In this episode, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, discusses various challenges faced by B2B sales leaders in the modern business landscape. With Corey Frank, CEO of Branch49, absent from the co-host chair, Chris invited ChatGPT to take a seat. He starts by introducing the idea of asking ChatGPT about challenges in B2B sales. He touches on the challenge of coaching sales reps, particularly their first failure points in conversations. Chris explains how technology, such as the one developed by Symbl.ai, can help identify these first failure points and support reps in improving their performance.

Chris stresses that addressing these challenges requires a combination of strategic thinking, technological proficiency, people management skills, and deep industry understanding.

Some of the challenges covered include:

  1. Adapting to Technological Change
  2. Understanding Customer Needs
  3. Compliance and Regulation
  4. Maintaining Quality Lead Generation
  5. Managing Sales Team Performance
  6. Pricing Strategies in a Competitive Market
  7. Cultural and Geographical Differences
  8. Integrating Sales with Other Business Functions
  9. Economic Uncertainties

 

Full episode transcript below:

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(00:22):

In this episode, Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell discusses various challenges faced by B2B sales leaders in the modern business landscape [00:00:30] with Cory Frank, CEO of Branch 49. Absent from the co-host chair, Chris invited ChatGPT to take a seat. He started by introducing the idea of asking ChatGPT about challenges in B2B sales. He touches on the challenge of coaching sales reps, particularly their first failure points in conversations. He explains how technology such as the one developed by Symbl.ai can help identify these first failure points and support reps in improving their performance. Chris stresses [00:01:00] that addressing these challenges requires a combination of strategic thinking, technological proficiency, people management skills, and deep industry understanding. Join us for this episode of Market Dominance Guys, thriving in market, turbulence, tech tango, and global jigs.

Chris Beall (01:24):

Hey, everybody. Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell and co-host of Market Dominance [00:01:30] Guys. Corey Frank seems to be otherwise occupied today. And so I’ve decided to go ahead and do something we haven’t really done before, which is to ask ChatGPT a question, we call them prompts, and see what it has to say about the challenges that are being faced by B2B sales leaders today. And who knows, maybe as I go through these, I’ll have something to say. I just got primed for all of this by wonderful lunch with [00:02:00] Dan Nordale, who is the chief revenue officer over at Symbl.ai. And he and I were talking about one of the challenges which is coaching, and specifically the challenge of coaching first failure, so I’m going to put that one out there, is coaching sales reps helping them become better is very, very challenging.

(02:23):

And one of the reasons it’s challenging is that it’s very difficult to find that moment where [00:02:30] they have a first failure in a conversation and just coaching that moment and doing so in a way that allows them to repeat the performance under pressure. So think about discovery calls, if we were to coach a discovery call and point out, “Hey, the first point where you actually failed, where you came up short was about 37 seconds in. And the issue is that you went ahead and plowed forward into the value that your solution [00:03:00] provides without having the least idea of whether the other person has made that transition from their initial emotional state, which is apprehension to some other emotional state that might be suitable and supportive for them to listen to what it is you have to say as an expert.” So we were talking about that and how the technology that they use a symbol could help with that because it listens to conversations and shows [00:03:30] that first failure rate if you choose to have it do that.

(03:33):

But then how long before they get to repeat the performance? If I’m teaching somebody how to serve in pickleball, for instance, well, I can have them serve and then I can note their first failure point, the place where they could try something different and they could try another serve. It’s just a matter of hitting the ball again. But in discovery calls, our next opportunity might be tomorrow or it might [00:04:00] be later in the week. And so that’s even in a good case, right? So how do we get that situation set up where we not only can provide feedback as to the first failure, but we can actually have the person perform again and by the way, perform under pressure. And so that’s very difficult. Now, here at ConnectAndSell, we have the ability to help folks have lots and lots of conversations. And so these are not discovery calls, these are first conversations, [00:04:30] we call them ambush calls or cold calls, whatever you want to call them.

(04:33):

And we have an opportunity to coach that first failure point and then have them go right back in the batter’s box and try again. And within two or three minutes there they are, another shot at trying out the first seven seconds, that conversation to see if they can get trust. So that’s one of the things Dan and I were talking about and the technology that they have developed at Symbl.ai is particularly suited to supporting [00:05:00] that kind of, “Hey, find out where the rep needs help.” And by the way, why first failure point? Why not get all of the failure points? Well, it’s pretty simple. The first failure point is generally the root cause of the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth and so on. That is, it’s not that the rep needs different technique later, they just need to avoid screwing up earlier.

(05:22):

And this is true of almost everything in the world of what I’ll call ballistic athletic activity. That is if you’re doing [00:05:30] something, throwing a ball, hitting a golf ball, you watch Ted Lasso, you’re taking a pass downfield and you’re catching it with your foot or your chest and getting that ball under control, these things are happening pretty fast and if you screw up part of it, instead of taking that ball with your chest and stopping it, it bounces off of you. Now it’s going upfield. Well, your next failure is going to be because you failed on the first task, the first subtask, that first moment. So in stuff [00:06:00] like cold calling, especially when you fail in the first 3, 4, 5 seconds, you’re playing catch up in a game that you literally cannot win at that point, there’s no way to recover. So you may as well take that failure, take that input, and use that input in order to attempt to perform again.

(06:19):

At some point you’re likely to actually nail it, and once you nail it, the cause of the second failure has been removed because it wasn’t you. It was the first [00:06:30] failure. But let’s go into the list that’s given to us by ChatGPT. I love how we can just ask ChatGPT a question and get an answer. I need to call it my faithful dog. It just goes ahead and gives it a shot. So I asked, what are the top 10 challenges facing B2B sales leaders? Now, ChatGPT normally talks about how it’s back in 2021 in September and it doesn’t know very much anymore, but it didn’t give that warning to this particular prompt. [00:07:00] It just started right in after saying that it would give me a list. So here’s number one in the list, adapting to technological change.

(07:09):

With the rise of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies, sales leaders must continuously adapt their strategies and tools to remain competitive. I think this is both true and false, true in the sense that things do change. You’ve got to keep up. False in the sense that what’s really underlying [00:07:30] sales and sales success and therefore some of the things sales leaders should be considering are the following two things. One, as a sales leader, are you supporting your sales reps to be able to execute in the circumstances in which they find themselves? That could be actually in a sale. They’re working with a customer, trying to understand a problem, trying to put forth a solution, trying to negotiate a transaction, trying to work through the complexities [00:08:00] of the buyer buying process or trying to get approval internally in their own firm or getting what they need, the investment from their company in the form of maybe discounts or extra help in order to get this particular deal across the finish line.

(08:16):

So all of those kinds of things are not actually technological in nature. They’re rather ancient, and they have to do with how human beings work and particularly how they make [00:08:30] transitions from one dominant emotion to another one. If you think about sales in general, sales is the process of helping someone else on an emotional journey make the move from a dominant initial emotion to one where they can consider the possibility that you, your company, your solution might be worth exploring further and then making a decision together to take that next step. So that emotional [00:09:00] journey doesn’t have a lot to do with technological change except to the degree that folks’ emotions can be triggered by technological change because it might scare them or make them feel inadequate or feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. Or in fact, they might not know what they’re doing.

(09:16):

Right? Try to use ChatGPT without a little experience doing prompt engineering, and you’ll find yourself at C fairly quickly. But a little bit of experience goes a long ways. Two, understanding customer needs. [00:09:30] B2B sales typically involve complex solutions and understanding the precise needs and pain points of each business customer can be challenging. That is simply a universal truth. That’s not just now. That’s forever. And the primary reason we don’t understand customers’ needs is we’re too concerned with our own need to get a deal done, get a transaction done, and for some of us, it’s venal enough to get a commission or keep our job. So [00:10:00] it’s really difficult to take a stance and take the actions to understand customer needs when we’re too busy paying attention to our own needs. Complexity is not our enemy. Complexity is inevitable. Customers have complex needs because there’s a lot of moving parts to almost any business.

(10:21):

We don’t understand those moving parts in advance, even if we are experts in some element of doing something about them, fixing them so to speak, or making [00:10:30] them work better. So we have to have these conversations that basically allow us to get a feel for the customer’s needs and then to check to see whether that feel, that sense is accurate before we move on. It’s actually a version of the first failure problem. That is our first failure in understanding customer needs is when we assume we know that what the customer needs before we have both assessed it, we’ve gotten it out of the customer and validated it in [00:11:00] some conversation with them. So number three, ChatGPT says, is compliance and regulation. Adhering to industry-specific regulations and global compliance standards can be complicated, especially when selling across different markets and jurisdictions. So this is a matter of both what you do and what you’re perceived as doing.

(11:20):

There’s a lot of branding that goes on with regard to compliance and regulations. And let’s face it, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, whether it’s [00:11:30] something like SOC 2 compliance or whatever it happens to be. If in your industry you need it, you need it, and hopefully you have the supportive folks who can see that compliance and regulation adherence is actually a product feature. Number four, one of my favorites, and this is because of bias, maintaining quality lead generation, generating high quality leads is essential for sales growth, but doing so consistently in its scale can be very difficult. [00:12:00] Now, I’ll speak to this. The issue with lead generation actually goes back to technology.

(12:06):

So we have technology that makes it very inexpensive to believe that we are putting an opportunity in front of somebody, and if they only were to read that ninth email that we sent in the sequence or to accept that offer to connect on LinkedIn, if only they would do that, well, then we could get into a conversation with them, help them. In fact of the matter [00:12:30] is the technology makes it so cheap to send that information out that all of that information simply becomes spam.

Speaker 1 (12:40):

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 [00:13:00] 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 with Corey and Chris.

Chris Beall (13:23):

This is where there’s an irony built in to the entire world of lead generation. We need to do it at scale, [00:13:30] not at arbitrary scale, by the way. We don’t have the ability to consume an indefinite or infinite number of leads. We need to pay attention to quality, that’s targeting really. We need to assess timing, which we can only do in conversations. I don’t care what anybody says about high intent, that’s something people talk about like we can tell your intent from your internet behavior. Well, I can tell your intent and you can tell mine in a conversation much more effectively. And we need to do so [00:14:00] with scarcity as our friend. So by using something that’s scarce, which is human to human conversations, live, synchronous that means I’m talking, you’re listening, I’m listening conversations. We actually can cut through most of the quality issues that are brought to the fore because of technology, making it so cheap to put a message in front of somebody else, and therefore so common for them to ignore that message and move on.

(14:30):

[00:14:30] Then we have my wife, Helen Fanucci’s favorite, managing sales team performance. As some of you know, she’s written a book called Love Your Team, a Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. And her point is pretty simple. As the manager, you’re not the performer. Your sales team members are the performers. Are you supporting them in a way that allows them to perform and that means in their professional world, but also in their [00:15:00] life and in their emotional world? So ChatGPT says, “Training, motivating and maintaining a high performing sales team requires significant time and resources. Dealing with varying performance levels and ensuring alignment with company goals is a constant challenge.” It sure is. Now, training’s fairly straightforward except we don’t know if it sticks, most of the time it doesn’t. Motivating, motivating is actually mostly a matter of supporting [00:15:30] and getting out of the way and helping where it makes more sense for you to be the actor than for them to be the actor that is recognizing they have limits.

(15:40):

Can you pitch in? One thing Helen does is she takes notes at meetings where her reps are presenting. Why? Because then they can focus on their presentation and she is actually getting a deep view, a real-time view, and for herself, a motivated view of what it is that they’re [00:16:00] trying to achieve in the presentation. And between the two of them, they have something to talk about afterwards. And maintaining a high performing sales team actually means dealing with change. We sometimes act as though employees who are working with us as our colleagues, may be reporting to us, are living what I might call a flat life. That is, it’s always the same the next day. Now in fact, their worlds are changing every day. And there’s not just varying performance [00:16:30] levels, there are varying circumstances for each person. So if we don’t allow and help them to adapt to their world, they’re not going to be able to perform in the world that we’re working in together.

(16:42):

And that’s a big part of managing sales team performance. So having those conversations and making sure that you have them regularly, that means mapping them out, putting them in calendar, taking the time to have them, and then being efficient about them. That’s really key. So then we have number six, pricing strategies. In [00:17:00] a competitive market, defining the right pricing strategy that aligns with the value delivered and also considering competition can be a complex task. That is for sure. There are small differences in pricing that can make huge differences in outcomes. It’s very rare that it’s the price. It’s often the perception of what this particular offering delivers value-wise compared to others and how it compares to what folks have paid in the past. So there’s [00:17:30] actually a disadvantage sometimes in being an incumbent. Your own future pricing is tied to your past pricing. That’s fantastic in one way, but it can be a problem when a disruptive market entrant shows up and says, “Hey, I’m going to use price as a weapon.

(17:47):

I’ll price at one third of your price and offer something that is almost as good.” And being able to respond to that in a way that works, especially when you have a big customer base, is very, very challenging. Seven, [00:18:00] long sales cycles. B2B sales often involve lengthy decision-making processes, necessitating persistent follow-up and a long-term strategy. So persistent follow-up is actually fairly easy. Talk to people until they’re ready to buy. So when you look at this dynamic, this is what Market Dominance Guys is all about. As a podcast, the dynamic is 1/12th of your market is in market right now in this quarter, 11/12ths is out in the future. Why? Because the replacement [00:18:30] cycle for B2B products is about three years. It’s not the sales cycle that you need to pay attention to first, it’s the replacement cycle. The replacement cycle of three years means 11/12ths of your market is out in the future.

(18:45):

If it’s five years, it means there’s 20 quarters in five years. 19 out of those 20 quarters are not this quarter. And following up, being useful, being there and also learning what’s going on in their world [00:19:00] through those quarters it takes until they’re ready to actually make a decision to replace their current solution, that’s key to market dominance. Then there’s eight, cultural and geographical differences. Navigating cultural nuances and understanding different business practices across regions can be perplexing, particularly for organizations that operate globally. Yes, yes and yes, and it can come down to a single word. Do you know what the word revert means? [00:19:30] It depends. Revert means go back to what you were like, but in some cultures it means get back to somebody. It means reply. So even knowing those nuances is absolutely crucial. And then there are many, many more. There is of course the question of male and female diversity.

(19:50):

How does this other culture think about men and women with regard to their roles? You’re a little bit stuck sometimes. You’ve got a notion of what you believe [00:20:00] and your notion may be both morally and culturally correct where you live, and it might not fit in where you’re trying to do business. So being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, so to speak, and at least understand where they’re coming from, quite challenging, quite important. Then there’s integrating sales with other business functions, ensuring that sales strategy is aligned with marketing, customer service, and other departments requires seamless communication and collaboration, which is often easier [00:20:30] said than done. Man, is that correct ChatGPT. First of all, sales and marketing alignment. I have an idea. Sales and marketing align within the humble cold call. Why? It’s simple. When we talk to somebody, when we ambush somebody in a cold call, we’re going to follow up.

(20:47):

What we’re looking to do is to see whether it’s time to initiate a sales cycle with someone for whom a sales cycle would be advantageous, both for them and for us, at least we think it might be. [00:21:00] Well, none of that is marketing. The marketing question is, can we condition the market so that more sales cycles arise out of it and those that do are successful? So some combination of targeting and stimulating interest and activity in the market is needed. Interestingly enough, the primary thing that happens in an ambush call, in a cold call or in a follow-up call is that person in the modern world, let’s go back to technology for a moment, [00:21:30] they actually go to your website most of the time. They actually will respond to an email that you send them most of the time, especially if you send it immediately after the conversation.

(21:42):

So there’s a case where technology, not yours, but the technology of the world comes together with the potential for alignment in order to make things work better. But only if you think about it correctly. Same thing with customer service or customer success. [00:22:00] I mean, one simple thing is try not to offer things that you can’t deliver. Now, I know this is tempting in sales, there’s always a temptation to say that one extra thing, that one extra piece of value that you believe is going to get the deal done. You might be overstepping the situation with regard to can that really be delivered. And a lot of times I see customer success blame for churn. I was in an event the other night where a customer success expert, [00:22:30] a legitimate one, one I really believe in, she said, “Look, if you’re depending on customer success to do something about deals that are about to renew but might churn, you’re too late.

(22:43):

You need to take care of that in the initial engagement. You need to make sure that what they’re buying is what you’re selling and that you have clarity around that.” So seamless communication and clarity is yes, easier said than done, but super important. [00:23:00] Finally, ChatGPT says, “Economic uncertainties. Global economic fluctuations can have a direct impact on B2B sales. Sales leaders must be nimble and act to adjust strategies quickly in response to changes in economic conditions.” Well, let me tell you, not just sales leaders, but business leaders. We’ve been through a simple change. It was about 15, 16 months ago. We are out here in August of 2023. So in the spring of 2022, [00:23:30] the Federal Reserve changed interest rates from zero to something else, a positive number. Tech valuations immediately collapsed, money dried up. Runways were, well, shall we say, shortened. And suddenly there was pressure to do things that might or might not be possible.

(23:50):

We’re now starting to see where that pressure leads. So companies are now for sale that thought that they would be able to raise and raise and raise, get more money and [00:24:00] go out into the marketplace and dominate. So is that an economic uncertainty? You bet. One way to buffer against uncertainties of course isn’t a sales function, it’s just a function. It’s called cash. Another one is to actually be capital efficient in your sales. Capital efficiency means you actually acquire net new customers and net new dollars in a way that doesn’t spend that many. Most sales leaders don’t think very hard about that one, capital efficiency in their sales process, [00:24:30] but it’s capital efficiency that gives you runway when your company is under economic pressure because of global macroeconomic fluctuations. So seek capital efficiency and ask yourself in sales and ask yourself, “How little can we do in order to acquire that next customer?

(24:50):

And are we trying to acquire customers that aren’t really great next customers who at the margin cost quite a bit both to get and to serve?” So ChatGPT [00:25:00] wraps it up and I’ll wrap it up with the same. These challenges require combination of strategic thinking, technological savvy, people management skills, and a deep understanding about the specific industry and the broader business environment. By addressing these challenges head on, B2B sales leaders can position their organizations for success in a complex and competitive marketplace. Now that sounds super challenging for one individual person to come to the table with strategic thinking, technological savvy, [00:25:30] people management skills, and a deep understanding of specific industry and broader business environments.

(25:36):

Wow, sounds like a team game, doesn’t it? So being able to work with other members of your team, some of whom might be better strategic thinkers than you are, some of whom might have a better handle on the tech than you do. Some people in your team could be great at people management and setting up situations where folks who you really need, who have deep skills want to stay with you and apply those [00:26:00] skills. And then there’s the deep understanding of the industry and the broader business environment. And I would say specifically of what you can bring to customers that they can’t do for themselves. Because that’s why us, B2B businesses exist. We exist to do for customers what is too expensive or too inconvenient for them to do for themselves.

 

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Today’s adventure is a jaunt on the high seas with Chris Beall’s wife, Helen Fanucci, the sailing extraordinaire (before she even became his better half).

Now, my sailing skills are on par with a landlocked pirate. But no matter because this story isn’t just about boats and briny waters – it’s a tale of drive, insight, and a dash of brilliance that’ll leave you pondering your business compass.

Picture it: a sun-soaked day, a boat called J80, and Helen Fanucci – a mechanical maestro with a thirst for precision. Amidst the waves, she spots a teeny metal tab on the mast, having a bit of a tiff with its groove.

But here’s the twist – she didn’t pounce on the problem like a hungry seagull on a French fry. Oh no! She executed a strategic dance of action and contemplation. Think of it as a chess grandmaster swapping their knight for a piña colada mid-game. The result? A symphony of decisions, a triumphant “click,” and a lesson that’ll rock your business boat. Join Chris for the full story in this episode, “Sales Insights Using Sailing Strategies for Business Success.”

 

Full episode transcript below:

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(00:21):

Today’s adventure is a jaunt on the high seas with Chris Beall and his wife Helen Fanucci, the sailing extraordinaire before she became his better [00:00:30] half. Now, I must confess, my sailing skills are on par with a landlocked pirate, but no matter, because this story isn’t just about boats and briny waters, it’s a tale of drive, insight and a dash of brilliance that will leave you pondering your business compass.

(00:44):

Picture this, a sun soaked day and Helen Fanucci, a mechanical maestro with a thirst for precision. Amidst the wave, she spots a teeny metal tab on the mast, having a bit of a tiff with its groove. But here’s the twist, she didn’t pounce on the problem [00:01:00] like a hungry seagull on a french fry. No, no. She executed a strategic dance of action and contemplation. Think of it as a chess grandmaster swapping their night for a pina colada mid-game. The result, a symphony of decisions, a triumphant click and a lesson that’ll rock your business boat.

(01:18):

Join Chris for the full story in this episode, Sales Insights using Sailing Strategies for Business Success.

Chris Beall (01:30):

[00:01:30] Hey everybody, this is Chris Beall and this is Market Dominance Guys, the podcast, without my cohost, Corey Frank who, he must be out doing something important because he couldn’t make it today, and I’ve decided to put something together that hopefully it’ll be of some value to you. So let’s see how I can do without Corey Frank, but with my favorite monstrosity, the Ovation of the Seas, [00:02:00] which this is my commemorative picture of it, showing up after COVID, the first cruise ship to show up in Elliot Bay in Seattle, reopening the world of cruising after it had been shut down by COVID. You can have a lot of opinions about whether cruising should be banned or not, as they’ve done, certainly in Amsterdam, they’ve decided it’s not a great idea to have these big things show up. But they’re kind of cool, like a giant hotel, city block long, so to speak, and [00:02:30] out there going from one place to another with other people on the water. There is something about it. I’m not a huge fan, but I’m fan enough, so there we go.

(02:39):

What I wanted to chat about today is this whole question of the delicate balance between drive and myopia. I’ll tell a story. So this is a story, as y’all know, I like to sometimes [00:03:00] tell stories about my wife back when she was my fiance, but this is before we were even at that level. She was taking me out sailing on this very body of water here, actually, not Elliot Bay per se, but for the north, just a place called Shilshole, and there was something about the boat and something on the mast that she thought was not quite right. It was just a little tab like object.

(03:25):

Now I don’t know anything about sailing. I mean, I used to sail Sunfish in [00:03:30] Boulder Reservoir in Boulder, Colorado, but to call that sailing is an overstatement.

(03:36):

So this boat is, I think, called the J80 or something like that, and she was in a group that raced them, Seattle Sailing Club, so she was a sailboat racer, but hadn’t really taken one out by herself. So she goes through a checklist, MIT trained mechanical engineer. Very, very thorough, very professional in the way she handled all that. I felt very comfortable getting on the boat. [00:04:00] I’m good on water anyway, I figure I can swim and how long are you going to be hanging out in the water anyway?

(04:06):

So we go out, there was a little mishap in that the bow line that connected the boat to shore hadn’t been loosed, and so we had a hard time getting going with that in its position. But that got resolved and out we went onto beautiful Elliot Bay. It was a lovely day, light breeze, really, really nice. But we were just getting going. And she [00:04:30] noticed something that was up on the mast a little ways, and it was like a little metallic tab that didn’t look like it was inserted correctly in this groove that went up and down in the mast. I don’t know anything about sailing.

(04:42):

What she did was she ran, literally ran, from the position in the back of the boat. As skipper, she was back there making sure it was going in the right direction, up to the mast and then put on the brakes. When she put on the brakes, she was close to the problem, to [00:05:00] the mystery, but she didn’t just keep going and grab it and start manipulating it. She got close, stopped and looked, and she looked at what this little tab was attached to, what it might be doing, what its degrees of freedom of motion might be, and so forth. Made a decision, took an action. Action didn’t quite work. Adjust it a little bit, it clipped into place whatever it was, and back she went to take care of making sure we [00:05:30] were continuing to go in the right direction.

(05:33):

I thought, what an interesting way to approach problems, and one that we could learn from. So there was a lot of energy, not waiting to see is this a problem or not, but application of a lot of energy toward the problem, and then slowing down, broadening the vision, looking around and then making some decisions to [00:06:00] do some experiments, and then figuring out what needed to be done. In this particular case, taking action, being satisfied that the action was sufficient to resolve whatever the situation was and going back to whatever she was doing. I think there’s a big lesson in business and in sales in particular around that.

Speaker 1 (06:21):

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

(06:24):

Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. [00:06:30] So when it’s time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world.

(06:43):

From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch 49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at [00:07:00] branch49.com.

(07:09):

And we’re back.

Chris Beall (07:11):

So we’ve talked on Market Dominance Guys about the problem of the dog, the bone or the piece of meat and the chain link fence, so I’ll repeat it. So this is fairly common behavior among dogs and sadly among salespeople.

(07:23):

If you have a dog and the dog is hungry, and all dogs are hungry at all times, [00:07:30] and you have a nice juicy piece of meat and you put it on one side of a chain link fence and the dog on the other side. So you release the dog right near the fence where it can smell the meat, and there’s a gate only 10 feet away to the right of the dog, easy to go through, wide open, what’s the dog going to do? The dog’s going to try to go through the fence, over the fence, under the fence in order to get to the meat. The dog wants to solve the problem. The problem [00:08:00] is the problem of not having this wonderful juicy piece of meat in its mouth so it could make more dog that way, so it could become more full and stronger and more powerful and capable of going through the world and doing what dogs need to do.

(08:16):

So here’s what the dog didn’t do, and that dog never does, and nor do most salespeople. Frankly, nor do most business people, which is to get close to the fence, but then ask this question, “What’s around [00:08:30] here that could be interesting, that could be connected to this problem?”

(08:35):

Well, backing up a couple feet, one might look to the right and look to the left and say, “That looks different over on the right, I think I’ll take a quick little trot over there and check it out.” Go over and check it out. “Oh look, it’s the biggest hole possible in a chain link fence, it’s called the open gate.”

(08:51):

So the gate is open, dog goes through, not too hard to navigate with a dog’s nose over to the meat, life is great. But most of [00:09:00] us have the dog that tries to go through the fence. So rather than approaching the problem and apprehending what’s hooked up to what might be in play, and then taking a look around, we tend to keep going. So we let our energy turn into drive to solve the problem.

(09:22):

One of the things I think is true is in the interviewing situations, when we’re interviewing somebody to be, say, a sales [00:09:30] rep, an individual contributor in sales, we love drive. So when somebody shows a lot of drive, when they show that they can just keep going forward to get something done, we think that’s fabulous. And we tend to rate that person and rank that person higher than others who might seem to be a little more circumspect.

(09:50):

We might go, “Oh, Mary here has huge drive. I love Mary. I want to hire Mary. Whereas Janine, she [00:10:00] seems like she wants to think about things a little bit, that seems like analysis paralysis to me. I don’t like that so much, I’m going to hire Mary.” It might work out, it’s possible that Mary’s got drive, but also can slow down, look around, figure out what’s going on and make a good decision.

(10:22):

But more often than not, a person whose energy can turn only into drive, and not into apprehension and consideration, [00:10:30] that is apprehending the situation and considering the possibilities, that person who only has drive, ends up pounding their head against the wall, pounding their nose, bloodying themselves in that chain link fence and telling you, the manager, the boss, that they’re making progress. After all, look at all the blood. “I’m bleeding, I must be doing the right thing.”

(10:55):

So I think it’s something for us all to think about and act [00:11:00] on when we’re interviewing is to ask ourselves the question, “Is this somebody who can use their energy?” Because they need energy. Without energy, we have nothing. So, “Can they use their energy to approach problems? But do they have the discipline to slow down, take a good look, think about what’s going on and then, choose a path that might include that gate that’s wide open 10 feet to the right?”

(11:28):

When you think about it, this is actually [00:11:30] the biggest advantage of taking difficult situations and simply talking them through. Because everybody’s at a different distance from the problem and looking at it from a different dimension, different angle. If somebody’s over there by the gate, they might say, “Hey, by the way, there’s a way across to the other side of the fence. If we got over there, do you think we’d be closer to the meat?”

(11:53):

Now somebody might say, “No, no, no, we’re farther away. I’m only two inches from it here, whereas if we go over there, we’re 10 [00:12:00] feet away and then we end up being 13 or 14 feet away. Wow, that’s a ridiculous thing.”

(12:06):

But we also might go take a look and take a look at what somebody else’s thoughts indicate. Might be a solution to a problem that’s challenging to us. So when we find ourselves in a situation, as individuals or as managers, where energy is turned only into drive, and drive becomes myopia, we have a contribution we can make. And the contribution [00:12:30] is, “Hey, let’s talk about it. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s slow down a little bit. Let’s back up two steps. Let’s look a little more broadly and see whether there’s another path, a strategy.”

(12:42):

Because as we’ve talked about in this podcast before, a strategy is a series of steps, each one of which reduces the cost and the risk of the next step that might get us closer to our goal. Think of it as a way to across a river.

(13:00):

[00:13:00] So you have a raging river and it has rocks in it. The rocks are dry or maybe a little splashed on, but if we can find a path rock to rock to rock, it might not go straight across the river, but if each one of those little jumps is a jump that we can make and land safely, we have a strategy for crossing the river.

(13:20):

It’s very, very rare in business, very, very rare in sales, that straight ahead… “Damn the maneuvers, go right at them,” as Lord Nelson [00:13:30] famously once said, is actually the optimum strategy. The world doesn’t arrange itself so politely for us in that way. So if we can back up, after getting close, great. If we don’t have the energy to get close, we’re screwed anyway.

(13:46):

So when we’re hiring, good idea is to hire for energy. But listen for stories about where somebody brought that energy to bear, got close to the problem, broadened their view, maybe with the help of others, [00:14:00] and chose a path that resulted in a positive resolution without getting all bloody trying to go through the chain link fence, which isn’t going to yield to the nose of that particular dog.

 

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In this episode, we step in with the AI sales tango. Corey, our tree-hugging sales champ, questions if AI can replace good old empathy. Our resident sales physicist, Chris chimes in, revealing AI as your trusty confidant, not a sales rival.

Chris dishes out AI secrets: it’s an emotional prosthetic, erasing self-doubt and boosting confidence. It’s like AI saying, “You’ve got this!” Corey and Chris tag-team AI’s power in sales—providing insights, suggesting next moves, and extinguishing self-doubt. AI’s not stealing the spotlight; it’s your backup dancer, complementing your sales swagger.

They salsa through the AI-human tango, admitting AI won’t replace human connection magic. But it’s the GPS guiding you through the sales maze. The bottom line? Episode 191 busts the myth: AI isn’t your enemy; it’s your trusty sidekick on the sales stage. Join us for this episode, “Boosting Your Sales Swagger with AI As Your Backup Dancer.”

Linked from this episode:

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

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Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:39):

It’s an emotional prosthetic erasing self-doubt and boosting confidence. It’s like AI saying, “You’ve got this.” Corey and Chris tag team AI’s power in sales providing insights, suggesting next moves, and extinguishing self-doubt. AI’s not stealing the spotlight. It’s your backup dancer complimenting your sales swagger. [00:01:00] They salsa through the AI human tango, admitting AI won’t replace human connection magic, but it’s a GPS guiding you through the sales maze.

(01:10):

The bottom line, AI isn’t your enemy, it’s your trusty sidekick on the sales stage. Join us for this episode, boosting your sales swagger with AI as your backup dancer.

Corey Frank (01:27):

Our last topic then let’s jump into just real briefly [00:01:30] my beef, my hang-up, and maybe it’s more emotional, maybe I’m more of a tree hugger on this, but you’re an old physicist, so maybe you can figure out an equation to help me justify empirically why I may be a tree hugger in this, in that I’ve tried chatbots, right? You and I’ve worked extensively with ChatGPT in the book with Susan, certainly. As I say, I’m a degenerate gambler where I, in most of my sales career, have tried [00:02:00] any tool weapon that I could, even if I get mere basis point increases. I was the guy that wanted to be the early adopter.

(02:07):

I was the one that Jeffrey Moore talked about that I am in the far left quadrant of the far left quadrant to say, “Give it to me because I got a number to hit and I want to do more, more, more.” But when it comes to the rubber meeting the road, I’m still old school enough, Chris, where empathy and attention and [00:02:30] eye contact and hepatics and nuances and speech and listening patterns and mirroring and all the NLP stuff, all the Sandler, all the Orrin, all this neuropsychology that I’ve been inundated in my sales group of mentors, such as yourself, that that matters to help establish trust with the prospect and ultimately get them to buy or not buy or to be postponed, but to have you as a trusted advisor.

(03:00):

[00:03:00] And with AI tools out there, do you see us crossing that bridge with deep purchases? I can see transactional purchases if I’m buying tires online, if I’m commoditized by buying, should I buy this Lego set for my son versus this Lego set? I get that, but what do you say about AI and the advent of it when I’m trying to cling to the fabric of my profession by saying, “Well, this industry does need guys like [00:03:30] me because I can connect well,” or are my days numbered?

Chris Beall (03:35):

Well, your days are numbered, in any case, I hate to…

Corey Frank (03:39):

[Inaudible 00:03:39]

Chris Beall (03:43):

Yeah, sorry to break it to you.

Corey Frank (03:45):

I didn’t mean existentially. I meant.

Chris Beall (03:52):

My days are numbered also. I don’t know what the numbers are exactly though. It’s a countdown to somewhere, but we don’t know where we are in the countdown, [00:04:00] so I’m good. I actually think in sales we tend to forget that, in B2B sales especially, what we’re doing only counts to the degree or to the effect of it moving what somebody else is feeling. We do in sales to change what somebody else feels. That’s our job.

(04:23):

And while there are AI chatbots you might choose to help you work your way through your own emotional [00:04:30] issues, it’s very unlikely that a buyer is going to choose an AI chatbot to work through the emotional issues that you need them to work through, which is they don’t yet trust you. This is the whole issue in B2B. That Anthony Iannarino quote, out of Elite Sales Strategies, people buy from people they trust to make a decision they don’t trust themselves to make.

(04:58):

Now mind you, Anthony [00:05:00] was actually quoting me and he was kind enough to put my name after the quote, which I discovered after he’d signed the book, which I found a little bit interesting. Point is, in B2B, the risk never changes. The risk for the buyer just doesn’t change. No chatbot. You won’t be able to say as the buyer, “Hey, I know we bought the system XYZ and brought it into our company. It turned out when we hooked it up, it destroyed our production floor. [00:05:30] It’s not my fault, it’s the chatbot. The chatbot made me do it right.”

(05:36):

That argument’s never going to work. That one is never going to work, and yet it’s the dream of automated B2B sales that the buyer will trust the chatbot or trust the AI sufficiently to throw their career into the ring and risk their kids’ college education and their retirement and their reputation with nothing more to back it up [00:06:00] than, “This chatbot recommended that chatbot. This is a recommendation chatbot here. This is actually a help to buy this thing chatbot. All the chatbots say I should have done like this.

(06:12):

The fact that it destroyed our production facility, that’s not my fault. It’s not on me.” It is on you. How do you overcome that? Well, the buyer needs to go on an emotional journey with regard to this one transaction and it starts somewhere [00:06:30] and it’s got to get to trust. In the denominator, we still have time. Now, we’re told by experts, and I’ll accept Chris Voss and the FBI and Harvard Business School and all these people who did this testing, that the amount of time we have to pull that off is seven seconds.

(06:47):

That’s actually the most salient little denominator piece in all of sales. We’re still going to need you, Corey, because only you are a safe partner to help somebody on a journey from where they are to [00:07:00] trusting someone. That’s you. That’s what’s interesting. You got seven seconds to do it. That’s kind of it. Imagine in one way you could say that the role of a salesperson is to get somebody else to trust them with regard to a specific proposition, buying and implementing whatever it is I sell.

(07:21):

It’s really a seven second process to get to the point where the most important part is accomplished or not, which is the trust part. At that point, you [00:07:30] could bring in the chatbots. In fact, I have a good example of that for myself. I engaged with ChatGPT the other day in order to examine the price and value equation and the parameters around that for our two basic products, our Connect on Target product and our Connect on Live Voice product, and we sell them at different prices and they have different underlying costs, and I have all the numbers.

(07:57):

I got 50 million dials a year [00:08:00] and all the outcomes of all those dials, 3.3 million conversations, on and on and on. I got all the numbers in front of me. How was I going to think this through and understand, oh, if I were to tweak this price this way, given what actually happens in the real world based on all the data that we have, will a customer get more value or less value, and will they pay more or pay less, and all this kind of stuff, right? Well, I asked ChatGPT. [00:08:30] I just took a table of all this data and just dumped it in and said, “Imagine, here’s this bunch of financial data.”

(08:38):

I trusted myself enough to take the recommendation that I interact with the chatbot, and it walked me through this process of thinking about something. Now, it did a really good job of selling me on some different price points, but first, I had to trust the salesperson. That was me. I had to trust myself to go and do that. I think once we get trust, [00:09:00] AI can really help us. This will happen in the future, by the way, where the salesperson will say, “Well, let’s talk together to the chatbot and do that with the prospect.”

(09:13):

You had this question, let’s ask it. And now you have a third party who’s an authority, because people really do love that. They’ll take as authoritative output both the good stuff and the hallucinations that come out of a chatbot. I remember we got some great hallucinations out of ChatGPT [00:09:30] for the book. We asked it to give us some endorsements, and it gave us six great endorsements, all of which were made up, but they were really credible. It’s like, this is the stuff these guys would’ve said, right?

(09:45):

But it hallucinates fine. We don’t have to accept the hallucinations, but the reasoning and the quality of the writing and that third partiness is really worthwhile. It helps somebody make that next [00:10:00] emotional state change. They go from trust to actually they’re now curious. Well, now the curiosity can be fed and satisfied through the process of interacting with the chatbot. Do you have to leave them alone to do that? No. It’s a great way to hang out with somebody in a Zoom. Do the screen share.

(10:18):

Bring up the chatbot. Let them ask their questions. I’ve done it with a doctor, by the way, who was wondering like, “Well, what is this chat stuff?” I said, “Well, here.” We’re in his kitchen. [00:10:30] It’s a friend and spent the night at their house and breakfast wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t know anything about ChatGPT. I said, “Well, let’s ask it some questions. Ask it a question.” Then I would type the question in and I’d read him the answer. He said at the end of about 30 minutes, “It’s a better doctor than anybody that I work with at my clinic.”

(10:51):

He says, “This thing really knows its stuff. It didn’t make up any. It was really, really good.” It’s like that changed his mind with regard [00:11:00] to a lot of different things. It could have not been about his profession, but that interaction where two humans are playing with the chatbot, we’re going to see tons of that. Folks are going to figure that out, but they have to believe now that the vendor’s bot is not biased.

Voiceover (11:17):

We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break. [00:11:30] ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing. As you know it connect and sell’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 with Corey and Chris.

Corey Frank (11:59):

It’s [00:12:00] our old friend, I think Aristotle. We talked about the four causes, the material, formal, efficient, and final. Is the final cause for AI in sales, is it to coming full circle from what we talked about? Is it to reduce time as you were saying? Is it to increase efficiency? Is it to reduce headcount, reduce costs? Or is it to ultimately increase sales?

(12:28):

I think until [00:12:30] we understand that, that the final cause should be to create profit, create sales, that we’re messing around with a lot of these other uses for it and either a formal cause or an efficient cause, that I don’t think really matter to the business as much as should. Any thoughts on that?

Chris Beall (12:52):

Yeah. Well, there’s a tendency with all technology when it’s new to want to jump to its potential [00:13:00] end state and give it a whirl.

Corey Frank (13:02):

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Chris Beall (13:03):

The potential end state is the tech sells for me. Owners love that because owners of businesses really are uncomfortable fundamentally with the fact that these humans, these salespeople that they hire, are independent agents effectively no matter how you integrate into your company and your future depends on them. They have the ability to screw you up in various ways, including [00:13:30] getting hit by a self-driving car. We have a tendency to go, “Well, wouldn’t it be great if the bot could do the selling?”

(13:41):

We try it. We tend to jump to that state. In most cases where the system settle down is where the emotional and the process cost algorithmic stuff come together, and the emotional tends to come to [00:14:00] the fore when you’re working with somebody else. Almost anything you do. I’m an old climber, as you know. I’ve done two kinds of climbing. There’s the kind you do with a partner and there’s the kind you do by yourself called soloing. Well, the difficulty of soloing is not that you’re going to fall to your death, although it does cross one’s mind on occasion.

(14:23):

The ground doesn’t look any different between your toes. It’s still way down there. You could be soloing and self-belaying, so maybe [00:14:30] you’re not going to fall all the way down there. You’re just going to fall a little ways and hang there on the rope and figure something out. But psychologically, the difference between soloing and climbing with a partner is truly night and day.

Corey Frank (14:43):

Interesting.

Chris Beall (14:44):

They don’t resemble each other in any way whatsoever. When you decide to go solo, you take a very, very deep look at who you are that day and you decide, do I want me as a partner, because I’m going to…

Corey Frank (14:58):

Well, could you argue then with [00:15:00] that, Chris? Sorry to step on your lines, but could you argue that a lot of the… We were joking about The New York Times article, I’ll read it again, is that it assists people with their wellness and emotions. Is that part of the introduction to a lot of these tools? It may be not necessarily the final cause, but it could be a cause nonetheless, is that I feel like I have a partner in my climb. I am not free soloing because I have a tool for outreach [00:15:30] or for cold outreach. I have a tool for email. I have a tool for dialing. I have a tool for looking at my pipeline, et cetera.

Chris Beall (15:37):

This is where I think a lot of this is going. I’ve been writing some pitches recently or just toying around with them, like company level descriptions and stuff like that. I found it super helpful emotionally to be able to start those just by asking, by spitting out a bunch of stuff at ChatGPT, typing kind of mindlessly, and then saying, “Please summarize [00:16:00] or please write a 20 slide deck.” The fact that it will do it makes me more comfortable with the process. And now I’m editing, I’m not creating.

(16:15):

I know it’s seen a lot of decks before, so I trust it to do something that’s deck like. Yeah, it’s an emotional prosthetic for me that also happens to know a lot about some things that I don’t know a lot about. How often [00:16:30] do we make decks for a company or whatever? Some people do it all the time. Most of us, it’s a fairly rare event. Being able to ask a chatbot, “So here’s what’s going on in this deal. So far I’m talking to this person and they said this and here’s the transcript of this meeting and blah, blah, blah. What do you think I should do next?”

(16:51):

If you’re really good at prompt engineering, you ask questions like this. What are the eight steps that are most likely to lead to this [00:17:00] outcome or help me qualify or whatever? Just having someone else, even though it’s a bot, tell you that stuff will make you more capable of executing it because you take an element of self-doubt away, which is what these therapeutic bots do. I think those are big uses. What’s funny about it is, that stuff’s free. Free enough.

Corey Frank (17:22):

Is it called cognitive resonance? Is that the term where I feel better about my decisions when I know that they’re socially supported [00:17:30] by others or reviews and restaurants? Is that really what I hear you say?

Chris Beall (17:35):

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think what’s also interesting is the recommendation that comes from a chatbot that’s a good one, a modern GPT style chatbot that’s got a lot of data in it, that recommendation is easier to take from the bot. You can go back and forth without embarrassment and ask for clarification and say, “I don’t understand what you mean,” or whatever, [00:18:00] than it is from a person because you know you’re not going to give up power to the bot.

(18:03):

One of the reasons we don’t like management, as employees, we don’t like managers, is they tell us what to do and we don’t like being told what to do because we lose agency. We lose that feeling that we’re running our lives. Now, frankly, I think we’re kind of more like ChatGPT. We just spit out the next word that comes to mind and then we justify it. We tell a story about how that was profound and deep and fantastic, and mostly it’s just regurgitation.

(18:30):

[00:18:30] But being able to do what you’re told without giving up power to whoever told you because they’re not a real who, that’s pretty liberating, oddly enough. And in sales, we need emotional liberation because we get stuck on the emotions of sales, our own emotions more than anything else. Most sales books are about how to overcome your own emotional limitations and go ahead and sell. You could summarize 98% of all sales literature like this, [00:19:00] just get over all this stuff that’s making you hesitate and just go ahead and tell somebody about something.

Corey Frank (19:06):

Well, it’s true. That’s true. Maybe the empath goal that we all have certainly will help us in our trust abilities and our cognitive connection abilities with our prospect to feel their pain and understand their solutions, but that also is a curse, because from a coaching perspective it sounds like.

(19:26):

Maybe the best blend is the higher form you get as a sales [00:19:30] professional with this ability to establish trust with your neural empathetic skills. But me, myself, it’d be nice to have agency over my chat sales manager to tell me what it is that I need to improve upon so I can still sleep well enough at night secure that I’m not that bad.

Chris Beall (19:49):

Yeah, I’m not that bad. There’s a reasonable next thing to do. I was told about a reasonable next thing to do. Oh, that sounds pretty doable. I go around a lot of my life. As you [00:20:00] know, people walk up to me on city streets and ask my advice. I don’t know why this is true. It’s somewhat embarrassing actually, but I’m willing to help somebody. I think it’s helpful anyway. Sometimes I think about that. It’s like, what am I doing for that person, because I’m very rarely telling them something they don’t know?

(20:19):

What I’m doing is reassuring them that what they know is perfectly reasonable and they should go ahead and do it. That’s kind of it. That’s the role. Well, we’re all uncertain [00:20:30] all the time. Everybody’s uncertain. Somebody who says they’re never uncertain is covering up for their uncertainty, for sure. We’re all uncertain and uncertainty is somewhat paralytic. And yet in sales, time is the enemy. If we can act now in a way that’s reasonable and doesn’t box anybody in, that leaves some options open, we’re going to do better than the person who’s hesitating and trying to figure stuff out.

(20:56):

I think a big role of AI is to give us an idea [00:21:00] of something to do that seems like a reasonable next thing to do. I don’t think this is going to come out of these really fancy tools that have looked at every conceivable thing that somebody might do in this particular circumstance. I think it’s a little more like that ELIZA program. It’s going to bring out from ourselves what we already knew we should do, and it’s going to reflect it back to us, with maybe a couple nuances or some minor insights.

(21:25):

Or maybe we’re going to go, oh, I thought I should do it in that other order. Oh yeah, this makes sense. I [00:21:30] should do that first. It’s almost always the order. Very rarely is it the things that’s almost always the order in which you do them.

Corey Frank (21:38):

Sure. But those nuances build trust. It’s easier a little leaven if the whole loaf versus a 40 yard bomb downfield risk on every play. That word reasonable, I think, is key, Chris. What is a reasonable next step that I can get from some guidance, counsel, wise advice from this [00:22:00] machine who has built many a deck, who has been in multi-exponential sales situations, who’s analyzed them and said, “This is the nets logical, reasonable step to take?” I would accept that. I would accept that.

Chris Beall (22:13):

It works for me. When I did that pricing exercise, I tell you, when I was done with that, it was 45 minutes on a Saturday morning asking all of this stuff. I finally went, that’s about as good an answer as I’m likely to come up with. Copy paste [00:22:30] to the team. Here’s all the analysis that was done. It’s kind of like I had done it, but I hadn’t done it. I actually didn’t do any of the analysis. I just kept asking. It’s like, huh, but what if we did this? Just in English. I came up with something I was pretty comfortable with. It was reasonable.

Corey Frank (22:49):

Well, I think we’re at our reasonable endpoint for this particular episode. Those are many reason, rational thoughts and steps for us [00:23:00] to think about using AI and other tech tools and weapons in your ecosystem. Thanks, Chris. That was incredible as always. Any final thoughts before we turn the page to another topic for next week?

Chris Beall (23:14):

My final thought is always the same, which is the denominator is your friend. Go in there and kill it.

Corey Frank (23:21):

Knowing your math. Well, excellent. Well, for Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank with the Market Dominance Guys. Until next time.

 

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Are you looking to gain a competitive edge in your sales process? Are you interested in understanding what lies deep inside your sales funnel and pipeline to drive more revenue? Then you don’t want to miss this episode!

Join our Market Dominanc Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank, as they dive deep into the world of sales technology and AI-powered tools. Discover the true advantage of understanding and optimizing the flow rate within your sales projects. Learn why it’s essential to focus on time as the denominator when measuring success rather than vanity metrics like conversion rates.

They provide valuable insights on discerning whether a tool truly de-risks your sales path and reduces friction or merely adds to your tech stack inventory without tangible results. Explore the fascinating concept of “speed beats free” and why pushing time on the denominator matters more than dream outcomes in sales.

Join us for this episode, “AI for Sales? Don’t be ‘Candy Crush’ Complacent

 

 

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Chris Beall and Corey Frank take us on a nostalgic journey through the evolution of sales tech and the intriguing world of AI. They start with a blast from the past, reminiscing about a 1960s AI program called Eliza, which acted as a non-directive therapist, fooling people into thinking it was a friend. Fast forward to the present day, they question the true value of CRM systems, pondering whether they actually help make money or just keep salespeople organized.

Corey shares a road trip story of stumbling upon racks of rock salt in Alabama, sparking the idea of the right people selling the right tools. Chris passionately emphasizes that onboarding salespeople should involve engaging them in discovery meetings from day one to boost their success.

This episode encourages sales managers and CEOs to rethink their sales tech strategies, focus on revenue-generating activities, and find the perfect balance between the human touch and AI. Join us for “Rock Salt & Roll: Unraveling Sales Tech’s Mystery.”

Linked from this episode:

EP9: How to Harvest Authentic Trust in your Discovery Calls

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
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Branch 49
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Chris unravels the enchanting world of manufacturing. Gone are the days of painstakingly crafting artifacts one by one, like our Stone Age ancestors. Now, we’re immersed in the art of flow manufacturing, where tanks channel the flow of chemicals, and even discreet manufacturing dances to the rhythm of flow. It’s a symphony of efficiency where our sales teams manufacture opportunities, creating the invaluable currency of option value.

Chris urges us to view our sales organizations as factories where identifying bottlenecks and maximizing flow rates are the keys to success. In this world, conversion rates become the icing on the cake, but only after we’ve mastered the flow.

Finally, Chris challenges the age-old debate of quality versus quantity and reminds us that we’re left with nothing without quantity. Join us for this episode, “Bottlenecks Beware: Flow Rates Coming to Crash the Party!”

Links from this episode:

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Branch 49
ConnectAndSell

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:19):

In this episode, Chris unravels the enchanting world of manufacturing. Gone are the days of painstakingly crafting artifacts one by one like our Stone Age ancestors. Now, we’re immersed in the art of flow manufacturing, where tanks channel the flow of chemicals, and even discrete manufacturing dances to the rhythm of flow. It’s a symphony of efficiency where our sales teams manufacture opportunities, creating the invaluable currency of option value.

(00:49):

Chris urges us to view our sales organizations as factories where identifying bottlenecks and maximizing flow rates are the key to success. In this world, conversion rates become the icing on the cake, but only after we’ve mastered flow. Finally, Chris challenges the age-old debate of quality versus quantity, and reminds us that without quantity we’re left with nothing.

(01:11):

Join us for this episode, Bottlenecks Beware. Flow rates coming to crash the party.

(01:20):

Hey. Everybody, Susan Finch here, sitting in for Corey Frank on Market Dominance Guys. I’m here with Chris Beall. And today, we’re going to go a little bit deeper on the topic of flow rates, conversion rates. Time is the denominator that counts, not the dials, not the emails, not whatever else you think it might be, not the voodoo, whooo, magic, whatever. Chris, you really wanted to get into the specifics, the specifics of flow rate. So let’s really go into that one piece of it.

Chris Beall (01:54):

You bet. So I’m an old manufacturing guy. I come out of the world of manufacturing software. I used to write build systems for manufacturers. And when you get into manufacturing, you realize that what’s amazing about it is, hey, folks have actually figured out how to build stuff through flow processes, not just through one at a time building something, that is through most of human history. If there was an artifact, somebody made that artifact from end to end.

Susan Finch (02:24):

Right.

Chris Beall (02:24):

And they would shape a spearpoint or something. I just saw a picture yesterday of some people who still are living that life, that Stone Age life, and they’re making those spear points out of dirt or flint or whatever they make them out of, flaking them and doing this.

Susan Finch (02:39):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (02:40):

And it’s a shaping process where what you just made determines what you can make. If you break your piece of stone that you’re using inappropriately in the wrong place, well, you got to start over.

Susan Finch (02:52):

Right.

Chris Beall (02:53):

So now, we manufacture things through… Even discrete manufacturing, which we would consider to be one at a time. You’re making something like an iPhone, or a computer, or a chair, or whatever it is, and I’m distinguishing that from true flow manufacturing. So a company like Huish Chemical that I used to work with in Salt Lake City, they were a flow manufacturer. That means they had tanks into which things would flow and they’d flow down sort of a channel and get mixed with other chemicals, and it would flow, right?

Susan Finch (03:25):

Right.

Chris Beall (03:26):

But even discreet manufacturing where you’re taking parts and putting them together one at a time, two at a time, three at a time, robots, all that kind of stuff, it’s still a flow business. And if you want to make it better, we always want to make our sales better, our sales process, our sales teams more efficient, we need to look at it like manufacturing. Because what we’re doing is we’re manufacturing opportunities in the pipeline. That’s the main thing that we should be doing in sales in our company. We might think of it as manufacturing customers or manufacturing deals, but those are both unreliable processes with incredibly high scrap rates and a lot of variability in terms of what goes in to make that thing work.

(04:10):

But if we’re manufacturing enough opportunities in the pipeline, life is good, because we have choices. And when we have choices, we have what’s called option value. The greatest value we get in business is always option value. So there’s a thing called a zero-cost option. You don’t pay anything, but it’s worth something. Well, pipeline is not a zero-cost option. It costs something. You have to pay people to do things like call people and stuff like that. But improving flow rates themselves that is making your pipeline work better by going to the bottleneck and doing something about the flow rate there makes a big difference.

(04:47):

Now, here’s how people think about sales, especially at the top of the funnel, where the shape of the funnel tells you it’s getting harder, I have to squeeze more stuff through there, and I got to get stuff out of there and do all that kind of stuff. So it’s like, okay, so here I have the top of the funnel, and we’re working the top of the funnel, and they care about conversion rates. They want to know for a certain number of inputs, say, a account of records that are coming in. I buy a bunch of data from ZoomInfo. Or I make a bunch of phone calls to those people. What percentage of those converted to the next stage? That’s what folks get obsessed with.

Susan Finch (05:22):

We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break. 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 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 TAM Branch49’s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com.

(06:10):

And we’re back.

Chris Beall (06:11):

And I deal with this every day. In my job, I talk to folks who are using ConnectAndSell to call lots and lots of people. And they’ll say, “Does your product affect our conversion rates?” And I say, “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t at all.” And they go, “Well, why would I bother to buy something that doesn’t affect our conversion rates? I want to know that we’re going to get more meetings per conversation or more conversations per dial.” And I say, “Well, we don’t do anything about that. What we give you is more conversations per hour, per rep.” And that’s the constrained resource. The rep who’s capable of talking to somebody during given period of time, and taking them from, “We don’t know anything about your company,” to “Now we’re more interested than we were before,” on our way to engaging or actually engaged. So that’s a flow rate question.

(07:03):

The denominator is time. The denominator is not the number of calls, it’s not the number of emails. All those things are treated, I think, incorrectly as being somehow fixed. So for instance, the notion that we could only make so many dials. Well, actually, that’s not true. You could have more resources making more dials at the same time. There’s other ways of cracking this problem. Just because you used to walk doesn’t mean that somebody else can’t invent a car. Once the car is there, you’re going to compete to get somewhere. You better get yourself a car. Walking ain’t going to get it done. Right?

Susan Finch (07:40):

Right.

Chris Beall (07:40):

Good for you. So flow rates are where it’s at. And conversion rates are nice once you have flow rates. But looking at conversion rates first gives you nothing, except it makes you go in circles. You keep trying to squeeze more out of something that you could have just gotten more of in the first place. And I find it a little bit frustrating, I guess, to talk to people who are very sophisticated in the world of building sales pipeline who will only talk about conversion rates. “We send so many emails, and we have this open rate.” That’s a conversion rate. And then they go to tools that’ll let them send more emails, but there’s limits to that and called spam at some point.

Susan Finch (08:26):

Right.

Chris Beall (08:26):

So it’s fascinating to me. If you think of your sales organization as a factory and you think of your sales process as a manufacturing process, you’ll look at it in terms of, “Can I find the bottleneck? What’s the flow rate through that bottleneck, the number of units per hour it’s producing?” And then in the case of manufacturing meetings, for instance, “Well, what are the number of meetings per hour you’re producing? If it’s conversations that might lead somebody to your website, how many conversations per hour are you producing?” Those are the flow rates. And the conversion rates, well, once you’ve got flow rates kind of maximized, or where you want to them, then you can tweak conversion. You have something to work with. But you don’t have anything to work with until you got the flow.

Susan Finch (09:13):

I hear what you just said from, not just people that are into sales prospecting, sales training, it’s maddening because they don’t back it out enough. Well, what led to that? Okay. Well, what led to that? And it does come down to the same thing, how are you increasing the effectiveness, the efficiencies of your sales force?

Chris Beall (09:37):

Yeah. Yeah. The order in which to do things is to increase efficiency first.

Susan Finch (09:42):

Yeah.

Chris Beall (09:42):

Because that gives you your raw material to address effectiveness. And I hear this one all the time too. I’ve probably done a whole show on the quality versus quantity thing.

(09:51):

I think I wrote an article once, the title of which was Quality Versus Quantity Versus Nothingness. And the point of the article was, look, just because it is easy to talk about quality and quantity as though they’re somehow independent, and you could raise quality arbitrarily without quantity, the fact of the matter is that without quantity, you’ve got nothing. There’s nothing to improve the quality of.

(10:15):

This is why markets get flooded first with cheap cars, and then people work to make them better and better, but the ones who got the cheap cars there first win. This is why the whole SaaS industry exists. All SaaS products are built on this premise, which is, “We’re going to get a lot of it out there, and then we’re going to get feedback, and we’re going to work to make it more valuable across the many,” rather than, “We’re going to go find one big fantastic customer and work with them for 50 years, and it’ll be great.” Well, it’ll be great, and you won’t be worth much. So if it’s a hobby, go ahead and do it that way. But you need quantity first, and quantity over time is flow. Simple as that.

Susan Finch (10:58):

I think that that is a great wrap-up to this episode. This was… We wanted something targeted, and you did it. This is all about flow rates. If you want to find your bottleneck, folks, you got to be looking in the right place. You have to be looking back a little bit further than just counting those conversions, than just counting the emails that are opened. Whenever you consider a conversion, that isn’t where it starts.

 

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The game isn’t won with the buzzer shot. The game is won by endless hours of preparing for the buzzer shot. Chris and Susan dive deep into the often-overlooked topic of prospecting costs and return on investment (ROI). Chris’s passion for the subject shines through as he challenges conventional thinking and emphasizes the importance of time as the ultimate business denominator. He reveals that traditional efficiency metrics like conversion rates and ratios have little to do with business success. Instead, he argues that prospecting is about maximizing the value of every hour and building a robust pipeline. Chris expertly breaks down prospecting ROI, highlighting the investment in time and the need to attribute pipeline growth back to conversations.

Throughout the episode, they share pro tips and emphasize the need for a strategic and holistic approach to prospecting beyond research and follow-ups. This engaging discussion is a must-listen for sales professionals looking to unlock the true potential of prospecting and boost their ROI. Join Chris and Susan for this episode, “Prospecting Costs and ROI: Dollars Spent, Dollars Missed.”

Links from this episode:

Susan Finch on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Funnel Media Group
ConnectAndSell

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

Susan Finch (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 Beal from Connect and Sell, and Cory Frank from Branch 49. Hey everybody, Susan Finch here. I am sitting in for Corey Frank on Market Dominance. Guys, I’m with Chris Beal and he tossed out some topics that we are going to be tackling one by one. And the first one we will be covering is prospecting costs on return on investment, which means dollar spent, dollars missed. So Chris, let’s just get right into these because I am really excited and I know you’re excited because then I will stay off your case to record shows for a few weeks. 

Chris Beall (00:53):

I do have a few things going on, Susan, so let’s be great. 

Chris Beall (00:59):

But this is one of my favorite topics. I’m kind of a fanatic about this and I keep finding myself thinking, oh, other people must think like this about prospecting, and then I get the same blank stares over and over, which it indicates to me maybe they don’t. So what I find is when folks are thinking about prospecting, they’re thinking about things like efficiency, like well, how many dials does it take to get a conversation? Or how many emails does it take to get somebody to open an email or to act on an email, or what’s our conversion rate when people come to the website? So there’s a lot of rates and ratios that go on, and to me, none of that has anything to do with business. The denominator in business is always time, right? So time is the thing you can’t do anything about other than get as much out of it as you can possibly get out of it, right? 

Chris Beall (01:50):

Money, you can go get more money, you can get talent, you can have ideas. You might even wake up being creative one day. I highly advise just go back to sleep, but you can’t really do anything about time. And the main thing is we have a whole show that’s dedicated to this is time is overhead, so it’s eating up your costs. It is the thing that just basically if you just sit around and do nothing, if you don’t prospect, then you don’t have a pipeline. If you don’t have a pipeline, then you don’t have future business. And if you don’t have future business, then out in that future you don’t have gross profit to cover your overhead and you will go out of business eventually or sell in a fire sale or whatever. So one part of prospecting is obvious, which is in as little time as possible, you need to build as much pipeline as possible. 

Chris Beall (02:39):

And pipeline built now is worth more to your business than pipeline built tomorrow. So going fast actually counts because of the nature of overhead. I think we used the phrase once. Overhead is like a race horse that you buy like a race horse that eats while you sleep. It’s absorbing your bank account regardless. And Susan, you run a small business and you know the feel, right? This is why business owners act differently from agents. Agents never feel this the same way. Even CFOs don’t feel it at the same level. So that’s part of it. But with prospecting, there’s another hideous cost that shows up, and this is multidimensional cost. That’s like the worst of the worst and it’s opportunity cost. So in the world that you can’t quite see from in inside your own business, there are out there multiple competitors. There are competitors like you, and then there are folks just solving problems themselves. And then there’s folks putting off solving problems, which gives time for a competitor like you to come in or for that person who thought maybe it was worth solving to go away and now that company won’t even bother to solve that problem. So time is your enemy in this other dimension, which is the dimension of opportunity cost, and the I’m 

Susan Finch (04:02):

So, I’m so glad you brought that up. Oh my gosh, I was, the whole time you’re talking about this, I was thinking constantly that silent behind the scenes in your sleep race against your competitors, which is where time, what are they doing? How are they handling it? Are they more efficient with their time than I’m being with my time? 

Chris Beall (04:20):

That’s pretty much it. And so to me that says that prospecting return on investment, the investment is in time, how much you’re getting per hour, and now you come down to, well, you got to break it down. It’s not just per hour of the day, but it’s per hour of prospecting capacity. So what is prospecting capacity? Well, it’s somebody, a person generally doing something that raises the probability that within a fixed period of time or a known period of time or an average period of times, some other buddy, somebody out there in the world will engage and be willing to learn from you how you might be able to help them solve a problem that they have that they would pay for. So when you look at it that way, you’re now down to a person in your organization. So that person is essentially being paid by the hour no matter how you pay them. 

Chris Beall (05:13):

You can always go back and divide it up and go, oh, it was so much per hour. In my case, as we well know, it’s we what we call a burger flipper wage, but we have other wages we could be paid. So here we have this hour of this person’s time has gone by, I call it a rep hour or prospecting hour. So how much pipeline did you build? Well, that’s often treated as a big mystery like, oh, how could we possibly know? And the answer is, it’s not that hard. You go to your C R M, you pull out the opportunities, you find out which opportunities were influenced by the actions of this person. So the easiest one is a conversation. Did a person on our team have a conversation with somebody and the customer’s team that proceeded the opportunities close date? Why do I say close date instead of create date? 

Chris Beall (06:07):

Because opportunities get influenced not just to get created, but along the way there’s a number of interactions that’ll occur and everyone counts. So trying to figure out which ones count as a big mistake because then it’s like, well, was it that conversation? Was this other conversation? Was it the you go crazy doing that stuff. What you want to know is in aggregate is the investment that I made in these people and whatever else I bought for them. So if they were working with us, maybe who knows, maybe they graced them with the opportunity to talk to many people an hour using connect and self. Or maybe there’s some other thing, an ad budget or whatever that you spent. But whatever that stuff is, just go back from the opportunities backward in time and go back and find out what did you spend on that you paid for by the hour? 

Chris Beall (06:58):

That’s people that influenced these opportunities. Now it’s a simple matter of division, by the way, numbers that can be achieved, and I have a big long list of customers of ours who achieve these numbers. You can achieve numbers like $10,000 an hour of pipeline building. If your pipeline coverage then is say everybody says three to one, but say it’s more realistically four or five to one. So say it’s five to one, you’re actually getting $2,000 an hour of future revenue out of that particular rep while they’re prospecting. So now the question is, well, how much of their time are they spending prospecting? General answer, once you know that you could be getting $2,000 per prospecting hour, probably not enough, you probably undervalue their prospecting time because you’ve never put a dollar number on it. Multiply that 2000 an hour times your gross margin. So say you’re running a gross margin of 70%, so now it’s $1,400 an hour of opport. That’s, this is opportunity cost by the way, because pipeline represents opportunity that you’re giving up to somebody else to go out and win that business. So every hour spent prospecting is a valuable hour, more valuable generally than time spent. Closing. Closing is something that happens relatively naturally if you have enough in the pipeline, but I tell you for sure, deals that don’t ever go into the pipeline, they don’t ever close. Oh, wait a minute, they do. Somebody else closes them. 

Susan Finch (08:33):

You’re right, you’re right. People get so worried about the last piece of it all, or not the last, but the first closing, 

Chris Beall (08:40):

Right? 

Susan Finch (08:41):

Because we always want to keep going and keep closing on more things as we go along, but they get so focused on that that they forget that they have to keep replenishing and keep replenishing and revisiting and reconnecting and all the pieces. That all comes down to great conversations. 

Chris Beall (08:59):

None of it is of it. Easy is easy and very little of it happens at the end. That counts. You know what people are like though? We all highlight reels. Nobody has a video of Michael Jordan practicing dribbling with his eyes closed when he was in high school. That should be on a highlight reel. It’s the shot made at the buzzer, and then we all go, well, that must be where the game is being played. Well, no, the rest of the game was being played both off the court and on the court, and almost none of it was the shot at the buzzer, right? You have to set stuff up and you prospecting is how we set stuff up. And unfortunately or fortunately, the thing I like about business, actually, I like competition a lot as some people who know me know that’s somebody once said, that’s why you can afford to be such a nice person, isn’t it? Yes. 

Susan Finch (09:46):

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

Susan Finch (09:58):

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 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 TAM branch. 40 nines modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more@branchfortynine.com. And we’re back. 

Chris Beall (11:23):

Yes, because I’m actually out of my mind with regard to competitiveness. It’s ok. I can afford it. Nice. But what I love about business is that the rules are simply the rules of nature and the law, and to some degree, social propriety, Elon Musk is demonstrating to us that perhaps that last one doesn’t count at all and he’s doing okay. Last I checked, he’s made more than a hundred bucks. So it’s really interesting when you think about what field you’re playing on, it’s a field that you are actually discovering while you’re playing the game. You’re discovering it by talking to people primarily. So prospecting does one more thing, which is really interesting, and that is it puts you in contact with the real world that you need to deal with and it puts your organization in contact. Literally the number of conversations you’re having and the quality of those conversations times each other is going onto your balance sheet that’s actually going in as goodwill. 

Chris Beall (12:28):

That’s what goodwill actually means. It’s like the folks, ultimately it’s the market that will do business with you times your gross margin attenuated off into the future because of the cost of money and a bunch of other stuff that business people think about. But when you come right down to it, that’s going on to your balance sheet. If you’re having more conversations, you’re actually becoming not just a better company in terms of your ability to do business. That is not just something that’s going to be on your p and l, but it’s actually going on your balance sheet as goodwill. You ever wonder what Goodwill is? It’s all those folks that you’ve talked with that would do business with you preferentially to somebody else. 

Susan Finch (13:08):

I had an interesting thought about that too. I teach podcasting classes. You guys teach things you train, and the other piece of that goodwill, when we help somebody, when we, when we present the questions that come back, unless you’re having those conversations with everybody, you would’ve never heard all these other perspectives too. 

Chris Beall (13:30):

Oh yeah, yeah, 

Susan Finch (13:31):

All the, I mean it’s like, man, I wouldn’t have even thought of that. And it’s some unique situation, but suddenly it’s applicable to many people, which adds to our value, which adds to our prospecting success because we have more to bring to them. So conversations, just because they don’t end up in our CRM immediately, doesn’t make them not valuable. 

Chris Beall (13:54):

And I think they should go in the CRM in the sense that we should be thinking about what we’re doing, what we’re influencing, but also about what we’re learning and all this conversational AI out there is actually quite interesting in that regard. My new favorite thing is to get an email, which I get now from a conversational AI product. It’s chorus. Yes. And it sends me an email synopsis. Every meeting that’s had in the company, it takes me less than 30 seconds to read one of those. It would’ve taken 30 minutes to go to the meeting, and I can get about 90% of the meeting value out of those 30 seconds. And I don’t have to go to an app to fetch it. They kindly send it to me as a summary in an email that if I want to click through and listen to, it’s fine. 

Chris Beall (14:42):

I always say that it’s the tone of voice, the cadence, the prody, all that stuff that makes a difference. But the fact is, once I know my reps, I know what their voice is. Like right now I’m trying to get 10 to, well, what’s happening next? Do we actually have a next step? Is the next step one that I would anticipate? Or am I going to learn something new? Because some surprising next step shows up and it’s amazing how good those summarizers are. Chat G P T showed it. It’ll summarize anything you and I had. It summarized podcasts and it did a great job. Didn’t make a great book, but made a book in two days, which saved a lot of time, 

Susan Finch (15:20):

But wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the point. 

Chris Beall (15:22):

Yeah, I know. I loved it when somebody called it a cheap cash grab. I’m going, so where’s the cash? Yeah, so it’s pretty interesting. But when I think about ROI for prospecting, the investment is the dollars you’re spending for the people who are doing the prospecting and any tools and data that you provide them with. The R is in the pipeline. The pipeline needs to be attributed back to the conversations in order to connect the return to the eye. And the surprising route, which the value that comes to you in your pipeline is going to take, is the route that didn’t go through a meeting. So we always think conversations lead to meetings, meetings lead to discovery meetings, discovery meetings, lead to demos, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is in your world as you’re selling. But in fact, what really happens is conversations lead to somebody knowing that you’re worth checking out. 

Chris Beall (16:15):

And it’s so cheap now to check folks out. They’re going to check you out. They’re going to check your company out just during the conversation. If you want to be super extra brilliant in getting a high return on investment, instead of having your rep, just send them a follow-up email. By the way, most first conversations and follow-up conversations that are done through cold calling, they get zero email afterward. But it’s the one email somebody will always open, thank you for our conversation of the day. And nobody bothers to send it, which I find shocking. It’s like, well, they didn’t take the meeting with me. They must not be interested. It’s like, do you actually believe that their company might benefit from your solution and send them the email? But if you want to be super brilliant, here’s like the pro tip to end all pro tips and that have the boss send the email. 

Chris Beall (17:04):

So set your automation up so when your SDR R or BDR has the conversation, an email comes from the boss with the personalization from the conversational AI that listened to the conversation and it has a subject matter, a line that says, thank you for speaking with my colleague today. Who’s not going to open that? And you’re a gracious boss. You’re like a love your team kind of person, like Ucci or something. I mean, I don’t know if you love your team like she does, but at least you’re kind of on the board. And these things are straightforward to do with modern automation and they’re not what’s being done. What we tend to do is instead of having the conversation, we tell people to do a lot of research because that’s easy. Also, there’s two things that are easy. Following up is easy. That requires a little thought. 

Chris Beall (17:58):

Research is easy and requires no thinking whatsoever. You just look at one thing and look at another thing and look at another thing. Draw some conclusion about somebody. I’m going to talk to Chris Beal about Arizona State University because he went there. Go Sun Devils. Little did they know. Well, I also went to the University of Arizona. So go cats. I got a fight going on maybe between devils and cats. Do you want to be in here? I don’t think so. Devils and cats altogether in the same brain. No. So don’t talk to me about the devils and the cats, but you think you accomplished something with that research? If you just call me out of the blue and tell me that you’ve discovered a breakthrough about something I care about, I care about, maybe I’ll give you a few minutes. So as we think about R O I, we need to really break it down. 

Chris Beall (18:48):

It’s like what is that person doing? That starts with a conversation and ultimately leads to engagement where the engagement is expressed in the CRM as an opportunity. And by the way, don’t just count the closed one. This is another huge mistake folks make in our OA at Eyeland. They go, oh, all that counts as the closed one really. Does your business run on magic? Is this Hogwarts? I mean, you don’t get to wave a magic wand and make business come into being. You have to actually go find folks who are first of all, fundamentally qualified to buy your product. And secondly, in market now. Now only one 12th of your market’s in market now. So 11 twelfths of the time, you have to fail anyway. So now you we’re down to what are you going to do with the remaining 8.66%? Because that’s all you got in this quarter. All you’ve got is one 12th of your market. So it’s not a magic wand thing. It’s actually got to talk to a whole bunch of folks. So it’s so interesting to me when I talk to somebody who says, well, I’m a bottom line guard, or it’s always a guy, by the way. Thank God it is. Say this, all I occur about is results. Really, you think if you pound your fist on the table long enough, something will happen, or hard enough, you fire enough people or whatever. 

Chris Beall (20:07):

I don’t think it works like that. I think you actually, it’s like being a, I’ll go back to basketball. It’s like being a John Wooden or something. You have to break it down. You have to break it down, and it’s going to come down to a person doing something with the limited time they have. And you need to be able to go measure what happened looking backward from the opportunity to that thing that they did. And my guess is the best thing for them to do is to hold a conversation with somebody who might be worth engaging in your business. 

Susan Finch (20:38):

Fantastic. Chris, this was perfect. So we’re wrapping up prospecting costs on return investment, dollars spent, dollars missed. I think you have told us all the ways we’ve been missing it. The way we’re not thinking properly. Yeah. The way we need to rethink what it actually means and the value and importance of pipeline. Not closed deals. Not signed contracts. That isn’t what keeps you going because once those are done, they’re done. And you need to keep replenishing the pipeline. Connect and sell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it, connect and sell. 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@connectandsell.com. Never miss an episode. Go to any of your favorite podcast venues and search for market dominance guys, or go to market dominance guys.com and subscribe.

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Chris and Corey asked me to prepare you for a mind-expanding journey as we take Dr. Goldratt’s theory of constraints beyond its traditional boundaries and revolutionize the way you approach sales. Discover the art of identifying the true constraint and learn why pulling together as a team can sometimes snap the traces. We uncover the secrets of critical paths, buffers, and the profound impact of time in the fast-paced sales arena. Embrace your inner rebel and challenge the norms by seeking fresh perspectives from other disciplines.

But wait, there’s more! Get inspired by the legendary story of competitive eater Kobe and his unconventional strategies that shattered records. We’ll show you how to think outside the bun and achieve unprecedented sales success. Join us for this episode covering mastering sales success by unleashing the power of constraints and revolutionary strategies but we’ll just call it, “Hot Dogs and Hot Deals: Devouring Sales Records!”

Links from this episode:

Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Branch 49
ConnectAndSell

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:21):

Chris and Corey asked me to prepare you for a mind-expanding journey as we take Dr. Goldratt’s theory of constraints beyond its traditional boundaries and revolutionize the way you approach sales. Discover the art of identifying the true constraint and learn why pulling together as a team can sometimes snap the traces. We uncover the secrets of critical paths, buffers, and the profound impact of time in the fast-paced sales arena. Embrace your inner rebel and challenge the norms by seeking fresh perspectives from other disciplines.

(00:53):

But wait, there’s more. Get inspired by the legendary story of competitive eater, Kobe, and his unconventional strategies that shattered records. We’ll show you how to think outside the bun and achieve unprecedented sales success. Join us for this episode covering mastering sales success, unleashing the power of constraints and revolutionary strategies, but we’ll just call it Hot Dogs and Hot Deals, devouring sales records.

Corey (01:24):

Well, here we are again. Welcome to another episode of The Market Dominance Guys, with Corey Frank and, as always in the sales throne, virtually next to me, Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the profit of prophet and the hawking of hawking. Chris, you look tan and rested. You must have been somewhere where there’s water and sunshine and fetching Ms. Fenucci and celebrating something. Correct? I see-

Chris (01:49):

Celebrating something. Our first anniversary, we got married last year. This is being filmed… It’s not filmed, but whatever we call it nowadays, Zoomed here on… What are we on? July something, or the 6th of July 2023.

Corey (02:04):

Wow.

Chris (02:04):

We got married on the 2nd of July 2022, and we went over to Hawaii to the scene of the crime where I proposed to her. I call it the second proposal. Oh no, the third, she calls it the second. She claims the first one was a proposition. This is where you can disagree about terminology, but agree on a course of action, in our course of action with this. So yes, back here in Seattle right now where it may as well be Hawaii. It’s 90 degrees and the sun is shining here as well. So why did we go anywhere?

Corey (02:36):

Indeed, indeed. Well, as long as you’re back here, both in front of the microphone where you belong, where we can talk about all things market dominance, and of course. Right before we hit the record button, it seems, Chris, that every time I come whining to you about a business problem that I may have, or other folks who climb the mountaintop to pick your brain about a course of action and what state they may be in, which you can talk about that certainly as a great review, we end up always coming back to the good and fine Dr. Eli Goldratt and his theory of constraints. And I think if we had a heat map of how many times we’ve talked about the theory of constraints in our episodes, but I think the real answer is it’s not enough. Already-

Chris (02:36):

Not enough.

Corey (02:36):

Not enough.

Chris (03:20):

Not enough. Kirsten, not enough there.

Corey (03:24):

Kirsten not enough. So I bet a guy like you, Chris, you see the theory of constraints in everything, not only in businesses and restaurants, but you probably had an episode or two when you’re on some boat or on some surfboard in Hawaii where it probably came up as well.

Chris (03:41):

Yeah, it’s interesting. We were just out the other day on a little boat tour. You get on one of these big catamarans and you go out somewhere. And if you’re lucky, it’s the kind that is not Coast Guard certified, therefore you can only have four couples on it, and then two of them cancel, so then there’s only two couples. And then you got white pineapple, which is like candy, so then you’re really doing well and they have some other things.

(04:04):

And I had a conversation with one of the captains on the boat, not the captain captain, but the mate who wants to go around the world on a cruise for three years in a sailboat. Serious stuff. And he’s a serious guy and he’s preparing for it seriously. And we had this discussion about what’s the constraint that needs to be understood and needs to be characterized, and you need to invest in you as a system before you go out and attempt to do something kind of nutty, which is to sail a sailboat 25,000 miles except it’s further because you don’t get to go just around the earth, you have to kind of go all the places, continents in the way and crap like that.

(04:42):

We had a brief conversation and I told him, “I believe the constraint for you is in this value chain or this action chain that goes on that says, everything’s going okay, now it’s not, what do I do?” So something happened, now what do I do? So when everything’s going okay, you’re probably in a state of flow, so there’s nothing to invest in. Whatever it is, you’re doing it, pay no attention to it, just keep doing it.

(05:11):

But when something happens that draws your attention, you need to know which of the other two states that you can be in as a system. And that’s what I was telling you I was, “Look, just think of yourself as a system. You’re going to go buy this system that’s going to be able to… or build it and it’s going to be able to go around the world without dying or getting lost or whatever, and you’re going to deal with a lot of stuff.”

(05:33):

So number one state, flow. Great, wonderful. Number two state, however, is you’re stuck. You don’t know what to do. There’s something bad happened. An orca off the coast of Portugal has got your boat’s rudder in its jaws and is looking over at its buddy going, isn’t this fun? I’m so glad we invented rudder fighting or whatever they call it in orca land. And this is going on a lot off the coast of Portugal right now. Well, what do you do? Well, you’re stuck. So even though you might feel like you have to take immediate action, you don’t know what action to take and you need to learn. So when stuck, switch modes to learning and that link in your value chain will be getting the attention that it needs.

(06:23):

And then the third one’s the tough one, which is you’re not stuck, you’re not in flow and you just have to wait. And this happens a lot of times when you’re doing things, like I used to do mountaineering, doing sailing or whatever. When the world is bigger than you are, sometimes there’s nothing to do but just wait. And you can find something else to do and go get in flow doing that. That’s why you should always keep puzzles around that you don’t know how to solve, because you don’t need to solve them, but you need something to do to help you be in flow when you’re waiting. That’s a real key, because waiting is the hardest thing of all, in business is the very hardest. Just waiting, waiting for the right time to talk to somebody about a deal, waiting for that moment. There’s externalities and you have to wait. And the best way to wait is to turn yourself away from waiting into a state of stuckness about something that has nothing on the line.

Corey (07:24):

Well, let’s talk about that learning. I think that’s key. Certainly as an impatient guy and salesperson, I resemble both of those pejoratives, if you will. There’s a book from a few years ago, Think Like a Freak, the authors of Freakonomics. What he talks about, Chris, which I know you’ll appreciate, is this concept of don’t be embarrassed by how much you don’t know and how much you don’t act. And he has this simple story that he uses. And here’s the story. A little girl named Mary goes to the beach with her mother and her brother and they drive in a red car. And at the beach they swim, they eat some ice cream, they play in the sand and have sandwiches for lunch.

(08:09):

Now the questions that are given are what color is the car, and did they have fish and chips for lunch? Did they listen to music in the car? Did they drink a lemonade with lunch? And so now let’s compare the answers in your mind, in our listeners’ mind with what a bunch of British school children aged five to nine who were given the same quiz, what they said. Now, nearly all the children got the first two questions, the car was red and they went to the beach. But then when you start asking other questions, such as did they listen to music? Did they build sandcastles? Most of the kids will try to bluff their way through it. Those are the kids that become salespeople, right?

Chris (08:55):

Oh, exactly.

Corey (08:57):

But we used to always say that the hardest words in English language are to say, I love you. But the authors of Think Like a Freak say the actual hardest word to say is, I don’t know. Because you often can’t admit, especially in business, you can’t admit what you don’t yet know. And so he talks, he postulates that in order to really get out of these stuck states, you have to think like a child. And we’ve talked a little bit about asking small questions versus trying to ask the big questions and how the small questions by their very nature are less often asked and investigated the simple questions. But they’re virgin territory for true learning. So what do you think about that when you’re asking the ship captain or even some of the experiences with some of your clients here in the last couple of months or so, when I’m stuck, what are the questions I should be asking? Because how do I know if I’m stuck or if I’m waiting, which one is it?

Chris (09:54):

Yeah. Well, that’s a great question. How do you know if you’re stuck or you’re waiting? After all, that’s a process itself. That’s a process in which you could be in flow figuring out if you’re stuck or waiting, or you could be stuck about being stuck or waiting. You could be waiting to see if you’re stuck or waiting, right? All of the above could be going on.

(10:14):

The safe place to go always is stuck. Always is stuck. Because it turns out, even if you aren’t stuck on this particular thing, you’re stuck on so many things because you don’t know hardly anything. I don’t know hardly nothing is what we should all wake up. When I interview people to work in any one of the various companies that I’ve done over time, Time being one of those really big concepts now. 40 years, right?

(10:43):

One of the things that I tell them in the interview, well, I tell them first, you wouldn’t be talking to me if you weren’t qualified for the job, so I have no interest in hearing about your qualifications. And they usually are a little shocked. It’s like, look, I have people to do that. If you’re not qualified, you’re not talking to me. So now you are talking to me. So the purpose of this conversation is to allow you to have a clear picture of what kind of horror show you might be joining.

(11:11):

So I want to just put out a couple of things for you. One is we’re probably going to fail. That’s a starting point. Because if this were something where you’re probably going to succeed, we wouldn’t be doing it. Others would’ve already done it. So everything that is worth trying that might be a very high value, is high likelihood of failure.

(11:31):

So first, you have to get happy with the idea that you’re joining up with likely failure. Think about that. Secondly is you’re likely to find out when you come here that you’re wrong most of the time. This isn’t because we’re mean people who like to point out that other people are wrong. It’s because we recognize we’re all wrong almost all of the time. And the trick is to stay enthusiastic when you’re wrong. And the way you stay enthusiastic is you treat being wrong as an opportunity to learn rather than opportunity to cover up.

(12:05):

And a lot of folks kind of look at it like, whoa, that’s doesn’t sound that great to me. And it’s maybe a third of the candidates come through the interview and decide to join. And I always just say, “It’s up to you. It’s not up to me.” You want to join up at a place where you come to work naked every day, where we just know we’re wrong, we know we’re wrong from the get go, we will learn little things. We don’t make sales in order to get folks money, we make sales to have an opportunity to learn from the experience of being in a customer relationship with somebody rather than a prospect or stranger relationship because we’re trying to help them. We’ll find out, Hey, we’re wrong. We have to improve. That’s how we’re going to learn. So we’ll be stimulated to learn, as the customer’s problem is the wolf at our door. And when the wolf is at your door, well, you do something. You don’t just sit there, right? What do you do in this case? You try to learn.

(12:55):

So I think that there’s a safe place to go, assuming you’re in flow. Faking flow is really common. Folks love to fake flow. I’m going to do today what I did yesterday. I’m comfortable doing it, it doesn’t matter how dumb it is. It’s like, I am going to tend my beach side garden during the tsunami siren. Well, it’s a bad idea.

Speaker 1 (13:24):

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

(13:27):

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(14:06):

And we’re back with Corey and Chris

Chris (14:16):

During the tsunami siren, it’s a good idea to think, what do I know about tsunamis? I better learn pretty quick. Oh, I’ve heard they can only go so far uphill. I think I’ll start going uphill, then get in flow going uphill, right? Tending your beach side garden because you did it yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before, and your mom did it and your dad did it, and your dog did it and everybody did it. And it’s a tsunami morning, my friend. It’s time to leave the beach side garden alone to see if it can fend for itself for a day while you get yourself uphill. Because getting tsunamied is not that great, right?

Corey (14:51):

No.

Chris (14:51):

Waiting is a bad place to go also, by default. And some people do that. That’s considered to be conservative by a lot of folks. That’s like, we’ll just wait and see. Wait and see is considered to be a conservative phrase. Wait and see is like radical risk taking. After all, if you’re waiting, you have spare resource, you may as well use it to learn. Learning always reduces risk incrementally and sometimes exposes value, opportunity. So in general, you should let the winds of change buff at you, but you should fall into the hole of stuck every chance you get.

Corey (15:31):

Okay. I think we had said in one of our episodes from a few years ago, so I’m going to paraphrase you to you, right? All great breakthroughs in business happen when you’re stuck. Did I say that correctly?

Chris (15:43):

Yeah. Yeah. When you’re in flow, nothing happens other than you make progress. Folks love progress, right? It’s like, oh, here’s my progress report. It’s like, you should write a stuck report.

Corey (15:54):

Write a stuck…

Chris (15:57):

Progress is like, that would’ve happened anyway. Who cares?

Corey (16:00):

Let’s talk about a little bit more into our good friend, Dr. Eli Goldratt. And again, you talk about the book, The Goal. That came out in the mid-early eighties, I believe, right? And it was meant for manufacturing. But what we at The Market Dominance Guys, with your leadership, Chris, we’ve, I think, perpetuated that theory of constraints across business and inside sales beyond just the traditional supply chain, reducing lead time, et cetera. So hopefully that continues to prevail.

(16:30):

By thinking about the theory constraints, and maybe I have this wrong, but if I have a constraint, let’s say I’m a sales VP and sales are down, maybe meetings are down, maybe whatever the symptoms are that come to you as the doctor, what’s the disadvantage of working on all the things in my business. So I talk with my counterpart in finance, my counterpart in marketing, my counterpart in HR. If everybody collectively works on what they think is their constraint, is that good for the business? Is that not good for the business? What are some of the repercussions if I do that? Because to me, that’s just naturally what I should be doing.

Chris (17:09):

Yeah. Everybody wants to pull, right? Everybody wants to pull their weight. Well, you pull your weight, you’ll snap the traces. I mean, there’s a weak link somewhere in there. You don’t know where it is. So if everybody pulls, you’ll break the weak link. And now you’re in a world of hurt. And now you no longer have a system. Now you have two broken parts of systems that have got to be put back together, and that’s really, really hard to do. It’s hard enough to find the weak link. It’s hard enough to characterize it. It’s hard enough to understand its investability.

(17:43):

I love the picture of the chain with the paperclip in the middle of it. But once you identify the paperclip, there’s a lot of things you could do. Here’s a non-obvious thing. Get 50 more paperclips and add them to that paperclip. Now you might have a weird looking link, but at least it’s strong, right? There’s stuff like that that can be done, but it can’t be done until you say, we’re all looking at the paperclip. Because then the question from finance is, do we have enough capital to afford 50 paperclips because that’s what it’s going to take here. Or then we might go off the operations folks and say, 50 paperclips showed up on the dock. Could we actually get them in here? And how do you put one more on? And then you go engineering and say, well, if we were to modify the paperclip a little bit so that it was already somewhat open, is it okay? Is it still strong enough if we bend it and they’ll do some engineering stuff, right?

(18:34):

You can do all of those things with everybody once you’ve identified the one thing that’s worth paying attention to, and thank goodness it’s easy. I mean constraints, it’s easy in manufacturing, it’s harder in other disciplines. And if you’re going to read Goldratt, make sure you read Critical Chain, not just the manufacturing books, the project books, because most of the time… The project book, right? Critical chain is about application of theory of constraints to projects. And in projects, the constraint is the entire critical path of the project. And the basic rule is critical path is there, it’s step by step, step step. It’s linear, but it has feeders, it depends on things happening. So feed early, build inventory early, and make sure that the feeder doesn’t end up delaying the progress along the critical path.

(19:31):

And then as you plan, don’t buffer the steps, only buffer the final outcome. So add a buffer. If it’s going to take two months to do something, add a buffer one month to the end. But if it’s going to take a week to do something, two weeks to do something else, and they’re all lined up, don’t add buffers in between them. If you divide a project up into enough small pieces, then the buffers themselves will stretch the project out to the point where you shouldn’t do it, even if it works.

(19:59):

And this is common in software development. It’s common in sales. It’s common actually in a whole bunch of disciplines that are not manufacturing. Manufacturing is funny because it has these stable, intermediate outputs. When I make a part that’s going to go into the next part of a process, it can sit in a bin for a hell of a long time before it becomes crap. This is not true in sales. When you put something a bin in sales, every moment it sits in that bin, it’s like a drop of water on a hot griddle, man, that thing is going somewhere. It’s jumping around and it’s getting smaller.

(20:32):

So you’ve got to pay attention to time in a different way in projects. And sales is always a project, always a project. We can manufacture intermediate results like this. I talk to you, you go on my follow-up list. As long as you are not interesting now, you are actually a stable part of my future system. Right?

Corey (20:51):

That’s right. That’s right.

Chris (20:53):

As soon as you’re interesting now you’re within the quarter, the period of consideration. Now you’re inside of a project with timelines, we have to figure out what is the critical path for us to move forward together to a potential resolution in one of the feeders, and we have to invest in the feeders early. I mean, it’s kind of funny because some folks disdain formal education when it comes to real business, right? Real business people here, we don’t do things. But this part of one’s formal education should not be neglected, which is understanding the application of the theory of constraints to projects and then understanding the most fundamental thing about theory of constraints, which is what not to do and what not to do, is to do everything. What to do is to go into stuck mode and say, “Well, we don’t know where the constraint is,” and we are going to go find it together. We’re going to learn.

Corey (21:48):

Yeah, it’s just a couple days after July 4th, and it made me think of somebody who has busted through, the Roger Banister, if you will, of competitive eating, and it’s the Joey Chestnut. But even before Joey Chestnut, there was this young man named Kobe who went to university in Japan, and he lived with his girlfriend, who signed him up for an eating competition because the first prize was $5,000 or something like that. And without telling him, signed him up and he entered. It was a contest where you had four stages, you had boiled potatoes, and then you had a seafood bowl and maybe a Mongolian bowl and then noodles. And he watched previous years and he tried to think, how could I outthink the competition? And so long story short, what he did was just ate just enough to get to the next round. And then the final round after he conserved a lot of his energy and his stomach capacity, he would win.

(22:57):

And then, having taste a little bit of success, this is where I think our friend Dr. Eli and Dr. Beall come in, is he wanted to go pro, and he did the Nathan’s famous 4th of July hotdog eating contest, which rained out for a little bit, but I think it just happened in… I think the winner was 62 hotdog, I think it was. But in 2001, when Kobayashi decided to enter the contest, the record stood at 25 and a half, in 12 minutes, 10, 12 minutes. And so for months, he trained in obscurity and he arrived at Coney Island as this… I mean, he’s five eight, he’s very slight. He’s skinny. And one of the contestants mocked him and said, “Your legs are thinner than my arms.”

(23:40):

So how did he do? In his first Coney Island competition, this is in Think Like a Freak, they talk about this. He smoked the field and set a new world record. He did 50. This 20-something-year-old skinny Kobayashi essentially doubled the world record. And so everybody thought, okay, are you cheating? Are you using stones to expand your stomach? What are you doing? Why was he so much better? But he observed and he learned, and he said that most of the eaters had a similar strategy. Think of this, how most callers have a similar strategy, most sales organizations have a similar strategy. And it’s really just a speed it up version of how an average person eats a hotdog at a barbecue. You pick it up, you cram the dog in and the bun into the mouth. You chew from end to end, maybe you chug some water. And he said, there’s got to be a better way.

(24:32):

Nowhere was it written, for instance, that the hot dog must be eaten end to end. What would happen if he broke the dog and the bun in half? And this gave much more options for chewing and loading. And then he said, okay, the bun itself is a problem. What if I dunk the bun in my free hand and I squeeze all the water out of it and I eat that as well as the bunless dog broken in half. So he systematically broke down, it sounds like he was listening to some of our Market Dominance Guys or reading some Dr. Eli.

(25:05):

But what are your thoughts on stuff like that? Because you see that in business over the time where too many sales reps are trying to eat the bun like a backyard barbecue, and you have the VPs who are saying, I want more and more and more meetings, for instance. When Kobayashi went through a different process, not how do I get more meetings, I want more meetings, but how do I get better meetings faster? By being more efficient.

Chris (25:29):

Yeah. I think there’s a great principle… I love that story. I mean, he identified the constraint essentially as saliva production, and he faked the saliva. And you’re eating the bun, you’ve got to wet it down with what comes out of you. And he goes, ah, I just dunk it.

Corey (25:44):

Yeah, yeah.

Chris (25:45):

Get rid of that problem. And the other thing, I can basically almost swallow hole if I can get a couple of chomps into it. So I mean, that’s a brilliant application of theory of constraints.

Corey (25:53):

How do I make hotdog easier to eat versus just eating more hot dogs?

Chris (25:57):

Exactly. Well, we have the same problem in our company. So for years, we offer this thing called an intensive test drive. And the test drive was a breakthrough. It was an accidental breakthrough, like so many good breakthroughs. There was a customer, name’s Melody. Melody wanted to talk to me a lot. And I finally said, “I never want to speak with you again, because we will go to our graves, both of us having never done business together, having a lot of enjoyable conversations under our belt, so to speak. How about if I get on a plane tomorrow, fly across the continent, and we’ll actually use our product in production with your team, one person, 20 people, whatever, live, no demo, no conversations, no nothing, just do it. Your rep will have conversations. We’re just going to watch, we’re going to enjoy.” It’s like, “Oh, okay.” So we did that, right?

Corey (26:45):

Yep. Yep.

Chris (26:46):

So we thought we were so brilliant. We had this… The intensive test drive we call them ITVs now. It’s so important, we shorten the name and they do marvelous things. No demos, just use product and production. Woohoo. Well, we wanted to make sure that when we did that. Early on, we’re being conservative,. So you have to sign a little contract. Yeah, it’s $0, but it’s DocuSign. How hard can this be?

(27:12):

Well, it turns out after seven years, seven years? Eight years of doing these intensive test drives, I started to think the constraint of our entire sales system, this machine that we’ve built, is getting that little $0 contract signed. And if we just said, let’s just do the test drive, we’ll sign all contracts later after the test drive should we decide to go commercial together. If we just did that, we’d be dunking our hot dog. So divide it into two pieces, change the order of operations and dunk the hot dog.

Corey (27:49):

I love that.

Chris (27:50):

We increased the flow rate of test drives on the books, just signed, by a factor of two in one day with exactly the same staff. That is from a Friday to a Monday, just by changing the policy. No contract required. Suddenly, just an NDA, simple little NDA, everybody signs NDAs, nobody’s ever enforced one in the history of NDAs. So they’re willing to sign a simple NDA. We won’t steal your stuff, you don’t steal our stuff, right? It’s kind of it. And suddenly we doubled the flow rate of the one thing that was constraining the entire growth of the company.

(28:31):

Now, that is separating out the bun from the dog and dog from the bun, right? Reducing friction. And it’s interesting to me how often the big breakthroughs are, and I shouldn’t say it like this, but I’ll say it like this, nothing more than breaking something that was one thing into two parts, and then reversing the sequence in which the two parts would’ve been used or interacted with or consumed within your process.

(29:02):

And if you kind of go into your stuck situation with this paradigm, which is, can I break this into two parts? And if you ever say anything like that, you’ll get every sacred cow response known to mankind, all of which come back to, we’ve always done it like this, which is the desire to stay in flow and tend the seaside garden, beachside garden in the tsunami warning. That’s what it is. But it’s like, but the garden, look, in the past, the garden’s always been great. Yes, but there’s a tsunami coming. How are we sure it’s a tsunami? It hasn’t been a tsunami before. Why, I heard something that sounded like that siren once, and it was nothing. I think they were just testing the tsunami siren, et cetera, et cetera, right? You will get the most strong negative reaction from the thing that you should most strongly consider as action.

Corey (29:56):

Really. So that’s how you’re over the target?

Chris (29:57):

That’s how you know you’re over the target.

Corey (30:02):

The other thing that Kobayashi did, Chris, which you’re talking about, is they said that he would make more room in his stomach by jumping and wriggling while he ate. Something that no one would think of, because you’re hunched over, you’re eating, you’re doing everything else. But what you’re saying about getting the meetings and how you have to ask the questions is, here’s an idea. If you stand up and we talk about this, certainly what you advise in flight school, is when you stand up, you talk with your hands, you’re emotionally comfortable, you’re going to sound more conversational and authentic.

(30:34):

Well, I tell you what, Chris, we’ve done almost 200 of these, and it’s really a joy to do them with you. This one should come with maybe a parental advisory warning for explicit truths or explicit lyrics for sales professionals and folks, because I don’t think that you can read the goal nearly enough. I have a buddy of mine who we know, Robert Vera, who reads it every year just to keep himself sharp and certainly Think Like a Freak and Freakonomics are ways to help us all think like children, which we don’t do enough of, which is asking the small questions. What if we dot, dot, dot, as opposed to trying to stay in flow state, try to always maintain, cover our ass, ignore the tsunami siren that is blaring, we seek not to hear it. And just by those things alone, we don’t need to spend any more money on tech stack tools or hire any more folks or add any new magical CRM snap ins to radically improve our business.

Chris (31:33):

Yeah, it’s extremely rare that you’re in a situation where you can’t double your business by simply finding the constraint, breaking it in two, and changing the order of operations.

Corey (31:44):

Yeah, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Well, we are up against the clock. We have market dominance things to do to pay the market dominance bills. So Chris, final thoughts on our revisiting yet again, our good friend Dr. Goldratt.

Chris (31:58):

Here’s a thought. My thought is, whenever you find yourself doing something that you’re comfortable doing, and you’re doing it because you’re comfortable doing it, ask yourself this question. Am I just covering up for being stuck? Because that’s what we do. When we’re stuck, we pretend to know the answers. And the more rigidly we do what we did yesterday, the more certainly we can be characterized as needing to go learn something new.

Corey (32:30):

Or as our good friend, Uncle Zig Ziglar said, feed your family or feed your ego. You can’t do both, right?

Chris (32:35):

You can’t do both.

Corey (32:37):

Can’t do both. Well, that’s a great mini summer edition, post honeymoon, one year anniversary edition of the Market Dominance Guys for Chris Beall. This is Corey Frank. Until next time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Dr. Mindy Weinstein, as they delve deep into the psychology behind scarcity and its profound impact on consumer behavior. You’ll uncover invaluable insights on how scarcity appeals to different generations, especially the younger demographic, and how you can leverage this powerful phenomenon to drive sales success. Drawing from their wealth of experience, Corey and Chris share practical strategies on positioning salespeople as indispensable resources in a scarce market, fostering authentic connections, and building trust through genuine expertise. By the end of this episode, you’ll be equipped with actionable tips and powerful communication techniques to elevate your sales game and unleash your full potential. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to transform your sales approach—tune in now and unlock the untapped potential of scarcity!  Join us for this episode, “Using Scarcity Tactics in Sales: GenX vs. GenZ Psychology.”

Links from this episode:

Dr. Mindy Weinstein on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Branch 49
ConnectAndSell

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:23):

Chris and Cory continue their conversation with Dr. Mindy Weinstein as they delve deep into the psychology behind scarcity and its profound impact on consumer behavior. You’ll uncover invaluable insights on how scarcity appeals to different generations, especially the younger demographic, and how you can leverage this powerful phenomenon to drive sales success. Drawing from their wealth of experience. Chris and Cory share practical strategies on positioning salespeople as indispensable resources in a scarce market, fostering authentic connections and building trust through genuine expertise. By the end of this episode, you’ll be equipped with actionable tips and powerful communication techniques to elevate your sales game. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to transform your sales approach. Join us for this episode using scarcity tactics and sales, Gen X versus Gen Z psychology.

Corey Frank (01:20):

Yeah, I think when we were meeting last week, I think one of the examples you gave, or maybe this is in your book, is you’re not going to find Christian Dior clothes, purses and et cetera at the corner Safeway or the grocery store. There has to be an element of scarcity and exclusivity to get these items. Chanel doesn’t mass produce these items, and it’s interesting. I wonder if Chris, if we’ve ever done any discussions or if, or the good doctor can comment on selling or buying from a younger generation.

(01:56):

We have a lot of folks in the 25, 30 or even younger or so that are in the marketplace that we sell our goods and wear’s to, Chris certainly, and that are consumers. I’m curious if there’s any studies on that approach, doctor, or experience that you’ve had maybe, Chris, where younger folks, they’re used to these drops that happen from Supreme or my 10-year-old lets me know when Lego’s about to do a drop two weeks in advance, and does that affect the buying behavior or the selling response for old salts like me and Chris here later on when we’re selling them into the marketplace?

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (02:36):

Well, I can tell you, I mean there is a difference based on age with all of this. So I will tell you the older generations, so more, I think we’re retirement years, they’re not going to be drawn to something that shows this is in high demand or the most popular because most likely they’re going to be like, I’m good with the product I’m using or the company that I’ve already been hiring, why would I switch? That’s not an incentive.” And actually it could even backfire. “Well, then that’s going to be really crowded. I don’t want to go there,” if it’s an event or something like that. Now with the younger generation, so when I say younger generation, I’m actually talking about Gen Z and millennials, so Gen X is kind of just in the middle. It just depends on a lot of other factors with them.

(03:16):

But for Gen Z and millennials, very much anything that is a supply related scarcity draws, or a limited edition, which is part of supply, draws them in a lot because they’re in a generation where very big on social media, very big on showing the latest thing that they have. They’re self-expression based on what you wear, what you drink, where you go, the experiences. And so they’re very susceptible to that and interested in that. They want to be unique, they want to feel like they are special and that they can show showcase something. And so going with the drops, that’s why Nike’s brilliant when it comes to that or Supreme, they have done such a phenomenal job because not only do they do drops, but if you’ve ever been to one of their stores, the first time I ever went was in San Francisco and I just thought they didn’t have a lot of merchandise available, like, “Oh, they must be running out of stock.”

(04:09):

And so I was there with my oldest son, so I asked one of the salespeople there, I said, “Oh, are these the only sizes you have?” And they said, “Oh no, we have a lot more in the back.” So they don’t even put everything out. They purposely make it look sparse. And then so you kind of get that feeling of like, “Okay, I need to get this now.” And they have all this stuff in the back. So very interesting, but very much that younger generation, they like supply related scarcity and limited edition.

Corey Frank (04:37):

Chris, what do you see from being CEO of a company over these last 15 plus years and certainly being in academics as well? Do you teach your sales teams to sell different folks differently generationally?

Chris Beall (04:53):

Nope. We’re not that sophisticated. We’re not. It’s kind of funny, it’s something we should think about more, but your Branch49 folks, how do we sell them on old calling something that people in their early twenties aren’t drawn to naturally? And it’s by offering them something extremely scarce and therefore valuable. We call it finishing school for future CEOs. And so is what’s that? Oh, I get to learn something other people don’t learn that might advantage me because I want to have a good career and I don’t know what’s coming. That’s a very simple example, but it’s a powerful one, and it’s the one that we actually conceptually kind of built the attraction of Branch49 around is, hey, you’re going to learn something that is very rare and is very valuable. You’re going to learn to hold conversations with strangers. The one thing every CEO has in common, they can speak comfortably and with value to strangers, you’re going to come learn it, which is very different from we’re going to pay you more than a burger flipper to talk to people who are going to yell at you and say no.

(06:09):

So same product, but packaged in a way that indicates that there’s a supply issue, you’re not going to learn this anywhere else, and there’s value built in because well, who doesn’t want to get closer to being a CEO? By the way, for those of you who thinking of being CEOs, the only reason we have the title is that the word janitor has a lot of letters in it and people just can’t remember all the letters. They can’t spell it, so they shortened it to CEO. You can figure out how that worked.

Corey Frank (06:43):

So it is primal in a lot of ways that, and certainly Mindy, I think you’re saying that as well, is that a lot of these response stimuli are predictable. We have to be careful, like any weapon. One of the expressions that Chris has used, maybe this is the title of our next book here, is that with ConnectAndSell, it’s a weapon that amplifies the volume of conversations that a sales rep can have. But if that sales rep is not armed with the right things to say and the right tonality, then the expression that Chris uses is then what you’re doing as a sales leader is you are amplifying their suck. And I can see if I use scarcity poorly, I can amplify the suck as well. So this is a how-to manual, but it also could be a cautionary tale if used in the wrong hands with the wrong intent, correct?

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (07:41):

Correct. Absolutely. Well, and hopefully this goes without saying, but I’m still going to say it is that you have to be providing something great. You’re going to do all the scarcity, but if your product is subpar and you’re like, “I’m just going to use all this psychology that I’m learning and just to get my sales,” well, that’s not going to work out for you long term either. So we have to think about that. But I even just love the conversation that you were just having, talking about younger people and working at Branch49 and all of that, is that the way that you’re wording it is setting them up that they are going to be special, they’re going to be an exclusive group of individuals that are going to be very much sought after and desired because they have a skill that not everyone has.

(08:28):

And I think that’s a huge thing, and it’s just like you just said, it’s the wording and you’re doing that. So we just need to think about a lot of times in our sales approaches, what type of wording are we using? Because it doesn’t have to be manipulative, it’s just really what is someone trying to get? So with what you said, yeah, it’s primal. And I didn’t even bring up FOMO. That’s a huge thing about scarcity is we don’t want to miss out.

(08:50):

And so that’s again how our brains are wired. Now in psychology, it’s not referred to as FOMO. There is loss aversion and then there’s like another way to explain it. But really what happens is we don’t want to miss out on something. And that’s again, how we’re wired because that’s primal to us, so we don’t want to miss out. And so that goes to why we value things that are harder to get, or while we’ll focus on it or make that quick decision, because we don’t want to be told no, and we also don’t want to feel like we missed that opportunity. And so that’s just another thing to keep in mind, but use it the right way. So don’t be cheesy about it with FOMO, but it does work.

Announcer (09:31):

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

(09:43):

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, an employee 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 TAM, Branch49s modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branchfortynine.com.

(11:07):

And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Corey Frank (11:10):

Well, it’s funny, Chris, when the good doctor and I had met, one of the interchanges we had through email was we’re talking about pitch anything. And our good friend, our good mutual friend, Oren Klaff and Oren has his three legs of the bar stool. People want what they can’t have, people chase what moves away from them, and people only place value on that, which is difficult to obtain. And Mindy shared that she was on a podcast recently, a marketing podcast, and the host said, “Oh, Oren Klaff, yeah, he’s my favorite. I love his book.” And we decided to keep it as just a secret because we don’t want Oren to be any, company more insufferable than he already is by knowing that.

(11:49):

So certainly Oren, if you’re one of the nine people who listen to our podcast, I don’t think he is, he’ll do that. But what the similarities that we, so we talk about pitch and anything and flip the script, Chris, certainly what you have with your vaunted sales experts inside of ConnectAndSell and a lot of interesting overlaps in that that I think we’re onto something these experts and certainly as a doctor of finance, and Mindy certainly is a doctor of psychology here in tapping into mere lays salespeople like us and what makes us tick.

Chris Beall (12:22):

Well, one of the funny things that, people don’t talk about this very much, but sales is interesting. I’ll make a comparison. So accountants don’t join companies that have great products. They might care about the product, they might not care about the product, but the fact that a great accountant works at a company doesn’t cause you to trust that product more. But when you interact with a great salesperson who is an expert, who is sincere, who is on your side, that immediately tells you, this must be a great product because this person could sell anything and they chose to sell this. And that actually creates instant scarcity because great salespeople are naturally scarce. They just are. They’re like, if you’re building a basketball team and well, you could get ahold of somebody who’s seven feet tall, has great athletic moves, great stamina, and 165 physical IQ, that’s scarce.

(13:21):

Without watching them play, you’ll probably draft them. And without watching you play, folks will buy from you because you’re an expert, you’re sincere, you’re on their side, and you’re handling them, so to speak, in a way that they like to be handled. It feels right to them. And somewhere in there it says, oh, this person could be selling anything and they’re selling this, so this stuff must be good. It creates a relationship between sales and I don’t even want to call it skill, it’s just sales quality and product quality because there’s a fluidity, a liquidity in the sales world.

(14:02):

Salespeople are the only people in business who can just go work anywhere. If you’re really good at sales, you can work anywhere. I don’t know if I’m any good at it, but I’ve sold Fuller Brush door to door. I’ve sold a little spider spray in my day and I sold Helen on marrying me in two days. She asked, she said, “That’s an interesting problem. Is it you, the salesperson or you the product? I can’t really tell.” Now that’s a case where it converges and you have to be skeptical, which fortunately she’s good.

Corey Frank (14:35):

Sure, yeah. As a good friend, Brad from Ferguson, from Sandler Sales says, “You have to learn to become the product of the product.” And I think certainly Chris, you do that and what you talk about ConnectAndSell, and certainly you do that as the sage of sales, as we all know you. Well, as we’re up against the gun here, final thoughts, Mindy, on scarcity, and especially when, as you know what Chris and I have been talking about for the last, gosh, I think four years, coming up on four years or so, Chris, is market dominance. And I know we talked about it briefly last week, Mindy, when you visited us here at Branch49, but any final thoughts on scarcity and how we can under-use it or overuse it or how we should be better using it today as professionals in our craft?

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (15:21):

Yeah, three things to think of. Number one, when we are talking about the whole idea of scarcity, just think about the words you’re using and how are you communicating? Because it’s not necessarily something brand new to bring to the table, and it’s this shiny new sales tool. It’s just the words that you’re using. So how can you just change your vocabulary to show that there is some true, so authentic, you want to be genuine scarcity that exists. And then the second thing, which I alluded to this, but don’t try to use just randomly, “Oh, I’m going to try this scarcity approach.” Know who you’re trying to reach to make sure that that form of scarcity is going to be something that’s going to resonate with them. And then three, and I’m actually, just as our conversation, actually is making me think about this, three, have that confidence and value of what you are providing because that comes through and that’s going to show that you know what, you can be trusted. And so those are three things, very tangible. Again, it’s just how you’re going about it, is the biggest thing.

Corey Frank (16:28):

I love that. We certainly are going to make the power of scarcity part of our curriculum here. I think it’s a perfect add on. And as Chris knows, I haven’t had an original thought since 1998. So any ideas that we glean from the power of scarcity will certainly be in our Branch49 curriculum and client book.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (16:48):

Good.

Corey Frank (16:48):

Chris, final thoughts on your side from chatting with Dr. Mindy here?

Chris Beall (16:52):

Well, first, thank you. Fantastic to have. You’re hitting the real stuff. You’ve actually taken what it is that makes us tick and helps us make a decision. And in a way, when somebody speaks to us as in a strong sense, when they speak to us in a way that lets us recognize scarcity, short circuit our decision process, and then make a good decision, that’s a gift. They’ve given us time, and then they’ve also given us the outcome of the decision. And that’s our job in sales, is to give folks that gift. If we don’t know how to give the gift, wrap it up and put it in their hands in a way that they’ll go, “Oh, this is worth opening and I’m going to have a look at it,” we’re actually dis-serving them. So it’s ironic in a funny kind of way that we’re obliged to understand to the level where we could manipulate in order to deliver value without manipulating. And I think that’s kind of the essence of the whole thing, and that’s why this stuff ain’t easy and doing it well, is itself, scarce.

Corey Frank (17:55):

Yeah, for sure. Well, excellent. Well, thank you as always, Chris, for your insight and your partnership over these last four years. Thank you, Dr. Weinstein, for the great insight and carving out the time on your day. You’re also, in addition to a much in demand speaker, you have your own CEO and marketing consulting firm.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (18:18):

Yes.

Corey Frank (18:18):

Market Mind Shift. Well, Dr. Again, the Power of Scarcity by McGraw Hill. Get your copy today. And for Chris Beall and the market dominance guys, this is Corey Frank.

Chris Beall (18:28):

Thanks so much.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (18:28):

All right. Thank you. It’s great to meet you, Chris.

Chris Beall (18:29):

Thanks, Mindy. Talk to you soon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode Chris and Corey are joined by the brilliant Dr. Mindy Weinstein, marketing expert and author of the bestselling book, “The Power of Scarcity.” If you want to boost your sales game, this episode is a must-listen. Dr. Weinstein breaks down the secrets behind scarcity and its four types: time-related, demand-related, supply-related, and limited edition scarcity. Learn how to tap into the psychology of scarcity and motivate your customers to take action. Together, they explore the dynamics of scarcity in business and the impact it has on sales and marketing strategies. They also emphasize the importance of trust and credibility. Don’t be that professional who abuses scarcity—build genuine relationships first! Join the Market Dominance Guys for a an insightful exploration of the power of scarcity in sales, in “Cracking the Code: Scarcity Strategies for Sales Success.”

 

About Dr. Mindy Weinstein

Marketing is her passion. Over the last several years, she has trained 15,000+ people how to effectively approach marketing and sales in today’s climate. Through webinars, workshops and conferences, her goal is to educate the business world one person at a time. As part of this goal, she has been researching, teaching and consulting about marketing psychology, with a special focus on the power of scarcity. In fact, that’s the name of her bestselling book, The Power of Scarcity: Leveraging Urgency and Demand to Influence Customer Decisions (McGraw Hill 2022).

Links from this episode:

Dr. Mindy Weinstein on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn

Branch 49
ConnectAndSell

 

Full episode transcript below:

—-more—-

(00:24):

In this episode, Chris and Corey are joined by the brilliant Dr. Mindy Weinstein, marketing expert and author of the bestselling book, The Power of Scarcity. If you want to boost your sales game, this episode is a must listen. Dr. Weinstein breaks down the secrets behind scarcity in its four types, time-related, demand-related, supply-related, and limited edition scarcity. Learn how to tap into the psychology of scarcity and motivate your customers to take action. Together, they explore the dynamics of scarcity in business and the impact it has on sales and marketing strategies.

(00:57):

And they also emphasize the importance of trust and credibility. Don’t be that professional that abuses scarcity. Build genuine relationships first. Join the Market Dominance Guys for an insightful exploration of power of scarcity in sales in Cracking the Code, Scarcity Strategies for Sales Success.

Corey Frank (01:22):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and as always, Chris Beall, the sage of sales, the profit of profit, and the hawking of hawking. But Chris, even though you have those three vaunted titles that we’ve used as your nom de guerre, I guess you could say, for the last several years, we have somebody who rivals that little triumvirate of a title. And that is Dr. Mindy Weinstein. You were named as one of the top women in marketing globally. Put that in your hat, Chris, sage of sales, profit of profit.

(01:58):

We have Dr. Mindy Weinstein, MBA from ASU, Professor of Marketing here at Grand Canyon University, and the bestselling author from McGraw Hill of The Power of Scarcity. Chris, that’s why we wanted to coerce, cajole, albeit probably subtly threaten Dr. Mindy Weinstein to finally jump on an episode of the Market Dominance Guys so we could talk about scarcity since we’ve talked about this as a backbone of sales at the crossroads for many, many of our nearly 200 episodes. Welcome, Dr. Weinstein, to the Market Dominance Guys. Chris?

Chris Beall (02:36):

Hey, what can I say, we share something, Mindy or Dr. Weinstein. My dad got an MBA from ASU also.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (02:44):

Oh really?

Chris Beall (02:45):

I spent my childhood almost literally crawling the stacks in that big library there. That’s how I grew up was in the ASU library when I was 12, 13, 14 years old.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (02:59):

It’s not a bad way to grow up, that’s for sure. It’s a good school. Well, I’m so excited to be here today.

Corey Frank (03:02):

Well, it’s good to have you. You’ve been promoted and recommended, and you are also a student of the great Dr. Robert Cialdini. Chris, we were talking several times certainly about pre-suasion and persuasion and the power of influence and how that affects many of our theories and our principles here at Market Dominance Guys.

(03:25):

Doctor, talk to a little bit about the relationship that you have, certainly with the good Dr. Robert, and influence and how that helped mold what you turned from a dissertation into your bestselling book, The Power of Scarcity.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (03:40):

It actually started out several years ago. It was over a cup of coffee. That’s even the first chapter in my book is talking about the cup of coffee with Dr. Cialdini. I had just heard him, gosh, now it’s been probably almost 10 years. I was at a conference. I loved his message. Always had a strong desire to understand motivation and influence because I’m in marketing. I mean, that’s what we need to do is understand people and what really drives them. When I realized that he was local to me, and as I got into my Ph.D. program, I’m like, I’ll just reach out and just to see if I can meet up with them. He was so gracious.

(04:19):

He met me for a cup of coffee in Tempe, Arizona, and we talked about influence and all the different factors. I was telling him some of the things that I was considering pursuing as I was looking at my dissertation topic. We talked about different gaps in research and what do we see out there. Scarcity was one of the things that was mentioned. But even after I left that conversation, I was like, okay, well, that’s interesting because I think like a lot of us, we feel like we have scarcity figured out or like, “Oh, I’m doing that, playing a little hard to get, or I have some type of restriction. I get scarcity. I don’t need to really dive into that that much.”

(04:56):

But after I had that meeting and the more I was doing my research and started doing my testing and experiments, I realized it is so much deeper and more complicated than almost all of us realize. That’s why I went down that route with my dissertation, then I turned it to a book. And then Dr. Cialdini was very gracious again and read the whole book too and gave me a very nice glowing recommendation. I put that on my book too. You could see that on the front cover.

Corey Frank (05:26):

Yes, a true gem, I believe, is one of the accolades that he mentioned. Chris, you, of course, been in sales and certainly in the catalog business are no stranger to scarcity. Certainly as a historian, as a practitioner, as well as CEO of ConnectAndSell, what’s your relationship with Dr. Robert here and the power of those books, the Pre-Suasion, and then also tying into the topic at hand, which is scarcity in business today?

Chris Beall (05:55):

Well, scarcity, it’s quite fascinating because I believe they’re in marketing especially, but in sales also, there’s a Gresham’s law. Gresham’s law of money says bad money drives out good, but it’s not actually that it’s bad money. It’s that it’s abundant. Counterfeit money is cheap to make, and therefore you get a lot of it, and therefore the good money goes under the mattress and the counterfeit money stays in circulation. And until something happens, and the something usually is violent, lots of people die. Isaac Newton was involved in this. Us physicists are always up to no good, I think, is one of the problems.

(06:34):

In sales, this phenomenon repeats in waves, the Gresham’s law phenomenon, which is cheap, easy communications drive out scarce, valuable communications, drive them into the corner, so to speak. It turns out all the business is done in the scarce valuable conversations and the other cheap stuff gets the label spam. It’s happening right now with ChatGPT, right? You and I and ChatGPT and Susan wrote a book. Well, that book is crap. It’s a wonderful experience to take two days to write a book based on our podcast because it was fun to use ChatGPT, but we know damn well that that book is as close to spam as possible for something that’s based on actual human beings speaking with each other.

(07:24):

The reason is because it took me from 6:00 in the morning on a Saturday until 10:00 in the evening on a Sunday, the same weekend, to get this book all the way done and to Amazon and rocking and rolling. It took the scarcity away. And if I compare it to my wife’s book or, Mindy, to your book, my wife wrote a book called Love Your Team: A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid World. That book is scarce. It’s hard to produce. The scarcity is, are you going to spend 11 months of your life while working another job and planning a wedding and a honeymoon and dealing with some guy who shows up in your life doing something unfamiliar and exhausting?

(08:11):

You know it if you edit the book. I don’t know how many edit passes you had. On our honeymoon, I personally did seven edit passes of this entire book. I mean, it’s the essence of the nature of value. The flip is interesting, which is in sales folks get so excited when the next cheap thing comes along and they don’t think about what the consequence is, which is it drives down the value of them as sellers to use cheap means of communicating. Mass personalization with no effort whatsoever. Spam. We see this now.

(08:51):

In my company, what we’re doing is we’re taking something that’s become so scarce that people don’t do it anymore, which is getting live conversations between somebody with a problem and might have a problem and somebody who might have a solution. We make them practical, but still scarce. The way that they become scarce is the price goes up. You can dial the phone for a penny, but you have to pay us a lot more in order to have a conversation with somebody.

Corey Frank (09:17):

Yep, yep, that’s right. Mindy, what do you think of that as far as we’re talking about? You certainly talked about the four different types of scarcity, which we want to talk about. I think Chris hit about three of those four that he’s experienced there.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (09:30):

Yeah, okay, well, I have a lot of thoughts because you also threw out ChatGPT in there too, because you have a very interesting point, and this actually all ties to why I think scarcity is such a fascinating topic, is that you talked about personalization, and a lot of times we want to just do something mass. I actually just this week, and I sent a screenshot to my husband as a joke, this week I got an email talking about how to handle my taxes per my divorce. I screenshotted it and sent it to him. I go, “Did you not tell me something? Did I miss the papers you sent me?” He laughed.

(10:05):

And then I kid you not, an hour later, I got an email from that mass email that it was sent out to from the accounting firm saying, “We apologize. We thought we segmented our message to a certain audience.” But I thought, there you go. It’s an example of what you’re saying. I even feel like for scarcity, what happens too, the easy way to do scarcity is just to say, “You know what? I’m going to slap a discount on this, or I’m going to put some kind of for this period only terminology and it’s just going to reach everyone. Everyone’s going to be happy, and I’m going to get all these sales.”

(10:39):

Well, not necessarily, and I think it goes to what you’re saying, personalization. Well, who am I trying to reach? Am I trying to reach a customer who really wants to feel like they have something that’s exclusive and different than everybody else that they want that premier or premium service that I can provide? That’s important because it’s going to change how you message things versus someone who is just after the deal and it’s a commodity and they don’t really care. Well, yeah, then let’s absolutely use time related scarcity.

(11:07):

I think even going with the personalization, if you really want scarcity to work in your business and in your sales, you have to know how the different types of scarcity interact with different people. If you don’t mind, I’ll just throw out the four types, which we already mentioned, but I’ll just put a label on them so we’re on the same page. But you have time-related scarcity. I mean, that’s sales, any kind of time restriction. You have demand-related scarcity. That’s, of course, a lot what we saw during COVID, huge demand.

(11:34):

All of a sudden everyone wanted toilet paper, but then that led to supply-related scarcity, which is any shortage, but the supply-related companies also can control that a bit too. We see that a lot with luxury. And then limited edition. They just work differently. I think that if you want to be successful, you can’t just throw a one size fits all and I’m good. Check the box. I incorporated scarcity into my message.

Corey Frank (11:59):

We do this as sales reps, right? As an amateur sales rep, I still fall into these techniques, Chris and Mindy, because they’re seemingly easy, but they hurt my credibility, don’t they, in a lot of ways? If I try to introduce scarcity maybe a little too quickly or a little too unelegantly, what happens when I do that? We talk a lot about this, I think. But what happens, Mindy, when we do that as sales folks?

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (12:27):

And that’s a really good point, and that’s something that I try to call out in my book too. It’s that for someone to listen to that scarcity type message, they have to trust you, which means you have to prove your credibility and your expertise. Well, how do you do that? Well, if it makes sense that you are talking about something being scarce and you wouldn’t know that, well, they’re going to listen to you a bit. But if you all of a sudden just out the gate you’re like, “Well, during this call only will you get this deal,” well, they don’t know and trust you yet. You have to build a little bit of that.

(13:00):

That’s a huge thing. We’ve seen a lot of studies that just even bring that point home even more, which it’s not going to be shocking. But there was one study done that showed that when people were presented with different financial messages, so things that had to do with investing their money, if there was an expert quote or recommendation next to one of them, they just blindly followed that because now they’re like, “Okay, I can let my guard down. I can trust this person.”

Announcer (13:30):

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

(13:52):

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 ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49.com. And we’re back with Corey and Chris.

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (14:20):

You have to take that time to build a bit of the trust, and it also can’t be the unexpected. It has to fit what you’re selling. I had a situation where… Both of my stories today I realized are accounting stories. Go figure. But it was an accountant that I had contacted because I wanted to hire a new accounting firm for my business. One had connected me on LinkedIn, and so I reached out. I get on the phone with him and he was going through, “Here’s what we provide to marketing agencies.”

(14:49):

It was a great conversation. And then he goes, “And this is our retainer.” He goes, “But if you agree to the retainer right now on this phone call,” I kid you not, he said this, he goes, “Then it’s this price.” I was a little shocked because it’s not something that I would expect in that type of scenario of why is my accountant doing high pressure sales on me? We don’t like that. You have to think again about where are you coming from with your business, who is your audience? High pressure is not going to work in that situation.

(15:16):

What would’ve worked better, this would’ve got me to hire him, is if he was like, “It’s really good timing you called because we’re able to take on one new client right now.” That would’ve had me. I tell you, that would’ve had me. I’d been like, “Okay, cool. I want in you. Let me in,” versus here’s for your price. And by the way, I said no. And then I kept getting emails of, well, I’ll extend that offer to you. It just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Corey Frank (15:39):

Well, Chris certainly is one of the more preeminent voices in trust in sales today, and I think it ties in a lot, Mindy, with what you’re saying and certainly what we’ve talked about at least half of our 200 episodes, I think, Chris, don’t you?

Chris Beall (15:54):

Oh yeah, at least half. I mean, it’s so interesting to me when you break stuff down like you’re breaking this all down, Mindy. It’s so interesting, because I mean, we break down this first few seconds of a relationship and try to get an answer to the question, how do we build trust in the amount of time we have to build trust before it’s too late? We were doing it for years and not understanding it. And then Chris Voss at dinner one night, I was lucky enough to be seated with him, and I asked him, “How long do we have to get trust in a cold call?”

(16:28):

He said, “Seven seconds. Just like that.” Now, that alone, the fact that he gave me this rare piece of information and he is credible made me trust… I already trust him. I read his book three times, but it was the way he delivered it, that certainty, which is very rare when you ask somebody a question like that. Normally, well, it depends, right? This was the opposite. This was the scarce opposite of it depends, which is here’s a gift, seven seconds. And then I did something that is not scarce in my world, which is I made a joke and I said, “Well, that’s funny because our research says eight seconds.”

(17:08):

He said, “Your research is wrong. It’s seven seconds.” At that point, I mean, I’m convicted. The FBI’s got me like this. Then I asked him, “Well, what do we have to do in those seven seconds?” Because to me, until you have trust, you have nothing. You’re doomed. Anthony Iannarino’s recent book, Elite Sales Strategies, opens with this quote that says, “People buy from people they trust to make a decision they don’t trust themselves to make.” That’s the essence of why they buy, especially in B2B where they’re risking their career.

(17:43):

Sadly, the quote was of me, he didn’t tell me, so he just put it in the book and then I saw it. He signed the book. I was looking at it that night going, “I think that’s me,” which itself was, of course, not rare for Anthony Iannarino. But the idea that all commercial success is based on trust, and therefore to me, sales itself is a very civilizing influence on all of us because we’re obliged to go through that scarce trust needle, the eye of the trust needle, in order to be able to ultimately transact when transacting is the right thing to do, and then we have to do something else that’s as scarce as hen’s teeth.

(18:26):

I always loved that phrase. I used to raise chickens. Duck don’t have teeth either, but anyway. The question now is, well, okay, so what percentage of the people that we’re selling to are actually capable of buying our product right now, even if they’re capable of buying the product by category, by what they call ICP, ideal customer profile? The answer is really scarce, it’s 8.6%. 11-12th of them are not in market now because they bought something like that to solve that problem too recently.

(19:04):

You have another scarcity thing going on there, which you need to deal with, and you need to deal with it through nurturing and patience and allowing this trust to stay in place long enough to finally get to the point where, yeah, it’s time to replace that car. It’s time to replace that, whatever it happens to be. I think this interplay between scarcity and trust is the essence of business. I think that’s it, right? Things that are abundant or free, things that are free can’t be transacted at a profit because your gross margin is zero.

(19:36):

Overabundance leads to zero margins, to true commoditization, and everything that’s purchased requires trust to be built before somebody’s going to risk as a consumer their money, or as a business professional, something more valuable, which is their career, their kids’ college education, their retirement. It’s the whole game.

Corey Frank (19:59):

Well, I’m curious, Mindy, what happens in the brain when we’re faced with scarcity? Because if we understand what’s happening in the brain, the quote that Chris just communicated with Anthony Iannarino is that you have to have that trust. But deeply from a biology perspective, what’s happening in the brain why we respond to it and why it’s so important not to abuse what you’re trying to create, which is scarcity, which is to build trust so they eventually buy?

Dr. Mindy Weinstein (20:29):

Yeah, yeah. No, good question. And that’s actually what I was thinking of because we were talking about value, because value is the word that keeps coming to my head, Chris, as you’re talking, is that for customers who want to move forward or clients, I mean, there has to be some type of value there. And that’s one of the things that scarcity does. This is something that we’ve seen in neurological studies through MRI scans, so the actual brain’s itself hooked up so we can see what’s lighting up and what’s not.

(21:00):

There’s two different studies that I want to bring up. One has to do with the valuation process. Participants were brought in, hooked up to MRI machines, and they were shown different scarce conditions. There was also one done for decision-making. And in both of those scenarios, they were faced with, like I said, a scarce condition, but the scarcity had to do either with a promotion, so a product was on sale and it was going to be this percentage, or an auction simulation. Those were the two things, so think eBay.

(21:30):

In those particular studies, what the researchers found was that when faced with scarcity, the part of the brain that has to do with valuation, so valuing something, lit up right away, showing that when faced with scarcity, we assume, our brains do, just automatically, that is more valuable and the value goes up. Now, for decisions, and this is the one where you really too have to be careful because it’s so powerful, is that the part of the brain that has to do with decisions lights up right away, but what we’ve seen in those scans is that the normal steps that would be taken to get to that decision are just skipped.

(22:09):

But it makes sense when you stop and you think about it, because if something seems scarce, meaning either there’s only so many left or the restrictions are there in some form, is that our mind now thinks this is urgent. It’s not going to deliberate over all the different choices and the alternatives and wait, let me stop and think. It’s all automatic. The thing about everything I’m talking about, this is all subconscious, it’s happening. We’re not necessarily thinking through this. We can’t stop because it is subconscious, meaning you can’t stop and be like, okay, whoa, whoa, what am I doing here?

(22:43):

We just don’t. The way that our brains are wired is we’re constantly looking for mental shortcuts where we can value something right away or make a decision, offload the burden of making a decision to that expert that we trust because they’re telling us that this is the situation, we’re going to believe them. That’s what makes it so powerful. But I do want to add on that, because. Corey, you said something related to this, is that you have to be careful because knowing this I feel like is really powerful.

(23:14):

I remember as I was writing my book, I’m like, am I giving everyone just all the tools they need to manipulate everybody else now? I was really concerned about that. The thing about it is it needs to be authentic. It does. It needs to be authentic and natural. But the way that scarcity works, and I broke it down to the four different types, I guarantee there’s some type of scarcity in your business somewhere. Whether it’s you, the team can only take on so many more projects or so many more clients, or there’s some supply issues going on, or you did a limited edition package or product.

(23:47):

I mean, it can naturally exist. When you do that and you just communicate it because you’ve already built that trust, that’s where you see positive things happening. You can have fun with it. You can make excitement. You can build relationships. Because even if that particular client or customer is not ready right now to make that decision, staying in contact with them and communicating any type of scarcity, that’s going to help too. There’s one business I was just thinking of that has been doing that.

(24:18):

They’ll do events and they can only have so many people in that event. Even if someone hadn’t come to their event before, they’ll still have them on their list and say, “Hey, this upcoming one, we have five seats left, four seats left,” and it’s true because you can only put so many people in the actual building. You can have a lot of creativity with it.

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