Artificial intelligence is transforming sales, whether we’re ready or not. In this episode, we dive deep on questions sales leaders have about leveraging AI amidst the hype and uncertainty. What’s driving adoption? Where can bots add value now vs. someday? We debate ethical considerations and the threat of/or replacing human jobs.

Our guides, Chris and Corey, are joined by Shane Mahi, now Chief Partnership Officer at AI startup mega.ai. Shane shares insights from the AI frontlines on what’s realistic today and the autonomous sales agent vision of tomorrow. Shane shares the hard-won insights he’s gained through making over 650,000 sales calls and landing more than 30 major clients. In this 3-part series, we’ll cover Shane’s journey along with the role of AI in sales. 

Join us for episode 213: Ethical AI Selling – Reality vs Hype

Links from this episode:

Shane Mahi on LinkedIn

MEGA.ai

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Branch49

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

 

Chris Beall (00:08:41):

Great. So I just finished a book I can recommend to everybody called Molecular Storms. If you want to understand how quantum physics actually derives from or is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics and why we are we are, what we are, where we are, and how it all works. Read that and Stephen Hawking has mentioned it in that book, so go for it.

Corey Frank (00:09:07):

The original Hawking and you are the Hawking of Hawking. Alright, I will add that to my children’s book list. Yes, it’s recorded, but we have a guest, we have a repeat guest from what, almost three years ago. We have Shane Mahi from Points undetermined Morocco, the UK, Maryland. So Shane, great to have you back on the Market Dominance Guys, after an extended disappearance and as you’ve built up your companies and built up your rotation and how many hundreds of thousands of phone calls you’ve had since the two and a half years that you’ve arrived, ready to share the information, not only on all what you’ve learned in those two and a half years since you’ve made the last appearance, but also we’re going to talk today, Chris and Shane Wright is about something I know nothing about, which is the I in ai, and we’re going to talk specifically about AI in sales and in outbound sales. So Shane, great to have you back on the Market Dominance. Guys.

Shane Mahi (00:10:05):

Thank you very much Corey, and thank you, Chris. It has been, I think, almost four years now. We’re in 2024. And from what I know, Chris, our episode was one of the most popular, most listened to episodes of that year. And in that time, I am thankful to Chris and the ConnectAndSell team, I was able to grow my company to a million dollars in sales revenue. I won’t say pounds because it doesn’t sound as cool, but we hit a million dollars in sales revenue. We made over 650,000 calls. We landed about 32, 32 major clients that had an A CV of about 76,000 pounds each. They ran for about seven, eight months and we were on our way to becoming a very dominant player in the market as a boutique firm. But the normal peaks and troughs of startup life happened. Me, I neglected my marriage and my family and I focused a lot on my business.

(00:11:07):

And that ended up breaking down what that relationship was. I also made a few mistakes in that process, which I’m glad I made because it helped me figure out how to increase the value of my business, what I’m doing, profit margins and all of these peaks and troughs. Letting go of my entire team at one point has led me down a path to where I am today where I have an abundance, an abundance of knowledge, I have an abundance of experience, the types of conversations I sit in, the people in people’s room and just really repeat what Chris has said, what Jerry has said, what all the CEOs that I’ve ever spoke to have said, and they’re just thinking, who is this young kid? And I’m 37 years old. I’m proud of everything I’ve done to this date right now. I don’t even know what my company name is.

(00:11:55):

I’ve changed it so many times, but where I am today, I’m the chief partnership officer of a company called mega.ai. I was brought into that company to build the strongest relationships in the industry. Chris, I believe is going to be one of, if not the strongest relationship I’ve ever had in my entire life because of this, Corey, hopefully you too. And the next journey in the next 11, 12 months is to build the next generation of autonomous agents that are going to be booking meetings 24 7, instant ramp up time, a thousand dollars an agent, 2070 5% cheaper than a human rep. And more importantly, your business can scale exponentially without the need for human labor. The only reason I’ve been able to build this type of narrative is because I ran 27 seconds, 650,000 times. So that to me, in a nutshell,

Corey Frank (00:12:47):

27 seconds, that actually works. Wow.

Shane Mahi (00:12:51):

Seven seconds and 20

Corey Frank (00:12:52):

Baby. So wild. Wow. So no, that is an incredible story. Of course, Shane, as impressive as that is, right, you’re also a very prolific contributor, never with your handout, but just contributor and thought leader into the space of B2B sales. And I know your reputation speaks for yourself. You take calls at all hours of the night. People use you as the sounding board for so many of us in the industry. So that’s also a testament, I think, to your great reputation. So great to have you. So let’s jump into it, Chris, on this AI and sales, what chain is talking about, certainly with mega, we want to hear a little bit more about, but let me pose it to both of you guys. How are folks using AI today that really has changed from maybe even since the last time you were on the show, Shane, a couple of years ago. You have sales copilot, I think from Microsoft, you have Einstein from Salesforce, I believe, and certainly the ubiquitous ChatGTP that folks have been trying to write screenplays. But maybe you can talk a little bit about Chris, what you’ve seen certainly in the private equity side of other burgeoning businesses inside of ConnectAndSell, and then Shane, kind of what you’re seeing as well. So Chris, what do you see as just the seismic tectonic plates that have shifted just in the last handful of years here now? Well,

Chris Beall (00:14:20):

The big shift was just in the end of 2022 actually when ChatGTP came on the market, it did something that was totally unexpected with regard to ai. Suddenly you had a popular, like everybody wanted it, everybody could figure out how to use it, AI friend, so to speak, that you could ask questions of. And it showed a couple of things. One is that vast general knowledge gained from just everything that’s ever been out on the internet put into a relatively simple, but really, really big neural network that’s organized in a very clever way can provide value to regular people that exceeds what they can get from going out and Googling. Because as the internet got more and more populated with websites that tell you everything, if you’re being told everything, then you’re kind of being told nothing. And so who do you trust?

(00:15:26):

To tell you the truth, well, Google came up with an idea a long time ago who has the most backlinks, and then they expanded on that with various levels of authority oriented algorithms and then somehow tried to make that work in a world that was fundamentally corrupt because they were taking ad revenue and they figured out how to square that circle. And then chat, GPT came along and said, eh, who really needs that? Just ask me a question and I’ll tell you something. And then if that doesn’t quite work out, ask me another question. And so instead of getting a bunch of stuff on the screen, including a bunch of ads, what you actually got was this sort of friendly, authoritative voice. And it took about, I would say, 362 milliseconds before somebody figured out how to use chat GBT in sales just by asking it to write an email for them.

(00:16:18):

And then they’d copy and paste it. It’s a better writer than any of us as long as you accept whatever the style is and write in different styles. So you can ask it as you and I know Corey, we wrote a book in two days, and actually I just did it by copying and pasting stuff out of chat g pt, there’s the book, right? Market Dominance book, a conversation with ChatGTP, and did that with no instruction, no nothing. And it actually walked me through the process of publishing it on Amazon. So end to end between six o’clock on a Saturday morning and 11 o’clock on Sunday night. That book was created from podcast episodes and it wrote everything except for the how we did it part. So that was already being used in marketing anyway. But the use in sales is pretty clear.

(00:17:08):

Most salespeople are not exactly readers and writers, shall we say, male colorblind, left-handed a DD. Dyslexics generally didn’t grow up getting like you did a degree in Elizabethan poetry, which often does require a certain amount of reading. I’m sure you regret taking that path with the amount of reading it took, but actually Corey is a prolific reader, but sales is populated with folks who didn’t raise their hand in class saying, oh yeah, teacher, I got the answer to that, right? It was folks who knew how to talk their way from a D to a C in order to graduate. So that was the immediate first use. And all the copilots are just that. That’s where we’ve come, yeah, that’s where we’ve come. I’ll write something for you, right? What’s happening now is much more interesting, which is, and this is what we’ll have Shane talk about it.

(00:18:08):

This is what Mega is all about, as we whipped right by the Turing test. The Turing test was a big deal. If you’re interacting with a bot and you can’t tell it’s a bot after a bunch of interactions by text, by the way, which is kind of a dumb way to do it. But if you’re doing that and you can’t tell if it’s a bot or a human, well, it’s passed the Turing test. And we’ve gone beyond some point in the evolution of computers and their relationship to society. We blew by the Turing test in one day and didn’t even notice it. Nobody cared, nobody noticed, except people said, oh my God, it’s going to take over the world. That, by the way, is ridiculous. Something typing to you is not going to take over the world and pictures don’t help. It is, oh, it made a picture of somebody, great, fantastic.

(00:18:58):

But in sales. Now the big question is can you make a selling bot? And that is a graded question. It starts with, in my mind, can you get a bot to get a gatekeeper to do a transfer that’s a sale. Can you do it? And that’s a really interesting question. That’s one that we’re going to be exploring with mega because we have a lot of gatekeeper interactions and it costs money. It’s human beings who are doing it. Maybe we can do it with a butt, I don’t know. But I like baby steps. I’m an old rock climber. You can stare at the summit all you want, but you actually have to make the first move and it comes off the ground. So sitting back across the valley going, oh, look at that. Doesn’t get the job done. So what’s the first step in making a selling bot?

(00:19:49):

Probably talking to a gatekeeper. Not really a regular gatekeeper, but maybe just an operator. So we suspect there’s things that can be done there. Now, can you go all the way to closing a deal? A real deal where somebody’s putting their butt in the line where their careers are on the line, where they’re risking everything, their family, their future on the advice of a vendor’s, but maybe not just because of the vendor’s. Butt is intrinsically at the moment on the wrong side of the uncanny valley or somewhere in it, and it’s like, well, we know the vendor’s but is clever. It was made by clever people. Hopefully their salespeople aren’t quite as clever, so maybe I can trust them. But that’s the continuum of questions. And yesterday, Shane asked me to be in a round table with a bunch of folks, and we were talking about the ethics, potential ethics, which I’d love to talk about here. But I think it’s really about the practicality, the ethical difference between AI and not AI and sales is like the ethical distinction between a knife and a gun. It’s like, okay, so with a knife, I got to get close to you in order to draw blood with a gun. I can do it from a little farther away. And if you’re a certain friend of mine, that might be about two miles.

(00:21:13):

So is there an ethical difference between those? Not really. There’s a practical difference between those. It’s still unethical to walk up to Shane in a bar and say, Shane, you son of a dog. I used to think you were a wonderful person. And now I don’t. And slip a shive into him that’s just as unethical as shooting him as he comes out of the bar. What’s the difference, right? So I believe this big ethics discussion tends to be a political discussion about computers, actually not about ai. And it has to do with who’s going to get more power at different points in different processes.

Corey Frank (00:21:54):

Well, Chris, Let’s talk about that just for a second with Shane and bring Shane in here. I see that ethical dilemma to me, it starts with authenticity. And if there is the sense chain that, hey, wait a minute, it’s as if you’re watching a Spider-Man Marvel movie, and you’re just engrossed in the experience of swinging from building to building, and then all of a sudden I see a string holding Spider-Man, or I see a boom mic in the corner that maybe the editor forgot to take out. The illusion just goes down immediately. And I said, wait a minute. I’m in a movie theater here and I’m eating bad popcorn. This is not me. The stakes all of a sudden go from being here where I care about the characters to now the stakes are just cruelly, artificial. And Shane, do you find that, or how do you bridge that?

(00:22:48):

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 to 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. Chris and Shane, by the way, the coming up front, front loading the fact that my AI interaction may be lumpy. You may call me out on it. You may see the wires, you may see the boom bike, but come on, it’s a movie. And so that authenticity can be front loaded by telling the truth. But Chris, do you see, and Shane, that a lot of these AI tools, the, is it Air ai, the one that has the demo for Apple? To me, that seems manipulative, and I think I’m not alone as a consumer, as a B2B consumer of say, they don’t front load that authenticity or that honesty at all. But Chris, do you see there’s a race towards making that seamless to the point where you don’t have to even admit that? Or how was it received in the round table yesterday when you said that, Hey, I think we got to lead with this honesty and trust upfront? Well,

Chris Beall (00:27:17):

I actually think that this is one of those rare cases where the ethics and the practicalities converge so tightly that you will not win in the marketplace with a bot that doesn’t say it’s a bot. I think there’s a lot of freaking out about this kind of stuff that just comes from how people kind of act like a bot. They sort of act like ChatGTP, and just start emitting the next words that come to mind, which is it’s a bot, therefore it’s not a person, therefore, it’s inauthentic because they’ve heard that string of words before. But if you really think about it, we do love to interact with bots as long as they’re responsive and we feel that they’re sufficiently neutral. That’s why chat GPT went nuts and became the fastest growing application in the history of applications because you perceive that it’s neutral, it’s on, if anything, it’s on your side.

(00:28:16):

And in fact, it uses language damn well it’s a bot, right? But it uses language that implies that it cares about you. When you correct it, I ask, Hey, tell me about Chris Beal. And it says, oh, Chris, he has a degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford, blah, blah, blah. And I say, no, no, no. I mean, Chris be the ceo, EO of ConnectAndSell co-host to market dominance guys. What about that guy that says, oh, yeah. And then it says some other bullshit about me. And I go, no, no. And it says, oh, I apologize. It apologizes to me. So it sees the world through my eyes, which is a bot that needs a little bit of help, kind of staying on the rails. But it does useful things for me, and it’s not against me. I think the big issue is going to be being the vendor’s bot.

(00:29:02):

We’re making an assumption that a selling bot has to be the vendor’s bot, but selling is a highly complex activity full of all sorts of interactions. One of the interactions is learning, do I need to learn one vendor at a time? James Thornberg would say, no, James Thornberg would say, and God knows, he knows more about it than any of us on this call. Being a neutral actually allows you to get better information and save time for the other party. You tell us your requirements once we’ll tell you which of three or four vendors that we work with is most appropriate, and those vendors are going to pay if one of them actually ends up doing business with you. Because for them, channel doesn’t mean manipulation. It just means being in the game, right? So we’re making a lot of assumptions about the bot filled future of sales that are simply knee jerk.

(00:29:57):

They’re simply, they’re not really even proper assumptions. They’re actually emotional reactions to the idea of being manipulated by something that might be smarter than us, and it’s very, very interesting. So the ethics and the practicality are going to merge just the same way they do in the 27th seconds. So Shane mentioned, how often has he opened with those two sentences? I know an interruption is the key. I didn’t say it right that time. Let me say it correctly. I know I’m an interruption now, why do I say that? Well, I say it because it’s the truth, and I’m telling you that I see the world through your eyes. So I say, Hey, Corey, I’m called Sam, but I’m actually a bot and I’m working for Joey over at company X, Y, Z. What I do is I reach out to folks like you to see whether you are interested in learning more about X.

(00:30:55):

You could go, well, I am, I’m not. And I could say, as the bot, Corey, I know, I mean talking to a bot who’s a vendor’s bot especially could be uncomfortable and affected, but you could think I’m manipulating you. If at any time you feel that, just call me out on it. If you want to talk to a human, let me know, right? I could say that as a bot. I could say it just like that. Modern bots can say stuff like that. I can work my way from acknowledging the truth, still following Chris VA’s advice, right? You’ve got to show the other person, you see the world through their eyes, then you need to demonstrate to them that you are competent to solve a problem they have right now. Those are two things. You have seven seconds to do it. Can a human do it? Most humans can’t. We train ’em, they fail. Why? They won’t throw themselves under the bus and they won’t make it sound fun when they offer to move forward. And people call it permission-based, which is utter baloney. There’s no permission involved here. It’s doing these two important things. I could do those things. It’s just cheaper. And by the way, it’ll actually do

Shane Mahi (00:32:03):

I agree. I agree fully. I think that’s a very, very, very important point. And anything that is scripted where it doesn’t require too much thinking involved, such as let’s just call it either an agent or the progression of an agent that becomes a bot or a bot in the future that has that four, five seconds of scripted behavior to get through the gatekeeper. Again, a human is going to cost five, six times more than that. Whatever kind of country you’re in, if you can use a robot to do that kind of stuff and just be authentic, be genuine, inoculate before you get to it, the market, what is it? The barrier to entry or that crossing the chasm becomes much easier. What was I going to say in the ethics piece? You jump in again and then I’m going to jump on that piece. I just wanted to catch that last piece.

 

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We’re missing Corey Frank today, but we still have a meaty solo episode for you from Chris. Chris is diving into a perplexing sales practice – coaching cold calls. Perplexing because everyone talks coaching up, yet so few actually do it. He explains why this type of coaching is critical yet so scarce, why both the coach and the call induce fear, and how to actually make coaching work. With compelling examples from golf and hostage negotiations, Chris breaks down the elements of an effective coaching framework. The key – simplify each call into bite-sized pieces and target very specific first failures to drive rapid gains. This episode overflows with accessible coaching advice for sales leaders. Join us for this Market Dominance Guys Episode, “Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching.”

 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

 

QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:

“Comfort is always the enemy of performance.” – Chris Beall

 

Others:

“Use recordings to model great calls, not critique.”

 

Here are 5 key points from the Chris Beall episode on coaching cold calls:

 

  1. Coaching cold calls and unscheduled sales conversations is critical but rarely done effectively.
  2. Recordings and delayed feedback don’t work well for coaching short, high-pressure sales calls.
  3. Fear of judgment from the manager and fear of rejection on the call inhibit performance during coaching.
  4. Coach one specific first failure at a time, use repetition, and offer feedback immediately after the call.
  5. Simplify calls into a repeatable framework focused on building trust, avoiding too much value too early, and closing for the next meeting.

 

Chris Beall (00:08):

Hey everybody. Chris Beal here with another episode of Market Dominance. Guys, I’m going solo today. Corey’s tied up doing some kind of work that is probably super useful I’m sure, and I got a moment so I thought I’d do something fairly quick, but on a subject that’s really been on my mind a lot recently, and that’s coaching, and it’s amazing to me but probably shouldn’t be that there’s so much talk about coaching in sales and there’s so little actual coaching. So the question is why and is there something we can do about it or is this, there’s something we should do about it First, I believe that at least for ambush calls for the cold call and the follow-up call that are unscheduled coaching is super important and super effective and the reason is that it’s a short performance and the performance has got to be pretty precise to be effective, but it doesn’t have to be perfect and we often fail fairly early in a cold call or fairly early in a follow-up call and when we do, we don’t have a chance at what would come next. 

Chris Beall (01:18):

There’s not a lot of recovery time because there’s an inclination on the part of the person receiving the call to go ahead and say, Hey, great, thanks for calling me goodbye. And that’s if they’re being nice. So what to do about it? Well, one thing that’s recommended and one thing that’s done a lot is recordings. So you record so that you can have a recording for the coach to listen to. And self-coaching and self-coaching recordings can actually be reasonably effective as long as the person who’s coaching themselves has got a framework, they have a way of looking at and thinking about the recording. And as long as they get over the hump with regard to listening to themselves, a lot of people are very, very uncomfortable listening to themselves on a recording. I know I used to be, maybe I still am for all I know. 

Chris Beall (02:10):

I used to make recorded videos back many, many years ago when I worked at Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin and I’d make a video every day and these were training videos in the world of software design and software development requirements, engineering subjects like that. And first few times I had to just look at that camera, how far away was it? I don’t know, 16 inches, something like that, big studio camera and then even worse, spend the afternoon with my good friend Mr. Singer going through the material and editing it. And first I didn’t have a very objective view because I was too concerned about that mismatch between what my voice sounds like to me inside, no echoing in my bony head and what it sounds like when it’s recorded and coming back to me. So with recorded coaching, even self-coaching, it’s rather challenging to get to the point where you’re listening, I would say clearly. 

Chris Beall (03:11):

And you still have to have a framework that you’re listening for and so it’s hard using recordings to coach somebody else that’s really commonly said that it’s happening. It’s really, really common. There are products out there whose purpose is entirely to help you coach your reps and what I tend to find is they don’t get used very much and when they do, they tend to get used in a way that isn’t very effective either. Some scores are put on them that says, you did this well at this, you did this well at that, kind of like grading a paper or something like that. Or they’re used to point out multiple places that the rep could have improved. And while it sounds great, most of the time, one, it doesn’t happen, it’s just too much work. And two, the reps don’t know how to really interpret those offline comments. 

Chris Beall (04:08):

Those comments that came from somebody listening to a recording and making their observations whether structured or unstructured. Meanwhile, there’s an Allego study that says, and I think it’s pretty accurate, that 54% of sales managers report that they provide an optimum amount of coaching, but only 37% of sales reps agree with their managers on that one. And 93% of sales managers report the coaching sessions they’re providing are high quality. Only 68% of reps agree with that, and I guarantee you that’s not for coaching. Ambush calls, cold calls and follow-ups. Now why am I so kind of focused on ambush calls? Because when we’re out to dominate markets, we only have that first opportunity to make a good impression and that good impression means it’s getting trust. So the whole concept of market dominance as we put it forth here on market dominance, guys, pretty simple pave the market with trust, harvest that trust over the next 12 quarters that it’s going to take for the folks in your market overall, all of them to ultimately decide that they’re going to replace their current solution with a new solution, which is when you have a shot. 

Chris Beall (05:24):

So you’ve got a lot of patience, you have a lot of persistence, you have a lot of structured follow-up management that needs to be done. And in addition, you have these very short conversations that require coaching and they tend to happen, especially now in a work from home world, they happen somewhere else where the manager no longer is. So the old idea of walking around and at least standing there and listening for somebody to get a connection with a target and talk to them, that doesn’t happen as much anymore. You can’t really 

Chris Beall (05:56):

Walk around your rep’s living room, their office, or whatever at home or some Starbucks, god forbid, and listen for them. Also, if you’re using conventional dialing technology like a telephone or a regular dialer, you’re just not getting that many conversations. So if you’re talking to say two people an hour, that’s a long wait for the coach. So it’s super inconvenient and expensive people like managers or coaches, if you have a specialized coach which are pretty rare, simply don’t have the time to stand there and wait for a conversation, especially given how many of those conversations end up being super short, 10, 15 seconds because they’re a brush off because they’re a quick hangup because the other person really didn’t want to be ambushed, which is always the case and the skill wasn’t there to get through the first part of the conversation and get to something that felt more coachable. 

Chris Beall (06:51):

So it’s quite interesting when we look at the world of coaching, I think everybody knows it’s very important that it’s almost impossible to improve without it, that the unit of change within a sales team that’s doing outbound calling is the individual rep. A rep will be very stable in their skills over time. They don’t jump up and down with regard to their ability to open or their ability to get curious or their ability to handle standard kinds of cold calling objections or their ability to close for the meeting. Those things are pretty stable. One of them is the current bottleneck of their process and as the coach you need to find that one and then help the rep see a better way of executing that and I guess I’ll say feel progress. That is when they execute in a better way, it not only produces a better result, but it feels better. 

Chris Beall (07:48):

It’s a very emotional business cold calling and it’s because when we call we’re the invisible stranger and we know that those objections really are kind of personal away, not to us as a person but to us in the role that we’ve chosen to adopt the person who ambushed them. And so we already have some concerns inside us about that and it’s kind of difficult to get over those concerns and get on with it much less to perform something new under that stress. So why is it that we don’t coach cold calls and unscheduled follow-up calls very much? Well, they’re not scheduled so the coach can’t make themselves available, but they’re also very fast. A lot happens in a short amount of time. So what should you coach? Do you coach something overall like the tone or the pace or how confident they sounded? Do you coach their word choice? 

Chris Beall (08:45):

What do you coach? It’s not obvious what to coach. And so generally what does get coached if anything is a bit of a mishmash and the coach, the manager to get as much in to that particular coaching unit, I’ll call it that feedback unit as they can and there’s just no way to change multiple things at the same time for the next performance as a rep and so you just end up with a mess. The other thing is there’s multiple agendas. So for instance, we run at ConnectAndSell. We run these things called flight schools and in the first session of flight school, which goes on for three hours, you’re making cold calls as the student, you’re actually doing real calls, you’re doing the whole call end to end. Your goal is the usual goal. You’re trying to get somebody to put a meeting on the calendar and yet for three hours you’re going to be coached for the first three hours on every conversation or at least almost every conversation immediately after the conversation while it’s still fresh in your mind and freshens your body. 

Chris Beall (09:50):

Quite frankly, you’re going to be coached on how well you execute the first seven seconds of that conversation. The first seven seconds are well known now by a number of folks who’ve studied this to be the amount of time we have to get someone to trust us. And given that trust is imperative in B2B, both within the call and then over the long period of time that we might have a relationship with somebody if we move forward with them, trust is so important. We have to make sure that we nail it. So we spend three hours in our Flight Schools three hours on just practicing getting trust and we do it the way that Chris Voss, the author of Never Split. The Difference How to Negotiate is If Your Life Depends On, it taught me one evening when I was very fortunate to get to ask him this question, how long do we have to get trust in a cold call? 

Chris Beall (10:43):

He said, seven seconds. And he said, but it’s easy. All we have to do is show the other person. We see the world through their eyes. We call it tactical empathy and then we need to demonstrate to them that we’re competent to solve a problem they have right now. Well, we are the problem. Cold caller is the problem they have right now. So it’s very easy to offer us a solution to that problem and it’s actually fairly straightforward to make it clear that you see the world through their eyes. Just declare yourself to be a bad thing and move on. So we teach people to say, I know I’m an interruption. I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called. I know I’m an interruption, says I’m a bad thing and I’m not interrupting your day. I’m an interruption notice, I’m a noun, I’m a bad thing. 

Chris Beall (11:30):

Nobody ever says, oh, an interruption, that’s a great thing. And then immediately we change our voice to a playful and curious voice and we offer a solution to the problem they have right now, which is us. Well there is in all of that I can only say a lot. So when we’re coaching, we’ve got to find one part to work on and then we need to master that part because that part comes before the next part and if we don’t master the first part, there’s nothing to master in the second part. It’s kind of like if I swing at the golf club at the ball and I miss the ball or I hit it off the heel or off the toe or whatever, it doesn’t really matter how great my follow through looks. It’s just like getting over that. What we need to do is actually figure out how to do the thing before we might hit the ball. 

Chris Beall (12:22):

It might be our stance, it might be our grip, it may be the way that we take the club back. It may be whether we’re keeping our head relatively stable. There’s a bunch of things that we need to do, but they’re all before impact. None of them are after impact. So when we’re coaching, we need to coach the before and then observe the after and then go back and coach the before again. So it’s very important to have an agenda that’s appropriate for what you’re able to coach rather than the agenda being let’s make the whole thing better. And there’s various pieces. Cold calls are quite short, maybe five sentences that are always there and maybe three or four or more that are sometimes there average length of times about a minute and eight seconds unless you successfully schedule a meeting in which case you’ve got another, say a minute or so of meeting logistics work to do. 

Chris Beall (13:17):

So in that call lots can happen. You’ve got to get trust, you’ve got to at least acquiesce to move forward. You have to get curious and that’s something that takes about three hours to coach and is also just the curiosity element of the call. You need to avoid too much value because too much value leads to the classic we’re all set objection, the objection. That is frankly not handleable. And so we’ve got to avoid that. Learning to avoid something is very hard. We’re tempted to bring in more value and under stress we tend to say we’re great. Here’s something more about us. And so learning how not to do something is actually much harder than quite frankly learning to do it. So these are keys to different parts of the call. So you can’t really coach the whole call. You have to break it down and then you have to allow time between the coaching sessions and the learning sessions in order for that to be internalized. 

Chris Beall (14:17):

Repetition is super important. After you’ve coached one thing, first failure we call it, you need to have the coach, the rep actually repeats that particular thing that they’re going to say probably 3, 4, 5 times immediately before going and performing again. And you need to have a mechanism to get to the next conversation quickly. I think that’s how we at ConnectAndSell fell into all of this coaching and training stuff. We never intended to be there, but we do provide conversations pretty quickly, a minute and a half, two minutes. If you’re connecting to the next live human, maybe three, four minutes if you’re connecting to the perfect target, the actual person on your list, and that amount of time is still long enough that you’re coaching input and the practice that you might have done will start to fade. That’s why it takes repetition before the performance and then repetition of the performance and the next coaching cycle should be immediate and it should be the first failure actually it should be okay, you did that a little bit better, but this still could be improved. 

Chris Beall (15:29):

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. So the other thing that is required for coaching to work is you need, you actually need a script. There’s nothing to coach to without a script. Coaching to generalities just doesn’t work. If I’m going to teach you how to swing a golf club, I’ve got to have a specific idea in mind of how the golf swing works. I can’t teach you a generic kind of like, well, it’ll be whatever it happens to be. Let’s see what feels good. I have to have a plan. You have to adopt the plan, then we have to break the plan down. And because it’s a ballistic activity, a golf swing or a cold call, they follow a pattern and what you just did determines what you get to do next or what you can do next. 

Chris Beall (17:22):

You can’t stop golf swing partway down successfully. I know Tiger Woods can do it. I tried it once and if this were on video, I’d show you the two broken figures that I got from my efforts. Somebody was walking in the way of it, so it was probably worthwhile, but it just showed that you think you can do things that you probably can’t do. That is you have this very sort of ballistic activity, but it needs a plan. It needs a first thing, a second thing, a third thing, a fourth thing. You need to start with the first one and then you need to be coached through that until you’ve mastered it, not to perfection, but to be sufficient to support the next one. If you’re getting enough folks to go with you and trust you into the second part of the conversation, then you can start to be coached on getting curiosity. 

Chris Beall (18:13):

A classic cold call goes from fear. That’s the prospect’s fear, not yours to trust in seven seconds because you did the two things Chris said you should do out of curiosity, which is how we avoid too much value, too much value and triggers the hey, we’re all set objection. And then from there into basically commitment, asking for a close, you make an offer, let’s meet. And then you’ve got to handle the natural objections after all, you ambush somebody and you have to also be ready to set yourself up for some sort of a follow-up conversation later because most of the time you’re probably not going to get a meeting on a cold call. So these are all important. I’ll call it tactical factors in coaching. You need a script as a framework to coach to you, coach to first failure. You need to have immediate repetition and practice of what the rep’s going to say next. 

Chris Beall (19:13):

Then they need to have performance hard on the heels of that experience. And then you’re observing for where they improve and for still first failure and then you give the feedback on where they improved the coaching on the next thing to practice. You practice 3, 4, 5 reps and go back in and perform again. So that’s the essence of coaching. Now we have kind of a real problem though, which is that the coach and the call are independently scary. The coach is probably the manager and managers have hiring and firing authority or at least strong influence over the people on their team. And that means the coaching may be interpreted as judgment, judgment on performance that might lead to potentially loss of job. It’s very hard to improve performance unless you feel free to try whatever it is that’s being suggested. And when you’re afraid of failing at that thing, you’re less likely to perform it particularly well. 

Chris Beall (20:15):

So you have the coach being scary and then you also have the call itself being scary because nobody likes to be that invisible stranger. The invisible stranger tends to get rejected. People don’t like to be rejected. Jeff Blunt wrote a beautiful book on the subject called Objections about how we feel objections as rejection and rejection is one of the most painful things we can feel. I have a theory as to why in the environment of evolution, the village being rejected ultimately could mean being rejected from the village. The word for that is exiled and exile was generally considered a punishment worse than death. So we’re afraid of the coach because they hold power over us and we’re afraid of the call because we know where the bad thing is and we know we’re going to trigger a response. And you put those two fears together and they tend to be somewhat paralytic with regard to performance. 

Chris Beall (21:13):

And everybody’s different with regard to how they handle that kind of fear. Some people, they can perform reasonably well, even if they’re scared in multiple dimensions. These people can go out and be a concert pianist or a major league baseball pitcher or whatever, and they can be under tremendous pressure and still perform. Most of us haven’t practiced that much and don’t have that much sort of, I don’t know, Prozac running in our veins I suppose is a way to put it. So what do we do about it? Well, one thing to do is just physically remove the coach. So it’s natural to work from home. You can’t really feel in a product like ConnectAndSell if you’re the user. You’re having conversations with people, you don’t really feel like somebody might be listening to those conversations, even if they’re clicking the little whisper button after the conversation to give you their positive feedback and to give you their first failure observation, to let you practice a little bit with them and to go back into pushing the button as we call it and having the next conversation. 

Chris Beall (22:19):

But that physical separation is actually very effective because out of sight is out of mind. It’s hard to keep in mind two things. One is I’m talking to this person that I just ambushed and the other is that somebody I can’t see at all is listening to me. So that’s a good separation to achieve and it’s actually one of the reasons that the old walk around listening to somebody, or as they said wire jacking, that’s where you plug into the audio line. You plug into the headset as the coach and you’re listening. That’s why that’s actually a harder environment, the physical environment to get high performance, which you want. You want the highest level of performance because you’re looking for what shows up as a flaw. When performance is good, when performance is bad for some other reason, somebody they’re sick, they’re grieving, whatever it happens to be, that’s a bad time to coach. 

Chris Beall (23:17):

All we’re going to find out is that they’re sick or they’re grieving or whatever. We’re not going to learn very much. So what can we do about all this? Well emphasize long live coaching. Listen in, be patient. If you don’t have technology like ConnectAndSell, and so you’re going to wait a while, you couldn’t coach multiple folks at the same time, if you can at least aggregate the audio and switch from one to another and get an indication when a call is actually in play when talking, and again, coach one thing at a time. First failure, avoid the temptation to coach the entire conversation. Use repetition immediately before the performance and of the performance itself. That is repetition before the fragment to be tried a little bit differently and repetition of the entire call. I think it’s a great idea to coach about 20 calls in a row over maybe three hours. 

Chris Beall (24:12):

That’s why we structured Flight School like that. But at least having repetition of the entire performance of repetition of the coaching fragment is important. Tune up. Your listening there is drift. Everybody drifts. They drift from best practice under pressure. They go to what’s comfortable. So a rep who might’ve said at one point, I know I’m an interruption, might take up saying, I know I’m a bit of an interruption, or I know that I’m interrupting your day. Those are very, very different. And the rep goes there because quite frankly, it’s more comfortable. Comfort is always the enemy of performance in almost everything and in cold calling, it sure is. So you might get comfortable as a cold caller, but there’s a more comfortable thing to do, which is to not be as good a cold caller. So use a simple script. Five sentences are enough to get the job done with the framework. 

Chris Beall (25:06):

Drive out fear every way that you can, including not being physically present and use recordings to model great calls, not to critique. 

Practice listening to recordings with your reps to find the things they improved and let them find the flaws on their own. 

For recordings, it’s a little bit challenging to go in and say there was your first failure because it isn’t followed by an immediate performance.

 

So in summary, coaching is tremendous for cold calls and for follow-up calls, it makes a huge difference. You’re asking somebody to perform something very difficult, very technical, very nuanced, very ballistic. One thing leads to another in a challenging emotional environment where they know they are a bad thing and there’s no getting around that last part. They never become a good thing. Even if in your heart you’re trying to help somebody, you also know you’re an interruption. 

Chris Beall (26:03):

It’s super important to coach. It allows us to move the needle actually fairly quickly. We know in these Flight School sessions we’ve seen teams go from like 40% of quota to 110% in four or three hour sessions and stay there. As long as there is coaching for drift that goes on an ongoing basis. Simplicity is the key. Coaches 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. So for market dominance guys, without Corey Frank here, I’m Chris Beall. Just thought you might like a sort of practicum on coaching and happy calling out there.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

As sales leaders, we’re ultimately responsible for revenue growth. In part two of this must-listen episode, Helen Fanucci and Chris Beall reveal how to build an asset that drives results: pipeline power. Learn why phone and conversation intelligence beats guesswork. Discover how to arm your team with the right data to fill your pipeline with serious opportunities. We dive into the critical questions you must ask on every account to accelerate sales cycles. Helen emphasizes that trust builds between companies early on, so executives must engage alongside reps. Tune into part two for tangible tips on avoiding over-strategizing in favor of authentic conversations. You’ll pick up tactics to leverage intent signals, stop playing pipeline games, and create alignment around valuable targets. The key takeaway: with closed-loop feedback, your pipeline can become a core competitive advantage that speeds up cycles and boosts revenue.

Links from this episode:

Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Branch49

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

 

Corey Frank (00:01):

Chris, you’ve said many times marketing has budget, but no headcount. Sales has headcount, but oftentimes no budget. I would imagine certainly one of the things with pipeline power, Helen, in this consultancy and this advisory that you have on helping clients get more refined targeting to think about their targeting differently is about giving more power to the sales folks. And perhaps if you’re talking to the marketing folks, giving more power to the marketing folks, how to allocate their budgets and allocate the resource probably a little bit more efficiently. 

Helen Fanucci (00:38):

Yeah, I think so. But it also may be, it depends on the size of the organization, but I think there is a strategic, there needs to be a decider, if you will. Okay, this is the strategic decision, the direction we’re going in because the targeting is a representation or a manifestation of the strategy of the business strategy. So that could be the head of sales, it could be marketing, it depends organizationally where that lands, or it might be the CEO if it’s a smaller company, but it does absolutely point to a business strategy. Now, if you get more efficient with targeting and are able to do more with less, that could be threatening to some sales leaders who want to have a bigger organization headcount wise, or that might mean higher quotas. So it just depends on the dynamics and I think it’s really going to take some iteration and conversations with some, if you will, friendly customers, friendly folks that I have relationships with to actually kind of see what that dynamic is and what the sweet spot is in terms of the offering as well as really the business challenge that these companies are looking to solve. 

Helen Fanucci (01:59):

Because it may not be targeting, per se, I say targeting, but it actually may be market expansion. They want to test more markets. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to apply that methodology and thought process. It could be, as I said, grow revenue fast here, get feedback, do more, or it could be okay, we want to expand and we want to try out some new markets. So it’ll be interesting as I get more time and focus engaging with my potential market to see really what’s resonating and what the core, I have an idea of the core challenges, but I think in some organizations it will be different titles that care and it will resonate with some folks and other folks it might not resonate with. 

Corey Frank (02:54):

Well, I see Helen on this. There’s a market maker to open up your aperture when you look at your total addressable market is right. How everybody’s taught is total addressable market, and then you have your service addressable market, and then maybe even under that, you have your serviceable, attainable market, right? So if TAM is your total potential market demand and then you have your sam, which is the portion that a business can realistically target, and then the OMM service attainable market is the portion that your business can realistically capture. If you’re helping me expand again or open up that aperture a little bit tot to grab folks that maybe I didn’t have access before, it seems like that aperture opening is good for small mid-size companies, especially because I don’t have, at Microsoft you probably had X amount of account managers walking through the halls. You had X amount of client amazement managers, so you could fill in the gaps where maybe I couldn’t see if I’m a small mid-size company to know, oh, no, no, no. Hey, Helen does the same thing that Chris, but Chris has a different title than Helen and she’s on LinkedIn and Chris doesn’t believe in that and he’s not on that. Would you see that Chris, from market dominance perspective is that that whole aperture gets a little bigger? 

Chris Beall (04:17):

Yeah, I think it gets bigger and then you get to wrestle with the big factor in business, which is time. One of the huge differences among businesses is just how long can they go without eating? So just like among animals, right? Really big animals like me, I won’t say anything about you who have had plenty to eat and are genetically engineered by nature to be of a certain size. We can go without eating for quite a little while. 

Corey Frank (04:47):

At least an hour. At least an hour, yeah, 

Chris Beall (04:50):

At least in my case, I’ve made it 37 minutes once and it was quite good. So a very small animal, it might have to eat once every hour or something like that. And I think a lot of what constitutes advice in sales and marketing go to market is advice that if you’re the wrong size company and you take it, you die, you actually die of starvation. It becomes a pretty serious business actually. So one of the factors you have to take into account is kind of like how much do you have to kill and eat in the amount of time you have before you get skinny and die? And when you’re opening that aperture, now that translates into how fast can you explore that new chunk of market you’re thinking about before it takes too long, right? So now the cycle time of exploration is super, super important. 

Chris Beall (05:42):

And if you believe that conversations of the means for exploration and frankly I don’t know of any other that delivers enough highly reliable high fidelity information, then the cycle time to next conversation within somebody hypothetically is worth speaking to in that wider aperture becomes the dominant feature in the execution of your strategy, and that actually becomes the dominant feature. The feedback becomes the dominant feature in your actual strategy because having a strategy you can’t execute is kind of ridiculous. And yet we all start out with strategies we can’t execute. We must because we don’t know enough to choose a strategy, we can’t execute. So our strategy is a hypothesis. We need to go out and engage. It always reminds me of when I first met Helen, we went sailing together and there was a little piece of equipment that was on the mast and she knows sailing and I don’t, she races sailboats and I serve as ballast, kind of animate ballast, right? 

Chris Beall (06:42):

There’s killer whales and you can’t get them to come up on the boat and do the job, so you use me instead. So I noted that when she saw this piece of equipment that was very small and looked out of place that she ran, actually went physically fast toward the mass, then stopped and examined. That’s what you need to do in markets. You need to go fast into a point where you’re engaging, which is the conversation. She was having a conversation with this loose piece of equipment with her eyes and her MIT trained brain, her engineer’s brain, and then she came up with a strategy. The strategy from where she was sitting in the back of the boat and the stern would’ve been a poor strategy because she didn’t have enough information. She needed the information from engaging the market, this little piece of metal that was hanging there looking funny in order to be able to go, oh, this is what I’ll do. 

Chris Beall (07:36):

I can safely tuck it away and ignore it, or I can take some time and fix it or whatever. I think that’s a great analogy for this kind of work that Helen is embarking on with pipeline power is look, you got to have somebody go run into the market and engage it and talk with it, not for the purpose of making a sale this quarter, but for the purpose of efficiently gathering information that will inform your strategies. You even know which of those three strategic layers with regard to Tam you’re in. 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 got for 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 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 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 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. 

Corey Frank (12:06):

Well, it also sounds like right Chris, defending, Hey, I got 4 0 9 a’s that I have to do every year. If I can make an argument that I have some proprietary IP with regards to my cybersecurity database versus everybody else’s, that could be an advantage from an acquisition or funding or valuation perspective. Could it not, Chris? 

Chris Beall (12:31):

Oh yeah. I mean when you come right down to it, growth is the big driver of valuations and proprietary information is the big driver of growth. We actually, I think everybody knows that. It’s like I want my really good reps out talking to people and learning what their needs are, proprietary information. That person told me what their needs are. I want to know when they’re thinking of doing something. I want to know what other systems and processes we need to fit together with. I need to know who are the other people who are important in making a decision. I need to know if they’re in a macro situation that tells me and tells them, Hey, we got to sit tight for a while, say in the middle of an m and a circumstance, but we think it’ll be kind of done and integrated within three months, four months, five months, whatever. 

Chris Beall (13:21):

All of that proprietary information that that’s what is fundamental to being competitive. Your product features, your product capabilities are almost never going to be able to stand up to the market over time. Because if they’re good people will copy them and they’ll copy them. In fact, the innovator’s dilemma tells us they will copy them with something that is cheaper than what you sell and not quite as good, but occupies a pretty big chunk of your addressable market. You’re now obliged to defend from above, right? This is those who haven’t read their professor, Clayton Christensen should grab their innovator’s dilemma and reread it, and I would recommend rereading it twice actually, because most of us don’t get it. When I read it the first time. It’s interesting to me again, I told you, I just read a book over the holidays here about the second law of thermodynamics, which is about the second law is the one that says you can’t break even. 

Chris Beall (14:18):

You always lose. So the three laws are like, you can’t win, you always lose and you can’t get out of the game, right? Well, the one that says you always lose says things just get more disordered. Your job as a business is to create order by using energy up in the environment to do something. Well, what does that order? That order that lower entropy is in the form of information that allows you to go to the market more efficiently, talk to this person rather than this person. Have another conversation with this person in four weeks. Stay away from this person or this company because they don’t have any need forever. Come back to these in a year because they will have need develop your product so it integrates with this product because that would give you access to this entire set of the market. All these things are driven by information that comes to you that creates order so that you don’t dissolve into chaos, into entropy. 

Chris Beall (15:14):

Like everything else in the universe, you’re trying to fight against the tendency of the universe, which is to go crazy, to go disorder. The glass when it falls and breaks doesn’t ever reassemble itself. Well, it’s your job as a business to reassemble broken glasses or keep them from breaking. There’s a lot of things that we can do. So what Helen is suggesting is one of the things we can do is let’s pay attention to where we have a chance, but let’s also find out if we have a chance that is let’s make some good first decisions, hypothetical decisions as to where to go learn more, then let’s go learn more, then let’s make better decisions based on that information of where we should go learn more. Sales is actually a learning process primarily, and the exhaust of sales is deals and revenue. 

Corey Frank (16:02):

That’s great. Chris, you heard that one yet, Helen, from him. Sales process is predominantly a learning exercise and the exhaust and residue is revenue. 

Helen Fanucci (16:14):

I think that that’s not a compelling value proposition for a business, particularly when talking to sales leaders. They’re accountable for revenue and yeah, okay, the learning thing, alright, maybe it’s a more CEO executive conversation, but for most sales leaders, I don’t think that’s a winning proposition. That’s just my opinion. I don’t disagree with Chris, but I think there’s probably a more elegant way to frame it that would resonate more with the audience. 

Chris Beall (16:50):

I love that. Well, that’s why I think most sales leaders last such a short amount of time in their jobs because they are held accountable for the quarter and maybe the next quarter, but the company is trying to do something over a longer period of time and you get this sort of mismatch. And so it’s one of the big issues that we have now is it used to be salespeople. Were formally, informally responsible for nurturing their territory. We give you a territory. We don’t expect you to leave the territory next quarter. We’re actually thinking the longer you’re in the territory, the more you’re going to control the territory and the revenue you generate from the territory will become more predictable over time. That’s kind of why we do it. You get Cory, you get Phoenix. Well, we don’t know how big Phoenix is for us revenue wise, but we’re pretty sure that if your butts on the line, your family’s fortune’s on the line and you’re good, you’re going to figure that out. 

Chris Beall (17:44):

In a world where geography no longer dominates, territories become challenging. And now we’ve got to ask ourselves, well, so what are we really doing? And what we’re really doing is we’re saying sales, you’ve got a new problem. You’ve got to also nurture relationships over time. The old problem that you had when you had a territory, but now you have to do it with a lot less territorial clarity. And I think almost all conversations with sales leaders now are relatively uncomfortable for a whole bunch of reasons, including the macro economy, which doesn’t help at all. They’re held accountable for what happens when interest rates go up too. Interestingly enough, I actually agree with Helen. It’s not a compelling value prop, but it’s a fact of the world. And the fact is those who sell really, really well turn out to be those who learned the fastest and turn those learnings into compelling value for those that are ready to buy now and nurturing relationships with those who will be ready to buy later. 

Corey Frank (18:49):

Well, and with what both of you have been saying, if it is indeed a learning exercise, and it may not be attractive to say that, hey, the residue is revenue, it also would yield the premise that the faster I can learn, the faster I can get to revenue, the more cycles I can put into that learning exercise. IE through nurturing, through cold calling, through understanding who my targets are out of the gate. It’s measured three times, cut once and versus how a lot of organizations are. I give you all these tools. I’m going to bring in all the reps for outreach and SalesLoft and LinkedIn navigator. You’re going to learn as a sales professional how to do it. But maybe my nature isn’t to be a farmer. My nature isn’t to be a nurturer. My nature maybe isn’t to be a closer, my nature isn’t to be a presenter, but I have an armed with all these tools. 

Corey Frank (19:41):

I’m saddled with a number, a million and a half. I’ll see you in 12 months. And that’s usually where it ends. And the sales leaders are there to help support them, meaning let me know if you have a deal that has a couple of commas in it, because I’m going to come in and I’m going to help close that deal for you. But the tactical efforts are maybe probably geared around how your hygiene in Salesforce is. Maybe that’s the majority of the tactical communication with the reps or in their all hands meetings. Correct. So it’s interesting dilemma, but I’m looking forward to hearing more about pipeline power. And by the way, if you go to pipeline power.com, that’s about offshore drilling rigs and things like that. Love it. That’s not what we’re talking about. 

Helen Fanucci (20:22):

This is pipeline power ai. Thank you very much. ai. Although I don’t think our website’s up yet, so still working on that, but yeah, no, I saw that as well. I thought, oh, that’s perfect. That means it’s a completely different industry. No conflicts. I know this is pipeline power ai. By the way, Corey, your last statements there, the faster cycle time. This is why people who actually use the phone are going to win because they learn faster and leaders must work with their reps or understand how their reps are doing. You can’t wait until there’s a deal with multiple commas to go in and close it because it’s already lost unless you’re working with them earlier on because it is a team sport, and you’ve got to get executives engaged early on to have that trust building relationship. The company that’s buying your product has to buy the trust of the company, not just the trust of the rep. 

Helen Fanucci (21:24):

So there’s a lot of leading indicators on territory planning, account planning, and I don’t mean plan and put on the shelf, I mean plan as an inaction. Next steps, what are you doing? What’s going on? What problems are we solving? What’s the compelling event, et cetera. All the questions that you would know matter along the way. But yeah, so pipeline power is really about targeting and improving and using closed loop data. So as you learn, that goes into the model to improve better and better targeting so that the company can grow and accelerate revenues and valuation and exits or whatever the end game is for the customer’s companies. 

Corey Frank (22:13):

What I hear you saying is right, a page out of the book is love your team by arming your team. I think there’s a recent LinkedIn post about that very thing, and so arm them the right 

Helen Fanucci (22:24):

Way. Yes, we got arm your team along the way. Absolutely. 

Corey Frank (22:27):

Well, wonderful. Well, Helen, thanks for coming, kicking and screaming to this episode of the Market Dominance guys, and glad you banished Chris to the corner of the house there where we normally get to opine and these weekly sessions. So Chris, final thoughts on love your team and on pipeline power and how it pertains to the market dominance mantra. 

Chris Beall (22:49):

Well, market dominance is always about starting with a list because markets are lists, they’re not ideas and getting that list to be sufficiently relevant that you can make hay while the sun shines, you can actually make some revenue off it. And then learning from those interactions quickly and make the list better and better. Sharper and sharper, more and more precise. That’s the nature of the game. I love the name that Helen’s chosen pipeline power. Your pipeline is power. Jeb Blunt says the pipe is life. And that’s pretty true. I mean, the pipeline is the power of your company. When you look at your balance sheet and you ask what is the number one contributor to the biggest chunk of your balance sheet, which is called Goodwill, it’s your pipeline. 

Corey Frank (23:36):

That’s so great and obviously valuations that we’ve talked about. So Helen, thank you once again for joining us. We hope to hear more and more as pipeline power learns more about this exhaust and residue that we’ve talked so much about in the industry. I think that no one is talking about this element of the tip of the spear as much, and I think the cycle times they’re reduced, those are real compelling arguments to certainly engage with Helen and her team. So for the market dominance guys and Chris Beal, this is Corey Frank. Until next time.

 

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Building a target account list is the critical first step for any successful sales strategy, yet it remains an overlooked and haphazard process at many SaaS firms. Rather than leave targeting up to individual reps, centralize it to boost efficiency and revenue growth. As Helen Fanucci, founder of Pipeline Power, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank emphasize in this episode, outdated title-based targeting must give way to responsibility-based keyword searches on LinkedIn and intent signals from job profiles. They delve into common missteps sales leaders make, from over-researching targets to allowing bloated pipelines and territories that hamper productivity. Tune in to learn how to focus your targeting, embrace open territories, have meaningful conversations, and build trust with the right prospects from day one. You’ll pick up tangible tactics to scale pipeline and accelerate deals. Listen to the first half of this discussion, Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.

Links from this episode:

Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Branch49

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

 

Corey Frank (00:30):

To be here, bestselling author of Love Your Team by Helen Fucci and former executive over at Microsoft and DRL over at Mediafly. So Helen is joining us today, Chris, and we’re going to specifically talk about, I think something that we’ve talked about many times on the Market Dominance Guys, which is targeting, right, the four legs of the bar, stool, target list message, and reps. Sometimes we forget that targeting is one of the easiest to overlook, and so we brought the heat, we bring the expert, Ms. Fanucci on the market dominance guy. So Chris, over to you to introduce Helen and some of the things that we’ve been talking about before we jumped on air here about targeting and what we can all learn from Helen today. 

Chris Beall (01:16):

Sure. Thanks Corey. Well, just to let you know, by the way, speaking of that Hawking thing, my most recent book I read is Molecular Storms, which is the application of the second law of thermodynamics to everything. So I think that it applies to targeting, actually, interestingly enough, targeting, it is an attempt to reduce the entropy that is the number of micro states that correspond to a macro state. The macro state in this case would be, Hey, bookings, we’re making money. The micro states would be all of the folks that you talk with and what you’re talking with them about and all that. And you’re trying to get that ratio in line so that you can survive by talking to relevant people, avoiding talking to irrelevant people and all that kind of good stuff. And Helen and I talk about stuff like this all the time. 

Chris Beall (02:00):

Somebody said to me once, you must be the nerdiest people, at least in all of Quail Creek as a couple. And I said, well, perhaps as a working couple, yes, that’s possibly the case. We may have nerdier people here in Quail Creek, but I don’t think very many of them were both of them profess to have jobs. So Helen, you’ve had some recent experiences and some previous experiences that I think bring something about targeting into focus that is often missed, which is kind of the cultural issues and the people issues and the change management issues around targeting and B2B, Corey and I tend to refer to it like, Hey, you’re the boss, let’s make a list. And as you have known all along and have certainly gotten to experience recently, it’s not quite as simple as that from a people perspective. 

Helen Fanucci (02:55):

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to be said in response to what you just said. So I’ve never had a job or been in a company where there was centralized targeting. Of course, everybody wants to engage the market. So when I was at Microsoft and my team had these big global accounts like Intel and hp, they were responsible for their own targeting and creating a strategy for reaching out to executives or go higher or broader, what have you across the organization. But even if an account rep didn’t have a single account but had a territory, again, they were responsible for it. And then more recently at Mediafly as a CRO, the reps would decide what accounts to focus on and who to reach out to as well as the SDRs. And it just got me thinking that that is perhaps a misuse of resource, that it might be more effectively done if it was centralized. 

Helen Fanucci (04:08):

And then there was some deliberate strategy around the targeting rather than leaving it up to the individuals with a theory that, well, they’re being paid to make their quota, and it’s up to them how they go about doing it. But I think that that actually is inefficient. There is a piece about it in terms of defining strategy and helping craft that strategy as represented by who do we want to talk to in the market? Who do we want to get feedback from in the market? Who do we want to pursue to generate growth and revenue? And then there’s a piece that is just, let’s do a job well and have it centralized versus the fragmentation that comes when everyone’s doing and applying it in their own way. 

Corey Frank (05:00):

So if we could take a step back though, Helen, I mean Chris, you and I, we speak with a lot, lot of organizations, a lot of CROs, a lot of VPs of sales. How do I do this really poorly? In other words, what is a traditional steady state of an organization? When they say targeting, do they say, Hey, I gave you LinkedIn navigator, you know what industries we play in, what geographies you are responsible for? Is that where it typically ends for most organizations? 

Helen Fanucci (05:30):

Yeah, I think that that’s a really good statement. So there’s Sales Navigator, but then there’s also data providers. And I like to learn by doing. So I went into sales navigator myself, and then I put in our data provider, they have a Chrome plugin. And what I noticed in the lists on Sales Navigator when I wanted to translate that into a contactable list with phone numbers and emails, that the data provider only had about 50% of the people that I had identified in Sales Navigator that I wanted to reach out to or have my team reach out to. And I thought, man, that’s really inefficient. That doesn’t feel great that we don’t have all the data. It’s multifaceted. Are we talking to the right people? There are people who are experts that have felt that, okay, I’ve been successful selling to vice presidents of sales or sales enablement or what have you. 

Helen Fanucci (06:36):

This is how you do it. Go into Sales Navigator, get their contacts, et cetera, et cetera. So it kind of pretty much ends there. Some companies have the point of view that’s really important to do research, and in fact, when I was at Microsoft and I was trying out or utilizing ConnectAndSell to reach HR executives, I thought, oh gosh, I’ve got to do some research on these people because what if I ended up talking to a few of them, which I hope to do? And they said, well, wait a minute. We have a relationship with Microsoft. I felt like they would expect me to know more about our mutual relationship. So I did some research and when I used ConnectAndSell, I realized, oh my goodness, I over researched. I did it for my comfort as it turned out, but it was not actually needed in the conversation. So I think sometimes that happens too. People get over 

Corey Frank (07:41):

Researched, our good friend, mutual friend, Steve, Richard, right? He advocates the three by three, Chris and Helen, which is, hey, get three pieces of information in three minutes before you make the call. Now, Chris, you and I are big advocates of, although Steve is brilliant in many aspects, I think we fundamentally disagree if you’re doing cold outreach to do three pieces of information for three minutes before you make a phone call. Correct. Tale’s point about doing too much targeting, too much research before you jump into a role of cold outreach free. 

Chris Beall (08:16):

Yeah, I mean, given that there’s a one and end chance and running between 10 and 30, that person’s actually going to answer your research is wasted somewhere between 90 and 97% of the time. So we don’t do very many things in life where we say, I insist that this be done. This is the most important thing to be done. And by the way, it’s complete waste. At least one out of 10 times you do it, you’re just going to throw it away. It’s sort of like saying it’s really important for these students to do their homework. So we know that they’re practicing and learning, say in a calculus class, and we’re going to assign them the homework, and then when they turn it in at random, we’re going to burn 90% of the homework that they gave us as well just, I don’t know, we can’t read it or whatever. 

Chris Beall (09:05):

I don’t know if that’s a great analogy, but it’s kind of similar asking somebody to do work and then throw away that work because the next step in the process is fundamentally statistically unreliable is just bizarre. And in fact, I don’t know if you know this, Corey, but our friend Jeb Blount called me last year and said, Hey, you did this presentation at Outbound about time, about how many hours in the day that we have, and I think my calculation said that it takes about 25 and a half hours in a day in a given day, and there are not 25 and a half hours in a day to follow the research and call program that’s recommended if you are attempting to talk to 10 people a day. So when you kind of look at it that way, it’s like our people at ConnectAndSell talk to 40 people a day. 

Chris Beall (09:52):

Would you rather have 40 conversations in which you’re relying on, I’ll call it the canned research, which is are they in your ICP as a company, do they meet the criteria for size of the company, industry, whatever it happens to be, and is the person more or less somebody that you want to talk to either to get a meeting with them or have ’em direct you somewhere else and yes, no, not me, not now kind of categorization. If the answer is you’ve done a reasonable job making the list in the first place, our view is just talk to somebody you’re targeting actually starts with the conversation. It’s true. It really starts with centralized list building, but the real action begins in the conversation where now you’re targeting based on high quality information coming back at 20,000 bits a second rather than here’s something I read and I sure hope it’s relevant and I can use it. By the way, research has another problem, which is almost none of it can be used in a cold call safely. You call somebody up and say, Hey Chris, how about the Wildcats? And I go, actually, it turns out I grew up in Scottsdale and I was a big A SU fan. 

Corey Frank (11:00):

That’s right. That is true. It’s inauthentic, right? Authentic and highest degrees can actually dissuade somebody from building trust, which is the intent of the cold call to begin with, because that feels manipulative from a traditional vanilla list building. Helen, to your point, about 50% or x percent of a given cohort that I want, they’re not available on traditional off the shelf one source, right? There’s a LinkedIn and may have to cross reference to get all these other different platforms. So when you give one of your reps, let’s say Microsoft or any of the other executive positions that you’ve held, do you assume that is that go with part of their expectations that you know that there may be 58 people inside of Honeywell that I want to target for this particular software product, but really only 14 or 15 of them are readily available in traditional office sell type of solutions. Do you factor that in when you’re working and leading your team? 

Helen Fanucci (12:01):

Well, so a couple things is you’ve got to factor in that you’re not going to be able to reap everybody. Yes, that’s true. However, if it’s a big company like Honeywell and you have a big team like I did at Microsoft covering Honeywell, chances are they can navigate to those individuals in ways that the average person going in through Sales Navigator or a data source. So that was an advantage position for sure. But if you’re not in Microsoft and you’re in another organization that doesn’t have those relationships, then I think it behooves you to have a broader list of folks. There is an assumption that you know who to talk to, but that’s a bad assumption. So one of the things that I believe deeply is that anyone you talk to, you’re going to learn from. And years ago when I had my first sales job, part of the training I got navigating and selling in big organizations is talk to people at lower levels or easier to get to learn and find out what’s going on, and then who’s responsible for solving a certain class of problems that your product addresses and then ladder your way up to different people in the organization or get sponsored in. 

Helen Fanucci (13:28):

So I don’t ever have heartburn over talking to the wrong person because it’s always a learning opportunity. And in fact, one of the things I think is missing, and if you look at my LinkedIn profile with pipeline power, I talk about closed-loop targeting. And what that means is taking your learnings from lots of different sources. It could be from your CRM system, it could be from your outreach, the dispositions of your outbound lead sources, what have you, and find out, use that data to inform and sharpen your targeting so that you can be more and more deliberate as you go to market. 

Corey Frank (14:14):

That’s interesting. I haven’t experienced that. I haven’t heard that. So there’s probably an element where if the three of us are all doing cybersecurity inside of Honeywell, we may have the same title, but odds are is we don’t, there may be some standards that are on a business card that are in the HR PeopleSoft system, but when it comes to maybe a LinkedIn or what a Zoom or with these other off the shelf type of solutions, it seems like that’s a big rub. That’s a big problem out there, is trying to coalesce these lists when three of us are doing the same gig. Same, but we have three different titles, but yet I’m supposed to try to search, my boss said I want to search for these titles. Marketing said I want to search for these titles. And therein lies a little bit of the challenge, doesn’t it? 

Helen Fanucci (15:02):

Yeah. Well, that’s your first mistake. I think titles are an outdated mode of targeting, but they’re the common practice. It’s a common practice, but it’s not common sense. It’s kind of the opposite from my book is common sense, but not common practice. Well, I am putting that on its head and going after common practice is not common sense. So the reason I say that is a director of sales can mean a lot of different things. It’s a titled and so if, to use your analogy, if the three of us are responsible for cybersecurity, but we have different titles, why not just search on the term cybersecurity and sales navigator? Because people in their profiles on LinkedIn, they represent what they do and the words they say and it’s like, okay, so who cares about a class of problems? Is it if it’s cybersecurity, they probably talk about cybersecurity or they probably talk about threat detection or whatever kind of security words that are relevant. 

Helen Fanucci (16:20):

It’s also a representation of what the company has hired them to do. I know a lot of people will look at job postings to find out what company strategies are, what gets revealed through company strategies, but also if you look on LinkedIn, it will reveal people who care about a certain class of business issues by how they structure and what they put in their LinkedIn posting. So why not search on that instead of director of sales, or you could do director of cybersecurity or what have you, but just put in cybersecurity as a title and search on that and then see if you get closer to a optimal target list. 

Corey Frank (17:09):

Yeah, so because fundamentally, what I hear you saying, and Chris, we’ve talked about this in the past, is that my message is why the power of the 27-second message is relevant today. But if I’m a inside sales rep and I’m trying to craft a telemarketing, an outreach message, I risk if that is catered too much to the three by three pieces of information or what I think is that particular title, your example of Wildcats versus Sun Devils for instance, and whatever is the equivalent in a business outreach. I risk wasting a lot of my outbound conversations that I have with the message that is too catered too specific to what I think is the title. Do I have that right, Chris and Helen? 

Chris Beall (17:55):

Yeah, that’s a big part of it. I mean, I’ll give an analogy. If you’re in a gunfight, if it’s dark, you want a shotgun. If it’s light, you can see the target. Clearly you might want to a rifle. If you’re far away, you might want a sniper rifle, right? Well, in business, when we’re starting to engage, we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s a dark room, it’s a dark world, it’s dark woods, and we really don’t want to be too precise at that point because that precision just means we don’t get any feedback when we miss the target, all we get is a hit or a miss. I’d rather wing a few of them and hear the Yelp. So anyway, you get what I mean, right? And what Helen’s pointing out also, I think speaks to this other question of intent. So we’ve talked about how what’s called high intent now is somebody from that company maybe in a relevant position if we can figure that out, is looking at our website or is looking at other folks’ website or is going G two crowd and poking around or whatever they’re doing. 

Chris Beall (18:57):

That’s called high intent. It’s also called by people who understand strategy entering a red ocean. If they’re looking at your competitors and they’re looking at your category and they’re looking at you, that means it’s a competitive situation already. One of the main things we want to do in business is stay out of competitive situations. It’s always a problem when it’s competitive. It means you come down to battle cards, you come down to besting, whoever it is while they’re in the fray. You’d rather come and actually win in advance by building trust early and then waiting until somebody is appropriately in market. So the way we miss is not so much in space, but in time we miss by being too early. We miss by being too late. Well, too early is great, too late is bad, and right on time isn’t as good as early. 

Chris Beall (19:44):

It just isn’t. You’d rather be early when you can dominate with trust. So that’s part of it. The other part about intent that’s interesting is let’s compare two things. So there’s a website visit, somebody shows up at a website and looks at something. So that’s thing number one. Or to quote Dr. Seuss thing one. Then there’s thing two, which is you pay a bunch of money to have somebody do a job for you. Now, which one shows greater intent? A website visit or paying somebody a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year to do an important job for you? Clearly the latter shows more intent to solve that problem on the part of the company, the employer than the former, which is somebody goes, looks at a website. So we have these multi-billion dollar unicorns that have been built around intent data, which is mostly website visits, and meanwhile, the most obvious and powerful piece of intent data. 

Chris Beall (20:39):

What did companies actually invest in their biggest investment, which is always people sitting right there in the profiles, as does people describe themselves in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. That is they describe themselves in the same way their company would describe the job to be done because advertising themselves to future employers to do that same job. So you get intent more clearly out of job profiles than you do out of the big fancy intent products, including LinkedIns because there’s no choice. I hire somebody to do a job. How are they going to describe themselves to the world as somebody who can’t do that job? That makes no sense. 

Corey Frank (21:25):

That’s fascinating. And in your universe then, I would imagine, right? Helen, I’m sure you saw this when you had a new rep who penetrated an account, Chris, you see it all the time at ConnectAndSelll, my universe on day one, maybe this size, my universe on day 30 is this size my universe, right? And day plus X or so is even smaller, and that’s ultimately that filet that I can continue to harvest. And if I don’t target, what does my universe look like Pretty consistently, probably maybe basis points, degrees in much smaller at gas. Correct. 

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 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 have 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 headcount 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 budget 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?

 

Key Points:

Centralized targeting can be more effective than leaving it up to individual sales reps to figure out their own targeting (Helen)

Over-researching targets is inefficient since there is a low chance of actually reaching many of those contacts (Chris)

Targeting based on titles alone is an outdated approach; it’s better to search for keywords related to responsibilities in LinkedIn profiles (Helen)

Being too specific with an initial outreach message risks wasting conversations and not getting helpful feedback (Corey and Chris)

Job profiles show greater buying intent than website visits since companies invest significantly in hiring people to solve problems (Chris)

As reps develop domain expertise over time, their relevant target universe tends to become smaller and more focused (Corey)

Many sales reps feel anxious without strictly defined territories and accounts; they resist more open territory concepts (Helen)

Sales leaders often equate headcount and territory size with power and status (Corey)

 

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Closing sales requires trust, and trust is built through conversation. As Chris Beall notes, in B2B, the gateway to ongoing dialogue is the discovery meeting. Yet, too often, sales teams fail to view the meeting itself as the product they are selling. As Bruce Lewolt highlights, sellers must frame their sincere care for the customer’s success. This care is best conveyed interpersonally. By securing that initial meeting, the sales rep opens the door to relationship-building. As Jennifer Standish explains, delivery matters as much as content in piquing interest. With the right tonality and empathy, a seller can turn cold calls into warm introductions. James Thornburg and Matt McCorkle build on this idea: the meeting is a gift, saving the prospect time and money. When sellers view appointment-setting as customer service, their conviction carries through. The discovery meeting enables the sales conversation to continue. Building trust starts with booking that first meeting. Join us for episode 209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting.

This episode has segments from the following full episodes featuring Matt McCorkle, James Thornburg, Corey Frank, Chris Beall, Jennifer Standish, and Bruce Lewolt.

 

EP139: Your Product Is the Meeting

EP122: Learning to Manage Your Voice Under Pressure

EP115: The Enemy of Your Message Is Drift

EP113: The Cold-Call Kiss of Death

EP108: Sales and the State of Apprehension

 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

 

Chris Beall (00:00):

I think that’s what we do primarily in sales is we help people go from the emotional state they’re in to one that would be more conducive to getting to an exploration of possibilities. And when we think of it differently, I think we get in trouble.

Matt McCorkle (00:16):

Yeah, I really like that analogy of being on the phone with somebody and the value of the meeting is saving them from an oncoming train or a bus or whatever you’re saying. What we say is that this one isn’t nearly as impactful, but when we’re training we say you are giving the person you’re talking to a hundred dollars, are you going to be excited and happy to give this person a hundred dollars because you’re saving them that money simply by showing up and showing them some of the knowledge that we have at Ksr for their operation. Absolutely. You’re not taking a hundred bucks from them. You’re not wasting their time. You’re giving them a hundred dollars and here’s the a hundred dollars of value you’re giving them. That’s when we use, pretend like you got a hundred dollars and you’re pocket and you’re just walking up to somebody to say, here you go. No strings attached. Here’s a hundred bucks. Help with that confidence. Absolutely right. Corey,

Corey Frank (01:09):

What’s more fun for you? Do you have a balance of how often do you do cold calls? How often do you do discovery and do you yearn for doing one over the other?

James Thornburg (01:19):

I’m enjoying it all. To be frank. Right now I have a great process. I make calls maybe like an hour, an hour and a half a day, typically four or five days a week, pretty much every day, anywhere between nine and 11. And then in the afternoon it’s dedicated to meetings. And depending on the day, I may be running two or seven different meetings. They might be net new meetings, they may be follow-ups, things of that nature. And then what people don’t get to see, and it’s kind of hard to understand is there’s a whole world of selling and working deals behind the scenes with the different providers in terms of registration and things of that nature. Competitors, I mean, it’s a knife fight. And what people don’t realize about this business is that these deals don’t always go through the front door. Traditionally how people expect them to be. I mean there’s a lot of maneuvering on opportunities to get things done.

Corey Frank (02:10):

How about from a metrics perspective, James? I think Chris, at any given time you give him seven seconds notice. He’ll pull up the data and the stats for his team and know within the first hour of the day if they’re off or who needs help on the intro, who needs help on tonality as kind of the proprietor of your own practice there. Do you look at the stats at that level of tactical detail of how you’re doing ’em one day or to the other and dial the connect or dialed a meeting or if you’re getting your butt kicked in the intro, maybe it’s a tonality thing and I should probably change it up. How do you use math of the data to alter or calibrate your sales process?

James Thornburg (02:51):

I do have a general idea in terms of what my numbers look like. I don’t get overly concerned about, Hey, what my conversions are down this month. I just think it’s a trend. I mean, you look at, last week for me, I set five meetings like an hour and a half, never happened before. This week I’m at one meeting, one meeting probably 20 conversations. So it’s not horrible but not great. And so it flows. It flows and some days I’m better than others. I can feel it. You just know the conversations or I’m catching the right people. But I have a good idea in terms of my conversions, I mean, well data connect’s kind of irrelevant I guess right now, but do connect was trending at probably close to three and a half, probably three and a half percent. But my conversions on my conversations are right around 10 out of 10 people I talk to. I’m converting one of those.

Chris Beall (03:45):

The disease that kills companies is distraction. That’s why little companies shouldn’t do strategic partnerships with other little companies that give each other the disease called distraction. And it’s highly communicable, so be careful of it. You need focus and the focus is starts with the list. It’s really easy to stay focused when you have that list. You can go through the list and say, have we talked to everybody on this list? We haven’t. Let’s take the ones we haven’t talked with and try to talk to them. Okay, if somebody wants help doing that, come to me. I can help you talk to a whole bunch of people. That’s what we do is like talk to folks and we help you talk to people. Have we got a meeting with everybody on the list? Not yet. Well, we have a job to get a meeting with the rest. Have we learned from the meetings that we’ve had, what resonates? So what percentage are resonating on the economics, what on the emotional and what on the strategic and what didn’t resonate at all? That’s a little trickier, but it’s very objective step by step by step, and by going step by step, we do take care of immediate needs because guess what? We’ll actually be closing business sooner than not. And the best part is it keeps getting easier instead of getting harder. That’s the reason you do this.

Jennifer Standish (05:06):

I also think that we have to accept that a certain percentage of the population doesn’t like to be sold to and they will shut down meetings to their own detriment. But there’s nothing you can say to them. They just will not be sold to. And we just have to accept that. But everybody else is someone willing. Some people are more willing than others. I’ve had situations where I get no objection. I get sure, I’d love to. Absolutely. I’m available on this particular date and time and it’s super easy. Other times there’s a little bit of pushback, but then people are amenable. It’s to scheduling appointments. So we just have to accept that some people are more willing to meet with people and are interested in what people have to

Corey Frank (05:52):

See. Jen, how much of that do you think, and you’ve seen, you’ve probably experienced bad calls. You’ve probably from your background, taught many folks to learn this skill. You have a voice. We have a handful of folks on this podcast, all brilliant folks, of course, present company included with me and Chris. But a lot of the folks that are on these podcasts of ours, they have a voice that can just melt butter and they have a command of their tonality, their stammer, their pregnant pauses. Is that something that you see as correlating to your success? Yes.

Jennifer Standish (06:29):

When you’re, and I’ll tell you, trainers, cold calling trainers, do not spend enough time working with people on their delivery because it’s 80% of your success as a cold caller. A great script hits all the points with a terrible delivery. We’ll get no appointments, but a great delivery with a mediocre script, we’ll still get you appointments. Absolutely.

Bruce Lewolt (06:58):

So there’s the athletic, the endurance, taking the brunt of rejection and still coming back strong. There is also, and to Corey’s point at the sincerity, I really care about helping students. If you’re a corporation, I really care about helping salespeople reach their full potential and do well. I care about helping your business do well. So that comes through to me. But when I train salespeople, I recognize if they work for a big electronics company, they may or may not care as deeply as I do about their customer doing things. So my daughter was a successful actress when she was young in Hollywood. She was on a lot of national shows and a lot of acting, trading, and they use framing, what’s my frame here? How am I looking at the world? So for the salesperson, before they start, they need to do the same exercises that an actor does beforehand to get themselves in the right frame seeing things in the right frame. So they are coming across as caring. They are coming across if need be as very confident, or they are coming across as, I’m struggling a little here, could you help me? The broken wing script, if that’s what they’re doing.

Chris Beall (08:13):

Well, one of the beauties of B2B is that B2B tends to run through a meeting. You’re going to have a meeting, and the meeting is a meeting in which both people are going to voluntarily show up. And the fear that’s expressed as annoyance, it’s going to be replaced by apprehension that you can replace with some other emotion. And it’s a lot easier to work with apprehension on a volunteer than it is to work with fear on somebody you’ve ambushed. It’s an easier emotional sort of game to play when we’re dealing with that more awkward conversation. The cold conversation. One of the beauties is, the only thing you have to believe in deeply and sincerely, is the potential value of the meeting for the human being you’re talking to in the case where you’re never going to do business with them, and this is the only time in business.

(09:03):

I think there’s such a thing as a universal framing. You can deeply believe no matter what you’re selling, you can deeply believe my company are experts at this because we’re specialists and this other person is a generalist and can learn from us. And what strikes me as especially odd is the product training that goes on for salespeople, even those who are setting meetings, is not about the product that they’re selling, which is the meeting. So they never learn about that product, which is the only product that they have to sell and be sincerely to have that sincere belief in its value. And it’s so odd. I have yet to see one time across all of B2B that I’ve run into, and you guys know, I see a little bit of it. I’ve never had a yes answer to this. So can you break down the discovery meeting for me that this person’s going to have? Who says yes in terms of the value that they’re likely to receive from attending that meeting?

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In our brave new AI-augmented world, navigating tech integration while retaining that human trust factor remains a tricky balancing act.

So who better to provide expert guidance than our sage of sales, Chris Beall? Today our very own ChatGPT steps in as co-host for Corey to pepper Chris across the AI-sales trust landscape. Should we unleash these bots to comb leads? How do we mitigate client skepticism? Does transparency enhance trust? Chris distills hard-earned wisdom on these questions and more.

From specific use cases in training and process efficiency to ethical dilemmas around transparency, you’ll gain critical insights for smoothly integrating AI without severing those all-important human connections. Chris even gazes into the future, weighing engaging versus alienating roles for our robot friends.

Chris offers actionable advice so we can deploy AI judiciously while cementing bonds of respect and rapport. Time to bridge that tech-touch gap in this episode, Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales

 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

Chris Beall  (00:14):

Hey everybody, this is Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. And today I am not joined by Corey Frank, my co-host. Corey runs the awesome company, branch 49, in addition to many other things, finishing school for future CEOs by providing folks who want to be great professionals in the world of business with the opportunity to learn how to talk to strangers by cold calling them. So I asked chat GPT today to come up with 10 questions to play the role of Corey and kind of interview me Now, poor chat, GPT doesn’t get to listen to the answers. I could probably have it do that, but I’m not going to do that. But I asked it to give us an opportunity to talk about a topic that is near and dear to me, which is the relationship between trust and efficiency in B2B sales in the era of chat GBT. 

Chris Beall  (01:12):

And there’s a lot of speculation out there as to where all this is going. I’ve been fairly immersed in AI for a long time, since 1992 in fact, and certainly am delighted that we have the ability to get to the next level with ChatGPT and all the GPT-4 stuff. And it does lots and lots of neat things. Many people speculate on what it might be able to do in sales, replace salespeople and so forth. I thought I’d explore just this one question, which is how about trust and efficiency? Are they actually at opposite ends of the spectrum? That is if we ramp up efficiency too far in B2B sales, do we ramp down trust or is there a case to be made for trust and efficiency actually working together in B2B sales. Now, just to remind my view of B2B sales, pretty simple. We need to establish ourselves with somebody else, another human being as an expert in a matter that’s important to them and as on their side. 

Chris Beall  (02:18):

If we can do that, we become what’s called a trusted advisor. And a trusted advisor has a lot of freedom to get good information, quality information from another party so that they can bring their own expertise to bear and guide the process of coming up with a potential solution to a business problem that can result in a commercial transaction between the seller’s business they work for and the buyer business, the one they work for. So trust is super important, but efficiency is important too because there’s a question of, well, who are we going to sell to? There’s a lot of folks out there we could talk to. Most of them will not be ready to 

Chris Beall (02:58):

Buy in the near term, even if they fundamentally need our offering, and most of them probably don’t need our offering if we’re at all specialized. I happen to work for a company called ConnectAndSell that provides something that lots of B2B companies need, but not all of them need it to the same degree. And so we have an efficiency problem just like everybody else. How do you efficiently go through the market and find the folks that are worth exploring with further, this is why the end of every sales interaction or the outcome of every sales interaction is the same. It answers the question, should we mutually decide to go down the road further together? So I asked chat GPT to play host Corey. It is standing in for you right now. And here’s its first question.

 

  • Chris, could you start by giving us a brief overview of how chat GT and similar AI technologies are currently being integrated into B2B sales processes? 

Chris Beall (03:56):

Well, one place we know they’re being integrated into B2B sales processes is in conversational intelligence. Almost every conversational intelligence technology now, and in technologies like the one I’m using here Zoom video, I’ve got the ability to summarize conversations using a GPT model. What does that really give us in B2B sales? Well, one thing it gives us is time compression. If I’m a manager and I’m trying to understand how are all the deals going, I can talk to my reps and have one-on-ones, I can have one-on manys where we do some pipeline review or deal review, all of those things are available, but if I could take every 30-minute conversation and have it compressed down to me into 10 relevant points that I can rely on, I can actually learn what’s going well, and also where it might be worth bringing some other resources to bear, whether they’re technical resources, whether it’s a senior executive, whether it’s some brainstorming, other resources might be worth bringing in at a certain point. 

Chris Beall (05:07):

And these technologies are awfully good at this. So they’re helping us be managers to participate more in the sales process without interfering in it. And it’s really an efficiency play. Now the efficiency comes from taking a 15, 20, 30 minute conversation, maybe longer compressing it down to 10 relevant points that can be read in about one to two minutes. So that’s call it 30 to one compression of time. And that means as a manager, if I had time for say 10% of all the conversations that are happening to come into my brain, so to speak, I now have time for a hundred percent and it only takes 30% of my day. So it’s quite an amazing breakthrough. And how does it speak to trust? Well, it’s kind of interesting. We need to trust that GPT compressor that took the information from a 30-minute conversation and the transcription engine that gave that information to the GPT engine for analysis. 

Chris Beall (06:14):

We need to trust that it’s kind of getting the whole thing that is, we wouldn’t want to find out, oh, it gave me kind of a vanilla compression or a vanilla list and there’s a disaster going on in there and I didn’t notice it because once we rely on something like a piece of technology to help us out, it can often introduce blind spots. This happens quite literally when you’re driving old-fashioned car mirrors, you have a blind spot right next to you, but you’re relying on the mirror to tell you who’s right next to you and you can make certain kinds of errors more frequently. So that’s a place anyway where these technologies are being used in a very efficient way. They’re also being used to write, I’ll call it better emails. And I don’t mean these automated emails that are being sent out effectively as spam, let’s just face it too many, many folks. 

Chris Beall (07:10):

But really just writing better than most reps. Let’s face it, most sales reps did not grow up as readers and writers. Some did, but most are better talkers and listeners. And so having an assistant, a co-pilot as they’re called to actually draft an email for you to do it in a professional way and to do it in what it thinks is your voice, it’s dynamite, saves a lot of time for the rep, but that’s not mostly the time. The rep can maybe get to the point of trusting that technology to frankly write better than the rep does. It’s certainly more efficient. So let’s go into the second question. So ChatGPT or Corey in stand-in mode here is asking me.

 

(2) In your experience, how has the incorporation of AI like ChatGPT affected the level of trust between sales professionals and their B2B clients? 

 

I would say not at all in the case where trust is actually being established, but I think it has kind of fooled a lot of sales professionals into thinking that they can generate trust in a mechanical way by having some AI write lots and lots of very clever emails, very wonderful emails and just send ’em out to folks. 

Chris Beall (08:29):

And somehow, that will generate trust-level relationships. I don’t believe it. I still believe that there are those seven seconds that we have in an ambush call or a cold call to get trust, and that has to do with how people work on the inside. So if I read something that may have been generated by a bot, and I know that’s true of everything that comes my way at this point, it affects the level of trust immediately because I think, well, why would I trust a vendor’s bot? I know what its job is. Oddly enough, I will actually be more inclined to trust a salesperson that I know is a person, but how do I know that that’s a person? Well, I can’t know it through a bunch of texts that’s on the screen an email. I need to actually be speaking with that person and they need to be acting like themselves, so to speak. 

Chris Beall (09:20):

So even if they were replaced with a bot, it’d have to be a really, really good bot. It’s not enough to fool me into think it’s a person. It has to enable me to comfortably say, yes, this is this person and by the way, get me to the point where I believe they’re an expert and they’re on my side. 

So how about efficiency improvements? 

 

This is question number three that chat GPT came up with playing the role of Corey Frank, 

 

3) Can you provide specific examples of how AI tools made B2B sales processes more efficient coaching?

No difficulty coming up with an example or two. I’ve already given one of them. I think there are more to come. I believe we’ll actually get to the point where AI tools will help us look for how a whole team is doing or how a campaign is doing right now. 

Chris Beall (10:10):

It seems to be very much one at a time. Here’s a conversation, analyze the conversation, take a look. What about analyzing all the conversations or a bunch of conversations that fits some criteria or finding the challenges that are thematic within a team’s efforts to reach out to the market? Do we really know who our message is resonating with in ways that one of these AI models can pay attention to? These things are tremendous at finding patterns within vast amounts of detail. So that would make it more efficient to find out who to talk to or more efficient to find out where our own team is challenged or those kinds of things. Bigger chunks I would call it. So those are some examples. By today. Most of it is conversation at a time or doing some writing and also doing some research for us. So if we are out trying to do some research before a conversation, a meeting that we’re having with somebody, certainly AI can help us a lot because it reads faster than we do. 

Chris Beall (11:17):

It’s probably already read about this person. But one thing for sure, and this is about trust, remember GPT technologies hallucinate facts. So if you rely on facts that have come back from an interaction, a chat with a GPT technology, you probably are going to be brought up short someday. This is why lawyers have been caught recently trying to use ChatGPT and similar technologies to generate citations, legal citations, and they’ll use them confidently and it turns out well, it wasn’t a citation, it was a hallucination.

 

Alright, so next question from our virtual bot named Corey Frank,  

(4 )How do you see companies balancing the use of AI with the need for human interaction in sales? Is there a sweet spot? 

 

Well, let’s work the other way around on this one. The need for human interaction in sales is absolute because of what I already said, which is we need to establish ourselves as the seller, as an expert who is on the other person’s side. 

Chris Beall (12:24):

We can afford to be on their side. We’re the expert after all, they’re the buyer. They’re a generalist about what we are an expert on. So is there a sweet spot with regard to using AI? All of research is a sweet spot because the AI can lead us to understanding things about the world that would be too expensive for us to go find out, like who should we be talking to or what’s going on in this particular field? Or there’s some new developments that we should be paying attention to and so forth. So AI is great for research, great for drafting, but we have to be a little careful in final form. So proposals, sure, draft a proposal, you GPT model, but am I going to s end it off without taking a look at it? No. It actually implies that there’s going to be other human interactions kind of to check that what the AI is producing is accurate and compliant, which is also a big issue. 

Chris Beall (13:22):

Well, how about in sales training? How can, this is question number five. 

(5) How can Che GPT and similar technologies be used in training sales teams to enhance their efficiency while maintaining trust with clients? 

 

Well, one thing you can do with the GPT model is make a simulator that plays the role of a client. And certainly, if you’re working off an awful lot of client responses, which are all out there for almost every kind of product in the world, getting a simulator out of a GPT model is pretty straightforward and chat is a very natural way to do it. Now I’ll give you the caveat on this, which is when it comes to establishing trust with the human voice, the human voice is a human voice, not a human keyboard. So you can simulate by going back and forth using your fingers. You can also do it using speech-to-text, but it’s the sound of your voice that is crucial, especially in those first few seconds. It’s actually always crucial, and it may well be that, fairly soon, these AI models can listen to the sound of our voice and give us feedback as to how trustworthy we sound. That would be a wonderful thing. Right now, they’re not quite there. They’re fairly easy to kind of fool into thinking that we sound wonderful. It’s very subtle what human beings pick up on with regard to trust. I’ve often said people are to trust or 

Chris Beall (14:51):

As wolves are to fear, they can smell it. And if you’re not trustworthy folks, they can so to speak, smell it in your voice. I know that sounds weird, I’m not talking about some synthesia either. So how about ethical considerations? What are this? 

(6) Question number six, What are some ethical considerations the companies should keep in mind when deploying AI in their sales process? 

There is one, keep this in mind. If your bot is talking to a client, it needs to say it’s a bot. That’s pretty simple. Transparency is always the way to get to a high level of ethics, and I have a bad feeling there’s going to be a lot of folks saying, well, that wasn’t me. That was my bot after the fact. Instead of saying it upfront, you got to be upfront. So that’s a big, big ethical consideration. Another one is, if your bot or your AI is giving advice, expert advice, you better make sure it’s actually expert advice because you take on a little bit of what I would call kind of a Hippocratic stance. 

Chris Beall (16:01):

That is, first you do no harm. When you advise somebody, you have to be conscious of the harm you might be potentially doing to them when they follow your advice. And so, just blindly saying, Hey, the advice from my GPT model is just go ahead and follow it without having it checked. It’s not just a problem that you might not be trusted. You might be committing a pretty serious ethical breach. 

 

Alright, so how about question number seven. 

(7) From your perspective, how do B2B clients generally perceive the use of AI and sales interactions? Does it enhance or diminish trust? 

Chris Beall (16:44):

It depends. If you give me something that you say was generated by your AI, by your chatbot or by your GPT model and you say, Hey, I had the GPT model whip this up for you and I took a look at it, it looks pretty good to me. Let’s discuss. No worries at all. In fact, it might enhance trust because you’re being open and transparent about using your technology, this technology to be more efficient and to bring in maybe other points of view or to digest more data that might be useful to the client. So in that case, I think you can enhance trust. I think destroying trust is really, really easy. I think I just hit on it in the previous answer, which is, hey, ask somebody to trust a piece of automation that you’re providing and don’t tell them that it’s automation. That one is going to cause not an erosion of trust, but a step function down from some number, probably not quite one if one is the highest number but to zero, and once trust is lost, it is not something you can go and get back. 

Chris Beall (17:52):

So how about skepticism this question number eight,

(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 a 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 comes to mind. And so it’s 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 track record because now you kind of know where the landmines are. 

How about question number nine, future trends. 

(9) Looking ahead, how do you think the role of AI and B2B sales will evolve? What new developments should we expect?

I think the main developments we should expect are around efficiency. We will get much, much more efficient in B2B sales when two things happen. One is we have a better idea of who to talk to, who to go out and have conversations with that is very efficient. Secondly, we will be able to efficiently assess new people coming onto our team, assess performance of people on our team and help them get better. There’s a lot of detailed information and patterns that can be detected, and those can be detected in meetings so they can be detected in targeting or in messages and we will be able to bring that stuff together much, much more efficiently so that we can generate trust more frequently. And if you think about B2B from a sales perspective, it’s essentially the manufacturing and management of a portfolio of trust. So first, you have to be worthy of trust; okay, that might be the hard part. 

Chris Beall (21:48):

But once you’re worthy of trust, are you being trusted by enough folks who might be able to take advantage in a good way of what it is that you provide? Probably not. I see AI, this GPT type, as being able to help us sift through, make sense out of detect patterns in larger amounts of data with different data sources so that we’ll just do a better job of having the right people talk to the right people often enough and generate more trust because that’s how it works over time and do so efficiently. So, allowing the generation of trust efficiently I think is going to be the main role of AI for quite a while in the world of B2B. And then finally, advice for sales leaders number 10. So Corey, here you are being played by ChatGPT who asked the final question.

 

(10) Finally, what advice would you give to sales leaders looking to integrate AI into their strategies without compromising on the trust and personal connection that’s vital in B2B sales? 

Chris Beall (22:53):

Well, my advice is kind of always the same, and I know people might get a little bored with it, but it is what it is; that is you’re trying to essentially pave a market with trust. A market is a list of people that if any one of them decides to do business with you, it reduces your cost and risk of doing business with every single other person. And therefore, their are companies in that market. Now that is not an oversimplification, but it hides some things like the flow of people through that list. Some come on, some go off, they retire, they go to new companies, they do all sorts of things. So there’s a lot that goes on. And usually your market is not defined very, I’ll say, coherently. That is markets normally are simply made up. Oh, we’re going to sell to all industrial companies who have more than a thousand employees who are located in these states or something like that. 

Chris Beall (23:51):

That’s a kind of target market that you can think of, but it’s not a true target market because it doesn’t follow the rule that we were just talking about. So okay, so I got this market out there. Now what’s my advice? Well, you had to pave the market with trust, but you have to do that both in a targeted way and a little bit of a promiscuous way. That is you have to take the current opportunity and you have to identify it targeted, not just among those who might need what you offer, but among those who are more likely to need it. So we’re going to have more application of AI to determine different levels of intent. Now we tend to determine intent from something super simple, which is, oh, they visited a website or they went to G2Crowd or whatever it happens to be, right? 

Chris Beall (24:41):

Action indicates intent. Well, there’s a lot of other ways that folks express intent, mostly through investment and mostly maybe about investment in people. So there’s going to be a lot to be done with regard to paying attention to how you can identify the folks that you need to pay attention to in the market while also helping the 11 twelfths of your market that’s not in market right now be more accessible and that you understand more about them and more favorably inclined to think that you are somebody they can trust to be an expert in an area they care about and that you’re on their side. 

So just by sticking to those principles, then we are very free to use these technologies in creative ways. When we abandon those principles, we enter the danger zone and we’re probably not going to do too well. So I just want to thank my virtual Corey Frank here, ChatGPT for asking. 

Chris Beall (25:42):

I answered these questions. I think they’re pretty sharp questions. Did ChatGPT think them up per se? No, it responded to a prompt. 

Here’s the prompt, 

 

please play the role of Corey Frank, co-host of the podcast Market Dominance Guys, you will be interviewing Chris Beall on the topic “the relationship between trust and efficiency and B2B sales and the era of ChatGPT”. Please generate 10 questions for Chris to answer. So Corey may well be a next engine himself and spit out questions like this one word at a time. I think he probably goes into a little bit deeper conceptual well than ChatGPT. But ChatGPT, you did a pretty darn good job there. I really appreciate it. And until next time, for Corey Frank, this is Chris Beall, Market Dominance Guys.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Discovery calls are typically auditory-only affairs, but this episode of Market Dominance Guys reminds us that we are physical beings having a full-person experience. As Chris emphasizes, you don’t converse with a brain in a jar, so why disconnect your body from the persuasive power of discovery? From micro-prancing, to miming props, to the hepatic value of gestures and pauses, your physical presence profoundly impacts connection, emphasis, and revelation. Body language not only expresses what pure words cannot, but it heightens the musicality and truth-emergence Chris describes as “letting the silence breathe.” So start envisioning your prospects, get your blood pumping, and bring your whole self into alignment with the call. It’s time to let your full-bodied discovery create breathing space for truth. What non-verbal techniques will you incorporate next call?

This is a continuation of last week’s discussion with Henry Wojdyla and Shawn Sease. You can listen to the previous episode here.

EP206: Mastering the Art of Silence How Pauses Can Improve Discovery

Links from this episode:

Shawn Sease on LinkedIn
Henry Wojdyla on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Branch49
ConnectAndSell

 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

 

Corey Frank (00:00):

Chris, I know you and fetching Ms. Fanucci got back from a recent trip to the wine country in the south of France, and I think you told me a few stories about how certain wines need to breathe after they’re open differently than others. And Henry, it sounds like what you’re trying to teach us here is that there are certain questions that you can just let, is there a French term for that, Chris, that breathing? What’s the wine? 

Chris Beall (00:24):

My French sucks, but it is ironic when you think about it, right? I think this actually is a pretty APTT analogy you’ve brought up. The wine is corked so that it almost doesn’t breathe. It actually breathes a little bit. This why real corks are considered to be important in some kinds of wines because there’s a little oxidation that needs to go on over a long period of time. There’s a little breathing, but then you went a lot of breathing reasonably fast. I have no idea what that is called In French, my French got better after 21 tastings one morning before lunch, and then we climbed a mountain together that it was really quite fluent, I’m sure at that point. But I don’t think I knew how to talk about this, but it is really something. I mean, this is true in music also. The silences are where the music has actually heard, so to speak, when you’re learning to play. 

Chris Beall (01:13):

Henry is a musical person. He’s been involved in this sort of stuff too. When you’re learning to play as a little kid, the rest don’t mean nothing to you. And when somebody’s a virtuoso, the rests are everything. It’s the timing of the silence and the precision of the silence that allows the listener to become part of the music. And that’s what you’re really looking for in discovery is you want the other person to become a producer of the music of these truths that are coming out and you’re working together on them as shunts. I love that. We’re going to do this together. We’re not going to do it. I think that’s not so much of a command, like I’m setting up a set of conditions. Either you do this with me or we’re not going to do it. It’s a statement of fact. Either we’re going to do it together or we’re not going to do it, as in we’re not really going to get it done. 

Chris Beall (02:02):

We’re just going to kind of sound like we’re getting it done or act like we’re getting it done. And getting to the bottom of stuff is quite difficult with folks. It takes pregnant pauses. I mean, pregnant pauses give birth at some point, and sometimes they give birth to stuff that’s pretty magnificent to something new and it’s the hardest thing we love to fill in. You imagine a podcast, say we ran the podcast like this, Corey, you ask a question. We all just sit here and look at the audience for, I don’t know, 30 or 40 seconds. 

Corey Frank (02:34):

Yeah, yeah. Take off the glasses once in a while, right? We’ve talked about that here at branches is the world of hepatic and NLP, and I know we have to cut you loose here in a minute, Henry, for a seven or eight, nine or figure deal here that you’re pursuing. But can you use those verbal disfluencies, the hepatic, the pregnant pauses to take off your glasses and lean forward as if we were together where there’s a figurative me reaching out just slightly touching your knee as I take off my glasses and leaning forward a good doctor would like a good therapist would, and tell you what I think. And with the deep baritone with the late-night FM DJ voice that our friend Chris Vos talks about, there’s a musicality of that glorious bastards, right? One of my favorite scenes is towards the end when they’re trying to impersonate, they’re an Italian film crew. 

Corey Frank (03:25):

We all remember it. Christophe Waltz knows that they’re not Italian, but he has them introduce themselves name by name, and he says, what’s your name? And is his Antonio Margarita or whatever his name is? Well, say it again. Let the music flow. He says, let the music of your name flow. And I just thought that was incredible that there’s certain words that you can enunciate and Henry’s got a great tone. I could listen to Henry read the phone book Vincent Price, and you have Christopher Lee and there’s one that will post to this that I tagged Yuan, a LinkedIn post from a gentleman who I thought had, what an incredible novel way to introduce himself. His name is Andrea Kliman. Chris, I don’t know if you saw that. Ronan a good friend, Ronan Ssar, but his intro, the gentleman, and you remember this call Shawn. It was all pushed forward by his tone. 

Corey Frank (04:19):

It was very novel, it was very serendipitous and it wreaked of authenticity because of that and the trust he had me, and I’ve never heard an intro like this before. We’ll link it to this podcast here so people can hear of it. Then I did while you were talking, Henry and Chris, I think my French sucks too, but the appropriate term is eon, I guess to aeration. And so I think we said Eon de latia. So the Wtia method is to ask a question and to just let it breathe and let it aate. Let ruminate. 

Henry Wojdyla (04:56):

You’re making it sound far more eloquent than it probably really is since you’ve mentioned a few names. Someone for me is a more recent discovery. I’m sure you’re been aware of him for some time. And Corey, he’s in your neck of the woods there in Scottsdale that really I think has some good thinking and training around this is Jeremy Minor. I’m assuming you’re familiar with Jeremy. Don’t know what your thoughts are there. Not really tremendously get into it, but I’ve just found some of his thinking around it. Helpful. At least for me. 

Corey Frank (05:20):

He uses hepatic a lot where he’ll use the props, right? Henry of take it off his sunglasses and emphasizing, and we have Chris and Shawn Miller. We have a lot of standup desks and I’m Sicilian, so I have to talk with my hands and I have to have a prop in my hands at all times. And so I think maybe the last thought, Chris and Shawn and Henry for you, certainly as you’re dealing with high stakes deals is things and props and pacing mechanisms. You do the micro prancing, Chris, which I’m sure keeps you on pace for your phone calls, but maybe we’ll put a bow in it and go around the horn between Henry and Chris and Shawn here on your go-to techniques. If I’m a new sales rep and I don’t employ just fluencies or tonality or I’m not aware of my tonality or I don’t use props or micro, give me your one go-to that I should have in my arsenal as a new sales rep when I’m doing discovery. So Shawn, let’s start with you. 

Shawn Sease (06:12):

I got here. I’m afraid if I say something, I’m going to steal Chris’s thunder because I’ve been mentoring under him for so long that I might say something that I learned from him. 

Chris Beall (06:21):

Don’t worry, Shawn, I ain’t going to run out of thunder anytime soon. 

Shawn Sease (06:24):

Yeah, yeah, go ahead Chris. 

Chris Beall (06:28):

Well, I was on somebody else’s podcast yesterday and we’re talking about language thinking and speaking. What happens when we speak and we tend to be very abstract about these concepts. We act as though we might be chat GPT, and it’s just one word after another coming out. We add the disfluencies, we add the tonality, we start to sing, and we think that we’re doing that with our brain and maybe some little part of our voice box or something like that. I truly believe that we think with our whole body and we’ve never walked into a room none of us have, and there’s a brain and a jar and we have a conversation with it, right? The person is a whole person. When I’m micro prancing, I’m a whole person in motion. I realize not everybody in our vast audience will know what micro prancing is. Just so you know. It’s a technique I accidentally developed to train for a very difficult marathon, the Mount Lemon Marathon in Tucson in a room in India, that in which I had 10 meters in which to train, and I’m getting ready to run 23 miles uphill, one mile flat, one mile super uphill, one mile, very down. So that’s what micro prancing is. For those of you who want to learn more about it, there is no place you can go to learn about micro prancing. It just is what it is. Well, 

Corey Frank (07:47):

Actually, sorry, Chris. There is a place you can go see the old Monty Python Ministry of silly walks. I think that’s probably the closest that people will get to your microprancing. But go ahead. 

Chris Beall (07:57):

Yeah, that was Michael Prancing too, which is a special thing. But to me it’s like when you’re bringing your whole person to be helpful to somebody else, you are a whole person. You’re actually a physical person. You’re not just a bunch of words streaming out. You’re not a recording of something. It’s not a trick. You’re there to be authentic. You have to also be in your physical self, and it’s fun to play with people like that. I do it on calls all the time. I’ll do a thing where I do this. It’s like we’re talking about cold calling us. I hold up the flight school shirts. I see flight school, right? Because it’s real. And that’s how we think about others too. We think about what we’re hearing from other people with their bodies also, and that’s why you have to be highly respectful of the late great Stephen Hawkin. 

Chris Beall (08:47):

Can you imagine having that little control of your body and being able to think and express thoughts that big? It’s one of the most amazing bridging of a gap that’s fundamental that we take for granted. However, he had a wonderful physical struggle, which was actually physically communicating. So without that, the game can’t be played at all, so to speak. So anyway, my advice to folks about this is you and the other person are both real people. Zoom didn’t make us into anything else. We’re still physical bodies and references to that. My story about my first conversation with Helen of substance where I said, use the word blood. There are words that invoke physical reactions in us or evoke them that allow us to get closer to the truth with each other, that break down some barriers that offer opportunities for silence that’s productive, and it’s smart to learn how to use those words fluently so we can use them fluently when appropriate. You cannot be disfluent on any words that you can’t emit fluently. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. Your body has to be capable of executing the language in a way that works for the other person all the way through if you want to execute the language in a way that works for them even better. 

Corey Frank (10:09):

It’s not mere words that matter. It’s not just belief. As we’ve talked about right now, you have the triumvirate of your words, your belief and your body, it sounds like. That’s great, Henry, thoughts on that? 

Henry Wojdyla (10:21):

My answer is going to be a little bit different. In fact, in some ways it’s not necessarily contradictory, but I think you use the term hepatic. Is that correct, Cory? Just to show how little I know about this. 

Corey Frank (10:30):

Yes, it’s part of this. When your aunt grabs your cheek, when people touch your elbow, they touch your knee just naturally at the base of conversation. 

Henry Wojdyla (10:37):

I think when it comes in the context of discovery call, and if I’m really getting into a deep, I almost might go to the other direction, meaning I will often close my eyes, sometimes I’ll even rest my head on my hands, whatever. Again, these are telephone-based, so I’m not mostly on a Zoom. I’d probably conduct a little bit differently if I was in that format, but somewhat like I was saying, shut up to allow them to speak. I’m also shutting up in blocking out all of their sensory perceptions. So I’m really truly listening, very simple, not necessarily the most elegant answer, but it’s the truth, and I’m finding that it’s actually really helping. Nothing else that’s going on through my mind. I’m not looking at all the multiple screens that are in front of me, any distractions. It is 1000% focus on that prospect. The words that are coming out of the mouth, the what they’re saying, the way they’re saying it, what they might not be saying. It allows me to really, really just drill down, distill things, and I kind of get that mental image of the confessional that Chris and you talk about. So that’s probably the mental imagery that’s going on, but that’s how I try to physically manifest it. 

Corey Frank (11:38):

Yeah, I can see that. I’m sure, Shawn, when you close your eyes, you still see and feel and hear the drill instructor from when you were 17 years old. But what other advice would you have for somebody jumping onto a discovery call in this world? What’s the one technique you would give to them as we round out this version of the market Dominus, guys, 

Shawn Sease (11:58):

Earlier today, I shared another phrase with you that I believe, I think it’s universal truth and it’s kind of self-evident that the truth is curative, right? The truth is curative. And I mean, if we’re going to actually be able to share secrets with each other and have real confessional-type conversations that it has to be genuine. And then you bring up the concept of how to listen, right? How do you listen? And just one technique that I have found, I picked it up along the way from other psychologists people before me again, is to say things back to people, to say back to somebody what they said to you, right? It requires that you listen. And I think another important add-on to that is to say it back to them. If you can have the acumen and experience and so on, to say it back to them in a way that maybe fortifies or even improves what they said. 

Shawn Sease (12:41):

And from a discovery and sales perspective, if you want to build, truly build trust, say it back to, even if you disagree, if it doesn’t fit with where you need them to go, which would be persuasion and convincing and things like that, which I am just not a fan of, I’d rather have a conversation with somebody, say it back to them and they say, you know what? That’s interesting. Or say it back to them in a way that fortifies their argument, especially if you disagree. And then when you hand that baton back to ’em, my experience and what I’ve learned from trying it is that they’ll continue to talk or they’ll say, that’s right, the gvo thing. Right? Negotiation. That’s right. Great. Okay. Next, let’s move on to the next thing. So that was a lot in there, authenticity, listening. The truth is curative all outside of the scope of very popular things like persuasion and bending people to your will and being crafty and things like that. It’s just simply not my way. I prefer to go that other route that is genuine and authentic, and those are some of the tools I use to get there. 

Corey Frank (13:34):

Beautiful, beautiful. I love that. Especially that word you do it effortlessly is certain words that resonates in the language for me. And I have a list of ’em, but the one that you just mentioned, you said fortify. That’s a very underutilized word, wouldn’t you say? Think Chris and Henry. That’s a good word to use earlier. Chris Henry, I think you and I peaked up when Chris used the word longitudinal qualities. Things have longitudinal clients. It’s that’s a good one. But the last question, lightning quick here, Henry. And I know you’ve been very gracious with your time, but I’m curious, do you screenplay and script out your discovery calls? Do you have the first X amount of questions? Do you have a goal in mind? You’ve done this so many times, the hundreds of millions of dollars in worth of properties and assets that you’ve sold and helped a broker through. But for your discovery calls in this new era over the last few years or so, do you screenplay them or script them out, or how do you structure them to make sure that they’re replicable? 

Henry Wojdyla (14:32):

I do have the euphemistic playbook I talk about, which is literal. I’ve got the copyright here in my desk in front of me. The discovery call is structured and scripted and thought through. I will tell you I’m using it less and less, and it’s partly for the reasons of the topics that we’re discussing here. Some of it’s perhaps just having gotten the reps now so many times that some of it’s just getting ingrained. But I’m finding that if I’m truly discovering and truly letting the prospect, more importantly, it becomes less and less reliant upon scripts. There’s still a basic framework in place. Obviously, you have to have a certain objective, and we have a little bit of benefit perhaps because we’re in a very narrow niche. It’s very well defined. We know who we’re speaking with. There’s not really much in the way of qualification that needs to go on. 

Henry Wojdyla (15:16):

They’re definitionally qualified if they’re in our tam. So that’s a separate topic. So there’s certain freight that doesn’t need to be carried in our particular discovery context that might be in others. So with all those caveats in place, I’m finding that I am moving further away from a kind of regimented discovery call. If I had to guess, just take the long view here, I’m going to probably cycle back. But when I get back to the more structured approach, it’ll be a re-engineered, reconstituted approach that’s going to be much more heavily reliant upon tonality and sub-concepts we’ve been discussing here. 

Corey Frank (15:48):

I get it. I am more of an advocate myself, Chris, and I’ll give you the last word as we round up this episode on screenplay Out, every pause and in the Discovery, the Cohen Brothers from Big Lebowski. Every “dude” was screenplay, was scripted, was written in there on purpose. David Fincher from, I think, Fight Club. Every nuance is written in there. And there are certain directors that are just adamant that what they write, they want the actor a pause, an “er” alike to be in there. And I find that helps replicate because we have a larger team, Henry, obviously with your team there as a contributor with your practice. But we’re trying to scale it up, and I’m trying to look for the factors that would diminish the opportunity in that discovery call. And so every nuance or word matters, but Chris, give the last word to you on this episode of discovery and tonality in the world of discovery calls. 

Chris Beall (16:50):

Well, I love the point you just made. I mean, we practice as professionals at anything so that we can improvise based on what’s happening without the practice. We have no foundation for improvising, without being willing to improvise. We can’t adapt to reality. So reality, that’s where the truth, the truth is out there somewhere and everybody has a plan, as they say, until X, Y, or Z happens. But you better practice your plan, so to speak, so that your speech can be ballistic, so to speak, right? It’s like you can’t throw a ball or you can’t do anything that’s athletic, a little tiny piece at a time. You’ve got to get to the point where you can do it smoothly. And then having learned that you can do it in reality, where there’s going to be things that interrupt the smoothness, you can riff safely 

Corey Frank (17:41):

For sure, or right. When in doubt, just let it aerate. Just let it breathe. 

Henry Wojdyla (17:46):

Let it simmer. Let it simmer. 

Corey Frank (17:48):

That’s beautiful. Well, excellent. Well, thank you gentlemen. Thank you, Henry, for jumping on this episode of Market Thomas. Guys and Shawn, thank you for having, it was a pleasure, the professor, professor of Prospecting, stop on by the studio. 

Henry Wojdyla (18:03):

I’m glad we could. So it’s good to see everybody, Shawn and Snake to make your acquaintance been a fan of yours on LinkedIn for a while, so it’s nice to thank you very much. Yeah, absolutely. 

Corey Frank (18:12):

That’s beautiful, 

Chris Beall (18:12):

Guys. That was really cool. I love it 

Corey Frank (18:16):

So far. Chris Beal from Connected Cell. This is Corey Frank. Until next time.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What’s the secret sauce to nailing discovery calls? Is it your intricate questioning strategy? Your ability to build quick rapport? We’re exploring an underappreciated element today – the power of tonality. 

From a Marine drill sergeant’s verbal shock and awe to real estate power players commanding eight-figure deals, our esteemed guests get vocal about vocal dynamics. 

Join Chris, Corey, and their guests, Henry Wojdyla and Shawn Sease as they battle assumptions, pregnant pauses, and the occasional restraining order. You’ll hear straight from the horse’s mouth why tonality eclipses terminology and how losing your cool in discovery can cost you deals. If your team overlooks today’s vocal victory tips, you’ll condemn them to tone-deaf discovery call defeats. Listen to this episode: Mastering the Art of Silence: How Pauses Can Improve Discovery

Links from this episode:

Shawn Sease on LinkedIn
Henry Wojdyla on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Branch49
ConnectAndSell

 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

 

Corey Frank (01:14):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank, and of course, always at my virtual side is Chris Beall, the stage of sales, the prophet of profit and the hawking of caulking. But we also have two other extra special guests. We happen to be graced in our in-house home Phoenix GCU-based studios with the professor of prospecting, Shawn Sease himself. Good afternoon, Shawn.

Shawn Sease (01:42):

Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.

Corey Frank (01:43):

And we have one of our eight registered listeners, Chris, of our podcast, the most gracious and esteemed Henry Wojdyla from RealSource. Henry, it’s great to have you on the podcast, back on the podcast. I think you’re one of our earlier guests, I believe so, Chris. So good to have you, gentlemen. We have a first here at Market Dominance Guys. We actually have four talking heads, three brains amongst four talking heads, so we’ll see what we can do here.

(02:12):

What we wanted to talk about is something we were talking about before we jumped on air. And Chris, I want to have you have the opportunity to tee up Henry, because I thought it was a compelling topic about tonality, but not just in cold calls, which we often talk about the surfboard and the surfer. But Henry brought up a very compelling point. Shawn, I’d like to get your take on this too, about the importance of tonality and when and how you use it in discovery calls. Chris, so I’ll leave it to you to tee up our good friend Henry here and let’s dive into this topic.

Chris Beall (02:42):

Sure. I mean, the conversation we were just having was about how much of the, well, we were talking a little bit about Branch 49 and how much of the waterfront makes sense to cover or the funnel or whatever. The big question is always, where’s the bottleneck? We always talk about theory of constraints on this show, and we also know if you ever address the bottleneck, you got to stand back. You have to stand back when you’ve done something about the constraint and see if it moves and if so, where it moves because it’s actually not easy to predict. It could move up or it could move down, so to speak, in the processes. Doesn’t move sideways too often.

(03:16):

And Henry was talking about how when we were just chatting out there, not where you’re sitting, not where he’s sitting or he’s sitting or I’m sitting, but where somebody else’s or you’re sitting, Corey. He was talking about how the tonality and disfluency is also the whole tonality package I call it, has actually become as important or more important to him as he’s evolved in the way that he does discovery. And what I thought was so cool about what he hit on is we call it the confessional. And the question is, well, what are you confessing to? And while you’re doing that confessing, are you learning? Are you getting self-knowledge, knowledge of your situation as a result that’s facilitated by the conversation? And I think that was a point that Henry was making. So at that, Henry, what was the point you were making? Because frankly, I was just eating tacos and listening in.

Henry Wojdyla (04:09):

Well, it was probably the ride-on piece to the opening comment I made about some recent conversations, Chris, you and I have had, and I’ll keep it brief to get back to your question. But the fact that the top of funnel has been improved so much by the good thinking here from Market Dominance Guys, the facilitation from ConnectAndSell, it gets back to the wood-turning analogy that you had so wisely laid out probably at least a couple of years ago on this podcast. But the idea that I can get enough reps in that I’m beginning to pattern match and seeing ghosts in the machine, so to speak, as it relates to discovery. And a lot of what I’ve been discovering about my own discovery process has been effectively getting out of the way. And a lot of getting out of the way is facilitating the prospect to do more and more self-discovery.

(04:54):

I will tell you that I’m not quite, I don’t have a fully baked theory on this yet or the framework has not been completely fleshed out. So this is definitely a work in progress and I’d say some of my insights are only really becoming to manifest in the last couple of months, but tonality has been a huge piece of that. So getting back more to the core of what Corey and you are asking me. The tonality piece, not just open-ended questions, but the framing of those questions in a way that elicits, I think hopefully a sign of genuine concern and a search for meaning from the prospect so that they can effectively self-discover by being more open, not necessarily just from a trust perspective, but I think almost more open in their own thinking, what they are willing to put out there. I know I’m speaking in very broad strokes, but nonetheless, it’s like I said, it’s a work in progress, but I’m realizing just how crucial tonality is in the discovery call.

(05:50):

I was thinking it was primarily in the domain of a cold call. It very much is too. But I’ve been slowly peeling back the layers of my own self-limiting beliefs on this topic. And in fact, Corey, as I think I mentioned to you a little bit before, I was frankly a bit skeptical when I was an early listener of just the importance of phrasing, tonality, voice. I thought, “Oh, that’s just huckster salesmanship type stuff,” and I’m a convert. So I’ve come a long way in that and I’m just realizing that not only is it important, but it’s important across a broader range of the sales cycle.

Corey Frank (06:26):

Well, it still may be huckster sales-type stuff, but it works. It’s the laws of gravity. I may not believe in gravity, but gravity believes in me. Shawn, from your perspective, especially being a DISC connoisseur, what do you say to what Henry is confessing to us here about tonality and with the four different types of personalities perhaps are some personalities more susceptible, more open to that verbal disfluency, the ahs and the ums and generating that authenticity where it doesn’t sound like a TED Talk, it doesn’t sound like the 150th time I’ve done this?

Shawn Sease (07:06):

I think that the research on the personality stuff, especially the DISC, the four different personality types, that data is pretty conclusive that it does matter how you speak to people. But it’s probably not, it’s one of many, many different data points. But to answer your question directly, to get in the weeds a little bit, the I, the influence type in DISC are the kind of people that will eat up a whole entire discovery call talking about their fishing trip if you forget to get them on task. And in contrast, example to that is if you’re talking to somebody calculative like a CFO, an engineer or something like that, you may want to dispense with pleasantries. But on the other hand, I think it’s still very effective to just be mindful of the words that we use, like genuine transparency or being transparent, being genuine, being authentic, empathetic, things like this.

(07:57):

If you’re not being true to those definitions, I mean, in even a maybe religious way or something like that, if it’s not true, then it comes across as disingenuous and that just reeks. It reeks of sales and commerce and things like this. And so yeah, there’s no doubt about it, tone, pace, pitch, all very important. And if you’re listening pretty well, people will tell you everything and people are just dying to tell you their stories. And that’s what I always find weird about people who have trouble with discovery. And I would trace it right back to your inability to not only create a rapport with somebody so that you have a longstanding rapport, but at the very moment that you start a conversation that you can enter a rapport.

(08:36):

And let me give you an example. Frequently, I send Chris weird messages maybe at 8:00 or 9:00 or 10:00 at night or something like this when I have an idea. And Chris will come back and tell me, “Hey, it’s a bad time. I’m walking. I’m getting on a plane to go to Europe,” or Australia or something like this. So Chris and I have a rapport, but sometimes when I call him up, it’s the wrong time and we have an inability to begin a rapport, to have a conversation about what I wanted to talk to you. Timing’s not right. And just pay attention to what someone’s telling you and they’ll tell you everything you need to know.

Corey Frank (09:04):

Do you find, that’s an excellent point. It begets the question, Henry and Chris, on to partition a discovery call. We could break this down like our friend Oren Klaff does when he does a pitch. Are there certain aspects, Henry and Chris, when you’re conducting the discovery call that you’ve found or that you discovered require more sensitivity to tonality, verbal disfluencies than other portions of the call? For instance, you’re talking about pricing, you’re talking about pain, or when you’re talking about building the rapport upfront, anything that you’ve observed or anything that you discovered in that area?

Henry Wojdyla (09:44):

I would say if I had to frame it, if there’s a typical structural pattern to my discovery calls, it’s probably, I’ll call it step two. The first step to some degree is a little bit of a slight recalibration of, okay, why are we here? Why are we assembled today? I will provide a little bit of additional contextual reminder of why we had reached out because it’s not uncommon that our discovery calls, I mean, I’m speaking for the most part to fairly senior-level executives. So at the earliest, we are usually two weeks beyond when that discovery call was scheduled. They have full calendars, they’re busy. So there’s just a little bit of the first phase of a bit of reminder, some context, here’s what we do, here’s where the Venn diagram overlaps. Hopefully, that process is a little bit of a trust that’s being reestablished or built upon even further.

(10:28):

Again, the tonality can be part of that. But I would say as parts of really the discovery is then trying to transition out of that because it’s not really a commercial about us when I open, it’s just a contextual framework. Then it’s about getting into them what they’re doing, what’s on their, I guess their windscreen? What are they looking at or through that is really directing where they’re vectoring as a company, as a firm. In our world where we’re dealing with a subset of commercial real estate assets, so there’s a lot of things that tie into not only internal factors, but external factors. And I think it’s getting a lay of the land. And then they contextualize their piece. Now we’ve gone from serving up from our side a contextual reason why we’re here today. Then we get phase two where they have responded back somewhat contextualizing where they fit in the marketplace, and then we start diving into the here and the now.

(11:21):

And I think that’s where, we would call it step three, where I’m beginning to get this, getting back to the piece we’re talking about, which is getting them to dial into the moment. Where does their company fit into the framework of the current market, the current dynamics? How are they seeing on a go forward basis? And getting them to start having thoughtful, self-reflective conversation. That’s the piece that I was referring to earlier. So that’s a very long-winded answer to your question. I would say it’s that third step, if you will. And again, like I did mention a moment ago, this is still a work in progress for me, so that my thinking is not as clarified as I’d like it to be on this. But I can just tell you this is again, this is some of the pattern matching that I’m starting to see unfold here over the last few months.

(12:08):

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Corey Frank (12:55):

And Chris, you’re a big believer in our friend Chris Voss and a lot of the mirroring techniques that he used. And I could see how mirroring could be incredibly effective in certain aspects of discovery.

Chris Beall (13:07):

Yeah, I mean, I divide these conversations into two big domains. One is the domain of the factual, where you’re relatively safe talking about things that are factual. Some might be more sensitive than others. Facts, if somebody were to get in a discovery call with me and two minutes into the call they say, “So Chris, what’s connectandsell? What’s your current run rate revenue? What are your gross margins? And who on your team are you most concerned about that you think you might have to do something about?” And they do that two minutes in, it’s like, I can go on there. Whereas in a second call or somewhere, sometime we really have a reason to talk about those facts, they won’t have to be as skilled and just waiting helps. That’s what Shawn was talking about. Just sometimes you just got to wait.

(14:00):

A disfluency is simply a form of waiting. You’re waiting and letting that moment be filled in with what’s in their mind. It’s like when I teach really young people to play the piano, I always make this point, which is you only need to provide the structure, the sound, they’ll fill in the rest in their head. The music happens over there, not out here, and not in our hands. It happens inside of them. But then there’s another whole range of things that we do end up sometimes hitting on, which are really sensitive issues, like political issues internally, or concerns that this person might have about their own job, or maybe they’re not going to be at that company anymore. And if they would tell you that, that’d be great. Where I think we get hung up there, and where I think tonality, disfluencies, mirroring, all of these techniques that… I never really think of them much as techniques, but all of these kinds of things you could find yourself doing if you were any good at this stuff.

(14:58):

Where they’re just super important is where it’s highly likely there are incorrect assumptions being held by you and by the other party. And it’s really hard to get underneath incorrect assumptions because in order to correct one, you have to give up something that you believe. You have to or they have to. People don’t like to give up anything. We all know that old thing, if I take 50 bucks from you, you’ll fight me until the end of time. If I offer you 50 bucks, you’ll ignore me and go on with your cat videos. It is a very tricky business to get beyond assumptions.

(15:34):

I had one just the other day that was interesting. I was conducting a discovery call with a very senior person at a huge insurance company. He had a very specific problem that he had been advised we could help with. I jumped to the wrong conclusion about the nature of the potential solution, and then seven minutes later, thank goodness, he said, “No, no, you don’t get it. What we want to do is X.” Thank goodness he felt okay correcting my assumption, which was incorrect. But that’s where had I been a little less sure of myself, I wouldn’t have gone as far down that road and we wouldn’t have wasted seven minutes. So it’s like that TED Talk thing, talking as though you know what you’re talking about causes other people to feel like they should either oppose you or shut up.

Corey Frank (16:25):

Right. Well, I think, Shawn, certainly your career, just like you have Mr. Rice on board at ConnectAndSell who’s a former Marine, Shawn, the importance of tone, if you’re a drill instructor, were you a Hollywood Marine or are you a Parris Island Marine? I never think we uncovered that yet.

Shawn Sease (16:43):

I was outside of the runway in San Diego. California, US Marine Corps, Recruit Depot in San Diego.

Corey Frank (16:51):

Okay. So you talk about the first couple of days establishing tone, Chris, certainly, I don’t imagine verbal disfluencies, Henry, worked too well with a drill instructor trying to influence 17, 18-year-olds getting off the bus, putting their feet on the yellow footprints. So how did tone influence you from a perspective of raising the stakes about what you need to know about what you’re going to go through for the next 13?

Shawn Sease (17:17):

Yeah, tone down, I can’t even, it’s frightening. I mean, it’s actually frightening for an 18-year-old to be at bootcamp. It’s frightening. Let me tell you this. Tonality is everything and it is just shock the fear into you. It’s basically a reset. You just forget everything that you learned somewhere else because when you walk out of here, you’re going to have a whole new plan for how you go about doing things. All the way from lining up your belt to shaving, to lining up your, just being completely squared away. But I’ll tell you a funny story because you imagine having a name, a last name like Sease on the firing line when you’re going to learn to fire your rifle. And I was accused of being so goddamn stupid that I’d start firing when they said, “Cease fire.” So yeah, right now I think about it right now, I start shrinking because I remember, “I get it, man. I am not going to fire my rifle. I know what cease means. I get it.” But it’s just relentless.

(18:14):

So I know what cease fire means and I know that my trigger should, I mean, this is 30 years ago. I could still hear it like it was yesterday. Trigger finger off the trigger unless firing, it’s in me. It’s embedded in me. So yeah, tonality can be even more important in the Marine Corps training folks where you’re actually trying to basically shock someone and strip them of everything that they’ve learned so far so that you could be created in the Marine Corps image, like a God mold kind of thing.

(18:43):

But one thing I wanted to touch on that popped up in my mind when it comes to discovery, and earlier we were talking, I shared with you this phrase that I’ve been using recently, which is I’m seeing a lot of teams gaining short-term tactical wins, specialization, other tools, things like this. Quick wins, dopamine hits at the expense of long-term strategic failures. So you get these short-term wins by automations, chat, all these, whatever, you’ll make it work. If it’s ChatGPT, you’re going to go do that and go, “Wow, look what I made?” Short-term win, tactical win, long-term strategic failure. And one of the things that I think about when it comes to discovery is that, and again, it’s just another real simple phrase is that we either do it together or we don’t do it at all. In other words, in discovery for me is that I also have some things that I need to know about you, not like the pains and the problems and how we can help you and things like that.

(19:35):

But how does your company actually buy something? When was the last time you bought something? Who else do I need to get involved with this? It’s the two-way street to build a mutual going forward, and it always seems like it ends up being more of a battle, like a sparring match or something like that. Like I am trying to get these answers, questions from you. Can I convince you that we solve a pain or something like that? And we too quickly get away from that concept of we either do this together or, that’s me saying that. We either do this together or we don’t do it at all. Which means that in the beginning, let’s set some expectations. Here’s some of the things I’m after. What are you after? Hey, if I give you a call, will you call me back? All these little tiny things that make all the difference in building relationship with someone and then keeping to your word and then coming back and telling people.

(20:22):

Let me share with you something at the end of a cold call where we set a meeting. At the very end of it, takes about five or six seconds, “Hey Corey, any reason why you wouldn’t make it to this meeting?” “No it’s on my calendar. I’m good to go. We’re good to go. Shawn, I appreciate that.” “Let’s just say this, in the off chance that you don’t make it, can you and I agree that we’ll work to reschedule it right away? That way you won’t have to get a restraining order because I’m going to follow up with you.” You go, “Yeah, you bet.” But I’m going to use that again. I’m going to use that in my language later on when you don’t show up or something does happen because, and I’m going to be true to my word and I’m going to remind you, “Hey, we agreed that we’d reschedule this thing. Let’s get it done.” And setting this expectation around, let’s do this together or not at all.

(21:02):

Or, yeah, I shared with you earlier today, one more thought on my calendar and on my about section in LinkedIn, [inaudible 00:21:07] says, “Hey, let’s get together and see what we can, if we like each other well enough to work together, shake something out of the trees. If not, we’ll shake hands and go our separate ways.” That’s my intro call because I want to find out is there something here and let’s both work on it together. Those are some of my thoughts. It sets the stage for a long term.

Corey Frank (21:24):

Just as you went into character there and delivered that message about, “Can we agree to work together and find a way to get this back on the calendar if something does get in the way?” I can imagine, Henry, that your high-stakes world of medical real estate properties, these aren’t six-figure opportunities. These are seven, eight-figure deals going on here. So credibility, certainty has to win the day. You’re dealing with a very competitive product. You mentioned to me a few years ago, I think. I mean, you’re dealing with just what’s left. It’s not even the alpha of a lot of these deals. And so tone implying, maybe uncertainty, tone implying that maybe you’re not the best person for this role. You’re a commodity, maybe there’s some commission breath, that makes a difference in overall how much it makes.

(22:16):

So how do you deal with, how do you balance the fact that you try to get that to be authentic, but you also not necessarily have to be the drill instructor here, as we heard from Shawn, but you do have to be in a position of authority to say, “Listen, your money’s safe with me. I’m not going to put your money to sleep. I know what I’m doing. I know these properties. I’ve already done the vetting.” How do you balance that in your, especially in your world?

Henry Wojdyla (22:39):

It’s a good question, and I don’t know that I have an immediate just pat answer for you. There’s no question, tonality is a piece of it. I think asking, I’d say framing the questions correctly is a lot of it. And that framing is a combination in my world of it is tonality. I think it’s using certain nomenclature correctly. I think it’s also, I will tell you the big thing tonality wise is I would say there’s a lot of, there’s this phrase, “There’s riches in the niches.” And we have taken that approach at a high level for the business model. But is it a discovery call? But I think there’s a lot of riches in silence and the ability to basically shut up after asking a question and being comfortable with sometimes some very pregnant pauses. Because to your point, Corey, and I know I’m meandering a little bit in answering it, but we’re dealing typically with eight figure or more size transactions, the questions that surround those in terms of where does this asset sit in your overall thesis? Where is this from a harvesting and recycling of capital perspective?

(23:45):

These are big questions. And even for people that are busy trafficking in these type of assets in a day in day out basis. If we’re really getting into true discovery and they’re really being contemplative about what they’re providing you in terms of feedback and answers, they’re going to need a few seconds themselves to think about that. So I think this is another example of getting out of the way at almost at a tactical level, which is just being quiet. I think that actually also instills some credibility because you’re not trying to fill the gaps. You’re not uncomfortable with the silence. I think that in and of itself provides maybe a tactical level benefit, but I think the more strategic benefit is you’re hopefully actually getting better quality responses from the prospect.

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(24:52):

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Many a promising startup has seen their lofty dreams dashed on the rocks due to lacking a bridge to cross that yawning chasm, separating early adopters from pragmatic mainstream buyers. Chris has contended with this treacherous chasm across multiple expeditions. Those early adopters feature prominently in startup lore – enthusiastic pioneers who relish new technology, derive career perks from kick-the-tires experimentation and care little about reputation risk. Yet they differ radically from that mainstream majority awaiting pragmatic proof. Chris invites you to draw on the profound insights of Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm) to help identify those visionary partners, extract maximum value from your earlyvangelists, and ultimately package your technology into a must-have product. Join Chris for this episode, “Finding Your Beachhead Beyond The Chasm.”

Reading list from this episode:

Out of Crisis – W. Edwards Deming

Theory of Constraints – Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey A. Moore

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:23):

Today, Chris unpacks one of the toughest challenges for startups, navigating the chasm, separating enthusiastic early adopters from pragmatic mainstream customers. As an admitted disciple of Jeffrey Moore’s pioneering work, Chris aims to spare fellow innovators from the common downfalls along the journey to achieving industry dominance. He’ll examine how to identify key early evangelists and high value visionary partners to fund the next grueling leg after the chasm. Safely across, he’ll share hard-won experience on transforming novel technologies into a must-have solution for pressing business needs. Charting this course carefully can turn scrappy upstarts into mighty market rulers. Chris offers guideposts so more pioneers can find safe passage from fledgling startup to titan. Join us for this episode, finding Your Beachhead Beyond the Chasm.

Chris Beall (01:23):

Hey everybody. Chris Beall here with Market Dominance Guys podcast. And hey, Corey’s not available right now, and I thought I’d just put something in the can here and see whether anybody’s interested in what I have on my mind today. So today I thought I’d talk about something really important that you can just go out and get a book and read what it’s all about and figure it out, but maybe you want to think through some of the things that are unappealing about it that will make you not want to do the right thing when it’s time to do the right thing. So this is for folks who come up with new technologies, with new solutions. So if all you do is you sell old stuff, probably isn’t particularly relevant to you. But if you’re selling a new technology, if you’ve invented something, or even if you’ve just come up with a twist on something and you think it’s really valuable, important, could make a difference in the marketplace, could solve some real problems, you have a real problem.

(02:19):

And your real problem is that people are generally repulsed by new technologies. In fact, in general, people are repulsed by just plain old new stuff. Once it’s been established and other people are doing it, they’re buying it, they’re using it, they’re getting good value from it, yeah, then it’s all pretty easy. But that’s a big barrier to get through is that psychological aversion that people have to doing something new or trying something new, especially if it involves parting with something that they already have that would normally be money and always time, and then you could throw in risk to their reputation and well, it only gets worse. So now you’ve got something new, you’re a member of the innovation economy, you want to come out with something, and I’m going to assume it’s B2B. Why? Because I don’t know anything about B2C.

(03:08):

I think I’ve mentioned this before. I’m clueless as a consumer and as a result, I don’t think that I’m qualified to say anything about businesses that sell to consumers. I divide my Shark Tank episodes into two kinds. The ones where they’re talking B2B, which is almost none of them, and the ones where they’re selling to consumers where I can sit back and relax and think, “I don’t know anything about this. These sharks seem to, but I don’t.” But B2B, I’ve been doing that a long time and I’m a disciple of Jeffrey Moore. The book in question is Crossing the Chasm. There’s another book called The Gorilla Game if you want to get into the fantasy of actually doing what we suggest here on Market Dominance Guys, which is dominating markets. So The Gorilla Game’s all about dominating tech markets with a product, not with a service.

(03:57):

If you want to dominate with a service, you become a king or a queen of that particular market, but you can’t be a gorilla. And Jeff explains this in great detail in both of those books. They are wonderful reads. I must have read Crossing the Chasm now five or six times. If you really want to get everything you need to know, you could consider Crossing the Chasm as a starting point. You could consider Deming’s Into the Crisis, so if you can read the crunchiness of it, he is a pretty grumpy guy when he wrote that book, but I would’ve been too. And then of course, all of the Theory of Constraints books, Eli Goldratt and everything, he tried to teach us about how systems essentially have one constraint and we should pay attention to it. Well, that actually goes together here with Crossing the Chasm.

(04:44):

And the reason is the constraint in the innovation economy tends to be just above the top of the funnel in the repeatable part of your business. This is the part that is across the chasm, not the part that is before the chasm. Let me see if I can explain this. So I would draw a picture here, but it’s a podcast, so I have to draw the picture with words. So imagine you have a typical sort of normal distribution, a normal curve. You’ve seen them all before a bell-shaped curves, they’re called. So it’s got a left side and a right side and a middle. They kind of get steep for a while and then it kind of levels off the top and goes down. So most folks think, “Hey, this is how markets adopt. They start with a few people at the beginning. Those people get some good out of whatever it is. Maybe they talk it up. Maybe you get to refine your product a little bit and you go smoothly from having hardly any customers to having a little more, a little more. You establish yourself.”

(05:41):

And then eventually you get past that midpoint in the hump and you’re in what’s called the late majority, and then you’re in among the laggards. That’s actually a great place to be. It’s hard to be displaced there, but you are going to where there are fewer and fewer customers over time. So you might have to come up with something new. Eventually, we all have to come up with something new. So the number one thing to know about that curve, that simple, smooth curve, is that it’s a lie. And by a lie, I mean it’s a curve that has a hole in it, it has a gap where you get to a certain point climbing up the side where you’re getting more customers and more revenue in particular, and suddenly it all goes away.

(06:21):

It goes to zero and it goes to zero for a while. And in fact, if you don’t do anything about it, it goes to zero for a while. That’s long enough that now you’re out of business. So the chasm is the part of the curve that for very repeatable, predictable reasons, has just got no buyers in it. And since it has no buyers, it has no revenue. And if you keep trying to sell in the chasm, so to speak, where there’s no buyers, you will run out of money because your overhead, which we’ve discussed before, is like a racehorse. It will eat while you sleep, it will eat up your entire company, and you’ll try more and more crazy and desperate things to get those non-existent buyers to buy your product. And this is referred to my world as thrash, and you will thrash yourself to death trying to sell to folks who just aren’t there.

(07:17):

Now, why are they not there? Well, it’s because the folks who buy early who are divided into two distinctly different groups that must not be mistaken for each other are radically different from the ones who buy just a little bit later. So when you have a new technology, there are always folks that are interested in it. They’re called technology enthusiasts. They love new stuff. They love it because A, it fits their personalities and their background. They know something about everything. B, they like messing around with stuff to see if they can make it work or break it. And C, they derive their own career and political power from being the sacrificial lambs out there trying things out that may or may not work and generally don’t. So they have a special feature. Their reputations cannot be harmed by checking your stuff out your new thing. So they will check your new thing out.

(08:12):

This produces a false signal to you if you’re not careful that says, “Oh, folks are interested in my new invention, my new product, my innovation.” Now there are folks interested just for a funny reason, they’re interested in trying it out, learning about it, kicking the tires, breaking it, tearing it apart, hooking it up to other stuff to see if it breaks that, and then they’re going to move on. So are they good, bad, or indifferent? Well, they’re really important. So you’ve got to engage with them and you got to engage with them early and you got to make them pay a little bit, otherwise they’re not going to take it seriously. And then you have to pay attention to what they have to say. They’re actually providing you with free advice, free consulting, in fact paid, and they’ll pay you to tell you about your product and they’ll actually try to use it.

(09:05):

So you have to kind of overpay attention to them, but also let them mess around and they’ll give you insights and you need to use those insights intelligently in order to improve your technology, which at this point you will probably think is a product, and it’s not a product yet. It’s a product when it’s in the hands of somebody who uses it for pretty much what somebody just like them has already used it for, it’s useful for some job, it does a job. At this point, the job to be done is kind of amusing the tech enthusiast and letting them learn what’s out there, what works and what doesn’t. So you’ve got to sell to them. You got to sell to them right away. You need a certain kind of salesperson. Generally it’s the person who innovated the product or somebody on that team. So feel free to do that.

(09:59):

Go sell to them. It’s great. You’ll have a little bit of growing revenue. Don’t make the mistake of building out your revenue plan for the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years based on the growth in the tech enthusiast market. That market burns up quite quickly. And if you find yourself going from one to another to another company trying to find the tech enthusiast, you’re selling to a market that has no future, and that’s a mistake. So as long as you’ve got a few, it’s moving fast, you’re getting great feedback, stick with them. But meanwhile, you’ve got to look for your other kind of pre-chasm customer, and that is somebody called a visionary customer. And a visionary customer, it’s a funny name actually, I’ve never quite liked this name. It’s a customer who has a vision of how your technology, not your product, but your technology can confer upon them competitive advantage.

(10:59):

And why is that a vision? Well, they’re having a vision of changing the competitive landscape or the strategic landscape in their business, in their market where they play. So it might be something that fills a gap for them that’s just showed up in the world because now everybody has it. Today that gap would be generative AI. This is why generative AI is generating such a big buzz in the world and such high valuations for so many companies is not that the tech enthusiasts will pick it up. They will, which is fine, but that it provides new potential weaponry for somebody in a specific industry who if they could just figure out how to use gen AI with the rest of what they’re doing, they could change the strategic landscape. That is they could get in a superior competitive position. The internet was like this once there was a point in the life of the internet when every internet company had a valuation that was based on the fact that lots of these visionaries, these customers that were going to seek competitive advantage, we’re going to need help.

(12:06):

And so if you could help them either with a product or a service that leveraged the internet all to the good, so you’re seeing that very same thing with generative AI. We’ve seen it before with e-commerce. We see it all the time in what I call hard engineering with advances in material science. You see it with battery technology. This is done all the time where something new shows up and the reason it goes hype crazy is actually a pre-chasm reason. It’s not the tech enthusiasts who will fool around with it. They’ll do things like I’m a better one when it comes to generative AI. We wrote a book using ChatGPT about market dominance, but it was really just to experience what is it like to use ChatGPT to write a book. So I made sure to keep it short time-wise, 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday until 11 o’clock on Sunday, the book had to be written from scratch or at least from transcripts out of this podcast and published on Amazon in three formats using ChatGPT to tell me how to do that.

(13:06):

Okay, so that was tech-enthusiast stuff. That doesn’t really drive that early hype in a new material or new crazy thing that you can do like, well, ChatGPT. What does is the fact that there are always lots and lots of companies out there in competitive positions where vis-a-vis their big competitor, they think they could make a difference if they were first to adopt and use something new as a weapon. So with your visionary customer, you’re selling to their vision of dominance or maybe their vision of escaping the dominance of somebody else. If they’re number two in a market, they got to be trying to figure out something. So I have an example from a long time ago where the folks at W. W. Grainger, big catalog company with MRO products recognized, “Hey, this internet thing means that our book, our catalog book no longer needs to contain only say 90,000 products. It could contain hundreds of thousands, but how are we going to organize them in a way that we can manage them and by the way, help people find them, which is the claim to fame in our red book?”

(14:15):

So they were willing to do some very strong financial shifts in order to get ahold of some technology, in this case, it was catalog technology. I happened to be the guy selling it and they could do some big things. They thought if they could get the data together about all these products and then organize it in a way that people could find it and buy it, but also keep it up to date because that’s a big problem when you’re publishing a book, you do it in annual cycle, but the internet says you have to do it all the time. So we ended up doing a pretty big deal with them at a company I was with called Requisite Technology is a pretty big deal.

(14:52):

It ended up being probably out of the box 14, $15 million at a time when we had essentially maybe, I don’t know, a million dollars of revenue. So should you do business with these visionaries? Absolutely. How many? A good number is one, that’s a pretty good number in that you focus on really helping them achieve their competitive goals, and you do it at a reasonably great sacrifice to yourself of some of your resources. So you put together a deal that’s got elements in it alike, believe it or not, source code, which no one likes to sell, but hey, if somebody needs competitive advantage, they need proprietary control. So one, make sure this isn’t somebody who’s actually representative of your future market. This is a smart one-off, and you’re going to do a deal that makes a lot of money, which you need unless you like going to venture capitalists and taking their money and having them sort of run your company for you one way or another.

(15:50):

So you need a lot of money in order to cross the chasm. So how do you load up on it? Well, you do a visionary deal with somebody in which they get proprietary control within a specific domain of how it is that you do things. I’ll call this your source code. It could be your secret formula, but it’s something along those lines. They also need intellectual property, so you need to cross-license or license patents to them if you have them and know-how, they need help, so you’re going to have to provide them with your best engineers. At what price? About one and a half times market because they’re going to get very, very special value out of your very, very special people. How long? Probably a year, year and a half. That’s normally long enough to execute on one of these sort of visionary plays.

(16:40):

And then what about exclusivity? Yeah, you got to offer that too if you want to make this work because you’re offering a competitive advantage so you can’t turn around and offer it to their competitor the next day. So let them name some competitors and have a period of time and a field of use and put that in the contract that you won’t sell this deal to those named competitors for this period of time within that field of use. And that way you’ve provided all of the elements for a competitive advantage for that visionary. And assuming that they’re big enough and this is a strong enough play for them, they will pay you a lot. How much is a lot? 10, 20, $30 million is possible on deals like this.

(17:21):

I know that sounds somewhat fantastical with the new technology, but especially if things are hot and you have information that’s special, that’s distinct, that’s rare about how to make some new technology work in a particular industry and you think that somebody could really do well if they had control over it and you don’t think they represent your future mass market, then go ahead and do one of these.

Speaker 1 (17:46):

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

Chris Beall (18:25):

These deals generally take about six weeks to do. You need to make it clear that your board of directors has told you to do a deal like this with one of three or four identified players, all of whom are competitors in that industry. You’re going to do one deal and the phrase that you use is that everything’s on the table. They will respond very positively if in fact this is something that appears to be of competitive advantage and otherwise they’ll leave you cold. So it’s a really easy qualifier. You won’t get a lot of tire kickers on this one. So you do that deal and now you have to split your company in two. So one part pays a great deal of attention to your new visionary customer, really a partner at this point. And another part takes the feedback about your technology and thinks, “Hmm, where could we go in order to establish our technology packaged appropriately to do a job as a product?”

(19:23):

And that where we can go is across the chasm. The beauty now is that you have hopefully enough money to cross the chasm because as I said before, there is no revenue down there in the chasm. It’s very, very dry. There’s the bones of companies that have crossed or tried to cross the chasm and didn’t make it. You’re going to have to walk by them and you’re going to shudder a little bit, but you got to realize, “Hey, over on the other side is the magic of the early market.” It’s the early market post chasm or early majority, and you’re looking for somebody with a broken mission-critical business problem that you’re pretty sure that your product along with whatever services are need to make it work, this is called a whole product, and it’s all put together can actually solve that broken mission-critical business problem.

(20:16):

Now, everybody has these. They’re all over the place. I mean, we’ll never run out of broken mission-critical business problems. They sort of like rabbits, right? Every time something happens in the world that’s new or different or somebody buys somebody or something is being obsoleted out or whatever, something’s broken, it could be an internal problem that they have. It could be a problem with their go-to-market. It could be a problem in their supply chain. It could be a problem in their financial supply chain. It could be a problem with people. Who knows? You know because you know what your technology can do, but you’re going to have to package it up as sort of a paper product that claims to solve this problem. Then you need to go to talk to folks who you think have this problem. And with some of them it will resonate and they’ll say, “I actually have this problem.”

(21:07):

Now you have an interesting problem. So your product isn’t quite perfectly ready for prime time, so you need to take the minimum version of it and you need to round it out with services, make it a whole product, and then sell it to somebody. For how much? Well, you’re actually going to price it down, and this is very counterintuitive to a lot of people. You’re going to price it down because you’re essentially buying the first customer’s willingness to work with you because they’re working for you and they are going to point out everything about your product that doesn’t actually solve their problem. So you were able to describe the solution, but you weren’t able to actually implement it quite perfectly. It’s really hard to get everything right in a product and they’re going to teach you, but by the time you’re done, you’ll actually have a product that is probably sellable to the number two person, and more importantly, you will have a reference.

(22:04):

And across the chasm, we tend to sell by reference. That’s why it works. That is the slightly more cautious person will buy what the slightly more desperate person bought if it worked for them. And everybody knows who that is. Everybody knows who the lead dog is. So now you go from one to another to another. You get your product more complete, you get your references more robust, and eventually word of mouth starts to take over. And at that point, your market is probably pretty small. You want it to be pretty small. The edge of your market is everybody who will talk about it and refer somebody else to it as a solution to their broken mission-critical business problem. And so, hey, you just keep going until that market starts to run out. But well before that, you identify an adjacent market that is similar enough in terms of the broken mission-critical business process that you can solve, but different enough, maybe a different role.

(23:07):

So for instance, say you solve a problem in sales, you might want to go talk to customer success or say you’re verticalized within banking, you might want to go talk to folks in insurance. You’ll know how to do this. You just have to decide when to do it, otherwise you’ll sort of plunge into a chasm of your own making. And after that, it is reasonably straightforward. Now you’re into, I’ll call it standard issue market dominance, like we talk about all the time on this show. That is you make a list, you call the list, you talk to people, you build trust, you recognize that only 1/12 of your market’s in market in any given point because they’ve already solved the problem too recently using something else and you have to wait till the replacement cycle for their solution kind of plays out. And now you go and you dominate that market.

(23:57):

But if you don’t get into the market, you don’t get to dominate it. So while you can employ brute force techniques like we recommend at Market Dominance Guys, make a list, call the list, talk to people, build trust, have meetings. Also have folks come to your website because you talk to them, have them answer emails because you talk to them, have them connect to you socially because you ask them to and you just talk to them. All that good stuff you get to do, but you want to do that on across the chasm side primarily, and you’ll feel it. It gets easier and easier and easier if you’re across the chasm. If you’re not, it just kind of stays the same. You can actually build very large pre-chasm companies. They sell weapons, not tools, but you’ve got to play the game a little bit differently.

(24:46):

You’re actually doing an endless series of these sort of little visionary deals. They’re little ones. They’re not as big because you can’t extract the big money for competitive advantage from folks that are competing with each other. It sounds like you could, and some have figured out how to do it. I mean, Google does this with Google Ads. They’ll sell you the ad words or they’ll help you with them, and then six months later, your number one competitor gets powered up by Google to compete with you with better or more powerful ad words that somehow yours have gone a little weak and back and forth it goes. It’s very rare. If you do one of those, more power to you. You can own jet airplanes of your own and do all manner of things and have silly names for your products, and it’ll all work out really great.

(25:30):

But if you’re more of a standard issue, “Hey, I’ve got a new product or a new idea for a product with magic technology and I am hoping to take it to market,” just remember you need to divide your market into two big pieces, pre-chasm and post chasm. Then you need to divide the pre-chasm into two pieces, tech enthusiasm, visionaries, then you got to make a very uncomfortable deal with one of the visionaries that’s sufficient to fund your chasm crossing and you just saved your company from a whole round of financing by doing that, and you’re still in control.

(26:03):

Then you need to make that list. But you’ve got to know that you solve a broken mission-critical business process before you make the list. Then you make the list and you get on something like ConnectAndSell, or you work with people like at Branch 49 or whatever, and you talk to people in order to get more and more folks to pay attention to the fact that, “Hey, there’s a solution to this thing. And by the way, a bunch of people just like you have already bought that solution and they’re quite happy with it.”

(26:33):

So that’s the end of this little episode. A little lesson. I feel like I’ve given it before on market dominance guys, but maybe not quite so straightforward away, and I thought even if I have, well, you know what they say, repetition is the mother of learning. So we just repeated it. And good luck to all of you mothers and fathers and others out there who are trying to take new stuff to market in the innovation economy. You’re much needed.

 

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Alex McNaughten continues his visit with Chris to share psychological insights that challenge traditional sales training. As an AI entrepreneur, Alex emphasizes confidence should be the priority when onboarding salespeople, not technique. He advocates first building enough confidence just to “pick up the phone” and draws parallels between sales and coaching – both guide people through “the emotional journey to consider something new.” Alex tells his story about overcoming fear in sales and boxing, noting most training overlooks the emotional side. He concludes that “so much sales training, particularly cold calling, is wrong or missing” these emotional components.

Alex’s perspective as an AI builder brings a unique view on honing the emotional skills crucial for sales success. He advocates pushing sales leaders to transform training to address confidence and psychology first. Join them for this episode, “Confidence Beats Technique in Sales Training.”

Links from this episode:

Grw.ai
Branch49
ConnectAndSell

Alex McNaughten on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:21):

Alex McNaughten continues his visit with Chris to share psychological insights that challenge traditional sales training. As an AI entrepreneur, Alex emphasizes confidence should be the priority when onboarding salespeople, not technique.

(00:36):

He advocates first building enough confidence just to pick up the phone, and draws parallels between sales and coaching. Both guide people through the emotional journey to consider something new. Alex tells his story about overcoming fear in sales and boxing, noting most training overlooks the emotional side.

(00:55):

He concludes that so much sales training, particularly cold calling, is wrong or missing these emotional components. Alex’s perspective as an AI builder brings a unique view on honing the emotional skills crucial for sales success. He advocates pushing sales leaders to transform training to address confidence and psychology first. Join him and Chris for this episode, Confidence Beats Technique in Sales Training.

Chris Beall (01:26):

Yeah, so I think a CS team would be very interesting. And he loves trying new stuff. He’s kind of like Corey in that regard, and I think CS might be as big a play as sales for Taylor.

(01:39):

In fact, I mean CS is the game in the world of SaaS. CAC is like, well, okay, great. But are you going to hold them, right? I know when somebody looks at a company, they don’t start out asking, what’s your effectiveness at acquiring customers? They ask, what’s your net retention rate?

Alex McNaughten (01:57):

I think CS becomes more important in a tougher environment because it’s much easier to sell more to your existing customers, and upsell them, rather than trying to bring on new ones for a lot of companies right now.

(02:10):

Thanks for teeing up this podcast, that was fun. 30 minutes goes quickly when you’re just talking. It goes so fast. You think 30 minutes is a long time., It’s really not. It flies past.

Chris Beall (02:20):

It is quick.

Alex McNaughten (02:24):

It’s good, though. Because…

Chris Beall (02:25):

By the way. Yeah, I think that it’s really interesting. We sometimes do these and we’ll go an hour and a half, or something like that. And it’s really interesting where the conversations end up going. We almost never go where we think we’re going to go, which is great. So we don’t think very hard about it, but they go by fast. They really do.

Alex McNaughten (02:42):

Yeah, that’s the best part about it. It’s often when a conversation just naturally flows. Chris, I just want to say a massive thank you for your support. You said some really lovely things about what we’re doing, and I get the sense that you genuinely believe and are excited by what we’re building. Which is really cool, and it’s the early supporters that I think really make a company. It’s those folks who kind of get it before 90% of the world gets it. I really appreciate it, and thank you. Let’s keep going on the journey together. We’re going to build something big.

Chris Beall (03:13):

I feel very fortunate that we got to talk in the first place. Just watching the demo, most demos don’t do much for me because they’re about buttons. And buttons aren’t very interesting. Push this button, this thing happens. And they’re generally about feeding the monster or making pretty pictures, neither one of which is interesting to me. You feed the CRM system or whatever all day long, and then you ask it for pretty pictures, and then you pretend the pretty pictures are going to change your life and they don’t. That’s kind of the history of enterprise software kind of in a nutshell.

(03:45):

We do something at ConnectAndSell that actually does something. It’s a doing thing, it’s not a looking and thinking and whatever thing. And what I was drawn to in the simple demo was the emotional content.

(04:01):

And my view of sales is pretty simple, which is we’re facilitators of an emotional journey.

Alex McNaughten (04:07):

Yep.

Chris Beall (04:07):

That someone else needs to go on in order to be comfortable enough that they can consider the possibility of something new. And that’s what we do in sales. And I don’t know why not everybody gets it. It’s like Anthony Iannarino gets it. You read Elite Sales Strategies, that’s what it’s about. The Jolt Effect guys, they get it. It’s all producing the reality and the perception of risk on the part of the other person, the potential buyer, so they can move forward. You’re actually an enabler of something that can’t be done without your help.

(04:43):

I used to teach people how to rock climb. And to be a modern rock climber, even in the gym, the number one thing you have to learn how to do is trust the rope. And experienced climbers can’t go back in time, back to when they didn’t trust the rope. So they start in the wrong place. They start with technique.

(05:05):

And they start by saying, do this, do that. Try this, try that. But the thing you need to do, and I think this is identical to what we do in sales, is you need to help that person who is properly naturally afraid of falling. It’s not incorrect to be afraid of falling.

(05:23):

I can tell you from experience, I once took a little fall on a mountain of about 800 feet. The chances of walking away from them are pretty close to zero. It was not something I would ask somebody else to give a try to. Why don’t you go jump on that chunk of tilted ice and see what happens when you go head-first into the rocks at 70 miles an hour?

(05:44):

And so I knew as a young rock climber that the fear of falling is a good thing, not a bad thing. But when I taught people, I would just teach first to trust the rope. And the way I’d do it is this, go up one foot, step off.

(06:00):

It’s kind of silly, right? Well, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt without the rope. Yeah, well, you’re going to learn to trust the rope. We do that until it’s boring. Then go up two feet, step off, go up three feet and step off.

Alex McNaughten (06:09):

That’s interesting.

Chris Beall (06:10):

When you’re so bored with that, then you’re ready to have your mind open to what’s the most effective way to rest? So let’s go up to that three-foot level, and let’s try different ways of resting. Because the other thing you’re going to be afraid of is running out of gas. Because you’re going to run out of gas when you’re climbing. That’s the first thing that happens.

Speaker 1 (06:33):

We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break.

(06:35):

Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it’s time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world.

(06:54):

From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire tam, Branch 49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branchfortynine.com.

(07:20):

And we’re back.

Alex McNaughten (07:22):

It makes you rethink learning journeys. My experience with boxing is quite similar. Is that I wish more time had been spent upfront on overcoming the natural fear of being punched in the face. Because it’s very jarring, because you start with all the technique, and the punches, and the movement. And then you move to that, and you suddenly sparring. But your natural instinct is to shut your eyes when you see a punch coming at you. Of course it is.

(07:53):

But I wish that, when I was younger, someone had spent time with me on that fear, because it would’ve made everything a lot easier later on. And I think most learning journeys are like that, and I think we leave the emotional side out of it.

Chris Beall (08:08):

And in sales it’s all we’re doing. We’re helping somebody overcome their correct natural fear of trying something.

Alex McNaughten (08:21):

Well, so is coaching.

Chris Beall (08:22):

We treat it like it’s not correct, but it is correct. They should be afraid. They should be concerned.

Alex McNaughten (08:27):

But that’s exactly the same as coaching. I think your description of sales as the emotional journey to help someone consider the possibility of something new, I think replace the word sales with coaching, and it’s exactly the same.

(08:40):

And I think that’s where most people go wrong, is they focus far too much effort and attention on knowledge, and product features if they’re teaching someone something, and they actually forget that, especially when you bring a new person into a sales role, probably the number one thing you want to focus on is actually just their confidence. It is arguably the first thing you want to do, is just get them confident enough to pick up the phone in the first place.

(09:09):

And then you can worry about the specifics of technique and product features, et cetera, and that builds over time. But yeah, anyway, that’s given me a thought. That’s kind of got my mind racing actually, in terms of conversational design. But that’s going to take me somewhere.

Chris Beall (09:28):

By the way, do you know about how we do our flight schools? It’s so unusual. We do exactly what you said. So we run a thing called flight school, and flight school takes reps who are hesitant, uncertain. Maybe they think they’re pretty good, maybe not. But it’s about cold-calling.

(09:46):

We deal first with the issues around fear by making it clear at the very beginning, most of the fear is actually on the other side. You’re the scary thing. The reason that you’re afraid of cold calling is you’re afraid of being scary. You’re afraid of being thrown out of the village. You have a deep, primal fear of being exiled.

(10:09):

And so there’s no place in the environment of evolution where we would interrupt a stranger, because there were no strangers. We have no mental, emotional machinery that prepares us to be the bad thing. Which is, in this case, the invisible stranger interrupting somebody.

(10:28):

And the way we overcome that is first we accept that’s who we are. Second, we accept that experts have actually figured out a way to turn that fear the other person has into trust, and to do it a hundred percent of the time using the same approach. So that now your journey is not about your product or anything, it’s just about, can I say something in seven seconds in such a way that causes a stranger that I’ve just frightened to trust me?

(11:01):

That’s a much more interesting job then, go sell a product, or go set a meeting. And it’s really fun to learn how to do it. I teach people how to do a dumb thing with the cork, hold it sideways, wine cork, bounce it and have it stand up. They’re not aware it can be done. Once they see it done, it becomes interesting, right? It’s a dumb little thing. But it’s a thing that, when you see it, you go, ooh, that can be done.

(11:25):

And when you see this, seven seconds happen repeatedly … So we coach for two-and-a-half hours with full conversations, by the way. But we only coach it for seven seconds. We let them fall on the rope over, and over, and over until they get confident in the rope. Which is, the rope is, I can get somebody from their fear to trusting me in seven seconds a hundred percent of the time.

(11:51):

At which point the rest of this is now just, can I get them curious about taking a meeting? There’s not much left.

Alex McNaughten (11:58):

So interesting, right? We talked about this last time and you just described it. Again, it just makes me think that so much of sales training, particularly the cold-calling phase, is wrong. Or just missing a key part of the equation. But this has been great. Thank you.

 

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