The guys are tackling the big question on every sales manager’s mind: Could AI replace me? With wisdom and reassurance, Corey and Chris explore the power of Taylor, an AI sales coach created by grw.ai CEO Alex McNaughten. Taylor provides a judgment-free space for reps to vent frustrations and surface red flags managers miss. As Chris explains, Taylor’s conversational skills elicit “confessions” from reps. And for managers worried an AI could do their job better, Alex gently says: “The goal here is to make leaders better…not replace them.” So breathe easy sales managers, and get ready to be 10-50X more effective. With the power of AI augmentation Sales Managers will be unstoppable. Join us for this episode, AI Coaching Conversations Elicit Unfiltered Rep Feedback.

About Our Guest:

Alex McNaughten – CEO/Founder – Grw.ai

With a background in B2B sales for both Kiwi startups and US tech giants, Alex is passionate about increasing the level of professionalism & performance in B2B selling globally. Prior to Apprento, through his advisory firm, he trained hundreds of founders, executives and sales professionals and worked across over 130+ ANZ businesses from pre-revenue startups like SafeStack Academy, to growth companies like Rocos to large multinationals like Vodafone, helping them to reduce their sales costs, speed sales cycles, maximize win rates, build out teams, expand into new markets and ultimately generate $10s of millions in new revenues.

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—-

(00:23):

The Market Dominance Guys are tackling the big question on every sales manager’s mind. Could AI replace me? With wisdom and reassurance, Corey and Chris explore the power of Taylor, an AI sales coach created by grw.ai, that’s G-R-W-A-I, CEO Alex McNaughten. Taylor provides a judgment-free space for reps to vent frustrations and surface red flags managers miss.

(00:47):

As Chris explains, Taylor’s conversational skills elicit confessions from reps. And for managers worried an AI could do their job better, Alex gently says, the goal here is to make leaders better, not replace them. So breathe easy sales managers, and get ready to be 10 to 50 times more effective. With the power of AI augmentation, sales managers will be unstoppable. Join us for this episode, AI Coaching Conversations Elicit Unfiltered Rep Feedback.

Corey Frank (01:22):

And here we are once again. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. It’s episode 200 and something. We’ll just say 200X episode of the Market Dominance Guys. As always, we have the sage of sales, the prophet of profit, and the Hawking of hawking. Chris Beall to my left or right, depended on where in the audience you are sitting right now. And we also have a guest. So Alex McNaughton, fresh over the pond. Do you call the Pacific the pond, or the Atlantic is the pond. I don’t know what the Pacific is. But anyway, he’s somewhere in the land of the Hobbits in New Zealand. I don’t know if you were in Auckland, but welcome to Alex McNaughton, the CEO of Grw.ai, and he’s going to talk to me and Chris about his company and some of the changes and trends that he’s been seeing. So first off, good afternoon, Chris. Good afternoon, Alex. Chris, how you been?

Chris Beall (02:15):

I’m been good. I’m down here south of you right now, in southern Arizona. Not as far south as Alex. He’s so far southeast, he’s an antipodal upside-down kind of guy. I’m looking to see the blood rushing to his head anytime soon.

Alex McNaughten (02:28):

About as south as you can be in the world.

Chris Beall (02:30):

Yeah, yeah. And still have a nice climate. That’s what’s kind of weird. How you guys get away with that in New Zealand is entirely beyond me. As you know, Corey, my sister Theresa once executed the most brilliant business I’ve ever seen. She flew to New Zealand to the South island. She bought a horse, a retired racehorse, and tacked to go with it. Rode it around for three months. A product of that was a trail horse. Trail horses are worth a great deal on the South Island. She sold said trail horse for enough to pay for the entire trip and then went up, spent two months on the North Island, hitchhiking around among friendly people. I still think if you want to see bootstrapped, she was wearing boots.

Alex McNaughten (03:15):

That’s awesome.

Corey Frank (03:17):

So Alex, tell us a little bit about Grw.ai and what kind of rundown [inaudible 00:03:23] did you stumble into meet a guy like Chris, besides LinkedIn, of course.

Alex McNaughten (03:27):

Well firstly, guys, thanks to have me on the podcast. It’s good to be here. How did I meet Chris? I think this was a podcast introductory conversation or just a LinkedIn conversation, that I’ve been running a podcast for a few years and it’s brought me to some interesting places and brought me to some very interesting people.

(03:49):

And in terms of Grw.ai, we are very early days. We’re four months into this journey. I’ve got two very, very smart co-founders, Alistair and Dan. Alistair’s a machine learning Masters from Cambridge University, and Dan is a full-stack engineer and data scientist by trade. And we are building a performance management platform for sales teams actually focused on performance. And really this came about because I’ve worked with about 150, give or take, B2B SaaS companies predominantly over the last four years. I accidentally built a go-to-market advisory and then I built a sales training and recruitment company down here in New Zealand. And we noticed that they were all using, I guess what you’d consider traditional HR performance management platforms, but they weren’t aligned to performance, had nothing to do with what was being measured and actually weren’t very helpful for sales teams specifically.

(04:40):

So we started building Grw to give leaders and managers better insight into their teams, help them manage more people, and really just help them be better leaders. And then the final thing I’ll say on that, for now anyway, and you might have some questions, is we also noticed 95% of sales leaders have had no sales leadership training, so they’re really struggling and I’m really passionate about this. Sales is, we’re the people who bring the business and keep the lights on. And when you’ve got 95% of the people leading those teams who haven’t been supported in the best possible way, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Corey Frank (05:15):

Chris, we’ve spoken about this several times. Particularly I think, Alex, I know you’re a fan of something that’s near and dear to our hearts here at the Market Dominance Guys is particularly after the top of funnel, the discovery process. And Chris has some interesting things to say about where a lot of folks are focusing on top of funnel, which is a good place to start. But it’s also, Chris, you talk a little bit, much more elegantly than I about the discovery and how critical it is to be trained there, to have feedback there, to have visibility there. So Chris, and I know you’ve taken a look a little bit about Alex’s platform, but first off, for the audience and for Alex to level set, your opinions on the discovery and where some of the needs are there that perhaps Alex is addressing with Grw.

Chris Beall (05:57):

Yeah, I think that one of the goals of any sales organization should be to shove the bottleneck of the entire company down into discovery. It tends to sit just above the top of the funnel. So we kind of built this whole podcast around the notion of, hey, you can beat everybody if you can solve that one problem because now you actually have got increased flow and improved targeting and the ability to go out and characterize markets and expand where it makes sense to expand and withdraw of where it makes no sense to go.

(06:26):

We have some episodes about discovery, and we call it the confessional. So the idea of discovery is to have the other person get in an emotional state where they will confess to you what’s really going on with them. And if that happens, then you immediately get an increase in flow rate through discovery and an increase in quality, and probably a decrease in cycle time. So when we’re looking at systems, we care about those three things a great deal, throughput, quality and cycle time, and we address all of them by making discovery into a proper confessional where somebody is comfortable confessing.

(07:05):

What Alex and his team have done, which is fascinating to me, is they’ve made the sales manager, sales rep one-on-one into something that, by taking the sales manager out of it, this is really quite interesting and ironic to me. By taking the sales manager out of the first level discussions about deals, which is what reps tend to focus on, they actually have come up with a way of eliciting a confession from the rep. And it’s not just a confession about how they’re doing in the deal. I mean you can do deals well or poorly or whatever all day long, but as we can still call her the fetching Ms. Fenucci, even though she’s now the Chief Revenue Officer of Mediafly and kind of too professional to be the fetching, but well, sorry Helen, we’re just going to fetch you up just a little bit. She reminded me this morning when I got her coffee. She said, “You’re the one who’s doing the fetching.” I said, “Yes, I fetch you and I pour.”

(08:01):

But it’s interesting, when I was observing Alex demoing to me, it reminded me of a very old program, not in how it’s built, it’s very, the freshest generative AI, super smart, getting smarter about the conversation, but the conversation has a great deal of lightness for the rep.

(08:19):

The very first word my eyes fell on when Alex was demoing to me was the word frustration. The rep was frustrated at how a deal was going, right? Well, that’s not actually a deal term. You being frustrated about a deal is not part of the deal. This is your problem, not his problem. But the love your team approach says, no, your problem is your manager’s problem. And your emotional problems, your life problems, your direction that you want to go, your ambitions, how you feel you’re being supported, who’s taken the notes. Remember when Helen told us once she took notes when her people would be presenting internally to the big bosses so they could focus. Even though she is the boss, she’s taking notes, a little servant leadership there. All that stuff comes together.

(09:06):

I believe Grw.ai has come up with something really interesting. It’s a way to get information compressed at about a 30 to one ratio into the brain of the sales manager by being able to get the extract from the interaction between the sales rep and the bot in question, which I’ll let Alex talk about. But then there’s another thing that happens, which is there’s a softness about that relationship because the rep doesn’t fear the bot. And so the rep starts telling their emotional truth to the bot. And there was a program called Eliza written many, many years ago that is a Rogerian non-directive therapist written in a hundred lines of code or something like that. And everybody I know who used it, and I had hundreds of people use it because I was so interested in it, ended up confessing to it. And that was a hundred lines of code.

(10:01):

So there’s some hidden magic in interacting with a bot that it feels enough like a human, but isn’t your boss. That you can actually relax and tell it the truth. And you know me in the Lonely Minds Club, right? CEOs live in the Lonely Minds Club because everybody lies to us. Well, sales managers, everybody lies to them too. So they’re not well-trained and everybody lies to them. It’s a tough combo. I don’t know. What do you think about that, Alex?

Alex McNaughten (10:29):

Yeah, so just to give a touch more context, as part of our platform we’ve built Taylor, and Taylor is an AI powered performance coach specific for sales teams. And the sales teams have one-on-one conversations with Taylor on a regular basis with our early design partners, that’s every two weeks.

(10:47):

And the behaviors we’ve noticed from the team is super interesting. We’ve seen people spend up to 45 minutes talking to Taylor. On average it’s about 20, but we’ve seen up to 45 minutes in a single session. And there’s an unbelievable amount of rich data that come out of those conversations. You imagine you’re a sales manager with a team of 10, the reality is you don’t have the time to do one-on-one across the team and get to that level of detail all the time.

(11:14):

So I think, Chris, your description of how it compresses information for the sales leader 30 to one, that’s probably fairly accurate. We haven’t measured the exact compression, but in terms of time compression, it probably is something like that.

(11:26):

And the other things we’ve noticed that’s really interesting is even though the sales team know that their leader, and even their leader of leaders, will see insights from these conversations, they’re extremely honest, if not more honest than they would be with a real human. So yeah, it’s super exciting and I’m pumped because what we’re able to do now is stuff that typically I would be doing as a person going into organizations to help them. Technology is allowing us to scale that, but do it better because the great thing about Taylor AI powered coach is memory across all conversations, across all the team, and it never forgets anything. So it can actually be more effective than a human in a lot of respects.

Corey Frank (12:12):

How did you overcome the empathy? As we’ve spoken about many times, when you’re giving feedback, you can’t just give the, Chris and I had a conversation yesterday, we were talking about the old English aphorism where it’s soft words, hard arguments, and that it’s not versus hard, sharp words. But I bet that process to make it accessible, to make it connect emotionally from an empathetic perspective on the feedback was a challenge. I find that fascinating to find out how you’ve evolved that and tested that.

Alex McNaughten (12:44):

So it’s moved very quickly. So we started with surveys a few months ago, was where we started. The problem is you don’t get very good data and we realized that that was not good data and horrible experience for people to interact with, which is more important, reason why we moved away from that. And then really we’ve just built, tested, learned, iterated again and again and again over many, many, many cycles. And then also drawing from my experience because I’ve personally coached hundreds and hundreds of people. So just trying to embed it with as much of the learnings I’ve had through my 11 years in sales and then sales coaching.

(13:20):

So it’s probably a mixture of, I guess, some psychology, some science, and then a little bit of art in terms of the testing and learning and the feel of it, to get it to a point now where it’s able to coach in a human way and give feedback in a way that isn’t jarring, which often having a conversation with an AI can feel quite jarring. And I’d say that’s something that we are, I wouldn’t say we’ve a hundred percent nailed it, but it’s moving in the right direction fast. We’re only kind of five months in.

Corey Frank (13:54):

Well yesterday, or I think this morning, there’s the news here, in the States at least, Alex, that Bobby Knight was a very famous, very successful basketball coach at the college level for many, many years. One of the all time winning college basketball coach. And he had a very sardonic sense of humor, demeanor, very aggressive when it came to discipline with his players. He’s frustrated, throws a chair across the court, grabbed one of his players by the throat. Nothing that we endorse as sales leaders of course. But very antagonistic and very Lin Subardi-esque to raise the bar of his folks. His famous phrase was, “I want it more than you do and that’s a problem.”

(14:35):

And Chris and I talked yesterday about a lot of leaders who are all about conviction, conviction, conviction, right Chris? And it’s just boom, boom, boom. And I would imagine from a coaching perspective, Chris, you have some thoughts on this about introverts versus extroverts in sales, in that fine line, Alex, to build a platform that can talk to both types of sales personas. Chris, anything to add to that from the perspective of find that nuance of a coaching mechanism that speaks to both styles?

Chris Beall (15:06):

Yeah, I think there’s three things in play here. One is Bobby Knight had an advantage. You couldn’t very well transfer from the team you were playing on to some other team. And so you were kind of stuck, if you wanted to get into the NBA or you wanted to even have a successful college career, your foot was nailed to the floor and you were pivoting in circles, which people do in basketball a lot. And he’d really be pissed off and tell you were acting like your feet were nailed to the floor even when you were moving as fast as you could.

(15:34):

So in the modern world, salespeople can go work for whomever they want and the best ones can work, literally just write their ticket and do whatever they want, wherever they want. So you start acting like that and you’re going to get down to the ones who like it, who like that kind of abuse, which is there are people who like that kind of thing, but not most high performers.

(15:54):

Secondly, I think this business of introverts and extroverts, I think introverts make better salespeople in general if they can bring energy, and energy is orthogonal to conviction. You don’t need to persuade somebody just to be energetic in a conversation. You can be very present, very energetic, and yet very open-minded about what is the best thing to happen next. You don’t need to be driving towards your end. And one thing we know about everybody, and it’s salespeople and customers and everybody else, is when you push on them, they push back. They might push back overtly, they might push back covertly and they may wait and push in the way in which the back that they’re pushing on is yours and they’re doing it with a knife.

(16:41):

So there’s a lot of issues that get buried in this short-term desire to get it done right now. And I think that it’s one of the things I really liked about, again, I had a short demo with Alex, but I loved thinking about how an introverted salesperson who’s really, really good would have fun exploring the ideas that Taylor is willing to bring out and would be encouraged. One of the things that… you got to check this thing out, Corey. Taylor actually says encouraging things to you, but only when Taylor thinks they’re the things that you’re doing that makes sense. And you’re always doing something that makes sense, or you wouldn’t be in the deal. Most sales managers never do that. They never tell you what you’re doing right. And so there’s an encouragement factor that I think works across a broader range of sales personalities, including the best personalities, which are high energy introverts.

Susan Finch (17:37):

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

(17:48):

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.

(18:12):

And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Alex McNaughten (18:18):

There’s a few things I’d add to that. I think coaching in its purest form is not telling people what to do, it’s helping them to get to the answers on their own, typically through smart questioning. So I think that’s kind of really the starting point for a lot of what we’ve built here was with that kind of lens of coaching.

(18:39):

And then what Chris just said there around validation is super important. And this was a surprise to us. We didn’t think that people would feel good with an AI-powered bot effectively saying to someone, “Hey, well done. That was smart, that was a good thing to do.” But we’ve noticed that a number of the early users have been telling us, and they were surprised themselves that it actually felt good. It felt good to get validation from something that wasn’t human. And that’s probably partially due to the fact that, like you said, most of them don’t get that from their boss regularly.

(19:15):

And it’s not that their boss doesn’t care, it’s that their boss is stretched. Sales leaders are so stretched, they have way too many reports a lot of the time that they can handle. They don’t know much about leadership in general, other than what they’ve been able to intuit over time.

Corey Frank (19:33):

Alex-

Alex McNaughton (19:34):

Yeah, jump in.

Corey Frank (19:35):

You bring up a great point. I’m sorry to step on your feet. I’m curious as a sales, am I threatened by this? How do I make this my friend? How do I amplify the results, because my gosh, what if my people, God forbid, they like AI better than they like me because I’m a sales manager who got into this because I have a high need for approval. Maybe I wasn’t the best closer, and for the insecure folks in the audience like me, how do I deal with that? This sounds too good here to put me out of a job, potentially.

Alex McNaughten (20:04):

No, so the goal here is to make leaders better and make their experience as a leader better for them as well. So the early customers and leaders who are using this are saying, this is helping me make better and faster decision. It’s helping me uncover things I didn’t even know were going on in my team, but I can actually fix, and it’s helping me to know where to focus on and who to focus on across my team. Who needs the help most at an individual level and how can I help the team as a whole.

(20:33):

And then it also from a feeling threatened perspective, I think, and Chris actually put it to me, he said, and I’m going to butcher exactly how you said it, but you said something along the lines of, “There’s an inherent fragility in relying on technology for everything in a team environment,” and things that can sometimes unexpectedly happen, and that’s what the human there is for, is to deal with the unexpected. Technology can’t solve absolutely everything. And I fundamentally believe that there is, even in an AI world, there is a space for great leadership. And I think technology actually just helps them be 10, 20, 50 times better to their team and ultimately drive performance. And that’s probably the final thing, is a sales leader who’s getting better results out of their team and hitting a better number themselves, I think that’s going to feel good irrespective of whether you’ve got an AI coach in the mix supporting you.

Corey Frank (21:27):

Yeah, yeah. Well we know that Tony Stark was made a much better superhero with the voice at his head and the Jarvis that was rattling around his brain.

Alex McNaughten (21:36):

That’s it, right?

Corey Frank (21:38):

[inaudible 00:21:38]. So I can see it.

Alex McNaughten (21:40):

That’s it. Maybe that’s the analogy. We should use the Ironman suit for sales managers.

Chris Beall (21:44):

Yeah, we already have it for sales reps, so you can borrow it from us. That was actually something that came out of serious decisions. One of their senior analysts about 10 years ago came over physically for an hour and a half with us. And at the end he said, “You guys have an Ironman suit for sales, don’t you?” Well, it goes fast and lets you shoot stuff that you want to shoot, so I guess so. I don’t know, does it smell good when you get out of it? We don’t really know. That’s another question entirely we have deal with.

(22:13):

Corey, you bring up a really good point. The question is, does this feel threatening to sales leaders? I actually suspect it won’t. And in fact, I think there’s a sales leader’s version of this, of Taylor, where the questions that you’re asking, the challenges, the frustrations are about the team themselves. And you are thinking of doing things like the things like are in the 17 chapters of that Love Your Team book where the question is, should I go this direction or that direction? Does this need this meeting or this conversation or that conversation?

(22:45):

My guess is, Taylor’s going to expand fairly quickly to handle those conversations too. And nobody likes confessing to their boss, nobody likes being made fun of. In the world of sales, by the way, there’s a lot of athletes that come out of trash talk land and they think trash talking is just like having fun with folks. Your entire team might not love being trash-talked at, to be called names or whatever it happens to be that was a big deal in the court or on the field where it just seems natural to folks who kind of grew up in competitive athletics. Well, not everybody in sales is a former competitive athlete from the field. In fact, some of the best in the world never did any of that stuff. They’re very different kind of people and they don’t take well to that particular style of interaction.

(23:38):

And one of the things that I think is so interesting about Taylor is, Taylor will challenge you clearly. Have you thought about this, but have you thought about… What do you think about this? You’re doing this, but have you considered this? Right? And most sales leaders aren’t comfortable enough in their own skin to say stuff like that. And if they came out of the world of trash talk, they can’t resist having that little dig. So I think there’s a lot here to be said for, think of it in the large, AI is a safe person to talk to, a bot is a safe person to talk to, because they can’t fire you and they’re not going to make fun of you.

(24:16):

And those are two pretty big deals when it comes to people feeling good about their own job. Because in sales, you’ve got to really feel good about yourself in order to help somebody else along the emotional journey they need to go on in order to have both real and perceived risk reduction to the point where they’ll take the next step with you. And if you’re feeling risk yourself as the sales rep, that feeling of risk is going to transmit itself directly to your prospect and they’re going to be less likely to move forward with you because it doesn’t feel right.

(24:52):

So where does your confidence come from? Well, it can’t just come from inside. I mean, going to a sensory deprivation tank sometime and see how long it is before you’re hallucinating like crazy. We don’t stay sane because of what’s going on inside of us. We stay sane because of what we’re getting from the outside. And getting consistent positive affirmation from the outside that’s not silly, is actually very helpful for all human beings to maintain their sanity and their confidence.

Alex McNaughten (25:20):

There’s something in that, and that’s one of the real motivators and drivers for me with this business is I’ve noticed over the years and across all these teams that I’ve just seen genuine human pain and frustration at a team level, at both leader and individual contributor level. And I think we can do better and I think that’s the exciting thing that technology can unlock. And the salespeople who’ve been using Taylor have been telling us things like, this is positively confronting. This is helping me think about things, this is helping me learn. And it’s a place I can go vent as well and let off some steam.

(25:52):

So it’s really exciting. I’m so pumped for the next 10 years of business technology, one, what we are doing, but two, what other kind of opportunities we’re going to be able to see in this space and this world of generative AI. So yeah, I think teams will fundamentally change and I think it can be a real catalyst for teams to change way for the better than where they’re at right now.

Corey Frank (26:14):

Well that’s wonderful. I agree. And what I hear both of you saying is that my job is relatively safe and I should not fear the reaper just yet from the AI bots taking over my job.

(26:24):

Okay, well we’re going to leave it there. So Alex, thank you so much for wrapping some time. We’d love to have you as a standing guest here at the Market Dominance Guys, since I imagine the data that the team is going to compile here over the coming months or so is going to be incredibly valuable to everybody in our profession. So for Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank from the Market Dominance Guys.

Alex McNaughten (26:49):

Thanks for having me.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In the last episode, our Sales sultans, Corey and Chris tackled the folly of chasing too many shiny objects. Now, Chris shares pragmatic insights on building resilient teams for the marathon versus the sprint. Should staff know the messy truths from day one? Chris believes people need full commitment to the mission. 

Does solidarity trump balance sheet bravado when attempting bold new initiatives?  Chris says,  “I think people love to look at stuff because looking at stuff is lower risk than doing stuff. Doing stuff is very high risk. You could fail.”

As Corey noted, presentations often overlook the people who drive innovation. Corey reminds us, “The people elements, traits, personas don’t live on the balance sheet.” Here’s a question posed, “When you go to a potluck, do you only eat the food you brought first?”  Listen as they tackle tough topics like letting go of personnel clinging to the past versus embracing the unknown future in episode 202 of Market Dominance Guys, “ Keeping Teams Future-Focused and Failure-Ready.’

 

Full episode transcript below:

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Susan Finch (00:05):

Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes speed bumps and off-ramps of driving to the top of your market, with our hosts, Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch49.

(00:21):

The last episode, these sales consultants, Corey and Chris, tackled the folly of chasing too many shiny objects. Now, Chris shares pragmatic insights on building resilient [00:00:30] teams for the marathon versus the sprint. Should staff know the messy truths from day one? Chris believes people need a full commitment to the mission. Does solidarity trump balance sheet bravado when attempting bold new initiatives? Chris says, “I think people love to look at stuff, because looking at stuff is lower risk than doing stuff. Doing stuff is very high risk, and you could fail.”

(00:53):

As Corey noted, presentations often overlook the people who drive innovation. He reminds us the [00:01:00] people elements, traits, personas, don’t live on the balance sheet.

(01:04):

Here’s a question posed. When you go to a potluck, do you only eat the food you brought first? Listen as they tackle tough topics, like letting go of personnel clinging to the past versus embracing the unknown future, in episode 202 of Market Dominance Guys, Keeping Teams Future-Focused and Failure-Ready.

Corey Frank (01:30):

[00:01:30] What would you suggest, as far as the level of candor, at an early stage, with your people, all the people, about what’s our most profitable product or least profitable product, what’s fungible and what’s not, how we make money, do you believe and have you evolved and have you seen other scenarios where they want to just keep it to the C-suite, and you’re just a team member, and here’s your myopic [00:02:00] vision? Or do you believe, and success is contingent on everybody knowing exactly what they signed up for, if they’re going to go off the earth on search of these new worlds?

Chris Beall (02:10):

Oh, I believe deeply. For me, it’s at the interview process. The first time I ever said this to anybody in an interview, I was probably in my early 30s, and I said, “By the time you get to me, it’s assumed that you’re competent. They don’t send incompetent people to be interviewed by me. [00:02:30] Well, that doesn’t happen, so therefore, you’re competent. So I’m not going to ask you any questions to assess your competence. What I want to do is make it clear to you what you’re getting into, and it’s going to be your choice whether you want to get in or not. And I’m good either way. So I know you’re good enough to do the job. Now I’m going to tell you about the real job, and the real job is doing really hard things.”

(02:53):

“So one, we’re likely to fail, so you have to accept that we’re likely to fail. Why do I think we’re likely to fail? Because [00:03:00] otherwise, we wouldn’t be doing this. Somebody else would’ve already done it who is less skilled, determined, insightful, clever or whatever than us. So we’re going to do something hard, and hard things generally fail, so you’re signing up for failure. So recognize that. But we’re going to persist. We’re probably going to have a good time. So two, you’re signing up to have a good time. Why? Because otherwise, we can’t do something so hard that we’re likely to fail. It just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work [00:03:30] to come in all glum and morose, and everything’s got to be great, otherwise, I got a bad day. I don’t want to hear about your bad day. There are no bad days in the sense of going after the mission. We’re just going to do it. So we’re going to be enthusiastically wrong every day. That’s going to be our thing, enthusiastically wrong every day. We’re going to say, ‘If we’re not having fun, we’re not taking this seriously enough,’ So we’re going to do that.”

(03:53):

“And third is, we’re going to make a weird sacrifice. I’ve made it. You’ll have to make it too. [00:04:00] That is, we’re going to do uncomfortable things when it’s time to do them, and we’re going to lay them out, what they are. So some of them are we don’t get to sell to the people we want to sell to, and some of them are we don’t get to build the stuff we want to build, and some of them are, we don’t get to go fast when it’s time to go slow. They’re like that. There are those sorts of things. And we’re signing up to do those things when it’s time to do them.”

(04:24):

“You might notice they all have an interesting feature. They’re all in order to reduce [00:04:30] the risk of failure because this is likely to fail. If we don’t reduce the risk of failure, we’re going to fail for sure. So your career, during this period, is going to be built entirely on our success, not on the skills you gather, which you will gather skills, it’s magic, it happens, or the people you meet, but you will meet people. You’ll have networks. None of that stuff is the purpose of what we’re doing. If our purpose is to make you better, we would’ve had to have been [00:05:00] bigger already and on a mission where we can’t fail, but that’s not this mission. This is a mission where we’re likely to fail.”

(05:08):

So here’s the test, then I tell people this, and people are appalled still to this day. If you come to me at some point, and you say, “Hey, I want to go to a conference in order to increase my skills, meet some people or do whatever,” I’ll remind you of this conversation. The second time you do it, I’ll fire you. They go, “Oh.” It’s like, but if you want to go on a mission with some folks and try to do a hard thing, [00:05:30] you won’t die after all, everybody probably will advance professionally because people respect people who do hard things. They do. And you learn real stuff doing hard things.

(05:42):

But the hardest of the hard things are making the transition from one stage of the company to the other. And there’s only one person who’s going to declare that that’s something that has to happen. That’s me. And you’re accepting that coming in. I’m the guesser. When we must guess, and this is always a guess, I’m the guesser, [00:06:00] and you have to accept that my guesses are the truth. And it’s corrupt. I get it. But mathematically, there’s no other way to pull it off. Just can’t be done. Somebody’s got to be the guesser, and you’re talking to him.

Corey Frank (06:16):

It seems that when you look at a business model, a company, in X years, we’re going to have the hockey stick. We’re going to have the J-curve. We’re going to have all this, that. Without those elements, what you just described [00:06:30] of the type of people, without even talking about it, because there’s many investment presentations you and I have been part of where it’s all about the product. It’s all about the market. It’s all about the margins. It’s all about the executables. But it’s rarely about the people besides the little bubbles of the three founders or the person who’s in charge of your innovation or the person who’s in charge of your delivery. But you don’t get into that level of persona, that level of first-born, [00:07:00] second-born, last-born, that dynamic of risk-taker, thar be dragons type of courage. And it seems like there should be in your world, correct?

Susan Finch (07:13):

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

(07:16):

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 employee successful sequencing that is fresh [00:07:30] enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire team, Branch49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com.

(08:00):

[00:08:00] And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Chris Beall (08:03):

It’s kind of the whole game. It’s kind of the whole game. I look at our company, the thing I’m really proud of about our company is the average tenure of people who are leading our company or doing important jobs is 11.2 years. My tenure is just over 12 years.

Corey Frank (08:19):

At a SaaS software company.

Chris Beall (08:20):

At a SaaS software.

Corey Frank (08:21):

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Chris Beall (08:23):

And the reason is not that we pay them extra. I think we do okay. The reason is they signed up for the mission. They’re serious [00:08:30] about the mission. The mission is the mission. We’re actually trying to help with this big problem, which is it’s really hard to make businesses work, to make the innovation economy work, unless folks trust each other, and they won’t trust each other to do that thing that they need to do, which is the risky buy, unless that trust is produced somehow consistently through conversations. That’s our mission.

(08:57):

And it’s fun to be part of. We don’t have a [00:09:00] mission statement. We don’t talk about the mission, blah, blah, blah. It’s literally in our blood. At this point, it’s in the organization’s blood. And so somebody who might want to work with us, they might sense that, but what we know is there’s a bunch of stuff we don’t have to worry about. There’s a bunch of stuff we don’t have to think about. We can operate at the level of minute details about things like, oh, with fast phone numbers, the score [00:09:30] of 50 officially means that we don’t know anything about that number, but it doesn’t actually mean that it’s just a little below 50.1. It actually has another meaning. Therefore, when we use it with the customers, we should do this instead of that. It frees us to do that kind of work all day long.

(09:47):

And it’s that kind of work that allows that business model to be animated with reality. It’s not revisiting the numbers. I mean, I think people love to look at stuff [00:10:00] because looking at stuff has lower risk than doing stuff.

Corey Frank (10:05):

Lower risk than doing stuff, yeah.

Chris Beall (10:07):

Doing stuff is very high risk. You could fail. So you have to be very enthusiastic about failure to actually embark on doing things many, many times a day.

(10:16):

I think I’ve told the story on the podcast. I’ll tell it again. My eldest, back many, many, many years ago, came to the office on a bring your kid to the office. And we sat through a long meeting in which there was a lot of numbers, [00:10:30] and we were walking over to Starbucks afterwards, and the snow was falling through the air. And she stopped and said, “Dad, can I ask you a question?” I said, “Sure.” She said, “Do they really think that by talking about the numbers, they’re going to change the numbers? And I said, “Yes, they do.” She thought about it for a second, said, “That’s very sad.”

(10:55):

There’s such a temptation to look and think that [00:11:00] looking at where you are in the progress that was predicted by the business model is going to tell you something about what you need to do. What you need to do sits right in front of you, as long as you’re not doing stuff that takes you backwards. But if you allow your salespeople to sell to your previous market, the one from your previous stage, you’re going backwards. The relationship with a business model of sales is there’s a gate. You go through the gate. We’re done with the tech enthusiasts. Now [00:11:30] we’re finding a visionary.

(11:31):

By the way, your sales team can’t probably help you with that. Maybe they know some people. You’re going to have to do that one yourself because what you put on the table is what you put on the table. Nobody’s going to be able to do it but you.

(11:42):

Now, we’ve gone past that. Okay, we have the remaining resources. We now have some money. We didn’t have to take two rounds of venture capital. Isn’t that cool? That’s why your VCs will never let you do this because they want to provide those two rounds of venture capital. But now, you’re cool. Hey, here’s our hypothesis. This is our market. Let’s [00:12:00] go get the first one. Totally new activity. Everything we did before, if we start doing that again in order to “make quota,” we’re going backwards. As long as we’re not going backwards, all we can deal with is the details in front of us, which is problems that are friction in our mission.

(12:19):

So what do we do? Well, we address the friction. How do we do it? We name it. We characterize it. It’s all theory of constraints at this point, all the way down. It’s just over and over, the same cycle. How do we [00:12:30] get the energy to do it? Because we believe it’s a good thing to do, and we signed up to do it with each other. That’s why. That’s how.

Corey Frank (12:36):

And it’s not on the balance sheet. None of those people, things, traits, you, Dan, Seth, Matt Forbes, I mean [inaudible 00:12:44], none of that lives on the balance sheet in any multidimensional form, but yet it makes all the difference.

Chris Beall (12:51):

Exactly. I mean, if you were to put it on the balance sheet, you’d put it in goodwill, but goodwill is supposedly the goodwill of the market toward you. But actual goodwill is [00:13:00] goodwill of you toward the market for people you’ve never met.

Corey Frank (13:05):

Yeah, for sure.

Chris Beall (13:06):

It’s that story you tell, and I was just in Europe, you talk to the three brick layers at the cathedral. I’m laying bricks to feed my family. That’s noble. A lot of people work like that. Well, I’m laying bricks to build this beautiful work of art, this edifice, which will last for a thousand years. Okay, that’s nice. I’m saving men’s souls, right? What [00:13:30] is it that’s driving all of you together to do the inconvenient thing of dealing with inconvenient details and broken stuff? Because all there is is broken stuff. I mean, otherwise you wouldn’t be fixing it.

(13:43):

Every day going forward, your job as the leader is to make sure that you don’t go backwards. You’ll naturally go forward then. So what’s going to take you backwards? Your sales team will take you backwards because you compensate them to do that. So don’t do that, and [00:14:00] then your business model can move forward.

(14:02):

Does it really have to follow exactly the math. Our business is interesting. I’ve been talking to people about it recently. It’s like, well, your retention isn’t high enough. Well, what’s the purpose of retention? Well, to allow you to grow. Well, look at the growth. Well, you can’t be growing because the retention’s not high enough. No, we’re actually growing. Therefore, for the way we sell, it must be high enough. But folks forget that. They [00:14:30] take the antecedents, and they go, “Oh, this has to be here.” No. You can look at how it’s actually progressing and ask yourself the question, “Are we acquiring more customers that we’re helping in a way that they would say good things about us?” Pretty simple, pretty big.

(14:49):

And how fast is it going? It’s probably going about as fast as it’s likely to go given the situation and the resources we have. Hence profits, by the way, because profits are the infinite [00:15:00] investment. They’re infinite. They go on for all time, as long as you keep being profitable.

Corey Frank (15:06):

And that’s hopefully what your business model will continue to show. So that’s a clinic, Chris, and I think we need to have a couple more episodes about that is all the things that could be in goodwill that most folks don’t think about when they’re building a SaaS or software company. And you hit on a lot of them, which is the people element, and certainly given [00:15:30] me much sage advice over the years when we talk about personnel. There’s a good friend of this program and a good buddy of mine. His name is Eli Chmouni, comes from Neon. He’s a great entrepreneur, multiple time entrepreneur, and he went to a workshop with Todd Davis, the founder of LifeLock. This may be a year or so ago. And this is the antithesis of what you’re saying about the retention of folks, because hanging onto some folks past their shelf date could be a challenge [00:16:00] to say the least.

(16:01):

And he goes to this workshop with Todd Davis, and the first thing Todd Davis says, I’m paraphrasing, meets the group, doesn’t do an introduction, just comes out and says, “Folks,” talking to a group of CEOs, “on Monday, you need to fire that person.” Everybody’s looking around, and it kind of sunk in a little bit. And he says, “The fact that everybody knew and drew their mind to one person in their mind shows you that you know exactly who I’m talking [00:16:30] about, and you just needed a sign from the universe to tell you you’re doing the right thing. You’re going to do the right thing by having this person move on to the next stage of their career,” because we’ve all done that, as you’ve said earlier, Chris, when you bring an organization up from the roots and the ground level, and you have some folks that maybe brought you to another level, but it’s probably time where they [inaudible 00:16:56], and it’s a very, very difficult thing. I found it in my career, very, very, very difficult [00:17:00] to hang on to folks well past their point, but it does bring the organization to a level where it stifles growth. That’s another thing I’d like your comment on here before we wrap it up.

Chris Beall (17:11):

Well, there’s a lot of folks who yearn for the past. They yearn for what was. I think all of us do to some degree. One of the, I would call it, the horrible things about business is it doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for our feelings about the past because we have these folks out there called competitors [00:17:30] who are trying to actually provide something better than we’re providing to customers at a lower price and with greater convenience and so forth.

(17:37):

And we have this odd obligation. It’s an odd obligation to make a horrible sacrifice every once in a while, which is that somebody who can’t overcome the draw of the past, whatever that happens to be, that pulls them in that direction, needs to stop pulling us all toward the past.

(17:58):

And I don’t think there’s another [00:18:00] cure for it. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with them. And sometimes it happens in people’s lives. They just get to a point where it’s like the past is more attractive than the future. At least it’s known. That’s better the known than the unknown. And yet, when we’re building businesses, pretty much all we’re doing is wrestling with the unknown. That’s kind of it. And we have to do it together. And if somebody doesn’t want to wrestle with the unknown, or can’t, it’s more like can’t anymore, but we have to [00:18:30] arrange for them to go find another known.

Corey Frank (18:34):

Yeah. It’s the example of when you show up for a potluck, and you and your spouse bring your dish, and you show up to a potluck, a neighborhood or a company, etc., whose food do you eat? You generally eat your own because you know what’s in it. You’ve made it, and you know what it tastes like. Suppose an organization, after a certain point, is that way is maybe the litmus test is everybody should have a potluck. And if you eat your own food, chances are is you’re certainly suspect, whether you’re [00:19:00] due to maintain the organization so.

(19:03):

Well, that’s great stuff, Chris. Beautiful to have you back on this side of the pond, 200 plus episodes under the belt, all kinds of stuff. We got to finish this book one of these days. Certainly, we’re going to have a multiple volumes and topics. I learned so much from this, from being, as I said on a LinkedIn post the other day, the more mentally stifled version of Ed McMahon to you, the king of late nights, the king of mid-morning, the king of late afternoon, wherever it is, where people listen [00:19:30] to this podcast. So Chris, for the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank. Until next time.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Getting punched in the face is practically a rite of passage for startups with seemingly bulletproof business models. Spreadsheets might predict hockey stick growth, but, as Corey says “customers aren’t formulas on a page. They’re human beings who are often “repulsed by new technology”. Adoption requires an emotional journey and trust, not a formula. Yet founders frequently ignore reality, believing spreadsheets will magically generate growth. Chris says this quest for an easy quota can even derail progress as “salespeople focused on quota may take company backwards” by clinging to the past. Hence leaders must prevent “retrograde motion back to what was comfortable before” by being “hard-edged on changing direction.” There are no maps for the uncharted path from startup to sustainable enterprise. But experienced guides like Corey and Chris are happy to share their battle scars and perspectives.  Join us for this episode, “Customers Aren’t Formulas: Navigating the Emotional Journey.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Announcer (00:06):

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

(00:21):

Getting punched in the face is practically a rite of passage for startups with seemingly bulletproof business models. Spreadsheets might predict hockey stick growth, but as Corey [00:00:30] says, customers aren’t formulas on a page. They’re human beings. Adoption requires an emotional journey and trust, not a formula. Yet, founders frequently ignore reality, believing spreadsheets will magically generate growth. Chris says this quest for an easy quota can even derail progress, as salespeople focused on quota may take the company backwards by clinging to the past. Hence, leaders must prevent retrograde motion back to what was comfortable by being hard-edged on changing direction. [00:01:00] There are no maps for the uncharted path from startup to sustainable enterprise, but experience guides like Corey and Chris are happy to share their battle scars and perspectives.

(01:10):

Join us for this episode, Customers Aren’t Formulas: Navigating the Emotional Journey.

Corey Frank (01:20):

And here we are. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, episode, I believe, 201, with the sage of sales, [00:01:30] the prophet of profit, the Hawking of Hawking, fresh back from his jaunt across the pond, freshly stocked with Porto and Cabernet and other assorted box wines, knowing Chris and the fetching Miss Fanucci. Chris, welcome back. Episode 201, what do you have to say about that, my friend?

Chris Beall (01:51):

Well, it’s great to be back on this continent. There’s all sorts of things that are wonderful here, even on the East Coast. And I’m hanging out at the Breakers, where I’ve learned the value of money, [00:02:00] which is no matter how much money you bring, you can’t get anything of value.

Corey Frank (02:04):

The Breakers, yes, I understand they’re renowned for their breakfast at the Breakers, right? Did you have a coupon, or how did you… I mean, the Breakers, talk a little bit about the breakfast before we get in our topic today.

Chris Beall (02:15):

Pretty much it’s all-inclusive if you pay $64 for the buffet. And hey, I had a very nice omelet there. By the way, the service of the Breakers is really second to none. Every single person that I’ve talked to here is incredibly accommodating, [00:02:30] gracious, pleasant, and willing to do the right things.

Corey Frank (02:33):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (02:34):

Yeah, you stack up on Stacey’s Naked chips, so guacamole and some salsa, you have the breakfast, and then you get through the rest of the day alive and bring your own wine, because the only way it’s going to work either.

Corey Frank (02:45):

Great. Well, let’s talk a little bit about one of the topics that you and I, I think, gosh, it’s peppered throughout the Market Dominance Guys on many of our 200 plus episodes with guests or without, and that is everybody [00:03:00] has a business model until they get punched in the face. But I want to talk to you about different business models. You’ve been talking with a lot of private equity firms, a lot of other investors. A business model from what I was taught, and I think you probably taught me this, Chris, is above all, it should be geared to make a profit. And certainly, you want to study your competition, you want to get the right staff and get the right talent level in there, but your business model should be geared to make a profit.

(03:28):

But let’s start from [00:03:30] the basics here on this. The traditional SaaS business models that are out there, they’re template driven oftentimes by a lot of VCs, a lot of investors. There’s a certain gate you have to go through on your friends and family, and then your seed round before you get your A round, and you have to have certain level of churn and a certain amount of continuity in the business and a price point and a cap below six months. So what do you talk about [00:04:00] when you’re advising other CEOs and other investors who are thinking about investing in SaaS companies, about the business model writ large?

Chris Beall (04:09):

Well, one of the things that I keep getting reminded of is there is truths underneath all of these potential models, and they’re unchanging truths. So one of them, for instance, if you’re doing a SaaS business, is SaaS is likely to be technology, believe it or not. And as such, it is likely to be [00:04:30] seen or felt as abhorrent by regular people who might consider the possibility of buying it. And the reason it’s abhorrent is people don’t like new stuff, they don’t understand. It makes them kind of sick to their stomach. And the fact that you built it, you love it, it doesn’t make it any less abhorrent to them. They’re repulsed by it, I believe would be the correct term. And that’s a universal.

(04:54):

That doesn’t go away because in your spreadsheet you happen to have a row that says [00:05:00] add headcount, or spend money on marketing, bringing people to the website or whatever, and therefore, the revenue will grow magically as a result. The actual underlying process that needs to take place is, at some point, somebody who fundamentally doesn’t want to buy anything like your stuff because it makes them sick to their stomach to think about it, has to decide to do so because it solves a broken mission-critical business process for them. And [00:05:30] preferably, at some point later, others buy for the same reason, and also because, “Hey, Mary bought it, and she’s like me.” So every time that Mary buys something, she’s kind of the lead dog, “I’m willing to buy,” maybe, or at least think about it.

(05:46):

So we’ve talked about that, how markets are essentially these sort of self-organizing sets of businesses you could sell to, where each sale you make successfully and service in a way that causes [00:06:00] value to flow, which is another thing, reduces your cost and risk of the next sale. And when you get to the edge of that market, it no longer reduces the cost and risk. It’s no longer inter referencing.

(06:11):

So that deep truth about people, people hate new technology, it makes them sick to their stomach, is very important. And it’s very rare that in a business model that’s on a spreadsheet that somebody has populated full of month over month growth [00:06:30] numbers or whatever, and all this much of it is aspirational, by the way, if we don’t hit the rule of 40, our growth rate plus our EBITDA adds up to 40 while we’re doomed, therefore, let’s make sure it always adds up to 40. And then let’s back into that by saying, “Well, we need the resources to do it.” And then let’s back into that by saying, “We need the venture capital to get those resources.”

(06:54):

What if there’s an air gap under there, or a super slippery [00:07:00] little slope in there somewhere that says, “Yeah, but regular people aren’t going to want to buy that at this point.” So business models can fool us, popular ones, especially when they have money behind us, them, into thinking the money will deny the truth of how people actually buy. And the truth of how people actually buy, the emotional journey that they go on to go from, “What?” to, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” That emotional journey [00:07:30] is based on stuff that has nothing to do with your business model, and you can’t force it to happen. You don’t have the luxury.

(07:38):

People always tell me, “Oh, yeah, my… That crossing the chasm stuff, I don’t need that crap. We’re already across the chasm. Unlike everybody else, we were born across the chasm, because our stuff is so great, so compelling. We do PLG.” “Oh, what’s PLG?” “Well, we give it away, and then that [00:08:00] way we learn a lot about it. And then…” Okay, so if you ask a simple question, have any PLG companies with relatively compelling products that somebody looked at, ever failed? Answer: Oh, yeah, lots of them. Lots of them. Well, if it’s a powerful model that sort of can’t fail on a spreadsheet, why does it fail in reality? Why do SaaS models tend to fail in reality? Rob McClarty has mentioned this. He says, “No, the streets are paved with the bones of SaaS companies [00:08:30] that looked perfect on the spreadsheet.”

Corey Frank (08:32):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (08:33):

Why? And I believe the why is, is because the realities of human beings making a decision to trust somebody more than they trust themselves are simply ignored in those models. They’re ignored in time, in magnitude, in dependencies. What do you have to get before you can get there? They’re just ignored. And they’re ignored, because the money is impatient.

Corey Frank (09:00):

[00:09:00] Well, that’s what we’re going to get to is that a little bit of, I guess, internally Gresham’s law, you would say, is that, Chris, scenario, if I had a SaaS company that you and I started and we had $5 million in capital to use however we want, not with the benefit of the last 25 years of experience or so, but just as maybe a first or second runaround, or had the benefit of funding it ourselves, [00:09:30] which one is more preferable from the aspect of crossing the chasm, learning a little bit about how your market runs and how it works versus potentially bastardizing it with too much of a good thing? So where would you stand on a scenario like that?

Chris Beall (09:50):

Well, in the general case, money is poisonous, in the general case for businesses. So why is it poisonous? It’s poisonous, because it causes us to believe [00:10:00] that what is in front of us is something other than what’s actually in front of us. So if I have enough money that I can buy that $64 breakfast buffet and think that it’s nothing, then I have enough money to do a number of other stupid things with my money. But the breakfast isn’t actually more nutritious, because if I bought it for seven bucks instead of 64 bucks, does it actually do more for my body? That was the purpose of breakfast, by the way, for me. I don’t go to breakfast to see and be seen, [00:10:30] I have to admit. First of all, nobody wants to see me. And secondly, why would I want to be seen? I’d rather be privately having my breakfast somewhere. But they were serving it out in the open.

(10:40):

So why is money poisonous in business is really interesting. I was just on somebody’s podcast today talking to them about this. If you have new technology, and all SaaS is technology, therefore at some point, it’s new technology. This is kind of like just math. People sometimes beat up on me, “Why do you say that’s just math?” Because it’s just math. [00:11:00] So it’s just math that if you have something later, you must have something earlier. And at some point, you had the one that’s earliest, and so it’s new. Okay. So here’s the problem with new technology, you actually don’t even know what it should be. You just have your fervent imagination, your fantasy or whatever.

(11:19):

But there are these folks out there that we call tech enthusiasts who love to play with and beat up new technology. It’s how they make their way in the world, because they work at companies where [00:11:30] other people in the company would like to know, “Well, what’s new, and what’s working?” And that’s what they do. They don’t have a title that says new technology checker outer, but they exist, and they’re called tech enthusiasts. If you skip the step of selling to tech enthusiasts, then your technology will never actually have been beaten up enough at a very, very low cost. Because they’ll pay you a little, not much. But they will beat it up. And you can’t buy that. You can’t buy it. Your QA team will do nothing to that product compared to [00:12:00] what the tech enthusiasts will do. And they’ll do it in all good humor. They’re actually trying to make it work. But they’re going to tell you about every little thing that’s wrong, and you can choose to fix those things or not. You should probably choose to fix them.

Corey Frank (12:14):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (12:15):

So that little annealing process, that little process of going from an idea embodied in code to code that actually implements at least part of the idea, that needs to be done. So if you have too [00:12:30] much money floating around, you’ve got that 5 million in the bank, you’re likely to either skip that step or do something even worse, which is to go back to your funder and say, “I have product market fit.”

Corey Frank (12:44):

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Beall (12:45):

“How do I know it? Look, the dogs are eating the dog food.” Well, those are not the dogs. They are not the dogs. The dogs are on the other side of the chasm. What’s eating your dog food? [00:13:00] Are these very enthusiastic sort of, I don’t know what they are, maybe rodents of some kind. And they love dog food, but they’re still not dogs. And you can tell, by the way, because they won’t pay you very much for it.

Corey Frank (13:13):

It’s what we talked about with the legendary Dr. Goldratt, where there’s a tail, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a dog behind that tail.

Chris Beall (13:25):

Exactly. Exactly.

Corey Frank (13:26):

And I think the example that we talked about was [00:13:30] Botox, right? Where, hey, Botox seems like, hey, people want to look younger, they want to feel younger. They love the image it portrays. But unfortunately, people also hate needles. So if it was a pill form or a cream form, that would catch on much more widely. It already is pretty wide, but it’s not exactly this dog behind the tail. And tails can be seductive, because there are these semi businesses, these nichey businesses, [00:14:00] these almost businesses. But it certainly doesn’t create a market dominant type of business. Correct?

Chris Beall (14:07):

Exactly. And the fact is, tech enthusiasts as the tail end question, they’re anti referenceable. They’re anti referenceable. If a tech enthusiast is using your product and loves it, that reduces the chance that’s somebody who’s a regular kind of business person is going to say, “I want to use that too.” Because they’re going to look [00:14:30] over there and go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mary’s like that. She’ll try anything. She loves new stuff. She tinkers with it. She has a great time with it. That’s not me.” So if she’s using it, it’s not ready for primetime.

Corey Frank (14:46):

But if I have all this capital, is it the formula, get money, hire salespeople, yield revenue?

Chris Beall (14:55):

Yeah, that’s what’s on the spreadsheets, right?

Corey Frank (14:58):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (14:58):

I mean, how many spreadsheets have I seen [00:15:00] in my career that work like this? And I laugh. I make fun of them a little bit. I try not to be cruel. And then I choose to be cruel to see whether I can actually get them to jump off that horse and walk around a little bit. And they work like this, “Well, here’s our business. You see, we have a bunch of words that describe the market. And then what we do is we add resources that generate revenue,” they’re called salespeople. “And we also spend money on [00:15:30] marketing that generates demand. The salespeople service. And well, now we’re done. Now we’re done. Now, we go execute. How do we execute? We hire salespeople.” It’s like, okay, so I know for sure what’s going to happen when we hire salespeople.

Corey Frank (15:47):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (15:48):

The salespeople are going to do a little of what works. So what will they do? Well, if your product is not yet gone past the tech enthusiast phase, they will [00:16:00] sell to tech enthusiasts. No matter what you say your ideal customer profile is, they will sell to whomever allows them to succeed. And in sales, succeeding means, “I close deals, and the deals are for money.” So now, the salespeople will both cost you money, which is a problem.

Corey Frank (16:18):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (16:19):

And then they’ll take you in the opposite direction from where you need to go, which is a bigger problem. And then you’ll get addicted to it, because you’ll start looking at the sales results [00:16:30] and going, “Wow, this is great,” which is a bigger problem. And then you’ll start celebrating these things and calling them wins. “It’s a win. What happened is a win.” Well, we’re trying to have Billy here grow up to be big and strong. And look, he’s over there eating Jello. At least he’s eating more Jello. We have a win.” I’m not saying Jello is bad.

Corey Frank (16:54):

A phantom product market fit.

Chris Beall (16:57):

Exactly. Phantom fantasy product market… [00:17:00] Then we get to the hard part. And this is what we were going through today on this podcast. The hard part is, not this one, but this other one I was on. Now you’ve got to decide what do you do next? So your technology has been beaten up a little bit and you’ve made some fixes, but nobody has ever really held your feet to the fire. Nobody has ever said, “This has got to work, or somebody dies here.”

(17:23):

And that’s the role of this kind of customer who’s next, who is misnamed, I think we’ve talked about this before, as the visionary. [00:17:30] Everything Jeffrey Moore ever said was correct, except I think he chose the wrong name for the visionary, because it’s their vision of beating the living daylights out of two or three or four of their competitors or escaping a noose that they feel closing around their neck. So they exist out there, and there’s one of them who really wants your technology to go and get competitive advantage. And if I had a $1.52 for every time [00:18:00] somebody said, “This is great. This customer of ours, prospect, they see themselves getting competitive advantage. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Announcer (18:10):

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 [00:18:30] 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.

(18:44):

And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Chris Beall (18:51):

If you’re at that stage, go get one of them. Go get one of them, charge them a huge amount of money. Make sure they get us, and do something [00:19:00] with them. But don’t do two.

Corey Frank (19:02):

Don’t do two.

Chris Beall (19:03):

Don’t do two.

Corey Frank (19:04):

Yeah. This aspect of this insidious decline, I guess, that happens in this performance, when I assume that my dogs, the type of dogs I want are eating the type of dog food I’m producing. And all of a sudden, I don’t get any new dogs. These are the same dogs who are eating the same dog food. The population of the dogs around the bowl are not increasing. [00:19:30] There’s generally, and you’ve taught me this, Chris, sometimes there’s this lateral adjustment that happens where, “Well, it must be the sales manager then,” or, “It must be the systems I’m using,” or, “It must be the comp plans.” How do I know that it’s not necessarily a lateral problem? It could be. And instead, more of a vertical challenge here that is going to be the bugaboo to vet out whether I have the right business model.

Chris Beall (20:00):

[00:20:00] Well, this is where being a senior person is super helpful. So one of the things that you get from seniority, senior people, talking to senior people, is you get what I call a shot at the truth. So if you go to one of your customers that you think is a dog that’s across the chasm, referenceable and all that, don’t go to the person who actually made the decision to buy. Go to their boss, go to their boss’s boss, and talk to them about the business problem that [00:20:30] your product is addressing for them. Just talk to them about it. Ask them like, “How’s it doing? What’s it doing for you?”

(20:39):

So if they talk about competitive advantage, well, they’re a visionary. If you charge them regular prices, you know you undercharged. That’s all there is to it. Plus, you didn’t put enough in the deal. If you talk to them, and they say, “Well, this is great. Mary’s learned so much using your product. We really have gotten a good view of how generative AI [00:21:00] could work in our business.” You know it’s a tech enthusiast, so that’s not a dog at all. That’s like some kind of a whatever, something else.

(21:08):

If they talk about they have this business problem, things changed, times changed, and your product helps them take friction out of the mission and get back to where they were doing what they were doing before, maybe even better. That is they had a broken mission-critical business process. Then you’ve got yourself a dog. [00:21:30] Now, you’ve got to find out, “Well, along which dimensions are they a dog? What is it about them that would cause somebody else to buy because they bought?” Well, you just ask them that question like, “Well, of these six or seven companies that we’ve been talking to, which one would you have gotten the most comfort from? I know you bought us, I get it. But had we sold to which one of these first, would it have allowed you to say, ‘Oh, this is safe. This is safer.'”

(22:00):

[00:22:00] Well, they’re in the market. Because they’re very rare. It’s very rare there’s symmetries in business. Almost everything in business is asymmetric. It doesn’t matter what you say, it’s all asymmetric. Water runs downhill. It doesn’t run across flat surfaces, and it sure doesn’t run uphill. So here, you have this early adopter. This is a true early adopter of your technology. This isn’t a tech enthusiast. This is somebody in market. Their relationship to the other players around is, if another one had gone first, who’s [00:22:30] enough like them, they would’ve happily gone second. They went first, because, inconveniently, they couldn’t figure out how to go second.

(22:38):

So just ask them. Ask them, “Who among this…” And you have to give them a list. “If we had sold to them first, it would’ve made it easier for you to buy?” And they’ll tell you. And now you know, “Okay, that’s somebody else in the market. We’ll go sell to them.” So the folks you’ve sold to will tell you who the rest of your market is from their perspective, [00:23:00] by reversing the order of the question and saying, “Who, if they had bought first, would’ve lowered my cost and my risk of selling to you?” And they’ll tell you.

Corey Frank (23:10):

I think, and you and I have been around a lot of founders, a lot of CEOs, a lot of boards, because the business model is one dimensional. It’s not an animate object. You have the people who are maybe a little bit more tree hugging in their approach to a [00:23:30] business model. They prevaricate when confronted maybe with some market data or some anecdotes from their sales team. Balance that as a CEO knowing to abandon ship, knowing when to bail water, knowing when to tack to a new course. So above the spreadsheet, when it’s you alone [00:24:00] and you’re in your office at 7:00 PM on a Friday, you got a board meeting next week, your people are waiting to hear from you in the all hands-on a Monday morning. What traits do you find most helpful in those solitude moments?

Chris Beall (24:17):

Whoa. Whoa. That’s a good one. I think the main thing that you need to bring to the party at that point is just clarity. Just [00:24:30] clarity. It’s like, if it’s clear you don’t know what you’re doing, be clear that you don’t know what you’re doing.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Episode 200 of the Market Dominance Guys features Corey, Chris, and special guest Jim Graf. They explore key trends shaping modern prospecting – from the diminishing returns of broad email campaigns to the rise of personalized, longitudinal selling. Jim explains how the old concept of BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) fails to capture the fluidity of today’s buying journeys. Rather than chasing “leads,” they advocate nurturing long-term demand through authentic relationship building.

The conversation culminates in examining the overlooked value of seasoned SDRs. Chris shares examples of 60+ year-old SDRs wildly outperforming their younger peers, dispelling misconceptions that this function is merely developmental. With their seasoning, polish, and focus, many late-career reps embody the consummate skills needed to excel. Jim and Chris emphasize how this critical frontline role requires a professional, not progressive, mindset.

In an era of noisy outreach, the guys explore timeless ways to cut through the clutter – with patience, personalization, and wisdom accrued over decades. Listen to this episode, “Authentic Demand: Moving Past Impersonal Lead Gen.”

 

Links from this episode:

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
Jim Graf on LinkedIn

Kazzcade
Branch49
ConnectAndSell

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Chris Beall (01:37):

Everybody thinks that they’re doing something clever, but they’re not asking themselves the fundamental question which is, what’s the cost of reproducing that and making another unit? And if the cost is too low, they can’t win based on it. You just cannot win in the marketplace, based on commoditizing the one thing that makes a difference, which is getting a trust relationship [00:02:00] going. Going the expensive way turns out to be a path to cheap dominance. It’s the least expensive thing you can do to dominate, is the most expensive thing you must do in order to get started.

Jim Graf (02:14):

The other thing too, and we train our guys on this, but when you have that conversation, there’s branding going on, but then there’s also all sorts of market intelligence. I mean, tons of market intelligence. And I’m not just talking about what do you use now, but there’s [00:02:30] first-party data. Our team a lot, is identifying when that contract runs out with your CRM, when it make the most sense to talk more about evaluating third parties, stuff like that. And you can’t buy that intent data. You can’t buy the fact that this law firm has a three-year contract with Salesforce, expiring December 2023.

(02:52):

And so our ability, we focus a lot on, of course, quotes them, “They’re not going to be interested. Now’s not a good time. [00:03:00] This is going to be standard, guys. Just get comfortable with it.” But it’s taking that and being able to, you can’t do this in email. Is what is that market intelligence that we can gather, where we can move this further down the pipe? Is there a contract expiring, have an A activity going on, but basically we’re really not forceful, but move to like we have this person’s undivided attention for 30 seconds. Let’s make the most of it. Be in the moment. Try to understand what their problems are, when things are expiring, but move it along. And [00:03:30] you don’t get any of that with email. Email’s just kind of a branding exercise. Someone from AWS reached out and they’ve got a special going on, and here’s a link to a landing page. Okay.

Chris Beall (03:39):

Yeah, and it’s funny too, though, there’s another marketing impact we don’t talk about, but we can measure it. I don’t know if you’ve done this with us, but we’ll measure from opportunities back to what produced them, what conversations produced which opportunities. And the biggest producers are the negative conversations. So the positive conversations, the super conversation, [00:04:00] the one that sets a meeting is the most obvious producer. But in most shops, and we’ve measured about 120 of them over extended periods of time, two to three, four years. In most shops, most of the money comes out of the negative conversations.

(04:15):

And the reason we think is, that person that you’re talking to feels kind of good that they got out of the conversation with their self-image intact fairly quickly, but they also went to your website while they were talking to you. And so your Google [00:04:30] ad, you paid them a lot of money. Why does Google make so much money? Well, they drive people to websites. That’s why, right? That conversation, which you need in order to set the meeting, its primary impact is almost always, they go to your website. And the secondary impact is, they will almost always answer an email you send them, immediately after the conversation, with this subject line, “Thank you for our conversation today.” Unless you want to really cheat, and then you send one from the boss that says, “Thank [00:05:00] you for speaking with my colleague today.”

(05:02):

Nobody gets emails like that. They’re totally scarce. They must be sincere and worth checking out. And if they come from the boss, by the way, that tells you something about that company as the receiver of that email, that makes them stand out. It makes them stand out as a potential partner. That person, that CEO or whoever it is, they care enough to send a thank you to me, for spending 30 seconds speaking with their colleague. [00:05:30] And by the way, they called them their colleague.

Jim Graf (05:32):

That’s really interesting. That’s a great idea.

Chris Beall (05:34):

There’s power weapons, power leverage, hiding in the natural things that happen after conversations. But I tell you, you try to get somebody to send and email to somebody who just brushed them off, and the rep has an emotional issue doing it. They have an emotional issue following up with somebody who hung up on them. I spent two lobster dinners one night in Boston with one of our podcast guests later, he works for me now, just convincing him [00:06:00] that it is in his best interest to follow up on folks who hang up on him. Just to put him in the follow-up list. And he says, “What am I going to say to him?” It’s like, say, “When we spoke back on October 6th, you didn’t have time for a conversation. Is now a better time?”

(06:17):

It’s actually pretty simple. You’re just being considerate and you’re claiming a piece of knowledge that happens to be true. They don’t remember it, but you do. So you must be somebody who actually remembers things that happen when you interact with people, and [00:06:30] you’re in the top 1/10th of 1% instantly by doing that. It’s pretty simple. And he says, “But I don’t like it when they hang up on me.” So it’s like, “You’re in sales. Your job isn’t to like anything. There’s no liking in sales.”

Jim Graf (06:43):

That’s interesting. That’s a great tactic strategy. Very true.

Corey Frank (06:47):

So Jim, when you look at having your agency for a few years, again coming from private equity, and these learnings from email to direct outreach, to creating authenticity and building trust, what are some of the trends you’ve seen, [00:07:00] just in the last couple of years or so, with outreach playing in the deep end of the pool with some of these big tech titans of yours?

Jim Graf (07:06):

Well, a lot of what Chris just highlighted with regards to email, it’s definitely getting louder and just have them do more to get less. The other big trend is this whole concept of BANT. And, Chris, I don’t know, I’m assuming you’re familiar with it, but the whole legacy concept of budget, authority, need, timeframe from a prospect, as if every organization, these projects [00:07:30] and these purchases are widgets that move down the line. And does it have the budget yet? Does it have authority yet?

(07:35):

Especially with cloud and things being sold as a service, we see that becoming, I don’t want to say less relevant, but really antiquated. So, I would just say the biggest trend is away from lead gen, as these leads are not widgets that you can just make. And that rather, it’s more about demand gen and you have to get out there and you have to generate the demand. And, that’s a lot of what Chris has been highlighting with, there’s [00:08:00] gold in those people that say no, if you follow up accordingly and professionally. And it’s just continuing to move them and massage them to the point of a more thoughtful conversation.

(08:09):

That’s probably the biggest thing, is that this concept of lead is kind of, I hate to say dead, but it’s really why we pivoted away and just focused more on demand gen and what’s required. And then, the whole idea of what you’ve seen in the tech world is a lot of products are sold bottoms up, where they’ll sell to a user first like Slack. [00:08:30] Our company doesn’t need Jim Graf’s approval for someone in my organization to start using Slack. But then when enough people use Slack, then probably it’s appropriate for a sales guy.

(08:39):

So that means the whole buying process/decision is different. So if I’m a sales rep for Slack, you got to be cognizant of that and just understand this isn’t, is there a budget for a new collaboration tool? Do you have authority? What’s the timeframe? It’s like, “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. My Microsoft Teams works pretty good.” So it’s just, I think, that whole model is kind of, it’s still appropriate [00:09:00] for certain products, but it’s definitely pivoted more towards demand generation and understanding the buying process. Definitely more fluid. Definitely more fluid.

Chris Beall (09:09):

It’s also more longitudinal. It’s way more longitudinal. So you mentioned back when you were selling, they give you a territory and say, “Go for it.” The brilliance of that model is you anticipated holding onto that territory for quite a while and therefore you work the territory, not just in space, but you work it through time. [00:09:30] And we all do that in our lives, right? When we think something’s important, we pay attention to our future interactions in that particular domain, not just what we can get right now. And yet, this whole BANT thing and all of the mechanization around sales implies that all that’s important is the transaction in question. That there is nothing longitudinal. Nothing goes on over time.

(09:58):

But we know just mathematically the following, [00:10:00] it’s a fact of the world. It’s a math fact, which is 11/12ths of your ideal market, of your perfect market, that they’re perfectly qualified in every regard, is not in market for a solution of your type, your category this quarter, 11/12ths.

Chris Beall (11:08):

Now, that’s a dominating number.

Jim Graf (11:10):

That is. Wow.

Chris Beall (11:11):

That’s just the biggest fact of sales. 11/12ths of your market, assuming you have a hundred percent information about who should buy. They’re not in market this quarter. And you cannot find out if they’re in market this quarter or in any future quarter unless you engage. And if you want to [00:11:30] win, to be their partner, you need to engage earlier than all competitors.

(11:36):

And, that simplifies everything about sales. That’s what this podcast is about. That’s why we call it Market Dominance Guys. It’s about dominating markets by being first to converse and build trust, and harvest that trust over the future quarters that you’re going to have to patiently work your way through, in order to dominate that market. And I’m shocked. Every day, I’m shocked that the simple math, this is [00:12:00] not like a big deep math concept. This is like, your replacement cycles for B2B products are about three years. Therefore, there’s 12 quarters in three years. Consideration cycles are about one quarter. So most of your market’s not in market. How are you going to find out? Well, the intent guys say, “Wait until they jump in. Wait for the red ocean and go in and fight.”

Jim Graf (12:23):

Right, right.

Chris Beall (12:24):

And, we say, “That’s idiotic.” Nurture the relationship inside their midbrain, in their gut [00:12:30] with the voice, and then when they’re ready to buy, you’re ahead.

Jim Graf (12:36):

That’s a great framing of it, because that is so true. When I first got out of school and I had territories, and then when I got into the, worked for the investment bank, you had accounts, major hedge funds and you never gave up. I mean, I almost think about that as it relates to some of my SDRs is, we need more data. And we always have these debates internally. “Is it more data? Why do you need more data? I mean, how much are you going to churn through?” I mean, [00:13:00] get you need data to work, but it’s a great point. I didn’t realize that stat of what’s actually in market.

Chris Beall (13:08):

It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? And I’ve never run into anybody that I’ve said that to. Said, “Oh, yeah, we know that.” It’s like, “But what’s the alternative?” Unless you’re going to either posit, the replacement cycles for products for solutions is less than three years, from B2B is not the case ever.

Jim Graf (13:27):

No.

Chris Beall (13:28):

Ever. I buy something [00:13:30] three years away considering a replacement, and the pursuit efficiency of everybody pursuing me at that point is going to be sub-10%. That is 90% of the time, even when I’m in replacement mode, I will not replace, because I don’t trust any of those guys more than I trust myself, and I trust myself to operate what I already have. So until one of them is trusted more than I trust myself, it goes nowhere.

Jim Graf (13:57):

Yeah, that’s interesting. [00:14:00] I mean, now that I think about it, we drink our own champagne, so to speak, so all of our revenue is we leverage the same process as an individual, except they’re executing on behalf of Kazzcade. And all the deals from last month, a good portion of them were from May. So it’s so true. It’s very true.

Chris Beall (14:20):

It’s funny, I had an investment banker ask me the other day, a question like this, “Well, what’s your 2024 pipeline look like?” I said, “Who knows?” [00:14:30] I mean, we talk to so many people. We talk to 108,000 VPs of sales a year. When they ripen, they ripen. We don’t make them ripen and we don’t make the sunshine. We don’t cause the sap to go up the tree. We’re just wandering around in the forest going, “Hey, wait a second. That one looks a little red. Maybe we’ll come back in a month and we can taste it or something.” I mean, it’s a simple model, but you’ve got to be able to go fast comfortably, in order to execute it.

Jim Graf (14:58):

Yeah. [00:15:00] Well, it’s funny, we actually just launched a, it’s not a new service, it just comes with our efforts, but it’s what you’re kind of highlighting. Where we might have a thoughtful discovery call or conversation and get all this information. “Hey, listen, our contract with our current MSP doesn’t run out until August of 2024. Here are the main things that are really a priority for us, concerned about this, X, Y, Z. But now it’s not the time. I mean, it’s contract’s not up until July 2024.” So we package that up. We package that up, all the detail [00:15:30] why to follow up, what’s going on, and clients love it. Absolutely love it.

(15:36):

Because we’ve had to articulate, “Guys, you have to understand. This is first party data, you cannot go off and buy off the shelf.” ABC law firm has a $10,000 monthly contract with an MSP that comes up for contract in July of next year, and they generally evaluate three different vendors two months prior, open to having a conversation at that time. I mean, my goodness gracious. [00:16:00] Yeah, it’s an interesting, but those are the two biggest things I’ve seen definitely change.

Corey Frank (16:05):

Well-

Chris Beall (16:05):

I love that product, by the way. I mean, when people get ConnectAndSell, they’re thinking about it. Unfortunately, we first do a test drive that consists of mostly cold folks I haven’t talked to before. We always ask them, “Bring some people you really want to talk with,” because we want to simulate the follow-ups that you’re going to have, because follow-ups are going to dominate. And in everything we do, [00:16:30] we ask, “Please pay more attention to talking regularly to the people you’ve spoken with before, and don’t be so eager to disqualify them based on some temporary characteristic.”

(16:43):

Just ask yourself, “Are they intrinsically qualified?” That’s the question we always ask. BANT, we pay no attention to BANT. We ask one question, which is, “Do we believe that their business would be significantly helped if they had access to conversations on demand [00:17:00] and used it in an intelligent way?” That’s the only question.

Jim Graf (17:03):

Yep.

Corey Frank (17:05):

Yeah. Well, this is great, getting you two titans together. I just want to ask you one more question, Jim and Chris, this was what the debate was the other day, I think you had over dinner with Jerry about SDRs and professionalism versus progression. And maybe you can frame this for Jim and let’s get his take on it.

Chris Beall (17:26):

Well, it started actually when my wife popped in, she’s just been announced [00:17:30] as the future chief revenue Officer for Mediafly. So a sales tech company, that to me was a modest significance until Mary Shea joined, at which point it immediately became a monstrous significance, and then now these beasts of the world are going to go dominate. I get to watch it and it’s pretty impressive, but she’s going to own their SDR function as a result. That was kind of a question. Do you want it or not? And they don’t really have SDRs per [00:18:00] se. They have these things, they call them account development people or whatever, but it’s the same thing, right?

Jim Graf (17:26):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (18:06):

And she’s gotten into the idea that talking to people really makes a difference. I mean, she already knew that, but the fact that you can push a button and do it effortlessly is interesting. But there was an assumption still in her from a question she asked me, which was about, “Well, these sort of junior people,” blah, blah, blah. It was something about getting these junior people. I said, “Hold on, hold on. The ideal SDRs that we’ve ever seen are in their 60s and 70s.” [00:18:30] The very best SDRs on earth are in their 60s and 70s. I mean, we’ve tested this.

(18:37):

So we worked with a company, Israeli cybersecurity company selling to hospitals, that had three SDRs way off in rural Vermont, 62, 68, and 72 years old. They were open to coaching. They went to flight school voluntarily. They wanted to learn more. These are true experts at the cold call, but they wanted to learn more. They generated [00:19:00] demand for an unknown product solving and unknown problem, which turns out to be pretty important. Keep the ransomware folks from killing your grandmother while she’s in the hospital, or at least threatening to. And they built $65 million of pipeline in five months. The three of them did, and the company sold for $300 million bucks, right on top of that.

(19:21):

Now, are there 24 year olds who can do what those 60 year olds can do? Maybe. Will they do it for 10 years? Maybe not. [00:19:30] Right? So of Corey’s people, we tell them, this is finishing school for future CEOs because they’re younger. So you learn to cold call. So you learn to talk to strangers because that’s a core CEO skill. You’re going to keep it forever. So you want to run something someday, come through this program. But there are actually more great SDRs out there at the end of their careers that no one is tapping. And I’ve always thought, somebody who’s in your business, Jim, could make the biggest fortune in the history of big fortunes, in the world [00:20:00] of everything that happens early in sales by getting these folks who are at the end of their careers. We have a podcast episode that’s titled Hire a Grandma, and we mean it to be taken literally. Right?Because, what did you say they need to be? They need to be in the moment. They need be active listeners.

Jim Graf (20:22):

Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve never connected the dots like that, and that’s a very, very interesting, but we definitely skew older. First of all, the Patty, [00:20:30] the gal I just described for you is more polished than … an older gal. The two others that we would start on Monday, older. And now I’m late 40s, so now it’s 60, 70. When you’re working with people in their mid 20s, well, first of all, in general, we are constantly training professionalism, just nonstop. And with a employee like Patty, you don’t have to train as much. And I’m talking communication skills. ” [00:21:00] Hi, it’s Jim with Kazzcade. Nice to meet you. How are you?” Pausing, listening. They have a question. “I’m sorry. Who are you with?” Because when you get into the younger generation, you absolutely, it is a lot rougher around the edges. A lot. And we have to train a lot on, you need to speak very clearly, and you need to say, “May I have?”

(21:20):

We actually, God, this is so funny. Just yesterday in the training with one of my guys who’s fantastic, but he was saying that my trainer, who wears a suit and tie every day because he wants [00:21:30] to promote professionalism, heard him say, “If you give me 27 seconds, I’ll tell you why I called.” And my trainer flagged it, and this sounds really small, but this is the level of granularity on how they present themselves would go. And we’re just like, “That’s just a little too cheesy man and a little too transactional. It’s not professional. And I don’t know, it just doesn’t sound, you give me this, I’ll give you that. You’re the one calling them. You’re the one interrupting them. You need to ask for permission. You need to do it professionally. You need to do it politely.”

(21:59):

So one, I was ecstatic [00:22:00] my trainer caught it. It was like, “We got to have a talk about this.” You would’ve thought the house was burning down. To Chris, to your point, I would err absolutely on the side of professionalism. I’d never thought about it like that with the age thing. And that does turn on a lot of light bulbs, actually.

Corey Frank (22:15):

Chris, by the way, Jim uses the permission base, 27 seconds, as his opener. Which is great, is music to Chris’s ears, as he can.

Jim Graf (22:23):

Oh, yeah. That thing is just gold. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it not work. If you say it professionally and politely, [00:22:30] and with honesty and being authentic, and just pause, just be quiet. Let them answer. And, I don’t think we’ve ever heard it not work. But anyways, to your point, Chris, yeah, there’s a lot more rough edges. I mean, there was a lot of role playing.

Chris Beall (22:45):

And the job’s too important. This was my other point was, look, this is the single most important job in any organization. It’s the one that’s also the most cryptic. It’s very hard to see inside of it and know how well you’re doing, because it’s being executed [00:23:00] in millisecond, millisecond, millisecond timeframes, with what’s going on inside of another human being as the actions. You don’t get to see the action. It’s not like, “Oh, here’s the sales process and we do this, and we do that.” It’s like a golf swing, man. You set it up wrong, you don’t have a hope. It’s ballistic, and it’s over in 35 seconds. And what could go wrong in there? Once it goes wrong, there’s no recovery. You never [00:23:30] come back from making a mistake in a cold call.

(23:33):

Now, if you’re as good as a Cheryl Turner, you can actually come back on the next one. You can stop and think about it, and she’ll give me a call sometime and go, “There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong,” and we’ll talk it over because she knows it’s in her. Or, it’s in the script or whatever it happens to be. And that was my point to Jerry, is this job is so important, it needs professionalism, not progression. These are professionals. They’re not progressing [00:24:00] to some other job. They might choose to, because we can all choose to do other things with our lives, but it’s like saying, “Oh, you’re an SDR. You’re going to progress to being an AE.” That’s crazy. It’s like saying, “You’re a surgeon, you’re a heart surgeon, but we’re going to have you progress to be a hospital administrator someday.” That’s not progress.

Corey Frank (24:22):

Absolutely.

Jim Graf (24:23):

Yeah, that’s very true. Yeah, and there’s just a lot of inherent skills. Professionalism says a lot, but from [00:24:30] active listening, speaking clearly, believe it or not, these are with some of the younger generation, there’s attention sometimes issues. Are you actually listening or are you just kind of like, “Okay, I’m looking at my script. As soon as this person’s quiet, I’m going.” We don’t seem to have that with some of our older reps. So that’s a very interesting business idea, though. I hadn’t really thought about that.

Chris Beall (24:52):

There’s millions of them out there.

Jim Graf (24:54):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (24:55):

Florida. They concentrate-

Corey Frank (24:56):

He’s in Florida, so he’s got a little more than most.

Chris Beall (24:58):

Yeah, yeah. [00:25:00] Let’s face it, without being unfair, you can practice a different kind of wage arbitrage.

Jim Graf (25:07):

Yeah, very true. Very true.

Corey Frank (25:12):

Well, beautiful. Well, I tell you what, it’s always, always a pleasure, Jim, talking to another killer, another pro like you. We’ve got to have you back again. I don’t know why we haven’t had. We have had 200 episodes and we haven’t had Jim on yet. We’ve got to talk to our booker, whoever, who that is on the podcast.

Jim Graf (25:29):

Have your agent call my agent.

Corey Frank (25:30):

[00:25:30] Yes, yes. We’ll do that. So for the Market Dominance Guys, this is Corey Frank, and for Chris Beall. Jim, thank you very much. Until next time.

Jim Graf (25:40):

Absolutely. Chris, nice meeting you. Corey, I don’t want you to get left out.

Chris Beall (25:44):

And thanks, Corey. You’re always, as Helen says, you’re the gem of gems.

Corey Frank (25:50):

All right.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Prepare for another thought-provoking journey as Corey and Chris are joined by special guest Jim Graf, the CEO and Founder of Kazzcade, a former private equity finance titan turned outreach sales guru. Together, they delve into the concept of “Gresham’s Law” – where “bad money drives out good” – and apply it to the world of sales.

In an era overrun by cheap tricks and impersonal outreach, the MDG team explores how these practices can diminish the value of genuine, high-touch sales. With AI and automation flooding inboxes with repetitive and uninspiring messages, Chris, Corey, and Jim examine the phenomenon of how “cheap outreach actually drives out the value of good outreach.”

Join the conversation as they discuss the impact of this shift on the art of selling. Can we reverse this trend? Can we, in fact, perform real “conversational alchemy” by transforming mundane interactions into genuine, meaningful connections? This episode offers valuable insights into navigating the challenging landscape of modern sales and cold outreach, where authenticity and real dialogue are held at a premium.

Don’t miss “Conversational Alchemy: Transforming Sales in the Age of Cheap Outreach” as it explores the timeless wisdom of Gresham’s Law and its relevance in today’s business world.

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Corey Frank (00:00):

Here we are with another episode of The Market Dominance Guys, as we inch ever closer to episode number 200, Chris. And as always, I’m here with the Sage of Sales, the profit of profit, and the Hawking of Hawking. Chris Beal. Chris, how are you? 

Chris Beall (00:17):

I’m doing pretty good today, having fun at the Outreach Unleash Conference the last couple of days. And gosh, I’d forgotten how amusing people are when you get ’em in a big herd like that. They’re pretty funny. 

Corey Frank (00:28):

Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about the trends [00:00:30] and not the most circuitous route to get to B P O and outsourced sales. We have a very special guest, Jim Groff, C e o, and founder of Kaz Kade k a zz kaz cade.com. Jim, welcome to the market Dominance Skies. 

Chris Beall (00:48):

Corey, happy to be here. I really appreciate the invitation. I’m excited, 

Corey Frank (00:52):

And you are also for full disclosure because our attorneys get on this every episode, right? Chris, you are a power user of connected Cell just for the listeners, so they [00:01:00] absolutely know this was not coerced. You’re not being compensated for your appearance in any way, shape or form. You were somehow enticed, seduced come on this podcast. And that’s all there is really is just the nuggets that come from Chris’s words. And that’s payment enough though, as it is for me for the last 15, 20 years. I don’t know what it’s been, Chris, but anyway. Well, let’s get right into it. So Jim, you come from a very different background that Chris has some interesting perspective on. You come from the private equity and financial [00:01:30] side of the ledger, but yet you own one of the best B P O sales consulting agencies marketplace over there in Lake Mary in Florida. So how did a finance guy, what left turn where you should have took a right turn to a space like this? 

Chris Beall (01:52):

Yep. I spent my entire life actually in sales from right out of undergrad and then after grad school and I worked for some [00:02:00] great companies that provided just a great foundational B two B sales. Then after grad school, worked for an investment bank where it’s a lot of selling. I mean, investment bankers by definition are kind of glorified real estate agents, but my specific role is what’s called an institutional broker. And we would help companies raise capital and I’d work directly with hedge funds on pitching them stocks, putting their portfolio long or short. So it was a constant sales job and a lot of phone sales. So sales has just always been in my D N A and I always navigated [00:02:30] towards sales because the income was always limitless and it was a great career. I really enjoyed it, but I always had a very entrepreneurial spirit and just realized that look, life’s not slowing down. 

Chris Beall (02:42):

And so I started to look for an organization that I could raise some money and buy. And I came across this at the time it was just a mom and pop lead gen company in Orlando, and I’m like, man, I didn’t even know appointment setting was even a thing. And I’m like, this is crazy because all my life in sales, I’ve never heard [00:03:00] of bant qualified. That still blows my mind. We can talk about that. I think that’s insane. I was given a territory and it’s like make it happen. So anyways, as I looked at the company, I’m like, this could be really interesting. I think it can add a lot of value here as sales is so cordo my profession. And that was eight years ago. And since then we really kind of transformed it into a complete S D R as a service. 

Chris Beall (03:19):

We’re more of a business process outsourcing where we bring the full stack from helping identify what is your I C P, any marketing around that email copy, the whole tech stack. [00:03:30] And that’s where Chris and Connect andel are a key component, huge believer in using the phone. Matter of fact, at times we’ve actually thought about pulling the email component because a good portion of all the engagement we get and appointments we actually deliver for our clients is all via phone. But anyway, so we bring that whole tech stack, build out cadences, and then of course it’s the technology, but then it’s really the talent and who is that S D R that’s going to steer that ship and execute those phone calls, respond to any emails, do it at scale, do it professionally, do it [00:04:00] well. And it’s been a great pivot so far. We’re very blessed that we have plenty of work. 

Corey Frank (04:06):

Well, Chris also comes in, has a deep experience from that private equity venture world, and he is also reformed from that side of the ledger and decided to help and augment certainly in the arms dealing business, the weapons business of helping amplify the power of the phone. So Chris, you’ve worked with and collaborated with and argued and debated with guys like Jim when he was in the other side of the fence there. [00:04:30] So what do you think of that? What do you think about a guy who’s actually reformed from the VC venture world and realizing, Hey, I’ve been in sales and now I’ve got to jump in and I have all this mass, these experiences I can help other people doing what I’ve been doing in my own practice day after day. 

Chris Beall (04:46):

I 

Jim Graf (04:46):

Mean, ultimately all of this is both constrained by and energized by money. That’s kind of how it works. I mean, it’s the magic of the fungible and the liquid and the leverageable. And so what’s so interesting [00:05:00] to me, and this is actually why I jumped into connect and sell, is that when I first saw that particular product, I didn’t see it. I was just told about it by a person that I was obliged to believe because if you fail to believe Sean McLaren, when he is speaking with you at six 30 in the morning at the Rosewood Hotel, you’re just going to fail in general life. So I went ahead and believed him and to me it was like, wow, we always talk about printing money and in business in B two B, conversations [00:05:30] are truly money that is, you have to hold them reasonably well, but if you can make conversations liquid, if you can make them reasonably fungible, which is what Jim’s organization does actually is like we can do it. 

Jim Graf (05:45):

You don’t have to do it, that’s fungibility and you can make them leverageable. So you get more than what you put in, you get out. And so now you get a compounding effect. You can actually magic with conversations the same way [00:06:00] that folks in venture and VC and private equity and hedge funds do it with money. And I’ve always said conversations with the other currency in business, it’s just the one that you feel like you can only print it at a certain rate. It’s like in the old days you had, okay, what made a good currency? Well, limited supply, gold was pretty good. Very limited supply of gold. It’s hard to make more of it. A lot of alchemists came along and said, I can do this. But it turned out they were not doing it correctly. [00:06:30] And Isaac Newton fellow physicist, he controlled the mint in England. 

Jim Graf (06:35):

And why would you put a physicist in control or mathematician in control of the mint? Well, because you want to make sure that what gets in there is real, right? And that’s kind of like the business of knowing what’s real. And I feel the same way about conversations that what we’re doing is we’re saying, can I do conversational alchemy? Can I make real conversations flow at an unnatural rate as though I was turning lead into gold? So [00:07:00] interesting. And we’ve been trying to work with folks as you know, Corey in the appointment setting, lead gen, outsource sales, whatever space for years. And we always have ended up in a business model conflict with them early and sometimes forever because what they are selling is predicated on scarcity of conversations. And their whole pricing model is predicated on flow rates of conversations that don’t exceed one or two per hour per rep, [00:07:30] and therefore their business model is whatever it happens to be, it’s by the meeting or it’s by whatever it happens to be. And it really takes a special kind of business mind to look at eight x nine x 10 x flow rate increases in conversations and say, we will adapt our business model to that and go dominate, which is what Jim and his firm are doing. 

Jim Graf (07:56):

Does that make sense to you? Totally. As 

Chris Beall (07:58):

A matter of fact, you said something about [00:08:00] conversations having a compounding effect, the name Cascade, the actual, the reason it’s cascade is that that light bulb went off many years ago. And I’m like, look, here’s the deal, because when we were doing lead gen, this is a lead that’s a lead. Here’s a P D F call bill. And it ultimately dawned on me there’s nothing more valuable than actually just doing this period hard stop and that every conversation actually has a cascading effect. And these aren’t just like a widget. Here’s a profile of a guy, his LinkedIn address and his email [00:08:30] as a lead, and that’s where we actually named the company. It’s Cascade because what we deliver has cascading effects for every business and for ourselves. And so I was telling Corey the other day when we were talking, we have some interesting tech and how we deliver our product, but it’s really the tech stack and connect and sell, which are key components where we spend an inordinate amount of our time is the training of individuals to have conversations like an inordinate because as you know, you [00:09:00] just have so little time, but it’s really that lever that really can make a great rep out of a good rep. 

Chris Beall (09:07):

And what’s funny is you talk about scarcity, they’re only, especially with the AI and everyone with the biggest buzzword going on ai, this AI that they’re going to grow in value. And we see it just in our ASPs. I mean, when I took over, I think our A S P was like 550 bucks. Now we’ve got a different pricing model, [00:09:30] but if we hit our benchmarks, it’s more like 1400. And that’s just been a steady why. To your point, these are harder to come by and you got to make the most of them. And that’s kind of why I get excited. I don’t see it going away ever. I mean, I could go on a diatribe how today’s world, people feeling more isolated, they’re just going to continue to grow in importance. And it’s funny, when we bring people on, I actually tell ’em, I’m like, look, here’s the deal. 

Chris Beall (09:55):

You are going to be trained on skills, but I’m just seeing in four years, [00:10:00] either you’re an engineer, you’re creating something or you’re interfacing with a client. Everything else, it’s gone. Don’t need it. Don’t need it. And so the skills that we are training with the people that we hire for an S C R, they see that and they understand that it’s a huge opportunity for ’em. But I really believe it. I didn’t come up with this. I think it was some author like Adam Grant or somebody said in the not too distant future, it’s going to be critical thinking, collaboration, creativity. There was another one. But outside of those skills with ai, [00:10:30] you better have those skills. 

Jim Graf (10:32):

Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s kind of funny. I’m an old programmer and we had a thing just happen yesterday in our company. It was kind of funny. It was kind of funny in a tragic way, but we got around the tragedy and that was some data that should still be in Salesforce had inadvertently been undone. It wasn’t there anymore. And so this is an AI story, and so I went back through 1500 emails and found the 56 [00:11:00] of them that contained that data, but simply as a webpage in an email copied and pasted those into Excel files one tab per and sent it off to the one and only Tom Jung, who’s been a guest on our show, he’s our data concierge, and I work with him a couple hours a day in the data. And here’s the AI part. This is why normally it’d say, okay, so the skill it takes to take this weird random stuff and extract [00:11:30] a little mini table out of the middle of it, over 50 something tabs and produce one beautiful piece of output that I can send to somebody who might be an investment banker or something like that about what’s happened. 

Jim Graf (11:43):

That would be a skill that would be in Tom’s memory as a programmer. 

Jim Graf (11:48):

So what did he do? I’m on my way to the eye doctor. I give him this assignment. I get to the eye doctor 22 minutes later, call him up, how’s it going? He says, I just had chat [00:12:00] G p T, write the Python script that will take all of this stuff and turn it into what we need. I’m testing it right now. This is 22 minutes on the clock. I’m testing it right now, and I think it’ll be done in 15 to 20 minutes. How long is your appointment? So the idea that you’ve got a bunch of stuff in your head that you can dredge out, and as a programmer you think, I’ve got these tricks up my sleeve, they’re not really there. Same thing with business analysis. [00:12:30] I took chat g p T for a little ride one day and just took some spreadsheets that described our costs, our true deep costs, agent navigation time, and a bunch of stuff like that. Our two kinds of contracts connect on target reach, connect on live voice, what we charge for them and how customers receive R O I. And I asked chat G P T to build me a pricing model that would balance my customer’s, r o i, with our desire to hit certain margin. 

Speaker 4 (12:58):

Wow, that’s 

Jim Graf (12:59):

It [00:13:00] did it for me through about an hour and a half of interaction. That one I wouldn’t have been able to do myself. I could have done it in spreadsheets and stuff like that, but it would’ve taken me two weeks and I get interrupted 30,000 times in two weeks. So it wouldn’t have happened. And it was just a fun Saturday just saying, no, no, no. What I meant was that’s $7 an hour, not $7 a minute. I misspoken. It goes, oh yes. Thank you so much for clarifying that and it gives me a complete analysis. I said, please put that in this form, put it in this form, put it in this form. [00:13:30] It analyzed the business and gave me a better pricing model. So if you think that your skills are these technical skills that other than critical thinking, and I would break that down by the way, anybody wants to do critical thinking, you got to understand set theory. You’ve got to understand survivorship bias. These things will not jump out of the ai. It’s interpretive critical thinking around what these fantastic tools can do. And it’s knowing when you can use it. When is it okay? [00:14:00] And when’s that damn thing hallucinating? 

Speaker 4 (14:02):

Right? 

Jim Graf (14:04):

Kind of jump in, but I agree with you a thousand percent. We have somebody we work with, her name is Cheryl Turner. Cheryl Turner is the master of the cold call, micro pivot. We listen to her because what she does is somebody says X, right? And she’s always inside the script, but her timing the little chuckle, 

Speaker 4 (14:25):

Oh, totally. 

Jim Graf (14:26):

Being genuinely amazed, whatever it happens to be. My wife and [00:14:30] I spent hours one day listening to her as my wife, Helen was preparing to embark on her career as a cold caller using Connected cell, which she did for one hour and has never done it since. And she said, greatest weight loss program in history. But she also said this, all my research was a waste, which is similar to all that stuff in your head’s, a waste. My research was a waste. All I needed to know was I was talking to another human being. I pushed a button and had the undivided [00:15:00] attention of another person, a person who could mean something to my business and vice versa. I had no idea there was such power. And we’ve been together for three years. 

Chris Beall (15:09):

Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. It’s funny, when we get into the training and the way we break it down, there’s selling skills and there’s product knowledge. But when you get into the selling skills, it’s so funny. You have the script and all that, but it really is, you got to talk it. And they use the example of a movie and who your favorite actor is and how, look, they have a script, but [00:15:30] he’s not reading it. And you got to be the same way. And it’s tonality and it’s active listening and the more human it is, it really, it’s just the more authentic it is. And we have this gal who started with us in July with no background, no background in sales, and no technical background. We have a lot of our enterprise clients are leading tech companies, A W S H P E, don’t know if I can say that on the podcast. 

Jim Graf (15:54):

You said you didn’t name them. 

Chris Beall (15:55):

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, excuse me. 

Jim Graf (15:57):

Similar to, 

Chris Beall (15:58):

It’s so funny. So this gal [00:16:00] we’re going over basics, what the cloud is. I’m just like, oh Lord. But she is so authentic and what she calls, she has such genuine excitement about the fact that this cloud provider can lower infrastructure costs by X percent. And she says it with such honesty and kind of like a pure, authentic naivete that the prospect is like, tell me more. Well, let me tell you, Chris, and it’s only because it’s authentic. He’s just genuinely [00:16:30] that positive all the time. It’s just her demeanor. And I coach these guys about this and there’s nothing magical because you get other sales guys who have a bit of an ego, and I’m going to close more and this and that, which is awesome. I love it. I get it. But there’s a part of, you got to be able to communicate that you truly believe you can help the person and be real. You got to be in the moment. If they ask you a question, just pause and think about it and then answer. But be honest. If you don’t know the answer, say you don’t know, [00:17:00] you start spinning off in the space trying to come up with something about the product that you don’t know much about. You’re just, it’s gone. It’s gone. But it’s try to 

Corey Frank (17:07):

Do that same thing. Jim, as you had mentioning, as you were mentioning, trying to do that same level of insistent mindset, authenticity in an email. And I think you had said something interesting, and I’d love to get Chris’s opinion on this, especially coming from Unleash the conference up there in Seattle. But you had mentioned that you’re thinking of pulling back on email as part of one of the [00:17:30] channels that Cascade does. Why, how come, and then Chris, does that mesh with some of the things that you’ve learned from Unleashed this week? Certainly the things that we’ve taught on this podcast for many years. 

Chris Beall (17:43):

So first of all, it’s just as simple as about 85% of our engagement and production is a result of a conversation. So it’s either our guys are able to actually set up a follow-up call with our client or actually set a time [00:18:00] where they will have the discovery call, but the majority of that, and it’s more than half, it’s truly close, like 80% is via the phone. Second thing is, look, we use chat G p T, and as Chris was saying, at this point, it’s really about the prompts. And I tell our clients, me telling you we use chat, G P T is like me saying, we use Google. It’s out there. Everyone uses it. It’s really how good are you at prompting? And we’re at the fifth iteration of our prompting for generating email copy. And even then it’s really AI assisted. [00:18:30] We still have a copywriter kind of audit. 

Chris Beall (18:33):

These subject lines are just cheesy, whatever. But I’m sitting here, I’m like, well, if we’re doing this, everyone’s doing this. The amount of content marketing and email marketing is just going to explode if it hasn’t already. It’s kind of been like that. And so the only reason we haven’t pulled it is we do have some of our SDRs, and this is more empirical. I don’t know a way to quantify it When they’re talking to a prospect, he or she’ll actually reference, oh yes, you’ve been, [00:19:00] I know you’ve reached out a couple times via email. What’s going on? I don’t know if it’s a trend yet. It’s more just data points, but that’s just empirical evidence. So we haven’t pulled it yet. Honestly. Also clients, they love to hear about this exotic cadence of X amount of touchpoints, email and phone. But in the back of my head, I’m like, I’m just telling you, it’s predominantly the phone. But I’m glad you like all these elegantly crafted personalized email messaging. So that’s why we’ve debated internally a couple [00:19:30] of times. 

Corey Frank (19:31):

Chris, what’s been the trends up there in unleashed with all the smart kids 

Jim Graf (19:35):

Rolling? Yeah, it was pretty interesting. For one thing, my buddy Tito Bort was there and Tito was the straightest of the straight shooters, right? It’s the South American thing I think. So I asked him, I said, Titos, what’s going on? We’re just standing around the first evening, what’s going on with email? And he says, oh, simple. One year ago, 72 emails to get a response now, 205. 

Chris Beall (19:56):

Wow. 

Jim Graf (19:57):

I said, well, doesn’t that mean you have to have three times as many [00:20:00] SDRs to get the job done, or you just have to use bots and hope nobody caress about your sincerity? And he says, yep, that’s it. And I just come right back to going around and listening to people at the conference and talking with Jerry Hill who was there, and James Townsend was there, came out for it. It’s like, what did everybody think? Who thinks somewhat like we do? And that is in the face of tricks. They’re trying to invent more tricks. [00:20:30] It’s like 

Chris Beall (20:31):

These chief 

Jim Graf (20:32):

Tricks. And what the theme was of this particular conference, and I’m not saying this in a negative way, I’m just observing, is everybody said, well, if it’s gotten hard, because everybody else is using ai, you need to use AI better. And that strikes me as just me as absurd because of the scarcity question. It comes down to this Gresham’s law [00:21:00] of money says bad money drives out good, bad money means counterfeit money and drives out means good money goes under the mattress when bad money’s in circulation because you don’t want your good money to go out there and circulate with the bad money because it becomes worth less, right? You hang on, and that’s when a whole bunch of interesting things happen. Prices tend to go crazy when there’s a lot of bad money floating around. And some people think the government printing lots of money is a form of bad money. It reduces [00:21:30] the scarcity value of the money that you have when they print more of it. Well, there’s an equivalent law, and I’m not Gresham and nobody else made it, so I’ll call it deals second law of something, or rather, which is that cheap outreach drives up the value of expensive outreach.

Links from this episode:

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Chris Beall on LinkedIn
Jim Graf on LinkedIn

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Corey and Chris continue their discussion about inertia and constraints. How can leaders identify hidden constraints shaping their strategy? What fosters innovation: centralization or decentralization? Can classic texts offer counter-cultural wisdom to elevate leadership today? Pulling insights from ancient to modern thinkers, Corey and Chris tackle these questions and more. They argue consolidation often hinders progress while decentralization promotes healthy competition. Chris advocates “divisionalizing” to optimize strategy. They explore conquering inertia, maximizing strengths by pruning the unnecessary and structuring for change. The curiosity continues in part two of this engaging conversation in this episode, “Pruning the Unnecessary to Focus on Strengths.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

There’s been, yeah, I think with this concept of innovation in limitations, it leads to [00:33:00] I think a natural progression to the next piece that Rami had spoken about was finding customer limitations. And he had three, and you talked about one earlier that you find customer limitations through the customer eyes, through the market’s eyes, and then through the product size. 

Corey Frank (00:33:22):

And so what are your thoughts on that? Because as a sales, a leader here and as an entrepreneur, [00:33:30] certainly sometimes, and he says in order too, it should be customer market and product. But as you know, and we’ve talked about many times too, Hey, I built the product so I’m going to start from the product. If I build it, they will come. Because many customers don’t understand the limitations. They can’t foresee the reality of a product without this limitation before connect and sell came around. Certainly folks didn’t complain about [00:34:00] the real limitations because they didn’t know a reality without the limitation of, wait, I just press a button and I don’t have gatekeepers and everything else. Or the Henry Ford, if I asked the customer what they wanted, they’d all be still driving or still riding horses. So what do you think about that with customer market and product and as far as a blueprint, if you will, to find customer limitations for innovation? 

Chris Beall (00:34:26):

Well, I always think of it in terms of what’s the unit of change? What’s the cost of change? What’s [00:34:30] the probability of change? So the unit of change, you got to know what’s the unit of change. The customer got to change their mind, their business, their point of view, the value that they’re hoping to get, what’s going to change there? The market always interesting. The market is going to say, Hey, here’s some alternatives. Here’s ways of looking at this. Whatever my way is, they’re going to have some other ones. So the unit of change is they don’t go with me, they go with somebody else or they do [00:35:00] nothing. Which is the most common one. The product is the most interesting one in this regard. You can design products for change or you can design products for perfection, for great fit. And they’re two different things. 

Chris Beall (00:35:14):

So the whole idea of software is so to speak, all software products are designed for change. This is why software is eating the world. You can do tricks with software. Think of the Tesla. Teslas download new software [00:35:30] all the time, and they keep getting smarter. It’s not that the car was delivered to you smart. It’s that the car’s getting sitting out there charging in your garage right now. So Elon Musk identified a unit of change. It was super valuable, and customers are delighted in it because it’s like, wow, look at that. Well, how does the car show that it’s smart? It has a big whole screen and it can show you new things on it so it can make its new smartness obvious. [00:36:00] So designing for change is hard. Nobody in design classes teaches design for change. When you’re writing code. The way I’ve always been a fanatic, and as you know, I’ve been writing code since 68. I know people laugh when I say that. It’s like 1868. I’m exceptionally well preserved, 1968. Sure. So maybe 1768, anticipating some events on the eastern [00:36:30] seaboard of the us. But I’ve been writing code for a long time. I’m not very creative when it comes to writing code. I don’t like tricks. I don’t like some tricky way of doing something. I did for a little bit, and then I decided, but the main way that we design code for change is just to make it readable. 

Chris Beall (00:36:50):

To make it readable. So you could read it to your mom. So my rule always when I hire great developers is we get in a room and we do two things. One is we decide what all the words mean. All [00:37:00] the words in the business need a formal definition. They need a comparative definition. It’s one of these and not one of those, right? So you have positive and negative, and it needs an extensive definition. There’s an example of one and every word that we’re going to use of significance, and the business goes on the whiteboard with three definitions. It generally takes about three days. Everybody is so impatient during this process. We hate you, we hate you, we hate. That’s 

Corey Frank (00:37:27):

An example Chris would be, what? A [00:37:30] good lead or an ideal client. Is that what you’re 

Chris Beall (00:37:34):

Speaking? Yeah, exactly. Or in our case, it’s like, what’s a dial? 

Corey Frank (00:37:38):

What’s a dial? 

Chris Beall (00:37:39):

Let’s, what’s a dial a connected? So we have a very, very specific definition of what a dial is. What does navigated mean when it’s applied to a dial? These are very formal, tight type concepts. When somebody misuses one of those words because they’re fresh to the company, they’ll get corrected by the C E O, because that’s the most [00:38:00] important thing is that the language we speak is within our own time domain, hyper precise. There are no colloquial terms used to describe anything that we do because the language is, the language expresses the tolerances within our machine. We want tight tolerances so we don’t have sloppy action, and then we have lubrication so that it doesn’t burn up. Lubrication tends to be we’re funny with each other. [00:38:30] That’s the lubrication is humor. You want tight language tolerances. You want something that loosens it up a little bit and cools it off because it is tight. But readability is the equivalent of readability. Is there in every product, is it easy to tell how it does what it does so that when we need to use it a little differently in a customer situation, we can without violating [00:39:00] what it is? 

Chris Beall (00:39:03):

That is the tough part of design. And enterprise products are really unusual in this regard. They have long, long, long survivorship. I have enterprise products in the field today that I designed in 1983 that are still being used. The lock-in on enterprise products is extremely long. And so now the question is, well, do we know how it [00:39:30] works? Do we know that’s not just enough to go, oh, it has this feature or this function, this trick and so forth. The constraint on change, the unit of change is somewhere inside of that. So we have a situation right now at Connected itself. It’s a customer who is at the edge of B two B, and they’re kind of doing some business to consumer stuff, and they need to do something really important, which is to take credit card information over the phone. Well, everybody knows that Connect and Sell is not a call center outbound system. 

Chris Beall (00:40:00):

[00:40:00] So do we have that built in? Well, we do have something built in, and it’s something that is very easy to apply in a certain way, but only across a whole organization. So now what’s the unit of change? Do you take one organization and say it’s two in a connect in self sense that is we divisionalized so that each one can innovate separately? Or do we say no, it’s more efficient to have them together, or now I have to have more if then else kind of statements, tricks in [00:40:30] order to do one thing rather than the other, where my tendency is, which is split ’em and eat the inefficiency so that you gain the flexibility that comes from knowing how the damn thing works. But there will always be arguments on both sides and when any and all gold GRS are talking about, when they’re talking about the theory of constraints, ultimately you’re talking about the theory of change [00:41:00] because okay, I’ve identified the constraint. Now if I didn’t change, what’s that all about? That about, oh, fantastic, Chris, you can see it. 

Corey Frank (00:41:11):

Yeah. He talks a lot about identifying it as this concept of the tail and the dog, where once you see tails in the world, once you’re trained to see the tails in the world, just like what you had just [00:41:30] explained with the product and how you look at code, you’re always in search of the dog. And so one of the examples he gave was with GoPro, the GoPro camera, and the tail was the following, the inventors, the innovators of the GoPro camera. They were already video cameras when GoPro came around, but they observed that surfers in the Southern California, Carlsbad area and the surf, they were taping, wrapping [00:42:00] their video cameras in plastic and waterproof containers to get right in the heart of the action as you’re going through a tube, as you’re going through getting started on the wave and take these incredible shots. 

Corey Frank (00:42:15):

And these same folks were the same type of extreme athletes that wanted to strap ’em to the front of their mountain bike as they’re going through these precarious trails and record the motion in a mere traditional Sony Handycam wouldn’t do. And so they [00:42:30] jury rigged all these other protection mechanisms. And so the tail was a small group of customers who spend extensively a lot of money and effort to satisfy a specific need that they had, and what’s the need that they’re trying to satisfy? Well, and then is that need potentially relevant for other customers? The size of the dog, if you will. Is it a [00:43:00] big dog or is it a small dog? And then how much effort does the market, does this company, does this innovation need to do to satisfy that need? And so he says that there’s oftentimes companies that have these tales that end up being a small doc. 

Corey Frank (00:43:24):

He also said something very humorous I thought, which says a tail plus a tail plus a tail plus a tail is not a dog. [00:43:30] It’s a bunch. And the example he gave on that is Botox, where Botox people, Hey, Botox, everybody wants to feel younger, but he wants to get rid of stretch lines on their face and the culture and be accepted. Or maybe it’s if you’re a Hollywood starch and you want to do all these things, but the limitation, the reason why it’s not a dog yet, it’s still a tail, is because needles, because the molecules are too big to have something that you can rub [00:44:00] or pill you take. So you still have the barrier of putting a need, and a lot of people don’t want to do that. So it’s not a dog yet. It’s still a tail because it’s ostensibly a small group still of folks who are willing to do it. 

Corey Frank (00:44:14):

And so when you look at what your market is as Clayton Christensen, the Innovators development, you come up with this software, this weapon that folks didn’t know that this limitation of getting rid of gatekeepers and voicemails [00:44:30] then even conceptualize that that could be a possibility in the world of sales. You guys created it, and that’s the tail. And the dog is look at this industry that as a result of that. But do you see that? Have you experienced that tail and dog and other industries? Certainly with a lot of the clients that you deal with, you probably see it pretty often. 

Chris Beall (00:44:55):

Yeah. I mean, I think the tail and the dog is kind of everything, and [00:45:00] you got to start with the tail and you’re guessing about the dog. You got to pull the tail towards you to go, okay, how big is this dog? Or is it just a funny shaped dog that’s got a big ass, but little stubby front legs? 

Corey Frank (00:45:17):

That’s right. That’s right. He says, you ultimately remember you want the dog, not the tail. So if you’re trying to create something, don’t live in the world of trying to make the tail better. You’re trying to go for the dog, 

Chris Beall (00:45:30):

[00:45:30] Right? But you got to make the tail good enough. So I mean, if this stuff were easy, everybody would do it, right? Everybody tries it. Most people are smart enough not to do it. They recognize that 90 hours a week is a long time to work, and neglect to your family has its limits. That becomes the constraint. Actually, we call that a backend constraint, 

Corey Frank (00:45:51):

A backend. 

Chris Beall (00:45:52):

It’s over there. It’s like, oh, no. Now Corey, I’m sorry. You’re only allowed to have zero children and you can’t interact [00:46:00] ’em because you don’t have time for either one of those activities. I don’t know the algorithm for that. I know that it comes like everything else. It comes down to costs and time and more time than costs. That is, you only have so much time to figure out something. And if you haven’t figured it out in a certain amount of time, you have a big choice to make, which is, are you going on faith that you’re going to figure it out, or are you going to go change tails, right? And try to [00:46:30] figure it out. You’re 

Corey Frank (00:46:30):

Talking about when you’re stuck. 

Chris Beall (00:46:32):

When you’re stuck and you’re always stuck when you’re at the tail, you’re just plain all stuck. Yeah, you’re stuck about the dog. You might not be stuck about the tail, but Oh, look, we put this thing together and it turns out it needs a mounting capability that goes on somebody’s head, and now that we have that blah, blah, blah, okay, fine, right? Oh, but that tends to slip down and get between their nose and then they hate it. And okay, we got to have another little thing that’s a strap on the back. Great. We’re in tail land. We’re tailing it up, right? Yep. [00:47:00] Getting to this question of is it a dog, one of the issues with that is there are people who want it to be a dog. It also comes down to this, what does somebody want it to be? What do they believe that it’s, and then who’s willing to look at the evidence? How much does it cost to get the evidence? How much time do we have to get the evidence? And by the way, we’re busy putting another strap on that damn thing, or making it a different color or using it for [00:47:30] some slightly different purpose. I actually think this is where markets take care of what we cannot, and we tend to be somewhat victimized by them. And it’s also why the folks who build these incredible products are not exactly, everybody’s friend. 

Chris Beall (00:47:48):

Steve Jobs is not everybody’s friend. Do you think you could name, at the time of his death, could he have named 50 people who are close personal friends of his? 

Corey Frank (00:47:59):

Yeah, [00:48:00] for 

Chris Beall (00:48:00):

Sure. That would help him out in any situation that he could call. No, that wouldn’t happen because his genius, and I’m speculating here, but his genius was he was pretty insistent. And people who are pretty insistent have fewer friends. I insist. I insist if all you say is I insist, and then you fire people who disagree with you, well, you don’t have that many friends. But I think that is sometimes as we look at all of these factors, [00:48:30] we don’t take into account this fundamental human factor, which is, and we say it about salespeople. We say, oh, well, the need to be liked, that’s pretty bad in a salesperson. Oh, really? And exactly. How do we go in and do surgery on somebody’s soul so they no longer have a need to be liked by other human beings? 

Corey Frank (00:48:49):

Oh, for sure. Chris. Yeah. 

Chris Beall (00:48:51):

Come on. Give me a break here. 

Corey Frank (00:48:52):

Well, it’s funny you bring that up here. As we come up against the top of the hour is so this old book here, right? And [00:49:00] for those at home, it’s the Tau te Ching, the book of the Way, written by our friend lasu circa what? Chris? Five, 600 bc. I think something along that a long time. 

Chris Beall (00:49:13):

We call that a while ago. 

Corey Frank (00:49:14):

Yes. I don’t even think you were coding back in 500 bc. 

Chris Beall (00:49:17):

Well, I can tell you, Mike, I was writing in Fortran, 

Corey Frank (00:49:20):

But exactly what you said, I think we’re going to end on this note. This is from one of his lessons, number 27, where he calls hidden values and talk about the need to [00:49:30] be liked and the value of inherent value inside of the folks that inspire innovation. He says, good hikers need no maps. Good speakers need no scripts. Good counters need no abacus. Good guards need no locks. The wises trusting and goodness see the potential in others treating no one as an outcast, trusting, and goodness. They redeem all things. Nothing is worthless [00:50:00] to them. They recognize the real hidden value. The whys take the lost, the seemingly lost under their wings. And so the seemingly lost become newfound treasures of the wise. Each is valuable to the other. This is the significance of spirituality. And when you talk about what we’ve talked about with the constraints, dealing with the false negatives as well as the false positive, the exhaust, the signals, the innovation, knowing [00:50:30] what to say no to, I think that you really conceptualized exactly why connected cell is so successful, why you’re such a great mentor, and all the people you’ve taken under your wings, the Toms of the world, and everybody in your skunkwork projects, et cetera, because nothing is lost. 

Corey Frank (00:50:48):

All these folks have signals and exhaust that can deliver to the bigger picture. So I thought that was very, I was like, I got to find a way to bring this in. And what did you do? You brought it right home [00:51:00] to Ru. So final thoughts, Chris, on the theory constraints, Mr. Lasu, in this episode here, this fanboy episode on ROI Goldratt. 

Chris Beall (00:51:12):

Yeah. Well, thank you ROI Goldratt for carrying on this work. It is a boulder that we never get to the top of the hill. It never, this is one of the rare things. Well, not that rare. There’s a lot of things in life like this, right, where it never rolls downhill for us, where if we [00:51:30] want it, we have to push it up the hill and theory of constraints is one of those things that will never roll down the hill. 

Corey Frank (00:51:37):

But that’s the juice though, isn’t it? Effort. That exercise is the juice which keeps knuckleheads like you and I still doing this over and over and over again, versus we like the occasional mi Thai in Margarita. But to me at least, I don’t want to speak for you, the sage of sales here, but isn’t. That’s a little bit of the driving force behind it, is that that endless, 

Chris Beall (00:51:59):

It’s a huge [00:52:00] part. If it were a trivially solvable problem, it would be solved. The understanding of the theory of constraints is fairly straightforward. The acceptance of it is harder. The application of it is idiosyncratic. That’s the nature of it. Every system is different from every other system in many, many ways, except for one. They all have one constraint. And so we can count to one, but that doesn’t give us the answer. It just tells us we need to go look, [00:52:30] that we need to go look. And it’s so difficult in a world where we must value ourselves as others value us. We don’t have an alternative to that. We’re not very good as a species in playing loner. Some people are better than others, but nobody’s perfect at it. And so here we are in a world full of people who need to feel important with a theory of how systems work, a true theory of how [00:53:00] systems work. This is like a unified field theory. It’s a done, done that basically says, most of us, most of the time just need to be carrying on, carrying on. We’re not that important except to the degree that we’re building flexibility for change. Change tricks, not do tricks that sit in our inventory when it’s our turn. 

Corey Frank (00:53:24):

I love that, especially the aspect of being loners. I’m glad you’re not a loner, Chris. Otherwise, this would be the market [00:53:30] dominance guy versus market dominance guys. And so it’s always Chris, we’re going to let you get back to the fetching, miss Ucci and all the stuff that you guys do. The brilliance that you come out of your dinners and your wines and your walks and everything else in the sales world is much better for it. So for the market, Dominus guys and Chris Beal, this is Corey Frank. Until next time. 

Chris Beall (00:53:58):

Alright, Austin, all yours. 

Corey Frank (00:54:00):

[00:54:00] Thank you, Chris. 

Chris Beall (00:54:01):

We’re coming your way. Austin. We’re headed down Thursday. 

Corey Frank (00:54:05):

Oh, there you go. There you go. Great stuff, Chris. As always, I have this meeting with 

Chris Beall (00:54:11):

Sue. I love it. That was so good. That was making my heart go pity, pat. That was really something. 

Corey Frank (00:54:18):

Yeah, trusting and goodness. I mean, because all your people, you think about the skunkworks project, you started how many years ago doing that, just even with Galen, the stuff that you do, right? It’s like he’s not classically trained as a data scientist [00:54:30] and everything. Tom’s a musician for gosh sakes, and yet you trust in goodness. They redeem all things. Nothing is worthless to them. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, in other words. And so, yeah, I love how counter-cultural that is. I wish it was cultural, but unfortunately it still is counter-cultural and 

Chris Beall (00:54:51):

It’ll always be. It’ll always be. And the forces that move in one direction are moving at all times. Otherwise, the stuff [00:55:00] wouldn’t be written thousands of years ago. And still it’d be like, oh yeah, we live in that world. 

Corey Frank (00:55:06):

Yeah. Well, it’s amazing that just even as a sales leader, this stuff is 3000 years old, nearly 3000 years old, and we still haven’t figured out how to manage somebody to their utmost potential. It’s like all this stuff we are talking about idiosyncratic to manage those idiosyncrasies, [00:55:30] what do you call it? Idiosyncrasies of all of us. I mean, that’s marriage, that’s fatherhood. 

Chris Beall (00:55:38):

Well, it turns out that as a matter, of course, I suppose when there’s complexity, when we’re trying to do stuff together, there are almost no short ways. There are profound ways. There are ways that we can understand ’em when we see ’em, but [00:56:00] there’s no short ways. There just aren’t. And yet we have a constant striving for short ways, and we read stuff and we consult and we put something on the wall and we think that’s it. But that’s it. It’s very different from, that’s it in execution. Think of your body. 50 trillion cells have got to collaborate, and they have to collaborate hundreds of thousands of times a second in order just to have you be [00:56:30] an organism and not complain about something. Yeah, right. Exactly. 

Chris Beall (00:56:38):

And we have such odd ideas, these odd hierarchical ideas. I’m reading an old book, 10 years old, not thousands, by this guy, Lipton. It’s called The Biology of Belief, and basically the thesis of the book is pretty simple, which is book, [00:57:00] let’s face it, big organisms like us, 50 trillion cell organisms have some specialization going on with regard to this nervous system that its job first and foremost is tell you when to dock. That’s its real job. You ever have somebody throw a brick at your head, it’ll do its job before you know that it’s done its job, and then you’ll tell yourself a story about how you always saw it coming. In fact, if you’re still there afterwards, you saw it coming a little bit late, but you still [00:57:30] got out of the way, right? Yeah. We have this superpower, which is to control the actions of subsets of these cells right down to inside of them, how they express the genetic material they have as proteins and how those proteins are folded. 

Chris Beall (00:57:49):

And he makes the point, the membrane of a cell is the brain. The D n A is like a recipe book, but the membrane decides what comes in [00:58:00] and what must go out under what circumstances. And that’s the definition of intelligence. What do I accept in and what do I exclude? The thousand things. I exclude the one thing, and is it time to go for stuff, or is it time to protect myself? Wow. What circumstances I find myself in, I’ve got 50 trillion cells right now, and so that are each working on that principle at this moment with little proteins that can fold and unfold a thousand times a second. So to think that we kind [00:58:30] of get it and reduce it to an aphorism on the wall, that aphorism might make us think in a way that is good according to us, which is probably as far as it goes, and according to people that the other organisms that we hang with you and me together and so forth, the influence is not small. We think. It’s not like, oh, it’s a miracle that our subconscious [00:59:00] mind controls the expression of whether we heal from a cut. That’s a miracle. No, that’s actually the only way it could be. Actually wouldn’t work another way. There’s not like, well, your finger is not detached from you. If I cut off my finger, then cut my finger, it doesn’t heal itself. 

Corey Frank (00:59:23):

Yeah, that’s fascinating. It sounds like the next evolution of sapiens, right? After you read Sapiens, you got to read [00:59:30] Lipton. 

Chris Beall (00:59:30):

Yeah. Lipton is kind of a crazy radical guy. He is a molecular, he’s not a molecular biologist, cell biologist in some sense. He’s out there until you really think about it. Then you go, no, actually, this is the most commonplace way to understand things. 

Corey Frank (00:59:48):

Oh, I got to read that. I love 

Chris Beall (00:59:49):

That. And I ask people sometimes to do this thought experiment, which is so, have you ever had a jalapeno pepper? You were bitten into one. [01:00:00] Think of that right now. Did you salivate? 

Corey Frank (01:00:04):

I 

Chris Beall (01:00:04):

Did imagine biting into a jalapeno. Nothing happened. There’s no jalapeno, right? But your salivary glands we’re convinced, completely convinced that you’re biting into one of those things right now. 

Corey Frank (01:00:19):

Yeah, the brick is coming. The proverbial brick is coming duck. 

Chris Beall (01:00:22):

Exactly. So anyway, I’m finding Lipton be desire, really fun to read and meaningful, and [01:00:30] kind of gets me doing different things, which is I think what we need from others is like, get me unstuck a little bit. I find myself repeating myself. 

Corey Frank (01:00:41):

Yeah, no, no, I agree. Chris. No, this is such great stuff. It’s such great stuff. I’m going to send this to Rami and this episode I told him that, hey, you probably got two guys in the States here who probably talk about you more than they should, and so [01:01:00] I’ll send this. So he was interested in that. So I’ll send him this episode here when we post on LinkedIn, et cetera, and see how he responds. But great stuff as always. How’s business otherwise good? 

Chris Beall (01:01:13):

Yeah, I mean it’s, lemme do this. Bye Austin.

 

Corey Frank on LinkedIn

Branch49

Chris Beall on LinkedIn

ConnectAndSell

 

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The guys are back together! Join our master salesmen Corey Frank and Chris Beall as they dive into this discussion on business strategy inspired by a recent event Corey attended featuring Rami Goldratt of the Theory of Constraints Institute. Discussing key concepts like inertia, identifying constraints, and the politics involved, they provide insight for sales managers and CROs looking to break through barriers to growth. Chris explains how constraints manifest on the buyer’s side, in their emotions and feelings of possibility. On the execution side, he advocates building key elements in advance to avoid delays. He and Corey cover divisional vs departmental structure, M&A pitfalls, and more insights. Join them for this episode, “Divisional vs. Departmental – Structure for Sales Innovation.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Corey Frank (00:00:04):

Here we are once again. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank, and of course the Sage of Sales, the prophet of Profit, the Hawking of Hawking, Chris Beal. Chris, it’s been a minute or two since the two of us have been in the same virtual room. How are you? 

Chris Beall (00:00:23):

I’m doing great. We must be like busy little bees out taking our flowers to task and doing our 

Corey Frank (00:00:30):

[00:00:30] Thing. Exactly. We don’t have the time. I wish we did to post prolifically on LinkedIn, but I think you and I both have businesses to run sometimes, so that gets in the way, doesn’t it? 

Chris Beall (00:00:40):

Sad business. Indeed. But you know what? Somebody’s got to do 

Corey Frank (00:00:44):

It. Oh, hey, listen, we depend on the Gerry Hills of the world and the Ryan Reiserts of the world and the Sean Ceases of the world to write so prolifically and so poetically and so elegantly, and then steal their ideas at scale. So [00:01:00] that’s certainly what I do. I speak for myself, of course, but I love their writings in particular and there’s many, many, many more out there. Hey, in the meantime, since the last time we had spoken and met a lot of folks, I know Taylor Swift has been in the news on a concert tour and then the Rolling Stones have had a tour that was kind of going and then interrupted and it’s starting again. And then Ed Sheeran also was recently on tour, [00:01:30] but I think although both of us, we kind of like music, we had a different tour that I figured that I’d share with you, and I sent you my picture, my Taylor Swift, our Taylor Swift, our Mick Jagger, and our Ed Sheeran. And that of course is Rami Goldratt from the Theory of Constraints Institute. He came to town on a special concert tour, and of course I had to drop everything and send you a selfie with a master himself because that’s how we roll, [00:02:00] right? As the other eight listeners on this podcast, I think that’s what we care about is anything and everything with regards to market dominance and certainly the theory constraints plays a big part of that, doesn’t it, Chris? 

Chris Beall (00:02:11):

Oh yeah. I mean the whole market dominance concept is built on the theory of constraints. As you know, I have a disciple of fanatic, and the trick with these things is they give you a framework to think, but you still need to think and you still need to do experiments, and you also need to look into your own mind and your heart and say, [00:02:30] am I looking at this objectively or am I playing mind games with myself? So that’s what makes it so interesting. 

Corey Frank (00:02:38):

It does. It crosses, although as you had educated me all those 10 plus years ago on Eli Gold Rat and that it was meant originally for the manufacturing space, I think what we’ve done here on the market dominance guys, certainly with your tutelage, is open up the minds of so many sales professionals like myself [00:03:00] that this transcends the manufacturing space into what we do in running sales organizations. Correct? 

Chris Beall (00:03:07):

To me, sales is actually manufacturing. I mean, we’re manufacturing the opportunity to solve a problem and supposedly we’ve come with a potential solution. Somebody has a problem that we could potentially help them with, but manufacturing that opportunity to solve a problem and to do it in a way that works for everybody. The other constraint, if you’re going to do it over and over, [00:03:30] it’s got to work for everybody. I mean, some folks in sales have been known to wear out their welcome a little bit here and there, but that’s not sort of the ultimate game. So yeah, I’m a manufacturing oriented guy. I used to build manufacturing systems and software and spend a lot of time on factory floors and out in distribution centers, and when you make it physical, it gets real. That’s one of the interesting things about the whole world of software is as soon as you make it physical, it gets very, very real. [00:04:00] And as you know, I’m married to Helen Ucci, who herself started her career as a manufacturing engineer. She’s a M I T trained mechanical engineer. So you can imagine around our house on a Saturday morning when we’re talking shop, it’s pretty good if everybody else just stays home and NAS on a bagel. 

Corey Frank (00:04:20):

Absolutely. Oh, for sure. Well, that’s what I think we want to talk about here. If I could indulge you and indulge again our eight listeners here on diving a little deep, I want to [00:04:30] throw out a couple of observations from the two and a half hours that I was privileged to spend with ROI Goldratt and get your reaction. I was giving you a little bit of play byplay afterwards and certainly sent you some pictures, but I’d like if I could just kind of get some reaction and of course to level set the audience for some of the folks that haven’t listened to probably about half our podcast. We talk in one form or another about the theory of constraints and business innovation. And one of the things that [00:05:00] Rami does to set to level set everybody is that if you look at your business as a whole and understand what governs the flow and constrains the business growth, that’s how you should think about what we’re about talk about here in the next few minutes with Chris Beal. So Chris, what Rami says and what Eli stated in the goal in the other books is that typically there’s one or [00:05:30] two constraints, and I think you just hit one when you’re talking about the development of software, he says that there’s one generally constraint in the creation of value, and then there’s another typical constraint in the execution of its delivery. 

Corey Frank (00:05:45):

So the creation of value and the execution of delivery. And obviously part of it is focusing on elevating these constraints because these are those leverage points that help the business. But what do you say with [00:06:00] that in a sales world when you talk about would you agree with that in the creation of value and then in the creation of its delivery? And how would you square that circle for us in sales when it comes to those two constraints that we’re faced with pretty often? 

Chris Beall (00:06:17):

Yeah, it’s so fascinating. I look at it from the buyer’s side. And so where is the value going to be created in a relevant way in sales? It’s actually inside the buyer’s body, it’s [00:06:30] inside their emotions. And so if the buyer responds to what the salesperson is saying to them, and it’s generally saying that does it, we don’t do a lot else. We don’t take dance for them and we don’t give ’em a massage and we don’t do any of these other things that we might consider doing. We’re pretty much in the saying business when it comes to sales, fortunately saying is enough to get some motion in that other person’s body, but for the buyer, [00:07:00] the value shows up in what is really a feeling of possibilities, a feeling that, hey, this could go in a direction that’s worth taking another step. And that’s really interesting because sales is all about management of uncertainty. 

Chris Beall (00:07:17):

And when we’re in a theory of constraints world, there’s this big question which is, well, where’s the bottleneck? Right? Where’s the constraint? And the answer as we start in a sales relationship from the buy side is, [00:07:30] I don’t know, it’s your job as the salesperson to guide me toward my constraint so that I have a feeling about it that includes the following. Oh yes, there it is, and we can do something about it. We can do something about it. And maybe it’s just, I can do something about it. Thanks for educating me, but we can do something. When it comes to delivery, what’s the equivalent of delivery and sales? So the value is created inside me as a buyer, and [00:08:00] it’s an emotional state. It doesn’t have a lot of intellectual qualities to it. I just feel like here’s somebody who seems to be an expert and they seem to be on my side. 

Chris Beall (00:08:10):

And we know from Oren’s work, the stuff that happens within a pitch helps the buyer to get to the point of saying, yeah, this is an expert and they’re on my side with the flash roll establishes you as an expert and the kind of offer, the fact that you can help that person, show them how to get through [00:08:30] the buying process because you understand it well, that shows you’re on their side, you’re going to show them sort of the easy way, but then you actually have to do it. And I think a lot of sales folks can talk that game that gets somebody to feel right, but as the steps start to be executed, then the question is, well, we still don’t know where the constraint is because a sale is, this is where manufacturing breaks down as an analogy. [00:09:00] So Gold Wrap wrote a very, very good book that I think that most folks don’t dive into very far. 

Chris Beall (00:09:09):

So everybody’s into the manufacturing analogy. I love the book Critical Chain, critical about projects, and it basically says this, I’m going to paraphrase it badly. Go read the book, don’t listen to me now, go read the book and don’t listen to me. But having stuck around this long, you’re listening to me. So listen to me, and this sounds a little [00:09:30] obstru, but just bear with me. The constraint on a project according to Gold Rat is the critical path of the project itself. So you lay out the steps and the critical path is like, this got to happen and this got to happen, this got to happen, this has got to happen, or you don’t get there. So actually in a sense, there’s that tie between the critical path and strategy in a business. Strategy is a set of steps that if we take a step, it reduces the cost and the risk of taking the next step [00:10:00] that gets us closer to our goal kind of sounds like a project we complete part of the project, it gets us closer to with regard to risk and cost the next step, which gets us to the next and the next and the next. 

Chris Beall (00:10:13):

One of the things that is so interesting to me and utterly ignored by most folks in sales, and yet it makes or breaks almost every deal is the feeders. So the critical path is what you must manage, and one of the [00:10:30] ways you manage it is you pre-build the inventory that it needs to consume. So say you have a contract that you’re going to have to get to at some point, a really smart thing to do is to pre-build everything about that contract, including the specifics you’re learning along the way. So when you get to that point, the cycle time between, Hey, we need this contract to move forward in a physical form, it might be a DocuSign, it may be a Word document or whatever, [00:11:00] but we need it. Oh, do we have to go make it? Now that introduces cycle time and brings Murphy into play. 

Chris Beall (00:11:08):

Murphy’s law is going to always prevail over time. And the critical chain, we’re told, Hey, take the last entire third of the project and just make a buffer. Don’t buffer the individual steps buffer the entire last third of the project because Murphy’s going to show up. But the way we fight Murphy is to pre-provision the feeders [00:11:30] and a contract’s, an example, a demo schedule as an example, having a resource that you’ve pre briefed rather than briefing them at the last second so they can help on a deal as an example. And I think great salespeople know how to manage the feeders that are coming into the critical path while they personally manage the critical path itself. We often just say to salespeople, get a next step, get a next step. But what if the next step requires something that comes in from the side? [00:12:00] Did we have it staged? Is it ready to go? So that’s the execution part to me. 

Corey Frank (00:12:07):

No, I love that. One of the quotes that Rami put up for his father is a great value does not sell itself. And when you look at the steps that you just outlined here, how many times have we spoken about the product folks? We’ll build something that they think is ready for the market, throw it over the fence [00:12:30] to the sales organization and the sales leaders get frustrated at the sales reps because they overhired to account for the quota that they need to hit on their spreadsheet to deliver to their board. And so I’m managing by a spreadsheet and say, Hey, I have five reps. I’m over spreading the quota, so really all I need is three of ’em to hit 80% and I should hit my number. And then when all of ’em hit 40 or 50%, then they start to panic and then they say, wait a minute, this product [00:13:00] is good enough to sell itself. 

Corey Frank (00:13:02):

And I think part of the realization, certainly from talking with you all these years is that quote from Proust, I think it is, he says, the real voyage of discovery consists in not in seeking new boundaries or new landscapes, but in having new eyes. And when you can go into an organization and not seek new landscape and boundaries, [00:13:30] but just have a fresh set of eyes on this and math of sales, breaking it down to the ludicrous conversation, conversion rate, demos per hour, right? The epiphany that all these things we’ve talked about all over these years is those are new innovations, if you will, in our space, in our sales space just by having new eyes. 

Chris Beall (00:13:53):

Yeah. Well, novelty is a very inexpensive way to get option value, novelty of perception [00:14:00] of somebody else’s point of view. You don’t have to do much. It operates in parallel and everyone has an opinion, so they give it to you very inexpensively, unless they’re an expensive consultant. Some people come in, they give you the really great stuff. I’ll never forget being in a room where Jeffrey Moore walked in and gave us the most valuable two days of consulting, which boiled down to this, you guys are not across the chasm. You’re a pre chasm company. Your product is pre chasm, adopt a pre [00:14:30] chasm strategy. Now, he could have just said that that would’ve been straightforward, but it had to be a new set of eyes that were opened in us. Our eyes had to become new. That’s what great consultants do, great teachers is they give you new eyes. And we could tell we had new eyes. We started having arguments about stuff we didn’t argue about before we had disagreements about the non-obvious. 

Corey Frank (00:14:55):

Well, let’s talk about that because I think this is one that you’ve certainly [00:15:00] waxed on many times and that is dear to the folks in the theory constraints is the concept of inertia. So I want to get a couple of riffs from you on inertia and that in business we sometimes oftentimes too, oftentimes act in the same way even when we need to change. And we’re caught in this inertia. And you had said something very wise to me several times, is that the [00:15:30] best breakthroughs happen when you are stuck, 

Corey Frank (00:15:35):

But yet you talk about Jeffrey Moore coming in and this new fresh out of eyes. But what do you have to say when certainly a lot of the businesses that you deal with that call you in, they’re arguably at a state of inertia. They need a force to act upon them, to get them in motion oftentimes, and they’re out of novelty. They have no more novelty left in the [00:16:00] tank to create the illusion of motion, and they’re stuck with their board and their numbers. So what do you do in those situations? And do you agree that a lot of businesses that are in this state of sales, they’re going to hire more sales folks or they’re going to do all these other things, but in essence they’re really at the state of inertia? 

Chris Beall (00:16:19):

Yeah, inertia is stuck, I think are really related to each other because when we’re, first of all, just to remind anybody who didn’t catch whatever episode we talked about, the three states [00:16:30] one can be in companies are in these states often, which is you’re either in flow, which is rare or wonderful and just stay there or you are stuck, which is the hardest one to recognize. You’re stuck. That means you need to learn something to move forward. You don’t need to do something to move forward. Now, you might need to do something to learn something, but your issue is lack of knowledge. You don’t know what to do. And then there’s the last one, which is waiting. Waiting [00:17:00] is very rare. Waiting is actually what critical chain is about, is don’t put in a state where you’re waiting. If you could have avoided waiting by building a feeder that is staged early, the problem with being stuck as a social problem, and it’s a problem of recognizing that it’s time to put your self-image aside just a little bit, and the need to be seen as all knowing and admit that you’re not knowing [00:17:30] because this is the obvious problem of being stuck in. 

Chris Beall (00:17:34):

And the problem of inertia come down to the same thing. Why do we have inertia? Well, we repeat what isn’t working because at least we’re acting knowledgeably. We’re acting like we know what’s going on, and our reputation is worth way more to us than any results. There is nobody in business except for maybe Elon Musk who says, reputation be damned. I’m just going for it. Right? That’s [00:18:00] actually the characteristic of these people who produce these astonishing things. The Steve Jobs is the Warren Buffets, right? Do you think Warren Buffet cares about his reputation compared to just making great investments? He writes that brilliant letter every year that looks like he cares about his reputation, but in fact, it’s a means for him not to have to care about his reputation because he’s basically laying out transparently how he thinks. And his reputation, therefore, is of somebody who lays [00:18:30] out transparently how he thinks, and you can trust him. 

Chris Beall (00:18:33):

And therefore, if you want to buy a share of stock, which is now worth, God knows how much in his company, well, you can go ahead and do that. And by the way, he’s not waiting for you to do it. He’s fine if you don’t. So those two are really together. I think the main role of somebody from the outside and only somebody from the outside can do this, by the way, no man is a prophet in his own country. The job of a consultant is to come in [00:19:00] and allow the team to recognize, especially their leader, to recognize we’re stuck. And that’s okay. So the first thing the consultant really ultimately does is says, look, getting stuck like this in whatever language they use for it is pretty much inevitable. It would be weird to be in flow forever, and it would be strange to be waiting and not doing anything. 

Chris Beall (00:19:23):

So you’re doing the same thing over and over. It feels like progress, but you note the numbers say it’s not progress, [00:19:30] and you’re tired of telling yourself stories about how it’s progress when it’s not progress. And so you’re stuck. And now let’s step back, get a little bit of slack, and in that slack we’ll do something that corresponds to learning. Now, one of the problems with different kinds of companies is like our company, we’re bootstrapped. So a bootstrap company like connect and sell never feels stuck because every day [00:20:00] you’re off selling for two purposes. One is the simple-minded purpose, I’ll call it the banana stand purpose, got to sell enough bananas to keep the lights on or keep the permit. It allows us to stand here on the corner and sell bananas. We have to pay the tax. We have to, I don’t know, pay the protection money, whatever it happens to be. 

Chris Beall (00:20:23):

The other one is, but wait, we’re going somewhere. We’re going somewhere. And that’s [00:20:30] the reason the bootstrap companies are so difficult and also so admired when they pull it off is how do you go somewhere when you’re also just trying to keep the wheels on the bus? That’s a tricky thing. And it comes down to just recognizing you’re stuck faster. There has to be an element of what feels like a little chaos at the edge, which is really the exploration of your stuckness to get you out. You can’t hire a consultant every time you’re stuck. Love to 

Corey Frank (00:20:59):

Steve [00:21:00] Jobs. One of the quotes that Romy talked about is Steve Jobs says innovation is saying no to a thousand things. 

Corey Frank (00:21:09):

And these bootstrap companies like you and I and have had, and I think all of your companies and all my companies have been relatively bootstrapped. Occasionally, if you get vc, you just spend it like drunken sailors and high mountain blueberries and Brazilian te Quin tables and all the necessities of life. So you think, [00:21:30] but you talk about this innovation, Chris, that companies have go through, especially as banana stand companies, where you have this expansion and you have this convergent knowing when to do this and knowing when to do that. How do you still focus on knowing which limitation, which constraint is the one that’s holding your business back a lot of noise. You still have to hit payroll, you got to hit [00:22:00] your cash number, you got to still grow. And you as, again, any devotee of this podcast knows is that if you’re a c e O and you’re still not selling, that’s a problem at least several times a week on the phones. So how do you balance all that knowing that job says it’s saying no to a thousand things. There’s a constraint. You know, want to kind of exhaust the novelty factor your pre chasm. How do I innovate to determine what is my guiding true north to know [00:22:30] that I’m on the right path? 

Chris Beall (00:22:32):

It’s a tough one. I think the main thing that we need to do, if we want to innovate, we have to innovate. We have to innovate just means doing new stuff that makes a difference. So if we just keep doing the old stuff, our issue is not that the old stuff will stop working. Our issue is that somebody else will figure out the new stuff. And in modern markets, unless you have physical control over your market, I sell hot dogs in Northeast Anchorage [00:23:00] on Tuesday afternoons maybe, but somebody will come along and go hotdog and brats. Oh, brats beer. So those are innovations in that kind of business, and it’s difficult to control markets, and this whole program is about controlling markets. So if you don’t innovate, your real issue is somebody will, and when they do, they’ll do something that you will retreat from. 

Chris Beall (00:23:28):

This is the whole innovator’s [00:23:30] dilemma problem. That is if you’re first, you’re the innovators, the innovator. I think it’s funny, I probably said this before, folks read Clayton Christensen’s book, the Late Great Clayton Christensen wrote a book, the Innovator’s Dilemma, and then some others that were the solution and so forth, and they think, oh yeah, the new guy’s the innovator. That book is about you are the first guy, you’re the innovator, and now you’re going to be attacked by a disruptor. So if you’re first, [00:24:00] we were first in this industry with the push a button, talk to somebody thing, we are ripe for disruption because whatever we’re doing is whatever we’re doing is more than is required because we had to do things and do other things to do other things. And they accrete, you don’t throw away very fast. So jobs used to throw things away with a certain ferocity, I would say, and that’s when he rejoined Apple. Somebody said, well, what’s going to happen? [00:24:30] I said, A whole lot less is going to happen than you think and one new thing’s going to happen. You didn’t think of. Yeah, 

Corey Frank (00:24:35):

Get rid of open docs. One of the famous decisions at Apple is getting rid of the open docs and how disruptive that was when he came back. 

Chris Beall (00:24:44):

The fact is there’s a reason the theory of constraints itself is hard to apply in business, and it’s because it’s exactly this thing about the thousand things. Your business has one constraint, one a system, and systems can only have one constraint. [00:25:00] This is what everybody hates about the theory of constraints. They hate it viscerally. It says this, everybody else has got to keep on keeping on. While, by the way, if you’re really clever, very inexpensively building some inventory of things you know how to do, should it be your turn? Should you become your organization? What you do becomes the constraint. So you have this preparatory work to do that has no payoff whatsoever. Now, [00:25:30] if you were to apply it, it doesn’t move the needle because you’re not the constraint. So you’re suddenly politically impotent hunt because you’re not the constraint. And a wise company finds the constraint, characterizes the constraint, understands it’s cycle time, it’s throughput, it’s quality, figures out how to invest in it, what the investment would yield, does an experiment to find out if that’s in fact true and then goes and makes the investment widens, the constraint flow goes through and the constraint moves one way or the other. 

Chris Beall (00:25:59):

It moves downstream [00:26:00] because they can’t handle it down there or moves upstream because it sucks down in all the inventory that you had that you thought was so great and now you’re out of inputs. Right? Okay, so they’re doing that. Who likes it? Who does it make look good? 

Chris Beall (00:26:18):

Well, if you’re under the microscope, at least you’re getting attention. Yes. If you’re not, you’re feeling neglect. And the politics of attention and neglect are highly asymmetric in [00:26:30] a company with regard to folks feeling about their own future. Therefore, the theory of constraints always is rolling a rock up a hill, up a hill of influence, politics, and how hard is it to sabotage the notion that there’s only one constraint? So the standard fight against the theory of constraints in sales or in business is this, no, no, no. There’s many constraints. Well, mathematically, there can only be one [00:27:00] in some curve, somewhere. There is one minimum. I mean, trust me, it may be a little difference, but there’s one, and folks hate it. They hate it. It makes them feel insignificant unless they are at the point of constraint, at which point they feel under too much pressure. 

Corey Frank (00:27:20):

Really? That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. So that’s the political ramifications, that’s the political reality, the [00:27:30] psycho reality of identifying a constraint. It’s difficult to identify it enough on a spreadsheet, but now that you have these personalities, right, department heads, marketing production, product delivery, finance capital, whatever it is, that makes it even more of a political landmine, which probably makes it easier for an outside consultant to navigate that versus doing it internally. 

Chris Beall (00:28:00):

[00:28:00] Exactly. And one of the structural ways to address this is divisionalized instead of departmentalized. So we seek leverage in departmentalization, this department’s going to take care of this function. Well, one of the problems with that is now you only have one thing in the company to work at, which is whatever the constraint is, it’s now in one department, if you divisionalized and accept the inefficiency [00:28:30] of having some replication of function, you have a joy that shows up incredible power. You get two constraints. It’s not one system, it’s two systems. Divisions operate sufficiently independently that each one gets to act like its own company. And if it has a supplier upstream called the corporation or downstream called the corporation that it buys on transfer prices or whatever, then well, that’s its problem. It’s not the [00:29:00] corporation’s problem. So you end up with this very interesting situation, and there are extremist companies in this regard. 

Chris Beall (00:29:07):

Thermo Electron is one of ’em. Three M is one of them companies that basically said, we’re going to divisionalized at such a fine level that we’re just going to absorb the inefficiency through the power of what is essentially an odd thing on the balance sheet, which is the power of innovation. And we’re going to just have faith [00:29:30] that the innovation is going to sparkle here and there sufficiently that it’s going to allow us to be a little less efficient when we seek efficiency. We drive multiple systems down to one system. If you and I decide, oh, we’re not going to do this podcast anymore like this. What we’re going to do is the podcast where we both get together and agree about everything about the podcast, that it’s podcast core from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, we only have one constraint in the podcast at that point. 

Chris Beall (00:30:00):

[00:30:00] We better agree on it. And if it makes you feel unimportant or me feel unimportant, or Susan or Austin or whoever, you got a problem. So we have a pipeline where we come in independently, we talk, each one of us gets talk as much as we want, although I talk more than you do, Austin does. His thing is, as long as a podcast shows up, a recording shows up, there’s work to do. And that’s interesting because that [00:30:30] allows his and Susan’s business to move to turn the crank that one time. That’s a key input and the thing kind of works, right? So there’s a tendency, and this happens in m and a. So in m and a, the big mistake that folks make now in m and a is to consolidate the C R M systems. It’s the standard error. It’s like the standard model in physics has all these funny particles and all this. 

Chris Beall (00:30:57):

The standard error in mergers and [00:31:00] acquisitions is this, well, since our thesis is we’re going to cross-sell two kinds of m and a, but one of them tends to involve cross-sell, right? One of ’em is tuck-ins, and you just get market from buying customers. And the other is the cross-sell thesis. So in the cross-sell thesis, which is the power thesis, we go, oh, we’re cross-sell this company, we buy its products are going to be sold to our big base and vice versa. Isn’t that great? [00:31:30] Well, we better consolidate our CRMs because until we do that, we have the same customer representative, multiple CRMs. Well, as soon as you consolidate your CRMs, what you tend to do is to create a situation first after a lot of time and expense that yields nothing. You create a situation where you’re now bottlenecked somewhere inside that C R m and nobody knows how that works, and it’s no longer allowed to change. 

Chris Beall (00:31:59):

It [00:32:00] was so hard to get it to where you wanted to get it. That’s where the sunk cost investment issues. So the gamblers paradox or fallacy or whatever you want to call it, tend to come in. It’s like we put so much into that, we can’t change it for sure. So it’s a huge mistake when you buy a company. One thing you should never do is consolidate the C R m, let the C R M stay with that company, figure out cross-sell through a friendly relationship between now two companies that happen [00:32:30] to be together and by the way, be prepared to pay compensation to multiple salespeople. Or before you had one, that’s the tax you’re going to get ready to pay it. 

Corey Frank (00:32:41):

One plus one equals one or one plus one equals three, or one plus one equals 11, right? Those are exactly 

Chris Beall (00:32:46):

Really 

Corey Frank (00:32:47):

The alternatives when you do that. Yeah, that’s fascinating. 

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Corey Frank continues his interview with Susan Finch as they talk about perfecting your craft and the importance of a supportive and evaluative community in the journey. This leads to an insightful discussion that draws parallels between renowned comedians and training sales professionals. Corey uses the example of comedians like Jim Gaffigan, Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld testing new material in heartland towns to underscore the significance of knowing your audience and how practicing your craft in smaller venues can sometimes offer more genuine feedback than large, more famous platforms. 

Listen in as Corey recounts the story of hotdog-eating champion Kobayashi, drawing lessons on questioning the conventional and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. They emphasize the power of not just aiming for more but seeking ways to make the process more efficient. Join them if you’re keen on exploring the intricacies of the sales profession, the art of feedback, and the significance of pushing boundaries in this episode, “Making Seinfeld Laugh: The Sales Professional’s Aim.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Susan Finch (00:00):

When you were saying about dressing, my mom taught me when I was a child. I mean, she did not leave the house without makeup and dress to the nines, but that was a different era. But that’s how I was raised. I do not go to my kitchen table without teeth, brush, makeup on, dressed ready to go. And I had one bad experience where I was seen on C N N in a bucket hat in the rain, and I will never do that again and leave my house without being presentable. It was a parade, but still 

Corey Frank (00:30):

[00:00:30] Camera ready. 

Susan Finch (00:30):

It did not look good. But it’s also out of respect when your team shows up that way, they’re respecting each other and they are saying, our business that I have an effect on that affects your bottom line, Joe, Bob, Gina, I’m going to show you that respect that I’m here for you too, and I will show up because we are all in it. And I want your clients to know that I respect you, and they can see that even if I’m just walking around the background on a call, [00:01:00] they can see that everybody has that same mindset of respect for each other, respect for the brand, respect for the client. And it puts us, I don’t know if you remember when I was in school and we had school dances and stuff, we love the formal themes best. I was in leadership because everybody behaved better than when they dressed up as babies or animals or whatever. It was some crazy hair day for spirit week. But when they dressed formally, [00:01:30] they all behaved better. 

Corey Frank (01:36):

I do remember that. And I guess I didn’t see the correlation back then, but yeah, we had dress up day versus dress down day or Hawaiian shirt day. Right, right. That is interesting. Yeah, I like that analogy a lot. I think it’s probably a little outdated in our sales world today. A lot of the clients that we have when we show up on the call immediately, they apologize for not dressing apart, not putting [00:02:00] a tie up, putting a jacket on, et cetera, which is interesting. And we use that as indicative of, okay, folks want to rise to a higher level. And we encourage folks to turn on their camera when we’re talking and it says, Hey, unless you believe that the camera somehow steals a portion of your soul, if you put it online, turn on your camera and let’s have a conversation. The screenplays that we present, which ties into a little bit what you’re saying too, because it’s all about authenticity. 

Corey Frank (02:26):

It’s all about presenting yourself. And what Chris and I talk about all the time is the [00:02:30] building, the power of trust in seven seconds or 27 seconds and the replays that we use, we try to incorporate a number of verbal disfluencies, s and ums. Think of the way Ellen DeGeneres talks this way. Bob Newhart certainly made a career of having the stammer. And we believe that Nicole call that it’s not a TED talk, it’s not a Toastmasters event. This is a serendipitously created Kramer like engagement. I barged [00:03:00] in and I’m a stranger. I’m the invisible stranger. You may be fearful. And if I start becoming a silver tongue devil and no ahs and ums and come off very strongly in spite of what my product may be, you’re not necessarily going to get the conversions. So part of our approach is that we look the part, but we’re going to come in very softly, but also very confidently. 

Corey Frank (03:27):

And we want this to feel like this is the first [00:03:30] and only call I made today, not the 150 second dial in conversation I’ve had today where folks will lose trust. The analogy we give Susan is the first time you see a superhero movie, maybe early on when you’re a kid, you saw maybe I could see the strings holding Superman up. It was terrible, c g i, but at that age you didn’t care because we had no c g I, and it helped create the illusion that Superman could actually fly. Now you look [00:04:00] at the Marvel movies today and the green screen and it’s seamless. And then you see behind the scenes where these folks really have to act because there isn’t this big universe and spaceships around and they’re just acting pantomime in front of a green or a blue screen. But you always had the kid that say, I know how they did that. 

Corey Frank (04:19):

Think of the magician. Oh, it’s up your sleeve. Oh wait, hang on a minute. It’s in the hat. And when you’re a sales professional, especially a newer sales professional, and you don’t have the care and feeding [00:04:30] of your voice and your intonation, your inflections and your modulation, the prospect has a diminished illusion of what’s happening as if they can see the strings. And so this whole illusion that you have comes tumbling down because people don’t talk without s and ums and hers when you’re meeting somebody in a bar, you’re meeting somebody serendipitously sitting next to you in an airline seat at a restaurant waiting at a train stop. And so we try to embrace that as a philosophy. And so for a lot of folks, again, it’s [00:05:00] antithetical to how they assume is that you have to be crisp and polished. But as both have a religious tradition, and one of my old priest said, never trust a man who doesn’t walk around with a little bit of a limp, is that if you don’t walk around with a little bit of a limp, no one’s that polished. 

Corey Frank (05:17):

That’s why the problem with the TikTok world, the Instagram world, right? So you’re tough to trust those folks and in a pitch, if you don’t have some Ss and ums and Ss, you too are also going to stumble a little bit. So what are your thoughts on that? You pride [00:05:30] yourself on being a particular communicator and a brand ambassador? So is that off base a little bit When I think of cold calling versus approaching someone like you, a c e O of a successful company as a marketing thought leader, if I came off with more ahs and ums and EHRs throughout the presentation, 

Susan Finch (05:49):

It’s an interesting thing because I’m also coming from an editor’s perspective and where video and in-person is so different than straight audio. So straight audio [00:06:00] because the expressions are not there. And the process in your eyes when you’re looking to the left or the right to search for the answer, to grab it, to create it. If you can’t see that, will I edit out most of that? Yes, A lot of it for that reason, just to be respectful of the listener in person. I agree. I mean, I do those things because I am searching and I’m spontaneous. I’m not coming to you with a script. I’m letting the conversation flow and that natural flow [00:06:30] will include for me, it’ll include some pauses like that because I’m looking for it. But I was raised by a father who presented and he taught us not to do the, like you knows the avoid the ums when you can, but was the biggest thing, lose the likes, lose your nose. 

Susan Finch (06:59):

No, I don’t know. I [00:07:00] don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? So I had some habits broken when I was quite young and they slip in when I get tired or something, but in a real conversation I get excited. And so I start with my and thens because I’m vibrating with excitement to be able to share an idea, and I’m trying to keep my mouth shut so I don’t miss what you’re saying. And so yes, I agree with the naturalness of that. I also though don’t have a huge [00:07:30] appreciation when I can tell that it is also put on, and maybe I’m just hypersensitive to things, but I can tell 

Corey Frank (07:38):

When you see the lines, when you see Superman pulled up by the cables, I see the cables, I see the rabbit up your sleeve, the whole illusion comes tumbling down. 

Susan Finch (07:46):

It does. So it’s from both ends though, from the ultra polished and from the, let me make it seem ultra casual and spontaneous. Either one can betray you and can diminish trust. 

Corey Frank (07:59):

Yeah, [00:08:00] yeah, for sure, for sure. That’s why we screenplay it in. We actually will have a screenplay where it will insert to say the ah and the do your nose and make senses and those amateur hour kind of trial closes. You’re absolutely right. Those are very hurtful to the overall illusion that you’re trying to build up. There’s certain points that it’s a straight road with no bumps, and there’s certain parts of the screenplay that are 10 miles an hour doing a European [00:08:30] turn. And that’s where you need to lean on a lot of the S and erms and Rs. And so we track this certainly the effectiveness of the conversation conversion rate, and we see it. And we’ve had a couple of linguistics professors who’ve commented on some of the things I’ve posted on LinkedIn that are fascinated by the fact that you can use this in sales communication, the power of of the introvert. 

Corey Frank (08:53):

Chris and I had a couple of episodes on that where we talked about how introverts make the best sales folks. And one of the [00:09:00] common traits of introverts is that I struggle sometimes putting together a sentence that is as streamlined as it should be. And a lot of introverts struggle with that. So if you scream to play that in that it’s okay to act, be like an introvert here, and then it’s okay to be on a straight line where it’s okay to go 60 miles an hour. That’s what keeps the engagement levels high, particularly out of a cold call that Chris’s big advocate certainly of [00:09:30] tone on this as well, the Triton resonance, tri tonal close. So those are the things, the basic building blocks as we started off our conversation, Susan, where we can take somebody who’s right off the boat, somebody who’s new to sales, maybe an introvert, never thought they would be interested in sales, and start with the inside and then work your way out. 

Corey Frank (09:51):

What do you want to do? What’s your personal legend? How should you act towards the world? It’s the Jira way of can you fall in love with your craft? Can [00:10:00] you truly say that there’s honor and dignity? As Martin Luther King said, if you’re destined to be a street sweeper, be the best street sweeper you can be. If you’re destined to be in a B D R or sales or sales leadership or data management or rev ops, et cetera, then fall in love with what it is that you do. And I think that there’s too many folks who are just in the next thing versus trying to master the craft of what they’re doing today. That’s very zen, that’s very introspective. And again, that’s probably not real popular as well. 

Susan Finch (10:30):

[00:10:30] Well, I find the best salespeople, I talked to you earlier about when we kicked this episode off about the tools and things. Not one tool have you mentioned is something that you purchase. It’s all things you learn to do. They’re all craft building items that you physically have to put the work in to learn and work through it and practice and practice. And you cited Toastmasters. And a big thing at Toastmasters is pace and varying your pace. And what you were talking about is [00:11:00] precisely that because it can get dull when people have that same pace. I lose interest, wake me up again, get me back on track to hear what you’re saying because you might have something really helpful for me, but I zoned out because you have that same tone, that same pace, and there’s nothing jarring to make me, what’s that? To spark my curiosity as the prospect. 

Corey Frank (11:24):

I think a lot of that though, Susan, is that when folks are getting cold called, or even during a discovery pitch, they’re trying to figure you out [00:11:30] as well, is just like when you walk into a room and maybe your spouse is watching a movie on Netflix and you’re not quite sure you join maybe five, 10 minutes afterwards, you don’t want to interrupt. So you’re trying to figure out is this a comedy? Is this a romance? Is this an action movie? Is this a documentary? You’re going through that. And a lot of folks who join cold calls or discovery calls, they’re also saying, okay, this person who’s pitching me, is this somebody I want to be close to? Is somebody I want to learn more about? Is this somebody who I see as [00:12:00] an authority? Is this somebody who has more status? Can I predict what they’re going to say? 

Corey Frank (12:04):

Is this somebody I can learn new vocabulary words for? All of that I think goes into that soup to help with the status and the trust. And if you’re not cognizant of that, if you’re just going through your 48 slides without any performance art associated with it, without any Scorsese director’s notes by, Hey, at this point, break the fourth wall and look at the camera, the office, Michael Scott [00:12:30] kind of stuff. That’s all effortlessly seen by us as the consumers of that content. But Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant and all the people associated with a show like that, they were very meticulous about camera angles, directions for the actors, correct. And yet, for a lot of us in sales, we don’t do that. And we just say, here’s what you should say, and then here’s your list. And then I’ll see at the end of the month when I’ll decide to put you on a pip [00:13:00] or not. And so you lose the fun aspect of the performance art when you don’t help guide people that that’s how they can master their craft is by realizing that whether you like it or not, you’re being judged on that aspect of your performance. 

Susan Finch (13:15):

Yes, definitely. Oh man. 

Corey Frank (13:19):

And I think that helps keep newer folks engaged that you’re performing for everybody else. The example we give is that if, I dunno if you like comedians. Let’s say you had Jim [00:13:30] Gaffigan, let’s say you had Chris Rock and let’s, you had Jerry Seinfeld and he had the three of them go on tour and they’re testing new material out and they’re going to Ottumwa Iowa and they’re going to Dubuque and they’re going to La Crosse, Wisconsin, and they’re going into Minnetonka, Minnesota. They’re not going to New York practicing the material. And let’s say Jim Gaffigan gets on stage first and Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld are in the back at the bar sitting, drinking a beer, watching their buddy [00:14:00] go on stage in front of 28 people on a Tuesday night. And a question we gave to the folks, to the sales team here when we’re doing our training program is who is Jim Gaffigan performing to? 

Corey Frank (14:14):

A lot of folks will say, well, he’s performing to the 28 people and that audience on a Tuesday night. I said, no, because what do they know about comedy? Nothing. But if I can make Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld laugh from one of my bits or one of my [00:14:30] riffs, now I got something. Now I got something that’s a nugget, a gold nugget here that I’m going to use in my next H B O special or when I’m doing live at the Hollywood Bowl. And so I think as a sales professional, when we had mentioned before on air, how can folks work from home in this profession? 

Corey Frank (14:51):

I need to know in a mosh pit here, if I’m performing something, did it make my jury Seinfeld or my Chris Rock laugh in my audience here? The prospects, [00:15:00] what do they know? I got thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Some of them don’t think I’m funny. Some of them will never think I’m funny. They’re going to comedy show. They don’t laugh. So I think if you’re conscious of that, of who is your audience, it’s not necessarily the prospect. Your audience are the other connoisseurs of your craft. And if they’re at a high level know their personal legend, have their goals are well-read, take notes, try to diminish and diminish and diminish before they grow, are very candid, very honest [00:15:30] with giving you the protector like feedback that you’re so good at. That’s the alchemy right there. That puts the soup at a high plateau. So again, but that’s how we run our shops here. 

Susan Finch (15:43):

But it’s also though human nature and ingrained in us as a species that we are better when we are answerable to a community, when there is somebody to not only support us, but to evaluate us, to lift us, to teach [00:16:00] us, to usher us through, to show us an example when we have to account for ourselves and our performance and everything else to our community. So for you, it’s your mosh pit there and they can all hear each other and it’s like, and maybe three of ’em go, dude, no, let’s try and redo that one. Let’s talk about that or how’d you feel about that? But because that community, as we talked about with the protector thing, they all [00:16:30] have the same goal though, for you to succeed, for us to succeed as a group for the benefit of the clients that will trust us and do more with us because we have done better by them. 

Corey Frank (16:46):

Yeah, for sure. I think it’s the old axiom. It’s by the work one knows the workman. 

Susan Finch (16:53):

Yes. 

Corey Frank (16:53):

And every aspect of the email with the right grammar, with the right tonality, [00:17:00] with the right follow-up, with maybe even again, the professional Look, my laundry isn’t in the background. My feet aren’t up at the desk by good posture. All that matters. I don’t think any one thing will diminish the sale. But there’s a series of these things that will certainly tear it down. And one of the stories, I think we told this on a recent podcast, Susan, is with the story of Kochi hot chapter and the autumn, was it 20-plus years ago. [00:17:30] And he lived, his girlfriend entered him into a competition. They couldn’t afford their rent, their electricity. And so she signed him up for a contest that paid $5,000 to the winner of this eating contest. And Kobe was five eight, a hundred and thirty-five pounds soaking wet. But he had a good stomach and a good appetite, and he won. 

Corey Frank (17:54):

And then afterwards he focused on the July 4th, the Coney Island, Nathan’s famous [00:18:00] 4th of July hotdog eating contest. And for years and years and years, the most hot dogs that any one person could eat was like 25 and maybe a couple of bites. So 25 hot dogs in like 10 minutes. And that was the rules is how many can you eat in 12 minutes? And Kobe entered the contest. And again, if the goal was 25, that was the leaderboard year after year after year, 24, 26, 24, 23, it’s he entered and he ate 50. [00:18:30] And how did he do that? Why was he so much better than everybody else? And when we look at what we do, what connect and sell does, what our folks do is why are we as modest as I can be here? Why are we so much better than everybody else? It’s never one big thing. 

Corey Frank (18:47):

He just observed that most of the eaters used a similar strategy, which was essentially a speeded up version of how the average person eats a hot dog at a backyard barbecue, right? You pick it up and you cramm [00:19:00] the dog and you put it in the mouth and you chew it from end to end and maybe a little bit of water or beer to wash it down. But he said, there’s got to be a better way. Nowhere was it written, for instance, that the hot dog must be eaten at end. What if you broke it in half? Or what if you did the bun? And so the point I’m getting at is that his competitors we’re asking the question, how do I eat more hot dogs? How do I get more meetings? How do I make more business? How do I get more x, more widgets, et cetera. 

Corey Frank (19:29):

Cohi [00:19:30] asked a different question. He said, how do I make hot dogs easier to eat? And the second lesson, how do I make hot dogs easier to eat, has to do with the limits that we accept or the limits that we refuse to accept. When he started training, he refused to acknowledge this legitimacy of the Coney Island standard 25 hot talks and just like the four minute mile, just like what we were taught in other limitations of our professional. And so [00:20:00] we had a gentleman last month who did a hundred meetings, and he’s been with us for about four weeks. And that a hundred meeting, that vaunted a hundred meeting mark has only been done a handful of times by some of our most esteemed veterans who’ve worked with us for years and years. He looked at this very much like Khi is what did the best reps do and how can I break it down again to get rid of these limits that we accept or refuse to accept of how do I make hot dogs? 

Corey Frank (20:30):

[00:20:30] How do I get more demos, easier to eat? But I don’t think that he could have done that. He may disagree, but I think we know him. If he didn’t go through the Alchemist, if he didn’t go through Gerald dreams of sushi, if he didn’t go through his journaling training, his goal board training, wondering what I’m working for, why I am doing this, and having a team around him of protectors that constantly nudged and guided him to the point where everybody celebrates the hundred that he hit last month, not just him. [00:21:00] I think that ties a lot of what we were talking about here, about taking somebody new, turning water into wine, and what are some of the processes that, at least on our side of the ocean here, that we advocate and what we’ve seen results in. 

Susan Finch (21:13):

I appreciate that you guys are in person. I love working from home, don’t get me wrong. I love my commute that is 50 steps out my door and rain or shine. It’s a short commute either way, but I also see the importance. I watch people on my own team [00:21:30] Hunter who wants to come visit you guys, and I look at those folks that have just graduated and they’ve not had the benefit that you and I had that Chris had of being in person with people. And to have that available to people. You are training CEOs there. I mean, these are the leaders that will come because they will have so many experiences of real people to be able to pull from and apply to whatever role they’re in a company, [00:22:00] because there’s nothing that sits with you more than being in person with people and remembering, oh, I remember that conversation. I remember that. And those little sparks come back and they can’t, if you’re not there with them.

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Corey Frank welcome Susan Finch to talk about humility, sales training, and sushi. If you’ve ever wondered how to turn water into wine without being at a wedding in Cana. Today’s discussion is all about nurturing the greenhorns and newbies by diving into how to nurture the budding talent fresh from school or those having a “Is this my life?” moment. Corey expounds on why humility isn’t just for monks in monasteries but crucial in the sales world too. Drawing unexpected life lessons from the likes of the book ‘The Alchemist’ to ‘Giro Dreams of Sushi’ – yes, a sushi documentary, because why not? – this episode promises a roller coaster ride through the heart of sales strategies. Listen to the first half of this conversation, “Humility’s on the Menu: Serving Sales Success Sashimi-style!”

 

Full episode transcript below:

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Susan Finch (00:21):

Hey, everyone, Susan Finch here, and today I have the pleasure of sitting with Corey Frank, and we have two parts of this visit. If [00:00:30] you’ve ever wondered how to turn water into wine without having to be at a wedding in Cana, well, you want to join us for this episode. Today’s discussion or the first half of this two-part visit is all about nurturing the greenhorns and newbies by diving into how to nurture the budding talent, fresh from school, or those having a “is this my life” moment. Corey expounds on why humility isn’t just for monks and monasteries, but crucial in the sales world too.

(00:58):

Drawing unexpected life lessons from [00:01:00] the likes of the book The Alchemist to Jiro Dreams of Sushi, yes, a sushi documentary. Because why not? You know these guys. This episode promises a ride through the heart of sales strategies. Listen to the first half of this discussion, humility is on the menu, serving sales success, sashimi style.

(01:30):

[00:01:30] Some of the things that I notice because you are in the trenches with newbies, new salespeople that are not cluttered with bad habits, and you are able to from the get-go show them based on your experience, of course, the best way to learn as a group, to mentor each other, to make use [00:02:00] of some of their talents. One of the things that you guys have talked about before is give me the dyslexic ADHD person and I will make a great salesperson because they are the good ones. That always cracks me up because there I am.

(02:15):

I love hearing because neurodiversity is such a big topic right now and what it means to people. It’s the quiet stuff we don’t see. It’s that silent diversity, the quiet diversity, however you want to word it, but it’s what we don’t see in [00:02:30] personalities. Some people are highly functioning with all of those assets, those quirks, however you want to call it. And yet there are some qualities that actually are way better for sales than they are for many other professions.

(02:50):

I wanted to talk to you about that a little bit, and also to see two things, and you can go as far as you want with this because we can just record this and chop [00:03:00] it up too, how to build a sales team from scratch for small to mid-size businesses. Which comes first, the people are the tools? And if it’s tools, I mean, we know ConnectAndSell, of course, but what are your must haves that there’s no deal without it, you must be using something to the effect of these tools because otherwise this will happen?

(03:23):

And then finally, I wanted to talk about the importance of a mentor in sales, especially when people are only remote. [00:03:30] I have seen the difference when people are trained in person. There is no substitution for that. As much as I love working from home, I also had the benefit though of mentors early on. I would not be successful, I would not know what I know today without being in person working alongside people, bumping along, reacting, responding, and pivoting. Those are the topics I was thinking about.

Corey Frank (03:57):

I don’t know how people do [00:04:00] that. It’s got to be tough to start your sales career and work from home that way, right?

Susan Finch (04:06):

I would think so.

Corey Frank (04:08):

There’s nobody to the left or the right and am I doing it? Yeah, it’s got to be tough. Susan, what we do here at Branch 49 is we certainly with the help of folks like you and Chris and the Market Dominance Guys’ philosophy is how do you turn water into wine? You and I have had a lot of conversations over the years. One of the things that we [00:04:30] like to call Branch 49, and I think this should be the aim of any organization that aims to hire folks right off the boat, right out of school, maybe career changers, is how do you arm them?

(04:43):

Chris calls it a finishing school for CEOs. When you look at maybe the traits of what we would all want to see as a nearly finished product or a product in progress of development, the biggest one that we see is humility. [00:05:00] It’s probably counterintuitive from a sales perspective is that don’t you want your sales folks to be killers and to put them in the field and run through that wall? The Goggins and the Jocko and all that stuff has its place. Certainly. What’s the axiom? I think the old Zen proverb is, I am nothing, I am everything, I am nothing.

(05:21):

And that approach where I have to start knowing that even though I have a degree, even though maybe I have five, 10 years of sales experience, but if I come [00:05:30] into an environment like this like we have, is that I know nothing. Certainly one of the hallmarks of that is what we talk about at market dominance guys, which is when a call starts, is that mental state that we have to have of true tactical empathy when we run up against a stranger. If I don’t have a level of humility to want to be curious, how can I be empathetic if I’m not curious?

(05:56):

To me, they’re counterintuitive. I think that’s the biggest [00:06:00] one that we see in that we try to test. We use OMG. We use Sandlers and Dave Kurlan’s OMG. We certainly use DiSC. We use Shawn Sease’s Humantic.AI platform. I look for every edge that I can get to bring folks in. The second part here as we talked about is what we may have jus a little different interview process, but after they take the OMG or the Humantic profile, we give them an assignment and we give them an assignment to do two things.

(06:28):

Number one [00:06:30] is to listen to The Alchemist, great book by Paulo Coelho. It’s probably 20, 25 years old or so. It’s told in a parable as a young shepherd who is on a quest to find his personal legend. It has nothing to do with sales, but it has everything to do with sales. This shepherd boy goes on this journey from Spain to Africa, eventually thinking [00:07:00] he’s going to find the treasure at the foot of the pyramids. And through a series of adventures and off-ramps, he eventually realizes as he makes his way back to where he started from home is that that’s where the gold is, that’s where the treasure is.

(07:17):

Sometimes we can set forth in a career. You and I, when we first met, we talked about this is that society wants you to set forth into a career of sales or marketing or management. [00:07:30] I guess I’m supposed to be happy doing that, but no one ever asked me if I’m happy. They just shuffle you out the door, right? Austin’s going to school for engineering and hopefully he’ll be happy at that. But no one talks about the personal legend, which is what will make you the most fulfilled.

(07:48):

Some folks will have 10 years of experience, but we say it’s one year 10 times, or hey, I have 20 years of sales experience, but it’s really 10 years two times, and they never fulfill their personal legend. They hit numbers. [00:08:00] They go through the motion. But as far as really finding that inner quest as something intriguing, exciting, something to be unwrapped over the years, they just go through the motions, and they just meander through life. That’s the first one is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and the second one is one that I’ve used for years too, and it’s a movie called Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

(08:23):

It’s an incredible documentary, Susan. It’s probably out about 10 years ago or so. It’s about the only [00:08:30] Michelin rated three star sushi restaurant in the world, and it’s in the subway station, the Ginza subway station, in Tokyo. The restrooms aren’t even on premise. It’s like down the hall. But here you have the hustle and bustle of going in a subway station, and it is a Michelin rated three star restaurant. Now, there’s only a couple dozen of those in the world. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary about the proprietor, the founder of the sushi restaurant.

(08:58):

It only seats nine, [00:09:00] nine folks, but it is a Michelin rated three star. I think we only have, what, three in the United States, I believe, I could be mistaken, Michelin rated. It’ll show you how rare this is. The movie has, again, nothing to do with sushi, but everything to do with life. If we have a candidate who goes through the process and they think they want to embark on a career in sales or even a career in a startup world, The Alchemist and the Jiro Dreams of Sushi is the key. You’ll see this, it’s highly recommend it.

(09:30):

[00:09:30] The documentary talks about loving your craft. This is a person who’s now 87, 88 years old, and he’s dedicated his entire life to what should be the simple nuance of making sushi. But everybody from around the world, from the top French chefs to the food critics around the world, realize that something so simple can yet be so elegant the way he does it and how he repeats himself over and over again.

(09:55):

Those are two big ones I think as a topic that you and I have spoken about for many, many [00:10:00] times, as well as Chris, on taking a candidate and bringing them to a state mindset that they’ve got to reduce themselves, reduce again in order to build themselves up.

Susan Finch (10:12):

I believe that what parallels with that is that openness that goes with the curiosity.

Voiceover (10:18):

We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break. ConnectAndSell. [00:10:30] 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.

Susan Finch (10:53):

The ego left at the door. I mean, humility and lack of ego, they’re similar, but they’re a little different. [00:11:00] We can be proud of what we do, but that’s not ego. Because it’s like if I can employ everything you have taught me and do something great for a client and give them the solution they needed, I’m proud of myself that I was willing to be open to the process to learn how to do that to get them there. That’s a different type of pride than the one that comes hand in hand with ego.

Corey Frank (11:30):

[00:11:30] When you were training me and Chris this concept of the podcast, I think the students were willing, but you gave us and guided us and shepherd us to doing it better and better, from the speaking to the stepping on each other’s feet, to the audio, to be mindful of your background, all that stuff. Where does that come from? How do you find, determine the clients that you want to bring on?

(11:56):

Because we’re a representation of your brand certainly. As [00:12:00] you and your team promote podcasts like Market Dominance Guys out in the marketplace, people say, “Hey, great. Who’s your producer?” Obviously that’s part and parcel of if we put out a poor quality product, which we haven’t always hit them out of the park, but how do you go through that discernment process to find out if the student is willing, if there is that level of humility from even somebody who may be seasoned as an executive?

Susan Finch (12:22):

That is a great question. I am fortunate. Maybe I should be less picky, because then I would have people banging down the doors [00:12:30] to want to be on the network, but I have to be able to get behind them 100%. If they are not willing to listen to improve, then I can’t do anything with them. That won’t make my brand good. It won’t make them happy. It won’t make the people they answer too happy. There has to be that willingness, that desire to be open to improvements, to consider things, and that trust in me that I’m not doing it to make me sound good.

(13:00):

[00:13:00] I am 100% doing it from caring. The three of us have talked about this enough, and with Helen too. If you guys don’t trust that I come from love for everything I do for you, then we don’t have enough trust to do business together. You guys had that from the beginning, and you knew that we were the real deal and we just want you guys to sound great. We want people to listen to the shows. We want you to build your audience. And to do that by hand, not just [00:13:30] automating everything, not sending it away, we wanted that personal touch.

(13:34):

That’s why Austin has been your editor since day one almost, with rare exception when he has too late of a night studying or something.

Corey Frank (13:42):

Sure, sure.

Susan Finch (13:43):

Because he’s invested in it too. He’s very protective. He comes from my background with my nonprofit, with Binky Patrol. I’m an advocate at heart. I’m a protector. I protect children. I protect babies. I protect. I protect kids and their creativity when I was an art [00:14:00] teacher. I protected the kids at youth group. I protect my clients. I do that. That all comes into play.

Corey Frank (14:09):

Interesting. That’s where the protective instinct to I care about your brand even when you don’t want to, and that’s why you may not agree with me, but I’m trying to protect you from you. When you do X or Y or Z, Mr. CEO, you’re diluting, diminishing your brand in the marketplace, so to speak. [00:14:30] Do I have that correct?

Susan Finch (14:31):

Yes. I might not always have that title and have as many people under me as all of you, but nobody’s going to protect you more. I do take that to heart. It matters to me. It matters to us here at Funnel Media Group that you’re proud and your guests are proud and they’re not embarrassed. Because if somebody’s embarrassed, who’s going to share the show? Nobody.

Corey Frank (14:56):

That’s right. That’s right. Well, that’s one of the things that my first mentor, Jamie [00:15:00] from 25 plus years ago, this is why we wear the monkey suits today. Those that are listening to this, everybody here at Branch 49 still wears a jacket and a tie. You can say, “Come on, it’s Arizona. It’s 100 and something degrees. Do you really need to do that? You’re doing full work.” Our answer is always, yes, you do need to do that. Especially us as an agency model, we’re responsible. Talk about being protective.

(15:23):

We’re protective for the care and feeding of our client’s brand in the marketplace. If we’re making a cold call [00:15:30] in a t-shirt and tube socks and short shorts with our feet kicked up on the table, drinking a half a can of Bud Light, you probably aren’t going to have the same level of intensity of care and feeding, of just being aware of what exactly you’re protecting that if somebody who dresses and acts the part. Now, that may be a little counterintuitive, especially today in today’s counterculture, that hey, you got to be comfortable, you got to work from home, you need your mental well-being.

(15:57):

I would argue that you should embrace the hard, difficult things, [00:16:00] and it is hard and difficult. We start early here. We do a lot of development work, the books to read, the journaling. These are things that are “encouraged to do.” In other words, we allocate time that we pay for as a business to sit down and do your journaling and do your goals for the day, goals for the week. We have our goal boards prominent posted for everybody in the organization to see, so we know who’s working for what.

(16:28):

And now I then have implicit permission [00:16:30] if I see Susan slacking off a little bit to say, “Susan, you have on your goal board a Disney World trip for your kids. You have a new Tesla model Y. You have a down payment on your new house. You have save at a 529. You have $1,000 commission. But it’s my job to care about your goals when you don’t want to. Right now it doesn’t appear that you want to.” I have to step in as that protector, as you had mentioned, and give you a little nudge in the ribs.

(16:58):

From our client perspective, [00:17:00] the client facing, when we’re on Zooms and they see the ties and they see the books and they see the people all doing what they should do, certainly they feel a little bit more at ease knowing that their jersey name is in the front, our name is in the back, and let’s not forget that, is that we’re calling on behalf of Cisco or Abnormal or whomever the cybersecurity or UCaaS company is, and we want to leave that person in better shape than how we found them, even if they don’t accept a meeting, even if they don’t [00:17:30] take sale.

(17:31):

I like hearing that you’re a protector. I think that’s probably why, certainly Chris, we know our friend Chris Beall is being a protector of the dignity, integrity of our profession, how much of a thought leader he is in the space. I wonder if that’s a common trait amongst other entrepreneurs or leaders is that protector trait, because I haven’t heard it much the way that you had explained there, Susan. Do you remember this, Susan? What’s on the screen here for our folks who are [00:18:00] listening?

Susan Finch (18:00):

View-Master. A View-Master.

Corey Frank (18:04):

View-Master.

Susan Finch (18:04):

Just about a dozen memories on one reel.

Corey Frank (18:10):

There’s 13 of those little windows on a circle, on a disc that goes into a plastic viewer, right? For those of you, google View-Master, what it is. For a lot of us, you, me and Chris growing up, hey, we saw there was cartoons on here. If you wanted to see Paris, you could see 13 different images of Paris [00:18:30] and you learned. Well, when I was at Goodwill, this is a View-Master that I saw, and it is how to break-dance.

Susan Finch (18:42):

Oh my gosh, that’s so funny.

Corey Frank (18:44):

Somehow with the limitations that were out there, somebody said break dancing. This is probably ’81, ’82, ’83, I would say somewhere around there. This is probably 30 plus years old, but there was a three real set of how to break-dance now.

Susan Finch (18:59):

Those [00:19:00] moonwalk footwork, back spins, and windmills

Corey Frank (19:05):

And windmills. That’s what says on this particular View-Master. Now, what’s interesting is I’m sure if I hired these folks out for a bar mitzvah or communion ceremony or a graduation for entertainment and I wanted to find or test out their bonafides, I wouldn’t probably expect them to say, “Well, I learned to break-dance by View-Master.” A lot of folks who try to learn sales [00:19:30] by working from home are really, in my world, my impression is learning by View-Master. I thought that was appropriate.

(19:40):

As David Sandler, Sandler sales method, title of one of his books is, You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar. I don’t believe that you can teach folks how to master their craft remotely. You can’t teach the next generation of Jiros how to make sushi unless you actually cut and work [00:20:00] in a sushi restaurant.

(20:02):

For all those who are, “Yeah, but I want to work from home in sales,” I would just challenge you as you’re embarking on your career that you may be one of those folks who have five years of sales experience, but really it’s one year five times because all five of your sales years of experience, you’re working remotely for an organization. There just is no substitute versus being involved and being on a sales floor.

Susan Finch (20:24):

I agree. Thank you for that.

Corey Frank (20:27):

That’s all I have to say about that. [00:20:30] This is overdue. Who needs broken down Chris Beall on these things, right? He’s out of all fresh ideas. No, he’s not. But Susan, it’s been great chatting with you, certainly as I learned something new as a protector, that makes a lot of sense of how you care about the Funnel Media Group brand, and certainly all the clients that you have and companies, little brands like Market Dominance Guys continues to go up into the right.

(20:53):

We certainly appreciate all the guidance and the mentoring and the Sherpa-ing, if that’s a word, that you do for folks where this isn’t our [00:21:00] day job is getting out there and branding the marketplace. Our day job is talking to strangers and asking them for time or money.

Susan Finch (21:06):

No, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Folks, you know where to find it. Go out to Market Dominance Guys and find all your favorite podcast apps. You need a Salesforce? Go look up branch49.com because they are the real deal. They will get you where you want to be. 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, Chris dives deep into the intricacies and pitfalls of sales tooling, questioning the effectiveness of piling on more tools and the notion of an ‘Uber tool.’ Chris explores the impedance mismatch between the world of sales tools and the neurodiversity of salespeople, highlighting the challenges faced by salespeople who switch attention frequently and the toll it takes on their productivity. With references to a recent Forrester article, an insight into sales conversations, and a sprinkle of Beall’s Laws, Chris delves into the complexities of sales processes, the importance of meaningful conversations, and the hurdles of creating a one-size-fits-all tool. Tune in as Chris discusses the present and future of sales technology, neurodiversity, and the search for an optimal toolset. 
Join us for this episode, “Decoding the One-Stop Shop Sales Tool.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:23):

In this episode, Chris dives deep into the intricacies and pitfalls of sales tooling, questioning the effectiveness of piling on more [00:00:30] tools and the notion of an über tool. Chris explores the impedance mismatch between the world of sales tools, and the neurodiversity of salespeople. Highlighting the challenges faced by salespeople who switch attention frequently, and the toll it takes on their productivity. With references to a recent Forrester article and insight into sales conversations, and a sprinkle of Beall’s laws, Chris delves into the complexities of sales processes and the importance of meaningful conversations. As well as [00:01:00] the hurdles of creating a one-size-fits-all tool. Tune in for a discussion on the present and future of sales technology, neurodiversity, and a search for an optimal tool set. Join us for this episode, Decoding The One-Stop Shop Sales Tool.

Chris Beall (01:23):

Hey everybody. Chris Beall here without Corey Frank. He’s probably available, but it’s a Tuesday [00:01:30] afternoon raining here in Port Townsend, Washington. I don’t know, I was just in a mood to hold forth on something. So here’s the something. I read yesterday, it was a LinkedIn post I believe, that pointed to a Forrester analysis that said basically the number of sales tools keeps going up and sales performance keeps going down. And asking the question, “Are they related to each other?” And [00:02:00] I think the answer is yes, but not for precisely the reasons they stated in the article. So the idea in the article was pretty simple. More sales tools means more stuff that the sales person has got to work with, or is tempted to work with. And it’s hard to become an expert at anything at all in this world, actually. Let’s face it. But it’s particularly hard to become an expert in something that you use occasionally and use a little bit.

(02:28):

So the idea is, [00:02:30] hey, you’re having to jump around from tool to tool to tool. And the suggestion is a one-stop shop that does everything, is going to get the job done. That is, you want one tool to rule them all. And it’s interesting. This to me, reminds me of the whole world of enterprise resource planning as it eventually came to be called. And you grew out of a thing called MRP, Manufacturing Resource Planning. And then MRP 2, which was a subtle twist [00:03:00] on all of that, that actually went and closed the loop between outputs and inputs. That is, you were actually talking about making stuff and ultimately maybe even shipping it. I only know about this because I was a architect designer of an MRP 2 system way back when. Which turned into, with a little bit of help, into a distribution management system to run a big automated warehouse full of all sorts of things. Humans and robots working [00:03:30] together.

(03:30):

And people who know me know I do love my humans and robots working together. Especially if the robots don’t have much physical form, if they’re just software. That’s what we do here at ConnectAndSell, is humans and AI work together to solve the problem of getting a conversation with somebody, which is a positive thing. And getting to ship the right stuff out on an order and not make any mistakes. That was a pretty good one too. So the reason I bring that up is, there was always a dream in the world [00:04:00] of ERP. And that dream has been repeated over, and over, and over in enterprise software land. Folks come up with something and say, “Well it’s just ridiculous that we’re using general purpose tools.” And they will generally point to email and Excel, unless they choose to say it in the other order. And then it’s Excel and email.

(04:22):

And then they might throw in something like, I don’t know, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, or nowadays, some Google tools or other. [00:04:30] And say, “Wouldn’t it be great if instead of using this general stuff, we could use specific stuff that was wired together to solve all the problems that are faced by all sellers?” And so these tools come out, first as point solutions doing this, that, and the other thing. And then somebody says, “Hey, let’s bring them all together and make something that works for everybody.” It sounds marvelous. It really does. It has a problem. [00:05:00] And this I think is one of the problems with tooling in general in the tech space, and much more specifically or in a more profound way, in the sales space. And the reason is, trying to make stuff work together assumes that you know what working is. That is, you know what the inputs are. You know what the outputs are. You know what the transformations are. You know what quality means. You know what it means for [00:05:30] an output to not meet up to standards and have to be sent back for rework.

(05:36):

You know what customer value actually is. That who gets the value of the thing that you’re producing at each step, and how do they realize that value. You know all of that stuff supposedly. And then you can make a system that says, “Oh, I’m going to represent these inputs in a database in this way, or put them on a screen so you can see them. I’m going to maybe animate them so that you can [00:06:00] watch them move, and get an idea of what’s going on. I’ll give you analytics of pictures that show you what’s happening. Lines marching up under the right, or whatever it happens to be. Won’t it be great?” It sort of ignores a glaring fact of life, which is we actually tend not to know exactly how things work. I was listening to a conversation today with four extremely smart people, who are extremely deep in their business, talking about [00:06:30] just how one thing works, or how it could work. Which was, “What are we going to do with these inbound leads now that we’ve changed our ideal customer profile?”

(06:42):

Now the keywords there are one historical, what are we going to do with…? And then it talks about something in the past. So the past is the past. You can’t do anything about it. So the inbound leads come as they are, however that is. Somebody built some system to take care of them. Somebody [00:07:00] built a process to take care of them. That was all full of all sorts of assumptions. It was tuned by experience. And I bet at some point it involved an Excel spreadsheet, regardless of what they might say. So even if it’s just for analyzing the outliers, somebody probably extracts data from that thing every once in a while. Puts it in a spreadsheet, takes it through some manipulations. If they’re any good, they do something brilliant with a pivot table. If they’re not so good, they probably sort [00:07:30] three or four of the columns and leave the other ones unsorted. But they’re happy because nobody ever looks at the data anyway. And then, well, everything’s just fine.

(07:37):

The beauty is, the spreadsheet provides a buffer against how things are in the real world, and how you would like them to be or like to report on them. Putting them in different categories, totaling this, that and the other thing. So that buffer is like grease in the machine. It provides lubrication for a [00:08:00] process that is not perfectly well understood. That is, doesn’t mesh perfectly. You can never make a machine a physical machine with perfect tolerances. There’s always a little scraping going on, a little friction. I used to be a Volkswagen mechanic many, many years ago. And I tell you those things don’t run very far, last very long if you run them out of oil. Even though they’re pretty precisely manufactured, they’re just not that precise. And by the way, when they get hot, they get less precise [00:08:30] because parts swell up. So when you look at processes, and think about them. And think, “Oh, I know exactly what’s going on here and therefore I could automate this process.” You’re probably wrong.

(08:44):

You’re probably ending up with your automation needing to be supported by some kind of a buffering mechanism that allows you to take things that aren’t quite described perfectly. “Oh, this particular thing works when we’re only shipping boxes [00:09:00] of the size, but now it turns out there’s a new product on the shelf and it’s in a weird shape box. And it doesn’t fit in the pallet anymore. And our process assumes everything goes on a palette in a certain way.” Or whatever. Anyway, this is where spreadsheets get involved and everybody throws up their hands eventually and says, “We got to stop running on spreadsheets.” Well, if that worked, we would’ve stopped running on spreadsheets a long time ago. So that’s kind of thing number one is, it’s really hard to describe [00:09:30] a process, even one in the past. And then there’s change. And change is the big deal, and sales processes are very, very prone to changing.

(09:42):

They’re also very, very prone to being executed in ways in the field that are significantly different from the way they’re drawn up. They’re not like NFL plays, they’re more like broken plays. That is, you can put the little chalkboard up there and you can draw X’s [00:10:00] and O’s, and swoopy lines that show where the wide receiver’s going to go. And who’s going to legally pick off whom. And all that kind of good stuff. But on the real field, in the world of sales, your opponents are not the other folks. Maybe they are. After all, you have a whole bunch of things working against you. You have time working against you. There’s no fixed amount of time. There’s no real rules of engagement, although people kind of stylize some of them and go, “Oh, we’ll have this discovery meeting first [00:10:30] and then we’ll do this demo next.” And so forth.

(10:33):

Those things are all talked about a lot, but there’s no real regularity to what I would call the playing field in the world of sales. And so it’s hard to describe it digitally, and we end up kind of having to describe it in various ways that work. And out in the field, the motivated salesperson is always going to find something that works rather than do the thing as prescribed. [00:11:00] So that’s part of the problem, there’s just variability out there in the field. Lots of things are going on. Folks are doing little things, and big things differently from each other. Another problem is that in sales, the actual play that’s being run is not the play that’s drawn up. It’s more like a real play, like drama. Maybe even a musical. I had the privilege the other night of going to sit with some people who are musical theater folks, and listen to them talk about their craft.

(11:30):

[00:11:30] And I tell you, that is high precision, very athletic stuff. Whose primary principle is, something’s going to go wrong, and you the actor, are going to have to adapt to it from your deep knowledge of the story. Well, this is what happens in sales. In every sales conversation, something goes wrong. And by wrong I mean, the other party doesn’t quite get what you’re talking about, or you speak at the wrong time. Or you say something that kind of makes them bristle a little bit and it wasn’t the part where you wanted them to bristle. [00:12:00] Or whatever. You can’t predict what the other person’s going to do, all you can do is adapt. So while your sales process is trying to figure out ultimately how to get you into a conversation with someone, out of which is going to come a decision. Now, sales does have one beautiful thing going for it.

(12:21):

There’s only one thing that’s really happening, which is conversations. And each conversation takes place one at a time. That’s marvelous. You’re not going to hold [00:12:30] three conversations at the same time, I hope. Please don’t do that. And out of it comes a simple decision. What is what we call the next step? That is, do we move forward, or do we disengage? So now we’re trying to describe all of this action and getting to the conversation and what happens next and all of this, in some sales tech that assumes that it knows how it all goes together.

Susan Finch (12:57):

We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break. [00:13:00] Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it’s time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employ a successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire team, Branch 49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to [00:13:30] ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. And we’re back.

Chris Beall (13:46):

And the fact is, it sort of can’t. So we end up in a jacket that’s so to speak, too tight, it doesn’t fit us very well. And that jacket starts to feel like a straight jacket. [00:14:00] And then management gets in the position of saying, “Well, you must do X, Y, and Z. You must put this data in the CRM.” By the way, CRMs are notable for two things. One is, they explode with fields. Over time, more and, more and, more fields get added. None of these fields tend to be added, very few of them by professional data modelers. They tend to be added by somebody who’s just in a hurry to have a place to put something. It’s kind of like you have a place, you’re trying to set up a picnic. And you don’t have enough room on the table, but there’s [00:14:30] this stump over there that’s been sawed off. And well, it kind of looks like a little table, and it’s sort of a pain to get it over near the table.

(14:37):

But if you sort of roll it over and stand it up, and fiddle with it, you can get it to be kind of like, well, an extension of the table. And you can put potato salad over there, or something like that. So that’s what we tend to do with CRMs, is we put stumps and other things around them, extra fields. And even extra, they’re called objects or whatever people want to call them, in order to have a place to set [00:15:00] something down so we can come back and get it later. Do we know exactly what it means? We kind of feel like we do, but we don’t. And we change our minds over time, and then we change something else. And this is what makes it really hard. We change the players on the field. So the world of sales is kind of like, “Oh, Lipton teabag.” They called it flow through. So what’s flowing through? People on the sales team tend to be flowing through. They just don’t last [00:15:30] long enough that you can really say, “Hey, this person knows exactly how this process works.”

(15:37):

So now you have people who are learning as they go, they’re hoping to be able to stay. Or maybe they’re already tired of it, and they’re looking to get out and go to their next gig. And you’re trying to have those people adapt to a system that was built by folks who were basically kind of just trying to make something work in the moment. And so now you have all of this [00:16:00] kind of mismatch going on, but where’s the grease? Where’s the lubrication? Well, it turns out the lubrication in sales is provided by this oddity called sales compensation by commissions. That, as human beings we’ll go to extraordinary steps, extraordinary means, in order to get paid. At least variable pay, they’ll do what they need to do. So you have an interesting situation where there’s kind of action at the edge.

(16:26):

There’s, “Oh, here’s the stump, but instead of putting the [00:16:30] potato salad on it, I think what I’m going to do is move the potato salad off of it. And I’m going to put this pie that is not yet cooked on it. Because later on the oven’s going to open up and I can put the pie in.” In sales, there’s a lot of “later on, the oven’s going to open up and I can put the pie in”. We’re almost always waiting for something over in the customer side. And so now our nice fields, our little stumps we put around, get full of all sorts of manner of things. They get pies, and pickles, and brownies and God knows what on them. [00:17:00] And then you don’t know what’s what. Meanwhile, the salespeople got to get the job done, because time is not their friend. Everything’s running kind of quarter, by quarter, by quarter. They’re trying to get the job done.

(17:10):

And you get this very interesting conflict between the systems and processes, and the execution itself. I guarantee you over time the execution tends to win. And then there’s this pushback by the very organized folks who go, “But why is it so chaotic?” And the reason it’s so chaotic is it has to actually be adaptive [00:17:30] to a situation that itself is not smooth, no matter how you draw it out.

(17:35):

So let’s add in one more confounding factor. What do salespeople work like on the inside? And I mentioned this before. There’s a lot of what would be considered neurological variance, or just the differences among people with how their brains work, how their nervous systems work. Probably their gut microbiome, their biome, their vagus nerve. God knows. We’re complex beasts. And some [00:18:00] people are very, very good at calmly reading things and writing them, and so forth. So now I have this system, the sales system, that describes a process. And the way I learn about it is to read about it. And I’m a salesperson, and I don’t know if I was the greatest most natural reader. I may have made myself into an okay reader, but it’s probably an effort for me to read. And then to pay attention [00:18:30] long enough to what I’m reading to be able to put it into practice, and patiently try whatever I’m supposed to try.

(18:38):

And by the way, have you ever used a digital system that didn’t make you go, “Why did they design it like this? I tried this and it doesn’t work. I get this stupid error message.” Well, we know that that’s the case. Because that’s why there’s tech support, and tech support is always pretty much overwhelmed. So now I’ve asked a person whose natural variety, their neural diversity [00:19:00] so to speak, might lead to them away from sit, read, and think, and apply patiently and then deal with it. Toward, “I’m just going to figure out how to make this thing work well enough in order to get onto the next step and away I go.” So we have sort of a mismatch between this whole world of sales tools, which tend to be read this, do this, read this, do this, read [00:19:30] this, do this. And how real salespeople tend to be constructed. Which is have a conversation with somebody, do this very athletic, delicate set of things in that conversation in order to maximize the probability of making a good decision with regard to the next step.

(19:48):

That’s their core skill. And that skill is often exercised with what seems like some… I’ll admit it, I’m not being clinical here, but maybe some attentional issues. [00:20:00] People talk about hyperactivity and ADD and this kind of stuff. I don’t know about those things. I think people use those terms pretty loosely. But I tell you the ability to switch your attention very quickly, and micro pivot in a sales conversation emotionally with your voice, with the words, with your body language. Being able to do that stuff on the spot and do it really well, but not know exactly that you were going to do it one second before. The ability to do that [00:20:30] can be enhanced quite frankly, by having a neural setup that allows you to pay attention to something new very quickly. That’s not true multitasking, but it’s kind of like flip-flip-flip tasking while you’re maintaining focus on the other person.

(20:47):

So it’s very interesting how great salespeople work. They focus strongly on the other person, but they move very nimbly with regard to what might happen next. What might be discussed next. And they’re very firm in their desire [00:21:00] or their intention, and their willingness to work toward a good outcome, which is making a good decision as to a next step. So now we give them more tools. So each one of those tools requires switching attention. Hey, that sounds pretty good for somebody who switches attention a lot. But switching attention to something that isn’t that easy, which is reading and understanding and being reminded, “Oh yes, at this point, this is the required field. Oh yes, at this point, at this exception in our sales process, I’m supposed to send this to so-and-so instead [00:21:30] so-and-so. Oh, I need to fill out this here, basically a form.” It feels like you’re filling one out in a doctor’s office or something in order to be allowed to go to the next step.

(21:41):

These things don’t line up that well with how salespeople work. And I’m in the business of sales technology, so it’s a challenge for us every day. How else are you going to put up the instructions, except by saying read them? So we try to simplify it down to, “Once you’ve done this once or twice, what do you do? You click on [00:22:00] a list, you click on a button that says sell, and you talk to somebody.” At least you’re in your element, you’re talking to them. But a lot of sales process now works through, “I’ve got to write an email. I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to adapt and text. And I’ve got to read a lot.” And frankly, it’s tiring and it doesn’t produce results much faster. Who it satisfies are the folks who want to see a very uniform, a very clean description [00:22:30] of a system. And get a lot of clean data out of it that tells them what’s going on.

(22:35):

So there’s this mismatch, and in some circles it would be called an impedance mismatch. And therefore the more tools we pile on, the harder it is for somebody to switch among them. And I think this is what the Forrester article was saying is, it’s harder to switch among them. And then when we do switch among them, well, it’s kind of harder to keep track of what we did. And then it’s hard to make them [00:23:00] work together. And we go back and we tend to do rework that’s about the tools themselves, and then we run out of time and energy. And that’s one conversation, or two conversations, that we could have had that we didn’t have. And that drives down the sales results. Because frankly, sales results are driven in time by a flow rate of conversations that are with relevant people, held by skilled people who are trying to honestly determine, “Hey, does it [00:23:30] make sense for us to move forward or not?”

(23:31):

That is, shall we make a decision of the next step that’s either to do something next together, or explore further, or close a deal or whatever. Or back up and disengage. And maybe wait, come back together in some future time. So sales tooling, the more the worse. And I’m not sure that putting it all into one big package solves the problem. Because having one big package actually [00:24:00] solve all the problems, so you don’t have to go to your ancillary tools. Your Excels and your emails. Doing that is really hard too, because whatever the big design is for the big one-stop shop tool, probably doesn’t fit your people and your process, and what you’re selling and your history perfectly. And so it’s just a tough area, and people argue about it a lot. And they invest billions of dollars in companies that [00:24:30] have the next thing.

(24:31):

There are thousands and thousands of sales tools, even just for B2B that have been created. Now, we’ve been doing our thing for 17 years. So I don’t know if that means it works. Or I don’t know what conversations, I guess maybe do matter. But it’s a pretty tough thing to actually solve either at the level of one big thing, because that one big thing is going to be too rigid. And if it’s not too rigid, by the way, it’s programmable. And if it’s programmable, it may as well be a spreadsheet. Or [00:25:00] a whole bunch of little things working together which scramble the attention of the rep. They have to keep learning stuff. And it actually causes them to go get another job faster, and to underperform in the meantime. So those are my thoughts on this topic. That Forrester article, I thought was excellent, but I think it didn’t quite get to the whole thing.

(25:20):

It basically got to one part, which is, “Hey, the complexity, the switching cost, the paying attention is tough.” But it didn’t really get to [00:25:30] sort of the other thing. It sort of suggested, “Hey, if we had one big über tool, then it’d be great because people don’t have to switch around.” It didn’t address the fact that that thing’s going to have to be programmable in some sense. And I have a law, I don’t know which of my laws it is. Beall’s Law, there’s a ton of them. Remember my first law, the smartest person in the room gets to fix the other person’s network. That’s the first law. But this law goes something like this. As soon as something is [00:26:00] sufficiently configurable to solve a problem that you didn’t anticipate, it is sufficiently programmable that you’ll spend all your time debugging it. And very little of your time using it. So with that Chris Beall, Market Dominance Guys, and happy hunting out there.

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