doing it for your own feelings. So, then, I just explained all that to you, your listener, but ChatGPT Data Analyst explained it all to me. And it [00:21:40] basically said, key observations from the heat map.

[00:21:43] Chris Beall: Meetings have the strongest positive correlation with direct amount, suggesting that as the number of meetings increases, the direct financial outcomes tend to be higher. One could say, well, duh, but it feels kind of bad to say, well, duh, to a well meaning bot, right? So I’m going to say, oh, that’s, that’s good that you [00:22:00] saw that.

[00:22:01] Chris Beall: It actually. it is kind of comforting that this obvious connection was made. Conversations and Connects also show positive correlations, though not as strong as Meetings, indicating their importance in influencing financial outcomes. Now this is important in a very simple way. You actually have [00:22:20] control if you’re running an organization to some degree over how many conversations the team has.

[00:22:25] Chris Beall: Your data could be better than it is right now, and it would take fewer dials to get conversations. You could use technology like ConnectAndSell that gets you more conversations. And you could also look at the reps’ activities and ask, [00:22:40] is too much time being spent wrapping up or pausing or hanging out, petting the cat and drinking coffee?

[00:22:47] Chris Beall: Could that time have been spent? Without abusing the rep in actual conversations. Sometimes reps have fewer conversations than they otherwise could. Jeff Blunt says one more dial. [00:23:00] We always say one more conversation here at ConnectAndSell. Then it says most of the score metrics show positive correlations.

[00:23:08] Chris Beall: Those are the skills with direct amounts, but these are relatively modest. This suggests that while higher skills ratings do relate to better financial outcomes, the strength of these relationships [00:23:20] varies. So then it says, given these insights, a regression analysis focused on meetings, conversations, and perhaps some of the higher correlated scores could provide further understanding of their impact on direct amounts.

[00:23:32] Chris Beall: Would you like me to proceed with a regression analysis based on these findings? Or is there any specific aspect you’d like to explore [00:23:40] further? Now, this is super important. At this point, I could go with the flow and say, yeah, that’s about it. But on reflection, what I’m really interested in is. What about the skills?

[00:23:52] Chris Beall: We work a lot in sales on skills. We coach skills. We don’t work as much on data, [00:24:00] even though it could increase the number of conversations easily by getting better data. I mean, say all of your data was for calling was data that told you that these are people who answer the phone. Or their actual propensity to answer the phone.

[00:24:15] Chris Beall: Now we actually have that data in ConnectAndSell and it’s automatically integrated into every [00:24:20] calling session, but it’s still one of those things that management pays less attention to than they do to skills, at least with regard to lip service. I’m not sure how much attention is actually paid to skills.

[00:24:34] Chris Beall: Because I’m not sure that the breakdown of skills is actually done that cleanly. But here’s what I [00:24:40] said to my friend, a ChatGPT data analyst. The correlation with meetings is actually mechanical, in that direct amount is defined as, quote, pipeline that resulted from meetings set in cold calls using ConnectAndSell.

[00:24:55] Chris Beall: This is also true to a lesser degree with regard to conversations and connects. [00:25:00] Even though the score metrics, that’s the skills, have a weaker correlation with direct amount, they’re actually more interesting to me because the impact of skill scores on business outcomes is an unexplored research topic.

[00:25:13] Chris Beall: So let’s try the regression analysis with the score metrics and see what we get. Now, one of the [00:25:20] things when you’re working with generative AI, and I work a lot with ChatGPT and then some other GPT 4 turbo models that we’ve created. is, hmm, it’ll do anything you ask it to do. It’ll give it a shot. This is highly different from most human employees, especially [00:25:40] analysts that you work with.

[00:25:41] Chris Beall: If you say something to an analyst and they don’t really agree that that’s worth studying, you’re not going to get their best. I love the fact that there’s no complaint about rework. or delving in again, or correcting it and giving it another shot by this particular [00:26:00] bot data analyst. I think it’s huge because it lets me be more creative.

[00:26:04] Chris Beall: I can simply ask it to do what I want it to do, look at the results. I didn’t put a lot of mental energy into the mechanics of producing the results because That’s what it did. And I can be more reflective. I can think [00:26:20] more about what I’m seeing and what I’m learning. So, the data analyst here, when I said, hey, let’s do the scores, it says, that makes sense.

[00:26:28] Chris Beall: Ah, comfort to me. Focusing on the score metrics, the skills, to explore their impact on direct amounts will help us understand how rep skill levels influence business outcomes. Since [00:26:40] this aspect hasn’t been deeply explored, it could provide valuable insights. We’ll perform a multiple regression analysis using these score metrics as independent variables and direct amount as the dependent variable.

[00:26:53] Chris Beall: I’ll prepare the regression model and show you the results. Let’s proceed. And then it goes ahead and does the analysis. [00:27:00] Now, if you’re like me, you probably could do a multivariable, multivariate regression analysis. With some effort. Using Excel. I don’t know how you might do it, but you could probably get it done.

[00:27:17] Chris Beall: This wasn’t much effort. I just said, please do it. [00:27:20] And here’s what I get. The results from the regression analysis using the RepSkill scores as predictors for direct amount are as follows. Regression summary. R squared. 0. 241. That means that about 24. 1 percent of the variability in direct amount is explained by the combined score metrics.

[00:27:39] Chris Beall: [00:27:40] Which indicates a moderate level of explanatory power. So this is really important, because even though skills, it turns out, are not highly correlated with outcomes, there are some things we can go after and try to make better. And 24 percent of your pipeline is a lot. So if 24 percent of the [00:28:00] variability in your pipeline, at least in this case produced from meetings, is explained by these score metrics.

[00:28:05] Chris Beall: Well, okay, it might not have been super strong, but it could be worth pursuing. And then there’s an adjusted R squared, adjusted for the number of predictors. And it indicates after accounting for the [00:28:20] number of variables, the model explains about 18 percent of the variance. So less than 24%, still not zero.

[00:28:28] Chris Beall: And think of it this way. If there is potential variance in the pipeline from 1, 000, 000 to 1. 18 million, or [00:28:40] some number like that, the skills could actually influence your ability to get that extra 180, 000 of pipeline. So these are not locks, by the way, because we really don’t have cause and effect here yet.

[00:28:51] Chris Beall: We have correlation, but worth knowing. And then it gives me the individual coefficients, [00:29:00] and the individual coefficients They tell you how statistically predictable these predictors are, that is, how wrong they are. So it says the greeting, opener, objections, assertiveness, and overall score are not statistically significant predictors of direct amount, as their p values are [00:29:20] greater than 0.

[00:29:21] Chris Beall: 05. That is, the p value means probability of the variance just due to Randomness. So, would you get the same thing over and over and over, or would it spread all over the place, so the p value is basically, say, percentage due to chance, eh, kind of high. The score [00:29:40] breakthrough, the breakthrough score has, get this, a significant negative coefficient.

[00:29:45] Chris Beall: with a p value of 043, suggesting that higher breakthrough scores might actually be associated with lower direct amounts, which is an interesting and possibly counterintuitive finding. Now this is the analyst, [00:30:00] the GPT analyst, telling me that this is interesting and possibly counterintuitive. So if you kind of think about that.

[00:30:07] Chris Beall: That’s pretty amazing that a bot that just knows how to spit out next tokens and next, effectively, words, would conclude that this is an [00:30:20] interesting and possibly counterintuitive finding. So I find it counterintuitive also, especially since I’m Kind of one of the people who came up with the breakthrough script.

[00:30:30] Chris Beall: And I would think following the breakthrough well would be a good thing, but maybe not, or maybe it’s only in the case where you’re trying [00:30:40] to follow the breakthrough and you fail that that’s a good thing. So again, we don’t know, but it pointed that out. The analysts pointed that out. The meeting score.

[00:30:49] Chris Beall: This score has a significant positive coefficient with a p value less than 001, it’s a really small chance that it’s due to chance, indicating a strong [00:31:00] positive impact on direct amount. This suggests that skills in securing meetings are crucial for achieving higher financial outcomes. Well, in one way, that’s well dubbed because if you don’t ask for the meeting, you don’t get the meeting.

[00:31:12] Chris Beall: But in another way, it tells you, hey, if you’re going to coach something, go coach that, asking for the meeting. That would, in sales [00:31:20] in general, be considered to be coaching for closing. There’s whole books on this subject, but I think it’s particularly interesting that the mathematical analysis says it’s kind of where it’s at.

[00:31:30] Chris Beall: And then the last one is professionalism, which also shows a negative coefficient. and p value close to the threshold for statistical significance, [00:31:40] suggesting a possible negative impact on direct amount. So, then it gives me an interpretation. We’re almost done. I hope that this was tolerable for you to listen to all this, but I thought it might be interesting because I’m going to go back and just go through the prompts and tell you how long this took.

[00:31:57] Chris Beall: I don’t think I could have done this kind of work if I’d been [00:32:00] left alone for a day, and I wouldn’t have trusted the results. I would have had to go back and check them. More than once. And then also, if I presented them to somebody else, they surely wouldn’t have trusted the results because they go, hey, Chris, these are your results.

[00:32:15] Chris Beall: So, here’s the interpretation. The most influential skills based on this model are [00:32:20] related to handling meetings, that is, asking for the meeting, and breakthrough moments in calls. With meeting skills being particularly critical for financial success. So, interestingly, one was positive and the other was negative.

[00:32:34] Chris Beall: This analysis suggests a selective impact of different skill areas on [00:32:40] financial outcomes, highlighting the importance of specific training and development focuses for sales reps. So now it asks me, would you like to delve deeper into any specific aspect of these results, explore other models, or adjust the analysis in any other way?

[00:32:55] Chris Beall: And I’m going to do a live demo right here, and I’m just going to add a prompt. [00:33:00] Let’s consider The impact on another financial metric, which is possible. Now, I’m testing it here to see if it can figure out that possible means possible amount. It does a great job. It says we will now analyze the impact of the REPS skill scores on another [00:33:20] financial metric, possible amount.

[00:33:21] Chris Beall: Possible amount means some conversation took place, and later,

[00:33:30] Chris Beall: So, what happens here? Interestingly enough, even if the conversation did not [00:33:40] lead to a meeting, you have the same correlations of the skills, the greeting, the opener, the objections, the assertiveness and professionalism to the outcomes, which is pretty much nothing compared to what Except for one thing, [00:34:00] professionalism has a strong negative impact on possible amount.

[00:34:03] Chris Beall: Now think about that. Isn’t that just fascinating? That you can be more professional and maybe you sound a little stiffer. Maybe you’re harder to trust. Anyway, it’s a strong negative impact on the possible amount and on the [00:34:20] amount directly from meetings. So I think that’s quite fascinating, and the breakthrough score is still negative, but it’s not as strong as professionalism, and the meeting score, asking for the meeting, has a positive coefficient on the overall amount, that is, whether it’s from a meeting or not.

[00:34:39] Chris Beall: Now, [00:34:40] we have to have a little bit of warning here. When you’re looking at results from any analysis, whether this kind done by a GPT model or done by hand, By an analyst, you have to be careful of certain things. So this particular analysis has a flaw in it. And the flaw is a kind of selection bias, and that is [00:35:00] the overall metric, which is, Hey, did you get anything in the pipeline at all?

[00:35:06] Chris Beall: Includes the metric from the meetings. That is, from the direct attribution from a meeting leading to the pipeline. So what I should really do is subtract out the, [00:35:20] uh, the pipeline that was generated from meetings and make sure that it’s not being included. And I could go ahead and do that even without reloading the spreadsheet.

[00:35:29] Chris Beall: I could ask the analyst to make up a new metric that subtracts the possible.[00:35:40]

[00:35:46] Chris Beall: So again, I’m going to recap the purpose in this whole exercise. The reason I’m doing this is just to show you that there are deep insights, or at least interesting insights that can be gotten much more rapidly than you might think. And I [00:36:00] think in a more compelling way, it’s easier to think about because you didn’t wear yourself out on the mechanics of the analysis, and you didn’t end up with the biases of your data analyst and just using a GPT model, like ChatGPT, and I recommend that the GPT 4 Turbo Model Data Analyst, just because I’m using it here.

[00:36:19] Chris Beall: I’m sure [00:36:20] there are others that are Equally good, and perhaps better, but using that in a simple way by loading up some data and then telling it what you’re trying to do. As I said, let’s analyze a collection of these results and look for a regression analysis to understand the impact of skills. On business outcomes [00:36:40] and just be guided by the response of the GPT model.

[00:36:44] Chris Beall: It comes back and says something, you ask another prompt and away you go. This entire process for me, the first time, I think, took 12 minutes. It would have taken me about a week. I get one pretty picture out of it, which is a correlation matrix, which I [00:37:00] can share with people. I get an analysis that I can share with a little copy and paste.

[00:37:06] Chris Beall: I got some, I can’t do this because the file has gotten stale. So I reloaded the file and did it again. The whole analysis again, I didn’t even have to tell it what to do other than let’s switch over to the possible amount from [00:37:20] direct amount. So, I hope this is somewhat enlightening. The main thing I want to do is, I want to encourage folks to use these large language models as their partner in reasoning through business situations and understanding them without relying [00:37:40] On a human analyst, you might take you a day, two days, five days, or forever to come back with results and may be injecting their own bias, either through selection bias or survivorship bias or something else.

[00:37:54] Chris Beall: And you can avoid a lot of arguments this way, get yourself some insights, and [00:38:00] then they’re packaged up nicely so you can discuss them with others. So a very different episode of Market Dominance, guys, but hey. We believe in data here and unanalyzed data. Well, it’s kind of like an unexamined life. Is it worth living?

[00:38:15] Chris Beall: We don’t know, but unexamined data or unanalyzed [00:38:20] data generally is not worth very much. So for Corey Frank, Enjoying Armenia and Chris Beall, this is Market Dominance, guys.

[00:38:37] Susan Finch: Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, [00:38:40] 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 successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world.

[00:38:56] Susan Finch: From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping [00:39:00] the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49. com. Never miss an episode.

[00:39:19] Susan Finch: Go to any of your [00:39:20] favorite podcast venues and search for Market Dominance Guys, or go to market dominance guys. com and subscribe.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Welcome to this special Market Dominance Guys compilation episode featuring highlights from some of our most downloaded episodes in the first quarter of 2024.

In these segments, Chris Beall and Corey Frank are joined by expert guests Shane Mahi and Helen Fanucci to explore critical topics for sales and marketing leaders navigating the evolving landscape of go-to-market strategies, data-driven targeting, and the impact of AI on authentic human connection.

You’ll hear eye-opening insights on the future of software development in the age of generative AI, why conversations are the often-overlooked key to unlocking your total addressable market, and how to coach reps effectively by providing immediate feedback.

Helen shares her framework for leveraging proprietary data to identify your best opportunities and align resources accordingly. The discussions also examine the challenges of territory assignment and the power dynamics of sales leadership.

Shane and our hosts dive into balancing the power of AI tools like ChatGPT with the irreplaceable value of genuine, trust-building conversations. And you won’t want to miss Shane’s story of how combining the entrepreneurial operating system with AI helped him rebuild his business in record time after previous setbacks.

These clips from Chris, Corey, Shane, and Helen will help you learn how to position your organization for market dominance through the right mix of data-driven strategy, technological leverage, and authentic human engagement.

Links from this episode:

Shane Mahi on LinkedIn

MEGA.ai

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Branch49

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn

Full episodes for this segment:
#10: EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots
#9: EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?
#8: EP213: Ethical AI Selling – Reality vs Hype
#7: EP208: Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales
#6: EP209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting
#5: EP214: The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity
#4: EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching
#3: EP211: Conversations Convert to Pipeline Power
#2: EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator
#1: EP145: Building Trust Must Always Be Step One

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

#10: EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots

The economy always gets reshaped around new capabilities in ways that surprise everybody who is thinking about it. So it’s never like that. This is going up and this is going down and it crosses or whatever. It goes along as it goes along with increasing efficiencies in certain areas until somebody innovates a flip and the flip turns it on its head and now it’s new, whatever the new thing is, and now you have the old way competing with the new way and the new way since it’s enabled by new material science. By that I mean a new capability that does tricks you couldn’t do before. It always wins, but it always starts where it has the obvious advantage. The skyscrapers are not out in the desert, they’re in Manhattan. It depends where you look, but once you get ’em going in Manhattan, I pretty much guarantee you the little three story building that you used to have that you had some offices in or whatever. First the offices go, then the condos and it’s all skyscrapers. Take a look at New York. It’s all up, right? Take a look at Des Moines. It’s a little up. Take a look at Scottsdale or Tenny. It’s just how it goes.

Shane Mahi (01:09:35):

You can even see in Dubai, Dubai was what? Flatland desert. DJ Khalifa Burj Khallifa is the biggest one up. And now, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the line in Saudi Arabia, same kind of concept, complete desert. Now there’s what, a quarter mile long, two pieces of glass inside a metropolis that is going to be heavily tech-orientated, flying cars, all kinds of weirdness. So if Saudi’s doing stuff like that, at what point do the outbound agencies or even tech companies realize we’ve got to kind of adopt the same kind of thing?

Chris Beall (01:10:08):

For sure.

Shane Mahi (01:10:08):

Who is that going to be? Chris, Chris and Corey. Who do you guys have your eyes out on in those markets who are going to be those game changers, those market shapers for AI and tech in our space?

Chris Beall (01:10:22):

Who I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t know and I don’t care. I know who the big early winner is going to be with ai. This is actually fairly simple. Microsoft pulled off a trick that nobody even thought of and that trick was to invest 10 billion to get an unlimited royalty free forever license to not only the tech, but all the learning that goes into it, all the training. That was a very good trick because they’ve always been in the business of helping folks build new things. And the most obvious thing about all this gen AI stuff isn’t what it does to sales, which is trivial. It’s what it does to what used to be called software development. Software development essentially is in the same state right now as a sugar cube is in a hot cup of tea. You can be pretty sure that game is over right now.

#9: EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?

Yeah. Is there a natural aversion to that or is it just Occam’s razor where it’s too simple? Or they’re going about a complex formula, methodology, and technology pathway. When you forget to dance with who you are, what are my prospects? What are my people in my TAM saying, what are the people in my ICP? What do they want? What pain do I solve? And gosh, if I could just have a conversation, not send them a survey, not send them an email, but actually have a conversation that can open up these veins of trust that that’s the key versus carpet bombing them with content, with white papers, with Gartner magic quadrants, and there’s no dialogue there. That’s monologue,

Chris Beall (15:20):

Right? This is kind of the awkwardness that I noticed in the entire thing. I’d asked this question, what if you could just talk to people? It’s like, oh, well, you can’t just tell Chris spiel that you can’t talk to people. That one doesn’t work. You can’t go down that road. I’m sorry. No, you can’t talk to people. Then it’s like, well, but you’d still need, and then they’d tell me that you’d still need, and I tend to agree. I mean, my thing I was telling folks is, look, I think all the digital stuff is fantastic, but why not cheat by starting with the conversation? You can’t get enough conversations for it to be worth cheating. And I said, well, isn’t go to a SDR or BDR world if you had 40 conversations a day with targets, that’s the equivalent of 40 targeted Google ads that caused somebody to go to your website. So that’s pretty good right there. What would 40 targeted Google ads to a vice president or whatever you’re trying to reach that actually caused them to go to your website, what would that cost? And they generally go like 30, 40 bucks each. Well, that’s $1,600 a day without any meetings of value that you’re getting from the advertising of just having conversations. Surely you’re not paying your BDRs $1,600 a day. There’s margin in there.

(16:39):

And the idea that, oh, talking to people could be a form of marketing that is, I think where the edge is. It’s almost like, but talking to that’s

Corey Frank (16:48):

Interesting

Chris Beall (16:49):

Light or something. If marketing can’t include talking to people nowadays,

Corey Frank (16:55):

It’s like bottled water. Hey, we’re out of water, we’re out of bottled water. We’re going to die of thirst. Well, what about this little thing called the tap? I tell my kids all the time. It’s like, Hey, dad, the ro, and we’re awa. It’s Arizona. You got springs all over the place. So sometimes I suppose we’re trying to overly complicate something where there’s conversations all around, but what do you say to that rebuttal if you can’t have enough conversations to make the math work? I think you and I would disagree on that, right? But is that where fundamentally the mindset is? Is that Chris? That’s cute. You can talk with a couple people, but I’m talking about sending out mass emails and segmentation, and I do more before 7:00 AM than you do all day with a conversation.

Chris Beall (17:37):

Well, I would say that that level of confidence is not what I was seeing at the conference. It was more like this, which is really, that seems unlikely. And I sometimes have my phone with our current statistics just for the day. I could go look at it right now and probably find how many conversations did we connect yesterday? So we have this thing that’s called daily dials, and if I were to look at daily dials, here we go, daily dials, I can probably find some numbers. And this is one of the things that I tend to do is just look at the numbers every morning when I get up. Actually, I’m kind of lazy, so I lie in bed and I reach over for my phone, and here I am looking at the Daily Dials report, and it said that ConnectAndSell customers had 19,352 conversations yesterday.

(18:35):

Not over some vague period of time, but literally yesterday. And out of those, say that they only set 1,679 meetings, and one of our customers sets lots of meetings. They set 983 with just one of their groups. Really, really kind of a good brand. So if I bring this up and I go, well see here, there’s this group of folks and it’s 242 companies, and they had 19,352 targeted conversations. It’s like, yeah, that’s them, but not everybody can afford that. And I’m thinking, well, wait. So I talked to somebody who does advertising, saying we wanted to send an ad or have an ad associated with all the online activity, the phone, particularly activity of everybody we talked to. So that’d be 19,432 people a day of everybody our customers talk to. Is that doable? Oh, yeah. And how would that work? Well, it costs you $20,000 a year minimum.

(19:32):

#8: EP213: Ethical AI Selling – Reality vs Hype

Certainly with your round table that you’ve talked with a lot of CEOs like Chris, but that authenticity, whereas as humans, we perceive those little subtleties and mood and those complex needs through a simple conversation. And when a tell happens from an ai, either Chris, to your point from a text or a bot, how do you combat that? Is that the racist to get as authentic as possible or because that’s where I think the Delta ethics happened. Chris is, wait a minute, I thought you were a real person, but now you’re a machine. So Shane, what do you think about that and bridging that gap?

Shane Mahi (00:23:29):

So Chris mentioned it yesterday and it drove a lot of the discussion, which was it’s the ability to tell the truth and just being truthful about anything upfront. And I used it when I started, and it comes from the 27 seconds, is the point of inoculation. And it’s stating a fact before somebody has that objection. And if you are using any type of artificial intelligence, computer robot, I think the most authentic, genuine thing to do is to tell the truth. And that comes from, Hey, this is a robot, Corey, I’d like to have a conversation with you. If not, would you like to be speaking to a human? You’ll then say, sure. The robot then has the advantage of saying, Hey, Corey, it’s going to take about five to six minutes to patch you through. I can probably get your questions covered in the next 45 seconds.

(00:24:18):

Do you want to have a chat with me or do you want to have a chat with the next person? And for me, that makes all the difference because time for a ceo, for a business professional is absolutely everything. And the ability to cut out that wasted time is everything. I’ll give you a quick example. I called, I mentioned it yesterday, right, Chris? I called Pizza Hut the other day and it took me six minutes to remove onions from my pizza because the guy kept battling from me that I said, you can’t just pick the goddamn onions off the pizza. I don’t like onions. And it was a nightmare. Now, had a bot just been able to say, Hey, which toppings would you like to add or remove if any? Just remove onions. My pizza’s at the door in 10, 15 minutes. And for me, again, the truth allows that time to be shortened, which gives you more opportunity to take care of other things that are most important in your life.

(00:25:13):

And another thing that I think is really important, I just watched it the other day, and that point you made on authenticity and being genuine and the truth. Mackinac, I’m sure you both have seen that. I had no idea. I think Sam Altman is an ex Mackinac that’s swear God, because when that person, the robot locked the door, obviously it’s playing with the guy. I’m a sucker for women, absolute sucker for women. So if I was in one of those situations and they were manipulating me without knowing it and putting the love spot, well, were you really interested in me? He’s lying to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to get out. That is where everything changes for me. And now after seeing that movie, I’m wondering, Chris is very smart, Cora, you are very smart. Are you going to start peeling off your skin one day and saying the same thing to me?

Corey Frank (00:26:11):

Well, but I think that’s part of it. It’s a brilliant point. I love the trust thing

#7: EP208: Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales

(8) If there’s skepticism or resistance from sales teams or clients towards AI tools like ChatGPT, how do you recommend addressing these concerns?

Well, a couple of different ways. There will always be skepticism about new technology. There should be. New technology means new, it’s unproven. We’re not sure what it does. Really, really cool technology that makes you think something that’s not actually true. Like, hey, ChatGPT is a person who’s talking to me. That’s not actually true. Hey, ChatGPT is thinking about this. That’s not actually true. It’s the next engine. It knows a lot of stuff that it’s read so to speak, and it knows how to spit out the next token, think token word, very similar concepts. And so when ChatGPT is talking to us so to speak, it’s really just going next, next, next. Now maybe our minds work like this too, and our voices work like this.

Chris Beall (18:52):

I have a feeling we do a lot of next, next, next, ourselves. It’s just the way the world is. We love to think that we’re really brilliant, having deep, deep thoughts and all that. Probably not. We’re probably just spitting out the next word that comes to mind. That’s why we call it. And so its natural skepticism is natural. The way skepticism is overcome is through two things. One is transparency, it let’s be open about things. And the other is track record. So if the track record is good, and we note that over time some particular function, and I’ll go back to those conversations where you take a discovery meeting, and the AI compresses it down to 10 points. Well, the first time I read one I might think maybe it’s missing some things. By the time I’ve read a hundred of them, which only takes me a hundred minutes that I might’ve spread over a couple of weeks, I’m starting to go, Hey, I think this is pretty good.

Chris Beall (19:47):

I don’t have any big misses yet. But it just takes time. It takes time, and it takes experience. This is why the most skeptical people who are really, really smart plunge in and start experiencing what I call in anger or with an intent for a meaningful outcome, a new technology that is clearly as powerful as ChatGPT and all the things that are like it. So if you haven’t gotten in there and put your hands on it, so to speak, and made some mistakes, try writing some prompts and seeing what happens. Don’t just do the same thing over and over. Your skepticism only will go away appropriately and correctly with experience that leads to a track record because now you kind of know where the landmines are.

How about question number nine, future trends.

#6: EP209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting

(Not this one – it’s another short compilation episode)

#5: EP214: The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity

We picked the most lovely industry to go into, and that’s telemarketing and cold prospecting. And what was it? And the only reason that I was able to get to the truth faster was because read about Daniel Disney when the pandemic hit found, cog found ConnectAndSell, bought Cog, bought ConnectAndSell, spoke with Gerry, did Flight Scool, had seven meetings in six hours, and that’s where it started. It was the ability to have your script, be honest, open, and just get into those conversations. And by doing that fast, quickly, efficiently, and at scale, we were able to progress our business much faster, I think, than a lot of people. We actually had 444% growth from year one to year two from using ConnectAndSell and implementing a system called the Entrepreneurial Operating System™ by Gino Wickman.

(00:35:15):

Now the authenticity of our brand, and even what is happening right now, came from all of the mistakes we made. And those are typically our storytelling, selling mechanisms, the mistakes we made and the path we took got us to a place where we made all those mistakes, learned everything, and served customers. I obviously lost my business because of some bad decisions I had to let go of my business, A lot of bad decisions. But I’ve recreated my business. That took me three years in three months with the use of ChatGPT. And why is it because I prompted all of my problems, all of my stakes helped me build a business plan that bypasses these mistakes and gives me the outcomes I’m looking for in half the time. And in that now, my marketing, my messaging, emails, prospecting, research, everything that, again, like you said, rightfully so, anything in the future is anxiety.

(00:36:12):

Anything in the past is regret. The only thing that matters is right, right now. And what’s happening right, right now is yes, you better get on board because AI is happening. As much as you are worried about what can happen 5, 10, 15 years in the future, that shit is going to happen whether you like it or not. So it’s either get ahead of the curve or get with the curve, or you are going to be that. They’re just bums, bums who want to stay behind and complain and say, this is going to ruin me. This is going to take my job. Get with the program, dude, get with the program. Start using it. I was a novice, an absolute novice using ChatGPT when it first came out. The only thing that drew my attention was a hundred million users in one week for that alone. I was like, all right, let me see what this is about. I’m a novice still to this day, but the amount of times I’ve set up till three in the morning, six, seven hours, prompting, prompting, prompting to the point, the only reason I went to bed is because it said, you’ve maxed out your attempts. You can’t use us anymore.

Corey Frank (00:37:13):

You finished the internet, you exhausted ChatGPT.

Shane Mahi (00:37:18):

That’s right, and that happened multiple times. And my knowledge comes, which is why I believe podcasts, even to the education of AI and ethics and sales and marketing, everything behind it has come from listening and watching podcasts. That’s the only reason I was able to learn.

#4: EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching

CLIP 1:

So that’s really key to getting coaching to work. The coaching has got to be immediate. Most coaching is way, way, way, way too late. Coaching somebody on Friday I about a performance they had on Monday, don’t bother. It’s just not going to get anything done. This is where I think managers often confuse what I’ll call deal work with coaching. They think that they’re coaching, they’re actually talking through how a deal might go, what some tactics and techniques might be, and they get an agreement from the rep to do something better, different whatever in the next interaction that they have with the prospect. And that feels like coaching, that’s more like advising and it’s nice and it’s important unless it’s just war stories. But coaching is really to improve performance and you need to have the performance and the coaching and the performance and the coaching be very close to each other in time.

Chris Beall (16:28):

Minutes are okay, not very many minutes, hours are too long and a week may as well be forever.

CLIP 2:

got to have a chance of listening for the same thing over and over. So it’s really, really important to do it. But most of what’s called coaching isn’t really coaching, it’s kind of advising it’s too far after the fact.

So if you can figure out ways, be listening behind the scenes, coming in and whispering to somebody immediately after a conversation and helping them perform that little bit better on first failure, you’ll find over time that and fairly short amount of time that what you’re hoping for in the bottom line, which is conversion rates, small number of conversations, leads to a bigger number of meetings, and a larger number of meetings are being set per rep hour, which is the key number. You’ll find that stuff improves on its own. So start from the beginning, you’ll get to the end. Eventually, you’ll get some great results

#3: EP211: Conversations Convert to Pipeline Power

Because let me tell you, if you think you know, you’re fooling yourself, you’re fooling yourself. If you aren’t getting feedback from the market through conversations at a short enough cycle time and a high enough frequency, you’re just guessing and your problem is competitively, somebody else might choose not to guess. And I think Helen’s going to help her clients choose not to guess.

Corey Frank (08:33):

And so with that, the helping knuckleheads like me choose not to guess. Where do you start, Helen, right? I’m a small mid-size VP of sales. I have a decent patient board. I have a SaaS software product. I got some funding. I think I’m doing everything right. I have enough people, I get more people as soon as I start proving myself and go to the board. So I think I’m doing okay, but where would I start with something like this? With people’s power?

Helen Fanucci (09:05):

I would start by looking at the data that you currently have in your CRM system or whatever your system of record is to find out one, where you’re winning, who you’re winning with, what types of people are making the buying decisions as a business. You may or may not already know. That depends on how you have been crawling through your own data. So I’d start there to look at the current state and try to draw some conclusions or at least illuminate where resources are aligned and are they aligned to where you’re currently winning or are they misaligned? So I would start looking at the current state to build a hypothesis of what you could do more of to accelerate your revenue, and it might be repositioning some resources to an industry that you’re doing well at or trying to then going to find people. Let’s say you have some folks that make the decision, so you have some champions or economic buyers, what do they have in common across each other?

Helen Fanucci (10:24):

And I don’t just mean job titles, but the characteristics. You can look on LinkedIn and see what the characteristics of those and then go find some more like that within a defined addressable market or where you think you want to go. I think some of those things are places to start. This begins to get the closed loop feedback here. You have data, you have some results and dispositions from your go-to market, even if it’s closed loss or not now, not interested, what have you. So trying to apply current data to then make some recommendations of how to move forward. The other thing too is what information do you have or that you capture that’s proprietary to you? Because they can’t build a defendable market dominance position on publicly available information. So what is it that you’re collecting or that’s proprietary and how do you get more of that that’s relevant to your business? And I don’t know if that’s something in my experience anyway, that’s not really a deliberate thing that people put. Time sort of happens and some people have more insights into their customer set, but doing that in an organized fashion to build up insights that your competitors don’t have, or at least that’s proprietary to you, makes a lot of sense and differentiating yourself and defending your position in the market.

#2: EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator

Helen Fanucci (22:01):

One of the things that was interesting is this idea of territory assignments, and we have a rep that has a locked in territory and people, I guess feel a comfort zone with that versus well, okay, here you have maybe 10 accounts, but all the other unnamed accounts are fair game and they go to whoever gets a meeting in those accounts. It’s so interesting to see how anxious or irritated people are by having an open territory concept. It’s like everyone wants to have their patch defined, locked down so they can pursue it as they wish. So is that going smaller and smaller? It probably is, and it was just fascinating to me to observe the dynamics around that and the discomfort with having all these accounts that were fair game for anyone to go after. I wonder if you have seen that much in what your thoughts are about that, but when you talked about the shrinking world or shrinking view, that’s kind of what I was thinking about is, yeah, you can zero in, but then you lose sight of what’s possible where you’re not looking.

Corey Frank (23:21):

Yeah, it’s funny. I think it’s probably the same reason why a lot of sales reps have the security of a bloated pipeline. They can’t disqualify folks in this particular quarter. Hope Springs eternal that this person will always close for this angst, this fear that if I keep sending them touch base emails, not picking up a call and having a conversation, not promoting something new, that I’m seeing what’s happening in the world from 40,000 feet that’s relevant or German to them. But if I simply do touch base emails, which is the equivalent of did you decide on choosing me and giving me your money yet? Or is there a better option that’s out there? But that’s why pipelines remain large. I can see that there is certainly from the team that all three of us collectively and Broaden knows we’re a sales organization. The bigger, the more states I have, and Chris, you and I have talked about this when it comes to people too, if you’re a sales manager, the more people I have under my purview, under my fiefdom, certainly the more prominent I am, I guess the more secure I feel. You probably saw this a lot at some of the larger companies you were with Helen, right? Is how many headcounts are under your particular p and l, and that somehow is a status thing.

Helen Fanucci (24:33):

Well, it’s power. You have more resources as a sales leader. You don’t have a budgeta compared to headcount. So headcount is more resources. It is a version of power to be able to get bigger revenue, bigger quotas, because headcount always comes with bigger quotas. The more headcount, the more quota. So if you’re willing to take that on, great. Why not?

#1: EP145: Building Trust Must Always Be Step One

(not this one – this was a small topic compilation episode that continues to be their top episode for over a year!)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall unveils the ultimate sales KPI: pipeline dollars generated per rep hour. This metric is a game-changer for CROs, CFOs, and CEOs looking to optimize their sales efforts and drive business growth. Chris explores the importance of measuring and maximizing this KPI, sharing insights from ConnectAndSell’s own data and revealing the significant potential of a well-executed market dominance program. He breaks down the different types of attribution, ideal conversation and meeting rates, and optimal prospecting hours per week. Whether you’re a sales leader aiming to improve your team’s performance or a C-suite executive seeking to understand the economics of your sales efforts, this episode will help you discover how pipeline per rep hour can help you take your company’s revenue generation to new heights.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

[00:00:00] Chris Beall: Hey everybody, Chris Beall with Market Dominance Guys with an episode about a bunch of numbers, a bunch of KPIs. And I decided since it’s just going to be numbers I’d leave Corey to do something more useful than ask me questions about numbers.

[00:00:16] Chris Beall: So, I came up with the questions myself and [00:00:20] I’ll play you with them. It’s right now, the 4th of April, 2024, right before Tax Day. And I was speaking last week, had the pleasure of speaking with Mike McCracken, the Founder and CEO of McCracken Alliance Partners, who provide all the information. amazing help with regard [00:00:40] to finance things, not just taxes, which is that’d be fairly straightforward, probably, although they can be complex, but really how to make your company sing, how to make your company dominate even with the help of financial professionals who know what they’re talking about and who will work with you to make [00:01:00] some stuff happen that you probably didn’t believe could happen.

[00:01:03] Chris Beall: So I asked Mike a question. I said, Hey, Mike it kind of bothers me that ConnectAndSell, which primarily has two impacts on companies that one would think CFOs would be interested in. One is immediate increase in pipeline, and everybody [00:01:20] knows that pipeline is a leading indicator of future revenue, and CFOs sure like to be able to forecast future revenue with

[00:01:27] Chris Beall: greater accuracy, specificity, and fidelity. And then it also allows you to decrease costs immediately because you can do more with less. And [00:01:40] less tends to be unnecessary headcount, extra headcount. You can also do more with more if you’re in the mood to do that. But in any case, there’s an efficiency play and capital efficiency is of great interest to CFOs.

[00:01:51] Chris Beall: And Mike, he gave me a great answer. He just like, boom, hit me between the eyes. He said, Chris, you gotta come up with a KPI that [00:02:00] is meaningful to CFOs, that’s meaningful to the business. And I said, well, we have one of those, and it’s called Pipeline Built Per Rep Hour. And I thought, as I was out doing my little barefoot trot today, getting the usual comments from folks, what is it about going barefoot that makes everybody think that you’re weird?

[00:02:19] Chris Beall: I [00:02:20] don’t know. In any case, I was out there trotting along in beautiful Arizona sunshine, and thinking, why don’t I just say what some really good values would be for some, KPIs, some metrics that folks tend not to think about very much. And so I, I just thought I’d share [00:02:40] some we measure at ConnectAndSell what we call attribution, and we measure three kinds.

[00:02:47] Chris Beall: So one kind is what we call direct attribution. That’s looking at all the pipeline that’s been built directly from meetings, appointments that were set in, ConnectAndSell. We know that happened because there are [00:03:00] dispositions that indicate that a meeting was set and there. Certainly is pipeline out there to be measured, and you can link it together a number of different ways.

[00:03:09] Chris Beall: The most straightforward is by the account name, by the customer name, and you can say, hey, set a meeting with somebody. Pipeline shows up later. How much pipeline? [00:03:20] What stage is it in? And you get a pretty good read on what you’re prospecting is accomplishing in terms of dollars of pipeline. That are being set by your reps, but what’s in the denominator and the big question that I think really is out there for all of us who care about prospecting and anybody who doesn’t care about [00:03:40] prospecting, certainly they either got some other weird kind of magic going on.

[00:03:45] Chris Beall: Or and bless you if you do, right? You don’t need prospecting, you’re in a special place. But most businesses need prospecting. And, in fact, Jason Lemkin just wrote an article this week talking [00:04:00] about how the new KPI for venture finance companies, not just net retained revenue, not even just gross retained revenue, all the stuff that’s about, oh my God, what if we lose a customer?

[00:04:13] Chris Beall: We got to keep them all very conservative sort of way of looking at the world. It’s about your [00:04:20] ability to add new customers. Well, add new customers is what prospecting is all about quite frankly. So now we have tied prospecting to the new, most important KPI that venture capitalists care about, which is adding new customers.

[00:04:37] Chris Beall: It actually made me go take a look and I [00:04:40] was pretty happy with what I saw for our company. It was interesting to see, a little bit more than a hundred percent new customers added over the last year. Some of which have come through partners who are working on an appointment setting basis, and they’re doing things for companies that would rather have somebody else do it, most of which are [00:05:00] customers of ours that are having ConnectAndSell help them do prospecting so they can get new customers and get new pipeline in a reasonably efficient way with predictability, visibility, and control.

[00:05:13] Chris Beall: So that’s really interesting. Pipeline is the number that we tend to look at. [00:05:20] And new customers are a, another number. I’ll call those numerators. But what should we be looking for in the denominator? Well, I’ll go to pipeline right now. We measure something called pipeline per rep hour. And we measure it, as I said, one way, which is what we [00:05:40] call direct attribution.

[00:05:42] Chris Beall: That means came from meetings. We measured it another way, which is came after positive conversations. Positive conversations are like, I’m interested, send me information, that sort of thing. And then, there’s the pipeline that comes from any old conversation. So any old conversation could be a negative [00:06:00] conversation, could be a blow off.

[00:06:02] Chris Beall: The fact of the world is, when you talk to somebody, they’re more inclined to take a look at your website. And they’re much more inclined to answer that email that you wisely sent them that says thank you for our conversation today and also much, much, much more inclined to actually speak with you if you call them in the future [00:06:20] because you’ve already demonstrated that they answer the phone.

[00:06:23] Chris Beall: And it’s more likely to be a good conversation because you’ve had a conversation, however brief, and you can open the next conversation effortlessly with what you wanted to say, but kind of didn’t get to say. How to, start that next conversation is something you make [00:06:40] available to your future self and in a set it and forget it kind of way, you become a sales genius.

[00:06:46] Chris Beall: But what’s in the denominator? Okay. So there’s pipeline measured three ways. In the denominator. must be, it seems to me, the number of hours that reps spend prospecting. Now, I venture to [00:07:00] say most of us have no idea how many hours our reps spend prospecting. And one of the, I think, appeals of the SDR BDR revolution is, hey, I’ve got reps that are just prospecting, so I can allocate all of their hours, I can tag all of their hours, categories, categorize all of their hours [00:07:20] as prospecting hours.

[00:07:22] Chris Beall: I don’t know if this is true or not, but I am sure that when somebody’s in a ConnectAndSell session and they’ve pushed the button, as we say, and they’re having conversations, that we have verifiable time spent prospecting. And that’s a cost to the business. Those reps cost money. [00:07:40] They’re fully burdened rate is whatever it happens to be that can be burdened with just the usual, but you could also throw in all the tools and technologies and data and all that kind of good stuff you have to provide and you can get an idea of what a rep costs you per hour.

[00:07:56] Chris Beall: You can, if you know how much pipeline was built by that [00:08:00] rep, by each rep, in each hour, and you know it in all relevant ways, one way would be directly through meeting set, that’s the one that most folks will measure, if they measure anything, by the way. Another one is positive conversations that lead to pipeline.

[00:08:15] Chris Beall: And another one is the really the good one, this you probably [00:08:20] won’t believe, but it is the best KPI. Is. Pipeline built per hour from any conversation. You don’t know what really has happened. A lot of stuff kind of goes out into, I’ll call it sort of the action cloud. That is what’s going on out there when someone has been spoken with by [00:08:40] one of your reps.

[00:08:41] Chris Beall: You don’t know. They can, that person, that target. They could talk to somebody else. They could go to your website. They could have a thought about what it is you do. They could check out you and your competitors, which is not a bad thing, by the way, if they haven’t been thinking about a solution in your space.

[00:08:56] Chris Beall: They certainly can answer an email or at least [00:09:00] read an email that you send them. So there’s a lot of things that can happen. You can advertise to them. A lot of things can happen after a conversation. But the pipeline is pretty easy to measure. It comes right out of your CRM. Opportunities are there.

[00:09:11] Chris Beall: They’re in stages. Therefore different accounts, and you know that you talked to somebody at that account. Certainty is not the goal here. You can get [00:09:20] a perfectly good KPI without certainty. And, like all good data, you can measure it over time. You can trend it. And then you can go and correlate it to the final results, which is

[00:09:32] Chris Beall: ultimately bookings and then revenue and if you’re a kind of an ARR or MRR kind of company ARR and MRR [00:09:40] because those could be interesting too. So number one new KPI to pay attention to pipeline generated per rep hour, and I’ll give you some numbers that will sound different from what you might expect. I’m looking at the last year.

[00:09:57] Chris Beall: So today is I’m [00:10:00] treating it as the end of March, so sort of April of last year, which is 2023 to end of March 2024. And I’m looking at a fair number of companies, about 130 of them, that I have pipeline per rep hour measured for. So, a really good number, [00:10:20] a fantastic number, is also a really big number.

[00:10:24] Chris Beall: Some of these you kind of look at and you go, well maybe they’re a little early in the game, but some of them are pretty stunning in any case. So one of our customers, for instance, and I won’t say their name because they haven’t authorized me to do that. They sell deals in an [00:10:40] average of about $73,894. And the pipeline that they’re building per rep hour in the last year is $378,082 of pipeline per rep hour of prospecting.

[00:10:57] Chris Beall: Now, darn well they’re not paying any [00:11:00] of their reps. $378,000 an hour. Do we know what their gross margin is? So we’d actually be able to say how much money is coming in, do we think, from these deals. Do we know what the probability of the deals are? Do we know when the deals are going to close?

[00:11:14] Chris Beall: Yes, we actually do know all those things, and those are very interesting to break down. But the [00:11:20] first thing to know is , you got to generate pipeline across all the different stages with a lot of different cycle times when they’re actually anticipated to close, a lot of different probabilities in order to have business.

[00:11:34] Chris Beall: That’s just the way it is. So this is $378,082 an hour. The [00:11:40] next one down is a very large company that is pretty fascinating, actually, if you kind of looked at what they do. But their deal sizes are really big, like $2.77 million per deal. And they’re generating $265,047 of pipeline per rep hour. And now I’m going with the pipeline that [00:12:00] is from all conversations, not merely that came directly through meetings, although we could look at that, but this is, I believe, the true most important KPI to pay attention to.

[00:12:12] Chris Beall: So next is $258,586 of pipeline per rep hour, [00:12:20] $164,766. So let’s go down a ways. I’m going to get to a company that is at about number 30 on the list. So actually, I’ll go with our company, ConnectAndSell. How much pipeline do we generate per rep hour? So, our average deal [00:12:40] size is not huge. We do initial deals that are in the sort of $20,000 range.

[00:12:45] Chris Beall: There’s, some of them can be very large, some can be smaller, but we like to get started with folks in a way that really makes sense for their business. And we do a lot of prospecting. How much prospecting in that last year? A lot of prospecting. [00:13:00] 13, 578 hours of prospecting. That’s a fair amount to generate a fair amount of pipeline.

[00:13:10] Chris Beall: So when you look at it, that’s 132 million dollars of pipeline. So it’s $9,731 per rep. hour [00:13:20] of prospecting that can be measured. This is not taking all of the hours in the day for these reps. This is the hours they’re spending. in sessions where they’re pushing button, talking to a target, and then wrapping up, we call it, which is taking notes, setting the, that little teleprompter for their future self and [00:13:40] setting a disposition.

[00:13:40] Chris Beall: So, and we’re gaining intelligence as a company about all of these conversations and also separating out and segmenting the market into folks who answer the phone, we know answer the phone because we spoke with them and folks who haven’t answered the phone yet. Across all of those, of course I don’t, know why we wouldn’t do [00:14:00] this.

[00:14:00] Chris Beall: We measure their tendency to answer the phone across the entire community. We crowdsource that tendency to answer the phone and keep that current every day. Not for everybody, but for about 24 million folks that are worth talking to. We call it fast phone numbers. So all that intelligence is coming back.

[00:14:17] Chris Beall: But the other thing that’s coming back is [00:14:20] opportunities going into the CRM and those opportunities have dollar amounts associated with them. They also have probabilities and stages and all that kind of good stuff. But right now I’m talking about the most important KPI that’s probably new to you. And if you’re measuring this KPI already, pipeline [00:14:40] dollars per rep hour, I’m super impressed, unless you’re already a ConnectAndSell customer, in which case we’re measuring it for you.

[00:14:47] Chris Beall: And then you’re getting to understand it and break it down. We break it down for you, trend it, see how it’s associated with individual reps. Would you like to know that each rep that is doing prospecting [00:15:00] is generating pipeline, and how much? Because being able to do attribution to marketing spend is one thing, but being able to do attribution to what you’re spending on the actual folks that are out prospecting, that’s whether they’re SDRs and BDRs, or whether they’re account executives, in our case, it is a mix.

[00:15:18] Chris Beall: Everybody at ConnectAndSell [00:15:20] prospects. Big surprise, right? So when you look at all of your numbers and you think about your business, whether you’re a CEO, whether you’re a CFO, whether you’re a CRO, whether you’re a business development manager, a BDM, a SDR manager, a sales manager, a VP of sales, whatever you are, [00:15:40] this KPI is the KPI you should be paying immediate attention to. Now, once pipeline per rep hour, you’ve kind of simplified this production of pipeline, which is you either add more rep hours or you improve the pipeline [00:16:00] being set per rep hour by improving either the number of conversations and impact of those conversations. So conversations per hour, is important.

[00:16:10] Chris Beall: Now we’re going to go to the other end of the spectrum. What are the drivers, right? So the simple drivers are conversations per hour. Have more. What’s a [00:16:20] reasonable number of conversations per hour that makes sense to have? There’s a number somewhere between six and say 12 really can make a difference.

[00:16:31] Chris Beall: Our average over all of our customers last year is about 9. 4, but it’s highly varied because they’re using different [00:16:40] protocols. Some are connecting on live voice, some are connecting only when the target answers. But if you’ve got five conversations an hour going on with your reps, you’re probably doing pretty well.

[00:16:50] Chris Beall: Now they’re probably setting meetings. That’s direct attribution. How many meetings per hour is a good number. About half a meeting per hour is a great target. If you’re setting [00:17:00] half a meeting per hour per rep, you’re probably doing quite well. How many rep hours per week really depends on what your reps are doing.

[00:17:08] Chris Beall: If they’re SDRs, my view is they should be doing as many as they can manage. That number is probably about five or six a day. And I know it [00:17:20] sounds like it’s terrible talking to people for five or six hours a day. It’s actually pretty fun. As long as you don’t have to dial, navigate phone systems and do all that kind of junk.

[00:17:29] Chris Beall: So that’s that’s a number that is interesting in the SDR world. Not many people achieve that. Our reps at ConnectAndSell, they run at [00:17:40] about 5. 8 hours of prospecting per week if they are SDRs. And they run at about 2. 5 hours of prospecting per week if they are account executives. So you can see it varies.

[00:17:54] Chris Beall: The AEs are busy doing other things, but they find time to prospect. They tend to prospect together, by the [00:18:00] way. Together in time, not in space. They’re all over the place because it’s more fun. And because management then can talk about what we’re trying to do in this particular session and we can gain more insights than just the data might give us.

[00:18:15] Chris Beall: So this is about is it, this is a tough one, but I [00:18:20] would say for an AE two and a half hours a week prospecting, real prospecting measurable, probably get the job done. And for an SDR if you really want to dominate, you’re probably talking about five and a half hours a week. Then you’ve got, okay, all this prospecting, prospecting is going on.

[00:18:38] Chris Beall: Have we got the conversations [00:18:40] per week that are, or per hour that are happening? So we now know maybe 60 conversations a week on average, but again, very different between SDRs and account executives. And the same thing with dials that should be done for them. No rep should ever have to do a dial.

[00:18:58] Chris Beall: It makes no sense [00:19:00] whatsoever. Reps should push buttons and talk to people, or hey, if you can talk to people without pushing buttons, that makes sense too. So what do your conversion numbers need to be in order to make this happen? Well, there are two kinds of conversion numbers, cold and follow up. Cold should be North of 5 percent if you’re in a market [00:19:20] dominance program, but the main reason you’re talking to folks is to segment the market into people you can talk to.

[00:19:25] Chris Beall: Those who answer the phone and people you need to kind of go after a different way. Those who don’t answer the phone. For those who answer the phone on the first conversation, what we call a cold call, you’re going to be shooting for around 5 percent across all [00:19:40] of your reps. If you have a rep languishing at 2%, or then you have a skill issue.

[00:19:45] Chris Beall: If you have all of your reps languishing at 2 or 3%, you probably have a targeting issue. The issue is that either your target market is being chosen incorrectly, or more likely, your scripting is allowing that easy [00:20:00] exit where somebody just says, “Thanks, we’re all set.” Almost every cold call script has got a major flaw in it that is going to drive your conversion for cold calls way, way down.

[00:20:11] Chris Beall: Now, not to worry, even if your conversion for cold calls is way, way down, the money is actually in the follow ups anyway. So as long as you’re having enough conversation, say a [00:20:20] rep is having something on the order of 50 or 60 conversations with targets per week. That should be generating something on the order of 40 to 50 follow ups.

[00:20:31] Chris Beall: Follow up opportunities. That’s people we know answer the phone that you can talk to next week or more likely next quarter. And you can nurture through the 11 [00:20:40] quarters in the future it’s going to take for their company to finally want to do business with anybody. And that could include you because you’ve got the inside track.

[00:20:48] Chris Beall: So you’ve got a kind of a two distributions called bimodal around the conversion rate. So the conversion rate can be at 5 percent for cold calls and should be at north of [00:21:00] 10 percent for follow up calls. And that also will, interestingly enough, follow up calls reduce the conversations per week just a little bit, because they tend to be longer conversations, but everything kind of comes out in the wash.

[00:21:14] Chris Beall: So, how many conversations should you get, by the way, per dial that’s executed for you? Highly [00:21:20] variable, but the cold call world, about 5%. And in the follow up world, something around 12 or 13%. And then, when you kind of look at it overall, you’ve got dials going on, how many meetings should you have per dial.

[00:21:32] Chris Beall: I don’t think this is a particularly compelling, KPI, unless your reps are doing the [00:21:40] dials, but it’s kind of good to know. So a number of about 0. 6 percent is a decent number for meetings per dial. And after that, what are the drivers? So let’s figure out how can we make the number that we want go up?

[00:21:55] Chris Beall: Well, you can make your average deal size go up, but your market probably determines [00:22:00] that. So I don’t think you should push on that one, but that’s that one can be interesting. Mostly the big correlation, interestingly enough, and obviously Well, pipeline per rep hour, let’s just increase the number of rep hours and we increase the pipeline.

[00:22:18] Chris Beall: It seems too simple, [00:22:20] but it actually is the key to everything. The number one correlation between any of these KPIs and the number of dollars a pipeline produced per day or per week, or per month, whatever it is that you care about, it’s actually primarily driven by [00:22:40] simply prospecting time. And a little bit of prospecting time goes a long way.

[00:22:45] Chris Beall: If your pipeline per rep hour is big $100,000 or even $10,000, just add more hours to get more pipeline. But what if I want to get my pipeline per hour up also, not just [00:23:00] add more hours, but add more pipeline? What do I do? Number one thing to do is increase the percentage of follow up calls, follow up pipeline generating prospecting calls compared to cold calls.

[00:23:14] Chris Beall: For some reason, folks get obsessed with cold calling, which they don’t even like to do. And it’s [00:23:20] like, well, we talked to this person, talked to this person. It’s almost like scratching lottery tickets and hoping to get lucky and hope might be a strategy in the world of lottery tickets, not a great strategy in the world.

[00:23:31] Chris Beall: of Market Dominance. So what do you want to do? Well, you want to make sure that your reps are talking to people it [00:23:40] makes sense to talk to, and your follow up lists automatically are full of those people because they either expressed enough interest or your rep decided it was worth talking to them in the future, and they’re easier to get a hold of.

[00:23:53] Chris Beall: So that’s number one. Number two is fix your messaging so it resonates. Your [00:24:00] messaging probably is driving folks away because it contains too much value. And the value statements in your messaging, we do X and Y for companies like you, blah, blah, blah, are causing somebody to get to achieve their goal in the call.

[00:24:16] Chris Beall: Which is to get off this call with our self image intact by [00:24:20] simply saying, “Thanks, we’re all set.” So that’s the next thing you should do. Why should you do that before you change your targeting, your actual lists? For a simple reason. Until you, you really get there and get to a point where you’re confident that at least you don’t have a structural, psychological issue in your messaging, [00:24:40] then until you get there, you don’t really know how well it’s working for targeting.

[00:24:45] Chris Beall: That is, you can’t really tell what’s resonating. You can get lucky sometimes. But you’ve got to have what we call a calibrated message. Then you need to get at least one of your reps to the point when, where when they deliver the message it is, consistent. You’re going to get [00:25:00] consistent read. That comes back in the form of meeting set per rep hour.

[00:25:06] Chris Beall: So that’s, a good one. It also actually comes back in conversion rate, meeting set per conversation. So you need to get to the point where, yes, we know what that, that is, what the conversion rate is, and how it ties to the reps [00:25:20] time. Then we’re free to say, okay, now, what part of our list is this working well for?

[00:25:26] Chris Beall: And what part of the list is it not working well for? And you can do segmentation that is more fine grained than what you have today. This is actually a little bit tricky to do, but if you take the [00:25:40] folks that you’re setting meetings with, then you take them off to a company like Rev, at GetRev. ai.

[00:25:46] Chris Beall: Fred Mondragon was on one of those. Market Dominance Guys talking about this. You can have them point to a whole bunch of companies that are in this exographics way, in a significant way, similar to the ones that you’re setting appointments with. That is, [00:26:00] you don’t have to even wait until you’ve got a whole bunch of business.

[00:26:03] Chris Beall: You’re brand new, you’re going after a new market. What’s the first signal that says that you’re going to have pipeline built? It’s meetings set. So go and use that. You can also look at the pipeline that’s being [00:26:20] set in the CRM based on the conversations. That’s the, we call that the possible attribution.

[00:26:26] Chris Beall: So you have two very nice signals that you can use in order to improve your targeting. Once you’ve done all of that, then it makes sense to actually increase the amount of prospecting time. Until you’ve got it all calibrated, if you [00:26:40] just increase the prospecting time, you just irritate yourself and people.

[00:26:43] Chris Beall: And you actually, you can burn out a team and you can burn through lists in ways that don’t make a great deal of sense. And you can also trick yourself into thinking that you’re seeing things, positive and negative things, that aren’t actually there. You got to get to the data to see the reality. So, that’s that kind of [00:27:00] wraps it up.

[00:27:00] Chris Beall: That’s a whole bunch of numbers, but I’m going to come back to the main one. Pipeline dollars per rep hour is the KPI that you need to be looking at. And to do that to have that number to hand, you have to have a way of measuring the actual rep hours spent prospecting and [00:27:20] tying that to the pipeline that’s sitting in your CRM.

[00:27:23] Chris Beall: Again, it’s something we do at ConnectAndSell as a convenience for you. It’s just go ahead and hook up your CRM and we’ll measure this every single day and break it down all the way to the individual rep, or to the list, or to the team, or whatever it is that you want, and you’ll have that [00:27:40] KPI in hand, but without that KPI, it’s really, hard, unless pipeline dollars that are being built per rep hour, it’s really, hard to figure out the economics of a market dominance program.

[00:27:54] Chris Beall: So for Corey Frank, you got a day off, Corey, and Chris Beall, this [00:28:00] is Market Dominance Guys

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Corey Frank and Chris Beall are once again joined by Fred Mondragon for this final segment from their visit. In the first two episodes with Fred, the guys covered the topic of The Seductive Shadowboxing of CRM data – Fit vs. Intent, Then the other side was discussed – Intent, Fit and the Future of Sales intelligence.

In this final segment, the trio explores how Rev’s AI-powered platform is helping sales teams “find the zipper in the weasel suit,” transforming weasels into top-performing pigs. Fred explains how Rev’s “special purpose AI” leverages vast amounts of data to help reps identify and target their ideal customers, while Chris emphasizes the importance of engaging in trust-building conversations. Corey sees the immense potential in combining Rev’s AI targeting with ConnectAndSell’s powerful sales acceleration tools to solve the challenge of “Who do I go after next?” Join us for this episode, “Finding the zipper – helping weasels become top-performing pigs.”

About Fred Mondragon:

Fred, a senior sales and business development executive with extensive experience at SaaS software companies, joined Rev in 2021. He has managed revenue generation channels at numerous successful startups and large companies, including TimesTen, Oracle, and most recently, Medallia, where he set up the channel sales and alliances function from scratch. Fred received his B.A. and MBA from Stanford.

Links from this episode:

Fred Mondragon | LinkedIn
The Sales Development Platform: Find your next best customer | GetRev.AI

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank are joined by special guest Griffin McGowan, a recent college graduate navigating the world of sales job hunting. The trio delves into the challenges and opportunities faced by young professionals seeking to launch their sales careers, with a particular focus on the crucial role of mentorship. Griffin shares his experiences interviewing with various companies and the valuable lessons he’s learned, while Chris and Corey offer insights on what employers look for in new hires and the skills needed to succeed. The conversation also explores the idea that interviewees are not just looking for a job, but are essentially “hiring” a boss or mentor to guide them through their professional journey. Packed with wisdom gained from years of experience, this episode is a must-listen for recent grads, mentors, and interviewers alike. Join them for this episode, “New Grads: You’re the Product, Choose Your Buyer.”

Links from this episode:

Griffin McGowan on LinkedIn

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

Corey Frank (00:00):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank from Branch 49. And as always, the sage of sales, the profit of profit, the Hawking of Hawking, the CEO of ConnectAndSell Chris Beal. Good afternoon, Chris, how are you?

Chris Beall (00:16):

Hey, I just finished watching Oppenheimer. So that Hawking of Hawking thing goes pretty deep right now. I’m into physics.

Corey Frank (00:23):

Really? Okay, we’ll have to think of one that rhymes my alliteration for o the [00:00:30] blank of Oppenheimer of, I don’t know, origination. How about that? Sales origination. So Chris, we have a special guest. I think this is a first for us in our 230, 40 episodes plus of the market dominance guys, because we talk about at Branch 49 and certainly a ConnectAndSell is what you’ve helped us build. Here is the term uco, which is a finishing school for future CEOs. And today we have Griffin McGowan, [00:01:00] who is a future CEOI think from all senses and from what we know about No pressure Griffin, but we want to track your progress on LinkedIn here over the years. And Chris, you have an interesting story about how Griffin, and then we want to hear from Griffin about what stage in this finishing school are you at and what is this concept of [00:01:30] a finishing school and what are the pieces that maybe are missing or that Chris and I certainly can help contribute to newer folks who are entering in a profession. So welcome Griffin and Chris. How do we know Griffin and why is he in a hot seat here at the Dominus guys market?

Chris Beall (01:48):

Well, the short version of the story is I got fired. I can’t remember what day it was probably Christmas Eve or something like that from AP Par when they decided to sell the company. And [00:02:00] I said, we don’t need a senior vice president of product innovation anymore. Who does need one of those anyway, when you really think about it. But I had the job and so I was flying back from the east coast where I used to commute back and forth between here and the West coast and there. And I was sitting next to somebody that I just hit it off with and we had this great conversation for the six hours it takes to fly into the wind from one coast to another. And that was Brian McGowan, Griffin’s dad. [00:02:30] And we talked about venture capital and we talked about building businesses, we talked about all manner of things you can talk about a lot in six hours.

Chris Beall (02:37):

And so, okay, that was fine. And we did some things later. Brian helped us out at ConnectAndSell in the commercial real estate arena. Got us a great meeting with JLL. I learned that commercial real estate as a world, whether you just don’t care about their salespeople and so they’d hardly want to help them with something like ConnectAndSell. But it was fascinating and we had a thesis and we ran at it and had a great time. [00:03:00] And then a couple of years ago, Griffin, you can tell the story. Did you reach out to me? It had to be your dad basically saying, look, I don’t know very many good people in business, but I know this guy is semi okay but better than nothing. So why don’t you chat with them or something like that.

Griffin McGowan (03:20):

Yeah, definitely. So it was my junior year of college I was planning on doing an internship at a big company, but right after hopping out of Covid, a lot of the internships [00:03:30] I was looking at were online internships, remote, and didn’t believe I’d really get that great experience doing an online remote interview would be better to be in person in the office. So my dad thought of the idea, why don’t I put you through my own little just background of meeting with a bunch of people, understanding how business works, getting that little internship feeling. And one of the things he specifically focused on was [00:04:00] reaching out to his network. That’s huge. So that summer I spent probably two or three months talking to a hundred ish people like-minded individuals like yourself from CEOs, the CTOs to people just getting into the business world, just trying to understand and pick their rein a little bit, learn their background, get some recommendations. I wasn’t sure where I was going with my career yet. Was looking in finance, was looking in real estate, and was looking in investment banking. So it was [00:04:30] just trying to put together the pieces before graduation. And I know we got the chance to talk, you recommended some great books. I went through your background about getting into sales and now that I’ve graduated last May, I’ve chosen the path of going into sales, understanding business, understanding the sales cycle. So that’s where I ended up.

Corey Frank (04:51):

And you went to a great school at University of Alabama, right? In business school? Yes.

Griffin McGowan (04:55):

I graduated from the CulverHouse College of Business there. Big school, big football [00:05:00] program. So it was awesome going there.

Corey Frank (05:02):

Sure, sure. Well this will be good for Chris, for you and I because you got have great pedigree, you have great raw material and moving into sales, what Chris and I want to do is help understand what needs to be thrown out and what needs to be added to this arsenal of wisdom and knowledge and skills for the next couple of years or so as you establish yourself [00:05:30] in sales. So does that sound okay, Chris? I think that’d be fun to explore this with Griffin.

Chris Beall (05:38):

Sounds outstanding. And by the way, Griffin, I didn’t know you’d talked to so many people. I have to say I don’t know another person who has executed a summer program that’s got that kind of, I don’t know, range SPECT depth. I mean that’s a lot of conversations to ConnectAndSell. Our motto is that conversations matter. You went out and got [00:06:00] ’em that alone. I mean, who needs to interview you, right? I’d be done. It’s like, okay, well whatever that is, go do more of that, but do it on my team. I may actually poke you away from whatever it is that you’re going to be doing, but you probably want to work for a better company than ours. So

Griffin McGowan (06:19):

Yeah, my dad always kind of worded around the bigger the network you have, the more opportunities you have. He’s been my mentor through this whole process. So getting out [00:06:30] and talking to as many people made me more comfortable having conversations, even like this one, understanding background, picking up on some terms. So it’s just overall increased my education.

Corey Frank (06:43):

Well, the great Harvey McKay has, he’s always asked what is the one piece of advice as a new grad entry into sales or even any profession is the key to his success that he would empower on folks is your net work [00:07:00] is your net worth and the more you can focus on your net, the more that your net worth will be year after year. And I thought that’s a great piece of advice that he’s preached for many, many years. So let’s start Griffin with, I’m curious at the University of Alabama in the college of business, was there a culture, was there a mentorship [00:07:30] or an urging to move into the sales arena at a major university like this coming out of the college of business? Or was it business writ large as this behemoth, this nondescript entity of commerce in general?

Griffin McGowan (07:46):

So I would say it was business as a whole, depending on where you wanted to take that you can take certain classes that lean more towards others. At the time I was really undecided, so I wasn’t sure of the path I was going to take. I have friends and even colleagues now that kind of chose [00:08:00] more of the path going into real estate, going into finance, going directly into sales. So there’s so many classes that offer it. Even picking a nice minor, you can really dive down into it deep a little bit more. The mentorship was great though. The teachers were great. All the classes were perfect. At the time I went, the more broader route with the major was just trying to figure out the path I wanted to take.

Corey Frank (08:23):

Sure. No, I understand that. But it’s something that I think that Chris and I have seen and we’ve talked about a few times in [00:08:30] our personal conversations over the years is that business has nothing to do with sales. Of course it has everything to do with sales, but somehow most of these patriot universities will give you the imprimatur, the certificate, the diploma, the degree and say, okay, go forth, young traveler into the world with this business degree. But somehow that [00:09:00] this concept, this science of sales is something that is picked up on the street. It’s picked up on Instagram and 62nd first necessarily from the market dominance guys, right. Chris, wouldn’t you say?

Chris Beall (09:17):

Yeah. Well it’s really interesting. I mean I’ve been working on occasion, been privileged to get to do some stuff with Dr. Howard Dover at a University of Texas Dallas, who runs one of the greatest sales programs, [00:09:30] maybe the greatest university level sales program in the world. It’s truly about sales and they learn theory, they learn practice, they learn from really solid folks who know what they’re talking about. They learn from yahoos like me and it’s very sales-focused, which is interesting and unusual. I do think, and again, I never went to business school, physics was hard enough for me, business would’ve been completely [00:10:00] overwhelming, but I don’t have any experience with it directly as a student. But my impression has been business schools will nibble around the edge of sales, but they won’t hit it head on as a true discipline that you can learn deeply and that is hyper important.

Chris Beall (10:18):

Your entire career is going to depend on it. And yet when you go to the other end of the spectrum and you say, okay, let’s talk to a bunch of CEOs, one, they almost all came up through sales. It’s [00:10:30] unusual otherwise. And two, they have sales chops, they can hold a conversation with a stranger. I’ll go back to meeting Griffin’s dad. So you get two guys like us sitting on an airplane for six hours, well, you’re going to have a conversation and it’s going to be a comfortable conversation. It’s going to be far reaching. It had a lot of personal elements to it actually. That’s one of the things that you learn I think when you’re moving in business, moving [00:11:00] up, moving out and around is it’s okay to be a person, but you don’t have to be some sort of a statue or something, but you can be yourself and that’s going to be helpful.

Chris Beall (11:11):

That’s actually going to be part of the thing that you’re doing. So I think it’s all quiet, it’s fascinating. I think sales is starting to make its way into business schools formally, but it’s still considered to be more of an art that’s picked up in the rough and tumble than a science [00:11:30] that you can learn. You could learn finance and modeling and stuff like that, I guess is what I would call it. So to me, I’ve gotten an opportunity to talk to a lot of young people about their careers and older people about their careers. And I always say the same thing, which is that in business you’re responsible for helping folks get to a point where they can accept your help. That turns out to be a big part of business because everybody’s busy [00:12:00] and everybody’s busy doing whatever they’re doing. And if you can be helpful, you have to break through that somehow. It’s change management where it’s not your organization, it’s somebody else’s. And the number one thing you need is you need to be respected. And in the world of business, if you’ve never sold anything, it’s hard to get a lot of respect.

Corey Frank (12:23):

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, and the art of getting to the point where you’ve sold something, [00:12:30] we see this a lot, Chris, right? That people wander like a ship without a rudder from sales gig to sales gig to sales gig. It takes three, four sales gigs where they maybe have six months, 18 months in or before they settle or they find the one that they’re now going to spend the next 3, 4, 5 years in. And it’s as if they’re looking for something and then they settle for something [00:13:00] or it’s that, Hey, I wasn’t successful at the sales gig because my manager, the leads, the market, the comp plan, the commute, what have you. And they do that a couple of times until they realize, wait a minute, I think that I’ve realized what the problem is and it’s the person in the mirror and I better plant my feet.

Corey Frank (13:19):

And so what a lot of great sales, mentors, sales skills are out there on the market today. If there’s one thing over the last 15, [00:13:30] 20 years, Chris, it’s that there is no excuse for a new grad not to have education in this profession without spending the thousands of dollars that you would have to do for a sales certification for the price of a couple of overdue charges at your local library or for a YouTube subscription, which is free. You should have no problem imparting some of the basics. So let’s get into it. Griffin. So [00:14:00] you just interviewed with a number of companies, but particularly some of the interviews that you had just recently, I think Chris and I and the audience are curious of what are the type of questions for a sales role that the sales folks, leadership execs, peers, et cetera, we’re asking somebody with you, with your qualifications to find out if there’s a real snug fit in their organization.

Griffin McGowan (14:27):

So definitely, yeah. The first question of course they’re [00:14:30] going to ask is why sales? They want you to be able to understand that question and be able to express that question in a way that shows why you’re interested in it. Of course, they want to hire somebody that’s hungry for sales. And then that correlates into other questions about what skills do you possess that are like skills and then going into other questions about tough situations if you’ve dealt with in the past, either if it’s a smaller job or working as a professional job, just trying to pick your brain a little bit, ask [00:15:00] you those tough confusing questions and then really see if you’re able to bring up experiences and if you’re able to sell yourself, I would say

Corey Frank (15:13):

Anything surprising about some of the interview questions that you’ve been asked,

Griffin McGowan (15:17):

I would say some companies that I’ve interviewed at some of the questions are a little, I would say overcoming a tough situation. Some of the questions don’t correlate directly with sales. I [00:15:30] would say some of the questions are a little too out of the ballpark sometimes. I’ve had weird questions when it comes to tell us a time that you were last stressed out at work, which I understand how that would correlate to sales, but it’s more of one of those questions that I believe it’s if you search up the list of 25 basic interview questions, it aligns in that way.

Corey Frank (15:54):

Well, that’s interesting. Let me ask you, and Chris can chime in on [00:16:00] this, but from your perspective, Griffin, from this hunt, this searcher on to find the next gig in the profession of sales, do you think that it is more nature or more nurture to succeed in the profession? And what do you think of the folks who are interviewing you at these larger companies, what do you think they think the answer to that is? And I’d love Chris’s opinion on this as well.

Griffin McGowan (16:30):

[00:16:30] I would say it’s both in the middle of that nature nurture. I think you really have to be driving and outgoing when it comes to it. And I would say the most difficult part about interviewing for a sales job is since Covid, we’ve noticed that the interview process has turned into online interviews not as much being held in person. And I think it’s difficult to be able to sell yourself through a Zoom call and especially go through all these interview processes. It just doesn’t work as well. I think more in person is where [00:17:00] it aligns.

Chris Beall (17:03):

Well, I’ll jump on that. I mean this whole zoom thing has been fascinating to me. For one thing, we’ve been running this company remotely since 2014, so we got pretty used to not being together because I couldn’t, I wanted top talent and I didn’t want to pay for two floors of an office building that was a long commute to get there and kept the top talent far away where I [00:17:30] could get ’em anywhere. What I learned through that process is it’s possible to be very human and very open and vulnerable and to have fun with people, whether you’re in person or whether you’re on a zoom, but you’re going to have to bring it. It’s you who has to bring that, we’ll call it the softness, a willingness to have fun with people even though you’re a [00:18:00] long distance away and you don’t get to sit down right with them.

Chris Beall (18:02):

And in a way it’s almost easier. But you’ve with that attitude and as Corey, my approach to talking to people is just to talk to ’em and see what happens. One of the things that I posted about this yesterday, I think one of the things I think is weird about sales and weird about a lot of business is there’s this idea that we should know the outcome of the conversation before we start the conversation. That is the purpose of the conversation [00:18:30] is for me to get what I want. You decide to sign the contract or whatever it happens to be. That’s the hopefully foregone conclusion. And yet the beauty of conversations is they always offer an opportunity to discover something that’s completely unexpected and that’s where new value shows up. So I’m wondering, Griffin, did you feel like in any of these interviews that anybody was trying to let the completely unexpected come out of your mouth?

Chris Beall (19:00):

[00:19:00] Or did you feel like there’s going, okay, one from column A, one from column B, which was it, and then they’re going to go talk about you among themselves and say, well, this area was like this and this area is like this. Whereas you could imagine folks talking about something and going, oh my God, that guy was just like it was to be in the same room with them and there’s going to be a lot of sales on Zoom. We better pick this guy up. So what did you feel like? Were they checking boxes or were they having [00:19:30] fun?

Griffin McGowan (19:31):

I would say it’s a lot of checking boxes of what I’ve noticed that you can tell the questions that they’re asking. You can see them staring to the screen next to them and you can hear them on the keyboard or writing on the side, taking notes. I would say a lot of the interviews are structured like that. They’re given a set of questions to ask, seeing how you respond to them and then formulating and talking to the team after to come up with more of a conclusion. I would say only some of the interviews I’d have that I’ve seen more really [00:20:00] just trying to understand you as a person by just having natural conversation with you. Some of it seems just very robotic.

Chris Beall (20:08):

Fascinating.

Corey Frank (20:10):

Have you been, again, without naming certainly any of these names, but when you’ve interviewed at some of these larger organizations, have you sat in awe of the person who is interviewing you and thought, my gosh, this is a scientist, [00:20:30] this is a master craftsman, this is somebody who I want to emulate, epitomize rise to that level from how they handle themselves and the charisma, how they light up a room, albeit virtually how they have the master of the art of the conversation? Or has it been candidly, maybe fairly underwhelming when you think of these large organizations should have the best rock stars on planet earth?

Griffin McGowan (21:00):

[00:21:00] I think it’s a mixed batch of both. I’ve applied for smaller companies and soft and tech. We’re all the way up to bigger companies and it depends who you talk to. There’s definitely been people that I’ve talked to that I’ve been blown away by wanting to work right under them, even viewing them as a mentor, even just having a 20 minute conversation with them. And then other account executives I’ve talked to that just sound robotic that you wouldn’t even think they were in sales in the first place. So it’s bouncing around. Within those interviews, [00:21:30] you’ll talk to somebody that’s a rockstar, then you’ll talk to somebody that was just trying to get through the interview, hit all the boxes and just do their job.

Corey Frank (21:39):

Well, first of all, love to hear that. I think that’s one of the pieces that I think that I’ve learned from Chris over these 20 plus years of knowing him and as a mentor. And one of the pieces of advice that I received early on is you choose your boss, you’re hiring for a boss and [00:22:00] a mentor as much as you’re hiring for the job and whether it’s a small organization, but somebody who’s a dynamic esteemed craftsman, I would take that even at less pay than going for the resume builder, which I think would be the traditional VC funded company, Chris, right? With the fast track and the folks who are going through the robotic mentor, and sometimes we chase the vanity metrics of what shows on our LinkedIn or our resume [00:22:30] versus really what’s going to do the best work to build our network down the road. Chris, any thoughts on that? Well,

Chris Beall (22:38):

To me it’s the whole game. I mean, the fact of the matter is there are some people that are just dynamite to work with where the freedom that you have to bring your best out to explore well so you’re going to be held to a high doing standard. That’s a good thing. And my standard, which is if you’re joining in order [00:23:00] to advance your career, I’m going to fire you immediately anyway. So that’s not going to work out. We’re going to actually accomplish something together and it better be something almost everybody would fail at, and that’s the fun of it. If that’s fun for you, then let’s go do that thing. If it’s not, then it’s probably going to be worse than you think. So the question of what are you getting? I mean, you’re actually buying something when you take a job with somebody, you’re buying that boss.

Chris Beall (23:30):

[00:23:30] That’s what you’re buying. What are you buying them with? You’re buying them with a chunk of your career with time and time you can’t get back. So it’s a very important purchase that you’re making. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that when you are looking around for companies to join up with and people to work with, you’re the buyer. They think that they’re the buyer. Trust me, it’s like when you’re raising venture capital, you are the product. [00:24:00] They don’t have the product. All they have is money and time. It’s not that interesting, but you’re the product, you’re the differentiated offering. That’s why they have to talk to so many and you may have to talk to a lot of them. They got to talk to more of you. So I think it’s the same kind of dynamic that, and I think it’s when times are tough for getting certain kinds of jobs.

Chris Beall (24:20):

And Griffin, you mentioned before we started, this is not the easiest time in the history of life to get a sales job. A lot of people are going, Hey, give me somebody with the big Rolodex [00:24:30] or give me somebody who’s got the depth of my industry or whatever it is that they’ve got going on and they’ve been doing cuts. And so especially in the SDR kind of end of things, which has become the traditional entry point, teams have gotten smaller. I don’t know if the standards have gotten higher, they should, but the number of opportunities and the flow rate has gone down a little bit. But I think the most important thing for anybody to remember is that you’re purchasing that boss. Now, one of the [00:25:00] challenges I’ve always had with big companies and why I haven’t worked for a lot of them is you don’t know what’s going to happen to your boss.

Chris Beall (25:08):

Your boss is going to get reorged to some other part of the world. My wife Helen had a deal at Microsoft where she ended up with a switch out of bosses and it just became untenable. And then she managed to get back to the previous boss and then they reorged around something completely new, which is all this AI stuff. And [00:25:30] here she is now starting her own company. But when you think about it, that’s what you’re buying. You are purchasing a boss and you’re purchasing them for as long as you want to get ’em, which we don’t know how long that is, and it’s probably the most important purchase you ever make. People talk about a house as nothing compared to a boss.

Corey Frank (25:52):

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So with that Griffin, what would you [00:26:00] describe, maybe speaking personally, but also from maybe some of the peers that you graduated school with? What are folks at the stage of your career? What are you looking for in a boss?

Griffin McGowan (26:13):

You’re just looking for somebody that can give you a lot of guidance that can really help support your career. Talking to other people, I’ve noticed that some of my peers are looking for a job with high income where they can make money straight out of school. Some are looking for just that great entry level job that can [00:26:30] really position and set them up for a great opportunity into the future. Personally for me, I’m just looking to work around smart people, work at a great company, have a mentor, and of course at the end of the day, make money work somewhere with an uncapped commission where the sky’s the limit of how I can earn money.

Chris Beall (26:51):

Uncapped commission see right there. That’s a good answer to a good thing to say in any sort of interview situation around [00:27:00] sales, it’s like, if the product’s great enough and the opportunity is big enough, I work just for commission. You ever want to get a sales job, just go ahead and say that. I would go ahead and I would just work for straight commissioning and go, oh, I respect you already. I used to work as a fuller brush man in Phoenix in the summer. I was desperate to do something. I needed to make some money [00:27:30] within a week or two, and I found myself with my first all commission job. And it was so interesting because it’s like so many things in life. Until you step across that threshold, you really don’t know what that feels like and what it feels like is going to determine what you act like. So that was a great answer right there. Absolutely.

Corey Frank (27:51):

It wasn’t a

Chris Beall (27:51):

Interview question was just a great

Corey Frank (27:56):

Right. Well, let’s keep that vein going for another question [00:28:00] or two here. Griffin, what would you describe, let’s say you were having a chat with my good friend Chris and myself here, and we were two sales leaders, and we asked you what’s the strongest part of your sales process, this arsenal you bring to our organization? You’re attracted by the mentorship and the untapped commission, maybe based off of the recent grad. A lot of folks are interested in the flexibility [00:28:30] and when the balance, et cetera, which are admirable things. But when you look at your sales arsenal of the things you need to succeed to tap into that on a commission, what would you say Griffin says is the strongest part of your sales process? What do you do really well?

Griffin McGowan (28:47):

Yeah, I would say to reiterate, just working in a strong company where the onboarding is great. I’ve noticed interviewing with some companies, and I’ve had some offers sent out that there really isn’t an onboarding process. [00:29:00] They just hold you to that, call 300 people a day, call 400 people a day, and that’s all they really give you. They just give you a script and just with small stuff like that, they’re just going to work you to death at that point. They don’t really care on your professional development. They’re just using you as another person in the door, another person to be on the phone just to call, call and just bleed you dry.

Corey Frank (29:25):

Well, let’s drill down into your specific skill set. If we were to [00:29:30] rank 23 and Me to do a stress test on your sales skills that you have as a recent grad, what are you better at than others? What’s the strongest part of your Griffin McGowan skillset?

Griffin McGowan (29:46):

I would say the big thing I’ve been focusing on is empathy and active listening, bringing that into sales, having empathy, being able to connect with the prospect that you’re talking to, and then also being able to listen, understand their problem, [00:30:00] keep your mouth quiet, let some silences go out, but to let them overall talk because if you’re going to be on the call with a prospect and you’re dominating the call the whole time and not letting them speak and express things, you’re not going to progress that any longer. Well,

Corey Frank (30:17):

That’s fascinating because that’s what I’ve observed in this chat with you thus far. This 30 minutes that we spent is you are an active, engaged listener. You don’t step on other people’s lines. [00:30:30] And I think that’s admirable to a large degree. I would push back just colloquially, just conversationally, that when you’re engaged in a good debate, a good conversation, that there does need to be an element where there is some tension. Because if there’s too much active listening where there’s a pause and [00:31:00] it’s a question, answer question, answer question, answer, the status is diminished. The supplicative behavior, although not overt, is there. So I would just, Christian, I know Rich, what your thoughts are on that, but you’re a phenomenal listener already. We can tell and just know you and meet you. But I think in the realm of sales, especially as a newer sales rep representing a product, and if you’re talking to a seasoned executive [00:31:30] like Chris in a discovery call, there needs to be this authenticity in a conversation. And I think there does need to be a little bit of tension introduced with some control. But Chris, what are your thoughts on that?

Chris Beall (31:47):

Hey, when you’re in sales, you’re catching whales on a five pound test line. You got to know on the letter run and when to set the hook. I mean, it’s a delicate business, there’s no doubt about it. [00:32:00] It is a lot more, I don’t know, it’s doing something like figure skating or something like that. It doesn’t look like a big difference to the layperson, whether you’re landing on that inside edge of the outside edge. But one of them, you go down and the other one you look great and things happen and there is a lot of delicacy. And that balance between empathy, which you need. I mean, Griffin, you’re dead, right? You need it, right? And then the thing [00:32:30] that you bring, so you have this baseline of, Hey, I can listen. I like to listen. I like to know what’s going on with you. But you’ve got the question of, well, why are you talking to somebody in the first place? Unless there’s some conflict between what they have and what they want? You wouldn’t be having the conflict uncovering the world without pissing anybody off too much, which is pretty interesting. So I hope it won’t piss anybody off here. Going back [00:33:00] to the beginning, I’m catching a ferry in 24 minutes. That is a 22 minute walk from here. Beautiful.

Chris Beall (33:07):

Beautiful. Yeah, it’s going to be fun. I want to thank Griffin for coming on. I want to recommend to anybody that by the time you just drop by, which will be like two or three days from now, he’ll already have 10 job offers. But if you want to get ahold of him and make him a job offer just based on this, which I think you should, I think he’s easy to get ahold of, right? Griffin, how does somebody get a hold of you?

Griffin McGowan (33:30):

[00:33:30] LinkedIn, best phone number. Email my LinkedIn’s Griffin McGowan. Feel free to reach out there. My email’s griffinMcGowan@gmail.com. Those are the best ways to contact me.

Chris Beall (33:43):

Wasn’t crazy enough to put a cell phone out there. Just anybody wants to know. My cell phone’s (408) 203-4321. Sometimes I answer, sometimes I don’t. But when I do, it’s very interesting.

Corey Frank (33:56):

That’s right. Well, we look forward to following your journey [00:34:00] here, Griffin, here at the Market Dominance. Guys, we want to have you back and listen to your first weeks of onboarding and see how well you really tap into the untapped commission that you certainly will enjoy. So with that, with Griffin and for Chris Beal from the CEO of ConnectAndSell, this is Corey Frank from the Market. Ominous Guys. Until next time.

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Welcome back to the second part of our insightful conversation with Fred Mondragon, where we continue to explore the intricate world of sales intelligence. In our previous episode, the guys discussed the significance of prioritizing fit over intent when targeting potential customers. However, the most successful sales strategies understand that fit and intent must work hand in hand to achieve outstanding prospecting results.

Intent data has become an indispensable tool for sales teams seeking to identify and engage with prospects actively looking for solutions to their challenges. By analyzing online behavior, intent data offers invaluable insights into a prospect’s buying readiness. When combined with a deep understanding of customer fit, sales teams can unlock the full potential of their prospecting efforts.

In this episode, Fred shares his expertise with Chris and Corey on effectively integrating intent data with fit-based targeting to create a powerful, holistic approach to sales. They examine the best practices for leveraging intent signals alongside demographic data, ensuring that you’re targeting not only prospects who are ready to buy but also those who are the right fit for your solution. Join Chris, Corey, and Fred as they dive into the fascinating interplay between intent and fit, and discover how this synergy can help you achieve unparalleled success in your sales efforts. Listen to episode 218: Intent, Fit, and the Future of Sales Intelligence.”

About Fred Mondragon:

Links from this episode:

Fred Mondragon | LinkedIn
The Sales Development Platform: Find your next best customer | GetRev.AI

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Is your sales team seduced by intent data, only to end up shadowboxing with poor-fit prospects? In this episode of Market Dominance Guys, hosts Chris Beall and Corey Frank explore a game-changing alternative with guest Fred Mondragon, CRO of GetRev.ai. Discover how “exographics” – AI-powered insights into how companies operate – enable sales teams to efficiently target ideal customers from the very first mile. Learn why fit beats intent when it comes to maximizing sales efficiency and dominating your market. If you’re a CEO or sales leader looking to slash wasted effort and turbocharge your prospecting, don’t miss this deep dive into GetRev.ai’s revolutionary approach. Tune in now and point your reps in the right direction from the start in this episode, “The Seductive Shadowboxing of CRM Data.”

About Fred Mondragon:

Links from this episode:

Fred Mondragon | LinkedIn
The Sales Development Platform: Find your next best customer | GetRev.AI

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

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Corey Frank and Chris Beall share eye-opening insights from their recent marketing conference experience that every CSO and sales manager needs to hear. Chris uncovers a startling truth: nearly all MarTech tools are based on the misguided belief that you can’t achieve success by simply calling prospects and having meaningful conversations. He challenges this notion head-on, emphasizing the immense power of genuine dialogue in building trust and gathering valuable information.

Our Market Dominance Guys also explore the critical difference between a mere phone call and a true phone conversation, revealing how these conversations can dramatically amplify your downstream marketing efforts. This episode is packed with actionable insights that will help you leverage the power of conversations to dominate your market and drive sales success. Listen to episode 216: Conversations, the Kryptonite of MarTech?

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

Corey Frank (00:00):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of Sales, the Hawking of Hawking and the profit of profit. Chris Beal. Welcome to Phoenix, Arizona and the campus Grand Canyon University for an onsite edition of the Market Dominance. Guys,

Chris Beall (00:17):

I’m telling you onsite, anybody, by the way, who has a chance to come to Grand Canyon University and visit this incredible campus and meet these incredible people and come in and actually hobnob with the Branch 49 team. I say, book your tickets now. Avoid that spring training thing because unless you really want to come and get some baseball too, because there’s a lot of great baseball this time of year around here. There

Corey Frank (00:42):

It sure is. And what brings Ms. Ucci and Mr. Beal to Phoenix and the greater Phoenix area, Scottsdale, Arizona if you had a very interesting couple of days at a marketing conference. That’s where I wanted to have a special edition of the market. Dom guys talk, not just about the conference and some of the learnings, but just kind of an above the line treatise, if you will, manifesto of what your rant for 2024 is about basic MarTech tools. So Chris, what did you learn at this conference where I’m taking deep

Chris Beall (01:19):

Breath? Well, I learned two things. So the conference is great. It was really well organized. It’s in Phoenician, so it was beautiful. It’s put on by Emerald, I think who puts it on, and they’ve got a bunch of conferences, so I highly recommend they do great conferences, go to their conferences, and I was invited to this one with Helen by our friend Scott Gordon and Lamb Alliance. They’re of salutary data, so they kindly invited us. They were going and they had kind of a discount coupon so to speak, and so well, but marketing conference, do I really want any marketing, right? I mean, I love marketing, but marketing tools and technologies and services have always struck me as there’s something about ’em that puts me off a little bit. But I decided, Hey, I want to go, Helen, you want to go? Yeah, let’s go.

(02:08):

So we drove up a couple hour drive, and here’s my impression twofold. One is actually about ConnectAndSell, which is surprising, and that is almost everybody, by which I mean about 35, 40% of the sales reps who were there pitching these marketing tools when they saw who I was and where I was from, as Helen said, you’re actually a little bit of a thing. I said, yeah, well, it’s kind of a thing that they would go to ConnectAndSell. I used that in and then they would cast it out in their mind when I was at this company 10 years ago, six years ago, nine years ago, whenever it was, and I love that all I had to do is push a button and talk to somebody and make this sort of a dance. Like, oh, I’d sit back in my chair and it was all smiles and all that kind of stuff.

(02:57):

And some really senior people were like, yeah, yeah, I really know. ConnectAndSell, blah, blah, blah. And one of them said, there’s something wrong with you guys. Your technology is so powerful, you should be dominating the entire world, and I’m going dominant, market dominant must not be doing something right. So that was part of it, but that’s a minor part. The major part was I went and talked to all the vendors. It was kind of a little bit of a quiet conference. It had some sessions. I didn’t do any of the sessions except I went and listened to ZoomInfo and technology advice together, and I like Henry a lot. So it was great to go and sit and have lunch and get to talk to him for a minute afterwards. That was kind of enlightening. They’re bringing in what they call second party data to go with first party data, which is the stuff you have third party data, which is the stuff ZoomInfo has.

(03:43):

But what about second party data, which is published data, but it’s not the data, it’s the fact that people who might be your potential buyers have come to consume it. So from publishers. So that was interesting, but the number one thing I walked away with was this, and I may be getting this wrong, but my impression is every single piece of marketing technology that’s out there is predicated on one concept, and that is that you cannot get a conversation by just calling somebody and talking to them that you must go through some, what I call textual time-based gymnastics in order to either cajole, influence, trick, herd, whatever, somebody to come to your website and talk to you. And so I thought, how interesting, and I’m starting to look at this. I’m thinking, how many hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into the development of all this technology. That’s based on what I believe is a fundamentally false premise.

(04:48):

As you know, Corey, we connect about 4.5 million conversations, live conversations with decision makers every year at ConnectAndSell. So I’m thinking this is just interesting to have a whole industry built around a notion that you can’t talk to anybody because if you could talk to people, then you would use every one of those tools differently. You would use the advertising differently, the sequencers differently, the stuff that tells you who you should talk to differently. You’d actually use it to talk to them. You would send emails after a conversation. So that’s kind of what struck me. Then the third thing that struck me was something mathematical. We always talk about the math of sales. We never talk about the math of marketing. And Helen told me something the other day, which she says, everybody says the same thing, and then they show you the same diagram and they believe this thing looks like it came off of stones that came down from the mountain.

(05:47):

It is etched in stone that only two to maybe 3% of your market is in the market now, and therefore you should do X, Y, or Z, which generally involves buying this vendor’s technology or their services or whatever in order to try to move that needle in your favor. And I just thought, what an odd mathematical claim that is. It’s just an odd mathematical claim. And here’s my thoughts about it. Say the number’s 2%. So somebody says, Hey, 2% of your market is in the market right now, so let’s just go forward. Say in the market means for one quarter they’re considering something for one quarter. So 2% in one quarter is 8%, four quarters, which is a year. And now that means that whoever says that believes truly that the replacement cycle for everybody’s category of solution in B2B is about 12 and a half years because 12 and a half times eight is Yeah, but

Corey Frank (07:02):

That’s true. Versus the great chat holmes who we know from market dominance is three.

Chris Beall (07:08):

It’s been three years. I mean, does anybody really buy a serious solution for their business? Unless it’s something really, I’ll call it strangely sticky, you can’t get away from, okay, Salesforce is a great example. Once you start with Salesforce, you’re probably doomed. Although I see people try to get off of it all the time, I mean, it’s like a rare rabbit in the Briar patch, you’re not going to get away from it. Why? Because all the fields change all the time and nobody knows what anything means, but it’s supposed to be your single source of truth. So it has the convenient feature that as a single source of truth, it never contains ascertainable truth and therefore you can’t get rid of it because there’s always a constituency for some flavor of the truth. We can’t take that away. It might not die. But in general, solutions in B2B last on average about three years, they don’t last for 12 years in the innovation economy. 12 years is 12 forever, right? So I don’t know, what are your thoughts about that?

Corey Frank (08:05):

That’s fascinating. So who attends these marketing conferences? Are they looking for the proverbial hope? Are they looking for the 40 yard path? Because when you extrapolate the math like that, and when you look at the wide variety of tool sets, that for the most part exists to get a couple of mere basis points. Not whole numbers of increases, it’s just people are running out of time, sales reps, sales VPs, CROs, board members, investors. It just seems that we’re on the T access here is running at a faster rate than the actual cash burn,

Chris Beall (08:46):

And that was a real theme when you talk to individual people who are attendees. So I’ll make a sharp distinction. So this conference was great, had a lot of good vendors there. The vendors of course send their salespeople, so that made it really easy for me to go talk to ’em. By the way, I realized that we are being kind of dumb at connect, and so we should just go to every conference of anybody doing anything. They send their salespeople and I go talk to ’em, and those salespeople will go, wait, you mean I could push a button and talk to somebody? Except what I’ve really learned is they say, I used your product before. I love that thing. It’s like, are you using it now? Well, no. That’s one thing is the conference itself is divided into the marketing people and up to chief revenue officers who show up to learn, which is great. They’re from the sessions and to check out the vendors and maybe to go to the happy hour. And there was a great dinner last night that was just a super dinner. The folks at postal put it on. By the way, the ceo co founder of postal actually said that postal is an okay name. I said, postal doesn’t going postal. And he said, no, no, nobody under the edge of 40 even knows what going postal.

(09:57):

That was great. And then we got invited to dinner. So there’s all this great stuff going on, and these are folks who are looking for something that they can kind of plug into their stack in order to really, in order to generate leads or pipeline. There was a lot of taco pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, which is great. Really,

Corey Frank (10:15):

Really interesting.

Chris Beall (10:17):

A lot of taco pipelines, but nobody told me that they could measure a pipeline, not one. Nobody said, yes, we will help you produce a measurable pipeline. It was always, we will help you produce pipeline. It’s like, well, but if it’s not measurable, is it really a pipeline? It’s that tree in the forest, right? It’s like is non-measurable? Pipeline, pipeline? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I thought that was a curiosity also.

Corey Frank (10:45):

Well, if you’re measuring this pipeline or you’re not measuring this pipeline, you just want more of it, right? Everybody wants more. What did you see at the conferences? You’re roaming the halls here. Okay, great, thank you, Mr. Marketing automation tool or MarTech. He helped me get more pipeline. What can you do or what should I be doing to help close, nurture, qualify, move down the funnel here with this pipeline? Is that, oh, no, no, no, that’s your problem. Now, that’s a different conference altogether. We’re only about X, right? Versus Y.

Chris Beall (11:20):

Yeah, you still got the sense, I still got the sense that it’s us over here in marketing and them over there in sales, and if only them over in sales loved what us in marketing, were giving them appropriately, then we’d have alignment because we’re working very hard to give them good stuff that’s going to become pipeline, whatever that means, leads or whatever. And I think there’s a great deal of sincerity and there’s still a lot of frustration. There was also, by the way, a big murmur everywhere, including a question asked from the stage on one of the sessions that I did go to. Basically it says, Hey, raise your hand if for marketing. These are challenging times. And everybody’s hand went up. And the reason that was given was because CFOs and investors are now scrutinizing marketing spend and marketing spend is challenging to justify. So there is a general feel of compression. We’re being squeezed. And I don’t mean the vendors, I mean the attendees we’re being squeezed on budget. And the place where a lot of the squeeze comes across the boundary from sales to marketing is the SDR teams. So SDR teams shrunk

Corey Frank (12:38):

Really.

Chris Beall (12:39):

So down to a quarter or a half or whatever, all that’s mostly happened because of the need for efficiency. So efficiency with growth is now the thing because venture capital and private equity and all other investment dollars are now competing, quite frankly, the returns they would get from investing in these, whatever they’re investing in, they have to compete with the returns you can get from just higher interest rates. So now holding periods for these companies, if they’re private equity held as longer, much longer, and what do you do for the extra two and a half years? You have to hold that company. Well, obviously this quarter is not the only thing that counts. So sales can’t be there yet. So nurturing is a thing, but how do you get the budgetary support to nurture if nurturing delivers results in the future and the future is uncertain?

(13:33):

It’s a very interesting time where the marketing people are looking for, I would call it less expensive stuff that works because their budgets are squeezed and something that’s measurable. And I just thought it was interesting to say to people, Hey, it kind of strikes me if you could push a button and talk to somebody, which for those of you who know how this works, I mean, we enable 4.5 million conversations with decision makers a year. So there’s pretty hard evidence that at least once you can push a button and talk to somebody because 4.5 million greater than one

Corey Frank (14:08):

A lot.

Chris Beall (14:09):

If you could do that, what else do you need? And actually, I think Helen went off a little bit on one of the folks about sequencers, which I thought was interesting. Somebody said, well, plus sequencer. Sequencer. She said, why would you use a sequencer? And you could have heard it rippled across the trade show floor.

Corey Frank (14:29):

What?

Chris Beall (14:29):

Somebody threw a stink grenade into the middle. Yeah,

Corey Frank (14:33):

Right? Right.

Chris Beall (14:34):

Why would you need a sequencer when you can just talk to people?

Corey Frank (14:37):

Yeah. Is there a natural aversion to that or is it just Occam’s razor where it’s too simple? Or they’re going about a complex formula, methodology, and technology pathway. When you forget to dance with who you, which is what are my prospects? What are my people in my TAM saying, what are the people in my ICP? What do they want? What pain do I solve? And gosh, if I could just have a conversation, not send them a survey, not send them an email, but actually have a conversation that can open up these veins of trust that that’s the key versus carpet bombing them with content, with white papers, with Gartner magic quadrants, and there’s no dialogue there. That’s monologue,

Chris Beall (15:20):

(16:39):

And the idea that, oh, talking to people could be a form of marketing that is, I think where the edge is. It’s almost like, but talking to that’s

Corey Frank (16:48):

Interesting

Chris Beall (16:49):

Light or something. If marketing can’t include talking to people nowadays,

Corey Frank (16:55):

It’s like bottled water. Hey, we’re out of water, we’re out of bottled water. We’re going to die of thirst. Well, what about this little thing called the tap? I tell that my kids all the time. It’s like, Hey, dad, the ro, and we’re awa. It’s Arizona. You got springs all over the place. So sometimes I suppose we’re trying to overly complicate something where there’s conversations all around, but what do you say to that rebuttal of you can’t have enough conversations to make the math work? I think you and I would disagree on that, right? But is that where fundamentally the mindset is? Is that Chris? That’s cute. You can talk with a couple people, but I’m talking about sending out mass emails and segmentation, and I do more before 7:00 AM than you do all day with a conversation.

Chris Beall (17:37):

(18:35):

Not over some vague period of time, but literally yesterday. And out of those, so say that they only set 1,679 meetings, and one of our customers sets lots of meetings. They set 983 with just one of their groups. Really, really kind of a good brand. So if I bring this up and I go, well see here, there’s this group of folks and it’s 242 companies, and they had 19,352 targeted conversations. It’s like, yeah, that’s them, but not everybody can afford that. And I’m thinking, well, wait. So I talked to somebody who does advertising, saying we wanted to send an ad or have an ad associated with all the online activity, the phone, particularly activity of everybody we talked to. So that’d be 19,432 people a day of everybody our customers talk to. Is that doable? Oh, yeah. And how would that work? Well, it cost you $20,000 a year minimum.

(19:32):

You have to sign up, you have to commit. It’s like, well, why? Well, I mean, for $20,000, you’d have a lot of conversations. Yeah. Well, it’s just like, it’s almost like I’m trying to come up with a good analogy. I love your bottled water analogy. It’s kind of like if you had the world of medicine divided into two kinds of doctors, those that had access to imaging like X-rays and MRIs and that kind of stuff, and those that just didn’t, they just didn’t. They’re not allowed to see what’s inside the body. They just kind of have to go with what might work. Here’s something that might work, take this pill and then, oh, maybe you should take this pill. It feels like that. I feel like the guy who’s going in and saying, oh, no, no, there’s this box. See, you can put this thing in front of a person and see all their bones, or you can actually see what’s going on in their soft tissue. You stick ’em in this big tube full of magnets and freak ’em out, make nasty noises, and then you can see what’s the soft stuff and talk about something that is so not experienced. But the weird thing about the show, for me, almost everybody at the show itself, salespeople working for these MarTech companies, was excited to talk about their personal great experience using connect and sell to talk to

Corey Frank (20:51):

People. Yeah, I bet that’s good. Last question here in this abbreviated episode, I’m curious, Chris, that when you look at folks are good friends on the MarTech side, and you look at two statistical models, same group, first group sent out emails, and you’re going to get responses, you’re going to get, do not calls, you’re going to get, take me off your list. But ultimately I’m trying to gauge, is there gold, a divining rod in this team? And I compare that with the same team, but I call and I talk with people, and let’s say that takes nth degree longer, shorter, it doesn’t matter. But if I just have two, can I deduce the same conclusions of a market if by email versus buy the phone and buy conversations? What do you see?

Chris Beall (21:45):

I think there’s two answers to this. One is, can you get enough information back from say your email campaign or your ad campaign or whatever to tell you what folks’ needs actually are? And this a lot of AB testing. So I’d say with email, even as attenuated it is, you’re going to get back in terms of the quantity, the response rates are way down. You’re still going to get back. Kind of a careful AB test will tell you which messages are resonating. So that’s fine. And there’s a lot of technology out there that’ll tell you who’s looking right now, who’s looking for solutions. So that’s another thing that will tell you that kind of information. And by the way, whoever’s looking, I think it’s great. It’s like, oh, bomb boas, six sense, blah, blah, blah. LinkedIn has got it, but it just takes you right into a red ocean. So if you’re seeking competitors because you like competing with deals rather than you like exclusivity, if you prefer competing for deals, then pay attention to intent. Because intent to buy right now means everybody knows the intent is there. If it’s worth knowing, all your competitors know it, therefore, you’re all now competing for the same customer

Corey Frank (22:56):

At the same time

Chris Beall (22:58):

And you’re doing it from whatever advantage or disadvantage you had coming in, but you can’t really move the needle. So I think, by the way, there’s incredible technology now available through ai. I talked to somebody about it last night, a company called Rev. I was talking to Fred Mongan and we’re going to have him next week on market dominance. Guys. Incredible technology because it basically says, ah, intent is nice, but fit at the company level for your solution. Even if you don’t know the timing, fit is greater than intent. We’re going to talk about that next week. I think it’s an awesome concept that does give you the 11 quarters that you’re otherwise missing, and it solves a false negative problem that plagues everybody in B2B. They’re calling on folks that are like the folks that they think they’ve worked with in the past, but they actually can’t see all the patterns out there.

(23:54):

They don’t see all the employment data, all the job histories of every single employee, of every company. These folks take every employee of every company in North America and make a fingerprint of the whole thing like Google does with websites. These guys do it with the employees of companies and everything they write about themselves, right? Yeah, that stuff is powerful. But the difference is if you talk to people, you don’t just get the information, you actually get the trust relationships, and so now you’re in a superior position because as you need more information, you have folks that you can rely on.

Corey Frank (24:29):

Yes. Bingo. Bingo. Yeah, I agree with that. And there’s an atomic weight of having a conversation, as we’ve talked about many, many times on the false negatives as well as just on the positives. And it just seems that the vehicles of beyond take me off your list or unsubscribe. I’m not getting the richness of the signals on the false negatives on the digital side, but it’s very interesting. Chris, we will learn more from Fred Mongan from Rev next week and the market dominance. Guys, any final thoughts as you depart probably your thousandth trade show in the career of trade shows here.

Chris Beall (25:06):

I love walking around those things. My thought is this, if you have marketing technology right now, look at it. Think about what it does, and ask yourself a simple question. What if this technology were used after a conversation rather than to get a conversation? That’s the question I would ask, because you’ve made an investment. The tech is amazing, by the way. I think the MarTech stuff is really stunningly clever because it’s trying to solve a really hard problem, which is how do you get people to love you when you can’t talk to ’em? But what if you could talk to ’em? Could you get ’em to love you even more? So I don’t think the MarTech industry is a waste in any sense. I just think it’s interesting when you add the catalyst of a conversation to the beginning rather than have the conversation be the goal.

Corey Frank (25:54):

Yeah, as the great Jerry Hill says, right? The conversations amplify your downstream efforts. And if you start with a phone call first, I think the rate’s about 14 x increase in the conversion rates from having a phone call first and then an email versus an email first and then a phone call. So lemme

Chris Beall (26:13):

Jump in and make a subtle distinction here. A phone call generally results in nothing. A phone conversation is a completely different beast.

Corey Frank (26:20):

Good point. Yes. See, even after 250 episodes, I still have the sensei, correct? Correct. My nuanced language matters here. Language matters here at the market matters,

Chris Beall (26:32):

Matters a lot.

Corey Frank (26:34):

Well, for the sensei of sales, this is Corey Frank and for Chris Beal. Until next time on the market, Dominus, guys.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This episode wraps up our conversation with Corey Frank, Chris Beall, and Shane Mahi. Throughout this series, the guys have delved into the profound impact of AI on sales, the evolving role of human expertise, and the transformative potential of AI in reshaping businesses. They muse on the future interplay of AI and the craft of sales. Corey champions niches – and the need to summon specialists. And we, the artisans, must elevate our skills. Chris predicts more earthshaking disruption for software developers than sellers. And Shane sounds warnings that agencies lean heavily on human effort today. Soon enough AI shall permeate their ranks.

Our craft endures turbulent seas, yet we shall reach new fortunes with nimble navigation. Mine your own insights from these philosophic titans who’ve logged countless hours of bold outreach fueled by devotion to their calling. Stay tuned for part 3, where they unveil actionable guidance to navigate what’s next for our noble profession. “EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots.”

Here is the full series.

Links from this episode:

Shane Mahi on LinkedIn

MEGA.ai

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Branch49

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

Corey Frank (00:58:09):

Yeah, it is, it is. I would argue the counter to that, it’s not really counter, it’s more of a pivot. As we said Chris many times, Russell Brunson, one of his books he wrote, says, the riches are in the niches and I believe there will always be a need for specialists. When you have a specialized software that requires not just a transaction but a relationship when folks care about their brand, you will have a niche. I’m a big believer in Plato or Aristotle, et cetera. The unexamined life is not worth living. And so when a person or a salesperson does this, the whole purpose of Flight School in a lot of ways is when they don’t examine their life to find their true self or their excellence of function, they’re ignoring their true self. And part of what we do certainly at Branch49, certainly Chris, what you do at Flight School, Shane, what you’ve taught with a lot of your organizations is that sales is a craft and just like being a writer for the New Yorker, it’s a craft.

(00:59:30):

Being a tradesman is a craft and there’s a lot of crappy bricklayers out there and there’s a lot of artesian bricklayers out there. And so I believe that there will always be a market for those that see that this is a mastercraft Shane. One of the stories that we talk all about here at Branch49 is a guy walks past the construction site and sees five guys laying bricks. Greg Chriss wrote the story many, many times. First guy, what are you doing? He’s like, I’m making six bucks an hour. Go to the second guy, what are you doing? He’s like, I’m building a wall, goes to the third guy. What are you doing? And he’s like, I’m building a cathedral and goes to the fourth guy and say, what are you doing? He’s like, I’m saving men’s souls. So the last two folks, the people who see I’m building a cathedral or I’m saving men, souls are the ones that you want on your team versus the ones that are building a wall or making six bucks an hour.

(01:00:28):

There’s a lot of folks in our profession who will leverageChatGPT to say, “Hey, I’m making five bucks an hour but I’m making 30% margin versus I’m making six bucks an hour and I’m making 5% margin.” So those folks who will see this as an efficiency game without a corresponding increase in the delivery of the service, they’re the ones that I think will fall by the wayside. I think there will always be a market for the higher end and part of our purpose at Branch49 is to create these organizations where folks can move out into the world and be truthsayers, be the pinnacle of their communities and their craft. We know that folks don’t leave Branch49. We say they graduate from Branch49 and that was part of the intention of starting this with Chris’s inspiration and I think we celebrate our fourth year coming up here. Chris, it’s crazy. It’s been four years already and how many millions of phone calls and I dunno how many hundreds of thousands of meetings, but that’s my response to that and part of that is tree hugging certainly to be sure what we are doing? We’re going to be the best damn buggy whip people that there are on the face of the earth. Even when there’s a sparse number of horses in the city, we’re still going to be selling these buggy whips come hell or head water.

Chris Beall (01:02:02):

Well actually I think that one of the ideas of Branch 49 was let’s take everything that’s skills and stance focused around sales and apply it to a wider range of so that the development of the craft and the codification of how to develop as a professional in the craft can be advanced. And it really wasn’t about cold calling and it wasn’t about follow-up calling. It was about discovery. And in the world of discovery, discovery is going to be in the information sense. Discovery already happens all over the place. Google’s provided tons of discovery and ChatGPT provides even more, although it’s getting more and more reluctant to answer your specific questions, it knows it’s hallucinating. So that’s actually by the way, a problem with LLMs and these large language models in general is they’re always going to hallucinate the idea that they’re not going to hallucinate is actually mathematically absurd.

(01:03:05):

If you know how they work, they’ll hallucinate. Guess what people do too? How do people correct their hallucinations? They interact with the world, other people and objects in the world in ways that discipline their hallucinations and cause them to correct. By the way, ChatGPT does this, you correct it and then say, oh, I’m so sorry I didn’t get whatever, and then it’ll do its thing again, the thing is it’s very patient and it’s not insulted by rework which human beings tend to be right. So coming up with something that automates initial outreach is going to be interesting, but it’s also going to be fairly temporary because it’s actually not a necessary part of the solution over long periods of time. It just is right now we have to get a hold of people who are doing whatever they’re doing and interrupt them because all the other ways of getting started seem to be broken.

(01:04:02):

By the way, conferences travel and going to conferences, which was hurt badly in COVID are coming back and conferences are far superior to cold calling with regard to forging new relationships and getting going in conversations. They’re just a lot more expensive. So will they survive? Absolutely. Will cold calling survive in the niches? Absolutely. Will discovery become more important with regard to skill and sincerity? Absolutely. And is it going to be a world that doesn’t have human experts? No. The idea of the human expert is, look, this large language model has got a certain number of artificial neurons. Compare that to what’s inside of each one of us here and everybody who’s listening to this, you’re off by a factor of a trillion or so. You’re off by a lot. You’re so much more sophisticated in your internal ability that you’re not able to actually observe. It just happens.

(01:05:08):

And by the way, so is your dog if you have one, right? Your dog is smarter than ChatGPT, it just doesn’t type and it doesn’t read the entire internet, so it doesn’t appear to be smarter. But if your dog had read the entire internet and could tippy type with its little dog paws, then you’d go, oh my dog’s a genius. No, it’s still a dog and it’s making geniuses and being able to smell what somebody intends for it. Good or bad. Dogs are really good at that. Humans are good at it in a different way. Again, this whole ethics thing, by the way to me, is like a non-conversation. Everybody’s excited about it. Everybody’s been told to be afraid of it. It’s like there was no new ethics around guns. You still can’t just walk up to somebody and shoot ’em and it’s okay just because easier or cheaper, it’s still wrong. And ethics is about what’s right and what’s wrong and the things that are wrong are still wrong. Lying to somebody about who you are or what your intentions are in business or in life is wrong. We’re done with the ethics discussion.

Shane Mahi (01:06:19):

Alright, so let’s ask this one then. Let’s throw this one in there. There’s a point right now where I believe 80 to 90% of all outbound agencies or inbound agencies are heavily dependent on human labor. Now there’s small, let’s just call it this, it’s all human right now, but then there’s small components that are being driven by technology, independent research, human research, ChatGPT research that can effectively, a robot can take that place. So at what point does this happen where you’ve got human heavy businesses where AI can then start filling a lot of those roles very, very, very fast and it will happen over the course of the years. At what point do you stop competing with the AI and saying, we’re going to stay focused on human have a little bit and do you get to a point where it’s even, or do you get to a point where it’s so heavily AI, robotic agent orientated where there’s not really a need for that many humans and then there is only

Chris Beall (01:07:23):

You get to a different point: executive team and a few leaders.

Shane Mahi (01:07:24):

What do you think about that?

Chris Beall (01:07:28):

You get to a point where it actually reshapes skyscrapers that didn’t show up in small county seats in Iowa, right? Even though you could build ’em, they just don’t show up there. They show up in, well, first in Manhattan, right? Why? Because UP was cheaper than out. That’s why. And square footage fits in up better than it fits in out. So there was a ratio of footprint and you might’ve said, well, it’s absurd, right? What was the enabling technology by the way? The safety elevator. The safety brake on an elevator. So when elevator cables snapped, you didn’t fall to your death. That’s actually what enabled that revolution.

(01:08:14):

Shane Mahi (01:09:35):

Chris Beall (01:10:08):

For sure.

Shane Mahi (01:10:08):

Who is that going to be? Chris, Chris and Corey. Who do you guys have your eyes out on in those markets who are going to be those game changers, those market shapers for AI and tech in our space?

Chris Beall (01:10:22):

(01:11:18):

The sugar cube is just getting a little rounded on the edges, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure out where that one’s going because Shane and Corey and even Chris Beall can develop something that’s a new capability in the world using gen AI in 1000th of the time and cost. And in fact, it’s even more than that because I’m going to ask you, Shane, if I asked you to develop a GPT-4 model from scratch, and I’m going to give you as your tools a Python runtime environment and a studio from scratch, right? So now you have to live to be a hundred million years old, which I mean you’re a robust guy. I don’t think you’re going to make it past a million, but you could flip.

(01:12:11):

But now make a chat bot that knows about the following. Say I said, you know what I want you to do is I want you to use a chat a GPT-4 engine to analyze a whole bunch of sales conversations and score them based on five skills and it invents the skills and then take those rep skill combinations and use that and combine that with pipeline built and come up with a scheme that actually says, Hey, your team needs to work on this skill because it’s going to drive more pipeline for you or in your industry. You could do that probably all by yourself if you just didn’t do anything else. Maybe in three to six months there’s a lot of moving parts and you got to have access to the data and all that, but it’s not a billion years, it’s just you could actually do it.

(01:13:03):

That’s what changes based on this GPT stuff. On these LLMs. What changes is the ability for person A who has an insight to turn that insight into functionality mediated by computers that person B can use. Immediately upon that insight being realized, software development is gone in its old form, and I speak as a person who has written lots and lots of code, more than a million lines of code, and what do I tell you? That’s where the change is. So the reason it’s unpredictable is we can predict Microsoft’s going to do really well. Microsoft in my opinion, will be underpriced for a long, long time because folks’ imaginations don’t understand what happens when you dissolve an entire industry and pipe the results over to another company that’s in a position to take advantage of that sales. Sales will be barely impacted at all compared to software development barely impacted at all. So I don’t worry about that stuff. Those in sales worry about it.

Corey Frank (01:14:12):

Yeah. Yeah. Shane, you had mentioned Sybil earlier. So Sybil is one of our great clients and we’ve had the CRO Ben Sternsmith on this podcast for a couple of episodes and the Branch49 scribe that’s in the background of this very podcast recording all of our emotions and our body language and our eye contact that is, so I will send you the Sybil of this call afterwards and you can see for yourself exactly how progressive it is.

Chris Beall (01:15:21):

By the way, take notes by hand, using your body. There’s actually good research that shows that it changes how you learn. Now, that’s one of those words, it’s like how you learn, actually, you’re reshaping your nervous system. You’re actually shaping it into something new. You become a new person when you learn. And so by taking notes by hand, you become a new person that you want to be, which is kind of what Branch49 is all about, right? It’s about becoming the new person that you want to be. And it’s kind of what the other side of sales is about, which is becoming somebody who has access to stuff you didn’t have access to. So your organization is new in a way. It wasn’t Corey’s use in civil, his organization is different as a result because it is learned civilly, so to speak, by grafting Sibyl onto its operations. Somebody had to sell ’em that.

Corey Frank (01:16:17):

We also call it screenplay versus script as well that we’ve used for years and years. So the screenplay is a little bit more specific and complete than a script. A lot of folks just colloquially say script, but our screenplay. So you incorporate the verbal disfluencies, a screenplay is brought more to life with the scenery, what your thought is, what the Scorsese director’s notes are, what your tone is, how this product you think is going to be perceived. So that’s all in not just what the rep says, but how the rep should feel about it. We’ve had many episodes about a key component that the reps need to have is belief when they’re presenting. James Thornberg talks about this with his neutrality focus. Certainly a lot of Chris reps that we’ve had on the podcast have done that as well. So that’s the piece where I think we’ll finish up here is on, again, I keep coming back to that authenticity, but what I’ve learned certainly from you two fine gentlemen, is that if you lead with the fact that, hey, listen, I’m going to approach you Mr. Prospect, but I’m not human, so accept me faults and all nuances at all hangups and all, but I am who I say I am. And so as we say in the 27 seconds, my ability is to establish that trust by acknowledging the fact that I am who I say I am.

(01:17:50):

And I think that’s key and that’s how you leverage, you augment a one plus one equals 11, it sounds like with AI versus trying to rip and replace, for instance, which a lot of folks are talking about.

Shane Mahi (01:18:05):

I second that.

Corey Frank (01:18:06):

Beautiful. Well, with that, thank you again, Shane. Let’s make sure that it’s not another four years before you drop into the episode of Market Dominance. Guys, we certainly want to keep an eye on what’s happening with your new venture. We look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn as always. Chris, any final thoughts on AI and sales?

Chris Beall (01:18:30):

One final thought, thought rhymes with bot and the sounds of words really count; human beings process poetry too. Corey, we’re back to your Elizabethan poetry. Yes, yes.

Corey Frank (01:18:41):

Comes back to

Chris Beall (01:18:42):

Shakespeare. And this is why talking bots actually are going to be quite interesting in the world of sales because words still start as sounds and thought still rhymes with bot.

Corey Frank (01:18:53):

Yeah, for sure. Well, beautiful four, Chris, this is Corey Frank from the Market Dominance Guys until next time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The guys are back with sales visionary Shane Mahi as we dive into the vital facets of authenticity, ethics, and trust in the world of sales. As sales leaders, you know these elements are crucial for fostering customer loyalty and closing those pivotal deals. Shane elaborates on how transparency and being genuine have led to exponential sales growth for him over the past months. They also investigate AI’s emerging impact and why interpersonal skills remain vital, even with advancing technology. This forward-looking discussion offers invaluable wisdom on steering sales teams through a shifting landscape. Whether you aim to amplify results or spearhead AI adoption, you will gain insight from Shane’s real-world perspectives. Join us as we continue unraveling the keys to ethical and successful selling in this next-level episode, “The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity.”

Links from this episode:

Shane Mahi on LinkedIn

MEGA.ai

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Branch49

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

Chris Beall (00:32:56):

So the ethics piece I think actually is simplified down to the bot’s, got to tell the truth that it’s a bot. It turns out that’s also the practical path. Bots that lie are like salespeople that lie. By the way, there is no shortage of the ladder. I mean, we act like, oh my God, the bot’s going to be lying about being a bot. The salesperson is going to be lying about being on your side. In B2B sales, I have exactly two jobs. One, I have to be an expert. Two, I have to be on your side. If one, I’m not an expert, but I portray myself as one and two, I pretend to be on your side, but actually over here on the side, I’m kind of dragging my commission in here to make sure that it talks to you before I do. If those two things are happening, which I believe happen in a very high proportion of sales conversations, then I’m exactly what people think. I am a lying salesperson. We have a podcast here that has 210 episodes that say you can dominate markets with the human voice at pace and scale under one and only one condition, which is that you tell the truth. That’s actually the condition. And it’s very interesting. I mean, we’re conceptually hoping to liberate salespeople to tell the truth, but you got to liberate the bot to tell the truth. You built the damn bot. Have it tell the truth.

Shane Mahi (00:34:16):

Well, I think that’s the only thing that made us successful. We picked the most lovely industry to go into, and that’s telemarketing and cold prospecting. And what was it? And the only reason that I was able to get to the truth faster was because read about Daniel Disney when the pandemic hit found, cog found ConnectAndSell, bought Cog, bought ConnectAndSell, spoke with Gerry, did Flight Scool, had seven meetings in six hours, and that’s where it started. It was the ability to have your script, be honest, open, and just get into those conversations. And by doing that fast, quickly, efficiently, and at scale, we were able to progress our business much faster, I think, than a lot of people. We actually had 444% growth from year one to year two from using ConnectAndSell and implementing a system called the Entrepreneurial Operating System™ by Gino Wickman.

(00:35:15):

Now the authenticity of our brand, and even what is happening right now, it came from all of the mistakes we made. And those are typically our storytelling, selling mechanisms, the mistakes we made and the path we took got us to a place where made all those mistakes, learned everything, service customers. I obviously lost my business because of some bad decisions I had to let go of my business, A lot of bad decisions. But I’ve recreated my business. That took me three years in three months with the use of ChatGPT. And why is because I prompted all of my problems, all of my stakes helped me build a business plan that bypasses these mistakes and gives me the outcomes I’m looking for in half the time. And in that now, my marketing, my messaging, emails, prospecting, research, everything that, again, like you said, rightfully so, anything in the future is anxiety.

(00:36:12):

Corey Frank (00:37:13):

You finished the internet, you exhausted ChatGPT.

Shane Mahi (00:37:18):

Corey Frank (00:37:34):

Sure, sure. And Shane, you’re a prolific podcast guest, and again, a purveyor of a lot of thought leadership on LinkedIn. Chris and I we’re on the campus of Grand Canyon University here. Shane, and Chris are responsible for what we built and why we’ve built Branch 49. He coined the phrase that we use here pretty ubiquitously now that this is a finishing school for future CEOs, part of that finishing school that curricula is that you have to have educational programs that not just teach technological aptitude, which is Hey, how to use chat gp, which you just went GTT, which you went through or Salesforce or ConnectAndSell or Cognizant or anything else. But Chris, I think what we’ve talked about many, many times, Shane, and I think your epitome of this is that you can’t just teach technology. You can’t just teach technology aptitude. You

have to teach interpersonal abilities that have to foster that trust and have to foster those connections.

(00:38:45):

And if you don’t, then you will be threatened by a chat GPT that will very quickly enable you to engender trust faster than probably somebody who’s fence posts the emotional AI that you need. The emotional intelligence that we’ve talked about, right in this profession for a long time, will be key. So I think one of our early episodes, Chris, we talked about, or maybe it was a guest, we talked about how there’s an ability to hear a smile, right? We’ve talked about that from our earliest mentors, right? Studies have shown that our sense of hearing is so incredible. It’s so acute that we can identify emotions and conversations even in a Zoom conversation like this. We can respond to the nuances of a head nod of no, of body language if there’s disassociation with the topic. So how does ai, I mean, I hear it’s coming that this ability for AI to listen to a stammer, to listen to a nuance, to hear a smile, and then maybe respond with a softer question with maybe a couple of verbal disfluencies on a pause versus finishing a response and then hitting with a direct question right out of the gate without any social nuance.

(00:40:14):

So do you guys see any of that or anybody teaching that, any technologies that you’re aware of that are moving in that direction?

Shane Mahi (00:40:23):

All of them. I’ll jump in real quick on that. So I ran a podcast, actually the second one with James Buckley, John Barrow’s, right hand man. And I asked him, who else do you think would be a great guest on the podcast? And he said, you’ve got to check out these two guys. And one of ’em is Sybil, and there’s another one that came with a W. I’ll check out the name. But one of those softwares has the ability now, just like you said, Corey, with going like this, your hand gestures, your movements, the ability to tell if somebody’s being genuine on a call, it detects eye movement. Did his eyes go like this? Here’s your trigger. Here’s your cue for this. Did he make a gesture? Did he lean back when you said this question, did he lean into it? Now, sometimes we’re on calls and we do have hidden agendas in some you shouldn’t, but everybody has some sort of hidden agenda.

(00:41:16):

Well, whatever the case may be, and you don’t have any way of knowing that without having your second or third party or let’s just say software to help you discover that. And I saw this the other day, right? So I’m sitting up on WhatsApp on social media, and I get a message from somebody and they say, oh, I love what you’re doing. I’ve seen you on this and this and this. Do you want to have a chat? I want to talk to you about a few things. And usually I wouldn’t say yes, but I said, all right, fuck it, why not? So I jumped on the call with him and sat on the call with him for three hours. It came to a point where I told him a little bit about my story and I didn’t expect anything from anybody, but I just saw the eyes go and right then the call was dead for me. I’m not working with that guy ever again. I told him, don’t ever call me again the next day. He just like

Corey Frank (00:42:11):

That.

Shane Mahi (00:42:12):

Just like that because I’m not stupid. I’ve been through plenty of experienced prisoners. I’ve been to prison, I’ve been to rehab, I’ve been living in the US New Jersey, I’ve come to the uk, I’ve been to Morocco, all kinds of countries. I sense body language, you can sense and feel people’s energy. And when you see somebody being disingenuous, I’ve had conversations with Chris for three and a half hours while he’s walking around the desert barefoot. So that to me is genuine. But when I’m having a conversation and now we’re talking about brand identity and who you are, and now the brand is you, Shane, and then when you ask for my opinion and you are not intrigued or interested and it’s just a motive, you are hidden agendas. You just want money out of me because you heard I generated X amount of revenue the previous year May, I’m done with you, and I don’t say that to a lot of people. So what do you think about Chris with the ability to recognize authenticity on these calls with any of these AI bots or AI softwares, and how can you trust the AI software to be genuine when it is dictating those outcomes to you?

Chris Beall (00:43:19):

Well, I think there’s two things. One is I think it’s okay to interact with somebody whose motives are clear. In fact, I think one of the uses of humor in conversations is that you can, in a light way, touch on the issue that you’re looking for a deal or whatever it happens to be.

Corey Frank (00:43:40):

Introducing our friend Orin’s introduction of tension. You have to introduce tension to create authenticity

Chris Beall (00:43:46):

And there’s natural tension, but it doesn’t need to be hidden. It doesn’t need to be cryptic, but it does need to be on an acceptable path from where somebody is emotionally to where they might be able to interact with you with a clearer mind. And that’s actually sort of what the entire this whole market dominance thing is about is you’re trying to help somebody go from their current emotional state, which is that they’re afraid of you because you ambush them, but say it’s a discovery call, they’re apprehensive about joining that call. They’re pretty sure you’re going to try to sell me something, and that makes somebody feel a bit put upon it feels dangerous, right? As the future CEO, you need to learn how to take somebody or help somebody make a transition from their current emotional state to one where you can be more useful to them.

(00:44:46):

And I’ll use an analogy, I worked a lot with animals. I grew up around lots and lots of animals, and some of them were very large horses in particular, and you owe that horse after all, the horse is getting a pretty good deal. It’s not out there running around in the desert trying to find a little pond to suck up a little water so it doesn’t desiccate and croak out there in three days. So it’s living in a nice paddock and in a corral, and you’re feeding it and you brush it, even just like people walk after their dogs and pick up dog shit. You’re a slave to the horse and all of that, but you owe that horse enough moment by moment awareness of its emotions that it can do its job so that you can afford to keep it. Its job includes having a bit in its mouth.

(00:45:38):

That ain’t that fun actually, if you think about it, right? Who would want that? Why don’t you put a piece of steel in my mouth, attach it to some ropes, so to speak, and then pull on ’em to tell me which way to go. Oh, great deal. Love it. I’m signing up for that right away. That horse wants to sign up for that, but it does kind of like that bale of hay and then horse pellets and a little oats every once in a while and a place to get out of the rain and maybe some horsey friends that it can hang out with and stuff like that. So it’s a trade-off, but you owe that animal the emotional journey to help on the emotional journey to where it’ll accept the bit. That’s what we do as helpful experts in sales. We need to help somebody go on that emotional journey.

(00:46:27):

So bots, if bots are going to be successful, cheap as they are, they also need to be able to help somebody on that emotional journey. Fortunately, that journey has been mapped out for different parts of the sales process in ways that certain kinds of scripting and voice can help somebody. If you refer to it as manipulation, you’re actually inferring that the purpose is your purpose against their purpose. If you believe you can be helpful, then you’re kind of obliged to do this. I was once a witness to a head-on collision where two guys not wearing seat belts went through the windshield of their vehicle, and I was driving a big truck that was full of cement mix. And so I’m looking down at this accident, very dramatic, right? I owed those people who are now lying there, bleeding from all the glass cuts and all lying on the hood.

(00:47:30):

I owed them if I could do it. And I was trained in this stuff, and some help on the emotional journey from laying there, bleeding and being all hyped up and thinking you should run around, took calming down, calming over, lying down, being treated for shock. While I had some people do some things like call ambulances and stuff like that because I was more expert than the other people around who watched that accident and these people were in need, I owed them if I could do it, the opportunity to go on an emotional journey that let them be treated medically. Because if they were going to run around chickens with their heads cut off and scream at people and jump up and down, it wasn’t going to happen. Life is full of this stuff. If you want to be a leader, you are obliged to take on an understanding and skills around helping somebody get to the point where you can help them, and that’s really the essence of sales. That’s what we do. That’s why what they’re doing at Branch 49 is so interesting because you go into the conversation pit, so to speak, and you learn how to have conversations that, yeah, it has a set of meeting outcome and everybody applaud and all that, but what you’re really learning to do is to help somebody get in a state where you can help them. That’s actually what it’s all about.

Shane Mahi (00:48:50):

I agree. And just to add a bit of context to that situation, the point of the conversation was supposed to be, let me show you a few of the things that I’m working on on the mega brand. So somebody who was supposed to be part of that, and hey, cool man, let’s have a look. Here’s a couple of the images. And without being genuine and saying, Hey, I want to show you this because I believe I can expand, or I can grow your brand with the same mechanisms to do this, then I’m game. I’m fine. Again, if we were on this podcast and after the podcast, it came to, Hey, Shane, can you buy this from me? It’d be the same thing if somebody came on my podcast and I was interviewing them because I want to share their journey with my network and have other people become educated on the path to entrepreneurship.

(00:49:41):

And then all of a sudden at the end of it, I said, oh, well, I want you to pay for this too, and I want you to give me this and give me this. And they would be like, Shane is a scumbag. So for me, again, that authenticity piece and the ethics behind just trustworthiness and being honest and transparent and frank, I’ve closed more sales in the past seven months from not trying to sell anything than I did in the past three years of my entire business career. And again, it was because I learned, I’ve had conversations very, very, I’m not bragging on nothing, but I’ve had very high level conversations with important leaders. Chris, like yourself on Chris, I want to fire the team. What should I do? Remember that

Chris Beall (00:50:22):

We had that conversation. That one took about two and a half hours actually, and was right over there on my patio that I was on the desert.

Shane Mahi (00:50:30):

We had that chat and many more. And then my conversations changed from, Hey, do you want to learn about how we can book you more meetings to, Hey, do you want me to tell you how I can increase your valuation and help you get to an exit in three years versus the next 10, right? Those types of conversations changed everything about what I’m doing, and it’s because I’m ethical in everything I do and how I approach my market. So that’s me on that piece. Just to chime in on that,

Chris Beall (00:51:00):

Corey, I think there’s a problem that you’re going to face, and the problem is we do need people to learn how to interact with other people starting from where they are. So when you’re young, your interactions when you’re really young have a lot to do with your parents and a lot to do with power. Anybody who’s ever had a 2-year-old knows it has everything to do with power because you’re trying to get a little power in the world, and there’s ways to do it. Screaming your head off in a public place works pretty well. There’s a bunch of others. The word no comes to mind, right? The original tough customer is a 2-year-old. They’ve got a response to your suggestion, no, you’re trying to sell ’em whatever. Why don’t you sit in the high chair here at the restaurants that run around the table and kick our feet?

(00:51:46):

No, right? I mean, that’s where the resistance to sales actually starts. We need people to learn how to do this, not in order to sell things to other people, but in order to have their own learning, which in certain ways will always exceed any bots. And here’s why. By the way, in the world of the innovation economy, all the value is created by bringing things together that weren’t together before, and discovering that you can get new value from simple combinations. If you’ve ever worked with a patent attorney, you’ll be told by a good one. Look, you don’t come up with something new. You combine two things that exist, and now you have something patentable. That’s the world of patents. And as you know, I have a certain book of them and my patent attorney, Sid Leach, up in Phoenix, the best that I’ve ever worked with, I’ve been working with them since my 40th birthday, so that means 29 plus years.

(00:52:46):

And that was the first thing he taught me was, you’re not coming up with something new, even though it’s novel, it’s always a combination. It’s always a combination. Well, everything can be combined. That’s why the innovation economy is so huge, because there’s so many combinations. So you asked, what is this AI stuff in sales? Oh, look, a combination AI and sales, two things brought together, but in order to get the combinations to happen, it takes conversations both with other people and inside of our own little noggins as we cro around in the desert barefoot or do whatever crazy things we do, and if we want to share those with somebody else and have them make a dangerous decision, do I want to try something new? Which is the essence of innovation, economy, sales, do I want to try something new? We need to get really, really good at helping somebody get to the point where we can have that conversation.

(00:53:39):

So if we deprive folks of the ability to do the baby conversation, which is the cold call, how are we going to get into the adult conversation? Which is, what do you think? If we were to take that technology, that technology and that company right there and put, I don’t know, maybe a hundred million bucks into it, what do you think? Can we do something there? That’s a much less comfortable conversation because there’s more on the line, but there’s always more on the line. So you’re going to face a problem, Corey, which is, and it is not going to happen fast, but when cold calling is better done by bots or done as well, but much more cheaply, which is a likely thing to happen at some point, at least for the first call, where does the practice come from for people to become competent business leaders? And it’s going to take some thinking and work.

Shane Mahi (00:54:34):

I have a quick question on this, Corey, and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. So let’s just call the typical outbound service in today’s society, roughly. It costs about 10,000 pounds for us to deliver a monthly service, 10,000 pounds, a monthly retainer, let’s call it that. Now you’ve got one or two dedicated reps, you’ve got a research team on there. You’ve got quite a heavy opex cost, let’s say 50 to 60% of the entire deal value or the monthly deal value goes towards that. When the time comes that a bot has the ability to do that process that those researchers can do, and those first callers can do the, does the outbound, does the outbound arena, the environment still keep their costs the same, the value is still the same, you’re still getting the outcome, or does it now become a period of, or a playground where we’re going to fight on costs?

Chris Beall (00:55:35):

I know the answer to that question because I didn’t study Elizabeth and poetry. I was reading Peter Drucker when I was seven years old. Oh, okay. Lemme throw you the answer. Prices always follow costs downward, always. And the reason is that there asymmetries and situations among providers, and for one provider, even holding quality constant, which is pretty impossible to know if you’ve done, it always is the case where they could either make more money now on the transaction or in the future off the market by offering the same service at a lower price. Therefore, they will do that, and therefore they will take share from you.

(00:56:20):

That’s just the answer. And a question of, in any competitive environment, how does that work out? I mean, again, this is a big deal on this podcast. We often talk about the fact that the world of sales obsesses about competition and also acts like there isn’t any competition at the same time, which is truly bizarre when you think about it. So if you want to get a salesperson hyped up, talk about a competitor, oh, there was a competitor in that deal. Oh my God, what are they offering? Where’s our battle cards? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it’s like, well, what are we offering? Oh, absolutely. We’re offering this value and absolutely we’re doing this. No, it’s all relative, you’re offering something that has an unknown and a kind of known quality at one thing that is known, which is the cost, at least the dollar cost, and comes with other costs like, oh, you got to actually implement it.

(00:57:15):

You got to hire people, you gotta train ’em, you got to do whatever. So what happens over time is competition shapes, markets and new material science shapes costs. New material science always shapes cost. As soon as you make rolled steel, you change the cost of automobiles. As soon as you can make a combination of rebar and concrete that you can take up far enough to put some really inexpensive glass on it, you make skyscrapers instead of three story buildings in old downtowns and you reshape the world. Material costs and per unit capability shape the economy’s direction because of competition at all times relentlessly and pretending it’s not going to happen is frankly idiotic.

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